DEADPOOL #900

I usually buy my comic books by mail, ordering them with a Previews catalogue that gets sent to me. I would flip through the whole comic store catalogue to see what I want and order it. When the books are published 2-3 months later, it'll be sent to me.

Anyways, every so often when I find myself near a actual brick and mortar comic book store, I would walk in to see what's new for the week. This past weekend, I found this little nugget. DEADPOOL #900. I always had a heart for Deadpool because he's was one of the first Characters I worked on when I started inking for Marvel Comics. When I picked it up, my thought was "Nine hundred?? How did Deadpool get to issue number 900? Did I miss something in between? Was there a lot of mini series with different issue numbers where Marvel decided to add them all up and release this issue #900?" So I took it to the counter and bought it. Here's how the cover to DEADPOOL #900 looks...
I picked it up and give it a quick flip through. Found out that it's a special issue which reprints some older previously released Deadpool stories. The numbering was a selling gimmick. Good gimmick because it got me to pick it up. It's a thicker book with 104 page for a $5.99 price tag. Not bad considering some of the comics these day are $3.99 with only 32 pages. As I got towards the middle of the book, I saw this reprinted cover...

HEY!!! That's the book I worked on over a decade ago. One of my earlier inking gigs for Marvel Comics. DEADPOOL TEAM-UP STARRING DEADPOOL AND WIDDLEWADE. They reprinted the whole issue. This was a nice surprise. How do I know I worked on this over ten years ago? I can actually tell you the exact month and year. In the art, you can see Pete Woods' name, my name, and the year written in kanji. A little Easter egg I put in there. At the time, the penciller, Pete Woods, wanted to have kanji characters written on some of the background art. He drew something there, but it didn't really look like kanji. I spoke to him over the phone and asked if it's cool for me to fix it. He gave me the green light, I did some research on kanji characters that sounded like both our names and wrote/drew that into the art along with the year we did it. Below is a scan of the two pages from the comic that has those kanji characters. I circled it in green. You can also click on to the image to blow up it up. Both pages has Pete Woods and Walden Wong written in Kanji. On the left page, it had the year 98 in Kanji and on the right page, 97 in kanji. Which means, I inked the page on the right on 1997 late December, then I inked the page on the left in 1998 early January. In the middle the New Years I believe.

Seeing this reprinted is a nice surprise. Hum... I wonder if I'll get royalties on it. DEADPOOL #900 is in stores now and you can read more about it by clicking here.