Does Anyone Know What Happened to Danny Ryan?

[idircaiden]

I'm sure we all got into this particular fetish in our own way. For me, like a lot of guys my age, it was Batgirl on Batman '66 reruns. It was that one scene in the '80s Helen Slater Supergirl.

But it was mainly the comics of the time. I went through puberty in the '90s, and as anyone who read comics in that era can tell you, comics were a bit different back then. Superheroines got in trouble a lot more. And when they did, the comics often didn't cut away. They'd... linger. You'd get covers like this...



...and a little something would stir in the cloudy recesses of your 13-year-old brain. If you were looking for it (and believe me, I started), it turned out there was plenty of what we now know as the genre this forum is dedicated to hidden away in everyday newsstand comics.

One standout for me was a title called Mantra. To a parent or comics code authority, it just looked like a kid's book. Pages. Staples. But if you were paying attention, Mantra was a page-by-page ode to superheroine peril.



Seriously, this poor girl got the crap kicked out of her. She got electrocuted. Drowned. Suffocated. Mantra got knocked unconscious so often it was a miracle she was ever able to solve crimes. And she was drawn -- lovingly, voluptuously -- by a penciller named Dave Roberts.

Sadly, Mantra only lasted seven brief issues. But by then I was hooked, and on the lookout for other comics like this -- comics that spoke in the secret code of what I was looking for. I stumbled on an indie comic named FemForce, a title with a limited print run, a specific audience and a singular superheroine peril mission statement. And who was penciling them... but Dave Roberts.



Then the internet happened, and nobody needed comics anymore. The good stuff was online -- real girls, drawings, something called "cosplay". One of the first ever sites that started catering to superheroine stuff was a pretty crappy, sporadically updated site called Superheroine Central. It boasted actual pictures and movies of models in peril. It even boasted commissioned comics. One of them was by a guy named "Danny Ryan". The name was different, but there was no mistaking that style:

36145_c01-page000_123_511lo.jpg (174.14 KiB) Viewed 1272 times

Now it wasn't even secret code anymore. This guy -- who a few years ago was drawing Marvel Comics -- was into this sort of thing. He had to be. He was one of us.

Danny Ryan popped up from time to time at one superheroine site or another, or even on DeviantArt, but more and more rarely. Maybe he just grew out of it. Maybe the pay was crap. Maybe he got other commitments. But either way, while he never outright disappeared, he became impossible to follow. And as the 90s gave way to the 00s and then the 2010s, a veritable tidal wave of superheroine fetish stuff filled the void. I mean, seriously: Look at the daily activity on this forum. That would have been equivalent to a year's activity in the superheroine fetish community in 1999.

Anyway. I was cleaning out some stuff in the garage last weekend and stumbled on an old box. and in it was my Mantra collection, and as embarrassing as it is to admit, I actually got nostalgic for stuff I used to spank it to when I was a kid.

Does anyone know what happened to Danny Ryan? Is he still producing stuff? The guy is a titan of the superheroine peril genre. He should be held up as our Jack Kirby. Instead he just kind of faded away.

[shevek]

Great post, Idircaiden!

I'm also a big Malibu fan, and I own many issues of Mantra, so I need to make a few corrections here.

The version of Mantra you posted above is not the first version. You posted the blonde Mantra (identity: Lauren Sherwood), from the short 7-issue 1995 run. That is indeed an amazing peril cover.

But there was an earlier run of Mantra from 1993 which lasted over 30 issues. Lauren Sherwood was a minor character somewhere in the middle of that series. But the actual Mantra character was a raven-haired beauty who was actually a man in a woman's body, and much was made of it during that run (at least what could be made of it without going hard R-rated).

The story goes like this. The first run of Mantra ended, and the editors at Marvel had just bought Malibu. Marvel wanted to reboot the character as more of a standard super-sexy 90s bad-girl character (hence, the blonde Lauren Sherwood). But the readers of the original run rebelled because they preferred the nuance of the original character, and that's why the book got cancelled after only 7 issues the second time around. Apparently there was no Malibu activity from Marvel after 1996 - they just let all those characters lie fallow, and they're still unused today.

As far as Malibu, Mantra was definitely a favorite, but I also very much enjoyed Elven. She was a troubled girl who used the same goopy substance that turned the boy into Prime (Malibu's version of Superman), except that because she was into LOTR-type fantasy, she transformed into a super-muscular elvish warrior whose mission was to attack anyone who harmed women. It was definitely Malibu's entry into the "muscle growth" genre, just like Mantra was their entry into SHIP. (A little bit of the inspiration for the Heroineburgh character Red Gina came from Elven, although mostly from She-Hulk and Typhoid Mary).

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Now onto Dave Roberts. The timeline is a bit askew, as (according to comicbookdb) he actually drew FemForce *before* starting on Mantra. He had several brief entries into other indie imprints (with similiarly appropriate characters such as 'Barbarienne' and 'Vamperotica'.

As far as whether he is actually "Danny Ryan" (and yes, I'm very familiar with those Fox strips on Superheroine Central, which by the way is a site that
many of us were influenced by early in our SHIP journeys)...how certain are you that is the case? Or is it up for debate? It'd be interesting to know if anyone could really confirm that, including DanO himself (if anyone keeps in contact with him regularly..last time I communicated with him was 2016).

According to comicbookdb, Dave Roberts hasn't done anything since a 2015 cover for an indie one-shot called 'The SadoMannequin'.

So that definitely is a mystery. Whether he is actually Danny Ryan is hard to say perhaps (unless you have more evidence), but it certainly would
be interesting to find out where Dave Roberts is today. ComicVine lists his birth year as 1960, so he's 59.

I wonder if Bill Black (from FemForce / AC Comics) would know Roberts' whereabouts? I've emailed him in the past, and probably should get back in touch with him anyway to send him Heroineburgh stuff, so I will be happy to ask Bill about Dave Roberts as well. We'll see what he says.

Very interesting thread topic.

[shevek]

Bill Black has no idea what happened to Dave Roberts, and wasn't even aware that Roberts had done something as recently as 2015.

Sorry, that was a dead end. Now I'm trying Roland Mann from the legendary Silverline Comics (a company that rose and folder twice - once in the 80s and once in the 90s..and is now back in the saddle with some kickstarted titles!). Roberts' artwork for The Sadomannequin was on Silverline in 2015. We'll see if Roland has any info, and whether he can confirm Roberts' possible pseudonym.