Mark Beachum

Mark Beachum is an American comic book artist, writer, painter, publisher, photographer and filmmaker known for renditions of the female figure. Having worked for Marvel, DC, and Continuity, among others, his most notable credits include work in Web of Spider-Man, Samuree, Vampirella, Penthouse Comix, Razmataz, Alienzkin and Supergurlz.

Michael Bair summarizes Beachum:

Beachum has often expressed that superheroes are an erotic idiom, and that he is not interested in writing/drawing for children. and continued his artistic development as an autodidact.

He worked at the Soundscape jazz club as he was making his way into the comic industry.

Continuity Comics From the late 80s to early 90s Beachum is working with Neal Adams at Continuity Comics where he was doing both comics and commercial advertising art work. He became most notable for drawing the Samuree story while there; at the same time he also worked on Michael Jackson Pepsi commercial storyboards and animatics. Mark warmly recounts and regards the time spent around Neal Adams at Continuity Publishing, as the place where all kinds of creativeness intersected and the place he wanted to be.

Aja Blu In 1990 Mark Beachum co-created an independent label Aja Blu Comix along with a comic world debutante Sandra Chang, who although a beginner, was among the first self-published Asian-American female indie comic creators and definitely one of the first women in the erotic comics field.The two of them did all that was required: wrote, edited, penciled, inked, produced, published... to self-publish the Achilles Storm/Razmataz books.

Penthouse At the time of its existence Penthouse Comix had the highest paying rate for comics and was priding itself on hand picking the best artists and in mid 90s Beachum painted the futuristic story Backlash written by Tom Thornton for them. Then he published his art portfolio FemmErotiSexiVision in the magazine as well as two stories Nightclaw and Latex Diva, which appeared in later issues of Penthouse Comix. The stories were painted as well as written by Beachum.

Other In the early 90s Beachum was friendly with Horatio Weisfeld and did cover art for his Bullet Comics publications Radrex and BIO 90.

In 1994 he illustrated the Syphons story written by Allen Curtis. Originally published in color as a three issue mini-series by NOW Comics, a decade later in 2004 it was republished by Image Comics as a black and white graphic novel.

Around the time of working for Continuity and Penthouse, he began submitting fully painted art thus eliminating the need for either inker or colorist. The art would be produced using watercolors, acrylics, graphite, ink, markers or any mixture necessary to achieve the desired effect.

In the early 2000s when the Alienzkin GN came out, there was a new look to Beachum's work, he started using CG to add yet another dimension to his art.

Beachum created original characters for his Razmataz and Alienzkin books and shared his ideas about independent publishing with others. Hart D. Fisher cites Beachum as his inspiration to go independent and create his own company, Boneyard Press, after Beachum said to him: “Why do you want to spend all of your artistic energy on something someone else owns?”

Art Collectors Mark Beachum created a logo for Sizzle magazine of NBM Publishing. Sizzle was the first place where his Alienzkin story was published over the course of three issues in 1999 (originally it was supposed to be called Razor Burn). NBM was in the process of moving to a new location, after the move they discovered that the original artwork for Alienzkin story was lost.

Beachum's artworks are numerous on the collectors' market, but several of them have been sold off without his permission on eBay.

Fellow comic artist Michael Bair collects Beachum art and tells that he would get paid with Mark Beachum art by Anubis Press. Beachum and Bair have done much work together; while some animosity has been reported between them between them.

Vampirella Beachum produced Vampirella work and covers during the Harris era, some of the art consisted of paintings and photography mixed media art.

In 2019 he was approached to make a variant Vampirella cover for the upcoming Black History Month in which Vampirella would be portrayed as a black character, Christopher Priest and Matt Idelson were putting that idea together. Here is what Beachum had to say about his history with the character:

Photography and Filmmaking Sometime in the 90s Beachum started holding photo shoots for art reference and to include in his multimedia creations.

During the mid 2000s, Beachum began venturing into film production. He showcased some of his film work on his websites, which appear to be between neo-noir and art-house that look inspired by Helmut Newton, Bob Carlos Clark, David Lynch, Shinya Tsukamoto.

In 2011 Beachum was cited to direct a short film based on Heroic Publishing's superheroine Flare. Heroic Publishing held a successful crowdsource campaign to fund the film.