My brother and I welcome you to our new website, MarcusBros.com. It’s about time, right?
We’re both very much our own individuals, but for the sake of this site — and to make things a whole lot easier — we’ll usually refer to ourselves as the Marcus Brothers and simply, “we.”
From an early age, we expressed our creativity on the page — through drawings, sketches, illustrations — you name it! Every year for Hanukkah, we’d even draw pictures of the toys and action figures on our wish lists so Mom and Dad knew exactly what to get us. Many were Mego superhero figures — Spider-Man, Superman, Batman — along with Kenner’s Star Wars action figures, which eventually led to one of the greatest gifts of all: the Death Star playset!
In junior high and high school, we created, wrote, and illustrated our own comic books. Kevin tended to draw more of the humans and warriors, while Brad gravitated toward the monsters and fantasy creatures — with plenty of overlap, of course.
This was long before kids had the internet, smartphones, digital drawing programs, or social media, so we did everything by hand. We illustrated the pages in ink, made copies, sometimes colored them — again, by hand — and then designed special covers, often using foil wrapping paper. We sold the finished comics to our friends for a modest price. It wasn’t really about making money. It was about sharing our imagination. Our magnum opus was our 500-page graphic novel, “Where the Shadows End.”
Thankfully, we saved the original pages, design sketches, and copies of dozens of those books — many of which we hope to share right here on this site.
We were also voracious readers and absolutely loved movies and television. Somewhere during our high school years, all those influences collided and we caught the writing bug, beginning to create our first stories and screenplays.
We even experimented with animation using our Super-8 camera, painstakingly animating objects around our living room — including two tikis and some clay. Our dog Cindy even made a cameo. The film was appropriately titled “Living Rooms.”
One can only imagine what might have happened if we’d had an iPhone and the internet back then.
Then again, maybe doing everything the hard way was part of the fun.
In the years since, we’ve been incredibly fortunate to make some amazing friends, mentors, and creative collaborators along the way. After all, while the Marcus Brothers may have started with two kids drawing comic books together, no creative journey — or life — really happens alone.
There were early mentors and champions such as Mark Bakshi, Rick Singer, our first agent, the late, great Caren Bohrman, and Ralph Burris — people who believed in us from the very beginning.
And then there was our own “Doc Brown” — Dr. Donald A. Reed, who transported us to other worlds through the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror, introduced us to Robert Holguin, and ultimately entrusted us with something that would become an enormous part of our lives: helping preserve, protect, and carry forward the legacy of the Saturn Awards.
Along the way came longtime partners in cinematic crime (and occasionally punishment), including Charles Vignola, whose creativity is matched by decades of professional experience, including his years as Director of Development at Jerry Bruckheimer Films, and our great friend and collaborator Doug Amaturo.
And, of course, there’s family — both the one we were born into and the one that grew around us.
Kevin’s better half, Marta, and her wonderful family became our extended family: Andrea, Maria Jose, Nelson, Alejandro, Lili, Emilio, Yesenia, Roger, Mary, Tony, Placer, Alex, and Madison. Each of them, in their own way, has become part of our story.
And it goes without saying that none of this story exists without Mom, Dad, and Grandpa Ken. Grandpa’s love of classic adventure novels helped inspire our imaginations long before we understood how much those stories would influence our own.
We can’t forget the four-legged members of the family, either: our beautiful blonde cockapoo Cindy, who grew up alongside us from childhood through high school; our beloved Bichon Chloe, who lit up our lives and hearts; and our buoyant Belle, who continues to make every day a little more interesting.
And in many ways, we’re still doing what we did back then — dreaming up worlds, telling stories, and finding new ways to share our imagination. Only now, thankfully, we don’t have to color every copy by hand.
And there’s much more to come. We created MarcusBros.com not only to share our own creative work — past, present, and still to come — but also to celebrate the books, movies, television, artists, and storytellers that inspired us in the first place. We’ll revisit classic films, rediscover forgotten gems, champion movies and television we think deserve another look, share our personal must-watches, and probably argue about a few favorites along the way.
After all, the best part of loving stories has always been sharing them.
So welcome to our world. We’re just getting started.
— Bradley & Kevin Marcus