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Well, I've found a new obsession and it remains to be seen if I can turn it into a paying proposition, but for now, I'm going to use my column to show some artwork and talk about it.
Recently, I inked a piece of art by John Byrne that I found online. It was a pencil drawing he did as a commission. It was his take on the classic cover of Avengers #4, the comic that introduced Captain America to the modern era. He altered it a bit, changing the poses a little here and there and made a nice, strong piece of artwork of it.
So, I took it and printed it out on a laser printer and inked the hell out of it!
It was fun, though a little frustrating, working on a low res image. I had to guess at some of the little details. And it wasn't until I was halfway through inking the part with Namor that I realized what that was upposed to be depicting (it's the part of the story where Namor finds Cap in the ice in Greenland and tosses him into the water).
When it came time to color it (how could I pass it up?!), I erased the bit with Namor. I realized there's a lot of red in this line-up, so I went with a different shade for each character's red. Iron Man's is a little more orange, actually. Giant-Man's red is a little faded. With Cap, I tried to stay in flag shades. I've never liked Cap's costume when it's colored the same blue as Superman's, I prefer a nice shade of navy blue.
I had so much fun with this that I decided to try my hand at revising some classic covers, or recreating them, in my own style.
My first attempt was a Justice League cover, #30, with the JLA vs the Crime Syndicate of America. I switched Flash and Johnny Quick around a bit and changed Power Ring's position, but I'm just not satisfied with it. I'll probably give this one a second go, when an idea strikes me for how to make it more dynamic and interesting.
Then I took a shot at the first issue of X-Men. It's a classic attack cover and I had fun with it. I changed a couple of things and wasn't really concerned with leaving logo space on it. For this column, I added a bit to the top, to allow for a facsimile of the original logo header. I cleaned it us a little, hiding the forcelines around Magneto, except where they're being impacted by optic blasts or snowballs. I added a little background detail, for the rocket base they're on in this scene and changed the thing that Hank's swinging from to a cargo hook, something you might find on a rocket base.
From there, I went back to the Avengers. In Avengers #9, we have the origin of Wonder Man, one of my favorite Avengers. I decided to rework the cover, building up the ionic ray machines and bringing Enchantress closer to the front. I figured, as long as she's going to standing there staring at Wonder Man's backside, I might as well get some eye-candy use out of her.
One of the decisions I made early-on with this cover was to lose, or hide the weird curlicue thing on Wonder Man's shirt. Never understood that, and so it gets lost in Kirby Krackle.
Coloring this was a little tricky, because I wanted to fade Simon a little, in the glare of the ion cannons, but I didn't want to lose too much line work on him or the other characters.
These were fun, but I hadn't found the "hook" I needed, yet, to make it really interesting for me. For that, I needed a suggestion from someone else, my buddy from school, Jeff Valentine.
We'd been browsing covers on a wonderful little web site called Cover Browser(http://www.coverbrowser.com/) and he pointed me to Avengers #145.
A nice, plain Gil Kane cover. I'm a big Kane fan, so doing one of his covers was inevitable, but this is also a cover with a NOBODY villain. Thanks to Jeff, we fixed that and I found my "hook".
Call it a mash-up, or an Amalgam cover, ...whatever you want... I think it works.
I'm looking for other cover candidates and alternative characters to place on them. There's a Marvel Team-up cover I've got my eye on, with Spider-Man and Ms Marvel, or should I put Supergirl in there, instead? Hmmm, or the Marvel Two-in-One with the Thing and Quasar, or maybe Green Lantern. Have to think about that for a bit. So many possibilities!
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Copyright © 2010 Joe Singleton
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