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I was having one of those months where everything I tried just bored me, so I fell back on some art I had done a few weeks earlier.
A little history . . .
I was 13 or so, when I caught the comic fever. In 8th grade, I started out by copying Mike Grell from his Legion stories and from the Warlord. From there, I branched out to other artists. I discovered John Byrne while he was still at Charlton, but most of my early influences were Silver and early Bronze Age DC artists. I saw Marvel comics on the racks, but for one reason or another, I just never picked them up. By 9th grade, that had changed. I had learned that John Byrne was working for Marvel, when my dad brought home Marvel Preview #11 out of the blue. From there , it was X-Men #113 that brought me into the Marvel Universe. Yeah, I tend to remember stuff like that.
It was also in 9th grade that Jeff and I started our first collaborations. At first, we did what a lot of fans do to this day, we created characters for ourselves. I had no clue what fan-fiction was, back then, I didn't discover it until I found my way to the online fan community. But, what we were doing wasn't actually fan-fic, we were creating our first "universe" and we didn't even know it.
In a previous column, I outlined a few of the characters we created together, but this month, I'm focussing on just one. This one was also the first example of a phenomenon that has come to mark our collaborations over the years. I've lost count of how many times we've come up with something, a character, a team concept or something, only to have it appear in a Marvel or DC comic a few months later. One day, Jeff came to school with a sketch of a costume he'd come up with for a character named Quasar. It was a month or so later that Marvel's Quasar appeared in Marvel Two-in-One. First of many.
The costume was largely based on the outfit the Warlord wore at that point (I had introduced him to the DC book I read at the same time he got me to read more Marvel books), studded with gems that somehow channelled star energy.
The helmet was based on Nova's, since Nova was Jeff's favorite comic at that time.
When I started working on comic covers a few weeks back, I got the idea of doing one for Jeff, so I turned to Nova #1.
Somehow, as I was finishing up the inking on this cover, the idea for doing an even more nostalgic piece came to me. Using the same basic layout as the Nova cover, I created a mock cover for Quasar #1. I cleaned up the design a bit from the original. I don't remember the origin Jeff came up with way back then, and to keep it in line with the Nova cover, I gave him an alien tech origin.
When I got around to the color stage, I decided to go with blue-white for the gems and gave him some blue pants. I just thought the blue-white glow would look really cool.
Sometimes it's fun to revisit these ideas, in case it sparks new ideas. Sadly, most of our ideas are just notes on paper, sketches and emails. We've never made the leap to actually publishing something together, but we ain't dead yet, so you never know. With the advent of the web comic, publishing in color is now possible at a cost anyone can afford. Of course, there's not a lot of money in it, but it's still a very new medium, so who knows what'll come in the future.
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Copyright © 2010 Joe Singleton
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