|
As happens, from time to time, a piece of art I've seen dozens of times will suddenly shoot out a spark of inspiration. This happened the other day, when I was re-reading X-Men #107 for the Nth time and that 2-page spread on pages 2 and 3 just reached out and smacked me.
It's the scene where the Shi'ar Imperial Guard is introduced for the very first time.
I don't know why it never happened before, maybe I just wasn't artist enough for it, but this time something clicked and I thought how cool it would be to do the piece, but substitute the Legionnaires, for their Imperial Guard analogs.
I thought about it so much, I had trouble getting to sleep, Friday night, anticipating what I was going to do with it on Saturday. It's nice when something like that happens. I looked closely at the original pages, even saw a low res scan of the original art, and I made the decision to change a couple of things.
But, first, I printed out the two pages at 9 inches high, and sketched the layout onto a comic page board on my lightbox. I deliberately shifted the original art to the right of the board, so that I'd have those few extra inches for something else I wanted to do with the piece. You see, I always thought the X-Men got short-changed, in the scene. I decided to remedy that.
I also decided to rearrange a character, here and there and later, to add one, just because . . .
The Impy analog to Cosmic Boy is Electron, and in the original shot, he's hidden off in the background, literally, between other characters' legs. I decided to drop the flaming character, Starbolt, the Sun Boy analog and move Cosmic Boy into his place. I left Sun Boy out and up high, I added Mon-El, near his lady-love, Shadow Lass. It's a little scary how few of these costumes I actually had to look up. I wish my memory was that good for other stuff. Any errors are my own, or conscious choices made for my own artistic reasons.
I didn't do this as a two-page spread because they are damn hard to work on, in my limited space. I thought, seriously, about doing the lettering,re-writing the dialogue to match the Legion, but thought better of it. The scene speaks for itself, except I haven't colored it yet, so you can't see that every Legionnaire's eyes are glowing green. The figures are so small, I just didn't feel like muddying up the faces with special effects better done with color. There wasn't time to color, because, YAY! commission work came in!
So, without further ado, he's my twist on pages 2 and 3 of X-Men #107 . . .
Joe L. Singleton
See more of my stuff at . . .
www.heroblog.com
www.adastracomic.com
http://joe-singleton.deviantart.com
http://heroblog.spreadshirt.com/
Copyright © 2013 Joe Singleton
|
|
