Marvel-Kirby...

I did this crappy drawing yesterday to celebrate the best comic book-related news story to come our way in decades.

"Forget it, Kitty! You're not good enough for us 'X-Babies!"

 

 

Ah, I remember New Mutants #13 (March 1984) when Kitty Pryde was like, "Oh, guys, can I hang out with you?" and Dani Moonstar was all, "Nuh uh!  You called us 'X-Babies,' so you can take your sorry butt right on out of these woods we're hanging out in and suck an egg!"  I was thinking about that the other day.  I've always loved the cover by Tom Mandrake.  Crying Kitty's in the foreground in her garish green circus costume, phasing sadly through a fallen tree, and the New Mutants are behind her looking fierce.  Especially Dani, who Mandrake places in this pose of haughty dismissal.

 

The story inside is heavy on Amara, Kitty and Doug Ramsey, none of whom I had the least interest in back in the day.  I briefly gave up reading the series right around this issue because the book seemed moribund.  No more Bob McLeod art, the team's central conflict-- Dani versus a Brood-controlled Professor X-- had long been resolved and the X-Men were back from space, where everyone had believed them dead.  There was really no need for a junior X-Team, unless it was to give Chris Claremont's complex narratives in Uncanny X-Men extra space to play out as a kind of main story footnote.  Hardly a compelling reason for another title, although it's standard operating practice at both Marvel and DC these days.

 

Rather than establish a distinct identity, New Mutants in its second year tended towards dull, generic super-kid stories. It hooked me again when Bill Sienkiewicz became the regular artist and Chris Claremont re-established his unique authorial voice by taking the kids and their narrative in a darker direction.  Demon bears, slumber parties, shape-shifting cyber-aliens from outer space.  All classic stuff.

But I loved this conflict between Kitty and Dani.  I took Dani's side, of course.  Who wouldn't?  Dani is only Marvel's greatest post-Jack Kirby creation.  Kitty's fine, but there's no competition there.  Mandrake's cover stuck with me for years after I'd forgotten Amara gets her codename in the story, long after I'd given up comic book reading for serious literature only to start in with them again, kind of the same way I did with New Mutants.

Every so often, I want to revisit that cover image, only my brain invariably turns it into something that only slightly resembles the Mandrake original.  Like with this drawing, which I knocked out the other day before work.  I felt like working on a foreshortened pointing pose, because I'd convinced myself Mandrake had drawn Dani that way.  Actually, if you take a look at New Mutants #13, she's just sort of waving her hand at Kitty.  And I really thought since Dani was establishing herself as team leader and spokesperson she was the one who let Kitty have it with the cover dialogue.  How wrong I was!  Well, my little sketch is poor Kitty Pryde to Mandrake's powerful Dani Moonstar.

A full color look at the New Mutants if they had somehow appeared on Saturday morning TV circa 1972...

Or something like that.  I would have loved a New Mutants cartoon in the 80s.  I used to watch that Mr. T cartoon and kind of squint at it and imagine it was Dani and company, only with Mr. T.

Supergirl versus Darkseid...

Sure, why not?  More of my silly art.  This is a detail from an early work in progress with a strangely cross-eyed Supergirl.  You know, I looked at what I'd done this morning and I felt excited and energized by it. 

"You're really getting somewhere with this art stuff, baby!" I told myself.  "You can fix those eyes and finish Darkseid's face and body and you'll really have something to brag about!"

Then I took a look at it between classes at work and all I saw were a bunch of jumbled, randomish lines refusing to coalesce into an image.  What made sense at 6am at the start of the day stood revealed as a potential disaster at 9:30.  That was a real downer.  Looking at it now, I see it's nowhere near as dire as I thought then, but I also see now I have plenty of work ahead of me yet.  My ambition may have exceeded my abilities once again.  Lots to fix in order to salvage this one.

Superman versus the Thing (in color)

There!  Yet another ridiculous image I've had in my head for a while.  I imagine after Superman and the Thing settle their difference, they'll go have a meal or share a drink or something and become really good friends.

Superman versus the Thing and Spider-Man takes a swing! A couple of "in progress" drawings

Two of my favorite characters come into conflict with each other.  I'm pretty sure Superman could take the Thing.  The Superman figure is largely complete.  I need to fix his hands, right calf muscle and the cape, and I may adjust the line weights a bit.  Poor Ben Grimm needs a lot of work, though.  Not happy with the arm shadow.  It needs to be wider and extend down his chest a bit.  And all those rocky facets!

 

Here's Spider-Man acting more like the Spider-Man we all know and love:

The color scheme for this one is going to be more John Romita/Gil Kane era Spidey than Steve Ditko.  I have to fix the perspective (look at the wonky windows on the building under Spider-Man's right foot, just to point out something that's pretty obvious), finish the webbing on his costume (and he needs his chest emblem!) and adjust the left leg. The muscle on the outside edge near the knee isn't working for me and the foot is angled wrong. The pose itself is lacking in dynamics. I've got a rough sketch of a more exciting (I hope) one I'm going to start inking today.

These are penciled in Manga Studio 5 and inked in Adobe Illustrator.  I'm considering another work flow, though, where I print out the pencils and hand-ink them on vellum or using a lightbox or something along those lines.  Digital inking is no panacea, although it's nice for fidgety, shaky-handed fools like me.  I like being able to fiddle around with the lines and get them "just so," but the results are lacking in humanity.  I am a machine.

Other works in progress include Supergirl versus Darkseid and, for one of my other blogs, a couple of Cassandra Cain Batgirl images, one where she goes up against Wolverine and another where she takes on the Joker.

A very Spidey sandwich... in color!

And... finished!  I don't want to work on it anymore and I'm already seeing things I hate about it but there it is, a silly image I've had stuck in my head for over a year now making its way inside yours!  Enjoy!