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My Disney Princess collection is complete:



Strangely sexual, given that he's technically an animal. Anyhoo, Belle here was the last of the five initially planned Disney Princesses that I felt inspired to draw/color. I know there are other official Disney Princesses, plus plenty of other great Disney characters, but this was my plan. Maybe if inspiration really punches me in the groin at some point in the future, I'll consider enlarging the collection, but I'm satisfied with what I've got now.

Wonder Woman!

That's about all the words I know from the theme to the old WW show. I think there were other words in that theme, anyway. That show kind of sucked, really. It had a WW who weighed about 94 lbs. who spun around to change her clothes (a trait which has, sadly, recently been forced into the comics, thanks to some nostalgic jackasses). The costume was also pretty terrible, with the goofy eagle on the chest and those French-cut underwears. This costume, on the other hand, was designed by Terry Dodson and kicks all kinds of ass (though I've made my own slight tweaks to it to fit this particular image, such as simplifying the star field on her panties). Seriously, this is one of those instances where an artist took a costume that I could never quite wrap my head around, made a few slight modifications to the lines (the angles of the openings on the bracelets, the belt especially, and adding seam lines to make what previously resembled a one-piece bathing suit suddenly look like a leather piece of light armor), and suddenly it works for me.

Alright kiddies, I hope you've enjoyed this recent deluge of new art, because I have a sad feeling it's coming to an end pretty soon. With convention time upon us, and prep time over, I'll be having to set about conventioning, and then getting right back to the grindstone on Saints.

Weird thing? By the time I'd finished uploading this thing and adding it to my color gallery (a process that takes less than a minute), it had already been favorited. And by someone who doesn't watch me. Weird, huh?

Well, it's not color art, but I do have a few scans of some of the convention sketches I did at this year's Chicago Comic-Con uploaded. I did more, but those often just go off with the person who I did them for, never to be seen again (though I hope the guy with the Eric Bana Punisher scans it and sends me a copy).








As always, click through for a larger version.

Here's a head shot of Katie Spencer, aka Bombshell, from our upcoming book, Bombshell. I had the hankering to do a head shot, something I don't know if I've really done in years, probably after looking at a bunch of J. Scott Campbell art (his girls are so cute). Katie was the obvious option, since my life has been consumed, in part or in whole, by this girl and her adventures for almost two years now (yeah, I've also been heavily involved with Saints and Borrowed Time, but Eric and Rey just don't do it for me in the same way that Katie does).

So, yeah, here she is. I created the character and wrote the series (and scripts for about 7 more that are in various stages of development, assuming the first mini goes anywhere), but I won't be providing interior art, so it's nice to get a chance to draw her every once in a while.

My local comic shop (or LCS, as we call them in the biz) has started a new weekly sketch "contest" for the artists that shop there. Each week, one of the employees chooses a character for all of the artists to draw. They alternate male/female each week, the sketches can take no more than 30-40 minutes, and have to be done on a backing board (and preferably inked, though I feel that's the best way to go when trying to work on the surface of the backing board. Them things don't accept pencil very well, even on the dull side).

I figure not only is this kind of fun and an excuse to do one-off drawings of characters I might not otherwise draw, but it'll be a great way to build material for next year's sketchbook.

The next entry into Lost World of Wonder's sketch competition thing (I'm not sure what the competition actually is, but it's fun to participate in). This week's character is the Flash. Usually they're pretty specific about these things, but this week's was simply "the Flash." There've been four characters with ongoing books who've used the name the Flash, and countless others who've appeared in various roles (including time travel and alternate universe versions, Black Flashes, Kid Flashes, etc.), but "the Flash" was as specific as they were willing to get. And I'd recently done a picture of the Flash (which isn't up on here yet because I haven't colored it).

So, this is what they're getting. Can you tell which Flash it is?

This was also my first foray into the wonderful world of Copic markers. Fantastic things. This entire piece is nothing but ink on a comic book backing board, but I was able to get some great subtle shading done (as opposed to last week's Marvel Girl, which I still think looks decent, but I had to settle for a much more stark "animated style" shading technique, given the limitations of my previous gray marker set). The only down side is they're damned expensive, costing about $6 a piece (and Artist & Display doesn't even carry all the shades I want, so I've had to order some online).

This week's character is Angela, from Spawn. I know basically 3 things about Angela:

1) She's from the Spawn comics. I really don't give a poopy diapers about Spawn comics. I generally consider most early Image books and characters to rank somewhere in the Guy Gardner/Longshot range of comic characters.

2) She was created by Neil Gaimen, and Todd McFarlane tried to stiff him on royalties, leading to a lawsuit that many believed was an attempt on the part of McFarlane to strongarm Gaimen into relinquishing his rights to the character of Miracleman to Image (though I don't think it's ever been fully resolved who actually owns the rights to Miracleman. The only thing we know for sure is that it's not Todd McFarlane).

3) The first action figure of the character had a paint app left out (to save on production costs) underneath her loincloth that essentially made it appear as though she was "going commando." Parent groups complained, a new production run was made with the thong paint reinstated, the original version gained the nickname "Party Angela," and you couldn't read an issue of Toyfare in the 90s without the subject coming up.

As these are the only things I actually know about the character, this piece is a tribute to that infamous action figure, as well as a famous pop star's adventures in panty-less-ness and paparazzi-preparedness.

The time limit on this one really caught me, though, so the shading's not what I wanted it to be. But, those are the rules.

And no, there's no "unpixelated" version. That was done right on the original image.

Uh...there's no link to the unpixelated version?

This week's character is Dr. Henry McCoy, best known as the X-Men's Beast.

A special thanks goes out to John Cassaday for making cat-Beast not quite so much of an eyesore as Frank Quietly designed. I'm still not sure what the hell his costume's supposed to be, though. Seriously, what is that? Like, leather capri-overalls?

So I go into the Local Comic Shop and hand them last week's Beast piece and ask them who the next character in the weekly sketch contest is. The following is a rough transcript of the conversation:

Me: "Here's this. Who's next week's character?"

Worker guy #1: "Huntress."

Me: "Are you kidding me? That's who I was going to suggest if I'd been here when you were deciding. I've been rereading Birds of Prey from the beginning for the last week."

Worker guy #2: "Yeah, but it has to be the Jim Lee version of Huntress."

Me: "Are you freakin' serious? That's my favorite version of Huntress."

Sometimes the universe does you a solid.

This week's character was Dr. Doom. The guys at the shop said they weren't enforcing the time limit for this one (apparently some of the pussies involved in this sketch battle are of the mindset that armored characters are ever-so-much harder to draw than non-armored characters). Ironically, this one was one of the quicker ones for me. With the last few, I really skirted the edge of the time limit (Beast and Angela both had backgrounds pieces, and Huntress, for some ungodly reason, I chose to draw at a really funky angle with a crazy fish-eyed lens effect), but this one didn't take me much longer than the Marvel Girl or Flash pictures from a month or two ago.

You know what's weird? I don't recall ever drawing Dr. Doom before. Honestly, Dr. friggin' Doom and I can't ever remember drawing him. And yet I was able to draw him from memory. Weird.

The speech balloons were added in Photoshop. I don't have handwriting nearly that neat. Or, you know, even remotely readable.

They've got to stop letting Andy pick the characters. Deathlok? Friggin' Deathlok? He's not even a character, but a type of cyborg in the Marvel Universe (actually, the first Deathlok cyborg featured was originally from a futuristic world outside the mainstream Marvel U., but he quickly started hopping through time and what have you, and now the Marvel landscape is littered with Deathloks. Or, it would be, if anyone gave a poopy diapers about Deathlok).

I'd rank Deathlok only marginally less sucky than Guy Gardner and Longshot.

Hawk and Dove... with boobies!

This week's character is the most recent (female) Hawk and Dove. Apparently we're just doing away with all the rules (the time limit was abolished a few weeks back for Dr. Doom, now we're no longer going boy/girl/boy/girl, and we can be assigned more than one character at a time).

Not that I have anything really against H&D, but my biggest experience with them in the past was that one episode of Justice League Unlimited where they were voice by the brothers form Wonder Years, and that was kind of a different Hawk and Dove (the kind with penises).

By what I can only assume is coincidence, this is also the week I picked up all 3 issues of Blackest Night: Titans, which Hawk and Dove feature quite prominently in. I've been pretty resistant to picking up the satellite titles with this crossover, but that sextabular Ed Benes art pulled me in on this one. Sadly, SPOILERS just as I was getting to like them, Holly was killed by a Black Lantern Hank Hall (the original Hawk), to make an undead pair of Hawks to set against one lonesome Dove. While Hank Hall has thusly remained alive (or at least undead), Holly was pretty well incinerated by Dawn, so there's little chance of a comeback.

This week it's Stargirl and STRIPE. Stargirl holds a bit of a special place in my heart, because the first commission/convention sketch I ever did was of Courtney here. She's also just a really fun character with a kind of odd and yet appealing costume design (I normally want to punch people who wear bicycle shorts i nthe face, but she somehow pulls them off).