Notorious Crackpot

It's been a long and exhausting few weeks. But I haven't forgotten my promise to post more images. First up is Superman. Man of Steel. Last son of Krypton. You might have heard of him. He's that predecessor to Supergirl that pops up every now and again. Kind of like how Perseus is an ancestor of Hercules? A second string character, but tied close enough to the mythos that we couldn't ignore him completely. Hopefully, the appearances of this old guy wearing a Supergirl costume isn't confusing to younger readers unfamiliar with this nostalgic artifact. Anyway... I like how Eric was drawing Superman in these images. Smaller eyes. I'm a fan of the squinty-eyed Superman. Next up is Zor-El. AKA: Supergirl's father. Eric was experimenting in a slightly different direction here. More cartoonish features. Larger eyes, bigger head. Doesn't work as well for me as it makes him feel to young. In fact, Zor-El in my head was much older. Almost wizened. Zor-El doesn...

As I've been digging through Eric's boxes of old artwork looking for Supergirl material, I've also been coming across alot of other artwork that never saw the light of day. This was one of two cover concepts put together for the Kid Gravity trade paperback that Disney Press released in... 2006? 2007? I don't remember. Probably 2007. This particular montage shot is a favorite of ours. I don't know why. Probably because it's easier than coming up with a solid theme. In fact, we also used the same basic concept on a Little Gloomy book, as seen here: We are not very creative creative people. Though in truth, I like the symmetry of the two designs when compared. And the universe of Little Gloomy and the universe of Kid Gravity are connected parallel realities. So it makes a certain amount of sense. I guess.

Again I bring you artwork from the depths of time. Almost a year and a half ago, to be precise. First up is Streaky the Supercat. I just happened to have inherited a young cat about the time I began working on this. Her name is JoJo and she is made of razors and barbed wire. She's tamed a bit now. With me, anyway. Everyone else she still wants to see bleed. Anyway, she was the inspiration for this version of Streaky, and Eric designed Streaky accordingly. I mean really. If a cat were to gain super powers, we would all be in serious trouble. Next up: Brainiac 5. Brainy was never seen in the series. Originally he was planned to have a major role, but the only limitation given to us by DC was to not use Brainiac 5. At the time, he was a major player in the Legion of Super-Heroes in the 31st century book so I can understand why. The sketches below were done before Eric and I found this out, and truthfully, he wasn't quite done cooking. But unlike most of the other characters, we...

I promised that sketches of the students would be posted today. And here I am, posting said images. Okay... so there are less student images than I thought. Thing is, we had three female lead characters from the onset. There were also going to be male characters of more prominence. Here's a look at what they might have been like. The characters were cut because it turns out that 6 issues at 22 pages long each isn't as much room as I might have liked. The relationships between the three girls would have been horribly muddied by these nonsensical subplots. So they were cut. But just to go a step further and show you what you were denied... There was an entire story behind this that involved duplicity and betrayal. The heart was to be made of gold kryptonite (heart of gold) that only had a short term effect. We had already explored the effects of green, red and blue. So gold was the next logical choice. As mentioned above, this was cut due to lack of space. It was also cut after I...

I promised there would be more art. And more art there is. Unfortunately, I'm still searching for those original Supergirl illustrations. All of Eric's original art is at my house for some reason, which means boxes and boxes and boxes and boxes of paper. 17 years of comics work in boxes (minus that one back cover illustration we left in a copy machine at SDCC about 13 years ago). To make matter worse, each panel of each page of Supergirl was pencilled at full size on a sheet of 8 1/2 x 11 paper. Think about that. Each panel of each page of each issue. This all adds up to alot of paper. Anyway, here's the next installment of Supergirl production art. A feature on this blog that I like to call: "Eric probably doesn't want you to see this but then he shouldn't have left it in my safe keeping because I'm not particularly trustworthy." The teachers! The gym teacher is named Mister Mongo. I don't remember if we ever mentioned his name in the comic. He...

I've been putting off posting this stuff for awhile. The fact is, I am lazy. The other fact is that Eric keeps hiding this art. I intended to lead off with one of the three original illustrations he produced for our initial meeting with DC. I'll have to search a bit deeper to figure out where those images are hidden. Anyway, instead I'm going to lead off with some Lena Thorul. This first one might be the actual first attempt on the character. Truth is, Eric and I had a pretty solid idea of what she would look like from the onset. The only issue with the initial designs was the question of hair. That was resolved fairly quickly. Yeah I know. Exciting. Woo. So we knew she would eventually end up in armor. I guess the armor was the real issue. If you've read the series, you know the armor exists in 3 states. The first is the backpack, which appears two issues before it is revealed to be armor. The second form is the transformed backpack, and the third is the full upgraded...

Well, it's in the new Previews catalog, so I guess I can finally announce what Eric and I have been working on since we wrapped up Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures... We'll be doing some issues of Batman: The Brave and the Bold . A comic series based off of the current animated series. A funny thing about this book for Eric and myself: We had actually spent a bit of time before San Diego ComicCon last year formulating a pitch for an all-ages reinterpretation of Batman based off a combination of the 1940's Dick Sprang art style and the 1960's television series. We then arrived at ComicCon to see images everywhere of this cartoon series and immediately scrapped the proposal. And now we're doing a comic that is fundamentally the same as the series we spent the summer quietly creating. Strange world. Our intention with this series is to capture the feel of the cartoon rather than literally interpret the style of the animated series onto a comic book page. Comics and animat...