Comic Art and Death Metal

About a month ago I was randomly browsing the comic art on eBay, which is something I almost never do (normally I just go with keyword searches like, um, "firestorm" heh). Very lucky that I did, as an hour or so earlier artist Vincent Locke (Sandman, among many many others) had listed one of his works. The "buy now" was $50 more than the reserve price, but I pounced as soon as I saw it.

The artwork in question is the final preliminary cover sketch to the album "Live Cannibalism" by Cannibal Corpse (The cover itself was ultimately done in watercolour paints). A bit of history for the uninitiated to come, but first of all the art in question:

Final version:

So you're probably thinking "geez, that's a bit gory". Well, yes. Cannibal Corpse have always delt with rather horrific subject matter (it's called "Brutal Death Metal" for a reason you know). Vince Locke has provided album art for the band since the beginning. Several of the albums have been very controversial, both in part to the lyrics, and the album covers. This has attracted attention from US politicians, church groups etc (all the typical groups that you would expect to get offended really). Even here in New Zealand the early albums were apparently banned for a while, although the two independant record stores in my city had their albums readily available so it wasn't much of a ban to be honest. By Cannibal Corpse standards the cover is rather restrained I think- certainly it's not as blatantly in-your-face as the likes of Tomb Of The Mutilated (do NOT google that cover if you are easily offended. And yes, I realise just by me saying that your curiosity pretty much leaves you with no choice but to have a look :p).

As for the actual significance of this to me- I've always been in to heavy metal, but it was primarily the more mainstream acts like Def Leppard, Living Colour, Skid Row etc in the late 80's/ early 90's. After finishing high school I went to university to study classical music. One of the guys there started introducing me to the underground metal scene. His favourite band was Cannibal Corpse, so they naturally wound up being one of the first Death Metal groups I heard (this was around about 1994). I've been hooked on extreme metal ever since, and Corpse have remained a favourite to this day. So it's pretty cool to pick up artwork from a band that I like and that helped me start down the musical path I'm on. Plus, y'know, Vincent Locke isn't half bad either ;)

Brief Interlude For Coolness

Currently in the middle of the Wellington Armageddon convention. Will give a bit of a rundown after the final day tomorrow, but for now just wanted to show off a couple of sketches I had done today.

The first is by Agnes Garbowska.

Her stuff's super cute, she has an issue of Spider-Ham coming out from Marvel in the next month or two.

The second sketch, which is what I'm most excited about, is by Mike Allred.

Mike's retired from doing convention sketches, and the previous week at the Christchurch con turned down all requests. This week I guess he was just in the mood for drawing, he got through 4 requests today. Lucky for me I was hanging around early on, since I wound up buying a Madman page (pics to come later). His wife Laura commented in the afternoon that she still couldn't believe he was doing sketches, so that's how rare they are. I love the character to it.

Framing Armageddon

Following on somewhat from yesterday's post about my convention purchases, today I framed my Wonder Woman page by Nicola Scott. That is, after walking the city trying to find a frame big enough...

As I've shown before, I like to get creative when I'm cutting the boards for a frame. This time I almost did it the traditional way, but as soon as I sat down to do it, I was hit with inspiration. I had a lot of dead space between the picture and the frame, so why not drop in the Wonder Woman logo.

I think it came out great. It took a little over 2 hours to do, but was worth the effort.

Just to be extra clever, I changed the bevelled edge on the red card to an undercut so it slotted in seamlessly with the yellow card.

Who said frames have to be boring.

Armageddon 2010. Round 1. Fight!

Round 1 of the two-week convention double header is done and dusted. Got home today (Tuesday) from Armageddon in Christchurch over the weekend. Now you may say "but hang on, it's the same guests at both cons". Well yes, but with one notable exception: Nicola Scott was only attending this one (actually there's a couple of actors only attending the upcoming con, but who cares about them ;)). So yes, although it was a good excuse to bum around Christchurch for a few days, I essentially made the 40 minute plane flight to see Nicola. It was worth it.

This is what fun looks like the night before:
...and no, I wasn't stalking the event, my hotel was 3 doors down from the con.
As was the case last year, the local comic store slayed their counterparts in the Wellington and Auckland cons again, with the sheer mass of their $1 bins. I wound up having to mail my stack of comics back to myself, and it clocked in at a feather under 5kg (11 pounds for those that still use an archaic measuring system :p). No way in hell I was getting that back on the plane via my carry-on bag. While it was slim pickings as far as knocking things off my wants list, I managed to pick up an almost complete run of the first 40 issues of X-O Manowar.

Comic guests this time were Nicola Scott, Mike Allred, and Francis Manapul. All were really friendly and engaging to talk to. I wound up not watching any of the acting guests (I'll see them next week), instead talking to Nicola and Mike a whole lot, and watching Francis draw.

For the first time, the con supplied free cards to get signed by the comic guests. This was an excellent move, both as something for passing kids to get signed, and (as Mike Allred observed) a nice little exclusive for the NZ shows for those of us that care about such things.

I hit Nicola up for a sketch first:

I got her to do Jason last time she was over here, so now I have a Ronnie Firestorm to go with it.
Then it was over to Francis Manapul:

Pretty damn cool. When I wasn't bugging Mike and Nicola (which I did a whole bunch heh), I was watching Francis crank these out. Awesome to watch, and for a totally insane $40. He has his girlfriend over with him, Agnes Garbowska (she works for Marvel), she had assorted prints of her work which is really really cute. Amazing coincidence, but she had a Blackest Night picture with Firestorm in it. Sold!

Mike Allred doesn't do sketches anymore which is a bit of a bummer, but he had plenty of art on offer. I picked up a cheap page from the Spaceman one-shot:

I haven't read the comic, but I really dig this page (images were ultimately laid over a painted background). His wife (who colours Mike's work) was there also, she was really nice. That's 5 comic pros at one table, and they were all really friendly and easy to talk to. That's not always the case, so I wound up spending more time with them than expected. They probably all secretly hate me by now ;) Although, I did buy Mike a packet of Tim Tam biscuits, after Nicola started raving about them (I won't bore you with the details), so that's gotta count in my favour ;)

Back to Nicola Scott, and the majorly hard decision for the weekend- what pages to buy. Seriously, I spent ages flipping back and forth through her folder. So many great pages. I had gone in planning to pick up 2 or 3 Secret Six pages, but wound up with just the one:

A nice little playful scene between Deadshot and Jeanette, with a great Ragdoll panel. The reason I only got one S6 page was because I found this beauty:
Pages 2 & 3 from Blackest Night: Wonder Woman #1. Brilliant. I've been wanting to get a double page splash for a while, nice that it's one of Nicola's and that I bought it direct from her. As an after though, I also asked for another sketch, since she was sitting there doing nothing:

Great eyes.

Onward to next weekend. I have a couple of Madman pages I'm considering picking up, but most of the next con will be spent watching the actors do their thing. Well, that's the plan anyway...

So Much Work, And Nobody Even Dies

Just got hold of the original art for Firestorm v2 #45 page 12. Aside from a couple of great Hyena shots, I found this one panel really interesting purely for the amount of editorial guidance that went in to it:

First of all, we have the letterer Carrie Spiegle needing to add one of those line thingies (technical term) over the E in CAFE (all red markings are by me to highlight)

Next, the point on Felicity's speech bubble was lengthed. I've roughly drawn in where it originally went, as it's twinked out and doesn't show on the scan. I guess it looked a little too much like the woman in the background was talking, although you'll notice they didn't exactly follow the editor's suggested look (in blue).

The note in the margin reads "lenthen point to Felicity"

Finally, there's a note to change the hairstyles on a couple of figures. The margin note reads "More black in both Ronnie & Ed Raymond's hair, also fix Ed's hair style". Both figures in question are circled.

One small problem though. While that's certainly Ronnie on the left, on the right it's Doreen, not Ed! Ed is the figure with his back to the camera. Editor Janice Race missed that the figure on the right is wearing a skirt, so we're left with a very masculine head on a woman's body.

That's pretty funny.

One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other

Another bit of comparisson of the printed page vs the original art. This is from Bloodhound #5 (by Kirk & Riggs), in a scene where Jason has an attempt to merge with Bloodhound rather emphatically denied. From the comic:

Original:

At the risk of sounding like I have something against colorists, I really prefer it in black and white. Could've been interesting if they still did all the lettering on the page though ;)

If you've got it, share it

Following on from my last post (it's almost like I planned it...), this seems as good a time as any to point out that my entire art collection is all scanned and online right here!

36 pages of both classic and modern Firestorm, an entire issue of Moon Knight prelims, convention sketches, and a bunch of other pages from Blue Beetle, Aquaman, Birds Of Prey etc.

Despite what it tells you when you register a paid account, the pages do not quite display on a 1:1 scale. Shag over at Firestorm Fan has full size scans of various pages on his site, so consider that the place to go for the proper article. As an online collection all in one place though, ComicArtFans serves it's purpose very well.

It won't be up to date for long though, I just won two more Firestorm pages on ebay ;)

Sometimes high tech isn't better

Just had some more Firestorm artwork arrive (4 pages!), a christmas present for myself if you will (well that's my excuse, really it was just because a dealer was having a sale). Of particular interest (well, to me anyway) is the first panel from #6, page 18. As it appeared in the comic:

Cool effects and all, but here's what was actually there originally:

Heh, that's an awful lot of lines and white dots to have a colorist come along and cover up. The printed panel is certainly effective, but I think I prefer the original art (by Batista & Green).

If It's Worth Doing, It's Worth Overdoing

I've come up with a bit more wall space recently, so it was time to frame another page. I've previously talked about this excellent Blue Beetle page by Casey Jones. After my successful experiment with matting a Birds Of Prey page, I felt like having another go at something unconventional. Pretty quickly I came up with the mad idea of cutting out Beetle's chest emblem into the mat. Yes, it would've been easier to paint it on. No, I don't like easy things. Result, pre-frame.

The first thing I wanted to try was following the panel alignment, which I thought might look cool. I could've done with 1mm or 2 of extra space, it wound up a closer fit than I'd planned, but it works well enough.

Then on to the icon for the black matt. I found a giant image of it via google, resized it to fit, then printed it out. The old-school carbon paper cheat of scribbling pencil on the back was used to transfer the image to the card, then it came to the pain staking task of cutting it all out.

I didn't time it, but I think I spent a little over an hour on this. It was actually pretty straight foward once I got the hang of it, just required a bit of planning before each cut to make sure the edge was sloping the right way, and that I wasn't going to run over another part with the blade.

It initially didn't fit the frame quite right, the top of the icon was obscured. I cut 5mm off the bottom (of the matt, not the art!), and hey presto, it looked perfect.

The finished product hanging on the wall.
Left to right: Vigilante (Todd Smith), Blue Beetle (Casey Jones), Mantra (Robb Phipps), Firestorm (Nicola Scott)

Art In Close-Up: Birds Of Prey #107

Time for a closer look at the second of two BoP pages I got from Nicola Scott at the recent convention.

Birds Of Prey #107
Page 13

Pencils: Nicola Scott
Inks: Doug Hazlewood
Writer: Gail Simone
Letters: Travis Langham
Colours: Hi Fi Designs

The full pages:



Nicola Scott does layouts on the back of her pages. This time I reversed the roughs (except for the full page shot, oooops!), so they're facing the same way as the finished page (obviously, being on the back means they face the opposite way normally).

I got this page primarily for the gorgeous shot of Ice in panel 4. It's also got a really interesting layout. How the heck do you artist people come up with ideas like that?

Panel 1:




Panel 2:



Hats off to whoever coloured this, because that middle transition shot of Catman made no sense to my eyes before I referred to the printed version. Being all tucked up like that, my eyes had it as being some sort of helmet in Catman's hand.

Panel 3:



Panel 4:



The original looks so much better than the coloured version imo. The colourist washed it out a bit too much for my taste. I love the expressions on the faces of Ice and Huntress.

Panel 5:




I framed it this afternoon. It may not stay there too long, that wall gets a bit of sun, and I normally just have a print there, since it's expendable. But, I really wanted to have a decent look at it, so I'll just keep an eye on it.