Thursday 23 January 2014

ADVENTURE COMICS #3:

Here's the next cover in the ongoing Legion of Superheroes series that I'm doing. The story revolves around the death of Saturn Girl at the hands of The Legion of Crime. 

Looking at the cover now, it reminds me an awful lot of the cover to LSH 258...but this was totally unintentional. When I sketched out the art I didn't know, at that time, who the two main figures would be. I drew and inked the cover pretty quickly. 



I decided on Saturn Girl because of a mix of convenience and gravitas. Death in comics is pretty irrelevant. It never lasts and if it ever does, they're minor characters. I remember reading LSH 206, got it second hand back in 1981 from a market stall, and finding out that Ferro Lad and Invisible Kid were dead, they were clones in the stories. I became slightly obsessed with collecting the issues they'd appeared in. It was years before I found a copy of LSH 203, the death of Invisible Kid. But the point is, they remained dead. It gave the Legion stories an edge, people could die, the adventures had consequence. 

Until the Legion became a book that rehashed the past stories over and over and over again. But we're talking about when the Legion was great here...

And so Saturn Girl is dead. She's one of the founding members obviously and her death will change The Legion...it also establishes the Legion of Crime as major enemies...after this storyline, which ends in issue 5, they'll be back. There are a few storylines I want to address inbetween, the adult Legion and also a storyline about clones. 



Thursday 9 January 2014

ADVENTURE COMICS #1 COLOURED

Eventually I'm going to print off all the covers in this series and make fake comics. I may have mentioned this before...but maybe not. Anyway, this is my first attempt at colouring one. I spent a while, ok ages, trying to colour it using Photoshop in a style that replicates the way comics used to be coloured. It may help me one day to look at the tutorial disc I got with Photoshop...but so far I've not found the time.

Some of this cover looks pretty neat. The key will be finding the right paper to print on. I took apart an issue of Adventure Comics to use as the interior, back cover...and also the staples. I've tried to let a few of the creases from the original cover show through. The rest will be done manually when I add the printed cover to the comic...I guess there'll be a few spine creases. I may kick it around a bit. Then I'll board and bag it. See how it looks.

Neal Adams was the best colourist at DC back in the late 60's and early 70's. Man, he did some great covers. Well, the Aquaman run from about issue 35 up was as good...heck, that's probably my favourite ever run of covers. Awesome. 

I'll get together a post about the 1967-70 DC era, the artists, the covers, the esoteric stuff, comics that are worth getting excited about...

For now here's the coloured cover wrap. I'm going to make the colours from the back cover match the front...I just need to find out how. Pressing random buttons doesn't work that often...


And here's a close up of some of the detail!


Should have the cover printed in a week or so. Next post will be Adventure issue #3 though...