MEMORY LANE #3
Spider Punk, Thor, Elektra, X Men 92, Kang, Magneto, X Men Legacy
Yooooooo,
We’re back with another round up of sketches and preliminaries. For those on the east coast of Canada, Mike and crew are heading your way for East Coast Comic Con this weekend. If you have any comic shops, tourist or food suggestions from Toronto to Moncton, let Mike know.
X-MEN LEGACY #11
Release Date: May 22, 2013
Definitely a lot of copy pasting on this one 😂 still took some time but it beats drawing each of those balls individually.
Magneto #1 Animal Variant
Release Date: March 5, 2014
I think the toughest part of these animal variants was choosing what animal would best fit the character. When figuring this out with Magneto I pondered, what animals relate to metal, what is something that this animal can magnetize. That question helped spark a ton of ideas and it got easier from there. Mice and mouse traps, a tiger in a metal cage and an owl perched on a branch of metal scraps.
KANG THE CONQUEROR #2
Release Date: September 15, 2021
Time travel themes are the most fun for me. There’s something about time that brings forth endless ideas. Anything time related is the kind of covers I run towards. Most of these Kang sketches I came up with were used for future Kang covers.
The first concept with the cuckoo clock was to show that Kang is a little nuts. He went crazy trying to figure out this whole time line thing and making changes until it hits perfect. The second concept of Kang running is showing how he’s constantly running through time / on a hamster wheel.
You can work with numbers and clocks when working on time concepts. There’s specific elements you can mix up and come up with different ideas. Alarm clocks, watches, sun dials, grand father clocks. When I did all these sketches, it’s just a page of ideas. Looking back, most of those ideas is the concept of trapped in time. One of those ideas in the page above was him trapped in numbers / constraints. Roman numerals are primarily used in the past and using different numerals are visually interesting.
X-MEN 92: House of XCII #3
Release Date: August 3, 2022
I didn’t go concept heavy on this one. This was a full circle moment for me and I just wanted to draw my favorite characters the way I remember them as a child, ready to smash up some sentinels.
Elektra #9
Release Date: December 17, 2014
I remember the ninjas in this cover were coloured red to stay true to the original colour of “The Hand”but it didn’t work cuz Elektra got lost in it so I switched them to a blue hue in order to bring her out as the focal point. Sometimes you gotta tweak reality to make sense of the cover.
Thor #9
Release Date: January 9, 2019
I remember reusing some elements from my Elektra #5 cover for this Thor one. The Elektra #5 had snowflakes falling in the form of crosshairs and I figured it would work well in this cover but instead the snowflakes would be spinning hammers. It was a nice garnish to the winter theme. So when in doubt, rehash!
Spider-Punk #1
Release Date: April 6, 2022
This was a fun one. When I get bored of my style I start to experiment with different brushes or new techniques to get me out of that boredom. It’s a discovery phase and when I find it I get excited again and work with that approach until I eventually get bored of it and begin the search once again. So this cover was pretty much the beginning of that discovery and me wanting to just vibe out with it. I don’t think I did much to the original sketch, it just looked done by the time I sent it in for approval. I just overlayed colors and voila.
It's always hard to pick favorite with your work because they're consistently so good and clever -- but your run of Elektra covers do stand out as some of my all-time favorites.
Are any of your sketches or original art for sale?