La Zona Muerta

A few things I’ve drawn recently and a few words about the artists and comics I ripped them off from that they came from:

Toth meets Kirby in a show I probably would have watched religiously had it made air

It was the great Alex Toth’s birthday a few weeks back and I felt like playing a wee bit of hooky at work (please don’t be a narc) and flipped through one of my Toth artbooks during the final hour of the day. I came across Toth’s pitch art for a prospective show for Hanna Barbara called “Revenge of the Golden Sphinx.” I was taken, obviously by how much Toth was channeling Kirby in his presentation board… but also in how raw the illustration was. It looked like he was sitting at his desk five minutes before show time and was like “let me do some touch ups,” and attacked the board with a Sharpie, just adding peculiar, blocky weirdness. I tried to capture as much of that feeling as I could, here. The “inking” and coloring didn’t take long; the main struggle here was “pencilling” the form and trying to get it to look right.

Crosshatching still gives me fits. Not so much in real life, but digitally where I still struggle with the tools a bit

Dan Spiegle is, unless you’re as deep in the weeds as I am, probably one of the greatest artists you’ve never heard of. very much an artist’s artist, never a superstar but someone in the industry known for his professionalism, speed, versatility and depth of output. Look ,I probably own something on the order of 40,000 comics or so and I LOVE Spiegle and actively seek out his art… but even I probably don’t even own a QUARTER of the work this man did. Above is my stab at one of his covers for my favorite work of his, the comic Crossfire (written by the equally versatile Mark Evanier). Crossfire is slightly difficult to recommend; it’s 90% brilliant, and the further away it gets from superheroics, the better it gets, but it has it’s roots in DNAgents, a book that was an attempt to cash in on the New Teen Titans and Uncanny X-Men teen gang superhero soap opera zeitgeist of the early 1980s. If I give you the elevator pitch for Crossfire, that it’s a Hollywood bail bondsman named Jay Endicott who gets caught up in some corporate espionage intrigue and ends up donning a costume to throw bad guys off of the scent, that’s one thing. If I tell you that you need to know Crossfire’s blood was removed and he was given fake, oxygenated blood from one of the DNAgents, prolonging Endicott’s life and that his main love interest is an innocent, vat grown, virginal clone with psychic powers who is mentally a young woman but really only a few years old, that info dump might make you go “huh?” None of that is particularly important to the average issue of Crossfire and they do try to downplay that stuff, but it does make it a bit more difficult to recommend wholeheartedly. At any rate, Crossfire is probably Spiegle’s finest, most personal work, and I hope my homage did him justice.

It’s hard to believe the nephews become good little Junior Woodchucks with stunts like this

Not much more I can say about walking in the webprints of “the good Duck artist,” Carl Barks. Emulating his style is VERY difficult for me, but I guess that’s why I do it. I really struggle with digital tools to make lines approximating the clean ink lines he probably didn’t labor all that much over. Same reason I like cribbing Archie art; it makes me work hard to make stuff look natural and pretty.

Another of my beloved favorite comics from the 1980s represented here; the great and, so far unmatched by any modern reinterpretation Suicide Squad

Luke McDonnell was a completely underrated and undersung veteran of the comic game for DECADES. His most famous work is surely co creating Suicide Squad (well, the modern interpretation, and a lot of the heavy lifting was done by John Ostrander and Bob Greenberger, with some sneaky help from Karl Kesel), but just before that, he drew Iron Man for almost four years and dozens of other things, besides. His greatest stuff wasn’t when he was ably inked by the likes of Bob Lewis or super slickly inked by Kesel (a very handsome combination and my favorite on the actual SS title) but rather when he decided to ink himself in the amazing Deadshot miniseries from 1988. DC, at one point, was absolutely UNTOUCHABLE when it came to the books that were a little more meaty, a little more mature, and McDonnell rolled into this assignment, making a decision to go wild. His layouts weren’t especially ground breaking or flashy or anything (although always good and in service of the story being told, which is, y’know, the point of the job to begin with); what stuns in the work here is the actual mark making on the page. I’m still not quite sure what he did. To my semi-trained eye, it looks like he inked the whole thing with markers. The work is arresting and expressive; I just blew up ONE PANEL from the four issue mini for my homage up there. Ostrander himself said that the Deadshot mini is his favorite thing McDonnell did and one of his favorite works of his own career, and that includes some pretty high-octane work. I hope I conveyed like even a quarter of the energy in those inks, man. Engrossing and a ton of fun to pay tribute to a guy who doesn’t get enough love.

I made an editorial decision to not draw Dr. Strange here for two reasons; I didn’t love the foreshortening on Strange’s figure and frankly, my hand was tired after inking this thing. Sorry

Speaking of unsung heroes… Sal Buscema is just the greatest. His brother John is probably, after Jack Kirby the man single most associated with the look of Marvel Comics (okay, maybe John Romita would be up there, too) and John is a lot of ways is probably the better draftsman… certainly at drawing the human form, anyway, but you could make the argument that Sal is more dynamic, more willing to throw himself into the story. The shot I cribbed from above, from Incredible Hulk #299 is probably the single most beastial Hulk Sal ever did. He looks like an unleashed ape here, and essentially, he is (the long suffering Bruce Banner has committed mental suicide, leaving us with this mindless horror). The inks by veteran Gerry Taloc were interesting; very airy and feathery almost like Vince Colleta on Thor (NOT an insult! If we take out the shortcuts Colleta was notorious for, which were on the one hand understandable but on the other, shitty and uncalled for, his airy inks on Thor completely differentiate it from the clean, polished inks of a Joe Sinnott on Fantastic Four, giving both books distinct looks despite being both drawn by Kirby). I started out emulating those inks but found I was having a hard time making the figure look substantial enough so I attacked the areas that should be darker with more “ink.” I thought this one came out pretty well, especially with my difficulties with thick and thins in Procreate.

Anyway, these are the kind of things I use the limited runtime of my hands for in my free time… hopefully you enjoyed.