Tag: Ultiman

Art Vs. Artist Again

It’s appar­ent­ly that time of year, when artists look back and post a sam­pling of the work they’ve done the pre­vi­ous year in this for­mat on social media. I’ve been see­ing some of these pop­ping up on LinkedIn the last few weeks or so, with the #ArtVsArtist hash­tag. Look­ing back, it’s been awhile since I did one (2020!), so I thought maybe I’d do it again, join in on the fun.

Any reg­u­lar vis­i­tors here will prob­a­bly rec­og­nize sev­er­al of these from posts I’ve made this year. I debat­ed using a more cur­rent image of myself in the cen­ter, but ulti­mate­ly decid­ed to stick with the same one I used last time. It’s a 12-year-old me, and if you saw the whole pho­to, you’d see I was attempt­ing to do a paint­ing (in oils, no less!) of the USS Enter­prise from Star Trek (the Orig­i­nal series, of course). We all have to start some­where (though the truth is I had been draw­ing for years even before this).

Any­way, thanks for stop­ping by, and a Hap­py New Year to you!

High Octane Stuff

Long­time vis­i­tors to my site might know that I did some work for Gary Carl­son and Chris Eck­er’s Big Bang Comics back in the ’90s. I got to do a whole bunch of things: design char­ac­ters, logos, draw sto­ries, sug­gest sto­ry ideas… Though no one was going to get rich off of Big Bang, it was a blast. (Hmm; as I guess work­ing for an imprint called “Big Bang” should be!) I real­ly enjoyed the whole “comics his­to­ry through a fun­house mir­ror” aspect of it, and con­tributed a bunch of fake cov­ers to a cou­ple issues pub­lished under the blan­ket title, “The Big Bang His­to­ry of Comics,” mod­eled after Ster­anko’s two comics his­to­ry volumes.

Fast for­ward to recent­ly. Gary’s putting out new Big Bang issues via Indy­Plan­et these days, and on occa­sion will reach out and run stuff past me (as a sec­ond pair of eyes). I vol­un­teered to help him out with some things on the cur­rent issue, spot­light­ing Ulti­man. In the course of help­ing to assem­ble and col­or some of the fake cov­ers from the old His­to­ry issues (which will be seen large and in col­or for the first time in this new issue), an idea popped into my head for a new cov­er. Gary encour­aged me to go for it, and this is the result!

I specif­i­cal­ly want­ed this new cov­er to look like Wayne Bor­ing’s work, as I’ve always kind of liked the bar­rel-chest­ed pro­por­tions and quirk­i­ness of what he did. This (along with one oth­er thing I did for the issue) hap­pens to be the first new art I’ve drawn for Big Bang in a long time! It was a lot of fun.

I did a whole bunch of fake cov­ers for the His­to­ry issues back when those orig­i­nal­ly came out, and it’s sur­pris­ing to me now to real­ize that I did­n’t gen­er­ate any Ulti­man cov­ers for them. As a kid, Super­man was a favorite (see at right, done back then), along­side Bat­man and the orig­i­nal Capt. Mar­vel. Well, that omis­sion’s been rec­ti­fied now!