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Tuesday, August 25, 2020

What Shall I Draw August 30th?

 

 
One Sunday every month from January through September I take on drawing suggestions for eight hours. It’s Instagram-mertainment that I call “What Shall I Draw Today?” (WSIDT). By that reckoning, this Sunday will be the 2020 penultimate edition of the drawing session.

What Shall I Draw Today?
Sunday, August 30th, 2020
Eastern Daylight Time:  12pm noon - 8pm
Pacific Daylight Time:  9am - 5pm
 
As a non-themed session, possible sketch topics may be just about anything: Disney, Marvel, DC, movies, television or just something original and not from popular culture at all. You may click on the WSIDT tab above for FAQs.

Pitch your suggestions at any of the following social media spots where you find the above prompting image from now until drawing day, Sunday August 30th. Please, no IG DMs.

Blog:  monotonae.blogspot.com (right here in the comments)

Instagram:  @monstergram7

Facebook:  /Monster Enterprises

Saturday, August 1, 2020

World’s Finest: The Supergirl-Batgirl Plot


At the time, the deadline for submitting fan art to DC FanDome was 2-1/2 days away. It was just about enough time for me to start and complete a third and final piece.


https://www.dccomics.com/dcfandome


The Plot Thickens


Superman is my favorite DC Character. This may not be a surprises if you’ve read the two previous posts about my DC FanDome submissions featuring Lois Lane and the Teen Titans. Following my strategic decision to avoid creating new Superman art, this third piece was going to be Superman adjacent. It was going to star Supergirl and (because why not) also Batgirl.


Dis-cover-y


I don’t have a favorite classic Supergirl comic story. As for classic Supergirl & Batgirl team-up comic stories, there are that many to begin with. Regardless, I proceeded with searching for a pre-Crisis era comic book cover featuring the two super side-kicks and came across issue #169 of “World’s Finest” from September 1967. The feature story is titled, “The Supergirl-Batgirl Plot.” According to the online wiki synopsis, Supergirl and Batgirl apparently team up to undermine their male mentors, then a twist is revealed and everything goes back to status quo, just like most of the comics of the Silver age and American super-hero comics.


The original cover is pencilled by Curt Swan and inked by George Klein. Here, Superman and Batman visually remain the stars of their own team-up book, but Supergirl and Batgirl combined are a close secondary read. The sky/background is a flat honey-amber and like A LOT of covers in the day, flat yellow was both more energetic than white and allows for characters with predominantly red and blue colored costumes to standout.


Sketch ’n’ Stretch


Unrestricted by the events of the original 1967 story, I attempted to re-imagine a cover/poster with the same or similar elements to elicit that “What in the world is happening here?” response in the audience/reader that was goal of those Silver age comic covers. 


A few quick thumbnail sketches explored different camera angles for composition, Batplane designs, logos and costume treatments.



I struggled with the initial full-scale layout. There were problems with scale, perspective and generally lacking an interesting dynamic to the whole thing.


Fresh Inking


Given the squarish space for art that results from placing logos and type at the lower quarter of the poster, I pushed Supergirl as big a full-figure  that would fit. Now, at least, she appeared to be hovering and not standing on the plane wing the same as Batgirl. Made-up alien invaders were made bit larger and gives something action-heroic to do for Batgirl. Batgirl’s flowing cape obscures how the other end of the cable is anchored to an eyelet of the plane, which would help justify how she can pull up those two beings.


For additional contrast, the Superman-Batman-Batmobile vignette were shrunk significantly while retaining enough for telltale details.


The ball of stuff in Supergirl’s hand doesn’t end up reading as well as it should. They began as big cannon barrels, that turned into space lasers, that got busted up with tangles of wires and tied in a large knot. It is literally space junk- weapons that no longer pose a threat. Story-telling wise it is simultaneously a success and a failure.


Super Friends


I don’t know why both Supergirl and Batgirl were kept as individual sidekick heroes and didn’t team-up more often and neither were part of the Teen Titans. I think that if a book like “World’s Finest” could successfully FORCE Superman and Batman on shared adventures, then the same could be done with Supergirl and Batgirl for their targeted audience. Their personality dynamic would be and should be different from their mentors, which could have been interesting. That is, as long as it didn’t become super-hero Betty and Veronica.


In this piece, I imagine that Supergirl/Kara is a couple of years younger than Batgirl/Barbara. I also imagine that she speaks with an Australian-like accent.


I Lost My Bat Shoe


I think dulled colors does a lot for this vignette of the former heroes struggling with the hum-drum task of changing a flat tire. It’s so average looking, that it takes a while to realize that Superman is struggling to carry a mere car tire.



The smoke was a late addition, which ended up also being a great place to hide a bat icon.


Incomprehensible


For giggles and elucidation, the art is presented without the word bubbles and other graphics.


Teen Titans: Surge Party


With one piece of fan art submitted to DC FanDome, I had time to make one or two more before deadline.


https://www.dccomics.com/dcfandome


New Crew


From what would become my third piece of fan art (to feature Supergirl and Batgirl) would evolve to DC Super-Hero Girls to Young Justice and then stopping on Teen Titans. As far as teams of young super-heroes, I skipped the Legion of Super-Heroes because there are just too many of them.


New Threads


Fans show their love in many ways: straight copying, fan-fiction, “ship”-ping, cosplay. Redesigning costumes can be mixed in with all of those. I find for a one-off project like this, a few small “thumbnail” sketches are sufficient. Color sketches aren’t necessary with most of their palettes to be based on existing reference.


New Line


The team mix is an amalgam from different sources, but mostly it’s based on the ground-breaking Marv Wolfman & George Perez series re-boot of the 1980’s - 1990’s, it being one of the significant books as I was getting into comic books. The composition is inspired by a group action drawing by Perez which included Kid Flash, but also only depicted Beast Boy, a.k.a. Changeling as a green bird. I re-interpreted that composition to spread out to a widescreen and placed different character as different distances from the theoretical camera.


New Black


For an artist, making fan art can also be an opportunity to play with art styles and art mediums. Her I pulled together several examples of the work of Alex Toth. One of the things for which  Toth became known is the character designer of many Hanna-Barbera action cartoons including  Space Ghost (1966) and the original run of the Super Friends (1973).


The final ink line was done with a brush and ink. It doesn’t achieve the look of some Toth’s more iconic style with appears to be done with pens of a couple of different sizes.


New-bies


If I could hide Mickey’s in Disney art and something like a Superman emblem in the previous Lois Lane piece, then I was going to try hiding a Batman icon in this one.


The “Teen Titans” logo is based on the one from the 1960’s with the trapezoidal perspective of the logo from the 1980’s. Then the letters are shook up not totally unlike the logo of the 2003 animated show.


New Attitude


For the final submission, I cropped it to a 4:3 dimension. The submission process calls for a title for the piece. Something alliterative with the letter “T” wasn’t coming together. So I landed on the awkwardly pun, Surge Party. If you say it quickly three times, then it sounds like “search party.”


New Teen Titans

My favorite Titan isn’t consistently the same through the different versions of the team, and not for the reasons that the team line-up changes often. Robin is my favorite from the 2003 animated series. Cyborg is my favorite from the 2013 Teen Titans GO! series. Wonder Girl is my favorite from the 1989 The New Teen Titans comic.