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.