Sunday, September 21, 2008

Variations on a Theme: The Hulk

More sketch cards for Upper Deck's Marvel Masterpieces series 3 done in hurry... I did simple variations on each character I drew to save time! Here's the original classic gray Hulk as designed by Jack Kirby.
And the green Hulk we all know and love!
And the lesser known Mr. Fixit Hulk from his time as a mob enforcer in Las Vegas! Seriously, I'm not joking! From Peter David's run, look it up!

The new red Hulk from the recent Hulk #1 by Jeph Loeb and Ed McGuiness. Who is he? What does he want? Why is he red? What about the rest of the Hulk Rainbow Army? Oops, I've said too much... spoiler alert!
And we can't forget World War Hulk, the baddest Hulk of them all! He's like Hulk crossed with Conan if he was raised by Spartans and trained to fight by Russell Crowe. The Russell Crowe from Gladiator, not the Russell Crowe from A Beautiful Mind. Forget "Hulk Smash!" Now it's "Hulk crush enemies, see them driven before Hulk, and hear the lamentations of Hulk's women. Also, Hulk might like to be governor one day..."

Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Variations on a Theme: Wolverine

I had to do a lot of original sketch cards for Upper Deck's Marvel Masterpieces 3 in a short amount of time, so I decided to do variations on each character I drew. Hey, it's easier than coming up with new poses every time! And think of all the cool costumes that Wolverine alone has had! Here's a few of my personal favorites. First, the John Cassaday costume from Astonishing X-Men.


Then there's the costume he took off of Fang, one of the Shi'ar Imperial Guard, during the Dave Cockrum or John Byrne run on X-Men when I was a little kid. I love that Claremont just added apostrophes to names to make them sound alien. Aa'ron S'owd. Sounds exotic!Then the Jim Lee take on the classic Kirby X-Men basic training suits. This was circa Uncanny X-Men #275, I think. Jim added a lot of belts/straps everywhere that served no purpose I could see, save looking really cool in an S&M kind of way!

Ah, the classic brown costume designed by Dave Cockrum, I believe. Is there a better costume designer than Dave Cockrum? Maybe Jack Kirby, but Dave has to be in the top tier!
Lastly, the Weapon X costume from the Barry Windsor Smith mini series. Can you really call this a costume? He's pretty much naked with a cool helmet and a few boxes hanging off him. I love the way BWS used color in that story and all the wires and pins sticking out of him are great (hard to draw on a tiny little card, though)!