Irwin Steveson from Darwin

Darwin is a comic book I'm working on at the moment, written by Graham Beadle of the Grinning Demon comic shop. This is a pinup or Xenobiologist Irwin Steveson I cobbled together for Creator Owned Day, the 1st of March. If you're on Twitter look up #creatorownedday to see more excellent independent creator-owned characters, and check back here over the next few months for more updates on Darwin as it progresses - this one is really going somewhere!

Stone!

I've contributed a page to a comic book, set in Maidstone, called STONE. It will soon be on sale in the Tourist Information Centre, and I assume also in The Grinning Demon comic shop. It is written by bona-fide comic writer and novelist Dan Abnett, and each page is drawn by a different brilliant artist. If you live in the area pick it up and support the efforts of the fine creative people who have contributed! I've been doing some stuff for it today, but took a break and sketched this, to rest my weary brain!

Donna Troy!

In mid 2011 DC Comics relaunched their entire superhero line. My little pitch for a miniseries would have been Donna Troy.

Donna Troy was introduced in the early to mid sixties as Wonder Girl, a younger version of Wonder Woman, before gradually developing an identity of her own. She was a key member of the Teen Titans in their heyday in the early eighties. Editorial changes to Wonder Woman's origins forced a number of startling alterations to Donna's own history, which little by little removed the character from her classic origins. A new Wonder Girl, Cassie Sandsmark, was introduced in 1996, further affecting Donna's position in the company's shared universe. These factors, and others, have left Donna Troy with a distinct identity crisis!

In this most recent relaunch, DC has solved this problem by... seemingly erasing Donna Troy from ever having existed! I'm not the world's most massive fan of the character, but I know she has her staunch followers, and in my opinion her classic red Teen Titans costume is a classic example of clean costume design. So here's my pitch...

California, today... A man is on a surfboard out in the ocean, waiting for waves. Unseen to him a black, swirling tentacled creature is edging ever nearer to him beneath the surface... He waits for a wave, we wait for the beast to attack... and then SPLASH! Donna erupts from the surf with the creature's inky, swirling form held high above her head! They make their way to the beach, where they spend the day getting to know one another. He learns of her upbringing by QueenHyppolyta on Paradise Island, as the adopted younger daughter of Wonder Woman, after she was found washed ashore in a cot-boat as a new-born baby. Now that she has come of age she has travelled to man's world in search of her true heritage. She learns that he is suffering from cancer - an illness she has never heard of, a black swirling mass that cannot be defeated with fists. She has much to learn of friendship, support and mortality, and that would form the central theme of the miniseries. At the same time she will be trying to rein in further aspects of this demonic mess that has escaped from some cavern beneath Paradise Island as it spreads across America. Crucially, she will not find the answers to her birth that she was looking for, but will discover that it can be her quest for truth and justice that defines her.

Visually, the series should be designed to appeal to, rather than exclude, female readers. As a young woman brought up on a small island, Donna feels a great affinity for the sea and will settle by the beach. This will be super-heroics meets the OC or 90210, all seen through the eyes of a girl brought up by warriors in complete isolation.

So that would've been my pitch, if I'd worked in comics! I hope you could visualise it a little bit - in my own mind I've read it, and I can tell you it's great!

Thanks for listening!

Summer bloke...

I've let my blogging slide over the past six months... I basically figured I should stop hurriedly doing things just to stick on here, thinking instead I'd put on some good stuff. That never materialised, so I'm putting this on! This was meant to be a drawing of Superboy, but it turned into a random guy in swimmers, and it was meant to be a darkened, wrestling scene, but it became a summery sky instead. All great art has a life of it's own! :-D Haha, not! I like the silk-screen-ishness of it. If I get round to adapting it into what it was meant to be, I'll post that too.

Happy 2011!

I have lost the ability to create. End of. My brain is absolutely teeming with ideas, but when I come to actually put pen to tablet, nothing happens. And that is why I missed December 2010. I'm so pissed at myself for that, because I was on such a roll of posting every month. Sad times. Among the things I would like to do is an adaptation of the movie Barbarella - itself an adaptation of a comic book. Along with the camp excesses of the film, it's that Adaptation of an Adaptation thing that appeals to me. As always, I will never get around to actually doing it!

Bonus post! 2 for November!

I hate that I've been posting one per month this year, how crap am I?! Here's something extra which I've taken from my hard drive and messed about with a wee bit! I must have done it months ago, god knows why I didn't post it then! I have separated out the layers so you can see how I (sometimes) work!

Doc Alibi!

This is a character of mine named Doc Alibi. You go to him if you've done a murder or something and you need a water-tight alibi constructed. As a concept I think it's a solid basis for an ongoing series, with a new client each story laying the basis for the plot to come. Often it is the opening of an adventure that is the most difficult to make believable. Also I really like the idea of a story that is not about the 'hero' or the 'villain', but a middle-man doing his job really well!

What I've been up to lately...

I've been drawing this Doctor Who comic strip in the scarce moments I am away from the day-job, taking a sort of mini-break from Crimson Iris (while still mulling it over in the back of my mind) to keep it fresh and all that. Anyway, I hope you like it, click it to big it! x

Quick! July is nearly over!

I've been pretty productive this month, but a lot of what I've done has been pages for The Crimson Iris, which are pretty meaningless out of context, soooo... Here's a bit of old random rubbish that I did ages ago! It's just a sketch, but it's pretty colourful so it caught my eye when I was looking for something to post before the end of July. xXx

The latest from the Crimson Iris...

Zomboy in Aussiebums!

I did this for an Aussiebum competition, but I misread the details and missed the deadline, so I'm putting it on here so that it wasn't a total waste of three hours!!! I hope you like it, it was fun to do!

The Flash!

Just a little sketch of The Flash, which I did while watching Desperate Houswives earlier on. He isn't a character I've ever really been a fan of, but I picked up the first issue of his new ongoing series, and really enjoyed it. Now I want to buy Flash: Rebirth, by the same writer, because I think I could really get to like this guy! I hope you like this picture, I do! As a little side-note, my boyfriend has a major imaginary crush on The Flash! ;D

Crimson Iris 2

The first page of my second Crimson Iris tale... A snatch-and-grab job has gone badly awry for the Crimson Iris, leaving her at the mercy of an East London gangster. The whole story is drawn in stark black and white and is deliberately rougher than the the first story... she's a long way from the elegance of the Riviera now.

I always intended to blog at least once a month...

...so I am posting another page from my Crimson Iris strip, this one leading on directly from the last.

What I've been up to...

I've really enjoyed doing this drawing, mainly that of the Crimson Iris herself, and the colouring has been a real self-teaching thing - I've been doing it more professionally with the help of The DC Comics Guide to Coloring and Lettering Comics, which is absolutely excellent and I think will be crucial to my work in future! You'll notice that there isn't any dialog yet... this is for two reasons - because the Lettering section of the book requires far more precision and care, and because the dialog is to be in Italian, which I do not speak! Anyway, I hope you like it, its still a work in progress so please tell me what you think!

Batgirl sketches.

More Viper!

Another image of The Viper, this time in the role of the femme fatale!

Enter The Viper!

The Viper is another of my characters, something of a villain, a mercenary and assassin who is in possession of a piece of alien technology called the Viper Vest. It links into the nervous system and allows total physical metamorphosis, which means that the Viper could be anybody. Literally anybody, man, woman, child, priest, senator, police sergeant, Barbra Streisand. Anybody. That's what makes the Viper exciting to me - you could have a whole comic series and never actually know who the main character really is. And being a mercenary really opens up story possibilities too. Visually the viper vest presents quite a challenge, having the colours and visual texture of oil. I know I could pick something easier, but that's what it looks like in my head - that or beetle shell colours, but that was even harder to pull off! As usual, I don't expect to get around to developing this idea further, as much as I'd like to... so many ideas, so little time!

Mist Maiden!

This was an experiment, trying to do some kind of hair texture, which I actually think worked pretty well. I have no use for it beyond that, but every day is a school day! x

Atomic Woman in... A Friend in Need

Part 2 of an occasional series! Previously, Ubero sought answers to the mysterious diminishing of his super powers...