A bit late, but here is “Der.Kork”s prize for crafting the winning entry for Caption Contest 13, a concept he calls “Cyborg Ranger”:
Thanks again to him for his great entry. Your chance to win your own custom black and white illustration of whatever you like (within reason) is going on now with Caption Contest 16, so get busy!
We finally have the winning prize for Caption Contest 11 finished! I am happy to present DJ Kill, by commenter Frankie:
You can win your very own custom black and white illustration of whatever you like (within reason) by entering Caption Contest 15, going on now!
xStacy and I have completed the prize for the Caption Contest 12 winner. The description was:
Female, light hair, in standard gunslinger gear–boots, jeans, shirt, tied-down revolver, duster, a Confederate cavalry hat–with a fan of five cards in her left hand. Maybe facing off with a giant tarantula or two somewhere in the Arizona desert.
I wasn’t able to work in the giant tarantulas, but here’s what I did come up with:
Thanks to Stace for coming up with a cool concept. And don’t forget, if you want to win your very own custom illustration, you can try your hand with Caption Contest 13: Naked Guy Edition going on right now!
His animation makes me weep, but “Jonny Quest” the comic book cheered me up at once thanks to this stellar cover for issue number three:
I love the way the illustration style goes from extremely realistic in the background, to more abstract and cartoony with Jonny in the middle-ground, to very cartoonish with Bandit the dog in the foreground. You rarely see this kind of layering of abstraction in American comics, where the style tends to remain the same throughout. You feel more sympathy for and empathy with more abstract, more cartoonish characters like Bandit, while the more realistic Indian and his wolf — being more concrete and visually informed — are scarier. Look at the detailed line work of the tree, for instance, compared to the completely linear and hatch-free inking on Bandit.
The coloring takes this even further. Jonny gets some nice color shading, halfway between the very tonal background and the stark black and white of the dog. I also love the use of cool blue tones for the background layer, progressing to warmer reds and oranges in the foreground. Color itself provides movement, pushing the background further back and pulling the foreground further forward, ironically making this cover more animated than most of the t.v. show’s moments.
An excellent cover by one of illustration’s icons, Doug Wildey. I also appreciate that Comico opens the issue with an inside-front-cover short biography of Wildey, and couples that with a lengthy three-page interview with him in the back. There’s one particularly good bit where Wildey (who was the main designer for all of the Quest characters) talks about Jonny’s lack of a hair part, and what a pain it was for the animators.
Perhaps those elements contribute to the book’s “hand-crafted” feel, something completely lacking in the animated series; you get the sense that this has been produced by someone who cares about what he does, a far cry from the soulless corporate hackery that doomed so many of Hanna-Barbera’s offerings.
The story itself is just so-so, featuring gold-smuggling Canadian loggers dressing up as werewolves, and … wait a minute, now that I write that out, it sounds awesome! Go Jonny!
(Cover and characters ©1987, Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc.)
Grizz and I have completed the prize for his winning Caption Contest 10 entry, the armor-clad J3er1ch0:
If you want to win your own custom black and white illustration of whatever you like (within reason), now’s your chance: Caption Contest 12 is going on now, so put on your creative thinking cap and make your entry today!
When I was looking through my old sketch books for the early HeroMachine designs, I stumbled upon the first comic book concept I worked on as more than a passing fancy. A friend of a friend and I worked through actual story ideas and I came up with a number of conceptual sketches that I remember being fairly proud of at the time. Nothing ever came of those discussions, but I’ve scanned the drawings in and re-inked them:
The Dagons were the bad guys, if I recall, and representing the forces of humanity was Dyson Lee, Space Marine. Or Navy SEAL. Or something, we never figured out which. I do remember envisioning that humanity was controlled by a very powerful theocracy, founded on the notion that everyone in the military voluntarily enslaved themselves to the hierarchy for the duration of their service. Hence the chain links as rank insignia on his uniform there.
I also argued that men and women both who were in the military should be bald, since that made the most sense in a helmet-wearing zero-gee environment. Looking back on it that might have been pleasing from a story-telling standpoint, but likely would have been disastrous in terms of marketing.
Sometimes I step back a bit and marvel at the sheer creative energy that geeks like us put out. I mean, I would bet that every person who’s reading this has a hard drive full of the remnants of whole worlds they’ve imagined, whether in the form of a half-baked comic like this one or that great American novel that never quite came together. People describe today’s generation as passive consumers, but at least the gamer/geek subculture is anything but. What we love about comics and movies and gaming is that it helps us feel creative. It spurs us to create our own worlds, our own characters, and if, like the Dagons and Dyson Lee, they never make it to print, well that’s all right too. At least they live on in our imaginations.
Long live the geeks!
Coyote, the winner of Caption Contest 8, chose a “Vampire Pirate” as his winning illustration theme, and here the ol’ swashbuckler is:
If you want to win your very own professional custom black and white illustration of whatever you like (within reason), get on over to “Caption Contest 10: A Hell of a Challenge” now and submit your entry!
Johanna Draper over at “Comics Worth Reading” (a great blog on comics) has a contest running for a male version of this awesome Adam Hughes “Women of the DC Universe” poster, seen here (featuring, from left to right, Catwoman, Oracle, Zatanna, Black Canary, Power Girl, Wonder Woman, Supergirl, Batwoman, Vixen, Poison Ivy, and Harley Quinn):
Here’s the prize for Caption Contest 7, which was won by Ashton. It’s a drawing of his father’s friend, who’s very ill. I think it was extremely generous and thoughtful of Ashton to think of his dad this way, I really hope they liked it. It turns out that drawing trees in ink is very hard.
If you want to win your very own professional black and white illustration of whatever you like (within reason), make your entry for Caption Contest 9: The Poetic Pooch going on right now!
I thought you might like to see the latest illustration I did for Jeff Mejia’s “World of Broadsword” expansion. The spec was:
I’m thinking American Indian features without the American Indian accoutrement’s
dark weathered skin. bald or scalp lock like a Pawnee warrior or Yul Brynner in Taras Bulba see pics
for weapons : primitive but exotic- Egyptian style axe/mace, boar spear, big ass hunting knife, short bow
clothing hide armor. leather with steel refinements maybe parts taken from legionnaires armor. not too constricting though. sturdy belt for knife, pouch, hand axe, etc.
pose: maybe crouching as if following a trail. in hot pursuit.
And here’s the final illustration:
