This is, of course, a recreation of one of my favorite single issues of any comic, the wonderful Justice League of America #200. Here's the original for your reference:
Uncanny, isn't it? Except for George Perez putting in about a billion more details and having about a zillion times my talent, the two image are like bookends!
Seriously, this was just a project to kick off an exercise: I plan to work my way through this comic, recreating each page, using my pastiche characters instead of the actual characters so I don't have to have the comparisons thrown into too drastic relief. I want to use the layouts and styles of all the different great artists in the books as a guide to developing my own skills. You could say it's an exercise in long-form swiping, except that I don't even have enough talent to swipe. Maybe it's a fool's errand, but I think there might be something to be gained from this, kind of like Malcolm X copying the entire dictionary while in prison, only not like that at all.
When I tried to do comic work during the Graphic Novel Intensive class at PNCA, I was using a lightbox to ink the pencils on a separate sheet. I don't have that luxury at home, and I am still not comfortable inking directly over my pencils, so I will be pencilling on paper and inking on vellum laid over it. It's not the best set-up in the world, but we'll see how it goes.
Speaking of inking: here's what the cover inks looked like before I got too photoshoppy with them. (That thick line in the middle is the seam between the two pieces of vellum.)
The coloring and mocking-up was just for the cover. Since this exercise is supposed to focus on my drafting skills and not my computer graphic skills, the rest of the pages will be drawn and rendered, and then just get a little cleaning up in the computer.
I may be coming at this about forty years behind schedule, but I intend to have fun anyway.
See ya in the funny pages.
