I haven't seen anyone put up a thread like this, but I may have missed it. This thread will be for the display of new work as I finish it. Some will be Fine Art, some will be more pop culture-ish. It is posted here for critique, comment, discussion, and even a little praise.

Here's the piece I just finished, for a contest over at the Superman fan forum, The Planet. The contest is for a one-page origin of a character, either original or established. I chose my own character, Lady Liberty...


Click HERE for a Medium-sized version (588 KB)
Click HERE for a LARGE-sized version (1 MB)

Terrific illustrations!

Hopefully constructive criticism:

• I find the middle frame on the left (with the shooting) a bit confusing. Is that her daughter getting shot? I'm confused. It's an elementary school, and it looks like her daughter, but she's wearing a badge, and the hostage looks like the heroine.
• She wears (huge, dangl-y) earrings?
• Those are SOME shoulder pads!
• I appreciate the relative modesty of the figure drawing in the last panel. That's a bit of a challenge, eh?

I suggested a thread like this for this section, preferably a sticky thread (IMHO), in the "About this website" section a while back. There was some interest, but it wasn't done.

Hopefully, I'll have more to post along these lines in the coming months too. On vacation, I finally splurged and bought myself a tool for roughing out wood sculpture, which I've been eying for months.

I'll have to give my brother the link to this thread; he'd appreciate the idea of creating your own superhero.

Thanks, Alan!

1. Our heroine is being shot. It only looks like the daughter because of the hair, but look at the face. The idea is that our heroine is a hostage negotiator for the Chicago PD, and was shot in a standoff at an elementary school. Her hair is different now that she's Lady Liberty. Her daughter wears her hair like her mom did when she last saw her.
2. Yup. Dangly!
3. Yup. HUGE!
4. Yup. Challenge. How do you make a comicbook heroine who's modest. I'm building the modesty into the character herself. You'll notice that in the shooting scene, she's modestly dressed, too. I want her to be beautiful, black, and modest.


Thanks, Chashab. I look forward to seeing your sculpture thread!

So she looks more White now that she's a superhero? And more middle class?

C'est vrai. To me, I still see a black woman. But I might like to, personally, see her look more "black." Dunno why, though.


Is this do-able, Alan? To create a sort of permanent, "sticky" visual art critique thread in this section?

She's just as middle-class as she was before she was shot. As to whether she looks more "white" or not, that's certainly an issue that would be discussed in the comic. As would the fact that she was transformed by a corporation seeking to bolster the self-confidence of Americans, build up their patriotism.

Here's a color pic of her, that I did YEARS ago...


Remember, though, that for the contest, I am distilling what is essentially a 22-page origin story into one page. There was only so much I could say in one page and still tell the story with feeling. And the origin would be the jumping-off point for all the stories I want to tell.

She's a single mom, a cop in Chicago. She's black, Christian, and over-confident. She's a woman trying to put a family together, asked to lead a team of superheroes (the ComPatriots) who are at best a dysfunctional family. She's a great character, I think. Too bad I don't actually have the time to do a lot of stories with her.

I gathered all of that from the one page story. Just the idea of her being a single, working mother makes her a superhero in my eyes.

She looks more upwardly-mobile than she did before was my point (especially the hair), not her actual status...


It's certainly do-able, but I'll wait until I see more threads along these lines. Once I do, I'll be happy (truly thrilled) to set up a special area.

Understood. Thanks!



Hmmm, the first thing I noticed in this picture was her left breast . . . buxom gal! Is she swimming or flying in this one? Looks like she's flying above water with some boats underneath, but I can't figure out what the yellow spotted thing below her is: vegetation? Way up in the sky?

Oh, and I think the big dangly earrings are a nice touch.

She's over NY Harbor. That's the Statue of Liberty beneath her. And isn't it her right breast more noticeable?

I'm warming to the earrings, I guess. I suppose there's a Super explanation for them in any case.

Are the stars on her hands on gloves? The color illustration would seem to imply that, but the B&W illustration would seem to imply that they're not gloves but some kind of tattoo or implant.

There's no torch for her in the color illustration...

Yes, that would be right on her, left in the picture.

That is indeed the Statue of Liberty in the color pic, and given the angle of the light in the picture, it is indeed her left breast that catches the highlights and the right breast that is in shadow. However, she is normally-bosomed (even moderately-bosomed) for a comicbook heroine. In comics, the bosom-to-head size ratio is startling. LL's bosoms are about 1/3 the size of her head, which is moderate in comicbook terms. She is not carrying her torch in the color picture.

She is wearing blue gloves with white stars on them. The gloves are a spandex-ish material, and the stars are leather, which is why the stars do not wrinkle, while the gloves do.

The dangly earrings have a VERY complicated explanation, full of techno-babble and difficult terminology. Basically, she just likes dangly earrings. Even in the panel where she appears as a cop, she is wearing earrings that are substantially larger than normal police attire would indicate. She's modest, but has a definite sense of her own style.

On the question of hairstyles - one of the questions Lady Liberty needs to wrestle with as her story progresses is just to ehat extent has she "sold out," to become palatable to a white audience. The hairstyle is a part of that question. What does it mean to be black in America? What are the requirements, as far as dress, lifestyle, language? Religion?

I'm a round, middle-class white guy, and not especially knowledgeable about these areas. Maybe it's presumptious of me to create a character designed to ask these kinds of questions. But I am not coming to it thinking that I have some kind of definitive answer. I'm coming to it with a character who has to find her own answers.

On another note, here's my entry for this month's fan art "Pit Fight." In a Pit Fight, two artists square off against each other, each one having twenty days to do their own piece based on a common theme word. This month's word is "Serenity."


Click on image for a larger version.

Here's my latest piece, done for a Secret Santa exchange.


Click on the image for a larger version.

It's entitled, "You Must Let Me Undress You."

Pen and ink?

I miss this medium some of the time. Used it a lot for rendering during my brief time as an architecture student. I also like ink with brush . . .

Yep. I normally ink parts of my pieces with a brush, but did not in this instance.

This is a piece I did on commission for the son of some friends of mine. It is a present celebrating his baptism. It is technically a "NameSake" (see my website for details on what a NameSake is) though it is not illustrating his name, but rather important passions in his life, all wrapped up in a meditation on baptism. Anyway, I like it.


You can click on this image for a larger version.