Back in 2003 Marvel Comics proposed a line of fan created comics – sort of (see Epic Returns).

There aren’t that many corporately owned comic characters that I’m interested in playing with but a couple of ideas for miniseries came to me. The first was Lizard and Son. I’ll go in to that some more tomorrow.

The second was Dragon Girl. The story was to revolve around a crippled girl and her dragon. The girl was the niece of the Mad Thinker. The dragon was the android Dragon Man. After the girl’s body was severly mangled in an accident the Mad Thinker figured out a way to store her mind in Dragon Man while her body was healed. Wackiness (and destruction and punching) ensued.

No, I never got around to doing a proposal.

This is all freehand ink drawing with a new Faber Castell brush pen. I generally prefer to do my basic inks, the grounding lines with a brush. Detail can be filled in with a pen or pencil but I like the feel of a brush on the main lines. Unfortunately it’s not easy to carry around ink and brush without risking spilling the ink or ruining the brush. Fortunately there are now brush pen that approximate the old school tools. I still prefer to use my have-to-wash-them-after-I’m-done-or-they’re-toast brushes but the brush pens allow me to ink in the field when the need arises.

One idea I’d had for using Nemo was for him to appear as a traveling companion for the young woman with the glasses. He’d be this constantly hysterical kid in pajamas who would seem to get horribly killed on a regular basis. He’d pop up again a few episodes later, right as rain and dumb as ever, ready to die again.

The lady’s other companion was to be her luggage. It would follow after her like a well trained dog, pop out clothes, weapons or lunch and could swell up into an emergency escape balloon if the situation required it.

A common animal that many artists don’t draw well is the horse. I suspect that’s because it’s an animal most of us are familiar with because we’ve seen it on television many times but rarely encounter the critter in person. We see cats and dogs on a regular basis but horses are not a regular part of most American’s lives.

Horses are herbivores. They’ve evolved to walk on a single toe. Once I realized that I didn’t know how to draw a horse from memory I avoided drawing them for a long time.

I’m pretty sure that the faces here with the big lips and the yarnish hair are my attempt at drawing golliwogs. I was picturing these as multicolored characters rather than the standard black skin and red lips. Really multicolored – blue, green, yellow, red, orange, white – with the hair, mouth and eyes one color and the body another. They’d be in every combination but black and red (unless the lips and such were black and the body red). The golliwogs have a nice simple cartoon design. It’s too bad that design is a racist sneer.

The overly muscled fellow at the bottom of the page is the Hulk. The Hulk was the second comic book character (after Spider-Man) whose series I read regularly. The version I read was the early seventies stupid Hulk. I’ve always been impressed by the artists who managed to draw that huge bulky physique and make it look, if not natural, at least real within the comic.