Artworm (also known as Here Comes....Power Girl)

This piece is a moment in which you get a peek inside my mind.  For as long as I can remember, I would occasionally read a book and get a need to draw a character or scene from the book stuck in my head like getting "Funkytown" stuck in my head as an earworm.  Even if the piece stunk and got tossed in the trash, I still would have to put it down on paper before I could get it out of my head.  This still happens to me, but I can't always nail it down to the reading of a book.  Now, I tend to get these ideas that appear in my brain and gnaw at me until I get a chance to translate it from thought to physical existence.  This is why I have a ton of random drawings and character designs taking up space in drawers and folders in my home.

Well, this is one of these things.  I came across a cosplayer photo online one day.  It was a nice looking lady dressed as Supergirl.  Yet, when I looked at her I thought her expression and body reminded me more of Power Girl way back in the 70s.  For those who don't know (or remember), back in the early '70s, in the DC Comics line, there existed a comic book called ALL-STAR COMICS that focused on a parallel Earth called "Earth 2." On this Earth 2, this was where the original Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman from the '40s existed and by the 1970s had aged towards retirement.  In that continuity, Batman was about to retire and Bruce Wayne was going to become Commissioner of Gotham City. Robin was an adult (with an updated costume) and Bruce Wayne's adult daughter had taken up the mantle of defender of Gotham as, The Huntress.  In this continuity, there had never been a Supergirl, but one day the middle-aged Superman (with gray temples indicating his age) introduced to the world, his super-powered younger cousin who would be known as Power Girl.

So, the next thing my brain did was began fixating on a "What If?" kind of scenario in which the television actors who had embodied Superman, Batman, Robin, Batgirl, and Wonder Woman in the '60s and '70s would be the personifications of those Earth 2 versions of the characters.  So, I did some Googling for official posed photos of those actors. I tweaked the costumes as necessary to match the Earth 2 versions.  Then I took the Supergirl cosplayer and gave her a haircut and a new costume and...voila.

I have a group shot imagining the Earth 2 Superman (George Reeves) introducing his cousing, Power Girl to Wonder Woman (Lynda Carter), Batman (Adam West), Robin (Burt Ward), and Huntress (Yvonne Craig).

Now that I've drawn it, it's out of my head and I can relax now.

High School Art *flashback* (Part 2)

In Part 1, I tossed up some art from Jr. High on into the early years of High School.  Now, I'm going to share some stuff from the latter half of High School (and maybe some College).  Just keep in mind that I was young and still learning! 

 This first pencil drawing was of "Snowball" from ANIMAL FARM.  He's the Lenin analogue in the allegory.  I am 100% convinced that the roots of my own conservative ideology can be traced back to my eye-opening encounter with Orwell's work through my High School English class.  *Thanks Mrs. Hopper!*

Other than girls and food, the things that primarily occupied my High School mind were comics, Star Trek, and vampires.  Slow time in class produced this Dracula sketch that I never finished. 

Star Trek was in the front of my mind after the incredible experience at that age of the death of Mr. Spock in STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN -- which is where this sketch got its inspiration.  You'll note I started to lay down some inks on it and then never bothered to finish it.  Story of my life.

This ink sketch of Daredevil was done entirely using a croquill pen and india ink with no pencils at all.  Also done at school during some down time.
 Which brings me to something that I started doing in High School (and continues today occasionally when somethig gets stuck in my head).  That would be the costume redesign for popular super-heroes (something popularized online at Project: Rooftop) and original character concepts.

The original "MIMIC"

In this old, ragged X-MEN comic I had left over from when I was little, there was a story featuring a character called "The Mimic" and his mutant power was that he had all the powers of the X-Men themselves.   That means, he had wings like Angel, eye-beams like Cyclops, monkey hands and feet like Beast, ice-hurling powers like Iceman, and telekinetic abilities like Marvel Girl.

By the time I was in High School, the most popular comic book published by Marvel was The "New" X-MEN, which was primarily made up (at this time) of Cyclops, Storm, Colossus, Nightcrawler, and Sprite.  I thought, in my brilliant teenaged brain, that since the original Mimic had sacrificed his life to save the X-Men, that it was time for a "New" Mimic to show up and join the X-Men.  So, tis was my update of the original Mimic's costume with elements that demonstrated he was adapting the powers of the current line-up of characters rather than the original line-up.