Pin up for the Shadowflame 20th Anniversary Hardcover. This came from a conversation I had with Joe Martino about the Wolverine pin up from the back cover of Wolverine (vol 2) #1. I mentioned doing a homage with Shadowflame and penciled it a couple days later. Joe then contacted Karl to ink it and he agreed.
Karl told Joe this: “This was a lot of fun– brought back a lot of memories of inking Byrne. Pulled out a few tricks that I used to use on his work. Hope everyone likes how it came out!”
I am on cloud nine. Seriously. My favorite Byrne Superman inker just said inking my work reminded him of working over Byrne.
Thank you, Joe, for getting Karl to ink this pin up!
Back when I was associated with the group “The Brain Trust,” I had supplied several retailer variant covers for various comic book issues/companies. Among them was various Rick and Morty covers for ONI PRESS. Back in late March, I submitted a couple sketches for approval with Oni for future one-shots they had scheduled for their Rick and Morty Presents books. Both covers were quickly approved by Cartoon Network and Oni. The first cover for Sleepy Gary, was to be a homage to the movie poster for A Nightmare on Elm Street. The second cover was a homage to Todd McFarlane’s Incredible Hulk 340 cover. It was for the Pickle RIck one-shot, which was originally announced as Jaguar vs Pickle Rick. Anyway, the group, The Brain Trust, for reason I won’t get into here, has decided to put on hold any future variant covers indefinitely. I decided to shop around the Pickle Rick cover, since I had actually, by this time, had it fully inked and I even colored it myself. (All my previous covers were colored by my friend, Jeremy Scott Browning.)
Thought I had found a new home for it with a local store that does variants but they decided they didn’t want to commit to the Oni minimum print run of 1,500 copies, so they declined it. (It should be noted that they declined it knowing I had until the end of THIS month to find a retailer for it and didn’t even bother to tell me they declined. I had to ask, so they wasted 2 weeks of my time.)
I did find a group last week that was interested in it but the main admin in the group was bogged down with a lot of stuff and couldn’t get to it within the deadline.
Sharing, publically, the cover because I think it’s too damn good NOT to share. I’m very proud of this cover and how quickly some of the pieces to it fell into place.
Oh well, I guess I know what I’ll be printing up for my next convention print.
In the Gotham by Gaslight Elseworld’s comic, the plot revolves around a version of Batman that came to exist in the late 1800s coming into conflict with Jack the Ripper. Amusingly as a red herring, on the boat back to Gotham from England Bruce and his friend Jacob Packer see a pair implied to be Sir William Gull and Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence, among the passengers.
Both men have historically been associated with the Jack the Ripper murders, either as the actual murderer or as part of a conspiracy revolving around said killings. A popular theory being that Albert had married an Irish shopgirl and had a kid, and Queen Victoria and the Freemasons then dispatching her physician Gull out to assassinate the six witnesses to the hushed up wedding ceremony.
This theory being popularised by the Sherlock Holmes film Murder by Decree, which was was then lifted and expanded upon by Alan Moore in his graphic novel From Hell.
Aside from his alleged career as one of the world’s most notorious serial killers, a claim which has since been discreditted, Gull was actuallly a very prominent doctor in his day. He was the first to name and diagnose anorexia noervosa, in addition to advancing the understanding of
myxoedema, Bright’s disease, and paraplegia.
Comparitively little is known about Albert, however. The suspicion that he was Jack the Ripper has been disputed by there being evidence that he wasn’t in London at the time. There has been a lot of speculation as to his health, mental health and sexuality, with some claiming that his death of flu at the age of 28 was actually a result of syphilis… but again, this is all speculation.
As to Jack the Ripper’s identity within the DCU proper, there are several contenders. In Hellblazer Jack the Ripper was stated to be Gull, but possessed by a demon by the name of
Calibraxis, while in the 1990s Superboy series Cadmus Labs clones a monster supposedly created from Jack the Ripper’s blood, but it is eventually dropped into a magma pit.
In Matt Wagner’s Madame Xanadu series, it features the titular character attempting to discover the murderer in order to save the lives of the local woman, the immortal magician having settled in Whitechapel at the time. It turns out that Jack is himself a mundane murderer, but his identity is being deliberately hidden by the Phantom Stranger.
This is because the last official victim happened to be pregant with the child of Jason Blood, aka the human host of the demon Etrigan, and to prevent the child growing up to be the worst dictator the world has ever seen, the Stranger allows her and five other women to die to save billions in the future.
Xanadu is understandably horrified by this, and the Stranger ends up causing Jack to fall into a sewer once he had completed his task. The murderer not being caught is to put down to the resulting fall paralysing him, and then him being eaten alive off-panel by hundreds of rats.
Not really
excited for anything about Marvel Legacy, the homage covers looks pretty cool
Marvel Legacy Animated Homage Covers
The Incredible Hulk: Jose Ladrönn’s Incredible Hulk Vol. 2 #94 (2006) by Jose Ladronn
Iceman: Gil Kane & Dan Adkins’ Champions Vol. 1 #1 (1975) by
Michael Ryan
Black Panther:
Todd McFarlane’s Incredible Hulk Vol. 1 #340 (1988) by unknown
Daredevil: John Byrne’s Uncanny X-Men #135 (1980) by Juan Cabal
The Falcon: Ron Wilson’s Iron Man Vol 1 #71 (1974) by Elizabeth Torque
Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur: Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four Vol. 1 #49(1966) by Felipe Smith
Old Man Logan: John Buscema’s Wolverine Vol. 2 #2 (1988) by
Cameron Stewart
Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man - Al Milgrom’s Captain America #260 (1981) by Paolo Siqueira
Spirits of Vengeance:
Dave Cockrum’s Giant-Size X-Men Vol. 1 #1 (1975) by Ken Lashley
Marvel Two-In-One: The Thing and the Human Torch - Rich Buckler’s Fantastic Four Vol 1 #159 (1975) by Edgar Delgado
Uncanny X-Men #136, page 14, scripted and co-plotted by Chris Claremont, co-plotted and penciled by John Byrne, inked by Terry Austin, lettered by Tom Orzechowski and colored by Bob Sharen. 1980
Byrne had this to say about this sequence on his forum, “There were a lot of annoyed fans, I can tell you, when X-MEN 136 came out, and there was no confrontation between Dark Phoenix and the Surfer.
This is a good example, as a matter of fact, of just how much impact the writer can have, for those who still wonder what Stan did, vs what Jack did. I was heavily plotting the book by this point, and that page of reactions shots was something I tossed in as I was drawing. Chris, unfortunately, chose to script it as if the Surfer was going to head off and intercept Phoenix – but that didn’t happen. After all, by the time I saw the finished issue, I’d already drawn about 4 issues beyond it!
Years later, a writer showed up at Marvel who had impressed Shooter, and Shooter asked me if there were any "plums” that could be given to that writer for specials or graphic novels. I mentioned this “untold tale”, and Shooter asked me to write up a plot, which I did. For some reason, the project did not go any further than that, tho years later I found a copy of my plot (written on a typewriter!) and pitched it to the X-Office. Again, we were all set to go, and then somehow the energy just trailed off …“
