Reminder: No video reviews this week, ’cause we’re at NYCC! Meanwhile: Art!
Because It's About Time Someone Did
Reminder: No video reviews this week, ’cause we’re at NYCC! Meanwhile: Art!
Rachel here!
As some of you no doubt remember from Episode 7 (waaaaaaay back when), my con sketchbook’s theme is Cyclops Has a Good Day. While the sketchbook itself is purely physical media, you splendid folks will once in a while e-mail me a digital entry, and they are universally delightful.
This week’s comes from Jenny Yule, who has worked out what I am pretty sure is the absolute best recreational use of Cyclops’s powers AND gave me a total nostalgia rush for the weird old Ambroisia game Harry the Handsome Executive, which I would now very much like to see given a superhero revamp. BEHOLD:
Last week, we challenged you to help us revive that awesome ’80s celebration of Kitty Pryde’s Spectacular Revolving Wardrobe, Kitty’s Kostume Korner! Much as we love the classic yellow-and-black she’s been sporting for the last decade-plus, we remember when Kitty reinvented her costume twice an issue–and you sent us some great revamps in that tradition. Click through for the full lineup!
An additional note regarding fan art, costume design, and sourcing: There’s one image we didn’t run, because it was done directly on unsourced art by another artist. We totally get that sometimes that’s the simplest way to do a design, and the person who submitted it was in no way attempting to claim the original art or plagiarize–but if you’re submitting a piece like that, the source needs to be noted and visible in the image–and, ideally, used with the permission of the original artist–for us to run it on this blog, i.e. “Recolored from [artist] design” or “drawn over art by [artist].”
If–like us–you’re someone whose costume design aspirations outpace your drawing skills, we also recommend resources like Hero Factory (again, we recommend citing ’em if you’re using ’em, as Rick did above).
Last week, we asked you to send in your ideas for a new costume for Kitty Pryde – any era, any codename. We’ve gotten some very cool ones already, but we’re extending the deadline for the official roundup by one more day to give latecomers a chance to send in their designs.
For inspiration, here’s Kitty doing her best magical-girl transformation twirl in Uncanny X-Men #168:
You’ve probably already seen it in the Episode 24 posts, but we are so in love with David’s Ororo: Queen of the Galaxy illustration that we’re posting it one more time for good measure. If you’re a collector of discerning taste, you can still snap up the original from David here; prints will be available here through October 5.
BECAUSE YOU DEMANDED IT (and we really wanted one), Probably a Summers Brother t-shirts (and stickers, and tote bags, and other stuff) are now available in several permutations at our Redbubble shop, sporting a snazzy design by Dylan Todd. Rachel will be rocking hers at NYCC:
Finally, on a slightly less cheerful note, it looks like episode 24 will be our last on Comics Alliance. This is a wholly amicable split–they’re shifting some things around in terms of how they handle podcasts, and it didn’t make sense for them to keep us onboard. Rachel’s still writing for them periodically, and updates will continue here–as well as on iTunes and Stitcher–as usual.
Listen to the episode here!
Since May, “Probably a Summers Brother” has been by far and away our most-requested shirt. Now, finally, with the help of designer Dylan Todd, IT LIVES.
EDITED TO ADD: There’s now also a version of this design available on light colored t-shirts, stickers, totes, &c! YAYBO!
A couple weeks ago, I spent some time breaking down my favorite panel from Uncanny X-Men #25, and why it’s both a great Cyclops character beat* and a great illustration (ha!) of how visual storytelling can and should work.
Right now, Uncanny is a semimonthly series, which means it’s alternating between two artists, Chris Bachalo and Kris Anka. That kind of switching off can be risky business: making it work takes a very carefully matched pair of artists, and which commonalities matter most in a given series isn’t always obvious going in.
Bachalo and Anka overlap a lot superficially: they’re both stylish and angular, with clean line art and similar enough visual language to keep the transitions from being too jarring. More significantly, though–and critical to this series in particular–they’re both exceptionally good at conveying emotion through body language.
That’s particularly important here because Uncanny X-Men is currently in large part a book about Cyclops’s personal reckoning with the death of Charles Xavier–the mentor and surrogate father Cyclops killed while possessed by the Phoenix Force. That means it’s a story driven largely by emotional beats–something to which Cyclops is singularly poorly suited on fronts both visual and canonical.
Cyclops is kind of a block of wood. He’s uptight and very guarded–dude’s mantra is “I’m fine,” growled through gritted teeth. There’s nothing fluid about his body language–he’s all stiffness and angles, even in combat but especially in conversation. If you want to make Cyclops emotionally expressive and stay true to the character, you don’t get to use expository dialogue, and you definitely don’t get to use exaggerated expressions. You’re pretty much limited to subtle details.
Now, as it happens, superhero comics have a standard visual shorthand for exactly that scenario. The catch? It usually involves subtle variation in the way you draw their–you guessed it–eyes.
Not really an option here.
That’s where Anka and Bachalo–particularly Anka–come in. Kris Anka isn’t someone I go to when I’m thinking of artists who are masters of facial expressions. He doesn’t have the expressive fluidity of, say, Sara Pichelli or Russell Dauterman, nor the explosive intensity of Bill Sienkiewicz. Anka is all about lines and angles, stylized and sometimes even a little rigid. With Pichelli, you look to eyes and hands; with Dauterman, mouths. With Anka, the emotional beats are all about exaggerated or broken angles: clenched jawlines, sagging shoulders, stances knocked slightly off-kilter. Kris Anka can do a lot with body language.
So: In Uncanny X-Men #26, Cyclops starts out front and center, all false front and righteous indignation:
In fact, Cyclops only talks on one page of <em>Uncanny X-Men</em> #26. After the panel above, he says one more word. And then, over the rest of the issue, he just crumbles.
Watch:
Daaaaaaaaamn, Anka.
*You may have noted that a lot of the more craft-specific posts here have focused on portrayals of Cyclops. There are a couple reasons for that. Cyclops is one of my favorite X-Men characters, but he’s also one it’s really easy to handle poorly, and how well he’s done is–at least for me–a pretty good bar for the general quality of any given series in which he’s part of the main cast. And when Cyclops is done right, he tends to become a locus of interesting visual storytelling, because you’re taking a character who’s by definition not visually demonstrative and dropping them into a static visual medium that’s generally all about exaggerated expression.