JAVCON Thursday Night: New artwork for DITKOMANIA and more

Earlier today at the JAVCON, I showed you a sneak peek at my upcoming comic book, COMIC POP. For our evening programming here, I'd like to show you two recently finished illustrations I've contributed to other people's projects.

First up is my pin-up for my friend Grasiela Rodriguez, whose debut comic book is currently at the printing press:

 

Grasiela's first comic book has been an interesting production to hear about, as she's not shown any artwork from the book. (In fact, I think she's only just now posted the cover on her website). She's been pretty low-key about the contents of her story, and in fact when she sent several of us requests for pin-ups, she only gave us a few key words to create a pin-up from! Some of the words were 'romantic, feminine, strange, melancholic', so from there I thought about imagery that, to me, captured some of these elements. Right away I thought of the image of a woman playing a violin, and then I thought of a surreal image combining the graphic designs of paisley patterns and some ambiguous idea of a romance that no longer existed. I envisioned Steve Ditko-type surrealism and listened to Morrissey while working on this piece, if you want to know! I'm very anxious to read her book, and very curious to see the printed pin-up, as she told me she added an element or two to tie it into the aesthetic of the entire book! Now that's interesting...!

Speaking of Ditko (as I often do on this blog!), I also contributed another piece of art to the zine DITKOMANIA, #80. This one accompanies Michael Aushenker's DITKOTOMY column, which spotlights Ditko's 1980s collaborations with writer Bill Mantlo. Ditko worked with Mantlo on the last half of the ROM, SPACEKNIGHT series, so naturally I focused on that imagery:

 

I'm also going to be contributing my own regular feature to the zine, starting in issue #81:

 

I designed this logo using illustrations Ditko created for a behind-the-scenes feature he and writer Stan Lee did in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN ANNUAL #1. My column will take an artist's look at the more unique and imaginative looking characters that Ditko has created over his long career and highlight the reasons I think they're successful.

Those are two of the most recent projects I've contributed to. Now it's back to working on my own comics! Enjoy the rest of the JAVCON, there's plenty more coming for the next 4 days.