Cue Danny Elfman...

also posted on my sketchblog: [link]

I sketched this up for last weekend during the Long Beach Comic Expo, inked it up when I got home, and colored it this week. And here I am posting in a reasonably timely manner, as promised.

I did my best to channel Alex Toth, Bruce Timm, and when I drew this (please go to , look at his awesome black and white ink sketches, and give him some compliments--it makes him very uncomfortable). There are some other influences at work as well... the general leanness of form is from Neal Adams (whose influence I've discussed previously), and of course the crescent moon eyes are from Dick Sprang. I think there's a little Jeff Matsuda in there too.

This started out as a pretty static sketch, but I'm trying to be more dynamic these days, so I consciously tried to move away from that. The big experiment for me on this one was spotting blacks heavily. I usually do all my lighting in the coloring stage because I'm uncomfortable with my ability to execute heavy inks. I feel okay about the result though--you can tell because I was actually willing to show you what the original lineart looked like.

(For those who care about such things--of course he has the yellow oval on his chest.)