Posts tagged: Miss Martian

Original Young Justice Page Art for Sale!

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Three pages of my original Young Justice art are now for sale on eBay. These are original interior pages from DC Comics Young Justice series, the companion comic to the popular Cartoon Network Young Justice animated TV series.  This is original, hand-drawn 11″x17″ page art by Christopher Jones.

Here are direct links to the three individual sales.

Young Justice #20 page 12
Featuring a nice kiss between Superboy and Miss Martian, as well as Superboy’s introduction to Clark Kent. The page also features Garfield Logan, Marie Logan, and Jimmy Olsen!

Young Justice #24 page 08
Featuring Wonder Woman, Superboy, Captain Marvel, Martian Manhunter, The Flash, and The Atom battling the alien villain Kylstar.

Young Justice #24 page 15
Featuring Wonder Woman, Superman, Captain Atom, Captain Marvel and Superboy battling Kylstar.

Auctions end Sunday August 18, 2013.

Coming in September: Young Justice INVASION!

Young Justice #20

Young Justice #20

Starting in September, the Season Two events of the Young Justice TV series will catch up with the comic!

YOUNG JUSTICE #20

Written by GREG WEISMAN
Art and cover by CHRISTOPHER JONES
On sale SEPTEMBER 19 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED E

• Following the animated series, it’s now five years later!
• ALIENS have infiltrated the Earth!
• NIGHTWING’s new team includes BATGIRL, BLUE BEETLE, WONDER GIRL and BEAST BOY!

Issues #17 of Young Justice comes out later this month! Pick an issue up in digital form or at your local comic shop!

Character Designs & Creating a Cover: Young Justice #14

We’re going to jump ahead in sequence of our Creating a Cover series, and we’re combining it with the next installment of Character Designs. That’s because most of what there is to tell about this cover is about the desgin work that needed to be done for it, and there are SO MANY new characters appearing in Young Justice #14 that I thought I’d get a few of them out of the way with this entry before detailing the rest of them in a separate entry on YJ #14 in the near future.

Long before I drew the issue itself and even before I’d seen a final script for the story, I needed to design the cover for the issue, needed early for publicity and solicitation purposes. The scenario I was given was to do an underwater downshot of Aqualad, Miss Martian and Superboy surrounded by Hooded Atlantean Purists. Furthermore, Superboy was to be wearing one of Aqualad’s spare costumes, but MINUS the Water-Bearers, BackPack and “A” belt buckle. He was also to be sporting a clear oxygen mask that covers his mouth and nose with some form of filter/re-breather attachment. Miss Martian was to have shape-shifted into a more underwater-friendly form, having ditched her usual cape and morphed herself to copy Lori Lemaris’s mermaid tail from the waist down and having grown Aqualad-like gills on her neck.  She was also meant to be shorter than usual, but that didn’t end up being a big issue with the floating figures on the cover.

The Purists were meant to be cloaked and hooded Atlanteans of Aquaman’s type, i.e. to the naked eye they look completely human.  Like all Atlanteans, there were to have bare feet.  I was also instructed that their eyes were to magically glow from within the shadowed depths of their hoods.

Miss Martian’s mermaid form was almost a non-issue, as it was just putting the top of her body on the bottom of the design for Lori Lemaris, plus adding gills identical in design to Aqualad. Superboy was basically in Aqualad’s costume minus key accessories, plus the addition of an oxygen maks. And I had to design the Purists.

Purists first:

Atlantean Purist A
Atlantean Purist A
Atlantean Purist B
Atlantean Purist B
Atlantean Purist C
Atlantean Purist C


I wanted to give the Purists interesting looking hoods, as I figured we’d be getting a lot of shots of these hoods serving as close-ups of characters in the actual story. I also wanted lots of draping fabric that could swirl in the water and make interesting shapes and suggest movement. The draping sleeves and tabards tended to get even more elongated once I was actually drawing the story. The whole design evolved a little bit once I started drawing pages, but we stayed close enough to the approved model that no one complained! I wasn’t sure about a color scheme, so I put these three options together, half-expecting to have someone suggest an option D. Version B was chosen, but which do YOU prefer?

Superboy Underwater Mask
Superboy Underwater Mask


Next up was Superboy’s air mask. I wanted to keep this simple and unobtrusive. I wanted Superboy’s face and expressions to be unobscured, and I figured we were dealing with advanced Atlantean technology and we didn’t need to be constrained by anything resembling current diving gear and oxygen tanks. This is what I came up with, and it actually became further simplified in the story, losing those square-ish bits at the corners of his jaw.

So now it was time to design a cover!

Young Justice #14 - cover rough 1

Young Justice #14 – cover rough 1

This was a relatively tight drawing for a cover rough, but we seemed to be pretty firmly locked into a concept, so I felt I could do something fairly tight I could then use as a basis for the final pencil art. Given that the characters were floating in water, I wanted the heroes to be “surrounded” in a fairly 3-dimensional way. I tried to make it clear that the Purists were not only coming from all sides but also from above and below.

The feedback was that DC wanted a little more of a feeling of action. Also, they wanted the piece to have a little more focus, so it was suggested to emphasize Aqualad a little more since it was his story.

Young Justice #14 - cover rough 2

Young Justice #14 – cover rough 2

The revised version is pretty similar – I just changed the proportion of some of the characters, bringing Aqualad forward and pushing Superboy and Miss Martian back. I turned Miss Martian’s head to better show off the gills on her neck. Aqualad is now deflecting a magical attack from one of the Purists with one of his hard water blades.

This version was approved, so from there it was the routine progression of pencils and inks, with color by Zac Atkinson.

Young Justice #14 - Cover Pencils

Young Justice #14 – Cover Pencils

Young Justice #14 - Cover Inks

Young Justice #14 – Cover Inks

Young Justice #14 - Cover Color

Young Justice #14 – Cover Color


And there you have it!  Young Justice #14 goes on sale TODAY both in digital form or at your local comic shop!

As always, questions and comments are welcome.

Creating a Cover: Young Justice #12

Time to break down the creation of another cover! This time it’s Young Justice #12, the second part of a storyline featuring Clayface, for a story that tells the unique Young Justice continuity origin of the character.

Once again we had to developing the cover before a finished script was available. To be clear, this isn’t meant to imply that the scripts were late or anything. Rather it’s a function of how early the cover is needed for solicitation/promotional purposes. DC likes action covers whenever possible, and the confrontation between Clayface and The Team didn’t come until the end of the story. There was some earlier conflict between Clayface and Batman and Robin, but Batman and Robin had featured on the previous issue’s cover, so there was a real desire to show the Young Justice Team. So we fell into one of my pet peeves of comic covers – we essentially tease the issue’s cliffhanger ending on the cover. Oh, well. C’est la vie.

So the cover became less of a conceptual challenge and more of a compositional one. The mission: Design a cover featuring Superboy, Miss Martian, Robin, Kid Flash and Aqualad all fighting Clayface in a sewer location. First off, the sewer had to be big to allow for all this action. The second issue was how to occupy all five heroes in combat simultaneously against a single opponent. Thankfully Clayface is not only large, but is a shape-shifter, frequently seen growing extra limbs to perform various tasks. So I placed a large Clayface figure in my sewer tunnel, with a separate arm holding each of four of the team members, with Superboy punching Clayfaces’ body, showing the futility of such an attack by splashing harmlessly into Clayface’s torso. Since Miss Martian is also a shape-shifter who has also produced extra limbs in the TV show, I thought it would be fun to give her an extra arm while she grappled with her own Clayface appendage. I placed her in the foreground so the figure would be a little larger and the extra limb a little easier to see. I wanted to have the solid parts of Clayface emerging from an amorphous mass of clay in the bottom of the sewer, making it feel the heroes were surrounded by Clayface – that we was coming from everywhere!

Young Justice #12 - Cover Sketch

Young Justice #12 – Cover Sketch

The sketch was well-received overall. Greg was concerned that Clayface wasn’t imposing enough, and suggesting making his figure more central. Jim Chadwick and Mark Chiarello at DC liked the asymmetrical design, and it was suggested to make Clayface proportionally larger than the heroes. They also wanted Clayface to appear more “solid” as they were already concerned about the sewer setting making Clayface look like a poo-monster.

So there wasn’t much room to make the Clayface figure bigger, so I made the heroes proportionally smaller. Rather than having the arm grappling with Miss Martian emerging from the bottom of the sewer, I had it at winding around from Clayface’s side, and I ended up flipping her position to make her work better in this tweaked composition. I also turned Clayface’s head so he was less in profile, hoping it would make him a little more menacing-looking.

As I said, this cover largely teases the cliffhanger moment at the end of the issue, and when the scene picks up at the beginning of issue 13, the script called for an arrangement remarkably similar to the cover here, so I kind of got to draw the scene again from a slightly different angle.

Pencils and inks by me are seen below, plus color by Zac Atkinson.

 

Young Justice #12 - Cover Pencils

Young Justice #12 – Cover Pencils

Young Justice #12 - Cover Inks

Young Justice #12 – Cover Inks

Young Justice #12 - Cover Colors

Young Justice #12 – Cover Colors

And there you have it! So this probably would have been a better cover for issue #13, but we used it on #12. So what did we do for #13? Watch for the next Creating a Cover blog entry to find out! Check this issue of Young Justice out in digital form or at your local comic shop. Watch for a Commentary blog entry on this issue soon!

Young Justice #14 Solicit is Out!

 

Young Justice #14

Young Justice #14

YOUNG JUSTICE #14
Written by Greg Weisman and Kevin Hopps, art and cover by Christopher Jones.

Aqualad visits Atlantis with Superboy and Miss Martian. But can they stop an insidious new menace that threatens to plunge the undersea kingdom into civil war?

32 pages, $2.99, in stores on March 21.

And yes, that’s Miss Martian with gills and a mermaid tail, and Superboy wearing a spare Aqualad costume. And who are the mysterious cloaked figures threatening our heroes? You’ll have to read Young Justice #14 to find out!

Issues #1-10 are currently available and issue #11 featuring Batman and Ra’s al Ghul will be out soon. Pick an issue up in digital form or at your local comic shop!