SwanShadow Thinks Out Loud

Thus far in our nostalgic romp through the past year’s comic art acquisitions, we’ve ogled my favorite new pieces from my two commission themes, Common Elements and Bombshells! Today, we turn our attention to our solo character galleries.

As regular visitors to my online art gallery know, I collect unique images of several beloved heroes and heroines. Alas, in 2009, most of those collections didn’t expand, as I focused my limited art-buying resources on my two primary themes. I did, however, pick up a couple of nice additions for my gallery dedicated to one of comics’ premier husband-and-wife duos, the Black Panther and Storm.

Favorite Black Panther Commission:
Alex Niño

Alex Niño is, without question, one of the most distinctive stylists the comics industry has ever produced. He created this eye-catchingly impressionistic interpretation of the King of Wakanda at WonderCon 2009.

Favorite Storm Commission:
Bob Almond (ink finishes over rough pencils by Mark Beachum)

Bob Almond, the guy who puts the “king” in “inking,” took a rough pencil sketch that Mark Beachum included as a bonus gift with an earlier art purchase and transformed it into this powerful image of everyone’s favorite mutant weather wizard. Bob spun Storm’s costume from an idea that Geof Isherwood created for a previous Common Elements commission — an adaptation of an original concept by the legendary Barry Windsor-Smith.

More retrospective goodies tomorrow. Be here… or don’t.

And that’s your fourth chapter of Comic Art Year-End, 2009.

This entry was posted on December 28, 2009 at 10:26 am and is filed under Comic Art Friday. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.