My 1999 "American IP, manga-fied" cover for WIZARD magazine (plus roughs)!

Following up on last week's belated post of the 1997 "How to Draw in the Manga Style (Sorta)" piece I wrote and drew for Wizard magazine, here's the cover illo I did for 'em in late 1999. The theme was, I assume, the idea of manga—or at least manga-influenced adaptations—of mainstream American properties; not sure, TBH, as I lost my comp copy  of the book years ago. 

A few words on the images: 

Colors on the piece were provided by Liquid, who were the biggest names in comics coloring at the time. Note that I was trying for a bit of a Street Fighter/ Bengus feel on the designs for Supes and Bats, which didn't quite work out. (Oh, well.)

That odd gray, vertical smear running down the center of the cover rough above is there because—brace yourselves—I faxed the sketch to my Wizard magazine editor, and my fax machine did not treat originals gently. (Should've faxed a photocopy of the rough, obvsly, but I was likely too short on time to run off to the city to do so.)

Note also the g-d Ruger P89 semiautomatic pistol in Lara Croft's hand, folks. I say "g-d" because, Lordy loo, is that gun ever difficult to draw, as the stupid thing is infested with bevels, scallops, sloping angles and other complex design curlicues that make it far tougher to render than, say, a nice, boxy Glock. I used to draw the P89 in my work (from Gen 13 all the way through Empowered vol.11) because it was, shall we say, especially easy to reference, if you catch my drift; but I really would've been better off depicting a simpler form of pistol.

Oh, yeah, forgot that I did a bunch of Batman-related designs in the mid-90s for some Hasbro project that went nowhere. I'll see if I can dig up those long-vanished sketches, but I hold up little hope of doing so, as they predate the digital era and were never scanned. 

These chara-design variations are pretty self-explanatory, I think.

That "Yuri" variation—cue the Pateon warning that the word "yuri" automatically triggers!—is derived from the anime iteration Dirty Pair Flash. 

Can't recall if I was yet doing the English rewrite on the Studio Proteus translation of Hiroyuki Utatane's Seraphic Feather at that time, but regardless, that manga's chara design approach was already a big influence. 

Kazushi Hagiwara is the creator of the fantasy manga Bastard!!, which boasted a stunning approach to sprawling scale and bludgeoning spectacle that heavily influenced my mid-90s work. 

The mid- to late-90s were the high point of Kenichi Sonoda's influence on my stuff, so it's no surprise that this cover went heavy on the Riding Bean-ish "design chinnery."

TOMORROW ON THIS HERE PATREON: No idea, folks! Some kinda "damsel-in-distress" content for the $5+ tiers, sure, but I'm not yet sure exactly what that content that might be.