Super Lois in Color

I've been wanting to color my Super-Lois for quite a while. There's a bit of a challenge to coloring a piece like this, because I have this tendency to sketch to use a lot of lines to create form. I admit it, I like black and white, I like the way ink looks on the page. I like what can be done with black and white and nothing else. But I live in the real world, today. Maybe someday I will have the status where I can do whatever I want and get people to notice me, but today I need to do whatever it takes to get me noticed.

So it's a bit of a challenge to figure out how to get dynamic, dimensional color to interact well with graphic black lines, especially when I had all these rules about how color should never break up the graphic quality of black line art. So this is the piece where I really played around and decided to bend those rules a bit. It really opened me up.

I also cleaned up the art a lot. This drawing is actually a couple of years old and there are some "parts" of the anatomy that I have a bit of a passion for. Anyway, there are particular parts that are very important to me that they look "natural" and it's really important to me that form carries weight. So I cleaned up the drawing a bit as I colored it.

I don't draw like Kurt Schaffenberger, whom I love and whom inspired this piece, but I certainly tried to channel his "Good Girl" magic for this piece. I may not be there yet, but I'm pretty happy with this piece.

Super Lois

To me there are three great versions of Superman. There's the 1940s Superman that Siegel and Schuster created and which was brought to beautiful life by the Fleischer cartoons. There's the Silver Age Superman with all the fantastic elements of that age. And there's the Christopher Reeves Superman. A dream project for me would be to get to do a version of Superman that borrowed from all three. Capture the style and tone of the 40s Superman, add the fantastic elements of the Silver Age Superman, and thow in the progressive inspiration of the Chris Reeves Superman.

Yes, a lot of what came out of the Silver Age was hokey as hell. But also cool as hell. And what we've seen from Whatever Happened to the Man From Tomorrow by Alan Moore, and All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, is that it works when you play it straight. It more than works, it produces the best Superman comics of all time. And I think that's the key to producing great comics, do something fantastic, and make no apologies for it. There is a time and a place for deconstruction, but there's also a time and a place to ditch it.

Anyway, I love Kurt Schaffenberger's gorgeous good-girl art on the classic Lois Lane comics. Lois was always getting into the strangest situations that were a lot of fun, and some of my favorites of these are the issues where she gained super powers and became Super Lois. So anyway, in the spirit of those classic comics, this is my version of Super Lois.