Oddly enough, Variables is about superhumans but after drawing roughly 50 pages of the comic, I haven’t been given the chance to draw many “superheroes”. Karter is halfway there with his hybrid SWAT/amateur paintballer costume but it’s still not really “costume-y”. A few weeks ago, I realized that convention season isn’t that far away and I haven’t drawn many superhero-types in the past year or more.

When it comes to indy publishing in comics, a lot of a creator’s money isn’t made by actually selling copies of his or her books but instead comes through commissioned artwork. Unless your comic is well-known, nobody wants to see drawings of your own characters. Everybody wants pics of Spider-Man, the X-Men, and Batman. A sad but true fact. I realized that I haven’t drawn any of these characters in months (if not years) and would need a nice backstock of images to show people and have things ready to sell by May, the date of the first convention I’m going to attend. Plus, I badly needed the practice.

So, I’ve been brushing up on superhero anatomy over the past few weeks, experimenting with ink washes, and getting used to working with markers again. I can’t exactly haul my entire art table with brushes, quills, and ink wells to a convention so I need to practice using more mobile methods of drawing and coloring. So, the comic will take somewhat of a backseat over the next month (but I still plan to update every week on time) as I get ready to dive into the world of licensed superheroes from Marvel and DC.

If you’re interested in seeing this work as I finish it, I’m posting a lot of it to my personal blog site over at Rocketpig.net.

Now for the art preview. This page was a tricky one. It was relatively easy to draw (plus, I got to draw a guy in a cape!) but where the real challenge lies is in the lettering. The focus of this page is the first article written by Hank Foster that I’m posting since the beginning of the comic. The reader will be able to see most of the article on the comic page, enough to get a feel for the incident, anyway. So, it’s kind of a trick page. It’s a drawing of… a book. Cheesy? I’m not sure. But it felt like a good way to give the reader loads of information about the Variables universe while exposing them to Hank Foster (again), a character who will appear throughout the entirety of Variables. Wanna see more? Click here to see the first issue of Variables 2002.

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