X-Men First Class Giant-Size Special #1

Page 22:  finishes over Jeff Parker's layout.  The FBI headquarters is a stat.

X-Men: First Class Special #1 cover art

I'd almost forgotten about this one until Dave Johnson sent me this link today.

Museum of Oddities, page three

Rough layouts, pencils, inks and colors. You gotta love a guy who packs a roast chicken in his lunch bag.

Museum of Oddities, page four

The other day I found some preliminary sketches for this story so I thought I'd share another page.  This is from X-Men First Class Special #1.

Museum of Oddities, page one

The discussion of hand-lettering got me thinking about this one.

The first notion was to do a Haunted House story but it evolved into something a bit more cheerful than that.

I had a lot of fun drawing it, mainly because Jeff Parker is one of those generous writers who tries to play to an artist's strengths.

The house is based on a real building, located a couple of blocks from here. I changed it a little but the basic shape is the same.

Working out the details on the title/poster images was the biggest challenge here, but I think they add a lot to the splash so it was worth the trouble.

The Marvel office not only let me do my own hand lettering, right on the board, but they let me do the colors and seps too. I kept it mostly flat but put in a few graduations/airbrushing here and there. My model for coloring is still the Silver Age comic covers at DC. With Photoshop, it's hard to know when to stop, but I still want the coloring to look like old comics, without the big dots.