WildC.A.T.S / Aliens page 28

From 1998. Pencils by the amazing Chris Sprouse.

Authority 27 and WildC.A.T.S. 28 cover

Dave Gibbons' pencils and my inks. I'm not sure exactly how this works but I believe that one side will appear on the Authority cover and the other side will be on WildC.A.T.S.

Whoever the colorist is, he or she or they did a beautiful job. This can't have been an easy piece to color.

WildC.A.T.S. 26, page 1 with Travis Charest

For some reason, they asked me to ink one page of this comic.  Travis pencils so tight that an inker really isn't needed.

WildC.A.T.S. 25, page 14 with Dave Johnson

Here's another page where the inks don't look much like the pencils but at least this one was planned that way from the start.  Alan Moore script, Dave Johnson layouts, John Nyberg background inks and my finishes.  I don't know if you can see it in the pencils, but Dave drew a Bart Simpson head on the guy in the bottom panel.

WildC.A.T.S. 25, page 9 with Dave Johnson

I posted page five from this story here but inadvertently labeled it issue #50. As explained last time, Dave Johnson did some terrific layouts, focusing on the tech, backgrounds and hardware. He left the faces and figures less finished because he knew that was the part I could have the most fun with. After I finished the pencils, I inked this page but the inks on the rest of the story were a combination of Dave, me and John Nyberg.  The script was by Alan Moore.

Gil Kane's WildC.A.T.S./Aliens cover

Scott Dünbier covered this in great detail a couple of years ago on his blog so I'll do a quick recap and maybe add a few points that Scott forgot to mention:

Back in the late '90's, Scott was editing books for Wildstorm and asked Gil Kane to pencil this cover.  Gil sent the pencils directly to me to ink because time was short.  I faxed a copy of the pencils to Scott's office.  We all hit the panic button: Kane drew Zealot, one of the WildC.A.T.S. fighting an alien, just like Scott asked him to, but  for the alien, he drew a creature in a space suit, not a Giger/Movie Alien.  In Gil's defense – since as Scott knows, I always side with creative people against management – I asked Scott if he mentioned to Gil that this was specifically one of the aliens from the movie franchise. In the most contrite voice I'd ever heard from Scott, he said, "Well, no..."  Then, to extend his discomfort a little longer, I said, "Did you send him any reference for the alien?" "Well, no..."

Think about how long Gil had been drawing Science Fiction comics.  For more than four decades, when an editor or a writer asked for "an alien", without supplying reference or directing him to a previous story or series, it meant that Gil was supposed to create a new alien.

Scott agreed but later quoted Arthur Adams' words of support, "What did Gil think this was, 'WildC.A.T.S. vs Make-up-your-own-alien?!"

Scott and I have had a couple of angry disagreements over the years, but this isn't one of them.  He was reluctant to make this story public, even after Gil passed because he didn't want to embarrass an artist he revered.  I pointed out that if he told the story correctly, he (Scott) was the only person who would look foolish. Every once in a while we have a laugh over it, and yes, I really did respond to his "What are we gonna do?" question with, "Whattaya mean WE, white man?" That was the first and probably the last time I've had a chance to quote that old Tonto punchline from MAD magazine.  Most of you are probably too young to get the joke.

WildC.A.T.S. 25, page 5 with Dave Johnson

Dave did all the layouts, most of the pencils and quite a bit of the inking on our half of the book.  For this page, Dave faxed me his prelim, then I did a tighter drawing of the flying Mr. Majestic.  He did a larger layout, sent the board to me and I finished the pencils on the close-up and the flying figure.  Then it went back to Dave who inked everything.  Nice colors by the talented Mr. Glen Murakami who did a beautiful job interpreting the lighting.

Wildstorm swimsuit calendar art

I don't even remember this character's name and I'm too tired to look it up.  I think she was in WildCATS, but you guys don't really care about those details, do you?  All I remember is that this was for a calendar in the late '90's and even though I did a really tight color guide (shown below) and specifically asked the separator to leave the swimsuit white, he or she put a 10% black screen over it.  Why do they do stuff like that?  By the way, I only drew two flamingos.  The rest are clones.