Elongated Man origin: page two

You can see me struggling with the first panel here.  The pose in the preliminary sketch almost works but it's a little weak.

Batman Confidential #26: a half-inked panel

This one was bit of a challenge.  As I've mentioned elsewhere, José intended to ink this series himself so the first two issues weren't quite as finished as the final one.  Most of it was clear enough for me to take directly to inks but a few pages threw me.  His approach to Gotham City is different from mine and from what I've seen, is based on NYC.  I wasn't always sure what to do with the buildings shown here.  Generally, when it comes to Gotham City, I follow the old Wallace Wood adage:  "When in doubt, black it out".  But as you can see, we have two distinct layers of action and making the background black just won't work, even with little slivers of light to represent windows.  I could do it if I changed the lighting on Batman; lit him from both sides instead of one or used a rim light.  The black area on his cape in the upper left would probably get lost if the building behind it was also black.  No, the more I thought about it, the foreground needed to be darker and the background lighter.  We needed a lot of contrast to show the distance between the two.

On the left you see José's pencils.  On the right you can see the same panel after I inked all of the foreground images and was starting to firm up some of the background details.  You can check out the printed book to see if we pulled it off, and how much the colorist, David Baron, helped us out.

Elongated Man origin: Page one

No big surprises here, but I held onto scans of the layouts, pencils and inks so I thought this would be worth posting to show the way things developed from rough idea to final colors. This was published in DC's "52", number 13, 2006. It's the first of two pages.

I've liked this character since I first saw him in Detective Comics in the 60's.  I don't remember which issue it was but the story had some beautiful Carmine Infantino art.  For a change, he was doing his own inks and even though they were a little "scratchy" compared to Anderson and Giella, they looked great to my young eyes.  Lots of energy and imaginative design work.

Those early stories were always fun, with bits of good natured humor. 

Metal Men page 1 pencils

DC is using this in their promotional material so I guess it's okay to show the whole page here now.  The image size is about 16" x 22"!  This is for Mark Chiarello's Wednesday Comics project so it'll be printed very close to original art size.  Needless to say, I'm inking it tight.