Art

A few years back, I had a conversation with Derek Charm where he talked about how much he loved drawing bright, poppy colors. Even then, I thought his clean lines, expressive style and love of neon pinks and blues would make him a perfect artist for a Powerpuff Girls comic, and now, we know that's the case. After serving as the regular artist of IDW's PPG and PPG Super Smash-Up, it's pretty clear that he has a knack for the job. And now, he's back at it, taking on the redesigns from the new television series in IDW's all-new Powerpuff Girls #1 --- and in addition to the art for the story, he's done a new variant cover where they're kicking the living heck out of Mojo Jojo.

Back in 2012, Benign Kingdom was launched by Becky Dresidadt, Frank Gibson and Evah Dahm as a series of creator-owned, high-quality art books featuring webcomics creators. It's a great idea that made for a fantastic showcase of independent talent, but unfortunately, we haven't seen any new offerings from the Kingdom since 2013. After putting out a series of books featuring creators like KC Green, Anthony Clark and Emily Carroll, it seemed like the project might have run its course. But Benign Kingdom recently returned with a Kickstarter campaign meant to fund a whole new set, with 32-page art books from Meredith Gran, Dustin Harbin, and co-founders Dreisdadt and Dahm.

What do the colors of your favourite superhero tell you about them? We're applying traditional color theory to iconic comic characters, to see what we can learn about them. Our focus this time is on darker colors, and how they define both heroes and villains. Black and red are colors for dark passion.

The galaxy is in peril from the forces of the evil Zarkon, and there’s only one thing to do: form Voltron. And it looks like the galaxy is in luck, because Netflix and Dreamworks Animation have resurrected the big ‘bot in a new series Voltron: Legendary Defender. The entire first (hopefully, of many) season is available for streaming now, and if you haven’t watched it yet, you should fix that, because it’s fantastic! In celebration of Voltron’s triumphant return, we’ve compiled a gallery of some of the best fan artwork featuring the big guy and Team Voltron. We even snuck a few Vehicle Voltron pics in there (because there’s no way Vehicle Voltron is ever going to get its own gallery).

Ralph McQuarrie is one of people whose name may not be known to the public at large, but whose imagination gave rise to some of the most indelible, incredible imagery in all pop culture. He was a designer, a concept artist, and a creator who could take fantastic ideas and give them form, serving an essential role in the making of classic films and TV shows. Born on this day in 1929, McQuarrie designed the spaceships seen in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and E.T., he conceived the look of the original Battlestar Galactica, he was responsible for a central image in Raiders Of The Lost Ark, he production designed Cocoon, and he worked as visual consultant for Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. But inarguably, his major achievement was defining the look of the Star Wars universe.

It took the folks at Archie Comics a while to get into the whole variant covers game. If memory serves, they only did their first one within the last ten years or so, but nowadays, they're making up for lost time! With every new series that gets announced, Archie goes all-out in getting some of my favorite artists to provide variants --- and when the all-new Josie and the Pussycats #1 hits shelves in September, it's not going to be an exception. To that end, today brings us the exclusive reveals of not one, not two, but three covers for the new series, from artists Gisele Lagace, Marguerite Sauvage and Robert Hack!

Last time in Superhero Color Theory we explained why our main heroes look the way they do. Now it's time to look at the secondary colors and how they often, but not always, signal the presence of a bad guy. Obviously it makes the most sense visually, that to stand apart from a primary colored (red/blue/yellow) hero, you want a secondary colored (purple/green/orange) one. But what do these colors tell us about what type of character the heroes are encountering?

Whether your first Jean was the Marvel Girl in her green gogo dress, the Phoenix (who we were later told wasn't Jean, but let's be real it was basically Jean), the hyper competent blue-headsock-wearing Jean of the '90s comic and cartoon, or the cool black leather Jean of the turn of the Century (whether drawn by Frank Quitely or played by Famke Janssen) --- it's hard not to be excited about this next era of the character. To celebrate that, we've put together some of the best Jean Grey fan art on the web. Some of it looks like Sophie Turner, some of it features various looks from the comics, and some of it is entirely new. Phoenix, Marvel Girl, or just going by Jean, she's one of the first ladies of Marvel Comics as well as one of the most powerful, and this artwork celebrates that.

Humberto Ramos has been a consistent presence on the Spider-Man titles for the past 14 years or so, but he actually came to the character nearly a decade into his career. Before tackling Spidey, Ramos worked on Milestone books, including Hardware, and numerous books for DC Comics, most notably a two-year run on Impulse with writer Mark Waid. Then he moved onto Wildstorm and helped found the Cliffhanger publishing imprint, where he produced 24 issues of his creator-owned comic Crimson with writer Brian Augustyn. It wasn't until 2002 that Ramos worked on a Spider-book.

Whenever I think about Ben Marra's comics, which is often, the one thing that always comes to mind is how well it captures the style of the VHS era. With his work on self-published titles like Night Business and OMWOT: One Man War On Terror, Marra's been doing his level best to evoke that sleazy, neon-soaked aesthetic of walking through the aisle at the local video store in the late '90s, full of boxes that haven't left my imagination in 20 years. It makes sense, then, that when it came time to re-release Takeshi Kitano's Violent Cop, the landmark 1989 yakuza film about a policeman pushed over the edge when his sister is kidnapped, Film Movement decided to tap Marra to create a new poster to accompany the feature.