art

Jimmy Giegerich puts a wild-eyed spin on everyone from Sailor Moon's Queen Beryl to the cast of Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey. His manic illustrations are packed with sweat, blood and brilliantly colored monsters.

As Steve Eyre of World of Superheroes in Sheffield, England, was walking through an art exhibition in his hometown last week, he noticed something unusual on the leg of one of the sculptures: The cover to 1963's Avengers #1. That comic was one of dozens of rare, classic comics artist Andrew Vickers used to create his papier-mache work. Vickers had no idea.

Rory Phillips has plenty of thoughtful—and sometimes funny—approaches to character design and redesign. He casts Wonder Woman as a Scythian warrior and trades in her bondage-themed lasso for the ancient Chinese weapon known as the meteor hammer. His Batgirl and Black Canary form a vigilante scooter club with a bit of roller derby flair. And he gives us a poster for the non-existent movie I somehow need to see, starring David Bowie as a fighter of giant monsters.

It would be wrong to dismiss Donya Todd's (some images NSFW) comics and illustrations as cute pictures of pretty girls. After all, her ladies, with their big lips and wide eyelashes, are often flavored with touches of manga and early animation. But on closer inspection, her pictures, filled with coffins, pizza, rainbows, skeletons and nightmarish creatures, feel like folk art from Todd's personal mythology, a peek into a brain obsessed with mysticism, pop culture and otherworldly landscapes.

Illustrator Christian Ward creates images that are part portraiture, part digitally colored collage. Rather than posing his subject amidst the tools of their trade, he places symbols on their bodies and faces that hint at their true nature. Zatanna is familiar in her magic stars, and Daniel Craig's James Bond takes on a new meaning with his code name childishly scrawled against his face. For his invented characters, we must use the actual composition of the the portraits for clues to each person's nature.

Robert Sammelin clearly has his obsessions: shapely women, motorbikes, bespoke fashions and big, hulking guns. His illustrations depict ladies who feel alive on the page and are ready for anything, be it a quick fight or a full-on apocalypse.

Daniel Bressette lives in a very strange world, a world populated by beasts made from bits of puppies and bunny rabbits, where warlord pigs rule with a bacon fist and celestial Pokémon clutter the cosmos. It's also filled with tons of animations sure to add a smile to your weekend: Workaholics' Blake riding a dragon, an evening at home with the Ninja Turtles, Finn and Jake gone Mega Man, and some truly adorable demons.

Would Breaking Bad be the least appropriate subject for a Saturday morning cartoon? Artist Ian Glaubinger does animation-inspired illustrations of unlikely pieces of pop culture, from Pineapple Express to The Shawshank Redemption. His portfolio is filled with plenty more surprises as well, with clever takes on Alfred Hitchcock, children's breakfast cereals that never were and Grant Wood's American Gothic as it might look in Toontown.

One of the things I particularly enjoy about looking at art school students' work is that, while the students have their own unique visual flourishes, they're also in a period of intense experimentation. Looking over Minneapolis College of Art and Design student Ann Macarayan's work, I can see details that could very well come to typify her style: little marks that add emotion to the faces, red and blue noses that make her characters a tad more cartoony, careful attention to the fit and wear of her clothing. But she's constantly testing out new styles and media as she learns and grows as an artist.

"It's okay to draw like a six-year-old," Phil McAndrew tells those of us with lesser drawing skills. McAndrew doesn't draw like a six-year-old, but that one little sentence says a lot about his work. McAndrew's art is marked by skillful composition and caricature, but it's filled with the energy of someone who hasn't forgotten what it is like to be a six-year-old doodling dinosaurs... Re