Repaneled: Animal Man #19

Animal Man #19 
by Grant Morrison, Chas Truog, and Doug Hazelwood

Yet another submission to Anthony's delightful Repaneled Blog.  Poor Anthony has to be getting sick of my constant spamming of his Inbox... :-) 

Here's the original: 

Here's my repaneled version:

"Animal Man" was one of my favorite comics (along with "Doom Patrol") back in the late 80's (holy crap, can it REALLY be that long ago?) and, being a sucker for meta-fictional stories, the entire story arc where Buddy Baker/Animal Man discovers he is a comic book character (#19 - #26) was right up my alley.  This moment is when, after taking peyote and tripping out, he turns to the reader and says "I can see you!".  Or, in this case, the blog reader, I suppose.  ;-)

Overall, I felt it was a brilliant run and did a much better job of setting up (and resolving) the "Second Crisis" than all of "Infinite Countdown to Final Crisis" ever did, IMHO.  Sure, "Final Crisis" had some cool stuff in it, but the Second Crisis in "Animal Man" was much better, more enjoyable, and brought back the fun, long gone characters for a while (as well as many new ones). 

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Step 1:  Here's the pencilled page on 11" x 15" Stonehenge 140# paper.

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Step 2:  Next up, I did some under painting to set up where the shadow would be on the face, using a mixture of Ultramarine Blue and Burt Sienna (it makes a great neutral color), as well as the under painting colors for the lips, eyes, and hair.  I also erased all the pencils, since they tend to get washed out with watercolor and can gray out some colors.  Gee, at this stage he almost looks like the illegitimate offspring of the Joker and John Constantine...  :-)

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Step 3:  I added a wash of skin tone over the face, which gave me a sort of base coat to the rest of the picture, which I could then begin building on and finishing.

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Step 4:  I finished up the shading, did some work on the hair and eyes, and generally tried to finish stuff up.  I intentionally left the t-shirt as a sort of line drawing, as I felt the contrast between the shaded, painted face and the line drawing of the shirt tied into the story and sort of amused me.  That and it saved me a little bit of time painting.  :-)

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Step 5:  I imported it into Photoshop, deleted the paper background, and added the lettering (copied directly from a scan of the page). There are a few things which could have been better, now that I look at it: The teeth, for example, should be shaded a bit more--I think they stand out a little bit too much.  The eyes probably need some bottom lashes, which I completely overlooked (Ha!  Unintentional pun!) until it was too late to fix..  But, maybe that would have looked weird, too, ala Alex from "A Clockwork Orange".  And the eyebrow on the right-hand side bothers me a little bit.  Oh, well... Live and learn!  Well, live, anyways...

This was done with watercolor on 11" x 15" Stonehenge 140# paper.

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