Fantomah

 Fantomah

Another bizarre Fletcher Hanks creation I've been meaning to do something with for a long, long time (and may do something again in the future).  Fantomah was first published in "Jungle Comics #2" in 1940, which beat out Wonder Woman as one of the first female, um, superheroes (?).  Mostly, like his other creation, Stardust the Super Wizard, Fantomah would discover evil-doers, show up, and dispense a vaguely ironic and/or monstrous sense of justice.  The End.

I've always meant to do an updated repanel of her transformation sequence, and probably will one of these days...

There is something so bizarre about the stories and characters he wrote and drew, you almost can't look away.  It is a strange amalgamation of competence and ineptitude that I find oddly compelling.  The comic book equivalent of Ed Wood, I suppose.  

A beautiful lady who turns into a blue-skinned, skull-faced woman with long, blonde hair wearing a one-piece, black bathing suit with a transparent short dress?  What's not interesting about that?  Then again, there's no accounting for taste.

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STEP ONE:  Here are the digital pencils, done in Clip Studio Paint on a 1,500px x 2,250px @ 300dpi canvas. 

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STEP TWO:  I then used a white, 15pt brush to go over top the pencils as a sort of digital scratchboard.  I always liked scratchboard--both the traditional art method, as well as the digital version.

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STEP THREE:  A Multiply Layer was created, over which the colors were painted.  From some reason, the reduced size of the rather large thumbnail here has made the colors shift a bit darker on the screen.

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Done digitally in Clip Studio Paint

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