I was really excited to contribute a page to the latest issue of @unbeatablesquirrelgirl​ by my buddy @ryannorth​! (Issue #9, at your local comic shop now!) 

In the story, Squirrel Girl encounters the character Mole Man, who is super old. So, for a page where he’s recounting a flashback, Ryan and Erica thought it’d be fun if it had a correspondingly old-timey look.

If you’re familiar with my comic Wondermark, you know that I am ALL ABOUT  old-timey drawings of nonsense. If you’re not familiar, well, it’s a comic strip that I make like a collage, using illustrations from Victorian-era books and magazines! (Here’s a quick example of how it works.)

I’m really proud of how the final Squirrel Girl page turned out, and Ryan gave me the OK to share some BEHIND THE SCENES INFO with you. 

Here’s how the page looked when I turned it in to Marvel:

With an assignment like this, I try to keep the conceit that the image is an authentic Victorian-style engraving – which means, rather than draw any image I want from scratch, I have to find a bunch of Victorian engravings that contain pieces of what I need, and then build the needed images from them. 

It’s kind of like playing with LEGO® brand building bricks, except the LEGO® brand building bricks are drawings created by people who are now dead.

Here’s a close up of Panel #1:

Ryan’s script for this panel called for a “portrait” of Kraven, and as everyone knows, old-timey + portrait = ovals, baby.

At the top you’ll also see a little Russian crest that I found on a postage stamp. I left it off the final version because I figured it might get in the way of the lettering, but now, looking at the final, it wouldn’t have! OH WELL. It’s a bit of gilding the lily anyway.

I have a lot of PunchandHarper’s and similar general-interest magazines, and they are filled with illustrations of well-dressed people standing around talking with one another. Which is great for Wondermark, thrice-voted “Talkiest Webcomic That Isn’t ‘Subnormality’.” (Winston knows that I kid.) For this action-packed assignment, though, I knew I needed to tap a much more action-packed source, and I found what I needed in the pages of The Illustrated Police News.

ThePolice News was one of Britain’s very first tabloids (later spawning a Boston edition as well, which is where I pulled material for this project). It was a broadsheet that luridly reported on crime, murders, skeletons found in pits or in armoires or in wells, serial killers being put to death, fires in convents and orphanages, horses found mysteriously dead, houses of ill repute being set upon by ghosts, and the like.

And because this was before the time when photography could easily be reproduced in mass media, every picture they wanted to print had to take the from of an engraved illustration! (Often using photographs as reference, as in the portraits below, but not always.) Meaning, the pages of the Police News are full of drawings of fights and scuffles and escapes and all kinds of horrible things, making this the perfect resource for a Squirrel Girl comic.

Below, you can see a few of the pieces that I combined to create the portrait of Kraven. The muscular body is from a boxer (the other thing the Police News contained a ton of was boxing profiles, quite handily for me), and the head was the result of paging through quite a few issues until I found a murderer headshot that made me say “Yup, that’s Kraven.” 

I believe the tiger is from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated, a London magazine. It has reared its head once before, in my piece on Mysterious Homicides.

Panel #2 features Doreen riding off “in an elaborate dress, riding a penny-farthing, while Kraven gives her a salute.” (Ryan’s script, paraphrased from memory.) This was the panel I was most nervous about, because Doreen is literally the star of the comic, and I had to figure out how to find a Victorian illustration of someone everyone would recognize, even though that person was not alive in the Victorian era and also is fictional.

Here are some of the scans I pulled. I’ve wanted to use that weird-looking bicycler for a while; he’s from Punch.I’m glad that some very small parts of him have finally found a home.

I found a lady’s head that I thought looked a bit like Doreen, and then set about trying to make it an even better match by reshaping her face a bit, redrawing some of her features, and of course adding in the necessary squirrel-ear and acorn accessories!

The final piece that really tied it all together was the bang of hair across her forehead. No one in Victorian times had that hairstyle, so to represent it, I looked at a bunch of textiles and drapery, and eventually found the perfect little wave in that cricket player’s pants. When I am on the hunt for shapes or textures I don’t care where they come from.

Panel #3 features Kraven fighting Gigantos, the whale-beast beneath the waves that Ryan invented in an earlier issue! This was a great panel to do because this character didn’t really exist anywhere else, so I could do whatever I wanted.

Now, I trust this representation of him is OFFICIAL MARVEL CANON. 

The submarine is made of some parts from a steam boiler and a locomotive grafted onto a ship’s hull. Kraven is built around another of those boxer profiles – more on that in a bit.

I knew the fun part would be building this crazy underwater whale-beast. For source images, I pulled a bunch of lizards and creepy creatures with scales, and I already had this sort of rotund boxer dude on hand (I believe this is a political cartoon of some kind; that may be a likeness of a specific 1870s politician) to build the body around. Even if not much of that actual body is visible in the final, it can be useful to start with some sort of skeleton or base reference pose so the body proportions don’t start drifting out of whack.

I asked Ryan if I could give the final version of the beast giant boxing gloves and he said YES.

Creating this illustration was almost more like sculpting than anything else – because it didn’t have to look like anything in particular, just cool,I would paste on a scaly wrinkle or a chunk of lizard meat as if it were wet clay on top of the image, and then blend it all together with soft brushes on layer masks. 

InPanel #4, this backwards lunge-dodge of Kraven’s is exactly the sort of pose that the Police News is equipped to provide in a way no other periodical of the era (that I have found) can match.

I also really lucked out in finding another lady’s face (a different drawing, from a different angle) that, when paired with The Famous Cricket-Pants Bang, ends up looking like the same character we already saw earlier on this page! Finding matching characters between poses can sometimes be really hard, since I work with a fundamentally limited pool of source material – that’s why most the key features of Kraven’s face in this panel are just redrawn on top of the original source guy.

Panel #5 is where those boxing profiles came in real handy. Ryan’s script called for Kraven to be in the same pose here as he was when fighting Gigantos, but it would have been fine either way because I now have a vast collection of people in old-timey boxing poses.

I cast these particular two boxers for this panel mainly because of their pants. I knew Kraven had to wear a leotard, and the reference drawings Ryan sent me of Mole Monsters all showed them wearing little loincloth things. These two particular fighters were wearing the correct pants for the needed roles.

You can see in this exploded view a dark outline layer (at far right). The engravings copied from photographs do a really good job of mimicking light and shadow, so they don’t always have the sort of edge definition we expect from line drawings. I had to go in and shore up the edges a bit.

Panel #6 called for a “big line of people throwing away various old-timey things” (again, paraphrased from memory). The detail’s a little small, and a lot of it in the finished comic is covered up with text, but there is a lady throwing away a box marked “MONOCLES”, and a guy with an open valise full of snake oil. The chair in the lady’s hand is missing a leg, and I presume the grandfather clock is cursed.

Landscape stuff is hard for me to do, because it’s hard to find really specific things in my source material. Creating something from scratch is easy, and making up whale-monster nobody has seen before is easiest of all, but making something very particular that has to fit a certain size and shape can take a surprisingly long time.

But it ended up being fine! 

Thanks for joining me on this trip down Mole Man’s Memory Lane. I hope you pick up Unbeatable Squirrel Girl at your local comic shop or on Comixology or wherever, or if you’re coming to this post from having read it already, I hope you check out Wondermark, where I do this same sort of thing every day! 

Many thanks to Ryan and Erica for inviting me to share their sandbox; thanks to Rico for adding great colors to the final product; and thanks to Bostonian boxers and murderers from a century and a half ago, for causing these artists to draw these particular pictures for me to use to illustrate a tale about an old man trying to marry a rodent lady.

Your squirrel friend’s got chops, kid.

Anime Central 2022 Cosplay Pictures Part 1

Glad to be back at Acen for this year. Got a good number of Cosplay pictures. Excited to come back next year in my own cosplay!