The Phantom The Bat and Supes

Here are a few more pages from the Tomb job for DD Digital. Here are my layouts and my pencils. I drew my layouts at print size, scanned them in, blew them up and worked over them on my lightbox for speed.

                                      And here is the last week's worth of the Phantom.

The Phantom, The Bat, The Kryptonian And The Minivan

This was one of the heaviest lifting weeks in the studio for a long time. On top of the two strips which keep me plenty busy, I also got a rush 10 page penciling job for DC Digital books, written by old buddy Phil Hester and inked by Comics god, Tom Palmer. I think it will show up on Comixology.

Tom and I last worked together over 20 years ago on Spirits of Vengeance.

you can see more of Tom's great work on his website tomplamerillustration.com

Its Supes and Bats vs Darkseid and DeSaad. It was a fun romp, better for an annual than a 10 pager as it was very dense and I had to get used to the DC Digital format which breaks things into two tiers for the cellphones and tablets.

The rough for page 1 on the left and the finished pencils on the right.













Still I was happy old Marvel buddy Steve Buccellato asked me to do it.  I got to draw the new costumes on Supes and Bats which made me miss the old ones--well at least on Superman.

This weeks was also a hard drawing week on The Phantom as week get Kit to his new school hidden away in the far off Himalayas. Great vistas and people, new character and street scenes, so it was a fun lush week written by Tony that called on all my drawing muscles!

 And here is last week's worth of The Phantom strips.

The band's trip back from Morrisville/Morristown continues in the Judge. This is from a plot I pitched to Woody back at the beginning of the year. Woody is scripting and adding his own flair of course. The band is on the way back and there looks to be some back seat hijinks. Oh, Oh, drama!

It was also a cleaning out week, out with more old and unwanted  comics and books into the recycle--I have acquired so much of everything it seems---so my rule is if I haven't looked at it in 5 years--it goes in the "out pile". Some stuff I will keep, but frankly its so easy to keep things you think you will look at again--then never do!! I brought crap home from my studio in school that I thought I'd want or would go through two years ago that I am just going through now--and most of the stuff I am tossing.

I think all mid career artists have to do this, out with as much as you can so what you have is good and easily found. One of the museum conservators at PAFA told me that when they get in an artist studio, all their material, sometimes after they pass, it's so daunting the family goes ,"Here you guys can have this stuff".

Then they have to go through a huge amount of junk that is basically mostly just junk to sort out the envelope with a doodle  that was some link in the artists work or process that is important, from the real junk mail. She told me to toss away as much stuff as I can along the way to avoid the huge pile of art debris she was going through. It was sound advice I should have listened too!

Super-Update

Its been a while since my last post as its been a super busy fall season for me. I started teaching my Illustration class again in the PAFA High School Program, this is my 5th year teaching the class and this year's class is probably the biggest I've taught so far, swelling to 40 students some weeks. That's quite a big number of students to teach, and a real workout for sure for myself as well as my two teaching assistants. The students run the gamut from the merely interested to the serious student working on portfolio pieces for their upcoming applications to various art schools. Each student is charged with coming up with a project to work on, it can be a comic, character design or an illustration of some sort. I give them help and tips for coming up with ideas and then a plan for taking the ideas from comps or thumbnails to finished work.

                                           Wood Street 12 x 16 Oil Available at Rodger LaPelle 

While that was going on I took part in the Plein Air Burlington with my crew from the PPAP and then we as a group were also asked to take part in the Old City Festival in October and painted along the festival route in Old City in Philly.

                            One of the two paintings I progress that I did along busy 3rd Street

On top of all of that I also have been keeping up on the Judge Parker strip and have pulled in a few guest inkers for the Sunday Strips.

              This Sunday was penciled by me and guest inked by my best buddy Bret Blevins

                          This Sunday was penciled by me and guest inked by Jerry Ordway

I was really excited and happy to have both Bret and Jerry help me out on some deadline gaining by pitching in on the inks on these two Sunday strips, they did an awesome job, especially having to ink form Blue Line printouts and not the original pencils due to the schedule.

On top of all of this I was also a guest speaker in  the writing class my buddy Jamar Nicholas teaches at Drexel University last Tuesday. I brought in a large selection of my comic and animation work to show the class, talked about my career and the "ins and outs" of comics and animation.

Then I did a live breakdown and layout from Dan Ingman's script, a nice young guy and aspiring writer is one of the students in the class that Jamar chose for me to work with.

I explained my thought process on adapting the script live as I worked, the difference between full script and plot and I laid out the same page in two versions and explained why I chose the shots/angles in each version and how that effected the feel and flow of the page; the need to understand how comics flow visually and that every writer needs to be able to lay out a comic page even if their drawing is terrible. You can lay out a page in a six panel grid on a single sheet of paper and that will give them an idea of how the script translates and becomes a comic page and the real estate and flow of a narrative and how the art/balloons an narrative really must share the space and work together.

A script is very abstract until it is locked down on a page--and it can be interpreted in a variety of ways depending on the artists adapting them.  Time flew by and it was fun and before I knew it it was over. Next week I'll be a guest critic for the students in the PAFA Illustration program at school.

Judge Parker Process

 In cleaning off an old UBS drive I came across a layout for an old Judge Parker strip from my first few months on the strip back in 2010. I the beginning I used to do a small layout for the Sundays, then blow it up and trace it off on my light box and finish the pencils, inks, etc. This is the way I worked on a lot of my comic work for decades. This allowed me to easily make changes and adjust things, at one point I even used an art-o-graph to do this. This way of working allowed me to see my whole composition and layout smaller; the bigger a drawing the harder it is for your eye to see the whole composition  at onetime without moving your eye.  If you have to scan your eye it is hard at times to compare the whole composition and see if it fits together the way you want.

This is still an effective way to work, a good way to work and sometimes on other projects I still work in this fashion.

 This was also a great way to work out perspective grids smaller as often the vanishing points extend way beyond the edge of the paper.

In the five years I have been working on the strip I have become a lot more comfortable and confident and long ago abandoned working out my compositions as I did above--now I just wing it--go from the gut. I see it in my minds eye and blast it down on the board. If I don't like something I just erase it and start over till I get what I want. This keeps the creative process more live and also speed up the whole process by eliminating the tracing or transfer process of my layout. Deadlines are always a constant issue on the strip and even a hour out of one part of the process can add up and ease the pressure. This week it was all pretty much just Neddy and Abbey talking heads, so expressions were the big key here. Attractive faces and good angles, not much else at play here, just enough of the environments to show the location. Color was a big thought from early on, I kept the blacks to really only local color of Neddy's hair. I wanted the color to feel the the sun flooding into the kitchen in early morning. You'll see this Sunday in full color at the end of July

Process: Penguin Trading Card

More from the manley Archives

I came across this page of thumbnail ideas for one of the Overpower cards I did for DC back in the 90's. One of the series of cards I did featured the Penguin.

As you can see initially I was thinking of having him sitting in a club with two gals with the Batsignal in the background, Another with his henchmen being taken out by Batman. But I think the reason I rejected them is the figures were too small and the idea would read better as a pin-up, than a trading card. I settled on the final idea with the big head menacing the city, which I think read much better at the size of a trading card.

Here is the actual final art of the card.

Batman Zero Hour

 More from the Manley Archives! Here is the original cover sketch for batman 511, which I drew on the back of some fax paper--remember that stuff? How many trees died so I could fax stuff back and forth in the mid 90's? I haven't located the other sketches yet for this cover, but I'm slowly working to put my extensive----and I mean extensive amount of drawings, art and sketches in order. Of all of the Batman cover I did this was my favorite. The original is below.

I hated the fact that when I started the book Kelly Jones was doing the cover--I felt that since I was the artist on the book, I should do the covers as well---nothing against Kelly. But DC was always kinda' weird that way, one artist on the book, another on the cover. I was almost always disappointed as a kid when I'd buy a comic with a cool Adams or Cardy cover and the insides were not by the same artist. I think this is pretty much the way it is today, one artist on the cover and another on the guts. i don't really go to the comic shops or buy comics anymore, but when I stop in once or twice a year this seems to be the fashion. Comics are now way, way to expensive for their short entertainment value---but that's for another post.

This was brush and the good old Hunt 108. There is no logo dressing on this which for me is good as the covers at the time were kind of a mess with all kinds of logos and blurbs that really covered up the art.

Draw! 22 is Shipping Now!

Draw! 22 hits the streets today! You can catch a preview of this issue right here. This issue is crammed cover to cover with great interviews and step-by-steps by Frank Miller, Klaus Janson, Jim lee, Danny Fingeroth, Jamar Nicholas and myself. Grab a copy right now in print or digital from Twomorrows.com

Superman-Batman layouts

Here are several pages of layouts I did last year for Jerry Ordway on Superman/Batman Worship to help with the old deadline doom.

More Lobo Layouts

Here are two more pages from the Lobo job I laid out and you can see Jerry Ordway's awesome finished inks over them. Its always interesting for me to see what the final blend of our collaboration looks like. Jerry is one of the greatest finishers and inkers ever!
One of the harder things for me is where to stop the drawing, in other words to not go so far as to do full pencils. Artists like Gil Kane and especially John Buscema really had that down to a science. It took me a while to figure out what I was comfortable with, but doing storyboards for years did help that a bit. By doing the heavy lifting on the storytelling it gave Jerry a heads up and pick up on the deadline. No two artists think alike or always agree but Jerry never really change a ton of what I did, and if he did since his name was going on the book I didn't mind, anything he changed would still be to the good and the work looks great to my eye.

Lobo Layouts

I'm posting a few layouts I did in helping Jerry Ordway on a recent lobo project. I laud the jobs out to help with the tight deadline and Jerry did the finishes.



Jerry would print these out and light-box them and make whatever changes he wanted and then go to inks.

More Magnus layouts

I had to pick up the pace during the end of my layouts so I started doing them smaller, actual comic size and inked them with a marker. I was drawing the full size and enjoyed doing that but the deadline stated getting too tight.


I always enjoyed the idea of the character and his pink metal tunic. I think that's magnus, if you change it it doesn't make sense, I know people love or hate a character but I think if you go away from the core too much you might as well just do a new character.

Magnus Layouts

Here is another batch of layouts from Magnus 3 which were later finished by Bill Rienhold. I've been doing a lot of layouts in the past year, I'll be posting more on some of the works soon from some of the other projects.

MAGNUS ROBOT FIGHTER 3 Layouts

Magnus NO. 3 hit the stands last week and so I thought I would post some of the layouts I did that Bill Rienhold did finishes over. I am really happy with what Bill did, it is a great looking comic, the coloring by Wes Dzioba is one of my favorite coloring jobs ever. So often I am just really dissappointed by the coloring which can really destroy the art on a book and ruin all your hard work--but not here, Wes really enhances what Bill and I did. Unfortunately I am off to other things as due to the dreaded deadline doom Bill has moved onto doing a Magnus origin story--so no layouts will be needed to speed the deadline.

Bill's inks!

This was hard book to layout from Jim Shooters scripts, Jim is a guy who has definite ideas about how his comics should be laid out and that honestly left me at times kinda' hemmed in compared to the way I usually work. Shooter believes in the strict panel grid in laying out a comic, no bleeds, no inset panels etc. I hate the term "old School' but that might apply here--or maybe the world conservative would. yet artists like Kirby and Ditko worked most of their careers in the grid--did their best work with the grid--so you can still go good comics, I think however the past 40 years teh grid has been really blown out and much more cinematic and "designed" page layouts have become the norm.

I knew from working with him at Valiant Jim would not be going for that--so I was not surprised at the way he wanted the books done, but at times I felt honestly a bit constrained as I could think of much more dynamic ways to layout some of the scenes. But those were the rules on this gig and so I spent my effort on making the panels the best compositions, the acting of the characters and trying to make the layouts as dynamic as possible knowing that there might be changes by Shooter and that Bill would make the art look sweat--and he did.


If you see this issue you can see there were changes to my layout.

I was thinking that I would just knock the figures in and let Bill "dress them up' as at this time they were still trying to come up with Magnus' new costume.

I got to do some fun future design stuff and again I just roughed in Magnus so Bill could add the costume when it was agreed on. My idea when laying out a page is the story is first, and I want to keep the figures and shapes of the background and elements reading clear. Strong clear gestures that can read in a silouette especially in panel 4 where Magnus uses his internal com-link to talk to A-1.


I'll post some more layouts in the next few days!