I decided to take the plunge with jam pieces this year, and it was a learning experience. This was the first page that I started with, which featured a few characters roughly the size of a sketch card. Then the third guy went bigger, a fourth bigger still, and the fifth blew up a quarter of the page. I'm not complaining, because the pieces were all great, but I wanted something to help pull it all together as a whole. Thankfully, the relative power scale and physical presence of the villains featured had expanded with the drawing space.
I felt that there was too much room left at the top to quit, but I was also concerned about pushing to the limit and "ruining" a good thing. I'd already gotten two pieces from Pat Broderick over the long weekend, so I could reliably predict that his contributing would only be a plus. Broderick asked, "you want me to finish this off," and sure enough, he did.
The Marshal of the Soldiers of the Red Brotherhood was a genetically engineered military leader who staged a coup by tricking the Martian people into a war with Earth based on spurious evidence. Why yes, Iraq did come up in our conversation before initiating the piece. The Marshal created the circumstances that relocated Martian Manhunter to Earth after having vacated in 1969, and the story arc was contemporaneous to Broderick's heyday as a top DC Comics artist on books like The Fury of Firestorm and Captain Atom. While I had initially wanted Broderick to contribute a character to the friends of Martian Manhunter page, the Marshal was a good fit for him, and I needed someone I could trust to bring this particular jam home. I'd also gotten full figures previously, so it was swell to see Broderick push in for a close-up look at this hulking menace. Click on the pic above to give that fine work a proper look.
2 comments:
I like it...and I'm completely intrigued by the jam concept. So will that blank figure in the middle be revealed later?
Most of the time I like the pop-up window for comments, but when I have to post anonymously, it's a drag. I keep failing to pre-select "anonymous," and then I can't back up from the sign-in screen to save my first comment attempt.
Anyway, all the gaps will be filled in eventually, but I'm not sure how soon in this case. It's a villain I haven't commissioned before that's recognizable outside Martian Manhunter circles, and it's by a known '90s Marvel artist.
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