Monday, September 14, 2026

Commissionpalooza I



With the blog's 20th anniversary next year, I'd really like to take care of old business, like unposted commissioned art that I've sometimes been sitting on for over a decade. I've got a lot of pieces lying around, and it can be hard to keep track of what I've got online already, and in what state. This is especially true of the section where I'm supposed to put artwork, Pictures of Martian Manhunter, having a note of last update as 6/4/11. I only started collecting commissions in 2010, and virtually none were in that mix. So I figured that I should create a repository post to help me sort it all out, and while I was at it, I figured I might as well show off some of my non-Alien Atlas art for what has always been my primary blogging audience. I have too much material for a single post, and it was too much work to not milk for more days. Also, if you think I've been holding back on you in the Sleuth from Outer Space department, I literally have dozens of pieces devoted to other interests that hardly anyone has seen. Since there are overlapping artists, I'd like to hold back those galleries until I can offer something more comprehensive. I also cut out the one-off artists sorted together by year at 2013, because I started all those jam projects in 2014, and those are still being reckoned with...

Karl Altstaetter Chris Beaver Damon Bowie Pat Broderick 2010 Ian Chase Nichols Brian Denham Derec Donovan 2011 Brad Garneau Brad Green Paul Gulacy & Walden Wong Kiriska Andy Kuhn 2012 Sam Lotfi Josh C Lyman Kevin Maguire & Tony Kordos Antoine Mayes Lane Montoya Marat Mychaels 2013 Mark Nasso Adrian Nelson Tommy Duy Nguyen Vo Nguyen Eddie Nuñez Brent Peeples George Pérez Nick Pitarra
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Sunday, September 13, 2026

2010 "DC Universe Vol.1: JLA" Martian Manhunter by alexmax

Click To Enlarge


Just for fun, here's me taking a stab at the DC superheroes in an animated type style. Inspired by the Bruce Timm cartoons and movies, but at the same time trying not to copy them. I had so much fun doing this that I'd like to try doing some other "sets" of characters (hence why I called it Vol. 1!), and put my own spin on some of them.

Of course I had to begin with the JLA, and my favorite JLA lineup is the one from the relaunch in the mid 90's. It had the best contrast of personalities with seasoned veterans, younger heroes, reluctant members, etc.

Here is what I was thinking as I did each design...

Superman: My favorite. More athletic than hulking (so the mild-mannered reporter persona can be believable). The "S Shield" should be as big as possible.

Green Lantern: Kyle Rayner, my second favorite comic character. A cross between his first two looks, kind of like what he has in the comics these days, except I don't like the white gloves and the logo on black. Slimmer, and younger, than any other hero.

Batman: Hard to make Batman look unique. Picked my favorite look for him.

Wonder Woman: Adam Hughes boots, Byrne's bracelets, current belt, big tiara.

The Flash: Wally West. Uncovered eyes to distance him from the JLU design. On the thin side like Kyle, but with muscled legs.

Aquaman: late 90's version. A guy living in the depths of the sea should be huge to withstand that kind of pressure. Monster calves to swim.

Martian Manhunter: More "squared" than the JLU version.
Another one that's been in my drafts folder since 2011, probably because I was going to use the art segments for the various heroes to crossover between my blogs. Despite the watermark, I'd rather just get this posted and move on.
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Saturday, September 12, 2026

2005 Upper Deck Justice League of America VS System CCG Card DJL-055: Maxwell Lord - Financier

Illustration by Cully Hamner.

This is just a cameo appearance by J'Onn, so I thought twice about featuring it, but hey-- I got dates to fill. Max was still a good(ish) guy around 2005, but this was the same year as Countdown to Infinite Crisis, so the heel may already have been turning. My main cause for pause to reconsider this was that it seems like Cully Hamner may have drawn influence from the likeness of another wealthy New York elite that turned into a global super-villain, and that semblance is more repugnant to me than a bullet to Ted Kord's brain.
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Friday, September 11, 2026

2007 Upper Deck DC Comics Legends VS System CCG Card DCL-054 : Mightiest Heroes

Art by Kalman Andrasofszky.

Another certified rare card from this set that I can't buy or find a normal sized scan for. The artist is probably best known for spearheading the modern era relaunch of Captain Canuck.
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Thursday, September 10, 2026

2005 Upper Deck Justice League of America VS. System CCG Card DJL-180: H'ronmeer's Curse

Art by Joe Bennett.

As of this writing, I still haven't pulled the trigger on buying a single Vs. System card. I actually played Overpower, and I have enough high quality base/chase cards packed out of boxes direct into 9-pocket sleeves to make it worthwhile for me to eventually plug in the holes. Collecting a CCG from scratch with only online resources twenty years after release is probably too big an ask for me. I have no great desire to put together any more Batman/Superman heavy card sets (see, again, Overpower,) and the more diverse sets like Justice League of America go hundreds of cards deep at various levels of availability. There are some really choice artists working on the set, but going back to granddaddy Magic: The Gathering, all these paintings are done dirty by postage stamp presentations in favor of game mechanic text.

All this is to say that I'm just prettying up scans swiped from eBay listings, and despite not being a valuable card, there are no good English language scans of this particular card handy. For presentation purposes, I doctored up an Italian-language card, but figure someone might be curious about a translation. The card is of the "Plot Twist" type, which I believe translates into an Event card in Overpower speak (which I stopped playing well before this card came out long enough ago to drink legally.) In layman's terms, it's a card that's played to change a gaming dynamic.

In this instance, "Ongoing: At the start of your attack step, if you control a non-stunned character, each player stuns a non-stunned character he controls with cost 2 or less." Hey Upper Deck-- your pronouns are out of date. Admittedly, I don't recall a single solitary girl ever playing Overpower in my vicinity. I think I knew a trans-femme in the broader super-hero trading card sphere though, and certainly women played more popular CCGs, even in my day. So, shouting out from Woke.0?

The flavor text quote reads, "For the weaker Martians, the curse is deadly."
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Wednesday, September 9, 2026

Justice League of America's Vibe #1-3 (April-June, 2013)

Martian Manhunter had a cameo in the debut issue of Vibe's solo book as a head shot in a preview of the upcoming Justice League of America. The following issue, the Alien Atlas stood beside Colonel Steve Trevor, Katana, Vibe, Stargirl, and Hawkman in front of the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. for a press conference presided over by President Barack Obama to announce the formation of the J.L.A. A photo of J'Onn also turned up on a corkboard at A.R.G.U.S. in the third issue.

Francisco Ramon was recruited by Agent Dale Gunn of A.R.G.U.S. to serve as the hero Vibe under orders from Director Amanda Waller. Given a costume and the codename "Vibe," Ramon would use his command over vibrational frequencies to detect breaches from other dimensions. He was also secretly expected to be a potential weapon against the Flash, just as the Martian Manhunter was a planned counter against Superman. The J.L.A.'s covert reason for being was to give the United States an option to take on the original Justice League with their own super-heroes, should it prove necessary.

The American League wasn't the only bit of dirty business Amanda Waller was up to, as she also imprisoned super-powered subjects in her underground laboratory dubbed "The Circus." There was already a containment cell that literally had Vibe's name on it if he ever fell out of favor. In her New 52 debut as part of a first issue cameo, captive subject Gypsy looked on from confinement, and wasn't the only such prisoner by a fair margin.

In the following issue, a menacing alien courier roamed the streets of Detroit until he was confronted by Vibe and brought low with the aid of Dale Gunn. It carried a scroll featuring extraterrestrial writing, which was eventually turned over to Waller, who brought it for a visit to the Circus. "...It has your name on it, doesn't it? Written in your language. It's a letter. Someone went to a great deal of trouble getting this to you..." The prisoner asked after the fate of the courier, and explained that the letter was a request from her father to come home. "You seem to prefer a more nomadic existence. That makes you something of a trans-dimensional... Gypsy." Waller wanted the girl to tell her father that she was safe and well cared for, but if he decided to try to take his daughter back, he'd share her "accommodations." Gypsy felt that Waller had no right to keep her, and Amanda agreed, but also noted that some of her superiors would prefer that her holding facility become an abattoir. "I want out! I'll take my chances out there! Please..."

Finally, feedback from a confrontation between Vibe and Kid Flash caused the power dampening generated in some of the Circus' cells to falter, allowing Subject 24 ("Gypsy") access to her abilities. Creating the illusion that she was a guard who had been trapped in her cell, Gypsy lured another guard into freeing her and escaping. The stories were written by Geoff Johns & Andrew Kreisberg & Sterling Gates, with pencil art by Pete Woods & Andres Guinaldo & Fabiano Neves. Yes, that is a lot of names for three issues, isn't it?
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Tuesday, September 8, 2026

2005 Upper Deck Justice League of America VS System CCG Card DJL-109: Power Siphon

Illustration by Keron Grant.

I forgot to mention yesterday that even though my card scans are often squared rectangles, gaming cards almost always have rounded corners like poker cards, because the rigors of gameplay would swiftly wear down pointed corners. The points would poke your hands (as was still the case if you played with plastic sleeves,) and it would create a point of vulnerability for the card to be permanently bent (or "marked,") and the sides could begin to separate from each other. Another thing that I forgot as I started looking into the VS. System is that I have old man brain, and it would wear me down.

I've been a little obsessive over the Vs. System, because I realized while working on the DC Secret Files Podcast that the short form periodical reference books like Who's Who were abandoned in the '90s in favor of trading cards. They returned in comic book form as Secret Files and Origins specials, but those were far from comprehensive in their coverage, so you needed trading cards to supplement them for snapshots of the full scope of the DC Universe in the '90s. But also, getting into the 21st century, the non-sports comic book trading card market was virtually extinct, and almost none of those sets featured original art. It was just reprinted, repurposed material from the comics industry. Also, the Secret Files books themselves were increasingly few and far between in the aughts. But see, collectible card games were still a thing, had a broad scope in service to gaming mechanics, and I finally realized my usual resource Trading Card Database effectively "hid" these cards in a separate gaming catalog. Suddenly, properties that I'd struggled to find resources to cover were at my virtual, digital fingertips. All these Vs. System posts are the fruit of searches for these cards on places like eBay.

The quality and resolution of these images vary wildly, and the availability of images from the later sets are thin. What I really wanted was to get my hands on the actual cards to pull my own scans. However, most eBay listings for individual cards start at a dollar each, plus shipping, and I'm looking at needing hundreds of these things. I don't want to get buried in duplicates of a card game that I'll never play by buying not-inexpensive boxes, where there are even boxes available to buy. So one day, my gal and I hit numerous comics and gaming stores, plus a gaming-specific co-op "convention" open most weekends on the other side of town. This took up much of the day. We came home empty-handed.

For starters, the only actual Vs. System product we found was at Houston's oldest comic book store. They only had Marvel cards, in packs, collecting dust in a plastic case on a back wall counter. The card I'm featuring today can almost book a rental car without any insurance hassles. Why would I even think anyone would have a decades old gaming system in stock? Even though VS. System had way more releases than the Overpower I did collect, and I saw them being sold in more shops, that was also probably during the Bush Administration. Hell, HeroClix is much more recent, and nobody has carried those in nearly a decade. The only hybrid comic/card shops that I know of to still exist are all like that one-- local institutions-- around my advanced age. Only after did it occur to me that I never see sports cards outside of department stores nowadays, or single trading cards outside of booths in antique malls.

I do see gaming cards, but guess what? That's still mostly Magic and Pokemon. Almost nobody has those bulky cardboard boxes, or even the wooden shelving anymore. It's all plastic and glass now, enough to hold active modern card packs and encase high dollar key singles. Common deck building stuff is what you buy the packs for, and then trade with your community, not the shop. I'm sure the prices come from matching online dealers, because who would bother to print a guide in 2026? At gaming specialty stores, Vs. System isn't necessarily even a memory. How many shops have opened and closed since the cooling of J-horror and the rise of K-Pop, itself an institution now, rather than an emerging scene?

At that CCG convention thing, my gal was going booth to booth with a picture of a Vs. System pack on her phone like we were working a missing persons case. We also called some shops on said device (not helped by her initially asking for "Vee's Cards,") and almost nobody even knew what we were talking about. Here, they had sports cards. There was a stray comic booth where I tried to buy a $3.50 Comics Journal, before determining it was actually a $350 wall book because of some early McFarlane art. There was a tiny representation of comic book trading cards in a few binders. There were some of those intricate cardboard boxes from back in the day. They did not contain twenty year old VS. System singles, nor should they have. Why would they? Only an old man who sees that broad expansive of time as a blip, despite my entire relationship with my previously mentioned old lady being contained within than expanse, could delude himself into thinking otherwise. What do I know about modern CCG retailing, or any hobby retailing? I haven't gotten my regular comic fix at an LCS in near on a quarter century.

And so, back to eBay, casting my net far and wide for viable scans. Probably ordering singles to fill those gaps. And torturing y'all with the product of these efforts. An old man boring you with tales of a card game that could attend college that he never even bought himself.
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Monday, September 7, 2026

2005 Upper Deck Justice League of America VS System CCG Card DJL-188: Rallying Cry!

Illustration by Duncan Fegredo.

Both the sportscard and comic book markets started heating up in the 1980s, feeding off one another, so that your average comic shop carried sports cards and vice versa. A lot of this was Mom & Pop stuff, so everybody was learning how each business type worked as they went along, and you tended to value every investment. In the case of cards, you'd typically open up at least one box of a desirable set to see which chase cards you could score to display in a case, and to have common singles to sell or trade to help customers put together sets. Even when you weren't actively making money on those loose cards directly, you provided a service, and by being a resource brought people into the store. Even as the trading card market took a downturn, the rise of collectible card games heightened the value of singles. Game players needed multiple copies of the same useful cards in customizing decks for play, or even just to have enough duplicate cards to maintain multiple active decks for various strategies of gameplay. Just as your Beckett was cooling down, your Scrye was heating up, and games like Magic: The Gathering and Pokémon kept the lights on when other hobby businesses were closing down.

I myself played Overpower and Star Wars, and usually kept my decks in sleeves. Since I was a DC guy, the only box of Overpower that I ever bought for myself was the JLA expansion. Aside from starter packs (basic pre-built decks of first editions,) everything else I got from loose individual packs, or by buying/trading single cards through other players and shops. As was typical, I usually carried my cards in a prefab folded cardboard box that held a single row of cards on their side, and was about 10 inches long with a built-in lid. At the shops I ran and frequented, single cards were usually kept in a variant of these boxes, which I'd guesstimate were something like a foot & a half wide and maybe two feet long. These were more complicated to build, because they would hold multiple rows of cards with separate cardboard slats that were folded into the larger pre-cut template. Cards in these boxes were stood up, and you had a separate folding lid template that could be used to keep dust and debris out of the boxes, or to secure them for transport. That's how you could safely get them to shows/conventions, though being cardboard, you wouldn't want them to be hit with anything more than the lightest of rain sprinkles. At least here in Texas, we'd have stacks of these boxes in our shops, usually supported by wooden shelving behind the counter or in the back room. If you had the right build, you could also get comic book short boxes on those shelves, and because you valued all that stock that you'd put money into, there were often a lot of each type of box around. Of course, in the '90s, after the bottom started to fall out, everybody had overstock to liquidate. You didn't want to pay property taxes on product that wasn't moving. You had to cut your losses at some point, or drown in them.
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Sunday, September 6, 2026

2007 Upper Deck VS System DC Legends CCG Card DCL-268: Overwhelming Odds

Illustration by Adam DeKraker & Jeff Albrecht.

Thanks to my doing extensive research into these Vs. system cards for another project, I'm flush with material for these daily posts, but Google itself has been working against me. First, I couldn't post comments here or elsewhere, nor schedule, but I did (eventually) do real time posts. For a while now, I could only access my Google accounts through Chrome, which is in no way my default browser at home. However, my desktop Chrome stopped logging into anything last night, and will barely function as a browser. I was busy elsewhere today, hoping it would correct itself, and failing that, I seem to have successfully accessed the blog via a different browser. Hence, the 14 hour late post that I could have easily served up at 2:25 a.m. (get it?)

Anyway, here's a Miss Martian cameo to change things up very slightly, and because it will (hopefully) be the latest post for less than half a day. If you'd prefer a better look at M'gann M'orzz, I posted her Ryan Sook drawn character card back in '09.
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Saturday, September 5, 2026

2005 Upper Deck Justice League of America VS System CCG Card DJL-073: Staged Attack

Illustration by Billy Dallas Patton & Kris Justice.

Annoying to have Google/Blogspot/Blogger's comment mechanism break down for two days a few days into the only multi-day posting I do here all year*. Especially because I was working on fairly substantial comments to other people's blogs, so I guess the timing was actually good, because I could just tuck those into one of these posts to pull out later. And anyway, Saturday morning is a perfect time to address the matter, since I was never going to have much to say about a sportsball-themed gaming card by unfamiliar artists** featuring a gambling-themed super-villain team I never had much use for. Just another "X" on the calendar.

* Scheduling/posting was giving me trouble too, so I'm glad I got anything out at all.

** Even their names sound more like football players' than comic book drawrers. This post brought to you by DraftKings.
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Friday, September 4, 2026

2005 Upper Deck Justice League of America VS System CCG Card DJL-054: Martian Manhunter - J'onn J'onzz

It's wild to me that I haven't previously posted this card, as it features two of my favorite things. Kevin Nowlan is one of my all-timer comic book artists, and getting a commission from him was a dream come true (...for me. Him, I think not so much.) Probably a contributing factor was the assumption that I would have posted it by now, and so perpetuated my not actually doing so. Plus, reposting scans is the laziest thing I ever did as a blogger, and I've always seen it as low value filler. But time brings respectability, and a lot of the places that I drew from for these images are no longer readily accessible. For instance, a bunch of these VS. System posts used to link to Ryan Sook's website for larger resolution original art, and now it redirects to a Swedish casino gaming website. I once found a decent enough scan of Arthur Suydam's virgin art to repurpose it as a mock cover for a Despero: The Greatest Stories Ever Told trade paperback. Now I can't find an unmarked scan of the actual card online or in my personal files. There's luckily still an eBay store that features scans of many of these cards, so I'm exploiting that resource while I can, because I might be the resource one of these days.
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Thursday, September 3, 2026

2007 Upper Deck DC Comics Legends VS System CCG Card DCL-022: Martian Manhunter - The Last Martian

Art by Juvaun Kirby

This one has a bit of history. I first featured the original line art in a post from 2009, taken from Kirby's seemingly defunct deviantART page, which is substantially altered/cropped/enhanced on the actual card. I'd first attempted a directory of these cards in 2014, long abandoned and forgotten, using links to a CCG specialty shop that no longer offers the cards (or images of same.) This effort was aided by LissBirds, a sweetheart of a regular commenter who I think I scared off with my pivot to podcasting (and our bro-y "locker room talk" among friends.)

As I've been researching the VS. System, it seems like the DC Comics Legends expansion is very tough to come by. I can't find any boxes available online, and eBay listings for individual cards are uncommon. I'm mostly having to do broader Google searches until I tumble upon old CCG sales pages that typically no longer offer the card for purchase. It's a very large expansion at 273 cards, the last DC set, and the second from last Vs. System release overall. It features some really beautiful art by Ryan Sook and others, but also some of the most hideous pieces of the game (often by John Van Fleet, doing what looks like CGI of a quality more in line with early '90s stuff like Donna Matrix. I have to work for every image, and this one? I had to blow it up to reach 400 pixels. There's also some element to this that was exclusive to tournaments/conventions, and there are a ton of repeat characters, so this may be some sort of re-release/compilation set. Whatever-- it's a toughie, and I wished I'd started on this when there were more online resources available.
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Wednesday, September 2, 2026

Strange Brain Parts: "Maybe Absolute Martian Manhunter Isn’t Great?" Video Essay

I often watch the videos of Strange Brain Parts, and appreciate that there's a channel that does the kind of deep dives into the "above ground" comics of interest to a fellow well traveled Gen-X reader. He's a lot better at social engagement than I'll ever be, with his own Discord and five-figure subscriber base offering hundreds of comments to individual videos. I'm exhausted just thinking about maintaining that, never mind the precarious nature of being financially supported by YouTube. His videos pop-up in the algorithm of my TV, but when I tried to search out a specific one online, I was forced to sign in just to view the thing. It's an odd model from my standpoint, but I was happily surprised my first post in months got a comment and a few views within a day. Who am I to talk?

Anyway, I had a few people reach out to me here and elsewhere about my thoughts on Absolute Martian Manhunter. I haven't finished collecting a Martian Manhunter comic in floppies since the 2015 volume, and I haven't even finished reading a run since the 2006 mini-series. I haven't truly enjoyed a book with "Martian Manhunter" in the title since the one from 34 years ago by an artist who's been dead for a decade-and-a-half and a writer we don't talk about anymore since he went to prison for the worst things. My opinion of Absolute Martian Manhunter should be as predictable as the setting of the sun and rise of the moon. But I did buy the trade paperback in softcover, and I had it read back in April. I did the action figure post first, because I felt it was more timely, with a plan to review that first volume the following week. But I always had something more interesting to do, and now that I have the second and final volume waiting for me... I can't really remember much about the first. So I'll reread it and do a review of both volumes this month, when I feel a compulsion to get it done, but that's kind of a review unto itself.

I never expect something like an Absolute Martian Manhunter video essay to find me. I mostly watch political/broader creative media commentary on the TV, as most comic book vlogging feels like a waste of my time. But one of the channels I already watch covering the rare book with six-figure sales will prompt that sort of thing. The video criticizes the book from directions that I hadn't really considered, because I was hung up on considerations both broader and much more specific to my interests. Still, I support all the views expressed here, and will add my own insights later in the month.

Hopefully you can see it, if the embed doesn't also prompt a dang sign-in. I hate the 2020s.
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Tuesday, September 1, 2026

2007 Upper Deck VS System DC Comics Legends Game Card DCL-059 "Telepathic Link"

Art by Cat Staggs.

This one is darkly humorous to me, because the post has been sitting in my drafts since before Photobucket started watermarking or omitting all of my blog images. They were my primary hosting site for years, especially my most productive period, and the prospect of going through all those posts for revisions contributed to my crashing out as a blogger. Anyway, as I sniff around for easy material in a largely unplanned 19th anniversary observation while simultaneously going deep into the VS. gaming system card for more pressing hobby concerns-- synergy! The jpeg from my files is dated 3/3/2011, and I managed nearly three more years of relatively daily posting from that point, so I guess this just got lost in the shuffle (so to speak.) Expect more of these throughout the month.
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