Marvel Mangaverse Manga Spider-Man 1 Cover

The end of Summer is nearing. That means it is time for me to clean out my computer contents and especially those temporary folders I've decided to create on my desktop and appropriately named "stuff" and "stuff2". You get the idea. Well, cleaning up piles of artwork folders overflowing with jpgs, gifs, scans, movies and other art files always has a few surprises and gems. The gem I found tonight is a nice image of the cover of Mangaverse Spider-Man #1. Thought I'd post it here to stir some memories of 2001/2002.

This Kaare Andrews cover really made an impression on me. So much so, I got a hold of Kaare's original art rep at the time, Leonard, through email. Nice guy and he had a huge list of Kaare's early original comic book art for sale on his website. So I bought some, including this very cover he did here. Give me some time to dig up the scan. The original art for this cover is pretty cool in person as it is much more simple as compared to this final color printed cover image, with the painted backgrounds and sky. Would you believe those buildings were done on computer? Yup. Kaare works on paper AND with his computer, digitally coloring and finishing as he goes along towards being final and printing. Not many artists embrace technology and still rely on traditional methods of hand drawing, inking and coloring, but I'll save that topic for another post. Pretty soon there won't be anymore original comic book art. It will be a pile of jpgs, gifs and we'll end up at youtube.com looking for comic book art. ;)

Back to my story... Years later, I had a chance to meet Kaare and Leonard at Comic-Con San Diego 2004. I ended up picking up more of his original art then and there, and of course, I even got a nice Manga Spider-Man sketch from him. I'll post more of his stuff in the coming months, and as I find images/scans of art while I clean up my computer. I've even got some other Kaare Andrews artwork for sale. Follow the link on the right margin to my art for sale page, to see a scan.

Can you believe this book came out 5 years ago?

Oh the pain...

This page is from Marvel Mangaverse New Dawn, page 37. This page is loaded with great art, all sorts of emotional facial expressions, and nice story-telling. You can feel the pain by looking at the eyes in this page.. Original art by Ben Dunn, and acquired from him in 2002.

Layout is exceptional and great use of shading (inks) to complete this page.


Please enjoy my blog, but I kindly ask that you please do not link to, download, distribute, repost or otherwise share *any original artwork images* from this blog as they are the personal property of 11by17.com. Thanks for your understanding.

Iron Maiden in action (original art version)

This is from Marvel Mangaverse New Dawn, page 36. This page features the death of Iron Maiden. The last panel in this page shows her getting KO'd by the bad guy. Sucks to be IM in this page. Great story telling by Ben Dunn.

It's interesting to look at this black/white version then see the next blog post, where I show you the colored printed version. With only inks, it is difficult to make out depth in the image. Plus sequences that show a lot of detailed action such as battle pages, can be hard to make out in only 2 colors. With art, you can't add camera tricks to blur the background and sharpen the foreground. The art is all done by hand, so any "tricks" come during the coloring of the page.

Iron Maiden in action (colored version)

This is the color version of the previous post. It's interesting to compare the black/white original artwork to the final printed color page.

Tigra

Now here's a great page and I'm damn lucky to be able to call this one mine. For those of you new to original comic book art, there is a certain collector out there that only collects original art of Tigra. Does he have a thing for cats? Nope, just another passionate art collector. He even has a cool website dedicate to his collection and he is a nice guy to boot. Anyhow, after you read the rest of my blog, check out his Tigra gallery.

Anyways, the story goes like this. I missed out on the original chance to pick up this page in 2002. Then after searching high and mostly low, I came across the page in his gallery. After maybe 2-3 years of going back and forth in email, we were finally able to swing a deal that worked out for both of us.

This might be one of my more favorite Marvel Mangaverse pages and characters from Ben Dunn. The middle panel is classic manga, even has the speed-lines. Gotta love the blood spittle coming out of the guys busted up chops, after getting a swift kick in da head by a furry chick. Yo that's gotta hurt though, heh. The layout on this page is superb. Just some great story-telling and the flow/transition is well done. Kudos to Mr. Dunn for the great sequence in this page. Tigra rocks.

Iron Maiden

First up, here is page 7 from Marvel Mangaverse New Dawn, featuring Iron Maiden done up by American Manga artist Ben Dunn. I acquired this from Mr. Dunn in 2002 and he was gracious enough to sign the page for me. I've always been a fan of his "Mangaverse" although I can say with some authority that many others didn't like it. The series was canceled relatively quickly thereafter, I believe by the time 2003 came around. I was fortunate to be able to acquire these pages at the time.

I can't wait till the new Ironman movie comes out.

First post in this blog...

Thanks for stopping by and welcome to my new blog. This will be dedicated to original manga and anime artwork, probably Marvel Mangaverse artwork mostly, but there will be some other art that I post and share. I will try to only post artwork that I own but I may also link to other artwork out there. So if you have some cool original anime or manga artwork, please let me know about it and I will post to it. I'd love to hear from you about anything anime/manga. This is as much for me to share as for you to share with me. Contact me at: burton(at)11by17.com