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?