Manga Spidey & Manga Tigra commission by Ben Dunn

Back in 2005, I was able to get a hold of Ben Dunn and get this commission done by him, and it's in color too! Full 11-by-17 inches in size and vibrant colors!! Features his rendition of Marvel Mangaverse Spider-Man and Marvel Mangaverse Tigra. Very cool!

I highly recommend contacting him and acquiring your very own personal commissioned artwork. I know he does commission auctions on eBay from time to time, when he isn't busy, so keep an eye out for the next one. He does a really nice job on them.

Hey Kids! It's Gumby!

Not exactly manga, but not exactly human either. It's Gumby, kids!!

I picked up this sketch from Arthur Adams at the 2003 Wondercon. He was gracious enough to meticulously pencil then ink this sketch for me. Art's a funny guy too, so while watching him do his magic, it's cool to chit-chat a bit and learn what's new for him. I remember when Gumby's Summer Fun Special comic book came out, as well as the Winter Fun Special comic. Good times.

Some of you may know that Art is a big toy fan. If you see him at the next local convention, bring him some cool Godzilla toys. He'd like that but he might also already have them too. But did you know that Art did the covers for the Masamune Shirow "American" Appleseed comic book in the mid-late 80s. The link is to an Arthur Adams fan site.

Marvel Mangaverse Spider-Man 1 Original Cover Art

Here's the original cover artwork to Marvel Mangaverse Spider-Man #1. This piece was all hand-drawn by Kaare Andrews. The backgrounds were done digitally and then all of it was combined and colored at time of printing.

I like the way Spidey's mitts are bigger. Really stands out, and gotta love those webs. Not sure if this was something added by Kaare, or if it was in the original Marvel Mangaverse design by Ben Dunn.

I hope someday they will bring back the entire Marvel Mangaverse, and then take them up against the DC Mangaverse. hahaha

Dirty Pair original art

Any Dirty Pair fans ? Adam Warren did some great work when adapting "Dirty Pair" to comic book form.

This is a great page from Dirty Pair II and shows Kei and Yuri. And guns. Lots of guns. Warren original art doesn't show up often and when it does, it definitely gets snatched up quickly. If anyone is interested in seeing more, give me a shout and I'll post more of his stuff in the future.

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?

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.

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