 Jim asked Sandy about the above artwork. Sandy: Carl Potts was the editor on this six-issue Solomon Kane mini series. This was another character dreamed up by the prolific author who created Conan, Robert E. Howard. Carl asked me to adapt "The Homecoming", one of REH's best pieces of writing, as a back-up feature. "Great," I thought, "love that poem — full of melancholy and the sorrow of a restless heart." Only problem is that Carl wanted the entire adaption crammed into two pages. I protested, but to no avail. Well, the job was a complete disaster. Bad penciling, inking, coloring, lettering and reproduction. A real embarrassment. A few years later I got it into my head to adapt the poem again and this time do it justice. Think I was planning on five pages but never got passed the first (below). So it goes.  Page 1 of a not-completed redo of Solomon Kane's Homecoming by Sandy Plunkett  Jim asked Sandy about the above artwork. Sandy: Actually, this is one of the few images posted on this blog that doesn't have a story attached to it. I believe it was the second Defenders cover I did for Marvel. Pretty straight ahead assignment. Though no one ever mentioned a similarity, I got the inspiration for the scene from a Michael Golden Dr. Strange cover that had come out a few months earlier. Not a case of swiping really, but bringing my toe dangerously close to the line. My coloring, and another strong inking job by Alan Weiss.  Another view of this New Defenders cover  The Dr. Strange cover Sandy mentions above  Jim asked Sandy about the above drawing Sandy: Back in the 80's Marvel put out a series of comics called The Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe which, collectively, served as something of an encyclopedia to their burgeoning stable of characters. I did a few drawing for the series, including one of a minor character named Jarella who, apparently, was the Hulk's main squeeze at the time. I really wasn't happy with the results (despite a nice inking job by Joe Rubinstein) but so it goes. Years later, though, a French fanzine called Back Up ran an extensive interview with me and tried to build their readership with that issue by offering a premium. They had me do a limited edition print that would be available for free to those who took the opportunity to subscribe. I used this as a chance to redraw that Jarella piece and bring it up to snuff, or at up to my satisfaction, this time adding a Burroughs-esque background to suggest that she was something other than a Marvel character. And that's that. Handbook to the Marvel University's Jarella  Fanzine's Jarella with Burroughs-esque background   With the recent announcement that Netflix is bringing Marvel's "Defenders" to its services, Jim thought he would ask Sandy about a 1983 Defenders cover.
Sandy: Carl Potts was the editor on the Defenders book, a buddy from our days at Neal Adams' Continuity Studios, and if I recall correctly, he pretty much gave me free rein on the cover, letting me do a "symbolic" representation of the group. That is, the scene I came up with didn't have to depict any actual event in the issue. Even by superhero standards, the Defenders was a weird-ass group. I could never get a read on that book (though, yes, it might have helped if I had actually read any of the stories.) The original creators took the most unlikely characters and tossed them into the same title. And the composition of the group seemed to change with mind-spinning regularity. Fortunately, I was under no pressure to include all the team members on the cover and so I cherry-picked, selecting the ones I thought would work well together visually. Alan Weiss did another stellar job inking my pencils and I colored it, as I did all my covers. Years later, a fan commissioned me to do a recreation of the cover. This practice might sound odd to the uninitiated, but fans who missed out on buying the original of a favorite cover sometimes hire the artist to "recreate" the work for them. I have mix feeling about this idea. On the one hand, redrawing a piece gives you the chance to work out all the annoying flubs you committed the first time round. On the other hand, given my propensity for spending an absurd amount of time worrying about minutia, reworking a piece until I get it right isn't a good idea. When I'm at the board sometimes, late at night, I imagine myself some retched character from an Edgar Allan Poe story, neurotically reworking details no one will ever notice on a drawing that'll never be finished. Though I did improve some of the drawing in the recreated version of this cover, my preference is for the original, largely cause Alan's inks are just so gritty and rich with texture. Defenders #124-related images from Sandy's archive are below  Above: Sandy Plunkett's original Defenders cover version, with Weiss' inks  Above: Sandy's color guides for the separators  Above: Recreated Defenders cover Three pieces from Sandy's files related to his work on 1986's "The Official Marvel Index to Marvel Team-Up" #3, discussed in a previous post. The first image is the rough for the Spider-man/Index Team Up cover and the next two, photocopies of the finished pencils. The last image is a close-up of Spider-Man from the finished pencils.     |
BLOGaboutPlunkett-fan Jim Harris interviewing Sandy about past and present projects. Archives
July 2026
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed