 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.     Two Nightmask pieces from Sandy's files. For more of the story, view this previous post. The first image is the initial rough sketch of the cover. The second image is Sandy's original color guide for Marvel.   Two more Ant-Man pieces, in support of a previous post Sandy's original color guide for one of the Ant-Man pages  Artwork done to help sell an Ant-Man proposal to the powers-that-be at Marvel   The day after seeing Ant-Man in the theater, Jim throws a few questions at Sandy (below) about his Ant-Man work in 1993's Marvel Comics Presents Vol 1 #131.
Sandy: Can't say there was anything that "lead up" to getting this job exactly. I had written a four part Daredevil story for the same title, Marvel Comics Presents, a while earlier and had a good relationship with the editor, Terry Kavanaugh. I think I just said something like, "Hey, want an Ant-Man story?" and he said something like, "go for it." MCP was an experiment for the company--an anthology book that came out twice a month. That schedule meant they were burning through material at an alarming rate. I think they weren't being very particular about what they stuck into the book so long as the pages were rectangular and there was a Marvel superhero somewhere in the story. That's the only time I handled Ant-Man, though I did submit a proposal for an Ant-Man graphic novel that actually climbed up the corporate chain of command for a while, until it didn't any more. As usual, no explanation as to why it stalled out but I wasn't particularly surprised or disappointed. Getting a proposal approved in comics is something like taking a whack at that game they used to have at carnivals... the one where you take a swing with an over-sized mallet and hit this little lever that sends a weight up a pole toward a bell. Very rarely does that weight make it all the way to the top and reward you with that little "bong" of success. I don't remember much about the plot I came up with [for the graphic novel] but I do remember wanting to exploit the fact that this guy hung out with ants--something no other writer had yet done. I mean, if you know anything about ant societies...!) I wrote, drew and colored this MCP job. As usual, I was appalled by what happened to the color when it reach the printed page. Marvel had switched some of their books onto a whiter, slicker paper and this meant that the inks weren't being absorbed and muted like on the standard newsprint. This accounts for that Easter egg look. |
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