A while back my mom was doing some cleaning and came across a box that had a lot of my art and writing from when I was a kid. What I'm posting here are a bunch of notebook drawings I did instead of paying attention in school. If I had it to do over again, I would have payed a lot less attention to school and a lot more attention to drawing comics. Education has done absolutely nothing for me. Just ask my paycheck. These all seem to be from 1988 and 1989. I would have been fourteen-ish I guess. Comics nerds err... aficionados well versed in the 80's will recognize that I was just imitating images from popular comics. (Which is pretty much how the pros have been making comics for the past seventy years.) I was big into the Marvel stuff at the time. The Excalibur drawing up top is a combination of pencil, ball point pen, magic markers and some sort of chalk. It was wrapped in wax paper to protect the chalk so it did not scan all that well.
This is from some Inferno era X-Men comic. The anatomy is all wonky but I dig it.
I think this was the cover of an issue of Uncanny X-Men.
Copying Frank Miller's Wolverine.
I think this one and the next one are from when John Buscema was doing the first Wolverine solo series stuff. Something about his drawing really spoke to me at that age. It was so much more gritty than the clean stuff all the Byrne and Adams clones were doing at the time.
Conan from, ya know, some Conan comic. I was big into Conan. Especially the big black and white magazines.
Some werewolf dude? No idea.
Batpants. Nice butt Batman. I don't remember being into Batman at that time but I did a lot of drawings by request back in those days. I was usually pretty booked up during study hall and lunch hour drawing stuff on the back of other kid's notebooks.
Most of my back of notebook drawings were of metal band stars like this drawing of Slash from Guns N Roses. I think I drew the Appetite for Destruction cover on the back of more than one notebook.
Looking at these, it is apparent that I had no idea what I was doing. All of the drawings are pretty small as opposed the huge size the "pros" draw at and the pens and paper were just whatever was lying around at the time. Which, now that I think about it, is still pretty much how I make comics now.
Your best pal ever,
Shannon Smith
5 comments:
I bet your hair was long in the 80's.
Oh yeah. You know it.
These are really awesome, Shannon. I sometimes still look at my terrible X-Force drawings from just about that same period and secretly enjoy a simpler time before the discovery of self criticism. Thanks for posting these.
Thanks. I did not know anything about anatomy back then or have any really craft or drawing knowledge at all. It was just drawing for fun which I think ends up being a lot better anyway. I've stopped drawing stuff that is not fun to draw.
Yeah, these pretty much rock the house. I can't draw even a little bit. Not even a straight line. Well, maybe a straight line with a ruler. Maybe.
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