I invented 'Steampunk Burlesque' a couple of years ago. Performers come on stage and strip their gears.

This is great and thanks for sharing this!

I wish I could ink like that again too I guess, but my hands are semi-shot, that was 25-30 years ago and not the most elaborate.

I'm for anything that works (and thus against anything that doesn't, although people who don't work need at least a basic support of course, I'm not inhuman, er, is this going on a little long for parenthesis?). I think some of the later style Warner Brothers cartoons under Chuck Jones were shot from the pencil art instead of having inkers, and it had a certain extra life that way, though of course less smooth looking. We end up talking about those Japanese zen master calligraphers who can express the nature of a frog or a fish perfectly in three brush strokes. Alex Toth could do things with a Sharpie marker that really are, to me anyway, the equal of Frank Frazetta with the finest sable hair brushes!

That's a wonderful Mary Marvel illustration, beccabear67. Really, really nice. It has a touch of the "Dave Stevens" about it to my eyes.

You used to be able to write to comic companies and ask for copies of pencil pages to try-out inking on, I think a large self-addresed-stamped-envelope would be a good thing there, but I don't know if they do such things now as you can find scans of pencils online. They used to get pages from the pencils before lettering and then the inks went on and I guess someone would copy some of those. Smaller operations the one would mail directly to the next person in that production line. I found a couple of letters from Dean Motter and Neal Pozner when they were at DC responding to my samples, Pozner wrote in hand that my line was heavy (which I think it was on what I sent that time). Below I am too light (this was an illustration to a text story, sort of meant to be from an alien civilizations illuminated manuscript. I also had some letters from Comico and Dark Horse before that, I thought I might be a good fit to ink the Fish Police. They were both fairly encouraging, but I think both wanted someone who could pencil as well as ink and I was pretty limited in drawing ability I thought (bad at drawing men, and slow).


My two things here are very color-open if anyone wants to give them a try coloring. Maybe the Mary Marvel would have those cartoony cloud signifiers removed or made white on a blue sky background? The Wow logo could be red, yellow or a fading of one into the other? In fact the sky could be other than just plain blue I guess. I've really come to appreciate the computer coloring when it's good on thise 1997-2001 Marvels I've been deep into.

Jesus! Worst swap EVER!