WORK STAGES on gritty, grimy & crime-y trading card art from 2004! (Patreon)

As I desperately flail about for a Wednesday post, here's a li'l something from one of my "MISCELLANEOUS" hard drive folders. This time, here are some Work Stages on a pair of Marvel-related trading cards I drew back in 2004, looks like.

First up, the final version of a Punisher card, featuring colors by my bud Ryan Kinnaird:

Note that ol' Frank's face arguably looked better in the initial rough sketch:

Oddly enough, this ransom, frankly (ha ha!) unremarkable Punisher artwork stirred a bit of reaction online, as I discovered back in the Before Times when I was still dumb enough to "ego surf" my own name on Google. Y'see, some whackadoodle rando in some forum online was deeply, deeply offended by this piece (possibly on aesthetic grounds, IIRC), and fulminated about its outrageous effrontery at great length. Not sure why this one hyper-obscure card illo—out of hundreds of the g-d things being cranked out en masse back then—would set somebody off, but there you go.

Completing this grimy, crime-y riff is another card that Ryan and I did, titled "The Payoff," apparently, according to the jpeg info:

No "name" characters from Marvel were involved here, so this piece didn't attract anyone's malign online attention, for good or ill. Nice colors from Ryan, though!

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON: Ehh, Friday's post will almost certainly feature something in the Distressed Damsels vein for the $5+ tiers, though I'm not currently sure what that content will be. You might see the newest human—nay, Elven!—sacrifice roughs from The Chaste and The Chained, or some Rose & Lily sketch sets left over from May's James Bond riffing, or maybe s'more material featuring hapless backup superheroine Emerald. Guess we'll find out shortly, won't we?