I Got Some Uzumaki On My Doctor Octopus (Patreon)

I wasn't planning on doing the gray color pencil spirals, but it got started while I was putting some background fill in and I liked what was happening and went with it. 

Third in a series of Marvel schmucks (and this pin-up has been spoken for). As I mentioned when I posted the WIP on this, I despise Otto Octavius. As a kid I had a visceral dislike of him, if he appeared in an issue I wanted him gone. He wasn't fun, he was garbage. He stirred up so much shit, and was such a petty bastard. The Green Goblin was bad news and all us kids hated him for the Gwen Stacy snuff, but he was out of his mind and there was melodrama and crap involved there. Otto was just a miserable little tentacle-addled shit. Ugh.  Ugh!

A lot of it stems from the issue of Amazing Spider-Man where he causes the accidental death of Captain Stacy. That story knocked me out when I read it as a kid in the first Marvel Treasury Edition. Captain Stacy really dies? What? No way. Oh, shit, yes way. This sucks! This was clearly a terribly IMPORTANT COMIC BOOK EVENT and left a mark on me, On top of that, Gil Kane inked by John Romita was just god-damned sweet. You had Kane's amazing, dynamic rendering and compositions, with Romita's beautifully-controlled, lush brush work softening Kane's sharper angularity, and adding a buoyancy to Kane's more brittle lines. I would stare at those Treasury pages over and over and over, and wish I could draw like that (and also wish all comics were printed at that enlarged size, especially the Kirby stuff, which just sings (operatically) when printed bigger). I eventually bought the comic itself (#91?) in an odd lot auction after a John Buscema spotlight panel at a NYC Creation Con. 

There are two stories about that panel, the first one I've told a few times before -- how John Buscema stunned the audience by saying he doesn't care for superheroes (the air was sucked out of the room faster than you can say Excelsior) and then how things got super-uncomfortable as a number of adult fans would not listen to the man and stop asking about specific Avengers plot points and trivia (after he repeatedly said he didn't know or really care about those things). It got cringey, I was 13 years old and embarrassed for the world. 

The story I haven't really gotten into before was how after the panel I proceeded to prove I was an asshole fan in-training. It's more of an anecdote than a story, but it's petty, not pretty, and pretty stupid, Meaning, it's pure Eltingville Club material. It really is. And it's not something I want to get into, because I still plan on cartooning that memoir some day. And I've got enough problems without grinding down on sad little 13-year old Evan right now.

Maybe I was projecting a little with my dislike for petty little Otto Octavius. Ha ha. Huh. 

No, I reject that. But it still stopped me short for a moment as I typed that. 

Excelsior, I'm sure.