Tigra pinup (Patreon)

  It won't come as a surprise to most of you, I'm sure, that I rarely dabble in the realm of superheroes. When I was a kid, I read Iron Man and The Hulk, The Avengers, and pretty much whatever I came across. This was back when a kid could save his milk money from lunch and buy a comic for a quarter at the market on the way home from school. (Ah, the past, always better than the present. Today sucks so much. ...But wait--that means, people in the future will look back enviously at us, today, which will be their past. Ha! Fuck you, future dicks! We got it made!) I switched to fiction pretty early on, and didn't rediscover comics until my late teens. By then there were all kinds of comics, with superheroes being just one genre (albeit the largest, at least in the U.S.). When I thought of doing my own comic, superheroes never even occurred to me. My first ideas were definitely in the vein of DC's Vertigo line, or maybe Dark Horse. Weirdly, the first thing I tried was a daily newspaper-type strip, called Hogsbreath, which some of you may have seen in the back pages of some issues of Boneyard. (I think I liked the idea of a daily strip more than the reality. It's virtually impossible--even for the best creators-- to be laugh-out-loud funny in 1-5 little panels, every single day.) But even when I moved on to actual comic book format, it was in sci-fi, horror, and comedy. All the while, my visual style was developing, and not in a superhero direction.    

   When I do get the occasional superhero commission, I'm always concerned that I may be letting the person down, because it's not my strength. The above Tigra commission is an example. I did my best, but all I know of the character is what came up in the search for reference. There's an energy to superhero art that escapes me. Maybe I should approach it from a humorous, caricaturish perspective, to try to capture that energy. Sort of a Bruce Timm approach. His style is one of my inspirations for the look of Superzeroes (which I see as an action/romantic comedy story with a superhero motif, rather than a superhero story). Also, although I like Timm's work, I can study it without plunging into the kind of depression that, say, an Adam Hughes will send me.    

   So, yeah. I drew Tigra. That's her name, right?