Marvel Merriness, Part 2

Spider-Man was without a doubt my favorite super-hero. Like every other geek on the planet I too felt that I could relate to Peter Parker, the outcast who despite everything going wrong in his life still managed to be a nice guy. Spider-Man had such a massive impact on my life, at one time there wasn't a single thing I couldn't tell you about his life, friends and foes (I'm sure I spent many hours proving that to disinterested parties over the years as well!)

Funnily enough though, I never used to draw him so much as his rogues gallery, who in my honest opinion are also some of the greatest characters of the Marvel U (many even have, or had, their own books).

Sometimes my influences were clear, other times they weren't. For example, Black Cat (above) is drawn like Terry Dodson's version, and the rest I think are based off toys that I owned... Shocker in the lower-right corner is however my attempt at recreating his costume a little bit.

My favorite of the rogues however was Venom. I'm talking about the 90's Eddie Brock anti-hero character here. I loved the concept that Spider-Man's suit would turn out to be an alien life form, and that it would give all of his secrets to somebody out there who hated him. Above you can see some of my Venom pics, including Eddie caught in a web (which will appear digitally colored on a later post), a redesign I did for Eddie with Venom stood over him, an idea for a comic book cover image (though hardly an original one), and a Venom I believe that I copied from 'Carnage Unleashed'. To the right, you can see the same Eddie design in ink, a mid-transformation Venom, and a couple of random Venom's. Each one drawn in a different style... And below, an idea I had for another redesign - the final image, colored digitally will also appear on a later blog. I loved the idea that Eddie's shadow was actually the symbiote watching over him.

Finally, a redesign I did for Cletus Kasaday/Carnage - the idea being that he was a mental patient (much like the original) who had lost his arm in one of his many adventures in younger life. I had an idea that the alien symbiote (the offspring of the Venom symbiote) would improvise and come up with creatively violent ways to ghost-limb (like how Carnage could form weapons from it's cell structure).