Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Icupnimpn2 repanels Transformers #3




Original written by Jim Salicrup, art by Frank Springer with inks by Kim DeMulder and Mike Esposito; 1984 Marvel Comics.   Icupnimpn2 has no website.

1 comment:

  1. For several years, I don't think I looked forward to much of anything more than the next issue of Marvel's Transformers. It departed from the TV cartoon pretty early on and offered what I sincerely thought was a mature storyline, with character deaths and tons, tons, tons of status quo changes.

    There was something about those Marvel licensed books, 'cuz GI-Joe had similar qualities, and even Rom was an excellently morose book.

    I still remember buying Transformers #3 in a shrink-wrapped pack of comics at Toys-R-Us. It was really awesome to think that Transformers and Spider-Man could take place in the same world.

    But oh my goodness was the artwork clumsy in Transformers, especially in the first, mewling issues. That's some of what I wanted to capture here by messing up the legs and hands, but if you look at the original, the robot, Gears, is already pretty asymmetrical and has botched perspective.

    I think it's especially amusing since all of the "how to draw comics" books show a technique of starting with simple shapes like cylinders and rectangles to build proper size and perspective before finishing in the details. What are these early Transformers but groupings of cylinders and rectangles?

    On a page later on, Optimus' head changes size like four times, once looking so small that it's evocative of the head-shrinking scene in Beetlejuice. In another panel on the same page, Optimus' looks like he's wearing giant sunglasses or something. Frank Springer was quite clearly out of his element and flying by the seat of his pants to deliver what was probably a rush job and a quick cash-in.

    I, too, was out of my element, as I'm only the most rudimentary of an artist. To take away the safety net, I drew with a regular computer mouse in a crippled version of Artrage 2 that doesn't allow layers. And I did it fast, since I didn't think my wife would possibly understand if she saw me working on something like this when I'm so slammed with work right now that I hardly have time for anything else.

    But when I was a kid, Transformers was pure magic, warts and all. It could have looked like my Repaneled submission, but I still would have loved the darn thing.

    Because transforming robots and Spider-Man transcend all.

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