Superhero Sundays, Part 2

As I wrote last Sunday, I used to really enjoy getting my pencil artwork inked by professional comic book artists. Here's another fun example. Brian Stelfreeze had done a great convention sketch for me in 1990 at the Chicago Comicon, long before it was Wizard World Chicago. He had been sitting next to Lurene Haines and Dave Dorman, for whom Stelfreeze had done little caricature signs. He was little known then, having basically done Cycops for Comics Interview. I was picking up (as I still do) comics that caught my eye artistically, and Brian Stelfreeze's style was fresh and anything but conventional. His drawings reminded me of Nagel paintings, and they had real life to them. By the time he got to my drawing it was nearing the end of the show on Sunday, but he did it for me anyway, finishing a half hour after the show was over. I was a fan for life after that.

The next year, I found him again all alone at the convention. Good luck with that now, by the way. I asked him to ink a sketch that I had done for my buddy Eric of his space-faring character Starhammer. He remembered me from the year before and inked the following sketch. When I asked him how much I owed him, he said, "Nothing. It's just an ink job." If he wasn't my hero before, he sure was after that!

I really need to get around to coloring this with Photoshop at some point. I can add the starfield and some effects for the sun behind the Earth: