Longbox Review

I think that just like any fan of superhero comics, I dabbled in drawing with dreams of some day producing my own comic book for DC (or even Marvel). When I was going through some stuff in my office, I rediscovered these pencil drawings I did back in 1985 & 1986.

First is a reproduction of Robin from a New Teen Titans poster (1983) drawn by George Pérez that I had (god, I wish I still had this poster). No, it’s not traced. I recreated the image from that poster freehand. If you look closely, you can see the roughness on the page from my many erasings. I spent quite a bit of time on this drawing to get it to match as much as possible to the original. Although, as you can tell, the head is different because I was actually drawing my version of Robin from a series of stories I wrote at this same time called The Crusaders, and that I couldn’t draw faces very well. I am still rather proud of this drawing.

This next one is another recreation, but of the cover to Batman #405 by David Mazzuchelli from 1986. This was part of the “Batman: Year One” story, and was a favorite of mine from that year. Again, no tracing, but I do recall deciding to do this one more quickly (as opposed to the previous drawing) as an exercise. Of course, there’s really not much to the drawing in the first place–mostly just blotches of shadow.

Obviously, I wasn’t going to make it in the wonderful world of comics as an artist, but I did have fun drawing stuff. Over time, I’ll be sharing “cover” images from the aforementioned Crusaders stories I wrote in the mid 80s.