Basic Action Super Heroes!

Hi folks. Over the years, I've commissioned a lot of supers art from a number of really talented folks. Figured it was about time to share some of it with folks other than those who have played in my online PBEM and PBP games.

I'll start things off with some classics from my home-brew Paragons game setting. All from a Romanian artist named Dragos that I worked with for many years. Sadly, he's retired now...

Boomerang








Mindgame




This nasty guy rules an undead Mexico in the setting...


And this one stomped on a lot of New Olympia, my comic-book version of Los Angeles.


Next up, some designs from one-shots and other campaigns.

Those are freakin' awesome! Very humbling too

Incredible! Too bad he's retired.

My favorites are Leopard, Madame Phantasm, and Necro King, but they're all fantastic. Too bad this guy retired!

Quality, god I wish i could draw....

Sentiments shared by me all around (these are awesome, I wish I could draw, too bad he's retired, etc.)

The guy was phenomenal. Fast, reliable, affordable -- and pretty much all mine. It was a total sideline for him, and he wasn't terribly familiar with the superhero genre. His real forté was fantasy / medieval pieces (I commissioned a bunch of those as well), but I was able to provide enough sample material and guidance (mostly "Give the dude more muscles!" and "I know it seems weird, but her chest needs to be bigger still") to get the final genre bits right.

He kept me fat and happy for the late nineties and most of the last decade. Then his professional life (also in art, but on the computer game side) overtook his ability to do commissions on the side, so off he rode into the sunset.

Will share a few more pieces tonight, and there is MUCH more to come.

And urbwar -- those are three of my favorites as well. All hint at his leanings towards fantasy pics, and you can see him really nail them. Madam Phantasm and Leopard are two of his older pieces, and they're just gold.

How about a super-sexy all-female lineup tonight? Can-do!

(These are all characters from other games, not the Paragons setting, btw.)

Spunky adventurer girl & her powersuit: Girillabot


One of Dragos' very first pics, from like 15 years ago. Yes, an aquatic amazon from Hydropolea, Atlantazon!


The speedster Scram... who has the personality of the 60-year old detective she's back-to-back with. The result of a mind-swap accident.


Japan's hot little defender, Dragoon


Dragoon's rival...


Assistant District Attorney by Day, super-strong, *-kicking vigilante by night... Verve was my first M&M character. Dig those boots.


Alesandra Santiago -- not someone to cross. Had the blast pistol and a pain-inducing device on her belt that could bring those around her to their knees.


One of my favorites -- a Green Lantern type concept who inherited her powers from her father, much to her older, nasty brother's chagrin.


One of his last commissions -- and a phenomenal piece, I think. The archetypal female form for super-women types. BaBoom.

I can not see the pictures you post in your thread.

Anyone else having the same problem?

Nope. They look great!

With their signature, I suspect that that individual may not be a BASH fanatic.

cheers

Okay. I now have access to the entire art archive. And looking back, I've commissioned hundreds of pieces of art over the past almost 20 years. So let's get in the way-back machine, back when I was working with a young Storn Cook, mostly pencil and ink stuff...

First up, troopers from ASERT, the American Special Emergency Response Team -- the Paragons Universe version of SHIELD. Looking back now, BOY was I obsessed with acronyms when I was putting together this campaign world.



One of my favorites from Storn, that is.

Next, he drew the titanic and world-shaping battle between Paragon and Talos. This pic was actually re-used in a book... perhaps one of the later Hero/Champions books.



Then there was Ultraman, my world's troubled Superman stand-in...



And Emperor Dang, one of my favorite villains, kind of a cross between the Mandarin and Dr. Doom. Very much a world-shaping force in the Paragons world.



LOVE that picture. One of my favorite commissions ever, even though it's just a pencil sketch. Really captures what I was looking for.

Then there was Frosta, the lame-named ice-powered bandit...



...Matrix, another mega-villain in the campaign...



(Not a bad pic, but somehow it never grabbed me and just wasn't what I was looking for.)

Then a really cool shot of the US's premiere super-team, Superforce 1. Top to bottom that's Utraman again, Astra, Centurion, Mr. American and American Eagle II. (American Eagle I, her father, can be seen squashed in the background of the Talos vs. Paragon picture, above.)



Dig that one a lot.

Then, finally, Mighty Mary, a mystery heroine with crazy-powerful powers and a quirky personality.



It was at this point in working with Storn that I realized his style just wasn't for me. I mean, those boots... I was trying to go for a sexy, uber-powerful female Paragon, and we wound up with some kind of super-stripper. Oish. (Not meaning to slander Mr. Cook here -- I just decided at this point to look around for someone else who had a style that more suited what I was looking for. And that's when I found Dragos...)

Anyway. Since I couldn't afford Storn's color work at the time, I went the cheap route and did it myself. Some of these are downright criminally bad, but hey.







Hope some of this is worth gazing at. It's a fun trip down memory lane for me if nothing else. Next up, some non-Paragons world Storn-drawn characters from the same period, and maybe some later renditions of the same heroes, heroines and villains by other artists.

I've seen the Superforce and Ultraman images before (possibly on Storn's site), but it's cool to see some more stuff he did for you. I don't think your coloring work was that bad either. I've seen worse!

I think your coloring is easily good enough for any purposes I could imagine. Great work.

The splashes of color set those pieces off so much nicer. I've actually never been a huge Storn fan myself. Just something *non-comic book supers* about his work to me... But your coloring definitely helps that.

-kev-

Change-up: a team picture by Tom... something. Sadly, his last name is lost in the annals of history. Or in my case, Pegasus Mail. Tom had a very cartoony style which I quite liked.

[Edit: MARTIN! Tom Martin.]

Regardless, enjoy! This is the Lost Foundation, a secret X-Men like org in my Paragons setting. A sketch, the costumes, the inked work and some awesome colors by Tom.






(The Lost are, incidentally, Gale, Sliver, the Bat, Enigma, Juxtapose and Silverfish. Oh, and the leader at center, Helix.)

(Also note this WAS the 90s. Check out the radios clipped to their unis!)

And I forgot about his tie. His tie is bloody awesome.