The JLA by Bruce Timm & Yoakum

The second Bruce Timm commission inks, following the Batgirl of two days ago. you know what i learned from inking this one?

Hawkgirl is bad ass. She's fun to draw. Why don't we have a monthly Hawkgirl comic?

Batgirl by Timm and Yoakum

Bruce Timm. Love his stuff.

Was given a couple of his pieces to ink over for commission. Had no idea how hard it would be to get something that i liked.

How about 5 tries?

I ended up doing this Batgirl 5 times before i was happy with the result. The commissioner of the piece has been extremely patient what i fiddled with them to my satisfaction, and had to delay finishing the work while i took on the Gulacy job.

And then I came back to them and hated them again. So I redid this piece, and the JLA piece that i'll post tomorrow, again.

So what was the problem? Well, Timm's stuff has its own cartoony logic to it, and if you don't nail the line thickness right off the bat, then you're basically dead in the water. There are no little rendering line that might take you eye away from the holding line, nothing to distract you. And maybe i'm being overly picky with my work, and no one else would have had a problem with them, but i did, and since there is no deadline on these, i continued to work them again and again.

And now i need to get them out of my studio before i start to harsh on them again.

BTW - saw some of Rain's colors for Timebomb over my inks and was totally blown away. TIMEBOMB will likley be the best looking book color and production wise that i've ever been involved with and I'm really psyched to see how it all looks in print.

In Review Of: Bruce Timm - Modern Masters

One of the joys of the Modern Masters series is the knowledge that while you won't actually get the full on, comprehensive, be-all, Gary Groth digging into the garbage for all the details, end-all interview, you will get a damn good overview.

Such was the case with Bruce Timm, creator of the most distinctive animated look since the Fleisher's put their fingerprints on the Man of Steel (or, at least, since Hanna met Barbara and rented a floor in my late grandfather-in-law's building). Reading this Modern Masters issue was the opportunity to finally get that overview, since it appeared, to me, that Timm just came out of nowhere. As usual, in comics as in most art, it is a overnight success story punctuated by long years of hopelessness and working at K-Mart between gigs. Typical.

What else do I like about the Modern Masters series? Loads of early art, art before the iconic images that we're used to seeing, art that needs a lot of work. Timm himself makes the comment that while doing his drawings in the late '80's that he had no idea who he really wanted to be with his art. And it took, probably with his work in animation, tens of thousands of drawings to start to distill things down to point where he can nail that one Batman drawing with five lines and a number 6 Windsor-Newton.

Some great early art, including a couple Etrigans, a Colan Dr. Strange with the mask, and two bizarre Batman try-out pages that look a lot a like more like Rick Veitch that Bruce Timm. And a story of perseverence that should be required reading for most people trying to get into the biz.

Is it possible that the entire Modern Masters is nothing but Eric Noel-Weathington deciding to spend some time with some of his favorite creators?

TwoMorrows Publishing has certainly done a great job of publishing a tremendous amount of comic related material well beyond the Kirby Collector, which is something that I have spent many hours reading and collecting and I doubt that I have spent any time blogging on. I don't quite know where to start actually, given how many damn Kirby issues I have in the files in my studio.

This is a better volume that the Michael Golden one, which I thought didn't cover the breadth of a creator as innovative and as influential as Golden, but Timm's seemed to be the right balance of art, overview and interesting facts.