X-Men Posters

One thing I did to celebrate my new found love of Marvel’s Merry Mutants (as Stan would sometimes refer to them) was to make an action poster to put onto my wall. It just so happened that my mom had some 3’ x 2’ pieces of paper from something so I appropriated them for my project. In my mind, I was going to make something like one of these fine pieces from Art Adams or the Hildebrandt Brothers. 

But I didn’t have the compositional skills to make it like that, and so what it ended up being is a collage of various pictures that were all spread out. As it turned out, X-Men #1 had a decent picture of all of the X-Men except for Jubilee and Bishop, so I had to find pictures from other sources. Since I didn’t do much in the way of background, I had to include a few things to account for the non-flyers, such as Cyclops holding onto a tetherline. 

I used pencil to draw them initially and then traced over them with a Pilot liquid ink pen I borrowed from my mom (but I didn’t know to erase the pencil afterwards). I had tried to do a drawing of Wolverine from the animated series some time before and wasn’t too keen on things like shading because it looked hard. At first I didn’t do a whole lot of that on this poster, either. Once I was finished with the initial pencils and ink, I decided to color them with colored pencils. I bought my own set of “nicer” colored pencils and maintained them, along with my own set of Pilot pens. 

After finishing the project, I slowly made changes over the years to the poster. I went over it with the pen some more to add in some shading, cross hatching, and other things like the shine on Wolverine’s claws, but it didn’t work super well overtop of the colored pencil. 

I started one that was going to be a combination of X-Factor and Excalibur, but I couldn’t find great poses for everyone (seeing as how I only had 1 issue of each comic and had to rely on cards), and so the project kinda petered out after a while. I finished all of the characters, but didn't know what to do with the title, and just as I was about finished the lineups of both teams changed drastically. I also made a poster detailing a lot of the famous battles Wolverine has had over the years, taking the art from various cards and the few comics I owned at the time.

The next time I did something was to make a poster for my friend Jake (not the comic store owner). He paid me $5 to make something like what I had done for my bedroom. I used mainly poses and things from cards I had collected.

Next I made one for my brother Mitch’s birthday. On this one, the X-Men were grouped together more, but I decided to do it in all silhouette, with things like the X-insignia, eyes, and a few other identifying features being the only thing that were non-black. I burned through a ton of pens doing it, but it turned out okay. 

After years of staring at my poster (along with a Spider-Man and Wolverine poster I bought), and lamenting that I didn’t have the accompanying X-Factor/Excalibur one done, and the fact that my poster was now out of date because some characters had changed teams/costumes, I came up with a better idea. Instead of posters, I would do two individual character portraits on a sheet of parchment paper - one standing and one action pose. And then if a character changed teams or joined I could just move them to a different section of my wall. On top of that, if I screwed up on one of them or they changed costumes, it would be easier to fix.

By this time my art was a little better, and I enjoyed the shading aspects of it, so I did it in all black and white except for the X-insignias and mutant power effects, which I did in red. I was also much better about drawing, inking, and then erasing the pencil marks. An added bonus was that by this time I had a lot more comics to use as inspiration, and not just the 4 issues I got for Christmas one year. So I began this project and it took me a few months, lots of parchment, and a bunch of pens, but I finally had a current representation of all 6 X-teams on my walls. I could only fit 5 of them, however, so I had to relegate X-Force to the entryway of my room. I also made Title cards with the comic book logos to put overtop each team’s members. When I moved out of my parents’ house, I took the pictures with me in a folder as a portfolio of sorts.

Years later, I decided to try the project again, but using Photoshop so adding things like glow from powers or the shine on Wolverine’s claws was better. And instead of it being a poster, it would be a desktop background for the computer. Over the years, the X-Men had gone through a lot of changes - changes I had not kept up on and some with which I didn’t agree. So I opted to do another version using the same early ‘90s lineup, including Professor X, overtop a digital background I created from scratch in Photoshop. 

I also wanted it to all be Jim Lee art, and I now had access to digitized versions of the first 10 issues of X-Men so I was able to find pictures of what I wanted. I ended up using almost half of of the same pictures anyway, and I wish I could have sent this final version back to myself to use as a guide when making the original poster.

Collecting Comic Books part 2

Collecting Comic Books Part 1

Eventually I was buying 10 monthly titles: Uncanny X-Men, X-Men, X-Factor, X-Force, Excalibur, Generation X, X-Man, Cable, Wolverine, and Deadpool. These plus the mini-series, quarterly series (X-Men Unlimited, etc.), annuals, and other random issues I bought meant I was spending upwards of $50 per month on comics, and sometimes more. One time I realized that we were going to be out of town on a Saturday and hadn’t been able to give Jake notice to hold some stuff for me. I knew where he worked during the week so I paid a quick visit to him to let him know. Later he told me that I shouldn’t have bothered him at work, and it was doubly embarrassing for me because I knew the girl who worked the counter from school. 

Here and there I got the opportunity to visit a few different shops. When visiting family in Utah I tried to visit comic/card shops when I could, and besides visiting 1,000,000 Comix a few times, once my dad took me to a shop near my old house in Boise during a visit to my grandma. 

Things continued much this same way for quite a while until Jake decided to move on with his life and close the shop. What I had to do instead was make arrangements with 1,000,000 Comix to set aside a copy of everything I wanted and then send them a money order every 6 weeks or so and they would ship me what I wanted. It wasn’t nearly as fun as getting a few issues every week, but it sufficed. However, I, too, was about to embark on a new stage in life and needed to find a decent cut-off point. Marvel did a company-wide event in May of 1997 where every monthly title was numbered -1, and it was a throwback to some past event. That seemed good to me so I stopped there. As it turned out, I was slated to help my aunt/uncle run their fireworks business that summer after I graduated high school. My mom and I mostly sat in the booth with not a whole lot to do (this would have been a perfect time to have a 3DS and a few Zelda games, but since those weren’t invented, a Game Boy). Out of sheer coincidence, the parking lot we were assigned to happened to be across the street from 1,000,000 Comix, so I was able to get my last shipment of comics in person and tell them that I won’t be needing their services anymore. I bought everything up to and including those -1 issues, and from that point forward the only thing I bought was Wizard Magazine. All together, I had seriously collected comics for a little over two years, roughly about the same amount of time that I had spent collecting cards, with about a 6 month overlap. 

During my first year of college, I left most of my things at home as I didn’t see the point of moving all my junk to a dorm 5 hours away to just go and move it back 8 months later. I did, however, take my stack of Wizard magazines as reading material. And I also made a trip to the local supermarket where I was able to keep purchasing the magazine when it came out. But after that year, I went to Japan for a couple of years so I wasn’t able to do anything comics related. When I returned to the States, I ended up buying a couple of issues of Wizard, and then one more after I was married, but it wasn’t quite the same. And since that day my collecting days have been over. I still have them, but they just sit in a plastic tote in my shed. I wonder if the acid from the paper has turned some of them yellow yet . . .

However, just because I didn’t buy physical copies didn’t mean I stopped collecting. I discovered that there were electronic versions of most major comics that people had scanned and put into zip files. Using file-sharing programs like eMule and some others, I spent weeks downloading large volumes of comics and sorting them. My goal was to a) get all of them, and b) separate them into “eras” that seem to make sense. So for example, the first era was from the beginning of publication until it was cancelled. The second started when the “new” X-Men (like Wolverine, Nightcrawler, and Storm) were added to the team, and ended when the first spin-off books were made (New Mutants and X-Factor). Another one was the 1991 reboot of all the teams up through the Age of Apocalypse crossover event.

In addition to all of the monthly titles which were easy to find, I also tried getting all of the one-shots and mini-series starring my favorite mutants, which was a lot harder because they aren’t as popular as the main series. I worked on putting a chronological publication list together, and then got more ambitions and started working on a correct reading order list, but that would take forever and be super confusing, so I gave up after a few hours. After doing all of that work, I had the project like 97% done, with the remaining 3% being finding random issues of things like Marvel Comics Presents or some obscure mini-series. I started to read through them and got up until around the Inferno crossover (circa ~1986) and then kinda stopped. So I can say that I’ve read everything from 1963 to 1997 except for a gap of 5 years between 1986 and 1991.

Part of me wants to go back and pick up reading the digital versions again, but then I think of the futility of it all. It’s not like the story actually stops at 1997, and a lot of things have changed in ways that I don’t agree with since then. In a way, I sorta like keeping things how they are; it’s like things just kinda paused and have been the same ever since. To me, comic books are like the male equivalent of a soap opera for girls. They both have a serialized nature with characters, but one focuses on drama, love, and betrayal, while the other focuses on action/fighting, super powers, and good vs. evil. But both just keep going (for the most part). It’s not something like the Harry Potter series where JK Rowling knew there were only going to be 7 books all written by the same author, or something like Back to the Future where there are 3 movies made by the same creative team and no more will be made. These comics keep getting published monthly, and all the while writers and artists swap out every so often so tone, quality, and pacing vary wildly from year to year. But I also suspect that because of waning interest, publishers have resorted to gimmicky tactics in an effort to attract readers, and such things turn me off from wanting to resume the hobby.

So it’s not like reading Tolkien’s works. In that world, Tolkien endeavored to make it seem like Middle-Earth was a real world, and that these tales came to us because he translated the stories from the Red Book of Westmarch (the one that Bilbo started, Frodo added on to, and Samwise finished). Unfortunately, the dedication of the writers/artists/publishers to keep up such standards depends on the year and the particular combination of the staff. When Chris Claremont was writing all the X-books (1975-1991), it felt more like Tolkien in that he (Claremont) had a grand story to tell in many parts though several teams, and that the stories of the various books wove together to make a tapestry. But once he was gone it seemed like every book had its own direction and so the illusion was ruined.


Looking back, there are a few trends that I don’t particularly care for in the world of comics. I didn’t like them when I was collecting, and from what I hear, they’ve only increased in frequency over the years. The first is cancelling and then relaunching a title with a new issue #1. Corporate bean counters noticed that a lot more people are willing to give a first issue a try so if they relaunch then that individual issue sells better (this can probably be explained by investment collectors buying #1s because they tend to be worth more and that issue #1 is attractive to new readers because they know they’re not missing out on crucial character history). After the Bryan Singer X-Men movies were popular, Marvel relaunched/rebranded the X-titles with a restarted numbering (and with new costumes that resembled the movie), and then after a few years continued the numbering where they had left off (with more traditional costumes). And while high numbering initially turned me off when I was younger, I took a sense of pride in reading something that had lasted over 300 issues. In the case of Action Comics, I loved seeing it hit issue #1000 as a testament to the longevity of the character of Superman.

Another trend is major retconning. Spider-Man did it in the 90’s with the whole clone story and everyone hated it, so they had to retcon the retcon. While I don’t mind that after 30 years of the character being around someone at Marvel finally decided to tackle the actual origins of Wolverine, it retconned a bunch of things like that the X in ‘Weapon X’ was actually a Roman numeral and our long-time understanding of how certain powers work was changed.

I also really, really hate title/mantle-swapping. To me, the character is the person and not their mantle/title/job. Peter Parker is Spider-Man, and if he retires while someone else gets similar powers, they need a different title. Spider-Boy, Arachnid-Man, the Tarantula - anything but Spider-Man. I didn’t like when Azrael was (temporarily) Batman - he should have been named something else. Unfortunately, it seems like almost every major character has been replaced with a race and or gender swapped character who took the original character’s name. This feels like a social-justice inspired change to try and appeal to the blue-checkmarks on Twitter, but ends up pissing off long time fans. In the case of Thor, ‘Thor’ isn’t a title - it’s his actual name, but somehow it got transferred to Jane Foster. When I replace Bob in accounting at work, I don’t change my name to Bob, but I guess this is how it works in modern Marvel. Granted, there are a few characters where title swapping is appropriate, like Green Lantern, but those are less common.

Overall, it was a fun ride and I'm glad I got to participate in the hobby. I'm not sure if my collection is really worth anything. The recent slew of superhero movies may have made them go up in value, but bad movies might have had an adverse effect. I guess I am not sure where I would find the demand for such things to sell them even if I were so inclined. While they're not really doing much other than collecting dust, I do sort of enjoy the feeling of knowing that I at least have them.

If I suddenly had lots of money and a ton of extra time, it'd be fun to take it up again, but I don't think the publishers are making them in a manner that I would appreciate at the moment.

Collecting Comic Books part 1

While I have always liked the superhero/comic book world, I didn’t get into collecting them as soon as you might imagine. Here and there, we would get free comics from school about fire safety with Smokey Bear, or stranger danger with Captain America. I remember getting another one about being able to tell parents about sexual abuse starring Power Pack, as well.

But I mainly stayed in the realm of animated series and such. As mentioned on my first card collecting post, I felt like I would need to read all back issues to fully appreciate the current story, so I never started. I always saw them at Circle K, 7-11, K-Mart, and other places, but never really bothered to even flip through them most of the time. Once I did and saw Superman with a beard talking to people I’d never heard of about things I’d never seen and it just confirmed that it would be too hard to get into.

My friend Brooks was a closet comic fan, and we had a sort of mutual understanding that we could discuss such things only when there was no one else around. He was a fan of Superman and Spider-Man, while I liked the X-Men and Batman. He took me to a small comic shop called Jake’s Comics in the back of a flea market in town that was only open for a few hours on Saturday. It was run by a local guy named Jake Bear, who was also an aspiring artist. Incidentally, there was a sign out front letting customers know about the comic shop in the back that was a really good Wolverine painted on some wood. But because it was his brown/yellow costume and not the yellow/blue one I was familiar with, I didn’t like it as much (though now I think his brown one is the best). Brooks later showed me his collection, and while I thought it was neat, I didn’t feel like getting into the hobby just yet.

The first “real” comics I owned were Christmas gifts from my parents. They found a 4-pack of X-Men related comic books that came in a nice cardboard box, and I believe it was a way of getting rid of some copies of issues that had been over-printed. It turned out that the issues were X-Men #1, Uncanny X-Men #281, X-Factor #71, and Excalibur #42 (all from late 1991). I read them and enjoyed them, but didn’t really understand certain parts of what was going on. Each issue referenced some history and characters that had not been covered in the information from my card collection, so I was kinda in the dark. But it turns out that those particular issues happened to be part of a major shift/re-branding of the entire X-Men family of comics, so they were good jumping on points. If it had included X-Force #1, then I would have had all five issues where the X-teams “reset.” Later on a trip to Utah, my mom got me an issue of X-Men Adventures, a comic book rendition of certain episodes of the animated series. While I appreciated the thought, she happened to pick the one episode that I liked the least - it was kind of a lackluster story and was somehow shown most often on re-runs. But now I had 5 comic books.

Around the Spring of 1995, when the first round of cards had wrapped up and the second set of X-Men cards were out, my friends across the street (who had I had traded cards with) bought a few issues of X-Men and showed me. There was a new Crossover event called the Phalanx Covenant going on that was going to start a 6th X-team: Generation X. He had a paper route that delivered to Circle K, so he had a daily opportunity to see the comics, and the card collecting had gotten him excited to try comics. I started learning about some of the “current events” of the X-Men world, like how Wolverine had gone off on his own after losing the adamantium from his bones. My friend Brooks shared an issue of Wolverine with me and left it at my house. Eventually he told me I could keep it, so now I had 6 issues and I started toying with the idea of buying things monthly.

Soon after something big happened, and something that I didn’t like - they were going to completely change everything and everyone involved with the X-Men. It was announced that the story was going to go in a whole new direction where Professor X hadn’t lived to form the X-Men so the world was a dystopian nightmare with Apocalypse as its architect. It was like everything I had worried about breaking into comics, but ramped up to an 11. I was on the verge of starting to read/buy stuff but I wanted it to be like the animated series version I was familiar with - not this whole new and completely different take. But it ended after only 4 months and everything went back to (relative) normalcy. And here was my opportunity. A really good jumping on point. That’s when I decided to go visit Jake’s Comics again and start giving comics a shot.

I started going there weekly, and it became a bit of a ritual that I would wake up on Saturday morning, eat breakfast, watch the X-Men animated series and whatever was after it, then head on down to the back of the flea market to get the latest comics. Often, I was there before Jake (the owner/proprietor) got there, and soon became one of his most reliable customers. Over the next few weeks I started to learn a lot about how the comics industry works - things like the release schedules for each title, and what limited series and one-shots are. It turned out that Jake didn’t really have an account with the big comics distributors; he happened to be friends with the owners of a comic store in Boise called 1,000,000 Comix and they let him purchase things at the same price that they did. He would make a weekly trip over there to pick up the week’s order and hang out with them for a few hours.

After getting 2 or 3 months of issues, I started to feel comfortable enough to branch out a bit. I told Jake to get me one of anything that has anything to do with the X-Men in it - be it a mini-series, one-shot, or guest appearance. I knew that the Marvel Universe was pretty interconnected, so sometimes events in Thor spill over to the X-Men in the form of weather, or a newspaper strike from Spider-Man shows up in the Fantastic Four. I guess you could say that I had a big case of FOMO - fear of missing out - and I didn’t want to be caught unaware when crossover events (however small they may be) happened. Even though I learned that I probably could have just stuck with the main series and been ok, I still wanted everything just in case the Gambit/Spider-Man/Howard the Duck Team-up One-shot had lasting implications (it didn’t happen often, but you never know).

Occasionally I would take a brother or two with me; Mitch and Brady were the usual candidates. When they came I would buy them a $1 issue of something called Professor X and the X-Men, which were re-tellings of the original Stan Lee run of X-Men from the 60’s, but with smaller words and newer, more modern art that was aimed at younger readers. 

I soon started learning to recognize different artists’ styles, and about how often they have to have guest artists sub in. Certain pencillers were very consistent and only rarely missed an issue, while others couldn’t seem to string more than 2 issues together at a time before tagging out. Another thing I caught onto was how the release scheduling worked; on a given Friday night I knew in advance which monthly issues I would be able to buy the next morning, so I took the time to re-read the last issues of those titles so that I would have a refreshed memory on Saturday.

I also started buying Wizard Magazine monthly. I had flipped through them here and there at the card shop and other places, and was turned off by how negative they seemed to be towards Marvel in general and the X-Men in particular. But I soon learned to take it in stride and grew accustomed to their brand of humor. After a while, I learned that their criticism most likely came from a place of love - they wanted the X-books to be better and poked fun at them as a form of public shaming to try and get Marvel to get back on track. My mom somehow heard through her false rumor grapevine that this magazine (Wizard) was teaching kids black magic. I argued with her for a little bit and finally had to resort to grabbing a copy and showing her, “Look - it’s Batman and Spider-Man. Comic books - nothing to do with magic or Satan worshiping whatsoever.” I fully believe that she would have been on the “D’n’D is of the devil,” train if I played such games.

So after having read and re-read those first four issues I got for Christmas multiple times, I finally decided to find out the resolution to those cliff-hangers. I learned that those gift issues were pretty good jumping on points, so I decided to try and complete the collection starting with October 1991. Over time, I bought issues here and there from Jake’s and other places, but the biggest score was finding a stash being sold for pennies per issue at a bookstore in Boise. I had gone over there with my mom, who was running some errands, and she dropped my brothers and me off at Q-Zar, a laser tag place. We played a few games of laser tag, some arcade games, and had a slice of pizza like usual. But I wandered over to the bookstore a couple doors down and found that someone had decided to sell their kids’ abandoned collection. I ended up going home with more than 50 back issues for like $15. Then I made lists of what I had and was missing and started to try and fill in the gaps from various stores (mainly Jake’s).

Once I had a decent collection going, I had to make a choice of what I wanted to spend my time/money on. The Nintendo 64 was going to be released within the next year or so, and card collecting had been fun but the benefit of learning new stuff was starting to see diminishing returns, so I stopped doing cards after the 1996 Fleer X-Men Kubert set and focused most of my monthly money on comics. Instead of buying pages, binders, and plastic cases, I started buying sleeves and cardboard backers to keep them in good condition. Acid-free paper and other things were popular at the time because apparently a lot of older things turn yellow over time because of a certain acid used in the manufacturing process. So stores were selling acid-free options (for a higher price) which were marketed as a preservation tactic. I cheaped out and bought the regular stuff, but I haven’t noticed anything detrimental yet. I used some old boxes from canned food purchases my family was going to throw out and turned them into makeshift longboxes that were laid out in my room. Unfortunately I had a slight mishap one day. I spilled some hot chocolate and it got onto some issues of X-Factor. They were in sleeves so most of the damage was just on the tops of the pages, thankfully, but I tried to clean and dry them as much as possible.

As part of the effort to get everything starting from that 1991 starting point, I had to go through and find all of the Age of Apocalypse stuff that I purposely skipped. Now that I knew it was just an extended “elseworlds/what if” type of thing (even though it had consequences that permeated back into the ‘regular’ world) I was okay with it and wanted to read it. But because it was such a popular crossover, it was hard to find certain issues. The next big crossover was called Onslaught, and it involved most of the Marvel Universe. In an effort to get everything, I ended up buying random issues of things like Hulk, Spider-Man, Green Goblin, and Fantastic Four. Here and there I would buy something else non X-related. When Spider-Man relaunched, I bought the first 5 issues of the new book, as well as a few independent things just because I liked the artwork.

Collecting Comic Books part 2

Zelda Title Screens Project

I started a project back in 2001 just after the Oracle games came out. It involved drawing the logo of each Zelda game prominently along with some of the other artwork from the instruction manual and promotional material. But after I hit a few roadblocks I put it aside until the last couple of years, at which point I decided to use Photoshop instead to accomplish my goal. But instead of making a collage of the title and other artwork, I opted instead for just the logos in front of the original Master Sword artwork from A Link to the Past.  

As an interesting twist on my original idea, I also later decided to make "realistic" versions of the title screens, which is a little more difficult with the animated title screens. Anyway, here they are: 


Gamebox Logos:

LoZ	AoL	LttP	LA
OoT	MM	OoS	OoA
FS	WW	FSA	MC
TP	PH	ST	SS
ALBW	TFH	BotW

"Realistic" Title Screens: 

LoZ	AoL	LttP	LA
OoT	MM	OoS	OoA
FS	WW	FSA	MC
TP	PH	ST	SS
ALBW	TFH	BotW	LADX

Bonus: Remake and Non-Canon Games

MQ	LADX	OoT3D	MM3D
FSAE	WWHD	TPHD	LAHD
G&W Z	TLoZ GW	Z:WoG	L:FoE
ZA	BSTLoZ1	BSTLoZ2	AST
NT	LXBT	TRR	TBFDS
TMTP	TBToL	BQ	HW
HWL	MNP:TP	HWDE	CoH
HWAoC	SSHD