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.