It's been over a year since my last update post on this jam, begun in 2017 for the 25th anniversary of Image Comics, and almost completely missing the entire year of the 30th anniversary, a hell of a thing for a piece intended to be completed in a single weekend. I started out with such good intention in January. Anyway, setting aside any Image Comics lateness jokes, here is the first of the figures I got colored after getting the finished art back from Evan Dorkin. He'd warned me against getting additional colors as a threat to the integrity of the piece. Obviously,
the central Spawn figure was colored by Joseph Michael Linsner from the beginning, but even one addition would be a commitment to doing many more. Further, depending on the coloring, the inks could easily be marred.
I debated on the matter for a while, but ultimately I felt like the piece would feel incomplete with one color figure. As important as Spawn is to Image and to myself, this is an image representing the full stable. At minimum, I wanted the founders' characters to get the same treatment. So, while on a road trip to visit friends in
Canada and
Boston, we made a detour to Connecticut, where I ended up running into Dr. Anj ahead of schedule. It was a fun mid-sized con hosted by a sprawling casino with a nice showing of actual comics talent, but I only had one day to spare for the show. I had specific things I wanted done and plenty of options, but oddly I think this is the first effort from that show to get posted. Most of the rest were more personal, or for other projects even further from fruition.
Paul Mounts was one of the first "name" comics colorists that I knew of. He had colored most of Marvel Comics' trading card sets in the late '80s & early '90s, a huge deal to that generation of fans, which got him notices in
Wizard Magazine. He later colored nearly 100 issues of
Fantastic Four, including the runs of the Waid/Wieringo and Hickman, the first volume of
The Ultimates, and the run of
Immortal Hulk. He even has an Image connection through work on
Brigade, The Tenth, and
Tellos. I recall particularly liking his flesh tones, so Witchblade was a natural choice.
Mounts shared Dorkin's reservations about the potential for inks running, and those concerns proved to be well founded. With the tools available at the con, the coloring ran into problems, and the attempted fixes are readily apparent. I still really like the tones throughout the piece, like the insectoid chrysalis yellow-brown within the gauntlet, and the shading in the hair. Obviously I worried that other colorists would have similar issues, but if anything, the flaws here encouraged me to get more coloring done to minimize the distraction. Blessedly, so far so good on later efforts, and I really prefer the piece with the colors. The question at this point is how far out to extend the color, as most of the main figures are done at this point. Blame COVID, poor convention scheduling in my area, and skyrocketing original art prices for this still being a work in progress.
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