Original comic art gallery–Green Arrow & Black Canary and the Bionic Man

This year I continued my Comicon season by commissioning sketches from comic book artists of my favorite characters, Green Arrow and Black Canary. I always like to let the artists do whatever vision they have with the duo and am always blown away by the results and at this year’s Planet Comicon it was no different. It’s even better when you watch artists take on characters for the first time.

At Planet Comicon weekend itself, I met Greg Smallwood, who I found at Artists Alley with the forthcoming Dream Thief co-creator Jai Nitz. Greg sketched this great piece for me, and I’d LOVE to see a series with this classic look.

Black Canary never before looked more like she was going to take everyone out of commission with that sonic scream!

I also asked my friend Damont Jordan to give me his take on Green Arrow and Black Canary and gave him a few weeks after the Con to take his time with it. Somewhere we started chatting up adding extra characters and I threw out the idea of something like “oh yeah, why not include Super Grover, too.” And BAM! Check this out:

It reminds me of Mauro Cascioli’s Green Arrow covers from a few years ago. I’m calling this “Don’t Sell Drugs on Sesame Street.” Click on the image for a bigger view and you can see a lot going on here, from the perspective of two drug dealers, a bombed Speedy, and a floating Super Grover. Great detail! So my take on the story is Oliver and Dinah show up and find two guys selling to Speedy while he’s working at Mr. Hooper’s on Sesame Street. Ollie puts an arrow in each guy as Speedy reaches for another hit. The next part could go either way–more like Super Grover is coming along to help get rid of the thugs (maybe called in by Oscar the Grouch on his mobile phone as he watches from his garbage can?), but Grover could also be some drug-induced image one of the dealers sees as he is passing out from the arrow wound. I’ll have to get the full scoop on this from Damont later this week.

Thanks to Greg and Damont for some great sketches–definitely they go at the top of my archive from 10+ years of Cons.

This month I also picked up the original Stephen Segovia cover art to one of the alternate covers for Bionic Man #1. A lot of energy!