Nova, The Human Rocket!

Last week while I was stuck in a comic book store for 24 hours doing the 24 Hour Comic Book Challenge I couldn't help but look through a few books to see if anything caught my eye. And, what do you know? I found a few!

The new Nova books from Marvel Comics caught my eye on the regular issue racks. It was cartoony, had some great art, great character design, and my brother had collected the original comic back when we were kids. I put the book down and went over to the collected trade editions to see if the individual issues had been collected yet. Lucky me, I found three of them. I took advantage of one of the store's many sales that day and picked them up.

The books were a lot of fun. The first issue had my imagination running and I found it was like a mix of the movies The Last Starfighter and Back To The Future along with a healthy dose of Marvel Comics super heroes. I've said I'd never work in comics again but, honestly, if I did want to work for a mainstream comic company again, this is the kind of book I'd want to work on.

So, of course, I had to draw something Nova related. During lunch last Friday, as a warm up, I sketched out this piece in blue pencil.

I love that this version of Nova is a fifteen year old teenage boy and he is actually drawn like a boy, not a small version of a muscle bound man. The image of him mixes my love of drawing children's books along with my love of comic book super heroics.

I detailed the pencils over the weekend and, if I can find the time this week, I want to lay some ink on this piece and go to color.

And, if all goes well, who knows, I may even do a few Nova sample pages, send them to a few people I know up at Marvel, and see what happens. But, first, let's see how this piece turns out.

Inks soon, color later. Have a great week and I'll see you all soon!