Jon Pinto

No, not THAT Aquaman. Several months back a few friends and I were having a discussion over dinner in Chicago and played a game of "who would you cast". The only thing was it had to be cast back in time. Many ideas were sprung and it was a fun night. Afterwards I set myself up to doing a few of them as posters. The first one I wanted to do was Paul Newman as Aquaman. He was our ideal choice for the lead but I got to cast the rest of the movie myself. I also really liked the change of pace it gave me and made me work in a retro style for the art as well. So what do you think of our casting? What do you think of the poster??

Enjoy!

Yup! Time to fill up a post with pages from my sketchbook.

Enjoy!

On one of the other social media's, I got a comment when I posted the silver age picture of Wonderman asking for a "Liefeld" version. If you are unfamiliar, Rob Liefeld was quite the name in comics back in the 90's. He has a very distinctive style that became all the rage and had many imitators. My memory may be a bit fuzzy on the subject, but Liefeld himself may have been influenced by the Jim Lee style. The thing is, Rob's anatomy was pretty distinctive as well. He's called out a lot for over exaggerating the form so much that it gets ridiculous. To be fair, it may have been partially due to the amount of work he was putting out as I have also seen examples of his work that looks fine. So now that we are all caught up to speed, I decided to indulge the comment. My family and I are selling our home and the packing and "staging" of the house is happening as of this writing and is taking quite a bit of our time. So as we sat down last night to relax …

I couldn't stop myself!! After finishing my attempt at updating the public domain hero known as The Wonderman, I started to think what he would have looked like in the silver age of comics. So I drew this:

So I recently discovered public domain superheroes. I've been having a blast reading about these forgotten heroes and why some of them went away. There are FB groups that have participants share their versions of these characters. I was particularly taken with The Wonderman. Appearing shortly after Superman he was the first character sued by DC and he never appeared again! Plus he was written and drawn by Will Eisner!! So, here is my attempt at an update to The Wonderman. 







Here is the cover to his only appearance and you can see what he looked like. Oddly enough, he doesn't sport a mask on the cover and it didn't appear in the book until halfway thru with no explanation. The girl in the story also has a name change halfway thru!!

As you know, when I was a kid I was enamored with comic book super-heroes. Maybe it's just a part of being young but I always held the "kid" heroes in a special place in my heart. Naturally Spider-Man and the Teen Titans fit into this category but there were lesser known ones that I gravitated to as well like Nova and a certain back up feature in Action Comics called Air Wave. This kid was the nephew of Green Lantern Hal Jordan and inherited his costume from his father. I thought he was pretty cool. Years later I meet longtime comic artist, most notable for his thirty plus continuous years drawing Spider-Man, Alex Saviuk at a convention. I introduce myself and mention that we had a common friend. My old buddy Mike Sanborn and Alex briefly worked together at a studio in Orlando. I have seen Alex at several shows since and had the pleasure of sitting next to him at one and got to know him much better. A few months back, I picked up an old issue of Action Comics out of a fi…