The Mighty Hercules!

Over the summer, I introduced my son Joe to the 1963 cartoon of Hercules. It was produced by Joe Oriolo, the same gentleman that owned Felix the Cat, and even had the legendary Grim Natwick (Betty Boop, Snow White) work on it as well!! The theme song was sung by Johnny Nash, who would have his biggest hit a decade later with "I Can See Clearly Now". The most notable tho was that my son instantly commented that he looked like Superman. I told him no, Superman looks like Hercules and then explained how Bruce Timm was heavily influenced by this when he created his Superman for the Animated Adventures!

I admit that I never really intended to create a whole poster. I initially thought I would just draw Herc, but it ballooned very quickly. I did the whole thing on my iPad while watching TV and it went faster than I would have imagined. I like the "retro" coloring I did on this one using a nice, broken charcoal brush for the shadows and lights. Kept it simple. I also made a "vintage" poster version as well as the clean one because I couldn't make up my mind. What do you think??

Here are the WIP shots as usual.

Bonus: This is a quick drawing I did based on a poorly photographed Bruce Timm commission of Hercules done many years ago.