spideyvsock

Pre-Sal Velluto there were 3 artists that I did enough work along-
side that I can comfortably say that they were partners who
created actual runs with me: Angel Medina, Tom Grindberg &
Kevin J. West. I alternated with the first 2 on my first pro work
WARLOCK & THE INFINITY WATCH from '92-'94. As mentioned
elsewhere, I was fortunate enough to redeem myself with Tom
when we later did STAR TREK: DS9 for Marvel. But after the
work Kevin & I did for Malibu Comics from the spring/summer of
'95 to the beginning of '97 (we previously did a total of 5 pp. for
Marvel's GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY annuals in '93 & '94),
Kevin & I hadn't worked together for almost 6 years when he
sent me the following 3 pieces of art to ink. They were art for
sale at his commissions site and he thought they would look
great if inked by me. The interesting thing about the Wolverine
art is that Wolverine was among the last things we did for the
Akron-Canton Ohio con program book in late '96 (seen in an
earlier gallery entry). Inking the Spidey vs. Doc Ock and
Wolverine art was fairly straightforward for me and I rendered
them with my usual amount of brush and some marker. On the
Joker & Harley piece I convinced Kevin that adding black to the
background would boost the image and 2 characters up a notch.
I subsequently made some adjustments in the art to accomodate
this change and tweaked the work a teansy bit. The 3 images
were completed by me on October 14, 15 & 16 in the order that
they appear here and Kevin was happy with them. As in the case
with Tom Grindberg, I was very excited to be able to team up
with an old partner and, if all goes well, these will not be the last
West/Almond collaborations that will appear at this gallery.

Now if someone would only commission me to ink art by Angel
Medina at some point...:-)

***A COLOR IMAGE OF THE SPIDEY JOB WAS LATER DONE
BY BLAKE WILKIE ON 3/30/08.