And partly because I don't wanna just post this on its own because while already not super confident in my regular drawings I'm especially amateurish in digital art, I'm gonna infodump a bit about how this character came to be
So, you might be vaguely familiar with Todd McFarlane's Spawn, Al Simmons, a government mercenary who goes to hell after being murdered by order of his corrupt higher up Jason Wynn, Al makes a deal with the demon Malebolgia in order to return to Earth and see his wife Wanda, becoming the face of indie superhero comics (and 90s comics overall as well as the character who inspired Shadow the hedgehog), he's maintained a long presence in comics, had a beloved animated show, a not so beloved movie (we'll get to that) and multiple crossovers, be it in comics, videogames or in the common tragic fate of appearing in the background of the movie Ready Player One.
Image comics was founded by seven artists who were tired of the treatment they would get at Marvel, so they left and created image, known for allowing the creators to keep the rights to their characters.
With this goal, you might in retrospect understand how much of a mess it would be how the original intent was for all the image comics to share a universe, with some of the image founders having their characters participate or even debut on the other properties. For this drama we're gonna focus on how originally, both in the comics and the animated series, Spawn was killed by Youngblood character Bruce Stineson, aka Chapel.
Problem comes from the fact that as you might've been able to tell from the shoulder pad, giant weapons and hyperdefined muscles in Chapel's design, Youngblood is owned by Rob Liefeld.
Something that hasn't changed from back then until now, Rob Liefeld can be kind of a dick.
With a LOT of interpersonal drama forming between McFarlane and Liefeld (or more accurately all of the image founders), you can imagine that this would be a problem when it came to Spawn's movie
Was the movie beloved and seen as a flawless masterpiece which has kept people talking about it nonstop in the nearly 30 years since it came out?
So anyway this movie had Jason Wynn hire a mercenary known as Jessica Priest, she was then retconned into having killed him in the comics and the whole thing with Chapel being false
Her backstory isn't exactly that groundbreaking, your classical assassin depicted as having been born dangerous and vaguely mentally ill (anything that can be said about this type of writing of mentally ill people has been said before and will be said again, it was the 90s, moving on), murdered her parents in an over the top way, roasted marshmallows on the house after she set it on fire, not gonna focus on that.
She goes on to be more humanized, he becomes the second She-Spawn thanks to the character of Nyx (Let's leave it at she's a witch who has both helped and fought Al)
You see that she has a daughter, but due to her dangerous life and countless enemies she leaves her at the care of her mother and pretends to be the child's aunt instead, keeping herself away in order to protect her.
She's an important member of the scorched, an antihero team formed by fellow hellspawns Gunslinger Spawn, Medieval Spawn and sometimes himself alongside Redeemer, (a mantle first known as anti spawn) with some other characters who join from time to time, like Haunt, Cy-Gor and Overtkill
And honestly I don't have much else to tell you, you can just read Spawn, I sure as fuck have lots of stuff I still have to read, but I think this might work as an introduction.
I'm just gonna leave my masterlist here, it has some more, less yap heavy spawn stuff
One of the most spiritually profound moments of my life was when I was sixish and at a natural history museum with my parents that had a whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling.
I remember my dad picking me up to sit on his shoulders (possibly one of the last times he did that because I was getting too big to hold there for long) so I could be close to it's flipper because he wanted to show me something. He had me hold up my arm parallel to the whale's, and explained that we had the same bones, pointing to it's scapula and humerus and radius and ulna and so on while poking the same bones in my skinny little arm, all they way down to the tips of my fingers and it's own.
And in that moment, I could suddenly see how the whale and I were the same animal, just stretched and shrunk into different proportions by nature. There was an entire exhibit with skeletons of different animals and we went through all of them, picking out the hands and faces of all of them on myself.
I had never felt such a profound connection to the world around me before as I realized on a visceral level that not only was I related to all these creatures, they were very literally my distant cousins, and that in a way, they were me from back then and I was them from now, and we all were others still from the future.
Every living thing on earth is your cousin. The most distantly related humans are your 50th cousins. Chimps are your several thousandth cousins. An octopus is your 25 millionth cousin. Trees are your billionth cousins. You and I are surrounded by family. And that makes me feel profoundly loved.
So thanks dad, for pulling your shoulder a bit to show me that I am part of the universe. I love you too.
Hey artists, C. Spike Trotman, founder of Iron Circus Comics, just posted an invaluable thread on depicting different types of black hair. I’d do the thing where you screencap the whole thread and post it but it’s just too long (which is great because it’s a whole lot of useful information!) Give her a follow while you’re there.
Anyway, go check it out. I just wanted to save it and share it because I didn’t know how much I didn’t know!
This is an amazing resource, not only for artists, but for writers too! I love this!
{ID - tweet from @/Iron_Spike that reads, “Black Hair for Non-Black Artists: a Cheat Sheet Thread. Hi, folks! Just spur-of-the-moment decided to put together some reference for folks who want to draw/model black characters in their work, but arent confident they won’t make simple, obvious mistakes w/r/t black hair. END ID}
A new design, she’s a very spiney lady but tries her best to look all cute and sweet :3
Her 2-day auction can be found here: https://ych.art/auction/233172
"Vanderhorst had been under the influence of MDMA and three litres of vodka she had consumed on the night of the offence last September, her lawyer Michael Hill told the court."
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