What’s your preferred size of Angel’s wings
Uh oh, here’s where I have to admit that I haven’t read too much X-Men. When it comes to Marvel Comics I’m a Fantastic Four, Venom, Daredevil and Spider-Man person. I’ve always wanted to read the X-Men but their backlog is so daunting and there’s a lot of spin off series too. I know when I start I’ll need both a reading guide and some recommendations from people who know my tastes before I jump in. (which is honestly how I recommend anyone start a comic series with a long backlog.)
So I’ll answer this as a general wing size of humans or humanoids with wings. I like them big. Small wings bother me so much, especially if I’m supposed to believe that they fly with them. If they’re an accessory or they’re using magic to fly, then I don’t mind super small wings all that often. But if a character is meant to use them in flight, I like each wing to be at least six feet or two meters in length.
Wings are hard to draw. Comics are on a deadline. Artists who aren’t familiar with drawing wings and are put on a series where one of the main characters has wings must see it as an absolute nightmare. The larger the wings on the character the more you have to think about how to pose them, articulate them, and if you’re not good at drawing them, well, that’s a large amount of space that could be a focal point of a thing you messed up. So I can see why artists don’t do large wings on characters and instead do moderately sized ones.
The larger the wing also means the more obvious it’ll be that you never touched or looked at a single reference ever. Example:
I’m not sure what issue this is from as I pulled it out of the Warren tag a few months ago when I was looking for things to correct on this blog. If you know what wings look like, this is really obviously not referenced.
The general anatomy isn’t atrocious, at least the elbow isn’t bending the wrong way... But the feathers are clearly just filled in like fur. Remember, the inside of a wing has three main feather layers, lesser coverts, greater coverts and flight feathers. The artist here ended up doing more work for both themself and the inker and colorist by adding all these extra feathers. (The feathers are also pointed and not rounded but that’s something for the actual critique/fix of this panel) Its a similar problem with the artist of Iceman’s solo had with Warren’s wings. They were big yes, but not referenced in the slightest and there were far too many extra feathers anywhere.
And I don’t hate more medium sized wings, like these ones on Warren from Fantastic Four annual #3. Again, I’m sorry I don’t read a lot of X-Men so I have to pull from my F4 knowledge. They get the point across, he’s a dude, he’s got wings.
These from House of X #2 are a nice size. I like this.
However, if you want to win me over. Go big and go stylized. One of my fave sets of wings I’ve seen on Warren, and please remember, I haven’t seen that many, come from that weird Angel solo Angel: Revelations.
Are these anatomically correct? Almost. Do they follow realistic feather layers? Nope. Are they still cool as all hell? Oh yeah.
This whole comic has a very cool art style which works in its favor here. While these wings aren’t 100% “correct” you’ll never see me complain about them. While they’re heavily stylized you can tell that some references were looked at as they mostly move correctly when in use. I was never distracted by any of them and they look amazing.
So, I suppose a tldr: I like winged characters with large wings, I have to be convinced they’re big enough to fly on. However I also understand that wings are a pain in the ass to draw over and over again and understand why artists choose to go smaller. If you really want me to love your comic have a fun unique style and I’ll probably be all over it.
