Points from the Paint: Clarissa vs. Fanny!

Here is a couple of unpublished pages from c. 1993 featuring Clarissa James (Ms. Megaton Man) and Donna Blank, the Phantom Jungle Girl, shooting some hoops on some suburban driveway. This sequence was intended to be a part of Bizarre Heroes, and I don't know why I was too lazy to ink the sparse backgrounds and finish them up (including the last panel with Jasper Johnson, Rubber Brother). This scene offers some important backstory to the Phantom Jungle Girl and her historical origins and I still may use it as a flashback scene in some future project.

What is unusual about these pages is that they are largely inked with a Hunt #102 crowquill pen and some brush on plate finish Bristol, which inks a lot smoother than the usual medium surface Bristol I used with brush. It is also significant that my female characters tended toward more realistic proportions much earlier than my male characters. Prior to this, I tended to make everyone cartoony so as to match the unwieldy proportions of Megaton Man, a tension that I struggled with for far too long. One of the reasons I always found some release in drawing Ms. Megaton Man was precisely this release from the feeling that everything in the Megaton Man narrative had to appear exaggerated and humorous. By this time I was growing comfortable with the idea that things could be light and humorous (and character-driven instead of parody-driven), and drawn in a less forced way.