This page was drawn from 7/15/-7//19/09.
I wanted to introduce the main character as a spy who is on the case, but also to show that the villains are getting tipped to beware of him. I also wanted to show him heading out on his adventure, Indiana Jones style, with a map in the background to show his exotic journey.
Notice I did not reference art for the Vice President character, I just attempted to draw a character who had a resemblance to Lucian Freud and/or his self-portraits. I also thought it would look interesting to draw some retro machinery in the mystery mole’s headquarters.
Here’s a funny note – Notice the bi-plane is cut off. This isn’t a matter of an incomplete scan that didn’t capture the whole image – The original art actually looked like that, where I didn’t draw it to the tip of its wing, and the wing is cut off. If you hold a ruler to it, you can see that the ends of the lines don’t quite line up, and they’re rounded, not flat like they’ve been clipped! Years later, I thought, Why did I do that? And there was plenty of space, so I just finished drawing the wing, and then re-scanning it!
Below is the original scan of the artwork:
Below is my first draft, in which I added some exciting black background textures, and then a map behind Agent Anger’s plane, in order to give it that Indiana Jones map feel. At the time, I was really getting into old maps, when lands were often uncharted, and if they were uncharted, they were dangerous, so map makers drew dangerous sea creatures in the dangerously uncharted areas. The map super-imposed below is by Jan van Doetecum from 1594.
Notice above that at first I had considered really drawing the map! I did a compas and a sea monster and realized – I don’t want to have to draw a map!
I liked all the imagery above, however I decided the pacing was too crowded. I eventually divided all this up into THREE pages! (Pages 14-16.) I also realized I wanted to showcase as many vehicles as possible for Agent Ian Anger, and that I had a big battle scene in mind with this abve Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny”, so I swapped it out for the Vought-Sikorsky VS-300 yuo see on page 16. (And since I intend for the battle scene to involve sea monsters, I swapped the map out too.)
So for this page, the idea was to have an image of the spies’ base. I had a book of cool castles and Gothic palaces, and I thought that each time I showed some spies in a base – always in a new exotic location, it could be a different ancient castle. This decision was made and the at completed on July 7, 2011, two years after first designing the page, and the same day I drew the Lucian Freud with Black Eye addition on Page 15 – Drafts.
So now, the new first of three pages looked like this:
In 2015, my best friend, Gerry Chow, colored these for me:
And then, on June 23, 2016, now having been working on this project for seven years, I was flipping back through all the old pages I’d produced and thinking, Why would I reference castles for the spies’ base?? This is a comic about referencing art – Why didn’t I reference a famous painting for their base?? That makes more sense! And so I came up with the currently published base. On a full page, I drew a few images to replace or super-impose onto old, non-art-referenced images, including this one (I added tanks to it on 6/26/16, and inked it 7/6-7/8/16.
My best friend, Gerry Chow, kindly recolored the page with the new base, below. This page, with this new base, was the first page I went back and re-drew, and it was this re-evauating of my use of imagery that later got me altering to squeeze additional references into pages 8-13.
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Small List of Great Artists
Small List of Museums
Chris with Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43), Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Above, a still from the Italian film, La Notte (1961), directed by Michelangelo Antonioni: Marcello Mastroianni with Giorgio Morandi‘s Still Life (1960), Tate, London.
