[ You can find a larger version here. ]

This illustration was done for the TRDL R3 Illustration Jam, the subject being Marvel’s Ghost Rider.

I was never a fan of this character. I like flaming skulls plenty, but like a lot of 70s Marvel, it’s so pop-culture heavy and therefore dated, it’s hard to accept it. Sure, Silver Surfer still flies around on a surfboard. But there’s something about a flaming demonic Hell’s Angel cipher that just never gets interesting to me. That said, I wanted to give it a try, so I did a TRDL Redesign, pushing forward to the year 3033.

In this design, the world of the 3000′s is one devoid of biological life. Artificial intelligence rules. Therefore, my Ghost Rider is a bot. I thought it was an interesting conceit that sentience, like the soul, is so little understood by science, that there’s no reason that if artificial intelligences could gain sentience, that they wouldn’t gain souls, and therefore have one to trade to Satan. And so, a demonic bot, we have here. To make him more dangerous in this world, I made his core out of a recovered, damaged Chinese nuclear pile. The head may be familiar to some of you. The wheels are actually fission tesseracts, held together by ungravity fields. He’s carrying a container on his belt that contains the DNA samples of each of the men that were once Ghost Riders before freed from their duties. The gun, posture, and framing elements will be familiar to anyone into manga in the 80s, I hope!
Please enjoy!

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You can find a larger version here.

You can see this illustration herein the TRDL Tribute Gallery.

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Process Notes:

So the composition is loosely based on my favorite panel from the Akira manga, with Kaneda, in his signature badass motorcycle, trying to ride up slabs on freeway concrete being torn apart by tetsuo’s TK, while firing a pulse rifle running out of power.

Here’s the original pencil roughs. Done very late at night. I like em!

Here’s the inks.

Flats, body first.

I did shade/shadow for the figure AND the bike.

Lots of places have mottling and weathering, even though it’s not easily seen in the final composition.

The figure, pretty much complete. I darkened the torso int he final piece because it competed with the flames.

Here’s the build-up of the flaming head, or rather pulsing nuclear energy head. Whatever.

The wheels were drawn plates surrounding the energy wheel itself, which were rendered up separately, energy added digitally, then cloned and modified for each wheel. The bike is a one sided axle design, which is fun.

In the final composition, I showed faded graphics on the bike: a pill as a node to Akira, and a TRDL crest as a nod to the [url=Team lope Tyre Clubbe]http://www.teamlopetyreclubbe.com[/url]…

Follow this topic in the R3 Forum here!

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