This series of X-Men illustrations began as a commission sketch, and developed into a sketch series for the entire team, as designed by Frank Quitely for New X-Men during his run with Grant Morrison. Once I saw the m in a preview, I thought these redeasigns were awesome, and couldn't wait to draw them... and prompltly filed the source material away and never got to it.

Cyclops I've drawn one million times growing up, and his classic costume inspired many a knock-off in my early comics drawings. That said, he's a tough character to make look reasonably confident and cool, especially given how he's handicapped in the scripts. Not just his brooding melancholy and rigid schoolboy attitude, but also frequently indecisive, reactionary and whiny. Terrible mistake. I think he has been one of the most consistently compelling tragic figures in Marvel Comics. This guy gets the hot ones, then loses them in fiery deaths , at the rate most of us buy pizzas. You have to be pretty bad ass to lead the X-Men for years, date their hottest members, get mind-wiped, mutated, soul-ravaged, your ass handed to you by your own freakishly hyper-aged children, seduced by clones and in general, rarely broke from that brooding grimace.