I recently posted to the CHCC group that I tend to be inspired by obscurity when drawing comic character sketches, be they jams or commissions, because unlike my childhood favorite characters, I haven't drawn them a million times, and the newness of an unfamiliar design makes for an engaging creative challenge. It gets my juices flowing to pick a random character from the back of the Who's Who books, or to see a strange selection for a monthly jam, or to get a specific, unusual request for a commission. I dig it.

More frequently, I get requests to do popular characters. One's I've pretty much exhausted my drawing energy on back in High School or whatever (not that I'm complaining...). Classic characters. When I was hired to do a piece on Wolverine, my initial reaction was "Meh!"... but then I was given some pretty free rein to play with it. We talked about the different versions he had in his collection, from the classic browns to a recent Age of Apocalypse one-handed version, to several tank top and motorcycle ones... his request was simply "give me a costume I don't already have, and make him aggressive!"

So this is what I came up with. I'm sure some of you will recognize those combatants from the 80s, when they were probably last used. And this version of Wolverine, as X-Men fans will know, was only seen a few times, and I don't think ever within an X-book.