Happy Birthday To Me

This is some fan art by Greek artist Kapandais Nikolaos that's based on the unpublished pages from Cloak & Dagger featuring Sabra as seen in the previous posting. I've had this art work for a little while now but I've been waiting for the right time to feature it as I love to do with good fan art. So with it being my birthday today I guess this is a good time as a treat to myself.

Coincidentally I also discovered this new fan art commission by artist Jeff Slemmons which was posted to Comic Art Fans just a few days ago. I would definitely say this is the best ROM related fan art for 2024 I've come across. ROM blasting away Dire Wraiths is nothing new when it comes to ROM fan art including this year with a fictitious cover by Bob Layton and a 3D rendering I saw on farcebook more recently that was kinda cool. But Slemmons does it best here hands down. 

https://www.comicartfans.com/GalleryPiece.asp?Piece=2074609

 December 12 Update: And look what else I just found! A new commission piece by one of the best and possibly most under rated Marvel 80s artists Ron Frenz. All that aside I'm always happy to have more Jewish superheroes in my posts.

 December 21 Update: Here's the color version. I can't decide which version I like better . . . 

https://www.comicartfans.com/GalleryPiece.asp?Piece=2079247

A New Comic Book Day unlike we've seen for decades now

Last month we had a New Comic Book Day that had a unique ring of nostalgia to it that even a few months ago I would not have believed would have ever been possible. Even though just a reprint, it was nice to see ROM back on the shelves of a comic shop in the new comics section. I didn't pick up the copy you see here I had already a couple days before placed an order for a foil cover variant. Unfortunately when I showed yesterday to pick it up I found out those dumbasses somehow ordered a standard copy for me. I was so pissed, it's really something else check it out...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmCH08g_RYU

And just to be clear, I'm talking about the genuine article and not the pale and pathetic imitation that was a commercial flop from idw publishing. Same goes for idw's MICRONAUTS reboot.

All this buzz about the ROM facsimile variants along with all the other upcoming ROM reprint projects has got me in a nostalgic mood this weekend so here's some new fan art. This one is a tribute to ROM 63 which was what I considered to be the last issue from the series where the art work was still decent. Plus it was always one of my favorite covers of the series.

https://viewcomiconline.com/rom-63/

 

I recently came across some Marvel Over Power cards for Sabra I had never seen before. I like the art work on them (artist/s unknown unfortunately) it's almost like discovering new fan art. 

October 9 Update: Speaking of all things Israel, I'm sure even those of you who are not much into politics have heard something about the war that broke out in Israel thanks to what was nothing short of an invasion by those iranian regime backed jihadi nazi mother fuckers in gaza. This is a photo I took of the scene in Redwood City yesterday which is about 30 minutes south of San Francisco on the other side of The Bay from where I live.

What the Hellhounds!?

The source material for this piece which I put together in Adobe photoshop comes from two other artists. The Torpedo was a line art character study from Eric Jansen. All I had to do to that one was basically add some color to it. ROM is a cropped version of an original piece from Greek artist Kapandais Nikolaos. All I did to that one is add some grey tones to make him contrast from the background a bit more.  

Here's a brand new awesome fan art piece of ROM blitzing a pack of Black Nebula Hellhounds by Kapandais Nikolaos. And this time this one is all him. By the time they realize just what the Hell hit them they'll be on a one way trip to Limbo.

https://www.deviantart.com/nikoskap/art/Rom-Spaceknight-955323949

A couple months ago I was hesitant to post these pages that were part of a SABRA story pitch to Marvel Comics from writer Matt Yocum and artist Jake Bilbao because I felt they were a little too "real world" in terms of subject matter. I've recently had a change of heart. Mostly because I really just want to share this stuff with as many people as possible out there. It's really great material when it comes to the question of what could have been.

  

Almost certainly by late 2023 we will start to see official movie trailers turn up for Captain America New World Order. But before those trailers we will almost certainly by privy to production and "first look" type still images from the film. Some of those no doubt will include Shira Hass as Sabra. I can't help but wonder if all the leftist antisemites as well as the ones within the muslim world will freak out out again and act like a bunch of cry babies with dirty diapers as they did back in September when the Sabra character appearance in the MCU was first announced? The Sabra character was created by Bill Mantlo and Sal Buscema with creative input from Belinda Glass. Thank you all!

April 8th Update: For any Star Wars fans out there I've got something to share that I just started last night and completed this morning. The show down from the season one finale of Disney Plus's Kenobi was one of the best light saber duels ever in Star Wars. The exchange that Kenobi and Vader had at it's conclusion was also some great writing that was the icing on the cake. That was definitely my kinda Star Wars.

April 10th Update: We'll, just when I thought I'd seen it all when it comes to comic book/sci-fi related public art in The San Francisco Bay Area. What we have here is an amazing Miles Morales Spider-Man mural. I've been past this block in Oakland more then once in recent months so I know this mural is pretty new. It's located on 29th Avenue right before the highway 880 south bound onramp. Check it out if you're in the area.

 

I have something better then flowers for Valentine's Day this year

Although this piece has been around for well over 2 years, for reasons unknown this is still largely undiscovered by ROM fans. I'm a bit more partial to ROM fan art that's a bit more creative theme wise, but still I gotta say I've got nothing but love for this one. Not because Valentine's Day is just around corner, but because the figure composition in this piece is so perfect along with how ROM's armor looks with this artist's (Idan Knafo) particular style. And the colors, the colors are almost down right mesmerizing. This is where I found it . . .

https://twitter.com/artofidan/status/1330456189294043136 

This is actually something I threw together in photoshop several years ago with some borrowed 3D renderings  I found online but for some reason I never posted it. But back then this piece only consisted of Brandy Clark and Hybrid. Thanks to photos that have turned up on social media in the past year or so of Alberto Diaz's insanely awesome custom electronic ROM doll I now can include him in the scene. 

For those of you who have never read ROM Annual 3 or maybe it's been a while I included this clip art in order to give the art work some context. That last panel still grosses me out to this day

I just by chance discovered this cool Sabra art work which belonged to a podcast episode from early December last year. The episode covered part of the Operation Zero Tolerance story arc in which Sabra was temporarily teamed up with some members of  The X-Men (Ice-Man and Marrow) as well as with Dr. Cecilia Reyes. Hopefully most of you noticed the Giant Sized X-Men Annual 1 cover art homage in David Wynne's art piece here.

February 14th Update: A poll closed this afternoon on the BacktotheBronzeAge twitter page. They periodically have these polls and sometimes ROM shows up in one of the categories. If memory serves me right, more often then not his category gets the most votes just like it did today. ROM had an early lead but toward the end The Micronauts started to close the gap but couldn't quite catch up by the time the poll closed.

Sabra vs Captain America and new ROM in The Microverse fan art

The sketch card you see below was originally done by artist Erik Roman. I liked it, but at the same time I felt it was missing something and that it had the potential to be turned into a great ROM and Micronauts cross over fan art piece.

A number of photoshop tools and some borrowed elements from some Micronauts fan art of mine (see link) from many years back was all it took to give this sketch card a digital upgrade . . .

 https://www.deviantart.com/csuhsux/art/Micronauts-MEGO-toy-line-based-comic-strip-concept-865196068

 

 These are a couple of a few unpublished pages having to do with stories about Israel's premiere super hero Sabra on the farcebook page of writer Matt Yocum that was posted back in 2013. It turns out they were pages that Yocum pitched to Marvel in order to give more exposer to artist Jake Bilbao in the hopes they would hire him for a Wolverine story Yocum wrote. However, despite the quality of Billbao's work Marvel instead hired Yocum to write a Sabra story. Matt Yocum is a United States Air Force veteran with a history of deep ties to Israel both in a personal and in a professional capacity. The Sabra story that Yocum wrote was a fantastic 8 page Astonishing Tales (digital only unfortunately) feature which was beautifully illustrated by Brazilian artist Adriana Melo.

https://cmro.travis-starnes.com/detail.php?idvalue=27154

 

Some new unexpeted fan art

Off the topic of my head, aside from cleaner air and less traffic there isn't other wise any upside to this corona virus pandemic nightmare. Millions of people all over the world are either not working, working much less or now don't have much of anything to do on the weekends. So, we gotta fine something to do with all this new found spare time. Most of the art work posted was dome in collaboration with https://www.deviantart.com/nikoskap

This one with Bug was done just before all this covid 19 shit but it's pretty recent so I'm going to include it in this posting.

This Mego toy line based MICRONAUTS piece is something I did way back in the late 90s but I decided to post it online for the first time just because.

Also, I'm throwing in some fan art I did of random Marvel characters that I like (Thunderbird, She-Hulk and Blade) that I did in the late 90s....

And if you also happen to be a Star Trek fan I even have something for you to. This Deep Space 9 battle scene is a water color painting I did back in 2002.

I've been re-reading a lot of G.I.Joe back issues recently and although I certainly always liked the Joes (especially Snake-Eyes) it was always the villains that were the most entertaining and intriguing characters.

Speaking of all things G.I.Joe, I recently discovered a fantastic story line that involves Israel in issue 2 of G.I. Joe Special Missions (1986). The Joes are forced to make a deal with a nazi war criminal (doctor otto totenschadel) after a WW II German bomber loaded with a deadly nerve gas is discovered stuck in a glacier in Greenland. Unfortunately they come into conflict with a Mossda (Israel intelligence) that are hunting  totensdachadel.

We learn for the first time as far as I know that a team member of the Joes is Jewish. G.I.Jew Lance Steinberg code name Clutch.

Fortunately as it turns out The Joes manage to deal with the nerve gas with out any assistance from totensdachadel despite Cobra making a play for the nerve gas for their own insidious reasons. Meanwhile in the jungles of Brazil, The Joes and Mossad manage to work together and storm a neo-nazi compound where totensdachadel's sorry ass is using as a hide out.

In the end neither The Joes or Mossad take totensdachadel into custody but instead simply decide to divulge some rather inconvenient and self serving secrets totensdachadel had been keeping from his nazi buddies that proves to be quite fatal for him. A great story full of WW II history, politics and poetic justice.

A Spaceknight and an Avenger walk into a bar...

Fan art by unknown artist, caption by yours truly

Left click to enlarge

  Don't you just hate it when you find an image during a Google search and want to know more about it but clicking on that image just directs you to an error page of some kind? That's what happened here, so I don't know who did this cartoon or what the premise is because it certainly looks like the sort of art work with a story behind it. So, I decided to come up with a caption that for me at least fit the scene.
  Also, here's some 80s nostalgia I bet most of you haven't seen before. I actually stumbled upon this years ago during a random Google search but lost the image when I accidentally closed the search window and was not able to find it again to save my life. I believe this is some sort of poster insert or possible splash page from Strange Magazine. Although the Strange art work here is original I'm pretty sure I know which classic ROM spaceknight issue was probably the direct inspiration for it...
http://berkeleyplaceblog.com/2018/06/12/rom-30-1982/

MASADA

I just wanted to open up the second half of this posting by saying that I'm not into Young Blood or anything else from Image Comics for that matter. But I do have an interest in Jewish super heroes in comics so I think this back story from Young Blood Strike Files #6 featuring Massada (code name taken from the biblical desert mountain fortress in Israel) is worth taking a closer look at. In this story a friend of Masada's goes awol (away with out leave) from the Israeli Intelligence in order to go on a personal crusade and take out an anti-Semitic hate preacher (Hashim) who is obviously based on the real life anti-Semitic hate preaching piece of pig shit louise farrakhan.

Concerned that her friend (Sibbechai) is going to get himself into some serious trouble while making a martyr out of the hate preacher she tries to track him down before he makes his move. Needless to say she has some mixed feelings about going after her fellow Jew especially if it results in saving the life of a filthy Jew hater like farrakhan . . . er I mean Hashim. Think of it in terms of Luke Cage being in a similar situation over david duke or a Mexican superhero with trump.

After a failed attempt to apprehend Sibbechai, Masada attempts to warn Hashim but he dismisses her warnings as part of some grand "Jewish conspiracy" to silence him.Ultimately she's forced to use her powers that enable her to enlarge her size (like you saw with Ant-Man in Avengers Civil War and more recently in Ant-Man & The Wasp) she manages to thwart the assassination attempt leaving the hate preacher only lightly wounded unfortunately. But as they say, haters gonna hate so ofcourse Masada having saved his miserable life does nothing to change Hashim's paranoid Jew conspiracy delusions. A bit of a predictable ending but pretty accurate none the less I'd say.

http://imagecomics.wikia.com/wiki/Deborah_Konigsberg

Bill Mantlo benefit art auction left overs in Portland

Shitty art work from past benefit auctions

Just got back from a weekend get away in Portland and paid a brief visit to Floating World Comics while I was there. They had some of these 11 X 17 glossy prints on a pretty thick paper stock of some of the art work from the past benefit auctions. Sadly none of them was of any of the good art that came out of those auctions. Most of the art work that came from those auctions were really amateurish and down right bizarre much of the time. Too bad, a high quality print of some of the better art work would have been a nice thing to take home with me. Those prints were only going for around $5 and there's no sales tax in Oregon.

So moving on to more satisfying matters. Just before I left for Portland I got a copy of Excalibur 121 in the mail which I bought on ebay. I think you can all guess why I wanted that issue and it came just in time to give me something to read on the plane even though Oakland to Portland is a fairly short flight. Some of the highlights is the opening sequence with the debriefing of Sabra by her superiors over a mission she under took with Excalibur.

When the story back tracks to the before mentioned mission we find out that Sabra doesn't play well with others here. Even when it came to fellow mutants she has a common heritage with (Kitty Pride ofcourse) things got of to a rough start. But toward the end of the mission Sabra gets a lesson in the value of team work which in turn may help explain her having been more of a team player (especially with Storm) in what would be the pages of future X-Men issues back then.

Left click to enlarge