Bill Mantlo finished tribute piece

Well here it is folks as promised. So the scenario you have here is the Dire Wraiths making a bee line for what they think will be refuge among the stars as they leave their watch-wraith servants to keep ROM occupied. It took me basically 48 hours to get this piece done which is an 8 1/2 X 11 water color with fine point colored markers. I want to thank all of you who both left comments and emailed me words of praise and encouragement while I was working on this. All that really remains now is for Floating World Comics http://www.floatingworldcomics.com/main/ to reply to my email inquiry a couple of days ago so we can take the next step to getting this into the auction and hopefully raise some money for Mantlo's family who no doubt are struggling with his medical care. If there is anybody out there who has any info. on Bill Mantlo's current condition please do share it with the rest of us by leaving a comment. Last I heard his condition wasn't that great and didn't seem to offer much hope for improvement. But perhaps unknown to most of us things have made a turn for the better since then. By the way if your curious what has been part of the auction in the past go to Spaceknight 2 in the blog roll. The first six to seven works from the top down have appeared in the last week and I can only assume are works for the up coming auction. To be honest I'm not sure what to make of most of the new stuff so far but again I'd certainly like to hear other people's thoughts rather you leave a comment here, on Spaceknight 2 or even with an email to me directly.

Bill Mantlo tribute piece - sketch

Any body remember the Watch-wraiths? They were these constructs that the science Wraiths developed as sentinels and body guards. We only get to see them 3 times through out the ROM series but I always liked em and wished we could have seen them more. Especially if they maybe had shown them in flash back sequences during the Galador-Wraith war fighting other Spaceknights.
Now over to Transformers II which was the return of Michael Bay to his usual over the top pander to pop culture shitty movie making style. But even this peice of shit did have it's moments like the forest fight scene in which Optimus takes on almost all the Decepticons on his own cause he's bad ass that way when he has to be. Even though he's too modest to admit it, which is really what makes Optimus Prime so awesome more so even then him being a great warrior! Besides, as Yoda said in ESB, "Wars not make one great" and I'm sure Prime would agree. There's this one point where Optimus climbs on the back of a Decepticon that's bigger then him and gets his "meat hooks" into the Decepticon and literally rips his fucken face apart! It was a great scene in the midst of a sequel that was so very inferior to the first TF movie. Here it is to the sound effects of the epic kick ass film 300.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ak_SvePnFXM
So anyways that's where I got the inspiration and idea for this sketch which I'll hopefully have colored by the end of Friday or Saturday. The dude at Floating World Comics wants this by Sunday for the Bill Mantlo art auction but I'm hoping he just wants to see something having been done and not the actual work in his hands. Shit I just found out about this on Tuesday afternoon and it's Thanksgiving today. Stay tuned folks I'll have the finished work posted as soon as it's . . finished. Sketching stuff always takes me longer then to color it so who knows I might have this done by tomorrow night. All I got going on tomorrow is I'm heading to S.F. in the morning with some friends to cause some trouble with the lunatic left wing fringe. They're going to be staging another pro-terror demonstration in the middle of the busiest shopping square in S.F on Black Friday.

ROM pin-up illustration by Glove Studios

I'm going to be working on piece for an auction to raise money for Bill Mantlo's medical care today and tomorrow. I wish I could say this is what I came up with because this is some pretty amazing work! It reminds me a lot of the kind of fantasy illustration style I might see on the cover of an issue of Heavy Metal magazine. But in actuality this just happens to be some more random art I discovered on the internet I had never seen before by some artist at Glove Studios. The details are also quite exceptional so if you have the means to enlarge or magnify this image please do so since I posted it at a fairly high resolution. This illustration also came with the following information you might find interesting:

It's been a while since I uploaded anything that wasn't Transformers, so I thought I'd upload a pin-up I did recently as sort of a commission for IDW Publishing's Editor-In-Chief Chris Ryall. Chris is a big fan of the 1980s character ROM who was a toy that was developed into a Marvel Comic. Unfortunately the rights to ROM are caught up in limbo (which is ironic if you are familiar with ROM fiction) so any future tales of the Galadorian Spaceknight are very much in doubt. However, I was able to at least have some fun with the character.

Amazing ROM rendering by Jeff Slemmons

I randomly came across this art last night while I was trolling around the internet. This one of the most coolest renderings I've ever seen of ROM. I mean I've come across other stuff in my time online but much of it I've seen repeatedly in multiple sites so I don't see much point in putting it here too especially since I started this blog to be filled with more unique content of ROM related art work and news. I love this piece! (which I think is done in pen & ink). The dramatic perspective, the excellent foreshortening just knocks it out of the park. I don't know if this artist spent much time in figure drawing classes or not but clearly he has an eye for human anatomy at different angles.
Jeff, if your out there I sure hope you don't mind me posting this but if you do don't hesitate to contact me and I'll remove it or add some more specific info about it if you want. I'm betting that there are a lot of ROM fans out there who haven't seen this yet and I'd like to make sure they have an opportunity to enjoy the fruits of your labor. Like Will Smith said in the movie Hancock, "good job".

X-Man 31 extended review: Saving Jimmy Marks

Ever since I learned about the existence of this issue of X-Man (1997) and how it featured the return of the most fearsome foe ROM ever faced I knew I'd have to get the full story somehow. Well thanks to ~P~ from Sanctum Sanctorum Comics (see blog role) I now at least have the electronic version of this issue which gave me access to all the clip art I would need to put together a more complete review of this issues story line then I have seen online thus far. I'd like to open things up by mentioning that this issue had a dedication to the original creative team of ROM Spaceknight Bill Mantlo & Sal Buscema. The main character of X-Man is Nathan (Nate) Grey.

Nathan indeed is related to Jean Grey and is also a powerful mutant with telepathic and telekinetic powers. Nathan is haunted by a series of nightmares in which he is trying to protect a young boy form the X-Men who are not at all acting as the heroes they are. One day Nate randomly comes across an article in the paper about an explosion at an orphanage in Clairiton West Virginia which happens to feature a photo of the boy from Nate's dreams and who also happens to be the sole survivor of the blast. Knowing for sure now that something is up Nate travels to Clairiton and learns from the authorities that the boy prior to being sent to the orphanage was found on an empty road in a traumatized state of mind with apparently no identification or memory of how he got there. So next, Nate travels to up state New York where the boy was sent for psychiatric treatment. Once he finds the boy Nate speculates that he must be some sort of mutant and proceeds to find out more by entering the boy's mind which he describes as being "splintered" and seemingly containing duel personalities. At this point in the story the readers are treated to a flash back of the entire back drop story of Hybrid leading all the way up to the last time he was supposedly vanquished by ROM's neutralizer. It turns out that the boy in front of Nate was Hybrid who had again escaped Limbo but did so at the cost of not having been properly reformed in body and mind and so ended up manifesting himself as his Jimmy Marks persona with the Hybrid psyche marginalized in Jimmy's subconscious. The dreams that Nate was experiencing was the Hybrid psyche reaching out to him as a way to lure him to Jimmy. At this point Nate realizes he's made a big mistake by
probing Jimmy's mind as it has made it possible for Hybrid to pull his psyche fully back together and once again Jimmy Marks is replaced in body and soul by the horror known as Hybrid. Hybrid shape shifts into his true self and attacks Nate who quickly finds himself on the defensive against Hybrid's telekinetic and psionic assaults. Nate puts a up a valiant fight but Hybrid eventually gets the upper hand. It looks like Nate is all but doomed when he takes a different strategy to fighting Hybrid by going back into his mind but this time to find the psyche of what remains of the Jimmy Marks's persona. After some probing he finds Jimmy deep within Hybrid's subconscious and makes contact with him. Nate then rescues Jimmy by absorbing his humanity. This has the effect of causing pain and disorientation to Hybrid while adding to Nate's Power and gives him his second wind in a manner of speaking in regards to his battle with Hybrid. On top of this Nate is pissed and now the full realization of Hybrid's evil and the tragedy that was Jimmy Marks causes him to cuts loose with a powerful psi-blast that literally blows Hybrid away. Presumably for good this time. Although in the aftermath Nate speculates that it is plausible that Hybrid could reform his atoms again as he has done before through shear force of will thanks to his inherit mental abilities and unique physiology.

Something of interest in this issue also is that during the fight Hybrid mentions ROM by name which I thought Marvel was unable to do for legal reasons given the licensing issue with Parker Bros./Hasbro. I suppose it's possible the writers wanted to slip that one under the radar for the sake of making this tribute issue more authentic figuring it's hardly likely after all these years since ROM's regular series that Parker Bros./Hasbro is liable to go after Marvel for some minor infraction. For more clip art from this issue go to http://beholdthegeek.blogspot.com/2009_01_01_archive.html