ROM's Cafe

Located on A street in Hayward California I swear when I first saw this place the logo looked like it was directly taken off from any issue of the ROM spaceknight series. Just a coincidence I'm sure but pretty cool to see just the same.

A new commission fan art piece by artist Jim Califiore. Well I'm posting it here so obviously I like it and I don;t even mind the minor artistic liberties Califiore took with ROM's armor. In fact, this is a nice basis of what IDW's reboot could have looked like. I'm quite positive this would have gone over much better with the fan base both new and old.

 

One of the things I love about fan art is that you don't have to worry about any sort of legal red tape when it comes to who you want to feature together. This latest here is by you're truly. I've had this cross over character concept idea for a while now I'm glad I finally got around to getting to it.

 

I spotted this a couple days ago along the side of some kind of portable office for a moving company in San Francisco. Just another good example of the cool public art you can find around here when it comes to all things comics and sci-fi.The first two films from the ALIEN franchise were absolutely classic iconic sci-fi horror and I love em both. However, I can't say the same for the rest unfortunately. 

I was recently reflecting on the "ROM Remix" project from several years ago https://romremix.tumblr.com/ as a concept it was kinda cool but ultimately poorly executed due to the poor quality artists that contributed to the project. The lone exception being Robert Duckett who did page 4. He did a fairly good job especially in the first few panels.

Fan art, all the different ways to "mix it up"

Sometimes I like to draw or paint something when I'm in the mood to do some fan art http://csuhsux.deviantart.com/gallery/  And other times I like to pick up some fan art done by other artists and kinda play around with it in photoshop. But I don't do that because I don't like the art work to begin with I do it because I very much do like the art work but find myself sufficiently intrigued by it so that I want to experiment with variant versions of it.
I do this at least a couple times a week as a hobby but you wouldn't know it most of the time I don't bother posting the stuff I come up with. In this case I am with this one which was originally done by artist Jeff Slemons 
http://lkseitz.blogspot.com/2011/05/spaceknight-art-by-jeff-slemons.html
Slemons has done at least 3 other Rom pieces that I know of and from it all you can see how he really likes to emphasize the interplay between light and shadow values. He's also excellent in the basic principles of good figure composition like with foreshortening, perspective and anatomical proportions giving his work a very professional look.

Gary Martin Jr. "a Rom curator" has been archiving all (both good and bad) the known Rom fan art out there from over the years. I love nothing more then well done fan art but I'm sorry to say what's turned up in the last couple weeks or so would best be described as abysmal. Unfortunately the latest pages from the Rom Remix project falls into that description for me although pg 4 and 9 are an exception but they're from last year.
http://romremix.tumblr.com/
As with anything meant to benefit Bill Mantlo I really want to be more enthusiastic about this project but the love for it just isn't there. Obviously a big part of that is all the amateurish looking work in it but after having contacted a hand full of the artists last year working on it I was surprised to find out they weren't even Rom or Bill Mantlo fans per se and in a couple of cases hadn't even heard of Rom or Bill until they got involved in the project. That gives me that feeling you get when you pick up an American flag and find the "Made In China" tag on it.

On a more upbeat note Bill Mantlo recently was given the Bill Finger Award. Never heard of that award but apparently it has to do with comic book writers who never got their due recognition during their careers. There might be something to that the owner of my local comic shop didn't know who Bill Mantlo was when I mentioned Bill to him a couple year back, go figure. For more details on the award go to . . .
http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=51711