Green Hornet

Mar02
on March 2, 2015
Posted In: Insect Characters

For some time I wanted to create a gallery of characters with the insect motif.
I was going to cover only comic book characters, but turns out that the first character in the list started in other media.

The Green Hornet is a vigilante that fights crime by night accompanied by his loyal sidekick Kato in a high tech car named Black Beauty. His alter ego is Britt Reid, the wealthy publisher of the Daily Sentinel newspaper. The general public and the police perceives the vigilante as a criminal, which makes easier for him to infiltrate the underworld.

He debuted on the radio in 1936. Between 1940 and 1941 appeared in two serial films. In 1940 he appeared in comics, jumping from one publisher to another, disappearing and reappearing years later. He is currenty licensed to Dynamite Entertainment. Between 1966 and 1967, Green Hornet appeared in a TV series that had even some cross-over episodes with the Batman series. In that series, Kato was played by Bruce Lee. In 2011, he appeared in a movie by Columbia Pictures. Seth Rogen was the Green Hornet and Jay Chou was Kato.

The Green Hornet

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Charlie Hebdo Shooting

Jan09
on January 9, 2015
Posted In: Tributes

On January 7th, 2015, a group of armed men attacked the offices of the french magazine Charlie Hebdo. They killed 12 people, amongst them 4 cartoonists and 1 police officer.

Who did they draw?

Update: January 9th, 2015.
A huge manhunt happens on France (more than 80,000 agents). The 2 gunmen responsible for the attacks are tracked and cornered inside a printing plant in Dammartin-en-Goele. The police managed to save the hostage and the criminals were killed.
Almost at the same time, a hostage situation developed in a kosher market in Paris. The 3rd gunman was also killed by the police agents, but not before he could kill at least 4 hostages.

Mispelled hashtag

January 11th, 2015.
Rallies across France gather around 4 million people on the streets. Around 40 world leaders joined and marched side by side on the streets of Paris. Other manifestations were reported all over the world.

The phrase “Je suis Charlie” appeared massively everywhere as an expression of solidarity to the victims. It rapidly become the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie in social media.

#JeSuisAhmed followed, refering to the police agent Ahmed Merabet, himself a muslin killed by the extremists.

In the middle of all that #JesusIsCharlie appeared. I’m not certain if it is a simple spelling error or a deliberate joke.

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More about Fireant

Mar06
on March 6, 2010
Posted In: Fireant Files

Right after the origin story I’ve made 3 more stories.

The second comic told how the professor Z, after escaping prison, became the fearsome Anteater.

The third comic showed the first time Fireant clashed against Anteater. It also showed the hero rescuing his beloved girlfriend Rebecca, who was in danger.

The fourth and final story was set some time after those events, and it started by showing how Fireant was fighting crime in a daily basis. The story then escalated to an extraterrestrial invasion that was stopped by Fireant alone. At the end, the invading fleet was diverted from Earth, leaving behind his leader, the Dark Conqueror, who swore revenge against Fireant.

I admit my drawing were not so good at the time, and I had to practice a lot using every mean available. Without internet to research, the only people I knew to like comic books were my brother, the neighbor I mentioned before and his brothers and cousins.

We exchanged ideas on how to draw our characters and even about how to create stories. In the end I improved my style by copying my favorite artists.

Yes, I copied scenes, poses, scenarios and so on from the comics we had in hand. My neighbor used to copy his stuff from Marvel comics, while I copied mine from DC comics.

The result? Below you can see two pages from the second Fireant story, side by side with their references. Most of the times I copied few frames from different comics, some other times I managed to copy whole sequences, even whole pages.

On page 5 from the second story, I copied 3 frames from Adventures of Superman #432.

Fireant #2, page 5, frame 1Fireant #2, page 5, frame 2Fireant #2, page 5, frame 3

On page 12, the copy went even further. It was a whole page from Superman #9.

Fireant #2, page 12

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