In the issue of FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD SPIDER-MAN I’m working on now, I have a very brief scene in which Logan/Wolverine appears. As usual, even when I’m drawing a character that’s only in one scene…. and sometimes only in one PANEL– I wanted to do a brief sketch to get a feel for him. I’ve drawn LOGAN before– most notably in the X-MEN 1/2 that Todd Dezago and I produced for WIZARD and MARVEL years back (which led us to the realization that we wanted to continue with the fun fantasy-themed type of comics…. and thus TELLOS was born). But it’s been a while– and so I wanted to refresh my ‘drawing memory’. I’ve noticed that over the years… ESPECIALLY since the X-MEN movies have come out… that people are drawing LOGAN much taller and less stocky than he was when he was originally created. He’s always been much shorter than the normal human being… and very thickly muscled. In fact, I can remember– especially during the Claremont/Byrne days of UNCANNY X-MEN– that people often referred to LOGAN as ‘shrimp’, ‘shorty’ and ‘midget’. But since the not-so-short Hugh Jackman played the character, he’s been portrayed more like his movie version than the original comic book version. I think I’ll stick with the short and stocky version for my scene….. although since he’s seated the whole time, it won’t matter much anyway.

The same ‘syndrome’, if you will, has happened to Ben Grimm/THE THING over the years as well. When the FANTASTIC FOUR comic book first began, Ben was actually a tad SHORTER than the rest of the cast. At least, he was shorter than Reed. And when I first started drawing FF myself, I actually started off making him smaller than he had been portrayed in recent years. But as is often the case with me, I read one too many message board posts discussing how ‘wimpy’ I made him look– and I guess I was subconsciously influenced by those comments (I KNOW I was now, looking back… but I don’t think I knew it then)– because as time went on, I made Ben more and more huge and hulking. Go back and check the difference between his appearance in issue #60, and his appearance in issue– say– #520 (back to the original numbering…. I didn’t work on the comic THAT long….). There’s a big change.

OK… that’s it for today.

This is Entry 161.

Mike

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