Some of Celina Hernandez's Super Girls...

After reading Reignbow and Dee-Va (the subject of the previous post) but before writing about it, I spent some time looking at artist Celina Hernandez's artwork in her MySpace gallery. You can go click around there yourself if you like; there's some pretty fun art there, including these cute little versions of the title characters of her comic.

If you don't want to take the trouble of doing that whole extra click to get there though, I thought I'd highlight a few of her drawings of some super-ladies here.

Ready?


Here's that one X-lady from the Bad Days of the X-Men, the one who was a ninja who didn't wear pants, and was maybe a psychic, who also had a laser dagger sword thing because why not, and her name and costume and powers had nothing at all to do with each other and was therefore a terrible idea of a superhero.

I'm not a fan of this X-person...what's her name...Psylocke.

Anyway, I like the stripped down simplicity of her here, and I once read an awful Death's Head comic where this X-person was so anatomically improbable I couldn't believe it saw print; she was all pelvis. Usually artists explode the breasts or legs, but she was just a giant pelvis with limbs hanging from it. Gah. Here, her pelvis is clearly only part of her body.

And also, she has a pretty ribbon.



Here's Power Girl. It's kinda neat to see such a simplified, two-dimensional version of the character, but beyond that, I don't really care for this one too much. It's still better than some of the images of Power Girl that DC has paid artists a lot of money to put on terrible, terrible covers though.



Here we have a Wonder Woman, and it's a very manga kinda Wonder Woman. I like the zig-zag posture—you can practically see a lightning bolt shape from her head to neck to torso to lower body. And the hip-to-thigh ratio is...intriguing. Does Wonder Woman have some wondrous quadracep muscles or...I don't know. But I kinda like this one.



And here's her She-Hulk. I like this one quite a lot. All of the proportions are pretty much perfect, in an Amazonian kind of way (right down to having big, powerful forearms for Popeye-like punching power and a crushing grip), it's super-simplified but detailed enough that with costume and coloring you know who it is, and it's manga-influenced without being manga derivative.

I also like the sketchy coloring, and the fact that you can still see the pencil marks Hernandez used as a guide. Those things would drive me crazy in a finished, sequential art comic book, but they look pretty cool in a single, static image like this.

Review: Reignbow and Dee-Va #1

I used to think that Brian Andersen’s So Super Duper, his self-published book about a flamboyant and feminine super-hero doesn’t seem to realize the apparent fact that he’s gay, was the gayest comic book ever (Except Batman).

But now I’ve read Andersen’s Reignbow and Dee-Va, and it’s much, much gayer.

That’s probably in large part because our gay hero Reignbow actually knows he’s gay, so while some of his behavior tends to be just as, what’s the word…flaming as So Super Duper’s protagonist Psyche’s behavior, he also makes jokes, puns and innuendo with his boyfriend. And makes out with him repeatedly. And looks right at the reader while stroking his giant, Cable-sized gun after firing it and remarking that he’s spent.

But it’s also the way Reignbow jumps through skylights:
See what I mean?

Anyway, Reignbow and Dee-Va opens in an alley, with the colorful crusaders talking about what sounds like a party of some sort.

What they find inside, however, are confused looking vampires in matching uniforms. This leads to a fight that dominates most of the issue, with the leads bantering, battling and busting out bizarre beauty products.

For example, Reignbow applies sparkly lip gloss before the fight (in a panel complete with the sound effect “SPARKLY!”), and Dee-Va deals with some vampires thusly: The very next panel shows two vampires having their heads CHUNK CHUNK-ed off by those buzzsaw eyelashes.

And here’s Reignbow wielding a whip that Dee-Va braided from her “100 percent steel-polyblend” wig in the space of, like, two panels: The art is by Celina Hernandez (Andersen draws his own So Super Duper) and it’s pretty good stuff.

There’s an obvious manga influence in the character design, and while the art is obviously simplified and occurring in a flattened out space, it’s not at all detrimental to the story, which is pretty much a string of silly jokes hanging on a fight/rescue plot. It looks and reads a bit like an ironically simplified and exaggerated Cartoon Network original show. Only with sound effects like “Splooge!” (it’s lip balm, I swear!) and a hero who shouts about how he hates pussy.

If this looks like something that you think might be up your alley, you can see a preview of the first seven pages and find out how to order it by visiting Sosuperduper.com.

And hey, while you’re there, why not buy a copy of So Super Duper #5?



*Full disclosure: Writer Brian Andersen contributes comics reviews to Newsarama.com’s weekly Best Shots column, as do I, and I wrote and drew a back-up story for his comic So Super Duper**.



**Speaking of which, So Super Duper #5, featuring a back-up Every Day Is Like Wednesday/So Super Duper crossover rather shoddily written, drawn, lettered and colored by me, is still available from sosuperduper.com for $4. That's just one penny more than Secret Invasion! Here’s a one-panel previw of it: