THUNDERBOLTS SPREAD

For the recent Point One issue of Thunderbolts, there was a double page spread that featured nearly every Thunderbolt who has ever been on the team. This was a LOT of fun for me as I got to have a go at characters I had never drawn before, like Hawkeye, Venom, Bullseye, and even Jolt from the original T-Bolts run. I used the opportunity to draw Crossbones and Juggernaut too, who had both left the team at this stage. There were a lot of characters to compose on the page and when I started doing my layouts at the usual size (5x7.5cm) I just wasn't able to get them all composed the way I wanted. I decided to make the layout bigger; so I could both compose all the characters and get a lot of the figure construction figured out before I started pencilling. I did this layout 3 times bigger than usual; takes up most of an A3 page.


As I recall, after seeing this layout Jeff Parker (Tbolts mastermind) thought that the lettering placement should go through the image more, instead of being sidelined to either side of the page, which was a perfectly good note. To rectify this, I moved the more recent T-Bolts line-up more to the right and took a couple of those and moved them up a bit. See how further up Man-Thing is in this version and how much space is left between Venom and Ghost.


This took a lot of time to research and get right but I'm really happy with how it came out. Jeff didn't make me add all those T-Bolts, the script just asked to include the main characters over the years. I can't be sure, but I got nearly all of them. Might be missing 4 or 5, but I wanted to give long term fans a really cool image where they could see their favourite character from the long-running series.

Dec.