Scott Koblish

The Eight Immortals! Page Eight!

Matt is the second "greeter." Just sort of an inside joke.

Isaac, you'll note that Iron Crutch's crutch has changed from the original design, streamlined, it is damaged from long use and it has the teeth of some monstrous animal embedded into the top. I wanted to give every part of an Immortal's design a chance to have a story about it later. Surely the dragon's eye at the base of the Sage's sword has a good story behind it, just as the teeth of some great animal in Iron Crutch's crutch has. The Immortals are especially gifted with various accoutrements, some from Matt's research, some from our own creation.

I rearranged all the panels on this page - originally Iron Crutch's reveal was on the following page, but the page seemed too open and empty with just the first three panels in it, so we adjusted and added the last panel of Iron Crutch. He was so much fun to draw. Matt did a really great job with his dialogue and his characterization. I love all the text, he just outdid himself with all the great stuff he wrote - clearly no adjective or adverb has ever escaped Matt Morra's steel-trap mind.

Matt's written application exam asking for an exemption from his anger management class follows-

"Comics is a knock-off medium. Copied, rewritten, and swiped a hundred times over by a hundred people from a hundred sources, there are so many layers of unoriginality that they have formed a deep, shiny lacquer of respectability. Don’t be fooled by this pretty veneer. Comics are, always have been, and always will be pulp fiction. Hell, poop Fiction -- regurgitated excrement, served up, eaten, digested, and regurgitated again for someone else to eat. I don’t know why I’m saying this here on page 8 of Immortals but I want to get it out before I die."

Bonus section-
At one point I had thrown my hat into the running to draw the Micronauts at Devil's Due, and had to whip up quick samples of the characters, so I used some of the Immortals art, cut and pasted in some Micronauts characters and presented those. The result was as you'd guess, since I have never drawn the Micronauts professionally. However, in the interest of showing all the madness I have gone through, I'll include a few of the pages I did with the Micronauts characters as I come across them. Here's the first of those pages. It's kinda funny to see it in this context, but might be too distracting to do all of them, it might ruin the pacing of the story, so perhaps I'll scan in one more altered page, when we get to the General's story. It was kinda neat to draw Baron Karza though- good villain, I wonder, since he was based on the Japanese toy, was he designed before or after Darth Vader?

posted by Scott Koblish @ 8:55 PM