The Legion of Spider-Villains: After the first round of DC-Marvel Amalgams, I spent the better part of the next year doodling characters in my notebooks. Soon after, DC & Marvel collaborated on another series of Amalgam books and included a Spider-Boy follow-up with the Legion of Galactic Guardians. While the title of the book followed the obvious idea of mixing the Legion and the GotG, the characters themselves were a hodgepodge of Legionnaires with whatever Marvel hero from whichever era suited the mix-up best. It was fine, but I really thought they ought to have stuck to mixing and matching one group with another, keeping the idea thematically in line as they'd done with Challengers of the Fantastic or the Magnetic Men... Along those lines, I had already done a mixing the Legion with Spidey's Rogues Gallery. There were a couple of ideas that the Amalgam comic duplicated (Electro and Lightning Lad), but such is life... 

The line-up: 

Shrieking Violence!

Electro Lad!

Paste-Pot Pete Ross!

Just a Guy Named Jo!

Chemical Kingpin!

Octavius 8!

The Living Ferro-Lad!

Night Cat!

Blob Goblin!

Princess Mysteria!

Mon-Ev! (Venom, spelled backwards!)

Sable Lass!

Karnage Kid!

Chameleon Boy!

Lunar Wolf!

Sin-Eater Lad!

Sand Boy!

Manhunter + Thundra = "Manhandler!"

Superman + Him = "Adam Forelock!" also, "The Mighty Ice-Sis!"

Donny Thunder & Thundergod!

Captain America + Death = "American Harvester!" shown here with her family members, "American Dream" and "Manifest Destiny!"

One of my first and still one of my favorite Amalgam ideas: Doctor Octopus + Starro the Conqueror = "Doctor Thirteen!"

And Darren, your work is really solid and imaginative! The Kirby-ness of that Aztec style figure is fun. I especially enjoyed the radiant energy patterns he's emitting! Very high quality stuff!

Thanks for the kind words Brian, I really appreciate them.

I also really liked a lot of the artwork you posted, although I'm not overly partial to amalgams, that bias doesn't interfere with appreciating some of the lovely lines you've thrown down.

Darren, really nice to see your work again. I hope all is going well for you and your comics work.

Carmen, I'll join in the chorus' of praise on the fabulous full figure in your last post. You've got a lovely splash page there, should you intend to take it further.

Peter, the grey-scale really pulls this image together, nicely done.

-D

I conducted some additional experiments on the working time of Copic Markers.  (see below)

Pen used:  Copic 0 and N1 on Strathmore 500 series illustration board.

These are all straight out of the scanner (Epson GT-20000) at 300dpi, full color scan.

(Descriptions below the image)

Test A)  This is the same one from the other thread, dry paper, no blender.

There's seems to be 2+ minutes of safe working time here, 5 if you aren't overly concerned about how contiguous the tone is (i.e., if you were putting it down mottled, you probably won't notice any difference).

Test B)  This has 0 colorless blender put down first, then N1 put down at 2,5 and 10 minutes.  Interestingly, you do get a bit more working time if you do this.  Also interestingly, at 10 minutes the N1 application seems to go dense at the edges!

Test C)  Same as above, but there was an attempt to "revitalize" the ink by adding blender before the final application.  This almost works.  The tone laid down this way seems of the same value as the initial tone, but there are noticeable bleeding affects, but they are quite blurry and, well, that's gotta be useable for something.  :)

Test D)  This is the same as above, except that 0 blender is added continuously over the whole surface every minute or so to keep it wet.  Not surprisingly, you get a very "blended" look, and there is no hint of tone stacking at all.  This could be very worth knowing if you plan on toning larger real-estate, particularly any sort of base-tone.

Anyway, hope that's useful to someone!

Might be interesting to try this with color Copics, but I don't have any.