At The Pulse, writer Tony Bedard — with the help of concept art by Renato Guedes — gives readers hope for Supergirl:
“One nice thing is that I am relatively unburdened by knowledge of previous Supergirls. Yeah, I read some of their previous appearances, but I never did figure out what the deal was with the girl/matrix/angel thing or anything like that. I’m just sticking to the basics: Kara is from Krypton, she’s insanely powerful, but she wants to be good. I also happen to think she needs to eat a sandwich and cover up a bit, but then I’m a father.”
Bedard debuts on Supergirl with August’s Issue 20.
May 30th, 2007 at 8:53 am
I think Bedard’s got the right idea going in. Keep it simple, which Supergirl has been anything but.
I’m interested in seeing what he can bring to the book.
May 30th, 2007 at 10:43 am
Fantastic. It’s encouraging to see a few of my fellow males “get it” and are making a deliberate, very public effort to distance themselves from the piggish excess of the last several years when it comes to Supergirl.
May 30th, 2007 at 11:01 am
Not a Dark Avenger and not a Goth Punk, but almost certainly a Muffin Top.
May 30th, 2007 at 12:58 pm
Bedard’s earned a lot of good will with his work for Crossgen and his handling of Exiles. I think I’ll give his Supergirl a shot.
May 30th, 2007 at 6:13 pm
Too much photo reference. I’m really not impressed by the look of Supergirl. It appears as though a model was paid to wear a homemade Supergirl costume and he simply drew it as it appeared, right down to every single (and excessive) wrinkle. No doubt the artist is supremely talented, but I’d love to see him develop a style that is not so heavily dependent upon photo reference.
May 30th, 2007 at 6:18 pm
Can you say for certain that Guedes relies on photo reference? Just because it’s realistic doesn’t mean he’s copying it from a photograph. He might just be *that* good.
May 30th, 2007 at 7:14 pm
If not photo reference, then he uses a live model. Probably both.
May 31st, 2007 at 8:12 pm
Guedes is great! His characters look like human beings, with human-being bodies. When he pencils, inks, and colors something, it’s typically of a very high quality.
June 1st, 2007 at 4:06 pm
“His characters look like human beings, with human-being bodies.”
And thus my point is made. This depiction of Supergirl looks like your average human being. There is nothing special or ’super’ about her appearance.
Great comic artists (Toth, Byrne, Romita Sr., Romita Jr., The Buscemas, Parlov, Eisner, Frenz, Mazzuchelli, etc.) used photo reference as a tool, and not exclusively. I’ve seen Guedes’s work on Omac, and the same holds true, an overreliance on photo-reference to stage panels/scenes, instead of figuring them out through study, repetition/practice, and imagination. Why not publish a comic with the photographs instead of drawing directly from them? With the advent of photoshop, it is entirely possible that any number of shortcuts can be made when it comes to capturing the ‘realism’ many seem to desire. I simply prefer my heroes to be iconic in appearance, and more stylized in design. These concept ’sketches’ do neither one of these things.
July 11th, 2008 at 9:05 am
In my opinion I actually think it’s a fair representation of what Supergirl should look like. I mean the people on Krypton weren’t heavily muscular. Clark only looks that way because he was a farmboy growing up and gained a decent amount of muscle.