Speaking of Japan, part two … Cliff Chiang shares some 10-year-old artwork for a project that never saw the light of day:
I imagined that the DC universe had a band of Japanese superheroes inspired by their original Western counterparts. It’s basically a mix of DC, old school anime and kaiju. This got a tiny bit of interest around the offices (this was a year prior to the Marvel Mangaverse) but it never went anywhere because they already had Chris Moeller’s giant robot Justice League book in the works.
May 19th, 2008 at 9:04 am
Man… I would LOVE to see this happen at some point. GO!GO!GO!
May 19th, 2008 at 10:25 am
So why does the girl look like Marvel’s Phoenix? Who is she meant to be?
Love Aquaman!
May 19th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
I think the girl is Wonder Woman. She has the lasso and there’s a golden eagle on her chest.
May 19th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
I recognize the Ultraman (Aquaman), Captain Harlock (Wonder Woman) and Speed Racer (Flash) pastiches, but who is Green Lantern supposed to be a take on? Astro Boy?
May 19th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
That’s too awesome for words! A great mix of classic anime and classic characters. Why is this dead? How do we revive it?
May 19th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
Call me narrow minded (go ahead, it’s OK) but I am SO glad this never came to be… WTF is with Aquaman and GL??? Pass.
Flash doesn’t look so bad, but what the f*** would he need a CAR for? Seems less likely than God needing a starship.
I can’t believe I just referenced Star Trek V.
May 19th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
Shaun, the designs are for redesigned DC characters, they’re about people in Japan who were inspired by the heroes. So it’s not the Flash who needs a car, its some superfan who dresses like him.
May 19th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
This is so terrible. Every single one of those poses was traced from a pre-existing piece of art by another creator. But I guess if it’s Japanese, it’s okay to copy the work outright and not give any cash or credit to Tsuburaya, Leiji Matsumoto, Tatsunoko, or the guys who made that movie whose poster Chiang traced to get Green Lantern?
Thank God nobody at DC put this into production. I think this stuff would count as plagiarism even under Japan’s lax copyright laws.
May 19th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
Wow, Shaun and Lynxara. Way to go with the intelligent and well-thought-out responses without actually properly evaluating the material within the context in which the concepts were applied.
*sarcastic slow clapping commences*
May 19th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
Lynxara, these were for a proposal, not for publication. Swiping stuff for publication is bad. Swiping stuff for a proposal is just a way to throw something together quickly. It’s not the same thing.
May 19th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
Actually, these designs were done as a goof, but editor friends at DC asked me to pitch after they saw the drawings. I didn’t pursue it very aggressively, particularly since I felt that a lot of the charm lay in the playful “rip-off” elements. The obvious copyright infringement is one reason why I never thought the project would see the light of day, but it’s cool to see that it’s getting a lot of interest now.
Though a lot of the poses were certainly inspired by frames of the cartoons, part of the fun when I did these was trying to mimic the original drawing styles — I’ll take the charges of swiping/tracing as a compliment that I stayed “on model.” That same year, I also did a bunch of my own “Superfriends” model sheets at the time in an attempt to deconstruct Toth and maybe even land a couple of pages in Evan Dorkin’s “World’s Funnest” one-shot.
Thanks for picking this up, JK!
May 19th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
Aww… those look pretty neat, and way better than the young Japanese heroes/JLA mishmashes that Morrison cranked out.