Tiny Tintins…
Recently, with the encouragement of my wife, I’ve been reconnecting with my geek past. As I’ve done so, I’ve noticed a couple of things. First, I have almost completely lost the level of acquisitiveness that used to drive so much of my collecting. I just don’t feel the need to own 95% of what I used to think would be awesome to have to put on a shelf or hang on a wall. My desires have changed, or more accurately, narrowed and become more refined. I realized that what really still excited me was the art itself, not the end product that was sold in stores, or at convention booths.
So this Spring, I was at the Chicago Comics and Entertainment Expo, wandering through artists alley, perusing sketchbooks, original pages and prints, and really not finding anything that worked for my needs. Or more accurately, my wants
My wants were:
-Artists whose styles I enjoy. While the prevalence of “house styles” is nowhere near what it was in the 90s and early ’00s, if I can’t look at your stuff and have a pretty good idea of who drew it, I’m not interested.
-Characters I have an affinity for. This is where my age comes through. I tend to skew more golden and silver age, and frankly, more second-tier. I’ve never had any great affinity for Wolverine, or frankly, for Batman. They’ve both had great stories and amazing work done featuring them, but they’re not the guys I’ve latched on to. I’m more of a Hank Pym/Blue Beetle kind of guy.
-Size. I don’t have any room currently to display stuff, and in the future, it’ll be limited.
-Reasonable pricing. Kind of self-explanatory, but also important because I don’t want to insult anyone, especially artists whose work I admire, by undervaluing their work.
-Finally, I wanted there to be some good, almost conversational element to this. I didn’t want to just walk up, plunk down a commission and come pick it up in a couple hours. This sort of relates to the character thing I mentioned above. I wanted to ask for something that they didn’t get asked to draw that often.
So, as I was walking around, it came together for me. I saw plenty of artists working on sketch cards. For the uninitiated, they’re 2.5” x 3.5”, the size of a standard baseball card. They come in a variety of surfaces. Lots of the artists offered them as a commission option, at a reasonable price.
Now all I needed was a character. I immediately decided that what I wanted was to get a bunch of artists whose work I liked to draw the same character. I thought it would be great to someday have dozens of small drawings of a favorite character displayed together. But what character?
Tintin.
It hit me just like that. I love the books, love the character, and he probably isn’t that common a commission request.
So I’m posting the first few sketch cards, and will continue to do so as I get more. I’ll try to include links to the artists’ sites whenever possible.
