"Apollo and Midnighter" by Jill Johansen

The comic book imprint Wildstorm printed it's last on the 22nd, and I wanted to do a picture of my two favourite Wildstorm characters, Apollo and Midnighter from The Authority as a tribute of sorts. I've never been a massive fan of Wildstorm in general, but there were some books that I really loved, and thinking back on it, I think the loss of Wildsorm is a sad thing. It published some excellent books, like The Authority (which had ups and downs, but the ups were excellent.) Ex Machina, Planetary, Victorian Undead, Sleeper, it was the umbrella under which Alan Moore's ABC comics were published, and it was where The Boys first appeared before DC chickened out on it. So, anyway. Farewell, Wildstorm.

DC says it will continue to use the characters, somehow, and thankfully Apollo and Midnighter were among the most popular, so I am sure we will see these two again, alternating between utterly badass and sweet, which was their charm. How they'll show up again... who knows? Though I think that with the final arcs of The Authority, the team is so broken it can't be salvaged, it just lost the *feel* of The Authority, went against the spirit of the book, and broke too many established rules of the universe, (Like, say, the Doctor is always male, while the Spirit of the Century is always female. Always. This is VERY firmly established. Swift as The Doctor?! Are you kidding me? Dumbest idea ever for so MANY reasons... Habib was ALIVE at the end of DnA's run, for one, the always male thing for another, and the sheer contrived coincidence of it. River is an insult to the Jennies, and poor Jack and his face cybernetics and that absurd costume they stuck him in.... Luckily, Apollo and Midnighter left the team by that point to join the Wildcats, where they were treated well, they were saved from being ruined, aside from the spiked shoulderpads of doom on Midnighter, (which you will note, I left off, because they're stupid) and the random punching in the face of an innocent bystander. Midnighter has always been very, very violent, often downright sadistic. But he only attacks those that deserve it... ok, it's often debatable if the 'crime' warrants the punishment he dishes out, but still, they've at least done *something* wrong if he attacks them. Not old men asking what's going on.) um. where was I? Went off on a geek-rant there. oh yeah, The Authority is broken beyond repair so I think they either need to disregard the post DnA stuff entirely, reboot it, or do a Apollo/Midnighter duo book. Preferably under the Vertigo imprint for any of the options. If they bring the characters into the DCU proper, I have no doubt Midnighter will promptly show up in Batman Inc. with Apollo along for the ride as the most absurdly overpowered "Robin" ever. :-P cus there is no way you could bring Midnighter in without Apollo, that would just be wrong. Though I really do like Apollo, so I hope he does get a chance to shine, not relegated to Midnighter's shadow as so often happens. I love Midnighter, I really do, but I'd like to see Apollo's potential explored too, he could be a lot of fun in the right hands. He's not just a Superman knockoff any more than Midnighter is just Batman knockoff. That was obviously their original  primary purpose, Superman/Batman standins and then, you know, slash them together. :p But they've grown beyond that, especially Midnighter, I just want Apollo to get the same development. He's WAY cooler than Supes anyway. ;)

Now that that's out of the way, Let me tell you of the problems this picture gave me. I WANTED to have it done by Wednesday, to post on the same day that Wildcats 30 came out, but my computer had other ideas... On Monday, I was doing the line art on Midnighter, and Apollo was finished when I went to save the picture... it was at that instant that my computer suffered a BSOD. When it came back up, the file was corrupted. I tried a few things to try and repair the file, but none worked, it was toast, all that work, it had to be around 20 hours by that point, gone in an instant. Luckily, a friend of mine is a fan of The Authority as well (though he's more of a Jack Hawksmoor kind of guy) so I was showing him progress images. I had Apollo and Midnighter's faces at full resolution saved from that. They were jpegs, but they could be used with minimal effort. Apollo's body lineart could likewise be salvaged somewhat, it needed a lot more cleaning up since it had been shrunk, but it was a lot faster than redrawing it... Midnighter had to be redrawn from scratch aside from his head. Of course, he's the hard one. >.< And then it was Christmas, so I had limited time to work on it, so I never finished it until the morning of the 26th (Saturday).

Also, Midnighter was certainly a challenge compared to Apollo. Apollo's got this simple elegance to his design... and then you have Midnighter, fiddly details all over the place. Buckles, straps, fancy gloves, complex mask, boots, oh man, how I hate drawing feet.  and black leather! gah! Have you ever tried to colour black leather? He looks cool, don't get me wrong. But damn, was he hard to draw.