80 Billion Years Later
The other day I got ahold of Frank Cho's Shanna the She Devil TPB. I've never really gone for Frank Cho, particularly that Liberty Meadows thing he does, which has never managed to hold my attention for more than a couple strips. Shanna had me with the concept alone, "a bikini-clad woman genetically engineered by Nazis lives in the jungle fighting dinosaurs," which sounds like a winner to me. Though Frank Cho's art is phenomenally great, with a premise like that I was expecting something a little more on the absurd side of things. I know, you are thinking "how could it not be absurd?" Somehow, it just feels really ordinary despite things like a bolo made of dynamite blowing a T-rex's head off or Shanna wading through a sea of velociraptors dispatching them left and right with a machete. It's still good, a tight little adventure story, and somehow takes itself seriously without making a fool of itself. The Nazi connection also reminded me of Hellboy right off the get-go, and Shanna's Nazi origins are never touched on. Not that you can expect a thing like Hellboy from anything but Hellboy, but, you know, Hellboy is really weird! Shanna is just a hot chick fighting dinosaurs! Nothing weird about that!

Anyway, even before I got the comic (perhaps I got the comic because) I was wanting to draw a girl riding a dinosaur, so here we go. I ended up putting it off for well over a week, because the gift store just moved to a new location and I got myself good and tired moving it all week long. Still, moving a whole store in just a week (5 days actually) is not bad! So now that things are back to "normal" I can lose myself in this more easily. I'm really pleased with this, though when I look at something sort of similar I did before I'm a little surprised by how much more subdued the coloring is. I didn't post it here, but the same thing happened (although at least somewhat intentionally) when I drew this picture of Sonic. What's going on??

Also, 88 Billion Years Ago!!