Commissioned sketch: The Shadow.

This was fun. I’ve never drawn The Shadow professionally, but I’ve doodled him quite a bit. It’d be hard to overestimate the impact the Shadow comics published by DC in the 70s had on me. They had an impossibly great line-up of illustrators- Mike Kaluta, Bernie Wrightson, Frank Robbins and E.R. Cruz- and the stories were so much darker, moodier and more brutal than the other comics I was reading at the time. They filled my head with wild notions of the possibilities of pulp melodrama, and by featuring such a wide range of styles on the same character, help raise my awareness of the effect an individual artist’s approach could have on a story.

Black and white commissioned sketch of The Shadow. Drawn in brush and ink on bristol.
Black and white commissioned sketch of The Shadow. Drawn in brush and ink on bristol.