Another one for my berzerk buddy @happymonkeyshoes’s SYMBIOTE SUNDAYS! Slightly late, but don’t make a fuss, or Venom is gonna eat your brain! 🕷

My demented pal @happymonkeyshoes, has been having some twisted alien fun with SYMBIOTE SUNDAYS, and invited me to join in the madness! So here’s Carnage, violently bursting forth with an almost audible SPLORCH. (Check my Instagram for a quick video showing some of my process)

So, last year I drew redesigns of Kwannon and Betsy from the X-Men, then decided to draw a psychic fusion of the two, and the first drawing above was the initial result. When I stepped back, I felt like something was off with it, and the more I looked at it, the more I disliked it. Finally I decided to scrap the drawing, and I never posted it (until now). (At the time, I decided to start over and complete a more streamlined and straightforward attempt–click here to revisit that result along with my drawings of Kwannon, Betsy, and Logan)

But back to the bad one 😆… it’s a pretty weak, cluttered composition, and lacks the sketchy energy of the character redesigns I was doing, yet also falls short of being a more polished drawing. I think it was a case where I was feeling a bit ambitious and got carried away with that momentum, yet failed to balance it with sufficient forethought and planning. I know that for my own process, I need to take care of composition and planning issues as early as possible–thinking “I’ll fix this as I go” pretty much never works out.

Anywayzzz, I recently stumbled back on this drawing while sorting through my files. With the benefit of some distance, I felt it was an interesting artifact after-the-fact… a byproduct of the process. And the story is maybe worth sharing just in case anyone else is out there kinda whiffing it on the first try? 🤔😆

When I was a little kid, Kang the Conqueror was the action figure from Secret Wars who I didn’t recognize and had a funny shaped helmet (I wasn’t reading comics yet). When I was a little older and devoting all my meager allowance-based resources to comics, I still didn’t ‘get’ the character.

A few years later and that all changed when Kurt Busiek and Carlos Pacheco’s Avengers Forever came out, and finally I understood the greatness of Kang the Conqueror. No shortage of credit goes to Kurt Busiek for his epic writing, but of course today my mind is on Carlos Pacheco who we lost yesterday. An incredible artist and storyteller, every single panel that he drew was a masterpiece, and every character was a star. Gone far too soon, RIP.