Fantastic Four #306 Commission

FF #306 is the first comic I ever purchased. I've looked for the cover or even an interior page of the original art for years. Thus far, I've only found one page and it is owned by someone on the same quest as I am.

Finally, I resolved just to recreate the cover.

I contacted Drew Moss to work on this commission. I wanted him to give me his interpretation of the cover. The idea is to do a complete recreation of the cover with Drew doing pencils, Stacie Ponder on inks, and me doing lettering and colors.



Here you see Drew layouts for the cover. He's changed all the poses to make them more close-up and more dramatic. I'm really digging Diablo's pose.

However, there are some minor changes that were made in the pencils.


Before we get to the pencils let's take a look at the head shots for the corner box. Drew pencilled the heads for the corner box on a separate sheet of paper. These are actually quite small (The Thing's head is about 1 in x 1 in).

I will be digitally inking these. Drew's knowledge of the FF shows here with Reed smoking a pipe. No Marvel character smokes at all any more, but Reed did at one point.



Here are the finished pencils by Drew. The only real change is Sue engulfed in flames replaces the golden transmuted Crystal.

I'm not sure why the original cover used Crystal rather than Sue. In the story, Crystal is taken out first (after signaling for the FF) and first battle although 1 panel longer than Sue's is less visual.

Far be it from me to question the great Buscema, but for this recreation, we went for the classic four members of the FF.

Now that I've scanned all the images, I can get to work on laying out the cover and mailing Stacie the pencils to ink.


Stay tuned for more at a later date.