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Back in 1988 I was walking around Artists Alley at the San Diego Comic-Con and decided to get a sketch. I've always been a fan of super-hero teams so I figured I'd get a sketch of a team. Being a DC fan I decided to go with a team of the following characters: Blue Beetle, Booster Gold, Nightwing, Batman, Atom, Superboy, Green Lantern and Brainwave Jr. The artist was Duval Stowers.

I got more sketches over the following few years but they seem to have gotten misplaced when I moved from San Diego. Fortunately I took photos of the sketches years ago. Unfortunately the photos didn't turn out all that well. (This was years before digital camera.)

The next year (1989) I had a sketch done was by Scott Benefiel and colored by Martin Thomas. I knew Martin Thomas from the local comic book store I was working at in Texas at the time. His coloring work on this sketch really blew me away and I quickly decided to have him color any future sketches I had done. Again I went with a team of DC characters: Starman, Superwoman, Atom, Quicksilver and Brainwave, Jr. (And, it was Quicksilver back then. This was before Max Mercury showed up in the Flash series.)

The following year (1990) I decided to get a sketch of Marvel characters. This one was done by Aaron Lopresti and colored by Martin Thomas. The characters I selected were: Shadowcat, Captain America, Hulk, Thor, Nightcrawler and Quasar.

But, being a more of a DC fan than a Marvel fan I went back to DC characters for the next year (1991). This time saround the artist was Scott Hana and once again Martin Thomas did the colors. The team consisted of Tarantula, Nightwing, Maser, Onyx, Starman and Dove (in her Lord of Order costume).

The final sketch I had done was the last sketch in the original series. I commissioned the sketch in 1992 from Scott Benefiel. This time around I went a little nuts. I've always been a fan of Robin so I figured that would be the theme for the sketch. But since I couldn't decide which one of Robin's costume I wanted done I figured why not do them all. This was going to be the most ambitions sketch I was going to have done. The plan was to have the various versions of Robin/Nightwing standing on a huge Bat-emblem. Here was the proposed line up from left to right:

As I said, I went a bit nuts on this one.

But, sometimes life has a way of derailing things. This was one of those times. Since Scott and I both lived in San Diego at the time we agreed that he didn't need to do the sketch at the convention. In hindsight, that didn't work out so well. Things wound up dragging out over the following years for various reasons. Scott had gotten a monthly book at Malibu and that was taking up most of his time. And the loger things dragged on the worse Scott felt about it. Long story short, Scott finally finished the sketch, or at least a more reasonable version of it. We had agreed in 1994 that just Robin and Nightwing would be fine. I finally got the sketch in 1995 and because he felt so bad about how long it took, Scott didn't charge me for it.

Due to how long it took to get the last sketch done, I didn't commission sketches for years after that. With the sketches getting misplaced in the move from San Diego, my enthusiasm for getting sketches died down for a while.

At Comic-Con International: San Diego 2007, Dave Dwonch offered to do a sketch for me. I decided to switch themes from groups to my favorite Spider-Man villain: The Spot.

Here is a sketch that I got from Mike Norton.

Here is a sketch of Toupydoops that I got from the creator of the series, Kevin McShare.

Here are the sketches I got with my copies of Jetta/Shi: Arrow of Detiny #1 by Martheus Wade.


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