This is a page from an upcoming issue of Starstruck. There’s a lot of history to this story – see the Starstruck Wikipedia entry for more. Michael Kaluta did the pencils and inks. What I’m going to focus on here, though, is the recent color work by Lee Moyer.
This is the last page of a 3 page article published in Look magazine in 1942 called “The Creator of Flash Gordon Envisions the World’s End.” Until just a few years prior to this Alex Raymond had worked mostly in comics with ink and line. He’d begun working in color, though, and delved into it in full force during World War II. A year or so after this image he joined the Marines and produced a number of works for them. This image, though, shows a blend of both his comics experience and an illustration style influenced by the likes of J. C. Leyendecker.
This is a portrait of members of the Millwall Bushwackers, one of the most violent football club hooligan groups in Britain. One of their regular chants is, “No one likes us, we don’t care!” According to Penn’s web site, this portrait was exhibited at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters in England in May of 2007.
To understand this picture we need to know a few things about it. First, it’s a two-page spread in a comic. Second, the story at this point is about a schism in Promethea. Promethea herself used to be a young girl, but she was taken into the lands of imagination where she became, essentially, a spirit of imagination and story. Over the centuries, she could manifest through physical people and become a super hero of sorts. In this story, she has unknowingly begun manifesting through two people, one on each side of the Crusades.