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Long John

Losing Every Thing Changes Everything

Sketch Fridays #105 – Havok

Jun20
by DBethel on 20 June 2025
Sketch Friday #105 – Havok

This was a spur of the moment drawings I made after stumbling on the idea after waking up one morning. Alex Summers, aka Havok, is a Marvel character from the X-Men comics. In fact, he is the brother of the perennial leader of the team, Scott Summers (Cyclops).

I haven’t read too many comics featuring Havok aside from his appearances in crossover events and his first run as team leader of the spinoff series, X-Factor, in the ’90s. I know more about him than stories I’ve actually read.

The main reason my mind ended up on him was that his costumes have always been interesting, none moreso than his original costume created by comics superstar, Neal Adams, in the late ’60s, an era defined by bold graphic design. So iconic it was, that it remained basically unchanged until the late ’80s.

Havok’s original costume design. Artist unknown.

When I first met him, he was the leader of X-Factor in the second iteration of that team. Being a government agency, all the team members wore what amounted to synchronized suit designs, though each had its own personal flairs. Gone were the (most) of the skin-tight spandex, replaced instead with bulky jackets, thick boots, and thigh belts and probably pouched belts, too. While unremarkable overall, it is a fun––and very ’90s––design.

Havok’s ’90s costume. Art: Joe Quesada

When I woke up the other day, I had a blurry idea to amalgamate the two designs, bringing back the austere nature of his original suit and laying it over a more practical, clothing-based design with a heavy jacket echoing his time in X-Factor. The main thing I was excited to draw was the homaging of the goofy headdress of his original costume into the epaulets of his jacket.

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D. Bethel Draws… Corner Box Challenge 2

Jun13
by DBethel on 13 June 2025

Another quick process video with commentary about the previous Sketch Friday and my second #CornerBoxChallenge, this time featuring the character Magik from the X-Men spinoff title, The New Mutants.

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Chapter 6 Update – Done Flatting

Jun06
by DBethel on 6 June 2025
Technically, the first completed panel of Long John, Chapter 6.

It’s been awhile since a post titled “Chapter 6 Update” has dropped, though we had an unofficial (though obvious) update when it was made public that all the pages had been drawn and inked.

Since then, another major milestone has been hit: color flatting is complete.

Again, flatting is probably the most mind-numbing stage of the entire process because it’s not very interesting, creative, or exciting. It’s just where you go through the pages and drop flat colors (hence “flatting”) to separate the elements of a panel to make the eventual shading and highlighting a bit easier and go faster.

While it is rather boring work, I found the flatting on this final chapter a bit reflective, too. I found I was focusing specific pieces of the pages rather than on the pages as a whole, which allowed me to appreciate (as silly as this sounds) myself as an artist. There were times when I saw a hand drawn particularly well and thought, “wow, that looks great!” nearly disassociating enough to wonder what choices past me made to make it look so good (which you’d think would be something I could be able to remember).

This was a face/hand/pose I ended up being quite proud of.

What’s also nice is that walking through each page slowly allowed another pass on story and scripting, finding more poignant themes or points to hit during the scenes to make the progress of the story even stronger.

So, I stepped into the flatting process with trepidation and a fair bit of whining, but took much more out of it than I had expected.

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