Kitty and Lockheed in 'Sentinel Sillies' (2024)

At OAX 2024, I saw a fun sequential piece by Manix on the theme "Rogue and Gambit on a date," so I asked him for a story with Kitty and Lockheed. I knew he would come up with something more memorable than the standard "Kitty walks through a wall."

Manix delivered this delightful wordless story, as only he could. It's one of those where the first panel has you wondering what exactly is going on, like George Herriman used to do in Krazy Kat. Does that Sentinel have a booger? The presence of Lockheed in panel two provides a clue that Kitty may be involved. Then the rest of the page explains the mystery. Plus bonus Wolverine in the last panel!

There's a bit of trickery in the character proportions. As seen with Wolverine, Manix often makes his characters only three heads tall. But Kitty couldn't do her ghostly calisthenics if she were that cartoonish; she must have more human-like proportions. Manix hides that fact by keeping her torso carefully hidden inside the Sentinel's head, so she never looks blatantly out of sync with Wolverine's design.

Manix is known in the Phillipines for his wordless sequential works like "12" and "14." He had warned me that my scanner would not be up to the task of capturing his fluorescent paint colors, and boy was he right; check out "additional images" to see how far off it was. A photo taken on my iPhone was closer in color but fuzzy when I zoomed in. So for the main CAF image, I stitched together images of the six individual panels, posted by Manix on Instagram. It's closer to the correct colors but still substantially misses the mark on the glowing eyes of the Sentinel. This is one of those pieces that, as they say, you have to see in person to do it justice.