Top Ten: The Forty Niners Book 3 Page 2, Gene Ha

September 2006 - Title splash for the third book/chapter of the Top Ten prequel. Wonderfully detailed pen/ink work and looks the better for the ink wash, purchased from the colourist on eBay. His, detailed, description below.

"This auction is for an original, (roughly) 11x17” inked comic book art page. It is page 2 of book 3 of TOP TEN: THE FORTY-NINERS. It is a full-page image, a "splash page" as it's called in the industry. This is the first in a several-page long sequence, one of the story's main action sequences, involving a "bust" on a vampire...house of ill-repute, let's say, by some of the main characters: Sky Witch, The Maiden, Steel Gauntlet, and The Black Rider. This is a favorite sequence of many of the book's fans, myself included!

TOP TEN: THE FORTY-NINERS won the 2005 Will Eisner Comic Book Industry Award for best new Graphic Novel. The awards were given out just a couple of weeks ago at the 2006 San Diego Comicon International. The Eisners are the the highest honor in the industry, the "Oscars" of comics.

TOP 10: THE FORTY NINERS at is a 96-page hardback graphic novel (now also available in trade paperback). It is a prequel to the Eisner award-winning 12-issues series TOP TEN. It was published in 2005 by Wildstorm.

It tells the tale of the world's “science heroes” and super-criminals, and their troubles adjusting to life, and a world, that seems to no longer want them around after World War II.

Both stories were wrttten by Alan Moore, perhaps the most acclaimed writer working in the comic book or graphic art medium. Alan Moore is also the author of comic books and graphic novels like The Watchmen, V for Vendetta, From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Promethea, Supreme, and Tom Strong.

Both were also drawn by one of the comic book industry's most highly-regarded artists, Gene Ha, whose illustration career includes such comic book properties as The X-Men, The Justice League, Captain America, Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, and The Authority, as well as album and dvd covers and the like.

The art has been rendered on Bainbridge 2200 Textured Cold press Illustration Board, chosen to withstand the application of ink-and-water brushwork for the shading of the figures and backgrounds. As you can see the ink washes have been applied. At this stage, the page was scanned into a computer, and then colored using Adobe Photoshop, converting the grays to colors and adding various effects. But here you have the original, final, physical art.

I have included a detailed look at a small area of the art, so you can see the kind of detail and quality inherent in this piece. It is a beautiful piece of art, with many details that were hard to see or lost on the smaller printed page."