Daredevil "Ascent" Progressive Homage to Gene Colan Prelim 1 by Eric W. Meador

This is a preliminary look behind the scenes of an ambitious series of commissions that artist Eric W. Meador and I are undertaking. We've long kicked around an idea of presenting an homage to the great DD artist Gene "The Dean" Colan and his uncanny ability to create that bombastic sense of motion across splash pages in DD comics, featuring a "shadow trail" effect that followed the movement of DD across a scene. In this case, Eric and I opted to show nine separate snapshots of DD ascending up a building in Hell's Kitchen and his arc of movement across the rooftops. Each piece will progressively feature a different letter that will ultimately spell out DAREDEVIL and will sequentially show Daredevil leaping onto a garbage dumpster, climbing up a fire escape, moving up the surface of the building, and performing some Colan-esque aerial acrobatics as he ultimately reaches the rooftops of Hell's Kitchen. Eric came up with the cool idea of creating the letters in DD's name by alternating the areas of crisp resolution with those that are less in focus within a given scene, as you can begin to make out in these work-in-progress shots. Panel A. features the initial working sketch of DD jumping up onto the aforementioned dumpster in the first scene depicting the letter "D," which was reinvisioned and replaced by the design shown in Panel B. Panel C. features the inital layout with the early watercolor undertones on DD. Panel D. features a progressive layering of the watercolors before adding in shading and finer details. Panel E. features a close-up of DD's face as more details are being fleshed out with finer shading, etc. We hope you enjoy each individual piece as they evolve as well as the final panoramic progressive watercolor that they will ultimately create. I will provide more updates as additional layers of watercolor, etc. are added.