Laura Kinney (X-23 & All-New Wolverine) by Brian Lopez-Santos

Commissions on three All-New Wolverine #1 blank covers. Done with pen, colored pencils, markers and acrylic paint.

When I first talked to Brian about this commission, he asked me what my favorite things about Laura were, so he could emphasize those characteristics in the drawing. Well, that was a pretty big homework assignment for me because I know the character so well that there’s a lot of things to be said on the subject.

One of the things I did mention, though, was the fact that while Logan is often seen as a berserker/brawler type fighter, Laura’s fighting style is more graceful and athletic, and relies more on quickness and precision than brute strength. Add in the claws in her feet and you can imagine a twirling, whirling dance of death. Brian latched on to this and sketched out some poses that were somewhere between fighting and dancing and looked like ballet movements with the addition of claws and deadly facial expressions.

It almost looked like a montage from a fight scene and I loved it so much that I suggested we did a similar final piece that included three figures. It quickly became clear that it would be hard to squeeze that onto a single blank cover, so I asked to spread them out over three interconnected covers. I picked out two poses that I liked immediately and they are seen pretty much unchanged on the left and right covers, although one was flipped horizontally so they would face away from each other and work as sort of bookends.

One had the grace of a ballet pirouette but also looked like it could be part of a fight move. The other one conveyed a lot of power, it made me think of a coiled snake ready to strike. Since we were doing this on All-New Wolverine blanks, I wanted Laura in her All-New Wolverine outfit, but after we turned it into a 3-part montage/series, I wanted to use a different outfit for each one. I picked what I consider the two most iconic ones; the X-Force costume and the MvC3 costume.

I then threw out some suggestions for the middle cover and Brian did some more sketches. After a bit of searching and back-and-forth, I came up with the idea to go with a Michael Jackson pose. It tied into the dance theme, and could work as a final flourish, Laura almost striking a pose with her enemies defeated at her feet. Seeing her from behind with her face in profile would also look good. And the icing on the cake; instead of pushing the hat down like Michael does, Laura would be pulling her cowl off at the end of the fight. This sort of cemented the idea in my head because I’d originally asked her to be shown with the cowl off because it hides so much of her face and artists tend to compensate for this by putting a lot of expression into her mouth, showing her practically growling or snarling. And that doesn’t fit the character very well.

Luckily Brian loved the idea and the rest was pretty straightfoward. He suggested blood spatter for the background to connect the covers and I added the idea to make some streaks and smears that would add movement to go with the dance theme. In the end we dropped the spatter as we both liked the clean look with just the smears after he put those in, and instead we just added some spatter on Laura herself. To go with Laura’s development, I asked for the X-Force version to have the most blood, the MvC3 version to have some and the All-New Wolverine version to have none.