Amazon (Ororo-Storm) by Jason Pearson & Mark Morales

A fun commission by Jason that he drew in pure pencils and that the commissioner had Mark Morales ink in 2018.

This is Amazon (Ororo of Themyscira from Earth-9602 apparently-Google be your friend) from the fondly remembered Amalgam comics which funly merged DC & Marvel characters.

What I love about the piece is the somewhat Art Nouveau Jason choose. Her body pose is somewhat reminiscent of that artistic current and both her negative space defined hair and the movement of her cape certainly play in that overall composition.

What is interesting to me from a stylistic point of view is that considering Jason’s history with Storm as a character, this would have been drawn after he drew her in his famous Uncanny X-Men annual 17 (which landed him different jobs at Image) and the just as famous X-Men unlimited 39 short story which turned many many heads. This one was drawn in 2000 and you can tell that Jason evolved out of his more angular and sharper style of the annual towards a rounder (plumper?) version of the character as displayed in X-Men unlimited of the early 2000s. Not there yet but closer.

Outside of Jason inking himself, I’d go for Karl Story or the Gaijin school of inkers to ink him such as Dexter Vines or maybe John Dell. Mark Morales did a good job. Part of the inks are a bit too visible for my taste, especially considering Jason’s usually faultless inks, more precisely within the cape itself. This may be due to the use of marker and/or the fact that it was inked during a convention.

Below you will find the uninked version of that piece which I saved on my computer years before buying the inked version (or knowing I would end up with it).

This may have been published in one of Jason’s sketchbooks but I need to check that fact.