Dark Phoenix (X-Men: The Manga) by Miyako Cojima

Thanks to a friend, I got on Miyako Cojima's commission list. Ms. Cojima is best known in Japan for being a horror manga specialist, but in the West, she's best known for her work on X-Men: The Manga.

According to Wiki, X-Men: The Manga, published simply as X-Men (エックスーメン) in Japan, was a manga adaptation of the 1992 X-Men animated series. It was published directly in tankobon format by Takeshobo in 1994 under their Bamboo Comics imprint to promote the Japanese airing of the show. As I was living in Japan then, I saw the first six volumes in a local bookstore and could not resist picking them up.

Ms. Cojima worked on the story "Enter Magneto", the 2nd volume of the tankobon series and issue 6 of the English version. She also did a manga adaptation of an X-Men video game, but I don't have that.

I chose Dark Phoenix for my commission because I thought this was the character that best blended the X-Men with her love of horror. Done on a Japanese shikishi board, the bright colors pop against the black wash she used for the background. I think the pose, with the classic foreshortening of the hand, works quite nicely.