Shikari by Tony Harris (Prelim Component for The Legion #21 Cover)

This was a recent eBay pickup, and as soon as I saw it I knew there was more to its story than met the eye. I knew Tony Harris had been the penciller for several of the later issues of The Legion, and I knew the piece looked a little bit familiar, so I did some digging! It turns out this - to the best of my knowledge - is a prelim for the cover to The Legion #21 (full cover in additional images). You can see that the cover features the heads of several Legionnaires who are under threat from the telepath Universo, and this head here is one of them! On the back of the piece, you can see that it was traced onto or from red tracing paper, and there's even another version of this piece on CAF that seems to have been made from that red tracing paper (or maybe this piece was traced over that one). I may not ever know the full story, but it seems like this image made its way on to the published cover one way or another!

The character featured here is Shikari Lonestar, a latecomer to the Reboot Legion who actually played a prominent role in the first Reboot comic I ever read (Legion Lost #5). She was a fun character, and you definitely don't see a lot of art featuring her, so I'm glad to have a piece with her in my collection - never mind that it doubles as a cover prelim! You can see that Harris re-drew her lips a little lower down on the page, maybe because he'd forgotten they have a bit more of an alien design, and they're the ones that made it onto the cover. You can also see that the teardrop-shaped marking on her forehead was changed to be its proper stripe shape on the cover.