Legion of Super-Heroes Vol. 6 #1 Cover Recreation (Artist Unknown)

This is a neat one that I've had kicking around in my oldest portfolio for ages, now, but I only recently grabbed a scan of it.  I bought it in my first year of collecting art, and I think it definitely falls within the first 20 pieces I ever purchased.  I was scrolling through the listings of this random eBay shop that had a ton of cheesecake art it had accumulated from somewhere, and came across this listing, artfully titled "SEXY SPACE GIRL PINK OUTFIT GATULES".  The title is descriptive, for sure, but you can't really fault an aggregate store for not knowing what I recognized right away: that this is a recreation of Jim Lee's gorgeous variant cover to the very first issue of Paul Levitz's "Retroboot" Legion from 2010!  I think the store interpreted the writing at the bottom of the piece as being the artist's name, "Gatules", and I agree that it definitely looks like there's a "G" and a "u" in there, but I'm pretty sure the writing actually says "After Lee", crediting the recreation.  That means that this piece is actually unsigned, and I have no idea who the artist is!  If anyone recognizes the style, please do reach out and let me know.  Jim Lee's six variant covers for LSH Volume 6 formed one big connecting image, and I think it would be cool to maybe recreate that with commissions from this artist.

That said, if I had been a more experienced art collector, I probably wouldn't have gone for this piece at all.  I was a newbie who was just happy to find something Legion-y (and cover-adjacent!!) and in her price range on eBay, since I don't think I'd plucked up the courage to really dive in to the art dealer scene, yet.  I much prefer to buy art from artists I know and recognize, and I'm not a huge recreation collector in the first place.  This is actually the first recreation in my gallery, and it's probably going to stay that way for a while.

It is neat to have a full-colour, mixed-media recreation of a piece that was initially done all in black and white.  Instead of trying to emulate Lee's incomparable linework and detail, this artist focused more on bringing the final, coloured cover to life, and I do admittedly enjoy the end product a fair amount.  And they did actually manage to squeeze an impressive amount of detail into the background buildings and the underside of the Legion cruiser!  The colours are done mostly with marker, but they've been overlaid a fair amount with coloured pencil to add extra highlights and depth.  There's some very nice colour blending on the cruiser, and a lot of care has been put into coluring and shading Imra's iconic pink bikini.  The colours overall come across as very bright and saturated, which gives the recreation a much brighter feel than the original cover (more in tune with the saturation of the Bronze Age, when this costume is actually from, than the sleek moodiness of the actual comic).

I went back and forth on whether or not I wanted to post this one at all.  It's a little below the standards of what I usually try to add to my collection, but it is a nice full-colour piece, and it's unique amongst the rest of my art because it's a recreation.  And I have to say, the Margaret Leigh of late 2022 (when I bought this piece) never even dared to dream that she would one day own some of the pieces that I do now, so it's nice to look back on where I was when I had just started collecting, and see how far I've come since then!