The Hero Business

This “Namor and Me” piece was done for CBR’s “The Line Is Drawn,” where a list of artists (including myself) had to choose from twitter feed responses and then create cover homages. Someone suggested a cover homage to Betty and Me #16, which featured an unintentional double entendre. This is a REAL cover, folks, no photo-shopping:

The twitter requestor suggested the same cover with amorous Prince Namor whisking the Invisible Girl away from her Fantastic Four teammates. But I wanted something more…. and then I thought of all the Archie “Double Digest” Collections… And I thought, ah, “Double ENTENDRE Digest”! And then just continuing with a stream of unintentional bits that could be seen as Archie-clean or slightly-naughty. Here’s the sketch:

The fun was taking some innocent double entendres to ridiculous new extremes, with dialogue from Reed, Jonny and Ben… plus a few little things in the trade dress and blurbs. That dialogue went through a few passes, as you can see my original thoughts in the sketch vs the final. It took awhile to get the exact phrasing down. And the writers of “Three’s Company” made it look so easy….

Plus, I always knew Northstar was going to figure in; That pretty much wrote itself!

And here’s the final:

This one was a lot of fun! Hope you enjoyed it.