CHARACTER DESIGN 06 _ DC's B-List

A lot of jibber jabber in the last few posts so I thought I would just post some art as a send-off to a long week.

These are from the character re-design threads I participate in on the Bendis board. I was never much of a DC comics fan, partly because of their characters' cheery demeanor and what seemed like gimmick superpower-driven stories kept me at arm's length.

I definitely appreciate them as icons and the mythologies that have been built around them. Some of the designs are impossible to improve upon (it's like redesigning an Apple) but here are a few updates with the present stories in mind.

AQUAMAN

He's been a pirate, a king, and a squid-faced monster and recently returned from the dead. For all of the attempts to legitimize the character, none of them has really stuck and I always find myself drawn to the classic get-up as aquatic pop candy. I definitely looked to Michael Phelps for the swimmer's physique and Olympic spandex.


WONDER WOMAN

I get that she fought in WW2 but it didn't seem right to me that a Greek warrior princess would be decked out in the American flag. I tried to push the warrior aspect while swapping her eagle for a dove to point to the dichotomy of her mission (Warrior for Peace). I also tried to make her seem less Anglo and gave her a sentient lasso that has the hots for her. Oh yeah, and an Invisible Sword.


THE FLASH

There's more than one Flash populating the DC Universe right now and I wanted at least one to have a different color scheme and symbol. Red and a Lightning Bolt is about as iconic as it gets but here I tried for a design with a sense of motion already built into the positive and negative shapes. I feel like it's the least successful of these three re-designs but a decent jumping off point for further exploration.