Superman-Doomsday

well, at last i submitted this "secret weapon" of mine. i did this at the beginning of last year if i'm not mistaken.

i was gonna save this to be sent to WIZARD Indonesia. But, rumors said (and confirmed by some) that the magazine here went bankrupt. no more magazines released these days. i'm really disappointed coz if this art won the prize i'd like to buy more of WIZARD to be sent to my late grandparents and cousins (before my grandparents from my mom's side died_my dad's parents died several years before). and especially my (ex) girlfriend. i sent the print to her along with her birthday present a few weeks after it was finished, but i also wanted her to see it printed in the magazine. i guess i wanted her to show it to her friends with pride.

well, it can't be helped. what's done is done. i didn't have time to go buy WIZARD for almost a year before it went bankrupt. even when it was still published here in my town, it would still be difficult, and for my standards (especially in Indonesia) to purchase the magazine coz the price is quite high. and when i did manage to purchase the magazine, it hasn't been published for months. they seldom sold it in bookstores before. but, they used to be sold at paper stalls. i used to walk around under the sun's heat (if i managed to find time to go out and about) from stall to stall asking whether WIZARD had been released. now, i there's no use doing it.

well, about the picture itself. last year, after i've just read a translated edition of The Death of Superman i feel this part, this page was somehow impressively iconic. it shows the worst struggle Superman went through in decades. Doomsday is the ultimate Kryptonian killer. so, i took a pencil, a piece of paper, and an eraser and started drawing. i used a 4H pencil and didn't even bother to ink it. i "inked" it using Photoshop 7 (if i'm not mistaken; i forgot which one did I use) and literally "redrew" the picture's lines and made a lot of correction (the right hand's actually not like that when i drew the sketch). regretfully the photoshop files of this picture is lost. it was accidentally erased from my harddisk. i thought i had it backed-up before my computer went "dead". still, i was lucky i had a few of the final results of the picture.

i was literally scared that a monster could actually kill Superman when it was printed in the newspapers here in '92 (or '93?). i was 7 or 8 at that time. the comic itself was never published in my town until recent years. comics are more available in Jakarta, Bandung and surrounding cities in west java (i guess... but, in Jakarta the un-translated editions are easily purchasable, though still at a very high price). they lack popularity compared to manga and anime which had become an explosion of popularity center from around 93 to 2004. even now, when comics are struggling to compete, manga and anime still have the highest place in popularity. (i don't mind actually, i'm a Naruto, Detective Conan/Case Closed, Gundam, Dragon Ball and Doraemon fan myself_it's just i like to see comics, manga, and komik Indonesia can share a mutual and balanced placed in markets and hearts of Indonesian readers )


i never wanted to be disrespectful of the artists who drew The Death of Superman. i just wanted to draw it my way and see how it comes. well, enjoy...

[this picture here has been re-sized after i did the final renderings and letters_the original pixel is much, much bigger]

Superman created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster