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Project Basement takes the fight to the mat with two awesome sketches by two different artists!!!

Okay, the that's a lie... Chris and Wayne aren't really fighting. I just thought "Wayne Wise vs. Chris Maverick" sounded sexier than "A Sketch by Wayne Wise and a Sketch by Chris Maverick." Anyway, let's get to the art!

Fixer by Wayne Wise

So this is a quick sketch/doodle I did of the Fixer. Not a character I hate, or love particularly. He was one of the long time Marvel villains that Kurt Busiek used in Thunderbolts and is pretty representative of the book at that time. Here was a character with a 30-plus year history that we really knew nothing about. He was a pretty generic villain. Kurt gave him a personality and made him interesting.

Unlike Songbird or Mach 5, both of whom became genuinely heroic over the course of the series, the Fixer was never really redeemed. I like the take on him, which Nicieza expounded upon after Busiek left the book, that Norbert (the Fixer) really likes the challenge of fixing things and solving problems. He is morally grey and his attention can be focused on solving problems for the good guys as well as the bad. He doesn't need redemption so much as redirection.

Not sure why I sketched him. He's not playing a huge role in the new Thunderbolts, but he is there, and I kind of like this iteration of his costume.

Cloak and Dagger by Chris Maverick

Ok, so characters you love and characters you hate. Cloak and Dagger fits both of those bills for me. I love the concept of Cloak and Dagger. The costumes are simple and elegant, and while mired in the 80s, stylistically, their look is immediately indicative of their abilities and the concept. The idea behind the base premise is classic. One character that epitomizes light, and all that is good in the world. The other, the essence of darkness and evil, and yet the two are forever tied together. Linked to each other in total dependence.

On top of that, we eventually discover that their powers aren't correct, the process that gave them their abilities mutated and corrupted them. Cloak was intended to be a being of light, while Dagger should have been possessed by darkness, thus showing us the readers that both light and darkness are forever linked. Opposite sides of the same coin. This is the stuff of Shakespearean drama. The metaphoric possibilities are endless.

But what went wrong? Well, everything! As perfect and pure an idea as Cloak and Dagger are on paper, in execution they were flawed from the very start. For one, the co-dependence wasn't bilateral. Despite the way the story was pushed, and while Cloak's abilities make him completely addicted to Dagger's "light", she's not actually dependent on him at all, at least not in any physical way, and while in classic storytelling, emotional dependence could be all the stronger, in order to really make the characters equals the physical dependence needed to be there to push the metaphor.

On top of that, the heroes were the victims of something that can ruin any comic book character. Bad storytelling. Since they were a bit too high concept to ever really take off with the mainstream right away, Marvel resorted to marketing trickery and ruined them even further. From pairing them with Dr. Strange, who also wasn't lighting the world on fire at the time, to revamping their entire concept to make them "mutants" just so they could pretend they were somehow linked in with the X-books line, despite the fact that it was a complete retcon of their origin and that retcon didn't even make sense in relation to itself. As a result, the X-book characters never acknowledged Cloak and Daggers mutantcy at all and Cloak and Dagger barely ever referenced it themselves, instead floating from one bad storyline in a soon-to-be cancelled title to another bad storyline in a new soon-to-be cancelled title.

So there you have it. A story far too common in comics. A brilliant idea ruined by mediocre writing and poor editorial control. They might as well have been the Spider-Man clone saga. Don't hate the player, hate the game.

And that, my friends, is a wrap -- the end of Project Basement vol 2!!! I want to send out a ginormous THX to everyone that contributed. Whether the art was made out of hate or out of love... I LOVED IT ALL!

Project Basement vol 3 is up next, and it's gonna be the best one yet! We've got a brand new theme -- Costumes and Powers -- which means you're going to be treated to some awesome character designs and capabilities over the next few months.

BUT FIRST... while I build up a backlog of PB v3 artwork, Project Basement is going to take a three week detour with a special "Spotlight" series, featuring some awesome pinups and fan art from Time Log, Super Haters, and (the upcoming) Pepper Jones: Adventure Scientist.

NEXT WEEK: Project Basement Spotlight on Time Log featuring Aimee Cummings!!!

Project Basement hexes you with some serious hate!!! It's...

Scarlet Phoenix by Ross Campbell

Ross gives us some PB v2 style hate with an amalgam of Marvel Comics characters -- the Scarlet Witch and the Phoenix Force. I thought I had a hate-filled rant from Ross, but I couldn't find one in my email. So, in its place (unless Ross wants to send me one...), here's what Ross DID say in his emails about this sketch:

11/21/10 - i decided who i’m going to do for Project Basement! Scarlet Witch possessed by the Phoenix Force! i couldn't decide which one i hated more so Kaylie suggested combining them. i like Jean herself just fine, i just hate the Phoenix Force cosmic entity thing. XD

EDIT: Here's Ross' rant in the comments. And it's good rant so enjoy!!!!

NEXT: Hate rears it's hideous head one more time as PB brings you Christian Bale Batman by... ME!

Project Basement celebrates Boxing Day with another hate ceasefire, featuring:

Magik by Chris Maverick

Mav returns with his second (here's his first) PB v2 contribution! BTW, check out his webcomic, Cosmic Hellcats.

Since I drew Cable as a character I hated I wanted to also do a character I loved. And that's why I picked Magik.

The character of Illyana Rasputin worked for me on several levels. To me, she represented much of what I loved about comics in general and Marvel comics in specific. While she was blessed with fantastic powers, she was ultimately a character that I, as a teenager at the time, could relate to. In the pages of the New Mutants, Chris Claremont presented her as a teenager with every day problems while also having the additional burden of her superhero life. In addition, beyond the standard problems plaguing her New Mutant compatriots, she had the additional difficulties of being the girl ruler of the realm of Limbo.

Being a demon was a perfect allegory for the teen experience. Even among mutants, natural outcasts, Illyana felt like she was an outcast herself. She had greater responsibilities and she had a plethora of issues.

Even more fascinating is the manner in which she was woven into the shared universe. While Cable was simply dropped in as a massive retcon, Magik was a character that had been around since the induction of Colossus years earlier. When she was aged and given powers in her limited series, she already had a natural backstory, and none of this was contradicted when it was decided to give her powers and make her a member of the team. She was in many ways the perfect example of how to write to enrich a shared history rather than blatantly disregarding it.

As a character design, she was quite innovative, at least at the time. Like all the New Mutants, she wore a variant of the original X-Men training uniform, however she was a very early example of how to customize the concept without destroying it. Something very popular in uniform design of team characters today and something that makes sense in real life. If you look at any uniformed group from prep school students to military operations (both of which one could argue the X-Organization is), you'll see that in real life individuality is maintained by very subtle modifications of the core uniform. The nature of Magik's powers gave her a natural modification of the uniform in this manner while maintaining the base look. It worked on multiple levels.

Plus she's just so fun to draw.

NEXT: Hate is back!!! Plastic Man by Byron Winton!

Project Basement is cooking up some awesome with:

Julia Child by Francisco Gruel

I'm really excited to post this drawing, but not because I'm huge Julia Child fan or hater or anything like that. No, it's because this submission spun out of the comments of A Podcast with Ross and Nick #76. And while we never turned #77 into an all-recipe episode, Francisco still submitted his kickass Julia Child sketch and this:

"And now, they get beaten together.

And this, as you remember, we've done a lot of things with eggs before and, whenever they gonna be cooked... or... made into something, they almost always have to be beaten up first.

And this, for some reason, prepares them for the dreadful things that are going to happen to them afterwards.

I think you can think that egg yolks are rather nasty, little people that need to be beaten up and treated roughly and... it's like, 'Speak roughly to your little boy, and beat him when he sneezes. And then he'll always do the right thing.'

That's just what you have to feel about egg yolks."

-Julia Child
"The Hollandaise Family" episode of
"The French Chef"

Next week, hate goes on a holiday for Grendel by Wayne Wise!

GRRRRR. Project Basement gets aggressive with:

Punisher and Marv by Katie Henderson

Please welcome Katie Henderson to the PB v2 fold! Here's what she has to say about her subject:

Marv vs Punisher - Heart versus... the other throbbing love muscle.

The more I thought of it, the more I realized how similar my most and least favorite comic characters were. But what was it that polarized me so?

Basically, Marv's is a mission with the human element. Who can't identify with having someone or something they loved or cherished taken from them? He wants answers (don't we all?) and it just happens he has to kill his way across the dark underbelly to reach the answer at the mouth of one of Ba(Sin) City's power-hungry heads, then crushing it like a grape. You follow his story and cheer him on the whole way, even if he does turn out to be a psycho killer. He even stops to consider this, proving some semblance of sanity. When all is said and done, this romantic bad lug with a good heart finds his peace and everything else is trivial by comparison.

Punisher, on the other hand, just makes dead bodies. He's reading material for violence fappers. It's not even like he does it for his family. He's an insatiable, testosteroned, maniac. Even superheros take breaks. There's no doubt in your mind that he's going to win the day, no twists, and worst of all, no conclusion. Don't get me wrong, I asked my roommate to explain him to me. "He fights because the justice system doesn't work." That's pretty boner-ish of him to think he's the total solution to the problem. I mean, at least the mob just runs drugs and casinos, most of the time they kill their own. Then one day, Frank comes along and just lays the place to waste just because he can. Then what? Those mobsters might have families too, then the kids grow up to be mobsters who hate the Punisher, and the cycle continues. It's like he's fighting the hydra, but just hasn't figured out there's a trick to it, and probably never will.

Next week: Rick Jones by Shawn Atkins!