Sketches I - Dave Gibbons

Now, this is a really sketchy sketch! It was the first one I ever got from a famous comic book artist, Dave Gibbons. It's Rorschach of the Watchmen.

AIMEE MANN - Save me

TOYS V - Le Fauve

Got this one early this year at the Ângouleme Festival International de la Bande-Dessinée. The little kitty is called Le Fauve.
He's the Festival's mascot/trophy and was designed by the great french cartoonist Lewis Trondheim.

COLDPLAY - Viva la Vida

TOYS IV - Lord of the Rings

While I don't think that Peter Jackson's adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings - one of my all-time favorite books - is as good as it could have been (curse you, Peter, for not giving us the scorching of the Shire) I still liked it, in no small way thanks to the visual translations of Alan Lee and John Howe.

My wife (then-girlfriend) got me the first special edition of the Fellowship of the Ring dvd with the Argonath miniature so it was only natural that we ended up collecting the rest of them. Smeagol, which came with "The Two Towers" is my favorite!

AEROSMITH - Fly Away From Here

TOYS III - Jasmine

This is a statuette of Jasmine, one of the main characters from John Byrne's Next Men.

Being a huge fan of John Byrne and particularly of his Next Men comic book series, I couldn't let this pass. I didn't get this statue when it came out but I have managed to buy it last year from e-bay. It's part of a limited numbered series (this is 338) and it's a reproduction from a sculpture done by John Byrne himself.

John Byrne's Next Men was a comic book that was originally released back in the early '1990s. It came right about the time the first Comic Book Shops were starting business here in Portugal, so it was one of the very first original american comics I collected and read - until then, the only versions of american comics we had around were translated brazillian anthologies usually sold on kiosks.

This year, IDW publishing has started to re-release the series in big-thick black and white phonebook collections. Check them out at amazon.

MADNESS - Our House

TOYS II - The Bat-Man

Next in the line, the "1st Appearance Batman". This is an action figure which was part of a series supposedly reproducing the original look of several DC characters, as in how they looked when they were first conceived back in late 1930's and early '40s. I've always been a fan of this Batman, back when he was THE BAT-MAN, so I had to get it.

As far as the rest of the characters in this series of action figures, some seemed pretty faithful to the intent of the series, but others seemed to miss the mark.