Art Wednesday: Superhero Edition

I feel bad that what, one week after I committed to doing at least one art post a week, I totally dropped the ball and didn’t follow up. Well, a few weeks later we have a follow-up.

I’ve been noticing a bit of a trend recently in turning comic books into movies. I know, this is nothing too new, but it has really been exploding as Marvel licenses every possible character out, DC re-images Superman and Batman (and tries to find a character that someone else might know) and Frank Miller turns everything he has ever done into a movie.

Well, now this trend is moving beyond just films and the art world seems to be jumping on the new-found obsession with Superheroes.

First up we have an exhibit at the Met: Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy. I’d probably have more to say about it, but I haven’t been to the exhibit yet. But I must say this is where I saw the start of the trend, after discovering this exhibit was at the Met (started last week), I keep seeing Superhero art.

Alessandro Cidda’s work found its way into my inbox this morning, close up shots of action figures, well, more precisely portraits of action figures. The originals are blown up to almost 3 feet tall (maybe a bit taller, my cm to inches conversion is a bit weak). The first two galleries on the website have some 33 portraits of all of your favorites (and some obscure) action figures, including Neo, Batman, Mr. Incredible, Jenna Jameson, the Crow and James Bond, to name a few.

I was a bit hesitant to post about Cidda’s work since it was an exhibition form 2 years ago, and well, the site was in Italian, of course then I stumbled upon Donald Soffritti’s work, illustrating aged superheroes. I started to notice a pattern here. First off, we have more superheroes, second we have more Italian…

Last on the list we have David Devries (or Uncle David) who takes kids pictures (we’ll guess at least 1 or 2 are actually nieces & nephews) of Monsters and Superheroes and sketches them out to what they would look like if they actually made it in to comic books.

In total, these are not the most impressive sites or artists out there, but I think they do represent a growing trend since these were all found independently on various sites. Actually, a little spooky that this is what I came across today in my daily readings.