Jamal Igle And Supergirl #34

A while back I mentioned that Jamal Igle is planning a retrospective look at his work on Supergirl over on his blog. I was pretty pumped to see what Jamal had in store. Well, he started that series and if this first entry is any indication of what is coming up, this is going to be fantastic.

Here is the link to the first entry, looking back at his (and Sterling Gates') first issue Supergirl #34:
http://jamalligle.blogspot.com/2011/12/from-vaults-supergirl-34.html It is well worth reading in its entirety, so please head there.

This was the beginning of a reworking of Supergirl's character and Igle starts out by discussing his initial approach to Supergirl and the other characters of the Superman universe. It is pretty interesting to hear his thoughts about how he planned to draw them and who he was trying to invoke.

But for a process nut like me, these things will be the real treasures of a series like this.

Here are the thumbnails of the first 8 pages of the issue. It's fascinating to see these quick sketches and how they match up to the real deal.

And, of course, the most 'controversial' aspect of the issue was the updating of Supergirl's outfit, lengthening the shirt a bit and adding the bike shorts that got the comic world twitterpated. We haven't had bike short talk here in a while!

Here is Igle's concept piece on his changes to the costume including the skort! Igle has always said that his initial plan was for the costume to be a skort and not separate bike shorts. It was a coloring error that implied the shorts! Wild! And there was almost a red skirt! Here are Jamal's thoughts:

I had also pitched an alternate costume design which would have incorporated elements of previous Supergirl costumes. Particularly a variation of the boots and red skirt from the 1980's/Matrix Supergirl. It was decided however that they didn't want to stray from the then current costume as designed by Michael Turner. I did however take some elements such as the new cape attachment and the ...well...

THE SHORTS

The Shorts, the shorts, the infamous shorts. Since there's no way to get around it, I'll tackle it head on. The first thing i need to say is they were never intended to appear as a separate pair of shorts. the whole idea was that they were supposed to be a skort, which is a popular item with female athletes. What happened is,Nei Ruffino had accidentally colored them red with a gold trim rather than the blue they were supposed to be. We went with it and most people didn't notice, until I did the interview with Newsarama that was picked up by NPR.

Hopefully I am not picking the scab of the bike shorts again. Maybe that discussion has scarred over.

Thanks to Jamal Igle for sharing these things with the Supergirl audience. I am looking forward to the rest of these posts (his post on #35 is already up on his site)!