I was really proud for Houston's biggest and longest lived comic show to score the coup of the majority of the surviving Aliens cast ahead of its thirtieth anniversary... until SDCC did the same thing a few month's later, closer to the actual anniversary, then added James Cameron, Lance Henriksen, and Gale Anne Hurd just for spite. Comicpalooza's never tried anything on that scale again, settling into being a purely regional attraction. Given how much money I spent to get all those autographs, I'm not entirely sorry about that. Still, this was a rewarding effort, and I am building a substantially larger portfolio of commissions to celebrate one of the few movies more beloved to me than this one.
At least The H's convention bureau made up for the absence of everyone's favorite fully functioning synthetic, the android Bishop. They brought in Lance Henriksen the following year, and at the same show, I tried out a new artist in Kyra Morphis. She was either an art student or recent graduate, and her portfolio had some really interesting stuff in it. I had my copy of the souvenir magazine for reference, and she took it to work on overnight. Wanting to get a better feel for the likeness, she pulled up additional reference online, printed on heavy stock color paper, and did warm-up sketches on one of the pages. She was really nervous when presenting me the final piece, but she needn't have been, as I was very impressed with her take on the late-film bisected android and the clear attention for detail (note the serial number on his inner arm, for instance.) Never underestimate how many cool applications an artist can come up with for White-Out.
In my haste to get the finish piece to the actor to sign (he was appropriately gravelly) I forgot my souvenir book, which Morphis held on to for a year before returning it to me at the next Comicpalooza. A class act, and not the first time an artist has gone above and beyond for me in this manner. They're good people. Me, less so, since I'd held out on posting the piece because I'd forgotten her name, and then sat on the post for another year-and-a-half besides out of pure inertia. Since Photobucket bombed out most of the images on my blogs, I had to light a fire in my gut to find and repost all of the Aliens pieces (which probably means no podcasting this week,) and here they all are now. At least I got another piece from Morphis for that other project...
2016-2017 Aliens 30th Anniversary Commissions
- Ripley & Newt Space City Comic Con Commission by Matt Haley
- Michael Biehn as Corporal Dwayne Hicks Space City Comic Con Commission by Tommy Nguyen
- Bill Paxton as Private William Hudson Space City Comic Con Commission by Geoff Shaw
- Jenette Goldstein as Private Jenette Vasquez Space City Comic Con Commission by Liam Sharp
- Ricco Ross as Private Ricco Frost commission by Adrian Nelson
- Cynthia Scott as Corporal Cynthia Dietrich Comicpalooza Commission by Chris Beaver
- Daniel Kash as Private Daniel Spunkmeyer Comicpalooza Commission by Toni Shelton
- Mark Rolston as Private Mark Drake Space City Comic Con Jam Sketch Detail by Vo Nguyen
- Private Mark Drake Jam Art by Vo Nguyen & Lance Schibi
- Paul Reiser as Carter Burke Space City Comic Con Jam Sketch Detail by Dietrich Smith
- William Hope as Lieutenant Scott Gorman Space City Comic Con Jam Sketch Detail by Josef Rubinstein
- Aliens 30th Anniversary Artist Jam featuring Facehugger by Cody Schibi
- Xenomorph Queen Comicpalooza Commission by Mark A. Nelson
