When I was a kid in Northampton (in America; not the one Alan Moore rules like a wizened, ring-bedecked Nodens), the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles guys opened the Words & Pictures Museum here as a labor of love. It only lasted a few years, but it gave the city a glowing-eyed gargoyle staring down at Main Street to match our other architectural absurdities (like a City Hall that bares a suspicious resemblance to the Keep in Warcraft 2), and it also gave me a head full of comic book images that have been burning up my imagination ever since.
One of the displays I remember was this huge wall-art mural of a fantasy battle. It was probably a blown-up version of a scene from Fugitoid or some 2000AD-knockoff from the eighties, but it stuck with me, and like a lot of other art at that weird little museum, I find myself calling up its memory to help me with some of the more complicated compositions I want to draw, like the second panel of this page.
Unfortunately, that sort of thing takes FOREVER. And this whole page is a mess: that panel in particular is cluttered and badly-scaled, my shadows wander wherever they want, and that demon-shield thing? What was I thinking with that? It looks like a Vampire: The Masquerade discipline after the writers watched too much Tron.
But that museum was really cool.
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