Art Attack: Ben & Rickey's Infinite Crisis Jam

In the summer of 2006, Rickey and I were struck by a bolt of artistic inspiration with the conclusion after over a year of build and execution of DC's Infinite Crisis. Having both done our fair share of promotional work on the book for Wizard, we decided to express our satisfaction with its success while also congratulating our buddy and the event's writer, Geoff Johns, by drawing as many characters featured in the story as we could and turn that into a card for him.

Our process was to trade the card back and forth, each of us doing two or three characters then passing it along to the other guy. We didn't set out with any assigned list of who would draw who, so it was a free for all to nab the folks you wanted most on your first pass and then hope the next batch wasn't taken when it came back to you.

Not surprisingly, I believe I went for the Suicide Squad guys and Flashes first. Rickey took the Big Three of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman as well as showing a perhaps unhealthy amount of enthusiasm for dead Teen Titans and villains with big heads. I'm not sure if he just got to Superboy before me, really wanted to draw sideburns, or I was still grieving.

Here's what we came back with...


I'd say I'm most pleased with how I did on Captain Cold, Bizarro, the Blue Beetles, Hawkman, Killowog and my random addition of Brother Eye. I was pleasantly surprised with how I managed details in a small space, which I think is pretty well represented in most of the characters I just named. I also appreciate that I drew Bushido with X's for eyes to indicate he was killed by Superboy Prime. I think my Zoom and Sinestro turned horribly wrong.

I love Rickey's Chemo and Wildebeest for how crazy they are and also how he used his style to turn out unique but faithful takes on characters like Golden Age Superman, Dr. Psycho, Hector Hammond, Black Hand, Alan Scott and Mongul; he made the villains look way creepy and the older heroes dignified yet clearly aged. And it goes without saying that his decapitated Pantha is a thing of beauty. However, Aquaman with the little fish swimming by aside, my overall favorite of Rickey's characters is definitely his bone-bearded Doomsday, who just looks cool as hell.

We've certainly got very different styles of drawing, as Rickey is way more comfortable than I am and can cut loose a lot easier while I tend to trip myself up in too many details, but I think we meshed pretty nicely here for a nice little collage. If I could do it over again, I'd have even more of our buds contribute for variety.

Back to 2006, we had our boy Jairo scan in the card so we could keep in in our records, then sent it off to California c/o Geoff.

Somehow it never got there and to this day he's never seen the darn thing.

But a week or so ago, Rickey was going through old files from Wizard and voila: there it was.

So happy fourth anniversary of finishing Infinite Crisis, Geoff! You did great!