With the appearance of Gwen Stacy in Spider-man Loves Mary Jane #5, I figure it's okay to post these development pics. This first version I did waaaay back during the inception of the original Mary Jane comic book 2 years ago. You can see the rest of the cast done at the same time in my WORK gallery but this one was kept under the radar due to spoiling the future plot.


To be quit honest I had very little background on the character and sorta winged this one. Mary Jane is portrayed as a sweet and light-hearted teen so, naturally, I pictured Gwen as more of a posher, sheiker MJ. As the series continued the design began to see signs of being outdated so I did the following version for the present SMLMJ.


A little more innocent and a little more casual. I think it fits the tone of where the story is going.

I think everyone is worrying about whether she dies or not but, as far as I know, she seems to be a character that will be kicking around for a while to come. Which brings me to thinking how fortunate we are not to be working within the confines of (dreaded) Marvel continuity. I never understood the need for said continuity anyway since no one truly dies in comics. And speaking of comics and dying, I saw X-men 3 a coupla days ago and was rather puzzled with the fact that a good chunk of the cast gets obliterated. Vaporized. Whatever. I'm not going into details but it made for a very unsatisfying movie seeing it as purely a movie. I hardly cared for the characters (most come and go even before you know their names) and the rest is filled with explosions and CG fluff, making it very abrasive and rather disjointed. The only constants were Wolverine and Storm, both having had plenty of screen time in the past 2 films already. Hell, they should just call the movie Wolverine, Storm and the freaky bunch.

Anyway, maybe it was their way of saying "we're not making any more X-men films". Seeing the direction it's going that's cool by me.

TAK