The Doom Patrol vs MODOK by John Byrne

I’ve never been big on the Mechanized Organism Designed Only for Killing (MODOK). He was a big head with tiny limbs and he fought Captain America a lot. But, I gotta tell ya, he deserved better than what he got in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, both in the cheesy visual effects used to depict him, and in the “we can’t take him seriously” vibe the filmmakers set for him. Corey Stoll deserved better. I’m sure his cheque cleared and he’ll be looking for something a little less dopey to be in next.

John Byrne continues to do commission work, and I found this piece with the original Doom Patrol fighting MODOK online somewhere. The subject matter is great and Byrne’s drawing abilities have not faded with time. Somewhere along the way, though, he responded to the increased rendering and detail that part of the fan demographic liked by massively increasing detail everywhere. While the buyer may have been impressed thinking they got their money’s worth, what’s been lost is the clarity that used to be one of the hallmarks of Byrne’s work via selective rendering and the placement of blacks. As a result, it makes it a bitch to lay in flats when you’re colouring one of these pieces as it’s not until you suss out the colour blocks that you know what you’re working with.

I went through the same thing when I coloured a Lizard commission of Byrne’s.

Note: I’ve been a slacker for a good chunk of this year, not in terms of colouring, I’ve certainly been doing that. But on the blog side I just didn’t have a urge to document the work here. So if you saw the pieces on facebook and Twitter, good for you. For the blog-focussed folks, there will be a steady stream until I’m caught up.

Byrne’s lineart.

Colour version.

Doom Patrol logo added