Sunday Pulp illustrations from Francesco Francavilla

You never know where a discovery might take you. Wandering Comic-Con on Friday, I found this little booth promoting The Black Coat, which led me to acquiring the whole series and writing a review on it.

Of course, my review at first neglected to include all the names of the people responsible for that comic book, and in rectifying that, I learned more about the co-creator and artist, Francesco Francavilla.

There is more to comic books than just the writing and story of course. The art and design behind it is just as important, if not moreso at times. And the artists who do these amazing covers and panels have other work that we don’t always get to see.

But Francavilla publishes a lot of his other stuff online and I stumbled across a bunch of it yesterday.

I visited his Pulp Sunday blog and was just struck by the amazing illustrastions he posts there on a regular basis. Take for example the Rocketeer drawing he did to the right in honor of that character’s creator, Dave Stevens. It’s got such an amazing look to it.

As I mentioned in my Black Coat review, I was astounded by the way Francesco choreographs his action sequences. Each panel sets up the next scene, and you can actually believe a character was able to make that slashing, stabbing move because he was in the correct position in the previous panel.

While I was on his site, I found a cool series of illustrations that really displays some of his awesome talent.

Each drawing is from something you probably saw once, but may not remember immediately. The hint would be a comic book movie.

You can read the comments below each of them to figure it out, or try on your own.

But it’s definitely worth it to look at them and try to figure out where these are from, and what they all mean together. And if you don’t get there, just check them all out, and then look at the final drawing to find your answers.

I thought this was really awesome. I love black and white, penciled illustrations and these are simply brilliant.

Here are the first two below:

Those are the first two, and you can find the third right here. Once you get to his site, you can find the rest of them numbered on the left side of the page to continue your journey.

I’m curious what your thoughts are to these and if you loved the “finale” drawing as much as I did.sun