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  1. In Memory of LAJ_FETT: Please share your remembrances and condolences HERE

JCC [Image heavy]A thread for art: See note on page 776

Discussion in 'Community' started by VadersLaMent, Dec 29, 2012.

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  1. Gamiel

    Gamiel Chosen One star 9

    Registered:
    Dec 16, 2012
    https://www.deviantart.com/matejcadil/art/Throwing-a-Rope-857560216
    [​IMG]
    Bilbo kneeling on the brink and peering forward cried: "There is a boat against the far bank! Now why couldn't it have been this side!"
    "How far away do you think it is?" asked Thorin, for by now they knew Bilbo had the sharpest eyes among them.
    "Not at all far. I shouldn't think above twelve yards."
    "Twelve yards! I should have thought it was thirty at least, but my eyes don't see as well as they used a hundred years ago. Still twelve yards is as good as a mile. We can't jump it, and we daren't try to wade or swim."
    "Can any of you throw a rope?"
    "What's the good of that? The boat is sure to be tied up, even if we could hook it, which I doubt."
    "I don't believe it is tied," said Bilbo, "though of course I can't be sure in this light; but it looks to me as if it was just drawn up on the bank, which is low just there where the path goes down into the water."
    "Dori is the strongest, but Fili is the youngest and still has the best sight," said Thorin. "Come here Fili, and see if you can see the boat Mr. Baggins is talking about."
    Fili thought he could; so when he had stared a long while to get an idea of the direction, the others brought him a rope. They had several with them, and on the end of the longest they fastened one of the large iron hooks they had used for catching their packs to the straps about their shoulders. Fili took this in his hand, balanced it for a moment, and then flung it across the stream.
    J.R.R. Tolkien: The Hobbit. Chapter 8: Flies and Spiders

    For #inktober2020 Day 9 "throw". For this prompt I immediately knew I wanted to draw this memorable scene from the Hobbit.
    And this picture is sort of a follow-up to my last year's inktober piece The Enchanted River, which was in turn inspired by Tolkien's own illustration of Mirkwood.


    https://www.deviantart.com/matejcadil/art/At-the-The-End-of-All-Things-858018546
    [​IMG]
    'I am glad that you are here with me,' said Frodo. 'Here at the end of all things, Sam.'
    (...) they rose and went slowly down the winding road; and even as they passed towards the Mountain's quaking feet, a great smoke and steam belched from the Sammath Naur, and the side of the cone was riven open, and a huge fiery vomit rolled in slow thunderous cascade down the eastern mountain-side.
    Frodo and Sam could go no further. Their last strength of mind and body was swiftly ebbing. They had reached a low ashen hill piled at the Mountain's foot; but from it there was no more escape. It was an island now, not long to endure, amid the torment of Orodruin. All about it the earth gaped, and from deep rifts and pits smoke and fumes leaped up. Behind them the Mountain was convulsed. Great rents opened in its side. Slow rivers of fire came down the long slopes towards them. Soon they would be engulfed. A rain of hot ash was falling.
    (...) And so it was that Gwaihir saw them with his keen far-seeing eyes, as down the wild wind he came, and daring the great peril of the skies he circled in the air: two small dark figures, forlorn, hand in hand upon a little hill, while the world shook under them, and gasped, and rivers of fire drew near. And even as he espied them and came swooping down, he saw them fall, worn out, or choked with fumes and heat, or stricken down by despair at last, hiding their eyes from death. Side by side they lay; and down swept Gwaihir, and down came Landroval and Meneldor the swift; and in a dream, not knowing what fate had befallen them, the wanderers were lifted up and borne far away out of the darkness and the fire.
    J.R.R. Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings. Book VI, Chapter 4: The Field of Cormallen

    For #inktober2020 Day 10 "Hope". This was a great prompt with so many possibilities because hope is such an essential concept in Tolkien's legendarium. But for the same reason it was not easy to decide what to draw. I was thinking about several possible things to depict, most notably the Star of Eärendil or young Aragorn (Estel), but in the end I decided for the Eagles as the bringers of hope because they were the easiest to depict in one particular scene. And I had to chose the most spectacular one of course.
    I hope you like it!


    https://www.deviantart.com/matejcadil/art/Trolls-Cave-858018949
    [​IMG]
    "They searched about, and soon found the marks of trolls' stony boots going away through the trees. They followed the tracks up the hill, until hidden by bushes they came on a big door of stone leading to a cave. But they could not open it, not though they all pushed while Gandalf tried various incantations.
    'Would this be any good?' asked Bilbo, when they were getting tired and angry. 'I found it on the ground where the trolls had their fight.' He held out a largish key, though no doubt William had thought it very small and secret. It must have fallen out of his pocket, very luckily, before he was turned to stone.
    'Why on earth didn't you mention it before?' they cried.
    Gandalf grabbed it and fitted it into the key-hole. Then the stone door swung back with one big push, and they all went inside. There were bones on the floor and a nasty smell was in the air; but there was a good deal of food jumbled carelessly on shelves and on the ground, among an untidy litter of plunder, of all sorts from brass buttons to pots full of gold coins standing in a corner. There were lots of clothes, too, hanging on the walls-too small for trolls, I am afraid they belonged to victims-and among them were several swords of various makes, shapes, and sizes.
    J.R.R. Tolkien: The Hobbit. Chapter 2: Roast Mutton

    For #inktober2020 Day 11 "disgusting": The hideout of the three trolls, Tom, Bert and William that captured Bilbo and the dwarves and also their treasury and storeroom
    I hope you like it... or actually don't like it, as it is supposed to be disgusting. You know what I mean.


    https://www.deviantart.com/matejcadil/art/Turgon-s-Armour-858320609
    [​IMG]
    "As he stood before the great chair in the gloom, and saw that it was hewn of a single stone and written with strange signs, the sinking sun drew level with a high window under the westward gable, and a shaft of light smote the wall before him, and glittered as it were upon burnished metal. Then Tuor marvelling saw that on the wall behind the throne were hung a shield and a great hauberk, and a helm and a long sword in a sheath. The hauberk shone as it were wrought of silver untarnished, and the sunbeam gilded it with sparks of gold. But the shield was of a shape strange to Tuor's eyes, for it was long and tapering; and its field was blue, in the midst of which was wrought an emblem of a white swan's wing. Then Tuor spoke, and his voice rang as a challenge in the roof: 'By this token I will take these arms unto myself, and upon myself whatsoever doom they bear.'
    J.R.R. Tolkien: The Unfinished Tales. Of Tuor and His Coming to Gondolin
    For #inktober2020 Day 14 prompt "armor"⁠. First time venturing into the stories of the Elder Days this Inktober. I hope you like it.
    I depicted the same thing once already in a small panel of one of my larger illustrations of the tale of Tuor from 2012. I have shared recently so you can compare it and see that I changed my designs a bit. Most notably the hauberk, my previous depiction was more influenced by the designs from the films, but since then I studied the matter a little bit and saw that more chainmail-based armour would probably be more accurate to what Tolkien had in mind. At the same time I tried to incorporate some elven and swanwing-like elements to make it more fancy.

    Although it took me much more time than appropriate for an Inktober drawing (again), it would certainly deserve more attention and time. Still, I enjoyed drawing it.


    https://www.deviantart.com/matejcadil/art/The-Tower-of-Cirith-Ungol-858418208
    [​IMG]
    In that dreadful light Sam stood aghast, for now, looking to his left, he could see the Tower of Cirith Ungol in all its strength. The horn that he had seen from the other side was only its topmost turret. Its eastern face stood up in three great tiers from a shelf in the mountain-wall far below; its back was to a great cliff behind, from which it jutted out in pointed bastions, one above the other, diminishing as they rose, with sheer sides of cunning masonry that looked northeast and south-east. About the lowest tier, two hundred feet below where Sam now stood, there was a battlemented wall enclosing a narrow court. Its gate, upon the near south-eastern side, opened on a broad road, the outer parapet of which ran upon the brink of a precipice, until it turned southward and went winding down into the darkness to join the road that came over the Morgul Pass. Then on it went through a jagged rift in the Morgai out into the valley of Gorgoroth and away to Barad-dûr. The narrow upper way on which Sam stood leapt swiftly down by stair and steep path to meet the main road under the frowning walls close to the Tower-gate.
    As he gazed at it suddenly Sam understood, almost with a shock, that this stronghold had been built not to keep enemies out of Mordor, but to keep them in. It was indeed one of the works of Gondor long ago, an eastern outpost of the defences of Ithilien, made when, after the Last Alliance, Men of Westernesse kept watch on the evil land of Sauron where his creatures still lurked. But as with Narchost and Carchost, the Towers of the Teeth, so here too the vigilance had failed, and treachery had yielded up the Tower to the Lord of the Ringwraiths, and now for long years it had been held by evil things. Since his return to Mordor, Sauron had found it useful; for he had few servants but many slaves of fear, and still its chief purpose as of old was to prevent escape from Mordor. Though if an enemy were so rash as to try to enter that land secretly, then it was also a last unsleeping guard against any that might pass the vigilance of Morgul and of Shelob.
    J.R.R. Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings. Book VI, Chapter I: The Tower of Cirith Ungol

    For #inktober2020 Day 15 prompt "outpost"⁠.
    I had wanted to draw the Tower of Cirith Ungol for a long time; it is one of the places that is so vividly and in detail described and I like to imagine what it might look like. So for this prompt I knew immediately it would fit.
    Unfortunately I didn't sketch it beforehand so I spent too much time just planning it and then it took me too much time to draw so I am late with it. I think it ended up too complex for an inktober drawing and at the same time too rushed. Still, I am glad I did it and I would love to redo it later with more time and maybe in other media. What do you think?


    https://www.deviantart.com/matejcadil/art/The-finest-rockets-ever-seen-858418373
    [​IMG]
    'Well, Mr. Frodo, if you do have another go, I hope you'll say a word about his fireworks,' said Sam. `Something like this:
    The finest rockets ever seen:
    they burst in stars of blue and green,
    or after thunder golden showers
    came falling like a rain of flowers.

    J.R.R. Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings. Book II, Chapter 7: The Mirror of Galadriel

    For #inktober2020 day 16 "Rocket" – really the only think in Middle-earth related to rocket that I could think of (and some of you also suggested) was of course Gandalf's fireworks. And I decided to depict them specifically as described in song by Sam.
    This time I managed to do it a little bit simpler, although I am not quite satisfied with the fireworks.
    I was thinking about using colours this time for the fireworks because the description of colours is so prominent, but in the end I stuck with black and white, for the sake of simplicity (and also because I don't have blue that could paint over black )
    Anyway, I hope you like it!
     
    Gamiel, Oct 30, 2020
    #45826
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  2. Iron_lord

    Iron_lord Chosen One star 10

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    Iron_lord, Oct 30, 2020
    #45827
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  3. Gamiel

    Gamiel Chosen One star 9

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    Dec 16, 2012
    Gamiel, Oct 30, 2020
    #45828
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  4. Gamiel

    Gamiel Chosen One star 9

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    Gamiel, Oct 30, 2020
    #45829
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  5. darkspine10

    darkspine10 Chosen One star 8

    Registered:
    Dec 7, 2014
    Darth Maul, by Raf Grassetti
    [​IMG]
     
    darkspine10, Oct 30, 2020
    #45830
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  6. Juliet316

    Juliet316 39x Hangman Winner star 10 VIP - Game Winner

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    Juliet316 , Oct 30, 2020
    #45831
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  7. Iron_lord

    Iron_lord Chosen One star 10

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    Sep 2, 2012
    Iron_lord, Oct 30, 2020
    #45832
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  8. Juliet316

    Juliet316 39x Hangman Winner star 10 VIP - Game Winner

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    Juliet316 , Oct 30, 2020
    #45833
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  9. Iron_lord

    Iron_lord Chosen One star 10

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    Sep 2, 2012
    Iron_lord, Oct 30, 2020
    #45834
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  10. Juliet316

    Juliet316 39x Hangman Winner star 10 VIP - Game Winner

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    Juliet316 , Oct 30, 2020
    #45835
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  11. Gamiel

    Gamiel Chosen One star 9

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    Dec 16, 2012
    Gamiel, Oct 31, 2020
    #45836
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  12. VadersLaMent

    VadersLaMent Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Apr 3, 2002
    [​IMG]

    Expedition by Envie P
     
    VadersLaMent, Oct 31, 2020
    #45837
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  13. Gamiel

    Gamiel Chosen One star 9

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    Dec 16, 2012
    Gamiel, Oct 31, 2020
    #45838
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  14. Gamiel

    Gamiel Chosen One star 9

    Registered:
    Dec 16, 2012
    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    from
     
    Gamiel, Oct 31, 2020
    #45839
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  15. Iron_lord

    Iron_lord Chosen One star 10

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    Sep 2, 2012
    Iron_lord, Oct 31, 2020
    #45840
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  16. Gamiel

    Gamiel Chosen One star 9

    Registered:
    Dec 16, 2012
    https://www.deviantart.com/axelmedellin/art/Drawlloween-day-25-Hack-O-Lantern-859235683
    [​IMG]


    https://www.deviantart.com/axelmedellin/art/Drawlloween-day-26-Beach-house-beasts-859337090
    [​IMG]


    https://www.deviantart.com/axelmedellin/art/Drawlloween-day-27-Oops-where-is-my-skeleton-859433496
    [​IMG]


    https://www.deviantart.com/axelmedellin/art/Drawlloween-day-28-Graveyard-in-the-playground-859544793
    [​IMG]


    https://www.deviantart.com/axelmedellin/art/Drawlloween-day-29-Brilliant-professor-Pumpkin-859634538
    [​IMG]


    https://www.deviantart.com/axelmedellin/art/Drawlloween-day-30-Dream-costume-concept-859753657
    [​IMG]
     
    Gamiel, Oct 31, 2020
    #45841
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  17. Juliet316

    Juliet316 39x Hangman Winner star 10 VIP - Game Winner

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    Juliet316 , Oct 31, 2020
    #45842
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  18. Gamiel

    Gamiel Chosen One star 9

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    Dec 16, 2012
    Gamiel, Oct 31, 2020
    #45843
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  19. Juliet316

    Juliet316 39x Hangman Winner star 10 VIP - Game Winner

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    Juliet316 , Oct 31, 2020
    #45844
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  20. Gamiel

    Gamiel Chosen One star 9

    Registered:
    Dec 16, 2012
    https://www.deviantart.com/green-mamba/art/130-Vermin-820519093
    [​IMG]
    Okay so this Spider-Man character has been a long time coming. I initially mentioned him by name back in Ana Kravinoff's entry, like thirty characters ago. I hadn't originally intended for him to be mentioned so early but decided he fit in the tale at the time so I did. So that's why it's taken so long for him to appear--there's a long lead time on these character drawings.

    ----

    Vermin has had a role in three previous entries--Ana Kravinoff, Gog, and The All-New Sinister Six. I'll go over his origin and the prior encounters with him. Among Calypso's many progeny, Vermin was a product of her goal to pass her inheritor genes to her offspring. She formulated a genetic cocktail that could temporarily grant men superhuman strength, but it was also highly addictive and was capable of driving the men mad. These men became her 'hunters,' who would both do her bidding and provide her with children. Her goal of producing a child that carried on her superhuman strength and senses was at last long achieved after coupling with Sergei Kravinoff, aka Kraven the Hunter, resulting in Ana Kravinoff.

    The other children she kept as pets in cages, treating them as subhuman. And when she had Curt Connors kidnapped and put into her servitude, Calypso forced the good doctor to transform her previous children into half human half animal monstrosities not unlike Connors' own lizard metamorphosis, and then had Kraven and their daughter hunt them for sport to test Ana's abilities. Many of these children were killed by Kraven during his last hunt, but one of those that survived his purge was one of Calypso's favorites, the half rat monster known only as "Vermin."

    (if the children had proper names before their transformation Calypso sure didn't refer to them by anything other than cold designations such as this)

    Strong, wild, and ferocious, Vermin was also easy for a strong master to control to their whims, and Ana took Vermin along with her after she killed her mother in retaliation for the horrors she had subjected her half-siblings to. Ana's goal beyond that became two-fold: she began looking for a way to cure her remaining half-siblings, and she would eradicate the remaining lines of inheritors.

    Following Calypso's death Vermin was next sighted alongside Ana when she freed Gog, the most fearsome of Calypso's children. He had assisted Ana in killing Cassandra Webb (who she very much so went out of her way to kill instead of subdue, which is not her style) and he also helped distract Agent Venom long enough for Ana to get the drop on him, as he was Gog's last real line of defense. After that, Vermin was next seen at the beginning of the All-New Sinister Six alongside Ana and Gog when they broke Hydro-Man, the Spot, and Mister Negative loose. But while the others escaped, Vermin did not, and he was apprehended by Spider-Man and the authorities.

    And as far as anyone knew, Vermin remained locked up following this, as the last time Ana had been seen she attempted to take on Thomas Fireheart alone (see Puma's entry for more details). Unfortunately that seemed a bit too good to be true.

    Some time after Peter first met the girl calling herself "Araña," he had found it hard to shake the would be sidekick. She seemed relatively competent, but Peter found himself bailing the girl out of trouble time and again. This time, however, would prove to be their undoing as a dynamic duo.

    It was late at night, and Peter decided to respond to a police broadcast of a disturbance at a wealthy former associate of Sergei Kravinoff's, who had hired the hunter in the past to kill some big game targets for his trophy room. He had a plush penthouse near Central Park, and when Peter arrived as Spider-Man (before the police), he couldn't even comprehend the level of carnage he saw through the skylight. The associate was dead and ripped to shreds, blood covering his trophy room. The stuffed display animals that Kraven had hunted for him were torn to pieces, and claw marks covered the walls. There was clearly a very serious struggle involved with something that wasn't quite human, but the crime scene was still very fresh and he was afraid of contaminating it before the police arrived.

    Unfortunately, Araña arrived just before Peter had made a decision to leave, and jumped into the penthouse skylight to survey the damage, and Peter jumped in after her to get her to leave. But before they could exit the room of stuffed beasts and bloody carnage, Peter's spider sense went off as Vermin leapt from behind one of the downed bear trophies toward Araña. Peter jumped in and tackled Vermin to the ground, but the beast fought harder than it had ever seemed to before. His claws and incisors flecked with blood, he was clearly the culprit, but as to why he had murdered Kraven's old client wasn't clear. In the darkness it was kind of hard to tell, but Vermin seemed to be wearing some sort of tracking device on his neck, but it was difficult to ascertain.

    Just when Peter thought he had gotten the upper hand while tussling with the rat monster, Araña grabbed Vermin by his back fur and attempted to pull him off her 'partner.' But Araña didn't anticipate Vermin suddenly letting go of Peter and turning on her, and he quickly spun around and bit clean through her left gauntlet. Peter briefly heard Anya scream in pain but it was quickly drowned out when the energy powering her gauntlet let out an enormous EMP burst and the raw power knocked all three of them out cold.

    When Peter came to, he found himself in a dark room and a man in a robe and slippers stood in front of him. It was Kraven the Hunter. Calypso and Ana stood behind him.

    ----

    So what the heck? Yeah okay there's going to be an extra here if you couldn't tell.

    Like I said earlier I hadn't originally intended for Vermin to come into play so early but it just kind of happened. I always planned to get around to him, it just took a while to finally get to him.

    He's pretty heavily redesigned from his comic look, where he was considerably more human-ish looking. Here the process that transformed him was based on the Lizard's, so I decided to have him look much more like a rat to kind of follow in my other cross breeds' footsteps. He's still got green pants though. The goal here was to make him look really disturbing and terrifying, something the heroes would shy away from just by looking at him. Big spooky yellow eyes, gross shaggy fur, a lot of ugly scars, and some pretty scary looking teeth and claws. And a big ole rat tail.


    https://www.deviantart.com/green-mamba/art/131-Scorpia-823525691
    [​IMG]
    It's time for the one-hundred thirty first character entry in the Spider-Man project. This one is Scorpia!

    ----

    Elaine Coll was a former US Army special forces member and one of the trusted allies of Frank Oliver (the Kangaroo, if you remember him?). She had a minor background role as one of the members of Oliver's forces back when he was working with Hammerhead and the Tinkerer, and she was one of the people arrested after the shootout between Hammerhead's people, the Inner Demons, and the Punisher (see the Kangaroo entry for more information on that).

    Jump forward several years--Elaine was released from prison around the end of the Grim Hunt. Rather irritated for how Spider-Man had gotten her thrown in the slammer, she had been formulating a method for revenge while incarcerated. Having heard that Phineas Mason, aka the Tinkerer, was released from his own sentence by Janice Lincoln's machinations, Elaine hunted the aged inventor down, and forced him to build an exoskeleton based on a design Oliver had obtained back in the day. Based on attempting to reverse engineer the Scorpion armor system that Mac Gargan had been equipped with by Octavius, it included a prehensile tail, specialized boots for high jumping, and clawed gauntlets that could rip through steel and discharge electric bolts. Not necessarily as sophisticated as the Scorpion's and she lacked his Oz enhanced strength, but she could make do.

    Unfortunately for Elaine, Spider-Man was nowhere to be seen for a couple weeks. The reason was because Peter was healing up after being stabbed by Ana Kravinoff, but she had no idea, all that meant was she had to make do with Black Cat and Spider-Gwen. So she shifted to phase two of her plan: find Oliver's hidden weapons cache. When Oliver and his compatriots were arrested they managed to conceal the location of his biggest cache in the city from the authorities, and last Elaine had heard no one had found it. The trick was that Oliver had kept the location a secret from basically everyone in his inner circle and had written the coordinates on an old set of blueprints he had. The trick, however, was that those blueprints were being held in the back of the art museum that the Kingpin had been hiding some of his valuables in.

    In the dead of night, Elaine, equipped with her new scorpion tailed exoskeleton, broke into the museum with all of her spec ops training. Unfortunately for Elaine, this was just at the same time the Black Cat was breaking into the museum on a mission for Silver Sable, looking to see if he had the Matter Diffuser schematics that Hammerhead had used to turn Mark Allan into the Molten Man. So a fight between the two broke out, and as hard as Elaine fought, her luck against the Black Cat just kept getting worse and worse. Elaine couldn't tell if it was because she wasn't used to the system or if it was genuinely malfunctioning, but the Tinkerer's exo suit just wasn't working the way she expected to. It ultimately resulted in the entire tail part of the system shorting out and dragging on the ground as dead weight, and at that point the Black Cat was jumping circles around her and the authorities arrived. Humiliated and defeated, Elaine was carted back off to prison, thus ending the short stint of "Scorpia."

    It would later become clear that Elaine's exoskeleton was actually sabotaged by the Tinkerer. Having grown tired of being used by criminals for their own purposes, Mason had intentionally made the suit to malfunction at just the wrong moment, hoping to ruin his own reputation and get the crooks off of his back. He was sick of it, he just wanted to live in peace.

    But as for that weapons cache... that can't be the last we'll hear of it, can it?

    ----

    So okay she doesn't really amount to much, but it's Scorpia, I'm not losing sleep over it. Her fight against the Black Cat is based on what is probably Scorpia's most well known appearance at the beginning of Kevin Smith's Spider-Man & Black Cat miniseries. Just like in the comics she doesn't have really any association with the real Scorpion at all. She's basically what she was to begin with--a low level mook who got a special suit.

    Design wise I decided I wanted her to be distinctly different from my normal Scorpion, so her outfit is supposed to look much more prototypical and slapdash than the streamlined suit that Gargan has. It's reminiscent of the suit I gave Grizzly, as they're both created by the Tinkerer, so there's some commonality there. Overall her design is kind of a merging of her modern design that originated in the aforementioned Kevin Smith series as well as her original debut look. She basically wears green, but the parts of the armor the go over her chest and waist are supposed to be reminiscent of her modern design. Ultimately she looks pretty original though. I decided to make her more muscular and kinda butch, just to make her different from a lot of my other female villains.


    https://www.deviantart.com/green-mamba/art/132-Marla-Madison-826634928
    [​IMG]
    New Spider-Man character time, this one is Marla Madison. She's a more minor supporting character, you might have to look her up.

    ----

    So at the end of the Sinister Syndicate business, a bunch of Spider-Slayers, hopped up on crazy amounts of SHATHRA energy from Overdrive's machine breaking, broke out into the city and started attacking everything on sight. Kind of a big problem--one Slayer was more than enough for Spider-Man to handle in his prime, let alone an army of them. The one saving grace was that they were obviously malfunctioning, with no clear directive, simply attempting to kill everything, making them disorganized. But shutting them down one at a time was going to take time they didn't have. Every other time Peter had stopped the Slayers he had relied on getting Alistair Smythe to stop them... and he had been dead for years.

    While Spider-Man, Black Cat, Cloak, and Dagger all did their best to corral the Slayers away from citizens and evacuating buildings in their paths, Mary Jane got busy researching potential avenues for shutting them down. That was when the most unexpected person contacted her--J. Jonah Jameson. He told her that the Slayers were based off early designs by Alistair's father, Spencer Smythe, that Jameson had funded, and he knew a former Horizon Labs engineer who worked with Spencer Smythe on the project. Knew her quite well, actually, because he was dating her! Named Marla Madison, she helped the elder Smythe build the programming that had functioned as the proto Slayer's artificial intelligence, and she had an idea to shut the manic Slayers down.

    The Slayers apparently had an emergency override code built into their systems. If Alistair's Spider Slayers were still built onto the same code base as the prototype Slayer as was believed, it could be used to shut them down. And she had a plan to broadcast this override code to all of the Slayers using the Superior Spider-Man's defunct city wide security systems--she just needed Spider-Man to get her to three of their stations to triangulate them.

    Breaking off from the rest of the heroes, Peter swung to the Daily Bugle building where Marla and the DB staff were hunkering down in. Before they left, Jameson told Peter that he trusted him now, but if anything happened to Marla he couldn't be held responsible for what he would do to Peter.

    Fortunately, Jameson's fears were unfounded, and Peter and Marla successfully shut all of the Spider Slayers in the city down with the override code (and then tore down the rest of the Superior Spider-Man's defunct surveillance system down for good measure afterward).

    With the crisis averted, MJ asked Peter why he didn't have Marla give him the system and do it all himself, and Peter said he thought it was about time he stopped trying to do everything himself.

    The Slayers didn't claim any lives, but they did result in many injuries and lots of destroyed property. Marla convinced Jameson to come forward and donate his own money to help rebuild the city, and to come clean with his original involvement in the Slayers' creation. After coming clean and publicly apologizing for the campaign he led against Spider-Man, Jameson announced his retirement from the Daily Bugle, to focus on a more peaceful life with Marla.

    ----

    I guess this can be seen as somewhat of a sunset on Jameson's active role in the story. If you're wondering, he's divorced in my continuity by the time Peter meets him. And I guess you could say that Marla Madison was present at the original Horizon Labs fiasco that led to the death of Spencer Smythe, so she's had a background role that I hadn't mentioned before. In the comics Marla Madison helped Jameson design a Spider-Slayer after Spencer had died but before Alistair was introduced and later became romantically involved with him and later married him (and divorced and then died pretty recently). So you can see how I worked some of that into the story here.

    Design wise she doesn't really pull much from Marla's look in the comics (which isn't actually very consistent to begin with), so I went in my own direction. I actually based her look somewhat on old photographs of NASA scientist Margaret Hamilton, albeit aged up. I imagine she's in her late fifties, maybe early sixties and the years have been kind to her looks I guess. And then there's an image of a Spider-Slayer on her tablet.


    https://www.deviantart.com/green-mamba/art/133-Joe-Smith-827433961
    [​IMG]
    Yes, this is an honest to goodness Spider-Man character. Probably the most obscure one in I've done thus far, maybe tied with Gog. He's an old Steve Ditko era character, originating in The Amazing Spider-Man #38, the story of which was called "Just a Guy Named Joe!" Yep.

    ----

    Before we can get to Joe Smith's entry into the story, we got a little scene setting to do.

    Last Peter had seen Ben Reilly and Flash Thompson they were leading a group of insurgents into the fake Kravinoff mansion, the squad of which murdered the two Chameleons masquerading as Kraven and Calypso and killed Vermin, not to mention attempting to kill Peter. Something was very, very wrong with them, but try as they might, Peter and his friends couldn't get in contact with them or with their employer, called New U Technologies. New U's headquarters was in San Francisco, so it wasn't a location Peter was exactly swinging by consistently. All anyone knew was that the company was very secretive but was apparently creating revolutionary organ transplants. Ben had traveled to New U to help control his cellular clone degeneration and Flash to help control the Venom symbiote. And then there was the matter of Eddie Brock suddenly transforming into Venom on his own without Flash having given up his suit--was it related? It was hard to say.

    The entire Sinister Syndicate/Spider-Slayer problem occurred while Peter and his friends were trying to figure out what was going on with New U. When Gwen healed up and Peter had a break from school, the two of them decided that enough was enough and they booked a flight to San Francisco to find out the truth.

    New U Technologies' headquarters was a pretty nondescript office building in the heart of San Francisco. When Peter inquired about Ben Reilly and Flash Thompson, however, the clerks said that there was no record of anyone by either of their names ever working for New U. Which was kind of freaky. At the same time, Gwen scoped out their last known places of residence--no sign of either of them or of Sha Shan, Flash's fiancée. Something very screwy was going on.

    Frustrated, Peter decided to swing around town as Spider-Man the next day to see if he could draw out anyone's attention. While swinging by Union Square he noticed that there was a superhero film of some sort filming in the middle of it. The sight of Spider-Man swinging by kind of ruined their shot, and everyone turned to look at him. For some reason, when one of the stuntmen by the name of Joe Smith, who was wearing a goofy green costume belonging to the movie's bad guy, spotted him, he suddenly got really quiet and stopped moving.

    When one of the crew members came by and poked him, saying it was time to reset for the scene, Joe flew off the handle, grabbing the crew member by her collar and throwing her in a superhuman arc into the air two stories high. Peter swung in to save the crew member, and when he got to the ground Joe was growling almost like a beast, attacking the crew and set around him with inhuman strength. As the cast and crew fled, Peter attempted to engage the suddenly very violent stuntman. But there was something disturbingly familiar with the sounds Joe was making, the roars of something Peter couldn't quite place in his mind.

    It wasn't until Peter managed to knock off Joe's helmet was he able to pinpoint the similarities. The whites of Joe's eyes were pitch black, as a black liquid oozed from his mouth. The smell, the sounds, and the feelings it was giving his spider sense were all too familiar--it was symbiote. Except... this one was on the inside of Joe, not the outside. Something very, very wrong was going on here. Joe's strength was absolutely unreal, being able to easily tear through all of the webbing Peter could throw at him. Disoriented by the effects the symbiote was having on his spider-sense, Peter was pinned by Joe for a second, only to have a sudden intense burst of energy blast Joe off of him.

    The blast had hit Joe hard enough to smash him into the wall of a nearby building, and the impact had knocked him unconscious. Peter's savior came by and offered him his hand to get up off the ground--it was someone Peter had only heard about on the news, San Francisco's resident vigilante named Cardiac. Cardiac greeted him, calling him "Peter," and saying Ben told him all about him. Kind of taken aback, Peter asked Cardiac what he knew about Ben Reilly, but Cardiac wouldn't be straight with him, as he marched towards Joe stuck in the wall. The only thing Cardiac said was that "Mr. Brock knows you're in town now. You'd better be more careful."

    When Cardiac reached Joe, he lifted his staff up to Joe's head. Peter realized he was trying to kill the stuntman, and he jumped in to save Joe's life. They tussled long enough for the authorities to arrive, and at that point Cardiac attempted to cut and run. When Peter tried to follow, Cardiac finally hit him with a blast from his staff and knocked him two blocks away. By the time Peter recovered, Cardiac was long gone.

    Joe Smith was taken to a hospital associated with New U Technologies, but by the time that Peter and Gwen went to investigate his stay there the next day he was gone. The hospital said he had been transferred to a different New U facility, but when Peter and Gwen actually went to the location of the second facility they found out it was a ruse--it didn't exist.

    Upon further research, they found that Joe Smith had suffered a serious bout with liver disease the year before and had gone to New U for an experimental organ transplant. It was all connected, but how?

    ----

    We're finally getting to the end of this New U/Cardiac/Scarlet Spider story I started way back in March of last year, but I think you'll be pretty surprised to see the direction it goes in!

    Joe Smith was a character I had wanted to introduce for a while as I had said before I wanted to hit as many of the old Stan Lee era characters as possible. And I rather liked the idea of this just absolutely average guy in every way suddenly becoming a serious threat due to unforeseen circumstances, but only briefly. This is how I figured out how to fit him into the ongoing plot. There's still quite a bit of connection to his original story, what with him working on a movie and what have you.

    For his look, the look of his suit is basically lifted straight from his original comic appearance, albeit altered some to look more like it came from a superhero movie. I definitely took some inspiration from some super hero movie costumes (his boots in particular are heavily based on Captain America's from the first Avengers film), but it's also supposed to look kind of cheap and goofy, to sort of set it apart from the 'real' super characters in my universe, but I dunno if that really comes across all that well. Oh well. For his actual face, I just basically went in my own direction, I just wanted him to look like a completely average joe (if you'll pardon the pun). Someone completely unremarkable in every way.


    https://www.deviantart.com/green-mamba/art/134-Venom-II-828980828
    [​IMG]
    A new Spider-Man character entry for you! And here's a twist you probably didn't see coming!

    This entry follows after Joe Smith's.

    ----

    The day after Peter and Gwen were given the runaround for Joe Smith's location, they returned to their hotel in San Francisco to an unusual quiet. The other guests weren't making much sound nor were the staff, but it was a lazy afternoon in California. In the elevator they were joined by a couple of chambermaids, when suddenly their spider senses went off. One of the maids swung a syringe of something at Peter and Gwen while the other hit the emergency stop on the elevator. Peter and Gwen managed to disarm and knock out the two suddenly hostile maids, and when the two of them fell to the floor, their faces shifted and warped into the blank faces of the Chameleon.

    Carefully exiting the elevator shaft (via the emergency hatch on the top of the elevator itself) they were confronted by many more members of the hotel staff, their faces already warped to their blank chameleon states. They fought their way through the hallway of chameleons (though Peter did think Gwen was having a harder time than normal) only for the faceless squad members that Peter had seen in the false Kravinoff mansion (which were also the same people Gwen and Felicia had seen in Florida attempting to capture the Lizard) to smash in through the windows of the hotel. Under heavy fire the two of them leapt up into the ventilation system for some cover.

    But it was all for nought, when a red tendril suddenly burst through the metal vent and grabbed Peter by the throat. A black clawed hand ripped open the vent and the ceiling and another red tendril reached out and grabbed Gwen. Looking down, they saw three figures standing below them among the squad, all of whom they recognized: Flash Thompson, Mac Gargan, and Ben Reilly. Their faces were uncovered, but each one was enveloped in a symbiote of some sort. Flash had his Agent Venom suit. Ben Reilly, the person currently holding onto them with red tendrils, was wearing some sort of red and blue symbiote reminiscent of Carnage's. And Mac Gargan was wearing something that looked like Eddie's old Venom suit, albeit with a different spider symbol.

    Absolutely none of them, not even Gargan, looked like they were themselves. Ben was the only one to speak, saying they just couldn't mind their own business, could they? But since they were here, he told them that Brock wanted a word. He pulled them down and Gargan extended tendrils of his own to better hold them in place as Flash shot them both with darts, and they blacked out.

    When the two of them came to they found themselves sitting in some sort of highly advanced laboratory with tubes of black symbiote sludge everywhere as well as stasis containers holding people in the process of being bound to symbiotes forcibly. There were blank chameleon faces lining the walls like trophies, and there were what looked to be the vivisected remains of Vermin in some sort of containment field. The three symbiote infused culprits who had captured them stood at their sides, as Peter and Gwen realized they were strapped into empty stasis containers. A single office desk with a large chair rotated away from them was the only real furniture in sight.

    This was all probably one of the most horrifying sights either of them had ever seen. Peter was the first to speak. "Eddie, what the hell have you done?"

    A grotesque voice erupted from everywhere in the room. "Eddie? Eddie is in the tank next to you."

    Sure enough, to the left of Peter was the sickly form of Eddie Brock in stasis, a black symbiote squirming all over his body. The voice said that Eddie had been found fraternizing with the enemies of New U and had spilled company secrets. His fate would be decided later.

    The next question, of course, was who was actually in charge here? If they were present they could at least say hello.

    The voice laughed, and the chair spun around, revealing it to be empty--except, not quite. A small black stain slithered from the chair to in front of the desk, and the black symbiote sludge in the tubes around the lab crawled out and joined the small stain that was now at the front of the desk. The symbiote sludge accrued, getting bigger and bigger until it formed a gargantuan, vaguely humanoid figure with an enormous mouth filled with razor sharp teeth and a slobbering tongue.

    The black figure introduced himself as the owner and operator of New U Technologies. The creator of the Venom project, and the one who had brought down the plane that had killed Peter's parents. His name was Edward Brock Senior, and he congratulated the son of Richard Parker on being drafted into the coming war.

    The stasis tubes surrounding Peter and Gwen closed and the inky black forms of symbiotes lunged out and grabbed them both.

    ----

    To be concluded in the upcoming extra, the War of the Symbiotes!

    So how's that for a twist, huh? Yep, this whole time I've been building to the War of the Symbiotes, not the Clone Conspiracy--the New U name was a red herring! And the man behind it all is... Eddie's father?! And he's actually a symbiote himself, nothing on the inside?

    The idea came to me in a flash of inspiration. Like, I had remembered that I had told some people that if a character is ever mentioned by name in any entry they would either have a character entry to themselves or would appear in an extra. But at some point I had forgotten that I had actually named Eddie's father outright, so I was going to say he was an exception to the rule, but then I just had a random thought--what if he came back as a villain? I had wanted to come up with a kind of conclusion for the Venom/symbiote arc akin to how Superior Spider-Man was intended to be one for Doc Ock, and then it just hit me that bringing back Edward Brock Senior as an "Ultimate Venom" of sorts would be the perfect way to do it.

    So in a way, my "Venom II" is the closest thing the project has to a unique character. Kinda sorta, depending on how you want to count Eddie's dad turning into Venom in the Ultimate Spider-Man video game ending flashback thing.

    On what to have him look like and what to call him, I used the appearance of the Conrad Marcus Venom from the early Miles Morales story in Ultimate Spider-Man as a basis. The whole pose and design here are pretty much straight lifted from Marcus' appearance on one of the covers in his story, albeit altered some to fit my universe more. And I thought, as this guy is actually just a big goop monster with no person inside him it would be fun to do more of the monstrous mouth with the big tongue and everything that my Venom has lacked. I had considered having him be my version of Toxin or Maniac or some other symbiote character I hadn't yet used but I figured, for what he's going to stand for symbolically, he had to be a Venom. So if you want you could call him "Ultimate Venom" or "Venom Senior" or something.


    https://www.deviantart.com/green-mamba/art/135-Clash-832199248
    [​IMG]
    Spider-Man character time. This time it's Clash, though my Clash is gender flipped from the comics. So this is Clara Cole instead of Clayton Cole. Got it?

    ----

    Who was Clara Cole? She was Spidey's number one fan, basically since the beginning. A pro wrestling aficionado, she scored tickets to be in the audience for the filming of the wrestling reality show that Spider-Man had crashed in his first public appearance, and from that moment, she was obsessed, pouring over every piece of footage, images, and articles of and about the webhead. She had every bit of merchandise the Kingpin released after he gained the rights to Spider-Man's likeness, and she had seen the first two Spider Hero films more times than she could count.

    Why just the first two? Because the third didn't come out until after the Spider Island incident, and that's kind of an important moment in Clara's life.

    You see, that's because Clara was one of the people Cindy Moon had transformed into one of her SILK Agents, giving her spider powers. When the mental hold Cindy Moon had over her SILK Agents vanished, Clara suddenly found herself in possession of extraordinary abilities that perfectly matched her hero! She didn't know how it had happened, but she believed this was her destiny!

    Most of the other SILK Agents had been captured shortly after Cindy Moon's demise, but Clara had not been present at the time, instead guarding another of Cindy's safe houses filled with experimental technology that went into the creation of her gauntlet. With no recollection of what had happened to her or why, Clara swung out into the city with her newfound powers (though it was rather difficult to get used to right away) in order to meet Spider-Man and... well, she didn't know after that. But she knew that from that moment, her life was going to be different.

    What she didn't expect, though, was to be attacked by her very hero. She thought she was going to be welcomed with loving arms for her powers, but instead, Spider-Man attempted to apprehend her, leading to a short chase that came to a close when Clara accidentally hurt herself swinging into a building and was captured.

    This was all done for her benefit--the SILK Agents were actually clones of people Cindy had killed and replaced. The original Clara was dead, the Clara with spider powers was actually a clone, and she was undergoing rapid cell degeneration. But Clara had no idea about any of this, and had to be brought kicking and screaming to have the Parker genome expelled from her body, which saved her life but removed her powers.

    To Clara it was the ultimate betrayal. She thought the story of the spider powers killing her was made up just so Spider-Man could keep others from getting his powers. All she had wanted to do was help, and all it got her was a one way ticket to a normal life with the rest of the average nobodies. And so what had started with a positive obsession with Spider-Man became twisted, and the longer she sat with these feelings the worse it got.

    Jump forward several years, to a full year after the conclusion of the War of the Symbiotes. Peter and MJ had just a few months left to finish getting their teaching degrees, and Gwen had acclimated to civilian life pretty well, getting back in the swing of things at college and was on her final year as well, and had gotten an internship at the reopened New Horizon, which Max Modell had decided to start again after he got out of the hospital following the Superior Showdown. Felicia Hardy had finished her "tour of duty" with Silver Sable's sanctum and elected to get a more normal job in the city. A sense of quiet had returned to Peter's life, with really just the Kingpin's cronies to keep him busy.

    That's when Clara Cole finally decided to make her move. Her obsession with Spider-Man eventually reached really, really unhealthy levels, and she formulated a plan for revenge. Recalling the location of the SILK safe house she was at when she first 'awoke' to her former powers, Clara found that it hadn't been discovered by the authorities in the interim and she absconded with some of the technology there. The thing that caught her eye the most was a sound wave producing device that Cindy Moon had Project Arachne build for her. It seemed like it was part of the design that allowed Cindy to control her SILK Agents, but on its own Cindy had written in her notes that it had potential as a spider sense cancelling device, in addition to more straightforward weaponization.

    For years she scrounged together parts to make a full suit that could utilize the sound waves and scrapped by just enough StarGOD metal to power it. Now she had the suit and the gimmick, now she just needed a catchy name. Like... Clash? Well... it'd have to do.

    Using waves designed to cancel Spider-Man's spider sense, Clara got the drop on Spidey as he swung through Chinatown on a lazy afternoon, blasting him a block away. Announcing herself as Clash, she told Spider-Man that she was designed to be his perfect nightmare, revenge for taking her life from him. Which just confused the webhead. She told him who she was, what had happened to her, how he had treated her like a common crook, catching her and forcing her to give up her newfound gifts. But while Peter had remembered catching SILK agents in general he had forgotten about her in particular (Spider Island was exhausting, physically and mentally, so a lot of it blurred together).

    This just ended up driving Clara even further up the wall, and she pinned him to the road with a sonic screech from on gauntlet on her suit and slammed him repeatedly with a hard focused sonic wave with the other. It wasn't until a few seconds later that Clara even realized that Spider-Man had stopped moving, and her assault let up. Looking down on Spidey's unmoving body on the ground, she looked to her hands and realized what she had actually done. She had beat Spider-Man?! All those other villains and monsters he had fought and she was the one to take him down?!

    Clara looked around her incredulously at the onlookers who just stood in stunned silence. It all suddenly dawned on her the power she had at her grasp.

    Unfortunately for Clara, Spider-Man wasn't totally out of it, and with what little strength he had left he webbed the street light above Clara, and pulled it down on her, smacking her in the back of the head. Her suit protected her from most of the blow, but she was still knocked down and had to regain her bearings. By the time she got back on her feet, Spider-Man was gone.

    News of the new costumed lunatic calling herself "Clash" who managed to get Spider-Man to run scared spread quickly. When Clara got back to her apartment building she found a black limousine in front of the door. When she approached, the limo's door opened, and two burly men in suits piled out and told her to get in. In the limo she came face to face with him--Wilson Fisk. He told her they needed to have a talk about this Clash character.

    ----

    So obviously this is all going somewhere.

    I elected to make Clash female for the same reason I switched up Swarm and Overdrive: Spidey's rogue's gallery doesn't have too many women, and I wanted to switch that up a bit. So Clayton became Clara. Her whole origin being a fan of Spider-Man's who feels betrayed and becomes a villain is basically pulled from Clayton's though obviously a lot of the finer points were changed. I originally wasn't going to do Clash until I thought up the Spider Island connection, which I thought would be a fun way to tie the character into the story and gave Clash a fun role.

    For Clash's design, I decided to base the design on the character's Civil War II era look, which I think is the stronger of the two suit designs. Outside of obviously making the character a woman, I had the challenge of trying to make the suit more bulky and technological looking while still calling back to a lot of the design motifs. The black and white color scheme along with the bulkier components have a very futuristic slant in this look I think, pretty different from a lot of my previous designs but still feels like it belongs in the same universe. And then the mask still looks like a 'nega Spider-Man,' just like in the comics.
     
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