I’m participating in the Wonder Woman Day IV Charity Auction this year.  The auction benefits these Domestic Violence Shelters and hot-lines:  Raphael House of Portland, Bradley-Angle House, and Portland Women’s Crisis Line.  I am very proud to participate in this auction because these are very important causes to me.  Please bid, and bid high!

I wanted to do a picture of Wonder Woman being happy and having fun – something that I don’t think happens nearly enough in the comic books.  I also really wanted to draw She-Ra and Catra, as well as Wonder Woman’s enemy, Cheetah.  Most pictures I’ve seen that have Wonder Woman and She-Ra together have them fighting each other.  I really don’t care for that, because I believe that Wonder Woman and She-Ra would get along really well and a tremendous sense of camaraderie, and I wanted to show them being friendly and having fun together.  I also wanted to play on the fact that they both have well-known enemies with a cat theme.

While I take a lot of my cues for Wonder Woman and Cheetah from the way that Terry Dodson depicted them when he drew the Wonder Woman comic book, I also take a couple of Lynda Carter elements that I sneak in here and there with Wonder Woman.  Cheetah also has a few George Perez elements in her design, especially when it comes to her facial markings, which Dodson mostly abandoned.

She-Ra and Catra were really fun to draw.  I’m a big fan of Mattel’s Masters of the Universe Classics action figure line.  It’s a melding of various canons of their franchises into one cohesive line.  My approach to She-Ra and Catra was along that lines.  I wanted to depict them with the familiarity of the Filmation designs of the cartoon that everyone knows and loves these characters from, but also bring in some of the details that the action figures had, whose designs were very different from the cartoon designs.  The result give detailed and interesting looks that easily stand up well alongside Wonder Woman and Cheetah.

The background is inspired by the Whispering Woods background paintings that were featured in the She-Ra: Princess of Power cartoon.  They are lush, flamboyant and magical looking.  As I was planning out the background, I thought it would be fun to have Lookie in it.  Lookie was always hiding in the background of the cartoons, and at the end of the episodes, he would reveal his hiding place and explain the episode’s moral.  Once I decided that Lookie was going to be in it, I wanted to balance the picture, and tried to think of a character in Wonder Woman’s lore that could serve as an analogue to Lookie.  The two franchises are pretty rife with analogues:  Ares/Hordak, Circe/Shadow Weaver, Giganta/Scorpia, Steve Trevor/Bow, Nemesis/Sea Hawk.  When it came down to it, I settled on the whimsical and fun Wonder Tot, who is Wonder Woman as a small child in the Silver Age comic book stories.  Wonder Tot often had “impossible adventures” right alongside Wonder Woman as an adult and Wonder Woman as a teenager (Wonder Girl), and I thought that the magical nature of the Whispering Woods, and the fact that She-Ra’s planet of Etheria was likely in another dimension, would provide a narrative that would allow Wonder Tot.

Here, Kitty, Kitty!
8.5″ x 11″ on Bristol Board
Pencils, Inks and Prismacolor Color Pencils

Wonder Woman, Cheetah and Wonder Tot ©DC Comics 2010

She-Ra, Catra and Lookie ©Mattel 2010