03 December 2016

An Unidentified Artist and a Flying Banana

I picked up this sketch card a while ago, figuring that it would be pretty easy to track down the name of the artist. So far I haven't had much luck in that department. The character depicted is Carol Danvers/Ms. Marvel as Captain Marvel, and the card comes from the 2014 Upper Deck Guardians of the Galaxy set.


I thought it was a pretty good depiction of the character, and I think I got a decent discount on it due to the lack of an artist name on the card. There is a signature on the back, but I haven't been able to tie it down to a known name from the sketch artist list for this product. I could probably put more effort into it, but I haven't got around to it yet. One cool thing about Carol Danvers is that she's a member of the United States Air Force, and that is my awkward way of tying this in to my visit to the Hill Aerospace Museum at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, this morning.


It's not quite as large as the big Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio, but it's still worth a visit. The bigger aircraft are outside, like your large bombers (B-29, B-1, B-52), cargo planes (C-130, C-7, C-123, C-47), and assorted other stuff, like this H-21 Workhorse helicopter, which carries the nickname "Flying Banana" due to its shape.


This is a picture from the balcony housing the museum's art collection. This building holds the older generations of airplanes. Highlights for me were the P-51, B-17, P-38, and the TH-13T. This museum was much better lit than the one in Dayton, which I thought was better for viewing the different parts of the aircraft. Many of the aircraft also had panels opened up so that you could see some of the internal features, like machine gun mounts, cockpits, and the various electronic modules sitting in their brackets. I don't recall seeing as much of that at the other museum.

I didn't take a photo in the other building, but it housed the newer stuff. The big highlight for me in that room was the SR-71 Blackbird. I wanted to look at the F-15 and the A-10, but there was an Air Force unit there having some kind of ceremony, and I didn't want to be that guy milling around while officers make speeches about someone's retirement or promotion.

Overall it was a good place to spend a couple of hours. I've seen most of the aircraft before in one form or another, but it's hard to get tired of looking at military equipment. The exhibits did a good job of tying each aircraft to Utah's history, as well as some interesting stuff about military involvement in Alaska, like the building of the Alaska-Canadian Highway and the recovery of the museum's P-38 many years after it crash-landed in Alaska.

6 comments:

  1. If you ever get down near the Florida Panhandle you need to check out the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola. It's remarkable. Easy to spend a whole day there and still want to come back the next.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'll keep that in mind. It would be interesting to see military aviation history from the Navy perspective.

      Delete
  2. That is one museum on my list. It does look well lit with a good amount of airframes.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yeah, they've got over 70 planes and helicopters on display, plus some other exhibits, a couple of missiles, and a few ground vehicles. I particularly liked the Dodge ambulance and the number of drip pans they had placed under their Jeep.

      Delete
  3. Any museum with an SR-71 is a museum on my list.

    P.S. As usual... cool sketch card. Was Ms. Marvel in Guardians of the Galaxy?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I don't believe that Captain Marvel appeared in the movie, but I think the original Captain Marvel (there have been four or five) existed in the same universe as the Guardians of the Galaxy, and I also think that maybe some heroes who have held the Captain Marvel mantle have been members of the Guardians under other names. It's confusing to me. I haven't kept up with all of the shifting timelines and stories well enough to be certain.

      Delete