2016 Marvel Masterpieces Sketch Card - Jean Grey by Justin Ayers

I took a day off from Sketch Card Week Part 2, but I believe this is the 6th post in the series. I am going back to the 2016 Marvel Masterpieces well with this post. I believe this was the first Marvel Masterpieces sketch I picked up. I don't have a particular affinity for the character, but I was searching for sketches from the set and this one was ending soon at the right price, so I put in a bid and won it.

The character is Jean Grey / Phoenix, and the artist, Justin Ayers, modeled his card after Jean Grey's card from 1992 Marvel Masterpieces. I recognized the uniform Jean Grey is wearing in the sketch card, but couldn't for the life of me remember where it came from. Eventually I found a page with the information I was looking for, but it took a while. She is dressed in her uniform from the Age of Apocalypse storyline. I probably should have been able to recall that in an instant, but I don't read the X-Books as faithfully as some comic readers do. I think the X-Men are cool and all (I named my kid after an X-Man, even), but I am more drawn in by the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, the various Hulks, and some of the lesser-known characters. But a good sketch is a good sketch, and I won't discriminate too much when it comes to adding a new character to my sketch collection.

I linked to Justin Ayers' Twitter above, as that seems to be his most active web presence. He's currently got a pretty awesome Guardians of the Galaxy sketch puzzle posted that is pretty darn sweet.

Here's the back of the card, again featuring the artist's name and the inspiration for the card. Although the two cards I've posted from this set both featured the same character as the original, many artists used the pose from the 1992 Jean Grey card and illustrated a different character. Sketch Card Week is almost over, but there is still some fun to be had.

2016 Marvel Masterpieces Nova Sketch by Kate Carleton

I didn't do a post yesterday. I planned on it, but I had to work and by the time I got home I didn't feel like doing anything. I did take my kids to the park for a little while, but that was about it. I had to try to keep them busy all evening as my wife had some homework due and needed some uninterrupted time to get through it. Today was my first day off in quite a while, so I slept in and then did some yard work.

One of the best-looking comic book card sets to be released this year was 2016 Upper Deck Marvel Masterpieces, featuring artwork by Joe Jusko. Unfortunately, it was one of those high-end products that the average collector is never going to obtain in any quantity. A full 1/5 of the base set is short-printed in one way or another, and the SP cards are hard to get and quite expensive. There are actually some parallels with higher print runs than the SP base cards, so some people are creating hybrid sets with the parallels in place of the actual base cards. I haven't done any of that, but I've considered my options just because the artwork is so good-looking. One thing I have been able to do, however, is grab a couple of sketch cards from the product on eBay.

One cool thing that Upper Deck did with the sketches this year is ask the artists to take inspiration from the cards in previous Marvel Masterpieces sets. Some artists took this more literally than others and some used comic book covers or other artwork as inspiration, but most artists did what was asked. So if you were wondering why so many sketches from this set look similar, that's the reason. They were all taking their inspiration from the same source material.

Today's sketch came from artist Kate Carleton, whose work has appeared on this blog before. The character is Nova, a character I liked as a member of the New Warriors. I've lost track of what he's been up to in the comics over time, but I still have that nostalgic attachment to the character. I came across this sketch while looking for Marvel Masterpieces sketches to add to my collection, and the artist, character, and price were all right for me, so I picked it up. On the right is the base card from 1992 Marvel Masterpieces that this sketch was inspired by.

Here is the back of the card, with nice sections for the artist to write their name and what their inspiration was. Many artists don't fill these blocks out (not cool!), but Kate Carleton did. I don't know all the history for this set, but you can see that the back is printed with the set name as 2014 Marvel Masterpieces, suggesting that there was at least a two-year delay in production.