By Devin T. Quin
With suitcase nukes and the proliferation of biological weapons, there’s a fairly good chance humanity could wipe itself out within, oh, say the next 48 hours. Should you be lucky enough to survive the coming biohazards and mutant attacks that follow, it shall fall unto you to rebuild our once great civilization.
The post-apocalyptic job market is understandably bleak. Mailman, outback scavenger or gyro pilot will be the best positions John Q. Public could hope for. Not you, however! By memorizing these five simple steps you will have the ability to draw comicdom’s favorite funster, the Amazing, Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, making you the new Walt Disney/Leonardo Da Vinci of the radiated dawn.
Gentlemen: women will want you and men will want to steal your hands, to reanimate through black magic, for their own commercial gain! Madames: Ditto, but with guys.
STEP 1. Source Materials
Find yourself a radioactive spider and have it bite somebody, preferably an orphaned nerd. IF YOU ARE working in a nuclear winter environment, this should be easy to accomplish, but if not then find a regular spider and go to the dentist. Right before they take the X-ray picture of your teeth, pop the spider into your mouth. Presto, instant radioactive spider! When your dentist asks you why the x-rays came back showing a spider in your mouth, tell the dentist your mouth is haunted! BooOOOooo!
Now that you have your own radioactive Spider-Man, we can move on to the most important step:
STEP 2. Super-Hero Proportions
What makes a super-hero REALLY super is their physiques. A guy like Spidey should be the size of seven of his heads tall, and three of his heads wide.
If this is unclear to you, just picture this in your mind: Take Toby Maguire and place him next to the 3D CGI Spider-Man who flips around in the movies. They’re not the same size, are they? NOW imagine chopping off Toby’s head, and stacking a pile of six heads with Toby’s on top, maybe secured by a pike or skewer. Did you imagine all that? Wow, you are one sick puppy.
Anyway, back to drawing: lay your radioactive human/spider hybrid down on a clean, flat surface, attaching metal manacles to his arms and legs. Moisten your subject with a supple salve, such as linseed oil or surfer’s wax. Use a pulley or ratchet to stretch this Psuedo-Spidey both taller and wider.
It’s best to do this in a darkened pit or dungeon, as the screaming can become a debilitant to progress. After a few months, you should have a Spider-Man of accurate proportions ready to serve as your artist’s model!
STEP 3. Penciling
Use a pencil to pick the lock to the Sloan Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and sneak down into the basement. Knock out a guard and hold his finger above a lighter. Make a heat impression of his fingerprint into the erasure on the end of the pencil and use this to gain entry to the Electrochemical Energy Lab, where they are currently building a prototype for a working shrink-ray!
Use the ray to shrink your model down to about 5 inches tall. We’re almost done, ready to ink?!
STEP 4. Inking
Purchase or steal a bottle of blue ink and a bottle of red. I prefer Daler-Rowney FW inks, but many professionals use Windsor Newton. ‘Stuck up snots. Dip your shrunken, stretched and irradiated Spider-Dude halfway in the blue ink, and then halfway in the red.
Pose him in exciting action poses and then press him firmly, but not too hard, against a piece of paper.
STEP 5. Finishing touches
Voilâ! Throw a bunch of random black lines on top of these ink impressions and you’re a regular old Todd McFarlane! Encourage your model to evolve spinnerets into his arms to save you the time of drawing webbing. Repeat this process with Vultures, Octopi and Goblins to give your Spidey super-villains to fight. Draw a few squiggly lines around Spidey’s head to indicate his Spidey-Senses are tingling, or that he’s hung-over, or maybe vexed that Lucy pulled the football away just as he was kicking it … *sigh* … again.
YEP, even after the curtains have drawn on modern society there will still be demand for Spider-Man comics. After all, if the clone-saga, getting married, getting magically divorced, dying, unmasking Spider-Man, the Spider-Spikes in his arms or that internet meme of Spider-man dancing like Napoleon Dynamite didn’t kill off the demand, I don’t know what the Apocalypse thinks it can do.
By following my steps you can enjoy a rich, fulfilling life as a noble preserver of America’s culture and heritage, or conversely a lazy plagiarist. It’s all in the eye of the beholder, really. WHO CARES, The brass tacks of the matter is you too can draw the Amazing Spider-Man!
