"COSMIC CUSTODIANS" Gloom Of The Glooms - Part One Post One

This particular science-fiction adventure was both written and then drawn in just a few weeks. It’s the first in a series of tales I’ve been sketching this year in order to scratch a ‘super-hero team in outer space’ itch I’ve recently been having. As I wanted to get the ‘introductory’ story out quickly I’ve utilised characters from a variety of older Mooretoons, and simply ‘tweaked them’ here and there. As a result it let me rattle through the panels fairly fast despite some quite major hiccups along the way.

 

As I didn’t simply want the plot to be a typical ‘this is how the heroes obtained their super-powers’ storyline, I went with a standard Earth gets invaded theme, and brought the Custodians in as an already established super-group who were determined to save the planet. Setting the tale on our planet was advantageous because as it let me re-use a load of military figures I’ve previously drawn and established that Galaxian, Mistress Tendril, Tortoise-Shell Eddie and Sagittarius were all part of the same super-hero universe I’ve created in series such as “Alternate Heroes”, “Heroes of Godwinson” and “Men of Mystery”.

 

The initial few panels are designed to set the scene of the half-asteroid half-alien space-ship coming into orbit of the Earth and settling above the United States of America’s Pentagon. I wanted to try and draw something a little different for the Gloom’s craft and I can’t help feel that it didn’t work out as well as I’d liked.

 

The satellite also took some reworking, as my actual drawing was much larger than it appears, and literally dwarfed the alien’s vessel. As a result it had to be scaled down significantly in size, so a lot of the detail I put into its panelling and exterior computers has been lost.

 

An alien invasion of the Pentagon is about to begin. But it’s not the only American military building the extra-terrestrials have targeted…