Original art from Alan Gallo!

I currently have a small collection of original comic art.  Most of it is from projects that I've worked on and from artists I know (plus there's a random Iron Man page that I bought for five bucks at probably the first convention I ever attended).  Even though I've got scans of all of the work - at multiple stages - of the stories I write, there's just something about physically seeing the art boards in front of you, the ink visible over the pencils and blue line.

Alan Gallo lives in the Philippines, and it's expensive to ship art internationally because of the size, but I had to add some of Alan's work to my own collection, and just a few days ago, I got a package with several pages of art and a few surprises.

Alan's a great artist and a heck of a guy in general.  I bought a handful of pages, perhaps the highlight of which is above: the Teddy and the Yeti promo page with Andromeda Jones and, yeah, my dog Rusty.  This is something worthy of a frame.

Nearly every time Alan has sent me a scan of a page, there always seems to be the tiniest sliver of the in-house logo left uncropped at the top, and I've never been able to figure out what it was.  It looked like a bunch of drawing of girls' faces.  Now that I've got some actual pages in my hands, I can unveil the mystery.  It turns out that the images are...a bunch of girls' faces.  Huh.  And the Glass House Graphics logo!  I didn't expect that.  Glass House is a studio that represents a lot of different artists, especially, from what I've seen, international artists.

Alan (because he's a great guy) also drew this Thing sketch for me on a Teddy and the Yeti sketch card!  It turned out great.  It's actually not the only Thing sketch card I got in the mail this week.  Below is one that comes from the magical land of eBay, and it's drawn by Puis Calzada.

I wonder if this calls for a new post devoted to the Thing sketch cards I have (as opposed to the Thing sketch book, which is entirely different and possibly more awesome).  I'd say it just might!