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Chris Dee wrote:

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Nice Ivy, GJ. Nice Zorro too. Me-ow

It was the first time Huddleston had ever drawn the character. In fact, I have a tendency to request characters from artists who've never done them before. More often than not, the artists take it a fresh challenge and draw them accordingly. But occasionally, I'll have artists flat-out refuse to draw a given character because they think it's too much work/too intimidating/too far out of their comfort zone. So it's kind of case by case.

Chris Dee wrote:

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Now that's an inspired approach. Asking for something they never did before, that is really wonderful.


And personally, I would put ironic quotation marks around an "artist" who viewed anything as "too far out of their comfort zone". Not doing something they don't want to do, that's fair. Everyone is entitled to do that. But in my experience, real artists tend to view stretching that way in much the same way a hungry dog views raw meat.

Truth be told, every single character I've gotten art of has been someone's very first. I've had Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, and Bugs Bunny drawn by people who've never done them before. Very few artists have ever done He-Man, Flash Gordon, or the Shadow. Artists at anime conventions virtually never have done any of the classic characters before. And only one artist out of everyone who's drawn Sandy has done her previously. I can't begin to tell how many times I've pitched characters to artists and found out it was their first time ever drawing them.

By the way, the character I get the most refusals on when it comes to sketches? Sandy. At the 2008 Motor City Con, I was turned down flat by at least four artists because they thought she was too hard to draw; they thought interpreting Olivia Newton-John as a comic book character was too much work. But as the Katie Cook, Art Baltazar, Adam Withers/Comfort Love, and Rami Imam renditions show, you don't have to draw an exact likeness to ONJ to make it look good. Sandy can be drawn as just a sexy comic book girl as long as she's visually recognizable. And in all those cases, those artists dove right into drawing Sandy without a second thought. But instead of looking at her the same way they would, say, Superman, some artists freeze up when they see ONJ's face and say no. (By the way, the only artist to ever have drawn Sandy previously? It was Katie Cook. For everyone else, it was their first time. Franchesco would have done her for the first time, too, had I not given him the choice of drawing either her or Poison Ivy. He'd still like to take a whack at her eventually.)

But yeah, it is frustrating when an artist balks at drawing a given character because they're too afraid to try. That's why I have a fairly large selection of characters to choose from. If one character is a no-go for someone, I hopefully have another one that's more their speed.