I can't wait to see a reveal of the actual sculpt in any kind of way.
In the meantime, I'm familiar with Kris Anka as a comic book artist. He interviewed with Comic Book Resources, posted earlier today. I had no idea he designed for SS.
These are just the SS parts from the interview but he mentions his part in designing Wonder Woman...
https://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=49575
Didn't you also do some work for Sideshow Collectibles, the collectibles manufacturer? I remember seeing some packaging art you did for them.
I did! After my third year at CalArts I decided to take a year off and it just so happened one of my friends, David Igo, was the Senior Designer over there. So I was brought on as the main in-house concept designer, which mainly entailed me doing rough pose drawings. When a character has been picked to be turned into a statue, I'm the first line of attack. I would brainstorm the character and try to come up with various poses, costumes, items, etc. that we felt would be the direction to take the character. Often times they already had an idea for which version of the character to go with before i even come to it, or I would just have to design multiple versions of a character depending on how many costumes they wanted to go with, i.e. a green Hulk, a gladiator Hulk, a red Hulk, etc. So for products coming out now, and products that will be coming out for a few years, i basically had my hand in almost all of it.
I want to talk about your work at Marvel, but before that can you talk a bit more about some highlights from your time at Sideshow? There's some great work there.
During my time, Sideshow was able to land the DC Comics license, which was a huge deal because before this only DC Direct was doing anything with the characters. So I was part of the first wave of attack with a lot of the pieces that'll be coming out, at least in terms of the 1/4 scale figures.
Out of the gate, the two biggest characters to tackle (and to probably no surprise to literally no one) were Batman and Superman. With these characters especially, this was a test in finding something that we felt was a truly iconic pose, while also being something producible. As you can see with my Batman design, I wanted a giant cape, [Laughs], which was not something that could be produced cost-effectively or something that would be able to be packaged easily as well. Action poses are fun and allow for multiple productions of a character (Hulks), because this was a launch of a line, and such important characters, we felt going down a direction that felt more "god-like" was going to work better, especially for these two -- as well as another truly iconic character, which I'm having a lot of input on her and I'm very proud of how it's coming along.
Iconic DC character who is female and is third in line after Batman and Superman but you can't say specifically who... I get you, Kris, I get you.
[Laughs] When we started on the line, we were also trying to figure out if prints were going to be included with these statues, like the Marvel line, so myself along with fellow artist Fabian Schlaga worked on a Superman print as a pitch.