Just Use a Reference!

Corrections on Fantastic Four 2018 Issue #20 page 2 Paco Medina on pencils and inks Jesus Aburtov on colors

The BIGGEST thing here is that Sky was originally given way too many joints.

I circled all of the places where it looked like there was a bend in her wings here. On the left wing I counted five and the right wing I found four. Obviously this is incorrect. A bird wing, like a human arm, should have three main joints. A shoulder, elbow, and wrist.

The other fixes all blend into each other, when I fixed the number of joints, I could also fix the pose, and then the feather layers. I could also add in scapulars and make the secondaries go closer to her back. Remember, a wing should have feathers nearly all the way to the body. Large gaps between the body and the secondaries will lose you lift, and also just look strange. I also dropped the secondaries down lower on her body and made them larger. This is a personal preference, on humanoids I tend to make the secondaries go at least to the butt and preferably I drop them to the back of the knee.

Venom 2018 Issue #33 pencils by Iban Coello OK. Ok.... OK. So, this is a mess, and my correction is still a mess but it’s less of a mess than the original. There are two issues I have with this picture, the first is that the fingers for these wings are sticking straight out of the bone of the arm and not the hand. Which makes it look incredibly off and in my opinion, bad. The second issue I have with this, which I didn’t correct is that the artist basically just drew a human man and added a terrible tail, long neck and dragon head, and “wings” to it.The body, the legs, the tail, nothing on this looks correct or dragon like. The tail is placed way too high on this dragon, but that’s because the hips are incredibly high on this dragon.The more that you look at it, the more you could nitpick. There’s a weird gap in the crotch, the knees are very off, the legs are too long, the “hand” on that dragon is just a hook, the tail is way too noodle like. The black stripes on the wings look like they were drawn straight over the chest on a different layer, they stick out as if they’re a different part of the body... These things wouldn’t bother me if this was a background picture, but this is a full page. One full page is dedicated to this picture, and none of it looks referenced.

My redline explanation is really simple. I put the “fingers” on the “hand” of the wing. I attached the webbing on the wing to the body near the where the tail should be. That way these wings could actually function and get poor Flash off the ground. I also added webbing from the shoulder to the thumb, so that it’s more correct to a bat’s wing. I also took the elbow spike out. A lot of people draw dragons with an elbow spike to have another bit to attach the webbing too, and honestly, that’s fine, I do it too a lot. But for this one I decided not to draw it.

For fun, I did a very quick sketch of how I would do a dragon Flash Thompson.

Ok first off, that is a beautiful statue! Holy hell. Its super well referenced, probably one of the better statues I’ve seen of a winged character. I think they went a little overboard with interior feathers, it almost resembles the back of a wing and not the front, but there are birds with that many distinct rows of feathers in the front, so they might have been referencing off of one of them. And it’s missing the alula feathers, which is fine, not every bird has super distinct alula feathers if they have them at all. I just tend to give humanoid characters them when drawing them as they help in flight control. I think that this is the perfect example of the lower limit I would be willing to accept as far as wingspan width on a character of this size. If I was in charge I would have dropped the secondaries even lower. Like this:

I tend to place the secondaries lower on most humanoid characters to make up for the fact that they do not have tails. Lower back is more aesthetically pleasing for many, but I like to make up for the loss of lift without a tail by making the secondaries wider and lower. My preferred placement for the length of the secondaries would be to the knee or slightly above. Without a tail, only the chest and torso are supported by the wings, leaving the rest of the lower body to dangle. Of course, this fantasy and isn’t real but I still like to try to give characters as much lower support as I can. When I’m creating characters of my own, I tend to give them tails, including non human creatures like gryphon or winged horses. I also tend to fudge where the human arms are on humanoid creatures with wings so that the wing doesn’t run into the shoulders on the downbeats, but that’s not what this ask was about. Lets get back on track. I edited the size of the feathers too, such that for every about two on the statue there was one on the corrected sketch. I think wider secondaries look nicer on humanoid characters. Real birds don’t have too much difference between the widths of the secondary feathers vs the primaries. They stay pretty much the same size all the way to the scapulars.

Uh oh, here’s where I have to admit that I haven’t read too much X-Men. When it comes to Marvel Comics I’m a Fantastic Four, Venom, Daredevil and Spider-Man person. I’ve always wanted to read the X-Men but their backlog is so daunting and there’s a lot of spin off series too. I know when I start I’ll need both a reading guide and some recommendations from people who know my tastes before I jump in. (which is honestly how I recommend anyone start a comic series with a long backlog.)

So I’ll answer this as a general wing size of humans or humanoids with wings. I like them big. Small wings bother me so much, especially if I’m supposed to believe that they fly with them. If they’re an accessory or they’re using magic to fly, then I don’t mind super small wings all that often. But if a character is meant to use them in flight, I like each wing to be at least six feet or two meters in length. 

Wings are hard to draw. Comics are on a deadline. Artists who aren’t familiar with drawing wings and are put on a series where one of the main characters has wings must see it as an absolute nightmare. The larger the wings on the character the more you have to think about how to pose them, articulate them, and if you’re not good at drawing them, well, that’s a large amount of space that could be a focal point of a thing you messed up. So I can see why artists don’t do large wings on characters and instead do moderately sized ones.

The larger the wing also means the more obvious it’ll be that you never touched or looked at a single reference ever. Example:

I’m not sure what issue this is from as I pulled it out of the Warren tag a few months ago when I was looking for things to correct on this blog. If you know what wings look like, this is really obviously not referenced. 

The general anatomy isn’t atrocious, at least the elbow isn’t bending the wrong way... But the feathers are clearly just filled in like fur. Remember, the inside of a wing has three main feather layers, lesser coverts, greater coverts and flight feathers. The artist here ended up doing more work for both themself and the inker and colorist by adding all these extra feathers. (The feathers are also pointed and not rounded but that’s something for the actual critique/fix of this panel) Its a similar problem with the artist of Iceman’s solo had with Warren’s wings. They were big yes, but not referenced in the slightest and there were far too many extra feathers anywhere.

And I don’t hate more medium sized wings, like these ones on Warren from Fantastic Four annual #3. Again, I’m sorry I don’t read a lot of X-Men so I have to pull from my F4 knowledge. They get the point across, he’s a dude, he’s got wings. 

These from House of X #2 are a nice size. I like this.

However, if you want to win me over. Go big and go stylized. One of my fave sets of wings I’ve seen on Warren, and please remember, I haven’t seen that many, come from that weird Angel solo Angel: Revelations.

Are these anatomically correct? Almost. Do they follow realistic feather layers? Nope. Are they still cool as all hell? Oh yeah.

This whole comic has a very cool art style which works in its favor here. While these wings aren’t 100% “correct” you’ll never see me complain about them. While they’re heavily stylized you can tell that some references were looked at as they mostly move correctly when in use. I was never distracted by any of them and they look amazing.

Lets look at some Hulklings!

I seem to remember having more issues with Hulkling’s wings when I was reading all the Young Avengers content I could get my hands on last summer, but they’re actually not that terrible. Most were fairly well referenced and I didn’t have a lot to red line.

First off, sources: Images 1 and 2: Siege: Young Avengers pencils by Mahmud A. Asrar Image 3: Secret Invasion: Runaways/Young Avengers #3 pencils by Takeshi Miyazawa

The biggest issue I have with Hulkling’s wings no matter who is drawing them in most every comic I’ve seen, is that they attach to his body too high up. With bat styled wings (and bird wings) you do not want to have a gap between the elbow of the wing and the body. You’ll lose lift, and since bat wings have a unique take to flight mechanics that don’t use the same type of airfoils that bird wings do, well, you’ll need all the lift you can get. In real life, bats wings are attached as far down as they can go, usually to the legs or a tail.

Obviously editing the design that much would be awkward and change Teddy far too much. So I opted to attach them around the hip area instead. This greatly increases the wing surface area and to me, personally, looks a lot better and more balanced.

Bat wings, like bird wings, are homologous to human arms. So again, anything a human arm can’t do a wing can’t do. But where bat wings are different from bird wings is the amount that they can bend. In bird wings the digits are fused at the end of the wing, but with bats, their digits are the wings. And they can bend these digits in a lot of ways birds can’t. Hulkling’s wings for the most part are really well referenced. The elbows all bend the right way, the number of fingers is correct to bats, they have five digits but “pointer” finger is fused to the middle finger giving them a three digit + thumb look.

For aesthetic reasons I added in the pointer finger as a completely separate finger, both for looks and to increase the surface area that the wing has to play with. BUT what was drawn originally is not anatomically incorrect. I also added in a more visible set of webbing from the shoulder to the thumb, it’s a pretty important bit of wing anatomy.

Iceman 2017 Issue #7 page 16. Art by Robert Gill

So this one was a doozy, I wasn’t even sure how I was going to approach this for a bit. I decided that the main point of this panel was to show off just how BIG Warren’s wings were. So when doing the redlines here I wanted to keep that idea in mind.

The first major correction here is the most important, I fixed the anatomy on poor Warren’s wings. His joints were all messed up. Feather layers were non-existent  and the guy suffers from that same weird skeletal bone thing that Sky had in the previous correction.

Bird wings are homologous to human arms. They have a shoulder, elbow and wrist, same as our arm. They also have digits but they’re fused at the end of the wing. In a lot of ways the first five or six primaries can act like “fingers” if you really need to emote a wing with a hand like gesture.

Keeping in mind that wings and arms are the same structure wise note that anything you can’t do with your arm, you also wouldn’t be able to do with a wing. (Wings have some restrictions arms don’t, mostly in how the wrist is allowed to bend but that’s not for this discussion)

Warren’s “elbow” here is bent in the completely wrong direction on both wings. He wouldn’t be able to use this wing, or properly fold it, ever. And that’s a pretty big problem. There also looks like there’s a strange joint in the middle of his primaries, or what I’m guessing are supposed to be his primaries... Lets just, remove that shall we?

Like most of the pictures I have saved here, feather layers are ignored completely. Most wings from the front will have three main layers of feathers, lessor coverts, greater coverts and then the flights. Flight feathers are the primaries and the secondaries, the primaries are the “finger” like flights and the secondaries are the rest. The usual point of differentiation for them is the wrist. Everything below the wrist will be secondaries. The back of the wings have more layers, including the alula, median coverts and then primary and secondary coverts. Many birds have four or five distinct feather layers on the back depending on the wing type.

I gave Warren the correct number of feather layers. Already that makes a huge improvement for how they look. Next up was the posing. Because the original had such terrible anatomy it was hard to keep it exactly the same. I opted to extend Warren’s right wing all the way out to showcase how big it was in this small room. For the left wing I did two poses, the first was trying to keep with how the original had the feathers bending on the floor. I had the wing come forward at the wrist and let the primaries drag. Feathers can indeed bend like this, they’re more flexible than one might think. The second pose I decided to just have him partially fold the left wing up. One could also draw a tighter closed wing, if he was moved slightly more to the left of the room, or if there was a more clear indication of where the other wall was, to really give the idea of a small, cramped, dorm type room.

Fantastic Four #17 Legacy #662 Cover by Nick Bradshaw and John Rauch

First off, I want to mention that this is one of my favorite covers for the Fantastic Four, I love the composition here between Sky and Johnny, it’s such a good pose. I just wish the wings weren’t an anatomical mess. There are three main corrections I made here in my redline.

1. There should not be such a sharp bend where the “elbow” is. This whole frame is too skeletal. You should not be able to see the arm structure of a wing under the feathers, and I’m not sure what that long bone over the primaries is supposed to be. If it’s a “finger” it is much too long and would never be the leading edge of a wing. This skeletal structure is not suited to a character with bird wings. The photo below shows that even when a wing is bent or outstretched there won’t be such a sharp point where the elbow is. There is muscle and connective tissue running from the shoulder to elbow and elbow to wrist. 

2. Feather layers. This will be a reoccurring point on this blog as many comic book wings do not have the correct number of feather layers or the correct size of the feather layers. Lets use that photo above, as it has a nice spread of both the back and the front of a wing. The front side (faces you) should have three main layers of feathers. The minor/lesser coverts, then greater coverts, finally the flight feathers which are typically broken into the secondaries and primaries. In the picture above we can see that the bird’s lesser and greater coverts are in tan/brown and the flights are in white tipped with black. Lesser coverts tend to follow the “outline” of the arm structure underneath. When in doubt, look at a ref for the wing type you’re trying to draw. It looks like Sky has a “passive soaring” wing shape, so that was what I used as my reference. The back side of a wing has a different number of feather layers than the front. Most wings have four to five distinct layers. These layers can be harder to spot if the bird is all one solid color. There is still a lesser covert layer, followed by a median covert layer, then the two bigger covert areas, the secondary coverts and primary coverts which cover the secondary and primary feathers. Wing backs are also where you see the alula feathers.On the picture above the alula feathers are the grey feathers just coming off of the lesser coverts near the top. They’re like little “fingers.”

The cover artist draws Sky with three feather layers, however they are not the correct shape or size. The “coverts” are far too large and the flight feathers are far too short. The feathers aren’t layered correctly either. When viewed from the front the leading edge of a feather is covered by the trailing edge. One the back it’s flipped and the leading edge covers the trailing edge.  

3. This point again has to do with how the feathers are positioned. Here he’s treating the secondaries and their respective coverts as being completely separated from the primaries. While there is a distinction between where the primaries and secondaries fall, it is not that dramatic and this area should not stick out above the primaries and their coverts when the wing is outstretched.

This photo of a harris hawk is in a similar pose. You can see that the secondaries lead into the primaries, and the coverts follow the same pattern. You can also see the alula feathers poking out near the “wrist”. Neither covers the other while the wing is outstretched. In a folded wing the primaries do tuck under the secondaries, but it still would not look like the cover photo.