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.
The first two images were already really nice, and besides some aesthetic things and the extended webbing, I changed very little. The last image had the most that I redrew. The wings were far, far, too small to support someone of Hulkling’s size.The anatomy on the digits were also wrong, they appear drop down along the forearm instead of being drawn as a hand. Unless that nub is the thumb in which case the other fingers are dropping down from the pointer finger, which is also not correct.
