#iceman 2017

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.

This is what happens when gay people get to write gay characters and it needs to happen more often