Aman­da Con­ner start­ed to work for Mar­vel, but soon she was a sought after artist for other com­pa­nies as well, and she made the cov­ers for many dif­fer­ent is­sues:

With these pic­tures, of course only the draw­ings are done by Con­ner; the col­oration is added in a sec­ond step by a dif­fer­ent artist, the dif­fer­ent artist, in her case, often being Palmiotti.

  

But Con­ner also soon drew the in­te­ri­or of is­sues. One of her first works which es­tab­lished her fame was Vam­pirella, like Power Girl one of the many rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the widespread cat­e­go­ry of un­der­dressed su­per­heroines and mon­sters:

And Con­ner ex­ploits this con­cept for what it’s worth to il­lus­trate G-rated erot­ic poses of heav­i­ly ide­al­ized fe­male fig­ures.

But she also starts to light­en up the –ini­tial­ly quite dark­er– sto­ries with her own pe­cu­liar charm and humor: de­spite her sim­pli­fied lines, her im­ages are full of lov­ing­ly drawn de­tails, and she sup­plies her pro­tag­o­nists not only with ex­pres­sive faces, but also spir­it and hu­man­i­ty. And here we also first met one of Con­ner’s women on a toi­lette.

But we also see other bath­room ac­tiv­i­ties, like girls titi­vat­ing them­selves, as in this pic­ture:

Or in the fol­low­ing pic­ture of a cos­tume party, with Su­per­girl, dis­guised as Su­per­girl (and a ref­er­ence to our later hero­ine):

  

And with­out a doubt in many of these early works the tal­ent of Con­ner is wast­ed on more or less triv­ial and lack­ing sto­ries,…

…but even those early works show the play­ful side, the joy of telling lit­tle sto­ries in Con­ner’s art…

…as well as her tal­ent for show­ing ex­pres­sive faces.

In the next part we’ll see how Con­ner il­lus­trates two a bit more in­ter­est­ing sto­ries.

« Part 0 · Introduction | Part 2 · Early Masterworks »

2010-11-13 · Jan Thor · www.janthor.com · jan@janthor.de