Nice Day for a Sprite Wedding

Here’s another homage/parody cover of mine for CAPA-Alpha, done around the
same time as the one I shared the other day.



This one’s much less of a straight copy, adding characters and ditching the logo. It
uses as its springboard Marvel Comics’ The Uncanny X-Men #179 — dated Mar. 1984, penciled by John Romita Jr., and inked by Dan Green. I drew it for Richard Rubenstein’s ’zine after we had a discussion about superheroes who were explicitly identified as Jewish.



Rich suggested that I take the X-Men cover and replace the mutant Morlock known
as Caliban with Al Rothstein, a.k.a. Nuklon of DC’s Infinity Inc., as the bridegroom of Kitty Pryde — who at the time this issue was published officially, if rarely in practice, went by Ariel (John Byrne’s original suggestion for the character, which made her pairing with Caliban all the more Tempestuous) but who originally used the codename Sprite.

I don’t know which of us came up with using Irving Forbush, Marvel’s old mascot, to officiate the blessed event in his costumed identity of Forbush Man, but he was kind-of a gimme. So was DC’s Ambush Bug, the villain turned antihero turned self-aware, mischief-making comic-book character whose civilian identity was Irwin Schwab. Ambush Bug is a favorite of mine and one whom you’ll see pop up fairly often as my art dribbles out onto the blog — including as the Amalgam-inspired mashup Forbush Bug.

Rich said that he thought a member of DC’s Legion of Super-Heroes was Jewish, which I’m pretty sure the K-a collective successfully sussed out as being Gim Allon, Colossal Boy, whose mother eventually became President of Earth (so one more point in favor of the Legion’s optimistic future). I recalled having him and other Jewish characters filling out the congregation with Ambush Bug, but that must have been in a preliminary sketch; if I dig it up, or if, when I come across the ’zine of my own that came out when Rich’s ’zine with the above cover did, that ’zine turns out to have sketches for the cover, then I will share.

I wanted to color the piece and put that version up here, too, but last night Blogger started giving me all kinds of hell, reverting yesterday’s post to a previous draft when I went in to fix something small and forcing me to rewrite half of it from memory since I had stupidly typed the post up in the Compose window rather than writing it offline in TextEdit and pasting it in like usual, and I hadn’t yet saved the HTML to disk.

Nuklon did indeed have a mohawk, which is what that wave of hair upsetting his yarmulke, or kipa, is. At first I’d completely forgotten to give him a tallis, the “ritual prayer shawl” worn by most Jewish men in synagogue, but that was rectified. What I don’t think ever occurred to me or Rich was how wrong it might be to show the very tall man bursting through the top of the chupah, a canopy on four posts under which Jewish couples traditionally get married. Although it’s not exactly sacrilegious to show it tearing, unless it is itself adorned with old tallitot (which often happens), clearly I wasn’t letting anything get in the way of a good sight gag.


Cover to The Uncanny X-Men #179 © 1984 Marvel Comics. X-Men logo, head shots, Kitty
Pryde, Caliban, and Forbush Man TM/® Marvel Comics. Nuklon and Ambush Bug TM/®
DC Comics. Nuklon & Kitty Pryde wedding cartoon art © 1995 Brian Saner Lamken.

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