MATRIX ONLINE illo, final

Behold, a low-res file (the best one I could find, alas) for the main promo illo from my failed pitch for an original MATRIX ONLINE story.... See the journal entry “FAILED-PROJECT FRIDAY: the MATRIX ONLINE story” for more details. Me on the line art, Ryan Kinnaird doing an awesome job on the colors, Matrix code and so on.

Completely irrelevant side note: I’d like to note (well, boast) for the record that Toren Smith and I were possibly the first guys to depict the .50 AE Desert Eagle semiautomatic pistol (as used by the Matrix’s Agents and our heroine, here) in a fictional medium! Ooh, ah! I drew it into issue #4 of DIRTY PAIR II: DANGEROUS ACQUAINTANCES within a few days of first reading about the giant pistol’s upcoming debut in GUN WORLD, circa 1989. Amusingly enough, several less-informed gun nuts immediately accused us of making up the “.50 Action Express” caliber... Anyhoo, the .50 Desert Eagle has since become a numbingly inescapable cliché in action films, TV shows, books, comics and manga, of course... But we were there first, yo! (Or nearly first, as I suspect that one of the many, many high-level gun nuts in manga circles prolly used the Desert Eagle before we did.) Okay, that's it for today's exercise in gun nuttery...