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Good evening, folks!  My name is Benita Story and I am the co-creator of Johnny Saturn.  I hope you have had a wonderful New Year’s Day and that your hangover from last night has gone away.

Earlier, Scott hinted that we have huge plans for 2009 for Johnny Saturn and this website.  He wasn’t joking!  One of the things we want to do in 2009 is thank you, our fans, with some freebies, including a monthly, downloadable wallpaper for your computer, more content (beginning next week, there will be new episodes Monday, Wednesday and FRIDAY!!), peeks into Scott’s sketchbooks on Tuesdays and Thursdays, new Saturnday stories, more reviews, Art Talk blogs, and other items still in the works.  Basically, it will be our goal to have something new for you every day of the week.

We are proclaiming 2009 to be the Year of Johnny Saturn!   Also, there is a contest to test your knowledge of Johnny Saturn.  We plan to have a new contest bi-monthly and a final contest in December, 2009, with something very special as the prize.  To be honest with you, I am looking forward to 2009 and all we have planned.

Here it is, the first Johnny Saturn drawing ever!  My vision of what Johnny looked like was pretty strong going in, so this picture is quite similar to how the costume and character eventually developed.  Already it had the hood, because I was going for sort of a medieval executioner look.  The piping on the side of the helmet made it into the final design, as well as the steel-toed work books and hockey shin guards.

You can also see early designs for Johnny’s bracers and gauntlets, with knuckle dusters included in the design.  Above are the headshot turnarounds for John Underhall, the man inside the costume.

Here is the second drawing of Johnny Saturn ever, and the costume was coming into focus.  The black rubber gorget or neck-guard makes its first appearance, as does the Saturn logo at his throat and on his belt.  At this stage of the game, I was toying around with scale armor for him.

At this point in Johnny Saturn’s design, the black rubber was popping up in insets all over his costume.  He is armed with a tonfa, or police billy club, on his leg, and his body armor is chain mail.  It’s interesting to note that at this stage I was toying with brass knuckles of a more traditional type.

Above and the left, you can see one of my early attempts to actually draw a body that was covered with burns, knife slashes, and bullet holes.  Eventually I would get this worked out to a fine science, but at this stage it was still an exploration for me.

Johnny Saturn is almost in his final form!  The design process had not been long, but a great deal of thought had gone into the character.

It’s interesting to note that in this version, much of Johnny’s uniform was made of puncture resisting webbing: I had been doing quite a bit of research into modern body armor.  It had always flabbergasted me that much modern armor is good at turning small arms fire, but not particularly useful in stopping puncture weapons, such as from a knife or shiv.

While you can see some the cloth folding on Johnny’s left flank, his costume has not yet taken on the well-worn, heavily folded look it later achieved.  I was getting sick of the useless and insulting Neoprene or molded rubber suits that superheroes often wore in the movies, and I was no fan of spandex, which wouldn’t be that useful for real world superheroes.  I had different ideas about the utility of costumes and what looked cool.

Drawn years before the storyline in the comic caught up with this, this was my first concept for John Underhall as king of Elysium City and the Mole people.  It’s not too far off from what I actually used, really.  I dropped the bandage “mask” and cowl, because it struck me as a little too “Hush” from the Batman storyline of the same name.  There was no longer a logical reason for Johnny Saturn to have a secret identity anyway.  The cloth bandages on Johnny’s workbooks also got dropped.

What can I really say about a picture like this one?  It was drawn to amuse myself, and it serves no conceptual or story-based angle.  I’ve always dabbled in more traditional cartooning styles, as you will see in upcoming “Inside the Book” entries.  The colors here are done quickly and dirty with Design Markers.

This sketch was the cover of the “2006 Special Edition Scott Story Sketchbook,” and that’s the only time it’s seen print.  I was well into taking open studio at the Indianapolis Art Center, and I was more than a little influenced by the inspirational pen & ink stylings of my friend, Paul McCall.  My pen & ink get’s more refined as I go forward in my sketchbooks.

Inked in marker, and roughly water colored, this was a proposed cover for the trade-paperback, “Johnny Saturn: Synns of the Father.”  This wasn’t bad, but it came nowhere near the attitude I wanted to capture for graphic novel’s cover.  It had good foreshortening, but overall it lacked in dynamics.

This was a shaded graphite drawing I did to entertain myself.  By this point, Greg Buchanan had been Johnny Saturn for a while, and John Underhall retired, but I kind of missed drawing the old guy.  I later tossed the original of this in with a customer’s order just because I wanted to: Sometimes, it’s more fun to share.