I’ve got a new policy for end-of-the-day sketching: if it takes me more than about thirty seconds to decide what to draw, I’m just gonna randomly grab an old issue of The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe and do a mini-pinup of one of the characters. I really enjoy drawing them and they sell really well at conventions, so why not?
A few nights ago this happened and I grabbed issue #8: N-P. I’ve already done a pinup of Nightcrawler, and I was trying to decide between the precious few other A-listers here (Power Man, Nick Fury and The Punisher) when my wife cut in and started giving me grief about how I never draw women. And she’s totally right. So, I started looking through for female supeheroes to draw….and the pickings were pretty slim.Nekra? Nikki? C’mon. The wife, though, spotted Polaris and suggested I draw her because she had a “cool costume” and “a bat shape on her va-jay-jay.” So that settled it. Here’s Polaris:
I didn’t know anything about Polaris, but apparently she’s from Uncanny X-Men #49 and has Magneto-like powers. I can’t figure out if she was created by Don Heck or by Werner Roth, but man that costume is total Ditko–from that pointy Dr. Strange collar to the weird spider web-y pattern in the collar and down her legs. I guess that’s why I gave her “Ditko hands.” I’m guessing, based on the more modern images of her that turn up on a Google image search, that after her encounter with the X-Men, she became a high-priced call girl.
The original art for this is for sale here.
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I see the Ditkoisms that you’re talking about, but I’m pretty sure that costume is a Cockrum creation, from around the same time that he was designing the Imperial Guard (and the Legion of Super-Heroes).
Polaris was a recurring minor character in the Claremont / Cockrum and Claremont / Byrne X-Men of my youth, and I always thought her costume was CRAZY.
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Yeah, that makes total sense. I was (mistakenly) assuming that the costume pictured in the Marvel Universe guide was the same one from her original appearance in X-Men. She’d totally fit in with the Imperial Guard characters stylistically.
I did a little reading around, and apparently there’s an in-comics explanation for why that costume looks so “Shi’ar”: it was given to her by the Shi’ar dude who was pretending to be Eric the Red.
It always seemed weird to me when she’d wear it, though, because she and Havok had this sort of “we don’t want to be superheroes, we want to be graduate students” thing going on. That doesn’t look like the sort of thing you’d put on if you were not all that keen on superheroics.
I remember Polaris from middle school. Hers is the only non-major player “real name” that I remember (Lorna Dane, which I remember because it’s basically “Lorna Doone”), and the one I bust out when I need to show my X-Men cred.
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Clearly I’m the last person on-board the Polaris trend! I hang my head in shame at my lack of X-Men knowledge….
I’m glad you talked about it, because since you first posted the pencils for this one, I’ve been thinking of Polaris as Crazy Crotch. What could have been Cockrum’s thought process for applying a visual black hole to that part of Polaris’ costume?
Good rendering of it though!
There are kind of a lot of Cockrum designs for superheroine costumes that wind up looking sort of … implausible.
And by implausible, I mean trampy like a space hooker.
I totally forgot about that Saturn Girl atrocity. My dad’s collection of Legion books stopped around that time, so I mostly grew up with the wholesomeness of Curt Swan.