Blue Monday - Climax

 Welcome back.
How'd you like that lovely Beauty & The Beast piece at the top of Maroto's blog page?
You did go look, right?

Okay, you were promised another story, so let's start there. This tale, like the previous trio, comes from Vampirella, because - Blue Monday. Previously we had a tale in the "tradition of Scheherazade" by Bill Dubay & Esteban Maroto. I believe the same team brings us this tale, but the writer goes uncredited, so it's hard to be certain. The other big question: Is this Maroto's colours?

...or until the next writer decided otherwise.
Finally, for today, we have another half-dozen images by our esteemed subject. We'll start with a bit of black & white line work, and climb up the ladder to full paintings:

If i wasn't already an Edgar Rice Burroughs fan, this might get me to buy Tarzan's books:

We've seen Maroto drawing other famous characters, but he also is prone to creating tributes to other artists, such as this piece honoring/homaging Milo Manara:

...and these two paintings in tribute to Jose Segrelles:

This last piece is a little special for a sad reason. The original has been damaged; the canvas scraped and flecked to white in places. Here is a semi-restored version. (No reference of the undamaged version available for full restoration)

*sigh*
A fitting end to this piece.

all art by Maroto. Pages from Vampirella #72 (1978)

Welcome to part 2 of our Blue Monday celebration of Esteban Maroto.

It was mentioned last time that he designed Red Sonja's metal bikini. Here's a couple of model sheets for reference:

One thing to note here - most of today's images, like those above, are photographs rather than scans of the originals. As you can see quite easily if you look at the red border lines, things can get a little distorted that way. But, moving right along...
Not surprisingly, Maroto also drew a bit of Conan while passing through at Marvel. This Conan drawing came a bit later-

If you prefer your fantasy a bit more up-to-date, you can follow the evolution of everybody's favorite Khaleesi through some of his artworks...

...or perhaps more classic fantasy, such as Alice...

...or Dracula...

...or even simply nameless faeries...

You can also find him rendering characters from other comics and media, such as Barbarella...

...Drunna...

...and Valentina...

...and, all sorts of beautiful renderings...

Oh! But, i haven't told you the best part.
Señor Maroto maintains an online contact point where you can not only see all of the above images, at larger size, and Many more - but you can also request custom commissioned artwork from the man! It doesn't update too frequently, but it is still active, and just up the digital street from here:

Esteban Maroto's Blog

We'll be back once more today with another story or two, and more artwork (that isn't from his blog, so go ahead a peruse the lovely works there while you're waiting)

all art by Esteban Maroto

Odd how things work. I decided to push my planned subject back a week due to the amount of work required to try to cover things a tad more than her costume. So i pulled some pages that were in the pile and decided this would be good. And then things started spiraling...
In the end, i suspect it would have been less effort to go with my original plan. The only way this is going to work is if we make this a multi-part

You see, my plan was just to run a few ... sort of fairy tale interpretations, illustrated by Esteban Maroto. But then there was that fourth colour tale. And when digging for a few biographical notes, all these damn beautiful pictures kept getting in the way. So, forget it. I'm not going to agonize over what to not use, i'm just going to spread things out into 3 posts over the day.

Anybody who was a fan of Warren's main magazines back in the 70s and 80s knows who Esteban Maroto is. But, while he produced a goodly amount of work in this country (over 100 stories for Warren alone), he only worked with DC and Marvel briefly, usually on a mini-series here and there. So many fans may not be familiar with his beautifully rendered work. Which isn't to say he didn't leave lasting marks while briefly passing through. For example, he designed her iconic outfit-

Like it or love it, it's hard to deny the impact her chainmail bikini had on designs in the decades to follow.

But we'll talk more extensively about Señor Maroto later in the day. For now, let's start with those first three tales to which i referred previously. Two tales written by Bill Dubay, and a third by Timothy Moriarity.

First up, a tale in the tradition of Scheherazade, of a bold adventurer by the name of Ali Addan...

From Arabian tales, we travel to the classic Greek myths, and Perseus-

Continuing on, we travel to the Danish coast and the story of a Little Mermaid-

All three of these tales appeared in Her magazine-

Here are the covers for those who enjoy them, or want a visual reference for hunting down the issues:

Join us later today for a colour tale, and more about the man and his lovely artwork. After all, you wouldn't want to bypass a man who still remembers Rima, The Jungle Girl, would you?

I know i wouldn't.

all art by Esteban Maroto, story pages for Vampirella #s 60, 68, & 102 (1977, 1978, 1982)