From The Archives 16

I had originally planned to post this when I learned that the brilliant French artist, Moebius died several weeks ago, but could not find the image.

This is a poster that Moebius created for Milestone Media back in 1994-1995 for the comic book series, Xombi, which I wrote. The poster features Xombi, David Kim holding a wooden staff/walking stick which was featured in some of of the concept art and because of that on a number of covers and this poster. The staff never featured in the comics (though I think artist J.J. Birch drew it leaning against a wall in David's apartment in one issue as a joke. We toyed with revealing that it was one of those rain sticks that sound vaguely like rain when you turn them over on end. I think Dwayne McDuffie said that the original idea was that it was part of a caduceus that was meant to appear as a visual element meant to indicate that David's healing powers were activated.

Another weird bit about this poster concerns David's appearance which is very unlike his appearance in the comics. It turns out that Moebius was working from some old sketches for the character when he was meant to be African-American, David Saunders. When a request was made to correct this Moebius elected not to redraw David's face, but simply to color his skin with a different palette.

I know Dwayne was really disappointed with how this turned out and, admittedly, so was I. On one hand it was amazing to have Moebius depicting a character that was very much mine, but it would have been even more amazing if the artwork actually looked like the character it was meant to represent.

I don't know how well this poster sold at the time. Probably not that well would be my guess. It does show up on ebay every now and then which is where the above image came from. I do own this poster, but have never felt compelled to get it framed.