MTG: Baxter Stockman / Oroku Saki (2024)
Outside my lane
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The Universes Beyond sets are meant to appeal to other fandoms, and if one likes UB products, it’s usually in direct proportion to how much of these fandoms one has participated in and cares to have mingled in Magic: the Gathering.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a property that I have had more or less tangential interaction with. Back when the comics came out, my older brother and I would attend small comic-con type shows in San Jose, a few times a year. These were really small, and we’d basically spend an afternoon poring over vendor boxes, discovering new things inexpensive enough to try, and maybe getting some also inexpensive back issues of things we enjoyed. We were young, so funds were pretty limited. I entered art competitions at some of these and won a couple, which was fun. My brother won at other times, but as I said, these were small shows compared to today’s behemoths that pop into mind when you hear the word, “Comic Con.”
My older brother was pretty taken by the early release of the TMNT comics. More precisely, he and many in the industry were taken by this more or less independent comic blowing up, and early issues becoming valuable much quicker than usual. It was quite a phenomenon to behold but just miss out on. For me, the gritty style of the art, vastly different from what was standard in the Marvel/DC world, and the fact that those early issues were all in black-and-white, made them more of an unusual thing that didn’t attract my interest as much, even when reprints of the early issues came down in price.
The next tangential exposure I had was when the cartoon series came out a few years later. By then I was 13 and spending far more time with video games and D&D, so I didn’t really watch it. Turtles were everywhere by that time, but my younger brother watched them some, which was my main exposure.
So I didn’t get too far into the lore of the series, mostly knowing the main characters and 3-4 of the main secondary characters and enemies. Baxter Stockman wasn’t one of those characters. I did like the mouser robot characters though, so getting to include a whole boatload of them with the illustration of this crazed scientist was a lot of fun.
Shredder I was familiar with, but his backstory or name of Oroku Saki I confess I was not. I was to portray him as an unusually brutal member among the other Foot Clan henchmen. As I was not that deep in the lore as to know these characters well, I am unlikely to geek out as much with this set as with other UB sets I have illustrated for.
Because these area Universes Beyond illustrations, I am unable to show in-progress or preparatory works for these images.
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