Where brooding Darkness spreads his jealous wings, and the night-raven sings

That is actually a quote from Milton’s L’Allegro  and appears amongst references to Cerberus and Cimmeria - but neither a creation by Robert E Howard or Dave Sim appears below

The above quote formed a part of the inspiration for - Night-Raven... and literally became his calling card - after a few word changes...

Night-Raven first appeared as you can see from the above in UK only Hulk Comic.  This was a breakthrough comic here in the UK - as it featured (amongst many other things)

Dave Gibbons drawing the Hulk....

Steve Dillion's (best known for his outstanding work on Preacher and The Punisher) first published work (at the age of 17!) drawing Nick Fury

John Stokes Black Knight

And David Lloyd on Night Raven

All of these UK sourced strips where great, but Night Raven was something else, the story that appeared in issue 2 "blind justice" won a eagle award - and it was only a three page strip!

It takes a very skilled writer and a virtuoso artist to be able to make a 3 page strip that good and evenly paced and Steve Parkhouse and David Lloyd delivered in spades

the level of artistic craft David Lloyd put into this strip simply can not be overstated enough, particularly the expression on the faces of anyone he drew -

Each one a real living breathing person that has lived, you can see the life they have led and how it affected them on every line on their face - it is a incredible skill, its little wonder David Lloyd is somewhat of a legend over here

It was this ability and the teaming with Alan Moore that went on to make the masterpiece that is V for Vendetta (which David says is inspired in part by his Night Raven work ), again the faces tell you everything you need to know and then some

Night Raven was a very much a success and even when the strip finished in Hulk comic, the character kept on coming back for more - morphing into text stories accompanied by brilliant large illustrations

Some of which (once again) was written by none other than Alan Moore (you can check them out here )

Beyond this point we was finally treated to "the house of cards" by Jamie Delano and David Lloyd

After which Night Raven's history gets rather murky... But I obviously think that to see this creation come back to life or just David Lloyd do a new comic would be nothing less than fantastic

But that's unfortunately rather unlikely as the character is owned by Marvel USA c/o The Disney Corporation as Marvel UK ceased to be quite a while ago now

And while I wouldn't says that its impossible for a someone who is not british to write stories for this character (witness for example some of the better Marvel :Noir titles, Night-Raven would fit into one of those perfectly as thats actually the era and location he came from originally, prohibition period new york) it wouldn't be the same

Certainly not without David lloyd doing the art - which is a shame as I bet he would love to give this character his due

I could not possibly even pretend to think that I could remotely have much of a chance of doing David Llyod justice artwise, so I deliberately chose the biggest drawing I could find of night-raven by him and that's the one above accompanying the text story...

If you have sharp eyes you will probably notice I have actually decided to go in for the "whole hog" and do a kind of parody text story.. which doesn't feature night-raven - I have done this more as a nod and a wink to Mark Roberts who's seminal blog It came from Darkmoor inspired this blog entry and the text story - if anyone is remotely interested in Marvel Uk head on over to his blog and thanks Mark

for everyone else (And possibly Mark as well) here is my attempt on its own without the cheeky text!

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oh and there is one more thing -

voting is now closed on what I should do next - if you remember Kirby's 2001 and Frank Millers Daredevil got 2 votes in, while Steranko covers had just 1

So what i am going to do is both !

I will start with a issue of Frank Millers Daredevil on Monday

and once that is done I will do 1 issue of kirby's 2001 ongoing comic title, not the actual movie adaptation as I think that would be much more interesting (certainly shorter as well!) and thanks to Douglas Noble for suggesting this!

I have done at least 1 drawing of each of the choices already so no-one has really lost out!

Hope that was okay and have fun - see you next week!