This page gave me a good opportunity to practice drawing The Bombardier. Since we started work on The Specialists all those years ago, The Bombardier has remained among my favorite pieces of design, especially the helmet. I still have a page in a sketchbook somewhere with various different ideas I went through for the helmet design; they may well be among the extra material included in the eventual big Book 1 collection, and you’ll get to see the other possibilities. But The Bombardier was the first character we created that really came together from head to toe (as it were) in such a way that feels–to me anyway–really appropriate to the WWII timeframe. Sometimes pieces of technology designed for other dieselpunk-style comics or videogames feel a little too overdesigned, like they’ve been filtered through our own modern sensibilites too much. Maybe I’m flattering myself, but, given the chance to redesign him from scratch, I don’t think there’s really much of anything I’d change.

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