80's Infinity War

It's become a tradition for me to produce a version of each Avengers movie poster featuring the characters as they appeared in earlier decades. The first movie was represented as the sixties: <img src="Image URL address" alt="Name of Image"> "Age of Ultron" was the Seventies:
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and now here we are in the eighties! This was by far the most challenging of the three to create. Squeezing this many characters onto on poster was a headache all by itself, but also finding a way to produce eighties versions of many of them was problematic. Some of them, like Shuri and Okoye, were not even around until the beginning of this century, and some had costumes that hadn't changed much since the sixties. I had to improvise quite a bit, which turned out to be lots of fun! I'm going to explain why each character looks the way they do, clockwise from Spidey:

1) Spider Man: Fairly easy, as his alien black costume was the definitive look for the web-slinger back in the eighties.

2) Groot: Difficult to interpret, as I could not find much on Groot's appearences from comics of that era. I decided to use some creative licence here and "Henson" him up. If Groot were in an eighties movie he'd probably be a puppet of some kind, so I tried to do a Jim Henson Workshop kind of Groot.

3) Mantis: A bit of a cheat really. Mantis debuted looking like this in the 70's, but her look remained much the same until the 90's

4) Gamora, Drax, Rocket and Starlord: These were among the easiest to interpret as their look remanied consistent throughout the eighties. I particularly enjoyed the rendering of Rocket as I enjoyed reading Mike Mignola's Rocket Raccoon series as a kid.

5) War Machine: Another cheat, as War Machine didn't appear until 1992. Oh well-- that was practically still the eigthies anyway, right?

6) Dr Strange and Wong: Fairly self explanitory, again just a case of drawing Benedicts Wong and Cumberbatch in eighties comic regalia.

7) Thanos: One of the problems of these pieces is that drawing the characters in the campy comic book iterations diminishes their dramatic presence. Not so with Thanos: this purple-headed invader would still look ominous in a tutu. More so, probably...

8) The Vision and Scarlet Witch: The Vision became opaque and ghostly after being rebuilt by Hank Pym. I think it was Hank Pym... I'm sure I shall be corrected by one of you Marvel Maesters out there if I'm wrong.

9) Iron Man: I've been looking forward to drawing this poster for five years specifically so I could at last get to draw my favorite IM armour: The red and white. I don't know why I like this version of it so much, it just looks so freaking cool. Also, if you google "Robert Downey Jr Mullet", you will not be disappointed. I gave him a supercool Don Draper cut for the sixties, a Ron Burgandy bouffant for the seventies, and for the decade that taste forgot, he's gone full blow-dried Macgyver.

10) Nebula: Originally I was going to draw Nebula in the correct era fashion. Problem was, she was basically a blue Gamora back then, and looked kind of boring. I cheated a little to give her the nineties cyberpunk look to make her look rad. See what I did there? Nobody in the western hemisphere has uttered the word 'rad' since 1989.

11) Black Panther: T'Challa didn't look very different from his 60's debut back in the eighties, so I kind of switched to my default here and just gave him a mullet. I'd like to apologise to the great Chadwick Boseman for making him look like an unholy fusion of Lionel Ritchie and Eriq La Salle.

12) The Captain: Cap was originally going to be in his 'Nomad' guise, since that is very much where this character is at after the events of 'Civil War'. There's a probalem with that, though-- the Nomad costume is completely ludicrous! It looked too seventies too. Luckily, a friend of mine reminded me that it was Cap who originally wore the USAgent costume, which was far more cogent for this piece.

13) Thor: This is kind of the boldest step I took in terms of character design. I could easily have just put Thor in the armour Walter Simonson gave him during his legendary 80's run. However, this felt too far from the more grungy, battlescarred Thor we saw at the end of Ragnarok, so I decided to put him in the costume from the 1988 tv movie "The Incredible Hulk Returns". And I gave him a mullet.

14) Shuri and Okoye: These characters weren't around for the eghties, so I had to figure a way of representing them in an era specific way. Shuri is a brilliant scientist, so I immediately thought of dressing her like Doc Brown from the quintessentially eighties "Back to the Future" films. Then I thought that the Doc's costume from "Back to the Future Part 2" is similar to Jubilee from the X-Men. Shuri; meet Jubilee's wardrobe. It works! I can totally see an eigties Shuri dressing like this. Okoye, Amazonic commander of the Wakandan Royal Guard, immediately made me think of the fantastic Grace Jones in "Conan the Destroyer".

I've buggered up this clockwise thing, haven't I? We're all over the place now, I think...

15) The Falcon and the Hulk: Sam Wilson is in his disco bass-guitar player outfit from the 60's, 70's, 80's and 90's. And 00's, come to think. Hey, that unitard must really smell by now! Hulk is grey-skinned, as he was during his Mr Fixit phase. I considered putting him in that pinstriped mobster gettup, but decided against.

16) Black Widow: The grey unitard and Flock-of Seagulls quiff is my favourite look for Natasha, so I was looking forward to representing her in that outfit here.

17) Bucky/Winter Soldier: I struggled with this at first, since Bucky was quite stubbornly dead throughout the silver and bronze Marvel eras. For a laugh, I gave Sebastian Stan a Rambo-style wet perm, bandanna and M16 to go with the classic Bucky outfit and MY GOD do I want to draw a comic called RAMBUCKY now. #teamrambucky