As I've noted elsewhere, I'm a longtime Mantis fan, and regret both her never guesting in MTIO and my own not having any art from her original Avengers run (it'll eternally be outside my price range, sadly). In 2007 she returned to Marvel activity in the Annihilation: Conquest storyline, with a new look designed by Timothy Green II; I was fortunate enough to write Mantis for her Official Handbook entries both in an Avengers book and in the subsequent hardbound series, and selected a lovely 'test' image of her that Mr. Green had done as a main image in the latter. In any case, that artist was at Seattle's Emerald City Comic Con in 2010 (March 13th) and I looked through his original art hoping for a nice Mantis piece with that look; while there were some, this page jumped out at me and stole my heart. This is the last page of the last issue of the Annihilation: Conquest - Starlord miniseries; Mantis is indeed far right, but also in it are, going clockwise from Mantis, Bug (of the Micronauts), Starlord, Captain Universe (Gabriel Vargas), Groot, and Rocket Raccoon. That roster pretty much set up Marvel's subsequent Guardians of the Galaxy ongoing series. An absolutely beautiful piece, and soon to be professionally framed and on my wall.

     Like my Ernie Chan commission, I've supersized the art here because it looks so much better at this size (unlike Mr. Chan's work, this still holds up at a lower size, but this page just gets more beautiful the bigger it gets!). My apologies to the bandwidth and/or screenwidth restricted, who may be hating me about now.

     There's some small chance one of you will notice that the credits of this particular book list Victor Olazaba as the book's inker, but Mr. Green told me he inked this particular page himself, so his name is going up on here.

     As a final note - at the convention, Mr. Green had agreed to do a Mantis sketch, but ran out of time and couldn't do it. He did pass on his email, and I may be contacting him about a more in-depth Mantis commission (I find myself wondering if he could do me a worthy Mantis/Thing team-up). We shall see...