This one is a pretty self-explanatory entry… putting together Marvel’s most crazed serial killer with DC’s most crazed serial killer really isn’t as clever as some of these other entries have been but Joker and Carnage is just to good a match-up to ignore.

The design for this one is deceptively simple looking while it really took a while to nail the final result. One of my biggest hurdles was the color scheme, I think I tried out a dozen shades of green and purple and white and red until I genuinely couldn’t tell the difference anymore – and then after endless tries I realized I also couldn’t settle on an order for the colors to be in. Was the face gonna be green or the mouth? What about the tendrils? Should they be red instead to accentuate his smile? I tried out another few dozen designs before settling on this one. I really love how this guy ended up looking. It’s immediately clear which characters got smashed together and nothing ends up illegible, which tends to happy with goopy characters like this.

The problem with putting the Joker into a prompt that demands a written element like this challenge does is that there just isn’t a whole lot to take from. He’s a mystery man and I want to stay faithful to that element of the character but I also want to write about him and make sure these mash-ups are more than just fun designs. I kind of ended up going with the most obvious route:

Being the leader of a clan of murderers terrorizing the Gotham streets, Mr. C (as this character is known without his symbiote) quickly finds himself facing off against the Caped Crusader. During one of their more violent match-ups the two enemies find themselves trapped in a secret underground laboratory run by Hugo Strange’s Life Foundation which has been used to morph the dangerous Venom toxin into something even more sinister. In a more tactless moment from the Caped Crusader, Mr. C is pushed into the containment chambers the foundation has been using – all of which are promptly broken. The separate pieces of Symbiote start to bond with Mr. C and thus Mayhem is born!

It’s a big entry today given that we’ve hit double digits as we enter day 10! I’m very excited to show everyone what’s next. I’m far from finished and my best pieces are still yet to come!