I seem to be doing a lot of fanart at the moment.

So I was working on a tarot deck for art (as you do) and I came to the Death card. Considering that the deck was the 'favourite character tarot' rather than the Marseilles or Rider-Waite deck (the art project is 'transitions', I bet you can figure the logic out if you try) Metal Gear Solid's Psycho Mantis was an obvious choice.
But making the image for the card made me remember how much I like this fellow - I'm always captivated by Kojima's psychics, but of all of them thus far, Mantis has been the most filled-out, back-story wise, and from Shinkawa's sketches you can tell he had fun creating the character. I like it when the creators like their own work.

The fact that making the thing prompted me to go and buy Metal Gear 3 (which I missed out on in 2005) and the MGS digital graphic novel (how did I ever live without Ashley Wood?) is testament to how much staying power the series has over me.

Oh, right; this is the raw image for the Death card - it's cropped and resized for the real thing, so I wanted to include it in its original state.