The Sprouse Daxes that never were

My friend Brandon recently told me that he had reached out to Chris Sprouse about buying a piece of art from Sprouse. When he was doing so, he asked Sprouse if he had anything from his Supreme days that he might be willing to part with. Sprouse replied:

I finally made it to the post office and mailed your art. Sorry about the delay—again. To make up for it, i threw a couple of extras in the package. I went through some boxes of old art and rejected pages and found two things that i thought only you might appreciate. One piece is my absolute last piece of Supreme related artwork: a loose pencil sketch of a bunch of villains for issues i never got to draw, which i was actually sketching when i got the call that Supreme was cancelled/Rob was going out of business. ... They’re not much, but i hope they go some way towards making up for taking so long to ship art out.

The villains are the Daxes from Supreme: The Return #2, that was ultimately drawn by Jim Starlin. Here's what Sprouse had to say about that drawing in an interview back in the early 2000s:

CBA: Did you get as far as #58?

Chris: Yes. I had gotten the script, which featured a whole legion of alternate Darius Dax characters, but Jim Starlin actually ended up drawing the issue, though I’d actually started to design the characters for that, and I think that’s what I was working on when Rob called and said it was over. I have no pages of actual finished work.

Brandon was nice enough to send a scan of the art to me:

 

Pictured are Darius Dax (the only other time Sprouse had drawn Dax was for a cover to issue # 52A):

...and original Dax...

...and Darius Duck!

Loosely sketched you can also see Delroy Dax (the Daxman) and some other figures. Unfortunately, Sprouse never got to finish the sketch or the series. Here's how Starlin drew the characters for comparison's sake:

 

Still, what a find! You can check out Brandon's new item (and some other amazing Sprouse pages) at his comicartfans page here.