Rise of the Cyber Emus


Original comic written and Illustrated by Anthony V D’Agostino

Follow the adventures of Steel Beak Squadron as they take on the fierce Iron Wallaby Federation in the Australian Outback!! With this book I was able to experiment with a digital collage style, with tons of texture. Flip through the book here, or check it out on Webtoon!














Process


This comic was one of my first long term projects, originating as just an idea 
from a character design class, it took the better course of a year to develop 
these characters into my first original comic. Inspired in part by the ‘Great Emu War’—a real military operation in 1932 in which the Australian government attempted to combat its own national bird—this project draws from a famously failed effort to cull the emu population in order to protect farmland. The campaign revealed just how fierce and resilient emus are: capable of withstanding multiple rounds from machine guns and sprinting at speeds of over 30 miles per hour.

From that Idea I spun off three fierce Emu warriors to be my main characters, setting them as cybernetic soldiers who were waging war on the Iron Wallaby Federation, the former nation of Australia under the control of an AI overlord. Once the foundation of the story was in place i could go and start designing just how this world might look!

“If we had a military division with the bullet-carrying capacity of these birds it would face any army in the world…They can face machine guns with the invulnerability of tanks.”
- Major Gwynydd Purves Wynne-Aubrey Meredith of the Royal Australian Artillery  


Original Iterations



As Seen at the Pratt Shows: Design 2025





@AVD_Designs 2025

Found Sketchbook


The found sketchbook project is where I had to experiment with sketching in a a discarded book already filled with text and pictures. The smooth pages were not meant or illustrations and paint, and this challenge helped me break through my usual conventions and really have some fun. Each page was filled with different mediums, subject matters, and everything in between.  Across the book I used Microns, Paint Pens,  Alcohol Markers, Ink, ballpoint pens, and White out.





Highlights!


Here are some of my favorite pages from the Sketchbook!

I've got this multi-media poster of Alejandra Villarreal , the bass player from the band ‘The Warning’. This is illustrated in blue color pencil on drawing paper, cut out and glued into the found sketchbook. The red and black background was acrylic paint rolled out onto the sketchbook pages with an roller!

The next page featured and ink sketch of my walk to work when I worked at the Pratt Library, done in  Ink brush colored in with  colored pencil and blue water color! The following page is an Alien  in an MTA jersey with a Mtn Dew bottle wrapper pasted in behind him. These collage experiments really influenced where I would take my poster and design work the following summer!





@AVD_Designs 2025


Cars Burn

Editorial Illustration and Spot


“The automobile has changed our cities in fundamental ways, colonizing ever more of the spaces that were once devoted to human interaction and transforming them into systems of parking lots connected by highways.”
- David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule The World

This editorial-style illustration was created to accompany B The Change’s article “How the Automobile Killed the Urban Space,” an excerpt from David C. Korten’s book referenced above. The issue is one I have been passionate about for years, shaped by my experience growing up in the suburban sprawl of Staten Island.

Through both personal experience and research, I became increasingly interested in how the rise of the automobile—along with the power of the auto industry and its lobbying influence over Congress—has reshaped American cities at the expense of community-centered spaces. This piece was my attempt to visually communicate those consequences.

Visually, the illustration is inspired by the iconic posters depicting bulls with smoke billowing from their nostrils. I chose a truck positioned in front of the U.S. Capitol to evoke the metaphor of a “bull in a china shop,” symbolizing the destructive force of car culture on American cities. The image reflects how the demand for wider roads, expansive parking lots, and highways has consumed enormous amounts of urban space, displacing homes and dismantling communities across the country.


Process

I started by sketching out concepts and ideas that I wanted to tackle in this editorial piece. I had a few different ideas for what problems I wanted to cover, and after narrowing down my idea, I began develop the Illustration  through multiple variations!

This was illustrated digitally in Procreate, and besides the main illustration I developed a  smaller spot piece focusing on the more striking imagery of a gas hose hanging in front of the capital. This was then animated into a short loop I could turn into a GIF.











































@AVD_Designs 2025 

Metal Infographic




This battle jacket inspired Infographic depicting the evolution of Rock and Metal genres. I am missing many genres and bands but for the sake of finishing this project at all I had to cut it at somewhere. After drawing these patch like sections in procreate I brought it all into photoshop for texturing and aligning at on the vest.

It’s difficult to narrow a band down to only one specific genre since bands never really stick to one, and for the sake of music that’s great but for the sake of categorization it makes it quite difficult. Don’t take this too seriously there’s a few bands that could fit in a million other genres but this is just how they ended up landing for this chart. This was great fun but also very time consuming to complete!
The infographic patches were drawn in Procreate and textured and compiled in adobe Photoshop.


















Movie Posters


Ink illustrated posters for the movie franchise ‘ Ghostbusters’  done on 11 x 17” Bristol .

Sonnet Comic Adaptations 




To gather experience with the traditional methods of comic making, professor Floyd Hughes tasked us with adapting two classic sonnets into single page ink comics. 

Started with the classic sonnet of Ozymandias, where the author finds a ruined statute from a long forgotten kingdom, boasting about the might of his works, yet nothing around remained. I interpreted this one as space travelers, discovering this relic on a long dead planet.   The second sonnet I adapted was Shakespeare's Sonnet 27, I worked to ensure the settings and costumes were time accurate to the period for this one. 

Translating the stories into 9 panels,  sketching out the panels in blue pencil, and than going over them in Ink. Both of these were inked with a combination of Micron pens and Ink Brush pen. The lettering was done digitally in Photoshop.

Root of All Evil


The Root of All Evil is a series of illustrations  depicting the tale of a father and son.

Originally planned to be album covers the project shifted into more of a three part narrative illustration as it went on. Focusing on themes of alcoholism and parentification.
Digital Illustrations done on Procreate.

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Grave Illustration




Colored pencils and Alcohol markers on 11 x 17’” Bristol board.








MTA Transit Posters


MTA Transit posters


These MTA Art Card Inspired posters cover the MTA’s most unknown line, the only one on Staten Island, the SIR! These were digital paintings made in procreate, below are the descriptions for each poster, starting with #1, the Bridge

This art card sized poster depicts the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge with Bay Ridge, Brooklyn on the right and Staten Island on the left. I pulled from various buildings and locations around Grasmere, SI and the surrounding areas! Spent a lot of time developing this looser, more painterly style over the course of this project.

Transit Poster series - Eltingville !
This was actually the first poster I developed for this project and it has started from a very different🚉 , more line art based style, but we discovered a much more painterly style with procreates

🍅 Top Tomatoes 🍅 - Great Kills

The last poster developed for this series and I decided to cover the next stop in the SIR. Great Kills Station might be the busiest stop on the south shore of SI, due to the express services that skip to here, as well as the times where it just stops here. Focuses on the town center above the train station and its businesses!

Cheese - The final long poster in this series, Had fun continuing to explore this looser, painterly style, something out of the norm for me. This highlights a number of Pizzerias on the island, specifically ones near SIR stations but not exclusively that. A good mix of local favorites and famous joints. Flying pizza monsters are invading the island as well, just for fun.