Welcome to the first "Art Barrage" of the new year, in which I intend to bombard you with loads of interesting work you might not have seen before. Some of it is comic art, while sometimes it will come from the increasingly comics-besotted worlds of illustration, fine art and street art. Let's kick off with the above image, from the second series of Mike Mitchell's surprisingly disturbing re-skins of the classic pose from the cover of Superman #6 (we featured the first lot here at Robot 6 in October). See them all here — the They Live and Krang ones are genuinely freaking me out. That Margot Tenenbaum is pretty creepy, too.

Below is a piece that reminds me of what Mitchell is doing: Hillary White's T-shirt design for Threadless from last year, "Super LOL." It gently takes the mick out of that sublime piece of Golden Age DERP!-thinking, that somehow just putting on a pair of glasses could ever instantly render Superman anonymous. Are you familiar with Ary Sheffer's "Temptation of Christ"? Well, the second image below is White's tribute, "Temptation of Robin." It's from her series, Pop-Reinterpretation, which also featured the much-blogged and Tumblred "True Muppet."

Plenty more from around the world after the break, including France's Didier Cassegrain, Italy's Adriano De Vincentiis, Japan's Patrick Awa, the U.K.'s Will Kirkby, the U.S.'s Babs Tarr, and Sweden's Robert Sammelin.

I just came across the work of French comic artist Didier Cassegrain. His Facebook page is a goldmine of art, with a style resembling the unlikely marriage of Eduardo Risso, Jordi Bernet and Simon Bisley. I love the work he does integrating his figure drawings with location photography (which reminds me of the crazy stuff perennial Art Barrage favorite Warwick Johnson Cadwell has been known to do to amuse himself). Here's his none-more-Mod Batgirl.

I saw this image by Adriano De Vincentiis recently in the Facebook feed of David Roach, who is a damned fine artist himself as well as a connoisseur and historian of comic and illustrative art. De Vincentiis's blog reminds me that, in Italy, erotic (and especially erotic horror) comics are pretty much the mainstream. So, in other words, don't click on that link unless you're not easily offended. Anyway, De Vincentiis captures some of Wonder Woman's inherent S&M kink in this piece, "Beauty in being defeated."

A regular face at "Art Barrage" is the U.K.'s Jack Teagle, who has produced this piece, "Heroines and Villainesses," as wrapping paper for the design house Urban Graphic.

I love these sketches Godzilla artist Simon Gane has recently posted on his blog recently, using Wite-Out as a third color and for interesting textural effect.

When Daniel Krall recently linked to the blogs of various assistants and interns he's employed in the recent past, I enjoyed looking through all their online portfolios, and all were producing fine work, with Krall's influence often visible. Here's Babs Tarr's Harley and Ivy. Babs' style is great, very rock 'n' roll. Dunno if she's interested in working in comics, but I'd recommend some enterprising commissioning editor give her a bell and at least ask.

I was asked at the end of last year somewhere to make a tip for one to look out for in the future, and I mentioned Will Kirkby. His style won't be popular with everyone, but I love it. I remember the work he was producing or amateur anthologies a couple of years ago and thinking how much potential he had, and he just keeps getting more and more polished wit every page he posts.

Primarily an artist and character designer in the animation world, Patrick Awa is a frequent contributor to the various low-brow art exhibitions that have became particularly zeitgeisty in the last couple of years (and have given various comic artists inroads into the fine art world of late). His contribution to the "Weapon of Choice" show at L.A.'s Design Matters gallery was this tribute to Aronofsky's The Wrestler, an amazing Steranko-esque tour de force of perspective, foreshortening and fluid linework. He's followed it up with more wrestling, this time drawing the old Dark Horse character El Zombo Fantasma, long-threatened to be returning as a 3D-animated film.

Here's some Robert Sammelin, whose day job is at Swedish game developer DICE, which makes the Battlefield series. He has a clear hankering to work in comics someday, and has some equally clear comic book influences going on. Again, editors — give the guy an email, what's the worst that could happen?