That's a great focus and a great start! (And a great idea -- using comics to study gesture! Brilliant!!! <333 ) 1h/day can be a lot of time, though, especially after a while and your mind is looking for excuses to skip a day (which usually turns into skipped weeks, etc.) Perhaps, have 1h/day as the ideal... which on your best days you'll hit... but a minimum of at least 1 gesture drawing from a comic per day? I do this with the things I'm studying... my commitment being, "Make sure today is non-zero" for what I'm working-toward. (It sucks to have time to only do my minimum, sure... but I know that at least today I moved forward at least a tiny bit toward my goal.) The important thing is to make doing what you want to be doing, a habit. Start small... easy... bite-sized... and once the habit is ingrained... then you can add bits-n-bobs to it... slowly... bit-by-bit. :)

The best suggestion I ever got for what to use for a sketchbook was from Alex Toepetti, (who at that time was lead key cleanup artist at Walt Disney Feature Animation). Printer paper and a clipboard. His thinking was that, 1) you're not worried about leaving frayed edges by tearing-out bad drawings so you're more adventuresome with trying stuff that might not work; and 2) You can choose the surface smoothness/roughness you like best... and change it up if you ever feel so inclined. I took that idea a step further and made my own, purse-sized sketchbook that I can thread-in/out any kind of paper I want. (Currently, I've got smooth paper for character ideation, toned tan paper for development sketches, and some lightweight Bristol paper for inks (or watercolor)... all in the same book! ( a quick walkthrough if you want to see it: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C1M4BlEr4m0/?igsh=MXc5cXd1Z3R0ZjNvNQ== )

How much time ought we to plan for working on a comic-book cover? I realize that the simple answers are: "As much time as you need," or "An hour less than you did last time", and the like... ...but I'm wondering what the "Industry Standard" is for doing a cover of the quality level we're seeing in the Cover Illustration section of the Marvel Comics course. I'm working on budgeting time for my first series and want to make sure that the schedule I plan-for will get me used-to what would be expected of me if/when I might get hired to do this as a legit. gig. (The web-searches I've done so far have yielded only chaff.)

It's really nice! I think you've got some good stuff going-on there! I especially like your first page where you're more focused on "gist" than "creating a nice line-drawing". (Actually... I kinda like that... "gist"-ure drawing... XD ) Advice that was given to me a lllloooonnnnnggggg time ago (that still hasn't quite sunk-in for me yet...) is to draw "verbs" rather than "nouns"... don't draw an arm or a leg... draw _how_ it's _stretching/compressing/bending/etc_... convey to the viewer how it _feels_ to you to experience that feeling of observing that and imagining how it'd feel in your own body. And, draw _through_ the model, especially at the gesture phase... actually draw (lightly) the eclipsed body-parts and where they connect, and how they are also stretching/compressing. Gesture-drawings are about the feelz, (not the finish).

It's lookin' good! My own experience with getting gestures to look a certain way -- I did a lot of studies of my target reference, (Glenn Vilppu, for me,) and tried to remember how it -felt- to create lines like his. Then... "replay" that feeling when doing my own from a model... and getting a heck of a lot of "brush-miles" in like that. A great work-around if you don't have access to free or cheap life drawing sessions... GestureVR is a life-drawing app on Quest where they've scanned real models. I got it looonng ago when it was only on SideQuest, but I think I saw that it was actually on the Quest store now. Make it fun to log those brush-miles! :D