Out today is Sandman Overture 4 special edition. I ended up doing a decent length interview for this, talking about process with editor Sara Miller, hope it’s amusing. And we used some photos in spots that show my mess of a workspace. Yay.
This time I’ve selected a set of pages that was from a not as well known project. Back when we still actually had Wildstorm, before it got fully absorbed into the DCU, they published many different types of really good creator owned books. Much like what has become much more popular in the market today. One of the them I was involved in, besides Promethea and Desolation Jones was a little labor of love called Wild Girl, written by the very talented Leah Moore and John Reppion, and drawn by the incomparable Shawn McManus with a little help from myself. Each issue featured a short sequence aspect that was a story inside the main story. Leah and John asked for me to do these special segments. I suspect that had something to do with seeing that I could tackle various styles and they really wanted each of these brief story segments to be unique from each other and from the main look of the book that Shawn was handling. I loved the concept of this series, and liked the idea of being able to do something radically different each chapter. Playing around with different styles and techniques is something I really can’t help myself from doing, so any opportunity to make that work in the context of the greater narrative is something I relish. The pages below are my complete sequence from the final chapter of the series, and one of my favorites to do. It pushed expectations in ways that excited me. A story about about gods of India, so I wanted to give it all a sort of eastern hand-painted folk-art look, but also had to keep it feeling like comics. An interesting challenge. The result is something unique, and not what one typically thinks of when thinking comics. I keep asking for this series to get collected into tpb, so people can discover it again. It was interesting material and a pleasure to work on.
Sticking with the theme of cosmic from last week– here is that relatively unpublished Warlock cover I mentioned. It was meant to be for issue 6, but with that particular series being canceled at issue 4 or 5 it never saw a full a release. I think it may have been used in the tpb of the story, can’t remember for certain. The fun thing for me about this is the pose I chose. Not many know this, but I love Ultraman. One of the all-time greatest Japanese live action monster versus space-alien hero shows. I remember fondly being eager to get home from school when I was a kid to catch the latest 30 minutes (with commercials) campy bliss of it all. It was that show and along the Adam West Batman TV episodes, and numerous anime shows from then that sparked my fertile young mind. At the time there wasn’t really anything like Ultraman being shown regularly, other than Godzilla flicks (love those too). Back then I had no idea that what I was watching was from the 1960s. There was so much crazy mind buzzing things going with that Japanese stuff. I couldn’t help but fall in love with it. To this day I get giddy over the concepts and characters, I still really dig this cheesy campy stuff. But at this point you’re probably asking what the hell does this have to do the Warlock cover below… You see, there was an often used iconic shot whenever SSSP senior member Hayata used this device that turned him into the enigmatic silver and red giant alien Ultraman. It’s one of those things that just doesn’t go away from my brain, forced tight perspective angles, permanently imprinted glory. So, for this Warlock cover I decided to try to capture that same effect. It came out somewhat alright. When I look at it, I want to imagine the sound effects and cheesy heroic music as its companion. I’m not certain at all why I ended up associating doing a Warlock cover with my fascination of Ultraman. Perhaps it’s the graphic design nature of both characters, some subliminal correlation taking place, I don’t know. Or… perhaps it’s just simply they’re both cool as hell.
Quite some time ago I was given the opportunity to redesign Warlock for Marvel. This was way back before all of the film stuff for them went into play. The formidable Greg Pak was tasked to write a new series, and for some reason the people in charge felt I could contribute something to the new design, and also do the covers for the series. Charlie Adlard was the interior artist, and as always did a great job. Unfortunately the thing just didn’t take off, and so it was abruptly cancelled at issue 4, resulting in an unpublished cover (I’ll post that later). I’ve always loved Warlock, one of my all time favorite Marvel stories, the stuff by Jim Starlin was/is a tremendous inspiration. So being asked to be involved in an attempt to bring the character back, I was excited over the prospects. The trick for me was to try do something visually new with the character while very much adhering to what made him visually strong in the first place, staying true to the right feel, to do my best not to defile Starlin’s golden child. It was daunting, but the result is pretty interesting. It’s too bad this wasn’t coming out now. I think it would’ve been a hit now. With the new interest in cosmic Marvel happening, and excitement over what future films may bring in this area, I thought it would be cool to post these two images. The first is my final design, color by me. The next is the first issue cover for that series, color by my pal Dave Stewart
Well, in an attempt to keep things relatively active here (I’ve been very neglectful)– I’m thinking about occasionally posting random images from my gallery at Flicker. Post a comment if you think this is a decent idea, or just a bit dull. Usually, in the past, I’d have more frequent content. Such as art of what I’m working on. But with Sandman, every reveal before issue releases is understandably negotiated by editorial. It’s difficult to figure out what can be safely shown that doesn’t spoil anything. And I’m rather indecisive as to what cropped art would be worth posting. So I’ve left it alone. But the result means that the blog has been very stagnant in terms of new content. And I’ve had very little time to devote to prose writing as I had previously discussed publishing here. Extra work time has been focused on developing projects that will follow Sandman down the road.
Anyway, so I thought maybe it might be a decent idea to post older images here once a week or so. So yeah, comment if this is appealing, or not. In the meantime here is something older to look at…
