COVER DESIGN 02 _ Dino Tales

Early in the process of designing our graphic novel, I became hooked on the idea of using skulls to illustrate the theme or plot of each issue in Dia de los Muertos-styled vignettes. With the desert as a setting, hunger as a motivating concept, and with tough men and beasts as key players in our tale, an inverted take on the classic Jaws poster seemed like a good fit.


The intention was for the skull to be a heatstroke hallucination of a wolf going in for the kill. Since we're so accustomed to seeing dinosaur skeletons, and with predators like T-Rexes attacking from above, we instead got a lot of questions about having a dinosaur on the cover.


Here are some examples of the evolution of the cover from what now seems like a stiff, but anatomically correct, rendering of the wolf skull and an ill-defined silhouette in the first rendition to what I think are more effective apparitions in the third.


In the end, we scrapped the idea entirely but it made me push for clearer solutions and hopefully a better concept.

(NOTE: I'm posting tonight, and no new post this Thursday, because I'm heading away for a week to go swim with my dog)

COVER DESIGN 01 _ Judge a Book

Here you have some more artwork from the pitch book I shopped around at NYC Comic Con 2009. In addition to sample pages and a full script for issue one, we decided to include cover comps for three issues. This seemed like the best way to communicate our mini-series as a fully fleshed out entity with an overarching design concept. It's one thing to have passion and a great concept, but, I've found that providing at least a taste of each aspect of your work helps in getting a complete stranger to see the big picture.

These are still raw, but, the final versions will continue to draw from Mexican Day of the Dead iconography and both woodcut printing and silkscreen processes for their aesthetic. An early decision was to try to avoid literal images and to instead create allegorical vignettes with skeletal actors to portray the theme of each particular issue.

I discovered the art of Polish Poster designs a few years ago and, with these covers, I threw down the personal challenge to meet their standard of bringing more mysterious, poetic, and outright nutso imagery into the world.

I've changed the cover to issue 1 pretty drastically since then because of one recurring comment: "Is that a dinosaur?" As cool as gunslingers fighting T-Rexes might be, they unfortunately do not appear in our story. I'll re-visit the evolution of that cover in the next post...