So friday afternoon David gets back to me. There's a problem with the cover. Roger Mincheff (head of Spacedog and the guy who discovered me a couple years ago and all round super-cool dude) has made the point that the problem is she doesn't use a gun. At no point does a gun feature in the story. It's kinda like Batman having a gun. It's inaccurate and misleading.
Can we lose the gun?
Let me tell you why David's a kick ass editor and give you an art lesson at the same time. All figures and images have an impetus or focus. It's the main thing that gives the figure purpose. Sometimes it's an action sometimes it's a mood.
The focus of the previous cover was the gun. David is savvy enough to know that if you take the gun away you basically gut the figure. He knew we needed more than just a redraw.
"Can you give us a new cover? You have til wednesday."
I looked at the clock. Friday afternoon now. I won't get home from work til at least 9pm. Hmm, if I draw it tonight. Check it saturday and send it to Annette, that will give her 2 days to colour it, and me another 2 days to draw it. That's doable. If we move quick we might even be able to get some edits in from David and Roger.
But drawing is easy, designing is not. By this stage I'd had the chance to have a look at some of the artwork that had been produced for the comic. While the artist is a solid storyteller with an excellent grasp of anatomy, I just felt that he hadn't quite captured the true cool of our Xtreme sports champion/fashion designer protagonist. I realised that this cover's job was to add to the feel and mood of the book as well as contribute to the story and her character. We needed people who read comics who also dig extreme sports to pick this baby up.
I was looking around for ideas when I saw what Stuart Immonen had been doing on Nextwave. Incredibly innovative design work. I took a big helping of that and mixed it with some of the design elements I see on skate magazines.
I whacked in the new logo I designed for the book on it's side as something extra to make this book stand out.
I waited with bated (baited?) breath for the response.
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