Back Cover Done!

I finished up the back cover last night.

A vintage Star Wars
figure I used as reference.

The gags on there were part of the reason I did the action figure gag on the front cover. Of course, this is still the old school style of figures with limited articulation. I used a Lando Calrissian figure (one of the last survivors of my original Star Wars collection) to model the figures of Dino and capture the hand position common in those old toys.                                                       

The Masters of the
Universe card back I
used for reference. 

While the front cover wasn't based on any toy packaging in particular, the back one is inspired by Masters of the Universe packaging. I thought the gags I dreamed up for it would be exaggerated and funny. But when I looked at the Masters card backs I had in storage for reference, I found the gags I had for the "action" features weren't all that far off from the real thing. Still funny though. 

There's a lot going on here and this took almost as much work to produce as an actual interior page, so this was a pretty good dry run for the comic itself. I used carbon paper to create uniformity among the Dino figures when I drew them and then was able to just digitally ink and color one and transfer the identical parts to the other figures, which helped cut down the workload. Having a character wearing white on a white background also cuts down on extra coloring. The cereal boxes in the background of the top image were a little distracting when they were located right behind a character's head so I took a couple of them out.

The top image and different Dino variants here are references to the story. All the text on the last Dino figure has been obscured so as not to spoil the story's ending. The nice thing about a digital comic is that you know there's no way anyone will be looking at the back first, so you can put spoilers on there with no worries.

I hope readers will bother zooming in on the back cover to see the gags when the comic is released. If not, it was still a lot of fun to do and good practice. Next up...page one!