Inside Back Cover Finished!

The inside back cover is done!

This is the inside back cover as it existed in 2000, just colored with inking touchups. This is inspired by the back cover (or sometimes inside covers) of books or trade paperbacks. I used artwork I had laying around and wrote a couple paragraphs. It was a quick way to fill space but, man, I love this page! The top has a disclaimer in it that's a great gag, but I won't show it here since it would spoil the ending of the story.

The big image is the initial Dark Knight Returns homage image I did back in the day. It was nice to get it in there. Of course, I have a much better version up on my personal Facebook page, which I've already detailed in a prior post.

For the author shot, I think that's a reworked self portrait I made for my student website. That bio is of course, circa 2000. I'm no longer a college student and, sadly, I also no longer have a nifty girlfriend. I do, however, still have a cool comic collection. 

Just got to do the back cover and I'm done! 

Social Media on Parade: Facebook Returns

Huh? What? Didn't I do Facebook already? Well I did the College Follies Facebook page a few days ago (facebook.com/collegefollies, for the love of God, please like it!). Today I'm going to look at my personal Facebook page art. Why? Because I like it, that's why.

Anyway here it is:

So this image has a bit of history. The one issue that was printed back in 2000 (that I'm restoring and coloring for the web currently) has my heroes, Stickboy and Psychoboy, in trench coats. Since those were damn fine trench coats they were wearing, I had to do a Frank Miller parody image.

Now Miller is the legendary writer/artist known for Sin City, a crime noir comic series (and later a movie) in which everyone wears trench coats. He's also known for doing Batman: The Dark Knight Returns with the famous cover of lightening striking in the background of a silhouetted Batman.

So I did an image where I modeled the characters after the position Robin was in as she jumped through the air in one of the splash pages in Dark Knight. I put them in trench coats and made them silhouetted in front of lightening and voila:

That was back in 1999. Recently, I thought about coloring the image and using it as a "College Follies Returns" image. But then it occurred to me, if you're going to do a parody you can't just jam random elements of someone's work together, you should refer directly, precisely to what you're satirizing. Thus I drew a new image, this time with Psycho and Stick taking the position that Batman took on the cover of the first issue of Dark Knight (one of the most famous comic covers of all time). I drew lighting that was fairly close to the cover too.

Then I scanned in the image and knocked out the background. I colored the background layer with a Photoshop airbrush set to a gargantuan size, trying to emulate the colors Lynn Varley used on the cover. I then used the airbrush (at finer size) to create a glow around the lightening on that background layer and then erased the inked lines above it and boom! Stick and Psycho are ready to take on the Reagan administration!

Though it is a promotional image, it would make a damn fine cover and, after doing it, I came up with a story for it. It would probably be a full length issue, so it's a bit longer than the stories I want to do, at least for right now. But eventually, who knows? Every comic has to end up in a possible dystopian  future at some point...