Issue Two...The Random Tribute Variant Cover!

A variant cover for a digital comic??? I'm not sure if that even makes sense, but inspiration hit me and I just had to do it.

So when I was creating issue two's cover, one of the references I used was the Captain Power card

back pictured to the right. As I was doing the cover, I spotted a font in Photoshop Elements pretty darn close to the Captain Power logo. I'm a huge fan of the old show and toy line and the idea of doing the cover styled after Captain Power packaging just popped in my head.

It was an irresistible force, I found myself just fumbling around with the cover one morning changing the  background color to red, redoing the logo in that font and making a few other minor changes...and it looked great!

I wanted to take it further and actually mimic the circuit board and sparks in the background.  I put that part off because it would be time consuming to do so, but I knew if I didn't complete the variant, it would feel like I was leaving the issue unfinished. So there it is below. I got to say I love it to death. Say what you will about Mattel in the 1980s, but their package artists and designers were second to none.

I'm calling this a "Random Tribute Cover" since it pretty much makes no sense with the series or story for the issue...just like most variant covers! I've got an idea for a variant for the first issue too I'll do at some point. I'll try to do one per issue as a way to lampoon variant covers.

I should be able to put it up on Amusedom at the very least for anyone who'd rather have this cover when it's released. Even if no one buys it, it's still too much fun not to publish.

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!

Cover for the Second Story Done!

Below is the cover for the second issue of College Follies. Wow. Just the idea of a cover having the words "College Follies" and "No. 2" on it is pretty amazing.

 

So since this is just a five page short that was originally meant as a backup in 2000, I never thought about a cover for the second story until I decided to finish it and turn it into it's own digital issue. The story is essentially a series of conversations in a department store about Dino's dating life. There are artists who could probably turn that into something dramatic and eye catching, but I haven't reached that level of talent.

 

So I wanted something vague that would introduce the character and setting for the story, which is Super Happy-Mart, the College Follies version of Wal-Mart. I kept racking my brain for things I associate with Wal-Mart. Some of the exclusive action figures I got there came to mind, and then immediately the cover and back cover popped into my head. I had to do it if only to have the words "Dino, The Ex-Girlfriend" on an action figure package.

 

There were a lot of different figure packages I was looking at to make this. Originally I wanted it to be a cover with some visual element of packaging. It ended becoming the opposite, so by the time I ended up putting the price on the cover, it became a store price sticker (poor Dino is apparently on discount).

 

I decided to not use any of the tricks I did on the inside cover to give the package an illusion of realism, since I might could pull that off with the packaging, but then I'd have a cartoon action figure in there and it would just look way off. I'd be like dropping Bart Simpson in the middle of an Alex Ross painting. Art needs to have a consistent style. So this is a package and a figure drawn in the style of the series.

 

The cover gives me with a tremendous sense of nostalgia. It definitely brings back memories of toys I grew up with. It's not Uncle Sam with an uzi but I thinks it's a big, attention grabbing image in its own way.

 

Next up, the back cover, in which you get to see Dino's exciting action features!