Happy Birthday, Bob Larkin!

Today, my friend Bob Larkin—the living art legend whose paintings grace the covers of my Saga of Pandora Zwieback novels Blood Feud and Blood Reign—turns 66, and is still producing incredible images, even as younger generations of horror and comic fans continue to discover his large body of work. Take a look!

LarkinArt04LarkinArt02These days, Bob is busily working for Topps, painting trading cards for their upcoming Mars Attacks: Occupation set, which is a sequel to the classic card series published in the 1960s. All of us here at ’Warp Central are eagerly awaiting the set’s release—and to see what other projects Bob has in development!

To see more of Bob’s stunning work, pay a visit to his art blog, Bob Larkin: The Illustrated Man.

To enjoy some of his amazing pencil artwork in printed form, order a copy of The Bob Larkin Sketchbook from the StarWarp Concepts webstore.

Happy birthday, Bob!

I Am the Author, And You Will Obey Me…

As an addendum to the recent series of posts about the creation of Pandora Zwieback–related covers for books and comics, I thought you’d be interested in seeing a truly odd choice for subject matter…

Larkin-Capaldi-Me

What you see here is a pencil sketch by “Pandora Zwieback” cover-painting legend Bob Larkin, drawn on a blank “sketch cover” that Dynamite Entertainment published as a variant for the second issue of their Doc Savage comic series. Only Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze, doesn’t appear on the cover. Instead, you’ve got actor Peter Capaldi (The Thick of It, Torchwood: Children of Earth) in costume as his most recent, world-famous role: Doctor Who. And standing in front of him, looking rather dapper in his black ensemble, top hat, and John Lennon sunglasses, is…me. In the garb I wear to conventions and book festivals in order to draw attention to the StarWarp Concepts booth.

Yeah, I was surprised by this, myself. But as Bob explained, he was drawing a bunch of Doc Savage sketch covers commissioned by fans—including the one done for me, teaming Doc with our adventurous Ms. Zwieback—and had a blank left over. So, liking my con outfit and aware of my fannish love for Doctor Who—I even once got to write a short story for a licensed Doctor Who anthology, as I discussed in this post and this other post at the StarWarp Concepts blog—Bob decided to combine the two, just for the hell of it.

Well, I certainly love it. But I have to ask: With my black outfit and goatee, standing next to the Doctor, does this make me a future incarnation of his oldest enemy, the Master? Only time may tell…

Pandora Zwieback: A Team-Up That Will Never Happen

And now for something completely different. Following the recent run of posts about the creation of the covers for the Pandora Zwieback novels Blood Feud and Blood Reign, IndyFest Magazine #85, and the comic books The Saga of Pandora Zwieback #0 and The Saga of Pandora Zwieback Annual #1, I thought you’d be interested in a different sort of cover-art story—for a onetime crossover of characters you wouldn’t expect!

Painter Bob Larkin, in case you didn’t know, is an art legend whose paintings have graced a ton of covers, movie posters, and trading cards; his covers for Marvel Comics—including Dazzler #1, The Savage Sword of Conan the Barbarian, Planet of the Apes, The Hulk!, Haunt of Horror, and Monsters of the Movies—are instantly recognizable by longtime collectors, even if they didn’t know that he was the artist. But what you may not be aware of—unless you’re a fan of 1930s pulp-fiction heroes—is that he’s primarily regarded as one of the top Doc Savage artists in the world. Probably the #2 Doc painter of all time, right behind his friend and mentor, James Bama, who established Doc’s iconic look of cropped, widow-peaked hair and ripped shirts in the 1970s, when he was painting the covers for Bantam Books’ reprints of Doc’s pulp-era adventures.

James Bama's 1970s cover for the first Doc Savage novel, The Man of Bronze.

James Bama’s 1970s cover for the first Doc Savage novel, The Man of Bronze.

Created in 1933 by editors at publisher Street and Smith and developed by pulp-fiction writer-for-hire Lester Dent (under the house name Kenneth Robeson), Clark “Doc” Savage Jr. was the king of the pulp adventurers: a multitalented genius whose superhuman muscles were outmatched only by his incredible brain. In fact, Doc was so superhuman that the creators of a certain Man of Steel “borrowed” a few elements in the development of their own character—where do you think the first name Clark, and the Fortress of Solitude, came from? Doc had them both first. Aided by five associates who were experts in their fields—but whose knowledge of each field still couldn’t surpass Doc’s—and his two-fisted cousin, Patricia, Doc fought all manner of bad guys and madmen, and built a fanbase that continues to grow to this day.

In the 1970s, Bantam Books acquired the reprint rights to Doc’s adventures, and it was Bama’s eye-catching covers that grabbed the attention of a new generation of readers (me being among them). When Bama departed the series, he left some pretty big shoes to fill, but Bantam’s art director knew exactly who could fill them: Bob Larkin. Just take a look at these covers (just three of many), and you’ll know Bob was the right artist for the right job.

Larkin-Doc-CoversSo, you ask, what does all this Doc Savage talk have to do with our resident Goth adventuress, Pandora Zwieback? Well, everything in this particular case; I just wanted you to have some background for what follows.

A few years ago, publisher Dynamite Entertainment acquired the comic book rights to Doc (and ignored all attempts made by me and others to get them to hire Bob for covers). And like most publishers these days, they print sketch cover variants for certain issues: covers that, beyond logos and price boxes, are completely blank so that you can get artists to draw on them. And when I snagged a copy of one of those sketch covers, I knew exactly which artist I was taking it to, and what I wanted him to draw…

Marvel_Two-In-One_21One night, while I was talking to Bob, I asked him if he’d be interested in taking the blank sketch cover and doing his own version of the Ron Wilson cover for Marvel Two-in-One #21, a 1976 comic that teamed Doc Savage with the Thing from the Fantastic Four (Two-in-One was a series in which the Thing teamed up with all sorts of Marvel characters, usually in stories that lasted only one issue). You see the cover there to the left: Doc and the Thing, crashing through a wall.

However, as I explained to Bob, I didn’t want him to reproduce Wilson’s art. I wanted him to draw, not the Marvel version, but the real Doc Savage (in other words, the Bama and Larkin version), and instead of the Thing, I wanted somebody special charging alongside Doc—a certain Goth adventuress. Bob loved the idea, and it didn’t take him long to turn my idea into an actual pencil drawing:

DocSavage-Pan-Cover

Damn! Makes me wish it were a real team-up!

And so there you have it: Pandora Zwieback, “guest-starring” in the second issue of Dynamite’s Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze. A team-up that will never actually happen…but it certainly makes you think of what that might be like, doesn’t it? A happy, sarcastic Goth chick popping into the 1930s to go adventuring with Doc and his gang…hanging out with Pat Savage…probably running into her immortal, shape-shifting, monster-hunting mentor, Sebastienne Mazarin…

Yeah, that definitely has some possibilities. 😀

Thanks, Bob!

Creating the Pandora Zwieback #0 Cover, Part 2

As you’ll recall, yesterday I was telling you the story behind the cover for what became a revitalized StarWarp Concepts’ first release in 2010: the promotional giveaway The Saga of Pandora Zwieback #0, which was intended to introduce readers to Pan and her forthcoming literary debut in the novel Blood Reign. I’d scripted the seven-page story in which Pan would speak directly to readers, leading up to a sales pitch for Blood Feud that required Pan to hold up a copy of the book (the cover for which would be digitally inserted).

Pan0-rev-sketchBut when the artist I’d hired, Eliseu “Zeu” Gouveia, e-mailed his pencils for the story, the sales-pitch page had been replaced with an image of Pan and her monster-hunting mentor, Annie, gleefully running through a gauntlet of monsters. A revision would be necessary—which meant it was time to break out a marker and sketch what Pan was supposed to be doing, so Zeu would have a clearer understanding of my intention with that page.

What you see here is just…tragic. There’s a reason I focus more on my writing than my drawing. 😀 But it was good enough to show Zeu what I was looking for, and you’ll find the final version of page 6 in the comic. As for what to do with the rejected page…

“Y’know what?” I wrote to Zeu. “Don’t trash those pencils—because I think we’ve got our cover art here!

That’s right—it might not have been the page I was looking for, but it turned out to be the perfect cover image! So I told Zeu to ink the piece, and soon enough I was looking at this:

Pan0-CvrInks

Perfect! And when I gave him the go-ahead to color it, this was the result:

Pan0-finalart

Now that’s cover art! The next step was to involve the comic’s designer and letterer, Mike Rivilis, a talented book designer I used to work with back in my editorial days at ibooks, inc. and Byron Preiss Visual Publications. (For SWC, he also designed and typeset the illustrated classic Carmilla, designed the graphic novel Troubleshooters, Incorporated: Night Stalkings, and designed and lettered the graphic novel Lorelei: Sects and the City and The Saga of Pandora Zwieback Annual #1.) I explained to Mike what the comic was for, and what design elements were needed—like lettering the seven-pager and typesetting sample chapters from Blood Feud in the back of the comic—and I gave him a rough idea of how the front cover should turn out.

There was one thing missing, though: a Saga of Pandora Zwieback logo. For the Pan novels, designer Mat Postawa simply has the series title arc across the front cover, in a traditional font, and hand-draws the titles. The comic, however, would require an actual title treatment. So I turned to the one artist I knew who had decades of experience in creating comic and book titles: Bob Larkin, cover painter of the Pan novels Blood Feud and Blood Reign. I wanted an old-style horror logo, so I sketched out what I had in mind and explained to Bob that I was looking for something along the lines of the lettering styles used for articles in the classic horror magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland and the logos of Marvel horror comics of the 1970s:

Horror-Title-Lettering

Not surprisingly, he immediately understood what I was looking for—we’re both old-school horror fans (that Haunt of Horror cover painting is one of Bob’s, in case you hadn’t guessed)—and a day or two later he sent over his take, which I thought was perfect. I forwarded it to Mike, who was just wrapping up his design and lettering work on the comic’s interiors, and soon enough we had a finished cover:

Pan0-finalcvrNice, huh? And it all started with the happy accident (as the late painter Bob Ross would say—we don’t make mistakes, we have happy accidents) of Zeu drawing the wrong image for the Blood Feud sales-pitch page. It’s great when things just work out, isn’t it?

By the way, The Saga of Pandora Zwieback #0 is still available for free download—I ran out of print copies a few years back—so just click on the cover link you see in the right-hand sidebar and snag your own copy of this (now) digital comic.

Pandora Zwieback: Creating Blood Reign’s Cover, Part 2

Zeu-Pan2TonedWelcome back to the story behind the creative process that went into formulating and executing the cover art and design for my second Pandora Zwieback novel, Blood Reign. As I explained last time, it began with my commissioning of artist Bob Larkin to paint the cover art, using as a template a Tomb of Dracula magazine cover he’d done for Marvel Comics in 1979. But since the version I had in mind was going to replace the victim with Pan and Dracula with Lady Kiyoshi Sasaki, leader of Blood Reign’s House Otoyo vampire clan, and I knew that Bob was unfamiliar with the fashion style Kiyoshi favors—called Elegant & Gothic Lolita—I brought in Eliseu “Zeu” Gouveia, artist of the Pandora Zwieback comics and the graphic novel Lorelei: Sects and the City, to design Kiyohi’s look.

Zeu’s first attempt (which I showed you in the previous post) was good, but not quite what I was looking for, considering both Pan and Kiyoshi were wearing black, which meant the potential existed for the characters to “bleed together” into one giant mass when seen at a distance. Something was needed to separate the two, and Zeu’s solution was to give Kiyoshi a white blouse. Problem solved! After he tightened the pencil art and inked the final illustration, I sent it over to Bob, who popped it into Photoshop to add the sort of cliff edge and lightning bolts found in his Dracula painting. The result was what you see up top (click to enlarge).

BloodReign_ArtOne change I asked Bob to make for the painting was to replace the heels on Pan’s boots with thick, flat soles, for three reasons: heels would be too impractical for all the adventuring (running, jumping, kicking, etc.) she’d be doing; thicker soles are her way of compensating for the fact she’s shorter than pretty much everyone around her; and Pan hasn’t mastered the art of walking on high heels—a scene in Blood Feud shows her wearing a pair of dressy pumps when she gets together with her friends, but spending most of her time wobbling around on them. She refuses to take them off because, well, she’s Pan. No stupid shoes are gonna show her who’s boss. But other than that, I told Bob, all systems were go for the painting. And, once again, when he delivered the final art he didn’t disappoint. (Of course, I knew he wouldn’t—that’s why I hired him.)

After that, it was just a matter of turning the art over to Mat Postawa, who’d set the tone for the series look with his design for the cover of the first Pan novel, Blood Feud. When all was said and done, the final cover came out as this:

BloodReign-FinalCvrSpiffy, right? Just as Blood Feud’s cover design had touches of red to complement the “river of blood” in Bob’s painting for that book, Blood Reign’s played off the blue tones in the stormy sky. Of special note is the “devil girl” symbol on Pan’s T-shirt—a manga-influenced version of the one on Blood Feud’s cover—only this one was whipped up by Pan’s original designer, Uriel Caton! I’d asked Uriel to contribute to the process in some way, and once I saw this design I not only wrote it into the novel (as a T that Pan’s boyfriend, Javi, gives her), but also decided that a running joke in the books (and covers) could be that folks are always giving Pan devil-girl shirts (the first, in Blood Feud, was a gift from Mom)—which she has to wonder is meant to be a comment on her personality.

So there you have it: the VH1 “Behind the Cover” story of Blood Reign. And what about the werewolf-centric Stalkers, the third cover that Bob painted so I’d have a complete convention banner? Well, that got bumped to book 4 in the series, replaced by Blood & Iron, which will wrap up the vampire war storyline of Blood Feud and Blood Reign—and whose cover was painted by an artist named Candra. We’ll get to the stories on each of those covers when the time comes.

Next: We’re not done with the cover analyses just yet! Tomorrow I’ll show you what went into the creation of the cover for the recently published IndyFest Magazine #85—an illustration by artist extraordinaire Zeu that depicts the first-ever meeting of Pan and StarWarp Concepts’ first lady of horror, the succubus called Lorelei!

Pandora Zwieback: Creating Blood Reign’s Cover, Part 1

Yesterday, I finished up the story behind the creation of the cover for the first Saga of Pandora Zwieback novel, Blood Feud. It was fairly simple in construct: I did a sketch of what I was looking for, handed it off to painter Bob Larkin, and he took it from there. Once Bob had delivered the final art, it went to designer Mat Postawa, who crafted the final look of Blood Feud’s cover. For the second novel, Blood Reign, however, I wanted something a bit more storytelling in its imagery—something that would end up making it a two-artist situation.

Now that the heroine’s-first-issue cover approach had been taken care of by using it for Blood Feud, the idea this time around was to create a dramatic image that would catch the eye of potential book buyers and entice them to explore the novel behind the cover. Of course, Bob Larkin was going to paint this cover, too, so I knew the final results would be amazing—but what, exactly, was I looking for him to paint? And then I remembered a first-issue cover that Bob had painted for Marvel Comics’ Tomb of Dracula magazine, back in 1979.

Tomb_of_Dracula1

The composition was exactly what I wanted, so I did what any smart-thinking publisher would do: I asked Bob to knock off the Dracula painting for Blood Reign. 😀 Just substitute Dracula with Lady Kiyoshi Sasaki, leader of Blood Feud’s Japanese vampire clan, House Otoyo, and replace the damsel in distress with Pan. Bob was okay with that, and was prepared to start sketching, but then I realized something: Since Kiyoshi’s wardrobe, as well as that of her entire clan’s, was based on Elegant & Gothic Lolita fashion—think nineteenth-century clothing with a modern-day twist, popular with not just Japanese youth, but American cosplayers—I’d be asking Bob to try and figure out a clothing style he’d never heard of, and be accurate about it so the image wouldn’t annoy Goth Lolis (as they’re known). My solution? Get another artist to design Kiyoshi and her dress, and then have Bob use that for the painting.

ZeuPanCvrEnter: Eliseu “Zeu” Gouveia, then-artist of The Saga of Pandora Zwieback #0, the free comic that introduces readers to Pan’s world (and still available for download; just click the link to obtain your own copy). Being something of a manga and anime fan, Zeu immediately understood what I was looking for, and soon enough came up with a design for Kiyoshi that he incorporated into the sketch you see here (click to enlarge), based on Bob’s Tomb of Dracula cover. A good start, but I thought the top half of Kiyoshi’s outfit was too oversized—she kinda looks like she’s wearing football shoulder pads—and that her all-black clothes set against Pan’s all-black clothes would be hard to see at a distance. Also, I wanted her looking forward; having her head turned sideways just raises the question “What’s she supposed to be looking at?”

So Zeu went back to the literal drawing board for a second-round sketch…

Next: The exciting conclusion to this pulse-pounding tale of cover artists and Gothic Lolitas!

Pandora Zwieback: Creating Blood Feud’s Cover, Part 2

BFeud-LarkinBack on June 1st I told you about the start of the creative process behind the cover art for Blood Feud, the first Pandora Zwieback novel: I commissioned painter Bob Larkin to bring Pan to four-color “life,” then sketched out what I was looking for, and not too long after Bob delivered a final sketch that I approved. And then I realized that the bloody smiley face image on Pan’s T-shirt would have to be redesigned, or potentially risk drawing the ire of a French company that’s owned the smiley face trademark since 1972. But what could replace that iconic image? Well…what about a brand-new image?

So I pulled out my drawin’ pencil again and started sketching. I wanted to retain some elements from Uriel Caton’s design, so the Band-Aid across the “nose,” the crosshatched bruise, and the stuck-out tongue stayed; now I just needed a face to put them on. Then the idea struck me: how about the head of a devil girl? Bright-red skin and horns, a pageboy hairstyle, and bright-green eyes would go really well with those “I just got in a fight, so what?” elements. In no time at all I had a design I liked, and e-mailed it to Bob for him to give it a professional finish. Thus was the Official Pandora Zwieback T-shirt born! (Which, by the way, you can purchase from the StarWarp Concepts webstore.)

Blood-Feud-PaintingNow it was on to the actual cover painting, and when Bob was finally able to clear his busy schedule he got right to work, and the result is what you see here. Nice, huh? I had just one problem with it: there was too much red in the background. The concept I’d handed to Bob was that the Hudson River behind Pan—we’re looking at Manhattan’s West Side from New Jersey, for those who were wondering—was supposed to be a river of blood; making the skyline just as red worked against it. Bob’s rationale was that sunlight reflecting off a bloody river would “paint” the buildings red, which I could understand, but still…no. I’d rather have the bloody Hudson made as unsubtle as possible.

So I turned to Mat Postawa, the series’ book designer (and part-time metal head), to ask what could be done. Like Bob, I’ve known Mat—and SWC’s other genius book designer, Mike Rivilis—for years, having worked with him in the trenches of publishing house ibooks, inc., when I was its editor-in-chief. As I explained to Mat, for the Pan series I wanted a distinctive look for the cover designs that would appeal to both teenagers and Goths, but would also draw the eye of a general book buyer curious about the novel’s content. “You’re already familiar with the kind of audience I’m trying to reach,” I told him. “So take your best shot. And, uh, can you do something about those red buildings in the background?”

After a few rounds of give-and-take, each one better than the last, this was the look we settled on:

 

BloodFeudFinal

You couldn’t ask for a better cover! Mat adjusted the buildings’ color; deepened the background and added a hint of blood splash to the edges to make Pan stand out brighter; and even hand-lettered the Blood Feud title. Having Pan on the spine was my idea—for any self-publishers out there, it’s always good to keep in mind that your book might show up spine-out on a store’s or library’s shelves, so an eye-catching graphic is essential. I also wrote the back cover copy, and thanks go out to Mike Rivilis, who, after looking at the first-pass design, remarked that I’d overwritten the copy—there were originally four paragraphs. And since Mike has a long history of designing covers for young adult novels (two examples being Daniel Parker’s Countdown and Francine Pascal’s Fearless series), I listened when he said there shouldn’t be more than three paragraphs on a YA cover. He was right—it makes for punchier text.

“Lock it in!” I told Mat. “This one’s a keeper!”

So, there you have it: the story of Blood Feud’s cover, from first sketch to final design—just as action-packed as you’d expected it to be, right? 😉

Next: Creating the cover for Blood Reign, the current novel in Pan’s saga.

Bob Larkin at Eternal Con 2015

SWC_Larkin_SketchbookEternal Con 2015 runs this Saturday, June 13, and Sunday, June 14. And although the StarWarp Concepts crew won’t be attending, Bob Larkin—cover painter of my Saga of Pandora Zwieback novels Blood Feud and Blood Reign, and featured artist of his own Bob Larkin Sketchbook—is scheduled to be there as a guest of honor, with his own table in Artists Alley. To locate him you’ll probably have to look no farther than the hordes of Doc Savage, X-Men, and Dazzler fans gathering at his table.

Eternal Con is being held at the Cradle of Aviation Museum, in Garden City, Long Island. For more information, head over to the Eternal Con website.

By the way, have you purchased a copy of The Bob Larkin Sketchbook yet? If not, you’re missing out on spectacular pencil drawings of Doc Savage, Spider-Man, Batman, the X-Men, and other subjects, and features a special, full-color cover drawing of a certain Goth adventuress. It’s 24 pages of artistic goodness, available exclusively from the StarWarp Concepts webstore. Visit the Bob Larkin Sketchbook product page for all the ordering information, as well as sample pages.

Pandora Zwieback: Creating Blood Feud’s Cover, Part 1

Wow, talk about getting sidetracked! When I wrote the introductory post for this discussion of cover designs, back in March, I didn’t know I was going to about to get caught up in a ton of freelance assignments, mixed with a barrage of promotional work (interviews, mailing out press kits and review copies, etc.) to help get the word out on Blood Reign: The Saga of Pandora Zwieback, Book 2 (on sale now, of course). Let’s recap and pick up where I left off, okay?

In 2008, I’d decided to resurrect StarWarp Concepts after an absence of three years, and turn the company into a book-publishing house, rather than just a home for my comic projects. It also meant a switch in a company focus from the Mature Readers character Lorelei—a succubus I’d created in 1989, and the star of SWC’s first comic series—to something more inclusive of a wider readership. To do that, the first project for the revived SWC would be The Saga of Pandora Zwieback: a young-adult, dark-urban-fantasy novel series I’d shopped around to major publishers for a couple of years, with no success. I still had plans for Lorelei, and for adding more titles to the budding release schedule, but Pan was going to be the new face of The ’Warp—and she was going to make her debut at the 2010 New York Comic Con, where I’d let the world know that StarWarp Concepts was back, better than ever.

There was just one thing, though: I needed a graphic to show off to the con-goers; I needed a banner to hang from the back of the booth. But in order to fashion that banner, I needed images to display—specifically Pandora Zwieback images. Which meant that first I’d have to commission cover art for books 1–3 in the series: Blood Feud, Blood Reign, and (originally) Stalkers. And there was only one artist I had to mind to tackle that assignment: Bob Larkin.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, by now you should be familiar with Bob Larkin—I’ve certainly written about him often enough! But if you’re still unfamiliar with his work, here’s a small sampling of what he’s painted:

LarkinArt02

Marvel Comics: covers for Dazzler, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Star Wars, Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jaws 2, Battlestar Galactica, Savage Sword of Conan the Barbarian, Tomb of Dracula, Haunt of Horror, Planet of the Apes, Crazy, and The Hulk!

Warren Publishing: covers for Creepy, Eerie, Famous Monsters of Filmland, The Rook, Warren Presents: Pantha the Panther Girl, and Vampirella

New World Pictures, Pathé, TriStar Pictures, Troma Studios, United Artists: movie posters for Heaven’s Gate, Humanoids From the Deep, Night of the Creeps, Piranha, Piranha II, Terror Train, The Toxic Avenger Part II, Troma’s War

So, y’know, the guy knows how to paint. And that doesn’t even count the hundreds of book covers he’s provided to numerous publishers, most notably his run of Doc Savage covers for Bantam Books (and for my own X-Men: The Chaos Engine Trilogy novels, from BP Books/Simon & Schuster). So when I outlined my plans to Bob, he immediately jumped on board. All he needed was for me to show him what I was looking for.

BFeud-SketchSo, loath as I am (not to mention embarrassed) to sketch out things for artists who are far better draftsmen than I, I picked up a pencil and started laying out my idea for Blood Feud. After a couple of days of trial and error, what you see here was the final result; click it to see it in its full horrifying glory. Still, it wasn’t too bad, I thought. The background is an obvious paste-up job, using a photo of NYC’s skyline as the background, but it got across the NY setting and “river of blood” element I wanted for the Hudson River—there were going to be vampires in the book, after all. And Pan stands in the foreground in what comic book fans would recognize as a traditional first-issue, here’s-the-star-of-the-series cover pose. Not the most action-packed image, but I wasn’t going for action so much as establishing Pan’s attitude. And it was still better than most mainstream publishers’ bland, extreme-close-up cover photos. So I sent it on to Bob, who, like most commercial artists, is appreciative of clients who know what they want—it spares the artist the teeth-grinding frustration of playing “I’ll know it when I see it” with clients who ask for multiple versions of a project before, more often than not, deciding that the first version was the right one all along.

BFeud-LarkinA few days later Bob e-mailed me his more realistic interpretation of my cartoony sketch (yes, you can click on this one, too). Sold! He’d subtly changed Pan’s body language and given her head more of a slight attitudinal tilt, and it was all perfect. I gave him the green light to take the sketch to the painting stage, and now all that was left was waiting for him to deliver the final art…

Except I suddenly realized I had a big problem in the making. See the design on Pan’s T-shirt—the bloody smiley face? That’s the look that Pan’s co-creator, Uriel Caton, came up with when he drew the first character sketches in 1998, and I thought it looked great—a T-shirt that had as much attitude as the girl wearing it. And so it remained for the next decade…until the first trailer for Warner Bros.’ movie adaptation of the DC Comics graphic novel Watchmen was released in 2008, and the studio got hit with a notice from a French corporation called The Smiley Company.

A little history, courtesy of Smithsonian.com: It turns out that, although the creation of the Smiley Face is attributed to American graphic artist Harvey Ross Ball, who designed it in 1963 for an advertising client, both parties never filed for a copyright or trademark and it dropped into public domain usage. Enter French journalist Franklin Loufrani, who in 1972 trademarked the image for his Smiley Company—which currently takes in more than $130 million a year for licensing rights.

Apparently no one at the studio had checked to see if an image that had become so identified with Watchmen, and so necessary to its plot—thanks to writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons—might have rights issues attached that needed clearing before the movie could be released. Oops. Nevertheless, an agreement was quickly reached that included the Smiley Company’s trademark language appearing in the film’s closing credits.

Well…good for Warner Bros., but bad for me, because Pan’s T-shirt needed to be redesigned immediately. Why get hassled by major corporations when I could take the easy way out? And so I set to work on finding a solution…

Next: Making with the cover design magic for the Blood Feud final cover.

Pandora Zwieback: The Evolution of a Series’ Covers

Last week, I covered the importance of having an editor involved in the creative process of writing a book’s manuscript, in a trio of posts found here, here, and here. But that’s just one part of what’s involved in putting together a novel for publication. Today, we start talking cover design.

Good stories are always essential, but from a sales point of view, one of the most important aspects of publishing is the cover. It’s the first thing a potential reader is going to see in a brick-and-mortar bookstore (unless it’s displayed spine-out on their shelves) or at an online retailer’s site, so it’s absolutely imperative that the cover be as eye-catching and intriguing as possible. The vast majority of small-press and self-published books often fail in that regard, choosing the laziest, most god-awful type-and-image designs they can throw together: photographs or paintings (or worse, silhouetted figures) that have nothing to do with the story; lettering taken straight from their computer’s font libraries; titles that are too long, or extremely pretentious, or head-scratchingly vague. (Truth be told, I’ve seen my fair share of books released by mainstream publishers that take the same approach.)

So in 2010, when it was time to transform StarWarp Concepts from a comic publisher to a book house, I knew that Job Two would involve using professional artists and designers to provide eye-catching covers (Job One was having quality stories to publish; can’t have the second without the first). The first person I approached was Bob Larkin, whose amazing cover paintings for Marvel Comics (Dazzler, Haunt of Horror, Vampire Tales, The Hulk!, Savage Sword of Conan the Barbarian, Crazy) and Bantam Books’ Doc Savage pulp-fiction reprints had created a fan base that included such luminaries as Alex Ross, Joe Jusko, John Romita Sr., Jim Steranko, and Larry Hama. I’ve been a fan myself, all the way back to the ’70s, and was thrilled when, in 2000, he agreed to paint the covers for my X-Men: The Chaos Engine Trilogy novels—and overjoyed when he did three cover paintings for SWC’s succubus character, Lorelei. This time, however, I wanted him to paint the covers for a series about a certain teenaged Goth chick.

LarkinArt02

Explaining the gothy nature of Pan took a bit of doing, since it’s outside the range of anything Bob had ever painted before, but he had two advantages going in to the project: Pan had already been designed by my creative partner, Uriel Caton; and Bob has an extensive history of painting horror-related images, from monster magazine covers for Marvel and Warren Publishing to monster movie posters for New Line Cinema, United Artists, and Troma Films (among other studios)—Piranha, Night of the Creeps, Humanoids From the Deep, and The Toxic Avenger II are just some of the poster images he’s created.

But why use painted covers? you ask. Why not go with a photograph of a model dressed as Pan? That’s what all the major publishers would do. And that’s the problem, because when all the major publishers do the same thing, they create a uniform look for an entire genre of books that’s extremely generic and boring. (To get an idea of what I’m talking about, check out this post about photo covers that I wrote back in 2011.) I wanted Bob Larkin originals for Pan’s series, and that’s exactly what I was gonna get. All I needed to get the process started was to show Bob what I had in mind…

Next: Creating the cover for Blood Feud, the first novel in Pan’s saga.