MCBA Springcon – May 18-19, 2013

If you haven’t had a chance to see me this month, it hasn’t been for a lack of me trying!

I’ll be signing and sketching at Springcon on Saturday May 18 and Sunday May 19, helping the Minnesota Comic Book Association (MCBA) celebrate their 25th Anniversary! We’ll be filling the Minnesota State Fairgrounds Grandstand with all the comic book geekery you can shake a Pronto-Pup at (Pronto-Pup’s not provided).

I’ll be there selling prints , Young Justice and Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes trade paperbacks, and doing commission sketches from 10am to 5pm both days!

 

I’ll be selling my 11″×17″ prints (all the same ones I just had at the C2E2 convention) for $20 each , which is $10 less than from my Etsy store! So if you’ve had your eye on anything in particular, this is a great time to purchase it!Stop by my table and show me that you follow my Christopher Jones Comic Art page on Facebook or @ChrisJonesArt on Twitter and get one of two FREE exclusive items:

I hope to see you at Springcon! And remember, you can check out all my planned convention appearances for the coming year on my Appearances Page!

My C2E2 Schedule/C2E2 Uber Post!

I am leaving this afternoon to drive to Chicago for C2E2. Because I will have limited ability to check my messages during the convention, I’m going to leave you with one last C2E2 uber post! What follows is my C2E2 schedule, how to find me at the convention, things I’ll be giving away and selling, and more. Are you ready? Yes? Good! Let’s go!

C2E2 Schedule

Friday 6:00-7:00 PM: Artist Alley Stage

Drop by and watch me draw, live, projected onto a BIG screen! If you’re interested in seeing my art being created, you won’t want to miss this!

Saturday 7:15PM: Young Justice Fans & Cosplayers Meet-Up

Saturday 7:30-9:30 pm: Charity Art Auction

I probably won’t actually be present for this, but I am donating artwork to it. This is a group portrait of The Micronauts (re-named the “Microns” for legal reasons) as they appeared in Marvel Universe – Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes #7. This art was used as part of a special-effects panel where the Microns were shrinking from action figure size down into their sub-atomic universe.

  

All other times, I will most likely be found at table B7 in Artists Alley. Here’s a handy map:

At my table, I am happy to sign anything you bring me! I will be doing commission sketches, and I will have comics and Young Justice trade paperbacks for sale. I will also have my prints for sale, including this new Young Justice print!

As well as these favorites:

 

I sell 11×17″ prints at conventions for $20 each, which is $10 less than my Etsy store! So if you’ve had your eye on anything in particular, this is a great time to purchase it!

Do you follow my Christopher Jones Comic Art page on facebook, or @ChrisJonesArt on twitter? If so, stop by my table and show me in order to get one of two FREE convention exclusive items:

 

I wanted to do a little something extra special for Young Justice fans at C2E2. So, if you’re hungry during the day at the convention, stop by my table in Artists Alley and give me the password, and I’ll give you a Reach Energy Bar, absolutely free, to keep you fueled for the day.* You won’t know what’s got into you!**

*While supplies last. I’m bringing 300 of them but I don’t know how many of you guys will be there.

**They’re Quaker Granola bars, don’t worry. But be mindful if you have any food allergies.

 

Hal will be running a free to play Young Justice role playing/scavenger hunt from my Artists Alley table as well. If you complete all four missions, you will be rewarded with a special button and a certificate!

 

So, as you can see, there is a lot going on this weekend! I can only imagine how busy I would have been had I also been scheduled for a panel or three!  Anyway, I’m going to go finish packing for my C2E2 road trip! I hope to meet lots of fans there and come back with many stories. Oh, and if you can’t make it to the convention, follow along on my Facebook page, where I will be posting photos of cosplayers all weekend!

Now THAT’S a lot of DiscoWing mini-prints!

I’ll be giving these away FREE at C2E2! If you want to get one, you need to show me there that you like Christopher Jones Comic Art on Facebook or that you follow @ChrisJonesArt on Twitter. These are CONVENTION EXCLUSIVE ITEMS and I only give them out at conventions!

You can get a better look at the art and remind yourself of all the details be referring back to this post.

You’ll find me at table B7 in Artist Alley at C2E2 – see you there!

And if you can’t make it to C2E2, click here to see the rest of my upcoming convention appearances!

Coming to Denver Comic Con – May 31-June 2 2013

They couldn’t keep me away! In a last-minute addition to my 2013 schedule, I’ll be a guest at the Denver Comic Con at the end of May. I’ll be joining my Young Justice partner-in-crime Greg Weisman at the Denver show, so it’ll be a great opportunity to get us BOTH to sign all those Young Justice comic books and prints! I’m looking forward to this, it’s my first visit to the Denver convention and really my first visit to Denver if you don’t count layovers at the airport.

I’ll have more to say about the Denver show after I get back from the Chicago Comics and Entertainment Expo (C2E2) this weekend!

You can check out all my planned convention appearances for the coming  year on my Appearances Page!

Creating a Cover: Young Justice #25

It’s time for another installment of my Creating a Cover series. As was often the case, this cover was being designed before I had seen the script for the issue in question, so I had to rely on a suggestion from series writer Greg Weisman for an idea of what would be appropriate subject matter for a cover. Greg suggestion was basically “Everybody versus Brainiac.” I hadn’t seen a script for our Brainiac (aka “The Collector of Worlds”) in action yet so I wasn’t sure what kind of offensive capabilities he was going to display. I figured I’d just have him in a “ready for action” pose and make it obvious that combat was imminent. The “everybody” he was going to be fighting included all the Young Justice Team members, plus members of the Justice League – everybody who had been seen up to this point on Brainiac’s ship or the ship belonging to our other villain Kylstar.

I asked if there was any one character who was the focus of the final showdown with Brainiac and I was told that there wasn’t. Because of that and the fact that this was going to be the final issue of our series, I didn’t want to emphasize one of the heroes over the others for the sake of a more dynamic layout, so the the challenge became how to include more than a dozen heroes fighting a single opponent, without giving any one of them the lion’s share of the focus.

As is often the case when trying to include this many characters on a cover, the way to organize them into a layout is a process of almost mathematical deduction. I knew what I wanted to do, but I felt the need to offer multiple options and present my reasoning.

Sketch A

Sketch B

Sketch C

I presented three sketches to indicate the three basic approaches I saw as our options:

Sketch A places Brainiac at the center background with everyone else rushing him. The disadvantage of this approach was that while it makes for a compelling image, it puts most of the heroes in a position with their backs to the viewer – something I especially wanted to avoid on the cover for our swansong issue.

Sketch B takes more of the lateral view – viewing the gang-rush of heroes more in profile, with Brainiac down in the corner to allow the heroes to be more spread out and coming at him from both ground-level and from the air!

I felt the strongest option was the one presented in Sketch C – with Brainiac in the foreground, cheated “towards the camera” so we get a better look at him, but his attention clearly on all the heroes converging on him from the background. This option has the heroes coming at us front on, and gives us lots of open space to spread them across the cover, still leaving room for the logo at the top.

Pencils

Inks

Happily for me, Sketch C was chosen so I proceeded to pencils and inks. This ended up being the only time I got to draw Lagoon Boy in his “puffed up” combat mode. This is also a great look at our version of Brainiac, who I was so happy to have gotten to design for Young Justice.

And finally, here’s the final version with color by Zac Atkinson complete with all the final logos and other trade dress.

I really enjoyed getting to draw so many of the covers for my run on Young Justice. I enjoy drawing covers overall, and I really enjoyed getting to contribute more fully to the total look and feel of the Young Justice issues I did, as opposed to The Batman Strikes were most of the covers were by other artists.

You can find my previous Creating a Cover installments here.