Emerald City Comic Con 2024

I’m delighted to be returning to Emerald City Comic Con, February 29—March 3, 2024. I’ll be set up at Artist Alley table B-11 selling prints and comics featuring my art, and generally chatting with fans who want to stop by and say hello. As always, autographs are free. I’ll also be taking a VERY LIMITED number of request for original sketch commissions, so if you’re interested, stop by EARLY and reserve your space on the list.

More details below:

Emerald City ComiCon is being held at the Seattle Convention Center, with Artist Alley located on the 2nd Floor of the Summit building.

Artist Alley Hours are:
Thursday:   10:00am—7:00pm
Friday:        10:00am—7:00pm
Saturday:   10:00am—7:00pm
Sunday:      10:00am—5:00pm

My prints are 11″x17″ on cardstock paper. They are $20 each (already a savings over what they cost when ordered from my Etsy store), but I can offer a discount of 3 for $50. I’ll have a selection of Young Justice and Doctor Who prints available, plus Justice League and Harley Quinn prints.

I still have copies available of Once Upon a Time Lord, the recent Doctor Who graphic novel by Marvel writer Dan Slott, with artwork by myself, Matthew Dow Smith and Mike Collins, and Heralds of Destruction, the Third Doctor mini-series I drew with a script by Paul Cornell. Those books are $20 each, and can be bundled with prints for that 3 for $50 discount.

I’m doing commission sketches for the first time in a while at the convention this year. If I’m drawing on my own paper I’ve got 9″x12″ bristol, but I will also draw in sketchbooks or on sketch covers if you bring them to me. Head-and-shoulders sketches are $100 and a full figure is $200.

I hope to see you there!

Reserve your print before NYCC!

I’ve done so many print designs that I can’t bring them all with me to conventions. If you’re coming to see me at New York Comic Con 2023 (ArtistsAlley table A-14) I’ll be selling 11×17 color prints for $20 or 3 for $50 – but I’ll have a limited selection. I want to bring a variety of Young Justice prints, Doctor Who prints, my new Harley Quinn print, plus favorites like Justice League and Svengoolie. But that quickly adds up to more than I can haul with me on my cross-country trek from Los Angeles to New York. So in my attempt to streamline my convention operations, I’ll going to be limited the number selection of prints I’ll be bringing with me, which means I might just leave your favorite design behind. UNLESS – you reserve your print in advance!

Please check out www.etsy.com/shop/ChrisJonesArt to see the full selection of prints I have available. You can order them directly from there, but if you’re coming to NYCC 2023 and want to buy it from in person at the lower convention rate, you can reserve any print from my archive I’ll bring a copy to NYCC and hold it for you!

Message me at chris@christopherjonesart.com. Let me know:

1) What print(s) you’d like to reserve for NYCC
2) Your name
3) and (if possible) What day you expect to stop by Artist Alley Table A-14 and pick it up.

I’ll have your reserved print(s) waiting for you at my table for you to purchase at my convention rates!

This is a first-time experiment I’m trying as a way to deal with the size of my selection of prints becoming a little unmanageable, but I don’t want to disappoint fans who come to my table looking for prints they’ve seen in past years or online. We’ll see how it goes!

New Harley Quinn print for NYCC!

As New York Comic Con approaches, it occurred to me what I wanted to go in with *at least* one new print. And while I had a number of Young Justice prints to offer, I had nothing connected to my work on the Harley Quinn animated series, which has been my day job for more than two years now.

Years ago when I was drawing The Batman Strikes (tie-in comics for the 2004 The Batman animated series) one of my favorite covers I did on that title happened to feature Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy, so I decided to remake that cover in the style of the current Harley Quinn animated series and make that my newest 11″x17″ color print. After NYCC this will be added to the prints available in my Etsy store, but it will make its debut at this year’s New York Comic Con. Like my other prints it will be available at my convention rate of $20, or 3 prints for $50.

Here’s the original Batman Strikes cover for reference.

Find me at table A-14 in the NYCC 2023 Artist Alley for this print and many other favorites. Read more about my presence at NYCC 2023 here.

Harley Quinn and my first DC Comics Writing Credit

Page 1 – The Corwin O’Dooley Show!

Page 2 – The Obligatory Monologue

Page 3 – Enter: The JOKER!

Russell Lissau was one of the writers contributing scripts for The Batman Strikes and I met him and was chatting with him at Wizard World Chicago. He mentioned that he’d wanted to do a story with the Joker but hadn’t been able to think of a Joker plot that could be told within the kid-friendly confines of the Strikes title. I mentioned an idea I’d had to tell a story from the point of view of someone under the influence of the Joker’s nerve-toxin, since in this continuity is was a paralytic rather than instantly deadly. The whole story would be about The Joker and Batman playing hot-potato with the victim while they were a helpless, paralyzed observer. Russell loved the idea and offered to co-write it with me, which lead to issue #35.

The concept got watered down a bit. I would have loved to tell the story literally from the victim’s POV – seeing it through their eyes, but I wasn’t surprised when it was deemed too  high-concept for an animation tie-in title. I’d hoped that we could at least limit our story POV to that character – only seeing and hearing what they would be personally aware of. But even that was considered to be a little too much.

Still, the story was a ton of fun. It introduced the show’s version of Harley Quinn into the comic, and centered on a late-night talk show host who earns the Joker’s ire when he is dubbed “The Clown Prince of Late Night” by a Gotham magazine. The character was deliberately a cross between David Letterman and Conan Obrian.

That opening page took forever to draw, but I really wanted that big shot looking from behind our host out at his studio audience – letting us share the view he would have walking onstage. I think this was one of the pages I apologized for when handing it off to inker Terry Beatty. I wanted the sequence to feel like you were seeing it from the stage floor of the studio, not from the POV of the audience or the cameras, so that meant a few more busy shots of the studio audience in the opening pages, until the action eventually led us to a chase outside the studio confines.

Page 5 – Harley Quinn’s big entrance.

Page 6 – Bruce & Dick sneak away.

Page 7 – The helpless host.

And here’s a look at how some of these pages looked in print, with inks by Terry Beatty and colors by Heroic Age.

New art in the Batman Strikes cover gallery

I’ve added a bunch of new art to the Batman Strikes cover art gallery, including unused cover sketches. You can see the selection of concept sketches, then follow the cover through the pencils, ink and color stages! Check it out by clicking the image!

Batman Strikes #41 Cover Color