Young Justice issue 9 out Wednesday!

Young Justice #9 - cover

This Wednesday sees the release of my next issue of Young Justice, and is the beginning of a new storyline featuring Captain Atom and a decades-old murder mystery.

Written by Greg Weisman and Kevin Hopps.
Pencil art by Christopher Jones
Inks by Dan Davis
Colors by Zac Atkinson
Cover by Christopher Jones

Find it at your local comic shop, or find it in digital form here.

Young Justice #12 solicitation is out

Young Justice #12 Cover Inks

Young Justice #12 - cover colors

Art and cover by: Christopher Jones

There’s a new menace in Gotham City: a creature so strange – and so versatile – that not even the combined might of the entire Young Justice team can stand against it. Witness the origin of…Clayface!

On sale January 18th, 2011. Cover price is $2.99 US. Rated E.

Young Justice features work by the creative team of artist Christopher Jones and writers Greg Weisman and Kevin Hopps. Weisman is one of the producers for the Young Justice animated series, and Hopps a regular fixture in of the show’s creative team.

The best laid plans

My apologies go out to anyone who came to Fallcon hoping to see me there and then didn’t find me.

Hospital Room (panel from Young Justice #6)

I’d had an infected scab on my leg that started to flare up on Thursday night, the night before my birthday. Friday morning I got up and my leg was inflamed, swollen, warm, and I was in pain. So my birthday plans were scuttled in favor of medical attention. My girlfriend Hal, the builder of this website, had planned to spend my birthday with me – and she did – but it certainly didn’t end up being the day either of us had anticipated. With her chauffeuring and my pain slowly getting worse, we set off in search of medical care.

The first clinic we went to only had two doctors on duty that day and they were both overbooked, and their Urgent Care facility didn’t open until 5pm, so they referred us to a second location that had an Urgent Care that had opened earlier. At that clinic a nurse practitioner took a look at my leg and saw I was going to need IV antibiotics and said they weren’t set up to do that there, and they referred us to a third location that was could cover all our needs and said she would call ahead with the information about my case so they’d be waiting for us when we got there. As it turns out we were unclear on which of multiple entrances/check-in desks we were supposed to report to, and even after that eventually got sorted out and we found the right place, it didn’t seem like any of the information had been forwarded and it took some time to be seen.

By the time I actually got looked at, it had been more than four hours since we first started running around and my leg was noticeably more red and swollen, the pain was noticeably worse, and I was running a fever.

The short version of the rest of this story can be broken down into good news and bad news.

The good news is that after a bunch of tests they cleared me of all the scarier things we were afraid it might be indicative of. It was just a virulent staph infection, which while serious was entirely treatable with just antibiotics, along with medication for the paid and fever.

The bad news is I ended up stuck in the hospital from Friday night through mid-day Sunday, which meant that I entirely missed Fallcon. I love Fallcon, and I’d been making and extra effort to gear up for this one with a new banner, new business cards, and I had really been looking forward to promoting my new gig on Young Justice (which I’d landed by the earlier MCBA convention Springcon, but nothing had come out yet), and I was looking forward to promoting this blog!

I also had two comics industry friends in from out of town for Fallcon, Mark Stegbauer and Steve Jones, who had planned to stay at my place. I didn’t get to see as much of them as I’d have hoped for , certainly, but they were good enough to not only visit me after Fallcon on Saturday evening, but then they picked me up from the hospital on Sunday and brought me home, so I wanted to give a shout-out to them.

The biggest thanks go out to Hal who not only ran me around until  I finally got some help, but who stayed with me through all the initial testing and until I was in my hospital room for the night.

So I’m home now, I’m fine, and I’m back at work. Now I need to start planning my next convention appearance, and hopefully I’ll have better luck getting there.

Another cover done!

Just finished another Young Justice cover. I’ll eventually be doing one of those Creating a Cover breakdowns for it, but I can’t show it yet.

No really, I can’t! I’d love to show it to you but they tend to like to have me wait until the solicitations come out for me to show this stuff off.

No, I couldn’t possibly…

Sigh. OK, because you asked so nicely, here’s a peek:

What? That’s not good enough? Alright, ONE more peek. click the image above to go to a second sneak preview image.

Creating a Cover: Young Justice #8

I’m not going to cover some of the same basics as I did in the previous Creating a Cover post, but instead will limit myself to the process specific to this cover.

Tasked with drawing a cover for Young Justice #8, which I knew was part 2 of a 2-parter focusing on Artemis. The bulk of the story consisted of cutting back-and-forth between two action set pieces: Artemis vs. dozens of robotic MONQI droids (Mobile Optimal Neural Quotient Infiltrators), and the rest of the Young Justice team fighting the android Amazo. If you read my Creating a Cover breakdown for Young Justice #7, you know that I deliberately avoided referencing any that action on my cover for that issue, as those were both initiated as a cliffhanger ending to that issue and I didn’t want to either spoil then ending or unfairly tease action that was to mainly be found in issue #8. Well here we are with the cover to issue #8, so now my cover ideas revolve around those two scenarios!

YJ #8 cover sketch a

YJ #8 cover sketch b

I did four cover sketches this time around, although they were all variations on just a couple of themes. Sketches A and B both showed MONQI droids swarming over Artemis. Sketch A was a tighter shot, which I thought would be cool from a design standpoint, with Artemis drowning in a sea of MONQIs. Sketch B was essentially the same, but pulling out wider – the advantage of this version being that I could create greater depth by showing some MONQIs larger in the foreground in addition to the ones swarming over Artemis.

YJ #8 cover sketch c

YJ #8 cover sketch d

Sketch C showed the other major action scenario from the issue – Superboy, Kid Flash and Robin fighting the powerful Amazo android in a gymnasium setting. It  was a great visual, but I wasn’t sure if the powers-that-be would want a cover without Artemis or not. On the one hand she was prominently featured on the previous month’s cover and it’s nice to change things up from issue to issue.  On the other hand, this is still part 2 of a story focusing on the character, which led me to Sketch D, which was simply a split-screen view of sketches B and C. I thought this approach had the advantage of featuring more characters and showing both major action threads from the story.

YJ #8 cover pencils

YJ #8 cover inks

Sketch A was chosen, so the next step was the straightforward task of penciling and inking the artwork. This was done by hand with brushes and pens on bristol art paper. The scanned inks were touched up a little digitally in Photoshop.

YJ #8 cover color guide

YJ #8 cover color

The image was so busy with detail and partially seen figures that I created a color guide to clarify what everything was. The final color was again by Zak Atkinson who did his usual fine job.

And finally, here’s the finished cover, with masthead, logos and other finishing elements.

YJ #08 cover w logos

I’ll be doing more Creating a Cover breakdowns, featuring Young Justice, The Batman Strikes, and other titles!