Marvel Universe – Avengers:Earth’s Mightiest Heroes #16

Adapted by Joe Caramagna
Cover by Christopher Jones

THE KREE EMPIRE COMES TO EARTH!
Ms. Marvel joins the Avengers against Ronan the Accuser.
Based on season two of the hit Disney XD TV show!
32 Pages / All Ages – $2.99

This is the second in a series of three covers I did recently for the comic book tie-in for the Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes animated TV show.

Initially all I was told was that the cover was to feature “Ronan the Accuser and Captain Mar-Vell putting the earth on trial.”

Without any other specifics on the story, I wasn’t sure how to represent that idea visually? I asked “Would you want some kind of alien courtroom setting? Who other than Ronan and Mar-Vel would need to be on the cover?”

I was told “Let’s go a little more sci-fi here – Ronan and Captain Mar-Vell looking down on Earth, the Avengers preparing to defend it,” and that the Avengers to be included were Captain America, Ms. Marvel and Iron Man.

Sketch A

Sketch B

I had a second take on the cover that gave more focus to the story’s “guest stars” Ronan and Mar-Vell, looking from their level down at the trio of heroes on some kind of platform with a protective force field dome and the Earth behind them. While this platform was likely to be specific only to the cover and not found in the story, this layout seemed to do a much better job of getting across the idea of Ronan and Mar-Vel presiding in judgement over Earth and the heroes. To strengthen this impression I put the heroes in shackles, and tried to make the platform a bit of Kirby-esque space sculpture but also bearing a resemblance to the top of a Grecian column, hopefully further evoking a courtroom ambiance.

Cover Pencils

Cover Inks

You can find my previous Creating a Cover installments here.

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

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

Final Cover

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.

Cover Sketch a

Cover Sketch b

Young Justice #24 cover pencils

Young Justice #24 cover inks

Young Justice #24 cover colors

Young Justice #24 final cover

You can find my previous Creating a Cover installments here.

This was another issue where we were able to sort through some cover ideas in email conversation so I didn’t have to do a bunch of sketches that weren’t going to be used. Since I knew our villain was a redesigned (by me) Kylstar, I thought it would be fun to do a close up of our bad guy and show the heroes facing him reflected in the facets of his crystalline form. Of course, we’d used that trick a couple of times before, most notably on the cover to Young Justice #09 which showed the team reflected on the surface of the metallic body of Captain Atom. (Check out Creating a Cover: Young Justice #9 for more information on that!)

Young Justice #09 cover

Of course then it occurred to me – Kylstar is a Captain Atom villain! There’s a connection! Which means this could be an homage! Or at least that provided an excuse…

Young Justice #23 cover layout

This is the “proof of concept” sketch I submitted for approval, based on email discussions with my editor Sarah Gaydos and series writer Greg Weisman. I posed Kylstar as similarly to Captain Atom as his very different proportions would allow. I also brought his hand up into the shot to further mimic the Captain Atom image. Having his hand in the frame also gave me more facets to play with for images.

On the Captain Atom cover I had one image of the team reflected across his body. With Kylstar, I thought it would be fun to have fragmented images of the heroes repeating across his various facets. I wanted to strategically feature good reflections of the heroes, but then fill other facets with random fragments of reflections. I didn’t want this to become a flat, two-dimensional mosaic of reflections, so I planned the shot to use edge lighting on the facets at fairly oblique angles to bring out the dimensionality of the Kylstar figure, while using the facets facing us more flat-on for the reflections.

This concept was enthusiastically approved, so it was time to actually draw the cover!

Young Justice #23 cover – inks

Notice that I repositioned Kylstar slightly in the finished artwork. The changes are subtle, but I was trying to maximize the dynamics of the composition. I made more obvious changes to what reflections went where.

You can see that some portions of this artwork are in black and others are in grey. The black image featuring Kylstar was drawn as one piece of artwork, and the reflections of the heroes seen here in gray were drawn separately. This allowed me to play with the placement of the reflections and have bits of the reflections repeat on different Kylstar facets. The artwork was submitted to colorist Zac Atkinson with the reflections as a separate layer, hopefully making it easier for him to work with them at the coloring stage. Or at least giving him the option of isolating them more easily, depending on his process.

YJ #23 cover tones & reflections

I wanted to make sure that my original intent for how this should be treated tonally was communicated, so I applied the approach from my original proof-of-concept sketch to the inks to create this reference guide which I also sent to Zac.

Young Justice #23

Here is the stunning result of Zac’s coloring. I especially love the treatment he gave to Kylstar’s eyes. I’d originally imagined them a cyan color, but I think the burning yellow-orange makes for a great contrast with the cool blues of the rest of the image.

Look for more of Kylstar in coming issues of Young Justice! Issue #20 will be out THIS WEDNESDAY, which represents the comic’s shift to the Season 2 / Young Justice: Invasion time-frame. You can find Young Justice at your local comics shop or in digital form!

Long before I drew the issue itself and even before I’d seen a final script for the story, I needed to design the cover for the issue, needed early for publicity and solicitation purposes. The scenario I was given was to do an underwater downshot of Aqualad, Miss Martian and Superboy surrounded by Hooded Atlantean Purists. Furthermore, Superboy was to be wearing one of Aqualad’s spare costumes, but MINUS the Water-Bearers, BackPack and “A” belt buckle. He was also to be sporting a clear oxygen mask that covers his mouth and nose with some form of filter/re-breather attachment. Miss Martian was to have shape-shifted into a more underwater-friendly form, having ditched her usual cape and morphed herself to copy Lori Lemaris’s mermaid tail from the waist down and having grown Aqualad-like gills on her neck.  She was also meant to be shorter than usual, but that didn’t end up being a big issue with the floating figures on the cover.

The Purists were meant to be cloaked and hooded Atlanteans of Aquaman’s type, i.e. to the naked eye they look completely human.  Like all Atlanteans, there were to have bare feet.  I was also instructed that their eyes were to magically glow from within the shadowed depths of their hoods.

Miss Martian’s mermaid form was almost a non-issue, as it was just putting the top of her body on the bottom of the design for Lori Lemaris, plus adding gills identical in design to Aqualad. Superboy was basically in Aqualad’s costume minus key accessories, plus the addition of an oxygen maks. And I had to design the Purists.

Purists first:

So now it was time to design a cover!

Young Justice #14 – cover rough 1

This was a relatively tight drawing for a cover rough, but we seemed to be pretty firmly locked into a concept, so I felt I could do something fairly tight I could then use as a basis for the final pencil art. Given that the characters were floating in water, I wanted the heroes to be “surrounded” in a fairly 3-dimensional way. I tried to make it clear that the Purists were not only coming from all sides but also from above and below.

The feedback was that DC wanted a little more of a feeling of action. Also, they wanted the piece to have a little more focus, so it was suggested to emphasize Aqualad a little more since it was his story.

Young Justice #14 – cover rough 2

The revised version is pretty similar – I just changed the proportion of some of the characters, bringing Aqualad forward and pushing Superboy and Miss Martian back. I turned Miss Martian’s head to better show off the gills on her neck. Aqualad is now deflecting a magical attack from one of the Purists with one of his hard water blades.

This version was approved, so from there it was the routine progression of pencils and inks, with color by Zac Atkinson.

Young Justice #14 – Cover Pencils

Young Justice #14 – Cover Inks

Young Justice #14 – Cover Color

As always, questions and comments are welcome.

Once again we had to developing the cover before a finished script was available. To be clear, this isn’t meant to imply that the scripts were late or anything. Rather it’s a function of how early the cover is needed for solicitation/promotional purposes. DC likes action covers whenever possible, and the confrontation between Clayface and The Team didn’t come until the end of the story. There was some earlier conflict between Clayface and Batman and Robin, but Batman and Robin had featured on the previous issue’s cover, so there was a real desire to show the Young Justice Team. So we fell into one of my pet peeves of comic covers – we essentially tease the issue’s cliffhanger ending on the cover. Oh, well. C’est la vie.

So the cover became less of a conceptual challenge and more of a compositional one. The mission: Design a cover featuring Superboy, Miss Martian, Robin, Kid Flash and Aqualad all fighting Clayface in a sewer location. First off, the sewer had to be big to allow for all this action. The second issue was how to occupy all five heroes in combat simultaneously against a single opponent. Thankfully Clayface is not only large, but is a shape-shifter, frequently seen growing extra limbs to perform various tasks. So I placed a large Clayface figure in my sewer tunnel, with a separate arm holding each of four of the team members, with Superboy punching Clayfaces’ body, showing the futility of such an attack by splashing harmlessly into Clayface’s torso. Since Miss Martian is also a shape-shifter who has also produced extra limbs in the TV show, I thought it would be fun to give her an extra arm while she grappled with her own Clayface appendage. I placed her in the foreground so the figure would be a little larger and the extra limb a little easier to see. I wanted to have the solid parts of Clayface emerging from an amorphous mass of clay in the bottom of the sewer, making it feel the heroes were surrounded by Clayface – that we was coming from everywhere!

Young Justice #12 – Cover Sketch

The sketch was well-received overall. Greg was concerned that Clayface wasn’t imposing enough, and suggesting making his figure more central. Jim Chadwick and Mark Chiarello at DC liked the asymmetrical design, and it was suggested to make Clayface proportionally larger than the heroes. They also wanted Clayface to appear more “solid” as they were already concerned about the sewer setting making Clayface look like a poo-monster.

So there wasn’t much room to make the Clayface figure bigger, so I made the heroes proportionally smaller. Rather than having the arm grappling with Miss Martian emerging from the bottom of the sewer, I had it at winding around from Clayface’s side, and I ended up flipping her position to make her work better in this tweaked composition. I also turned Clayface’s head so he was less in profile, hoping it would make him a little more menacing-looking.

As I said, this cover largely teases the cliffhanger moment at the end of the issue, and when the scene picks up at the beginning of issue 13, the script called for an arrangement remarkably similar to the cover here, so I kind of got to draw the scene again from a slightly different angle.

Pencils and inks by me are seen below, plus color by Zac Atkinson.

Young Justice #12 – Cover Pencils

Young Justice #12 – Cover Inks

Young Justice #12 – Cover Colors

And there you have it! So this probably would have been a better cover for issue #13, but we used it on #12. So what did we do for #13? Watch for the next Creating a Cover blog entry to find out! Check this issue of Young Justice out in digital form or at your local comic shop. Watch for a Commentary blog entry on this issue soon!

When we starting talking about cover designs this time, I learned that Ra’s was our villain and that the story featured an encounter between Ra’s and Batman and Robin, but I didn’t know much about the rest of the story, as the script wasn’t final yet. My first instinct was to pay homage to one of the early Neal Adams covers that represent the comics that made me fall in love with the character in the first place. Here are the covers I was suggesting along with my notes to writer Greg Weisman and my editor Jim Chadwick. (Notes in blue.)

Batman #232

Batman #232 – First appearance of Ra’s. I think it would be fun to swap Batman and Robin’s position on the cover. With or without the same text.

Treasury Edition

Treasury Edition collection of the early Ra’s al Ghul stories – Again I think it would be fun to swap Batman and Robin’s roles. If Talia isn’t in the story, we’d have to decide if there’s another character to put in her place in the composition, or whether to eliminate the figure.

Even if we do a new composition, I’d love to do a cover with a big, ghostly Ra’s figure in the background as in either of these two covers.

Batman #244

Batman #244 – I’m guessing the Lawrence of Arabia setting wouldn’t work, but I think the Ra’s and Batman figures could be recast as Ra’s and Robin.

Not knowing the specifics of the plot, I didn’t know if any of these were remotely appropriate – even as a symbolic cover. Greg responded with the following suggestions of his own that tied in more specifically to the script-in-progress:

1. A confrontation at a missile launch site. (Which I think is more or less where the story opens.)

2. Something Lazarus Pit oriented where someone or something is rising out of the pit. (Which I think is more or less where the issue ends).

I asked for more specifics about what Greg had in mind regarding a “missile launch site,” but a Lazarus Pit scene captured my imagination. I suggested the following:

What about Ra’s rising from a Lazarus Pit in the foreground, with a missile launching from the pad (symbolically) behind him, with Batman and Robin looking on in alarm, either as figures or as ghostly images like Ra’s in two of those classic covers? (I can clarify this with a sketch if it sounds like a direction we’d want to pursue.)

I assume whatever Ra’s is wearing in the story we’d want him in his main costume for the cover, unless he’s seen rising from the pit in which case I’d prefer him bare-chested.

Greg and Jim liked the direction of a Lazarus Pit scene, even though it meant a symbolic cover that depicted a scene that did not literally take place in the story.I wanted Ra’s to be the focus of the piece and make him look powerful, with Robin the next most prominent figure as he’s the only character on the cover who’s a regular star of the book. I settled on a low angle shot looking up at and past Ra’s with Robin closest to Ra’s in the foreground with Batman further back (and therefor smaller.) I did this relatively tight sketch for approval. The dark setting served to simplify the background and keep the focus on the characters, as well as allow for dramatic under-lighting. I tried to make the image more dynamic by using strong vertical lines in perspective, which can be seen not only in the background architecture, but in the Lazarus Pit goo dripping off of Ra’s.

As always, I was careful to leave enough room at the top for the Young Justice logo and other DC Comics trade dress.

Young Justice #11 – Cover Rough

The sketch was approved, so it was relatively straightforward to proceed with pencils and inks. I elaborated on the doorway Batman in running through, trying to pull in some of the architectural detail of the Fortress Al Ghul location where the Lazarus Pit would be located in our story, a location seen in episode 6 of the TV show, “Infiltrator.” Pencils and inks by me are seen below, plus color by Zac Atkinson.

Young Justice #11 – Cover Pencils

Young Justice #11 – Cover Inks

Young Justice #11 – Cover Color

And there you have it! This turned out to be one of my favorite covers for the series so far, and some others must have liked it as I saw it used in a number of articles previewing DC titles coming out that month. And the story inside turned out to be a lot of fun, too! You can check it out in digital form or at your local comic shop.

I’ll be doing a Commentary blog entry on this issue soon, and will be doing another “Creating a Cover” entry for Young Justice #12 sooner still!

The villain in question is Rako (aka The Cambodian), and you can read more about the redesign of this character in a previous blog post. Once again I was designing a cover before the script for the story, so I didn’t have anything to draw from other than being told there was a fight with The Cambodian at an Asian-styled mansion, and that Superboy being cut by the Cambodian’s sword was a major story point.

Captain Atom #7 cover

YJ #10 cover sketch a

YJ #10 cover sketch b

YJ #10 cover sketch c

YJ #10 cover sketch d

YJ #10 cover pencils

YJ #10 cover inks

YJ #10 cover color guide

YJ #10 cover colors

Young Justice #10 Cover

You can read a 4-page preview here, and then pick up the comic in digital form or at your local comic shop.

I’ll be doing a Commentary blog entry on this issue in a couple of weeks, and will be doing another “Creating a Cover” entry for Young Justice #11 in a month’s time!

So let’s look at this issue-by-issue. I knew the first part of the story included a scene where Adam Strange comes to the aid of the League members when they are under attack by an alien T-Rex like creature. (It could shoot beams out of its eyes, too. I know, I know…)

JL Adv #25 - sketch a

JL Adv #25 - sketch b

Sketch B: This take on the same scene featured all the Justice League characters clearly in a bad way, but I didn’t think it did as good of a job showing off our guest star Adam Strange.

JL Adv #25 - sketch c

JL Adv #25 - sketch d

Sketch D: The one other idea I included was a throwback to the Silver-Age era that Adam Strange is associated with. It keeps the menace a mystery, but shows Adam Strange confidently pushing the League out of the way on the cover of their own book as he takes center stage to announce himself. I didn’t think they’d go for it, but it would have been fun to draw.

JL Adv #25 cover pencils

JL Adv #25 cover inks

Inks: By Dan Davis.

JL Adv #25 cover color

JL Adv #25 cover final

Final: It amuses me that the dialog given to Adam Strange is so similar to what I’d suggested for Sketch D. It might have been a coincidence given that it’s pretty generic expository bombast! (THAT was a fun phrase to type!) I wish the dialog balloon didn’t cover part of Adam Strange’s body.

So issue 25 left each Justice League member in a cliffhanger situation, and I’d had the brainstorm of taking advantage of Adam Strange’s costume designs to use his chest straps to create a multi-frame cover design that would tease each of the cliffhangers that were to be resolved in the pages of Justice League Aventures #26.

JL Adv #26 - sketch a

Sketch A: This was one of my all-time favorite cover ideas, so I pitched hard for it. I did a full cover sketch and didn’t offer any other options (although I obviously would have provided more options if they’d been requested. It was sad watching this one slowly gun off the rails…

At the end of the previous issue, a weakened Superman was being threatened with an axe, Batman had just found a murder victim with a knife in his back, Martian Manhunter was threatened by a pack of the alien T-Rexes as seen on the previous cover, and Wonder Woman was tied to a rocket. All these scenarios were happening simultaneously, so I really liked this as a tease for the multiple resolutions. I loved the multi-frame thing with the red areas of Adam Strange’s costume between the white straps, and I highlighted the threatening element in white in each frame for extra visual interest.

JL Adv #26 - sketch b

Sketch B: My editor liked the Adam Strange design part, but wanted the Justice League members in more action-oriented situations. He asked to have the inset scenes changed to ones where Superman was battling an undersea creature, where Batman was being held at gunpoint, where Wonder Woman was fighting a giant robot, and the Martian Manhunter scene could stay the same.

Not only did I not like this as much conceptually, but these scenarios were challenging to depict in a very small, irregular area and keep the Justice League figures large enough to be prominent. Also, this drawing didn’t lend itself to highlighting the threatening elements in the same way, so I tried highlighting the League member’s eyes in white instead. The above layout is what I came up with. It was OK< but already I didn’t like this as much as the original.

JL Adv #26 cover pencils

JL Adv #26 cover inks

Inks: The inks were again by Dan Davis.

JL Adv #26 cover color

Colors: For me this is where it started to fall apart. I don’t blame the colorist, I think this was a communication breakdown. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any input into the color on this title, so by the time I saw the color version of the art it was final and there was nothing to be done.

• Rather than more stylized color, the art is the regular colors for the characters just tinted red, and there’s shading applied to the red on the Adam Strange figure which to me makes the inset art look like weird tattoos.
• The area on Adam Strange’s belt that was intended as a highlight is colored like it’s surface detail, like an off-center belt buckle. It doesn’t look bad, it’s just wrong, and inconsistent with how the character looks elsewhere in the book.
• The color on Adam Strange’s face doesn’t seem to have the same underlighting scheme the line-art does.
• The biggest change is the addition of a space background. I think it changes the way the whole piece plays, and the sparse stars don’t read to me as a space background, the just look like hastily-added white dots.

JL Adv #26 cover final

Final: So there’s the final cover. It’s not a terrible cover, but it’s not what I’d intended. I think the “Strange Days!” text to the left of Adam Strange’s head makes the open space to the right seem oddly empty – it unbalances an otherwise symmetrical design. Ah, well. Rarely is a piece of art everything you want it to be, and the reader doesn’t know what you’d originally had in mind. Unless you do something silly like write blog entries where you do deeply into the behind the scenes process of how you design covers.

Whoops.

As usual, the process starts with concept sketches so a cover idea can be agreed upon, and again this was being done before I had seen a full script for the issue. I was told that the story would feature Captain Atom sending the team to investigate a murder mystery as part of their training, which was fun since Greg Weisman (co-writer of the YJ comic and head writer for the animated YJ TV series) had worked as a writer on the early run of DC’s Captain Atom comic. In fact, the first time I ever worked with Greg was on a comic that featured Captain Atom encountering a pastiche of Disney’s Gargoyles characters, the property with Greg is perhaps most associated.

I was told that the story the Young Justice #9 and #10 would feature several supporting characters from the era of Captain Atom, including the villain The Cambodian who Greg was planning to rename. I often referred to him at this point as “the villain formerly known as the Cambodian.”

The actual first step in creating the covers then was to figure out our comics’ design for The Cambodian. Greg made it very clear that he preferred the dark gray color scheme of the Cambodian as seen on the cover of his first appearance in Captain Atom over the orange and red color scheme seen thereafter, and I thought the design looked a little blocky and didn’t fit well with the aesthetic of the Young Justice series, so that all led to a design process that I’ll detail in a separate blog entry soon.

Once a design for The Cambodian was agreed upon, I set out to create cover concept sketches, once again building over the Young Justice cover template I had created so I could plan for the masthead and logo elements.

Young Justice #9 - cover sketch a

Sketch A: So without a script, I was told that the story was full of happenings and intrigue including infiltration of the Pentagon, Robin and Miss Martian finding murder victims and more, I didn’t feel I could really depict any of that without more information about those scenes. I was told that the main action of the issue was a confrontation with the (former) Cambodian and the team members who actually fought him in this issue were Miss Martian and Superboy. There was concern that there had been a lot of Superboy-centric covers, so my first thought was this image with our villain taking a swipe at Miss Martian with his energy sword.

Young Justice #9 - cover sketch b

Young Justice #9 - cover sketch c

Sketch C: I tried another version of the same idea with the sword held vertically and only Miss Martian reflected in the blade, but it didn’t work much better.

Young Justice #9 - cover sketch d

Young Justice #9 - cover sketch e

Sketch E: Another composition around the same basic idea, this time with the villain turned away from us. With the dark armor making him almost a silhouette and the glowing sword raised over his head this one could have been interesting if refined as the final version.

Young Justice #9 - cover sketch f

Sketch F: Finally a design that doesn’t feature the villain at all, but rather Captain Atom symbolically charging the team with their mission in a classic “Uncle Sam – I  WANT YOU!” pose. I think I recall the idea being suggested by Greg, my apologies to my editor Jim Chadwick if the idea was his! It was my idea to include the reflections of the assembled team. I took care to distort the reflected image a bit as Captain Atom’s body isn’t a flat mirror, and the image is of course reversed, as most noticeably evidenced by Robin and Superboy’s costume emblems.

Young Justice #9 - cover pencils

Pencils: Sketch F was the lucky winner, so here’s the pencil version of the cover. The sketch had been pretty tight, so going to full pencils was pretty simple and straightforward. Poor Aqualad’s face is hidden, but the image of Captain Atom left very irregular spaces to fill with a reflected image.

Young Justice #9 - cover inks

Inks: Here are the finished inks. I tried to use bolder, brushier lines on Captain Atom’s hand and arm to push it into the foreground.

Young Justice #9 - cover shading guide

I had a very specific idea in mind of how I wanted the linework to be interpreted as far as the highlights and shading of Captain Atom’s chromed surface, and I also wanted to clarify what were reflection elements that should be somehow separated with color from the lineart of the Captain Atom figure itself, so I created this guide for our colorist, Zac Atkinson.

Young Justice #9 - cover color

And here’s what the finished color looked like. The addition of the glow to Captain Atom’s eyes give them a piercing quality that I love. Note the ample room left for the inevitable cover text to the left of Captain Atom’s head, and the UPC Code box was expected to be placed in the lower left corner.

Young Justice #09 cover

I was often frustrated during my run on The Batman Strikes! with cover art being saddled with text that I felt was pretty insipid. This is a rare instance of getting EXACTLY what I expected and hoped for when I drew the artwork. “Captain Atom wants YOU!” indeed. I was a little surprised that they let Captain Atom’s head cover part of the logo. I’d expected it to run behind the logo, but that’s why I try to be really precise with my layouts, making sure that two elements like that overlap a little, but not too much, and not be edge-to-edge.

So that’s the story of another cover. This is the current issue of Young Justice on sale, and you can buy it at your local comic shop or in digital form here.

I’ll be posting an article about the redesign of The Cambodian soon, as well as a “commentary” on the art for the issue. Stay tuned!