Commentary: Young Justice #9 “Cold Case”

OK, I’d meant to do this about a week ago, but I was too busy for blogging, but at long last here’s my commentary on Young Justice issue 9! I’m including samples of a few pages of artwork here, but I’m commenting on close to every page, so grab your copy of the comic from your local Comic Shop or your digital copy and read along!

YJ #9 pencils pg 1

Page 1: This was a fun way to start the story with single-character panels showing the members of the Team bored by the lecture they are hearing, but all demonstrating their individual personalities. Connie cameo in panel two! Probably the most interesting detail on the page lies in what Aqualad is writing on his notepad…

Page 2: This page was a little frustrating to compose, as it features the Team arranged classroom-style listing to a lecture by Captain Atom. I felt I needed to show Captain Atom from the front as this full-page shot was the reveal of his character as the guest-instructor for the Team, and we needed to see what was written on the holographic “white board” behind him. I ended up doing a side shot of this scene in order to clearly include all that detail. A downshot would have been a little more visually interesting, but I was worried that the setting wouldn’t be clear  as the Mount Justice Mission Room if we could only see the floor, and I didn’t want to wait until page 3 of the scene to make it clear where we were. The biggest problem with the angle I showed is that it begs to be a panoramic *wide* shot, but has to fit within the portrait aspect-ratio of the comic book page. I tried to sandwich the shot I wanted before the overhead dome fixture that tops the Mission Room, and some space at the bottom left open for credits and/or the title.

YJ #09 pencils pg 3

Page 3: One of the big things in this story were these holographic displays that appear throughout. I created these images (note the ID photo, typset text, voice print, and fingerprint seen on the display in panel 3), and in any panel where the background is partially visible through the semi-transparent holographic projection, the holo-image was provided as a separate layer from the line art so it can be composited at the coloring stage. Once upon a time this would have been sent to DC comics as a vellum overlay on the original artwork for the production people to deal with, but now it’s a separate layer in the scanned art Photoshop file.

Page 4: The shots of Miss Martian in “camouflage mode” are hand-drawn rather than created the same way as some of the holo-displays, but as those figures they needed to be transparent they also were provided as separate layers.

Page 5: Yet another holo-image, this time projected from Robin’s gadget-laden gloves. It was around this time I realized how much this mystery story was turning out to be very special-effects heaving regarding the artwork.

Page 6: This flashback sequence was described in the script as being in “sepia tones,” and the scenes within the sequence were meant to be not bound by discrete panel borders. Multiple-image montages are a fun challenge when they’re a collage of figures and faces, but given that these images were individual scenes with specific background settings, I had a real challenge. My solution was to stylize the sequence so the characters are floating against an inky black background, with the figures and settings picked out in the (sepia toned) light. This let me suggest backgrounds where they were needed with bits of detail but letting the background otherwise bleed off into darkness so the images were separated but without hard panel borders.

There were some revisions on this page around the fact that the body at the center of the story’s murder-mystery was meant to be found with a knife sticking out of his chest. It was key to the plot, as the murder weapon was the key piece of physical evidence in the original trial. Even though that this storyline was in keeping with the tone of the Animated TV show upon which the comic was based (the show whose head writer Greg Weisman is writing the comic!), there was concern that this was too much for a comic considered to be part of  DC’s Johnny DC line. The price of trying to push the envelope of what we can get away with in the comic is that sometimes there’s some negotiation required and sometimes the battleground of those negotiations are art revisions. Ah, well…

Page 7: Problem: How do you do an establishing shot of the Las Vegas strip when it’s the small first panel on a page of 5? You put a couple of palm trees in front of a recognizable neon and light covered entrance to one of the iconic Vegas casinos. Problem: How do you make said entrance even less recognizable even though the name of the casino has been removed from the facade? You change the color scheme!

BTW – I’m amused by Superboy’s flippant response to the unknowing casino employee’s concerned question about his age.
Dealer: “You ARE under twenty-one?”
Superboy: “In weeks or months?”

YJ #9 pencils pg 8-9

Pages 8 & 9: Part of why I wanted a good solution to the flashback montage issue back on page 6 was I knew it was going to come up again on this double-page spread across pages 8 and 9. The biggest challenge was the 3-panel Viet Nam combat sequence, but I think I was able to successfully frame the action in the negative space within the silhouettes of palm trees. Man, the stuff you have to figure out drawin’ comics! (Scroll down to the bottom of this post for the inked and colored version of this double-page spread!)

Page 10: The flashback continues! These images seemed relatively simple to deal with after the jungle combat scenes on the previous pages. Back in the present, Wally is still eating.

YJ #9 pencils pg 11

Page 11: The sequence with Robin and Miss Martian finding a body was fun to draw, as it was filled with lots of moody shadows. I love doing sequences like this, which I suppose is partly why I love drawing the Batman characters so much.

Page 12: Miss Martian proves telekinesis is useful when carefully investigating crime scenes. Oh look, another holographic display!

Page 13: More CSI work simplified by Miss Martian’s superpowers. When the inevitable Miss Martian Mysteries series happens, can I draw it?

Page 14: We meet Captain Nathaniel Adams’ adult children. His son was meant to strongly resemble his father and is wearing an Air Force captain’s uniform, but I didn’t want the characters to appear identical, so I added an extra little cowlick of hair to the short, military haircut, and added a slight cleft in the chin.

Page 15: Aqualad and Artemis walking on the beach. Nice, interesting color choices for this sequence by colorist Zac Atkinson.

Page 16: Another holo-display AND thermal vision. I should have taken the time to do a color guide for the thermal vision panels, as I’d have preferred to see these panels without the black line art and with brighter colors for the “hot spots” in the image. Oh, well. Next time…

Page 17: More panels with Miss Martian in camo-mode, meaning more figures drawn on separate layers so we can see background showing through them.

YJ #9 pencils pg 18

Page 18: Here’s our first look at Rako, the artist formerly known as The Cambodian. This guy was a villain in the Captain Atom comic series from the 1980s during the time Greg Weisman was working on it. One of the first notes I saw about this character from Greg was that he intended to rename him. I guess nothing great ever presented itself other than the guy’s given name, as that’s the only thing he’s called in this story. Rako’s look was redesigned by me from his original appearance as The Cambodian. The armor is meant to look like traditional armor of the region if it had been rebuilt by Tony Stark. I’ll be doing a blog entry on that process very soon. And oh look, another thermal vision panel!

Page 19: That’s the last camo-mode panel of the story. I was kind of surprised to see that a sound effect wasn’t added to Rako’s backhanding of Miss Martian here.

Page 20: As much back-and-forth as there was over that knife sticking out of the murder victim’s chest earlier in the issue, it was nothing compared to the negotiations around how to show the wound on Superboy’s chest. Again, a crucial plot point – Superboy is cut and bleeding. But could we show blood? Was it enough to just show energy steaming up from the wound and have the dialog indicate that Superboy’s skin had been cut? Ultimately a little blood was indicated with color with no wound being shown beyond a slashed T-shirt.

Well that brings us to the end of another issue. I’ve previously done similar reviews/breakdowns of Young Justice #7 and Young Justice #8 over at World’s Finest Online. I’ll eventually be duplicating that content here as well as going back and doing similar reviews for my first two issues on the title.

Anyone still with me after all that? Is anyone finding this level of detail in analysis interesting? I’d love to hear from you. Leave some comments!

Young Justice #9 pages 8-9 color

Title Pages: Batman Strikes #6

Hi all! Sorry I’ve been so quiet the last few days. Busy, busy, busy. Maybe I should do like Mark Evanier and just post a picture of  soup can on days when he’s too busy to blog. Hm, come to think of it I’m not even sure what that means…

Batman Strikes #6 - Title Logo

Anyway, here’s a look at another Title Page from The Batman Strikes!, featuring another hand-drawn story title logo. This one features Catwoman, and I should say something about her design here. Like all the major villains appearing in The Batman Strikes!, Catwoman’s design is based on animation models from the animated TV show the comic was a tie-in for. This Catwoman costume had large yellow goggles, presumably influenced by the then-recent Darwyn Cooke redesign of the character. The animation design also had a loose collar, which could pull over her head as a hood for added stealth.  That’s one of those ideas that sounds cool on paper but then doesn’t get used much in practice. I could be mistaken but I suspect that Catwoman was first seen on the show lowering the hood to dramatically reveal her mask and then it never went back on. I’m pretty sure she never had it up in any of the comic stories I drew.

But the main thing about this Catwoman design that was – I’ll be generous and call it controversial – with fans were the ears. Now if you look at her, I see what they were going for. The ears are actually more anatomically in proportion with her head for certain breeds of cats, and the big ears I think actually add to the overall slinkiness of the figure. And this Catwoman was meant to be slinky! But whether it’s Catwoman, Batman, or a host of other costumed characters emulating those or similar animals, there has become something of a tradition that the ears are represented by stylized little triangle shapes, and it’s somewhat disconcerting to see these huge cat wars sitting o Catwoman’s head. I actually found the mask fun to draw, but much like this animated series’ version of the Joker, fans were vocal about their dislike of the design every time the character showed up.

Batman Strikes #6 - Title Page

Here’s the full penciled page. Notice the really elaborate city background and the tiny figure of Catwoman climbing over it in multiple images. I’m a big fan of Marshall Rogers work on Batman, and the biggest lesson I learned from his work is that when drawing Batman one of the main characters of the story is Gotham City. Putting the characters in a rich, detailed, vast Gotham really makes them sing.

As a bonus, one of my hand-drawn sound effects appears here as Catwoman’s whip takes apart an inconvenient security camera. The sound effect is a simple one, but I always like to design sound effects myself when I can, so I can better integrate their shape and placement into the design of the panel.

Batman Strikes #6 Title Page

And finally the finished page. More to come soon!

Creating a Cover: Justice League Adventures #25 & #26

This time for Creating a Cover we’re going back to a two-part story from Justice League Adventures #25 and #26. The story had Superman, Wonder Woman, the Martian Manhunter and Batman transported to the alien world of Rann where they have an adventure with space-faring hero Adam Strange as a guest star, and I got to draw a recap of his origin which was a lot of fun.

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.

Creating a Cover: Young Justice #9

Time for another entry in the Creating a Cover series, this time featuring the most recent issue of Young Justice, #9.

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!

Title Pages: The Batman Strikes #2 & #4

Time for a look at more hand-drawn logos from title pages, this time looking at two more issues of The Batman Strikes!

The Batman Strikes #02 - Title Logo

This one was simple enough – with a short title and a leaping Batman figure, I thought I’d try to work the title into the highlighting on Batman’s cape. I assumed, therefore, that the logo would appear in blue. Also, I tried to create the letters in swooping, curving shapes as to compliment the flowing cape.

Strikes #02 - Title Page pencils

Strikes #02 - Title Page color

Strikes #04 - Title Logo

This one had a pretty straight-forward logo: Hand-rendered letters based on a typeface called Whoopass. Because I wasn’t leaving this for the letterer to typeset, I could position everything as to make sure that the ears of the Batman figure beneath the logo crossed the letters so as to not be lost against the black background.

Strikes #04 - Title Page pencils

Strikes #04 - Title Page color

Click on any of the images to visit my gallery where you can find more title pages and see the pages in higher resolution.

More to come, stay tuned!