Cover song

the mysterious appeal of the variant

I decided to write this week about the variant cover I’m currently working on. I’ll show sketches, inspirations and research, and hopefully the sometimes too long process of doing a variant cover will help you understand how different working on a cover is from working on interior pages of a story, and why one can distract the artist (me) from the other.

Whenever I’m thinking about doing a cover, I think about cover songs: versions of a (known) song originally played and sung by another artist. Comic book covers can have also a similar approach: you’re doing your version of these characters, this story, this World. Like with the song, you’re probably giving it your own spin, your own flavor.

Having done a book with the same title as a famous Beatles song, it’s impossible for me not to be attracted and interested by any version of Daytripper I hear. Doesn’t matter where I am when I hear it, my mind travels to moments when I was working on the book, or places I’ve been because of the impact and reach of that story. And to think that I didn’t know any covers of that song before I made the book.

There are quite a lot of them.