Nice house

Wanna see how I made a cover with a dog?

“Every sketch you make in your sketchbook must be of Archie characters right now”, Bá said to me this past week.

“Even if you’re drawing a carnaval scene, or doing one of you Moon Girl warm up sketches, do it of the characters you’ll have to learn how to draw even with your eyes closed.”

I guess my sketchbooks will miss the colored hair moon girls for a while as they make room for a blonde with a ponytail and a brunette with bangs.

(I gotta ask Terry Moore if Veronica and Betty were in any way inspirations for Strangers in Paradise’s Francine and Katchoo.)

Speaking of Terry Moore, he announced a partnership with Dark Horse to create an imprint with them. Right now, they announced the books of his that Dark Horse will be reprinting, but I assume that, down the line, there’ll be brand new material also. You can watch this video where he talks about this.

Before I get to the cover section of this letter, I just want to point out again this conversation with Diana Schutz at the Word Balloon podcast. A week went by and, every break I got, I listened to more of it, and it’s a fascinating tour of the history of American comics from the early 80s to this day through the eyes of someone who lived in the middle of most of it, giving a lot of events a perspective we can often lose because the context in which these events took place isn’t known or well documented.

the dog cover

In the DC comics solicitations for the month of May that went online last week, you’ll find that I’ve done a variant cover for The Nice House By The Sea #10. If you’re not yet reading James Tynion IV and Alvaro Martin Bueno’s incredible story, I highly recommend it. I haven’t been this engaged in reading a monthly comic book in a very long time. It looks like no other comic out there, and you come to identify with and care about a lot of these strange characters.

I was also impressed with Alvaro’s art, which feels painted at times, even if it’s done all digitally. This is an artist giving us a fully realized world, paying the same amount of attention to the background and the clothes and the animals as he is to the characters. The way he draws the interior pages of the book and its covers inspired my own approach to this variant, and on top of that I always thought Vertigo covers looked different than everything else on the stands, so, just like all the effort we put on our Daytripper covers back in the day, I was set in stepping up my game for this cover.