Designing The Trade

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Okay, first of all, this week I made a typo in a BATMAN script and I think I just created a very profitable new South Park character:

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Anyway! Last week I had to come up with the cover for the PUBLIC DOMAIN collection. I know a lot of collections just re-use cover art from the single issues, but I feel like they’re different markets? Like, comic books are racked in shops a variety of different ways, but a lot of them are like this:

Which means you need to have your issue title in the top third of your cover so people can easily spot it.

I don’t ALWAYS follow that rule. On variant covers I move the logo a lot because those feel very secondary to the main cover market. But even when I’d get “arty” on Sex Criminals covers I’d make sure that logo was in the top third, even if I did make it too light OOPS:

Anyway! With the Sex Criminals collections I really wanted something that felt more bold, that felt at place in a comic shop AND a book store:

And now I’m back on my bullshit with the PUBLIC DOMAIN trade.

First step was to figure out what the concept was.

Since a lot of the story deals with the legality and ownership of comic IP, I had the initial idea that, shit, maybe the cover is JUST the legal indicia of my comic! The thing that says that I own it! I got this far with that idea, sending it to my dearest chum:

He’s very kind. And man, what a weird flex it would be to make this the cover. But ultimately I don’t think it would be interesting enough to get people to pick it up, and almost no one would get that this is the legalese from comics. Partly because the classic legal text goes horizontally along the bottom of a page, not vertically.

I then thought maybe I could show the legal text incorporated on a page and make THAT the cover! I got as far as photoshopping the text and images off an old comic and temp placing text and an image over it:

Nope! At this point I was losing my mind trying to make the idea work. A better designer than me could have pulled it off, but after staring at the file for too long, I gave up.

So, what other imagery could I work with that would sell the idea? I just finished this ad for the book which used elements of the stripped down issue one cover:

But I wasn’t sure if it worked as a book cover. However the mask still felt like it should be central. It’s definitely one of the easiest ways to convey a story about a superhero.

So I recreated the mask in Illustrator as a vector file, making it cleaner. I stared at it for a while until I had the idea to make the eye holes word balloons coming from different directions (thank you Sheridan College “Conceptual Illustration” class from 1997). It felt like it somewhat summed up the two different creators at odds about their creation:

But it didn’t quite feel like it was enough to sell the idea. So, like an absolute hack, I resorted to the classic “torn paper” motif to indicate the split.

I achieved it the old-fashioned way! By tearing some newspaper pages (I could never tear comic pages) and isolating the tear.

But I still didn’t really like the look of it. The white felt … weak? I don’t know, but the colour scheme wasn’t working for me. Also, white gets scuffed easily, and in a bookstore that means damaged.

So, this is where I’ve ended up:

It’s a variation on a colour scheme I used to use a lot back in my painted illustration days. I then dropped in the light comic page to give some more visual interest and to, y’know, indicate that there may actually be a comic inside.

And yeah, I will, for the rest of my life, use the fact that Matt and I spent, like, two weeks in the #1 spot on the NYT Bestseller list for graphic novels once upon a time. I’m not above it!

NO YOU’RE NOT

I’m sorry that this ended up being such a process post! I was just going to show you the final cover but then I figured I’d also show you how many bad ideas one man can have if he just believes in himself.

And now, the VERY IMPORTANT PART for my dear subscribers! I have collected all the PDF/CB files and they will now live in One Post To Rule Them All!

And that’s it for today! But HEADS UP! This Friday we’ll be doing a KAPTARA ORIGINAL ART GIVEAWAY!! So check your email Friday instead of just fucking off for an early weekend like usual!!!

Love,
Chip