The fairly pedestrian origin of the new cover to The Strange Death of Alex Raymond
Hi, Everybody!
If you're like me, you need to fill a slot on your Blog about Cerebus.
Also, you're about to get sued for poaching content for your Blog about Cerebus from MY Blog about Cerebus... dick.
Anyway, as I'm sure you are aware, there is a Kickstarter for a limited-edition signed and numbered edition of The Strange Death of Alex Raymond.
When the standard edition became available to order through Diamond, I asked Sean and Carson:
Hey fellas,
Whose idea was the new cover for the "Complete" Strange Death of Alex Raymond?
Like, what was the thought process there?
And which one of you wants to write the column explaining it? Matt
Since the cover doesn't look like the one from the California Test Market/Fundraising Edition:
And Carson responded:
That is all Sean's genius!
And I said:
And then he's gonna say it was you, and I'm gonna have to write my own damn column.
I know how this works...
And surprisingly, I was wrong. Sean said:
Hey Matt,
So much of the book is focused on a. looking for meaning through enlargement/microscopic examination b. teasing out that titular "Strange Death", unravelling the moment of impact
... that I thought a fitting cover would have to present both things, simultaneously. Both the blow-up, the minute examination of the moment of the crash, and the tangled web of interrelated events that create the skene of the book.
So I started with some of these visual elements, including two particularly potent double-page spreads of Dave's, and a closeup of one of the faux covers Dave created for the interiors of the book, and started moving them around until they had some visual frission.
You can see from these very rough roughs, left undeveloped, that I only tried out a handful of possibilities, and it was pretty quick work to arrive at the finished image. Though that didn't stop me from making a few different variations of the actual cover once we'd mostly arrived there.
In my two strips in You Don't Know Jack, which was originally intended to be promo for SDOAR, I joked about a "deluxe hardcover" with a Chip Kidd-designed cover, saying Chip Kidd covers were "the new LENTICULAR COVERS" or something along those lines. Joking aside, Mr. Kidd's aesthetic has been immensely influential, cleverly taking the Lichtenstein-style giant fine-art blowup aesthetic and applying, you know, wonderful loving design to it, with heavy use of spot-color to bring interesting color design to black-and-white artwork. So I thought having a cover image that evoked that "enlargement" aesthetic while presenting something of of the deep, and detailed, interior, would be the way to go.
Hope that's not too much information for you Matt!
One of the UNDEVELOPED, unfinished covers Sean made.
Sextto? And yes, this was all so I could type "Sextto"...
So, THAT'S why the Living The Line edition of The Strange Death of Alex Raymond cover looks like this:
You can get a Signed and Numbered copy if you pry it out of the cold dead hands of one of the 301 backers of the Kickstarter. (The 301 signed by Carson AND Dave is sold out. You can still get one signed by just Carson...)
A big shout out and thank you to the Uncanny Omar of Near Mint Condition for the glowing review of the California Test Edition we sent his way!https://youtu.be/wqarP8bUeOw
I am a big fan of the channel, so give them a like and a subscribe. .......................................................................................................................... Thank you all for the suggestions yesterday regarding the scans of the tracing papers. Sean and I are working hard to figure out a product that checks off as many boxes as possible.
Also, thank you for the feedback on the Original Art. The consensus, as I suspected it would be, is to put all the art up at once and have people contact me privately at clubgrubbug@gmail.com
The pages already posted here as add-ons will stay here.
Henry G. Franke III has first pick. He can either keep the page he pledged for on here or switch to another page. I feel bad he didn't get the opportunity to view the field. After that it is first come first serve. I will try to respond to emails and update the site to say what has sold as quickly as possible, but this next week is a busy last-week-of-the-semester at work so please be patient. I apologize ahead of time if someone else beat you to a page and I haven't had a chance to update the site yet.
Anything past the V1 art will be sold after the book drops, so as not to spoil anything. Keep an eye out for a post-campaign update on that.
Also, there is still art available from the Strange Death of Alex Raymond spin-off, You Don't Know Jack. http://hodtech.net/ydkj.html
All proceeds from art sales go "directly" to the Buy Bucha More Treats fund. As a Labrador she always thinks she is starving.
Yes, I am totally comfortable with this blatantly emotional manipulation of posting picture of "starving" animals in Alabama. Anything to get her to quit pulping tree branches.
So if you wanna feed a "starving" puppy by buying Original Carson art to SDOAR, that's how you do.
Next Time: "Gee Matt, I wanna back a Kickstarter, but I can't back SDOAR because I'm emotionally stunted from seeing the 1980 Flash Gordon movie..." Well buddy have I got the Kickstarter for you...
6 comments:
Tony Dunlop
said...
The picture of Bucha with her dino reminds me of the Ow, My Balls" sequence in the prophetic "Idiocracy." That scene is one of the few things that made me laugh even harder than the "Avenjaque" pages in "You Don't Know Jack."
Tony, I LOVE that film. Sadly prophetic. More and more so every day.
Dan, My best guess, Sean can correct me though, is that the blue came from the blue-line print-out technique I use in my process prior to inking, which plays a thematic roll in the end of the book. Once you have that blue and are looking for shelf-pop and vibration, orange is the way to go. There were other combos with the blue, but we agreed, "stick with complimentary colors."
If you do a web search for images of a color wheel you'll see blue and orange are opposite each other. Colors that are opposite each other are considered to be complementary colors (red and green, yellow and purple, blue and orange). The high contrast creates a vibrant look especially when you use full saturation. It can be jarring to the eye. NEVER do it with text, but with images you can spot a cover like this from across the room.
6 comments:
The picture of Bucha with her dino reminds me of the Ow, My Balls" sequence in the prophetic "Idiocracy." That scene is one of the few things that made me laugh even harder than the "Avenjaque" pages in "You Don't Know Jack."
Well, it's an interesting explanation, but my question was about the color choice.
Tony,
I LOVE that film. Sadly prophetic. More and more so every day.
Dan,
My best guess, Sean can correct me though, is that the blue came from the blue-line print-out technique I use in my process prior to inking, which plays a thematic roll in the end of the book. Once you have that blue and are looking for shelf-pop and vibration, orange is the way to go. There were other combos with the blue, but we agreed, "stick with complimentary colors."
If you do a web search for images of a color wheel you'll see blue and orange are opposite each other. Colors that are opposite each other are considered to be complementary colors (red and green, yellow and purple, blue and orange). The high contrast creates a vibrant look especially when you use full saturation. It can be jarring to the eye. NEVER do it with text, but with images you can spot a cover like this from across the room.
I'm glad my art degree hasn't been wasted.
Thanks, Carson!
...and Birdsong.
Orange and teal was all the rage in movies in the '90s.
-- Damian
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