Strange days, no?
Brian here, and last week, I learned that an Idaho state senator was trying to get Saga removed from circulation at a local public library. As always, Fiona Staples and I prefer to let our work speak for itself (and I’m not sure some Los Angeles writer blabbing about community standards would help the situation), so I’ll just say that I’m profoundly grateful for the thoughtful response from the library board vice chair, and for the increasingly challenging work of librarians everywhere.
The twelfth volume of Saga will be available in (most) public libraries early next year, but you can pick up your own copy of the first issue of our new arc in just a few weeks, exclusively at your friendly neighborhood comic shop.
Speaking of forbidden content, in today’s vignette of Spectators from letterer Fonografiks and artist/co-creator Niko Henrichon (who has an incredible new Artopsy coming up later in this very missive), spectral cowboy Sam thinks back to a formative experience with the taboo…
What’s in the box…?!
Creators who hope to publish stories for adults that involve any amount of sexuality are facing more hurdles than ever, so thanks to everyone reading this right now for helping to make Spectators a reality, especially you generous paid subscribers.
And while we’re on the subject of spicy stories for grownups, I wanted to recommend a hot new book from author M.C. Vaughan, who also happens to be my brilliant sister-in-law.
For you Saga readers, “M.C.” is basically a real-life D. Oswald Heist, a popular romance author who also subtly reveals deep secrets about the human condition. (I stole from her a lot of Val’s observations about The Terminator for Spectators.)
Romancing Miss Stone--which will be available everywhere TOMORROW--is her first work for the beloved institution Harlequin, and I’m enjoying the hell out of my advance copy. If sizzling reads are your speed, I hope you’ll check it out, and then let M.C. know what you thought over here.
In last week’s chat with you valued members of The Tower, we were discussing our favorite comics of the year (so far), and folks named a lot of awesome-sounding books that I now need to add to the towering ziggurat of comics on my nightstand.
Jenny Hernandez suggested:
Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees by Patrick Horvath has been the best so far for me. Such a dark comic with great writing.
Also, Marvel’s Blood Hunt event that just started isn’t too bad either.
Rob Schamberger added:
Also read Homicide, Hard Switch and Hypericum and loved them all. Definitely recommend hunting down Manuele Fior’s other work as it’s excellent. What else this year for me:
Where the Body Was by Brubaker and Phillips. They never let me down.
The Ms Tree collections that Titan is putting out are so delightful. I read a lot of the Max Allan Collins/ Terry Beatty stuff as singles a couple decades ago, so it’s cool to finally read it all. These definitely hold up for me.
The final volume of Hey Kids! Comics! by Howard Chaykin is darkly hilarious and so on the nose. It’s pessimistic, but so am I, so I guess I’m the target audience.
Immortal Sergeant by Joe Kelly and Ken Nimura was impossible to put down once I started reading it. Hit REALLY close to home.
Return to Eden by Paco Roca is perfect. Roca’s maybe my favorite cartoonist in the world right now. It’s between him and Gipi for me.
I had a few other five star ratings in my Goodreads but these are the ones that have stayed in my mind. Present company excluded, naturally!
And two quick picks from TD:
Feels lazy cause it just dropped last week but Hate Revisited by Peter Bagge feels like the chart topper.
Maybe my favorite comic this year.... is Gilbert Hernandez’s ‘Godzilla’ one-page in PSYCHODRAMA ILLUSTRATED #7.
Such good recs, but only one reader could receive this signed copy of my favorite graphic novel of 2023…
…and our intern Genesis the Exploded Giraffe (who will be on safari for the next month, so please be patient with your prizes, lucky winners!) randomly selected Nate Schachter, who echoed perhaps the most-mentioned comic:
Helen of Wyndhorn is fantastic. Bilquis Evely’s art is astounding and the writing from Tom King is great as ever.
I admit that I was going to be a dirty “trade-waiter” for that one, but not after all of your rave reviews, thanks.
Okay, time for me turn things over to my creative better half, whose magnificent original artwork you can always purchase directly from Essential Sequential.
By the way, I saw that another of the killer sketches Monsieur Henrichon did for you fortunate Founders just sold on eBay for more than the cost of joining our merry band of giraffes, so Niko’s artwork looks like a sound investment, and more importantly, will look beautiful framed on your wall.
Anyway, I hope you dig his latest artistic autopsy as much as I did, and I’ll meet you back here next Monday evening for more free Spectators and some other surprises. - BKV
Hello, everyone!
For this month’s Artopsy, I’ll talk a little bit about one of the small, and luckily for me, rare annoyances of the comics business. I’m talking about cancelled publications.
A few years ago, I was assigned a set of four covers for a Marvel miniseries called Spider-Man: Daily Bugle. All covers were finished and paid for but unfortunately, only one of them was published. The cancellation happened at the time we had some kind of worldwide viral pandemic event with a lot of testing and confinements, maybe you remember? So yeah, publishers were forced to cancel many projects, and this Daily Bugle mini was unfortunately on the list.
Nevertheless, I think I did some of my best cover work on these, and when looking at the experience from a distance, it sparked a renewed passion for traditional coloring.
While confined, I used the opportunity to do more commissions and experiment a lot with watercolors (which I’m still doing currently on Spectators, as well as other projects).
Let’s take a look at the art!
First cover:
I had a problem with color intensity when working with watercolor back then, a problem I partly solved by changing my watercolor brand as well as the paper stock (and also by using a professional digital camera instead of a scanner to digitize the artwork).
There’s often a good amount of Photoshop tweaking (cheating?) on each watercolor piece that I do, especially on the early jobs. That’s why I’m a big admirer of artists like Alex Ross and Esad Ribić, whose published work looks exactly like the original art.
The good news is that I Photoshop less and less these days. Most of the Spectators pages look almost exactly like their original counterparts. Just to give you an idea of the difference, here’s what the original art of that Spider-Man cover looks like:
The layout for this cover was pretty much a one solution thing. The editor was very specific on the composition and angle so I only did a few versions of the same layout.
Final result:
A fan did a realistic rendition of it. Pretty cool, huh?
Next cover:
For this one, I had more latitude for composition and angle so I did a few layouts.
The big symmetrical frontal shot was chosen. So the shredded newspaper was very present in the picture and, like a real pro, I made a fake version of the newspaper that I printed at almost standard size. I put it over a real newspaper, shredded it like Kingpin would have, and took a photo of it to use as reference for my final drawing.
The end result:
[BKV here, interrupting to let you know that a) the original art for that extraordinary Kingpin cover is available for purchase here, and b) there’s more never-before-seen Niko art for those of you in The Tower after the jump!]