With these romance rewrites, I have to find my way into the new story that I'm grafting onto the original. I stare at panel after panel until one finally offers up the dialogue that should be there, and then I start building the story around that one. Here's the one from the latest ROMANCE REDUX that made it clear that the guy was going to be obsessed with diner food. Having just mentioned Karl Kesel two posts ago, I completely forgot that I'd named the couple in the story Karl and Myrna after Karl and his wife.

The second ROMANCE REDUX (Guys and Dolls) is in comics shops now, where once again we do comedic spins on old Marvel romance comics that really, were already funny. But I'm particularly happy with the one I worked on which is called "Diner Demon," so please pick it up.

Despite ongoing confusion about where I am or will be regarding comics shows, I WILL BE at The Emerald City Show in Seattle this weekend. I'm going to try to be there Saturday and Sunday, but it's possible I will only be there sunday 'cause Karl Kesel is nice enough to let me ride shotgun with him. The guest list is full of good people, so if you live anywhere near the Northwest, hit the road.

Well, fart. Just as I was smiling about how the Charlotte Heroes Convention was lined up to be just a week away from my cousin's wedding so I could plan our big North Carolina trip better, then I find out our friends' wedding is that weekend. And Allie's a flowergirl in that, so I can't send one of the canny Jeff Parker Robots in my place to trick everyone like I do so often. So I apologize to all the people I made plans with at Heroes, I have to miss this year too. Just when it suddenly became the biggest show in the East too, thanks to the Wizard War! This one's really going to sting. You people back East are going to love it though, Shelton Drum's conventions should be the industry model.
Let's look at another good review of that Starbrand special. That always makes me feel better.

Open auditions have begun in the UK for the girl who will play Lyra Belacqua of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, and I nominate my daughter Allie. I don't care if she's ten years too young and not British, she can crawl through pipes just like Lyra! I'm especially curious as to who will play Lyra's dad. And of course, the polar bear.

That's right, I didn't call it The Golden Compass auditions. We Americans know what the northern lights are, you don't have change titles for us all the time...

Okay, maybe he gets out of it. Anyway, the Fantastic Four encounter the Black Panther in issue 10 of Marvel Adventures Fantastic Four, and here's a review of it from Silver Bullet Comicbooks' Ray Tate.

I was just enjoying looking over some more Tomm Coker art from our upcoming story. He has such a terrific range of influences like Micheluzzi and Toppi and makes it look so fun to draw, when I know dang well it's really hard. I also like looking at the pencils compared to the inks. I know lots of you like process too, so here's a little bit. I'll just start calling this blog Mystifying Coker.

There's a piece on NPR about Gordon Parks, who just died. I've been in some awe of Parks ever since watching the A&E Biography of him a few years ago and pondering just how many things he did. Our modern culture is overly concerned with specialization and we constantly send the message to the public that you can only do or be good at one thing. But Parks was successful at photography, writing, composing, directing film and more. You could just classify him as a renaissance man, but the truth is that creative people are often creative across the board. And it must have kept him young, because he was still looking great at 93.

My old cubemate from Sony Animation, the talented Ben Ferrer, just wrote saying he saw my credit on ULTRAVIOLET this weekend and I looked to see what files I had left from that job. Not much, because it was done a year ago exactly, but I did dig out three stages of the fake comic book cover that I did. The idea was to give the impression that the character has appeared in comics for years, so Ford Gilmore set many of his talent pool from Illuminati Entertainment on the job. Most of the guys like Dan Norton, Jason Pearson, Sanford Greene, Kieron Dwyer and more did modern style covers, but some went retro like Rick Remender who put on his Wally Wood hat and did an EC Comics cover. In that spirit I went towards the 60's, with the intent to ape the Gold Key Comics covers. I often do CRUDE color roughs with my wacom tablet in photoshop and hope people can intuit what I'm suggesting, and that's what I did with my first idea. So the first take was UltraViolet simultaneously fighting a robot and a caveman, with a background split between an exploding volcano and a giant face.


To me, that's the heart of what comics is (at least from the 60's), but I don't think the people at Sony knew what to make of it. So I paired it down a bit to her fighting a nazi-esque soldier type, and made the background just the volcano. That went over much better with the film folks, so I kept on that route.


And then I spent untold hours digitally painting (as it were) the final. I had to use a friend's G5 to do it any keep up any speed, because they wanted at least 600 dpi images, preferrably 1000 dpi. Even designing and combining text on the other covers required much more processing power than my laptop could handle, but that G5 slapped those files around as if they were sissy little jpegs! The director asked for specific text to accompany the pieces, most being the filmmakers' credits. I made up a Screen Gems logo based on the Gold Key one, and placed text in all the usual places they would have, using Futura. At some point I finally found out that she was fighting vampires in the movie, and gave my bad guy fangs at the last minute.

So I still think they weren't quite enamored with my 60's approach, because mine zips by pretty quickly when you see the movie. But I enjoyed doing it, especially coming up with the 60's style logo. Now that the movie is out I hope some of the other guys will post their covers on their websites. Let me know if you see anyone do it, and I'll link to it.

Another piece for Steven Gettis' cool website where comics artists draw pictures based on literature they like. That's Arturo Perez Reverte, author of The Club Dumas and Alatriste, which is soon to be a movie with Viggo Mortensen. Dark Horse writer/editor Scott Allie put me onto his work a while back, and it's brilliant stuff. Dumas especially perplexes me, as it's two plots running alongside each other that work as one. Gettis has an upcoming book featuring many of the works there. It's interesting to see what authors comics people find inspirational, and watching some struggle to not make them Batman.