Well, here is it, the cover to “Uptown Girl-Little Adventures”.
I will let you bask in it’s beauty.
Amazing, right? I can’t stop looking at it. This was expertly done by my friend Ben Mudek. I’ve known Ben for about 8 years and he’s done a few covers for the monthly comic series and a few of the trades. Of course he did the cover to “Big City Secrets” as well. Incredible work.
This cover is a homage to the “Choose Your Own Adventure” Books that I loved as a kid. What? You guessed that? Oh.
Anyway, what makes this cover so amazing is looking back the original drawing I sent Ben and seeing how much awesomer he made it. I sketched out the cover a few months ago and here it is:
I thought I nailed it pretty good. I love this cover a lot because as exciting as the cover it is, the book contains stories about a bathing suit and recycling. Far from the more adventurous scene on the front. Anyway, here’s the final version I sent to Ben:
And to give him an idea as to what I was thinking, I sent this as well:
Ben wisely ignored my suggestions and created the amazing cover that you see up there.
And here’s the back cover:
Whoa. This is obviously a parody of the old Hostess ads that used to be in comic books. Brian Bastian wrote this little story and it turned out great. I told him to do whatever he wanted and he did a solid job. Ben did a knockout job coloring it and capturing the appearance of an old comic page. Terrific.
Like anything Brian and I work on, I printed the script and kinda panel-ed it out to see how it would look. Usually I draw these breakdowns on the script page itself, along with a rough sketch of any new characters that are there.
Sometimes the script gets tweaked a bit as you can see in the last line compared to what is in the final panel. Sometimes a change happens because I wasn’t paying attention to a small detail in the script. I think that was the reason for the change in this comic. I had the villain hauled away on a stretcher instead of in handcuffs which kinda changed the flow of it.
I love the Pizza Pirate. He might be added to the Walrus’ rogue gallery if the Walrus ever returns…but I don’t think that will be for a while.
After I sketched this out, I drew the final version.
Amazing work as always Ben.
Now, let’s get to work on next year’s book…