Cozy Lummox

2011: Year in Review

2012-01-01T11:57:00.011-05:00

Looks like I forgot to do one of these last year. Oops. Anyway, here's pretty much everything I designed, art directed, illustrated, or wrote in 2011 (apart from stuff that hasn't been announced yet.) In no particular order:

Liar's Kiss by me and Jhomar Soriano

Branded to Kill

Tokyo Drifter

Blind Goddess

Leaping Tall Buildings

Tiny Furniture

The Moment of Truth

The Comics Journal #301

Sweet Smell of Success / art direction by me, illustration by Sean Phillips

Le Havre / art direction by me, illustration by Manule Fior

Three Outlaw Samurai / art direction by me, illustration by Greg Ruth

Godzilla / art direction by me, illustration by Bill Sienkiewicz

A Night to Remember / art direction by me, illustration by Gregory Manchess

On Intersectionality

The Killing / art direction by me, illustration by Connor Willumsen

Senso / art direction by me, illustration by Glen Orbik, type design by F. Ron Miller

The War Room

ATP 2011 postcards

12 Angry Men / art direction by me, illustration by Sean Phillips

Shock Corridor / art direction by me, illustration by Daniel Clowes

The Naked Kiss / art direction by me, illustration by Daniel Clowes

Jim Henson's Tale of Sand / design by me, illustration by Ramón K. Pérez

The Phantom Carriage / art direction by me, design & illustration by Christopher King

Four Feathers / art direction by me, illustration by Gregory Manchess

Broadcast News

Diabolique / art direction by me, design & illustration by Dave Plunkert

The Muses Go To School

Topsy-Turvy / art direction by me, illustration by Yuko Shimizo, type design by F. Ron Miller

The Mikado / art direction by me, illustration by Yuko Shimizo, type design by F. Ron Miller

Island of Lost Souls / art direction by me, design & illustration by Aesthetic Apparatus

EGG # 3 / stories written by me and drawn by Jorge Coelho, Robert Goodin, and (kind of) Leonard Starr. Cover by me.

Here's to a great 2012!!

Branded to Kill / Tokyo Drifter

2011-12-12T09:59:00.000-05:00

I believe these hit stores tomorrow, so now seems like a good time for a process post on these two Seijun Suzuki classics!

The backstory of these films is that Suzuki was working as a “director for hire” for Nikkatsu in the ‘60s, cranking out genre picture after genre picture, getting progressively more and more stylized and “out there,” until culminating with his masterpiece, Branded to Kill, which was so shocking to the suits at Nikkatsu that he got fired and subsequently blacklisted. I had been told that before watching the films and thought, “oh, those provincial businessmen! How shocking can it be?” But I think you’ll agree after watching it, that if you were expecting a simple noir picture and got that, you’d be pretty shocked, too.

Tokyo Drifter is the best (or one of the best, at least) of Suzuki’s genre pictures: a noir story executed in the most stylish way possible. Branded to Kill, by contrast, takes the bare bones of a genre film and builds something completely new and different. Both totally fantastic films, but Branded in particular is in a class all its own. HIGHLY recommended if you haven't seen it before.

In our previous editions (before my time) we had treated them very much as a matched pair, but this time around we wanted to emphasize the differences. We toyed with the idea of giving the two projects to two different designers, but ultimately decided that they should go to the same designer, more to avoid unintentional overlap than anything else.

(We actually first went to an outside designer, who did some fine work that unfortunately just didn't click with how we were hoping to present the films. So we then brought them in house and the project fell to me to design. If that previous designer would like to share his own comps, he's more than welcome to, I just didn't want to presume on his behalf.)

So, taking the films separately, starting with Tokyo Drifter: this one doesn't need to be too overly deep. The movie is slick and just plain cool, so that’s really the main thing we wanted to get across in the design. The way the film uses color and composition is certainly bold and striking, and we definitely wanted to capture something of that feel. There’s also something interesting about the way it encorporates city signage and advertisting (that hair dryer!). Producer Jason Altman really loved the scene early in the film where star Tetsuya Watari is spotlighted against a black background in his bright yellow suit, so we soon narrowed in on that scene and it really became a question of how best to execute it:

The first one was a early favorite, and Bob's your uncle.

For Branded to Kill, we came up with the idea of starting with a base of something relatively straightforward: the kind of thing that could be the cover to the film Nikkatsu might have imagined they were getting, simple genre stuff. Then we take that image and violate it with some seemingly incongruous element, probably the butterflies in the film. Some kind of strong transgressive action in what would otherwise be a very simple cover.

The butterflies are a perfect encapsulation of this idea, because their function in the plot (a butterfly--representing Joe Shishito's growing obsession with the mysterious woman--lands on the barrel of his rifle, upsetting his aim), mirrors their function formally (the butterfly motif keeps recurring, getting more and more abstracted and disruptive), which in turn mirrors what Suzuki is achieving with this film: the ultimate triumph of style over "substance," his own vision as a filmmaker making the otherwise cookie-cutter noir plot almost irrelevant. I was VERY pleased with this idea… I just needed to find a way to execute it!

My first attempt was pretty close, though I probably let myself get carried away with the patterning and such… the rain, in particular, makes the whole thing look a bit like Eurythmics album cover…

I had the idea of including Japanese type on the "underlayer" to suggest a complete Japanese poster that was then being "violated" by the butterfly… but the overall effect was maybe a bit too simple:

A few more variations on those themes…

…but the choice was obviously between the first two. The first was definitely my favorite, but was seen as a bit too "out there," so I tried some tweaks:

Thankfully, everyone agreed those were too tame, and after a little more tweaking, wound up here:

Which I was thrilled with! Definitely my favorite cover (of mine) in a while!

Best of 2011?!

2011-12-03T09:47:00.003-05:00

Hey wow! Critic Nathan Wilson at Graphic Novel Reporter just selected Liar's Kiss as one of the Best Graphic Novels of 2011! (You have to scroll down a bit in that link.) He also says the book "combines all the flavors of a classic Bogart film with the soulless debauchery of a Jim Thompson novel," which might be my favorite pull-quote yet. Thanks, Nathan!

(P.S. Hope to see any NYC-based folks at the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival in a couple hours!)

Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival 2011

2011-12-01T11:28:00.004-05:00

This Saturday is the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival, at which I'll be set up with a table, selling the usual comics and prints, including Liar's Kiss and a hot-off-the-presses new issue of EGG! (That's the cover above.) The Festival looks to be expanding exponentially this year, with TONS of great artists in what I imagine will be a tightly-packed room. New Yorkers, elbow your way in and say hi!

The Festival is in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church at 275 North 8th street. As you can see on this (PDF) map, I'll be upstairs toward the back, table 27. It runs from noon to 9 PM, hope to see you there!

Miami International Book Fair!

2011-11-15T12:06:00.004-05:00

For what it's worth, this blog isn't *quite* dead, just a bit fallow lately... I have a couple of posts in the queue that I'll get up here soon(ish)...

In the meantime, anyone in the Miami area is invited to come check me out this weekend at the Miami International Book Fair! The fine people at the Book Fair have very generously invited me out there to participate in a panel and talk about Liar's Kiss, which I am both excited and frankly a little nervous about. Should be a fantastic event, though! In addition to the talented folks sharing the stage with me at our panel (Rob Venditti, Philip Gelatt, and Tyler Crook), the HUGE festival includes appearances from people like Kate Beaton, Dan Clowes, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jennifer Hayden, Michael Ondaatje, Chuck Palahniuk, Seth, Adrian Tomine, Colson Whitehead, etc, etc, etc...

Our panel is 11 AM on Saturday, so if you're planning on being at the book fair, please do come by!

Also, just in case I forget to mention it later, I'll also be appearing at the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival on December 3rd in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. And if all goes to plan I should have some new comics in one form or another to debut there.

NYCC 2011

2011-10-13T17:33:00.003-05:00

Hey, remember how I have this blog? Yeah, me neither. Anyway.

In case anyone was wondering, yes, I will be at New York Comic Con this weekend. Mostly hanging out at the Top Shelf table, signing copies of the not-really-a-'new-release-anymore-but-still-worth-your-time Liar's Kiss and just generally being personable. Stop by, say hi!

ATP 2011

2011-09-30T10:59:00.006-05:00

This year's ATP posters... or, postcards, actually. Collect 'em all! Trade with friends!

More info on the film schedule for this weekend here.

TR!CKSTER / San Diego

2011-07-20T17:07:00.004-05:00

In case you haven't already heard the news, I'm curating a small gallery show in San Diego this weekend. Criterion is partnering with the TR!CKSTER crew to present this one-night-only show at the TR!CKSTER space. I think you'll agree it's a pretty stellar pool of talent: Mike Allred, Scott C., Josh Cochran, Francesco Francavilla, Robert Goodin, Victor Kerlow, Ted Mathot, Scott Morse, Sho Murase, Bill Presing, Jim Rugg, Yuko Shimizu, Bill Sienkiewicz, and Connor Willumsen have all generously donated their time and talent to pay tribute to the films of Akira Kurosawa. The show starts at 7:00 PM this Friday night and runs until 1:00 AM. It's free to enter, but proceeds from the sale of the artworks will go to benefit the Japan Society Earthquake Relief Fund.

There's also going to be Criterion DVD and swag available at TR!CKSTER throughout the weekend, and Kent Williams may be stopping by at some point to sign Rashomon posters. For those not already on the bandwagon, TR!CKSTER is the spot across the street from Comic-con where all the "cool kids" are going to be hanging out all week. With talks and "symposia" and rock shows and specialty cocktails, not to mention lots of cool exclusive stuff to buy, TR!CKSTER is the place to be in San Diego. And when I say "across the street"…

…I really mean it!

So if you're one of the 125,000 people descending on that city for Comic-con, hop across the street Friday night for what should be one hell of a great show--and hopefully a pretty good party, too!

(Below: a sneak preview of Josh Cochran's Throne of Blood piece and Victor Kerlow's I Live in Fear.)

Also: just a reminder that I'll be in San Diego myself this Friday and Saturday, splitting my time between TR!CKSTER and the Top Shelf table at SDCC proper, hawking Liar's Kiss. I'll try to update the tweetymachine with my location at any given moment if you want to try to track me down. Hope to see you there!

San Diego

2011-06-20T15:20:00.004-05:00

Just booked my flights: I'm officially headed to the San Diego Comic Con this year. I'm busy enough this summer that I can't justify the full 5 days, so I'm only going to be there Friday and Saturday (July 22-23). (Limited engagement! Catch me while you can!) I'll be promoting Liar's Kiss with the Top Shelf folks, plus I'm also involved with another fun event that should be of interest to readers of this blog. I shouldn't talk about that yet but it'll be announced next week. (Here and elsewhere.)

This'll be the farthest I've yet travelled on my "book tour," and my first time at the (in?)famous SDCC... I'm mildly intimidated, but also psyched! Hope to see you there!

Tweet, tweet

2011-06-17T10:18:00.004-05:00

Two (?) years behind the curve as usual, I gave in and signed up for the Twitter. I don't promise to have all that much to say, and anyone who follows this blog will know that limiting myself to 160 characters is going to be difficult, to say the least. But if you're interested: @EricSkillman.

Lots of irons in the fire at the moment, but I've got a couple of good design process posts cooking. I hope to find the time to write them up properly soon. (Cul-de-sac should be first on deck, I think...)

Heroes Con this weekend!

2011-06-01T10:20:00.002-05:00

If you're anywhere near the Charlotte, NC area this weekend, come on out to Heroes Con at the Charlotte Convention Center! I'll be set up somewhere in the "Indie Island" area, I believe adjacent to the Top Shelf table. Prints, comics, and copies of Liar's Kiss will all be available for sale.

And for those who only check this blog for the design talk, I'll be participating in a panel discussion on design in comics on Saturday at 1:30, room 203A. Here's a description of the panel from moderator Rich Barrett:

"What is it that draws your wandering eye to one particular book on a shelf that is brimming with loud, look-at-me, multi-colored covers? It is the design of the book that makes that first impression count. Join cartoonist Rich Barrett (Nathan Sorry) as he dissects the art and function of Design with some of the most important and innovative names in the business: Jonathan Hickman (FF, The Nightly News), Chris Pitzer (all things Adhouse) Matt Kindt (Superspy) Drew Weing (Set to Sea), Eric Skillman (Liar’s Kiss) and Jim Rugg (Afrodisiac)"

That's a pretty fun line-up, I'm sure you'll agree. Hopefully I won't embarrass myself too badly speaking in public!

Solaris by Sam Smith

2011-05-27T16:34:00.003-05:00

You guys all have Sam Smith's blog bookmarked by now, right? So you don't need me to tell you about his awesome process posts, like this one for Solaris? I didn't think so.

Liar's Kiss hits stores this week!

2011-05-16T22:14:00.004-05:00

Just a quick post to bump this info back to the top of the page, given it's timeliness: Liar's Kiss hits stores this Wednesday! Obviously if you're any kind of regular reader here, I've talked this thing to death, but for those who want a little preview, the first few pages are here, and you can browse through a selection of my favorite panels if you scroll through the blog archives.

And anyone in the New York area should consider themselves invited to the Release Party on Thursday, May 19th, at Desert Island in Williamsburg, Brookyn, 7-9 PM. Free beer! [Not free] books and hand-pulled silkscreens! Hope to see you there!

Liar's Kiss Design Process

2011-05-12T12:26:00.000-05:00

Most exciting design process post yet? Maybe! (For me, anyway. Your mileage may vary.)

This, obviously, was a big one for me: my own book! (Or, mine and Jhomar Soriano's, more correctly.) I've talked in the past about my half-baked theory where "art" communicates your own ideas and "design" communicates someone else's… but this time there'd be no client to blame things on if the cover doesn't come out right. This had better be a damn sexy cover, or I won't be able to show my face at the weekly graphic designers meeting again. (Note: there is no such meeting. Or, if there is, I've never been invited.)

Naturally Jhomar had to draw it—his art is probably the best thing about the book, and it'd be crazy not to advertise it on the cover. But at the same time I wanted it to feel "design-y," something more than just another page from the story. And, selfishly, I wanted to put my own visual stamp on it, too, if possible.

My initial, not-that-inspired idea was something like the following sketch (cobbled together from Jhomar's interior art):

I liked the idea of cropping the top of Abbey (the woman)'s face, to emphasize her lips (playing off the "kiss" in the title) and keep her intentions a bit mysterious, and Nick kind of hovering around in the background seemed appropriate, if not particularly motivated. I explained the idea to Jhomar, who turned it into this lovely drawing:

Which I proceeded to color and add type to:

(I should mention that at this point in the book's development we were still planning on printing the whole thing in color, though we (okay: I, really) ultimately decided that wasn't getting the mood we wanted as well as the stark b&w did, so we dropped it. The colors here reflect the basic look of what we were doing inside.)

So, anyway, even before we get to the half-assed type design… it's just not quite there. It's a fine drawing, fits the story, but doesn't elevate anything. Not enough "wow" factor.

The story was intended to be the quintessential noir, so it was important to communicate that classic noir vibe… but at the same time I wanted to find a new tweak on the usual visual language. I love what Hard Case Crime does, for example, with their totally classic pulp style, but that kind of painted look isn't really Jhomar's style, and besides it's kind of done to death in a comic book context.

So I tried to think of what I liked best about Jhomar's art—the gorgeous thin lines, for example. I tried to get back to the roots of crime imagery, what makes that work? Shadows and angles, sure, but also: seedy locales and flickering neon. What about running the lifework without any spotted blacks at all, to evoke neon signs in the night? I did a quick (EXTREMELY quick) sketch as proof of concept and sent this note to Jhomar:

…anyway, here's my idea: Abbey, naked and wrapped in sheets, sprawled out on the bed in Nick's office, playing with Nick's gun. The room is totally dark, except for light pouring in from the open door, where we can see the shadow of Nick in his fedora and coat. Then wrapping all the way around to the back cover, just show all the clutter and mess of Nick's office, with whatever noir-ish details you can fit in there... photos on his desk, etc. I'm attaching a rough sketch of what I'm thinking of, hopefully that helps give you an idea.

And here's the most important part: I think the whole drawing should be OUTLINES ONLY: NO shadows or blacks of any kind. The outlines should be as detailed as possible, but all consistent thin lines, no big areas of shadow. So you give me something like the black and white sketch attached, and I'll reverse parts of it to make something like the color version. Does that make sense?

And please feel free to pose Abbey in different ways... I kind of like the legs in my sketch, but I can't quite figure out an interesting way for her arms to hold the gun. I'm sure you can figure something out there. Maybe sketch out a couple different poses and we can pick the best one? We probably shouldn't see her face, but other than that whatever you want to do is fine.

Jhomar liked the idea, and quickly sent a few sketches:

I liked the first, and set it into my layout, which quickly showed that the angles needed to change just a bit to fill the space properly.

Jhomar tightened the sketch up a bit...

...and we had a working sketch. I liked my new title treatment, but had a little trouble at first figuring out just how to get our names, etc, on there. This, for example, was a terrible idea:

Ultimately I went for a much simpler approach to the names, as you'll see in the final, below. I was getting sick of the red, though… it had always been kind of a placeholder color. Black, white, and red always works… but is used so often that there's almost always another color that could work BETTER. So going back to the whole "neon" concept, I figured just brighten it up to a super-hot neon pink. I thought fluorescent pantone at first, but the Top Shelf guys weren't crazy about that idea, so I settled on a more magenta-ish (but still pretty bold) pink on the final cover. Anyway, once the sketch was approved by the fine folks at Top Shelf, Jhomar completed the final (and gorgeous!) drawing:

And here's the shadow he made, which is kind of cool by itself:

I combined the elements and assembled the final cover, seen here in all its glory:

We did talk briefly about putting a spot varnish on the pink lines, to give it even more "pop," but the printer felt that the lines were a bit too thin for them to guarantee the varnish could register correctly, so we decided against it. Anyway, having held the sexy little hardcover in my hands, I can say with certainty that I'm extremely happy with how it came together; hopefully the world at large will agree next week!

Just in case there's anyone out there who ISN'T sick of me shilling this book yet, I'll mention again that it'll be for sale in comic shops across the country this coming Wednesday, May 18. (And presumably book stores around the same time, though I think they tend to be a little less release-date oriented than comic shops.) Or there's always Amazon.

And anyone in the NYC area can come on out to Desert Island in Williamsburg, Brooklyn on Thursday May 19th from 7-9 to pick up a copy of the book and maybe an exclusive hand-pulled silkscreen poster, have a beer, say "hi." (I'm friendly, I promise!)

TCAF postgame / what's next

2011-05-10T12:36:00.003-05:00

I'm a little swamped at the moment so I shouldn't write too much, but it's worth a quick update to mention what a great time I had at TCAF… Couldn't have asked for a better experience for my first outside-of-NYC show. Thrilled to meet (or reconnect with) plenty of fantastic people, like Connor Willumsen, Darwyn Cooke, Michael Cho, Becky Cloonan, Scott Campbell, Top Shelf table-mates Matt Kindt, Jeff Lemire, Jess Fink, the Immonens, and especially roomies Nate Powell and Leigh Walton. And plenty more than that, too, but that's probably enough name-dropping for one post. Also very happy to meet blog-readers in a new setting--who knew this little blog had such an international audience?

Next on the agenda is the official Liar's Kiss release party at Desert Island in Williamsburg, Brooklyn on May 19th. (The book itself should hit comic shops--and presumably bookstores and Amazon queues--on the 18th.) Come on by to pick up a copy, have a beer, and maybe even grab yourself one of the exclusive hand-pulled silkscreen promo posters that decorate this post.

Hope to see you there!

Thursday, May 19th, 7-9 PM
Desert Island, 540 Metropolitan Ave, Brooklyn

(For the record, those are just jpegs of the art; the actual posters are a bit large for my scanner at home, but have a bit more of a "handmade" look--also a brighter, more flourescent pink.)

In Toronto this weekend

2011-05-02T15:12:00.003-05:00

Come by and see me at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival this Saturday and Sunday. This will actually be my very first convention outside of NYC, and I hear it's a good one. Free to the public, too, so if you're in the Toronto area you've got no excuse! I'll be at the Top Shelf table all weekend, along with a killer line-up that includes Jeff Lemire, Kathryn & Stuart Immonen, Nate Powell, Ludovic Debeurme, and Jess Fink. You'd be forgiven for noting (correctly) that I'm the least exciting thing going on at that table, but come on by and say hi anyway.

In related news, here's a Q&A with me on the National Post website.

Liar's Kiss Release Party: May 19th

2011-04-18T11:25:00.004-05:00

I'll post more about this as it gets closer, but just wanted to mention that we've scheduled the official Liar's Kiss Release Party for next month at Williamsburg's favorite comic shop:

Thursday, May 19th, 7-9 PM
Desert Island, 540 Metropolitan Ave, Brooklyn

Sadly, it looks like Jhomar will not be able to make it out from the Philippines, but I'll be there, happy to scribble whatever you like into your very own copy of LK. So if you're in the NYC area, mark your calendars now, hope to see you there...

MoCCA Postgame 2011

2011-04-11T12:24:00.004-05:00

Fantastic experience at MoCCA this year! Liar's Kiss sold out mid-day Sunday—sorry to anyone who wasn't able to get a copy!

And as always, great to get to catch up with some folks I hadn't seen in a while, put some faces to names I hadn't met before, and of course pick up some great new comics. I haven't quite made my way through all my swag yet, but early favorites include new Matt Wiegle comics (Wiegle for Tarzan, and, even better, his story in Papercutter #13), finally getting a chance to read Benjamin Marra's Night Business (which is just as balls-to-the-wall awesome as everyone keeps saying), Jason Viola's fantastic Who is Amy Amoeba? (which seems to be available to read online at that link--recommended!), Brecht Evans' gorgeous Night Animals (The Wrong Place is next on my list), and Victor Kerlow's genius high-concept sketchbook, "People From Yesterday."

Very curious to hear people's reactions to Liar's Kiss now that it's out in the world... if you're one of the lucky folks who picked one up, I'd love to hear from you! Drop me a line or leave a note in the comments, and hopefully I'll see some of you (and new people besides) at TCAF in Toronto or Heroes Con in Charlotte…

[Blog housekeeping note: I think I'm going to pause the LK preview panels for a bit... if I keep putting them up at this pace I'll have posted the whole book soon! (out of order, but still.) But I'll try to keep the design process posts coming as best I can.]

MoCCA update

2011-04-10T07:55:00.003-05:00

Thanks to everyone who came out yesterday! I know I missed a few people who came by my table while I was over at the Top Shelf table, or vice versa, but hopefully I wasn't TOO hard to track down. I know we've only got a few copies of Liar's Kiss left, so if you were planning to pick one up today, I recommend coming by the Top Shelf table early...

LK34

2011-04-09T00:00:00.001-05:00

From Liar's Kiss, by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, available for pre-order now.

LK33

2011-04-08T00:00:00.002-05:00

From Liar's Kiss, by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, available for pre-order now.

MoCCA 2011

2011-04-06T10:35:00.005-05:00

In case I haven't mentioned it enough, I'm going to be at the MoCCA Festival this coming weekend, selling the usual assortment of comics, prints, (yes, I should have more goldfish prints), etc… and of course, the world-premiere debut of Liar's Kiss!

The MoCCA folks seem to have included my name on the list of "special guests" in the press release, which you might think would indicate they're running low on the "special"… but actually the line-up this year looks pretty great, including Criterion vets Adrian Tomine, Kate Beaton, Victor Kerlow, Scott C., and plenty more great artists besides. And that's not even factoring in the best part of MoCCA, which is discovering some new book or artist that you would otherwise never have heard of. I highly recommend the whole MoCCA experience.

You can find me at either my own table (E17--in the back, toward the middle) or periodically at the Top Shelf table (J5/K5--in the front, on your left as you enter). Come on by and become one of the first people in the world to purchase your very own copy of Liar's Kiss! Come early enough on Saturday and you could be the very first! I will happily note your copy as such, if it is the case. OooOOooh...

Also: for those not in the NYC area, I'm also currently planning on being TCAF in Toronto May 7th-8, and Heroes Con in Charlotte June 3rd-5th, as part of my international book tour! (What? Canada counts!) For those not in any of the above places, there's always Amazon...

Hope to see you this weekend!

(Above: Peter Kuper's poster for MoCCA.)

LK32

2011-04-06T00:00:00.000-05:00

From Liar's Kiss, by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, available for pre-order now.

LK31

2011-04-04T00:00:00.001-05:00

From Liar's Kiss, by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, available for pre-order now.

LK30

2011-04-01T00:00:00.000-05:00

From Liar's Kiss, by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, available for pre-order now.

More Senso!

2011-03-31T10:14:00.002-05:00

I did add just add this to the original post also, but it's worth highlighting on it's own: For those who were interested in the Senso process, F. Ron Miller just posted his half of the story (taking that cover illustration and rippling it out into a fantastic package) on his own blog. Well worth a read!

LK29

2011-03-30T00:00:00.000-05:00

From Liar's Kiss, by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, available for pre-order now.

Senso

2011-03-29T11:00:00.002-05:00

Senso was absolutely a group effort: I worked with illustrator Glen Orbik and Criterion Art Director Sarah Habibi worked with designer F. Ron Miller to get to the final result. And I have to say, I'm really really happy with how everything came together! This post will be primarily about the cover, so let me start by sharing the text of the note I first sent to Glen Orbik:

[...] So here’s what we’re thinking: Visconti said that he wanted to show in this film the “melodrama of life”, to show that big operatic melodrama can be powerful and meaningful. So all of the emotions of the film are deliberately heightened and exaggerated, but in a deadly serious way. So we want the cover to have that same feeling of heightened emotion, without straying into tongue-in-cheek self-parody. We thought your style, so influenced by the great mid-century illustrators, would be perfect for this.

We’ve had one fairly specific idea that we think you could execute really well. Taking inspiration from the costuming of the film, with his white uniform with the cape, and her progression of black dresses, I had the idea of something very graphic, where the black and white areas are reduced to simple shapes but all the other details are rendered very painterly and realistically. Something like this kind of thing:

That’s an old Mike Ludlow illustration from (I think) the Saturday Evening Post, but hopefully it makes clear the kind of thing I’m thinking of. So imagine a black background, her in the foreground in her black dress, him behind her in his white uniform, so the shape of him helps to outline the shape of her. This has the added advantage of showing the lovers together but not in a traditional embrace; ideally they’d even be looking away from each other.

The final piece of the puzzle, I think, ought to be the red, quite, and green leaflets dropped on the opera in the very first scene of the film, fluttering in the blackness around them, both to add some splashes of color, and to suggest the political undertones of the film (Italian flag colors, etc). Here’s a very quick and dirty photoshop mock-up of the kind of thing I’m thinking of:

The poses here aren’t ideal--the image of her is actually kind of alright, I think, in the kind of emotion it expresses, but his pose is a bit stilted and nothing special… plus the leaflets obviously look horribly silly in this sketch, but I have faith that they could be striking and beautiful when rendered as part of a painting. But hopefully it reads as proof-of-concept, at least? (And just to be doubly-clear, I’m not suggesting black & white imagery, that was just easier to throw together.)

It’s also worth mentioning that we’ll probably want a decent amount of space at the top (more than in my crappy photoshop sketch, even), for title, director name, etc. Just something to keep in mind.

I should say that this is a lot more specific instruction than I normally like to give to an artist, but the nature of this film just lead us to this idea, and I thought you’d be the man to execute it. If you have any other ideas after watching the film, we’re more than happy to have you sketch those out, as well, but this is the idea that was most exciting to us in the abstract, so we definitely want to see some variation on this sketched out.

(I should take a moment here to credit Sean Phillips with introducing me to the work of Mike Phillips, as seen above. For Sean's own take on a mid-century illustration style, check out Sweet Smell of Success.)

So, working from that incredibly specific brief, Glen sent the following sketches:

Glen also sent along these references for the faces, and a period reference for her pose, to help clarify the sketch.

Glen's new ideas were excellent, too, but at the end of the day the second one was too focused on the bedroom (we wouldn't want to give anyone the impression that this is Dangerous Liaisons or something), and the third made her into a bit too much of an ingenue, when really she's kind of swept up in things, not ultimately in much control at all…

So we were still rolling with the original idea, but we thought her pose wasn't quite right… a bit too heroic. And the wind-swept leaflets were a bit overdramatic, even for this film. So we asked for a revised sketch, and got this (with the understanding that the leaflets would change from sketch to execution):

Closer, but not quite enough of a departure. We asked for another take, and also asked to maybe try the figures higher up in the frame, to accommodate a bottom-of-the-page title treatment. Glen sent the following, with and without the leaflets. Again, reference for her face follows:

We approved the last of those and were off to the races! Glen quickly turned around the final painting, which was absolutely stunning!

…and here's the final, composed cover with type by Ron Miller:

EDITED TO ADD: The story continues over at F. Ron Miller's "Flog."

LK28

2011-03-28T00:00:00.001-05:00

From Liar's Kiss, by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, available for pre-order now.

LK27

2011-03-25T00:00:00.001-05:00

From Liar's Kiss, by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, available for pre-order now.

LK26

2011-03-23T00:00:00.001-05:00

From Liar's Kiss, by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, available for pre-order now.

Close-Up

2011-03-22T11:00:00.001-05:00

So… Close-Up. This one really surprised me when I watched it; great, but not at all what I was expecting. I thought it was going to be a real challenge to design a cover for, since it's very much a film of ideas more than visuals, but as it turned out we hit on a great basic concept in the briefs meeting, and the rest pretty much just came down to execution.

The basic idea, of zooming in super-close on a printed image to reveal the process dots that make up the printed image, might seem a bit on-the-nose for a film titled "Close-Up," but is actually kind of perfect: Kiaristami's whole methodology in the film is to lay bare the structure of filmmaking, it's both the main mover of the plot and the theme behind the whole thing. But then, of course, he's playing with you, too, you're never entirely sure what's real and what isn't, what's "re-enactment" and what's documentary, and even some of the things that seem to be very real--the final scene, for example, where the audio cuts in and out--are actually very deliberate choices to draw attention to the constructs of filmmaking.

Similarly, the 4-color process dots in the cover here draw your attention to the actual process of printing, but of course are actually an affectation… there's no press in the world that would use dots that big. (That's one reason why the cover was made totally digitally… we could have actually printed something out very small, then scanned that in and blown it up, but I liked the artificiality in this case, I thought it worked toward the theme.)

So anyway, with that idea in mind I put together the following comps. The very first one I did is the clearest execution of the concept, taking an image from the lovely scene at the end of the film--the greens and pinks really hold the whole thing together, (and it didn't hurt that this seemed like a good moment to use green in the design for an Iranian film):

I was pretty convinced that was the way to go, but I did a few more variations on the theme just to give people some options to chose from. This first one below is kind of interesting, but kind of blows the 4-color process concept by printing all 4 colors at the same angle (i.e. directly on top of each other). It's a neat look, though, I should just it for something else sometime… (I recommend clicking to embiggen.)

The rest are just variations on the theme, not terrible but not as nice as the first one. So that's where we wound up!

Hey, look!

2011-03-22T07:59:00.003-05:00

The book is printed! It's a real thing and not some elaborate prank someone was playing on me! (Excuse the lousy iPhone photos, the pink is brighter in person.)

Get your own here,* or at MoCCA in NYC on April

*Price has dropped to $9.66 on Amazon, by the way... that's only $.08 per page!

LK25

2011-03-21T00:00:00.001-05:00

From Liar's Kiss, by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, available for pre-order now.

LK24

2011-03-18T00:00:00.000-05:00

From Liar's Kiss, by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, available for pre-order now.

Interview with me

2011-03-16T15:34:00.004-05:00

I talk about Liar's Kiss and the similarities between writing comics and art directing over at MTV Geek.

LK23

2011-03-16T00:00:00.001-05:00

From Liar's Kiss, by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, available for pre-order now.

The Comics Journal #301

2011-03-15T11:00:00.000-05:00

The Comics Journal #301 doesn't hit stores for a little bit yet, but I thought this was worth posting now in honor of last week's long-overdue and very promising relaunch of TCJ.com.

This was such a monster of a project, I'm worried this post doesn't do it justice. But for the sake of sanity, I'll stick to the initial concept/cover design here... you'll have to buy the magazine to see the interiors. (Which I highly recommend doing, by the way... last time I checked Amazon was selling the thing for like $16.50, which for 624 heavily-illustrated pages is nothing short of crazy.)

I was pretty excited when Jacob Covey emailed me to ask if I might be interested in re-designing the venerable Comics Journal for its upcoming relaunch as an annual (rather than monthly) publication. Then I found out it was going to be 600-something pages. But by that point it was too late to say no! (I'm kidding... mostly.)

Since this issue was to be something of a change in format, my initial impulse was to do something expansive, that related more to the Journal generally--or even comics criticism generally--than to any specific content-related story. To get away from the idea of a "cover story." I had a cover concept in mind that I *almost* sent but didn't, but I'm not going to share that idea here because I will absolutely use is on something, someday... (If anyone has a book on Wally Wood they're putting together? Call me.)

BUT, the issue in question was to be very R. Crumb-centric: a 50-page interview with the man, plus a 100+ page critical roundtable on his recently released Book of Genesis Illustrated, and another article on Crumb in the '60s besides. So obviously Crumb is a major selling point for this issue, and since he's just about the biggest-name "alt"-cartoonist out there, it seemed crazy to use anything but Crumb on the cover. So, starting from that foundation, here's the pitch I sent to Gary Groth and the other editors of the Journal, with a few added notes in italics to clarify some things that might otherwise be unclear):

Some thoughts on TCJ...

FORMAT:

It sounds like the fact that the ads are already in [ads had been sold for the issue before they decided on the format change, and so the advertisers submitted their ads in the same size/proportions/etc as previous issues.] is probably going to limit us to keeping the same size/shape as the previous issue.

If we COULD change formats, I had been planning to suggest something a little less magazine-y and more bookish; something closer to 6.25" x 8.5", not unlike that issue of L'eprouvette that Kirsty was kind enough to send over. I think it's enough of a shift from what's come before, and it would accommodate the sketchbooks and comic reprints perfectly. If there's any way to adjust the ads or make them fit in a new size, that's the size I'd recommend.

BUT, if we CAN'T change the dimensions of the book, we're left with the problem of how to differentiate the new, bigger, annual Journal from the old, smaller, monthly magazine. I know cost is an issue but if we're stuck in the same size, I think switching from softcover to hardcover is a pretty solid way to signal the shift, and hopefully bring a little extra attention to the relaunch. If that's not an option, then hopefully the designs below will do enough good work to differentiate the new format on their own.

COVER DESIGNS:

I think these are relatively self-explainatory--big pretty Crumb art, tough to argue with, right? The only real formal conceit is to basically shunt all of what would normally be the magazine cover copy onto the spine, which serves a few purposes: (1) it highlights the thickness of the book, just how much is in there; (2) it totally separates the art from the words, which I think has a nice, subtle resonance for a book that is, after all, writing about art, and (3) it reflects the shift from a magazine-style scenario, where everything's displayed cover-out because nothing has a spine, to a bookshelf scenario, where the majority of the time the book is going to be displayed spine-out on a shelf.

(And of course the current spine copy is not final; we can highlight whatever stories you want to highlight.)

I'm envisioning it printing as 3 colors--black, orange, and white--on a brown kraft paper, so that the texture of the paper really comes through and gives it a nice tactile sense. I think the same basic idea would work as either a softcover or a wrapped-board hardcover.

I quite like the Sodom and Gomorrah image, myself--it has a nice, "hide your children, Comics are coming!" vibe to it, and it's probably the best single drawing in Genesis, for my money--but since that one kind of needs to wrap around, I'm also including a second option, in case we wind up needing to print an ad on the back cover (which would be a shame)...

I should note: the comps above were made at 6.25" x 8.5", but either would work fine at 7.5" x 9.25" as well... here's the Sodom & Gomorrah one resized:

SKETCHBOOKS / McBOING BOING:

The other big open question, of course, it how to treat the reprints and sketchbooks. As Gary and I talked about, I don't really like the idea of printing them as separate booklets shrink-wrapped together. [Which was an idea that had been floated by the Fantagraphics folks.] The shrink wrap keeps people from browsing in the store, and then once you've got it home it's not really part of the same magazine any more... the "text" goes on your bookshelf and the "comic" probably goes in a box somewhere. Which isn't the end of the world, I suppose, but if you're publishing it as one product it should stay one product, right?

So, I don't see any reason we can't reprint the McBoing Boing [Gerald McBoing Boing is the name of the comic being reprinted] stuff within the body of the magazine.... my preference would be to set it off by printing those signatures on a different paper stock (ideally something like that nice newsprint-y stock DC's been using for their Kirby reprints), but if that turns out to be a difficulty for the printer, we could certainly achieve a similar effect using a very light 5th color to "yellow" the relevant pages slightly, thus setting them off from the rest of the book at a glance. (It's worth mentioning: the reprints and sketchbook pages would fit pretty perfectly in the 6.25" x 8.5" size (which is why I was suggesting it), but of course we can make them work in the other size if need be).

The sketchbook stuff: I still haven't seen the Dixon or Woodring sketchbooks, but I'm told they're not dissimilar to the Hensley stuff, format-wise. We could certainly use a third paper stock there, something a little heavier and extra toothy, that would feel like sketchbook paper... Or again, we could set them off with a 5th color on the same paper as the rest of the book.

ANYWAY...

Hopefully we'll be able to get the ads/format issues sorted within the next few days so that I can get started on the interiors. Let me know what you think of all this, and thanks again for getting me involved in this.

So... thoughts?

So. They dug my cover idea and I reformatted it to a size that was the same proportions as previous journals but slightly smaller. Then came the interiors, and taking you through that process would probably take 600 pages! Suffice it to say, budget and space concerns caused me to scale down a few of my loftier aspirations, (as is only fair), but overall I'm pretty happy with how the book came out. (Or, how the design came out--I haven't seen the printed book yet, fingers crossed it'll look great.)

One last thing to point out, which is the lettering on the spine: I felt like mixing Crumb's artwork with hard-edged computer typography would do it a disservice, so I set it in Yoter, then printed out that type at something like 400% size in a very light blue, and traced that with my trusty Sharpie markers. I then scanned that in and placed it in the file, and hopefully that gives it the feeling of being hand-drawn, but with the even-handedness of typography. (Plus it provides a bridge to the typeset interiors, which use Yoter for headlines and such.)

Anyway, here's the final cover with approved copy from the TCJ folks:

LK22

2011-03-14T00:00:00.001-05:00

From Liar's Kiss, by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, available for pre-order now.

LK21

2011-03-11T00:00:00.000-05:00

From Liar's Kiss, by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, available for pre-order now.

LK20

2011-03-09T00:00:00.000-05:00

From Liar's Kiss, by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, available for pre-order now.

Gristle

2011-03-08T09:05:00.000-05:00

I don't talk enough about book covers on this blog... I do fewer of them than I do DVD covers, but I've done a bunch, and some are alright. It's nice to keep my hand in, as books are often a different kind of process than DVDs, since you don't have an already-established visual aesthetic to work within (or play off of, as the case may be). I just turned in a couple sets of comps for a couple books that I was pretty happy with, which inspired me to raid the archives for a few older book projects. Here's one from last year, Gristle from the New Press.

A pretty straightforward project, this one was mainly a question of locking down the details. When I was assigned the title, I was given a concept that came from the book's editors, Miyun Park and Moby. (Yes, that Moby.) idea was to show a butcher's diagram of a cow, but replace the labels (shank, ribeye, etc) with the chapter names from the book. Simple, graphic, cool idea. I found a diagram to reference, (since I can't quite fabricate a cow from memory), then built an image around that:

I felt I should include at least one other idea of my own, just for the sake of appearances, and found this image on some stock image site. (Corbis or Getty or something, I can't remember.) My thinking was, I'm not a vegetarian myself, but I thought this image was somewhat less than the most appetizing way to present meat, especially when paired with that title, and maybe that would fit the book's contents?

But like I say, I dug the editors' concept so I was happy when they decided to stick with that. They weren't quite happy with my color choices, however, and so asked me to take another crack at it. Also, I was asked to try adding a sad little eye to the cow, to make it a bit more sympathetic-looking. (I was skeptical of the eye at first, but I think it kinda works.) They also felt like I had been a little too flowery with the script font, which... fair enough. Anyway, here's my rainbow of options from the second round:

For some reason I can't recall I was really reluctant to make the title and lines in black, but of course the one time I did that it was the one they picked. (Actually, that was a weird week where every approved design was bright yellow for some reason... this, Political Awakenings and The Playwright were all around that time.)

Originally the publisher had asked me to make Moby's name bigger than his co-editor's, him being a rock star and all, but to his credit I believe it was he who asked for the two editors' names to be featured equally, so I made that last tweak and we had a final cover:

LK19

2011-03-07T00:00:00.002-05:00

From Liar's Kiss, by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, available for pre-order now.

LK18

2011-03-04T00:00:00.001-05:00

From Liar's Kiss, by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, available for pre-order now.

Yet Another Review

2011-03-03T15:23:00.005-05:00

Hey! I just realized what day it is... Happy Buster Cornelius Day, everyone!

("Buster Cornelius" by the Colorblind James Experience.)*

Also: another little Liar's Kiss review, this one from Paul Gravett. The bit on our book is short and a little ways down in a longer post, but here's the meat of it:

Reading a full preview, I was much impressed by this duo’s debut collaboration. Blending Chandler-esque repartee by Skillman and classy Risso-style chiaroscuro artwork, intercut with grey-washes for flashbacks by Soriano, the pair serve up a solidly-crafted, morally ambiguous cocktail of murder, sex, betrayals and vengeance, gripping you all the way, down to its final twisted twists.

*It has been pointed out to me that Buster Cornelius Day is in fact the 3rd of MAY, not March. So, mea culpa, and now we all have something to look forward to.

LK17

2011-03-02T00:00:00.001-05:00

From Liar's Kiss, by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, available for pre-order now.

LK16

2011-02-28T00:00:00.001-05:00

From Liar's Kiss, by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, available for pre-order now.

Make Way For Tomorrow

2011-02-25T12:35:00.000-05:00

If we at Criterion have yet had a more perfect pairing of artist and film than Seth designing Leo McCarey's* Make Way For Tomorrow, I'd be hard-pressed to think of it. I was privileged to work with Seth on this project, but apart from my one half-formed idea about a dusty photo on a mantle that was quickly (and rightly) discarded, conceptually, this was entirely Seth's show, so I won't write too much on the "process" in that big picture sense. The only "revision" to his cover concept was to ask him to tweak the title treatment in his original sketch:

...to accommodate the Criterion branding:

But I thought it would be interesting to take a quick look at the technical details of how this project was created. Anyone familiar with Seth's work** will probably not be overly surprised by the fact that he doesn't design with a computer. Instead, for this project at least, he would send me sketches of how he'd like the layout to be organized, along with finished art for each color of ink that we'd be using. So, for example, here's the sketch for one spread in the booklet:

And here's the component art:
Black:

And blue:

I combined all of that in InDesign, added the film framegrab imagery, the body text in Stempel Garamond and headlines in a font I built from letters that Seth made for us,*** and here's the result:

And here's how the booklet cover (probably my favorite bit of art in the package) came together:

Sketch:

Black, silver, and purple plates:

And final assembled art (wraparound front and back covers):

The process was the same for the menus (except in Photoshop rather than InDesign), from early color rough to final execution:

Thanks again to Seth for allowing me to show these bits of process, and for a fantastic design!

*Apropos of nothing, isn't it absolutely bizarre that the same man directed this quiet, heartbreaking film and my favorite movie of all time, Duck Soup? I still can't quite wrap my head around that...

**Seth fans in the crowd may also be interested in his Criterion Top 10 list.

***Interesting (?) side note: that font ("Seth bold") has since had a second life in Seth's excellent redesign of Canadian Notes and Queries. They were kind enough to send me a few issues of the magazine, and I have to say, in addition to being well-designed, it's also a pretty interesting magazine, even if, like me, you are not Canadian. (Though, to paraphrase Tina Fey, growing up in Rochester, NY, I was able to "see Canada from my house.")

LK15

2011-02-25T00:00:00.001-05:00

From Liar's Kiss, by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, available for pre-order now.

Another review

2011-02-23T08:42:00.003-05:00

Hey, best review so far! And from the notoriously demanding Comics Journal,* no less! I feel almost immodest linking to a review like this... (Not that I'm not gonna let that stop me.)

"[N]ewcomer Eric Skillman deserves a place alongside Frank Miller, Brian Azzarello, Ed Brubaker and Darwyn Cooke as a vibrant storyteller based on his debut graphic novel, Liar’s Kiss."

"Soriano has achieved a delicate middle ground between overtly heavy lines and reliance on deep blacks to create the atmosphere. [...] A solid story with powerful illustrations, Liar’s Kiss is a strong addition to Top Shelf’s catalog."

*Full dislosure: I did design the latest (print) issue of TCJ, (though I don't believe I ever met Nathan Wilson.)

LK14

2011-02-23T00:00:00.000-05:00

From Liar's Kiss, by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, available for pre-order now.

LK13

2011-02-21T00:00:00.001-05:00

From Liar's Kiss, by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, available for pre-order now.

LK12

2011-02-18T00:00:00.000-05:00

From Liar's Kiss, by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, available for pre-order now.

LK11

2011-02-16T00:00:00.001-05:00

From Liar's Kiss, by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, available for pre-order now.

More LK stuff...

2011-02-14T23:14:00.001-05:00

I really enjoyed this little promo thing that Jhomar put together, repurposing a page out of Liar's Kiss.

Also: a glowing review over at Giant Fire Breathing Robot.

I absolutely appreciate this very generous review, but it does remind me of something worth mentioning for the record: this book isn't "Liar's Kiss by Eric Skillman." It's "Liar's Kiss by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano." We put my name first because, for whatever reason, the standard convention is writer-then-artist, but Jhomar is absolutely an equal co-author and deserves the credit. I don't mean to single out the fine folks at Giant Fire Breathing Robot, who obviously have excellent taste--just wanted to mention it while I was thinking of it.

(Also, my name is spelled with a "C," but, y'know, whatever.)

And!

LK10

2011-02-14T00:00:00.001-05:00

From Liar's Kiss, by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, available for pre-order now.

Our First Review!!

2011-02-13T18:20:00.003-05:00

From Joanna Draper Carlson at Comics Worth Reading! Awesome!

"[...] an enjoyable escapism that puts a fresh twist on the private eye yarn."

EDIT: Also, I learn from this review that for those interested in pre-ordering Liar's Kiss through your local comics shop, the Previews order number is apparently "FEB11 1167." (Or there's always Amazon.)

LK09

2011-02-11T00:00:00.000-05:00

From Liar's Kiss, by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, available for pre-order now.

REJECTED: Stumblebums

2011-02-09T18:49:00.003-05:00

I did some designs for the new album by the Stumblebums (formerly the Stumblebum Brass Band) a while back. But since their mailing list just got an email announcing the release of the record with another cover entirely, I'm guessing the Stumblebums decided to "go another way." To "downsize the design department." That the covers I did "sucked." But I dunno, I kinda liked 'em.

This first one I did before I knew what they were considering for the album title… obviously there's not much connection there. Visually, it was inspired by a song of theirs (that didn't wind up on the album, funnily enough), called "The Ghosts are Gonna Get You", and is a blatant--blatant!!--rip off of Jordan Crane. (Particularly this one.) Had that actually been published, I might have felt a little bad about the obvious theft, so that's for the best, probably.

The second is a pretty literal take on the title, but I kinda dig it. In case you're not familiar, that's literally a photocopy of the cover of Lady Gaga's first album, with some scribbling on it. Ideally it would have been printed with silver ink (reality check: no one was going to pay for specialty printing!) on the scribbles, to give a sense of pencil marks on paper… but again, neither here nor there.

At the end of the day, I get that probably neither of these was quite raw enough for the Stumblebum sound. (ahem.) C'est la vie! I got to show 'em here, at least. The album is still worth picking up, especially if you've ever wondered what the misbegotten love child of Louis Armstrong and Iggy Pop might sound like.

LK08

2011-02-09T00:00:00.001-05:00

From Liar's Kiss, by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, available for pre-order now.

LK07

2011-02-07T00:00:00.000-05:00

From Liar's Kiss, by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, available for pre-order now.

LK06

2011-02-04T00:00:00.001-05:00

From Liar's Kiss, by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, available for pre-order now.

Broadcast News

2011-02-03T15:30:00.001-05:00

This was not an easy one. I really like Broadcast News, but it's a film whose appeal is primarily in the characters and dialogue, rather than its visual aesthetic. So finding a visual to represent the film was no easy task. Plus, what angle to approach it from? Media critique? Love triangle? Morality play? Straight-up comedy?

At the briefs meeting we settled in on a particular moment between Holly Hunter's character and William Hurt's character, their first newscast together. It gives you the setting (behind-the-scenes of TV news), and a sense of the connection between these two characters. In the film, it's a moment where, despite the action buzzing around them, Hunter and Hurt start to seem like the only two people in the room. So, good: an important moment for the film.

I took a couple swings: first, a pretty straightforward take, and one with some color bars added to give a little color and visual interest to the top of the frame…

Plus a couple not-particularly exciting directions…

But I worried that all of those privileged the "serious" aspects of the film over the comedic aspects--an the film is funny, after all! There's a moment in the film when Albert Brooks describes William Hurt as "the devil," and you could make a case for that as the big question of the film: is that character an innocent, or an immoral manipulator, or somewhere in between? Is Holly Hunter's character naively self-righteous or the last bastion of integrity? So I came up with this slightly goofy idea:

I like it because you can read it as an indictment of William Hurt, or you can read it as Albert Brooks' character off to the side, childishly scribbling over his rival's head. This was probably my favorite of the bunch. (Though admittedly, breaking "BROAD-/CAST" like that does sort of imply it's some weirdly sexist movie about women in the newsroom—that wouldn't have been a terrible alternate title for Anchorman, now that I think of it.)

But James L. Brooks wasn't happy with it. So I went back and simplified a bit:

But now it's getting REALLY somber. So I tried to add a little energy by taking another angle on the same scene, this time from inside the booth:

And yet another variation on the theme:

That last was a bit TOO cheeseball. The ones above got a better reaction, but the concern was that the reality brooke down too much… why would Hurt ever be on camera from that angle?

So I tried tweaking some earlier versions again, trying to get a title treatment that would say "NEWS" more clearly, and hopefully bring a little more energy to those.

Ultimately I was working at cross-purposes with the image… that shot, that moment, is about the quiet connection between the two, so adding "excitement" to that just makes a muddle. So, how about trying a new "onscreen" image in the "from the booth" shots? Many tweaks later…

…we had a final cover.

From the comments...

2011-02-02T12:44:00.003-05:00

I was catching up on comments and found that my response to this question from commenter Jason was getting a bit long, so I thought I'd bump it up to an actual post. Here's his comment:

"[…] I'm curious at what point in the process you decide to go with an illustration as opposed to a photo/still, and how soon you decide on an artist once that decision is made. Also, does the idea of matching a favorite illustrator to a certain filmmaker ever precipitate an illustrated cover over a photo cover?"

I thought that was an interesting question. My probably-less-interesting answer is: it depends.

Sometimes the idea of illustration precedes knowing exactly who should illustrate it--like, for example, Wise Blood or Topsy Turvy, where the concept ("'50s-style literary paperback" and "topsy-turvy head made up of Gilbert and Sullivan," respectively) came first and we had to find someone to execute it. Of course, Josh Cochran and Yuko Shimizu both made those projects their own in fantastic ways.

Sometimes we don't have a specific idea of a concept but we know a particular artist will be a great fit and we can trust them to do their thing--like Seth on Make Way for Tomorrow, or Darwyn Cooke on Monsters and Madmen.

Sometimes it's a combination of the two--I had a very specific idea of what I wanted for Divorce Italian Style but it absolutely depended on Jaime Hernandez to execute it.

And finally, sometimes it's a practical decision first--we just don't have any decent photographic art elements so some kind of illustration (or at least photo-free design, if you want to make that distinction) is the only way we'll get a cover we like. That happens less since the advent of HD transfers for everything--back in the SD-only days using framegrabs any bigger than 1/2 a page was pushing it. These days we routinely use framegrabs (with a little digital magic applied) as full-bleed pages.

And to your point asking if the opportunity to pair a favorite artist to a particular filmmaker or film has ever pre-empted what might otherwise have been a photographic cover... sure, yeah, absolutely. I always love the opportunity to create a new icon for a film, to add something lasting to these great legacies, and illustration is often a great way to do that. Not to mention: the chance to work with so many artists whose work I've long admired is unquestionably one of the great perks of my job.

Also, some housekeeping: apologies to the folks who've been commenting on older posts and not seen their comments appear, that's a Blogger thing designed to cut down on spam comments (which otherwise get out of control on older posts). I've just updated and responded where appropriate. And to the multiple folks who've written requesting posters of various covers: apart from the deluxe art prints available here, most Criterion covers are not currently available as posters. But it never hurts to make suggestions to mulvaney@criterion.com!

Also, have I mentioned yet that Amazon seems to have lowered the pre-order price of Liar's Kiss to $10.17? (which I particularly enjoy because 10/17 happens to be my birthday!)

Should have a new design post ready for tomorrow…

LK05

2011-02-02T00:00:00.001-05:00

From Liar's Kiss, by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, available for pre-order now.

LK04

2011-01-31T00:00:00.000-05:00

From Liar's Kiss, by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, available for pre-order now.

LK03

2011-01-28T00:00:00.000-05:00

From Liar's Kiss, by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, available for pre-order now.

The Only Son/There Was a Father

2011-01-26T12:30:00.000-05:00

It was a real thrill to get the chance to work with Adrian Tomine on The Only Son/There Was a Father. He really "gets" Ozu, and of course his line is absolutely gorgeous.

Interestingly, Ozu seems to be a favorite filmmaker of a LOT of cartoonists--I know at least Tomine, Seth, and Chris Ware are all big fans. I wonder if maybe that's because his frames are so often static, and so artfully composed, so you can almost see it rippling out as panels in a graphic novel… (For the record, that's my observation and not Adrian's--he just thinks Ozu is one of the great filmmakers, which, of course, is also true.)

Anyway, the easiest thing to do, I think, is just to reproduce the text of the note I sent to Adrian at the beginning of the project:

THE ONLY SON COVER

As I think will be obvious to you, the important relationships in both these films are parent and child: in The Only Son it’s Mother and Son, in There Was a Father, it’s Father and Son. Those are definitely the relationships we’d like to focus on for the covers—probably to the exclusion of any other characters.

The shot that sticks out to Kim (the producer of this disc), is this moment from about halfway through:

This is a great mother/son moment, and the smokestacks in the background also do a lot of good work, hinting at the city/country contrast, and also emphasizing the working class roots of these characters (which are of course a big driving force in the story.) Here’s a better shot of the smokestacks:

So that’s one idea that we’d love to see you try, plus anything else that suggests itself to you, keeping that focus on mother and son in mind.

THERE WAS A FATHER COVER

Again, the main thing is the Father/Son relationship. A recurring motif in this film is the father and son, shot from behind at a distance:

Kim is very drawn toward that kind of visual (particularly that first iteration there, with the two walking together away from their house, the son with his school bag being a nice touch), and would love to see something like that in a cover. But again, that’s just one idea to try, we’re open to others.

THE SLIPCASE:

The most difficult part of any set like this is the slipcase cover, as we’ll need to somehow serve both films well without privileging one over the other. Here’s one idea that Kim has suggested, which I think could work pretty well: She’s imagining an empty room, lovingly composed with the shoji screens Ozu was so fond of, seen from the low, straight-ahead angle that Ozu loved to use. In the foreground, we see the red teapot that Ozu used in so many of his films. Here’s a shot of the teapot, and another (better composed, in my opinion) shot of an empty room--the teapot’s in there, too, but less prominently:

The idea being, it’s a domestic scene that’s entirely about the absence of characters, just as parent and child are physically distant from each other in both films.

One possible variant on this idea, if the empty room is feeling too spare, might be to include hints of parent and child, cropped just outside of the frame (so that hopefully the figures can be obscured enough to stand in for either parent/child combination): parent in the foreground, child in the background (i.e. the next room), to symbolize their separation from each other. This kind of relationship:

Or as I say, if you have another idea--maybe even something as simple as a dyptich, with one image from each film—we’re all ears.

THE REST

As we move further into the packaging, we can stray a little further from the “high concept” stuff that tries to encapsulate the entire film(s), and toward some smaller moments. I’d like to use those opportunities to create some fairly straightforward appreciations of Ozu’s compositions--almost, as you suggest, like film stills.

For example, there are a number of shots of laundry hanging on lines, flapping in the breeze, in The Only Son--I’d love to see something like that spread across the inside of the DVD wrap (underneath where the disc goes). If we don’t wind up using the smoke stacks on the cover (or even if we do, I suppose), an image of those would make a great disc label. Or, in There Was a Father, the images that immediately jump out to me are the umbrellas leaned against the wall and the lake where the boy drowns, or maybe some of the buddhist symbols Ozu keeps cutting away to. (I’ve included some images of all of that with this note.)

As you look through the film, keep an eye out for any of those kind of shots that speak to you, anything that you can visualize as a drawing. Jot down the timecode or a quick description of the shot and I’ll get you high-res stills as soon as the new master is ready.

While we do want to be respectful of Ozu’s compositions, I don’t think we need to be too slavish—obviously, we’ll be working with different size “canvases,” so the important thing it to be true to the spirit of the thing, while giving you some room to add your own artistry to the project.

STYLE

I completely agree with your instinct to aim for a limited color palate on these. I probably wouldn’t want to go strict black/white/grey, though: in the context of our collection, where we deal with so many black and white films, I like to make a distinction between films where the black-and-whiteness is part of the essential character of the films (i.e. most Bergman), and those where it’s more simply a function of the technology of the time. I think these films stradle the line a bit--we probably wouldn’t want to see any bright bold colors, but pale muted tones feel kind of right, somehow. I think those are the kind of palates you seem to gravitate towards anyway, so I trust your instincts on that.

Re: design, I’m imagining things fairly simple: full bleed images, plain unfussy type. I’d like to let the images speak for themselves, without too much “design-y” mediation. But again, if as you’re working some more overt structure seems to present itself, I’m flexible on all this.

Adrian's work on this was pretty spot-on, so there wasn't a lot of back and forth in the sketch stage. The only thing we asked for was to move the father and son figures back in space a bit (i.e. make them a bit smaller). But aside from that, they were pretty much great from the get-go.

We picked our favorites from the smaller sketches, and Adrian finished up the art:

Finally, here's a few options I did for cover typography:

And here's where we finally landed:

Thanks again to Adrian for his amazing work!

LK02

2011-01-26T00:00:00.000-05:00

From Liar's Kiss, by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, available for pre-order now.

LK01

2011-01-24T00:00:00.001-05:00

So... I thought I might try something a little different around here.

In the lead-up to the publication of my very first book--the graphic novel Liar's Kiss, written by myself and drawn by the great Jhomar Soriano, I'll periodically be posting some of my favorite panels/lines/drawings/etc from the book. The idea is hopefully to spark some modest amount of "buzz," so if you like what you see, (a) be sure to pre-order a copy of the book (for example, through Top Shelf directly, or through Amazon), and (b) don't hesitate to facetweet or whatever.

For those of you who just come for the design, don't worry--my pledge to you, as penance for filling this space with so much shameless self-promotion,* is to have at least one proper design-themed post per week, every week until the book debuts (fingers crossed) at this year's MoCCA Fest in April. Anyone who's been checking back on this blog for any length of time knows that's an ambitious promise, but anyway, I'll do my best.

*not that the rest of the blog isn't ALSO shameless self-promotion, mind you...

Sweet Smell of Success

2011-01-21T17:30:00.001-05:00

Sweet Smell of Success is one of my favorite covers in recent memory, both because Sean Phillips' painting is just plain gorgeous, with the kind of bold primarily colors we rarely get a chance to use on a Criterion movie, and also because the process of getting there was a great example of taking lemons and making lemonade.

Basically, the big hurdle on this title was a clause in the contracts stating that the likenesses of both Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster MUST appear, and both MUST be the same size. And given the power imbalance between the two characters in the film, the idea of having the two of them just standing there, on equal footing with each other, felt really wrong… but the solution we came up with in the briefs meeting, was, I think, a really great one… here's a description from the letter I sent to Sean explaining the project:

…As I mentioned, we've got some fairly specific ideas of what we want for the cover, mainly because we have some limiting restrictions from the studio we're licensing the film from. Specifically, they require that likenesses of both Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster appear, and they must be the same size. Once you watch the film, you'll realize that this is, conceptually, an annoying requirement, because Lancaster's character basically towers over Tony Curtis in every way, both physically and in terms of prestige, power, etc, so the idea of putting them on equal footing is kind of a shame.

Our idea of a solution to this problem is to reference the very first scene in the film, where Tony Curtis is buying a paper from the newsstand in Times Square, and the delivery truck is behind the newsstand with the giant ad on the side for Hunsecker's (Burt Lancaster) column.

I don't think there's any particular shot in the film that captures exactly the idea, so you'd have to create it, but if we get Tony Curtis in the foreground and Burt Lancaster's face on the side of the truck in the background, I think we should be able to get both faces approximately the same size while still conveying a sense of Lancaster's importance and stature relative to Curtis. This idea has the added benefit of giving the opportunity for some nice street scene work in the background, (to give a sense of Broadway/New York), and the newstand/newspaper to reference the specific world the film takes place in (i.e. the world of gossip columnists.) Hopefully all of that makes some kind of sense? Let me know if anything is unclear or seems to you like it might not work.

(It's worth mentioning that I think the Huntsecker ads in the film itself feature his glasses but not his face… or at least some of them do. So you won't be able to copy the ads directly, but I think you can capture the feel of those ads using Lancaster's actual face, right?)

[…] Stylistically, this film is kind of noir-but-not quite--very little specifically criminal happens, no one ever pulls a gun or anything, but the overall tone of moral decay and the use of shadow and light all fit the noir pattern. So noir-y kinds of shadows are definitely appropriate, but we wouldn't want to go overboard in suggesting that kind of thing, if that makes sense… which is why I thought something painted, ideally with a nod toward some mid-century illustration styles, would be a good fit.

So with all that in mind, Sean turned in these sketches, the first a pretty straightforward rendering of our idea:

…and the second incorporating the sister--conceptually solid, compositionally excellent, but contractually a bit murky.

So the first above was closer, but we had a couple issues: we were concerned that Tony Curtis looked a bit too 'private eye' rather than slightly frazzled street hustler. We asked to replace the overcoat with a suit, and lose the cigarette. Also, we were hoping to get a little more of the newsstand in there. So Sean did a quick revise:

Which was pretty much spot-on! Our only concern was that the "Admiral Television Appliances" sign might interfere with the title treatment, so we asked him to cheat that over a bit in the final. Sean sent the pencils over before he painted anything to confirm, and as expected, they looked fantastic!

Sean decided to play around with the color scheme a bit, with really exciting results:

…and then the final painting:

Here's a few takes on type that I tried, before finally settling on a variation of some type from an old poster:

With this being the final choice:

I should say also that I was pretty happy with the way the rest of the package played out… sometimes when we start with an illustrated cover it's difficult to make the transition into menu or booklet design, but in this case I thought it worked well. First and foremost, Sean was able to paint two additional paintings for us, including this gorgeous wraparound for the digipak:

For the menus, I riffed off of the vintage type we used on the cover (I had to hand-draw those headers based on the original poster type), with a slight textural overlay to suggest newsprint:

And for the booklet, I was able to take advantage of the newspaper motif and put that front and center. Here's the wraparound booklet cover, followed by a couple interior spreads:

So there you have it!

um...

2011-01-20T18:18:00.003-05:00

...eek. Almost three full months without a post. Um. Sorry.

Working up something for tomorrow now, but in the meantime, has everyone noticed F. Ron Miller's fine process post on the America Lost and Found box set? A very nice post on a FANTASTIC design.

Also worth noting: Bill Sienkiewicz's Robinson Crusoe on Mars art prints are currently on sale at the Criterion store, through the end of this month. Use promo code "MONA50" to get fifty bucks off the regular price. Can't beat that deal!

And again... design post coming tomorrow. I promise.

Hallowe'en with the Criterion diaspora

2010-10-28T16:36:00.004-05:00

Lots of seasonally appropriate design-blogging going on!

First up, designer/rock star Sam Smith has been picking up a lot of my slack on the Criterion-design-process-blogging front: check out his excellent posts on the poster for the Janus release of the creepy Kuroneko and the DVD/blu-ray design for the bats**t insane House.

Then check out Jesse Marinoff Reyes' fantastic blast-from-the-past post on the cover to Equinox, which he art directed and was illustrated by Tavis Coburn. (The link is to his Facebook page but I don't *think* you need to be facebooked to see the post.) It's part of his always interesting "cover-of-the-day" feature--that's right "of the day." Not "of the quarter-year" like some slacker bloggers...

Charade Blu-ray

2010-10-12T17:32:00.000-05:00

I'll offer these without too much commentary, since there's not a lot of high-concept thinking behind them: we wanted to take the original Charade cover and update it slightly for the Blu-ray release. Ultimately, we basically just went back to something a little closer to the original poster, with the title treatment taken directly from the film itself, but as you can see there were a few detours along the way. Here's the original DVD cover (not by me), and a few of the various original posters on which it was based. I'm actually not sure which of these was the original, or who did them, but they're obviously all very indebted to the great main title work by Maurice Binder. (NOT Saul Bass as I've seen a few people inaccurately suggest. Bass was also great, of course, but Binder, who gave the world most of the classic Bond opening titles, among others, was no slouch himself!)

And here's my tweaks... interesting how subtle things (like changing the angle slightly from the DVD version) make a big difference, right?

Some at the office wanted to go for more of a departure, something like those last few above, but in the end I think we made the right choice. Those other covers might have been the right choice for a whole new edition, but this release is all the same content as the DVD, just in a new format, so it just made sense to keep the same basic look as the basically successful original DVD, just slightly tweaked to fix a few things that had started to grate on us over the years. Getting a little closer to the original poster gave me some confidence that we'd have something which had already stood the test of time. Here's the final cover:

Post-NYCC rundown

2010-10-12T15:27:00.003-05:00

Thanks to everyone who stopped by the table this past weekend--I hope you all enjoyed your Liar's Kiss promos!

NYCC was an interesting experience--in some ways very different from the more crafty vibe of shows like MoCCA or King Con, but once you get to talking to people it's always good fun.

And I met some very cool people, on both sides of the tables... not least of which my tablemate Jorge Coelho, former (& future, hopefully) collaborators Dan Duncan & Joe Dellagatta, their buddy Shaun, Charles Ardai, Jason Latour, Rico Renzi, Jamie S. Rich, Scott Forbes, and of course the Portugese contingent, Ricardo Venâncio, João Lemos, Filipe Andrade, Nuno Plati and Ricardo Tércio, just to name a few off the top of my head. Talented folks, all.

Also: proper design post coming later today...

NYCC is on!

2010-10-08T08:00:00.000-05:00

NYCC opens today! Come by my table (R-11) for lots of fun goodies, including a free (FREE!) minicomic sampler of Liar's Kiss, coming this spring from Top Shelf!

R-11

2010-10-07T10:30:00.004-05:00

That's where to find me and Jorge this weekend: table R-11 in "Artist's Alley" at the New York Comic Con. Stop by, say hi!

New York Comic-Con

2010-09-30T10:16:00.001-05:00

Have I mentioned yet that I'm going to be at NYCC this year? I'm splitting a table with co-conspirator Jorge Coelho in Artists Alley. (That's Jorge's drawing above; the first image from a project we're working on together that we're going to start pitching very soon... gorgeous, right?)

More immediately, I'm going to have the usual stuff for sale, comics & prints, including a proper colored version of "The Deserter," the return of the much-requested Steel Helmet print and a new print for everyone who liked the more whimsical style of the "Troubling of Goldfish" thing I did a while back:

(In case you can't tell, that's an elephant in Groucho Marx's pajamas.)

Not sure exactly where our table will be located yet but I'll update here when I know more. If you're in New York the weekend of October 8-10, stop by and say hi!

The Night of the Hunter

2010-09-29T15:47:00.000-05:00

I'd like not to have to begin every post here with an apology for not having posted for a month, but, well... I suppose to do that, I'd have to actually post with some regularity. Luckily, I've built up a little mini-cache of posts at the moment, so at least for the next couple weeks I'll be able to keep this blog on something approaching a weekly schedule. Here's a nice juicy one to start us off; there are at least four covers below that I personally would have been very happy to have gone with, so lots of eye candy here...

The Night of the Hunter is a film that a lot of people L-O-V-E, and which has been unavailable for a long time, so it was a daunting design assignment. The hardest thing was to capture the correct tone--storybook but sinister and threatening, melodramatic without being tongue-in-cheek, theatrical and stagey at times, seemingly slapdash but all about the details, over-the-top but deadly serious… Laughton throws so many different stylistic flourishes into the mix it's a wonder the film works at all, let alone that it works so well.

Obviously the big icon of the film is Robert Mitchum as the evil preacher. We wanted to stay away from his "LOVE" and "HATE" hand tattoos, now parodied and homaged so often as to be cliche, but the idea of finding a new kind of iconic image of Mitchum was appealing, so that was where I started off. This was the early favorite:

I still like it a lot, I think it does a fine job of getting at the weird staginess of the film, plus the creepy religious elements (a serial-killing preacher, after all!), while keeping the focus squarely on Mitchum. Not everyone liked the handwritten type but I'm still quite fond of it. The biggest problem with it, though, was that it failed to capture anything of the children who are so central to the film. It's not that we felt the children themselves had to be on there, necessarily, but somehow that childlike perspective needed to be present.

This next one gets the right basic elements in--the kids, Mitchum being threatening, nature, etc--but winds up being a bit too bookish and boring for such a big release.

These next two, pulling back on that kooky Mitchum pose, have a similar problem with bookishness:

The last of the first round of comps was this one, which I sent along with the note: "this one is probably a joke, unless you all like it, in which case I'm totally serious."

The image here is actually a completely unaltered production still, that twisted Norman Rockwell quality is inherent in the image, which was just too weird not to do something with. But while the obvious Saturday Evening Post riff doesn't have too much meaning relative to the film, there's something about the kind of twisted storybook quality that works, and it certainly gets the idea of the children's perspective in there. Ultimately it's a bit too funny for a film that isn't really, but I still thought there was something to it...

There developed a sense that the first image was maybe the right way to go--simple and bold, create a new icon for the film, etc--but people weren't totally sold on the handwritten type and thought it was maybe a bit hard to parse the image. I did a subtle variation, trying to accentuate the ramrod-straight posture:

…followed by some more drastic variations on the same image:

…a few misguided tweaks on the Norman Rockwell image:

…and just for good measure, some totally new directions that didn't really quite work:

None of those quite clicked, so it was back to the drawing board again. This moment of the boy looking out at Mitchum on the horizon* was suggested, but I think it reads a bit too "Western" out of context:

This was my attempt to get some more "storybook" qualities into the cover, but it got pretty "Watership Down" pretty quick.

With nothing else quite working, some variation on that very first comp was still the front runner, even if there was some hesitation about it. At this point we received some legal requirements from the studio (that had unfortunately been delayed up to this point), which required that the names of Robert Mitchum and Shelly Winters both appear above the title at (if I remember correctly) no less than 25% of the height of the largest letter in the title treatment. So, take a look at the size of the "N" in "Night" in that first comp and you'll see how that would totally throw off that whole design. So I tried a few variations on that image with new type treatments…

But by this point everyone was getting a little bored with that cover. (And I certainly liked it a lot less without the energy of the handwritten type, myself.) I tried a drastic move toward something more high-concept, trying to capture the predator/prey theme of the film in a single striking image:

It's not Robert Mitchum, obviously, but it kind of is, if you know what I mean… Probably a bit too extreme of a departure for such a well-loved film, but I kinda like it. (I didn't want to push too hard for this direction, though, since I had no idea how to carry it forward without doing 300 new drawings, which… ack!)

Some photographic representations of the same idea were much less successful:

Getting a little desperate now, I went back to the Norman Rockwell image again, and found a solution that I thought actually solved the reference problem pretty well, making the "storybook" thing much more explicit by referencing Little Golden books:

For the record, if we had gone in this direction I would have redrawn the spine graphics so as not to literally steal them from Golden Books. Since "storybook" was a descriptor we'd kept coming back to, I thought that reference had resonance with the film in a way the Saturday Evening Post didn't… I was, apparently, the only one who thought this was an improvement, however.

Finally, we were getting down to the wire. (You might notice all the rest of these comps use the same title treatments: that was because I had already committed to that type in the menus, which were already finished and couldn't be changed without delaying the release… that's how behind schedule we were at this point!) I just abandoned all the previous imagery and went back to the archives to find some new imagery. This first one is nothing special:

This next, referencing a scene in the film where the girl innocently makes paper dolls out of the stolen money that is the (ostensible) reason Mitchum's character is chasing them in the first place, is kind of a neat idea but in practice it looks too much like a heist movie or something… the money is never really the point of the film.

But this next one I liked:

I thought this image had some of the same Norman Rockwell qualities of the other image, but keeping the background black felt more in keeping with the film. The only problem was, it lacked Robert Mitchum, the big movie star.

Which led to the final option.... Frankly I was a little worried that it implied that Mitchum's character was a slightly different kind of predator, but no one else seemed to share my concern: the character does spend the film murdering women and children, after all, it's not like this qualifies as character assassination even if it is slightly misinterpreted. And it definitely captures all the main qualities we were looking for: Mitchum, ominous threat, childlike perspective, staginess, the idea of Mitchum pretending to be a good guy while in fact being a predator… there's even a nice bit of plot in there for those already familiar with the film, with the doll between the two characters and Mitchum oblivious to what's inside. So, lots of good work being done by this image, which is why it was our final choice for the cover:

*(Funny story: that's not actually Mitchum: the soundstage they were shooting on was too small to get that shot, so Laughton put a midget on a pony! See what you can learn from watching the special features?)

Top Shelf sale

2010-09-13T12:43:00.002-05:00

In case anyone isn't already aware, Top Shelf Productions is having an amazing sale this week, with some books as low as $3! Perfect chance to pick up such Skillman-designed editions as ALEC, The Playwright, or AX... (or dozens of other great Top Shelf books!)

I'm married!!

2010-08-17T08:19:00.002-05:00

Crazy, right?!

(The image above was our (awesome) wedding gift from Rachel Friere of Dental Hygiene & Secret Identities fame. )

My phone

2010-07-29T19:15:00.001-05:00

I've had this on the back of my phone for over a year now, but for whatever reason everyone's just noticing it now. Apparently I've been more discreet about checking email during meetings that I would've thought...

The Playwright

2010-07-14T10:04:00.005-05:00

UPDATED: Now with actual content!

As I mentioned before, I wanted to be sure to remind those who might be interested that Eddie Campbell & Daren White's new book, The Playwright is hitting U.S. stores today. (I think it may already be out in the U.K.? Maybe?) If the snazzy cover I designed isn't enough to sell you on this thing (which is the idea, after all), then take a peak inside and see for yourself that this is the most visually stunning book Eddie has yet made... (UPDATE: I discovered today that it's being sold shrink-wrapped, so you CAN'T actually take a look inside... so I guess you have to buy it to see how gorgeous it is.) Something as simple as switching from a 9-panel grid to oblong 3-panel pages really lets you focus in on each panel as an individual composition, and each page as a composite whole. And the color palate is vibrant and gorgeous throughout: as Eddie himself put it: "I have had enough of the purply brown. For me the rainbow!" And I don't mean to give short shrift to Daren's story, either, which is funny and a little sad and mildly terrifying to those inclined to the artistic life but ultimately kind of sweet. Anyway, if you're anywhere near a comic shop today, do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of this sexy little hardcover. (Proper bookstores are a little less fetishistic about "release dates" than comic shops (Harry Potter notwithstanding), but certainly they ought to have them out soon enough as well. Or there's always Amazon.)

Enough of that: here's the design process stuff, as promised:

My first idea for this would have involved some new art from Eddie, so you'll have to kind of imagine it, as it never really came to be. There's a repeated scene of the book's protagonist sitting on a bus, fantasizing about the women around him. Here's that scene in the book:

I liked the idea of expanding that into a full bleed cover, replacing all the other characters with attractive women to fantasize about. Here's my 30-second sketch of the concept:

That would have been the dust jacket, and underneath that on the cover itself would be the same image, except in the second version, we get a glimpse inside the playwright's head and show all of the women nude, and he himself red-faced with shame. A little silly, admittedly, but I thought it was funny, and kind of fit the cheeky story.

The second idea was less high-concept, I just liked this particular drawing of the playwright, so I took some type from some old playbills. Not unattractive, but a bit too close to what had just been done on Eddie's previous book, The Black Diamond Detective Agency.

Then the final option in the first round of comps was based on that idea, but with some pretty girls added in to give a hint of the root of our protagonist's frustrations. I also liked the way the ball dots the "i" in "playwright."

The later ideas got the most traction, so Eddie drew some new girls (in bikinis this time so as not to offend the delicate sensibilities of the book-buying public), and I tried a few new variations.

The conversation the shifted back to an earlier idea Eddie & Daren had (before I got involved), about a close-up of the playwright's typewriter with little fantasy nudes crawling all over it--an idea that had been rejected for potentially looking too much like a '60s-era Batman splash page. But there was something to the idea of incorporating the typewriter, so I tried a couple versions along those lines, with a bunch of different typewriters, ranging from a more iconic typewriter to something a little closer to the typewriter that's actually in the book...

We got really down into the nitty gritty of tweaking that concept, and it was just about approved, Except... Eddie and I both had some last minute qualms, primarily that the design ultimately wound up a little too quiet and might get lost in the shuffle at the retail level. We felt that a book so colorful and bright deserved a more colorful cover, and I decided it was time to go back to the well... there's only so far you can tweak a concept before it crumbles under the weight of the design committee, and I think this concept had just about reached that point.

So, stepping back from it, I realized that we had actually lost quite a bit by adding the bikinis to the girls... girls in bikinis playing with beach balls is just a beach scene; NAKED girls playing with balls is illicit and slightly surreal, obviously a fantasy. And a curiously innocent fantasy at that (at least until you process the visual pun there), which I think says something significant about our somewhat naive protagonist.

Also, the typewriter was a bit on-the-nose... the title of the book already does the work that the typewriter did, conceptually: it's the concept between the high-minded/creative/artistic ideal ("the playwright") and the purient/sexual/human (the naked girls) that gives the idea its power. The typewriter was only confusing the issue.

So I lost the typewriter and replaced the bikinis with a "censorship" bar to emphasize the illicit nature of the nudity, and that was the answer. I did a "safer" white version (closer to what we'd been looking at)...

...but the clear winner was the version in bright yellow and pink, (with a snazzy spot varnish on the non-yellow areas), which certainly solved the problem of it being too quiet! Everyone was happy here, and we were off to the races!

And, having seen the final printed book today, I have to say it came out really well! (I'm especially happy with the transition from the yellow/pink cover to the turquoise endpapers inside!) All in all, I'm very happy with how this came out, and thrilled to be involved with this fantastic book. Thanks again to Brett, Chris, Eddie, and Daren for letting me be a (small) part of it.

Sam's Myth

2010-06-29T16:32:00.004-05:00

We just put up a link to his Everlasting Moments post over at the Criterion Current, which reminded me that I've been meaning to link to newly-minted Criterion designer (and helluva nice guy) Sam Smith's excellent blog for a while now. (In my defense, I've hardly posted anything at all, so it's not like I was specifically neglecting Sam.) If you've been frustrated by the lack of updates over here, Sam's blog should help fill that design-process-blog-shaped hole in your life...

Chaplin!

2010-06-11T14:11:00.005-05:00

Hey, how about a sneak peek of the poster for the new Janus Films Charlie Chaplin series that will be touring soon:

It's drawn by the great cartoonist Kate Beaton, she of the great webcomic "Hark! A Vagrant"--also available in book form as Never Learn Anything From History. She did an amazing job capturing the classic icon of the Little Tramp but treating it in a new way. We wanted to remind people that these aren't just stuffy classics to be studied, they're honest-to-god funny films to be ENJOYED. (Something that even some of us at the office had forgotten until we started watching them again recently.) And I think Kate captured that spirit perfectly.

The type is inspired by (read: "stolen from") an old poster for Modern Times, one of the films in the series, redrawn in Adobe Illustrator. In the actual posters that grey is a shiny pantone silver, which gives it a little more life. Overall I'm thrilled with how this came together.

The series starts June 17th in L.A., then July 16th at Film Forum in NYC, and on from there.
As of this posting, we don't quite have the Chaplin site live yet, but given the frequency of posts around here these days I should probably link to it anyway, since it'll almost certainly be up before I get around to another post here...

Stagecoach

2010-05-20T15:32:00.000-05:00

We now resume your regularly scheduled blog postings, already in progress...

As previously mentioned, this movie is pure bottled fun. (Not that you should take my word for it.) But like a lot of old Westerns, it never got the design it deserved. Especially when they get to DVD, so many classic Westerns just get the "big John Wayne in a cowboy hat headshot" treatment, to the point where I don't know how you'd tell Stagecoach from The Searchers. So I really wanted to try to find a new angle on film westerns, something other than the aged sepia-toned thing that you see so often. I liked the "western noir" approach I worked out for The Furies, but that wasn't appropriate for a film this light... and besides, I'd already done that!

Unfortunately, there wasn't a whole lot to work with, in terms of photography. In fact, I didn't even have much in the way of big John Wayne headshots! (Mainly because John Wayne wasn't even the marquee name for this film at the time of its release--Claire Trevor got top billing.) I tried a few photo based treatments that were pretty bad--most of them bad enough that I never even hit "save" on the files, so I can't show them here. The least egregious of the bunch is below. The execution is still pretty rough, the tattered black border in particular, but I did like this photo of the whole cast in and around the stagecoach--it is really an ensemble picture, so that did seem to capture something of the film.

Then there was this version, which uses the original title treatment from the film. notice how quickly I fell back into bad sepia-toning! The rest of it, meh... but the title treatment, at least, was a good idea.

At this point I got stuck, and started flailing around for inspiration. What else says "western"? I thought about Hatch Show Print, the great Nashville printers, and thought that might be an interesting avenue to pursue. So, looking at stuff like this:

...I came up with this:

Better, but too Warhol for no reason. (Plus, the saddle doesn't look nearly as good repeated as the guitar.) I wasn't looking to enshrine the film as a kitsch artifact, I wanted to emphasize the upbeat fun in a way that was appropriate to the period but also felt modern and cool. Then I remembered some great prints that Josh Cochran (who you may remember from Wise Blood) showed me, which evoked old tin toy packaging, screen printing, and just plain looked great. And how about those colors!

So that sparked some ideas, about how to use negative space and color. I had one still of the most exciting moment in the film, a great stunt scene from the climax where John Wayne's character (but really the great stuntman Yakima Canutt--check out the doc on him on the disc!) jumps from horse to horse to regain control of the reigns. Awesome stuff, and totally gets at the popcorn fun of this movie. I added some layers of color and texture inspired by Josh's drawings, and came up with this, which I was immediately happy with:

I did a version with a big John Wayne head floating in the sky, just in case anyone was worried about not including him on the cover:

...but it just immediately brought it back to discount twelve-John-Wayne-movies-for-ten-dollars territory. Better to let the concept stand... and luckily everyone agreed! It took a few lousy covers to get there, but at the end of the day, this is one of my favorite covers in a long while. I hope you all like it, too!

Updates!

2010-05-20T15:18:00.005-05:00

So... if you know me well enough to care, you've probably heard the news already, but it's worth mentioning as an excuse for the extremely light posting schedule around here lately: I went and got myself engaged! That's right: the lovely and talented Mariel P. Isaacson and I will be tying the proverbial knot this August. And just to keep things vaguely design-related, here's a look at Mariel's ring, custom-designed (with some input from me, of course) by Brooklyn-based artist Camile Hempel:

So... yay! Exciting times!

Anyway... regularly "scheduled" design post coming in 3... 2... 1...

MoCCA Post-game

2010-04-15T14:39:00.002-05:00

Just as busy coming out of MoCCA as I was going in, but I thought I should take a quick stab at the traditional "wrap-up" post. I had a great time, as always, and the cool April weather was a definite improvement over last year's swelterfest. Met plenty of interesting people, old friends and new acquaintances (and new friends and old acquaintances). I had prior engagements at non-MoCCA parties Friday and Saturday nights so I missed that whole scene, but I hear Frank Miller knows how to party.

By the way, apologies to anyone who read my little restaurant guide and got psyched for Vietnamese sandwiches only to discover that Baoguette are apparently closed on Sundays now. If it helps, I was similarly caught unawares and sorely disappointed. (And between DeFonte's and Saravanaas I still ate pretty well.)

Having a table to myself this year (rather than splitting it as I did last year) gave me a little less time to peruse the rest of the show--the lovely Mariel Isaacson was gracious enough to man the table for a while, but I felt bad leaving her alone for too long and the show is just so damn big! For example, I never did find the Partyka table, which means I apparently missed a new Matt Weigle mini... grrr. But sales were decent: I even sold out of both issues of EGG on Sunday. (Admittedly, that's partially because I accidentally left half my stock of EGG #2 at home.)

I did still manage to get some great stuff, most of which I haven't had a chance to read yet, but early favorites include the gorgeous newsprint anthology "POOD" (featuring what might be Connor Willumsen's best story yet, in my humble opinion); "Beard" by Pranas, "Little Wolves" by James Hindle, and "Big Empty Space" by Victor Kerlow.

ANYway. Proper design post coming soon.

MoCCA 2010 Restaurant Guide

2010-04-07T11:29:00.003-05:00

My good deed for the day: since MoCCA moved up to the armory last year, folks seemed a little lost when it came time for lunch. But actually, that neighborhood has some of the best food in the city! So let a local give you the lowdown:

--My personal favorite eatery in the area is DeFonte's of Brooklyn, just a short walk away at 3rd ave and 21st street. Their hot roast beef sandwich, which comes with fresh mozzerella, wafer-thin fried eggplant, and beef jus, is just about the most delicious sandwich you'll ever eat, with the possible exception of their "Nicky's Special" (ham, capicola, salami, fried eggplant, provolone, hot salad, marinated mushrooms, lettuce, tomato, oil & vinegar). One sandwich is probably enough to feed two people, but you're not going to want to have to share.

--Just across the street from the armory is Baoguette, (Lexington between 25th and 26th), a banh mi (Vietnamese sandwich) place that seemed to be the big hit of last year's show. I've only had the classic banh mi there, (pork, ham, pate), but I hear good things about their catfish sandwich, too.

--If you want a quick sit-down place, I'd recommend Saravanaas, katty corner to the armory at Lexington Ave and 26th. Great vegetarian South Indian food, dosas, etc. One of their Thalis, which are kind of like the world's greatest sampler platter (and not for the faint of heart, spice-wise), will MORE than fill you up for dinner, but are cheap enough that you don't need to feel too bad even if you can't finish everything.

--The justly world famous Shake Shack is also a short walk away in Madison Square Park, but be prepared to wait in line for an hour if it's even a slightly nice day. (Seriously. Check the "Shack Cam" if you don't believe me.) If you do go, order two burgers (or a Shack Stack--deep fried cheese-stuffed portobella atop a cheeseburger) rather than bothering with fries--one won't quite fill you up and you certainly won't want to wait in line a second time!

--On the opposite end of the burger spectrum (i.e. giant burgers in a dark pub), you could do worse than a short jog over to Molly's Pub and Shabeen, at 287 3rd ave between 22nd and 23rd. Fair warning: shield your eyes when exiting or the shock of the sun may just blind you.

--Finally, if you're really looking to splurge, I've yet to be disappointed by Gramercy Tavern on 20th between Broadway and Park Ave south. You can probably get out of there for lunch for around $40 if you don't go crazy on wine.

Feel free to show your appreciation for these fine suggestions by buying some of my comics. ;)

View MoCCA lunch options in a larger map

It's that time again... (MoCCA 2010)

2010-04-06T13:45:00.004-05:00

The 2010 MoCCA Art Festival is this coming weekend, and once again I'll have a table set up, selling my comics and prints. In addition to most of the comics and prints I've sold at past shows, this year's MoCCA will feature a bunch of exciting new comic stuff:

--EGG: Hard Boiled Stories #2,* featuring 3 crime stories drawn by three fantastic artists: "Cold Feet" drawn by Evan Bryce, "Lost & Found" drawn by Ming Doyle, and "The Platform" drawn by Victor Kerlow. (If you already purchased the old minicomic versions of either "Lost & Found" or "Cold Feet" that I've had at previous shows, remind me of that and I'll give you a discount on EGG #2)

--"Dental Hygiene and Secret Identities," a new kid-friendly/humor/silent/autobigraphical minicomic written by me and drawn by the amazing Rachel Friere.

--"The Deserter," another departure for me, an action-packed mini about a demon living amongst regular folks, drawn by the great Dan Duncan.

--Hopefully one more minicomic, "Sense Memory," assuming we can get it finished in time, illustrated by the talented Jeff Faerber.

--And if you ask nicely, I may even give you a sneak peek of a few of Jhomar Soriano's gorgeous pages for the coming-soon-from-Top-Shelf-Productions Liar's Kiss.

So if you're anywhere near New York this weekend, come on by the 69th Regiment Armory between 12 and 6 this Saturday or Sunday, and say hi! Admission is a low low $12 ($20 for both days), and for that money you get not just me (exciting as that will surely be), but also such greats as Jaime Hernandez, David Mazzucchelli, Frank Miller, Paul Pope, Kyle Baker, Kate Beaton, Al Jaffe, R. Sikoryak, and literally hundreds more!

*By the way, if you're not able to make it to NYC, but happen to live in the San Francisco or New Orleans areas, I recently sold some copies of EGG #1 & 2 to Comix Experience and Crescent City Comics, so ask for 'em there! Or for the rest of the country, there's always Indyplanet...

EDIT: MoCCA-goers may also appreciate this restaurant guide.

Dental Hygiene and Secret Identities

2010-03-16T08:00:00.001-05:00

So you've all been reading my "Your New Favorite" posts at Geekweek, right? Well, this week's is a particular favorite, as it gives me an excuse to post this recently completed comic I did with the great Rachel Friere! It's a total departure from anything I've done before--it's comedy, it's all-ages appropriate, it's silent, it's even vaguely autobiographical--and as such I'm really quite taken with it. (Also because Rachel really knocked it out of the park in the art department!) Here's the story in it's entirety, in black & white... if you're going to be at MoCCA this year, I'll be selling a minicomic version of this, in color... assuming I find the time to color it between now and then.

Anyway, I hope you like it as much as I do--let me know in the comments section!

CHE

2010-03-08T09:19:00.001-05:00

The first consideration for me in designing Steven Soderbergh's CHE was trying to figure out how to make a design for this film, as opposed to a design promoting Che Guevara the man, or Che the cultural icon. The iconic image of Che, originally a photograph by Alberto Korda but used and reused by so many artists and designers, is one of the most recognizable images in the world. The idea of Che is well known, but the film's project is to "humanize the icon"... which makes the icon the logical starting point.

It became clear to me pretty early on that we had to tackle that head on, to show the image you recognize, tweaked just enough to show that this isn't going to be exactly what you expect. We settled pretty quickly on the idea of reproducing the classic Che icon with Benicio del Toro's face in place of Che's. It seems like an obvious idea—so obvious, in fact, that I was shocked that it hadn't been used for the original theatrical campaign, apart from one rare French teaser poster—but effective, nonetheless.

The question, then, was how to execute that? The visual inspiration for the set design came from two sources: first, the color palate Soderbergh uses for the map sequences that open each of the two films:

And second, from Cuban and South American poster art:

Using a simple high contrast, street-arty style, I threw together a Che graphic pretty quickly, then tried a couple possible layouts:

But really anything fancy was just obscuring the central concept: that the face in the icon was Benicio del Toro's. The simpler the better, then:

The next question (or, really, a concurrent question) was where to go from there? CHE is broken up into two films, Part I and Part II, which meant I was going to need three covers: one for each film plus a slipcase.

My first thought was to treat each cover as a separate poster, drawing from some of the wildly varying styles of Cuban and South American revolutionary design. This proved a little too ambitious to execute... I never quite got anything that cohered well enough to be worth showing to anyone, but for you, loyal blog readers, I'll show a few. Stealing blatently from some of the examples shown above, I came up with these:

I have to say, I remember these being a little worse than they are, for the most part... I recall being really embarrassed by these at the time, for whatever reason, but a couple are alright on their own. Regardless, I couldn't find a way to make them cohere into a unified set, so I set all those aside to narrow the focus down to one style with three variations: expanding the icon to incorporate Che's early days in Cuba, in the more traditional 26 July movement uniform (before he started wearing the beret, at least in the film), and the end of his life in the Bolivian jungle, with long scraggly hair. It also gave me the opportunity to really highlight the colors, which quickly became the anchor for the set. Here's the two individual covers:

That basic concept was holding together pretty well, but then it came time to tweak the cover image. Soderbergh liked the concept, but wasn't happy with the execution of the slipcase cover—he had a number of comments, but the one that I remember most is that he didn't like the way I drew the lines on del Toro's forehead, which made it look like he smelled something funny. So over the course of a couple weeks, I tried a series of tweaks, some minor, some major, some alright, some really really bad. The difficulty was in trying to find a balance between conveying the right emotion, (defiance mixed with vulnerability), meshing well with the hair and hat from the original Che icon so it doesn't look too cobbled together, and just plain looking like del Toro. I did a lot, most of which got saved over at various points, but here's a few that survived:

You'll also notice I tweaked the red from the first round--which seemed just TOO obvious--to a subtler red-orange color, which I thought sat nicely next to the individual covers. Finally, we ended up here As I recall, the highlights in his eyes in that last version we what finally made it click):

And so we had our package. From there, I tried to find interesting ways to incorporate photographic imagery, icons like maps and stars, and of course the colors of the film, while not getting trapped into repeating the style of the covers over and over again. Normally my menus and packaging are a little more regimented; on this I tried to include as much variety as possible. Here's a few favorite menu pages, for example:

And... there you have it. (See this is why I don't like to include menus, etc in these posts... so much more dramatic to just end on an approved cover, don't you think?)

A Correction

2010-03-05T18:48:00.001-05:00

I was just looking over that interview I linked to yesterday (because I'm vain, apparently), and realized that I unintentionally dodged one of Rob's questions: he was asking about the bands I claimed to design logos for in high school and I misinterpreted that as a question about the bands I've done posters for recently. So, lest anyone think that I'm trying to hide my sordid musical/design history, the "logos" I was referring to were doodles in my sketchbook for Pearl Jam, Nirvana, etc--I remember being particularly happy with a Stone Temple Pilots logo where all the letters connected to each other in complicated ways--and of course my own high school band, Truman's Kitten. (Not to mention it's earlier incarnation, The Two Lips, or spin-off, Stogieman & the Inbreds.) Maybe I'll see if I can't find some of those old flyers or something to post up here, just for giggles...

Good times.

Another interview

2010-03-04T11:46:00.002-05:00

....over at Light & Shadow, Boston University's film and culture review blog. In case you don't get enough of me on this blog.

Revanche (DVD)

2010-02-27T11:33:00.002-05:00

Hey, look at this: a design process post, on this "design process blog"! What are the odds? *Ahem.*

Anyway, previously, I discussed the process of designing the theatrical poster for this film. The image we chose for the poster was aimed at mass appeal--emphasizing the "genre" elements of the plot (i.e. the gun) to hopefully draw people into the theater... and I think it was a good fit for that.

But when it came time to design the DVD, we wanted to take a step back, think less about why Revanche will be interesting to see tonight at the movies, and more about why this film deserves a place in the collection, what about it is really remarkable. And we decided, ultimately, that it was the subtle things--the gentleness in the tone, the quiet way the film inhabits different spaces--that make it great. One thing that I loved in particular was the way Spielmann will linger on shots of various locations, well before you understand why they might be significant. You almost don't notice it on first viewing, except when the film finally arrives at the moment which gives a particular location its significance, and it has that much more impact.

Practically speaking, the other major advantage we had for the DVD was that I could use frame grabs from the film itself, instead of relying solely on set photography. (We didn't yet have a digitial master when I was working on the poster, and anyway frame grabs don't really have enough resolution to blow up that large.) Don't get me wrong, there was some excellent set photography done for this film, but having the entire film open up to you is a huge advantage.

So, these first two were based on an image from the film that Peter Becker particularly liked... it's a big emotional turning point moment in the film (which I won't spoil for you) that's punctuated by a wind that starts blowing across the previously clam lake. It's a great moment in the film, but it really depended on the movement of the water to make it work, so these... didn't work.

This next was based on a [german, I think?] poster for the film. I rebuilt it from framegrabs since I couldn't find the original files. I like the poster, but I'm glad we didn't use this for the DVD, since it's someone else's design... (Original poster is the 2nd image below.)

This next one I quite liked, because if you've seen the film, you understand immediately the importance of this moment (again, don't want to spoil it for anyone), but even if you haven't, you get a wonderful sense of calm and quiet but yet with an unmistakable sense that something is very very wrong here... a variation of this actually wound up as the booklet cover. (More on that below.)

And finally, the winner: based on the opening shot of the film, this image of "ripples in the water" is a visual metaphor that's certainly been done before... but it, again, takes on a deeper meaning once you've seen that point in the film and know just what is making those ripples, plus it's just a visually beautiful image. Again, very much that sense of quiet. I also quite like the fact that you first view this an image of trees and the reflection of those trees in the water, but in fact both sets of trees are reflections in the water (one before the water ripples, one after), the top one is just flipped upside down. People tend not to notice that at first, but even though you can't put your finger on it, you kind of know that something is off... Anyway, I liked this one a lot, and so did everyone else, so there you have it.

People often ask me to include more than just the covers on here, and I think this is a good opportunity to do that, since the booklet design went through a couple iterations here, too. Here's a look at the first version (I've shrunk it down so you can get a sense of the whole thing--click to enlarge a bit, though still not full size. If you want to read the essay, it's up at the Criterion Current (or you could always just buy the DVD)):

We so seldom get good, high-resolution color photography, I was kind of seduced by it, so I built this design based primarily around nice colors and pretty pictures. And it's fine, I think. But Peter reminded me of some of what I was talking about above--in particular the idea of locations--and I came at the design again with a new perspective, using framegrabs this time:

I think the final booklet was definitely an improvement, and overall I was very happy with this package--an interesting case study in treating the same film in different ways.

Announcing: LIAR'S KISS!

2010-02-23T23:09:00.003-05:00

That's right: I wrote a book! The great Jhomar Soriano is drawing it, and it's going to be published by Top Shelf Productions. And you don't have to take my word for it, you can see the official listing up at the snazzy new Top Shelf website. Here's a glimpse at the full (not yet final) wraparound cover--click for a larger view of Jhomar's great linework:

It's possibly a bit premature for me to really start hyping this--I'm sure I'll be posting much more about it as it gets closer to the actual release, but since Top Shelf officially posted the listing today, I just can't resist linking to it.

Stagecoach!

2010-02-16T18:17:00.004-05:00

Hey, it looks like we've announced our May titles, including the first (or second, I guess) of the three favorites I mentioned the other day: John Ford's Stagecoach!

I'll give this a proper design-y post closer to the actual release date, but for now I'll just mention how much I love this movie! Uniformly great characters, surprisingly intense action, and just incredibly fun to watch, start to finish. I always thought of myself as more a Clint Eastwood guy than a John Wayne guy, but this totally turned me around--and, incidentally, started a whole Western kick around our house for a while. I *might* still give The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence the nod as the best Wayne/Ford movie, but Stagecoach is damn close!

Empty Kingdom

2010-02-09T18:31:00.002-05:00

There's another little Q&A with me up today, this one at emptykingdom.com. Go on over, give it a read.