Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Megastar: TAS -- The Cover!

One of the coolest factors involved in my latest Megastar story is that I was asked by the editor of Digital Webbing Presents to get a cover image done depicting Megastar for the comic the character's set to appear in. So since the story involves Megastar getting trapped in a cartoon based on his exploits, I wanted to have a cover commissioned that personified that type of story. As soon as I was asked, an image came to mind of an old Superboy comic from the '90s. For those of you that aren't aware, this is the same Superboy that currently runs around dressed in a t-shirt and jeans in the comics and in the animated series, "Young Justice". However, before that iconic (and arguably boring) look, he dressed very much like your typical '90s character.



In other words... Awesome!

Spandex with varied colors, shades, a leather jacket, buckled straps in random places, and a spit-curl fade. It just doesn't get better than that, ladies and gents. Anyway, the Superboy of the '90s, aka The Metropolis Kid, was one of my favorites during that period of my comic-reading life, and I had just about every issue of Superboy during that initial run written by Karl Kesel with incredible artwork by Tom Grummett. Grummett, in particular, was one of my favorite artists around that time, along with Mark Bagley (among numerous others), and was one of the biggest reasons I became such a fan of the book. His covers always caught my eye in the local comic shop, and as I said above, one in particular was emblazoned in my mind's eye the second I was asked to produce a cover for the Megastar story. Here it is below:



Now, there's not too much going on here compared to your typical, attention-grabbing comic, but the Grummett art is so pretty that I don't really care. The cover immediately grabbed my attention as a kid because, A) I was a tremendous fan of the Superboy comic when this came out, and B) I was also a huge fan of Batman: The Animated Series. It's been one of my favorites for quite some time, and as a result I wanted, nay... demanded(!), that the cover I had commissioned for the Megastar story pay homage to this one. Now, the artists for the Megastar story, Jake Bilbao and Dario Carrasco, would have been fine choices for the cover, but I've recently been working with another artist named D.C. Stuelpner on a top secret project, and his art has been so incredible on it, that I thought I'd ask him to try his hand on the cover for Megastar. He agreed, and I was able to wrangle Paul Little, a colorist that has done work for a variety of books for Image Comics, to finish things up. They did everything I asked and more. The cover is bustling with activity, it's funny, and it looks absolutely fantastic. I can't wait to see it emblazoned with the DWP logo, and... well, enough out of me. Just scroll down and feast your eyes...

No comments:

Post a Comment