Second, my thoughts kept going back to one of my biggest inspiration artists: Dave MacKean. I always loved that he could put a cover together without referring directly to the subject as a figure. That’s always been one of the main goals I wanted to tackle with the Raven Nevermore covers because I make use of so much symbolic stuff threaded into the plot. Non of it is directly ESSENTIAL to the plot, but for those interested in catching the subtle things, it’s filled with treats.

Other artists I can’t get out of my head for different reasons are Ben Templesmith (30 Days of Night, Fell, an others) for his use of layered textures to create backgrounds and convey feelings, mostly those of creepiness and supernatural horror, and Jock (Losers, Scalped, and others) for his very clean, strongly graphic design, covers that always seem to capture a very artistic composition.

Anyways, here’s a few more examples of my cover design process. It’s taken on another layer of importance for me because now I’m focusing on what the look and feel for the entire series should be based on my final result.

Here’s where I focused on just creating a rich background to work with. Total win on those birds as a Photoshop brush… awesome time saver! I ended up liking this quite a bit and may even make a print of it for myself. AS a comic cover, it’d be quiet “unorthodox” I’d imagine… although, sometimes just THINKING that makes me WANT to use it for the very purose of breaking conventions. Alas, that’s another topic entirely…

Here, I zoomed in the figure, cleaned up the edges a bit just to see how it’d sit on the background. It became evident to me that for a final I’d definitely have to work larger and add more detail. I also realized that I’d have to add fuller colours. That’s when it hit me that this direction was not where I wanted to go. I wanted to attempt flatter planes of texture as much as possible for the cover’s direction. I’m not sure I can convey exactly WHY I wanted this… I think in my head it’s connected to the exploration of “layers” within the story itself–on a character level as well as on a plot level (and even symbolic level). In any case… it was time for me to explore more iconographic options.

My first direction was to try something with a bit of “silent eeriness”, something more simple and clean (except for the grunge scratches of course). I used the previous background for the pattern of a crow’s silhouette and kept the new background desaturated.

Aaaaannnddd… this leads to the most current incarnation where I went in the opposite direction and made it darker. This has the strongest appeal to me so far. I like how the layers worked with each other, I like the cityscape on the bottom third representing Cog Town (and even the Watchtower is in there), and I like the sort of “woodcut” look of the crow-man thingy (notice the dark claw?!). I added more bird flocks to the cityscape to add some perspective (even though it’s entirely a flat collage plain), and I added the dead tree and some grunge ink to the raven’s body to break the form up some more.

Will I keep going with these? Perhaps, perhaps. But it may be time for me to explore issue 2′s themes and see if I can create a cohesive visual flow with these!

The first result of this mix is the cover to Raven Nevermore #1 (or trade). It’s not 100% for sure, but it’s something that’s been on the mind for a very long time.

Currently, Emmanuel Xerx Javier has done a spectacular job with the first 5, but deep down inside I feel this motivation to add something of myself to the book’s style. Hopefully the first 4 issues will be ready for release in Spring 2012! Exciting times ahead!

This series was fun to work with although it does ends with a pretty morbid conclusion, but alas, that is the story of Lorelei of Lone Lake! It comes from a golden age comic called “Web of Mystery #2″ published in 1951 by Ace Books. It was a series that collected short pulpy strange tales of suspense and mystery.

A man, named Roy, hears an urban legend about the hauntings from Loon Lake. Fearless of such rumors he goes for a night swim (stupid Roy). During a dive he knocks himself unconscious and meets Lola. They talk and she shows Roy her home in a submerged cave. Lola pleads for his help so that she can rest because she is so very tired. Roy gains consciousness and submerges, but becomes restless himself. The next day he sets out with diving gear to search the lake, determined to find the submerged cave home of Lola. He discovers only bones with an ankle trapped under a root… and flowing, flowing red hair.

This series will very soon be printed on canvas and I can’t wait to see what it all looks like! Pics to come!

“She Came From the Lake”, XEI, September 2011

“Beautiful Stranger”, XEI, September 2011

“Quiet and Peaceful”, XEI, September 2011

“Drowning Dream Fantasy”, XEI, September 2011

“Deep Breathe”, XEI, September 2011

“Twisted Roots”, XEI, September 2011

… and no… I actually don’t know if “that’s what they say” either.

That Sheriff doing the shooting was likely described as the one from the public domain comic. Emmanuel may even have done a concept sketch. It never got really used here, but as you can tell by the script, the Claytons’ older brother Ike “won’t be happy” about what’s transpired. If I’m correct (and it’s been a while, so I may not be), Ike is actually the only Clayton brother that really gets page time in “The Last Stand” since he’s basically the money mastermind behind the runnings of Dry Water Gulch. Come to think of it, since I mentioned Deadwood already, he’s basically “Sheridan”. (woooow… it’s all somehow connected… in the universal consciousness…)

So that’s it! That’s my LONE STRANGER pitch all out in the open!

I hope you enjoyed the mini-story, and I hope you enjoyed my own “commentary” about the process, the thoughts, the motivations, etc I experienced along the way. I hope in some form or another they help somebody out there in some way! If you’re a publisher… contact me, lets talk. Seriously. Do it. The Lone Stranger in lonely. And bored.

Enjoy what you do; do what you enjoy!

Thanks again goes out to Emmanuel Xerx Javier whom I could collaborate with forever; he’s the artist master behind the Beholder monthly for Blueprint Magazine as well as Raven Nevermore!

Also, thanks to Thomas Mauer, who’s work I first saw in Bad Dog and then in Killer of Demons (Image Comics) without knowing it was him that I contacted via the internet a Google search later for “letterer”. Oh, he also worked on the Outlaw Territory Anthology for Image Comics. Great book of western shorts, go buy it!

AND Thank all you visitors and readers once again!

I wanted the nick name “Pale Faced Bandit” to the only description the town got before he skedaddled outta there! The idea is that if a crime goes down around him, he’s likely the target to get the blame due to his “bein’ different” an all.

I made sure in this short pitch to indicate that even in a time of great stress and flight-panic, the Lone Stranger is a morally guided individual. He not only takes the time to pay for the drink he never finished, but even the broken furniture he was forced to defend himself with.

There was also likely way too much coin in that purse of his. I guess the Silver Moon Saloon can give it to charity.

I didn’t want anything convoluted here. Primarily, I didn’t have the pages for it. Secondly, these guys are just basic yee-haw hooligans and not a match for the extra-terrestrial reflexes of out pale-faced hero!

My idea behind his power set when it comes to gun play was this: What if an individual could see the “math” to possibilities very rapidly and break down a sequence of cause-and-effect patterns to then choose the best options? Luckily for me I now have a movie reference for this (and, no, not the Matrix with bullet-time… although…) The movie I’m referring to is Sherlock Holmes with Robert Downey Jr. When I watched the movie in the theatre I didn’t really know that was the basic framework of how the modern update of the character was going to be presented. I was in love with it immediately and was like: Holy crap, this… THIS is how Stranger would think!

That said, Lone Stranger is NOT a Sherlock Holmes. He wasn’t so much intuitive (an innate skill necessary for picking up clues) as he was “logically deductive”. More like Deep Blue, the computer that beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. This would come up in later tales in more detail. The basic notion being that Stranger may look like the “monster” or “inferior biological hombre” to people of that time, but to all us of the in-the-know-future, gray aliens are soooo much more advanced then we simple humans are.

Stranger is just very modest about it all.

Actually, something else just occurred to me about why I wanted this one page scene. Strangely enough fo a guy “who was never into westerns” is concerned, some of the very first (if not first first ever first) comics I ever read were the Franco-Belgian series by cartoonist “Morris” called “Lucky Luke”, a cowboy who could “shoot faster than his shadow.” Even more strange is the fact that the whole series I read was a collection my great-uncle owns translated into Portuguese, printed in the ’70s and ’80s. If it wasn’t the whole run, it was damn well close. I read them when I was 10 or so one summer when I stayed in Portugal for 3 months. I was sad that there was no such book to be found in English in Canada.

PS: Cinebook Ltd has been publishing Lucky Luck in collections every two months since 2006!!! WOO!

At some point two years back I started to really REALLY get into public domain comics from the golden age. I got them where I could and consumed them. I started to focus on the western issues for some reason even though I never really got into western movies. Part of the reason for that is that it took me long enough to watch “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” and I ended up LOVING the flick. I didn’t want the magic of what I felt there to be ruined by a “bad choice”. Being a newbie to the genre, it was a fear that simply held true.

With the golden age stuff, what fascinated me the most was how FAST these stories were told. Heck, there were even ONE page stories in these collections. That’s what set me off: If I was going to put a pitch together, I’d keep the story tight, try to get out quick character development, hit the climax and ride off into the sunset. Done!

So, these two ruffian bastards are actually characters from a public somain story that appeared in Western Adventures #3 featuring the Clayton Brothers (and Dry Water Gultch) called “The Last Stand”. That tales was enough to give me the antagonists to my protagonists. It also set up for me a clear intent to tell future stories using golden age western details as easter eggs; characters, town names, saloons, you name it!

It was an excuse for me to keep finding more old PD westerns and imagining how Lone Stranger tales could keep some of that content alive.

Also, worth mentioning at this point was how I had to really minimize how much was said. I wanted Lone Stranger to say as little as possible to real people, so the story had to move with visual queues or with other characters being the “lead dancers at this shindig”… ha… four pages in and I already can’t help the comparisons…

Anyways, that’s a wrap for this post! More next time!

I’ll talk a little about the color palette and page texture choices with this post. The idea from the start was I asked Emmanuel to try something new. I knew I wanted to attempt a more parchment-like approach to the page, so Emmanuel went with pencils and no inks with some bits of color on a tinted paper.

I loved the experiment, but what I discovered in the post-production process is that scanning toned pages is erratic on the uniformity of the whole. For example, some pages had a more tan hue while others a more reddish hue, or the pencil details were more gray in some and black in others. I think it was an auto correct function of the scanner compensating for the image’s levels, but ultimately I choose to work on the pages digitally to try to find a happy middle.

This took HOURS… and at the end of that experience, I still wasn’t happy.

Finally, I settled on one last night working on the pages and stripped them of the toned paper around the panels and then created layers of each panel, and another set of layers for components within each panel. I played with the hue, contrast, levels and saturation of each component, within each panel, within each page, and then used a textured stock image to unify the page itself.

I liked the idea of the warm hues to identify the setting and people in it, and then desaturating Stranger’s skin to make him seem even more out of place on a visual level.

If I were to do this again, I’d like to stick to white paper and do colors and texturing in post-production. You can’t learn lessons without taking chances and experimenting! That’s the motto I live by and I don’t regret it!

That’s the lesson for writers out there trying to write in the “voice of the times” for flavor, or characterization: Take notes! Treat it like school all over again, emerse yourself in the workings of the language, the vernacular, the intent and structure of the phrases. Watch old movies if you have to, read old western comics (that’s how I got sucked into this whole idea in the first place), just make sure you feel comfortable BEFORE you start otherwise it could all fall apart during the writing process.

These were all lessons learned for when I moved on to script Raven Nevermore. There are way more characters in that plot and I tried to create a “vernacular framework” for each one. Notes, notes, notes! I created a spreadsheet even! Do what you have to do, but stay consistent to the voice you create!

This page sets up Lone Strangers friendship with his horse Spur. I wanted to create a sort-of Lone Ranger and Silver (amongst many other examples). Stranger’s reply to Spur, was also meant to suggest that he can hear the horses thoughts–like an animal empathy.

It’s said that a cowboy trusts his horse more than the men he rides with… actually, I have no idea if that’s “said”, but it should be! The guy just wants a friend… is that so bad?

I guess there shouldn’t be a “cover” to an 8-page story, but part of making a pitch involves making a cover. Here is the mock-cover for a pitch idea that was put together alost two years ago when I started this crazy journey into comic goodness!

I re-skinned this cover to match the Raven Nevermore designs. I figure… if I COULD make all my products have a similar design to brand them all a certain way, I would.

Cover Art by Emmanuel Xerx Javier. Post-Production Colors and Design by Nuno Teixeira.

Stay tuned!

UPDATE: READ 8-PAGE PITCH FREE