The cover

I was pretty stuck with a cover idea for the first Ho12 cover. The first book has comics from four of my favorite cartoonists and I wanted to create something that had at least something to do with one of the strips. I really liked Darryl Ayo's story about folks with x-ray vision a lot, so I started mulling that one over.

Dave McKenna, Amy (my better half) and I were at Maxwell's in Hoboken seeing a show by Brian Musikoff's old band, Friends, Romans, Countrymen when I was struck like a bolt from the blue. I typed up a note on my phone, screaming out much like Spock in 'The Devil in the Dark.'

Xray eyes!

white and color on black!

chakra lines!

energy waves!

The next day I came up with this doodle.

Sort of an "Alex Grey meets Ayo" sorta thing. I thought it was kinda neat, so I moved on to the next phase: actually drawing the fucker.

A few days later I drew out each layer separately while watching Hill Street Blues on Hulu — that show holds up like a motherfucker.

I should point out that these are obviously not scans, but iPhone pictures. Y'see, I started conceptualizing the cover while I was at the office and they were the best I had. I'll scan the art for the final. They cleaned up just fine for my needs. Anyways...

So, I colored the layers and thinking about how I wanted to present them. After monkeying around with it for a while I came up with this:

"So far, so good," I thought, but a little jumbled. It was kinda hard to see what the fuck was going on, so I ran through a variety of configurations.

I'm a few hours away from a final design, and I still have to scan the art and replace these iphone pic stand-ins, and add in some 'energy lines' (time to break out the Spirograh!), but I figure by sometime tomorrow we should be good to go.