Numero Ocho

I decided to take a crack at the cover for Love and Capes #8 today. It's Memorial Day, so things are a little slower than normal, but that's cool. It gives me the chance to do some stuff that I wouldn't have the uninterrupted time to do otherwise. And this cover will be due in a couple of weeks anyway.

I was thinking of what to do for a cover. There's always Mark and Abby. And I know what happens in the story, so I could have done something on that. But then it occured to me that this will be the eighth cover (tenth if you count the two alternate Free Comic Book Day covers) and Darkblade hadn't appeared on a one. Amazonia, the Arachnerd, Major Might and Steel Worker all had. So I started thinking of things that would include him.

My first idea was to have Darkblade coming out of a shower on the phone, calling me saying "Zahler? When will I get a cover? What do you mean 'what am I doing right now'?"

I didn't like the idea of Darkblade not looking heroic, though. And worse yet, something that wouldn't put him in costume. It's a bit of a risk to not put Mark and Abby on the cover. It's why Abby appears in that heart shaped balloon on #6... I couldn't have her missing from the cover of the final issue of the first arc. So I needed to have some typical hero trappings to make it work.

Then, in the shower today, I got an epiphany. What if Darkblade was threatening a thug? And what if I was the thug?

So I did a rough. Darkblade was on camera left, and I was on camera right, and he was holding me straight. I scanned it and dropped it into the Love and Capes template that I designed and it didn't work at all. But that's why you scan the rough. I started to see that if I reversed the positions that I had more room for the dialogue. And if I had Darkblade lifting me up, the diagonal making it more interesting and creating more dialogue space.

There's a trend in covers to not put any words on it. I figure, if it works, do it. And here the dialogue is definitely needed.

I've also been accused of making Mark look like me. I honestly don't see the resemblance. We've both got brown hair. I use myself as a model, but I model for all the characters, so I don't see why he should be any different. So now we can see what I'd look like as a Love and Capes character. And I even worked Abby and Mark into my shirt. A shirt which is available for sale, in fact.

Nothing like a little merchandise plug every now and then.