See Exotic Places

When I work on Love and Capes, I do it in what I call "animated" style. I design a background/set and then lay the characters on top of it. Coming in the next issue, we go to Amazonia's home dimension. So I had to design an exterior.

Amazonia is obviously based on Wonder Woman, but I didn't want to borrow too much from her. So, instead of making it a Paradise Island kind of place, I went with making it a little more Flash Gordon-y, circa the "I know it's not good but I still dig it" 1980's extravaganza. I wanted a bright, technicolor landscape that Amazonia would look natural in. The film was famous for some skimpy costumes, so it makes sense that Zoe came from a place like that.

Click to embiggen, as usual.

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.

Process Crimes

I love process stuff. I love books that go behind-the-scenes of TV shows and movies (like the way-cool Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion) and into artists' studios and especially Steven King's On Writing. So, in that spirit, here's a glimpse into the way I write.

I got a little stuck on page five of Love and Capes, so I grabbed my iPod and took a walk. It seems to clear my head, and by the time I got to the beach, I'd gotten two and a half more pages of LNC #8 plotted. It's amazing how well that works, and I wonder why I don't take walks to get over writer's block more often.

Being an artist, I tend to think visually, so I keep my plot for the book as a series of Post-It notes. I keep them on my kitchen wall, which is close to my studio and is the largest empty wall here in Zahlerdu that's not in the living room. Not that I have that many visitors, but I like to keep the public areas a little clearer than my work areas.

Each Post-It one represents four panels of the book, and has some note, usually the punchline, to help me remember the bit that I'd written. And having this in such a visual medium lets me plot the pacing of the book and see how many more pages, how much more I have.

You'll notice one note in the lower right hand corner. That's the last page. I always have the ending planned out before I do the middle. It gives me an idea of where I'm headed. As I plot other sections, they'll appear in other places on the wall so that I can see the book as a sequence of scenes rather than just one age at a time.