Comic Books Are For Dorks


I wanted to write to you today as I was inspired by a good friend of mine. He is currently working on a project that I had a few years ago at IUPUI and I must say his post on the project brought back many many memories. The project is to take a hand drawn comic book cover from a numerous selection of covers. Once you have selected that comic book cover you are to take a 2 inch by 4 inch rectangle to recreate digitally. Once you have chosen that it is up to you to make that block look as close to the original cover. I used Macromedia Freehand when I was in this clss. However, I am sure that Josh is using Adobe Illustrator. But regardless, the end result is the same; a vector version of the hand drawn cover.

I wanted to just show what came of my project. I not only did a 2×4 block, I did 3 total comic covers. From the images you can not get a true sense of the detail but every single line across all three of these covers is a series of points. Hundreds of thousands of points, and over 400 hours was put into this project. I had nothing but a blast creating these three pieces and still prove to be a major focus in my portfolio.

I would love to hear your thoughts on these. If you have not seen these Josh, please tell me your thoughts and the process you went through on this project. Enjoy some comic book cover re-design!

On a side note for those of you that do not know what vector means, allow me to explain. Vector is the opposite of raster. Raster is a pixel based format and allows very little flexibility when it comes to scaling the image. Vector, however, allows you to scale as small or as large as you want because the lines are drawn in a mathematical base. So, let’s say that in five years I want to blow these covers up and paste them on the side of a building. I could. And they would look the exact same and have the same proportions as you see here. I am a very big fan of vector design. All the logos you see, print media, and basically everything that is not web based or an actual photo is vector.

I am back, a day after the original post of this article, to tell you that posting this and seeing Josh’s work that I am debating starting a new cover. But I do not want to do an easy cover. I want to do a much more complicated cover. I am not a big fan of drawing so me drawing one myself is not really an option. But here is an idea. I want to see your ideas. Shoot me some concepts, some covers that are hand drawn that you would like to see in a digital sense. Maybe someone out there is an incredible artist with pencil and paper. If you have or know someone that has a cover drawn (or the ability to draw one) and wants to have it in a vector format send that my way as well. I want to draw and I need your help!