Nerd Inferno: Cover Process

The Nerd Inferno cover took a long time to finish up because I was super anxious about it. You can see the process above as it went from a rough to a finished cover.

Started out with a rough sketch of the cover idea featuring characters from all three books in the omnibus. Five panels for M&C and each member of the Eltingville Club, with the Club members holding toys and collectibles of characters from Dork that fall under their main genre interest. You can see the pncils develop over three images above. I used the lightpad to trace the figures after re-sizing them and printing out the roughs. Penciling took a while because I was nervous and avoiding working on it. Afraid I would screw it up.

Bill is holding a comic with Father Time and The Clock Kid, from a Devil Puppet story in Dork. On the shelfves behind him are statues of Battle Broad and Super-Mummy. There's some Major Violence comics and books thrown in as a nod to the Adult Swim pilot.

Josh is holding a Broken Robot figure. The UFO and Grey aliens on the shelf are from the Fun Strips in Dork. So is "Tampon Seijin", the alien thingie in the upper-left corner of the panel (it's from an Ultraman gag). Josh's t-shirt has another Fun Strip character, Extry, the host of "Science-Fiction Theatre". The rocketship on the shelf is a nod to Kid Blastoff, a comic we did for Disney Adventures that we carried over to a couple of SLG comics.

Pete got more background characters from Dorkthan the others. He's holding a Georgina Riley figure from the Murder Family, behind him is the Devil Puppet, Myron the Living Voodoo Doll, the undead comedy team of Bud and Chub, and Littel Fatty Jumbo, the slow-moving zombie.

Jerry got short-changed, all he has is a rum Magic card with the Shitty Witch and the Crappy Cat on it. Except they've been renamed the Incompetent Witch and the Lousy Familiar for the sake of marketing. They remain shitty and crappy in the comics.

Inks went slowly but pretty smoothly, I penciled very tightly so as not to have to make many (or any) decisions while inking. Again, with the anxiety. The first inked image is the raw inks, the second the inks with the black and white leveled up in Photoshop. I left the circle around Milk & Cheese alone because Sarah was going to add that in digitally before cleaning and coloring.

Jerry's eyes are brown but Sarah's changing them to blue, as seen in the zombie story and the back cover pin-up in the Eltingville collection. Jerry was supposed to have brown eyes but he had blue contacts in the zombie story and got the same colors in the pinup. I colored his eyes blue in drawings I've sold. So the fans know Jerry as being blue-eyed and they seem pretty adamant about it so Sarah's changing his eye color and sending that off to Dark Horse in the next day or so.

I'll post the process on the cover logo and lettering seperately, because I really choked on that and there are dozens of roughs and takes to go through. I meant to draw the title directly on the cover art but I couldn't come up with anything I liked and I was pushing the schedule back trying to think of soemthing I didn't hate. So I decided to go forward with the art and get things moving, which was kind of a dumb idea, because I was forcing the title into the space I left for lettering, including the word balloons for M&C, without knowing what the hell was going to go in those space. Dopey way to work, folks. I don't recommend it, especially when you're sweating everything.

Anyway, I'll talk about more about that when I et the time to scan all the lettering roughs and takes and finished pieces.

In the meantime, thanks for the wonderful response to the book announcement, I can't tell you how happy the feedback here and across social media made me. This one's very special to me. I can't wait to see this brick in my hands (with Jerry's blue eyes).