Kody Okamoto

FENCE CHALLENGERS: SWEET SIXTEEN #1 cover

Added 2024-10-24 22:17:59 +0000 UTC

Woke up this morning to AIPT tagging me in an article that let me know my Fence cover is OUT IN THE WILD!! Ahh! I'm so excited!

I freaked out when the email from the BOOM! editor on Fence (beloved, u know who u are) arrived in my inbox some months back asking me to do a cover. Fence is like. The Western BL big leagues to me, haha! I can't believe I got a chance to do a cover, joining folks like Kevin Wada and HamletMachine as an official Fence variant artist.

The Fence job actually came in before the S.I.R. one, and originally I was going to paint it in the style of modern BL manga covers with a plain white background. I'm glad my editor steered me away from that, because with that direction, I ended up doing that bright blue sky, and it's maybe my favorite sky I've ever painted? Once I was going for "sunlight is behind the boys" , everything else fell into place (and directly served as inspiration for my S.I.R. cover, in that I wanted to contrast the daytime sky here with the night sky I did for S.I.R.)

ALSO I was literally in the middle of typing up this post when I went to go grab some Twitter links and saw that BOOM! just posted a trailer for this and IT OPENS WITH MY ART??

Watch here!

Opening?? With MY art??? and not the Johanna the Mad?! I cannot believe.

As always, you folks get a peek at the thumbs I sent that weren't chosen. While I'm super glad we went in the direction we did, I do still like the one of the boys sitting back to back! Maybe I'll turn it into fanart someday, hahaha!!