One of the highlights of the January solicitations is the first issue of Scalped, the new Vertigo crime drama by Jason Aaron (The Other Side) and R.M. Guéra (Heavy Metal), with covers by one of my favorite artists, Jock.

Best known for his collaboration with writer Andy Diggle on Vertigo’s The Losers, Jock is an Eisner Award-nominated cover artist whose vibrant illustrations have fronted that series, as well as Batman, Nightwing, Catwoman, Detective Comics, Rush City and others.

His upcoming projects include Faker with Mike Carey, and Green Arrow: Year One with Diggle.

Scalped #1 is one of my favorite Jock covers to date. It’s not as dynamic as his work on Rush City, or as “designerly” as some of his work on The Losers. But it exudes attitude and quickly establishes the mood and setting for the story. It’s stunning.

Being a process junkie, I asked Jock to walks us through the creation of the cover, from concept to final product. Here’s what he had to say about Scalped #1:

Jock: Time was of the essence with this image: We already had a promo piece produced for the official announcement at Wizard World Chicago, and there was the chance of that image being used on the cover of Issue 1 if it was strong enough.

However, we all felt something better was needed so I turned in some new sketches as quickly as possible.

The first one was a pretty successful design, but a little too “quiet” for a first issue. We don’t get a good look at Dash, the main character, and it’s important to establish a strong sense of person and place with a first issue. Don’t be too suprised if this turns up on a later issue, though!

The second was a strong design, but too incidental. It gave no sense of the feel of the series: a crime/gangster story set on a Native American reservation.

The third worked okay, too — I liked the strong up-shot of the lead character, and the bottom space allowed for whatever elements we needed to see to suggest the story well.

All three were given a preliminary nod from Karen Berger, the executive editor of Vertigo, so it was time to thrash out the details and hone in on particular elements with my editor, Will Dennis.

We both favoured idea #2 for its bold design. I love strong, simple designs, and this often leads to me heavily shadowing figures to bring strong slabs of black to play around with, as I’ve done here. But there was a danger of losing the character if we went too far in that direction. I tried to resolve this by adding other elements into the backgrounds …

This also gave me the chance to play around with the kind of colour idea I had: just a simple, strong, totally saturated orange …These both had elements that worked, but Dash just didn’t come across well enough. Then Will had the great idea of combining the attitude of idea #3 with the design of this sketch. It worked great, and I went about coming up with different ways of handling that with the background elements.

We both felt this was getting close, but still, it wasn’t quite 100 percent. The great thing about working with Will is he knows when to push and when to hold back — and a time to push is for a first cover. I think I would have happily produced this as it was, but — quite rightly — Will felt it needed something else.

Right back when I first started coming up with sketches for Scalped, I bought a huge reference book on Native American culture … to get ideas for iconic elements that we could use on the covers. Among objects that came to mind were things like headdresses and tomahawks. Will suggested a headdress on Dash, which was the perfect idea. Even though the character doesn’t wear one in the issue, it puts across a very strong and bold sense of the series. With this in mind I removed the existing background “wallpaper” elements and gave dash a huge headdress.

With the inclusion of Dash’s trademark weapons — nunchucks — this design was approved for the final art.

I drew up the black and white version:

But I wasn’t keen on Dash’s face, so I redrew a patch for the cover, keeping more of the expression of the sketch.

I greyscale-shade the figure once the black and white is completed, and scan in paint textures to manipulate the image and add weight to the piece as a whole. The simple colour scheme got kind of lost along the way, and although the final art relies on a limited palette there’s a lot more going on in the final than in those original stark sketch ideas.

A couple of stages from along the way:

Again, being a first cover, I ended up playing around with a lot of different colour ideas. I always try to adapt to a suitable style for different projects, and this being new I hadn’t found my “parameters” yet, which translates into many hours playing and tweaking until I find something I’m half happy with!

A nearly finished version had a sepia/sand colour background, but it was decided the harsher white would help the image pop.

And here is the uncropped final version before being sent in for solicitations:

This isn’t the final art, as I’ll get a chance to go back to it for the printed cover. I think a few of the elements can be improved, and I’d like to backlight more of the figure with the strong contrasting blue/purple highlight you see on his right arm, just generally take a look at it again with fresh eyes to see if anything can be improved on.

Footnote: I also designed the logo for Scalped. Here’s a few dry runs and then final logo, roughly placed on the solicitation art:

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 31st, 2006 at 8:33 am and is filed under Art and Design, Comics, Covered. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.