Thursday, July 12, 2007

The True Meaning of Smekday – Making the Cover 2

So here are four cover ideas that I sort of settled on as my best bets. The story features, among other things, a road trip in a flying car, a theme park with the Snow Queen's castle at its center, and large spaceships that have fish bowl-like tops and hose-tentacled lower halves. This is hopefully enough information to understand why I liked these images.

5 comments:

Bill Ferguson said...

Sounds awesome, is it going to be a Graphic Novel?

Adam Rex said...

Not a graphic novel per se, Bill. But a heavily ilustrated novel that includes about 15 pages of comics amid its 400+ total length, and dozens of fake photographs and newspaper clippings.

Tony Shasteen said...

These are great! I liked the previous cover concept as well, but I can understand that it could be difficult to grasp at first. I believe it would have come together in the final illustration though! Not that it's up for a vote but out of these four I like the top right, and bottom left. The top right sketch has a nice Will Eisner's Spirit feel to it. It also seems a little more menacing with the space ships in the city. I'm not sure if that's what you were going for. The bottom left cover looks like a lot of fun, you get the signs in there, and it has a flying car. I mean, who DOESN'T love a flying car?

Great work!

-Tony

Shawn Escott said...

I think you made a great choice with the cover design you chose. Very creative. The second in line is that very cool flying car!!! Awesome :)

Adam Rex said...

Thanks, Tony and Shawn! Yes, it was hard to do that cityscape piece without thinking of Eisner. I wish the great man was still around so I could send him a copy. And I did want the ships-in-the-big-city (hey, a Mo Willems joke) to come off as a little disquieting and intriguing, so I'm glad you felt that way about them, Tony.
I'm glad you both seem to like the flying car solution as well, since I squeezed it on to the title page. I'll show that in my next post.