Zombie Love is © and trademark 2012 Most Funnest Entertainment and Jeromy Cox.
Zombie Love is © and trademark 2012 Most Funnest Entertainment and Jeromy Cox.
Zombie Love is © and trademark 2012 Most Funnest Entertainment and Jeromy Cox.
For six plus years now, I’ve been occupying a spot as colorist on the Vertigo title, DMZ. I’ve worked on hundreds of comic books and this is definitely one of my favorites. This past Wednesday, I made my way to my local comic store and picked up the last issue. Issue 72. That’s a record for me. I colored a ton of Catwoman comics and a number of Promethea comics, but not 72 issues. Well, 71 to be exact. Brian, the writer handled all the art chores on one of the 72. I get free comp copies of all the comics I color, but I’ve been going to comic stores for years now and I still like the feeling of picking the books up and buying them at the actual comic shop. Call me crazy. I didn’t know what I was going to feel seeing the last issue, but I couldn’t help but smile. Lots and lots of smiles. I probably looked strange to the people I passed as I walked to my car, the clerk at the pet store that was ringing up the crickets for my gecko and spider or the waitress as I sat down for breakfast at lunch time. Just lots of smiles. I’m not sure what it was. A sense of accomplishment, a sense of pride, joy in rewinding all of those issues and all of their individual stories in my head. I can’t explain it and then I thought to myself, I don’t want to explain it. I just want to enjoy it like I imagine everyone else has that have liked the book.
DMZ is not really a book to smile about. Dystopian future New York is not necessarily party material. Unless you’re into that kind of party, I guess. But you know what, good comics are something to smile about. Take me out of the equation, and this is a damn fine comic book. The book totally works with out color. Great lettering, great artwork, good personal stories, nice character development, politically engaging, put together well, cohesive. This book rocks.
Okay, put me back in. (Egosaurus) I was lucky enough to get the chance to color this book. Thanks Will. At some point, if you really get into coloring, you realize you’re like the DP of a movie, only for comics. You get to light the scene and apply a mood that best fits the story. DMZ was ripe with opportunities to paint different moods. Riccardo’s art, and some people hate when I say this, is completely strong enough to work without colors. Quite frankly, that’s how I get the pages. Black and white with no lettering. And the story is there. All of the artists that have worked on DMZ have this strong sense of black and white contrast and great storytelling. So my job has really been not getting in the way. That is, unless the storyline called for it. Sometimes you just leave everything flat to let the art breathe or allow the pace of the storytelling to move along. Other times you just wow the crap out of the reader by rendering the heck out of a scene or a bowl of noodles or a gun.
I learned a lot working on this book. I really got to play with colors. I’ve been told that I handle primary colors well without looking childish. I take this to heart, because I grew up loving comic books and primary colors really speak to that visceral first impression. Then again, sometimes primary colors can really work against a mature mood. That’s probably one of my least favorite parts of my contribution to the book, but I really don’t regret it. When you’re working on a monthly schedule to get a book done and out on time, nuance really is a treat that you don’t always get to taste. You’re really going with your gut reaction as fast as possible to get 22 or 20 pages done and look as good as possible. One thing you’ll find if you’re working at this pace is happy accidents are your friends. Now, did that accidental drop of red on the page really come from some inner artistic genius, or did you look at it and think “…that looks good, how will that effect the rest of the page or the entire story?” 72 issues allows such experimentation.
Most people that are interested, usually ask which of the issues was my favorite. I most likely will say the snow issue, and while true, I’ve grown to like individual issues less and less as years have gone on and like the entire series as a whole. The entire breadth of the work as it were. Probably sounds cheesy, but that’s the way it feels. There’s usually striking moments in the story lines that stand out, but that’s usually set up by good writing issues before. That explosion tears at your emotions because your cared about the character being ripped apart. Or that neighborhood being bombed is an actual borough in New York, so you can imagine this scene that much more. I actually felt guilty for a time working on the book, because I hadn’t actually made it to New York and all of my depictions were from my own imagination. Sure Brian’s reference, Riccardo’s renderings and Google Maps helped, but I hadn’t felt the actual vibe. Well, I did get a chance to see New York for myself and I think my imagination was pretty good. Upon visiting a couple of years ago, I kept thinking to myself, “Wow, for as much as New York has been depicted in film and television, they really haven’t got it right. I think the closest
people have got is part Midnight Cowboy, part Woody Allen and part David Letterman exteriors, but not really. Naive, I know, but I think my point is, that the city is too massive to really capture. The sheer amount of people and their individual diversity is ridiculous. Again, it makes me smile. It makes me want to go back. All the things I did wrong and all of the things I want to do again. I didn’t mean to go off on a New York tourism pitch here, but I think that’s at the heart of this story. It’s a story about New York and if you find your chance to pick up the trades and read our take on it, you’re gonna get a different view of the city. Sure, we’re destroying it, but that makes you reflect on how much you appreciate the place and it’s people. Or the freedoms we take for granted or the trust we surrender. Okay, I’m getting to far off into the weeds here and I’m all out of tinfoil. This was a fun book to work on. I hope I get a chance to work on a book like this again, but then again, I don’t think most people get a chance to spend days in such worlds, let alone six years. I guess you do as a reader, but imagine that plus you’re turning on the lights or changing the colors of the vehicles, or shading a impending disaster. Cool stuff. My brain overfloweth. Let’s wind this up. Hit up your local comic store this week and pick up the last issue if you’ve been reading along or pick up that first trade and dive in. Heck, I think DC even made the first issue available for free. No excuse, loser. (smile) It may not be your cup of tea, but you may also find yourself thinking “I didn’t know they made comics like this.” Well, we did and it’s over and ready for you to read.
-J
Hi there. I’ve been busy coloring some cool comics, so I haven’t had much time to post. Here’s that Dark Knight 07 cover that I mentioned in my earlier Bane Damage post. I wanted to play around with some orange or red colors for the cover and I’m really happy with the outcome. This will most likely change before print, but it’s a good first stab. One thing I like to do, and this goes back to when I was self publishing my own comics, when coming up with cover colors is thinking about all the issues laid out next to each other. I looked at the previous covers that Alex Sinclair had colored (issues 1-5) and this lead me to c0me up with a hotter warmer color for issue 7. Issue three was blue, four was green, five was yellow and issue 6 which I did is sort of an olive drab. This may seem simplistic, but I find it works and sometimes going simple works much better than over thinking everything. This isn’t necessarily a rule I live by, but it’s a good place to start when you first get a striking piece of black and white artwork to color. Having easily distinguishable colors for covers works well on the stands and when you have the issues in front of you at a convention or store signing, it really pops. Sometimes a cover comes in and it just screams for a specific color. This can be due to atmospherics on the page or because you have large iconic super heroes with very specific colors that make up most of the image. If you’re coloring a cover with a large pose of say Superman, his blues and reds are in most circumstances fairly dominant. Of course it’s art and there’s always room for interpretation. Anyways, I don’t want to go on to much about the minutia of putting a comic cover together, I was just really happy with how this turned out. I also saw the trailer for the new Dark Knight film and it got me going on Batman… so go check out the cover and check out the comic when it hits the stands in March.
-J
Pong, Asteroids, Dig Dug, Bump and Jump, Ghosts and Goblins, Tempest, Choplifter, Mr. Do’s Castle, River Raid, Summer Games, Sidearms… I grew up loving video games. I loved my Atari 2600 and luckily for me, my good friend and next door neighbor, Daryl, had a Commodore 64 and hundreds of games on disk. Where am I going with this? MC Hammer.
This is years ago, so excuse me if I get the facts slightly wrong. I was a roguish handsome young devil (I warned you about my facts) and I had recently been given an opportunity to find a new job (layoffs). I had been working as an animator of sorts and there were some animation jobs opening up in Los Angeles. I even went up and took a tour of the Disney Studios in Burbank. Our guide was a storyboard/layout artist and the uncle of a mutual friend. There were these great maquette’s (can’t believe I spelled that right on the first try) of Hyena’s and we got to hear these great songs for the film by Elton John. We listened to dialogue reads by Jeremy Irons as an evil lion. There was this immense storyboard room with sliding tack walls filled with gorgeous artwork. Thoroughly impressive. By the end of the tour and over lunch I was basically offered a job. 
The strangest thing was, I think I remember my first thought being, no. Why? My gut reaction was I didn’t want to ruin my appreciation of the animation field and Disney any further that it already had by seeing more of what goes on behind the scenes. I would end up working for Disney twice in the future and my concerns would be proven correct. Nothing wrong with Disney, far from it. It’s just that sometimes, you don’t want to know what goes into making the hot dogs.
Hot dogs… MC Hammer. Okay, back on subject. I didn’t take any of the animation jobs up in Los Angeles but ended up with a great job in Carlsbad at a new company called Verizon. Wait, what? Oh yeah, it wasn’t called Verizon yet. You see, Verizon used to be GTE and that company had a video game and multimedia wing called ImagiTrek. Let me tell you, the phone company had money, to say the least. At the time, there were just a handful of HDTV’s in the continental United States and we had one hooked up to a Laser Disc in a storage room with an endless loop playing of flowers blowing in the wind. There was no other content to play on the massive orphaned television, just flowers. We were also developing this internet television service before there really was an internet to speak of. With this service we were developing, you could talk to other people through your tv, or order pizza, or look up information like in an encyclopedia. It was like the future, ten years early. I was hired as a production artist to work on sprite games for platforms like the Sega Genesis, SNES and 3DO. My first day on the job, they sat me down to read photoshop manuals and play Sonic. I played Sonic for hours that first day and at one point the head of the division walked up behind me and startled me. My first thought was
“ahh, playing video games when the boss walks up… I’m in trouble.” He promptly commented, “Nice job. You’re getting much further than most people do.” Oh yeah, that’s right, it’s a game company, they encourage gaming. I would have to get used to this. Time passed. I worked on some pitches for games and interactive CD’s. I even did some sprite processing and simple animations for a game called Jammit. Now we get to the meat of the story.
One of the most awful feelings in the game industry, is working on a game for a year or more and then having it “shelved”. This happens much more than you can imagine. I’ve worked on at least three games that have been shelved. One game in particular was the MC Hammer video game. Sure, I would have loved to work on the Slayer or Tom Waits video game, but that wasn’t in the cards. We had signed on to do the MC Hammer video game and we began a time consuming and, in my opinion, rewarding adventure, to say the least. The game was a side scroller in the vein of Double Dragon, with villains and boss levels to defeat. The story line had a sort of end of days aspect to it with the bad guys being these possessed zombie like creatures called Soul Suckers. We shot a lot of the character moves on video like Mortal Combat had done and then rezzed those frames down to sprite size and added animations or color tweaks to those sprites. All this time, I was learning more and more about photoshop, which leads me to my favorite part about working on a project like this, the people you meet and work with. Sure, on some projects there are people you wish you had never met, but on the whole, if you’re lucky enough, you’re working with similar like minds that are as dedicated just as much as you are to making great stories and art. I was learning Photoshop from the books and talking with this great guy named Tommy Yune. Tommy had worked on the 
Photoshop Wow book and was just brilliant if you ask me. Oh, and he’s also one of the nicest people on the face of the planet. Meet him, you’ll see. Along with Tommy, there were great co-workers like Christopher K., Susan H., Lori N., Brian M…. okay, I see I should stop there, I could keep going on and on about the great people we had. It may sound obvious, but a great team is what you really need when you’re working on a project that’s going to take you months or years. Someone to pick up the slack or point out how to fix things or what remind you what doesn’t connect to the work done months earlier. We worked on this crazy idea for what seemed like a year or more. I learned about rotation points, world views, LOD’s, bit depths, LUT’s, game mechanics, and ultimately business. We had this great working game where I could sit in the lead programmer’s cubicle (I think that was Phil Sorger) and play the game like I had been playing the Sonic game, much earlier. That’s about when the business lesson came in. You see, when we had started the project, MC Hammer was on top of the world with top selling records, flashy videos, his own line of shoes and Saturday Morning cartoons, but nearing the end of the project, the intense interest had passed and the publishing costs of the game far outweighed the projected profits of the game if it were released. I’ve been told that only the top 5 games each year end up making back the money invested, and alas, the MC Hammer video game didn’t make the cut. Oh how I wish I could play this game on my cell phone now. Maybe we should have gone with the Kool Moe Dee video game.
-J
Very cool. GQ has posted the pages from the story I worked on with liner notes from the writer and artist, Matt Fraction and Nathan Fox. The interesting thing for me when I see digital versions of my work is that those are the closest to what I originally see on my end. A number of colorists/painters that use computers to render their work are working in cmyk, because that is what eventually ends up in print. I have, from day one, been working in RGB and then mentally adjusting to know what the colors will look like in print from experience. With the advent of day and date digital versions of comics being made available by all of the major companies at this point, I think were going to be seeing some intense swings in the use of colors in comics. I can’t tell you how much more my electric blues or screaming yellows look on my screen in comparison to how they look in print. Now, I’m not trying to start an argument about the virtues and qualities of the print media, I can talk your ear off for hours about the benefits of not using the 16 million colors plus made available in photoshop versus the benefits of just choosing the correct colors in the first place. That’s not what I’m saying. But if you don’t see the vast new and younger audience approaching that are going to have their own tastes and likes, I believe that is to your detriment if you wish to talk to a larger audience. I just wish I could get all of my RGB colors into the digital versions that are now coming out. Going from RGB to CMYK and then back to RGB is a mistake that someone is going to take advantage of fairly quickly. What am I saying? That’s gonna be me in about a month when I start releasing my own colors on this here site. Stay tuned… in the meantime… go check out the GQ pages… they look all cool up there.
-J
Years ago, in a galaxy… okay, I guess I can leave the galaxy part out. Many moons ago, I used to color a comic book called Leave It To Chance for a comic imprint entitled Homage Comics. Homage was a sort of a boutique of quality comics, if I do say so myself. I had been coloring a number of pages for various Wildstorm titles like WildCATS, Gen 13 and Stormwatch, to name a few and around 1995 or 96, Homage Comics was started. At this time, the artwork for the first couple of fledgling titles started to come in. I think I was in charge of handing out work at the time and when I saw this amazing artwork from Paul Smith come in, I was floored. We had to turn the first cover and poster around in a matter of days (if not hours) so I wasn’t going to be able to assign it to myself (it’s good to be the King). Alex Bleyaert and James Rochelle handled the first two pieces and then I did some sample pages to submit to Paul and James, the writer. For as much as I knew about comics at the time, I knew very little of Paul’s work. I had actually read the X-Men comics he had done, but I hadn’t connected all of the dots, as it were. Paul’s artwork was so strong and open that I really was dying to color this new book. Well, all things worked out and to this day it is still one of the most enjoyable titles I’ve worked on. Image comics has reprinted all of the stories in some nice over size collections, so if you get a chance to check them out, please do. I’ve posted more of the photos from this small signing/tour of sorts over at my Google+ page, if you’re interested. The image quality is terrible, being that the photos were taken with an early digital camera. You can find some Busiek’s, a Marder, a Layman… I feel like I’m calling out rare bird species… go check out the photos.
-J
I just finished the colors for Batman: Dark Knight 07 cover, but I can’t post that just yet. I’m really happy with it, so I’ll just have to post it for viewing later. In the meantime, here’s the colors I did for issue six, which comes out in February. The best part about working on Dark Knight is the fact that it’s a single character book and I get to spend all the time on the single character as opposed to working on a team book, where you’e having to color any number of characters. There’s a real balance of wanting to do some really interesting dark colors and not wanting the cover to turn out, what colorists tend to call “muddy”. My first version of this cover was much more mono-chromatic and dark, but upon viewing and working with David, Rich and my editors, we brought in more colors. This helped define the shapes that make up the figures and helped with the overall composition. Obviously, a book like the Dark Knight is a great place to use some really nice dark colors, but readability is a must. This cover inspired me to push myself even more with the issue 7 cover.. but more on that later.
-J