Danger Girl: Revolver numero uno came out this week. I provided the many colors that saturate the book. Danger Girl is an interesting book for me to color for a number of reasons. The book itself is a bevy of beautiful adventurers taking part in many over the top action sequences. The artwork, provided by Chris Madden, is very open and wonderfully dynamic. It looks a lot like some of my favorite Disney character designs. Upon picking the actual book up at the store, I cracked it open nervous that it may have printed too dark. I hadn’t had anything printed through IDW in quite awhile and was nervous my settings for other printers might not work. I’ve been doing this for years and I still get bad print jobs from time to time. Happily, this issue printed perfect. Really solid glossy paper that really matched my screen well. The book is a fun romp and I wanted the colors to match the tone of the art and story. My first thought, “mmmm, yummy candy.” Now I know I’m talking about my own artwork here, so bare with me, but the colors printed all colorful and fun. That’s
one of the things I was aiming for. I also, wanted to match a bit of the cinematic feel Danger Girl has. Chris draws every detail you could imagine and Andy Hartnell, the writer, mentions even more details in his scripts and notes. Overall, it’s  a bit laborious to keep up with, but the finished product is well worth it.
Mentioning Andy takes me back a bit. Cue soft focus and dreamy music. Candle’s light. Ahhh, the good ol’ days. Danger Girl takes me back to Wildstorm studios many, many moons ago. One of the first books I worked on, after Stormwatch and WildC.A.T.S., was the first Gen 13 series. Jeff Scott Cambell was one of the new artists brought in from the Wildstorm talent search. He was at Wildstorm well before I showed up, but I actually worked on bunch of the first series. Back then, Joe Chiodo (art god in my book) with a few assistants would mock up these amazing color guides in markers and colored pencil. If you’ve ever seen these guides, you know I’m not exaggerating when I use the word amazing. Anyways, the four or five computer colorists that were at Wildstorm would divvy up the pages and all gang up to color the books. The color guides helped us keep our styles cohesive and provided an overall look for the books. The computers we used back then were so slow, we were lucky if we could finish one page in a day. We were also developing the first real digital coloring styles along with some of the other Image studios coloring departments. Joe’s guides elevated our collective look and made us all much better artists than we were when we started. I dragged out some old “make ready’s” I had, to illustrate where we’ve come from in those early days of computer coloring/painting. Make ready’s were the uncut books we got from the printer to see if anything went majorly wrong. The Gen-13 cover on the right was one of the first pieces I did without a guide. My coloring was fairly weak when I first started at Wildstorm, I just had some really good talents with computers and drawing at the time. I had been working in animation and video games, and I had self published my first couple of issues of Zombie Love, but none of these really focused on color, per se. Wildstorm acted as part job/part school. This particular cover I wanted to play with some techniques I had been imagining but had not yet had the chance to apply. I crumpled up a piece of paper and threw it on the scanner to then use as an alpha channel on the manilla envelope and the classified document. I added a texture one the wall behind the Gen-13 kids. The biggest thing I did was went ahead and manipulated the line work. Back then, the comic industry was moving from basically fill colors on comics and most artists didn’t want their line work messed with.  I decided it would look cool to add creases to the photo and slightly blur the smoke coming off the cigarette. Everyone seemed happy with the finished cover, though some were nervous I was taking too many liberties with the line work. In hind sight, that would pale in comparison to what colorists/painters are now responsible for in the creative process of producing comics.
Okay, off that tangent of working with Jeff and Alex (Alex Garner was the inker for Gen-13) from way back when, move forward to, I’ve left Wildstorm to work at Angel Studios (Rockstar West) as an art director on a Disney ride for their new Disney Quest project. I was down in La Jolla to visit friends, namely Guy Major, and see what’s up with the studio. Guy and my friend Justin Ponsor (both whom I had a hand in hiring… mad props to me.. woo woo) were working on this new book by Jeff that was being written by another friend who I totally got hired, Andy Hartnell. The name of the book was Danger Girl. Andy is a great guy to hang out with and shares so many of the same likes and tastes that it feels like we were both grown in adjacent vats. I have fond memories of playing Doom II on the coloring computers until the wee hours of the morning, and trekking to Xena conventions to track down Lucy Lawless, and another trip with our friend Ian to a convention where we had the worst road side dining experience of all time. Fun stuff. So, Andy, is writing this new book and Guy and Justin are coloring it and I’m thinking to myself, let’s see what these kids are up to since I’ve left. Damn. I really couldn’t believe what was on the screens in the “pit” (common work area for the colorists). Justin and Guy had moved up a giant notch (that’s one of my stage names). Their colors were bold and so colorful in all the right ways. Jeff’s artwork took off in this whole new direction that had a more cinematic feel and all of his figures were now way more solid and stronger than what he was doing on Gen-13. Thumbing through the print outs, I could tell this book was going to be gangbusters. But I wondered about the story. Could Andy pull it off and live up to this great artwork. Well, of course he did. Why would I start this thread and not have a plan to tie it up. Andy’s fun adventure style of writing is exactly what ties the whole book together. His love of Empire Strikes Back, Indiana Jones and Army of Darkness shines through in what’s just an enjoyable read. Is this Tolstoy? No. I don’t want to read a Tolstoy comic.. well, okay, maybe I do.. but that’s not my point. That’s where I’m going with all of this. I have a lot of admiration for what these guys had/have done and I’m going to do my best to live up to it. This is the first of four issues. Check it out (here’s a good preview of the book) if you need need some good escapism, and really, who doesn’t at this point. Have fun!
-J