Cover Art

Here's how the artwork for the cover of 'Funny Misshapen Body' was drawn in its original state, which was then taken by designer Cherlynne Li to create the final cover. I figured I'd just draw the different elements for her to use, because of the text on the back of the book would make it easier for her to arrange than for me to try and figure out.

Today Is The Day

that "Funny Misshapen Body" comes out. USA Today's Whitney Matheson has a short preview over on her blog Pop Candy.

Scripting

My scripting process is too gather up elements/moments/stories I want to include and make those into an outline, which is then refined further and further, until I get a more detailed script - either panel by panel or page by page. This is script from 'Funny Misshapen Body' before I restarted it with a re-written script. Usually I just have enough notes to myself for what's going on, with final dialogue not written until I'm sitting down to draw the page. I'm usually composing panels/imagery in my head as I'm scripting, so there usually isn't anything visual written down for the scripts either.

Cover development

After talking with the editors and designer at Touchstone, we settled on the standing-on-the-scale image for the cover, and the next step was to develop that further, and here are those drawings. These were drawn at the final trim size of the book to give a better sense of how it would look.

Cover Ideas

Here's some of the initial brainstorming for the 'Funny Misshapen Body' cover. There were about a dozen more ideas, but these were the strongest ones. All the ideas were passed along to the editors at Touchstone, who then looked at them and decided which parts and aspects of the concepts they liked most.

Cover Designs

Here's an early cover design for Funny Misshapen Body. Since the book is about becoming an artist, I tried to draw a cover that captured that struggle. Unfortunately, I wasn't allowed to show nipple on the cover, and so this idea had to be scrapped.

Changes

I had drawn about 100 pages of "Funny Misshapen Body" when I decided things didn't feel right, in terms of chronology, narrative, drawing style...after some internal debate I decided to completely start over, changing the arrangement of stories from strictly chronological (the finished section covered high school) and instead arranging stories by subject matter. Some of those stories from the 100 pages got dropped entirely, while others were re-drawn to varying degrees. Here's an example of a page as it was first drawn on the left, and how it ended up looking in the book on the right.
If you're in Michigan, there's a new exhibition of comics artwork - all Michigan creators - at Eastern Michigan University's Ford Gallery . Four of the unused pages are up in the show, and there's an opening and discussion tonight.