Horrific Comic Book Covers

Capturing the iconic look of pulp horror!

Greetings Mad Creators! I've been busy prepping for the lunch of the big Kickstarter for my comic Young and the Dead. Unfortunately, one of the artists I hired to create a variant cover had to back out for personal reasons so now it looks like the project will be launching in early August. I'm in the process of commissioning a new cover artist and want all the artwork completed before lunch. Rest assured those of you subscribed to this newsletter will be the first to know when it's ready to go live. Stay Tuned!

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ART

In preparation for the Kickstarter, I've been hard at work creating the graphics for the campaign page. One of the most important elements of a successful Kickstarter is the main project image, which is the first thing people see before clicking on your campaign. I wanted to create something that combined all to fun and excitement that my kids vs. zombie adventure had to offer.

Here's what I came up with along with some process photos of how I got here.

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ADVICE

As I mentioned I've hired some additional talent to create variant covers for the first five issues of Young and the Dead. In addition to the art, the covers also needed graphic design. Joshua Kemble who provided the variant cover for issue 1 created an all-new logo and trade dress for the comic. I wanted to keep up that tradition with the other issues so I started all new logo designs and layouts for each variant issue to make each issue unique.

Here are a few tips and some insight into how I approach logo design in hopes that it will help you design better layouts for your comic book covers.

The first thing I do is look for inspiration. (more on this in the next section) Since my comic has many horror elements I hand-picked some of my favorite horror comic covers to inspire me.

For logo design, I always work in a vector program like Adobe Illustrator, never a raster program like Photoshop. Logos have to be versatile so they can be used in a variety of situations, and can be scaled up without any loss of resolution.

In illustrator, I type the title of the logo, and then go through all of my fonts and pick the one most suited for the project. To do this I use the website wordmark.it which shows you a preview of whatever you type using all the fonts on your system. If your book has a sci-fi theme you will want to select some high-tech font, If your project is humorous choose whimsical font. For my book, I selected fonts that fit the horror theme.

Next, I pick the type treatment I like best, copy them and convert the copies to outlines so I can alter them. I still have the original so I know what font I used if I need to find it in the future)

I rarely use fonts as is, I prefer to alter them enough so they are unique. There are several techniques I use to customize them, I may remove all the crossbars on the letters and rise, lower or angle them. I may extend the ascenders or descender of a letter. In this case, I opted to chip away at the letters to give them a horror comic feel. It's fun to experiment with customizing letters you never know what you will come up with.

Here are a couple of alternate logos I'm working on for Young and the Dead.

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INSPIRATION

I believe that some of the most iconic comic covers are from horror comics. Joshua Kemble homaged the aesthetics of EC comics for his rendition of Young and the Dead #1. However, there are so many more classic horror books to pull inspiration from. Here are a few of my favorites.

I hope you found this newsletter informative and inspiring, Don't be a stranger. Reply to this email and tell me what you think.

If you are interested in supporting my work visit my website at Serkworks.com

I'll be back soon with more Art, Advice, and Inspiration, see you then

Scott