Cover me softly (Patreon)

There was a period of my life when I would be asked to do variant covers for comic books. This period of my life is seemingly now over. But some of the covers were fun and I had forgotten about them.

Below is one of my favourite covers I've ever done. It was for a 2017 "loot crate" variant of some kind. The comics were printed but the company went bust, making this a very very rare cover. I sold a few of my comps but when exposed to the grisly personalities of the R&M collectors who wanted them, grew enraged, and cut the remainder half with my guillotine. The artwork was reused for a different comic. The loot box ones I cut up, I have seen sold online for upwards of $500. No regrets.

Anyway, it's R-Type, yeah?

In 2018, Boom had me sit and sign next to Kiwi Smith, who wrote "Legally Blonde" among other gilded properties. Brewing up for star names! Kiwi wrote a comic series for Boom called 'Misfit City' and thanks to my good manners, I was asked to do a cover for it. I can't remember a lot about the series, but it was spooky. I think I was drawing the cover off the basis of some character designs, a synopsis, and a few pages of script. So I had no sense of the characters at all and had seen a maximum of two drawings of each of them. This is not unusual, but I did feel a bit out at sea.

Here's a cover that for some reason Marvel let me do for Squirrel Girl in 2017. While drawing this I learned that the Squirrel Girl logo was designed by Mike Allred, because his name was on the logo's filename. Incredible insights.

There are more covers lurking in my back pages, covers for things I don't know anything about, but that I did my best with regardless. I did a cover for a Regular Show comic by KC Green.

This is the last one I did, in 2021, before the phone stopped ringing (perhaps I had said that I thought variant covers were "unnecessary" one time too many) and I was proud that in my last gasp, I did a Transformers cover, as the first comic I ever drew was a Transformers comic (I drew it on the backs of old Kleenex boxes).

I think the connecting theme of all these covers is that I was outside my comfort zone, but I tried. At worst, I fell down, got up, and finished fourth.