covers- BACCHUS no.1

A lways on the lookout for stuff to show here, I noticed some interesting oddities in my master-file of Bacchus copies when I was looking in there recently. These include unused art, variations and interesting solutions to technical problems that you may find either educational or too Campbellian to be of any use to anybody anywhere. I'm just going to show a handful of the more interesting ones.
My first issue was fairly straightforward. The finished line art is dated Sept 1994 and the painting Nov. 1994 even though it wasn't to be released until May 1995. I would never again be this far ahead of the game in all my years of self-publishing. I even had time to make a concept sketch in pencil, and furthermore, to file a photocopy of it. The ink version appeared in black and white ads wherever needed. I had to look hard to remember who did what on it. I think Pete Mullins must have pencilled the girl and then I inked the whole thing. Pete then painted in acrylics over a photocopy of the line art made on the sturdiest paper or card that the copy machine could handle. Pete paints great hair. The third image is the colour xerox from my file, and these never looked 100% accurate; the flesh tones look too red, but on the other hand I remember being a little disappointed with the yellow on the finished print. The printed versions always looked dirty compared to the xeroxes and I came to expect that and make allowances. There's a warmer tone about the printed version which is perhaps a mix of aging paper and the different photographic process. Furthermore, the printer, Preney in Canada, lately defunct, had a rather annoying tendency to make things blacker than they needed to be, which means in painted work even the yellows will have an unwelcome amount of grey content. We were well underway before I got around to speaking to them about it. This was my first experience in buying printing and I didn't know much about the process. If things looked murky, I was inclined to think of it as an inevitability rather than something within my control. But after dealing with comic book publishers for some time Preney were in the habit of cranking up the output on the black inkjets. This is fine with black line art, but for painting it's all wrong. Also at this time, I had no idea how to put a logo on a cover other than by gluing it onto line art, which you can't do with colour. I simply left enough space for it, and asked Preney to put it on there in red with a black drop-shadow, in the same place as we put it in the completed black line ad. Thus the logos on my first five issues were pretty much left to chance.