covers- DHP no. 98
Sometimes the black and white drawing looks like it didn't involve very much work, but once it's been colored you couldn't add or subtract a line without ruining it. This is another where the colorist completely understood the desired effect, and I don't know who did it (When I visited Dark Horse in '93 they had a colouring department with three or four people working industriously at their monitors) and I don't think we sent a colour guide as I would have made Joe's hair white instead of blond. The drawing illustrates the part of the story where Joe Theseus meets God, and God turns out to look exactly like a child's crayon drawing. Pete and I both tried to draw God in a child's style but it just wasn't working. It was coming out too cute, too knowing. Another thing about a child drawing a comic strip is that the character would never look the same twice. You would never even get the same proportions reccurring. Thus for authenticity I got wee hayley campbell to draw God. She'd have been eight at the time the story was drawn and just a couple of months older at the time of this cover, dated 28/10/94. I honestly didn't think I'd get away with having her draw the 'hand of God' in the foreground of the actual cover, but I decided to brazen it out. Nobody said anything to the contrary and it remains a favourite of mine. Pete had more of a sense of big heroic figures, so he worked over and inked Joe Theseus, but the Eyeball Kid looks like mine. And the girl at the back is Pete's.
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hayley campbell, no longer eight, reviews Beirut's London gig at audioscribbler.
She has also been looking up Grose's 1811 dictionary of the Vulgar tongue. This is probably what Neil Gaiman was looking up when Alan Moore wrote (in the appendix for From hell Chapter 3 page 3):
"The expression , in this instance, was passed on to me by Mr Neil Gaiman, who has a dirty mouth in at least seven centuries."
************
Find out the rating of your blog (thanks to John C.)
This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:
hell (19x) death (5x) crap (2x) shit (1x)
It's that hayley campbell's fault.
Labels: bacchus3, covers-2, Eyeball Kid, hayley campbell (2), hayley campbell 1, Pete Mullins
posted by Eddie Campbell at
00:05
20 Comments:
So does Haley get co-creator credit on God, or was it work-for-hire?
I liked the way you got a wee child to illustrate the One God. Although I never could figure out what that motherfucker was doing in a comic book about the Olympian gods.
A gorgeous cover. Joe Theseus really looks like a god there.
My blog is rated PG. (Surprisingly, I've apparently never used a curse word in it. And only get the PG rating based on "dead" being used 3X and "murder" 1X. Goddamn.)
That dictionnary is great!
Hi Eddie! I hope you don't me asking a quick (unrelated) question... How did you manage to get your recent posts to be just listed in order, rather than date order? I've tried everything but I'm unable to get it to ditch the annoying months/dates.
(If anyone else knows the answer to this, maybe you could step in?)
My blog is rated 'G - suitable for all'... I might pop a swear word into my next post in order to at least get a PG :)
Thanks!
- Johnny
I really like the 'hand of God', btw. It's weird, I almost didn't notice how it was drawn! Your comments on colourists make me feel that it's an odd step in the comic making process: I would have thought that the artist would have been heavily involved. How does it work, exactly? Are colour guides of varying detail sent in, depending on the artist? I remember an issue of Greyshirt (or maybe ABC:A-Z) showing Greyshirt's "piercing blue eyes" (literally described in the same panel) in a close-up as brown... Very weird!
Johnny..
re the colour guides I posted a few days back. that's the only time I've ever really been involved. I started doing colour guides for the Captain America books i drew but after a couple of pages I got the color samples through and I saw he wasn't even looking at my thoughts on the matter so i stopped doing it and left the colorist to his own devices. It all moves too fast for you to be worrying about such things.
re.post listings. Do you mean my 'posts by category?.
Johnny
just checked your blog.
It's so long agpo since I went into the Html template and rearranged the furniture. I don't think mine was ever arranged the way yours is, but you can go in there and fix it all up however yo want it, or at least you could under the old system.
Bill
God, whoever he is, belongs to everyone. And remember, the reason i got Hayley to draw it was so that it would never look the same in any two pictures. How do you own that?
Hi Eddie, thanks for your reply. Wow, I'm amazed that the colouring is done with so little control. I guess it *appears* like something that would drastically alter the artwork, but maybe it actually doesn't...?
-snip- Took so long writing my post that you've already added a second one :)
The list of posts; I guess it's something you modified by hand then? Time to take another look!
Thanks,
- Johnny
*sigh* This is all I see:
http://www.thunderpeel2001.com/blogprob.jpg
No idea how to get into the HTML via this interface... Thanks for trying to help, Eddie. I'm guessing it's changed since you used it.
I post so infrequently it makes no sense to have what few posts I do have hidden in "Month" folders. Maybe someone else will come to my aid?
I'll stop derailing your comments now... Sorry for the intrusion.
- Johnny
when i started I had
'most recent posts'.
how you got that date thing i do not know.
You need to get into the template. Once in there you can take it out and put in something else.
I put in my 'posts by category' and 'gallery of amusements' in the same way that one puts in a blogroll, though i didn't even know how to do that when i started.
I just persevered until i figured it out. I could never get a picture to go in the profile page, so i took out the whole profile page and stuck one in the sidebar. once i realised i could do that i stuck a whole bunch of other pics in the sidebar. There are four there altogether now.
I also found I could change the colour of my title header, make the main col wider and the sidebar narrower, changed the colours of the links, the size of the post titles, then i got hold of large caps and drop caps etc. I'm still learning.
when I open the thing up at first I see a bunch of choices:
Dashboard
Posts, settings, template, view blog, new post.. etc...
is this only in the old 'beta blogger'?
I don't think so, that's what I see, too. I can edit/add things to my side-bar, but, unless I'm being very stupid indeed, the closest thing I can see that seems relevant is called "Blog Archive".
Here's what I see on my screen (cut and paste into browser):
http://www.thunderpeel2001.com/blogprob2.jpg
I probably am being very stupid and missing something very obvious!
Thanks for your help, Eddie!
- Johnny
Johnny,
uh... i've never seen anything like that before, so we're obviously operating in different systems. this is what I see in mine (and it's about three yards long):
(actually it won't show up here, (just tried) but it's just three yards of cascading html text that looks like algebraic equations.
eddie
What else are you doing with your time Eddie (blogging aside...and I know how frustrating mucking around with templates can be)?
Would be curious to find out future works (now that self-publishing is out of the question).
PEGO!
WE'RE TAKIN' IT BACK!
Rats! Oh well, thanks for your help. I'll have to do some proper research, it seems. Damn.
- Johnny
Children go through specific stages of drawing early on, albeit with some variation, but it's hard to get anywhere near the mindset of how kids approach drawing - it's so conceptually different, depending on their age and individual headspace. A fascinating area! Having raised (quite a few) children, I was surprised by how similar their first drawing attempts were, although at different ages.
Hi Eddie!
Thanks for the cool blogposts about your covers! I just started going through the art I've purchased over the last 25+ years and couldn't remember where this piece was from (thought it was a backcover or pinup in an Eyeball Kid mini) - but, thanks to the internet I came to this post and found out all the great details.
Hope you are having an excellent weekend!
Mike
thanks for commenting, Mike!
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