Here’s a fun cover to my GREYSHIRT: INDIGO SUNSET series.

Back in the old days, before desktop publishing revolutionized the look of comics, we had to try all kinds of weird tricks to get interesting special effects. The effect I used a lot was the “surprint” which involved doing a second piece of artwork, to be merged with the original in the film process, which would print in color only.

Here’s a good example from the cover to SWAMP THING #79, which I just unearthed and had a buyer waiting for. The shot of Superman is the black plate (inked by Tom Yeates over my pencils) with the red line indicating where the surprint will go. The second piece of art, with SWAMP THING’s airbrushed face inside tendrils of energy, is the surprint itself, which printed as green on the cover.

And here’s how it looked on the finished cover.

The cover to WORLD’S GREATEST COMICS MAGAZINE #8 (©Marvel Enterprises) with Doctor Doom’s mailed fist clutching the Cosmic Cube in my best Kirby Kracklin’ style. Bruce Timm inked the final version on a separate board so I have this lovely 11 x 17″ pencil version in perfect condition and am offering it for sale in the $350 range. If interested please get in touch.

UPDATE: We have a buyer.

Sorry the blog hasn’t been updated in a few days but we got caught right in the middle of that ice storm that crippled New England last week. Our power and internet went down Thursday night and we’ve been keeping warm with the woodstove and hauling water from the pond for our plumbing needs ever since. Power finally came back today and we are glad to hear all the little systems in the house running again (and most thankful for hot showers).

Here’s a GREYSHIRT cover to tide any hungry eyeballs over. I will resume daily posting tomorrow!

The nice folks over at WNET/13 have just released my cover image to the next issue of NATURE COMICS for a story on the PUBLISHERS WEEKLY site. I also wrote, drew and colored a 6 pager for it. Not sure of the actual date of publication but there’s a link in the article for an on-line version of a story by Mark Evanier and Tom Yeates.

Cover to TOMORROW STORIES #12. Pencils and inks, Rick Veitch. Copy and lettering, Todd Klein.

This was the cover to RARE BIT FIENDS #12, documenting a big dream I’d had a dozen years earlier. It came at a time when my dreaming had become suddenly lucid; with me fully aware I was dreaming, floating outside my sleeping body or traveling across the landscape at superhuman speeds. The sense I got of this vision, was that whatever I was seeing was multidimensional and alive. Dyes, inks, colored pencil and guache, 1994.

Building on yesterday’s announcement of the upcoming 300+ page limited edition hardcover INDUSTRIAL STRENGTH BRAT PACK from King Hell, here’s the painting I’ll be using on the cover. Feel free to splash this all over the web, if you wish. Just be sure to let everyone know that the book will be solicited in FEB 2009 PREVIEWS for April ship.

This painting of Raphael, with his brother Turtles lurking in the background, was done to accompany an interview AMAZING HEROES did with me in 1989. I’d just left DC over the SWAMP THING 88 brouhaha and was doing the first of a bunch of TURTLES work and announcing my plans to launch KING HELL PRESS, my own self-publishing imprint. Pen, ink, dye, pencil and airbrush, 1989.

Since DC has released the image on-line, I can post my cover to ARMY@LOVE: THE ART OF WAR #5 here. It’s a digital manipulation of the famous unfinished Gilbert Stuart painting of the father of our country. And he cannot tell a lie.