San Diego Comic-Con 2012 is less than 3 months away? Really? Holy crap, I gotta save up some money! Anywho, just like every year, they give you a bunch of free stuff when you get there. Among the things they give you, is the annual "Souvenir Book". Some peeps collect these things (my former roommate, for one), and some flip through it mindlessly while waiting for something at Con. But, 130,000+ people get the book.
The book takes submissions for art and articles, this year's themes include the 100th Anniversary of Tarzan, and John Carter of Mars. Tarzan might of been fun, but I thought I'd keep my distance from John Carter. There's also the 75th Anniversary of Prince Valiant (I hated that comic strip). The 50th Anniversary of many of Marvel's greatest heroes including Spider-Man, Hulk and Iron-Man. This could have been fun, but with the Avengers coming out I figured this would have been the over saturated category for submissions this year Also, I did Marvel for last year's Souvenir Book. So I would like to do something different. That pretty much left me with the 20th Anniversary of Image Comics.
Image was just starting, and Spawn was among the first comics I started to read when I really began to get into comics. I don't know if it was because I particularly cared for the character, or story. But everybody was saying it was "THE hot book". A lot of the early Image titles have since fallen off, and Image as a company has grown to be the destination for creator-owned properties. Spawn? He's still kickin it 20 years later. Since it was there at the infancy of my comic indoctrination, it is apart of me. And made sense to be my submission this year. Though I did have an itch to do some Walking Dead art, but decided to stick with my comic roots.
Originally I wanted to do something that honored the core of Image when it began, and having a tribute of sorts to the key founding comics. The problem is some of those properties are no longer with Image (Jim Lee's branch for one, is now owned by DC), and I wasn't sure if that would work with Comic-Cons rules of not mixing properties. The Wild C.A.T.s were with Image, but now they're under DC. Don't want to disqualify myself cuz I'm not sure how the legal umbrella is constructed. So again, it came back to Spawn.
I did take a while to START this piece, and there was some crunch-time towards the end. Sadly, my original "concept" did not pan out, and at the zero hour, there wasn't much I could do to work it in. My original plan was to have the Image comics logo running down the center of the image. Everything inside in the logo was gonna be in COLOR, and everything outside the logo was gonna be Black and White. This didn't work because Spawn is mostly... BLACK (with shades of grey). And while I did ad some blue to the greys of his body, it still was too close to grey that it didn't really work with the black and white concept I had. So the end result is a pretty basic pin-up of the demonic-powered hero. Which I'm fine with. Just note to self, I need to start sooner next year, so if a problem comes up... I can draw something else.
Anywho, much like last year, I did not know if my art would be lucky enough to get published. And I did not know until I got to Comic-Con and flipped through the book myself. So... that will probably be the case this year I'm assuming. So until July 11th, I can only wait...
