Vicious Circle Cover

Why this is one of my best covers ever

Hello from Castrum Lusitania, my fortress in northern Portugal. Welcome to another edition of our weekly newsletter.

I’ve spent a few days away from work this week, celebrating the 9th year of marriage with my lovely wife. Apart from the lovely time we had together, catching Phenomena Book 2 in the wild was a thrilling surprise. The Spanish edition was just published and it was everywhere where books are sold.

Obviously, a week of traveling meant heavily compressing work during the previous week, particularly crunching various tasks throughout that weekend and rendering writing a newsletter impossible.

Nonetheless, here we are again, this week with what I think is one of my best covers.

But first…

…Project Red

A couple of weeks ago, I made the decision to codename my new book with Rick Remender Project Red - that way we have a shorthand to talk about something that is a long, long way from being announced.

We’re deep into issue 1, thought progress can feel slow at times. That’s because while working in a first issue (and long before it) you end up establishing quite a lot. We need to come up with all kinds of design work, concepts, ideas, how to portray them, storytelling approach, rendering techniques (the same ones? New ones? New materials?), first cover, etc.

But things are getting more and more robust, with lots of character designs, concept work, 8 pages drawn and 8 more in the works, 3 covers pencilled and half inked - you can really feel the entire thing taking shape, which is very exciting.

Vicious Circle Cover

A few months ago, I got invited to draw a cover for A Vicious Circle, a fantastic book by superstars Mattson Tomlin and Lee Bermejo. The book is about time traveling and it is visually very impressive, because Lee - easily one of the best in business - employs, with enormous mastery, different styles to represent the different eras.

Needless to say, you do feel the responsibility when working on such high profile books, so I was pretty happy when the idea for what ended up being the final cover hit me as I was reading the comic in preparation for the gig.

I think it’s one of my best ever because of how well the idea represents the book plus the good execution, heavily helped by Chris O’Halloran’s top notch color work. My concept was to show the main hero and his antagonist as a reflection of each other, with the time traveling machine in the middle of the two and all around it all the eras they visit throughout the story. I sent two versions of the same thumbnail - a traditional one and a colored one with some notes - to make sure what was going on was clear to both editorial and creative team:

Enthusiastically approved, I went to town with it. A cover like this demands lots of references, both from the book itself and external stuff from photos/scientific illustrations. You want to nail the details in every occasion, but especially with time traveling. I can’t stand anachronistic stuff making the rounds just because I’m too lazy to properly research it. If I made any mistake, believe me, I tried very hard not to.

See below pencils, inks, tones and Chris’ colors:

Recommendations

I recently bought The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Our beginnings are one of the most fascinating aspects to ponder and this book is all about the roots of our civilization, completely restructuring what was previously known. I have yet to read the book (busy finishing reading Liu Cixin masterpiece 3-Body Problem trilogy - some words on that soon), but I’ve already watched some interviews/talks with Wengrow (Graeber unfortunately passed away soon after publishing the book) and even on a more superficial level it’s already revolutionary stuff.

I’ll leave you with two of the best, with the promise to return to the subject once I read the book:

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See you soon!

André

P.S. The more I read about Megalopolis the more curious I get. Did any of you get to see it?