I always LOVED your comic stories and I hope to see new ones!

Good one here.

Excellent Work, Joe. And the subtle Process dots are the4re too, Very Marvel looking color choices.

I was going for 80s Marvel, but the composition I used ended up being more of an 80s DC. When I drew this I was thinking about a comic I liked as a kid: Jim Aparo's cover for DC's The Brave & The Bold #139 (which also has a spotlight circle and black background). As it turns out, 1980s Marvel covers usually left the background mostly open for coloring; either with flat areas, or figures dropped back from the foreground by, say, putting their black linework down as a spot color. It looks pretty crazy compared to today's more considered, shaded, unsaturated choices.

Knowing your color sense, Scott, I'm pretty sure you'd like this version more than REAL early 80s Marvel coloring, which could easily have the entire background done in orange, pure cyan or hot pink. Going through cover galleries, I had forgotten how common that was.

Well you are right about the colors (but I have terrible color sense XD), but it was the Title font really.. I didn't read a lot of DC except War comics back int eh day I was more of a "Make Mine Marvel" at the time. My brother and I reading Spiderman, though he likes Fantastic Four a bit more. and the Classic X-Men Jean Grey saga occurred during my high school years.

Scott

Nice work - and it doesn't hurt that "narr" means clown or fool in Norwegian.

Great work! The only way it could come off better would be if CMYK layers were misaligned!

I thought about it! I stopped myself from doing a lot of corrections too: "Oops, that dark blue is bleeding over into -- wait, they wouldn't have fixed that."

But the only thing I thought of that I just couldn't figure out how to do in any reasonable amount of time was to make the color areas 'halo' into the black the way they did on the real CMYK covers, because the blacks were flat blacks instead of rich blacks so the other plates bled through. Now that would be authentic!

IMO, the distinction between rich and flat black isn't really visible until you have a specular highlight, as 'rich' blacks seems to be more reflective while good flat is uniformly matte.

Perhaps it could be simulated by making 'rich' black pure black and giving matte black the tiniest greenish hue?

The bleed-through effect would probably have looked all right if I had dialed the black linework layer back to about 90%-96%. The real problem was that on those old covers spot color areas were cut by hand on film, so the bleed-throughs were straight-edged polygons haloing the artwork. To make it look authentic I would have either had to color like that in polygonal areas below the linework layer from the beginning (which I didn't -- who would think to do that now?), or go back and extend and then square up all the areas I'd already done after the fact. That would probably have been hours of obsessive work, and I didn't think it would add enough to the art.

It was hard enough trying to replicate the various color matches and values with my primitive color sense. What was and wasn't saturated on an early 80s comic cover doesn't match what a cover or computer screen looks like now!

As an invertivrate-I mean inveterate dumb question asker, I have to inquire, are the young ladies antagonists costumers who somehow got turned into real villains and monsters, or did they just sneak into the con trying to pass themselves off as costumers. It'd be a shame if some of those bad guys just came to hear Neal Gaiman speak or buy some DVDs or drawings in the dealer's room