Getting the Lay of Things

It’s occurred to me that recent­ly I’ve kind of trapped myself into almost every­thing I post need­ing to be a big pro­duc­tion: a ful­ly-real­ized cov­er, with inks, let­ter­ing and col­or­ing. I’m giv­ing myself license to not always have to do that, hence this post of work from the past.

Reg­u­lar vis­i­tors to this site will know that I’ve had a long­time asso­ci­a­tion with Big Bang Comics, going back to when it first was pub­lished through Cal­iber. And I’ve kept that con­nec­tion even to today. Over the length of my asso­ci­a­tion, I’ve had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to con­tribute in var­i­ous ways. I’ve pen­ciled sto­ries and cov­ers, done ink­ing, col­or­ing, designed char­ac­ters and logos, and even con­tributed ideas to sto­ries here and there.

But you would­n’t know that I also got to do rough lay­outs for oth­er artists to work with! What you see here are lay­outs done for a sequence in Big Bang Comics #14, which was part two of some­thing we referred to as the “Time­bomber” sto­ry­line. Erik Larsen saw fit to loan Gary Carl­son his Sav­age Drag­on for this sto­ry, where Drag­on end­ed up with a lit­er­al time­bomb strapped to his chest that kept explod­ing and bounc­ing him around through dif­fer­ent time peri­ods (and art and writ­ing styles). Along the way, Drag­on met up with var­i­ous Big Bang heroes and villains.

For the final sequence of Big Bang #14, it was sup­posed to have a “Bronze Age Jack Kir­by at DC” kind of feel to it. As I recall, when this job came up, I was too busy at the time with my day job in ani­ma­tion to actu­al­ly pen­cil it myself, but I did agree to do lay­outs (seen here) for anoth­er artist. If you have a copy of the com­ic, you’ll see that my lay­outs were giv­en to pen­cil­er Joe Zier­man, who did a pret­ty good job of tak­ing the “Kir­by-ness” of my lay­outs and fol­low­ing through with it in his pencils.

Oh, by the way: I also did Ster­anko-style lay­outs for the sequence pre­ced­ing this Kir­by one, AND a cov­er rough/thumbnail lay­out for this issue that was giv­en to Rich Buck­ler (which I even did a col­or guide for). So I was kind of all over this issue, but in sort of an “invis­i­ble” way.

Though I love see­ing oth­er peo­ple’s roughs, I always feel a lit­tle fun­ny about post­ing my own. So hope­ful­ly vis­i­tors enjoy this.