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ABC INTERIOR DESIGN WORK In addition to designing the covers of the ABC hardcover and trade paperback books, I also designed the title pages, end matter (galleries, bios, etc.) and the chapter pages. Something Alan, the artists and I all felt strongly about was that the covers of the ABC books were an integral part of each issue, and when those issues were collected, we wanted the covers to go at the beginning of each issue, instead of all together at the back, as is often done. This required an extra page be inserted before each cover to keep the left and right hand page order correct. I decided to make these "chapter" pages, each having a brief description of the issue, which I wrote, some sort of art or iconic symbol, and the cover credits. I had fun putting these together.
© America's Best Comics Above is a sample chapter page from Promethea Book 1. Most of the chapter pages had a similar background of ABC star symbols. J.H. Williams got the most involved in these (no surprise!) and created new art for many of them. In the issue descriptions, I was trying for a haiku-like distillation of the contents. Some worked better than others. I always ran them past Alan, who made occasional minor changes, but generally thought they were fine.
© America's Best Comics I think I had the most fun with the SMAX Hardcover chapter pages. The art on each came from the story inside, seen through the torn parchment that I used here and on the book's cover. The text on each was meant to be song lyrics as performed by Smax's Singing Sword, and using approximately the same font he sang in for the stories.
© America's Best Comics Another book that required lots of design work was GREYSHIRT: INDIGO SUNSET, a six issue miniseries, also collected in a trade paperback. Of the 32 pages of each issue, 8 pages were meant to be excerpts from the Indigo City Sunset newspaper, modeled after the New York Post. All those pages were written by Rick Veitch, who also did the "photo" art and the comic strips. I designed them and put them together. Shown here is a back cover, where we had a lot of fun with the creator credits for each issue at the top. All text and images © Todd Klein, except as noted. All rights reserved. |
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