The Early Years Collected Cover Design

This cover is an abandoned direction I was exploring for The Early Years Collected before I made some major edits to the book. Originally a short comic featuring this character was at the beginning of the anthology in Sketches and Streams, which now acts as a prologue for Flying Solo. In the end, the comic was cut down to one page, and moved into Momentos, at the end of the book. Since the image didn’t really represent the body of work as a whole, and it no longer lead into the prologue, I decided to try something else. I liked the image though, so it also found a place in Momentos.

I also felt that the cover needed to be more eye-catching and iconic. The work inside spans the time I spent dreaming of making comics and my first few efforts. I’m hoping readers will see the progress I think I’ve made as a writer/illustrator. I had been wanting to redesign company logo for a while, and putting it on the cover, front and center, gave me an excuse to do so. Once I finished digitally coloring the artichoke, I settled on the orange background, and then the blue type. This and Martian Debut have my favorite covers so far.

The Early Years Collected ended up being a 164-page anthology.