A few cool things I can talk about, finally.
First:
WILD TIMES: THE ORAL HISTORY OF WILDSTORM STUDIOS
Joseph Hedges ran a successful Kickstarter for this project—collecting a ridiculous amount of interview material and charting the history of Wildstorm Studios; for non-comics folk, this was part of the upstart Image Comics "movement" years ago, and later was purchased by DC Comics. Wildstorm produced some amazing and innovative comics material from some of the biggest names in comics. To be frank, a lot of them became the biggest names in comics because of their Wildstorm work.
Joseph hired me to tackle the book's interior layout chores, and I'm pretty pleased with the result. (The cover is by the excellent George Sellas.)
To purchase the print or digital editions, visit the book's official store.
There's also some cool related material on the book's Tumblr.
ATOMIC ROBO: ULTRA FIELD MANUAL
I've been a big fan of the comic series Atomic Robo since pretty much day one and it's been a pleasure to get to know the book's creators (writer Brian Clevinger and artist Scott Wegener) a bit.
A while ago, they ran a Kickstarter (I'm sensing a theme), and one of the rewards was an employee handbook for Atomic Robo's company, Tesladyne. It's a lovely bit of work, funny and smart.
So I was super-thrilled to be invited to help them put together a similar project for them, a military-style field manual for the super-secret shadowy paramilitary organization ULTRA (which intends to seize and re-engineer as much of Robo's / Tesla's technology and use it to SAVE THE WORLD mumble mumble but also secret bad guy agenda mumble mumble).
It was a blast.
It also made for a fun design challenge—make something that looks credible as a military manual (which, historically, tend toward the deeply, vastly ugly) without making it look deeply, vastly ugly.
In addition to typesetting Brian's text, I got to create all kinds of fun things like requisition forms for exotic / world-breaking weapons, requisition forms for those requisition forms, a "Secret Vampire" checklist (your commanding officer might be a vampire! Be ever vigilant!), Vampire autopsy forms, unit insignia for ULTRA, and all kinds of fun stuff.
For details, visit the Kickstarter page here.
And some samples of the material:
And a peek behind the curtain; my "worksheet" for designing the ULTRA insigne.
