The Eltingville Club: Character Pin-Up Pages (Patreon)

These were done for the Eltingville Club collection. I originally wanted to draw them in the style of the old Jack Kirby Marvel pin-up pages, but didn't have time to work on accurate pastiches. Instead I ended up with a design for them that was inspired by a Jack Davis title page from Tales From The Crypt, which featured the Crypt-Keeper in front of a gallery of hanging faces. Pete -- The Secretary of Horror -- was the first piece I worked on, so I was looking at horror imagery for ideas, and that set the format for all four. I went with generic heads based on characters and tropes rather than referencing actual superheroes, monsters and fantasy figures, again, because of time. I would have sweated the details even more than trying to do the Kirby designs, and would have probably tried to fit in many more characters. Sometimes I do restrain myself, a little. 

It turned out to be more fun drawing all the heads from my memory of the things I was basing them on. The real pain was working on the title lettering and the Eltingville Club logos for each character. I ached those, but I was pretty happy with how everything came out. I did screw up the lettering on the sidebars, which were lists of the character's favorite things in their chosen "field". I started lettering Pete's top horror picks on the board and it just looked terrible  -- with all the decent, clean work in the art and logos, the loose lettering just got on my nerves and made me crazy. So I lettered everything on separate paper and scanned it so Sarah could assemble the final pages digitally.  

I'm not completely unhappy with my lettering for my comics, but lettering chunks of text in that way highlighted the fact that I'm no Ben Oda or Artie Simek. And, sure, I don't need to be, but sometimes I really wish I could belt out some lovely, classic comic book lettering. I tend to enjoy doing titles and headers for the Fun Strip pages, and some of my logos aren't bad, but I have to craft everything in a very time-consuming way because of my lack of training (and lack of patience when it comes to study and practice). I don't letter those features so much as cobble them together. I use the lightpad to trace traditional fonts scanned and printed out at various sizes, or eyeball mutant versions of them. It's too late to change my habits, but I still dream of sitting down with the old pen nibs and lettering pamphlets and spending some time with them, some paper, an ames guide and a bottle of ink. 

(You can see here that I goofed up Jerry's EC logo in the original art, whoops!)

I ended up really happy with these pieces, I was clicking pretty decently with the page while working on them and had a lot of enthusiasm for what I was doing. I would love to make pins or stickers of the four Eltingville Club badges, I wanted to use them for the DHC lunchbox design, but it was a bit of a rush schedule so we used the throw design of "geek elements" Sarah and I made for the collection end papers and cover. The Eltingville lunchbox appeared too late and the entire line it was a part of did pretty poorly, especially the Club's. But, hey, they got made, which is nutty. Now that I think about it, the low sales on the Eltingville two-parter and production on the collection caused the book to be a money-loser, as well. Eltingville went from three Eisner Awards and a pilot to a box office stinker. Sheesh! 

Let this be a lesson to you creators out there -- if you wait years to get something done, the audience may no longer be there for it.  I meant to finish the Eltingville stories in the early aughts, but got sidetracked for various reasons (lack of an up-front page rate and working on other projects, among others). Hopefully Beasts of Burden won't get buried for similar reasons -- nine years between collections of the main storyline and the shrinking sales of single issue comics have murdered our numbers) but at least that situation wasn't of my own making. 

Cripes, the Dork collection is still in the red and that didn't even have new material costs to help sink it. Twenty bucks for that sucker and it's one of the best things I ever put out. Sometimes I wonder, too often I blunder. Comics is a marathon. I'm tired, and I need new sneakers, but I'm still running. Wish I knew where the hell I was going, though.

Interesting where a post goes when you're winging it.