Coloring a Classic
Re-Coning classic Treasury Edition art
One of the things I look forward to is con season. But in the case of the Albany Comic-Con, I not only get to attend as a guest but I also get to design trade and social media images for the show. I thought it would be fun to take a look behind the making of this year’s show design.
In past years, working on this show has given me an opportunity to work with some of my favorite artists, Joe Sinnott, Joe Staton, and Fred Hembeck to name a few. The Albany Comic Con roster usually hosts comic greats from the silver and bronze ages. As those are my favorite comic periods, I have some fun creating a retro esthetic while updating the original. This summer Jose Garcia-Lopez is the featured guest. So I started out searching for an image of his art that I could use that would lend itself to promoting the show. I used the image of the Batman/Hulk crossover from the 1981 Treasury Edition. One of Jose Garcia-Lopez’s most widely known covers, and a huge moment in comic history.
I managed to dig up a clean black and white high-res image and recolored the art to enable me to play with a wider range of colors than the original printed image. I kept much of the basic colors used for the Hulk, Batman, and the ruble, but with today’s digital coloring I had a much wider range of shading and color options to work with. The original printed version had a white background, I changed it to gradient to complement the figures and pull the eye up toward Albany Comic Con logo.
Keeping the Albany Comic Con logo in Illustrator allowed me to change colors to play off the image and create the desired contrast for the information.
Placement of the guests, dates, location, and contact information is around the central figures of the Hulk and Batman.
After a bit of back and forth, mostly with the guest list changing, the image is all set.
If you are in the area, check out the Albany Comic Con show, it is one of the highlights of the con season and grows year after year.