And inside the copy of Previews is the solicitation for our first issue followed by this two page preview. I think this is the first time any of the interior art has been shown anywhere.

It really is just a sneak at what we have going on in the series.

BTW, sorry for all the ripples but the images were on newsprint so it's hard to get a clean scan.

Just picked up the November edition of Previews. This was on the inside of the back cover. Kind of exciting for us that book is actually going to come out soon.

This was a character design I came up with about 3 years ago or so. It was for a book that Top Cow is putting out right now called Necromancer. At that time Top Cow decided this was going to be their next big title and they asked me help develop the visuals for it. It was a pretty rough idea so I had freedom to do what I wanted-- I came up with this young girl who had tattoos or symbols on her arms and back and they would light up when she conjured spells. Anyhow, the project never developed past that and I moved on to Dark Horse and their Star Wars line. Fast forward a few years and Top Cow has moved ahead on gone in a different direction. Anyhow it's just interesting sometimes to think about how things work out. Besides, since they never really used this design I can save her for something I do in the future.


-Brian 

Check out the beautiful cover that artist, Travis Charest, turned in for KOTOR #1. Travis is going to be the regular cover artist for our book.

Check out his website to see many of his other pieces.

Watching the local news and some of the TV anchors didn't even believe the reports of how big the hail balls were. They couldn't believe they were larger than pea size-- these look just a bit bigger than quarters to me.

Here was the scene from Monday, October 17th. Strange. We went from 90 degree weather here in Los Angeles last week to upper 60s and low 70s weather in a matter of days. And for about 10 minutes on Monday afternoon we had a hail storm.

This is the scene right outside my front porch. My girlfriend's car is under that tarp that was later shredded by the hail.

This is page 4-- it's quite a thing to draw Vader. I'd been so involved in the Clone Wars for so long and just working on all types of Prequel stuff. It was such a nice change to draw the old classic baddie. The funny thing here is which Vader do you draw though? The 350 lb body builder one from the Classic Trilogy or the newly made and maybe 230 lb version of him from EP III? No offense to Hayden Christiansen but I always liked how massive the original one looked so I went with him. Also, it was quite fun to draw stormtoopers :)

Ahhh, it's the double pager (pages 2-3) of all the destruction the Empire has unleashed on these poor rebels. Despite killing a bunch of good guys, I rather enjoyed drawing this page. It's not often that we put double page speads into the book and sometimes it's kind of an odd proportion to work in. It's just a really large surface to draw on with such a tiny pointed pencil. Usually, if you're going to work in this scale you'll use a soft lead pencil that spreads easily and creates big shapes. But in order to keep the detail tight and the image free of smudges I draw with an H lead and a drafting lead holder. The point is very fine (equivalent to a .3 mm lead from a mechanical pencil) and gives me all the detail I need. I probably spent close to 4 days on this-- which isn't half bad if you average it to 2 days per side.

My latest issue, SW: Empire #35, hit the stands a couple of weeks ago. As usual I like to share some of my pencils to give people an idea of how things look at the penciling stage.

This is page one of that issue ( for anyone who hasn't picked it up yet, you may want to stop looking at this stuff-- you've been warned). You can see how much cool stuff our colorist, Mike Atiyeh has put into the final pages.