Maybe I can’t do comics just yet, but I can do pictures that take as long to read as one — this cover was for an old friend Goran Sudžuka’s (and Stephanie Phillips’) new book, so I wanted to go all out on it if I could.

I started this one with a lot of thin slices, but then made a rough with fewer strips, as a ‘safer’ backup, but it didn’t make it better, and only undermined everything about the flow. It just needs to be crowded. Denser was actually more clear.

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This one being the most recent published cover makes a full circle at the moment: the first bit of work of mine that was published in US comics was an uncredited color version of the Outlaw Nation black and white omnibus (featuring the other Goran’s — Parlov‘s first US work too, fresh off his 1200-page stretch on Magico Vento).

This was just a few color bits added over Goran (Sudžuka)’s gray washes–

Though the full circle may have happened earlier, when I colored two more Outlaw Nation covers for the German edition in 2020. Same setup, working over gray washes, and they wanted to keep the color scheme limited to red white and blues–

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Before all these, in college, I was coloring other covers, like this one for the original edition of Martine Moon (which is now available in English over at Panel Syndicate), and some of Goran’s comics (from a series I drew a comic for too; that’s for some future retrospective post) —

And while I was still in high school, on the other end of the country, I was coloring a bunch of his (and Darko’s) magazine illustrations too.

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And — way before all that — I was in fifth grade, waiting for new episodes of his (and Darko Macan’s) Svebor and Plamena in the magazine we got through a school subscription, not imagining I’d know him someday, or that I would even be drawing comics. But he definitely helped me a lot along the way, in more ways than I can recount here.

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