Hooray! Rebellion are reprinting the hard to get second and third editions of the Nikolai Dante series of Graphic Novels with some dazzling new covers from series co-creator Simon Fraser! I asked Simon of he'd be kind enough to send me the lowdown and, as usual. he didn't disappoint! Over to Si:
"Rebellion are finally succumbing to pressure and doing new editions of the second and third Dante collections. In the case of The Great Game it wasn't so pressing as there are still a lot of copies of the first edition knocking about the distribution and retail chain. It was part of the abortive DC comics publishing partnership from years back. So the new edition is more about maintaining consistency. In the case of The Courtship of Jena Makarov, it came out after the DC deal collapsed and as a result had a MUCH smaller print run. Copies of this book have been reselling on ebay for silly amounts of money for some years now. I have lost count of the number of times that people have asked me where they can get a copy of this book. They want to buy it , but can't, therefore they can't/won't buy the 8 volumes that follow it. Arrgh! After years of asking Rebellion nicely about this, then not so nicely, I eventually just told people to Bittorrent the thing. Yup, that makes me a bad person. Off to Hell I go!" I believe it's called Mek-Quake...
Simon continues "Aaaanyway, so now, at last, we're having a new edition of each book. New covers are required. This is fun for me , because A) I had thought that I would never do another Dante cover and B) I wasn't much keen on my earlier efforts. So in order of publication..."
"Nikolai Dante - The Great Game"
"You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy"
"The original cover has dated badly. I hate it! It's been annoying me for years now. While I actually quite like the ship (I wanted to do an airbrushy Ferrari car portrait like used to be on my brothers bedroom wall in the 80s and I think that worked), everything else is static. The exploding planet is awful. Some of the wreath of character portraits are just bad. This may have been done while I was learning Photoshop in 1997 or 98. All my previous colour work had been done on my Acorn RiscPC, which I was fairly fluent with. This cover might have been the first thing I did on my new-ish 233Mhz Pentium PC. So this was done while I was living in Vienna. I was still in my 20s ( just ). What I'm saying here is that it's bloody old!"
"So what do I want the new cover to be? Well in the first instance I want it to be all about the ACTION. In the second I kind of want to make more of the EXPLODING DAMNED PLANET! I always liked the character of Elena DiJanisaire, it spoke well of Dante's character that the girl he actually married was so badass. I kinda-sorta-mighta have used her as a springboard for my own character Lilly Mackenzie. Quite subconsciously you understand. I wouldn't want to give Morrison too much credit ( he'd want royalties or something )."
Just a normal day for Lilly and Cosmo...
"The fact that Elena dies early in the story isn't a problem, in fact it's a plus. If she's so prominently featured on the cover, one might ( mistakenly ) assume that she would last for the whole story. So the shock value of her murder is enhanced. This story also has an awesome baddie in Dante's insane half brother Valentine Romanov. I wanted to incorporate him in there somehow. I wasn't immediately sure how I could do that. Would he be cackling in the background as the Darkstar explodes? Naaah, it takes away from the explosion to do that. Also I don't want to spoil the reveal of his true face near the end of the story. In the pencil rough you can see that the exploding skull is already there, but also some refugees from the first cover 'wreath'."
Then, Valentine did the most powerful burp ever...
"They made it into the first colour rough, but then those bozos were erased. There was going to be a lot of exploding detritus and I didn't want the composition to get bogged down with too much stuff."
Surly Valentine
Why was Valentine crap at musical statues?
'Cos he kept Roman-off...
"I did a lot of screwing around with wet media brushes in Photoshop to get the explosion nice and detailed. I wanted the feeling of gas plasma being released by the heat. I fiddled about with the Hue slider on the background too. Sometimes that will suggest a colour combination that you would never have attempted, but totally works."
Valentine reads too many progs in one go...
Romanov family reunions were always a little explosive...
To finish off I made the skull a little darker, to contrast better with the blast. Some people have told me that they don't recognise it as a skull immediately, it comes later and is a bit surprising. I'm happy to have made an almost full cover image of an exploding skull, subliminal.
Eloise remembers just why she divorced Nikolai...
Nikolai Dante- Love & War ( formerly The Courtship of Jena Makarov )
The coolest swinger in town...
"Like the Great Game cover, the original one is quite cheerful and swashbucklery. The new title however, suggests a bigger scale and more tragedy. So I rethought this cover more completely. I don't hate the original this time. I actually quite like it. If it has a problem , it's that the composition is quite flat. I thought I might try and amp up the drama this time."
Dante's Inferno...
"So in the next version I went all out for EPIC. Also , because the book no longer has her name in the title, I dropped Jena Makarov from the central position with Dante and substituted Katarina Dante. I love the idea of our handsome, virile, action hero going into battle, with his Mum!"
"Muuum, they're all picking on me..."
"I've kept the sunset from the first cover, thrown in some grand architecture and massed armies to give it scale."
Notice how all those leading lines draw you you Dante's crotch? Very clever Simon...
"In retrospect I'm not mad keen on that dull red colour. Oh well. Maybe there will be a 3rd edition of it one day and I can fix that!"
Just... move your arm a little Katarina...
HUGE thanks to Simon for this, it made me realise just how much I miss Dante. Perhaps a Christmas re-read is in order?
Speaking of Christmas, there will be a festive update to this blog each day until Christmas Day! Enjoy!
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