I’m a fan of “process” commentaries, where people go through the steps of how a project evolved into the finished product. Our June cover is a celebration for AG’s 4th anniversary and is drawn by Qomix artist Caesar Meadows, so I thought I’d post some of his sketches how the ideas evolved into the actual cover.

The idea to do another cover with original artwork (the first since July ’07’s Punks: The Comic cover by Kody Chamberlain) sprung from AG editor Dan Fox, who really wants to be immortalized in a similar way I and former AG editors Noah Bonaparte and Patrick Strange were on our June ‘06 cover (drawn by The K Chronicles’ Keith Knight). I’m not a big fan of AG covers being so self-referential, as I think people pick up AG more to check out our content than to see our pretty faces (the reason that Keith Knight cover happened was because I was so stoked we made it to our first anniversary post-Katrina that it made sense to pat ourselves on the back a bit), so another cover featuring the editors seemed a bit weird to me. That said, I’d put money on next year’s 5th anniversary cover having editors on it. And it’ll be original artwork again (I’d feel way too weird to have a photo of myself on the cover–no one wants to see that, right?), probably by AD’s Josh Neufeld or someone like that.

This idea also came about during the second week of May, so timing was an issue. Caesar was an easy choice because he knows the magazine so well and we knew he could flip the artwork fairly quickly. The original idea was to have a giant “4″ on the cover, with me, Dan and Marty Garner somewhere along the top and a list of maybe twenty former cover artists all in a party scene at the bottom.

Once Caesar said he could do it, he immediately said that fitting all of what we wanted in would be difficult since time was an issue and getting all the caricatures down is pretty time-consuming. We asked him to come up with some general ideas that would make things easier. This is what he came up with:

Cool idea, and it would’ve had some of the former cover artists dancing on the moon, but I didn’t want to be primarily featured and it was reminiscent of Vance Kelly’s poster for our second anniversary show at One Eyed Jacks, with the two-headed monkey flying through space.

Another cool one with me as the primary character.

I really liked this one, but the issues with our Gray Ghost story aren’t even a year old and it doesn’t really embody AG. The idea was incorporated into the final version, though, which I like.

One more with me as the main character. Also close in concept to the Vance Kelly poster.

Dan and I really wanted a party scene, so we decided to narrow down that list of characters and focused on some that would be easier to draw while representing a variety of artists. The only true caricatures would be of DJ Soul Sister, One Man Machine and Reverend Spooky LeStrange with Clockwork Elvis’ DC Harbold, with the others being the puppet Lil’ Doogie, the guy in the lion mask from The Bally Who? cover, The Gray Ghost, and Glorybee’s Masta Boink. It took a few days, but Caesar started to knock it out of the park:

All that was left was to add in the guy in the lion mask, Masta Boink as well as the gray tones.

I was surprised to find that I wound up on the cover anyway, alongside Caesar himself. Dan missed out on this one, but Caesar felt that the space needed to be filled and he’s familiar enough with me that my likeness was easy to duplicate. Next year, Dan!