Transmetropolitan

My entry for Cape & Cowl/The Original Art Shop's comic book cover contest. These two Derby based titans of retail have challenged Derbyshire's greatest illustrators to design the best comic cover they can.

To be honest, seeing as my entry lacks colour, a cover title/logo, issue number and barcode etc I'm very unlikely to win but Martin at Cape & Cowl [link] demanded I enter and it gave me an opportunity to draw Spider Jerusalem so I dove in head first.

This is three weeks work and was originally going to have a mash up logo title that would've read "Derby Evening Transmetropolitan" (I even bought a copy of the Derby Telegraph so I could scan the font) but there wasn't time. I still kept the theme of Derby in there though as Spider sits on the East Street Ram Statue in the centre of Derby.

My mate Neil helped with photo referencing here and originally the plan was that I was going to sit atop of the statue with my old laptop and get it done all at once but the snow meant it was a risk so I took a separate photo of me cross legged at home. This results in Spider looking like he's either floating above or in front of the statue for some people. My natural depth perception is quite poor so I could never balance it off properly.

The edges are messy as when I scanned it to do the clean up I discovered I'd trod the usb connection of my Wacom Bamboo One into shit. Replacing that is going to be difficult...