Can you feel it? Dave here and it’s getting crazy close to the release of Red Moon so today I’m going to tell you a bit about the development of the cover design.
Now, it goes without saying that the story, page design and art is all very important to any graphic novel but the story won’t be read and those pages won’t be seen at all if the cover doesn’t catch the eye and make the potential customer want to read it. So it could be argued that the cover is almost more important than the book itself.
Throughout the development of Red Moon I would sketch cover ideas whenever I thought of them so some of these that I’ll be showing you are years old.
One of the earlier designs I sketched specifically for the cover was this one:
It’s majestic and I would’ve made the moon in full but I ultimately didn’t like that Daeden was covered up so much.
Another sketch I did but much later in the process was this one:
I thought maybe an action shot and massive herd of animals behind them, but I didn’t like that you couldn’t see Mox or Daeden’s bodies.
Those were two of the earlier ones that I never finalized. And many of the following were actually sketched long before the pages were finished but I had a little bit of time before Red Moon was actually printed so I used it to finalize some of the better ideas so Steve and I could make a better decision on which one was best.
My thoughts for the cover was “less is more”, meaning a simpler image is often more powerful. I thought the cover was going to be the easy part.
Here’s the first stab at the cover:
Nice, simple silhouette’s with a big red moon. Or how about:
Wow. Even simpler. This is easy. What about some color?
Not bad. But Steve says “People were interested in the prequel because they loved the detail of the cover.”
Ooh. There goes my “less is more” theory. But ultimately he’s right. “Less is more” really only applies if the artist, title or, to a lesser extent, the writer, is well known. If you’re unknown you better impress the hell out people with the art.
Steve suggested a few ideas:
This is really based on a movie poster idea that I had for Red Moon before I made it a graphic novel and I was going to animate it as a feature length film. I like it but it doesn’t grab you.
This was a cool idea Steve had since I did a couple variations of it in several panels in the book. Pretty cool but I didn’t really think the title name and characters should be so distorted on the cover.
Steve had a pretty specific idea for this one and it did come out pretty cool but I think it’s just too red and full color would lessen the effect.
So finally what ended up happening, as it so often does, is that we went back to the beginning.
The final cover design is literally one of, if not THE first sketch I did for the cover. I drew it at the same time I drew the first sketch at the top of the blog. It was actually used as the first flyer we put out, although I redrew it and changed it ever so slightly.
Here’s the final cover of RED MOON. Hope you dig it.
Red Moon will be out soon and will be available at redmoongraphicnovel.com
Dave
