Uncivil War: Another Birth of a Cover

So the cover process for the first Uncivil War volume was a bit arduous. Not for me, of course: I just sat back and giggled madly whenever my brilliant cover artist, Christopher Gugliotti, sent something in. I'm not sure he had the same reaction whenever he'd get a return email from me saying, "Awesome! Perfect! Good to go as is! Or...or, hey...maybe we should try..." Still, he never complained, maybe 'cuz he's just about the greatest guy in the history of ever or maybe because I gave him some of his first ever professional comic book work or maybe because I was holding his beloved dachshund, Nibbles the jedi timelord, hostage. Who can say, really? Artists are so mysterious.

Still, this time 'round, for After the Fall, it was quite a bit easier, in part because we already had the logos more or less settled, and in part because Chris had already done more than a half dozen variations on the original theme. So I pretty much just had to tell him which variation and give him the subtitle and we were good to go.

Well...almost.

Here was the original variation we decided to work from.

But we'd changed the logo (and, I think, the dimensions) since then, so we had to update those, and add the correct subtitle. And since After the Fall is a short story collection, and the stories take place in five different (former) states, we also tweaked the number of stars in the union (the blue part of the flag). I spent a few minutes thinking about what the best arrangement for the reduced number of stars would be, before realizing that Chris was going to be a much better judge of that so why was I even bothering? I was right. Chris also took it upon himself to leave one of the stars sorta kinda ghosted which I loved oh so much.

Done!

Or...hmm...maybe...hey, Googs, how would you feel about flames? You know, turning the red stripes into flames towards the bottom? What's that? You hate doing flames? Oh. Okay.

And then he did it anyway.

Oh my.

I love that guy. I'm not giving him his dog back, but I surely do love him.