Topic: Round 1: Stitchwork

Here we go in day 2, with more projects to post. With the rate people and projects are coming in, I'll be posting 2 projects today, to keep the "spread it out" theory going, without making people wait too long. I'm putting them up in the order they arrived, so here we go with our second prospective project...

Stitchwork
by Martin Brandt - Silvina Rinaldi

Joshua has learned in life paranoia is not a psychosis it's a survival skill as he tries to uncover the mysteries of his murders and how he is able to run away from death each time. Left only with convoluted memories and vague images of the spider limbed sisters who resurrected him, Joshua must act quickly to put the pieces together before his murderer strikes again.

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We know the drill by now...The judges will have their say, and then, verdict and out for public comment. Watch for the next project to go up soon!

Ah finally! This whole spread them out thing is almost maddening! More projects!

Alright lets get into it, shall we? As always, I'll go premise first, and move to the art.

Premise: This one is brief and to the point, and I like that a lot. It's giving me the character Joshua, it's giving me the hook, that he's resurrected multiple times but doesn't know why, and it gives me some conflict, in that he's being murdered more than once by someone and again doesn't know why! So in terms of being concise and interesting, I think this pitch works very well. I do think the writer could use some help with his sentences, as you've got some run on action going there and you could stand to break that up a bit, not only for dramatic effect, but for ease of reading as well. Sometimes you can be TOO short and sweet, so keep that in mind. All in all, I dig this pitch. Well done.

Cover: I can tell right off the bat that this cover took some serious work. What impresses me the most here is all the imagery you're using. The masks and animals of course, but also the needles and how they've sewn the character in the middle of the cover up almost like a mummy, binding him. Nice.

I'm not sure I like the dead space at the bottom of the cover. It seems like you almost ran out of time and submitted it before it was quite finished and I think that takes away from an otherwise pretty strong composition. If you left that space open on purpose...I'd caution against that. I have seen a number of people try to alter the normal flow of things with regard to comic covers, and while I can fully respect the need to do your own thing, comic covers follow a tradition for a reason. Comics are normally racked or shelved so as to leave the top half of the cover more visible than the bottom half. As such your important copy, or text if you prefer, needs to be in that top half to be seen by a potential walk up customer. This includes your logo of course and your bounding box. The title traditionally goes lower on the cover, and it's nice enough to leave space for that, but you would be better served using that space for your art and worrying over the addition of a title later. Letterers are crafty folks and can usually figure something out. You also want to consider when designing your logo that you don't want it interfering too much with the top portion of your art here. I think if you're going with the right logo you'll be fine, but it's something to consider, because if this makes it to later rounds it's something I'll be looking for.

A couple of other things worth noting here, the head is off center slightly to the left, which looks a little funny. With the giant mask and eyes at the top as well as the threads splitting the cover down the middle having the head not centered distracts, especially without any good reason for not centering it.

The head anatomically is a bit off as well. I can chalk at least some of that up to a stylistic choice, especially when looking at the width of the face being a bit wide, but the lack of the right eye bothers me. Yeah you've got the hair there to cover it, but the hair is such that you should still be able to see part of the eye underneath. The same goes for the ear on the right side of the head. (left side as we're looking at the head of course.)

Conclusion: I think you're striking a pretty good balance here between story and art, and from what I see so far the art fits the story quite well. I'll say right now with this type of art choice, finishing is EVERYTHING. There's so much fine detail here you need to focus extra hard on the little things and get them right. I'm very interested to see further work on this and I'll vote YES here without reservation.

you'll thank me in 2 weeks when we're in a slow period…unless things keep picking up speed, in which case, we'll speed up ourselves!

Well, the short answer… hmm…. YES (not a WOW, YEAH, WAHOO, but a solid yes).

The Pitch - As Cary mentioned, this pitch is short and sweet, but I feel like it could have used a little bit more oomph to it to really grab me. Conceptually, I'm interested, but if I were a publisher, I wouldn't say, "oh, I want to invest money on this." The first sentence could be split into two sentences and really pop, I think, and gives you a good lead in to the rest.

1.   Paranoia is not a psychosis; it's a survival skill.
2.   Joshua, who has died repeatedly only to come back again, struggles to uncover answers.
3.   Left with only convoluted memories and vague images of the spider-limbed sisters who resurrect him, he must act quickly to solve his own mystery before the murderer strikes again.

Still, though, I feel like it could use something… Just a little to give us a glimmer into what's going on.  As a publisher, I would not want to guess what this is about; I would want a little clue, but not the answer.

You know, thinking about it, the simple fact that I DO want to know more is a good thing.

Take what you can from what we said on that and see what you can do with it… A little more pop.

The Rough Cover - I have a feeling this cover has more detail than we're going to see in a lot of entries, which says a lot for the project. On the plus side, I see emotion in Joshua's uncovered eye, which I like. Dynamic emotions, regardless of genre, are something I really want to see in artists. I don't care of you're drawing capes or convicts, give the characters life, not just a six pack, so good job on that! The imagery is balanced, but as Cary mentioned, the space left at the bottom for the logo ~ I would not at all recommend going that route.  Problem is, as Cary mentioned, in a lot of comic stores, you only see the top chunk of the cover. Same with a lot of newsstands. The people who can typically pull off an unconventional structure are either established (not the first issue), a name (creative team is known), or has some marketing behind it to counteract the "art".

As for the content of the cover… top half, masks, eyes integrated, detail, shadowing, etc… all very nice. I kind of like covers to tell me a story, which this more draws a question mark over a story. So I'm a mixed bag as far as the cover goes… no doubting the skill, but wish something a less symbolically tied to the pitch.

Preference, it's all preference!

As mentioned in the beginning… YES. Good job.

Wow, two entries lined up for us. We'll start here with yours:

THE ART:

Pro: Right off the bat we're going to disagree with both of our esteemed colleagues and say that the composition is actually our favorite part. Perfectly symmetrical images are a fast track to bored, static pictures, and having the head ever so slightly off-kilter reinforces the general off-ness of the story inside. That unease Cary mentioned is actually a good thing, as it not only reflects your story but also the incredible spookiness of this cover. And the space on the bottom… we reserve judgment. We know how much color adds to a piece, and with something this moody we're envisioning a lot of texture work in the final colors and inks. There's also the typography to consider, and until we can see what you're planning to do there we won't tell you if it's good or bad. We're big fans of cover artists who break conventions, and in this day and age people pick up comics as much because the image grips them as anything. Just because you can't see a title peeking up above a newsstand doesn't mean much of anything anymore.

…and we could go on for a while about how traditional newsstands no longer exist, the comic stores are dying out, and many of those that survive have non-traditional interiors that (among other things) display the comics in a much more open and visible manner. In short, though, we will say that designing your cover based on traditional and antiquated store models is a mistake. Let the art and the graphic design sing out loud and that will be your guide. Just look at James Jean, who has built a career on doing just that.

Con: The anatomy isn't strong, but at this point it looks like a stylistic choice so we aren't going to hold it against you. Yet. Lots of great artists use more loose, animated styles of illustration, and lots of terrible artists use "style" as an excuse to never learn how to draw. Until we see more of your work we can't judge. We're looking forward to seeing some full-body sketches from you to get a taste of what your art really looks like.

Also, this cover is going to live or die by its color. The right sort of moody color scheme is going to make this something really neat. If the color falls short, however, the whole thing will collapse.

Last Word: It's a solid layout with some interesting compositional choices that could make it a real winner - if the color and typography come together with the drawing as a unified whole.

THE PITCH:

Pro: It gets to the point and lays out the information in an easy-to-read format. All the most important stuff is right there, and it's interesting. A guy who keeps getting murdered and resurrected over and over again? Curious. It's got us wondering what's going on, so that's good.

Con: It doesn't quite have enough solid information to make a judgment on the series concept. There is a difference between your series pitch and the blurb on the back cover of your trade paperback. When you're pitching, don't use flowery language that raises questions you aren't answering– just tell us what the story is about. If you're talking to editors, they don't want questions about what your series will be so don't tease them with an unclear pitch! Reformat this baby so that instead of sounding like the preview blurb in a TV Guide it instead tells us exactly what's going on. That way we'll know for sure if it's a concept we're interested in or not. If an editor doesn't know if he is interested, he's just going to assume he isn't.

Last Word: There's enough here to sound like it could be interesting, but not enough to say for sure if it really is or not.

FINAL VERDICT: We give it a yes. We want to see more of the final art style and find out more of what the story is before we turn it down, but the pitch in particular isn't solid enough just now to make us really anxious to find more.

And we have our first 3-Yes vote of the year…having hosted this contest a few times now, I'd say this one benefited from the early submission, let that be a lesson to any of you out there who are still deciding if you want to be in this thing….

Let's hear some public comments then…

Adam&Comfort said

Right off the bat we're going to disagree with both of our esteemed colleagues and say that the composition is actually our favorite part. Perfectly symmetrical images are a fast track to bored, static pictures, and having the head ever so slightly off-kilter reinforces the general off-ness of the story inside…  We're big fans of cover artists who break conventions, and in this day and age people pick up comics as much because the image grips them as anything. Just because you can't see a title peeking up above a newsstand doesn't mean much of anything anymore.
… In short, though, we will say that designing your cover based on traditional and antiquated store models is a mistake.

Just wanted to throw out there… I'm all about breaking conventions, but with unknown books, you typically want to say SOMETHING about what's going on besides artistic symbology. You can do both ~ give a dynamic image AND integrate some subtle symbolism. The cover just didn't sing for me because there wasn't anything going on.

As for the store model being dead, understand your point there, just meaning there's a balance between rocking the boat of convention and making something that may alienate the very people you want to look at the book.

I thought the pitch for Stitchwork was pretty interesting, my only qualms with the cover was that the face looks too stiff, almost like it's a cardboard cut-out or something. I think the sharp, defined shadows lend to that as they give no softness to the face. The eye in particular stands out to me in that respect.

Congrats on making it to Round Two, I can't wait to see more of this project!

Thank you!

I appreciate your advice. The pitch is something I honestly struggle with. There is a line between too much and too little information. There is also the fact that the pitch is different depending on who receives it. I was going for the short sweet few second pitch. I wanted to get your interest and have you ask for more.

I guess in some ways I did that, maybe not exactly as intended. I have several revisions to this pitch, some are even a paragraph or two. I kept running into the issue that people felt it was a story about vampires. I guess cause they would fixate on the whole not dieing thing. Personally I felt it was a bit singled minded as there is many ways to be undead, but that is what is popular these days.

I'll take your advice to heart and review the pitch again. This is the time to try and nail it all down.

I should also say I knew I would take a hit on the run-on sentence.

Once again thanks for the advice.

I agree in regards to the run on sentence and wish I could see a hint of a right eye. Besides that, GOOOOOOOO Martin!

You guys are getting double coverage! My project just posted...with your cover! Very clever guys, very clever indeed...

I'm not worried about the run on sentence. If people are worrying about the sentence structure rather than the idea, then you have a problem. As I see it, I think the idea over powered that. If it were the other way around, a bad idea with impeccable grammar, you wouldn't have made it through. This should be an interesting project. Can't wait to see what you do next.

i'll fix the thumbnail…oops…

Michael Leal said

I'm not worried about the run on sentence. If people are worrying about the sentence structure rather than the idea, then you have a problem.

Main point is that if we have trouble getting through reading it, that same problem could very well translate to the end product. Hard to read pitch, which should get as much or more attention than any page of script, needs to be clear. If not, there are hundreds of people waiting in line after you to pick up the slack.

AIPman1 said

i'll fix the thumbnail…oops…

I just had to mess with Team Stitchwork a bit!  

Martin and Silvina,
The cover is intriguing. I do like the asymmetry…reminds me of The Mothman Prophecies, which used the idea to great effect.
I've admired Silvina's work for a few months now. Very interested in the character sketches.

RobbiedaKid said

You guys are getting double coverage! My project just posted…with your cover! Very clever guys, very clever indeed…

Damn you found us out!

MartinBrandt said

RobbiedaKid said

You guys are getting double coverage! My project just posted…with your cover! Very clever guys, very clever indeed…

Damn you found us out!

I'm smooth like that! Your plan has been foiled, you will have to come up with something even craftier now!  

Fo serious though, congrats, I loved your pitch!

RonaldMontgomery said

Martin and Silvina,
The cover is intriguing. I do like the asymmetry…reminds me of The Mothman Prophecies, which used the idea to great effect.
I've admired Silvina's work for a few months now. Very interested in the character sketches.

Thanks Ronald,

Sil worked hard trying to get the right vibe for that cover. I know I have a prior revision I can share with you guys later.

I really liked the cover art, but can't believe how soft-handed everyone was with their pitch critique; the first sentence is practically unreadable! It's confusing ("his murders"? Whose? Is the protagonist being murdered or is he doing the murdering? We can infer whatever we want, but the wording isn't clear, even with the "run away from death" line. Is he killing people and then running away? Why wouldn't you say "escape death" if he is the one not dying? And is he dying and then coming back to life, or just not dying at all?), and the appalling lack of punctuation has gotten a ton of other projects (last year) tossed out. Aside from the major structure problems, I guess I just didn't find it that interesting; sort of a "typical manga"-type story…

This has got a long way to go in the coming rounds.