When I did the first two Snow Job covers, the series was still supposed to come out in print as single issues. By the time I got to this cover for issue #3, I had fully committed to the webcomic (and direct-to-graphic-novel) route. So the concept of single issue covers didn’t really make sense. At this point, I wasn’t sure if I needed to do covers anymore, but ultimately, I decided that since I had already done them for the first two issues, I’d at least be consistent and do them for the remaining issues as well. I also figured for the graphic novel collection and the webcomic Series Index, it would be nice to have these covers as chapter break images.

Honestly, I have no idea what I’ll end up doing for the next story arc though. I go back and forth between whether I should keep doing covers/chapter images or not.

For the record, I do really like this cover, especially since it’s the first one where I didn’t feel the need to showcase the main characters or the ship. If I do keep doing these images, it’ll be nice to know that they aren’t being used as covers to sell single issues. As chapter break images inside a book, I might feel freer to experiment and do something that wouldn’t work as well for a cover meant to catch your eye on a crowded comic store shelf.

Not the most action-packed cover, but it’s one that I really like for setting a mood.

In The Big Snow Job, Bocce gets left behind on Ciceron since he’s incapacitated by his leg injury. While not a hugely important plot point, there’s a scene early on in this chapter where he’s a bit bummed out about it. So I thought it would make for a nice cover to show him really tiny, with all the footprints of everyone else going off on the mission.

The image is my Fargo moment. That movie does an amazing job of capturing some really beautiful and bleak images of vast expanses of snow, so that was my inspiration for this cover. I even had the soundtrack/score to Fargo going in the background while I worked on it. That, and a wood-chipper.

At last, the long-awaited second RUNNERS arc! Yay!

As I mentioned before, I love story titles with double meanings or wordplay, dating as far back as my work on The Tick. With “The Big Snow Job,” I wanted something that referred to both the snowy setting of the story and the double-cross aspect that tends to happen a lot in underworld business.

The cover itself was a bit of a time-saving two-fer for me. I had to come up with new outfits for all the main characters for this story arc, namely winter gear they’d be wearing for most of the story.  I decided to make the cover a full-body group shot, 1) because I thought a group shot spotlighting the alien cast would make for a good first issue cover, and 2) because I would then have a nice reference image I could use myself in drawing the outfits!

Unlike characters like Batman and Spiderman, where you can pretty much remember everything about the costume after a few times drawing it, with RUNNERS, the characters change outfits often and I try to make them all have different detailing. So it’s hard for me to keep track of everything without some costume reference images to work from.

Hmm…maybe I should consider simpler sci-fi outfits like in Logan’s Run or THX-1138. White jumpsuits for everybody!