Our editorial team are excellent at what they do and have been publishing incredibly exciting, high-quality books for years. It's always a trip to hear how they make decisions and what process they go through to get a final product. Assistant Editor Jim Gibbons, who is working with editor Sierra Hahn on House of Night, put together this piece about choosing the cover artist for House of Night and working with her to create the series' enchanting covers.-Did you know you can preorder House of Night now? Call you local comic shop and ask them how.
The first and biggest challenge that came about in creating covers for our upcoming House of Night series was finding the proper artist for the gig. P. C. and Kristin Cast's series of vampyre boarding school novels is hugely successful, with millions of fans worldwide, yet relatively unexplored in a visual medium. So, we needed to track down an artist who could capture the fantastic magical elements of this dense fictional universe, bring life to the historical characters from this world and the series’ star, Zoey Redbird, and convey the dramatic and sexy feel and tone of the series that fans would expect.
It was a tall order, but thankfully Dark Horse editor extraordinaire Scott Allie (well known for his work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Hellboy) knew the perfect person for the job!
Jenny Frison, whose previous cover credits include IDW's Angel and Tim Seeley's Hack/Slash, has an astounding painted style that she's frequently used to create beautiful covers showcasing attractive heroes and heroines in stylized images. Knowing we needed an artist that could blend aspects of our modern-day story focusing on Zoey and her friends with historical tales from The Fledgling Handbook, Jenny seemed like a perfect fit to compose elegantly simple yet powerful pieces of art with a complexity and intricacy fans would appreciate.
Now, with a talented artist approved by the Casts and hired, we had to provide Jenny with a staggering amount of reference material from the House of Night novels and a description of each issue in our comic series. Jenny then got to work.
This was Jenny's first, loose sketch for the cover of issue #1. At this point, she's mostly laying out the cover's elements (characters, scenery, etc.) and working on their composition, feeling out how the final image will look. The first cover needed to showcase our heroine (Zoey), but also give readers a taste of the historical vampyre tale this issue would feature—in this case, the story of the vampyre priestess Freya. Ms. Frison came up with the idea of using the different elemental affinities covered in each issue to make uncomplicated yet ornate borders for each image, here utilizing trees to demonstrate Freya’s (and Zoey's!) affinity for earth. You can see here that Zoey is also holding an interpretation of The Fledgling Handbook, a clue toward what the series will entail.
At this point, writer Kent Dalian chimed in with his vision for the fierce Norwegian forest cats that Freya would encounter. He sent along this photo as reference for the mane he pictured these majestic beasts would have.
With initial notes from P. C., Kent, and us, Jenny did a tighter sketch (with a mockup of the book's design elements in place) before moving on to the painting stage.
Doing all of her painting digitally (at least for this series), Jenny was able to deliver to us her first take on the final cover in a staggeringly quick fashion, and it looked pretty darn fantastic!
At this point, the general consensus was that Zoey (and her hair) looked a bit too green, and she needed some more life in her eyes. Jenny took those notes and after only one more take, delivered our final cover.
Really beautiful work! As editors, we were extremely happy with our first cover for the series, and man, Jenny's work just kept getting better and better with each cover. Wait till you guys see the next ones!
After that, our terrific design department added the finishing touches, and this baby was ready to go to print!
Jim Gibbons
Assistant Editor