People often ask about the "process" of makin' these hyar pitchers, and FX has been (and continues to be) a unique experience. So far I have worked on only two projects where I have inked unlettered pages (that would later have lettering on them). FX is one, and the upcoming ROMULANS book is the other. But FX is different from ROMULANS in a significant way.

Working on ROMULANS, I treated the pages much like I do any other comic pages, being aware that much of the top third or so of each panel was going to be covered with copy, so keeping in mind that there was not much point in putting artwork, or at least detailed artwork, where balloons and captions would have to go. Why draw something that was going to vanish in the printed book? Some might say, to make the pages look better for subsequent resale, but that's something about which I worry less and less. As I have progressed in my career, and my approach to the pages, I have found myself being concerned more and more with what the printed page will look like, and less and less with what the original art looks like. Sometimes, in fact, the originals can be pretty messy, with scratch technique and white-out and paste-up and dry-brush and all kinds of other tricks of the trade used to get effects that will look good in the finished book, but look like crap on the originals. On ROMULANS, too, I have resorted to doing a lot of the "effects" on the scans I sent to IDW. So, for instance, on the originals I did not bother to spot many of the larger black areas, such as outer space. Why waste time that could be spent drawing, I reasoned, when I can fill in those areas on the scans with a single click of the mouse? Ditto the starfields. Why spend time dotting the page with white-out when I can sweep a specially formatted "brush" tool across the space, and do the job not only much faster, but much better?

FX is different, tho. FX I am approaching much more as if each page was an individual commission piece, so, like the commission pieces, I not only look for ways of doing more-or-less the same "effects" without messing up the page, but also keep in mind that Wayne is not, like a normal publisher, merely buying my work on the job, he is also buying the finished pages. Unlike the publishers, Wayne gets physical ownership, and that means I am trying to produce finished pages that, in many cases, have fairly detailed artwork even in places I know balloons and captions will have to go.