Sometimes it still happens

Terrible iPad photo of midnight sketch.
Don't judge; the scanner is misbehaving.

Something really cool happened last week.

I was doing the dishes, as I recall--one of my favorite ways to avoid writing--when the crazy voices started up in my head. I've learned to love my crazy voices. They're the ones that say things like All the superheroes are dead; isn't that awesome? and What's the craziest thing that could happen in Chapter 10, and how can you make it even more psychotic? The crazy voices make the best stories. 

I had been feeding the crazy voices of late. The crazy voices live on good stories--both the kinds of stories that literary poobahs define as good and the ones that I just plain like. The crazy voices love Shakespeare plays and awful B movies. They feed on old radio dramas and random articles about World War I and strange conversations with my friends. The weirder the better. If it's bizarre and it holds my attention, the crazy voices eat it for lunch. 

Most recently, I'd been peering at set photos for the upcoming Winter Soldier movie (I cannot begin to tell you how excited I am for that thing) and thinking about characters with interesting, complicated, slightly scary backstories. I'd also been kicking around an old question of mine--an author of my distant acquaintance, whose work I much admire and with whom I've corresponded a tiny bit, released a story a couple of years ago set in the universe that had inspired Masks, way back when I was a scrappy kid of fourteen. And in that rather more recent story was a character who was briefly, mistakenly, called Trevor. 

I'm pretty sure this author was, at some point, aware of Masks, though I doubt he read it--he's a busy fellow. And the brief misidentification of an interesting, complicated character with a slightly scary backstory as Trevor had gotten me thinking. I didn't pick the name Trevor for its great significance to pop culture or superhero lore; I pulled it at random out of an old yearbook. (I think Trevor was in kindergarten when I was in seventh grade, or something like that.) There wasn't much outside meaning to the name Trevor. So was this beloved author's name-drop a reference to Masks? Or just a coincidence? I didn't want to feed my ego, as it could always stand to lose a few points, but the idea was intriguing. What if the name was this author's idea of a gentle poke at my hero, who could very easily end up looking a lot like that author's beautifully broken and slowly healing character a few years down the road?

And then the crazy voices whispered: Who cares if he did it on purpose or not? It's a damn good story either way. Because guess what?

What? (My crazy voices love a good dialogue.)

You know how Trevor doesn't have much of a backstory?

What are you talking about? He's a psychologically damaged former sidekick with a history as long as my arm. He's got more backstory than anyone else in the series, with the arguable exception of the Black Mask and Eagle Eye, and maybe the Masked Rider ... 

Yeah, but there's a hole in it. A big hole. You know that big hole that bugs you sometimes?

I don't know what you're talking about. There's no hole.

Is too. Right ... here!

Ow! Right in the plot cohesion! You're mean, crazy voices.

Whine, whine. This is why you're doing the dishes. Anyway, look what we found to fill that hole.

Stop saying "hole". What is that, anyway?

We take this character over here ... and then do this ... and that changes everydamnthing. And it even fills the hole. Right?

But he hasn't said anything about this incredibly important event. Ever. You've got to load Chekhov's gun before you fire it, stupid voices.

That's the beauty of it. You love Winter Soldier comics because there's always some new twist on his past, and the reason they never have to load that gun is ... ?

Because he's got memory problems. There's always something he doesn't remember.

And of all the people who'd be involved in this, who is the most likely to tell the audience about it ... and the least likely to know about it?

Oh. Ohhhh, boy. You are evil, crazy voices. 

We know. You're welcome. Want to break some dishes?

I've been working on Masks for fifteen years now. It's rare to get a big new idea on a project that's been going that long, especially when it concerns a core character like Trevor. Maybe I don't know Golem's backstory until I sit down to write it for the bonus features in Volume 1, but Trevor? Him I know. 

Right up until I don't. 

People can always surprise you--imaginary people more than most. And I'm really excited about this twist. It's going to require a lot of reworking of the outlines for later books, and that's a good thing. They were feeling a little stale. This is going to be lots of fun. All of a sudden I don't know where I'm going anymore, and I'm throwing the car into overdrive.

It's not supposed to happen a lot, fifteen years in. But sometimes it still does. 

And now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to sweep up some dish shards that have mysteriously appeared on my kitchen floor ... 

How I made the bookmarks

Do you love how I’m saying “I” made the bookmarks when Nicole did all the work? Well, I paid for the tacos, anyway. And the Alex Ross artbook she called reference and I called a bribe. That’s almost like work, isn’t it?

Step 1: Take reference photos.

The lovely Carolyn Kabelitz modeled for Rae, in a somewhat ad-hoc version of Rae’s costume. My parents’ backyard provided the backdrop. We took a bunch of photos and cherry-picked the best ones.

Trevor was a more difficult task, mostly because I don’t know any guys with the right build and facial structure to double for him. I knew plenty in high school, of course, which is why he looks and acts the way he does, but most of them did eventually get that last growth spurt and are now much taller than I am. So I dug up a photo of a boy playing what looks like flag football and told Nicole to use her imagination. There were extra tacos involved.

Step 2: Lay out the bookmark design

This is the point where Nicole took over. She flopped the image of Carolyn so that she now appeared to be standing with her left hip toward the camera—you’ll see why in a minute—and turned both photos black-and-white. Then she fiddled with layouts until she arrived with something she liked in the right proportions to fit on the bookmarks, which we knew would be 2x6”.

Step 3: Pencil.

Next Nicole printed out the photos at four times their final size (that’s 4x12”, for those keeping score) and laboriously copied the poses. She added Rae’s logo brooch at her hip (the reason she flopped the photo in Step 2) and lengthened her tunic. She also wants it known that she is now going to draw Rae in Chuck Taylors at every opportunity, because Carolyn made them look so superheroic.

The Trevor image was harder, of course, because she had to take an image of a boy running in a loose T-shirt and shorts and translate it into an image of a boy running in long pants and a jacket, and add his signature mask and goggles. It didn’t come out too badly, though. Nicole also changed the position of the boy’s right arm, because “every time I drew it like it was in the photo, it looked weird.”

Step 4: Watercolor

After Nicole scanned in the sketches to back them up in case something went wrong, she began applying watercolor paint to the images—first the black areas, then the lighter shading. We knew we’d be tinting the Rae image red and the Trevor image blue, so the whole process was very much about values of light and dark—making the shadows stand out sharply, capturing the different grays that would represent the hues of their costumes. The final step was to brush gray paint lightly around the figures to create a textured background and a sense of light. Nicole asks me to inform you that she decided to make the area behind Rae’s shoulder darker because she has such ominous forces around her all the time, and she gathered some shadows near Trevor’s front foot because John Lawrence is always showing up overhead and glowing, which would naturally make the sky around Trevor very light.

Step 5: Production

Once the black-and-white paintings were dry, I stepped in again and scanned them into my laptop. There I used PhotoFiltre to remove the penciled boundary lines marking the edges of the bookmarks (the printer asked me to leave 1/8” clear all the way around the design in case of printing issues) and add the text to each image—the quote, plus the information about the book and the blog address. Finally I used the Colorize option to tint Rae’s bookmark red, then turned up the saturation and contrast to get a really vivid hue. I did the same thing to tint Trevor’s bookmark image blue. Then I emailed the two .jpgs to the wonderful Richard Fieger, printer extraordinaire, and let him do his magic.

The result—my best bookmarks ever, which is good because with this much work for a 2x6” piece of cardstock, I don’t want to have to redesign them anytime soon. Although I’m sure I’ll end up tinkering with the proportions just a bit on the next batch … I really need industrial-strength therapy.