Here is an image I co-created with the lovely and talented Barbara Canepa to help promote the new "Metamorphose" imprint of Bande Dessinée (French "comic" books) for Soleil, a dynamic publisher in France. This image was used as a fold-out poster in a new Soleil catalog released for Angoulême, France's premier Bande Dessinée festival, which just occurred a week or so ago.
For those of you who may not know, Barbara Canepa is a talented artist and writer, and is behind the highly successful Sky Doll series (amongst several other things), which is soon to be published in the United States by Marvel Comics.
For this poster, I drew the basic layout and imagery based on Barbara's direction, and then handed it off to Barbara to finish. She tweaked the colors, re-arranged some of my drawn elements, and added the lettering to bring the whole thing together. The images in the ovals are from each of the three new series the poster is promoting. My part was drawn in pencil and colored in Photoshop.
As many of you must know, France is a world-leader in the production and appreciation of sophisticated, diverse, and beautifully executed sequential illustration. It would do most of the American comics audience a world of good to look beyond their fetishistic fascination with putridly colored men-in-tights to the wonders being drawn in France and around the globe.
Joshua