Archival Synchronicity?

I'll let Aaron King of MEGATONik start this post:

"Every year, for the past four years, the great folks at the Comic Book Resources Classic Comics forum have participated in a Classic Comics Christmas list. Thought up and moderated by the Spectacular Kurt Mitchell, past lists have been built around favorite single issues, favorite characters, and favorite comic adaptations and merchandise. This year, the topic was favorite covers from before 1990.

So, presented here with gracious permission from Kurt Mitchell and the rest of the Classic Comics crew, are my picks for this years Twelve Days of Classic Comics Christmas.

My selections were chosen with no solid criteria but were all pulled from my personal collection. Generally I wanted them to stand on their own, regardless of the story inside. If someone needed some information from inside the comic, the cover was probably disqualified from my list. Also, I looked for pieces that were more than pretty drawings. Either they exhibited something new and weird or they utilize the form and tropes of comics in a way that moves them away from being anything other than comic art. Of course, there are pieces that break all of these rules. Enjoy."

Well, one of the covers on his list was TOTB#2.

He wrote: "Anyone that read last week’s Emanata knows how much I love Beanworld, and here’s another little dip into that strange place. Automatic points for the graphic design element of including the main illustration inside a box, and you can just feel how worn out and full those beans are despite how non-representational the art is."

Thanks for the kind words, Aaron.

This morning, I decided to dip into the Beanworld Archives looking for something to post. One of the first pieces to pop into my hand was the piece below. It's the color comp that I made for TOTB #2. I thought more like an advertising creative director than comic book creator at the time. I was very accustomed to making ad comps for client approval. I treated myself like a client and so I would do things like making full comp layouts for Beanworld ventures for myself to approve. As time went by, this internal agency/client relationship disappeared as I became more familiar with how Beanworld was perceived in the marketplace and started to make it up on the drawing board as I went along.

Anyway, as you can see, it is totally old school, a messy paste-up done with marker on layout paper and some photocopies stuck on with Spra-Mount. I can see that I thought about some decorative dingbats to be put outside the frame of the illo but decided against them and just covered then with bits of paper. Looks like I followed my layout pretty closely.