zeda | THROWBACK THURSDAY 1 : 40 Seconds

For my very first Throwback Thursday post, we're gonna travel back a FULL DECADE to the year 2009, and the Death Note International Fan Anthology, 40 Seconds! [The fact that the website for our publication still exists, after all this time and the advent of Web 2.0, is frankly incredible to me.]

The first fun thing about this book is that it had two front covers, because it featured comics in both Left>Right AND Right>Left formats! That's because, as the title implies, we featured fanfiction, standalone illustrations, and short comics from a wide variety of artists scattered all over the globe. I created the art for one of the covers, shown above! And, before I start to drown you all in illustration work, I didn't want to pass on mentioning that I also created the templates for the 'artist credit & commentary' pages of the book, where we were encouraged to talk about ourselves and drop links to pertinent websites! Sharing this image is great fun, because even though this IS from 10 years ago, some things never change- namely the presence of DeviantArt, and my dot-com web address:

Although you can see me talking about how I wished I could do 'MORE MORE MORE' in my little blurb there, the truth is that I did a whole lot of work for this anthology, including [on top of the stuff above] a total of roughly 11 illustrations to go with three pieces of fanfiction written by two of my fandom friends. The following full-page illustrations were created to accompany a story written by Jenwryn, featuring Mello, Matt, and Mello's recurring nightmares of death leading up to the Takada abduction incident:

The high contrast and light placement in these pieces still look really fun to me, and leave me feeling a little bit proud of myself for what I did back then! I would like to be this daring with my lighting choices way more often, honestly, and looking at these older pieces is a great way to remind myself that I need to CHALLENGE myself more!

Although the last two images were of a more traditional sort, meant to fill the page alongside the body of Jenwryn's uninterrupted text, the bulk of the illustrations that I made for this publication were more like the following, in that I did my best to carefully blend text and illustration together. My goal was to create an end result that felt more like an enmeshed work of collaborative art:

FIRST, please, do not hold my use of Bleeding Cowboys font against me-! 😂 The font was still relatively new on the scene [having made its debut on Dafont in 2007], and not yet the bane of every graphic artist who has had to lay eyes on cheap design work done for BBQ or Tex Mex restaurants. If I were to create text and image interactions like these TODAY, I would definitely weave the content together differently, on top of making different font choices. I didn't know yet how much I could really push the envelope, as far as utilizing page bleeds to unite two-page spreads, so I was restricting images to more typical active image areas and playing it TIMID, rather than simply safe. But hey, these were still some fun and creative choices to make, even if I didn't PUSH IT TO THE LIMIT like I would want to now!

Believe it or not, on top of the hard copy that I saved for myself, I still have at least one extra copy of this anthology in my bookcases at my Mom's house! For a while there, I brought my contributer's pack of books to conventions when I was tabling, but this was long before fanzines became popular and commonplace, and also at a time when professionally published books that cost almost $20 were considered to be far above the average price that Artist Alley customers would pay for fan-made goods. Honestly, in the modern market? A 300 page fanzine selling for $20 would be RIDICULOUSLY cheap, huh?

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So that concludes this installment of Throwback Thursday! If you have any questions about the book, the artwork featured here, or my still fervent passion for Mihael "Mello" Keehl [up to and including my willingness to fight for his proper characterization in a Denny's parking lot if I have to], let me know in the comments! ♥