A Tale of Two-and-a-half Covers

A lot of eagle-eyed readers have noticed that the cover of Aphrodite: Goddess of Love that appears on the back cover of Poseidon is different than the the cover that appears on the actual book. I wrote a piece on the :01 blog that details the reason why. It's an interesting glimpse behind the scenes of the creative and editorial processes.

APHRODITE: GODDESS OF LOVE is out! Today!

What more can I say?

Chocolate Aphrodite

I don't remember what twisted strain of conversation lead to "chocolate Aphrodite" being today's Drawbridge topic, but I do know that the best way to a goddess's heart is to give her a milk-chocolate replica of herself. Better than flowers anyday.

I might color this whole thing when I get home. Then again, I might not.

Just realized that there's a great joke in here somewhere with a Mars bar, but this is an all-ages blog.

Whaddaya know? I did decide to color it when I got home.

warm up- The Apple of Discord

My first thought upon learning today's topic was "The  Big Apple". My second thought was "Naw, I ain't gonna draw that". So here's my third thought, the Golden Apple of Eris.

 As you all of course know, Eris was the goddess of Discord, who, miffed at not being invited to a wedding, showed up anyway and threw her golden apple to the ground, shouting " To the fairest". Now this was a pretty fancy wedding, so many of the Olympians were present. I chose to depict the exact awkward moment when Hera, Athena and Aphrodite, each believing themselves to be the fairest of them all, all simultaneously reached for the Golden Apple of Discord. One thing leads to another, and this little incident eventually lead to the Trojan War and the more-or-less complete destruction of the race of Heroes.

Aphrodite 2.0

Longtime devotees of my blog will remember the problems I had in nailing down the character of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. Well, those problems had continued until fairly recently, when I finally drew the above pinup (for the Olympiansrule.com website). It took a lot of back and forth on my part to find the right body type for an ancient goddess of beauty. I think I finally got it. She's only made a couple of cameos in the series so far, but now, fully fleshed out, Aphrodite can take the stage for a more prominent role.

Olympians, the Poster!

So guess what? The series I've been talking on this blog about forever is now just called Olympians. Who needs the the?



Who can name all 14 principle characters?

In the beginning...

Above is a finished black-and-white page from my upcoming graphic novel on the life and times of Zeus, king of the gods. This particular scene actually takes place before the birth of Zeus, right after his father, the Titan Kronos, has taken a sickle to his own father, Zeus' granpa, the Sky (also called Ouranos, or Uranus). The blood of Ouranos rains down over the Earth (Zeus' grandma, by the way), and everywhere it touches, new life comes forth. From left to right, we see the birth of the gigantes, the nymphs, the Furies, and in the final panel, a puffy pink cloud that will eventually form into Aphrodite, goddess of love.

Watch for a color version soonish, and some more black and white pages even more soonish.

Oh, and a big published thank you in Zeus to anyone who can help me think of a suitable subtitle for this book. I think Zeus is a fine title , but it just needs a little something else...

She's got it, yeah baby, she's got it

While designing the appearances of the various gods as they will appear in The Olympians I had the hardest time by far figuring out Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty and love. She had to look stunning, even by perfect goddess standards, and at the same time have a air of danger about her. She's so beautiful that even the gods couldn't behave themselves around her. That's why, as soon as she stepped from the foam, Zeus married her off to Hephaistos; that way, at least if she was "off the market", so to speak, it would minimize the conflicts between the immortals.

For the longest time I couldn't get the design of Aphrodite to work, and eventually I came to realize that the problem was that I was drawing her as a blonde. Which is funny, when you consider that no less an authority than Botticelli, painter of probably the most famous image ever of Venus/Aphrodite envisioned her with brown hair. She was a mediterranean beauty whom even the ancient Greeks believed came from somewhere out of the far east. In other words, probably not blonde.  Once my version became a brunette with olive skin everything fell into place.

After all that work, Aphrodite only makes a one-paneled, unnamed cameo appearance in Zeus. She plays a somewhat larger role in Grey Eyed Goddess, but her real chance to shine is a few books down the line.