AUG 1996

The editor's art direction was "I'm paying for full color covers... use every color." Yikes. I hated all the text put over it, I hated the pink logo, and I sort of hated my own drawing. Devout Standard Design readers will note the dog is a prototype of Banjo from Broken Lines.

JUNE 1997

How Boston-y-er can you get than a zine cover of riding the T? Not a great drawing (I tried and failed to make the kid look like he was pressing his face against the glass of the window), but I give myself points for the watercolored background people. I do not know what possessed the layout person to crop the drawing and add those blue borders. Sort of killed it and made it harder to easily tell the scene was taking place on a train.

FALL 2000

After two not-super-pleased experiences making covers, I came back one more time, because I have an insatiable need to see myself in print. This was a bizarrely complex Photoshop file. Like, everything was drawn seperately and combined later (main characters, statue, trees). I think I'd progressed a lot as an illustrator, and was interested in making a clean, bold drawing, which I did. Then I got comments from the editor amounting to "add more shit in. I want it to be like a MAD magazine thing with tons of little things to look at." So that led to adding in the background people, pigeons, squirrels, foreground dog & sign, dogshit, tree details, things in the sky, etc. Charlie Brown's flying a kite back there, too. Really cluttered the shit out of it. Ah, well. The devil is pretty rad. After this cover I was like "no more Lollipop".

Look, it's Banjo again.