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Trading cards are like cover art, with an extra design challenge. You have to make the art work at such a small size. Lots of artists get around this by showing a close-up of a face or solitary figure. What if they had to show a guy in a vintage gas-mask holding another guy hostage in a dilapidated amusement park while two other guys fight overhead on a helicopter drop ladder with propwash blowing everything around? That's what cards were like in the old days of Mars Attacks and the ‘60s Batman TV show. The artists rendered one lurid image after another, each perfectly readable and beautifully painted.

the crow

Kitchen Sink Press produced a card set based on the sequel to The Crow movie. Robert Boyd, editor at Kitchen, asked me to do a card.

The Crow is about a guy who is shot to death and comes back to life to wreak vengeance on his murderers. I decided to show this entire sequence of events in a single drawing. Boyd wanted to see a sketch to submit for approval with The Crow's licensing company. Licensed properties are tricky because art directors guard the franchise, the character's image. The guy who originally played the Crow died and the studio had a sequel coming out with a new actor. There was plenty of paranoia surrounding the Crow's image.

 

madman card

Physical Education cel vinyl on board 9.5" x 13.5", 1996

Michael Allred wrote to me out of the blue one day asking for any art I had laying around. I sent him xeroxes and he sent me comics and we've been friends ever since.

It's not unusual, though. Mike has lots of friends in the comic business, and sometimes he gets them to draw his Madman character for trading cards and pinups. I kind of like the painting I did, but it doesn't work at the size of a trading card.

I show a villain I created a few years ago, an overgrown schoolroom bully type. Operating from another dimension, he's towel-snapping Madman and administering an "atomic wedgie." The fact that I have to explain all this means the illustration doesn't work.

This card is my homage to the 1960s Batman cards by Norm Saunders, hence the surreal subject matter and impossible predicament — and the villain's Joker-like face.

Only recently did I discover that Saunders painted his originals at a small size, 5" x 3.375", so they wouldn't lose their detail when reduced. Even at that small size I noticed in Chip Kidd's Batman Collected that the original Saunders paintings are very sketchy and transparent, and that they gain their tight, plastic-like textures in the reduction. I'll do my next card at a smaller size and I won't paint as tightly as I did here.

Left is a preparatory sketch. I used the "Paint" program that comes with Windows to lay out my color scheme.