Angel : Aftermath

What-ho gentle readers!

Can finally talk a bit about the new Angel story arc by Brian and myself, since it was all announced at Comic-con last week. The official solicit goes a little bit like this:

Angel #26: Boys and Their Toys #1 (of 2)

Writer: Brian Lynch; artist: Stephen Mooney; covers: Stephen Mooney, Nick Runge

Somebody has made a movie based on Angel’s adventures in hell! Angel and Spike go to a comic con to see how badly Hollywood has mangled true events, only to find themselves surrounded by supernatural evil at every turn. Can Angel tell the difference between an evil demon and a 14-year-old fanboy dressed as an evil demon? Is there a difference? The Angel: After the Fall team of Brian Lynch and Stephen Mooney throw Angel and Spike into an all-new hell!

Sounds good, right? Well it is. The issues were finished last week(writing AND art) and I think its some of Brian’s very best Angelverse work. When I heard I’d get to illustrate an Angel/Spike ’buddy movie’ type storyline I was pretty darn excited, as I loved the episodes of the show where they’d focus on the bickering, sibling-type relationship the boys share. There’s some stuff in these two issues that rivals Cavemen v Astronauts, I shit you not.

Here are my two covers, firstly the B+W version of the ’Action Figure’ cover for issue 26(as I didn’t do the colours) and then two versions of the cover for 27(which I DID colour).

The first version of 27 is the one that everybody’s seen already, but the second is new. It shows our boy Groo(who features pretty heavily in this storyline, with his funniest dialogue yet) seperating the two sides of the Spangel head. Chris and Brian quite liked the Groo version, but felt that it may be a tad mis-representational in the grand scheme of things. I agreed, and also felt the image was just more immediate without The Groosalugg in there muddying up the concept.

I think the lads were right to pick the simpler version, and so my mission to get Groo onto one of my covers goes on!