Entry 95: S.H.I.E.L.D. #1 Fourth Print and Ben Bates

Okay, this is starting to become ridiculous. Shield #1 sells out again and goes to a FOURTH print! What are these print runs like? Seriously, retailers, this book is doing better than you keep thinking it will. Order more copies.

I guess these reprints are good press. And obviously people buying the book is a great thing, but we are running out of things to put on the covers!

No really. Daniel, the assistant editor on the book, called me up and told me that we were going to a forth print. Great news! "But we don't have anything to put on the cover," he says. He mentioned the idea of putting a big image of the shield, and then asks if I have a big image of the shield. "Nope," I say. He says, "we'll have to think of something, let me know if you think of anything." And we hung up.

That's when Ben Bates came to the rescue.

Ben is a studio mate of mine. He's just getting started with his professional career in comics and he's doing a fine job of it.
He was recently interviewed on Newsarama for his work on S.h.o.o.t. First featured in Dark horse presents. He's also penciled issues 217 and 218 of Sonic The Hedgehog, which will be out in September and October. And he's currently working on more Sonic. Here's a link to his sight.

So after my conversation with Daniel, I got to thinking about the forth print cover and I thought it would be cool to have the shield with a reflection of Da Vinci in it. I asked Ben if he would be willing to help me out with getting it done since I was desperately trying to make a deadline and couldn't do it myself. I've helped Ben out a number of times, so he kind of owed me, and he agreed to to it. And he did a great job! He created a perfect version of the shield, colored it, and together we worked on dropping the Da Vinci reflection in.

Ben has helped me out once before, back when I did the 2 page Thing Thing story for Fantastic Four Adventures. He did a lot of the color flatting and made such good color choices I hardly had to do anything since almost all the colors are flat colors.

Just for fun, here are those 2 Thing Thing pages. I posted panels from this but never the whole thing.