Scott Koblish

SK8! the Cover!

OK- here we go.
I intend to have fun with this, because the birthing process for it was so impossibly hard and ended in sorrow, agony and dashed dreams. I worked on each page between gigs as an inker for Marvel Comics, while living in SoHo in New York in 1999. Matt and I hatched most of it in a giant coffee house/gallery off of West Broadway, near Spring Street. The general idea was that skateboarders were publicly persecuted (there are actual signs in every town forbidding their activities) and they needed to have a savior - our twist was that he was an alien. Had tatoos. And was blue. He could power his skateboard forward really fast, and had healing powers -because most skateboarders we'd ever seen were broken or torn or bleeding and could benefit from a healer. He was a savior to the downtrodden and a hero to the masses. Or something like that.

Here's the cover to the issue for SK8, minus the cover copy, oddly enough. Matt must have done the cover copy separately on a file that I don't have. Matt's cover copy consisted of "Earth's First EXTREME Hero!" in the upper right corner (I remember he was saying it was funny BECAUSE Extreme had already been overused, even back then), and at the bottom left "The Mysterious Talking Skateboard Tzontemoc!" Tzontemoc was an idea that came to us late in the game, after we'd done the 1st issue, but before we did the cover. The intent was to put Tzontemoc in the second issue, or rework the first issue eventually to include the story where Tzontemoc was discovered by Bucky. If I ever catch you using a talking skateboard that has an imprisoned, spiteful mexican deity within it, I will hunt you down.

This was very early in my attempts at understanding Photoshop, the files I found recently didn't even have the proper suffixes. This cover was colored by one of my compatriots at Stan Lee Media, Peter Tbolski. After SLM went under I had Peter color up a copy. I remember having to break into his house in order to retrieve it, but I don't remember why. Certainly it wasn't because of any hostility, I just don't remember the circumstances.

I had also come up with the idea of having a flip-book animation in the lower right hand corner of SK8 doing a skateboarding trick, and I'll have to find the little figures and post them at some point. I wanted to have them on the cover, but it was nixed, which was fine.

Matt Morra did the script, he and I worked out the plot, Dave Sharpe lettered it on the boards.

posted by Scott Koblish @ 9:33 PM