A little detective work.
Most of the original artwork for Big in Japan is stored in Japan; I only have a handful of pages here. But yesterday I was looking through the ones I have, and I came across this one. I was curious about it, because the only things on the page are the living things: the heroes at the bottom, and the monster at the top. The rest is white space. Then I looked at the comic book, and saw that the white space is filled with familiar-looking buildings. They are not in exactly the same relation to the space as this image, but they are definitely the same ones. You can compare the two pictures and find the same buildings.
Most of the original artwork for Big in Japan is stored in Japan; I only have a handful of pages here. But yesterday I was looking through the ones I have, and I came across this one. I was curious about it, because the only things on the page are the living things: the heroes at the bottom, and the monster at the top. The rest is white space. Then I looked at the comic book, and saw that the white space is filled with familiar-looking buildings. They are not in exactly the same relation to the space as this image, but they are definitely the same ones. You can compare the two pictures and find the same buildings.
Who would have noticed? The coloring for the buildings is completely different. The use of the buildings is different. They are very effective on this page. It must have interested and amused Seth to be able to use this image for two quite different projects. The dates on his files show that the poster art was saved in June of 2005, and the art for Big in Japan was saved in August 2005. However, this is only the second book of the series, so most likely he was working on both of these projects around the same time. He probably decided to picture Rampage (rather than some other game) for the poster based on the fact that he had these cityscape drawings in hand.
1 comment:
It’s nice that Seth could find several uses (without overdoing it) for such a brilliant design. Saves lots of time too!
Nowadays many artists (or “artists”) are generating buildings and other things (guns, automobiles, planes, etc) in computer programs like scatchup (or something like that) and then always just inserting that into their artwork.
Others are outright tracing photographs...some scary and sad things out there.
Laziness seems to be the new pastime.
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