iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Clearer shot of King Rexa from the story's climax! It was fun learning new digital brushes while doing the Inviso-Vision™ scenes.

When I think of "magic", I think of 3 things: Magic the card game, stage magic, and occult magick. So I wanted to represent all those in the audience. Easter eggs galore!

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Indeed, the actual King of the Transparent People, Rexa himself, was the only logical choice. I tried to make him as creepy as I could. Subnote: this has to be a record for the longest gap in between a character's comic book appearances. Over EIGHTY YEARS!!!

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While working on the issue, I had an idea. In one of Kardak's 40's stories, he comes across a race of glassy, transparent people. With our invisible theme, I thought it was a perfect fit if one of those beings was the villain. Editorial, and especially Joe, were SO gracious to let me use the idea!

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Our villain was an entity from the other dimension that Kardak slipped in to. Joe's initial thought was a tall, slender figure, which worked visually because being thin could imply slipping in between cracks. So that's the direction I went. The face designs had a similar motif, "pushing through"

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DOUBLE easter eggs! Unbeknownst to me, Joe named the talk show host that Kardak appears on after legendary artist Bob Montana. Unbeknownst to him, I patterned his look after Kardak co-creator Harry Shorten. Also used his name elsewhere in a bus easter egg, along with Kardak co-creator CA Winter.

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Teehee. Slipped in my collaborators in this panel, and it got through unnoticed :D :D :D And yes, I'm not very good with likenesses! Sorry guys!

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Audience's first reaction to Kardak's magic. That's not Jughead! Those are all characters from Kardak's 1940's stories. Thought it'd be nice to give them a small nod here in the 2020's!

When Kardak slips into another dimension, he gets what we lovingly called Inviso-Vision™. I came up with a few options how to depict that. We ended up with option B. A would have cranked up the contrast. C would have involved turning into a retro style with old-school colors and rendering.

My 1st version of the effect had him disappearing in layers so you'd see flesh, muscle and bone underneath for more gore, but it was too hard to pull off. Ellie took that and added her ghostly spin to it, which made it so much cooler!

John's power that he gets in the story is the ability to slip into another dimension and basically turn invisible. Again, I wanted to "horrorify" that a bit. So instead of just fading out, I wanted the impression that he disintegrates into nothingness.

Turns out, she isn't! I was thinking of how she'd transition from old shopkeeper to Enchantra, and made use of an unused idea for the main villain (more on that later) and had Enchantra emerging from inside the old lady. Small jumpscare there for readers, hopefully.

The shopkeeper was a character that had been previously seen, I just made pusher into a creepier direction, and not exactly human.

Kardak wanders into a shop selling magical trinkets, and that's all I needed to know. Stuffed that baby with easter eggs from Final Fantasy, Magic the Gathering, Dragon Ball, and more!

O always see this "effect" with women with heavy eye makeup, so I thought it would be appropriate on Kardak here, as well.

Comic legend Whilce Portacio once drew a Filipino flag jacket easter egg, and this audience member gave me a good opportunity to do the same. Thank you to Ellie for accommodating my request!

...she's a TRAINED stage magician, but is also relatively NEW at her job. And she's also a PLANT, pretending to be an audience member. That was all in my head during the hours I spent drawing these pages!

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Something subtle I had to figure out early: Generally in comics, you have to exaggerate movements to liven up your characters, which stage magicians do as well (usually to hide other things). But there were other things to consider in my neurotic brain. Lorna, in this flashback for example...

After seeing Joe's script, I felt that the story had more of a creeping, tense type of horror vibe, as opposed to jumpscares or body horror. So I went into the lab and started thinking about the visuals. I considered a retro style but went with something modern, lots of heavy, moody shadows.

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