ALL EYES ON ME Character Sketches

Hello! Wanted to drop these here, as I never did previously! These are sketches I did of my character Callisto for my comic ALL EYES ON ME, which was released last October in Hello Darkness issue 4 from BOOM! Studios. I am going to be going through page-by-page of the comic on my $5-tier for the next several weeks, and so I thought it worthwhile to get a bit of a glimpse into the process before I dive in.

The comic itself took me a bit of tinkering to figure out; originally, there were to be NO leather vibes! I got the email asking me to write and draw a comic for Hello Darkness the day I picked up the science fiction volume of Sergio Toppi comics, Future Perfect. Toppi has a penchant for drawing very expressive and gorgeously-rendered animals (as witnessed below), and I felt I wanted to do something similar; also, his storytelling is rather unlike other artists, and so my entire goal was to just do my version of Toppi.

But what was the idea? I imagined an image of a woman holding an octopus covered in eyes on a stage in front of many people; the look was the 1020’s, something I have never drawn before, but for which I have great love (German expressionism, Soviet montage, etc.). I had realized that the book could be about the coming of sound in cinema, and the octopus and this woman could somehow be an allegory for that, stealing the voices of all the illustrious Hollywood types at her gathering.

Unfortunately, while I DID like the idea, I could not rationalize an ending that felt worthwhile, and there were certain aspects of how the octopus would steal sound that I just could not wrap my head around; I ultimately abandoned the idea one day when I was falling asleep on the subway and had the image in my delirious brain of the girl above: Callisto! Clad in tight latex and vinyl, she jumped into my brain and never left me alone (of COURSE a girl looking like this would show up in MY dreams lmaooooooo). In sketching her, she originally had both eyes, until I drew her hair covering one of them and realized that the eye could be gone and it would help portray her relationship to the octopus in the book (which I will get into more as I go through the pages).

So yeah! Hopefully you all find these cool! If you are a $1 tier subscriber and would like to know more about this comic— my first published comic on the actual comic book stands — then join my $5 tier to learn about all the goods! Haha

Thanks so much!! ☺️☺️☺️