This week I would like to cover how the creative team on The Sheriff of Babylon<\/em> does their thing.\u00a0 Ironically, I don\u2019t read the title and the material that I am presenting and analyzing is taken from the back of issue #2 of the Vertigo title The Dark & Bloody<\/em>.\u00a0 I can\u2019t say why this piece got included but I am glad that it did as it is always helpful to see how someone does it.<\/p>\n A bit of dwerping around on the internet has revealed to me that The Sheriff of Babylon<\/em> is a 8 issue limited series from Vertigo written by Tom King with art by Mitch Gerads.\u00a0 Vertigo describes the comic series as:<\/p>\n The behind-the-scenes look covers the creation of page 7 of issue #4 and is written by Mitch Gerads.\u00a0 He breaks the creation down into seven steps.<\/p>\n Step 1:\u00a0 First he gets the script from Tom King, which provides a description of action and dialog, panel-by-panel.<\/p>\n Gerads makes a point of saying that the script arrives about a week before he even starts and that allows him to \u2018live with it for a while\u2019, by which he means that he reads it several times and plays the action out mentally before he starts forming them on paper.<\/p>\n Step 2: Gerads develops the layouts in a quick and loose fashion, which he calls \u2018Mitch Gibberish\u2019.\u00a0 The idea here is to get the overall look and feel into the rest of the creative team\u2019s hands.\u00a0 Unfortunately, he doesn\u2019t get into any back-and-forth that may exist where King or editor Jamie Rich may ask for adjustments.<\/p>\n Step 3:\u00a0 Gerads tries to bring a sense of realism to the book since the events are based on real-life.\u00a0 He, apparently does this by looking at photography of Iraq, military hardware, etc.\u00a0 He also shoots photo references in which he acts out the parts (or gets help from his family \u2013 here pictured his twelve-year-old cousin Coop).<\/p>\n Step 4:\u00a0 He says that he tweaks and arranges all of these photographs into a reference collage in Photoshop as a prelude to drawing.<\/p>\n Step 5:\u00a0 According to Gerads, The Sheriff of Babylon is done completely digitally.\u00a0 So he then turns the reference layout into a digital blue-line drawing and then covers the drawing with digital inks, resulting in a black-and-white layout.<\/p>\n Step 6:\u00a0 Once the inks are done, Gerads hands off the pages to the color flatter, Joseph Franzzetta, who blocks in random colors so that Gerads can continue to draw.<\/p>\n What I believe is happening in Step 6 is that Franzzetta gets the art carefully colored with a palette that can be easily remapped to whatever Gerads want it to be.\u00a0 For example, the green sky in the image above maps to the sandy colored sky in the final done in Step 7.<\/p>\n Step 7: Gerads does the final colors and formats it before sending it off to the printer.\u00a0 Sadly, he doesn\u2019t provide much in the way of how he formats and if formatting includes the speech balloons.<\/p>\n![\"SB_Step1\"](\"http:\/\/aboutcomics.blogwyrm.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/SB_Step1.png\")
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