THE DEMON'S QUEST REVISITED

A while back I noted that I like to draw, and that lately I've been doing it on my iPad. Well, since the advent of the Apple Pencil, which my wife was kind enough to get me as an early Father's Day present back in May, I've really been having a lot of fun, and I've even been posting some stuff to DeviantArt (linked off to the left-hand side there).

But, as I also noted before, every so often I draw something that I'm really proud of and with which I'm pretty satisfied. It's rare, but it happens, and this is such an occasion -- so I figured I'd share. Ever since the BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES volume 4 soundtrack came out, more or less coinciding with the birth of my son, I've been in a TAS mood and I've spent a number of late nights with the baby streaming episodes on my iPad (more on that next weekend, by the way). One of my all-time favorites is "The Demon's Quest", based upon "Daughter of the Demon" from BATMAN #232 and "The Demon Lives Again" from BATMAN 244, both by the venerable Dennis O'Neil/Neal Adams team.

So for whatever reason I was wondering what the cover to BATMAN 232 would look like in the ANIMATED SERIES style. This led to a furious week or so of work last month, which resulted in the following:

Now, I can't take total credit for this, of course. The layout comes from Neal Adams' cover to BATMAN 232; I basically just re-drew it in the ANIMATED SERIES style, using screenshots for reference. I did add Talia and Ubu flanking Ra's Al Ghul up above, but that's my only alteration to Adams' original. Even the tagline up at the top, "A tale to haunt you forever," comes from 232's cover (I assume it was written by editor Julius Schwartz). But, nonetheless, I think this turned out really nicely. I may try to do another at some point.

Behind the scenes, for those who care: this was all done on a 9.7" iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil. "Pencils" were done in the Adobe Sketch app, "inks" in the Autodesk Graphic app, and flat colors and special effects in the Autodesk Sketchbook app with shading added by jumping back into Graphic.

I'm not sure at what point in the process I decided to turn this into a movie poster rather than a comic book cover, but I think it's appropriate since this homage is based on an animated cartoon. The titles and credits were also all done in Autodesk Graphic; the Batman font is called Plaza and the movie poster credit font is Steeltongs; both are available for free online. I actually had to take a screenshot of "The Demon's Quest" title card and recreate that text in a higher resolution for the thing as well. The "DC" and "WB Animation" logos were simply grabbed from a Google Images search.

So this is my little tribute to Neal Adams, Denny O'Neil, Bruce Timm, and one of my all-time favorite episodes of BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES. Hope you like it.