Jan's Atomic Heart cover process.
Here's a little peek inside the design process behind the final cover for Simon Roy's Jan's Atomic Heart, which will be released through New Reliable on June 3rd.

Originally, the book was to be called Morning Coffee with Jan and Anders, but was changed about halfway through the process.



I think the "vacation photo" approach was a nice touch, but in the end was not a strong enough attention grabber to get people to pick up the book.



We decided to toss around a couple ideas, all of which I liked. The first is based off a panel within the book. The second is the initial meeting between Jan and Anders and the third is, well...it's Jan. Looking reflective.







We decided to explore the second a little, before deciding to move on.

Somewhere around this point, we got our Diamond rep, Jay, into the discussion. This is the first time that I've had a Diamond rep get so involved in the process of the cover design. In the end, it was a great experience. His input was greatly appreciated and really helped in shaping what would become the final cover design.

Based on discussions between the three of us, Simon came up with the following mock ups.















With the final two mock-ups it felt like we really had something that could both grab people, while giving enough of what the reader was getting him/herself into.

After some further discussion, it was agreed to use the arrest scene, combined with the TVs of the latter.

The result:



Almost there!



Lastly, the hand drawn title was replaced with a custom font and voila!






I can't begin to describe how ridiculously excited I am for people to read this book.

Keep an eye on the New Reliable Press site. In the next week I'll be posting pages from both Jan's Atomic Heart and True Loves Vol. 2.