This was a fun assignment. I was asked by Comic-Con International to draw the cover for their 2015 Souvenir Book, which was a thrill. That the theme of the cover was The Spirit for it's 75th anniversary made it even better. It was an honour to draw something that was a tribute to the great Will Eisner and I had a lot of fun trying to come up with an image that had an Eisner feel without aping Eisner's style.
Like everyone else, I always enjoyed how Eisner seamlessly blended lettering and type into his Spirit splash pages, so that seemed like a good starting point. And since Will Eisner laid so much of the foundation for modern cartooning, I wanted the cover to evoke a bright shining city built from the foundation laid down by Eisner and overseen by the Spirit.
The art for this was drawn using a combination of digital and traditional techniques. I thumbnailed it on paper, tightened the pencils for the buildings digitally, inked it on paper again and then coloured the whole thing digitally.
As a side note: I'm happy to announce that I'll be a guest of the San Diego Comic Con this year, and am grateful to the organizers for inviting me. I'm looking forward to attending the show.