Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Play the cards you're dealt

Storytime!

The first time I heard the name Nathan Fox was at the Heroes Convention maybe 5 years ago. I guess Chris and I had just started really showing our work together or maybe it was as Chris' Batman LOTDK run started coming out, I can't remember for sure. Either way, our mutual friend Jim Royal told us that our stuff was kind of reminding him of Nathan Fox's stuff. When I got home from that weekend I got online and checked around and found Nathan's work. I was pretty blown away by what I saw. This crash one is the one that really burned itself in my mind, I'm not even sure if it was one of the first things I saw or if it came later but it really stuck with me. Needless to say I was an instant admirer of his work.



Fast forward to a few months ago, I'm getting files on press for printing at my day job. I see all these files labeled "nfox" and think..."naaaaah". I opened them up and it was unmistakably Nathan's work. I was crazy excited to be printing this stuff! I checked the order form and saw that the order was placed by Paolo from Cadence Comic Art. I'm pretty friendly with Paolo so I sent him an email to ask him what the deal was. He said Nathan would be sitting with him and his gang at the upcoming Baltimore Comicon and I should come by their table and he'd make with the introductions. Then, a day (or a few hours) later Paolo emails and says he has a couple pin-ups by Nathan that he'd like to get colored...for free. Now, my friends and family all know better than to ask me for free stuff, I guess Paolo didn't know my rules yet. I'm kinda glad he didn't because I said sure I'd take a crack at the art but asked if I could just do one of them. Turns out they only needed one colored (that was the Kade thing I posted a while back). So, I did the spec job hoping Nathan would be into it and would lead to more stuff with him. (I didn't really think it would since he does such an awesome job of coloring his own work.)
I met Nathan (he's a gentleman) at the Baltimore Con and it turns out he liked what I did and he said he might have a magazine job coming up that I would be right for. I guess he sent some stuff to the art director and we were on it! So yeah, did anybody read all that stuff I just typed? I hope it made some kind of sense because there's no way I'm reading it! Yeah, here's some of the art, buy the magazine it has metallic ink (not where I planned for it to be for the most part but ah well, what are you gonna do right?) You can find the whole 6 pages at the WIRED magazine website here.







































9 comments:

Jon McNally said...

Eye-poppingly awesome, Rico.

Anonymous said...

WTF do you mean you don't work for free?!! :-P As always really sweet stuff, brother. I too love me some Nathan Fox drawings. I think the first time I saw his work was on a B/W back-up Batman gig. Fell in love with everything since then. I wanted to meet him at Comicon, but he always had a crowd. Did see some of his originals though..WOW!!
peace,
Herc

Anonymous said...

RR,

Do your thing, sir, nice job. That story illustrates (no pun) why you have to sometimes stay open...sometimes. I guess you can never know where it's gonna come from.

Lovin' me some Nathan Fox, so I hope this leads to other collabs with him. You deserve it, dude!

david benzal said...

Cool drawings!!
Amazing work.
See you.

Paul Conrad said...

wow Rico,.. SUPERCOOL WORK...as always!

rico said...

Thanks you guys!

riq said...

Great Stuff Rico!!

It awesome that you hooked up with this job.. And your color look great over Nathan's stuff.

Unknown said...

Hi rico, Great finding, I must say, your blog looks awesome. And instead of talking about your great art, I must also mention that I am impressed by your narrative skills. Is a pleasure to check your pages, no matter how finished they are. I will be back for sure!

Alessandro Micelli said...

Amazing!
Hi Rico!