So I have a book coming out.
It Came From Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office
It comes out July 29th and you can pre-order it here.
It's about the origins and history of the alt-right, 4chan, 8chan, Something Awful, Tumblr, and other countercultural communities that shaped the internet and politics today.
And fun fact: I also drew the illustration for the cover.
This is a little blog post about my process making that drawing.
When I first started thinking about it, the title was still up in the air. I knew I wanted a sort of swampy maximalist mix of memes or something like it.
In my first sketches I was thinking of some other early title ideas and concepts from the book like, "Garbage Fire".
I was also having a lot of fun drawing Matt Furie’s Pepe the Frog and KC Green’s “This is Fine” Dog, the defining memes of the 2016 election.
My editors really liked, "It Came from Something Awful" for the title, which was a chapter title. And when we went with that, I thought I really needed a cover that helped connect the sort of swamp monster 50s/horror theme to the content of the book, the internet, screens, memes, the alt-right, the 2016 garbage fire election, etc.
And my editors agreed. It seemed to route to go was drawing some sort of hideous internet monster emerging from the meme sea of vomited up pop culture detritus-- that vomit sea, after all, is a main theme of the book.
So here is my first crack at it:
The first sketch was derived directly from an old horror comic cover. It was fun to draw, but not particularly original and I didn't like that there wasn't a central figure, rather a sort of tableau you had to take in.
I did end up inking it a bit though, just because I love being inefficient and wasting my time.
The third sketch, the dialogue-box themed one, was a fun concept and perhaps the most book cover-y (as opposed to my style, comic booky). But I thought it would be tedious to create because I would essentially be in Photoshop making an image that looked like a pixel-perfect Windows 95 screen. I preferred to be inking comic book-style.
Plus, I liked that the second image-- sad exploding face monster-- got at the anonymity of the internet and the flip side of that -- pop culture and social media's ultra-obsession with identity, self-definition, and identity crises-- another big theme of the book.
Here's the inks, done in Clip Studio Paint, and the colors. done in Photoshop:
When I gave the illustration to the graphic design team, they added this cool mysterious gradient on the monster, which I thought was a great idea. They also upped the saturation on my colors, which was also smart.
After that I did some clean up all over the place, because man my inking still looked rusty and sloppy in many places.
I also changed the monster to a screen-green rather than a blue, to make it look a little more apparent that he was emerging from a screen rather than a pool of water.
Here’s the final illustration after the graphic design team set it in their design, yiii:
gamechangershow
amandla
turnnoffyourmind
titsay
