Jason Badower/Moonlight Serenade

Jason Badower shares his comments and original art about his work on Moonlight Serenade.

Page 1

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  "I started off researching the year 1967. Cars, clothes, hairstyle, makeup (I drew [Linda's] eye lashes different to how I normally draw eye lashes), architecture, fashion trends (I had to carefully plan all her clothing, although R.D. Hall did suggest the turtleneck sweater on the first page), music and movies."
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  "[R.D.] asked for [Linda's] room to have lots of stuffed animals and 'curiously, lots of old shoeboxes'. I decided to go overboard on the stuffed animals, as I saw Linda using them as a substitute for real human contact. An indication of imaginary friends...I wanted to explore as much detail and mood in her room as possible. Long dark shadows line the walls, and I wanted a singular very strong light from the window. I had a ball drawing all the folds of the quilt (I haven't drawn fabric in Zero G for a VERY long time). The stuffed animals were fun and so was the design of the bed-head. For this page, my lovely sister helped me out and modeled for Linda and her mother."
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  "The parents were fun. I liked the idea of these parents cowering around the edge of the door frame, scared of their daughter. I really wanted to communicate that Linda has done something in the past to really scare them. When viewing the page in black and white, I noticed that the shadow cast by the back of the door almost looks like a panel border and heavily bisects the panel. I asked Annette to help me out by adding a glow from the lava lamp to help soften this shadow."
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  "Randomly, Annette coloured Linda's jumper red on the first page, and I asked her to maintain the red to add to Linda's whole 'vampiric' nature. After that, I followed Micah Gunnell's lead on War Buddies, Part 7 and kept her clothing and hair flat black after this page."

Page 2

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  "I don't usually play with different angles, but I really liked this design and composition [in the first panel]. I thought it made it very clear that she's asleep and from the expression on her face that she's dreaming. I was more concerned with the graphic elements of lighting and clothing than anything else. I had great fun drawing her left hand and the way it affected the lines of her top. I was especially pleased with that."
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  "I love playing with panel borders as a means of communicating different scenes. Transporting a reader across scenes is actually a really tough thing to do...I felt I should do something at my end. My decision was to narrow the panel borders slightly and then add that misty effect to give it that dreamy feel."
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  "I had looked through the previous stories and found that we had never seen Linda actually connect and draw the energy/aura/life force out of someone. We had only seen her glowing blue hand loom over someone. I asked Annette to make it look like veins of energy being sucked out of this guy's aura."
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  "I love this page. It's hands-down my favourite from the entire graphic novel. I didn't even use a model! I had great fun drawing it, but once I saw the life that Annette injected into it, I almost fell out of my seat. This is Annette and I at our harmonious best. I would argue that this is the best page Annette has ever coloured."

Page 3

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  "One of the few changes to my layouts is in the first panel where [Linda's] pose is different. Once I decided that she would look sexier in a skirt, I knew I couldn't have her with her legs up like that."
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  "I am a huge fan of Bryan Hitch and Paul Neary's work on The Ultimates. I love their layouts and the street scenes that they draw. I used this page to tackle their style."
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  "Panels 3, 4 and 5 really show what I can do. I also like how the mess of detail contrasts with Linda's solid black figure. Again, I avoided drawing her feet to give her an ethereal, floating feeling. She's not grounded in this story. She floats though it like some sort of unwordly spirit."
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  "People have really noted the brilliant job she did on the auras, and have especially commented on R.D. Hall's great idea of the hippie with his tie-died aura...It's hokey, but it works so damn well."

Page 4

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  "Ida May Walker...has the designated "pixie hairstyle" that R.D requested. I did have to do a bit of Google action to find out what the hell a pixie hairstyle was. Having just read Artemis Fowl, they're lucky I didn't give her pointed ears."
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  "I had to deviate here from the script as it asked for a full jazz band playing here. While I did some research on what jazz bands looked like in the 60s, I felt that they would hog the panel. Besides, a lone saxophone player screams "jazz and blues" to me more than a full band does."
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  For Moonlight Serenade, Jason used a new tonal style, and this is the first time it's been colored by Annette. He began developing the style with The Death of Hana Gitelman "as a way to replace the time-consuming layered greyscale effect that I used on Road Kill and War Buddies."
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  "Ah, Annette with her crazy floral drapes. This again is another example of how I use models--and that is only as guidelines. The same model posed for both the nurse and Linda. I just used the model as an indicator of lighting and expression. The rest all comes from my twisted little head."

Page 5

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  "My biggest goal for this project was to quite simply, draw the pants off anything I'd done before. I wanted to inject as much detail and life into the graphic novel as possible."
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  "Special note has to go to Annette here for juggling all my excessive detail as well as the auras...You see, a good colourist creates a limited and distinctive palette for each scene."
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  Regarding his new tonal style, Jason says, "It's unique and places me somewhere in the middle of painting artists and traditional line work artists for a look that is familiar yet has never been seen before. It also uses my medium to it's best potential."
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  "I also have to comment on the great lettering job. Again, R.D. Hall asked for her captions on lined diary paper, but Comicraft went above and beyond with their lined school-paper captions. They made her seem younger and added a great juxtaposition between the content of the captions and the normal school work or kids notes we would normally see on such a piece of paper."

Page 6

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  "I was going for something vampiric, aloof and cold. Big, wide blue eyes, full lips (denoting passion and hunger) and a slight widow's peak resembling our classic Christopher Lee vampire. No detail is too small for me."
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  "Even though Micah Gunnell and Robert Atkins had drawn Linda, neither of them had drawn her as a 16 year old. And also, there's kind of my take on the character. I have to figure out what I want to say by her appearance."
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  "I saw this as a horror story. It's about a serial killer's first victim. And more than that, it's about a vampire."
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  "I'm so proud of the final product. What I really dug was that R.D.Hall seemed to have such a clear idea of how he wanted this to look. Annette's colours bring so much life to the piece."

Notes about Jason's drawings are taken from his weblog.