Alien VS Predator
title: Illustratorco-illustrated with Brian O'Connell
I spent probably as much time drawing Aliens in high school and college
as I did drawing Predators. I'll never forget how excited I was the day
I heard they were going to have the two legendary screen monsters do battle
in comics. Good clean fun in the spirit of King Kong vs. Godzilla. It seemed
inevitable that I would tackle them both some day.
Many years later, at ComiCon, my friend Brian O'Connell and I were given
a look at a story pitch for an AvP story. It was a pretty cool idea, written
by Ian Edington, who'd scripted the 'Machine' comic I'd drawn years earlier.
Brian and I took on the piece in an unusual artistic collaboration. We'd
both worked at Industrial Light and Magic for some time at that point, and
wanted to give the story a cinematic feel in it's design and execution.
Furthermore, we wanted to fuse our styles together, more so than a typical
penciller/inker relationship. So we decided to split the design, layout,
pencilling and inking phases up and play hot potato with them.
First I did designs for the creature and robot elements, Brian did the characters
and ships. Then, we split the 20 page story into interiors and exteriors.
Luckily, there were 10 of each. Next, Brian layed out all the interiors,
I did the exteriors. Then we switched, Brian pencillng from my exterior
layouts, me pencilling from Brian's interiors. At last we switched again,
inking over the other's pages. In the end, it made for an unusual and successful
fusion, and a great working exercise. Now that the movie is on it's way,
maybe this little three parter will get reprinted!
