Exclusive: Mignolaversity: Duncan Fegredo’s “Cometh the Hour” covers

This November “B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth” comes to an end. To mark the occasion, Duncan Fegredo drew an impressive piece spanning all five issues of the final arc, with colors by Dave Stewart. The final fifth of the piece was revealed last week in November’s solicitations, but to really get the full effect, you need to see the covers all together. Duncan even agreed to give us a look at his process too…

Click each image to see a larger version.

Duncan Fegredo: When I was tasked with drawing these covers there was a suggestion from Scott Allie that each of the five covers should focus on a different character. From the start I had an overview of this story arc and most of the scripts. I think before I started sketching that enabled me to see them as a whole—at the least they needed to relate to each other.

I identified that Kate should be central to the fourth part. She became the focus for the five issues. A couple doodles later I had her spreading her arms across the covers. That wouldn’t work, but it got me thinking… There has been a long tradition on the “B.P.R.D.” covers of design motifs that link story arcs, an overall image with superimposed details, montages that allude to story elements. What if I could do similar, but make it a single image across the 5 issues?

From that initial notion the rest fell into place pretty quickly. I assigned appropriate cast members to each subsequent cover, indicating a background that linked to the events of that issue. I generally don’t like to do straight renditions of the events in a comic, that’s the domain of the artist telling the story. I see covers as a taster, a mood piece to set the tone.

Without even forcing it, the distinct landscapes on each of the covers started to blend. I guess the key moment was transitioning the modern cityscape on the first to the the suburbs of Hell on the second. From that point the covers became a map, a journey, it felt right.

The first rough was pretty close to the final covers, the exception being for the third where I was requested to substitute Iosif for Fenix.

Next the pencils are refined. I should say at this point everything was drawn digitally on a Cintiq. I was intending to print it onto paper and work on it traditionally, whether as 5 separate pieces of art or one huge panorama…

You can see from the note I was trying to match the perspective between the modern city on the first cover to the city in Hell on the second. It worked, but I wish I’d remembered to let Hell become more tumbledown and erratic.

Pencils complete, I roughed in the gray values for the figure work. I wanted a little separation between the cast and the landscape—I was set on inking the background traditionally and painting the figures in line and wash. I did a similar transition of styles in “Hellboy: The Midnight Circus” and thought it could work here too… I brief experimented with painting the first cover and sanity prevailed. The painting was abandoned and the final cover was finished entirely digitally. The rough tones I had painted were refined and became the final work.

My work complete, I think my one note to color artist Dave Stewart was that the hellish ‘sun’ on the central cover should be the main light source. And that’s it!