Cloud Town Tuesday and The Case of the Secret Book Cover
Introducing the first ever page-by-page time-lapse commentary of a complete graphic novel starting here with the case of Cloud Town. If you're a reader, comics lover, writer, artist, educator, or librarian there may be something here for you! There are spoilers so read ahead at your local library, or favorite comic book retailer. Signed copies are available at my website and the following stores. If your comic book retailer would like to be added to this list, have them shoot contact me via email and I'll send some signed book plates their way. https://danielmccloskey.com/shop/cloudtown-dmn9a Signed copies available at: USA: CA--Mission: Comics and Art, Comix Experience, Silver Sprocket, Cape & Cowl, Sour Cherry Comics, Escapist Comics, Knowhere Games & Comics, The Comic Bug, Current Comics, Hicklebees GA-- Read It Again Bookstore MI--Vault of Midnight NC--Ssalefish, The Country Bookshop NY-- Books of Wonder, Gutter Pop Comics, Anyone Comics, Desert Island Comics, Everyone Comics IL-- Quimby's OR--Cosmic Monkey Comics PA-- The Copacetic Comics Company, Phantom of the Attic, FireFly Bookstore, Main Point Books TX-- Space Cadets Collection Collection VA-- Velocity Comics WA-- The Comics Place Not on this list and want to be? message me: https://danielmccloskey.com/press Praise for Cloud Town: "Weirdly and unexpectedly wonderful." Kirkus Reviews "A rollicking giant monster adventure will be a hit with fans of Hannah Templer's Cosmoknights and Tillie Walden's On a Sunbeam." School Library Journal "Meet Daniel McCloskey - a bold, new cartooning voice! Cloud Town is a beast! It's original. It's different. It's full of energy and life! Kaiju, skateboarding, manga, YA, so many ideas, and great cartooning! This is a special graphic novel. It feels like the future." Jim Rugg- The PLAIN Janes, Street Angel, Hulk Grand Design, Cartoonist Kayfabe channel "You're going to want to hold on tight for a wild ride from beginning to end! A thrilling adventure defined by Pen's strength and Olive's bravery," Eric Colossal- Rutabaga the Adventure Chef
Rough Trascript
[00:00:00] Hi, I'm Daniel McCloskey Bean CanDan on the internet. It is finally time for me to make public the video series. I have been privately releasing. For my Patrion supporters for the last six months. Back then I didn't quite realize I was starting the first ever video series, deck document, and entire graphic, novel and page by page. Time-lapse . But that's what this is. It's a real deep dive in the day by day. Grind., being a graphic novelist. you will see me grow, get better equipment, make new friends in the cartooning community and learn a lot about even my own comics so here's the very first episode finally made public. Enjoy.
Welcome to Cloudtown Tuesday, the day where I share a page from my graphic novel, Cloudtown, and um, tell you about the process of making it. It's like a, um, editor's commentary on a DVD. So if you're a comics fan, if you're a friend of mine, if you are an artist looking for insights into the comics process, here it is.
Let's go. [00:01:00] Let's do it. I've sent you some timelapse with voiceover before, trying out adding this video element. I thought it would be a little nicer, it slightly embarrassing . You can just see how sloppy it is when I'm roughing it out, or rethinking it, or rethinking you guys today is the case.
So the case, if you guys don't know, here, let's... Alright, this is a hardcover copy of Flat Town. We've talked about this before. Below the hardcover slipcase is the case. Alright, so when I was approached to work on this they said, do you want to illustrate the case and the end pages? You have until next Thursday.
Um, and I didn't know what case was and I was googling case and case and case Um, I eventually figured it out, but it is that cover under the cover that glues the cardboard [00:02:00] of the actual hardcover. I was really struggling with color, and again, I was in such a crunch time that after my work at the comic shop, I texted some images of what I was doing to my friend Kurt, who gave me a little bit of thoughtful feedback.
I really like this design. I want something kind of moody and dreamy, because I do feel like Cloudtown is a story that has two sides. It has like, two sides. The goofy kid's side, where like, dogs bite you on the butt and you're barfing in a robot. Uh, but it also has like that angsty side, like these are teenagers, they're in high school, fighting a lot, and they're dealing with a lot of their feelings and what it is to become an adult.
So, this, I think, shows that [00:03:00] kind of conflict between the two friends and that intense emotion,
or
at least that is a ton of space to do in the book. Uh, I really was happy with having a nice little spine doodle. Because, you know, the spine can see me. Kind of thinking and rethinking how I would do the, um, the text for that one. That, on the left hand side, is the version of the title that I liked the most about the different versions I had done, uh, up to this point.
Uh, but I do think, at this point, my strongest one is the final copy that ended up in this case. People sometimes ask how I think[00:04:00]
of how I used to dream about houses a lot, um, I, I used to, you know, run the Cyberpunk Apocalypse Writers Project in Pittsburgh, right, so that was a big mess of houses. At first it was two little houses back to back, and then it became a large, like, formal apartment building. Not large for an apartment building, but large for a house.
And I, um, often was the person in charge of repairing and fixing it, changing the heating, um, patching up the roof if I could, the gutters. And so, um, I... I've paid a lot of attention to parts of houses and the houses around me in my neighborhood. Many of these houses are designed based on houses I've lived in, and some are just designed on my daydreams.
Um, the idea of all these points and spikes on all the houses were, um, were inspired by the idea of, like, if you were a poor person that lived near a [00:05:00] place where there are giant monsters, like, what could you do to try to prevent your house from getting squished? I thought, like, Nailing big spikes on your house?
That might help. You can see me using chunks of art from the book to get Olive to go go shopping where she lives. You can see me kind of just daydreaming the little buildings adding some spikes.
So you can see me trying to get, like, the sky here, and, um, doing my best to kind of be painterly. Again, something I don't have a lot of experience in. Um, you spend so much time um, that sometimes when you come to something like this it's both kind of a relief that you get to spend more time, um, but at the same time not that much more time.
Uh, and there's also the added pressure of, yeah, working in colors that you're not familiar with. I [00:06:00] tried to just like, uh, use a lot of reference photos of sunsets for, for the palette there. Um, and I also was trying to give the visual of, there's two types of clouds in Cloudtown. There are the clouds that are coming from the rift, the kind of otherworldly magical clouds.
And then there's like, the clouds of the overall earth. And those clouds give you kind of the perspective of the sky. Something I did not really think about or realize about clouds in my day to day life is that clouds really do give you a sense of perspective and depth in the world because even though they can be random sizes and be random heights, um, they actually are relatively consistent.
So you get that kind of sealing of the world by those clouds reducing in size and following the rules[00:07:00]
of perspective. got a lot better during the creation of CloudTown, I think my, uh, General things with perspective knowledge has grown even more since so I'm excited to see, um, how that affects my next stories, what my abilities
with CS Power guys. In the first version of CloudTown, they, uh, had a, their own subplot that was like a totally secondary narrative that if you watched them in the corners of all of the pages they would have a second kind of, um, you know, adventurer story happening in the background. Where's all those now?
Unfortunately, uh, that got edited out very early on a lot of big edits and changes in this book. There were so many times where I had a vision for the story and then, you [00:08:00] know, it just Uh, part of it kind of was taken out and sometimes for me, you know, you're holding a story together almost like, like a bunch of blocks between your two hands.
And if you take out a block, they often kind of crumble. You don't figure out a way to fill that space, for those beats. Um, like one example of that is that, someone might want you to take out a scene. But that scene was a, a down point, right? So you got a happy scene, a sad scene, and a happy scene. And that's, that can be a good rhythm.
But if you have a happy scene, and then another kind of equally happy scene, it's like, wait, what's going on? Like there's something, um, It's just like, uh, holding a note unusually long in a song. So
yeah, there is the Cloudtown logo starting to take shape for a new title. Yeah, I really like how that ended up. It's both crisp, [00:09:00] legible, and a little wacky and sloppy. Uh, weird and wonderful. Was the blurb that, uh, School Library Journal, I think, gave me? No, Kirkus Reviews said Cloudtown was weird and surprisingly wonderful.
And I think that weird and wonderful is kind of where I'm aiming on a good day. So, hopefully that title is...
I spent a long time tweaking this, you can see me getting into the shadows here, adjusting the shades, and then trying these different blurbs for the back, there are challenges ahead that you can't imagine, and you can see the little details of the house, I did my best to keep depth. Show this kind of, um, on [00:10:00] ramp to the highway, it's a v bar,
and then there's sort of Um,
I hope to make something even better, but... I think that's probably, uh, the best illustration I did that year, actually. Alright, so this has been Cloudtown Tuesday. Uh, I hope you guys like it. I'm gonna show you a timelapse of me creating a bunch of different pages, once a week. I'm gonna go through most of the book, maybe?
We'll see. And, um, yeah. That's it. Uh, please do message me, tell me what you like. Skulltooth makes it look like I'm missing a tooth, but be
safe, their friendship will last forever. [00:11:00] Hug could stop a hurricane. Oh, I forgot I wrote that down. I like that. And then this one's from an elk song in the 1912. Here's to the friend in stormy weather, better than all the friends when all is fair. Uh, and that quote I like a lot, and I'm using that as the tentative title to tentative sequel to Hug.
I don't know. That felt kind of long to me. I don't know how it felt to you. I was thinking maybe I should have, like, um, conversations with, you know, cartoonist friends while looking at it. Maybe that would bring up more interesting things. Uh, this is a work in progress. Yeah, it's a work in progress. I'm figuring it out.
I'm a cartoonist, not a videographer. Documentarian. Grandpa, is it time to go for a walk?