Jonny Crossbones: Down Hanover Wash is an ongoing adventure comic for all ages. Follow Jonny, a young auto mechanic in a skeleton suit, as he and Gretchen Fiveash, the niece of a wealthy adventurer, navigate an eventful lakeside vacation while learning more about themselves and their unknown, shared past!
First time readers might be best served by starting at the beginning of Jonny's First adventure, Dead Man at Devil's Cove.
A lot of it is just faked! I was looking at a photo of the haystack rocks off Cannon Beach here in Oregon for the islands, and I was thinking of the bluffs by the beach on Whidbey Island, where my grandparents used to live, mixed with a little bit of the way the foliage looked on the shore of Sebago Lake where my family used to vacation when I was a kid. I try to mash it all together and come up with something that looks compelling.
Nice! The result is scenery that looks familiar but avoids distraction by being too recognizable.
Between your settings, characters clothing, and other details like cars, the world feels both contemporary and timeless. On that note, how do you decide on clothing for characters? And why are Jonny’s outfits relatively muted and based on earth tones when compared with the supporting cast?
For the clothes, I used to get a bunch of clothing catalogues sent to me to flip through and get ideas, but now I mostly go to department store websites and look at what they have. A lot of it is also made up!
Color-wise, Jonny ended up colored that way because I try to maintain a consistent color palette for my main characters– I want them to be recognizable quickly even if they change their clothes!
When I originally designed Jonny, he didn’t wear a shirt, so his colors were black, white, and the khaki of his pants. When I started putting a shirt on him, I wanted to maintain that color scheme so I added the grays. I’m kind of thinking I should go back and take the light gray out of the pages, and make his shirt more stark black and white. The rest of my colors come from a very limited palette, which keeps me from getting too caught up in color choices. I will use variations of my limited colors, too, but mostly I keep to the basics.
I should note that the color-coding is very much something I learned about from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, which has informed a huge part of my thinking about comics in general!
Man, those rock formations are beautiful. How do you research your locations and backdrops?
A lot of it is just faked! I was looking at a photo of the haystack rocks off Cannon Beach here in Oregon for the islands, and I was thinking of the bluffs by the beach on Whidbey Island, where my grandparents used to live, mixed with a little bit of the way the foliage looked on the shore of Sebago Lake where my family used to vacation when I was a kid. I try to mash it all together and come up with something that looks compelling.
Nice! The result is scenery that looks familiar but avoids distraction by being too recognizable.
Between your settings, characters clothing, and other details like cars, the world feels both contemporary and timeless. On that note, how do you decide on clothing for characters? And why are Jonny’s outfits relatively muted and based on earth tones when compared with the supporting cast?
For the clothes, I used to get a bunch of clothing catalogues sent to me to flip through and get ideas, but now I mostly go to department store websites and look at what they have. A lot of it is also made up!
Color-wise, Jonny ended up colored that way because I try to maintain a consistent color palette for my main characters– I want them to be recognizable quickly even if they change their clothes!
Hopefully you can recognize them just from these palettes.
When I originally designed Jonny, he didn’t wear a shirt, so his colors were black, white, and the khaki of his pants. When I started putting a shirt on him, I wanted to maintain that color scheme so I added the grays. I’m kind of thinking I should go back and take the light gray out of the pages, and make his shirt more stark black and white. The rest of my colors come from a very limited palette, which keeps me from getting too caught up in color choices. I will use variations of my limited colors, too, but mostly I keep to the basics.
This is my base palette for everything:
http://jonnycrossbones.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Screen-Shot-2019-06-12-at-12.25.09-PM.png
I should note that the color-coding is very much something I learned about from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, which has informed a huge part of my thinking about comics in general!