Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Jo Chen Gives Life to Vampires

Jo Chen's covers for the Buffy Season 8 comics have been some of the best in the series. They are warm, rich, detailed and textured. She uses light extremely well, and it is always appropriate for every subject and subject matter. The characters she paints have weight, body, movement and life. One of my favorite paintings she has done for Buffy was the one on the third issue of the series seen here.


Her work is just shy of photo-realistic, stylized enough to be suitable for a comic book cover, but worthy of framing as art in its own right-of course, there is a plethora of fantastic comic book art out there that I would and have put on my wall. Chen's latest piece is not for Buffy Season 8 but for an upcoming Tales of the Vampire one-shot, written by Becky Cloonan and Vasilis Lolos. Five years ago, there was a 12-issue Tales of the Vampires series written by Whedon himself and several other Buffy scribes including Jane Espenson and Drew Goddard. Amber Benson wrote a story for another Buffyverse collection, Tales of the Slayers. Each series, now collected in trade paperbacks, takes a vampire or slayer from the 'verse timeline and centers a story around that given character while connecting it to a larger narrative.

Jo Chen's stunning cover for the new Tales of the Vampire story followed by a brief plot description from Dark Horse's press release:


In a small town in Massachusetts, a young man named Jacob goes about his day as usual-wakes early, eats breakfast with his mom, and heads to school. He's a hard worker and a reliable friend to Alexia, an athletic and headstrong young woman. But at night Jacob likes to cut loose at the local arcade, where he's befriended a reckless gang of vampires who enjoy drinking his blood. Jacob craves the high and the easy escape from the monotony of his life that this "bloodletting" provides. Enter the mysterious and sultry May, who can help Jacob leave those high-school days behind-that is, if Alexia doesn't stop her first.

Blood and pomegranates. Always a good combination in my book. Tales of the Vampire comes out on June 3rd.

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