Guest post by Aaron Muszalski
Released last week, Comic Book Tattoo is a collection of over fifty stories based on the songs of Tori Amos. A collaboration of over eighty comic book authors and artists, contributors include San Francisco artist Star St.Germain, Metropol creator Ted McKeever, “Rent Girl” illustrator Laurenn McCubbin, and famed Sandman artist Mike Dringenberg.
Conceived by editor and long-time Amos friend Rantz Hoseley, the book has a simple premise: comic artists adapt the concepts behind Amos’s songs into graphic vignettes. The final product, in an oversized 12″x12″ format, contains 50 stories by more than 80 creators. “What I was extremely clear about was that the comic artists weren’t being asked to do visual cover versions of the songs. It wasn’t their job to try and figure out what the song is about, it was their job to use the song as a jumping-off point,” Amos explained. [Publishers Weekly]
“The end result is something pretty amazing. We’ve got this huge number of really insanely talented creators bringing their ‘A’ game on a wide variety of themes, genres, topics and subject matter. We’ve got science fiction, fantasy, historical drama, slice of life character studies, and some stories that really play with the rules of the traditional comic form, resulting in stories that could only be done in comics format, and the kind of boundary-pushing that you don’t see all that often.” [Comic Book Resources]
images by Jason Levesque and Star St. Germain
