Skip to main content

Operation: Montauk - Cover Comps

For my next book, Operation: Montauk, I sought out a painter and designer who knows the pulp style inside and out. I kept looking at the art of Blain Hefner and knew I had my guy for this particular project.

I had been planning on using Erin Kubinek, my artist for Lost at the Con and God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut, but I have employed her full time on another project and she wasn't available... Which makes me sad on one level, but she's plenty busy on a great project I will tell you about soon. And Blain was born to do this cover.

Check out this poster for Temple of Doom he did and posted on his blog:

He's clearly someone who understand the pulp aesthetic, right?

Well, Operation: Montauk is a pulp novel, through and through. Here's my brief synopsis:

"Operation: Montauk" is a time-traveling science fiction novel patterned after the pulp-adventure stories of the 1920s and 1930s.

Lost in time after a failed attempt to kill Hitler before his rise to power, World War II soldier Cpl. Jack Mallory finds himself stranded, his whole team killed, nearly 100 Million years off course. Together with a group of other wayward time travelers, Mallory has to fight to survive in a hostile environment swarming with dinosaurs. Things go from bad to worse for the group when a squad of Nazis sent back in time to protect the Fuhrer find themselves caught in the same temporal anomaly.

Well, Blain sent me some of his rough, small sketches for his idea for the cover and I couldn't be more happy about it. And I couldn't wait to share a taste of it with you. His art is money well spent.

Here is a small cross-section of the comps he sent me. I think the bottom two are the ones we're going to jump off from, but I"m curious, which one do you like the most?






Operation: Montauk comes out in June 2012. And here's Christopher Walken talking about Lost at the Con:

Comments

Max Holliday said…
I love the third one, the shapes and the out line just screams 30s pulp to me! The last two feel too 60-70s scifi to me, but thats just my two cents its going to look great either way!
11:49 PM
Emily Rose said…
I love the very last one. Blue helmet with slanted text. It's intense and draws my eye back to it. I like it better than the similar one with the text on the bottom because the slanted text gives that pulp feel more, and the lower image lets me fall into the circles and deeper into the picture (if that makes sense).
8:02 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Anatomy of a Scene - City Lights

We're going to break down another scene this week, and it's one of my favorites in cinema history. It comes from the ending of City Lights by Charlie Chaplin, which I think is the greatest romantic comedy ever made. 
It's a touching film from 1931 and I would make it mandatory viewing for anyone who wants to learn to tell a story.
The scene we're going to be breaking down comes from the very end of the film, so if you haven't seen it, I don't want to spoil it for you. Go watch the film. You can rent it for $3.99 in HD on Amazon or for free on Hulu with a free trial or plus subscription. You should just buy the Blu-ray, though. You're going to want to revisit it.
For those of you familiar with the movie, or for those of you who are going to ignore my pleas to watch it and go ahead with this post anyway, I'm going to set this clip up a bit before you watch it.
City Lights tells the story of Chaplin's Tramp and how he falls in love with a blind flower …
Post a Comment
Read more

The End of an Era and a New Beginning

It's been a long time coming, but I think an upgrade to my web presence was long overdue. I began this blog in 2005 and it's served me well over the last 13 years. My goal in those early days was to write a short story every month. Back then, that was the only writing I was doing.

This website, then called "Bryan's Short Story Corner," got me into a regular writing habit. One that I still maintain today. I hoped it would help me get eyeballs on my words and, looking back at some of those early short stories, I shouldn't have wanted any of those eyeballs looking. Today, my Patreon fills that void. There is a dedicated group of supporters there that help subsidize my ability to write short stories on the regular.

After I started publishing books, this blog morphed into a place to talk about my projects and writing and it worked well enough for that for a long time. But now I have Twitter and Medium for those functions and they have much cleaner and easier inte…
Post a Comment
Read more

50+ Rules and Tips About Writing I've Collected Over the Years

I have twenty or thirty notebooks and journals filled up with snippets about writing, my plans for stories, bits of dialogue, interesting ideas, plotlines, scraps of short stories, and a dozen other things. I carry one with me at all times and it takes me a couple of months to fill one up.

One of the things I've kept in one of my notebooks was a collection of writing tips and rules that I've collected over the years in my travels. From teachers, from books, from wherever. Most of my career has been spent screenwriting, so a lot of these are most applicable to that, but I wanted to present them so they might be of use to you as well.

I've never stopped collecting these over the years and I never will.

To start the list are Kurt Vonnegut's eight rules of writing. They are the first in my notebook and, I think, the most useful. I'll add a star to those I think are applicable most to screenwriting. Some of these aren't applicable to everyone in every situation, but…
3 comments
Read more