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 lov
Post a Comment
Read more

Anatomy of a Scene: The Third Man

It's time again to break down a classic scene. One that's well-written and, in my view, a fine example of excellent craft. I've done some of these articles from books (like The End of the Affair   and Starship Troopers ) and other movies (like Citizen Kane , City Lights , Raiders of the Lost Ark , and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid ), but now it's time to take a look at a scene from The Third Man . It blends the best of Orson Welles (as he's in the film and drives this scene) and Graham Greene, who wrote this particular screenplay. Before we get to the scene, we need some context. The Third Man is a tale of the black market in Vienna, just after World War II. It's about a cheap, dime-store Western novelist named Holly Martins (played by Joseph Cotton) and his friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles.) Lime offered Martins a job in Vienna, so Martins leaves America and arrives, only to find that Harry Lime is dead. Penniless, without a friend or reason to be
Post a Comment
Read more

The Missed Opportunities of Days Gone By

“Hello?” I said into the phone, accepting the call from a number I didn’t recognize. “Hey,” the feminine voice on the other replied, as though I should know the sound of her voice. At a loss, I said, “Can I help you?” “It’s Brooke.” Her name stopped me. It couldn’t possibly be her. We hadn’t spoken in years, a decade perhaps. “Brooke?” “Yeah, Brooke Baker. This is Mark, right?” Jesus Christ. It was her. “Yeah, it is Mark. Brooke. Wow. How are you? It’s been a long time since… well… since anything.” “I know.” “So, how are you doing?” “Okay, I suppose…” Her voice belied her words, though. Something was up. “I… It’s just been so long and I guess I wanted to hear your voice.” “I don’t think I had a number for you. Ever. I offered a couple of times, but…” “I was a brat back then.” And that’s how a random phone call turned into a two-and-a-half hour catch-up session. We spoke of everything under the sun: people we still knew, how different we were, h
14 comments
Read more