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: