Jason Badower/Moonlight Serenade

"I started off researching the year 1967. Cars, clothes, hairstyle, makeup (I drew [Linda's] eye lashes different to how I normally draw eye lashes), architecture, fashion trends (I had to carefully plan all her clothing, although R.D. Hall did suggest the turtleneck sweater on the first page), music and movies."

"[R.D.] asked for [Linda's] room to have lots of stuffed animals and 'curiously, lots of old shoeboxes'. I decided to go overboard on the stuffed animals, as I saw Linda using them as a substitute for real human contact. An indication of imaginary friends...I wanted to explore as much detail and mood in her room as possible. Long dark shadows line the walls, and I wanted a singular very strong light from the window. I had a ball drawing all the folds of the quilt (I haven't drawn fabric in Zero G for a VERY long time). The stuffed animals were fun and so was the design of the bed-head. For this page, my lovely sister helped me out and modeled for Linda and her mother."

"The parents were fun. I liked the idea of these parents cowering around the edge of the door frame, scared of their daughter. I really wanted to communicate that Linda has done something in the past to really scare them. When viewing the page in black and white, I noticed that the shadow cast by the back of the door almost looks like a panel border and heavily bisects the panel. I asked Annette to help me out by adding a glow from the lava lamp to help soften this shadow."

"Randomly, Annette coloured Linda's jumper red on the first page, and I asked her to maintain the red to add to Linda's whole 'vampiric' nature. After that, I followed Micah Gunnell's lead on War Buddies, Part 7 and kept her clothing and hair flat black after this page."

"I don't usually play with different angles, but I really liked this design and composition [in the first panel]. I thought it made it very clear that she's asleep and from the expression on her face that she's dreaming. I was more concerned with the graphic elements of lighting and clothing than anything else. I had great fun drawing her left hand and the way it affected the lines of her top. I was especially pleased with that."

"I love playing with panel borders as a means of communicating different scenes. Transporting a reader across scenes is actually a really tough thing to do...I felt I should do something at my end. My decision was to narrow the panel borders slightly and then add that misty effect to give it that dreamy feel."

"I had looked through the previous stories and found that we had never seen Linda actually connect and draw the energy/aura/life force out of someone. We had only seen her glowing blue hand loom over someone. I asked Annette to make it look like veins of energy being sucked out of this guy's aura."

"I love this page. It's hands-down my favourite from the entire graphic novel. I didn't even use a model! I had great fun drawing it, but once I saw the life that Annette injected into it, I almost fell out of my seat. This is Annette and I at our harmonious best. I would argue that this is the best page Annette has ever coloured."

"One of the few changes to my layouts is in the first panel where [Linda's] pose is different. Once I decided that she would look sexier in a skirt, I knew I couldn't have her with her legs up like that."

"I am a huge fan of Bryan Hitch and Paul Neary's work on The Ultimates. I love their layouts and the street scenes that they draw. I used this page to tackle their style."

"Panels 3, 4 and 5 really show what I can do. I also like how the mess of detail contrasts with Linda's solid black figure. Again, I avoided drawing her feet to give her an ethereal, floating feeling. She's not grounded in this story. She floats though it like some sort of unwordly spirit."

"People have really noted the brilliant job she did on the auras, and have especially commented on R.D. Hall's great idea of the hippie with his tie-died aura...It's hokey, but it works so damn well."

"Ida May Walker...has the designated "pixie hairstyle" that R.D requested. I did have to do a bit of Google action to find out what the hell a pixie hairstyle was. Having just read Artemis Fowl, they're lucky I didn't give her pointed ears."

"I had to deviate here from the script as it asked for a full jazz band playing here. While I did some research on what jazz bands looked like in the 60s, I felt that they would hog the panel. Besides, a lone saxophone player screams "jazz and blues" to me more than a full band does."

For Moonlight Serenade, Jason used a new tonal style, and this is the first time it's been colored by Annette. He began developing the style with The Death of Hana Gitelman "as a way to replace the time-consuming layered greyscale effect that I used on Road Kill and War Buddies."

"Ah, Annette with her crazy floral drapes. This again is another example of how I use models—and that is only as guidelines. The same model posed for both the nurse and Linda. I just used the model as an indicator of lighting and expression. The rest all comes from my twisted little head."

"My biggest goal for this project was to quite simply, draw the pants off anything I'd done before. I wanted to inject as much detail and life into the graphic novel as possible."

"Special note has to go to Annette here for juggling all my excessive detail as well as the auras...You see, a good colourist creates a limited and distinctive palette for each scene."

Regarding his new tonal style, Jason says, "It's unique and places me somewhere in the middle of painting artists and traditional line work artists for a look that is familiar yet has never been seen before. It also uses my medium to it's best potential."

"I also have to comment on the great lettering job. Again, R.D. Hall asked for her captions on lined diary paper, but Comicraft went above and beyond with their lined school-paper captions. They made her seem younger and added a great juxtaposition between the content of the captions and the normal school work or kids notes we would normally see on such a piece of paper."

"I was going for something vampiric, aloof and cold. Big, wide blue eyes, full lips (denoting passion and hunger) and a slight widow's peak resembling our classic Christopher Lee vampire. No detail is too small for me."

"Even though Micah Gunnell and Robert Atkins had drawn Linda, neither of them had drawn her as a 16 year old. And also, there's kind of my take on the character. I have to figure out what I want to say by her appearance."

"I saw this as a horror story. It's about a serial killer's first victim. And more than that, it's about a vampire."

"I'm so proud of the final product. What I really dug was that R.D.Hall seemed to have such a clear idea of how he wanted this to look. Annette's colours bring so much life to the piece."