Tomas De Rat / Tomas The Rat

De Ijzeren Vogel / The Iron Bird

De Ijzeren Vogel (The Iron Bird)

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Comments

Most often I would first make the cover before even starting to work on the comic itself. This means I had to draw something of which I was sure it would occur at some point in the totally-organically-growing story. For this comic it was quite simple, because it revolves around Tomas building a giant bird-shaped aeroplane, so the iron bird blasting off provided for a spectacular image.
Notice the sun on the image. I think about every panel in the first two comics had a sun in it, unless it would be raining, indoor, or night (then you'd see a moon of course). For some reason young kids want to have a sun on every image they draw. It's as if a photographer wants to take all pictures with the sun shining into the lens.

The flag displayed on the cover is the flag from Animal City, which is the upgraded version of the animal forest from the first two comics (see page 1). I don't think I ever used this flag anywhere else than on this cover.

It's hard to see due to the dark blue background, but the cover is slightly littered with what could be considered promotional slogans: “super”, “exciting” and “even better”. With this comic it's still acceptable because I added them after creating the cover, hence they're not so obnoxious and there are only three of them. But the covers of some later comics had similarities to Microsoft product packaging. You can now either deduce something about how I was at the age of 9, or how Microsoft is now.

This cover also has the dreaded adhesive tape on the side, to protect the paper from wear. In this case it did a pretty good job, but in general this was the worst idea I ever had about increasing the lifetime of the comics. On some of them, like the Aziz comic, I even put tape on the edges of some pages. The paper under the tape discolored, and often became stiff so it actually caused more damage than it was supposed to prevent. Morale of the story: don't laminate your paper with adhesive tape in an attempt to protect it. Just use good paper.

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