The Return of Dr. Hedge Fund!

This was a job I did last fall for Communication Design, a design firm here in RVA that has been doing award winning design work for national and international clients for the past 25 years. This was the 2nd time I worked with them on Dr. Hedge Fund for CFA magazine which is a magazine for the financial industry. I know, it sounds deadly boring but I have to say they've been surprisingly fun to work with. For this particular job they wanted to give the material a 1960's - 1970's kitschy Marvel comics sensibility. That happens, for better or worse, to be a sensibility that I'm all too familiar with. So when Bil Cullen called to ask me if I was available to for a second go round with the good Dr. I was more than happy to oblige.

Like the last time I had the pleasure of working on Dr. Hedge Fund, the scope of the job was rather large. They needed a full page illo or in this case a splash page and 5 spots. It's always fun when as an illustrator you get to work on a job that's this involved.

Here are a couple of the sketches for the splash page. The first one being the roughest and the 2nd a bit tighter with a the basic placement of the word balloons and captions. In the final they would adjusted even further.

Here's the finished illo minus the type placement. To see it in it's proper context follow this link it will take you to the Z mag, essentially a digital version of the magazine where you can see the entire job. Also if you look at the bottom left hand corner of the splash page in the digital version, there's an explosive text/caption box, it's a link to the previous Dr. Hedge Fund story with all of the corresponding illos.

In this case I wanted to give it a more retro feel so I played with the halftone effects and in some areas of the illo made it look like the registration is out of whack which was an all too frequent occurrence in the comics of the 60s and 70s.