A Shot at Glory – Comic for ESPN

When art director Siung Tjia from ESPN called me in early February offering the coolest job ever given to a mortal, I had to say yes. Just the CHANCE to do something so big for such a visually creative, innovative publication was too much to pass up.

Zev Borow, a sports writer for ESPN, had written a short story about a fictitious performance-enhancing drug for regular guys, and editor Neil Fine thought it would be great as a comic. That’s where I came in.

Zev wrote the story, I adapted it as a comic, and he went back in the end and filled in the word bubbles. It was a thrilling way to work that allowed for game of creative ping-pong that was really exciting to be a part of.

After my first shot at the story, I had a meeting with Neil and Siung discussing the goals of the project. Neil was excited about the piece so decided to push the deadline back to give me some time to make this thing really good. At the meeting he told me they’d be able to make it six pages if that eased things up on me.

The schedule was really tight when the job got pushed because it up overlapped with some other jobs I was doing. I was fortunate to have the help of a good friend and illustrator, Mike Neumann, to help me out with the flatting. There’s no way I could have gotten it done in time without him. Thanks Mike!

I passed my finished line drawings on to Zev with an estimated word count for him to work with, numbering panels so he would be able to easily see where the text was going to go. I was kind of nervous but he did an amazing job on the text.

Then I went back into Photoshop and spent the next two days hand-lettering every bubble. As the project got closer to completion, the clouds parted and the sun cast a heavenly glow on my studio. Laser beams of passion then shot out of my eyes, almost causing my monitor to catch fire on two separate occasions.

The story went to print in the 10th Anniversary issue of ESPN the Magazine, with LeBron James on one side of the flip-cover double issue. It’s currently on stands, and also features a full page and spread illustration by bad-asses Jillian Tamaki and Nathan Fox.

When it was all done, I was given a left-over ticket to the magazine’s 10th anniversary party, where the band was none other than 90’s favorite Third Eye Blind.

I love my job.

f.