I’ve been spending a lot more time with the cover for Issue 1 of Bloodbath on Unholy Island lately. I wrote about an earlier version before, but since then the cover’s gone through a few meaningful shifts—refinement, colour, and then a fairly big disruption to the whole layout. This post is really about that process and why I leaned into those changes.
The first image is a high-fidelity sketch built straight from pen and ink. Rom is front and centre—our way into the story—drawn with a fairly raw line. At this stage I started blocking in colour in a deliberately brutalist way. Flat, assertive, not trying to be subtle. The aim wasn’t polish; it was mood. I wanted the colour to feel imposed onto the drawing rather than blended into it, something a bit uncomfortable but confident.
In the second image, things tighten up. Rom’s portrait gets a lot more attention. His blue-green eye colour is locked in and the rendering is pushed to a level that feels more resolved without becoming glossy. This is also where the cover starts to behave like a cover.
The title Bloodbath on Unholy Island begins to assert itself, with extra weight on Unholy. My publishing logo, Inner Sight, comes in, along with my name under writer and artist. Around Rom, the collage starts to form. Frank—our opening antagonist in Issue 1—begins to emerge. He’s not fully defined yet, but his presence is there, and that matters.
Then, in the third image, I deliberately broke the whole thing.
I shifted to a full spread view: back cover on the left, front cover on the right. I flipped the vertical ribbon holding the logo and author/artist info over to the right-hand side of the front cover. That single move changed the read completely. Now Rom stares out from the left side of the front cover, while Frank occupies the right. It creates tension between them rather than stacking them hierarchically.
Under Frank, I’ve started sketching in the car—bright headlights cutting up from the bottom-right corner. It’s still loose, but it introduces motion and threat in a way the earlier versions didn’t quite manage.
The back cover is now doing some quiet narrative work too. There’s space marked out for the barcode and blurb, but more importantly, there’s a figure moving up a staircase, gun in hand. This is Lauren—Loz—the sharp Interpol detective tracking Frank’s trail of damage. She’s not fully part of Issue 1 yet, but she’s about to be. The image is a promise rather than an explanation, hinting at the shift in the story as we head into Issue 2.
At this stage, the cover feels less like a single illustration and more like a threshold into the book. It’s still evolving, but it’s finally starting to talk back to the story in the way I’d hoped.
More soon.
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