Jamie Jones, who calls Heroes Haven Comics in Tampa Florida home, has been coming up to Terrificon in Connecticut for the past 3 years
now. Heroes Haven may sound familiar as they have exclusive covers for various comic book such as Ghostbusters/TMNT and Star Wars #1. Among the other variants that can be found at Haven, Jones has created covers for a few of them including Five Ghosts and Solar: Man of the Atom which was his first published work as well. Jones’s style is a wonderfully detailed ink wash where the graying effects give the images some real depth. Like many artist, Jamie started with pencils and inks before finding his own style which always catches my fascination. Jamie draws from inspiration of other ink wash artists such as the famous Will Eisner or more recently, Joe Shuster award winner Francis Manapul.
Jones will spend about an hour and a half to bring a drawing from rough pencils to get a figure on paper with some facial features, to going straight into inks where the piece really start coming together. Finally finishing off the tones of the figure with ink wash that can really make or break the piece of illustration. Heroes and villains from Marvel and DC Comics are among his commissioned artworks along with his own comic Dodger, but with each piece of artwork you can see a second style emerge from his pieces. Jamie admittedly tends to draw characters modeled after himself, more on the skinny side. But that doesn’t stop him from being able to ink a brooding Batman with bulky muscles, “I like my heroes skinny and my bad guys huge. Like Flash vs Grodd, I am in heaven.”
Jamie Jones’s work can be seen in greater story telling detail in the pages of his own comic Dodger, a collection of stories based around a Mech-Suit Spaghetti-Western. The second issue in the series is set to premier at SPX (Small Press Expo) with a small gofundme campaign to pay for print costs. Sadly Jones won’t be in attendance but Tres Dean, the writer of Dodger, will be there.
If I am like most art enthusiasts, the styles you follow may tend to shift every now and again, but I keep coming back to the wonderful ink wash style that I have come to associate with Jamie Jones. Check out my review of the first book of Dodger before you pick up the second collection here!
Catch up with Jamie and where you can find him and his wor here:
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