#sirois

The Head & Shoulders campaign said it best: “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” In any other case, this would definitely be true. However, in my case, that’s not quite how events have unfolded.

In the long and windy road that is the publication of “Excelsior,” I’m getting a THIRD chance to make a first impression, and I’m hoping that this third time is the true charm.

When I was putting the finishing touches on the first edition of the book back in 2010 (wow, it seems so long ago!), the realization hit me that I had to make a decision on the cover very soon. It had to fit the theme, it had to catch buyers’ attention, it couldn’t look amateurish and it couldn’t be too busy. That’s not so bad, right?

The problem was that I couldn’t decide on the type of image to use, and when Jason came by to spend a few hours working on a suitable cover design, we did a lot more brainstorming than I intended. By the time he left, we had something workable. Cheryl took a picture of my hand holding one of his art pens to a white page, and Jason took my original sketch drawing of Excelsior that I first drew in 1992 and gave it a true artist’s interpretation that I couldn’t give it.

We decided that a cool-looking cover would consist of my hand (as Matthew Peters’ hand) drawing an updated version of the character with a starfield coming out of the comic, implying that what was on the comic panel was spilling out into reality, which it was, in a way.

When I got my copies of the book and got to hold the finished version in my hands, I was satisfied with the cover, but I knew in my heart that it could have been better. Not to say that I wasn’t happy with Jason’s work on the cover because I was; it’s that we came to this idea simply because this was all we could come up with after a few hours of brainstorming.

Two years later, when I had the opportunity to go back into the eBook version of “Excelsior” and give it a much-needed revision, I thought this would be a great chance to take the cover design and enhance it to a point where it would stick out more to prospective buyers. Jason unfortunately wasn’t available this time around, due to work commitments, so I reached out to another friend – Ilya Arbit – who did a hell of a job on the revisions. He lowered the desk since it wasn’t important, he darkened the starfield to give the color some extra pop and most importantly, he added a really cool-looking starburst to the end of the sword Excelsior was holding. He also added in the “Top 50 Amazon Kindle Bestseller” text at the top (after its re-publishing, it went as high as #5 on one of their bestseller lists) and removed my middle initial. It’s hard enough to get people to remember George Sirois; no reason to confuse them even more by sticking a middle initial in there.

I thought that would be the last time I would need to worry about a new cover for this book… until I took the plunge and submitted the manuscript to Rocking Horse Publishing. By accepting me into their growing library, they gave me the green light to not only give the book one last round of edits, but to prepare a brand new cover for this new era for “Excelsior.”

This time around, I had more at my disposal. I had a very important prop that a friend loaned to me that I didn’t have while I was in New York. I had a background that allowed for a much more attractive texture. I had a concept that I considered back in 2010 that now seemed viable, and I had Cheryl who knew how to take that concept, make it look good on camera and then make it look great in Photoshop.

After seeing the most recent version of the final product – and I’m having some selected people look over it to make sure that it measures up to books currently in stores – I’m thrilled to report that I truly love how this cover looks. It’s a nod to the history of the character since the sketch that’s used is how Excelsior was originally designed back in 1992, and it’s proof that he’s gone beyond the simple black-and-white drawings I would fill my spiral notebooks with during high school and into the 3-dimensional world in which we all live.