Our guest artist for this one-page Weird Luck prequel story is the noted horror and weird fiction illustrator Dave Felton, whose darkly evocative work can be found gracing books by authors like Thomas Ligotti, Jon Padgett, and H.P. Lovecraft.
When we approached Dave about doing the art for one of these Weird Luck prequel tales, he was in the middle of a creative challege he'd set for himself: Draw one new picture every day and post it on Instagram, for 100 days in a row.
Dave agreed to draw a one-page Weird Luck story if we could do it in such a way that it could also be part of this 100-day art experiment. So Nicky sent him one panel description and caption per day, for six days in a row, and on each of those six days Dave drew a single square panel based on Nicky's panel description and posted it to his Instagram account. Those six panels make up today's story, "Protection."
It was a novel approach to collaboration, quite different from any of our other Weird Luck collaborations. And quite a challenge, to fit a whole story into six panels and have each panel involve a dramatically-different scene of the sort that Dave would enjoy drawing. Dave liked the crows in the first panel description, so they cropped up again in later panels. He also requested that we include some sort of monster or demon in the story (because monsters and demons are fun to draw, and he is after all, a horror illustrator), and suggested including floating skulls as well. All of these factors contributed to how the story ended up developing, and we hope you share our delight with the result.
With this story, we officially begin the series of Weird Luck prequel tales that we're calling The Corvus Drive Papers. Our protagonist and narrator here is Madeline de Verninac, who we'll be seeing a lot more of.
In working with various guest artists for this series, part of the fun was seeing different artists do different visual interpretations of Madeline. We gave them each the same general description and let them run wild with it, without pushing any of them to conform to what the others were doing.
And yes, Mariel, Madeline's sidekick in this story, is the same Mariel who shows up in the main Weird Luck storyline. This round of prequel stories takes place about 13 years before the main storyline, which makes Mariel only 20 years old here. Her tendency to get into damsel-in-distress predicaments is a lifelong pattern, a symptom of her particular personal version of weird luck. We'll learn more about Mariel and her luck when we return to the main storyline in Volume Two!
Up next: guest artist JingleJude returns, and so does Madeline, for the debut of a longer prequel tale called "The Misfortune of Monsieur Dimanche."
