Avengers Academy: Arcade Death Game Book Design

I’ve been living in this house for over two years and I still haven’t fully unpacked from my unplanned COVID induced move to Washington state. In a neglected sudo-room appendage that branches off of my closet, I house a pile of half-opened boxes that I frantically rummage through about twice a year in search of important documents. During my last hurricane attack on the boxes, I uncovered something I hadn’t seen in years: a copy of Avengers Academy: Arcade Death Game.

Over a decade ago now, I had the pleasure of working on the book design for this issue of Avengers Academy, right before the first Avengers movie hit theaters. At this time, book design was my favorite type of work, and I was a comic book nerd, so when I got the request to work on a special edition for a major comic book publisher, I might have jumped around the room a bit before accepting.

I created brushed metal design elements to match the metallic treatment of the Avengers Academy logo and accented these metal pieces with blue “swoops” to create movement. On pages that involved displaying reproductions of cover and spread art, I used a faint, low-contrast, grayscale version of the art displayed to fill the white space. 

Younger me, clicking away on my old iMac in a rent-controlled apartment in Berkeley, worked late into the night for a flat fee, with a smile on my face knowing my work would soon be seen in comic book shops around the world. Having had the opportunity to work on a Marvel book still brings a smile to my face after all these years.

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