Sketches: Mel Blanc: The Man of a Thousand Voices

I am surprised to discover that I had been asked to start on this over two years ago. (It's taken that long for the book to be finished.)
These were my earliest concept sketches. Version A. would have had the characters sort of emanating from the open top of Mel Blanc's head, though in thinking about it after-the-fact, that's probably not an apt metaphor for having created the voices for the characters, rather than creating the characters themselves (but hey, it seemed like a good idea at the time).

I had also been thinking it might either be difficult or damn near impossible to get good, useful character art, and I was trying to design around that limitation — so the other concepts could have used tiny photographs of Mel Blanc's head (perhaps each with a different expression) or character art. (The photos would have been in several different colors, rather than just black-and-white.) There could be a few (Version C.) or quite a few (Version D.), depending on what became available.

In retrospect, there wouldn't have been as many photos of his face in different expressions to support this design (but hey, it seemed like a good idea at the time).

A year later — literally, a year later! — we had an actual photo (and a really good one) for the cover, and the design was refined a bit...
The idea (mostly in my head, and not at all well demonstrated here) was that all the cartoon character art or photos — at this point I think it was more likely to be character art — could be contained by a series of circles in the background. (Those grid lines in the sketch were for my own reference.) That'd make it easier to put the cover together, easier to incorporate the different shapes of the different characters, et cetera et cetera, and allow for a degree of flexibility, depending on how much or how little became available.

And another year after that, the manuscript had been finished (mostly), and I started thinking about the design of the bookblock. (During this time, arrangements were also made for an artist to provide a selection of cartoon character heads, with the idea that they'd be used in a form more or less like the sketch above.)

Here's where I digress a bit (and I apologize in advance). A few weeks before I started work on the Mel Blanc book (again), I put together the cover for a different book...
...And as you can see, I ended up using a modified version of the basic structure I'd had in mind for the Mel Blanc cover there, instead (but hey, it seemed like a good idea at the time).

I still could have used it again, anyway — I'm not averse to repeating myself, not by any means, and I could easily have made the covers look very different, despite the similar structure — but in the back of my head I'd been thinking of something else, anyway. By this point we had decided on character art, and I was thinking it might be much easier — practically speaking — to incorporate that stuff into a series of square shapes, rather than into a series of round shapes.

That was the way I began to approach the design of the bookblock, with the idea that the square shapes (with the character art) could be used as design elements with the chapter breaks (as seen in this somewhat sketchier-than-usual series of sketches)...
It was during that process that I stumbled across the idea of using word balloons, instead. What better design metaphor for a voice artist?

That very quickly led to the question of how can I use this idea for the cover? Two very quick thumbnail sketches later — one of a series of series of word balloons in a grid, the other a more chaotic arrangement — and I had an answer I thought might work...
...Which I elaborated on just a bit to get an idea of relative sizes, type placement, and so on. (Those notes off to either side are about the measurements for the hardcover case wrap, which will need to be slightly more wide.)
And so, more than two years later, in a somewhat unexpected, roundabout way, we arrive here:
I wanted to use a combination of well-known and less-well-known characters on the cover — hence, the less-recognizable Woody Woodpecker, and the somewhat-controversial (though by now forgotten) The Frito Bandito. Everything had to fit together more or less like a puzzle, and I ended up modifying a few of the illustrations to make them better fit the space I had, making the occasional color adjustment here and there.

There's an ol' Warner Bros. cartoon from 1949 called "Curtain Razor," essentially a series of blackout gags as Porky Pig auditions a series of vaudeville acts. One of the performers (voiced by Mel Blanc, of course) is known as "The Man of a Thousand Voices," and he performs a rapid-fire series of voice impressions. (Sorry, I tried to find a link to the cartoon, but they've all been taken down.) That was more or less the inspiration for this cover — a chaotic series of different cartoon voices that seem to bombard you all at once.

(In the cartoon, Porky responds that he only counted 999 voices. The performer is puzzled, trying to remember what that other voice was — the gag, of course, is that it's his normal speaking voice — and he wanders off, hoping that he might think of it later.)