Gallery

An Artistic Prehistory of the Wildes

Back in the days when the first draft for Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom was still being typed out, I got it in my head that I'd find the perfect artist for the Wildes and then convince my (as yet unknown) publisher to use that artist for the books.

The man I chose was Aussie comics virtuoso Gary Chaloner. When Gary read the first part of the book, he hopped on board and worked diligently at coming up with some character designs that really captured the characters in my head. But once the novel actually found a home at Putnam, their art folks opted to use Tim Gabor as the cover artist. The resulting art is fantastic, but Gary's work was too good not to let you folks see it (and I hope one day we'll see his designs in comic book or even animated form).

Here's Doc Wilde's very first appearance at the end of Chapter 1 (as you can read for yourself in the action-packed excerpt from the book on the FREE Stuff! page).

Again from Chapter 1, we see Brian and Wren in the Lyceum. Gary captures the spirit of the Wilde kids perfectly.

A very early sketch of the kids. Early on, I'd conceived of Brian as ten years old, and Wren as seven, so these designs reflect that (in the finished book, Brian turned out to be twelve, and Wren ten).