If Pandora was alive today, she would confirm it was a bad decision to have let the worldly ills of life escape from the jar.

Would she say the same of the 2.94 terabyte data trove that exposed the offshore secrets of wealthy elites from more than 200 countries and territories? 

We’ll have to ask Zeus and his accomplices to give her a break so she can give her opinions. For now, allow us to entertain you all with behind the cover conversations for issue #57:

Post the usual “hello, hello”, “can you hear me?” “yeah, I can hear you”, “hello?”, we started with our conversation. 

Dudly: How are you doing man?

Amal: Hey buddy! Was making some sketches for the issue...

So the idea behind this sketch is the pandora’s box breaking open from the bottom and leaking all the data to the people "below" as the top-tier sapheads try to save them.

Dudly: Nice concept. I was reading a lot about Pandora and the mythology story.

Amal: Oh yes! That would be interesting to add.

Following this conversation, we had the Red intervention suggesting we use an image of Pandora so the analogy is conveyed well. 

We set out to make some sketches and came up with the idea of Pandora basking on the beach with her multi-billionaire genies who have escaped from the trunk. Only these genies weren’t so friendly…

We had a long call after this idea was presented,

Dudly: We are missing the Redlion “twist” in this.

Amal: How can we bring that on?

Dudly: Maybe we shouldn’t use the classical Pandora depiction. We can show a modern Pandora hacking into the systems…

Dudly: Have you seen the Watch Dogs 2 in-game artworks?

This was the beginning of the cover. We went from sketch to idea to the first draft in a day.

I animated a few parts frame by frame to induce the manga/cartoon effect. In the end, all of these lived on layers inside layers, inside layers. The “layer apocalypse”, as Dudly fondly remembers it 🤪

We worked on it another night to add more references that you now see on the final cover.

As an easter egg of sorts, I had written “Fuck hope” in the graffiti style you see on the top. It’s barely legible but the reference behind was from the story of Pandora where the only thing that doesn’t escape the vase was hope. This helped people to hold onto hope while all other ills loomed over humanity. The legibility of the phrase was reduced to pose the expression as an oxymoron. It’s left for you to decide whether we can hope or not. 

In the end, we had it all covered: Pandora the hacker, Sheikhs and Putins, House of Fraud giveaways, Offshore hoarding, Hidden in Noise NFTs and Coinbase NFT platform.

The artwork was handed over to Dudly who went over the layers with his organizing- superpower (believed to be gifted by Zeus for organizing his google drive) and then over that with After Effects skills he mastered for years inside a cave on Mountain Olympus while Kratos took care of his kitties.

Dudly's comment:

"Well, well, well. What do we've got here." I told myself upon opening the Photoshop file delivered by Amal. Artist's creativity mess at its best. 😆

I spent about an hour going through the layers, grouping them into logical clusters to make my life easier later on while animating. Have a look by yourself below.

Thanks to our luxury time reserve we were on call with me streaming the screen and literally holding an online AfterEffects lecture. We could discuss each moving part until Amal had to run because of serious reasons. But we will continue the lesson next week for sure.

I can't be happier for the result, Amal did an awesome job with the drawing and the collaboration was an entertaining experience. I am stoked it's not only me anymore fighting on the cover battleground each week. I got a new wingman and friend.

Due to certain circumstances, I wasn’t able to watch the entire walkthrough of the animation but the results were uber-cool! My takeaways are lessons on organizing and yours is an awesome cover we’ll strive to beat next week!

Thank you frens! Enjoy the week :)