Our cover for this week’s Halloween special is studded with SHIB, the star of the past week.

Last week, we had planned that we needed to have a cover for issue #59  in which a lot wasn’t happening—a single character with a simple background. The charts gave us one: SHIB, the top dog. So we took to the board with a plan to illustrate an angry, zombie Shiba Inu. 

What makes a zombie dog a zombie dog? Peeling skins, protruding canines, drooling endlessly with the thirst to eat anything on sight. We referred to several styles and concepts of showing the doggo in its element. Finally, we settled for one with a clean 2-colored palette with sharp lines. 

After scrolling through countless zombie references, we formed a picture of a good-boy zombie Shiba Inu. A quick sketch was made to approve the pose and approve it did.

Quick sketches, like it says, are “quick” and give you the hope of imagining a killer result. The truth is that it only gives you an outline of hope which flickers as the deadline draws close.

When I finished the sketch, I was happy. It looked exactly like how I wanted it to, and that is always a relief. Unfortunately, my cat did not feel the same about this haunting dog that now stared right back at it. She tried to convince me we could maybe use a zombie-er cat that eats up the dog. I refused to follow her instructions and continued to the next stage. 

The idea was to frame-by-frame animate the dog barking. This didn’t seem like a good idea when the deadline looked as scary as the dog. We worked our way around it to burn the drooling dog down to bits and then have a jump-scare that would slide into another scene of going down the throat. This thankfully worked in time. We had a zombie Shiba Inu that disappears and comes right back at you. We had a throat to shove all the references down to a zombie Zuck, Tungsten DAO cube, Flashloan “Flash,” and a Fidenza pattern. 

The artworks next went onto Dudly’s operation table, where he carefully stitched them together, interpolated, added the eerie radiance, colors, and sounds that give you the goosebumps. Thus, zombie Shiba Inu was brought to life through our magic and mantras. The downside was that it also bit us in the back by shooting the gas prices us up. So we have kindly requested it to go back to where it was (lol).

On that scary note, we wish you a happy week frens!