City rooftops festooned with gargoyles are nothing new in comic books. But the gargoyles aren't usually alive. Here, dozens of them perch on eaves and soar above the buildings of the planet Arcadia, setting for this steampunk series whose run was cut short by the closing of its publisher CrossGen.

When you commit to a story with a bustling Victorian city, you're going to be drawing a lot of buildings and people. This street scene has over a hundred human figures on the streets, plus the flying creatures above them, and the docks in the distance. Presumably at least one of them is a street sweeper, cleaning up gargoyle scat.

The image is spread across two pieces of Bristol board, but with very generous margins, so I cropped the main image to make its details easier to see. The actual pages can be seen in the "additional images" section. I asked Jackson Guice about this image, and he graciously explained:

"I remember this piece well. Once I accepted the job offer from CrossGen, we moved down to Tampa in just a few short weeks. I met Mark Waid for the first time, and we discussed and created the general premise behind Ruse, the book we would be doing together. Mark needed about a week or so to pull everything together and finish the first script, so my time in the CrossGen offices during that period was spent putting together various world and character illustrations. I was on salary as opposed to freelance, so it kept me busy and allowed myself and Mike Perkins (the inker) to work out our own kinks before diving into the first issue.

"This piece is one of the very first illustrations I ever drew for Ruse. I had previously drawn the cover to the first issue before moving down, but this might be the next thing I did. (Details can be a bit fuzzy after all these years.) There were also a number of single and double page character shots, along with a batch of head shots for possible characters. Before too much time passed we were off and running on the actual book itself. Congratulations on acquiring the piece. I have always had a fondness for it and the part it played in visualizing the world of Ruse."

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