I've undertaken a number of fun and fantastic commission projects with Chris Giarrusso over the years, but this one was definitely the most ambitious. It started in April of 2023 with a crazy question:
"What do you think about Mini Marveling the connecting covers of the
Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe Deluxe Edition from 1985? There are 15 issues with wraparound covers, so that would be a big undertaking that I expect would take a few years, but let me know what you think."
Marvel Universe was essentially my Bible as a kid reading comics in the 1980s and I've really enjoyed having Chris recreate a number of my favorite Marvel pieces in his
Mini Marvels style, so this project felt like it was going to be fun and fulfilling on a number of levels.
Fortunately, Chris was on board with the idea, but he was busy working on
Officer Clawsome: Crime Across Time, so we agreed to touch base later in the year when his schedule opened up. He started working on the layouts in the Fall of 2023 and shared the first preliminary sketches with me in March of 2024.
To say I was thrilled with what I saw from Chris would be a major understatement! The translation of the original covers by John Byrne and Josef Rubinstein into the blue line pencils in his Mini Marvels style was a wonder to behold and I loved the dynamic energy and motion that Chris captured across the sweeping series of covers.
From that starting point, I knew that this project was going to be a major effort, but I don't think I fully appreciated the artistic and logistic challenges of laying out thirty interconnecting pieces of 11" x 17" art board. Chris definitely had his work cut out for him as he progressed with the project.
In May of 2024, Chris shared with me confidentially that he had been approached by Marvel about publishing the
Marvel Universe pieces as variant covers. In the moment, I hoped that Marvel might be re-publishing facsimile editions of
Marvel Universe to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the title in 2025. Dare to dream…
Chris had been working with Marvel on his variant covers and stories for
Venom and also had his rendition of Jim Lee's iconic connecting covers for
X-Men #1 scheduled to be published as variant covers for
Uncanny X-Men and
X-Men in the Fall of 2024, so it was great to learn that more of his amazing work was going to see print.
The project really progressed over the next few months after Chris finalized the layouts and pencils and started laying down the inks. Next up were the colors and it was a real pleasure to see the progress as everything came together. In January of 2025, Marvel
announced that the covers would be printed as connecting variants for 15 titles that would be released in April.
It was almost exactly two years from the time that I first suggested this crazy idea to Chris to the date that the first batch of comics was released and I couldn’t be happier with the way it all turned out!
