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This story first appeared in the Aug. 1 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.“>
Comic-Con began as a comic book convention. So what better way to get back to its roots than by turning the pages of The Hollywood Reporter into a graphic novel? The “Titans of Comic-Con” mixed-media portfolio— in which Grace Park and Katee Sackhoff were inserted into Star Wars, Chris Hardwick is shown stepping out of Doc Brown’s time-traveling DeLorean from Back to the Future, along with a half-dozen other actors posing as iconic sci-fi figures— was a group effort. It involved several different photographers, editors, designers and countless personal publicists.
But a big chunk of the credit goes to illustrator Reid Kikuo Johnson, a prolific graphic artist (and author and illustrator of the 2005 graphic novel Night Fischer) who painstakingly drew each background then seamlessly inserted the stars. “It’s kind of like doing a collage,” says Johnson of the process. “I just basically drew around the photographs of the actor and reimagined the movie-scene background in black and white. I’d never done anything quite like it before.” It certainly required a different sort of research than Johnson was used to. “I had to get into the films, and I hadn’t seen a lot of them before,” he says. “I’d never seen an Alien movie, for instance. I hardly see any movies. I’m an illustrator. All I do is stay home and draw.”
. That’s a big deal to me.””]
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