Superman: The Animated Series
Like the series itself, which was produced as a follow-up to the successful, Batman: The Animated Series, this collection of music from the animated TV adventures of Superman was released after two similarly-constructed and well-received albums of music from the Batman show.
La-La Land Records, 2013
Although I hadn't designed either of those Batman compilations, the Superman album designs needed to meet some of the same visual benchmarks, including: episode-specific imagery to correspond with the track-by-track analysis, character spotlights on the individual discs, and an homage to the show's distinctive opening titles. And, in keeping with the mirrored nature of the two heroes, I wanted the album design to resemble the look of the show's "light deco" style, which acted as a counterpoint reflection to the "dark deco" world of the animated Batman.
Having been produced and edited prior to the start of the modern digital and high-def era, there was an understandable lack of quality imagery from the animated show. Stills from the series (shown top left in the above comparison) were often too poor in terms of resolution and detail to feature larger than small thumbnails in the designs.
In order to use the images in a more dramatic and impactful way, the artwork was traced in the vector program Adobe Illustrator to eliminate the jagged lines of the relatively low-resolution scans (above middle) then combined over the existing backgrounds (far right). Additional examples of the method are shown below.
from left to right: DVD screen capture from "World's Finest" episode, redrawn elements in Adobe Illustrator, and new vector figures over the original background
In some cases, like the Supergirl example below, multiple screen captures from the DVD were first composited, then redrawn as vectors in Illustrator. In this case, the background of Metropolis was swapped for a similar shot from the same scene in order to open space in the page layout.
Just as with Batman: The Animated Series, the opening titles for the Superman show did not dissolve to a series title, but to an iconic pose of the main character. However, when it came to merchandise and tie-in products, the Batman series consistently used a logo that depicted the show's full title, which was later used on the various soundtrack albums
This was not the case with Superman. Action figures, sticker books, and official merchandise from the time of the initial series' run (shown above) used a logo that read simply, Superman. The DC Comics tie-in series further modified this logo to include its own "Adventures" subtitle.
above: logo as provided by the Warner Bros. home video department.
This soundtrack album was planned to be the first in a series, meaning that later volumes would incorporate a "Volume 2" subtitle. This meant that the "Animated Series" portion of the title needed to be fully contained within the series logotype so that a second volume did not visually appear to have multiple subtitles. After adding "The Animated Series" in curving text beneath "Superman," I then recolored styled the logo to be more in line with the series' art direction.
above: newly drawn logo featuring the full series title.
The outer space panorama seen stretching across the above spread was featured in the opening minutes of the very first episode of Superman: The Animated Series. Since the original painting couldn't be located, the background panorama of Krypton and its moons was stitched together from multiple freeze frames of the DVD and retouched where necessary.
