Yesterday, we gave you a glimpse at artist Francesco Francavilla’s lovely cover for DETECTIVE COMICS #874 — but what’s the story behind how we got there? For that, we went right to the artist for a quick recap of what went into that lovely piece of art. Take it away, Francesco: This is the cover of the first full feature dedicated to Commissioner Gordon you will see during 2011 on Detective Comics. That's right, the back-up features will disappear after #873 to become full feature every 3-4 issue of Jock's Batman feature. In Scott's master plan, the Commissioner Gordon story is strictly correlated to what happens in the Batman story, so we thought this was the best way to get the two storylines run to parallel while still adapting to the new 20 pages format. As always I try to do, I wanted this cover to reflect a bit the story inside issue 874, so I asked Scott for a brief synopsis and for what he would like to see on the cover. Once acquired that info, I produced the 2 layouts you see here. Everyone at DC loved the first concept (which was my favorite too) but we wanted to make sure there was some of the elements of the second concept too (the search in the woods). So I added some foliage to the insert image with the doll and voila', you got the cover you saw yesterday. Little trivia: the eye missing from the doll and ending up as something the kid is toying with was something I came up while working on the final inks (concept and pencils had the doll with both eyes and the kid just playing with a stick) Hope you guys enjoy it and don't forget to pick up Detective #871 at the end of November :)