Final files are rolling in from Jose Villarrubia for Inverna Lockpez’s and Dean Haspiel’s CUBA: MY REVOLUTION, each page colored directly from pencils. It’s a beautiful stylistic departure for Dino, who’s dubbed the color scheme “a cross between Preston Sturges and I Love Lucy.” Now that’s a Valentine’s Day sneak peek waiting to happen — so, here you go! We decided at the beginning that this would be a two-color book. That decision’s always the easy part. Picking the colors is harder. As we all learned in art class, black’s a color. So we’d need to stick with black and another color — or two colors and no black line at all. On the one hand, CUBA is a dark political thriller set in the early years of Castro’s regime, as seen through the eyes of an idealistic young woman who falls out of love with the revolution’s turn to Soviet Communism. On the other, it’s a story set in the tropical light of the Caribbean, just as the revolution suspends Cuba in time, preserving it in the colors of the 1960s. So…what to do? We considered black and red, but that seemed too obvious. Too easy. Surely we could tinker around and come up with something else. Idealists. I’m not gonna show you those results. Take my word for it, I’m doing you a favor. They weren’t working. One scheme made the book look like Christmas in the tropics. Another made it look like…a banana. Of course, Jose was the one who finally put us back on track. One of the best colorists in the business, he dragged us back to the original black-and-red scheme, and showed us how it could become a thousand different colors in two. And we fell in love — as will you, when this hits stores in September.