249. "Yogi" 7" x 10.5"

Size: 7 × 10.5 inches art print (not a comic book)
Availability: Pre-order ends Sunday, July 19th  at 3 PM PT / 6 PM ET
Shipping: Expected to ship approximately 40–60 days after the purchase window closes. Estimated timeframe. Not guaranteed.

From the Artist: 

Pop Fly #249: "Yogi Berra"

When I was a kid, I never separated baseball history from the baseball happening in front of me. On my bedroom wall, Ty Cobb, Yogi Berra and Honus Wagner lived alongside the players I was watching at the time... Dale Murphy...Orel Hershiser...Will Clark...Nolan Ryan...They were all part of the same game, even if decades stood between them. That's how baseball was to me then. And now. 

I drew constantly. Most of those drawings disappeared the way childhood drawings usually do, but one of the few that survived was a picture of Yogi Berra.

Looking at it now, it feels very much like a photo-Pop Fly. Long before Pop Fly existed, that drawing already contained some of its basic language: multiple images telling one story, a strong title treatment and a baseball player presented as something larger than life. When I found it again, I did not want to simply redraw it. That would have missed the point. Since it already was Pop Fly adjacent in some way, Instead, I treated it like a creative brief from a client.

My job was to understand what mattered in the original drawing and protect it. At the same time, I had to solve the things the original artist could not yet solve and turn it into a cover that could convincingly belong beside a comic book from Yogi’s era.

I even traced the lettering from my childhood drawing and rebuilt be hand it into the finished title. I could have replaced it with a font, but that would have removed the hand that began the piece in the first place.

So this became a collaboration between two versions of the same artist, separated by more than 35 years. The younger one supplied the subject, the structure and the instinct. The older one finally had the experience to finish the job.

Yogi was the right subject for that conversation. Few players accomplished more. Ten World Series championships as a player. Three American League MVP awards. Eighteen All Star selections. And even with all that, he served in the Navy during World War II and took part in the D-Day invasion.

But I know any of those numbers or ideas were why I drew him as a kid.

I think I drew him because he looked like Yogi. Because he smiled. Because he had a really interesting gap to the side of that smile (my gap was dead center and about as wide as the continental drift)... Because he seemed both legendary and completely human at the same time.

Pop Fly #249 is not a recreation of a childhood drawing but maybe the comic book that drawing had been reaching toward all along

~ Daniel