Over the six-year run of the acclaimed, Eisner-winning Locke & Key, series

co-creator Gabriel Rodriguez made the transition from promising

artist to a celebrated and sought-after talent. Praised for his
architect's precision, deftness with subtle details, and his
limitless imagination, Rodriguez brought the bright notes
and dark beats of Locke & Key to life. Now, enjoy each
comic book and hardcover collection cover, as well
as process pieces and other exclusive items, in
this special volume that celebrates one of the
most promising artists of our generation.
All-new introduction by Locke & Key co-creator and novelist
Joe Hill, and an outro by Gabriel Rodriguez.
Its hard to come up with new ways to praise
Rodriguez's artwork seeing how words like
beautiful, detailed, chilling, gorgeous,
atmospheric, magical, cinematic, and
breathtaking have all been used ad
nauseam over the years.
IGN
Gabriel Rodriguez's artwork
perfectly suits the tone of Hills
story His character work is hugely
expressive This book has given
Rodriguez the opportunity to really
stretch his creative muscles...
A.V. Club
www. i dwpubl i s hi ng. com $24. 9 9
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LOCKE & KEY: THE COVERS OF GABRIEL RODRIGUEZ. MAY 2014. FIRST PRINTING. 2014 Idea and Design Works, LLC. The IDW logo is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. IDW Publishing, a division
of Idea and Design Works, LLC. Editorial offices: 5080 Santa Fe St., San Diego, CA 92109. Any similarities to persons living or dead are purely coincidental. With the exception of artwork used for review purposes, none of
the contents of this publication may be reprinted without the permission of Idea and Design Works, LLC. IDW Publishing does not read or accept unsolicited submissions of ideas, stories, or artwork. Printed in Korea.
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ISBN: 978-1-61377-970-5 17 16 15 14 1 2 3 4
Locke & Key created by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez Follow Joe Hill on Twitter @joe_hill Follow Gabriel Rodriguez on Twitter @GR_comics
Ever have a dream so disturbing, so overpowering, you wake up from it with your pulse running
at heart attack speeds... only to have the nightmare melt away in the first moment of consciousness,
leaving you with no idea what the hell you were dreaming?
Yeah, sure you have. Everyones had that.
You shove aside the blankets and drift, clammy with sweat and half-awake, through the rest of
your morning, going back over the tiny little bit you can remember: a wolf walking through the
backyard, a red froth running from his jaws; a beloved teacher, drowned in his bathtub; and wasn't
there something about your Mom making out with your best friend?
You may ache half the day to know what those ridiculous, horrifying, baffling visions meant. It all
made sense while you were asleep. The fragments are just a tease, details of a tapestry that has
been rolled up and tucked away behind the impenetrable black door of your unconscious.
And that door is locked. There is no key.
2.
I cant tell you much about what it was like to write the scripts for Locke & Key, for a very good
reason: I dont remember writing them. Not for the most part.
The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has written notably about the state of flow, a kind of
meditative trance that will come over a person when they are entirely consumed with a demanding
but exhilarating task. In Csikszentmihalyis formulation, flow is what possesses the mountain climber
when he switches off his anxieties and begins, effortlessly, to find the handholds in an apparently
sheer rock face. A painter will slip into a state of flow, playing her brush across the canvas with a kind
of empty-headed ardor, then look up and find three hours have passed while she wasnt paying
attention. Flow erases time and thought alike.
For mefor any artistIm always hoping to find my way into that state where I dont have to
think anymore... that state of certainty and peace that Csikszentmihalyi is talking about. On the very
good days, the next scene, the next sentence, the next idea is just there, coming out of the pen
as if it had been bottled up in there along with the ink. The writing is as easy and thoughtless as
breathing, as relaxing as an afternoon nap. And on Locke & Key, they were almost always good
days.
Im not sure what it says about me, that two of the things I like to do bestsleep and writeboth
involve entering a state of unconsciousness. Reading, too, helps me to stop thinking my own thoughts
and start thinking someone elses. Why is that? Why exactly do I find my conscious mind such a
fucking bore?
I couldnt tell you. All I can say is there is contentment and pleasure in the altered mental states
that come with flow, rest, and the waking-dream of fiction. Whereas ordinary consciousness is roughly
as exciting as a dentists waiting room.
When I do try to remember the experience of composing the scripts that became Locke & Key,
I remember it in much the same way you remember those dreams we were talking about. All I have
left is a scattering of vivid, often delightfully gruesome moments that lingered with me after the work
was done. Moments like:
Keyhouse, under a tormented red sky. It appears as a forbidding crimson shadow, a tragic past
reimagined as architecture.
A sparrow in the snow with its head bitten off.
A grinning 18
th
-century lunatic brandishing a blood-drenched bayonet in one hand, and a
barbaric black key in the other.
A leering, naked homunculus, peering out from inside an empty bottle of pop.
And Keyhouse again, now a blackened wreck, roof caved in, walls punched full of holes, the
door gaping into desolate darkness.
An Introduction
by Joe Hill
Those are all Ive got, the remnants of the work-dream.
Basically: the covers.
3.
I think what I am saying is that for roughly six yearsthe time it took to complete Locke & Key
Gabriel Rodriguez dreamed my dreams for me.
4.
We are told that whatever walked in Hill House walked alone, but in Keyhouse, anyway, I always
had Gabriel Rodriguez to light the passageways and show me wherever we needed to go next.
Neurologists have discovered that when a beloved fictional character dies, a part of the brain that
corresponds to grief lights up in the mind of the reader, as if one of her friends had died. Inner
experiences can have all the force of anything experienced in the skin-and-bone world, at least to
the person imagining them. In that sense, for Gabe, Keyhouse is a true and actual place even if it
isnt a real place. It may only exist as an imaginary construct, but Gabe has looked into every room,
and has spent almost as much time there as he has in his own house.
He knows Keyhouse in the way any architect or builder knows any place hes hammered together.
I am in no way exaggerating or playing lyrical games with language here: Gabriel is an architect by
training, as is his gifted and internationally honored wife Catalina, and I have no doubt either one of
them could tell you exactly what the afternoon light is like when it hits the kitchen, or how deep the
pool is in the backyard. Even though there is no pool, no kitchen.
I dont remember writing the scripts, not mostly (just the difficult ones: issue 2 of Welcome to
Lovecraft, issues 2 - 5 of Head Games. Not much flow there, Im afraid, just a lot of frantic scrabbling).
But I do recall what it felt like to get a new page of art every day. Seeing those pages, I always felt like
a ten-year-old stepping into a hot air balloon and feeling the ground drop away. Total vertiginous
delight. This was never more true than when I saw one of Gabes masterful covers, which would
always, somehow, condense the whole emotional power of the issue into a single ruthlessly forceful
image.
For me, those covers always came with the shock of a vision hauled straight up from a dream to
the conscious world. As if Gabe had unlocked my head, turned me upside down, and dumped out
every bad, unsettling thing that was in there.
5.
A series of shadows: a centurion, a goblin, Peter Pan, a wicked witch wearing a terrifying crown.
A series of broken and ruined objects: a smashed mirror, a shattered action figure, an ornate
music box, a bloodied ice skate dropped in the snow.
A series of linked locales, each bringing us a step closer to the dreadful place at the thumping
black heart of a nightmare: the old house, the well house, the garden, the cave, the door.
Gabes cover images almost seem to reside, one inside the other, like a set of unnerving Russian
nesting dolls, each more disturbing than the one that came before. One revelation leads to the next,
with the final reveal going the deepest, shocking the hardest. They are the part of the dream that
refuses to fade, even in the strong light of morning.
And thats enough out of me. You came to be shown, not told. Turn the page. Go to Keyhouse
now. Gabe will meet you there. Take his hand. Hell guide you through those old dim corridors, along
those steep, ancient stairs. Hell take you everywhere you want to go.
Sweet dreams.
Joe Hill
Exeter, NH
May 2014
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