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It's easy to assume that you or someone you know is one of the millions of people eagerly (and impatiently) awaiting Grand Theft Auto 6 whenever the release date ultimately is. Comic artist Tyler Boss is among those of us as well, but unlike you and I, he has an incredible way to bide the time - he's teamed up with GTA masterminds Dan Houser and Lazlow to provide covers for their (very GTA-coded) crime comic, American Caper.

Published by Dark Horse Comics, the ongoing comic series American Caper hit the streets on November 12 - following the American dreams (and realities) of a disgraced beauty queen, a Wall Street billionaire-turned cowboy, a lawyer with a bad gambling addiction, a Mormon hit man, and others as they deal with the messiness of modern-day American life, and crimes (and crimes of passion) that go with it.

For Tyler Boss, illustrating the primary covers for each issue of American Caper allows him to stretch in new ways from his own comics work, even when it means stretching the testicles of what he's drawing. We caught up with Boss recently, and here's what he had to say.

Popverse: Tyler, How did you get involved with American Caper?

Tyler Boss: I was on a road trip, touring for one of my other books that had just come out. I'm in the mountains of Portland, just trying to drive through this one, lone highway. I check my Twitter, and there's a DM from Shelly Bond asking if I can do a cover for her. I'd never spoken with Shelly before in my life, except for one time when I was graduating college - she came to my senior portfolio review, and she said, 'I really like your stuff. It seems like you really like David Lapham.' I'm a big fan of him. Now, 10 years later, I'm getting an email [about] doing a book with David Lapham: ‘Would you like to come and do the covers for the series?’

I was the demographic for Grand Theft Auto when the news was saying it was bad for kids, and I was the kid sharing it. So now I'm on the Zoom calls with Lazlow, where I'm hearing the voice of the radio stations from the games speaking to me about, you know, 'Maybe if we change the colors here,’ ‘We do this thing, change this.’ It’s very surreal. And it’s like, well, mom and dad, I guess it's a good thing I played those games. 

There’s a distinct art style in the Grand Theft Auto cover art and promotional materials. Did that affect what you were doing with American Caper at all?

It's funny; when Shelly, Lazlow, and Dan [Houser] approached me, they had a lookbook of my stuff that they were kind of like, 'This is sort of what we're thinking, what we like.' And the sketch covers I came up with ended up being kind of what it came out of. Issue two’s cover feels a bit like one of my other book covers, where we had a very ‘graphic design’ element for it, sort of inspired by, like, 60s film posters for bars.

4 Kids Walk into a Bank?

Yeah. The other one I did, which ends up being the issue one cover, the pose is pretty reminiscent of the Vice City ‘bikini girl’ loading screen. That, like, subconsciously, was just kind of in there. It wasn't a thing I was doing on purpose. But it was something I've been looking at since I was, you know, seven, eight years old. It's this loading screen of the chick with the bikini on the beach and just… yeah. Art does weird things where it's like, a soup in your brain, right? Like everything sort of comes out. 

Was there ever a moment you had to pull away from your GTA influences?

I remember, we were doing this one cover [for issue 2], and they were worried that maybe it would be too reminiscent of Grand Theft. They wanted it to be a little bit separate from that. So in doing that, we picked different colors to get away from that. And they were really into me stretching out the testicles, the truck nuts [see cover]. And I was like, what if they're really long like this? And they're like, ‘That's great! What if they're longer?’

Check out Tyler's first four covers for American Caper here: 

Get ready for what's next with our guide to upcoming comics, how to buy comics at a comic shop, and our guide to Free Comic Book Day 2025.