Mike Gold Is On First
Multifaceted Mike shares about starting First Comics, returning to DC, and other stuff
Interview conducted by JON B. COOKE
Above: Back in CBC #10 [Fall 2015], Ye Ed wrote as definitive a history ever written on Stuart Gordon and Lenny Kleinfeld's three-part play, Warp Below: What started First Comics was Mike Gold's dry run producing the Organic Theater one-shot,Weird Organic Tales, art by Joe Staton and Bruce Patterson, and words by Paul Kupperberg and Gold. Inset right: Panel from same.
[Welp, the third time is the charm! Chicago boy Mike Gold is the first CBC interviewee to have a three-parter, but its not to indulge the gent; it’s just that he has so many different facets to his career! In part one, we discussed Mike’s boyhood growing up in the Windy City, working as press agent for the Chicago Seven defendants (for whom he helped produce Conspiracy Capers, an underground comic book), and his organizing and heading the National Runaway Switchboard. Our second segment looked at his first stint at DC Comics which culminated in the notorious “DC Implosion” of 1978 and, last we left him, Mike had returned to his beloved city. — Ye Ed ]
Comic Book Creator: Mike, is this longest interview you’ve ever given?
Mike Gold: I remember, like 1,000 years ago, I did an interview with Peter Sanderson and that seemed to last for days.
CBC: Okay, Peter wins. I think we’re up to 1980. [chuckles]
Mike: Forty-three years ago.
CBC: So we’re at 1980, after the “DC Implosion.” So, where did you go?
Mike: Home. I went back to Chicago. I was planning on leaving DC in August 1978, anyway. I took the job for two years. People back in Chicago were on my case to come back and the Implosion made it a lot easier. But, even if the Implosion hadn’t happened, I probably would have gotten back anyway, almost definitely.
So, almost two years to the day, I went back to Chicago and was involved in several different projects and I was doing a lot of writing. I was asked to set up a home video magazine called Video Action, which was pretty cool at the time, because I was able to hire, as freelancers, a lot of my comics friends, and give them a chance to do a lot of writing about something that wasn’t directly comics-related. For instance, Steve Mitchell did a lot of writing for me and that’s where I met
Martha Thomases. Mark Hempel did one of our early covers. So that was a fun experience.
The publisher… I don’t know why I love cockroach capitalists publishers so much. They eventually run out of money. But publishing is a stupid business anyway — always has been — and the only person making money at it was Bennett Cerf. But Video Action was great fun. It was like a two-year stretch for me as editor. Rick Oliver was my assistant editor. We had a good time.
But, in the midst of all that, in 1980, I got involved with my friend, Stuart Gordon, who at the time was a theater director who went on to make great horror movies. He was the guy who co-wrote and directed Warp, as well as many other plays. And Stuart asked me to put together a comic book [Weird Organic Tales] for him as a fundraiser for his theatre group, and I did that. I got Joe Staton, Bruce Patterson, and Paul Kupperberg to be a part of that — they wrote and drew the thing — and we printed something in the neighborhood of 300,000 copies. It was an insert in The Chicago Reader, a very high circulation cultural weekly… boy, this is dusting off memories!… We had a great time but, for me, the idea was this was going to be a dry run for doing our own publishing. And that’s exactly what happened and that really was the birth of First Comics, in 1980.
Stuart had just started up a revival of Warp, and very few people had seen the second episode of the play outside of Chicago. (At that time, only Washington had performed all three episodes.) The first episode had played on Broadway and it bombed, because they just weren’t ready for a three-part science fiction play. So nobody in the New York community saw the second or third parts, and the second was by far the best of the episodes… I mean, it was really enjoyable and the most
20
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Warp, Weird Organic Tales TM & © the respective copyright holder.
second
city comics guy
exciting. So we did a special performance of the second part for the guests at Chicago Comic-Con. Now, the purpose behind that was, essentially was to get DC and Marvel interested in picking up the rights to do the comic-book version.
I was working not with Stuart so much on that, although clearly he was part of it, but with Rick Obadiah, who was the producer… you can see this is all coming together now… And I told Rick, “This is what’s going to happen: Paul Levitz [of DC Comics] is going to say, ‘We should talk after the play,’ and then [Marvel’s] Jim Shooter is going to come up to you and say, ‘We should talk.’ But Jim will suggest that you go and talk to Paul, and then come back to him and Marvel would just offer more than whatever DC was offering.”
Rick was vaguely impressed by my prediction. And we had maybe 50 or 60 writers and artists at the Chicago Comic-Con that year who showed up to see the play. And what happened with Paul and with Jim went exactly as I predicted. And, as Rick was preparing to go out to New York to talk with both publishers, I had given him a ten-point list of things to watch out for when negotiating. Rick looks at this list and says, “These are ridiculous. These are professional people in professional organization.” And I said, “Yes, but the comic book industry itself is not what you think of as fiducially professional.” He says, “No, this can’t be. These people have been in business for decades. They can’t operate like that.” And I said, “Well, okay. Have fun.”
Then I told Rick right before he left, “We can do this ourselves.” He said, “No, we should leave it to the pros.” I said okay but explained to him how we can we could set up our own publishing operation. And he was interested but, you know, that really wasn’t what he was in it for. He had a fiduciary responsibility to Stuart and to Lenny Kleinfeld, who was the
co-writer of Warp [under the pen-name Bury St. Edmund].
So Rick went to New York and, after he talked with Paul at DC, he called me and said it went exactly as I had said it would go. I knew what would happen partially because I had worked there, I knew all the players, and I knew how they would respond, and it’s also because I had a lot of friends of DC — I had worked there for a few years — and they pretty much told me what was happening.
So Rick was impressed that I knew all that and he was astonished that I’d hit nine out of ten points on my list. He just couldn’t believe it. I said, “When do you meet with Jim?” He said, “In a couple of hours, but all Jim said at Comic-Con was that he would beat DC’s offer. But DC didn’t offer much of a deal to beat.” So I said, “Go and listen to Jim, because you have a fiduciary responsibility. And, when you come back, we’ll sit down, talk, and we’ll make some decisions.”
Rick flies back after these meetings and he was very frustrated. But not because they were bad deals, but because they just weren’t professional. They didn’t respect the property. It was your typical comic book deal for 1980, which was: “Here’s a small check, we own everything.” And that’s not what anybody was really interested in over on the Warp side of the deal. So Rick comes back, he meets me at Video Action and we commandeer an office, and I spend the next two or three hours explaining exactly how you set up a comic book publishing company, how the direct market works, and how to put together a budget. And you can’t really just produce one comic book. You need to develop an engine to produce a comic book, and you can use that same engine for the same money to produce several. And we pretty much decided to go that route. That was the birth of First Comics right there.
Rick continued talking with Jim and Paul because he had a responsibility to do so, but it really didn’t go anywhere in areas that made sense on the business level. Particularly when it came to ownership and control of the property, which was a preexist-
Above: Mike Gold shed his counter-culture look in the go-go ’80s, as seen in this pic from Fandom's Forum #8 [Sept. 1982]. Inset left: In the late ’70s, Neal Adams returned to draw items for a Warp revival, including this program cover. Below: In the early ’80s, Gold gathered some comics compatriots to produce Video Action magazine, a short-lived but still highly-regarded effort.
21 C OMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2023 • #30 Warp, Video Action TM & © the respective copyright holders.
This page: First Comics made an impact in fandom, producing comics titles with the same professionalism as the Big Two, but with content far more sophisticated. At top is Frank Brunner's Warp #1 [Mar. 1983]; below is a vignette of
ing property that, by this point in time, had toured a number of major cities in America, and then revived in Chicago and had a couple-of-year runs in Chicago. It was already established.
So I came up with this philosophy concept: put together a line, start off with Warp, make it look like a traditional comic book, but with top talent, and make it better. Frank Brunner drew it and he got us a lot of attention, because he had just very loudly and publicly quit working for Marvel Comics, because he was pissed at the way they had operated. So, bringing Frank in would get us a lot of publicity and also give us a very, very gifted artist. I suggested we bring Joe Staton in as art director and Bruce Patterson as production manager, both of whom had worked on Weird Organic Tales, and maybe we can get the rights to E-Man from Charlton, which we did on behalf of Joe. Nick Cuti was going to be part of that deal, but he was on staff at DC and they wouldn’t let him be involved, which is sort of understandable and I don’t think it really was worth it for Nick to put everything on the line and quit his job at DC. So we brought Marty Pasko in as writer, and Mike Barr wrote a few. So the E-Man revival with Joe Staton brought us even more publicity.
The third bit was to take a very well-established A-lister, in this case Mike Grell, and have him create something entirely new, which in this case was Jon Sable, Freelance. And we also picked up his Starslayer as a lead talent book, where we brought in people like John Ostrander, Timothy Truman, and Hilary Barta to do that book, but it was still Mike Grell’s creation. So we had Starslayer; Jon Sable, Freelance… and then we brought in another A-lister to do a book that would just be really mind-expanding, something that the comic business in America certainly had never seen before. And that was Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg. We went on from there, and we picked up Nexus and Badger because Capital Comics went out of business and I knew Mike Baron, and those were very good properties, and then Whisper by Steven Grant. We kept on expanding the company and the rest might be a fart in a blizzard chuckles] but, at the time, we were making comics history.
You said First Comics needed to look as professional as DC and Marvel at the time. And you choose their printer, World Color in Sparta, to initially print your comics…?
Mike: Yes, there weren’t a lot of options in those days, but that changed pretty rapidly as the direct sales market became more viable. A lot of printers out there thought that the comics business was expanding, which is true in that the number of publishers were expanding, but circulation wasn’t, as the Implosion proved. There’s certain to be a lot of competition. We wanted our comics to not only
look like Marvel and DC at first — we were trying to improve on that look, because that’s what you do to compete and to look like you know what you’re doing — and also, World Color had the distribution network because they printed everybody else’s stuff. So we were there for a couple of years, we found out that they’re kind of playing fast and loose with their pricing. CBC: How did you find that out?
Mike: It’s an interesting story and, to tell you the truth, nobody has asked me that before, so you’ve got information revealed for the first time in 40 years! We were at Archie Comics — Rick, me, and our attorney — and we’re talking about the idea of reprinting of First Comics stuff for the newsstand. I didn’t think that was going to go anywhere because they were already tied to the Comics Code, and we really weren’t producing material that the Comics Code would approve of. Although I would have killed to do a Betty & Veronica/American Flagg crossover! [laughter] But, in those days, that wasn’t going to happen. I think Chaykin would have wanted to do it, too, so that could have been fun.
So we’re going over the numbers, you know, they’re making offers and we’re talking business, and stuff. And we realized that they were paying a lot less to get printed at World Color than we were, even if you break it down on a volume basis. And then when we started to do some investigating later, the way lawyers do, and we discovered that — I guess the phrase “ripped off” was valid. And ultimately we wound up suing them and that didn’t get resolved for years, until after I left the company, and it became very personal for a lot of the attorneys involved, which always happens. Which just reaffirms every cynical bone in my body — and my body’s got a lot of cynical bones!
That lawsuit had a life of its own. We had a brilliant antitrust lawyer and he thought we should bring Marvel in on that lawsuit — sue Marvel, as well — because they were one of the direct beneficiaries of this arrangement. So we did that. I wasn’t really
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Warp TM & © the respective copyright holder. Jon Sable TM & © Mike Grell. American Flagg TM & © Howard
V. Chaykin.
Assume nothing. If I’ve learned anything from the following two-session conversation — conducted via Skype in Sept. 2022 — with Toronto-based comic book artist Michael Cho, it is to leave my preconceptions at the door before pontificating to the man about what I presumed were his artistic influences. As you’ll see, I quickly learned better and, in the process, discovered the diverse, widespread, and eclectic forces that helped to shape Cho’s artistic sensibilities.
Relatively new to comics — the Korean-born artist had a few things published by Marvel and DC during the ’00s and early ’10s, but it was his eight-pager kicking off a new Batman Black and White run in 2014, that garnered attention. “Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When,” was written by author and book designer supreme Chip Kidd, who kindly shared with this magazine appreciation for his collaborator:
“Michael Cho and his work embody the ideal
of the best of comics artists: strength, joy, power, vulnerability, courage, heart. He accomplishes all of this with a remarkable economy of means and a splendid sense of design. I am never less than thrilled to see what he does.”
Since that break-out effort, Cho has been tapped by DC and Marvel to produce a vast number of beautifully designed, retro-centric covers, plus he wrote and drew the remarkably sensitive and evocative Shoplifter, a short graphic novel Publishers Weekly called, “A funny and touching portrait of urban angst.” All told, however, Cho has created but a handful of mainstream comic book stories though he is poised to launch into superstar status once a dream project — which might or might not involve characters and concepts created by certain comics royalty with the initials “J.K.” — is realized and I'll be the very first in line when any Cho tribute to the King makes its debut. —
Jon B. Cooke
#30 • Spring 2023 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR 40
An Interview with Comic Book Artist/Illustrator Michael Cho
Conducted by Jon B. Cooke • Transcribed by Tom Pairan
Comic Book Creator: Did you have creative people in your family, Mike?
Michael Cho: No, I did not. I was born in South Korea. My dad was a hardcore businessman — an entrepreneur — who had been in the army, which I think was the formative experience in his life. My mom was a former schoolteacher, and neither of them did anything creative, but that’s partially due to economic circumstances. They were kids during the Korean War. So, there was no opportunity to be a pianist or artist or something like that.
But my mom does have an appreciation for the arts and, having thought it over through the years — trying to figure out where my creativity came from — I think it comes from that side, be cause she appreciated literature and fine art. Her favorite painter is Cezanne, for example. So I know she had an inclination toward creativity; she just never had the economic means to pursue that or even thought of that as a viable career.
CBC: What year were you born?
Michael: 1971.
CBC: So you came over when you were six, so that was 1977 or ’78?
Michael: I think it was January of 1977 when I came over. And we came to the Maritimes, which is like New England in the U.S., but it’s Canada’s Atlantic section, the east coast. And it was a complete culture shock. [laughs]
CBC: Do you have much memory of South Korea?
Michael: Oh, yeah. I remember lots about South Korea, but I didn’t go to school there, because I left when I was six. So, therefore, I never attended a day of school in South Korea, except for an art class my mom signed me up for. I remember we had a house, for example, and we were considered rich because we had a telephone — even though we were not rich, by any means… we had an outhouse! This is like pre-modern South Korea, which is now a high-tech paradise. But, back then, in the ’70s, it was still being reconstructed after the Korean War, so we had a little concrete house in Seoul… with an outhouse. We
had a well and we used to pump water. We had coal stove that heated one little section of the floor.
I remember we were considered well off because we had a telephone and we had a black-&-white TV, and nobody else in the neighborhood we knew of had those luxuries. And the wild thing about TV back then — and I remember this vividly — is it only started programming at 6 o’clock, around dinner time, and it would only go on until 11. And the first thing they would air at six were cartoons. So my mom had a hell of a time trying to pull me away from the TV to get me to eat dinner because they would play Mazinger Z or they , and all I wanted to do was watch those
So they were the Japanese cartoons?
Yeah, so I was watching giant robot cartoons when I was like four or five, and that left a impression on me, because I decided that’s all I wanted to do. I wanted to actually build a giant robot and take over the world. I think that was my first ]. And I wasn’t the only one… I remember going to see the first animated feature film that they made in Korea called Robot Taekwon which is their knock-off of Mazinger Z, the first giant robot cartoon, and it was like Star Wars over here, like “Riots,” really?
Michael: Oh, yeah! It was the biggest thing. Basically, Korea today is an animation powerhouse, right? And that movie started it. Because, what happened was, it was such a big hit that, even in Seoul, there were riots because kids would come to the film and the movie would be two hours late because the other theater decided to squeeze in one more screening before they gave up the reel to the next theatre, you know? And so we’d be sitting there while kids are screaming and throwing popcorn or whatever, and I remember that movie vividly.
Years later, when I was in art college, I was talking with a friend I’d met and
41 C OMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2023 • #30
The X-Men TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Batman, Robin TM & © DC Comics. Shoplifter, background illustration © Michael Cho.
Above: Posters of the first and second installments of the wildly successful South Korean animated film franchise, Robot Taekwon V. The initial release made an impact on young Michael Cho and was dubbed and renamed Voltar the Invincible when it hit screens in the United States.
Below: Michael Cho and his older sister as babies, photographed with their mother in pix taken before the family’s move from their native South Korea to Canada.
he had recently arrived from Korea, and we were talking about Robot Taekwon V. I mentioned that I saw that in Korea and he said, “Which one?” And I was like, “What do you mean, ‘which one’?” He said, “They made four of them.” I was stunned. I did not know there were more sequels. It’s like finding out there are four extra Star Wars films that you’d never seen!
CBC: So, when you came to Canada you came through the Maritimes. Did you go straight to Toronto?
Michael: No. I came from Seoul, which is a super-bustling, gigantic city even then, where there’s millions of people. And then I came to the Maritimes, which is like as rural as you get in Canada. So that’s where we landed, in Newfoundland, which is the island at the furthest, eastern-most edge. When you see photos of Newfoundland, it looks like Scotland in the 1920s. My mom had taken a few English courses so she could
navigate Canada because we were going to emigrate. My dad had been over here for a while, setting up some form of an existence for us.
We were told that Canada’s a very cold country, so we all got in our winter coats, and then got on this plane, and our first stopover was Hawaii, where it was super-hot, and we’re in these winter coats. And my mom’s trying to figure out where the connecting flight is and I’m tugging on my mom’s sleeve, going, “I don’t understand. I thought you took English… I thought you spoke English!” And then I fell asleep on the plane and, the next thing I know, when I woke up, I was basically in a log cabin in Newfoundland. I awoke and looked up and saw these wood beams, and I was like, “What is this?”
My big memory from Newfoundland, at that time, was there were some local people trying to help us, and one of them offered to take me to a baseball game. I thought it was a baseball game, meaning at a stadium, because that’s what I was used to in Seoul, and we went and it was just a game in the middle of the field, just two teams playing, with the grass up to my neck! And I’d never seen grass that tall, because I was a city kid. So, it was a complete culture shock. And we spent a good six months sort of moving all around the Maritimes, as my dad and mom considered settling there, and then we moved to Hamilton, Ontario, which is just an hour outside Toronto. And that’s where I spent most of my childhood.
CBC: What was your father’s trade? What was his vocation?
Michael: My father had a really weird life in that regard, because he was kind of a maverick. He was in the Vietnam War as an army officer, because it was financially viable. In Korea, at that time, there was no money, with very few job prospects. From an early age, after his oldest brother was killed accidentally during the Korean war (he was a teen and was playing at his friend’s house when they dropped a bomb on it by mistake) my dad became the breadwinner for six brothers and sisters, because he was now the oldest son. So he decided to enlist in the army and became an officer because he was very smart. He became a captain and then went to Vietnam as an army officer working with the U.N. and U.S. forces. And there he started an import/export business — shipping TVs and things like that back to Korea — and then, after he got out, he became the manager of an all-girl band that toured U.S. Army bases. And so, he came to the United States and toured Army bases with this all-girl band, and then eventually managed them as they made their way through Canada, with him trying to make enough money so he could bring my mom, my sister, and me over. So that was my dad’s initial job and then, when we settled in Hamilton, he did what most Koreans did in that era, which was open a variety store. He basically came here with nothing and got a little bank loan and put down a down payment to purchase a variety store in Hamilton, Ontario, in the worst part of town. Well, it was the
42 #30 • Spring 2023 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR
Robot Taekwon V TM & © Shincine Communications Co., Ltd.
• Photos courtesy of Michael Cho.
toughest part of town. And that’s how we got our start in Canada.
CBC: So your sister, is she older or younger?
Michael: She’s one year older.
CBC: Oh, so you were both pretty small when you came to Canada. Okay, your father started the convenience store. Is there a network of Korean expatriates who could help him out with setting one up?
Michael: Yeah. The nice thing about Koreans is they always have this sort-of network that helps each other out, like most immigrant communities. With Koreans, the way it works generally is, whatever large metropolitan city they end up in, they usually have to find a church or something they can belong to, right? And the various members of the church pool some money together as a loan to give to the new family, to help them get a start. And that helps out with things and they join a community, so they’re not quite so homesick.
But, back in the ‘70s, when we came over, there was no Korean popular culture in North America. Nowadays, Korean culture dominates everything, right? You’ve got movies that are Oscar winners; you’ve got music that has conquered the world; everybody has a Samsung phone… but, back then, whenever I’d say I’m Korean, they would go, “What’s that? Are you Chinese?” It was a lot different back then.
CBC: What was your first taste of American pop culture?
Michael: When we were in Newfoundland… Keep in mind it took a year or two years to learn the language, right? When we first landed in the Maritimes, my dad took us to some movies, because he was a huge movie buff. And I would constantly fall asleep in these things because I didn’t know the language. I remember seeing A Star Is Born, with Barbra Streisand, and we watched Rocky (and I did a little better with that because, while I fell asleep for most of it, when it came time for the final fight, I woke up). Then he took me and my mom to this theatre where there was a double-bill and my mom said, “Look, there’s a line up around the block!” And she was going to go see the horror film, maybe it was The Omen, or something like that. She was like, “They must all be here for this horror film. It must be good!” And then my dad took us to see this other film that was playing that happened to be Star Wars. And the line was obviously for that.
When Star Wars started, I did not fall asleep. I don’t think I knew any English at the time, but I remember it so vividly and I understood the story and, when the film was over, I met up with my mom and she said, “There was no one to see that ghost story film at all.” [laughs]
CBC: So when did you first pick up a pencil and start drawing?
Michael: I was drawing since I was, like, three. That was a core part of my identity, for as long as I can remember. Back then, in the ‘70s, in Korea, you would go to the local corner store, and they would sell you ten sheets of paper for a penny. And I’d buy that and would just draw on both sides — giant robots, whatever — things I could think of and that’s how I amused myself. And I remember the big thing that happened: they used to have little stationery stores and they would sell all sorts of paper stuff to kids, like coloring books. But there was one set of books where they were like these little paperback things. They had a picture at the top that was a still from cartoon and then a space at the bottom for you to your copy of that. And one time I bought one and it had a contest: “Send in your best version of a drawing from this book and we’ll pick some winners.” And so I did my very best copy of a giant robot animated still. Then I sent it away and I waited, and this huge paper package arrived, a manila envelope stuffed to the gills, and it
said I had won third place! This was my prize and it was a pack of loose paper games that this company had put out… origami things to fold, a car that you could fold out of paper. There was a paper soccer game where you cut out the ball and there were these rules to play soccer. And that’s when I knew I had made it as an artist! [laughter] CBC: Holy smokes, that must have been quite the thrill!
Michael: It was just a manila envelope, full of 30 or 40 little things like that, right, but when I was five — CBC: It’s treasure!
Michael: Yeah, totally! And it convinced me that, you know, I have a future in art. [laughs]
CBC: Were you born, were you given the name Michael?
Michael: No. When we came here, we had to use Western names so we could assimilate better, and I think my dad picked it, but he could never spell “Michael” properly! So he’d sometimes, on my government documents, write “Mike.” I’m officially called “Mike Cho,” which is hilarious. [laughs]
CBC: So, what was your first exposure to comics?
Michael: Iron Man #145… [looks it up online] “Raider’s Rampage,” and it was drawn by John Romita, Jr., and Bob Layton… That was the first comic book I saw it at my parents’ variety store, because, back in the ’70s, they stocked comic books, along with MAD magazine, and a million other publications. They had a little comic rack and they would get comics every month. I saw this Iron Man thing on the stands and it reminded me of giant robots. Because it had a guy in an iron suit and I could relate to that. I remember reading this thing and learning enough English to read it, and that left such a huge impression
Above: Cho vividly recalled the first time he watched Star Wars in a movie theater. Despite not knowing English at the time, when the motion picture started, Cho said, “I did not fall asleep.” Incidentally, this famous poster by the Hildebrandt brothers was produced in a mere 36 hours!
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Photos
• Star Wars TM & ©
Below: Michael and his grandmother and his father.
courtesy of Michael Cho.
Lucasfilm, Ltd.
Above: In honor of The Spirit’s 75th anniversary, Cho drew the 2015 Comic-Con International souvenir book cover. Talking with Charles Brownstein for that effort, Cho said of Will Eisner, “A lot of the language of storytelling that he invented along the way… is so ingrained in comics forms that if you’re not cribbing it directly from Eisner, you’re cribbing it from someone who cribbed it from Eisner.” Below: In his formative years, Cho read the Eisner textbook.
go see them, I’d buy them lunch. And, when I got engaged, he told me, “Son, I never approved of your decision to go into art. I didn’t understand it. I didn’t see why you would want to do that, but you never asked me for money. I think you did alright.” Now, it wasn’t a big moment, because I had already given up on any need to have parental validation, you know. I knew what I wanted to do and I was going to do it, whether I succeeded or failed. But my relationship with my dad was great for years when I was an adult, because I would always take care of them. I was a good son. My dad, he had Alzheimer’s for a long time before he passed. Every weekend, I’d come by with my kids and my wife and take him to a nice restaurant, buy him lunch, and take care of him.
CBC: So when you were in high school, you did mention a couple of friends who are artists. Did you have fellow nerdy friends who…
Michael: Oh, yeah. I always had one friend who drew when I was growing up, and, you know, it was in whatever neighborhood I was in, whether it was outside of Toronto, the Maritimes, or in Hamilton. But my best friend at the time was a guy named Nick Veliotis. I met him in seventh grade, when we were all in the gifted class, and every student there was new and nobody knew one another at all. And he was this Greek kid and we got partnered up to do an exercise to learn about each other, and we had to ask each other questions. And he said, “I draw.” And I said, “I draw!” And then we were best friends for, like,
forever. I still talk to him occasionally. And he was the guy who would make this journey with me — from John Byrne to Frank Miller and then to Mazzucchelli — so he got it, you know? And the great thing with him was that he could draw vehicles and I could draw people. So he was really great at drawing tech, great at designing cars, spaceships, guns, monsters… and I could draw people and wildlife and trees, and things like that…. CBC: So did you have classmates who would say, “Hey, Mike, draw me something! Draw me a girl!” Or anything like that?
Michael: Oh, yeah, all the time. I was in grade two drawing a tattoo on somebody’s arm with a Sharpie, you know. And then, in high school, it was, “We need an invite for this. Can you draw one?” And it’s a way to impress girls.
CBC: Is your stuff in the yearbook?
Michael: [Laughs] I don’t think so, because, by the time I was in high school, I was a really rebellious kid. I was always a straight-A student, but the only time I’ve ever gotten a C in my life was in art class and it was because I would relentlessly fight with the teachers. My first high school art teacher was a guy who taught chemistry and his name was Mr. Morrison, and he decided to teach art. I got along with him because of the fact that I just took pity and thought, “Okay, you know, I’m not going to give you much trouble.” But, in my second high school year, my art teacher was a guy who was a failed illustrator and he was constantly drumming into us, “You’ll never make it as an illustrator. It’s so hard.” And I was like, “It was hard for you, but it’s not going to be hard for everybody, you know.” I was constantly, like every rebellious, pretentious teen, checking his bona fides. “Who are you to tell me this?” And then, I would be sent to the office, you know, to plead my case to the principal. But he did like me and I would see him years later, at conventions and things like that, you know, and he’d come by my table and I apologized for how rude I was in high school. So I never did anything in the yearbook because I just rebelled against that stuff. I was supposed to hate yearbooks, you know?
CBC: Okay. Did you drink and drug and smoke, and all that wicked stuff? Or did you stay away from that?
Michael: I did some drinking in high school. Like, occasionally, I would go to school drunk. And then, at lunchtime, we would go sometimes to the bowling alley near us, where they would serve us occasionally (if you could pull it off). And, me being Asian, it’s hard for people to card me, you know, because they can’t tell how old I actually was. So, I would be the guy who they would ask to get a case of beer for a party. I would do that.
Plus, my dad, by this time, had moved on and now owned a bar, and he was pretty lax, really cool about this. He would be like, “Well, you kids are going to a party, so do you want a case of beer?” We would be like, “Yeah!” I was a snot-nose kid and I never got along with those churchgoing Koreans because, you know, I was too much of an idiot rebel. So I would come to school drunk sometimes. I would party. Never did any real drugs, just small-time stuff. But, but yeah, there was some exposure to that in my teenage years. And certainly a lot more in art college.
CBC: So you got into the college. Did you have any aspirations to be a comic book artist or illustrator?
Michael: Yeah. My order of career choices goes like this: When I was five, I wanted to build a giant robot and take over the world because I was watching cartoons. Then, when I started getting exposed to comic books, I wanted to be a comic book artist. Then, when I took that grade five Saturday afternoon art class, I met a woman who was an illustrator and I didn’t know what an illustrator was. I didn’t know what that meant. And she said, “You draw for books,” and she did children’s book art and
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some magazine assignments. And I was like, “I want to be an illustrator.” And then, when I was in high school and I was painting a lot and learning about fine art, I wanted to be a fine artist.
So I wanted to be all those things. And my one of my earliest desires was I wanted to be a cartoonist, a comic book artist, and I was quite serious about it. I read How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way when I was like 13 or something like that. I ordered it from the comic shop, and I read Eisner’s [Sequential Art] book. Those are the only two books out at that time, right? Eisner’s book on graphic storytelling and How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, and I made my own comics… I learned how to do lettering and things like that, but then it sort of fell by the wayside as I pursued fine art.
CBC: What were the comics that you hand-made?
Michael: When I was in grade three, on a folded sheet of typing paper, I created my own super-heroes and drew a 19page story (because, at the time, some comics were 19 pages). And I inked it with a ballpoint pen or a tech pen, and I did this for three months, and kept a deadline. I put out three issues of this thing, this hand-drawn thing, and it was like a little anthology of super-hero comics. Very, very John Byrne-derived, you know? And I kept up the schedule for three months until my mom found them one day while she was cleaning and thought it was some junk and threw them out. And after that, for years, I could never commit again, I could never complete a comic. It wasn’t until my 20s when I actually finished another comic.
CBC: Were they characters that you created?
Michael: Yeah, they were. They were characters I created. I remember what happened was that I was coming home from like taekwondo class and I passed by the comic book shop and, I went in and bought four comics, like I usually do. I was on the bus reading them and I didn’t like any of them. They were all garbage, and I remember being on the bus thinking, “I’m so dissatisfied. These comics I bought this week suck!” And then this light bulb went off in my head and I decided, “Well, you should just make your own comics.” And it was as if I’d invented the idea of making comics, you know? [chuckles] And it was like such a revelatory moment on the bus going, “Oh, my god! You’re right! I can make my own comics. I could draw and create my own characters. I could write my own story!” And I went home and I immediately started creating some super-heroes and I wrote a story… It was very, very Stan Lee. There was a super-hero has a secret identity, but he has a little flaw. And there’s a scientist who made a robot that it was like going to take over the world, but the robot has a flaw, just like a Stan Lee story. It’s not waterproof, right? So, in the course of the big fight, he punches the robot into the reservoir (or something) and then it electrocutes itself. And I thought that this is a great story, you know. And I created a flying super-hero and I did another one where it’s more a Daredevil-type of character, a grounded, street-level super-hero. So these are all my own characters, though I never did a Batman homage…
CBC: Did you have names?
Michael: Yeah, though the names elude me right now. One was a flying guy called Sonar or something like that, which I thought was a really cool name and, at 10, you think, “That’s the greatest name ever!” The Daredevil knock-off, I don’t remember, but I know he had a mask like Hawkeye.
CBC: You’re an adult. You can look back and not be cruel about your own talent. Were you any good?
Michael: I was good for that age, I think. I see this now with new lenses, because I have a daughter who draws and she draws beautifully, but she’s of her generation, so she can color things digitally. And she’s very comfortable working with
electronic tools as well as traditional tools. She draws a little better than me in some ways. But I took it really seriously. I tried to learn anatomy… though I never actually learned anatomy, ever. Still don’t know anatomy… But like, I would do roughs in pencil and build the construction lines, you know… do the egg for the head, then build the spine, and attach the limbs, and then go over a little bit tighter. Then I would do the outlines and stuff. I think I was pretty good. In school, I was always considered either the number one or number two artist. I got a scholarship at one point… I won an award when I was three, man! [laughter] I got that Manila envelope full of stuff!
So I think I was good for my age and I’m glad… I’ll always be thankful to my mom for signing me up for that Saturday afternoon art class, because that exposed me to a whole different world of art that I still tap into these days, as opposed to someone who just drew comics and never got exposed to anything else.
CBC: Did you did you have a moment where design all of a sudden came into play? When you had an epiphany about balance and all that?
Michael: I think design was always part of it. I cared about design, as well. I was a visual kid, you know? Like, as a kid, I’m looking at animation and comics, and then, as a teenager, I’m looking at fine arts and design, and paperback design, magazine design, environmental design… Like you’re watching Blade Runner and thinking, “God, these designs are incredible!
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This page: Photos of Cho with his spouse, the artist Claudia Dávila, who, an online bio states, “writes, illustrates, and designs books for kids of all ages, with stories and themes that encourage children to be strong, thoughtful, compassionate, and responsible people.”
Photos courtesy of Michael Cho.
Above: Cho’s take on the classic Detective Comics #31 [Sept. 1939] cover, featuring The Batman. Previous page: Ye Ed’s favorite Cho work, the artist’s brilliant Detective #1000 “1950s variant cover” in various stages of completion.
Below: Ahoy, Albert Moy!.
were estimating 700 pages at the time, which I would kill to read, just as much as I would kill for a Cho Fantastic Four story arc. You and I are cut from the same cloth as far as not being ashamed at all for a love of super-heroes. But I also love the indie stuff and I really loved Shoplifter
Michael: You know what the wild thing is? The big thing that made the light switch go on was Mazzucchelli. He could do it. He could do both. He was an absolute top-level super-hero artist. And then he went on, did this indie stuff, and then he went and did covers for The New Yorker, you know? And when I saw his career path as a kid, I was like, “You don’t have to pick. You can love both things!” When I was 18, if you loved Seth and loved Love and Rockets, people thought how could you possibly be into X-Men? But I liked it all. I love super-hero comics. And I genuinely love it. I don’t love it in an ironic way, you know. And then there were other people who were like, “If you love Todd McFarlane or Jim Lee, how could you read this lame stuff by Adrian Tomine?” I’d say, “Well, no, because of the whole spectrum.” And, when I saw Mazzucchelli, I thought,
“This here’s an example of exactly what I’m talking about. You know, he’s great at both and he doesn’t have to pick.”
There was a reissue of Batman: Year One, and, in the back, Mazzucchelli wrote a little two-page comic about what Batman means to him, and it’s a modern thing, right, something he had written like 10, 15 years after doing Year One, and the love was right there. It was basically a summation that super-heroes are real when they’re drawn and in black-&-white and ink. And I understood that.
When I met Mazzucchelli, in 2007, it was at the New York Comic-Con, and I was there with a bunch of other guys, like Nick Derrington and Eric Wight. We all knew each other because we all drew in a similar vein at the time. And we thought, “Mazzuchelli’s here. We should go meet him.” And we were, “Okay, who’s going to talk to him?” Eric says, “You should, Mike, because you talk good.” And we met him and he was super-nice, super-sweet, super-supportive. He wanted to see what we were working on and he checked out all our portfolios and said, “You guys are good.” It was a moment of validation.
Mazzucchelli had these little Batman drawings there that he had just done for the show in a little portfolio. I think I’ve seen several of them pop up again online, you know, and they’re in his newer style, which clearly changed and evolved. And it was not the same as when he was younger. He had a different view of Batman, but the love was still there. And you could sense that the joy and the charm and the adoration of making this kind of art, tapping into that childhood joy, and I hope that my work evokes a similar quality.
CBC: I think your Detective Comics #1000 cover is one of the greatest super-hero covers. Because it’s funny, it nails the ’50s, and exudes the joyful kookiness of super-heroes. Plus it’s also just a really good drawing! A solid art job. [They schedule the next interview session.] All right, I had a lot of fun. Thanks, Mike. Michael: My pleasure, Jon. You know, I got to tell you, I have this issue beside me of Comic Book Artist [Vol. 2, #4] where you did an interview with Dar[wyn Cooke]. And I remember reading this thing on a beach in Cuba, your whole interview… This was just after I’d met him and before we started hanging out, and it was this profile that made me go, “I should get to know this guy, he’s a lot like me in the way he thinks, not just the way he draws.” So, when you wanted to do this interview with me, I thought about Dar’s interview and I was looking at it and realize, “Oh my God! It’s from 2004.” You know, that’s 18 years ago!
CBC: I miss him terribly. Yeah, we shared the same last name and he always said we were brothers. I didn’t know he was going, you know… that was just so sad.
Michael: Yeah. He kept it from everybody and just let his closest friends know. So, I know a lot of people were shocked when the announcement came that he had cancer. And then, just a few days later, he passed. It was like six months from the diagnosis. But I’m flipping through this right now as I’m talking to you, and I remember this issue of Comic Book Artist vividly. He’s describing his advertising career from years ago. I totally know what he’s talking about because I did time in advertising as well, as an illustrator. I’d met him like once or twice when this issue came out and we’d hit it off, and I realized we should hang out more.
CBC: There was a mutual advertising experience which bonded us. Like Darwyn, I got caught up drinking too much because advertising will chew you up and rip you to shreds, you know?
Michael: What he described as “turd polishing.” That’s exactly right. [laughter] [Session ends.]
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Batman TM & © DC Comics. Black Widow, Iron Man, Captain America, The Thing TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.
thing conceptual to work on or about the industry. Tim used to be art director of Owl magazine, a children’s magazine here in town, and he called me in to show my portfolio — this is back in the ’90s — to see if I could do children’s illustration. At that point, I had not done any editorial illustration… well, maybe one or two small gigs. But I knew very little about editorial illustration, because I wasn’t trained at that, in any way. But he called to say he saw some work I had done, signs and a book that I had illustrated with a friend. And he said, “Come in and show us your portfolio.”
Owl was a magazine in Canada that everyone knew about because, as kids, we all read it in the school library. So I went to the newsstand and bought the latest copy and looked over this issue of Owl magazine while riding the bus to the appointment. At first, I was thinking, “Oh, yeah, well, my stuff’s hot shit and they must be an old fuddy-duddy kids magazine.” So I’m thinking beforehand that my portfolio should be fine — the arrogance of a 20-something-year-old, right? — and then I open up the magazine and realize, “Oh, Dave Cooper’s in this… Seth is in here… Craig Thompson’s got an illustration in here… here’s Jay Stephens… and in the back is a Mitch O’Connell illustration…!”
CBC: Really? Holy smokes! This is all in a single issue you’re looking at?
Michael: Yeah. Tim is that good as an art director. The great thing about Tim is, like any really good art director, constantly hungry visually, constantly checking out new artists in other magazines. He still goes to TCAF [Toronto Comic Arts Festival] here in town, a local indie comic arts festival, and is excited to see new talents and new approaches, you know, and he doesn’t like some art directors where they go, “Here’s my little stable of artists and I’ll just use them.” Tim is going, “What if I get this guy who draws this crazy, weird horror indie comic, but his style could lean toward doing kid books. Why don’t we get him a shot?”
So I went to the meeting, brought my portfolio, and I was already crestfallen after looking through Owl. I literally said, “Why would you even want me? You’ve got like Dave Cooper, Craig Thompson, Jay Stephens…” Then he saw my portfolio, took pity on me, and said, “No, you could do something for us. I think it’d be good. I’m going to assign you this little two-page spread and maybe you can hand it in at the end of the month.” And that was my introduction to Tim and was my mentor for years as he moved on to other magazines.
Before I joined up with illustration reps Gerald & Cullin Rapp, who handle my editorial and corporate illustration work, Tim was the first guy I contacted, and I asked, “Hey, what do you think of them?” He said, “You’d be a fool not to sign with them.” But the best piece of advice he gave me, along with a million others, was: “As an art director, I don’t want you to give me what you think I’m looking for. Just wow me.” And I’ve had that same, almost word-for-word direction from another art director who I really respect and that’s a sign of a really great art director. They’re not looking for what they’ve already pictured in their head. If you’re just functioning as a set of hands for the art director, it’s less of an art. So I’ve always appreciated an art director who will sit there, give me the article, and not micro-manage on the concept, but will give me
a chance to go at it, where I say, “I hope you’ll trust that I’m professional enough to deliver something that’s appropriate for this article, while at the same time stretching and giving you something unexpected.” And the best art directors do that. So I always love Tim for setting me free by telling me something like that and giving me the opportunity not to be just a supplier or a set of hands, but rather to be an artist.
CBC: I’ve been a creative director and art director, and I’ve hired any number of freelancers. And the bottom line is they are hired not just for their talent, but for their intelligence and creativity. “What can you come up with conceptually?”
Michael: Yes and when I talk to students, I always tell them concept trumps technique seven days a week. A great concept can be executed in a lot of different ways that doesn’t involve technique, but technique without concept is just rendering. I see guys coming out of school and they’ve learned how to use
Above: Cho shared about this variant cover for The Terrifics #25 [Apr. 2020], "Another nice change of pace, I tried to draw this one in a different style as I had been playing around more and experimenting with digital tools." Inset left: Cho's design was on T-shirts debuting at the San Diego Comic Con in 2017. A second version features a woman of color in the same pose. Next page: Cho's wife, designer/illustrator Claudia Dávila, provided the typographical treatment on these Marvel covers from 2016 (at top). The Marvel Comics Presents #2 [Apr. 2019] cover was meant to invoke 1950s' double-feature movie posters.
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The Terrifics TM & © DC Comics. "Fight Evil" emblem © Michael Cho.
Photoshop (or, back in the day, learned how to airbrush) and, because they know how to do these certain techniques, the work always employs these techniques, because that’s the motif of their work, you know? And I’ve always viewed it, even with myself, that I’m not beholden to technique. It’s the concept that matters.
An example of a really great illustrator is Christoph Niemann, a man who has a million different ways to tell an idea, but the idea is what works. So, when I describe an illustration that he does, the person hearing that description can picture that idea, and it makes perfect sense and can be rendered in a million different ways if you ask. If I told a roomful of students, here’s an article, and I’m going to verbally describe Niemann’s illustration for it. They would go, “Oh, that’s a great illustration idea.” The concept translates across form and media. And then, if you ask them to set it down on paper, they’ll all draw it a different way, and it’s all great.
CBC: You’ve spent so much time doing editorial illustration, does that give you a special something that you can add to the to your comic book storytelling?
Michael: No, I think you have to go a little further back than that. For me, it was about my art school training and that’s the way I try to explain it. I know other artists who studied illustration or even comics at art college, but I didn’t. I studied contemporary art and, at the time, the course was
called experimental arts. A lot of people did installation work and some people painted — I painted — some people did sculpture, and some did sound poetry… whatever. But the main thing I learned during my art school years was to rethink what art is. To ask the essential questions, strip away preconceptions, make connections between disparate ideas and try to push boundaries. Essentially, tap into the roots of creativity. And that thinking still informed me when I got into illustration and became an editorial illustrator. I had no formal training in illustration, but I had a method of thinking that I learned in art college, so that’s what I tried to apply.
And it’s the same thing I apply to comics: back then, there wasn’t a formal school you could go to learn comic storytelling or whatnot, but I bring my background in all these different disciplines and apply it. At the heart of it is questioning, “What am I doing? What’s important?” You know, it’s not rendering that’s important; it’s the thinking that informs my work in comics and still helps me to this day.
CBC: So, with the storytelling, obviously you had the illustration down. You’re telling a story with a single illustration or, let’s say, you know, a triptych or however it’s set up. With comics itself, you obviously had an experience from childhood of doing your own homemade comics. When you broke into the professional realm of comics…? Talk about that, please.
Michael: I come into comics in a really round-
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All TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.
All photos courtesy of Don McGregor.
about way. Like I said, I was an editorial illustrator, and then I was doing work for Owl magazine, doing a lot of children’s book and magazine illustration in Canada, as well as the occasional adult publication, like a business magazine or something. So one day, Owl magazine told me, “Hey, we have a comic feature that we have here and the illustrator of the comic feature doesn’t really get how to draw comics. And they said, “Would you take a stab at it and break down this for page story for them? You work in a comic style, we figure you’d know how to draw comics.” And I said, “Yeah, okay, I’ll do it.” So I broke down the story and they said, “Actually, this other Illustrator doesn’t want to do this project anymore. Would you take it on?” And I said okay, as long as he genuinely left and I didn’t cause him to lose his job or something. So I did this four-page comic feature in Owl magazine for a few years, and that was my first professionally published comic book work. And, at the time, I was terrible! [laughter] I couldn’t even draw in perspective, and I had a friend explain to me how perspective works, because, as an illustrator, you can cheat a lot of that; you can fake perspective and draw the angle that you feel like that that you’re strongest on. But, with comics, you can’t. We talked about this with Frank Miller.
So I drew this four-page comic feature about a detective, a kid’s mystery thing, for a few years. And every month I would take it as a challenge to improve something in it. So, I would say, “This is the month when I focus on expressions,” or, “This is the month when I’m going to try to focus on compositions and panels to lead the eye around,” “This will be a month where I try to focus on defining the backgrounds better and get a clearer sense of space,” and things like that. That was my little training ground. And then, having done that, and then drawing a few little indie comics on my own, I felt more and more confident about drawing comics.
Around that time, a bunch of us Toronto cartoonists were starting up a web comic portal, which doesn’t exist anymore. They asked me, “Do you want to do a daily or weekly webcomic?” And I was like, “Hell no. I’m way too slow and way too busy for that. I could never hit that deadline. I’d fail that in a week.” But then we talked and I said, “Hey, what if I did like a short story every month?” So I drew these short little web comics every month, but they started getting longer. The first was four pages, the next was eight, and then the next one was like 16 or 24 pages, or something like that. And it was around that time I was like, okay, you know, I’m starting to better figure out the storytelling. I’m feeling more confident about storytelling and it’d be nice to try and maybe try and pitch some graphic novel projects. And so it went from there.
CBC: That was “Transmission X”?
Michael: Yes.
CBC: And are they any good?
Michael: Well, at the time, I thought they were good.
CBC: I mean, are they do you think they should be collected?
Michael: There are a couple of stories that are good. I think I did a sum total of maybe eight different stories, and the first one’s pretty good, the second one is okay… There’s one that’s really long that I thought was good… because they were genre-less stories, just fiction. There’s one story about a woman who quit smoking, and another about a kid who remembers a childhood friend who passed away. And then there’s one about a kid growing up in the suburbs and how sh*tty that is as a teenager (which is literally just me and my memories of growing up in a suburb) and that one I thought was really good when I was writing it… And when I read it now, I go, “Oh, this is so emo.” It is just dripping with teenage angst! Dar used to
mock me for that, like “Whatever you write, I know it’s going to have ennui….”
CBC: Hey, but c’mon, those are valid feelings, right?
Michael: I can look at it now, like it was a learning exercise… It was a way for me to learn. I still think a couple of the stories hold up, the ones that are less pretentious.
CBC: But you can do “quiet.” And that’s not often done enough within the milieu of comics. There’s a real sense that I get from Shoplifter where there’s this… this hesitancy... When she’s with the shopkeeper and they exchange looks. You know, it’s a very pregnant moment filled with import. You have a natural, dramatic flair for nuance…
Michael: Thank you, I appreciate that. My focus, when I was writing those types of stories is, I’m really interested in trying to create characters that are alive and then trying to put an honest, internal emotion on the page. I would fiddle, for instance, so many times with an eyebrow placement and things like that. Just so that I didn’t have like a stock set of, say, five expressions. Let’s say two people are in bed, right? Two people have
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All TM & ©
Marvel Characters, Inc. • All photos courtesy of Don McGregor.
Above: Cho called it, "easy money, really," when he drew the 1940s' variant cover for Action Comics #1000 [June 2018], adding, "as it was an opportunity to draw Superman vs. the Nazis in WWII." Inset right: In Sept. 2021, Cho tweeted, "DC released my cover for the Wonder Woman 80th Anniversary special [Dec. 2021]. I got to do the '1960s themed' cover and it was a treat for me to draw. Did some hand-lettering for it, too!" Next page: Cho's piece for Shazam!: The World's Mightiest Mortal Vol. 2 [2020]. The artist also provided a nifty Marvel Family piece for the first volume of this trade paperback series reprinting the charming 1970s' Shazam! run.
the same kind of nighttime scenes and same kind of quiet. It’s just that one is way more angsty. Shoplifter is more refined. So, yeah, it does come out of that.
What happened was, at the time, I was doing illustration work, and I also wanted to write and draw comics. I pitched to a literary agent here in town the idea of doing five short stories in one big book. And Shoplifter was initially one of them. Then I realized I’d bitten off way too much, because it was going to be a ridiculous amount of work to do all five stories. So I said, let’s do them separately and I’ll do Shoplifter first, because that was the one story that very self-contained and, “I can do this and it’s the shortest, simplest one, and let’s see how that goes.” And then, in the course of doing that, I realized, “Oh my god, this is a huge endeavor.”
CBC: Did your agent first pitch it to Pantheon?
Michael: No, she pitched it to a couple of different places, and then what happened was that Pantheon’s editor, Chip Kidd, had worked with me on a Batman story right around the same time. [Then-DC art director] Mark Chiarello had contacted me and asked, “Would you do a Batman Black and White story with
Chip Kidd?” And I said, “Yeah, totally! I love his work, but I don’t know why he’d want me…” Mark said, “Well, he asked for you.” And then Chip and I became friends in the course of that. And then, because he’s the editor of Pantheon, he said, “You know, if you have a book project and want to do it at Pantheon, I’d be happy to look at it,” so then I called my literary agent. And they went from there.
CBC: Were your expectations with the book’s reception met?
Michael: In what way? Like financial?
CBC: Was it was as successful as you had hoped it would be?
Michael: I don’t know. I don’t have expectations like that. I don’t honestly think much in terms of critical reception. I tend to think, “Did I tell the story I wanted to tell? Did I achieve my artistic goals for it?” And then was I able to support myself by doing it? So, I don’t know what the critical reception was, if that’s what you’re asking. I know that some people liked it… I liked it, but I thought that there was a lot to be improved upon. CBC: Well, to be blunt: where’s the follow-up?
Michael: The follow-up to that was I had another child, and doing an indie graphic novel for a tiny advance was never going to be able to support two kids, and a mortgage, and a wife. So that’s the equally blunt answer to that. I realize that I could probably spend my days writing applications for government grants, then toiling away, incredibly absorbed in a graphic novel that was emotionally draining to me… because, even a book like a Shoplifter, when I’m writing and drawing — especially when I’m drawing it — it’s really draining, as I’m constantly trying to put myself in the headspace of these characters. I was just like, “Oh God, I’m so tired of trying to be in this headspace as I draw every line,” just so that I capture the nuances of what I’m trying to draw.
I’ve worked in publishing long enough to know I’m probably not going to see much of a royalty, because with most books you never see anything past your advance. And that’s especially true for personal, quiet projects without some giant IP tie in.
#30 • Spring 2023 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR 68 Action Comics , Superman, Wonder Woman TM & © DC Comics.
sequence, and things like that. I did some porn… well, it’s softcore porn: somebody asked me to illustrate a book that was “literary erotica.” But it wasn’t boudoir, 17th century stuff; it was more like hardcore, modern erotica. Some of those I’ll find occasionally and realize, “Oh yeah, I drew that. That is a woman with a strap-on penis that I drew…” I did a deck of playing cards of 50 nude illustrations that never got printed. It was like a retro nudie playing card deck from the ’40s or something. I hand-painted all the signs at a popular local bookstore, illustrating all the categories. I did gig posters and CD packaging for local bands.
So, I did stuff like that. But that’s all early stuff. Nowadays, I still catch weird illustration assignments, where they ask me to draw things like a team mascot for a school that’s half-fish/ half-cougar. I did illustrations for the Biden campaign in 2020. I drew an info-comic about teens and STDS for an agency to be distributed in U.S. high schools. I did another info comic for the Dairy Farmers of Canada. There’s so many of these things in the wild. Toy packaging, T-shirt designs, pharmaceutical billboards, and on and on. So, every once in a while, like six months after I finish something, I’ll be surprised when I open my front door and there’ll be a FedEx box with some final product of something I did. “Oh yeah, right! I designed these hoodies. Oh right!” “These are the trading cards I did.”
CBC: When I mentioned Hamlet to you, you replied
as if you still might still be thinking about it. Is adapting Shakespeare still on your mind?
Michael: Yeah. Hamlet’s my favorite story of all time. I never read it in school. I read Hamlet years later and I was like, “Oh, this is such a great story! This is the ultimate petulant teen.” And he’s so modern. So, for years afterwards, every time there was a film production of Hamlet, I would always seek it out. And I’d go, “Oh, they got it wrong. Oh, it’s close, but it’s not there. They got this little bit wrong.” Because, in my mind, I would picture what I see the play as being about. I mean, obviously, I’m not an expert and don’t have the authority to say they got it wrong. But, for me, there’s just my personal version I see in my head. So I have always carried around the idea of drawing it sometime. Every once in a while, somebody will ask me to do a commission: “Can you draw something for me? And you can pick the character,” and I’ll draw Hamlet. So, over the years, there are a few drawings of Hamlet that I’ve done for people — from 20 years ago, 10 years ago, and so forth.
As I get older, every few years, I reread the play and think, “Oh, this would be a really good staging for this sequence.” And then, in my head, I break it down to the panels. So, a few years ago, Chip and I were on stage in San Francisco, and he asked, “Is there a project that you want to do at some point that’s like a dream or vanity project?” And I said, “Yeah, I’d
71 C OMIC BOOK CREATOR • Spring 2023 • #30 Batman TM & © DC Comics.
Above: One of the artist's favorite pieces, the variant cover for Batgirls #4 [May 2022]. Previous page: At top is black-&-white line art for a very recent story by Cho and writing partner Anthony Falcone, "The Wheelman of Gotham," in Batman: Urban Legends #21 [Jan. 2023]. At bottom is yet another sweet Batman illustration by Cho., this beauty from 2016 Visit Michael Cho on the web at his blogsite chodrawings.
— the last speech before the duel, then the sequence on the parapet with the ghost, and when he’s being when he’s being told by school friends that the ghost is going to arrive tonight, and then the ghost arrives, and then he’s telling his friends, “Unhand me, gentlemen. By heaven, I’ll make a ghost of him that lets me!” And I thought, “This actually works. This would be great if I could just print this from the pencils.” I’ll have to take a crack at actually trying to figure out how many pages it would be. I don’t think it would be 500 pages like I initially thought. I think I’d probably do something like 250 and really cut it down. And, if I could do it in a lean, economical way that still has what I wanted, I would love to do it.
CBC: So Hamlet is “haunting” you. [chuckles]
Michael: Weirdly, every few years, I look at old notes and recognize it still works. A few years ago, I bought an iPad and one of the first things I did was try to work out a cover for Hamlet. What would that design look like? What would appeal to like? Seamus Heaney did a modern version of Beowulf and it’s dynamite. Not to compare myself in any way to a Nobel Prize-winning poet in any way, shape or form! But I really loved that version of Beowulf and that’s what I’m picturing in my head for Hamlet: something that takes the text and cuts it to the bone for a modern audience.
CBC: Hey, you’re allowed to be inspired by a Nobel laureate, Mike.
Michael: I just don’t want anyone to think that I’m comparing myself to Heaney. When I saw that, I realized that’s what I’m after and it’s something always missing from every film version of Hamlet I ever saw.
CBC: You know, I wonder if it’s a young thing to be into Hamlet and, with middle age, comes Macbeth and with old age, Lear...
Michael: I think with old age comes The Tempest.
CBC: Well, there’s that. Yeah, but Lear… if you got kids…. Oh, boy!
Michael: I thought of that. Lear doesn’t resonate with me as much as Hamlet. Hamlet is just a modern character, you know? And, for some reason, I gravitate to that because it’s like the petulant teen who thinks he’s too smart for everybody else. But, at the same time, he’s not, and he’s moody, and t disturber, and he’s a little sh*t, and he’s cruel to people… But it’s so modern, you know, that kind of a character written… what?… 500 years ago…? A guy who’s horrible to his girlfriend, but at the same time, you know, he does have a noble heart and every sh*tty thing he says, like the first line out of his mouth when his mom was going, “Everybody’s father died, why it seems it’s so particular with thee,” and he’s like. “Seems madam? Seems? Nay, tis. I know not ‘seems.’” It’s such t thing to say.
You’ve had a truly eclectic career, Michael…
Canadian
like to do a comic book version of Hamlet.” But I know that I’d have to wait because the market is saturated with these sort of manga versions of Hamlet created to get a school audience, so instead of buying Cliff Notes, they buy the manga version and read that. And I can tell that some of these have not been created out of love, but out of a desire to hit a market. And they get it all wrong. You know, the artist has been hired to draw it and they’ve got been given a piddly amount of money, and they have no real love for the source material, so they just draw expressionless faces with 30 word balloons in iambic pentameter.
And so, I’d like to take a crack at an adaptation, at some point. It probably will have to be when I’m older because I’d have to do it economically in terms of style, because there’s a lot of pages, and you’d have to cut, with a machete, huge chunks of the play and just get to the meat of it. To cut it down to something that would work in comics form, you’d have to be ruthless in the editing.
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Michael: That’s a fun way to put it. People told me, “You have to pick a path. You have to pick a track or else you’re going to be ten years behind everybody all the time. You know, you’re only running at half-speed.” And that is true; the older I get, I see that. But, at the same time, I have a hard time picking paths. You know, there’s that little petulant kid in me who wants to show everybody up and go, “If you expect this of me, I want to do the opposite!” And I don’t want to give up one path for another. I’ve always artistically… I guess, I’m a journeyman, you know, I want to try it all. I don’t have to master everything, but I do want to try my hand at everything.
I still have, in my files, sequences I broke down into panels
One of my favorite things I used to tell people was, “I reserve the right to disappoint any expectations of style.” I approach all the projects like that. I don’t want to just be doing,
#30 • Spring 2023 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR 72 Characters TM & © DC Comics.
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COMIC BOOK CREATOR #30
comic book artist, illustrator, and graphic novelist MICHAEL CHO in a career-spanning interview and art gallery, a 1974 look at JACK ADLER and the DC Comics production department’s process of reprinting Golden Age material, color newspaper tabloid THE FUNNY PAGES examined in depth by its editor RON BARRETT, plus CBC’s usual columns and features, including HEMBECK! Edited by JON B. COOKE
