Comic Book Artist #15 Preview

LOVE AND ROCKETEERS! No.15 November November 2001 2001

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$6.95 In The U.S.

The Rocketeer ™ & ©2001 Dave Stevens.

Luba ™ & ©2001 Gilbert Hernandez.

Maggie ™ & ©2001 Jaime Hernandez.

Mr. X ™ & ©2001 Vortex Comics, Inc.

STEVENS • HERNANDEZ BROS. • MOTTER • WAGNER • RIVOCHE • PLUNKETT

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Editor/Designer JON B. COOKE Publisher

TWOMORROWS JOHN & PAM MORROW Associate Editors CHRIS KNOWLES DAVID A. ROACH CHRISTOPHER IRVING Contributing Editors ROY THOMAS JOHN MORROW

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DEPARTMENTS: THE FRONT PAGE: LAST MINUTE BITS ON THE COMMUNITY OF COMIC BOOK ARTISTS, WRITERS & EDITORS “Moby” Dick Giordano, Dirty Danny, Ralph and the Swampmen cometh!..........................................................1 EDITOR’S RANT: WHERE DO COMICS FIT IN NOW? What can American comics do in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks? ................................................4 COCHRAN’S CORNER: THE ART OF STRETCH COMEDY A look at art spiegelman & Chip Kidd’s new book Jack Cole and Plastic Man......................................................5 CBA COMMUNIQUES: LETTERS FROM OUR READERS Alex Toth on 1941, Dave Cockrum on David Singer, and John Lustig gets the last word in on First Kiss ............6 FRED HEMBECK’S DATELINE: @!!?* Our Man Fred looks at twenty years of Gilbert and Jaime Hernandezes’ Love and Rockets................................11

COMIC BOOK ARTIST™ is published bi-monthly by TwoMorrows, 1812 Park Drive, Raleigh, NC 27605, USA. 919-833-8092. Jon B. Cooke, Editor. John Morrow, Publisher. Editorial Office: P.O. Box 204, West Kingston, RI 02892-0204 USA • 401-783-1669 • Fax: 401-783-1287. Send subscription funds to TwoMorrows, NOT the editorial office. Single issues: $9 postpaid ($11 Canada, $12 elsewhere). Six-issue subscriptions: $36 US, $66 Canada, $72 elsewhere. All characters © their respective owners. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © their respective authors. ©2001 Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows.

Cover acknowledgements: Rocketeer ©2001 Dave Stevens, Luba ©2001 Gilbert Hernandez, Maggie ©2001 Jaime Hernandez. Mr. X ©2001 Vortex Publishing, Inc. First Printing. PRINTED IN CANADA.

Proofreader ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON Cover Art DAVE STEVENS, GILBERT HERNANDEZ & JAIME HERNANDEZ Cover Color HOMER REYES Production JON B. COOKE GREAT SWAMP GRAPHICS

LOVE AND ROCKETEERS: THE ’80s VANGUARD DAVE STEVENS INTERVIEW: OF HOLLYWOOD AND HEROES The man behind the Rocketeer on his life in the comics, the movies and the pin-ups ........................................12 MARIO HERNANDEZ INTERVIEW: A LOVE OF COMICS Big brother goes first in our special Hernandez hermanos section ......................................................................34 GILBERT HERNANDEZ INTERVIEW: DOWN PALOMAR WAY Chris Knowles chats with Beto on Heartbreak Soup, Palomar, and a post-punk sensibility ................................44 JAIME HERNANDEZ INTERVIEW: THE MECHANIC OF LOVE Xaime gets the CBA treatment complete with in-depth interview by Chris Knowles and tons o’ rare art............56 MATT WAGNER INTERVIEW: THE ARTIST DEFINED The creator of Mage and Grendel talks to Chris Knowles about a life of independence......................................66 DEAN MOTTER INTERVIEW: MISTER X-MAN The writer/artist/designer on the man behind the City of Dreams, the City of Nightmares ................................76 PAUL RIVOCHE INTERVIEW: THE MISTER X-FILES The renowned designer discusses his involvement in the creation of ’80s icon Mister X ....................................90 SANDY PLUNKETT INTERVIEW: THE BEST ARTIST YOU NEVER HEARD OF Tim Barnes answers the question of who is Sandy Plunkett and how does he do such superb artwork? ..........100 Opposite: Detail of Dave Stevens’ cover art to The Rocketeer: The Official Movie Adaptation. ©2001 Dave Stevens. Top: Four unpublished panels by & ©2001 Jaime Hernandez. Below: Luba at various stages of life by & ©2001 Gilbert Hernandez.

All letters of comment, articles and artwork, please mail to: Jon B. Cooke, Editor, Comic Book Artist, P.O. Box 204, West Kingston, RI 02892-0204 Phone: (401) 783-1669 • Fax: (401) 783-1287 • E-mail: jonbcooke@aol.com

Transcribers JON B. KNUTSON BRIAN K. MORRIS SAM GAFFORD Logo Designer/Title Originator ARLEN SCHUMER Mascot WOODY by J.D. King Issue Theme Song PEACE ON EARTH U2 Visit CBA on our Website at: www.twomorrows.com /comicbookartist/

Contributors Dave Stevens • Gilbert Hernandez Jaime Hernandez • Dean Motter Mario Hernandez • Paul Rivoche Matt Wagner • Sandy Plunkett Alex Toth • Michael T. Gilbert Chris Knowles • Tim Barnes Dean Smith • Jerry K. Boyd Chris Pitzer • Eric Reynolds Kim Thompson & Fantagraphics Arlen Schumer • Fred Hembeck Jon B. Knutson • Brian K. Morris Sam Gafford • Greg Preston J.P. Shannon • Shawna Ervin-Gore Dark Horse • John R. Cochran Scott Saavedra • Bob Beerbohm John Totleben • Larry Ivie dedicated to my sister

Becky Cooke and in memory of

Barbara Knutson Jerry DeFuccio Johnny Craig Chuck Cuidera Barbara Rausch Herbert Block and in celebration of the newborn arrivals of

Lily Morrow and Violet Knowles and to the spirit and everlasting endurance of the birthplace & home of american comic books

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CBA Interview

Of Hollywood & Heroes Rocketeer creator Dave Stevens on his life as an artist Opposite: Dave Stevens poses in his Studio City studio for photographer Greg Preston in a recent picture. Ye Ed had the pleasure of meeting Greg in San Diego this year and we hope to publish a book of Greg’s outstanding portraits of comic book creators and animators someday soon. Courtesy of and ©2001 Greg Preston.

Above: Dave Stevens’ most enduring creation, The Rocketeer as rendered by the artist for a fan. Courtesy of and ©2001 Dave Stevens.

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Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Sam Gafford The sensual art of Dave Stevens burst forth on the world of comics fandom like a buzz bomb during the Spring of 1982 in, of all places, a back-up strip in Starslayer #2, featuring a new character, The Rocketeer. Stevens’ stylings—and his new comics adventurer—were immediate hits and the artist remains very popular even though he has produced a relatively small number of (albeit high-quality) comics pages over the years. Ye Ed was fortunate to interview Dave at the 2001 International Comic Con: San Diego in July with a follow-up talk via phone in August. Dave copyedited the final transcript.

Comic Book Artist: Dave, where are you from?

Dave Stevens: Lynwood, California, which is basically part of South-Central Los Angeles.

CBA: When did you get interested in comics?

Dave: About age four, or five. My dad had a box of Disneys and ECs—though not the horror books, unfortunately! Only the tamer ones. He had Stories from the Bible and a couple of the science-fiction titles.

He liked Ray Bradbury and also had a couple of hardcover compilations like The Omnibus of Science Fiction, etc. So, I started out with Bradbury, too, as a youngster, along with Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, and a handful of others.

CBA: Were you into books that featured continuing characters like Sherlock Holmes?

Dave: Oh sure, Tarzan and even Tom Swift and The Hardy Boys for a while. And later, in high school I got bitten by the paperback reprints of The Shadow, Doc Savage, and Conan, along with a lot of my friends.

CBA: Did you have an interest in previous eras even as a kid?

Dave: Yeah, I guess I did. But, you know, as a ’50s kid, I grew up on a daily diet

of early television, watching Our Gang, Laurel and Hardy, Hoppy, The Lone Ranger, Betty Boop, Popeye, and scads of old movies. Plus, radio was still pretty vital in most homes. Your Hit Parade was still on, as well as regular radio dramas, and much of the music was still predominantly swing; big bands and crooners played in every household. So, a lot of the aspects of the pre-war years were still very much a part of my daily life. Milk was still delivered door-to-door, Helm’s bakery trucks had regular routes through all the neighborhoods… and WWII was still talked about by most adults, since it had only just ended ten years earlier. So, I think I came by a lot of it honestly. It was just a large part of my early consciousness. And very early on I started collecting records, and by the time I got into high school I was haunting the used record stores looking for old 78s—jazz and old vocalists. Who knows why? But obviously it came from early exposure to the best of it.

CBA: Were you cognizant of Hollywood being near?

Dave: Not really, it seemed like another world from where I lived, and very exotic, like journeying to Mecca. I saw evidence of it around town, public appearances by local TV celebrities: Jeepers Creepers, Chucko the Clown, Engineer Bill, and Tom Hatton. But, my first real brush with the reality of it was probably when my Scout troop got to visit The Munsters set on the old Universal lot, in 1964. That was pretty amazing! I never wanted to go home again.

CBA: So was it ‘30 and ‘40s pop culture material?

Dave: Yeah, everyday things I’d been surrounded with. I still have specific memories from as early as ’58, when my younger brother was born. I remember my mom dragging me to a John F. Kennedy rally which would have been, what, 1960? I remember events like that; things that left an impression. They were only worm’s eye views but I do remember them.

CBA: Was radio an influence when you were young?

Dave: Well, that was at the very tail end of the radio era. There were still a few shows on, like Johnny Dollar and X Minus One, but not much. But, luckily, a lot of them had already made the transition to television—Amos ‘n’ Andy, Burns and Allen—a lot of them had made the switch so I got to see the performers behind the voices.

The Great Gildersleeve and people like him were on the box all the time. It was all character driven skits, obviously, with loads of personality and shtick. It was great material and a lot of it still holds up, today. It’s milder, of course, but still extremely funny. It’s nice to pop a tape in once and a while, and remember how well-written those shows were. And much of it was really groundbreaking.

CBA: Did you enjoy the Superman TV show?

Dave: Oh, sure. We all watched it and Zorro, and tied towels around our necks and jumped off the roof! [laughs] CBA: Did you follow the TV anthology shows? The Twilight Zone, Playhouse 90?

Dave: The Twilight Zone, sure, but I preferred The Outer Limits because it seemed more visual, more creature-filled. It appealed to kids, more than adults, I think.

CBA: Did films like King Kong have any effect on you?

Dave: Oh, tremendously! When I was five, my folks let me stay up and watch Kong because I just lived for dinosaurs. And it was just magical, I was transported. I believed every second of it! That big ape charmed me and terrified me. And the theme of the film, the tortured monster and the beautiful girl… hey, it still works for me!

So, I got to experience that one very early, and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, War of the Worlds, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and a few other genre films that they thought I could handle. But the COMIC BOOK ARTIST 15

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really scary bogey-men, like Frankenstein, Dracula, etc., that were a bit more horrific, visually, I wasn’t allowed to see for another couple of years.

CBA: Who was your local horror host?

Dave: Jeepers Creepers, at the time. Vampira had only been on for a short time in ‘55, so I missed her show, but Jeepers Creepers was her successor. And then much later, in the early 1970s, there was Seymour. But, the one I was always enthralled by was Zacherley, the Cool Ghoul. He was the East Coast’s horror icon. Unfortunately, we never got his show out here (but I could read about him in Famous Monsters of Filmland!). He looked like sort of an undead foreign dignitary, who probably liked to dig up bodies at night.

CBA: When did you first pick up Famous Monsters?

Dave: When I was about seven. My folks wouldn’t have let me buy it, but… there was always Grandma! We’d go to her house and pretty much anything went. They spoil you rotten—anything you want—as long as it’s cheap! She was a short bus ride away, and in those days, parents would put their kids on a bus and just send them off! [laughs] I remember my mom walking us up to Gage Avenue one morning, my little brother and I (he was maybe three!) standing at the bus stop, waiting for it to pick us up and take us to our grandma’s. And she told me which stop to get off on, to sit near the front and what to tell the driver. Ah, young parents!

CBA: How many brothers and sisters did you have?

Dave: One brother, two sisters. My brother builds kit planes for a company in Idaho. He’s like their engineer, the man in charge of prototypes. My sisters are homemakers. My dad was really the only family member who was artistic. He was a doodler, a cartoonist, though he never did it professionally. I think he would have loved working as an animator. I didn’t really know the extent of his interest until a few years ago at my grandmother’s. She pulled out an old sketchbook of his from when he was about eight or nine years old, and it was just filled with cartoon characters. Every page of it!

CBA: Was he any good?

Dave: He was terrific, and totally self-taught! He could do Popeye with his eyes closed and that’s a tough character to just pull from your head. He taught me to draw my first cartoon characters when I was about four (and I would draw them all over everything). I remember him sculpting Br’er Rabbit one day, at the breakfast table.

He was an oil painter, as well. Very, very imaginative, talented guy.

CBA: Did you ever know him to approach a studio for work?

Dave: No, he only took one semester out of high school, at a local art college and that was it. Then he joined the Air Force. Basically, my mom kept after him until he married her. Then, I guess he figured that he had to get a real job and cartooning just didn’t seem possible to him. So, instead, he got involved in the early days of computers, back when one computer took up an entire room.

CBA: Was he successful?

Dave: Yeah. He became a systems analyst, and he did that for a number of years.

CBA: Is he still alive?

Dave: Oh, yeah. He was just here a few weeks ago.

CBA: Are you close?

Dave: Very. He still has the soul of an artist. I just wish he’d do something with it.

But, he abruptly gave it up, forty years ago! Just stopped drawing. I still find that incredibly sad. Occasionally I could nudge him to draw something and it was always brilliant!

CBA: Does he follow what you do?

Dave: I keep him up to date. I guess he just figured he’d pass it on to me, watch what I did with it, and that was good enough for him; vicariously, I suppose.

CBA: So he was always supportive of you?

Dave: Oh, yeah. But, my parents really didn’t know what to do with me, vocationally! I remember religiously, watching John Nagy on TV. And doing the old Famous Artists tryout, you know? “Draw the Lumberjack.” I sent it in, filled out the evaluation test they sent me, then the school’s salesmen started calling our house! [laughs] They wanted to sell me the full course! I remember picking up the phone and this guy was just talking a blue streak about test results and could he speak to my father? So I handed my dad the phone and stood by, watching him trying to get a word in. He finally said, “Well, yes—but you see, he’s only 11.” And that was the end of that conversation! [laughs] No sale! I wish though, that my dad had subscribed to the courses. Boy, I could have gone nuts with those books.

CBA: You told me you’re currently going to art school full-time; do you think you’re making up for that missed opportunity now?

Dave: Well, that is the hope. I never really got an art education after high school.

Most people go on to an art college of some kind, but I just went straight into the job market.

CBA: How do you look back at that now?

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ultimately more employable. I could’ve done a lot more than just storyboards or character designs. I could have done finished illustrations. So, in my early days in Hollywood, I just hired out mostly, as a sketch artist.

CBA: Did you always look to your childhood for inspiration?

Dave: I suppose we all do, to some degree: Mining our personal experiences, and the other art forms we’ve enjoyed over the years: films, books, music.

CBA: Did you collect comics when you were young?

Dave: Not originally. I had that stack of my dad’s and read those until they fell apart.

CBA: Were they Carl Barks?

Dave: Some were, and a mixture of other funny animal books.

CBA: Did you recognize Carl Barks at all then?

Dave: I could recognize “styles.” There were certain artists I liked because they were more expressive or more animated.

Above: An early Dave Stevens effort was an underground comix strip satirizing gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson in Kitchen Sink’s Fear and Laughter from 1977. Courtesy of J.P. Shannon ©2001 the respective copyright holder.

Inset right: One of Dave Stevens’ first professional assignments was to ink strips for the British comic Tarzan Weekly over the pencils of such artists as Mike Ploog, Will Meugniot, and Danny Bulanadi, illustrating stories by Don Glut and Mark Evanier, among others. These panels are from the June 25, 1977 issue, courtesy of Dean Smith.

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CBA: Did you like Floyd Gottfriedson?

Dave: Yes, very much. I didn’t know him by name but knew his style. I’d say he was my favorite of the Disney stable.

CBA: Did you get any exposure to Floyd’s ‘30s Mickey Mouse newspaper strip work?

Dave: Only in reprints, because at the time Disney still repackaged the stuff in odd formats like kids’ primer comics.

CBA: Did you see that stuff as being better than his ‘60s stuff?

Dave: Yeah, but only because the current material seemed tamer by comparison, you know? Mickey was pretty homogenized by then. The ‘30s strips were a lot zanier and the characters were more distinctively animals.

CBA: Do you remember seeing any glamour or cheesecake material at that time?

Dave: My first exposure would have been the old Esquire fold-outs by Vargas and Petty. I don’t remember who I saw first but I do recall that I liked Petty girls better, probably because they were more “cartooned,” and more accessible to a young boy. Vargas’s work was much more realistic and softer, not quite so carved out or geometrically shaped. It wasn’t as lively to me.

CBA: How old were you?

Dave: Probably ten or eleven.

CBA: You didn’t see Playboy?

Dave: I did, but only at other people’s homes, my dad wasn’t a “Playboy Man”!

CBA: You read them in the woods! [laughs] Dave: [laughs] Yeah, or the cemetery! I’d occasionally find men’s mags in vacant lots, on my way to school, but they were always in tatters! We had a neighborhood deli where a friend of mine and I (we were about seven or eight) would sneak behind the counter when the cashier would go to the back and we’d quickly thumb through the nudist magazines. “Ooh! So that’s what that looks like!”

CBA: [laughs] Did you gain any kind of fascination for that kind of material?

Dave: Not at all. I was just too young to care! It was furtive and naughty, but that was the only thrill to it—that we were doing something we shouldn’t have. I just wasn’t interested yet. Not until I hit high school, and even then, there wasn’t much available if you were underage. We couldn’t buy that stuff! So most of what I saw was, you know, movie magazines and occasional calendar girls and that was it. You know, we’re talking about the ’60s, here.

CBA: Did you draw girls?

Dave: I tried but I wasn’t any good at it, so I stuck with heroes and monsters for a long time. I remember I drew my first nude (at the request of a friend) when I was 13 and my dad walked by while I was doing it. He just said, “You know… you’re a little short in the pants to be drawing that kind of stuff, yet.” [laughter] So I learned right away, that if I was going to draw women, I’d have to be discreet about it. My mom soon after, found my Vampirellas and some underground comix in my room. I guess it was pretty shocking for her; the undergrounds in particular! My dad very calmly said, “Look, you’ve got little brothers and sisters around and they cannot see this stuff. Don’t bring anymore of it home.” He didn’t really mind the Warren mags, but drew a line at Zap, Slow Death, and Yellow Dog! CBA: Were there comic book artists that you were particularly drawn to? Like Wally Wood?

Dave: I remember my first Marvel—I’d read a few, but the first one I actually bought off the rack was Tales to Astonish #82 (SubMariner vs. Iron Man, started by Gene Colan and finished by Kirby) and it was absolutely amazing. I’d never seen that kind of storytelling and it was so potent, so rock ’em, sock ’em. To me, that was the best stuff my young eyes had ever seen.

CBA: This was Kirby and Colan?

Dave: Yeah, Colan had drawn the first few pages and Kirby finished it. I could tell the difference between the two but I didn’t care! It was just great storytelling. The very next thing I picked up was an issue of Spider-Man and it was Romita’s second issue. I was, again, just knocked out and then I read that Ditko, another artist, had actually started the series, so I looked around for some of his work, and liked it immediately, but stylistically, his issues of SpiderMan looked to be from 20 years prior. (By comparison to Romita, whose style was very contemporary and of the moment, in the mid-1960s). Kirby’s work was also not quite as contemporary looking. Romita’s work was almost like fashion art, it was very graceful. I appreciated him more than Ditko at the time because Ditko’s fashions looked dated, the hairstyles were old, everything looked like it was still 1940. But he drew a Spider-Man like no one else and his villains were just plain creepy!

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CBA: Was [Jack’s youngest daughter] Lisa there?

Dave: Yeah, but she was pretty young, maybe nine years old; Neal was still there, as well. We got to see some of the Fourth World stuff as Jack was creating it. And occasionally, he would even include some of us in them! I remember one friend in particular, who was a real squirrely little guy, and Jack turned him into “The Bug.” CBA: Oh yeah?

Dave: Yeah, it was hilarious, and I remember thinking it was so cool that Jack actually saw these kids as characters and incorporated them into his stories!

CBA: Did you see him as an uncle-type role?

Dave: Probably, because he would give us advice and entertain us with wild stories.

CBA: War stories?

Dave: All kinds of tales, about growing up in New York, about the industry, people he’d known.

CBA: Was he honest about his Marvel experience?

Dave: Well, it was pretty sugar-coated at the time. I’m sure he didn’t want to shatter our illusions. And yet, he could be pretty frank, when he needed to.

CBA: So the only outlet for comics on the West Coast would have been Western/Gold Key? Dave: Yes, and I really had no interest in what they were doing.

CBA: So you didn’t like The Twilight Zone and stuff like that?

Dave: It was just dry, civilian stuff to me at that age. Remember, at that time, Métal Hurlant was just starting to hit the states, this was ‘74, and that magazine was a real eye-opener for me. It was so different from anything we’d seen here, so weird and beautifully illustrated and it was a slick, glossy magazine.

CBA: Did you go down to Richard Kyle’s Long Beach comic shop to get that?

Dave: Periodically, but there were a couple of local comic shops that had also started getting the imports in. The European material was a bittersweet discovery for me because, I’d already written off having a career in comics. It just didn’t seem to be in the cards. I wasn’t going to relocate to New York to draw funny books, so I was already looking for something else to do. Production art or advertising and that was it. But, that same year, I visited Russ Manning’s studio. Several of us had gone up there for the day and I got to show Russ my samples. Unfortunately, he was not a fan of the Marvel style at all. And yet it wasn’t that far removed from his own style, really. Some time after that Shel called me and said that Russ was looking for an assistant and he’d had suggested my name but Russ said, “No, no, I don’t want that Marvel look.” So I wrote Russ a note and included a Tarzan drawing that I’d done. Within days, he called and I picked up my first Sunday page on my way back from LA. It happened that fast. That was a surprising career U-turn, ending up in comics after all, albeit in the Sunday pages, which were much different.

CBA: What was Russ like?

Dave: He was a great guy, very kind and fatherly but also an authoritarian, ruling with an iron fist. Very ethical and he seemed able to juggle a lot of different things at the same time. He did a lot of grade-B horror film art on the side and odd advertising gigs. He was also very active in his community. He was the volunteer fire chief for Mojeska Canyon. I remember being at the drawing table and the 18

alarm would go off and he’d jump up and often wouldn’t be back until late at night. I was expected to stay at my board and work until he got back, too! Quite often, I would finish a page without him being there to correct me and when he’d get back he’d take it and I’d hear that electric eraser just buzzzzzzzzing away.

CBA: Did you like each other?

Dave: We got along really well. In fact, he insisted that I come up and work in the studio with him, rather than just having me mail the stuff in. So, he must’ve been able to stand me. And I often ate with the family, and played volleyball at the firehouse.

CBA: And what were you doing?

Dave: Backgrounds and minor figures. He wouldn’t let me do Tarzan for a long time, but eventually I got the green light.

CBA: Did he have tight pencils?

Dave: Yeah, pretty tight. Not as tight as some of the guys you see today.

CBA: Could you identify most of your work on the strip?

Dave: I think so.

CBA: Was he an influence on you?

Dave: Mostly, in terms of inking for reproduction.

CBA: There’s a sensuality to his line that’s also in your work.

Dave: I guess there are some similarities. He would emphasize the importance of thick and thin lines and how to “weight” a figure… using darker lines on the underside, basic things like that. It was a crash course in practical inking which I was completely unaware of and didn’t understand yet. He was always on me about overfeathering and unnecessary detail because, “It won’t reproduce!

Stop it! If it’s not going to reproduce then don’t waste your time!”

CBA: Did you like the Magnus, Robot Fighter stuff?

Dave: I liked it, but again, when I first saw it, as a young teen, it seemed a bit sterile, a little cold. Beautifully done, but I just craved the more “in your face” Marvel approach at that time, and anything else really paled by comparison.

CBA: Did you get rid of your collection?

Dave: I stopped buying comics by ‘73. I still picked up a few of the Marvel black-&-white magazines, but not much else.

CBA: Really? Not even the Fourth World stuff?

Dave: Well, okay, I was picking up Jack’s work and Kubert’s Tarzan, Kaluta’s Shadow and Wrightson’s Swamp Thing. I was just selective. I would only buy the “art” comics. I wouldn’t even look at super-hero stuff at that point.

CBA: What about Neal Adams’ work?

Dave: I remember being very excited in 1971, when he was doing Green Lantern/Green Arrow. Of course, I loved “Deadman”! I thought it was brilliant work, but within a few years, felt like I’d outgrown the super-hero genre.

CBA: You were looking for something more sophisticated?

Dave: Just different! Swamp Thing and The Shadow were more baroque, more Gothic to me and I really wanted more of that. I loved Lt. Blueberry and Arzak…

CBA: Were you a pack-rat?

Dave: Oh, I haunted junk shops and would come home with strange stuff, but I was also particular. I was conscious of quality over quantity early on. I didn’t have the hoarder mentality of rabid collectors. I never had all that many comics. I kept them all in one box. That was it.

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Above: Dave’s rough pencils for his Airboy #5 cover featuring “The Return of Valkyrie.” Courtesy of the artist. Characters ©2001 Todd McFarlane Productions, Inc. Art ©2001 Dave Stevens.

Opposite page: For his pin-up work, Dave often photographs models to use as reference. Top is Jewel Shepard and, at bottom, a model the artist identifies as Rebecka Smith. Photos by and courtesy of Dave Stevens.

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psychedelic and loaded with subversive humor.

CBA: Were you clued into any particular underground artists?

Dave: I loved Crumb because of the nostalgic feel. It was like looking at a filthy Fleischer cartoon on paper. But really strange and really sick! [laughs] I admired his drawing skills, but I got bored with the sickness factor after a while to the point where I just stopped picking the stuff up. Richard Corben was astonishing. He was… semi-underground, I guess? None of the other guys drew as well and nobody could do what he did with an airbrush. Corben was unique.

His characters looked like little rubber figures jumping off the page.

He did some truly amazing things with color, too. Rowlf was the first book of his that I saw and it was just so well done. Obviously he was really into it. His characters looked like gargoyles and his women were just unreal! They were aliens. [laughs] CBA: How long were you with Russ Manning?

Dave: About a year and a half. 1975, ‘76, and part of ‘77. But I only worked in-studio with him, for about eight months in ‘75. Then

I moved to LA and he would actually drive all the way up to give me occasional jobs he needed help on.

CBA: Were you guys close?

Dave: Yeah, though not like I was with Doug Wildey. But we were on very good terms and he trusted me enough over time, not to look over my shoulder. He knew that I would never let him down on a job or a deadline.

CBA: Where did you get this discipline from? Your father?

Dave: I suppose, it was probably more out of respect than discipline. I knew what Russ expected of me and I was just not going to mess up.

CBA: Were you born with a work ethic?

Dave: Probably not. Most artists are intrinsically, lazy bums.

CBA: But you were working with Manning very early in your career, and he was an enormously productive artist.

Dave: Yeah, we put in some long hours. I’d often be there from nine in the morning until midnight. It was grueling work, but I was 19, and who sleeps at that age?

CBA: Was this salary?

Dave: No, piecemeal. He would break it down and pro-rate it by the panel. How much work I did on each and that’s how he paid me! [laughs] But he was very fair. He paid me more than I think anybody else would have. I also ended up doing other work, via Russ, for guys like Zeke Zekeley (samples for PS Magazine with Mike Ploog).

We didn’t get the gig but we did the presentation art for it. I think the contract went to Murphy Anderson.

CBA: Mike Ploog wanted to get the gig?

Dave: Yeah, and I was attached as inker. All I recall was that Zeke was calling the shots, and he liked my work.

CBA: Who was Zeke Zekeley?

Dave: He was a very talented strip artist who started with George McManus. Zeke was George’s assistant [on the newspaper strip Bringing Up Father]. He ghosted the strip for many years and eventually took it over and you couldn’t tell any difference.

CBA: Did he do cartoons for advertising?

Dave: Yeah, he had offices in Beverly Hills and was obviously quite successful. He was right on Wilshire Boulevard. I met Ploog at Russ’s, when he came in to do a few Tarzan stories.

CBA: What was Ploog like?

Dave: I remember him as a great big bear of a guy, I liked him a lot. Very easy going. Russ had a problem with his interpretation of Tarzan, though. So, he redrew almost every single panel Mike had drawn! I was inking Mike’s story, which was a “cowboys in Pellucidar” scenario; roping dinosaurs for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and Mike had done a great job on it. But Russ really took issue with the fact that it was a noticeably different version of Tarzan. I thought it was terrific, but it definitely wasn’t Russ’s Tarzan!

CBA: So none of that exists anymore?

Dave: Oh, it was published. It was done for the European market.

These were stand-alone stories. Alex Niño did one or two, Dan Spiegle, and Wildey…

CBA: Was it all black-&-white?

Dave: No, they were color books. Mike Royer did a couple…

CBA: Did you know Bill Stout from early days?

Dave: Yeah, I met Bill at an LA mini-con in ‘72 or ‘73 but I had known of him from the fanzines. He’d contributed to a couple of ’zines that I was in—’Nuff Said, The Sentinel, The Collector…

CBA: Did you see any progression in your abilities in the early ‘70s?

Dave: Only in the inking. During my time with Russ, there was a marked improvement especially with the weight of lines and understanding shapes and gravity. There was some good growth there, but my drafting skills were still very weak. I felt for years that I just didn’t have the chops for penciling. I would occasionally take a night class in life drawing, but if I’d been smart, I’d have been doing that all along.

CBA: Russ had the Tarzan strip until?

Dave: 1979, I think, then he started the Star Wars strip, immediately after.

CBA: Did he take over from Al Williamson?

Dave: Oh no, he kicked it off. He was the first artist on it. In fact I believe he quit Tarzan because he wanted that feature.

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 15

November 2001

CBA Interview

A Love of Comics Big brother Mario on life with Gilbert & Jaime Hernandez Opposite page: Vootie! Mario Hernandez sent us this recent pic of himself in regal salute.

Right inset: June 1972 photo of The Brothers Hernandez—at least three of them—hanging outside their Oxnard, California home in Mario’s car. In the back seat is Gilbert, in the driver’s seat is Mario, and Jaime rides shotgun in the passenger seat. Courtesy of Mario. Below: Love and Rockets is a sort of music, don’tcha think?

Mario renders himself (on drums) with hermanos Jaime (strings) and Gilberto (brass). Courtesy of the artist. ©2001 Mario Hernandez.

Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Jon B. Knutson We’re featuring our interview with Mario Hernandez as the kick-off to our special “Los Bros.” section because, well, Mario is not only the biggest brother of an amazingly talented family, but also the sibling who organized the first issue of Love and Rockets, was the third contributor to the mag (albeit an infrequent one), and today writes the serial, “Me for the Unknown” in the current incarnation of L&R. Many thanks to Mario, an engrossing and delightful guy, for this last-minute interview, which took place via phone on October 4, 2001.

Comic Book Artist: Where are you originally from?

Mario Hernandez: From Oxnard, in Southern California. It's about 60 miles from L.A., right between Santa Barbara and L.A. I was born in 1953.

CBA: You're the oldest of five. Are your siblings all boys?

Mario: We've got a youngest sister—after Ishmael—named Lucinda.

My dad finally got the girl he was waiting for. I've got four kids of my own, one son and three girls.

CBA: Was it fun to grow up with so many brothers?

Mario: It was fun, though we had kind of a Dickensian type of upbringing. We were pretty dirt-poor. My dad was from Mexico, my mom was from a poor part of Texas, and we grew up in our three-bedroom house, which was very small. My mom still lives there. It seems smaller every time I go and look at it!

CBA: Did all of you kids have to share rooms?

34

Mario: We all had to share. There were always two kids in one room, and three in the other. So Gilbert and I were really close, the ones that were always the closest together in age got to share. I couldn't stand any of my littler brothers!

CBA: Gilbert was the one closest to your age. Then came Jaime?

Mario: There's one in-between Gilbert and Jaime, his name is Richard.

After I got married and moved out of the house, Richard moved into the room with Gilbert, and then they got to know each other, and the rest is of history.

CBA: What did your father do?

Mario: He worked at General Motors, on the line, assembling cars. He was proof to the motto, "Don't buy a car made on Friday or Monday." [laughter] CBA: He was workingclass?

Mario: Oh, yeah.

After he married my mother and they had me, he had to go back to Mexico because they didn't allow him to stay here until he got his paperwork fixed. When I was three years old, he came out, and then we had Gilbert.

CBA: What kind of school did you attend? Was it mixed?

Mario: Oh, yeah, we had a very mixed school. There were a lot of Hispanic, black and white, very mixed. We were right near a Naval base, so there were a lot of kids from all over, many with weird accents. There were a lot of Asians, too—Oxnard has a big Japanese and Chinese population that owns a lot of the land. It was a farm community.

CBA: And you had TV? Mario: Our saving grace was TV, comics and crummy movies.

CBA: [laughs] So you boys were steeped in American pop culture.

Mario: Oh, yeah. I confess that we had no taste, we just got into everything and anything… we collected everything, and our mom threw it all out, and we had to re-buy it all! [laughter] The whole sordid story! I read about these guys that their moms threw out their collections; well, we went through that same thing. The only thing she would let us keep were comics, though, because she was a comics fan. She's the one who inspired us to get into doing our own little comics, because she had done a lot of drawing and grew up with Captain Marvel, Superman and all that stuff. She went through all that Golden Age stuff, and it was in the blood.

CBA: Besides the obvious fact that your father was Mexican, were you exposed to Mexican pop culture to any degree?

Mario: A lot of music—that's where we got the appreciation for it—records, music, the radio. We had this huge radio, an oldCOMIC BOOK ARTIST 15

November 2001

fashioned one from the ’30s, that stood about four-foot tall, three-foot wide, and had a huge dial on it. It was in the middle of the living room, and whenever he was around, he would play his Mexican music. We got a good appreciation for a lot of Mexican music, mariachis, you name it. When he wasn't home—because he worked nights—during the day, my mom would play all the British invasion music, all the Top 40 stuff all the time.

CBA: Your mom sounds pretty hip!

Mario: Well, she is. [laughs] She enjoyed a lot of that stuff, still. That was a lot of really good influence we got through that music.

CBA: Did she encourage you creatively?

Mario: Yes. In fact, we got into the comics and drawing partially because my dad wanted to keep it quiet! My dad told my mom one day, "Hey, why don't you buy some of those books you like so much and give them to the kids so they can shut up?" It was like four little savages running around! He’d say, "Tear up some paper bags, give them some crayons and let them copy the pictures out of the comics." So, we did that, it just kind of snowballed from there, and we got really hooked.

CBA: Looking at Jaime and Gilbert's influences—Dennis the Menace, Archie Comics—you guys were pretty nondiscriminating in your tastes, right? Kiddie stuff, monsters, super-heroes…

Mario: Well, sure! We read anything that was comics. I was working on a story recently, telling about how when our local grocery store, where we used to by comics at all the time, closed and we had to go search for comics around town at all the newsstands. There was a route we took, taking us to about five different stores, because the distribution was so bad on a lot of the comics that we bought regularly, so we had to go to several different stores. We pretty much had the lay of the land of downtown, and we just bought comics in every different store, anything we could get our hands on, that we could hoard, anyway.

CBA: Did you have a job? Did you deliver newspapers?

Mario: Oh, no, we were bums.

CBA: How did you get money for comics?

Mario: Well, to keep us quiet, we would line up, and my dad would dole out money to us. I thought he was the richest man in the world, because he’d pull out a pocket full of quarters in his hand! My dad was game for anything to get us kids out of the house and out of his hair.

CBA: What were your favorite comics?

Mario: Early on, I read all the DC stuff—”Legion of Super-Heroes,” Superman, stuff like that. Later on, of course, the Marvel stuff came in, and then it was all over. I had to have everything! I still have all my old comics. I bought Fantastic Four #1 off the stands. I was into the super-heroes as well as the Atlas monsters mixed together.

CBA: You were eight years old when you bought FF #1?

Mario: Yeah. I started collecting comics when I was around six, seven years old, and fortunately, my mom let me keep them because she was reading them, too! She got into them. As long as we didn't make F's in school, we could keep them.

CBA: Did she use comics as bargaining chips… "If you do wrong, I'll take your comics away"?

Mario: Oh, sometimes, yeah, but she didn't throw them out. The only things she threw out were cards, and we had collections of all the Mars Attacks! cards, all these things, and they just disappeared! She would never say that she was going to do it, but they'd just be gone, and we could never find them. We went and searched all the trash cans in the alley, looking for these things, [laughter] but she would just totally disappear them.

CBA: Were you guys into sports at all?

Mario: Not too much. My younger brothers, Richard on down, were all in Little League, but as far as me and November 2001

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 15

Gilbert, no, we avoided that stuff like the plague. [laughs] We weren't that bad at it, we just weren't interested. Especially Gilbert, he wasn't very athletic.

CBA: When did you start drawing?

Mario: You know, it's weird, because we started doing the super-hero drawings with crayons and stuff, then a couple of years passed, and one day I was turned around, and Gilbert and Jaime were still doing them, and they had stacks of these things they'd been doing every day! Like issue #100 of something! [laughter] That's when we graduated to drawing on typing paper, folding it in half and just making little booklets. Usually, they were just folded in half with a cover and three pages. They were mostly like, "Hey you, come here!" Blam! And that would be it. [laughter] But the covers were very elaborate.

CBA: Did you like Jack Kirby's work?

Mario: Even in the early monster material from Tales to Astonish and those books! They had these little credits written in those stories—”Stan Lee and Jack Kirby”—so we knew who we were looking for when we'd start getting a little picky about what artists we liked. At the same time, I was cutting out all the newspaper strips, the more serious ones like Kerry Drake, Steve Roper, Judge Parker, Pogo, and all those things. I remember one year, my aunt had been keeping all the comics pages because she wanted to catch up with them, and she gave them all to me, saying, "I can't read them all; here, you can have them." She gave me about three years worth of comics, and I still have them! [laughter] I still have all those pages! I wish I could reprint them or something, because they're turning yellow! Brown, actually! [laughter] CBA: So you're quite a pack rat?

Mario: Oh, yeah. I managed to hold on to a lot of other stuff. Plus, in the meantime, buying the Pogo collections and anything we could—Mad pocketbooks, all that we could get our hands on which had some kind of drawings and balloons—we just went after that stuff all the time.

CBA: Did you guys have a shared collection or did you each have your own individual ones?

Mario: There's big fights about this… [laughs] we started writing our names on the books we individually bought. I still have some of the stuff that has Gilbert's name written on it. Being the oldest, I was mostly the one that kind of held sway over the collection, but only when I lived in the house, of course.

CBA: Being the oldest— Mario: Of course, only in the house, of course.

CBA: Also having the oldest stuff, right?

Mario: Oh, yeah.

CBA: So you had the "library" they could all go to for reference. Certainly Gilbert’s “BEM” is influenced by the old Kirby and Ditko monster books.

Mario: Oh, yeah, sure. We shoved out all of our clothes hanging in the closet and we used a shelf in the closet where we put everything, you name it— Superman, Hot Stuff, Richie Rich, Archie—everything was just piled in there. All the time, my mom would say, "Each of you get your stack of comics and go sit at the dinner table and eat, as long as you're quiet."

So there'd be a line of us standing there, picking out our comics we wanted to read for the evening. It was strange, now that I think back on it! [laughter] CBA: It must have been pretty tough keeping all those boys in line. I have three boys myself, and it's like a madhouse here.

Mario: There's a lot of energy going on, even if you're not athletic.

35

CBA Interview

Down Palomar Way Gilbert Hernandez on his days with Luba and L&R Opposite page: Another fine portrait by Greg Preston, this one of Gilbert Hernandez, taken in the artist’s studio. Courtesy of and ©2001 Greg Preston.

Below: A self-caricature by Gilbert Hernandez detailed from Love and Rockets #40. ©2001 Gilbert Hernandez.

Conducted by Chris Knowles Transcribed by Jon B. Knutson Next is our talk with Los Brother Number Two, Gilbert Hernandez, the writer/artist best known for his Palomar stories in Love and Rockets. Beto (as he is also called) has also produced other series such as Birdland, Measles, and New Love, the latter recently collected in the delightful Fantagraphics book, Fear of Comics.

Gilbert was interviewed via telephone in January 2000 and he copyedited the final transcript.

Chris Knowles: I want to know what you’re reading, drawing, and what you’re listening to in 1975.

Gilbert Hernandez: Holy moley! Okay, I was probably just drawing comics for myself.

Chris: Were you drawing sci-fi kind of material? I remember from the first Love and Rockets Sketchbook that a lot of the material you guys started out doing was pretty standard fan stuff.

Gilbert: Yeah, except when it’s done by us, it’s done good. [laughter] Well, actually, I guess I went through a phase of Flash Gordon-type, romantic science-fiction stories. I was working on an epic at the time… I don’t know what you’d call it… space opera? That type of story.

Chris: With female protagonists?

Gilbert: It was equal in those days, males and females. It didn’t really have a title. I was sort of feeling it along. I never really got to it, as I matured and lost interest in that sort of material.

I kept my notes and stuff. I was doing drawings and writing little parts of stories, but I didn’t have a complete piece.

Chris: Just drawing for your own pleasure?

Gilbert: Yeah. It was a plan to draw sort of a… to come up with a graphic novel, for lack of a better term in those days.

Chris: Did you have visions to work for the big publishers at this point in time?

Gilbert: No, not at all, because I didn’t draw their way. [laughs] Chris: Independent from the very start!

Gilbert: Not because I was being snotty or anything, it was because I didn’t know how they did it, and I didn’t like the rigid requirements that had to go along with it. Going to conventions and talking to professionals, most of them were… [laughs] A lot of them were sort of snotty and not interested in younger artists who didn’t do what they did.

Chris: Were these the fan favorites, or were they the older pros?

Gilbert: These were the younger pros, who were just a little bit older than me. I can’t name names, because I really don’t remember who I talked to.

Chris: It’s not important… fandom was pretty immature at that point in time.

44

Gilbert: And that’s okay for them, but I loved comics, but I didn’t really belong with them. But I also didn’t belong with the underground movement, either.

Chris: Were you reading undergrounds?

Gilbert: Yeah, the ones that came out in the late ’60s: Zap, Freak Brothers, and a few others.

Chris: How about Richard Corben?

Gilbert: Yeah, I enjoyed Richard Corben, even though I knew it was sort of a limited future to it, as far as emulating it.

Chris: So who were you trying to emulate? Were you just drawing in your own style, and just taking it as it comes? Or did you have certain artists in mind that you were trying to model yourself after?

Gilbert: At that time, it was mostly Marvel damage in those days, and damage it was. [laughter] It really put a cork up comics’ butt, as far as creativity goes. I’d look at Savage Sword of Conan, [laughs] you know, but I was wanting it to be better, something else. I appreciated they were for older readers, a black-&-white magazine, but even then I just couldn’t relate to it completely. I related to them because they were comics, but not necessarily what they were about.

Chris: Did you feel kind of stateless at that time? Did you feel there wasn’t anything out there you could feel any kinship towards?

Gilbert: As far as the kind of comics I wanted to do, I enjoyed, I still enjoy Jack Kirby comics and the great cartoonists, but I usually read the comic strips and comic books that were well gone. I’d look at the Kirby comics of the ’60s, I didn’t look to much at the ’70s ones; I didn’t look at comic strips in the paper at the time, I looked at ’30s comic strips. I was just more interested in the quality of that work, which I think for some reason—I blame it on the hippies and the late ’60s, the decline of the mainstream comics.

Chris: You blame the hippies for that?

Gilbert: [laughs] Well, actually it’s just a joke. It’s that things became self-conscious by then. People became so self-aware of what they were doing.

Chris: It was kind of the awkward adolescent phase.

Gilbert: If you look at the comics coming out in that time, the mainstream companies and such, they were just trying to keep up with the kids at this stage, and comics became strange and a little embarrassing.

Chris: They lost that kind of innocence.

Gilbert: Yeah, ’50s and ’60s comic books are pretty goofy and I suppose you can dismiss them, but at the same time, they’re pretty entertaining in a goofy way. They sort of lost that, and now, if anything’s goofy, it’s really self-conscious, like, “Eh, eh? Get it?

We’re funny.”

Chris: One thing that I always liked to look at was the old ’60s Strange Adventures tales, the guy’s got a planet-head or something, they were just so hemmed in by the Code that they just went totally nuts with the kind of stories they were doing to alleviate the boredom.

Gilbert: Actually, my favorite Strange Adventures story is the one where the guy has a computer on his head. It’s similar to the planet on his head guy, but… [laughs] Chris: There was a whole genre of something-head stories. It was like a template or something.

Gilbert: I just looked at one of the DC Archives of the Green Lantern, and they had a cover of The Flash where his head grows really big, right? But inside the issue, his head never grows big! So were they thinking they were selling books with the Flash with a big head? That’s really weird! [laughs] COMIC BOOK ARTIST 15

November 2001

Opposite page: Pencil sketches of various citizens of Palomar by Gilbert Hernandez. Striking a defiant pose is the effervescent revolutionary feminist. Vivá lá Luba! Courtesy of the artist. ©2001 Gilbert Hernandez.

Below: Gilbert’s seminal character Luba here in a 1984 Beto convention sketch with Guadalupe.

Courtesy of J.P. Shannon. ©2001 Gilbert Hernandez.

46

the two styles were very similar for quite some time. There wasn’t a real divergence between your individual styles. At what point did you guys start to break apart?

Gilbert: When Jaime went to college. He has this innate ability that very few artists have, to be able to draw really well from his subconscious. Somehow, when he went to school, it unleashed that. It’s not necessarily that the school taught him how to do that, it helped him unleash it. Once we started Love and Rockets, we were looking at pages, and I thought, “Wow! I didn’t know Jaime could draw this way.” Mario was surprised, too; we did not know he could draw as well as he does.

Chris: Did you regret not going to school when you saw that happen?

Gilbert: You know what? I did go later, but it’s in Jaime, it’s not in me. Nobody else in our family draws anywhere near as well as he does.

Chris: That’s one thing that I’d like to touch upon. The standard line about Love and Rockets is that Jaime was the better artist, and you were the better writer. I always thought that was absurd. I mean, I always thought that both of you did both things equally well, you just worked in different styles.

Gilbert: That’s really kind, but I’d have to agree with the others. [laughter] Jaime has it, Moebius has got it, Jack Kirby had it, Roy Crane had it; they have something we don’t have. [laughter] There’s something that pours from their brain into their arm and no matter how much we learn, we can’t get that. That’s my opinion on it, and Jaime’s got it, and I just don’t have it. So, all my stuff’s pretty labored; it’s difficult for me to draw, and he can close his eyes and do it.

Chris: Well, you seem to be so much more prolific than he is. I mean, it kind of makes me wonder whether it really is a struggle for you to draw.

Gilbert: Well, I’ve accepted my lot.

I’ve accepted being #2, as far as having drawing skill. I know my limits, I know what’s going to be really hard for me to draw, what’s going to be easy, that kind of thing.

Chris: So you’re like Avis. [laughter] Gilbert: I’m #2, I just try harder. I can’t please the way Jaime does, I have to please my way, and I have to do it double-strength, so that might be why I’m a little more prolific.

Chris: Okay, so let’s go back to the late ’70s. You discovered punk rock, you’re starting to hang out on the scene.

What is this doing to your sensibilities, as far as what you want to do with comics?

Gilbert: Well, it’s interesting because that was around the same time Star Wars came out, in ‘77, and even though I didn’t

feel it was a great film, I appreciated that it pushed Flash Gordon to the top, and I looked down on the world saying, “Nyah, nyah! See? I was right!” Flash Gordon and this kind of stuff is cool. Then, of course, I got burned-out right away because it became this ridiculous phenomenon and it ruined movies forever and blah, blah, blah. [laughter] But at the time, I was like, “Yes! Flash Gordon wins! It went up against Annie Hall!” The grown-ups have their movie, but the fans had theirs, and I was really happy about that.

Chris: It was a whole different period then, when you think back on it, because there were so few sci-fi films, and there were so few adventure films. It was a very grown-up period for movies.

Gilbert: Right, this is our movie, and it’s huge! And it got bigger and bigger, and I was like, “Whoa!” I got bored with it really quick.

Chris: It was always easy to do. [laughs] Gilbert: Yeah, unfortunately it influenced a lot of my drawing, because that’s when the magazine Heavy Metal came out, as well.

Interestingly enough, a lot of things came out in ‘77.

Chris: A very important year, in a lot of ways. Watershed.

Gilbert: So, it’s Heavy Metal, then the Star Wars phenomenon. I kept in this science-fiction vein with my drawing. It’s fun to draw rocketships, it’s more fun for me to draw a rocket than a Cadillac… it’s more fun for me to draw an alien than a horse… it’s more fun to draw a robot than a stove. It’s my imagination poring forth, but I had no place to put it. Because, as you said, I was into punk, I was aware of the world and the condition of things and had more insight, and it didn’t apply to the science-fiction thing; the Star Wars/Heavy Metal thing just did not apply, but early issues of Love and Rockets have a lot of science-fiction.

Chris: Because you hadn’t yet purged that?

Gilbert: Yeah, I hadn’t purged that, and it was easy. “What am I going to do? Have this character driving a van or a spaceship?”

Well, I’ll draw a spaceship, and nobody can tell me I drew it wrong. [laughter] Very simple reasoning.

Chris: So, when does what turned out to be Love and Rockets start to take shape?

Gilbert: I was doing stories with whom later became Love and Rockets characters. I did a couple of female characters in sciencefiction stories, but I was more interested in their personal problems, in their personalities. Those stories I worked on for myself, but I also planned to have them actually published one day, hopefully.

Chris: Let’s talk about that middle ground, between underground and mainstream—Cerebus, Elfquest, Sabre, First Kingdom—like the kind of material you were doing.

Gilbert: I could see, “Well, I don’t have to bend over and do Spider-Man, or I don’t have to go the other way and do some rude underground thing or I don’t have to do a Heavy Metal sciencefiction thing.” I thought, “There’s a new place here, and they’re all different.” I mean, I could tell characterization was most important in those new books. I know I just kept those in mind when I was doing work for myself. It just came like a comet, like a meteor crashing to earth. Mario got some time to print at a college, to get a book printed for free, so we thought, “Well, other guys are doing it!” [laughs] We didn’t know what the hell we were doing! So, we just gathered together what we had. Jaime didn’t have much work at the time, so that’s when he started Maggie and Hopey right away, and I had a backlog of sci-fi stuff ready to go.

Chris: You had all the science-fiction stuff you felt obliged to print.

Gilbert: Yeah, and I had this story, “BEM,” that was laying around, so I thought, “Well, I’ll put this in.” There was no plan to take over the world with a new kind of comic or anything like that, we just wanted to get in there. We just liked comics, and we wanted people to read ours. That was it. No big plan.

Chris: That’s how revolutions start. [laughs] Gilbert: So, luckily, Jaime was in top form with his skill, and he dove in, with a completely new strip featuring Maggie and Hopey. It took me a little while before I got to my Heartbreak Soup stuff because I was using backlog material to fill in the first issue of Love and Rockets, and the response from Jaime’s work was so quick, as soon as the first issue of Love and Rockets came out. First people were raving about his drawing, and then they’re raving about the characters in there. And I thought, “Well, what am I doing this sh*t COMIC BOOK ARTIST 15

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for? I’ve got my own realistic characters I want to do.”

Chris: Are you talking about the first Fantagraphics Love and Rockets, or the first self-published Love and Rockets?

Gilbert: Well, I guess I was talking about the Fantagraphics one.

Chris: Did the first self-published one ever get to the stands or the shops?

Gilbert: In small areas. We were living in Ventura County where there was only one comic store there, Ralph’s Comic Corner. Ralph is a real nice guy, and he said, “Sure, I’ll sell these, whatever, just bring them in.”

Chris: Now they’re worth a squedillion dollars.

Gilbert: Well, they aren’t anymore. That’s the trouble with reprints, you can’t hoard your comics anymore.

Chris: Now, I was always unclear on this: Was the material in the self-published also printed in the Fantagraphics version?

Gilbert: Yes, it’s half of the Fantagraphics version. It’s pretty much the same material.

Chris: Let’s talk about how the punk rock fit into this whole oeuvre of ours. You’re going to see bands like The Germs, X… Gilbert: The Go-Go’s… believe it or not, the Go-Go’s were a punk band back then.

Chris: You’d see bands like The Bags, The Avengers and The Zeroes…

Gilbert: Yes, those were the bands to see.

Chris: So, this is the first wave of Cali-punk, which is much, much artier and Bohemian than the second wave, which is much more violent and surfer-y.

Gilbert: But unfortunately, more significant. [laughter] There’s a Catch-22 there. Anyway, yeah, we still loved comics as a medium, November 2001

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 15

but we were more interested in music and partying.

Chris: So you had to figure out how to bridge the twain, so to speak.

You had this Bohemian, arty dominion that you were traveling in, and then you had the ultimate in square, geek things, which were comics.

Gilbert: We started a punk band, but even then I figured The Clash or The Ramones are just so good, and I thought, “Wow, these guys… I wish I could be them, but I can’t! So I want to be them in a different way.” So, we looked at comics, and put our energies into that, and Jaime directly put the punk stuff in his work, and it was like, “Well, there’s two things that we can be original at,” and that was putting punk in comics because rock ’n’ roll, as far as I’m concerned, was for the most part wretched in comic books.

Chris: Like the Alice Cooper comic. [laughter] Gilbert: In Superman comics, some well-meaning 50-year-old guy has to draw The Beatles or something.

Chris: And didn’t know what guitar looked like!

Gilbert: “What, does it have seven strings?” [laughter] I mean, I love those comics now.

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CBA Interview

The Mechanic of Love Jaime Hernandez talks about life with Maggie & Hopey Opposite page: Greg Preston portrait of Jaime Hernandez.

Courtesy of and ©2001 Greg Preston. Center inset: Previously unpublished (and self-rejected) Love and Rockets T-shirt design by Jaime. Courtesy of and ©2001 Jaime Hernandez. Below: Self caricature by Jaime from L&R #40. ©2001 Jaime Hernandez.

Conducted by Chris Knowles Transcribed by Jon B. Knutson Jaime (pronounced “high-me”) Hernandez is perhaps the finest cartoonist to emerge from American comic books in the 1980s. Add one part Dan DeCarlo, throw in a batch of Alex Toth, with a pinch of Charles Schutz and Hank Ketcham for flavor, mix in a whole lot of personal insight, garnish with a rare respect for women, and you might get an idea of what the creator of Maggie, Hopey, Penny Century and numerous other females is all about. Jaime was interviewed by phone in Jan. 2000 and he copyedited the transcript.

Chris Knowles: When I talked to Gilbert last night, the question I started off with was, what were you doing in 1975? How many years younger are you than Gilbert?

Jaime Hernandez: A couple.

Chris: Okay, so I’m going to start off with you: What were you doing in 1977?

Jaime: In 1977, I was a senior in high school, and I had not discovered punk, but I had heard of it. [laughs] Chris: Were you listening to Kiss at the time, like Gilbert was? [laughs] Jaime: In ’75 and ’76, I was… by ’77, they were disappointing me already. I think the “Destroyer” days are gone. Those “Love Gun” days. I just don’t like them that much any more, but I was the biggest Kiss fan in the world in 1975.

Chris: Gilbert said that Star Wars had an amazing impression on him in 1975.

Jaime: Yeah, I guess I would say not as big on me, but big enough. I saw it later than most people, but I was bowled over, and Star Wars was the thing, and all that stuff. I’d graduated high school and I was thinking about breaking into fanzines. Comic fanzines, little cheap things or just these real small-time publishing things.

Chris: Were you submitting any of your work back then?

Jaime: That’s when I started. I would say right after I graduated was when I started concentrating on actually using pen and ink to draw with, because it was usually ball-point pen and stuff like that before. Let’s see… I did my first story, I got my first story published in a fanzine called Fandom Circus.

Chris: Was anybody involved in that who went on to do other things?

Jaime: I was in the second issue; Jerry Ordway was in the first issue.

Chris: No kidding? So that’s quite a pedigree.

Jaime: The second issue, I think I was with—do you remember the guy, B.C. Boyer?

Chris: Yeah, The Masked Man. Jaime: Yeah. I don’t think he does anything any more, but yeah, he was in the same issue. I still didn’t know anybody, all this was through the mail.

Chris: Were you guys kind of isolated? Did you go to cons back then?

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Jaime: I would say about that time, I had gone to my first or second con. We would drive to LA from Oxnard, it was about an hour away, we’d drive downtown and go to these cons at the Biltmore.

Chris: Were these big cons, or were these kind of little shows where they’d be just mostly for sellers?

Jaime: It was small shows, but in those days, professionals went. [laughs] Well, anybody who lived in LA, I guess.

Chris: There wasn’t the kind of comics community back then in LA, because it was still mostly based in New York.

Jaime: There were a few people here, and also because a lot of guys came here to work in animation, so they lived here and they were really transplanted from New York or the Midwest or something.

Chris: Did you meet any real big names at any of these shows?

Jaime: Well, I kind of tagged along with Gilbert and Mario, who were also breaking into their comics. They were actually working on a big, long comics story. They didn’t know it was called a graphic novel. I just tagged along, and I said, “Well, I’ll do my little fanzines, and maybe one day, I’ll be like the guys.”

Chris: Any chance of that material ever getting reprinted, or is it long gone?

Jaime: Parts of them have been reprinted, like in our Sketchbook and things like that. If you go to a con and go through the fanzine box from somebody’s table, you might find something I did, but it was all few and far between. I must say, those old fanzine editors were a lot worse than professional editors! [laughs] Chris: They were like little Hitlers?

Jaime: Yeah, they really took themselves very seriously! They really treated us like we didn’t exist, you know? They f*cked with the work, they’d mark on it and all this stuff, so I thought, “This was it?

This is comics?” [laughs] Chris: It wasn’t a good introduction.

Jaime: No, but you know, I didn’t really expect anything. It wasn’t that big a blow. I didn’t expect to be treated like royalty, but at the same time, I knew there was an artistic integrity in me, you know?

Chris: Gilbert told me at this point, I guess you took some drawing classes at a community college?

Jaime: Yeah, that was from ’78 to ’79.

Chris: And he said your work just really took off at that point.

Jaime: I went to college because I was being paid, because when my dad died, we had some kind of Social Security deal where, if I took enough credits in college, they would pay me $300 a month, COMIC BOOK ARTIST 15

November 2001

and that’s better than working! [laughs] Chris: Nothing wrong with that!

Jaime: So I said, “Okay, I’ll go to college, I’ll take dumb classes. Gee, what do I like to do? Oh, art! Okay.” So I took art, and I just happened to be there at a time when there was this great art department of these old men who had been there since the ’50s!

Chris: Guys wearing the old Bridgeman/Andrew Loomis kind of style?

Jaime: Yeah, and they were all established, real artist guys, like real training.

Chris: A lot of them working in Hollywood at the time?

Jaime: I don’t know about Hollywood, but I knew there was a teacher there who used to draw Daniel Boone or something like that, the comic strip. There were these very distinguished, old-fashioned kind of guys. My life drawing teacher just happened to turn my art upside-down, I don’t know how he did it to this day. I don’t know how teachers teach.

Chris: What Gilbert seemed to think was there was something in you that was waiting to come out, and it was just kind of uncorked at school.

Jaime: Yeah, I guess so. Also, that was at the time when we just dove into punk, so I was just really excited about my life again. I mean, I came aback to life… I was dead since sixth grade. I was just a whole new human being again. It was just very exciting; I was just having a blast, you know?

Chris: The impression seems to be that you went for the punk thing a lot more than any of your brothers did.

Jaime: Me? I would say Gilbert and I and my younger brother, but it ended up me and my younger brother went a lot further.

Chris: And his name was?

Jaime: He’s Emile, he’s in a punk band. He’s in an old band, doing the old comeback routine.

Chris: What’s the name?

Jaime: Doctor Know Chris: You got a lot of hand bills for them. So, let me ask you this: I was talking to Steve Rude, and he was telling me he’s well-known for being the big Andrew Loomis freak.

Was there a particular book or a great old drawing technique book that you latched onto and didn’t let go of?

Jaime: No, you know, most of the stuff I learned was hands-on by doing it in class.

Chris: Okay, so it was the school that did it.

Jaime: I really liked that book… what was the guy? Jack Hamm.

Chris: Oh! [laughs] I’ve got that book right here! You know—just as a little aside here—I knew that about you. I didn’t know that until now, but I remember when I was a kid, I was so into the work you were doing, and I remember I bought that book, and somehow it just clicked… I saw the connection there! [laughs] Jaime: It’s not like I would copy drawings from them, but it was like I would just look at them, like a reference book. Like sitting on the toilet, I would need something to read. [laughs] I would look at them, and enjoy them, and somehow that seeped in or something. I still don’t know how, to this day, exactly how I learned to draw, you know? [laughs] Chris: It just happened.

Jaime: Other than drawing over and over, keep drawing.

Chris: That’s really the only way it happens. And then, feeding your mind at the same time.

Jaime: I’ve never looked at things in a research academic way, I just somehow let November 2001

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57

CBA Interview

Wagner: The Artist Defined Talking with creator Matt Wagner on Grendel and Mage Below: First design of Kevin Matchstick as he appears in Mage: The Hero Defined.

Courtesy of and ©2001 Matt Wagner.

Conducted by Chris Knowles Transcribed by Jon B. Knutson Writer/artist Matt Wagner first came to prominence in the mid-1980s in the pages of Comico’s first color comic, Mage, a hero Matt created. Soon a back-up strip appeared in the same title featuring a character that would prove to be Matt’s longest-lasting and most profitable franchise, Grendel. This interview took place in January 2001 and was copyedited by Matt.

Chris Knowles: Let’s start from the beginning, Matt: Where are you originally from?

Matt Wagner: The middle of Pennsylvania, near a very small town. The closest landmark town would probably be State College, where the main campus of Penn State is located.

Chris: Up in the north country there, with those beautiful pine trees?

Matt: Yep. We usually had to cross a mountain to go to our nearest relative.

Chris: Where did you get your comics?

Matt: Just off the newsstands.

My mom was an English teacher. She quit actively teaching when she became a mom, but that’s how I got my first exposure to comics.

She didn’t care that I was reading comics, so long as I was reading.

Chris: It seems a lot of people who got into comics had teachers for parents.

Matt: She thought I’d grow out of them [laughter]… instead of growing into them!

Chris: When did you start reading comics?

Matt: I was very, very young. In fact, I remember one of my most traumatic punishments when I was a kid was… oh, I forget why, but my parents took my comics away for one or two months, something like that.

They took the comics, stuck them on a shelf in the garage which was excruciating because they were in plain sight. I was allowed to see that they were still there, but wasn’t allowed to have them.

Chris: What we do with our kids today is take away their video games.

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Matt: Same sort of thing, right? I also found comics in those pack deals. My parents frequented lots of county fairs, farmers’ markets, that sort of thing, and you always found those periodical stands that had the packs of four or five comics in it with the covers half ripped off.

Chris: The ones that weren’t supposed to be sold! [laughs] Matt: Right. The ones that were cashed in by newsstands as returnables. But I garnered a lot of comics that way. I didn’t love that the covers were half ripped off, but on another level I didn’t care because I was more interested in what was inside.

Chris: What kind of stuff were you reading?

Matt: Well, there was only Marvel and DC and some Mickey Mouse comics and stuff like that. I was born in ’61, so this is probably mid-’60s, 1965 to ’70, something like that. I mainly liked DCs, for the reason that the stories had endings, whereas in that period, the Marvel stories went on and on and on. I’ve always found it a great irony that I then grew up to write these long, epic storylines that go on and on and on! [laughs] I didn’t like that as a kid. So I enjoyed DCs. And also, DC at that time started doing a lot of those large-sized reprint stuff… the 100-Page Super-Spectaculars, which had lots of reprints of Golden Age stuff, the period my parents grew up in (they were fairly older when they had me). My dad remembers buying the first Action Comics and the first Detective, though he never kept them, of course. So, through them, I had a nostalgia for that period and those kind of stories, and when DC started reprinting those stories, that just clicked with me Big Time.

Chris: When did you start drawing?

Matt: When I was very young. I don’t remember when, really, but my mom says that when I was three years old, I’d say, “Mommy, draw me a cow,” and I could already draw a cow better than she could. I wasn’t really athletic as a kid, so I drew a whole lot. As a fledgling artist, you tend to copy other people’s work, copy panels out of comics and stuff like that, and at some point, fairly young, I realized I was going to have to stop doing that and try to draw my own drawings.

Chris: Did you make up your own characters?

Matt: Let’s see, what was the first one? I can’t remember how old I was… sixth grade, maybe fifth… I called him “Granite Man,” who had magic wristbands that made his fists granite-hard. And he could fly! [laughs] Of course, that only makes sense to a kid: Granite fists… and he can fly!

Chris: Were you planning on pursuing a career as an artist pretty early on?

Matt: Yeah. Also, my parents have a “school memories” book from when I was young and on the back of each page in grade school, it says, “What I want to be when I grow up.” One year I wrote “astronaut,” and every other year I wrote “comic book writer.” I think I assumed whoever wrote comics also drew them as well.

Chris: You weren’t reading the credits then, I guess. [laughs].

Matt: Right. Well, a lot of comics didn’t have noticeable credits.

Initially, I think the team of Irv Novick and Dick Giordano were the first two names I started recognizing in comics.

Chris: They would’ve been doing Batman about the time DC started actually playing up the credits in the books. Did you have a lot of friends you hung out with that read comics?

Matt: I had a few, and had more as I got older, of course. My family moved around a few times, too, due to my dad’s job, so I’d COMIC BOOK ARTIST 15

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get to a different environment, and there’d be other kids that I didn’t know who, yes, were into comics, too. And so then I just made connections that way.

Chris: At any point in your school days, did you start getting involved with organized fandom?

Matt: No, almost not at all. I had always lived in very rural areas to begin with, and then kind of suburbanally, and then rural again, so I didn’t have access to any organized scene. I knew it was out there, and had been to a couple of conventions when I was about 13 or so, but those were absolute larks as far as me getting to go to them; I didn’t have regular access to go to that sort of thing—stores or shows.

Chris: When you were younger, you never got the Comic Buyer’s Guide or any fanzines?

Matt: I did get CBG for an extremely short time, and I think the reason it was a short period was because I had to pay for it. [laughs] My parents wouldn’t give me money for it, I had to pay for it. After the first subscription or so, I let it run out. That was in the real early days of CBG, when they were still running big, illustrated covers every issue. Then, my family moved to Virginia, and we were really kind of out in the woods there, and I had to drive an hour, hour and a half, to get to any small little comic book store. I just didn’t have much access to the comics world.

Chris: How did you go from being an illustration major to getting interested in comics again?

Matt: By moving to Philadelphia and meeting some guys who exposed me to a lot of the renaissance that was going on at that time. Byrne had been making some marks on X-Men, and he did a run on Captain America for a while, and I had seen those kind of briefly, but these guys showed me Frank Miller and… at that point, I was within walking distance of a pretty good comic book store, so I suddenly had access to the early Amazing Heroes and Comics Journals, etc… and it just led me into a whole wider branch of what was available.

Chris: Did you hang around South Street a lot?

Matt: Yeah, down on South Street. But the store I shopped at… you know Fat Jack’s Comic Crypt? That’s the big chain in Philly, and that was the store we shopped at. I want to backtrack for a second and say another huge influence on me was in the mid-’70s when Warren started reprinting The Spirit.

Chris: They always had those great airbrushed covers.

Matt: The great airbrushed covers, and the stories were so unusual compared to the contemporary comics at the time. They were tidy eight-page segments, far more cinematic than you saw in newsstand comics. They had such pathos and often focused on the mundane aspects of life rather than the bustling, bursting super-hero books, you know? Often, The Spirit himself would only appear in one panel, usually near the end, but his presence was still felt so strongly throughout the entire story.

Chris: The thing that strikes you about that is just that allpervasive mood.

Matt: The all-pervasive mood, and The Spirit was such a human character. He got the sh*t beat out of him all the time, you know?

I’ll never forget a sequence, a really great story about a sniper, a mass murderer/sniper who’s holed up, and The Spirit busts in to save the day and gets shot in his shins with a machine gun! This storyline continued for several weeks—these eight-page stories were originally released every week as a supplement to the Sunday papers—so that continued for several weeks where he was hobbling around in crutches, and he was going to have to undergo surgery, and they November 2001

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 15

didn’t think they were going to be able to save him, and they were going to have to amputate his legs! Oh, it was a tremendous sequence, and I remember being just so struck by the sense or repercussion and consequence, which you didn’t get in a lot of in contemporary comics at the time, you know? Most of the super-heroes that had that sort of element in their “origin,” like Batman losing his parents, only experienced that kind of trauma in the beginning of their story, and Batman doesn’t suffer a lot after that. I suppose Spider-Man counts as having a fairly consistent tragedy in his stories, but really it’s only recently that they’ve started to explore the sort of dimensions. So that had a big, big influence on me.

Chris: I assume that you followed that into the Frank Miller Daredevil material.

Matt: Yeah, right, I was going to say that Miller…

Miller was just kind of coming

Inset left: Detail of Matt Wagner’s cover art for Grendel: Black, White, & Red #4, an anthology miniseries featuring Wagner-scribed tales illustrated by many of today’s best artists. Courtesy of Shawna Ervin-Gore & Dark Horse Comics. ©2001 Matt Wagner.

Below: A photo of Matt Wagner around the time Mage first started; 1983 or ’84. Courtesy of Matt Wagner.

into his big stride there, and it was like nothing else I’d ever seen. You really cared what happened in the next issue! [laughs] My buddies and I were all so damned poor, we could only afford to buy one copy of things, so we’d chip in and buy one communal copy of the big Bullseye/Elektra fight. [laughs] We drew straws to see who got to read it first! [laughter] Then it was passed around.

Chris: So that brought you back into the fold.

Matt: Yeah. And much stronger than I had before. Much deeper.

Chris: Tell me about these gentlemen you met who were going to start Comico.

Matt: The initial line-up of partners, I guess you would call it—I don’t know if they actually were drawn up in contract form at that point—were the two guys that I had went to school with: A fellow named Jerry Giovinco and Bill Cucinotta. Giovinco was high school friends with a fellow named Phil Lasorda, and another guy named Vince Argendezzi. Those were the four guys that showed up in the first issue of Comico Primer, it was their gig and it was their four stories. I forget what Argendezzi’s was even called, but Giovinco did Slaughterman, Cucinotta did Skrog, and Lasorda did Az. Those three characters led to the first batch of individual 67

CBA Interview

Mister X-Man Motter A tour through the City of Nightmares with the artist/writer Opposite page: Mystery man Dean Motter poses in an urban setting for this photo. Courtesy of and ©2001 Dean Motter.

Below: Megatron Man vinyl record cover illustration by Dean Motter featuring the first visualization of Mister X. Attic Records, 1981.

Courtesy of & ©2001 Dean Motter.

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Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Brian K. Morris Dean Motter is a triple-threat comic book guy: Writer, artist and— perhaps most prominently—one of the finest graphic designers to ever work in the field. In the mid-1980s, Dean brought a new design sensibility to comics, a medium long in need of a sophisticated graphic approach. Since introducing Mister X, the creator went on to produce a number of memorable comics including The Prisoner, Terminal City and the current Image title, Electropolis. Interviewed by phone on September 6, 2001, Dean copy-edited the final transcript.

Comic Book Artist: Where were you from originally?

Dean Motter: I’m from just outside of Cleveland. We moved to Canada when I was in high school. I decided to go to college there in London, Ontario.

CBA: Did you have an artistic interest early on?

Dean: Oh, yeah. I learned to draw, quite a bit, from comic books.

I had a pretty steady diet of comics based from about the third or fourth grade on. My uncle, who lived with us for a while, and grandmother—and my parents—would buy Batman and other comics for me occasionally. It wasn’t long before I was going down to the corner store, picking up stuff myself, putting my candy money towards comics.

CBA: Was it mostly super-hero stuff?

Dean: Yeah. At that time, that’s all that was let in the house. Horror comics still had a bad reputation. This is still early ’60s, late ’50s. But they still had a leftover reputation even though they had pretty much cleaned up. So I think it was felt that super-hero fare was harmless enough that it was let in. As a child, I read mostly DC. CBA: Did you start recognizing artists’ styles? Were you particularly clued in to certain ones?

Dean: At that time, I especially recognized Dick Sprang and Curt Swan and some of the mainstay, stylistic artists over at DC. I would collect what I could of theirs—well, I wasn’t collecting them, just more or less accumulating them—and when I would sporadically see their artwork, I would buy it.

CBA: Were you into the Dell or Disney stuff?

Dean: The cartoon stuff didn’t really appeal to me, it seemed too childish. The first material I remember getting outside of the superhero genre was, I guess, the Gold Key and Dell TV adaptations. When Gold Key started publishing Magnus, Robot Fighter and Space Family Robinson, those books started to appeal to me because it wasn’t so much costumed heroes but still had a nice, stylistic flair. I’d always been a fan of Tarzan, The Phantom and Dick Tracy Sunday papers so when I came across Tarzan comic books, that was a bit of an epiphany.

CBA: Did you actually draw your own comic stories as a child?

Dean: Of course. [laughs] I must have created I don’t know how many Justice Leagues. [laughs] Thousands of characters! But later on in high school, when I first moved to Canada, I came across some fans drawing their own books and publishing them. And I realized I might be able to actually have something published if I worked hard at it. This is when I came across the fan press in a big way.

CBA: Did you contribute to fanzines?

Dean: After I got out of high school, I did. When I first went to college, there was a fanzine, a sort of a tabloid called Media Five. It was coming out of Ontario and I came across it in what they call “smoke shops” which, basically, was just a corner newsstand (the fanzine had managed to secure some kind of distribution. I think the publisher was probably distributing it himself). So I got in touch with him. His name was Bill Paul and one thing led to another and I soon became the art director, designer, and main illustrator for Media Five for several years.

CBA: Media Five contained your first published work?

Dean: Yeah. I’d made attempts to get published a couple of times, but this was my early college years and one of my elected thesis projects was to write and illustrate a comic book. So I did a 24-page story called “Andromeda” which eventually formed the basis for the Andromeda comic out of Toronto. But it started out originally as a tabloid that I wrote and drew in college for my senior year.

CBA: Did you go to comic conventions at all?

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Dean: Yes. I think the first convention I went to was a Star Trek convention in Toronto, during high school. Later on in college, I was really going to Cosmicon, the annual convention held in Toronto at York University. I met a lot of my future colleagues there including Ken Steacy who I continued to work with for several years—and still do occasionally.

CBA: Was there quite a creative community in Toronto?

Dean: Oh my, yes! One of the earliest comic book shops, the Silver Snail, came out of the backroom of the science-fiction bookstore, Bakka Books. The Silver Snail attracted all kinds of aspiring and working professionals, semi-professionals—people who wanted to break into the business—people who wanted to break into any business—people who had been professional illustrators for years and hadn’t entered the comics realm. It was a focal point for quite a large community.

CBA: Did you find yourself hanging out with a lot of these guys?

Dean: Oh, yeah and we all had our own peculiar tastes. I was out of college by that time and I had been working in the music industry as a record cover designer for quite a while. First, for CBS Records and then for my own studio, Diagram. I worked for just about every record company that had Canadian records coming out at the time, which was most of them. Comics had become a hobby more than anything else. It was something to do in the afternoon and the evenings and people to hang out with. Occasionally, I would hire some of those comic book artists in Toronto to do album covers. I hired Paul Rivoche a couple times to do jackets and promotions for me. When I was at CBS, he was a fledgling illustrator. I think Paul aspired more to be a paperback illustrator, to do science-fiction covers and he was quite an accomplished airbrush artist at a very early age. A community eventually formed in the city but it had its own cliques. It had a super-hero clique which I wasn’t really part of but it had a science-fiction one of which I was. And we concentrated on that for years.

CBA: Were you an avid science-fiction reader?

Dean: Not too much as a kid, but in college, I was living on a pretty good diet of a lot of New Wave stuff. J.G. Ballard, Harlan Ellison, and Phillip K. Dick were particular favorites.

CBA: What college did you attend?

Dean: Fanshawe Community College, an arts and technology college in London, Ontario. I originally took a fine arts course but eventually changed over to electronic media—or new media—course. That curriculum was taught by people who had worked with Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan. I studied holography, geodesics, the emerging videotape medium and all kinds of electronic, New Age, forward-thinking philosophy based on McLuhan and Fuller. I eventually wrote and directed two multimedia plays which were both, actually, just disguised comic books.

They were very fantasy-oriented, deriving themselves more from the works of Jack Kirby than the theatre like Pinter, Tharp and Brecht, that I was citing at the time. [laughs] But they were quite successful local productions and very ambitious, inspired by the success of Warp [the 1970s Stuart Gordon/Neal Adams play] on Broadway. I was sure we could do the same thing using college resources and we actually did pretty good.

CBA: I assume you developed an interest in Jack Kirby’s work?

Dean: I did in college, though not much interest in public school. Actually, my brother was more interested in Kirby at that time because I found Jack’s style to be too exaggerated. When I was in high school, my brother was into Marvel and I was into DC, and we had an ongoing feud for a while. [laughs] He recognized Kirby’s expressionistic quality much before I did. At that time, I was much more of a Neal Adams/Al Williamson/Wally Wood fan and I was much more attuned to trying to keep it real, rendering things as realistically as possible. But when I got to college, my appreciation of art actually matured enough that suddenly my eyes were opened to any number of different things, including Kirby. Probably because I was expected to know something about these things and professing to be a bit of an expert. When I arrived there, my reputation was of a Comic Book Guy. I even drew a comic strip for the school newspaper, and things like that.

CBA: What was the strip called?

Dean: The first year, I did a take-off of Vaughn Bodé called The Great Transatlantic Balloon Race, The second-year sequence was just called The Funny Pages, made up of different things.

CBA: Were you exposed to underground comix at a certain point?

Dean: As soon as I became aware of them, I assimilated them as quickly as I could. I was in college so I became exposed to R. Crumb, Robert Williams, Trina Robbins, Vaughn Bodé and all those folks at the same time. I would tend to mimic the artists as carefully as I could and I really didn’t develop my own style, really just imitating others at which I became very adept. I could do really good takes on Neal Adams and Crumb, and eventually a decent Moebius. I was copying and aping not so much the content of their work, but their line styles and things like that. But I had to become a bit of a historian as well. The more I became involved with Marshall McLuhan’s son Eric and later, his father’s work, I was sort of coerced and forced into becoming a bit of a historian on comics for the college, providing a resource for their November 2001

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Above left: Album cover art for The Tenants Visions of Our Future LP. Illustration and design by Dean Motter. If you look real small, you’ll see Mister X in the background. Courtesy of the artist. ©1985 Epic Records. Above right: Triumph Surveilance LP cover.

Design and art direction by Dean Motter. Illustration by Paul Rivoche. Courtesy of Dean Motter. ©1986 RCA Records.

Below left: Triumph Thunder Seven LP Cover. Illustration by Dean Motter. Courtesy of the artist. ©1987 RCA Records. Below right: Loverboy LP cover. Art direction and design by Dean Motter.

Photograph by Barbara Astman.

Courtesy of Dean Motter. ©1981 CBS Records.

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New Media department.

CBA: Fanshawe was a pretty progressive college that recognized comics as being a valid medium?

Dean: It was very progressive, though not by design. More by the fact that it attracted a lot of eccentric professors in the creative arts courses. They were encouraged to develop their own curriculum. So when I went from fine arts and figure drawing, which became pretty avant gardé after a while, over to electronic media, they were already building a multi-track recording studio—one of the first in Canadian colleges—and it also became the first recording arts course in North America. My Communication Arts professors were also part of that revolutionary ’70s special Canadian thinking, where we didn’t have quite as many social barriers to overcome as the American academic community at that time. There wasn’t as much social movement going on in Canada because they weren’t participating in the Vietnam war to any significant degree, as the U.S. did, and the civil issues weren’t as volatile. So Canada had all this creative energy and living so close to the United States, all the angst and the creative forces were spilling over the border but not too many of the causes. They really devoted themselves more to the arts and sciences than social issues. So in a lot of ways, it was hard not to be a progressive college at that time in that part of the country.

CBA: Did Canada develop its own specific approach to comics at all? Not a lot of comics were being produced, but was there a unique sensibility?

Dean: There was eventually. There was a Canadian history of comics that eventually petered out, a post-war industry. In the years I was working, it was all about imitating American comics, and it wasn’t

until we started publishing Andromeda out of The Silver Snail (where I was the art director and editor), that an aesthetic actually began to emerge from the Canadian books. Was it different? I don’t know. The Canadian super-hero business just never got off the ground. They tried very hard for years to create Canadian equivalents of American super-heroes, and all of it was derivative. But what we were especially keen on doing, was trying to create a legitimacy not just for Canadian comics but comics in general. So we really wanted to create something that we all aspired to; which were comics that everybody could read or comics that adults would read or comics that appealed to the people other than comic book fans. And that’s why we worked pretty specifically in the science-fiction area for a long time. Eventually, we took it into fantasy and other things, but some of our other colleagues working at the time were into a kind of humor like Dave Sim’s— satire—and they were beginning to veer away from super-heroes and, as such, they weren’t operating in the same ghetto that most of the American comics were at the time. They were striving to be literature on their own level a lot earlier than American comics were.

CBA: What was the genesis of Andromeda?

Dean: Well, the owner of The Silver Snail, Ron Van Leeuwen, was a heavy science-fiction fan. He wanted to develop and publish adaptations of science-fiction stories long before Byron Preiss started doing it. Ron had the money. The Silver Snail was doing well and he started a distribution business, handling pretty much all of the comics distribution in Canada. He was ready to do a fandom press project and thus he founded Andromeda magazine. He bought the title from the fellow that published my thesis in London, Ontario, and we started our first issue with a James Tiptree story. In the following issue, we adapted an Arthur C. Clarke story that Paul Rivoche illustrated.

We went on for—I forget how many issues—but it was quite a number. The comic was black-&-white and every issue featured an adaptation of a major author’s story. This was before the authors’ agents thought there was any money to be had. Ron was able to get the rights to specific short stories by a lot of these guys for a song.

We had Arthur C. Clarke, Harlan Ellison, Tiptree, and the list went on.

I did an adaptation of an A.E. Van Vogt story. It was quite a ride.

CBA: Was that comic book-sized or was it 81/2” x 11”?

Dean: No, it was comic book-size.

CBA: Was Andromeda at the same time that Star*Reach was being published?

Dean: Star*Reach had opened the door for an alternative comic that wasn’t underground.

Something that the distributors and the stores would carry that wasn’t DC or Marvel or R. Crumb, that there could be something else, and wasn’t a fanzine.

CBA: It was distributed through Bud Plant and Phil Seuling?

Dean: Yes, it had national distribution.

CBA: Can you give us a rough idea of what the print run was?

Dean: I don’t know. It was sizeable. It did very well, well enough that Ron started a sister COMIC BOOK ARTIST 15

November 2001

CBA Interview

Rivoche’s Mr. X Files The artist on the up-and-down creation of Mister X Opposite page: Paul Rivoche in 1982, just prior to starting conceptual work on Mister X. Courtesy of Paul Rivoche.

Below: One of Paul Rivoche’s stunning and sophisticated Mister X posters, released prior to the series’ debut to create a buzz among comics readers. Courtesy of the artist. ©2001 Vortex Comics, Inc.

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Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Brian K. Morris Like Sandy Plunkett, Paul Rivoche is often an overlooked commodity in the comic book world. A superb designer and expert artist, Paul has a profound respect for the work of comic book masters (as indicated by Paul’s interview with Alex Toth published in Comic Book Artist #11) and infuses lessons learned into his own work. While his comic book work is sparse, thankfully the artist is increasing his involvement in the field. Much appreciation goes to Paul for sharing so much archival work with CBA. The artist was interviewed by telephone on September 7, 2001 and he copyedited the final transcript.

Comic Book Artist: Paul, where are you from?

Paul Rivoche: I was born in Tucson, Arizona, and later grew up in a number of different places. My family moved to New York City, Montreal, then Kingston, and later Ottawa; different experiences, different lengths of time. The longest time we lived in one city was in Ottawa, where I spent my pre-high school and high school years.

CBA: When did you start reading comics?

Paul: Oh, boy. It would have to be maybe around 1965 or ’66.

CBA: What books were you into?

Paul: Mostly DC. I remember going to one of those old-type corner stores, and it would be in Montreal, around 1966, ’67, in which case I would have been around seven years old. I remember they had all the racks of comics and I remember being mostly attracted to the DC comics. For whatever reason, I just never really got into Marvel. I remember noticing them but I remember all kinds of DC stuff.

“Enemy Ace” in Star Spangled War Stories was a favorite. Stuff like The Hawk and the Dove, Secret Six, all that great stuff. I remember reading some “Legion of Super-Heroes” comics. It’s all mixed up in just wonderful memories of those early days.

CBA: Did you start drawing at a young age?

Paul: The first memory I have of drawing is going to the YMCA swimming class in Montreal, which didn’t go well. The part that was good was being in the cafeteria afterwards. I must have been six or seven years old, and a kid challenged me to a contest to draw Superman, which I lost because he did a really good Superman. [laughs] So that must have spurred me, somehow, to either just notice comics or be interested in them and then try drawing like them. They fascinated me. I not only read comics but I avidly copied stuff, and I drew my own comics from an early age. My parents were good enough to get me a desk in the corner of our apartment in Montreal. I had my own little oak desk with drawers and a lamp, and I used to sit there with my work, every day after school and industriously draw all these comics.

CBA: Were they full stories?

Paul: They were my attempt at it. Sometimes, they’d be longer or shorter, like any kid that does this. Sometimes, they were attempted epics that got stopped in mid-stream or abandoned. Some were actually completed but then you notice a definite tail-off towards the end, that I lost interest and just wanted to get it finished. Most of them were in pencil. A lot later, when I started figuring out how the pros did it, I experimented with trying to ink them. But the early ones, they were either done in colored pencil or in pencil, stapled together.

CBA: Did you share your homemade comics with your parents or friends?

Paul: I think I probably showed them to my parents. I don’t believe they were really all that interested in the sense of constantly looking at what I was doing. And I don’t remember a very strong urge to show anybody, but I do remember a powerful urge to just do them for myself. I was completely fascinated with storytelling, with the medium, the actual combination of words and pictures, the magic in that. I did a lot of early kid writing too. By grade two or three, I was drawing pictures to accompany short stories that I’d written at whatever crude level. I remember my older brother showing a bit of an interest in comics and watching what I was doing, but I don’t remember my parents as being overly interested. But they certainly didn’t discourage my interest in comics. Like I said, they gave me the equipment I needed, a pencil and a place to work, and that made me feel important.

CBA: Were you a comics collector?

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 15

November 2001

the comics of that period and I’m still not. I certainly couldn’t see how I could make a contribution or fit into that production line. I wanted to learn to develop my own stuff, my own style. I didn’t want to fit into the “Marvel Look”, or any rigidly set “Look” for that matter. So I thought to myself, “I’m going to have to make money somehow, these guys are well-rounded artists... yeah, why not? I’ll follow their example. I’m not above doing advertising work...” or as it turned out, animation work at Nelvana Animation. I adapted myself to the realities of my situation.

CBA: What was Nelvana doing at the time?

Paul: They were just getting going. They had done a series of TV specials that had done well and were ambitiously doing the feature film Rock and Rule, as it was finally called. I wanted in there as now I needed a steady source of steady work because I was just struggling like crazy, living in the Cockroach Motel [laughs], as we called the apartment I shared with fellow young commercial artist Peter Bielicki.

It was around Christmas 1979, I believe, just turning into 1980. One snowy day, in desperation and at the end of my tether in terms of bank account, I happened to wander into The Silver Snail and Ron or one of the guys said, “They’re looking for people at Nelvana Animation—you should go for it.” So I just kept bugging Nelvana until I finally got hired by Frank Nissen, a wonderful artist and designer, who now works for Disney I believe. It took a while to get hired at Nelvana. They didn’t say yes right away, because I was pretty inexperienced, but I guess I had the right kind of enthusiasm. I did what they asked me and just kept at it. Frank said, “Go off and keep sketching, keep showing me your stuff.” He was mad about Moebius. They showed me all this Moebius stuff and I tried to follow that, filling a sketchbook with doodles and designs, and I just kept showing up until they finally said, “Okay, you can be a background designer.” Then I was in the door! It was honestly like heaven—one of the happiest days of my life.

CBA: Was the pay good?

Paul: It was great. For a kid, and back then, it was $400 a week, and I think they raised it up to $440! It was just like a gold mine. [laughs] I was just euphoric the day I was hired. It was like some kind of drug [laughs] because it was external validation for my struggling, just the biggest boost. I was accepted, validated as an artist, and I had done it on my own. It solved all these problems. I had the money, finally, to survive for at least a couple of years and I was in a community of artists that I could learn from and I did. I had tried going to art college, the Ontario College of Art, for a few months the year after I’d gone to university. But I left that too because it was fart-art mostly—it was just not serious craft training. But my school became Nelvana Animation. People like Frank Nissen, Don Marshall and Louis Kay (a brilliant background painter) were my instructors. I just watched these guys and learned from them and that was better than any art college.

CBA: Did you work on any animated series?

Paul: Back then they weren’t doing series, but these TV specials. For example, one was called A Cosmic Christmas, and they did a bunch of others. After that they aspired to go the Disney route. It was later that they became the modern Nelvana, becoming a major player in producing series animation.

But they only did that after they failed with their feature, Rock and Rule—it was just a disaster. It bombed. I left the company a little while before it was actually released because I knew the ship was sinking. It did so badly, put them in such financial troubles, that even though they were reluctant to become a series producer, they were forced to. So they sort of transmogrified into what they are today.

CBA: When you were freelancing for Dean, was that subsequent to Nelvana?

Paul: Once I got the Nelvana job, I did less for him, doing only occasional work. I still kept my spot in the studio which I November 2001

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 15

shared with Ken and Dean and a bunch of others. I used to go there at night after work at Nelvana and I used to do various freelance jobs, and it was still pretty intensive, you know. I was just a basket case. [laughs] It was a bit nutty, but I didn’t want to give it up because it was part of my identity to have my own studio spot, separate from Nelvana.

CBA: Did you guys look south? Did you aspire to come into America or you were happy where you were?

Paul: It never was a priority for me frankly, and not because I have anything against the U.S., like a lot of Canadians do.

I was born there, and I love the U.S. But I just never felt the need to actually move there.

CBA: And this was just with the advent of FedEx and desktop publishing hadn’t really started yet.

Paul: No, it had not. From the mid- to late ’80s, I kept freelancing. I managed to get enough commercial artwork, mostly from Toronto but increasingly, as things went on, I got more and more from the U.S., mostly through having an agent, which helped. As the age of faxes and FedEx came on, I guess my share of U.S. work increased and that always helped, but it wasn’t a huge priority. Now, I do virtually all of my work for the U.S. CBA: Can you outline your remembrance

Above: Line art for the first Mister X teaser poster. Courtesy of the artist, Paul Rivoche. ©2001 Vortex Comics, Inc.

Inset left: Marker rough for unrealized Mister X poster by Paul Rivoche. Below: Detail of our (anti) hero by Paul. Courtesy of the artist.

Mister X ©2001 Vortex Comics, Inc. Art ©2001 Paul Rivoche.

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CBA Interview

Sandy Plunkett is the Best Artist You Never Heard Of Tim Barnes interviews the renderer extraordinaire Right inset: Mrs. Plunkett and her two children, Sandy and Michéle.

Sandy writes, “Looks as though it’s from another century, doesn’t it?

Guess it is, actually!” Courtesy of Sandy Plunkett.

Below: Photo of Sandy and his nephew, Charles Fredrick Plunkett Beach, on the occasion of the latter’s tenth birthday. Sandy writes, “His career path has taken a drastic sea change of late, from astronaut to philosopher and comic book artist.” Courtesy of Sandy Plunkett.

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Conducted by Tim Barnes

I never got to know my father well (he died when I was seven). But I do know that he Just who the hell is Sandy Plunkett? Ye Ed did some commercial art at various periods discovered the elusive artist via a Marvel in his life. My impression is that he had Comics Presents Ant-Man story back in the Bohemian proclivities and wasn’t very early ’90s and was blown away with “career oriented” (maybe that tendency runs Sandy’s accomplished stylings and exquisite in the family as well). As a teenager, I came ink line. In e-mail conversation with Brit across a full-page cartoon that he drew and I Tim Barnes (The World’s Number One had trouble, at first, distinguishing it from Howard Chaykin Fan), Ye Ed learned that one of my own pages. My mother taught art Mr. Barnes was also a rabid aficionado of at a grammar school in New York for several Plunkett’s, and Barnes was immediately years, but I don’t remember her ever actively asked to interview the artist, the results encouraging me to draw. But then, she which follow. The interview was conducted might have realized that pushing me in that by e-mail in Summer 2000, augmented by a direction might have caused me to rebel and couple of phone calls, which due to the differing time zones, were never pick up a brush or pencil. She did have a Masters degree in made after Tim got home from the child psychology after all…. pub. The Q&As were married up by Tim: Did you always intend on a career in art, and was it comics Tim and the whole thing was edityou aimed for? ed by Sandy.—JBC. Sandy: The idea of being an artist as a career didn’t occur to me until the time came to start thinking about college. At a young and Tim: Tell me something about tender age, I was encouraged by friends and family to throw out my your background: Where you comics and “grow up.” When I gave up comics, I seemed to lose my were brought up, and the interest in drawing as well. So for the majority of my teenage years, I environment. Were you didn’t think much about art, let alone consider it a career option. The IF into YOU THIS born an ENJOYED artistic void PREVIEW, seemed to be filled by an interest in snakes, and I was seriously CLICK THE LINK TOthinking ORDER THIS family? about becoming a herpetologist (I read tons of books on ISSUE IN PRINT FORMAT! Sandy: Art was OR “in DIGITAL reptiles, had about a dozen snakes and lizards as pets, some which the family.” Until I occasionally escaped into neighboring apartments. Police arrived on was four, we lived the scene on one occasion, but that’s another story.) Then something in Mexico City. changed. It seems that one day I just decided that if comics still had We were supsome interest to me (and they did), I’d start reading them again, ported, primari- despite the ridicule I was likely to get. Fortunately, there was a newsly, through art stand on the corner of 79th Street and Broadway, right next to the classes that my subway I took to school, which always had an up-to-date selection of mother taught comics. So getting back into comics was easy. Unfortunately, other in her third floor kids from my school got off at that same subway stop, so, despite my studio. She was a resolution to be courageous, I always had this dread that my weakgraduate of the ness would be discovered. Sooner be found reading pornography Rhode Island than the latest issue of Swamp Thing!… Anyway, soon after I began School of Design reading comics again, my interest in drawing returned. Not too long (a well-regarded after that, I met Larry Ivie, who took it as a matter of course that I college1980s here in VANGUARD should/would #15: & get into comics as a career. At the time, I had no real the States).

SheSTEVENS DAVE interest in art other than what was found in comics and related Interviews with independent DAVE STEVENS, was’80s heavily into creators fanzines.

In high school, it seemed those kids who were into art were JAIME, MARIO, AND GILBERT HERNANDEZ, MATT WAGNER, Abstract of PLUNKETT, cliquish and DEAN MOTTER, PAUL RIVOCHE, andkind SANDY plus maybe pretentious. I guess I thought I would be lots of rare and unseen art from The Rocketeer, Rockets, Impressionism. rejectedLove if I &tried to enter that social circle so I never tried. Pre-empMr. X, Grendel, other ’80s strips, and more! New cover by worked BROS.!tive rejection, if you know what I mean. In any case, most of what STEVENS andShe the HERNANDEZ on large canpassed (112-page magazine) $6.95 for fine art really bored me. No art classes for me…. vases in oil. Edition) $3.95 (Digital Tim: When was it that you got back into reading comics? Was it http://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=98_56&products_id=531 My parents the same stuff you’d previously followed, or were you attracted by separated some of the newer artists/titles? when we Sandy: I got back into comics somewhere in 10th grade, though I moved to had been eyeing them surreptitiously for a while on the newsstand. I New York guess I gravitated to the new books and artists that were on the marCity, someket. The landscape had changed a good deal, but I don’t think I had where any urge to “revisit” the titles of my youth. I was never so much a around Fantastic Four fan (let’s say), as I was a fan of Kirby’s Fantastic Four.

1959, and so When Ditko left Spider-Man, I lost interest in Spider-Man, etc. When COMIC BOOK ARTIST 15

November 2001