Draw! #11 by TwoMorrows Publishing

NUMBER 11 SUMMER 2005

$5.95

IN THE U.S.A.

THE PROFFESSIONAL “HOW-TO” MAGAZINE ON COMICS AND CARTOONING

IN THIS ISSUE! IN-DEPTH INTERVIEW AND DEMO WITH THE MOTH’S

STEVE RUDE FROM HAPPY TREE FRIENDS TO PARADISE WITH ANIMATOR

ROQUE BALLESTEROS FROM ZITS TO POLITICS WITH PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING CARTOONIST

JIM BORGMAN PLUS! DRAW!’s REGULAR TUTORIALS BY

ALBERTO RUIZ, BRET BLEVINS, and MIKE MANLEY!

THE PROFESSIONAL “HOW-TO” MAGAZINE ON COMICS & CARTOONING WWW.DRAWMAGAZINE.COM

SUMMER 2005 • VOL. 1, NO. 11 Editor-in-Chief • Michael Manley Designer • Eric Nolen-Weathington Publisher • John Morrow Logo Design • John Costanza Proofreaders • John Morrow & Eric Nolen-Weathington Transcription • Steven Tice

FEATURES

COVER STORY INTERVIEW WITH THE DUDE STEVE RUDE

For more great information on cartooning and animation, visit our Web site at: http://www.drawmagazine.com

Front Cover Illustration by Steve Rude

CARTOONING POLITICAL CARTOONIST AND ZITS! ARTIST JIM BORGMAN

SUBSCRIBE TO DRAW! Four quarterly issues: $20 US Standard Mail, $32 US First Class Mail ($40 Canada, Elsewhere: $44 Surface, $60 Airmail). We accept US check, money order, Visa and Mastercard at TwoMorrows, 10407 Bedfordtown Dr., Raleigh, NC 27614, (919) 449-0344, E-mail: twomorrow@aol.com ADVERTISE IN DRAW! See page 2 for ad rates and specifications. DRAW! Summer 2005, Vol. 1, No. 11 was produced by Action Planet Inc. and published by TwoMorrows Publishing. Michael Manley, Editor, John Morrow, Publisher. Editorial Address is PO Box 2129, Upper Darby, PA 19082. Subscription Address: TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Dr., Raleigh, NC 27614. DRAW! and its logo are trademarks of Action Planet Inc. All contributions herein are copyright 2005 by their respective contributors. Action Planet Inc. and TwoMorrows Publishing accept no responsibility for unsolicited submissions. All artwork herein is copyright the year of production, its creator (if workfor-hire, the entity which contracted said artwork); the characters featured in said artwork are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners; and said artwork or other trademarked material is printed in these pages with the consent of the copyright holder and/or for journalistic, educational and historical purposes with no infringement intended or implied. Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman TM and © 2005 DC Comics • The Hulk TM and © 2005 Marvel Characters, Inc. • The Moth and all related characters TM and © 2005 Steve Rude • Nexus TM and © 2005 Mike Baron and Steve Rude • Joe Paradise TM and © 2005 Wildbrain.com, Inc. • Happy Tree Friends TM and © 2005 Mondo Media • Zits TM and © 2005 Zits Partnership. This entire issue is © 2005 Action Planet Inc. and TwoMorrows Publishing and may not be reprinted or retransmitted without written permission of the copyright holders. Printed in Canada. FIRST PRINTING.

FLASH ANIMATION INTERVIEW WITH JOE PARADISE CREATOR ROQUE BALLESTEROS

ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR TIPS USING SYMBOLS BY ALBERTO RUIZ

DRAWING ON LIFE BY BRET BLEVINS AND MIKE MANLEY

Figurative interpretation by Bret Blevins

FROM THE EDITOR Welcome to DRAW! #11, which you are hopefully reading as you wade through the crowd of Jedis, Storm Troopers, and Klingons at the annual San Diego Comic-Con. This issue has it all, baby! From Pulitzer- and Ruben-award winner Jim Borgman to Eisner- and Harvey-winner Steve Rude. I want to thank Jim Borgman, who was a complete gentleman, taking time from his busy schedule to do an interview and share with us the steps behind his process. Jamar Nicholas, who is a fellow political cartoonist for the Philadelphia Tribune, was the man who came through with the interview, cartoonist to cartoonist. It was especially interesting to see Borgman’s sketchbook and idea process. I want to thank both Steve Rude and his hard-working wife Jaynelle for all of her technical help in obtaining the art files for the art in this issue’s interview. I wish we could have made this issue twice as long to show even more of Steve’s great art. Last year’s San Diego Comic-Con was a fortuitous event, because that’s where I happened to bump into animator Roque Ballesteros, whose Joe Paradise cartoon I’d been a big fan of, and voilà—a year later and here is an article on Roque cuing us in on Joe and what he’s been up to since then. A hearty thanks and slap on the back to my regular DRAW! contributors, Alberto Ruiz and Bret Blevins, for their informative, fantastic, and enjoyable articles. Who knew kitchen cabinets could be so inspiring and sexy? Imagine what Alberto could do with a dinning room set, or even a sofa! It was especially enjoyable to jointly do the article on gesture drawing with Bret and compare notes and approaches as well as drawings. I really encourage each and every one of you to take the life-drawing plunge, headfirst. Go out to a mall, local park or eatery and draw from the spectacle of life that parades in front of you. You will be surprised how much this will improve your drawing of not only the fantastic, but of the everyday situation. You don’t need to spend a lot on art supplies to do it, and even 45 minutes once a week will give you a wealth of material and experience to draw from. So get to drawing! Have a great summer and we’ll see you in October!

E-mail: mike@drawmagazine.com Website: www.drawmagazine.com Snail mail: PO Box 2129, Upper Darby, PA 19082

ADVERTISE with TWOMORROWS FULL PAGE: 7.5” wide x 10” tall — $300 HALF PAGE: 7.5” wide x 4.875” tall — $175 QUARTER PAGE: 3.75” wide x 4.875” tall — $100 INSIDE COVER OR BACK COVER: Please Inquire

Rates at left are for black-&-white ads, supplied on disk (TIF, EPS, or QuarkXPress files acceptable) or as camera-ready art. Typesetting service available at 20% markup. Due to our already low ad rates, no agency discounts apply.

GET THE TWOMORROWS TWO-FER! Prepay for two same-size ads in DRAW!, Back Issue, Alter Ego, Write Now!, or any combination, and save! (Display ads are not available for The Jack Kirby Collector.)

Send ad copy and check or money order in US funds to: TwoMorrows 10407 Bedfordtown Drive Raleigh NC 27614

FULL PAGE: 7.5” wide x 10” tall — $500 ($100 savings) HALF PAGE: 7.5” wide x 4.875” tall — $300 ($50 savings) QUARTER PAGE: 3.75” wide x 4.875” tall — $175 ($25 savings) INSIDE COVER OR COLOR BACK COVER: Inquire for availability BULK AD PACKAGES ALSO AVAILABLE: Please Inquire 2

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

Questions? Phone: (919) 449-0344 Fax: (919) 449-0327 E-Mail: twomorrow@aol.com

We also accept Visa and MasterCard! Please include card number and expiration date.

ince the ’80s and his long run on Nexus, Steve Rude has won just about every award the comic industry has to offer, from the Harvey to the Eisner. Steve’s dedication to his craft, along with his legendary sketchbooks, have made him the “artist’s artist” to his peers. Since the first issue of DRAW!, Steve was one of the artists I really wanted to interview for the magazine. I caught up with Steve as he continues to work on his new creatorowned series The Moth, published by Dark Horse. This interview was conducted via phone from Steve’s studio in Arizona.

THE MOTH © AND TM 2005 STEVE RUDE.

—Mike Conducted 5/9/05 by Mike Manley Transcribed by Steven Tice DRAW: When we set up this interview you told me right now you’re in the process of doing layouts for issue #5 of the next mini-series of The Moth. STEVE RUDE: Yeah, it’s going to be six issues. We left off at number four; now we’re going to be doing five through ten, and it all depends on Dark Horse whether it gets picked up or not. The way we did it last time was, we had a special, which was intended to be DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

STEVE RUDE

COMICS

issue #1, but Dark Horse marketing decided it might be a better sell if we double-whammied them, a special, and then a #1 coming out. DRAW: So you can essentially have two number ones, in a way. SR: That’s right, yeah. I wasn’t crazy about it, because I don’t necessarily subscribe to that kind of thinking marketing people have, but they seemed pretty desperate to sway me. I thought, “Well, let ’em try it. That’s fine. It’s not a big deal.” DRAW: Right, and it does seem today that one of the things you do face is that unfortunate drop-off between issue one and issue two and issue three, and then maybe people come back with issue four or five. Several friends of mine who have done their own self-publishing, or their own mini-series, their own independent books, as well as myself, you deal with that unfortunate drop-off between issue one and two, where everybody orders the first issue, then they immediately slash the orders 30%, 40% sometimes on issue two. And then, down the road, because they’re ordering, say, issue four by the time they’ve actually seen what they’ve sold on issue #1 your numbers may either bump up or not, and then you have to make a hard choice.

SR: Well, that would be great. But the thing is, there’s a problem too. People ask “What are your long-term plans?” I have shortterm plans, and that’s all based on what my conscience tells me I have to do, but now I’m going to do The Moth regardless of whether I’m getting paid to work on it or not. Also because we’ve already let so many months go by after issue #4—that was the last Moth that came out. DRAW: So you don’t want to lose too much time between issues. Basically, you don’t want to give people time to forget about The Moth. SR: That’s exactly right, so going on the assumption that we’re going to have a book, rather than not have one, I want to be ready. And I want to make sure that I can take advantage of whatever commissions, notoriety, interviews, and all that sort of stuff that comes from my comic book work.

THE THUMBNAIL DRAW: So you’re working on issue #5, and you’re in the layout stage, and you’re continuing to work with Gary Martin as the writer and the inker. Is he going to continue to ink, or are you going to ink yourself on some of this next series?

SR: Interesting. So that’s how that works. It’ll pick up with issue #4. DRAW: Well, in the case of someone like you, who people know, and they know your work, it’s different than if, say, you’re someone who is new, or an artist they are not really familiar with. Retailers are ordering the first issue sight unseen. They’re ordering usually the fourth THE MOTH © AND TM 2005 STEVE RUDE. issue by the time they’ve actually sold the first issue, because we have to work so many months ahead. You have to solicit three months ahead. So there’s that whole other aspect of the business that you have to consider, besides just learning how to draw drapery, and foreshortening. [laughs] But, still, I imagine that having the issues done, having all that work done, whether you go through Dark Horse or not, you’ll still find a publisher who’s going to be willing to take the chance, because you have so much material already finished. 4

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

SR: No, he wants to continue as inker. Gary really wants to do that. DRAW: And I guess that also allows you to just keep concentrating on penciling. It’s hard to stay on schedule doing both inking and penciling. SR: I’m happy to let someone else do the inking. As long as I can see the pages, Mike, after the inker’s done with them. DRAW: So you can make little tweaks? SR: I always make tweaks, yeah. And in some cases even paste over some heads, things like that. DRAW: Now, are you physically sending the pages to Gary to ink, then he’s sending them all back, and you make your correc-

COMICS

STEVE RUDE

tions, if you need to, and then you send them out to Dark Horse? Or do you send them directly to the colorist, Glenn Whitmore when they are inked? SR: We send them directly to Glenn after that. But I’ll send the pages to Gary, Gary will ink them on the board, and then he’ll send them back to me. And then I’ll make my touch-ups, and then I’ll scan the pages, or, rather, Jaynelle, my wife, will scan the pages, and then get them off to Glenn Whitmore. And then he has electronic files that he’ll color and send to Dark Horse. DRAW: Now, are you lettering on the boards? Are you doing the lettering in illustrator; is that being done later? SR: No, I forgot about that, we’re actually lettering it on the board because I like the way it looks. DRAW: I think it’s great when you have the opportunity to do that, because you can really incorporate the balloon, as you should anyway, into the flow of the art, leading your eye around, as a compositional element. And sometimes you can also make an adjustment. If the balloon ends up being a little bit bigger, you can slightly tweak a head or a hand or something. A little nip and tuck, you can move it a little bit, if you need. THE MOTH © AND TM 2005 STEVE RUDE.

SR: Well, there are production advantages to both, but because I’m an artist, I think in terms of the original art. So rather than no lettering being on the page—that cuts the appreciation in half when you don’t know what people were talking—it’s actually on the boards. DRAW: So you prefer to have the lettering on the board because you like the aesthetic of having the final page, the original, with the word balloons and lettering on it. You like that? SR: Yes, I do. I love that. As do all guys from my generation. DRAW: Although it’s very rare now when that actually happens anymore. The last several jobs that I’ve done, I would say, within the last five years especially, it’s really rare when I actually get a job inhouse to either pencil or ink, that actually has the lettering on it. SR: How do you feel about that, Mike? Having to fill in all those areas that may get covered up? DRAW: It depends. If it’s a plot, in which case I’m sort of always having to guess or make up what the writer is suggesting and then basically play the movie director and make it specific.... Like, “This person is yelling here, and having a conversation with another character, telling them to get out,” etc. I’m having to write dialogue in my head so I can make the character act. Y’know, there’re pros and cons, because if you’re really in sync with the writer, it works out well. But sometimes you’ll draw a page or a sequence, and you had somebody making a gesture or yelling, and the writer has the guy not yelling. And that feels like bad comics, bad acting. In your case, since you’re the head honcho on The Moth, you can have final say. Ideally, I think the balloons should be lettered on the board, and even if it’s not a full script, it should still be set up so that, as the artist, you can control that flow of the balloons. Because a lot of time, when they allow other people to do it—I hate to cast aspersions, but not

PREVIOUS PAGE: Model sheet for one of the Moth’s gadgets. ABOVE: Pencils for The Moth #3, page 1.

every editor or every writer is good at eye flow. SR: No, that’s for sure. But that’s what comics are to me. When you look at a page of art, everything should be on there, like there used to be. Things have been changed over the years. I have nothing against technology, but if it goes against what I think is aesthetically part of what comic books should be, I’m going to go against it. And as long as I can do it, I’d sure like to keep doing it. DRAW: Also, in your case, since you’re in control of the factory, per se, you start it and you end it and you monitor production along the way. That’s a little bit different than if you just get a script from Marvel or DC. Especially from Marvel, where you’re working Marvel-style, say, from the plot. So, touching on that, is The Moth a full script, or is it a plot? Do you and Gary get on the phone and talk things out, and then he types and sends it to you? How do you guys work that out? SR: Well, in the beginning I just kind of briefed Gary on what the whole circumstances of The Moth was all about. I remember originally he thought up very silly things that I thought, “He DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

STEVE RUDE

COMICS

can’t be taking this seriously when he’s saying this to me.” But he was mentioning things like the Mothmobile. [Mike laughs] Things like that. I said, “No, no. This is the real world, man. There’s no Mothmobile.” [laughter]

SR: Yes. In fact, I’ve found that when I got done with the thumbnails on five and six, they went over by sometimes, like, four pages.

DRAW: So you weren’t going for sort of a campy feel?

SR: Gary wrote it to be, like, a 21-page story, and I made it into a 24-page story.

SR: God, no, because I despise camp. It’s making fun of something I think is very serious, in a deliberate kind of a way, so I don’t go for that at all.

DRAW: Oh, and Dark Horse allowed you to do that?

DRAW: So if the Moth had a car, he wouldn’t call it the Mothmobile, he would just use a car. SR: Yeah. He has a truck that belongs to the circus. Real-life stuff. Because that’s the way I think about all the things that I do and draw in comics is a reflection of real life, the world that I live in. DRAW: So you work all this out, back and forth with Gary.

DRAW: The issues went over by—?

SR: Thank God, yeah. That’s what I like about Dark Horse. They’re not so corporately stringent about policies that they don’t allow the story to rule.

PLOT VS. FULL SCRIPT DRAW: Now, on The Moth you’re working a little bit differently than when you were working with Mike Baron in the past, because I would assume on Nexus you were getting a full script.

SR: Yeah, and then I let him go. And Gary—I wanted to see what he could SR: Yeah. And turn up when the remember, there is training wheels were an evolution taking off, and he did a place with different great job. I thought writers working difthe dialogue was a ferent ways. I startlittle weak on the ed off with Baron THE MOTH © AND TM 2005 special, but right STEVE RUDE. always having full after that he scripts, and he picked up on continued to do things I was going that for a long, long over with him really ABOVE: A turnaround guide for Sophie, part of the supporting cast of The Moth. time. In fact, he drew well. And by issue four NEXT PAGE: Steve’s pencils for pages 4 and 12 of The Moth #3 show that talking heads probably the scripts for pages don’t have to be boring while getting necessary information across to the reader. he was extremely strong, the first 50 stories that and I got really excited we did for Capital and to see how good he was getting. And now, with the issues that First. And then Baron’s back got bad from hunching over and he’s turned in since then, five, six, and seven so far—eight’s on drawing the scripts. its way—these stories are as good as anything I’ve ever worked on, Mike. They’re plots, they’re Marvel-style plots. There’s about DRAW: So he would draw the script as like a little comic book a paragraph description of every page. page? DRAW: So each page is broken down into about a paragraph’s length, which describes what happens on that page? SR: That’s right. DRAW: But then you’re still free to flow something over to another page if you feel you need to do that? 6

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

SR: Yeah, that’s exactly right. He would just draw his little figures in there. And I think he had a great time doing that. And so that was the way I always worked with Mike Baron. I did a few other projects in between those 50 issues of Nexus, and I thought this should be a good time to experiment. “Let’s see what it’s like when you give me a breakdown of the story rather than a full-dialogue kind of

COMICS

STEVE RUDE

thing going in, and see what I can do with it.” And to me it was seamless. And now, it seems, the way it worked with Gary seems especially right for me. DRAW: So you started out, basically, working, for the most part, with a full script. SR: Yeah, and I couldn’t imagine doing it any other way, because how else was I going to cue the character’s body language if I didn’t know what they were saying? But somehow, with all the years under my belt as it is, I don’t sweat those things out, anymore. They just seem to come naturally, and I don’t have to sweat over them. DRAW: Now, when you were working on the Captain America book for Marvel, was that a plot, or was that a full script? SR: That was a full script. Bruce Jones gave me a full script for that. I could have worked either way. I ended up changing a lot of stuff. Sometimes writers don’t visually provide that pizzazz that’s needed for a dynamic storytelling sequence, I will change it so that it is reflective of the emotion that needs to come out of that scene. DRAW: So you’ll change the staging? SR: Yeah, exactly, right. THE MOTH © AND TM 2005 STEVE RUDE.

DRAW: And with a character like Cap, it’s always pretty dramatic, so you don’t want three or four pages going by where people are just sort of sitting there in the Avengers Mansion having tea talking to each other. SR: Yeah. That would be out the window with me. DRAW: Do you have any rules or any philosophies that you’ve developed as a result of having started, say, with the full script, and working your way towards doing the Marvel style of the plot? Do you have any theories about what the average page should have, or do you lay out two or three pages next to each other at the same time, to get a feel for pacing? SR: Yeah. The only rule I have is “never bore the reader.” DRAW: And so you figure, if you’re boring yourself, you’re boring the reader? SR: That’s the way to look at it. That’s probably the only yardstick you actually have to judge that. One time Baron gave me a story that started off with people talking for the first three pages, Mike. And I said, “This is so painful, I can’t draw it. This is so boring, I can’t draw it.” I called him up and told him that very thing. He gave me grief about it, like he always does for the first five minutes, and he said, “Yeah, you’re right.” And then what he turned in was this great three-page sequence where Nexus went on a mission for this guy who was casting for a giant fish on a different planet, and how he killed this guy because he was some corporate bad guy that was trying to kill or embezzle or something like that. But that’s what he replaced that three-page, people sitting around in a board room talking this really boring, philosophical junk with. DRAW: Well action, especially action super-hero comics, it’s not really about lots of people sitting around talking. If you would study the Lee/Kirby stuff, they’d give you one of two pages of people talking. Of course, Lee always had them doing something when they were talking, they were never just sitting. They’re driving somewhere or they’re inventing something, they’re doing something, something that usually advanced the plot and defined their character. And then you would cut back to some action. So DRAW! • SUMMER 2005 7

STEVE RUDE

COMICS

you’d have subplot, then you’d have action. A little subplot, and a little action. That way you don’t have four, five, six pages of people sitting around just jawboning each other. Which on TV or movies, maybe even in animation, you have the voices, the actors, music, you can do slow pans, things like that. But in a comic, it’s just dead. It isn’t Glen Gary Glen Ross.

DRAW: So you don’t read the plot, put it aside, go do research, come back, and then look at it again, or something like that?

DRAW: Yeah, it’s sort of you absorb that pacing from reading that work, that classic work.

SR: No, I look at it really peripherally when it comes in just to make sure that it’s good. And because it’s almost always good, then I’ll just set it aside until I’ve gotten done drawing the work that I’m on, I’m drawing the scripts that he’s sent in already. And then, when it comes time to actually draw that issue that he just sent in, maybe a month later, after I’m done drawing the issue before it, then I’ll do what I have to do to digest the story. I’ll read it carefully, then I’ll write little notes in case anything seems funny to me or I don’t really get it, and I’ll call Gary up and we’ll talk things back and forth. We’re almost always on the right wavelength with stuff.

SR: Yeah, the pacing, what it’s all about. Ever since the special, I just completely turned Gary loose on the whole thing.

BREAKING DOWN THE PAGE

SR: It is dead. And all I can say is, because I grew up on master storytellers like Romita and Kirby, that ability was absorbed into me or something like that, what you do and what you don’t do.

DRAW: Oh, okay. So you’re not even really discussing, like, “I’d like to have him fight a Circus of Evil People or something”? SR: Well, he and I talk fairly regularly. I’ll say, “You know, in an upcoming issue, we need a book where we show their circus act. Show what they do and all that stuff.” And I’ll throw those out at him, and I’m sure they stick on the wall in his house somewhere. But generally I stay loose, because I think that’s the best way to deal with a guy who’s trying to learn the art of writing. And I only step in when he does it wrong, and then I’ll call him up and say, “This doesn’t work.” In fact, on one issue I completely threw out twice what he did, Mike. That was The Moth #3. It was what I called being completely misdirected as to what you want to see, knowing that you’ve read #2. You’re expecting to see certain things, and it was completely off the track of where the story should have gone. That’s just something you sense and feel. And so I would call Gary up and say, “No, it has to be directed more to this specific theme, because this is what you were building up in one and two.” DRAW: I’m looking at issue #2 here, and you have American Liberty. Did you say, “Well, I want to do a patriotic type of character, a strong female character?” Do you pitch that kind of idea to him, talk about things like that back and forth.

DRAW: So when you read the plots for The Moth, do you start to get little images in your mind? And as you do that, do you jot those down on the script? SR: On occasion, but rarely. When I have to really look at the story carefully, because I’m about to draw it, in case images flash into my head, I’ll jot down little things. That usually doesn’t come out to very many images. DRAW: I noticed they reprinted some of the layouts in The Art of Steve Rude that came out several years ago; you do your initial layouts on 8-1/2" by 11" paper. SR: That’s kind of a recent thing. That’s where I do all my trialand-error stuff. But they’re still the same size, on that typingsize paper, that they’re going to be when I transfer them to my 16 little pages per typing paper size thing. DRAW: So you do layouts for 16 pages on one sheet of typing paper? SR: That’s right. I can fit 16 of my page thumbnails on there. DRAW: And each thumbnail would be one page?

SR: Not even that. In fact, American Liberty was entirely Gary’s idea. Most of the story-specific things are entirely Gary’s, only because he’s getting so good at what he does now that he doesn’t need any help from me.

SR: That’s right.

DRAW: Okay. But you are still free to suggest things like that, if you want?

SR: Yeah. I’ve never felt any reason whatsoever to go any bigger than that. In fact, I’ve actually found ways to make it even smaller sometimes.

SR: God, I hope so. If it’s wrong, I tell him. I say, “No, this is all wrong. You’re better off going here rather than where you were going.” DRAW: So once you get the plot, what’s your next step creatively? As you sit there and read it, what do you do? SR: Well, I never actually look at it in great detail until I have to draw it. I’ll skim through the thing to make sure it’s on the right track, but I never do anything until I have to do it. That way my brain stays unfettered. 8

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

DRAW: So you’re working very, very—literally, size-wise like a thumbnail. [laughs]

DRAW: So you’re just purely working on what, shape, flow? Because you can’t do a lot of detailed drawing that small. SR: Yeah. Obviously, the reason for drawing small is that you can’t put unnecessary detail in there, and can just basically be concerned with the art of telling the story the best way you can. Panel direction, eye flow, things like that, I find that incredibly fascinating. RIGHT: Thumbnails—at nearly full size—for pages 1-16 of The Moth #6.

STEVE RUDE

THE MOTH © AND TM 2005 STEVE RUDE.

COMICS

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

STEVE RUDE

COMICS

DRAW: When you work small, it’s much easier for your eye to take in the whole image, the whole page. SR: That’s a very good thing, too. At a glance, you can wake up in the morning, and say you’ve got a page of 15 or 16 thumbnails. You can spot anything that’s wrong about it almost right away. DRAW: Right. Do you have any rules like not wanting to have panels that have too many heads of similar size on the same page? Do you have a rule about close-up or medium shots? Do you have theories or rules about that, yourself, about how you set up? SR: No, I don’t have any rules whatsoever that are going in my brain. All that would do is just straitjacket my brain. No, it’s just to tell the story in a very non-boring way. To be very, very clear, and to make it exciting to want to read it. And use everything at your disposal to make sure that can happen. DRAW: So how long does it take you to go through and, say, lay out and entire issue? SR: About five days, Mike.

THE MOTH © AND TM 2005 STEVE RUDE.

DRAW: And after that, what’s your next step?

SR: Then I start drawing them on full-size boards. DRAW: So you don’t go to any intermediary process like some people do? You don’t do another step of refined little thumbnails, like I do often, which are done at print size. You just go right to the page? SR: Yeah. I square up the little panels, and then I’ll square up my page and just work from that as far as getting the proportions right, things like that. DRAW: So you don’t work on a lightbox or use an Artograph or anything like that? SR: No, that’s just not my style to do things. That would be so redundant after a while. It’s like, get on with it, y’know? DRAW: I always find this part of the job, to me, as an artist talking to another artist like you, to be the most interesting part of the job. I learned a lot studying the ways artists—like Gil Kane, who had a formula way of doing all those little layouts. John Buscema, too, he worked full-art size, and he would do those really cool gesture drawing layouts on a sheet of one-ply with a 6B pencil, and then he would put his Bristol on top, and then proceed to do a clean drawing on top of that. So everybody has these different ways of starting at the thumbnail stage and how they proceed to producing the page. Some guys do two or three versions of the same page. Like Bruce Timm, I’ve seen him do two or three versions of the same page. SR: Yeah, that’s an incredible waste of time. DRAW: So you just figure, “I’ve got my thumbnails, bam, I’m sitting down and I’m drawing it now.” SR: Yes. Once the thumbnails have been put down, they’re all finalized. Anything that, say, I may discover later on, when I’m drawing page 14 or something, if it’s lacking, I’ll change it somehow. DRAW: Do you ever, in the course of drawing something, go, “Boy, I’m not really happy with this figure. I’m not really happy with this position here.” Will you sometimes work on that specific drawing in your sketchbook, or on a separate sheet of paper, to solve a drawing problem? SR: Yeah, I do, but usually I do that drawing in the sketchbook before I’ve drawn it on the actual board, because all my gestures have been worked out fairly clearly in the thumbnail stage, actually. The gestures are part of that little thumbnail stage. And I know what they’re going to be before I draw them. But the mirror is an incredibly handy resource. DRAW: So you have a full-length mirror in the studio? SR: A full-length mirror, yeah. Working has always involved drawing myself in the mirror to get something down.

ABOVE: Another Moth cast-member, with a “twist.” NEXT PAGE: Roughs for the cover of The Moth tbp.

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

DRAW: So you are everyone. You’re the four-year-old girl and the fat lady, too. [laughs] SR: Yeah, that’s right. I’m everyone.

STEVE RUDE

THE MOTH © AND TM 2005 STEVE RUDE.

COMICS

CLARITY AND READABILITY DRAW: Like I said, this part of the process is what I find very interesting, because, to a certain extent, this is the most creative part of drawing comics. Because drawing, after a while, once you get your skill to a certain level, is monkey work in a way. I don’t mean that you don’t have to work hard, but still, the most creative part is figuring out the storytelling and the pacing and the reveals, and what’s going to happen. SR: Yeah. Because storytelling is the basic thing that comics are about, before drawing gets involved. That’s why I’ve always worked small like that, because you can tell your storytelling much easier by working small if it’s working right. DRAW: Now, how did you pick that up? Did you come to that on your own, or from reading, or from studying? How did you come up with that idea of doing everything small? SR: I got that from, I think, when I attended Madison Area Technical College, and I had some books that I was looking through, I discovered this whole idea of working small. I know that I had been exposed to the idea of working on these so-called thumbnail things long before that, from the Loomis books. When I came down to really figure out a science to what I had to do to get the best thing, the quickest and the easiest, it always came down to working very, very small. And all my covers are developed the same way, all my painted covers.

DRAW: Right. And I noticed you do a small drawing, then you do a total study. SR: Yeah. I’m just trying to work out readability, for the most part. I’ve already got that sense of what the cover’s supposed to look like, just from us being artists and all, and then it’s just a matter of working out the right poses. But then everything has to be clearly read. The values have to work, and the colors have to work, so that you’ve got a sense of focus going on. So if you’ve got a cast of 1000 characters running toward you over a hill with rifles and stuff on the cover, it’s still got to be easily read. And a lot of people maybe that haven’t been to art school, or haven’t bothered to really reflect on the importance of this readability factor no matter what’s going on in the painting, they don’t understand that all the detail has to work in the service of readability. DRAW: Oh, yeah, everything is in service of the story or of clarity. SR: Yeah, of clarity, right. I’m just so glad, Mike, that I grew up in the era of Jack Kirby being at his peak. But even in the ’40s and ’50s, he drew unbelievably complex covers. Especially during the war days, when everyone put in everything and the kitchen sink, all those casts of thousands, all these things going on. Things that are not even done on comics covers nowadays. Now it’s just, all Marvel wants is a big pin-up shot of their character, and there’s no sense of storytelling going on whatsoever. DRAW: I’m always struck when I walk along the shelf [in a DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

STEVE RUDE

COMICS LEFT: Another page from The Moth #3. RIGHT: Warm-up sketches by The Dude.

DRAW: Right, I believe Kirby called it, “the Grabber.” One of the things about those covers is that, since they were on the newsstand and there were a billion other things to grab your eye, the cover did have to grab you. And it also had to tell you a little bit of the story. And it had to really, in the end, make you want to pick up the book and flip through it.

READING HABITS

THE MOTH © AND TM 2005 STEVE RUDE.

DRAW: So I take it you don’t go to the comic book shop that often?

comic shop] how many covers are basically the same image. Everybody’s doing the same thing, or you’ve seen that image, or they’re referencing for the 10,000th time, the cover to Fantastic Four #1, or something like that. It’s amazing to me how derivative and insular and walled-off the visual language of the medium is becoming, the smaller the business becomes. You still have people who do incredible drawings or really interesting art, but 90% is just the same sort of thing that you’ve seen so many times before. SR: Yeah. If I were to advise those people that think in those ways, the small window of perception that when they draw their covers, I would say—God, I hope they’re interested enough in the history of their own profession to go back and look at those Crime Doesn’t Pay comics that Kirby did with Simon, Justice Traps the Guilty, that kind of stuff. I just couldn’t believe all the stuff that was going on in those covers. Y’know, Kirby would have one guy strapped into an electric chair, and a couple guards bust through the door, and there would be someone inside the room they were busting into and they would be doing something. It would just be this endless but very comprehensively understood and deciphered image, no matter how many people were in there. 12

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

SR: Well, seldom. I only go, probably because I get so guilty thinking that I’m in a profession where I no longer read almost anything that comes out. I don’t even look at it anymore. This was a trend that started early on with me. As soon as I got into this business and got some experience under my belt, Mike, I became much more selective about what I would get, because I saw a lot of it as being this kind of same old stuff. And I couldn’t stand the same old stuff. I couldn’t stand the idea that I was going to buy a book that had things that I’d seen so many times before. It showed me that the artist was a person of limited intellectual resource. [Mike laughs] I’m bored with something we’ve all seen so many times. When I do The Moth, I actually have no contact with modern comics; I don’t have any of that material anywhere near my desk. I will actually get sick looking at it. These endless permutations of photo-traced art, straight out line-drawings that look as though they are tracing photographs, things that offer no sense of... what’s the word? Joy? It’s all bland, no imagination, no grandiosity, not like the thrill of looking at the images comic books were made up of in the ’60s, when it was Jack Kirby, Romita, etc. DRAW: Well, there’s no charge in much of the stuff today. SR: That’s another word. Throw as many words as you can upon the barricade of despair. I know why people of my generation no longer love the field of comic books. DRAW: Well, that’s what I find sort of the saddest is that a lot of my contemporaries, or people a little bit older, people I admire, there are so few of those artists today working in the business. I mean, there are good people coming up, I still see new people every year who are doing exciting, cool, sort of different stuff, but it’s always right around the edges. SR: Yeah. DRAW: So what was the last comic you bought? SR: The last comic book I bought was probably back in the late ’80s.

COMICS DRAW: Really? SR: Yeah, I would say so. DRAW: Well, I guess it’s sort of like, you’ve decided you don’t want to eat any more junk food, I guess. You want the best diet possible. SR: Yeah, that’s right. Actually, I think about TV when I think about junk food, because the whole idea of a show coming out and there’s five minutes of commercials. By the time the show comes back on, I’ve lost my appetite.

ART GYM DRAW: What is the Steve Rude art gym regime? What do you do on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis to keep yourself growing? Because one of the things about comics, especially if you do a lot of them, is that it sort of forces formulations upon you just as part of the process of producing a great volume of work. Do you still go to life drawing, do you have a model come in, do you go to figure drawing class, do you go to the mall, or do your drawing to the spot at a local café? What do you do to keep yourself growing as an artist? And to keep yourself excited, because we all have, like you said, the peaks and the valleys. You’re up and firing away, you walk away from the table and “that’s great!” And you have days where you walk away from the table, like, “damn I suck.”

STEVE RUDE

book for the first time probably when I was 18. I was dating this girl named Suzie, and Suzie was in college and had taken an art class as an elective. With that art class she bought a sketchbook and she gave it to me. And when we’d be doing things I’d be drawing the whole time, and that was always my release. DRAW: You use you sketchbooks for inspiration and perspiration, because you’re always trying to, on paper, work out philosophies, work out techniques, work out approaches, analyze something.... SR: Yeah, that’s a perfect description. DRAW: Well, I’m basically a self-taught artist, and one of the things about being self-taught is that you have to do a lot of analysis. You have to break down why someone did something. I mean, I had help, once I got older, and once I was in the business I became friends with Al Williamson and Ricardo Villagran who were both great. Al did all the great stuff, classic approach to pen-and-ink, was influenced by Raymond and the classic pen and ink illustrators like Coll, etc. I learned from Ricardo, who was the kind of artist who could say, “Oh, you want to do blond hair here? This is how you do blond hair.” Al could not explain to you how to do blond hair, but he could show you how to do it by actually doing it. SR: Yeah, you’re right. I remember asking Al about inking hair, etc., and his answer was, “That’s tough, sport.” DRAW: Right. He was always sort of frustrating, because you’re thinking, “Come on, you’ve been doing it for 40 years, you must know how to do it.” SR: He’d say copy Raymond, copy Foster.

SR: That’s funny. An Art Gym? Is that the word you used?

DRAW: Yeah, yeah, he would say that.

DRAW: Yeah, “gym.”

SR: “Copy the masters, you’ll pick it up.” I still can’t do it.

SR: Like a gymnasium, right? DRAW: Yeah, exactly, yeah. SR: Well the first one is, I don’t do monthly books.

DRAW: And you decided that a long time ago, or is that just something you realized—because Nexus was monthly. SR: It was monthly for a long time, and I kept it up so long. I think by virtue of my age, 20 to early 30s, that kind of a lifestyle— DRAW: The bachelor lifestyle? [laughs] SR: By having the circumstances that I created, I became completely self-devoted, which was wonderful. I picked up a sketch-

DRAW: Well, if you don’t understand the theory behind what you’re copying, you’re just making marks. SR: That’s so true. DRAW: Yeah! So just by nature, I suppose, I’m an analytical artist, because I would try to study the work of somebody like Neal Adams and figure out how he did his stuff. And as a kid I was often at war, because I would love Adams’ stuff, especially when I was younger, like 15 or 16 years old, but then I also liked Jack Kirby and Chuck Jones. And I couldn’t get any of that stuff to kind of even out. But I think because I had to teach myself, I became analytical by nature. DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

STEVE RUDE

COMICS seen it with my own eyes to make myself understand what I thought they did.

BATMAN, SUPERMAN, WONDER WOMAN © AND TM 2005 DC COMICS.

DRAW: Right. For instance, I remember the first time I saw an original by, I think it was Nebres, and noticed how thin, or washy the ink was. Now, those guys inked with a bamboo brush or whatever and they have that amazing facility, that amazing technique, all of this delicate feathering and rendering, but also their ink was very thin. I also remember the first time I saw a Frazetta drawing, and I noticed that all of his ink wasn’t super-dense black, it was a little watery, it was a little bit thinner, which allowed him to get a little bit finer line. So you pick up those little things as you go to a convention and you see an original. You can’t buy it when you’re 14 of 15, but you just kind of study it, try to download it into your brain.

ABOVE: Rough layout with DC’s Big Three.

SR: You used to copy work? DRAW: Oh yeah, I used to copy stuff. I would copy a head, or I would try to copy—I remember one time very specifically trying to copy something that Tom Palmer had done and trying to figure out how he used the brush. Of course, you’re looking at the comic and you’ve got what happened with reproduction and everything. And I remember doing the same with Joe Sinnott or Klaus Janson. I remember I liked Klaus Janson’s inking a lot as a kid. He was a guy who was easier to figure out, for some reason, because his style was more overt, in a way. SR: Klaus Janson? DRAW: Yeah. SR: Very organic, bold stuff. I could tell how he did it. Joe Sinnott as well. A human made those lines? DRAW: Exactly. When you look at somebody like Sinnott or even one of the Filipino artists like Rudy Nebres or Alfredo Alcala, you’d look at them, it was just this amazing bravado technique. SR: I could never fathom it. I would have had to have actually 14

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

SR: And I still can’t buy it.

STRAIGHT AHEAD STEADY AS SHE GOES DRAW: Getting back to your process, you’ve gone through, you’ve got all of your layouts done. You’re sitting there, you’re going to pencil the page. Do you work from page one through to page 22? Do you jump around? SR: I don’t jump around. I never jump around. That’s cheating, in a way, for me. Why would you want to jump around? Because there’s some big close-up of a face you can’t wait to get to? It’s waiting. Do it, do steady work all the way through; that’s the best way for me. DRAW: What kind of paper are you using? SR: The paper Dark Horse gives me. DRAW: Okay, so Dark Horse is supplying you with the paper? The standard 2-ply Bristol. SR: Yeah. They have great paper. And then I just draw. But I draw on the back of the board, Mike, the side that’s doesn’t have all the preprinted guides on it. DRAW: Oh, right, right. I do that, too. Something about when they put the blue ink on there, it changes the surface of the paper. SR: I have noticed that about the blue printing.... DRAW: Affecting the surface there? SR: Not that, but there’s so much clutter on pages nowadays. There’s the quarter-inch “don’t put any detail outside of this,” and then there is this inner dotted box of stuff. And it’s so damned confusing to me. I don’t want to have to look at that when I’m trying to create. So I turn the damned thing around, size it up, and start drawing. DRAW: What kind of pencils are you using? SR: Remember we talked about the Color Erase ones, and how they stopped making my light blue? CONTINUED ON PAGE 59

CARTOONING

JIM BORGMAN

Conducted by Jamar Nicholas Transcribed by Steven Tice Edited by Mike Manley

artoonist Jim Borgman is a rare breed: he’s a full time political cartoonist, an occupation which is unfortunately becoming more and more rare at newspapers across the country. But that alone isn’t what makes him rare amongst his fellow cartoonists. Borgman has reached the peak of his profession, and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize (1991), but he is also a four-time Ruben Award-winner for his hugely popular newspaper strip Zits, which follows the life of a typical 15-year-old, Jeremy, and his friends. Now each job alone would be enough to keep your average cartoonist super-busy fighting the dreaded deadline, editors, and political hacks, but doing both a daily cartoon and a political cartoon puts Borgman in the rare eschelon of cartoonists like Mike Peters (Mother Goose and Grimm) and the late Jeff McNelly (Shoe) who both did a daily cartoon strip and biting, funny political cartoons. DRAW! interviewer and local Philadelphia political cartoonist (The Tribune) Jamar Nicholas caught up with the hard working Jim Borgman and conducted this interviewed with him from his office at the Cincinnati Enquirer. —Mike Manley

JAMAR NICHOLAS: Do you do a lot of interviews?

JIM BORGMAN: Well, any more it’s mostly when the comic strip gets in a new newspaper, then we do something usually with the local paper that’s launching it. But, yeah, I’ve done my share over the years. JN: Give us a quick recap on your background, where you’re from, your family situation. JB: I was born in 1954 in Cincinnati, Ohio, so I work here in my own hometown. I graduated from Kenyon College in central Ohio in ’76, and it was midway through my senior year that I kind of naïvely bumbled my way into my hometown paper and asked if they wanted a political cartoonist. I’d just started to get interested in political cartooning a year or two earlier and was drawing for the school paper up there. Just green as could be, but lo and behold, the longtime cartoonist for the Enquirer, L.D. Warren, had retired a year or two earlier, and they were sort of passively keeping their eyes open for anybody new. It’s like all the forces converged and I was standing there and they looked at my work and hired me to begin right after I graduated in June of ’76. So I took one week off and then started in on the same dead-end job that I’m still working today. [laughs] That was almost 30 years ago. DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

JIM BORGMAN

CARTOONING

So I grew up here in town. My dad was a sign painter, very much a blue-collar kind of life. I have a younger brother and two older sisters. Three of the four siblings have ended up in the arts. My brother is a designer for the St. Louis Post Dispatch. I have a sister in New Jersey who’s more of a florist now, but she’s done fashion design. I started editorial cartooning here for the Enquirer, in June of ’76, and then, in June of 1997, Jerry Scott and I launched Zits, the comic strip, so since ’97 I’ve been doing two jobs. JN: So when you first started working at the Enquirer, how old were you? JB: I would have been 22. JN: Oh, wow. Before you just walked in off the street for that job, were you doing any freelance work? Were you still working on a portfolio? JB: Well, I didn’t really even have time to do any of that. I was a college art student. I was beginning to think about where I’d fit in the world, but really this was the only job I ever had to go out and apply for. I sent out some letters, as I recall, the beginning of my senior year, beginning to check the waters to see if there were any jobs out there. But I really never had to do what most people have to do, auditioning myself and lobbying editors and getting to know who was out there

THIS PAGE: Jim’s rough sketch and finished inks for a recent editorial cartoon.

and where the vacancies were. I can hardly believe how lucky I was to essentially wander into a job opening right in my hometown. They hired me, I want to say January of my senior year. So I just finished out the year and graduated and started right here. It was a big shock. I was doing college cartoons for a loving, nurturing little campus, where everything I drew the students kind of applauded. Then all of a sudden I was in front of a larger metropolitan audience, and my voice is very much not the prevailing political philosophy of this city or this region. So suddenly I had grown-up adults calling me on the phone and yelling at me, and that was a strange experience. [laughs] That was baptism by fire. I made it through those first couple of years and got on my feet. JN: Now, when you were in college, did you have more of a fine arts style? Were you really cartoony then? Or did you kind of walk the tightrope between the two worlds? JB: I was an art major, and really most of my thoughts were about drawing noncartoon drawings. I was very much under the mentorship of a great art teacher there, Martin Garhart. And if you looked at those drawings, you did not see an emerging cartoonist in them. It was all very serious, taking myself seriously. And it was really only this shadow side of me that was drawing political cartoons for the school paper, and caricatures, things like that. My main influences, cartooning-wise, at the time, was David Levine, the great caricaturist for the New York Review of Books who employed heavy cross-hatching. I just thought his drawings were so elegant and beautiful, and that was my main influence. And my mom would send me cartoons she clipped out of the newspaper. That was how I started my diet of learning what was out there in the field. She sent me the work of Pat Oliphant and Jeff MacNelly and those are the two editorial cartoonists who were the predominant voices from that era. I started drawing for the school paper, and that was how I began to cut my teeth. JN: Wow, that’s a great story. It’s odd how it just kind of flows, one thing flows into the other, starting off with the school paper, then you started to get an idea of feedback. Was there a lot of feedback on the college campus for your strips?

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

CARTOONING

JIM BORGMAN

JB: Well, I do everything in clusters. I don’t do one editorial cartoon and one comic strip a day. On days when I focus on editorial cartoons, I try to draw two. On days when I focus on the comic strip, I try to do— don’t know how to say it... a batch. A week’s worth of penciling or a week’s worth of inking, or several Sundays, or something like that. My life is very organic. I have this downtown office down here at the paper, and I have the corner of a room at home. And there’s pretty much always work to be done if I find half an hour here and there. Typically I work for a while after the kids go to bed at night, and pretty many hours on the weekend. I like what I do, so it isn’t really that hard, and I don’t feel oppressed by the work, but the fact is, it’s pretty much always with me. THIS PAGE: Jim at his desk in his “little corner of [his] room at home,” along with a POV shot of his desk.

JB: It was gentle feedback. You’ve got to remember, this was this pastoral little college up in central Ohio on this green hilltop. It was a very favorable sort of incubator. So, yeah, people would say, “Hey, that was a great cartoon yesterday,” that kind of thing. And that was it. I just thought, “I’m hot stuff.” Actually, no, I didn’t think that. I was always pretty aware of what I didn’t know. But it was a nurturing kind of hobbit hole. I was lucky to have a year or two of testing my abilities in a nice, safe shire. JN: So now here we are. Tell us a little bit about your daily work schedule. Now, with the editorial strips, are you doing them daily, three times a week? What’s your schedule like? JB: Editorial cartoons, I draw five a week now. I began by drawing six a week back in the day. That was for probably 15 years or so. Then I actually at one point cut down to four a week. A personal thing, my wife passed away, I had to raise my kids; I was trying to scramble and keep things together, and the Enquirer was kind enough to let me drop down to four cartoons a week. I did that for several years. But five has been probably the average over the years. JN: And now, since you’re doing Zits on top of that, how does that factor into your daily schedule?

JN: So with that, you keep nine-tofive office hours. How do you work that, your home versus office? JB: On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I work down at the newspaper office, a very full day, sort of 7:30 to 6:00 kind of a day. And on those three days I always get my editorial cartoons done. Sometimes I get to poke at the comic strip a little bit here and there, but mostly those are the days I focus on editorial cartoons. If big news happens another day of the week, I’m on call, ready to react. The comic strip is Tuesdays, Thursdays, evenings, weekends, whenever it fits in there. JN: So do you have a different type of set-up at your office space versus your home space? Or is it pretty much the same type of deal, like tables, computers, things like that? JB: Well, they feel pretty different. Down here at the newspaper, it’s a newspaper office surrounded by cubicles and reporters and things. I do have an office of my own. And it’s got a great view; I look out at the Ohio River and the stadiums and big, huge sky. I’m on the 19th Floor of the downtown office building, so that feels a lot different than my little corner of my room at home, which looks out into the woods. But if you look at just the basics, yes, I have a drawing board and a computer at both locations. My little nest of materials and things. I don’t have to tote things back and forth when I work. DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

JIM BORGMAN

CARTOONING JN: What kind of set-up are you using? JB: It’s a Wacom tablet. Do you mean dimensions and stuff? JN: Yeah, give me the whole shebang. [laughs]

THIS PAGE: Pencil rough and finished inks for a holiday editorial cartoon.

JB: Oh, okay. Let’s see, I’ll have to measure. Here at the paper, the tablet area itself looks like it’s 9" by 12". The one at home is smaller, probably whatever the next size smaller is. So I use the stylus and I’m pretty comfortable with it, actually. If I had to, I think I could compose the whole cartoon on the screen. But I like the feeling of doing it the old, traditional way. That’s my natural way of doing it, so I just enjoy it.

JN: I totally understand that. I know it myself. I’m pretty comfortable with the tablet, but I still couldn’t just give myself over to just drawing completely with that thing. JB: Do you know Jeff MacNelly’s work? JN: Yes.

JN: Do you incorporate a lot of computer technology into your drawing nowadays?

JB: He was kind of my guiding light. I just loved his work, and I know he embraced the technology. When it came out, he just couldn’t wait to convert over. I know at least in the end, he was drawing almost all of his cartoons straight onto the computer screen. That still amazes me. I mean, I can see how you can do it, but to me it feels like the long way around.

JB: I still draw everything, 99% of things, in the old traditional way, ink on paper. But then I scan everything in and file it electronically. And over the years, as I’ve gotten more and more familiar with that, I do find myself editing and changing the work on the screen a lot more. There probably aren’t many drawings I do that get printed exactly as they were on the physical paper. Some of it’s mundane. Sometimes I’m just shifting a line of lettering to the right because it wasn’t centered, or that kind of thing. But it’s also not unusual any more for me to actually erase a character and redraw them on the screen, or recompose a panel.

JN: Are you using any type of surface tricks with your tablet? For instance, do you lay a piece of typing paper over the tablet to give you a better feel for the surface?

JN: So do you use a digital tablet, too?

JN: Yes, some people do that. Or it just gives them more of a feel of pen to paper experience rather than gliding across that surface.

JB: Yeah. 20

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

JB: Well, no, that never occurred to me. [laughs] Yeah, I don’t get out much. [laughs] JN: That’s a good little trick. JB: Yeah, that sounds clever. They do the sketch on the paper and then trace it?

CARTOONING

JIM BORGMAN

JB: You know, I don’t compare notes much with other people. It’s amazing to me that you’re interested in this stuff. I’ve developed in something of a vacuum for the last ten or twenty years. Used to just soak that stuff up. When you’re young and in this field, you just want to hear which nib everybody uses. JN: [laughs] You know I was going to ask you those questions soon. JB: I mean, there’s still part of me that’s fascinated. If I were to sit down with Ronald Searle or Ralph Steadman, I’d probably be asking them, “How do you get that spattery look?” But you also get to the point where you’re working within your own zone, and how other people do it isn’t all that relevant anymore. JN: Right. There is a point where you get over that and you just create, but it’s still always wondrous to see how people get from A to B.

ABOVE: Jim has several sketchbooks in which he writes and sketches ideas as they come to him.

JB: Yes, it is, it is. JN: Were you early-adopted to the computers, especially since you were working in the newspaper field? JB: Y’know, I was thrown into it, like you know how they teach a kid to swim by throwing him in the water? [laughs] The story was that we had this big camera kind of machine back in the art department.

then, you know how it is, you get used to it a little more, and a little more, and a little more. I’m still no whiz, believe me. JN: But you have your shortcuts and everything now. JB: I have some of that. I know that a guy like you or other people probably—I sense that you’re younger. JN: Yeah, I’m 30.

JN: Was that a stat machine? JB: Like a stat machine, I guess, yeah. I remember going back, it was a darkroom, and you’d take the photosensitive paper out of the box in the dark and put it on this machine, and then essentially shoot your art. I don’t know how it worked, but it was a big machine that took up half of a darkroom. And this was the critical piece of hardware for the way that I was doing my Sunday color work. I would shoot the cartoon, the finished work, onto a piece of acetate, and then that would be the black plate. And then I would—I'd be lifting and setting it down and coloring on a second piece of paper that they then put on some kind of rotary drum and scanned. It’s just the way it was done, so this is the way I was taught to do it. What happened is that the newsroom started going to computers, and the art department started going to computers. And finally one day this stat machine broke down, and the powers-that-be started asking around, and it turned out I was the only one still using it. They said, “Well, forget that, we’re not going to get it fixed. You’ll have to get used to a computer.” So literally that day I had to learn how to color a cartoon on a computer, and from then on, that’s the way I did my Sunday cartoon. So, like any of us, I remember those first ones being just nightmares, where I thought I was holding the pencil tool when I was in fact holding the magnifying glass tool. I’m zooming in on the drawing, not understanding what was happening. [laughter] But it didn’t take too long. I’d say within a month I was working pretty smoothly with that simple little step of coloring cartoons. And

JB: Yeah, I guess people like you, my son’s generation, 20-something, could just put me to shame, but I’ve learned enough that I’m pretty comfortable. As long as I’m not trying to do anything too far outside my range, I can do it pretty quickly and without a lot of trauma. [laughs] JN: Are you using Photoshop? JB: Yes. JN: Do you know what version of that you're using? JB: It’s an old one, I think, 7.0? JN: Oh, good. I think that was the last before the newest version, so in Photoshop years, that’s pretty good. JB: What do people use now? JN: I think it’s CS, now. That’s the latest one. So you’re not too far off. JB: Y’know, my experience is that my son would always try to convince me to go to the newer version, and every time I did, there was such a huge learning curve for me that it was like, “Well, I just want to do it my old way.” I think actually on my home computer I still have, like, 4.0 or something. And now and then I’ll just go back to DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

JIM BORGMAN

CARTOONING

that, because it’s like my old, comfortable shoes. [laughs] JN: It’s really not worth upgrading once you figure out where all your doodads and everything are, to go and relearn it for no reason. JB: Okay. Well, that’s nice to hear. That was always my intuition, but I didn’t want to be left in the dust, so I kept trying to— ARTWORK ©2005 JIM BORGMAN.

JN: You’re fine with what you have. Don’t reinvent the wheel. JB: [laughs] Okay, I’ll tell him that. JN: Now, as far as the technology thing, does this change the way you archive your work? Are you still keeping your originals, or do you have more photo files and CDs laying all over the place. I’d much rather have them be out there doing good. JB: I do keep everything electronically now. I guess that’s probably true since about 2000. I was always pretty good at keeping hard copies of my work. I have a more or less complete file of my work from the beginning. So there’s always that to fall back on. And then I have CDs of the more recent stuff, because that’s completely archived digitally. We started scanning the Zits strips from day one. JN: A side question, do you sell any of your originals? JB: Oh, yeah. There’s a little gallery here in town, actually more of a frame shop, but they do represent a couple of artists. The folks who run the place used to show up at my talks when I’d give them, and they just were interested in my work. We became friends, and then they proposed that they carry my work there. For me, it was always just not knowing how to handle folks who called wanting to get originals. They were worth something, but I was a terrible negotiator and all that. Artists should always get someone else to represent our work—we tend to undersell ourselves otherwise. So I thought it really was best to put it in the hands of somebody else who could speak for me. And they’ve been doing that for years now. It’s a great little family-run shop, and they have my signature in a neon sign in the front window, and everybody in town has just learned that’s where you go if you want one of my drawings.

JN: I feel the same way. What good is it doing me having it sitting there. If somebody wants to buy it, hey. JB: Well, yeah. JN: The type of computers are a huge deal nowadays. Tell us what kind of computer you’re running your work off of. Are you a Mac guy or a PC guy? JB: Mac all the way. I’ve never worked on a PC. Now you’re going to ask me what kind of Mac, aren’t you? JN: [laughs] Well, you can just tell me what operating system it is and I’ll be fine with that. JB: At home I know I have OS X. JN: It’s a G3 or a G4? JB: G4. JN: And does the newspaper outfit you with a new desktop every so often, or is that up to you?

JN: They just go right there, huh?

JB: No. You get one and you’re supposed to be happy.

JB: Yes, and they sell many of them. Also a lot of them do go to fund raisers and things like that. I’ve always tried to be generous with my work. I think service is a big, important thing in our world. We have these by-products of our work, these physical drawings, by the end of it, and they just sit in a drawer often, and

JN: Yeah. You work with it until it dies, right?

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

JB: I think at home I’ve gone through three, maybe. But I’m perfectly happy. I don’t know, I think it’s—does 40 GB sound right? JN: Yeah, that sounds good.

CARTOONING JB: Yeah, I think I have 40 GB, and I never sense that I’m at the edge of any capacity that I have, so I really do just kind of leave it alone if it’s working for me. And I have a really big flat screen monitor, which I love. JN: What kind of scanner are you working with, size-wise? JB: I have a really big flatbed scanner at home. UMAX, I think it’s called. It can scan 11" x 17". It’s really great. That’s like, for me, having a great car or something. I don’t care about cars, but when I got that big scanner, that was like, “Ah!” JN: It’s a monster. I have an Epson; I have one of those big ones. It cost me an arm and a leg. JB: Yeah, this did, too. I forget. It was a couple thousand, I want to say. But it makes all the difference, because then you don’t have to take that intermediate step of reducing your work on a copying machine in order to scan it. I don’t know if that’s how other people did it, but that’s how I was doing it. And then you’re dependent on the quality of that copy. So this way you know I’m scanning right from my original and it’s very true to the drawing.

JIM BORGMAN

gives me a kind of a funky look if I’m lettering inside the panel, like in a voice balloon. I always hold my Micron a certain way. You’re getting into the real eccentricities here. JN: No, that’s the good stuff. JB: When I use the Micron, I always point the barrel, I always hold the thing in such a way that the number on it is facing up toward me. And so, as I use the thing, it kind of breaks it in in a certain way. It’s not random each time, it’s the same way each time, and I think it produces a slightly thick/thin sort of feel. It chisels the point a little bit, and once you’ve really broken one in, they’re great for lettering that way. JN: Do you go through a pen until you kill it, or do you just switch out whatever’s close to your hand? JB: I go through it until I kill it. JN: I know, especially in Philadelphia, it’s hard to find stuff, just because there’re so many cartoonists and people in the area, they buy out the art stores all the time.

JN: Well, let’s talk about your drawing setup now. What kind of drawing supplies are you using these days?

JB: Really? Wow. In Cincinnati they’ve imprisoned most of the artists.

JB: I draw with a brush, a Winsor & Newton Series 7 #3.

JN: Yeah. Do you get your supplies from a brick-and-mortar store, or do you go onto the Internet to find supplies?

JN: The industry standard! [laughs] JB: For pencils, I’ve gotten partial to these little retractable Papermate Sharp Writer pencils. There’s nothing fancy about them, but it works for me. And then I use a lot of these Pigma Micron Pens to doodle. The lettering for the comic strip is all with one of those .05 Pigma Microns. And for the editorial cartoons, I do it a lot of different ways. Sometimes I kind of draw each letter with an angle-tipped Micron .03. Sometimes I use this Speedball nib. It’s a D5, I think it says. It depends on what kind of look I want. That

JB: I have bought them through Cheap Joe’s on the Internet. But there are also these allegiances. Like, the newspaper has allegiances to various retailers in town, and so forth. I still buy, when I make my purchases twice a year, we actually call a brick-and-mortar store here in town, which the Enquirer has been doing business with for years, and we make our big supply orders through them.

JN: We were talking about your pencils and inking and everything. Now, that’s very interesting that you use Microns. That seems to be more of a “young cartoonist” device these days. PREVIOUS PAGE: Sketches and quotes

from the 2004 presidential debates. BELOW: More editorial cartoon ideas/sketches from Jim’s sketchbooks.

JB: I wouldn’t know. JN: Yeah, using the markers or the Micron Pigmas, something like that. Because a lot of the younger cartoonists don’t know how to pick up and use a brush, so they kind of lean on the Microns more than just sitting down and learning how to use a Winsor & Newton. Or just the ignorance of not knowing about crow quills. JB: Right. Well, what about you? What do you use?

JN: I’m a kind of grab whatever’s near me type of guy. I use a little Winsor & Newton Series 7. And I do use the Microns. Actually, I have one in my hand right now. And I have a secret love with calligraphy markers. DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

CARTOONING

JIM BORGMAN

ABOVE AND RIGHT: Jim’s commentary on the extravagent 2005 Inaugural Ball for President Bush. When the ball was held, the U.S. had not yet commited any funds towards the relief effort for the victims of a then-recent, devastating Tsunami, which killed thousands and left tens of thousands without food or shelter.

JB: Oh, cool. JN: You just get crazy thick/thins off of them.

JB: It’s all Strathmore Bristol. I learned a few years ago that I was actually using the student grade. So then I thought, “Well, geez, I guess I should use the professional grade.”

JB: Yeah, I’ve tried a number of things over the years. Tony Auth there in Philadelphia, we were in more frequent contact back a while ago, and he turned me on to a little fine-tipped felt pen, and I got a few. And I liked it; it just was a dream to draw with, but it wasn’t permanent ink. I don’t think any of us were really thinking about that at the time. But I’ve got one of his drawings from that era, and I’ve got it up on the wall; it’s faded and faded and faded.

JN: Just in case they come looking for it.

JN: It gets all purple and everything.

JN: Do you use one versus the other for a reason, or that’s just kind of what you have there at the office?

JB: I hated to think that was what would happen to my drawings. Permanence became something I started watching a lot more for, so when the Microns came out, I just started buying them by the box.

JB: [laughs] Yeah. Strathmore 500 Series Bristol. JN: Is that smooth or is that a vellum— JB: Plain surface, it says. Three-ply. Yeah, it’s real smooth.

JB: Yes.

JB: That’s kind of what I’ve settled on over the years as being comfortable. I’ve always liked a real smooth surface. And Strathmore went through a period some years ago, guys like you probably know about this, but it seemed like the board got rougher. And I was kind of scrambling, because it felt like a labor to draw with that. And I don’t know, some seemed to get better again. Do you know about all that stuff?

JN: Now, what size board are you using? What kind of paper are you using?

JN: Yeah. And also how the Black Magic Higgins ink is like gray water now.

JN: You keep a nice stockpile of them.

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

CARTOONING

JIM BORGMAN

said, “Eh, the drawing has to look like a drawing when I’m doing it.” And that really rang true for me. Even if the blue doesn’t reproduce on the plate, it’s still got to feel like a drawing, it’s still got to look like it’s coming out right when I’m creating it. So I do need the ink to look nice and black. JN: Do you use color eraseable pencils at all?

JB: No. I just use these little Sharp Writers, and then I erase them with a soft eraser when I’m done. JN: Now, once you’ve finished with your penciling stage, are you doing sketches and doing any lightboxing, or are you going straight onto the boards? JB: Straight onto the drawing paper. I’ve never done the lightbox thing. JN: And are you doing full blacks when you’re inking, or do you do any spot blacks with the computer? JB: Oh, okay. Yeah, see, you’re into this. This is cool. I don’t compare notes with people much. I’ve switched to a kind of ink called Dr. Ph. Martin’s Tech. JN: Oh, okay. I’ve never used it, but I know about it. JB: I just find it perfectly great. JN: I know a lot of people are now using the F.W. Acrylic ink, but I’ve always heard good things about the Ph. Martin stuff. JB: I don’t know about the acrylic ink. What’s acrylic ink? What’s that mean? JN: Hold on, let me find my jar. See, we’re swapping war stories. JB: This is great! JN: This is called F.W. Acrylic Artists Ink. It’s India ink. I don’t really know what’s acrylic about it, but it lays on really black and it’s not as streaky and watery as most stuff is now. I used to actually cut my Higgins with Sumi ink and make a little soup, just because the Higgins got so gray, and I had a whole lot of it. And the Sumi Japanese ink is really dark. [laughs] I’ve turned into a chemist instead of a cartoonist. JB: [laughs] I remember, again, MacNelly—I told you how important he was to me—and the first time I met him, I just hung on every word he said. So I said to him, “Jeff, it seems like the ink’s getting so thin. How do you keep your drawings looking right?” And he said, “Well, I actually add some water to mine.” So he was looking for a whole different look from the rest of us, I guess. And I guess no matter what you’re comfortable with—Pat Oliphant told me once, “When I do a drawing, it has to look like a drawing.” He said it actually in relation to the question, “Do you draw with a blue pencil underneath?” And he

JB: No, the drawing, inasmuch as I can, is going to look complete when I’m done with it. So, I would fill in all the blacks on the paper. I know what you mean, you could do that. A smart person might do it a different way, but I just like it to look real if I can. JN: To me, I kind of feel like it’s cheating. You gotta do something with all that ink you have laying around. JB: And there are a lot of people who like to put these up on their wall. I know I said earlier that I edit a lot on the computer, and that’s true, but the version somebody is buying or bought at an auction, my original still has an integrity to it, I think, that you can still understand what the cartoon’s about. Something might have been moved a millimeter on the computer, but for all intents and purposes, it’s still a complete drawing in your hands. JN: So then you’re going to scan. What are your settings when you’re scanning your work in? JB: Let me think. I never change them, so I don’t think about it much. JN: Are you going at a high DPI, like 800 or something? JB: Oh, yeah. Let’s see. The DPI for the editorial cartoons I think is just 400 DPI, because they told me at one point that above a certain point it’s kind of wasted on newsprint. But the comic strip I think is 800 DPI, because we use those same scans for book reproductions. You want those to be as fine as possible. I mean, I always figure even if in the newspaper certain details are lost, maybe by the time they’re in the book, that’s going to be your best capture of the artwork, so 800 seems to be plenty good for that purpose. And then the book covers are 1200 DPI. DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

JIM BORGMAN

CARTOONING

RIGHT: More sketchbook material. NEXT PAGE: Pencils and finishes for a Zits daily strip.

JN: And it’s better to go high than low, because you can’t go back once you go low. And what about when you’re doing Zits? Are you still coloring your Sundays? JB: I do some. I also have help. JN: Do you change any of the DPIs for that? JB: Yeah. American Color, they send out a guide sheet; I think I scan the black-andwhite at a finer DPI than they even ask you for, but I file those at 800. And then it seems to me the color is at 300. Does that sound right? JN: Yeah, that sounds right. JB: About 300. So yeah, that’s the way we do that. JN: Oh, okay. Do you save any of your files at a lower DPI just to have them at a lower res if you need to give them to somebody or send them to your syndicate? Like, 72 DPIs for the web or anything like that? JB: No, I never have done that. Maybe they’re doing that on their end. No, I just kind of have that one size. It’s e-mailable—we have a T1 line, so I can basically send almost any size file that the recipient can receive. I have no trouble just sending them at 400 or 800. JN: That’s a pretty standard way of doing things, and it seems like the technology curve has helped your process a little bit. JB: Yeah, I would say so. JN: You don’t have to go into the dungeon and do stats anymore. JB: Right. No, I don’t miss those days at all. And the truth is, I dunno, I can be a little anal when it comes to this work, and it’s satisfying to me to remove that one pixel that’s in the wrong place. [laughs] I know that I’m just talking to myself at that point and not really having any significant impact on the way the thing’s reprinted, but I like to get it right. So I do spend time shaving pixels off of eyeballs and stuff like that, just so I have that satisfaction of knowing it’s really right. 26

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

JN: Let me ask you a question about your lettering. I’m a big fan of hand-lettering, but I don’t do it anymore, because it was killing me. How do you feel about people who are using computer fonts instead of hand-lettering their strips and things these days? JB: Y’know, I try not to pass judgment on other people. They seem to have their sense of what their work should look like. I know that in the couple of cases that I felt like I might have a sensibility for the artwork, when the artist started using fonts, even when it was, obviously, their own font, it seemed to me to have a more static quality to it. So I still like the liveliness and bounce of authentically lettered stuff. That’s pretty wonkish, isn’t it? JN: No, no, I think it’s cool. I do some teaching, too, and kids have no idea what an Ames Lettering Guide is. You know what I mean? You find those in the clearance bins. JB: Well, my dad was a sign painter, so when I was growing up, he’d take on extra work and be doing it down in the garage in the evenings, after supper. So I’d go down and I’d stand behind him. That was some of the time we spent that I just loved. We did it together, both our eyes trained on the sign in front of him that he was lettering. He’d mark off the spacing of the letters before I could tell what it was going to say. And he’d form those letters—I mean, it was real old-world kind of craft to form these letters. He was beautiful at it. And I’d stand there and watch this sign take form in front of me, and sometimes I’d guess at what it was going to say, but mostly I think it was just, my eyes were tracing the letters as they went down. And somehow or other, that went right into my soul. And I just developed a love for the aesthetics of lettering. Now, I’m not great at all kinds of lettering or anything. It’s not like I have this whole stable of fonts that I can letter in, but I

CARTOONING think I’ve developed an aesthetic for it. To me, the lettering has to be right in a drawing. It can’t be flat and static, it’s got to have as much life as I hope to put in the expressions on the faces. JN: That’s one of the most downplayed aspects of cartooning is, the lettering is just an integral part of the strip, just as much as the art is. JB: Yeah. Do many people feel that way, or am I an old-timer? JN: No, no. I think a lot of people feel that way, but I think the younger people just don’t know yet. After some brief beatings, they should get— JB: [laughs] Yeah. Well, I always try to be aware that I am speaking for myself. Guys like Tom Tomorrow—well, I’m just saying that I think everybody has their aesthetic. I wouldn’t presume to tell a Tom Tomorrow or a Ted Rall or a Scott Adams that they should be lettering every panel. I don’t know. It might be that something of a static look or a kind of preset lettering kind of look is what they’re after. So I’m not trying to comment on anybody else’s work, I’m just saying that in my own world of aesthetics, my work has to have that kind of life to it or I’m just not happy with it. JN: I think especially in cases like Tom Tomorrow and other cartoonists that the lack of handwritten lettering or lots of fonts actually bring out the style of the strip. Like, Tom Tomorrow’s whole feeling is a very sanitized, almost, I don’t know— JB: Ironic-looking.

JB: That’s kind of what I was getting at. And I think even Scott Adams, he’s trying to do a strip about the static life of the workplace, and something about capturing some of that monotony of the workplace might even be aided with a static kind of lettering. I don’t know. That’s something for him to decide. But I try to fill my panel with as much life and electricity as I can. That’s just my way. So I need the lettering to be part of that team of building excitement. JN: One thing I really admire about your work is the life your characters have. The dynamics of the Zits strips, and how “teenagerish” your teenagers act and function. Do you do a lot of referencing or do you do any life studies? JB: [laughs] My life is a life study, I’ve got to tell you. I got remarried last year. I had two teenagers and my new wife had three teenagers, so we have five teenagers in my house. And throngs of their friends pour through. JN: [laughs] That’s crazy. JB: I don’t really need to go outside my house to study anybody. But also, when you’re doing a strip like that, your eyes suddenly tune to that world, and so I’ve always liked having kids come through my office, things like that. I turn my personal satellite to a little finer frequency when I’m around teenagers, and I soak up everything I can. I love that world, I always have. I love being around teenagers, and to me, they are the most authentic people around. They tell you what they’re thinking and they wear their attitudes. Compared to the gray world that most adults exhibit, teenagers just show you so much more. And I love that honesty about them. I try to capture some of that.

JN: Yeah, yeah. So it would probably detract from it if he was doing the lettering by hand.

JIM BORGMAN

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

CARTOONING

JIM BORGMAN

ABOVE AND RIGHT: As seen in this Zits Sunday strip, Jim starts by penciling and lettering the strip (top). He then does the brushwork (above). And finally the fine detail work is inked with Micron pens, then the artwork is scanned in and cleaned up and fine-tuned in Photoshop (right).

JN: Do you ever have problems kind of jumping in and out of these two worlds, going from doing the Zits stuff into changing your mindset to do political?

comic strip as talking about the little things in life, and editorial cartoons tend to talk about the bigger things. For whatever reason, between them, that pretty much covers the span of my thoughts.

JB: Y’know, you’d think. On paper, you’d think it would work that way, but it doesn’t, actually. I just feel like I’ve got the forum now to talk about most any thought that comes to my mind. If it’s a big kind of global, “This is wrong, this has got to change” kind of thought, that fits into the editorial cartoons. And when I’ve had enough pontificating and I just need to sort of, for my own therapy, talk about my life and the issues in my household, the strip almost always can accommodate those thoughts. No, it’s actually a pleasant back-and-forth between those two worlds. I think of the

JN: That’s got to be really fulfilling that you can get it all out in either one of the avenues.

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

JB: Terrifically. Thanks for saying that. You’re, like, the first person that’s said that. When you’re a cartoonist, or maybe any kind of artist, I think you want to be able to use any thought you have. Your mission is to create a forum and a breadth to your work so that any intriguing thought that you have has a home. And I can’t say that I had that when I was only doing editorial cartoons,

CARTOONING because a lot of things just don’t rise to the level of an editorial cartoon. Shuttling the kids to football practice, that doesn’t exactly merit an editorial cartoon. So there were a lot of things that just kind of play on my mind that didn’t have a home. And then when I did the strip, suddenly every thought had a home, and there is no waste anymore. It’s like, if it seems like an intriguing thought or a feeling that I’m having, it’s got a place to go. JN: That’s got to be great. Since I do the web comics thing and I do editorial, I’m still trying to find where can I dump the rest of the stuff in my head. Y’know what I mean? JB: Yeah, I do know, I do know. I wish you a forum. I hope you find your way on that, because I just think that becomes a very satisfying way to live. Then it’s no longer, “How can I sustain this? Where’s my next idea going to come from?” It’s more a matter of paying attention to your thoughts and saying, “Oh yeah, that I can put here.” JN: Do you keep a sketchbook? JB: Yeah. JN: Is there a method to your sketching or do you just jot things down as the day goes on? Let me rephrase that. Do you keep a “Jim’s Thoughts” sketchbook and do you keep a work sketchbook, or are they all the same thing? JB: It’s all the same thing. Here was the breakthrough for me. Everybody kept telling me, my teachers would tell me, “You’ve got to keep a sketchbook, keep a sketchbook, keep a sketchbook.” In my head, what I was hearing is like a Leonardo Da Vinci sketchbook full of these beautiful, explicit little drawings. And my basic feeling was, “I don’t have time to do all those new beautiful little drawings. I want to get it to the big paper faster.” So I didn’t for a long time. Then my wife read a book, I think it was called The New Diary. It wasn’t directed to artists, it was to writers, but the concept was applicable, which was, “Don’t treat these things so preciously. Write everything down. Write your dreams down in them, write your gro-

JIM BORGMAN

cery list, let your kids draw in them, paste things in them.” Everything and anything. It’s just a working treatment of your recorded thoughts. What she told me about that book—which I never did read, by the way, but she told me what I needed to learn from it—I thought, “Okay, now I know what to do here.” And I started keeping sketchbooks and treating them that way. And they just look like the biggest hodgepodge you’ll ever see, but a lot more of my thoughts got recorded. And I even found that, looking back over the sketchbooks, the juxtaposition of random things often leads my mind into good places. So you’ve got a grocery list next to a little sketch of an armadillo and then something you cut out with a Marine in Iraq all swimming around on this page together, and that often leads my mind to interesting places. Actually, I find that if my well runs dry and I’m not coming up with very fertile ideas, it’s usually because I haven’t been drawing in my sketchbook much. JN: So do you keep it near you at all times, or is it just something you go to when— JB: My advice is to keep it with you at all times. I can’t honestly say I practice that. I keep one in the car, I keep one in the office. I’ll remember to pick it up if I’m going someplace where I know I’m going to have to cool my heels for a while, like a soccer game or picking up my kids from school. But do I really literally have it with me all the time? No. I wish I could say I did. But here’s the other great thing about a sketchbook. When I was in my mid-20s, I did what many people do. I looked at my work and I thought, “You know what? I am no more than the amalgamation of other people’s work. There’s a little MacNelly here, there’s a little Oliphant here, there’s a little Mike Peters here, there’s a little Ronald Searle here. But basically I’m no more than the digested sum of all those people who’ve influenced me.” And I was very frustrated. I wanted to know who I was and what my voice sounded like. So I went into kind of a cold turkey period where whenever I started to draw, I would, if it started to look like somebody else had drawn it, I would start over. I was trying to get back to what I drew like in a more virginal form. And my best clue ended up being my sketchbooks, because what I found was, I put my ideas down in my sketchbook before I started

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

CARTOONING

JIM BORGMAN

RIGHT: Vice President Dick Cheney make an appearance in Jim’s sketchbook before the then-upcoming 2004 Republican convention. BELOW: An optional Zits Sunday strip lead-off panel. FAR RIGHT: Jim works out a Colin Powell profile. NEXT PAGE BOTTOM: Jim asleep at the board.

becoming self-conscious about what they looked like. It’s just all raw in the sketchbook. And I’d look back there and think, “Oh, that’s what I would draw that like if it were just me.” JN: That’s like before you put on your uniform to go to work, it just is raw. JB: Exactly. So the sketchbooks were very valuable to me that way, and I still look at them that way, like there’s a sort of primitive simplicity to the way I put the drawings down in my sketchbook, and if I ever feel like I’m losing my way, I can go back to that. JN: Do you think the fact that you keep a sketchbook has something to do with why you don’t do under-tracings of your work and you go right to the board?

JN: Right, right. You kind of wish your way out of doing what you originally planned to do.

E. SYNDICAT FEATURES D BY KING TE BU RI DIST NERSHIP. 5 ZITS PART ZITS ©200

JB: Maybe, yeah. That makes sense, because it’s already captured. The essence of the idea is captured already, and I have that to refer back to. Y’know, I find that my first instinct on a drawing is usually the right one. When I record the idea in the sketchbook, usually all of the important elements are right there, and the unimportant elements are not there, and it becomes this pretty good road map. ’Cause I don’t know about you, but in the course of a day, I might come up with a good idea and then outthink it 15 times.

JB: And then, by the end of it, you can’t even remember what you were thinking in the beginning, how to get back to it. So if you have that in a sketch form, whether it’s a sketchbook or a rough or whatever, it’s like leaving a bread crumb trail, you can always find your way back to the beginning.

JN: What do you think about the other cartooning mediums nowadays? Do you have any interest in web cartoons, or do you know much about that world? 30

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

JB: I don’t know much about them, I see probably the tip of the iceberg. I can tell you that, in theory, it seems like a great thing to me. A lot of people now who never got seen are seen, I assume. I think it’s always a good thing for the individual and for the world to have a person’s work out there where others can see it. I guess in a way it comes down to my own life. I’ve got all these kids and two jobs. I just don’t have that much time to sit in front of a computer and wander. So I’m happy that folks are finding and developing this new trail, and it’s free from some of the constrictions of traditional publishing and syndication, and that seems like a good thing. There are a lot of fields of cartooning that you’d think I would know about, that I’m actually pretty naïve about. Like, I do not know the whole comic book world much at all. I could name only one or two people in that whole area. JN: You’re not missing too much sometimes. [laughs] JB: Well, on the other hand, I’ll take my son to the comic book store, and I look and I think, “My God, these are fabulous artists. Why do I not take it upon myself to get to know all this work?” To some extent I guess it just doesn’t speak to me that much. I don’t know. It’s just, we’ve got one life and a limited amount of time, and for whatever reason, that hasn’t made its way into my priorities. JN: Well, how do you feel about the comics page nowadays, as far as the newspaper is concerned? Do you feel like it’s changing? I won’t get too much into syndication, because that’s always touchy, but one of the things with the web cartoons is that you have a bunch of people who feel like they couldn’t get in the front door with syndicating, so they went the other way, and now they own more say in their properties, and they’re free to do what they want with their creations, versus the editorial constraints of syndicating and things like that.

CARTOONING

JIM BORGMAN

JB: I have worked at a newspaper long enough to see that the decisions that are made about what goes in the paper are kind of “least common denominator” sort of decisions, in many cases. Newspapers are real broad brush, and it goes into homes of people, all kinds of different life situations. And the editor’s trying to make choices that will appeal to a whole lot of folks, so by the nature of that decision, it’s not going to have some of the cutting edge things that would be fascinating, but only appealing to

a small number of people. So I’ve just come to accept that that’s the way the world works. I think it’s a great thing if people can find another avenue. I don’t have many thoughts or bits of advice for the people in that position on how to make their work more marketable, or even if that’s what their goal is. JN: Right. The same type of thing happens in comics, with selfpublishers versus somebody working for, like, Marvel Comics. There’s one side of the fence that feels like, “Well, these guys just have sour grapes because they weren’t “good enough” to get in with the big guys, so they have to go and do their crappy versions of comics to make their way. Then there’s the other side of the fence that feels like, “Well, you guys are disillusioned because I’m doing what I want to do with no one else to dictate anything to me.” It goes both ways. JB: At some point it becomes that argument of “if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it—.” I would wish for everybody in this world to find an avenue for expressing themselves. We’d all be happier if they did. But if what that person is doing is so esoteric or “inside” that I can’t understand it, then it’s not reasonable for you to expect me to keep tuning in, either. I suspect you find your audience, and if talking to them is satisfying to you, then that’s what you do.

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL CARTOONIST!

EACH BOOK PERSONALLY SIGNED AND NUMBERED BY THE ARTIST ART ATTACK is limited to 200 copies. It’s 48 pages filled with gals, monsters and weirdos for only $10 US. THEY CAME FROM OUT OF MY HEAD is limited to 500 copies. It’s 48 drawing jam-packed pages for only $10 US. Add $1.50 each for shipping. Overseas orders add $7.00 US Send a check or money order (preferred) to my mail box: PO BOX 2129 Upper darby PA 19082, or my paypal account by sending money to Action Planet Inc mike@actionplanet.com

www.actionplanet.com

Conducted in 2005 by Mike Manley Transcribed by Steven Tice n the glut of webtoons that sprung up seemingly overnight in the Dot-com boom of the late ’90s, Roque Ballesteros, with his award-winning web cartoon Joe Paradise, was one of the real stand-out talents. After the boom went bust—taking most of the web cartoon sites with it and making new millionares, “thousandaires”—Roque surfed on and has stayed at the forefront of Flash animation as it’s matured and continued to develop as a valid and viable format for animation on both TV and the web. Working from San Francisco with his new company Ghostbot, which he runs with two partners, Roque continues to use Flash as he animates on everything from TV commercials and rock videos, to those cuddly little bundles of violence, The Happy Tree Friends. I meet Roque last year at Comic-Con International: San Diego and was immediately floored by the demo DVD he had with him. Being a big fan of Joe Paradise, it was great to get to talk with Roque and show more of his work and that of the mysterious men of Ghostbot. —Mike Manley

DRAW: This is the typical question I always ask artists I interview, but I’ll ask you the same thing: Were you into comics and animation as a kid, and when did you decide that this was what you wanted to do as a job? ROQUE BALLESTEROS: Definitely! I loved comics since I was a wee lad. I think the first comic I owned was a Jack Kirby FF. Then the Uncanny X-Men was my book for the longest time. I’d watch animation all the time—three o’clock was the golden hour of my afternoon because I’d watch Transformers, He-Man, Thundercats, SpiderMan and his Amazing Friends, anything and everything. I even loved the animated bits on

ROQUE BALLESTEROS

FLASH ANIMATION

Sesame Street. I think they burned a hole in my subconscious. So the story goes, one day in seventh grade, me and a buddy wanted to go watch a Jean Claude Van Damme movie... I think it was Cyborg. My mom caught wind of our plan and said, “Why don’t you go watch The Little Mermaid? Of course this was a rhetorical question because basically she was forcing us to go watch the less violent Disney film over the blood-and-guts neo-apocalyptic flick. So, we reluctantly went. As I sat and watched that movie, I found I was wrapped up in the story and the characters and I forgot that I was watching animation. I distinctly remember one moment that I caught myself and thought, “Wait a minute—someone had to draw all of that?” I thought that was the coolest thing and I realized I wanted to do that when I grew up.

physically cutting the film and all that kind of stuff. We weren’t really technologically on top of the bar, so I didn’t know that much about Flash when I got out of school. I went straight from RISD to a commercial animation studio in Boston called Olive Jar Animation Studio. I just had a brief stint there. I was there for maybe a month and a half, and I was animating a commercial for Kraft Singles. [laughter] The thing about Olive Jar was since they were close in proximity to Providence, they tended to get a lot of RISD grads in their pool of talent, so a lot of grads went straight there, which is what happened to me. So it was like you got thrown into the pool of commercial animation. I wouldn’t say I was that prepared for it. It was going from animating your own fancy artsy-fartsy student film to animating on a commercial. But definitely it was a good experience. DRAW: And I’m sure the biggest difference is the time crunch, because on a commercial you probably have to really crank it out. RB: Yeah, yeah, for sure. And it was kind of crazy because I actually started that job a little bit before I graduated, just a few weeks before I graduated, so myself and another pal of mine were actually commuting back and forth from Providence to Boston to work. Basically since our finals were over, we didn’t really have that much schoolwork to do, we had some gaps in our schedules, and we could commute back and forth. It was insanity; it was really, really crazy. DRAW: So while you’re working at Olive Jar, and working on commercial stuff, were you starting to develop things like Joe Paradise, or think of your own projects? Were you getting gems

RB: Yeah. I don’t want to knock my school, but I guess every school has its weaknesses. One of the weaknesses, I thought, of RISD [Rhode Island School of Design] was they weren’t the most technologically-savvy when I was there. It was great because they were really focusing on the traditional foundation pencil-and-paper kind of work, gritty film editing, ABOVE: Joe Paradise design model. RIGHT: Storyboards for Episode 16: “The Stranger” of Joe Paradise. NEXT PAGE TOP: Miss Hush pitch model.

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

DRAW: So when you graduated from art school, where did you go next? Because at that time in the late ’90s I guess Flash was starting to come up, and was growing as fast as the web was growing then.

FLASH ANIMATION of ideas in your head, or a better direction of where you wanted to go, what you wanted to do? RB: Yeah, this is a funny story. Joe Paradise came from when I was still in school, when I was a junior in college. We had a final assignment for the semester, which was to animate a one-minute project, and the theme was laundry. And in my mind I didn’t really want to do anything about laundry. I actually wanted to do some guy running around shooting things. [laughter] DRAW: Like just about half of the students I teach—all the male students. They just want to draw things that are blowing up, fighting and killing each other. There’s just something very primal, very male, about that, I guess.

RB: The opportunity to work on something that I created myself, that was just the first thing that my mind went to. I was really into John Woo films at the time, so I was like, “I want to animate some guy running around shooting things!” So that’s actually where Joe Paradise came in. It was a more primitive version of him, but the little short film started off as him blasting through the screen and just running around shooting things. And then basically the last five seconds of the film, he lands on the floor, and he jumps up and he sees a washer and a dryer, and then the film ends. [laughter] That was my way of throwing laundry into my film. But it was funny, because I got such a weird and great response from my peers. They really liked it; they thought it was just so campy and goofy, so that character always stuck in my mind, and I thought, “Oh, maybe I could do something with him.” I would sketch him out here and there at school,

ROQUE BALLESTEROS so he kind of was there already. And then, right after that film I actually had an internship my junior year in college, in San Francisco, where I am now, and I was interning at Wild Brain. That’s where the connection came from that later ended up resulting in me producing Joe at Wild Brain. After my job was done in Boston, I said, “I really liked San Francisco, I really liked Wild Brain. I’m going out there. I’m going to go try and work for them.” So after Olive Jar I went to Wild Brain and started off as an animation assistant there.

DRAW: When did they start thinking of producing all those cartoons like Joe Paradise and Glue? That was sort of in the big wave, when everybody like Icebox and Wild Brain was cranking out these web cartoons, and people were downloading and watching them at work when they were bored. RB: Yup, yup. It was quite fun, actually. I guess it was in... I want to say 1999.... DRAW: OK, because it didn’t last very long; that whole thing blew up in 2000. RB: What happened was, I was working as an assistant on a whole bunch of commercials that were just coming through Wild Brain at the time, and I think they did it like a yearly thing, where they would have a pitch time, where anybody in the whole company could go and pitch a project idea to some of the directors there. And the directors would look at and critique your idea. The hope was they would develop it, but because I was a newbie at the company, I was going there just hoping to get some great feedback for my ideas. The one idea I thought I would pitch was Joe Paradise, because I liked the character. I didn’t really have a story totally fleshed out at the moment. I thought he was cool, he was fun, and I wasn’t totally attached to him, but I wanted to give it a try. So I took a week and started developing a story; I gave him a back-story, gave him some side characters to work with, gave him an arch-nemesis, and all that kind of stuff. I pitched the idea to the executives, and, to my surprise, they really liked it. They opened up this idea that they were producing Internet shows for their website, which they were developing because the whole dot-com thing was building up. So they said, “You know what? This is not going to work for television DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

ROQUE BALLESTEROS

FLASH ANIMATION

because of its guns and its style—it’s a little bit graphic and abstract. It might not work for kids. But why don’t you try it for our Internet series?” And I was like, “Cool! All right! Let’s go!” So they kind of catapulted me into position of the creator and director of the show. DRAW: Wow. And you were actually animating on it, too, right? RB: I did some stuff—anything that was really too hard to explain or I really wanted to craft myself—but for the most part, I wrote everything, I storyboarded everything, and then with the second season I had a storyboard artist named Amber MacLean, and she was really awesome. But initially I storyboarded everything, did all the design, and then they started slowly building up a crew behind me to start working on the shows. DRAW: Was this done as a full script or a plot, then broken down? In other words how much freedom did you or the board artist have to invent or “plus” the script as you were storyboarding it? RB: Since I was the writer, there was a lot of freedom—no egos to offend if things changed. We would always come up with new visual gags or solutions for the story as we were boarding. When 36

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

I wrote the actual script, I had an idea of where the story was going and maybe some specific scenes already worked out in my head. But oftentimes, once I was done writing a particular episode, I’d switch modes and become the storyboard artist and approach it as if it was written by any other writer. It was very schizo. DRAW: What was the main thing you were looking for from the board artist? RB: Someone who could draw like the dickens—someone who could emulate the style of the show and at the same time, bring

LEFT: Roque’s thumbnails for Episode 16 of Joe Paradise were drawn on Post-it notes and pasted in place. BELOW: The top row of thumbnails at left, drawn out in full storyboard form. RIGHT: A rough design drawing of the Russian spy duo, Moesch and Yuri.

FLASH ANIMATION something to the table that I wouldn’t think of. Also it was real important that the board artist had a good sense of cinematic storytelling. DRAW: Were you giving direction to them saying for instance “Go all John Woo here, but get quiet here”? RB: Yes definitely. Basically how it would work is I’d hand my rough thumbnails to the other board artist and we’d walk through them. That’s when I’d give them the overview of the episode and any specific direction I had about scenes. We were working so closely that they could show me their progress and I’d give revision notes, or redraw scenes that weren’t quite working. I remember one time I brought in a bunch of movies— The Godfather, Hard Boiled, The Conversation—and we dissected them scene by scene to see what was working. DRAW: Were your boards pitched? Did you hang them up and have them reviewed?

RB: [laughs] We didn’t have time for reviews. I think that’s how half of my crazy ideas got produced. The production schedule was so insane that most of the time my finished boards were already in production before they got in front of anyone who could veto them.

ROQUE BALLESTEROS

DRAW: So how did you break down your story? Did you mostly write it out first as a script, or did you write it out visually as a board, hitting “beat points” and work back and forth filling in and connecting sequences? RB: Both. Sometimes I would craft an episode just around a gag. For example, there was an episode called “Salty or Sweet” that I wrote about the dilemma you face when you order from a breakfast menu. “Do I pick a salty dish or a sweet dish?”—or maybe that’s just me.... Anyway, it was with the two Russian spies, Moesch and Yuri, and I turned it into this spy lingo that they were talking to one another as if they were talking about a code book or something. Then after I got the basic episode idea down, I figured out how to work in the whole story arc of that season into it. DRAW: Did you have to run the boards past anyone else at Wild Brain, or were you left to your own to create as you saw fit? Did you have any sounding board, a person to look at what you were doing and say something wasn’t clear? RB: For the most part it was all me, which was what made it so fun. I’d definitely bounce ideas off of other artists on the crew. I’d turn in finished scripts to the producers, but I never heard anything back that said “change this or that”—again, I don’t think we had any time. On the second batch of episodes, I was corresponding with a writer in L.A. named R.C. Rossenfier who happened to contact us because he was a big fan of the show. He became my script bouncing board as the season progressed and really helped me solidify aspects of my story. He was great and really witty. If I ever did a Joe Paradise series I’d hire him as a writer for sure. DRAW: How tight were your boards? Were you doing them tight enough to use as layouts, to cut down the drawing time? RB: That’s exactly what we were doing. When I first started the show, my boards were chicken DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

ROQUE BALLESTEROS

FLASH ANIMATION

RIGHT: A page from Roque’s sketchbook filled with ideas for Joe Paradise. NEXT PAGE: A rough design model and a pitch board for an episode of Joe Paradise.

scratch, only good enough for me to understand. But as soon as there was a crew, I started drawing tighter and tighter so there wasn’t any question as to how I wanted something to look. And then in order to save time, we would draw the boards tight enough so that the animators would just blow them up and use them as layouts. It worked out really well. DRAW: Can you describe the art process from board to Flash a bit?

RB: Once we had final boards, I would distribute those to the entire team. The animators would take our boards and blow them up to layout size. Then they’d separate out all the elements—characters, props, backgrounds—onto different levels. After they were done animating and designing up each scene on paper, they’d give their final artwork to our art prep/Photoshop guy who would scan all their artwork in, vectorize it using, at the time, Adobe Streamline, and then color it in Flash. Then he would send a file with all the finished assets to our Flash animator who would start assembling the episode in one master Flash file with sound, using the storyboards as his guide. During all those steps, I’d have check-ins to see how everything was looking, but there definitely was a point when we became a well-oiled machine and I’d trust these guys enough that I’d just comment on the final assembled file and do my revisions there. DRAW: Did the actors see the boards to go from or were the boards done after the voice recordings? How much freedom did you give the actors to ad-lib? RB: Voice recording and boards usually were happening at the same time; it seemed like everything was happening at the same time, actually. I don’t think I ever had completed boards to give to the voice actors to work from. Sometimes I’d hand them a design if I thought it would help them get more into character. Some of the actors worked really well with ad-libbing, like the guy who 38

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

was Joe Paradise. He was awesome. An amazing voice actor and he brought so much of Joe’s character through his voice. Other actors needed the structure of following the script exactly. Voice recording was one of my favorite parts of directing the show. DRAW: And how long would it take you to complete the average episode? RB: Let’s see. I want to say it took a couple of months to complete an episode. The episodes ran roughly anywhere from two to three minutes, maybe. DRAW: And then they gave you a budget, obviously, to go hire voice actors and things like that? RB: Well, the cool thing was, the only voice actor that we had to pay and hire was the guy who did Joe Paradise’s voice. That actor, his name was Bobby Black. He was incredible. He did the voice of Joe Paradise; he did the voice of Moesch, the big Russian bear; he did the voice of Big Mouth, the big fish guy; and Blackie, who is the little guy inside his mouth. And a couple of side voices on top of all that stuff—he did a lot of the voices. So he was the only professional voice actor we used and had to pay. All the voice actors for the rest of the characters were people that were my co-workers, or friends of friends of friends. It was kind of cool, because I really loved the voice acting on the show,

FLASH ANIMATION

DRAW: What was the feedback like after the episodes started to air? How did you feel? Was reaction strong and immediate? RB: It’s funny because we didn’t know what to expect when we started. The launch of Episode One of the series was so anti-climactic. It was like “Okay, we’re going to launch this afternoon.” Then the next moment it was up on the web, and that was it. No big launch party. No commercials on TV. It was totally surreal at that time to think that anyone in the world with a computer could see my show. Then responses started trickling in once word got out, and when we were in full swing, we were getting daily e-mails from all over the world. It was amazing. I got e-mails from Israel, from South America, from India. I was responding personally to them at first but then it got overwhelming and I didn’t have enough time. DRAW: So the whole dot-com thing kind of came, went, crashed, taking out everything with it. Which was a shame.... So what happened to Joe Paradise? What did you do after that? RB: Well, we produced two seasons of Joe Paradise, which was a total of 24 episodes, and the last thing that happened with him basically was that Sony had a website called Screenblast.com which was too little, too late, in my opinion. It was at the very, very end of the decline, and they were still trying to buy content. So Joe Paradise went on their website on their action channel, our show and another show called El Macho by a creator named Jorge Gutierrez. They aired the 24 episodes, and then that site just kind of disappeared and Joe Paradise kind of disappeared into the shadows. As quickly as he was created, he disappeared into the shadows. I went in and talked with Wild Brain since I had been working with them for a while by the end of the second season. I had recently gotten married, and when I came back from my honeymoon, there was no work.

RB: And my wife lost her job, too. DRAW: Oh, boy. This I guess was a direct result of the whole dot-com fallout. RB: It was really rough. Talk about getting to know one another, totally relying on one another. But it was awesome. I definitely wouldn’t trade that time for anything. It was rough, as far as work was concerned, but— DRAW: Do you still own Joe? RB: It’s kind of this crazy thing. Because Wild Brain shelled out money for the Internet part of the show, they owned the Internet production rights. But if I wanted to go and pitch Joe as a TV series, I have the rights to sell. That’s still mine. DRAW: Or if you wanted to do a comic book or a book...? RB: Right, exactly. Which has come up, because after that it was just—I don’t know. It’s been hard. It’s funny, because Joe Paradise definitely opened a lot of doors for me. It was a great time, I got a lot of experience on it, I had a fun time, great crew. But I’m kind of at this point where I’m like, “Okay, that’s done. Let me move on and let me create another show. Let me think of a new idea,” because it has a lot of baggage with it. It’s still kind of tied slightly with Wild Brain. I’ve even been telling them, “Let’s print up a DVD,” because there are a lot of shows that are successful just based on DVD sales. And I still get e-mails about Joe. I get at least one e-mail a month from some random fan who JOE PARADISE ©2005 WILDBRAIN.COM, INC.

I loved the people who were the voice actors. Ninety-nine percent of them weren’t professional, which is pretty amazing to me.

ROQUE BALLESTEROS

DRAW: That’s a nice honeymoon present. “Hi, honey! We’re married! Sorry, I have no job!” DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

FLASH ANIMATION

ROQUE BALLESTEROS

LEFT: Pitch model for Joe Paradise’s setting, Some City. BELOW: A rough design model from Joe Paradise. RIGHT: A pitch board for an episode of Joe Paradise.

finds out my e-mail address and says, “What happened to Joe Paradise? Is there a DVD?” DRAW: Some guy like me! [laughter] RB: So I would love to produce a TV series, but it’s just a lot of politics. DRAW: It’s always red tape until somebody has enough green paper to make the red tape go away. Then all of a sudden everybody can be friends. RB: Exactly. DRAW: Because I would think if you had 24 episodes at three minutes each, that’s enough for a DVD.

in that we did a lot of drawing, a lot of animation on paper, and then scanned it in and vectorized the art, and it would be assembled by a guy who knew Flash. He could do all the camera moves, he could go in and cut stuff together. But it wasn’t really animated in Flash, I would say. Maybe little things, but nothing really truly was drawn in Flash. There would be timing that I wanted really perfect, and there were things that I was being specific about. So after hours I would go into the file and try and figure out how to work Flash so that I could move around and adjust timing and shift some of the timeline. But one of my Ghostbot partners, Alan, learned Flash before I did, and was one of the animators on Joe Paradise for a season. So I asked him, “How does Flash work?” And he kind of gave me a few lessons after hours, and it was like the scales fell off my eyes. [laughter] “Wow, that’s how it works!” So then I would go in and I would just noodle to my heart’s content. And I got Flash on my computer at home, so at the end of the day I would take the Flash files home and I would adjust timing, I would fix colors... I got totally obsessed with it. DRAW: Oh, yeah. You can go hog wild and tweak to your heart’s content, yeah. RB: So that was the beginning of my learning Flash. DRAW: Because it seems now when I look at the industry, compare the

RB: Yeah, definitely. I don’t know. I would love to see one. I was talking to some people—with the stuff I know about Flash now and my experience up to this point, I would love to do a 30-second Joe Paradise pilot or a new episode or something. But at the same time I’m like “Cool, but I just gotta move on.” I don’t want to be attached to that for the rest of my life and be the greatest show that never got 77 episodes.

RB: Yes. Joe Paradise was being done in Flash, but we approached it in a very traditional way

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

DRAW: I’m still not exactly clear on how you came to interface with Flash. Since you didn’t learn Flash in college, you basically had to pick it up yourself as you went along?

FLASH ANIMATION

ROQUE BALLESTEROS lot of crap, too. Even with all of the good stuff that came out of the dot-com era, there was a lot of crap that came out. A lot of crap. It was a matter of sifting through it to find the little gems that were really good.

DRAW: And I guess when you’re bored at work and the boss is not looking, you’ve got plenty of time to sift. RB: [laughs] It’s true.

pre-2000 with the post-2000 industry, the amount of 2-D being done is lowering, and a lot of the 2-D work that’s being done is mainly for commercials—they still do plenty of commercials with 2-D—or it’s something being done in Flash. Because you don’t have the big powerhouse studios spending 150 million dollars to do these 2-D movies that in turn spawn out and create sequels and things like that. You don’t really have that big demand for the 2-D, the traditional way that you learned. They still do tons of 2-D TV cartoons, but they are, for the most part, not animated here; they are done overseas. RB: Yeah, that’s true, that’s really true. And it’s definitely becoming the trend now. You’re seeing a lot of these shows on TV like Foster’s on Cartoon Network. DRAW: Yeah, they do great stuff with Flash on that show. RB: Yeah, they’re doing really cool stuff, and people are really pushing the limits. And the studios are finally recognizing—. When we went down and visited L.A. a couple times, the buzz was, “Oh, this is going to be X Studios’ first Flash show.” Cartoon Network has Foster’s, and we’re going to do this show, which is going to be our first Flash show.” So everybody’s kind of moving toward that trend of realizing that Flash is a viable option, and it helps keep the budgets down low, and turns around fast. It gives the director a great chance to kind of get in there when it comes to retakes. It’s amazing, because you can go in there—like, I was doing in 2001 on Joe—go into the file and fix things and change things. DRAW: Also, you can do things here, you can employ people here. It’s become increasingly difficult over the last several years for people to go to art school and graduate and find a job doing 2-D animation in the States. It’s pretty hard. RB: Yeah, it’s true. But on the flip side, like you said, as far as traditional skills, you work a lot harder to find jobs for 2-D stuff. Flash design is out there for those people who have the training and the skills grounded in that traditional medium. There was a

DRAW: I saw some statistic that said the peak time usage for people downloading stuff like that was Wednesday afternoon at two o’clock. People just totally bored, the middle of the week, “I’m going out of my mind, let’s go watch Joe Paradise, or Glue, or Mister Wong, or something like that.” RB: Yeah, exactly. We would do that, too. We would take breaks from making the show and watch what everybody else was doing. What was the next greatest show of that week or whatever. DRAW: I found that to be a really exciting time— RB: It was. DRAW: —and now if you’re doing something really good, there doesn’t seem to be any competition, because really nobody’s doing it now. RB: Yeah. DRAW: And everybody has broadband, so many more people have broadband compared to the year 2000 or 1999. RB: Yeah. I think the big thing is the money. Before, there was just all this investment capital. One of our executive producers was saying that the dot-com era was like taking a cannon full of money and shooting it in a toilet. [Mike laughs] There was money everywhere. Even when we were working at a dot-com, we were kind of separated from the rest of the company at Wild Brain, so we were kind of like, “Ohhh, it’s the dot-com guys. Oh, you’re in your fancy offices and you’re working....” We were kind of segregated, except there was a lot of investment money and that was just floating around; every studio had that. But now that kind of dried up. Nobody could figure out a way to make that money back through the Internet; it definitely died down. We’re seeing people trying to produce original content that they can maintain and produce regularly on the Internet now. But it’s prime time now, I think. Everybody has broadband, we know better, Flash has improved, there’s a lot more people out there who know what they’re doing. DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

ROQUE BALLESTEROS

FLASH ANIMATION worked, as far as tying their properties to merchandising and to marketing so it didn’t overpower it, but really was able to find an audience that could generate some revenue. Now they’re producing DVDs. They’re still producing HTF for their website, but those episodes eventually all are produced on a nice DVD that has a whole bunch of episodes all kind of categorized together. And I think they’re starting work on the fourth one now. DRAW: So they found a model that worked, sort of like the Homestar Runner guys. RB: Yeah! DRAW: Homestar found a model where they can produce a weekly show, and it’s fairly limited animation. I guess with Flash you also get the library of stuff that you can reuse over and over as you go along, which also saves you a little bit of work. But they have that revenue stream of people buying their t-shirts and everything.

RB: Yeah, they’re selling t-shirts in Hot Topic and their DVDs are at Virgin and Tower Records, so they’re getting really good distribution. They’re a huge hit in Europe and Asia, and they’re slowly cracking the market. I mean, they’re big here in America, but not compared to Europe and Asia, because they’re on TV in Europe and Asia, evidently. DRAW: Which one are we talking about, Homestar or Happy Tree Friends. RB: Happy Tree Friends.

ABOVE: Thumbnails for “Stealing the Spotlight,” a heartwarming episode of Happy Tree Friends. BELOW: Storyboards for “Stealing the Spotlight,” based off the thumbnails shown above.

HAPPY TREE FRIENDS DRAW: There are a lot of newer computers that come with the new Flash already loaded on it so you don’t have to go and download it. There were a lot of hardware/software issues in the old days, where you had 56K dial-up, or your computer couldn’t run Flash. So where do you, as a guy who started out cutting your teeth on it in the very beginning, where do you see it going right now? You’re working on something new and it’s done in Flash—cute little bundles of death and mayhem called Happy Tree Friends. RB: Yeah, we’re doing some work for Happy Tree Friends. And that’s actually a workable model. They were there during the dotcom boom, and we actually know all the guys that work at Mondo Media which owns Happy Tree Friends—we’re good pals with them. They had Happy Tree Friends out the same time we were doing Joe Paradise, and that was definitely one of our competitors. There was this friendly competition. And they made a model that 42

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

DRAW: So they’re running them in Europe and Asia? RB: Yeah.

DRAW: They love everything that’s little and cute. And if it’s little and cute and it kills, that’s even better! [laughter] RB: Yeah, that must be it. And then, like you were saying, the library, whenever we were working on an episode, we were given a file, and it just has the entire Happy Tree Friends library ever built into that file. You have a billion different hands and eyes and expressions that you can use, it’s there already. It’s like in 3-D, you have everything pre-built. DRAW: I’m sure some people would look at that and go, “Well, that’s a negative,” but I sort of look at it and go, “Well, if you’re producing that type of a cartoon, where it’s not about that Disney level of finesse in the form, it’s more like the old Hanna-Barbera—” RB: Yeah, those little Hanna-Barbera shorts, they would reuse their walk cycles and reuse all sorts of clothes and stuff, and it’s very similar in that sense. Like you said, we’re not trying to rewrite the Illusion of Life while we’re doing Happy Tree Friends.

FLASH ANIMATION DRAW: Yeah, you can’t really do that on any kind of episodic TV, whether it’s Internet or whatever; you just don’t have the time to sit there and go, “Well, I’m going to redo this bit of animation for the tenth time.” You just don’t have the time. And really that’s not the point or even what the audience expects. So where do you see it heading? What are you interested in, yourself, right now? Where do you see yourself going with this type of project? RB: As far as Flash, or just in general? DRAW: Flash, or yeah, the whole thing—TV, Flash in general. Do you see the two merging more? RB: It’ll be great to see how all these new Flash shows that are coming out are doing when the numbers come back, when the ratings come back, or whatever; it’ll be really interesting to see. Because, like you said, like Foster’s, they’re doing really amazing stuff, and they’re kind of using the strength of Flash because they’re doing a really great quality show with great design and a lot of appeal. So it’ll be interesting to see where that goes. As far as me, personally, I definitely want to work in longer format stuff, be that television, be that feature films, and try different stuff, work on different things. I’m a little bit tired of commercials and how quick the turnaround was. There wasn’t enough time to have really a serious storyline going on, going back to what we were talking about earlier. So I would love to work in longer format, and as far as Flash is concerned, if that’s a part of it, great. And I think that it seems like that’s the trend that’s going on today. I’ve heard rumors, like all these things, the first Flash feature, I think that was a show called Lilí Pimp, which is like the first feature. DRAW: Right, right. RB: But I’ve never seen it, and I don’t know how they did it. I think it just went straight to video.

ROQUE BALLESTEROS

DRAW: Well, I remember when we met in San Diego last summer at the con and you gave me that promotional DVD you had. I wasn’t aware of Happy Tree Friends. I’d heard the name before, but I’d never seen an episode. So I took the DVD in and I played it for the kids in my animation class, and they just went apesh*t! They were just howling, and they were like, “What is this? What is this?” There were some sequences on there with the robots blowing stuff up. That was Flash, too, right? RB: That was all Flash. DRAW: You’re right, it didn’t really look like Flash. Partially, also, because of your use of color and you not having that thick outline around everything. Because that seemed to be the hallmark of Flash cartoons circa 2000, 1999, everything had this big, huge, black magic marker line around everything. RB: [laughs] It’s true, it’s so true. It’s like, “Okay, do graphic! And graphic means drawing the outline with a Sharpie!” [laughs] DRAW: Yeah, exactly! RB: I think the reason why Flash has been working with shows is that you get designers and art directors like the Powerpuff crew and the Samurai Jack crew, where they started getting rid of that line. Just blow out that line, it’s all self-color stuff. We’ve been finding a lot of strength in Flash when you don’t have that line where it’s obvious that, oh, you’re puppeting this or that, or you’re kind of treating it like a Flash cartoon. You don’t have to reveal all the tricks. DRAW: Right, you don’t see the hinged little joint, like, “I know the arm’s going to move!” It’s like when you watched those old Hanna Barbera cartoons—

DRAW: It’s funny, because I talked to somebody about storyboarding on that, because they were in a desperate search to find people to board on that. But I would have had to go out there and stay in L.A., and it wasn’t feasible for me to just suddenly quit whatever I was doing and go work in the Holiday Inn or something for six weeks in L.A. So you’re interested in producing more feature-length stories of your own characters? RB: Yeah. We always try and use Flash in a way that it doesn’t look like Flash. We try our best. There’s certainly things you can’t help, but every job that we work on with Flash, we’re trying to trick the viewer into thinking that it’s not Flash at all. “How do they do that in Flash?” DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

ROQUE BALLESTEROS

FLASH ANIMATION

RB: Yes, I was just about to say it! Where you knew which boulder was going to get blown away. DRAW: Yeah! It was like, “Race Bannon’s going to push that boulder!” [laughter] RB: I never understood that concept when I was a kid. I was like, “Why does that always look different from the rest of the stuff?” And then once I learned about the production, I was like, “Ohhhh....” DRAW: You could always tell what they were going to pick up, because that wasn’t painted like the background. RB: Exactly. So a lot of the current work that we’ve done, we get rid of that line, and we definitely take a page out of the book of Samurai Jack and the Genndy Tartakovsky crew—those guys, Dan Krall and Scott Wills, those guys are amazing. They really perfected that look, and it just so happens that it works so well in Flash. So that’s helped us kind of bring what we’re attempting to have, more of... a full, non-Flash look, using the strength of what Flash can do to mask the puppeting aspect of it. DRAW: Now, when you’re doing material like Happy Tree Friends, are you storyboarding that with your studio Ghostbot? RB: There was an episode that we worked on recently, a Christmas episode called “Stealing the Spotlight,” which I did the storyboards on, and then we all three animated sequences on it. But for the most part, I think we’ll be storyboarding more. Our schedules were jumbled up when we started working on Happy Tree Friends, so it was like, we’ll take a piece here and a piece there. But I think with this new year we’re trying to take a whole episode and board it from the beginning and do all the animation and deliver the finished episode.

DRAW: Now, when you go from your storyboard and you go to your next step with your animation, are you still drawing it with your pencil and importing it into Flash and inking it in Flash, or are you using After Effects? What’s your process? RB: Well, for Happy Tree Friends, there’s a huge library of stills. Basically what we do is we look at the storyboard as our guide, and we kind of set up layout in Flash based on that storyboard. DRAW: So you’re kind of building it out of the pieces from the library? RB: Exactly, exactly. It’s kind of like rigging the scene with the character models. And then, in the event that there are custom parts that need to be created, like a pose that’s just not working with the parts that we’re building it with, then we might do another drawing. But with a show that has such a huge library already as Happy Tree Friends, we’re just using pieces that have already been created. DRAW: Now, that other clip I saw on the DVD you gave me, I don’t know what it was from because it wasn’t credited, but it’s the one with the van and the robot chasing. What was that from? RB: That was a music video that I directed for a band called Five Iron Frenzy. They’re no longer together, but they were producing a DVD that was their last hurrah. It was kind of like a salute-to-the-band DVD, and they wanted to have an animated video on it. So I had a friend that used to work for the record label that this band was on, and he knew that I was an animator, so he asked me, “Hey, do you want to direct this?” And I was like, “Yeah! That’d be awesome.” So that’s how I got connected with them. But I have no idea if that DVD is still coming out. [laughs] It might be like Joe Paradise. It’ll be the greatest music video that nobody’s ever seen. [laughter] DRAW: So it’s sort of like the unreleased Gorillas DVD or something. RB: It’s true, it’s true. And I really love how that came out. You don’t hear the song on our promotional DVD, obviously, but their song was called “Wizard Needs Food Badly.” It was really catchy, kind of like this third-generation ska band. It was very catchy and we were really trying to push things in the animation. I thought we got away with some really cool things. DRAW: Now, that was Flash, too? RB: Yeah, that was in Flash, as well. DRAW: When you did ARTWORK ©2005 ROQUE BALLESTEROS.

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

FLASH ANIMATION

ROQUE BALLESTEROS

PREVIOUS PAGE: Final design models for the Five Iron Frenzy video, “Wizard Need Food Badly.” RIGHT: The warm and cuddly Happy Tree Friends get a little too warm in “Stealing the Spotlight.”

that, since you didn’t have the library like you have on Happy Tree Friends, did you produce it the same way you did Joe Paradise, where you drew it and you inked it in Flash? RB: No, we used a lot of drawing and custom poses which we would import into Flash and then build, draw it, like physically do cleanup in Flash on top of the custom drawing. DRAW: So you bring it in as what, a jpeg? RB: Yeah. Bring it in as, yeah, as a jpeg, and then we would use the line tool to kind of trace over it and then bucket fill in the colors, then blow out the line at the end of it so it was all kind of self-colored again and it really helped to hide the puppeting. And then we would use a combination, depending on what was going on in the scene, we’d do the combination of breaking apart the character into different pieces and puppet it to animate, or actually doing more custom poses, to make it look full. Using that combination really helps to make it look less Flashy and more full. Because, for example, if a character is slowly drifting in slo-mo, you don’t want to have to trace back every single frame. It’s really tedious and time-consuming animation-wise. So instead we’d get away with breaking apart the pieces and slowly shifting them separately so it doesn’t look like it’s just a piece of art sliding across. DRAW: Right, you can lower the arm or leg or whatever.

DRAW: I just always wonder what guys like Chuck Jones or Tex Avery would do with something like Flash. RB: I know! Right? Well, actually, Chuck Jones, he had a little show called Timber Wolf— DRAW: But did he really have anything to do with that? RB: I don’t know.... DRAW: Because I looked at it, and I’m thinking, like, “Oh, yeah, that’s kind of an old-man Chuck Jones drawing, but it’s like....” RB: Wile E. Coyote with a shorter snout. DRAW: Right, yeah. It’s like, you see Stan Lee’s name everywhere, but is Stan really doing all this stuff? [laughs] Y’know?

RB: Yeah, but you don’t have to keep redrawing it. But then when there’s real broad movement, and really extreme poses, we like to do more drawing, so you’re not building a totally new pose out of two hands that look like the same hand.

RB: I hope not! [laughs]

DRAW: Now, are you doing the timing on these things yourself?

RB: Yeah, I think Flash is very director-friendly. It really allows you to just kind of hang on to that last bit before you release it, and it’s really attractive that way. It’s great. It’s a really fascinating tool, and to think that it was created for, like, web banners....

RB: The timing?

DRAW: But I always wonder, because especially guys like Tex Avery were so totally into all the timing and everything.

DRAW: The timing, I mean are you slugging the cartoons yourself?

DRAW: Right. Now, are you using After Effects at all?

RB: Yeah. I kind of do it traditionally in that I would scan in my board and then kind of cut it together like a board-o-matic in Flash. Then, like for that video, I cut it together with the music, and then I would hand that to my friends who were animating on it and they would slug in their animation on top of whatever scene they were doing.

RB: No, actually, I don’t know much of any After Effects, and that’s something that we as a studio had been thinking that we should really try and invest some time in, because that could take your work to the next level. It kind of works similar to Flash, but it has all those fancy things that it can do. Like Photoshop filters. DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

ROQUE BALLESTEROS

FLASH ANIMATION

RB: [laughs] That’s it. Exactly. Our relationships continued. We made it to the second date. [Mike laughs] Yeah, we just realized that the work we were doing as a team, as a group, was so much better than what each one of us could do individually. We would work on in-house Leapfrog projects together, and then there were times where we would freelance or moonlight on other stuff, and we would ask the other people to help us out. So with that Five Iron video, it was like, “Help me out,” or Alan started directing Buddhist Monkey, which was the clip that was on the DVD.

GHOSTBOT DRAW: Well, why don’t you tell me a little bit about Ghostbot, your studio, there. How did Ghostbot come about? RB: Ghostbot is just the three of us: Alan, Brad and myself. We knew each other from Wild Brain, and before Wild Brain we knew each other from Curious Pictures. We kind of all went through these different studios at different times, but we knew each other. And of course Alan worked on Joe Paradise when I was directing that, so I know him a bit better, and Brad was one of the top animators at Wild Brain when we were all there. So we knew each other and we were good friends, but we hadn’t really built up any sort of professional relationship with one another. In 2002, we all started working at Leapfrog, which is in Emeryville—they do educational toys for kids. And they were producing a new platform called the Leapster, which was basically equivalent to a Gameboy. And it just so happened that the games that were built for the Leapster, they needed us to produce it in Flash. Alan was hired there first, then Brad, and then myself, and there were a couple of other people there as well. So that’s kind of where we all started working with each other a lot closer. We were all there for roughly about a year-and-a-half, and as we started working with each other more, we realized that we had a really great working relationship and a really great rapport. And it got kind of sick in that we would start working over each other’s work; we would draw over each other’s drawing. We just realized that when one of us would help the others out and plus the work, it would make it that much better. DRAW: So there was no, like, “How dare you correct my calf muscle! That’s it, the friendship’s over!” 46

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

DRAW: How do you go about breaking down what you and your two partners, Alan and Brad, do at Ghostbot? Do you divvy up the work by who wants to do certain things, or is good at certain things, or do you draw straws so to speak? RB: It depends. Sometimes jobs come in because a client wants to work with a particular director. Other times someone will take the lead based on their strengths—or if the others are busy directing other jobs! It’s funny because the three of us have similar skills. We all love to animate, we all love to design, and we’re all jerky directors. However we obviously have individual strengths which we kind of naturally fall into on jobs. It’s almost like we don’t talk about it anymore and we just do it. It’s really weird and cool. And if we ever have big decisions to make, we just vote. Since there’s three of us, majority wins. DRAW: So business-wise, separate from drawing-wise, how do you split it up? Is one guy better at selling? How do you bring in work? Or is word of mouth enough? It sounds like you’re busy. RB: Yeah, it’s definitely word of mouth, and we each have different contacts. So yeah, it’s weird. I don’t know. The jobs just kind of come based on weird contacts and weird relationships. So it’s really cool. [laughs] DRAW: Now, do you have a manager, or is one person responsible for cleaning the bathroom, and one’s responsible for paying the phone bill, and one’s responsible for making sure there’s enough Cheetos or whatever? How do you break that up? RB: Well it’s just the three of us, and we’re so small. We don’t have a studio space right now. We work out of each other’s homes. DRAW: So it’s like a virtual studio, then?

FLASH ANIMATION RB: Yeah, it’s a virtual studio. So if we’ll all be at the computers, we’ll be at home and we’ll be on instant messenger and we’ll communicate that way. And we have an FTP, so we’ll post up our work, or say, “Here’s my latest file, check it out,” blah, blah, blah. But if we need to draw, then we definitely work together for the main phase, because we need that kind of synergy with one another. DRAW: So do you ever all go over to one person’s house and sit at the dining table, drawing? RB: Exactly! [laughter] Hopefully by the time this interview’s done we’ll have a space, but it’s funny, because people will say, “Oh, yeah, Ghostbot, I’ve heard of you. Yeah, we’ll come up and visit you guys when we’re up in San Francisco.” And we’re like, “Ooookayyy. Sure!” “Oh gosh, we’ve got to get a space!” [laughter] DRAW: Or the wife comes home and goes, “What, they’re here again?” RB: Yeah. I’m married, and then my friend Brad’s married, he has kids, and then Alan lives with his girlfriend. And they always call us “the other wives,” because we’re always talking with each other on the phone. If we’re not talking on the phone, we’re on IM with each other. If we’re not IMing each other, we’re together. DRAW: You’re on with your man-wife. [laughs]

LEFT: Background style guide for the Five Iron Frenzy video, “Wizard Needs Food Badly.” RIGHT AND BELOW: No, you’re not seeing double. Twins are the theme here.

ROQUE BALLESTEROS

RB: Exactly. It’s really sad, actually. DRAW: Well, like I said, I was a fan of Joe Paradise and the Flash cartoons in general, I came across your site while surfing around to find out more about Joe Paradise, so it was just great bumping into you in San Diego and then getting that DVD. Because, I mean, animation is such a small business. RB: Yeah, it’s amazing how small it is, because, so-and-so knows so-and-so, and then the next thing you know, you’re meeting somebody you totally look up to. Like, I was looking at DRAW! magazine when you guys first started, so I was a really big fan. So it was a pleasure meeting you. And then I looked at that photo in the last DRAW! magazine, and I was like, “This is the most surreal picture! I’m standing next to Mike Manley....” DRAW: Alongside Ric Estrada and Dan Panosian, too. RB: And Dan Panosian, I remember his work from the early ’90s at Image, and I was like, “Oh my gosh! What am I doing in this picture?” DRAW: Well, that picture can only happen in San Diego. RB: That was my first time in San Diego, too. DRAW: Oh, really? Well, I think it’s a great show from an industry standpoint, because, for me, since I’m on the East Coast, I get to meet a lot of people who I work with out West in L.A., and I might only see them once a year in San Diego. And it’s always good to sort of put a face to the name. Now, I notice you also started a blog.... RB: Yeah. [laughs] Oh, shudder, shudder. [laughs] DRAW: And again, and this is something I also stress to my students, the big difference between now and ten, 15 years ago, was that as a student or a person working in the business, you can—how did you and I get to meet each other? Because of the Internet. If it wasn’t for the Internet, we may have eventually met, but it would have been a lot harder, because you’d have to be in the same city or the same event. Now... do you see that helping? Are you trying to sort of create a little community of fans and people around your work and what you’re doing? RB: That was the most amazing thing about doing a show for the Internet in 2001 was the instant connection with the audience. How people would DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

FLASH ANIMATION

ROQUE BALLESTEROS

DRAW: I mean, for me working in the animation business, working out of my studio at home the entire time, a home on the East Coast no less, when most of the industry is in L.A., it’s always interesting to be able to see what the studios look like and what people are doing. And I love seeing the weird drawings and the model sheets. I like seeing art and designs that didn't make it— RB: Exactly!

DRAW: Yes, I stumbled across a link on the Cartoon Brew site. There was a blog done by the people working on My Life as a Teenage Robot. RB: Yeah, yeah! DRAW: I surfed it the other day and I was able to go back through the posts and see a bunch of the drawings and great art. RB: I know, it’s awesome! 48

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

DRAW: The failure, you know? The balled up pieces of paper that somebody threw in the wastebasket. Sometimes those are the most interesting drawings, at least to me as an artist, even if they fail. RB: They really are. I have a whole box of them; I’m going to be sifting through this stuff and I’ll scan it and send you some. I have a whole bunch of drawings on post-its we did when we were working on Joe Paradise, the goofy drawings we were doing, the creator of Glue, Dave Fremont, and myself. We had this one running gag, we were going back and forth making fun of Joe Paradise’s name, so it was, Joe Pair-of-Dice, so we drew a picture of Joe Paradise with two dice. [Mike laughs] We just kind of went nuts, and I still have all these post-its where we did these drawings making fun of his name. And I thought I might put that on a DVD, but that’ll never be made, so, hey, I’ll throw it up on the Ghostbot blog. DRAW: I think that’s something people love to see. And I also really loved Glue, I thought that was a funny, twisted cartoon. RB: Yeah, it was really funny. It was perfect for the Internet, too. DRAW: I heard that that creator of Glue is working down at Nickelodeon, too. RB: Yes, he did a pilot there. I can’t remember the name

come back with the responses, and their two cents about “Why did you do this in the story?” And that kind of community has always fascinated me, just the fact that you can kind of connect with people you don’t even know, about something common. So as far as our blog is concerned, I’ve always been elbowing Brad and Alan, saying, “Aww, we’ve got to do a blog, it’ll be fun!” Because I always look at a lot of people’s blogs online, and I just kind of threw ours up there using Blogger.com, and it was really easy. And then we just started communicating with each other. And then I posted a couple links to this site and that site, just for fun. Just saying, “What are we doing with this?” Blah, blah, blah. “Are we gonna be like this site? Are we gonna be like this site?” Then the next thing I know, I look at those sites and they say, “Hey, look at this new blog from Ghostbot!” [laughs] And I’m like, “Oh no!” Then we’re committed to it. But I don’t know. I kind of just want it to be—I don’t want to take it too seriously in that there are some sites which are really committed to, like, “Let’s build this community and really communicate about how we can better the animation world,” and that’s great. I just don’t think I have the bandwidth or the time to really put the effort into something like that. I kind of just want it to be a space of like, “Hey, this is something cool we’re working on,” or, “This is something cool I saw,” or “Here’s something dorky that happened during our time today while we working.” Just to give an insight of life—that’s what I appreciate when I look at other people’s sites, that you can connect with the humanity of it. “Oh, yeah, they’re doing bad drawings, too,” or “That person whose work I admire, they’re kind of stumbling around with this issue, too.”

FLASH ANIMATION

ROQUE BALLESTEROS

LEFT: Design test image. BOTTOM: Rough and final image for a design test done for Nickelodeon’s Xs series. RIGHT: Bombaby pin-up.

of it; it was something like Ninja Caveman. [laughter] I think the pilot was produced, but I’m not sure if it was picked up as a series or not. I haven’t talked with Dave Fremont in a while. But he was great. He was cool, because we were two creators in the same room, we were doing totally different shows, and we were just kind of sharing insight and coming from two different places. We were such a small crew, that whole dot-com thing, that it was like a little family there.

DRAW: Well, I think that maybe within five years the Internet cartoons will come back, because the web’s still growing as an entertainment destination and the media keeps merging more and more, the Internet with TV—already the viewership for TV is eroding as more and more people in the evening spend time on the Internet playing games, or writing blogs, or seeking to entertain themselves. And the idea that I think helped kill the Internet cartoon, which killed the Internet anyway, or set it back, was the idea that was being pushed back in the late ’90s, early 2000s, that everything was free, and that you never had to pay for anything on the web. That idea, I think, has gone now. But I know at that

time it was like, “Well, why should I pay for that? The Internet’s for free! I should get everything for free!” RB: “Because there’s 40 other shows for free, why would I pay for that one?” DRAW: Yeah, “Why would I pay ten cents for your cartoon when I can get that other cartoon for free?” Then there was that guy doing doodie.com, I don't know if he's still doing that. Free poop jokes every day, and he was getting Hollywood interest. RB: [laughs] I love the Internet! DRAW: He was supposedly talking with, I don’t know, the likes of Tom Hanks or, y’know, Ivan Reichman, who’s going to make Doodie.com the Movie. [laughter] DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

FLASH ANIMATION

ROQUE BALLESTEROS

ABOVE: Miss Hush won’t get off Santa’s “naughty list” this way! A Joe Paradise illustration done for a Christmas card. BELOW: Plants can make a background more interesting.

And I remember there was a thing in Time magazine about the guy; it was amazing.

RB: That’s quality material. The stuff that HBO is doing, all their shows are top notch.

RB: I think definitely you’re right, they are definitely trying to merge TV to your computer, your whole media experience; they’re trying to bring it to one focus point, and I think that paying for a show on the Internet is definitely viable. It’s just a matter of getting a quality show on there that people think is worth the money to pay for.

DRAW: So if you’re going to charge me 20 dollars a month and you’re going to give me quality cartoons one day a week, they would get my money.

DRAW: Well, you know, I pay for HBO— RB: There you go. DRAW: —so I can see The Sopranos, or Curb Your Enthusiasm, or Deadwood, or The Wire. 50

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

RB: Yes, exactly. This is funny, because I love working on Happy Tree Friends; it is definitely one thing I love to work on. But the stories I like to tell, the stories that I really get engaged with, are serial stories where the story keeps going. It leaves you wanting more at the end of it. I don’t like to write stories or create stories that are like the one-hit wonder, like the doodie.com, that like, “Ha ha ha, that was a great laugh, but why would the person come back for more?” So I want to see more shows that really have that kind of long story arc that’ll keep you engaged and keep you wanting to watch. That’s why all the shows on HBO are so great, because the stories just keep you going, and keep you frothing at the mouth looking for more.

or this fun assignment I wanted to give the cover the look of the silkscreen posters from the WPA era [Works Progress Administration, 1935-1943, an arts/information program created by the government to provide economic relief from the Great Depression]. I went off to experiment with textures, using the Symbols feature in Illustrator.The idea is not to fool the viewer into thinking the end result is an actual painting, but to sort of soften the digital feel of a native vector picture.

By Alberto Ruiz

The drawing featured on this page was my first idea for the finished cover. I like it a lot, but I wanted to use the actual cover assignment to apply the Symbols palette goodies built into Adobe Illustrator CS. I braced myself for a lot of trial and error, since this was my first time using Symbols, but to my surprise, the Tools and Symbols palettes were intuitive and user-friendly.

ALBERTO RUIZ

DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION

Before I started working in Adobe Illustrator, I put together a comprehensive color sketch in Photoshop.The final image ended up a lot different than the comp [see below], but this was needed to minimize the color and shading guesswork. I worked out the color planes, highlights, and shadow areas, and even the logo placement.

I was bent from the beginning on using an “all flower” pattern, and I carry this idea right towards the end. Eventually I found that it was way too busy to have the girl’s dress and the background competing with each other for attention.

Fortunately for me, I had created a few flower repeat patterns for surfer trunks back in my garment district days, so I had a few designs to choose from.

For the sake of this demonstration, however, and to show you how easy it really is to generate a pattern in Illustrator, I re-drew and put together a new “tossed” flower repeat based on the old designs.

As with most of my illustrations involving preliminary drawings, I scanned the original pencil rough at 150 DPI and saved the image in TIF format so I can then use it as a template. After creating the new document in AI, I placed the file by choosing Place from the File menu with the Template option checked.

I then locked the current layer (Layer 1 or Template) and created a second layer, which I renamed “coloring” and dragged directly underneath.This is the layer in which I’ll be doing most of the work. I used just one layer for this illustration—quite a departure from the 20-plus layer, gargantuan files I normally deal with.

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION

ALBERTO RUIZ

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

ALBERTO RUIZ

DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION

SHAPE SHIFTER Using the Pen tool, I traced over my sketch, blocking out the main shapes, as usual, working from back to front.The hand with the gun was drawn separately and “pasted in back” of the girl.

Both the top and the skirt were filled with one of the previously created repeat patterns.The pattern itself was “warped” to conform to the girl’s curvaceous back side [see below].

WARP SPEED Rather than re-draw some of the elements of the pattern to follow the girl’s contour, I applied the Fisheye effect to the mask containing the skirt’s flower design.

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION

ALBERTO RUIZ

SEXY SYMBOLS Symbols turned out to be a lot of fun to work with. I haven’t been too thrilled with them in the past—too predictable and stiff for my taste. Illustrator has improved on this old concept. It sports a nice set of tools to help you harness those pesky vector freaks, although I must say they require a lot of RAM to function properly. In a slower machine, they take forever to re-draw on the screen.The tools themselves can become sluggish at times, but overall Symbols can be very useful and fun to experiment with. Click and drag Symbol to artboard, re-color, and drag back into the Symbols palette.Then apply the Symbol using the Spray Can tool. It’s that easy!

For this illustration I only used one Symbol—Mezzotint.You can find it by following this path: Window>Symbol Libraries>Artistic

NOTE: You must expand the Symbol after you drag it out of the pallette by selecting Expand [from the Object menu] in order to modify it.

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

ALBERTO RUIZ

DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION

I researched night and day looking for a decent tiki to draw, not knowing I had in my possession the Native Art collection of clip images from House Industries.What a time saver! These came in handy, for sure—just the right touch for the logo portion of the main header.

I wanted a more menacing looking tiki idol, so I messed around a bit to achieve the “terror” I was looking for.

These designs, as well as all of the main title fonts used for this project, are part of the Native Art collection available from House Industries: House Industries, PO Box 30000,Wilmington, DE 19805.

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

ALBERTO RUIZ

DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

COMICS

STEVE RUDE

LEFT: Steve at the board... well, sketchbook. BELOW: Nexus versus Nexus!

DRAW: Yeah, you’d break half your lead off with those things sometimes. SR: Right, and it drove me nuts after a while. I almost got paranoid to even shove it in there and try to turn it after a while. DRAW: Now, since you’re penciling this for Gary, and I’ve seen your pencils before, when you pencil for other people, it’s tight. I mean, if the guy’s got his chops, he’s going to do a good job. If he doesn’t have his chops, he’s going to mess it up no matter how tight you do it. But when you pencil something for yourself, do you leave some of the drawing for the ink stage?

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 14

DRAW: Yeah. Now they make the next one indigo or whatever, but the light, light blue, I don’t think they make that anymore. So are you still using some of those? SR: I’m using the ones they still manufacture, which is the blue. They called it Color Erase, but there’s nothing easy about erasing it, for God’s sakes.

SR: You know, when I penciled comic books specifically for myself, they were the same tightness. I just saw that as part of the discipline that I had to do to not be sloppy in my thinking. Like, I would have to really [home] in on it really, and really explain the knuckles in a hand or something, or the thumb. That was all part of the craft part of it that I wanted to know I really knew how to do it rather than just being less than precise about it. So, no, I always pencil very tight. Now, when I do these commission things, I find that I

DRAW: No, but it’s certainly better than trying to erase a Prismacolor. [laughs] SR: Yeah. DRAW: So you go and rough everything out in blue first? SR: Yeah, I do. I find it’s the whole process of the underdrawing—a separate process where I’m just concentrating on gesture and placement based on my thumbnails, without thinking of detail within detail within detail. DRAW: Okay, I guess you go back over it and tighten it up. What do you use, HB, 2B?

NEXUS © AND TM 2005 MIKE BARON AND STEVE RUDE.

SR: I use just an H or HB, I think. Just a regular pencil that I sharpen in my electric pencil sharpener. DRAW: Okay, so you don’t use a mechanical lead holder or anything like that? SR: I used to for, like, 15 years; I used one of those big, fat leads. You had to sharpen it. And I remember, every time I would be in the middle of something tense, I would break the lead off in those damned things. DRAW: Oh, yeah, in the little hand sharpener? SR: Yeah, the hand sharpener. I’d be turning it and I’d hear that crack, and I’d just wince in agony. DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

SUPERMAN © AND TM 2005 DC COMICS. HULK © AND TM 2005 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

COMICS

STEVE RUDE

LEFT: Cover painting for Superman vs. the Hulk. RIGHT: Painting of Madonna from her “Material Girl” days. BELOW: “Gino.”

need about half the pencil mileage on the board before I go in with ink. Which is kind of exciting. But, no, when it comes to the actual drawing comics themselves, I always maintain the same strict standard of drawing as tight as it needs to be to have everything explained to the person who was going to take over from there. And it’s not because there’s people taking over, it’s because it’s part of what I consider professional, the part where I have to show how good I am to myself. DRAW: You just take that as part of your craftsmanship. SR: That’s right, yeah. DRAW: So how many pages do you do a day? Do you have a rule, like “I have to get a page-and-a-half ” or “I have to do two pages?” Do you have a schedule for yourself?

SR: I try to have a schedule, but generally it works out to about a page a day. And sometimes, when research gets heavy, it’s not even that much. Like when I have to draw Clarabelle the elephant, I have to get out the damned How to Draw Elephants books, and I’ll spend at least an hour drawing them. And this is what I go through every time something I’m unfamiliar with has to be drawn. I mean, there’s times when I’ll put my dog, Ram, in a story—my old beagle, Ram. And I need to get out the How to Draw Dogs books.

DRAW: Well, drawing people is hard, and drawing animals is just as difficult as drawing people. And if you don’t draw animals all the time, it’s like going back to square one. It’s easier for me to do things like draw dogs, because I have two dogs, so I’m very familiar with them. But drawing horses or elephants, yeah, that’s something you don’t draw every day. SR: Yeah, I don’t draw them at all. So we’ve got to do what we have to do to draw them as though they’re not hard to draw. And there is also the fact that is important to let people know, you never find the right reference in a book for the animal that you’re drawing.

DRAW: No, you never find exactly the right angle. And usually if you’re thinking of something, you’re in the flow and you’re creating, and you’re thinking, “Oh, I’ve made this really cool angle of the elephant!” And, of course, you always choose a hard angle to draw. SR: Yeah. So that’s why you’ve got to get out a book that tells you how to draw elephants, and then you can get enough down in the hour or so that you’re drawing those elephants to get a sense of how it should look from that angle, and then it can be drawn in there and forget about it. DRAW: Now, since you’re drawing the circus animals and things, do you ever go to the zoo? Do you ever go to the zoo and say, “I’m going to draw the elephants today,” or “I’m going to draw zebras today.” DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

STEVE RUDE

COMICS

SR: Well, this zoo was a good 45 minutes away from where I lived, so I would not go on the trip specifically to draw a panel or two where Clarabelle appears. But there is an Indian elephant down there, and the next time I happen to go to the zoo, I’ll either study the elephant carefully just through my eyes and try to do memory drawing, or I’ll bring my sketch pad.

SR: Yeah, and I’ve been real big on that lately with painting, mostly influenced by John Gannon, who was a big believer in disciplining your memory to remember things, and going home with that memory intact and actually trying to draw and paint it. DRAW: That is something that I was doing with the figure drawing class that I teach. I would pose THIS PAGE: Recent nude studies from Steve’s easel. the figure for 30 seconds and make the students RIGHT: Steve’s version of the cover to Nexus #1, which was originally illustrated by Paul Gulacy. look at the model. I’d tell them “Draw the model with your eyes.” And then the model would get out of the position, and then the students would have to draw the figure from memory, and then I’d have the model get back in the position so they could compare. SR: Yeah, I bet that’s very discomfiting for people to have to learn that. DRAW: Oh, geez, yeah. At first it was all complaining, but after a few exercises they started to get better at it. SR: It still makes me nervous to think about it, the image being taken from me, but for some reason I’ve been able to adapt to that without too much pain. In fact, a lot of things in my sketchbook recently have been just things that, “Okay, that’s interesting. How well can I remember this?” What I’ll basically do is just look at it and then close my eyes and draw it in my head. And then I’ll open my eyes again. And I’ll keep repeating that until it’s pretty firmly fixed in my mind. DRAW: Well, it’s funny, because sometimes you can look at a person, and then look away and do a caricature of that person, an off-drawing of the person, who will look more like the person than if you’re sitting there actually just staring at the person and doing a drawing. It’s funny how your brain will condense things like that sometimes. SR: The brain’s a pretty funny thing.

DRAW: So yeah, I’m a big practitioner of the old Famous Artists School. I guess that’s something that you and I have in common, from the standpoint that we’re both were initially self-taught. You have to teach yourself and pick up things. If you’re lucky, you get to pick up the Famous Artists books along the way.

INKING DRAW: Now what about for inking? What are your tools of choice? SR: Inking... let me see. Up until like a year ago I was being cheap with my brushes, but now I’m going to have to stop doing that. I’m 62

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

DRAW: Okay. So you’re doing the old, “See, observe, remember” thing? The old Famous Artists School motto?

NEXUS © AND TM 2005 MIKE BARON AND STEVE RUDE.

THE MOTH © AND TM 2005 STEVE RUDE.

COMICS going to have to buy some really good sable brushes. There’s no way around it. I’ve got a Silver Renaissance #8, [http://www.silverbrush.com/art/art_products/renaissancelh.html] and now I’ve worn that down, so I had to buy a new one. DRAW: And that’s what you’re using for inking your comic pages? SR: Yeah, yeah. For the inking stuff, Mike, now I’ve got a #8 brush that I picked up at an art store in Memphis when I was there for a convention a couple of weeks ago. Any kind of a nice, real sable brush will do. Anything less, like a synthetic sable, they lose their curl in the end, and they drive me nuts. So I don’t ever use those. I’ve also got a brush here that’s about a quarter inch wide; it’s a Yarka brush. They’re disposable sables from Russia. They’re really cheap. DRAW: It has sort of a chisel to it? SR: Exactly. I use those for inking, but I’ve got this new sable. And I also use the 104s, the Hunt 104s. I’m going for that Alex

STEVE RUDE

Raymond thing, which I quite like. DRAW: Well, I think you ink your work the best of anybody. I like your work when you ink it yourself because it’s tight but it’s not dead. Whatever little imperfections there are is the character of your work. SR: Well, thanks. I’m trying to get that Alex Raymond freeflowing pen style down. DRAW: Yeah, if you look at his, that’s one of the things. I have a few originals, but I also have a lot of Xerox copies I made from when I was in Al’s studio from Rip Kirby, shot from the originals, and Raymond was always experimenting with his technique. He would ink each story a little bit differently, and he would have lines flow or be loose. Lots of air—he wouldn’t close all the forms. The stuff when it reproduced tightened up, but when you see the original, you realize that it was pretty loose. There was a lot of air in his inking. SR: That’s so dead-on, Mike. I went up to visit Al when he was still working with Bret Blevins years ago. It was the coolest place I’d ever visited. It just reeked of art all over the place. I loved being up there in that second story of his carriage house—I loved it. And he had all those Rip Kirby originals up there. And I was really into Honey Dorian at the time. She was, like, my ultimate dream girl, which is what Sundra Peale from Nexus is supposed to be. Alex, of course, did it much better than I could. And Al gave me one of those originals, one of the early Honey Dorians where she still had the baby face. Later on she turned into this kind of chiseled, thin, skinny model type, but I didn’t like that as much. But I can’t believe the thinness of the line on the original. DRAW: Yeah, the pen nibs that they had back in the day could really do amazingly thin lines. One thing I learned from Al—and I still follow today—if I find something that I like, I hoard it. I buy a ton of it. I bought brushes years ago that I still use today for my own personal work. I still do buy current stuff, but inevitably what happens is what happened to you. You find the brush or pen or ink that you like, and then what happens? They stop making it. Then you have to find something else that will do, but often it’s not quite as good as the thing that you used to have. So it’s like you have to train yourself to work with crappy art supplies.

THE MOTH © AND TM 2005 STEVE RUDE.

SR: Yeah, I’ve always wondered why. I wish I wasn’t so cheap. DRAW: Well, I’m not cheap about my art supplies; I’m not cheap about the stuff that I’ve bought, because, like I said, in my own career—ink for instance—the Pelican ink today isn’t as good as the Pelican ink was years ago, because they changed the formula, they changed the shellac or whatever they use, so it just doesn’t flow as nicely.

LEFT AND ABOVE: Steve’s value study and final painting for The Moth trade paperback collection.

SR: That’s horrible. I was using Black Magic, and then I bought a bottle of it in the late ’80s and it was crap. What is going on with this ink? It comes off the brush, it’s a wishy-washy kind of a half-black kind of a wash. So I just ultimately stopped after a bottle and now I use this stuff from Dr. Martin’s, Bombay Black India Ink. DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

STEVE RUDE

COMICS SR: I don’t think so. I think it’s exactly the same. There’s the technical stuff, like doing thumbnails first, and figuring out the storytelling and the gestures in those little thumbnails. And then there’s going directly to the actual board, that hasn’t changed at all. No, I don’t think a whole lot’s changed. I just want to make sure that when I sign off, it’s what I expect from myself.

DRAW: Right. That’s a good ink. You can only get it in little jars, though. SR: That’s right. DRAW: So do you use anything like Rapidographs or templates?

DRAW: Do you ship an entire issue at one time to Gary so he has all 22 pages, or do you feed him in batches? How do you guys work?

SR: Yeah, I use templates and I use Rapidographs, but I got tired of the Rapidographs, at least the ones that were throwaways. I just got tired of them.

SR: I cut it in half; I send him eleven pages at a time. DRAW: So he sends them back to you eleven pages at a time?

DRAW: The disposable ones?

SR: Yeah, yeah. DRAW: Do you go over and make color notes for Glenn?

SR: Yeah, I just couldn’t deal with them anymore. So I actually made the conversion to Micron....

SR: Generally I don’t have to, but on the occasions that I have a specific thing in mind, yeah.

DRAW: Pigma?

DRAW: So you say, “This is a night scene, so mute everything down?” Since you are a painter, as well, I imagine you have pretty specific ideas about how you would like things col-

SR: Yeah, Pigma Micron. DRAW: What about your computer set-up? SR: Well, I don’t really use a computer except for just e-mail.

. E RUDE 5 STEV TM 200 D N A TH © THE MO

DRAW: So you don’t scan your artwork in and FTP it to Dark Horse? Are you computer-phobic, or you just never learned to do the stuff? SR: Well, I’m both. DRAW: So your wife does everything? SR: Yes. I hate computers, like I said. I despise all machines. I’d like to destroy them all. DRAW: So you’re like Magnus? [laughs] SR: He has a better attitude toward machines than I do.

MOTH VS. NEXUS DRAW: Now, are you approaching The Moth in any way different than when you were doing Nexus? Do you find that you modify your approach at all as time goes by? 66

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

ored. SR: Well, if it’s a night scene, it should be obvious from even the black-and-white work. But say there was a back cover where I drew the escape artist in The Moth—his name is Enric—and I knew right away that I wanted it to be colored in a completely different way than the standard, dumb comic book kind of coloring. I said, “Make it look like a ’60s rock poster from the Billy Graham era.” DRAW: So did you send him an example? SR: No, I don’t think I did. I think Glenn knew what I was talking about; he probably just googled some stuff from the posters at that time. What’s the place Billy Graham ran, was it the Fillmore West, East? That stuff. The really vague, low-color sense. And Glenn found a way to dig up those posters for reference, and he gave me four examples of his versions of them. So he gave me multiple examples to pick from, which I really liked. DRAW: Well, with the Internet now, it’s really easy to send stuff. Does your team send you jpegs, copies of the work in progress, and say, “What do you think?” And then you tweak things that way?

COMICS SR: I think Glenn will do five pages at a time and send those off to me. But basically the process is one that everything goes back to me, because I’m the final [arbiter] of everything to do with this book, which I just love. I love not having to have some fools on the line that I have no respect for as a creative person, or even just as a tech person, to decide what is best for my book. DRAW: Well, that’s the great thing about doing the creatorowned thing. The downside is that what you’re doing now is you’re basically doing three, four issues in a row, and you’re not sure if you’re going to get paid for them. Or when, I should say, you’re going to get paid for them.

STEVE RUDE

book is where it all springs forth, all these other side things. And I have to really kind of stop doing the commissions that I’ve been doing to concentrate on the comic. I’m getting tired of doing them. They were a creative challenge, in the beginning— and they still are, but really, I have to keep my priorities in mind, and my priority is getting out my comic book. I don’t make my living as a commission artist, y’know? DRAW: Although there are guys out there who do that, who seem to make their living— SR: I think they have to. Which is kind of sad, I guess, but....

SR: Dark Horse is horribly slow about paying. They’ve always been, as long as I’ve been working for them, which is a long, long time. They try to deny it, but denial is futile.

DRAW: Although I also know—I’ve done a fair amount of commissions—it’s still the same thing, where people want you to draw Batgirl for the 500th time.

STEVERUDE.COM

SR: Yes, I don’t do that. I don’t do things that drive me insane. It’s not worth it.

DRAW: Touching on that subject of finance and money a bit, I notice that you have steverude.com, which is sort of the Steve Rude Store on the Internet, and people go there and buy posters and prints and get commissions. Although I notice you’ve said that you were filled up on black-and-white commissions. What kind of commissions are you getting? Are these people that go to your website, steverude.com, and say, “I want a drawing of Big Barda?”

DRAW: Well, I’m always trying to come up with different ways to draw it. It’s a double-edged sword, too. Sometimes at a convention—which is the exact opposite of my daily experience, and yours, too, which is working, usually in solitude, in your studio— suddenly it’s like battlefield conditions. You’re in a convention, lots of people are coming by, and people are asking you questions, and you’re selling something, and you’re talking to this per-

SR: Yeah. You know, my wife, Jaynelle? Do you remember her at all? DRAW: No, no. I’ve talked to her briefly a couple of times on the phone, but I’ve never met her. SR: Well she does encourage me in a lot of ways. She’s my emotional opposite. DRAW: So she does a lot of the, I guess, day-to-day interfacing with the fans, running your website? SR: Yeah. That’s what she does. And right now she’s having to enter the work force again. DRAW: And this is due to just the demands of bringing in a steady paycheck?

SR: Yeah. Without commissions, and without the extra freelance or various comics coming out right now, things are tight, and then in the past there have been the little sketchbook things like the prints. Jaynelle ran the website as a sort of a general store kind of thing. DRAW: [laughs] And you run that all out of your house? SR: Yeah. And there’s t-shirts, things like that. She takes care of all those things to keep the business kind of separate from the art. I had talked with her about three weeks ago, and I said, “Look, honey, I’ve been doing this commission thing and all these things for a long time now to bring in the extra money, and you can only approach the same type of subject so many times, so many ways. I’ve been doing these commissions for so long now, but I really have to get back to my comic books. My comic

ABOVE: A page from Steve’s sketchbooks. PREVIOUS PAGE: Page 17 pencils from The Moth #3.

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

STEVE RUDE

COMICS

son, and “Oh, hello,” and then, “Can you draw me Captain Marvel?” And then it’s like, who knows. It’s like trying to draw while somebody’s shooting a shotgun over your head. I have a hard time, sometimes, at shows doing what I feel is a good commission. So it’s sort of a double-edged sword, because I like to do drawings for people, because I like the fact that people like my drawings. But sometimes I feel like I can’t really do my best drawing because I’m so, like A.D.D, so distracted at the con. SR: That’s my experience. DRAW: And then sometimes, too, people want me to draw something that I just have no affinity for. Like, I’m still struggling to finish this Buffy the Vampire Slayer commission from a guy. I’ve owed him way too long, and he’s been a really nice guy about it, but I just have no affinity for Buffy. So every time I draw something, I go, “God, this is just terrible.” THE MOTH © AND TM 2005 STEVE RUDE.

SR: Well, that may be the difference between the way I do things with the commissions that I take on at home. I won’t do anything that doesn’t feel right to me. Nothing’s worth the agony of that. And I’m not a person for hire. I never have perceived myself as somebody that does that.

five in, with all the talking that goes on, and all the horse-swipe, and all that stuff. Sometimes it’s an incredibly difficult balancing act that all us artists have to go to when we’re trying to work with two different sides of our brains at social functions. DRAW: Right. When you put up the commissions, do you set a certain price and figure (a) it sells, or (b) it doesn’t, but you’re not going below a certain price, because you feel that your artwork is worth at least X amount of money? SR: Yeah, pretty much. It’s done two different ways. One is Jaynelle will tell me that we need money to pay stuff, for the house. And she’ll say, “Do up some stuff for eBay.” It’s either that, or it’s people that write in directly and say, “Would you draw this,” and I say yes or no. DRAW: So you usually have, I would imagine, a list of people who are like planes waiting to land and get their commission? SR: Yeah, in some cases, yeah. DRAW: And would you say that adds up to be a fairly lucrative part of your income? SR: Well, all taken, I think, with what Jaynelle does with my website and all that kind of stuff, I think we hauled in 30 grand one year for all that.

DRAW: So if someone writes to you through steverude.com and goes, “Gee, Steve, I’d like to have you do a drawing of Nexus killing my character.” SR: If I like his character, I might consider it. But what I’m thinking of is, there’s been this guy who’s been writing for years now, and he keeps wanting me to draw some DC character that I just have no energy for at all, no interest in whatsoever. And I don’t draw it. And I think that’s the secret of my mental health. DRAW: Is it you just don’t do what you don’t want to do? SR: That’s right. Yeah. DRAW: The art I’ve seen you put up on eBay, these are really nice drawings. SR: That’s the difference between doing them at home and doing them at conventions, Mike, as you well know. They can be done with markers. They don’t take all day for me to do. I try to get at least 68

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

DRAW: Wow! SR: Which sounds like a lot, but when you’re living in California, you’re barely making ends meet. DRAW: Yeah. In California that’s like making 15 grand. SR: The main thing is that the sitting back and letting the world take care of you like it was back in the ’80s, the comic book companies would take care of you. They would do all of the promotion, and the fans would pick up on all the things you were doing, and the conventions would always fly you in and put you up in a hotel— DRAW: Those days are gone.

COMICS

STEVE RUDE

SR: Those days are not what they were. So now it seems to be, you’ve got to be self-motivated. You have to rely on yourself to get the word of mouth about your particular book out in a way that never had to happen 15 years ago.

SELF PROMOTION DRAW: So you sort of feel like now you have to promote The Moth; you’re the guy who has to be doing all the pushing, at least an artist who’s taking a much more active role on The Moth than you were, say, on Nexus, right?

SR: Far more, yeah. Far more. And that’s because my name’s on the book. I was the original creator of the character. And Dark Horse has been good enough to put me in charge of everything. Everything goes through me, and The Moth is reflective, therefore, of Steve Rude’s entire sensibility of what a comic book is all about. There’s not some editor-in-chief talking at me, or giving me orders to remove all the cigarettes from their mouth, or draw so many close-ups per page—garbage like that, which has nothing to do with what being an artist is all about. DRAW: So do you enjoy this? Do you relish doing this? Is this something that you’re happy that you’re able to do? Because not every artist is like that. There are many—I mean, it’s something I talk about often in the magazine, and I talk about with my friends who are artists. I see that there are two types of artists: the artist who is a self-manager, a guy like Will Eisner; and then you have other people. And you can name dozens of Silver Age and Golden Age guys who ended their careers as bitter, old men. SR: Yeah. Guys that did what they were told, to make a living for their families, right. DRAW: Right. SR: I’m not a guy that does what he’s told to begin with. And I never think about what I do in my life as something I have to support my family with. This is literally my calling in life, what I have to do, and I have to dictate the circumstances that are going to make me not mentally insane by the end of 30 years of doing this. So what I’ve found that’s best for me is to kind of do what Simon and Kirby did at one time, which is produce their own books and have somebody publish them. Or what Eisner and Iger did back in the ’40s and ’50s, which is simply be somebody that does your thing, and then somebody else will publish it. That’s kind of what we have with The Moth, but I rely on Dave Land, the editor, to make sure everything’s coordinated right on their end. He has to make sure that all my covers are going to reproduce well, because they’re painted. And they have to come out on the time that Dark Horse schedules them. The production has to be top-notch, the paper has to be great. I design, whenever there’s extra pages for the letter column or some such, whatever it is, I’ll usually lay those out and give them to Dark Horse’s production staff, and they can work from my layouts. Like, for example, the twelve pages in The Moth trade paperback—the twelve extra goodie pages—those were all laid out by me. And then I turn them over to Dark Horse and say, “Okay, plus this based on what I’ve given you.” DRAW: And then they send you stuff that you can look at?

ABOVE: A page from Steve’s sketchbooks. PREVIOUS PAGE: A sketch of The Moth’s Sophie.

SR: That’s right. Everything comes back to me. And I enjoy that immensely. It’s so creatively satisfying to me. I know what I want so specifically that I don’t need other people to supplement my vision. It’s all there. And, because comic books no longer look like what I think good comics should look like, my comic stands out as this oddity, almost. DRAW: So I take it you’re not a big fan of the overly slimy Photoshop-rendered comic that is the average comic book out there today? SR: It’s actually visually repulsive to me to look at stuff like that.

INSPIRATION DRAW: When you have those days, and we all have them, where the muse isn’t there, was is it you turn to to look at or to inspire yourself? Or do you just say, “I’m blocked on this page, so I’m going to go sketch in my sketchbook for a while”? SR: Well, you know what I do, Mike, is I go back to the comics I grew up on, because all the things that made me what I am today, and for the last 25 years, have all come from that source. And I find it endlessly good for me to go back and look at those things. Not necessarily relive the way things were done long ago, but my ideas of what a comic book is came from those eras, the style of storytelling. DRAW! • SUMMER 2005 69

STEVE RUDE

COMICS

DRAW: Your sense of craft. SR: Yeah, my sense of craft. The kind of coloring that was done, where it wasn’t just a thousand tones heaped upon the black-andwhite linework and all that stuff. That’s all today’s sensibilities, and because I find it really visually disagreeable, what can I look at today that’s going to make me want to buy it? It’s this alien thing to me. DRAW: What about illustration or painting in general? SR: Yeah, I always go back to those sources. I always have my favorite illustrators that I’ll look at, especially when I’m painting the covers, that I’ll routinely go over and just look at them and soak them up a little bit, and prepare myself for the event of having to render these characters that are done in outlines three-dimensionally.

STEVE RUDE, TEACHER DRAW: It says on your website that you’ve done seminars. And we had talked briefly about that, and you said that you didn’t mind doing that, but you didn’t feel that you would want to teach.

SR: Yeah. And how you go about doing the demonstration, teaching them the most amount of stuff in the time that you have, and pacing the whole thing, is what I find interesting. Those are great people skills to learn.

BRANCHING OUT DRAW: I notice that you had also done a painting for a national conservation group. SR: Yeah, that was quite a story. DRAW: Is this something you wanted to do? Are you trying to branch out, or to do more illustration on top of just doing comic books? SR: No, not at all. Because comic books are my life. That’s the sum total of what I want to spend my life doing. It’s not something I want to do to get into another field. I want to do comic books, and that’s what my life is going to be devoted to. But every now and then, because of my rep in comics, I’ll get offers through the mail to do certain things. And then I’ll decide if this will be artistically challenging and fun for me. And, based on that, I’ll do it or not do it.

SR: Yeah, teaching takes up too much time, and so much energy, and it’s not worth it based on the ABOVE: Steve’s rules for oil painting. DRAW: So how did this opporfact that most students in there NEXT PAGE: Rough done for a painting commisioned by a national tunity come up? Was it somebody are people that don’t share the conservation group. who contacted you through your kind of drive that you have to website? learn and improve or whatever. They’re just people that are kind of hobbyists in some way. And SR: Yeah, yeah. They’re all comic book fans. Comic book fans are those people and I probably aren’t suited for each other. I’ve gotta on every corner in this world. In this case, he wanted me to do a have hardcores in there with me. painting for his organization that he was working with that had to DRAW: [laughs] So if you don’t have lifers, you’re not going to be able to do it. But did you find that to be an enjoyable thing to do it for the weekend, or for the seminar? SR: Yeah, because I learned about the whole thing of teaching. I have this non-boring policy that extends into most everything in my life, not just storytelling and comic books. But I want to make sure that—like, for example, this thing I taught in Memphis lasted an hour too long, and I can’t do that anymore. I can’t let it go three hours. Nobody has a three-hour attention span. So I’ve got to cut it down to no more than two, and within the two hours I’ve got to break it up so that I always hold their attention throughout the entire duration. DRAW: So you were doing a painting demonstration. 70

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

do with conserving soil and water. I said, “Well, this sounds kind of boring. What exactly would you like me to do here?” And at that point he told me what he had in mind. I said, “Well, do up a little rough for me so I know where you’re going with this thing.” That’s one of my secrets is always have the person who’s telling me what to do to it first. DRAW: Even if it’s just a crappy stick-man drawing. SR: Especially if it’s a crappy stick-man drawing. I want to get some idea of where I need to base where I’m going to go with this thing on their idea, so I don’t waste five days spinning my wheels. Nobody smart ever does anything like that in the world, so I’m trying to be a person who’s getting smarter, not stupider, over the years; that’s one of the little tricks I always employ

COMICS when I’m working with people. They’ll want me to do something for them, especially if it’s an art director. And they’ll give it to me, and I’ll look at it and say, “Yeah, this is pretty good. If the money’s going to be there, then I’ll take time out and do this one for you.” This particular painting drove me insane, because it took a whole month to paint the damn thing. DRAW: What size was it? SR: It was two by three feet, I think. DRAW: Wow. Had you done any paintings that large before? SR: Yeah, the wedding portrait I did of Jaynelle was, like, five feet. DRAW: Wow, okay. SR: So I’ve worked big before. I’ve even worked on a seven-foot canvas on occasion. But the hard thing about this is that there were so many elements on the painting. There was, like, seven people, all different ethnicities. And I had to draw the background of the

STEVE RUDE

farm, and the pond and the trees and the apple orchard and the cornfield and the field of wheat and stuff. And one guy was holding a big cart of apples, and another person was holding bread. So all of this stuff had to be tirelessly researched. And, as we know, that’s all part of getting geared up for the final thing, but.... DRAW: And did you do studies for it? SR: I sure did. I always do. Nowadays I start off by doing impression sketches. That is, without thinking of anything too detailed, I’ll just get the impression by way of paint, an atmospheric sketch done that gives me the feeling of what the final will have, even with all the detail added. It’s very abstract, but people are reduced to basic shapes, with lighting a certain way, and the colors a certain way. Like, with this poster, I wanted to get a feeling of warm sunlight up there. Because you can impart that feeling to something without any sense of putting fingernails or hair follicles on people. That’s all just on top of the main statement, the feeling that you get from looking at it. And all that stuff can be easily done in your head, if you have a sense of how sunlight works or whatever lighting is required. DRAW: So what size are you doing these at? SR: Those were done by about 2" high, I would say.

DRAW: What are you doing those in, gauche or markers? SR: No, mostly they’re done in some kind of opaque paint, so that if when I’m swishing the paint around and I need to go over something that isn’t right, I can quickly amend it. So they usually sell vinyl paint or opaque watercolors, they call it. Something like that. But it’s never done in oil. It’s always sketchbook or just fastdrying type paint. DRAW: Now, did you shoot reference, shoot photos, get people to pose? SR: I sure did. This was something I was determined to get right. And I had to find a regionally correct lineup for this thing, which—political correctness is not something I agree very much with. I find it just another way of saying you’re a despicable coward if you want to put something in there to make everybody happy. But in this case, I thought it was fine. Besides, the idea of drawing Mexicans or blacks was a challenge for me. So I went out to find some guy, I found some guy that worked out at my gym. He was a black guy, and I posed him. I aged him about 20 years by giving him graying hair, but he was a perfect model to work from. I shot him outside with the approximate loaf of bread next to his head the way I wanted it, on a little cutting board, he held that up. So that was the way I shot reference for the stuff. But I would turn white ladies into Mexican ladies and stuff. There was this fat Mexican lady in there DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

STEVE RUDE

COMICS

that I had a fat white chick pose for.

picture.” Junk like that. That’s what drives me nuts.

DRAW: Hey, nothing wrong with that. I mean, illustrators used to do that back in the old days. They’d take themselves, and they were the only model they could have. They would be the fat guy or the skinny guy or whatever.

DRAW: So it took, you said, about a month to finish it?

SR: Well, I couldn’t find a Mexican model to work with. And I looked everywhere. I was even thinking about going down to the Home Depot and hiring a bunch of these little Mexican guys to come over and shoot pictures in my backyard. But that never happened for some reason. But I found a guy who was Mexican, and I shot him. He worked at the art store, and I shot him for a certain angle. He wasn’t quite right, but based on the reference I shot, I could easily transform him. DRAW: Were these people all flattered to be part of the painting? SR: Sometimes. The smart people are. The stupid people just give me a hard time. DRAW: They just want the money? SR: No, they just think of it as an imposition. They have no idea what this is for, even though I explain it to them, and it’s just a pain. “Well, let me talk to my boss about it. I don’t know if I can take five seconds off and go outside there and shoot this stupid

SR: Yeah. Way too long. DRAW: Is it something you would be interested in continuing to do? I mean, besides doing the comics stuff? SR: Yeah, because it’s all part of the big picture of artistic rope that I’m interested in. My heroes are illustrators, and that’s the kind of work they did, so I wanted to be a part of that composite.

STEVE RUDE, STUDENT DRAW: When you decided to leave Wisconsin and move to California, you did that because you wanted to go to art school. [You were] at that time continuing to take classes and seminars to improve yourself as an artist, specifically with painting. SR: Yeah, there was just so many things I didn’t know, in spite of all the practice I did on my own in my studio. Y’know, all the painting studies I did of master paintings that I found great, and all that. It just wasn’t coming fast enough. As the years went on, I became very frustrated over that, and I realized that I had to make a decision to do something about it. And by that point you’re thinking, “Well, what do I do about it? There’s nobody here in Madison that can teach me what I need to learn, so I have to leave Madison.” And there were only two choices, it was New York or California. And New York was cold and California wasn’t, so it was an easy choice. DRAW: [laughs] Coming from where it’s already cold, you don’t want to go where it’s cold again. SR: Yeah, and I love it in California. The first several years there, I thought it was paradise. And I loved being there. It was so exciting to change my environment. Scary, too, of course, so it was always fear mixed with excitement, that goes with moving your life a thousand miles away. But it was something that just had to be done, otherwise I was going to pay a horrible price for it by being stunted as an artist. DRAW: And you went there with the idea to go to, like, Art Center, or a specific school? SR: Well, I knew that I would start at Art Center, knowing what a great reputation that school had, and I did end up going there for I think it was a semester. It was one class I took.

DRAW: When was this? SR: This was ’88. DRAW: And you were still, of course, right in the midst LEFT: Another page from Steve’s sketchbooks. NEXT PAGE: Searching for the right nose and other sketches.

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

COMICS

of working probably close to full-time on Nexus, right? SR: Yeah, I sure was. I remember what I was working on at the time I moved; I was working on the next Nexus mini-series. And I remember the editor from First yelling at me, telling me, “Well, why don’t you wait! Can’t you move next month?” I saw it right away for what it was, an endless way of me trying to cater to someone else’s idea of what I needed to do for my life. I said, “No, damn it, I’m moving in September, and that’s that. I’m not going to delay this thing endlessly for your convenience.” I had to move, and I had to move then. I didn’t want to piss around with it anymore, I wanted to get it on and do what I had to do. So I moved, and I’m sure I was late with that issue, but I worked as hard as I possibly could with that apartment I was renting being half set up and all that. DRAW: And did you move and were you enrolled right away, or did you have to wait? SR: Well, pretty much right away. There was no time to waste, and I got right in there. I asked around a little bit about the right teacher for me, who was going to show me things that I knew I was lacking, and then I enrolled in a class right away, pretty much. I took it at night. DRAW: So you’d be drawing Nexus during the day, and then taking your night class? SR: Yeah, I had to gather all my oil painting materials and haul off to class at seven o’clock. Had to eat something real fast and run off. And you know what a pain that is. DRAW: Yeah. I’ll be doing that tomorrow night, because I’m taking a painting class right now, myself. SR: Ah, you took a painting class? Where was it at? DRAW: Yeah, I’m taking a painting class at the college that I teach at, so one of the pluses of teaching at the college is that I get to take classes for free. So you found a teacher there that you clicked with at Art Center? SR: I don’t know if I clicked with him, but he was a good teacher. He taught me a lot about little things, like burying the edge control of highlights, and specifics about every shape you put down. This really finite detailing stuff that I needed to understand. Because I remember I didn’t understand what detail was all about. I didn’t have a definitive word to explain to me what detail was. I didn’t understand it, and it was very frustrating for me. So I went to find out, well, what exactly is detailing? How detailed can I get, and how much do I need to put in there? Because a lot of painters don’t do it. They stay gestural, and they stay realists, but they’re not triple-zero brush guys. DRAW: Yeah, like Cornwell would do these really detailed drawings, and then his paintings would be kind of loose, especially the stuff where he was painting more like Harvey Dunn. SR: Yeah, in his early days he was extremely broad stroke stuff. Cornwell influenced so many guys, both ways. His later stuff, he

was doing something so different from the early stuff, which was so Harvey Dunn. But yeah, I had kind of a list of things that I needed to understand, and I was hoping the California teachers in L.A. would fly in with all the answers. And I’m happy to say that I did find everything that I needed to find out. DRAW: Now, you went to a college in Calabasas, eventually? SR: Yeah. Calabasas was this school that was talked about almost in this hush-hush tone. When you’re really ready to paint or draw, then you go to the school in Calabasas. And it was started by a guy named Fred Fixler, who was a Frank Reilly student from the Art Student League in New York. He migrated out here, and when the California types saw what he had to teach them, we all kind of went bonkers and forced him to start his own school. He should have called it Fixler School, but he called it the Art Institute of California—some innocuous kind of bland name like that. DRAW: And that’s where you met Glen Orbik, who’s painted many covers for DC in the last several years? SR: Yeah. Glen was a teacher there for at least ten years. I’m actually glad that I never had Fred himself, because Fred was a bit of a dictator when it came to teaching art, and I’d had enough dictators in my life, in my early years, that I didn’t need another one. So Glen was a very gentle, yet very, very specific guy on explaining all the answers of art according to my needs. He turned out to be the best teacher I ever had. DRAW: When was the last time you took a class or a seminar DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

STEVE RUDE

COMICS LEFT: Paintings from Steve’s sketchbooks. NEXT PAGE: A waterfall study done on canvas.

DRAW: So you number your sketchbooks. SR: Well, I have to, because I want to know how many I’ve done, for the one thing. DRAW: And do you fill one up totally, then go to the next? SR: Yeah. DRAW: Or do you jump to 28 and go back and work on 24? SR: No, just like on comics, I do one thing at a time. DRAW: So are the sketchbooks sort of your art gym, where you go and you work out and you push yourself and experiment?

SR: Yeah, exactly. I would mentally deteriorate without my sketchbook. It would be like a guy who never exercised his body in the gym, like you’re making the reference to gyms and stuff. I don’t know what would happen to me. That’s my thing to put down every thought that I have. DRAW: So even if you were to never draw another comic book, you would still always work in your sketchbooks. SR: Yeah. It seems to be a compulsion that all artists have, who are compulsive sketchers, that are people that just have that mental need to draw. for painting? SR: Well, I’m still going to my weekly class in Scottsdale Artist School. DRAW: And that’s for what, figure drawing? SR: I paint figures, though. But it’s a live model, and I paint using various mediums, to keep myself interested. DRAW: I’m impressed by that, and was from the first time we met 20-something years ago at a show in New Jersey, and you had one of your sketchbooks there that had a bunch of studies from Loomis, and I think there was Christie? SR: I’m sure, yeah. DRAW: And a couple of other things. And obviously you’re very famous and noted for your sketchbooks. And you told me you’re on sketchbook number what, now? SR: I think it’s 26. 74

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

DRAW: And do you feel, as many artists I know do, that the drawing that you do in your sketchbook is better than the drawing you do elsewhere? SR: No, not at all. DRAW: No? Because I always feel my sketchbook work is always way better than my finished work, for some reason. I don’t know why. Somehow the absolute freedom to create whatever I want seems to be so much more liberating. Even if you’re doing a job that you like, somehow having that specific order to fill. SR: Well, if you feel liberated, you’re going to have a good time. That’s certainly part of it. I just wouldn’t be content with just drawing—. To do what Alex Ross does. He just produces and produces and produces comic page after painted comic page. And that would drive me insane. I couldn’t do it. DRAW: He doesn’t work in a sketchbook? Do you know Alex at all?

COMICS SR: Yeah, we talk fairly regularly. DRAW: And he doesn’t have a sketchbook? SR: No, he doesn’t do that at all. DRAW: Well, there was a period in my career, when I was younger, when I was really busy. At that point the industry was, once you got in, and if you were prolific and decent and easy to get along with and met your deadlines, they would swamp you with work. I was so busy that I actually didn’t sketch hardly at all, because, literally, from the time I would wake up until I would go to bed, if I was drawing, I was drawing because I had to make a deadline. It’s not that way now. Now I would rather just draw in my sketchbook all day. He’s very typical; I know many artists that are the same way, that they’re so busy working that they don’t really do much sketching. Most of their finished work is being reproduced someplace. SR: Well, ideally, that would probably be the best way to live your life, but I can’t be gratified by just doing simply work. Work is hard. But working in my sketchbook is fun and liberating. DRAW: Do you start out, say, by warming up working in your sketchbook, and then you go to the board. SR: That’s usually the way I’ve done it for most of my life, but procedures get modified all the time based on the reality of the moment. And a lot of the time, the reality of it is I just want to get in and draw my pages. DRAW: You just want to draw them and get them done? SR: Yeah, get right into it, y’know, instead of pissing around in my sketchbook doing stuff. DRAW: So where do you see yourself in five years? SR: Doing The Moth. DRAW: And would you still like to be doing the occasional commission? SR: I think so, yeah. I’ve put in so many years under my belt doing the commission things, I would just as soon focus on drawing The

STEVE RUDE

Moth, but it’s a good mental exercise to have something else than just your comic book life by doing commissions, especially the painting commissions. They come in every year and I get to do very varied subject matter stuff, that keeps me stretching as an artist. DRAW: So do you ever go out and do landscapes or anything? SR: Yeah. Now that my class is gone for the summer, I’m trying to go out once a week and paint something outside.

ALEX TOTH DRAW: Now, this brings up an interesting subject—and if you don’t want to talk about it, it’s fine. Via the Internet I came into possession of the copies of the Jonny Quest job you did that had a blunt and rather brutal, reaming critique that Alex Toth gave you over your art on the story that you did. SR: No, I don’t mind talking about it. Copies of that job have made it out because I gave copies to a friend years ago. DRAW: Okay. The main thing I want to know is, did you learn anything from that ARTWORK ©2005 STEVE RUDE. blistering critique? I think Alex was a bit unfair to you in some regards. I mean, from the standpoint of a teacher, it’s fine to say, “Jesus Christ, this sucks!” but it doesn’t help you. Now if you say, “Jesus Christ, this sucks, but this is how you can make it better....” SR: Oh, yeah, a couple of things. But he was so wrong with some of the things that he brought up. There was something that I actually had a lot of help on the research that went into those eight pages, and Alex was actually completely ignorant of what I was drawing. “What kind of a camera is that?” DRAW: Right. I remember him being very hot about a camera they were using. Was that a made-up camera or was that a camera you actually had reference for it? SR: No, that was actually a for-real camera. I don’t remember exactly what it was. It seems to me it was more than just a camera of some kind. I don’t have any memory of why I used it at the time in the story, but it was a very specific real-life item that I’d put in DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

STEVE RUDE

COMICS this story would have. I never faked that damned thing. I’d do the research myself or some friend of mine helped. DRAW: I just thought it was sort of interesting that he was so angry. Did you continue correspondence with him after that? SR: Well, I wanted to, but I remember I called him up, I think, after he wrote me that long letter. I was happy Alex was honest with me, but I mostly just wanted to try to talk with him about it, to have him explain to me the finer details of the things that he half-explained, and I wanted to get the full explanation. And the conversation deteriorated in five minutes, because every time you tried to say something or try to understand something, Alex would be so confrontational.

ABOVE AND RIGHT: Alex Toth’s critique of page 1. NEXT PAGE: Look familiar? If not, look at this ish’s cover!

that panel. And Alex said, “What the hell kind of a camera is this? I’m a camera buff, and I’ve never seen anything like this before.” Well, it wasn’t fake, it was researched and it was specifically designed for what the characters were doing. And when I would ask Alex to explain a little more in depth some of his points, he’d get mad and bite my head off again. DRAW: So it was a survey camera or something like that? SR: Yeah, it was something like a surveyor’s camera. Thanks for reviving my memory, here; that’s what it was. And I was very careful to get every detail down just because I was very much into researching and getting reference on this job, very conscious from the very beginning to do research, so I covered myself carefully. I didn’t want people writing to me and yelling at me for things I got wrong, so I was very careful about that to begin with. But no, I would say that three quarters of everything that he said was—

STEVE R UDE.

DRAW: One of the things I always do, as a teacher, is when I’m critiquing—and I don’t pull my punches—but I

will also say what is good that you did, and I will also then show you possible solutions to fix your work. Because if you don’t, then you’re not really teaching, it doesn’t serve you any purpose to tear people down.

DRAW: Like that the gas pumps were wrong....

SR: No, it doesn’t. The best quote I ever heard about Alex was from Mike Vosburg, and that is, “When you’re with Alex, it’s like you’re around a live grenade. You never know when it’s going to go off.”

SR: Yeah. I mean, I look at gas pumps pretty closely for that kind of stuff, probably more than 60% of any comic book artists drawing

DRAW: Well, I mean, he did point out some things I’m sure that you agreed with, about storytelling or something, but it just

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

COMICS seemed like he just wanted to hate on everything so much in that critique, that it’s like, what could you pull out of that that you could use? SR: Yeah, the more I tried to account for what I had done that he had erroneously pointed out, the more mad he would get. DRAW: So when you said, “No, that’s not a fake camera, that’s an actual, real surveyor’s camera, and I went and did research on it.” SR: Yeah, that was not something he wanted to hear. He was much more content with just blasting you and having his way. And that was that. DRAW: Yeah, that’s too bad. SR: He’s unlike any person I’ve ever met in my life in his extreme attitude about things. He’s an absolute extreme in a way that I’ve never seen anyone in my life. DRAW: Well, it’s a mixed event sometimes, meeting people that you admire. Sometimes you can meet a person that you admire and they are such a wonderful person that it’s just a great experience. And sometimes you can meet a person who’s a hero or that you admire, and they just end up being an ass, they end up being a bad person. SR: Yeah, it’s fascinating to look back at all the people, like Kirby being the perfect gentleman and the easiest guy on Earth to talk to. And then you meet the opposite in Alex. DRAW: Is there something else you’d like to say? SR: The only thing I might want to say is kind of what we touched on, Mike. I’ve been reading this really nice article about Will Eisner in Alter Ego here, that just came, and the whole entrepreneurial spirit that Will Eisner had about knowing what he wanted to do and doing it, regardless of the circumstances of the publishing world and what they would give him, I think is the route that I am set on hopefully for my life, here. Even with the business being so shaky right now. DRAW: So you’re going to try to find some way, despite it being shaky, to make it work for you? SR: Yeah. I feel driven by conscience to do as much as I can to reflect a manner of producing a comic book that is the way they did back in the ’40s, even. DRAW: And you’re talking from the craft level? SR: Yeah. Some kind of a full circle kind of a thing, where I don’t want to work under some guy that knows nothing about the needs of me as an artist, and so I had to create my own character.

STEVE RUDE

I’m looking at this Alter Ego with Eisner in it, and there’s an ad for All-Star Auctions, and there’s a Spider-Man cover, #40, where Romita drew Spider-Man standing over the Green Goblin. Just the excitement that oozes from these covers, where Spidey saves the day, the end of the Green Goblin. That’s what personified anyone picking up a comic book. You looked at it and you thought, “Oh, my God! I’ve got to get this here! I’ve got to get this thing!” Well, that sensibility has been gone for so long. In fact, it’s been turned on its ear. Now everything is about this really stoic-looking dark crap on the cover, where a #1 isn’t put big in a book anymore; it has no meaning anymore. They went overboard in the Valiant days, when they would gold foil everything, and put a hologram #1 on the cover and all that kind of crap. And now they’ve gone the reverse of that, probably to try to make it more adult or whatever, their layouts. That’s where Marvel is right now. And I couldn’t work with those kind of guys. They don’t agree with my sensibilities. DRAW: No, that’s the hardest part. And that thing you were talking about, about that Romita cover, is just his natural sense of appeal. His drawings were always appealing. They always showed you the shots that you wanted to see, they always showed you the kind of image that you would like. And they were drawing comics that would also appeal to a younger audience. And now that the audience is our age, right, so the audience is in their late 20s to late 40s, they’re not trying to draw Spider-Man to appeal to a nine-year-old or ten-year-old. They’re trying to draw Spider-Man to appeal to a 40-year-old. And to do that, then they draw Mary Jane like a stripper. [laughs] SR: Yeah, the current vogue in drawing people in comics is essentially the Image look, isn’t it? Well, maybe that’s my problem. I’ve never done anything I’ve ever done on thinking about an audience. I’m so glad I spared myself that, what I have to do to make people happy. That’s the surest way to suicide, I think. DRAW: Do you collect old comics? SR: Yeah, I sure do. And it’s the only thing I collect. DRAW: Do you collect art? Do you collect illustration? SR: Last year I went over to the Kirby booth, where [Mike] Thibodeaux was, and Lisa Kirby, and I bought a page from the ’50s, a romance book. And I just said, “Gee, I’ve got to have this.” I’m someone that looks at material possessions as something that’s critically important to your life. It just goes against all that PC crap where you’re not supposed to put to much stock in all that. That’s all horsesh*t.

THE MOTH © AND TM 2005 STEVE RUDE.

DRAW: Now, if you’re buying that, you’re buying it because you not only DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

By Bret Blevins and Mike Manley ruth is a vital part of expressive realistic drawing, and the source of visual truth is observation from life. This article demonstrates the value of keeping a sketchbook with you and using it everyday. In past issues of DRAW! we’ve discussed many aspects of figure drawing, mostly principles of construction, rhythm, proportion, movement, and other concepts directed toward the creation of invented imaginary figures. Usually these drawings are designed as instruments and components of a narrative— designed as characters with personalities that can be manipulated by the artist through a process of “acting on paper.” A storytelling figure artist depends on an understanding of human emotions and attitudes as outwardly revealed by the position of the limbs, head, and torso— collectively referred to as “body language.” These clues, signs and hints about a person’s inward thoughts and emotions that we gather from observation are endlessly vast and varied—no one can store every possible variation of this subtle and often fleeting language in memory. This makes constant sketching from life an invaluable resource for deepening, refreshing and enriching your range and mastery of the revealing gesture. As every serious artist knows, it’s easy to level out into plateaus as you proceed through the years. There are so many demands on your time and energy that one can fall into an unexamined habit of using “stock” shorthand solutions to many picture-making problems. There is nothing inherently wrong with achieving a set of workable skills and then repeating them, but there is so much more territory to explore— more than any one artist could fit into several lifetimes. Returning to the source of all art and experience—your life in your environment—is a constant source of renewal, both of your skills and your spirit. As you’ll see in the pages that follow, making quick sketches from the human life happening around you doesn’t necessarily create glamourous rich works of art (although it can), but a finished masterpiece is not your goal. This realization is important—most artists resist this endeavor because the results are often so fragmentary and unimpressive to the undiscerning eye. You need never show

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

these studies to anyone—they are made for your benefit, your improved understanding, as a means of increasing your awareness and ability. The essential strength of sketching from life is the effect is has on quickening your eye and hand—as you gather filled pages of “lightning sketches” you will experience a process of distilling the most important information almost instantly. I call this “essencing”— honing in on the most bare, sparse statement of the key shapes and rhythms. To an appreciative eye, these simple yet remarkably eloquent brief arrangements of lines convey a sense of life and consciousness that is often missing from elaborately constructed and meticulously rendered realistic finished drawings. In turn, both your collection of sketches and the experience carved into your mind by the act of making them will enrich your invented work immeasurably. Sketching the people, animals, objects and places around you is an ever renewable resource for your ongoing growth as an artist. Experimenting with different tools and means of making the sketches will broaden your mastery of techniques and your range of expression, as well as fill your memory with the construction and shapes of innumerable bodies, faces, garments, shoes, handbags, buildings, tables, chairs, cars, trees, plants, clouds... the list is endless. This infusion of ever fresh information will inform all of your work, expanding the breadth and subtlety of choices you can mine as you begin each new artwork, whether a single illustration, a 20-page comic book story or a 1000-frame storyboard. It’s important to remember that the prime result of observation sketching is not the drawings themselves, but the experience gained by making them. Time spent sketching from life is never wasted.

GESTURE DRAWING

BLEVINS & MANLEY

BRET’S TRAVEL KIT

MIKE’S TRAVEL KIT

Here are my basic field sketching tools: ■ Two sketchbooks—a small cheap pad that I use for marker drawing, and a bigger pad containing nicer paper suitable for more subtle graphite sketches. ■ Two grades of Derwent Graphic graphite pencils: HB and 6B, along with a small pocketknife I use to sharpen their points. ■ A kneaded eraser. ■ A Pilot Razor Point non-waterproof marker and a Pentel Presto Jumbo Correction Pen with a Fine Point tip. —Bret

Here is a picture of my basic “travel kit” that I pack when I go out for life drawing or gesture drawing at a local mall, eatery, book store, etc. I try and keep it light and to the basics, or what I know works well for me. First I buy a decent pad of drawing paper; the Biggie pads are good, but any art supply store will have plenty of selections. I also pack a backboard of some sort for support. I have this nice little masonite board that came with the DC Comics bag they gave us artists in the late ’90s when there was still $$ to me made in comics. I also take along a few clips and also some scrap paper, 8 1/2" x 11". Being comfortable when drawing and having a sure surface is important. You also don’t want your paper falling or shifting, blowing away. Next I pack some pencils—all softer leads, 2B-6B—and a range of markers, too. I like markers, as they force you to commit right away, no shading or messing around, no tenderfoot noodling, nope—BAM! Put down that line, boy! I like to take a range of markers all in the same tonal area—all warm, all cool. I love to use markers that are drying out; I find it’s like drawing with a pice of pastel or charcoal at times, without the mess. I will also pack a few colored pencils, an eraser, and shapener. Lastly, a few black markers, maybe a brush marker—Faber Castle or Pigma are good. I have a little totebag with a nice drawstring that I got with a pack of Mach III razors recently that holds all the supplies nicely. I pack it all in the nice DC bag again, but any nice shoulder bag which isn’t too bulky will suffice. You can get a nice piece of masonite cut for you to size at any local Home Depot or Lowe’s—they usually only charge a small fee. Another money-saving tip is to buy a tackle or tool box to hold your art supplies at the local Home Depot, etc., as it will be at least 50% less expensive than the art box at the art supply shop is. You get basically the same item, and with the cost of art supplies always rising I say save a dollar whenever you can. Lastly, I make sure to wear my magic hat. Yes, it may look like an ordinary baseball cap with Conan O’Brien’s face on it, but this hat engenders smiles and good vibes from those who see me wearing it. People often feel uncomfortable if they see you sketching them, like they are being spied upon, and local mall cops and narcs may be suspicious of a person lurking and sketching, but that happy little hat puts out magic vibes that sooth their worries and allows me to get what I need... a little bit of their soul on paper! Hahaha! —Mike

The tools needed for on-the-spot sketching are simple and cheap. Here you see the travel kits used by Mike Manley and myself. If you have a favorite tool you don’t see here, by all means use it. Simplicity and ease of use are the goal—the key is to keep your tools compact, small and lightweight. Loose paper is fine, but difficult to keep tidy as you accumulate drawings—an inexpensive sketchbook binds your drawings together, is easier to carry about, and provides its own stiff backing to support the pressure of your hand. You can incorporate tonal rendering with graphite or other mediums, though this demands more time than a lightning sketch. This is fine—you want to vary the pace, depending on your mood and the subject. I suggest always starting a session with a marker or pen, though—and usually a moving subject, because this forces you to commit quickly and forcefully—no turning back, no correction! After you’ve warmed up a bit, then you can slow down—but not too much. The idea is to “prime your speed,” and avoid settling into a careful, meticulous approach that defeats the purpose of quick sketching. You can sketch virtually anywhere and everywhere—you’ll see I even made a sketch from the dentist’s chair as the Novocain numbed my jaw! It’s usually best to find a spot that is out of the main stream of traffic or activity, a place where you can draw without attracting the attention of your subjects or other people. (This often happens anyway, but most people are polite about it.) A parked car is a great vantage point, plus you have plenty of room to arrange your equipment, and the steering wheel of most cars provides a comfortable support for your pad or sketchbook. (Car sketching tip; clean the windows before you draw!) Our primary focus is people—figures expressing attitudes. You’ll see in the sketches by Mike and myself printed here that you can capture a surprising amount of essential information in just a few sweeping lines. This may not happen for you immediately if you are new to life sketching, but don’t worry, it will come with a little practice. The point of this method of forced observation under pressure is to eliminate unnecessary or self-consciously mannered marks and rendering, which are the first acquired crutches of the beginning artist. When your are working within the pages of your sketchbook, you are free to be yourself, and release any and all expectations you

have of your drawings or your “style.” This is not about proving skill or repeating habitual learned tricks—it is an adventure of discovery. You are trying to spontaneously translate your impressions into lines and marks that reveal what caught your attention—not what you think you should notice or what you believe another artist might focus on. Working under great pressure of fleeing time is important, and this will occur automatically by attempting to draw people in motion—you are forced to retain impressions of fleeting shapes and arrangements of form or light long enough to glance at your sheet and record them any way you can. There is a quality of mild desperation in this process that will quickly eliminate any hesitancy— before you are quite aware of it you will be honing in on the essential lines and movements that best suggest your desired effect. It’s good to begin with the biggest lines of action running through any pose or motion—try to get a sense of the entire image immediately, then add as much telling information as you are able to squeeze into the few moments the subject or the mental impression that struck you is still available. Avoid detail unless the subject is stationary or your memory impression is clear enough to trust.

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

BLEVINS & MANLEY

GESTURE DRAWING

Now we’ll have a little fun—here some of the lightning sketches have been used as a basis for a more finished drawing. Many details have been embellished from memory, from suggestions found in the original sketch, or through outright invention. But the sense of verity—spacial accuracy, the “rightness” of the body masses and movements, the convincing feeling of reality and personality owe their origin to the sketch and the observation/memory skills developed by sketching. A cautionary word about using photographs: there is a special benefit to drawing from life that is subtle but very important. The spacial relationships, the sense of volume and mass existing in depth and atmosphere is a quality that is unique to our human eyes. No camera can match the three-dimensional effect of seeing with two eyes, and the constantly changing focus of our vision is crucial to a drawing that feels warm and human. A photo, especially a digital snapshot, is massively compressed, and the depth and the optical effect of detail on our visual perception is wildly exaggerated. When drawing from life, looking across and into space, our eyes emphasize what is important to us, and dampen or soften the rest. The non-essential is not necessarily blurred by our actual organ of sight, but the impression on your mind and memory is selective. What interests you the most becomes dominant in your consciousness. In contrast, a camera records every detail indiscriminately, or through the settings and capabilities of its lenses/filters. When a photo is printed, all the information is compressed across the single thin layer of its surface, eliminating all depth and atmosphere, precluding the sensibilities and perceptions of your eye and mind. Your natural function of selection and preference is blocked because you are looking at a gross distortion of reality. Drawings made from photos always look airless and inert, and never have the vitality of direct observation from life. This function of human sight also applies to inanimate objects and environments— look at the warm sense of spacial dimension in these drawings of spaces and still lifes. Establishing vanishing points and constructing these same scenes in mechanical per-

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

ABOVE: The lack of ruled edges give these drawings a “human” sense of space—your eyes do not apprehend a scene with mathematical precision—the measured rules of mechanical perspective create a convincing impression of accuracy, but often at the cost of warmth, vitality and atmosphere. The slight but important shifts in viewpoint that occur as your mobile eyes change focus when observing the different areas and distances of a real three-dimensional space create a relationship of angles that more closely represent human vision. LEFT: I’ve used a naturally observed life drawing of my son Timothy as the basis for a stylized caricature—the second image has strengthened the “heroic” or glamorous aspects of Tim’s head and face. Note how the planes and angles have been sharpened and exaggerated into greater symmetry—the eyes have been enlarged and the intensity of the gaze heightened. The shapes of the hair have been designed into a strong, pleasing, and instantly clear arrangement.

spective are convincing in a logical way, but they are lacking the mysterious “essence” of reality that the direct observation drawings have. Of course artist’s are free to use all techniques and knowledge systems to create their work, but the immediacy of life observation is often missing from the artwork we see around us today. The conveniences of living in an electronic age of infinite visual reference and stimulation has shaped the perceptions of many pairs of eyes around the limitation of a video screen or printed page. Again, there is no reason to reject this wealth of inspiration and enlightenment—but your eyes and mind are wonderfully subtle instruments of perception no machine can match. Don’t miss the chance to enjoy them! See you next time! Bret and Mike

GESTURE DRAWING

MIKE MANLEY

BELOW: This college student was a good subject, lost in thought. Most of the time you will have 20-30 seconds or even less to draw a person as their pose will chnage or they will pass you or get up and move. It may take a few trips out to sketch until you find your “groove” and loosen up. Relax, and have fun; don’t worry about mistakes, paper is cheap!

ABOVE AND RIGHT: Old people are a lot of fun to draw. Time has given their faces and bodies a lot of character that makes drawing them a blast. And old people wear hats, like this lady I sketched at a local mall in colored pencil and marker. Compare her posture to that of the student.

LEFT: This old fella had a great head to draw, what a cool “type.” After I drew him, I re-drew him a few more times (BELOW) from memory trying to “push” the drawing or design. I find this to be a great exercise.

ABOVE: The variety of people is endless and entertaining. Sitting in a mall or coffee shop for a few hours is only giving you the smallest sample of humanity, yet combinations of porportion are endless as these two figures show. Both ladies were walking withing a few steps of each other.

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

GESTURE DRAWING

BRET BLEVINS

LEFT: I made these drawings from the balcony at a concert, very quickly and in near darkness. In the second sketch (in five minutes or so) I attempted to capture an impression of the entire choir—don’t be afraid to tackle any subject. If the attempt fails all you’ve lost is a sheet of inexpensive paper and a few grains of graphite!

RIGHT: The first lightning marker sketch was made on the spot as this shopper was bending over a jewelry display, and was then used as a basis for the stylized sketch. Again the changes amount to a simplified exaggeration of the rhythm and increased clarity of design. I’ve lengthened her legs and narrowed her waist and hips to enhance the effect of feminine grace. The increased swing in the angle of the line that sweeps across and through her shoulders and arms strengthen the gesture, as do the fold indications of her shirt.

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

GESTURE DRAWING

MIKE MANLEY

LOCATION: BORDERS BOOKS MEDIUM 2B PENCIL I loved drawing this lady. I was sitting in the coffee bar at my local Borders, which allowed me both a good view of the coffee bar and the first floor below. This browser was such a good model... though she didn’t know it, every pose she did was a great pose—perfect, expressive, clear. She was really intent on scanning the bookshelf and each time she bent over or searched the shelf or looked at a book, she struck a great pose. I was drawing fast and furious here as she may hold that pose only 1020 seconds. This is where the Famous Artist motto “See, Observe, Remember” really pays off.

This drawing was done after the fact at home in my studio based on the gesture drawing to the left.

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

BRET BLEVINS

GESTURE DRAWING

ABOVE: This fellow was very tall and lanky—I just pushed those characteristics in the stylized drawing. ABOVE RIGHT: The girth of this stout man and especially the clothes he wore captured my interest—the flowing drop of the loose garments, nicely accented by the curving cap create a graceful series of sweeping curves that form an unexpectedly elegant silhouette. RIGHT: I ran this observation sketch off the bottom of the page, so I had to complete the legs and chair in the second drawing. Again, consciously applied design has streamlined the rhythm and forms to accentuate the most appealing elements found in the original sketch.

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

GESTURE DRAWING

MIKE MANLEY

LEFT: This was a drawing I did without turning my head to directly look at the subjects. These two guys were sitting directly to my right, less than five feet away in a Starbucks, so if I had turned to directly look at them it may have been awkward. So I slightly turned my head and did this drawing by looking to my right and using my peripheral vision, too. As a result there is a lot of energy and distortion I like a lot in this sketch.

LEFT: More people waiting in line at the coffee shop; their poses suggest everything about their personalites in these quick gestures. A more detailed drawing may add surface detail and color, etc., but it won’t make the gestures any better. ABOVE: This drawing of my student, Rhandi, was done on a sketching field trip to the mall, and was drawn with a black Prismacolor pencil. Her serious concentration on her drawing comes through in this sketch.

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

BRET BLEVINS

GESTURE DRAWING

LEFT: The most noteworthy detail of this pair of drawings is the slight but important shift in the position of her left foot. This minor adjustment enhances the grace and feminine rhythm of her entire figure. All art is artifice—contrived to enhance a desired effect. Literal accuracy is mere reporting—always look for opportunities to make your drawings stronger or more suggestive of your particular interest in the subject. My attraction tends to run toward grace and pleasing sensuous shapes—another artist might have emphasized the solid weight of her heel-planted original gesture and the boxy squareness of her shoulder-padded jacket.

ABOVE AND RIGHT: The changes here are simple—thinner, more rhythmic forms and smoother flowing lines.

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

GESTURE DRAWING

LEFT: This little sequence of sketches really interested me because of the differences between the first woman and the second at the computer. They are performing the same action—searching for something at a computer terminal— but each one has a completely different pose. The woman in Sketch C was also standing at the same computer, yet her pose suggested to me a sort of upscale person, impatient, a little like the woman in Sketch B with her hands on her hips, yet both are subtly different. This is what I find fascinating about gesture drawing. Subtle changes in a person’s pose can really show their personality and this is the type of info you want to get into your comic drawing. No two people stand exactly the same while performing the same action.

ABOVE AND RIGHT: The drawing of the Hulk here is based on the gesture of the annoyed woman above who cast me a sort of crabby side-ways glance as I quickly sketched her as she hurried past. Commiting this type of drawing to paper fast also transfers it to your memory banks so you can pull from it later and apply that “Life Energy” to another drawing, even if it’s a character who’s built completely differently.

THE HULK © AND TM 2005 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

MIKE MANLEY

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

BRET BLEVINS

GESTURE DRAWING

LEFT: The most interesting changes here are the increased upward sweep of her hairdo and the absent-minded finger gesture of her left hand. The suggestion of this common gesture is in the original doodle, but I had to spell it out in the second drawing.

RIGHT: Three of these four shoppers were quite still for a long moment as they contemplated the object before their eyes, and that is reflected in the level of “finish” in the drawings. The woman flipping through a rack of prints was in constant motion and thus the sketch of her is less precisely described. One of the pleasures of life sketching is this variety of tempo, and the different qualities of the resulting drawings.

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

GESTURE DRAWING

MIKE MANLEY

More from the mall... I really like the loose gestures of the three old ladies looking in a store window (below), this type of quick sketch can be the basis of a more detailed drawing.

RIGHT: This fella couldn’t keep still for 30 seconds; he was constantly moving as he read his book. He was a challenge to draw.

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

BRET BLEVINS

GESTURE DRAWING

Pets are great subjects—especially if they sleep a lot! The wet grays in the marker sketch of my cat Sylvia were made by dipping my finger into a glass of water and smearing the Pilot Razor Point lines. This takes a bit of practice—try in on scrap paper first to get a sense of how much and how fast a given density of marks will bleed.

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

GESTURE DRAWING

MIKE MANLEY

RIGHT AND BELOW: This marker drawing of my dog Buster (below) was done using a few different markers: a thin marker first to do a quick gesture as he moves a lot, then a quick hit with a nearly dry marker to rough down some tone indication. Buster was sitting up in the living room window, his favorite spot. The drawing of my other dog, Shazam (right), was done with a marker that was just about dried out, but the texture it gave me added a lot of “juice” to this sketch.

LEFT: This is a sketch of my old dog, Sabastion, who died about nine years ago. It was drawn in a rollerpoint marker. ABOVE: A quick gesture from class done in charcoal.

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

BRET BLEVINS

GESTURE DRAWING LEFT: Look at the fun range of body types, gesture, and personality in this page of sketches done at a shopping mall. I especially like the little girl carrying her coat in front of her like a tired matador, and the woman with loaded shopping bags stretching her back.

LEFT AND BELOW: The first drawing of my daughter Katy waiting for her meal was made across the table of a restaurant booth—always keep your small sketchbook with you—opportunities to draw are everywhere, all the time!

BELOW: Here the sliced watermelon, knife, and especially the cutting board are enlivened by the loosely observed perspective. Using a ruler to rigidly lock the straight edges down would cost this sketch most of its charm.

ABOVE: Here I caught my wife Patricia in a casual relaxed pose as she watched a movie on the TV screen—remember, you can find inspiration to draw anywhere and almost any time. As long as your eyes are open and there is sufficient light, you have a subject.

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

GESTURE DRAWING

MIKE MANLEY

ABOVE AND RIGHT: The subjects that are the hardest to draw out in the mall, park, or bookstore are children; they almost never stop moving, and if they do it’s merely a beat or two between more high-energy activity. I find I have to be fast and really rely upon the “Look, See, Remember” philosophy.

BELOW: This may be the first bowl of fruit I’ve ever drawn. It offered a little challenge for me as I sketched it with a Prismacolor marker while I waited for my morning coffee to brew. I like the slightly “warpy” feel to this drawing and its “casual” perspective. Again, because of the fact that a marker can’t be erased, it forces you to really look at the subject and take a bit more time before drawing .

ABOVE AND BELOW: This drawing of the space monkey was based on the super-quick doodle from above.

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

BRET BLEVINS

GESTURE DRAWING

TOP LEFT AND ABOVE: These sketches of other patients were made as I sat in a dentist’s waiting room. When I had drawn everyone else in the waiting room I turned to drawing myself drawing myself drawing myself.... Even a shot of Novocain can’t stop a compulsive sketcher! LEFT: Sometimes sketching is a great way to relax into a good night’s sleep!

DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

GESTURE DRAWING

MIKE MANLEY

LEFT: These are quick direct marker gestures done while standing in the figure drawing class I teach as examples to my students. The poses were 30 seconds or less. Markers cut the fat out—no wishywashy drawing. RIGHT: Two more shoppers from Borders books. BELOW: This series of drawings of the Mexican workers at the local mall were done on two different occasions, and I was attracted to draw the same woman a second time. Again, I went with the marker approach and worked fast, putting down a really quick gesture drawing with a lighter marker and then going back with a darker one for detail. Little things like her large ears and short neck stood out. These folks work fast wiping down the tables and keeping the food court clean, so I was really looking and drawing with my eyes first.

Grab your pencils and pad and head out to you local mall or park and do some gesture drawing right now! DRAW! • SUMMER 2005

HOW-TO BOOKS & DVDs

WORKING METHODS: COMIC CREATORS DETAIL THEIR STORYTELLING & CREATIVE PROCESSES Art professor JOHN LOWE puts the minds of comic artists under the microscope, highlighting the intricacies of the creative process step-by-step. For this book, three short scripts are each interpreted in different ways by professional comic artists to illustrate the varied ways in which they “see” and “solve” the problem of making a script succeed in comic form. It documents the creative and technical choices MARK SCHULTZ, TIM LEVINS, JIM MAHFOOD, SCOTT HAMPTON, KELSEY SHANNON, CHRIS BRUNNER, SEAN MURPHY, and PAT QUINN make as they tell a story, allowing comic fans, artists, instructors, and students into a world rarely explored. Hundreds of illustrated examples document the artists’ processes, and interviews clarify their individual approaches regarding storytelling and layout choices. The exercise may be simple, but the results are profoundly complex! (176-page trade paperback with COLOR) $21.95 ISBN: 9781893905733 Diamond Order Code: MAR073747

HOW TO CREATE COMICS FROM SCRIPT TO PRINT

HOW TO DRAW COMICS FROM SCRIPT TO PRINT DVD

REDESIGNED and EXPANDED version of the groundbreaking WRITE NOW!/ DRAW! crossover! DANNY FINGEROTH and MIKE MANLEY show step-bystep how to develop a new comic, from script and roughs to pencils, inks, colors, lettering—it even guides you through printing and distribution, and the finished 8-page color comic is included, so you can see their end result! PLUS: over 30 pages of ALL-NEW material, including “full” and “Marvelstyle” scripts, a critique of their new character and comic from an editor’s point of view, new tips on coloring, new expanded writing lessons, and more!

Documents two top professionals creating a comic book, from initial idea to finished art! In this feature-filled DVD, WRITE NOW! magazine editor DANNY (Spider-Man) FINGEROTH and DRAW! magazine editor MIKE (Batman) MANLEY show you how a new character evolves from scratch! Watch the creative process, as a story is created from concepts and roughs to pencils, inks, and coloring—even lettering! Packed with “how-to” tips and tricks, it’s the perfect companion to the HOW TO CREATE COMICS FROM SCRIPT TO PRINT book, or stands alone as an invaluable tool for amateur and professional comics creators alike!

(108-page trade paperback with COLOR) $13.95 ISBN: 9781893905603 Diamond Order Code: APR063422

(120-minute DVD) $29.95 ISBN: 9781893905399 Diamond Order Code: AUG043204

BUNDLE THE BOOK & DVD TOGETHER FOR JUST $35.95 (SAVE $8)

NEW FOR 2008

FREE! FREE!

COMICS 101: HOW-TO & HISTORY LESSONS TwoMorrows has tapped the combined knowledge of its editors to assemble How-To and History lessons including: “Figure Drawing” and “How To Break Down A Story” from DRAW!’s MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS, “Writing Tips” from WRITE NOW!’s DANNY FINGEROTH, plus ROUGH STUFF’s BOB McLEOD provides “Art Critiques” of promising newcomers! There’s even a “Comics History Crash-Course”, assembled by ALTER EGO’s ROY THOMAS and BACK ISSUE’s MICHAEL EURY! (32-page comic book) FREE! (shipping charge applies) • Diamond Order Code: FEB070050

COMICS GO HOLLYWOOD TwoMorrows unveils secrets behind your FAVORITE ON-SCREEN HEROES, and what’s involved in taking a character from the comics page to the big screen! It includes: Storyboards from DC’s animated hit “THE NEW FRONTIER” (courtesy of DRAW! magazine)! JEPH LOEB on writing for both Marvel Comics and the Heroes TV show (courtesy of WRITE NOW! magazine)! Details on the unseen X-Men movie (courtesy of ALTER EGO magazine)! A history of the Joker from his 1940s origins to his upcoming appearance in the Dark Knight film (courtesy of BACK ISSUE! magazine)! And a look at Marvel Universe co-creator JACK KIRBY’s Hollywood career, with extensive Kirby art! So before you head to your local cineplex this summer, make sure you pick up your FREE copy of this must-have item from your local retailer on May 3, 2008! (32-page comic book) FREE! (shipping applies) or FREE at your local comics retailer on May 3, 2008

BEST OF DRAW! VOL. 1

BEST OF DRAW! VOL. 2

Compiles tutorials, interviews, and demonstrations from DRAW! #1-2, by DAVE GIBBONS (layout and drawing on the computer), BRET BLEVINS (figure drawing), JERRY ORDWAY (detailing his working methods), KLAUS JANSON and RICARDO VILLAGRAN (inking techniques), GENNDY TARTAKOVSKY (on animation and Samurai Jack), STEVE CONLEY (creating web comics and cartoons), PHIL HESTER and ANDE PARKS (penciling and inking), and more! Cover by BRET BLEVINS!

Compiles tutorials and interviews from issues #3-4 of DRAW!, with ERIK LARSEN (savage penciling), DICK GIORDANO (inking techniques), BRET BLEVINS (drawing the figure in action, and figure composition), KEVIN NOWLAN (penciling & inking), MIKE MANLEY (how-to demo on Web Comics), DAVE COOPER (digital coloring tutorial), and more! Each artist presents their work STEP-BY-STEP, so both beginning and experienced artists can learn valuable tips and tricks along the way! Cover by KEVIN NOWLAN.

(200-page trade paperback with COLOR) $24.95 ISBN: 9781893905412 Diamond Order Code: AUG078141

(156-page trade paperback with COLOR) $17.95 ISBN: 9781893905580 Diamond Order Code: APR063421

NEW FOR 2008

COMICS ABOVE GROUND

SEE HOW YOUR FAVORITE ARTISTS MAKE A LIVING OUTSIDE COMICS

BEST OF WRITE NOW! Whether you’re looking to break into the world of comics writing, or missed key issues of DANNY FINGEROTH’S WRITE NOW—the premier magazine about writing for comics and related fields—this is the book for you! THE BEST OF WRITE NOW features highlights from the acclaimed magazine, including in-depth interviews about writing from top talents, like: BRIAN MICHAEL BENDIS, WILL EISNER, JEPH LOEB, STAN LEE, J. M. STRACZYNSKI, MARK WAID, GEOFF JOHNS, TODD McFARLANE, PAUL LEVITZ, AXEL ALONSO, and others! There’s also “NUTS & BOLTS” tutorials, featuring scripts from landmark comics and the pencil art that was drawn from them, including: CIVIL WAR #1 (MILLAR & McNIVEN), BATMAN: HUSH #1 (LOEB & LEE), ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN #47 (BENDIS & BAGLEY), AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #539 (STRACZYNSKI & GARNEY), SPAWN #52 (McFARLANE & CAPULO), GREEN LANTERN: REBIRTH #1 (JOHNS & VAN SCRIVER), and more! Also: How-to articles by the best comics writers and editors around, like JOHN OSTRANDER, DENNIS O’NEIL, KURT BUSIEK, STEVEN GRANT, and JOEY CAVALIERI. Professional secrets of top comics pros including NEIL GAIMAN, MARK WAID, TRINA ROBBINS, PETER DAVID, and STAN LEE! Top editors telling exactly what it takes to get hired by them! Plus more great tips to help you prepare for your big break, or simply appreciate comics on a new level, and an introduction by STAN LEE! Edited by Spider-Man writer DANNY FINGEROTH.

COMICS ABOVE GROUND features comics pros discussing their inspirations and training, and how they apply it in “Mainstream Media,” including Conceptual Illustration, Video Game Development, Children’s Books, Novels, Design, Illustration, Fine Art, Storyboards, Animation, Movies and more! Written by DURWIN TALON (author of the top-selling book PANEL DISCUSSIONS), this book features creators sharing their perspectives and their work in comics and their “other professions,” with career overviews, never-before-seen art, and interviews! Featuring: • BRUCE TIMM • BERNIE WRIGHTSON • ADAM HUGHES • JEPH LOEB

• LOUISE SIMONSON • DAVE DORMAN • GREG RUCKA AND OTHERS!

(168-page trade paperback) $19.95 ISBN: 9781893905313 Diamond Order Code: FEB042700

(160-page trade paperback with COLOR) $19.95 ISBN: 9781893905926 Diamond Order Code: FEB084082

NEW FOR 2008

PANEL DISCUSSIONS

TOP ARTISTS DISCUSS THE DESIGN OF COMICS

BEST OF DRAW! VOL. 3

BEST OF DRAW! VOL. 4

Compiles more of the best tutorials and interviews from DRAW! #5-7, including: Penciling by MIKE WIERINGO! Illustration by DAN BRERETON! Design by PAUL RIVOCHE! Drawing Hands, Lighting the Figure, and Sketching by BRET BLEVINS! Cartooning by BILL WRAY! Inking by MIKE MANLEY! Comics & Animation by STEPHEN DeSTEFANO! Digital Illustration by CELIA CALLE and ALBERTO RUIZ! Caricature by ZACH TRENHOLM, and much more! Cover by DAN BRERETON!

More tutorials and interviews from DRAW! #8-10, spotlighting: From comics to video games with artist MATT HALEY! Character design with TOM BANCROFT and ROB CORLEY! Adobe Illustrator tips with ALBERTO RUIZ! Draping the human figure by BRET BLEVINS! Penciling with RON GARNEY! Breaking into comic strips by GRAHAM NOLAN! Lettering by TODD KLEIN! International cartoonist JOSÉ LUIS AGREDA! Interviews with PvP’s SCOTT KURTZ and Banana Tail’s MARK McKENNA, and more! Cover by MATT HALEY!

(256-page trade paperback with COLOR) $29.95 ISBN: 9781893905917 Diamond Order Code: JAN083936

(216-page trade paperback with COLOR) $24.95 ISBN: 9781605490007 Ships May 2008

Art professor DURWIN TALON gets top creators to discuss all aspects of the DESIGN of comics, from panel and page layout, to use of color and lettering: • WILL EISNER • SCOTT HAMPTON • MIKE WIERINGO • WALT SIMONSON • MIKE MIGNOLA • MARK SCHULTZ • DAVID MAZZUCCHELLI • MIKE CARLIN • DICK GIORDANO • BRIAN STELFREEZE • CHRIS MOELLER • MARK CHIARELLO If you’re serious about creating effective, innovative comics, or just enjoying them from the creator’s perspective, this guide is must-reading! (208-page trade paperback with COLOR) $24.95 ISBN: 9781893905146 Diamond Order Code: MAY073781

MODERN MASTERS SERIES Edited by ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON, these trade paperbacks and DVDs are devoted to the BEST OF TODAY’S COMICS ARTISTS! Each book contains RARE AND UNSEEN ARTWORK direct from the artist’s files, plus a COMPREHENSIVE INTERVIEW (including influences and their views on graphic storytelling), DELUXE SKETCHBOOK SECTIONS, and more! And don’t miss our companion DVDs, showing the artists at work in their studios!

MODERN MASTERS: IN THE STUDIO WITH GEORGE PÉREZ DVD

MODERN MASTERS: IN THE STUDIO WITH MICHAEL GOLDEN DVD

Get a PERSONAL TOUR of George’s studio, and watch STEP-BY-STEP as the fan-favorite artist illustrates a special issue of TOP COW’s WITCHBLADE! Also, see George as he sketches for fans at conventions, and hear his peers and colleagues—including MARV WOLFMAN and RON MARZ—share their anecdotes and personal insights along the way!

Go behind the scenes and into Michael Golden’s studio for a LOOK INTO THE CREATIVE MIND of one of comics' greats. Witness a modern master in action as this 90-minute DVD provides an exclusive look at the ARTIST AT WORK, as he DISCUSSES THE PROCESSES he undertakes to create a new comics series.

(120-minute Standard Format DVD) $29.95 ISBN: 9781893905511 Diamond Order Code: JUN053276

(90-minute Standard Format DVD) $29.95 ISBN: 9781893905771 Diamond Order Code: MAY073780

Volume 1: ALAN DAVIS

Volume 2: GEORGE PÉREZ

Volume 3: BRUCE TIMM

Volume 4: KEVIN NOWLAN

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905191 Diamond Order Code: JAN073903

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905252 Diamond Order Code: JAN073904

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905306 Diamond Order Code: APR042954

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905382 Diamond Order Code: SEP042971

Volume 5: GARCÍA-LÓPEZ

Volume 6: ARTHUR ADAMS

Volume 7: JOHN BYRNE

Volume 8: WALTER SIMONSON

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905443 Diamond Order Code: APR053191

by George Khoury & Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905542 Diamond Order Code: DEC053309

by Jon B. Cooke & Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905566 Diamond Order Code: FEB063354

by Roger Ash & Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905641 Diamond Order Code: MAY063444

Volume 9: MIKE WIERINGO

Volume 10: KEVIN MAGUIRE

Volume 11: CHARLES VESS

Volume 12: MICHAEL GOLDEN

by Todd DeZago & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905658 Diamond Order Code: AUG063626

by George Khoury & Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905665 Diamond Order Code: OCT063722

by Christopher Irving & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905696 Diamond Order Code: DEC063948

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905740 Diamond Order Code: APR074023

NEW FOR 2008

Volume 13: JERRY ORDWAY

Volume 14: FRANK CHO

Volume 15: MARK SCHULTZ

Volume 16: MIKE ALLRED

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905795 Diamond Order Code: JUN073926

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905849 Diamond Order Code: AUG074034

by Fred Perry & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905856 Diamond Order Code: OCT073846

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905863 Diamond Order Code: JAN083937

MODERN MASTERS BUNDLES

NEW FOR 2008

Volume 17: LEE WEEKS

Volume 18: JOHN ROMITA JR.

by Tom Field & Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905948 Ships May 2008

by George Khoury & Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905955 Ships July 2008

BUNDLE THE GEORGE PÉREZ VOLUME & DVD TOGETHER, OR THE MICHAEL GOLDEN VOLUME & DVD TOGETHER

ONLY $37.95 EACH (SAVE $7 PER BUNDLE)

MODERN MASTERS VOLUMES ON MIKE PLOOG AND CHRIS SPROUSE ARE COMING IN FALL 2008 SEE OUR SUMMER CATALOG UPDATE!

THE ULTIMATE MAGAZINE FOR LEGOTM ENTHUSIASTS OF ALL AGES!

NEXT ISSUE IN JUNE:

COMING IN MAY:

BRICKJOURNAL COMPENDIUM 1

DIEGDITITIOANL BLE AVAILA

BRICKJOURNAL #2 (VOL. 2) Our second FULL-COLOR print issue celebrates the summer by spotlighting blockbuster summer movies, LEGO style! The LEGO Group will be releasing new sets for BATMAN and INDIANA JONES, and BrickJournal looks behind the scenes at their creation! There’s also articles on events in the US and Europe, and spotlights on new models, including an SR-71 SPYPLANE and a LEGO CONSTRUCTED CITY. For builders, there are INSTRUCTIONS & MINIFIGURE CUSTOMIZATIONS. Plus, there’s a feature on the ONLINE LEGO FACTORY, showing how an online model becomes a custom set, and a look at how the LEGO Group monitors its quality! (80-page magazine) $11 US POSTPAID ($14 Canada, $20 Elsewhere) (80-page Digital Edition) $3.95 (or FREE to print subscribers) • Ships June 2008

4-ISSUE SUBSCRIPTIONS: $32 US Postpaid by Media Mail ($42 First Class, $50 Canada • Elsewhere: $66 Surface, $78 Airmail)

PRINT SUBSCRIBERS GET THE DIGITAL EDITION FREE, BEFORE THE PRINT ISSUE HITS STORES!

VOLUME 1 features interviews with LEGO car builder ZACHARY SWEIGART (showing his version of the timetraveling Delorean from the movie Back to the Future), JØRGEN VIG KNUDSTORP (CEO of LEGO Systems, Inc.), Mecha builders BRYCE McLONE and JEFF RANJO, paraplegic LEGO builder SCOTT WARFIELD, BOB CARNEY (LEGO castle builder extraordinaire) and RALPH SAVELSBURG (LEGO plane builder), REVEREND BRENDAN POWELL SMITH (author of the LEGO version of the Bible), NASA Astronaut Trainer KIETH JOHNSON, JAKE McKEE (Global Community Director for The LEGO Group), builder JASON ALLEMANN on recreating the spacecraft from 2001: A Space Odyssey and 2010: The Year We Make Contact, features on the BIONICLE universe, how to make your own custom bricks, plus instructions and techniques, and more! Reprints Digital Editions #1-3 (below). (256-page FULL-COLOR trade paperback) $44 US POSTPAID ($51 Canada, $61 Elsewhere) ISBN: 978-1-893905-97-9 • Ships May 2008

GET DIGITAL EDITIONS OF VOLUME 1, #1-9: The first nine issues shown below comprise Volume One, and were released from 2005-2007 as Digital Editions only, averaging more than 100,000 downloads each. They’re available for downloading now for $3.95 EACH, and issue #9 is FREE!

DOWNLOAD A FREE DIGITAL EDITION OF VOL. 1, #9 NOW AT www.twomorrows.com

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY BOOKS

NEW FOR 2008

DICK GIORDANO: CHANGING COMICS, ONE DAY AT A TIME JOHN ROMITA... AND ALL THAT JAZZ! “Jazzy” JOHN ROMITA talks about his life, his art, and his contemporaries! Authored by former Marvel Comics editor in chief and top writer ROY THOMAS, and noted historian JIM AMASH, it features the most definitive interview Romita’s ever given, about working with such comics legends as STAN LEE and JACK KIRBY, following Spider-Man co-creator STEVE DITKO as artist on the strip, and more! Plus, Roy Thomas shares memories of working with Romita in the 1960s-70s, and Jim Amash examines the awesome artistry of Ring-a-Ding Romita! Lavishly illustrated with Romita art—original classic art, and unseen masterpieces—as well as illos by some of Marvel’s and DC’s finest, this is at once a career overview of a comics master, and a firsthand history of the industry by one of its leading artists! Available in Softcover and Deluxe Hardcover (with 16 extra color pages, dust jacket, and custom endleaves).

MICHAEL EURY’s biography of comics’ most prominent and affable personality! Covers his career as illustrator, inker, and editor, peppered with DICK’S PERSONAL REFLECTIONS on his career milestones! Lavishly illustrated with RARE AND NEVER SEEN comics, merchandising, and advertising art (includes a color section)! Also includes an extensive index of his published work, comments and tributes by NEAL ADAMS, DENNIS O’NEIL, TERRY AUSTIN, PAUL LEVITZ, MARV WOLFMAN, JULIUS SCHWARTZ, JIM APARO and others, plus a Foreword by NEAL ADAMS and Afterword by PAUL LEVITZ!

NICK CARDY: BEHIND THE ART NICK CARDY has been doing fantastic artwork for more than sixty years, from comics, to newspaper strips, to illustration. His work on DC Comics’ TEEN TITANS, and his amazing comics covers, are universally hailed as some of the best in the medium’s history, but his COMMERCIAL ILLUSTRATION work is just as highly regarded by those in the know. Now, this lavish FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER lets you see what goes on behind his amazing art! Nick has selected dozens of his favorite pieces from throughout his career and shows how they came to be in this remarkable art book. From the reams of preliminary work as well as Nick's detailed commentary, you will gain fascinating insight into how this great artist works, watching each step of the way as some of his most memorable images come to life! By ERIC NOLENWEATHINGTON and NICK CARDY. (128-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $34.95 ISBN: 9781893905993 • Ships June 2008

(176-pg. Paperback with COLOR) $19.95 ISBN: 9781893905276 Diamond Order Code: STAR20439

(192-page softcover) $24.95 ISBN: 9781893905757 • Diamond Order Code: APR074018 (208-page hardcover with COLOR) $44.95 ISBN: 9781893905764 • Diamond Order Code: APR074019

R! WINNE! D R A Y AW OR EISNESRT SHORT ST BE

SECRETS IN THE SHADOWS: THE ART & LIFE OF GENE COLAN ART OF GEORGE TUSKA

• ALAN MOORE • WILL EISNER • STAN LEE • GENE COLAN • JOE KUBERT • JOHN ROMITA • HARVEY KURTZMAN • DAVE SIM • DAN DeCARLO • HOWARD CRUSE • DAVE COOPER and more!

A comprehensive look at GEORGE TUSKA’S personal and professional life, including early work at the Eisner-Iger shop, producing controversial crime comics of the 1950s, and his tenure with Marvel and DC Comics, as well as independent publishers. The book includes extensive coverage of his work on IRON MAN, X-MEN, HULK, JUSTICE LEAGUE, TEEN TITANS, BATMAN, T.H.U.N.D.E.R. AGENTS, and many more! A gallery of commission artwork and a thorough index of his work are included, plus original artwork, photos, sketches, previously unpublished art, interviews and anecdotes from his peers and fans, plus the very personal and reflective words of George himself, making this book a testament to the tremendous influence Tuska has had on the comic book industry and his legion of fans! Written by DEWEY CASSELL.

(208-page trade paperback) $19.95 ISBN: 9781893905160 Diamond Order Code: JUN022611

(128-page trade paperback) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905405 Diamond Order Code: DEC042921

“I HAVE TO LIVE WITH THIS GUY!” STREETWISE Featuring NEW autobiographical comics stories by: • BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH • SERGIO ARAGONÉS • MURPHY ANDERSON • JOE KUBERT • JACK KIRBY • BRENT ANDERSON • NICK CARDY • RICK VEITCH • ROY THOMAS & JOHN SEVERIN • SAM GLANZMAN • PAUL CHADWICK • EVAN DORKIN • C.C. BECK • WALTER SIMONSON • ART SPIEGELMAN • Cover by STEVE RUDE • Foreword by WILL EISNER (160-page trade paperback) $19.95 ISBN: 9781893905047 Diamond Order Code: STAR11522

BLAKE BELL takes a look at what its been like living with comic book creators over the past 60 years, with the people who know them best! Explore the lives of the partners and wives of the top names in comics, as they share memories, anecdotes, personal photos, mementos, and never-before-seen art! Featured are interviews with the “significant others” of:

The ultimate retrospective on COLAN, with rare drawings, photos, and art from his nearly 60-year career, plus a comprehensive overview of Gene’s glory days at Marvel Comics! MARV WOLFMAN, DON McGREGOR and other writers share script samples and anecdotes of their Colan collaborations, while TOM PALMER, STEVE LEIALOHA and others show how they approached the daunting task of inking Colan’s famously nuanced penciled pages! Plus there’s a NEW PORTFOLIO of never-before-seen collaborations between Gene and such masters as JOHN BYRNE, MICHAEL KALUTA and GEORGE PÉREZ, and all-new artwork created specifically for this book by Gene! Available in Softcover and Deluxe Hardcover (limited to 1000 copies, with 16 extra black-and-white pages and 8 extra color pages)! Written by TOM FIELD. (168-page softcover with COLOR) $21.95 ISBN: 9781893905450 Diamond Order Code: APR053190 (192-page hardcover with COLOR) $44.95 ISBN: 9781893905467 Diamond Order Code: APR053189

JACK KIRBY BOOKS

NEW FOR 2008

WALLACE WOOD CHECKLIST The most thorough listing of Wood’s work ever published, taking more than 20 Wood experts over two decades to compile! Lists in exacting detail Woody’s PUBLISHED COMIC WORK, including dates, story titles, page counts, and even documents the assistants who worked with him! It also includes his NEWSPAPER, ADVERTISING, and FANZINE WORK, plus a myriad of more obscure Wood pieces such as GUM CARDS, STICKERS, GREETING CARDS, and more! Also included are listings of his UNPUBLISHED WORK, and it’s profusely illustrated throughout with WOOD ARTWORK! (68-page comic book) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: JUL032590

NEW FOR 2008

BRUSH STROKES WITH GREATNESS: THE LIFE & ART OF JOE SINNOTT During his 56-plus-year career in comic books, JOE SINNOTT has worked in every genre, and for almost every publisher, from 1940s Timely Comics to Charlton Comics, Treasure Chest, and Dell as a top penciler. But his association with Marvel Comics in the ’60s as its top inker cemented his place in comics history. This book celebrates his career, as he demonstrates his passion for his craft. In it, Joe shares his experiences working on Marvel’s leading titles, memories of working with STAN LEE and JACK KIRBY, and rare and unpublished artwork from his personal files. It features dozens of colleagues and co-workers paying tribute to Joe, plus an extended Art Gallery, and a Checklist of his career. Written by TIM LASIUTA, with a Foreword by STAN LEE, and Afterword by MARK EVANIER. (136-page softcover with COLOR) $17.95 ISBN: 9781893905726 • Diamond Order Code: MAR073744

ULTRA-LIMITED EDITION A 52-copy edition of the Softcover with custom Sinnott pencil portraits of his most popular characters! Call or go to www.twomorrows.com to request a copy with your favorite character, while they last! (136-page limited edition softcover ) $69.95 ONLY AVAILABLE FROM TWOMORROWS!

KIRBY FIVE-OH!

CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF THE “KING” OF COMICS

The publication that started the TwoMorrows juggernaut presents KIRBY FIVE-OH!, a book covering the best of everything from Jack Kirby’s 50-year career in comics! The regular columnists from THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR magazine have formed a distinguished panel of experts to choose and examine: The BEST KIRBY STORY published each year from 1938-1987! The BEST COVERS from each decade! Jack’s 50 BEST UNUSED PIECES OF ART! His 50 BEST CHARACTER DESIGNS! And profiles of, and commentary by, the 50 PEOPLE MOST INFLUENCED BY KIRBY’S WORK! Plus there’s a 50-PAGE GALLERY of Kirby’s powerful RAW PENCIL ART, and a DELUXE COLOR SECTION of photos and finished art from throughout his entire half-century oeuvre. This TABLOID-SIZED TRADE PAPERBACK features a previously unseen Kirby Superman cover inked by “DC: The New Frontier” artist DARWYN COOKE, and an introduction by MARK EVANIER, helping make this the ultimate retrospective on the career of the “King” of comics! (A percentage of profits will be donated to the JACK KIRBY MUSEUM AND RESEARCH CENTER.) Takes the place of JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #50. (168-page tabloid-size trade paperback) $19.95 ISBN: 9781893905894 Diamond Order Code: FEB084186

HERO GETS GIRL! THE LIFE & ART OF KURT SCHAFFENBERGER

JACK KIRBY CHECKLIST: GOLD EDITION The most thorough listing of JACK “KING” KIRBY’s work ever published! Building on the 1998 “Silver Edition”, this NEWLY UPDATED GOLD EDITION compiles an additional decade’s worth of corrections and additions by top historians, in a new Trade Paperback format with premium paper for archival durability. It lists in exacting detail EVERY PUBLISHED COMIC featuring Kirby’s work, including dates, story titles, page counts, and inkers. It even CROSS-REFERENCES REPRINTS, and includes an extensive bibliography listing BOOKS, PERIODICALS, PORTFOLIOS, FANZINES, POSTERS, and other obscure pieces with Kirby's art, plus a detailed list of Jack's UNPUBLISHED WORK as well. BONUS: Now includes a complete listing of the over 5000-page archive of Kirby’s personal pencil art photocopies, plus dozens of examples of rare and unseen Kirby art! (128-page trade paperback) $14.95 ISBN: 9781605490052 Ships May 2008

COMICS INTROSPECTIVE: PETER BAGGE

Profusely illustrated bio of KURT SCHAFFENBERGER, the preeminent Lois Lane artist and important early Captain Marvel artist who brought a touch of humor and whimsy to super-hero comics! Covers his LIFE AND CAREER from the 1940s to his passing in 2002, and features hundreds of NEVER-SEEN PHOTOS AND ILLUSTRATIONS from his files! Also includes recollections by family, friends and fellow artists such as MURPHY ANDERSON, WILL EISNER, CARMINE INFANTINO, JOE KUBERT, ALEX ROSS and MORT WALKER! Written by columnist MARK VOGER (Schaffenberger friend for the final 13 years of the artist’s life), with a Foreword by KEN BALD.

With a unique, expressive style, PETER BAGGE’s work runs the gamut from political (his strips for reason.com), absurdist and satirical (the BATBOY strip for WEEKLY WORLD NEWS), and dramatic (APOCALYPSE NERD). From his Seattle studio, Peter Bagge lets journalist CHRISTOPHER IRVING in on everything from just what was on his mind with his long-running Gen X comic HATE!, to what’s going on in his head as a political satirist. This book features an assortment of original photography, artwork picked by Bagge himself, and a look at where Bagge’s work (and mind) is taking him.

(128-page trade paperback) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905290 Diamond Order Code: SEP032545

(128-page trade paperback) $16.95 ISBN: 9781893905832 Diamond Order Code: MAY073779

KIRBY UNLEASHED (REMASTERED) Reprinting the fabled 1971 KIRBY UNLEASHED PORTFOLIO, completely remastered! Spotlights some of KIRBY’s finest art from all eras of his career, including 1930s pencil work, unused strips, illustrated World War II letters, 1950s pages, unpublished 1960s Marvel pencil pages and sketches, and Fourth World pencil art (done expressly for this portfolio in 1970)! We’ve gone back to the original art to ensure the best reproduction possible, and MARK EVANIER and STEVE SHERMAN have updated the Kirby biography from the original printing, and added a new Foreword explaining how this portfolio came to be! PLUS: We’ve recolored the original color plates, and added EIGHT NEW BLACK-&-WHITE PAGES, plus EIGHT NEW COLOR PAGES, including Jack’s four GODS posters (released separately in 1972), and four extra Kirby color pieces, all at tabloid size! (60-page tabloid with COLOR) $20 Diamond Order Code: OCT043208

JACK KIRBY (1917-1994) stands as comics’ most prolific talent, with a 50-year career wherein he created or co-created such iconic characters as THE FANTASTIC FOUR, SILVER SURFER, THE HULK, X-MEN, CAPTAIN AMERICA, THE NEW GODS, and a legion of others. These books pay tribute to him and his creations.

COLLECTED JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR, VOLUMES 1-6, EDITED BY JOHN MORROW

VOLUME 1

VOLUME 2

VOLUME 3

VOLUME 4

This colossal trade paperback reprints issues #1-9 of THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR, the highly-acclaimed magazine about comics’ most prodigious imagination: JACK KIRBY! Included are the low-distribution early issues, the Fourth World theme issue, and the Fantastic Four theme issue! Also includes over 30 pieces of Kirby art never before published, including uninked pencils from THE PRISONER, NEW GODS, FANTASTIC FOUR, CAPTAIN AMERICA, THOR, HUNGER DOGS, JIMMY OLSEN, SHIELD, and more! Features interviews with KIRBY, JOE SIMON, MIKE ROYER, MARK EVANIER, JOE SINNOTT, STEVE SHERMAN, and other Kirby collaborators, plus an introduction by MARK EVANIER.

Reprints JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #10-12—the Humor, Hollywood, and International theme issues! Also included is a new special section detailing a fan’s private tour of the Kirbys’ remarkable home, profusely illustrated with photos, and more than 30 pieces of Kirby art never before published, including Jack’s uninked pencil art from THE PRISONER, NEW GODS, CAPTAIN AMERICA, THOR, HUNGER DOGS, JIMMY OLSEN, SHIELD, MACHINE MAN, THE ETERNALS, and more! Learn more about the King’s career through interviews with JACK AND ROZ KIRBY, JOHN BYRNE, STEVE GERBER, MARK EVANIER, ROGER STERN, MARV WOLFMAN, and others!

Reprints JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #13-15—the Horror, Thor, and Science-Fiction theme issues! There’s also a NEW special section with 30 pieces of Kirby art never before published, including uninked pencils from CAPTAIN AMERICA, THOR, JIMMY OLSEN, THE DEMON, NEW GODS, THE PRISONER, and more! Go behind-the-scenes of Jack’s career through interviews with KIRBY and his collaborators and admirers like DICK AYERS, CHIC STONE, WALTER SIMONSON, AL WILLIAMSON, and MIKE THIBODEAUX, and see page-after-page of rare and unpublished Kirby art! Features a 1960s Kirby cover, and an introduction by STEVE BISSETTE.

Reprints JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #16-19—the Tough Guys, DC, and Marvel theme issues, and a special issue detailing the intricacies of Jack’s art! Also included is a new special section with over 30 pieces of Kirby art never before published, featuring Jack’s uninked pencils from NEW GODS, MISTER MIRACLE, FOREVER PEOPLE, JIMMY OLSEN, KAMANDI, CAPTAIN AMERICA, THE SILVER SURFER, OMAC, and more! It features interviews with KIRBY, STAN LEE, FRANK MILLER, WILL EISNER, NEAL ADAMS, nearly the whole MARVEL BULLPEN (including JOHN BUSCEMA and JOHN ROMITA), and others, a Foreword by colorist TOM ZIUKO, and a KIRBY/STEVE RUDE cover!

(240-page trade paperback) $24.95 ISBN: 9781893905009 Diamond Order Code: DEC032834

(160-page trade paperback) $17.95 ISBN: 9781893905016 Diamond Order Code: MAR042974

(176-page trade paperback) $19.95 ISBN: 9781893905023 Diamond Order Code: APR043058

(240-page trade paperback) $24.95 ISBN: 9781893905320 Diamond Order Code: MAY043052

SILVER STAR: GRAPHITE EDITION

CAPTAIN VICTORY: GRAPHITE EDITION

First conceptualized in the 1970s as a movie screenplay, SILVER STAR was too far ahead of its time for Hollywood, so artist JACK KIRBY adapted it as a six-issue mini-series for Pacific Comics in the 1980s, making it his final, great comics series. Image Comics recently collected the printed comics as a full-color hardcover, but now the entire six-issue run is collected here, reproduced from his powerful, uninked PENCIL ART, showing Kirby’s work in its undiluted, raw form! Also included is Kirby’s ILLUSTRATED SILVER STAR MOVIE SCREENPLAY, never-seen SKETCHES, PIN-UPS, and an historical overview to put it all in perspective!

For the first time, JACK KIRBY’s original CAPTAIN VICTORY GRAPHIC NOVEL is presented as it was created in 1975 (before being broken up and modified for the 1980s Pacific Comics series), reproduced from copies of Kirby’s uninked pencil art! This first “new” Kirby comic in years features page after page of prime pencils, and includes Jack’s unused CAPTAIN VICTORY SCREENPLAY, unseen art, an historical overview to put it in perspective, and more! Besides presenting this classic story in never-before-seen pencil form, proceeds from this comic go toward the huge task of scanning and restoring the 5000+ page photocopy archive of Kirby’s pencil art from the 1960s-80s!

NEW FOR 2008

VOLUME 5

VOLUME 6

Reprints JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #20-22—the Kirby’s Women, Wackiest Work, and Villains issues, featuring interviews with JACK KIRBY and daughter LISA KIRBY, plus DAVE STEVENS, GIL KANE, BRUCE TIMM, STEVE RUDE, and MIKE “HELLBOY” MIGNOLA! Also features an unpublished Kirby story still in pencil, Jack’s original pencils to FANTASTIC FOUR #49 (from the fabled Galactus trilogy), and over 30 pieces of Kirby art never before published, including Jack’s uninked pencils from THE DEMON, FOREVER PEOPLE, JIMMY OLSEN, KAMANDI, ETERNALS, CAPTAIN AMERICA, BLACK PANTHER, and more, a Foreword by DAVID HAMILTON, plus a KIRBY/DAVE STEVENS cover!

Reprints JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #23-26—Jack’s “Greatest Battles,” “Gods,” and his Golden Age work with JOE SIMON! Features rare interviews with Kirby himself, plus new ones with comics pros DENNY O’NEIL, JIM SHOOTER, JOHN SEVERIN, and WALTER SIMONSON! PLUS: see a complete ten-page UNPUBLISHED KIRBY STORY! Jack’s ORIGINAL PENCILS to FANTASTIC FOUR #49 (the first appearance of the Silver Surfer)! Kirby’s original concept art for the Fourth World characters! An analysis comparing Kirby’s margin notes to Stan Lee’s dialogue! Plus a NEW special section with over 30 pieces of Kirby art never before published, and a Foreword by MIKE GARTLAND!

(224-page trade paperback) $24.95 ISBN: 9781893905573 Diamond Order Code: FEB063353

(288-page trade paperback) $29.95 ISBN: 9781605490038 Ships August 2008

(160-page trade paperback) $19.95 ISBN: 9781893905559 Diamond Order Code: JAN063367

(52-page comic book) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: JAN042759

“HOW-TO” MAGAZINES Spinning off from the pages of BACK ISSUE! magazine comes ROUGH STUFF, celebrating the ART of creating comics! Edited by famed inker BOB McLEOD, each issue spotlights NEVER-BEFORE PUBLISHED penciled pages, preliminary sketches, detailed layouts, and even unused inked versions from artists throughout comics history. Included is commentary on the art, discussing what went right and wrong with it, and background information to put it all into historical perspective. Plus, before-and-after comparisons let you see firsthand how an image changes from initial concept to published version. So don’t miss this amazing magazine, featuring galleries of NEVER-BEFORE SEEN art, from some of your favorite series of all time, and the top pros in the industry!

DIEGDITITIOANL

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

BL AVAILA

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

ROUGH STUFF #1 Our debut issue features galleries of UNSEEN ART by a who’s who of Modern Masters including: ALAN DAVIS, GEORGE PÉREZ, BRUCE TIMM, KEVIN NOWLAN, JOSÉ LUIS GARCÍA-LÓPEZ, ARTHUR ADAMS, JOHN BYRNE, and WALTER SIMONSON, plus a KEVIN NOWLAN interview, art critiques, and a new BRUCE TIMM COVER!

BL AVAILA

ROUGH STUFF #2

ROUGH STUFF #3

ROUGH STUFF #4

The follow-up to our smash first issue features more galleries of UNSEEN ART by top industry professionals, including: BRIAN APTHORP, FRANK BRUNNER, PAUL GULACY, JERRY ORDWAY, ALEX TOTH, and MATT WAGNER, plus a PAUL GULACY interview, a look at art of the pros BEFORE they were pros, and a new GULACY “HEX” COVER!

Still more galleries of UNPUBLISHED ART by MIKE ALLRED, JOHN BUSCEMA, YANICK PAQUETTE, JOHN ROMITA JR., P. CRAIG RUSSELL, and LEE WEEKS, plus a JOHN ROMITA JR. interview, looks at the process of creating a cover (with BILL SIENKIEWICZ and JOHN ROMITA JR.), and a new ROMITA JR. COVER, plus a FREE DRAW #13 PREVIEW!

More NEVER-PUBLISHED galleries (with detailed artist commentaries) by MICHAEL KALUTA, ANDREW “Starman” ROBINSON, GENE COLAN, HOWARD CHAYKIN, and STEVE BISSETTE, plus interview and art by JOHN TOTLEBEN, a look at the Wonder Woman Day charity auction (with rare art), art critiques, before-&-after art comparisons, and a FREE WRITE NOW #15 PREVIEW!

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: AUG063714

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: NOV064024

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: FEB073911

(116-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: APR063497

ROUGH STUFF #5

DIGITITIOANL

DIEGDITITIOANL

ROUGH STUFF #6

NEVER-BEFORE-PUBLISHED galleries (complete with extensive commentaries by the artists) by PAUL SMITH, GIL KANE, CULLY HAMNER, DALE KEOWN, and ASHLEY WOOD, plus a feature interview and art by STEVE RUDE, an examination of JOHN ALBANO and TONY DeZUNIGA’s work on Jonah Hex, new STEVE RUDE COVER, plus a FREE BACK ISSUE #23 PREVIEW!

Features a new interview and cover by BRIAN STELFREEZE, interview with BUTCH GUICE, extensive art galleries/commentary by IAN CHURCHILL, DAVE COCKRUM, and COLLEEN DORAN, MIKE GAGNON looks at independent comics, with art and comments by ANDREW BARR, BRANDON GRAHAM, and ASAF HANUKA! Includes a FREE ALTER EGO #73 PREVIEW!

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: MAY073902

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: AUG074137

ED BLE AVAILA

ROUGH STUFF #7

DIEGDITITIOANL E

BL AVAILA

Features an in-depth interview and cover by TIM TOWNSEND, CRAIG HAMILTON, DAN JURGENS, and HOWARD PORTER offer preliminary art and commentaries, MARIE SEVERIN career retrospective, graphic novels feature with art and comments by DAWN BROWN, TOMER HANUKA, BEN TEMPLESMITH, and LANCE TOOKS, and more! (100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: NOV073966

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

ROUGH STUFF #9

DIEGDITITIOANL BLE AVAILA

ROUGH STUFF #8 Features an in-depth interview and cover painting by the extraordinary MIKE MAYHEW, preliminary and unpublished art by ALEX HORLEY, TONY DeZUNIGA, NICK CARDY, and RAFAEL KAYANAN (including commentary by each artist), a look at the great Belgian comic book artists, a “Rough Critique” of MIKE MURDOCK’s work, and more! (100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: FEB084188

Editor and pro inker BOB McLEOD features four interviews this issue: ROB HAYNES (interviewed by fellow professional TIM TOWNSEND), JOE JUSKO, MEL RUBI, and SCOTT WILLIAMS, with a new painted cover by JUSKO, and an article by McLEOD examining "Inkers: Who needs ’em?" along with other features, including a Rough Critique of RUDY VASQUEZ! (100-page magazine) $6.95 Ships Summer 2008

4-ISSUE SUBSCRIPTIONS: $26 US Postpaid by Media Mail ($36 First Class, $44 Canada, $60 Surface, $72 Airmail).

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

DRAW! (edited by top comics artist MIKE MANLEY) is the professional “HOW-TO” magazine on comics, cartooning, and animation. Each issue features in-depth INTERVIEWS and STEP-BY-STEP DEMOS from top comics pros on all aspects of graphic storytelling. NOTE: Contains nudity for purposes of figure drawing. INTENDED FOR MATURE READERS. TWO-TIME EISNER AWARD NOMINEE for Best Comics-Related Periodical.

4-ISSUE SUBSCRIPTIONS: $26 US Postpaid by Media Mail ($36 First Class, $44 Canada, $60 Surface, $72 Airmail).

DRAW! #4

DRAW! #5

DRAW! #6

Features an interview and step-by-step demonstration from Savage Dragon’s ERIK LARSEN, KEVIN NOWLAN on drawing and inking techniques, DAVE COOPER demonstrates coloring techniques in Photoshop, BRET BLEVINS tutorial on Figure Composition, PAUL RIVOCHE on the Design Process, reviews of comics drawing papers, and more!

Interview and sketchbook by MIKE WIERINGO, BRIAN BENDIS and MIKE OEMING show how they create the series “Powers”, BRET BLEVINS shows “How to draw great hands”, “The illusion of depth in design” by PAUL RIVOCHE, must-have art books reviewed by TERRY BEATTY, plus reviews of the best art supplies, links, a color section and more! OEMING cover!

Interview, cover, and demo with BILL WRAY, STEPHEN DeSTEFANO interview and demo on cartooning and animation, BRET BLEVINS shows “How to draw the human figure in light and shadow,” a step-by-step Photo-shop tutorial by CELIA CALLE, expert inking tips by MIKE MANLEY, plus reviews of the best art supplies, links, a color section and more!

(88-page magazine with COLOR) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: JAN022757

(88-page magazine with COLOR) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: APR022633

(96-page magazine with COLOR) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: FEB032281

DIEGDITITIOANL

DIEGDITITIOANL BLE AVAILA

ONLY!

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

DRAW! #8

DRAW! #10

DRAW! #11

DRAW! #12

DRAW! #13

From comics to video games: an interview, cover, and demo with MATT HALEY, TOM BANCROFT & ROB CORLEY on character design, “Drawing In Adobe Illustrator” step-by-step demo by ALBERTO RUIZ, “Draping The Human Figure” by BRET BLEVINS, a new COMICS SECTION, International Spotlight on JOSÉ LOUIS AGREDA, a color section and more!

RON GARNEY interview, step-by-step demo, and cover, GRAHAM NOLAN on creating newspaper strips, TODD KLEIN and other pros discuss lettering, “Draping The Human Figure, Part Two” by BRET BLEVINS, ALBERTO RUIZ with more Adobe Illustrator tips, interview with Banana Tail creator MARK McKENNA, links, a color section and more!

STEVE RUDE demonstrates his approach to comics & drawing, ROQUE BALLESTEROS on Flash animation, political cartoonist JIM BORGMAN on his daily comic strip Zits, plus DRAW!’s regular instructors BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY on “Drawing On LIfe”, more Adobe Illustrator tips with ALBERTO RUIZ, links, a color section and more! New RUDE cover!

KYLE BAKER reveals his working methods and step-by-step processes on merging his traditional and digital art, Machine Teen’s MIKE HAWTHORNE on his work, “Making Perspective Work For You” by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY, Photoshop techniques with ALBERTO RUIZ, Adult Swim’s THE VENTURE BROTHERS, links, a color section and more! New BAKER cover!

Step-by-step demo of painting methods by cover artist ALEX HORLEY (Heavy Metal, Vertigo, DC, Wizards of the Coast), plus interviews and demos by Banana Sundays’ COLLEEN COOVER, behind-the-scenes on Adult Swim’s MINORITEAM, regular features on drawing by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY, links, color section and more, plus a FREE ROUGH STUFF #3 PREVIEW!

(96-page magazine with COLOR) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: DEC032848

(104-page magazine with COLOR) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: DEC043007

(112-page magazine with COLOR) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: MAY053188

(96-page magazine) SOLD OUT (96-page Digital Edition) $2.95

(88-page magazine with COLOR) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: OCT063824

DRAW! #16

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

DRAW! #14

DRAW! #15

Features in-depth interviews and demos with DC Comics artist DOUG MAHNKE, OVI NEDELCU (Pigtale, WB Animation), STEVE PURCELL (Sam and Max), plus Part 3 of editor MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ COMIC ART BOOTCAMP on “Using Black to Power up Your Pages”, product reviews, a new MAHNKE cover, and a FREE ALTER EGO #70 PREVIEW!

BACK TO SCHOOL ISSUE, covering major schools offering comic art as part of their curriculum, featuring faculty, student, and graduate interviews in an ultimate overview of collegiate-level comic art classes! Plus, a “how-to” demo/ interview with B.P.R.D.’S GUY DAVIS, MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ COMIC ART BOOTCAMP series, a FREE WRITE NOW #17 PREVIEW, and more!

(80-page magazine with COLOR) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: MAY073896

(80-page magazine with COLOR) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: AUG074131

Features an in-depth interview and coverage of the creative process of HOWARD CHAYKIN. From the early ’70s at DC, STAR WARS, and HEAVY METAL, to AMERICAN FLAGG and now WOLVERINE, we catch up with one of comics most innovative artist/storytellers! Also, we go behind the drawing board and animation desk with JAY STEPHENS, from JET CAT and TUTENSTEIN to his new Cartoon Network show, SECRET SATURDAYS! Then there's more COMIC ART BOOTCAMP, this time focusing on HOW TO USE REFERENCE, and WORKING FROM PHOTOS by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY. Plus, reviews, resources and more! (80-page magazine with COLOR) $6.95 Ships Summer 2008

Don’t miss our BEST OF DRAW volumes, reprinting the SOLD OUT ISSUES!

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

NEW STUFF FROM TWOMORROWS!

ALTER EGO #77

BACK ISSUE #28

WRITE NOW! #18

DRAW! #15

BRICKJOURNAL #1 (V2)

ST. JOHN ISSUE! Golden Age Tor cover by JOE KUBERT, KEN QUATTRO relates the full legend of St. John Publishing, art by KUBERT, NORMAN MAURER, MATT BAKER, LILY RENEE, BOB LUBBERS, RUBEN MOREIRA, RALPH MAYO, AL FAGO, special reminiscences of ARNOLD DRAKE, Golden Age artist TOM SAWYER interviewed, and more!

“Heroes Behaving Badly!” Hulk vs. Thing tirades with RON WILSON, HERB TRIMPE, and JIM SHOOTER; CARY BATES and CARMINE INFANTINO on “Trial of the Flash”; JOHN BYRNE’s heroes who cross the line; Teen Titan Terra, Kid Miracleman, Mark Shaw Manhunter, and others who went bad, featuring LAYTON, MICHELINIE, WOLFMAN, and PÉREZ, and more! New cover by DARWYN COOKE!

Celebration of STAN LEE’s 85th birthday, including rare examples of comics, TV, and movie scripts from the Stan Lee Archives, tributes by JOHN ROMITA, SR., JOE QUESADA, ROY THOMAS, DENNIS O’NEIL, JIMMY PALMIOTTI, JIM SALICRUP, TODD McFARLANE, LOUISE SIMONSON, MARK EVANIER, and others, plus art by KIRBY, DITKO, ROMITA, and more!

BACK TO SCHOOL ISSUE, covering major schools offering comic art as part of their curriculum, featuring faculty, student, and graduate interviews in an ultimate overview of collegiate-level comic art classes! Plus, a “how-to” demo/ interview with artist BILL REINHOLD, MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ COMIC ART BOOTCAMP series, a FREE WRITE NOW #17 PREVIEW, and more!

The ultimate resource for LEGO enthusiasts of all ages, showcasing events, people, and models! #1 features an interview with set designer and LEGO Certified Professional NATHAN SAWAYA, plus step-by-step building instructions and techniques for all skill levels, new set reviews, on-the-scene reports from LEGO community events, and other surprises! Edited by JOE MENO.

(80-page magazine) $6.95 Now Shipping Diamond Order Code: FEB084191

(80-page magazine with COLOR) $6.95 Now Shipping Diamond Order Code: AUG074131

(80-page FULL COLOR magazine) $8.95 Now Shipping Diamond Order Code: FEB088010

ALL- STAR COMPANION V. 3

MODERN MASTERS VOLUME 15: MARK SCHULTZ

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Ships May 2008 Diamond Order Code: MAR084108

KIRBY FIVE-OH! (JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #50) The regular columnists from THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR magazine celebrate the best of everything from Jack Kirby’s 50-year career, spotlighting: The BEST KIRBY STORIES & COVERS from 19381987! Jack’s 50 BEST UNUSED PIECES OF ART! His 50 BEST CHARACTER DESIGNS! Interviews with the 50 PEOPLE MOST INFLUENCED BY KIRBY’S WORK! A 50PAGE KIRBY PENCIL ART GALLERY and DELUXE COLOR SECTION! Kirby cover inked by DARWYN COOKE, and an introduction by MARK EVANIER, making this the ultimate retrospective on the career of the “King” of comics! Edited by JOHN MORROW. (168-page tabloid-size trade paperback) $19.95 ISBN: 9781893905894 Diamond Order Code: JUL078147 Now Shipping

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: MAR084109

SILVER AGE ALTER EGO: BEST SCI-FI COMPANION OF THE LEGENDARY COMICS FANZINE In the Silver Age of Comics, space was the place, and this book summarizes, critiques and lovingly recalls the classic science-fiction series edited by JULIUS SCHWARTZ and written by GARDNER FOX and JOHN BROOME! The pages of DC’s science-fiction magazines of the 1960s, STRANGE ADVENTURES and MYSTERY IN SPACE, are opened for you, including story-bystory reviews of complete series such as ADAM STRANGE, ATOMIC KNIGHTS, SPACE MUSEUM, STAR ROVERS, STAR HAWKINS and others! Writer/editor MIKE W. BARR tells you which series crossed over with each other, behind-the-scenes secrets, and more, including writer and artist credits for every story! Features rare art by CARMINE INFANTINO, MURPHY ANDERSON, GIL KANE, SID GREENE, MIKE SEKOWSKY, and many others, plus a glorious new cover by ALAN DAVIS and PAUL NEARY!

Go to www.twomorrows.com for FULL-COLOR downloadable PDF versions of our magazines for only $2.95! Subscribers to the print edition get the digital edition FREE, weeks before it hits stores!

(144-page trade paperback) $19.95 ISBN: 9781893905818 Diamond Order Code: JUL073885

In 1961, JERRY BAILS and ROY THOMAS launched ALTER EGO, the first fanzine devoted to comic book history. This book, first published in low distribution in 1997, collects the original 11 issues of A/E from 1961-78, with creative and artistic contributions by JACK KIRBY, STEVE DITKO, WALLY WOOD, JOHN BUSCEMA, MARIE SEVERIN, BILL EVERETT, RUSS MANNING, CURT SWAN, & others—and important, illustrated interviews with GIL KANE, BILL EVERETT, & JOE KUBERT! See where a generation first learned about the Golden Age of Comics—while the Silver Age was in full flower—with major articles on the JUSTICE SOCIETY, the MARVEL FAMILY, the MLJ HEROES, and more! Edited by ROY THOMAS & BILL SCHELLY with an introduction by the late JULIUS SCHWARTZ.

More amazing secrets behind the 194051 ALL-STAR COMICS—and illustrated speculation about how other Golden Age super-teams might have been assembled! Also, an issue-by-issue survey of the JLAJSA TEAM-UPS of 1963-85, the 1970s JSA REVIVAL, and the 1980s series THE YOUNG ALL-STARS and SECRET ORIGINS, with commentary by the artists and writers! Plus rare, often unseen art by KUBERT, INFANTINO, ADAMS, ORDWAY, ANDERSON, TOTH, CARDY, GIL KANE, COLAN, SEKOWSKY, DILLIN, STATON, REINMAN, McLEOD, GRINDBERG, PAUL SMITH, RON HARRIS, MARSHALL ROGERS, WAYNE BORING, GEORGE FREEMAN, DON HECK, GEORGE TUSKA, TONY DeZUNIGA, H.G. PETER, DON SIMPSON, and many others! Compiled and edited by ROY THOMAS, with a new cover by GEORGE PÉREZ!

(192-page trade paperback) $21.95 ISBN: 9781893905887 Diamond Order Code: DEC073946

(224-page trade paperback) $26.95 ISBN: 9781893905801 Diamond Order Code: MAY078045

(10TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION)

SUBSCRIPTIONS:

Surface

Airmail

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR (4 issues)

$44

1st Class Canada $56

$64

$76

$120

BACK ISSUE! (6 issues)

$40

$54

$66

$90

$108

DRAW!, WRITE NOW!, ROUGH STUFF (4 issues)

$26

$36

$44

$60

$72

ALTER EGO (12 issues) Six-issue subs are half-price!

$78

$108

$132

$180

$216

BRICKJOURNAL (4 issues)

$32

$42

$50

$66

$78

Features an extensive, career-spanning interview lavishly illustrated with rare art from Mark’s files, plus huge sketchbook section, including unseen and unused art! By ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON. (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905856 Diamond Order Code: OCT073846

MODERN MASTERS: MICHAEL GOLDEN DVD Shows the artist at work, discussing his art and career! (120-minute Std. Format DVD) $29.95 ISBN: 9781893905771 Diamond Order Code: MAY073780

For the latest news from TwoMorrows Publishing, log on to www.twomorrows.com/tnt

TwoMorrows. Celebrating The Art & History Of Comics. TwoMorrows • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 • E-mail: twomorrow@aol.com • www.twomorrows.com