Draw #12 Preview by TwoMorrows Publishing

THE PROFESSIONAL “HOW-TO” MAGAZINE ON COMICS & CARTOONING

The ever-Pliable

NUMBER 12

KYLE BAKER

SPRING 2006

Machine Teen’s

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MIKE HAWTHORNE

IN THE U.S.A.

The Venture Brothers’

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COMIC ART BOOT CAMP WITH

ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR TUTORIAL BY

bret blevinS

ALBERTO RUIZ!

MIKE MANLEY

AND

CHRIS McCULLOCH

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

SPRING 2006 • VOL. 1, NO. 12

FEATURES

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

COVER STORY INTERVIEW WITH CARTOONIST KYLE BAKER

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

Front Cover Illustration by Kyle Baker

SUBSCRIBE TO DRAW! Four quarterly issues: $24 US Standard Mail, $36 US First Class Mail ($44 Canada, Elsewhere: $48 Surface, $64 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! SPRING 2006, Vo l . 1, No . 12 w as p r o d u c ed b y A c t i o n Pl an et In c . an d p u b li s h ed b y Tw o Mo r ro ws Pu b l i s h in g . 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 2006 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. The Bakers, Cowboy Wally, Holmes & Watson, King David, Nat Turner, Why I Hate Saturn, You Are Here ™ and © 2006 Kyle Baker • Batman, Joker, Lex Luthor, Plastic Man, Superman, Woozy Winks are ™ and © 2006 DC Comics • Captain America, Daredevil, Darkhawk, Kingpin, New Mutants, Sleepwalker, Spider-Man, Terror Inc. ™ and © 2006 Marvel Characters, Inc. • Popeye ™ and © 2006 King Features Syndicate, Inc. • Goofy, Mickey Mouse ™ and © 2006 Disney Enterprises, Inc. • Dick Tracy ™ and © 2006 Tribune Media Services, Inc. • Hysteria ™ and © 2006 Mike Hawthorne • Queen & Country ™ and © 2006 Greg Rucka • Ballad of Sleeping Beauty ™ and © Beckett Enterprises, Inc • The Venture Brothers ™ and © 2006 Noodle Soup Productions • Dexter’s Lab ™ and © 2006 Cartoon Network • John Carter of Mars ™ and © 2006 ERB, Inc. This entire issue is © 2006 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.

COMICS HYSTERIA AND THE BALLAD OF SLEEPING BEAUTY ARTIST MIKE HAWTHORNE

ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR TIPS DEADLINE HUNTER BY ALBERTO RUIZ

THE VENTURE BROTHERS INTERVIEW WITH SERIES CREATOR CHRIS McCULLOCH

COMIC ART BOOT CAMP CREATIVE PERSPECTIVE BY BRET BLEVINS & MIKE MANLEY

FROM THE EDITOR First off I’d like to thank Rachel Simon, the producer at Noodle Soup Productions in New York, the studio which produces The Venture Brothers for Adult Swim, not only for her help in putting together this article, but for The Venture Brothers crew’s help and time when I took my class of animators from DCAD (Delaware College of Art and Design) to visit the studio on our class trip to NYC. In the middle of their busy schedule they were very gracious with their time and answered a lot of questions about their working process for the students. There were many smiles that day and a lot of inspiration; seeing how a real studio is run is something every student should have happen. I’d also like to thank this issue’s contributors, Kyle Baker and his assistant Nicole, for all the help in conducting this interview which is so big we had to break it into two parts—the second half will run in the next issue of DRAW!. I’ve always admired Baker’s work and it was really great to get a chance to rap with him about his work and his philosophy as a businessman, something everyone working in comics can take a page from. A tip of the hat and a cheese steak to my pal and DRAW! columnist Jamar (Grand Poobah) Nicholas for his great job in conducting the interview with Mike Hawthorne, certainly one of the most talented and prolific artists working in comics today, as well as being a super-nice guy. These two are old buddies and I thought because of that it would be great to have them get together and yak about the old days and the current work Hawthorne is doing. I think the interview is one of the most honest and frank you will read from a working cartoonist. This issue also starts a new regular feature in each issue that is a direct result of your many requests for more on some of the basics like perspective, anatomy, storytelling, etc. So this issue Bret and I have started a feature we decided to call “Comic Art Boot Camp,” and each issue we will lay down some Basic Training on a variety of subjects, like this issue’s premiere article, “Creative Perspective.” There are a host of good books out there on perspective, but not much on how to take it to the next level and push it, break the rules to enhance a page, panel, or illustration. Also, a hearty slap on the back to Eric who keeps making my job easier by taking the hard part of the layout on DRAW! out of my hands and letting me concentrate on the editorial side. In closing I’d like to say I hope to see more feedback from you readers both on our message board and in our mail box—it was the continual letters and e-mails asking for more on basic drawing skills that led to our new feature. I hope to see you at one of the cons I’ll be attending this spring and summer. I plan to be at the Philadelphia Wizard World Con, the San Diego Comic-Con, and, I hope, the Charlotte Heroes Con as well. Have a great spring and I’ll see you in the summer,

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

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The Artist, Kyle Baker, the Comic Book Maker Interview conducted by Mike Manley Edited by Mike Manley and Kyle Baker Transcribed by Steven Tice arly in his career, Kyle Baker left behind the journeyman-like work of monthly comics to embark on a path that would lead him to produce graphic novels such as Cowboy Wally and the much lauded Why I Hate Saturn long before graphic novels became the rage they are today. Baker further expanded his efforts with I Die at Midnight, You Are Here, and King David, all for DC Comics. With Nat Turner, Baker is starting a new chapter in a career that has spanned 20 years and earned him a wall full of Eisner and Harvey Awards: Kyle Baker the self-publisher. DRAW! Editor Mike Manley caught up with the busy artist as he was in full production on the second issue of his slavery epic,

Nat Turner. DRAW!: So what was your work day like today? Were you working on Plastic Man, or were you working on Nat Turner? KYLE BAKER: Today was actually catch-up day, doing all my phone calls and paying bills and picking up bills and things like that. With the self-publishing, there’s lots of that kind of filling invoices and then billing people, and things like that, which I tend to put off. And weeks when I’m on deadline, like if I’m working on a Plastic Man, nothing gets done for a week. Nothing else. DRAW!: I know what you mean. I’m basically the same way, I let everything pile up, and then I have to sit down and basically have a couple days where I have to go through and do all of my business and correspondence. What is my long distance phone service? Oh, I forgot to pay the bill!

KB: Like today, one of the things that happened when I was in San Diego was I sold a couple of things by credit card at my booth, but I never sent in the receipts or whatever. You swipe the card, but then you have to send them to the bank and the credit card companies and they send you the money. So that was what I finally got around to doing today. [laughs] DRAW!: So you’re the alpha and the omega there at Kyle Baker, Inc. KB: Yeah, there’s also my assistant Nicole who’s taking care of a lot of stuff. At this point, I’m still trying to stay on top; we keep getting these orders for, like, ten books, or two books, or stuff like that, little tiny orders, and those are the ones that kind of pile up on you. DRAW!: Right. I dealt with that when I was in the midst of the heat of self-publishing, back about nine, eight years ago, I was doing the same thing. I would get my reorders from Diamond and they were like, “Send two copies of Action Planet # 2 to this DRAW! • SPRING 2006

K YL E B A K ER

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place, send five over here.” And so I would be making little boxes of books to ship, and you had to follow with the invoice to make sure you got paid.

LEFT: Cover to Nat Turner #2. BELOW: The artist at work. RIGHT: Opening panel of Nat Turner #1.

These little tiny $15 checks coming in, and then you have to remember to send out, like, four envelopes, because it’s a four-issue series.

KB: Yeah, I’ve been waiting for my comp boxes—I get comps of The Simpsons—and they come five to a box, which I guess is the least they can send from the printer. [Mike laughs] So I was waiting for a Simpsons box to show up so I could fill this order that I got. [laughs] I’ve got all the—

DRAW!: Right, right. KB: We wanted to make it available to everybody, but that one, we just said, “God.” It turned out to be too much work for the return on the investment. You know what I mean?

DRAW!: You use the comp boxes, when they send them to you.

DRAW!: Right.

KB: Yeah. Well, I’ve got those, and then I got the boxes that they send me the comics in when I have my comics printed. So I never throw boxes out anymore.

KB: ...to make three bucks. [laughs]

DRAW!: With TwoMorrows, they actually have a mail house that fulfills the subscriptions, so they take the copies over. Basically, that’s how most magaR. 05 KYLE BAKE © AND TM 20 DRAW!: I was the same way. I would zines do it; they have a company that actually hanNAT TURNER take all the boxes I would get from my dles that, because they can’t possibly afford to send out two copies comps from Marvel or DC, and then I would recycle those, ship- like that, y’know, have a room full of people working for Time magping however many issues for each distribution center. Although azine stuffing Time magazines in the Time Life building and sendDiamond actually has a lot fewer of those now. I think they only ing them out. But, that’s the hands-on aspect of self-publishing, and, have, what, two or three or something? They used to have, like, you know, 20 copies here, 20 copies there, five copies here, seven ten. copies there adds up at the end of a year, and especially on a good project that’s getting some heat. I would assume a book like Nat KB: I think it’s somewhere between three and five now. Turner has a longer shelf life—it is not something that is going to have a one- to two-week shelf life. It’s not like a regular super-hero DRAW!: Yeah, they used to have a lot more, so I was sending comic, say, that you have 30 days of it having a valid sales window two copies here, two copies there. And that eats up a good little and then it’s a back issue. I mean, you can keep it in print forever. bit of time to do that. KB: It does, and it doesn’t—it’s a fine line, because at this point I’m still trying to drum up business and stuff, and the reorder thing, it’s pretty good this time. Since Nat Turner came out—it was I guess a month ago or two months ago—we keep getting these little, tiny orders, anywhere from 50 to ten. It’s been nice. But also, we were selling subscriptions for a couple of weeks, until we gave up on that. DRAW!: Oh, so you were trying to sell subscriptions to Nat Turner? KB: We had them, yeah. And it wasn’t that it wasn’t working, it was that it was just becoming too much work. 4

DRAW! • SPRING 2006

KB: Yeah. DRAW!: And now I would imagine, issue two is out? KB: No, I’m working on the second issue now. The second issue will be out when DRAW! #12 comes out. DRAW!: I see your situation being like my friend Ande Parks, who just had his Truman Capote comic/biography published by Oni Press. I remember talking to him and saying, “You know, this thing is going to have legs, because unlike something like Batman, where it © AND TM 2005 KYLE BAKER

K YL E B A K ER

NAT TURNER © AND TM 2005 KYLE BAKER.

COMICS

comes out and there’s another Batman comic to push that Batman off the stands in 30 days, this kind of book has an unlimited shelf life, because there’s always going to be somebody who will just become interested in that subject. KB: Well, almost everything I do—I’m not sure about Plastic Man—but almost everything I do I have that in mind, to have a shelf life. Most of my cartoons could really take place at any time. Even something like You Are Here, everybody kind of dresses in a very generic way. The only thing that’s dated about that book is that New York has changed. DRAW!: Yeah, I guess that’s true. KB: A couple of buildings are gone. DRAW!: If they reprinted that, would you ever consider going back and changing that, or is that just sort of history now? KB: No, no, no. I don’t think it totally ruins the enjoyment of the book. Most of my books are designed to stay around for a very long time, and I just, y’know, watched a lot of cartoonists over the years, and most of my favorite cartoonists sort of become more popular and more successful over time. I mean,

even the cartoons that are successful today, like Spider-Man and The X-Men, were created about 40 years ago. DRAW!: [laughs] Well, Spider-Man’s older than I am, I think, now. KB: Yeah, there you go. But you know what I mean? I remember Chuck Jones didn’t really become recognized, he and Friz Freleng didn’t become recognized until, like, they were in their seventies. People take that stuff for granted, and also, I think sometimes your core audience is very young and has no clout. DRAW!: True to an extent, but, actually, that’s a little bit different today. When we were kids, we didn’t have as much clout. But today it’s a youth-driven market; everything is skewed towards kids today, in marketing. KB: Yeah, but I’m saying, for example, when you go to an X-Men movie now, all of the stories are ’80s stories, because whoever made that movie grew up reading The X-Men in the ’80s. Like, all the Sam Raimi movies, Spider-Man stuff, is all Steve Ditko/Stan Lee stuff, because he’s our age, and that’s what he was reading. I remember Steven Spielberg hired Jim Steranko for Indiana Jones for the same reason. Because these guys grow up and they have the DRAW! • SPRING 2006

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DRAW!: So what do you like best about digital? KB: What I like best about digital is the predictability.

KB: I like that I get back exactly what I thought I was going to get back. When you do a painting, and maybe it’s gotten a little better, but when I did paintings, back in the ’80s and ’90s, what was printed never looked like what the painting was. I’ve seen blue turned into purple. I’ve seen green turned into purple. You just never knew what was going to happen. Or you’d do a drawing and it’s got a lot of subtle tones, and the guy shoots it and overexposes it and all the subtle tones drop out. Or you make a correction, you cut the guy’s head off and you drew the head and you paste a different head on, and when you see it printed, you see the razor blade line around the guy’s head, and the rubber cement looks really dark for some reason. [laughter] DRAW!: Well, nobody’s doing that anymore! Nobody’s shooting stats and pasting stuff down anymore. KB: I did a drawing years ago with colored pencils, and it was all very subtle, and it just mostly got lost. It just disappeared. So I like that with a computer, if I type in 20% blue, it ABOVE: Panel from Nat Turner #1. The pencils are scanned in, the tones are adjusted, and the will be 20% blue. And when I proof it in my image is converted to line art for a high contrast look. computer, what comes out in the comic store NEXT PAGE: Kyle’s caricature of Milton Glaser and Silas Rhodes. looks pretty much like what came out of my computer printer. Or at least it’s predictable, Because it’s a pencil drawing, it’s got a wide range of tones. But because of course a computer printer is not as good a quality. I don’t want a wide range of tones, I want it high contrast. And I DRAW!: So you don’t miss not having a physical original any more? KB: Um... no. For me, the finished piece is always the printed work, and I’ve never seen the point of having something come out that was inferior to what I have in my apartment. I can do a painting, and nobody’s ever going to know it was a great painting, because what came out in the newsstand was a piece of crap. DRAW!: Right, right. Now, with Nat Turner you’re doing what, charcoal drawings or pencil drawings? KB: Yeah, pencil drawings. I’m using an 8B pencil, I think. DRAW!: Okay, so it’s a real nice, velvety soft— KB: Real dark black pencil, and then I’m shooting it as line art, because I want it to break up. I mean, there’s a good example. 18

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would never trust a printer to get which parts I wanted to drop out and which don’t. DRAW!: And you can just sit there and play with your levels in Photoshop and kind of— KB: And say, “Okay, I’m willing to lose those trees.” Or maybe adjust the trees. If I hit the threshold level and it turns out that I’ve missed, that something in the background has dropped out, I can select that one piece and darken it up, or something like that. But once I get what I want, there were no surprises with that book when it comes out. Except that two pages got printed out of order in the first issue. [laughs] But it wasn’t my fault. DRAW!: Oh, really? KB: Yes. It got fixed.

COMPUTERS AND SOFTWARE

DRAW!: Which I find funny because the dynamics of your art, cartooning is about a certain sense of unpredictability.

K YL E B A K ER

COMICS DRAW!: What kind of computer set-up do you have? Be specific—what kind of digital tablet, etc.? Do you try and stay up to date with the new versions of software? Do you do the layout of the book, preparing it for press, laying out in Quark or Adobe inDesign? KB: I work on a powerbook G4, I have a Microtek Scanmaker 4800. Wacom tablet. Two LaCie hard drives which are almost full, so it’ll be three soon. I put stuff together in Quark because DC wants it that way. I used Pagemaker before that. DC also requests you not use the newest version of Quark, because DC won’t upgrade. So I have Quark 5, but save files as Quark 4. I use Photoshop 7, and Painter 6. I’m not sure how up-to-date that is. I upgrade software when it’s incompatible with everything else. You want to be able to open your Illustrator files in Photoshop, for example.

❤ New York.” He’s done tons of stuff. DRAW!: Yeah, I know who he is. KB: When I worked for him, I was working on children’s books. He was doing all of the Barrons books at the time. DRAW!: And you were assisting him? How did you come to work for him? What time was this?

DRAW!: Now, were you thinking of working in this way from the beginning, when you were thinking of doing the book? In other words, do you, like an actor who might study a mentally ill person if they’re going to play a person with a specific mental illness, or a card shark if they’re going to card shark? One of the things I like about your work is that you sort of stretch artistically a bit from project to project.

KB: I got placed there in the mid-’80s by the School of Visual Arts alumni office. He was very involved with the school. He needed someone to draw bunnies, and I was doing Howard the Duck for Marvel at the time, so I was funny animal guy. I was doing them in his style. He would basically choose the style and the approach. He would say, “Use this type face. Draw it in my style that I used on a Bob Dylan album cover, and use this pen, and use these pantone colors.” And once you come up with the idea for “I ❤ New York,” you don’t really have to do it. He’d give you a layout or something, and say, “Here, use this typeface and these colors”; it would look like he did it. But the thing was he had all these different floors in the building. He had one floor where he was doing books, one floor was, like, art prints that people hang on their wall, posters and stuff, and one floor was Grand Union. I think they’re out of business now, but at the time he was doing all of the products—you know how the grocery stores have their own products? So you can either buy Wise potato chips or Grand Union potato chips.

KB: I hung out with a lot of slaves.

DRAW!: So he was basically doing branding.

SETTING STYLE AND TONE

DRAW!: [laughs] What I was getting at was, one of the things I like about your work, as a cartoonist, is you cast yourself maybe stylistically different with each project. Like, Jack Kirby always drew like Jack Kirby. It wouldn’t matter if he were drawing slavery stories, they would have looked like they could have worked for Galactus. You know what I mean? KB: Yeah. A big influence on me was a guy named Milton Glaser. I don’t know if you know who he is? DRAW!: Yes. KB: Milton Glaser is a very well known graphic designer. He designed the Grand Union red dot, the “I

KB: Right, right. And one thing that he said that made a real impression on me was, “You can be creative up to a point. If the job is to design a ketchup bottle, for example, it would be nice and creative to make a blue ketchup bottle, because nobody’s ever done it. And you might even say, ‘Hey, it doesn’t have to be a bottle shape. Why is ketchup always in a bottle? Maybe it’ll be a blue pen!’ And the problem with that is, who the hell’s going to know it’s ketchup? And nobody’s going to buy it.” When you’re designing a rock-and-roll poster, you’re trying to project one image. But if you’re working for Grand Union, you’re probably trying to project the image of, y’know, a reliable family grocery store. You want a real boring typeface. You don’t want psychedelic colors on your—

DRAW!: You want Helvetica.

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KB: Right, exactly! Or something really bad like that, yeah. DRAW!: So his process... KB: ...was that whatever the client was, he would try to solve their specific problems. So if you came to him and said, “Hey, I’ve got a rock and roll thing,” and he’d say, “Okay. Well, the values that rock and roll bands have is, like, excitement and sex. I’ll try and get that into it.” But if the job is designing a language book—Barrens did a lot of how to learn a foreign language and stuff like that—those have a certain look to it.

KB: Right. So when I’m doing a humor thing, it should look funny, and everything about it is funny. There shouldn’t be any confusion about Plastic Man’s intended audience. I know there is. They’re like, “What the hell? It looks like a kids book!” And it is a kids book. That’s why it looks like that. It’s designed to appeal to six-year-olds. DRAW!: So what attracted you to going to self-publishing and doing such a variety of material. Because you have The Bakers, which is like this family—

DRAW!: So you’d sort of take that philosophy and apply it to how you flex yourself artistically, depending upon the project?

KB: Because all of these ideas. I’ve done work for other publishers, I’ve done stuff for Crown Books and a bunch of other people. But the only real big comic book connection I have is DC Comics and Marvel, and I know that both of those companies, as ABOVE: Cowboy Wally and friends—from Kyle’s we discussed before, do really badly with anything sketchbook. that’s not super-heroes. Anything that is normally an BELOW: Turnaround for a proposed Cowboy Wally cartoon. easy sell. Like, if you walk into a TV producer’s NEXT PAGE TOP: Panel thumbnails for Kyle’s classic graphic novel, Why I Hate Saturn. office and say, “Oh, I want to do this funny show NEXT PAGE BOTTOM: Sketch of Laura and Anne, the about my family. Let me tell you about my kids. protagonists of Why I Hate Saturn. They’re always making a mess.” They would say, “Oh, I understand that! I get that! That’s terrific! We have lots of shows like that. We’ll buy it.” Or you say, “I want to do a story about black history and slavery.” “Oh, that would be good for February! We’ll buy it.” But only in comics do they just not get that stuff, and not really know how to sell it. DRAW!: Yeah, I think it’s more they don’t know how to sell it. I don’t think it’s that they necessarily don’t get it. KB: But I’m thinking it’s the only place—anywhere else, if you go to any other publisher and say, “I want to do a story about black history,” or about slavery, or about whatever, Hitler. They get it. My ideas are not that far out that they don’t have a built-in audience. I’m not, “I want to do this story about how the CIA is beaming radio messages into my head.” DRAW!: [laughs] Hey, I want to see that graphic novel! KB: I always have these ideas like, “Hey, wouldn’t it be fun to do a book of Mother’s Day cartoons.” [laughter] Because it’s easy. Someday, when I get enough gags, I want to put out a book of dog cartoons. DRAW!: So Kyle Baker Publishing is basically the result of your frustration and 20

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Interviewed by Jamar Nicholas

Transcribed by Steven Tice

rtist Mike Hawthorne may be able to justifiably wrest the “ hardest working man in entertainment” title away from James Brown just on page count alone. A prolific artist, Hawthorne has quickly risen up from his indy cred beginnings page-bypage on such books as his own Hysteria, as well as Queen & Country, Terminator 3, Ruule, 3 Days in Europe, and, most recently, Marvel’s Machine Teen. Hawthorne’s work always delivers strong drawing, great storytelling, and a sense of fun that has him pulling away from his pack of peers, clearly showing he isn’t a one-trick pony. His diverse body of work shows he can handle a great variety of subjects, from sci-fi to soap opera—which I have to say impresses the hell out of me. Hawthorne’s earned his bones, and he happens to be one of the nicest guys in comics you’ll ever meet. DRAW! interviewer and long time pal, Jamar Nicholas, who’s known Hawthorne since the beginning of his career, interviewed Hawthorne from his home in York, Pennsylvania.

—Mike Manley

DRAW! • SPRING 2006

MIKE HAWTHORNE

COMICS LEFT: Mike mugs for the camera thug-style. BELOW: Kung-fu action. RIGHT: The Kingpin from sketch to inks.

JAMAR NICHOLAS Mike, tell us about your childhood. What was it like growing up? MIKE HAWTHORNE: Well, I had a good and bad childhood. I was in a single parent house, just mom trying to make due. We were broke. Real broke. We were even homeless once, did I ever tell you about that? JN: No... MH: Yeah, it was bad at one point when we first moved to Pennsylvania. My mother, who was Puerto Rican, couldn’t get a good job. She had worked at Group W cable in NYC for like 10 years or more, but couldn’t get a shot at the local cable company here in PA. We were on welfare—government cheese, government peanut butter in a cardboard jar, the whole nine. We got evicted from a house we moved into early in here in York City, and we had to move above a bar to keep from being on the street. One room, with one bathroom for the whole floor. Dudes used to take their “dates” up there for an hour at a time, know what I mean? JN: Wow. MH: I remember my mom used to push the TV in front of the door to make sure no one broke in! She kept my milk for the Cheerios on the windowsill, ’cause it was winter. I remember thinking it wasn’t that bad, but I could see how bad my mother felt. JN: Yeah, when we’re kids, you don’t have a point of reference— it’s just how you live. MH: Exactly. You didn’t really know you’re that poor ’til you see how other kids lived. Then we got taken in by this family—this lady with three kids. I hated them at times man, cause they made sure I didn't forget I was worse off then them. I was getting to where I could tell I was poor. I started hating it, started hating not having options. If I remember correctly, I started to draw more at this point. We just had that one room, and I never wanted to be around the family so I drew a lot.... well, I always drew. But I think it really got serious here. Then, when we moved I made friends with a dude on my block named Shavane. He put me on to comics, ’cause at the time I just drew graffiti and little hip-hop characters. JN: What time period was this? 30

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MH: Ahh... 4th grade, maybe 5th? I forget. My mom isn’t around anymore, or I’d ask her. JN: This is like mid-’80s? I forget—I’m a little older than you. MH: Yeah, I’m 29 so that sounds right. Mid-’80’s... I was listening to Stetsasonic after we moved from that house. I could use my old Hip-Hop tapes as my timeline! JN: We have a lot in common, Mike. MH: Word! [laughter] JN: OK, so then, you weren’t thinking you wanted to draw for a living, were you? MH: Nah, not yet. I was just amazed that someone could draw highlights in hair or make something look like metal! I couldn’t believe some of this stuff when I saw it in comics. It was like magic to me. JN: Yeah! I remember having this old Terry Austin X-Men poster, and I would just stare at Colossus’ metal plates all day. It was amazing. MH: Exactly! I remember drawing Colossus and kids were bugging out on it! “Yooo, how’d you make it look like metal!?” It was like I became a magician by looking at that stuff. Like learning tricks by watching the stage show. JN: Especially for li’l dirty kids in the hood, you didn’t draw for a living. You drew as a hobby. That’s not a “real” job that people would strive for. MH: You drew graf[fitti]. Like I told you before, I use to charge to draw peoples’ names and stuff. But, to actually have art be your job? That was crazy! My mom used to tell me artists aren’t worth any money ’til after they died! JN: So did you wanna play ball or something when you got older? Every kid had some sort of vocation they thought they’d do. MH: I wanted to box at one point. I lived next to ©2006 MIKE HAWTHORNE

COMICS a boxing gym at one point, and used to hang out in there. Put the gloves one once or twice. I also wanted to freestyle bikes or race them. We’d set up ramps with old wood and cinder blocks and just go crazy. I played football, baseball. All of that. No b-ball though. But once I figured out you could draw comics for money, that’s what I wanted to do. I was too short for b-ball! [laughs] JN: I had that dream for a second. I wanted to be Dr. J. Then I realized I wasn’t going to make it past six foot. And I wasn’t very good at it, either. MH: Of course! Every Philly kid wanted to be Dr. J! He was like a super-hero in the flesh! JN: So what kind of grades did you get in school? Were you studious? MH: I was good, ’cause my mother was on me. She was alone, so she’d come down hard on me if I KINGPIN ©2006 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC. messed up. My grades were good. Actually, they were really good in middle school and junior high. I was at a Catholic school, so they were on us, too.

MIKE HAWTHORNE

JN: Man, me too. I was doing a lot of graffiti and was aping Genosha soldiers in my pieces. MH: Yeah, we’d steal characters from anywhere! A dude might draw Hagar the Horrible in his piece and everyone would flip out! JN: What did you get out of graffiti? MH: Graffiti just got me drawing. I think it got me hooked on people going off on [appreciating] your work. Like, when you’d try something different and people noticed and flipped out! That was a drug for me as a kid. It also taught me that you had to practice because you never knew if you would have to battle someone. Battling made me want to get better, sharpened your skills. JN: Yeah, you couldn’t be sloppy with your stuff—it had to be crisp or you’d get clowned on. MH: Even now, I want to be able to take on anyone in art. I know it’s silly, and immature, but it’s just a holdover from that culture of battling. Competition. Later, in high school I got into graffiti on walls. I did some in Philly, and some here in York City. York was sad, ’cause there was no real graf, and so I took it on myself to fix that. [laughs] I’d go out at like two or three in the morning and just burn all over the place. Had my little collection of caps and everything! JN: Yeah, I know about that. MH: That taught me to respect a deadline I think. You only had sooo much time to mess with a piece before the cops would roll around. So, you had to work well under pressure!

JN: What were you drawing with at that time? Woolworth markers? Anything you could get your hands on? MH: Yeah, mostly I drew with pencils and markers. Any paper I could find. Note books were nice. The composition books were cool.

JN: I think people just see it as petty vandalism—graffiti has a set of rules you had to adhere to... well, back then you had to.

JN: You said graffiti and comics were what you were vibing off of then—what kind of comics? MH: Well, at first any comic that people would give me. Shay used to buy a lot of Conan comics, so that’s what I’d look at. Later I got some Judge Dredd comics from another dude I knew. Any comic was fine with me. Later, much later, I started buying X-Men. Then, graduated to Punisher War Journal.

MH: Yeah, exactly. No personal property. No house of worship. Now you see graffiti on people’s cars, man! I’d have never done that!

JN: JR JR! I really liked those, too. I liked his Punisher. JN: Those rules don’t exist anymore. MH: Honestly, I didn’t care who drew it in the beginning. Didn’t even occur to me to follow an artist. It wasn’t ’til I started buying X-Men that I noticed an individual artist. Marc Silverstri was penciling X-Men when I first jumped on, and just thought he was the man. And Jim Lee, when he did Punisher War Journal.

MH: Sad. JN: Plus, people used to die for it. That was real. I guess it seemed real silly, but that’s how deep graf was back in the ’80s. DRAW! • SPRING 2006

COMICS

MIKE HAWTHORNE

MH: I try and do that, but it’s a fight. I guess it’s for the best, but I miss it sometimes....

THE LABORATORY JN: Tell us about your workday. I know you have children, so it’s got to be a tightrope you walk to get your work done. MH: Man, it’s ever changing. Some weeks I’m up at 6am to work ’til “noonish,” then hang out with the kids and finish in the afternoon while they nap. Some weeks I’m watching the kids most of the day and only get to work while they nap, and after they go to bed... those days I end up working ’til all hours of the night. It’s silly; I have to be really reactive, which I don’t like. I wish I could stick to one schedule all the time. JN: Do you keep a TV in your studio? What do you do to get you through your drawing day? Radio? MP3s? Tell. MH: Hell no, I don’t have a TV in the Studio! I don’t watch much TV to begin with. Hell, we don’t even have cable in the house! [laughs] A stereo I do have. And a Walkman. I’m listening to music the entire time I’m working, unless I’m writing. I just can’t listen to music and write. Messes my head up for some reason. 36

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JN: Talk about your art supplies. I know you have tricked out pencils and brushes. MH: I love trying out all kinds of exotic art supplies, when I can. I have these Japanese brush pens I sketch with right now that I love. I have a big mix of stuff in my stash. I have these paint markers that I use for sketching. They have actual opaqueish paint in them and I can use them to block in big areas. I have this old school fountain pen I want to use for sketching. What else? A good mix of tech pencils. Graphite crayons and blue lead pencils. The stuff I generally use on the actual pages is pretty standard though. Hunt 102s, Raphael Kolinsky #’s 2 & 3. Well, I use the Deleter pens too. I love the G pen for bigger things that call for a pen. I also have a bunch of litho pencils and crayons I use for texture stuff. On my desk, I have a big cup full of erasers. Kneaded, white plastic erasers, gum and the old school pink pearls. I have a pen and brush cup with Raphael #’s 1, 2 and 3, as well as the Deleter dip pens and a Hunt 102. I have a couple of Winsor-Newton Series 7s in there, too. Then, the tech pen cup. All kinds of disposable and refillable joints in there. Oh, and the marker cup. Two of these cool Japanese brush pens from NYC, some Copic grey markers, and a couple of Tombos. For penciling I’m pretty simple. I use Dixon Ticonderogas and a cheap Sanford Tech pen, 0.5 lead size. JN: Do you ever use Col-Erase Blue Pencils?

By Alberto Ruiz

The deadline for the new DRAW! magazine article was fast approaching, and instead of choosing a “tool” to write about, I decided to use the current cover I was working on to illustrate a typical “tight deadline” assignment. The final cover illustration took one full day to complete; the article, well that’s another story. The concept was based on an old preliminary sketch I never got the chance to use. Salsipuedes is the name of a famous hanging bridge in the almost inaccessible mountains of Ecuador. I’ve always thought the name was interesting and fitting, because in Spanish “sal si puedes” means “get out if you can,” which is precisely what one thinks while crossing the bridge. It turns out the peculiar moniker is not as original as I once believed; an

Internet search resulted in more than two dozen towns throughout the Americas and Spain bearing the same name, including a California municipality and school district.

The concept plays on the literal meaning of the set of words that make up the name. Because I was both the client and the art director for this piece, the approval process was a snap! I showed the preliminary rough to Alberto (my art director and account manager) and he approved it with but a few minor changes. He then showed the concept to the client (Mr. Ruiz) who was delighted with the clever concept and stamped his seal of approval on the spot. DRAW! • SPRING 2006

DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION

ALBERTO RUIZ

If you use tints of the same custom color, one click is all you need to switch colors (you must select the entire repeat).

Using the Rectangle tool, I drew the horizontal shapes and filled them in with a custom color.

If you use CMYK or RGB colors, you can always switch colors via the Adjust Colors module found in the Filter menu on the top menu bar.

The vertical shapes came next. I used a tint of the same color.

I selected all the shapes and applied the Divide filter. I discarded the unwanted shapes outside of our repeat rectangle, re-colored the shapes, placed a white rectangle in the back, and dragged the newly created pattern into the Swatches box.

Main font used: Emulate Serif from the T26 collection of typefaces.

You can download the original files at this address: http://homepage.mac.com/deepfriedcandy

DRAW! â&#x20AC;˘ SPRING 2006

ALBERTO RUIZ

DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION

More than to show the process, I did because it was a lot of fun. I love diagrams and schematics, don’t you?

You can download the original files at this address: http://homepage.mac.com/deepfriedcandy

As usual, I layered my shapes, overlapping from back to front, setting the transparency blends to Darken or Multiply for shadows and Screen or Color Dodge for the highlights. The bumps under the barrel of the gun project a shadow that is contrary to the light source, but they lend “texture” to an otherwise flat object, so I left them alone.

After drawing the shield shape outline, I sliced it in two using the Knife tool (you can find it by clicking and holding the Scissors tool. TIP: As a quick alternative to the Pathfinder Divide filter, and for a clean, straight cut, hold both the Shift and Option keys as you slide the Knife tool across the shape. You can download the original files at this address: http://homepage.mac.com/deepfriedcandy

DRAW! • SPRING 2006

K YL E B A K ER

COMICS

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 28

more— That’s why I’m doing it. It’s more of an experiment than anything else. And, actually that’s the reason I’m doing The Bakers—I just did 48 pages of The Bakers to pad out a graphic novel. Because I already had a hundred pages of material, and I needed more to make a whole book.

DRAW!: Well, I have a theory about that. KB: Well, there’s too much competition for too few dollars. DRAW!: Exactly. There’s just too much stuff. The average person cannot absorb all the new TV shows, all the new DVDs, all the new books, all the new videogames, all the new—

DRAW!: So you may alter your publishing— KB: My publishing plan is still based on graphic novels, because that’s the only way I make money is on the $15 books. I either break even or lose on the $3 ones. DRAW!: So do you see the direct market as something you want to grow away from, in a way? In other words, the direct market is still basically a pamphlet market. It’s basically driven by, and most of the stuff sold is the $3 pamphlets, which, if you’re self-publishing like we do, it’s really hard to make money doing that. But if you can break out into the book market, in a book chain, then libraries and other venues— KB: I’ve just found that is the way the world is today, because publishing in general is on the ropes. I mean, publishing is not doing so well, but the weird thing is, as far as I can tell—and I read a lot of business magazines and stuff—all entertainment is on the ropes. 50

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KB: There aren’t enough hours in the day. That’s the thing, when I was young, there were three TV channels and two comic book publishers. So of course everybody was reading Spider-Man and Superman, because that’s all they were publishing. And everybody watched Happy Days because it was the only show on TV. DRAW!: And you could only play so much Atari. [laughs] You can only play so much of that tank battle Atari game, y’know? I’m very interested in that, too, because I’ve thought about plans for the future and was interested in how you felt about web comics, because it’s something that I’m thinking about. I have some other ideas that I plan on putting out. Some of the things, I’m thinking about doing almost like a super-limited run, like some of the stuff I saw people doing at MOCCA, where you may do 50 copies and sell them for $10 apiece just because you want to produce this sort of cool little comic. And then there’s the web comics, which I actually did do before. I did do my Girl

Mix two parts Jonny Quest with one part Hardy Boys and maybe a dash of Scooby Doo and might you end up with Adult Swim’s hit series, The Venture Brothers, created by Chris McCulloch, who was one of the writers from the short-lived live-action Tick series on Fox. DRAW! editor Mike Manley was one of the storyboard artists on the first and second seasons of The Venture Brothers, and visited the Noodle Soup Productions studio in New York with his college class in order to shine some light behind the scenes and get a scoop of noodles on Los Bros. Venture. Mike conducted this interview with show creator Chris McCulloch via the Internet.

DRAW!: I guess first off I’d like a little bio info. Where and when were you born? Chris McCulloch: Brooklyn, New York. 1971. Lived there until my father remarried in 1983 and we all moved to New Jersey.

DRAW!: Did you go to art school? CMc: Yes and no. I enrolled in the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art and then quit on the first day. I had spent my last two years of high school dreaming of going to Kubert’s (if I’m to be shamelessly honest, those dreams more than likely included me drawing Spider-Man for a living, and maybe marrying Jamie Gertz or something) and I took no interest in college whatsoever—a result of already knowing what I wanted to be “when I grew up” and a blinding misconception of how much colleges cost based solely on the tuition for Columbia University, which I heard about from a guy I knew. No offense to Joe or his fine school, but it happened to be situated only 20 minutes from my father’s house, and I was working after school in a comic-book store at the time. It suddenly hit me—as all my friends were heading off to their big colleges with lush, sprawling campuses—that I was about to spend the next few years of my life waking up every day in my parents’ house, commuting to a school to learn how to draw comics, and working in a comic shop until it was time to go back home to my parents’ house. The depressingly narrow

scope of it all just caved in on me that first morning, I got super-depressed, and when I reached for the new watch I had gotten just a week or two before for my birthday, I noticed it had stopped. Silly as it sounds, I took it as an omen, and I decided I needed to quit and go to college after all. So after the worst three months of my life working at UPS, I started community college and eventually transferred to Rutgers University, where I majored in art and minored in English. I wasn’t crazy about their art program—they had more of a fine arts/conceptual-heavy curriculum that was light on technical training and luridly unfriendly to cartoonists (see Daniel Clowes’ The Art School Confidential—he explains it better than I ever will). So I ended up taking a lot of unnecessary history classes instead, just because I liked learning about that stuff, along with a couple of film and literature classes. Artistically, the best part about my education there was working on a weekly “alternative” school newspaper called The Medium. I did a full-page comic strip every week for three years and edited the Arts section for a while, so it was great practice for writing and drawing my own stuff. I never finished college because I ran out of money and got a job working on The Tick animated series. I often wish I had gone someplace like SVA (School of Visual Arts) or RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) or something, because my drawing skills were probably stunted by all of this—which frustrates the hell out of me because I can’t always visualize the things I create. But my writing skills and general social awareness improved at Rutgers, which is ultimately more important to me creatively.

CHRIS Mc CUL L OCH

ANIMATION

I love to write and draw my own stuff, but if I could only do one, I'd prefer writing. I'm pretty lazy that way—everything past the initial idea becomes work. The most fun to be had is in making stuff up. Watching myself fumble through heavyhanded attempts at drawing what inevitably becomes a lackluster version of whatever I had in my head is endlessly frustrating. I’ve definitely improved, but very slowly. I really wish I drew more. DRAW!: Were you heavily into comics and animation as a kid? CMc: Very much so. Like every kid, I was really into cartoons—as a product of the ’70s I enjoyed the heyday of Saturday morning TV, for better or VENTURE BROTHERS worse, but Looney Tunes really stood ™ ©2006 NOODLE SOUP PRODUCTIONS. out as the best there was. They hooked me at age one and they’ve never gotten old. In comic books, I was super into Spider-Man and Batman, despite the unwritten code of childhood that dictates you either like Marvel or DC, as you can only like Mad or Cracked, Mets or Yankees, Coke or Pepsi. My older brother was a real comics collector, and Spider-Man was his favorite, too, so I had access to nearly a decade’s worth of issues that predated me, which was really great, especially when the month’s wait for a new issue, in kid time, is like a year. I grew out of comics for a while, and even drawing, but then The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen hit during my adolescent/high school years and they pulled me back in. Having not much else to do with myself, I got super-serious about collecting and reading and drawing, and that’s when I started working in the comic shop and dreaming of drawing comics for a living. If having a brother with a sevenyear head start on a comics collection was the elementary school of my comics upbringing, then having an entire comic shop’s back issues to browse through was my Masters program. Good

god, I sound like a dork. It was a Master’s program in dorkiness, wasn’t it? That’s okay. I’m a dork. I’m fine with that. My girlfriend likes to remind me of this every time I accidentally start to think I’m cool because my hair looks good that day. DRAW!: [laughs] Since Venture Brothers is an obvious parody of Jonny Quest, were you a big fan of the old Hanna-Barbera cartoons? CMc: Not really. You kind of take what you’re given when you’re a kid, so I liked everything because, hey, it was TV. But they didn’t resonate with me like the Warner Bros. stuff at all. Not until I was older anyway and could approach them with a certain amount of irony or nostalgia or something, and appreciate the simplicity and retro-ness of the design work on them. DRAW!: Why the Venture Brothers? Was this an idea you had for a while? CMc: Yes and no. The germ of the idea—just two dorky boys named Venture with a ’60s aw-shucks sleuthing mentality—goes way back to the mid-’90s, when a friend lent me some old Tom Swift books and I started catching ABOVE AND LEFT: Head and body construction designs for Race Bannon stand-in, Brock Samson—a super-spy and bodyguard with a license to kill.

DRAW! • SPRING 2006

ANIMATION some Jonny Quest cartoons on TV. But I didn’t seriously start developing it until around 1999, when I was trying to build up material for a story in the first Monkeysuit anthology. I hadn’t drawn comics in a while, though, so I didn’t think my skills were quite up to snuff to nail the specific look I had for The Venture Brothers. I had in my head. So I held off on that story until I’d gotten a couple of other Monkeysuit stories under my belt and started to feel more confident in my drawing. In the meantime, the characters had started taking on a life of their own and new situations and jokes filled my little notebook until there was too much for one story, so I started another, intending that to be short... and that one got too big, too. I combined the two and started typing all my notes into a screenwriting program one night, just for kicks. Four days later I had a pilot script for an animated series. DRAW!: Tell us a little bit about the creative impetus behind VB. Did you have in mind to pitch it to Cartoon Network right off? CMc: Not at all. I hadn’t even considered them at first because they weren’t doing adult animation at all when I first started pitching the thing. There wasn’t an Adult Swim yet. I finished the pilot script during a time that I was coincidentally in the midst of pitching another idea to Comedy Central—based on one of the comic strips I had done in college, which I’d created with my friend Ralph Vincelli. That week we had our last of several meetings with them, in which they finally told us, “Thanks, but no thanks. Do you have anything else?” “Yes!” I said, “and it’s ten times better than the other thing I’ve been pitching you all month!” Well, they didn’t think so. I pitched it to a few more places, and everybody liked it and thought it was funny but uniformly didn’t think it could sustain a series. A couple of years later a friend told me I should check out this crazy new cartoon they had on Cartoon Network late at night, because the main character looked like Race Bannon, and he knew I was pitching a Jonny Quest parody type of thing. Turned out it was Sealab 2021, and I checked it out, and that’s when I learned about Adult Swim. I mailed them my pilot script and pitch presentation about a month later and the rest, as they say, is her story.... DRAW!: How did you come to partner with Noodle Soup in New York to work on the VB for Cartoon Network?

CHRIS Mc CUL L OCH LEFT: Character designer Martin Wittig. BELOW: Chris George—also a character designer on the first season—draws his designs directly in the Wacom Cintiq digital tablet. BOTTOM: One of Chris’ characters designs for the show. This one was labeled “beautiful island girl.”

CMc: They’re all my friends. I had worked with the entire staff of Noodlesoup at one time or another in various other studios over the years and some of them are part of the Monkeysuit Press collective with me. Noodlesoup formed while I was living in L.A. working on The Tick live-action series, but we’d all stayed in touch and I watched their progress in getting the studio up and running from afar. Because I had pitched Venture Brothers to a couple of places already I knew the trend in development deals was fast becoming “Can you do it cheap... in Flash?,” so I had already run the project by Jeff Nodelman once or twice to get an idea of what could be done on a limited budget. When Cartoon Network gave me the green-light I had just moved back to New York with no intention of leaving again, so there was no place else I wanted to take the show but to my incredibly talented friends in New York. As I expected, they put twice as much effort into it as any other studio would have, we had a lot of fun, and I think it showed in the final product. DRAW!: Chris, it was great getting the chance to meet you in Philly during that Adult Swim pitching contest. CMc: Yes, you too. I can’t believe we never met before and feel like we must have at one point, however briefly. You do look terribly familiar yet eerily brand new to me! DRAW!: Break down your creative process on VB. How do you work with your writing partner, Doc Hammer? CMc: Doc Hammer (half his real name) and I have perhaps the least structured writing process in television. We have no formal meetings, no pitch sessions, no huddling over a computer and saying, “Well, what does Brock do now?” Our best ideas are generated sort of organically, more often than not when we’re both working in the same room on completely different things that have nothing to do with Venture Brothers and we just start shouting dialogue at each

DRAW! • SPRING 2006

ANIMATION duction—so much that I put off writing the Christmas special for months while we chugged through post-production, which was waaaaaay more time-consuming and stressful than I ever expected it to be. So while the waiting was really annoying—and a little depressing—it did give me the time I needed to really want to come back to the show and it gave my mind the space to develop new ideas. I did get to watch the show slowly grow in its popularity over that period of time, too, which of course encouraged us. And during the hiatus, I went broke enough that I needed to take a storyboard supervisor gig at another studio for a while. So I was exposed to their production process, which was somewhat different from ours and involved a heavy reliance on those Wacom Cintiq monitors. I made it a major point that we get some of those for our production, and they paid for themselves within weeks. Really streamlined a lot of things. Plus, the timing of our start date coincided with that production’s end date, so I got to hire some really great artists from that team.

CMc: That’s good that you’re more involved, and in a way that makes me more involved as well. I’m now kind of forced to scrutinize the thumbnails more closely than I did last season because I’m waiting to see how new artists handle things. It’s more work for me up front, but the more I’m able to steer the storytelling and the setups in the right direction at the thumbnail stage, the less my revision team will have to do, so they can focus on improving and finessing the boards rather than just fixing them. We also do two animatics now instead of one. When we get the first draft of the boards in the editor puts together an animatic right away, so I can watch it and see how things play out the way the artist saw them. It cuts back on some of my revisions because, rather than staring at a bunch of still panels and imagining how the show would run, I watch it unfold. I can see where even things that aren’t how I originally imagined them actually play out well, so I leave them alone instead of putting a ton of post-its on them. I also see in a much more obvious way where we need extra poses and stuff for dialogue that takes longer than the artist thought it would, or if the voice is more expressive and demands more expressive posing. It takes the storyboard from the theoretical to the concrete and I get my notes out of the way early so there are no surprises in the end, when it’s too late to do anything

DRAW!: I know for me the biggest difference is that now since Bill Pressing has left as storyboard supervisor to work at Pixar, I am doing my own thumbnails now, which I enjoy more as I feel totally immersed in the storytelling process, where last year I felt a bit removed.

CHRIS Mc CUL L OCH

DRAW! • SPRING 2006

CREATIVE PERSPECTIVE By Br et Blevin s a n d M ik e M a n ley

n the realm of two-dimensional drawings or paintings made on a flat surface, visual perspective is always an illusion— the convincing appearance of objects and figures existing as three-dimensional forms that occupy space and extend across distances is achieved by deceiving the eye. If the lines, shapes, and masses are effectively chosen and placed by the artist, the viewer’s mind will use its history of real world observation to cooperate with the artist’s trickery and complete the illusion of depth. This marriage of real world observation and careful artifice is the key to our subject, because the focus of this article is the distortion and exaggeration of the traditional rules of drawn perspective to create dramatic effects. The drawing formulas of One-, Two-, and Three-Point perspective work through mimicry of real world appearances—by imitating the visual affect of the seen world as it is processed by our eyesight. The basic example of viewing, from the center point between the rails, a straight run of railroad track stretching away across a flat plain is a simple proof—by drawing two converging lines meeting at the distant horizon we can trick the brain into accepting our drawing’s claim of distance. This visual deceit, coupled with the willing cooperation of the viewer’s mind to “believe” in the artist’s legerdemain is our essential technique of creating all manner of complicated illusions of space and depth. I’m stressing the artificial essence of drawn perspective to free your thoughts from an adherence to “true,” “factual,” “realistic,” “accurate” constraints when considering this aspect of making representational drawings. Although spectacular, powerful, and beautiful images can be created with a schematically faithful drawing that respects the rules of optical perspective as inviolate laws, broadening our concept of those same rules into a sort of flexible “reference keyboard”—a playing field with room to bend and distort as invention inspires you—opens up endless potential for dramatic picture making. In this case fakery and deception have no negative connotations—they are essential means to our aesthetic goals. Of course, a straight, literal use of the traditional rules of perspective may be just the effect needed for a drawing, scene, or project, but restricting your ideas of what is possible to the limits of these rules is an unnecessary binding of your imagination. If you can push your drawing to subtle or outrageous extremes and it remains convincing—believable to the viewer—then anything that works is fine. Remember, in visual art, if it looks right, it is right! It’s important to understand the basic principles of traditional perspective drawing demonstrated at the beginning of this article because command of those precepts makes it possible to stretch beyond their dictates and reach for drawings that use more expressionistic/impressionistic distortion of space and form.

In my own work, I rely on a knowledge of classical perspective to “ground” my flights of fancy—to make extreme distortions feel consistent with the traditional world I may have created around it—in other words, make everything I draw believable to the viewer, no matter how outlandish.

PERSPECTIVE: A Glossary of Terms THE HORIZON LINE: The horizon line runs across the canvas at the eye level of the viewer. The horizon line is where the sky appears to meet the ground. VANISHING POINT: The vanishing point should be located near the center of the horizon line. The vanishing point is the single point where all parallel lines (orthogonals) that run towards the horizon line appear to converge, come together like train tracks in the distance. It’s usually placed at the viewer’s eye level. ORTHOGONAL LINES: Orthogonal lines are “visual rays” helping the viewer’s eye to connect points around the edges of the canvas to the vanishing point. An artist uses them to align the edges of windows, doors, walls and bricks, etc. LINEAR PERSPECTIVE: A mathematical system for creating the illusion of 3-D space and distance on a flat, 2-D surface such as paper, canvas, or wall. AERIAL PERSPECTIVE: Creates a sense of depth in a color drawing or painting by imitating the way the Earth’s atmosphere makes distant objects appear less distinct, hazy and more “bluish” as they recede into the distance. This is also known as atmospheric perspective. DRAW! • SPRING 2006

PERSPECTIVE

B RET B L EVINS

BATMAN: In these three pages of the two fighting Batmen, Catwoman, and an out-of-control helicopter cavorting around on a suspension bridge, the perspective is mostly straightforward and conventional—the vanishing points can easily be traced out and the distortion of the figures is mild. Here the bridge itself created an opportunity to add sweeping scope and exciting eye direction/dynamic shape movement to the scenes. But I could not have constructed these scenes without a thorough understanding of basic traditional perspective—and there is one subtle but very effective trick employed in the splash page of the helicopter arcing toward the bridge below as the city stretches out around it that is useful for adding an energetic twist to panoramic downshots. All the perspective is clean and by-thebook, except the building in the lower right corner. Here the riverbed vanishing point (for this single building) has been moved up into the scene to “bend” that building around and create a “fisheye” effect that increases the illusion of depth.

This kind of distortion that feels “optically right” increases the feeling of height somehow, perhaps by suggesting a quality of vertigo. It’s a very useful device for “animating” this kind of master shot—adding energy, visual excitement and an enhanced rhythm to your scene. The distortion of the Batman figure is similar, though here the background does not participate—the intended effect here is heightened dramatic movement, exaggerating the power and determination of Batman as he returns to the scene of conflict. The panel showing the helicopter dropping a net over Azrael uses distorted perspective to solve the problem of making an absurd fantasy action appear feasible. This scene is physically impossible, but careful bending of scale, distance, and especially the roiling curves of the strands that form the weighted net create an illusion that this scene could happen as we see it here. (As long as the reader doesn’t linger and think about it too long!)

DRAW! • SPRING 2006

B RET B L EVINS

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These diagrams eliminate form and surface detail to lay bare the structure of the planes advancing toward the Picture Plane and receding away from it. Study them carefully. Conceiving an image with this awareness is important in all two-dimensional drawing, but is especially useful when distorting perspective for exaggerated effect, because in these kinds of images you cannot “correct” any odd-looking problems by tracing out the forms to their conventional vanishing points. Much of this kind of distortion is instinctual, and your instinct can get you safely home if you understand the rules you are bending and breaking. The grossly distorted depth of the leaping/swinging Batman figures works because I am pushing the exaggerations to the edge of believability, and I’m able to do that by thinking in terms of these charts before I begin building the structure of the actual forms, anatomy, rendering, etc.

DRAW! • SPRING 2006

B RET B L EVINS

LEFT: In these single-panel examples the perspective is dramatically stretched, compressed, bent, and twisted for various dramatic purposes. The (soon to be) Moleman fleeing the bar is distorted almost to the breaking point—pushing the “fisheye” effect any further would have strained the eye’s credulity—the figure and background would begin to feel disjointed and no longer believably “whole.” That effect might be perfect for a nightmare or hallucination sequence, but here the intent is to convince the reader the figure is an actual form in a “real” space—the exaggeration is used to heighten the drama, convey visually the panic and anxiety the character is feeling. The steep upshot of a disguised and crippled Bruce Wayne approaching a possibly dead victim of abuse is a beat in a story sequence of Bruce discovering, then saving the invalid by restoring his dangling oxygen mask. I used an odd point of view and exaggerated the steep angle to visually intensify the moment’s tension, disorientation, and Bruce’s fear of being too late as he desperately hobbles over on his double canes. The perspective and point of view of the other panels on this page (not shown) are very simple and “straight,” allowing this extreme shot to function as a moment of emotionally heightened drama.

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RIGHT: The scorpion-like character flying out from the “fish-eyed” jumble of electronic equipment uses a similar device—the eye level runs across the base of the figure’s neck, separating the background between a downward point of view below and an upward angle above. But here the perspective distortion is intensified by exaggerating the forward thrust of the figure, throwing him right out of the circular picture plane, off the paper into the viewer’s “space.”

DRAW! • SPRING 2006

PERSPECTIVE

B RET B L EVINS

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DRAW! #12

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! (96-pg. magazine w/COLOR) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $3.95 http://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=98_59&products_id=335

DRAW! • SPRING 2006

LEFT: The splash page of Sleepwalker struggling within the subconscious/dream/memory realm of his host’s mind is a perfect opportunity to bend perspective for drama, fancy and just plain visual fun. This is an example where it is impossible (or at least more trouble than it’s worth) to locate from every element a clean set of vanishing points that relate clearly to an horizon line, but there is an eye level/point of view that holds the image together in a convincing arrangement. Although it was not worked out with measured precision, the viewer looks down on all the objects below Sleepwalker’s eyes, and up at all the objects above them. This familiar orientation allows me to twist, force, bend, extrude, and otherwise distort the perspective of the environment around Sleepwalker by intuition and instinct, creating a whirling kaleidoscope of surreal spatial relationships that create an entertaining image, “grounded” by the visual logic of the consistent eye-level point of view.