Draw! #14 by TwoMorrows Publishing

NUMBER 14 $6.95

SUMMER 2007 IN THE U.S.A.

THE MONSTROUS ART OF

DOUG MAHNKE

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

PIGTALE’S PIGTALE’S

OVI NEDELCU SAM & MAX CREATOR CREATOR

STEVE PURCELL

PLUS

82658 27764

THE THE THIRD THIRD INSTALLMENT INSTALLMENT OF OF MIKE MIKE MANLEY MANLEY AND AND BRET BLEVINS’ BRET BLEVINS’

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

SUMMER 2007 • VOL. 1, NO. 14 Editor-in-Chief • Michael Manley Designer • Eric Nolen-Weathington Publisher • John Morrow Logo Design • John Costanza Proofreaders • Eric Nolen-Weathington and Chris Irving Transcription • Steven Tice

FEATURES

COVER STORY INTERVIEW WITH DOUG MAHNKE

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

Front Cover Illustration by Doug Mahnke

WELCOME TO THE FUNHOUSE SAM & MAX CREATOR STEVE PURCELL

SUBSCRIBE TO DRAW! Four quarterly issues: $26 US Standard Mail, $36 US First Class Mail ($44 Canada, Elsewhere: $60 Surface, $72 Airmail). We accept US check, money order, Visa, Mastercard, and Paypal 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 2007, Vol. 1, No. 14 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 2007 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 work-for-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, Birds of Prey • Black Adam, JLA, Major Bummer, Plastic Man, Spawn of Frankenstein, Superman ™ and © 2007 DC Comics • Stormwatch ™ and © 2007 WildStorm Productions • Hulk ™ and © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc. • King Tiger, The Mask, Motorhead ™ and © 2007 Dark Horse Comics, Inc. • Pirates of the Caribbean ™ and © 2007 Disney Enterprises, Inc. • Sam & Max, Toybox ™ and © 2007 Steve Purcell • Big Wheels, Gumball Seeds, Inima, Pigtale ™ and © 2007 Ovi Nedelcu • Death Jr. ™ and © 2007 Digital Eclipse Software, Inc. • Pink ™ and © 2007 Will Vinton/Laika • Maniac Mansion ™ and © 2007 Lucasfilm Games • Juniper Lee ™ and © 2007 Cartoon Network • Felix the Cat ™ and © 2007 Don Oriolo • Tarzan ™ and © ERB • Scorchy Smith ™ and © 2007 Associated Press • Rip Kirby ™ and © King Features • Akira ™ and © Manga Entertainment • This entire issue is © 2007 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.

BEHIND PIGTALE AN INTERVIEW WITH THE SERIES CREATOR OVI NEDELCU

COMIC ART BOOTCAMP SPOTTING BLACKS BY BRET BLEVINS & MIKE MANLEY

ON THE ROAD TO CHINA THE STATE OF THE COMIC BOOK INDUSTRY IN CHINA BY MIKE MANLEY

And don’t miss the FREE PREVIEW of our sister magazine ALTER EGO #70, on page 80!

Figurative interpretation by Mike Manley

FROM THE EDITOR Welcome to our annual summer issue of DRAW! Some of you may be reading this issue after picking it up at one of the many conventions, like the annual Comic-Con International: San Diego or Wizard World Chicago. TwoMorrows will have booths at both shows as well as the Baltimore Comicon, September 8th and 9th. I’ll be attending the Baltimore show so stop on by. It seems everywhere I go I meet more and more people interested in learning how to draw, paint, animate and cartoon—and that includes China. In this issue I cover a bit of the international comic scene, fresh from my two-week trip to China. My fiancée, Echo, and I spent a grand vacation in China, and one of the things I was most interested to see was what the comic business in China was like. It seems that outside of Hong Kong there isn’t much of one, but the walls of the local comic stores were lined with fan art and there were kids interested in learning to cartoon, so check out this issue’s travel article for more.You can also check out more about my travels on my blog: http://www.china-manley.blogspot.com. I was pretty stoked this issue to interview Doug Mahnke; he’s certainly one of the best artists out there today doing super-hero comics, and it was really interesting to find out he’s also a competitive powerlifter! It’s always fascinating to find out what other talents people have away from the drawing board. The Ovi Nedelcu article I was happy to run this issue after having to bump it last issue. His work is so charming and appealing I know many of you readers out there will love it as much as I do, and many of you may not have been aware of his series, Pigtail, which was published Image. Get out there now and search for the issues—you won’t be disappointed. My good buddy Jamar Nicholas conducts another great interview this issue, this time with Sam and Max’s super-talented Steve Purcell. Steve is another great example of how a good and flexible artist can cross platforms, genres and job titles. It seems he’s done everything from comics to games, animation, movies and more... what’s left? Also in this issue, Bret and I return with another installment of our Comic Book Bootcamp. This time we cover “spotting blacks,” something that will make any comic drawing or page stronger. We are on the verge of a big announcement here at DRAW!, something I know that many of you regular readers have asked about for a long time. Part of that big change has taken place with this issue with our slight change in format, but that is only the beginning for what we have planned here. Over the course of the next year we plan on releasing a few more “How To” books on figure drawing by Bret and myself, as well as follow-up DVDs. The big-BIG announcement will have to wait till next issue though, which is our big “Back to School” issue, out in October. In the meantime, have a great summer and get out there and draw something! E-mail: mike@drawmagazine.com Mike’s Blog: http://drawman.blogspot.com/ Snail Mail: PO Box 2129, Upper Darby, PA 19082

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DRAW! • SUMMER 2007

NEXT ISSUE: DRAW! #15 It’s time to head BACK TO SCHOOL, and DRAW! Editor MIKE MANLEY is here to drop some knowledge! He’ll be covering the major schools that offer comic art as part of their curriculum, including interviews with faculty, students, and graduates in an ultimate overview of collegiate-level comic art classes! Also, a “how-to” demonstration and interview with SANDMAN MYSTERY THEATRE and B.P.R.D.’s GUY DAVIS! Plus DRAW! Editor MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS bring you another installment in their Comic Art Bootcamp series, and more! 80 pages with a 16-page color section, $9 US POSTPAID Ships OCTOBER 2007

Conducted by Mike Manley Transcribed by Steven Tice

oug Mahnke is an artist’s artist. He does all of the hard things well, and makes it look easy. He’s one of the rare artists in the medium of comics who can flex between funny, fantastic action and horror. From Seven Soldiers of Victory: Frankenstein to The Mask, Major Bummer, Superman: Man of Steel and the JLA, Mahnke’s powerful figure work has always stood head and shoulders above many other artists working in the field. It’s not surprising to find out that the man who draws such powerful and dynamic heroes is also a competitive power lifter. DRAW! Editor Mike Manley catches up with this busy artist and father of six from his home studio in Minnesota.

DRAW!: What is your typical workday like? DOUG MAHNKE: It has varied quite a bit over the years, but I’ve settled into some fairly regular habits, as it has become obvious to me what gets the job done. I could divide this up into two different days, which is the productive day vs. the unproductive day. They do their best to coexist, although I feel

the unproductive day always gets the better deal as the productive one has to pick up the slack. Productive day: I get up by 5 a.m. and go right down to the studio. The first thing I tend to do is turn on the computer to check e-mail and let my brain warm-up by visiting some of my favorite sites, all of which tend to be weightlifting-oriented. By 6:00 or 6:30 I get to work penciling or inking, whichever is the DRAW! • SUMMER 2007

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priority at the moment. I might just sit in silence or turn on the radio. I get into ruts where my “atmosphere” is concerned, and will go for very long stretches doing one thing then suddenly shift and do another. It might be talk or sports radio for a month or three, then some local music station for a while, then I might listen to a Greek or Italian station on the net for days. I will also put in a movie to keep me company. Most recently on a long productive day—which actually stretched into two days—I watched the first season of The Beverly Hillbillies over and over again. I’m not actually watching it very often, just listening to it. Oddly, I did this recently with the Jet Li movie, Hero, which is in Chinese. As I sit and work I hear the house wake up, as one after another my six kids and my wife rise until the house is full of noise. Usually after seven I go upstairs for a quick breakfast with the family, then back downstairs. It might be a bowl of oatmeal and some eggs or a protein drink. Coffee is a major player in my regular day, although I try to drink green tea now and then at the recommendation of DC editor Peter Tomasi. I also drink Yerba Mate. The bottom line is THIS PAGE: Batman pencil sketch. NEXT PAGE: Cover to Dark Horse’s King Tiger & Motorhead #1.

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caffeine, which I am pretty sure is the secret to the success of the human race as we know it. Back to work after breakfast, and I try to get at least one page finished by 10 a.m. I eat a snack then... probably a piece of fruit and more protein. Back to work and try and get a little more done before lunch, which can happen at any time between 11:00 and noon, or whenever my kids have lost their minds with hunger. After lunch I will goof around on the computer for a little bit, but I keep it down on productive days. I find keeping off of the computer the best way to get work done. The computer can kill your day. I don’t play any games or do much with it, but time flies even when you’re looking for reference. After my goof-off time, it’s back to work, which will be more of the same, penciling or inking. If everything has gone well, a productive day can have me finished with my work by 3:30. I’ll knock off then and lift weights until supper. I don’t have a set pattern for the amount of penciling I will do before inking, although I do know it’s best for me to mix the two, so I can make realistic projections of when I can finish a page. Unproductive days for me are almost identical to productive days, except everything is slower. I get to work later, I eat longer, I linger on the computer, I get distracted by some pointless Internet thread. I could be looking up some military reference, then discover myself an hour later looking up information on the old Will the Real Jerry Lewis Please Sit Down cartoon. I might find myself paying too much attention to some facet of a page that will probably end up covered in a word balloon, or using some ink that is so thick I can barely get it to pour from the dropper, let alone flow from my nib. Out of a five-day work week, if I have two slow days it takes a couple of ultra productive days to make up the difference. The problem lately has been to turn the heat up on the productive days, as they feel they contribute enough. Occasionally I will work late, but I just function better in the morning work-wise than in the evening. Recently I’ve gone through a very long “anti-productive” slump, possibly the worst I’ve had in my 18 years of comic drawing. I chalk it up to a couple of things... one is coming off of an enormous productive stretch that lasted a couple of years and left me mentally exhausted. When I say “antiproductive” I mean in terms of quantity, as the quality is pretty high. I also was in a car wreck one year ago on October 14th, which is the date of my anniversary. My wife and I were going to go out for a quick bite at one of our favorite restaurants. To do so we were driving our kids to my sister-in-law’s place. About one mile away from our home we were rear-ended, while waiting to turn left off of the highway. I saw the car coming at the last moment in my rear view mirror and hit the gas, getting us moving just enough to diffuse a little of the impact. The driver, a young guy, nailed us at 45 to 50 miles an hour. My seat broke and threw me backwards, the back of my head smashed into my oldest daughter’s head, just above her right eye, severely fracturing her socket and the bones on the right side of her face. (I’m happy to report a full recovery by the way)... it could have been pretty grim. I received a concussion, but being the true professional totally behind the eightball with a big deadline, I went home that

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night while my daughter was in the intensive care unit and finished five or seven pages if I remember correctly. The injury also effected my sight for a while, but I managed to work. Honestly, there are a few months that are merely a blur for me, but when you have a job to do you have to do it. DRAW!: What’s your drawing pace like?

DM: In all actuality, when only penciling and if the pressure is on, I can pencil a page every two to three hours of straight work. If it’s reference heavy, that can slow me down, but if I know what I’m doing, I can knock them out fast. I’m very fast with drawing and pretty accurate with laying out perspective without ruling lines. The only problem is it can fatigue me pretty bad these days, and leave me a mental pile of mush. I’ve penciled a complete book in a three-day tear with the help of my old assistant Shawn Moll. This is all fine and great but a sensible person would never put themselves into a position to find that kind of output necessary. Having to work that hard and fast is usually the result of taking on too much work—which I’ve done—or too many unproductive days. DRAW!: What is your studio set up like? DM: Very unimpressive. My studio is fairly small; it’s in a 12’ x 12’ room in my basement. Thankfully I have a nice window. My most recent addition to it is a large desk where I can organize my paperwork and store books and supplies. The last time I bought something for my studio was 18 years ago. I’ve always been terribly frugal where my studio is concerned, and it wouldn’t hurt me to invest in some new stuff now and then, but I’ve been comfortable enough to work with what I originally bought those many years ago. My desk and chair have seen better days, and I rule lines with an angle that is broken in two pieces. The angle has so many chips and dings in it that I have to watch out for the irregularities when inking with it. It does add character to a straight line though. There is an old tabby tray on the left side of my desk that is nothing more than a glorified pencil holder and graveyard for old erasers. I also have a picture of my wife and my mom there, and a cool little piece of artwork one of my kids made for me that I always liked. Sitting next to me on my left is an old child’s school desk that I use for a table. Reference material, opened ink

bottles and scratch paper is usually sitting here, while inside is a nice hand mirror that I swiped from one of my kids as well as my old broken one. Whichever ends up in my hand first is the one that gets used. Right behind me is a little piece of furniture with three open shelves, which I clear off a few times a year and slowly pile stuff on for the rest. I also tend to set coffee or food back there. I have a shelf that I line with knick-knacks and photos of my family, a Swedish horse, a little Greek vase, a Hmong tiger carved out of ivory, and my prized Lou Martin/Major Bummer Inaction Figure that my friend Joel made. I have a second desk that I bought a few years ago when my friend Shawn Moll started to work with me as my assistant. Since then Shawn has gone on to do his own work, but the desk stays. It DRAW! • SUMMER 2007

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has a nice chair, and my kids or wife come in to work or draw now and then. It has a light, which is something I should really get for my own desk, but as I sit by the window I enjoy the natural light. On my walls I have a few pieces of artwork. A framed piece of The Mask holding a pie with a bomb in it, the wall hanging of the first Justice League cover that I did, a nice copy of Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam” from the Sistine chapel. My friend and fan Kevin gave this to me as a gift. I also have a picture of me on the wall holding a weight over my head in the clean and jerk, with a bunch of medals hanging next to it. I’m an avid competitive weightlifter. That’s about it for the studio. I have a phone that is rarely charged and constantly goes missing, and the necessary computer with e-mail to keep me connected to the world. DRAW!: Wow, that’s some story, I’m really glad to hear everyone came out okay. Can you give me a bit of your background, your schooling or art schooling if you’ve had any? DM: I had no formal training or art school. I never liked school and higher education wasn’t for me, but I am always learning and I’ve had some direction here and there over my lifetime. When I was in 5th or 6th grade I took a special portrait drawing class from a very talented gentleman whose name escapes me, unfortunately. I was a little kid in an adult class, and learned a lot about proportion and lighting. I took some private art lessons as a child from a woman who was an artist. Joelle Waldo was her name, and she was a good teacher and lovely person. She showed me art beyond comics, and made it fun. I also took some private lessons from a commercial artist. He would give me an assignment and then provide me with the tools to execute the piece. But my most influential teacher was a woman named Pat Wolf. She was my 9th grade art teacher and her personal focus was pottery, but she was an excellent teacher. The greatest “teaching moment” she ever gave me was when I was doing some drawing of a man... just something out of my head. She looked at it and told

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me the legs were too short. I took immediate offense, and disagreed with her with all my self-centered artistic soul. She calmly picked out a few books that had some old masters art, mostly figure stuff, and had me take a look. I couldn’t disagree with her after that. It opened my eyes from then on, and I was never the same since. I knew I was not God’s gift to art, and that if I was open to learning I could at least always improve. I’ve been a bit detached from what I do since that day, and open to criticism. I look at what I do for how I can improve it, and I like to look to others to see what can be learned from their work. No matter how badly I might think someone draws, if they sell comics and have people interested in their art there has to be something there. Sometimes it’s not the clarity with which they draw but the emotion they “draw out” from the person looking at it. Art is fascinating that way. Really, I am always learning something new. One day I’m going to sit down and learn how to draw women’s hair. I think it’s about time! DRAW!: What are you currently working on? DM: I’m penciling and inking Stormwatch PHD for Wildstorm. Christos Gage is writing it and David Baron is coloring it. My editor and friend Ben Abernathy is doing his best to keep me in line. It’s a revamping of the old Stormwatch book, which I wasn’t familiar with previously, so it’s all new to me. Instead of a super-powered Stormwatch fighting super-bad people, they have a scaled down, budget conscious human division fighting super-bad people. Christos has come up with some very fun characters to draw, from vivacious to less than ordinary. One of them is a former super-villain called the Machinist, who is now a has-been with a growing paunch and receding hairline. I like to draw guys like that; it’s fun for me. No matter how unimpressive they are they still have to go up against the exotic and super-powered, which is great contrast for the main cast of characters. As this article goes to press, I’ll be working on a Black Adam miniseries, written by Peter Tomasi. DRAW!: You know, there are a lot of comic artists from up in

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your neck of the woods: Gordon Purcell, and I guess that’s where Ordway is from, Milwaukee I think, and Terry Beatty, too.

DRAW!: Now, how did having assistants work with you? What were their duties?

DM: Yeah, Pete Krause, Tom Richmond, Pat Gleason, Tom Nguyen, Dan Thorsland, Shawn Moll, Sam Hiti, Peter Gross, Zander Cannon and Clint Hilinski. Not to mention other comics professionals, such as inker Barbara Schulz and writer Terrance Griep.

DM: Well, they’re two entirely different kinds of guys. When Pat Gleason was working with me, he was just a kid. I mean just out of high school. But I knew that he would get into comics without a doubt when I saw his work. It’s a pretty cool story, really. One Halloween this kid, not Pat, but a friend of Pat’s, came to the door, and I’d set out some trinket that kind of identified me with comics or with The Mask, so the kid struck up a conversation. And he stated, “Oh, you draw comics? Well, you know, I really want to draw comics.” You know, I kind of hear that from a lot of kids. I said, “Well, if you ever want to show me your stuff, I’ll take a look.” And for about a year, maybe two, this kid would

DRAW!: I guess there’s a few little pockets in the Midwest. There were a lot of artists out of the Detroit area, from where I’m originally from, like Milgrom and Austin, Starlin and Vosburg and Keith Pollard. DM: That’s quite a list. DRAW!: But yeah, there were several little areas like that. And then there’s the Chicago area. So there’s, I guess, what you call, little enclaves. DM: Breeding grounds. DRAW!: Yeah, yeah. And I know, like those artists that I mentioned before, guys like Milgrom and Terry Austin, they were all getting in I think around the same time, so I think that probably also facilitated that a little bit. You know, because once your buddy gets in, then you help your buddy.

ASSISTANTS DRAW!: When we first talked about this interview you mentioned you had an assistant? DM: Yeah, Shawn Moll, he’s doing some stuff for Ben Abernathy right now, over at Wildstorm.

PREVIOUS PAGE: A sampling of covers from Doug’s run on JLA. RIGHT: From Doug’s recent Stormwatch series.

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DM: Always. What else are you going to do? You do kind of graduate towards those that you’re friends with, but you also have desire as a limiting factor. If you don’t have desire, you’re not going to make it. And talent does sort of dictate, but a friend gives a word, which always helps to get editors to take a look. It certainly never hurts to have somebody work with you, and then they become familiar with an editor. It’s as simple as that. Patrick Gleason, for example. He’s been working at the DC offices and he’s making a career. He used to be my assistant.

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show me his stuff. And the truth is, to make a long story short, he never had the ambition, nor the talent. But he had the mouth to keep coming at me with stuff. He would call me up and say, “Oh, I’ve got some art to show you.” So I’d have him come over to the studio, and he’d have nothing. Every time, he had nothing. At best it was some hastily drawn figures or some designs of a character floating in space. I would always tell him, “You’ve got to draw comics. I can’t help you like this. I can’t show you anything because you’re doing nothing for me to critique.” DRAW!: Right, that’s typical, too, of a lot of young artists. DM: Oh, yeah. They don’t quite get it. DRAW!: Yeah, they’ll show you a sketchbook full of dismembered figures and things floating around. You know, “Here’s something I drew five years ago,” and it’s all dirty and smudged.

DM: Yeah. Well, the worst part is, the first time he came over, his mom brought him, and she sat and talked to my wife upstairs while I took him to the studio and showed him art. And when I

went upstairs to see, she had his sketchbook, and of course, like any mother, she was extremely proud of her son and all of the good things that he had done. And I don’t blame her there. Great. And so I started flipping through the sketchbook, all this totally marginal stuff. She goes, “Yeah, yeah. How about this, though?” And she turns this one page, and it was a copy of a Mask drawing that I had done. You know, it was as best as he could, line for line. She goes, “Now, this is good!” I look over at the kid, and he looks at me, like I said, “I’m not going to rat you out, son, but that’s my drawing. That ain’t your drawing.” So his mom, the best thing that she could point out was something that he had just copied. Anyway, this kind of dragged on for a while, and finally I said, “I don’t want to see you until you have something concrete to show me. I’ll give you one more chance.” So he calls me up and he says, “Yeah, I’ve got some stuff, and I got a friend, he wants to be in comics, too.” I’m thinking, “Oh, great, two of them.” So I met them at a local comic shop. I sat down and said, “Okay, what have you got?” He had nothin’. He pulled out some of the usual notebook paper, some hastily drawn stuff. I just laid into him. I said, “This is sh*t. I know you just did this. What are you wasting my time for?” And he was apologetic, but also defensive. He goes,

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PREVIOUS PAGE: Pencils from The Mask. ABOVE AND RIGHT: Cover and interior work from The Mask Returns #4.

“Well, I’ve got school and work.” And I’m thinking, “Sure, whatever.” And then I look at the other kid, which was Pat Gleason, and said, “What have you got?” You know, I was kind of flippant about it. So he reaches into this paper bag and pulls out a stack of about 50 or 60 comics that he had drawn, minimum 22 pages each. DRAW!: Whole comic books!? DM: Yeah. DRAW!: Wow! DM: They were all black-&-white. DRAW!: Yeah, but still, that’s pretty impressive, because usually guys have 20 stories that they started but never finished anything, you know? DM: I know, heck, I couldn’t even have pulled something like that out. Not even close. I would have been closer to the other kid. Anyway, Pat drops this huge pile of comics on the table. I start flipping through them, and I’m just amazed. It was pretty crude, but you could see his progression from when he began drawing, he kept getting better. You could see qualities of his storytelling change as the work got better. He and his buddies used to sit and just draw comics, starting when they were pretty

young, perhaps 14 or 15 years old, and so by the time he was 18, he had a pile of stuff. I mean, some of them were just enormous, like, 44 pages, 60 pages. DRAW!: He was right out of high school, then? DM: Yeah. So he had been busy. And when we were parting ways, I gave him my telephone number, saying, “Pat, call me any time. One day you’ll work in comics, if you want to.” That’s all I told him. So of course he called me, and then he started working as my assistant. But he’s also at this time a young guy living life large and having fun, and he was a great kid, but I was trying to show him how to get work on it. I said, “Okay, we’re going to start work at eight o’clock.” DRAW!: So how was he working for you, were you having him trace things off or get reference? DRAW! • SUMMER 2007

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DM: Nope. I literally would just let him try to lay out a page. DRAW!: From a script you two were actually working on?

to look a certain way, I always gave him reference to work from. I said, “You have to learn how to draw, if you’re going to draw. And we’ve got a head here, it’s got to look like something that I did.”

DM: Yeah. And if it was useless, which it wasn’t unusual for them to be, we’d start over. He had two great inadequacies. One, he had a really heavy hand. He had a hard time controlling the pencil to get a fine line, and the only way that was going to work itself out was through hours with a pencil.

DRAW!: Right, it has to fit in your style.

DRAW!: Right. Yeah, I find that very typical of many students, actually. There’s the person who draws very small, and the person who draws very heavy, like they’re grinding the pencil right through the board, almost, sometimes. And you’re right, there’s just a certain amount of facility you have to gain, confidence, too, maybe.

DM: Yeah, which was very different than his own style. Really, the most important thing I wanted to get out of it for him is the idea that there’s a script, and that you’re trying to tell the writer’s ideas. I used to have a lot of fun looking at his stuff, because he was totally free of anything that I would consider my conventions and my rules. You know, if he was doing a story that involved people talking, he just put people wherever it suited him and kept moving them around. So if you had a group of people talking, he just kept switching it up. Like, if he had three guys walking down the street, they usually aren’t weaving a path back and forth amongst themselves to suit the dialogue, so you have to get crafty about it if you’re paying attention to continuity, at least visually, that you want the people to appear to be where they’re supposed to be. And he never bothered with that as a kid. And so I was trying to show him that

DM: Yeah, it’s the more hours you put into it, the more you get out of it. And really what I wanted him to do was just sit down and try to figure out what to do with a page from a script standpoint. And sometimes he did well. If I really wanted him to do something useful, I would knock out a quick layout and then have him work up some of the intermediate, flesh in a bunch of the drawing. DRAW!: Would you have him do things specifically, like, “Deadline’s approaching and I’ve got four backgrounds. Tighten these backgrounds up,” kind of thing, or “Xerox this for me,” or...?

DM: Right. DRAW!: It can’t be his own personal take, suddenly.

DM: In his case, since his idea of how to draw was good enough, especially from a figure standpoint, I’d let him work on figures and try to fill things in. DRAW!: Wow.

THIS PAGE: Interior detail and cover for The Mask Strikes Back #4. NEXT PAGE: Early Mahnke work.

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HORSE COMI CS, INC.

DM: And when it came to, like, drawing, let’s say if I wanted something

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when you have an order of people speaking, and you have things happening in some kind of logical progression, you have to pay attention to it. That was probably the only thing I really worked on him with. In a lot of ways with Pat, even though he was my assistant, it was more like a teaching opportunity more than anything. And I never really got.... Well, let’s put it this way. I didn’t make any money having him work in the studio. It was more the fact that I saw him as somebody who was going to make it, and I really wanted to give him some guidance, and that was the best way to do it. DRAW!: Okay. And I certainly, I understand that, too, when you meet another young artist and you recognize a little bit or yourself in that person, and the potential in that person, that you sort of feel like you want to help that person. You want to extend a hand to help them along. And I suppose, in my case, since I’ve had a few assistants over the years, and now I teach, it’s part of— in my philosophy, anyway—paying forward or paying back. If you have the information, I feel personally it’s almost sort of like a duty to kind of pass the information on.

DRAW!: Because this is a business that traditionally was mostly based out of the big cities like New York, and the assistants would go and learn right with a pro, you’d go to Will Eisner’s studio and he’d say, “Here, kid, here’s a broom.” And then eventually he’d go, “Oh, here, kid, here’s an eraser.” And eventually he’d go, “Here, kid, here’s a pencil. Draw this lamppost,” or something. And you learned right on the job there. But for guys like us in the Midwest, there really wasn’t anybody like that. There was no Will Eisner in Ann Arbor that I could go work in his studio or something. DM: I agree with you, we’re a small industry, and if you really see somebody with talent, you should really try, for better or for worse.... Not everybody can afford to goof around with an assistant, but I think it’s more along the lines of, in many ways, that with Pat, I really wanted to see him draw a comic book. I wanted to see what would happen if somebody would put a pencil in his hand and say, “Here, draw something.” I thought it was kind of exciting. And I’ve got the chance over many times, now, and watched him grow. He never was very regular down

DM: Oh, I would agree.

here in the studio. He was too angst-ridden at the time. If ever he would actually show up early it was unbelievable. DRAW!: So I take it now you don’t have any assistants? DM: Not right now. Shawn Moll was a friend of mine before he started working with me. He went to MCAD, the Minnesota College of Art and Design, and he’d been making his money in other ways, working in software and web design and all that stuff. His wife and he both do art out of the house, they’ve got their own business. But he really wanted to get into comics, so one day I said, “Well, if you really want to do that, I’ll make a deal with you. You can come up to my studio.” And he lives— well, at least by Midwest standards, it’s a bit of a haul, during rush hour over an hour to get here. But I knew out of him I was going to get a real assistant who would be extremely dedicated, show up and do whatever. DRAW! • SUMMER 2007

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STORYTELLING: PLOT VS. FULL SCRIPT DRAW!: Getting back to the guts of laying out and storytelling the thing you mentioned about figures weaving in and out or suddenly changing place without regard to continuity, that’s something that I see a lot of professionals don’t really pay attention to. You see characters seeming to randomly jump around on a page, the breaking of the 180º rule. I guess that’s even more evident when people learn to work from the Marvel method, where it’s a

loose plot, and you kind of put things where you want, and the writer goes in and places the balloons to help try and clarify the storytelling, as opposed to the more traditional full script, where the writer’s really dictating specifically, “This person is talking, then this person is talking.” And that means that you have to put the person who is speaking first usually on the left side of the image. DM: Yeah, I mean, you certainly do your best. I suppose there are people who would sit down and read a comic and they never even notice that you moved people around. Maybe it’s just that when I was introduced into comics that I worked with a very fastidious and specific writer, John Arcudi. John’s scripts taught me a lot about how to draw comics, because he always told me what was important in a script. And so I’ve always enjoyed full scripts and things that have some quality and detail to them. His scripts were always perfect for the comic medium. And it’s—this is kind of getting off the track of what we were talking about, assistants, moving into Shawn Moll, who’s different. But with the writers that I’ve worked with over the years, you can see where the writer has got a comic book mind. And Arcudi’s one of them. He thinks in comic book when he writes in comic book, as opposed to cinematically.

DRAW!: Or TV, with lots of dialogue.

DM: I worked with Joe Kelly for quite a bit, and Joe was quite capable of just about giving me an aneurism per script. And, you know, I love Joe Kelly, we’re friends. And I would tell him every once in a while, “What are you, trying to kill me with this script?” Because Joe thinks very fluid, and so when he would write a scene I would call, I would tell him, “You’re writing a Fellini moment. How am I supposed to put all this stuff in?” And he might DRAW! • SUMMER 2007

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DRAW!: So you prefer to work with the full script. DM: Yeah. DRAW!: As opposed to work with the old Marvel method, which is the plot.

DM: Well, I think more than anything I don’t want too much information. I want somebody to tell me exactly what is taking place, and I don’t.... It’s not that I can’t handle the other, it’s just that, for me, one is definitely easier than the other. Maybe my mind is too old and inflexible and not as acute as some other artists who enjoy the freedom. And it certainly doesn’t stop me, but given a preference, I understand certain kinds of scripts better than others. In other words, it actually makes the day go faster when you can just sit down and read a script and say, “Yup, this goes in this panel, in this spot.” And John would often say where people were located in a panel. I think he often saw a layout with a great deal of clarity.

LEFT: Partially inked sketch. THIS PAGE: Page from Major Bummer #9, written by John Arcudi.

write, I’ll use one as a stock example, “Batman crashes through the window, rolls across the floor, and then takes a sh*t on the toilet while reading a magazine.” What does he want? DRAW!: Right, five actions in one panel or something. DM: Yeah, you can’t, unless you’re doing it like the Flash. But Joe always thought of things cinematically, I think. In other words, every frame he was seeing the action. And so I always had to dig through his stories thinking, “Okay, what’s important here? I can’t have this.” Or he would go into extreme detail about little things, and yet the shot that we’re doing is taken away by the fact that we’re framing a hundred-foot monster miles away, but he’s telling me all the little things that are happening right by the monster. He’s thinking about all of this stuff, where John never did that. John was always very precise. And it makes it very easy to work on an Arcudi script. And I’m sure some people would feel like they lacked the freedom that you get from other kinds of scripts. Now I’m working with Pete Tomasi right now on something, and Pete is a very clear and clean scripter. Very easy to read.

DRAW!: Well, I think also that a writer who writes a plot is not taking as much responsibility for the specifics of how things are arranged, the specifics of storytelling, then that falls upon you, as the artist, to really connect all the dots, connect all the beats and make all the story beats all hook up, and sometimes in order to do that you really have to be a writer, yourself, and write the pieces in between the beats. I just did that on a Ninja Turtles script that Steve Murphy wrote, and it was a very loose script, so there was actually a lot of writing on my end to sort of figure out how would I connect one specific story point to the next specific story point. Splinter and Casey Jones are running through the sewer here, and then they have to be over here, and they see some ninjas and have to fight. What happens between those beats? Because if you just drew what the writer wrote, you would have only a four-page story. So, when you had your assistant come into your process I guess what I’m trying to get to the gist of, and having talked to other artists about assistants, that each assistant, like you said, has a strength and a weakness. So how do you adapt, what you’re doing with that assistant, and how do they affect your process based upon their ability, or lack thereof. I’m very interested in this train of thought, also, because you like the full script. What is the beginning of your creative process of taking the words and making the words into pictures? Are you making them into pictures, or do you see them as a sequence, do you see it as a page, do you start little thumbnails and connect them together? DM: Usually when I sit down with a script, full script or otherwise, I get it up and running really fast. If I was reflecting back on what I’d do when I first started in the business, back then I had no idea what people did, or what I was going to be doing. And I wanted to hear what other people did, or try different things. I remember going to Kinko’s and having a bunch of little comic-book-sized pages made up that I could fill in and do thumbnails on, and all these different things. DRAW!: Would you enlarge those, then? DM: I tried everything, and then finally I realized, you know what? I’m really good at about one thing: just sitting down and DRAW! • SUMMER 2007

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COMICS DM: Yeah, and then I have to figure out how to jam it into the next page. So I do that, make sure I’ve got the panel count. And then I look for how much dialogue is in each panel, I just kind of make a mental note really quick. And I guess it’s from experience, knowing that certain kinds of panels and dialogue require a certain setup. You know, if I had to sit down and write it out, I wouldn’t know, but just like anyone who’s done something often enough, any artist has got a feel for it when they recognize a certain sequence. I make note of primary characters and what I can get away with, and then start filling in, do a quick panel breakdown, just sketch it in really fast. DRAW!: And this is right on the actual board? DM: Yes.

DRAW!: And I take it then you’re also being very aware, then, where the word balloons are going to follow through the page.

drawing. I didn’t really relate too well to spending too much time trying to figure out what I’m going to do. It was more along the lines of just sitting down and doing it. DRAW!: So it was just sort of by your gut instinct, you just sort of put that right down. DM: Yeah. So what I do is, for example, I have conventions just like every artist, and I fall back on them all the time, but I try to achieve some type of balance in the page. I don’t move the eye around too much. A lot of my stuff is straight up and down, and I try to make it interesting by the composition within a panel, usually. As opposed to tilting a panel, I’ll tilt panels for drama here and there, but as a rule I use the unusual things less so when I do use them, they have more effect. So what I’ll do is I’ll sit down and count up the number of panels on a page. Literally this is the first thing I do. I sit down with a script, and I’ll read through the pages. Usually I’ll run through the script one time looking for things that I might need, reference-wise. One of my habits is I check off every single frame on the script to make sure that I don’t get the count wrong. Sometimes I miss a frame here or there. DRAW!: Yeah, especially when you’re going fast. I’ve done that, too. It’s kind of like, “Oops, gee, I forgot to draw panel five.”

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DM: Yeah. They kind of run parallel through my mind. Of course, I’ll probably go back to the script a couple of times. It just sits there to the left of me on my drawing board. But once I’ve gotten the figures of the characters, I know that they have enough room to speak, and then I might make adjustments. I’ll trim a little from this panel or that to make sure there’s enough space in there. And as I’m doing this, I try to just vary things, especially when it comes to speakers or whatever. I vary head size quite a bit. I mean, that’s what I’m looking for probably more than anything, because if something is dialogue heavy or rich... well, even if it’s not, unless there’s a real point for a static kind of shot where you have the person’s head roughly the same size, the only other aspect you have to really give the story momentum is making sure you’re moving the eye around, not necessarily always changing the angle, but in the balance within the panel, within your composition. You know, like, what are some simple conventions? You know, two people talking, one on each side of a panel, and a letterbox-size panel; well, if you’ve got two of those, you have a chance to have two fairly good-sized heads. But then I might break into the next panel and have a smaller head centered not directly in between them but slightly off to one side. DRAW!: So you can weight or counterweight the compositions to get a variety? DM: Yes. This is all stuff I lay out really fast. In fact, I would say, as far as getting the layouts of a page and our characters all in place and ready to go, it takes me very little time at all. When Shawn was my assistant, that was the one thing, if I sat down I could get the guts of a book laid out in a day, where everything is in place, if not 22 pages in one day, in a long day I could definitely get everyone in place within a book, and everything going. DRAW!: Now, are you drawing with a very hard, like a 3H or something, or a blue pencil? DM: No. I just use an HB almost for everything that I do. DRAW!: So you don’t do like some artists do and use a blue pencil and then go back on top?

COMICS DM: No. I think that would drive me nuts. To each their own, you know. Whatever people can see through, I’ve got to have something. And really I don’t make much of a mess is part of the other thing. Once I get something down, it’s there. I tend to block, even with figures. I don’t build them up as much as contour a character in any kind of pose, dramatic or otherwise. I just quickly get the form and the shape down. I don’t worry about circles or different body shapes to add up to an arm. It’s pretty much just block it in fast. DRAW!: So it’s like you’re sketching it out, sort of, as opposed to drawing the little mannequin person? DM: Right. DRAW!: And I think that probably happens to most guys once they get past that basic stage where they don’t feel the need to.

DOUG MAHNKE

DRAW!: Right. I mean, how many times can you draw Superman punching somebody through a wall? DM: Right. DRAW!: I mean, eventually you’ve drawn the upshot, the down shot, the side shot, the three-quarter side shot. And I think that’s part of the language of comics is the fact that things are repeated, especially in things like comic strips, which are much more restrictive because of their format than comic books. You know, there’s a lot of the standard shot of the character’s head just talking, but that’s just part of the story flow, you go along. I always looked at it as, there are certain shots that I call our “give me” shots. They’re shots or panels that are put in to move the story along. Not for you to go, “Wow!” That’s the wow, like Neal Adams used to have the “wow” panel, where you would just look at a really great drawing. There are just some drawings that are just a shot of the guy’s head that are standard because he’s saying some important dialogue to move the story along.

DM: Yeah, and usually we artists, we’re always repeating ourselves, constantly. I suppose over the 18 years, going on 19, that I’ve worked, how many times have I drawn this or that particular image essentially retrofitted to suit a new book and a new cast of characters? It’s all the time.

DM: Yes. You’re just moving the story along, that’s all that’s happening.

PREVIOUS PAGE: A page from JLA #86 with writer Joe Kelly. BELOW: Two-page sequence from Major Bummer #12 with John Arcudi.

DRAW!: So do you always lay out the whole book, or do you usually lay out, like, four or five pages, six pages, and jump back...?

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DM: Well, if I were really smart, and I have yet to prove that I am, I would do it one by one so that I wouldn’t get caught up. For example, on the book I’m on right now, Black Adam, essentially what I’ve done is I’ve laid out the whole book, but that was more along the lines of just me kind of resting, in a way, and being productive at the same time, so that I can prepare for the punch of finishing a bunch of pages. You know my mind, unfortunately, it doesn’t always shift gears as quickly as I need it to in terms of getting the work done. I really wish that I approached every page with the same degree of, “Okay, let’s get this done,” but I don’t. It’s more along the lines of, “Okay, okay, we’re getting there. All right, now just do it. Finally. Finish the pages.”

DRAW!: Is it harder finishing the page than starting the page?

DM: Oh, yeah. If all I did is sit down and do layouts, I would be an extremely happy guy. I can lay out pages easy and fast, and committing the final act is sometimes more difficult, because I know it requires more precision. I think it’s just a mental thing. DRAW!: Sometimes it’s a little bit less creative. I mean, the layout, the pacing, breaking down, the story that’s like really being the director. That’s making all the pieces move. DM: Yeah. You’ve made all the choices, and returning to the page is kind of like, “Oh, I’ve got to make this all obvious now?” DRAW!: Well, it’s something I’ve observed there’s a real difference in. You know, super-hero comics, American comics, are a very specific type of comic, I think partially because of the assembly line nature of—it’s not sole authorship, usually just one person is not doing it. And I noticed, like, when I would see people like my friend Ricardo Villagran work, his pencils were always very loose, and he did most of his drawing when he inked, so the inking was actually drawing, and the penciling was like some half-layout loose pencils. The pencils were very sketchy. He would never, for instance, draw as tightly as you or I would ever draw, or even, say, someone like García-López; he’s from Argentina, but he adapted to working for the American comic sensibility. So our work has these very specific stages. Layout, pencil, because then, if we’re not inking, then the next person has got to be able to finish it, and most pencilers these days are guys who tend to draw very tightly as opposed to the guys, say, from the classic era, where they’d have Frank Giacoia go over Buscema’s breakdowns. Because Giacoia could draw really well, he could put all the drapery on the arm. He just needed the energy, the gesture, the beats, the dynamics of the storytelling, and he could actually do the drawing. It’s very different today. DM: Yeah, honestly, what you’re describing would be very fun, to tell you the truth, to work in tandem like that. Not always handling your own layouts, moving over here to do something different; for almost the entire last year, between Stormwatch, which I inked, and the Grant Morrison Seven Soldiers stuff where I did Frankenstein. DRAW!: I wanted to talk about both of those, because I could see there was a different approach and sensibility to both of those in your art. The Seven Soldiers stuff reminds me a lot more of Richard Corben.

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DM: Yeah, well, Corben was a big influence on me. DRAW!: I can see it. And when I look at Stormwatch, it looks more like a deadline book, like you were moving a lot faster, you had to move faster on it, and the drawing is looser. The inking is a little looser. The Frankenstein stuff had a lot more detail in it, more rendering, more middle tone. At least, that’s the way it appeared to me. I don’t know if it’s true.

DM: You know, the biggest difference between Stormwatch and Frankenstein... well, other than the content, they were two totally different books. Frankenstein had a tremendous amount of freedom to draw whatever I wanted, I loved doing it. I thought it was fun. If somebody had handed me more Frankenstein scripts, I’d be doing them right now. It was ridiculously free of any constraints. I remember talking to Mignola once, and it was kind of like anybody going to the top of the mountain and saying, “What’s your secret?” Asking the guru, and he says, “I draw what I want.” I mean, that’s kind of what Mignola told me is, “Everything you see, I’m just drawing what I want to draw.” DRAW!: Yeah, I mean, that’s what Hellboy is. Hellboy is him just drawing only the things he really wants to draw, which is great. DM: Well, yeah, and it shows. With doing Frankenstein, there was an awful lot of that freedom to just have fun drawing and not worrying about what I was putting down. But also the paper, the paper was different. DRAW!: Oh, really? Were you working on a rougher paper or something? DM: Yeah. So with Frankenstein, the paper was rough, which held the pen different. I just use a C6. DRAW!: A C6 nib? Like a Speedball? DM: Yeah. DRAW!: So that’s what you ink with is a Speedball C6? DM: Man, you think I’d even know if they’re called Speedball? All I know is they’re those damn things that I buy when I find them in the store. My wife goes and picks them up for me, and I have bags of them. DRAW!: Is it the globe? Is it fat in the middle and narrow at the end, and it’s silvery? DM: It’s pointed and you put the ink on the side. What is it, made of copper top to it or something? DRAW!: Oh, okay. That’s a lettering pen. DM: Maybe. The absolute truth is, I don’t know and have never asked. My wife’s the one who went to art school, and she buys them. DRAW!: That’s interesting, because I would have thought that

PREVIOUS PAGE: There’s nothing gentle about that guitar. ABOVE: Opening page of the Seven Soldiers: Frankenstein mini-series.

maybe you would have used the more standard Hunt 102 or 103, which are a little firmer. DM: I don’t know. I’ve used this type of nib since I was a kid, when my mother brought me home some stuff. And I never rolled too far out from the tree that I must have crawled out from under— DRAW!: So you never tried, like, “I’ll try this nib, I’ll try this nib, I’ll try this....” DM: I border on idiocy when I [Mike laughs] discover something that makes my life easier, I go, “How come I didn’t know about this before?” DRAW!: Well, maybe that’s smarter, not dumber. I’m always trying different tools. A Hunt 108 gives you a different line. If you were going to try to do some lush kind of Al Williamson thing, then you’ve got to use that real flexible pen. If you’re going to ink like Richard Corben, it looks like he used a less flexible pen. You know, the pen will give you a certain kind of line. Joe Kubert uses one of those lettering pens, as well, for doing some of his inking. DRAW! • SUMMER 2007

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But it’s always interesting, because the paper also will give you a certain look too. That was DC paper, I take it, the rougher paper? DM: Yeah. DRAW!: Yeah, that paper’s like sandpaper. It really has a big effect on.... DM: Oh, yeah, totally different than if you were using a plate finish. JLA ™ AND ©2007 DC COMICS.

DRAW!: Yeah. It’s hard to draw little details on that paper. DM: Oh, very. DRAW!: You’d have to use a 9H or something to pencil tight. I guess I would only use that kind of paper, myself, probably if I were doing something like a monster book or a horror book, where you’re trying to get a broader, bolder look. It would be great for dry brush or something. But with that issue of Superman I just did, it would have killed me to do it on that rough paper, because I just would have been fighting to get the fidelity, you know? DM: Fighting to maintain composure over the rough terrain. DRAW!: Yeah. So the Wildstorm stuff, the Stormwatch, that’s on the plate?

and Flex Mentallo, and I enjoyed that work by Frank Quitely more than anything else he’s ever done. It seems like you two like books that have humor in them. DM: Oh, I love humor. DRAW!: Which seems to be like Kryptonite for comics fans. Most fans really hate anything that’s funny. DM: I don’t know why. It’s America. As strange as it is. In fact, the older I get, the more all I want to do is sit and read Groo or something like that. I like humor. If you sit me down to actually read a comic book, I don’t read anything that’s too dark or brooding. I don’t know, I’m just not interested, it’s not that I can’t handle the material. But if you give me something that’s light or entertaining, yeah, I’ll read it. On the other hand, I’ve held on to all the archived Spirit stuff, and Plastic Man, and that’s kind of what I’ll read. If I’m going to go read something, I’ll read that. DRAW!: So getting back to your process, after you go through and you rough everything out, I guess how far you take the pencils depends upon whether you’re inking them or Tom Nguyen, the guy who’s inked tons of your work or somebody like that is going to ink them, right?

DM: Yeah. I mean, if it’s me, I put all the information down, I just don’t parse DM: That’s all on plate, so which line is heavier. that means with this particuWorking with Tom Nguyen lar tool, the ink flows very for as many years as I did, fast. And it sits on the top, ABOVE: JLA #65 focused on Plastic Man, allowing Doug to ham it up. eventually he knew from it doesn’t absorb in as NEXT PAGE: Unused pencils intended for the cover of Major Bummer #4. working with me what lines quickly. It’s just different. were what, so I loosened up over the years where he was concerned. On the other hand, like DRAW!: So are you more of a pen inker than a brush inker? with the book that I’m doing right now, it’s going to be inked by Norm Rapmund, and I should do him the courtesy of making DM: Oh, yeah. sure that I don’t provide him with some kind of map that he has DRAW!: I actually have an original page from that. to decipher as far as the penciling is concerned. I’m going to put down hard edges and make sure that he knows what’s what. DM: Do you? DRAW!: So do you shade in the blacks, or do you put Xs for DRAW!: Yeah, I really liked that book. I liked Major Bummer blacks?

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COMICS DM: Nah, just Xs for blacks. Well, yeah, if it’s a large black area I’m never going to fill in. I might, as I’m laying stuff out and working through it, put a little bit of graphite down to give me a mental cue for what I’m doing there. But I don’t want the inker to just sit down like a slave and literally copy, all they have to do is copy every aspect of line weight and everything. That’s not what I want, they should be embellishers, they need to be finishers. I mean, they have a hand and a technique all their own, and why try to force them through my mold? It’ll still look like I drew it because of the way that I arrange things and the way that I draw, the structure. DRAW!: Yeah, I mean, your work is very structural. And John Buscema, I remember reading in an interview where he basically felt, he drew his page, and if the inker was good, they could pick the ball up from where he gave them the ball, and they would enhance it. They would make all the right choices. And if the guy sucked, it didn’t matter how nail-tight you drew it, he’s still going to screw it up, no matter what.

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work.... Because if I’m doing the whole job myself, sometimes I break it up just to break up the monotony of penciling 22 pages and then inking 22 pages. Although, for me, personally, inking is always easier than penciling, because then all the hard work is done. The inking is actually the easiest, the most enjoyable part of the job. DM: I’m really enjoying inking my own stuff again. DRAW!: Has that changed, or would you say it has affected the way you pencil? DM: Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, when you’re penciling for yourself, you know what you’re trying to do. And sometimes when things are flying you can get away with such a limited

DM: That’s true. DRAW!: And he’s probably drawn more pages than the next 15 guys put together. He really had that whole philosophy. And, again, the philosophy maybe of a guy like John Buscema is slightly different than for us, because also comics are a little bit different now. What a person would accept in your standard comic in 1975, and the amount of detail the fans tend to like today, is really very different. DM: Yeah, it’s a different world. But then again, those comics back then were pretty good for me. DRAW!: Oh, yeah! They were great.

DRAW!: Right, right. So now, you’ve gone through, you’ve got your layout, you’ve done your pencils. Do you tend to pencil in batches and ink in batches, or do you pencil it all and then ink it all? DM: Well, when I’m doing it for myself, I almost always finish the page completely before I move on to the next page. DRAW!: Just so you don’t break up your DRAW! • SUMMER 2007

DM: In a lot of ways I don’t want to go back and take a look at them and judge them differently. When War of the Worlds came out, hey, I loved it. I’m not probably ever going to read it again, but, boy, I was a fan at the time.

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amount of information that you put down. But I’ve discovered the one area that I can’t fool around with is women’s faces. I’ve got to make sure that they’re right, otherwise they end up looking funny. I hate to go back and go over a page and go, “Boy, I really botched that.” You know, it’s like you have one chance to get it right, and then you have to drag out the whiteout. At least that’s the one area I probably spend more time making sure that everything is correct. But the rest, male characters, I put an awful lot in with the ink. I really finish it, I definitely finish it with ink. DRAW!: Well, you know there’s a much more narrow tolerance for what we accept as a pretty girl than what we accept as a handsome guy. One nostril is a little off and she goes from being a hottie to homely, y’know?

lettering pen. Any particular ink you like or don’t like? DM: No, I just use Black Magic. I’ve got a dozen bottles sitting around in there. When I’m washing in some blacks, I’ll grab a bottle that’s all coagulated and heavy so that it has some density to it. So at least when the page gets done, it looks like a nice, finished page. The rest is extremely little. My wife has been helping me fill blacks, and she’s better at it than I am. DRAW!: So you don’t do things like I did on that last Superman job, scanning and FTPing the pages to DC, are you still sending them the original pages? DM: No, I’m sending the originals.

DM: It’s so easy to mess it up.

DRAW!: So you don’t have a scanner?

DRAW!: And the guys who do it so well, like Blevins, do it so easily it’s infuriating sometimes. [laughs] You know, there are certain guys like him or Bob Oksner, that just have that deft touch with a pen. One little dot with a nostril, or just breaking a line on a face or something could just add so much to an expression, or add a little air to the.... Or make it free. So your basic tools are, you have a C6

DM: No, I’ve got a scanner, but I just send in the boards. If there’s another way to do it, I should talk to them. If that’s what people are doing, isn’t it sad that I’m sitting here just sending stuff out Fed Ex? DRAW!: Well, the reason I mention that is, you were talking about things like whiteout, and I find myself now, especially if I’m pressed on a deadline, cleaning up any glitches, smudges

BELOW AND NEXT PAGE: A Stormwatch page from rough layout to finished pencils.

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COMICS etc., in Photoshop. My old aesthetic, which I really got from spending time and working with guys like Al Williamson was, “work for the original.” To Al, the original was the thing; it was a really beautiful piece of art, and he worked for the original. I initially came from more of a commercial art background, where the piece of art is a mechanical, and the final printed image is actually the final destination of the art.

DOUG MAHNKE

DM: Yeah, I’m more with you on that. I haven’t even had time to really think, as I’m doing stuff, going, “Oh, that’s a really great page,” in terms of it standing alone as a piece of art. DRAW!: I mean, I still think of it as a piece of art, but now, because of the way technology has really started to affect the process, often now I won’t go back—. If I have a large area of black, I can paint bucket it in Photoshop, or if I’m going to do little whiteout things or whatever, clean up my borders, I do that all in Photoshop now rather than sit there and go in with the whiteout, and then have to go back and touch it up again if it’s not enough, and you’ve got to put it under a lamp so it can dry, and then you’re blowing on the page, you’re taking a hair dryer because you’ve got to go to Fed Ex. It’s just so much easier now not to have to rush to. Later I can go back for my own purpose, aesthetic or if I want to sell the piece and clean stuff up and fill large areas of black. DM: See? You take advantage of technology. I don’t.

DRAW!: Well, I find that very interesting, because reading back through the start of our interview online, you said your studio is basically more or less technically the same as when you started, so you haven’t improved a lot of things as you’ve gone along. Is that because you don’t feel it’s important, or you’re just kind of going along? DM: I don’t know if it’s important. It could just be that I’m so dense.... DRAW!: [laughs] You’re not dense. You don’t draw like you’re dense. DM: My real skill’s to sit down with a pencil or a pen and render. That I understand is an ability I have. However, I really don’t get much feedback.... DRAW! • SUMMER 2007

DOUG MAHNKE

COMICS DRAW!: Yeah, join the club. [laughs] DM: Yeah, if you’re not talking to other people... I mean, I could learn a lot just from my buddy Tom Nguyen, if I wanted to really learn some stuff about inking.... I have his inking DVD. I put it in just to fill the void of quiet. I could put it in and have it run for the four hours or however long that crazy thing is, and learn something about inking from a guy who inked for a living. But I haven’t done it. You know, I could pick up tips and skill stuff, but I think my mind is always in the execution of a page primarily from a penciling standpoint, and the inking has just been an extension of my penciling. Another friend of mine, Tom Richmond, who does work for Mad magazine, on the other hand, he’s pumping out some really cool stuff, artworkwise, and he takes advantage of technology. I know he does. I just don’t. It wasn’t that many years ago I didn’t have a computer. I just never did. When I finally got one, I considered it a whole flippin’ leap into the future. The fact that I send e-mail and can communicate that way, or if somebody has to send me something or that I can look up reference online is incredible. DRAW!: Oh, that’s amazing now, yeah. DM: It is something that I appreciate more than I could ever possibly have imagined. If nothing else comes my way, that’s the one that makes life easy.

DRAW!: Well, if you want a .45 caliber in a shoulder holster, you just type, “.45 caliber shoulder holster,” and bing, you’ve got it. In the old days, if you wanted a picture of the Brooklyn Bridge, you had to go to the library, and you’re limited to whatever pictures you could find in that particular library. Now you’ve got more pictures of the Brooklyn Bridge than you could ever use, possibly. Getting back to the whole technology question, many jobs now I actually physically would not be able to do the job if I did not have the ability to FTP the stuff to the person or the client, vice versa, to send the material to me. It seems like, of all the people I dealt with, comics was sort of like the last industry to kind of go, “Oh, there’s an FTP thing?” I mean, how much money must they have saved on Fed Ex now? It’s so much easier for me, if I’m done at four o’clock in the morning to put something on the server, not having had to run to Fed Ex at six o’clock. And it also gives you more control from the standpoint that if you scan your stuff in, and you decide, “Well, that doesn’t look right,” I can blow it up 10%, I can clean it up.... It allows you to manipulate the final image. In many cases the companies are actually requiring you to FTP the stuff. It used to be—DC wanted the lettering, but they were the last company that wanted lettering on the boards. DM: You’ve got to admit... maybe it’s kind of whimsical, but I kind of miss lettering on the boards. DRAW!: Oh, I do, too. I really love lettering, and lettering to me is part of the art, it’s part of the composition. It affects the composition, so it has to be considered part of the art, let alone that it is a craft, just like inking or anything else. So, yeah, I miss it. When you look at a page of comics without the lettering is not quite the same as looking at a page with the lettering on it. And it’s less work for you, too, to ink, if the lettering is covering up some of the backgrounds. DM: Absolutely.

ABOVE: Head sketches.

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DRAW!: And the person placing the balloons didn’t quite place the balloon where they should have placed the balloon, so you get these weird, bizarre tangents or whatever. So getting back to your routine, it sounds like your routine is pretty standard, pretty

COMICS basic. It sounds like you really haven’t changed that much over the years, and it also sounds like you don’t get a chance to do much work outside of your occupation.

DOUG MAHNKE

DM: Almost none. In fact, it is so rare for me to even sit down and sketch. In fact, I started a sketchbook once because... well, Pat Gleason always had them. Of course, now that he’s a professional, he probably doesn’t have anything in his sketchbook. But before, there was a time, and I used to look at his sketchbook and go, “Wow, this is so cool. I need a sketchbook.” So I went out and bought a sketchbook, and I think I got a page filled, actually. DRAW!: One page? DM: One page. It still sits there waiting for something else to be drawn in it. DRAW!: So you don’t do that to warm-up? You just hit the board and start. DM: Nope. I just sit down and grab a board, grab the script, start laying stuff in. DRAW!: So there’s no warming up? DM: No. Coffee. That’s my warm-up. DRAW!: Most days, if the deadline is tight, I’m pretty much like you. I just sit down, grab a piece of paper, and just start going at it. On a day when I can warm-up, I have the time, I do like to do a little drawing, and I do a lot more drawing for myself now than I did for many, many, many years, and I’m so glad that I do it because it’s really taken my art in another direction. DM: Drawing for yourself is such a different thing from drawing for a job. And, boy, if you’ve got the time to do it, man, congratulations. That’s fantastic. I wish I didn’t always pick up a pencil with the concept that, “Oh, okay. Here we go. Time to get to work.” It’d be nice to grab a pencil and go, “Hey, let’s do something.” Then again, when you’re at a restaurant with a bunch of artists, chances are some napkin’s going to get filled in. DRAW!: Things are going to get filled with drawings, that’s for sure. Do you use a lot of photo reference at all? You’re a weightlifter, so do you ever light yourself to get a pose? DM: No, not really. I mean, there was a time, y’know, I had some bodybuilding magazines laying around, but it’s the one thing, anatomy comes, for the most part, pretty easy to me. Every once in a while I’ll run into a position or something where I don’t think I’ve drawn this before, and I’ll have to turn it over in my head a bunch of times. DRAW!: What about hands, or hands holding guns, or guys in suits? DM: No, I don’t.... I would say, as far as reference, it’s always stuff that I’m totally unfamiliar with when it comes to hardware, or a specific building, or anything that any writer needs to be accurate. You know, if they don’t need it, if it’s something that I can make up, believe me, it’s going to be made up. And as far as suits go, I think I’ve drawn enough suits over the years, y’know, clothing, that I can draw a suit, but the one thing is to not get stuck in any particular time, 1980s haircuts, or the way people wear their clothes. If you want things to be somewhat current, you have to at least crack a magazine, and I can be pretty guilty of not looking at those.

PREVIOUS PAGE: Page from Stormwatch. ABOVE: Cover roughs for Black Adam #1.

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DRAW!: Yeah, well, it’s like, you look at those old comics like we were talking about, like from the ‘70s, guys basically just drew things the way they looked in the ‘50s or the ‘40s. Maybe the Capri pants from the ‘60s or whatever, when their wife was still hot or whatever. They’re kind of stuck in that era. You know, when a guy like Ditko would draw a car... I mean, it was a totally Ditko world, where everything was Ditko in the Ditko world. But guys still wore hats. You know what I mean? The lapels on the coats were still the same way that he probably drew lapels in 1963. DM: Of course, wouldn’t it be easier if we still just had to do that, an army of men in hats walking down the streets? If you draw the hats enough times, it becomes easy. You fill in an army of people who all look different—oh, look what you have to face.

figures, which look like a guy who has studied or does bodybuilding. They don’t look like you’re doing your fifth version of John Buscema. You know what I mean? I can tell you, if you don’t do bodybuilding, you’re looking at bodybuilders. That’s one of the things that always stood out to me about Corben’s work. His work really is very unique. I mean, obviously he loved EC comics and stuff, but when you look at Corben’s stuff, his stuff really stood out from everybody else’s stuff, to me.... I mean, I’m sure he was using photos for a lot of it, but still, his figures were really unique compared to anybody else’s. DM: Well, yeah, in more ways than one. Then again, he did tend to fall back on a particular female template that he liked a

DRAW!: It’s also interesting because you’ll see a lot of modern cartoonists will have to draw something like a hat, or like a policeman’s hat..... Like, cops don’t really wear hats as much now, but in the old days, the policeman always wore his hat. So you’ll see a modern cartoonist often will draw something like a hat, a fedora, or draw a policeman wearing a hat, and it’ll look really bad. It seems that the comics that you and I grew up on, which were the ‘60s and ‘70s comics, those artists were trained at a level where they really had to be able to draw anything. A horse, a dog, a boat, people wearing clothes. It wasn’t all guys with skintight costumes punching each other. They drew a lot more variety of material.

DRAW!: Right, right. And now everybody’s sort of trained... In some cases they’re severely trained to basically be able to do, and can only do, one kind of drawing, one kind of figure, one kind of approach, and you ask them to draw something else.... But when I look at your work, I can see that you have that discipline. And I can also imagine, being a bodybuilder, that makes you physically aware of your body in a way that maybe some people aren’t. And I always say that to my students that are animators that in order to really be able to convincingly throw a body around and draw dynamic poses, you have to be physically aware of the meat of your own body, can you feel that pose in your body. So I’m looking at your

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DM: Like magazine illustration or something. They’re multi-purpose artists.

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DOUG MAHNKE

PREVIOUS PAGE: Page from The Decapitator. RIGHT: Doug Mahnke performing a 153-kg (337 lbs.) clean-and-jerk.

great deal, there’s no doubt about that. But, yeah, he could draw an old man, he could draw a young man, and he could draw a guy who was a super-hero, but not using the conventions that the comic book used. DRAW!: Right. I take it he was one of your major influences? DM: Yeah. When I was buying comics, I picked up all of the Warren stuff that Corben did, because I was fascinated, especially by his color. The more you learn about Corben and color, the more you learn to appreciate what he was doing, because he was such a groundbreaking artist then. I mean, nobody... DRAW!: Nobody was doing Maxfield Parrish. DM: ...had done or had to do what Corben did. DRAW!: Right. All those overlays by hand and everything, which is just amazing. DM: Oh, yeah. I mean, it’s amazing what he got out of it, and you’ve got to think that some of it, the tremendous knowledge, but he had to be lucky here and there, too, but some of that luck ended up becoming really cool stuff, color-wise. And his use of lights and darks, his shading and his bounce light, the fact that he used it at all in a very real way is what especially attracted me to his work. And plus, the way he would often do action, it was implied offscreen action. Like, I loved when he would do vertical panels where you would just see parts, or see what’s happening by filling in the blanks in your mind as a character is being kicked off-panel, or just parts of his body were here and there, he was a real master at capturing action without showing you everything. DRAW!: I also felt, especially with things like “Den,” the stuff was cinematic in a way that a lot of other comics.... Well, people always throw that term around a lot in comics, cinema, things like that, but when I compare a person like Steranko, who people always say his work is very cinematic, I look at it more as graphic design, and less as cinema. Whereas I look at somebody like Corben, it’s much more about the cutting and about the composing. And like you said, also what’s happening in between the panels, whereas Steranko’s storytelling was much more about the dynamics of the graphic design on the page. I always loved Corben’s stuff, he was one of my favorites. And his stuff still to this day is very—nobody does stuff like that. I loved that

story that he and John [Arcudi] did with the Spectre. That was one of my favorite little comic stories from the last, I don’t know, 10, 15 years or so. I just thought it would be great to see him draw the Spectre, and I thought that John wrote a really awesome story for that, too. I thought he had a great take on the character. So who else besides, I take it Frazetta? DM: Yeah, if you list the two that really captured my imagination, Frazetta obviously was the other.... And I can’t even say how guys like Frazetta had an influence, because they’re so fantastic in what they did, but it somehow has played out in my mind somewhere. I mean, that was definitely something that got my imagination, and I admired him deeply. Whether or not I ever tried to do anything Frazetta-like, I don’t know. That would be fantastic if I ever succeeded. DRAW!: Well, he’s one of those guys where he’s such a super artist it’s like an atomic explosion. Even if you’re not standing there, you’re still being affected by the way, the ripple, the radiation, because he affected everybody else. DM: Yes. All the way from his sequential storytelling to his painting, the guy was great. And there’s, it’s pretty hard to find a chink in his armor. His composition, his use of color. His paintings were extraordinary, and yet his pen and brush drawings, whatever he used, were also great stuff. Imagination. He could draw guys.... I mean, that’s something, if you took both Corben and Frazetta, and you said what stands apart from what they’re doing; it really is their sense of the figure, and the drama that they can pull out of something, or the mood. DRAW!: Right, right. Both were really good at setting a scene and setting a sense of that tension. When somebody is punching someone, you could really see that they were very well aware of the tension within the.... Often people in comics draw everybody’s muscles like they’re all in relief at the same time, but that’s not how the body works. If you’re punching, your arms are more in tension than maybe the other side of your body, or maybe your stomach is contorting because you’re twisting or something; they were very aware of that in their drawings. You can see that in their drawings. DM: And they’re so very different from each other, too, at the same time. They really stand out as unique islands unto themselves. DRAW! • SUMMER 2007

DOUG MAHNKE

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DRAW!: So who else was influencing you when you were coming up? DM: Mike Ploog, especially when he was doing “Man-Thing,” that was some cool stuff. I remember that a lot. How he would do his lighting and his bounce light, all that really struck me, as well as just the really cool way that he handled the page, and some of his gangly figures. DRAW!: So were you more into sci-fi or fantasy art as opposed to super-hero stuff? DM: No, actually, not at all. It’s just that, between Corben and these people we listed.... No, I got into comics as a big SpiderMan fan. I collected Spider-Man for years, and Hulk, and Thor. You know, all that stuff. I was mostly a Marvel kid. I didn’t really even look at the DC books. If it had a cape, I usually ignored it. It’s kind of funny I ended up where I am. Let’s see, who else did I end up admiring? Of course Barry Windsor-Smith, I always loved what he did. You find guys that do stuff, guys like him were doing things that no one else was doing. Barry Windsor-Smith started out conventional, and all of a sudden he was this totally different artist. Who else? Paul Gulacy. Paul Gulacy doing Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu. That was the pinna-

cle of it, because I was a huge Bruce Lee fan, and mourned the day that I discovered he was dead. I’d just found this new hero of mine in the world, and this guy was drawing, essentially, in my opinion, Bruce Lee playing Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu. And all of his lighting and the way that he would position Shang-Chi. And let’s face it, Gulacy was borrowing an awful lot from stills and stuff that he probably had on hand to do Master of Kung Fu. And Master of Kung Fu without Gulacy was not the same for me. As long as it was being played by Bruce Lee, I really liked it. And everybody else who was working back then. Captain Marvel, Starlin doing that. That was always fun to look at. The fact that he would draw so much little intricate debris was always kind of fascinating. I read the Hulk and enjoyed the work of Herb Trimpe as well. DRAW!: So I imagine when Heavy Metal came around in 1977 and you saw that, I guess you probably then also got into Moebius and guys like that? DM: Yeah. You know, I always grabbed stuff that had a lot of interesting ink work in it, and of course Moebius’ stuff would knock anyone who just normally read comics.... I can’t remember what the magazine was, but it must have been Heavy Metal, the first thing I saw of Moebius was “The Horny Goof.” I don’t know if you’ve ever read that. DRAW!: Mm-hm, and I actually have the original graphic novel. Yeah, if that’s your introduction to his stuff, I mean, it’s very different than, like, The Airtight Garage or something. It’s actually sort of like him almost doing Robert Crumb or something.

DM: It was funny as hell to me, I can tell you that much, let alone that I was fascinated at some very cool artwork. You know, you just keep weeding through and finding stuff that’s interesting and catches your eye. Of course, comics through the eyes of a comics professional, or an artist of any type are very different than comic books that a fan might look at. I’m not going to place fans in any particular category, because they all like where they do. But I think visual literacy is a totally different thing, what a fan has as opposed to an artist. We can look at art and appreciate it from a variety of angles. I am in awe of guys like Jordi Bernet, for instance. His art is amazing, but might go unappreciated by the guy who just likes big muscles rippling through tights. DRAW!: Well, it’s funny, I’ll read something on a message board or something, and you’re right, because a fan will like Superman because he likes Superman. I only liked Superman, after I was a little kid, if I liked the artist who drew Superman. If it was an artist I was never particularly interested.... Like, there’s many issues of comics that somebody will say, “Oh, Alan Moore wrote that story,” or, “This guy wrote that story,” if I don’t

LEFT: Early Mahnke work. NEXT PAGE: Another page from Stormwatch.

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DOUG MAHNKE

of comic. It wasn’t fantastic. It was a well drawn, enjoyable comic, but it didn’t have the spark that it had when Kirby was working with Lee and they were constantly coming up with those new concepts. Then it really became a book where we have Galactus come back and try to eat the Earth for the twentieth time. Maybe part of that is the fact that, at least with super-hero comics now, there’s that thing that they exist in continuity, where you’re having to try to justify stories that happened in 1963 with stuff that happened in 2003, and wait a minute, they were talking to the Monkees here, or President Nixon here. But wait a minute, we’ve got President Carter, but the guy hasn’t aged more than five years. Today as a professional working, I find that to be like a big yoke to have around your neck, because you’re not as free to do stuff now. Everything has to dovetail into this other thing that dovetails into this other thing. I’m sure that’s why working on something like Frankenstein was, “Hey, I can do anything I want, draw some cool, crazy stuff.” It doesn’t have to be, “Wow, you can’t draw that guy because so-and-so’s doing that character now.” DM: Nope, it was pretty much “Just have fun.” DRAW!: I have to say that, while I loved the art on it, I had a hard time reading the story on that. The story wasn’t... it didn’t gel in my head. But I take it there are no more plans for those characters right now?

like the art, I couldn’t care less. I’m only interested in it, really, for the art. If you have a good story to go with the art, great. But I can just look at really good art with a dumb story and still enjoy the beautiful artwork, but if the artwork is horrible or not to my taste, I’m like, why bother? I wouldn’t buy every issue of the Fantastic Four just because I’m a collector and I have to have every issue of the Fantastic Four. DM: No, I’m in your exact same camp. And I’m sure that there are plenty of artists out there who are... well, maybe I’m wrong, who are extreme fans of something and will pick it up just because it’s that person that they love or grew up reading. Well, that’s why I used Gulacy doing Shang-Chi. That was perfect, to me. It really was just the right thing, and I could get into it and love it for what it was. But you change the art chores, and if I can’t get into the art, forget it. My entire interest wanes, and all that’s left is the fact that, yeah, Shang-Chi is still that character, the same one. He hasn’t really done anything, in my mind, since Gulacy was dealing with it. DRAW!: Yeah, well, I guess for me and the Fantastic Four, it stopped being the Fantastic Four essentially when Kirby stopped working on the book. And I still enjoy the issues that Buscema did because I enjoy his art, but it was definitely a different type

DM: No, to tell you the truth, I have no idea. I know that something was supposed to, at some point, have spun out of that Seven Soldiers series. It doesn’t look like, to my knowledge, it is Frankenstein. But drawing Frankenstein and all of his pointless adventures, even though within Seven Soldiers it actually had a point, for me there was no point. I didn’t have to do any continuity work. It was, like we said, just fun. So I don’t know what they’re going to do. That remains to be seen. I’m sure something must be happening, but it would have to involve Morrison and whether or not he wants to stick around and do any of the stuff that he’s been involved in there. DRAW!: I just think it’s sort of a shame that, again, the business is so limited from the standpoint that you can’t really have monster books or horror books, or if you have horror books, now it’s zombies, so it’s only a matter of time now before zombies aren’t cool anymore because everybody does zombies. But everything was so—it’s not general audience. I think a book like Frankenstein probably would have been very successful, say, in the ‘70s. Knowing they had magazines for people who like cartoons, people who like cars, people who like monsters, people who like war books, or whatever. Now we really don’t have that. You basically have people who like X-Men and manga. That’s what we’re sort of left with: X-Men or manga. DM: Well, we could use a Renaissance, I guess, huh? DRAW!: Yeah. So what are you working on right now? You’re done with... DM: I’m done with Stormwatch. 29

CONTINUED ON PAGE 74

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WELCOME TO THE

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

JAMAR NICHOLAS: A lot of my interviews are about trying to really get into the artists’ head, and since I’m an artist, too, a lot of it’s just process junkie type stuff, the things only we would care about asking, like how do you hold a pen versus...?

From comics and animation to Lucasfilm, Pixar to video games, Steve Purcell has worn many hats and used many different palettes, digital and traditional, in his career. DRAW!’s Jamar Nicolas conducted this interview with the busy, multi-medium artist just on the cusp of the new hit game release based on his Sam & Max characters.

STEVE PURCELL: Those are kind of hard questions sometimes, because you don’t normally have to think about the way you do that stuff.

DRAW! • SUMMER 2007

JN: Right, right. Are you that type of person? Do you devour up other people’s working styles, or do you just kind of do your own thing? SP: Not at all, I tend to always try to reinvent the wheel. I’m kind of stubborn that way. I don’t like to ask for help. It’s good for me when I do, but I like to try to sort things out on my own.

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STEVE PURCELL

JN: Do you keep a network of people around you, or are you the solitary artist? SP: I like to make my mistakes in private, so working in a collaborative environment at an animation studio means you end up having to show stuff before you want to sometimes. But it’s good for me to have people looking over my shoulder from time to time. At home I’ll show projects to my wife, Collette, but only if I want to get feedback because she’ll give it. JN: I’m sure you have a studio at home, too, right? SP: Yeah, I do. JN: How much does that differ from your work environment? SP: Physically not too much. My studio is full of a bunch of crap that’s all around me. I have lots of artPREVIOUS: Concept art for the Sam & Max TV show. work hanging up, I’m surrounded by toys, books and ABOVE: Steve at age 5 in Magnolia, Massachusetts. musical instruments. I keep a really messy desk. I have things right in front of me where I work, and I kind of JN: Yeah, that’s true on a couple of levels. I always forget who have to shove things out of the way. And my office desk is pretty said this quote, and it’s probably somebody who’s still alive, but much the same. Somehow things just pile around me, and I’m they said, “When you work at home, you’re always at work.” always digging through the strata, the layers of junk to find what I need. SP: That’s true. That’s true. Whenever I was doing freelance, which is most of my career, I spent about 20 years doing freeJN: I just started a new day job, and I’m finding that my worklance stuff, I always felt like I couldn’t get going until late in the space at home looks like a disaster area, but I keep my workday. I would end up working late into the night, and it would be, space at work really clean. I don’t know what that’s about. like, a twelve-hour work cycle, into about three in the morning or something like that. And I felt like I had to do a lot more SP: Is anybody looking over your shoulder ? hours at home because of distractions. I kind of like having a structure of knowing that my day is this many hours and whatevJN: It just, it kind of makes more sense at work to have a noner I can get done in that block of time is the work day, and then I chaotic space. But in the house, it all makes sense. can come home and kind of create another workday for my own stuff. SP: Once in a while I’ll take the time to go, “Okay, time to clean all this junk out.” I go through it all and I’ll actually manJN: Even if you have to walk a couple yards to home, still age to put it where it should go, but over time it always builds there’s that difference, right? up again. It’s like, right now my paint jars are all over my desk, I’ve got your magazine, I’ve got a lot of sketches and other stuff. SP: Yeah, I’ve known people where it’s worth it for them to rent Somehow that all ended up on my desk, and it hasn’t been a space in town just so they can leave the house, and they go to thrown away in about a year. this place and they feel like there’s structure, having to go someplace to work. JN: That’s awesome. I have very random things laying around my space, too. Now, let me ask you a question, since we’re talking about work areas and things like that, do you find that you spend more time creatively at work versus home, or vice versa?

JN: Do you find time to do a lot of commissions? Do you do a lot of commission work?

SP: Well, we built this studio at home. It took a lot of last year to do it, and it moved me out of the house, freeing up one of the bedrooms upstairs. Somehow having this little separate space that I have to walk twenty feet from the house to has been more productive as far as creating anything. This last year I’ve been able to do more paintings and things on the side than I have previously, and I don’t know what the difference is, really. It’s something about having a separate space. It feels more fertile for creating stuff than the old studio inside the house.

SP: Not so much private commissions, but I do a few illustrations from time to time. I did a Death Jr. cover for a trade paperback. It’s something that I normally don’t do, but they needed one in a hurry, and I like the character, and I like the creator, Mike Mika, and agreed to do it. And it was fun, because I don’t do a lot of that. And then I agreed to do the digital color, which I also haven’t done a lot of either, because I figured I’d take a stab at it to get better at doing it. I had an idea in my head to see the whole thing through. I always find a way to make the job more complicated for myself. There’s another guy, Jai Nitz, he DRAW! • SUMMER 2007

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ABOVE: Panorama view of Steve’s studio space. LEFT: Steve at work at the drawing board. BELOW: Ever wondered what was inside an artist’s desk drawer? Well, here’s a look into to Steve’s—you might even be able to find art supplies.

to go to that much trouble, why don’t you just do another painting?” At that time it was really great advice, and it’s something that I’ve thought about a lot, that if you’re going to keep reworking everything, you could have done three or four paintings for that amount of effort.

MEDIUMS JN: What are you working in these days? Now, I know you do a lot of gouache and things like that, don’t you? was doing a book for Image, and he asked me if I would do a cover for him. Okay, I’ll just do a quick painting, I thought, and I started to do this thing thinking I could do it in my character design style, which is really rough pencil with washes of color over it, but I didn’t like it. I started the whole thing over so that I could be satisfied with it. So the idea of a quick, shaggy cover disappeared. JN: Do you ever find yourself being in positions where you can’t give something away? Just like you said, you don’t think it’s good enough, so you keep messing with it and messing with it? SP: I have done that. I normally don’t do it so much anymore. I remember I had a teacher that I didn’t learn a lot from, but one thing I do remember learning is, whenever he would see somebody fussing over a painting too much, he’d say, “If you’re going

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SP: I used to. Actually, I started doing gouache for game covers early on when I was freelancing. I found out I could do those pretty fast, that I could do the painting in a couple of days, and the style that I was using was kind of painfully detailed. I was doing these little hatch lines instead of just blocking in tones. At some point I started experimenting with acrylics, and it took me a while, but it is more of a loose, washy acrylic style that I’m using now, where I kind of work detail into the more opaque part and let the washy stuff show through the darker areas. I started doing that at ILM when I was painting a lot of character designs for the feature development group and I would start with these really loose pencil sketches. I’d Xerox them onto Bristol board and build them up in washes and I really liked working that way. It seemed like I wasn’t having to be as painfully detailed as I was when I first started out painting. So that’s how I’ve been working lately and if there are structure lines that are

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ABOVE: Steve’s finished cover art for a Death Jr. trade paperback collection.

visible, they’re really choppy and kind of raw, which I like. JN: Right, right, you just keep adding onto it and don’t really worry about what’s underneath, yeah. SP: Yeah, I’ve enjoyed how those turn out, so most of the stuff that I’ve been doing in the past couple of years has been acrylic. JN: Now, back when you were doing some of your old Sam & Max stuff, and you were doing kind of the sidebar, was that gouache, too? SP: Yeah, those comic strips were mostly gouache. In that case I would use it pretty thin, like regular watercolor, and a couple of those were thin acrylic. I actually would draw and ink the whole strip like a regular comic page, and then I would go back into it and paint right on the original. I’m really pleased with how those turned out. I’m doing some color strips right now, kind of experimenting with painting those on Xerox copies on Bristol. I’ll do a loose pencil page, and then I’ll Xerox it onto Bristol board and then paint it in acrylic wash. Then chop in some of the opaques.

JN: Oh, okay. Are you adding any computer stuff to the way you set up the pages? I have a lot of friends who do the pencils on whatever type of paper, then they scan it, and scan it and print it out in bluelines. SP: It’s the same principle as that, just taking the pencil drawing and just copying it onto heavy paper. Sometimes I just take it to the copy place and copy it onto the Bristol. But you can’t put too many heavy blacks in the original because it’ll lift off if you get tape or anything on the page, so I kind of keep the page fairly minimal and then add all my blacks later with the paint. JN: What size do you work at normally for your illustration stuff vs. your comics stuff? SP: The comics that I did in the past were standard comic size, a 10” x 15” page. And the paintings that I’ve been doing lately are all a little smaller than that, 10” x 12” or something like that, so that I can put it on my desk. The webstrips are a 12” x12” square.

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JN: Oh, okay. I was going to ask you that, is there a reason why you do them at that size; so they’d fit in the scanner? SP: Sure, and I like working at that size because I know I can finish it in a timely manner. There’s less real estate to cover. JN: Oh, right, right. The bigger it is, the more unwieldy it seems. SP: I got it in my head at one point, “I’m going to do a painting a weekend,” I started doing these little paintings for myself of my Toy Box characters, a comic that I did years ago, and I did a few of them before I fell out of the habit. But it was nice because I’d see them through in a couple of evenings, and I was very pleased with the way they were turning out. In the past I’ve painted in oils, and there are a couple of covers I did for LucasArts Games, these three-foot-tall oil paintings. One was a pirate ghost, like a zombie pirate, and the other was this weird family that was meant to look like something out of the Disney Haunted Mansion ride.

JN: That’s great, but just trying to do things that big nowadays is not going to work for you, huh? SP: I have one in mind that I’d like to do, a big oil painting like that. Not quite as big as those others, but I would just like to get on it within a year. JN: It sounds like you’re really busy. How long have you been at Pixar? SP: I’ve been there for four years. JN: Has your schedule as far as freelancing changed a lot?

SP: Oh, yeah, Pixar always comes first, and then whatever I

find to do on the side I’ll do, and I just make it clear to whomever I’m working with that the Pixar stuff is priority. And that’s fine, and it just keeps everything in order, so nobody can expect anything more from me than I can deliver. JN: Now, has that added a lot of structure to your working schedule? SP: It does because there are milestones to hit constantly and a lot of other people depending on you daily to get your stuff done. Even though I’m working there and commute a long way every day, I’m still left with a lot of energy afterwards. I find that a lot of people that work at Pixar are fueled by their work and able to find room for their own outside projects. That seems to be more true there than working at other companies. JN: Or digging ditches. SP: Boy, that’s true. Hey, some people are digging holes in the street for a living, and here we are, drawing pictures.

TOP RIGHT: Portraits of Suda and the gang from Steve’s Toybox series. ABOVE: Suda and Ernie story sketch.

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JN: You won’t hear me complain. That’s good just to have a great motivation factor to keep you going, you know, so a lot of times you want to just come home and bum out on the couch all evening. CONTINUED ON PAGE 43

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with ovi nedelcu

Ovi Nedelcu’s Pigtale, a story about a talking pig published by Image, was one of the standout comics of this last year. What’s so big about a talking pig you might ask? Oh it’s just a comic filled with intrigue, charm and style—making his book quickly the talk of many of his new comic peers. This was also another case of an animation artist doing a comic, which seems to be a growing trend. A veteran of animation story development and character design, Nedelcu seemed to “pop” into comics out of nowhere. DRAW! magazine editor Mike Manley wanted to find out where Nedelcu came from and how he got so good...

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DRAW!: Why don’t you tell us a bit about your background, education, etc. Did you go to art school at all? OVI NEDELCU: Sure, I left high school in 1997 and went straight into art school at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. I was an Illustration major, but only managed to finish two years out of the four I was supposed to be there. Mostly because I got a job offer from WB Animation down in LA, but also because I just couldn’t afford to keep taking classes. My funds were just about empty and I had no job or other means to keep paying tuition with. So it kind of all worked out just in time, which was fine with me because I never went to art school for a diploma. I got what I needed and got out. Although I have to say there are one or two classes I wish I could have taken, but for the most part I’m happy with what I got. I have a big problem with paying $2000 for a “required” academic “career search” class. If you’re paying that much for school and you don’t know what you want to do for a living, you’re in trouble. The school recommended you take three art classes and three academic classes so that your workload wasn’t too overwhelming. But I think this is just another way to get you to take worthless expensive classes you can take at a community college

for a fraction of the price. But some art schools won’t let you transfer the credits. It’s an evil monopoly. I only took art classes while in school. I took six art classes every semester, for two years. I got what I needed, and left the expensive “required” classes behind. Wow, this interview is starting out on a good note. [laughs] Just making friends. DRAW!: Can you tell me a bit about how you broke into the animation business? What was it you were aiming for job/career wise? ON: Well, back when I was in art school and even before that I wanted to be a professional comic book artist/illustrator. I would always attend comic book conventions and show my portfolio to pros and editors trying to get advice and a job like every other 18-year-old aspiring artist. I continued to attend the shows through college and still do to this day. Although I loved animation and the art form, it was never something I saw myself doing or getting into. I just didn’t like drawing the same thing over and over to make it animate. After I got into the animation business I realized there where plenty of other things to do besides in-betweening.

RIGHT: Pink development art, pencil on paper.

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try and learn everything possible about the art form. I was like a sponge just taking it all in. I wasn’t good at it by any means, but I was getting better and was hungry to learn. After a while I felt I was up to speed. My perception about animation changed once I was in it. I always thought you had to be an in-betweener for like five years before you got to do anything else. I didn’t know you could just come in and be a story artist, character designer, a visual development artist and so on, which I really loved doing. Although my heart was and still is in sequential art—comics—I felt I had found a second home. I could design characters and do storyboards just like a comic book. It was great.

DRAW!: It’s that type of pooling of info and talent that places like Disney benefitted from. I think without that “think tank” type of atmosphere they would have never been ABOVE: Sketchbook art, pencil on paper. able to raise the craft so high. But for many BELOW: Character design for Cartoon Network’s artists it’s hard to supplant the ego, to learn Juniper Lee. Pencil on paper. from another artist. Sometimes we artists are too egocentric. It can ruin or lessen you I was in art school in San Francisco and happened to go to to have that type of personality, especially since animation is a the Wonder Con that year. One of my friends that went along collaborative medium. came up to me while I was waiting in a portfolio review line at DC’s booth and said that WB Animation was upstairs doing portfolio reviews. After my DC rejection I decided I might as well go show WB my work since I wasted nine bucks for admission. So I get up to the review room and there’s around 20 people waiting in line to get a review. And all I hear from the front of the line is “no, no, no, sorry, no,” and so on. At that point I felt I was wasting my time. Here I was trying to get comic book work while standing in an animation portfolio review line—with artists who actually wanted to work in animation—anticipating my rejection. So I get up to the review table and sitting there is Shawn McLaughlin [associate producer on Batman Adventures/Batman Beyond]. I show him my work and he quickly responded to it. He gave me his card and told me to call him. That’s pretty much how I got into animation. Couple weeks later Shawn sent me a test to see if I had the chops to work on Batman Beyond, and sure enough, I didn’t. Although they liked my test, it still wasn’t strong enough to do clean-up and character turns for the show. But what Shawn did do—which in my view was even better—was show my portfolio to the creative executives, who were developing five or six different shows for the upcoming season. I got a call from Linda Steiner and she asked if I was interested in moving down to LA to do some visual development for some of their projects. I was pretty excited and really didn’t believe it was happening until I was there in the studio. For the first month or so I didn’t even have an apartment, I would just sleep at the studio. After work I would study everything about animation and its history for hours and hours. Some nights I wouldn’t even sleep; it was like boot ©2007 CARTOON NETWORK. camp. I read all the books and asked a lot of stupid questions to DRAW! • SUMMER 2007

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ANIMATION LEFT: Pigtale digital pin-up art. BELOW: Juniper Lee character development art, pencil on paper & digital color.

apply directly to your comics work? Do you feel that working in film language, the cutting and editing has really influenced your comic work?

At this time were you still taking any life drawing classes or working heavily in sketchbooks, you know working out or practicing theories? ON: Yup. I’m always drawing in my sketchbook. I haven’t been life drawing as much lately but I still try and do it when I get the chance. But yeah, I’m always drawing in my sketchbooks, or now that I have a digital PC tablet, I draw on that also.

ON: Yeah definitely, a lot of people have commented on how the book felt cinematic when they read it, and I think it comes from working in animation and studying film. I don’t try to deliberately make it feel and pace like a film, it’s just the way I visualize and pace things in my head when writing and doing layouts. I think it started long before I ever got into animation, though. Back when I was in high school while I was studying comics, a friend of mine gave me a book called The Five C’s of Cinematography. I was blown away by all the great information in that book and I still reference it to this day. That and Will Eisner’s Comics and Sequential Art really shaped me into what I am today as far as any type of storytelling “language” goes. But yes, later when I got into college and in animation I got interested in all the different forms of film language and just visual language in general. DRAW!: What is your studio at home or work set up like? What type of computer do you use? Are you working more digitally?

DRAW!: So what do you do at Laika? ON: Right now I’m a story artist on Henry Selick’s next film, Coraline. I did some early production art/design work at the very beginning, but now I’m on full time as a story artist. Before that I did some character design and storyboards on Henry’s short film, Moongirl. The work being done on Coraline is absolutely amazing and I’m not just saying that because I’m working on it. Films like this only come around once in a while, and I’m glad to be a part of it. Working with Henry has been a great experience. People are going to be blown away when they see this film. ©2007 CARTOON NETWORK.

DRAW!: What would you say you learned from animation that you

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ANIMATION ON: My studio at my house is actually pretty sweet. It’s basically a living room turned into a studio space. When I bought my house here in Portland, that was one of the things I knew I wanted to have: a good studio space. I moved up to Portland from Pasadena, California, and I had the smallest studio space in that apartment I moved from. So, yeah, I was hell-bent on making sure I had enough room to work and store all my books and materials. Right now I’m using an HP workstation. It’s nothing fancy but it gets the work done. I use a flat LCD 20” Viewsonic screen and have a tablet I draw with. Eventually I

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want to get a Wacom Cintiq so I can draw directly on my screen like I do at Laika. It’s pretty sweet. At Laika I draw my storyboards digitally on the Cintiq, but at home I still draw my comics on paper. I’m not sure if I’ll ever switch over and do my comics digitally from start to finish but you never know. I still like paper. DRAW!: Okay, now it’s time to talk shop. What are your tools of choice, paper, pens, etc.?

BELOW: More Juniper Lee development art.

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ON: Well, I kind of just answered that, but, yeah, I like using paper to draw my comics with and use the computer to tone them digitally. I do my storyboards digitally because it’s really efficient and works well when you have to constantly change scenes and re-board stuff. The only downside to doing things digitally is that I’ll never be able to sell originals on eBay when I retire. [laughs] For pencils I use a pencil called Mirado Black Warrior. I like the texture of it as it hits the paper. Blends well, and erases well. I usually ink my work with a ballpoint pen, like Papermate or Bic. I love those things, and I always get a lot of crap from my friends about inking with them. Apparently they aren’t “professional.” I used to ink my work traditionally with a brush and crow quill and was actually pretty good at it, but it just died off after a while, not sure why. Another reason I like using ballpoint pens is that you can get the feel and look of a pencil but inked. It just has a nice tooth to it that I like. As far as paper goes, I use the super bright laser 8” x 11” Hammermill paper to sketch with and the 11” x 17” sheets to do my comic book pages on. In the end it doesn’t really matter what I use, those are just the materials I like to use when I feel like wasting my hard-earned money. [laughs] DRAW!: So how did Pigtale come about? And why Pigtale, was this something you had burning on the side you had to get out?

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ON: I’ll start with the latter. Comics have always been my passion from the beginning. It’s such a great medium because it allows you to create and produce your own stories the way you envision them from start to finish—that is, if you’re the sole creator/writer/artist. It’s a great medium that allows you to have your own personal voice and to express and tell the stories you would like to see and read. I mean, you can do the same with a short film, but the difference being a comic book is a lot cheaper to produce—although technology is allowing people to make short films much cheaper and faster, with a lot less overhead— and it’s a great feeling being able to actually hold a tangible piece of work in your hands. You create, write, draw, ink, paint it, etc., all by yourself. It’s like directing a film, but instead of having your film filtered through 300 other people, you do it all yourself. I’m always writing and creating new projects, it’s just something I’ve always done, as I’m sure a lot of other artists do. I never want to stagnate or get comfortable at my day job. The real work starts when I get home. Pigtale stemmed from another project I was developing at the time about three housewives that were married to incompetent detectives. The idea was that the housewives were actually super-heroes by night and housewives by day, and the wives would always end up saving their husbands from the mess they

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would get themselves in. Only to have the husbands later come home and brag about how good they were at their job by taking the credit of the super-heroes and creating a kind of false identity with the media. Anyway, there was a lot more to it, and I might end up doing that story one day. It’s in my vault of projects waiting for attention. I also had another idea about an intelligent talking pig which I always liked, so I thought, “Ok, drop the wives, stick to one detective and then drop a talking pig into the story!” All of a sudden things just started rolling and falling into place. I just wanted to simplify the story and make it a bit more interesting by adding some talking animals and have humans actually respond to talking animals the way humans really would. I always found it funny when the prince or princess would talk to animals and the animals would reply with perfect English and in the same period dialect from which they came. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but I just thought it would be interesting if there were a story about talking animals and have humans respond to that in a real way. What would that be like? And so, the birth of Pigtale. DRAW!: Wow, that’s a really cool and interesting take. I guess I never thought of that about the animals talking, but yeah, they always talk with an English accent, etc. I bet you could have

LEFT AND ABOVE: Pencils and digital tone for a Pigtale splash page.

some interesting conversations with a creature you usually thought of as dinner or a snack. ON: Yeah, exactly. You’re out on the deck talking to an intelligent talking pig about the meaning of life and just then your uncle walks up with a plate full of baby-back ribs. DRAW!: So did you write out all four issues first, from start to finish? ON: Yeah pretty much. I wrote the basic premise and outline for the entire story arc and then went back in and wrote the first four issues in a script format. From there I went ahead and started my page layouts. DRAW!: How do you go about breaking down the work? ON: Well, after I finish writing the script I’ll go ahead and start doing little thumbnail page layouts. Sometimes I will storyboard scenes the way I would on a film and then go back in and reshape the panel frame to fit into a page layout. It’s a give and take and it’s never a perfect system. Different scenes DRAW! • SUMMER 2007

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DRAW!: So you are almost working with “beats” or “timing out” the pacing this way. I suppose this goes back to the whole film language thing. I noticed that many animators who do comics also work in a similar way. Guys like Bruce Timm work smaller and also on bond paper, using mostly markers.

ON: Um, well yeah, I kind of just beat out the story events, then I go back and rework the panel shapes and sizes to match the pacing and intensity of the shot/action. Its not necessarily “film language” as much as it just a visual language. Both film and comics use it, and almost all other visual art forms. DRAW!: What are the good things you’ve learned as an artist who’s basically self-publishing, and what advice would you pass on to artists reading this interview? ON: What have I learned? Don’t self-publish. Ha, no that’s a joke. There really is no better way to learn the business you want to be in then by jumping in head first. By that I mean if I were to have my books published by a publisher that pampered me and did everything for me then I wouldn’t have learned some important lessons that I have. Not that the publisher I’m with now doesn’t do their part, but they leave it open for the artist to make sure the work is promoted not just in Previews but outside the comic catalogs. Like going out and being a sales person to try and get bookstores and independent mom-&-pop shops to pick up the book. Sending out fliers and e-mails, posting on blogs and forums to try and get the word out that you and your work exist. You can have the best product in the world but if no one knows about it than it’s kind of a lost cause, I think. Not that I think we should all just be about selling product, but let’s face it, this is a business and you have to find that balance between being a pure artist and having good professional business practices. So I guess the biggest thing I learned is that if you want something to get done you have to do it yourself and always look out for yourself and not rely on others all the time. I feel this can only be a good thing, even if you are being taken care of from a big-time publisher or studio. What advice would I give? Well I guess I just gave it. Always look out for yourself and make sure you don’t rely on others to do things for you. If all you want is to be employed by a studio and just fit into the system then that’s fine, but if you want to get ahead and make a name for yourself then you really DRAW! • SUMMER 2007

require different methods of work. After that I’ll blow up the thumbnails to actual art size and start doing tight pencils while reworking layouts, moving things here and there that don’t work or work better a different way. It would be the equivalent of putting the reel up in editing and cutting things here and there to make it work better. Finally I go back in and ink the page and then send it to the scanner to be toned and lettered digitally in the computer. On a good day I can get two to three pages fully completed from start to finish. Granted I have a finished script to work from. When I’m doing layouts I try and work quick to not lose the feeling and tone of the scene I’m boarding. I work really loose and try not to get tied down doing details. The idea is to get the pace and feeling across and if I slow down to make a pretty drawing, I’ll lose the essence of what I’m trying to capture. Some of my layouts are pretty rough and even I have trouble deciphering them sometimes. To me one of the most important things when it comes to pacing and page layout is making sure the panel size matches the pace and speed of the scene or action. Knowing when and why you are using a certain panel size is really important to getting a nice flow in the telling.

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PREVIOUS PAGE: Cover to Pigtale #1 and development art for Gumball Seeds—pencil on paper and digital color. THIS PAGE: Big Wheels development art. Pencil on paper, with marker and color pencil.

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ABOVE: Inima character development art, pencil on paper with marker and color pencil. BELOW: Cover art for Pigtale #4, pencil on paper with digital color.

have to make a name for yourself. No one will do that for you, except maybe your agent if you are paying them a nice percentage. [laughs] I know that might not be a sexy answer, but it’s the truth and just how things work.

ON: Growing up I was and still am a huge Will Eisner fan. Also the masters: John Buscema, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, etc. Later I got more and more into illustrators like J.C. Leyendecker, Norman Rockwell, Oliver Hurst, etc., and finally a lot of animation artists like “the Nine Old Men,” Tom Oreb, Provensens, Mary Blair, Bill Peet, and of course modern artists like Nico Marlet, Craig Kellman, Joe Moshier, Tony Fucile, etc., etc., the list goes on so long. Now I’m just kind of open to everything from fashion to fine art and everything in-between. Its all a matter of what gets me inspired and excited. DRAW!: With Pigtale done, do you have any other projects on the horizon for the comic format? ON: Yeah, for sure. I will always be in the publishing industry, God willing. I have three or four projects I’m developing right now that I want to release as either original Graphic Novels or children’s books. The future is really exciting and I’m looking forward all the time. 44

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DRAW!: Who are your main influences now and growing up and how do you go about growing as an artist, staying inspired?

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LEFT: Steve at Lucasfilm Games with his Maniac Mansion painting. BELOW: “Pigeon”—an acrylic painting from Steve’s personal work.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 32

SP: Yeah, you don’t want to be doing too much of the same thing. Like, I’m trying to do some comic work right now, but if I were to try to make my living doing comic work, I think it would take some of the wind out of it, because when I was doing straight comics for a living it was really a struggle. It seems like the people I know having the most fun doing comics right now are people who are doing it as a hobby, because they do what they want and it doesn’t matter if it sells or not.

ANIMATION AND STYLE

SP: I wouldn’t say a lot. Most of the animation that I did was doing game animation for LucasArts. I worked for Colossal Pictures in San Francisco at one point, and I actually got that job because they were teaching animation to illustrators in the area so that they could call them to do freelance animation jobs. So I took a class there and learned how to do screen animation, but ended up just doing character design and storyboard stuff for them. I jumped straight from there to LucasArts and was animating game characters, which were really primitive. It wasn’t anything like 3-D animation. DRAW! • SUMMER 2007

JN: Now, you have a pretty vast background as far as your artistic stuff. You have a lot of animation in your background, too.

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ABOVE: Acrylic paintings of the Toybox characters. LEFT: Sam & Max character concept.

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JN: Now, don’t you believe that your style has changed a lot from just doing those type of projects? SP: Yeah!

JN: That loose, sketchy style, things like that. SP: I think that I would always kind of adapt myself to whatever I was doing, and I think that there can be a downside to that because you end up maybe not developing a style. I think if I have a style, it came out in some of the illustrations I was doing for the LucasArts packaging, and doing my own comic; that’s where my own personality starts coming out, and I think that’s the best stuff that I did, when I did my own comics and when I was illustrating humorous stuff or whatever—things that were close to what I

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was interested in. When I did my first published Sam & Max comic, I didn’t really think about what the style of my comic was, and I was going, “Oh. I’ve always kind of dashed this stuff off, and now I’m going to actually spend some time and do this as a comic. I wonder what this should look like as a comic?” I had to sit down at the time and think about what it was going to be drawn like, the inking style and stuff. It was an interesting dilemma to find myself in, “Oh, I’ve been kind of drawing this stuff for a long time, but I’ve never really laid down a style for it.”

JN: Now, when you started doing the Sam & Max comics, did you see yourself grabbing a couple of existing comics and figuring out how you wanted to approach it, or did it just come all out of your head?

ABOVE: Character concept art. You can’t go wrong with lady pirates as a concept! LEFT: “Carol”—an acrylic painting from Steve’s personal work.

SP: I guess I didn’t really base the style of the comic itself on anything specific, but when I was a kid it was always Mad magazine that I was influenced by, so when I was designing the cover of the first comic, I drew the logo of Sam & Max looking like the Mad comics logo at the top. I think that influence kind of showed up within it, but I didn’t really have any comics beside me to guide me through the process. I was just doing what I thought was entertaining. I set myself the challenge of trying to make myself laugh once per page. I don’t laugh at anything, so that was kind of a big job.

INKING

JN: I was looking through a lot of your Sam & Max stuff, I love how crisp your inking is. Now, are you still using crow quills for a lot of your work or are you switching that up nowadays? SP: The last time I did a Sam & Max comic, it was actually inked with a ballpoint marker. I would go through and I would actually ink the line weight. The reason comics take me so long is because I actually draw the width of the line and fill it in, so it’s like this crisp brush line, but it’s actually a painfully rendered pen line. So I’m DRAW! • SUMMER 2007

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kind of experimenting now to see if I can do a comic with my sketching style, and I’m liking the look of it. I’m painting on top of my sketches, and it’s looking really spontaneous, and I’m going to try that and see what people think of that, because it’s very different looking. It has this kind of energy that maybe my inking doesn’t necessarily have. JN: Wow, that sounds interesting. I’ve been experimenting, myself, with maybe doing a comic book on nothing but paper bags. SP: I was working on brown paper when I used to do figure drawings in school. I loved working on that with, like, a little bit of white chalk on the figures. JN: Ah, yeah, that’s great. Those mid-tones, they just pop at you. SP: People are always, like, fussing about acid-free paper and stuff, “You’re drawing on butcher paper? You need to make sure this doesn’t rot,” but tons of drawings that I did on newsprint in high school are still around, even though they don’t deserve to be. I like working with junk materials from time time to time and if those works don’t survive beyond me I’ll never know.

JN: So getting back to that whole technology thing, are you archiving any of your work on the computer? Are you hands-off with computers? SP: I have computers around. I use them to write, and my wife uses her Mac to do graphic design and my stuff gets scanned and manipulated on her computer. I’ve got some of it on disc, but until recently there’s been no really good, concerted effort to archive all that stuff. I’ve got flat files in my office, and all the work I care about is in those. And there are copies of most everything I’ve done somewhere, so it’s not really a very organized way of archiving it. But lately everything I paint I scan at 600 DPI just for the record.

PREVIOUS PAGE: “Black Tree 400”—another of Steve’s acrylic paintings. ABOVE: Concept art from Sam & Max. The ship’s design is based off a DeSoto. LEFT: This acrylic painting of Sam & Max was done for a limited edition print.

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STEVE PURCELL

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JN: I was going to ask you when we were talking about office things before, what’s your theory on file cabinets? Do they work, or are they just a graveyard for paper?

I like the thumbnail and the idea, and the rough sketched for the first time on the side of a panel layout, so I guess I keep that kind of an informal sketchbook from time to time.

SP: Well...yeah, they can be. I try to go through and sift stuff out sometimes, and usually what I throw out is what I can’t stand looking at anymore. I’ll keep things as long as I can, because I feel like anything that’s an original drawing should be saved, but then I go through the stuff, I go, “Oh, look at that, I would never show that to anybody.” So there’s a practical use for file cabinets, but you have to purge from time to time.

JN: When I was in high school—I went to a creative arts high school—they beat it into us to keep a hardback sketchbook, so now that’s all I can use.

JN: Yeah, that’s one of my problems, I put it in there, give it a couple last rites, and I’m done with it. I never see it again. SP: I have a lot of concept stuff that I did for games, and it’s not like I would ever show it to somebody, but I look at it and I go, “I spent a lot of time on that drawing. I’m not going to throw it away yet.” Even though it’s not something I would ever want in a book or put in a portfolio or anything. It’s just taking up room, and at some point I’ll have to purge it. JN: Do you ever go back to old designs and reuse them for things? SP: Well, yeah. Especially in the comics file, there are ideas where I’ll just randomly write what I think is a funny line for a Sam & Max moment. It’s amazing how much of that stuff hasn’t gotten used and still has a place somewhere. Like just a jotted down catch phrase or something will remind me of an idea for a gag I had a long time ago. JN: Do you keep a sketchbook?

SP: Oh, I was visiting the Art Academy in San Francisco while I was working at LucasArts, and there was one professor, Barron Story, and he was the one that promoted the sketchbook. He would have students pasting things in the books, sketches and photos and poetry and they were really cool art pieces. And we would receive a lot of those sketchbooks at LucasArts as portfolio submissions. I remember one time this staff artist was lamenting, “We keep getting all these sketchbooks with guys’ paintings of their naked mother. Doesn’t anybody want to draw monsters anymore?” JN: [laughs] I think they beat it out of you. They beat all types of imagination out of you. You can draw a lot of apples and cantaloupes. SP: Yeah, they’re amazing sketchbooks, but very serious. Very much still lifes and café sketches and things. JN: I just like to doodle. I’m a doodler, and I’ll just attack something. SP: I want to do a sketchbook of just heads because I like to do these random drawings of, like, devil heads, Frankenstein heads, and gorilla heads. JN: We all have one thing we draw all the time, for some reason.

JN: That’s interesting, too, that there’s kind of an emotion that comes to just an object. You know, like you said, just having the bound sketchbook, it almost gives you this feeling of dread. “I don’t want to draw in that. I gotta draw in something else.” SP: Something with a spiral in it releases me from the pressure of worrying about what’s in it, because I can tear out the drawings I don’t like and it doesn’t make a mess out of the book. I still have spiral sketchpads from my old comics stuff that I’ve kept because PREVIOUS PAGE (CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT): “Bud Luckey”—personal acrylic painting. “Uncle Blue”—personal acrylic painting. “I Hunger”—personal acrylic painting. “Humpty”— personal acrylic painting. RIGHT: For New Year’s of 2006, Steve drew up this festive Sam & Max illustration as a greeting for his website.

SP: I don’t ever keep an official bound book, because I get intimidated by having a binding. I just don’t draw in it because I don’t want to mess it up, because I feel like, oh, it’s got a binding, so this has to be an important drawing. I keep ringed, spiral sketchbooks just so I have paper to draw, like if I go on a trip or something, but it’s not like I keep them together. If I like the drawing, I’ll tear it out and put it in the drawer. Most of my sketches are done on random pieces of paper and just collected in a pile. So I wouldn’t call it a sketchbook, but I guess I do sketch quite a bit.

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SP: I have tons of drawings of those things. I just want to put them in a grid format or something and publish a sketchbook. JN: Have you thought a lot about putting out just a sketchbook? SP: I actually gave myself this task to put one together, and I have some friends that want to publish it for me. And I thought, everybody has a sketchbook. I go to the San Diego Comic-Con and there’s fifty million sketchbooks, and I kind of gave myself this insurmountable task of trying to do a narrative sketchbook. So I’ve got a little half-assed story that runs through it that connects all the sketches in it in a story using some of my other characters. So that’s about half done and in progress, and I have to finish drawing all the new stuff, where if I were smart, I would have just gone ahead and taken a pile of sketches and put them in a book. It would have been out three years ago. JN: I’ve been trying to put a sketchbook together for two or three years, myself. I keep getting these deadlines and blowing them. I totally know what you’re talking about. I know you’ve been working on the Telltale web comics. How’s that going for you? SP: It’s really fun. They’re always having to call me and pester me for it. Now they have a new guy there, Jake Rodkin, he did the Sam & Max Unofficial site and is a talented graphic designer and he’s been given the task of bugging me for my next web strip. I think he’s actually given up asking. But it’s been really fun to have an excuse to come up with the work, though I don’t update it nearly enough, but it’s nice to take the time and paint something, and then we’re doing this kind of flash trick where you mouse over the panel to get the dialogue, which I like. That’s gives me an excuse to do comics. And I’m also experimenting with a serialized form, which is fun to float out little story clues for the future and have to resolve them later. JN: Are you staying one step ahead of yourself? Are you sur-

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ABOVE AND RIGHT: Sketches for Toybox.

prising yourself when you get back to it? SP: Yeah, I wrote a storyline and it has markers that I want to get to, but I’ve totally already gone off the rails, and I get in there and find other things I want to play with, like in a recent episode a cockroach neurosurgeon shows up at the windowsill and Sam is in a coma and his CAT scan shows eggs growing on the base of his brain. The neurosurgeon is about to intervene just because I got the idea into my head that I wanted to draw this cockroach racing through Sam’s brain with a flamethrower. JN: I’ve been reading some of those. I’ve been catching up. And it’s funny, because I let it go for a second, and then I went back to it, and I was just looking at the strip going, “Okay, now, where’s the...? Oh, that’s right, I have to mouse over it.” SP: That’s right. Yeah. We have to remind people because there are no instructions on there. I’ve sent the link to some friends of mine and they send me back e-mails saying, “Oh, that’s nice,” and I’m thinking, “Oh, they probably forgot to mouse over it and they think I’m just painting these incomprehensible pictures.” JN: I’m really enjoying them. How long do those usually take you to put together?

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SP: Since I’m not inking the artwork, I’m drawing it and painting directly onto the drawings, then I kind of punch up the outlines with Prismacolor pencils, and it’s a lot faster than if I had to ink anything. All the Lucas strips that I did were totally inked strips, and then I would put the color in.

more to it. And also, having looked at other web comics, I think that’s how I arrived at the square format. Like, sometimes when a regular comic page format is used, it kind of feels too big for the screen I’m looking at. So I like being able to see it all in one page and not having to scroll down to get the last panel.

JN: With the Telltale stuff, is this also supposed to coincide with the new PC game that’s coming out, or are you doing that?

JN: That’s a big roadblock on a lot of web artists to deal with, what’s the most comfortable way to read this. Have you ever heard of Infinite Canvas? That’s a web comic that’s done by Scott McCloud, who tried to use the web as just an ongoing canvas to do the strips on. So instead of being a six-panel grid or something, you can keep moving the slider all the way across the page for, like, two minutes. Or you can go vertically or...

SP: The storylines are meant to intersect, but mostly the goal is to keep the characters alive while people are waiting for the episodes to show up. And what’s cool about the Telltale stuff is that the fans don’t have to wait that long because these things are on such a short cycle. And it was just the idea of, “Here are the characters, let’s start seeing what they’re up to right away and not have to wait for the game.” The game quickly got ahead of the strip though, which is fine with me. JN: Was this your first foray into the web comics or doing things on the web? SP: It definitely is. I’ve got a web page, but I haven’t taken the time to put any content there, so it’s kind of cool to have Telltale as a way of exploring that. And I’ve definitely never done a web strip before, and I like the idea of using the Flash for the word balloons, because it creates a sense of interactivity and something that you wouldn’t get just having it in a comic book, and getting a look at the artwork without any word balloons on it, so that’s cool. JN: Were you researching web comics at all before you decided to do it like that? SP: I looked around to see what other people were doing. I got the idea for the mouse over thing from Graham Annable, who is doing the other Telltale strip, Dank. It’s about a caveman, and Graham has done a very simple, elegant thing, which is that because cavemen speak in caveman language, when you mouse over the balloons, you get their translations.

SP: That kind of drives me crazy. I haven’t seen his but I shy away from web pages where I’m having to scroll and not know where I’m going to end up, I feel like I’m in this void, and I want more of a tent pole in the ground. I like having a point of reference, if I’m going to go to a new page or open a new page, because if I’m scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, I think there’s something wrong with my browser. JN: How do you feel these days about comics in general; not as far as enjoying them, but would you get back into publishing comics? SP: Part of the reason I’m painting these web strips is I’m looking forward to hopefully collecting them all in a little book, the box that I’ve kind of designed myself into is that I’m using so much dialogue that I’m filling up all the art space with dialogue. And so I’m thinking if I put these in print is to maybe stretch the pages out, and kind of break them, like one page could be two or three. I would find ways to expand on certain moments and space out the dialogue so I’m not covering up all the artwork. And you would be getting some extra material in the printed version. What’s kind of cool about what’s going on

SP: Yeah. It’s simple and it wasn’t intrusive. Because I don’t like web comics where you have to wait for the whole frame to load, or you have to go to a new page for the next frame, or wait for music and things like that. I think all that is more than I’m interested in doing, but I like that there’s just a little bit of something you have to do, because when I look at web comics that are basically a comic page, I kind of wish there was something RIGHT: A Sam & Max web strip freshly painted.

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JN: That’s pretty brilliant, actually.

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in comics now is people are doing all different formats. There’s not any standard. I mean, there still is for all the mainstream stuff, but the people that are doing their own books, they’ll do little digest-sized ones, or tiny little square books, or somebody will do a painted book. Scott Morse did a great little book about Maurice Noble, and it’s done on that kind of board book format, like the kind of books you buy for little babies to chew on. JN: Right, right, like the Golden books. SP: They’re thick boards that are varnished and it’s really sturdy, but it’s an adult story told on that.

JN: That’s cool. Yeah, I like Scott’s stuff. So you don’t find any issues with going back into the comic shops? There’s a lot of people who tread really lightly if they’re going into the comic stores again. SP: I’ll go in from time to time. There’s a good shop down near Pixar that I go to, Dr. Comics and Mr. Games. There was a nice shop in my town, I used to walk by there every weekend to see what’s going on and check out the toys and buy the Comics Journal and stuff until they were pushed out and replaced with a smoothie shop. JN: It’s just real intriguing about how comics are going. A lot of people are deciding to just stay on the web now. SP: Well, that’s fine, yeah. And the guys I work with at Pixar, a bunch of guys do their own books. They also do an anthology called Afterworks. They all got together, and having a deadline was good for them to motivate them to get their stuff together, and this year they’re doing it again, and more people are in it every year. And so it seems like a lot of the people who are having fun doing comics are doing their own and because they’re not having to make a living at it, they’re able to explore whatever subject they want, or some character they’ve thought of for years. It’s a neat way to try out their own ideas. JN: A couple of years back, when you were into the Sam & Max book, were you looking at doing Sam & Max as a business model? You know, “I’m going to do the game, or another comic, and then we’ll do this, that, and the other, and build it up.”

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SP: There was no long-term planning involved. At one point I had done a few comics and had agreed to do another couple of comics for Marvel and then the chance to do the game with LucasArts presented itself, and so I had to make a choice at that point, because I wanted to be really involved with the game. I didn’t want to just hand it off to someone else to do, so I had to make the decision, am I going to do the comic, or am I going to go and work on the game? And I chose to back out of the comics deal, even though I had written the story and started working on it. I remember talking to Mike Mignola about it at the time, and I hadn’t had good luck having my stuff distributed, when it would come out I wouldn’t even be able to find it in a store. The Marvel/Epic books were very difficult to find. And in Mike’s words, he said, “Just think of it this way. It’ll just be another Sam & Max comic that people thought they weren’t able to get.” So I went and did the game, and the game turned out to be a really good thing to do. It got a lot of attention and was available for ten years or so and a lot of people wouldn’t have seen Sam & Max otherwise, but they know them through the game. Most people that come up to me at conventions had played the game when they were younger and that’s how they discovered the characters, and later learned that there was a comic. And as far as getting the comics reprinted in the Surfin’ the Highway trade paperback, that was just a great chance to get people access to those other stories that they weren’t able to get, just putting the material in one place. People still ask if that book’s going to be reprinted, and the answer is yes, there will be some form of that book redone so that people can get those stories again.

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STEVE PURCELL PREVIOUS PAGE AND LEFT: Late ‘90s model sheets for Sam & Max.

mean, just being in the business I’m sure you dealt with doing bibles and character designs and stuff like that. Did you just kind of hand them stuff over? Did you have to make new things for the cartoon?

SAM & MAX: THE CARTOON JN: How did the cartoon come about? SP: I remember I was approached by Nelvana early on in the ‘90s. I think it was even before I went to do the Lucas game. And I had hired a lawyer that I ultimately ended up having to fire because I felt like conversations were happening without me being informed and that the process was getting ahead of me. It wasn’t Nelvana’s fault, it was just me not trusting my lawyer, feeling real itchy about that. I turned down the deal and went and did the game instead, which turned out to be a better decision at the time. And then years later I had a chance to work with Nelvana again, there was a story editor there that I had some conversations with, Dan Smith, and he was like Sam & Max’s champion, the guy in-between Nelvana and me, and the guy I trusted would be true to the characters in the TV show. I ended up working with him a lot. We did one season of the show. It was a couple of years after the game came out. JN: That was an experience for you. SP: Yeah. We did a season of the show and it was starting to feel at the end of the first season that we were really getting into a groove and understanding how to best adapt these characters to TV. Just as we were getting into that groove, they decided not to renew the show. There was intrigue at the network and the person that had green-lighted our show was out. JN: Was the process with the cartoon very alien to you? I

SP: There were new things. Like, the story bible is kind of an alien document because it’s not really informing the people that are going to make the show that much, it’s more about convincing somebody why the show’s a great idea, and why you want to do it, and how fun and exciting it’s going to be, and so it’s almost like writing ad copy because you’re just trying to get somebody excited about the idea. I think nowadays the comic books themselves end up being the story bible to get an idea sold. You can get a better handle on what this property is by just reading the story of it. Dan Smith and the creative people had already read the comics, and they knew what they were getting themselves into. And that’s what was cool about working with them is they already knew the characters, where the story bible is aimed at the executives who would never pick up a comic. JN: Right, right. How else was the process for you? Were you really hands-on while the season was being created? SP: Yeah, I tried to be. I worked mostly with Dan Smith, which was working on the stories and trying to get the style of the dialogue in there, it’s got to be the quirkiness of the characters. People say, “Oh, that was a watered down version of the comic characters,” but I think when you look at the animated shows from that time period, I think Sam & Max were still pretty true to themselves as these kind of oddball characters with questionable morals, which was pretty unheard of in a mainstream Saturday morning network show. So for it to be a mainstream show and have these kind of demented, morally-ambiguous characters, was, I thought, pretty unique at the time. JN: And then you’re dealing with the censors and all those type of things. Like, you couldn’t really draw rabbits with Lugers in their hands and stuff like that. DRAW! • SUMMER 2007

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SP: I saved some of my censor notes, which were hilarious. “Please don’t have Max standing in water with battery cables attached to his teeth.” And, when Sam would throw Max through a brick wall, they wanted Max to wear a helmet. [laughs] Because when kids at home are throwing their brother through the wall, they should be wearing a helmet, I guess. JN: Yeah, it’s the safest way to do things like that. SP: I remember one of my favorite ones was, when we were adapting “Bad Day on the Moon,” which is one of the comics stories. And we wound up deciding, based on that, not to try to adapt the comics anymore, because it was too much of a can of worms to try to do what the comic does, so we just made up new stories after that. But there’s a scene at the end of “Bad Day on the Moon” where Sam & Max come back to their apartment and they find a roach standing there with a .45 automatic. The censors, naturally they say, “No, he can’t have that gun.” And so we say, “Well, what kind of weapon can he have?” And they agreed that it was okay for him to have a hunting knife. We thought that was amazing. It didn’t make sense, because a kid’s more likely to find a knife in their house than a .45 automatic. But ultimately they agreed that it was okay for him to hold a tommy gun, a ‘30s style machine gun. That was okay, for some reason. Sometimes the rules were very obscure, and there was kind of some sweet spot in there that you would find somehow by accident. So the tommy gun was fine for us. This kind of negotiation that Dan Smith would always do with the censor, like, “Oh, we’ll give you these two things if you’ll let us have the tommy gun.” JN: It’s a give and take, push-and-pull thing. SP: In one episode Sam & Max were at a wedding and they’re firing their guns and reloading, and that was about as close as we ever got to having their guns be realistic in the TV show. They usually had a futuristic bazooka thing, which always looked ridiculous.

BREAKING DOWN THE STORY JN: When you’re doing scripts or laying things out, are you mainly a thumbnail type of person? Are you typing out scripts? SP: It definitely helps to have drawings as part of it, because the drawings inspire the dialogue. It kind of helps to see it and

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imagine the sound of it at the same time. So, yeah, when I’m working on the web strips, I do definitely use thumbnails, and then I build the dialogue into the drawings. JN: Do you do a lot of fudging? Like, say, would you draw something interesting, and then, when you’re at the point of typing it or inking it, throw in the dialogue? Do you change gears a lot? SP: Oh, yeah. Especially with these webstrips, because I do a rough pass on the script, and I sketch it to size, and then I scan the sketch. And then on the computer I place the lettering so I see how much room I have left to put the figures into the panels. And then I go back, and while I’m working on the finished art, I’m kind of rewriting in my head. Because, you know, I put down the first few passes in the rough, and I’m always looking for a better solution for it before I commit it to the final strip. So I definitely am always looking to make it better as I go along. JN: How much do you noodle something? Would you just keep picking at something until you ran out of time? SP: I used to say I would painfully labor over the creativity and spontaneity. People would always say, “Hey, do you write this stream-of-consciousness?” And it’s kind of the opposite. I’m wanting it to sound like it is, I’m trying to make it flow in a certain way, or I’m trying to think the right words that are the funniest version of it. So it’s definitely noodling to try and get that spontaneous effect. JN: It’s a magic trick. It’s making people think it’s easier than it is. SP: Yeah. It’s just trying to get to the point, or to get the funniest version of it that sounds the most off the top of the head kind of thing. Like, the more natural and instinctive the lines come up. Especially if they’re painfully long, like Sam is kind of long-winded, and so if you have this thing that piles on all these adjectives, the more that can trip off his tongue in a funny way, the better.

COMICS JN: There’s definitely a rhythm to it. SP: Sometimes I’ll favor a rhythm rather than comprehension. Like, I’ll put in a silly word that doesn’t make sense just to make a sentence sound funnier, rather than be more informative. JN: Do you find the writing process to be... does it hold your interest more than the art? SP: Oh, yeah. That’s why there’s been such a dry spell for me to do any comics stuff is because seeing it through is the obstacle. It’s not the writing of it. I’ve got a million stories in my head, and when I’m writing them is the fun part because it’s all potential, not having to see it through. But then actually drawing things and making it make sense in the visual is the part that slows me down. So at least I have a little headstart doing the web strips where I don’t have to ink them, so that gets me on the page a lot faster. Nobody has complained about the style, so it’s more likely I’ll do the work if I can present it in a way that doesn’t take me forever.

STEVE PURCELL

have to feel obliged to be providing them busy work or something rather than making good use of them. I’d want to keep them busy just so they wouldn’t be breathing down my neck. “Take all these old drawings, and line them up.” It’s probably a good idea, but when I think of it, it makes me anxious to think of somebody hanging around looking for something to do. But if I think it through, I could see there’s a lot of good things that I could have somebody like that do, like go through my file drawers and get everything from every drawer kind of organized, at least by subject, so I could decide which things matter. JN: I feel like I’ve struck a nerve, man.

SP: The joy of doing my own stuff is not having anybody breathe down my neck, so it’s just work on my own terms, and if I want to stay up late and paint or something like that, the hobby side of it, that’s my choice. But if it gets to the point where I needed an assistant to do it all, I think it would be too stressful to be worthwhile. I would maybe just shut it all down and concentrate on my day job only.

JN: Do you do any other writing, like, personally?

DIGITAL DRAWING

SP: Yeah, there’s always something I’ve got kind of brewing in the background. And writing is part of what I do at Pixar, too, so I end up writing a lot.

JN: Did I ask you what your computer setup was? Has anything changed?

JN: Do you see yourself as a pretty on-task type of guy? Do you stop and start a lot? Do you have some stimulus to keep you going until something’s done? Do you “ADD out,” as I like to call it? SP: I like to be working on new stuff, and in the past year or so, I’ve been trying to contribute to these little painting shows, so it’s fun to have an excuse to produce those. It does help me to know that there’s a goal. If the goal is too openended, it’s too easy to push out of the way. Like, when I was working with that sketchbook idea, it had this intangible deadline, and it was easier to push it out in favor of other stuff. So it does help me to have a drop-dead kind of goal for something to get it finished. But I think I’m pretty good at using my time to create work beyond my day job.

JN: Do you like the tactileness of it? Do you like the way that feels? Because I know there’s a lot of people who don’t.

JN: Do you have an assistant?

SP: Drawing on the Cintiq?

SP: An assistant? Oh, that would drive me crazy to have an assistant. You mean, like, a person? JN: Yes. [laughs] Or a robot or something. SP: I was wondering, do you mean a computer program? No, that would be crazy to have somebody breathing down my neck looking for stuff to do. That would make my regular life like a job to

SP: Actually, what has changed is at the office, I don’t know how much I can say about the set-up at my day job, but I’ve been using a big Cintiq tablet at the office, and I find that really appealing. I can see maybe installing that at home. I’m working on a sketch for a game magazine right now, and it is such a time saver to have the actual format of the magazines just on the desk. To actually have it there and to be able to draw right into the layout of the magazine cover and just do simple blocking in of color and stuff, there’s a real appeal to that ease in the kind of graphics/layout step of coming up with concepts. I don’t know that I want to do a lot of finished art on it, but I sure like it for blocking out ideas.

JN: Yes.

SP: What I do like about it is it kind of reminds me, when I was a teenager I used to draw with markers on, like, SAM & MAX ™ AND ©2007 STEVE PURCELL. cheap kind of poster board or PREVIOUS PAGE: Concept art for the Sam & Max something, and the pen would TV show. glide over the surface of that in a ABOVE: Sam & Max character concept for Flint Paper. way that I liked, so I don’t mind it DRAW! • SUMMER 2007

COMICS

for that, for sketching. Because I like sketching with a ballpoint pen on paper that has less tooth, so I don’t mind drawing on a plastic screen. I feel pretty comfortable with my hand moving freely over the drawing surface. JN: Do you have a big honking scanner somewhere? SP: At home I have a little scanner, I end up scanning things in pieces and combining them in Photoshop. JN: Oh, really? That sounds like a pain. SP: It is a pain. I should probably get a big, giant scanner. I’ve never gotten around to it because I’m too lazy and I let my wife do all the technology stuff at home. My scanner’s five or so years old, and it probably wouldn’t hurt to have a big one there. We had a really nice one that we used for many years but when we switched over to a Mac, it became a doorstop overnight. JN: It’s just, the time saver of just putting it on the glass, so to speak, and be done with it. I don’t have the mental acuity to put something together. I’d just go play Xbox or something. SP: It’s a good thought. There’s more work that I’m doing lately where it would help me to have a big scanner. It’s just that my poor wife ends up having to set up all this stuff in her office, and it’s just another thing that takes up a lot of room in her space. JN: You can make a cozy for it. [laughs]

PERSONAL WORK JN: Are you doing any personal paintings? SP: Yeah. Like I was talking about doing these little group shows. In the past year it seems like there’s been about a halfa-dozen or so group shows that I’ve gotten involved in. One was, like a year ago around this time it was the I Am 8-Bit Show at Gallery 1988 in LA. It was all classic videogame imagery, and then there’s a little gallery in my town, and I’ve done a few things for them. I painted on a train car for them, and I did a Day of the Dead show, and there was another show that just went up that I had something in, and now a bunch of Pixar folks are doing a show in San Francisco that I just did three little pieces for. So it’s been really fun to

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have an excuse to do these little self-contained pieces that aren’t really connected to any of my other work. Sometimes I connect them thematically to my comics, but it’s always fun to have this outlet to do some work that I don’t get attached to because I know that they’re supposed to be for sale. JN: Do you feel more comfortable selling, I don’t want to say commercial, but things you do for shows versus your comics stuff? SP: It’s nice to know going in that you’re intending it to be sold just so it’s kind of like being the surrogate mother when you know your baby’s going to be adopted, so you just make up your mind you’re not going to get attached to it. It’s funny, because at one point I decided to sell out pages from a couple of the Sam & Max stories, and as soon as I started doing it I was feeling regretful, like, “Oh, I should have just kept all those because I’m not really going to do that many of these kind of pages.” And I’ve kind of gotten over that a little bit, but it took me a long time, because even though I wouldn’t ever sit and look at this bundle of pages, there’s something about sending them off separately that felt odd.

STEVE PURCELL

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By Bret Blevins and Mike Manley

SPOTTING BLACKS

The Use and Placement of Black to Empower a Page elcome to the third installment of our continuing Comic Art Bootcamp series, where Bret and myself instruct on the basics of cartooning and comic art. If you’ve been working toward breaking into the business for any time, be it by reading an interview in DRAW! or standing in line to get a personal critique from a pro or an editor at a con, you have almost certainly heard the term “spotting blacks.” I remember the first time I

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heard it myself; it was at a local comic-con in the Detroit area, and the artist, a pro, who I was showing my work said to me I spotted my blacks pretty good on one page but could use them better on the others in my samples. At first I wasn’t exactly sure of what he meant, but he took his pencil and showed me. Taking his pencil he added a few shadows or pointed to where on his original art he used big areas of black to lead the eye to something important, to frame something, to push something forward or make it stand out. This is, in essence, 2-D design—using the contrast of certain elements of a design (in this case blacks) to focus the attention where you, the artist, want the viewer to pay more attention, to make something stand out or “pop.”

What is “spotting blacks” you ask? Simply put, “spotting blacks” is the placement of black as a design element in a composition (panel, splash page, cover or page) which directs the viewer’s eye to the focal point(s) of the composition and helps achieve depth, separating figure from background, background from foreground objects. The use of black as a design element also helps lead the reader’s eyepath across the comic page as a whole, for the arrangement of panels on a page must be considered not as single panels but as a unit, the master composition we use to tell a story in a sequence. The smart, planned use of black, the placement of word balloons along with the direction of the elements in the panels themselves help create a road for the eye to follow across the page. Most readers are unaware of this “magnetic path,” but the artist must be; he or she must purposefully plan this out carefully. Poorly planed or poorly used placement of black or lack of black can reduce a dynamic drawing or page to an unreadable, boring hash or flat, lackluster drawing. In pen-&-ink drawing, which comic art clearly is, the amount of middletone rendering is usually at a minimum, even the most rendered comic style usually has a minimum of halftone, therefore most of the range of tonal value is either black or white which reads as light or shadow—two values. The middletone, or third value, is reserved for a slight “feathering” between the light and the shadow areas on a form. The feathering can be done in a variety of styles but they all achieve the same result: a halftone between the shadow and the light. But the greatest achievement of depth or shadow is created not by the rendering, or half-tone rendering, but by the careful placement of the shadow, or black. Unlike a charcoal drawing or other medium where we can achieve a highly sensitive passage of values, light to shadow, in comic art we are reducing the values down to a very narrow range, often to just black-&-white with no middletone value. The exception here might be the few black-&-white comics where the artist can achieve a more rendered style since they don’t have to worry This page of Felix the Cat by Otto Messmer is a classic example of clarity about the color muddying up things or covering up the linework. and charm. This clear-lined comic style is employed with minimal use of rendering and fluxuation of line weight, the center of attention in each panel is But for color comics clarity is essential, as one has to take into clearly Felix whose solid black color is a prime example of “local color.” account the color will probably have as much if not more to do in some cases with the clarity and how well a page reads. This “high contrast” style or approach in comic books came from comic strips first, and the more photorealistic approach is clearly evident in the masterful drawings of the comic strip masters Noel Sickles (Scorchy Smith) and Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates, Steve Canyon) who were the first to employ this approach along with Hal Foster on Tarzan before he created Prince Valiant. Later artists like Alex Raymond (Flash Gordon) as well as many others came along to follow in the realistic tradition of comic strip art and there became a few distinct styles or “schools” as it were. The Caniff School and the Foster-Raymond school. DRAW! • SUMMER 2007

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SPOTTING BLACKS

The huge success of these four artists went on to influence other artists of the day and the roots of their stylistic approaches to pen-&-ink art have trickled down artist to artist and are still with us today. Foster and Raymond employed very realistic drawing, as did many of the artists who followed in that tradition, often using photographs and models to achieve a highly realistic look. Noel Sickles left comic strips for the field of illustration, but Milton Caniff continued to refine that approach along with the disciples of the style such as Frank Robbins who continued to produce a very chiaroscuro style which was bolder, employing a bold brush line and more cartoonish and stylized drawing than the Foster-Raymond school. In the context of comic art, animation and illustration we are discussing here, the concept of spotting blacks serves as a narrative tool in conjunction with its simultaneous roles as a design element and a formdescription technique. I know that sounds like a lot to hold in your mind at the same time, and it can be confusing, but it gets easier with a little careful study of each role. First let’s define a few conditions of our working properties:

In the basic optical sense, black exists in the absence of light, so when making cartoon line drawings with our extreme limitations of either pure black or pure white, using black to indicate cast shadows from a light source creates a black shape on the composition. This is a logical way to place black within your images, and is a solid foundation for building a series of black patterns (that must also, because they effect the composition, function as design). Our eyes understand how shadows behave in the actual three-dimensional world, and will accept these patterns in artwork that effectively mimics them. Even here though, aesthetic distortion, exaggeration or elimina-

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Black as Shadow

tion is often necessary. If you look at the Sickles examples below you’ll see that he eliminates or simplifies shadow that would logically appear on the faces of the characters in some of the scenes—this is intentional and helps the characters “read” better—too many shadows obscuring their faces would be distracting and serve no purpose.

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SPOTTING BLACKS

Black as Local Color LEFT TOP: A classic example of Hal Hoster’s work on Tarzan which paved the way for the use of realistic figures in action in comic strips and, later, comic books. LEFT BOTTOM: A Rip Kirby strip by Alex Raymond. Raymond’s use of black not only as local color but broken patterns, along with his crisp, sparkling pen-work and stellar drawing, set the high-water mark for realistic drawing in comics that still stands today. ABOVE: Scorchy Smith by Noel Sickles. Sickles, along with Milton Caniff, set the pace for adventure strips and dynamic, virtuoso use of blacks in comic strips that was so influential they created a whole “school,” as it were, of cartoonists who worked in a similar style, such as Frank Robbins and Alex Toth to name two.

This simply means that black is the color of the object depicted—a jacket, car, umbrella, sofa, night sky, etc. Light striking a black object may carve white shapes out of it in realistic styles of cartooning. In decorative styles a white edge is sometimes used to suggest an abstracted “rim light” in order to separate two black (or shaded) objects that overlap.

Black as Abstract Design This allows the artist a wide and subjective freedom to use black as a purely visual eyedirecting or mood-creating tool. Applying abstract black shapes that move the eye in a certain direction, clarify a form, separate planes or simply add an energetic graphic “snap and sparkle” to the image or page.

Black used to create Mood Using black to create mood is a process of selective esthetic application of the above techniques in various degrees and combinations, and is so personal and subjective for each artist that it’s difficult to encapsulate the concept in a few simple guidelines or principles. Because creating a mood of mystery, excitement, gloom, terror, tension, humor or any other dramatic tone is the ultimate goal of narrative cartooning—its reason to exist, really—this culmination of effect is the most important aspect of using black. Because of its endless variety, though, this idea is best understood by continuing study of artwork you admire and analyzing why and how its effects were achieved. Establishing the “needs of the narrative” as your guiding precept helps simplify the challenge of using black well, because it identifies irrelevant or distracting choices of black placement; if the storytelling clarity or drama is weakened or derailed by poorly placed black areas DRAW! • SUMMER 2007

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SPOTTING BLACKS

those areas are “asking” to be removed or modified. All these choices should be made in the planning or pencil stage—changing black areas of original inked art on paper is an unpleasant chore. If you are working digitally this isn’t a big problem, but it’s still better to learn to think clearly in the planning stages rather than “find” your best results by later trial and error. Your work will be stronger and more consistent. A second difficulty is the fact that any number of choices within the same set of images may work equally well! This is where your personality, preferences and intentions must guide you. In many cases the possibilities are decided by the mood the material and your treatment of it requires. A gothic horror story or image is a natural vehicle for deep, black, shadow-rich

scenes, a lighthearted, whimsical humor story suggests a bright cheerful approach. Notice the complete shift in effect between these two treatments of the respective subjects. Depending on the desired narrative intent, any treatment can work, but in typical cases a specific mood will “feel” appropriate. As I’ve already mentioned, mood, (or narrative effect) created by “spotting” black is almost impossible to apply isolated from the other specified functions of black—they are almost invariably woven together, because any placement of black that doesn’t strictly describe form moves into the role of local color, cast shadow or arbitrary elements of shape and contrast, any of which also automatically becomes a design element. If this seems confusing, just stay with it, study and experiment and you will understand the concepts. If you are reading this you are already interested in narrative artwork, so you have seen the effects in the material you find inspiring—look at them with a fresh eye, make altered versions (like those below) of images or sequences that strike you. Doing this will reveal how an effect was achieved (or missed) by the artist’s original choices, and you will begin to develop a sense of manipulating the black patterns in your own work to achieve the results you intend.

The cute elephant looks bright and silly in the first image. The stylization of form, the caricatured features and the impossible pose are contributing to the playful fantasy feel of the drawing, but absence of black is a key factor, too. Look at the creepy incongruous effect of the second, heavily shadowed version. It’s slightly disturbing (though in the right context it could be made to work) because it doesn’t seem appropriate.

The crawling corpse seems much more menacing in the first version —the heavy shadow of the arm across the skull gives an impression of mass and weight and locks the effect of a light source (moonlight we might presume) casting the shadow pattern throughout the rest of the image. The weightless outlined image seems almost dainty by comparison and certainly doesn’t project much spooky atmosphere.

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SPOTTING BLACKS The “rules” of this element of narrative picture-making are so fluid it is difficult to be more specific about this topic— there are significant differences in the application of black between almost any two artists, even if they have otherwise similar styles. The absence or abundance of black effects can also vary among the works of any given artist. So the issue is a

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really a matter of personal taste and preference—you must create desired results through experiment, invention and awareness of your options, which is an ongoing process of study. You can start with the examples found in this article and continue the quest by developing the habit of extracting an awareness of how the black is used in every piece of artwork you see. Good hunting! Bret & Mike

In the comic book pages that follow you will see these typical basic variations in the uses of black: • As form and local color description only • Form and local color description plus design • Design only • Form description plus design plus mood

Spend some study time isolating and understanding these effects and you’ll soon have them in your picture making repertoire.

BATMAN PAGES Here black is used almost as a character—the placements are suggested by the logic of cast shadows, but they are stylized into stark design in places, particularly on the building exteriors and especially the interior of commissioner Gordon’s office, which is a void of black broken only by the simple window shapes and the top of Gordon’s desk revealed by the lamp. Black shapes the powerful mood of these scenes.

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AKIRA PAGES Aside from the small sphere-bot’s white stream trail and speed lines that are defined by the gray tone, all the heavy lifting is done by the blacks in this busily rendered Akira sequence. If the gray were removed the scenes would still read clearly—these pages are a good example of how careful planning and use of black will make the structure of your artwork very strong. This is especially important if you are not in control of the overlaid color or final printing quality—strong black patterns minimize the damage of unpredictable circumstances that often cause problems in the commercial art process.

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SPOTTING BLACKS

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RIGHT: The blacks are treated very boldly here—entire masses and forms are reduced to solid shapes of black interlocking with bold white areas to carve out the planes and objects. From the Shade mini-series.

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SPOTTING BLACKS LEFT (MIKE): This is an unused page that I drew and inked for Birds Of Prey #66 which took place in a library at night. As a result I was looking for ways to use the background and foreground elements as well as blacks and cast shadows to make cool, interesting patterns and help create not only mood, but depth. The simpler and stronger the black patterns are the stronger the design will be. The the “X” of the window’s shadow as a design element combined with the framing of the girl’s head helps focus our eye on her face even though it’s in shadow. The repeated square shadow pattern of the cast shadows and the decreasing thickness of the shadow patterns running across the floor help achieve great depth and focus our eye on the figure leaving. No amount of detail would be able to achieve depth as well without these strong black patterns. Shadows or light create depth, not detail.

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BELOW: The drawing of Frankenstein below is a quick illustration in how adding black to a drawing gives it so much power. The first version of the drawing is fine, if it was colored well it would be a solid panel, but you can’t always rely on the colorist to save you, in fact, you usually can’t. By simply adding the black cast shadow against the wall we quickly put Frank in front of the wall, by following suit with adding black to the arch and a cast shadow shape in the archway we create the illusion of greater depth very simply. It’s the black that gives the power and pop here, the depth, not the detail or linework. If in doubt a good solution is to make a copy of your art and experiment with placing blacks with a marker first.

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This unused page from Birds of Prey #66 is another good illustration of how the careful placement of black, especially as drop shadows (shadows created or cast by an object or form) or black cutting into white as a framing device gives the figures weight. This use of black should be planned out from the beginning stages to help hold the page together and lead the eye where you as the artist want the focus to be. All of this is conscious design, blatant, nothing is by accident.

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SPOTTING BLACKS

PIRATE COMPARISON BRET: Here is a comparison of two treatments of the same subject—Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean. In the first story, the plot revolves entirely around Jack and Will’s comical attempts to open that chest—the story is a series of whimsical variations on a joke, so I chose to design the artwork with an open decorative treatment. In these two pages you can see that the blacks are spotted lightly throughout the artwork—the splash is predominately local color (Jack and Will’s hair, the foliage on the tree, Jack’s shoulder belt) and a few judiciously placed stylized shadow shapes on the crags and tools. The second page is entirely local color spots. This line art was designed to be open for color as well.

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SPOTTING BLACKS

The second set of images are from a more serious adventure story full of action, danger, threats and suspense—the scenes shown here take place in an Aztec pyramid, lit by moonlight and torches. There is black aplenty, mostly cast shadow composed and designed for dramatic effect, with a bit of local color here and there. The stonework pattern that covers the wall, ceiling and sides of the pillars on the altar page is stylized to enhance mood—in the lighting conditions I’ve set up, probably only the tops of the pillars would be visible, but I like the exotic atmosphere suggested by the uneven white edged patterns—it also evokes a “crackling” energetic vibe to the scenes.

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CHINA

INTERNATIONAL COMICS

ON THE ROAD TO CHINA DRAW! Editor-in-Chief Mike Manley recently returned from traveling for two weeks in China and gives you DRAW! readers a glimpse into the comic book business—or manhua as comics are called in China—as it exists today.

ack in June I spent two great weeks in China with my fiancée, Echo, who is from Beijing. It was a great trip and a wonderful experience, especially visually as an artist. I snapped a ton of pictures from our trip through Beijing, Kunming and Dali. One of the things I was interested in seeing when visiting China was what the comics situation was like there. Echo had done some comics for a publisher in Beijing before she moved to the US—we even passed that publisher one day riding to the Forbidden City in a cab. The only Chinese comics (manhua) I had been exposed to previously were some I had picked up downtown in Chinatown here in Philly. They were basically comics where dudes were fighting each other, like some kind of Dragonball crossed with Fist of the North Star. Echo said these are comics from Singapore, Korea or Taiwan. The father of Echo’s friend, Summer, ran the dorms for international students, and he was able to hook us up with a dorm for a week for a ridiculous price of about $170 US. The dorm wasn’t bad and had air conditioning, something none of the other far more expensive hotels we stayed at had. Being near several universities, like the Schools of Language, Geophysics, etc., had a lot of benefits, as there were many Internet cafés, bookstores, etc. One day after having breakfast at the local McDonald’s, Echo and I noticed a sign for a comic shop called Cool Comics. Echo said that there really wasn’t much done domestically comic-wise in China, as the publishers didn’t last long and most Chinese readers wanted Japanese comics. Also the government would crack down on anything that was deemed too far-fetched,

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lewd, etc., and there really wasn’t the local fan support. The shop was located in the small mall in the bottom of the same shopping complex at the McDonald’s at a busy intersection about a half mile from our dorm. There was also a jewelry store, music store and a calligraphy shop where some artist did signs and gave lessons. When we showed up the comic store wasn’t open yet. We peered into the dimly lit shop, which reminded me of the trips my parents took us on to Ann Arbor from Detroit as kids. Before we moved to Ann Arbor we visited often, and always on a Sunday as that was my dad’s day off. We’d often pass a comic shop which was always closed. I’d longingly stare into the door wanting so bad to be able to go inside. Years later I did visit that shop, sometimes a few times a week after we moved to Ann Arbor. We both looked around the mall a bit then to wait till the shop opened at 9:30. Our hours were pretty screwed around still as Beijing is a 12-hour difference from Philly, so we’d wake up at 4:00 a.m. and were a bit out-ofsorts as nothing was open yet except for places like McDonald’s, as it was open 24 hours a day. Soon the shop owner came by and we were able to go into the shop. I was a bit let down to see the store was stocked with pretty much just all Japanese comics, in fact the same stuff you’d see here in the States, though translated into Chinese, of course. I didn’t see one single American comic, no Hellboy or Sin City even, though I did see a TMNT figure. As we perused the shop a few more teenagers came in and shopped. I had Echo introduce me to the shop owner whose name was Lai Yongxiang, which translates to something like Eternal Peace. They did have some manga drawing supplies, so I bought that up, Zip-a-Tone, paper,

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pens, inks—just to try and for presents for friends back home. Echo’s comments about there not being many, if any, local Chinese comics seemed to be proven true when we looked around the shop. I didn’t see one local Chinese comic as I scanned the shelves, but instead walls filled with figurines, buttons, cosplay costumes, book bags, backpacks—many featuring Nightmare before Christmas characters. Maybe there were, but I didn’t see any; we asked the shop manager and he said he didn’t really sell any. The only other comics I had seen on the trip were a few bagged Disney comics in the local newsstands. The Chinese LOOOVVEE Disney. One of the things that happened comic-wise was that we noticed on the CCTV English channel we had on the cable in our dorm, a news story about popular Japanese manga, Death Note. As I reported on my blog from China, it seems the popularity of both the manga and the movie have caused a little controversy in Beijing, at least. It seems the local authorities had become upset over the comic, especially I think the licensing, specifically the Death Note notebook which had been made. I guess the idea of disgruntled teens writing down the names of people they wanted to “punish” didn’t sit well with the authorities. The funny thing was in the news story they showed books being taken off shelves, DVDs confiscated and they were interviewing LEFT: A merchant I bought a few little kids, kids under 10, brushes from in the market in who the book certainly Kunming. isn’t written for nor I imagTOP: The Cool Comic store in ine would appeal to. I had Kunming. to laugh, it was the sort of ABOVE: The manager of the the Chinese version of the Beijing Cool Comic shop and me. lame old story we see here: RIGHT: A calligraphy shop that “Bang! Zap! Comics are was located next to the comic shop. not just for kids anymore.”

CHINA

I asked the manager about this, or had Echo translate for me. I asked him why he still had copies as I had seen on TV that the local authorities had been removing copies from stores all over. He said that they really only wanted the notebooks, not the comic. He had a full set in his comic shop. I’ve read many of the volumes so far and have enjoyed the story, and I was curious why it was so popular with the Chinese fans. So I asked one who was shopping who appeared to be in his early 20s. He said that he liked the story because it required thinking and strategy over super-powers or some other type of magic ability. That thought was also echoed by the manager and the other teen shopping. It seems that the more cerebral approach really appealed to the readers. This wasn’t the Naruto crowd, though clearly he seems as popular there as here in the US—they even had a ready-made cosplay Naruto costume hanging from the ceiling of the shop. This store was part of a chain, and when Echo mentioned we were traveling to Kunming, the manager gave us a card and said they had a sister store there. Like I said in the first post I didn’t see any American comics my whole time in China. I guess you could call the Disney comics I saw in the kiosks and newsstands American, but since I never opened the bagged issues I saw I am not sure where the material originated. Disney does have studios around the world that produce comics, so perhaps that work was merely reprints. That’s what I imagine anyway. I saw no Civil War, 52, Hellboy, Sin City, Batman or even Spidey comics in either shop I visited nor on the newsstands I saw. I did see ads for DVDs of the Batman/Superman cartoons and Tom and Jerry that Warners Bros. is releasing in the big bookstore I shopped at in Kunming.

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CHINA

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There appears to be no direct market in China. I think most of the comic shops import products from Japan, go through regular bookstore distribution, or buy from the distributors of publishers who reprint the unlicensed versions of the comics, translating them into Mandarin, the official state language. Pirating of many items in China is a huge issue, not just comics, but any product you can imagine, copyrights are a big issue the Chinese have to learn to abide by and deal with in the long run. The super-popular Death Note albums in China are bootlegs.

the comic shop, but along the way we came across a bookstore in the main shopping area downtown. It was big, three floors, like the Chinese version of Borders or Barnes & Noble. I asked for and found the art section and was kinda’ floored. It was pretty big, but that’s not what got me. What got me was the huge amount of drawing books and painting books available, most really good—much better than most drawing books you see here in the US. Many were on cast drawing, still life drawing and drawing portraits, people, etc. I bought a huge batch, including two copies of one of Zhaoming Wu’s sketchbooks I have been unable to get here in the States. The art section did also include books on cartooning, which were almost all pretty bad. Again, I think the domestic market for cartooning in China is rather poor. It’s hard to imagine this, with over a billion people, that there is really not a great demand for cartooning from the homegrown markets, but this seems to be the case.

MANGA ART SUPPLIES I did buy some art supplies in the comic shop in Beijing. I was always on the hunt for art supplies of any kind on the trip, and while I came cross many places selling sumi brushes, I never found a legit, full-size art supply store. They still make what we used to call Zip-a-Tone in Japan. I think the manga market in Japan is bigger than the comics market here in the US, so there are several companies which make art supplies specifically for comic artists. This includes ink, pens, and various screen patterns as well the amazing amount of markers you can find today. I picked up some ink—both black and white ink—a few packs of drawing paper and some screens. The paper was manufactured by a company called Mantain and came in two sizes, 8-1/2” x 11” and 10” x 14-1/2”, and is called Comic Manuscript Paper. The bigger pack sold for $25 RMB which is a about $8 US and the smaller for $15 RMB which is about $2 US, each pack has 36 sheets. The weight is similar to 1-ply Bristol, maybe a bit lighter. I bought two pen sets, both made by Memory. The Comic Pen Set had two holders and four nibs for $15 RMB $2 US and another was a boxed set with unfinished wooden holders. I haven’t tried the inks yet or the pens, but I will. After doing a drawing of Superman while leaning over a small shelf for the manager of the Cool Comic store in Beijing he gave us the address and phone number for the sister store in Kunming. We said we’d look it up when we got there. Echo was really looking forward to replacing some of the series she used to have years ago which were lost or given away. A few days later after we arrived in Kunming we went for a walk and decided to try and find

DRAW! • SUMMER 2007

NO MARKET Without a real market, a real demand, the Chinese publishers are not turning out their version of Spider-Man or The Monkey King. Without a direct market you don’t get a mature comic artist self-publishing books, as there is really no effective way to reach the audience. Besides, I think anything that was probably too violent, cutting-edge, weird or cool would soon bring the ire and might of the Chinese government down on the artist and publisher. With this situation in place I don’t see there being a readymade solution to growing a domestic Chinese market, though it is clear there is a huge fanbase and obviously fans who love to draw. As a result the Chinese comic fan is by default, I think, left no choice but the mostly Japanese products and little outlet besides the fan art I saw displayed in both comic shops. One thing I noticed about the store in Kunming—besides it being two floors with the entire second floor designated as a reading and video-watching area complete with a really large collection of manga to read and snack bar—was the fact that the store was full of girls and managed by one who looked like she was about 16. The few boys were crowded around the TV watching some

INTERNATIONAL COMICS

samurai anime-type DVD. In the back were lots of photos of kids dressed up in cosplay—some looked pretty good. The shop also sold pre-made costumes, as well. In this shop I did find these two weird American super-hero figures. As I scanned the store again I noticed basically the same type of manga and anime material I see in shops and cons here. Naruto, One Piece and the boy-on-boy comics too. The store also had plenty of Nightmare before Christmas- as well as Miyazaki-inspired product, too. Echo was happy as she was able to buy the complete set of 3 Eye by Tezuka she’d been looking for. Several girls crowded around as Echo chatted briefly with the manager and then we left. But as we walked out I noticed that almost right next door to Cool Comics was another comic reading room called Comics World. Here you could sit, order food and read, like a comics café. I know these are common in Japan, but it seems they have become popular to at least some degree in China as well. We didn’t stay as the huge package of art books I bought was starting to get really heavy, so we hailed a cab and went back to our hotel. I think the Chinese market is ripe for some good homegrown Chinese comics. If they could develop some cool concepts and characters and stay free of the Chinese government censorship, who knows, 10-20 years down the road the next huge comic/animation property could be Chinese, not Japanese. One thing

CHINA

was clear from my trip, China is going through a huge revolution, bigger than the old cultural one, as it is trying to leave the third world and the borders are open to a lot of culture from around the world in a way they never were before. Just like the comics and animation hugely influenced the Japanese artists like Tezuka after WWII, I think the same is going to happen or is already happening in China now. Somewhere in China there is a teenager scratching away with a fevered imagination, ink and some blank paper dreaming of being the next big world-wide comic star. If you’d like to read more about my travels in China, visit my China-Manley blog at: http://china-manley.blogspot.com

PREVIOUS PAGE: Cool Comics, Beijing. Two comic pens set made by Memory. ABOVE LEFT: The packs of comic paper I bought. ABOVE RIGHT: Fans in Cool Comic’s reading room watching a DVD and some of the fan art they do displayed on the wall behind them. LEFT: Ink—one white, one black—I bought. BELOW: The art section in the Kunming bookstore showing the amazing amount of good art instruction books available.

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DOUG MAHNKE

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 27

DRAW!: That was how many issues? DM: Six issues, penciled and inked. And it seemed like it took way too long. I certainly wasn’t going much more than a pace of either a penciled page or an inked page a day. Which isn’t bad in the bigger scheme of comic book production, but it was a slow year for me. It could have been better. But I gotta give myself a break after... cut myself some slack— DRAW!: Because the previous year you’d done a lot of work, right? DM: Yeah. DRAW!: What, you had done the Frankenstein, and then what was it?

DRAW!: I remember Williamson telling me that when you had an assistant—because he’s had assistants here or there over the years—it’s that thing where if they’re too bad, then you can’t really use them because then you’re just really having them do scutwork, like “Xerox this,” maybe fill a black, erase a page. If they’re good, you know it’s only a matter of time until they graduate up.... You know there were professional assistants, I think, guys like Tex Blaisdell. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of him. He used to do a lot of ghostwork, a lot of backgrounds for people. But I think that was more in the comic strips; I think there were guys who probably were professional assistants. Like, Caniff supposedly had several people, and he would go in and maybe he’d break it down and he’d draw stuff, and then the guy would draw the backgrounds, and then he would go through and ink the heads and hands, and then his other assistants would come in and.... You know, the Japanese artists... DM: Oh, yeah.

DM: I really just did too much. I got involved in too many things, and during some of that time is when I had Shawn as my assistant, and that really sailed along nice between Shawn and I; it was a pretty tight studio, and work got done extremely fast. Probably for a couple of reasons. A) I enjoyed having somebody to work with, and B) I knew that I had to pay Shawn, so I had to make sure that stuff was constantly going out the door. DRAW!: I guess that was the other thing I was going to mention about working with an assistant. I know when I had an assistant, it meant that if she was coming that day, or before, with people like my buddy John Heebink helped me years ago, and occasionally Ande Parks would chip in and do stuff, you had to have stuff for the person to do when they came over, so it actually made you have to be more efficient or you basically have got a person there twiddling their thumbs. DM: Yeah! You don’t want to do that to anyone, especially if they’ve gone to the trouble to come over to get something done. DRAW!: Yeah, but even in the case of Bonaia when she was helping me, I was doing stuff for Adult Swim, scanning stuff, printing out stuff. I mean, there were hours and hours there that I would have had to be doing that myself, so it worked out having the assistant do that. DM: Well, I certainly enjoyed working with a friend, because Shawn was a friend before he was an assistant. And he was a lot rougher when he started. It was a very different arrangement than I had with Pat. Usually what I did was I would do layouts, I’d let him work stuff up on a page that I did the layouts on, and then I would do the finishes. And so we were constantly rotating through a handful of pages at an alarming pace, sometimes. And the productivity was just ridiculous. And the amount of money that was coming in, was going through my fingers. Granted, I was paying him, too. I was like, “Whoa. Did we do this much this last month? That’s an astounding amount of work.” But I never felt too worn out by it, probably because I was having fun working with somebody. I was willing to work to kill myself, practically, to enjoy the fact that I had somebody in the studio with me. So then he goes and he gets his own work, so what can I say?

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DRAW!: They have tons of assistants doing stuff. I mean, they have a whole big, giant—it would be the only way to be able to produce that much. DM: Yeah. But you could see how it could effectively work when you look at how they do things, or how the finished work looks. And I’ve seen plenty of Japanese stuff that I’m a fan of,

ABOVE: Fun sketches from Doug. NEXT PAGE: Pencils for a rather rough and tumble barbarian.

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DOUG MAHNKE

and one of my favorite books was one that Dark Horse had been publishing. I wonder if they still are doing it, I haven’t checked that out for a little while. It was Blade of the Immortal. If that guy used assistants, he was certainly using the right ones.

DM: You know, surprisingly, I have very little time to read. At least I stopped reading cookbooks. On the other hand, I like to cook and that was always a bit of a passion, but I don’t have time for it anymore. I was an avid reader at one time. I read all the time, and I always had a book I was working on. But these days it’s pretty rare. In fact, the last book I read is a book I’ve read many times over, and it’s... I’ve probably read it ten, eleven times, and I just reread it. It’s a book called Eleni, and it’s a true story. It’s a story written by the father of the writer that I’m working with on Stormwatch. Eleni is the true story of a woman living in post-World War II Greece, when the Communists occupied northern Greece. And she was in a small village near the Albanian border named Lia. Her children are in danger of being taken north beyond the Iron Curtain. She manages to get them to escape but has to stay behind, and is killed for this. Her son grows up and becomes an investigative reporter for The New York Times and researches her life as well as her death. His name is Nick Gage. Well, Nick Gage happens to have a son named Christos Gage who’s writing comics right now, and we’re working together at the moment. DRAW!: Wow! That must be an interesting story. DM: Yeah! There’s so much more to it. It’d be hard to go into all the detail. But I ran into Christos on the DC message boards, and I noticed his name, Christos M. Gage. And I’m thinking, what are the chances? I’ve read all these books, the story of Nicholas Gage’s life and his mother’s saga in northern Greece,

DRAW!: I have the feeling that maybe he wasn’t, but I think guys like Otomo were. I think the guy that was doing, what is it.... But I think most of them do, simply because if you’re doing something in Shonen Jump and you’re doing 40 pages a week or whatever, it’s a huge amount of work; you have to have zipa-tone boy, you know, and zip-a-tone girl, and background guy. You simply have to, or you would be dead. You would have to draw a page an hour or something and eventually you would give out. So what are you reading these days? I always find it sort of interesting to see what fellow professionals are reading, what’s getting them excited about..... You know, when you have that Maytag repairman day, do you go to the comic shop? Do you flip open an old Eerie or Creepy and look at a José Ortiz story or something?

and also he followed up with a book called A Place for Us, which takes place in, I think, Worcester, Massachusetts, where the boy Nick grows up, after he leaves Greece. He and his sisters go to live with his father, who’s an American originally from Greece. But it wasn’t unusual for Greek men to go abroad, especially back then. So at the end of these books, I know of the birth of this man’s son, whose name is Christos. And I’m thinking, oh, could it possibly be? So I e-mailed him and said, “Are you the son of Nick Gage?” And he goes, “Yes, I am.” So Christos had been working in television and film, and he started working in comics, and the rest is kind of history at the moment. A brief one. We ended up working together at Wildstorm. So pretty neat. For me it was fantastic. It’s like encountering, even though just a little tiny character, a character out of a book that I have read. So that was the last book I read. As far as comics goes, what did I just read? Solo with Sergio Aragonés. It’s just been lying around the studio and I pick it up and I read it again. DRAW! • SUMMER 2007

DOUG MAHNKE

COMICS DM: No. I wish I did. I wish I knew more of what my brethren are out there doing. And sometimes I’ll catch up. I’ll sit with somebody who’s been reading something and they’ll recommend it, and then I might go through and I’ll check stuff out. But the fact is, there’s not enough time in the day anymore. It’s not that I’m totally jaded on comics. It’s I run out of stuff at the end of the day. DRAW!: Well, you’ve got six kids, right? DM: Yes. DRAW!: You know, that’d be enough to tax any normal human being! DM: And then I’m a competitive weightlifter, so a lot of the time I’m— DRAW!: Is that power lifting?

DM: Weightlifting, like you see on the Olympics. DRAW!: Right, so clean and jerk, stuff like that? DM: Yes, clean and jerk and the snatch, I do that. That’s my release valve. DRAW!: So, now, are you doing that at home, or do you have to go to a gym? DM: Nope, I do it at home. I’ve got stuff out in the garage, and my family listens to me drop weights for hours. DRAW!: “Mommy, you’d better go spot Dad!”

ABOVE: A rather Corben-esque Frankenstein page. PREVIOUS PAGE: Pencils for a rather rough and tumble barbarian.

DM: Oh, they don’t go anywhere near me. With weightlifting, you notice if you watch the Olympics, they drop weights, and they’re a steel core with rubber— DRAW!: Yeah, so they bounce around, yeah.

DRAW!: So I take it you don’t go to the comic book store much? DM: No. I don’t even have one close by me, but when I do, a week ago I met Pat Gleason, we hooked up at The Source, which is a comic book store between Minneapolis/St. Paul. We were looking at comics there. But, you know, I get the DC comps. Usually what I’ll do is, they’ll build up and they’ll build up, and then what I’ll do is I’ll crack them open and I’ll go through all the comps and I’ll dig out all the funny books and I give them to my kids. And I’ll find stuff that catches my eye.... I’ll look for art. I’ll look for something that has me go, “Wow, I haven’t seen this. Let’s check this out.” It’s something that usually has to get my visual interest piqued and then I’ll take a look, but nothing on a regular basis ever. You know, my mind is submerged in comics so much throughout the day that I’m usually looking for pretty darned light reading. And like I said, I got all of the Spirit stuff, all those volumes that DC’s put out, and Plastic Man, and I really like reading those. DRAW!: So you don’t really follow much in the way of modern comics?

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DM: Oh, they bounce huge. So I’m out there, boom! I’m sure my neighbors just are afraid to even ask what I do in the garage. They’re walking past, boom! DRAW!: “He’s making explosives again in there!” DM: “There’s something going on there and we just don’t know what it is.” DRAW!: “And he’s big and burly, so we better not ask! He may snap our neck!” DM: I try to be nice and polite. I hope that I’m approachable. DRAW!: So do you like to watch guys, like The World’s Strongest Man with Magnus Magnusson or whatever? I was surprised, I remember the first time I saw that program and I saw a guy named Magnus, and I thought that Russ Manning made that name up or something! DM: It’s all the Icelandics and all those guys. For some reason,

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DOUG MAHNKE

they make for good strongmen. I’ve been lifting weights since I was 17 years old, and I did a lot of physical stuff before then, so I’m as much of a jock as I am an artist. I’m always busy. In fact, that’s probably one of the most contradictory things in my life is how much I actually have to sit, when I’m very much not a sitting kind of person.

I sometimes wonder how some of my fellow professionals make a living, because I see so little work from them, so I always assume that they must be rich, or their wife’s a doctor or something.

DRAW!: Well, you can’t do this job if you’re not sitting. Well, I guess you could stand, but you really have to, it’s about having your ass in the seat. A minimum, I mean, if you work eight hours in a day, you’re probably like me, “Wow, that wasn’t really working.”

DRAW!: So where do you compete? On what level, interstate or national?

DM: Boy, eight hours, that’s nothing.

DM: Yeah, my wife was saying everyone’s wife is a nurse or something like that.

DM: Well, I was almost World Masters Champion at one point. I lost to a Canadian on body weight. That’s what I get for eating an extra slice of bread.

DRAW!: That’s one of the things I always try to impress upon people who are interested in this as an occupation; it’s like, if you don’t derive a great sense of pleasure from sitting there and drawing—it has to be something you really love to do as much, if not more, than you like doing anything else—you’re going to have a really hard time with this job.

DRAW!: Wow!

DM: You’re going to be in trouble.

DRAW!: So where are you, are you middleweight, heavyweight, bantamweight?

DRAW!: Especially if you’re trying to draw, I would say, monthly comic books. I mean, if you’re doing independent comics, or you’re doing your own thing, or you’re doing a graphic novel and you’ve got a year deadline, fine. But if you’ve got to draw an issue of Superman in two weeks, you’ve got to be able to put your ass in the seat and go. And if you can’t, you really can’t make your living at it.

DM: I am what would be a light heavyweight right now. I weigh about 220 pounds, and we just had our state championships and I took third. But it was kind of a lackluster performance. I’m nursing some injuries, so I couldn’t perform very well.

DM: Yeah, I’m pretty good at it. I’m one of the better local lifters.... It’s divided into categories, so it’s not as much “wow” as you think. On a national level I’m very competitive in my weight class for the Masters category. That means “old guys lifting.”

DRAW!: I know that is as much about as strength it’s about technique, and if you mess your knee up or something, those big ligaments there where you have to finesse to get the weight up, it’s tough. DM: Yeah, if they’re complaining, you’re not going to be doing too well at that. DRAW!: So you don’t go to a regular gym to train?

DM: No, I’ve got everything at home. But I kind of save time by training at home. And training in an unheated garage all winter in Minnesota can be pretty daunting, but I still do it. So, yeah, I’m kind of hardcore that way. But I can’t stop it. I absolutely compulsively like to lift weights, and since I’m still competitive, that probably gets me more interested in it. DRAW!: It’s always interesting to me as an artist to also find out the other artist’s passions. Because usually artists are very passionate people, and they usually have other... maybe art is a major passion, but they also might like music, or in your case you like to cook and you’re a power lifter. So I would think that physical type of hobby or sport, it definitely feeds into what you do as a comic book artist, because you’re drawing these massively muscular, strong people, so I would think it definitely does give you.... DM: Yeah, in a lot of ways. To me, they always were connected, oddly enough. The first thing I did when I started reading comics as a kid was, well, I want to be a super-hero, you know? That was number one. And I remember when I was five years old or six years old, something like that, I strapped a couple of squeeze bottles to DRAW! • SUMMER 2007

DOUG MAHNKE

COMICS

my wrist and I ran around the yard as Soapman, because that was all I could think of. And the guy who introduced me to comics, himself, he was a rugby player and a really rough, physical kind of guy, and that was kind of a neat beginning. But for me it was comics, and all that I’d ever aspired to as a kid was I kept trying to figure out ways I could be a super-hero. Because that was cool. I wanted to be able to save people, and I wanted to do the same things. I never had any success figuring out how to formulate something that would shoot out of my wrists as a webshooter, but believe me, I tried. I was always messing around with stuff. I’m lucky I never killed myself with the various chemical stuff that I was trying to do with zero knowledge and an infantile appreciation for what happens when you combine certain chemicals. I blew up more than a couple of light bulbs in my bedroom. Like a lot of kids, people that draw, I started at a young age, and loved drawing. I was always drawing monsters and cool stuff that appealed to me, and then comics came along roughly at five or six. This guy just gave me all of his comics. Every time he would buy them, he gave me more. So it was a steady diet of ©2007 DOUG MAHNKE. Marvel stuff, and I just loved Spider-Man. That was great. I really didn’t have to buy any comics for quite a while. Then we moved to a new place and this guy wasn’t anywhere near us anymore, and I discovered that they were in stores and I’d buy them when I had the money. When my Mom was with me and I was a kid at Safeway, “Can I buy a comic? Can I buy a comic?” “Sure, pick one off the spinner rack.” And all the while drawing. And probably at that age, I would say as soon as I discovered comics, I knew that I wanted to draw comics. That was what I was going to draw. I was busy drawing super-heroes ever since. And then, you know, finding comic books stores. The basic comic book geek, we’d find each other and we’d befriend each other and enjoy going to the comic book stores together. And I could definitely be pegged as somebody who was comic-book-oriented, because when the day was done for me, you know, maybe I went to football practice, but then it was no sports after school after that, man, it was back to comics. I used to live in Kansas City, and there was a comic book store that I went to there. It was a place called the Hobbit House, which was run by this guy who I don’t know if he ever got out of his chair. He didn’t really care about his comics all that much. Mostly he sold paperbacks. That’s where I learned about a lot of stuff that wasn’t the mainstream comic. That’s where I picked up on Corben’s work and anything that was underground. And there was another place called Grandview Book Gallery that we’d make a trip to. I think that’s still in business. All the time I’m thinking I’m going to be a comic book artist. DRAW!: You know, it’s very interesting that you say those things, because that one store you described—well, there’s two things. One, you lived in Kansas City, which is where Corben lived.

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DM: Yes! DRAW!: Did you ever meet him? DM: Never did. I knew that he was there, but that’s like knowing that God’s in Heaven or something. DRAW!: [laughs] Yeah, but you could meet Corben. You might not be able to go over to God’s studio. But the other thing is that, in Ann Arbor, where I grew up when I was a teenager, there was a store that was like that one you described, which had the mixture of old comics, and it also had paperbacks and old magazines, so you could really find a cool paperback Robert McGiniss, or a Frazetta painting you had never seen. DM: Oh, yeah. DRAW!: And those stores for the most part don’t exist anymore. DM: Probably not. But that’s exactly where I discovered, that’s where I got to learn about Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard. And I started reading that stuff. I’m sure at one time basically I had everything that they were printing that had Frazetta covers. But that was a great way to really enjoy reading science fiction and fantasy. I already had a cool image in my mind to start off with when I cracked a book. They were fun stories. I just loved reading all that Pellucidar stuff. Of course, one of my favorites was just a real brief thing that Burroughs did, which was The Mucker. Damned if Frazetta didn’t provide an excellent couple of covers, you know, when they divided that into.... DRAW!: The Mucker, and then The Return of the Mucker, I think? DM: Yes. The Mucker, to this day, I would love to do a Mucker story. I’ve thought about it many times, “Boy, wouldn’t it be fun to do that.” You know, just some tough guy from the streets of Chicago, hard-drinking, that ends up getting in trouble. DRAW!: Or just a guy with the name “The Mucker!” “Don’t mess with the Mucker.” You know, it’s probably not too uncommon for guys around our age to probably have had some similar experience, and tastes. DM: It was a fun time back then, that’s for sure. DRAW!: Well, I stopped playing sports at the end of the tenth grade, because I was working and I had art, and I figured, well, one thing was going to have to give, and since I was going to be an artist, not a pro athlete, I gave up wrestling and playing football and track and stuff like that. And then I was working, and I was really seriously trying to work on getting into comics, and I had a commercial art job and stuff like that. So it’s funny, we sort of have a lot of similarities there.

COMICS DM: At least you hatched a plan and did it. I ended up, somewhere along the line, because of family troubles and this and that, I got away from comics. Not totally, but they were more in my peripheral. I had other things to deal with. And I ended up kind of forgetting about them for a while, and even my interest in drawing comics, and I ended up putting myself through machining school and I worked in machine shops. I did a lot of manufacturing stuff even before I did that. I worked all kinds of menial jobs, simple stuff really just with my hands. And then a couple of things happened. I was working in a machine shop and I almost lost my left hand. I was in an accident that really could have made or ended any career I was going to have doing anything that required anything special out of my drawing hand. DRAW!: Oh, so you’re left-handed? DM: Yeah. I was working with an end mill. I don’t know if you know any machining tools or anything like that, but it’s like a big drill. And we were running these parts that required this end mill, which was probably a half-inch in diameter, you know, it’s rotating at who knows what RPM, you know, 10,000 RPM or something like that. DRAW!: Enough to go through your hand! DM: And they’re razor sharp, made of hard steel. Like my hand has any chance of resisting this. And they had a couple of us running parts, and instead of running coolant, we would just put them in a chunk and we would just touch this end mill to this part and lift it up. And the part would get hot even though it’s just touched for a second, but it would have been too messy to run coolant. So we were wearing gloves. Well, for some odd reason, almost everyone in the shop was left-handed... no, righthanded ones. So I turned a right-handed one inside out and wore it as a left-handed glove. I don’t know why that worked, but it did. And these parts, we were running them, and the day’s wearing on, and really there’s very little chance for accidents... you’re not even near the machine hardly at all. You run the part, you step back. Well, there were little bits of fiber sticking out the end of this glove, just little bits. And it’s towards the end of the day, and I’ve got this end mill up. And I turned to talk to my partner who was at the machine next to me, and the glove drifts over by the end mill, which is going extremely fast. And it grabs the glove, all right? So all of a sudden my hand is just clenched and my whole body is shaking as this hardened old leather glove is being shredded, palm inside, and my fingers have wrapped around it so tight I can’t open my hand. And any fraction of a second now, it’s going to chew through the leather and then into my hand and just get tighter and tighter. And I found the strength in me and I just ripped myself away from the machine. The glove went flying just like a missile across to the other side of the shop. And it didn’t cut me, not at all, but it seriously wrecked my left thumb. So for many years I couldn’t even make a whole fist, let alone effectively hold a pencil for a while. DRAW!: Wow! One of an artists worst fears: losing or maiming your hand.

DOUG MAHNKE

DRAW!: It would also then affect you being able to lift weights, right? DM: Yeah, somehow I managed, believe me. I could close my hand around a bar, but I could not close my thumb in all the way. My thumb only bent about half as much as it was supposed to, and it was totally compromised at the end of my wrist, where the thumb meets the wrist. I still occasionally have problems with it today. But I was thinking, “Wow, I’ve got to get away from doing stuff like this. If I can make this mistake now, what’s going to happen down the line?” So I thought, “Well, at least I’ll become a regular machinist.” And I went to school, a trade school, put myself through that, still not thinking about drawing. Though I did a little bit on the side. My family was living out in California at the time, and I moved back to Minnesota after I got my machining certificate, and I never worked another day in machining. I ended up, just for some strange reason, I’d gone through all of these hoops to do this other stuff, and I went and started doing t-shirt design for some guy who I’d run into. He wasn’t paying me very much, and he was causing more headache than anything, but it was kind of fun to be doing some art again. All through this time, I was still doing paintings once in a while, but comics just wasn’t on my radar. It was kind of like something I was too far away from to grasp. And plus I didn’t live in New York, and I didn’t realize you didn’t have to anymore. So, to make a long story short, I ended up doing t-shirt designs, and ended up actually becoming a t-shirt painter.

$200,000 PAID FOR ORIGINAL COMIC ART! COLLECTOR PAYING TOP DOLLAR FOR “ANY AND ALL” ORIGINAL COMIC BOOK AND COMIC STRIP ARTWORK FROM THE 1930S TO PRESENT! COVERS, PINUPS, PAGES, IT DOESN’T MATTER! 1 PAGE OR ENTIRE COLLECTIONS SOUGHT! CALL OR EMAIL ME ANYTIME!

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DM: But I kept working with it. This happened when I was 17. DRAW! • SUMMER 2007

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ALTER EGO #70 PREVIEW! Edited by ROY THOMAS (former Marvel Comics editor-in-chief and top writer), ALTER EGO, the greatest ’zine of the 1960s, is back, all-new, and focused on Golden & Silver Age comics and creators with articles, interviews, unseen art, P.C. Hamerlinck’s FCA (FAWCETT COLLECTORS OF AMERICA, featuring the archives of C.C. BECK and recollections by Fawcett artist MARCUS SWAYZE), Michael T. Gilbert’s MR. MONSTER, and more! Issue #70 spotlights ROY THOMAS at Marvel in the 1970s, during his stint as Marvel’s editor-in-chief and one of the company’s major writers. Plus there's art and reminiscences of both BUSCEMAS, GIL KANE, NEAL ADAMS, JOHN ROMITA, HOWARD CHAYKIN, FRANK BRUNNER, MIKE PLOOG, BERNIE WRIGHTSON, BILL EVERETT, GEORGE PÉREZ, FRANK ROBBINS, BARRY SMITH, FRANK THORNE, HERB TRIMPE, and a passel of talented writers (including a guy named LEE)! Also, there’s a salute to Golden Age artist LILY RENEE, plus regular features FCA, MR. MONSTER, and more, all behind a great Invaders cover by GENE COLAN! (100-page magazine) SINGLE ISSUES: $9 US SUBSCRIPTIONS: Twelve issues in the US: $78 Standard, $108 First Class (Canada: $132, Elsewhere: $180 Surface, $216 Airmail). NOTE: FOR A SIX-ISSUE SUBSCRIPTION, CUT THE PRICE IN HALF!

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“Writing Comics Turned Out To Be What I Really Wanted To Do With My Life” ROY THOMAS Talks About Writing—And Editing— For Marvel During The 1970s

Interview Conducted by Jim Amash NTRODUCTION BY JIM AMASH:

Transcribed by Brian K. Morris Sol Brodsky was there—right before he left for Skywald and was succeeded by John Verpoorten. As production manager, Sol ranked me in certain ways, and I had no problem with that—but he wasn’t involved in editorial decisions except from a scheduling angle, so the three of us took care of things… well, in a sense maybe there were four of us, because Stan relied on John Romita in certain areas concerning Spider-Man and even art direction and corrections. JA: Now, as you rise in the company, is your compensation rising that much? THOMAS: I was doing okay. Is anybody ever really ever paid what they’d like? I was working, really, for [Marvel publisher] Martin Goodman, and he wasn’t somebody you could go to directly and say, “I’m worth more money.” Remember, Flo Steinberg quit in the late ’60s because she couldn’t get a $5 raise, because Goodman felt secretarial positions paid a certain salary and not a penny over that. But, between Goodman and Stan, I got raises from time to time, when sales were fairly good. There were sometimes Christmas bonuses, too. And, unlike back in the ’40s or ’50s, they never had to lower my salary, although back around ’68 they probably came close to doing that across the board when sales went soft, right after they turned the three anthology titles into six solo hero titles. JA: How did other people react to your rising in the company? THOMAS: I probably had more friends than I’d had before. [mutual laughter] JA: That’s what I figured.

“By The Middle Of 1970, I’d Been At Marvel For Five Years” JIM AMASH: All right, so it’s 1970 and you’re the second “head writer” of Marvel Comics, with Stan [Lee] being #1. And you’re editing, so you’re the #2 editor, too. THOMAS: That’s like saying you come in second in a horse race. You don’t get nearly as much money. [mutual laughter] Actually, it was a nice situation to be in. By the middle of 1970, I’d been at Marvel for five years, just picking up whatever little tidbits or reins Stan let fall, sometimes at his direction, sometimes at my own initiative. And I just became “#2 editor”—my real title was “associate editor”—by default.

THOMAS: Well, I had more people suddenly finding excuses to hang around with me. I’m not saying they were always doing that consciously. You naturally gravitate towards somebody in a situation like that, as I’m sure I’ve done myself. I never had to work hard at that, because when I was dealing with pros earlier, it was most just writing fan letters to Julie Schwartz or Gardner Fox or Otto Binder. And, with the exception of once or twice with Julie, I wasn’t really thinking in terms of getting into the field professionally. Some people probably accepted what you call my “rise” in the company, and some people didn’t. I wasn’t handing out assignments directly at that stage, but I had some growing influence, and Stan often listened to my suggestions. Sometimes he’d ask who should do this or that. It was a case of a gradual evolution. If I’d looked from one year to the next, I was probably handling a little more and I was having to deal with a few other writers and a bit more with the art—less with the art than with the writers. But I wouldn’t have noticed from day-to-day or week-to-week.

Roy Thomas Talks About Writing—And Editing—For Marvel During The 1970s

“[Readers] Were Mostly Saying ‘Do Conan!’” JA: Now, Conan the Barbarian starts in 1970, and I know you’ve talked about how you got Marvel to publish Conan. THOMAS: I may have spoken about that somewhere once or twice, yeah. [laughs] I’ve written all those articles in the past few years for Dark Horse’s Chronicles of Conan reprints, and before that for Marvel—and even something like 100 such articles that were printed only in Spanish, in Barcelona, back in the ’90s. Of course, when I was writing such articles for Marvel, I was a bit more constrained about what I might say. Stan and Goodman wouldn’t have liked it if I’d mentioned another company’s comic books, or a policy of theirs I was unhappy with—that kind of thing. And I accepted that. But I never really had to lie. So I guess I can save most of the Conan talk for the upcoming Alter Ego issue on the history of sword-and-sorcery comics.

Roy The Beverly Hills Barbarian! (Above:) One of the few photos of himself Roy really likes is this one, taken at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel, circa 1977. He and friend Alan Waite, a producer of TV commercials, were waiting to interview comedy legend Phil (Sgt. Bilko) Silvers about his latest—and sadly, as it turned out, last—role, in the movie The Chicken Chronicles, for Marvel’s new magazine Celebrity. (The latter was a well-named but under-funded People-style brainchild of Stan Lee’s.) Right after Alan snapped this pic, the Lounge’s personnel descended on them to inform them that photo-taking was verboten in the fabled watering-hole. Silvers soon arrived and kept his interviewers in stitches for an hour—and the guys took photos of the comedian in his Century City digs a few days later—but alas, Celebrity died after only an issue or two, as that piece was literally on the presses. [©2007 Alan Waite.] (Right:) Barry Smith’s powerful pencils for the cover of 1970’s Conan the Barbarian #1 as they first appeared in print—on the cover of Marvelmania Magazine #2, the Marvel-published fan club mag, that same year. [©2007 Paradox Entertainment.]

JA: In the early ’70s, I know Stan was often only coming in like two days a week. THOMAS: Two, three days tops, even back when I started in 1965. He’d already worked things out with Goodman so he could work at least two days a week at home. And soon I worked it out with Stan so I could work a couple of days a week at home, and still get paid freelance for pages I wrote there, just as he did. It was like a de facto raise. You’d think Stan would’ve wanted to stagger it so I was there days when he wasn’t, but Stan preferred me to be there the same days he was, for conferences and the like. So the days we weren’t there, Sol and Flo kept things moving. Sometimes they or some assistant editor made a phone call to me or to Stan, depending on what the situation was, and asked, “What do we do?” I don’t even know who the assistant editor was, except when Gary Friedrich was there from 1966 to 1968. In 1970, Allyn Brodsky was on staff for a while, and was spelling me when [my first wife] Jeanie and I went to England that summer. But Sol—later Verpoorten—they were mostly just interested in getting the books out. They both knew what they could do without checking, and what they couldn’t, just as I did.

JA: Right. But I still have a couple of questions that I don’t think I’ve seen in print. THOMAS: Okay, shoot. JA: By the time you pitched Conan to Stan Lee, how often were you pitching ideas for

ALTER EGO #70 Preview

series? THOMAS: Good question. Not that often, because Stan was really the guy who generated the ideas, and I don’t think he pushed us to come up with new characters in the early days, except for villains. If something came up, he was open to it. As I’ve often said, I didn’t like creating many characters for Marvel, because I knew I wouldn’t own then… not that I advertised that feeling to Stan or Goodman! Besides, we already had a fair number of books. Marvel over-expanded in ’68, the field got overcrowded, and there was a brief downturn in sales. By 1970 or so, we started expanding again. Stan was very open to what readers wanted. So, when fans wrote asking us to pick up properties from outside the comics field—especially Edgar Rice Burroughs, the Conan/Robert E. Howard material, Doc Savage, and Tolkien—we were open to that. At one time or the other between 1970-75, we went after each one of those. And, except for Tolkien, whose people turned us down flat, Marvel did end up eventually doing all of them.

our super-hero comics, elements which would appeal to the same readers. One was a strong, action-oriented hero—another was colorful villains and, I probably emphasized, monsters. The other thing I stressed was that there would be lots of beautiful women. I probably glossed over the fact that such a comic would look as if it were set in the ancient or medieval world, because that wouldn’t have had an innate appeal to Martin Goodman. After all, Black Knight never went anywhere in the 1950s, nor did most other Timely/Marvel comics that were set in the real or imagined past, except for World War II or the American West. Goodman liked the memo and authorized us to go after a character. I first went after Lin Carter’s Thongor, who was a quasi-Conan with elements of John Carter of Mars, partly because Stan liked that name the most.

JA: I had seen pages in Comic Book Artist where you and Barry Smith made up a team, I think it was Bucky and Quicksilver and Red Raven. THOMAS: I think that’s something Barry and I were just kicking around. Maybe Barry was looking for some extra work. It wasn’t Bucky, though; it was actually Rick Jones. Barry drew up a handful of pages, most of which have been reprinted somewhere-or-other, because, if we were going to talk Stan into it, it’d be better if he saw some pages. But whether we actually ever showed the pages to him and he said no, I don’t recall. JA: Did you ever talk to Martin Goodman about Conan? THOMAS: I didn’t talk; I wrote. When I think about things I wish I’d saved to document my career, such as it was, one of them is the memo Stan suggested I write to Goodman to see if he’d allow us to license an existing sword-and-sorcery hero, such as our readers were asking for. Not that readers were really saying, “Do sword-and-sorcery.” They were mostly saying, “Do Conan,” or “Do Robert E. Howard,” or something like that. Just like they weren’t saying, “Do jungle comics”; they were saying, “Get Tarzan or John Carter,” and “Get Doc Savage,” “Get Tolkien.” It wasn’t all just hype when Stan said Marvel’s readers were the real editors. Maybe that’s the reason why I don’t believe Stan and I ever discussed the possibility of making up a new sword-andsorcery hero. If we had, I suspect we’d have made it quite different from Robert E. Howard’s. I don’t think it would have worked out as well, so we were all winners on that one—Marvel, and myself, and the Robert E. Howard heirs. So Stan suggested to me, while we were kicking around the swordand-sorcery thing: “Why don’t you write a memo to Martin Goodman, to explain why we ought to license one of these characters?” It was left up to me because I was collecting a lot of the paperbacks—mostly for their covers, then—to decide which one. I felt that bringing such heroes into Marvel would upgrade comics. I wrote that memo, two or three pages, telling Goodman that sword-and-sorcery stories contained several elements in common with

Not To Mention Buscema The Barbarian! It’s well-known that the artist originally intended to launch Conan the Barbarian was Big John Buscema—seen above at the All Time Classic New York Comic Book Convention held in White Plains, NY, in summer of 2000. (Photo courtesy of host Joe Petrilak.) The original Buscema/Montano art for the splash page of Conan Annual #2 (1976) headed an interview with Roy T. conducted by Ralph Macchio that year in the 4th issue of FOOM, the second Marvel-published fan club magazine. At that time or soon after, newcomer Ralph was assistant editor on such mags as The Savage Sword of Conan—and today he’s a senior editor at Marvel, and has Roy happily adapting such classics as The Last of the Mohicans, Treasure Island, and The Man in the Iron Mask for him and the ambitious new Marvel Illustrated line. What goes around, comes around! (But Crom—didn’t either of those geniuses notice that the word “under” is missing in the last line of Robert E. Howard’s famous “Nemedian Chronicles” prologue? It got printed that way in the comic, too!) [©2007 Paradox Entertainment.]

Roy Thomas Talks About Writing—And Editing—For Marvel During The 1970s

JA: He would. THOMAS: Well, it was a better comic book name than “Kull” or “Conan.” Stan even liked “Kull” better than “Conan,” because it has that “K,” and “Conan” is just another name, like in Arthur Conan Doyle, and “C” isn’t a strong letter. I wouldn’t have pushed for Conan, because I figured it’s Stan’s business. Thongor and the City of Magicians is the first sword-&-sorcery novel I ever read, and I later owned Frank Frazetta’s cover painting for that novel, the one with the hero riding on a giant pterodactyl above flowing lava on a black background, for ten or fifteen years. Months, maybe a year, later, Martin Goodman threw a party— maybe it was at The Illustrators Club—to me it just looked like some big empty room—I think he was celebrating making an extra million bucks or something, [Jim chuckles] and thought maybe he’d cut us a tiny piece of cheese out of it. So he came up to me during this gathering and really raved over my memo. Of course, there was no offer of any extra monetary compensation. Hey, I was getting to write the comic— that was enough of a reward, right? And he mentioned that memo to me at least one other time we ran into each other—probably because he couldn’t think of anything else I’d ever done! [mutual chuckling] It made a big impression on him. And it was very important to my life, certainly—and to Conan and REH’s heirs, as well—because I soon got stalled by Lin Carter’s agent on Thongor (he was hoping I’d offer more than the $150 per issue I was authorized to offer), and I got a sudden impulse to go after Conan—I contacted Glenn Lord from the address that L. Sprague de Camp put in his preface to the new paperback Conan of Cimmeria, and that was that.

“Barry Smith [Was] Looking For Work” JA: I know the initial sales on Conan were not that strong. THOMAS: Well, #1 did very well. But then, each of the next six sold less well than the one before, nadiring out with #7—actually, one of Barry’s and my best issues, I think. JA: I know it was actually cancelled for a day. THOMAS: Yes. Based on the sales reports for #7. There’s no accounting for readers’ tastes. JA: Still, was there a buzz in comics fandom about Conan? THOMAS: To a great extent, it started right away. We got a fair amount of mail, mostly enthusiastic. Of course, there were people who hated the idea that Barry Smith was the artist, and felt it should’ve been someone like—if not Frazetta, then Bernie Wrightson in particular. A couple of people may have suggested Frank Brunner, who was just starting out, too. Bernie actually did up a couple of sample Conan drawings. He was just becoming a pro at that stage, and those drawings were very nice. I was more enthusiastic about his work than Stan was,

but it was Stan’s decision. So I figured I’d wait and do something with Bernie later; and, of course, we soon did that “King Kull” story, “The Skull of Silence,” which was lovely. I wish he and I would’ve had a chance to do even more together, though at the time I suspect Bernie thought I was down on him. I honestly don’t recall if we saw his Conan drawings before or after we decided on John Buscema as the original Conan artist. JA: And then Buscema didn’t work out, and you couldn’t get Gil Kane for the same reason. THOMAS: Yeah. Goodman said they were both too expensive. He wanted to get back that $200 an issue I had overenthusiastically offered Glenn Lord for the Conan rights, so we had to get somebody cheap.

And Now—Bernie The Barbarian! (Top center:) Photo taken at a Heroes Con in Charlotte, NC, some years back by Dann Thomas. (Top right:) The splash of Bernie’s story in Creatures on the Loose #10 (March 1971)—repro’d from a scan of the original art, courtesy of Jim Amash. With thanks to Teresa R. Davidson. [©2007 Paradox Entertainment.] (Right:) A Wrightson Kull sketch from the program book for Creation Con 1974. [Kull TM & ©2007 Paradox Entertainment.]

ALTER EGO #70 Preview

It didn’t have to be a beginner. At least two other regular Marvel artists were pushed to me by Stan—I won’t mention their names, but I told him I didn’t think they’d bring Conan the singular quality I wanted, now that I had read all the Conan material. Stan said, okay, if I could find someone else acceptable, I wouldn’t have to use one of them. And here was Barry Smith—deported back to England because he’d been working in the States without a green card, and looking for work—the immigration people gave him 24 hours to leave the country or be locked up—so I lateraled Conan the Barbarian to him. It was one of the best decisions I ever made—for Marvel, for me, and for Barry. JA: Did you get a lot of mail on the book? THOMAS: Yeah, including some hate mail. Some people didn’t like the way it was done, because, after all, it wasn’t really Robert E. Howard. Or they excoriated us because they hated Barry’s earliest work. But most of the mail was pretty favorable from the start. JA: Frankly, Barry Smith drew a leaner Conan than what Frazetta represented in his paperbacks. THOMAS: It wasn’t exactly my idea of how Conan should look, I’ll admit. I liked the face okay, but he was just too thin. He should’ve been bigger. But Barry was lean, and artists have a tendency to draw their own body types when they get a chance. Barry’s artwork was so beautiful, though. Not so much in the first issue. There were good panels and bad panels in #1, but from #2 on, it was increasingly good work. Even #1 has a lot of good stuff in it. But we almost replaced him. [mutual laughter] If we’d had another good choice walk in the door, we might have done it. I’m glad we didn’t. He is, too—or at least, he ought to be. JA: He quit Conan two or three times. THOMAS: Three. That was a year or two down the road, though. In the early days he was just happy to be working steady, just like I was. JA: Because you were working Marvel style, it seems to me you’d have had to do a little more than just a Marvel-style plot on Conan, since you were adapting stories. THOMAS: Well, at the beginning. But Barry read all the Howard material, and I think we were in sync pretty much from the start. So, soon, I turned Barry loose on stories, though I know I did a severalpage plot even on #4, “The Tower of the Elephant,” as well as on the early non-adaptation stories, of course. Working on Conan kept Barry attached to Marvel, and I really liked him, in addition to liking his work. There wasn’t much I could do, except gradually, about his page rate, but it worked in his favor for a while. He got raises when the book sold better, and he was up to a decent rate for those days, by the first time he quit.

“Both [Buscema and Kane] Knew Enough About Conan” JA: I’m going to skip ahead slightly here—to when Barry Smith leaves and Gil Kane does a couple of issues, and then, of course, Barry comes back and Barry leaves again and John Buscema becomes the regular Conan artist. Did you have to write a little more or spend a little more time talking to Kane or Buscema? THOMAS: Not really. I’d sent some of the paperbacks to John

Face-Off! Collector Aaron Sultan provided us with a photocopy of Barry Smith’s original art for the cover of Conan the Barbarian #8 (Aug. 1971)—the first issue that began the climb back up the sales charts. Note that the face of the heroine is missing—blotted with Whiteout, it would seem. Stan didn’t think Barry drew Jenna pretty enough. On the printed cover, Jenna’s visage was rendered by John Romita. Inks by Sal Buscema. [©2007 Paradox Entertainment.] At left, Barry (top) and Roy, in photos printed in Savage Tales #3 (Feb. 1974). [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Buscema when he was going to be the artist for #1. He may have even had the plot for #1 when Goodman nixed him as artist. John had read a lot of that material, so he was ready when the time came. As for Gil— he was familiar with Conan a decade or two before I was. He had all those Gnome Press hardcovers from the ’50s and early ’60s. In fact, I purchased his collection eventually. There might’ve been something in particular I might have wanted to say, but both those guys and Barry, once they read the Howard material, knew enough about Conan to draw anything that came up. We fixed it in between issues, like between #1 and #2, and then between the next ones, etc. The second issue was pretty good, but was a little too much Edgar Rice Burroughs and not quite enough Howard—even though our pro peer group nominated it for an ACBA Shazam award. \ For the rest of this article and more, get ALTER EGO #70, on sale now from TwoMorrows Publishing!

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DRAW! #5

DRAW! #6

Features an interview & step-by-step demo from ERIK LARSEN, KEVIN NOWLAN on drawing and inking techniques, DAVE COOPER’s demo on coloring in Photoshop, BRET BLEVINS on Figure Composition, PAUL RIVOCHE on the Design Process, reviews of 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) $9 US Diamond Order Code: APR022633

(96-page magazine with COLOR) $9 US Diamond Order Code: FEB032281

(88-page magazine with COLOR) $9 US Diamond Order Code: JAN022757

DRAW! #8

DRAW! #10

DRAW! #11

DRAW! #13

DRAW! #14

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!

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!

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!

(96-page magazine with COLOR) $9 US Diamond Order Code: DEC032848

(104-page magazine with COLOR) $9 US Diamond Order Code: DEC043007

(112-page magazine with COLOR) $9 US Diamond Order Code: MAY053188

(88-page magazine with COLOR) $9 US Diamond Order Code: OCT063824

(88-page magazine with COLOR) $9 US Diamond Order Code: MAY073896

WRITE NOW! (edited by DANNY FINGEROTH), the magazine for writers of comics, animation, and sci-fi, puts you in the minds of today’s top writers and editors. Each issue features WRITING TIPS from pros on both sides of the desk, INTERVIEWS, SAMPLE SCRIPTS, REVIEWS, exclusive NUTS & BOLTS tutorials, and more!

Go online for money-saving BUNDLES, including the entire run at HALF-PRICE! “Anyone wanting to write comics (or film, or TV) isn’t likely to learn any magic secrets here (mainly because there aren’t any, except hard work) but if you can get past that childish desire, there’s a lot of information to be gleaned here.”

Steven Grant on WRITE NOW!

WRITE NOW! #1

WRITE NOW! #2

WRITE NOW! #3

Get practical advice and tips on writing from top pros on BOTH SIDES of the desk! MARK BAGLEY cover and interview, BRIAN BENDIS & STAN LEE interviews, JOE QUESADA on what editors really want, TOM DeFALCO, J.M. DeMATTEIS, and more!

ERIK LARSEN cover and interview, writers STAN BERKOWITZ (JLA cartoon), TODD ALCOTT (“ANTZ”), LEE NORDLING (Platinum Studios), ANNE D. BERNSTEIN (MTV’s “Daria”), step-by-step on scripting Spider-Girl, 10 rules for writers, and more!

BRUCE JONES on writing The Hulk, AXEL ALONSO on state-of-the-art editing, DENNY O’NEIL offers tips for comics writers, KURT BUSIEK shows how he scripts, plus JIMMY PALMIOTTI, JOEY CAVALIERI, and more! New MIKE DEODATO cover!

(88-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: MAY022406

(96-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: AUG022441

(80-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: NOV022869

WRITE NOW! #4

WRITE NOW! #5

WRITE NOW! #6

WRITE NOW! #7

WRITE NOW! #8

HOWARD CHAYKIN on writing for comics and TV, PAUL DINI on animated writing, DENNY O’NEIL offers more tips for comics writers, KURT BUSIEK shows how he scripts, plus FABIAN NICIEZA, DeFALCO & FRENZ, and more! New CHAYKIN cover!

WILL EISNER discusses his comics writing, J. MICHAEL STRACZYNSKI on Hollywood writing, BOB SCHRECK details his work on Batman, DENNY O’NEIL’s notes from his writing classes, FABIAN NICIEZA, PAUL DINI, and more! CASTILLO/RAMOS cover!

BRIAN BENDIS and MICHAEL AVON OEMING in-depth on making an issue of Powers, MARK WAID on writing Fantastic Four, BOB SCHRECK’s interview continues from last issue, DIANA SCHUTZ, SCOTT M. ROSENBERG, & more! OEMING cover!

JEPH LOEB and CHUCK DIXON give indepth interviews (with plenty of rare and unseen art), JOHN JACKSON MILLER discusses writing, MARK WHEATLEY on his new Image series, & more NUTS & BOLTS how-to’s on writing! TIM SALE cover!

Part One of “how-to”crossover with DRAW! #9, as DANNY FINGEROTH and MIKE MANLEY create an all-new character and ideas are proposed and modified to get a character’s look & origins! Plus interviews with DON McGREGOR & STUART MOORE!

(80-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: FEB032284

(80-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: MAY032566

(80-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: AUG032628

(80-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: JAN042904

(80-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: MAY043069

OUT! SOLD

WRITE NOW! #9

WRITE NOW! #10

WRITE NOW! #11

WRITE NOW! #12

WRITE NOW! #13

NEAL ADAMS discusses his own writing (with rare art and a NEW ADAMS COVER), GEOFF JOHNS discusses writing for comics, a feature on the secrets of PITCHING COMICS IDEAS, MICHAEL OEMING and BATTON LASH on writing, plus more NUTS & BOLTS how-to’s on writing and sample scripts!

Interviews and lessons by Justice League Unlimited’s DWAYNE McDUFFIE, interview with Hate’s PETER BAGGE conducted by JOEY CAVALIERI, comics scripter/editor GERRY CONWAY, writer/editor PAUL BENJAMIN, plus more NUTS & BOLTS how-to’s on writing and sample scripts, and a JUSTICE LEAGUE UNLIMITED cover!

STAN LEE, NEIL GAIMAN, MARK WAID, PETER DAVID, J.M. DeMATTEIS, TOM DeFALCO, DENNY O’NEIL, and 18 others reveal PROFESSIONAL WRITING SECRETS, plus DeFALCO and RON FRENZ on working together, JOHN OSTRANDER on creating characters, and an all-new SPIDER-GIRL cover by FRENZ and SAL BUSCEMA!

DC Comics president PAUL LEVITZ on the art, craft and business of comics writing, STEVE ENGLEHART’s thoughts on writing for today’s market, survey of TOP COMICS EDITORS on how to submit work to them, Marvel Editor ANDY SCHMIDT on how to break in, T. CAMPBELL on writing for webcomics, plus a new GEORGE PÉREZ cover!

X-MEN 3 screenwriter SIMON KINBERG interviewed, DENNIS O’NEIL on translating BATMAN BEGINS into a novel, Central Park Media’s STEPHEN PAKULA discusses manga writing, KURT BUSIEK on breaking into comics, MIKE FRIEDRICH on writers’ agents, script samples, new RON LIM /AL MILGROM cover, and more!

(80-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: SEP043062

(88-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: MAR053355

(80-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: AUG053354

(80-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: FEB063440

(80-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: MAY063519

WRITE NOW! #14

WRITE NOW! #15

WRITE NOW! #16

BRIAN BENDIS interview, STAN LEE, TODD McFARLANE, PETER DAVID and others on writing Spider-Man, pencil art and script from MARVEL CIVIL WAR #1 by MILLAR and McNIVEN, JIM STARLIN on Captain Comet and The Weird, LEE NORDLING on Comics in Hollywood, and a new ALEX MALEEV cover!

J.M. DeMATTEIS interview on Abadazad with MIKE PLOOG, DC’s 52 series scripting how-to by RUCKA/JOHNS/MORRISON/ WAID, KEITH GIFFEN breakdowns, pencil art by JOE BENNETT, JOHN OSTRANDER on writing, STAR TREK novelist BILL McCAY on dealing with editors, samples of scripts and art, and more, plus a FREE ROUGH STUFF #4 PREVIEW!

An in-depth interview with Spawn’s TODD McFARLANE, Nuts and Bolts script and pencil art from BRIAN BENDIS and FRANK CHO’s MIGHTY AVENGERS and from DAN SLOTT’s AVENGERS: THE INITIATIVE, an interview, script and art by DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF on his acclaimed graphic novel TESTAMENT, cover by MIKE ZECK, plus a FREE DRAW #14 PREVIEW!

(80-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: JAN074011

(80-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: MAY073903

(80-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: AUG063716

HOW TO CREATE COMICS HOW TO DRAW COMICS TRADE PAPERBACK FROM SCRIPT TO PRINT

DVD

REDESIGNED and EXPANDED version of the WRITE NOW! #8/DRAW! #9 crossover, showing how to develop a comic, from script to pencils, inks, colors, lettering—even printing and distribution! With 30 pages of ALL-NEW material!

See the editors of DRAW! and WRITE NOW! magazines create a new comic from script and roughs to pencils, inks, and colors—even lettering—before your eyes!

(108-page trade paperback) $18 US ISBN: 9781893905603 Diamond Order Code: APR063422

(120-minute DVD) $35 US ISBN: 9781893905399 Diamond Order Code: AUG043204

HOW-TO BOOKS & DVDs

BEST OF DRAW! VOL. 2

WORKING METHODS

COMICS 101:

COMIC CREATORS DETAIL THEIR STORYTELLING & CREATIVE PROCESSES

HOW-TO & HISTORY LESSONS FROM THE PROS

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!

TwoMorrows has tapped the combined knowledge of its editors to assemble an all-new 32-page comics primer, created just for FREE COMIC BOOK DAY! You’ll learn: “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) $2 US Diamond Order Code: FEB070050

BEST OF DRAW! VOL. 1 Compiles material from the first two sold-out issues of DRAW!—a wealth of tutorials, interviews, and demonstrations by DAVE GIBBONS (layout and drawing on the computer), BRET BLEVINS (drawing lovely women, painting from life, and creating figures that “feel”), 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! 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 BRET BLEVINS!

Compiles material from issues #3 and #4 of DRAW!, including tutorials by, and interviews with, ERIK LARSEN (savage penciling), DICK GIORDANO (inking techniques), BRET BLEVINS (drawing the figure in action, and figure composition), KEVIN NOWLAN (penciling and inking), MIKE MANLEY (how-to demo on Web Comics), DAVE COOPER (digital coloring tutorial), and more! Cover by KEVIN NOWLAN. (156-page trade paperback with COLOR) $22 US ISBN: 9781893905580 Diamond Order Code: APR063421

(200-page trade paperback with COLOR) $26 US ISBN: 9781893905412 Diamond Order Code: OCT043046

(176-page trade paperback with COLOR) $26 US ISBN: 9781893905733 Diamond Order Code: MAR073747

PANEL DISCUSSIONS

TOP ARTISTS DISCUSS THE DESIGN OF COMICS 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:

HOW TO DRAW COMICS FROM SCRIPT TO PRINT

COMICS ABOVE GROUND

SEE HOW YOUR FAVORITE ARTISTS MAKE A LIVING OUTSIDE COMICS

DVD

HOW TO CREATE COMICS FROM SCRIPT TO PRINT

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: • LOUISE SIMONSON • BRUCE TIMM • DAVE DORMAN • BERNIE WRIGHTSON • GREG RUCKA • ADAM HUGHES AND OTHERS! • JEPH LOEB

REDESIGNED and EXPANDED version of the groundbreaking WRITE NOW! #8 / DRAW! #9 crossover! DANNY FINGEROTH & MIKE MANLEY show stepby-step how to develop a new comic, from script and roughs to pencils, inks, colors, lettering—it even guides you through printing and distribution, & 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 “Marvel-style” 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!

(168-page trade paperback) $24 US ISBN: 9781893905313 Diamond Order Code: FEB042700

(108-page trade paperback with COLOR) $18 US ISBN: 9781893905603 Diamond Order Code: APR063422

• 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!

Documents two top professionals creating a (208-page trade paperback with COLOR) $29 US comic book, from initial idea to finished art! ISBN: 9781893905146 In this feature-filled DVD, WRITE NOW! Diamond Order Code: STAR19844 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! “The closest thing you’ll find to Packed with “how-to” tips and a comic creation tutorial; an tricks, it’s the perfect companion to the WRITE NOW #8/DRAW essential reference for anyone who’s #9 CROSSOVER, or stands ever hoped to self-publish or make a alone as an invaluable tool for amateur and professional serious bid at a career in the field.” comics creators alike! (120-minute DVD) $35 US ISBN: 9781893905399 Diamond Order Code: AUG043204

ink19.com on HOW TO CREATE COMICS

TwoMorrows Publishing 2007 Catalog Update JUNE-DECEMBER 2007 • ORDER AT: www.twomorrows.com TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 • e-mail: twomorrow@aol.com

Introducing: COMICS INTROSPECTIVE!

TwoMorrows Publishing proudly presents a new book series that spotlights indy comics talent with an outside-the-box approach. Through a combination of original photography, multiple art gallery sections, and an introspective dialogue with each subject, COMICS INTROSPECTIVE is unlike anything being published. Printed on deluxe glossy stock to maximize the impact of the art and photography, the goal is to make the series as breakthrough as the innovators it covers.

Volume 1: PETER BAGGE

Volume 2: DEAN HASPIEL

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 debut volume of COMICS INTROSPECTIVE features an assortment of original photography, artwork picked by Bagge himself, and a look at where Bagge’s work (and mind) is taking him.

Volume Two shines a light on DEAN HASPIEL, the multi-genre cartoonist behind BILLY DOGMA, the existentialist bruiser hero, and the artist on Harvey Pekar’s AMERICAN SPLENDOR mini-series and THE QUITTER graphic novel. Writer/editor CHRISTOPHER IRVING hangs with Dean in his Brooklyn apartment for the day, talking about Haspiel’s diverse and unique approach to comics, his use of Dogma as a semi-biographical “avatar”… and just what “Aggro-Moxie” really is. Featuring galleries of original Haspiel art, as well as original photographs by RYAN ROMAN, and an introduction by Y The Last Man’s BRIAN K. VAUGHAN, we continue this experimental and bold new series.

(128-page trade paperback) $21 US • ISBN: 9781893905832 Diamond Order Code: DEC063948 • Ships July 2007

(128-page trade paperback) $21 US • ISBN: 9781893905900 Ships January 2008

Coming in 2008: Volume 3 featuring JAY STEPHENS, and Volume 4 featuring BOB FINGERMAN!

UPCOMING BOOKS: MODERN MASTERS SERIES Edited by ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON, these trade paperbacks 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!

Vol. 14: FRANK CHO

Vol. 15: MARK SCHULTZ

Vol. 16: MIKE ALLRED

(120-page TPB with COLOR) $19 US ISBN: 9781893905849 Ships October 2007

(128-page TPB) $19 US ISBN: 9781893905856 Ships December 2007

(120-page TPB with COLOR) $19 US ISBN: 9781893905863 Ships February 2008

MORE MODERN MASTERS VOLUMES ARE COMING IN 2008: GAIJIN STUDIOS AND JOHN ROMITA JR.! SEE OUR JANUARY CATALOG FOR DETAILS!

t o

KIRBY FIVE-OH! (JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #50) ALTER EGO: THE BEST OF THE LEGENDARY COMICS FANZINE

(10TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION) In 1961, JERRY BAILS and ROY THOMAS launched ALTER EGO, the first fanzine devoted to comic books and their colorful history. This volume, first published in low distribution in 1997, collects the original 11 issues (published from 1961-78) of A/E, with the creative and artistic contributions of 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.

Picks up where Volume 1 left off, covering the return of the Teen Titans to the top of the sales charts! Featuring interviews with GEOFF JOHNS, MIKE MCKONE, PETER DAVID, PHIL JIMENEZ, and others, plus an in-depth section on the top-rated Cartoon Network series! Also CHUCK DIXON, MARK WAID, KARL KESEL, and JOHN BYRNE on writing the current generation of Titans! More with MARV WOLFMAN and GEORGE PÉREZ! NEAL ADAMS on redesigning Robin! Artwork by ADAMS, BYRNE, JIMENEZ, MCKONE, PÉREZ and more, with an all-new cover by MIKE MCKONE! Written by GLEN CADIGAN.

(192-page trade paperback) $26 US ISBN: 9781893905887 Ships February 2008

(224-page trade paperback) $31 US ISBN: 97801893905870 Ships March 2008

TITANS COMPANION VOLUME 2

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 halfcentury 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.) (168-page tabloid-size trade paperback) $24 US ISBN: 9781893905894 Ships December 2007

HOW-TO MAGAZINES

DRAW! is the professional “How-To” magazine on cartooning and animation, featuring in-depth interviews and step-by-step demonstrations from top comics professionals. Edited by MIKE MANLEY.

WRITE NOW! features writing tips from pros on both sides of the desk, interviews, sample scripts, reviews, exclusive Nuts & Bolts tutorials, and more! Edited by DANNY FINGEROTH.

ROUGH STUFF features never-seen pencil pages, sketches, layouts, roughs, and unused inked pages from throughout comics history, plus columns, critiques, and more! Edited by BOB MCLEOD.

DOWNLOAD DIGITAL EDITIONS OF OUR MAGS FOR $2 95, STARTING IN JULY! SEE PAGE 4 FOR DETAILS! 2

NEW MAGS: T H E U LT I M AT E C O M I C S E X P E R I E N C E !

BACK ISSUE celebrates comic books of the 1970s, 1980s, and today through a variety of recurring (and rotating) departments, plus rare and unpublished art. Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

ALTER EGO focuses on Golden and Silver Age comics and creators with articles, interviews and unseen art, plus FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), Mr. Monster & more. Edited by ROY THOMAS.

BACK ISSUE #23

BACK ISSUE #24

BACK ISSUE #25

BACK ISSUE #26

“Comics Go Hollywood!” Spider-Man roundtable with STAN LEE, JOHN ROMITA, SR., JIM SHOOTER, ERIK LARSEN, and others, STAR TREK comics writers’ roundtable Part 1, Gladstone’s Disney comics line, behindthe-scenes at TV’s ISIS and THE FLASH (plus an interview with Flash’s JOHN WESLEY SHIPP), TV tie-in comics, bonus 8-page color ADAM HUGHES ART GALLERY and cover, plus a FREE WRITE NOW #16 PREVIEW!

“Magic” issue! MICHAEL GOLDEN interview, GENE COLAN, PAUL SMITH, and FRANK BRUNNER on drawing Dr. Strange, Mystic Art Gallery with CARL POTTS & KEVIN NOWLAN, BILL WILLINGHAM’s Elementals, Zatanna history, Dr. Fate’s revival, a “Greatest Stories Never Told” look at Peter Pan, tribute to the late MARSHALL ROGERS, a new GOLDEN cover, plus a FREE ROUGH STUFF #6 PREVIEW!

“Men of Steel”! BOB LAYTON and DAVID MICHELINIE on Iron Man, RICH BUCKLER on Deathlok, MIKE GRELL on Warlord, JOHN BYRNE on ROG 2000, Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman, Machine Man, the World’s Greatest Super-Heroes comic strip, DC’s Steel, art by KIRBY, HECK, WINDSOR-SMITH, TUSKA, LAYTON cover, and bonus “Men of Steel” color art gallery! Includes a FREE DRAW! #15 PREVIEW!

“Spies and Tough Guys”! PAUL GULACY and DOUG MOENCH in an art-packed “Pro2Pro” on Master of Kung Fu and their unrealized Shang-Chi/Nick Fury crossover, Suicide Squad spotlight, Ms. Tree, CHUCK DIXON and TIM TRUMAN’s Airboy, James Bond and Mr. T in comic books, Sgt. Rock’s oddball super-hero team-ups, Nathaniel Dusk, JOE KUBERT’s unpublished The Redeemer, and a new GULACY cover!

(108-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: MAY073880

(100-page magazine) $9 US Ships September 2007

(104-page magazine) $9 US Ships November 2007

(100-page magazine) $9 US Ships January 2008

ALTER EGO #72

ALTER EGO #73

ALTER EGO #74

ALTER EGO #75

ALTER EGO #76

SCOTT SHAW! and ROY THOMAS on the creation of Captain Carrot, art & artifacts by RICK HOBERG, STAN GOLDBERG, MIKE SEKOWSKY, JOHN COSTANZA, E. NELSON BRIDWELL, CAROL LAY, and others, interview with DICK ROCKWELL, Golden Age artist and 36-year ghost artist on MILTON CANIFF’s Steve Canyon! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, and more!

FRANK BRUNNER on drawing Dr. Strange, interviews with CHARLES BIRO and his daughters, ROY THOMAS’ 1971 synopsis for the origin of Man-Thing, interview with publisher ROBERT GERSON about his 1970s horror comic Reality, art by BERNIE WRIGHTSON, MICHAEL W. KALUTA, JEFF JONES, and others FCA, MR. MONSTER, a FREE DRAW! #15! PREVIEW, and more!

STAN LEE SPECIAL in honor of his 85th birthday, with a cover by JACK KIRBY, classic (and virtually unseen) interviews with Stan, tributes, and tons of rare and unseen art by KIRBY, ROMITA, the brothers BUSCEMA, DITKO, COLAN, HECK, AYERS, MANEELY, SHORES, EVERETT, BURGOS, KANE, the SEVERIN siblings—plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, and more!

FAWCETT FESTIVAL—with an ALEX ROSS cover! Double-size FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America) with WALT GROGAN and P.C. HAMERLINCK on the many “Captains Marvel” over the years, unseen Shazam! proposal by ALEX ROSS, C.C. BECK on “The Death of a Legend!”, MARC SWAYZE, interview with Golden Age artist MARV LEVY, MR. MONSTER, and more!

JOE SIMON SPECIAL! In-depth SIMON interview by JIM AMASH, with neverbefore-revealed secrets behind the creation of Captain America, Fighting American, Stuntman, Adventures of The Fly, Sick magazine and more, art by JACK KIRBY, BOB POWELL, AL WILLIAMSON, JERRY GRANDENETTI, GEORGE TUSKA, and others, FCA, MR. MONSTER, and more!

(100-page magazine) $9 US Ships September 2007

(100-page magazine) $9 US Ships October 2007

(100-page magazine) $9 US Ships December 2007

(100-page magazine) $9 US Ships January 2008

(100-page magazine) $9 US Ships March 2008

DRAW! #15

WRITE NOW! #17

WRITE NOW! #18

ROUGH STUFF #6

ROUGH STUFF #7

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!

HEROES ISSUE featuring series creator/ writer TIM KRING, writer JEPH LOEB, and others, interviews with DC Comics’ DAN DiDIO and Marvel’s DAN BUCKLEY, PETER DAVID on writing STEPHEN KING’S DARK TOWER COMIC, MICHAEL TEITELBAUM, C.B. CEBULSKI, DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF, Nuts & Bolts script and art examples, a FREE BACK ISSUE #24 PREVIEW, and more!

More 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!

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!

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!

(80-page magazine with COLOR) $9 US Ships October 2007

(80-page magazine) $9 US Ships October 2007

(80-page magazine) $9 US Ships January 2008

(100-page magazine) $9 US Ships October 2007

(100-page magazine) $9 US Ships January 2008

Digital Editions: $295 Pros@Cons!

Summer 2007 Update Edition • Hype and hullabaloo from the publisher determined to bring new life to comics fandom • Edited by John Morrow

New Cover Art!

For various reasons, we’ve had to change cover art on a couple of items since we published our January catalog. Above are new covers for WRITE NOW #16 (shipping in July), and MEGO 8” SUPERHEROES: WORLD’S GREATEST TOYS (shipping in October)! For WRITE NOW, we’ve added a roundtable of Silver Surfer writers, including STAN LEE, STEVE ENGLEHART, JIM STARLIN, J.M. DEMATTEIS, and RON MARZ, so we felt this new cover painting by MIKE ZECK seemed spot-on. And the MEGO cover changed at the polite request of our friends up at DC Comics, so who are we to argue? Same great pubs, but with great new fronts! Get ’em soon!

Beginning with our July issues, we’ll begin offering digital editions of all our new magazines at www.twomorrows.com, for only $2.95 PER DOWNLOAD (way less than HALF THE PRICE of the printed versions)! Not only that, but these new PDF editions will feature much of the art from our printed magazines’ black-andwhite pages in FULL COLOR! As a special bonus, subscribers to our printed magazines will get FREE ACCESS to the digital versions of the issues in their subscription, which will generally be available 2-3 weeks BEFORE copies are even printed. So if you’ve hesitated to subscribe because our mags show up in your local comics shop before they’re in your mailbox, you can now see the whole issue digitally (and in color) weeks earlier, for no extra charge! We’re offering these digital editions as a test to see if there’s a market for them, not as a way to do away with printed magazines. But we’re relying on the honesty of our readers, to NOT share their digital editions with others. Since we rely on sales from every printed copy and download to keep the magazines going, if readers illegally share these files with others, the TwoMorrows mags you love so much could cease to be published in ANY format. So enjoy the files, but make sure you pay for yours! And if you’re a subscriber, send your e-mail address to www.twomorrows.com to get free access to these new digital editions!

During the second half of 2007, we’ll be exhibiting at the following comic cons: COMICON INTERNATIONAL (San Diego, CA, July 25-29, 2007) WIZARDWORLD: CHICAGO (Chicago, IL, August 9-12, 2007)

BALTIMORE COMICON (Baltimore, MD, September 8-9, 2007) SPX (Small Press Expo) (Bethesda, MD, October 12-13, 2007)

ULTIMATE SINNOTT

So stop by our booths and buy something!

We Built And Diamond Order Codes It, They Came...

Here’s a list of Diamond Order Codes that weren’t yet available when we printed our January Catalog: Alter Ego #68: MAR073852 Alter Ego #69: APR074098 Alter Ego #70: MAY073879 Alter Ego #71: JUN074006 Back Issue #22: MAR073855 Batcave Companion: NOV068368 Brush Strokes With Greatness: Joe Sinnott: MAR073744 Comics 101: FEB070050 Draw! #14: MAY073896 Image Comics: The Road To Independence: MAR073745 Jack Kirby Collector #49: JUN074028 John Romita... And All That Jazz! (HARDCOVER): APR074019 John Romita... And All That Jazz! (SOFTCOVER): APR074018 Rough Stuff #5: MAY073902 Write Now #16: MAY073903 Modern Masters Vol. 12: Michael Golden: APR074023 Modern Masters Vol. 13: Jerry Ordway: JUN073926 Modern Masters: Michael Golden DVD: MAY073780 Working Methods: MAR073747

BATCAVE DELAY

Our upcoming book THE BATCAVE COMPANION (by MICHAELS EURY and KRONENBERG) has been pushed back to April, to allow extra time to make it the most outstanding “Companion” we’ve ever done. Stay tuned! We guarantee it’ll be worth the wait!

Over 25,000 copies of COMICS 101 (our Free Comic Book Day publication) were handed out on May 5 at comics shops across the country, and from our webstore. And thousands more have been given away at conventions we’ve attended. If you somehow missed your copy of this great sampler of our mags (featuring “how-to” and history lessons from our editors), you can still get one online for a measly $2 IN THE US (which covers our postage costs to send it to you). Get it while the gettin’s good!

Only at www.twomorrows.com, we’re offering an ULTRA-LIMITED EDITION (only 52 copies, lettered “A” to “Z” and “AA” to “ZZ”) of our Joe Sinnott bio, BRUSH STROKES WITH GREATNESS! Joltin’ Joe has drawn 52 pencil drawings, and one has been bound into each copy, making a truly one-of-a-kind edition! So hurry online to get yours, and you can choose which character you want before they sell out! NOT SOLD IN STORES!

New Subscription Sell Outs! Rates: (due to postage hikes)

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: Four tabloid issues in the US: $44 Standard, $56 First Class (Canada: $64, Elsewhere: $76 Surface, $120 Airmail).

BACK ISSUE!: Six issues in the US: $40 Standard, $54 First Class (Canada: $66, Elsewhere: $90 Surface, $108 Airmail). ROUGH STUFF, DRAW! & WRITE NOW!: Four issues in the US: $26 Standard, $36 First Class (Canada: $44, Elsewhere: $60 Surface, $72 Airmail). ALTER EGO: Twelve issues in the US: $78 Standard, $108 First Class (Canada: $132, Elsewhere: $180 Surface, $216 Airmail). NOTE: IF YOU PREFER A SIX-ISSUE SUBSCRIPTION, JUST CUT THE PRICE IN HALF!

These items are now SOLD OUT: HEROES & VILLAINS: THE WILLIAM MESSNER-LOEBS TRIBUTE SKETCHBOOK WRITE NOW! #12 DRAW! #9 and #12 COMIC BOOK ARTIST COLLECTION, VOLUME 2 COMIC BOOK ARTIST #11 To get periodic e-mail updates of what’s new from TwoMorrows Publishing, sign up for our mailing list! http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ twomorrows

NEW RATES: Prices include US Postage. Outside the US, ADD PER ITEM: Mags & DVDs, $2 Canada ($7 Surface, $9 Airmail) • Books, $4 Canada ($12 Surface, $22 Airmail)

NOW SHIPPING FROM TWOMORROWS!

ALTER EGO #70

BACK ISSUE #23

ROUGH STUFF #5

WRITE NOW! #16

KIRBY COLLECTOR #49

Spotlight on ROY THOMAS’ 1970s stint as Marvel’s editor-in-chief and major writer, plus art and reminiscences of GIL KANE, BOTH BUSCEMAS, ADAMS, ROMITA, CHAYKIN, BRUNNER, PLOOG, EVERETT, WRIGHTSON, PÉREZ, ROBBINS, BARRY SMITH, STAN LEE and others, FCA, MR. MONSTER, a new GENE COLAN cover, plus an homage to artist LILY RENÉE!

Comics Go Hollywood! Spider-Man roundtable with STAN LEE, JOHN ROMITA, SR., JIM SHOOTER, ERIK LARSEN, and others, STAR TREK comics writers' roundtable Part 1, Gladstone’s Disney comics line, behindthe-scenes at TV’s ISIS and THE FLASH (plus an interview with Flash’s JOHN WESLEY SHIPP), TV tie-in comics, bonus 8-page color ADAM HUGHES ART GALLERY and cover, plus a FREE WRITE NOW #16 PREVIEW!

NEVER-BEFORE-PUBLISHED art 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 DC’s Jonah Hex, a new STEVE RUDE COVER, plus a FREE BACK ISSUE #23 PREVIEW!

An in-depth TODD McFARLANE interview, STAN LEE, STEVE ENGLEHART, JIM STARLIN, GEORGE PÉREZ, and J.M. DeMATTEIS on writing the Silver Surfer, Nuts and Bolts script and pencil art from BRIAN BENDIS and FRANK CHO’s MIGHTY AVENGERS and from DAN SLOTT’s AVENGERS: THE INITIATIVE, STAR TREK comics writers' roundtable Part 2, cover by MIKE ZECK, plus a FREE DRAW #14 PREVIEW!

WARRIORS, spotlighting Thor (with a look at hidden messages in BILL EVERETT’s Thor inks), Sgt. Fury, Challengers of the Unknown, Losers, and others! Includes a rare KIRBY interview, new interviews with JERRY ORDWAY and GRANT MORRISON, MARK EVANIER’s column, a pencil art gallery, a complete 1950s story, a wraparound Kirby Thor cover inked by JERRY ORDWAY, and more! SHIPS IN AUGUST!

(108-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: MAY073880

(100-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: MAY073902

(84-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: MAY073903

(84-page tabloid) $13 US Diamond Order Code: JUN074028

IMAGE COMICS

COMICS INTROSPECTIVE VOLUME 1: PETER BAGGE

WORKING METHODS

MODERN MASTERS VOLUME 12: MICHAEL GOLDEN

(100-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: MAY073879

JOHN ROMITA... & ALL THAT JAZZ! The artist who made AMAZING SPIDERMAN Marvel’s #1-selling comic book in the 1960s 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 STAN LEE and JACK KIRBY, following Spider-Man co-creator STEVE DITKO as artist on the strip, and more! Lavishly illustrated with Romita art, it’s a career overview of a comics master, and a firsthand history of the industry by one of its leading artists! Available in Softcover and Hardcover (with 16 extra color pages, dust jacket, and custom endleaves). (192-page softcover) $29 US ISBN: 9781893905757 Diamond Order Code: APR074018 (208-page hardcover w/ COLOR) $49 US ISBN: 9781893905764 Diamond Order Code: APR074019

THE ROAD TO INDEPENDENCE In 1992, seven artists shook the comic book industry when they left their top-selling Marvel Comics titles to jointly form a new company named IMAGE COMICS! IMAGE COMICS: THE ROAD TO INDEPENDENCE is an unprecedented look at the history of this company, featuring interviews and art from popular Image founders ERIK LARSEN, JIM LEE, TODD MCFARLANE, WHILCE PORTACIO, MARC SILVESTRI and JIM VALENTINO. Also featured are many of finest creators who over the last fifteen years have been a part of the Image family, offering behind-thescenes details of the company’s successes and failures. There’s rare and unseen art, making this the most honest exploration ever taken of the controversial company whose success, influence and high production values changed the landscape of comics forever! Written by GEORGE KHOURY. Introduction by DAVE SIM.

First volume of TwoMorrows’ new book series spotlighting INDY COMICS TALENT with an outside-the-box approach, combining original photography, multiple art gallery sections, and an introspective dialogue with each subject—all on deluxe glossy stock to maximize the impact of the imagery. Volume One features PETER BAGGE, whose work runs from political (his strips for reason.com), to absurdist and satirical (the Batboy strip for Weekly World News), and dramatic (Apocalypse Nerd). From his Seattle studio, Bagge lets us in on everything from 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. Written by CHRISTOPHER IRVING.

Art professor JOHN LOWE puts the minds of comic artists under the microscope, highlighting the intricacies of their storytelling and creative processes stepby-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.

(280-page trade paperback) $39 US ISBN: 9781893905719 Diamond Order Code: MAR073745

(128-page trade paperback) $21 US ISBN: 9781893905832 Diamond Order Code: MAY073779

(176-page paperback w/ COLOR) $26 US ISBN: 9781893905733 Diamond Order Code: MAR073747

Features an extensive, career-spanning interview lavishly illustrated with rare art from Golden’s files, plus huge sketchbook section, including unseen and unused art! By ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON. (120-page TPB with COLOR) $19 US ISBN: 9781893905740 Diamond Order Code: APR074023

MODERN MASTERS: MICHAEL GOLDEN DVD Shows the artist at work, discussing his art and career! (120-minute Std. Format DVD) $35 US ISBN: 9781893905771 Diamond Order Code: MAY073780

SUBSCRIPTIONS: JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: Four issues US: $44 Standard, $56 First Class (Canada: $64, Elsewhere: $76 Surface, $120 Airmail). BACK ISSUE!: Six issues US: $40 Standard, $54 First Class (Canada: $66, Elsewhere: $90 Surface, $108 Airmail). DRAW!, WRITE NOW!, ROUGH STUFF: Four issues US: $26 Standard, $36 First Class (Canada: $44, Elsewhere: $60 Surface, $72 Airmail). ALTER EGO: Twelve issues US: $78 Standard, $108 First Class (Canada: $132, Elsewhere: $180 Surface, $216 Airmail). FOR A SIX-ISSUE ALTER EGO SUBSCRIPTION, JUST CUT THE PRICE IN HALF!

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