Draw! #15

NUMBER 15 SPRING 2008

$6.95

BACK TO SCHOOL ISSUE

IN THE U.S.A.

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82658 27764

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

WHERE TO GET YOUR

COMIC ART DEGREE

FEATURED ARTIST:

BILL REINHOLD

PLUS: MIKE MANLEY AND BRET BLEVINS’

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

SPRING 2008 VOL. 1, NO. 15 Editor-in Chief • Michael Manley Designer • Eric Nolen-Weathington Publisher • John Morrow Logo Design • John Costanza Circulation Director • Bob Brodsky for CookieSoup Productions Proofreader • Eric Nolen-Weathington Transcription • Steven Tice Front Cover Illustration • Michael Manley For more great information on cartooning and animation, visit our Web site at: www.drawmagazine.com DRAW! Spring 2008, Vol. 1, No. 15 was produced by Action Planet Inc. and published by TwoMorrows Publishing. Michael Manley, Editor, John Morrow, Publisher.

Editorial Address is P.O. 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 2008 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, Commissioner Gordon, Enemy Ace ™ and ©2007 DC Comics • A.I.M., Blaze, Captain America, Dr. Doom, the Hulk, MODOK, the Punisher, Reed Richards, Silver Surfer, Spider-Man, the Thing, Venom ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc. • The Salon, The Voyage of the James Caird ™ and ©2008 Nick Bertozzi • Conan ™ and ©2008 Conan Properties International LLC • The Phantom ™ and ©2008 King Features Syndicate, Inc. • Shi ™ and ©2007 Billy Tucci • Badger ™ and ©2008 Mike Badger • Desiree’s Baby ™ and ©2008 respective owner • This entire issue is © 2006 Action Planet Inc. and TwoMorrows Publishing and may not be reprinted or retransmitted without written permission of the copyright holders. ISSN 1932-6882.

Printed in Canada. FIRST PRINTING.

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CONTENTS COVER STORY

The Big Back to School Issue Introduction

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THE JOE KUBERT SCHOOL

Interviews with Joe Kubert and Mike Chen

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THE CENTER FOR CARTOON STUDIES Interview with Michelle Ollie

MINNEAPOLIS COLLEGE OF ART AND DESIGN Interview with Terry Beatty

SCHOOL OF VISUAL ARTS Interview with Nick Bertozzi

SAVANNAH COLLEGE OF ART AND DESIGN Interview with John Lowe

FEATURED ARTIST Interview with Bill Reinhold

COMIC ART BOOTCAMP “Drawing Your Best Foot Forward”

by Bret Blevins and Mike Manley

FROM THE EDITOR

Figurative interpretation by Echo

School’s in session! Here it is, our big “Back to School” issue of DRAW! It was quite an undertaking but it was also really exciting, and surprising as well, to do this issue’s research and find out the state of art education in regards to comics. Sure, we comic and cartoon fans know comics seem to be making big waves today, from Hollywood to the rise of the graphic novel as a major genre in book publishing. Heck, any Barnes & Noble or Borders has a few aisles now set aside for comics trades and graphic novels carrying a pretty wide range from Naruto to Blankets to Batman. Certainly never before in my career as a professional cartoonist or even as a fan of comics have they ever been more visible in bookstores.

Coupled with this is the amazing amount of people interested in cartooning and animation as a career. This seems to have caused an explosion of interest in the serious study of comics in college-level education. Many colleges now offer classes on writing comics and drawing comics, some as Continuing Education or as part of their Art and Illustration programs. The impetus or idea of this issue sprang out of my own teaching career and the questions that come from the help I give to my students at DCAD (Delaware College of Art and Design). Each year many of my students ask my opinion on where they might go after DCAD to continue their education, as DCAD is a twoyear school. Some like manga, some like fantasy art, some like animation or mainstream superhero comics. So while doing a little advising I started to come across more and more schools that offered cartooning classes, some even full degrees. And then it occurred to me that no one had ever, to my knowledge, put all of this info in one place, one source, so that people could compare and contrast what these schools have to offer, as not every school is the right fit for every student, and so the idea of this issue came to be.

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There are a few schools, like SVA and the Kubert School, who have been around for a while offering classes and training in comic art, but now there are an amazing amount of schools offering a BFA degree in Comics. I find this to be both amazing and heartening to see comics accepted as a legitimate form of art, like film printmaking, painting, etc., and also the fact that this says comics have grown in importance to the overall culture of art in our country and the once common idea that comics will “rot your mind” has finally been buried.

Today there are a handful of universities and school that offer the budding cartoonist a variety of approaches of philosophy as well. Just like traditional art schools where some focus more on abstract art while others focus more on classical art, the schools covered in this issue really offer a wide variety of philosophies as well. From the Center for Cartoon Studies, with its bent towards the more “indy” style of comic, to SCAD and MCAD, where you can do both or more mainstream superhero work. This also means that more cartoonists like myself are teaching, offering the students access to real working pros that just wasn’t possible outside of places like New York City in the past. In short, you as a prospective student have more choices and possibilities now than ever before in your education as a cartoonist.

I’d like to thank all of the people who came through and really helped make this issue possible: The great Joe Kubert and Mike Chen from the Joe Kubert School in Dover, Nick Bertozzi who teaches at SVA in New York, Michelli Ollie from CCS in Vermont, Barbra Schulz and Terry Beatty from MCAD in Minneapolis, and John Lowe from SCAD in Savannah.

I’d also like to thank my good friend Bill Reinhold for his help and time with his interview. Bill is an amazing artist; he can do anything it seems, and it was great getting to share not only his great working techniques, but also some of his fine art away from comics. I’d also like to thank my best buddy Bret for helping out on the Foot installment of our continuing series “Comic Book Bootcamp” and Steven Tice for transcribing above and beyond the call of duty on this issue.

And as always we like to hear feedback from you: suggest artists you’d like to see covered here and subjects, techniques you’d like to see articles on. Lastly, I am sorry to report that due to the dreaded spambots I have had to shut down the DRAW! message board. It was corrupted with so much spam that it became impossible to manage. For now you can use my blog: www.drawman.blogspot.com to leave comments and questions, and I hope to have a new message board back up soon. DRAW! also has a myspace at: http://www.myspace.com/drawmag so stop by and join up.

Best,

E-mail: mike@drawmagazine.com Website: www.drawmagazine.com Snail mail: PO Box 2129, Upper Darby, PA 19082 DRAW! • SPRING 2008

his issue took a while to put together and was a big undertaking. I felt at times like an investigative reporter trying to nail down the facts behind a mystery or story— in this case the state of college-level education for cartooning and comics—and the case was bigger than I thought, one door led to another, and yet another.

The original impetus for doing this issue devoted mainly to comics education and schools grew out of my own experiences teaching the past six years at DCAD (the Delaware College of art and Design) and advising and helping my students in choosing what schools they might want to attend after they leave DCAD, which is a two-year Associates Degree school. I teach in the Animation Dept. (Storyboarding and Storytelling and Drawing for Animation and Illustration) and often the students who like animation want to do comics and vice versa. In the course of advising some students from last year’s class, it really hit me that, as far as I am aware, no one had yet compiled in one place an overview of what colleges offer courses and degrees in cartooning, either as a separate discipline or as part of an overall program in Animation, Illustration, etc. At DCAD I do teach comic storytelling as part of the Storyboarding class and I cover the similarities and differences in film vs. comics and comics vs. comic strips.

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Most people seem to know of the Joe Kubert School in Dover, New Jersey, run by one the best and most influential comic artists of all time, Joe Kubert. His school’s been around well over 20 years, and has probably the highest profile. But in that time comics have become, in many respects, mainstream. As a result of this explosion of comics upon our mainstream culture, courses on comics have sprung up, and now many schools—as you will read about here—offer an actual degree in Cartooning or have it as a significant part of their curriculum.

Luckily, I have many friends and colleagues who teach at some of the schools offering classes, and I was able to interview quite a few of them here. I also wanted to, if possible, get some examples of some of the students’ work at the schools and to present the financial end of schools, as well. I know firsthand just how expensive college is and how that expense can directly affect one’s ability to attend any school. I also wanted to try and find out the strengths and differences in each school’s program and what they stress, as not every school is a good fit for every student. I want to again thank each and every one of the folks I interviewed here for their time and graciousness and enthusiasm in helping me put together this article.

Let’s get the ball rolling with The Joe Kubert School, located in Dover, New Jersey.

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THE JOE KUBERT SCHOOL OF CARTOONING AND GRAPHIC ART Joe Kubert was gracious enough to take time out from his busy schedule to talk to DRAW! about his school and its programs, as was Mike Chen, the Special Projects coordinator, who also teaches there and has for a number of years. Mike was very helpful in supplying art samples by current students and more info about the Kubert School, and in setting up my interview with Joe. DRAW!: So as I come to understand it, Joe himself teaches in the senior year class?

MIKE CHEN: Yeah. He’s teaching sequential art, naturally, and I think a sketching and layout course.

DRAW!: Well, he is the master of layouts.

The Joe Kubert School of Cartooning and Graphic Art 37 Myrtle Ave Dover, NJ (973) 361-1327 The school was founded in 1976 and is a three-year vocational school. Find out more on their website: http://www.kubertsworld.com/kubertschool/KubertSchool.htm

Florida, California, Texas, Hawaii. People from other countries, Canadians, the British, South Americans, Central Americans, people from China, Japan. Some people from northern Africa. I think we even had one or two guys from Australia.

MC: Yeah, he is a genius.

DRAW!: He’s someone that, whenever I get stuck for ideas, all I have to do is look at a Joe Kubert comic and it always seems to suggest an idea or free up the mental block. He’s one of the artists I think I probably learned the most from, as far as page layout.

MC: Before I came to the school, I remember seeing his stuff at DC back in the ’60s, and it was eye-opening. It was not necessarily Neal Adams or Jim Steranko, but it’s like, “Wow! This stuff is great!” But I remember when he was doing stuff on Winnie Winkle, and you’re looking at this god-awful dull soap opera of a strip, and what he did with the panel layouts, it’s like, why don’t more people do this stuff? Of course, they don’t even try. But that’s the way Joe is. It’s second nature to him to experiment, to try things differently. Why just settle for the status quo?

DRAW!: So, in the first year at the Kubert School, do you have Figure Drawing and Anatomy?

MC: I think it’s ten courses. But Human Figure is mandatory; Design and Layout; Lettering; Methods and Materials; Intro to Animation, Humor and Caricature are all mandatory. Yes, you have to be funny here. Narrative Art is mandatory. Pacing, Mechanicals, those are all the courses that they have to take.

All the courses that we have in our curriculum at each level are mandatory. There are no electives. You cannot pick and choose what you’d like to do.

DRAW!: What about things like financial aid? And I know you guys at least had dorms. Do you still have dorms?

MC: We have three dormitory buildings in and around the town of Dover, where we’re situated. They’re each about a mile, a mile-and-a-half away, and with the three buildings we can accommodate fifty students, I think, altogether. Obviously, we do get students from the New Jersey area, the Tri-State area.

They just make their way here, they commute. But we are getting people from all over the United States, from Alaska, from

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DRAW!: Wow! Do the foreign students get preference when it comes to staying in the dorm?

MC: Yeah. It’s always going to boil down to a question of availability. We try to accommodate the foreign students as best we can, but if they decide to sign on at the very last second, and we’ve got all these Americans who’ve already signed up before that, we’ll do what we can, but it really does depend on when you’re signing up for this stuff. We only have so much space.

DRAW!: And since you’re an accredited school...

MC: A vocational school.

DRAW!: A vocational. Does that help with prospective students obtaining financial aid?

MC: Yes and no. Because we are accredited, they do have access to financial aid, but since we’re not a college, we’re not a university, we don’t offer any degrees, it’s a little bit tougher for our guys to be able to get financial aid. They still can get it.

And, obviously, our tuition is a heck of a lot less than going to most colleges.

DRAW!: What is the tuition?

MC: Oh, bother. I’m going to say, off the top of my head, about $16,000.

DRAW!: Not including the dorm, right?

MC: No, no, no. that would be a separate issue. I think that’s another $6,000.

DRAW!: Okay. That’s helpful because I’m trying to, as much as I can, give specifics. “This is what you get, this is how much it costs, the way the courses are structured,” so people can really start to compare. Because I’ve had students over the years ask me what school I recommend, or did I go to a school, when

to start looking, and there’s never been one place you could go and get that information. For medical school or music school, there are a lot of places you can go and see, “There are these schools, and this is what they offer.”

MC: Of course, that’s all before the Internet. But there just never was that much interest. Like you said, in terms of a medical school, or a law school, or what have you, a business school, there’s plenty of information, because you have hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of people who are interested in that sort of thing.

Outside of the people that you know as cartoonists, how many cartoonists would you say would be in your state? You know, we don’t exactly broadcast our location, and we’re definitely in the minority. Not everybody is going to be a cartoonist. For that matter, not everybody who has the ability to be a cartoonist, the talent, is going to be one. We are a very rare breed.

DRAW!: Yeah, and especially for things like political cartooning, where there’s actually a great decline of newspapers employing political cartoonists, now. That’s something I’ve been following the last several years, which is a shame, because that is a great and very vital form of cartooning.

MC: I agree, and also newspaper comic strips; there are still a lot of people who are trying to get in there, but it’s not like it used to be when Joe Kubert was a kid. That was the Holy Grail.

DRAW!: Or even when we were kids. [laughs] So do you talk about that kind of thing in the school? I mean, they’re really facing a very different world, as prospective professionals, than I did growing up in the ’80s, because now DC’s talking about doing web comics; they have a contract for doing web comics. I mean, that’s very different.

Artwork from Barry Lyndon Verastigue, a student at The Joe Kubert School.

MC: Right. I can’t say that, formally, we have something like that. We don’t have a web comics course, but because of the nature of our instructors, they’re spanning the generations, themselves. I mean, we do have younger instructors in their late 20s, early 30s, as well as the geezers. I think it kind of gives a good overview to the students of what’s going on there, and we get them to start thinking about this. Again, it’s not just a bunch of pretty pictures. They have to consider their livelihood. How is this going to affect them?

DRAW!: And this covers things like how to conduct yourself as a professional in the business world as well, I suppose.

ARTWORK ©2007 BARRY LYNDON VERASTIGUE

MC: Yes, I remember this guy who showed up at DC one day looking like a bum. He was dressed in shorts, and it looked like he was covered in dust. It was like Pigpen from Peanuts—just a cloud of dust. He comes into DC’s pristine offices carrying his artwork in a paper bag or a backpack or something like that. He goes up to one of the receptionists and says, “I’m here to show my artwork to DC to get a job.” And the receptionist, trained of course, properly, smiled sweetly and said, “Well, who’s your appointment with?” The guy is flustered. “I don’t have an appointment with anybody. Who do I show it to?” “Well, you would normally show it, perhaps, to one of our creative directors.” “Okay, well, which one’s available?” “Well, sir, you have to have an appointment first. We can’t just let you in.” And then this guy proceeded to get into an argument with the receptionist.

DRAW! • SPRING 2008

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While that was going on, another fellow came in right after him dressed cleanly—no cloud of dust. Not a threepiece suit or anything, but just clean, had a portfolio with him, walked up to another receptionist who was not involved in a fistfight, and identified himself. And she said, “Oh, yes, and who’s your appointment with?” And he identified the editor and the time. “Oh, fine, that’s not a problem. Please have a seat, sir.” That was one of our students. That was one of our students.

And that always stuck in my head, that instance. You know, the guy who came in with the cloud of dust may have been a far better artist, possibly, than our guy, but he didn’t act the way he was supposed to act. He didn’t understand the way things are.

DRAW!: Yeah, that’s very true.

Whenever I see pictures of the older cartoonists, or when I would meet someone like Will Eisner, he always wore a suit. Here he’s retired, and he’s still wearing a suit. Guys from that generation, there was a little bit more formalness, in general.

MC: He was a businessman. He knew how a businessman thought, and he was able to play the game just as well as any of them, which is why he was as successful as he was. Now, while Joe won’t wear a suit, even under duress, he knows exactly what you’re supposed to do, and this is what he passes on to the students. This is who you talk to, this is how you have to behave. You’re going to act one way at the beginning of your career, and then you can act in a different way later on, but don’t start assuming airs right off the bat.

DRAW!: Sometimes young artists are guilty of the breach of being a little bit too familiar with people, like they are Sequential artwork from Alex Konat, a student at The Joe Kubert School. your peer. I know that that happens.

ARTWORK ©2007 ALEX KONAT You would be surprised, or maybe you wouldn’t, at some of the letters I get from prospective employDRAW!: Unfortunately, sometimes what that does is reinforce that sort of stereotype that people have of artists, you know, ees or apprentices or what have you. Their tone is like that of “You flaky artists. You hippies.” Well, obviously that’s a your buddy you’re going to go out to the movies with or somestrength of your school, something that runs through the whole thing, not like someone you are trying to... curriculum, then, that whole idea that, while you’re an artist and MC: And that’s fine if you’re dealing with another cartoonist, everything, you’re also a businessman, and when you’re interbecause we’re all like that. But, when you’re dealing with the acting with the business world, you have to interact as a busibusiness folk, who are in the majority, they don’t understand nessman, and your business is your art. that point of view. It’s like, “Well, shouldn’t you be behaving a certain way?”

MC: Exactly.

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can’t come into the spring semester. You’re just going to have to wait until fall of next year.

DRAW!: So you couldn’t start classes in January?

MC: No. DRAW!: Okay. Going back to the dorm, Joe said you used to have a cafeteria. I wasn’t clear if you still have that or not.

MC: Well, we call it a lunch room. The cafeteria is a leftover from when the school building was actually a public school. I think three of Joe’s kids graduated from the school when it was a public school, so when he says “cafeteria,” he’s referring to the room, geographically, in the building, but we weren’t serving pizza and french fries to anybody. But we still have a lunch room. It’s got vending machines, it’s got a microwave—that kind of stuff. The students congregate there.

DRAW!: You sell art supplies, too, right?

MC: Sure. That’s the art store, yeah.

DRAW!: Right. So there’s no excuse for never having paper.

MC: There’d better not be. They are told, “This is what you’re supposed to have, so bring it in.” You can’t pull that excuse on a client, either. “Gee, I don’t have the art supplies.”

DRAW!: I’ve had a few students who have done that. I know that they spent their money on something else that weekend, but...

More sequential artwork from Alex Konat.

ARTWORK ©2007 ALEX KONAT

DRAW!: Do you have a portfolio review day?

MC: No. If you apply to the school, if you go through the formalities, I mean, obviously your portfolio will be reviewed, but we don’t have a portfolio review day for the general public, no.

DRAW!: So do you send in your portfolio? You mail it in?

MC: It depends. Like you said, if the person lives within the area, they can just drive down here for an in-person interview. If they’re willing to take a plane and come out here, that’s fine, and bring the portfolio with them. If it’s a telephone interview because they’re living in China, that’s fine, too, as long as we’ve got that portfolio in our hands, or at least we’ve got a CD-ROM or DVD that has that information, that’s fine. We don’t need to have originals to be able to judge a person’s ability. They’re not applying for a job. We just want to get an idea of what they’re capable of doing. So if they want to send hard copies or scans or photographs, as long as we can see it, that’s fine.

DRAW!: And do you have rolling enrollment?

MC: In September of any given year, that’s the only window of opportunity. For instance, we’re still in the fall semester. You

MC: Unless, of course, they were trying to negotiate that as part of the fee, as, “Oh, I’ll do this job if part of the fee is in art supplies,” then that’s fine.

DRAW!: How long have you been at the Kubert School yourself?

MC: I’ve been working here in this capacity since ’85, but I’m a graduate of the Kubert School class of ’81. I was in the third class to graduate from the Kubert School. I was in the same group with Tim Truman.

DRAW!: Okay. One of my good friends I think was in the first or second class, Chris Kalnick.

MC: Oh, he was in the second class.

DRAW!: It must make Joe feel pretty proud to have so many graduates out there working in the business.

MC: Well, in the fields that have any graduates come in, it’s good to have professionals, but it’s even better to have professionals who know what it’s like here, and know how the students think. Especially with the younger instructors, and they’ve got a better feel for [laughs] some of the strange things that the students will be thinking.

DRAW!: Ah, yes.

MC: We all think strange thoughts, but...

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Inked two-page spread from Zane DeGaine, a student at The Joe Kubert School.

ARTWORK ©2007 ZANE DEGAINE

DRAW!: Yes, especially if you’re a cartoonist. Cartoonists are always thinking strange things. That’s why we’re cartoonists.

And it’s a great job to be able to get paid for your strange thoughts. Do you teach any of the classes yourself?

MC: Currently I’m just teaching the lettering class here at the Kubert School for the first-year students.

DRAW!: And you’re teaching that as hand-lettering, right?

MC: We start off with the hand-lettering. This year we are changing the program so that they’re going to be using the computer, working with Illustrator, a little bit of Photoshop, to do it that way, but we feel that starting off with the traditional methods, then segueing to the computer techniques, is the best approach.

DRAW!: Right. I still prefer, if possible, to have the artwork actually lettered on the board, but that’s so hard to do now. You can’t really do it at any of the companies.

MC: No. Marvel and DC are geared completely towards computers now.

DRAW!: Yeah.

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MC: Over at DC Comics, of the guys in their production department who do the lettering—lettering collections and the like—the majority are from the Kubert School. One of the reasons why they were hired—partly because one of the guys who does the hiring went to the Kubert School—is that they were taught the traditional techniques, but could do the computer, too.

DRAW!: Right, right. Well, it’s always good to have the foundations. One of the things I always warn the students against...

Hey, I love my computer. I love my new Mac laptop. It’s just a fantastic thing. But if you always let the computer make the decision, how do you know if the decision’s any good? You’ve just abdicated to the engineer’s parameters on the machine, on this filter or that setting—“Well, I guess that’s okay, because that’s what it does.” You’re not really deciding, you’re not making those critical judgments yourself.

MC: It’s a terrific tool, but they’ve yet to synthesize the imagination and creativity of a cartoonist.

DRAW!: Right, right. And hopefully that will never happen. [laughter] There will be no logarithm that will ever be able to explain that.

MC: I hope the Chaos Theory doesn’t help the mathematicians come up with a program for that.

DRAW!: But, yeah, I always say that those aesthetics that I learned at 15 or 16, when I had my commercial art class in high school, then allowed me to go make my little portfolio and go get a job at a printer. Which is funny, because we’re talking about the Kubert School, and the first guy I worked for, his name was Rock, and he was very much like Sgt. Rock, actually. He was an ex-Marine and an ex-art director for Chrysler, so he was sort of a no-nonsense kind of guy. But those aesthetics I learned with him, I’ve carried those all my life. I do not miss having to use things like a waxer or anything like that, but the skills I got training my eye to do those mechanicals, and then also learning to deal with a client, and I learned to do printing, so I understood how a book was made, which then you understand reproduction, which helps you... Not too many people get that experience anymore, with the four-color process or anything. I don’t know if you still do it, but Joe used to do that book, where they would take the graduates and create a book. Do you still do that?

MC: No, we don’t do that formally. Sometimes the students will get themselves organized to try and do something like that on their own, which is extremely educational, as some of them have to function as editors and art directors and suddenly realize, “You know, there’re a lot of deadheads here. I wouldn’t

trust my life and career on any of these guys.” But it does teach them very important social skills, of trying to organize a team, and trying to adhere to a deadline, to a schedule.

DRAW!: Yes, the tyranny of the deadline.

MC: You can always promise yourself you’re going to be doing the best picture, given an unlimited amount of time, but somehow the rest of the world doesn’t quite understand that concept.

DRAW!: Yeah, that’s true. Do you have a pretty long day at school?

MC: I’m normally here from 8:00 until 4:30.

DRAW!: That’s a pretty long day.

MC: Yeah, well, it keeps me off the streets.

DRAW!: And do you do creative work on your own, outside the school?

MC: I do. I don’t have anything right now, but I’ve done a lot of freelance work for Marvel, DC, Image. I’ve done some stuff for Archie Comics, King Features Syndicate. Some advertising stuff, of course. Different things.

DRAW!: So you’re really a sort of jack of all trades.

MC: No, I’m a cartoonist.

Next I spoke with the big man himself—Joe Kubert—and got his perspective on his school and what his goals are for his students. There probably isn’t anyone in teaching today who has taught more students in the art of cartooning than Joe.

DRAW!: Thanks, Joe, for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk to us about your school. The main focus of this issue of the magazine is art schools—particularly colleges that offer comic or graphic storytelling as part of their curriculum. So, of course, we have to come to the Mecca of comic book storytelling.

JOE KUBERT: Yes, thank you, thank you. And it’s of interest to me, Mike, to find out exactly what the other schools that are going to be incorporated in your interview are offering. There are excellent schools, there’s no question about it. The School of Visual Arts and so on. What are they offering? I’m not even sure that they do have a cartoon program anymore, do they?

DRAW!: Well from my interview with one of my friends, Nick Bertozzi, who teaches there, and I know Klaus Janson still teaches there, I think the comic book courses come underneath the Illustration program.

JK: Just one facet of the overall program.

Inked sequential art from Josh Jicha, a student at The Joe Kubert School.

DRAW!: Right, you don’t get your BFA in Comic Books. I think it’s in Illustration.

ARTWORK ©2007 JOSH JICHA

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DRAW!: Right. SCAD seems to be a little bit more similar to you. The Center for Creative Studies seems to be more towards the Harvey Pekar, graphic novel, more indy format. I’m sure that there are students that go to the Kubert School that do the same thing.

JK: They do, but not specifically. That isn’t the specific program. And it may be with their institution. I think it’s rather important to point those things out, just as you’re saying, so that people who are interested in coming to any of our schools know what to expect.

DRAW!: Right. For instance, today one of my students, Rachel, was asking about schools that I know of, since about this time of year I try to help them, if I can, when they are trying to figure out what the next step is, because DCAD is a two-year school, so you get an associate’s degree. Some of them are thinking they’re going to go on to RSD or SVA or MICA. There are so many different places. Some of them want to go into animation or game design, some of them want to do comics, some of them only want to do independent comics, some of them want to do manga, some of them want to do the Avengers. Rachel wants to do comics, but she wants to do manga. So I’m trying to explain to her, as I understand the field, that it’s a lot harder to do manga in the United States. You know, that stuff is basically produced in Japan, and most of the stuff that we see is reprinted.

JK: Oh, it goes way, way beyond that, too. I think primarily what’s important is that each one of the kids should make a determination if they really want to make a living in this business. And if they focus in on any one, narrow area, they’re also narrowing the opportunities of making a livelihood over an extended period of time.

Sequential artwork from Alex Konat—now with pirates!

ARTWORK ©2007 ALEX KONAT

JK: I would assume, and I’m pretty sure, that you’ll point out the differences between what we’re doing here and the other schools. I’m not trying to denigrate, I’m just trying to make a comparison.

DRAW!: Well, that’s exactly the point of what I’m trying to do. Terry Beatty teaches out at the school in Minneapolis, there, and the person who used to run that school is now the head of the Center for Creative Studies, the cartooning school up in Vermont. Each school offers a different view and that’s what the interviews are all about. So can you give us a rundown of the way you go about teaching at your school?

JK: Well, it’s not only the way of teaching. I think it’s also important to point out, and just to give the right dope to the people who are going to be reading this with any interest, what the expectations would be in terms of completing any of our schools, mine or any of the others—what they’re looking for, and what they’re looking to accomplish. What I would do, and what I’m interested in—and I’m sure the other schools are, to some extent, too—is to make sure that people don’t come with erroneous ideas about what they’re going to be doing, what their time at the school is going to result in, and so on.

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DRAW!: That’s exactly what I was telling her. Because you may want to do autobiographical comics, but if you’re saying, “That’s the only kind of comic I want to do,” then if somebody gives you a different type of job, are you qualified to do that?

Do you limit yourself?

JK: They don’t really know. I can’t imagine somebody coming to a school and saying, “I want to learn science, I want to be a scientist. And this is what I want to learn, this is the part of science that I want to learn.” It’s telling the teacher what they should be taking as part of the course, and what they shouldn’t be taking as part of the course. Which is a sad thing for the person who might be attending the school, because apparently they don’t have enough information. They’re not clear about what it is they want to do, or how to do it.

DRAW!: Right. So, in a nutshell, what is the thrust of your school and your philosophy?

JK: Okay, let me tell you what I think is the most important factor that I’d like to get across to anybody who is considering going to any of our schools. What we focus on here is to make sure that people will get a job when they get out. That means, then, that we’re giving them a ten-course curriculum, all of which they must take and pass. In other words, a person can’t come to the school, here, and pass only nine of our courses and expect to graduate. We will not graduate a person unless they

have taken and passed all ten courses, simply because each one of the courses that are given here will result in their ability to get a job in any one of the areas that are covered by the course. A cartoonist, a comic book artist, incidentally, is somebody who can get a job anywhere in the commercial art field, because all those things, all the knowledge that you have to have in order to be able to get a job as a comic book artist are the same things that will give you a job at a dozen other different places in the commercial art field. Comic book artists do children’s books, comic book artists do graphic novels, comic book artists do layouts and storyboards for movies, for TV, for advertising, for promotions, illustration. All of those things are covered.

JK: I’ve got to tell you very quickly, too, that I had the help of guys like Sol Harrison, who used to be like my second father, really, and Jack Adler, who is a very dear friend, who described to me the needs and necessities and the kind of courses that should be set up to accommodate people to know how to get into those areas, not only to be able to handle those areas of the commercial art field, but to be able to get a job in production doing any one of these things.

So I got input not only from my own experience, but from guys in the business themselves. At the school now, we have an advisory board. That advisory board is made up of Neal Adams, Paul Levitz, Joe Quesada, Victor Gorelick from Archie, and one or two other companies that are in advertising and... what’s the manga company?

DRAW!: I agree, and I often say that to my students, that those skills to be a really good comic book artist, you can really transfer to so many other jobs.

DRAW!: Tokyopop?

JK: That’s correct. But you need all those skills. Like I’m saying, the ten courses that we give here really reflect all those skills that you need in order to be a comic book artist, but just because somebody comes out of the school and they are equipped and have the ability to take on a terrific superhero character at any of the publishing companies, there’s no assurance that there will be an opening. They’re not about to fire somebody in order to hire somebody who’s unproven. So what you have to do is get a toehold in the field. Nobody I know who gets into comic books likes to do handlettering. Every cartoonist that I know hates to do hand-lettering.

Yet hand-lettering is an integral part of the job for anybody who wants to get into the area of editing or preparation that has to be done before a comic book is completed and goes to the printer.

Most of the lettering, it’s true, is done on the computer, but corrections and all that knowledge that you have to know as a letterer go into the production part of putting this material together. Now, that can be your toehold into the business. There are at least a dozen guys from the school who are now working up at DC in their production department, just waiting now for the opportunity to get into doing a strip, and many of them already have taken that big, giant step. But unless you can get that toehold in, you’re battering your head against stone walls in order to get that first strip, that first job, despite the fact that you’re able to do it. Like I tell my students, there are three things that every one of us has to accomplish in order to be able to get that first job. You have to be at the right place, at the right time, with the right stuff. Now, if any three of those elements are missing, you aren’t getting that job.

JK: Tokyopop has their representative. All of them are on our advisory board, and the job of the advisory board is to keep us apprised of those things that are happening, and the needs in the business itself, so that we can incorporate them in all the courses that we’re giving.

DRAW!: Your school’s been going since what, ’77 or so?

JK: We started in ’76. We’re in our 31st year now.

DRAW!: It’s very true.

JK: If you’re there with the right stuff and at the right place, but not at the right time, when the opening isn’t there, you’ve gotta keep going back, and back, and back again. Or get yourself a toehold in that business so that, when that opportunity does open up, you’re there to take advantage of it.

DRAW!: Right. I imagine your curriculum was based upon your experience as a professional, having grown up, starting as a teenager...

JK: Exactly. Exactly.

DRAW!: ...learning, starting out sweeping the floor, you know...

More pirates sequential artwork from Alex Konat.

ARTWORK ©2007 ALEX KONAT

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DRAW!: So some of the skills you have to have now didn’t exist back when the school started. Like, today people have to use computers.

JK: That’s correct. Incidentally, we have about 30 instructors who teach, because none of the instructors are full-time teachers. Every one of the instructors is working outside in the field that he’s teaching about in the school. The men and women who come here to teach, teach maybe one, or two, or three days a week. The rest of the time, they’re working at the stuff that they’re teaching about here at the school.

DRAW!: Which I’m sure is really invaluable to the students.

JK: Yes, because the stuff that they’re telling students is exactly the kind of experience that they’re going through every day.

DRAW!: And you really can’t beat that. That’s basically my philosophy with teaching at DCAD; I teach storytelling and storyboarding, and we do comics in that class, and I tell them that the things I’m teaching them are the things I employ, myself.

JK: Well, my own sons, Adam and Andy, are doing the two top features in the business today, Batman and Superman, for DC, and they’re contracted with the company. They teach here. So every one of the instructors that are teaching are telling the guys, “Look, this is the work I do. This is what I do every day.

This is what you’ve got to do to get into the business and make a living at it.”

DRAW!: Is it a three-year school now?

JK: It is a three-year course, yes. We started at two years. Geez, I should show you... I don’t like really to talk about it too much, but I got a letter from Rick Veitch just the other day. He was in the first year, 30 years ago he came to the school, and out of the clear, blue sky, every once in a while I hear from the guys. He just wanted to write to show me what he’s been doing recently. He sent me a whole bunch of his stuff, which is just great. And telling me how lucky he was to come to the school, how fortunate he has been for the last 30 years, to be able to do the kind of work that he’d always dreamed about doing, living the kind of life where he loves getting up every day and doing the work, and people still pay him for it.

MM: That’s the great thing about being an artist is really, when you remove everything, all the business, all that stuff, the fact that you can sit down and draw for a living, and that’s what you love to do, and you can make your monthly nut with that, that’s a great thing.

More pirates sequential artwork from Alex Konat.

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ARTWORK ©2007 ALEX KONAT

DRAW! • SPRING 2008

JK: The tricky thing is, though, Mike— and everybody should know this who’s thinking about doing it—there are a lot of people who draw real well, are good artists, but they don’t want to draw all the time. They like to draw when the spirit moves them. [Mike laughs] But you can’t do that and do this professionally. You gotta want to draw all the time. Now, somebody who doesn’t have that motivation, I can’t give them that. I don’t know where the hell that comes from. It’s something that they have in themselves, or they don’t. That’s it.

DRAW!: So when the students come in their first year, how is your program structured? Do you have basic level programs for everybody?

JK: That’s correct. To a great extent, they’re actually repeating the programs, year by year, with more intensity. As each year goes by, we become more and more demanding of them, and they become more demanding of themselves. And it’s a rather sensitive situation, because you have to realize, as instructors and people who are working with young people, you have to know when it’s getting to a point where that challenge that you bring on each one of the students becomes too much. And I’ve seen that happen time and time again, where some very talented people, potentially, really talented people, have just literally destroyed themselves when the demands were too much, too fast.

DRAW!: And they just kind of hit the wall?

JK: Well, the term that they use is they burned themselves out, but I think it’s just as you described, Mike—they hit a wall.

Look, the person that you’re competing against is not the guy that’s sitting next to you in the classroom. The guy that you’re competing against is you, because you’re constantly trying to push yourself and get better and better.

DRAW!: Right.

JK: There are no two people who draw alike. Everybody has different ideas, everybody has different thoughts, everybody has had different experiences that result in different kinds of thinking and different kinds of people where we express ourselves in the drawings that we do. So it’s not a matter of drawing, of being better or worse than the guy next to you. You’re different.

You’re just completely different. The challenge is to try to improve yourself, and to see what the hell it is that you’re doing, and keep at it. No matter what the heck happens, you’ve just got to keep at it. And where you get that kind of drive and motivation, like I said before, I don’t know where the hell that comes from, but it’s got to be there.

DRAW!: One of the things I also wanted to talk about was do you have a fairly good track record of former students getting a job in the business?

JK: If we didn’t have a good track record, I’d have been out of business a long time ago. Our employment rate of graduates who come out of the school is between 80% and 90%.

DRAW!: Wow! JK: It is very high. Not everybody goes into comic books.

Everybody may come here thinking that they want to get into comic books, but, as a result of the different and varied courses that are taken here—there’s only one program, but there are a lot of courses—they’re learning about doing things that they never have experienced. You know, most of the people who come here wanting to be comic book artists have never dealt with color. We have Rowena, who is teaching painting. Now, how lucky can you get to have an instructor like that? We’ve had Greg Hildebrandt and Tim Hildebrandt who have taught

More pirates sequential artwork from Alex Konat.

ARTWORK ©2007 ALEX KONAT

here, taught painting and illustration. And the student suddenly discovers, never having worked with color before that... You know, it’s like being born again. So, as a result of that, they go into a whole variety of different fields that they’d never even dreamed of: Book illustration, children’s book illustration, advertising, and so on. So a lot of people come out of here going into different areas of the commercial art field other than the comic book field that they thought that they wanted to get into. As a result of that, our employment rate is really good.

DRAW!: Is it like a nine-to-five? Is it a long day?

JK: These are very long days. The schedule maintained by the students here is a tough one, but it’s only preparation for what they’re going to have on the outside. The school hours are five days a week. The first class starts at 8:30, and they’re out of here by a quarter till 3:00.

DRAW!: That’s banker’s hours for us comic book artists! [laughs] JK: Well, that’s not the end, though. Every one of the courses has homework. And the amount of homework that they have to do equals, very often, the amount of time that they’re spending in school. The average schedule maintained by every student DRAW! • SPRING 2008

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who attends here is that they’re drawing anywhere from seven to ten hours a day, six to seven days a week.

DRAW!: But then that also means that you probably start to see some progress.

JK: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I’m sure that you realize, too, that the last person who can actually recognize the kind of progress that you’re making as an artist is you, because you’re on top of the stuff, and you’re so close to it all the time. Like we tell the students, if you take a look at the stuff you’ve done in the first year, as opposed to what you might be doing in the third year, it’s like day and night. It is very tough. It is very tough for the students.

Look, we have people who come from all over the world. We’ve had people coming here from countries I never even heard of.

DRAW!: Oh, really? You have a lot of international students?

JK: Oh, yes. Most decidedly. I would say that at least 20 to 25% of the students who attend here are from outside the United States. Which makes it a little tougher for them.

Tougher, yet the motivation that pushed them to come here under those circumstances is helpful because that’s what keeps them driving at what they’re doing.

JK: We have a library, we have a lunch room, we have all the facilities necessary for any school. We are wired for computers; we have a wireless system completely throughout the building for computers now.

DRAW!: Do you have people who also specialize in teaching things like Photoshop and some of the other programs?

JK: Well, as you’ve mentioned, when I started the school, computers didn’t exist. Now you can’t publish anything unless you are knowledgeable with them.

DRAW!: [laughs] You can’t even get your scripts, now, if you don’t have a computer!

JK: That’s right. Who ever would have dreamed that you’d never have to turn in an original, that all you had to do was just scan it in and send it electronically to someplace. Never. Never.

DRAW!: Right. So I imagine you’ve to be staying on top of

DRAW!: I guess that probably touches on the subject of financial aid and things like that. Is there any of that available to people?

JK: Oh, absolutely. We’ve been nationally accredited since the second year of our being in business. All kinds of financial aid is available, and grants are available, and we have a whole slew of scholarships, as a matter of fact.

DRAW!: That’s great! Your school has continued to grow and grow and grow over the years. I think you told me your facilities were expanding, or have recently expanded, right?

JK: It’s too complicated to get into, but the whole building has been renovated. The place I’m sitting right now was originally a high school that was built back in 1917, and it contained three floors that equaled about 100,000 square feet. There was about 30,000 square feet per floor. Recently, we’ve had the building completely renovated—new windows, an elevator installed, painting, new toilets. Everything was done, and the whole building is completely and totally renovated, plus about half the building has been torn down.

DRAW!: Oh, wow.

JK: We had an auditorium and a gymnasium, of which we had very, very little use. We had a big cafeteria. All of them had been added to the building over the years, but they were just draining the heat and other resources here. That was all knocked down, all taken away.

DRAW!: Now, what about things like a library and other facilities, the Internet, things like that?

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Color work from Zane DeGaine.

SHI ™ AND ©2007 BILLY TUCCI

that, as well.

JK: Oh, yes. As we do.

DRAW!: What would you say is the best thing about your school?

JK: Oh, God, Mike, I don’t know. The best thing about my school is that I graduated both my sons.

DRAW!: [laughs] Okay.

JK: It was worth starting the school just for that.

DRAW!: Okay, but come on, their dad is one of the greatest comic book artists, ever. I think they probably could have just stood behind you and watched you draw! [laughs] JK: Mike, look. You draw, I draw, and I don’t think, genetically, they’re set for anything. Two of the boys were interested in cartooning. None of the others drew at all. To me, it was just a miracle that Adam and Andy had an interest to want to follow, and to do this kind of stuff. But what was even more astounding to me was to find out that they love doing the work that they do as much as I love it. To me that’s just a miracle.

DRAW!: Well, also, maybe because you loved it. I mean, it’s probably a great thing to see your dad being happy with his job.

JK: Maybe. Maybe. You know, we never even talked about it, but that probably is true. It enabled me to be home when I was working, to be with the kids as much as I possibly could, which was great. Maybe that had something to do with it. I don’t know. [laughs] DRAW!: Well, like I said, I appreciate you taking the time to talk to us and give us a rundown on your school.

JK: I appreciate that. And, incidentally, if it weren’t for the subject that you’re doing, Mike, I’d be kind of reticent to even discuss it with you, but I’m in full agreement with what you’re doing, and I think it’ll be a good thing and helpful to those people who are interested in going to any of the schools.

“Enemy Ace” page from the man, himself—Joe Kubert!

ENEMY ACE ™ AND ©2007 DC COMICS

layout and page layout. You’re probably my favorite artist when it comes to that, and it’s great to use material like yours and show that to the students and see the little light bulb pop on.

JK: Oh, thank you. I appreciate that.

DRAW!: Are you working on anything now?

DRAW!: You know, the thing that I find amazing today is that... I’m 46. When I go to the conventions, I don’t think there have ever been more people interested in doing this than are now. It’s like at every show there are more. Every time you go to San Diego, there are more people. There’s, like, 100,000 people in San Diego, and 98,000 of them want to do comic books.

JK: Oh, yeah. I’m always work. I’m just finishing off a series of comic books that’s going to be a graphic novel, as well. I have projects for the next five years set on my table.

DRAW!: Wow!

JK: There are more opportunities today to do things. When did you ever hear of a guy who was writing or drawing for comic books directing movies? When did that ever happen? We’re respectable, now. [laughs] We’re even appearing in The New York Times. Can you imagine?

JK: If I live that long. [laughs]

DRAW!: There you go. Well, again, I really appreciate you taking the time. I’ve always been a huge, huge fan of your work—you’re actually one of the artists whose work I always take in and show to my students, especially for things like panel

DRAW!: Well, thanks a lot, Joe.

DRAW!: Oh, I think you’re like Shazam, you’ll live forever.

Your beard will just get a little bit longer every year.

JK: Out of your mouth into you-know-who’s ear. [laughter]

JK: Mike, thank you very much.

DRAW! • SPRING 2008

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THE CENTER FOR CARTOON STUDIES (CCS) The Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS) is a school that offers a two-year course of study that centers on the creation and dissemination of comics, graphic novels and other manifestations of the visual narrative. Experienced and internationally recognized cartoonists, writers, and designers teach classes. The school is located in downtown White River Junction, Vermont, in the historic Colony Surprise Department Store.

I met James Sturm at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art Festival (MoCCa) two years back, just as CCS was ramping up and I was very curious to see how the school would progress and what it had to offer. It seemed aimed at a different endpoint compared to SVA or Kubert; it seemed aimed more towards the independent or alternative-minded artist. I view this as a great thing for the medium of comics, that there are now schools that can clearly have a different bend, a different aim, just like the more mainstream schools, where one might be more of a classical school, like the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, or more design-oriented like RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) This is great for the field of cartooning and for the student interested in attending art school for comics. I contacted and had a great and very informative interview with Michelle Ollie the managing director and co-founder of The Center for Cartoon Studies. Michelle came from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD)—also covered in this issue—where she taught Marketing and Design and was also a director.

DRAW!: Thanks for taking the time to talk to us, Michelle, about The Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS). Why don’t you tell me a little bit about CCS and what makes your school different from, say, Joe Kubert’s school?

MICHELLE OLLIE: First of all, our school just in general is set up as a program that is very similar to what you might see at an art college, like Savannah College of Art and Design, SVA, and Minneapolis College of Art and Design, in the sense that there’s a very strong studio component with the Liberal Arts integrated. The curriculum is very similar in that way. The difference, I would say, is that our school really fosters selfpublishing. We’re seeing a lot of studios writing stories about their lives, themselves, fictional stories, non-fiction stories. And their visual narrative is not too often superhero based.

DRAW!: Okay, so it would be less fantasy-oriented?

MO: I would say less, yeah. I hate to generalize, because there are students that explore all categories.

DRAW!: I’m looking at your website here, there’s even a superhero right here on your website. [laughs] MO: Exactly, yeah. That’s why I do think there are some. And, of course, we have people who write science fiction and illustrate wonderful stories that could be in the genre of superheroes. It wouldn’t be fair to exclude that, but I definitely think 16

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The Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS) P.O. Box 125 White River Junction, VT 05001 The school was founded in 2005 and is a two-year school. Find out more on their website: http://www.cartoonstudies.org Or contact them directly: Telephone: (802) 295-3319 Fax: (802) 295-3399 E-mail: writeon9000@cartoonstudies.org

the overwhelming number of students and the desire of the topics that they’re working on revolves around self-publishing their stories, their own work, their own experiences, fictional stories, memoirs. It just seems that there’s definitely a trend with that type of work being produced. And the faculty are pretty diverse in their experience. We have Alison Bechdel, whose book just recently came out—an amazing memoir. Of course all the students are curious about how she produced that. Many are taking a look at the way they’re producing their work, and there’s definitely influence with it.

DRAW!: Now, you’re saying that you have studio classes. Is this a two-year school, or a four-year school?

MO: Two-year. Two years on full time.

DRAW!: A two-year certificate, then you can transfer out and get your BFA, your MFA, at another university?

MO: Actually, no. We just had a meeting with the State of Vermont Department of Education. We’re going to find out soon, so we can’t necessarily announce anything at this point, but we’ll know by the end of May, we very well may be awarding the Master of Fine Arts.

DRAW!: Still you’d have to do two years?

MO: Yes, you would have to have an undergraduate degree in order to qualify for that. You’d have to have a Bachelor of Fine Arts, or Science, or a BA before you would be able to pursue the Master of Fine Arts. But we have a classroom that’s diverse, so we have both students that would be in the Comics track, and also are in the Associate of Fine Arts track. We don’t have the degree granting yet, so for now it’s a certificate, but we’re hoping that by May we’ll find out about our degree granting for both the Master of Fine Arts and the Associate of Fine Arts.

DRAW!: Okay, so you’re trying to get certified to do...

MO: To do both. Yup. We’ve been working on that for two years now. We have a site visit, and the application process, for us, has been a little over two years, where it involves all different stages of producing a self-study.

CCS FACULTY MEMBERS INCLUDE: James Sturm, Peter Money, Sarah Stewart Taylor, Michelle Ollie, Jason Lutes, James Kochalka, Michel Vrana, Jenny Hansen, Rachel Gross Tom Devlin, Rob Chapman, Stephen Bissette

DRAW!: I’m very familiar with that. DCAD, where I teach, has been going through that same process. Actually, they’re still in that process right now and it’s very time-consuming.

MO: It’s lengthy. But we were informed that we’ll find out by, I think, mid-May or the end of May, as to what degrees we’ll be able to award.

DRAW!: Your studio classes, are those three- or six-hour classes a day?

MO: Well, the studio classes can run anywhere from three to six hours, and those courses involve drawing, design, publication assembly, finishing, and...

DRAW!: Finishing. You have a specific class that teaches how to prepare work for publication?

MO: Yes, well, actually it’s integrated within the Publication Design class.

DRAW!: So you actually have to print your own comic book, I suppose?

MO: Yes, you have to produce at least 30 for a class crit each time. We have the ability to integrate the computer with their original work, so we’ll actually have the students in a class assemble a book in InDesign or Quark, and they’ll have to use Photoshop to touch up or clean up images. So we provide both a technical side of a design and a conceptual side.

DRAW!: And how are you printing it? Are you printing it on, like, an Epson printer?

MO: We have two industrial printers here that are high-speed wireless—one’s full-color, and the other is a black-and-white laser. They’re wireless, and anyone can print from anywhere in the building, up to 11" x 17". We also have a screen printing lab, and our full production facility includes a hydraulic cutter, multiple trimming devices, and 20 Macintosh laptop computers.

DRAW!: So the student at your school is not only going to learn about the drawing aspect of producing comics, but also about the technical aspects of what you need to know about how your work is going to be printed.

MO: Yeah, Mike, that’s a wonderful summary. Both from concept to completion, I would say.

DRAW!: Great, great. How’s your two-year school set up?

What do you get the first year? Do you get Anatomy, 2-D Design, Art History? What are the classes the students will have?

Introduction booklet to The Center for Cartoon Studies. ©2007 THE CENTER FOR CARTOON STUDIES

MO: We start with the basics, and review, for some, writing. We spend a lot of time on writing. We spend a lot of time on history with Steve Bissette. He has a course called Survey of the Drawn Story: Understanding the History of Cartooning. And Steve will spend a full semester doing nothing but talking about the history of comics. He has I don’t know how many slide shows—just an immense amount of visuals to reinforce the analysis of the work that’s been produced in the past, and its influence in the future.

DRAW!: From Yellow Kid to Dan Pussey. [laughter] MO: He covers every gamut, he goes through it all. To me, that’s kind of like our history class. And then we have foundation drawing. We don’t call it foundation drawing, it’s called Drawing Workshop I and II, and we spend a lot of time on the human form.

DRAW!: This is life drawing?

MO: Life drawing, anatomy, perspective, still life. And in conjunction with the drawing class we have a life drawing session every Friday open to the whole student body where we bring in a model so that people can continue to practice on drawing the human form.

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DRAW!: Basically, that’s what comics is all about, drawing people.

MO: That’s the way we feel. And it’s been wonderful. When we started it our first year, we had no idea the interest, that students would show up on a Friday to attend the drawing class, and it’s had a pretty loyal following.

DRAW!: As you go through the first year you’re doing a lot of drawing, but are you having classes, say, on breaking down a story, like storyboarding, roughing, laying out...

MO: Definitely, definitely. Cartooning Studio, and James can tell you about that class probably better than I can, but he spends quite a bit of time just taking a look at the form of comics. And he’ll, of course, lecture on sequence, lecture on taste, timing, frames, everything. And he starts from the basics and works his way up until the second year, where they’re producing anthology comics and actually working on these principles.

DRAW!: Are the students producing their own comics, or are they contributing to an anthology of comics for the entire class?

MO: Yes, they do both. With the anthology, typically James will break the class down into groups of four, and they produce an anthology together, which is a great exercise. They have to come up with a theme, they have to work together on producing the book.

DRAW!: Artists having to learn to work together, what a novel idea! [laughs] MO: I like the idea, right. I think for cartoonists it might be a little rare to afford that opportunity, because cartoonists often work alone at their desks.

DRAW!: Oh, everybody’s such an iconoclast. Everybody’s such a loner, sometimes it’s difficult getting people to work together. I know from personal experience trying to get ten cartoonists to work together, it’s like trying to get ten cats into a bag sometimes.

MO: Yeah, it’s tough. And also, for us, I would say that there’s a professional practice within the curriculum that’s ongoing.

We’re constantly exposing the students to the aspects of the industry by bringing in editors, by bringing in agents, by bringing in designers, by bringing in creative directors, art directors.

DRAW!: You’re bringing in people from the...

MO: From the industry.

DRAW!: So you’d bring somebody from Fantagraphics, or somebody from Penguin?

MO: Drawn and Quarterly is here. One of their designers, Tom Devlin, is one of our core faculty.

DRAW!: So are they sort of scouting at the same time?

[Michelle laughs] I would think that one of the opportunities at your school is, you’re sort of connecting with that “indy” or “alternative” side of the industry as opposed to someone wanting to go to Marvel or DC. It seems the way that side of the

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industry is going now is the graphic novel is really coming into its own, where people, it seems, today, could graduate, maybe already be in a few anthologies, and actually go directly to Penguin and say, “Here’s my La Perdida. Here’s my Houdini.”

MO: Pitch your project.

DRAW!: Yeah, directly. Is the aim of your school, in a way, to sort of prepare the student so that they could pitch a book?

MO: I wouldn’t say that we’re preparing them to do the pitch, I think we’re just preparing them to be good cartoonists, and to consider all aspects of the work that they’re producing.

DRAW!: So you’d say anything from greeting cards to graphic novels?

MO: Yeah. You know, some people have more desire to do that.

They may find that that’s an area where they tend to thrive more. So I don’t know just about the pitch, but of course we’re bringing in the editors, and they’re wanting to hear what their stories are. So I think your observation could be true in that there are people, I wouldn’t say scouting, but their ears and eyes are wide open, and they’re definitely curious about what the students are producing. And many have said that this is where they’re looking for the next group of cartoonists, and they’re definitely looking to the school for talent.

DRAW!: Your school’s been around for two years?

MO: Yeah, our first incoming class was fall of 2005. And I should point out, Mike, that our curriculum is sequential, and the fact that the courses all build upon each other. But the first year—and it might be hard to capture on our website—is all about building your skill. The second year is focused primarily on a thesis project. So the student is really able to take all of that first year experience in the classroom and, under the guidance of an advisor, and under the guidance of a faculty, it’s a very structured sort of course, where there are weekly critiques and lectures. But they’re afforded an amazing amount of opportunity of time to work on an individual project of their interest.

DRAW!: So in the second year you’re producing individual projects, the thesis project. That includes doing your own personal comic books as well as the anthology?

MO: No, the entire second year is on your individual work.

Under the guidance of an advisor, which, in our case, are cartoonists from all over the country.

DRAW!: I’m seeing here you’ve got Tom Devlin, Walt Simonson, Jeff Smith. Do you pick the person you would like to have work with you?

MO: Yeah, and we’ll work with the student on determining who that is, because it really depends on the work that they’re doing, and who we also feel might be a good complement to their project. Ivan Brunetti is one of our advisors, Eddie Campbell, Kevin Huizenga and Paul Karasik. And, really, it depends on the students and the work that they’re producing, and who might be a good fit, and who they also feel that they want to work closely with.

DRAW!: If you’re a humorous storyteller, you might want to work with, say, Ivan or Eddie, as opposed to someone not noted for doing humor.

DRAW!: Have you had any success stories yet? Any students that have gone through the program and have come out and are starting to get regularly published?

MO: Exactly.

MO: Well, the first graduating class is actually this May. May 19th is our first ever commencement. So we’ll hopefully have some stories after that.

DRAW!: What other courses do you take? You’re taking your Drawing I the first year. What courses are you taking the second year?

DRAW!: Okay. Are there any scouts coming around and scouting the students?

MO: The second year is primarily thesis. That’s full-day class, and it includes also about six plus hours a week of studio time.

That’s the majority of what you’re doing your second year is working on the thesis project. There are some courses, like, Visiting Artist Seminar, where you show up and you take on knowledge. But the intensity of the work that you’re producing should completely revolve around your thesis project.

MO: Well, we had an Editor’s Day two weeks ago now, and then, of course, like I said, we have this constant professional practice environment, so there are always people on location reviewing portfolios, meeting with students, looking at their work, having crit sessions. It’s really an ongoing culture here, so there’s not just one opportunity where that happens.

DRAW!: By the time you graduate, you should have a body of work? I suppose that’s the goal, to have a body of work that you can basically use as a portfolio?

DRAW!: So there should not be a situation where one of your students would graduate and go, “Gee, I don’t really know what to do, who to go talk to.”

MO: Exactly. Well, in some cases they may have already even talked to publishers or editors or agents, or they just simply are going to show at the end of that year, the conclusion of the work that they’ve produced during that time, but with the goal that they set a year prior, which may have been to complete two books out of a series of three, two comics, or to complete chapters one through four of a graphic novel, or to complete a graphic novel.

MO: Oh, no. They’re fully engaged and networked in the industry. It’s really up to the individual, always, to determine how much they want to take advantage of that, and how well they foster those relationships that they built during school, but I think we’re going to see a really strong CCF community of alumni.

DRAW!: So that would be one of the big advantages of going to your school, the networking aspect with the industry.

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MO: Well, they certainly have a lot of exposure to some of the top cartoonists in the industry, and because of the size and scale of our school, the exposure is really intimate. You’re in a classroom of 20 people, and if, like, Ivan Brunetti comes to the school—which he’s been here, and he’s coming back in a few weeks—Ivan wouldn’t only be coming to your classroom; we’re going to have pizza with him out on the deck at the Main Street Museum. And we might even go to Van Wheeler’s and have a beer. It’s really a very small school, and so the exposure to these individuals often is more relationship-forming, and the opportunity that these students have to really get some in-depth review of their work from these individuals, or to have wonderful discussions on their thoughts on comics or a body of work, it’s just a rare opportunity.

DRAW!: So this is almost like an intimate, two-year workshop, in a way.

MO: It’s like a boot camp. People that have attended, people that are in the classes or in our summer workshops, the term “boot camp” gets brought up a lot.

DRAW!: It sounds like it’s pretty intense, which I suppose is actually very good, to have that sort of an intense experience.

MO: Yes, very focused. I mean, because of where we are, too, we don’t have the distractions of a big city. We’re in a small town in Vermont. The idea of coming to school at the Center for Cartoon Studies, the majority of it has to do with our location. It’s a place to reflect, it’s a place to really engage in your work, you have nature around you everywhere, you have access to trails and hikes for inspiration and fresh air...

DRAW!: So when you get that artist’s block, you can walk out your back door and...

Introduction booklet to The Center for Cartoon Studies.

MO: Get the fresh air.

DRAW!: So you have a small school and a small class size.

What is the size of your classes? Twenty students?

DRAW!: Commune with nature.

MO: Yeah, and look up to the mountains. There’s less of that distraction that a big city student might face. And we’re only going to take the serious people, too, Mike. In the interview, we find out they’re incredibly intense and dedicated towards cartooning. We can see it in their work and in their essay, so when they come here, that’s all they’re going to be doing, probably, for two years.

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©2007 THE CENTER FOR CARTOON STUDIES

MO: Twenty students for each year. At least, that’s what we’ve taken on the last two years, and now for the third year. We’re only going to accept about twenty.

DRAW!: So the competition to get into school is fairly rigorous.

MO: Yeah, it’s rigorous. And the curriculum’s rigorous. We’re a selective school, because the reality is it won’t do us any good

Do you have a breakdown of what the standard tuition is?

MO: Definitely. Our tuition is $14,500 per year. That was just last year, in 20062007. It’s going to go up slightly in the 2007 academic year, to $15,000, and that has to do with just the overhead of equipment and computers and the cost of teaching. When we opened up the school, we wanted to keep it accessible. We know that affording college is becoming a challenge for everybody. Some of the tuition comparisons that we had in front of us when we were building the business plan ranged anywhere from $14,000 to $27,000, as far as competitive options.

And we really wanted to keep the school as close as we could to being affordable beyond covering our costs.

DRAW!: Does this include any room and board?

MO: No, that would be additional. It does include access to the lab, it includes 24-7 access to the buildings and library privileges, the student services. But it does not include room and board.

DRAW!: And supplies, right?

MO: The students are given a supply list of what they need. We do furnish paper.

We furnish screen printing supplies and a screen for each student. So we do equip them with the basic tools. But most cartoonists have a preference of a certain ink they want to use, or paper, and there are art supply stores nearby that we have partnerships with for discounts.

DRAW!: Since they’re going to have to come up with their own room and board, do you have a rough estimate of what that costs in the area up there? to bring someone in that’s not quite sure they’re interested in cartooning, they’re not focused and haven’t spent a lot of time working on it.

DRAW!: To get to the heart of it financially, too, what are we looking at it as far as tuition? Because I know that does affect a lot of people’s choice...

MO: Oh, definitely.

DRAW!: ...about where they are going to go. A lot of my students this year were facing money issues, and going back to school in the fall, I’m going through the whole process myself.

MO: Yeah, anywhere from $350 to $450 a person, per month. And we do have an agreement with the Hotel Coolidge, which has a hostel wing that many of our students live in during the year. They have a month-by-month space at the Hotel Coolidge. It’s very similar to a dorm. It’s got the wood floors, high ceilings, the shared kitchen/common area.

If you share a room it’s about $325, but if you get your own room it’s $450 a month.

DRAW!: They have a kitchen facility?

MO: Yes, they have a kitchen, showers, and then a little café with high-speed wireless.

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DRAW!: Do you have a rough price per semester of what the additional room and board and everything would come to?

MO: That’s a good question. I can calculate it quickly. It would be nine months for the year, I guess, because the people who stay in the Hotel Coolidge often go home for the summer. So that would be nine times $450. Four thousand dollars a year for the room.

MO: At this time we’re focusing on what we’re doing as far as degree granting, so I guess it’s too early to know where we may expand our programming to, but my hunch is we’re probably going to stay a two-year school for a few years.

DRAW!: And you will stay at roughly the same size you are right now?

DRAW!: One of the purposes of this issue of the magazine is to give a lowdown of what each school is doing and the actual costs. Obviously, your costs for room and board are going to be a lot cheaper than someone, say, at SVA, having to live in Manhattan, or even Brooklyn.

MO: For the next few years. But we are evaluating our business plan. We are updating our five-year business plan, so there may be an expansion, an increase in enrollment. In the next five years, we could ending up shifting that enrollment slightly, maybe running two sessions at once.

MO: Yeah. And $450 would be the higher end, I would say, because often our students are renting a house in the village.

We actually help them find housing.

DRAW!: Oh, right, so during one class’s second year, you could also have another class starting their first year?

DRAW!: So you do help them find facilities?

MO: Oh, definitely. Yup. We have a private message board for the students that are accepted, and we find that they start communicating months ahead of time, and many of them decide they want to live together and they rent a house, and rent gets down to, like, $300 a person. Many of them rent a four-bedroom home, let’s say. So it really depends what you want for a living situation. If you want to live alone, you’re going to spend more. If you want to live with people, you’ll save some money.

MO: Yes, exactly. But this’ll be our third year coming up this year, so we’re all about making sure everything we’re doing is right. Now that we’ve been through a full cycle of the school and the program, we need to be able to let ourselves have the opportunity to now reflect and determine what growth patterns we want. I think it’s in our cards to be an intimate, small school.

DRAW!: You’re never going to have 300 students.

MO: We have no desire to be the largest art college in the country. [laughs]

DRAW!: Well, that’s good to know. Now, do you also have financial aid?

DRAW!: Well, this gives people, I think, a good overview. I’m trying to present this so people can choose based on their personality, likes, financial status.

MO: We do. We have a payment plan for students that are accepted into the program. They can enroll in a payment plan so they can spread the cost of tuition over payments. At this time we don’t have federal loans, but we do have the payment plan option.

MO: Yeah, some people like a bigger environment. Some people thrive in a setting where there are lots of social clubs.

DRAW!: No Stafford loan or anything like that?

MO: Not Stafford. We may soon have Sallie Mae, but we’ll find out in a couple of weeks about that, because it’s in conjunction with a degree possibility. Those two partner together.

Once we get degree granting, then we would be able to offer Sallie Mae loans. But our payment plan is a good deal, because we’re not charging an interest rate. We’re just charging a very small fee to process it.

DRAW!: It this because you’re not offering an official associate degree, which means it would have to be accredited at a certain level?

MO: No, no. Actually, once we’re able to offer the degree, we will be able to offer Sallie Mae loans. Sallie Mae is one of the biggest loan providers to student loans in the country. So we will be able to offer those. Degree granting allows you to do those things, and so we will find out in a few weeks. But for the last two years, what we’ve offered to the students is a student payment plan. Which is like a loan, but we take on the risk. [laughs] DRAW!: Is there any plan in the future to convert to a four-year school, or are you thinking that you’ll keep it a two-year school?

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DRAW!: Some people are going to be scared of the woods, but they’re not going to be scared of Times Square. [laughter] MO: I like that. That’s a good analogy.

DRAW!: Some people are not going to do well in the smaller, quieter environment.

MO: Oh, definitely. That’s what’s good about, I think, our admissions process, is that it’s a fairly intense process, and that we’re going to do our best to try and make sure the student’s a good fit.

DRAW!: Well, all schools should be intense. As a teacher, I feel that a school is also only as intense as you, as a student, decide. There are some people who start out intense, and kind of flame out as they go along. But it sounds like you have a fairly unique program, where, instead of having the first-year students, and then they transition to second-year students, you’re actually taking your first-year student and following each student all the way through the process.

MO: No doubt. Exactly. I’m glad that you summarized it that way, because that’s really what we’re about.

MINNEAPOLIS COLLEGE OF ART AND DESIGN Minneapolis College of Art and Design is located in Minneapolis, Wisconsin and is a four-year and post-graduate college specializing in the visual arts. The college offers a BFA degree in Comic Art and Animation. The MCAD Program breaks down like this:

Minneapolis College of Art and Design 2501 Stevens Ave Minneapolis, MN 55404 (612) 874-3700

COMIC ART I Introduction to Comics balances an emphasis on simple character development and sequential storytelling skills with a general introduction to the key skill sets in the profession, which include penciling, inking, coloring, and lettering. Demonstrations and discussions on creative process and media are given. Penciling will be studied in a manner that focuses on storytelling, composition, style, space and perspective, gesture and mood. Inking will be presented as a drawing method within a Comic Art methodology. Students will be exposed to a variety of tools including ink with brush, nib, wash, and film overlays. Coloring will be approached through various media including computer-aided coloring.

Prerequisite(s): Foundation 2-D, Foundation 3-D and Foundation Drawing I. Media I and Foundation Drawing II should be taken concurrently.

The university offers a four-year BFA in Comic Art and Animation, as well as post-graduate degrees. Find out more on their website: http://www.mcad.edu/

COMIC ART II Comic Art II is an intermediate exploration of comics as a storytelling art form.

Stress will be placed on more complex storytelling concepts and advanced technical and media skills, including production values. Intermediate storytelling themes explored will include aspects of storytelling vs. “script” writing, comics as a visual narrative language, and time structure concepts of: dual narratives, story length, story arches and mapping the story. Comic book usage in mainstream and art comics, educational and documentary comics will be examined with assignments from each genre. Students’ individual voices will play an increasingly important role in this course.

Prerequisite(s): Comic Art I. COMIC ART III This course stresses the development of the student’s personal voice, through experimentation, critical analysis, and advanced storytelling discussion. Early in this course students explore advanced themes on the interaction of the Narrative Word with the Narrative Image. Text in comics may play a secondary role to the image, but it is a crucial and unique role. Through a series of exercise students will explore how text and image uniquely interact in comic art. Topics explored will include using text to creating secondary meaning, parallel thought, and the manipulation of time and pacing in the comic narrative. A study of top contemporary comic professionals working within the mainstream, art comic, educational comic and documentary comic fields will supplement the topics discussed within this course. As the semester progresses, students are will work from their own story ideas and develop them in-depth through individual and group critiques. Self-direction and a strong use of process are essential for this course.

Prerequisite(s): Comic Art I and II. Recommended: Comic Art: Image as Narrative IMAGE AS NARRATIVE Image as Narrative is an advanced exploration of iconographic storytelling in both its literal and secondary modes. Stripped away of dialogue the student will learn ways in which image can tell a full story. The course will explore the ways in which

image can effectively tell complete stories through manipulation of tone, pace, time, and implied dialogue. Students will further explore the use of image in the traditional and metaphorical modes. Students will examine the secondary meaning of image considering how storytellers’ choices affect the clarity and overall structure of the narrative. The intent of the class is to strengthen the student’s ability to clearly tell a story while further developing the notion of secondary meaning of image. Students will further both their technical and storytelling abilities by critically examining the possibilities inherent in image based narrative. Through this process, students will begin to understand how they can communicate a clear but buried message to the reader.

Prerequisite(s): Comic Art I and II. FIGURE IN PERSPECTIVE The Illustrated Figure in Perspective focuses on the depiction of the human figure in invented space and locomotion, as commonly and dynamically expressed in the Comic Arts. Students will expand upon their understanding of anatomy and figure motion as they create fluid gesture and expressive clothed figures without relying on the use of a model. As the course progresses the students will learn to place the invented figure correctly into real and invented environments. This course is designed to build upon and expand the students observational and figure drawing skills, bringing them into specific use within the comic book page. Research by the students, lectures on various comic and illustration artists, as well as individual and group critiques will be used as part of the learning process.

Prerequisite(s): Foundation 2-D and Foundation Photo are strongly recommended. A Foundation Drawing course should be taken concurrently.

FIGURE IN THE ROOM Building upon the concepts of perspective and creating strong compositional space this course will focus on the depiction of the invented human figure in a living environment.

Starting always with the idea of drawing within a pictorial space, comic panel or page, students will explore the relationship of the figure to, and movement through, the picture plane using perspective to ground the figure and environment together to create a narrative visual flow. Students will explore one- to three-point perspectives, alternative perspective theories, and picture composition relationships, primarily as used in Comic Art, and how to use these compositional devices to drive a narrative. Students will invent and create illustrations and comic pages using the concepts covered.

Research by the students, slide lectures on various comic and illustration artists, as well as individual and group critiques will be used as part of the learning process.

Prerequisite(s): Foundation 2-D and Foundation Drawing courses. Figure in Perspective is recommended, although not necessary before taking this course.

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PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE/PORTFOLIO: COMIC Students enrolled in this course will focus on preparing for the transition from student to working professional. Students will be exposed to the varied opportunities available in our contemporary marketplace. Through lecture, demonstrations, inclass and studio visits, presentations, writings and self directed projects each student will prepare their “book” and supportive collateral that effectively reflects each student’s particular vision.

COMIC INKING Pen and ink drawing is employed by Comic Artists and Illustrators to capture the rich textural nature of their work. This course explores the basic principles of compositional decisions and strategies, and the application of lighting, textures, values, and tone. Demonstrations of various tools and techniques will be given from the traditional pen and brush to Japanese tonal effects and current trends in digital finishing. Students will work on professional comic pencil pages, their own-penciled comic pages created specifically for this class, and on pen and ink observational drawings.

Prerequisite(s): Introduction to Comic Art INTERMEDIATE COMIC BOOK PUBLISHING IN PRINT AND ON THE WEB Comic Book Publishing is designed to prepare students for the expectations and rigors of production and promotion of a comic book. Working on a self-directed project, each student will in essence become his/her own publisher. The class will be divided into three sections each one building upon the completion of proceeding stages. A first section will focus on the design and creation of web ready and print camera-ready art. Students will become familiar with web and printing terminology and proper pre-press procedures. The second section will focus on all the variables of the printing process that can add to the overall tone and impact of a book. In a final section students will prepare for the website’s/book’s launch. Students will learn how to prepare the book for distribution, while creating collateral to help support its rollout. The intent of the class is to provide each student with the skills necessary to give their projects the greatest impact once completed and published.

Prerequisite(s): Comic Art II, Media One.

COMIC ART: ADVANCED NARRATIVE SEMINAR Comic Arts Advanced Narrative Seminar continues the development of the student’s personal voice. As a class students will explore advanced readings and hold indepth discussion on contemporary comic art theory. Students will be given a topic or theme to develop into a full comic narrative. Critical input from the instructor and fellow students will help guide the projects towards completion, allowing for a developed, and mature narrative assignment. Students will give proposal, development, and final presentations to the class. Using the same process, during the second half of this course students will work from their own story ideas and develop them in-depth. A strong working process and self-direction are essential and encouraged for this course.

Prerequisite(s): Intermediate Comic the Narrative Art, and Image as Narrative.

SENIOR PROJECTS: COMIC ART Senior Project is a semester-long project developed by the individual student in consultation with a faculty member. Senior Project can take the form of either a research project or an in-depth comic arts problem or a concentration on the development of a particular strength, genre or need. Students will create a story of approximately fourteen fully realized and professional developed pages. At the beginning of the semester, the student is required to develop an appropriate proposal, timeline and goals for their senior project. Professional presentations by the students to the class and the greater MCAD community are required for this course.

Students are also required to find and gain input from, an outside Mentor, appropriate to their project.

Pre-requisite(s): Senior standing as Comic Art major.

MCAD 2007-2008 TEACHING STAFF: Barbara Schulz, Terry Beatty, Ryan Kelly, Zak Sally

MCAD 2007-2008 COMIC ART VISITING ARTISTS: Scott McCloud, Kim Deitch, John Porcellino, Hope Larson, Anders Nielsen, Linda Medley, Chris Staros, Mike Norton

SPECIAL TOPIC ON-LINE COURSES OFFERED 2007-2008 2007 Fall Workshops: Web Comics: Instructor Ursala Husted Super Hero Comics: Instructor Andy Schmidt Manga: Instructor Tania Del Rio 2008 Spring: Digital Coloring for Comic Books: Instructor Brian Haberlin 24

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NOTES OF INTEREST. Comic Heads: This student group publishes an annual anthology of student work, in addition to hosting a 24-hour comics challenge.

MCAD Comic Mini-Con: An annual event, open to the public.

MINNEAPOLIS/ST. PAUL AREA INSTITUTIONS: Big Time Attic, La Mano, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, The International Cartoonist Conspiracy, Minnesota Comic Book Association, Big Brain Comics, Dreamhaven Books, The Source Comics and Games

MINNEAPOLIS/ST. PAUL AREA CREATORS: Ken Avidor, Terry Beatty, Chris and Joe Brudlos, Kevin Cannon, Zander Cannon, Will Dinski, Paul Fricke, Neil Gaiman, Patrick Gleason, Terrance Griep Jr., Peter Gross, Sam Hiti, Chris Jones, Dan Jurgens, Tom Kaczynski, Peter Krause, Max Konrardy, Ryan Kelly, Bob Lipski, Roger Lootine, Doug Mahnke, Gus Mastrapa, Mr. Mike, Shawn Moll, Tom Nguyen, Danno! Ochsendorf, Ozel, Tyler Page, Gordon Purcell, Quillan Roe, Brittney Sabo, Steve Sack, Zak Sally, Brett Schlosser, Brent Schoonover, Chris Schons, Barbara Schulz, Timothy Sievert, Taki Soma, Curtis Square-Briggs, Vincent Stall, Steven Stwalley, David Tea, Sean Tenhoff, Clarence Thrun, Mike Toft, Chaz Truog, Lonny Unitus, Jon White, Dave Witt

It sounds like a great, full program with an active comic and artist community. One of the benefits of being in the business as long as I have is I get to know some great people like Terry Beatty (pictured above). Terry is a great cartoonist, almost a cartoonist’s cartoonist, and has been around a long time producing stellar work on such titles as Ms. Tree, Mickey Spillane’s Mike Danger and Johnny Dynamite with Max Collins, and his bold slick inking has been gracing the pages of DC Comics’ The Batman Strikes and before that Batman Adventures. He’s also the cover artist of Scary Monster magazine, as well a being quite a talented sculptor. He currently resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota and teaches at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD).

DRAW!: So how many years have you been teaching at MCAD? TERRY BEATTY: This is my second year as a visiting artist, and a couple years before that as adjunct faculty.

DRAW!: So how many days are you teaching now?

TB: Three days a week—Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. And then the occasional meeting and preparation and all.

DRAW!: So what was the difference for you, going to being a visiting artist from adjunct?

TB: Well, as adjunct, basically, I got slowly pulled into the program. Mark Schultz was the one full-time comics instructor there, and he convinced me to come in and try one class. The first semester I taught one class, then he got me teaching two the next time. As visiting artist, essentially they’ve got me as full-time faculty, so I’m doing three classes a week, and they’re studio classes, so they’re five hours long. It’s a fairly hefty bit of work.

DRAW!: Yeah. Now, is that akin to being a guest lecturer?

TB: No, I’m temporary, full-time staff.

DRAW!: Well, that’s good, because you get bennies and things like that.

TB: I’ve got all the benefits and everything. But it’s just a twoyear position, and after that it’s either back to adjunct, or throw myself back into freelance full-time, whichever happens.

DRAW!: Oh, okay, so this is a temporary thing.

TB: Yeah. Two years is the longest they can offer the visiting artist operation. I think eventually, the way the program is going, they’ll need another full-time instructor. I don’t know, my experience in doing full-time here has taught me that it’s hard to do this and the freelance work, too. But I do not have a degree. I’m operating on my 30 years of professional experience.

DRAW!: Well, I mean, that is a degree.

TB: Yeaahhh, but...

DRAW!: It depends upon the institution. I don’t have a degree, either. That’s why I’m back actually finishing my degree now.

I’m sure I could probably always continue to teach CE and adjunct and things like that, so I’m exactly in the same position you are, as are a lot of our fellow cartoonists.

TB: Yeah. So, like you, I could probably teach adjunct there as long as they would let me. When the time comes for them to hire a full-time instructor, whether that happens or not, I think my lack of a degree would likely get in the way of that.

DRAW!: You might be surprised. I think in the commercial DRAW! • SPRING 2008

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MCAD students at work, and two examples of their efforts.

ARTWORK ©2008 RESPECTIVE OWNERS

end, if you’re teaching a vocation, as opposed to teaching maybe fine art, I mean, you have something that no one going through four years of college can have, which is going through the experience and the years of knowledge from doing it. But I’m also curious, is MCAD a two-year, or four-year?

resource, because they have a person who is a consummate professional with a lot of experience. Is the comic program there folded into Commercial Art or Illustration? Is it a sub-program where you get some comic classes as a separate course? How do they work that?

TB: Four-year.

TB: Well, it’s part of the Design department, but it is a separate major. I believe the first year students have to take some of the traditional art classes, and then I believe the second year they start taking the specific comics courses. I think this may be changing soon, but right now we have it set up with Comics I, II, and III, and then there are supporting classes. Ryan Kelly came in and taught an inking class. I’m teaching a figure drawing class called Figure and Perspective. And then there’s the senior project, there’s Professional Practice, and all these other classes that are part of the Comics major.

DRAW!: So there is a certain level of accreditation there.

What led you to teaching? Not everyone likes to teach. Some people are like us, where you find out, when someone asks you, that you actually like it, and you continue to do it. And other people, they go to art school and can’t sell their paintings, so, “Well, I guess I’ll teach.”

TB: Well, for me, again, Mark convinced me to give it a try— one class, one semester. It wasn’t that big a commitment to see if it would work for me. You know this fairly well, with being a freelance cartoonist, you spend a lot of time alone in your house, in your studio.

DRAW!: Oh, yes!

TB: You don’t get out and mingle, interact with other people.

DRAW!: Yeah, that’s what we always used to say, like being the Maytag repairman, you’re just kind of sitting around, and see the FedEx person and maybe the mail person.

TB: Yeah, when the mail carrier becomes the most important person in your life, at the end of the day, that’s a sad thing. [laughs] And getting out there and interacting with these other students, and getting to pass along some of the information I gleaned in my nearly three decades of drawing comics, it was a pretty nice experience.

DRAW!: Did you have any input into how the classes were structured? In other words, they are using you as a great

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DRAW! • SPRING 2008

DRAW!: So if you were there, you could actually graduate from MCAD with a major in what, Sequential Storytelling?

TB: Comic Art. Which, frankly, as somebody who remembers when comics weren’t the most respected art form seems kind of amazing. Every day I sort of shake my head in kind of nonbelief that, yeah, we’re turning out kids with a degree in Comic Art, and bringing in my contemporary cartoonists as guest speakers in the Professional Practice class, and bringing in...

Well, recently we had Kim Deitch, the underground cartoonist, as a guest lecturer. And 30 years ago, underground comic book artists wouldn’t have been the guest lecturer at a college.

DRAW!: No, they might have been looked a little bit askance at, like a social pariah or something.

TB: It’s amazing to me how the tide has turned.

DRAW!: Well, you know, I think it’s a generational thing.

Most of the people, say, ten years or so older than us, say up to

the MCAD program is. Tell us a little bit about that, because, again, the whole thrust of this issue of the magazine is to give potential students info to help them make a choice in choosing a school. If you want an actual BFA, you can get your BFA from MCAD. You can get a three-year vocational degree from the Kubert school, but that is not a BFA. I’m trying to give readers of the magazine the ability to look at the various schools and get an idea what the landscape is. At DCAD where I teach, I have 20something students this year. Not quite as many people who want to do comics this year as last year. Most people want to do animation. But many want to also do comics as well. And you can see how the skill set, if you’re a really good comic book artist, can cross over into so many other vocations, so many other mediums.

Most of the female students are not interested in drawing Spider-Man or male power fantasies. Most of them are interested in manga, and most of the male students who want to do comics now are also more into anime and manga, as well—it’s about half and half. So what would be some of the thrust of some of your programs there? The reason I’m asking you that is because you’re a professional. And I think that really helps in this profession—if you were 18 years old, 19, 20, and you could have met a professional doing the job you want to do... You’re bringing a real world experience to this, so you can say, “These are really the things you need to know, and these other things are really important to know, but not as important for this particular job.”

Artwork from Madeline Queripel, a student at MCAD. ARTWORK ©2007 MADELINE QUERIPEL

your late 50s, early 60s, were people who were fans of all the stuff that was bad for you, like TV and comics and cheesy movies and stuff, and I found out a little interesting thing this week. I knew that my teacher at PAFA, Scott Noel, liked comics and was a big Marvel fan back in the day. He loved Kirby, and he loved Gene Colan. And then I found out that, Patrick Connors, who’s my Cast Drawing teacher, loves Gene Colan. So I said, “Oh, you know, Scott likes Gene Colan, too.”

“What?” So here you’ve got two great artists who are teaching at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts who were both Marvel comics fans as kids, and both liked Gene Colan. And I find that very often now, that you will mention something like that, and people of our age and a little bit older, it seems to be very common.

TB: Well, yeah. You look back at sales figures and the percentage of kids that read comics in the ’50s and ’60s, they all read comics. Maybe not to the extent that those of us who became cartoonists did, but all of us had some experience with that. I mean, I read comics because my older brothers read comics. They were all bringing them home. I’m just the one who ended up collecting them and becoming obsessive over them. [laughter] DRAW!: Talk a little bit about the strengths of what you think

TB: Well, I think the real strength that MCAD has is its faculty—the people that they’ve brought in to teach comics. Not all of these people I’m going to mention are teaching there now, but they’ve had Peter Gross, Ryan Kelly, Zack Sally, and Barb Schultz, who has had a long career as a comic book inker, and I’ve been there the past few years. And in addition to that we have a large number of cartoonists in the Twin Cities area that we rely on to pull in, in my case, for Professional Practice class. Almost every week I’m dragging somebody in, whether it’s Paul Fricke, who did a lot of work for Marvel and DC years ago, and now is using his comics abilities to do commercial artwork, storyboards and advertising work, or somebody like Tom Richmond, who does movie satires for Mad magazine. If I know some cartoonist is passing through—like Matt Haley a couple weeks ago, who I finagled to come to the school, to really just have that one-on-one experience with the students and let them pick the brains of these cartoonists, let the cartoonists come in and tell the students the things that they would have wanted to know when they were beginning, and learned the hard way. Also, it is a very rich art school.

There’s a Fine Arts program, and an Animation program, and a Liberal Arts program, and the students there who are comics students can take advantage of that, and they’re not just strictly taking comics courses. They can also take a painting class and an animation class. And vice versa, the animation students can take some of the comics classes. In fact, I’m seeing that some of the best comics work gets done by some of those animation students.

DRAW!: It sounds like there’s a lot of other disciplines and possibilities that you can explore, and it’s always important in schools to have these other venues. I mean, they definitely all can feed off of and into each other.

DRAW! • SPRING 2008

27

Gallery displays of MCAD student artwork.

TB: And we have, within the Design program, there’s an Advertising program, there’s an Illustration program. One of the Illustration instructors is, here’s a name for you, Yelena.

She’s done a certain amount of cartooning, herself. She’s done stuff for Top Shelf and a few other publishers in the comics field. So you have instructors working in the other disciplines who are sensitive to the comics work, and who I know also sometimes have to tell the comics students, “Hey, forget the cartoons in this class, will you?” [laughs] “Let’s try something a little more serious for this assignment, please.” But it’s not a school where they’re going to look down their nose at the comics medium.

DRAW!: And what do you, personally, get out of teaching?

TB: Well, there are the insurance benefits, which... [laughter] are nice, and I took advantage of some of those this year. But seriously, folks, when I was coming up and trying to learn all that I needed to learn to become a cartoonist, I had the advantage of getting to meet some pretty heavyweight artists, who gave me advice and helped me along and were pretty supportive. And you can’t pay those guys back. There’s no way for me to thank Dick Sprang for showing me how to draw a nice long, quick ink line. I can’t repay Chet Gould for his advice about cartooning. The only thing I can do is pass that advice along, along with everything else I’ve learned, to this next generation, and do whatever I can to help them become the best artist that they can be. And I gotta say, it’s thrilling when you have them hand in this work, and you’re looking at material that is of professional or near-professional quality. And, in some cases, I’ve had a few students just hand me work that is beyond what I can do, and that’s exciting.

DRAW!: Yeah. I know, for myself, I can also say that it’s an affirmation of the disciplines and the thought process that I employ myself when I help someone else learn it.

TB: Well, this is very true. I think teaching has forced me to be a better artist. I mean, here I am teaching a figure drawing class. I’d better be up to it, y’know? [laughs] And it’s made me reexamine my drawing, and get back to doing the life drawing, and studying the books again. I definitely see an improvement in my own drawing skills.

28 DRAW! • SPRING 2008

DRAW!: Something I always try to impress upon my students, and also within the context of the magazine, hopefully, is that at any stage of your development as an artist, there is, and should be, growth and continued possibility of growth, as opposed to reaching a stage where you’re just endlessly repeating formula without any kind of self-critical process in looking at your work. Because I think that leads to what we always call “old man drawing,” or stagnation, where you tend to draw everything the same way, or you approach everything the same way.

TB: I talk about that with my students a lot, driving home the fact that once you’re done with the program and have your degree, that that should not be the end of your art education, that your life as an artist should be an ongoing study of the world, and you should always be attempting to make the next drawing better than the last one.

DRAW!: Yeah, I agree. Describe for us a little bit the facilities at the school. What are the facilities like? What do they offer? I know you have a good computer lab. You said that there’s a museum near the school?

TB: Actually, the museum is not at the school, but it is essentially on the same block, although it’s a very big block. That’s the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the MIA, which is a worldclass museum. I’d just move in the place if they’d let me.

DRAW!: [laughs] You’d live in the basement there, and live in the catacombs.

TB: Well, you know, there’s a huge Maxfield Parrish, and a couple of N.C. Wyeths, and Russell and Remington and Van Gogh and Monet— DRAW!: So nothing to see, really. Keep moving. [laughs] TB: “Nothing to see here.” It really is a spectacular museum.

DRAW!: Obviously you personally are taking advantage of that, but I assume that you’re also trying to incorporate that with the classes to a degree?

TB: There are some classes that will drag the students over and force them to look at the work. I just encourage them to do so,

and tell them they’re fools if they don’t. Why wouldn’t you?

DRAW!: So you have this world-class museum. It sounds like you have a burgeoning professional artistic enclave of cartoonists and artists within the Twin Cities area. What else? What about the facilities, like computers, computer labs? Are they modern?

TB: There are actually two buildings. One is older, one is modern. And, yes, there are computer labs aplenty. There’s also a movement—I think this will be in place by next year—to have every incoming student have a laptop. They’re in the process of upgrading a lot of the classrooms so that they will all have projection capabilities.

DRAW!: Wi-Fi and all that?

TB: Yeah, there’s Wi-Fi throughout the whole school. The classroom that I teach my Professional Practice class in, I can just go plug in my laptop to the wall and it plugs into the projector, and we can show anything that I can have in my laptop on the screen.

DRAW!: So you can actually take them, say, through your creative process, show a page in process, and things like that?

TB: Absolutely.

DRAW!: Or some of the paintings and illustrations you do, you can show them the steps, I suppose?

$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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TB: Yeah. And when I have guests come in, we can go to their website, or we can slip in a disc with some of the images that they want to show. Very high-tech classroom. Now, the other classrooms in the older building are fairly low tech.

Blackboards and desks and a nice skylight. But, for some of the more basic classes, I don’t necessarily need anything more than that.

DRAW!: Well, some of them are drawing classes, so it’s basically the drawing lab.

TB: Yeah. I’m the low-tech guy for most of my classes. It’s all pencil and pen on paper, and they may ultimately end up scanning the work and adding lettering or color if they want to go that far with it, but I’m all about getting the basics down first, and then hitting the computer programs. And I’m not the guy to teach that. [laughs] DRAW!: Well, it sounds like you have a good integrated curriculum there. The faculty, as it should be, they should work off each other.

TB: Absolutely. And also I have to say we have a very nice gallery space, and there are always revolving art shows going on, sometimes student work, sometimes faculty work, other times traveling shows. There was a great exhibit of rock posters last year. Recently there was a show of manga art that was fantastic. We’re supposed to have a comics show coming up. I think it’s still in the planning stages, but it’s something that’s being curated by Ivan Brunetti that’s going to come around. So there’s always inspirational stuff on the walls. And there’s studio space for the students. We have a studio space that’s strictly devoted to the comics students to work in.

DRAW!: And do you have the practice of always hanging the weekly assignments up on the wall so people in the school and the students can see each other’s work?

TB: Not necessarily. Some classes do that. I don’t do that in my class, although within the class we’ll do group critiques. In fact, just today we finished a project where I challenged the students to draw an old-fashioned Sunday comics page in the style of a vintage cartoonist, so we had those up on the walls doing critique within the class. But we don’t leave them up for everybody in the school to see.

DRAW!: Oh, okay. Some schools do that, where they pin up the work so people can see what each class is doing. The fine artists can see what the photographers are doing, the photographers can see what the fine artists are doing...

TB: There’s some of that, but it’s not like a constant ongoing thing.

OR SEND YOUR LIST TO:

DRAW!: Well, it sounds like you can have a pretty full, rich experience or education there.

MIKE BURKEY

TB: I believe so.

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DRAW! • SPRING 2008

29

SVA (SCHOOL OF VISUAL ARTS) Located in New York City the School of Visual Arts was established in 1947 by co-founders Silas H. Rhodes and Burne Hogarth as the Cartoonists and Illustrators School and was renamed in 1956. Hogarth drew the famous Tarzan newspaper strip and was an author of several books including Dynamic Anatomy (1958) and Dynamic Figure Drawing (1970). Many classic cartoonists from the Golden and Silver Age of comics attend classes there, such as Al Williamson and Wally Wood.

SVA is a fully accredited college that requires the completion of a four-year, 120-credit course for a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.

Animation and Cartooning are offered as undergraduate degrees.

Comic luminaries such as Klaus Janson; Walter Simonson; Sam Viviano, a contributor and now current art director at Mad magazine; Jessica Abel, graphic novelist and writer/artist of La Perdida; Matt Madden, cartoonist/writer of Odds Off; Tom Hart, cartoonist/writer of Hutch Owen; Gary Panter, cartoonist/writer of Jimbo in Purgatory; and my old buddy Nick Bertozzi teach at the school. That’s a pretty impressive list of talent if there ever was one, and one that also covers a wide range of styles, personalities and genres in the field of cartooning.

School of Visual Arts (SVA) 209 East 23 Street New York, NY 10010-3994 The school was established in 1947 and is a fully accredited four-year college offering a BFA degree, as well as postgraduate degrees. Find out more on their website: http://www.schoolofvisualarts.edu/ Or contact them directly: Telephone: (212) 592-2000 Fax: (212) 725-3587 E-mail: admissions@sva.edu

I’ve know Nick for years, long before he was the giant he is today. His series Rubber Necker from Alternative Comics won the 2003 Harvey Awards for best new talent and best new series. He’s worked with Harvey Pekar and Jason Lutes on Houdini: The Handcuff King (published

by Hyperion) and has two web comics, Persimmon Cup and Pecan Sandy as part of the ACT-I-VATE comics blog. When does this guy sleep?

DRAW!: I’ve known you since you were working at Fat Jack’s Comic Crypt in Havertown, PA. NICK BERTOZZI: That was 1992.

DRAW!: I know! I mean, you were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. And ever so nice! [adolescent voice:] “Mr. Manley, can I help you find those issues of New Gods you were looking for?” But you were a smart guy right from the beginning. That’s something that I could pick up. And you’ve really come up through the trenches in a very different way than I came up, because being ten years or so older, when I was coming, the independent scene really wasn’t there in the way it is now. And I think my intent may also have been slightly different, too. I mean, I really wanted to work for Marvel. That was my goal.

NB: So the question is where did my intent come from?

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Page from Nick Bertozzi’s webcomic, The Voyage of the James Caird.

THE VOYAGE OF THE JAMES CAIRD ™ AND ©2008 NICK BERTOZZI

DRAW! • SPRING 2008

DRAW!: Yeah. When you were working in the comic book shop, and you were thinking, “Maybe I’d like to do this as a living,” were you specifically thinking, “I

want to do this type of comic” or “This type of story attracts me?” I remember seeing your first... I don’t know if they were first, The Incredible Drinking Buddies and stuff like that, and it was funny stuff. I mean, your drawing and everything of course has all gotten better since then, but I think your work had a very specific flavor to it, and I can still see that in anything that you do today.

NB: [laughs] I’m happy to be praised as somebody who’s smart and funny, but not until recently have I become a critical thinker, and I was just floundering right after college. I was a Spanish literature major, and then I started working at a comic book store. I liked reading comics. I wasn’t interested in becoming a cartoonist. I was interested in pursuing music, and being a rock star, and playing in a bunch of bands.

DRAW!: Which you still do, right?

NB: I still do music, but I haven’t played in a band in a long time. But it didn’t occur to me until about a year after Another page from Nick Bertozzi’s webcomic, The Voyage of the James Caird. working at the comic book THE VOYAGE OF THE JAMES CAIRD ™ AND ©2008 NICK BERTOZZI store that I should be doing into my mind and I can’t stop thinking about it, and it turns out I comics, because it’s an art form that’s all mine. You can choose just kind of warp it a little bit and it turns into one of my stories. I to work with other people, but you can also very easily make won’t go into particulars about it. But when I first met you, I was comics by yourself, and tell very disgusting, dirty jokes. [Mike only doing comics just to put my foot in the water, never with the laughs] In just a few pages, you can get your anger, or whatever it is that fuels you, out on the page much more easily than going idea I’d be penciling or inking or writing stories for DC or Marvel, or any of these other big guys. Or even for Fantagraphics. into a room full of guys who are probably half-drunk or stoned and telling them what chords to play and having to berate them.

DRAW!: Or certainly not being an editor up there. You were So when I first started doing comics, I’d always been doing art, an editor there for a while, right? and as a matter of fact, I had done about 80 of my own superhero comics when I was a kid, between the ages of eight and 14.

NB: No, no. I was in marketing.

DRAW!: Wow! These are, like, multiple-page epics, or just one...?

NB: They’re basically ripoffs of X-Men and Starblazer. Oh, and then they turned into kind of ripoffs of Hitchcock movies.

DRAW!: That’s quite an abrupt turn, going from Starblazer into Hitchcock!

NB: Well, I’m still a sponge. If I watch a movie, it gets sucked

DRAW!: Oh, okay. I thought for a brief time you were an editor.

NB: Oh, no, no. I get along with the editorial people, but they thought of me, I think, as a slick marketing person, because I—.

It was funny, in your introductory question you were kind of saying, “You were always very nice.” I worked really hard for whoever I worked for, whether it was DC... I was working at a mortgage company before that inputting checks, and I was DRAW! • SPRING 2008

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Two pages of pencils for “...And Call My Lover MODOK!”, an irreverent take on Marvel super-villain MODOK’s love life.

MODOK, A.I.M. ™ AND ©2008 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

always the guy who was finished a half an hour after you gave me a task, and they’d always say to me, “Well, find something else to do for the next eight hours of today. Look busy.”

DRAW!: So you went to high school, you went to college, then you started working at Fat Jack’s after college. What was your next step?

NB: I got hooked on Hate and Eightball when I was in college, and that led me to Love & Rockets, and that led me back into comics. I wound up moving to Philadelphia after going to school at UMass, and then, in Philadelphia, I kind of just stumbled into being the manager of one of the satellite Fat Jack’s Comics Crypts. It was there that I met a couple of people, Brian Saner-Lamken and Scott Kohn—one was a comics writer, one was a comics artist. They were going to school to be comics artists, and I got kind of sucked into that world, and started doing my own comic strips, just little pieces, just to get my feet wet. This was while I was working at the comic book store.

One of my customers was writing advertising copy for DC, and they offered him the job of retailer representative up in New York, but he’d just had a kid, so he couldn’t do it. And he said, “You should call them. You’re a bright, young fellow. They could use somebody like you.” The next thing you know, I’m up

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DRAW! • SPRING 2008

in the marketing department with a tie on, and a fresh haircut, and calling retailers all over the country for three years. I had essentially turned into a salesman, and I was just terrible at that.

I was the kind of guy that, having been in the trenches as a retailer, would say to them, “Oh, make sure when Green Arrow #16 comes out, cut your orders a little bit on that, because the book’s going to get canceled in a month.” That’s not a real example, I’m having trouble coming up with one. But I was a little too honest, perhaps, and my sales numbers— DRAW!: An honest salesman? Come on!

NB: Yes. That wasn’t for me. At that point I was really getting into comics. All the while I was in the marketing department, I was creating mini-comics with my friend, Bill Weaver, doing The Incredible Drinking Buddies, which is a superhero parody.

A very disgusting one, at that.

DRAW!: Oh, they’re the best kind! Come on!

NB: When I quit DC, I thought, “Okay, now I can be a selfpublisher, and I’ll follow the examples of my friends, Paul Pope, and I know the guy who does Too Much Coffee Man, who sells a lot of comics.”

Panel from Nick’s graphic novel, The Salon.

THE SALON ™ AND ©2008 NICK BERTOZZI

DRAW!: Shannon Wheeler, right?

prospective readers?

NB: Yeah. He gets the coffee stores, I’ll do the bars. So we started publishing—

NB: It actually just points out how stupid I am. I had access to all the DC numbers, I knew all the retailers, I called all the retailers a couple of months before my book was going to come out... Like I said, I was friends with Paul Pope, and he was selling probably 10,000 of whatever he put out. And I thought, “All right, now, 10,000. Let’s see, I don’t have nearly the grip on anatomy as Paul, but I think I should be able to sell at least half of what he sells.”

And this is after I’ve worked at DC for three years. I thought, “Okay, I’ll sell at least 5000 copies of Incredible Drinking Buddies.”

DRAW!: Too Much Incredible Drinking Beer Man! NB: Yeah, I thought it was a natural, right? But, unfortunately, people wanted to spend their money on actual alcohol instead of comic books, so... People don’t really tend to read in bars like they do in comic shops.

DRAW!: Really? I find that an amazing concept, that drunk people would now want to read comic books. [laughs] NB: Yeah, not too bright, huh? So we published five issues, and I think I had dropped $15,000 on publishing, and everything that I’d made from my stock at Time Warner while I was working at DC was put into it, and I got $10,000 more into debt after that.

DRAW! Now, wait a minute. You traded your, which would probably now be worthless, Time Warner stock—so you probably actually sold it at the right time, anyway...

NB: 1997.

DRAW!: ...to finance your self-publishing. Because you had worked at DC in the marketing department, did that aid you in being able to crack the code and get your books in front of

DRAW!: Incredible Drinking Buddies came out in what year?

NB: 1997.

DRAW!: Okay. That was after the demise of Capital City, right?

NB: Oh, yeah, way after Capital City’s demise.

DRAW!: Okay, because I started self-publishing two years before you did, and I spent a lot of money in advertising and trying to convince the mostly idiotic base of retailers who will only sell XMen comics, or Superman, or whatever, to buy my comic. Today I wish I had all that money that I had spent on advertising, because I found that, basically, advertising in comic books doesn’t pay out, because those guys are never going to order your comic book. My numbers were immediately halved when Capital City went out of business, and they never recovered. In fact, I know a lot of people DRAW! • SPRING 2008

33

Panel from Nick’s graphic novel, The Salon.

THE SALON ™ AND ©2008 NICK BERTOZZI

whose numbers never recovered after that. That was kind of like getting your right arm cut off or something, y’know?

NB: Oh, yeah. Well, when I was publishing, way after that, with Jeff Mason and Alternative Comics, I had a nice, big $900 check coming to me from doing The Masochist, the book I did.

And LPC, our book distributor, went out of business, and I think we got $90 back, as opposed to $900. It hurts!

DRAW!: You’ve gone to college, you have a degree, you’ve worked in marketing and a couple different places, had a lot of business experience. You’re working, you’re building up your artistic skills, self-publishing and going through the hard knocks many businesses of any stripe go through. But I think the big thing is that, at that point, and when you were actually working at DC I’m sure you saw this, there were a couple years there where the market was literally in free-fall. The amount of stores that were going out of business month-to-month, the numbers were just going down, down, down, down. Now you’re very successful, which is fantastic and all very well earned. What would you advise the Nick Bertozzis of 2007/2008 to do differently? Would you advise them to do a web comic? Because the road is very different now than it was in the mid-’90s. Even five years ago, or 2000, when I started doing Girl Patrol as a web comic, then I almost had a deal to do a TV show and stuff based on that, and then all of a sudden that March, pfft! The Internet went bust, and suddenly nobody wanted to pay for anything. But now it’s all kind of sort of coming back again, and now it seems like web comics seem to be the big thing.

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DRAW! • SPRING 2008

NB: It’s cyclical, right? It’s cyclical. And if I had anything to tell Nick Bertozzi of ten years ago, if I had some sage advice for him, it would be two things that I learned that are really important. The most important thing I learned was, after I had gotten my Incredible Drinking Buddies numbers back for #1, after printing 5,000 of them—I printed them before I got the numbers back from Diamond, by the way. This is what a brainiac I was. And the numbers came back 604 copies.

DRAW!: Oy vey.

NB: And then the next three issues, it continued to collapse until I think the last issue was down to about 90 copies.

DRAW!: So you weren’t still printing 5,000 copies?

NB: No, but I was kind of thinking I was going to go the Jeff Smith route where it’s going to be a slow build, but it’s going to happen, so it’s better to have these on hand. And I’ll also be giving out a bunch at conventions and things like that. And, in fact, I went to one show where I tried to give out free copies of Incredible Drinking Buddies and nobody wanted them.

DRAW!: You know, that’s one of the funny things about comics, and you’ve experienced it firsthand. If you go to a convention and you stand there and say, “Hey, take a free copy of my comic,” people will actually walk further away from your table, like, “Why are you trying to give me your crap for?

Obviously that’s a piece of crap.” But if you put a sign on that same comic book that said, “$5,000 comic book, first issue,” people would still think you were cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, but they would come over and they would all be curious, and they would be looking at it. It is so funny, because I have seen that— we have all seen that. You go to a convention, like Wizard World Philly, and Artists Alley is full of guys like where you or I were ten years ago, trying to self-publish stuff. You’ve got your little comic there, and you’re kind of sitting behind your table, hoping people come up and look at your stuff. And you say, “Hey, do you want a free copy?” “No.” NB: But to get back to that point, that’s where I was. It took me a long time to realize that what I was doing was just shooting myself in the foot. And it wasn’t until I lived with Dean Haspiel and I was working on a comic called Filthy Baby, about a very disgusting grown-up man who was a baby, and eats sh*t, and stuff. But I sent that around, and I thought, “Well, Ivan Brunetti does a very popular comic called Schizo. I think I can out-Schizo Brunetti. I’ll do this comic called Filthy Baby.” And it was turned down by everybody. It was at that point that my then-roommate, Dean Haspiel, said to me, “Stop trying to do comics for perceived audiences that you have, like the people in bars for Incredible Drinking Buddies, or the Schizo crowd for Filthy Baby. You’re really just, in that regard, trying to grab onto somebody’s coattails. What you need to do is just do a comic for yourself. And, by the way, there’s this big compilation comic that’s going to come out next year, in 2000. It’s called Comix 2000. And it’s going to be 2000 pages long, it’s going to be silent, and it’s going to be published by this French publisher, and each person that gets selected for this contest to be in this book, they’ll pay 100 Euros,” or whatever the equivalent of Francs was at the time. And I thought, “Oh, well, nobody wanted Filthy Baby. Maybe I’ll give one last stab, here.” I did this kind of dreamlike comic that was about the myth of Sisyphus.

And, as it turned out, it got accepted by the Comix 2000 people.

And if I were to go back to the Nick of 1993, I would say to him, “Don’t do Incredible Drinking Buddies. Don’t do Filthy Baby. Do comics that you want to see, not that you think people will want to see.” That’s number one, and that’s the most important thing I could tell my younger self.

The other really important thing that I would say to them is, don’t be afraid to talk up your good points. It’s fine to be self-deprecating, but it really doesn’t get you anywhere, and after a while it goes from being a quirky, funny little trait, and maybe a little bit endearing, to being a little annoying, especially from people that are very talented. And it becomes a crutch. On the opposite side, nobody likes to see somebody beating their chest and screaming at everybody with a megaphone, “Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!” There’s nothing more offensive than that. But a good artist is somebody that thinks critically about themselves, knows what their strengths are and what their weaknesses are. And a good artist also, in this day and age, and every day and age—you can go back to Leonardo, who had patrons—you’ve got to know how to talk about yourself without sounding like you hate yourself, or you love yourself. There’s a fine line to ride. There’s a boundary.

DRAW!: Right, you have to be your own PR machine. And it’s funny that you mentioned that, because I was talking to a friend

Panel from Nick’s Boswash.

BOSWASH ™ AND ©2007 NICK BERTOZZI

of mine at the school recently—this is more from the fine art point of view than usually the commercial art, because a commercial artist doesn’t write their statement, y’know? You go over to Marvel and DC, your portfolio’s your statement. You don’t give them a statement, “Well, my work represents my philosophy of Jim Steranko vs. Alex Toth,” or something. Basically, it sounds like what you’re talking about is having an artist’s statement, and have it being able to eloquently explain who, what, where, and why about your art to someone who was interested.

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Sequential artwork from one of Nick’s students at the School of Visual Arts. ©2007 THE CENTER FOR CARTOON STUDIES

NB: Well, it’s all going back to being a critical thinker. And I know I’m sounding like a broken record to that, but for me... Well, two things. One, being able to speak eloquently about yourself.

The second one is, how did I get to that point? I was not comfortable with public speaking, or any sort of speaking, until working at Fat Jack’s Comic Crypt and being the manager. And then, when I was up at DC Comics, I was forced to give sales talks. And I found that I enjoyed preparing little wisecracks for the retailers. So it became easier to do that, because I looked forward to trying to make people chuckle a little bit. And that led into teaching, which is pretty much the same. It’s like a performance. You have to get up there, and the more you can make them laugh, the better they’re going to learn. [laughs] If you’re yelling at them all day, they’re going to turn off after a while. If you crack them up all day, they’ll walk out of your class remembering a couple of things. And how did I get there? Well, it’s definitely through having been forced to do it. As a manager at Fat Jack’s, having to be forced to deal with people, and trying to sell them comics. Trying to tell them what was good about this month’s Justice League of America.

But, about artistic statements, it’s interesting that I had never had to write one until I was taken on by St. Martin’s Press to publish The Salon. Their publicity department asked me to write an artistic statement. [laughs] And that was a really hard thing to do, because, even though I’d been teaching, and had sort of a philosophy about what I thought [made good comics], it really was difficult to talk about my own work in such glowing regard. But as they say in the fine art world, you seek patrons, or you seek gallery owners that are going to find patrons for you, and if you don’t have

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this kind of very erudite, very wise, very pithy artistic statement, and maybe a little touch of enigma to it, then you’re not going to get very far. If you’re somebody that says, “Oh, I just like painting,” that’s not going to satisfy the kind of cult of personality that artists have to have. I mean, they just have to have it, you know?

DRAW!: Well, I think that is very true. Now, the other thing you were talking about was being a critical thinker. You went to school to be a writer or to study literature. You did not specifically go to art school. How did you go about educating yourself about art, about cartooning? What cartoonists did you follow?

Who did you read? Who did you study... who were your heroes to help guide you along?

NB: Well, I have to correct you on one thing. I went to school because it was expected in my family that I would go to university. I was going to be a history major. My parents had said that they wouldn’t pay for me to be an art major, which is what I wanted to do. They wanted me to have a more rounded education.

DRAW!: As if art could not possibly be rounded, I guess.

NB: [laughs] So I got to school, and I’d gone to visit one of my friends who I was in high school with, who was an exchange student in Spain. And I just got completely bamboozled by the culture of Spain when I went to go visit him, which is just amazing.

He had this beautiful cousin that my heart was pounding for. So I got back to college and decided to become a Spanish literature major to learn how to speak Spanish. [laughs] And it wasn’t to

become a writer at all. It was also because I like reading a lot, that’s just one of my hobbies, so it’s something that comes easily.

To sit down and read a hundred pages, that’s not a chore, that’s fun. To write a paper about it is not so much fun, but I thought, “Oh, the reading part will be easy. And I want to learn Spanish because I’ve got a good reason, there are all those cute girls in Spain.” [laughs] That was the real genesis of becoming a Spanish literature major. But as far as the path to going to become a cartoonist, it was really just people I bumped into like you and Scott and John Heebink, who said, “Oh, stop using a ballpoint pen.

This is called a nib. Use this. This is called ink, use this. This is called Bristol board. Use this instead of tracing paper,” or something like that. I don’t even remember what I started doing comics on. And then running into a couple of other cartoonists.

When I got up to DC, my friend Charlie DeGreco was working in the production department. I got to see all the tools he used.

He was a Kubie. He had gone to the Kubert school, so he got a good grounding in how to work all the tools. That was his job.

They were still doing paste-up then, and it was very hands-on...

at somebody who was sort of the whole package, which is what Kurtzman was. He was the whole package. He was the writer and the artist, as opposed to somebody being just an artist. But you mentioned you were reading things like Eightball or whatever...

NB: Well, listen, was the story entertaining? Was the story moving? Watchmen is really great, and I liked a lot of Frank Miller and Grant Morrison’s stories... I wasn’t just reading Fantagraphics comics, but the Hernandez Brothers definitely

DRAW!: Right, now everything is done in Photoshop.

NB: Right, this was when they were actually drawing on a piece of paper, cutting little pieces of paper out, and redoing hands...

DRAW!: Or, like, taking some whiteout and going over the top of something, and then inking on top of it to fix an eyeball.

Nobody does that anymore.

NB: So that was great, to learn that way. And then I had a friend who was a background artist, who shall go unnamed because he doesn’t want everybody to know about it. But he showed me how to use the nib. And then just bumping into a couple of other people at conventions and things like that, just learning how to use the tools.

DRAW!: But who were the artists that you were reading? I know you said, like, Dan Clowes. Was he one of the artists you said, “Oh, I want to do stuff like that. I like that art. That appeals to me.”

NB: You know what? I think I mentioned this when we were talking about SVA, but I think I’m much... I’m not against Harvey Kurtzman, because I think he’s one of the best comics artists that’s ever been. I think I’m much more in his camp, though. I think I care much more about the idea of the story rather than the presentation of the story. Of course I care about the art, but that’s really secondary to telling the story. It’s getting the right beats down, and getting the right content down. Hell, I just don’t... I am not a Wally Wood. I can’t make myself care more than I do about achieving a more slick art style. And you look at somebody like Harvey Kurtzman, it works for his war stories. I think his linework is so expressive and beautiful. But people always, when they talk about EC, they talk about Wally Wood, and I really think Kurtzman’s got him beat in the shade. But it’s clear that Kurtzman spends much more time composing a page than he does finishing it, which is why he was the guy that was storyboarding, basically, for other artists to finish, like Will Elder.

DRAW!: So I guess you were not looking at Moebius or somebody, going, “Oh, I really love that kind of art.” You were looking

Panel from Nick’s Boswash.

BOSWASH ™ AND ©2007 NICK BERTOZZI

DRAW! • SPRING 2008

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Panel from Nick’s graphic novel, The Salon.

THE SALON ™ AND ©2008 NICK BERTOZZI

were a couple of artists who I’ve really admired, and who never seemed to let the art get in the way of the story. Their art is beautiful to behold, but it’s also, and I mean this in the best way, it’s serviceable to the story.

have said that, thankfully, but I’ve never been one of those artists.

DRAW!: You can correct me here, it seems what your saying is that your art is in the service of your story, and for you, since the story is paramount—I mean, you want your art to be nice, and your work certainly has improved—it’s more about the story than it is about the drawing of the hand. You want it to be good, but you’re not going to be like Woody and just go crazy with trying to make it the most beautifully drawn hand ever, you’re talking about the whole... It’s a slightly different beast.

NB: [laughs] No.

NB: It doesn’t interest me as much. I also try to think of other paradigms other than comics to kind of explain it. I think that my mind is much more suited to directing comics than it is to being a director of photography, or the gaffer. Or even the screenwriter. I enjoy the writing part of it, but it’s putting together the moments, putting together the beats, putting together the acting styles, putting together the whole thing.

DRAW!: So you like the orchestration of the...

NB: Yeah, exactly! And I know that’s hurt me. People don’t think of my art and go, “I’ve gotta have a piece of that on my wall.”

They read my comics and go, “Wow, that was a good comic,” but they don’t ever go, “I need a t-shirt of that.” Well, some people

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DRAW!: They don’t want a hot pin-up of a jungle girl by Nick Bertozzi? Is that what you’re saying?

DRAW!: Well, I think that the great thing about that is that we have, in America, now matured as a medium and can incorporate and allow artists like you, who are more... You’re in a very different idea, and a very different track, than someone like I was. I’m sort of backtracking now, interested more in doing things that you’re doing now at this stage in my career. I think it would have been much harder to try to do that in 1981 than it actually would be to do it now.

NB: You wouldn’t live like one of those Will Eisners out there, just fighting through sheer force of will to get your message, your comics, out there, and year after year doing another comic and selling 5,000 or 10,000 of them. I don’t know, that guy spent 40 years banging his head against a wall. I mean, I know that— DRAW!: But he was a smart guy, though, because he went off and he used his skills that he developed as a businessman doing comics, to do comics as a businessman for the Army, and made a very comfortable living. He’s a smart guy. There are very few Will Eisners in the world of comics, very few Joe Kuberts, very few Neal Adams, you know?

Panel from Nick’s graphic novel, The Salon.

THE SALON ™ AND ©2008 NICK BERTOZZI

NB: And a critical, critical thinker. That is, to me, and I know I’m sounding like a broken record, but that guy understood the right questions to ask. It’s not how smart are you, how bookread are you, how street smart you are. It doesn’t matter unless you’re asking the right questions. It doesn’t matter if you can do logarithmic math problems; if you’re not asking the right question, you’re never going to make a good discovery.

DRAW!: You know, I met Eisner a couple times. I had breakfast with him one day—he was very nice—at WonderCon. So I don’t really know him as a person or anything like that, but my feeling, observing it from the outside, has always been that because he was not so busy chasing the mouse every month, that that allowed him the time to develop that critical thinking. But if your job is, “I’ve got five kids to feed.” You know what I mean? “I have to produce five pages a day, or three pages a day, minimum,” you will develop some critical thinking just as a byproduct of this job.

Or if your editor goes, “This Jack Kirby guy, he’s selling a lot of books. You need to make your stuff more like him or you won’t have a job.” Obviously, survival dictates that you have to put some brain power behind it. But the way I always looked at it is that he did not burn himself out in the same way that most of the top talented artists of his generation did. The other guys of his generation who were successful and made a comfortable living were the guys who went into the strips, who after a while were able to hire ghosts or assistants, or made enough money that they could get a staff to make producing that volume of artwork feasible. If you were doing comics, if you’re Gil Kane, you’ve got to do five

pages a day. If you’re John Buscema, you really have to produce that volume. And I think that it’s kind of obvious how a guy like Eisner at a certain point says, “You know, The Spirit’s not working, whatever. I’m stopping it.” He was a businessman, and his business was art, and that is a whole different philosophy than saying, “I need to make fifty dollars by Friday.”

NB: Yeah. You know, I wish he were alive now, because I’ve only recently, in the past six months to a year, started feeling comfortable enough to approach some of my heroes, somebody like Eisner, to say, “I know I’m not on your level, and I’m embarrassed to show you my artwork in that I still have a lot to learn, but, please, mentor me, teach me the secrets, give me the insight.” You know, it’s funny. I was just going over that—did you interview Steve Rude about the Alex Toth—?

DRAW!: Yes, yes.

NB: Yeah, I was just reading this to my students, and I was talking about critical thinking, and I was like, “Here’s an example of taking critical thinking way too far.” [laughs] It’s important to be a critical thinker, but it’s also important to have a big picture in mind, and not obsess with— DRAW!: Balance is very important. If you get to the point where you think too much, it will freeze you, and you’ll never be able to come to any answer at all that will ever satisfy you as an artist. That happens to a lot of people, they get to that Masters DRAW! • SPRING 2008

39

stage in college and their brain just seizes up because they...

NB: You know, what’s so interesting about somebody like a Toth is that what he’s really railing about is himself. Even though he’s tearing apart Steve Rude, it’s like, you know what?

This guy’s full of anger, and he’s angry because he’s 60 years old and he spent his life working on Zorro and...

DRAW!: Space Ghost. [laughs]

NB: And Space Ghost. They’re beautiful to look at. I mean, they are just gorgeous, the pacing is gorgeous. But the stories, I defy anybody to actually sit down and read more than ten pages of that Zorro book. I mean really reading the dialogue and enjoying it not as an artist, but as a reader.

DRAW!: Well, I have to confess I probably looked at that Zorro work hundreds of times, but I don’t think that I actually read them.

NB: You can’t!

DRAW!: I would just kind of look at his artwork. And I also think, you’re right. My feelings on Toth are probably fairly... not so much hero worship like a lot of guys of my generation. I think he was an amazing artist, but I also agree with you. I think one of the reasons he might have perhaps been angry is because maybe at the end of his life he realized, you know, he made a very comfortable living working for Hanna-Barbera, but that stuff was absolute sh*t, for the most part, when it was turned into TV shows. You had this guy who was working with Walt Disney, and had artists equal of his level or better as draftsman that they could pick up the ball and run, but when you’re getting stuff churned out for the cheapest budget possible, there’s no way the stuff could ever be better. It was always a lessening of the effort. I agree with some of the things he said in that critique of Steve’s stuff...

NB: Of course.

DRAW!: ...but there’s stuff that I do not agree with. And I think you do have to have critical thinking, but on Jonny Quest, how far does your critical thinking have to go? Do you really have to work out the science of the megabands of Space Ghost, or how Jonny Quest’s hair really works? Because, you know, his hair is a design. It doesn’t really work. It looks good when it’s drawn from certain angles.

NB: “Of course you do, kiddo! You better do it, or you’re never going to get a job in this town! You’re too lazy, Manley!” We could go on and on about that.

DRAW!: But those are good lessons. You can learn a lot from just that kind of critical thinking. You were touching on the interview we did about the SVA. When you were teaching, maybe because you now had to sit there and think about, “Well, why do I do that?” when helping a student solve their problem, did that then help you to sort of create a philosophy? You started to have a reason that you could look at and say, “Hmm, yes, this does work.” You started to become a critical thinker.

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Panel from Nick’s Boswash.

BOSWASH ™ AND ©2007 NICK BERTOZZI

DRAW! • SPRING 2008

NB: Or I was able to articulate my critical thought, and I was forced to go... I mean, certainly everybody has critical thought.

To be able to articulate them clearly is very difficult.

Interestingly enough, clarity is I guess my mantra, somewhat my philosophy, at SVA. I say to the kids all the time, if you can show your comics to a 70-year-old grandma or a seven-year-old kid, and they know what’s going on, you’ve done your job for my class. You’ve achieved the clarity that I want you to achieve.

When you’re done with my class, you don’t have to worry about clarity unless you want to. But, for my class, I want to strive for

they’re maybe two inches by one inch.

They’re real thumbnails. And they include all the information you need for the story. And they’re so full of artistic intent that it’s just stunning to see how clearly the story comes across just in these incredibly economical amount of lines. Or lack of line, I should say.

DRAW!: Well, when you’re working that small, it’s all basically design, it’s 2-D design.

NB: Yeah, but he’s working it out in his mind, not necessarily out on the paper. I mean, obviously it’s good to work things out on the paper. You have to get the physical motion going. But he’s working inside. He’s working before his pencil even hits the paper, which is what they always say about the good movie directors. Hitchcock was walking around with North by Northwest in his mind—every frame. He knew exactly how far away the camera was, so much so that he didn’t even have to be on the set.

DRAW!: And he storyboarded his films. He storyboarded all that stuff.

NB: Yeah, but he would look at the rushes from his second assistant director and go, [Hitchcock voice:] “I asked you to put the camera 20 feet away, not 50 feet away, from the actors.”

And the second director would say, “Uhh, I thought we put it at 20 feet.”

And Hitchcock would say, “No. Go back and measure it.” And they would go back and measure it, and he’d be right. He was just such a freak about it. It was all up there in his brain. And they say that about the best writers, too, that you do your best writing before the pencil hits the page, and if you can train the synapses in your brain to work like that, the neuro-pathways to work like that, you have much easier access to that mode of thinking.

Page from Desiree’s Baby, by one of Nick’s SVA students.

The more you think in that respect, the DESIREE’S BABY ™ AND ©2008 RESPECTIVE OWNER more your brain will automatically go clarity, and because of pushing that so hard, I’ve looked for it in toward those pathways. And that’s one thing I really like about my own work now. I try to make sure that my own work is a teaching is that you meet a kid who seems kind of dopey and seamless read, and is not trying to needlessly stonewall people in dumb, but once they get there, you can actually change their the middle of a story. The intent of each panel is extremely clear. mind. The pathways physically change in their brain.

And, actually, that came out through my work with working on the thumbnails of Jason Lute on the Houdini: The Handcuff THE BACK TO SCHOOL GUIDE CONTINUES ON PAGE 59 King book, because his thumbnails are tiny, tiny, tiny. I mean,

DRAW! • SPRING 2008 41

BADGER ™ AND ©2008 MIKE BADGER

Conducted by Mike Manley Transcribed by Steven Tice

DRAW!: I understand you had some college or art school training. Was this is at the American Academy?

BILL REINHOLD: The American Academy of Art. There was a lot of attention put on Andrew Loomis’ work there, and a number of the teachers actually pretty much were, you might say, teaching from that knowledge.

DRAW!: From the Loomis books?

BR: They didn’t actually put the books out. In our school, we never used the books. There were no books at all. In fact, my favorite life-drawing teacher, he didn’t even do demonstrations on paper. Rarely, very rarely. Everything was him describing things, and he was an amazing teacher.

DRAW!: And who was that?

BR: That was Bill Perks.

DRAW!: Was he sort of a semi-retired, working illustrator?

BR: He could have been in his 50s.

DRAW!: Which, of course, now we say is not old at all. [laughs] BR: That’s right. But you know when people are older and when you’re younger, their style is so different from you that they seem a lot older just by how they look.

DRAW!: Although I think that generation of people, when they were 50, were older than us being that age or near that age.

I think they had a very different view.

BR: Yeah. So with Loomis, part of his teaching is talking a lot about planes and the figure, so there tended to be a lot of us that really went towards that, and with some of the artists that were learning that way, it was so obvious in our work. I mean, the planes would be exaggerated, almost. People would look like Iceman in the comics, y’know? It’s a great way to learn, to understand the figure, but at some point you have to start breaking that down so it’s not obvious, and you start making things look more organic. But I think that’s where my angular style developed from.

BR: Well, he was an older guy. You know, it’s funny, he’s passed on now, but when I look back at him, he seemed really old when I was there, but I was in my early 20s...

DRAW!: Was from that really structural breaking down of the figure into planes?

DRAW!: So anybody over 30 was old, then. [laughs]

BR: Yeah. So you understand, like, when you’re coming across a part of the figure and all of a sudden you’ve got to make a right

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A trio of Punisher covers by Bill.

THE PUNISHER ™ AND ©2008 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

turn, and you’ve got to make a left turn. It’s obvious. You know where the signs are. A lot of my career was first learning how to draw, and then trying to forget a lot of that stuff, and trying to break it down into something more organic and looser. Because I would find my work looking too stiff, and when I penciled my own work and other people would ink it, I tended to work in that way, penciling was a step for me, because I was used to inking my own work. So sometimes a lot of that angularity would be in the pencils that I didn’t really see as being in the finish. If I were inking it, I would destroy some of that. I’d break that down and make it look more organic. But if somebody else inked me, they would sometimes emphasize it, even.

DRAW!: But, see, now you have the experience to be able to interpret that.

BR: Exactly. I actually never turn young artists towards those books. To me, they’re confusing. They’re beyond what I think a beginner can really look at, to me.

DRAW!: I know what you mean. I do recommend them to some of my students, but in general what I do is take certain pages, when we’re talking about, say, blocking the masses, and I will use them to illustrate the principles... the big masses. I think his work, because it is so highly stylized, you sort of look at those figures and they look like, I don’t know, DRAW!: Well, that’s like Gil statues or something. “How Kane’s work when he would do I apply that to trying to ink himself, or, say, someone draw a normal person?” I like Romita or Wood would remember thinking Jim ink him with a much softer Starlin’s art, when I was a kid, style, it would sort of soften looked like Bridgman. his work. But sometimes Everything was big and inkers would ink his work and A 1989 self-portrait/mug shot by Bill. blocky, and it was like the ARTWORK ©2008 BILL REINHOLD would emphasize the angularipeople had no skin or were ty of his work, so the people made of stone or marble.

I could clearly see that obviously not look more like moving statues or something. only did Frazetta, but Gil Kane definitely did study his work.

BR: Exactly. Yeah. But I really like learning that way, as opposed to artists like George Bridgman. When I saw his anatoHOGARTH VS BRIDGMAN my books, I couldn’t make sense of those things.

DRAW!: I think that they’re very difficult to digest without a good teacher to help you, or without having a fair amount of drawing experience yourself.

BR: Now I actually can enjoy them. I look at them and go, “Wow, this is really good.” [laughs]

BR: Well, are you thinking of Bridgman, now, or Hogarth?

DRAW!: Bridgman.

BR: Okay. Hogarth...

DRAW!: Hogarth I never liked. I never liked his work, ever...

DRAW! • SPRING 2008

43

BR: He was even further. I mean, he was the real Gil Kane, Jim Starlin, for anatomy books, you know? The reason comic book artists like his stuff is because it looks like comics, because the guy was a comics artist. Although the guy can draw like crazy, all of his background is like if you, I don’t know, took the average comic artist and they learned how to draw really well, they’d still be drawing the comic style, but it was done in a technical way.

DRAW!: You know, it’s funny, because I always disliked his work.

I never liked his Tarzan stuff. And I actively tell my students, if they have the Burne Hogarth books, to actually throw them away, because I think that they’re terribly inaccurate, but they’re convincing because everything is so well-finished, it’s so well-thought-out and completed that it gives you the false sense that what he’s stating is actually true. But the more I learn about figure drawing over the years, the more I realize that a lot of the stuff he talks about is just his very personal, sort of twisted take on it.

BR: There’s really no room for that in other kinds of art. In comics there is more room. I wasn’t attracted to Hogarth’s comic work at all. I mean, I’d look at it; it was somewhat interesting. But really, the reason I liked his books is because everything was so evident. When I looked at somebody like Bridgman, or even some others, either I didn’t like the figure work, or I just thought it wasn’t playing what was being said and the way things were described. I liked when I could see where the muscles connected and where things actually went. I felt like I needed that. So that’s why I was attracted to Hogarth

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A Silver Surfer GN cover and a 9/11 tribute piece.

SILVER SURFER ™ AND ©2008 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

DRAW! • SPRING 2008

and Gil Kane and Steve Ditko. These guys, the anatomy was there, plainly. You could see it. Whereas somebody like Buscema, their stuff was so organic, you really couldn’t learn to draw from it, at least in a technical way. You could learn a lot about good art and composition and drawing, but it was more advanced, in a way. It was more subtle.

DRAW!: I’m taking anatomy classes now, and it’s completely different to teach yourself and to learn from comics, where everything is very extreme and all the people are extreme.

Hogarth’s approach is an extreme stylization of anatomy. It’s not like really learning how the body is put together. He doesn’t really talk about how the muscles insert on the bones, and...

BR: I’ve never read the books. I’ve just looked at them. [laughs] DRAW!: When you start really studying anatomy from a very technical standpoint, you start to learn the different layers of muscle on the back—you have the romboids, and then you have the trapezius, you have these layers of muscles that work together.

BR: I would look at other anatomy books for that. I have a lot of anatomy books, and some of them are more technical, almost

medical. Because I would find myself, as I was learning anatomy, becoming more and more curious about where things went and how they connected. And I needed something to show me where things went under the layers, how they connected to the bone. I didn’t go too crazy on that, but, still... ’Cause if you’re drawing figures all the time, and if you are drawing anatomy that’s obvious, you’ll find yourself drawing a line, and you go, “Wait, where does this go? Does it go over this muscle or that muscle?” And then I’ve got to find out.

because it was right there. You could see it. And it wasn’t until later that I learned to hide it more and make it less obvious. Or even when I drew folds on drapery or clothing, I mean, my folds were so cut-out. I wanted to, the same way with anatomy, I wanted to know where everything was going. I had to understand where it was connecting to. Where now, I try to leave things out, be more spontaneous, and put fewer lines than I used to put in, and try to tell it in a simpler way.

DRAW!: And then you have the completely different experience, if you’ve only learned to look at comic books or books, and you go and look at a middleaged housewife as your life-drawing model, and it’s like, well, she doesn’t have rippling triceps, and she’s got several layers of fat over her skin, and her sternomastoid doesn’t look like the Hulk’s. It’s good to know where things are, but if you just have just a steady diet of that one form of drawing, it really only applies to maybe comics, and somewhat to animation, but otherwise you’re pretty lost for other kinds of drawings.

BR: Well, in my school, I was mostly studying with teachers that taught more surface anatomy, more form, and not so much the almost medical side of anatomy. I had one teacher like that, because I felt like I needed it at one point in school, because I had so much of that teaching on more surface anatomy, the planes and understanding the outside of things as well as you would understand any physical object. So when I took this other teacher, then I was hanging around a bunch of artists that were really into anatomy, the guys who would go to study cadavers, things like that. I didn’t want to do that, but these guys had that kind of thought about anatomy.

And that really helped me out a lot, too, because it answered some of my questions.

DRAW!: I think, in general, it seems that as you mature as an artist, the “less is more” tends to be sort of the way a lot of artists go. In the beginning, you’re very conscious, I think, of wanting to show your knowledge; you kind of want to pile that on, and as you go along you realize that to be a little bit more sophisticated you can only hint at that, and if you know your stuff you know exactly what you need to put down in order to indicate that that other stuff is there. You don’t have to emphatically state everything in such an equal way. A lot of the ’90s style of drawing that came up—where you had a lot of guys who were sort of fan artists become professional artists—the average lay person tends to equate detail with sincerity, with merit. The more detailed something is, the better it is.

BR: That’s what most young people think, anyway.

DRAW!: Right, and then it’s sort of a process, of learning, of education, that that’s not necessarily true, and more is not better. Sometimes more is wrong.

Bill enjoys painting landscapes, such as this unfinished watercolor painting.

BR: But there are people who are expert at more. They are great artists, and you can lovingly look at their detail, but that’s because they understand all sides. I think it would have been hard if I had come up as an artist in the ’90s as opposed to the early ’80s, because then I would have been really influenced by all that stuff. Because it influenced me, a little bit, anyway.

©2008 BILL REINHOLD DRAW!: You could directly apply that philosophy, then, to your comic book work, and help give it a little bit more of a sense of flesh, and not a sense of people being made out of dolls or mannequins or DRAW!: Well, I think it influenced everybody. something.

BR: I think if I had come up then, I very possibly would have gone in a totally different direction. We were talking about this BR: After a while, yeah. It took a while for me to change like more linear, detailed side, that the other side to that is when I that. I mean, my early work is definitely more towards the discovered Alex Toth, and then everything changed. Everything angular side, and more obvious side of anatomy. I don’t know. I from storytelling to drawing, I looked at everything differently, mean, there are some artists who seem to just come out of the and I found myself seeking out other artists that also loved Alex gate and have a good understanding of the figure, but I don’t Toth.

I’d go to a comic convention and be talking to a guy, and know. It was a slow change for me, in a lot of ways. People then Toth would come up, and then it would become a big conwould always say to me, “Oh, you seem to know anatomy well,”

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DRAW!: You have guys as great as Kubert still doing things occasionally, all the way to artists in their early 20s, just breaking in, doing stuff. So arguably never in the history of the medium have we had people that were that great in age range, and style-wise, because then you have the whole manga/anime thing. You have people, they’re just totally immersed in that world. They never read Fantastic Four or Spider-Man.

“The Meeting” combining ink and watercolor. ©2008 BILL REINHOLD

versation. Everybody would want to talk about him. And this was, I guess, mid- to late ’80s, before all that happened. Now, I don’t know that any of those guys that started that whole drive of the so-called “Image style” sat around and talked about Toth quite the same way. I’m sure they appreciate him, but...

DRAW!: I think they had a different aesthetic, too, because I think us being in some cases ten or 15 years older than some of those guys... Well, actually, I’m only six years older than Rob, because Rob’s 40.

BR: There are so many styles that are popular now to be swayed one way or another. That’s another thing that I found, after doing this for so long, I’m not quite as swayed as I used to be. A little bit here and there, but not any big directions. I don’t find myself going from one style to another any more. I’ve tried to keep to what I feel is more genuine for me, what feels more real, and it tends to be something that looks more like an older style. That’s the other thing is that, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten more influenced by older artists. Which is weird. It’s like I’m going back in time instead of forward. I’m not looking to compete with the people who draw in the Japanese style, I’m looking at Alex Toth or Frank Robbins or artists from other parts of the world more so than, well, of course, manga is Japanese, but Japanese art has become so strong here, it almost seems American now.

DRAW!: Well, you even have generations of that. Once you start studying the manga and the anime, they have stuff that’s just like our Silver Age and our Golden Age, and a lot of the

BR: You’re just a kid.

DRAW!: Yeah. I think, though, that those few years did make a big difference in what you were exposed to and what you were reading.

BR: I’ve heard it described as there was a period in comics where there weren’t a whole lot of new people coming in, and the guys who were drawing comics in the ’60s were still drawing them into the ’70s.

DRAW!: Well, that’s true. I think there was a lot of resistance to those guys.

BR: There was a small drive of people who came in the ’70s, Wrightson and Kaluta...

DRAW!: Right, Chaykin, people like that.

BR: There was a drive of people in the ’80s, but the biggest drive, of course, was the boom in the late ’80s, early ’90s. But there was certainly a big difference in age between the guys I hung around in comics and the guys who had been doing it for a while. They tended to be older. Now there seems to be a wider range of ages of people who are in comics, from very young to older—

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“Linda’s Flowers”—done in watercolor. ©2008 BILL REINHOLD

students, when I talk to them, they have no idea who Tezuka is. They just, “Oh, what?

Astro Boy? What’s that?” They know the people that are drawing Death Note, or the stuff that’s on Adult Swim... I think that artists today are much more fortunate than artists of any age of the past, because, with a few keystrokes, you can literally find an image of just about any artist you can think of. And that never existed before in the history of the world. Before the Internet, you might have to go to Europe, or live in a big city, to be lucky enough to be exposed to fine art in general. If you didn’t live in one of the big cities, it was very hard to ever see an original, or have any idea how things were done.

BR: Yeah, it’s great to be able to mention an artist to somebody and then they can just look it up online and find a lot of material right away.

DRAW!: I have a hard drive that’s just bristling with all kinds of images and art in various categories.

BR: I love going to sites where people sell original art and put up nice, large images of different things. Heritage, they’ll put up these gigantic scans that are bigger than you would ever need, but still, it’s great to be able to see old work in great detail like that.

DRAW!: I remember the first piece of original art I saw at a convention when I was a teenager. I believe it was a Tom Sutton piece. I think it was for RBCC or something like that, and just the idea of seeing, “Oh, so that’s what an actual original looks like.” I think the next one I saw was a Sal Buscema/Joe Sinnott FF page or something, and I was amazed at the brushwork.

Everything seemed so perfect and sparkling, yet it wasn’t dead or mechanical. You could see there was a looseness to it, and you realize that reproduction hides so many things.

BR: Oh, yeah. I think I learned a lot by seeing originals for that reason, because I started to realize, sometimes even the guys that I thought of as tight artists really weren’t, that their stuff was sometimes more spontaneous than I had realized. In fact, I have this theory that comic book art—the stuff that’s gotten more and more detailed—was influenced by art in print more than the original art, that when young artists would look at George Pérez or whoever it may be, and they look at it in print, they would then try and copy it; they would try and do original work that looks like the detail in print as opposed to the large size of original art.

DRAW!: Oh, I agree.

BR: They take it to another level of detail that wasn’t really realistic of what they were doing on the page.

You can’t go wrong with Nazi robots. ©2008 BILL REINHOLD

DRAW!: One of things I wanted to talk about is that we have had similar careers paths in the fact that you started out as a penciler, but now you actually do a lot more inking of other people’s work, and less penciling.

BR: Yes, predominantly I ink, and occasionally pencil. And “occasionally” has drifted off to “hardly ever.”

DRAW!: And this is not something that you planned, right?

BR: No. I actually became very curious about inking other people. I always inked my own work from the very beginning, and I always encourage young artists to always work in ink. Don’t become, in comics, just a penciler, or just an inker. You should work in both disciplines, because either one is going to improve your whole. And I decided that it’d be interesting to ink somebody else, so I just put it out there to other artists, letting them know that it would be fun to ink somebody sometimes. And I’d only done it in the past, you might say, in an amateur way. I went to school with Mitch O’Connell. He’s a comic book artist, and now mostly an illustrator, and he had been very involved in the fan press. He had his own fanzine out for a number of years.

DRAW!: I remember that, because the comic book shop that I used to go to in Michigan actually used to carry some of them.

BR: Lollapalooza was the name of his magazine, and it was one of the most professional-looking fanzines I’ve ever seen, before the days of digital and easy printing. But we would ink DRAW! • SPRING 2008

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his work, I guess. I assume that’s what his thought was. From that I started becoming an artist that worked, you might say, half and half, penciling and inking my own work, and inking other people. But as time went on—because I’m not a superfast artist. I can get it done, but I’m not somebody who can do two books a month, either inking or penciling. So if I’m doing one thing, it’s kind of hard for me to do anything else. Maybe a little bit on the side, but I can’t handle two things— DRAW!: You can’t split your brain that way?

BR: Well, it’s partially that, but it’s partially just speed. If I’m inking somebody, I’m really on the average not going faster than a page-and-a-half a day. It might be a page to a page-anda-half a day, depending on the artist I’m working on. Of course, I can work faster, as many times you have to do two or three pages a day, but that’s when you’re in emergency mode and you’ve got to make a deadline. But, for me to feel good about my work, it’s hard for me to go that fast.

DRAW!: Oh, it’s very interesting that you say that because...

You get that question, I’m sure you do, all the time, when you’re at a convention and one of the first things people ask you is, “How long did it take you to do that? How fast did you do that? How much time do you have to do a job?” Sometimes I say, “Well, you never have enough time. You just have the time that they give you to do a job.”

Monochromatic wash. ©2008 BILL REINHOLD

each other’s work, and it would get published in the Comic Buyer’s Guide or any of the fanzines that were around at that time. So that was interesting to do, but at that time, inking, for me, was a little bit more like tracing, or, if it wasn’t like tracing, just reinventing it to look more like mine, as opposed to being able to do some combination of artists very well. So, as I got more experience with ink as time went on, I thought it would be interesting to try it. I had mentioned this to Adam Kubert. I can’t remember where it was, it was at a convention or something, and he remembered it. And so he called me up and asked me to ink him on the Spirits of Vengeance.

DRAW!: I remember that stuff! That was a great team. I think you kept the spirit in his drawing, but you brought your drawing, and a sense of spontaneity and maybe a certain sense of texture, which is one of the things I’ve always really liked about your work, to his work, that other inkers didn’t always add.

BR: That’s actually one of the things that sort of attracted him to me is that I had showed him... The job he remembers, I showed him a story I drew and inked for Hellraiser, which was a book that Marvel put out—the Clive Barker creation. I did a short story for that. It was a story based on Jack the Ripper, so there were all these scenes in England, and modern day, but I got to use a lot of texture in the city, and he remembered how I had handled water, reflections of water, and things like... He was remembering a lot of things like that, the textures and things I added, and that’s what he was hoping I would bring to

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Ink wash commission sketch of Reed Richards as Doom.

DR. DOOM, REED RICHARDS ™ AND ©2008 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

Studio guys came along...

DRAW!: Wrightson, Kaluta?

BR: Barry Windsor-Smith, Jeff Jones, Kaluta and Wrightson, these were guys who decided, “Hey, we’re going to start a career where we spend a whole month on one piece.” [laughs] Which is the total opposite of comics. And this was very attractive to me, because that’s what I love doing, taking a long time on something. It’s kind of hard to bring that into comics, with the deadlines; you can’t really do that.

DRAW!: The old guys also developed their styles based upon the fact that, “I’ve got to draw five pages today, or break down three or four pages.”

BR: And those are the guys I’m attracted to now, really, more than anything, the guys that were quick and fast and spontaneous. I’m slower than them, but they influence me more than the guys who are highly detailed, even though I do go back and forth. I mean, there are times when I do still lean toward the detailed work, on my own. Of course, if somebody else is penciling, if it’s there, you’ve got to deal with it. But the stuff that really excites me now is the stuff when it’s simple. That’s the stuff where I go, “Oh, my God. Look at that.” When I look at Frank Robbins or Alex Toth, those guys, that’s the stuff that just makes me get excited and go, “Wow.” As opposed to looking at every blade of grass in a drawing. I appreciate that, but that doesn’t get me excited anymore. I might even put that in my own work, but it’s not the stuff that drives me, it’s not the stuff that makes me want to improve in the same way.

Bill’s inks over Adam Kubert’s pencils for Spirits of Vengeance #5.

THE INKER’S JOB

BLAZE, VENOM ™ AND ©2008 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

BR: That’s always my answer. But, of course, see, I’m someday who will tend to fill that time up.

DRAW!: And then it’s like a sponge, the job is like a sponge, it expands to fill the glass.

BR: Yeah. Some people, they’re going to get it done in two weeks no matter what, if they’re inking somebody. Or if they’re penciling, they’re going to get it done in three weeks. They don’t take a whole month. That’s just how they are. They can’t find themselves sweating over a page any longer than that. They’ve got to move on.

DRAW!: Well, there’s a different aesthetic, too. I think that you can very clearly divide that idea—what goes on a page, what should be on a page, the amount of detail on a page or drawing—clearly in almost a generational sense, because when I talk to the older guys, and I worked with Williamson in his studio for a year, but I knew Al for a couple years before and after, the idea that he and Angelo Torres would sit down and in one night draw a six-page cowboy story for Stan Lee or something, I mean, people just don’t do that anymore. In general, today, the fans expect to have a lot more detail and finish on a page.

BR: Yeah, I was always somebody who was more attracted to the illustrator side of comics or illustrators, so, like, when The

DRAW!: So, getting back to the inking thing, when you inked Kubert, did that start to lead to offers from other artists saying, “Hey, do you want to ink my stuff?”

BR: Actually, what it led to was partially artists and partially editors seeing me do it. In general, I tend to get more work from writers and pencilers than I do from editors. That seems the way it’s gone for my career, mostly.

DRAW!: I think artists are probably more aware of the guys that they think, “Wow, that’s a good inker. I’d love to have him ink my stuff,” where an editor’s not really looking at your work, probably, in that fashion. I mean, if you’re on a run of a book or something that’s successful, or a successful team like Klaus Janson inking Frank Miller, it kind of pops into your mind, “Oh, let’s have Klaus Janson, who inked that popular book, ink this book.”

BR: Yes. Well, I became good friends with Carl Potts, who was an editor at Marvel at that time. He was my editor, at the beginning, on Punisher at Marvel when I was drawing, and continued later on to be my editor on other things. Once he knew I was inking, he thought of me, too, as inking things. I’m trying to remember the next thing I worked on. I guess the next thing I worked on as an inker was Ron Wagner on Daredevil. I had met Ron locally, because at the time he lived in the Chicago area, and he saw my inking on Adam. A lot of artists really like DRAW! • SPRING 2008

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Steve Ditko layouts and Bill’s finishes for a page from Phantom 2040 #1.

THE PHANTOM ™ AND ©2008 KING FEATURES SYNDICATE, INC.

Adam Kubert, so when they saw my work on Adam, they were able to envision me inking them. People like to see the work, sometimes, and see it demonstrated, and then they can imagine what you might do on them. So I started to work on Daredevil, and through Carl Potts that led to me inking Steve Ditko on— DRAW!: Which much have been a lot of fun.

BR: Yeah, that was, of course, the thrill of a lifetime, and is still one of my favorite things because I look up to him so much. And that was probably one of the first times I really had to think, or, at least, I let myself think differently, as opposed to just bringing myself to something and kind of reinventing somebody’s work to look somewhat towards mine. I really had to think about giving his work respect, and not to just make it look something like mine. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted it to look like his.

DRAW!: Not like Bill Reinhold drawings in Steve Ditko positions.

BR: Exactly, and that’s what a lot of people do when they ink people, and I try and always be somewhere in between. I actually battle over it, sometimes, wondering how far to go. In general, if it’s somebody who maybe I’ve known their work for many years, it’s kind of hard to get that out of my head, and I don’t want to change it too much. I want it to still be what I like about their work. I don’t want it to all of a sudden turn into my work.

Especially if I’m inking full pencils, I tend to keep it towards their work as much as I can, with more my technique, and bringing some of my own drawing to it, but not trying to recreate it.

DRAW!: To me, that’s a very fascinating and crucial point in something that, as a craft, most people don’t really understand,

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unless they’re an inker, and especially unless they’re a person who inks other people’s work, they don’t quite really understand, there’s that point at which... As I explain to the students, when Joe Sinnott erased Jack Kirby’s pencils, it was Joe Sinnott on the page.

Jack Kirby was gone, his pencils were gone. So there’s that point at which, like you’re saying, you want to respect what the penciler intended. But it’s also, the art is not complete. The pencil art is not the end, it is a stage.

Maybe with certain artists their work might tend to be less open to interpretation.

I mean, some artists will pencil things so tight that you could literally just shoot the pencils. They’re indicating line weight, and drawing every little texture. There’s little room, or they’re intending there to be very little room for interpretation. And it seems that many of the older artists knew that they were going to be collaborating, they knew that the inker was going to come in, especially if it was...

BR: And the pencils were penciled that way, and they’d leave it open for that. And those are the people I actually... I say respect people’s work, but at the same time I do like bringing myself to it, and I do like when artists don’t, like you say, put every line down and make it super-tight. I like when they leave me some room.

But I do have their own work in mind, and if somebody inks their own work, I always say, especially if I haven’t seen it, “Could you let me see some of your own work when you ink it. I want to see what you like.” You know? And then I try and bring some of that to it. That’s what I would like if somebody inked me, at least. I’d like them to go towards what I like, at least. Y’know, if they can bring better drawing to my work or something, great, but I’d like it to have a little bit of the feel I like, also, with it. Although the funny thing about that is, my favorite works usually are done by artists that also draw in their inks, and they do bring a bit of themselves to their work, and I do enjoy that.

DRAW!: So who would be an example?

BR: Well, I mean, any of the great inkers we could think of from years ago always did that. I mean, anyone from Sinnott, or Frank Giacoia, or Tom Palmer...

DRAW!: Giordano.

BR: Giordano, right. But those guys were great artists in their own right. Later on we started to develop more people who were

just inkers, that they went into the business to be an inker, and that’s all they ever did. And some of these people never really learned to draw that well, but got great at technique. So sometimes, then, they came to the work, they didn’t bring the drawing, so much. They brought great technique, but not so much drawing.

So if somebody’s going to ink me, I’d rather have, at this point, somebody inking me who’s going to be themselves and just do what they want with it, as opposed to just following my lines.

Because, if they follow my lines, it’s never going to work out.

DRAW!: I’m going to put you on the spot. Name a few of your favorite inkers that are working today, artists that you look at.

BR: That’s a funny thing, too, is when I think of ink, I usually think of the people who ink themselves, more so. But inkers?

Okay. Well, mainstream inkers I think of right away that are at the top of the list, I guess... I’m thinking of penciler/inkers again. [Mike laughs] Well, see, I really like Klaus Janson, I really like Kevin Nowlan.

DRAW!: They’re like the whole package, though, yeah.

BR: Yeah, they do reinvent stuff a lot of times, and that’s what they’re hired for. People hire them because they want it to look like their stuff. They don’t want them to go in and make it look the same. They’re hiring them thinking, “The reason we’re hiring this guy is because we want this work to be taken to another level.” I used to be jealous, when I came into comics, I’d see beginners like me all of a sudden having Klaus Janson or Joe Rubinstein thrown on them, and think, “Wait, it’s not fair! I’m inking my own work here, and these guys are working with people who have been in the business a lot longer than them, and their stuff is all of a sudden a whole other level than mine, just because of who’s inking them.” [laughs] It just didn’t seem right. But today, gosh. I don’t know. He’s been at this a long time, but Scott Williams is a really good inker, and he can work in different styles. He’s mostly known for inking Jim Lee, but I know he can work from a loose style to a tight style, it’s just he’s always working on stuff that’s tighter.

big influence on me inking my own work and other people. It might be hard to tell now, but it’s because he had an evident technique when he would ink something. He’d ink a leg, he had a way he did it. He inked different parts of anatomy, it was a certain way he did it. It was easy to see. So he was like a teacher, in that way, looking at his work. I’ve talked to him many times at conventions, and I’ve learned a lot— DRAW!: He was a guy, early on, that, when you would meet him, he would always say he had this kind of pen and that kind of pen, and he was really into the whole science of pen nibs and what gave what type of line, etc.

BR: Yeah, he loves to teach. I found, talking to him, he loved to tell me about other artists I didn’t know about. Which, I like doing that with younger artists. I like telling them about somebody they’ve never heard of, and having them get excited about it when they see the work, helping them find new things. And Joe was like that. We were doing a show in Texas, and we were staying, or maybe he was just visiting, at the house of the guy who was hosting the convention. This man had a collection of EC collected editions, and Joe had a couple of those books open, and he was pointing to the different work and telling me somewhat about how it was done. And it’s funny, he’s actually slightly younger than me, but he came in the business way, way ahead of me, because he was 18 or something when he first started, maybe even younger. But he was able to really take the stuff apart and tell me how things were done technically, and I really didn’t have anybody around who had that kind of knowledge, so I learned quite a bit from him.

I’ll tell you an inker I find amazing today, technique-wise, especially on certain artists, is Danny Miki. I mean, he’s not the kind of person I would ever want to ink me, but when he inks certain people, especially David Finch, who is a very detailed artist...

DRAW!: Yeah, I can’t even remember him inking anything looser at this point.

BR: He did some Punisher stuff for a while where he was doing more finishes, and it was definitely looser than we know him for doing. But the guy obviously can really draw, and it’s evident in his work. He’s not just following stuff. I’m sorry, man, I am having a hard time thinking of newer inkers that I look towards for inspiration. It’s mostly old guys that I’m always looking at. I’ve done a lot of work inking Doug Braithwaite, and when I was going to ink him I looked at a lot of tighter Tom Palmer work from years ago. Tom’s worked in different styles, from really tight, to looser, and the stuff that he was doing that was very tight still had that organic feel to it. Even though it was very detailed work, he was still able to keep it feeling free and loose. And that’s true for Joe Rubinstein, too. Joe Rubinstein had a

Bill’s inks over Doug Braithwaite’s pencils from Hulk #67.

THE HULK ™ AND ©2008 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

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A Thing commission piece from rough layout all the way through to a finishing ink wash (next page).

THE THING ™ AND ©2008 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

DRAW!: So you really think of the inker matching his craft to the penciler. I’m basically the same way. You had certain inkers who were pretty flexible, who could ink a lot of different people, and then you had certain inkers who were really good with certain people... Like, Klaus is really a great inker on somebody who has sort of a bold style that allows him to do textures and various line weights, where maybe he wouldn’t be as good a fit with somebody who was doing a very tight style, where there wasn’t much flex in line weights or something like that.

As part of your education, would you buy pages, if you could, to study what people were doing? Buy originals, if you could? You live in Chicago, so I suppose you would go to the Chicago Con every year.

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BR: I did buy some stuff in the early ’80s, when I started out. I did buy a Janson Daredevil page. I bought some Gil Kane stuff.

I didn’t buy a lot of art, but I would look at it at conventions, for sure, go up to the art dealers and just stand there and look at art for a long time, and take in what I could. Yeah, I definitely learned from that. But I think—and I know you emphasize this, too—the thing that really teaches somebody how to use ink, of course, is just learning how to draw. Because, if you know how to draw, technique doesn’t really matter that much. At least, not to me. It really matters where you put the lines. My example is that I could ink with a stick, because, in the end, it really doesn’t matter what it looks like. It matters where you put that line, and what it’s designating. My daughter is an artist, too, and I was looking at this one painter’s work, and talking about it with

her, and this painter used this very bold style, using a palette knife and other things. But the guy was such an amazing draftsman, and understood color so well, he could just put, like, a block shape down on the figure and it made total sense and described the figure in a realistic way. And only because the guy knew how to draw so well. Where, if somebody doesn’t know how to draw, no matter how good their technique is, it’s not going to work. It’s just going to look like bad drawing. And if an inker really depends on the penciler for good drawing, then you’re kind of sunk from the beginning.

TOOLS DRAW!: Let’s change it up a little and talk a bit about technically what you’re using today, and what inks you use, what pens or brushes you tend to like to use.

BR: Well, for the inking, nowadays I tend to use two pens. I use the Hunt 513 EF pen, which is a pen that Joe Kubert used a lot, and still uses. I learned about this pen from Adam.

DRAW!: So you learned about the Glowpoint from Adam Kubert?

BR: Yeah, I looked at his dad’s stuff. Inking other people, I found myself on a search at one point for finding the pens that people were using to do more of a deadweight line on things,

guys who it was obvious in their work. And this would go back to early comic book artists and to a lot of the European artists.

They were doing work where it was obvious they were first laying out everything ink-wise with a deadweight pen, a deadweight line, and then they would go in with their brush. An example of an old guy whose stuff I like a lot is Don Heck. He did that. I mean, you would see this one-weight line on everything, and then his brush would come in. And Alex Toth. Some people did this by using markers later on, like Alex Toth and Gil Kane. But I wanted to use real ink. So when I met Adam I asked him what his dad uses, and that was the pen that he used. When I got that thing, it was an eye-opener for me, because then all of a sudden I was able to draw more in ink than ever before.

DRAW!: That style actually goes all the way back to Foster and Sickles, who were sort of the guys who started this whole “realistic” way of drawing, the comic book language, because Foster had that very dead line on the Tarzan stuff. Later, he would still follow the same thing on Prince Valiant. The ink line was a very sort of dead line, and then he would pop the line with the brush.

When I worked in Al Williamson studio, although he was following in that classic vein, using the Hunt 108, he would ink first with a pen, and then go back and pop the line weights with the brush later. I think Ordway does the same thing. It’s very similar.

BR: The other pen that I use, the Hunt 108, is a flexible nib, to get lines that are almost brush-like. Nowadays the brush I use is a Rafael #4.

DRAW!: That’s the one I have been using, too. They’re still pretty good. I’ve found that the Winsor & Newtons have kind of started to slide. You can find a good one, but, man, I have to go through six or seven in the store to find one that’s not beat up.

BR: Rafael #8404. I actually gave up the Winsor & Newtons years ago—by somewhere in the later ’80s. I discovered a brush

by Strathmore that they no longer make, and I’m not going to bother looking for the name of it, because you can’t find it.

DRAW!: Well, that’s something that we often joke about. But I always say, if you find something that you like, buy tons of it.

Like brushes, just buy 50 of them, because...

BR: But you think they’re going to make them forever. You don’t know.

DRAW!: Sadly they don’t, there was a great brush in the ’80s, and I still have a couple of those left. Bret Blevins has a lot, he bought even more than I did, so he still has a nice stack of them.

But they stopped making them. They had the best Kolinsky sable.

BR: The difference, I’ve found, was that Winsor & Newtons, the kinds of hairs that were in there were kind of a combination of the soft and kind of a stiffer hair, and they had more bounce and more snap. Now they’re like mops.

DRAW!: Yeah! They bend in that way, and they just stay bent.

BR: Yeah. The Rafael is still kind of mop-like, but it’s better.

And this is what drives people to using the synthetic brushes and stuff, because they have more snap than the hair brushes, but...

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DRAW!: But they wear off.

BR: ...they actually wear, yeah.

DRAW!: They wear off as you’re painting or drawing.

BR: I have to be really concerned with the brush that I’m using when I am inking other people, because I might be trying to be more delineated, a little slicker, a little tighter on their work. I use the brush more for masses of black and textures and things like that, so I don’t have to worry about it. If I want a delineated line, I’ll use my pen.

DRAW!: Now, do you use any markers like the Pigmas, for templates and things?

BR: The one I use the most is the Mars Staedtler. But, to tell you the truth, I use it a little bit because my wife, Linda Lessmann-Reinhold, will assist me on inking jobs quite often by doing things where I know we’re going to use a ruler for straight lines. She’ll use a #3 or a #5, and just do a breakdown of the shapes. I don’t have her do anything where she’s trying to delineate or doing line weights or anything like that. It’s just to break it down, get the basic shape down, so I can come in there with a brush and add some organic lines to finish it off. It’s just saving me a step, some time. Really, I like inking even the straight line stuff freehand, given the time, but sometimes there isn’t time to do that. So I can say I’m using that pen, but it’s more like she’s using that pen.

DRAW!: [laughs] Okay.

BR: If I’m even using a ruler, I tend to use the ballpoint we were talking about with a ruler. It works great with a raised ruler. That pen works really nice. And then I could do a flexible line if I want. It doesn’t have to look like a deadweight line, which I really don’t like at all on most of the work I do.

DRAW!: What about inks? Because it’s hard to find a good ink now.

BR: I use a pretty good ink, Koh-I-Noor Universal, and that I use for the brush. For pen I use Higgins Regular, which is a pretty thin ink, but when you’re using it with a dip pen, you want it to be a thin ink, because every time you put a line down with a pen, you’re kind of puddling ink.

DRAW!: Right, so it’s a little denser, anyway. Yeah.

BR: Right. When you puddle the ink, it becomes very dark. It never erases down. It doesn’t soak into the paper. It sits more on top. So then I want a thinner ink, because it flows better off the pen. If you use Koh-l-Noor Universal with a pen, it’s too heavy and doesn’t come off the pen very well.

DRAW!: And you don’t get that flow, you’re fighting the pen trying to get the ink to come off.

BR: Yes, yes.

DRAW!: Now, what about white-out?

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Punisher commission piece with some nice dry brush.

THE PUNISHER ™ AND ©2008 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

BR: A white-out pen. I don’t use white-out much at all. I have a fetish about not using white-out, which is the only way I can describe it. [laughs] Of course, I’m not counting some horrific mistake when you’re still inking the page or something, but for making corrections, I use single-edge razor blades or Exacto knives.

DRAW!: Did you pick that up from looking at Wood and Romita originals, Frank Robbins, people like that?

BR: Oh, yeah. Definitely. And then also I discovered electric erasers, which I might have found out about from Joe Rubinstein. I can’t remember. But I know I’ve seen him use them a lot, and also Al Williamson used one, too.

DRAW!: Yes, Al did. And Al used the razor a lot. Instead of white-out, he put stars in by flicking up the board, basically chipping out little pieces. Terry Austin actually sits there with a toothpick or something, and puts in all the stars very precisely.

BR: You know, I did that at one point, where I would use a brush with, like, ProWhite or something for touching things up.

Now I just have a flat-edge razor blade and I look for everything sticking out of panels or off a figure and just scrape it off. When I did use white-out, I would find myself turning it into a whole

new level, sometimes, adding to the work with white-out. But, if I’m doing something like a star field today, those white-out pens are fantastic. Actually I like to do a star field freehand, where you just leave white showing through the black. You’re actually drawing the stars. Sometimes I’ve used things like sponges or a paper towel to leave areas of texture of stars, things like that, and then take the white-out pen to do the final, you might say the more compositional stars—the ones that are going to go in a particular direction. So the white-out pen’s great, because that stuff doesn’t come off easy. Sometimes the old white-out would fall off or crack or whatever, but the stuff now is like paint, so it doesn’t come off. And you can ink over it, too.

DRAW!: Yeah, that’s true.

CLASSIC ARTISTS AND INKING THE GREATS BR: Well, talking about technique, I went through experimental times with my work where I did a lot of texture. I think I learned a lot about it when I went overboard, even. I think anything I’ve ever learned about and discovered, I would go to the extreme at some point and then pull myself back. [Mike laughs] And I was really into a lot of the Spanish artists for a while, that did work on Creepy and Eerie, like Jose Ortiz.

pacing and massing and storytelling and a different sense of textures. JR’s stuff is a little bit broader and open to a little bit more interpretation, where if I’m inking Bret, or like when I inked Michael Golden on Birds of Prey, that stuff is just so beautifully drawn, you just don’t want to ruin it. [laughs] BR: Well, I had an experience where—like I said, I try to respect an artist’s work. I inked a Challengers of the Unknown job on George Freeman. And I love George Freeman’s work.

DRAW!: Yeah, his work is great.

BR: So when I inked him, I was totally intimidated by the work. Because in my head is great George Freeman inking, inking himself. Who could ink him better? So I’m looking at his work like crazy when I’m inking this stuff. I’m sure I brought myself to it, too, but it was definitely me really thinking about how he handles his work. Later on I found out that he was disappointed that I didn’t do more me on it.

DRAW!: It’s funny you say that, because that’s what Golden told me, himself, when I met him. I mean, he liked the job I did, but he was hoping I would do more “me.” And I’m looking at his stuff and going, “How can I put me on top of that?” Because

DRAW!: Oh, yeah. His work was so magnificently textural.

And gestural, too.

BR: And Victor de la Fuente, who was more of a Williamson type guy, as far as realism. But Ortiz, a great artist, would use tons of texture, and he would use anything laying around to add textures. So I really got into that for a while, and used a lot of the paper towel and toothbrush. I think I was influenced by Sienkiewicz for a while, because I was working with Ron Wagner, who loved Sienkiewicz on his work. In fact, as an example, when I was going to ink Ron Wagner, he had just had a job of his inked by Bill Sienkiewicz. It was a Blaze job, and it was an amazing job. They were a perfect combination.

Although Ron tells me that Sienkiewicz said he didn’t want to work with him again because he thought that Ron’s stuff was too tight. I don’t know if that’s true or not. Anyway, it was a great combination, and I looked at this work, and this was an example of where... I was saying how I like to look at an artist’s work when they ink themselves? Well, this was an artist telling me, “I love this job where this guy inked me.” When he said that, that was my permission to go for that style. So I started looking at a lot of Sienkiewicz stuff, and brought some of that to my own work. He’s very textural and loose and spontaneous, much further than I usually go with my work. And that got me experimenting with all kinds of tools.

DRAW!: Now, I would also say that—and I’m speaking from my own experience, too—when you ink different artists, it’s like wearing a different pair of shoes, or a different set of clothes.

You learn something from that person. Now, if I’m inking Bret Blevins and then let’s say John Romita, Jr.—very different artists, both great storytellers, but there’s a sense of flesh in Bret’s work that JR’s stuff does not have, but there’s a sense of

Ron Garney pencils and Bill’s inks from Amazing Spider-Man #539.

SPIDER-MAN ™ AND ©2008 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

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DRAW!: I know exactly what you’re talking about, and it’s funny, because it was for the same editor, Carl Potts. There’s that issue of Daredevil that Ditko did, and they actually sent it to Al, and it was literally like, just one outline. They were very much like little puppets. There wasn’t really any detail or anything. You really had to bring it to the table on that, and Al didn’t want to do that much drawing on it, and he said, “Well, maybe I should send it back.”

BR: Al didn’t like doing things like that.

DRAW!: Right. So I said, “No, no, no, let’s keep it.” And I went and actually pulled out my Ditko stuff, and I went through and basically penciled it as much as I could sort of like Ditko, or Ditko inked by Wally Wood.

BR: That’s what I did. That’s exactly what I did.

DRAW!: I inked about 80% of the job, and Al inked about 20% of the job. And that job actually impressed Carl so much that he started giving me regular work after that. So Al was a prince for doing that...

BR: Carl’s a gigantic Ditko fan.

DRAW!: Right. So that worked out for me, with Al doing that.

And it was very educational, because, even at that minimal level, everything was there, and you could basically dress it up and make it nicer, but all the important stuff was there in Ditko’s work, even at that very simple level. It was pretty amazing.

Bill’s inks over the legendary Gil Kane’s pencils.

CONAN ™ AND ©2008 CONAN PROPERTIES INTERNATIONAL LLC

it’s going to erase him. A few times I’ve had the experience of inking other pencilers who I know were less than happy with what I did because I put too much me on them.

BR: Yeah, yeah. That’s why it actually takes time working with an artist to really work that out. Doing a single job is very frustrating to me, or doing five pages.

DRAW!: So inking Garney on Spider-Man, now, you guys had a nice, long run, there. I think you guys really clicked. And you started inking him on...

BR: On Green Arrow. It was a couple years of inking. Oh, yeah. The first job I ever inked him on, I look back on them now, and they feel stiffer to me. They don’t feel like I’m being myself, yet. But, as time went on, we both worked out how we were going to work with each other, and it got very, very comfortable, where I didn’t really have to think about it anymore.

But, when you first work with an artist, I’m overthinking it, how I’m going to do it. It takes a while of letting some of that go and being myself, at the same time respecting their work. I’d like to bring one thing up, though. In talking about Ditko before, when I inked him, this was doing finishes, which I’ve done a few times in my career. You know, where the penciler does pretty much just a linear figure, with no blacks or lighting, anything like that, it’s just an outline figure.

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BR: And that’s how Ditko penciled for other people to ink for his whole career. I’ll get to that in a second, but, when I inked him, I really was doing everything I could to do it like he did it. I mean, I had his work spread out in front of me, Wally Wood’s work spread out in front of me, Joe Kubert. These are all people that I feel have something in common, or have influenced each other.

So I’m looking at all this work, and I’m just trying to bring all that together. So, I guess, in some ways, I’m not trying to necessarily ink it just like Ditko, although I was at times. I was trying to bring what I felt were the sensibilities that he liked in work.

But I would go so far as to have, like, if I’m inking a bunch of people in clothes, I’m looking at the way he inks pants legs, and I’m doing that on the page. I’m not trying to do it my own way. I didn’t want to do that. I felt like I would ruin it. I really felt like I had to be as close to him as possible, as if he did full pencils.

DRAW!: Yeah, I guess I felt sort of the same way. I was lucky enough to ink Gil Kane a couple of times when I was inking Power of Shazam! Then, I was trying to think of who were my favorite guys who had inked him. And inking Kane and then inking Ditko were two of the times where I really, honestly felt I was really a comic book artist, because I was inking those guys I had grown up admiring. Not that inking other people isn’t great or wonderful, but when you get to ink a classic artist like that, well, that’s what it’s all about.

BR: I wish I could have done more of that. There were guys around, like Don Heck I mentioned before—he was still penciling for quite a while while I was inking.

DRAW!: I actually tried to get him to ink some Darkhawk stuff of mine, and they would not let him ink my stuff because there was still that—and you’ve probably heard it before—if you put his name or Ditko’s name on a book, there for a while it supposedly lowered sales on books. People would go, “Oh, Don Heck? Oh, I don’t like his stuff.” So they would not actually let me have him ink. And I’m like, “The guy’s awesome!” He was an awesome inker.

BR: He got a bad rap for a lot of reasons. Partially because he’d pencil, other people would ink him, and most people couldn’t ink him anywhere near as well as he could ink himself. And, also, I could see a lot of personal things in his life that were causing him to not put quite as much work into what he used to do, and so a lot of stuff might have looked rough or whatever. But I saw some work he did later in his career, where he did some penciling. It was actually for a commercial job; it was comics, but it was a commercial job. And the pencils were just fantastic. Really nice work.

DRAW!: And, again, that aesthetic had changed. When we were growing up there were a lot of people like that who had sort of a journeyman approach—they weren’t the stylists or innovators like, say, a Kirby or Neal Adams were, but there were a lot of artists working who were solid; they were good storytellers.

They were maybe good at doing horror comics or war comics or romance comics, but all those comics basically disappeared. So you had a lot of artists like that who superheroes were not necessarily their forte, and they were sort of unfortunate in that. But I actually bought a six or seven-page story by Heck... As soon as I started making money, I started buying originals, and I bought this little House of Mystery story by him, which was really awesome. I learned so much about pen and ink techniques looking at his work. You could see he was very influenced not only by guys like Raymond, but a lot of Caniff was in his work.

BR: Oh, yeah. I have a page on my wall from Tales of Suspense “Iron Man,” and you could see a lot of Caniff in it when he inked himself. The same way Robbins had that.

DRAW!: And it’s funny, because now a lot of young guys I meet at shows and over the Internet are really digging guys like Frank Robbins. I always liked him; as a kid I even liked his stuff on Cap, and a lot of people really did not like that. To them, it was too weird. They couldn’t hack it.

BR: The weirdness especially came out when other people inked him. When you look at Frank Robbins, the stuff that really drove me nuts with excitement is when I started seeing Frank Robbins ink himself. And some of the first stuff I got a really good look at was the work he did in the ’70s; I guess it was, on The Shadow.

DRAW!: Yeah, that stuff is dynamite.

BR: And on Batman. But then I discovered his Johnny Hazard stuff, not so much by seeing it in print, because I think there were reprints around of the stuff. It was all little; it was hard to really look at. But then I came across an Italian reprint book done in a large size of some of his Sundays from Johnny Hazard, and you could see everything. And it’s just amazing.

Superb Batman pin-up, penciled and inked by Bill.

BATMAN, COMMISSIONER GORDON ™ AND ©2008 DC COMICS

FUTURE WORK DRAW!: I read recently that you’re going to go back and start doing some more penciling. Are you going to do some Badger stuff?

BR: I’m doing a short story, a “Munden’s Bar” story. “Munden’s Bar” was a backup that was in the Grimjack book for First Comics that Tim Truman drew, and Munden’s Bar was this interdimensional bar. First would use it as sort of a universal point for a lot of their characters. But, www.comicmix.com is doing online comics. If it hasn’t started already, it’s starting soon.

DRAW!: They announced at the Baltimore show, I think, that they were...

BR: Yes. They’ve announced it, but I think some stuff was starting this month, October. Mike Gold, who is a big part of that, asked me to do a “Munden’s Bar” story that Mike Badger is writing, that would guest-star the Badger, even though the Badger is really being published by IDW soon as a series. But Mike owns the rights to the character, and he got permission from IDW to have the Badger guest-star in this story. I’m rushed to get my penciling right now, so it’s taking longer than usual for me to do. I feel like I have DRAW! • SPRING 2008

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to kind of take it slow to get it down, because I trust the drawing much more, at this point, than the storytelling. It’s not a habit for me right now. I actually was kind of surprised when I sat down to lay out the page and I said, “Whoa. This isn’t just coming right out of me.” I was never fast at it. Layout, thumbnailing and laying out a story I always took my time on. I would spend about a week laying out a book, sometimes, before I would start doing the actual penciling and inking, where I know guys who can do that in a day.

I’ve never been able to do that. I can’t thumbnail a book in a day.

But it’s slower than ever right now. I like what I’m doing, it’s just coming out slow. But I’m really enjoying it, and it won’t be too long before I’m done with that. Otherwise, the only other penciling is occasionally when I’ve gotten to do a pin-up for something, and sometimes it’s just because I hear somebody’s putting out a collection of something, and I say, “Hey, can I do a pin-up for that?”

DRAW!: Would you like to return to regular penciling?

BR: Well, I would like to see this as an entry into my doing it again.

I realize now I would really have to push myself to make it happen.

I don’t see myself getting invited to do it that easily, and I’m going to have to really kind of pose myself to editors and publishers, some who really have no idea I actually have drawn comics. I mean, I meet editors today who, partially because of their age, or maybe because they got into the business late—they don’t know my work from ten years ago, so they don’t realize that I’ve penciled before. They just know me as an inker. Sometimes when I point out my portfolio, they’re surprised that I drew my own stuff. And I’ve found myself really wanting to do material that’s less superhero and I guess more realistic, as least as far as men in tights. I’d rather do things that are fantasy, science fiction, urban, things like that.

DRAW!: I know one of my favorite things you’ve done is the Epic series you did.

BR: Spike?

DRAW!: Spike, yeah. That was you working very loose. That had a very European look and feel to it.

Ink wash illustration. ©2008 BILL REINHOLD

BR: That was during a very experimental time for me. I was looking at a lot of European work at that time. And I also did some Punisher work the same way, where I really was looking at a lot of the European stuff. I look at it now and some of that stuff’s just crazy looking to me. But it was really a great adventure in learning. Like I said, I had to swing all the way to one direction and really learn a lot of things from it, but now I’ve sort of gone back to the middle, and my stuff is probably more traditional than it used to be. But I like that better, myself, as I think it’s clearer now and easier to read. Which it was early on

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in my career, too, but for a while I got very experimental, and there was a lot of energy to it, but it probably hurt the stuff a little bit.

But, yeah, I’d like to see myself get back into penciling, for sure, because that’s really what I love doing most. I really miss the storytelling side of it, the layout and design. I really miss that. So I hope I can get myself back into doing it at least once in a while. If I can’t make it a regular thing, at least... I mean, I’m sure the greatest thing in the world would be if a graphic novel fell in my hands right now I could do, but otherwise, if I could do a short story here and there, that’d be nice.

ART OUTSIDE THE PANELS DRAW!: You also sometimes do watercolors and things like that outside of the studio. Have you had a chance to do much of that?

BR: No, I haven’t. When I went to the American Academy of Art, I had a great watercolor teacher named Irving Shapiro, and I learned a lot about painting there. I would occasionally do paintings after that, but now the only time I really ever paint is, oh, doing a birthday card for my wife [laughs] or something like that. The closest I’ve gotten to it nowadays is whenever I do convention sketches now, I’m in the habit of doing a lot of washes on the work in gray, where I almost feel like it’s not finished until I do gray washes on top of it, besides the ink. I still really enjoy that side, and I’d like to see myself get back into it, but I’m somebody that, when I’m working all the time, my spare time I don’t think of doing more artwork. I think of spending time with the family or, y’know, going for a walk.

DRAW!: [laughs] Not sitting down at the easel or the art table.

BR: No, it takes up so much of my time as it is, it’s like I need a break now and then. So, sure, a great thing would be a graphic novel that I did in line and finished in watercolor. Make it my job. That’d be fantastic. The only other way I see myself painting a lot would be if I actually got to do something like retire, which is kind of unheard of in the comics business. [laughs] DRAW!: Yeah, that’s true.

BR: But, if I did I would love nothing more than to do a lot of painting, do landscape paintings. That’s my favorite thing to do.

I take photos all the time when we go up to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, of the trees and forests, and I just love that material. I’d love to do paintings of that. I could have all the fun in the world drawing an old, dead tree with moss and mushrooms growing on it. [laughs] I mean, that’s fun, to me.

THE BACK TO SCHOOL GUIDE CONTINUED FROM PAGE 41

THE SAVANNAH COLLEGE OF ART AND DESIGN The college offers BFA, MA and MFA degrees in Sequential Art as well as a BA in Visual Communication with a concentration in Sequential Art, both at SCAD-Savannah and SCADAtlanta, through the School of Communication Arts. The BA also is offered online via SCAD-eLearning. SCAD is one of few colleges that offers both undergraduate and graduate degrees in the sequential art field.

I’ve known about SCAD, and the animation and comic programs they’ve had running there, for several years. In fact, the programs really seems to have grown since I first heard about them. The school even publishes anthologies of current student work in very hefty and handsomely designed volumes, excerpts of which we are running in this article. I caught up with the head of the program, John Lowe, just as the semester was about to begin.

DRAW!: Give me the 20/20 on what SCAD’s Comics and Cartooning department is about.

SCAD’s 2007 student anthology.

ARTWORK ©2008 RESPECTIVE OWNER

The Savannah College of Art and Design Admission Department P.O. Box 2072 Savannah, GA 31402-2072 SCAD is a four-year university with the largest comics program in the country. They offer BFA, MA, and MFA degrees. Find out more on their website: http://www.scad.edu Or contact them directly: Telephone: (912) 525-5100 or (800) 869-7223 For tuition and fee information go to: http://www.scad.edu/admission/tuition/20072008.cfm

JOHN LOWE: Well, I’m going to give you what I think would be a good overview of our department and how I think we are distinct from the other departments, related to each school, specifically. Our college is a teaching institution, so all of the professors who teach there are not teaching on a parttime basis; we are hired full time. That is significant in that that means the school pays us well, we have health benefits, all that stuff. We also know they expect us to teach and see results of what we teach. And what that means is, as the department chair, I have dedicated faculty to our curriculum discussions. We discuss changes that need to be made in the curriculum, and we’re always thinking about ways in which we can present the classes better. We started doing our own internal assessments about three years ago to see where students were excelling, where they were falling behind, and how we could address those issues. We noticed, for example, that students really didn’t have as strong a handle on perspective as they should have by their junior or senior year, and what we did is we addressed that in introducing new classes. We spoke with the foundations department, and they introduced a class called Drawing for Storyboarding, which introduced one-, two-, and three-point perspective, and placing figures in an imaginary environment.

So we really focus on curriculum development and goals and outcomes that we expect our students to really get, and we’re able to do that because our faculty is very dedicated, and, really, it’s a full-time job for us for 30 weeks out of the year. I mean, that’s what I tell people who we invite who want to teach, because for some people it’s a little off-putting in that, you know, if you’re in New York and you’re a cartoonist and you want to teach at SVA, you can probably go pick up a class and you’ll be able to teach that class. And SVA has that resource, having great cartoonists, because they’re in New York City and they can take advantage of that. But we’ve had students—and this is just anecdotal from what I’ve heard from students who have transferred to our school—that, “Yes, there were a great number of cartoonists there, but I didn’t feel like I had a very structured program. People brought things to the table, but it wasn’t in an incremental and systematic way that we were introduced to ideas.” So what we try to do is teach visual storytelling and communication, and we leave it at that. There’s no DRAW! • SPRING 2008

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house style. Joe’s school is pretty much geared toward mainstream work, or at least, when you go to his website, that’s kind of what you think about—Marvel, DC, Vertigo, something like that. James’ school at CSS, which I think is a great institution, is geared more toward Fantagraphics, the alternatives, or the individual comics creator, which is also great, but that’s the type of students they’re recruiting and developing, and doing so with great success. I think our students really run the gamut, and that’s what I love about the school. We have as many manga students as we have mainstream students as we have students who want to create their own comics, and they’re all working together in these classrooms. So I think for us, for me anyway, as a department chair, that’s one of the big benefits is that—and when I send you the anthology to reinforce that, you’ll see the variety of different styles—what we focus on is clarity of storytelling. The program doesn’t address stylistic concerns.

DRAW!: Your faculty, are they professionals that are teaching full time?

JL: Yes and no. I was hired there because I had worked as an inker, and they had a deficit in that they didn’t have inkers working there, so that was my first position there, because that was a specialty that I was able to teach, and also I was very interested in storytelling from a theoretical point of view. We have Tom Lyle—you know his work, Spider-Man—is mainstream. But then we have other people like Julie Collins Rousseau and Mark Kneece. Mark’s worked in the mainstream, writing for DC, Batman stories, but he and Julie do stuff for NBM, and they did a graphic novel a couple of years ago that got nominated for an ALA Award. Julie’s also an illustrator. We have a young professor named David Duncan who’s very good, and is talking with Slave Labor Graphics and doing these kind of alternative comics that are for children. So it’s great. The diversity within the faculty is as diverse as the students that we’re teaching, and I think that brings a lot to the table, as well.

dents who are majoring in Animation that really love comics have also tended to minor in our program.

DRAW!: So you would get a major in Animation and then a minor in Storytelling?

JL: Sure. You can get a major in Illustration and a minor in Sequential Art, if you want to.

DRAW!: Oh, Sequential Art, okay.

JL: Yeah, Sequential Art. They use either term, but it’s comics. I mean, it’s pretty much comics or visual storytelling.

DRAW!: So how does that break down over four years? What is your first year? Sort of a general...?

JL: I’ll give you a general overview of what you might do as a student. There are two things to keep in mind here, one of which is you can transfer in. A lot of students that we have, money is an issue, because it’s a private institution. If you wanted to transfer in, you could go to a community college wherever you are, and get rid of your...

DRAW!: Your prerequisites?

JL: Yeah, all of that, and basically knock out almost two years, so that you can finish in two years. But if you were to go four years, the general program would be your first year is all of your

DRAW!: You are a four-year school?

JL: We are a four-year school. We’re actually a university, because we have an MA program, as well, and an MFA program.

DRAW!: If you were to choose SCAD and were interested in comics storytelling and illustration, is it a specific, separate program, Comics and Cartooning, or is it rolled under or included in the Illustration program or Animation program?

JL: No, not at all. In fact, ours is the largest comics program in the nation. Our official title is the Sequential Art Program, and, just to give you some approximate numbers, we have 300 undergraduates studying just Sequential Art. We have approximately 45 students in the graduate program studying Sequential Art, most of them being MFA students. We have very few MA students, the one-year degree. The college, which has 8000 students in Savannah, Georgia, has 24 different majors, and there’s a lot of interaction. So, for example, the students that come to us, generally the majority of them are interested in producing comic books. There also is an interest in storyboarding, students who are interested in conceptual design. A lot of the stu-

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SCAD regularly brings in professional artists to participate in forums.

ARTWORK ©2008 RESPECTIVE OWNERS

JL: It’s still in your sophomore year, right. A couple of early classes that may happen right at the end of your sophomore year or the beginning of your junior year, would be, we used to call it Computer Coloring for Comics. We’ve now changed it to Digital Applications for Comics, which would be Photoshop, and the introduction of color, and also Painter, so that, for people that want to use color as more of a storytelling element, they’ll have the ability to do so earlier on.

DRAW!: I’m working on a job today that I’m printing stuff out and sending it digitally. Nobody hardly even wants to FedEx anything anymore, so you have to know how to use Photoshop and to use Fetch...

JL: And FTP files, and all of that. And that’s one of the things about our school, like I was saying in terms of being very strict about our curriculum, we notice that, and notice those changes, and we’ve been able to implement them fairly quickly.

DRAW!: You’re constantly reevaluating your curriculum to make sure you’re up to date with these trends within the business.

Another forum booklet cover.

ARTWORK ©2008 KYLE BAKER

foundations and studies courses, which would be Figure Drawing, Color Theory, foundation courses for the Drawing for Storyboarding class that I was telling you about, liberal arts electives, and drawing classes—Drawing I, Drawing II, that kind of thing. You declare your major at the end of your freshman year. In Sequential Art, what that would mean is your next courses that you would be taking in sequence for us would be Drawing for Sequential Art, Introduction to Sequential Art—and the difference between those two is the Introduction is all about storytelling techniques and methods, and exploration of panel to panel progressions, comic strips. It’s an overview of everything.

Drawing for Sequential Art is specifically working with drawing the figure in environments, drawing from imagination as well as drawing from life. It’s really a lot of heavy duty drawing. And the next classes you would take in the sequence would be Materials and Techniques of Sequential Art, and that would be approaches to drawing, inking techniques, ink wash, introduction to watercolor, introduction to some computer applications...

JL: Absolutely. Well, the mission statement of our college is to prepare the students for careers, so, in keeping with that mission statement, absolutely the thing that’s going to be at the forefront of our minds is if we see trends starting to happen, and things starting to change... We just got Wacom tablets for all our students, so there are 20 Wacoms that they’re now beginning to work on for storyboarding classes and some of the drawing classes, computer coloring. So, yeah, we try to keep up with everything that’s happening in the industry. Just to go through the sequence a bit more, then they would take Character Design and Storyboarding for Animation— DRAW!: And is that still in your second year, now, or your third?

JL: It could be late sophomore year, early junior year. Writing for Sequential Art would kind of be in there next. Backgrounds, Props, and Structures, where you concentrate on really getting environment. And this is a new introduction within the last year or two, that we really just wanted to take a quarter and focus on drawing environments and props and things like that—cars and vehicles. It’s really drawing and thinking heavy at the beginning, as it should be, probably. And then we move into what is currently called Penciling and Inking I, which will now be called Visual Storytelling I, in which we start introducing scripts, students working from scripts— DRAW!: Pre-existing scripts, or scripts that they come up with, themselves?

DRAW!: So that’s when you would learn things like Photoshop?

JL: Both. We give them existing scripts. In the course of the ten weeks, we’ll give them a script that’s kind of a Marvel style script.

JL: Yeah, well, you touch on Photoshop. It’s still mostly handson at this point. We do do end design in Photoshop with lettering, as well as showing hand-lettering, because it’s a very early course.

DRAW!: So you work from a plot, and then you work from a full script?

DRAW!: So this is your first...?

JL: Right, and then you get to work from a full script. And then you work from, say, a script that you bring in from your writing class, you’re working from your own script, and then we give DRAW! • SPRING 2008

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them just some challenging things. When I taught this class, I would change it every quarter, but one of my assignments would be something like I would do maybe a true story, or one time they had to explain a process. I would say, “You need to explain a process using the medium of comics.” And so it was interesting. I got some great things from that. One guy did the digestive system of a snake and showed how it actually worked, using the comic format. Another guy did the reproduction system. So we really try to challenge them to think about visual communication in ways other than, well, predominantly linear storytelling, as most of us know it. And also using comics as an art form in the ways that you can use comics that are unique to that art form. That’s what they get into with Visual Storytelling I. Then they’ll take Visual Storytelling II. In with all of this, they also have four electives that they’re able to take, and we have a range of classes. This could be anything from manga class to alternative class to superhero class, so really they could tailor... The core program is about being able to produce an effective and concretely told narrative. The elective program allows them to kind of branch off and really study the thing that they want to study. So if we have a student who really wants to work for Marvel or DC, they’ll have the resources to do so, as will a manga student, as will someone who wants—

DRAW!: So if someone wants to be the next Tokyopop star... [laughs] JL: Oh, that, yeah, well, we’ve had three or four girls within the last three or four years who are now working for Tokyopop.

Someone who just graduated a year and a half ago is Heidi Arnold, and she’s doing Jim Henson’s Labyrinth for Tokyopop— they hired her right after she got out of school here. So, yeah, Tokyopop comes every year. One thing I think is worth mentioning is that every year—since we aren’t in New York City and we don’t have the proximity to a lot of cartoonists—we do make a concerted effort to bring in visiting artists. Every year we have a comic art forum in which we’ve invited about ten working professionals to come down and host workshops and do portfolio reviews with students and answer questions. And we also host an editor’s day at the end of the year in which we invite about eight editors from Marvel, DC, Oni, Dark Horse, Tokyopop, alternative comics, Top Shelf, from all the different kinds of publishers, to do portfolio reviews for the students.

DRAW!: Great! And your senior year is mostly working on your specialty?

JL: Yeah, well, you’ll have a capstone class called Senior Project.

In that class you kind of separate yourself, and you’re working towards portfolio-worthy material, but it’s all your choice, and you’re directed kind of by the class. But, yeah, that happens in your senior year. That’s really when you’re able to start defining what you’re going to be doing for yourself. I mean, you would know this, just from being a sequential artist. The way that we tend to look at it, and the way that I certainly think about it, is that the four-year program, the undergraduate program, most of the students that are in that program are usually about 18 when they start and about 21 to 23 years old when they graduate.

Comics requires so much technical learning just to get the chops down to be decent at it. The undergraduate program is really about, if not acquiring all those skills, mastering all those skills, at least having a very solid foundation so that, when you step out of there, you can continue to develop them on your own. You have a very good understanding of what you need to do.

DRAW!: Right. Well, it’s funny that you mentioned the thing about perspective, because this semester I’m teaching Storyboarding and Storytelling at DCAD, and one of the things I always find is that that is probably the greatest weakness, that and composition are usually the greatest weaknesses, overall, in most students, as a body. And, of course you know, it’s like the ankle bone’s connected to the shin bone. If you don’t really know how to do perspective really well, then that affects your ability to form compositions that work, and then it usually follows down along the line that you have other weaknesses or deficiencies, so a lot of what I teach at DCAD is, my assignments and the critiques are all about going back over that basic core canon of representational art, which is composition, storytelling...

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Anthology of student artwork for John’s 2006 class.

ARTWORK ©2008 RESPECTIVE OWNER

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JL: Well, I was having a discussion with an Illustration professor the other day, and he was saying that what’s interesting is that the systems and the studies of the great painters—the great systems and perspective and lighting—where you really see it now is in the conceptual art field and the comics field, because we’re interested

Sequential artwork for “A Hot Idea,” by Jarrett B. Williams for a SCAD anthology collection.

A HOT IDEA ™ AND ©2008 JARRETT B. WILLIAMS

in that in terms of having the ability to effectively tell stories.

DRAW!: Right. And the other thing I have noticed, especially in the last five, six, seven years, is all the representational art programs springing up all over the United States. You have the Arts Association out in L.A., Watts Atelier of the Arts in San Diego, Anthony Ryder has one out in New Mexico. There’s one down your area, one in North Carolina. There are a couple in New York, one in Canada. What I view as the most positive aspect of all of this is that, at this point, if you’re interested in drawing comics, storytelling, being an illustrator, and really trying to get the old classical training, there are a lot of places and you have a lot of choices now, where 20 years ago when I was initially interested in doing this stuff, I mean, you basically had Joe’s school and that was it. There was no French style teaching anywhere, and, in fact, my experiences were actually almost all negative when it came to taking drawing classes, because representational art was basically still looked down on. It was all the “draw what you feel” school of creative... You know, “I am an artist. You can’t label me or make me have to learn things like perspective. That’s holding down my creativity!” [laughter] JL: Right, right, yeah.

DRAW!: The magazine, of course, is an outgrowth of my feelings about that, but also there have probably never been more people interested in this as a profession as there are now.

Maybe back in the ’30s and ’40s there were, but I don’t know.

If you go to San Diego, there are 100,000 attendees, and 90,000

of them want to draw comics. And the people who do animation want to do comics, the people who do comics want to do animation. There’s a lot of crossover now.

JL: Yeah. I think it’s really quite remarkable in terms of the interest. I think the avenues that people have now, the Internet is cheap, free, if you want to put things up. A lot of communities that are happening there, a lot of good feedback that people get— DRAW!: Well, it’s such a fantastic resource. I say that to my students every single week. If you were interested in being a background artist for a game company or Disney or something, there are artists who have blogs, and you can write those people and go, “Where did you study? What are you using.” I mean, that just did not exist for me; when I was a teenager there was no Internet. Maybe you would read an article here or there, but outside of the Star Wars guys and the coverage you would see in the fanzines, you really did not have the opportunity to talk to, I don’t know, Joe Johnston or Ralph McQuarrie or any of those guys doing the stuff back then, or Bob McCall, or anything.

JL: Yeah, it really is amazing. I mean, I tell them the same thing. My career in comics came from making the move to New York after getting a degree in figure drawing. I knew I wanted to do comics, but I was from Tennessee, and there was just nothing. These things that I teach the kids now, I tell them, “Listen, you have to understand. I was a talented student, I was a pretty good drawer, but I didn’t have the crazy drive to teach myself.” That’s what I tell most people that ask me, “Are DRAW! • SPRING 2008

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schools important?” Sometimes they ask, which is a common question, “Can you do it without schools?” Yes, most people can do anything without schools, they can be autodidactic if they want to, but most of us really don’t have the discipline to do it if we aren’t going to school, to sit down and hammer out the perspective stuff without having an end in sight. And I tell the students, “I was probably 24 before I really felt like I had a true understanding of perspective, because it was never taught to me. You guys are getting this wealth of information now that you really have to take advantage of, because it really is just a tool.” And, once you get it, you never un-get it. It’s so easy.

Once it clicks... You know, for some people perspective is much easier than for others, but, really, for anyone, once it happens, you just see it click. And I agree with you in that I think, once people learn to think that way, and they can think outside of just an interesting figure or something, they do start thinking about all the other elements, like composition, how space and shape relate to one another, and I think all of that comes from training your eye to see all these different ways.

DRAW!: Right. Now, what about the cost of the school? Do you have an idea off-hand?

JL: Roughly, if I’m not mistaken, I think it’s about $24,000 a year—something like that.

DRAW!: Okay. And do you have dorms and boarding?

JL: They do, they have dorms. And, actually, if that’s information that you need for the magazine, I can get you all the hard information from other sources, because I don’t usually deal with it. I know that, yes, we do have dorms, we do have housing, we have all of that. Another thing that I do like about our school a lot is that students have a chance to interact. This is an art and design college, so it’s all related to the arts somehow, whether that be graphic design, or sound design, or filmmaking, or animation.

We’ve got people who do motion design for videogames and film.

DRAW!: So you get to be exposed to a lot of other disciplines.

JL: Oh, absolutely. I have students who have hooked up with film students, they’re storyboarding their projects, and they’re getting valuable experience and working with people and building a little storyboarding portfolio while they’re going to school here. And the thing I like about it is, you know, I lived in Manhattan and New York for ten years, and if I were a student, I would have been so distracted I would never have gotten anything done. We’re in this really cool town, Savannah, but it’s a small town, so students really, they have a chance to go out, there’s a lot of things for them to do, but at the same time it’s not like New York, and it’s not difficult, people just get in their car. Most things are in walking distance, or, if not, it’s maybe, at most, a mile or two away. And they just have all of these resources around them that they can fully utilize here.

DRAW!: Now, what is the average class size?

JL: Well, the classes can never go above 20. I would say an average class size is probably more like about... in your sophomore year, I would say about 16, 17 on average. By the time

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Artwork for “The Key,” by Hunter Clark for a SCAD anthology collection.

THE KEY ™ AND ©2008 HUNTER CLARK

you’re a senior, you’re looking at class sizes probably about 12, something like that.

DRAW!: Okay. Because that’s important. We know this, as teachers, but I don’t know that that’s something you really think about asking as a student, but it actually does greatly effect you.

I have a class that’s very large this year—I think I had 23 students. In certain classes it’s very hard to be able to spend as much individual time. The smaller the class is, hopefully the more time you get to spend with each student.

JL: I think that’s a very good question, and the way our classes are structured—because this may differ. We’re on a quarter system, and a quarter is ten weeks. All of the classes meet twice a week, so you may have a Monday/Wednesday class that goes from 11:00 until 1:30, or 2:00 until 4:30, and students generally take three classes per quarter. And generally you’re taking two studio classes and one academic class.

DRAW!: So now, when you graduate, do you have an MFA, BFA? What do you have?

JL: To the undergraduate, it’s just like any other college. If you started and you go the four years, you’ll get your BFA at the undergraduate level. The people who come back, the MFA program is very interesting because we have people from all different

JL: Yeah, it’s not so difficult, and we do see it a lot.

DRAW!: And I guess you offer the typical financial aid packages?

JL: Oh, absolutely. Sure. We’re an accredited institution; it’s a four-year school with a Masters program, so we have financial aid, student work study. Scholarships, a lot of scholarships if students are very good. And what’s interesting, and what I’d like to send you, is a partial list of some of our alumni.

DRAW!: Oh, yeah, that would be great. Like I said, one of the things I’m getting from everybody is also samples of students’ work, because, you know, you’re in Savannah, and somebody else is in New York, and you’ve got somebody in Idaho who’s reading this and going, “Well, I can only afford to travel to two schools to see what the campus is like.”

JL: Well, what I sent you was our last two anthologies. That’s all students’ work, and you’ll be able to get an idea of the range. We just introduced a theme and then allowed students to write and illustrate their own two- to eight-page stories based on the theme, and then we joined the stories in, so you’ll see those. I included some sketchbooks. You’ll see the type of artist that we have come down, and the range of artist that come down, and we put a little on-the-cheap sketchbook together for all the students and all the people participating at the forums so they could remember it by.

DRAW!: Oh! Well, that’s great. Well, I think that’ll cover it for right now.

WRAPPING UP More artwork for “The Key,” by Hunter Clark for a SCAD anthology collection.

THE KEY ™ AND ©2008 HUNTER CLARK

disciplines coming in. And then an MFA, you can get either an MA at the graduate level—of course, you’ll have to have completed four years of undergraduate in something—and then an MFA in two years.

DRAW!: So then the Masters, you would get in what, Sequential Art? JL: It’ll be Sequential Art, yes.

DRAW!: Okay. Could you get, like, a major in Sequential Art and then a minor in Animation?

JL: You can do that. You can absolutely do that at the undergraduate level. There are many courses. Our department is going to be hosting next year a minor in Conceptual Illustration, and we’re partnering with the computer animation department so that a student who would take that would do a lot of traditional skills as well as being taught by some computer animators so they could learn some of the requisite skills that they might need there. But, yeah, you can minor in Sequential Art and major in something else. Typically, when people choose to minor in a program, what they’re doing is tacking on probably about another, say, two quarters to their time at school here at SCAD. DRAW!: Great!

Well there you have it DRAW! readers, our first overview of the major colleges and schools in the US teaching comics as degree courses, and I hope you find this to be a great resource for those of you in search of a BFA or other degree in comics or sequential storytelling or those who are just interested in taking college level classes in comic art. These are not the only schools in the country who offer courses on comics; many local colleges—state, private and community— now offer comic classes as part of their continuing education programs. I recommend you get a catalogue or check on-line at a school in your area to see if there are any comic classes offered. There are also some schools that offer classes and education via the Internet as sort of a correspondence course, so for the serious student as well as those just interested in learning some new skills, there is a great variety of art education in comics that should be able to fit just about anyone’s needs and budget.

I also recommend that anyone serious about attending any art school, not just those covered in this issue, go and see the school in person if possible. I give this advice as not only a teacher but also as someone who is himself currently a student. The amount of money it costs these days to invest in education is substantial, and not every school will be the right one for you. Phone calls and catalogue pictures won’t give you a full picture of what the campus and facilities are like in any school. If you have a school or a comic class in your area that you’ve attended and were happy with, drop us a line and tell us about it, we’ll be happy to pass the info onto the rest of the DRAW! community.

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Drawing Your Best Foot Forward

By Mike Manley

T

hey say a person should always start out on any journey putting their best foot forward, and this is just as true for an artist as it is for anyone embarking on a sequence of grand actions or events.

This being so, it is of course vitally important that we visual artists have a solid grasp on the anatomy of the human body as a whole, with extra attention given to the head, hands and feet, which offer every artist a great challenge.

One of the main judgments of an artist’s ability is their skill in drawing people, and especially the face, hands and feet.

Where would the portrait artist be—or the fashion artist or comic artist—without these skills? Probably mostly underemployed. Drawing the figure well clearly separates the A-level artists from the C-level artists. And it seems artists who don’t draw the figure well, and are weak on their drawing of hands and feet, will go out of their way, try anything to avoid drawing them.

Feet of Clay? Nay, Feet of Smoke!

It is sometimes surprising to see how poorly so many artists (pro as well as amateur) draw the foot, as well as shoes. Often they will employ an amateurish bag of visual tricks to avoid drawing the feet altogether. In the ’90s, during the boom and rise of the Image Comics look, it became the rage for artists to

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avoid drawing the feet by “fading them away,” hidden in some ever present mist or low lying ground fog that perpetually surrounded and obscured the characters’ feet in any drawing. It could be outer space, it could be the bottom of the ocean; it mattered not what time of day it was... nope, those pesky feet were a problem to draw, and so they were eliminated in puff of smoke or series of “fade-away lines.” I can’t tell you how many portfolios from prospective artists I saw doing the “fade-away feet” back then, and still do now. It’s one of the biggest deficiencies I see in the work of artists I meet at conventions who are looking to break into the business. They draw the foot like they’ve never seen one, don’t have two themselves dangling at the end of their own legs. As a result, the shoes are poorly drawn to boot, their figures often awkward, clumsy looking and off balance. Nothing can ruin an otherwise good drawing of a sexy girl or super-heroine faster than big, ugly or clumsy feet.

Since this is such a big hurdle for so many artists, Bret and I decided right away one of the earliest “Comic Art Bootcamp” articles should be devoted to drawing the foot. To get started on

the right foot, let’s begin with some basic anatomy to give you some solid knowledge of how the foot is constructed and how it fits or is attached to the tibia—one of the shin bones of the leg.

Fear not loyal DRAW! reader, Professors Bret and Mike won’t leave you with feet of clay, after the mini-lessons in the next few pages you will be able to blow away the fog of ignorance and draw feet that not only stand on solid ground, but are dynamic, powerful, sexy and fashionable.

To start off let’s cover some basic construction fundamentals about the foot. It doesn’t matter if you are drawing realistic feet or

a more stylized foot, say for an animated character where you must eliminate detail and rendering, the basic construction is still the same. The foot breaks down into these basic parts: • The Heel (The Oscalcis) • The Ankle • The Arch • The Toes (Phalanges) DRAW! • SPRING 2008

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INNER VIEW

1

A

C

D B

2

E F

Both pairs of my daughter’s feet were drawn from observation, and while they are very animated, their basic form breaks down to the rough, simple forms in Examples 1 and 3. It’s always best to sketch in the gesture of the feet first, then locate the ankles to observe how far the foot is flexed (the arch and instep).

The arch of the foot acts like a spring, pushing the foot upwards. The flexing of the toes in Pose B forces the instep upwards.

3

BREAK DOWN THE FOOT INTO THE SIMPLEST SHAPES

C) The Instep D) The Arch E) The Tibula or ankle bone F) The Oscalcis 68

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FRONT

LEFT TOP: When the foot pushes against something convex it bends, forcing the instep upwards.

RIGHT: A) The ankle of the foot is basically a hinge which fits in between the notch of the Tibula and Fibula— the bones of the lower leg. The inner ankle bone is higher than the outer ankle bone. There is a nice line of energy or arch that runs from the inside of the knee down along the shin, terminating at the inside high point of the ankle. Accentuating this natural shape is really good when doing super-heroes or a more animated, shape oriented drawing as it gives your figures a lot of power and spring even in a static pose.

A

BACK

MOVES JUST LIKE A HINGE

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FEMUR PATELLA (KNEE CAP)

THE CURVE OF THE ARCH

TIBULA

FIBULA

FATTY PAD TIBIAL PROTUBERANCE

THE HIGH POINT OF THE SHIN

1 2 3

These two stylized drawings illustrate the position in the frontal view of the leg where the Astragalus rests between the Tibula and the Fibula. You can think of the foot in this view as a triangle dividing the foot into three sections: 1) the Tarsal 2) the Metatarsal 3) the Phalanges The outside of the foot turns in at the little toe.

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WRITE NOW #17 PREVIEW! Edited by DANNY FINGEROTH (former Marvel Comics editor and Spider-Man writer), WRITE NOW!, 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! Issue #17 is a special HEROES ISSUE with secrets behind the hit series, the comics, and the website, from series creator/writer TIM KRING, writer JEPH LOEB, and other creative minds behind the franchise that’s taken fans everywhere for the thrill ride of the decade! Plus: Find out about the HEROES: ORIGINS spin-off series! Also: Interviews with DC Comics’ head editorial honcho DAN DiDIO and with Marvel Publisher DAN BUCKLEY! PETER DAVID talks about writing STEVEN KING’S DARK TOWER COMIC! MICHAEL TEITELBAUM tells us about writing superhero kids novels! Writer and editor C.B. CEBULSKI talks about writing and editing, from manga to Marvel! Plus lots of great script and art nuts and bolts with rare, unlinked pencil art by some of today’s top pencilers, and more!

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IN THE HOT SEAT:

THE DAN DiDIO INTERVIEW Conducted by Danny Fingeroth, November 6, 2007 Transcribed by Steven Tice Copyedited by Bob Greenberger, Danny Fingeroth, and Dan DiDio

As VP-Executive Editor, DC Universe, Dan DiDio has been responsible for implementing sweeping changes to DC’s heroes—reinvigorating old favorites and introducing new ones—and guiding such bestselling series as Identity Crisis, Infinite Crisis, 52, Countdown, and the upcoming Final Crisis.

Before joining DC, DiDio was with the computer animation company Mainframe Entertainment where he served as freelance story editor and scriptwriter for the series ReBoot and War Planets. Later he became its Senior Vice President, Creative Affairs, overseeing the development, distribution, marketing, and promotion as well as merchandising and licensing of all Mainframe’s television properties.

Among the projects he developed were Weird-Ohs, Beast Machines, Black Bull’s Gatecrasher and Jill Thompson’s Scary Godmother. He began his television career in 1981 at CBS, where he worked at a variety of positions before moving to Capital Cities/ABC in 1985. At ABC, DiDio served as Public Relations Manager for the three New York-based daytime dramas, then moved to Los Angeles to become Executive Director of Children’s Programming. There, he was responsible for Saturday morning programs and After School Specials, serving as Program Executive on such series as Tales from the Cryptkeeper, Hypernauts, Madeline, Dumb and Dumber, and ReBoot. Dan also cowrote Superboy, with Jimmy Palmiotti, just before getting his staff gig at DC in 2002.

Dan was able to take some time to talk to us about how he got to where he is today, and about the state of comics in 2007, 2008, and beyond.

—DF

Dan DiDio, as rendered by Phil Jimenez. [© 2007 DC Comics.]

DD: No. Actually, the one person who was into that was.

When DC was doing New Talent Showcase, [editor] Sal Amendola, and I had a number of exchanges with him on just trying to get a project ready for New Talent Showcase.

I never made it to the final cut, but he was extremely helpful and encouraging to me.

DF: When you were a kid, did you think you’d be a writer, or somehow involved creatively in media?

DD: Well, I was always writing and submitting. I have a stack of rejection letters dating back to 1976, so I guess there was something in me that always wanted to write.

DF: What was your first entertainment or media job?

DD: I started as a page at CBS. I was still in college at the time, and I had the opportunity to get a part-time job as a page at CBS in New York. The first thing I was working on there was The Warner Wolff Show, which was a local New York sports show. I had a chance to work with Warner and his producer, Carmine Cincotta. It was a real fun experience, because it gave me a real behind-the-scenes look, and caught all the fun of the entertainment business.

DF: Any favorite rejection letters?

DD: One of my favorites was from Paul Levitz, in which he completely shot down an idea with, “Stock, basic plot with no real value.”

DF: Did he encourage you to resubmit?

DF: Now, what led you to do that? Were you a communications major?

DD: I was a communications major at Brooklyn College. I was operating as a teacher’s assistant for one of the graduate classes, and ultimately I had seen and watched somebody

DANNY FINGEROTH: Where are you from, Dan? DAN DiDIO: Born and raised in Brooklyn. Went to Tilden High School there, and then went to Brooklyn College.

74 | WRITE NOW #17 PREVIEW

from CBS Human Resources have a water-spilling accident on the desk during the whole speech, and his attention was completely on the water that was pouring onto his lap rather than talking to the kids. Well, about three months later, I went to another seminar, and the same guy was there. And I approached him, and he had the typical Human Resources veneer on of just talking at you rather than to you. And I brought up the water incident, and it broke him down to the point he started laughing, and we had real comfortable conversation, and he’s the one who turned me on to the page job at CBS. Ultimately, when CBS offered me a full-time position, I wound up taking it and finishing school at night, because I looked at how people worked and how people progressed in television, and I saw how, realistically, it was more about who you knew, and where you worked, and how you were perceived, more so than the actual degree. I hate to say it that way, but it’s true. And the reality is, I was able to go from one position, from a per diem position to a full-time position there, and then we were off to the races.

My most influential teacher was a man by the name of Robert Schimmel. He was the one who I worked as a teacher’s aide for, in Brooklyn College. Also, he taught my script-writing class, and he was also the producer/director of the Gary Moore Show which, during the ’50s, was one of the top shows on the air. Just sitting and working with him and listening to how things were assembled for TV shows was one of the things that made me want to learn more about the TV business, and become involved in it.

art, even if what they’re really enjoying is the story.

DD: I was always most intrigued by Stan Lee, always, and I still think what he accomplished in comics stands head and shoulders above what anybody else accomplished.

Not to detract from anyone, but to balance the business and balance the promotion side, to be as creative as he was, and as prolific as he was, and being able to control it and really focus it is really a testament to one man’s vision. I mean, you can sit there and argue about who created what, and who did what. And I understand that’s an important issue. But I look at the aggregate, at Marvel Comics as a whole, and what Stan meant to Marvel Comics as a whole, not just as far as the individual characters, but to the entire company, and then ultimately to the entire industry…

Jumping ahead for a second, when I first got to DC, I had no publishing experience at all, so it was really starting on the ground floor and learning the business, and one of the games Paul Levitz and I played when I first got here was that I did a breakdown of the first three years of Marvel Comics, about how characters were introduced, how they were rolled out, what types of stories they were telling. It’s an interesting study to see how a universe is built, and, more importantly, how it was built on the fly. You can see how they were experimenting and changing and working to get the characters going in the best possible direction.

And we go back to the thing about me studying writers— I’m always more interested in the written word and how

DF: You were a page at CBS. Is that sort of a fancy term for intern?

DD: A paid intern. Basically, the page positions at CBS were handling seating of the audience, as well as more like a temp service within the company. And what’s great about that is that you really get a chance to work various departments, everything from videotape management to the CBS Morning News, the reception desk, and so on. And then, from there, I started getting involved with special events, working the Thanksgiving Day parade and the New Year’s Eve show. Then after that... it’s a long litany of bouncing around. It’s a 21-year journey. I went in there cold, and I got a chance for an interview. They just happened to need somebody at the time that I had gone in there. And what I did, then, is I rearranged my college schedule in order to be able to work full days at CBS. And I always say that Warner saved me because he wrote a letter to my French teacher getting me out of my French final, which I would never have passed, and I’d still be in college now. [laughs] The thing for me, also, with that, I always loved writing, so even while I was working my way through CBS, and then ABC, I was finding ways to submit and try to write things.

My greatest accomplishment as an amateur writer was that I got an honorable mention in a Twilight Zone magazine contest submission.

DF: In an Inside the Comics Writers Studio online interview, you mention that you gravitated, as a kid, to writers more than artists in terms of the comics you were reading. That struck me as kind of unique. Most kids will first look at the

One of Dan’s earliest projects as a TV network executive was the CGI-produced series ReBoot. He transitioned from working at ABC to working for Mainframe, which produced the series—after ABC canceled it. [© 2007 Rainbow Animation, Inc.]

DAN DiDIO | 75

rials. This was all still in New York. From station relations, I went into public relations for three years with ABC’s New York-based soap operas, so it got me a chance to be on set at a regular time, and work with actors. It was an incredible learning experience for me, but I was always writing. And here’s the strange part of the story. At the time, I was also helping out a friend of mine, Jimmy Palmiotti—and, actually, Joe Quesada at that time, also.

Jimmy and I had grown up in the same building in Brooklyn. So when Jimmy and Joe started Event Comics, I helped do a bunch of press releases for them. I DF: That’s unusual for a kid. Kids had done some writing for things usually notice the art first. like Entertainment Retailing, which DD: You’ve got to understand that was a Wizard magazine, and Comic I have absolutely no artistic talent Book Week, a Fred Greenberg magat all. So, for me, anybody who azine. I did some work for Nick can even draw anything is already Barrucci, also, when he was doing head-and-shoulders above anythe Creator’s Universe card set. So thing that I could ever accomplish.

I found ways to keep my toe in the So I know I can possibly write as comic book water just because I well as someone in the field, but I enjoyed it so much, but my real job know that I’ll never be able to was TV. One of the things that I love draw as well as anybody. So I best about television is children’s think that’s one of the reasons television, which was one my ultiwhy I’m more interested in the mate goals in the television busiwriting side, because I know that’s ness. Again, it’s about persistence. I something that I can strive to applied for the same California job achieve and work at. Of course, three times over the course of everything is a combination—the three years, to get into children’s perfect storm of character, writing television programming. To move and artwork is the perfect storm from the East Coast to the West of everything, and those are the Coast within a company was practibooks that transcend, that are the cally impossible in those days, and I evergreens. But, for me, the charwas moving into programming with acter always comes first. There absolutely no programming experiwere six writers, when I got into ence, which was also impossible in comics, who were just exploding Once Dan assumed editorial direction of the those days. But somebody who was on the scene, and I would follow DCU, he “roadmapped” (a phrase he coined) a champion for me over on the them from any book to any book, storylines—events that lead readers through a West Coast, who spoke very highly regardless of what it was, because sequence of stories—throughout many titles, culminating in Identity Crisis, written by of me, was a woman by the name I had complete faith in their storynovelist Brad Meltzer. Cover art to issue #1 is of Linda Steiner, who I had worked telling abilities. They were Roy

by Michael Turner. with in New York. What happened Thomas, Gerry Conway, Steve [© 2007 DC Comics.] was that, one position that I was Englehart, Steve Gerber, Marv passed over for opened up six Wolfman, and Len Wein. And, of months later. And at that point they were tired of interviewcourse, all roads lead to Stan. But by the time I was getting ing or something; I just wore them down and got the job. into comics, all his stories were out there, and they were [laughs] So then I was the executive director of ABC chilthe Bible from which all these other guys drew. There are dren’s programming for two-and-a-half years. certain people who transcend the business, and Stan’s such a person. As soon as you see his name on a comic, you buy With every position comes a certain level of authority that it. The same way for me, growing up, you see Jack Kirby’s allows you to do whatever you want in certain areas, name or Neal Adams’ name on a book, you know you’re whether you’re right or wrong. [laughter] And one of the going to buy that book, regardless of what it’s about. things that happened to me early on at ABC was that, I had just started, and I was new to the position, and new to givDF: So, from being a kid who loved comics and science ficing notes and the whole process of production. And I was tion, how did your journey end up at Mainframe Animation sitting down with the writers of our new Free Willy animatand California? ed series. These are Emmy Award-winning writers who’d DD: The dotted line goes from CBS to ABC. At ABC I worked done things like Little Mermaid, if I’m not mistaken. in what’s called “station relations,” which I worked with all I said to one writer, “This script isn’t funny enough,” as the affiliate stations, providing them with promotional mateany true executive would do. [laughs] And the writer things are spoken, all the twists and the turns. Growing up I would love the Alfred Hitchcock shows or the Twilight Zone. I loved the twist ending, the play on words, the allegorical statements being made, the high fantasy, the science fiction. Those were the things that really brought me in, and when I got into reading comics, those are the things I was looking for. I found that there were certain writers that really played into my sensibilities and told the stories that I wanted to read. I stuck with the character because of the writer more so than the artist.

76 | WRITE NOW #17 PREVIEW

stopped taking notes, put his pen down, stared at me, and said, “Describe ‘funny.’” And I said, “It just didn’t seem to work.” And he goes, “I’ll tell you what. Until you know what you’re talking about, I’m not going to bother taking any of your notes.” And I said to myself, “You have two options.

You can use your position of authority and tell him that ‘you have to take the notes or else I’m going to put in a recommendation to change writers on the show,’” which doesn’t seem to make much sense, “or you can actually do some research and figure out what you’re talking about, and come back and argue the point.” So I went home and ripped the entire scene apart and rebuilt it, figured out where the lines were weak, thought about the pacing, and came back with a two-page argument about why I believed it wasn’t funny enough. He flipped through it, threw it aside, and said, “Okay, now I’ll take your notes.”

The point is, if you’re ready to make a statement or argument or a position about why you believe something should be done, you should research your position as much as possible.

DF: So you had an executive position at ABC on the East Coast, then you moved to an executive position on the West Coast?

DD: I was manager of publicity, then I moved into the director position on the West Coast. It was the next step up the ladder, but was just in a completely new department.

tionship on what we thought the series should be. And we basically did it together. Believe me, this was his show top to bottom. His ideas, his direction. Ian was truly a visionary not only in regard to the series, but also in the whole field of computer animation. What he did for computer-animated television is really what set the standard, really paved the way for everybody else to come. I can’t speak highly enough of this guy. He’s one of the people I considered a true friend, but also one of the true innovators in computer television.

DF: And then you were a freelancer for a couple of years?

DD: For a year. I did some development work for a couple of studios. I was doing ReBoot, and then I was also starting the development on a War Planet series, which was the next show that I was taking over at Mainframe.

DF: But, in general, you prefer having a day job?

DD: I love having a day job. I’m terrible, terribly insecure working alone at home. If I’m not talking to somebody at the office, I feel forgotten. You’re wondering whether or not you’ve fallen out of sight, especially in the TV business. You’re a flavor one minute and you’re forgotten the next.

Also, I love the interaction—the exchange of ideas. I love talking to people, talking things out, the exchange of conversation, which is what really gets the creative juices going.

DF: Then you moved from ABC to Mainframe?

DF: How did you end up at DC? DD: Right. Disney had purchased ABC, DD: I was working at Mainframe and and we knew that they were going to had pretty much gone from just be running our children’s department, Countdown to Infinite Crisis was one of working as a freelancer on the writing so they were asking us to close down. the major stops on DiDio’s roadmap, taking side to opening their L.A. office, and At that point I had to clean the slate of everything from Young Justice/Titans: then ultimately handling the sale of all the product that was non-Disney the product both domestically and related to make room for all the Disney Graduation Day through Identity Crisis, internationally. Then I took on the shows that were going to be brought in. building them into an explosive story One of the shows that I unfortunately which spawned four miniseries addressing marketing and publicity area, as well.

And I worked closely with all the prohad to cancel was ReBoot, which was the state of the DC Universe. Cover to ductions, as well, because I was the the first computer-generated show on C.I.C. #1 is by Jim Lee and Alex Ross. primary contact in the U.S., and that television, and I basically learned my job [© 2007 DC Comics.] was eating up a lot of my time. I was on it, with all the mistakes and flying a lot. I was on a plane three weeks out of every month, aggravation that come along the way.

So when ABC announces that they’re going to shut down between Europe, Asia, Canada, and the U.S. The problem our department, the people from Mainframe called me up was that I was living on the East Coast, but doing all my and said, “Hey, do you want to give this a shot? Do you work on the West Coast. I had moved out to the West Coast want to be the scriptwriter/story editor for the new season for a while, but the family wanted to get back to the East of ReBoot that we’re going to create for Canada?” I never Coast, so Mainframe was gracious enough to allow me to be had written script or story edited on a regular basis. bicoastal for two years. But it did take its toll. And I was on a plane out of Newark on September 11, 2001. Got trapped DF: So why did they offer you the gig? in Canada for about five days because I couldn’t get out of DD: Because the producer, Ian Pearson, who was also the the country.

CEO of the company, and I had struck a real symbiotic rela-

For the rest of this interview and more, don’t miss WRITE NOW #17, on sale now from TwoMorrows!

DAN DiDIO | 77

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[© 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Here, we see pages of Ed’s script and Marc’s pencil art. The inks are by Joe Weems and Marco Galli, with background assists by Sheldon Mitchell. [© 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

X-Men: The Messiah Complex, Chapter One, launched the first Marvel mutant-title crossover in years. The event kicked off with a one-shot written by Ed Brubaker, and boasted the return to the X-Men of superstar artist Marc Silvestri.

X-MEN MESSIAH COMPLEX NUTS & BOLTS | 79

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The actual es 2 and 3 of the night-time on what is pag ring fast across page spread and around Blackbird soa and TWO blurred below h pages. The PAGES ON E world arcing and the top of bot the , oss uds acr el clo 1—Wide pan s and through r -- Zoom! over mountain m, as they soa They’re flying clear above the ed. rs and moon ving at top spe them. The sta into Alaska, mo ng ssi Cro – ckbird CAPS: The Bla 1 LOCATION pages. s across both Cyclops t spread in tier this mission. are below tha seat assembled for These panels s seats. In a m that’s been tea the ts and copilot see tt pilots. are in the pilo the ship, we ler Sco ide as raw Ins er htc el. uld ) and Nig his sho gel on An now 2—Wide pan d is for m han or a the vis g of both , placin just the d. And behind (no mask on, leaning forward e for a ed, arms crosse Angel costum we see Emma behind Scott, , who looks bor the classic blue and white rine lve Wo is to k to that look: Across from her ks now . Or maybe go bac . Here’s a link loo – whoever he Angel in forever /archangel-bigcostume4.jpg haven’t seen me while, since we nyxmen.net/images/costu can http://www .un

Note how the characters are introduced by name, and also given a bit of dialogue that establishes each one’s mood and personality, unobtrusively telling (or reminding) readers of who the heroes are. [© 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

MESSIAH COMPLEX

[© 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

The use of the two-page spread—specified in the script—provides Marc the room he needs to give scope to the storytelling. [© 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

X-MEN

om p lex #1 es si ah C X-Men : M Brubaker Script by Ed

The 13-chapter storyline revolves around the birth of the first mutant child since the events of House of M, which saw the Scarlet Witch reduce the mutant population from millions to 198. Note how Ed’s script gives Marc flexibility in setting the scene, and even in deciding what outfit the Angel can wear.

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

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

Still more galleries of UNPUBLISHED ART

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

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

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

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

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

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

ROUGH STUFF #5

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DIEGDITITIOANL

ROUGH STUFF #6

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

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

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

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

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ROUGH STUFF #7

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Features an in-depth interview and cover by TIM TOWNSEND, CRAIG HAMILTON, DAN JURGENS, and HOWARD PORTER offer preliminary art and commentaries, MARIE SEVERIN career retrospective, graphic novels feature with art and comments by DAWN BROWN, TOMER HANUKA, BEN TEMPLESMITH, and LANCE TOOKS, and more!

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: NOV073966

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ROUGH STUFF #9

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ROUGH STUFF #8 Features an in-depth interview and cover painting by the extraordinary MIKE MAYHEW, preliminary and unpublished art

by ALEX HORLEY, TONY DeZUNIGA, NICK CARDY, and RAFAEL KAYANAN (including commentary by each artist), a look at the great Belgian comic book artists, a “Rough Critique” of MIKE MURDOCK’s work, and more!

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: FEB084188

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

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

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

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

DRAW! #4

DRAW! #5

DRAW! #6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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DRAW! #8

DRAW! #10

DRAW! #11

DRAW! #12

DRAW! #13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DRAW! #16

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DRAW! #14

DRAW! #15

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

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

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

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

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

(80-page magazine with COLOR) $6.95 Ships Summer 2008

Go to www.twomorrows.com for BEST OF DRAW volumes, reprinting the SOLD OUT ISSUES!

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NEW STUFF FROM TWOMORROWS!

BACK ISSUE #26

ROUGH STUFF #7

WRITE NOW! #17

ALTER EGO #74

BRICKJOURNAL #1 (V2)

“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!

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!

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!

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!

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

(100-page magazine) $9 US Now Shipping Diamond Order Code: NOV073966

(80-page magazine) $9 US Now Shipping Diamond Order Code: AUG074138

(100-page magazine) $9 US Now Shipping Diamond Order Code: OCT073927

(80-page FULL COLOR magazine) $11 US Now Shipping Look for it in December’s PREVIEWS

ALL- STAR COMPANION V. 3

MODERN MASTERS VOLUME 14: FRANK CHO

(100-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: NOV073948

KIRBY FIVE-OH! (JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #50) The regular columnists from THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR magazine celebrate the best of everything from Jack Kirby’s 50-year career, spotlighting: The BEST KIRBY STORIES & COVERS from 19381987! Jack’s 50 BEST UNUSED PIECES OF ART! His 50 BEST CHARACTER DESIGNS! Interviews with the 50 PEOPLE MOST INFLUENCED BY KIRBY’S WORK! A 50PAGE KIRBY PENCIL ART GALLERY and DELUXE COLOR SECTION! Kirby cover inked by DARWYN COOKE, and an introduction by MARK EVANIER, making this the ultimate retrospective on the career of the “King” of comics! Edited by JOHN MORROW. (168-page tabloid-size trade paperback) $24 US ISBN: 9781893905894 Diamond Order Code: JUL078147 Ships April 2008

SILVER AGE MEGO 8" SUPERSCI-FI COMPANION HEROES: WORLD’S In the Silver Age of Comics, space was the GREATEST TOYS!TM

place, and this book summarizes, critiques and lovingly recalls the classic science-fiction series edited by JULIUS SCHWARTZ and written by GARDNER FOX and JOHN BROOME! The pages of DC’s science-fiction magazines of the 1960s, STRANGE ADVENTURES and MYSTERY IN SPACE, are opened for you, including story-bystory reviews of complete series such as ADAM STRANGE, ATOMIC KNIGHTS, SPACE MUSEUM, STAR ROVERS, STAR HAWKINS and others! Writer/editor MIKE W. BARR tells you which series crossed over with each other, behind-the-scenes secrets, and more, including writer and artist credits for every story! Features rare art by CARMINE INFANTINO, MURPHY ANDERSON, GIL KANE, SID GREENE, MIKE SEKOWSKY, and many others, plus a glorious new cover by ALAN DAVIS and PAUL NEARY! (144-page trade paperback) $24 US ISBN: 9781893905818 Diamond Order Code: JUL073885

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

Lavishly illustrated with thousands of CHARTS, CHECKLISTS and COLOR PHOTOGRAPHS, it’s an obsessive examination of legendary toy company MEGO (pronounced “ME-go”), and the extraordinary line of super-hero action figures that dominated the toy industry throughout the 1970s. Featuring a chronological history of Mego, interviews with former employees and Mego vendors, fascinating discoveries never revealed elsewhere, and thorough coverage of each figure and packaging variant, this FULL-COLOR hardcover is the definitive guide to Mego.

BRAD MELTZER raves, “I’ve waited thirty years for this magical, beautiful book.”

And CHIP KIDD, internationally-recognized graphic designer and author of BATMAN COLLECTED, deemed it “a stunning visual experience.” Written by BENJAMIN HOLCOMB. (256-page COLOR hardcover) $54 US ISBN: 9781893905825 Diamond Order Code: JUL073884

SUBSCRIPTIONS:

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More amazing secrets behind the 194051 ALL-STAR COMICS and the 1941-44 SEVEN SOLDIERS OF VICTORY—and illustrated speculation about how other Golden Age super-teams might have been assembled! Also, an issue-by-issue survey of the JLA-JSA TEAM-UPS of 1963-85, the 1970s JSA REVIVAL, and the 1980s series THE YOUNG ALL-STARS and SECRET ORIGINS, with commentary by the artists and writers! Plus rare, often unseen art by KUBERT, INFANTINO, ADAMS, ORDWAY, ANDERSON, TOTH, CARDY, GIL KANE, COLAN, SEKOWSKY, DILLIN, STATON, REINMAN, McLEOD, GRINDBERG, PAUL SMITH, RON HARRIS, MARSHALL ROGERS, WAYNE BORING, GEORGE FREEMAN, DON HECK, GEORGE TUSKA, TONY DeZUNIGA, H.G. PETER, DON SIMPSON, and many others! Compiled and edited by ROY THOMAS, with a new cover by GEORGE PÉREZ! (224-page trade paperback) $31 US ISBN: 9781893905801 Diamond Order Code: MAY078045 Surface

Airmail

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR (4 issues)

$44

1st Class Canada $56

$64

$76

$120

BACK ISSUE! (6 issues)

$40

$54

$66

$90

$108

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

$26

$36

$44

$60

$72

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

$78

$108

$132

$180

$216

BRICKJOURNAL (4 issues)

$32

$42

$50

$66

$78

Features an extensive, career-spanning interview lavishly illustrated with rare art from Frank’s files, plus huge sketchbook section, including unseen and unused art!

By ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON. (120-page TPB with COLOR) $19 US ISBN: 9781893905849 Diamond Order Code: AUG074034

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

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

TwoMorrows. Celebrating The Art & History Of Comics.

TwoMorrows • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 • E-mail: twomorrow@aol.com • www.twomorrows.com