Draw #15 Preview by TwoMorrows Publishing

NUMBER 15 SPRING 2008

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BACK TO SCHOOL ISSUE

IN THE U.S.A.

82658 27764

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

THE JOE KUBERT SCHOOL

Interviews with Joe Kubert and Mike Chen

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

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.

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. DRAW! • SPRING 2008

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

DRAW! • SPRING 2008

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.

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

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

DRAW! • SPRING 2008

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?

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. DRAW! • SPRING 2008

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. DRAW! • SPRING 2008

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. DRAW! • SPRING 2008

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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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!: 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

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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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

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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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.”

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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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

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. DRAW! • SPRING 2008

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?

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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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

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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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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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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Drawing Your Best Foot Forward By Mike Manley

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

INNER VIEW

D B

E F

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Both pairs of my daughter’s feet were drawn from observation, and while they 3 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, DRAW! #15 BREAK DOWN THE FOOT pushing the foot upwards. The flexing of BACK TO SCHOOL ISSUE, covering major schools offering INTO THE SIMPLEST SHAPES comic art as part of their curriculum, featuring faculty, student, the toes in Pose B forces the instep and graduate interviews in an ultimate overview of collegiatelevel comic art classes! Plus, a “how-to” demo/interview with upwards. BILL REINHOLD, MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ COMIC ART BOOTCAMP series, a FREE WRITE NOW #17 PREVIEW, and more! (84-page magazine with COLOR) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

C) The Instep D) The Arch E) The Tibula or ankle bone F) The Oscalcis

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