Draw #20

#20 SPRING 2011

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

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ROUGH STUFF’s

THE UNPARALLELED

BOB McLEOD

WALTER SIMONSON

CRITIQUES A NEWCOMER’S WORK

Orion TM & ©2011 DC Comics.

INTERVIEW & DEMO

WRITE NOW’s

DANNY FINGEROTH SPOTLIGHTS WRITER/ARTIST

AL JAFFEE LACKADAISY’S

TRACY BUTLER REVIEWS OF MUST-HAVE

ART TOOLS

PLUS: MIKE MANLEY AND BRET BLEVINS’

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DIGITAL

NS DRAW! (edited by MIKE MANLEY) is the professional EDITIO BLE A “HOW-TO” magazine on comics, cartooning, and IL AVA NLY animation. Each issue features in-depth INTERVIEWS FOR O 5 and DEMOS from top pros on all aspects of graphic $2.9 storytelling, as well as such DRAW! #1 skills as layout, penciling, inking, “Penciling” by JERRY ORDWAY, lettering, coloring, Photoshop tech“Computer Layout and Drawing” niques, plus web guides, tips, tricks,

by DAVE GIBBONS, “Secrets of Drawing Sexy Women” by BRET and a handy reference source—this BLEVINS, lettering by JOHN magazine has it all!

COSTANZA, inking demonstration NOTE: Contains nudity for purposes of figure drawing. INTENDED FOR MATURE READERS.

DRAW! #5

DRAW! #6

DRAW! #2

DRAW! #3

DRAW! #4

by RICARDO VILLAGRAN, cover by BLEVINS, and more!

GENNDY TARTAKOVSKY interview, inking with KLAUS JANSON, PHIL HESTER on self-publishing comics, in-depth interview and “how-to”

by STEVE CONLEY, second installment of “Secrets of Drawing Sexy Women” by BRET BLEVINS, reviews, links and more!

Inking by DICK GIORDANO, interview with animator/director CHRIS BAILEY, “how-to” on web comics, BRET BLEVINS’ “Figures in Action,” PAUL RIVOCHE on “Design for comics and animation,” a discussion of trademarks and copyrights, drawing tips, and more!

Interview with ERIK LARSEN, KEVIN NOWLAN on drawing and inking techniques, DAVE COOPER’s coloring techniques in Photoshop, BRET BLEVINS tutorial on Figure Composition, PAUL RIVOCHE on the Design Process, reviews of comics drawing papers, and more!

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DRAW! #7

DRAW! #8

DRAW! #9

DRAW! #10

MIKE WIERINGO interview, BENDIS and OEMING on how they create “Powers”, BRET BLEVINS shows “How to draw great hands”, “The illusion of depth in design” by PAUL RIVOCHE, art books reviewed by TERRY BEATTY, plus reviews of the best art supplies, and more!

Interview & demo with BILL WRAY, STEPHEN DeSTEFANO interview, BRET BLEVINS shows “How to draw the human figure in light and shadow,” Photoshop tutorial by CELIA CALLE, inking tips by MIKE MANLEY, reviews of the best art supplies, links, and more!

Interview/demo by DAN BRERETON, ZACH TRENHOLM on caricaturing, “Drawing In Adobe Illustrator” demo

by ALBERTO RUIZ, “The Power of Sketching” by BRET BLEVINS, “Designing with light and shadow”

by PAUL RIVOCHE, reviews of art supplies, links, and more!

Interview & demo by MATT HALEY, TOM BANCROFT & ROB CORLEY on character design, “Drawing In Adobe Illustrator” by ALBERTO RUIZ, “Draping The Human Figure”

by BRET BLEVINS, a new COMICS SECTION, International Spotlight on JOSÉ LOUIS AGREDA, and more!

WRITE NOW #8 crossover! MIKE MANLEY & DANNY FINGEROTH create a comic from script to print, BANCROFT & CORLEY on bringing characters to life, Adobe Illustrator with ALBERTO RUIZ, Noel Sickles’ work examined, PvP’s SCOTT KURTZ, art supply reviews, and more!

RON GARNEY interview & demo, GRAHAM NOLAN on creating newspaper strips, TODD KLEIN and others discuss lettering, “Draping The Human Figure, Part Two” by BRET BLEVINS, ALBERTO RUIZ on Adobe Illustrator, interview with MARK McKENNA, links, and more!

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DRAW! #11

DRAW! #12

DRAW! #13

DRAW! #14

DRAW! #15

DRAW! #16

STEVE RUDE on comics & drawing, ROQUE BALLESTEROS on Flash animation, JIM BORGMAN on his daily comic strip Zits, BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY on “Drawing On Life”, Adobe Illustrator tips with ALBERTO RUIZ, links, a color section and more! New RUDE cover!

KYLE BAKER on merging traditional and digital art, MIKE HAWTHORNE on his work, “Making Perspective Work For You” by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY, Photoshop techniques with ALBERTO RUIZ, THE VENTURE BROTHERS, links, and more! New BAKER cover!

Demo of painting methods by ALEX HORLEY, interview and demo by COLLEEN COOVER, a look behindthe-scenes on Adult Swim’s MINORITEAM, regular features on drawing by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY, links, color section and more!

In-depth interviews and demos with DOUG MAHNKE, OVI NEDELCU (Pigtale, WB Animation), STEVE PURCELL (Sam and Max), MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ COMIC ART BOOTCAMP on “Using Black to Power up Your Pages”, product reviews, and more!

Covers major schools offering comic art as part of their curriculum, in an ultimate overview of collegiate-level comic art classes! Plus, a “how-to” demo/interview with BILL REINHOLD, MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ COMIC ART BOOTCAMP series, and more!

In-depth interview with HOWARD CHAYKIN, behind the drawing board and animation desk with JAY STEPHENS, COMIC ART BOOTCAMP on HOW TO USE REFERENCE and WORKING FROM PHOTOS (by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY), and more!

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DRAW! #17

An in-depth interview and tutorial with Scott Pilgrim’s creator and artist BRYAN LEE O’MALLEY on how he creates the acclaimed series, plus learn how B.P.R.D.’s GUY DAVIS creates the fabulous work on his series. Also, more Comic Art Bootcamp: Learning from The Great Cartoonists by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY, reviews, and more!

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DRAW! #18

DRAW! #19

Interview & demo by R.M. GUERA, Cartoon Network’s JAMES TUCKER on the hit show “Batman: The Brave and the Bold,” plus product reviews by JAMAR NICHOLAS, and Comic Book Boot Camp’s “Anatomy: Part 2” by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY!

DOUG BRAITHWAITE demo and interview, BOB McLEOD critiques a newcomer’s work, JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews art supplies and tool tech, MANLEY and BLEVINS’ COMIC ART BOOTCAMP gets your penciling in shape, plus Web links, reviews, and more!

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

SPRING 2011

CONTENTS

VOL. 1, NO. 20 Editor-in-Chief • Michael Manley Designer • Eric Nolen-Weathington Publisher • John Morrow Logo Design • John Costanza Proofreader • Eric Nolen-Weathington Front Cover Illustration • Walter Simonson

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WALTER SIMONSON Mike Manley interviews the legendary writer and artist

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ROUGH CRITIQUE Bob McLeod gives practical advice and tips on how to improve your work

DRAW! was produced by Action Planet, Inc. and published by TwoMorrows Publishing.

Editorial Address: P.O. Box 2129 Upper Darby, PA 19082 Subscription Address: TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Drive Raleigh, NC 27614 DRAW! and its logo are trademarks of Action Planet, Inc. All contributions herein are copyright 2011 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.

This entire issue is © 2011 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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TRACY BUTLER Mike Manley speaks with the creator and artist of the webcomic, Lackadaisy

UNDER THE COVERS Publisher John Morrow and colorist Tom Ziuko show how this issue’s cover was (re)created.

AL JAFFEE Danny Fingeroth interviews the Mad-man cartoonist

THE CRUSTY CRITIC Jamar Nicholas reviews the tools of the trade. First up: brush pens.

COMIC ART BOOTCAMP “Emotional Design”

by Bret Blevins and Mike Manley

DRAWING AHEAD ometimes things in life seem so hard and unfair, and terrible things happen to great people. It seems like a bad story, like the writer went off the rails, like it can’t be happening this way, and we struggle to find a way to cope and live with the terrible thing.

I’m dedicating this issue to the memory of my friend, Pat Blevins, who passed away after a long fight with breast cancer. Honestly, I hate to have to write something like this—it’s devastating. Nothing I type can translate the human experience of something like this. But that is life, and you can’t hide or shrink from it, even the worst of it. We can only honor the people we loved.

S

Pat and Bret Blevins

Pat was one of the best people I have known in my life—such a good person, as anyone who knew her would attest. Rich of soul, and such a strong person and supporter of her friends and family; she was the tent-pole for her husband, Bret, in his life as an artist—no small role. She was always behind me as a friend and supportive of me during many sad and sour spots in my life, and she encouraged the idea and then reality of this magazine from the start. She had a great laugh and a wit as sharp as they come, and I cherish the last visit I had with her and the Blevins crew. I urge all of you DRAW! supporters to donate time or do a walk or sponsor someone for the fight against breast cancer and to really take stock of the loved ones and friends in your life.

I’ve lost too many good friends and important people in my life in the last few years, from Al Williamson to Mike Wieringo and now Patricia, and it defines you, it cuts your life in specific ways, some of which you may not even understand. The soreness might fade, but that scar I feel for some time. But I am a much better person for having known them all, and my life will be less sunny on many days without them.

However, I don’t want to only talk of loss, but of life as well. I want to thank all of those who helped make this issue happen: Walter Simonson, who I’ve known since I was about 16 years old and who really is one of the Kings of Comics; my main men Bret and Jamar, for coming through once again and delivering the gold; Danny for the great Al Jaffee interview; Bob McLeod fought the deadlines to get his critique in; and a big thanks to David Seidman and Tracy Butler of 4th Dimension Entertainment for the help with the Lackadaisy article. Tracy’s work is great, and I was really charmed to meet her and David at Wizard World Philly last year, where they really stood out amongst the publishers at the show. Of course, the hat always tips to John, my publisher, and my main man, Eric, for pulling the train out of the station.

So, enjoy the read and go draw something!

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

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DRAW! • SPRING 2011

WHOSOEVER WIELDS THIS PENCIL...

THE MIGHTY

WALTER SIMONSON

Interview conducted

by Mike Manley and transcribed

by Steven Tice

W

alter Simonson needs no introduction.

From his first pro job, “Manhunter,” he made it known that he was an artist to watch and study, and he’s still going strong.

DRAW!: You have the honor of being the only professional I ever

WS: Oh, how funny.

wrote a fan letter to.

WALTER SIMONSON: Oh, is that true?

DRAW!: I remember writing you a letter after that.

WS: Wow. Well, it may be still in a file somewhere.

DRAW!: Yeah, yeah, it’s true!

WS: That’s funny.

DRAW!: You can haul it out someday and embarrass me with all

DRAW!: And that was after I met you for the first time. You might

WS: That’s very funny. How old were you at the time?

remember that convention; it was in, I think, Novi, Michigan, or somewhere near there. And you were there with Al Milgrom...

WS: What year was this?

DRAW!: Let’s see. If it was ’80, I was 18, 19.

WS: Okay. Well, that’s old enough to have a portfolio.

my horrible spelling.

DRAW!: This must have been about 1980. Right after you did that last Cylon story for Battlestar Galactica.

WS: Oh, yeah, okay. That’s probably ’79 or ’80, I suppose.

DRAW!: You were there, Al Milgrom, Terry Austin, Mike

Vosburg.

WS: All the Michigan boys, except for me.

DRAW!: All the Michigan boys, yeah. And I remember meeting you there, and you were such a nice guy. I remember you taking lots of time with me. You were very patient, looking at my horrible samples. And I remember we started talking about, I think it was Bernie Fuchs or Bob Peak or something else, and I was like, “Wow! This guy knows other stuff besides comic books!”

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DRAW! • SPRING 2011

DRAW!: Yeah, 17, 18, 19, somewhere in there.

WS: That’s a riot. Well, I’m very honored.

DRAW!: You also had done a National Lampoon cover, I think?

WS: I did, right around that time.

DRAW!: Have you done a lot of color work since then?

WS: No, I don’t do very much color work. I haven’t colored in a

long time. I did some in the ’70s and early ’80s, but not in comics. For other areas of commercial art, but not really in comics. I colored some of my actual earlier stories. I haven’t done that in a long time, either. I did more color back in those days, but I haven’t done much in a long time. I’m still trying to figure out black-&-white.

DRAW!: When you colored your stories in the beginning, did you color them and have somebody give you a hand doing the codes?

WS: Nah, the codes just weren’t that tough. I mean, once you figured out it was R2, R3, and R—that was the three grades of red—it just wasn’t that tough.

And we had a sheet from Chemical Color that had all the combinations and permutations of the various colors. It was a series of circles in a kind of rectilinear pattern. It might have been five down, and seven or eight across, and it showed all the different combinations. So coding that stuff wasn’t brain surgery.

DRAW!: I think I still have one that I got from Carl Potts or Nel Yomtov or somebody at Marvel years ago.

WS: Yeah. I probably still have it. In the old days, they printed it up on newsprint, so it was on the same kind of paper and you could see how the colors would look in print. But the first time I got one, probably from Jack Adler at DC, he X-ed out a whole bunch of them down in the lower-righthand corner—all the browns that were not that far apart, and all the ones that were the 75% and 100% color variations of magenta, cyan, and yellow, but they were all not that far apart from each other.

He said, “Don’t use any of these colors,” and X-ed them out. They weren’t so different, so that wasn’t that much of a hardship, either. It was the old days.

DRAW!: Printing is different now. When you were doing a story that was being printed on newsprint, as opposed to now, where you can basically draw with anything and get anything reproduced, has that affected the way you approach your work, because the coloring is so different?

WS: Nah. Not really. [laughter] DRAW!: You’re not supposed to say that, Walt!

WS: You know, I do what I do. I do the kind of draw-

(previous page) Artwork for an ad in Thor #336 to promote the Walter’s then-upcoming run. (above) Walter drew this illustration of the Lord of the Nazgul (as well as many other Tolkein-inspired images) in 1965 at the tender age of 19.

ing I do, I ink it, I try to do the best drawing I can manage, I try to do the best compositions I can manage, and the best storytelling, and the color, that’s really somebody else’s job. I try to get good colorists to work over me. I’ve been very lucky in that regard, but I haven’t really done fewer black or done more blacks. Probably the only thing I’ve done, actually, in the modern era of color, is, when I remember to, I generally tell whoever’s coloring my stuff, “Don’t knock my blacks out in color.” Because, at least when computer color first came in, everybody wanted to knock blacks out in color. It became blue, it became brown, it became something else. My work is shape- and design-oriented, and no color has the strength of black. So if you start knocking out my blacks, you start screwing up my compositions.

I work with, in a lot of ways, mostly the older colorists. Steve Oliff was one of the early guys to work with computers, and he worked before computers came in, so he has the sensibilities from the time when you only had, effectively, 35 or 40 colors, tops. Generally I try to keep the rendering from being too rendery. Again, I haven’t made a fuss about that. I mean, mostly I

THOR ™ AND © MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

haven’t had a problem with it. The blacks is the one area where I really have said, “Look, please don’t knock my blacks out. Or, if you do, get a hold of me first, send me a shot of it and show me what it looks like, and I’ll decide then.” Because I also believe in the empirical evidence of what’s going on rather than just laying down a law. If you over-render my stuff—since it’s not drawn in a way to be highly rendered—what happens is you’ll take large areas of shape that I’ve created—negative areas or even positive areas—if you do a lot of color rendering inside there, you basically break up those shapes that are really crucial to the composition of the drawing. When you start breaking that stuff up, then the drawing doesn’t look as good.

I haven’t done that much work on the computer. I’ve worked on these long projects that take me a while to get done. The last monthly book I worked on was Orion for DC in the early 2000s, and there Tatjana Wood did the bulk of the coloring. Of course, Tatjana colors old school. She would be a little cranky with me, because I would try my best, but apparently I was not error-free DRAW! • SPRING 2011

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in forgetting to draw in various costume lines on characters from time to time. I would try to get them right, I would work hard, but you’d have Mister Miracle or somebody, and somehow I’d forget to point some line around the arm or whatever it was, I don’t even remember anymore, and she would fuss at me, in a very gentle way. She would fix it for me in the color, which is very nice. I tried to keep it straight, but it was kind of hard to do. And then I did the Elric book with Mike Moorcock that came out from DC, about 200 pages long, and Steve Oliff colored that. He colored it with a much more modern sensibility, but it was still... It had echoes of the past in a way that I liked and was happy with. And I also think Steve has very pretty color, the kind of color I like.

I don’t work with a lot of really modern, young guys who have carved out a whole swath in the industry. So I don’t know what would happen... I’ll get that way eventually, but we’ll see. I want

them to work as hard at the stuff into making it proper, as I do, myself. And I really haven’t changed what I do in order to accommodate the fact that you’re going to have eight billion colors on your work. In the old days, in newsprint comics, it was difficult, although not impossible, to screw up a page with color. It was not easy. I mean, the coloring was pale enough, and the printing was bad enough, that it was hard to do that. You couldn’t really destroy a page with color. And now it’s remarkably easy. You could really completely destroy a page with color without batting an eye. So it’s worth keeping closer track of. I have, to some extent, but I’ve also mostly worked with guys who are younger than me, but older than a lot of the young colorists, who understand the old stuff. Sort of like one foot in both camps—the old material, the new material—and they find some pretty good balance. I like that. So I’ve been lucky in that regard, so far.

DRAW!: Do you use less Zip-a-tone and things

like that, maybe, than you used to?

WS: I never use Zip. I used Zip once in a blue moon back in the old days, but very rarely. K-tones— mostly in the old days, on newsprint, unless you were like Tom Palmer, who was a magician with the stuff, or Wally Wood—just made the color look kind of dirty. And, also, it was newsprint printing. So I very rarely used it. I used Zip-a-tone on a few of the very few black-&-white jobs that I did, jobs that were for Marvel magazines or for Warren. I would occasionally use Zip on stuff like that, but I didn’t use Zip very much.

It’d be interesting to go back and do it now. Of course, now, I haven’t developed a facility for it, but now... Well, two things have happened. One, I think there’s a lot more Zip. It went through a period there, 20 years ago, or 30 years ago, where Zipa-tone became very hard to find. Shading tone was rare; it was almost impossible to get. And then—this is my take, anyway—came the influx of manga into America, and the fact that lots of stories began to realize you can get sheets or preprinted pads of paper now preprinted for newspaper strip proportions, or comic book pages, or manga pages, or whatever. So now, thanks to the Web, there’s a lot of Zip-a-tone available. And other brand names, obviously. And, of course, as some friends of mine do, you can just manufacture your own K-tone sheets, essentially, or patterns, in the computer, and lay that in. I have not done that because I haven’t used Zip very much.

If I’m using it, I prefer it on black-&-white jobs. I haven’t done a black-&-white job in a long time.

Klaus Janson applied the Zip-a-tone to Walter’s work here for Marvel’s Battlestar Galactica #4.

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA ™ AND © UNIVERSAL CITy STUDIOS, INC.

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DRAW! • SPRING 2011

DRAW!: Yeah, that’s what I did. I did two X-9 stories for King Features, and I made up my own Zip in Photoshop, so when I scanned my pages in, I basically was able to make a sheet of 20% and 30% of the right line screen, and then I could just bring that in on the layer and erase off what I didn’t want, which was a lot easier than having to cut it with an X-acto knife.

Walter’s layout and Wally Wood’s finished inks for Hercules Unbound #7, page 1. Walt’s pencils are quite loose with little black indicated.

HERCULES ™ AND © DC COMICS.

WS: Well, I understand, I know how it works, I just haven’t done it myself. I haven’t tried to do it. I’d have to go learn how to do it, really, but I understand the theory of it. It sounds kind of cool, but, again, I’m not Tom Palmer, so I haven’t done a lot of that kind of stuff.

DRAW!: One of the things about your career is you’ve worked with heavy inkers like Tom Palmer on Star Wars, you’ve worked with Wally Wood on Hercules, you’ve worked with Tony DeZuniga on Thor. How did that affect your work, because that was earlier on in your career, when you were working with finishers—inkers that draw so well themselves? Did that affect the way you thought about the pages as far as—?

WS: [laughter] I’m not sure I think about this stuff as much as you’d like me to think about it, Mike. [laughter] I mean, on stuff like that, I take that kind of case by case. In the case of Woody, for example, he was doing finishes on Hercules Unbound for DC in about 1976, maybe a little earlier. Somewhere around there. I had been doing my earliest work which was for DC, so I was there when that was happening. José García-López had been doing the penciling on Hercules, which was the first of José’s work I’d ever seen, and Woody was doing the finishes over it. And I think the book was probably bi-monthly. I don’t remember for sure, now.

Woody was doing the finishes, Denny O’Neil was the editor, and, up to that point, three or four years into my career, I had only penciled and inked my own work. I had not done pencils for anybody else to ink; I hadn’t done layouts, and of that sort thing.

And a few of my really early jobs I actually lettered as well as penciled and inked. It was one of Howard Chaykin’s jobs, one of his Iron Wolfs. Denny, at some point—because José was getting off Hercules Unbound—asked me if I would be interested in doing layouts for Woody to ink. I had not done any layouts at that point, but I knew Woody; he hung around Continuity, and I hung around Continuity, and of course I was a huge fan of his work from back to the Mad magazine days. I don’t think I’d seen any of his EC work at that point. I don’t mind having on my résumé somewhere, “Got to work with Wallace Wood.” So I said, “Hey, sure, I’ll figure out layouts, and I’ll do layouts until the cows come home.”

So I began doing layouts for Woody. I didn’t know really what layouts were. They were not quite tight, but were actually pretty pencil-y, with no blacks on them. I did two issues, and then Woody left the book, which was kind of funny, actually, because I’d only gotten on it because he was doing it. We never talked about it. I mean, I knew him, but I don’t know if he was just tired of doing that particular book or whatever, I’m not sure, but he got off the book after two issues. But I’d done layouts for him; I got to put on DRAW! • SPRING 2011 7

Walter’s layout for Marvel’s Star Wars #62, page 22.

STAR WARS ™ AND © LUCASFILM LLC.

my résumé, “I worked for Wallace Wood,” so it was very neat for me. It was fun to see it come out. By the time it’s done, of course, it looks like Woody’s stuff. But my job was to provide pencils that he was able to ink and shape in a direction he wanted to go. That was completely fine with me. I understood that in the beginning. I mean, I knew guys like Larry Hama and Ralph Reese, guys who worked for Woody, so I knew how he worked, somewhat. I knew what to expect. It wasn’t like I went in there without knowing how this was going to play out as far as the way the work would look.

But that was fine. I may be able to send you a page of pencils and a page of my layouts and a page of Woody’s finishes on that.

DRAW!: I think that would be really interesting, because I

remember seeing the stuff that García-López did, and then your stuff, and you can tell that somewhere under the Wally Wood there is some García-López, and somewhere under there there’s Walt Simonson. It’s sort of like Wally Wood drawings in positions that Wally Wood would never draw.

WS: Would mostly not draw, but it still looked a lot like Woody. So, anyway, that’s how that worked out. In the case of Star Wars, when Tom Palmer was inking it, you’ll have to ask Tom. I don’t know if I was doing pencils or layouts for that book. I mean, it might have been layouts. I can’t remember. It may also have been pencils, at least early on, in the first part of that series, I don’t know. I came on right after the adaptation of The Empire Strikes Back, which Archie Goodwin and Al Williamson did. And I did one issue right before that, or somewhere in there, that I actually penciled and inked. I think it was Star Wars #49. Then #50 was a special double issue, and I took over after #51. Maybe the movie was right before that.

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DRAW! • SPRING 2011

Tom may have been brought on board with me. He was really a perfect guy for it, and it was great, because his son, Tom Jr., who was very young at the time, was a giant Star Wars fan. Still is, I believe. Hi, Tom! So when Tom Sr. would ink spaceships, Tom Jr. was watching over his shoulder, and they had to be right.

[Mike laughs] He was the small consultant. Again, I’m not sure if I was doing pencils or layouts there, but Tom brings his own brand of finish to the work, the same way Woody did, and it really seemed incredibly appropriate for Star Wars. And he did a lot of work. The first splash page we did together, I think I had a Y-Wing flying into a planet. When that came back, he had actually transferred my drawing to Kraftint and then done the Kraftint thing on it. It was really elaborate, and it was gorgeous.

And it just got the world’s worst printing. It was just awful. But it sure looked great in the original; it looked fabulous. Tom really brought a whole new game to that stuff that I just didn’t have, so it was quite a combination of the two of us.

And then DeZuniga’s stuff, that was about ’77, ’78. I did Thor for a year. Len Wein wrote it. I think I was doing layouts. I went through a period—’76, ’77, I probably started on Hercules somewhere in there—where I decided I wanted to learn how to think faster about what I was doing. So I set aside doing pencils and inks for a while, while I did layouts for books like The Rampaging Hulk for Marvel, which was finished by Alfredo Alcala; Thor, which was finished by Tony; Woody’s stuff; and so on. It was a way of my trying to concentrate not so much on the drawing and the finishing of the drawing of the panels and so on, but to think about the page as an element of design, and to really try to figure out how to tackle that in a quick way.

When I was doing “Manhunter,” Archie Goodwin and I were telling 20-page stories, basically, in eight pages. If you go back and look at the “Manhunter” stuff, it’s 10, 12, 14, 15 panels on a page. No matter how you cut it, that’s not going to happen very fast. The Rampaging Hulk was a 40-page story or thereabouts, and they’d be big because it was the Hulk breaking stuff, so I wanted big panels. Hercules was a little like that, a little more story in that stuff, I think. A little shorter, too. And Thor was me and Len Wein doing kind of the Lee-Kirby riff on the character with some of the old foes, and a bunch of Asgardian stuff, and some new guys we invented. But, again, for Thor I wanted a sense of scale, I wanted something bigger. I did one annual that Ernie Chan inked. But those were layouts, because there I didn’t have to think so much about how I was going to finish the drawings, but I could give the shapes, and the design, and the compositions, and the storytelling my full attention and let those guys do the finishing work.

DRAW!: When you start approaching your page, are you think-

ing sort of rhythmically, like you want to get to a certain point at the bottom of each page to flip the page, and you sort of work back and forth? I’m interested in your process, because I’ve always really admired your layouts. I think, besides Kubert, you’re one of the best guys with layouts, and I learned a lot by studying your stuff in the beginning, by studying how you laid out a page.

WS: Okay, well, now you’re just scaring me. [laughter] You know, I’ve gone through a lot of stages. I probably couldn’t even remember them all at this point. Howard Chaykin remembers this, because he’s mentioned it a couple times. I kind of

remember it vaguely. I mean, I think about pages one way for a while, I think about them some other way for a while. At one point pretty early on, I was thinking about the page architecturally, where I wanted to have some sort of design element at the bottom that almost acted like a foundation upon which the rest of the page was built. I can’t describe it any more than that. It was sort of a metaphor for whatever I was doing. But I wanted the page to be solidly designed and solidly resting, probably based on whatever the bottom of the page was about, and then build stuff above it. Now, I did not mean that I started at the bottom panel and then worked my way up. It wasn’t like really doing a building, but I was aware of trying to establish the gravity at the bottom of the page in a way that would hold the design for everything.

In the early days, I think I was probably just penciling directly on the boards. I don’t really remember at this point. I know by the time I was just doing layouts, I began doing layouts full-size on layout bond, just a big pad of cheap paper from the art store. I would do full-size layouts. Part of that was because with “Manhunter,” and even a Batman job afterward, and even the Metal Men, to some extent, I’d done pages with a lot of panels, a lot of small stuff. I’m fairly nearsighted, so I learned how to work very close and very small, and I was very good at working very tiny on very tiny stuff.

Well, when you start doing the Hulk, the talent of being able to work on very small stuff isn’t all that useful.

Unless you’re doing the little person Hulk or something, it would be a whole different deal. And I really wanted to do Kirby energy and big, explosive stuff, so I began working with full-size layouts as a way of having to draw bigger. I learned to draw stuff that was really big, and then Walter’s cover for Thor Annual #7. During this first run on Thor, Walt only did layouts. when it shrunk down, it still seemed ALL CHARACTERS ™ AND © MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC. pretty big. And for a book like The Hulk, a book like Thor, that was very useful. So I thought about DRAW!: Right, right. With certain finishers, certain people, they the pages a little differently in that case, trying to figure out how will tend to soften or pull things back a little bit. to put fewer panels on a page but still tell the story, and have a lot WS: Well, I think layouts and sketches can be very energetic and of energy left over. There, of course, it’s also true, since I was powerful, but it’s a very difficult thing for anybody to render it being finished by other people, I tried to get as much energy into down to a finish and still keep that life and energy that you see the layouts as I could, because that way, whatever the finish was, in the rough phase, and I think that’s just the natural progression I felt some of that energy would still maybe show through. That doing the finish on a piece. It’s very rare—maybe a guy like Ralph Steadman can do a drawing that’s exploding over the page. was my intent, anyway.

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A page from Heavy Metal’s graphic novel adaptation of Alien, illustrated by Walter. The project marked his first of many collaborations with John Workman.

ALIEN ™ AND © 20TH CENTURy FOX FILM CORPORATION..

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A 1965 Jim Holdaway-drawn Modesty Blaise daily strip.

MODESTy BLAISE ™ AND © MODESTy BLAISE LTD.

A Ralph Steadman Spider-Man or a Ralph Steadman Superman would be kind of interesting, but probably nothing I’ve never seen before. But it’s very difficult in comics to go from pencils to finished inks and really capture all that energy. So one of the things I’ve tried to do over the years—and I couldn’t even say how, really, I just do it by eye—is to try to do the finish in a way that will retain as much of that primal energy from the early sketch ideas and layouts as possible.

DRAW!: Kubert said he would lay out two pages next to each other, and he was very aware of not making too many heads the same size, because it’s like hitting the same note over and over.

One of the best things about your work is the relationship of shapes. Were you thinking about that? Are you pushing shapes, saying, “This needs to be bigger so that looks smaller?”

WS: To some extent. I don’t know what Joe does, if he really laid out pages in tandem. I never did that, partly because, in the old days—probably through the end of the ’90s, and it may still be true—the full-page ads in comics, over several months, would not fall on the same pages. In other words, they would do what they called “change the ad flaps,” and what that meant was that you always had page one, two, and three in a comic. That first page, and then pages two and three facing each other, were always the same. There was never an ad on page two, there was never an ad on page three. But there could be an ad on page four, or any page thereafter. Sometimes there was no ad on page four, it was just a page of comics, and the ad was on page five. The companies change those things fairly frequently, every few months. I’m not quite sure why. Maybe so you couldn’t skip the ads, because you’d know, “The ads are in the same place, I’ll skip this page.” I don’t know, I have no idea.

DRAW!: Maybe they just sold more ads that month. You never know.

WS: Well, you always had 22 pages of story, or whatever it was, 17, 18, 21, 22 pages of story. So they didn’t cut into the storyline for one month for new ads, then give it back the next month.

They had a standard number of pages, although the editorial pages changed over time depending on inflation and paper prices and things of that sort. I learned this the hard way in a Battlestar Galactica. I was doing a storyline in which a Cylon basestar showed up. I don’t remember the story itself anymore, but, essen-

tially, the basestar shows up, and I set it up so that you would get to the bottom of one page and then go, “Oh, my gosh! Look!”

And then you would turn the page and there was the basestar in the first panel or however it worked. And what happened was, between the time I looked at the issue that gave me my clue as to where the ad flap was going to fall, Marvel changed the ad flap.

So, when that issue came out, I opened it up and there’s my basestar on the right-hand page, right up at the top of the page.

So you turn to that opening spread, that’s not a reveal anymore, it’s just right there. I was really annoyed. I was very cranky in the office. I was cranky enough I think Jim Shooter came out, to make sure nothing terrible had happened. And, really, honestly, nothing terrible had. But that was when I quit trying to figure out how to do right and left pages in ordinary newsprint comics.

Now, I did an adaptation for Heavy Metal of the movie Alien.

Archie Goodwin wrote the adaptation, John Workman was the art director, and it was the first time John and I worked together. He was also responsible for getting me on the project. In that book, there were no ads. There were 60 or 61 pages of actual story, no ads in the middle, so there I was careful about left and right pages, and I was careful about drawing it so that, if a scene changed, you would turn the page and you’d get the new scene. And the other thing I learned doing that book, up to that point and for sometime thereafter in regular comics, there were no bleed pages. You couldn’t do bleeds. And that’s because, I believe, the printers charged more to handle bleed. Which was probably a frost, but there you are.

DRAW!: Were you looking at anybody for inspiration for how to

lay out a page? Were there people whose work you liked?

WS: Well, there were artists I really liked. I don’t know that I ever looked at them for layout information. The only guy I did that with, I looked at a lot of Jim Holdaway in Modesty Blaise, the newspaper strip. It didn’t help me a whole lot with entire pages, because he was in the newspaper strip format, a very limited format of three horizontal panels. It was always fascinating to see how he did it, because it was always interesting. In this limited space, it was just wonderful, and he was a major influence of mine, and remains a major influence on my work. I still look at his stuff if I go dry; if I feel I can’t figure something out, I’ll grab a Modesty Blaise reprint and I’ll just start reading through it. I’ll kind of look at the pictures. In some ways that’s like getting a refreshing drink of water, and I can start fresh.

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There are other artists I’ve been influenced by, tremendously, but there’s probably nobody else where I really go back and study his work, and start looking at it, and I’m really inspired by the way he controlled the storytelling and the way he put pictures together. That was really the way to do it. His ability to tell a story was really unparalleled, so I still find that very interesting. I still go back and look at it. And he did a thing where he would usually have one big head and some smaller shapes, because he only had the daily to work on, but it was quite a lesson in shape, black-&white, and texture. Every one of his strips was like that. They were just astounding. So I would look at that stuff.

I looked at other work. I was a big Moebius fan. I had the Blueberry stuff, not so much Moebius back in the early days. A lot of Giraud, a lot of Blueberry, and I had a lot of the early volumes Holdaway’s work. I also was a big Frank Bellamy fan. I only really had the Garth stuff—not all of that, even, but a couple of them got reprinted back then, and a couple of English reprints in the Daily Mirror, I think, from ’74 and ’75, maybe. It was on newsprint, but it was black-&-white work, so you could see it. It was a newspaper strip again, but had really neat drawing, a really superhero physique on Garth, where

his shoulders are twelve miles wide, and a very narrow waist, and beautiful rendering, beautiful drawing. Slightly abstract. It wasn’t photographic, which I thought was really cool. I borrowed a lot from that for a while. So there were guys I looked at.

Outside of Holdaway, in a sense, I’m not sure I’ve ever really looked at other artists for inspiration in the layout. Well, yeah, Jack Kirby. I basically ate, lived, and breathed Kirby for years when I was first reading Marvel comics from the mid-’60s on.

And probably, if there’s anybody I was really learning layouts from, it would have been Jack. It’s absolutely true. But it’s also true that I’ve looked at enough Jack stuff over the years and absorbed so much of it that it’s all internalized. I mean, I love Jack’s stuff. I don’t have to go back and look at it, in a way, to be reinspired. I just think it’s fabulous. Holdaway’s work, for some reason, I will go back and it remains inspirational and fresh, even though I’ve seen it. He was only 45 or something when he died, I believe, about 1970, around the time I discovered him. So he did maybe, I don’t know, 15, 16, 17 Modesty Blaise stories and died in the middle of one of them. I’ve looked at that stuff a million times.

DRAW!: I remember coming across his stuff, you

might remember those, when Ed April used to reprint those along with Williamson’s Corrigan strips in Cartoonist Showcase.

WS: I had the Cartoonist Showcases; I have all of those. That was when I first discovered Holdaway.

One of my friends, when I was in art school I had a friend who was a year or two younger, Doug Smith, and Doug was into comics, the older stuff, and knew this guy’s work. He must have had something I could look at, because I ordered the entire run from wherever you could get it back in those days, and got all of them, and just fell in love with the Holdaway stuff. I just enjoyed looking at the artists. Russ Manning’s Tarzan, and Archie and Al doing Secret Agent Corrigan, Horak’s James Bond—that’s something I looked at a lot.

Nothing says Kirby like The Thing.

Walter drew this illustration for a trading card.

THE THING ™ AND © MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

DRAW!: Yeah, that guy, he was cool, but he was really kind of weird, too.

WS: Yaroslav Horak. I looked at that stuff for a while. The early stuff, especially. I was and remain a major fan of his early James Bond stuff. And that was influential, as well. I looked at a lot of that stuff. And he was a good storyteller.

And Kirby’s such a natural. I looked at so much Kirby I just internalized it, so I probably got a lot from that. I’d been in comics for six months when I started doing “Manhunter,” and that was giving me problems to solve that I had not seen anybody do, in a sense, I don’t think.

Which is to say, 12, 13, 14, 15 panels on a page. I had not seen The Spirit, really, at that point. I knew about it because Jules Feiffer’s Great Comic Book Heroes had one earlier Spirit story in it, and I’d seen the black-&white job that Eisner did for one of the New York newspapers after the great New York blackout in the mid-’60s.

DRAW!: So this was before Warren was doing the Spirit reprints.

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(above) Walter’s 1973 tribute to Will Eisner and The Spirit, which ran as the cover on an issue of the Menomonee Falls Gazette. (right) Bob Peak’s one-sheet poster for Apocalypse Now. THE SPIRIT ™ AND © WILL EISNER, INC. APOCALyPSE NOW © UNITED ARTISTS.

WS: Oh, well before that. Somebody began reprinting some of the

Spirits and they were doing it from the very beginning, and they were little folded sheets of legal-size paper. It was all black-&white, not very well produced. But they started from story one, and I subscribed to those and saw some of them, but they were really early. They were not the way you think of The Spirit later.

So I didn’t really see that stuff. I did, however, see the two Harvey comics. I had those, from the mid-’60s, that reprinted about eight of the classic Spirits in each one, more or less. So I’d seen some of Will’s stuff, but I have to say, at that time and place, it was not too influential. I didn’t go back to it. Maybe because it had the kind of cartoony stuff, and even though they were great stories, I think with “Manhunter” I was shooting for something different, really, much more in the Peter O’Donnell/Jim Holdaway Modesty Blaise sense of adventure, and more serious, world-traveling kind of stuff, so I wasn’t looking at much Eisner at the time. I didn’t know there was that much to look at, really, back then.

DRAW!: Were you keeping up with illustration and other things outside of comics, as well?

WS: Well, I liked illustration. Chaykin was one of my earliest friends in New York. He was a huge fan of illustration. Again, this is all pre-Internet, so you had to get clippings, and get magazines and tear sheets. I did not have Howard’s patience for that.

Howard really had a lot of patience for that. But, because of him,

and maybe myself, anyway, we learned about guys like Bernie Fuchs and Meade Shaeffer and Dean Cornwell and Bob Peak, Harvey Dunn, going back to really the American school of illustration that Howard Pyle kind of founded. We tracked down what we could, looked at as much of that stuff as we could find.

Howard might remember when this was—late ’70s or thereabouts, maybe the very early ’80s. We’d been doing comics for a while at that point. Several of those artists, Mark English, Peak— I don’t know if Bernie Fuchs was part of that crew or not—gave a seminar. They did a traveling seminar about their work, and we attended one of them.

DRAW!: I seem to remember reading something about that in an

issue of some magazine in high school.

WS: It was either over a day or over a week. I think it was on a Saturday. I don’t know if we went two days or only one. What I remember most is that Bob Peak had a slideshow, and it showed billions of paintings of his, all the roughs and some finishes for all these movie projects that either never happened, or they were roughs he just did as part of the deal. There were all these shots of Marlon Brando from Apocalypse Now, with sun painted in his face and little— DRAW!: You know what? I saw those in Philadelphia, at one of the art schools here. Just by accident one day, I’m walking down

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kills me that there’s not a giant Bob Peak book out with all that stuff. We just sat there with our mouths open. It was so much stuff, and it was so rich and wonderful, and it was just all stuff that had never gotten to print. Look, I’m sure Bob made plenty of money doing it, but it just killed me that it was all stuff that just went into a basement somewhere, or into his attic. It was put on display once in a while, but you never had a chance to get a giant Bob Peak book with billions of paintings in it. It was just fabulous.

DRAW!: They were proposed ads, or one-sheets?

But we did that course, just that seminar, really, for fun, WS: Yeah, or they were just comps that he worked up and they decided they were going to go in some different direction. And it because it was all guys we really liked. So we paid attention to it, Howard more than I did, but it still—I mean, I’d come out of art school, I’d taken lithography, I’d taken silk-screening. I was better at silk-screening than lithography, but I’d taken them both. I’d had type courses there where I really learned to love typography. And so I had a broader range of interests than just comic books by the time I actually got into comics, and I do think that that range of interests—most notably in my sound effects—really affected the way my work looked.

But when I was doing the early “Manhunter” stuff, I don’t think I had any models for guys doing 1015 panels on a page. I mean, I had time. We were doing one story every two months, so I had about a week per page. I didn’t just do a week per page, but I spent a lot of time on them. I did a lot of thinking, particularly about design, about eye direction across the page. I spent a lot of time trying to think about how to lead the eye from one panel to the next, how to drop down to the next tier, how to drop down to the third tier and then out of the page. It’s the things you learn in art school. I was a lousy painter in art school. I took a painting course; I was terrible at it.

But the classic thing you get taught about painting is that you have a center of interest, and you’ve got to have some way to lead the eye into the center of interest and then some way to lead the eye out. I have no idea if anybody actually paints like that. I haven’t got a clue. But in comics, you have a natural eye direction. In the West, you’re reading from top to bottom and from left to right, you’re predisposed with a certain kind of arrangement of visual material to make that happen.

And so I played with that a lot, and Walter’s pencils and inks for the “Manhunter” back-up in Detective #440. Ten panels—count them!

I learned a ton about that stuff doing MANHUNTER ™ AND © DC COMICS.

Chestnut Street, and I go past the Art Institute, and I look inside and go, “That looks like a Bob Peak Marlon Brando head!” And I go inside and it was this great shot of Kurtz squeezing a sponge on top of his head. They had a whole exhibition of his work there.

WS: Yeah. There was stuff from The Black Stallion. There was tons of the stuff you’d never seen. It killed us.

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“Manhunter” and trying to cram all the stories we were doing into those eight-page segments.

DRAW!: The other thing I always notice in your work is the details or textures. You mentioned that you liked the textural inking, which you definitely have. When you ink your own work, you don’t make super-tight pencils. That way you can try to keep some of that energy in when you go in and you start doing the inking.

WS: It’s true, although I will say my pencils are probably tighter than you think. But I don’t always ink them precisely. I like having a really solid armature for my ink drawing, but I don’t necessarily work to ink what I’ve laid down in the pencil. I just want to have enough pencil there, or I want to have plenty of pencil there, so I have complete confidence that I can just zip right, and move my hand around, and get stuff streaming out that I want to come out. Unlike, say, Bill Sienkiewicz, who apparently can draw, like, a circle, put in two dots, a vertical line, and the next step in the process is the “Mona Lisa.” I can’t do that, so I’ve got to be a bit more careful about that, or at least more thorough. But I don’t pencil so that I’m going to ink exactly what the pencils are. I mean, I will make decisions about where I’m spotting blacks, stuff like that, very much in the pencil stage. I don’t change that around much. But I try, in a lot of ways, to let the drawing speak for itself, and in that way I try to keep the drawing as fresh as possible.

Jon Bogdanove once referred to what I do these days as a “paper-intensive” approach to drawing, which is really true. What it means is, in a sense, what I do is a very carefully worked out series of steps that are designed to make it look as though I just tossed the drawing down on the paper and walked away, as if it were like, “Oh, yeah, I’ll just go [speedy mouth noise],” and, “Look at the great drawing that he’s done.” That ain’t how it actually works. [laughs] It’s like hearing stories about Fred Cover pencils for Orion #23. Walter leaves much of the final decisions for the inking stage.

Astaire practicing and practicing and practicing ORION ™ AND © DC COMICS. and practicing, but when you see the movie, it all seems incredibly fluid, and you don’t see the bazillions of hours blow them up by changing the lens focus. By raising and lowerhe put in making sure that, by the time he was done, it was all ing the machine, you could run up to six times bigger or down to three times smaller than your actual drawing, which is plenty of fluid and easy. room for doing a typewriter-sized layout and blowing it up. This DRAW!: Well, Sargent was the same way. He would paint and table model was, at the time, maybe three or four hundred bucks, wipe off paint and wipe off paint and wipe off, so that, in the end, and a whole bunch of us bought them all at the same time. I used it looks like he did it in five minutes, but it was a very laborious that for a long time, doing all the Star Wars stuff during the early process. Zorn, the same way, to make it look as if it was very ’80s, which is probably when I really began doing thumbnails.

By the time that came along, I had done my really big layouts easy. Kirby looks easy, fun. on Rampaging Hulk and things like that. With the Artograph, I WS: You want to make it look like it was very simple to do. I’ve used the same system for a long time now. Back in the late ’70s began moving to doing thumbnails or typewriter-page size. I and early ’80s, I went through a period where I used an would just draw one page per sheet of typewriter paper, back Artograph. Artograph had come out with a brand new table when it was still typewriter paper and not copier paper. I undermodel. It was very convenient. It was basically an opaque pro- stood the relationship of space on the page, of large space to small jector, so you could put typewriter-sized pages in the back of it, space, large shapes to small shapes. I’d learned enough of it by and you could project them right onto your drawing board and then, so I began doing my thumbnails about that size. My earlier

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Here we have the beginnings of a pin-up style illustration done for a charity auction. Walter starts with a loose pencil rough. Then he draws several small “structure drawings”—loose sketches where he tweaks the poses and placement of figures within the composition to see what works best.

ALL CHARACTERS ™ AND © MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

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thumbnails were pretty complete.

They’re actually almost like little drawings. I mean, Neal Adams would do these phenomenal thumbnails that were on a quarter sheet of typewriter paper, and they were outstanding. But it’s not given to most of us to be able to do that, so I just did what I did. But I was able to put them on the Artograph, blow them up, throw them onto a piece of drawing paper, and then trace them off, clean everything up, and get a pretty clean drawing out of it—which was important, because I wasn’t inking the stuff. I didn’t want Tom or whoever was inking the material to have to figure out which of the twelve lines I meant to put in there, so I was pretty careful at rendering out a relatively tight layout in that fashion.

Then in ’84, ’85, ’86 somewhere, I got a really good table-sized lightbox, and I began tracing the layouts off with it. It was kind of halfscratch-built and half-drawing table. Still have it, and I still use it extensively. And then, when I was doing Fantastic Four for Marvel, about 1990, copiers became available to home offices. They got to be small enough and cheap enough so that you didn’t have to get a giant machine into your studio. In fact, I think I came down to Philadelphia to where you were and got a used machine through your good offices.

DRAW!: Yeah, I remember that. We

Next he enlarges the structure drawings he likes best, and along with the rough, uses a lightbox to make

his pencils from those images, which are much tighter, but still somewhat loose. went and you bought a copy machine ALL CHARACTERS ™ AND © MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC. at the place I had bought mine.

WS: That was my first copier. I forget what brand it was. little notes, and it’s designed so that I don’t end up on page 19 of Anyway, that really opened up a whole new world of textures and my layouts and then discover that I still have half my plot to collage techniques and other things that were really a lot of fun. squeeze in there. John Buscema, I believe, could just take a plot, start laying out on page one, and by the time he got to page 22, I’ve had a copier ever since.

Art and drawing in comics is always a balance. You’re always the work was all just laid out beautifully, paced beautifully, and trying to reach the perfect balance of your words and your pic- he was done. I would be scared to try that. This way I pace everytures, because the words carry the story, but they’re also part of thing out. With longer stories, I may start in the front and start at your pictorial element. So what I’ll do now—I’ve done this for a the back and kind of work both ways to reach the middle, try to long time, now—if I’m writing my own stuff, I’ll write a plot and get a balance of everything.

When I’ve got a balance I’m happy with, then I will take more get it approved by the editor. Once the plot’s done, I will take a piece of copier paper. I will draw 22 small boxes on it, four rows copier paper and I’ll draw a big box on it that’s just a little smallof five with two more boxes at the bottom. Each little box repre- er than the edge of the paper, and do a thumbnail, one sheet of sents a page. I will write out with each little box what’s going to paper for one page of comics. When I’m done, I have 22 pages happen on that page. I won’t write in detail. It’ll be, “Orion of thumbnails, and I have my story laid out, and I have my pages breaks into the throne room and Darkseid yells at him. They composed and my individual panels composed. It’s all stick figshare a milkshake.” Whatever is happening in the story. It’s really ures and big circles, and it’s not always decipherable. In the old a matter for pacing at that point. There’s no drawing, it’s just days, I was more thorough than I am now. Now I’m a little more

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Walter leaves most of the heavy lifting and detail work for the inking stage.

ALL CHARACTERS ™ AND © MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

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A Two-Face structure drawing.

TWO-FACE ™ AND © DC COMICS.

abstract, but I know what I’m doing.

And that’s the way I write my script. I kind of work on my own stuff Marvel-style, so I write my script from my thumbnails.

One of the hard lessons people learn doing comics over the years, or probably anything, is that the more work you put into something, the less inclined you are to change it. Even if it’s going wrong, you will work and work and work to try and bring it back to true again. But sometimes the words take on a life of their own, the same way drawing does, and you kind of write the scene, it works out great, but you look at your art and you go, “Well, these layouts don’t really cut it for this scene.” But, you know, the layouts are just stick figures and circles and little lines for the horizon and stuff like that. Throwing them out and putting in a new layout’s not a big deal, so I’ll just re-lay out the page according to the script I’ve written. Or I may have a layout I really like, and I may take a while to get the script squared away, but basically, by doing this, I feel that I’m able to achieve a balance of the words and the pencils, the layouts, before I’ve committed anything really complete.

Then I take my thumbnail, put it in the Xerox machine, and blow it up about 135%, plus or minus. I put that on the lightbox, I put a piece of drawing paper over it and rule out all the borders.

I rule out, as necessary, trim lines in the live art area, whatever I need, because now, of course, you can do bleeds. I’ll rule all the panel borders and square everything up with a T-square and triangle. Then I will very loosely trace off the thumbnails at full size. At this stage they’re still circles and squares and lines and very little drawing, but I can see what’s in each panel. Then, because I’ve been lucky enough, generally speaking, DC has still allowed me to get my work lettered on the boards. I’m still working with John Workman, as I’ve worked with for many years.

A Cyclops structure drawing for an X-Factor cover.

CyCLOPS ™ AND © MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

DRAW! • SPRING 2011

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DRAW!: Wow, you’re still able to do that?

WS: I’m an old guy, pal. They grandfathered me in. [Mike

laughs] Not all the time, but mostly I’ve been allowed to. And I prefer it, because it means I can really make the balloons more a part of the drawing. One of the things I feel about computer lettering, generally, is it mostly looks like an overlay on the art rather than being a part of the art. It doesn’t have to be. The computer is only a tool. I’m sure you could work it out so it looked more like it belonged on the page, but most of the time I look at stuff, it’s not terrible, but it just looks like the layer on top of the art as opposed to a single layer of pictures and words, which is what I love about comics.

So I’ll put a piece of tracing paper over the art and tape it across the top, and then I will spot all my copy. I’ve got my com-

plete script already. That’s where I really find out if a scene works, if the lighting works, or the pictures work, and if they all work together. At that stage of the game, it’s not a big deal to go back and change a few layouts or rewrite a scene, a few lines, whatever it is. When I’ve finished that process, I’ve still got a layout, but I have all the balloons placed, all the captions, all the sound effects, I know where everything is going to go, and I have a real sense of how it’s going to read. I’ll fire it off to John along with a copy of the script. I’ve numbered everything: all the balloons, the display lettering, and sound effects.

We’ve worked together a long time, John and I. One of the things I like about John’s lettering is that it’s derived both from typography and from calligraphy. It has a slightly formal quality, which is what I really like. It’s kind of like my own lettering, but better, which has been great. So on sound effects, if Thor is striking a great blow, or Superman is striking a great blow, I’ll just type in “clickety-clock” or whatever, a bunch of K’s and C’s and W’s and whatever else, the “fwams” or whatever I feel is going to work there. Usually it’s more letters than will fit. I’ll put a box on the page, usually a horizontal box. I mean, it can be tilted, but I will outline the areas in which I want the sound effects to go. And then John has the freedom to use however many letters he can cram in. However it comes out. Some sound effects I run off the page like bleeds, some I don’t. It depends on the story and the effect I’m looking for. But that way the work goes off, John letters it, and in the fashion of letterers from the old days, he does all the little lettering, display lettering, titles, and sound effects. He puts in the panel borders; he puts in the word balloon shapes.

So, when I get it back, I have pages that are all ruled out entirely, with almost no drawing on them. And that way, if I have mistaken myself and I’ve got a guy’s head and he’s saying, “Oh, look, it’s the Purple People-Eater,” and somehow the words take a lot more room than I thought, at this stage, it’s still just a layout. It’s still just light penciling, and it’s easy to take an eraser and go, “Okay, I’m going to recompose this panel right now in order to have this guy’s head giving the expression I want and the size I want,” and I will accommodate the word balloon as part of the drawing.

DRAW!: I think that that is the best way. It’s

A 1998 unpublished Superman cover, depicting a slew of alternate Supermen.

SUPERMAN ™ AND © DC COMICS.

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one of the downfalls of the computer’s effect on the craft. I love my computer and everything, and in the Judge Parker strip I put in all the lettering myself, but one of the downfalls, I think, is that the younger guys coming along who never had to really work with lettering and do the things that you’re talking about there, you don’t really train your sensibility.

After a while you sort of know, “Well, I need to leave X amount of room for the lettering,”

This two-page spread from CrossGen’s The Path #5 was done in the style of the Bayeux Tapestry. Now that’s doing your research!

THE PATH ™ AND © DISNEy ENTERPRISES, INC.

or consider the balloon an element of the art as opposed to, like you said, just something that you’d stick on wherever you can when you’re done.

WS: Yeah. It works well for me, and it’s what I really enjoy doing, so I’m very grateful for DC for letting me do this, for the most part, because it really makes my art a little better. I’m vehemently opposed to anything which I think is going to make the work less when it’s done. So I’ve asked for it, I’ve been granted it, I’ve taken advantage of it, and I think it’s worked out well. I think the work I’ve done in that direction has worked out very well.

Again, you can do stuff with the computer that would make it work that way. Somebody recently, I forget who it was, was talking about trying to spot copy on a job, and he was having the devil’s own time trying to get the lettering in anywhere that would fit and not cover over too much. I don’t know if there was a lot of copy, or a lot of drawing, or whatever, but trying to get that balance was very difficult. And, in a way, it would be hard.

If you’re working over finished art, you have fewer options for what you can do as far as putting stuff down.

On the other hand, I did a job years ago for CrossGen that Ron Marz wrote. It was for The Path, a samurai series that they put out for a while. They needed a fill-in, so Ron called me up out of

the blue, and at the time I was not under contract anywhere. He said, “Do you want to do a samurai job for CrossGen?” And I said, “Yeah, sure, what the heck.” It was a fill-in story, but because he was also writing the regular series, he was able to write me a story that both sat by itself as a unit, as a complete story, and also fit in the continuity he was writing. Bart Sears was the regular artist on that. In the series, itself, there was a Viking that was hanging out over in Japan with the samurai, the hero of the story—this was kind of an alternate world. The Viking was his good buddy, and they’re waiting for a battle to take place.

While they’re waiting, the samurai guy says to his Viking buddy, “So how did you get here anyway? How did that happen?” And then the Viking tells his story. Most of the comic is the Viking telling his story. At the end it goes back to the present, and you can see that the battle’s about to begin. That was done in the mid’90s, maybe, but it was computer lettered.

You know, I’m always afraid to be making money at comics, so I always try to find ways to not make any money doing comics. As far as I know, there is no Viking art, like painting or drawing. There are carved runes on stones; somewhere in Istanbul there are Viking runes carved by the Emperor’s WALTER SIMONSON INTERVIEW CONTINUES ON PAGE 70

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21

Constructive analysis and criticism of a newcomer’s work by

BOB MCLEOd

B

ack in the Dark Ages, before I finally broke into comics but to me it’s just another style. There’s nothing wrong with and began my now 37-year-long career, I got compli- manga as long as it’s well done. Jason’s art isn’t manga, but it has ments on my art all the time. In fact, I can’t remember any criti- some of that influence. His figures are a blend of cartoony exagcism at all until I got my first rejection letter from Warren geration and dramatic realism, and that’s fine and probably even Publications at age 19 (curious readers can see the letter and my preferable for superhero comics. You could say the same about art submission on my web site at http://www.bobmcleod.com some top artists in my generation, such as the great Michael /rejection.jpg). All of those wonderful compliments from fami- Golden, and the following generation’s Todd McFarlane. ly, friends, and teachers had taught me absolutely nothing! Well, Jason does have a lot going for him. I really like the way he’s they did teach me that I could draw better than my family, moving the camera all around, showing up-shots and down-shots, friends, and most of my teachers! But it wasn’t until I got that close-ups and long-shots, etc. He also knows just when to use a rejection letter that I realized I wasn’t actually the best artist close-up, and when to pull back, and how to animate his figures. on earth (next to Mort Drucker, my art god) and in fact I had I like that he’s drawing a good amount of backgrounds, and a lot to learn. I would soon also have a comic strip adding a lot of weighty blacks and dramatic lighting, then bal(http://www.bobmcleod.com/nosey.html) rejected by several ancing it with a fine-line rendering technique. He’s leaving the newspaper syndicates, and a few years later when I traveled to right amount of room around the figures for dialogue balloons.

New York attempting to get work in And no boring six-square-panel grids for comics, Marvel Comics would refuse to him! He’s trying hard to be innovative in “Anyone I’d bother to critique his panel layouts as well. He’s obviously even look at my samples, and DC Comics in a magazine has talent and done a lot of studying on visual storyeditor Joe Orlando would tell me I needed to go back to school and learn how to potential, so there’s nothing telling and put in a lot of months (no draw! We don’t like to hear it, but only doubt years!) working on his figure drawto gain by compliments.” criticism is what makes us begin to recoging, and is probably sitting there thinking nize our faults, and only then can we he’s ready for Marvel to hand him an Ximprove on them and become better artists, or, in some cases, Man script. Okay then, enough with the compliments. So far, I perhaps wisely decide to become writers instead! And construc- haven’t taught him anything or told him anything he doesn’t tive criticism gives us a jumpstart on that improvement by show- already know. Let’s get Rough! ing us exactly what to work on and study. So that’s my goal here Jason sent me three pages, and I’d like to use all three of in my “Rough Critique.” Anyone I’d bother to critique in a mag- them, because they can each teach Jason and you some different azine has talent and potential, so there’s nothing to gain by com- things. We’ll go page by page, okay? For those of you who may pliments; that’s what family, friends, and at least elementary not be familiar with standard comic art procedures, I should school teachers are for. I’m here to try to get you to that next mention that Jason has put an X wherever he wants the inker to level and get published! Which brings us to this issue’s art sam- fill in black, rather than take the time to fill in those areas in pencil. ple submission by the talented Jason Dennis.

Most editors actually now prefer that the penciler doesn’t do this.

Comic art styles are constantly changing, and in recent years The first step in drawing a page is deciding on your panel manga has taken a firm foothold on American comics. Many layout—what shape the panels will be, and how big they’ll be. I artists still work in more traditional styles, but several of the used to just start drawing the first panel and then work my way hottest artists in the last decade are incorporating many elements down, panel by panel, kind of making each of them work with the of the manga style. A lot of people in comics put down manga, space I had left. That’s not a good way to go. It’s much better to

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do a thumbnail and plan out the page, giving more space to important panels and action scenes, and less space to talking heads and close-ups. On page one, there’s a dramatic battle with Wolverine, but it’s squeezed into small panels, while a figure sitting in a chair and a close-up use up over half the page. Jason’s done a fine job composing it, but wouldn’t it be better to have the third panel, the most dramatic scene, dominate the page? Isn’t that the panel we want to see the most?

Also, the panels on the right overlap the panel on the left. Is this a good idea? It certainly can be, and is done routinely by almost everyone today. But hold on, you must take care when overlapping panels or using inset panels (small panels inserted into larger ones) so that you don’t obscure anything important in the underlying panel and don’t confuse the order in which the panels should be read. Here, the third panel intrudes excessively into panel one and obscures a lot of one figure’s head. It overlaps so far into the panel that it grabs our attention and leads our eye to view it before the second panel. Because we naturally tend to read left to right and top to bottom, we first look at the central figure in panel one, then our eye moves to the figure on the lower left, then the middle, then the lower right, then right up Wolverine’s leg into panel three. It’s rarely a good idea to overlap a panel by more than 2/8" or 3/8" for this reason.

I should say, before I go any further, that you may see things like this being done in some manga and even some mainstream comics. My students love to point out that they see printed comics with artists doing stuff like this. Believe me, just because something is printed in a comic doesn’t make it a good thing to do. Professionals do things they shouldn’t all the time. And fans often go nuts over bad art, as long as it has lots of little lines everywhere. There are no hard rules in art. But there are soft rules, developed by thousands of artists over time through trial and error to help you make better art. We older artists have tried most everything you’re going to try, and we’ve learned the hard Page 1 of Jason’s sample story.

X-MEN ™ AND © MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC. way what works and what doesn’t. Once you know what you’re doing, you can bend and break the rules as you see fit. But it’s important to be in conFIGURE 1 trol, rather than do something in ignorance or by accident. You don’t have to follow all my advice, but I promise everything I tell you will make your art better. It’s up to you how good you want to be.

Linear perspective is something that plays a huge role in how we construct scenes, and far too many artists neglect studying it. Most people can see something’s not quite right, but they don’t understand what. There’s a lot more to perspective than simply having lines go to a vanishing point, though that’s at least a good start, and Jason could really benefit from doing at least that much. In fig.1 (see right), by following the general direction of his background lines, we see the horizon must be far below the figures (all objects parallel to the ground recede to points on the horizon where they vanish, All lines and objects parallel to the ground and each other recede toward the horizon thus “vanishing points”). A simple rule is to a common point where they vanish from our vision, called a “vanishing point” (VP). that we can obviously only see the bottom So this background would suggest the horizon is below the picture frame.

DRAW! • SPRING 2011

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FIGURE 2 FIGURE 3

In one- and two-point perspective, ellipses will always appear basically horizontal or vertical. In three-point perspective, which is used when the viewer is looking up or down, they may appear tilted.

Many pro artists don’t bother to find specific vanishing points, but they understand perspective well enough to estimate where the points are (better than this).

It doesn’t have to be perfectly accurate for comics, but it should at least look accurate.

FIGURE 4

Judging from the seated figure, floor, and ceiling, it’s evident that Jason intended the horizon to be at chest level, but there are actually several horizons indicated. In my version on the right, the chair and ceiling have been adjusted for a horizon at chest level, and the chair is on a suggested raised platform (so I added steps), allowing the near figures to possibly be on the floor, although the chair would be on a level with their heads...

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of things above the horizon (which is always at the viewer’s eye level), such as a ceiling, and the top of things below the horizon, such as a floor. So we can only see the surface (top) of the floor if we are above it, and here we are below it. So what are the figures standing on, the edge of a wall? To put it another way, we can only look in one direction at a time, and here he’s trying to have us look up at the ceiling and down at the floor simultaneously (you could actually lay your head on the floor and see the approximate view he’s drawn, but that would put the horizon up in the panel just above Wolverine’s foot, not way down where he has it). And just as some lines recede off to the left, lines perpendicular to them should recede off to the right, to a single vanishing point on the same horizon. In fig. 2 (see above), we see that these do not. No wonder he’s hanging onto that box, because this room is tilting every which way! Nothing in the room is level.

But let’s go back to panel one. It also presents several very common perspective problems. Ellipses such as these ceiling lights are affected by perspective as well. Within our field of vision, ellipses on a ceiling will always appear horizontal, not tilted (fig. 3, see above). And in fig.4 (see left), we see that the chair arms recede to a common vanishing point (except for the inside of the arm on the right), establishing a horizon at his chest level, which seems to be where Jason intended the horizon to be, yet the bottom of the chair doesn’t recede to that point, as it should (nor does the ceiling), and the seat of the chair recedes to a different point establishing a horizon at crotch level, which means either the seat is sloping downward toward the rear or else the arms are sloping upward! And if you imagine the guy in the middle at the bottom moving toward the horizon until his head is where the upper figure’s head is, that establishes a horizon far above the panel! And because he’s presumably standing, while the other figure is seated, that horizon would be even higher! So in other words, for those three figures at the bottom to be where they are, they’d need to be standing at a level far below the floor, because if the seated figure stood up and walked toward them, his head would move up from the horizon, not pass down through it to where theirs are! If you’re confused by all of this, you can get a book on basic perspective at a library or bookstore

FIGURE 5 OK, hands are tough, but you do have a model right there on the end of your arm!

FIGURE 6

Page 2 of Jason’s sample story.

X-MEN ™ AND © MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

and learn it pretty easily. It’s a little too complicated to explain in depth in this column.

Moving on from perspective, pencils are often inked by another artist. Editors today expect the penciler to render lines an inker can follow closely. The days of interpretive inking done over loose pencils, as was common during most of my career, are mostly over, sadly. Many of today’s inkers are not pencilers, and could go astray without tight pencils to follow. The multitude of hatch lines in panel five would confound any inker, and if followed would print as a muddy mess. So the rendering style needs to be more thought out and controlled, and used more judiciously. In panel one, rendering the wall on the left and the wall in back flattens out the depth of that corner. Only one or the other should be rendered (as in my version in fig. 4), or at least one should be rendered more darkly than the other.

While the backgrounds in panels two and three are interesting, they compete too much with the figures. The figure on the left in panel two almost totally disappears into the background.

Details and blacks in the background should always be designed

Always place heads, hands, and feet carefully, so they’re not obscured or touching shapes behind or in front of them.

When extending art from adjacent panels, don’t obscure elements within the panel needlessly.

to balance and frame the figures. Here, it’s difficult to even see the figures because the backgrounds are so complex behind them. In order to achieve depth and clarity, you should surround areas with their opposing value. Put white around black or grey, black around white or gray, gray around black or white.

Moving on to page two, this is a problem in panels one and three as well. Black and heavy lines catch our eye and dominate, while thin lines and white recede. So the background in panel one is totally dominating over the figures, and which is more important?

Generally, you should put thicker lines outlining closer and bigger objects and thinner lines on objects farther away or smaller.

In panel three, Cyclops almost appears to be about to hit his head on the wall jutting out in front of him. Always take care to keep the space around heads (or any other main focal point) clear of obstructing elements. Notice how the left hand and right foot of the figure on the right in panel one read clearly because there are no background lines competing with them. That’s the way to do it (but don’t crop off that heel!).

Designing unusual panel shapes is fine, but this page wastes DRAW! • SPRING 2011

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an awful lot of space that panel three sorely needs to avoid being postage stamp size. Panel two could’ve been done vertically and placed on the upper right to allow panel three to be much bigger.

Jason’s anatomy is generally pretty good, but in panel two, the thumb is broken and the forefinger is swollen (fig. 5, see previous page). Hands admittedly can be difficult to draw, but try a little harder. You know that doesn’t look right. In panel four, take more care in placing your focal points (hands, heads, feet, etc.).

Storm’s right foot is interfering too much with the lower figure’s hand. Placing it where I have it (fig. 6, see previous page), the

Page 3 of Jason’s sample story.

X-MEN ™ AND © MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

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overlapping thumb still creates depth, but now the hand reads clearer. Cyclops’ hand shouldn’t be touching Storm’s head, because that flattens the depth, and the large head from panel six shouldn’t be touching the leg. The figure on the right’s (I give up—is that Phoenix? Polaris?) right foot shouldn’t be touching her left because it flattens the depth. Moving the whole group of figures over to the right a bit gets Storm’s left foot into the panel and away from the panel border. In panel five, I don’t know why you’d jam the left panel border into that guy’s head, when you could have easily moved it to the left just a bit. And don’t cut the guy on the right down the middle; always crop off-center.

On page three, your panel design is very interesting, but maybe too clever for its own good. I’m guessing which panel to read second, and you don’t want the reader to be guessing.

One of the few things Marvel’s exeditor-in-chief Jim Shooter said that I agree with is whether you’re writing, penciling, lettering, inking, or coloring, one of your primary goals should be clarity! Don’t confuse the reader. I also think tilted panels are usually a bad idea (designing with diagonals is good, but use perspective to do it), and this is so tilted it’s difficult to look at. How would you like to have to look at the world from a 45º angle?

It’s too disconcerting.

Again in panel one, that’s an awful lot of linework on the face.

What looks okay in gray pencil doesn’t always look so good in black ink, and this would be a disaster. I like panels two and three (oops, a compliment!), but once again in panels four and five the backgrounds compete far too much with the foreground.

In panel four, you need to simplify the background around the figures, and in panel five the background could have been minimal. And get his left hand into the panel so he’s not touching the panel border! Again, place hands carefully.

All of these problems are relatively minor, and you surely should be able to work them out. I hope you do and wish you luck, Jason, because your art is fun, and I think you have a good future ahead of you in comic books. Thanks for submitting your samples to “Rough Critique.”

Readers who would like me to critique their sample pages should email me at the rather dyslexic mcleod.bob@gmail.com.

Conducted by Mike Manley Transcribed by Steven Tice DRAW!: You’re done with your busy workday, I take it?

TRACY BUTLER: No, actually, my day job ends at about seven at

night, and then I come home and I start on my comic art, so... [laughs] It’s on to job #2.

DRAW!: Where do you work?

TB: I actually work for a small game development company during the

day called Simutronics, located in the St. Louis area. There aren’t many game development companies in this area anymore—they all moved to the West Coast—but we’re still hanging on out here, and making online roleplaying games, and Facebook games, and occasionally working with 3-D software for an MO development tool.

DRAW!: What program are you using for that?

TB: Our primary operating tool is 3-D Studio Max. We use a lit-

tle bit of Maya, as well, but those are generally the industry standards in the games.

DRAW!: Did you go to school for this?

TB: I did not, actually. I desperately wanted to when I was a

teenager, but had parents who did not believe that art was a lucrative career choice, so I ended up going to school for a short time for biology. But I kind of drifted into art, anyway. I put up a website while I was in college, and the company happened to take notice of it. One of the lead programmers saw my art online, and they flew me out for an interview, and the rest is history, I guess.

DRAW!: That’s great.

TB: Yeah. I learned 3-D on the job, basically. I kind of just saw

DRAW!: And what do you do with the company?

TB: I’m an artist there. I started as a studio artist doing a lot of

some of the other artists there working with it, and got curious, and kind of fell in love with the whole process.

their illustration, promotional, graphic design sort of work, and I moved into 3-D animation gradually. I’ve been with the company for ten years now. So, yeah, I moved on to character animation, character design, things of that nature.

DRAW!: Did you find that it was much of a learning curve?

TB: Oh, definitely, yeah. It starts out very slow, because the soft-

DRAW!: So you actually animate, as well?

TB: Mm-hm. Yup. In-3D, not traditional cel animation.

ware is rather daunting. I mean, 3-D Studio Max and Maya and the other programs that Autodesk produces are extremely elaborate things. They do so many different things that just getting into the tool and learning how to use it is the hardest part. Once you DRAW! • SPRING 2011

27

get used to the interface and the general working paradigm, it becomes much easier and much more intuitive. You reach that point where you just take off and you figure out how to do things in the way you’re comfortable. All the possibilities start opening up for you, and you realize, “Oh, I can read things this way, or model this way, if I choose,” and it’s a lot of fun.

DRAW!: It sounds like you to multiple jobs there.

TB: Yeah. Because it’s a small company, the staff there wears numerous hats, basically.

We don’t tend to get pigeonholed into one task only. With larger companies, either you’re concept artist or you’re a texture artist or you’re a modeler. But with the small company that I work for, I enjoy the varying experiences I get, because we have only a limited number of people to work on things, so I get to get my hands on all kinds of different tools and types of art. So it’s been a big learning experience for me. I didn’t go to art school, but I think I’ve learned more working there than I would have in four years of school.

DRAW!: Well, yeah. Working on the job,

actually working every day, sort of trumps school, because you’re dealing with the real world, and you’re also dealing with real world consequences, the good and the bad.

TB: Right, yeah. You get thrown right into the pit where people are criticizing your art, and you have to have meetings every week where the art goes up on the big projector screen in the conference room and people—not just artists, but programmers and other people involved in the game development process— are basically tearing your art to shreds. [laughs] It’s a little intimidating, but it really brings reality right up to the forefront. You can’t really live in denial at that point on where your weaknesses are.

Thumbnails for the Lackadaisy web strip. Tracy typically works on three or four pages at a time.

LACkADAISy ™ AND © TRACy BUTLER.

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DRAW!: How did you come up with Lackadaisy? Because your day job sounds, from the tone of your voice and everything, very fulfilling.

TB: It actually is. I’m not entirely sure how to explain where Lackadaisy came from. I’ve been living in the St. Louis area for a while, saving money and everything, and finally bought a house of my own. It happened to be about a hundred years old, and I was really fascinated by the history of the house and the neighborhood, and I started researching that, and that expanded into researching the history of the St. Louis area in general. I was listening

Once the pages have been penciled, they are scanned and adjusted in Photoshop.

LACkADAISy ™ AND © TRACy BUTLER.

to a lot of jazz music at the time, and I think those things just kind of congealed into a storyline formulating in my head. I had some characters that I wasn’t really doing anything with; they didn’t really have any context, but I enjoyed drawing them all through high school in my notes while I was supposed to be paying attention in class. So I kind of merged those two things together and came up with this comic. It didn’t exactly start as a comic. I think I was thinking of maybe just doing some artwork in that vein to start with, but there was a story there, so I figured, well, there’s got to be some way I can put this on paper. So I started doing the comic, my first foray into that realm of art, really.

My first serious foray into it, anyway.

myself a writer by nature, but this kind of forced me to start doing things that I wouldn’t otherwise do. If I want to get the story out there, I’ve got to write it and make sure that I do it right.

So it’s a challenge, but I think that’s what keeps me interested in doing it—it’s always forcing me to try something new. I also tend to be very organic-oriented when it comes to drawing; I like drawing animals and anatomy and people and cartoon characters, but I tend to avoid doing perspective drawing and things like that—landscapes, cityscapes, backgrounds, and vehicles—and this comic has really forced me to do that, because the whole story takes place in a city in the 1920s, and so I really had to get my perspective drawing down. [laughs]

DRAW!: So you hadn’t done comics, or long-form comics,

DRAW!: Well, you started right off the bat giving yourself one

before this?

TB: No. No, not at all. Probably when I was in high school I did a very informal bit of comic drawing just for my friends, but it was very loosely done, and I wouldn’t call it a serious project at all. Lackadaisy is definitely the first time I’ve actually seriously taken on a comic project and endeavored to tell a whole story in that form. It’s a new experience, a lot of learning.

of the most difficult things to deal with, which is drawing historical fiction. You have to do research.

TB: Yeah. That’s an ongoing difficulty, too, but I enjoy that, as well. There’re just so many facets to doing a comic that, if you’re just doing illustration, it’s just one thing you can focus on, but if it’s a comic, you’re writing, you’re drawing, you’re researching history, and it’s opened up so many new and different things for me that I probably never would have even been interested in or looked at, given a glance, had I not started the comic.

DRAW!: What did you find to be the most challenging aspect of it? I mean, you’re an animator and illustrator, so you’re used to doing a volume of work, but comics is definitely a different form.

TB: Oh, yeah. As an artist, I’m much more comfortable drawing and painting and such than I am writing, and I think probably the story writing aspect of it, and writing dialogue, has proven to be the absolute most challenging portion of it for me. I don’t consider

DRAW!: You started the comic first, and then you approached

Fourth Dimension Entertainment after you’d already been producing it for a while?

TB: I actually started putting it on the web. It was a web comic to start with, and I didn’t approach any publishers, actually. I didn’t DRAW! • SPRING 2011

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think I was there yet, but people kept telling me, you know, “You should probably publish this,” and some of the readers were encouraging me to do that, so I was thinking, “Well, maybe at some point, once I have enough comics, I’ll do a little self-publishing thing and I’ll just sell volumes of the book on the website for anyone who’s interested in having a hard copy.” At the time, I didn’t realize that that was a viable way to do business, because it was right there, for free, online for everybody to read if they wanted to. But, as it turns out, that’s actually a really powerful marketing tool, and I’ve since learned of many other comic artists who make their living selling their work. Even though it’s free online, people buy related merchandise and books that are printed volumes of the comics.

DRAW!: The computer’s always on, and I’m always looking at artwork

and things on the web, but there’s nothing like the intimacy of looking at an actual book.

TB: Yeah. There’s something comfortable and familiar about just sitting on the couch with a favorite book and being able to flip through it at your leisure, and not being in front of a computer screen. I mean, so many of us are at our day jobs every day looking at a computer monitor, so it’s nice to be able to get away from that for a little bit. So I’ve definitely come around and realized that people do want hard copies of these things and like to have that, even though you can find it online. I kind of thought I was alone in thinking that, or of a minority thinking that, but it turns out that that’s not the case. So that was a nice thing to discover.

Eric from Fourth Dimension contacted me at some point and asked if I was interested in publishing, and we didn’t reach a conclusion immediately. He kept talking to me about it, and eventually convinced me that this was a good idea, that he was on the same page as me as far as what makes good entertainment, how a book should be put together, and so forth.

DRAW!: How long did you produce the strip before it eventually arrived in the form of the graphic novel?

TB: I started it in, I think it was the end of summer of 2006 when I started posting the comic online, and I believe it was January of last year that I finally signed the contract with Eric and we put the book together and showed up at WonderCon with it.

DRAW!: Wow, so quite a long time, then.

TB: Yeah, it was about two-and-a-half years. And I actually got picked

up by another small publisher in Italy prior to that, so volume one took me a little less than three years to put together.

DRAW!: What were the things that you learned—the successes and pit-

The panels are then assembled into a single file in Photoshop.

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falls—in being a self-publisher on the web? What worked? What would you go back and change now?

TB: I think I would have spent a longer time before I actually started putting the comic out there, just creating a buffer of artwork that I continue posting, because posting comics in a very regular fashion is your best friend as far as getting page views and generating revenue if you’re selling merchandise related to your comic and what have you. So I would have definitely done that, because it’s been kind of daunting balancing my day job and the web comic and keeping both of those going at a steady pace, because my day job sometimes infringes on my evening hours or my weekend hours, and that makes it difficult to update it as regularly as I would like. That’s definitely something to keep in mind if you’re going to venture into web comics.

The other thing is to never consider it a casual endeavor. If you’re going to do it right, you’ve got to treat it like a second full-time job. It’s a lot of work. [laughs] Just remember that. You’ve got to love what you do.

DRAW!: I guess running it regularly for a couple of years, it sounds like you

were building a regular fan base. How often were you updating the strip?

TB: I started out being able to update about once a week, and then my job got more demanding around 2007. We had a lot of milestone deadlines that were cutting into my time, and I started updating more like two pages a month. These days, I tend to work in vignettes, where I’ll do three to four pages and post those once a month, and I let people know through Twitter and RSS feed and so forth that I’ve updated. So people don’t check back as regularly as they used to, but I’ve gotten more comfortable with it, because it allows me to put together a large body of pages and get a sizable chunk of the story out there without having to worry about doing it once a week, because my job makes that difficult to do. I’ve gotten into the groove of doing it this way, instead.

DRAW!: And I guess the nice thing about the web is nothing ever goes away. As long as you pay your Internet bill, it’s always accessible.

TB: Exactly.

DRAW!: Obviously you’re using a lot of Photoshop, but it looks like

you start with a nice, pencil drawing or something? You’re drawing it first in pencil?

TB: I think with any long-term project, the art will tend to evolve a little bit. You want to keep the style consistent, but at the same time you don’t want to stagnate as an artist. I think it’s kind of natural for that to occur. But, yeah, I still do all my linework in pencil first, and then I scan it, but I started out with minimal amounts of Photoshop editing. Really, all I was doing was putting it into Photoshop and adding a little bit of sepia tone to the pencil work and adding the dialogue and speech bubbles and whatnot. But these days I do a lot more work in Photoshop after I scan my linework in, and add a lot of lighting.

I started watching a lot of noir films and gangster movies as I got into this project more, and that use of black and white and lighting, and the sort of drama and depth you can achieve in a scene that way, inspired me to take my own work a little bit further. Even though it’s sepia tone and a little bit softer-looking than that noir appearance, I realized I could push it a little further than that, and that’s kind of where I’ve been going with it. I don’t think I could realistically make it much more elaborate than I have without pulling myself down much further. If updates become too slow, then it sounds unreasonable.

DRAW!: Since you’re working digitally, working back and forth from the traditional to the “tradigital,” as I’ve been told they call it now— TB: Yes! DRAW!: —the format of the story is not the traditional 6" x 10" comic

book size—it’s more horizontal. I take it that’s a result of the fact that this is first being viewed via the web, and not being viewed via a comic book.

TB: I guess I would chalk that up partly to inexperience. I think if I had been more of a comic buff before I started this... I would say I’m a comic buff now, but before I started, I was a little bit uncultured in their realm of comics. I think I picked up my notions of what a comic page looks like from the Sunday strips, like Peanuts and Calvin & Hobbes, so that horizontal format for some reason just seemed more natural to me, and I think I just felt more comfortable working in that shape. So I started doing the web comic that way and took advantage of the freeform look

Next comes the lighting, still in tones of gray.

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that I could get on the web. The length of each page on the website varies a little bit depending on what portion of the story I’m trying to fit into a page. A page doesn’t have to be defined by a single sheet of paper that’s consistent to a book. The way you’re working on a website, it can be a little bit longer, a little bit shorter, depending on what you’re trying to say, so I took advantage of that. But that’s one of those other hindsightis-20/20 sort of things that, if I had known that I was going to make a book out of this at some future point, I think I would have reined myself in, there.

DRAW!: Apple just revealed the iPad the other day. Many people are

expecting that at some point, whether it’s this particular device or not, we’re going to go to digital books, and people are going to be reading more books digitally. Is that anywhere in your horizon as you’re thinking about continuing with the strip?

TB: I think it is a little bit. I’ve been talking to both my Italian publisher and my English-language publisher about producing an iPhone version of the comic. It’d be quite a challenge, I think, because I did take advantage of the web size I had and the nebulously defined pixel space you have to work with when you’re building a website. But I think, as far as the iPad goes, it’s a fancier, trendier version of the Kindle, perhaps, and it’s possible that it will be a big thing for web comics, or even for comics, in general, going to digital format. I haven’t really calculated that into my future plans, yet, for the comic. Right now I’m just focused on getting Volume 2 together and producing that in such a way that I can easily get it into book form instead of struggling with the trying to cram something that was built for the web into a book.

DRAW!: Let’s talk about your actual working process. You said you start

out with a pencil drawing. Since you’re working on your book in threeor four-page sections now, do you go through and do a little layout for each page?

TB: Yup. I refer to this outline I have for the story, and, “Okay, I’m working on this particular section now, and I think I can probably tell it in two or three pages, or three to four pages.” Then I will sit down and thumbnail that all out, work out what I’m going to do, and write a first draft of the dialogue for that section. Then I’ll sit down with usually Bristol board, 14" x 11", and start penciling.

DRAW!: Is that hot press or cold press?

TB: That is hot press, actually. I just prefer that particular texture of the

paper. And then, once I have my penciling all done, I scan everything in and put it all back together again in Photoshop. Usually it ends up being one huge Photoshop file, upwards of half a gig of memory, occasionally, once I’ve got it all put together.

DRAW!: Wow! TB: Yeah. [laughs] When I’ve got three or four pages all together stacked

on top of each other, then I chop them up, of course, for putting them onto the web, because it’s not very practical to put giant files on the web.

DRAW!: So you have it basically as one big, giant piece of art?

TB: Yeah, one big, giant Photoshop file, so I can scroll down and make

A second pass at the lighting to sharpen where needed.

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sure that my panel progression is making sense and make sure that things are flowing the way I want them to. The layout process is kind of an art form of its own, I’ve found. I started out doing things very rigidly, and I think as I got more comfortable with the sort of format I was working in, I started playing a little bit more with that and adding little minipanels and things where I didn’t necessarily want to draw a whole scene,

but just the character expression or a series of character expressions. I do a lot with expressive characters. But just matching my art style to the layout, and I think those things are a little bit more in sync with each other now.

DRAW!: Do you think that maybe that comes from your experience working in animation?

TB: Probably, yeah. I think when I’m working with comics, I almost do it more like a storyboard than a real comic. My background is so much more in animation and illustration. I think that really bleeds over into my approach to comics. For better or for worse, I’m not sure. [laughs] Either way, I enjoy working with it, and at least there’s a small contingent of people who seem to enjoy the way it’s turned out.

DRAW!: I, myself, am very influenced by animation. When I started storyboarding, even when I was doing comics, I would always see the movement of the characters in my head, and it was sort of like you’re trying to capture a specific pose.

TB: Yeah, it plays out like a movie in your head, and you’re trying to pick the pertinent screen shots and put them on the paper. My pacing is a little bit strange, I think, compared to some other comics I look at. The more I read other comics, the more I realize that I’m maybe drawing a little bit more like a storyboard, where the clicks are faster than they are with a comic in a more traditional mode.

DRAW!: Well, there’re several different ways of skinning a cat, as they

say. I’m looking at a page here, it’s almost like key frames, where you have these really key poses.

TB: Like an animator, yeah.

DRAW!: Right, and you’re putting a lot of information on one page. It actually reminds me of almost a European approach, too, as opposed to the traditional American mainstream comic, from the standpoint that, at least the way American comics have evolved today, people are more interested in drawing these voguish key poses as opposed to acting, and it seems to me that your comic is a lot about acting, and very much about the facial expressions of your characters.

TB: Yeah, I really like to focus on the movement of the characters, and I think that comes from my interest in animation. As a kid I probably ruined my parents’ VCR by watching things like Bambi and stuff in slow motion just because I was so fascinated by the motion of everything, so I think that’s probably where that came from. Also, it’s a little bit from my ignorance of how comics are made. I’d probably be faster at producing them if I wasn’t so focused on drawing a sequence of basically just the motion of a character on the paper.

DRAW!: Are you drawing it as a page, as a unit, or are you drawing it as panels and then assembling those panels in Photoshop?

TB: A little bit of both. I tend to work on those big pieces of Bristol board, like I mentioned, and I’ll fit usually three tiers of panels on there, but I’ll frequently add panels in that are establishing shots or key, important panels that are bigger, and I’ll generally draw them on a separate piece of paper. Sometimes the smaller mini-panels that are just there to emphasize a character’s expression or something are also drawn on separate pieces of paper, so I’ll have to do a lot of reworking the layout in Photoshop, and once I get it all in one big Photoshop file, like I was saying before, I’ll see places where maybe these panels don’t quite flow into each other the right way, so I’ll make adjustments to how that works. There’s a lot of reworking of the layouts once I get it all into Photoshop.

Dialogue and sound effects are added on a separate layer.

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DRAW!: Do you have a palette already set up, or actions, or anything that you use when adding the sepia tones?

TB: I don’t actually use macros or anything for that. I just work in grayscale, for the most part, as I’m adding toning and lighting and fixing my linework, and things like that. And, once I’m completely done, I then convert it all to sepia tone just by adjusting the color balances. And, as I said, I’ve been playing with that a little bit more. It used to be completely monotone, but the more recent pages have just a slight amount of desaturation in the background as opposed to the foreground, where the foreground has a little bit more of a reddish-yellow hue just to make it pop more and hopefully give a little bit more dimension. But I’ve got to rein myself in and not go too far with it lest the pages start looking a little bit too disparate from the previous volume.

DRAW!: What kind of computer setup do you have?

TB: I work with mostly my laptop, lately, since I recently got a Sony Vaio.

I think it’s a 12UX, the name of the model; it’s a small one that’s hypothetically portable, but it comes with so many cords and wires it’s a little difficult to travel with, but it is nice if you just want to sit down on your couch with a laptop and get comfortable. I sit around and work maybe six to eight hours at a time on comics pages, so it’s nice to have a spot where you can sit that’s comfortable.

So I work with a Sony Vaio laptop, and I have a PC, as well, that I tend to work with that’s got a Wacom tablet plugged into it. I’ve had that thing since probably the year 2000. [laughs] It’s lasted this long, so it’s a reliable, old tablet.

DRAW!: I have a scanner from 1999—a big tabloid scanner—and it’s still working. I don’t see any reason to spend thousands of dollars to buy something new if the old one works fine.

TB: Yeah, that’s great. I really wish I could find a scanner that would last me more than two or three years. I haven’t had good luck with scanners. I was using HP for a long time, and those tended to, if you left your machine running for any period of time, like overnight or something, for some reason the HP hardware would seem to stop responding. You’d have to constantly reboot to get it to work again. So I switched to Epson. I do like my Epson scanner, but it tends to tinge all my artwork a weird bluish color in some of the corners and things of that nature that get a little frustrating.

And finally the gray tones are adjusted to give them sepia look.

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DRAW!: I’m using a Microtek 9600 XL, and it was a good one. The problem with all these companies is that they’ll make something, and then two years

later they don’t make drivers for them anymore. Luckily, I was able to get a driver for it when the new OS came out. But it sounds like, really, your work is more than 50% digital at this point.

TB: At this point, yeah. I think it’s crossed over the line where I probably spend more time now in Photoshop than I do with the actual penciling. The penciling is the nice, easy, relaxing part of it. I consider that the most fun part of it all.

Taking it into Photoshop, I’ve got this big, monster file to work with.

DRAW!: You must have a lot of

RAM on your Sony VAIO, there.

TB: Yeah, a few gigs of RAM. [laughs] Actually, this laptop I’ve got, I bought it about a year ago. I dropped my previous laptop down the stairs, which was rather unfortunate. But this one, it’s been great.

It’s got a dedicated video card, so it works out pretty well.

DRAW!: So what’s next for Lackadaisy? You said you’re working on your second graphic novel?

TB: Yes. Volume 2 is in progress right now. I’ve probably got another year or so of work to do on that one, but I’m trying to get that done as quickly as I can, and I’m also going to try to put together a small art book as a companion, since I do color illustration, as well. That kind of fits in with the comic. A little companion book and Volume 2 and a few other small things. I’m working on putting together a card deck.

A page from “Little Pearl,” a mash-up of The Scarlet Letter and Little Lulu.

LITTLE PEARL. ™ AND © R. SIkORyAk People keep asking me for that. I did a little bit of art that had a playing card theme for the posters—full-color—and a lot of people DRAW!: Right. I think, actually, if you had gone right when you seem interested in having a card deck of that nature, so I’ve start- had started your strip, it would have been a much better show. I ed doing that, but it’s been a prolonged project of collecting just think that the show has seen its day. enough color images to put on every card. Were you planning on TB: Yeah, we found that the East Coast shows were a different speaking to Eric [San Gregorio, editor and publisher of the environment altogether than the West Coast shows. We actually Lackadaisy collections]? did really well over on the West Coast. WonderCon and San Diego Comic-Con were great, and Eric took the book to Anime Expo and a bunch of other shows.

DRAW!: I was going to speak to him after I’d spoken to you and go over his side of things, but I was very interested to talk to you more in depth. We talked a little bit at the Wizard show.

DRAW!: I would think that would be much more of your audience than the Spider-Man fan.

TB: Yeah, in Philly.

TB: Yeah, Philadelphia and Chicago were geared towards, I think, people who were much more interested in the more tradiDRAW!: I felt bad for you guys at the show, because Wizard is such a crappy show. tional Marvel/DC back issues of comics and things like that, and I just didn’t quite fit into that particular paradigm.

TB: We were definitely out of our element there.

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LACkADAISy ™ AND © TRACy BUTLER.

DRAW!: Right. And the other thing is that there is a big fan base here that probably isn’t going to be looking at something like a Wizard show. Very few of my students at school went to the convention. There really isn’t the crossover between the anime and the superhero. Some people like everything, but there’s not that many people that do.

TB: Yeah, it seems to be two different audiences, for the most part. Which is all part of the learning experience. I had no idea.

Now I do.

the Lucca comic festival, which is their biggest comic convention every year. That was quite an experience. [laughs] A different audience there, too, actually; all of the crowd was younger kids, much younger kids, whereas Philadelphia, Chicago, tends to be older, adult people showing up at the shows.

DRAW!: I like that, “older, adult people.” [laughs] TB: [laughs] I don’t mean to sound— DRAW!: I remember coming up to your booth, and there was

DRAW!: What’s the response been from Europe? Because this

seems like this would be right up their alley.

TB: Pretty good, actually. I’ve been asked by a few different publishers to produce a full-color version of the comic, because, for some reason, that would do better in Europe than here, where I guess black-and-white is fairly common. In Europe, I guess, those big, beautiful, color art books are very popular. But I have had some interest from German, Russian, and French publishers.

I don’t want to name any names yet, because we’re trying to work out some deals with those, but, yeah, it’s actually been pretty well received there, I think. Renoir Publishing is my Italian publisher, and they’re looking at possibly doing a second print run there shortly, so that worked out pretty well.

DRAW!: Have you gone over there to any conventions?

TB: Yeah, actually, I did. They flew me over there, which was

very gracious of them, and we went on kind of a whirlwind little tour of Italy, from Milan to Rome to Tuscany, where we went to 36

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this grumpy, old guy looking down. “This isn’t what I like. Why do you have this here?”

TB: Yeah, it was kind of an odd thing to have older guys walking by and what on Earth, why would they be interested in cartoon cats?

It’s very cartoony in that way. It has a little bit of an adult edge to it, but the look of it, it definitely screams “younger kids,” so I can definitely see why I wasn’t a big smash hit at those shows. [laughs] DRAW!: I was attracted to the work as soon as I saw it. It’s really

beautiful stuff; it’s full of personality. I’ll be honest, I’m not usually a fan of digital art. I mean, there is some good digital art, but a lot of it sort of looks the same to me.

TB: Yes. I have the same opinion of a lot of digital art. I get that same feeling. Everything looks neat in a Photoshop airbrushing job, but no matter how much integrity the art may have, it kind of all blurs together after a while. But I try to do something a little bit different with it, and kind of mix my natural media in there and add textures and things, to keep it from looking too digital, I guess.

DRAW!: Do you do any traditional media?

TB: It’s been a while since I’ve done anything that was fully tra-

ditional, but for a long time I worked with watercolors, gouache, colored pencils, acrylic. That was my main thing when I was in college. Before I came to work for this game development studio, I had no experience at all with Photoshop, no digital background whatsoever, so I was doing all traditional art, and just scanning it in and putting it up on my website.

DRAW!: Where did you go to college?

TB: Our Lady of the Elms College in Massachusetts. It’s a small

Catholic school. I had wanted to go to Rhode Island School of Design or Savannah College of Art and Design. I aspired to be there, but couldn’t convince my parents that that was a lucrative career.

DRAW!: Well, boy, weren’t they wrong? [laughs] TB: Yeah, they have since acknowledged that art was pretty much

out going into details. Right now we’re producing a Facebook game. It would fall into the casual game genre, but it kind of takes the casual games a little bit further, we feel, and puts a little more of that MMORPG feel into it than what Facebook currently has to offer, so we’re hoping to go far with that. We had been working on a fully 3-D, massively multiplayer online game, but, because the economy tanked, we had major difficulty finding a publisher to help us get that out the door, so it’s kind of on indefinite hiatus right now. But we did put together a bunch of world-building tools that various other studios are currently using. BioWare Austin has built their Knights of the Old Republic MMO on the tools that we built for our game. They licensed it from us and took it from there, so we’re all pretty honored to have them building that with our tools. [laughs] So a little bit of free MMO stuff and some stuff that’s geared more towards the casual game area, which is more 2-D art-oriented, but those were the two projects I’ve been involved with recently.

the only path for me. We’re on the same page now, so that’s good.

DRAW!: It sounds like, between your day job having you wear

DRAW!: Well, I guess now, when you go to those colleges, you’ll

TB: Yeah, art all day long. [laughs]

multiple hats, and then you come home and— just be going to speak.

TB: Hopefully, yeah, someday. [laughs] We’ll see.

DRAW!: Can you talk a little bit about what you do during your day job, or is that top secret, hush-hush, can’t divulge?

TB: A little bit. I’m under non-disclosure agreements to all the projects we work on there, but I can talk about some of it with-

DRAW!: Hey, that’s a great thing.

TB: Yeah, I can’t complain, really. I’m definitely not being

deprived as far as the creative output venues go. I really feel quite blessed, actually, to be able to work in art all day, and then come home at night and do some more art.

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1. Raw pencils. This scene takes place just after dusk, so I have a lot of lighting work to do here.

2. Just a simple brightness adjustment so that I have a medium value to work with as a base.

4. A broad-stroke first pass at lighting, done mostly with soft, round brushes at low opacity. The soft shadows help carry across the partially faded, old-timey look.

38 DRAW! • SPRING 2011

LACkADAISy ™ AND © TRACy BUTLER.

3. Adding some more values to bring out details and add a little depth. I mostly use the Dodge tool and low opacity Multiply Layers for this step.

5. I use hard, round brushes for a cleaner, additive second pass at the lighting. I also use this step to sharpen some of the details and to fix any lost or weak linework.

6A. The sepia tone is achieved with a simple color balance adjustment to the grayscale image.

LACkADAISy ™ AND © TRACy BUTLER.

6B. I often create two variants of sepia: one higher contrast and more saturated, and one softer and darker.

7. Stacked on top of each other, I use a layer mask to let the saturation shine through on focal points or in lighted areas and to allow the darker, lower contrast layer to dominate the background and shadowed spots.

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What the cast of Lackadaisy would look like if they were human, rather than cats.

LACkADAISy ™ AND © TRACy BUTLER.

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HOW WE RE-CREATEd THIS MONTH’S COVER

by John Morrow and Tom Ziuko

JOHN: When we decided to use that great Walter Simonson Orion drawing for this issue’s cover, the quandary was: what kind of background could possibly complement it? I figured, why not copy from the best, and do what Jack Kirby did? So was formed the idea to do an homage to the cover of New Gods #1.

Although it was actually DC Comics’ production department that designed the New Gods #1 cover (Kirby had likewise just submitted a single Orion figure for the original cover of NG #1), that’s such an iconic image, that it made sense to pay tribute to it.

Jack Adler was known for his skillful use of graytones and mezzotints on the early 1970s covers at DC, so the trick was, how do we mimic the old-style conventional mezzotint with today’s technology? I started by scanning the original Kirby cover into Photoshop, and laying Walter’s Orion drawing on a layer over it, to get it in approximately the same position as Kirby’s figure. From there, a simple radial fill from white to black was added to the background, approximating the burst on Kirby’s cover. Then a Photoshop mezzotint filter was applied to the background.

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TOM: I started with this new black-and-white file John had put together, but felt that the mezzotint background looked a bit weak and somewhat washed out, in comparison to the original printed cover. (Those early 1970s DC covers were always so dark and saturated, they seemed to be almost dripping with ink.) So in Photoshop I made a duplicate copy of the new background layer, and set it to multiply, thus essentially doubling the weight, feel, and look of the gray tint. Then with a filter I added a slight blur to it, further sealing the effect.

Next I went back to a scan of Kirby’s original art for the cover, and picked up the speed lines at the bottom between

Orion’s legs (which Walter hadn’t included), and placed them in approximately the same position, in order to add to the feeling of Orion hurtling through space.

Then came the coloring, which I did with a straightforward approach—that is, coloring Orion’s costume and harness normally. But it just didn’t look right; after all, the original cover coloring on New Gods #1 has a surreal, almost “blacklight” feel to it. So I then took the color layer, and went into the Photoshop “Adjustment— Hue/Saturation” feature, where I used the Hue bar slider (something I rarely do) and slid it back and forth until I arrived at a setting that made the colors look all wonky.

And thus, I hope, we came close to capturing the spirit of the cover of New Gods #1. Kirby sez, “Don’t ask—JUST ENJOY!”

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SPOTLIGHT

Interview conducted in person by danny Fingeroth on April 28, 2010 and transcribed by Steven Tice

B

orn in 1921, Al Jaffee was a member of the first graduating class of New York’s High School of Music and Art (where his classmates included future Mad magazine colleagues Will Elder, Harvey Kurtzman, Al Feldstein, and John Severin). Jaffee worked as an editor, writer and artist for Stan Lee at Timely (later Marvel) Comics during the 1940s.

Then, in 1955, Jaffee joined “the Usual Gang of Idiots” at Mad where he’s been a mainstay ever since, entertaining generations with his “Mad Fold-Ins” and “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions.” Al has also created innumerable cartoons, comics, and illustrations for other publications, such as Humbug, Trump, Esquire, and Playboy.

His biography, Al Jaffee’s Mad Life, by Mary-Lou Weisman, with 70 new illustrations by Al, was released in the fall. It tells of Al’s amazing—and harrowing—life’s journey, from Savannah, Georgia to a small village in Lithuania, to the pages of Mad. The recent retrospective show of Al’s work—“Is This the Al Jaffee Art Exhibit?,” co-curated by Danny Fingeroth and Arie Kaplan—was a crowd-drawing and pleasing event at New York’s Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA).

Despite repeated requests, Jaffee refuses to retire and is frighteningly active, including still doing the “Fold-Ins” for Mad. Danny spoke to Al in April 2010 in the Mad-man’s Manhattan studio.

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DANNY FINGEROTH: Let’s start at the beginning, Al. Can you talk a little bit about your background and how you got into comics in the first place?

AL JAFFEE: I got into comics primarily because it was the only thing I knew how to do. I wasn’t really trying to do anything but artwork. I graduated from high school at the tail end of the Great Depression.

And if people think that the economy is bad now, just imagine what it was like when it was twenty times worse. Jobs were few and far between, and we just scrambled to try and figure out how to make a living. I think I probably would have taken a job working in a department store if I could get one. But I truly loved drawing, and it’s one of the things that I found that I could do easily. Not good drawing, but funny drawing. What I mean by “good” drawing... Superheroes Al Jaffee covers for Patsy Walker #38 and Patsy and Hedy #7, both from 1952. were the rage at the time that I was tryPATSy WALkER ™ AND © MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC. ing to enter into the field. There was Superman, of course, and Batman, and one of my favorites, the Spirit by Will Eisner, which just was me.” And I did. I sweated it out. Believe me, it was very difficult. magnificent.

I looked in magazines to see how girls moved, and how they But there were many, many others that all required the dressed, and how they looked. And then I looked at some of the knowledge of anatomy, and memory. Anatomy and memory. The women’s magazines and started copying really terrific artists like reason I don’t know anatomy is because I can’t remember the Stan Drake. After a while Stan Lee wanted me to take over sevmuscles. But even though I had taken a lot of courses in school eral Patsy Walker comic books. I guess I was getting better at it in figure drawing and all of that, anatomy was not something that as I went along, and eventually I felt very comfortable with it. was appealing to me. What was appealing to me was the emotional heart of a drawing, not the clinical, surgical-looking pos- DF: You’ve minimized, in your modesty, your talent in that area. turing of a muscled person. I was more interested in the funny I think it was more realistic than, say, the Archie stuff, wasn’t it? expressions, or the emotional expressions, emotional movement AJ: Patsy Walker? It was realistic. But it was also highly stylized, that told a story rather than just posturing like a clay figure. But and they wore a lot of clothes, so you can’t tell what the anatohumorous drawing was just not being bought by anybody. The my was like. But if I had to draw somebody in his underwear the [humor comic book feature] I remember was by Sheldon Mayer way Superman and Batman are—although, in all honesty, and I’m at DC. He was doing something called “Scribbly,” but he could not bragging when I say this, if I had to learn to draw a Supermanget away with that because he was the editor of the magazine it like feature, I would learn to do it. It’s just a matter of time. appeared in. There was practically no place to sell humor stuff until I met Stan Lee and he started producing what we called DF: Did you ever try to do any superheroes for Stan? “animated” comic books: comics based on animals, rabbits, pigs. AJ: No, but he once asked me to do a crime story, a Bonnie-andHe asked me to create a humor feature for Timely [later Marvel] Clyde-like crime story. And I did it, and I thought that it came Comics, and I created “Silly Seal,” and then we added Ziggy Pig out very successfully. So sometimes I even surprised myself. to it. They did a lot with those two. Later on, I went on to draw Maybe the innate ability is in there somewhere, but you just have “Super Rabbit,” and then I did teenage stuff. This is the kind of to feel motivated enough to want to do it. stuff I could write and I could draw.

DF: Did you have your first formal art training at The High School of Music and Art? DF: The teenage stuff was realistic. It had real anatomy, so you’ve done that.

AJ: Yes, I had four years of very, very fine training there.

AJ: When Stan came to me and said, “I want you to do a teenage comic for me, and we’ll call it ‘Jeanie,’” I said, “But, Stan, I draw DF: You had some well known classmates there, as well. rabbits and pigs and stuff like that. I don’t know how to draw AJ: Well, the ones that come to mind were Will Elder, who was pretty girls. I’ve never even tried it!” He said, “You can do it. I my best friend. I also knew Johnny Severin, Harvey Kurtzman. I want you to do it. Write a script and illustrate it, and bring it to didn’t know Al Feldstein. He is a number of years younger than

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Illustrations done for Al Jaffee’s biography, Al Jaffee’s Mad Life. The first depicts his father taking back custody of Al and his two brothers from his mother—who had taken them from their hometown of Savannah, Georgia to live in a stetl in Lithuania—thereby saving them from poor living conditions and the rise of Nazi Germany. The second shows the beginning of the friendship between Al and Will Elder. © AL JAFFEE.

I am. But there were a number of others who came out of Music and Art who went on to become pretty well known artists in other fields, not comic books, but magazine illustration, and so on.

DF: How did you end up at Music and Art? Were they teaching you art in junior high school, as well?

AJ: New York City junior high schools, at the time, did have classes in both music and art. They called it “music appreciation” and “art appreciation.” It wasn’t strictly for teaching you to draw.

It was similar to gym. When we went to gym, they weren’t teaching

Cover art for a collection of Al’s “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions.” © EC PUBLICATIONS.

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you how to become a baseball player or football player, but those who had talent eventually did become competent baseball players and football players. The rest became fat and pudgy. So when we went to art class, very few people in art class could draw, but the teacher wanted them to understand what art is, and we would be shown pictures by Michelangelo and Rembrandt and some modern artists’ work. And then you also had the freedom to create an assignment. For example, a teacher would say, “Draw a scene that appeals to you. It can be nothing more than a park and trees, or flowers, or a picture of your friend, or a cartoon.

Whatever you want.”

So, at one point, I was in a math class and a monitor came in and said, “You have to go up to the art classroom now.” And I went up to the art classroom, and there were about 50 kids there.

No one knew what it was all about, because the kids were pulled out of all kinds of classes, including gym and shop and whathave-you. And the teacher said, “You have a pencil and you have paper. Draw whatever comes into your mind.”

Well, the only thing I could think of drawing was a picture of the town square in a little town in Europe that I had lived in as a child for six years. And so I drew the scene with the horses and the church, all that kind of stuff, as well as I could. And then suddenly I looked over the shoulder of the little, skinny kid in front of me, and I saw that he was drawing the most beautiful portrait of what looked like a peasant of some sort. And, at the end of this class, the teacher collected all the papers and announced, “Everyone can leave except Al Jaffee and Will Elder.” Will was the kid sitting in front of me. Our names were slightly different at that time, but you can read my book [Al Jaffee’s Mad Life] and you’ll find out what they were.

We were called down to the principal’s office, and we sort of felt nervous about it, because usually that meant some kind of punishment. And while we were sitting there, this little kid, Willie Elder, says to me, in this thick Bronx accent, “You know, I tink they’re gonna send us to aht school.” And sure enough, the principal calls us in and says, “A new high school in music and art has been created by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, and you two have been chosen to go there.” This really was a seminal moment in both our lives. Willie, of course, went on to be one of the founders of Mad magazine with Harvey Kurtzman, and also did wonderful work in “Little Annie Fanny” and Humbug and Trump, and was a brilliant artist, and also a very fine painter, as a hobby.

I tried to keep up with Willie, and eventually followed him to Mad.

DF: Was there a philosophy or point of view about art that they imparted to you at Music and Art? AJ: Music and Art was primarily devoted to classical music and fine art.

I had classes, for example, in everything from wood engraving, to etching, to pastels, to oil painting, to watercoloring.

There were also classes in industrial design, which I didn’t take, but I did take a class in type design. So we got everything, and I really enjoyed all these classes. I learned things that I never dreamt I would ever know. But cartooning came to me very naturally, and I did a lot of cartoons for fun in class, which the other kids admired— but the teachers didn’t, and they would lean on you if you did that. I remember Willie Elder brought in a beautiful rendition of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and the teacher grabbed it out of his hands and said, “You’re not bringing this kind of stuff into this art school again!” But Willie learned a lot about fine art there, and so did I. I imagine that we might have had some luck becoming fine artists if comic books hadn’t come along.

DF: You alluded to your childhood in Lithuania. There were aspects of it that were fairly traumatic. Do you think that affected your art?

AJ: Art has kind of saved my life in many, many ways. I had a dysfunctional childhood. I was ripped out of my hometown in Savannah, Georgia, and Al’s “Mad Fold-In” for the back cover of Mad #186. transplanted into a little town in © EC PUBLICATIONS. Lithuania, and then I eventually was ripped out of Lithuania and brought back to America and plant- blackboard and drew a picture of Mickey Mouse. And there was ed in the Bronx. In each one of these cases, I was an alien. I still absolutely no reaction from the kids, even to Mickey Mouse. arrived in strange places with strange-speaking people, and cus- But quick-thinking Jack turned around, and—he’s one of the toms that I was not familiar with. And the only way I could ingra- fastest artists in the world—drew an absolutely perfect caricature tiate myself and become part of the gang in each—the little of the teacher, and the kids collapsed on the dirt floor, laughing gangs in Lithuania, the little gangs in the Bronx—was to draw hysterically. So that’s what I mean by universal language. There funny pictures. Being a cartoonist is almost like having a univer- are places where even Mickey Mouse and Superman are not known. But just the ability to make a drawing of something sal language. You can make friends anywhere in the world.

I remember, on one of the trips that Mad took us on, to funny, or of someone and make it look funny, gives you entree to Suriname, in South America, I went on a trip in a canoe with hordes of people. And this has been the story of my life. It’s [Mad publisher] Bill Gaines and a couple of other Mad men. We opened up a lot of doors for me. I could entertain my little friends shot the rapids, and everyone had a very exciting time. We and be part of their group very quickly instead of having to work arrived in a native village where people were living in the jungle my tail off doing it. So cartooning has been very good to me. the way their ancestors in Africa had been living for thousands of years. We were taken into a rudimentary classroom. There was a DF: You worked briefly for Will Eisner? teacher and a whole bunch of little kids who were dressed in AJ: Yes. Will Eisner was a hero to all of us aspiring cartoonists. I handmade clothes. It was very primitive. We were introduced by know that Joe Kubert eventually went to work for him, and so did the teacher and told that we’d come from a faraway country, but Jules Feiffer. Anybody who had any kind of talent wanted to be disthere was no real communication until Jack Davis went up to the covered by Will Eisner. I don’t know what inspired me to do it,

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A “Get-Mad Postcards” illustration for 1969’s Worst from Mad #4. © EC PUBLICATIONS.

because I certainly couldn’t draw anything that would resemble The Spirit. And all of Eisner’s work was by artists who could really draw the figure very well. He packaged Doll Man and Military Comics.

A friend of mine said, “Why don’t you go up and see Will Eisner?

The worst that can happen is he’ll throw you out.” So I created a feature called “Inferior Man,” and it was just a funny, silly takeoff on Superman. I guess I was a little bit ahead of my time, because eventually, when Harvey Kurtzman created Mad magazine, that’s the kind of thing that became very popular at that time. But nobody was interested in the kind of stuff that I was doing, like “Inferior Man.” But I took it up to him anyway, and he kind of liked it, and he said, “I’m going to hire you to do it as a filler in one of my comic books. It’ll be a one- or two-page filler.” And he paid me ten dollars a week to sit in his Tudor City apartment and draw.

DF: Feiffer later got a similar deal.

AJ: Yeah, Feiffer got that deal, too. And so did Alex Kotzky. By

the way, Alex Kotzky was a schoolmate of mine, and I got him his job with Eisner. It’s funny. He got me a job with Chad Grothkopf, and I felt exploited by Chad, so I went out freelancing, and I took along a page of Alex Kotzky’s work and showed it to Will Eisner, and Will Eisner hired Kotzky away from Chad Grothkopf. So it’s very funny how these crazy, circular things were happening, and none of us knew what was going on, really.

But, in retrospect, it was very exciting.

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DF: How long did you work for Will?

AJ: I was there only about, oh, I think under six months when he

passed me on to a guy by the name of Ed Cronin, who was packaging comics. But my entry into the Air Force was imminent at any moment, so it didn’t matter.

DF: Did you serve here, or overseas?

AJ: I served here, mostly in the Pentagon, as an artist. It was a

very good experience. It didn’t kill too many Nazis, but it did help in some little way, because I was with Dr. Howard Rusk, who at that time was Colonel Howard Rusk, who eventually created the Rusk Institute in New York, which is a world-famous rehabilitation center. My job for him was to create posters and pamphlets, all having to do with returning wounded servicemen, to try to get them to convalesce faster, because the nature of the program was, putting a wounded soldier in a hospital and letting him lie there very often made him worse than when he came in.

It’s very debilitating to just lie in a bed all day long. And the worst of it, of course, was something called “recidivism.” When the soldier was finally discharged from the hospital, he was sent back to his unit. His unit was full of extremely healthy guys who were jumping over fences and jumping out of airplanes with parachutes. These guys were so weak from two weeks in the hospital, and going right back into action put them right back in the hospital again. Howard Rusk’s theory was that, immediately after

(above) The Humbug crew. Al is the one sitting on the ladder in the back. (right) One of Al’s illustrations for Humbug #5. © RESPECTIVE OWNER.

arriving in the hospital, a man or woman should be exercising to whatever limited ability, at first, even if they just were lying in bed and lifting their arms up and down, and progressively get to the point where they were doing full calisthenics by the time they were released from the hospital so that they can rejoin their troops at the level that the troop is at, physically. And that was a very good program, and I designed a lot of pamphlets that projected the program.

DF: Any other artists we would have heard of who worked there,

as well?

AJ: I was the only one working in that division. There were lots of

artists in the Pentagon, and one of them was Will Eisner, and there were others in the various departments. Mine happened to be in the air surgeon’s office. This was the medical section of the Air Force.

And Will Eisner was in, I think, ordnance, maintaining equipment.

DF: So after the war, is that when you went to work for Timely and Stan Lee? AJ: When the war was over, you had to go through all the stuff that the military has where you go to be signed out. And a notice came through in my outfit that said, “Anyone who has an immediate job to go back to will receive early release. Just apply to the commandant.” So I wrote to Stan Lee and I said, “Do you have a job for me?”

DF: Did you know him from before?

AJ: I did. I said, “Stan, do you have a job for me? I’d love to come

to work for you.” And he said, “Yes, I do.” So I said, “Would you write a letter that I can show my commanding officer?” And he said he would, and he did. So I was released, and I came back to New York, and I got a job at Timely Comics in the Empire State Building, which eventually led to Stan Lee appointing me as an associate editor—before the entire staff was released.

DF: Now that was, as far as I know, the only time you had a staff

job, in editorial, and clearly you were good at it. How long did you work in editorial at Timely?

AJ: It was just maybe a year, a year-and-a-half.

DF: So you had a ten-year relationship, but mostly it was as a

freelancer?

AJ: Yes, it mostly was freelance.

DF: What made you leave the company?

AJ: The entire staff was released. The company got smart. They

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The “Mona Lisa.”

An illustrated adaptation of War and Peace.

A “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions” strip. © EC PUBLICATIONS.

were paying rent for lots of offices, and they realized that every one of us would be perfectly willing to do the same features that we were drawing on staff, at home. And they wouldn’t have to pay for health care and rent.

Will Eisner doesn’t count for much. Two months with Chad Grothkopf doesn’t count, and Ed Cronin, I think it was another two months. Mainly it was Stan Lee and Gaines.

DF: What was it that made you so compatible with Mad? It

DF: You never write for other people or draw for other people, do you? Everything you do is always written and drawn by you?

AJ: Yes.

wasn’t just that they hired you. You helped create that Mad sensibility and sustain it. What do you think happened when all you guys got together?

AJ: Humor and satire have always come easy for me, so I guess I just fit into Mad right from the get-go. And it was easy to think in creative terms when you have a market that is so receptive. I mean, that is really the crux of the matter. You’ve got a hungry market. The magazine is eating up material constantly, and is always on the lookout for a new angle, for something new. You don’t want to do the same thing over and over and over again, much the way syndicated comic strips do. I mean, Little Orphan Annie is Little Orphan Annie for 150 years. But, while Mad in the early days did repeat certain kinds of things, they were innovative. I mean, Frank Jacobs would write songs, or poetry, or nursery rhymes in one instance. In another instance it would be a UN meeting done in song and dance. So there was always variety. I also did a lot of things that involved inventions. It’s almost as if every one of them was titled, “Why don’t they have such-andsuch?” But I think the inventions covered enough areas to be new all the time. One might be about how to solve a big city parking problem. Another one might be about how to solve a big city doggie-doo problem. So if they were amusing enough, you can get away with doing series like that.

DF: By your choice, I assume.

AJ: Well, mainly because it was one way of creating work for

DF: You’re still doing the “Fold-Ins,” right?

AJ: I’m doing the “Fold-Ins.” I’ve done about 413 or 414 of

me. I’ve worked for so few people. Essentially, I really only worked for Stan Lee and Bill Gaines. Five or six months with

them. This spring, a two-volume set of the “Fold-Ins” will be coming out.

DF: But wouldn’t they need your editorial duties? Even if people

were drawing at home, you’d still need somebody to supervise things in-house.

AJ: Stan Lee gave me all these Patsy Walker books to do, and I edited them, and wrote them, and drew them, and handed them in for five years. And it worked out fine. Then they created a whole new staff. And I knew some of the people that they’d kept from before, but then they had all new people as well.

DF: So you never pursued an editorial job elsewhere?

AJ: No. DF: Were you happier as a freelance writer and artist?

AJ: Yeah. I just went with the flow, usually. I never even had to

look for work. People heard about me, and, for some reason, I would get work. Being a writer/artist had advantages. A lot of publishers had problems pairing up an artist with a writer who was compatible, and so on. But if they could hand the whole job to one guy, it made it easier. It solved their problems.

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“Mad Fold-In” for Mad Special #19. © EC PUBLICATIONS.

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AJ: Well, I think it would be ridiculous

for me to compare myself or Mad’s work to people like Mel Brooks and Sid Caesar.

DF: I think as many people know

“Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions” as know “The 2000 Year Old Man.” AJ: Maybe they do, but these people were my heroes, so it’s hard for me to compare anything I do to the work of my heroes.

THE ART OF THE GAG DF: When you write and draw something, is there a typical way you do it?

Obviously, it starts as an idea, but is it a note for yourself on the back of an envelope and then a series of sketches?

Writing first, art first? Simultaneously?

What’s a typical Al Jaffee strip development process.

AJ: I would say inspiration is first, and then writing, but I don’t really understand how it happens. Whatever business you’re in, subconsciously you are thinking about your business. And you could Another “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions” strip. be a bricklayer, and you may be going © EC PUBLICATIONS. out to a movie, but somewhere in the DF: A lot of people have said that Mad really influenced several back of your mind, if you have a problem in your bricklaying busigenerations of thinkers about comedy with its smartass attitude. ness, it’s festering there and you’re looking to solve that problem Do you think that’s true? Do you see Mad’s influence in TV and even though you don’t seem to be working on it then. When I movies, in other magazines? worked on my comic strip, Tall Tales, it was with me all the time.

AJ: When I first started watching Saturday Night Live, I started I wasn’t consciously sitting down and saying, “Hey, I’ve got to to sense that there was some influence there from Mad, because write a Tall Tales joke.” But I’d be walking down the street and the satires they were doing, in some instances, were—well, I I’d see something, I’d make a note. I’d look in a magazine, I’d see wouldn’t say they were similar because the printed page is one a cartoon about skiing, and I’d say, “Hmm, skiing, you know, I thing, standing up in front of a TV camera is another thing. And know another funny thing about the latitude for comedy on a large television show is so much skiing...” Then I would have a skiing thing that would be entirely greater than the latitude in a printed magazine. But the influence, different from the one that I was looking at. So, subconsciously, I think, is there, and I’ve even had people who are in the comedy if you are a freelance writer, the art part is the secondary part. business today personally tell me that they were influenced by Mad before they got into the business. Stephen Colbert told me DF: When you have an inspiration, do you first write down the that, and so did Jon Stewart. idea in words, or do you sketch an image?

AJ: Oh, absolutely write down the idea. For a recent project, a DF: Were you a fan of Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks’ comedy special card series, I wrote down 15 ideas before I even started routines, such as “The 2,000 Year Old Man”? drawing anything. There are rare thunderbolts, but they do occur.

AJ: How could you not be? I mean, they came out of The Show The inspiration comes from really just sitting down and fully of Shows with Sid Caesar, Carl Reiner, Imogene Coca, and immersing yourself in what you’re looking for. You look for a Howie Morris. They had a fabulous crew. Sid Caesar was a subject, and then you do themes and variations on it, and all of a comedic genius, physically. I’m not sure how much of a writer he sudden something pops out. In this particular thing with the was, I don’t know. But I know that his physical humor, his paro- cards, I had the gimmick, and it was just doing 15 original funny dies of Italian movies and things of that sort, were just brilliant. versions of— Mel Brooks was one of the writers on the show. But Mel Brooks earned his fame doing plenty of other stuff. His movies, Young DF: Oh! That’s all? Just 15 original funny versions? All right, Frankenstein, The Producers, they were just brilliant. nothing to it. For you.

AJ: They came very fast. Sometimes I have to stop because I DF: Do you see any common thread between their humor and only need 15 and I’m on to 22. Then, actually, I do have the Mad’s, and yours in particular? choice of going through and picking out the 15 real winners. And

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there may be another one are two that are real winners, but they have to be sacrificed. But you write down everything, because you never know, the second time around, how you’ll add a new, additional gag to it. So that’s pretty much the way I work.

Now, the things that come out of the blue, like the “FoldIn”—the “Fold-In” came out of the blue, but it was influenced by the fact that there were a lot of magazines doing fold-outs. And when magazines do foldouts, the natural thing for Mad to do was a fold-in. So that happened very easily.

Then I set to work on it. “Snappy Answers” came about in another fortuitous way, in which I was on a ladder and my kid asked me a stupid question. I gave him a very snappy answer.

DF: Read the book for the full-length version of that story, folks.

The process for Tall Tales, and the process for the “Fold-Ins,” and the process for “Snappy Answers”—are they all similar?

AJ: They’re similar to me. The example that I gave before about these cards that I was doing was a little bit different in that I hit upon the notion that I’m not going to try and do, for 15 cards, on spec, 15 monumental, prize-winning gags. I just want little bits of entertainment. So I came up with the gimmick of investing my caricature in each one of these situations and making the situation interesting and funny. So the ideas came very quickly.

The thing with doing a workmanlike job on anything, whether it’s writing gags—I remember writing a dozen gags for Playboy many years ago, which were the only cartoons I sold to Playboy. I just sat down and determined that I wanted to sell a bunch of cartoons to Playboy. I just put my mind into a Playboy frame of mind and sweated it out. And, little by little, something came. I don’t know how.

But Hefner bought straight gags, too. He had a great appreciation for good, funny stuff. I sold him a multi-panel gag in which there was a guy sitting on a barstool, and the bartender is mixing a drink, and pours it into a martini glass. The customer takes a sip, and he puts the glass down, and right before your eyes, in the next three panels, this guy shrinks up and curls up into a little wrinkled ball, and the bartender leans over and says, “Dry enough for you, sir?”

DF: You talked about the cards you were

doing, you say you were doing them on spec. Do you mean you’re going to shop them around?

AJ: No, no, no. It’s an assignment from my friend, and he’s trying to start a business with these cards. And, if it’s a successful business and they can go on doing it, then, eventually, maybe there will be some kind of money in it.

TOOLS OF THE TRADE DF: Let’s talk a bit about how you do the

art. Is there anything special about the tools you use? Anything that’s special or unique about the way you paint the “Fold-Ins”? Any Al Jaffee special techniques or advice?

AJ: Yes, it’s true that there’s a lot to be said about the kind of equipment people use and the way they work. We all work in different ways, and some have to do with our limitations, and some have to do with the changing styles. Now, in my own case, I started drawing with pen and ink. The holy water of the cartooning business was Higgins India ink. And everyone went around bragging about, “This new pen that I found, it’s a Gillotte #2648,” or whatever, and everyone rushed out to buy that pen, as if it would make a big difference. Then, when I went to work for Eisner, the Japanese brush became the fashion. Working with the brush after you’ve worked with a pen was a nightmare. I couldn’t learn how to DF: When you say “a Playboy state of mind,” were they a more sophisticated do it to save my soul. And then I apprenstyle of humor of than you might do for ticed to Chad Grothkopf, and he was a Mad? master with the brush, and he set a style of thick-and-thin which Stan Lee kind of AJ: I was thinking for Playboy in terms that it had to have some kind of sexual fell in love with, and everybody was content, and I looked at something and it doing thick-and-thin, which means with said “masquerade,” and then I thought, one stroke of your brush you went from A “Tall Tales” gag panel. © AL JAFFEE. “Masquerade. That’s a nice setting for a half a hairline to an eighth of an inch in sexual cartoon.” And what I came up with thickness. It would give the lines characis a pretty girl dressed as an Easter egg—don’t ask me how I figured ter, and it was very interesting for a period of time. It didn’t do out she should have a costume that looks like an Easter egg. And anything to tell a story of any kind, nor did it make the artwork there’s a guy standing there dressed as a chicken, and he says to appreciably better. But it was more “designy.” a friend, “I have a feeling I’m going to lay an egg tonight.”

I did all the Tall Tales, for six years, with a brush. I’d pencil DRAW! • SPRING 2011

53

Thumbnails and pencil sketch for the “Mad Fold-In” for Mad #506. © EC PUBLICATIONS.

it first, and then ink it with a brush. Then, later on, I discovered something called a Rapidograph, which was a pen that you could fill with ink, and you just keep drawing and drawing. You don’t have to dip. But it lacked character. You couldn’t do thick-andthin. You could only just do whatever thickness the nib was.

Then, later on, I tried other techniques where I used flexible pens and sometimes brushes. I tried everything. Then, when markers came out, I found that these worked very well for me.

DF: What kind of markers?

AJ: Sharpie markers. I have a variety of them. I just keep buying

them, and keep trying them. Some are better for certain purposes than others.

THE PROCESS DF: What techniques did you use for the illustrations in Mad Life?

AJ: I created a very flexible way to work. One of the terrors that

an artist faces, a commercial artist, or a cartoonist, is having to make corrections. For example, if you take out a sheet of drawing paper or illustration board, and you then work directly on the board, you have to have a pretty precise, exact picture in your mind of what you’re going to put on that page, because, once you put it down, you can’t just go in and erase a million times. You’ll take the surface off the paper, and also it starts to look like hell.

So that’s very intimidating, especially if it’s a complicated thing like, say, a scene with 25 people in it doing different things.

So, to solve that, one way is to do it on tracing paper and trace it onto the final board, and that works pretty well, but it does increase the amount of work you have to do. You’ve drawn it on tracing paper, now you’re drawing it again. What I discov54

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ered was that I could make my drawing on a tracing block—a pad of tracing paper. And I’m very loose with it. I’m not intimidated one bit. So I’ve drawn my 25 figures on it, and then I notice that one or two of them don’t look right. They’re a little too close, a little too far away, something. So first I take the sheet off and I spray the back of it with Spraymount repositional adhesive. And I put it down on a sheet, a firm board of some sort, a whiteboard.

And those two figures that I had that were out of place, I just take an Exacto knife, I cut them out, and I move them to where I want them. And I can move other things around, too.

DF: This is in pencil stage?

AJ: In pencil stage, on tracing paper. Now, when I’ve got the

whole thing arranged exactly the way I like, I take a piece of vellum—heavier tracing paper—and I lay that over the whole thing, and put it down with Scotch tape. And I ink directly on the vellum, right over the penciling. This works fine if you work in line only. I use markers. I found a package of markers made by Staedler. The markers come in 0.1, 0.3, 0.5, and 0.7. 0.1 is hairline. Four thicknesses. And they’re very good. Because sometimes you want the outline—for example, let’s say the trunk of a tree—a bit heavy, so you use a number three, and you want to draw lines for the bark, you use a number one. So you have a lot of choices. The only drawback is, you can’t do color with this technique because vellum won’t accept paint.

Now, the reason it worked very well for the book is because I was able to do 70 original drawings, and some of them were very complicated, full pages, you know, showing, say, the entire interior of the railroad station in Hamburg in the 1920s, and I was able to do this in the short amount of time I had, which was less

than six months. If I had to do it all in color, it would take me a couple of years.

So this was done in black-and-white, and I had a magician colorist use Photoshop on the computer, so the entire book is in color, but I drew it in black-and-white line.

DF: Who’s the colorist?

AJ: Ryan Flanders. He works for Mad,

and he is terrific. He had help from his friend Doug Thompson.

DF: You’re okay with inking on vellum? A

lot of people don’t like doing that.

AJ: I don’t like inking on vellum with a pen, because it slides too quickly. But the felt pen kind of grabs the vellum, and there’s no problem at all. I use a certain kind of vellum. I don’t use the really hard vellum.

The one I use is called Planprint, by Flax art supplies. It has a bit of a tooth to it, so it will accept the pen much better than hard vellum. You have to look for these things.

However, if you want to do it in color, and you want to use my inking method— and I have done this—I take the drawing on vellum and run it through my copy machine onto art paper. You can’t run cardboard through a copy machine, but single-ply Strathmore will go through very easily. I use kid finish. It has a tooth and works with watercolor, works with markers. But if you like to work on smooth Strathmore, I’m sure you can get it in one-ply, and you can use markers to do the color. Smooth illustration paper does not take watercolor too well, but it takes markers well.

DF: How do you paint the “Fold-In”?

AJ: The “Fold-In” is on very, very stiff

Thumbnails and pencil sketch for the “Mad Fold-In” for Mad #506.

three-ply Bainbridge. The reason I used Bainbridge, right from the beginning, is because the folded-in sections have to match. If you work on thin paper, humidity affects it, and it could stretch the wrong way, and then the thing goes to the printer and comes out in the magazine and it doesn’t match.

DF: Do you paint it with watercolor?

AJ: I use both watercolor and gouache. I don’t use anything else.

I have a set of what are called “Acryla,” which is acrylic gouache.

I use that in areas that I intend to redraw and paint over, because, like acrylic, it becomes plastic and you can work over it again, whereas it’s more difficult to work over anything that has a water base. I’m giving you the trade secrets of my life.

DF: Is that okay?

AJ: Sure. Share them with the world and add to its misery.

DF: These days, you work out the “Fold-Ins” on a computer, don’t you?

© EC PUBLICATIONS.

AJ: I never see the “Fold-In” until it appears in the magazine. At

Mad, they put it on the computer. I never see it on the computer. I measure it very, very carefully. I spend a lot of time on measurements. Before I put pencil to paper, I have drawn the whole thing out on tracing paper. I’ve drawn the finished image out, cut it in half, and moved it over, and then put another tracing paper over and filled in the middle part, and then made corrections on the two sides because things don’t look quite kosher. So there’s a lot of redrawing. When I’m finally satisfied that everything is in place on the tracing paper, then I put it down on the illustration board.

DF: When you do a “Snappy Answers” thing, when you say you write it first, do you literally type out a script, or do you fill in the words once you’ve drawn the image?

AJ: It’s changed through the years, but I’ll talk about the latest way it works. On sheets of paper, 8-1/2" x 11", I draw the art with a pencil. And then, on the right side, I put in all the answers.

DF: Then somebody letters it at the office?

DRAW! • SPRING 2011 55

(above) Pencils for a panel in a comic sequence in Al Jaffee’s Mad Life. (below) Inks for a full-page illustration in Al Jaffee’s Mad Life. © AL JAFFEE

AJ: No, it’s set in type. What they do is, they take my rough pencil

drawing, and I’ve got the question over on the left, and the three answers on the right. They set it up on the computer, and then they put the balloons in the way they’re going to actually appear, and they put all the type in, and then they give it back to me. Then I have to just do the drawing that matches my sketch.

DF: In case the readers haven’t figured it out from reading this interview, Al is well above 30. So the obvious question is, “Why are you still at it after all these years?” Aside from serving as an inspiration to everybody. And the other question, I know you have some shakiness in your hand. You hold one hand over the other to draw. What would you advise anybody who has a physical problem like that?

AJ: I think that the little bits of reinvention that I’ve had to do through the years for one reason or another pale in comparison to some of the things I have seen. I’ve seen people who, with very, very serious—I don’t know if the term “handicaps” is used anymore, but I’ve even seen, on television, people doing paintings holding a brush with their toes. Thalidomide people, who were born without arms at all, learned to write, and draw, and paint, and do all kinds of things with their feet. And so, comparing my slight tremor to that is almost totally unfair. I had trouble from the beginning, when I started drawing. I believe that I had the so-called “essential tremor” in childhood. My neurologist said yes, that’s true, that most people don’t realize it because it’s so slight when you’re young, that only when you get older does it get worse and worse and worse, and you notice it more.

DF: So you’ve given up that brain surgery hobby?

AJ: Yes. And never do self-brain surgery. But, seriously, the fact is,

everyone reinvents themselves. I mean, there’s a golfer, Ken Green, who lost one of his legs in an automobile accident, and he’s playing golf. There’s a runner in the Olympics, Oscar Pistorius, a doubleamputee, who’s running on springs, which the Olympic committee is arguing about, that it’s not fair to people with normal legs because he gets a boost out of it. I don’t really see a problem coming up, 56

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even if I live to be 110, because I’ll figure out a way to do it.

There’s always a way. You lose something one way, but you gain in another way.

DF: For a guy who had a traumatic childhood, that’s a remarkably positive attitude.

AJ: It’s very difficult to comment about yourself, because what you do is what you need to do. You look forward. Basically, if I’m getting down in the dumps at any time, I try to think of something coming up that’s going to be very enjoyable. Right now, I’m really looking forward to going to my summer place. For a while there I thought maybe we wouldn’t make it because of health problems that my wife and I thought we had. Well, we overcame those problems, and now I’m looking forward to that. So having something to look forward to all the time—and it doesn’t have to be something big like going on vacation. I mean, I can think of, for instance, a special place that I like to get a Danish and cup of coffee, and I can look forward to that. I give myself a time when I’m going to do it. I say, “I’m going to do that at 1:00 today.” And I go and do it, and I feel much better.

DF: Have you been that way since you were a kid?

AJ: Yeah. Always looking forward to something. And if I have

absolutely nothing to do, I start trying to think of a book I could write, something I could create, or a piece of furniture I could build, just to make something happen.

DF: Something I see in common in your peer group, one of the

things that you and people like Stan Lee and Jerry Robinson and

Irwin Hasen and Joe Simon all have in common, is that when you call them up, they go, “I can’t talk for long right now, I’ve got a deadline. Let me check my schedule.” It’s a rare and wonderful gift to have that kind of attitude. Always having something to do that people are waiting for.

AJ: I firmly believe that what has kept us going is that we don’t think in terms of, “It’s over.” Because it’s not over. I never expected to do 70 illustrations for a book this past year. Mad went from twelve issues a year down to four issues. And when I was told that it’s going down to four issues, I found out that I have a contract for a book. And it’s always been like that. There’s always something to come. And I believe that it’s because, if you have creativity in your brain, by osmosis it goes out into the world and reaches somebody who just needs you, and the next thing you know, you get a call. It’s happened to me so often that I can’t discount it.

DF: I can’t think of a better place to end this interview. Thanks so much for your time, Al. AJ: Thank you, Danny.

Danny Fingeroth is Sr. V.P. of Education at New York’s Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA). He was the longtime editor of Marvel’s Spider-Man line. Danny created and edited Write Now! magazine for TwoMorrrows, and is co-editor, with Roy Thomas, of the company’s upcoming (and amazing) book, The Stan Lee Universe. He’s the author of Superman on the Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us About Ourselves and Our Society and other books on comics. You can reach him at: Danfinger@aol.com.

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TwoMorrows publications should only be downloaded at

www.twomorrows.com DRAW! • SPRING 2011

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S

alutations to all and sundry! I am Jamar Nicholas, and it is a pleasure to introduce myself as the newest Crusty Critic for this illustrious magazine.

Much in the vein of British doctors who travel around in police boxes, the face of the Critic has changed, but our title and mission is still the same: To bring forth knowledge and understanding about the one thing every artist must have: art supplies!

So please look to me to give you secret tips, news, reviews and insights on the way of the Tool. I hope you enjoy it as much as I will.

For my inaugural article, I will focus on the elusive art instrument known as the brush pen. For as long as I have been cartooning, every artist worth their salt has tried to explain the use of learning the traditional brush to ink comic work. Most artists that I have come into contact with have at one point been apprehensive about learning to use one. I have to state for the record that it’s imperative that you educate yourself in the Way of the Brush. You can’t dodge the Brush!

called Jetpens (www.jetpens.com) where they have an enormous selection of Japanese art supplies. Their stock ranges from office supplies like erasers and paper, to varying pens, pencils and markers at reasonable price points. I have been hoarding pens from this store for a while, and for this Critical Critique, Jetpens.com was gracious enough to send some brush pens my way. I have mixed some pens that I have personally bought, along with their samples.

I have to say that I’m at a small disadvantage, as the packaging for most of the pens featured here are in another language, so I’m going off of my invoices from the company and cross-referencing the products on their site to name the pens. The jetpens.com site is very easy to navigate with clear, precise images of the products.

Outline Brushpen

BUT WAIT . . .

The brush pen has come a long way in a short time. A quick definition: This tool is a synthetic tipped instrument with an ink reservoir or cartridge that holds ink and performs much like a traditional brush without the mess and the dipping—oh, the dipping!

That is a huge plus for using such a tool for your comic work—less cleanup, no spilled jars of ink on your drafting table, and you can put a cap on it and put it in your pocket. No muss, no fuss. But they’re not perfect; they run out of ink, and you need to throw them out. That is something a traditional brush doesn’t do. You can also get a million different brush strokes out of a traditional brush. Some brush pens have a limited range of line.

I have yet to find a brush pen that beats a real brush, but some of these come close.

I was lucky enough to get turned onto this great online store 58

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This brush pen didn’t have the juice to satisfy this critic: The synthetic bristles kept a solid point, but either the pen I got was drying out, or it just didn’t stand up to the other pens I received. This pen gave very spotty lines, not being able to withstand a lot of changes in direction and left me with “dry spots” during a thickthin line test. Probably good for a drybrush-effect, but not much else. The only thing going for this guy is the fact that it’s easy to find in your pile of art supplies because it’s long, slender, silver and has a scalloped cap. But as this critic can attest, looks aren’t everything.

— Almost unusable

Uni-Ball Double Sided Pocket Brush Pen — Fine & Medium I’ll say this: the Uni-Ball pen, blue with a baseball-bat like design, has a felt-like thick brush, and a small, hard-tipped brush on the other end. This pen doesn’t have the longevity to last more than one page of comic art, and the line stuttered across my art page, not leaving this critic with a good feeling in his stomach. It gets an extra beret for having two tips, but in the long run, I’d rather buy a pen with one tip, more ink, and a better shelf life.

With two ends, you’re literally burning the candle at . . . you get where I’m going with this. Not so great.

— Started off strong but expected more.

Forgettable experience.

Zebra Disposable Brush Sign Pen — Fine The Zebra brand pen was a welcome change that had a great “snap” to the hard-tipped brush and delivered satisfying blacks and smooth, nice curves. But like the Pilot before it, it just doesn’t last. This could be a great pen if you bought a bunch of them at a time, but the frustration may not be worth the price point or effort.

Tombow Kuretake Fudegokochi Brush Pen — Super Fine

The Tombow brand is known in the United States. You may be familiar with those long, skinny, double-sided colored brushpens that you can find in any art supply store—they’re great! The black markers aren’t. But these brush pens that are under review are made to take punishment, and garner the top pick of the article.

This tool has an edge which isn’t so much a brush, more like a tiny, tough fiber nib which would be described as a “hard” brush. The ink is lush, wet, and dark, and it makes great cuts and may be a little thin for some, but I enjoy making lines with it. It reminds me of a Hunt 108 crow quill nib, a great nib where you can get some amazing things to happen. One big problem is that it’s disposable, which means you’re going to have to order a few of these if you’re trying to handle a lot of pages of work with them. Also it may fray on you if you’re not careful, but that’s easy enough to fix.

— Great find! Top choice.

— Promising, but needs to last longer.

Pentel Brushpen, soft with extra ink cartridges and WWF Panda I remember when your trusty critic was just forming his crusty exterior and first discovered Japanese supplies, I bought one of those Kuratake brushpens that set me back around $30, and bought little packets of ink cartridges and cleaning oils, then summarily lost the thing. When I found it, it was dried out and the oil just made the brush oily. The brush’s tip split, and I never got it to flow ink again. I swore off that pen for decades, thinking I’d never return. This pen reminds me of that nightmare, but with different results. The brush pen that I reviewed is packaged for the Japanese market. On a visit to one of my local art supply shops, I saw the same pen but with Pentel branding— same pen, so if you see one of these in the wild, don’t get confused.

After fussing with trying to load the cartridge into the pen, I found my tests to prove a few things: The “soft” synthetic brush doesn’t have the snap you’d want from a tool like this, and it can’t handle quick linework. If you push the pen to do slow, labored strokes it’s fine, but if you attempt to lay down speedy, precise lines, the pen can’t keep up, plus the ink cartridges don’t provide the deepest blacks—it looks like a sad, dark gray. It’s great that you have extra cartridges, but this critic expected a little more.

— Nice package, extra cartridges make it worth the purchase.

Tombow Fudenosuke Brush Pen — Hard — Blue Body

I spent a lot of time with this tool as I burned through the back end of a project and was sad when I ran out, which led me to buy a ton of them “just in case,” as I really enjoyed working with it.

The barrel of the pen has a nice rubber feel to the plastic, making it easy to use for long periods of time. It’s a tool that seems to get better as you break it in, along with crisp lines and a decent black ink—an enjoyable pen, all around.

— Enjoyable experience.

Pick some up. Wish this wasn’t disposable.

All in all, the Crusty Critic advises you to pick up several different brush pens and find what works best for you. The prices of most of these pens are affordable—the most expensive pen is under twenty dollars, so you can grab a few different kinds and not feel too much of a pinch.

I fully recommend jetpens.com for your one-stop shopping of brush pens and other supplies. I’ll see you here next issue where I’ll dissect another weapon in the artist’s arsenal!

Until then, Stay Crusty!

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by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY

n recent years in my role as a teacher, I have come to focus on a series of issues that the young artist faces in developing their own vocabulary on their way to becoming a mature artist in command of their skills and medium of choice. Just this evening as I write this article, one of my former students sent me his work, asking for some help with how to solve a storytelling problem. What both Bret and I hope to demonstrate in this article are the same principles I used with my student to help him solve his problem and make his story clear, interesting, and emotionally involving—what I have come to call the building blocks of Emotional Storytelling.

I

As storytellers, taking a script and transforming it into a narrative or story is not an easy task. It’s hard work to cast a spell over today’s readers, who are really quite sophisticated and easily bored, as well. As visual artists, we work in a world that is just blasted by visual images from every device and platform possible. I think one of the chief questions we face as modern storytellers is: “How do we tell an interesting story that will cut through the ‘chatter’ and grab the imaginations of the readers?” Our success in weaving that magic spell over the viewer or reader— who takes our lines, shapes, colors, balloons, and panels and creates in their mind an exciting comic—lies in our ability to manipulate them visually into having the emotional response we as storytellers desire. That’s right; outright manipulate them, just as a magician does.

Our first and most important tool in 60

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our magic kit is design: arrangement of the elements within a design (panel, meta-panel or comic page).

By careful thought—and often trial and error through sketches, thumbnails, and layouts—we create work, images that communicate specific moods, feeling, action, and emotions in the mind of the reader, when and where we want it. I didn’t write, “eye,” as the mind is the chief instrument here; it interprets what the eye sees, not the other way around.

The success of a story on an emotional level in a comic is build on the emotional design in the panels and all of the great cartoonists did this—no manner of rendering or flashy drawing will overcome bad design. This is one of the most important lessons to learn as a cartoonist or visual storyteller, and it’s one you can improve on for the rest of your life, the possibilities are endless.

Let’s start with something simple: two basic examples of drawings or comic panels which give the reader a specific feeling and how that feeling can be changed greatly by just a few adjustments.

Here is another example, a person sitting at a tree. If we place the elements in the middle we get one kind of emotional feeling. Symmetrical compositions tend to give a feeling of harmony or stability, even calmness.

First we see a lone rider on the horizon, the sky dominating the composition. Now let’s take that same drawing and reverse some of the elements in the design.

However, if we shift the tree and person to the left, look at how this composition creates a question because of the dominance of the negative space.

Clearly the second composition has a very different emotional feeling than the first. If you asked yourself what emotion each drawing created, what would they be? Isolation, fear, danger, tranquillity? This goes to the emotional heart of the reader, and what you want them to feel. This has to be a conscious and informed decision on your part as the storyteller or you might end up creating a drawing that has either the wrong or an unclear emotional note in the story. Often the trip-up in this issue comes from an artist’s personality. We are all seduced as artists by different things, and many artists, especially younger artists, are seduced by craft, by finish, or by the cool shot—the awesome detailed drawing or bit of cleverness.

It’s easy to understand. Who doesn’t like good drawing? And most people like flashy drawing. But the good storyteller will not choose flashy drawing at the expense of the design of a panel or the emotional need of the story. The great storytellers combine both!

And if we shift the tree over to the other side, we create a slightly different mood and emotional feeling in the viewer.

What emotions does each composition create? Are you aware of them and are you choosing to arrange the elements in the composition to give the reader a specific emotion? This, my friends, is really the heart of it. Are you aware and in control, or are you flying by the seat of your pants?

Think for a moment. We have all read a lot of comics by now, some of us literally thousands of issues and stories. Now think about the ones that come to your mind the most. Why do they DRAW! • SPRING 2011

61

stand out? I think it’s because they carved an emotional grove in our memory as much as a visual one. We remember key panels or pages, and those have left an emotional groove in our memory.

For training purposes what I suggest is to go find some of those favorite comic issues and do some dissection of them. Find that key scene or panel and take it apart, break it down, and study the compositions. How was that panel or page designed, and why do you think the artist was so successful in creating, along with the writer, such a strong comic? By studying the formal aspects of the work of the great artists before us, we can learn from them—as they learned from their heroes. It is your charge to do this, to take from the greats their secrets, which they have left here for us to learn from.

Effective emotional storytelling arises from choices that convey sensations to your audience: reader, listener, or viewer, and all the senses can be invoked visually—sight obviously, but also sound, touch, scent, and taste. An image of rotting, moldy food or a bloody knife evokes unpleasant associations of scent, taste, and touch. A pleasing image of delicious fruit or flowers will strike a pleasant chord. A convincing image of someone screaming in pain evokes memory of disturbing sounds. A delighted, laughing child or water flowing over rocks will suggest appealing sound. All of our physical experience can be suggested by powerful visual representation, and as a visual storyteller these are the means of affecting your audience.

In specific technical terms this means a combination of two elements: your CHOICE of content/subject matter, and HOW it is presented in the language of visual art—composition, emphasis, and treatment (technique and style).

The first element of CHOICE seems obvious, but it is no small accomplishment to consistently choose the best focus and content for any given scene or image. Most people feel confident they can explain themselves clearly in a succinct manner, but they are often wrong. Clear communication of complex information requires consideration and careful arrangement, and most of us are too constantly busy or distracted to prepare all our thoughts for utmost clarity. In the give and take of conversation, confusion can eventually be cleared away, but as a visual storyteller for a phantom audience, clarity is essential, and many of the common errors found in poor storytelling are a result of the 62

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artist assuming that the initial choice they’ve made is clear and effective, without realizing that further thought would improve both the clarity and the impact of their work. To create fine storytelling you must acknowledge the difficulty of the task and respect the effort it demands—telling a story well is not as easy to accomplish as it appears to be from the other side—enjoying it as a reader/viewer in its carefully constructed final form.

The second element of HOW information is presented becomes much less concrete than choice of content, much more open to an endless variety of approach, accent, and stylistic treatment. This is why we all have favorite creators that we prefer to others who may possess equal or even greater talent. Some quality or characteristic of their expression has a particular, more affecting appeal or resonance with our own sensibilities and personality. Content may be the initial attraction to a work or artist, but it is HOW they communicate the content that grabs us and forms our preferences. Craftsmanship can be parsed into its technical components and easily studied, but the mysterious cumulative effects of tone, mood, and the distinct atmosphere of a creator’s personal approach is the gestalt that excites and intrigues us.

Here we run up against the difficulty of trying to explain something that is largely intuitive and subconscious. The choices any authentic creator makes are the result of a lifetime of experience, much of it unconscious. Another unquantifiable element we might invoke here is the concept of taste—personal taste, good taste, poor taste, these are concepts that cannot be narrowed to a fixed set of definitions, but we all have an opinion on where a particular artwork ranks in our particular standards of good or bad. This illustrates the difficulties of discussing the subject of emotional storytelling. No two sets of criteria are identical, and it’s possible for an intelligent viewer to admire or respect work that he or she doesn’t enjoy, or even like. Talent and quality may be obvious, but the character of the work does not necessarily appeal to each individual’s taste.

Thus it is impossible to declare unequivocally that my preferences are always “right.” I can only describe why the examples presented here have a certain affect on me. I can also safely say that the principles underlying the construction of these images are fundamental to most visual communication throughout the world, because their basic tenets arise from common physical experience and emotional empathy, as we shall see...

I’ll explain one very basic and simple example of “shape communication,” but there are many and are easily recognizable once you know what you are looking for. Fig. A is the most common shape for a tombstone around the world—you won’t see the starburst grave marker, fig. B, anywhere that I know of. The reason is found in our own body language. Death is sad, and sadness is felt and shown in the body by a drooping, heavy, downward pull. The typical tombstone shape resembles the silhouette formed by stooped shoulders of a human frame with the chin on the chest. The starburst shape suggests exuberance, an opening out of life, energy flying out from a center, and is inappropriate for expressing the typical attitude toward death. Most trees grow up and out, spreading their branches skyward, but the Weeping Willow is so named because its dropping branches suggest sadness and falling tears.

This is one simple visual motif—most are obvious. Horizontal shapes and lines suggest vastness, quiet, calm. Vertical shapes and lines suggest height, aspiration, and strength. A pyramid suggests great weight, stability, solidity; an inverted pyramid suggests instability, danger, and unpredictability. Straight lines are static, curved lines are rhythmic, and so on...

Note how effectively Frazetta uses the “tombstone” shape to suggest anguish and sadness in this mourning scene. The main grieving figure is arched over, and everything about him is dropping downward. The placement of the three buzzards repeats the shape, reinforcing the effect.

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In this powerful Howard Pyle painting, the sense of isolation, fear, and loneliness is palpable.

The strong horizontals and vast space dominating and minimizing the arched figure create a vivid sense of despair.

In this horrifying scene of terror, death, loss, and pain, Repin has again used the “tombstone” motif as his basic overall shape in composing the two figures, but has intensified it by the powerful expression of the old man’s face, the gesture of his desperate arms, and his dying son’s vacant eyes and weakening grip. The son’s entire figure is slumping, un-animated, collapsing of its own weight, adding to the effect. These choices of pose may seem obvious after the fact, but this picture is famous because of the brilliant power of Repin’s thinking and skill. His draughtsmanship and acting ability empower his innate human empathy and elevate his well conceived composition into a masterpiece of emotional storytelling.

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A different psychological power is conveyed in the self portrait by Egon Sheile. His haunted, disturbed personality is expressed by nervous, wiry, jabbing, desperate, almost painful lines and strokes—as if the drawing were cut and beaten into the paper. The brushstrokes resemble blood smears and dirt stains more than rendering marks. The exaggerated features are more akin to caricature than representation, but their emotional power is undeniable. No conventional realistic portrait could convey the frantic neuroses of this savage drawing. This is emotional storytelling of dramatically heightened intensity, carefully contrived by the artistic devices we’ve been discussing. You can see by the photograph that Sheile actually looked quite ordinary—far from a leering psychotic.

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On this page I used the simple device of moving gradually closer to the madman in the cell as he rants—ending on a lurid close-up of his wild face contorted by insanity. The exaggerated acting; the impossibly huge mouth; the crazed, staring eyes; the exploding, spiky hair all add to the frenzied impression of his twisted mind.

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These pages from a New Mutants sequence show the bizarre behavior of the alien Warlock (who has no understanding of death), as he retrieves his friend’s corpse from a casket and crudely reanimates him in a misguided attempt to return him to life. I composed each panel with a clear concept of what I wanted to show and why it was included. I tried to use any device I could think of to clearly convey the emotions of each character at each stage in the unfolding events. I also set up the shots to favor the character who is feeling the strongest emotion at that moment, and used facial expression and body language to “act” each part. It was a challenge to capture the morbid, zany mood of the events without making them repulsive or too absurd—and this was mostly accomplished by the serious reactions of the characters. The reader will hopefully identify with their emotions and “believe” in the events depicted.

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Starman parts from his beloved wife to meet a threat they both know he will not survive. Here my task was to underscore and enhance the dialogue between these two people whose passion and love for each other conflict with duty. The compositions are straightforward, the viewpoint is eye-level throughout, broken by only one down-shot to emphasis their physical and emotional separation for a beat. All the storytelling here is carried by acting, with just enough shot/“camera” variation to eliminate monotony. Again each panel favors the character who is feeling the strongest emotion, or who is conveying important information.

See you next time, Mike and Bret

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WALTER SIMONSON INTERVIEW CONTINUES FROM PAGE 21

Varangian guard back in the old days, or whatever, but there’s no Viking art that I know of, so I don’t know how the Vikings would have drawn. But the Normans in Normandy were Viking descendants, and, after the Battle of Hastings in 1066, a great tapestry was made that was, really, a comic. It was the story of William the Conqueror’s successful invasion and taking over of England.

It’s called the Bayeux Tapestry, and it’s about 200 feet long. I think the one end is not finished or has been destroyed, but most of it’s there. It’s very cool. You have these Viking ships sailing across to England and all this very abstract weaving into the tapestry. So, for the comic book, in the section of the story where the Viking tells his pal his tale of how he got to Japan, which starts off in Scandinavia, I drew that section of the comic as if I were drawing the Bayeux Tapestry. So I drew it in this very flat style, and it changed some as the story went along. You’ll never be able to tell this in the comic, but in the first part of this series of pictures of his tale, it’s all inked with a pen, and then, as you get to the Japan, I switch over to inking with the brush. You’ll never see a difference, really, but the waves go from being these rolling, Viking tapestry waves to being Hokusai waves. Just stuff like that. You’ve got to amuse yourself, or why are you bothering?

TOOLS AND TECH DRAW!: You seemed to be, at least in the beginning, more of a

pen inker, but I would say, over the last several years, it looks like you use more brush than you used to.

WS: Well, somewhere in the mid-’90s—I’d been doing comics at that point for about 25 years—I thought, “I have got to learn how to use a brush.” So I began doing brush mostly for covers. I use it for insides some. I do more brush than I did, and I’ve gotten to like it and enjoy it. The funny thing about that, for me, when you’re a kid and you’re trying to draw comics, and you’re starting off doing your own inking, at least in my case, I started out using technical pens, and that’s because the technical pen has the most similar feel to pencil. It feels like I’m writing with a pencil in some ways. And yet, of course, the line is as far away from pencil as you can get. There’s very little sensitivity, no tonal variations. But it’s not an alien feel.

The brush, which is as far from penciling as you can get, as far as the feel—you’ve got to be light in your hand, and you’ve got to control the direction of the point, and all sorts of stuff. It’s nothing like a pencil. And yet, for me, the line that you leave behind with a brush is as close to a translation of the pencil line as you can get. More so than a pen, the brush is more forgiving, and it does have a value to it in terms of line thickness and grace that even good penwork doesn’t usually quite pick up to that degree. There’s a subtlety about it that even good pen work doesn’t quite grab. So why I say it’s funny to me, the brush is as close to pencil as you can get in terms of the transliteration from one medium to the other, but it’s about as far from pencil as you can get in the way it actually feels, and what you have to do with it.

DRAW!: What kind of pen do you like to use?

WS: I’ve been using a Hunt #102 crow quill since the dawn of

time. Actually, since I discovered crow quills. My earliest fan stuff—I say “fan,” it wasn’t printed, but I just did some work when I was young—high school age and probably college age— where I began drawing little bits of continuity inspired by comics I was reading: the Kirby stuff and Gene Colan and Steve Ditko.

And so I would draw a couple of pages, or maybe three or four pages. The very first thing I drew was inked with a Pentel, of all things. That’s what was available; I’d never seen a dip pen.

DRAW!: Hey, it worked for Gil Kane. [laughs] WS: Well, it worked for Gil. It worked for Alex Toth, I’ll tell you.

Pin-up piece for Green Lantern Gallery #1.

STAR SAPPHIRE ™ AND © DC COMICS.

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But somewhere in there I began using technical pens to ink stuff with. It was a whole bunch of pages about Thor that I inked with a technical pen. I used a Rapidograph—everything from, I think it was 3x0, useless. But they were 2x0 up to about a 4x0. And the funny part about that stuff is that—I would have been about 22 at the time. I was just in art school—maybe 23 by then. I hadn’t really had any art training. I was going to art school, but you weren’t doing a lot of black-&-white drawing, so you learned a lot while you were there, but a lot of it by osmosis. And so this early Thor stuff, which is not professional, I was doing for fun— I knew nothing about whiteout. Or about brushes, or about dip pens. So I did, like, 25, 30 pages of stuff that is all technical pen.

I tried to imitate what I know now is a brush line, or a pen line, even, where it’s thick in the middle and thinner at the end. I tried to imitate by drawing over the lines several times to get that vari-

(above) A page from Walter’s Thor story done while in art school at the Rhode Island School of Design, inked with Rapidograph technical pens. (right) The cover of Thor #346 from Walter’s second run on the title, where he was writer, penciler, and inker.

ODIN, THOR ™ AND © MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

ation in thickness using a Rapidograph pen. And I got, of course, to Asgard and had all these star fields. For the star fields I would use a 4x0 or thereabouts to make a circle in the sky, and I would ink all around it using a 4x0. I would draw in the blacks using a 4x0 Rapidograph.

DRAW!: Oh, my God. WS: I didn’t know anything about it. I was crazy. So, eventually,

I kind of ran out of gas on it. I thought, “I’m going to come back to this story when I learn how to ink better.” And then, 14 years later I started doing Thor in 1983 for Marvel as a writer/artist, and I went back to that story and did it the right way.

DRAW!: So you’re saying you basically haven’t really altered your technical approach as far as inking, or pens, or brushes, or anything?

WS: Well, I still use a #102. I still like them. I’ve got a bunch of them in the drawer. I’ll use them as long as they last. I’ve got a lot of them, so they should last as long as necessary. The only thing about brushes, for me, I tried a little brushwork early on and was not very successful. For some reason, Winsor & Newton brushes did not work very well for me, or I was not able to work

with them. I mean, they were the sine qua non of brushes back in the ’40s and ’50s—all the artists used to swear by them—but, by the time I was trying them in the ’70s, I didn’t care for them.

They didn’t work right. I couldn’t get a good line out of them. I didn’t have any training, I didn’t ask any of the older artists to help me out, I just tried using them, and didn’t get lines I liked, and it just didn’t work. I just wasn’t able to get stuff out of them I thought was worth doing. I did much better penwork, so I stayed with a pen. And then, in the mid-’90s, I guess, thanks to a friend of mine, I discovered Raphael brushes. And suddenly I was able to ink with a brush as I had never inked before. So, in that case, I think the tool made a big difference. I’ve used Raphael brushes ever since. Whenever I do ink with a brush, that’s what I use.

DRAW!: Are you using a #3 or a #4?

WS: I use an 8404, generally either a #2 or a #3. The Winsor &

Newtons were series 7 #2 and #3, and the 8404 from Raphael, the #2s and #3s, are about the same size as those. And they’re comfortable sizes for me.

DRAW!: When you were doing the Elric stuff, I know you were

working, what, twice up?

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(above) Structure drawing for page 46 of Elric #1. (next page) The full, finished page 46 for Elric #1.

ELRIC ™ AND © MICHAEL MOORCOCk.

WS: Yeah, I was. I realized I was going to make some money out of it, so I thought I’d better work and still do something that’s going to keep me from getting done too fast. Partly Michael Moorcock, who wrote the story—and there’s a lot of stuff in the story—and I wanted the chance to put in as much stuff as I could, and I thought that would be a way of achieving it. I did four 48page comics. As it is, I believe I put in tons of stuff, it looks like, and I could easily have done each one of those comics as 96 pages. There wouldn’t have been a lot more story, I wasn’t cutting out story from the material, but there were a lot of visuals and a lot of inspirational things that I would love to have included and just wasn’t able to. But it was great, it was a lot of fun.

And, yeah, the pages are enormous. At least by comparison to the modern stuff. It’s kind of funny, when I pull them out, I look at them and go, “Oh my God, I can’t believe it’s this big.”

DRAW!: Would you like to work that big again?

WS: I would, but from an economic point of view, I probably

can’t. If I hit the lottery, I’ll work that big for the rest of my life.

Well, maybe I wouldn’t, anyway. It was fun. There are some things I was able to do at that scale that I would not have been able to do very well smaller. I just enjoyed doing it. I don’t know that I’m wedded to the idea, “I have to do this again or not do this again,” but it was fun to do, and, you know, if I had some project that I was going to do where I thought that would make a difference...

Mostly I try to derive my approach from whatever the job’s going to be. A simple example of that would be when I was doing Thor, I did kind of a rough inking, because of all that Viking stuff: fur and rough wood and mead halls and that kind of thing.

On the Fantastic Four I tried to use thinner lines, almost icy, almost technological. That’s the book where I finally had to ink a straight line with a ruler, which I was never able to do before.

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brush while I was doing the FF, so I have a lot of hard-edged lines in that strip. In the case of Thor, I felt the strip looked back to a mythical past. In the case of Fantastic Four, it looked forward to sort of an optimistic, technological future, and I wanted the art, to some extent, to reflect that.

DRAW!: And what are you working on now?

WS: I’m doing a long graphic novel for DC. It’s 96 pages long.

I haven’t said much about it yet. I’m not going to now. I’ve got a ways to go, so it won’t be coming out until probably late next year at the earliest, and I’d rather not say very much about it before I get more of it done. A lot of it’s done, but I’ve got some ways to go.

DRAW!: So you’re not doing anything else besides that right

now?

WS: You know, the odd job. Actually, I’ve had several weird jobs, or odd jobs, come around, that I’ve done here and there. I’m at the point now where I’m not going to do any of those anymore until I really get this job finished. But I did, for example, something for DC Legacies that Len Wein is writing. Every two issues are drawn by one artist. There are ten issues in the series, and there are two issues by this guy, two issues by this guy. Adam Kubert did two issues inked by his dad. J.G. Jones. But then they have back-up stories in at least some of them, little eight-pagers.

I know Dave Gibbons did one, and they asked if I would do one.

Each of the back-ups is a different facet of the DCU, basically.

The whole book is kind of a tip of the hat of DC’s 75th anniversary. The story I was asked to do was a story that involved the ’50s DC space characters, and those are the guys that I read as a kid. So it was Adam Strange, Tommy Tomorrow, the Space Ranger, his little alien pal Cryll, and Captain Comet. I never saw “Captain Comet,” but the other guys I knew from back then, and I enjoyed their stories a lot when I was a kid. It was an eight-page story that I penciled and inked. Allen Passalaqua colored it. He did a very nice job. A modern guy. It was very cool.

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Structure drawings for Walter’s back-up story for the DC Legacies mini-series.

ALL CHARACTERS ™ AND © DC COMICS.

DRAW!: The last time I saw you I think you were working on

Winter Men, I think?

WS: No, Winter Men was John Paul Leon, one of my former students. Brett Lewis wrote it, another former student, and I’m very proud of both of them. I was probably on a panel with John Paul, he probably had pages there. I was probably saying something along the lines of, “Gee, I wish I had drawn those pages.”

TEACHING DRAW!: [laughs] How long have you been teaching?

WS: I’ve taught in three stretches at the School of Visual Arts.

The first time I taught, I was there for six years. I taught from about ’92 to ’98, something like that. Then I went back, 2001, 2002, for three more years. I’ve taught nine years altogether, and this year they got me to come back again, although this time I’m teaching two one-semester courses and one two-semester course.

I’ll see how that works out. But I’m back to teaching again, and I teach a course in graphic novels. I used to call it Graphic Novel for Cartoonists. I’m not sure what the hell it’s called now, the new one I’m doing right now. But, basically, I’m trying to teach storytelling. I’m trying to have the students write and draw their own story and try to figure out how to do a story with pictures and make it work. So, in many ways, it’s almost a portfolio class.

It’s like a critiquing class, where they bring in their pages and I tape them to the walls and give them a hard time.

DRAW!: [laughs] I wish I could have had that experience. I just

had a hard time. [laughs] WS: Well, I don’t know if it helps these guys or not. You’ll have

to ask them when they’re done.

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DRAW!: I’ve been teaching about eight years, myself, now.

When you’re teaching, I’ve found, for myself, it’s sort of a reaffirmation of things that you know when you help somebody else solve their problem.

WS: It’s fun. It’s neat. There’s so much subjective stuff when talking about how to make a comic. I mean, it’s nice because they have several teachers now that are in cartooning and comics.

There were fewer back when I first started in the early ’90s. But Klaus Janson has been there forever. Klaus has been teaching a long time, and Klaus is hugely organized, which I am not. So with Klaus they get a syllabus and they get a lot of stuff about the tools to do stories with, and then my class is kind of free-form. I think it kind of complements what Klaus is doing, or maybe he complements what I’m doing, but I think they usually get his course before they get mine. But pretty much we start with blank sheets of paper, and then I try to get them to figure out how to put lines down on the paper that will eventually tell a story. And I’m not sure if it’s any more complex than that. I’m not sure it’s any simpler than that.

DRAW!: Have you noticed any difference in, let’s say, the kinds of stories that people were telling in the beginning, when you started teaching, versus now? Do you notice a change in the student body at all?

WS: Well, the only big change, I guess, when I taught in the early ’90s, a lot of the kids wanted to do really alternative comics. I had a couple of guys that were mainstream superhero, but a lot of them wanted to do alternative comics, independent comics. And then, in the early 2000s, I got kind of a mix: superhero, a lot of alternative, and some manga. I hadn’t seen any manga-influenced material

A commission drawing of Marvel’s cosmic villain, Thanos.

THANOS ™ AND © MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

earlier on, and then I had a lot of manga stuff coming by, which was fine. I only have a small sample right now—my one class right now will be in the ninth week of the semester this week, actually. So I haven’t had the kids a long time, I haven’t seen a lot of their work yet, but at least in this very small sample, there’s a little manga, but less than I saw during my last stint. Now it’s possible, as one of them suggested, it might be self-selective. There are a lot of other teachers teaching graphic storytelling at SVA than there were, so it may very well be that those students who want to learn a more manga approach may go to other teachers that are doing that. I don’t know that they are, I just don’t know who else is doing—I mean, I know that David Mazzucchelli’s on staff, along with Klaus Janson, Gary Panter, Keith Mayerson, and some other guys, so there are mainstream guys, there are alternative guys. I don’t know about manga, specifically, but it may be I’ve got fewer students who are doing manga because they look at the stuff I’ve done and go, “Well, this guy’s not going to be able to help me out.” You never know. So I don’t know. I don’t know what the scoop is, but I do have less manga in the work in general. A couple of guys are manga-influenced. I have a couple

of guys who are very mainstream, and a couple of guys who are very alternative. More who are alternative, really.

DRAW!: What I’ve found interesting is that when I first started

in the early 2000s, there was a lot more manga. And then, about three, four years ago, maybe five years ago, I started seeing people who were interested in Mark Schultz or something, and then I would show them Frazetta and their heads would explode. Now there’s sort of a trend of young artists coming along and they’ll find somebody, I don’t know, like Boris Vallejo. But they won’t know Frazetta. It’s sort of odd, because when I was a kid the industry was much smaller, so I think you paid more attention to things. You were more aware of, “Oh, there’s Boris, and there’s Frazetta and there’s Corben—even though it was harder than it is now to find examples. It was much harder then. You might see one Franklin Booth drawing, and you’d go, “Wow, this guy’s great! Where did he come from?” There was no Franklin Booth book, you know what I mean? Now you just go to Google and you type in “Franklin Booth” and there’s a zillion Franklin Booth images. Thank God for the Internet!

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Thor and Beta Ray Bill kick Frost Giant butt in a recent commission illustration.

ALL CHARACTERS ™ AND © MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

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WS: I mean, it’s the good and the bad. Back when we were

around, there were fewer guys to have to try and keep track of or discover, but it was harder to find their stuff. Now, there are far more guys you can keep track of, but now you’re swamped by information. So, really, the best you can do is you maybe try and help these guys sift out some of it, and at least point them in a few directions. Hopefully they’ll find ones that are appropriate to what they want to do, or it will inspire them. But you’re right, it’s a lot easier now to find some of this stuff. I’ve made some suggestions for guys they should go look at. I know the stuff’s out there on the web, so if they want to, they can certainly go take a look at some of the stuff in a way that would have been impossible 20 years ago.

DRAW!: Besides Jim Holdaway, what are you looking at today?

What do you do when you have a day where it just seems like the muse is not in the room. Or do you not have those days?

WS: [sarcastically] I never have those days, Mike. I never have those problems. [Mike laughs] Part of it is because I started when I did. I have a ton of books. If I were starting right now, that might not be true, because you wouldn’t need the books for reference. Back then, since you never knew what you were going to have to draw, I ended up, rather than getting a swipe file, I collected a lot of books, which of course weigh a lot more than a swipe file. Basically I had a lot of books that had a lot of pictures—every Time/Life series ever made, practically, and a lot of other stuff, as well. And a lot of graphic novels from Europe— some from England, mostly French and Italian. A lot of artists who I like. And I had a lot of books just for reference of architecture and all kinds of stuff. So if I’m stuck, I just can pull some of that stuff out and look through it.

As I said, Holdaway, Bellamy, Moebius, Toppi. I’m a big Sergio Toppi fan. I was delighted this past New York convention, there was some book store there, I guess, from France—I don’t where they were from—and they had a whole bunch of Toppi books I had never seen before. So I pretty much blew my wad for the convention right there at that table, and it was absolutely worth it. It was just great. So Toppi’s stuff I find very refreshing.

I can look at his stuff a lot and come away refreshed. I’ve gone to other guys over the years. Those are probably the guys that I’ve stayed with, that I can go back to. I mean, the other guys I go back and look at once in a while. I really like Mike Mignola’s stuff, I like Dave McKean’s stuff. I don’t dig their stuff out quite as regularly to be refreshed by it, but I’m wowed whenever I look at it, and I try and keep track of at least some of what they’re doing. I don’t keep track of all that stuff. Again, in the modern age, there’s just too much damn stuff to keep track of.

DRAW!: Do you go into the comic store, or do you mainly

follow the stuff through the— WS: I get a few things out of comic shops. I get very few comics now. I’ve got a subscription at the store. I get a few comics, because I’ll just pick them up, thumb though them and see what the guy’s stuff looks like, or I’ll thumb through them in the comics shop. Less of that now than formerly, I must say. The only comic I get and I really buy and read month-to-month-to-month is Usagi Yojimbo by Stan Sakai. It’s been my favorite comic for years, and the only comic I actually buy, I bring it to the house, I sit down, I read it. And I read it for the same reasons I read

A Thor pencil sketch.

THOR ™ AND © MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

comics when I was a kid, or as a young adult, or even as an old adult. I really read it because I enjoy the stories. It’s well crafted stuff. I don’t stop to analyze it. I mean, I can. Occasionally, I will look at stuff he’s done, but mostly it’s like reading an old Carl Barks Uncle Scrooge story. It’s just solid workmanship, it’s solid drawing, it’s a good story. What more do you want in a comic book? So I’ve really enjoyed that book for a long time, and I’m just delighted that Stan has been so completely dedicated to getting it out on a regular basis that it’s just brought me a lot of enjoyment.

DRAW!: Is there anything else you’d like to talk about before we

wrap things up?

WS: One of the things that’s happening right now—I’m involved

in it peripherally because it’s my stuff, but I’m not really doing anything new for it because I’m under contract at DC—is Marvel is going to put out an Omnibus of all my Thor stuff from the ’80s next year. Because I have most of the original art, Marvel hired a friend of mine to scan everything. It’d never been scanned before. It’s all being recolored by Steve Oliff and Olyoptics. On my Facebook page, in one of the galleries, you’ll find I’ve put up a splash page from Thor #340, and some guy was very crabby about how awful it was. Somebody actually posted the original newsprint splash next to the recolored version. And, of course, as you would expect, there were guys who were grousing about it, and guys who liked it. Mostly, if you’re on the web, you’re looking for stuff to grouse about.

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COMING THIS SUMMER URBAN BARBARIAN DAN PANOSIAN IN

DRAW! #21 In DRAW! #21, we track DAN PANOSIAN from his stint at Image as a top inker and his fan-favorite work at Marvel as a penciler on X-force and Wolverine, as well as his independent illustration and design work. Dan has always been in demand, and now he talks shop with editor MIKE MANLEY, as we learn the secrets behind how he produces his gritty, design-inspired work. Then, DANNY FINGEROTH interviews Emmy award winning writer/artist DEAN HASPIEL about his creations BILLY DOGMA and the semi-autobiographical STREET CODE, and his pioneering work in personal webcomics with the invention of ACT-I-VATE. Plus, another installment of MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ “Comic Art Bootcamp”, a “Rough Critique” of a newcomer’s work by BOB McLEOD, product and art supply reviews by JAMAR NICHOLAS, art-related website and book reviews, and more!

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“Unfinished Sagas”—series, stories, and arcs Kirby never finished. TRUE DIVORCE CASES, RAAM THE MAN MOUNTAIN, KOBRA, DINGBATS, a complete story from SOUL LOVE, complete Boy Explorers story, two Kirby Tribute Panels, MARK EVANIER and other regular columnists, pencil art galleries, and more, with Kirby’s “Galaxy Green” cover inked by ROYER, and the unseen cover for SOUL LOVE #1!

Urban Barbarian DAN PANOSIAN talks shop about his gritty, design-inspired work with editor MIKE MANLEY, DANNY FINGEROTH interviews “Billy Dogma” writer/artist DEAN HASPIEL, plus more of MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ “Comic Art Bootcamp”, a “Rough Critique” of a newcomer’s work by BOB McLEOD, product and art supply reviews

by JAMAR NICHOLAS, and more!

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A/E celebrates 100 issues, and 50 years, of ALTER EGO magazine in a double-size BOOK! ROY THOMAS interviewed by JIM AMASH about ALL-STAR SQUADRON, INFINITY, INC., ARAK, other DC work, and more! Art by PÉREZ, McFARLANE, BUCKLER, ORDWAY, MACHLAN, GIL KANE, COLAN, GIORDANO, and more, plus Mr. Monster, FCA, BUCKLER/ORDWAY cover!

Fox Comics of the 1940s with art by BAKER, FINE, SIMON, KIRBY, TUSKA, FLETCHER HANKS, ALEX BLUM, and others! “Superman vs. Wonder Man” starring EISNER, IGER, MAYER, SIEGEL, and DONENFELD! Part I of an interview with JACK MENDELSOHN, plus FCA, Comic Fandom Archive, MR. MONSTER’S COMIC CRYPT, and new cover by SpiderMan artist DAVE WILLIAMS!

Spotlight on Green Lantern creators MART NODELL and BILL FINGER in the 1940s, and JOHN BROOME, GIL KANE, and JULIUS SCHWARTZ in 1959! Rare GL artwork by INFANTINO, REINMAN, HASEN, NEAL ADAMS, and others! Plus JACK MENDELSOHN Part II, FCA, MR. MONSTER’S COMIC CRYPT, and new cover by GIL KANE & TERRY AUSTIN, and MART NODELL!

The early career of comics writer STEVE ENGLEHART: Defenders, Captain America, Master of Kung Fu, The Beast, Mantis, and more, with rare art and artifacts by SAL BUSCEMA, STARLIN, SUTTON, HECK, BROWN, and others. Plus, JIM AMASH interviews early artist GEORGE MANDEL (Captain Midnight, The Woman in Red, Blue Bolt, Black Marvel, etc.), FCA, MR. MONSTER’S COMIC CRYPT, and more!

Looks at the LEGO MECHA genre of building, especially in Japan! Feature editor NATHAN BRYAN spotlights mecha builders such as SAITO YOSHIKAZU, TAKAYUKI TORII, SUKYU and others! Also, a talk with Brian Cooper and Mark Neumann about their mecha creations. Plus mecha building instructions by SAITO YOSHIKAZU, and our regular columns on minifigure customization, building, event reports, and more!

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(NOW WITH 16 COLOR PAGES!) “Thrilling Days of Yesteryear!” The final DAVE STEVENS interview, Rocketeer film discussion with DANNY BILSON and PAUL DeMEO, The Phantom, Indiana Jones, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ heroes, Dominic Fortune, Sherlock Holmes, Man-God, Miracle Squad, 3-D Man, Justice, Inc., APARO, CHAYKIN, CLAREMONT, MILLER, VERHEIDEN, and more, Rocketeer cover by DAVE STEVENS!

(NOW WITH 16 COLOR PAGES!) “Dead Heroes”! JIM (“Death of Captain Marvel”) STARLIN interview, Deadman after Neal Adams, Jason Todd Robin, the death and resurrection of the Flash, Elektra, the many deaths of Aunt May, art by and/or commentary from APARO, BATES, CONWAY, GARCIA-LOPEZ, GEOFF JOHNS, MILLER, WOLFMAN, and a cosmically cool cover by JIM STARLIN!

(NOW WITH 16 COLOR PAGES!) “1970s Time Capsule”! Examines relevance in comics, Planet of the Apes, DC Salutes the Bicentennial, Richard Dragon–Kung-Fu Fighter, FOOM, Amazing World of DC, Fast Willie Jackson, Marvel Comics calendars, art and commentary from ADAMS, BRUNNER, GIORDANO, LARKIN, LEVITZ, MAGGIN, MOENCH, O’NEIL, PLOOG, STERANKO, cover by BUCKLER and BEATTY!

Special 50th Anniversary FULL-COLOR issue ($8.95 price) on “Batman in the Bronze Age!” O’NEIL, ADAMS, and LEVITZ roundtable, praise for “unsung” Batman creators JIM APARO, DAVID V. REED, BOB BROWN, ERNIE CHAN, and JOHN CALNAN, Joker’s Daughter, Batman Family, Nocturna, Dark Knight, art and commentary from BYRNE, COLAN, CONWAY, MOENCH, MILLER, NEWTON, WEIN, and more. APARO cover!

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TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 E-mail: twomorrow@aol.com • Visit us on the Web at www.twomorrows.com