Draw! #23 by TwoMorrows Publishing

#23 SUMMER 2012 $

7.95 In The US

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

PATRICK OLLIFFE INTERVIEW & DEMO

AL WILLIAMSON

THE MAN & HIS WORK REMEMBERED BY TORRES, BLEVINS, SCHULTZ, YEATES, ROSS, AND VEITCH

ROUGH STUFF’s

BOB McLEOD CRITIQUES A NEWCOMER’S WORK PLUS: MIKE MANLEY AND BRET BLEVINS’

Contains nudity for demonstration of figure drawing • Mature Readers Only 02 1

82658 27764

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! #4 skills as layout, penciling, inking, Interview with ERIK LARSEN, KEVIN lettering, coloring, Photoshop techNOWLAN on drawing and inking niques, plus web guides, tips, tricks, techniques, DAVE COOPER’s coloring techniques in Photoshop, BRET and a handy reference source—this BLEVINS tutorial on Figure magazine has it all! Composition, PAUL RIVOCHE on the Design Process, reviews of NOTE: Some issues contain nudity for comics drawing papers, and more! purposes of figure drawing. (88-page magazine) $5.95 INTENDED FOR MATURE READERS. (Digital Edition) $2.95

DRAW! #8

DRAW! #9

DRAW! #10

DRAW! #5

DRAW! #6

DRAW! #7

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!

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DRAW! #11

DRAW! #12

DRAW! #13

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!

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!

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DRAW! #14

DRAW! #15

DRAW! #16

DRAW! #17

DRAW! #18

DRAW! #19

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!

Interview and tutorial with Scott Pilgrim’s BRYAN LEE O’MALLEY on how he creates the acclaimed series, learn how B.P.R.D.’s GUY DAVIS creates his series, more Comic Art Bootcamp: Learning from The Great Cartoonists by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY, reviews, and more!

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, DANNY FINGEROTH’s new feature on writer/artists with R. SIKORYAK, BOB McLEOD critiques a newcomer’s work, JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews art supplies and tool tech, COMIC ART BOOTCAMP on penciling & more!

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DRAW! #20

DRAW! #21

DRAW! #22

WALTER SIMONSON interview and demo, Rough Stuff’s BOB McLEOD gives a “Rough Critique” of a newcomer’s work, Write Now’s DANNY FINGEROTH spotlights writer/artist AL JAFFEE, JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews the best art supplies and tool technology, MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS offer “Comic Art Bootcamp” lessons, plus Web links, book reviews, and more!

Urban Barbarian DAN PANOSIAN talks shop about his gritty, designinspired 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!

Interview with inker SCOTT WILLIAMS from his days at Marvel and Image to his work with JIM LEE, FRANK MILLER interview, plus MILLER and KLAUS JANSON show their working processes. Also, MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ “Comic Art Bootcamp”, a “Rough Critique” of a newcomer’s work by BOB McLEOD, art supply reviews by “Crusty Critic” JAMAR NICHOLAS, and more!

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

SUMMER 2012 VOL. 1, No. 23

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Editor-in-Chief • Michael Manley Designer • Eric Nolen-Weathington Publisher • John Morrow Logo Design • John Costanza Copy-Editing • Eric NolenWeathington Front Cover • Pat Olliffe

DRAW! Summer 2012, Vol. 1, No. 23 was produced by Action Planet, Inc. and published by TwoMorrows Publishing. Michael Manley, Editor. John Morrow, Publisher. Editorial address: DRAW! Magazine, c/o Michael Manley, 430 Spruce Ave., Upper Darby, PA 19082. Subscription Address: TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Dr., Raleigh, NC 27614.

PAT OLLIFFE

Mike Manley interviews the artist about his career and working with Al Williamson

rough critique

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

DRAW! and its logo are trademarks of Action Planet, Inc. All contributions herein are copyright 2012 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, or historical purposes with no infringement intended or implied. This entire issue is ©2012 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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The crusty Critic

Jamar Nicholas reviews the tools of the trade. This month: Manga Studio EX 4.

comic art bootcamp This month’s installment: Rules of Appeal: Aesthetics & Design

PLEASE READ THIS: This is copyrighted material, NOT intended for downloading anywhere except our website. If you downloaded it from another website or torrent, go ahead and read it, and if you decide to keep it, DO THE RIGHT THING and buy a legal download, or a printed copy (which entitles you to the free Digital Edition) at our website or your local comic book shop. Otherwise, DELETE IT FROM YOUR COMPUTER and DO NOT SHARE IT WITH FRIENDS OR POST IT ANYWHERE. If you enjoy our publications enough to download them, please pay for them so we can keep producing ones like this. Our digital editions should ONLY be downloaded at

al williamson

Jorge “George” Khoury looks back at the life and career of a comic book legend

www.twomorrows.com DRAW! SUMMER 2012

DRAWING AHEAD

his is a very special issue of DRAW! for me as we cover Al Williamson’s career in a big article by Jorge “George” Khoury. I was very fortunate to not only become friends with Al, but also to share his studio for a while along with my best buddy and regular DRAW! contributor, Bret Blevins. One of the fondest memories I have from those great days and great memories is jaminking a page of The New Mutants with both Al and Bret as they raced the FedEx deadline. With only a short time to get the page done, Bret cut the page apart and then Al, Bret, and myself each inked a bunch of panels with one eye checking the clock and our ears listening for the sound of John, our FedEx driver, coming up the steps. It was a flurry of Hunt 108 pinpoints and No. 4 brushes as we raced ahead. We finished, erased, and taped the page back together just as John opened the door! Deadline saved!! Later, resting up with some coffee and doughnuts, Al told us that he and his long-time buddy and fellow artist Angelo Torres did that type of thing a few times rushing deadlines on jobs they teamed up on back in the ’50s. So enjoy the great interview and great art—Al was a great guy and one of the best artists to ever work in comics and comic strips. A big thanks to Pat Olliffe for the great interview and art in my article with him this issue. Pat is one of the most talented guys working in the business today, and he is also one of the nicest artists you’ll ever meet. Hats off to my regular crew, John Morrow and Eric Nolen-Weathington, for getting this issue out on time, especially while fighting through my computer meltdown and Eric’s virus! Thanks also to Bob McLeod, Bret, and Jamar for coming through once again with great articles. See you in the fall!

NEXT ISSUE IN NOVEMBER! DRAW! #24 (80 pages with color, $7.95), the professional “how-to” magazine on comics and animation, gets up-close and in the studio with illustrator GLEN ORBIK, as he demos how he creates his fully painted noir paperback and comic covers for Marvel, DC Comics and others! Then we jump from comics to animation as DRAW! interviews ROBERT VALLEY (pioneer of the cutting-edge psychedelic animation for Harmonix Music Systems’ “The Beatles: Rock Band” music video, and character designer on Tron: Uprising and Motor City). Plus there’s the latest installment of Comic Art Bootcamp (this time on “Dramatic Lighting”) with editor MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS, reviews of new art supplies by Crusty Critic JAMAR NICHOLAS, and a Rough Critique of a newcomer’s work by BOB McCLOUD, and more! Edited by MIKE MANLEY. SUBSCRIPTIONS: Four issues in the US: $30 Standard, $40 First Class, $11.80 Digital Only NEW LOWER RATES OUTSIDE THE US: Canada: $43, Elsewhere: $54 Surface, $78 Airmail

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DRAW! SUMMER 2012

Spinning Tales

with

PAT OLLIFFE

From the traditional to the tra-digital, artist Pat Olliffe has spun a web of pages through a diverse career that has covered everything from Spider-Girl and digital Spider-Man comics for Marvel to the new 52 Aftermath: The Four Horsemen with Keith Giffen. DRAW!: One of the reasons why I wanted to interview you for this issue of DRAW! is because there’s also going to be a big article by Jorge Khoury on Al Williamson. PAT OLLIFFE: Oh, great! DRAW!: And since we both loved Al and worked with him, I thought it would be a good thing to interview you for this issue and get some of your experiences working with him. PO: Yeah, that would be great. This is no disrespect to other inkers that I’ve worked with, but to play around with some crosshatching and some linework that, as you’re drawing, you’re thinking, “Oh my God, Al Williamson is going to ink this.” It was just more than I could ever hope for. It was great stuff.

Interview conducted by Mike Manley and transcribed by Steven Tice

DRAW!: So when you were working with Al, did you guys talk on the phone? How did your relationship work as a team? Because you guys worked together for quite a while, right? PO: Yes. I think, all told, we worked together for over seven years. He was the inker I worked with most in my career. Basically, we just talked on the phone. Back in those days, email wasn’t an option, so we would just talk on the phone on occasion. I have to admit, especially early on I was intimidated a bit, I guess, as nice a guy and as gregarious a guy as he could be, you’re still, especially initially, somewhat intimidated. So our phone conversations, especially initially, didn’t last too long because I didn’t know what the hell to say. [laughter] But as time went by, we would occasionally chat on the phone, talk about the pages. He was always very complimentary, which was very nice to hear, and he always was somewhat unsure about his approach. He was always really critical of his own work, and wasn’t sure how the pages were looking. And they always looked good to me. So, it was those kind of conversations. And we talked a little bit about art and

DRAW! SUMMER 2012

(left) Pat’s thumbnails for pages seven and eight of Spider-Man Annual #37’s “Untold Tales” back-up story. (opposite page) Finished art for page seven of Spider-Man Annual #37’s “Untold Tales” back-up story. Spider-Man and all related characters ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

that kind of stuff. That’s mostly how it ended up working. We eventually had some great phone conversations over the course of the years. DRAW!: What would you say would be a couple of the best things you think you learned the most from working with a guy like Al? PO: You tend to learn things, at least I did, in just how he would talk about different parts of his career, or early on in his career. He was obviously still a fan of the genre that he grew up in. You know what I mean? DRAW!: Oh yeah. I mean, clearly, he still was; he was still like the twelve-year-old his entire life. He still had that love and passion for the material. PO: Right, exactly. So for someone to be involved in this business that long and to still retain that kind of attitude, I think, in terms of just an overall approach, I thought that was pretty impressive. As you know, this industry can kind of knock that little inner flame around quite a bit, but he was able to keep it going to a certain extent, and so I think Al was a nice little lesson to learn. Plus, the thing that I think I learned from Al when I would look at the pages, and look how he handled the inks—there’s an inking process that seems to have been really prevalent in comics over the 25 years that I’ve been working in the industry, that just seems to be a tighter, more-polished ink line. And I think that’s fine. That look has quite a value to it, and I’ve

DRAW! SUMMER 2012

worked with guys that have a slick look to them, and it gives your work a different kind of an overall veneer, and I think that can be pretty good for certain projects. But looking at the linework and the ink lines that Al was laying down, he really just seemed to be so organic, and it just kind of flowed. It was almost like he was just drawing with the ink in terms of how he was aware of line weight, aware of creating foreground, background, and midground. But it wasn’t; how he was going to ink a certain line wasn’t all-encompassing for him. He was inking it as he would ink his own work, as an illustrator would ink his own work. That kind of almost organic approach. I would look at these pages, and when I would think about it in terms of my own inks, I remember thinking to myself that I’ve got to let go a little bit. I mean, I’ve got to just let the lines flow a little bit. That tends to be a little bit closer to my own personal ink style. So I think that was another thing, just kind of looking over the pages and going, “He’s just letting it go.” I mean, he’s just drawing with it, so it was kind of cool. DRAW!: When you would get the pages back, when Marvel would return the pages to you, would you ever go back and look at your Xeroxes of your pencils compared to how Al interpreted with the inks? PO: Yeah. Oh, definitely, definitely. And Al was trying to stay pretty close, structurally, with what I had. I thought that was kind of nice. I mean, he’s Al Williamson, and I’m not, and he was nice enough not to try to keep me in there, It didn’t seem like he was going to go in and redraw a bunch of stuff or

anything, but I did notice how he would use the pen line and use his linework to delineate folds in clothing, hair, texture, that kind of thing. Looking at some of the stuff that Al did, you can see how he would, like I said, delineate textures…. That was the most amazing. I was looking at how he would show folds in May Parker’s clothes, like the crease in her light jeans, where the knee folds, and that kind of stuff, or when Peter Parker had a long-sleeve shirt on, which he did a lot of times, how Al would lay these lines and create folds in clothing. I was just enamored of that stuff. I would look at that for a long time. DRAW!: Well, Alex Raymond, and Hal Foster were his two big heroes, but I think through his friendship with Roy Krenkel he was also a big fan of many of the classic pen-and-ink illustrators from the early part of last century. He had huge clip files on those artists. So, Al definitely had much more of an illustrative line. Through reproduction, when you reduce the strips down, Rip Kirby or Flash Gordon, it actually appears very tight, but, if you look at the originals, you really see how loose they were, and the finish, the appearance of it being tight is really just due to the fact that it was being reduced. And Al definitely had that quality of sort of like a sketch even in his finished work that kept it from being very tight. I think you’re right; it seems like the last, say, 25, 30 years of comics, the styles are much more tight, the inking is much tighter. The artists today draw tighter, and therefore the inkers ink tighter. That older generation of guys worked much looser. They were working faster. They were also working a lot bigger. PO: Well, that’s definitely true. The change in the original art size over the years has had a fairly dramatic impact on not only the artistic approach, but reproduction and all that stuff. You’re exactly right. DRAW!: Would you say that you were sort of learning with each job, picking up a few little tricks here and there as you went along with him? PO: Yeah, I think so. You mentioned the fact that, over the years, pencilers pencil tighter, then inkers ink tighter, and that kind of thing. And I think, when I first got into comics, I was always inking my own work, trying to find my way through that process, trying to use the tools and that kind of thing. Once I get into Marvel, I inked a couple things initially myself, but I just wasn’t fast enough to turn around the work as quickly as was needed on a monthly schedule. And to be honest my inking heroes tended to be guys like Klaus Janson and Bill Sienkiewicz, and when I showed up, my first work for Marvel was in 1990, and that style wasn’t really what people were looking for. 1990 would have put us into the era of a lot of the Image guys and that kind of thing, and the slicker style was really more in vogue. So, you put the two together, and I just ended up doing more penciling work from there. It’s interesting you mentioned that pencilers get tighter because that’s exactly what I did over the years. I would try to pencil to the inks. I would try to pencil not necessarily how I would ink it, but I tried to keep the linework controlled enough

so that the inker would not be confused about what he’s interpreting. And, like you said, it’s a cycle. It would get tighter, the inks would get tighter, and, overall, the whole work just tends to get drier, When I look at my pencils over the years, they’ve definitely gotten tighter, and tighter, and tighter. I didn’t start working with Al until a little bit later in my career, and so then you’d get these pages, and you’d get to see where it does have this illustrative feel to it; it does have this kind of looser feel where he’s just kind of letting it flow. He’s not thinking about the line, how it begins and ends, necessarily. He’s just interpreting what he sees; he’s illustrating what he sees. And I think by looking at Al’s inks over my pencils, you start to see the lost value of looseness that I was kind of losing in my pencils. Because I think while I was working with Al Williamson, my pencils started to get a little bit more illustrative, and started to get slightly looser to try to capture some of that feel, some of that energy that I knew Al would also bring into his part. So that was a big impact by working with him on Spider-Girl especially. We started working together on Untold Tales of SpiderMan, but that was still kind of a new relationship, and over the years, when most of our work ended up on Spider-Girl, my pencils tended to start to head in that more illustrative direction. I’d look at his inks, and I could see what he was doing, and I’m

DRAW! SUMMER 2012

Pat’s thumbnail and finished art for page 10 of Spider-Man Annual #37’s “Untold Tales” back-up story. Spider-Man and all related characters ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

thinking, “Okay, I need to let go a little bit more loose. I need to approach this a little bit differently.” And so, yeah, looking at his stuff definitely had that impact. DRAW!: When I worked with him in the studio, and I would see him ink John Romita Jr., or Bret Blevins, he was cranking it out. He was a machine there for a while—he was inking, like, three, four books a month. PO: I know, yeah! [laughs] DRAW!: One of the things that I learned, or I was sort of surprised by, I guess, was the fact that he never used a ruler. He inked everything freehand. I mean, he ruled the panel borders, but, everything inside of the panel, he inked everything freehand. He might rule it out with the ruler to draw it, but then he would ink it freehand.

DRAW! SUMMER 2012

PO: That is crazy. Yeah, that is just—I can’t get my brain around that. DRAW!: Yeah, it would definitely give everything this very nice, organic feel, and his work had a sense of what I would call sparkle or air in it because he would also do this thing where he would not attach all the lines, so he would leave spaces or distance between the figure and background, like the lines near a head. And he wouldn’t run all the lines through the head; he wouldn’t connect all the lines. A lot of inkers ink all the lines, everything is touching, and they close all the forms. Every form is perfectly closed so, if you were coloring it, you could just take the paint bucket and drop it in. But Al didn’t do that. He left all these little bits open, and I know that he was very influenced by Foster and Raymond in that respect. It’s the sensibility of an illustrator or painter.

PO: Sure, sure. Oh, no doubt. DRAW!: And that’s one of the little tricks that I picked up from him, that I could actually make something look more illustrative as opposed to making something look more cartoony. PO: I think you’re exactly right. That’s a great way to describe it is having air, to have things having air in them, and to have that kind of quality to them. There was actually one scene where Spider-Girl was on a rooftop, and she was fighting Kaine, and I wanted it to be in the rain because I just thought what a great chance to see Al Williamson linework, and how he will handle this, and what kind of atmosphere he’ll create. And so I had the linework in there for rain and that kind of thing. And the same thing with the splash pages and the covers, since I knew he was handling it, and that was in my head as I was penciling, I knew that I could get this kind of atmosphere in these pieces, in these splash pages, or covers, or moments, and I knew that he would be able to pull it off. DRAW!: That’s one of the benefits I think that often today now is sort of lost because it doesn’t seem like there are as many teams on books as there used to be. You’d have Giordano ink Neal Adams, Sinnott ink Kirby, Byrne and Austin, or Lee and Williams, or whomever. You get a certain synergy when two people work together over a period of time. You can kind of read each other’s minds a little bit, or play to each other’s strengths. You’ll go, “Oh, so-and-so does this great. I can leave that for them to do.” And that was, I think, much more of a standard thing prior to 1990, or prior to, say, the Image age of comics and artists doing long, long runs on books. Also, the older guys, the Golden and the Silver Age guys, the inkers were usually guys who were actually pretty good pencilers themselves. Maybe they just weren’t as dynamic, or maybe they weren’t as fast. PO: Well, right. And I had a couple of opportunities to work with Sal Buscema. He inked a couple of things over me on Spider-Girl, and it was the same feeling that you were working with an inker who came up as a penciler and overall artist, and he had a more well-rounded approach to his comics work in both penciling and inking, and you could see that in the final product too. DRAW!: Those guys had such experience from having drawn so many pages and solved so many problems that they could always bring a little something extra to the table. PO: And the thing you mentioned before, which I thought was a great point, you don’t see teams on books anymore that last for a long time—I think that really is a big impact on the overall look to the projects. Not only does it allow the inker and penciler to become a team where you can artistically kind of read each other’s thoughts, you know what he’s good at, and he knows what you’re good at, and you create this synergy. Over the years, when I would pick up a comic book that I’d done, I didn’t necessarily look at it as my artwork or the inker’s artwork. It’s almost like a new artist has been created by these two artists, and that’s the person that ends up in the

Sal Buscema inked Pat in Spider-Girl Annual #1, as shown here. Spider-Girl and all related characters ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

comic book because there is that give and take depending on the penciler, the inker. And then, in the final product, there’s this combination of the two. So you’re right, over the years, if you work together with somebody for a long period of time, you get to kind of create that new artist, that new third person. That is what our experience was on Spider-Girl. It didn’t break any sales records, to be sure; we were always afraid it was going to get canceled. But now not only is there no time for a penciler and inker to become a unit, there’s no time for a writer and penciler to become a unit, and there’s no time for a fan base and the character to become a unit. And that’s what we did on Spider-Girl. We had this tiny, little fan base that was just as loyal as anything I’ve ever seen. And one of the reasons that was the case, I think, was the fact that I started—I mean, Ron Frenz and Tom DeFalco created her in What If? #105, but with Spider-Girl #1, I was the artist, Tom DeFalco was the writer, Al Williamson was the inker, and we just went. Every month people knew we were going to be there. They knew they could expect a certain kind of story. They could take their time to connect with us and connect with the character. They weren’t

DRAW! SUMMER 2012

A Samson pin-up and a page from Dark Horse’s Mighty Samson #2. Mighty Samson ™ and © Random House, Inc.

thinking, “I’m going to pick this up and, in six to eight months, there’s going to be a new team on this book.” I think that’s pretty much gone now. DRAW!: It seems that’s the norm now, as a penciler, is that you’ll do four or five, maybe six issues, then you are, voluntarily or involuntarily [Pat laughs] jumped to another project which you will do another four or five, six, issues, and then you jump to another project. I’ve talked a lot to younger artists or people that I have taught, and I’ve said Jack Kirby never would have been able to develop the Marvel stuff if he only did six issues of the Fantastic Four, then jumped and did four issues of Thor, and then jumped and did four issues of something else. I mean, those guys built their careers because they sat down and they dug in. I mean, how many issues of Sgt. Rock did Joe Kubert do? I think that that actually hurts your growth in some respects, as an artist today, working on the commercial side of it and not really working a long time on anything. PO: Yeah, oh yeah, I totally agree. I’ve been very fortunate. I was on Untold Tales of Spider-Man for two-and-a-half years,

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and on Spider-Girl for five years. I’ve had little moments where I got to sit on a book and then connect with the character, so that’s been great. Several years ago I was hired to do The Atom with Rick Remender at DC. We just got a few issues in, the sales weren’t that great to begin with, and they pulled the plug on us. But that was a book I was so excited about drawing after talking to Rick about what he wanted to do, and I was hoping we would get two, three, four years of that. That would have been great if it had worked out that way. I mean, that’s what I look to is that kind of, can I find a project that you can connect to?

THE DIGITAL DIFFERENCE

DRAW!: Would you say that that is probably the biggest difference between, say, your career now as a penciler working in comics, making your living in comics, and even ten years ago? Is it the fact that you can’t really guarantee that you’ll be on a project for more than a couple issues? PO: Yeah, I think that’s it. I think that is the biggest difference. Now, the other one was when we did an Amazing Spider-Man Digital, and we hoped to go longer than the story arc that it

A Samson pin-up and a page from Dark Horse’s Mighty Samson #2. Mighty Samson ™ and © Random House, Inc.

did. So there have been a couple projects where that was a possibility, but the approach, editorially, is a little bit different over the years because there are fewer and fewer guys who can turn around twelve issues a year, even ten issues a year. DRAW!: We were both working on the stuff for Dark Horse, and I think that was actually a prime example of what you were talking about because I came in to help Bill Reinhold on Magnus, and you were working on… PO: Samson. DRAW!: Samson. I think, by the third issue, it was like the bloom was off the rose, and everybody was running for the exits. And it’s very hard; you work very hard for three or four months to just get the first several issues done, and then, by the time you’re working on your third or fourth issue, the news is in, and it’s like, “Okay, well….” PO: [laughs] That’s it exactly. Samson was a character I’d hoped to be on a little longer than I was, but that’s exactly right. There were certain delays, obviously, that happened in the production of those books. But you’re right. You got to a point where you’ve got a handful of issues done, you’re heading in a direction, and then numbers come in, and then that’s about it. And it’s certainly not, as you know, unique to Dark Horse. You start a project anywhere these days, and you just know that you’re going to wait a few months, you’re going to watch and wait for the numbers, and if they don’t look good, then that’s it. DRAW!: Well, there are numbers today that books are published at that, when I started in ’83, you’d be a ghost! I think if you sold under 75,000 copies, the book was canceled. PO: Yeah, right, exactly, because they had life on the newsstands.

The Digital wave

DRAW!: Now, 75,000 would be one of the top-selling books. [Pat laughs] And people also make a lot more money per page, so the books are more expensive because it costs more to make them, we get paid more to tell them, and everything. But you were working on the digital stuff for Marvel. How did that come about, and how was your approach different, say, than doing your regular pages that would be in print? PO: Well, that’s a conversation that I had with Bob Gale, who wrote it, and Steve Wacker. Bob came in with a very specific approach for how he thought these things should look, and he described it to me, and I thought it was perfect. The idea being that it would provide, rather than the kind of “scan and pan” approach that Marvel had when they put up their archives or previously published material, this was more interactive with the viewer, where you would have a panel appear on the screen, you would click your mouse or your arrow button or whatever, and you would move forward. A word balloon would pop up, or an image would pop up, or the next page. It was much more interactive with the viewer, and I thought it was great. I thought it was perfect. I was really excited to be involved in that kind of thing, especially that approach. But Marvel also needed this to come out as a comic book at some point, so they weren’t sure how they were necessarily going to make money at this, and this was kind of an experiment. Up until that point, I think we might have been the very first, certainly it was the very first original Spider-Man material to show up online before it would ever get onto the newsstand. But, because they needed a working model to make some kind of money at this, they needed it to come out as a comic book at some point, so I had to do them in the standard comic book page format: 11" x 17" board, all that kind of stuff. But the idea

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Here’s where Amazing Spider-Man Digital began. Above is Pat’s thumbnail for the opening page. You can see several Spider-Man figures in the first panel. When viewed online this panel will start with only the smallest of these figures visible. With a click that figure will disappear and the next in line will appear, and so on until the largest figure is on-screen. To be as efficient as possible, Pat drew the figures on a separate board from the background, much as figures were drawn on separate cels from backgrounds in traditional animation, so that they could be animated without having to redraw the whole scene in every frame. Spider-Man ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

of using slashing panels, all of that Neal Adams kind of thing where you try to move the eye around, that was something that was really not available to me in telling those stories because the panels needed to be plucked out and put in a viewer so that they could actually be seen on a screen. So it had become a little bit more boxed in in terms of what you had to be aware of designing the page overall, and moving the eye through the page like a regular comic book. So it was a little bit of a balancing act as far as that was concerned. It wasn’t as much a page design challenge as most comic books that I was used to are, even though, obviously, you have to keep that in mind because eventually it will be read that way, but initially it was more a kind of single image kind of thing. DRAW!: Since it was going to be the single images, and then it was going to be recomposited later, did you have to basically draw every panel the same size, and would you then be in charge of relaying the pages later, when it was put into a book?

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PO: No, what happened was, there were certain aspects where I was trying to keep the pages laid out as a top half and bottom half, but I wasn’t as limited to the grid system as it would seem because, as the images would come up on the screen, they wouldn’t necessarily all fit in proportion to the screen. It was okay to have a thin panel, or a squatter panel. So, essentially, what I did was I just kind of kept the top half/bottom half separate, but I could still use thinner, rectangular panels, the smaller square panel, and that kind of thing. So that would allow you to have a fairly interesting panel layout in the comic book, and then also be able to fit the needs of online viewing. But, because you could still play with the panel shapes, it didn’t need to be recomposited later as a comic book page. If I kept certain aspects in mind about where the panels are supposed to go, the top half/bottom half thing, I was able to give them what they needed for online viewing, but also create a page that worked well enough in a comic book so it didn’t need to be repurposed later.

DRAW!: So did you lay it out as a comic page first, and then split it up? PO: I did. Yes, once we started going, all my layouts were pretty much the same as I had always laid out a comic book. The only differences being that on occasion there would be a layout with Spider-Man kind of hopping, swinging across the city or over a city street where I did a full background separately, with no figures. I would pencil the background completely, and then, on a different board, pencil the different figures as they were moving, and then they were composited to be viewed online. And what ended up happening was that there was a struggle to get these things viewed. I don’t quite understand how it worked, but there is a certain format, or a certain system that Marvel was using in order to view online comics, and trying to do an online comic the way we wanted to was creating some headaches as far as trying to figure out how this was all going to be viewed online. So, essentially, there was less movement on the panels or pages as the chapters went along than I’d hoped there would be, so there really weren’t a lot of times where I had to do a lot of overlay work. What would happen was a lot of the interaction could happen in each panel, if that makes any sense. Click and a panel would come up, and then word balloons would come up, that kind of stuff, as opposed to individual figures moving or coming up on the screen. DRAW!: So the viewer would trigger the next movement or frame with a mouse click or keystroke. It was driven by what the user wanted, or the viewer wanted, as opposed to it running as some sort of slideshow animatic or animation. PO: Correct. They would click, and then a word balloon or a panel would come up, sometimes two panels. It was very interactive with the reader. You [didn’t just] sit there and watch. We were very conscious of the fact that there are certain things that comics do that are unique to comic book storytelling, and I think that’s the challenge that a lot of people are going through right now. Obviously, digital comics, online viewing,

more than likely that’s where the future of this medium is going to go. But, beyond the business model side of it, where, okay, how do you make money off that, the creative side? How do we tell a story visually that keeps the things that comics do best without moving too far toward animation? And I think that interactivity that Bob had in mind, and that we tried to do, I think it is the key. I think that’s where, if you just sit there and the images move for you, in my opinion, you start sliding more towards animation. But I think the interactive experience, and kind of using the panel-to-panel storytelling triggered by the viewer, is the key. DRAW!: If you were going to do a project now, what would you do different than what you were doing on the thing with Marvel the first time? PO: Well, I think what I would do is I would create a situation where there was even more interaction with the viewer. I think the struggles of trying to get this particular way of viewing a comic book into the system they had in place at Marvel at the time for digital comics limited us to a certain extent on how much we could really play with it. If I did my own project specifically with that in mind, I would make sure that there was even more the viewer could do. You know, a panel would come up on the screen, a word balloon, a character would come up, a panel would come up next to it. You could even have a panel, a second panel, and then a third panel, kind of almost a page, sound effects, a character movement, word balloons, the conversation itself because you can actually organically grow a conversation. Now, you can do it in comics to a certain extent by the length of having a silent panel, the length of a panel, the width of the gutters, and that kind of thing to slow the reader down, to slow the movement of the eye down. But, digitally, you could do that even more, where you can get a click, and see if you could work in a delay. Pace it as if you have somebody reacting to something that somebody else had said, or someone else had done, and you wanted a pause in there, you could actually try to get that pause as part of the

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(left) Thumbnails for Amazing SpiderMan Digital #3, pages C and D. Notice how loose the first two panels are for page D. (opposite page) Finished art for Amazing Spider-Man Digital #3, page D. Spider-Man ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

reader interaction. So I think that’s what I would probably do different if left to my own devices. I would turn up several notches what we were trying to do there and allow for the reader to be even more involved in the storytelling process. DRAW!: Technically, how did your approach differ depending on how big you were drawing, or whether you were doing a lot of feathering, or little feathering, rendering or whatever, to be on the computer screen, because it’s different than print. Resolution is an issue. PO: Well, I think that’s one of the things that we were just experimenting with as we went along, because, really, I had never done anything like this, and I remember the first time I viewed online the first chapters, I thought, wow, you could really kind of pull in, you can zoom in a little bit more, and suddenly—you know, we talked about earlier where Al Williamson and a lot of the older guys worked larger, and then it became tighter as they were reproduced, well, you can’t really do that when you have a system that allows someone to zoom in under the work. So that’s kind of a work in progress. It’s really kind of an incomplete work for me. Because I was inking it myself for the most part, I had to keep in mind that this still was going to be reproduced as a comic book, and it was still going to be reduced in size, so I couldn’t get too detailed with it, but I also had to be aware that, yeah, people could zoom in online. So, I tended to be a little bit more graphic, a little bit more open because that way you can kind of serve both masters. I mean, you’re going to do a lot of rendering and that kind of thing that may work on the screen, but will close up in reproduction. And I was also experimenting with linework that was a little looser, that you would have that looser, il-

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lustrative feel as a comic book, but also it served the benefit of the fact that online, if the line was loose as a part of your technique, I think that covers a few sins too. DRAW!: Yeah, well, I think these are the kinds of issues that almost everybody working in comics is going to be dealing with because everything is migrating online now. There’s going to be your print version, but then you’re also going to have your digital version. And some people are only going to get the digital version. Like, almost every magazine, including DRAW!, has a print version and a digital version. PO: Right. And I think you mentioned at one point that the digital version’s sales are the ones that are actually going up? DRAW!: Right. Even on Judge Parker, there is a digital version of the strip that you can get from King Features, or your local paper carries it, they can run it online, and then there’s the print version. But I think the print version is no longer, and has not been, growing for years. It’s the digital version of the strip that’s growing. So right now I sort of feel like, well, the Sunday version, you know, it’s a little bit bigger, it’s a little bit nicer, you can put a little bit more into it, the colors are brighter, and you can deal with brighter colors and everything. I mean, it looks like the version I color on my computer screen, whereas the version of anything you color on your computer screen doesn’t look the same when it’s in print. PO: Right. That’s exactly right, yeah. And I think on Spider-Man Digital, there was still the feeling that, “We have high hopes for this project, but we still want a comic book out of this.” So I think that, even though I had to keep some of that in mind, the bottom line was my approach still had to kind of edge more toward,

“Look, you’re still going to have to produce a comic. Print is a big part of this overall project,” so I had to keep that in mind more than anything. DRAW!: What are you working on right now? PO: Well, I’ve been working for Disney Publishing and their Marvel Press stuff. I started working for them about a year ago, picking up a little freelance here and there while I was doing the Dark Horse stuff. I just picked up little here and there, and then, once Samson was canceled, they basically said, “Look, we got a ton of work for you if you’re interested,” and I said, “Sure,” so right now I’m basically doing the pencil art for all of their Origin Storybook covers. I’ve already done the interior art, pencil art, for their Mighty Avengers storybook and their Captain America Joins the Mighty Avengers storybooks, so we’ve got more of those planned. So, basically, that’s what I’m doing right now is just doing the pencil work, and then Brian Miller and Hi-Fi Designs do the color paints on them. DRAW!: Okay. I did a Captain America book last year for Disney, but that was done before they moved everything to New York. I think they switched the offices. I penciled it, and then they had somebody digitally paint it. That seems to be another growing trend, which is that you’ll find somebody to draw something, and then they’ll find somebody to take it into the digital world—either digitally ink it, or digitally color it, or digitally paint it. That seems to be another offshoot of the process. Jobs sort of shift, so it seems like inking is not the job it used to be in comic books because a lot of books are actually done that way, where they just scan somebody’s pencils. PO: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And it’s too bad, too, because there is such an art to inking, and that was one of the things that I did enjoy on Samson. It wasn’t a superhero book. I tried to divorce myself, to a certain extent, as far as styles were concerned. In terms of how I approached the inks, I tried to be looser; I tried to not over-think it. I wanted a little grittier look, and I couldn’t do that just with a pencil. I mean, you can, but you can’t really get these big, chunky black inked line kind of

things, and you can’t really play around with that stuff. Now, I guess you could probably do it through digital inks, although I’ve never tried that. But there were things that I was doing in Samson that I knew I could not do in pencil work. But you’re exactly right, the inker is being squeezed out more and more as we go to coloring right over pencils, and that’s too bad. DRAW!: Have you thought about trying to move into the digital thing using Manga Studio or whatever? Have you thought about doing that?

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Panel from Amazing Spider-Man Digital #5, page I. Spider-Man ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

PO: Well, unfortunately, for me, this is a big mistake that I made. And I don’t want to sound like I’m kicking myself around too much for it because my work is considered pretty traditionally influenced. But somehow I’ve been able to put together a 25-year career, I’ve rarely been out of work, so it’s worked out pretty well. But I have not done myself a service by ignoring the digital age—Photoshop and that kind of thing, I’ve just now been trying to play around with colors, paints. Basically, I’m trying to update my skill set. The Manga Studio thing and digitally inking is something that I’ll probably play

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around with at some point. I tried to do some digital inking on my own pencils through Photoshop. I haven’t really found anything that I liked. At some point, I’m going to have to start looking in terms of maybe a Manga Studio program as far as digital inking is concerned. But I’ll be honest, Mike, I would actually be more interested in digitally penciling something than I would digitally inking something, and that’s unfair for me to say because I don’t have any experience inking or with Manga Studio, but there is something I really enjoy about physically inking a piece that—this is going to make me

sound older than I am—I don’t know if I could really make that transition to the digital inking, to be honest. DRAW!: Well, I know what you mean. My feeling is that, even though I have inked things digitally, I am still way faster, and way better, and I still prefer to do things organically—in the real world, in the meat world. I also enjoy being able to have an actual artifact, the actual original piece of artwork. So I can, depending upon the job or need be, do things digitally, but I just don’t want to give over to that. I still want to be able to have an original. Al had stacks and stacks. I mean, you do too, I’m sure. PO: Oh yeah! DRAW!: I mean, I’ve got going on three years’ worth of originals from Judge Parker. Well, it’s not the same having three years of originals on a comic strip as having three CDs’ worth of a comic strip. PO: No, that’s exactly right. I don’t know if that’s a generational thing. If you are a new guy coming into comics, and you start off learning Photoshop, Illustrator, you start using Manga Studio, maybe that’s fine. Maybe you don’t have anything to compare it to as far as the organic feel and the meat world that you described. But for guys like me and you who have had that experience, and know what it feels like, and know the effects you can get, that’s hard to go back on. And I think you made a good point too that at this point I am still way faster with traditional tools, especially inking. Anything I would do digitally I would just kind of monkey around with just to get a little bit better, but you’re right. When it comes down to meeting a deadline, then, yeah, I’m much faster with the traditional tools. DRAW!: I’ve seen it with some of my students. I’ve seen them sit there with a Wacom tablet, or even on the Cintiq trying to pull a line, and they might have to do five, six, seven versions of that one line to get the line that they work. I just do it one time. So already I’m seven times faster just because I only had to do the line once. [laughs] PO: Yeah. I decided I would take the plunge, and I did buy a Wacom tablet pretty recently, and I can already tell it takes a while. That eye-hand coordination thing, you’re looking at the screen, you’re drawing on something else, and that’s exactly right. I thought this would speed my time up a little bit, but I mostly was using it in mind of speeding up layouts, pencils, and then printing them out and inking traditionally from there because in the few times that I have done exactly that, where I have, in practicing with the Wacom tablet, saying, “Okay, I can get tons of pen pressure. I should be able to get something that approximates an ink line.” And I can’t do it. Not only do you have to, like you said, pull each line, like, five times, even when I have, by accident, created something that I felt looked okay, I still can’t match what I can do on board. DRAW!: Right. When you look at an original by Williamson, and you see the way that he put the line down with a combina-

There’s quite a bit of crosshatching and fine detail work in this page from Mighty Samson #1. Mighty Samson ™ and © Random House, Inc.

tion of the 108 and the brush, and the ink is either thick or the ink is thin, gives you a dry brush or whatever, in order to do all that kind of stuff in Photoshop or any of these programs, you’re always limited by the engineer’s ability to understand how to program that kind of parameter into the program. And it just seems to me, still, silly to try to forcibly recreate one thing with the other. I know people who are using Manga Studio, and they do fine, and if that works for you, great. But I still think that if you don’t learn how something works traditionally, then how do you really understand how it works digitally? Because the digital is an imitation of the original. PO: It’s all built from the ground up. You can’t start halfway up the tree. I haven’t seen too many guys that can pull that off digitally yet. You mentioned the whiteout. When I started on Samson, I pulled out as much work by Jorge Zaffino as I could look at because that was the most amazing thing to me. When I see his original art, I see the fact that he’s practically painting. He’s not even thinking in terms of inking in the classic, traditional comic book sense. He’s actually creating a painting. He’s cutting in and out, back and forth—I mean, there’s ink, there’s whiteout, there’s paint. It’s just incredible. My jaw hits the floor every time I see that.

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DRAW!: Yeah, he would ink it, then he would cut it back in with a pen, and then he would cut it back in with white, and then he’d go back over the white, or he’d cut into it with a razor. I have some originals of his, and they’re pretty beat up in places because he would really work on that. PO: Yeah, and I remember an instructor of mine at the art school said, “Don’t worry about being too precious with the original piece because, as long as it reproduces cleanly and it does what you want it to do, you’re fine. People can kind of get too hung up on this. Now, in our work it’s different because you do have an original art market. And it dictates how clean you want your boards to be. But I always thought about that in terms of Zaffino just kind of attacking the board. Even though the thing looks like hell when he’s done with it, the fact that it reproduces and achieves what he wanted it to achieve on the printed page, that’s all you need.

ART SCHOOL

DRAW!: Where did you go to school? PO: I went to the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. DRAW!: And what did you go there to study? PO: Basically, I went there to draw comics. I mean, I was a comics fan when I was a kid, and I knew that’s what I wanted to do. In junior high school and high school, I had done a little bit of grunt work for a little animation company in Pittsburgh, and Ron Frenz did some work occasionally for them as well. So, I knew Ron had gone to the Art Institute at Pittsburgh, Paul Gulacy had gone to the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, so I felt, “Well, that should be a pretty good place to go.” I went to the Art Institute with the idea that I was going to become a comic artist. When I was there, I talked to other kids and other students, and you start to see a larger illustration world. So I left the Art Institute thinking, “Well, do I want to do commercial illustration, or do I want to do comics?” And comics kind of bit first, so I said, “Okay, let’s pursue this.” But I did go there initially just to be a comics artist. DRAW!: And they had classes specifically in comic art? PO: Well, no, actually, they didn’t. It was a general commercial art/visual communications program, but, like I said, Gulacy and Frenz came through that school. But, no, they didn’t have a cartooning class that really addressed comic books specifically. It was more just a general cartooning kind of thing. Essentially it was a general commercial art school that taught certain basics that you could then apply that to comics art. DRAW!: Was it a two-year school, like an associate’s degree? PO: That’s correct, yeah. DRAW!: Did you go straight out of high school? PO: Yeah, right out of high school I started there. DRAW!: How did you go about breaking in? Did you go to the local conventions? PO: I was just sending out samples to editors and got my box

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(above) Thumbnail layout for Booster Gold #40, page 12. (opposite page) Pencils for Booster Gold #40, page 12. Booster Gold ™ and © DC Comics.

of rejection letters. There was a handful of guys in art school that were all interested in drawing comics. There was a guy that had graduated ahead of us—I didn’t really know him that well, but he had started to get work at this little black-andwhite comic book company in California called Malibu Comics, which was just starting out. I guess they had a project for him, and he couldn’t do it or something. I don’t know. Through a friend of mine, I became aware that they were looking for an artist. So, I sent them some samples, and they hired me to do Stealth Force. I got that first gig about a month before I graduated art school. DRAW!: Well, that must have felt pretty good, getting a gig right before you graduate. PO: Yeah, it was. Fortunately, my mother was kind enough to let me live and work in the basement because I didn’t make a damn thing. But it was great. It was really nice to get a job before I even graduated in ’87, and I thought, “Well, here you go.” I started getting work at Malibu and Eternity, in that late ’80s black-and-white comic book glut—there were black-andwhite comics everywhere. I was getting work through them, but still getting my rejection letters from Marvel and DC.

DRAW!: Y’know, it’s funny. I realized a little while ago—because we’ve known each other for a couple of years—I actually inked a few pages on a Nomad that you did. [Pat laughs] I think there was deadline problem, and I inked some on a weekend. I forget who he was fighting. That was when he was going around dressed up like the Lone Ranger or something like that? PO: Well, yeah, he had the eyeglasses. I did it when he had the eyeglasses, the long hair, and the trench coat. I took over for Clarke Hawbaker. And he would carry a little baby around with him all the time. DRAW!: Yes! I inked some pages of one of those, “Hey, can you do three pages over the weekend?” kind of jobs. PO: [laughs] Yeah, that’s about right. That’s funny. I didn’t know that. That’s pretty cool.

I had met Ron Frenz through the animation studio here in Pittsburgh. I stayed in touch, and I sent him some samples. They sat on the shelf for a little bit, and then, I think it was around ’90, Marvel needed somebody to do some “Tales of Asgard” stories, and it was through Ron showing my stuff to Ralph Macchio that I got my first gig at Marvel. From there, my first regular gig at Marvel was because Glenn Herdling walked into the office of Ralph Macchio and said, “Hey, do you know anybody to help us out on this Nomad book?” And he said, “How about this guy?” So he showed him my stuff, Glenn liked it enough, and they hired me to do Nomad, and that was my first regular gig.

DRAW!: I don’t even know if that really happens now. I mean, I ended up helping Bill Reinhold and Jerry Ordway in the last few years. But that used to be the kind of way people would get a job is you’d be hanging around, and somebody would say, “Hey, we need four pages inked—stat!” PO: And that’s really how the last few years went before I got the Dark Horse Samson gig, after Spider-Man Digital and The Atom. I spent a good deal of the last year or so doing exactly that. I helped out on Sigil from Marvel just doing a few pages here and there to help Leonard Kirk, who was the penciler. He had some other issues; I don’t know if he had a problem at the studio or something like that, but he needed a hand, so I just came in and did a couple pages here and there. And I was starting to just do more of that kind of Mr. Fixit stuff. “Hey, can you do four pages, five pages?” As it was happening, I was thinking, “Yeah, it might not be a good idea to continue to do this kind of stuff too much.” But, yeah, they have so many deadline problems that I actually for a while thought that maybe that would be my new cottage industry, that, since nobody seems to be able to hit a deadline well, I’ll just make a paycheck by just standing around. “Okay, whenever the deadline is in the weeds, give me a buzz, and I’ll help you out.” But that’s no way to make a career. DRAW!: No, you don’t always want to be the fireman. PO: Right, right.

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(left) Pencils for the cover of Disney’s X-Men Origin Storybook. (opposite page) Pencil sketch for Pat’s blog, which can be found at patrickolliffe.blogspot.com. X-Men ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

DRAW!: The only reason you’re invited to the barbecue is because there’s going to be a fire. [much laughter] PO: That’s right! I remember hearing a quote by Kevin Nowlan that, when he first started, Al Milgrom told him, “Don’t blast through your work. Spend the time, do it well, and that’ll stand the test of time.” Now, I am certainly no Kevin Nowlan, but there have been periods in my career where I was the fireman, and I did the work a lot faster than I needed to, a lot faster than I should have, but that’s what you’re supposed to do as a professional commercial artist. You have an editor, he needs a job, and you do it. And it served me well enough that I have a decent enough name that I’ve been able to continue a career, but I don’t think it’s helped my career, either. DRAW!: I think that’s an important point, especially for a lot of the younger readers of the magazine, a lot of younger people breaking in. Because it seems when you’re young, hungry, and looking, and you get that opportunity, it’s usually because the pooch has been screwed somewhere. There’s a five-alarm fire, and only two alarms have shown up. [Pat laughs] And it’s usually on something you don’t care about, or not your favorite character, or it’s just a bunch of people talking in an office. It’s never the ideal circumstance, but you want that work. That’s your opportunity, so you want that to be your calling card, foot wedged firmly in the door, and you hope that the work is good enough, and that the person on the other end actually is appreciative enough of it to think of you the next time there isn’t a fire. PO: Right. But that’s the problem too. There are a lot of times where you go in with the idea that, “Okay, I came in and was the fireman and helped put out this fire, so the next time you need to hire somebody to actually build a building, you’ll give me a call.” And, a lot of times, you’ve got to be careful about painting yourself into that fireman role because they’re not going to ask you to help build it; they’ll just ask you to help put out the fire when it’s coming down.

DRAW! SUMMER 2012

Branching Out

DRAW!: Now that you’ve done the digital thing, and you’ve sort of branched out into doing the books for Disney, where do you see yourself, or where would you like to be heading with your career? PO: Well, I think I would like to just continue to branch out. I mean, I don’t think that I ever see myself not doing comics, but working for Disney has been kind of an eye-opener because the work I’m doing for Disney is more single image— it’s still superheroes, but it’s a single-image mindset. It’s more of a spot illustration mindset. Even the storybooks, the Origin storybooks, tell a story, but it’s a single image and text. You’re not telling a story in the traditional comic book sense, and I wonder how I would feel about not being able to illustrate the stories again, that kind of page layout approach. And I miss it somewhat, but it’s also been fun to do something different. I saw somewhere in the last year I was mentioned and I was described as “a longtime industry veteran,” [Mike laughs] and I thought, “Holy crap! When did that happen?” [laughs] So, as I’ve been around a little while, there are certainly projects that I would still like to do. There are certainly editors that I enjoy working with. But I think not only for my own enjoyment do I need to branch out, I think from just a career standpoint, even though I’ve been around for a little while, I’m not—. You know, I’ve got a long way to go before my career is finished, and, branching out into other things, I would love to try to get storyboard work. I have a five-year-old daughter, and I’ve been reading so many children’s books lately, you know, little ideas start to pop into your head. I’d love to do a children’s book that my daughter could read some day, so that’s also a work in progress. DRAW!: One big difference between now and when we broke in is that because of the Internet and networking it’s much easier to actually get in contact with people at the various studios and

find the person who’s in charge of a particular show, or the showrunner, or the person in Human Resources. You get so-and-so’s email from such-and-such, and you just email the person and ask them. I mean, in the beginning, when you were living in Pittsburgh, you were kind of like me; you were in the Midwest. So the idea of being able to just hop on the subway and run into the office didn’t exist. I was in Michigan. You didn’t live in New York. If you lived in New York, you could just go, like, haunt the office until somebody gave you something. PO: Right, exactly, exactly. DRAW!: But now people can actually do that over the Internet. I mean, there are people that are getting jobs over the Internet, and are never even going in to the office. There are people that are working together that have never even met each other, PO: It’s been years since I’ve been to either the Marvel or DC offices. All the relationships that I have are either work relationships or online relationships. But I think you’re right, the Internet kind of closes that gap a little bit and creates a smaller environment.

Tech and Gear

DRAW!: We should talk the technical specs. What kind of computer rig do you have? What kind of set-up do you have? PO: I just have a PC running Windows 7, Photoshop CS3, and I just picked up a little Wacom tablet. That’s basically it. It’s pretty simple at this point. And I have to admit, the Wacom tablet, I’m not technically proficient enough at it yet to really make use of it other than doing layouts, but it’s been a fun tool to play around with. I stood in Best Buy for I don’t know how long deciding whether to get the small, medium, or large version. [Mike laughs] And there was nobody in the store I could ask because they don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. They’re aware of what it is, but, y’know, I am trying to draw comic book layouts with these things. So, true to my nature, I picked the middle version. DRAW!: I have a big one for my old G4 upstairs that I still use, and then I have a little one for my laptop. PO: On Judge Parker, are you doing traditional layouts, or are you doing digital layouts and pencils and traditional inks? DRAW!: On Judge Parker it’s still traditional as far as drawing and inking. The only digital part is the coloring and the lettering. Everything else is done traditionally, and, as long as I can work that way, I’m very happy to continue to do it that way. It’s much more relaxing. I mean, the other thing about technology, as you know, is that you’re always having to update it. Or something breaks, or you’re trying to print something, or you’re trying to send something… it crashes and you lose everything! PO: Oh, yeah, I just had that. Not long after I got the Wacom tablet, suddenly my computer wouldn’t recognize the tablet driver, and I had to uninstall it and reinstall it. And I was like, “For #*$!!’s sake.” DRAW!: So what about paper, pens, inks? Do you have any preferences?

PO: Oh, the only other thing that I forgot to mention is I have a Brother all-in-one printer so I can print out the boards. It’s an 11" x 17" bed, so I can scan my pages, and I can print out stuff; it’s a Brother MS36490CW. It seems to be the workhorse a lot of guys are using, and that has served me well. DRAW!: And that wasn’t too expensive, right? PO: No, it wasn’t. It’s been a few years. I got it during some kind of a sale, and, like I said, I don’t remember how much it was, but it was really, really reasonable. Before that I had a smaller scanner, 8-1/2" x 11", and you’re trying to stitch together pages, and it was a pain in the ass. This way you can just scan in everything you need, and then you can print out bluelines. That’s how I approached the Disney stuff. It’s traditional pencil thumbnails on 8-1/2" x 11" sheet of paper. I have two page layouts per page on that 8-1/2" x 11" sheet, and then I just print them out in blueline on board, so that’s come in pretty handy. DRAW!: And then you just ink it or tighten it up from there? PO: I would ink it up for comics if I was doing that, but for the Disney stuff I just tighten it up in pencil and send it off. The funny thing is, as I’m learning to do that kind of stuff, it suddenly feels like everybody has their own formula for how to print bluelines. [Mike laughs] “Well, how do you do it? I set the hue for one thing, saturation for another, lightness for another.” And you talk to somebody else, “No, no, no. I do it this way.” I’m thinking, “What?” Sometimes it’s more like blue, some it’s slightly green, so anyway….

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DRAW!: Who were you using? PO: I was using the Design drawing pencils. DRAW!: Was that by Letraset or Tria? I think the Design markers are gone. PO: Yeah, it’s from Design: Design Drawing Pencil, Series 3800 and 00. That’s what I’ve been using for a while, but now all of the pencil lines are super-soft. I don’t know what is going on there. But I usually stick with the HB pencil, standard kneaded erase or the Pink Pearl eraser, and then any boards that I get. It’s interesting that the tighter my pencils have gotten over the years, the smoother board I prefer to work on. If I can get a smoother paper, I prefer it. The more toothy it gets, the slower I pencil, so I try to get a plate finish of some kind, whatever the companies tend to office. Although, on the Dark Horse stuff, if that work was going to go on too much longer, I was going to start buying my own board. I don’t know what you thought of that paper, but that was a little too rough.

Pat inked by Al Williamson. The opening splash of Spider-Girl #14. Spider-Girl ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

DRAW!: I always found that when I did it, I would adjust each page based upon how dark or light the pencils were. Because some people would pencil lighter and there would be parts that would be very faint, so you would have to darken that, or darken that part of the panel, so that you could actually even see the art when printed in blue. PO: Right, exactly. There was a time when I was trying to make sure the pencils, the blueline was light enough, even though the blue on the board is fine because you’ll remove it when it gets scanned, but I still wanted it a little bit cleaner. And I remember trying to print them out as light as I could print them, and as I’m penciling them, I’m thinking, “Man, I’m getting a headache.” And I realize that I printed them out too light. I’m straining to see these tiny little lines. “Okay, that’s not working.” DRAW!: Do you like a hard lead or soft lead pencil? PO: I tend to be, as my Wacom tablet choice indicates, kind of the in middle. I use an HB pencil, sometimes a 2B pencil— an HB is what I usually use. And, unfortunately, I have been having a little pencil problem lately because the pencil that I’ve been using for a while, I don’t know if they changed their lead, all their HB pencils are all drawing like 4Bs, and I’ve been trying to change pencil makers and that kind of thing.

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DRAW!: In my case, since I was doing layouts and scanning and sending them, I was penciling the layouts on the Canson Fanboy Paper. And Bill was printing them out at his end and doing whatever he needed to do before he inked it. What do you ink with? PO: I use a Hunt 102, usually Higgins Black Magic. If I can get my hands on Pelican ink, I like that better. Higgins tends to be not dense enough, so I sometimes will try to combine a couple of inks. But most of the Samson stuff was inked with the Faber-Castell Pitt pens, and occasionally what I would do is I would use the Faber-Castell Pitt pens, the S and the F, which are really small, and then the brush pens. If I couldn’t get the effect I wanted—there were a couple places where I couldn’t achieve the crosshatched look I wanted—then I would use the crow quill, the Hunt 102, to get that kind of crosshatchy look. And another thing, because I wanted it to be a little different look than some of the stuff that I’ve inked in the past, and in the past I’ve only used a crow quill and a brush, I wanted to change the tools up a little bit to see if that would allow me a slightly different look to the work that I was doing. And the other change of approach that I did with Samson was that, kind of by accident, and I’ve heard since then that other artists have done this, is that once I penciled the page, my first step would be to just pull out the brush pen and just blast in as much black as I could. I’d draw as much of the page as I could with large shapes, just kind of draw with the brush, and then go to the penwork afterwards. And that’s backwards from the way I had previously worked all my career. When I’d inked my own stuff before, it would be linework first, brush second, and that kind of thing, fill in your blacks. But this time I wanted a different approach, and, if nothing else, just to make it kind of an experiment for me. And I thought that worked really well. That was a lot of fun. DRAW!: I think that’s an interesting approach. I’ve done that too. I think actually, in a way, that’s almost a much more painterly approach because what you’re doing is you’re dealing with the big shapes first, and then you’re working to the

smaller details, which is how you work when you paint. You tackle the big shapes and you work toward the smaller shapes. You don’t start with a little, teeny eyeball and work up. I think a lot of guys who used to do the strips would do that, and they would go in with the brush and then add the detail work on that—especially guys, I would say, more in the Caniff school. PO: Oh, yeah. And I think that it just changes, at least it did for me anyway, the mindset. It changed the way I viewed the lighting, or the figures, or even just the approach because your brain has to shift. And when I first started to do it, it was a little bit like a trapeze artist without a net. You just start blasting in blacks and then go, “Okay, if I screw this up, then I’ve got to find a way to fix it.” You just have a different mindset to approach it with that painterly aspect that you mentioned as far as going there and knocking in some bigger shapes, and then working your way back from there. DRAW!: Right, as opposed to the other style, where you would go in with the pen, do everything with the pen, and then go back and you would hit everything with the brush. Now, I would watch Al work, and Al would work that way. Some days he would come in, and he’d do everything with a pen, and then he would go back with a brush, pow, pow, pow, go back in with the brush and finish it up. Some days he’d come in and he’d do a bunch of stuff with the brush first, and then he would go back and work with the pen. For a person who had been doing it as many years as he had, he probably mixed things up just so he didn’t get bored. PO: Oh, yeah, exactly, yeah. And I know that guys that will ink little bits and pieces of different pages, and have five or six pages going at once, and I’m sure that also provides some kind of variety. I could never do that. I still go from panel to panel because basically I’m following the story. Even at the inking stage, I’m still following the story, so I still approach it that way, and I just go from panel to panel and move along that way. DRAW!: That’s interesting. I know that Al would ink five, six, seven pages at a time. In fact, if he got a shipment in that day, he’d pull the pages out, he’d sit there, he’d grab a cup of coffee, and he’d look at them or study them, and then he would start on one page, ink on that page until it got wet, he’d put that page aside, ink on another page until it got wet, and put that page aside. So he might actually ink on all five or six of the pages that he got on that one day. He felt that way if he had a good day or a bad day it would be spread out. So if you were kind of feeling rusty, or you had a cold or whatever, you wouldn’t see it like, “Wow, this page really is terrible, and this other page is really awesome!” PO: For those reasons, I thought about approaching it that way, but, like I said, I still just follow the story along because most of the time I ink my own work. Now, I have inked Ron Frenz a couple times, and I did get the wonderful opportunity to ink John Buscema. I inked an issue of Thor over John Buscema; that was great. It was terrifying, but it was great. [Mike laughs] But most of my inks are over my own pencils, and that probably has something to do with it too.

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constructive

ANALYSIS& CRITICISM newcomer’s work of a

BOB McLEOD

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Electro, Spider-Man ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

n this column, I try my best to help a young artist move up to the next level and hopefully break into comics. I’ve penciled many jobs for Marvel and DC, and I teach sequential art at the Penn. College of Art & Design, so hopefully I know what I’m talking about. This issue’s Spider-Man sample page was submitted by Brandon Hendricks. Brandon’s obviously worked hard to get to this level, and he shows some real potential, but some basic problems common to many beginners are holding him back. I notice more and more in today’s comics that the basic principles of visual storytelling that I learned back in the ’70s when I started drawing comics are often no longer valued, or perhaps a lot of current artists simple don’t know them. So it may be argued that some of my comments are irrelevant to success as a professional comic artist, but I’m still going to attempt to convey what I believe to be the best way to draw comics. If you think you can get by without being able to tell a clear story visually, or without learning basic anatomy or perspective or composition, then good luck to you. But I still think the fundamentals are important. Although comic art is, or should be, primarily more about storytelling than drawing, good comic art requires a basic level of competency at figure drawing. And I use the term “figure drawing” rather than “anatomy” deliberately. It’s not all that important to put all of the muscles in the right place (although it’s certainly desirable), and many published artists don’t, but it is very important to be able to pose the figures dynamically rather than awkwardly. And in my opinion the basic structure should also be sound, meaning for example that the arms should extend from

figURE 1 figURE 2

Figure 1: You don’t have to know all the muscles in the leg, but they aren’t that hard to learn. figure 2: Arch the back, add the foot, and learn to draw hands. Spider-Man ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

the socket rather than stick out from the rib cage, and the legs should extend from the hips, not the waist. Unfortunately, there are innumerable examples of popular published artists where this isn’t the case, but I still think it should be. A good artist should also know where to place things in a panel to create a sound composition. Moving the point of view (or “camera angle” as it’s commonly called) around is important, but even more important is simply creating a good, interesting picture with a strong composition. The problem with so many beginners is that they want to draw comics so much that they try to draw a page full of pictures before they’ve learned how to draw even a single picture correctly. Whenever you’re drawing a panel, you’re obviously choosing to show an edited view of the scene, so how you edit that scene is critical. The proper way to begin is to place the center of interest, then any other primary focal points, then design a background to balance against them if a background is necessary. Drawing a background in every panel can make a page look crowded and claustrophobic, with no “eye relief,” so you can often leave out the background on close-ups and medium shots. Brandon is doing a lot of things well here. He’s moving the camera around, choosing good angles, using a lot of dynamic diagonals, balancing his blacks, showing good action, drawing pretty good proportions, and adding a lot of well-done backgrounds. He’s obviously working hard and putting in a good amount of effort, and he’s studied anatomy and perspective. I think he’s on the cusp of being ready to get work. But it’s often that last ten yards that holds people back. More than a few artists have come this far and given up before they ever managed to get published. What can he do to move forward from here? In panel one, Brandon chose a good standard viewpoint: an over-the-shoulder shot of Electro with Spidey in the distance. But he’s shoving Electro off to the side unnecessarily, his arm is at an awkward angle, and the hand is a bit too small.

Perspective affects our bodies just as much as it affects backgrounds. If the distance from his head to his hand affects their relative sizes that radically, then the distance from Spidey’s foot to his head would affect their relative sizes just as much. Brandon’s also having Electro look at Spidey out of the corner of his eye because he doesn’t want to just show the back of his head. But we can face him toward Spidey quite a bit more and still get his face in. Also, it’s not a good idea to draw detached body parts because the viewer can get confused about to whom they belong. And Electro’s right hand here simply can’t be attached to his body at that angle. It would require his elbow to be too far from his shoulder. Do comic artists do this all the time? Sure, but it’s still a bad idea. If you’re going to do it, at least go ahead and draw the whole arm outside the panel to see how it would look, then erase it. Heads and hands are usually the primary focal points, so it’s important to keep them unobstructed like Spidey’s are here. Marvel’s ex-editor-in-chief Jim Shooter’s first rule in all things regarding comic art was clarity. So all that black stuff next to Electro’s left hand is confusing clutter that should be removed. And I don’t see any reason to crop Spidey, the center of interest. As long as there’s room, why not bring him down into the panel, as I’ve done? Brandon’s got him in a nice, spidery pose, but his structure is off. His right arm and shoulder are dislocated, and his left forearm simply can’t be there and still be attached to his body. His right foot is also incorrectly attached to his leg. I know it’s Spider-Man, and trying to use correct anatomy with his extreme poses can often be counterproductive, but I think you need to be a bit more in control of where you bend the rules, rather than breaking them out of ignorance. Studying the skeleton and understanding its limits really pays off when drawing figures. In panel two, Spidey looks squeezed into the panel, with his leg and arm seemingly posed to avoid going off panel. It’s

DRAW! SUMMER 2012

important to place hands carefully because they’re important focal points, and Spidey’s right hand is getting lost amid the clutter, and his left hand is needlessly cropped. To really get a sense of him falling, you could raise his hips and lower his head as I’ve done, and move the bad guy to better balance the composition. It’s actually unclear whether he is falling or somehow hovering from the first blast. I guess he’s supposed to be turning in mid-air to avoid the second blast? But even if that’s the case (and we shouldn’t have to guess if the penciler does his job right) we’re still stuck with no explanation for how Spidey got where he is in panel four (is he still hovering?!). When moving characters, it should make sense how they got from one place to the next. Redesigning the background in panel two so that the black area is on the upper left, not the right, would help to balance the composition. Panel three has what I generally consider one of the weakest viewpoints. Straight-on shots almost always look flat. They’re even worse than profile shots. It helps a lot that Brandon turned the torso, but the arm and gun still look glued to his body. I think turning it to a ¾-view is a better idea, and the gun and head are what is telling the story, so I think it’s better to crop out the lower body and focus on them. This is also a panel where you can easily skip the background. And does anyone actually use revolvers anymore? Don’t major bad guys all now use semi-automatics? Details like that can be important in making your pencils up to date and authentic. Panel four is a good shot, but Spidey appears to be hang-

figURE 4

figURE 3

ing in mid-air, and Brandon had to work overtime to contort the foreground figure so we’re not looking at his back and so we’re able to see his gun. But his pose now makes no sense. It looks like he might be thinking of shooting Electro. Probably a better way to show this scene would be the reverse, from behind Electro, so we could easily see the gun. It might be even better, perhaps, to use a long, horizontal panel with Spidey in the middle and a bad guy on each end. There’s always more than one good way to show a scene, so try to choose one that avoids obvious problems. Spend more time thinking before you start drawing, and it will help you avoid giving yourself problems you don’t need. Panel five is too heavily weighted on the right, with a decapitated head in the corner. I added Electro’s hand in my version in an effort to help the balance, and moved the bad guy more into the picture. Again, I don’t like adding his detached hand

figURE 5

figure 3: Be sure to leave room for the pelvis, attach the humerus properly, and don’t bend the femur. figure 4: A figure’s silhouette shape should read clearly and have balance. figure 5: The head has a front and a side, which are determined by the skull and facial muscles. Electro, Spider-Man ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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holding the gun, and probably wouldn’t have if I were designing this page. You should never crop a head at the neck, and avoid placing any major elements in corners. Also, the shadows on his head don’t follow the planes of his face, and he seems to have lost the brim of his cap, and is apparently now wearing a beret. Spidey, meanwhile, is badly posed. I realize he’s being zapped, so he might look awkward, but you don’t want to place his hand on a straight line with his leg and arm. It’s bad design. You should always consider a figure’s silhouette shape, and try to make it interesting and well designed. As I mentioned above, Brandon’s figure anatomy, while not great, is almost good enough. But his structure still needs some improvement. In panel two Spidey’s back is too stiff. You should arch it either forward or back, avoiding right angles with his arms and legs. His left hand is very poorly constructed. Why are hands and feet the last things comic artists seem to learn to draw? Spidey’s right leg looks like an amputated stump. Yes, I know all too well many of the top comic artists do this, but it’s simply poor figure drawing, and it drives me nuts. You don’t need to draw the lower leg, but show the foot. In panel three, the hand is too small. We normally enlarge hands a bit in comics, or they tend to look puny. In panel four Electro’s torso is too short, and his right arm is emerging from his rib cage. In panel five Spidey’s right arm isn’t correctly attached, his right thigh is too short, and his nose is too prominent. Spidey’s mask isn’t normally drawn to look like pantyhose over his face. It’s as if his mask has a bit of air in it, so that it doesn’t quite conform to his facial structure. Lighting is another thing that can get tricky if you don’t understand the human form. In panel one Electro’s tendons are sticking out too much on his black fist, and the shadows aren’t consistent on Spidey (or anywhere else on the page). You should choose a light source that’s going to create shadows where you need them in your composition and be consistent in lighting your scene. How high would that thigh muscle on Spidey’s thigh have to be in panel two to not be black? Why is his crotch white in panel five? The lighting doesn’t follow the form of the bad guy’s face in panel five (I have no idea who this guy is). Clothing folds also need to be studied. Drawing them all the way across the form as Brandon did on the legs in panel three makes the legs look flat instead of round. His arm in panel four also looks flat because of the way the folds are lit. Finally, your surface rendering style is critical in today’s comic art where the penciler is expected to do what used to be the job of the inker in my heyday. You must study where to put rendering and where not to put it, and what kind of render-

(above) Bob’s advice for Brandon put into action. Electro, Spider-Man ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

ing to put. The best way to learn this is to simply imitate your favorite artist. All of the top artists started out by imitating someone else. Your own style will soon emerge as you begin to understand what you’re doing. All of these things can seem like nitpicking when looked at individually, and yet collectively they’re holding Brandon back from a career in comics. The good news for Brandon is that the hardest part is behind him, and all of these issues can easily be addressed and corrected with some study and effort. If you would like to submit a sample page for next issue’s Rough Critique, email me at mcleod.bob@gmail.com. Bob McLeod is a veteran comic artist who’s worked on all the major titles for Marvel and DC, and is the author/illustrator of Superhero ABC, published by HarperCollins. He also teaches at the Pennsylvania College Art & Design.

DRAW! SUMMER 2012

UNDER REVIEW MANGA STUDIO EX 4

alutations once again to all and sundry! Back again, your loyal maestro of markers, your swami of Strathmore, the artistic surveyor of supplies with the eagle eyes, the Crusty Critic, here again to help you navigate the mine field of art tools. So heed my advice, and you will keep from blowing off your leg, or even worse—blowing your deadline! We are now firmly entrenched in the digital age, where nothing is spared from the e-hands of fate—erm, technology. The recent uptick of affordable art and design have been great to artists in some amazing ways— the advances of art tech have shaved off hours, even days of time it took to get something done. Imagine in 2012 having to drive to the copy store to have the clerk shrink down your 11" x 17" art board so you could then fax it to your editor in another state to get advice on a page that needs reworking, going home to wait to hear back, then returning with more of the same? That’s days (or more) of back-and-forth that can now be done in minutes due to email, and cartoonists having smart all-in-one copier hubs in their studios. How about having to build travel time into a job’s schedule so that you could gather all of your art into a

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FedEx box and then send it to the publisher so they got the art before the deadline (hoping it doesn’t get lost or damaged)? A quick Dropbox or MegaUpload transfer has even taken the place of FTP (File Transfer Protocol) in a lot of studios. Wotta world! The muss and fuss of making comics has gotten even

easier due to the Adobe Suites: Photoshop, mainly for clean-up and coloring, and Illustrator for lettering comics. There have been great books written about the digital process and comicmaking, notably the great, but quickly aging Digital Prepress for Comic Books (by Kevin Tinsley, Stickman Press) and more recently The DC Comics Guide to Digitally Drawing

(opposite page) Screen display of the layout palette options. (above) G.I. Joe artist, Will Rosado, demonstrates his step-by-step process when using Manga Studio EX 4. G.I. Joe ™ and © Hasbro.

Comics (by Freddie E. Williams II, Watson-Guptill), which I hope to review in a later article, that has uncovered and shone light over the mystery and guesswork of creating comics on your computer. A contender to the mighty Photoshop has appeared on the horizon, and will be the focus of my review: Manga Studio by SmithMicro Software. This program has been around for a few iterations already, and from all of the cartoonist circles I fraternize with, not a lot of people had the inclination or time to tinker with the older versions of this. Cartoonists are a superstitious lot, and once they find something that works in their digital workflow, they’re not in a hurry to change it. There’s a never-ending

quest to find a best, shiniest way to invent (and draw!) the wheel, and once you find a method that works, you don’t want to mess with it. I also believe the name of the software freezes out a lot of American cartoonists who don’t want to buy something that’s not marketed for them. Manga Studio doesn’t sound like something a cartoonist interested in drawing for Marvel would want to buy, does it? But enter Manga Studio EX 4, and everything changed. There is another SmithMicro box on the shelves called Manga Studio Debut 4, but your Crusty Critic has put it at arm’s length because it is a crippled, cheaper version of EX 4, and there are so many things disabled in that version that it’s not worth reviewing. Let’s begin, shall we?

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PRICE: As of this writing, the SmithMicro site (http://manga. smithmicro.com) has the retail price for Manga Studio EX 4 at $299.99, but this Crusty Critic is also a Pursed-Lip PennyPincher and has found Amazon.com discounts this deeply. On the other hand, almost every other week SmithMicro runs a sale, sometimes chopping the price by 70%! I picked up my copy for $79.00, which is a great buy. — Reasonable price for the content. FUNCTION: Manga Studio EX 4 boasts that it is the allpurpose comic making program—from soup to nuts, you can create a full comic book from scratch with this. It’s pretty accurate, as MS even takes the set-up of a comic into consideration, all the way down to the output. For example, one of the first steps of the program, after creating your page style and dimensions of your comic, is to find out if you want to create a single page (creating your own reusable template is a snap) to create a story with multiple pages, where you can then enter as many spreads into the workflow document as you’d like. I am currently working on a 96-page graphic novel, and it took seconds to set up a new file for this project. Doing this in Photoshop would take a lot of files, a lot of scanning, layers, and a final trip into Adobe InDesign to setup your document for pages. — Does what it’s supposed to do.

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TOOLS: Being that this program was designed for Mangaka (Japanese-styled cartoonists) you have a great selection of digital tools at your disposal created in mind for the Japanese comic workflow. You have a great selection of inking tools, something in Photoshop that would take lots of tinkering or trial-and-error to find the right effect. Your inking tools for example are several inking “nibs” such as real Deleter-style Japanese steel pen nibs like the G, Maru, and so on. Other great options are the “Beginner’s Assistant” palette which takes all of the major areas of the program and sets them up easily for you to find—such as an easy way to take pre-planned panel layouts, like a six-panel grid in 2" x 2" formation, and easily drag-and-drop them right into your page! Other amazing bundles jammed into this program are a ton of screen tones, speed lines, and grids. It’s a breeze to lay out a panel with a customizable perspective wireframe that can set up a cityscape in minutes. This program changes everything. Manga Studio EX 4 also allows for you to letter pages right in the document, as you can create your word balloons and text in the page or grab a premade balloon and drop it right into your panels. (Almost) all the bases are covered here.

— Amazing amount of options—if it isn’t here, you don’t need it.

(opposite page) Here Will used the customizable wire grid function to build a cityscape. (above) Manga Studio EX 4’s pen nib options include traditional manga-ka nibs, which you can further customize. (right) Here Will made use of the speed line function.

LEARNING CURVE: The learning curve isn’t nearly as blindingly steep as Photoshop, where almost every step has to come from a tutorial or a pal who figured it out already. Manga Studio isn’t as hard to learn, but much like most of the modern design suites, MS is set up with a main tool palette. But thinking that MS will behave like Illustrator and Photoshop’s functions is a fools’ errand, though the icons look the same in some places. There’s not a lot of documentation for the program; there is a …For Dummies book floating around, but it’s for an earlier version of the program and of no use to you for Manga Studio EX 4. You’re going to have to rely on the help of YouTube tutorials and some good clips on the SmithMicro site where there are a few good and long interviews with power users of the program such as cartoonists Dave Gibbons and Doug TenNapel. Be sure to take notes. — Could be a lot easier to manage, would love to have an easier tutorial section. COMMUNITY: As the word goes out about this program, I’m seeing more and more professional cartoonists who have adapted to the software as a need to speed up their process, as well as amateur cartoonists who have done great things experimenting with MS. SmithMicro does a great job herding in fans of the software on their website, where they also pool YouTube tutorials for easy viewing. Not much else on the net to find about Manga Studio, but if you troll some of the art forums like DeviantArt or PencilJack, you’re sure to come across some helpful tutorials.

way you think they should, which makes applying some ideas harder than they need to be. It took your Critic several tries and calls to my pals who use the program (such as superartist Will Rosado, who’s art accompanies this review) to get it to behave and play nice. Something that should have been a 101 step wound up making this Critic angry when he finally figured it out after an obtuse answer. Also, one could color comics with this program, but you may find yourself opening up Photoshop and exporting your file over to do that heavy lifting. I don’t trust that MS can give you what you’re looking for in that department. Yes, it’s there, but I don’t think is worth re-learning. This Crusty Critic definitely recommends picking this up and giving it a whirl—you may find something you like in here that may accelerate your workflow. If you enjoy the idea of keeping original art and aren’t completely sold on digital drawing, you can easily flex the program to work for you; for example, you could create page layouts in MS and then print them onto art board and work traditionally. Or even draw your pages out and scan them and ink digitally. It’s really up to you. A must-buy! Thanks again to illustrator extraordinaire Will Rosado for his great art samples of Manga Studio at work. Please visit Will on the web at http://williamrosado.blogspot.com/. Until next time, stay Crusty! One of Will’s digital illustrations using Manga Studio EX 4. To see more of Will’s work, please visit williamrosado.blogspot.com.

All in all, I think Manga Studio EX 4 is a great tool that can be used to speed up a cartoonist who is looking to create a bigger volume of work in a quicker timeframe. When time and output is a factor (or space or raw materials or spilled ink on your floor and hands), you need an edge in the comics-making race, and this program does that well once you’ve figured out how to make it work for you—not an easy task at first. One of the short-comings of the software is a head-scratchingly frustrating learning curve—some things just don’t work the

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Rules of Appeal:

Aesthetics

&DESIGN A

esthetics is the study of artistic phenomena, such as painting, music, literature, dance, and sculpture and is usually used in reference to the visual arts. For hundreds of years, the best philosophers, artists, and critics have discussed, created, critiqued, and debated one another to determine the most important, attractive, effective, and esthetically pleasing elements in the design of artistic works and objects from fashion to toasters to automobiles and everything from film and print to painting. In comics we can look at something like the design of not only a page, a panel, or a costume, but also, more importantly, how those elements and objects are designed and how they work together to make a page or cover really go POW! Design, which is a combination and arrangement of visual elements such as line, shape, proportion, form, color, and pattern, is the way we build an image. Artists—in our case illustrators, comic artists, cartoonists, and animators—achieve a good design though the manipulations of these elements in the “design process,” the rough sketch or layouts where they manipulate line and shape and the silhouette of those shapes.

Here we prove our design and work out all of the bugs. Line is considered the main design element, our chief tool in the way we separate, cut, or create divisions or space on the picture plane. Or, to put it simply, the way we draw space and objects in that space. Of the visual attributes, aestheticians believe silhouette to be most important because it “frames” an object in its surroundings. Line also interacts with color to emphasize or deemphasize silhouette and shape. (DeLong, 1987) The interaction of line and color is the most important determinant of “significant form”—a visual image—that people find attractive. (Bell, 1914) The qualities that create an appealing image vary with individual taste, personal experience and awareness of aesthetics, but the technical principles discussed here are basic and universal—they physically construct the artwork. It’s useful to consider a drawing or painting as a journey for the viewer’s

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eye—a literal, physical journey directing the eye through, around, over, into, and across the contents of the image. The artist is in complete control of this journey, and dictates the ease or difficulty of the viewer’s experience by the choices made and the arrangement of the marks, shapes, tones, and colors used. Speed seems to be a crucial element—the pace, fast or slow, that the moving eye navigates through the image. This tempo can (and usually should) vary throughout the experience, but an image that can be apprehended quickly without

confusion, and yet reward a longer, slower continued perusal with deeper and more subtle content will always appeal to the widest spectrum of viewers. Most of the examples shown in this article are unfinished, revealing the process of finding, improving, and refining the design that best suits the intent. Often this vital (and frequently hard-won) essence is hidden to the untrained eye of the casual viewer, but it is this careful planning and discovery beneath the final rendering that creates the satisfying response we are calling appeal or attraction.

Paul Power’s East Meets West The first rough reveals a clear idea of my intention, and the basic rhythm, strong overall pyramid shape, balance of masses, and general energy of the action is good, but the forward position of Om's left arm, though explaining the thrust of the big cat’s pull, creates a lumpen silhouette on that side of his body. The second attempt solves most of the problems—I’ve moved his left arm clear of his body, thrust his right arm back, brought him forward, and added a more jaunty, confident attitude to his stride. By the time I was ready to render the finished piece (in a faux J. C. Leyendecker's style, as assigned), the buildings seemed intrusive and distracting, so I strengthened the silhouette by replacing them with a bleached cow skull and bit of cactus which explains the western location more elegantly than the storefronts.

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HOOK This fantasy piece is designed to read very quickly, with slashing diagonals thrusting at each other in very simple, strong silhouetted poses. You can see in the sketchbook roughs that the basic shape relationships were clearly conceived from the outset. I refined proportions and anatomy in the charcoal block-in, and decided what the woman is holding by her left hand. At this early stage of painting, I am further solidifying masses and structure.

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JOHN CARTER OF MARS I did many, many more roughs and revisions of this composition before committing to the final poses and details of form, but you can see that the basic elements of the image were in place from the first rough doodle. The complexity of this scene demanded much careful thought and revision, but the effort was necessary to bring the entire painting into a harmonious whole. The movement, tonal and color contrasts, and bright light effects quickly attract/excite the eye with kinetic energy. Then there is much to see as the viewer slowly examines each element, the design pattern guiding the eye in a circular arc around and around the picture.

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LOTS REVIS This piece is in mid-revision—the original composition is on the left. Attentive perusal will reveal many changes in shape, movement, simplification of masses, and especially of silhouette. Notice how much easier it is to grasp the entire scene in the right-hand version—how the broader shapes, elimination of busy detail, and simplified contrasts improve clarity, mood, and interest.

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Mahar I established a strong, upright shape framed by an upward curving arc in the initial doodle, and a general idea of the woman's pose—very simple shape relationships. You can see in the pencil drawing that I experimented with raising the creature's arms in a attempt to increase the feeling of menace—but that didn't work—it created too smooth (fast) an arc across the top of the composition by aligning the tops of the claws with the top of her head. The victim’s head needed to rise above the arc formed by the creature’s arms, to slow the eye movement a bit. I placed the vague forms of the other monsters behind them with great care, to enhance the mood and threat and accent the foreground grouping—not distract from it with bad placement or too much detail.

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MERM I liked the greater simplicity of the second sketchbook pose and followed it very closely in the charcoal drawing. During the first lay-in of paint, I slightly adjusted her right arm to strengthen the overall silhouette, and added a little more twist and curving flair to her tail.

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MONSTER MEN The digital scribble was a memory doodle of a Frank Frazetta frontis piece ink sketch printed in an Ace paperback of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Monster Men. I followed the general layout of my doodle, but changed the feeling of the scene by adjusting the pose, and subsequently the figure’s rhythm and attitude. I decided I wanted to shift the emotion from an impression of direct angry menace to one of less certainty—more tentative. This makes the monster more pathetic, possibly even a bit sympathetic. Subtle changes can create significant shifts in effect.

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MOON MAID In this Burroughs scene from The Moon Maid, I had a clear idea of the action from the first sketch—aside from adjusting the centaur-like creature’s anatomy to suggest something slightly more otherworldly and alien rather than a normal earth horse physiognomy, very little was modified in the pencil and underpainting stages. The placement of the bat-toads are specifically designed to subliminally suggest the arcing rhythm of the beast’s gallop.

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WITCHES This grouping of young witches was originally planned as a painting, as you can see from the color rough reproduced here. I still intend to paint it, but an ink drawing was needed first—rendering in this style of wash and line work requires a very careful pencil drawing as a guide. There can be no mistakes once inking begins. You can see how every shape and detail of form has been worked out in advance of dipping the brush into the ink bottle. A notable difference here is the loss of the central witch’s right foot into shadow in the painted rough—a dark mass worked better there—the lit foot “snagged” the eye on its journey around the composition. The different effects of the two mediums allow the foot to be visible and work fine in a line/wash technique.

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LIFE DRAWINGS I’ve included a selection of life drawings from live models to demonstrate that the function of design in artwork is constant—you can design for visual appeal/charm/beauty each and every time you place a mark on a surface. The mediums represented here are pencil, Conté (chalk), and oil applied with a brush. The time spent on the individual poses range from two minutes to fifteen. In each instance I quickly decided what aspect or impression of the subject before me I would attempt to capture/emphasize in the time allowed, then calmly attacked the task. The last phrase is revealing—you must work furiously, but with absolute concentration and focus because to design means to consciously make choices each split second you are drawing or painting. Where to place the subject within the borders of your surface —how big or small it will be, what to accent, form, structure, mood, light, weight—an impression of flow or movement, or a likeness of the model…? After much experience many of these decisions may become intuitive, but the process of realizing them on paper or canvas is largely conscious. It’s work.

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Creating fantasy or any kind of contrived, invented imagery places the decisions of design foremost in your awareness, since there is nothing outside your imagination to refer to, but it is important to realize that visual art is design—working from life does not mean copying what you see as blunt objective fact. Notice in these drawings how much information is sublimated or missing entirely, and how in each case it is the simplification and aesthetic treatment of what is portrayed that creates appeal and atmosphere—far more than any photograph, or hand-drawn imitation of what a camera indiscriminately records, could ever convey. See you next time… Bret

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SuperSad Studies SuperSad is a selection of paintings exploring some of the superhero iconography in my fine art work. In these paintings or drawings I often work from life with a live model or employ photography. In this series of paintings and sketch paintings, you can see I explored and developed my concepts for the compositions and designs of paintings I wanted to produce. You can see where I not only experimented with the color but also the cropping of the figure. Sometimes, by cropping the figure and getting in close, you create a very different, almost monumental or unique feeling to the figure. Experiment—try many, many different ideas through studies and sketches. That’s the best way to really see if you can find something deeper and unique about your idea—to see if your idea really has something unique and deeper to explore and whether you can avoid the ordinary solutions.

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Super Sad 1 In this painting I worked with the live model, photography, and invention. I wanted to get the charge and energy of the gesture of the model even in this quiet pose. Every pose, even one in repose, has an energy or rhythm. Working from life I blocked in the figure. I had a “feeling” I was searching for in this picture, and that was always my guiding force. The biggest issue here was that the concept required me to then jump from working from life, or observation, to the background which was based on a series of photos I shot myself. I knew the height and the angle of my point of view working with the live model, so, when I went to shoot the pictures for the environment, I made sure the height/angle/positions I had working with the model matched the perspective as closely as possible. I worked on the background to block that in, and then, in the next session, worked again with the live model. Using the photos I was aware that they were just to add a sense of reality, and that I could bend or move anything I needed to create the aesthetic I wanted.

The background with the tractor and the clouds were all created from imagination, so this work had three very different sections and stages, observation or life, photography and invention which all had to seamlessly mesh together. The viewer should never suddenly become aware of the fact that some parts of your painting came from life and another from some other source, like photos.

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Supergirl On this page Supergirl stops Mary Marvel from really hurting the crooked mall cop. I always try and stage the action with strong gestures of the figures which will read cleanly and quickly; everything must conform to this idea, including and drapery or capes, even if they are floating, as they are in the main panel. By eliminating the border and the background in the big panel, I also open up the page and focus more on the heroes in the most emotionally important panel on the page. Since this story features two “super” girls, I really want there to not only be a sexiness, but also a strength to their poses. That is conveyed through the rhythm of their gestures which have a lot of “S” curves and shapes in them. I drew the figures of the girls first, then added the capes and drapery in support of the action and motion. Once I traced off the layout, I decided to have a close-up of Mary’s face much larger to show how she was now in power and control after she had confronted the bad guy. The final page was inked by John Nyberg.

Buffy In this commission I really wanted to push the line of action with Buffy’s figure in contract to the lumbering figures of the monsters or zombies. Zombies or monsters often have an ungainly or awkward gate or movement. The design ideas was Buffy shooting in like a lightning bolt. By making her the most colorful figure, she also stands out, and your eye goes to her figure first. I did the initial sketch in Photoshop using my Wacom tablet. You can see some of the initial underdrawing in the lighter grey where I really worked on starting with a broad, strong gesture. Once I was satisfied with the design, I traced it off and did the final illustration using watercolors and some colored inks and pencils.

See you next time… Mike

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Al Williamson The

Maestro

by Jorge “George” Khoury

photo by Greg Preston

I Flash Gordon ™ and © King Features Syndicate, Inc.

t is impossible to not gaze your eyes upon his beautiful artwork without being captivated by the stunning draftsmanship and sheer devotion behind it. From his vivid doodles to the impeccable sequential storytelling, his lifetime pursuit of perfection can be seen in every precise line he put down. With his elegant techniques and sensibilities, he never exaggerated his human figures and yet showed movement effortlessly. A master of positive and negative space, mood and atmosphere, this consummate craftsman did it all with gusto and dominance in his compositions. All of these hallmarks were the calling card of the late Al Williamson, one of the most important artistic talents the comics arts will ever know. Alfonso “Al” Williamson was born on March 21, 1931, in New York City. His Colombian father was part of an affluent family in his home country; his mother, a native of Pennsylvania, was a telephone operator in Manhattan. By 1933, young Al, along with his mother, had immigrated to Colombia to rejoin his father. Between the crumbling relationship of his parents and his own loneliness, his childhood years in Bogota were not easy, but it was there that his great

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(left) A sample page Al worked up circa 1947-48 in an attempt to get work from Fiction House. (above) A 1950 portfolio illustration. Artwork © Estate of Al Williamson.

love affair for comics and cinema began, introducing him to fantastical worlds and creativity. In 1940, during the Golden Age of comics, he traded his skates for a stack of Pacquins (a Spanish-language comics magazine) and never looked back as he searched for more comics wherever he travelled. Riding on his enthusiasm, he began to fill up notebooks of drawings emulating his favorite strips, like Flash Gordon, his favorite hero in the funny books and cinema. After the break-up of his parents, Williamson and his mother, Sally, returned to the States in 1943, originally to San Francisco and a year later back to his hometown of New York City. In Manhattan the youngster—one of the first true fanboys of the comics medium—found himself in the heart of the comics industry, and he visited the syndicates themselves in search of more comics or anything else comics-related he could get his hands on be it actual original art, clippings, tear-sheets, or proofs. All he wanted was to study the art techniques and production process of his favorite creators up close. It wasn’t very long before Williamson started taking art classes taught by legendary Tarzan artist Burne Hogarth and befriending fellow students like Wally Wood and Roy Krenkel. By 17 he broke into the industry doing a few spot illustrations for Famous Funnies. As comic fans and artists tend to do, Williamson soon became great friends with other kindred spirits like Frank Frazetta, Angelo Torres, George Woodbridge, and future

Mad editor Nick Meglin—all in the infancy of their respective careers. Together these young men pushed one another to better themselves, and they collaborated on many artistic assignments in those early days. At the height of legendary EC Comics line, Williamson was a Wunderkind cutting his teeth on now-classic comics like Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, Weird Fantasy, and Weird Science amongst others. Only in his early 20s, EC Comics allowed him to cement his name and show the world that he was an artist with incredible range, who could draw science fiction as well as any crime story without missing a beat. After 1954 the years were lean for all comics professionals—and EC in particular—due to the public outcry and wave of censorship triggered by a Senate hearing investigating the link between juvenile delinquency and comics. During this unglamorous period, Williamson worked for nearly every publisher in New York, and for low page rates—primarily at Atlas Comics, but also other outfits like ACG, Charlton, Dell, and Harvey. On this rugged road, sometimes the work was done quickly and suffered for it, but he persevered because he had a solid foundation and, frankly, only the best artists survived this comics crash. Into the 1960s Williamson continued perfecting his craft and made a pivotal move to work as an assistant to artist John Prentice on the newspaper strip Rip Kirby, an Alex Raymond creation. Working and following Prentice’s lead, Williamson began to develop a sense of self-discipline and professionalism that he felt he was lacking next to the all-business approach of the older Prentice. Here he began understanding how to effectively use perspective and blacks in his layouts and inking. He now had all the tools to make even the most mundane of civilian scenarios look compelling and interesting. By the end of the experience, he would ghost art not only

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(above) January 29–30, 1973, dailies of Secret Agent Corrigan by Archie Goodwin and Al Williamson. (opposite page) Cover art for Dark Horse’s Classic Star Wars #18 which reprinted the Star Wars newspaper strip in comic book form. Secret Agent Corrigan ™ King Features Syndicate, Inc. and ©1973 King Features Syndicate, Inc. Star Wars ™ and © Lucasfilm Ltd.

on Rip Kirby strips but provided art for other dailies like Big Ben Bolt and Dan Flagg. Creepy #1, along with a handful of strips for Warren Comics’ magazine line, officially began Williamson’s long and fruitful collaborative relationship with writer/editor Archie Goodwin, a friend from the ’50s. Now he was more than ready for the new challenges that awaited him. He was now his own man. Williamson’s artistic hero was Alex Raymond, the creator of Flash Gordon, who like him was an impeccable stylized artist. When King Features offered Williamson the opportunity to officially draw three issues of a Flash Gordon comic book, it marked a significant personal victory, and he returned every ounce of passion and joy unto the artwork. In a 1969 interview to Cartoonist PROfiles, Williamson said, “I studied looking at illustrative pictures. I studied Raymond as a kid, and I copied his work. All you need is a couple of Flash Gordon pages, and you’ve got an anatomy course right there. He had the anatomy, and he had the proportions. I used to draw Flash Gordon all the time. I learned to draw by imitating Raymond. This is the way I learned how to draw figures.” The well-received work on this classic Flash Gordon effort was an elegant homage to Raymond and his love for these characters. In 1967 he continued following his idol’s path when he finally received his very own newspaper strip in the form of X-9: Secret Agent Corrigan, another great character created by Raymond. The 13 years spent drawing X-9 for King Features Syndicate, with Archie Goodwin writing the scripts,

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would become Williamson’s largest body of work. With its rugged and dashing protagonist, the spy strip was full of beautiful women, dastardly villains, exotic landscapes, cinematic action, never-ending suspense, and a plethora of guns that Williamson brought to life on a daily basis until 1980. The strip was a tour-de-force because he put so much of himself into his artwork. Looking at the artwork… you literally see the familiar profile and body language of Al Williamson, himself, because he injected himself as reference. Frustrated with his financial arrangement at King Features, Williamson returned to comic books in a big way thanks to his writer, friend, and now Marvel Comics editor Archie Goodwin with the highly anticipated Marvel Comics adaptation of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. Empire proved to be such a massive success that it has been repackaged and remains in print to this day. Because of the size of this project, Williamson recruited artist Carlos Garzon to render backgrounds and the high-tech hardware and gadgetry, while he inked his own figures for consistency. A whole new generation of readers became Williamson fans because of his uncanny ability to capture the look and feel of ’80s cinema blockbusters in the sequential adaptations of Empire, Flash Gordon, Blade Runner, and Return of the Jedi. When George Lucas in 1977 personally picked Williamson to draw a Star Wars newspaper feature, the artist was stuck in his King Features contract and unavailable. But after his Marvel Comics Empire adaptation, he was offered the Star Wars

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syndicated strip yet again. This time he accepted the offer of drawing new expanded adventures written by Archie Goodwin and featuring Luke, Han, and Leia, which began running February 9, 1981, and concluded after a nice run in 1984. Between his work on the film adaptations and newspaper staple, he became the definitive Star Wars comics artist. For this writer, this work made Williamson the first artist whose name would become ingrained into his very being, and, I know, legions of Generation Xers have similar stories. Although his love for comics never faltered, Williamson reached an interesting crossroad in the mid-1980s after more than thirty years in the business. For his family’s well-being, he decided to make the transition to becoming a full-time comic book inker, signing an exclusive contract at Marvel Comics. This arrangement allowed Williamson to provide his family with health benefits, a steady income, and for the first time in his illustrious career… royalties. In turn, a prolific Williamson brought out the best from the pencils of stellar collaborators like John Romita Jr. (on Daredevil, Daredevil: Man Without Fear, Uncanny X-Men), Rick Leonardi (on Daredevil and Spider-Man 2099), and John Buscema (on Wolverine) throughout his tenure. His association with Marvel would last until his retirement in 2003 after more than 50 years in the industry, one of a handful of individuals who remained active in the field from the Golden Age to the Modern Age of comics. Al Williamson died on June 13, 2010. He was a gentleman, an artist’s artist, and a true connoisseur of the medium. He never stopped being that kid in Bogota who loved comics. He was a mentor to many artists and won pretty much

A mid-’50s sketch of a rider on horseback. Artwork © Estate of Al Williamson.

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every award and accolade this industry could give him. He left behind an impressive body of work that reminds us all of a romanticism for comics art that must never be forgotten. He was the great Al Williamson. Thank you to Angelo Torres, Bret Blevins, Mark Schultz, Tom Yeates, Alex Ross, Rick Veitch, and DRAW! editor Mike Manley for sharing their memories about their friendship and work with the talented Mr. Williamson. The interviews within this article were conducted separately between 2008 and 2010.

HIS INFLUENCES

ANGELO TORRES: Al, he was nuts about Raymond, and especially the Flash Gordon stuff. This was his whole life. MARK SCHULTZ: His mother got a job working at a company that was right next door, literally in the same building, to a business that sold—and this is just pure coincidence. Apparently, the business next door placed American comic strips overseas with foreign markets. So Al just was in hog heaven when it turned out that this office was next to his mother’s office. You could just go in there, and a guy in there turned him onto and offered him proofs at some point of some of this stuff. I’m not sure if the proofs he got at that point were the Hawks of the Sea proofs or something else. But, yeah, ever since he was a teenager, he realized the value of this stuff, certainly long before the professional ranks realized the value of it. That stuff, to them back then, was all disposable, and they were willing to just get rid of it. They were happy if someone like Al wanted to cart it away from them.

DRAW!: He eventually met Alex Raymond. SCHULTZ: Al has told me in the past that he got to see Alex Raymond, like you said, and I think he was probably about 18, and apparently it went very well. He said Alex spent a lot more time with him than he expected, because he knew the guy was super-busy. He was working constantly just keeping up with his deadlines. But Al was very shy, and I get the impression from what Al has said that he felt he took up too much of Alex Raymond’s time, and after that he just never went back to see Raymond again. And a while later, like a year later, I think he met up with Raymond’s assistant in another context, I forget what, and Raymond’s assistant said, “Boy, it’s too bad that you didn’t come back and stay in touch with him. I think Alex was really impressed with your work, and I think he would have possibly used you as an assistant.” And this just crushed Al. But this is my feeling, and this is what I told Al, is that, “Gee, Al, if that had happened and you had become Alex Raymond’s assistant, probably, or very possibly, you would never have had the chance to develop as you did, doing the EC stuff and everything else.” Maybe Al Williamson never would have developed his own thing if he’d become an assistant to Alex Raymond. DRAW!: Like Raymond, Williamson also strived for a certain perfection. SCHULTZ: They wanted to get something that was very reflective of illustration at the time. DRAW!: These men wanted their work to be immaculate. SCHULTZ: Yeah. Well, the standards were much higher, and there was a standard that I think has kind of been lost along the way, at some point. And these cartoonists were aspiring to the same sort of standards that you saw in illustration. So, yeah, they were all pushing themselves to perfect this sense of draftsmanship and quality in their drawing. RICK VEITCH: Oh, it’s insane. It’s crazy. But he comes from this school, like, he assisted John Prentice on X-9, and Prentice had evolved that sort of way, working with photographs and models, that came from the illustrator side of things. And, comparatively, if you look at the type of work those guys produced compared to what was normal in comic books, it’s like head and shoulders above.

THE BEGINNING

TORRES: I was going to the School of Visual Arts, which then was the Cartoonists and Illustrators School. I was studying there under Burne Hogarth. And Al and Roy Krenkel went to that school years before I did, when it was just a little holein-the-wall up on the Upper West Side. So he knew Hogarth. But, getting back to how I met him, my friend Nick Meglin, who was the editor of Mad all these years, but then was just a student at school—he was a friend of mine at SVA—he started going down to EC, to 225 Lafayette, where EC was, and just hanging around, meeting people up there, and he’d come back to school the next day and tell me, “Oh, I met so-andso, I met Marie Severin, or I saw so-and-so.” And one day

A cover sketch for EC’s Panic magazine. The magazine ran for twelve issues in the mid-’50s, but this sketch was not used. Panic © William M. Gaines Agent, Inc.

he came back, and he said he met Al. And I said, “Oh, that’s nice,” and so on, and so on, but nothing came of that until this artist, Sid Check, was kind of stuck on a deadline, and he called Al to see if Al could help him, and Al said, “No, I can’t. I don’t have the time. But I know a guy that has a friend in art school that’s pretty good,” meaning me, “and maybe he can give you a hand with this stuff.” So Nick came running back to school the next day, very excited. He said, “Do you want to work? Do you want to work on a comic book?” And I had never done anything for publication before. I was still in my second year in school. I said, “Sure, that sounds good.” And he said, “Well, this guy, Sid Check, needs help, and Al told me that you should get in touch with him and see what you can arrange.” So I did, I called Sid, and he said, “Yeah, can you come out and help me out? I have to have these jobs in tomorrow. Can you come out and give me a hand?” I had visions of going out there and maybe working two or three hours and helping him out, and I said, “Can Nick come along?” And Sid said, “Yeah, sure, that’s fine.” So around five that afternoon, we took the subway out by Coney Island in the pouring rain, and found our way to Sid Check’s house. And we got there, the electricity was off because they had a storm and it knocked out all the power, so they had candles so they could find their way around the

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(left) Illustrations by the dynamic duo of Al Williamson and Frank Frazetta! (above) Frazetta pitched in to help Al with the inking on this 1950 John Wayne story. © respective owners.

house. I thought, “What the hell did I get myself into?” But we went in, and finally they restored the power, and Sid said, “Can you help me with this?” I think he was working on a story for Timely or some other company. And I said, “Sure,” and he started passing me pages, and I started working, and I realized this was going to take all night. I had never been up all night working on a job in my life. But we ended up staying up until morning working on these, and getting these jobs finished. And then he said, “Oh, Frank is coming over this morning to bring some pages he was helping me on.” And I said, “Frank who?” He said, “Frank Frazetta. He’s been working on one of my jobs, trying to get it finished for me.” Sure enough, at about 7:30 or 8:00 in the morning, Frank shows up. So I met Frank first, before I met Al, and we started talking and yakking it up and everything else, and I was familiar with his work, but not that much. But we hit it off right away. He found out that we like to play baseball. Turns out he’s a

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baseball fanatic. He actually played a lot of ball when he was young. We took it out to his car and opened the trunk, and he had about ten baseball gloves, and bats, and balls, and all kinds of stuff in there, and we just flipped out. We said, “We gotta go down and play ball.” And he said, “First, I have to deliver the work. Let’s go over and pick up Williamson, and we’ll all go into the city.” So that’s what we did. We drove down to near Pratt Institute, where Al lived, and that’s when I met him. We picked him up that same morning. I met both these guys. We picked up Al, we went into the city and delivered Sid’s work, or we left him in town or whatever, then we drove back to Brooklyn and we pulled up to the nearest schoolyard we could find and we knocked the ball around for a couple of hours. And Al and I just hit it off right away. I found out that he spoke Spanish, and that he grew up in Columbia in South America. His father was Colombian. From then on, we just went out together. We

started hanging around. We loved movies, we grew up watching movies in chapters down there, and I grew up in Puerto Rico, so we had a lot in common. And I was thrilled to death to actually see the EC stuff, because we were all very familiar with the EC work being done in school. Everybody wanted to work for EC some day, so here I was with Al and his sciencefiction work, which I loved. He was probably my favorite artist up there. We just became close friends. SCHULTZ: Well, I guess you would say a second generation came along that had a love for the stuff. I think the first generation more or less saw it as a business, and a lot of those cartoonists, working in the comic book industry anyway, they didn’t see comic books themselves as anything great. They were looking to graduate into being illustrators. And even in the comic strips, there wasn’t a great appreciation for the value of the stuff beyond that initial, you get it in the paper, you hit your deadlines, you get it published, you get it printed, and they didn’t see—there were no collections on the horizons, then, or anything. But he was that second generation that did see that stuff that he was seeing in the papers inspired him, and if he could get better copies of it for himself, wow, that was excellent.

LATINO

TORRES: He was born in Colombia, in Bogota. He spent quite a few years down there as a kid, before his mother brought him back to the States. And I grew up in Puerto Rico. I didn’t come to this country until I was about 13 or 14... His father was Colombian. But [his mother] spoke Spanish, and she was just a sweet old lady, and she just loved to have us over. One day while I was there, Roy Krenkel dropped in, and I met Roy then. And this was tremendous. Roy had also been to the Visual Arts when Hogarth opened that school, so it turned out that they both used to drop by my school just to bust chops, just to go up to my room, and say hello to Burne Hogarth, and sit in the back of the class with me. It was just a great, great friendship. And eventually I broke into comics on my own. EC was having problems then, and even though, at the time I met Al, it was just the biggest thing going, I mean, Bill [Gaines] was putting out the two science-fiction books, and the horror stuff, and of course Harvey Kurtzman was still putting out the war stuff. EC was a wonderful place. We used to go up there just to hang out, and there was always somebody up there. John Severin used to be up there, Marie Severin worked up there, Johnny Craig used to work up there, too. So it was great, and we were always welcome. Bill never said, “Get out of here, we have work to do.” He always welcomed the guys. And we were just art students, for heaven’s sake. And we were always welcome up there. Of course, Nick eventually went on to become one of the Mad editors later. But Al and I just became very close friends. We lived right near each other. We hung out, we went to the beach, we went to the movies. We used to get in my car and drive up to 42nd Street around midnight and find a movie. It was just a great friendship. And, of course, Frank, too. And Frank was mostly playing baseball and running around Brooklyn. That was a tie

Angelo inked Al on this story for Piracy #2— one of their collaborations while working for EC. © William M. Gaines Agent, Inc.

there with Frank. We used to play ball every weekend. I’d go out there and play softball with Frank and Nick and the people out there. So it just became a great clique of artists, but it had other interests besides just drawing and doing comic books. We had a lot of other things in common, so it really worked out nicely.

EC COMICS

TORRES: Actually, the first Mad magazine came out after I left the service, I think it was ’54. So I was aware of all this, though I never in my life saw myself drawing for Mad. But I wanted to work for EC someday, and of course I end up doing so a little bit with Al, and then later on my own. I just wanted to break in, and while at Visual Arts, I won two scholarships while I was there. One of them allowed me to get myself a car so I could run around with the Frazetta crowd out there in Brooklyn and play ball and all of that. But mostly it steered me in that direction. But I won a scholarship my first year, and I won a six-month the second year, and then I won a contest that Stan Lee gave at the school. He gave out scripts to all the artists, and the winner would finish the story, and he would print it—which turned out to be me. I did the job, and Stan picked that one, and he offered me another script, and I

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took that. And I found myself working regularly for Stan. And that’s when I quit school. I just dropped out of school and went to work for Timely, for Stan Lee. And all through this, during the exhibits, for my first year there, and my second year, when I won the first scholarship, Frank and Al and Roy were there to see it. It was just a big crew working together, just loved to hang out together. SCHULTZ: When I first met Al, I was blathering around about how influential the EC guys were on me, and Al said, “You know, if you like the EC guys, you gotta look at the guys who inspired us. Look at Foster, look at Raymond, you look at the great illustrators.” And he was right. He was absolutely right. And that’s kind of the neat thing that I learned from Al was that you’ve got to keep digging. You don’t just say, “Oh, these guys influenced me, that’s good enough.” You keep looking at the history of it. Where did they come from? Where did they take their inspiration? You learn so much more, and it really helps influence what you’re doing.

JAMMING

TORRES: Down there in Puerto Rico we used to get the funnies just like they do up here, the Sunday funnies, with Tarzan and Prince Valiant and the whole thing. Plus, we had the comic books that were being distributed down there just like they were up here, and the movies, and the chapters. We saw a lot of the stuff down there, like he did in Colombia. So we saw the same things, the Spy Smasher chapters, Fu Manchu, and Flash Gordon, of course, and Both Angelo and Frank Frazetta jammed with Al on this story intended for the we just went nuts talking about all this stuff unpublished Crime Illustrated #3, part of EC’s short-lived Picto-Fiction line. that we knew when we were kids. And that was © William M. Gaines Agent, Inc. the bond that we formed right away. I mean, it was just this general thing. So he loved to have me around. I’ll do it.” And I did. I started inking the thing. Roy [Krenkel] So I started doing little things on his work. I was thrilled to was involved in that; he did all the backgrounds and he inked death to do that, doing a panel here, maybe a little background some of it. Eventually Al inked some of his own stuff. And I there, or a head here and there, and just to have me there for think even Frank inked a head or two in that job. So it was one company, so we could talk about the old days. And we did. of these collaborative things, but I was actually very much We just became very close friends. involved in the inking of it. We also did a couple of things for a railroad union. We did a DRAW!: Back in the ’50s with your friends, you guys always 24-page promotional booklet for this union out in Detroit someworked well as a team? place, and we both penciled and inked that thing. We worked TORRES: Well, we worked together mostly to keep each on it very hard. We had to draw trains, we had to draw stations, other company. We just loved to be together. and people, and rallies, and all kinds of crap, plus a guy and a girl, and so on. So we worked together on that. We actually took DRAW!: You learned from each other. photos for all of that. We set up models and got all the pictures TORRES: We actually worked on very few jobs where we we needed, and it came out really good. And then, a couple of really worked together. Like “The Arena” [from Valor #1, years later, I got my own to do. They wanted to do a new one. Al EC Comics]—I don’t’ know if you are familiar with it—the couldn’t do it because he was too busy, so I said, “I’ll take it. I’ll one with the Roman; that job is famous for that. He penciled do it myself.” I did the same thing. I set up models, took photos it, and he said, “I want you to ink it.” And I said, “Wow, fine, of everybody, and pulled it off. It came out really nice.

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PENNYSLVANIA

TORRES: I was the first one out there. I moved to Pike County, Pennsylvania. By then, Frank I had moved to Merrick, Long Island, I think. Al was still in his old neighborhood here in Brooklyn, and he met a very nice girl, his first wife, Arlene. She was a student at Pratt. And when they got married, she said, “Let’s get out of Brooklyn, too.” She came from Fosterdale, from that area up in New York near the Delaware River. And they found a place up there, and they packed up and moved up there. And a couple of years later, Frank, who was in Merrick, they decided to get out, and they found their place in Pennsylvania, too, down by Stroudsburg. He and Ellie and the kids, the whole family, and they bought this huge farm in Stroudsburg. So we all ended up in that area together. And all those years that I was living near Greeley, Pennsyl-

vania, Al was in Fosterdale, and we started working together. That’s when the Creepy stuff came in, and I started doing work for the Creepy magazines. Al was doing some too in the beginning. And we also did other projects together. He was doing Rip Kirby at the time, and I think I did a week of Kirby, and then I got involved with John Cullen Murphy’s Big Ben Bolt, and I took on the Sunday page, which I did for about six years. But we were always together. We kept company. I used to go up to his place and work up there. We were always trying to find something, some excuse for hanging out together and maybe working together.

YOU CAN CALL ME AL

TOM YEATES: I was actually introduced to Al first at a convention in New York, but I think he had just lost his first wife, and he wasn’t interested in talking to anybody. He kind of had his head down and was walking through the convention. He wasn’t up for meeting anybody. But then, later, right after I graduated from the Kubert School, he was thinking of quitting his newspaper strip, Secret Agent X-9, and he called up Joe Kubert because Kubert had just opened up the school and had been talking to Al about the school, and Al said, “Hey Joe, I want a young assistant.” Al didn’t have anybody specific in mind. He was open. That’s the way Al is. You don’t have to have already met him, or he’d seen your work and so he was impressed by you. He’s a very open artist, open to everybody, open to everything. That’s one of the things that’s so special about him as a man, to everybody who knows him, is what a unique personality he has. So he called up Joe Kubert and said, “I’m looking for a new, young assistant. I want some fresh blood in my studio, and I want to quit my newspaper strip job and get some other work, and I want to have somebody young who’s in the business now to hang around with and create with.” So Kubert called me up, because I obviously was the one in that first batch of students who was trying to draw in that Raymond style that Al Williamson has. So I called up Al, and we immediately hit it off over the phone, and he invited me up, and we just became friends instantly. BRET BLEVINS: I believe what happened is I was penciling an issue of The Hulk— a fill-in issue for Carl Potts—and a mutual friend Brent Anderson knew Al, was going up to visit him, and invited me along. So I went along and took the section of the job I had drawn. It was a fantasy story in a very Al Williamson kind of world, actually. And he said, “Gosh, I’d love to ink this.” So I went back and arranged it with Carl. And we did, Some of Al’s work for Creepy’s sister magazine Eerie #3. and then we started working together that © New Comic Company LLC.

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way and talking on the phone. And then he said, “You should come up and work in the studio,” and I was ready to move at the time, so I did. I was living in Connecticut then. ALEX ROSS: It was the Harvey Awards at this convention that I believe is where I met him, exactly, and the fact that he was there in the audience to witness when I got the first award I’d ever received in my life. Now, this would be the first of a few I would get over time, but this was a very, very important time for me, and, in particular to get to shake his hand after that event, it was as satisfying as anything could have been, because he was there. Because one of the greatest craftsmen I’d ever known of was there. So it was a major impact for me, huge satisfaction of his being there, hanging out with him later that evening. And I guess I would see him off and on over the years, and then the last time I saw Al was, I believe, ’97. In the San Diego Con, I saw him at the Graphitti Designs party, and I spoke with him extensively, he and his wife and son, and talked with his kid about art and whatnot. I think, if I’m right, it was that his son might have been an admirer of mine. He was a young kid at the time. I was very happy to spend the time with the family. And over the last several years, it’s more been that I’ve known a lot of people that are close to Al that I’ve kind of kept tabs on him and his life.

THE NEWSPAPER STRIPS

TORRES: He always wanted to do [newspaper strips]. And the closest he got to that at that time was working on Kirby after Raymond was killed. Prentice took over Rip Kirby, and Prentice hired Al to help him out. They actually moved to Mexico for a while. I don’t know if you know that. John Prentice and his family, Al inked his own figures for this Weird Fantasy #18 story, but Roy Krenkel—equal and Al and Arlene, they all ended up in Mexico parts friend, collaborator, and inspiration—inked the backgrounds. City for a year or two, or however long, and Weird Fantasy © William M. Gaines Agent, Inc. they mailed the strip from down there. They did it down there. So he spent some time down there, too. That’s YEATES: Well, it definitely got me excited about art and when they came back to Fosterdale, I think. I think they went drawing and illustration and comics. He had magazine illusto Mexico from Brooklyn, I’m not sure. But I didn’t see him trations by various artists. Of course, Krenkel drawings. The for a couple of years during that period. Even now it’s hard to whole idea of making a beautiful drawing was something that communicate with him, but I call and I talk to Cori [Al’s wife], I have always tried to strive for, and I think I credit a lot of and before he got so into this stage we used to talk almost once that to time spent with Williamson. And a lot of people will a week, sometimes twice a week. We’d get on the phone and tell you the same exact thing. chat, just like the old days, and laugh. He was always great fun to talk with, and talking about the old days. “Oh, Angelo,” DRAW!: He never got tired of comics. we’d talk in Spanish, and it was just great. Just great. We were YEATES: I don’t think so, maybe a little. But that’s what he always, always in communication with each other. So he was chose to do. And it’s funny, people have also talked about how quite an artist. Still is, I would imagine. he was really an illustrator, and he could have been a great illustrator if he’d gone into magazine illustration or something, DRAW!: Being around the environment of his studio, did that but he was a comic book nut. He loved comics. He just loved make you believe more in comics? comics. He wasn’t into the superhero stuff, which is kind of

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For more information about Secret Agent Corrigan and the new collections of the strip, please go to www.libraryofamericancomics.com. Secret Agent Corrigan ™ and © King Features Syndicate, Inc.

too bad. If he had been, it probably would have been an easier career for him, especially since he ended up inking Marvel superheroes. I don’t think that really served him well, artistically, to be an inker at Marvel, because his heart wasn’t in it, even though it was good to have that steady paycheck, and it’s hard for an artist to get a steady paycheck. DRAW!: But what he aspired to be was a newspaper strip artist? YEATES: Well, that was what you wanted back in the old days. Most of the guys aspired to get their own strip. That was a really big graduation. You’d start off on comics, but you really wanted your own strip, and there were a lot of adventure strips in the ’50s still. And if you could get your own strip, then you had it made. You’d make way more money.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

YEATES: I had a main big exposure to comics. It was this one event, a visit to my cousin in Colorado when I was about 13 or so. I was aware of comic books, but they weren’t special to me. I’d read them once in a while, had a couple, but I hadn’t been a big comic book reader, I hadn’t gotten the Marvel bug or anything and I wasn’t a collector at that age, but I visited this cousin of mine, Randy Yeates, who was a Marvel nut. He had Wally Wood’s Witzend fanzine. He was aware of DC Comics. All this stuff. This was the very early days of fandom. I mean, the big fandom. The fanzines were starting to come out, like Witzend, and he exposed me to all that extraneous stuff that I

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wasn’t familiar with, including the artwork of Bernie Wrightson, Steranko, Wally Wood, and Al Williamson. I was familiar with Krenkel and Frazetta from their Burroughs book covers. I first saw Williamson at Randy’s, and I was impressed by his work. Later, in high school, I got one of his Flash Gordon comic books, the King comics, the one with the Beastmen story, and the more I looked at it, the more I appreciated it. I don’t think he knocked me out at first, because he was very clean, and I was into that kind of raw Frazetta-styled, more intense artwork. Al’s stuff is a bit less intense, and more laid back and classy. But the more I looked at his work, the more impressed I got with it. And then, of course, I saw more when I started buying, in high school, the old Creepys and Eeries, with his incredible work printed in black-and-white, where you could really see the drawing and the inking. And those things just dazzled me. I was absolutely dazzled by those early Creepys and Eeries, those first dozen or so issues that Williamson and Torres and all those guys are in, Crandall. I still pore over those issues. The sheer finesse with which they would lay the ink on the page and place the figures in such a way that there was this balance and beauty, and the way the blacks are laid in, and those beautiful long pen strokes that Williamson can do, just knocked me out. VEITCH: The first time I became aware of it was the Flash Gordon issues he did for King in, what, the ’60s. I bought those off the stands, and at that time I was, like, 13, 14 years old, and I was totally plugged into Jack Kirby, and to see Williamson’s highly illustrative style just kind of blew me away, and I was fascinated with those two issues that came out.

SCHULTZ: I was aware of Al’s work before I knew the name Al Williamson. I remember seeing those King Comics Flash Gordon issues that Al did around ’65, and this was amazing to me, because it looked so different than what Marvel and DC and all the other comic companies were doing. And then I saw, around ’68, when he started doing the Secret Agent Corrigan feature in the papers, the paper in Pittsburgh, where we lived at the time, was carrying that, and I was just amazed by the art in this strip, and I started collecting them. And then around the same time I stumbled upon this book with illustrations by Frazetta, Krenkel, and Al called Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure. It was kind of an overview of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ career by Dick Lupoff. And I picked up a paperback version of that and I saw these incredible illustrations. They just blew my mind, and it took me a while to realize that the same guy who was doing the comic books, the comic strips, and these illustrations was one guy, was Al Williamson. And at that point it just kind of freaked me out. I didn’t realize that you could work in all these different venues and still be the same person. And that kind of was it. When I put that all together in my head, I became a big Williamson fan. ROSS: I would think the first thing I saw was probably his adaptation of The Empire Strikes Back in 1980. And it was certainly before I saw some of his older work reprinted in the pages of Alien Worlds, the PC comics series that took a lot of work that had been done already, as well as new stuff, but they had reprinted a lot of stuff from the 1960s and ’70s that was

done for Warren magazines and such. So they were recycling some of that work, but doing it in color, and I think there was a space story in there done by Al. And by the point that I saw that, I already knew who Al was. Then, of course, he followed up Empire Strikes Back with doing the adaptation, at least in part, for Return of the Jedi. If I remember correctly, he didn’t draw all of that, but he did most of it.

HIS STYLE

BLEVINS: His scenes always seemed to have a very natural ambience to them. In other words, as if the place actually existed and the background wasn’t constructed just to flesh out that illustration. There was an atmosphere to it that I always liked. ROSS: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, for one of the things, too, is that, if you go back to the first Star Wars adaptation done by Chaykin and a bunch of other guys, I felt dissatisfaction with not seeing the material that was on the screen translated exactly, and so what Al first provided for my generation of readers is that satisfaction of, it is exact. You could see he was working from pictures, from a base reference of that was Mark Hamill, that was Harrison Ford. And when he drew the helmets of Darth Vader or the Stormtroopers, you knew it was dead-on, and there was something very much to appreciate with that, whereas with other, more artistic interpretations of these things, it was less satisfying to me, because the way it was on the screen seemed so dazzling that no filtering of that influence was going to be as exciting.

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YEATES: Two things. The subject matter, I’m not, it turned out, as into that intense, hairy, bloody, gory trip that’s so popular. I love horror, but I like the old fashioned horror, like the old Universal movies. I don’t go to the new ones. And Al was drawing things that I liked. I like short mystery stories. I like adventure stories, I like science fiction, much more so than superheroes. So he was drawing the kind of stuff I liked. And he also had this incredible finesse that, as I said, I was dazzled by. In my work, if you see my work I was doing then in high school, once I got into the Rapidograph and markers trying to ape that style, my inking was really terrible. The drawing was there, but the inking, I just had no clue how they could do that. How could these guys create this? That was because I hadn’t discovered the brush. And then when I did, my work still had this crude element, this rough, scratchy element that it still has today. I’ve always worked to fight against that, to make it look professional. And Williamson, of course, has that going on like crazy. His work was just so professional, so slick and stylish, and I just loved it. I wanted to have that professional quality, to become a professional instead of being an amateur.

THE ART COLLECTOR

BLEVINS: I loved the stuff, but I could see that by that time, too, that Al had amassed such an enormous archive of material that he almost felt himself more of a custodian of this heritage of beautiful work than an artist in his own right, in a sense. SCHULTZ: Oh, yeah. It’s Mecca if you’re into comic strip art or classic American illustration. It’s just an amazing collection. This was also a thing that impressed me about Al was how much he enjoyed the art, how much he wanted to share it with other people, just the sheer enjoyment of it. He never got tired of pulling out something and looking at it again, or talking about a piece that was hanging on the walls that he saw every day. He always had that feeling of the way he’d look at it fresh every day and find something new and really interesting about it. BLEVINS: Oh, absolutely. And his adventures in New York collecting. He’d met a lot of the great cartoonists and illustrators, or had attended speeches. He was a member of the National Cartoonists Society, and had been honored, himself, several times for his strip work, so he’s met just about everybody. And he had a huge collection of original art, and books, and clippings. Just an archive of wonderful illustration. DRAW!: Without Williamson collecting a lot of these old comics and art, much of it would have been lost for future generations. BLEVINS: Oh, and he valued it in that sense. That’s another thing that was very impressive to me about him is how—because, as much as I love drawing and value making artwork, I had sort of absorbed by that point that this stuff was treated as mechanicals by the publishers. It really didn’t have a lot of intrinsic aesthetic merit except to other aficionados and other artists might appreciate it, but he really had a reverence for it. He loved originals, and he just pored over them. They were

everywhere in the studio, in the house. He had a huge gallery that he would rotate out occasionally of just beautiful work, and he loved to feel it and smell the paper, and he really had a very physical appreciation of it. I did pick some of that up from him. DRAW!: So he could look at that art and dissect it? Analyze the use of linework or the brushstrokes? BLEVINS: Well, there was that, too. That part was certainly an element in it, but I think also he just loved being part of that world that had meant so much to him when he was young himself. He just loved the Sunday strips and the early comic books, and that really was probably the place in which he was emotionally happy.

TEACHER

BLEVINS: Yeah, I did learn something there. What I saw from him, in that sense, was that there was a danger of loving your inspiration too much so that he always felt that he was in some kind of aficionado relationship to it. Raymond was a on a pedestal to him, and Foster, and so he could never feel that he was on their level in that same sense, so he really felt of himself as part of a lineage, so he really enjoyed working on characters such as Flash Gordon or characters that he loved.

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Frazetta was not like that. Frazetta was completely self-centered about his own statement. That’s what motivated him, and the only thing he was interested in, really. And you could see that. And you can see why he was able to do the kind of work that he did. DRAW!: Why did he stop teaching at the Kubert School? BLEVINS: He just got tired of the commuting. It was quite a drive. And then, as his workload piled up, it became difficult for him to get everything done and still take that entire day off to drive down and drive back.

SCHULTZ: Al would give tips, but he’s not the kind of guy you can just walk up and say, “Hey, Al, I don’t know how to ink blonde hair. Can you show me how to ink this?” He would just say, “Oh, blonde hair’s impossible to ink. Go back and look at Foster.” But if he saw something in what you were doing that he felt he could help with, out of the blue he would say, “Can I make a suggestion of what you’re drawing there?” And of course I’d say, “Well, sure,” and then he would show me this better way to look at the situation or to solve the problem, or at least an alternative way, but almost every time it was a superior way to work out the drawing problem that I was having. You had to wait for him to approach you, because he wasn’t the type of guy that you could just expect to drop a… If you had a problem, you couldn’t just go up to him and say, “Hey, solve this for me,” or, “Give me the right solution here.” You’d have to wait for him to be ready. But, boy, what he would give you back was always valuable. BLEVINS: Well, it was more of just a very simpatico relationship between the personalities that agreed on a lot of aesthetic enthusiasms, I guess you could say. Because I loved Foster, I loved all of the old turn-of-the-century illustration. Anything that was well drawn, with a lot of energy. It wasn’t limited to just realistic fantasy artwork. He loved Krazy Kat, Peanuts. Anything that was well done, Al loved, any kind of good drawing, cartoony, I felt the same way. So we had a lot of the same enthusiasms. Loved the same music. I loved old jazz, and so did he. So we just really hit it off as friends first, really. Well, I looked up to him, and obviously he’d done all that great work going all the way back to the ’50s, so I didn’t consider him just like another studio partner at all, obviously. But it wasn’t a teacher-student relationship, and that tone was set by him, too, because he really just loved to share the love of this medium and all kinds of good art. So that’s the basis on which he invited me to come up there was as a studio partner, not as any sort of a mentor. DRAW!: Did he try to teach you anything, or did he give you any advice? BLEVINS: Yeah, he did, and we’d help each other a lot, because as gifted as he was, he was never terribly confident. It’s true of a lot of artists. And so he would get nervous about being able to pull something off that he was working on. Not that he needed the help, but he almost just wanted to share the burden a little bit, so he had me pencil something for him. And then we helped each other make deadlines a lot because we were both grinding out assembly line work in those days, so he would help me ink things a lot to get it in on time, and vice versa. If he was jammed up, I’d ink something for him, and we were pretty good at blending in together. In fact, we did several things together where we came up with a phony name. It was Albrit Blevinson, and he came up with that, because he used to invent names in the old days when he worked with Krenkel and Frazetta. DRAW!: What was his mode of teaching? Did you learn anything from that experience?

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VEITCH: I learned a lot, one, just watching how his hand worked and made the organic textures. He never showed me like a teacher would, but I just watched the looseness of the hand with the brush, and how he would create these incredible organic textures. And I never got to the level he was at, but it definitely inspired me a lot. Another amazing thing about working for Al was his collection of original art. So while you’re working on your comics, there’s Raymond’s Flash staring down at you from the walls. He had notebooks of tear sheets of the complete Prince Valiant, the complete Foster Tarzan, and the complete Raymond Flash Gordon. And, while I worked with him over those ten years, in the evenings after I’d go to bed or something I would always pull down a couple of notebooks, and I was able to actually read the complete run of all of those guys’ work, which is pretty unheard of in that day and age, because that stuff hadn’t been collected anywhere. DRAW!: At the Kubert School, I thought you were one of the guys that the other students were always jealous of. YEATES: Maybe of my better work, but there was plenty that was still amateurish. I got there quick, but at that moment I wasn’t quite there. I got a job from Al and his assistant, Carlos Garzon. They worked together a lot, and Carlos’s regular job was the Flash Gordon comic book that Gold Key/ Whitman was putting out regularly. There was an issue where Carlos was behind, and so they asked me if I would pencil an issue of his Flash Gordon book, which of course was a dream come true for me because I love that character. I can draw the stuff I love, like the old characters. So I penciled that, and looking back at those pencils, you know, they’re close,

they’re not bad, but it wasn’t quite professional. And Al didn’t need an amateurish Al Williamson to help him out. He needed somebody that could bring something different. So we became great friends and I would visit him regularly, but I didn’t really do much work with him at first. But I brought my friends up there, one by one, we’d all go up and visit Al, this pilgrimage up to his wonderful house, this threestory house right on the river in Callicoon, New York. And it was really a kick, he’s got all these originals. None of us had ever hung out with someone like Al Williamson—Joe Kubert was the only professional comic book artist that any of us really knew. Other teachers would come in and teach their class, but Joe we had hung out with a little bit more. Some of us had gone up to his house. But Joe is more businesslike, sort of the John Wayne of comics. DRAW!: He was very stern back then too. YEATES: Yeah, somewhat. They both were interested in everybody and in how they drew, whether they were a cartoony style or underground style, or painters, or whatever they were. But Williamson’s more of a big kid, and he’s a very generous personality. He was interested in all kinds of art. He hasn’t any kind of elitist element in his taste. He was very accepting. Except if he saw something he didn’t like, he’d say he didn’t like it. He wasn’t into modern art, like Jackson Pollack-type stuff. I don’t think he was really into that. And he also liked jazz music as long as it wasn’t too far out, and the old swing bands, and, of course, the old movies. A huge old movie fan. And we just hit it off. Rick Veitch was my roommate at the time, and I brought him up there. Rick was very useful to Al,

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because Rick could letter, and he could color, and he could draw machines like nobody’s business. So he really ended up being Al’s helper more than I did at first. Which kind of hurt, to tell you the truth, at the time, but I totally understood it. He was just more useful to Al than I was. But we all were friends, and Rick would go up there a lot. But eventually I started getting work and started doing these anthology mystery/science fiction stories for DC’s books. Going back a few years, at the same time I was buying the used copies of Creepy in ’69, ’70, ’71, DC was publishing their own

anthology mystery stories—House of Mystery, House of Secrets, The Witching Hour—and those were also really, really terrific books. Excellent stories, excellent art. Gray Morrow, Kaluta—all these great artists were working for them. So I was into that stuff, too, and that’s really what I wanted to do in comics was that kind of work. So I was lucky and I got those jobs. As I said, it took me a little while to get up to scratch, but within a year or so of graduating from Kubert School I started getting that work. So I’d go over to DC and I’d get, like, a seven-page science-fiction story. And I’d go up to Al’s to visit him, and he’d say, “Hey, bring your work up, sport. Bring up whatever you’re working on. I want to see what you’re working on.” So I’d go up there and I’d work on my job that I was doing, and he’d look over my shoulder and make a few comments here and there. Not a lot, but once in a while. He basically liked my work. He thought I was doing good stuff, but he would have a few moments here and there, and those were helpful. But in some ways I’m kind of self-taught by studying people like Al, and staring at Hal Foster and Reed Crandall originals on his wall and stuff like that. I guess it’s just what I like. How can I take my personality and my work approach and achieve something that’s closer to that level of quality? But then, as the years went by, I got the Swamp Thing book, and I remember Al got a kick out of that because he remembered Swamp Thing from the Wrightson period. “Good old Swamp Thing.” I remember him laughing about it. I don’t remember working on Swamp Thing up at Al’s because that was such a grind. I didn’t take the time off to go up there. I was just hunkered down in my apartment on Lake Hopatcong and worked on that steadily for the year-and-a-half or so that I did it.

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DRAW!: Did he ever comment to you about that? I think Tom said that he could never see him as a teacher because he was too nice. BLEVINS: Well, that’s a perfect description. Everyone was a fellow lover of cartooning to him. He didn’t see himself as anyone’s superior or overseer or instructor. So I never actually saw him teach, but I can imagine that he made it much more like a group meeting of comic fans to all get together and have some fun here kind of thing.

THE COMARADIE

BLEVINS: Well, he loved having young people around—young, enthusiastic people. He fed off of it. So I was only 22, I think, or something. I was really young, then. VEITCH: It was like a gang of guys just hanging out, and half the time we’d get there and we’d decide that, Al would call it “Let’s goof off,” and off to the movies we’d go, or something like that. He’s a real social guy, and he loves to have people around him while he’s working. BLEVINS: I really wasn’t intimidated because he was so affable. He was such a likeable, fun person to be around. In fact, he said this himself: he was a collector first, and an artist second. So I think the root of that enthusiasm, he almost was more interested in enjoying good stuff than he was in actually creating it. Which, as he got older, especially, that became quite a bit of a chore for him, because he’d developed such a labor-intensive style of working. That’s eventually why he moved into doing mostly inking. MIKE MANLEY: I shared a studio space with Al, along, at that time, with Bret Blevins. That was starting I believe in… Well, when Bret moved up there, I believe he moved up there in ’85, ’86, and then I started going up and visiting with Bret and Al, and then when I broke up with an old girlfriend at that time, I decided that I would Splash page for Marvel’s Star Wars #42, adapting The Empire Strikes Back. move up there and share the studio. Al’s, Star Wars ™ and © Lucasfilm Ltd. “Well, why don’t you come up here?” So I came there and shared a studio with him. I was never actually So he was going to send it back, and I said, “Whoa, don’t do an apprentice, per se, but I would work on a job with him, or that. Take the story, and then what I’ll do is I’ll tighten the help him out, do backgrounds, or help him. Because he was pencils, and then you could ink it.” So basically what hapalso inking Bret’s stuff at the time. It was like a bunch of pened was that I took the pencils, and I got out all my good buddies in a studio, so you sort of end up sometimes helping Ditko and Wally Wood stuff, and penciled it up really tight, somebody. The FedEx guy’s coming, “Hey, can you ink this and basically Al and I split inking the book. I inked a bunch, background,” kind of thing. and he inked a bunch. And that led me to getting more work I think the first real collaboration with Al came when there from Carl, and getting more work from Marvel, so that was a was an issue of Daredevil that was penciled by Steve Ditko, fun job. and by “pencil” I mean that it was really pretty loose break- BLEVINS: And there was a fellow named Ed King who was downs, because I think, by that point, Ditko really didn’t turn occasionally there, too, who worked there, who was a letterer. in full, full pencils. I don’t know if he ever turned in full pen- He did a lot of house lettering, and then he did freelance work cils for himself. Maybe he was one of those guys that always on his own, as well. But he wasn’t there every day. He had a sort of worked loose, or structurally, and then he just finished lot of things going on. But, yeah, most of the time it was just the work when he inked it. At that point I had been inking the two of us. And when Mike came up, it was three of us, Alpha Flight for a while, through Carl Potts’ office, and so and that was a lot of fun, because we were three guys who they sent this Daredevil story up to Al because they thought just loved all this great, traditional, classic kind of illustration it would be a good combination, try to get that sort of Wally and cartooning work. So there was no shortage of enthusiasm. Wood feel to it. And Al felt a little unconfident about inking VEITCH: It’s similar to musicians sitting in a room and just the stuff because it was really, really loose. There were no starting to play, and at some point it starts to gel, and the creblacks or anything. It was really, really just bare bones stuff. ativity of the music is going, and it kind of rises up off the

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ground. And that’s what happens in a comics art studio is, everyone is bitching, and talking, and laughing, and this and that, but at some point everybody gets into that zone, and it’s really happening. And that’s when it’s amazing.

WORKING WITH AL WILLIAMSON

DRAW!: Tom said you had more to offer to what Al needed, that you had skills like coloring and lettering. He didn’t have any of that. VEITCH: He’s [Tom Yeates] like Al’s spiritual son, where I come from a different side of comics. But, anyway, he needed somebody to go up and letter Star Wars. He was just starting The Empire Strikes Back, and he really likes to work with a letterer on the premises, so even though my lettering was a little dodgy, he brought me up in there, and I lettered the first issue up there. I spent three or four days. And Archie Goodwin was pretty happy with it. But in the process of the lettering, there was stuff in the first issues of Empire Strikes Back that they had very little photo reference for, and that was the attack of the walkers in the snow scene at the beginning of Empire. And all they had for walkers were these two little Polaroid photos of the models. And Al just couldn’t, he was trying to draw the

thing, and he couldn’t figure it out. And Carlos Garzon was his main assistant at that point, and he couldn’t figure it out. And I’ve always sort of had a pretty good head for how machines work and geometric shapes and stuff like that, and I sort of took tracing paper to show Al how to do it. And he said, “Well, why don’t you try doing these backgrounds here.” So he was so happy with it I was graduated from letterer to assistant background guy and penciled that whole sequence of the walkers. I mean, Al did everything else, but I drew all those walkers as they come toward attacking the good guys. DRAW!: How long did that last, that period working with him? VEITCH: Oh, God, let’s see. Probably started in ’79, and I betcha for ten years. My wife, Cindy, became really good friends with his wife, Cori, and so if we were anywhere near the area, we’d give him a call and say, “Hey, we’re going to come visit.” And Cori and Cindy would go off antique hunting or whatever they do, and Al and Rick would sit down, and I would assist him, just drawing backgrounds for him. DRAW!: That was a busy period for him when he was working on Empire and Blade Runner and Flash Gordon. VEITCH: Flash Gordon and Blade Runner and then the next Star Wars. I couldn’t do things in his style, but I could create backgrounds of things like rubble and organic trees and weird castles and stuff like that that he really liked inking on top of. And he would make corrections to it as he inked, but he would add his incomparable inking skills to what I had penciled, and it came out pretty neat. He dug the organic forms I would get. Like, if I would get billowing smoke, stuff like that, he really loved inking that, because it was natural to see, his hand would start interpreting it in his own amazing Raymond kind of thing. It was something to watch. It was really great. BLEVINS: Well, I’m very nostalgic about that first Hulk story, because it was very exciting to meet him and to be getting to know him, and seeing him do that magical brushwork on that particular job. He gave me all the originals of that job, and I still have it. That was a very inspiring time. So I love that job. And we did parts of the New Mutants stories, I think; [those] are some of my favorite things that we did together. I worked with him later on the Ghost Rider, but at that point I had already moved west again, so that was a long-distance relationship, so my memories of that aren’t so cozy. I was dealing with him over the phone then, and with Trouble with Girls as well, we were talking a lot on the phone, but it’s not the same thing as being in the studio together, getting there, going out, getting our coffee, and sitting there drinking our coffee while the snow’s falling, looking at some great old artwork in some book, and then getting inspired.

FLASH GORDON 1980 ADAPTATION

The climax of Blade Runner as it appeared in Marvel’s adaptation in Marvel Comics Super Special #22. Rick assisted Al with backgrounds. Blade Runner © Warner Bros.

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ROSS: Of course, what’s ironic is that, Flash Gordon being my favorite movie of all time, I actually really didn’t like the comic adaptation and didn’t appreciate the fact that an artist who was as close to Alex Raymond’s era and style as he certainly was, was to a degree interpreting the material more. He was combining it more with the historical comics version of

In Western Publishing’s adaptation of the campy Flash Gordon film, Al toned down the camp and added a bit of romanticism. Flash Gordon ™ and © King Features Syndicate, Inc. Flash Gordon film © Universal Pictures.

Flash Gordon rather than what was on screen, because I really liked what was on screen, and I wanted that preserved in the comic book, and his version of the character, it wasn’t Sam Jones, it wasn’t the clothing style of the movie in many parts, and so it was a weird kind of thing that was a hybrid. Artistically, if you look back at it now you can appreciate the fact that Al Williamson did this and he created a composite between the two. When people worked on these movie adaptations, as Al did so many times, they’re given a load of reference, but not necessarily everything that they need. Sometimes they’re even given an earlier version of the script or movie to work from, and then points of the story either change, or scenes are excised, so there was a lot of that that he was having to deal with and to have to kind of piece it all together. VEITCH: It was really kind of bogus, and it wasn’t true to what he saw as Flash. That was the problem. I mean, Al tends to stress out about everything, but ten minutes later, he’s not stressed out. He’s just one of those guys, he gets a little excited worrying that he can’t do it, that kind of stuff. But he’s the master. When he knuckles down and does it, then no one can compare with him. DRAW!: I think he did a great job on that book.

SCHULTZ: Well, he did, he absolutely did, and this was despite the fact that it was just very onerous, for a number of reasons, working under the conditions. But he did an excellent job. And he even had to turn up and promote this. They took him out to California to do a series of signings at malls, and they were blaring the Queen soundtrack music, which he absolutely despised. It was on a loop blaring behind him. Al really is such a purist about Flash Gordon that he just had all sorts of problems with the decisions being made on this. And, of course, ultimately they did it very cynically. They did it as a tongue-and-cheek, “isn’t this quaint, isn’t this a campy type of thing,” which utterly sabotaged the film.

THE PROCESS

TORRES: The first thing I do lately, the last 20, 30 years, I break the whole thing down on a small sheet of paper, 8½" x 11". I break the whole job down so I know what I need, what’s going to be in it, and generally I follow those layouts pretty closely. I think that’s the way Al used to work. Al was a master at laying out a page. I don’t think anyone can lay out a page the way Al did, with insert panels, open panels. He was the one that started all of that. I mean, nobody did it better than he did.

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DRAW!: Making his preliminaries work was the hardest part. TORRES: I used to watch him do it. He’d take out a page and he’d read the script, line out the page, and break the panels down the way he wanted them to. And he would follow that pretty closely. He was very unconventional in those early days. He was the youngest guy at EC, and he was a hotshot. He was good, and everybody knew he was good, and he was probably the best figure guy they ever had up there. The guy could draw the figure like nobody. So most of his jobs emphasize the figure. He did a lot of full-figure shots. I don’t think he enjoyed doing close-ups of faces. He enjoyed doing action figures. So he would lay out the job with a lot of open panels, gave himself a lot of room to have full figures doing the action, doing the work, and he was just terrific. And I learned a lot from him. I never could come close to being the figure man that he was, but I learned a little bit about laying out a page, and I put that into effect doing the Creepy stuff, where I did a lot of open panels, and a lot of things like that that he used to use. And the thing about working for EC, you could do anything up there as long as you got the story told, and as long as it looked good. Many times Al would take out a tracing pad and sketch out figures, the pose that he wanted in that panel, and many times he was pleased with a sketch to the point where he would actually cut it out and paste it on the page, the tracing paper. That became the figure in the job, and he did that in many of his science-fiction jobs, and the stuff just looked terrific. It looked different than anything anybody was doing up there. And Gaines and Feldstein loved it, they loved the work. He used to come up there and he used the dot stuff and Craftint. He used all kinds of techniques to get the thing across, and he made it work. He was just incredible. I used to love to watch him work. I used to stand behind him at the drawing board and watch him do the stuff. It was just incredible stuff.

PHOTO REFERENCE

SCHULTZ: As far as referencing, yeah. Boy, Al did more finished preliminary work than anyone I’ve ever seen. I was always amazed he would work out not only the figure drawing on a piece of tracing paper or something, but he would also go in and work out his inking before going and doing the finish. And, of course, the results were there. It helped him get beautiful finished pieces.

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DRAW!: But it doesn’t make you very fast. SCHULTZ: Yeah, it’s very meticulous. And Al was still relatively fast at getting this all together for the amount of work he put into it. Once he decided on a figure and started drawing it, he could really bring it together. I was amazed at how quickly he could bring it together without having to do a great deal of correction. VEITCH: Well, he had the natural flair with the figure, but he tended to rely on the photo reference a bit much, at least when I was working with him, and I think the best Williamson work will have a few photo references in it, but will be him

(opposite page and this page) Three preliminary sketches and the final printed cover for Flash Gordon #1, the first issue of Marvel’s two-issue mini-series. Flash Gordon ™ and © King Features Syndicate, Inc. Flash Gordon film © Universal Pictures.

just sitting down and blasting out figures, because he’s really got the human figure in his head and his hand in ways that I don’t think anybody, maybe, like, Kubert has got. SCHULTZ: He needed photo reference to feel comfortable. Personally, I think his best stuff was where he would use the photo references to assist him working out specific little drawing problems, but he wouldn’t become overly reliant on them. When he was doing the X-9 strip, the incredible deadline pressure of having to turn out six of those strips a week led him to become very, very reliant on working very closely from photo reference. And it was a necessity for him to get done what he had to get done, but sometimes I think that stuff gets a little over-reliant on the photos, and it takes away from the beautiful feeling of romanticism Al can bring to figures when he puts more of his own drawing into it. DRAW!: You also graduated to that perfectionist level. Williamson’s art has a clean look. He’s not into cartooning. YEATES: Right, and the photo reference thing. DRAW!: In his artwork, people have to look a certain way, the same way they looked in his head, I guess, is what he wanted on paper. YEATES: Every artist does that, I think, but his vision is one that I really gravitated toward. But there is an element of photorealism in there which, to me, at this point in my career, I’m not as interested in, but it helps to go through a phase of the photorealism, where you are using photos a lot. At least, for me it was very helpful, and I still use them sometimes, because

it helps you learn to draw accurately, to copy photos, and then to put them away, and then remember what you learned while you were drawing different poses, different things. Because you acquire that realistic look that you can then pour out of your ink pen onto whatever you’re drawing. You can give it that realistic look because you know what reality looks like. DRAW!: Didn’t he usually draw a breakdown and then take the picture? YEATES: Yes, yes. He would always do his own layouts. He loved to compose pages. He loved doing that. He would yak when he was inking, but when he was doing layouts, he had to stop yakking and actually think. Yeah, all that stuff that he did, which his friends helped him on, for the most part were laid out by Al, the stuff that he did with Krenkel and Frazetta and all those other people, Garzon, everybody he worked with, Crandall, and up to and including probably his work—Bret could extrapolate on this more because they really worked together a lot. I only worked with Al briefly, and most of the work I did with him, I would take it home and work on it. But he would do the layouts. I did a handful of Star Wars strips for him, and I believe he gave me the boards with his layouts on it, and then I finished over those. I’m pretty sure that’s how it was done. There might be a few where I laid them out. But he would do the layout, and he would photograph with Polaroids, and then he would project it, and he would pencil it on a page from the projection. But then he would make the legs longer, and the heads smaller, and the hands bigger. He would fix it. He would make it his art. And then he would

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often do a tracing over it in ink. He’d put a piece of tracing paper over tight pencils, and then he’d ink it on tracing paper with a brush, sometimes with a pen—he went back and forth between pen and brush—to see what it looked like with ink, if his idea of how he was going to spot the blacks and stuff would actually work and achieve the desired effect. And those tracings are just gorgeous, where he would loosely lay in the ink on the tracing paper. Tracing paper takes ink differently than regular paper. DRAW!: Did it seem like while you looked at his process, “Wow, I can’t do this or I’ll never get anything done.” YEATES: Yeah, yeah. I didn’t adopt that particular technique of his. I did not. I don’t go through that many stages. Krenkel was even worse. Krenkel would do numerous tracings, turning the figure this way, one tracing would have the head looking up, one tracing had the head looking down, etc… DRAW!: He has barely any finished work. YEATES: Yeah, it’s always roughs and things. But Al managed to get the work done. He was slow, but he got it done. He wasn’t that slow. He’d keep going. He’d tell me he’d just keep doing it, don’t stop, and eventually it gets done. Even though it seems kind of overwhelming, you just keep at it, and then you get your reward, you get to goof off.

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THE PURSUIT OF PERFECTION

BLEVINS: Well, it was so labor-intensive for him that it wasn’t practical for him to try and do comic books if he couldn’t get enough pages done each month to compare with the income he was making. MANLEY: Yeah, most of those old guys, from, say, Al’s generation, and he was sort of the youngest of those guys, but they would do an eight-page story. You never saw Frank Frazetta sitting down doing 22 pages of X-Men every month. Those guys didn’t want to work that hard. I think they liked doing comics. It was a fun job. Their goal was to get to do a newspaper strip. That was most of that generation’s goal. You made it if you did a newspaper strip. If you could do Rip Kirby, or you could sell your own strip, that was their goal. That was their aesthetic. And Al’s aesthetic comes from that. So, yeah, I mean, I am doing the strip now, and I’m trying to do it in a realistic style, but even myself, I literally don’t have the time to be able to hire the models or round up my neighbors and stuff, so I’m using a little photo reference. BLEVINS: He would just get nervous. “Oh, I can’t let that go. Look at that guy’s hand, it looks like a bunch of bananas.” He would say stuff like that, where he was focusing on these details that I guess he felt were a vulnerable spot for him. He wasn’t confident in drawing hands, for instance, out of head, so he would want to photograph to make sure that was correct,

the knuckles were in the right place—which he didn’t need to do, of course, because his intuition had guided him beautifully in his first draft, but he didn’t trust it. He reached the point where he didn’t trust it and needed to verify everything, and then it just escalated into this enormous process of several stages where he’d Artograph everything down, trace it, come out of the dark room and clean up that pencil drawing. It took a long time for him to do completed work. DRAW!: Williamson was like some sort of director when you look at the way he nailed down the technique he used to do make his art. I think most of the times he’d start with a preliminary, sketch it out, and then pose and photograph, and then draw it out. Most guys don’t take that amount of time to do one page of art. ROSS: Well, yeah. But, then again, what I often overlook is that much of the time that I’ve seen myself and other artists go and do in the last 20, 25 years of art is not so different than what many of the craftsmen did years before. Guys like Wally Wood would put an extraordinary amount of work into these pages. So there is a precedent that comes well before the modern time period where artists could really go crazy with the amount of detail. Say, the entire career of Bernie Wrightson, for example, is one that really wouldn’t exist without that attitude coming down into play with the artists in the field trying to make a different mark, and a much more elaborate artistic mark, with truly embracing this art form as their fullest expression. They weren’t saving their fine art for any other media. They were doing it right here in publishing, and they were trying to make that expression happen right here. So there is something to that generation, of which Al was a part, that it was their doing that at the earliest stage. But, then again, go back almost 100 years now and you’ve got one of the most famous comics of all time. Little Nemo in Slumberland is a pure artistic tour de force. Or for that matter Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon. There was nothing held back in Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon. That was as elaborate as anything could be.

INKING

DRAW!: How did you get him to ink you on that DC Comics Presents with Swamp Thing story? VEITCH: Well, I’d been assisting him in doing backgrounds and stuff, and he told me, “If you get a good job and you need an inker, I’d love to do it.” I think Victor was probably in college, or going into college, in those days, and he needed to make a little extra money on the side, and what he was finding was that he could ink really fast and make more money and keep the kid in school. So he just lucked out, I guess, hitting there. DRAW!: But that was one of his first jobs doing that kind of stuff, right? Because right after that book is when his inking career took off. VEITCH: He made sort of a conscious decision just to ink, at some point. I’m not sure what year that would be.

DRAW!: Around ’86. Did you like what he did with your pencils? VEITCH: Oh, man, I loved it! There’s one shot of Superman that DC made him change, but I’ve always wished that they would have allowed it. There’s this big head shot of Superman where his heat vision’s going crazy, and I did this totally demented head of Superman with the flames pouring out of his eyes. I was so proud of it. And I guess Julie Schwartz told Al, “No, it’s too much.” So Al quickly whipped another head in there that I hadn’t penciled. DRAW!: So you were the one who introduced him to Marvel Comics in terms of doing a lot of inking work? BLEVINS: I think so, because by that time I’d been at Marvel for a few years and I knew everybody, and then, through that Hulk job, he began to be interested in the idea of making that a much bigger part of his output, because he was, at that time—I’m trying to recall the order that this happened in, but he had penciled an original story for the Star Wars comic for Marvel [Star Wars #98], but he had done it just as he did the strip, where he photographed every panel.

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DRAW!: He always collaborated with the guys that came from his same school of art. Meanwhile, your figures work a little different, more cartoony, more expressive. BLEVINS: Well, I think that kind of invigorated him a little bit, too, just being in touch with a more contemporary vibe that was happening. Because the comics were beginning to boom, and that was the beginning of the direct market, and that was a really golden time there where there were a lot of different kinds of projects being done. DRAW!: When you met him, he was starting to do inking at Marvel? SCHULTZ: Yeah, I think, if I remember correctly, he was about to finish up a stint at DC and was about to move on to inking at Marvel.

DRAW!: Did he feel content with that work? SCHULTZ: Well, he continued to do some of his own work, little short stories here and there. When I say his own work, I mean stories that he would draw and ink himself. But he was very happy to have the continuity, the regular work he was getting from Marvel that would pay the bills and allow him freed up time to do other things. It was very rough, as I understand, working on the strips. Just the pressure of drawing six, seven strips every week, week after week, it’s just a horrible strain. And the fact was that this was at a time when the adventure strips were starting to really die out of the newspapers, and there was less and less money to be made on them, and it was becoming more and more of a financial deficit working on strips, and when Al could turn around and get good regular work doing inking in the comics, I think that was a big relief to him. DRAW!: It just seemed like the comics industry at some point didn’t understand Williamson’s art. There wasn’t a place for someone drawing so lavishly. SCHULTZ: Yeah, well, I think these days, unfortunately, the type of work that Al does and that whole Raymond school, and by extension the type of work that someone like Al does, it seems very old school, and, while there is a niche market for it, it’s not the much more expressionistic, much more exaggerated type of mainstream cartooning that’s popular right now. DRAW!: Being around that environment around Al, did that make you believe more in comics? YEATES: Well, it definitely got me excited about art and drawing and illustration and comics. He had magazine illustrations by various artists. Of course, Krenkel drawings. The whole idea of making a beautiful drawing was something that I have always tried to strive for, and I think I credit a lot of that to time spent with Williamson. And a lot of people will tell you the same exact thing.

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DRAW!: He never got tired of comics. YEATES: I don’t think so, maybe a little. But that’s what he chose to do. And it’s funny, people have also talked about how he was really an illustrator, and he could have been a great illustrator if he’d gone into magazine illustration or something, but he was a comic book nut. He loved comics. He just loved comics. He wasn’t into the superhero stuff, which is kind of too bad. If he had been, it probably would have been an easier career for him, espe-

cially since he ended up inking Marvel superheroes. I don’t think that really served him well, artistically, to be an inker at Marvel, because his heart wasn’t in it, even though it was good to have that steady paycheck, and it’s hard for an artist to get a steady paycheck.

THE RETURN OF FLASH GORDON

DRAW!: So that Flash Gordon two-parter for Marvel Comics in 1995, that was something you had in mind? Or was that something Williamson was pushing for? SCHULTZ: No, Al, absolutely, had always said that one thing that would get him back to drawing again would be a chance to do Flash Gordon. And I think the guy who actually made the situation happen was Tom DeFalco. He was the editor-in-chief at Marvel at the time, and always was trying to egg Al on to drawing again. And Al would let him know that, well, “Flash Gordon might be the thing that gets me to do it,” so Tom worked out a deal with King Features to get the rights to the character and presented it to Al, and Al agreed to it. He said, “Who I’d like to work with as a writer to write this stuff would be Schultz.” And Tom agreed to that, and basically I took plot ideas that Al had already worked out in his head, the notion that we were going to go back and look at Flash Gordon’s childhood a bit and tie it all in with the story, it all came from Al. I just had to kind of take his basic plot ideas and string them together into some sort of a semblance of a working story. DRAW!: Was this like a bookend for him, to close his work on Flash Gordon? SCHULTZ: I don’t know if he was thinking of it in that terms, that this was it. He just wanted to get back, he just liked doing the character a lot. He wanted to use his son, Victor—his son was at the right age to play the young Flash Gordon, so his is a visual model for the character. DRAW!: This was a beautiful book, but it was just out of place at that moment when it came out. SCHULTZ: Well, the problem was that midway through doing this Tom DeFalco left that position at Marvel, and the people that came on after that had apparently no interest in seeing through and promoting this, so they just kind of dumped it on the market, and there was no real promotion or marketing of it at all. ROSS: I took great note of the fact that Al did his first storytelling work—in fact, I think I spoke with him about this when it came out—his first storytelling work in years was for a Flash Gordon series that he did in the ’90s, when they got the license for all three of the major properties for King Features. And I thought, “Wow, this is a big deal to get Al to do interiors again.” And I took note of the fact that the story itself was a very loving, kind of closing the door in a sense, or wrapping up, of his history with Flash Gordon. If anything, it was the truest tribute to the artistic legacy of the character in comics. The fact that Al’s work is, in itself, the lead of what Alex Raymond had designed, but then you’ve

got the fact that the story wrapped up certain details of that universe. I think it had something to do with Flash Gordon’s father in it. It’s been a while since I’ve looked at it. There were just two issues. But, you know, as you look back at that, you can recognize that’s a pretty healthy two issues, because it’s a dense amount of work. He put a lot of detail in that damned thing. So there was a lot of blood-sweat to make that happen.

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“ONE LAST JOB” FOR DARK HORSE PRESENTS

SCHULTZ: We started the story back in ’89. Something happened; that comic, that anthology, never happened. But then, I don’t remember the date, but originally it was published, Dark Horse got in touch with Al and said, “We want to put a story of yours in Dark Horse Presents,” and Al remembered this story and finished it up. So it appeared in Dark Horse Presents, and I’m not sure even which issue that was. [Ed. note: issue #120] DRAW!: It was very different, the style he used in it. He didn’t use so much reference. SCHULTZ: Yeah. By that point he was in a position where he didn’t have to, for deadline purposes, rely so much on using the photo reference. Al would still photograph the figures in the different positions he wanted to draw them, but he wouldn’t in any way use tracings of them. He would just eyeball them up and use what he could from them and change them up as he saw fit. That story was done that way, and then it was reprinted in the Insight Al Williamson Adventures book.

PERSONALITY

MANLEY: Al was one of those guys who would show you if he was doing it, but he was not the kind of guy, even though he had later on a very elaborate system of working, he was much more of an intuitive artist, and not the kind of guy who would sit down and say, “Okay, if you want to draw a girl, this is how you do it,” or, “if you want to draw rocks, this is how you do it.” He could explain something to you, or he could ink something, and say, “This is how—.” I learned more by watching him work than necessarily by asking him specific questions, because he wasn’t a tech guy or a process guy in that way, although he had a very elaborate process. DRAW!: He wanted his images to look a certain way, right? MANLEY: He was a perfectionist. And the thing I guess that was the most surprising was that he was also a very insecure artist, especially about his drawing. And that is why I think, over the years, if you notice, when you look at the history of Al’s work, you often see him working in collaboration with Krenkel, or Torres, or Frazetta. He would often have Carlos Garzon work with him on the Star Wars stuff, doing the robots and the techy stuff. He was always insecure about his drawing. If you look at the beginning of Secret Agent X-9, which was later renamed Secret Agent Corrigan, if you look at the beginning of the work on the strip, there was a lot more drawing, even though there was plenty of photo reference as swipe. Later on he became more and more reliant upon using the photo reference, and more and more reliant upon actually staging, and posing photos, and posing himself or friends or neighbors, or using the photo romances or the fumettis that he would buy. He relied more and more on that to make the work have that realistic appearance that he wanted. And when he stopped after the Star Wars strip, then he started doing more inking for Marvel

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and DC, he actually had a couple jobs that took him a very, very long time to work on. I remember he was working on a job one day that I think Mark Schultz had written. DRAW!: The Flash Gordon books? MANLEY: No, this is before that. This was long before that, because actually Mark was a guy who used to come up and visit in the studio, too, back then, when he was beginning to do Xenozoic Tales. And Al would get very angry and frustrated with himself. I remember one day he was working on this book that was written by Leonard Starr and was going to be printed in Europe, and it was like one of those Kelly Green graphic novels, and he sort of bit off the horse for a while with the drawing. He’d been doing a lot of inking at Marvel, and I think he found it very frustrating to go back at points and work on the stuff. I remember him getting really mad at himself one day and throwing his pen across the room and storming home, he was so upset with what he was doing. And that was surprising to me, because when I looked at his stuff, I said, “Wow, this stuff is all great.” But he would become very insecure about hands and things, and he would really feel like he wanted to shoot a photo to get the drapery right, and things like that.

Flash Gordon, corporate shill. Al did these licensed one-page stories for Union Carbide’s marketing and advertising department. Flash Gordon ™ and © King Features Syndicate, Inc.

So he ended up having this very elaborate process where he would do these amazing layouts, rough drawings on tracing paper, lay out the strip, which were great. Then he would go sometimes and shoot photos, or find swipe for the particular pose he wanted, and then he would combine his drawing with the photos he took or photos he was using for getting characters’ faces from photo romances. So he had this very elaborate system which basically made him slower as he got older, and I think once he started inking for Marvel, he was making a lot more money than he ever was working on the strips, and it was actually easier, and he always loved inking. That was always the fun part of the work for him. So I think that’s why he basically stopped penciling stuff.

edge, and the skills, and the devotion that went into it. He didn’t have a finicky kind of obsessive/exclusive view of it.

DRAW!: You never found him to be a very intimidating character? MANLEY: No, Al was a very amicable, gracious, warm guy, so it really wasn’t intimidating. Especially if you got to know him for a while. He was a goofball, just like all those guys were back then, and I think that, looking back on it now twenty years gone, I think what Al liked about having Bret and myself in the studio was the energy you get from having a couple other people around you working, and having a couple younger guys working, too, because he was kind of isolated. But in a very wide-ranging appreciation for all the knowl-

DRAW!: That’s a very classy way of looking at art. MANLEY: Yeah, his stuff was really Flash Gordon, Saturday morning matinee serials. It was the old pulps. That was the stuff that he loved. He was like the first comic geek, because he collected that stuff as a kid. He had a big trunk of that stuff when he came up from South America as a kid. He really was a geek for that stuff in the way that people sort of normally are now. But he was kind of ahead of the curve with that. Comics are not classy in the way that they used to be. There was a romance, and some people would say it’s kind of cheesy or hokey now, but there was an element of romance to

DRAW!: Yeah, some people, if they like Raymond, they won’t like Matt Baker or something. BLEVINS: Yeah, exactly. If it was vital and good, he loved it with all his energy. I mean, he had his favorites, obviously, usually the stuff that really knocked him out when he was a kid. DRAW!: His matinee idols. BLEVINS: And he could always return to that stuff for inspiration. But, yeah, he was very, very open-minded in that way. He could really appreciate anything that was well done.

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all of his stuff. ROSS: I guess the difference with him is that, unlike, say, the guys who would come in to do the stuff in comics in the 1970s, primarily, Al was kind of a bit more on his own, as a young guy who grew up loving the comic strip stuff that he was raised on, the fantasy world of Alex Raymond and all the other type of stuff, that basically he was the next generation before there really was a wave of guys who would take over the field, guys from Roy Thomas’s era. You know, men like Jim Starlin or Len Wein, who grew up reading the comics of people that they would suddenly grow up to be able to work with as equals, but then they would begin to recast an entire art form based around their being fans of it, as opposed to the guys who crafted it between the ’40s and the ’60s as being guys who were creating all the stuff for the first time, but they didn’t necessarily come to it wanting to do this. This wasn’t their desire. They wanted to be artists or storytellers. They didn’t necessarily want to be reliving the stuff as people

who admired it from their childhood. Superheroes and comics didn’t exist when they were kids, although if you go back to the 1920s when most of these guys were children you do still have the comic strip as an art form. It’s just that they admired the comic strips, and comic books is still, I think—was then and still is today—seen as somewhat this bastard child that is off and kind of looked on askew as being less than respectable compared to all the other stuff that’s followed since.

ROMANTICISM LOST

DRAW!: Comics doesn’t have the romanticism that you guys put into it. TORRES: Well, no. From what I see, anyway, the majority of the stuff being done now is violent, it’s ugly, it’s just action for the sake of action, and it doesn’t have the romanticism, like you say, of the stuff that EC was doing that were always very gentle, even though they had—I’m talking about the sciencefiction stuff. Some of the jobs Al did were tied in with romance with a girl. There were always women in a job, and heroes, real heroes. You don’t see that anymore. Even the women now in the comics are beating people up. Everything is action, action, action. And you’ve got these muscular girls fighting with the villains just as much as the guys. So it’s lacking something. Probably it had to go that way because the movies have gone that way, too. You see how violent the movies are? If you don’t wreck ten cars in a movie, you’re not making a good movie. It’s all violent, it’s all wreckage, it’s all explosions and fire. And the comics are following in the same direction. ROSS: One of the things I find a really sad loss in the abstract about his passing is that we are finally removed from that early 20th Century period of craftsmen. The original creators of all the major characters in comics from the ’40s have all pretty much passed on. When Marty Nodell died, I thought that the end of an era; we no longer have these originators of the medium with us. But, because Al started when he was so young, and was there side-by-side with so many of these key guys in the 1950s, he was a connection, a tether to the beginnings of this art form. Even though he would have, by their eyes, I guess, be seen as the second-generation guy kind of coming in.

FAVORITES

(above) Al’s encore performance inking John Romita Jr. on Daredevil began with this cover of Daredevil: Man without Fear #1. (opposite page) Talk about romanticism—this story for EC’s Weird Science #16 was the epitome of romanticism. Daredevil ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc. Weird Science © William M. Gaines Agent, Inc..

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DRAW!: What’s your favorite Williamson work? MANLEY: I would say, overall, the Corrigan stuff, especially up to around 1970, was really great stuff. Those couple of Flash Gordon comics he did were really nice, and then I think he did a fantastic job of inking John Romita Jr. on that first run of Daredevil, where Ann Nocenti was writing the stories. That stuff, to me, is still a real high point for both J.R. and him. It’s like when Sinnott inked Kirby, it sort of changed Kirby, and there was something that happened as a result of combining those two artists that you would not get with either one by themselves, and I think that that’s the case with someone like J.R. I think he actually taught other people how to ink J.R., because all they have to do is look at what Al did and go, “Oh! That’s how you should do it.”

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YEATES: What’s my favorite Williamson? I think that possibly that first one I saw might be my favorite, issue #5 of the King Comics Flash Gordon, the Beastmen. It’s very simple for Williamson. When he did the Star Wars stuff later, his work was wall-to-wall details and this incredible technique that he developed. His ability to ink metal I think is unsurpassed. You look at his inking on Darth Vader’s suit, I mean, it’s just mind-boggling to me that he can do that, and with a brush. And I would try to do that when I was working with him. I would do an occasional Darth Vader, and my Darth Vaders always were so clunky, and I couldn’t do that stuff to save my life. And I look at Al as sort of superhuman in that area. But I think my favorite work is actually the simpler stuff that he did on that Flash Gordon book. He did them real fast, he knew exactly what to put in and what to leave out, and I absolutely love that stuff. But I like his Creepy work a lot, too. I think my favorite is that stuff he was doing in the

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mid- to late ’60s. The early, the very first X-9s he did, and those Creepy stories. Like, there’s one called “Sand Doom”; there’s the famous one about the cartoonist, “Success Story”; and there’s one called “The Jungle”—it’s kind of a rare one. You don’t see it around as much. It’s spectacular stuff. It’s got it all going on. ROSS: There’s something to his perfectionism that basically showed that comics can be this good. And his style was an apex of execution. Something to do with also bringing things to life in a way that you would clearly recognize as realistic, was seductive and challenging. You know, challenging to me as a young person to say, “Well, shoot, I want to be able to achieve that.” I remember even copying certain panels or certain illustrations of his just to, say, draw the Darth Vader helmet. I thought, look at Al Williamson’s shot, because you know that’s perfect. I remember collecting even a paper cup series that was a by-product release of Star Wars merchandise that they adapted all three films on these. On the side of each cup was an illustration from a scene or a character in the movie, and they were recycling a ton of Al Williamson art for this. And I’m not sure if they had any original artwork by himself otherwise than was seen in the adaptations, but even that was something, for me, that was kind of dazzling to take in, because I think they did have elements from the first movie that were completely redrawn to be more in keeping with Al’s style, because once Marvel had Al doing this stuff, there was a sense of, I hate to say it, you look back at the first movie’s adaptation, you go, “What the hell?” We don’t want to see some crazy, artsy-fartsy elaboration on what these things look like. Once you see the movie, you just know, the movie makes the comic book look silly by contrast. And that’s what Al’s work was there to do was to equal the incredible level of what was realistic on celluloid so that now the comic, by contrast, would never seem absurd. It would look like it fit. Special thanks to Eric NolenWeathington, Steven Tice, and Jim Vadeboncoeur Jr. And thanks to Heritage Auctions, Aub Driver and Dark Horse Comics, Wally Harrington, Dean Mullaney, Richard Kung, IDW and The Library of American Comics for providing most of the art for this article.

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THE BEST IN COMICS AND LEGO BOOKS & MAGS!

ALTER EGO #113

ALTER EGO #114

BACK ISSUE #60

BACK ISSUE #61

BACK ISSUE #62

MARV WOLFMAN talks to RICHARD ARNDT about his first decade in comics on Tomb of Dracula, Teen Titans, Captain Marvel, John Carter, Daredevil, Nova, Batman, etc., behind a GENE COLAN cover! Art by COLAN, ANDERSON, CARDY, BORING, MOONEY, and more! Plus: the conclusion of our LEONARD STARR interview by JIM AMASH, FCA, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

MARVEL ISSUE on Captain America and Fantastic Four! MARTIN GOODMAN’s Broadway debut, speculations about FF #1, history of the MMMS, interview with Golden Age writer/artist DON RICO, art by KIRBY, AVISON, SHORES, ROMITA, SEVERIN, TUSKA, ALLEN BELLMAN, and others! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER and BILL SCHELLY! Cover by BELLMAN and MITCH BREITWEISER!

“Halloween Heroes and Villains”! JEPH LOEB and TIM SALE’s chiller Batman: The Long Halloween, the Scarecrow (both the DC and Marvel versions), Solomon Grundy, Man-Wolf, Lord Pumpkin, Rutland, Vermont’s Halloween parades, and… the Korvac Saga’s Dead Avengers! With commentary from and/or art by CONWAY, GIL KANE, LOPRESTI, MOENCH, PÉREZ, DAVE WENZEL, and more. Cover by TIM SALE!

“Tabloids and Treasuries,” spotlighting every all-new tabloid from the 1970s. Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man, The Bible, Captain America’s Bicentennial Battles, The Wizard of Oz, even the PAUL DINI/ALEX ROSS World’s Greatest Super-Heroes editions! Commentary and art by ADAMS, GARCIA-LOPEZ, GRELL, KIRBY, KUBERT, MAYER, ROMITA SR., TOTH, and more. Wraparound cover by ALEX ROSS!

“Superman in the Bronze Age”! JULIUS SCHWARTZ, CURT SWAN, Superman Family, World of Krypton miniseries, and ALAN MOORE’s “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?”, art & comments by ADAMS, ANDERSON, CARDY, CHAYKIN, PAUL KUPPERBERG, OKSNER, O’NEIL, PASKO, ROZAKIS, SAVIUK, and more. Cover by GARCÍA-LÓPEZ and SCOTT WILLIAMS! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95 • Ships Oct. 2012

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95 • Ships Dec. 2012

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95 • Ships Sept. 2012

(84-page TABLOID with color) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships Nov. 2012

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95 • Ships Jan. 2013

It’s MARIE SEVERIN, The Mirthful Mistress of Comics! MARIE SEVERIN colored the legendary EC Comics line, and spent thirty years working for Marvel Comics, doing everything from production and coloring to penciling, inking, and art direction. She is renowned for her sense of humor, which earned her the nickname “Mirthful Marie” from Stan Lee. This loving tribute contains insights from her close friends and her brother JOHN SEVERIN, as well as STAN LEE, AL FELDSTEIN, ROY THOMAS, JOHN ROMITA, JACK DAVIS, JACK KAMEN, TONY ISABELLA, GENE COLAN, JIM MOONEY, JOE SINNOTT, MARK EVANIER, and others, plus extensive commentary by MARIE herself. Complementing the text are photographs, plus rare and unpublished artwork, including a color gallery, showing her mastery with a painter’s pallette! NOW SHIPPING! (176-page trade paperback with COLOR) $24.95 • (Digital Edition) $7.95 ISBN: 9781605490427 • Diamond Order Code: MAY121304

Modern Masters spotlights ERIC POWELL! Take a look inside the mind of the creator of THE GOON, courtesy of co-authors JORGE KHOURY and ERIC NOLENWEATHINGTON. Through a career-spanning interview and heaps of fantastic artwork, including rare and unseen treasures from Powell’s personal files, this book documents his amazing career and details his creative process—it even includes a gallery of commissioned pieces in full-color. NOW SHIPPING! (120-page trade paperback with COLOR) $15.95 • (Digital Edition) $4.95 • ISBN: 9781605490410 • Diamond Order Code: APR121242

FALL BOOK RELEASES! SEE PREVIEWS & GET 15% OFF ONLINE!

FROM THE TOMB digs up the best of horror comics history! Since 2000, FROM THE TOMB has terrified readers worldwide, as the preeminent magazine on the history of horror comics, with stellar writing and intensely frightening illustrations from the best talent in the industry. Produced in the UK, issues have been scarce and highly collectible in the US, and here’s your chance to see what you’ve been missing! This “BEST OF” COLLECTION compiles the finest features of FROM THE TOMB’s ten years of terror, along with new material originally scheduled to see publication in the NEVER-PUBLISHED #29. It celebrates the 20th Century’s finest horror comics—and those they tried to ban—with a selection of revised and updated articles on BASIL WOLVERTON, JOHNNY CRAIG, RICHARD CORBEN, LOU CAMERON, RUDY PALAIS, MATT FOX, ALVIN HOLLINGSWORTH, plus classic publishers including ACG, ATLAS, EC, FICTION HOUSE, HARVEY COMICS, SKYWALD, WARREN, HOUSE OF HAMMER, A-BOMB COMICS, CANNIBALS, and others! It also includes a full-color section, and an invaluable set of collectors’ indices, to help you track down long-buried gems in the horror genre. SHIPS OCTOBER 2012! (192-page trade paperback with COLOR) $27.95 • (Digital Edition) $8.95 • ISBN: 9781605490434

The fabled master of glamour art finally gets his due! In the early 1940s, MATT BAKER became of one the earliest African-American comic book artists. But it wasn’t the color of his skin which made him such a significant figure in the history of the medium—it was his innate ability to draw gorgeous, exciting women and handsome, dynamic men in a fluid, graceful style. Imagine DAVE STEVENS or ADAM HUGHES working in the ‘40s, drawing a new story every month, and you’ll have a good idea of Matt Baker’s place in the industry throughout his career. Yet few of today’s comic book fans know of the artist or his work, because he died in 1959 at the young age of 38, just as the Silver Age of Comics was blossoming and bringing in a new generation of readers. MATT BAKER: THE ART OF GLAMOUR, edited by JIM AMASH and ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON, presents an impressive career cut tragically short. It features a wealth of essays; interviews with Baker’s friends, family, and coworkers; and a treasure trove of his finest artwork, including several complete stories. SHIPS OCTOBER 2012! (192-page HARDCOVER with 96 COLOR pages) $39.95 • (Digital Edition) $11.95 ISBN: 9781605490328 • Diamond Order Code: JUN121310

The FILMATION Generation lives on! LOU SCHEIMER was the co-founder of FILMATION STUDIOS, which created the first DC cartoons with SUPERMAN, BATMAN, and AQUAMAN, ruled the song charts with THE ARCHIES, kept Trekkie hope alive with STAR TREK: THE ANIMATED SERIES, taught morals with FAT ALBERT AND THE COSBY KIDS, and swung into high adventure with TARZAN, THE LONE RANGER, and ZORRO. Forays into live-action included SHAZAM! and THE SECRETS OF ISIS, and in the 1980s, Filmation singlehandedly caused the syndication explosion with HE-MAN AND THE MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE. Now, LOU SCHEIMER tells the entire story to best-selling author ANDY MANGELS, including what it meant to lead the last allAmerican animation company through nearly thirty years of innovation and fun! Profusely illustrated with photos, model sheets, storyboards, presentation art, looks at rare and unproduced series, and more—plus stories from top animation insiders about Scheimer and Filmation’s past, and rare Filmation art by BRUCE TIMM, ADAM HUGHES, ALEX ROSS, PHIL JIMENEZ, FRANK CHO, GENE HA, and MIKE McKONE—this book shows the Filmation Generation the story behind the stories! SHIPS SEPTEMBER 2012! (224-page trade paperback with COLOR) $26.95 • (Digital Edition) $8.95 • ISBN: 9781605490441 • Diamond Code: JUL121245

(224-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95 • (Digital Edition) $11.95 • ISBN: 9781605490458

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The AMERICAN COMIC BOOK CHRONICLES: 1960-64! THE AMERICAN COMIC BOOK CHRONICLES is an ambitious new series of FULL-COLOR HARDCOVERS, where TwoMorrows’ top authors document every decade of comic book history from the 1940s to today! JOHN WELLS leads off with the first of two volumes on the 1960s, covering all the pivotal moments and behind-the-scenes details of comics in the JFK and Beatles era! You’ll get a year-by-year account of the most significant publications, notable creators, and impactful trends, including: DC Comics’ rebirth of GREEN LANTERN, HAWKMAN, and others, and the launch of JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA and multiple earths! STAN LEE and JACK KIRBY’s transformation of superhero comics with the debut of Marvel’ FANTASTIC FOUR, SPIDER-MAN, HULK, X-MEN, AVENGERS, and other iconic characters! Plus BATMAN gets a “new look”, the BLUE BEETLE is revamped at Charlton Comics, and CREEPY #1 brings horror back to comic book form, just as Harvey’s “kid” comics are booming! These are just a few of the events chronicled in this exhaustive, full-color hardcover. Taken together, the series forms a cohesive, linear overview of the entire landscape of comics history, sure to be an invaluable resource for ANY comic book enthusiast! SHIPS NOVEMBER 2012!