Draw #28

#28 SPRING 2014 $8.95 IN THE US

FAREL DALRYMPLE

The professional “HOW-TO” magazine on comics, cartooning and animation

MAKING A PROPHET

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PRODUCER AND STORYBOARD ARTIST

DAVE BULLOCK REGULAR COLUMNISTS

JERRY ORDWAY & JAMAR NICHOLAS

PLUS! MIKE MANLEY AND BRET BLEVINS’

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DRAW! (edited by MIKE MANLEY) is the professional “HOW-TO” magazine on comics, cartooning, and animation. Each issue features in-depth INTERVIEWS and DEMOS from top pros on all aspects of graphic storytelling, as well as such skills as layout, penciling, inking, lettering, coloring, Photoshop techniques, plus web guides, tips, tricks, and a handy reference source—this magazine has it all!

NOTE: Some issues contain nudity for purposes of figure drawing.

INTENDED FOR MATURE READERS.

DRAW! #13

DRAW! #14

DRAW! #10

Other issues available, & an ULTIMATE BUNDLE with all issues at HALF-PRICE!

DRAW! #15

DRAW! #11

DRAW! #12

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!

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DRAW! #16

DRAW! #17

DRAW! #18

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

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

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

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

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!

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DRAW! #19

DRAW! #20

DRAW! #21

DRAW! #22

DRAW! #23

DRAW! #24

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!

WALTER SIMONSON interview and demo, BOB McLEOD critiques a newcomer, DANNY FINGEROTH spotlights AL JAFFEE, JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews art supplies, MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS offer “Comic Art Bootcamp” lessons, and more!

DAN PANOSIAN talks shop with MIKE MANLEY, DEAN HASPIEL interview by DANNY FINGEROTH, MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ “Comic Art Bootcamp”, critique of a newcomer’s work by BOB McLEOD, art supply reviews by JAMAR NICHOLAS, and more!

Inker SCOTT WILLIAMS discusses his work, FRANK MILLER interview, MILLER and KLAUS JANSON show their working processes, MANLEY & BLEVINS’ “Comic Art Bootcamp”, critique of a newcomer by BOB McLEOD, art supply reviews by JAMAR NICHOLAS, and more!

PATRICK OLIFFE interview/demo, AL WILLIAMSON’s work examined

by TORRES, BLEVINS, SCHULTZ, YEATES, ROSS, VEITCH, and others, MANLEY & BLEVINS’ “Comic Art Bootcamp”, critique of a newcomer

by BOB McLEOD, supply reviews

by JAMAR NICHOLAS, and more!

GLEN ORBIK demos painting noir covers, ROBERT VALLEY on animating “The Beatles: Rock Band” and Tron: Uprising, Comic Art Bootcamp on “Dramatic Lighting” with MANLEY & BLEVINS, critique by BOB McLEOD, supply reviews by JAMAR NICHOLAS, and more!

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DRAW! #25

DRAW! #26

DRAW! #27

LEE WEEKS (Daredevil, Incredible Hulk) gives insight into the artform, YILDIRAY ÇINAR (Noble Causes, Fury of the Firestorms) interview and demo, inker JOE RUBINSTEIN shows how he works, “Comic Art Bootcamp” with MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS, “Rough Critique” of a newcomer by BOB McLEOD, “Crusty Critic” JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews art supplies and software!

JOE JUSKO shows how he creates his amazing fantasy art, JAMAR NICHOLAS interviews artist JIMM RUGG (Street Angel, Afrodisiac, The P.L.A.I.N. Janes and Janes in Love, One Model Nation, and The Guild), new regular contributor JERRY ORDWAY on his behind-the-scenes working process, Comic Art Bootcamp with MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS, reviews of artist materials, and more!

Top comics cover artist DAVE JOHNSON demos his creative process, STEPHEN SILVER shows how he designs characters for top animated series, plus new columnist JERRY ORDWAY presents “The Right Way, the Wrong Way, and the ORDWAY!”, “Crusty Critic” JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews art supplies, and hit “Comic Art Bootcamp” with Draw editor MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS!

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THE PROFESSIONAL “HOW-TO” MAGAZINE ON COMICS & CARTOONING WWW.DRAW-MAGAZINE.BLOGSPOT.COM SPRING 2014, VOL. 1, #28 Editor-in-Chief • Michael Manley Managing Editor and Designer • Eric Nolen-Weathington Publisher • John Morrow Logo Design • John Costanza Front Cover • Farel Dalrymple DRAW! Spring 2014, Vol. 1, No. 28 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.

DRAW! and its logo are trademarks of Action Planet, Inc. All contributions herein are copyright 2014 by their respective contributors. Views expressed here by contributors and interviewees are not necessarily those of Action Planet, Inc., TwoMorrows Publishing, or its editors.

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 ©2014 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 China. FIRST PRINTING.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

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FAREL DALRYMPLE

Eric Nolen-Weathington interviews the writer/artist about world-building and surviving in the real world.

36

RIGHT WAY, WRONG WAY—ORDWAY!

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Dave Bullock

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comic art bootcamp

Shazam! step by step, from plot to finished art.

Mike Manley interviews the director/storyboard artist/comic book artist—what doesn’t he do?

This month’s installment: In with the In Crowd: Drawing Multiple Figures

PLEASE READ THIS: This is copyrighted material, NOT intended for downloading anywhere except our website or Apps. 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. Otherwise, DELETE IT FROM YOUR DEVICE 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 within our Apps and at

www.twomorrows.com

DRAW! SPRING 2014

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B

-ING AHEAD

y the time you read this, I will have passed another big milestone in my personal journey as an artist. I will have graduated with my Master’s Degree in Painting from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. This event draws to a close one rather long, enjoyable, and specific portion of my journey as an artist—that of the student.

I entered the Academy at the age of 45 after having an already successful career as a professional comics artist and illustrator, and also working in animation and starting DRAW! magazine. When I started teaching art classes in 2000 in Delaware, I actually became rather jealous of my students and wanted to become one myself again. I found my first time in college right after high school rather disappointing and frustrating, as this was in the hippie-dippie, modernist ’80s where people were much more interested in drawing what they “felt” and being free from all the constraints they felt were placed upon them by the classical tradition of art education.

Well, brother, let me tell you, that classical tradition was exactly what I wanted, but I was unable to find it in a school until I moved to Philadelphia and found out about the Academy.

Despite the fact I did not have a good teacher or a college art education, I did not let that stop me from achieving my goals of working in comics and animation. As I tell my students at the beginning of every semester, spending a lot of money going to college will guarantee only one thing: owing a lot of money for your college education. It will not guarantee that you get a job in the industry and achieve your goals and dreams as an artist.

Only diligent, hard, and consistent effort will achieve that, and

most importantly—not giving up! I cannot stress this enough.

It’s going to be an all-out assault trying to get your dream career, and the person who has the most effect on you achieving your dream is you! You only have to ask yourself one question: Are you willing to do whatever it takes to achieve your goal?

In going back to school as an established artist, I had to lay aside my past successes in order to open myself up to the process of learning from my teachers and not let my ego trip me up. My goal was to become a better painter.

If I had gone into the endeavor of being a student with the idea that I knew better than any teacher, then I’d have set myself up for not only conflict, but the possibility that I might miss some Golden Nugget I had overlooked on my self-taught journey—perhaps a new perspective that might launch me toward something grand as an artist.

But even though I am leaving the world of academic learning, I will never stop being a student; no real artist ever does.

Big thanks to this issue's feature artists, Farel Dalrymple and my buddy Dave Bullock—we couldn’t have done it without you! And once again, hats off to my publisher John Morrow, my main man and right hand Eric Nolen-Weathington, and my fellow DRAW! contributors: Jamar Nicholas, Jerry Ordway, and my best buddy Bret Blevins, who issue after issue still struggles to get my likeness in these little caricatures.

Now go draw something!

Best,

NEXT ISSUE IN SEPTEMBER! In DRAW! #29 (80 pages, now in its new full-color format, $8.95 print/$3.95 digital), we "cover" illustrator extraordinaire Dave Dorman! Best known for his Star Wars related work, Dorman is a top painter of science fiction, fantasy, and horror novel covers, and an in-demand comic book cover artist. DRAW explores his career, and the techniques he mastered to become a success. ALSO: LeSean Thomas is a quickly rising star in the field of animation and comics. He garnered acclaim as the supervising character designer and co-director of The Boondocks, and his work as a producer and director has helped make Black Dynamite: The Animated Series an instant cult classic. Now he tells us what it takes to make it big in today’s animation industry. PLUS: "The Right Way, the Wrong Way, and the ORDWAY!" with new columnist Jerry Ordway, and "Comic Art Bootcamp" by Draw editor Mike Manley and Bret Blevins!

SUBSCRIPTIONS: Four issues US: $34 Standard, $41 First Class, $11.80 Digital Only Outside the US: Canada: $43, Elsewhere: $52 Surface, $141 Airmail SUBSCRIBE NOW At: www.twomorrows.com

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DRAW! SPRING 2014

Farel Dalrymple Pop Gun Warrior

Pop Gun Warrior

Interview Conducted and Transcribed

by Eric Nolen-Weathington

DRAW! SPRING 2014

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A drawing from Farel’s sketchbooks.

Artwork © Farel Dalrymple.

DRAW!: You’ve been pretty busy.

FAREL DALRYMPLE: Oh yeah. [laughs] DRAW!: You finished up The Wrenchies just a few months ago, and Delusional came out recently. Let’s talk about Delusional first. What went into your editing process? How did you decide what to include and what to leave out, and how did it come about in the first place?

FD: The book came about because Chris Pitzer from AdHouse contacted me. I had done some stuff for some of his books, like Project: Superior, and he just asked me if I was interested in doing a book with him. I had been thinking about doing a collection of sketchbook stuff and/or a comic book collection of all the anthology work I’ve done over the years, so I told him, “Well, I want to do this, and I want to do this.” He was like, “Why don’t we just do them together?” so I gave him pretty much everything I had. [laughter] I think it was around 500 pages, and I laid each page out sort of how I wanted it. He sent me back some PDFs of the design he did on it. A lot of things he blew up or repositioned; he added tones to certain pages. Since I was trying to finish up Wrenchies, I asked him to do all that stuff. [laughs] It was a lot of work for him. We went back and forth a couple of times. The book comes out at a little over 200 pages,

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so half the stuff I gave him, he didn’t use. I think most of that was sketchbook stuff. I think most of the comic stories I gave him, he used. A lot of the sketchbook material ended up on the cutting room floor.

DRAW!: So he took over most of that process, and you were mostly just approving his designs as things went along.

FD: Yeah. I gave him all the pages formatted, but he did all the design. He’s good at that sort of thing. [laughter] Generally I like doing my own design on things like that—or at least making it look more like me—but it was kind of a mishmash of art, and I really like the work that he did. He always produces really good books. He did James Jean’s art books, Paul Pope’s, Sterling Hundley’s—I really like the way that book looks. I figured he knows what he’s doing, [laughter] and I had other things to worry about. That’s what he does for a living, [laughs] so I trusted him and I was really happy with the results. It’s kind of neat just giving someone some artwork and seeing what they come up with. I mean, we went back and forth a lot on things, so he didn’t surprise me with anything.

DRAW!: Was there anything you wanted to get in the book that didn’t make the cut?

FD: There were a couple of things. None of it was too precious to me. There were a couple of things I insisted on, and there was one illustration that I wanted in there, and he was like, “Ennh, I don’t like that,” [laughter] and I just said, “Whatever.” It wasn’t a big deal.

DRAW!: Let’s go back to your beginnings. You went to SVA? FD: Yeah. I graduated in ’99. I went from ’96 to ’99.

DRAW!: But you didn’t go there right out of high school, right?

FD: No, I actually dropped out of high school and got a GED a couple of years later. I worked for a few years at a publishing warehouse. I think I was 24 when I transferred to SVA. I transferred as a sophomore because I had done some junior college—a little bit in California and three years in Oklahoma at the Tulsa Community College.

FD: Yeah, I was always drawing and making my own comics that I would never show anyone. I might show a friend, “Oh, here’s this comic I want to do,” and I’d have eight pages of pencils and not work on it any more. But at the junior college I was taking mostly art classes, so I was drawing and painting and practicing.

DRAW!: When you started at SVA, were you thinking of going into comics from the beginning, or were you thinking more about illustration?

DRAW!: So how did you hear about SVA and decide to transfer there?

FD: A recruiter for SVA came to the community college. I was taking art classes, and I was considering going to a university or art school. I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to further my education, I just knew I didn’t want to work in the warehouse any more. [laughter] “I should get better at art, because that’s what I want to do.”

I was thinking about going to the Kansas City Art Institute, and I applied there. Then this recruiter came by. I’m blanking on his name, but he was a really nice guy. He showed a bunch of slides from the senior portfolios, and I was kind of intimidated by it. I was like, “That’s good. I should go somewhere that’s intimidating, because that means I’ll get better rather than be comfortable.”

DRAW!: You need a challenge to give you that extra motivation?

FD: Yeah. It’s weird thinking back on it now. I feel like a lot of the work was the super-glossy, rendered stuff I kind of hate now, [laughs] but at the time I was, “Wow! That looks really professional. I should go to that school because it will kick my ass.” I like making things hard for myself sometimes for the improvement factor that comes from conflict. That was my idea, I guess, when I decided to go there.

And I visited New York and fell in love with the city. I’d never lived anywhere like that before. I guess there isn’t anywhere else really like that. But it was neat after being in Tulsa.

I didn’t really know a lot of artists in Tulsa, so it was exciting being around other people making interesting art and music. I think too that being a little older, it didn’t seem as scary. Like, if I was right out of high school, there’s no way I would have gone there because it would have seemed like a crazy, scary place. It was still a little scary. [laughs] DRAW!: Do you think being a little older also helped with your confidence in terms of your art, since you’d taken art classes before transferring there?

Artwork © Farel Dalrymple.

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FD: I was thinking more along the lines of illustration. I was playing with the idea of being a fine artist, but I didn’t really have a mentor. I was winging it. I mean, I liked illustration, and I liked some fine art stuff. I really liked comics, but I think at that point in my life I’d given up on the idea of being a comic book artist. At 16 or 17 I kind of just lost interest in the comics I’d been exposed to and knew about. I mean, I liked Bone and things like that, but most of the superhero comics— I think that was just when Image started, and I don’t know if I was too old for it, but I remember being completely bored by all of it. “Oh man, I really want to like comics. I really like the form.” And I remember reading really good comics, but what I was seeing on the shelves in the comic stores in Tulsa just wasn’t doing it for me. It wasn’t until I got into art school that I started reading comics again.

But it was weird, because I always made comics. I wasn’t reading any for a chunk of time other than certain back issues I still liked, but I wasn’t really collecting anything new. So when I went to art school, I was debating, “Should I go into the Fine Art department, or should I go into the Illustration department?” The recruiter I had talked to told me to go into Illustration. “You can always do fine arts.” I’m sure a lot

of fine art teachers might scoff at that, but he basically was saying, “You can get these skills to learn how to draw and paint, and if you want to do fine art, you can do that anyway.”

That seemed reasonable, so I decided to go into the Illustration department.

Then I saw that Walt Simonson was teaching a cartooning class in the Illustration department. I was like, “Oh, man, I love Walt Simonson.” His Thor run was amazing to me. So while I was there, I was making comics and taking comic classes, but I never thought, “Oh, I want to be a cartoonist.”

It was just something I did. I wasn’t thinking I could draw Spider-Man. I wasn’t even thinking, “There are cartoonists who make their own stories.” I mean, I knew about it, but for some reason it wasn’t connecting with me that I could do that too. It was just something I did as a hobby.

In Walt Simonson’s class I started doing this 40-page comic.

I had some friends there who were self-publishing. They went to the Small Press Expo—I think it was the fourth or fifth year of the show. I went with them, and, “Oh, there are all kinds of awesome comics. People are doing them just because they like doing them, just like I’m doing them.” [laughter] By the time I got out of school, I was like, “I don’t want to do illustration. I want to make comics and see if I can figure out how to make a career out of doing that.”

DRAW!: It sounds like you were a mainstream reader growing up, so what kind of comics were you making before you got to SVA? Did you spend any time trying to emulate the typical Marvel and DC styles?

FD: Not really. Every once in a while I would do a little Spider-Man doodle or something, but for the most part I didn’t really draw superheroes. When I was younger, yeah, I remember filling up sketchbooks with team shots. [laughs] I actually have a sketchbook from when I was 17 that my mom gave me recently. It’s pretty embarrassing. Every page is some guy holding a gun in some pose.

What is wrong with me? [laughter] I’ve never even shot a gun. And I’m still drawing that stuff too; that’s the sad part. [laughter] I remember one story I did was this teenaged kid who had an older friend who was a scientist, and he had an eyeball growing out of the side of his head. Looking at it now, it kind of reminds me of a comic Vertigo would do.

DRAW!: It sounds like something out of Madman.

FD: Oh yeah, totally. I like that book a lot.

Artwork for a promotional poster for SPX (Small Press Expo).

Artwork © Farel Dalrymple.

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DRAW!: When did you start seeing comics like that, when you got to New York?

FD: I was familiar with Madman before that. I remember liking Bone and Madman, but I didn’t read Love and Rockets until I got to art school. I didn’t read Watchmen until I got to art school, so it was a little lost on me. “That was okay, but what’s the big deal?” [laughter] Violent Cases, though, was a big inspiration for me. I started drawing that 40-page comic I mentioned—Smith’s Adventures in the Supermundane—after I read it, and it was a big inspiration. I liked that first Books of Magic series. There was a collection of it in the school library, and the first issue had John Bolton art, and I was really impressed by that.

DRAW!: You read a lot of science fiction and fantasy, right?

Did you read a lot growing up?

FD: I wouldn’t say I read a lot, because there are people out there who read a lot. I mean, I read some, and I really like it. I’m not really well versed in any one type of genre, but I guess I gravitate to that type of thing more than other things.

I like books that have a sense of fantasy or the surreal or science fiction. I like Ray Bradbury’s work a lot, Kurt Vonnegut, writers like that.

DRAW!: Even in your early work there’s that urban fantasy feel to it. It’s a little beyond magical realism, but there’s a real world setting with all of these fantasy elements woven into it.

FD: I liked Madeleine L’Engle’s stuff a lot when I was younger, and I think that informs the sort of stories that I write. Even with comics—I remember reading Spider-Man and being really excited when Peter Parker would be in his normal clothes and do something with his powers. He might shoot his web-shooter that’s under his shirt, or climb up a wall while still wearing his street clothes. For some reason I liked that more than when he was wearing the costume. I like that idea of everything looking normal or relatively realistic and there’s this magical aspect you don’t have to explain, where you can figure out what’s going on even though it doesn’t make any sense.

DRAW!: Given that Meathaus formed out of your SVA experience and the people you met there, do you think SVA was more important for you in terms of developing your artistic skills or in terms of the connections you made there?

FD: [pause] I almost feel like those are the same thing, even though they’re totally not. It’s hard for me to put emphasis or priority on one of those over the other. I don’t know that I made any connections that helped me in my career, whatever that means, but it was really important for me to see what my peers were doing. It was really inspiring.

I was at that school at a time when there happened to be a lot of really good artists. I think that school probably produces a lot of good artists every year, but when I was there, there were an exceptionally high amount of amazing artists a couple of years ahead of me and a couple of years behind me—Tomer Hanuka and James Jean, Esao Andrews, just off the top of my head. Tom Herpich works on Adventure Time— the Meathaus guys and a lot of people outside of that. A lot of people were doing interesting, amazing work while they were

in school, and that really informed my art. If they hadn’t been going there, I probably wouldn’t have been as inspired to do comics as much as I do now. I definitely felt the time spent in the studio drawing and painting was super-important, but I feel like if I did that at any other school, I don’t know if it would have been as effective training for me without those guys sitting next to me I could look at as well and learn from.

DRAW!: What was your favorite class at SVA? FD: I only officially took it for one semester, but I sat in on the class every year I went there. There was a teacher named John Ruggeri—I think he still teaches there. He was a Jack Potter protégé. He taught a class called Drawing on Location, and that was a big deal to me while I was there. It was tough to get my mind to work like this, because I was so used to trying to do a comic page where it was, “Okay, I have to draw a background.”

That was always the real intimidating part. The fun thing is you can draw the Hulk or a dude running down the street with a machine gun, but drawing the city in the background, I didn’t know how to do that. I knew from How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way about perspective, but it seemed like a pain in the ass to do. [laughter] But then I took this class, and he was like, “Don’t worry about that. That will happen if you’re looking at real life. Look at those buildings, and draw what you see.”

And that was really liberating. It made drawing backgrounds fun. I guess I could have done this on my own, but

Artwork © Farel Dalrymple.

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FD: Yeah. I’m not a clean, neat artist. I feel like my stuff is pretty gritty and sloppy. I look at an Art Adams page—who I’m a fan of; I like his art a lot—but I noticed that in every panel, he rules everything out in blue line. He has a hundred little lines in every panel that he works on top of. It’s probably just a technique he’s developed to save time, but I don’t think I could do that. [laughter] It’s impressive, and it makes sense, but I prefer to let things happen a little more naturally.

DRAW!: How did Meathaus come together?

FD: Me and Tomer and James all went to the Angoulême comics festival—it might have been 1999 or 2000, something like that. We met some guys there who did an anthology called Spon, and they did an issue a week for a year. I thought that was pretty crazy. They were really small, loose drawings, but, I mean, they did one a week. [laughs] I don’t know how they did that. But the idea was really inspiring. We thought it was pretty cool that these guys were producing this regular book.

When we got back to New York, I talked to Chris McDonald about it too, and so all of us got together—I think it was at a party at Chris’ apartment—and worked on it. The idea was we were going to do one a month—that didn’t happen.

But we all made our comics for the first issue that night. I think I might have worked on mine a little more, and I think some of the others did too, besides what we did that one night, but that was the catalyst.

I think that first issue ended up taking us a couple of months to put out, and then each issue got bigger.

It was friends we went to school with, and people we knew around the city. Over the years, as we did new issues, we just started asking other artists we knew and that we liked from around the world.

The opening page of Farel’s contribution to Meathaus #2.

Rejection © Farel Dalrymple.

there was something about having a class and the direction of a teacher who would come over every once in a while and check me. “Look at what you’re doing here. You’re not really looking.” And he would sometimes do quick demos. It freed me up in a lot of ways. “Life isn’t made with rulers. It’s okay if something doesn’t look perfectly straight in the background.

If it’s grounded enough in reality, that doesn’t matter.” Once I let that go, it was easier and more fun, and it looked better.

I felt like it was really good training for comics by a guy who doesn’t really have anything to do with comics.

DRAW!: And that approach suits your style better anyway. If you had all these perfectly straight lines next to your figures, it would look out of place.

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DRAW!: Were you kind of surprised about the response you built up? It seems like even people on the fringe of the indie scene have heard of Meathaus, even if they’ve never seen an issue.

FD: The one thing that was cool about making work, and I kind of experienced this when I did my first self-published book just before Meathaus, was being part of a club. You made a book and, “Oh, we made a book, and there are other people who have made books, and now we’re in the club of people who’ve made books.” [laughter] It wasn’t like any of us made any money or got any attention out of it.

Over the years of doing it as long as we did, there were a few interviews. A foreign magazine, Xfuns, did a review of it, a couple of New York magazines talked about it a little bit, but I don’t know how many people were reading it. [laughs] Chris McDonald is still doing a Meathaus blog, and I think that has

a pretty big following, but it seemed more like an excuse to make a comic story. “I want to be involved in the next Meathaus comic, so let’s make a comic story I can put in there.” I don’t know if it necessarily opened any doors or got me any accolades, but there is a little bit of a rep, like you were saying, having the name recognition. Plus, there are a couple of other comics that kind of sound like it, like Dame Darcy’s Meat Cake. “Oh yeah, I think I’ve heard of that.” [laughter] But I’m glad I did it. The power you get from being around other people making stuff, it was neat just for that. It was a way to keep in touch with other artists.

DRAW!: Did it demystify the process for you too? “This is a viable thing I can do.”

FD: Exactly. It’s proof of your existence or something. “I did this.”

DRAW!: What were you doing to make money?

FD: The same thing I do now: whatever I can to survive. [laughter] I do a little more paid comics work now.

The past couple of years I’ve be trying to figure out how to marry the money-making things with my personal work.

I worked at an art supply store for while—Utrecht on 4th Avenue. I worked at an ad agency for a bit. I actually worked at a Flash animation company during the dot. com boom, and that’s where I met Brandon Graham. Chris McDonald and I both worked there, and I think Becky Cloonan might have worked there too. Urban Box Office was the name of the company, and they did all these weird Flash animation things that they hosted. I guess the idea was to sell advertising space. I don’t know how they were making any money from it, but there were a bunch of comics artists and animators who were starting out working there. LeSean Thomas worked there at the time. I worked there about six months, and then the bottom dropped out and I got laid off.

I worked at a vegan restaurant for a while.

I used to go into Bob Schreck’s office at DC and bug him, and he gave me work on Caper.

That’s when I quit my coffee shop job—or at least cut back to working there one day a week or something. “I’m a professional now.”

DRAW!: Schreck is good friends with Matt Wagner. The Grendel job came first, right?

FD: Oh yeah! That was one of my first gigs.

I like Matt’s stuff a lot. I think someone else was originally supposed to draw that, and the funny thing about that story was he told me to make the villain look like John Byrne. [laughter] I thought that was pretty funny.

That was my main instruction for the story, “Just make that guy look like John Byrne.” [laughter] That might have been through Diana Schutz, because she gave me some of my first paying work through the Autobiographix anthology. It had Frank Miller and a bunch of other guys in there. This was after I’d started doing Pop Gun War, and someone must have given her a copy of that—Jim Mahfood or someone like that I’d met at a show. She called me at work—I was working at a coffee shop in the East Village area—and said, “Hey, do you want to do this thing?” I was like, “Yeah, that sounds awesome! I get paid to do comics?” [laughter] That was the first thing, and the Grendel job was not too long after that. I must have met Schreck through Diana Schutz.

DRAW!: Speaking of Pop Gun War, it was around the time the Grendel story came out that you received the Xeric Grant.

They’re not doing the individual grants anymore, but how big was that for you at the time?

More from Farel’s sketchbooks.

Artwork © Farel Dalrymple. Batman © DC Comics.

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A page from the sequel to Farel’s Pop Gun War, shown here in Farel’s inks and finished watercolors.

Pop Gun War © Farel Dalrymple.

FD: That was huge. I don’t know if I’d be making comics without it. I’m very grateful for Peter Laird for establishing that. It makes sense they aren’t doing it anymore because of the whole crowdsourcing thing. It seems a lot easier to get money to do a comic than it used to be. Maybe not to get a page rate, [laughter] but at a time there wasn’t anything like that.

I’d been working on the first issue of Pop Gun War, and a buddy of mine, Dan Zalkus, who is good about emailing me information about art and artists, told me about it. “Hey, have you heard about this Xeric Grant? You should apply for one of those.” So I went to their website, found out all the information, and saw that they wanted five copies of everything—I guess they had five judges—and you had to be 90% done with your book. I had almost all of it done, except maybe the last few pages were only penciled. So I sent them five copies of the photocopied book, five copies of my artist statement, and I slipped in one copy of the Smith’s Adventures book. There wasn’t anything in the instructions about it, but I thought they might want to see something I’d already done. I got a letter back saying they wanted four

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more copies of Smith’s Adventures. It was still under the deadline, so I sent those four extra copies off, and then I got the grant. When people asked me about it when they were applying for it, I’d tell them, “Just make sure you send five copies of everything.” [laughter] But I love that they had that grant. That was really cool of Peter Laird to share his Turtles fortune with the comic world.

DRAW!: Do you think it helped you sell Pop Gun War? FD: I think there’s something to that. I remember they took an ad out in Previews, “Here are all the Xeric winners.” They used some of my art in that ad, so maybe that inspired people to check it out. I’m sure it didn’t hurt.

I noticed that sometimes people would get a Xeric Grant and say, “Winner of the Xeric Award!” [laughs] It’s not really an award—well, I guess they’re awarding you money. [laughter] It’s better than an award to me, because it’s someone believing in your work enough to give you thousands of dollars to help fund it. It was way more validating than getting some accolade.

DRAW!: You were working mostly in black-and-white during this time. Were you doing any color work outside of your comics work?

FD: Any color stuff I did at that time was oil painting.

DRAW!: Were you still flirting with fine art?

FD: Kind of. I didn’t really do much of it. I had painting classes, and I even had a class where I did a series of paintings on the “Book of Revelation.” I was still pretty religious at that time sadly. I was still oil painting. I would sit in on a lot of oil painting classes at SVA. I would use a print shop a lot too. I would make prints and etchings and different things like that, and I would use colors in monotypes. But I didn’t really start using watercolors—I mean, I did a little bit in school, but I didn’t color my comics until later.

DRAW!: Was it just a matter of time and speed that you went to watercolor?

FD: Yeah, it seemed faster to me than working in Photoshop.

Photoshop was more of a learning process for me, and I would get really caught up in minutiae—zooming in on an image and saying, “Oh, this isn’t quite right.” But with watercolor, you can go pretty fast, and if you make mistakes, it doesn’t really matter. I mean, some people are pretty tight with their watercolors, but I felt with my style— DRAW!: It fits with the organic feel of your pencils and inks.

It’s not a slick look, so the watercolor is a natural fit.

FD: Yeah, I agree. Plus it’s kind of fun to do—more fun than coloring on a computer anyway. [laughs] DRAW!: The coloring programs have really improved over the years. Have you ever tried duplicating the effect of your watercolors digitally with paint programs?

FD: I’m not really interested in duplicating the effect. I think that’s when you get in trouble with Photoshop. Certain people are good at it. It lends itself to making things look old. Jim Rugg does that a lot with his comics, using screens to make it look like the old printing process. I know there are things you can do to make it look like paint, but to me it’s like, “I’ll just paint it then. Why would I do that on a computer?”

Whenever I computer color things, the stuff I enjoy looking at and the stuff I like doing is really flat. I just like the way that looks. You have all this technology at your disposal, and all these tricks and tools, but keeping it really subtle and understated I feel is the way to go—like Dave Stewart’s coloring on Hellboy in Hell. Every once in a while there’ll be something vibrant, but for the most part there are just greys and browns—real subtle. I love that stuff. I feel like it makes the line art—especially when you’re dealing with someone as graphic as Mike Mignola—stronger.

DRAW!: He has a brighter palette when he works with Darwyn Cooke, but it’s a similar approach.

FD: Yeah. I recently got to see some of the pages he’s coloring for Craig Thompson’s new book, Space Dumplins, and that stuff looks amazing, and it looks different too from what he’s doing on Hellboy.

DRAW!: Have you thought about doing some type of project down the road where the flat coloring might work better for you?

An example of Farel’s digital coloring.

Artwork © Farel Dalrymple.

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FD: Yeah, actually I just started drawing a Dark Horse Presents story with Chris Stevens. He’s writing it and I’m doing everything else pretty much. I knew it was going to be the project I did after The Wrenchies, so I’ve been working with the idea I’m going to computer color it. I got kind of burnt out watercoloring such a big project, and I thought it might make this new project a little more fun to do. It’s more of a straightup science-fiction world; it’s not the wacky fantasy land my stuff is. I thought it might lend itself better to being computer colored. Hopefully I can streamline my process to where I don’t get caught up in the coloring too much.

DRAW!: With Wrenchies, did you do all the coloring towards the end, or were you going back and forth?

FD: I would do, especially towards the end, a ten-page chunk, where I would put five spreads up on my wall and figure it out from there. I would usually pencil those five spreads, then ink them, and then color them. But most of the book was done one page at a time. I might thumbnail a chunk of pages, or I might do a batch of three or four pages, where I would pencil them, ink them, then color them, but if I let them stack up to much, it would start to feel like a chore. It still did at times, but I tried to figure out how to not let it get too far feeling like that.

DRAW!: It’s the biggest project you’ve worked on, right?

FD: Definitely. It’s 304 pages.

Preliminary sketches for “The Ear Farmer,” written by Chris Stevens for Dark Horse Presents.

The Ear Farmer © Chris Stevens and Farel Dalrymple

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DRAW!: It took you, what, about three years?

FD: Five. [laughter] That’s part of the not letting it feel like work problem. If I had put a little more pressure on myself, I probably could have gotten it done in three. But I had no idea when I started that it would be that involved. I was thinking maybe a year or two of work on it. That’s kind of why I named the art book Delusional, because I am. [laughter] The amount of work I can get done, and what I think I’m capable of, and not measuring up to that. You kind of have to be delusional in order to get anything done.

DRAW!: You mentioned earlier about trying to balance the work-for-hire jobs with your personal projects. Do you seek out those jobs—Omega, Prophet—or do they just happen to come along?

FD: Anything like that I’ve gotten has been from an editor emailing me. It’s weird, because when I lived in New York, I barely got any work, and I would go in a lot. Brandon [Graham] and James [Jean] and I—I took James into Vertigo, and he got work right away. “Oh yeah! This is great!” Heidi MacDonald was working for Vertigo at the time, and she told me, “You’ll never work for Vertigo.” Jim Higgins told me pretty much the same thing. I met with three or four different editors, and they all said, “Ennh, we’ll call you.” Going in to those companies rarely got me any work. The thing that got me work was me making my own comic, and someone

seeing that comic and saying, “I like this. Do you want to do this other thing for the man?” [laughter] “You guys will pay me, so, cool, I’ll do that.”

DRAW!: Going back to your comment about liking to see Peter Parker doing superheroic things, Omega the Unknown was kind of along those lines. How did you get involved with that?

FD: What I heard from talking with the writer, Jonathan Lethem, I think he originally wanted Adrian Tomine to draw it, but he turned it down, saying he was too slow—which I totally get. [laughter] He asked Bob Fingerman who would be a good artist for it, and I think Bob showed him the story that Dylan Horrocks wrote and I and Paul Hornschemeier made for DC’s Bizarro World anthology, which Joey Cavalieri edited. The Bizarro thing was actually something I got from going in and bugging Joey Cavalieri about. “I want to be in one of those.” [laughter] So that was something good that came out of me going into the offices— that and hanging out with Bob Schreck. But I think I have Bob Fingerman to thank for showing Lethem that story, because the way that story looked worked well with how he wanted Omega to look.

That story too, all the reference I used for it came from the last neighborhood I lived in in New York, Carroll Gardens, and I think that was the area Lethem was from. I think that was another reason he responded to that Bizarro story. “I recognize that. That looks like New York.” And in the Omega story, they’re in the Inwood/Washington Heights area of Manhattan, and it was important to him that we base that on reality and reference a lot of actual places.

Farel did eventually work for Vertigo—a story for The Unexpected anthology.

DRAW!: Which goes back to your Drawing on Location class at SVA. FD: Exactly. If I hadn’t taken that class and drawn those buildings, my stuff might have looked like a regular comic book and wouldn’t have looked like Brooklyn.

DRAW!: Why did you end up leaving New York? Did you move to Portland from New York?

FD: No, I moved back to Oklahoma for a few years to be with my family. I also did a little bit of Euro-tripping during that time. I moved to Portland maybe two years after moving out of New York.

I moved out because I had just had enough. It was too much. I loved it when I first moved there, but I was there eight years, and the last couple of years I just felt exhausted and really angry all the time. I walked around feeling frustrated. I

The Unexpected © DC Comics.

think there were a couple of bad winters too. “I don’t want to live in a cold, harsh place like this anymore. I need some comfort in my life.” [laughter] I couldn’t hack the big city life.

Now I’m kind of complaining about Portland being too big.

DRAW!: Portland has a big art community, and seems to be receptive to the arts in general. Is that part of the reason you moved there?

FD: Oh, definitely. Where I grew up mostly and where I went back to live in Tulsa, Oklahoma—it’s probably better now, but at the time it felt bereft of any culture. It was like they were paying for some past sins or something for not embracing their heritage. It has some cool history, but when I lived there it didn’t seem like anyone supported local businesses

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or local artists. Everything seemed really cookie-cutter, strip mall, mainstream city. I had a friend in Portland, and I visited him a couple of times. There was a good art scene, a really cool music scene, and it seemed like a lot of young people were doing stuff and making things.

I had no idea about the whole comic book connection. I knew Dark Horse was here, and I knew Craig Thompson from shows, and he lived here, but beyond that, I didn’t know until I got here that there’s Oni Press, Top Shelf, a crazy amount of cartoonists, and Fantagraphics is pretty close in Seattle. It just seemed like the perfect place for me when I first moved here.

There was a party at Bret Warnock’s house when I first moved here, and he said, “Man, everyone’s moving here!” and it did seem like that. I bump into people all the time, “Yeah, I just moved here from L.A. to finish my comic.”

DRAW!: Does having the comics community and the art scene in general make it easier for you to do what you do?

FD: Yeah, I think so. It’s neat getting the support in your hometown. Here there’s not just one good comic store—I didn’t have any in Tulsa, but here I have two of my favorite comic shops nearby. The guys that run the stores here—and there are a bunch of really good stores here—are really good at promoting local artists and having openings. And it seems like every coffee shop, comic store, and bank sells art. [laughter] Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like people buy a lot of art—at least not from my experience. I haven’t had a sold-out show at a comic book store yet or anything. Maybe it’s my own fault for not stepping up my game into a real gallery. I

Sketches Farel made during his travels through Europe.

Artwork © Farel Dalrymple.

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don’t even know if I could do that. There’s art showing all the time, but I don’t see a lot of red dots on pieces.

I don’t do a lot of shows. Maybe once or twice a year, I’ll do something at Floating World Comics, where I’ll have a book signing or something. People always come out for it, and it’s neat to see, especially considering how little I go out for anything. [laughter] I’ll do book signings in other towns and no one will show up, so it’s nice to be in my own town and have people show up.

DRAW!: Do you think it’s better or worse than being in New York? When you were in New York, did you find there was almost too much going on?

FD: New York’s weird, because it is pretty much anything you want, whenever you want it. But it was really hard for me to be productive there. When I was at the vegan restaurant, I actually had a pretty good productivity level, because I would work until midnight, then go home and stay up all night working on my comics till seven in the morning, and then sleep all day, and repeat that five days a week. I had a really good system of paying the bills and the inspiration to go home and work, because when I was at work I’d be like, “I just want to smash this glass in this person’s face. [laughter] I want to go home and work on comics. That’s all I want to do.”

Now that I do just work on comics, it’s a little harder for me to capture that motivation. The thing about New York, though, was it was hard for me to keep up that level of intensity. It was so exhausting. Whenever I left the house, I knew I would be gone all day. “I’ve got a long subway ride. I’m going to be hanging

out in the city all day.” Going home felt so daunting.

“I’ve got to ride the subway, then I’ve got a long walk from the subway.” It was ridiculous, but for some reason it was intimidating to me. Maybe that’s why I started working in coffee shops and drawing with friends. I always bring my stuff with me to work on wherever I go. I noticed Brandon Graham would always do that too. Wherever we went, a bar or something, he would pull his pages out and start drawing. “If he can do that, I can too.”

DRAW!: So you still carry your stuff around with you?

FD: Like a security blanket. It’s kind of ridiculous. [laughter] Even if I’m running errands. “I might get stuck in the car for 15 minutes. I could chip away on this thing.” Because I’m always thinking about stories I want to do, so it’s nice to have it with me. I feel like a crazy person, honestly. [laughter] If you look in my bag, there’re comic pages, some comics I like, weird scraps of notes, my tools.

DRAW!: You don’t have a little sketchbook where you jot down your ideas?

FD: I do. I have a big sketchbook that’s really heavy that I schlep around too. Sometimes I’ll be flipping through all these things and be like, “I’ve got to organize all of this. What is the point of all this? What am I doing with my life?” [laughter] DRAW!: How much time would you say you spend drawing something that may or may not end up being a project—sketching ideas and things like that—versus doing focused work?

FD: I don’t know, maybe 50/50.

DRAW!: Wow. That much?

FD: Probably not. I don’t have 300 pages of sketchbook from the time I spent doing The Wrenchies, so I probably spend much more time doing comics, but it feels like I’m doodling a lot to procrastinate getting real work done. It probably comes from me telling myself that any time I spend not completing a task, I’m wasting my time, but I feel like all that stuff is good for me on the whole.

DRAW!: Do you develop your ideas through that process?

FD: Oh yeah, that’s how I do it. I’ve got a thousand started ideas, where, “I’m going to make a comic about this someday.” I’ll do a doodle and write a little paragraph. “I’ve got an idea for a character.” It would probably look ridiculous to anyone else who looked at it, but I’ll get an idea I feel is really inspiring, and I’ll put in my book or have it in a folder forever.

A painting of Sherwood, one of the Wrenchies cast members.

The Wrenchies © Farel Dalrymple

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with him. I’ll put him on the superhero team.” [laughter] There’s a guy in the book who’s this big, grey dude who wears jeans. He’s a scientist, so everyone calls him The Scientist, even though he has a name.

That character came from a comic I was supposed to draw a long time ago.

The guys who were doing the comic said, “We’re not into your design, so we’re going to go with another artist.”

I liked the design though, so I used it.

Two more of the Wrenchies, Bance (left) and Tad (right).

The Wrenchies © Farel Dalrymple

DRAW!: For something like Wrenchies, because it has a pretty big cast, how many of the characters came out of that sketching process, and how many came when you sat down to write the book?

FD: Most of the characters in the book were used for something else originally, or I had thought about using them for something else originally. Like, the Hollis character was a character I used for the anthology stories I did for Chris Pitzer. The Wrenchies itself is inspired from a short story I did for the last Meathaus collection, S.O.S., and I’ve included that story as an afterword at the end.

Most of the adult Wrenchies—because there are two groups of Wrenchies. It sounds so ridiculous. [laughter] The designs for the adult superhero Wrenchies came from a couple of old failed comic proposals back when I was still living in New York. Some of them are from a story I was trying to develop with Ann Nocenti, the writer. That project never manifested, but I used some of the character designs to inspire some of the guys in The Wrenchies. I guess it’s a mish-mash. I did some character designs in my sketchbook specifically for The Wrenchies, but there are a few characters from random other places. “I like this guy, even though I don’t know what to do

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DRAW!: Do the characters stick with you, or do you have to look back through your sketchbooks when you’re trying to flesh out the cast of a story?

FD: It’s kind of hard to remember with that one in particular, because so much has changed since I originally designed him. But I feel like I had those drawings and some folders of different things I want to use one day, and I picked all that stuff out specifically for The Wrenchies. “Yeah, these characters will work well with the story.”

I had some kind of attachment to the scientist character, and when I looked at him, I said, “I’ll use him as this guy.” I wanted a really smart person who invents gadgets, and something about the way he looked seemed antithetical to that type of character—he’s a big strong dude, but he never uses his size or strength at all in the story. He just happens to have this big robot body. I love stuff like that. Not to pat myself on the back too hard. [laughter] Maybe nobody else will like that.

DRAW!: Going back to Omega the Unknown, the book got quite a bit of critical acclaim. Did you have more people coming up to your table at shows, or anything like that after the book came out?

FD: I don’t think so. It’s kind of hard to tell. It didn’t seem like there was any big response that came out of it. Even at the time I was working on it, I didn’t get emails from anyone about it. [laughs] I don’t know how well it sold for Marvel— probably not too well.

DRAW!: It must have done reasonably well, because they did a hardcover collection.

FD: I don’t know what the deal was with that, because the production on that book is amazing. Paul Hornschemeier was responsible for that. We wanted to print it on matte paper, but that was the one thing Marvel insisted on—“No, we have to

have it on glossy paper.” But other than that, they let him do pretty much what he wanted, and it might have even gone over budget. But they haven’t done a paperback collection. You said it was critically acclaimed, but at the time it was coming out, I didn’t really hear much about it at all from anybody, including Marvel. [laughter] Considering the writer is a New York Times bestselling author—I’m not trying to slag Marvel, because I appreciate them, but I felt like they dropped the ball on promoting it. Maybe that’s just sour grapes on my part. [laughter] After the collection came out—maybe even a couple of years after—I started to get a lot of positive response to it, which was really weird. I mean, it was cool, I like the job I did on it, and I’m glad I got to work with Jonathan, but it was a couple of years later that I heard, “Hey, I meant to tell you, I really liked Omega the Unknown.” “Okay, cool, thanks. A couple of years after the fact, but thanks.” [laughter] At the time I was doing it, people were telling me, “This is going to change your life.” Maybe it did. Maybe that’s why First Second picked up The Wrenchies. “Oh, this guy’s doing work for Marvel. Let’s give him a book.” I don’t know, but no one said that. It wasn’t ever spelled out for me like, “Now that you’re doing Omega, your life is changing.” [laughs] It was cool getting to do it. I was and still am a fan of Jonathan, so it was awesome getting to work with him. And it was neat to fulfill a childhood fantasy of doing a series, even a limited series, for Marvel.

I feel like people really didn’t know what to make of that book, because it had an indie vibe to it, but it was still Marvel.

DRAW!: It came out after Fantastic Four: Unstable Molecules, right? So Marvel had already done something with a similar tone.

FD: Guy Davis drew that, right?

DRAW!: He penciled and inked from James Sturm’s layouts.

FD: Craig Thompson did the covers, and he was supposed to be the artist on that.

DRAW!: Yeah, he bowed out to work on Blankets.

FD: That was a cool series. That was even more subdued than Omega. We actually had fight scenes and action. [laughter] DRAW!: We’ve brought up Brandon Graham a couple of times already, and Prophet has a pretty strong following.

FD: Yeah, I feel like that is the most mainstream thing I’ve done in a way. I don’t know if it’s just the strength of Brandon Graham’s rep in comics, but I’ve gotten more feedback from those two issues of Prophet I’ve done than almost anything else I’ve done in comics—even my own work. It’s been good exposure. And they were fun to do too. I like working with Brandon, and I love science fiction. It’s pretty much Conan in space, and I like drawing space barbarians. [laughter] DRAW!: I’ve mentioned this to you before, but the book seems like it belongs to you guys—you and Brandon and Simon Roy and Giannis Milanogiannis—more so than it does Rob Liefeld.

It doesn’t feel like you’re doing a work-for-hire job.

A finished panel from The Wrenchies.

The Wrenchies © Farel Dalrymple

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(above and next page) Farel’s cover for the Prophet vol. 3 trade paperback collection, from sketch to pencils to finished artwork.

Prophet © Rob Liefeld.

(above and right) Farel loves the “Conan in space” idea behind Prophet. As you can see from these sketches from Farel’s sketchbooks, Farel’s likes straight-up Conan too.

Conan © Conan Properties International LLC.

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FD: Yeah, totally. I think that’s because a Marvel or DC series has all that history and continuity, and other writers are using the same characters. I’ve never written anything for those companies, but I imagine there’s a lot of editorial control, and even though Rob Liefeld owns the character, he’s pretty much letting Brandon write whatever he wants. “Oh, sure, you want to completely change everything about the story?” [laughter] He lets the artist do whatever they want, which I think is a really great model that the big companies should look into following.

I don’t know if it would sell any better, but it would be interesting to me to see different artists doing whatever they wanted with these characters.

DRAW!: Every now and then they flirt with that kind of thing, like with Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight or Spider-Man’s Tangled Web, or the Elseworlds stories.

FD: Yeah, I love that. I would take it one step further and make every story arc—“In this one Aunt May could be alive, and in this one she’s dead, and it doesn’t matter.”

DRAW!: The typical superhero reader seems to be all about the continuity and the history. But you’re establishing worlds with your personal work too. Most of your projects are loosely tied together. It seems a lot more fluid though.

(above and next page) Pencils and finished inks and watercolor for a Dr. Strange commission. (left) A Blackhawk commission piece.

Dr. Strange © Marvel Characters, Inc. Blackhawk © DC Comics.

FD: Well, yeah. It’s just me, and it doesn’t matter if I can’t keep everything straight. I don’t care with my own stuff. [laughter] If I was working with someone else’s character, I would be really stressed out about getting everything accurate. But I know how all the characters feel and how they fit together, and if something doesn’t make sense, I don’t care.

It’s my thing. [laughs] DRAW!: You mentioned the Hollis character is in The Wrenchies. Is he the same character as in those early “Hollis” stories?

FD: Yep. It’s pretty much the same outfit. There’s a little variation; I think I gave him a utility belt. He goes into the future and meets up with the Wrenchies gang. I don’t just plop him into this other world. A big part of the story is how he gets there, because most of The Wrenchies is a post-apocalyptic fantasy world. My Pop Gun War world is an urban environment with some weird stuff happening here and there, whereas The Wrenchies is more straight-up everything’s weird. [laughs]

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DRAW!: You also do a web strip, It Will All Hurt. What made you decide to do a web strip instead of working the way you’re used to working?

FD: That actually came out of me working on The Wrenchies.

I was getting towards the end—I don’t remember how many pages I had left, but Wrenchies started out at 100-something pages, and as I was working on it, I kept getting more and more ideas for things I wanted to do and scenes I wanted to pace out a little longer, and I kept adding pages to it. It got to the point where I said, “I have to rein this in if I’m ever going to finish it, so I have to pick which characters and scenes I want to focus on.” I started drawing other stuff in my sketchbook that fit in that same futuristic magic world they live in.

I was just doing them in my sketchbook for myself. I didn’t even know what I was going to do with it. “Maybe I’ll collect this,” but it wasn’t penciled nicely. I’d just grab a pen and make a box as carefully as I could without a ruler, [laughter] and just draw and have fun making a comic.

Like I said, I keep trying to trick myself in ways that make my life more fun, that makes working on a comic more fun.

Which you wouldn’t think you would need to do, but anything

gets boring, I guess, if you do it too much. So instead of feeling like work, it was, “I just want to draw in my sketchbook, but I still like to make comics.”

Then Zack Soto, who runs the Study Group website—he lives here in town. Both of us really like the Jordan Crane website What Things Do. It’s an anthology website like Study Group, but it has Sammy Harkham, Kevin Huizenga, Gabrielle Bell—a bunch of the comic lit crowd have comics there.

We thought it was a really good idea, and Zack told me he was doing a genre-based webcomic portal. I thought it was a great idea, and he asked, “Do you have anything you want to do for it?” I was like, “I’ve got this thing I just started in my sketchbook,” so it just worked out. He’s the one who suggested doing a print version, and he published that for me. It was his idea to do it on newsprint, and it came out looking pretty cool.

It just came out of working on ideas I couldn’t put into Wrenchies, but still kind of tied into that world. Once the webstrip started, I stopped doing them in my sketchbook and started doing them on individual pieces of paper. It seems pretty easy too. I can do them in digestible doses.

DRAW!: It has a stream of consciousness feel to it.

FD: Oh, it totally is.

DRAW!: So are you making it all up as you go?

FD: Pretty much. Now that I’m on the last set—I just finished chapter four, and I’ve started chapter five now. I was kind of thinking it would be six chapters total—three books, and each book has two chapters in it. But with chapters five and six, I started planning it out a little bit.

DRAW!: Just so you have an ending?

FD: Exactly. [laughter] Well, I’ve had the ending in mind for a while. Now it’s just figuring out the mechanics of getting from where I am now to there.

“This has to happen, and this has to happen.” But I’m actually thumbnailing it, and blocking out the pacing.

(above and next page) Inks and watercolors for a pin-up of Zack Soto’s The Secret Voice, a webcomic on the Study Group anthology site.

The Secret Voice © Zack Soto

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DRAW!: Does your work process change from project to project depending on what you’re working on, or do you have a basic structure you apply to most projects?

FD: I don’t really have a structure—at least nothing I could easily define. [laughs] I have ideas and a stack of papers I want to get to eventually, but the thing is, in the past couple of years I was working on The Wrenchies—I got an advance from First Second for it, but working on it for five years, that really didn’t cover my expenses. The past couple of years were a big struggle for me trying to figure out how to get a big project like that done and still bring in enough money to pay my rent. I’ve made a lot of lifestyle changes over the years. I don’t really have a lot of things; I try to keep it pared down.

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(this page and next) Farel’s thumbnails for Prophet #4.

Prophet © Rob Liefeld.

But I still kind of stick to thumbnailing five pages at a time.

I don’t thumbnail a whole book or a whole story. Otherwise it gets too overwhelming for me. I generally have four to eight pages I’m working on at once, where I’ll pencil them all, then ink them all, and then color them. If that’s a process, I guess that’s the way I do it. [laughter] DRAW!: Do you say, “I want to work on thumbnails for an hour, and I’ll pencil the rest of the day”?

FD: Every day I’ll tell myself, “I’m going to spend two hours thumbnailing. And I’m going to spend two hours on this, and two hours on this, and then I’ll have dinner at this time.” But usually by the end of the day I’m like, “Oh crap!

I was supposed to finish that page! Okay, I have to forget everything else and get this page done.” [laughter] I just finished a page for Prophet—the penultimate issue, issue #44.

I did the one page, the last page, and I’m doing a few pages for the very last issue as well. I had it penciled, and Brandon just emailed me a couple of days ago, “Hey, when do you think you can get me that page?” He’s super-chill about it. [laughter] I think he needed it this week to have it colored in time for the printer. I spent all day inking it, and scanning it, and cleaning it up, and then my day was over. “Oh, well, at least I got that done.” [laughter]

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DRAW!: Do you have a set number of hours in the day in which you work, or is it random?

FD: It’s random. I want to do that. I write schedules down constantly. “Every day I’m going to wake up at this time.”

And I’m pretty good at waking up at a decent hour. I usually wake up around 8:00 a.m., but I don’t put pressure on myself. I’m not Jeff Smith by any stretch of the imagination. Even if I’m supposed to be working on something, I might say, “I feel like working on this today.” But I am always working. I do a little bit of messing around, but I’m not completely unproductive, it’s just not always the thing I feel like I’m supposed to be working on. I kind of do that on purpose. Otherwise, like I said, I feel like I would never get anything finished, and my work would start to feel too much like work. It’s like, “Okay, I’m going to procrastinate, but at least I’m going to be making something else. It might not be the thing I ought to be working on right this minute, but at least I’m making something.”

DRAW!: What’s your work space like?

FD: It’s not great right now. [laughs] We’ve been in this house for over a year now, and we keep saying we need to move. We have a big yard, so I can look out the window and see grass and trees and birds—that’s the best thing about it.

I have a long convention-style table I work on. I do most of the inking and painting on that desk. Penciling, if I’m not out doing it at a coffee shop, I’ll do it in the little loveseat I sit in.

I have my computer and scanner set up on another desk, and there’s a bookshelf that separates them which holds my inspiration and reference books. I don’t have a normal art desk, which I should get. I feel like I bang my head against the wall a lot. A nice ergonomic chair would probably be way better for my back. Instead, every day I complain, “Oh, my back hurts! I should get a better chair,” but I never do it. [laughter] DRAW!: You said you typically pencil in coffee shops. I guess background noise doesn’t bother you. Do you have music or a TV on when you work at home?

FD: If I’m in a coffee shop without headphones, I’m miserable. I’m kind of misanthropic, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it. [laughter] I go to the coffee shop, but I definitely try to put out the vibe of, “Don’t talk to me! I’m not here to entertain you. I’m here to get work done.” But sure enough, almost every time, someone will come up and say, “Oh, you’re doing artwork, huh? That’s neat.” [laughter] So I haven’t really been going to coffee shops too much lately.

But, yeah, I have to be listening to something just to drown out all the conversations I don’t want to hear. When I’m trying

to think, I don’t like to listen to anything that has lyrics. Sometimes I can listen to metal, because you don’t have to focus on the lyrics. It can be sort of droning in the background. I listen to a lot of books on tape—well, audio books. I guess I don’t really listen to them on tape anymore. [laughter] But that’s when I’m inking and coloring and don’t have to concentrate.

Writing, thumbnailing, penciling, it’s got to be classical music or metal or soundtracks that won’t distract me.

DRAW!: What are your go-to tools?

FD: For just drawing in my sketchbook, I usually use the Faber-Castell Pitt pens. Lately I’ve been using something similar, but it has replaceable nibs, the Copic Multiliners.

For my more finished stuff, when I pencil, I typically use a brush. It’s a Raphael 8404 #4. It’s like the Raphael version of the Winsor & Newton Series 7 that most of the pros use.

I started buying it because when I was in Walter Simonson’s class, he had just started using it. He had mostly used a dip pen up to that point, but he recommended it to me. I had gotten one of the Winsor & Newtons, and was like, “I am not good at this. I don’t know if it’s the brush or me, but I kind of suck at this point.” So Walt recommended one of those, and I think Tom Palmer was also using them. He was teaching at SVA at the time too. I just fell in love with that brush. That

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s h a m a n Farel’s cover art for the new series Shaman #1 started with a thumbnail sketch, followed by a loose pencil sketch.

Then comes the inks and watercolors, before the finishing touch in Photoshop.

Shaman © Ben Kahn and Bruno Hidalgo

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and Dr. Martin’s Black Star ink I’m a total snob about. [laughter] I don’t really care about any other materials but those two things. I’ll never change. I’ll be bummed out when they stop making those brushes. Maybe I’ll be all digital by then.

DRAW!: How much do you do digitally? Is it just for clean-up at this point?

FD: Pretty much. I don’t mess with it too much in Photoshop. I just scan it in, maybe clean up some crud and fix some lettering or things like that. I try not to tweak the colors too much, because I feel you can get into dangerous territory doing that. Every once in a while I’ll mess with something. The Deadly Class cover I did recently, I think the finished version looks a little different than the original because I messed with the colors. I keep telling myself that I can’t fight progress, and one day I’ll buy a Cintiq and start drawing on that. I mean, Moebius was doing it before he died.

DRAW!: You still letter on the boards, right? Do you use the Microns for that?

FD: I used to use a dip pen. I don’t know what the size was—a C2 or something—but I kept screwing up with it. I don’t know if I was just not taking good care of them, but there seemed to be a very small envelope of when I could get some good results out of them before they got too messed up. Some of them I would use right out of the box and it would be, “This doesn’t write very well.” It seemed Farel’s hand-lettering adds to storytelling in this page from The Wrenchies. weird that you would use something that didn’t work, [laughter] so I The Wrenchies © Farel Dalrymple started using those Pitt pens to letter.

It doesn’t look as nice on the board, the object quality isn’t as art on, I think it would just look weird without the lettering. If nice, but once you scan it in, you can’t really tell—hopefully, you’re part of an assembly line, maybe it would be different. anyway. Maybe there are some hardcore snobs that can tell If you’re only drawing Spider-Man, maybe you would like it better without the lettering. But even with Omega, I handthe difference. drew all the word balloons. “I might as well draw it right on DRAW!: Do you think you’ll ever convert to lettering on the there.” If someone wanted to buy the page, or if I just wanted to show someone what I was doing, I feel like it would look computer, say, with a font based on your handwriting?

FD: I actually do have a font of my handwriting. I might. I kind of naked without the lettering on there. And I like the don’t know. I guess if I ever started drawing on the computer, way organic lettering looks better. When it’s one artist doing that’s when I would start lettering on the computer too, but as everything themself, and then you get a computer font on top long as I have a board, a physical piece of paper I’ve done the of that, it looks a little jarring to me.

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that. It’s not necessarily something I sought out, like, “I’m going to pick this guy’s brain and find out exactly the way he did it.” I probably should have been doing that, but I feel that anything I’ve picked up has been through osmosis. Being around awesome artists, it’s like, “I want to make something now.” I’m not consciously trying to ape someone’s style or even pick up the little details of what they do. I just put these things in the back of my head.

I definitely feel that I’m not as confident as I should be. Maybe that’s good. You don’t want it to be debilitating, but some amount of questioning yourself—“Is there some way I can improve my process? Is there something I should be doing that I’m missing here?

Should I be going to digital?”

DRAW!: Can you look back at your previous work—like the stuff in Delusional—and build up your confidence by saying, “I’ve Farel may no longer take life drawing classes, but he tries to keep up the practice. improved since then”?

Artwork © Farel Dalrymple FD: Sometimes. Overall I do feel Moebius has a really good essay where he talks about doing like I’ve improved as an artist. Maybe I’ve gotten slicker, or your own lettering and how it’s part of the art. It’s in the back more professional looking. But sometimes I look at old drawof the Silver Surfer book he did with Stan Lee. It’s neat that he ings and think, “Wow! I used to know how to draw better.” did this, but he basically wrote an essay on being a cartoonist. [laughter] Probably because at the time I was taking more life drawing classes, and I wasn’t resting on my visual vocabulary DRAW!: He wrote a lot of essays like that for Métal Hurlant. as I do now.

But some of those drawings, I still cringe about—even FD: He’s probably repeated a lot of these things other places.

But he talked about the lettering being part of the art and how some of the stuff in Delusional. I have this problem that, important it is, and that’s always stuck with me. “Yeah, that’s everything I’ve done, I have to show people. [laughter] Like I said before, I need that proof of my existence. “I did all right. It is part of the art.” this work. I might not be that good, but….” [laughter] I don’t DRAW!: Are you interested in talking with other artists know if The Wrenchies is any good. I’m just going on what people tell me. I like it, and my partner read it. She doesn’t about their processes?

FD: Oh, yeah, of course. It’s interesting to me. Not so much read comics at all, or necessarily like them, but she seemed for “you should do it like this,” but, honestly, I do end up feel- to really like it. That was nice. [laughter] But I’m still halfing like that. When I go over to Craig’s house, he’s got a stack dreading its release. I’m sure everyone struggles with that of pages there. “Oh, I should have my desk at that angle, like kind of thing. It’s kind of weird, though, to work on someyou have. You’re using this kind of paper? Maybe I should try thing for so long and not have any feedback. No one’s seen that I’ve done all this work. that kind of paper.”

With Delusional, I wouldn’t have been able to edit that.

DRAW!: You mentioned How to Draw Comics the Marvel I went through the whole thing several times, and got rid of Way, but did you try to seek out that type of information what I could, but the rest…. “Okay, you figure out what should go in there. I don’t know if any of this is good anymore.” before going to art school?

FD: It’s weird. I almost feel like I don’t have the confidence I should have at this point in my career. I’m always doubting DRAW!: When do you decide to let go of a page then? If myself. “Maybe I’m doing everything wrong,” you know? you’re not sure if it’s good or not, at what point can you say Anything I’ve gleaned from other people has come out of it’s finished?

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Pencils and watercolors for a poster advertising a NW Film Center (of Portland) screening of Miyazaki’s Laputa: Castle in the Sky. Laputa: Castle in the Sky © Studio Ghibli

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Overworked? Maybe, but Farel’s Prophet pages sure look good.

Prophet © Rob Liefeld

FD: That’s a toughie. I can go back to something a week later, a year later and say, “I didn’t see this. I can add onto this.” Sometimes I feel like I might overwork a page here and there. Right now I’m going through this Pop Gun War sequel that I started over ten years ago. I’m coloring a chapter I drew before I moved to Portland, and I’m surprising myself, because I like the artwork still. I mean, some of the choices here and there I would probably do a little differently now. I don’t know if that would make it better or worse, but I would probably approach things differently.

A few things really bother me. “Oh man. I don’t like the way I used to draw the hands really big.” It’s weird things like that, but I’m not going to go back and change it. It’s been too much time. I should just do a whole new page, but I can’t bring myself to do that. I’m just going to color it, and let the warts and all stand.

So I don’t really know. At some point I just get sick of working on something. Sometimes that’s good, sometimes that’s bad. I think sometimes I’ve maybe let things go a little too early, and sometimes I may have worked on things a little too long. Some of those Prophet pages I feel like maybe I

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over-worked. I’d never drawn anything like that professionally before, and I felt all this pressure to make it look cool and detailed and interesting.

DRAW!: Were you going back and forth with Brandon, showing him what you were doing, or was it just, “Let me know when it’s done”?

FD: There was a lot of back and forth in the beginning when we were writing it. We went through all the thumbnails, and he had a lot of suggestions for pacing. He’s really good at that.

That’s why I think the series is so cool. [laughs] He had me change some stuff based on ideas he had, but from there on I just penciled and inked it.

DRAW!: When you’re working on something like the Pop Gun War sequel, do you have anyone you can bounce ideas off of, or are you on your own in that regard?

FD: I’m kind of on my own. It was supposed to have been published by Dark Horse, like the first book, but because it’s been so long—and I don’t have any hard feelings against Dark Horse; I’m doing a Dark Horse Presents story for them—but I just feel

Farel also worked MK Reed on an earlier project called Pangs, which told the story through a series of individual prints.

Pangs © MK Reed and Farel Dalrymple

for that book they might not be the best publisher considering the type of book it is. So I don’t have an editor at this point, but I have been thinking a lot about that, and how I could benefit from meeting with someone regularly to look at pages, but who wants to do that without getting paid to do it? [laughter] I just finished a book a couple of weeks ago—a young adult story called Pale Fire which M.K. Reed wrote. I just did the black-and-white art. I think someone is going to color it. It’s just a straight-up young adult story—teenagers driving around in cars together. I had an editor on that, Greg Means.

He has a company called Tugboat Press. He lives here in town and is a good friend of mine. It was really fun working on that, because I would meet up with him once a month or every other month, and I’d have the physical pages and show them to him, and he would give me feedback and ask questions about things. He seems like he has a really good critical eye for spotting continuity issues and things like that. It was cool getting to meet with him, and I’m considering asking him if he’d be able to help me out with Pop Gun War. It would be nice to be kept a little more accountable.

Another thing I’ve thought about too, which would be an interesting editorial process, is just posting them online some-

where as I do them. I didn’t know how that would work with The Wrenchies, if First Second would like me doing that or not, so I didn’t really consider it then, but with this I don’t have anyone telling me what to do with it. I can do whatever I want with it. I could put them on the Study Group site, or make a Tumblr for them or something. It would be neat to do pages and get an immediate response to them. Hopefully it would build an audience too.

DRAW!: That’s something you have to consider these days.

Wrenchies took you five years, and your side work during that time was pretty sporadic. You’ve got a blog that you update fairly regularly, but what else do you do to keep your audience with you?

FD: I don’t know, man. The Internet has changed a lot since I started working on The Wrenchies. I don’t think there was Tumblr back then even—at least, I wasn’t aware of it. I almost feel like the Internet audience is its own thing. I don’t know that whoever buys the books First Second puts out would even be aware that I have a blog. I like the idea of publishing online because I think it can only help get more readers. I feel like the people who read it online might or might not buy the

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book, but the people who will buy the book probably won’t read it online. I think they would help each other out, but I have nothing to base this on other than direct observation and my gut intuition.

A few years ago, maybe three years ago, I stopped getting any work at all. I had a crappy website, and I have a book agent, but I don’t have an illustration agent, a manager, or anything like that. Any sort of paying work I got was stuff that fell into my lap, or occasionally I would email an art director and say, “Have you got anything I can do? Fast?” But a couple of years ago that just completely dried up. I don’t know if it was the industry as a whole or what, but I didn’t have any sort of income at all. That’s why I got on Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr, and almost instantly I started getting commission work from that, and that kept me afloat until I got some regular gigs again. Maybe that’s why I got so much feedback from Prophet, because I’m more active on the Internet. I’m sure it helps.

(above) Page 21 of The Wrenchies. (right) A panel from page 224 of The Wrenchies, featuring the full team.

The Wrenchies © Farel Dalrymple.

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DRAW!: Have you looked at Kickstarter for the Pop Gun War book?

FD: Yeah, I’ve thought a lot about crowdsourcing—especially over the last year or two I was working on The Wrenchies. My agent was pushing me to do a Kickstarter, and a lot of people were telling me to do it, but I felt weird about already having a publisher and then doing a Kickstarter. I’ve been thinking a lot about maybe doing something Kickstarter-ish with Pop Gun War, but I want to wait until I have more of it done first.

And then I’m doing the Dark Horse Presents thing. Part of the reason I wanted to do that is because it’s a regular gig where I have to turn in pages every month. It’ll keep me honest.

I’m still doing comics, I’m getting to work with someone I’ve wanted to work with, and I’ll be getting a paycheck every month, which is really important. [laughter] The advance from First Second wasn’t a lot of money, but it was a decent amount for me. But over all of that time I worked on it, it was nothing. It was really rough going there for a while, because it was like, “I have all of these pages to do, where I need to be working on those pages every day to the exclusion of all else, but it’s not bringing me any money right now.” I didn’t know what to do, so I’d chip away on things here and there.

That was the neat thing about that young adult story, was that it was a regular gig. “I can do this small amount of pages every month and still have time to work on my personal work,” and it was enough to survive on. That’s what I’m trying to think about for the future. I’m not even trying to count book sales as income, because that doesn’t seem tangible right now.

You can’t tell your landlord, “Oh, no, in a few years I’ll have

some royalties coming in. Probably. I don’t know. That’s what they tell me.

We’ll see what happens.” [Eric laughs] It doesn’t seem like there are a lot of opportunities like that going around.

I’m not capable of doing 20 pages of pencils or inks for an ongoing comic, and I’m not really capable of working on something for a year without any sort of return on my investment, so this seems like a good in-between thing I could pull off. I feel like my whole comics career is trying to think, “How can I keep doing this thing that I love and at least eke by?”

DRAW!: You don’t really do a lot of shows, do you?

FD: I haven’t traditionally. I’m starting to do more. Last year I did a few, and this year I want to do eight to ten shows.

Once The Wrenchies comes out in the fall, I’ll probably be doing some promotional appearances for it. I’ll try to do some bookstores too. But I’m definitely going to be at SPX. I’m definitely going to be at TCAF [Toronto Comics Arts Festival] this year. VanCAF [Vancouver Comics Arts Festival], a small show in Vancouver I did last year that was fun.

DRAW!: Do you do any shows in Portland? I know the Wizard World show was just there last weekend.

FD: I didn’t go to that Wizard show.

I went last year, and it seemed really celebrity-driven. Whenever I do those shows, I get kind of depressed.

A page from the upcoming “Ear Farmer” for Dark Horse Presents.

DRAW!: You’re not far from Emerald City. Do you do that show?

FD: Emerald City is a great show. I did that last year, and I’m doing it this year. I’ve done it a few times in years past.

I really have a hard time with cosplay. [laughter] I’m trying to not let it bother me. So at those kinds of shows, I have to tell myself, “Remember why you’re here,” and figure out ways to focus on what I want to get out of the show and not let them bum me out. But that show’s pretty cool in the sense there’s a good mix of all types of creators there. There’s a lot of cosplay there, but it doesn’t seem to be to the neglect of everything else. There are still people who come there who want to buy comics and not just play dress-up.

Portland has Rose City Comic Con, which is somehow related to the Emerald City Comic Con. There’s some type of loose affiliation there. Stumptown kind of merged with them.

It was kind of like an indie show, even though it seemed like

Ear Farmer © Chris Stevens and Farel Dalrymple

the people who ran the show didn’t want it to be an indie show. I don’t think they had a good year last year, and they merged with Rose City. Rose City is a more mainstream show, but they seem to celebrate creators.

Zack Soto and François Vigneault, who does a comic called Titan on the Study Group site, started a show here in town called Linework. I think this summer will be the first year they do it, and it’s a juried show. It’s really small, with some local people and comic creators from all over the world. That should be a fun show and more independently minded.

DRAW!: Do you see the shows as an extension of what you’re doing on Facebook and Tumblr, or vice versa? What are you doing to make them work together?

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FD: It’s the way I tell people I’m going to be somewhere. I’ll Facebook about it, Tweet about it—just so all my bases are covered. I just went to Vancouver recently to work on the Prophet stuff with Brandon, and while I was going up there I thought, “I’ve got a new book out.

I should do a book signing while I’m there.” I haven’t thought about this stuff too much over the years, and now I’m trying to get better at it. “This is my business.

I should be good at my business. Besides the comicmaking part, I should also be doing all the stuff I don’t like doing, like self-promotion and going to shows.”

Figuring out a way to make money at a show is really important. For years I would go to a couple of shows a year, and do it half-assedly. I wouldn’t have new product, and I wouldn’t make any money. “I just spent all this money to stand for eight hours around people wearing costumes. This sucks.” Recently I’ve tried to be smarter about all that, and I think about how to get people to come over to the table and to let them know I’m there.

Artwork © Farel Dalrymple.

DRAW!: A lot of guys will keep close track of what sells at a show, because what might sell well at one show may not sell well at another. Are you keeping track of things like that? Do you ask your artist friends about what they sell at different shows?

Artwork © Farel Dalrymple.

FD: Yeah, totally. I feel like I ask more about that type of thing than I do about process. I know some people will stand the whole time. There are even some artists who’ll have a standing easel set up. I’ve noticed that more people will come over to your table if you’re standing. Even the way I have my table set up is very specific.

And it does seem like there are certain shows where, “Oh, at this show people will buy prints.” At Heroes Con in Charlotte—I did that a couple of years ago—a few people told me, “You should do commissions, because that’s a really big commission show.” So I did that, and I tried to do them as quickly as I could. I did a bunch of commissions at that show, and that seemed to work out.

At some shows they might buy more prints. At some shows it’s original art.

I started selling the It Will All Hurt pages for pretty cheap at shows. It’s nice because they’re small, and I can put them in a stack that people can flip through really fast. And it seems like

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Artwork © Farel Dalrymple.

a good mid-range money item that people might not mind spending money on.

DRAW!: Do you have time to read many comics these days?

FD: Yeah, I’ve always got time to read some comics. I just finished the second volume of Sunny by Taiyo Matsumoto, and I’m really enjoying Hellboy in Hell—really awesome. I just picked up a story by Sam Alden called Backyard that I’d read on his Tumblr. I saw that Sonatina Comics had it, so I bought it and reread it. And I got Brandon Graham’s Walrus, which is really cool.

I keep a lot of books by the toitey. [laughter] I read in the bathtub. It’s a rare time when I’ll say, “I’m going to sit down and read this stack of comics.” I’ll just chip away at a few things here and there. When I was in Vancouver I picked up the last Optic Nerve, and I waited until the train ride back to read it.

Amazing. I loved it. It may be my favorite Optic Nerve so far.

DRAW!: So you’re working on Pop Gun War and the Dark Horse Presents story now.

FD: Yeah, and I’m still doing the web comic. I’m trying to do three of those two-panel pages a week, and I just started up chapter five yesterday. And I’m doing some pages for the last issue of Prophet. Brandon is doing a Strike File thing—a handbook to the Prophet universe. I’m doing some of those too. That’ll be fun.

DRAW!: I hate to see that ending, but he’s got that new line, 8House, starting up.

FD: I think they’re doing another Prophet series called Earth War. I don’t know if Brandon is just going to be the editor on it, or if he’s going to co-write it with someone, but it’s a new art team.

FD: Yeah, we talked a little bit about it. It’s down the road a ways still. I’m trying to figure out how to make everything work with my schedule, but I would love to be involved with it somehow, even if it’s just backup stories.

DRAW!: He said that it’s not a work-for-hire set-up. All the creators involved with it will have ownership in what they do.

FD: Yeah, it’s all creator-owned. It’s a shared universe. Everyone is doing their own stories, but it’s open-source, where you can use other people’s ideas and characters. I love that idea.

With my own stuff, I kind of want to keep that in its own little place, but working on Prophet, even though we didn’t own that character, it was neat to see me making up things in the stories I did, and then seeing the other artists use those things.

I love that. I don’t think I’d ever experienced that before. I mean, it happens all the time in superhero comics, but it was really fun for me.

DRAW!: If you do end up doing something for 8House, would you view it more as a work-for-hire job, even though you would own it, or would you view it more like your personal work?

FD: I don’t know. Everything that I do is personal. It’s kind of hard for me to separate the two. Even if I had to draw Dr. Strange fighting Spider-Man, it’s not like I’m thinking I have to work in a different style or anything. I like that stuff, but I don’t necessarily like the traditional storytelling formula most of those comics seem to have. I generally try to infuse in my stories something from outside of comics. I might try to bring in something from literature, or just my own weird subconscious ideas. In that way, all the comics I do are personal.

DRAW!: Did he approach you about doing anything for 8House?

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35

The Right Way, The Wrong Way, and The

OrdWay !

The Power of writing and drawing shazam! by Jerry Ordway

I

n this installment, I want to show the steps I followed in bringing an issue of the Power of Shazam! from start to finish. A little back story will be helpful for any readers not familiar with my past work as a writerartist. One of my most enjoyable projects for comics was re-introducing the original Captain Marvel to DC comics readers. I created a fully painted 96-page origin story, The Power of Shazam!, which was published both in hardcover and softcover. A year later, I helped launch a new monthly series, as writer and cover painter, with artists Peter Krause and Mike Manley. With issue #42, I took over as penciler, in addition to my writing and cover painting chores.

With any comic, you start with a script.

At the time, the most popular method was to write a detailed outline, or plot, which gave the artist the ability to lay out each page to his own liking. The writer would then customize his or her dialogue (the word balloons) to the artwork provided by the penciler. In the situation on Shazam, being the artist as well as writer, I could get away with writing a barebones outline. As you can see from the sample pages of plot, I described enough for the editor, Mike Carlin, to know what was going to happen in the issue. We had previously discussed the direction for the whole year’s worth of stories, so none of this happened in a vacuum. For this particular issue, the plot was written a few months before I was ready to draw it.

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The Plot Thickens! (previous page and this page) The plot pages Jerry faxed—remember faxes?—to Power of Shazam!

Editor Mike Carlin for approval.

Power of Shazam! © DC Comics

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The time gap from my writing the outline until the start of drawing was helpful because it gave me the time to chew over the story beats and allowed me to second-guess what I’d written earlier. In drawing the layouts, I formulated the dialogue while I sketched.

On the first two pages, I drew them at around 6" x 8" size, each on the clean side of a sheet of reused copy paper. I used a hard lead in my mechanical pencil, and scribbled in the shapes and forms loosely, creating a mess of lines in graphite. Once the motion of the scene looks right to me, I will “ink” the scribbles, picking out the shapes with a Sharpie permanent marker, or a fine-tipped Pentel marker for smaller details. Working with the markers allows me to be quite messy with my pencil, and refine the drawing in ink. Then I erase the graphite, leaving a relatively clean image to photocopy. Marker also insures that the lines you draw will be dark enough to show through when you put the photocopy under the sheet of two-ply Strathmore paper on the lightbox.

PRELIMINARY Examination Pages 3 to 22 were drawn smaller, with two prelim pages per sheet of paper. My only reason for doing so was to force myself to complete the layouts faster. I don’t know why it works for me, but I could do two pages on one sheet in the same time I was drawing one larger prelim on a whole sheet.

The larger layout size had me drawing tighter prelims, which made the enlarging and tracing a bit more monotonous.

For this monthly comic to be completed, I had to lay out the whole book in under a week, which left me about two weeks to pencil the pages onto the actual comic paper. Next I had to type up all the dialogue and captions, and mark up where the balloons fit, on accompanying copies of the pages.

These were sent to the editor, who then sent them on to the letterer, John Costanza. Oh, and somewhere within that month I also had to reserve time in which to paint the cover and write another issue’s plot! The deadline was tight.

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(previous page) Prelims for pages 1 and 2 of Power of Shazam! #42, done at roughly 6" x 8". (above and left) Prelims for pages 3 and 4 and pages 5 and 6. From here on, there are two pages of prelims on each 8½" x 11" sheet of copy paper.

As you can see, the prelims are still rough drawings, with plenty of art spilling past the panel borders.

That’s okay, as I can size it up or down on the photocopier, and move the image around while tracing.

This is the most freeing aspect of doing prelims on a separate sheet.

I have always tended, when drawing layouts directly on the final art board, to run out of space, drawing too big. Early in my career, an editor referred to that as a “crowded page.”

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Okay, here (at right) we see the actual pencil work for page 1, and not much was changed from the prelim. The large area to the right of Captain Marvel will contain a fair amount of copy, and is left open. The inker of the comic was the late, great Dick Giordano. He had been working as a “finisher” over Peter Krause, the previous penciler, so, having no desire to take money out of his pocket, I was trying to draw “breakdowns” and failing completely!

The inker is paid more per page to work over looser pencils, and the penciler earns less for penciling looser. It was by far my favorite way to work when I was an inker, because it wasn’t about merely following the penciler’s lines. You got to contribute much more to the final look of the work. As a penciller, leaving details unfinished for an inker to fill in made me nervous. It’s a trust issue, and also a control issue. It’s always been my desire to do the complete art, but have never been able to pencil and ink a comic comfortably within a monthly deadline.

PENCIL(ing) case

By page two (at left), I was still drawing fully rendered pencils, with the only concession being that I didn’t shade in the black areas. I marked them with an “X.” If you compare this page to the prelim, you will see how I resized elements so that the drawing isn’t pushing against every panel border. I also added my specific color notes in ink-pen in the margins for Glenn Whitmore, our colorist, to follow.

If these notes had been done in pencil, they would have likely been erased when the inker was done with the page, and the colorist would have never seen them.

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On page three (above), I was easing into breakdowns a little better, but couldn’t keep myself from finishing the back shot of President Clinton in more detail. Again, note the re-sizing of panel elements to fit things better on the page. On page four (at right), I indulged a few areas with pencil shading, but I finally seemed to get the rhythm. A fun detail on the last panel—I drew Peter Parker in the foreground, taking a picture. That was a nod to the Romita era of Spider-Man, which inspired my approach to The Power of Shazam! comic book. The rest of the pages hew closer to traditional breakdowns, and I got them done at a rate of two per day. First issue done, and I moved on to the next.

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When I first saw the ink work, I had mixed feelings.

Dick’s rendering work was great, but all I could see were the flaws in my drawing! I will be honest here and state that I am always disappointed when I see inks over my pencils, for mostly the same reason— my glaring mistakes!

For aspiring inkers out there, there is also a lesson here about how things look in pencil compared to how they look in ink. Pencil can be a subtle medium with delicate lines and shading, but ink, especially as applied in most comics, is a blunt force. The bolder the better.

Thinking

INKING If you are inking a page over actual pencils, (as opposed to a blueline print-out) your page may look great with the pencil shading showing through and around the inkwork, but once you erase the pencils underneath the ink, the page will invariably look too delicate. You must go back into the art and “beef” up some of the lines to make it bolder. It’s a crucial step, and one that Dick Giordano excelled at. His approach was to use a heavier outline on the shadow side of a figure or object. It’ll give your figures “weight,” and make them seem more three-dimensional.

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If you compare pages three and four with my pencils, you’ll see how Dick used his line weights to separate elements, bringing some closer to the viewer, pushing others back into the background. He also had a wonderful technique for rendering hair, as evidenced on the Mary Marvel figure at the bottom of page three.

My one attempt at drawing in breakdown style was short-lived. I never found a comfort level in it, so Dick agreed to scale back to just inks, no hard feelings.

For additional art examples and demos, I can be found at: http://ordstersrandomthoughts.blogspot.com As well as on Facebook at: https://www.facebook. com/pages/Da-Ordster/163023617094533 And to find out more about Jerry’s storied career and see a ton of his artwork, check out Modern Masters Vol. 13: Jerry Ordway, available from TwoMorrows at www.twomorrows.com!

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Savage Brush the

of

Dave Bullock Interview conducted by Mike Manley and transcribed by Jon Knutson DRAW!: What are you up to these days? I think the last time we talked was when we worked on New Frontier, and then you were working on He-Man—the new-new He-Man. Dave Bullock: Well, we worked together in 2008 on JLA: New Frontier but last saw each other around 2000 when I was helping out on the He-Man series. He’s on his way back again I think.

Hasbro. They’ve come out with something new... I don’t know if they’ve announced it yet. I know there’s a new series, but I don’t know if they’ve mentioned the name of it publicly yet. But I’ve wrapped up with Hasbro, and now I’m doing some work for Valiant, and I’m helping out on a couple of little side projects that are pretty cool.

DRAW!: Valiant—you mean the comic book company?

DB: Yeah, I’ve mostly been doing some covers with them, but I’ve just started on an eight-pager with those guys.

DRAW!: So every ten years they dust off Castle Greyskull, and a new generation of kids get to….

DB: Well, they’re selling toys like crazy, I know. I’ve got a few of the new toys, so maybe it’ll be back with a new cartoon. We’ll have to wait and see, I guess.

DRAW!: Let’s go back to the beginning. We actually worked on a lot of the original Batman toons back at Warner Brothers, and the one I remember specifically, was it “Heart of Ice”?

DB: You were probably there before me. I was there doing some Superman shows.

DRAW!: And you worked on the adaptation of The New Frontier.

DB: That’s right. I directed the toon adaptation of Darwyn [Cooke]’s great comic.

DRAW!: Bret Blevins and I started on the same show, Superman, which was the Lobo two-parter.

DB: Yeah, you guys were there probably three months prior to me getting on board.

DRAW!: And then you did work on Transformers, or am I misremembering that?

DB: Yes, I was on for the full run of Transformers: Prime, probably about five years or so, maybe even six I was with

DRAW!: Where were you before that?

DB: I was in college! [laughter]

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DRAW!: Oh, really?

DB: Yeah, I was in college… You know what? I had actually done some work on the Fox Spider-Man cartoon. So I did put some time in on production, probably about a year prior to making the move over to WB. I had grown up a huge Superman fan, and when I saw a couple of images where WB was putting together a new Superman series, I figured I’d try to get involved. It was all about Clark Kent, and his story there. So yes, I went over to WB, and came in on a crazy episode with a demon called Karkhal.

DRAW!: Yeah, I remember that.

DB: You and I were on Dan Riba’s unit.

I remember seeing you had done some really fun stuff with the demons flying around the Daily Planet there.

DRAW!: It’s funny, because so many people I know in comics want to work in animation, and almost everybody I know in animation wants to do comics, so there’s a real crossfeed back and forth. I think I was so burnt out on comics in a way that coming into animation was like a new territory, and I was very excited to do that. It didn’t seem to matter to me that my name wasn’t going to be out front. You still got your name on the credits as being the storyboard guy. Now, when you watch a show, they shove the credits over to the side and run them really super-fast so nobody can really read the credits anymore!

DRAW!: That was the show where a demon was turning people into other demons, or something like that?

DB: Right, and you had a great Lois Lane demon.

DRAW!: I enjoyed working on Superman. That’s actually when it seemed like the pressure was kicking up, and things were changing in the landscape of television cartoons.

DB: Right, and I didn’t know any better, because I hadn’t been in it for too long, but that’s when cable started to really open up, and WB launched their own network. But I can tell you from my point of view, the explosions got bigger, and Lois’ skirt got shorter. [laughter] DRAW!: It wasn’t too long after that that Saban got out of making the stuff, and everything really changed.

DB: The Lion King movie really blew up big, and opened up a lot of the animation. There was a lot more starting to happen. I guess that was the mid-’90s, about ’96.

DRAW!: Yes, because I came on in ’99.

I was still working for DC, inking Power of Shazam!, which was the last monthly comic book regular series that I did, and I stayed on that while I started doing the boards. When the boards worked out, I stopped doing the regular comic books.

DB: Looking back, did you miss having your name directly on the front of the material as a comic book artist? I guess there are pros and cons to both, being a storyboard artist and a comic artist.

Dave revisits his Superman roots with a variant cover for Superman Unchained #2.

Superman © DC Comics

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(this page and next) Dave’s storyboards for the direct-to-video Wonder Woman animated feature produced by Bruce Timm.

Wonder Woman © DC Comics

DB: They want to cover themselves legally, but they don’t want anyone to be able to read your name. I’ve found all that stuff to be a lot of fun, no matter what I was working on.

I’ve always sort of let my heart lead me to stuff that’s more project-specific, as opposed to, “Was it a cartoon or a comic book?” I think maybe that’s the key to trying to keep this stuff fresh for ourselves, as you’ve mentioned.

DRAW!: One of things that also appealed to me was that I felt the comics had gotten away from the source material in a way, and at least at the time, the cartoons were really about the core of the character. That’s one of the things I enjoyed about Superman, was that it was really about Superman.

DB: Yeah, I really have to hand it to those guys; they really had a smart set of heads on their shoulders when it came to boiling the characters down to their essence, and building them back up from a ground zero point. But they had the benefit of many decades of comic books under their feet to build upon—standing on the shoulders of giants.

DRAW!: Yes, exactly. I think what I realize now, in hindsight, is that comic books tried to be more adult, in a way, and felt embarrassed by the fact that this material appealed to children. They tried to take the work and make it more adult, whereas the cartoons actually kept the characters in the core state of what was good about them, so they didn’t have to apologize for the fact that Superman should appeal to a tenyear-old boy. That’s who he was created for. They didn’t have to make people into prostitutes and stuff. I think, in comics, they felt like, “Superman is boring. He’s been out for a long

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time.” But when you take a character like that and make it more adult, you kind of lose the core of what the character’s about, and I think that’s why I liked the cartoon, because it’s Superman; it’s a pure version of that character.

DB: That’s part of the trick of publishing, because it goes on, month in and month out, and you try to figure out as a publisher how do you keep this character fresh? I know as a young guy, when I went into Bruce Timm’s office for the first time, and they were interviewing me for Superman, the first question out of my mouth was, “Is he going to have long hair?” [laughter] I was more concerned with pushing the version of the character I had grown up with, and it didn’t necessarily fall into whatever was happening on a monthly basis in the comics at that time.

But I see they’ve rebooted the entire universe in the past couple of years. Have you been keeping up with the New 52 at all?

DRAW!: No, no. I will readily admit that I go into the comic book store every couple of months, I flip through stuff, and I usually put it right back on the shelf.

DB: It’s a lot to keep up with. There are so many books, I think the idea that they started with a smaller line and continued to build on that was a good idea, but I don’t know; it gets tricky. We’ve all grown up with these characters, and different generations have different ideas as to who they are, and if it’s not your version of Superman on the stands, you’re less likely to pick it up.

DRAW!: Oh, that’s true. I teach people who are generally 20 to 30 years younger than me, and I’m always interested in

seeing what they’re into, because they’re the next generation of creators that are coming up, and it’s always surprising that a lot of them just don’t read comic books! They like comic books, but they don’t read any. Out of the last two classes I’ve taught, I’ve only had two people who’ve regularly read any Marvel or DC comics, and part of it is because it’s just too expensive.

I was just talking to one of my students last week, because he had a few comics in class, and he really resents that fact that when you go and you buy this story, you’ve got to buy 10 other comics to get the rest of the story, and you’re spending a hundred dollars to buy 20 comics! He literally can’t afford it!

DB: But what about comics technology—the digital direction? Point him that way.

DRAW!: A lot of the female students read a lot of material online. And there’re a lot of online comics… or they just go read manga bootlegs online. There are a lot of people reading who don’t get cable or anything like that.

DB: I think that when the manga invasion started, it really split the audience. You could get manga comics on being a baseball player if you wanted to. It catered to a lot of different niches, so it really split the American comic base, I think.

DRAW!: Well, also I see there’s a shift in availability and economics. What is it, the four-dollar 10¢ comic? I have several students who are interested in comics. I have several fellow students at the academy, master students and undergrad students, who are interested in doing their own comics, but I tell them now I would be doing stuff online, because economically it’s more feasible, and your stuff’s always available.

This sort of segue-ways into what you’re doing, your own comic. You’re trying to self-publish your own material.

DB: Yeah, it’s been a big learning curve, but I love the idea now with the Internet, it puts you in a position where you’re able to compete with mega-corporations, like a Warner Brothers, or Disney, or whatever. You have this little corner of the Internet with your blog, or your website, or your Deviant Art page, where you can generate a piece of artwork and just pop it up there for people to see. Like you said, it’s accessible at all times, so the key is to figure out how to make money doing that, and how to form your business and move forward.

There’s still a market, I think, for more graphic novels, and I think, being an older fellow myself—I’ll be 43—.

DRAW!: Oh, you young whippersnapper!

DB: Right. I like to sit down with a book in my hand, and prefer to carry it around the house.

DRAW!: You still like dust mites!

DB: [laughs] I see the younger guys coming out. They work the keyboards like maestros. They keep you young. They keep you on your toes.

DRAW!: I see them texting… I’m a two-finger typer, and a one-finger texter.

DB: They call it the hunt-and-peck, right?

DRAW!: Yeah, and I see these students, I mean, they’re going at it on that little keyboard like they are generating of the Matrix or something.

DB: Well, I was fortunate enough to work with some guys who were at Lucas on some Clone Wars episodes, and watching some of these guys really motivated me to start cracking more of the digital code. So I’ve been half-and-half lately.

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Dan on Superman and Batman, I was faxing stuff over, and there was a lot of paper involved. Now everybody’s switched over to Storyboard Pro. DB: I used to love drawing on that animation paper. There’s nothing like it. It’s funny you mentioned that. I was digging through some old art, and I came across some old Tarzan storyboards I’d done for Disney many years ago, and yeah, it was a lot of fun drawing on paper. It was a very different experience.

I’d say about three years ago, working on Transformers, I made the shift over to digital. The first year was like pulling teeth for somebody who, his whole life, was drawing on paper. But once you get the hang of it, you start seeing some benefits, especially working on storyboarding and production art—you just end up generating so much of it— when you can get into a program like Toon Boom [Studio], and get the hang of it, and start to play it through as an animatic immediately. You can see how your thoughts are paying out, and how your sequences are shaping up, in a much more immediate way. We used to have to wait for it to go through a scanning process, and then it’d get cut and assembled in an animatic process, and that would happen a week or two after your entire storyboard process had been turned in.

DRAW!: Not being on site, I never saw my animatics. I never saw what it looked like. A lot of times, I wouldn’t see what the show looked like until they actually ran the show.

DB: Yeah. Now it’s sort of considered to be “flying blind” when you work in that method. And it’s really neat too. I’d have to say one of the coolest parts of being digital is that you can live anywhere and upload your work to servers, and share it immediately.

Storyboards for Beware the Batman done in Storyboard Pro. Batman, Man-Bat © DC Comics

I’ve been generating a lot of my layouts and things on the Cintiq tablet, and I’ve been taking it and light-boxing it to get it to more of a finished page, which I’ll ink. It’s a bit of a process, but I’ve lately been leaning more and more into the digital side of it, because it eliminates scanning, it eliminates letting ink dry, that sort of mess, right?

DRAW!: Well, that’s interesting, because almost every single person I talk to for the magazine, we discuss the digital divide.

If I went back to storyboarding, I’d have to get a Cintiq, because everybody’s going paperless. Back when I was working with

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DRAW!: To back it up a little bit, you left college and started working right away doing storyboards?

DB: Pretty much. I graduated from the Philadelphia University of the Arts. I hear they have a pretty fancy storyboard teacher now.

DRAW!: [laughs] Yeah.

DB: At any rate, gosh, that was around ’92. Then I made my way out to the West Coast and started working on a SpiderMan cartoon for Fox with the mighty Bob Richardson. Bob produced Dungeons & Dragons and Muppet Babies—all kinds of great stuff. So it was really fortunate to have him as one of my early mentors. I worked with those guys, and I was in L.A. for about 18 years, and managed to work with just about everybody in the business for a brief period of time at least. One of the more interesting projects I worked on briefly was with Genndy [Tartakovsky] on something called Sym-Bionic Titan.

DRAW!: It got one season?

DB: It shows you what a fickle medium it is. It was such a beautiful production.

DRAW!: Yeah, just a gorgeous cartoon.

DB: It was kind of a rough time for me. I had somebody who I was close to pass away at the beginning of that production, so I was kind of closed off, but what a great group of talent. It was great to see what they were bringing to Saturday Morning cartoons. It was a really wonderful show, and the idea that it was so short-lived, it was disappointing. From there, of course, I went to Transformers: Prime, which was a heavy CG-based project.

DRAW!: Did you have a learning curve going from 2-D, flat storyboards, to doing something that was going to be 3-D? Did you have to change your process?

DB: Yeah, it was definitely a different cinematic language to get hip to.

While I was back as a 2-D artist, I’d learned Photoshop, and that was my first step into the digital realm. I was working on a Wacom tablet—it wasn’t a Cintiq—where you’re drawing below and watching up above. Darwyn

Page 4 of “Silent Night... Unholy Knight” for Batman: Black-&-White #2, written by Michael Uslan with art by Dave. Dave started with digital thumbnails (top), which he tweaked and added tones to (above). For this story, Dave penciled on the board, but often he pencils digitally as well.

Batman © DC Comics

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From there it’s time to ink, first adding the blacks, and then the grey tones.

Batman © DC Comics

Cooke helped me out drawing my comics and scanning them in. I got my feet wet.

DRAW!: Was this when you guys were at Warner Brothers?

DB: That’s right. That’s when I did a handful of Superman covers for DC, and colored them digitally. I was just blown away and thrilled with the idea that, “Wow, you can get this right here on your computer and print this out.” It was really spectacular, as opposed to the process where you’d wait, sending it to a color person, and getting it separated professionally.... It was really something else to see it come right out of your machine.

I had the advantage of working with Photoshop for several years, but once I got on a Cintiq tablet, it was like baby steps.

You know, Transformers: Prime was okay, moving digital, but we were just drawing in Photoshop directly on a storyboard template, so I sort of made the jump into digital, but on a storyboard template that had three storyboard panels on it, so it looked like old school sheet of paper, similar to what I had been used to working on for many years. With Transformers, Hasbro was still working that way. I think that they were one of the last productions to make the move into Toon Boom.

DRAW!: You were using Toon Boom instead of using Storyboard Pro?

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DB: Well, Toon Boom [makes Toon Boom Studio] and Storyboard Pro—it’s all basically the same program. They were using Photoshop to generate their storyboards, and I think they prefer Toon Boom [Studio] because the producer likes to flip through storyboards in a handout meeting with his directors. I think that’s more their process. But yeah, I know Warner Brothers, Nickelodeon, and most of the other studios are doing it in Storyboard Pro. So I went from working digitally on a storyboard page template and took the step into Toon Boom, or Storyboard Pro, which, as I said, was definitely a bit of a learning curve, but I was lucky to have a younger guy I had helped train over the years, who got his feet wet with it first, and he turned around and was able to educate me—a guy named Rick Morales.

DRAW!: I’m familiar with his name.

DB: Yeah, great guy. Funny how that works out, you can be teaching a kid something for maybe five or six years, and then he turns around and keeps you relevant in the industry.

DRAW!: And the one thing that is still a constant is that there are not that many people who do storyboards. Are there 50 storyboard artists who do cartoons in L.A.? It doesn’t seem like it would even be that many, because you see the same

names all the time on all the various shows. It’s sort of jump over here, jump over there.

DB: Right, I think it’s all about what sort of filmmaking you best fit into as an artist. I’d always been more attracted to the super-jock type shows, and anything that had more of a cinematic staging. But more and more now, I’m seeing things have been heightened even more so. You’re getting shows like this new Ninja Turtles which has a lot of comedy and a lot of character along with a lot of action, and lots of characters on screen at once.

DRAW!: I’ve never been a big fan of wanting to work on shows that had eight characters on it, because it just ends up being a lot of work. I mean, it’s a lot to do with just one character or two characters. You have to really love drawing to do this, because it takes a lot of drawing power to do a storyboard.

DB: It is, and then when you start to compare it by saying, “Well, how much did I earn this week?” it’s sort of...

“How many comic book covers would I need to do in a week to match that? One or two?” So I started looking at that as I got a little bit older, and it’s probably like what I said before, what keeps this fresh is that I try to dip a toe into one, some more illustration versus the storyboarding. But I do like working in both fields, and I’ve been fortunate enough that I’ve been able to stay relevant with the technology and stay employed to some degree in both fields.

DRAW!: That’s always an interesting fulcrum, because when you’re in the industry, and you’re working for Warner Brothers, and they decide, “We’re going to change from paper to digital,” you were able to get educated and carry on, because you’re working for them. Whereas if you’re freelancing and you’re on your own, you really have to buy that program and educate yourself in order to be able to stay employable, you know what I mean? If you go, “Hey, I’ve got my Post-It Notes and my Scotch Removable Tape, I’m ready to do my storyboard,” they’ll go, “Sorry, there’s no paper over here!” [laughs] You’ve got to go out and buy a Cintiq, which costs what, about two grand to buy the big rig, and you’ve got to buy Storyboard Pro, which I’d imagine is, like most programs, at least $500–1,000, so you’re laying out a couple of grand easy just to even get the job!

And, finally, the white highlights are added.

Batman © DC Comics

DB: Yeah, absolutely. Nobody said it was cheap to be an artist! [laughter] You have expenses on either side. I guess a lot of guys buy their own paper if they’re working in comics, but then they’ll still at least need a scanner to get it to the inker, or ink it themselves and scan it and send it off to an editor, so there’s definitely some overhead on both sides of the fence.

But yeah, it was a bit more with the Cintiq purchase and all that. But it’s part of having to stay relevant with the way the industry is moving.

DRAW!: I just think back to when I bought my first computer four years or so before I started doing storyboarding, and how all those various storage devices and platforms and

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everything have changed so much in just that time till now.

You went from the Syquest to the optical to this to that. You’re always having to slide your stuff from one format to the other.

People were using Flash, and now Flash has kind of gone away, and people are using Toon Boom. And I’m sure this whole thing with Adobe sort of forcing everybody to pay this monthly fee, because you’ll never have a hard disk copy of your program again, you have to be linked to something in the cloud or whatever, that’s going to force people to come up with….

DB: Well, you’re ahead of me on that one, I didn’t realize that’s where it’s headed. And that’s part of staying relevant.

As I said, going into a studio even once a week was a big help. I’d be standing over another artist’s shoulder and see him punch a couple of keys, and say, “What did you do right there?” That was a really great way to learn, just the synergy of being in the studio, and sharing this information with other guys. Relocating out here, I’ve sort of been a man on an island for the past couple of years, which is why I’m anxious to come to the University of the Arts to see what the students are up to, see what’s the new technology, see how things are still progressing.

DRAW!: So you moved to L.A. because you figured, “Well, that’s where the business is, so I need to be where the business is.”

DB: Yeah, I knew the animation industry was out there, but at that time, Image Comics had just blown up real big, and I thought with their California base, “Well, I’ll see if I can get some comic book work out there at the same time.” I was midway through going to college for animation, when Image Comics blew up, and I thought, “Gee, I should be drawing comic books. It looks like these guys are having a lot of fun.” That’s two of the reasons I went to the West Coast, and I’ve got the rejection letters. [laughter] I started out as a character designer on the Fox Spider-Man show. They had a guy in the story department take a medical leave, so I sat in and filled his spot for a little while, and as another fella left, I managed to make myself useful in the story department. So, it’s funny how it worked out, but I was young and had all kinds of energy, and was ready to learn, you know? And that’s one of the things they do like at these particular studios: they like to indoctrinate young guys and teach them their production methods, and it becomes your roots as to how you’re going to go about these things.

Dave’s cover art for The Ultimates #21.

Ultimates and all related characters © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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DRAW!: Do you see that having changed now? Going back to SymBionic Titan, I mean, it was just a cavalcade of stars working on that show, but if it doesn’t connect with licensing somehow, it doesn’t generate enough revenue, then the company kind of goes like, “Eh! Next thing!”

Two pages of an unpublished black-&-white story written by Chip Kidd and intended for The Spirit.

The Spirit © The Will Eisner Estate

DB: It’s always been a bit of a mystery to me how they decide if they’re going to make more episodes or fewer episodes. I do think a lot of it has to do with toy sales, and maybe DVD sales.

We had a gal leave on a maternity leave on Beware the Batman last year, so I jumped in on three episodes between seasons of Transformers, and I was disappointed that they hadn’t picked the show back up, because I thought it looked so fantastic, and it was so smartly produced, but they seem to have had trouble getting their CG shows to stick over there at WB. I’m not sure why. I think maybe part of it was too much Batman too soon.

DRAW!: I’ve said this to friends before, I think part of the problem is that there’s just so much of everything. So this Batman is 3-D. That might seem to us who’ve been around decades like a big deal, that now you have a digital Batman, but to the target audience it’s just, “Oh, it’s like everything else. It’s like The Lego Movie.” It’s just stuff, but there’s so much stuff that nothing is special in that way.

DB: They’ve come up with more and more video games over the years, and they see incredibly slick cut films and cut scenes in these video games with Batman fanning his cape out

and gliding a few stories, so it’s not new to a large part of the audience, even though it’s new to TV production, so to speak.

DRAW!: Yeah. I also think that there’s been such a glut of superhero stuff for so long. Every three or four years they redesign Batman. There was the Batman we worked on, then you had the Batman with the toy that you held up to the TV set, The Batman.

There’s so much stuff, and it seems they’re very impatient now to have immediate blockbuster success, like Adventure Time. It clicks on so many different levels. I have teenage students and young students that I teach in my comic book classes; they love that stuff. Then I have college kids that love that stuff, so it’s like SpongeBob, where it crosses over age groups.

DB: Yeah, I think that’s the trick, to find that broad audience.

And it comes down to the property. Is it something unique? Is it fresh? Like we were saying, these things get turned around so often that maybe it’s a little too soon. Maybe people have had enough of a certain type of superhero, and they’re looking for something new. I don’t know if you’ve been going to comic book conventions lately, but comic book conventions have been popping up all over this country like wildfire.

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A screen shot from an animated promotional video for Dave’s King Ronok Kickstarter campaign.

King Ronok © Bullock Art Works

DRAW!: Oh yeah, every weekend, somewhere in the TriState Area, there’s a comic book convention!

DB: Yes. I think it’s fantastic. I think it’s great that there’s a fan base that’s interested in that stuff, and they’re interested in coming out and meeting with the artists, and talking about their work, and looking at original artwork and things like that. Certainly it’s exciting to go to these conventions. I’ve been going to the New York Comic Con for a few years, which has been a fantastic experience, and it’s literally like an airplane hangar full of artists. It’s just row after row of talent, so there’s definitely something for everyone, whether you’re looking for something a little more juvenile, or manga, or more of a U.S. inky comic book. There are so many things to choose from. I think that’s what’s so exciting about what’s going on in comics as opposed to maybe animation, is that it’s cheaper and easier to produce and you’re getting more unique, undistilled stories and art from the talent.

DRAW!: One person can do a comic, but one person can’t do Batman: The Brave and the Bold; it’s just impossible to have somebody do something like that.

DB: But two guys—I was able to pull a little clip of animation together with a buddy of mine who works in After Effects. It’s really interesting what a few guys can do with the technology now. I always think, “What would Lou Scheimer do with today’s technology?” Lou, for the readers, was the guy behind Filmation cartoons, and He-Man, and they were famous for reusing cels and footage.

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DRAW!: Every time he turned to run, it was the same turn to run! [laughs] DB: He kept his studio busy for years that way.

DRAW!: So you went to the West Coast, worked at a bunch of different places, and decided, “Well, I’m done with that, I’m going to move back to the East Coast,” or…?

DB: Well, yeah, to some degree. I’d watched a couple of my pals relocate back to their families in whatever state they’d initially grown up in. Some of my family was getting older and needed a little help, and I wanted to be here for them, so I made my way back to the frozen tundra that’s known as the Tri-State Area.

DRAW!: Especially this year, geez!

DB: Yeah, this has been some winter. In fact, it’s enough to make us consider relocating out towards San Diego or something. We’ll have to see where we’re at this time next year. So yeah, I relocated back, having seen a few friends being able to upload their work, and it’s been working out pretty good.

I’ll say after, gosh, three years of Transformers and some more work with Hasbro on another project I just wrapped up with them, and now I’m trying to put more than just a toe into the world of comics. So we’ll see how this goes. I can’t say, “Oh, I’m a comic artist now,” for certain, it’s just something that I do sort of for fun and to try to pay the bills, but part of what comes along with that is cutting the overhead, and just being able to work a little smarter as I’ve gotten older. I’m actually really excited to be doing more work with Valiant

Another screen shot from the King Ronok video (above), and cover art for the upcoming series (below).

King Ronok © Bullock Art Works

these days. I did a handful of covers with them this past year, and I’m just getting started on a short eight-page backup story which I can’t really go into too much detail.

I think the caliber of writers is a different type of thing in comics, that it is a little bit more adult perhaps, so I’m more excited to be working with some of the comic book writers. And it’s been a lot of fun going out to conventions. I find it helps to supplement my income a little bit, which sure doesn’t hurt, but I do think at some point my animation union hours will start to dwindle, and I am a bit concerned about my medical benefits and things.

DRAW!: In the beginning, were you thinking you wanted to do storyboards, or were you thinking, “That’s something I want to do,” and you just wanted to work in animation?

DB: I’ll tell you, as a college student, we were taught how to animate, and how to design characters and things like that. But it wasn’t explained how TV production was broken down into the different divisions and things. When I first decided to come to California, initially I wanted to get involved with cartoons, and then once I found out that Image Comics was mostly located on the West Coast, I thought that would be something I was interested in finding out more about. And in the process of that, I saw that Spider-Man was looking for some artists in the back of some magazine or something, and I thought I’d give it a shot.

Once you get into a studio, you start to see that there’s a background department, a character department, a story department, and the longer you’re around, you get to meet people in each of those departments, you start to see what maybe looks more interesting to you, or where in the production you can use your talents, and I quickly found that just designing the secondary characters was kind of boring for me. I wanted to draw Spider-Man. I didn’t want to draw a bag lady walking down the street. [laughter] DRAW!: You didn’t want to draw people looking up in the sky; you wanted to draw Superman!

DB: That’s right. That’s why I was there, I was there for the heroics of the whole thing. So I quickly moved into the story department and found that’s where I wanted to be. And then after some time in that, I thought, “Yeah, let me take a crack at some comics, and we’ll see how that goes.” I used to hound the editors at the San Diego ComicCon year after year, and finally after being turned down for many dates, I was offered a gig on Ghost. So I left Spider-Man to draw a comic called Ghost from Dark Horse. I did a few issues of it and struggled like crazy to make the deadlines.

DRAW!: How was that different for you? Because I know people who have only done comics books, and I know people who’ve only done storyboards, and I know people like you who’ve gone from doing comic books to storyboards. There were a couple of guys on Superman that came in from comics

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Cover art for Valiant’s Eternal Warrior #1 and X-O Manowar #16.

Eternal Warrior, X-O Manowar © Valiant Entertainment, Inc.

to do boards, and they found it to be a struggle just to do that amount of drawing. It’s also a different way of thinking about telling a story, because you’re not just drawing one whole pose. All of these scenes have to hook up together.

DB: There’s a lot more thinking, I think, that goes into the storyboard process. Like you said, you’re hooking up shot ideas, and you’re coordinating your efforts with a background designer, and other character designers, and a script, whereas when you’re doing a comic, a lot more of that falls on one artist. The storyboards can generally be a lot rougher, but… it’s so competitive now that a lot of guys are striving to make these storyboards look like comic books, which can be tricky, especially when you have a director who is a little bit revision-happy, who might have a lot of ideas of his own, and maybe didn’t communicate them to you in the handout. So it can be tricky. The thing about comics is that you’re in a room by yourself for the most part, so you’re definitely a lot more isolated, and that’s not for everyone.

DRAW!: You’d learned animation at school, but you hadn’t learned storyboarding. So how did you pick up storyboarding?

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I remember Bruce Timm telling me that there were basically people who just naturally got it, and they could learn the ins and outs of film language, all the screen direction.

DB: I heard that a lot too, at the beginning, that it was a sink-orswim situation, that guys had either grown up watching enough film that they just sort of intrinsically understood how things cut together better than others. The way I always looked at it is, comic books is really just going for moments. You’re picking key moments out of a script, and you want to put emphasis on those moments, whereas with the TV work, or the storyboarding, you’re trying to connect those key moments as well.

DRAW!: Right. I remember looking at storyboards that Toth had done, and storyboards that Jack Kirby had done, and the drawings are great, but they suck as storyboards. They really don’t hook up very well. It wasn’t until I actually did boards that I understood why they didn’t work. While the drawings looked good, you’d actually have to go in and do a lot of other drawings to hook those sequences up and make them work as film. It was like really cool comic book panels drawn in a storyboard frame.

DB: I agree. That, again, is one of the biggest differences.

You’re elaborating a lot more on illustration in comics, as opposed to the storyboarding. But it’s different across the board too. It depends on who you’re working with. I know some guys like a lot more hook-ups and things from shot to shot in a storyboard, and I’ve worked with some directors like Genndy, who likes to go from key shots. He likes his film to look a little more like a comic book, which I thought was great, and I learned a lot working from him in that respect. It was just go for whatever the next big moment was, you know?

DRAW!: When you started doing boards, did they kind of coach you? Do you think you benefitted from being inside the studio and peeking over people’s shoulders?

DB: I don’t mind telling you, on the Fox Spider-Man cartoon, I shared an office with a guy named Hank Tucker, and Hank was an incredibly seasoned veteran. He had worked on Thundarr, and lots of feature films, and Hank was probably where I first learned what was really going on. And being in that office, I would get to see storyboards come in from all the other storyboard artists, and Hank was the director of that show, so I would see storyboard artists come in from Flora Derry, Gary Graham—some of the most talented guys in the

DRAW!: Yeah, and it’s funny, because I think Genndy’s films have a sort of a David Lean quality about them in a way. They’re these big, giant set pieces—although Dexter’s Lab was very different, you know? It was more like the old Warner Brothers—a lot more character.

When I worked on Samurai Jack—which I loved working on, because I also got to contribute to the writing process—Genndy would give you an idea, and you’d run with it. There wasn’t a lot of dialogue as compared to, say, when I worked on something like Fairly Oddparents, which was cutcut-cut-cut-cut. It was super-spastic storytelling, very hyper, because almost line by line, you’d cut to another shot.

DB: That’s a good way to tear through a whole bunch of story and exhaust a lot of storyboard artists, and also make something that doesn’t have really a rhythm when you sit down to watch it as a viewer.

I liken it to a machine gun going off in your face for 22 minutes; it’s just cut-cut-cutcut-cut. I prefer something that has a little more pacing to it, and that’s why you see some of the studios and different producers have different approaches and some seem to work better, and you seem to align yourself more with certain productions than others. It definitely comes down to the taste of who you’re working with.

I worked on the Spectacular Spider-Man cartoon recently, and I got to direct, and I thought it had a really smart sense of pacing to it, and they were really smart in that they would leave some of the action sequences a little bit more bare-bones. They knew we would be able to play that up visually, translating the script to the visuals. We kind of had the best of both worlds in that production. We had smart character and smart character sequences written out, but they would leave us a little bit more open-ended An early version of Dave’s cover for Bloodshot #13. with the action sequences, so we could flex our muscles there visually.

Bloodshot © Valiant Entertainment, Inc.

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industry wanted to work on Spider-Man. I would sit and stamp their storyboards as a young guy, and number their shots, and things like that. That was probably the best training I could recommend to anybody getting involved in it, being an assistant to a director, and see all that come across your desk, and see how they’re cutting it together, and see what was getting a lot of revisions by Hank, and what wasn’t.

DRAW!: But you must’ve had that storytelling instinct, to be able to do that. To me it’s become really apparent that there’s the illustrator brain and the storyteller brain, and there’re people that can do fantastic storyboards, who would actually kind of suck at doing an illustration. They wouldn’t be able to put the finish to it or whatever. And then you have other people who are obsessed by finish, and could do a fantastic illustration or a painting, or even a comic book, but they couldn’t parse the film language. They couldn’t get into how they mix and hook everything all up. It’s like a different sort of brain.

DB: As much time as I spent doing storyboards, I feel like I never am putting in enough time on my comic book pages. I feel like I don’t have enough patience to really be a full-blown illustrator. That’s why I think my comics work leans more towards the storytelling than the illustration side.

DRAW!: In comics we have a history of people who are really into doing storytelling, and then other people who are really into doing illustration. Take Kirby versus someone like John Severin or Russ Heath—just beautiful illustration, you know what I mean? Kirby could never draw a tank with a convincingness of Russ Heath.

DB: And that tank wouldn’t look the same in any two panels. [laughter] DRAW!: The only time I visited Warner Brothers when I was working on staff, Glen Murakami and Shane Glines were sitting there, arguing about Parademons having two toes or three toes. [laughter] Because Kirby never drew any of that stuff the same!

Every time he drew a Parademon, it looked completely different than the last time he drew a Parademon.

DB: That’s right. That’s why I was attracted to what WB was doing at the time, because I had grown up a huge comic book fan, and I liked the idea that they were more rooted in comics from their perspective of how to design a cartoon, and what kinds of stories they were going to tell. The studio’s since evolved. I know Bruce used to call that “the golden age of cartoons.”

Mike uses this Kim Possible sequence storyboarded by Dave as a teaching aid.

Kim Possible © Disney Enterprises, Inc.

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DRAW!: I think so too, when I look back at it, for a couple of reasons: You had a lot of really super-talented people who all loved the same kind of stuff and synched very well together. You had really good source material to work on.

It was successful enough that it seemed like the studio didn’t want to come in and mess with everything. The business was actually still expanding in ’96, ’97.

Pixar was still growing, and everything was growing, so there was such a huge demand to get talent into the pipeline. It seems very different now in that regard.

DB: It was a wonderful place for a guy like me at the time to be situated. It was like Christmas every time a Bret Blevins board came in, and to work with guys like yourself, and Lee Weeks, and see these things was so inspiring, that all I wanted to do was keep my ass in the chair.

The rest of the “Kim hops down and kicks a couple of guards” storyboard sequence.

Kim Possible © Disney Enterprises, Inc.

I was fortunate enough to be on a story team with, I guess he’s a producer now, but James Tucker was next to me, and Darwyn Cooke came in—he was on the other side of me. We would have these story meetings just on the fly, and I think it really came down to always wanting to outdo the other guy.

DRAW!: You know, being on site was great. I would get Dan to send me everybody’s boards, and I still remember when I started working on Kim Possible. I have the animatic that you did, the one where the dragon was melting Wisconsin?

DB: They were in a giant cheese wheel, I think.

DRAW!: They were in a giant cheese wheel. I got Chris to send me the animatic for that, and I’m just so incredibly impressed by what you did on that.

DB: Thanks, man.

DRAW!: That’s the one thing I give the students an actual board from. I almost worked on the show, but for some reason I didn’t, but I ended up getting a script and a bunch of model sheets. I tell them to read a passage that says, “Kim hops down and kicks a couple of guards on the way down to the switch.” You took that and made something really cool and visually interesting out of it. Sometimes you’ll read these scripts, and you don’t laugh when you read it, or you don’t get excited when you read it. It doesn’t jump off the page. You have to make it jump off the screen, and I was just really impressed by the storytelling, and the hook-ups, and everything on that. You broke the model and made it work better than the model.

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More of Dave’s storyboards for Kim Possible, this time the start of a fight scene.

Kim Possible © Disney Enterprises, Inc.

DB: A lot of that has to do with the other talent that was on that production: the designer, Alan Bodner; Stephen Silver; and of course, Chris Bailey. Chris Bailey instilled in me the confidence to just go ahead and have fun with it. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was hot in the theaters at this time, so he would say, “Yeah, throw some of that parkour stuff in there!” you know, and make it cool. I think Chris and I hit it off immediately because we had a similar look to the way we drew.

DRAW!: That’s very true, yeah.

DB: I don’t think I ever commented on that, but we just had that in common, and we kind of knew we were kindred spirits. I think he was the kind of producer who would look to see, was this guy giving you 110%, and if he was, he would want to encourage it, as opposed to squash it. And by squash it, I don’t mean just give you heavy notes, I mean over-write a script, where the script is trying to overly explain every little moment that goes on. I would feel as an artist, “How do I fit in? Do I have a little bit of fun with that sequence?” especially if you got scripts that were long.

The general rule of thumb is it’s a minute of film for every script page, so if you’re looking at a script that was 30-some pages, well how’s that going to fit into a 22-minute cartoon and leave room for the story artist to expand on beats, or gags, or action sequences? But in the case of Kim Possible, we were given a lot of freedom, or at least I was, and had a great time with it.

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DRAW!: That’s the thing about teaching, you also realize, “Wow, that cartoon was ten years old or more, and the students that I’m teaching are 20, so that was a big deal to them when they were growing up.” Maybe that was the cartoon that made them want to be an animator, or work in comics.

DB: Oh, how neat! I find it goes the other way for me sometimes. When I talk to a younger kid, I’ll say, “Oh, yeah, just like Kim Possible,” and they have no idea. They just look at you with a blank face. They have no idea who the character is.

DRAW!: Well, I actually found that out in a weird way this week. I’m teaching Visual Development class, so I’m having them do their style boards, and stuff for the project that they’re working on, and one of the students is working on something that kind of looks like Mad Max. I said, “Mad Max,” and who doesn’t know Mad Max? Well, maybe one person in the class had heard of Mad Max. I don’t think anybody had actually seen the film! That was such a big trilogy of films, and none of the students were aware of it. I’ll say, “The Highlander,” and they’re “Huh? What? Is that a Toyota?” So I tell them, “If you’re going to work in the business, you should be historically knowledgeable—not that you have to love it, but you should understand what came before.” I actually think that The Road Warrior is a really awesome film of the genre, and I said, “You should feed your brain with this stuff, because

you’re going to be working with people that know this stuff, and if they say Road Warrior, and you go, ’Eh?’...”

DB: When I started out, my go-to film was Die Hard. Any time I wanted to be inspired and see how film is cut and made, the first Die Hard film was what I went to more often than not. I got to work with Butch Lukic for a while on the Batman cartoons, so I started really looking at the old James Bond films—not the Roger Moore stuff, the old Sean Connery stuff—From Russia with Love.

DRAW!: That fight on the train with Robert Shaw is one of the best fight scenes ever in film. You really feel like the actors are actually hitting each other!

DB: That’s right. And it’s just brutal, and again, at the time WB was opening things up a bit, so we were able to try to work more of that intensity into the storyboards. It wasn’t anywhere near as brutal, but that was just a good example of some of the filmmaking.

makers is in the first Spider-Man movie Raimi did, where it’s Peter and Aunt May’s laying in a bed in the hospital, and also Mary Jane’s seated in a chair. He talked in the commentary about how, when it was storyboarded, it was three shots, and he turned it into one shot with a nice camera move. And with a little piano music over it, it just pulls at your heartstrings, right?

DRAW!: Right. I like the first Spider-Man, and the second Spider-Man, but the third one’s a mess, because there’s too much stuff going on. I compare the storytelling in the first two to the new one, and I just don’t like that new Spider-Man. At least to me, it doesn’t feel like a John Romita comic; it doesn’t feel like a Stan Lee script. It feels like it could be any character. It doesn’t have the feel of the classic storytelling that Raimi picked up on.

DRAW!: I want to go back and talk more about the learning curve going from boarding 2-D to boarding 3-D. DB: The CG learning curve came for me when I went to direct for Lucas for The Clone Wars series. George had a proprietary program. It was sort of a SketchUp program that would allow you to get into a location that was built in CG, and move your camera around and take a snapshot, but that was the early days of CG production, and Lucas had the budget to be there a couple of years ahead of the rest of Hollywood, so that was a great opportunity to figure out what was going on with the camera Artwork based on the Justice League: The New Frontier animated movie which Dave directed. in CG. Justice League © DC Comics Part of that had to do with Dave Filoni. He was the guy running the show up there, and DB: It’s hard to hit a home run every time out, but I just go he was a big fan of Alfonso Cuarón as a director—Alfonso back to the material you got a kick out of. That first film had Cuarón directed the third Harry Potter film. Alfonso would so many fun, crazy shot ideas in it. There’re a couple of shots use these big, sweeping camera moves, but I think the key was of Spidey swinging overhead, and they’d pivot into the shot, to start on a real great composition, and end on a great com- and right after that’s a cute belly shirt shot. position. It didn’t matter what the camera did in the middle. It could be pushing through a giant clock, and craning up above DRAW!: Yeah, I think you could tell that he dug that stuff to reveal a wonderful landscape or something. It was just a when you saw Darkman. matter of figuring out your compositions and how those shots DB: Oh, yeah, that was a good one. Part of it is, if you are tied together in an interesting way. somebody that’s studying this, and who wants to be a proSam Raimi was always a real inspiration too for that sort fessional at it—and we’re talking to your students now—you of thing. One of the shots I like to point out to young film- have to observe and report, right? You just try to take in and

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digest as much of this material as possible, and decide what it was you thought was a good idea about that, or communicated a good idea about that. Then you’ll be able to work some of those ideas into your material.

DRAW!: When I started boarding, there was The Young Man and His Horn and a couple of other Ted Turner classic movies on—one with Robert Ryan, The Set-Up, where he’s a boxer—and I just did compositional studies from those films.

The thing you were talking about having a great composition, to me the storytelling starts with the composition. If you have a really lazy or unfocused composition that is not reinforcing the emotional feeling of that scene, you’re kind of working against yourself.

DB: I’d like to talk about the emotional content, because the mood is the motivating factor for pretty much everything that follows, right? It’ll make you decide whether the camera’s in really tight, or out far, or how the scene is lit. The emotional content is what drives everything. That’s the first thing a good story artist asks himself about the sequence, when he’s just sat down to visualize.

DRAW!: You can be seduced by eye candy, and it will throw you off the emotional pitch of the scene. And I think that also feeds into the illustrator or single-image artist versus the storyteller artist, where for some people it’s really important to get the shine on a belt buckle, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but if you’re going to be a storyboard artist, you can’t be

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seduced by that in lieu of the emotional part of storytelling.

It’s really hard. Some people really struggle with that. It’s like they’re ripping their hair out. When you explain it to them, they go, “Of course! I completely see what you’re saying now.” But it’s definitely a different mindset, so I’m always really interested when I talk to people like you who do comics, because I do see in your comics, and what I’ve seen in Chris Bailey’s comics, or Darwyn’s… you can tell that Darwyn loves comics, but you also get the feel of movies in those comics.

DB: I think we’re all fans of comics and just good storytelling. So that’s what we are striving for when we’re putting this stuff together on our own.

DRAW!: So now you’re working on other people’s comics, but you’re also working on your own comics. How are you splitting your day now?

DB: Well, that’s a really good question! [laughs] Because it changes all the time, you know? It all sort of ends up being, “When’s the deadline?” So typically I try to put in eight hours or ten hours on my storyboards, and beyond that, I find time for my family, and if I can, then squeeze in a little bit of time on my comic. I was hoping, initially, to just sort of hash out the story beats, and plan out all my designs, and then I was looking at taking the project to Kickstarter, but I’ve lately been feeling like I want to have a little bit more pulled together before I go to Kickstarter and ask for thousands of dollars from my friends and fans, because the more you have done up front, of course, the cheaper it gets to reach your goal.

DRAW!: You can really tease people by showing them, “Well, here’s one drawing of my character. Give me $10,000 and I’ll make it.” Instead, you can say, “Here’s selected cool stuff from the comic.”

DB: Right. The comic is called The Savage Blade of King Ronok. If you go to faroutfiction.blogspot.com, you can check out quite a few designs and things. Ideally, I was trying to put together one image a month, and like I said, it’s slowly chipping away at a big rock, and after several years now, it’s really started to take some shape. With one image a month, at the end of the year you should have twelve good images, sometimes maybe a little more, maybe a little less, but I thought that was a good, steady clip to be shooting for on top of everything else, family and the high demands of animation and comic book deadlines.

I’m at a point now where I’ve just started to thumbnail out and pull a few story pages together as sort of sample interior pages, and I’m thinking again about what’s the best way to go at this. I’ve had a couple of my friends help out. I’ve got one guy who’s working on an app for me, which will kind of be like the free hat that you get if you contribute to the Kickstarter, and it’s pretty much just a 3-D image of the flaming sword with the particle effect on the sword, and some music.

That is one of the advantages of having been involved in animation all these years, I’ve gotten to know some people, and I’ve really clicked with a handful of guys, one being Kevin Manthei, who’s a wonderful composer. He did the score for The New Frontier and quite a few other cartoons, and Kevin was generous enough to donate a piece of music for King Ronok, and of course I promised if I do make a ton of money on this, I won’t forget about him. [laughs]

DRAW!: Comics is smaller, and animation is bigger, because there are a lot more studios, and people move all over. We started on Superman, and now, 15, 16, almost 20 years later, you’re working over here, I’m working over there, Butch is working over here, another guy’s working over there… you do develop a nice network of people.

DB: Yeah, and sometimes it’s just the work you’ve been doing. The work I’ve been doing over the years has pulled people towards me where they’ll see something they like, and we’ll get to talking, and you really hit it off, and it’s, “How can we figure out how to work together on something one of these days,” you know? It might not be right away, but within a year we might find a buddy’s hoping to cut together a sizzle reel with a couple of shots. That’s similar to how it came together. I’ve been helping out a guy named Josh Book who’s got a Kickstarter named Mighty Yeti. He’s looking to do children’s storybook apps on the Internet, and he’s got a lot of good ideas. He was the driving force behind a lot of the technology that’s been built up at Nickelodeon over the years, but he had contacted me about five years ago, and we did some work together developing that Marvel MMO video game—I think it’s called Marvel Heroes. So we did some work together, sort of kept in touch, and now he’s helping me put together a sizzle reel for King Ronok when I get some down time, and it’s coming together really great. He’s going back through and putting a bit of lighting into some of the shots, putting a little bit of particle effects on the flaming sword and things, and it’s really starting to pay off, so it’s really exciting to be able to marry that with the music that Kevin’s donated, and just some great digital cinematics. I think it’s going to be the thing that gets fans excited about the comic book.

Promotion for the upcoming King Ronok (above), and King Ronok’s adversary, Pit Boss (right).

King Ronok © Bullock Art Works

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DRAW!: So you feel, honestly, it’s really important to do the commercial stuff, but also to do your own personal stuff.

DB: Yeah, absolutely. It’s kind of the thing that fuels the fire. There’s only so much of yourself that you have to give to anyone else. You have to step back every once in a while and say, “What was it that got me interested in all this in the beginning after all? Was it just the work on Superman, or to work on my own property, and work on my own characters?” After a number of years of having a boss tell you he prefers to see things this way or that way, you know, you get a little bit older and you start to think that you want to be your own boss. And that’s what’s so nice about comics. You can achieve quite a bit with just a few cogs in the machine.

DRAW!: Oh, yeah, definitely. I almost moved to L.A., but I decided I didn’t want to work exclusively at one place. I never really felt comfortable doing that, because I like being able to do different things. Being able to do more than one thing keeps it interesting for me, but I also realize now, because things have changed a lot from when I started, that it’s really important to have things that are completely your own. They’re bringing back Kim Possible, or whatever show we worked on, but we’ll never get another check out of that. We won’t even get a copy of the DVD if they release it half the time. It can be a lot of fun to work on, and a great learning process, but that’s what I call a “dead check.”

DB: Working in the animation industry, you get a lot of really great benefits.

You get good medical, dental and eye benefits, and things like that, but like you said, you never really have ownership or control over those properties.

You might say, “I don’t think it’s right for Kim and Ron to kiss at this point in the series,” but if the guys above you don’t agree, you’re not going to get what you want out of that story beat.

DRAW!: I loved working on Samurai Jack, but because Samurai Jack didn’t sell a million toys, there’s a lot of pressure to, “Well, we need to go with something else.” Back when I had only done maybe two Superman shows, it was not immediately pulling numbers that Batman was doing, and there was a rumor that they were going to cancel the show.

DB: That’s right.

DRAW!: They were going to cancel the show right away, and I was thinking, “Wow, that sucks. Everybody’s working on this, and it’s really good.” And I realized right then that as an artist, you can be at the top of your game, doing great stuff, but if you don’t control that property, the new executive can come in and decide that all the old executive’s stuff is a failure, even if it wasn’t.

If you can remember, was it Batman they were shifting around on the schedule, trying to lower the ratings on it because the new lady didn’t like the boy stuff, and she wanted to do something different? I remember thinking it’s such a crazy thing, and it affects my bottom line as an artist. I’m just trying to work and improve my craft, and to make my work better, do the best, most exciting stuff I can, and then you have somebody else who comes in and has this other agenda that affects you, and it wouldn’t matter if you made the best cartoon ever.

DB: If we’re honest with ourselves, like you were saying before, you didn’t get into this industry just to work for other people, you got into it because you were excited about comics and things. The natural evolution, I think, of an artist, is you want to take a step into the creator-owned realm and see what it might hold for you.

King Ronok © Bullock Art Works

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DRAW!: I do the newspaper strip, which is a great, steady form of income, but….

DB: It’s great, by the way.

King Ronok © Bullock Art Works

DRAW!: Thanks. But I look at that as my base thing. I would still like to do comics, but I don’t want to go back and do corporate comics. I really just want to do my comics, so I’m thinking I would want to do the Kickstarter thing. But I’d have to wait until I’m done with the master’s program here in a couple of months, and think about what I’d want to do. Because I did all of that self-publishing, which sort of led to working at Warner Brothers, but I still have an attic of old comics. So I think now I would do a Kickstarter thing, maybe do it online, or just do it as a graphic novel. Everything’s changing. Now they have the Amazon on-demand printing. There are other options that we have now that you didn’t have ten years ago. There was no YouTube. You could make your own cartoon now and put it on YouTube, and it could be a huge hit.

DB: That’s right. It’s all about how you’re going to get some exposure, and get some draw, and hope it goes viral. I look at guys like Justin Bieber, right? He started out as a YouTube sensation, so there must be something to it. [laughter] And Kickstarter, I should say, does have a bit of a learning curve to it. I was definitely wide-eyed when I first heard of Kickstarter. I thought, “Wow, you can get people to donate to your dream and make your own comic,” and that is definitely the case, but there’s a lot that goes into it as well. It’s typically a month-long process that you’re trying to bang the drum, which does look a bit tiring after watching a few friends go through it, and it does look all-consuming during that month. But there’s also a percentage of your earnings that goes to Amazon, and a

percentage goes to Kickstarter, so it’s probably about a third of it that goes in that direction, plus you also have to pay taxes on some of that if you’re pre-selling a book, right? So it’s just a matter of managing your finances, and getting your business pulled together beforehand. That’s part of my learning curve, and that’s where I’m still getting some of my ducks in a row.

DRAW!: When it first came out, people thought, “Oh, this is the greatest thing since sliced bread,” but that’s the reality.

Because there are a lot of people doing Kickstarter, but how many people have successfully gone all the way through and then released a product, and where are we a year after that?

DB: Yeah. I don’t mind telling you too, I’m in the process of cutting my overhead in such a way that I’ll be able to afford this new Kickstarter plan. So it really has to be a labor of love when you get into these things. It’s not something you just jump right into.

DRAW!: You said you’re thinking about moving back out to California?

DB: Well, the main thought is just to cut my overhead so I can afford to do more comics and try to make a living on a modest Kickstarter budget. But since this harsh winter here in New Jersey, my girlfriend and I have been talking about relocating to somewhere warmer. [laughter] I always think of humans like cars out here, you don’t see a lot of those old vintage muscle cars on the road here in New Jersey. Things just don’t seem to run as well with all the cold.

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One last screen shot from the King Ronok promotional video.

King Ronok © Bullock Art Works

DRAW!: Who doesn’t like San Diego? The weather’s awesome all the time.

DB: I know a handful of guys out there. That’s one of the fun things about doing comics over the years, you find we’re like a band of gypsies scattered all over the planet, and when you go to these conventions, you might meet a guy who’s from Czechoslovakia. You never know where they might be from, but you meet guys from all over this country as well. So you might meet guys from every state, and it’s nice to know that, “Hey, I have a friend there who can give me the lay of the land,” you know?

DRAW!: So your plan is to try to shift more to doing your own personal projects, but still keeping your foot in the door.

DB: Well, I love comics, and I love working in comics, and I like the idea that they also give me a certain amount of exposure to my name. Moving in the direction of gradually doing my own comics, it sort of helps with the synergy that’s promoting what I’m doing, and what I’m doing helps to promote a cover or a certain story I’m doing for another company.

DRAW!: Do you find people in Hollywood think of you in a different way, knowing that you’re also a creator as opposed to just being a guy who’s a really good captain, knowing how to run a ship? Do they think of you in a different way?

DB: I guess you’d have to ask them. I really couldn’t tell you.

I do think there’s maybe some concern that, “Oh, gosh, is he really working more on his own project than he is on our project?” but as long as you’re turning in your work and meeting deadlines, there shouldn’t be any issues.

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DRAW!: I always liked humor stuff. I always loved Mad magazine. I had Chuck Jones cartoons in my head, I watched so much of that stuff when I was a kid. But when you’d want to do humor stuff, editors would say, “But you’re a guy who likes to draw straight stuff.” So when I did my own stuff, I did more humorous stuff, and people were surprised that I could do that. It’s like being a character actor, I suppose. If you just played the villain, they don’t think of hiring you for a comedy, you know what I mean? I was wondering if you experienced the same thing in a way of like, “Well, you’re an action guy,” so they wouldn’t think of you for comedy.

DB: I’d like to think that they considered me as good with the character and acting as well as the action. I think as things have gotten more sophisticated, I’ve been looked at less like a guy who is interested in a heavily choreographed fight scene, at least in terms of the martial arts side of it. I can still hang with the fisticuffs of Justice League, but when it comes to anime-based martial arts, it’s just not really who I am. I’m an American kid, raised on muscle cars and sweat.

But yeah, I think it does help to be versatile. To be able to do a little bit of lightheartedness and fun, to work on Lilo and Stitch, or Kim Possible, along with all the fisticuffs of the super-jocks sure helps. But when it came time to cook up my own character, this King Ronok guy, I looked back to what it was that got me excited in all this at the beginning, and that was serialized pulp stuff. I’m a big fan of the sword swingers, and any of the old Lone Ranger stuff, Zorro—those things got my blood going as a kid, and that’s what I hope to bring into King Ronok.

DRAW!: We always like to talk tech stuff too. You’re drawing your layouts, or your pencils, digitally, and then printing them out and inking them traditionally, and then scanning those back in?

DB: To a large degree, yeah. I like the look of the finished product with the ink on it. But there’ve been times, as I’ve been working more and more on the digital thing, where I’m able to replicate more and more of that look, so at this point, it’s sort of 50/50 right now.

With the early King Ronok stuff, I was less inclined to work digitally, so most of it was inked, scanned, and colored like a traditional comic, and more and more it’s becoming fully realized in the computer.

DRAW!: Does that concern you, having no originals to sell, or the constant migration. I guess it’ll eventually all be in some kind of cloud, and I guess it be like the cloud.2 and the cloud.9. I have so much stuff now, since ’94, I just have to keep terabytes of stuff shifting and shifting and shifting!

DB: No, you just have to keep buying more and more backup hardware. It starts to pile up, but I guess at the end of the day, you can put a lot more of these digital flash drives on a shelf than you can physical storyboards or books, even.

DRAW!: Well, yeah. That’s true.

DB: I do like having original art to sell at shows, and I’ve always loved original art. I love having it up on my walls. I know that’s what the collectors are after, and I still prefer it.

I’m a big fan of the old Warren magazine comics, and as I’ve gotten older, that’s the kind of comics I’ve wanted to make, at least visually, and it’s hard to replicate that in the digital realm.

Like I said, I’ve had some success with it, but I’m still finding I often times want that piece of art in my hand at the end of the day. And so do the collectors. They want something nice for the wall. It’s nice to have something to sell. You can make a few extra bucks. It’s tough living as an artist, man!

DRAW!: I look at all the Silver Age and the Golden Age guys, and a lot of them didn’t get their originals back, or didn’t care to get their originals back, and now, anything from the ’70s is going for a gazillion dollars, and stuff from before that you can’t even touch it any more—it’s that sort of a figure. Who knows? 20 years, 30 years down the road, all of my Judge Parker stuff might be worth a lot of money just because it’s, “Wow, here’s a bunch of original art.” It just seems like that’s always the way it’s worked. I also just like having the physical original. Everything from how I trained myself comes from my sense of touching the paper, and the feeling from the pencils and pens, and the brush.

Terry Beatty is doing Rex Morgan now, and he’s doing it all in MangaStudio. I have MangaStudio, and I’ve played around with it a little bit, and it’s not like I have anything against it, but I’m still way faster traditionally than I am with anything else.

DB: There you go, that makes sense for you, then, to work that way. I know for me, it’s been a bit of a learning curve. I’m still trying to settle in on how to achieve what I’m after, but I think the thing I’m most comfortable with is generating my layouts on the Cintiq. That way I can resize and move things around at that early storytelling stage, and then I’ll print that out and light box it, and then ink that up. After I’ve scanned it, I have the opportunity to make a few tweaks or revisions if time allows. I try to get it right on the board. But yes, knowing I have that piece of original art is comforting to me.

For the young guys I use a F pencil on Strathmore Vellum Bristol. A Series Seven #2 brush mostly. Higgins ink. Then I import it into a Mac via a Brother scanner with a 11" x 17" scan bed. Start saving now!

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In with the In Crowd

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by Mike Manley and Bret Blevins

igurative artists—especially cartoonists, animators, and illustrators—in pursuit of their work constantly face a wide variety of challenges when creating visual narratives such as illustrations, comics strips, storyboards, and comic pages which depict the human figure in various scenarios.

Composing pictures with even one or two figures can tax an artist’s compositional skills in getting the pose right, looking for a good angle, or choosing something that’s dynamic and visually interesting but also clear. The more complex the image, the more the artist has to pay attention to compositional issues such as being careful to avoid tangents.

When you add multiple figures—let’s say four or more figures—into a scene or a single composition, then things can become complicated very fast. The complexity of the composition and the primary issue of strong and clear staging of the figures for good storytelling in the scene then takes extra work and planning to make the composition and staging both clear as well as interesting.

Artists have wrestled with multiple figure compositions for hundreds, even thousands of years. With the invention of perspective in the Renaissance in the 14th century, artists were able to create pictures with the visual depth and complexity of real life and had a greater ability to make more realistic and illusionistic space.

Multiple figure compositions have been with us since the beginning of visual art by humans, for they were seen in the cave drawings by our ancestors featuring hunters and their prey they hunted, animals that were important to them and their survival. These were mankind’s first stories. When we jump 20,000 years to Michelangelo’s great Sistine Chapel, ad we find another grand example of dynamic multiple-figure compositions telling stories of God and man and stories from the Bible and history.

Michelangelo had the entire ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to play with his figures, but we humble cartoonists and illus-

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trators have a less grand canvas to play with, yet we still deal with the same issues of multiple figures in space as well as Gods of Thunder and figures of great ability. Team books— comics filled with teams of battling heroes—is a standard.

X-Men, Fantastic Four, and Justice League are just a few examples of comics that have a lot of panels and pages featuring multiple characters fighting and battling each other.

Some artists seem to revel in this type of comic. Jack Kirby, George Pérez, John Byrne, and John Buscema handled these types of comics with multiple-figure action well. But these types of comics can be a lot of hard work and the complexity of the compositions can trip up the artist as a result.

In dealing with comics or illustrated stories that have many figures, you must work a lot harder at the layout stage. The type of script—full script or plot—also makes a difference in the amount of space the dialogue will take up. If it’s a full script then right away the artist knows who is speaking and how much room the dialogue will take up. If it’s a plot to be scripted later, that means the artist must plan spaces into the composition to allow multiple characters’ dialogue to be scripted later by the writer.

Whether it’s a scene in a bar, the cabin of a starship, the hero’s secret hideout, or a restaurant, in team books we often have scenes with multiple characters sitting in non-action poses, talking away to reveal a plot or story points. Interior scenes with a group of characters are a bit more difficult due to the fact that you do not have the visual motion of characters moving in dynamic poses in the compositions, and often the interiors are smaller in nature, such as a kitchen table, so they are not always in spectacular settings.

Then there are the battle scenes featuring multiple characters in grand landscapes fighting it out with each other.

While these scenes offer the artist many opportunities to give the reader wild moments and spectacle, they also tend to be extremely complicated when trying to make everything not only clear but dynamic.

Here are a few concepts and lessons to learn from artists who handle this type of work well:

The Map Staging from above for clarity. One of the best ways to stage a crowd scene is to raise the camera angle up so we are looking down on the scene we are drawing. This gives us a landscape view of the scene, or what I call “the map.” In this great illustration by Albert Dorne for The Saturday Evening Post we can see Dorne has employed the map to help separate the crowd of kids cheering on the soap box racers. Dorne built the illustration in three clear groupings. The kinds in the foreground, the leading racer, and the kids behind the racer who mass together in a clear shape/layer. This helps keep the grouping of figures clear as shape masses.

Dorne paid a lot of attention to the way each massed grouping laid on top of another to avoid tangents and shape/layer confusion. Dorne was an expert at this type of illustration and a leader in the field for decades.

Avengers © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Dorne also employed the perspective grid to work everything out like a stage in this illustration. By working out his perspective correctly, it allowed him to drop out the ground and still have the figures feel planted and not floating in space.

The map and grid is employed here in this splash page from the Avengers by George Pérez. Pérez built his career and appeal to fans on scenes like this. Pérez takes care to work out and layer each character on top of the other, almost like the old Colorforms puzzles where you laid each figure carefully over an intricate “Where’s Waldo” type of background. Fans enjoy searching his richly filled, multi-character scenes.

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Hanging figures on the same horizon line In this page from JLA/Avengers (right) Pérez employs both the map (panel 3) and the cheat of hanging the figures on the horizon line (panels 2 and 3).

The cheat here is hanging or placing all of the standing figures’ waists on the horizon line. This is sort of like a telephoto lens shot which compresses space. Each layer or grouping of figures receding or placed behind another has their waist cross the horizon line at the same height. This assumes most characters here are approximately the same height and is a great way to “chart” your perspective without having to employ the grid. Many of us comic artists and illustrators learned this from Andrew Loomis’ book Creative Illustration (as seen below), which lucky for all of us in now back in print—go get yourself a copy now!

Silhouettes/ Contrast A great way of making figures read in a crowd is by separating the main or important figures from the crowd by playing with the contrast. Here is a great illustration by Albert Dorne from The Saturday Evening Post in which he employs contrast as a simple way to separate the figures into two distinct levels (foreground and background). Look how clearly the figure in the doorway “reads” as a shape against the crowd in the background.

The gesture of his pose reads so fantastically clear as a silhouette against the soldiers inside of the room. This also adds drama and interest to the illustration without adding confusion.

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Contrast was also used in this panel from Tarzan by Hal Foster (right) as a way to separate the humans from the apes. The humans have very little blacks on them, while the apes read almost as solid black shapes framing the humans. This also helps the apes appear more threatening. Foster also posed each of the apes with distinctive poses that established individuality within the group.

Tarzan © Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.

All characters © DC Comics

In this cover from my run on Batman (left), I employed the cheat from Loomis but slightly louvered the camera to make Batgirl’s figure even more dominant.

I also employed the ideas of contrast on the figures, keeping Batgirl mostly dark and the hero group lighter, and used the background as a design element to focus the composition down to the heroes’ expressions.

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overlap, pains have been taken to ensure that nothing important is obscured. The size and placement of each character has been very deliberately chosen to create a natural sense of variety—tall or short, thin or heavy, different clothing—and the dark shapes have been set against light shapes with great care to both create a visual rhythm and add variety.

All characters © DC Comics

ffective composition is the essence of a convincing image depicting multiple figures, especially if they are engaged in specific and interrelated action. The simplest method to indicate a group is to line them up next to each other (top right).

Simple variation of size suggests more depth and is slightly more interesting, but still doesn’t suggest any relationship between the individuals, aside from proximity (bottom right).

The key to a pleasing and convincing grouping of figures is carefully arranged overlapping. This involves all the basic elements of design: size, placement, shapes, rhythm (guided by the tenets of storytelling), viewpoint, character, situation, acting, mood, emotion, and body language/posing. Multiple figures (and props) increase the complexity of the problems that need to be solved, but the challenge becomes easier with practice.

Avoiding tangents while achieving a natural sense of gesture and attitude is the main task. It can be a bit like assembling a puzzle. In this example from a Batman Beyond storyboard (below), all the pet owners have been composed and drawn over a pre-existing background, in this case a veterinarian's office. The pets are being agitated by a sonic disturbance only they can hear, so the distress of the animals and the concern and confusion of the owners dictated the acting and posing.

Look this image over carefully and you will find that each element has been staged for clarity—where people or objects

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Here’s another storyboard frame—this one from Justice League Unlimited (top right)—that features a truck-out revealing a large group of heroes. Looking down on the scene from above allows more of each figure to be seen clearly, and even though there is no action and almost no variety in posing, careful arrangement of the overlapping shapes creates a convincing sense of power and nobility. You can see how carefully they were arranged by comparing the drawing with the silhouette chart (below right). All the figures are still readable as flat diagrams because the overlapping parts were designed with great care.

Compositions usually begin with a strong feeling about the impact or mood to be conveyed. In these masterful illustrations by Howard Pyle (below and next page), the charts accent some of the underlying elements that dictated the composition. The battle scene (bottom left) is structured around clashing diagonals, as seen in the outline chart (bottom middle). I’m sure that before he reached this stage of planning though, Pyle’s first doodles were focused on something akin to the second chart (bottom right), which is a loose indication of the essential rhythm, the large movement that “grabs” and conveys the primary feeling of the drama. Establishing this groundwork first will always help the process by keeping your explorations, design choices, posing, and structuring focused along a conceptual “track” to follow.

All characters © DC Comics

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The chart of the pirate piece reveals the strong simple underlying horizontal masses that create the striking division of space, and form the bold contrast with the upright pirates who are dividing treasure among the expectant crew.

This humorous movie poster image

by Frank Frazetta is bursting with riotous kinetic energy, but the picture is very carefully constructed and the forms and shapes are precisely woven together to create a controlled visual effect of wild pandemonium. The underlying structure is more apparent in the posterized version, but in the simplified overlay shape chart you can see the large rhythm that supports and dictates the detailed posing and rendering of this busy but clearly staged scene.

The characters are carefully posed to support the big sweeping movement across the scene from left to right, anchored by the more rigid upright shapes of the central figures in the bed and the lower figure of the small girl, who has a “tail” shape of an opposing arc that strengthens the large main one by creating a subtle directional contrast.

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This illustration by Frank Godwin (right) shows him to be a master of overlapping clear silhouetted gestures that feel completely natural and “right.” There is so much complexity in the scene—people, horses, dogs, and a motorcycle—all grouped into a beautiful clear pattern that reads visually with no effort at all. This image was printed across two pages of a magazine, hence the open area down the center to account for the stapled spine, but the two halves are very cleverly linked here by the dog leashes at the bottom and the simplified background shapes at the top. The blunted tonal chart reveals how well this piece is composed—the little white spaces between the carefully drawn and arranged forms are so important, and beautifully placed.

This wonderful illustration (left) is by Perry Peterson. The chart reveals how simple the underlying concept is.

The large foreground figure leads the eye up across the arc of the other character’s heads, where all the emotional storytelling is taking place. Simple and powerful.

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In this group of vignetted figures by Noel Sickles (right), the subtlety of posing and the wonderful relaxed body language is doing most of the work, but the careful attention to shape and rhythm is what gives the piece its visual “sparkle.” Notice how striking the shape patterns are when accented inverting the dark and light pattern.

Prince Valiant © King Features Syndicate, Inc.

In this famous page from the second year of Prince Valiant, (below), Hal Foster shows us why he’ll never be equaled.

The clarity of this heroic depiction of Val fighting and defeating an entire band of Vikings is stunning—so clearly and forcefully conveyed with such minimal rendering.

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I’ve included a group of brilliant compositions by Frank Craig (above), all depicting very prosaic scenes—no action to speak of in most of the images, just characters walking, standing, or sitting, but what inventive divisions of space and arrangement of overlapping forms! He often strings the important element— the character’s heads— along a horizontal band high in the frame, and drops the supporting shapes of the figure’s bodies down into the picture plane, creating dynamic cross-shaped designs and bold negative shapes. Yet the compositions never feel forced or contrived. The viewer is effortlessly convinced that if he or she were present, the scene would appear just as Craig has conveyed it.

There is much to be learned by careful study of these images—which are just shy of a hundred years old!

This strange drawing is from an educational interactive electronic book featuring one of the animated versions of Batman.

These figures were overlaid onto a background, but here you see them isolated, which makes it easier to spot the careful posing that avoids tangents. The Joker’s gang are identically dressed, but their gestures are varied to make them seem alive and not too mechanically posed.

All characters © DC Comics

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The bold poster-like coloring of this Herbert Paus illustration (right) could be confusing if the forms weren’t so carefully composed, but the design is so strong and precisely constructed that it reads beautifully.

Russell Patterson was a master of flat pattern. This wildly crowded scene (below) is handled with such a deft combination of boldness and elegance that it just flows effortlessly. I could look at this one every day!

Frederic Chapman flawlessly arranges carefully overlapped figures to create these breezy scenes (above).

The linework and color really couldn’t be any simpler here, yet the artwork is so effortlessly effective.

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This pencil layout from Martians Go Home is atypical because the point of the scene is the illusion of disorganized chaos—a wall of Martians pressing forward around the hapless Earthling. Only one Martian’s body is visible—the others are a mad jumble of heads mashed together—but the composition still must read clearly. In this rough state you can see how much attention and time was spent arranging the angle and position of each head so that there is no actual confusion—just the carefully organized impression of confusion.

These last examples (above and left) are particularly suited to the purpose of this article—these were from an aborted project about a family visiting New York’s Chinatown district, written by Louise Simonson. The warmth and humor of Weezie’s writing always bring out the best in me, and I had a lot of fun with these characters. Though still in the pencil layout stage, these pages are brimming with crowded scenes and intricate storytelling told through staging, but especially, in this case, through expressive acting and gesture.

An important aspect of the principles we’ve been discussing is that good composing sets the stage for the most effective communication. It presents the vital information in a way that effortlessly assimilates the story into the viewer’s consciousness. If you study these pages closely you will find many simultaneous character interactions and storytelling squeezed into these busy panels, but not (I hope) in an obtrusive or clumsy manner. As we’ve seen in the many examples printed throughout the article, to achieve this effect of spontaneous natural ease requires a great deal of knowledge and a lot of hard work, but that’s the visual storytelling artist’s job—to do the work so the reader/viewer doesn’t have to!

See you next time...

Mike and Bret

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“’80s Independents!” In-depth looks at PAUL CHADWICK’s Concrete, DAVE SIM’s Cerebus the Aardvark, and RICHARD AND WENDY PINI’s Elfquest! Plus see ‘80s independent comics go Hollywood, DAVID SCROGGY remembers Pacific Comics, TRINA ROBBINS’ California Girls, and DENIS KITCHEN’s star-studded horror/sci-fi anthology Death Rattle. Cover by PAUL CHADWICK!

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SWAMPMEN: MUCK-MONSTERS OF THE COMICS dredges up Swamp Thing, ManThing, Heap, and other creepy man-critters of the 1970s bayou! Features interviews with WRIGHTSON, MOORE, PLOOG, WEIN, BRUNNER, GERBER, BISSETTE, VEITCH, CONWAY, MAYERIK, ORLANDO, PASKO, MOONEY, TOTLEBEN, YEATES, BERGER, SANTOS, USLAN, KALUTA, THOMAS, and others. FRANK CHO cover!

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1940s WILL EISNER/”BUSY” ARNOLD letters between the creator of The Spirit and his Quality Comics partner, art and artifacts by FINE, CRANDALL, CUIDERA, CARDY, KOTZKY, BLUM, NORDLING, and others! Plus Golden Age MLJ artist JOHN BULTHIUS, more of AMY KISTE NYBERG’s History of the Comics Code, FCA, Mr. Monster, BILL SCHELLY, cover by DANIEL JAMES COX and JASON PAULOS!

CAROL L. TILLEY on Dr. Fredric Wertham’s falsification of his research in the 1950s, featuring art by EVERETT, SHUSTER, PETER, BECK, COSTANZA, WEBB, FELDSTEIN, WILLIAMSON, WOOD, BIRO, and BOB KANE! Plus AMY KISTE NYBERG on the evolution of the Comics Code, FCA, Mr. Monster, BILL SCHELLEY, and a new cover by JASON PAULOS and DANIEL JAMES COX!

Edgar Rice Burroughs adventure heroes in comics! With art by FOSTER, HOGARTH, FRAZETTA, MANNING, KANE, KUBERT, MORROW, GRELL, THORNE, WEISS, ANDERSON, KALUTA, AMENDOLA, BUSCEMA, MARSH, and YEATES—with analysis by foremost ERB experts! Plus, the 1970s ERB comics company that nearly was, FCA, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY, and more! Cover by TOM GRINDBERG!

MARVEL UNIVERSE! Featuring MARK ALEXANDER’s pivotal Lee/Kirby essay “A Universe A’Borning,” KIRBY interview, MARK EVANIER and our other regular columnists, a look at key late-1970s events in Kirby’s life and career, STAN LEE script pages, unseen Kirby pencils and unused art from THOR, NICK FURY, HULK and FANTASTIC FOUR, plus galleries of ETERNALS, BLACK PANTHER, and more!

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A WORK OF ART

DON HECK remains one of the legendary names in comics, considered an “artist’s artist,” respected by peers, and beloved by fans as the co-creator of IRON MAN, HAWKEYE, and BLACK WIDOW, and key artist on THE AVENGERS. Along with STAN LEE, JACK KIRBY, and STEVE DITKO, Heck was an integral player in “The Marvel Age of Comics”, and a top-tier 1970s DC Comics artist. He finally gets his due in this heavily illustrated, full-color hardcover biography, which features meticulously researched and chronicled information on Don’s 40-year career, with personal recollections from surviving family, long-time friends, and industry legends, and rare interviews with Heck himself. It also features an unbiased analysis of sales on Don’s DC Comics titles, an extensive art gallery (including published, unpublished, and pencil artwork), a Foreword by STAN LEE, and an Afterword by BEAU SMITH. Written by JOHN COATES.