Draw #29 Preview by TwoMorrows Publishing

#29 FALL 2014 $8.95 IN THE US

The Professional “How-To” Magazine on Comics, Cartooning and Animation

Batman TM & © DC Comics.

ILLUSTRATOR EXTRAORDINAIRE

PRODUCER AND DIRECTOR OF THE CULT HIT BLACK DYNAMITE

PLUS! REGULAR COLUMNIST

AND MIKE MANLEY AND BRET BLEVINS’

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THE PROFESSIONAL “HOW-TO” MAGAZINE ON COMICS & CARTOONING WWW.DRAW-MAGAZINE.BLOGSPOT.COM FALL 2014, VOL. 1, #29 Editor-in-Chief • Michael Manley Managing Editor and Designer • Eric Nolen-Weathington Publisher • John Morrow Logo Design • John Costanza Front Cover • Dave Dorman DRAW! FALL 2014, Vol. 1, No. 29 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

DAVE DORMAN

The master illustrator wields his brush like a Jedi master as he demos his unique process

comic art bootcamp This month’s installment: Concept & Design

LESEAN THOMAS

RIGHT WAY, WRONG WAY—ORDWAY!

Jamar Nicholas interviews the renaissance man of animation

Challengers of the Collaboration

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DRAW! FALL 2014

Mike Manley Jon Knutson

interview conducted by and transcribed by

At this moment in our very own galaxy…

Draw!: So, what are you working on today? Dave Dorman: Today, I’ve got some juggling on a couple of things. I’m putting together a small art book for San Diego, featuring some of my Aliens and Predator artwork. It’s all production work—just gathering the art, putting it together, getting it ready for the printer, and sending it out tomorrow. I’m also laying out a comic book story, a 20-page comic that’s going to also be available at San Diego, featuring some characters from my Wasted Lands graphic novel project. The comic book is called Red Tide, and it’s a prequel to a three-issue series we’re going to do in the fall.

ave Dorman is an Eisner Award-winner, an Inkpot Award-winner, and a favorite among Star Wars fans—including George Lucas himself! He’s worked on practically every major science-fiction, fantasy, and horror licensed property at one point or another, and he’s learned a thing or two about slinging oil paint. So gather ’round, young Draw!: And are you publishing this yourself? padawans, as the master teaches us the ways of the DD: Yeah, I’m doing the whole thing myself. I have a writing partner, Mike Bawden, who’s doing the scripting, but I’m Illustrator. DRAW! FALL 2014

(left) Dave: “‘The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan’” was commissioned for a book on fantastical places. From the start I wanted to do something different for this piece. The first was not to show Khan from the front. The piece is about the pleasure dome, not him. But I wanted it to exude strength and eroticism. This is the pencil art for the 20" x 30" painting.” (right) Dave: “After I transfer the drawing I begin the oil underpainting, adding textures in the paint by pulling the paint form the board and using the transparency of the oils and white of the board to add depth to the background.” The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan © Dave Dorman

plotting it and doing all of the artwork and production, and sending it off to the printer. I’m laying out the pages right now so I can start on the pencil work tomorrow. I’m also juggling a couple of logistic things for San Diego, and intending to go to Austin for the Capital City Convention—I’m working on that. So basically, partial art, partial business. Draw!: Is that a fairly typical day for you, to have the business side, and then the art side? DD: No, that usually happens maybe two or three times a month. Most of my actual work time is penciling, drawing, sketching, preparing the artwork—that type of thing. This type of book production stuff comes up occasionally, I’d say maybe three or four times a year. Mostly around this time, in the late spring/early summer, getting ready for San Diego and the convention season. I look to have new product out for when I attend the shows. So, that’s usually when this type of thing happens. But my regular work day would be get up,

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check my email, see if anybody’s ordered anything, answer fans’ questions, and then get to drawing, whether it’s drawing preliminary roughs, doing a layout, getting a painting ready, or actually sitting down and laying paint on the board. Draw!: Do you have a fixed schedule, as far as you’re usually up by a certain time, to work by a certain time, or do you sort of roll with the deadlines? DD: It’s rolling with the deadlines. I have a son in elementary school, so during the school year, it’s getting him up and off to school, and that’s the start of the day. It used to be, before we had Jack, our son, I’d get up and basically just start working, and then take a break for lunch or whatever. If there are some errands or things to be done around the house, then come back and just work again until it’s time to go to bed. But with my son it changes—good changes—the whole day, and as a matter of fact, I had to adjust the schedule to fit family life. So I work a little bit more at night, when everyone’s gone to bed, and the house is quiet.

(left) Dave: “Two more layers of underpainting give me a solid base to work from.” (right) Dave: “I begin rendering the details, this time mostly in oils as I want to be able to blend parts of them back into the background while it is still wet.” The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan © Dave Dorman

Draw!: I take it you don’t pull too many all-nighters anymore, unless it’s an extreme deadline? DD: Unless it’s a very extreme deadline, I don’t pull an allnighter. Yeah, I find that pulling all-nighters causes a lot of anxiety, obviously, because you know you’re running late, so I just basically try my best to stay on schedule, make sure that I know when the deadline’s going to hit. After 30 years in the business, I’m pretty good at approximating how long any particular piece is going to take, so I know that if it’s going to be close to a deadline, I need to work another hour or two at night to make sure I can hit those deadlines. I’m getting a little bit too old to pull those all-nighters. Draw!: [laughs] Yeah. The other thing is I know sometimes when you push the all-nighter, you also run the risk of making a mistake that takes you actually longer to go back and correct, where if you just stop and get a little rest, you would actually move much faster, and you would avoid... DD: Sure. You just don’t want to compromise the integrity of the art. You don’t want to send anything out of the studio

that you’re not happy with. If I haven’t learned my lessons through the years in the industry now, I’m never going to learn. I learned very early on it’s better to paint when you’re rested then when you’re falling asleep and ending up with a forehead covered in oil paint from dropping on the drawing board while you’re snoring away. Draw!: Do you give yourself time after you’ve finished a job to get away from it to look at it before you send it out, or does that really just depend on how hot the deadline is? DD: Exactly, it depends on how close the deadline is. Usually, I would take a day or two to let it set, so that I can turn away from it, and then come back with a fresh eye and make sure that it’s exactly what I wanted, whether additional detail needs to be made, or colors need to be adjusted, or something to make it just a little bit tighter, and a little bit more of what the client expects. Obviously, some of the things now, with the digital technology, I can sort of paint to a point, and then not have to worry about maybe shifting a color a little bit, or doing a little bit darker tonal thing on the page. I can just

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(above) Dave: “I adjust some of the background to reflect the cherry blossom coloring and detailing I will be adding in the next step. I have intentionally left a lot of the background less detailed, as I will be covering it up in the next step.” (next page) Dave: “With the painted art finished, I scan it in and have a digital copy. At this point I add the cherry blossoms digitally, layering them from back to front to help give a depth in them and also to the painting itself.” The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan © Dave Dorman

scan it in and do that digitally very quickly without having to repaint an area, or lay on an overcoat of transparent paint to go change that tone. I can do it in the computer a little bit easier, so the digital thing has made it easier on the back end of the painting. Draw!: I remember reading—it was in the last year or so— on Facebook, you were asking people about scanners. I guess the pulse was about digital painting, and how that was a big deal for some of your clients, like they wanted you to do the art because they like your work, but then thought that you were digital, but you aren’t digital. DD: It just started out as an interest in digital work because, I’d say about 15 years ago, I started encountering a lot of young guys who were coming out of school who knew my work, and wanted to talk to me about work. Most of these

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young artists were traditional painters, but they were also educated in digital mediums. So, I started talking with them, and experiencing what digital was doing. I really hadn’t thought about incorporating digital at all into my repertoire of media until three or four years ago. This was, like I say, back around the late 1990s/early 2000s, and digital “started raising its ugly head.” [laughter] I started experiencing it more and more, and I started playing with it on my artwork, because at that time, I was already scanning my artwork into digital files for the publishers, rather than me having to send my original artwork to them, since they were going to digitize them anyway. It’d gotten to the point where I just wanted a large format scanner to scan my pieces in, and send them to the publisher. Then I started learning about little tweaks that could be made to the pieces. It was a slow learning process for me, as far as after-image digital manipulation was concerned. But I never thought that I would have to create an image from a blank canvas to a fully rendered piece digitally, because in my world—and I think, in most artists’ worlds—the image is what speaks for the artist. The image is what is. It doesn’t matter how you got there, it doesn’t matter what medium you use, as long as the image is good, it’s what the client wants, and they can use it for whatever they have their purposes for. Then, about three or four years ago, I got a couple of calls in a row—and if this would’ve happened maybe two or years separate, I wouldn’t have made too much of it, but it happened within like a month or two of each other. I got two calls from two companies. Both art directors liked my work quite a bit, and wanted to hire me to do these projects. These were two separate companies. And we got into the conversation with my art, and what they wanted, what they expected from me, and the first art director said, “Okay, so you’re working digitally, so we can get these digital files.” And I said, “No, I’m working traditionally and scan my work in and give you digital files.” He said, “Oh, so you don’t work digitally?” I said, “No, I don’t.” He said, “Well, we’re really looking for a digital artist for this project.” And I really didn’t know what to say at this point, because the art speaks for itself. Draw!: And once you scan it in, it’s digital anyway, so what difference would it make, right? DD: Well, yeah! Exactly! And that was my interpretation of things. But, this happened, and then almost the exact same thing happened about a month later, and I lost the second job because I wasn’t doing my artwork in a digital fashion, from a blank piece to a finished piece. So, I started thinking about this, and it occurred to me, in talking with a lot of artists nowadays, probably about a third of the artists I know are strictly digital artists; they don’t do traditional art at all, and have never done traditional art. We have a generation—or probably two generations now—of artists who have never really put pencil to paper to any extent, or put paint on board to any extent. The whole creative process is through the computer! So, they don’t really grasp that traditional art is just as viable as digital art.

week on it. Ideally, with deadlines, I like to have a week per painting. But there’re some deadlines where I need to turn it over quick, and I can turn it over just as quickly. Draw!: And you can even do it like Frazetta, and put it in the oven and bake it! [laughs] DD: Bake it? Draw!: Bake your painting, if you need to to speed the drying! Kidding of course. DD: We’ll get into how I get my pieces done quickly later in the interview. I can finish a painting, actually putting oil paint on a board, and have it literally dry and ready to scan in an hour. These are just techniques I’ve learned over the years. But the digital thing? It’s lost me a couple of jobs, so what I did, a year ago or so, I started asking on Facebook and through some social media things, “Guys who are doing digital stuff, give me some tips. What do I need to know? What programs do I need to know?” I played with Wacom tablets, and the eye-hand thing where you’re drawing somewhere but you’re having to look elsewhere just didn’t do it for me. Then they invented this Cin-

tiq, which is the tablet that you’re actually painting on so you can see where you’re painting, so it’s more natural. I did eventually get a Cintiq. I have one in the studio here. It’s been sitting here for two months, and I haven’t touched it yet. [laughter] Draw!: Did you get the arm for it, so you can move it around? DD: It’s on a platform that sort of tilts. It gives me everything I would need. But it’s a process of learning a whole new tool, and I’m an old dog. I can still learn some new tricks, but it’s going to take me a little bit longer to learn those new tricks. Draw!: And you don’t want to have to learn it on a deadline. DD: Well, that’s exactly right. So, I just need two or three weeks to sit and play with it, and see what it can do, talk to some friends. Jon Foster, a very good friend of mine, I’ve known him since he was one of those young kids coming out of school, doing both traditional and digital, and he’s been a very big help for me with information and how to approach digital work, even taking partially done traditional paintings and scanning them in and finishing them in digital. Guys like Jon are very helpful, and have been, and I’m looking forward

(left) Dave: “Original inks for page 22 on 11" x 17" Bristol board. I ink with a Hunt bowl tip dip pen and Black Magic ink.” (right) Dave: “I painted the color in the old blue line style, meaning the painted color is on a separate board and the black line art is mechanically placed on top of the colored art. In this case the color was scanned and then married to the black line art in Photoshop. Wasted Lands © Dave Dorman

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Dave: “Move ahead 13 years.... I have decided to finally revisit my Rail graphic novel and this time finish the five-novel series left undone those many years back. However, I have kept working on the world of Wasted Lands and Rail and have made a few minor and some major changes—one of the most visual is that I redesigned the bad guys’ motorbikes. Below is my new design for the Hollow Men bikes. I knew it was a complicated design and I would have problems with perspectives on it, so I contacted my good friend and 3-D designer Dave Taylor and asked him to render me a bike in 3-D so I could maneuver the image for proper drawing.”

(bottom left) “Dave Taylor’s initial rendering of the bike. An amazing job that my life so much easier!” (left and right) “Making the changes in the bike panels on a separate page of Bristol. I took this into Photoshop and merged the new art onto the old page.”

Wasted Lands © Dave Dorman

to gaining more information as I move into the digital. As a commercial artist, I can’t lose work because I can’t work in a particular medium.

eye, to the layman who’s looking at the packaging of a product or a movie poster, these technicians are faking it and bringing down the overall quality of what commercial art should be.

Draw!: If you think back to the ’50s, when modern art really started affecting illustration, you had that whole generation, Bernie Fuchs, Bob Peak, and all those guys messing around and working on different ways to try to be more modern. That’s kind of what killed Leyendecker’s career. He did fantastic work, but his work looked like a certain era. But if you told someone it was digital, they might not be able to tell it wasn’t digital! They’d just say, “Oh, yeah, these are all digital,” because in the end you’re not supposed to be able to tell, for the most part, if it’s digital or “tradigital.” DD: Let me just bring up something else that’s really bitten my butt over the last ten years, and I’m sure that your butt has some bite marks on it too—so have a lot of traditional artists— which is the commonality of programs that are able to produce styles and techniques with the click of a button. They get into the hands of people who now, because it makes “art” easy, we have these people taking away jobs from trained, talented commercial artists, and that itself is a product of this digital world. I call these artists “technicians,” because they’re not artists. They know the programs, and they can fake art, and to the untrained

Draw!: I agree. Part of my thesis for my Master’s touched on some of that. You really see it if you go into a Barnes & Noble and look at the paperback covers. They’re all photos that somebody is tweaking in Painter or Photoshop. They’re putting filters on it to make it look like an illustration, but it’s actually just a photograph that they doctored up. DD: Right, and that’s what makes them technicians and not artists. They can do that quickly. They can go to an online stock photo house, get a photo, somebody else’s magic little sparkles in the background, then go to another photo stock and buy a castle, and then put them together in Photoshop, and make some colors over it, and add some fancy type, and there’s your book cover.

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Draw!: I was in the supermarket the other day, and I went past where they have their pathetic rack of books, and there was a bunch of whatever the current Tom Clancy kind of thing is, and it looked like a photo of the White House with some helicopters they’d popped in, and they put some filters on it, and they smudged it, and blurred it, and then you leave

(left) Dave: “An absolutely fun project fell into my hands when I was asked to do a tribute to the amazing Winsor McCay and his creation Little Nemo. I have been a fan of Mccay’s since I don’t know how long. His controlled pen line work was a great inspiration to me in my own pen work. So I jumped at the chance to say “thank you” to one of the great illustrators of the 20th century. This piece is the small rough idea for my Nemo vignette.” (right) Dave: “I took my rough into the computer to do a quick color comp to guide me in my thoughts—even though later I wound up throwing it out!” Artwork © Dave Dorman

I do commercial artwork as a living, so the time that I spend when I do continuous panel stuff, I don’t have need to worry about a deadline. I don’t have to crank out 30 pages in a month. I don’t have to worry about whether a panel looks right or not to be able to finish the page. I can take the time to make sure that panel looks right, because I don’t have a deadline. I’m drawing for me. If I end up doing one of my strips for, say, Dave Elliott wanted for Monster Massacre, something like that, I have a deadline, but I make sure it’s a long enough deadline for me. If I’m doing twelve pages, I have three or four months to do twelve pages. So, I can take the time to make each panel right, taking photo reference, or looking for photo reference on the Internet, or whatever, to make sure that what I’m rendering is what I want. But your average comic guy can do that, your average comic artist can render a comic book every two months, that’s a lot of work. It’s not a habit any more, like the old strip guys used to do, doing seven strips in a couple of days. Draw!: Well, almost every single one of those guys had a background assistant. Leonard Starr had Tex Blaisdell. I know Blaisdell used to do backgrounds for other guys. I collect that

stuff, because I love the classic strips. Al had Carlos Garzon help him on Star Wars, because just drawing C-3PO, there’s no way you can do him fast! [laughter] Or R2-D2, those things are so tech-heavy. Even trying to simplify something like the Millennium Falcon is work to simplify something complex. DD: Right, I agree with you 100%. It just depends on the artist, but you find very few of that type of artist working in the medium today. Draw!: Well, there’re only a few continuity strips left. One of them I do, Judge Parker, and I was looking at some of my Leonard Starr originals the other day, thinking about how they were printed about five times larger than my strip, and also it doesn’t pay me enough money to afford a guy who’s lettering, or hire a guy to say, “Here’s a reference, go draw those cars and trucks. I’ll lay it out, but then I’ll give it to somebody else.” Even in the old days of illustration, part of your pay that was built in was the model fee! The guys, they would go to the same photographer. That’s why everybody says Steve Holland was on every single paperback cover! DD: He was the go-to guy!

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Design C

by Mike Manley and Bret Blevins

oncept Art is an ever growing field that today plays an important role in every film, television program, video game, and yes—comic book. Look at the recent Marvel movies as an example. The core visuals are built on the visual language and designs of the great Marvel artists, but especially Jack Kirby and the hundreds of comics he drew in his teaming with Stan Lee during the prime Marvel period. The initial character and concept designs for the Marvel Universe are chiefly the result of this visual dynamo, one of the most important artists of the 20th century, whose work fuels the fantasy designs of the 21st century.

Every cartoon I have worked on has contained as part of the design pack a style guide for backgrounds and character designs, etc. It is essential in the early parts of the development of a show to get everybody on the same visual wavelength. You can’t have the dozens of artists working on the cartoon running in every different direction, and in the movies and video games you now sometimes have hundreds if not thousands of artists spread across the globe working on the same project. In the very earliest stages of the design and concept process of a movie or video game, the artists, art directors, and people in charge of visual development pull together style boards to help create the visual talking points that lead to the building blocks that form these new universes. Ralph McQuarrie’s concept illustrations for Star Wars (1977) are probably the best example of the way modern filmmaking employs the use of this concept of creating a grand visual narrative in the preproduction story stage. Some companies may even go further, as Disney did with Mulan, by sending the development team to a location— in Mulan’s case, China—to One of Kirby’s concepts that’s become a major visual backbone of Marvel’s do research, to draw, sketch, 21st century movies is the S.H.I.E.L.D. and take pictures for authenhelicarrier seen in its original design ticity. In the case of Mulan, a (left) and the Avengers and Captain very important story and herAmerica movie version (above). oine in Chinese culture, DisS.H.I.E.L.D. © Marvel Characters, Inc. ney wanted to get the visual The Avengers © Marvel Studios. details correct.

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(above) Star Wars is a massively influential film that has spun out culturally, and its world was built on the “style boards” of Flash Gordon and the comics and sci-fi movies that influenced and thrilled George Lucas as a child. C-3PO is just one example of a major character in Star Wars that came from a visual inspiration or style board from another source. In C-3PO’s case, it was Maria, the robotic woman from Fritz Lang’s silent movie classic Metropolis (1927), which sparked the initial idea. (top right) One of Ralph McQuarrie’s first Star Wars concept illustrations featuring one of his original designs for C-3PO. (right) C-3PO in the final form we have all grown to love. Star Wars © Lucasfilm Ltd.

Building Your Style Board

A great way to start developing your ideas, no matter the medium, is to start by spending time building what are called style boards or inspiration boards. Graphic designers and fashion artists employ these collections—almost a visual collage of images, textures, fabrics, texts, etc.—to create an overall “style” in which to visually illustrate the work they want to create. Interior designers will employ this as a way to show a client how the new interiors will look. Pinterest is basically a web-based style board. It’s often hard to just pull ideas out of the either. Even the great Jack Kirby, who was ten times as imaginative as the normal artist, would find inspiration for some of his fantastic machinery from household objects like his wife’s hairdryer. Even the most fantastic designs are better if they are based on something real. To start making your style board, I suggest you spend some time being sort of a detective for your project. Think about the who, where, why, what, and when of your ideas. Write these notes down and review them, make lists. You can break things down into figures, backgrounds, interiors, exteriors, etc. Once you have these lists, you can then start hunting down your visual reference. Google is of course a fantastic resource and search engine, but knowing how to ask for something in more than one way is also essential. I still recommend going to your local library and asking for help to research your list of ideas. There is more and more on the Internet every day, but not everything is online, and there are many, many research books and references that line the shelves of your local library.

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Organization

The next step, once you have your pile of visual information, is to start organizing it into folders that then you can use to build your style boards. Once you have the folder filled, it’s a snap to make a series of collage boards for the different subjects for your project:

CEO An elf. Elves are tall, slender, graceful humanoids with brightly-colored eyes and pointy ears. They’re pretty, but they’re also alien and often a little threatening. Elves come in skin colors ranging from light green to pale blue, through the spectrum of “normal” skin colors. Elves’ eyes come in whatever color you can think of, which contributes to their alien appearance. I’d like to splice the familiar J.R.R. Tolkien elves with earlier Germanic elf mythology—so, our elves are tall and graceful and have a magic connection to nature, but they’re also cruel, superior, as comfortable in the dark as in the light, and nearly incapable of empathy toward non-elves. At some point I’d like to write a conversation between some characters about how in the “old days,” elves would snatch children and whisk them away into the darkness of their forest citadels—in the “old days,” elf princes would happily serve a human or orcish “piglet” at banquet, a gruesome meal eaten with finest silver, crystal glass, elegant conversation and the most tasteful furnishings. The CEO can be a man or woman, I’m not particular there. The only specifics I have in mind are that the CEO has extensive neural implants, which may result in an unusual haircut/style, and that he/she should have clothes that look like they cost more than you make in a year, a combination of elven robes and corporate chic. For acting, the CEO is rich person who’s always been rich and always will be. He/she isn’t intimidated by the Dragon punks—they’re just maggots so far as the CEO is concerned. At the time of our story, the CEO has been infected with Siren, though. Elves are all about ego—their natural gifts allow them to keep their feeling of superiority despite any odds. For elves, Siren crushes the ego—it provides too panoramic a view of time and space for them to maintain their self-importance. So, the CEO is grappling with an implosion of identity, which leads to all kinds of strange expressions/behaviors. I guess it wouldn’t be a good idea to be overly explicit about it, but the CEO should seem slightly “off” the whole time. ART NOTES: For some reason I could see this character very clearly right away. She was there from this first doodle.

There were other incidental character roughs done as well, but these characters—plus a dragon—were the elements of the first promotional image. I needed a logo so I began doodling, first filling a page with aimless unimaginative notions, then deciding I would work backward: I’d sketch out a composition for the entire scene, then let the logo design grow organically out of that. You see here how it developed, and I found a good working idea for the logo.

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Epoch © Bret Blevins Productions LLC

Boom! Goes the Dynamite

an interview with

Interview conducted by Jamar Nicholas and transcribed by Jon Knutson JAMAR NICHOLAS: Tell me a little bit about when you were in grade school. Were you a decent student, or were you distracted from always thinking about drawing? LeSean Thomas: I was always really distracted as a kid. It wasn’t that I didn’t have good grades, or that I didn’t do well in school, I just wasn’t interested. I wasn’t one of those kids that would do everything I was told. Any chance I got to draw, I would, so that got me in a lot of trouble. I got in trouble more for being mischievous, for not doing what I was told, than anything else. My friends didn’t help at all either, because they were mischievous too. And we didn’t do anything bad. We didn’t do anything super-crazy. It was primarily, “Okay, LeSean should be studying pages 247 to 263,” and you pull the textbook back, and I wouldn’t be reading, I’d be drawing. The other thing too, looking back, a lot of my teachers, as nice as they were, didn’t live in my neighborhood, so for me, there was a disconnect with the teachers I had. I knew they were important because they were white, they were somebody to be listened to and respected, but I didn’t understand why I never really related to them much. The only teacher I really related to was my art teacher, Mr. Light, and ironically, it wasn’t because

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of art—because I actually hated that class. It was just the way he treated me, and the way he would talk to me in a language I understood, if that makes any sense. He made things fun for me, he made things interesting, and it made me want to learn what I was learning in his class. And I felt like, in my other classes, there wasn’t a lot of interaction. It was, “Sit down, be quiet, read these pages.” And I didn’t know who these people were. As a kid, I was like, “Who are you? I’ll be with you eight hours a day, and then I’ll go to the real world when class is up.” I wasn’t too interested in my teachers per se, and I think it had an effect on my behavior in class. JN: I think that’s interesting. Being a teacher and knowing a lot of teachers, I don’t think a lot of teachers really think that hard about the students and where they’re really coming from, and how they interact with the teachers. It’s either you’re good or you’re not good, or you’re a problem or one of the good kids. LT: I think that’s just a by-product of our system, and I don’t want to get too deep into that, just lightly touch on that. I think it’s indicative of the culture at that time—this was the ’80s. A lot of the teachers that I had were very young, and I never really thought about them being young people, because I was so young myself. But these people were in their mid-20s, late 20s,

30s. Some of them had been there for a very long time, so obviously they were much older. My principal, Mr. Raggio, was actually in his mid-60s; he was an old dude. They didn’t come from my world; they spoke a different language than I did. It’s not a knock on them, I just felt like... it doesn’t seem like it’s changed that much today from then, but teachers, to me, were just there to get their paycheck. They weren’t paid very well. They weren’t from the neighborhood. They were from nicer neighborhoods, a lot of them, and they came to the projects in the South Bronx from 152nd between 10th and Union. They’ve got Pau Rouge, they’ve got Latin Kings—this is dangerous, B! This is the crack era. It was just get in, get out. “I don’t have time to get to know you. This is what you have to learn. Oh, you’re not learning this? There’s something wrong with you. You can’t learn, so you need to go to Special Ed class.” And it’s dumb! The system was set up to leave people behind. If you judge a person by their ability to do something that may not be in their personality or learning curve to do, and then you automatically categorize them as not being able to learn, or as inadequate, or damaged goods... I never really adhered to that. Everybody learns differently. Some people are more hands-on, other people can just read something and get it, and then other people, you kind of need to repeat it to them a bunch of times. Everyone is different. What’s that Einstein saying? “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid.” That statement is profound to me, and it correlates to a lot of these children, and I think that part of it is a cultural thing. You have a lot of teachers that are not from that culture, who are not speaking that language. The other thing is there aren’t a lot of African-American males teaching, either. Especially in my community, growing up, there weren’t a lot of African-American males. There were a lot of broken families, a lot of single-mom homes, and there weren’t a lot of black male teachers. A lot of people don’t know this about me, but after I wrapped up working on Lizzie McGuire as an assistant animator in New York City—this was before I started working on Arkanium for Dreamwave and started doing some freelance for Warner Brothers—I took some time off. I taught at a charter school in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, not too far from my apartment. I had a brownstone I lived in across the street from Boys and Girls High School, Boulson Street Subway Station. They used to have the African-American Arts Festival there in Boulson Park. I lived right across the street from that, and there was a really dope charter school right down the block from me, and I taught in an afterschool program. I didn’t have a teacher’s license, but I think my girlfriend at the time had hipped me to their looking for some extra help for afterschool, and I was like, “Oh, why not? It’ll be a cool opportunity.” So I taught there for about a year, and the whole school was run by black parents! It was crazy, and I was one of the only brothers there, you know what I mean? They had a lot of young moms, single moms, so they see a handsome 6' 3" black man handling their kids, they’re like, “Oh my God, this is what’s up!” There was a need for that, a male... I didn’t have that in my school. I think that was another reason why I felt the need to act up. It could’ve been some kind of subconscious plea, like I needed a man to put me in shape every day, because my dad was around when my mom got divorced, but he was only around at really, really important times. He wasn’t there every day. I don’t know, I think I said a lot just now, but I think it’s all tying in to a point of... because I didn’t have that attention, I used that as an opportunity to act up. It could’ve been a plea for help or attention, but just thinking about that now, for the first time in many years, I think I kind of sum it up to that. JN: All those things tie together in weird ways, when you look back at them all. I’m sure you weren’t a “bad kid.”

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moved upstate. I was the dude who would draw all of their characters for Dungeons & Dragons. I was doing that kind of stuff. When I came back, I had a penchant for fashion at that point. It was being young, just turning 18, and being legal, and fake I.D.s, and all the clubs… that whole thing. I think it was towards the end of my senior year that I decided to take it seriously. The moment escapes me, but there was a catalyst in my life that made me like, “This is what I want to do. I want to do this art thing.” And when I turned 18 and I was doing the art thing heavy, that’s when I stopped going outside, and started going to comic book conventions, and I started discovering anime, and I started really, really focusing on my art. I got a drafting table for the first time in my room. This was a big deal for me. JN: That had to be a huge thing for you. LT: That was a big deal, because up to that point, I was drawing on the floor with a lamp, or I would use a window as a lightbox. My brother and I didn’t value comics back then. We would rip out the pages and put them under looseleaf paper, and use the sunlight on the windows to trace drawings. So when I got a drafting table, it was just heavy, B. It was a big deal! “I’m a professional now! What? Come outside? I’ve got my drafting table. I’ve got my Nintendo behind me. I’ve got my snacks. I’ve got comics.” [laughter] That was me! That happened! It’s just so funny how it all turned out, but that’s when I really started taking it serious.

(above) Promo art for Aaron McGruder’s The Boondocks. (right) Sean’s model sheet for Riley, one of the main characters in The Boondocks. The Boondocks © Aaron McGruder

to an art college. Would I be the same individual? Would I be doing the same things? I don’t know. But everything happens for a reason, and everything doesn’t happen for a reason. That was pretty much my experience with high school, as far as art school was concerned. Just that whole process, and dealing with peer pressure. Especially when I came back, because after I’d moved upstate, I wasn’t drawing at all. JN: You put it down. LT: I put it down. I mean, I did a couple of illustrations here and there for some of my friends in the neighborhood. All of my friends were white. There were no black kids when I

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JN: When I got into ninth grade, I remember being overwhelmed by, like you said, being on a subway going downtown, being around all these people I’d never imagined I’d be with in the same place, and then having to turn in decent artwork. LT: It was mind-blowing, man, and it was even more weird for me that I started to have different perspectives of class and economy around that time, because to me, the Bronx was normal, and when I went to Manhattan, I was kind of like, “Man, I don’t want to go home. I like these tall buildings, and the fact that they have a 7-Eleven that has Slurpees. I’ve never seen anything like this before!” I discovered Forbidden Planet on 59th Street—a good ten-minute walk. They had two locations: the one on Union Square that kind of shifted around the same block area over the years, but there was another one on 59th between Second and Third Avenue. I used to live at that spot. The top level was classic art cover books, and figurines, and stuff like that, but downstairs was where they kept

that there are usually a couple of people who are really in it to just push the boundaries, and other people get dragged along? LT: You know, that’s interesting. That topic comes up quite a lot, and I think I’ve gotten a different perspective on that, especially when I left the country for a couple of years to live in South Korea, having that experience, working late nights, 20-hour days with Korean animators, and the Korean production system. It’s a very interesting, symbiotic relationship between Korea and America when it comes to television animation production. Every job, every place has those people, you know. There’s always the archetype, the person who has the vision and the dream and the hustle, and the aspirations to do something that’s never been done before. And then you have the person or the people who are hand-picked, who are about it, down for the cause. And then you have those people, like you mentioned, who are just kind of along for the ride. They see an opportunity—and it’s not to slight those types of people, I’ve just learned over the years that not everybody wants to be the boss, not everybody wants to tell stories. Some people are, in fact, just infatuated with drawing, and it doesn’t matter what project they work on. Coming from New York City, it’s always been about the hustle for me, like every single day. Out in L.A., everything seems a little more laid back from my point of view by comparison. So if I see someone that good, I’m automatically assuming that they’re hustling the system. Yeah, they’re doing this stuff for this guy, but the real stuff [laughs] is on the side. They have to cut off a piece for them, because they can’t spend the rest of their lives making everybody else’s dreams come true. You can’t be this good and not have your own

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thing popping off, because logic would put you in that direction, you know what I’m saying? What I’ve learned is that there are guys who are super-talented, amazingly good, and they have no aspirations to do their own stuff, for a number of reasons. They don’t want to have to deal with the politics of the industry, they’re uncomfortable with the business aspect, or they just want to draw. And some people just don’t have a story to tell! Those are the types of people that I run into a lot. But the reason I bring up the outsourcing aspect and the creative aspect is, in answer to your question, I’ve learned working with Korean animators... their culture is completely different. They’re really prideful in their work, but they’re extremely humble, in my experience—extremely humble. I’m not entirely sure where that comes from. It could be part of their culture; it could be a religious thing, a Buddhist thing. I don’t know what it is, but the type of drama I deal with, as far as talent is concerned in Korea, is nothing compared to the type of drama I deal with in Hollywood. In Hollywood, the system is established that if you’re really good, you can kind of be an asshole. It’s so prevalent that when you meet someone who’s really good, there’s a popular saying, “Man, he’s so good. Why isn’t he an asshole?” [laughter] “He should be an asshole!” Because we expect that. We’ve enabled that behavior, which is pretty sad. And I run into that all the time in Hollywood. In fact, I had culture shock when I came back to working in Hollywood, because I was so used to working around immensely talented, creative monsters who could do everything—backgrounds, props, layout, key animation, in-between, color. They can do it all—storyboard, character design. And I come to the States, and there it’s so compartmentalized. There’s character design—you just do character design; you’re not good at

and stuff like that, and that was my first project, Arkanium. JN: You’re really hard on yourself now, looking back at it. Did you just have a different idea of what you wanted when you...? LT: I had no idea what I wanted. I’d been dreaming about making my own comic for so long, and when it finally fell in my lap, I just kind of scatterbrained it. “Okay, now I want to do this, now I want to do that.” When you look at the book, it’s just all over the place. I was breaking all kinds of 180° rules, panel mistakes, but I knew that as long as the energy was there, people would feel it, and that was the one thing I can really say about that book, is when you look at it, it’s just energy all over the place. Hard to read energy, but energy. It was an interesting time, and when the book was about to get cancelled.... You know, Arkanium was competing with a whole bunch of books at Dreamwave. First there were Transformers books, and then they released three titles at once: Theta the Blade, Arkanium, and I don’t know if it was Dark Minds or Sandstorm, but they released three titles when they originally launched their Dreamwave Comics imprint, and we were Phase One of that imprint. I just felt like Pat should’ve released one book at a time, released Arkanium first, or Theta the Blade first, and after six months you see what happens, then you launch the second series, so that each book had a chance to shine on its own. I felt like we were competing for a lot of space. But it wasn’t his fault, it was his first time running a comic book company too. We were all young at that time. Yeah, that was how I got in to comics, was through Pat Lee. Pat Lee was the only guy who believed in me. He saw my stuff—and I didn’t even have any pages; he just saw my concept designs. He didn’t even know I was black. Pat Lee, real talk, was the only guy in comics doing associated color comics, you know what I mean? Dark Minds, Wreck of the Lotus Lord—which was Warlands, but I call it Wreck of the Lotus Lord because it was the clearest inspirational homage or whatever. He was the only guy interested in producing that associated, animated comic book style. He was the only one doing that really big. Over the years, I’d talk to people about working on Arkanium, or Dreamwave, and they’d go into their “Dreamwave sucks” diatribe, and how messed up it was, and the messy politics behind Pat Lee and that stuff, but when I look at Pat Lee, I see a guy who gave me a shot. I didn’t deal with those issues. I will forever be in gratitude to Pat Lee, because he was the

only guy who saw value in me when nobody at Marvel or DC gave a crap about my work. And I was drawing like Jim Lee.... Dude, I had batches of pages that were like nothing I would draw now! The one time I drew like me, Pat was like, “This is dope. I like this. Let’s do a comic.” JN: Especially when you were younger, and you were trying to figure out just the right formula to gamble on, how hard was it for you to just let your own style shine, and stop trying to emulate somebody else’s stuff? LT: It was right after I stopped pursuing comic books, and started getting gigs in animation—storyboards, character design—where that kind of dead line style was acceptable. It was mandatory! I started being in an environment where my dead line weight was important to the process. So, by the time I hopped into comics after being in animation for four or five years, I was just like, “This is me. I’ve already gotten my approval from the people who not only paid me to do this stuff, but paid me and forced me to stay in a clean line weight.” No one was telling me anything else. By this point, I said, “This is me. I’ve done this for five years. If I’m going to do a comic book, it’s going to look like a cartoon.” JN: I was going through your Seoul Sessions YouTube videos, and those are really great man. LT: Oh really? Thanks, man. I didn’t really watch those things. I put them out, I wasn’t expecting to get lots of responses. I was just happy that people sent back responses, and

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The Right Way, The Wrong Way, and The

OrdWay ! Challengers of the Collaboration by Jerry Ordway

n this issue, I will go into detail about working with a collaborator on a comic, and the give and take necessary to accommodate each person’s vision of the story. In this instance, I was asked by Dan DiDio, one of the head honchos at DC Comics, to co-write and draw a “New 52” reintroduction of the classic DC comic Challengers of the Unknown with him. Dan knew I was a big fan of the Jack Kirby’s Challengers, but did not want a “retro” comic book here. This would be a new origin and setting for the existing characters.

We started by having a few conference calls with the editor, Wil Moss, where Dan outlined his basic premise of mixing the team’s origin in with Nanda Parbat, a mysterious land in the Himalayan mountains. This brought to mind James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon, and the great movie version directed by Frank Capra. (I later took the DVD and made some screen captures of the settings and the palace for visual reference.) By the end of the call, we had mapped out the five-issue story to our satisfaction, and I began writing longhand notes before typing my draft of the first-issue plot. Somewhere after the first issue was plotted, I was informed that editorial had cut the story to three issues for scheduling reasons. This forced us to re-think our pacing, and ultimately forced storytelling restrictions on me as the penciller. This, along with other editorial edicts often Jerry’s handwritten plot notes. happen in the course of any project, and you need to be flexible, and think on your feet to make the best of things. Part of being a professional is to do your best in any situation, and not to abandon a project when you don’t get your own way. Of course everyone has their own threshold for just how much they can take. I make no judgments.

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Once my characters are set, I often start a job by drawing tiny thumbnail images in the page margin of my plot or script (right). These are often undecipherable after a few days, even to me, but are my way of figuring out how much will fit on a page. They’re building blocks, really. The blue scribbles lead me to the more thought-out prelims, which leads me to the pencil stage.

The initial two pages of layouts or prelims shown below were done for my own purposes to work out the panel arrangements and allow me to enlarge and lightbox clean pencils in deference to the inker. I penciled the third page (bottom of next page) right on the drawing paper, as it was pretty straightforward, and didn’t need to do a separate prelim. The editor and I had chosen an inker, and it was my first time working with him, so I didn’t want him interpreting messy pencils. It always takes a bit for an inker to get the rhythm on a penciller in my experience. I need to get a comfort level for myself as well, so prelims can be the way into any project, but especially one with so much to stage, as on these pages.

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DRAW! #29

DAVE DORMAN demonstrates his painting techniques for sci-fi, fantasy, and comic book cover, LeSEAN THOMAS (character designer and co-director of The Boondocks and Black Dynamite: The Animated Series) gives advice on todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s animation industry, new columnist JERRY ORDWAY shows his working process, plus more Comic Art Bootcamp by BRET BLEVINS and Draw! editor MIKE MANLEY! Mature readers only. (84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 http://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=1168

+FSSZ T SFWJTFE QSFMJNJOBSJFT GPS QBHFT o PG DC Universe Presents: Challengers of the Unknown $IBMMFOHFST PG UIF 6OLOPXO Âª %$ $PNJDT

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$IBMMFOHFST PG UIF 6OLOPXO Âª %$ $PNJDT

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