Draw! #30 by TwoMorrows Publishing

#30

SPRING 2015 $8.95 IN THE US

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

CHRIS SAMNEE THE DAREDEVIL ARTIST ON EVERYONE’S RADAR

BUTCH GUICE

CREATING WINTER WORLD PLUS! REGULAR COLUMNIST

JERRY ORDWAY AND MIKE MANLEY AND BRET BLEVINS’ 01 1

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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 figure drawing instruction. INTENDED FOR MATURE READERS.

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

DRAW! #21

DRAW! #22

DIEDGITIIOTANSL E

BL AVAILA

DRAW! #18

DRAW! #19

Features an in-depth interview and demo by R.M. GUERA (the artist of Vertigo’s Scalped), behind-the-scenes in the Batcave with Cartoon Network’s JAMES TUCKER on the hit show “Batman: The Brave and the Bold,” plus product reviews by JAMAR NICHOLAS, and Comic Book Boot Camp’s “Anatomy: Part 2” by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY!

DOUG BRAITHWAITE gives a demo and interview, pro inker and ROUGH STUFF editor BOB McLEOD offers a “Rough Critique” of a newcomer’s work, JAMAR NICHOLAS’ “Crusty Critic” column reveals the best art supplies and tool tech, MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ COMIC ART BOOTCAMP gets your penciling in shape, plus Web links, reviews, and more!

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

DRAW! #23

DRAW! #24

DRAW! #20

WALTER SIMONSON interview and demo, Rough Stuff’s BOB McLEOD gives a “Rough Critique” of a newcomer’s work, Write Now’s DANNY FINGEROTH spotlights writer/artist AL JAFFEE, JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews the best art supplies and tool technology, MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS offer “Comic Art Bootcamp” lessons, plus Web links, comic and book reviews, and more! (84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

DRAW! #25

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

Interview with inker SCOTT WILLIAMS from his days at Marvel and Image to his work with JIM LEE, and PATRICK OLIFFE demos how he produces Spider-Girl, Mighty Samson, and digital comics. Also, MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ “Comic Art Bootcamp”, a “Rough Critique” of a newcomer’s work by BOB McLEOD, art supply reviews by “Crusty Critic” JAMAR NICHOLAS, and more!

PATRICK OLIFFE interview and demo, career of AL WILLIAMSON examined by ANGELO TORRES, BRET BLEVINS, MARK SCHULTZ, TOM YEATES, ALEX ROSS, RICK VEITCH, and others, MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ “Comic Art Bootcamp”, a “Rough Critique” of a newcomer’s work by BOB McLEOD, art supply reviews by “Crusty Critic” JAMAR NICHOLAS, and more!

GLEN ORBIK demos how he creates his painted noir paperback and comic covers, ROBERT VALLEY discusses animating “The Beatles: Rock Band” music video and Tron: Uprising, plus Comic Art Bootcamp on “Dramatic Lighting” with MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS, Crusty Critic JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews art supplies, BOB McCLOUD gives a Rough Critique of a newcomer’s work, and more!

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!

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 (Digital edition) $3.95

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

(84-page COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

TwoMorrows. A New Day For Comics Fans!

DRAW! #26

DRAW! #27

DRAW! #28

DRAW! #29

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!

FAREL DALRYMPLE shows how he produces Meathaus and Pop Gun War, director and storyboard/comics artist DAVE BULLOCK dissects his own work, columnist JERRY ORDWAY draws on his years of experience to show readers the Ord-way of creating comics, JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews the latest art supplies, plus more Comic Art Bootcamp by BRET BLEVINS and editor MIKE MANLEY! Mature readers only.

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 today’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 COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Drive Raleigh, NC 27614 USA 919-449-0344 E-mail:

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THE PROFESSIONAL “HOW-TO” MAGAZINE ON COMICS & CARTOONING WWW.DRAW-MAGAZINE.BLOGSPOT.COM SPRING 2015, VOL. 1, #30 Editor-in-Chief • Michael Manley Managing Editor and Designer • Eric Nolen-Weathington Publisher • John Morrow Logo Design • John Costanza Front Cover • Chris Samnee Front Cover Color • Tom Ziuko

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHRIS SAMNEE

Eric Nolen-Weathington interviews the artist about cartooning in a photorealism-driven field

DRAW! Spring 2015, Vol. 1, No. 30 was produced by Action Planet, Inc. and published by TwoMorrows Publishing. 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 2015 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 ©2015 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.

If you’re viewing a Digital Edition of this publication,

RIGHT WAY, WRONG WAY—ORDWAY!

Butch Guice

comic art bootcamp

The crusty Critic

From your mind’s eye to the page

Winter has come. Mike Manley interviews the artist about winter soldiers and winter worlds.

This month’s installment: Ear, ye! Ear, ye! Let’s hear it for the ear!

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

Jamar Nicholas reviews the tools of the trade. This month: A pen nib and a pocket sketchbook

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DRAW! SPRING 2015

-ING AHEAD

hey say 30 is the age of wisdom, or maybe that’s just when you get your wisdom teeth out? Anyway, DRAW! has made it to the 30th issue mark! I owe much of this success and dedication to John Morrow and Eric Nolen-Weathington for being there through the hard days—and like any creative endeavor, there were hard, tough days. There were times I thought this might be the final issue, but then an e-mail or letter would come in telling me how important the mag was to that reader. I’d also like to thank my best buddy Bret Blevins for being there from the first issue’s cover to this issue’s charming little doodle of yours truly. This milestone is also helped by Jamar Nicholas and Jerry Ordway for their great articles and support for the idea that the craft of cartooning needs to be shared, and the knowledge of all those who work telling stories should be collectively shared. That is the continued goal for DRAW! into the future: To share with you readers the knowledge of as many great cartoonists and illustrators as possible! Now go DRAW! something!

NEXT ISSUE IN JULY! DRAW! #31 (80 FULL-COLOR pages, $8.95), the professional “how-to” magazine on comics and animation, busts some new moves, Philadelphia Freedom style! This issue features how-tos and demos by Philly area artists J.G. Jones (52, Final Crisis, Wanted, Batman and Robin) and Khoi Pham (The Mighty Avengers, The Astonishing Spider-Man, The Mighty World of Marvel). Plus regular contributor (and Philly boy) Jamar Nicholas gives his reviews of art supplies, and we finish this jam-packed issue with Jerry Ordway (demonstrating the “ORDway” of drawing) and “Comic Art Bootcamp” by Draw! editor Mike Manley (yet another Philly resident) and Bret Blevins. Grab a side of cheese fries, and enjoy this artistic belly buster! NOTE: May contain nudity for figure-drawing instruction; suggested for Mature Readers Only. SUBSCRIPTIONS: Four issues in the 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

DRAW! SPRING 2015

Chris Samnee

A LEAP OF interview conducted by Eric Nolen-Weathington and transcribed by Jon Knutson

C Daredevil © Marvel Characters, Inc.

hris Samnee knew he was going to be a comic book artist at an age when most kids still dream of being firemen or astronauts. But he hasn’t always held that same strength of belief and determination in his natural cartooning style. Editorial resistance to his work led him astray for a time, but with the help of the right projects and the right editors, Chris has taken his cartooning to bold new heights. What do editors know anyway? DRAW! SPRING 2015

Thumbnail cover designs and finished inks for a DCBS exclusive variant cover for the newly relaunched Amazing Spider-Man #1. Spider-Man © Marvel Characters, Inc.

DRAW!: I don’t know if you remember this or not, but I first met you, I think it was 2003, at the Comic-Con International: San Diego. You came up to the TwoMorrows booth with, I don’t know if she was your fiancée at that point or just your girlfriend, and you were surprised I knew your name, because you really hadn’t had much published at that point. CHRIS Samnee: Yeah, I was surprised. DRAW!: You’d worked with Chris Irving, who’d done some work for TwoMorrows, on this little book that I don’t think had even been distributed, Blackbird. CS: I know he printed some himself. I don’t know if they ever went out to anybody besides friends and family, and people that he hand-sold them to. I had a few copies. DRAW!: I think the idea was to use that comic as kind of a portfolio. Were you doing a lot of that kind of spec work? Whatever you could to get your work out there? CS: I was doing samples all over the place, and I’d kind of gotten to the point where people would look at it and say, “This is good, but we don’t know where we would put you,” and I just kept doing more and more samples. I’d just create my own story that was three or four, five pages. I met Chris Irving, and we got along really well, and he

DRAW! SPRING 2015

was going through pretty much the same thing on the writing side, and we said, “Why don’t we do a few things together?” So, there were a couple of other things we did. I can’t remember what they were. DRAW!: There was a G.I. Joe blog he had. CS: Oh, yeah, I did some G.I. Joe head sketches that looked like the backs of the old cards. [laughs] You’re really digging deep. Most of that stuff I’ve forgotten. DRAW!: Well, that was the early days of the Internet being a way to get your work out there. Were you trying to meet people on message boards at that point? CS: I didn’t even have a computer back then. Chris told me about Batman: Dead End [a short fan film] and I was like, “Oh, that sounds awesome. I’d love to see that!” He said, “It’s on the Internet,” and I was like, “Oh, I don’t have a computer.” He had to mail me a CD he burned of the video. Oh, man, that makes me feel so old! [laughter] DRAW!: If you didn’t have Internet access, what were you doing to find these opportunities? CS: I was just beating the bushes. St. Louis had a lot of conventions back in the day, and every time a convention

would come to town, I’d go with my portfolio under my arm and beg for work, show my portfolio, and try to get reviews from… it didn’t matter who, whether it was a letterer, or a penciler, or a writer. I was just trying to talk to anybody and figure out how comics were made. I wasn’t finding work anywhere. Mostly I sent sample packets through the mail. I’d found a directory of publishers and their addresses, and I’d make tons of copies at Kinko’s and fill packets on the weekends. DRAW!: Your interest in how comics were made started pretty early from what I can tell. I think you said somewhere that by age ten, you knew you wanted to be a comic book artist. CS: Oh for sure, yes.

CS: There were certain artists that I liked, but it was so hard to find comics back then. It was like, “I like this guy,” and I’d write his name in my notebook. I had a whole list of names in a Trapper Keeper—it looked like a hit list of guys that I really liked. [laughter] But we didn’t have comic book stores where I lived. Every couple of weeks, my dad would take me to the flea market, and I’d get to buy old comics. There were four-for-adollar comics, but it was random boxes of who knows what that people brought from their houses. So, I never got whole runs of anything, and every once in a while I’d run across something completely random and go, “I’ve never seen this

DRAW!: A lot of people say they want to become a comic book artist when they’re ten, but you really went after it. CS: I started fighting for it early on. I was into cartoons, just like any normal kid would be into cartoons, but one day while I was waiting for Showbiz Pizza to open with my grandma, she said, “Let’s go into Venture while we’re waiting for it to open.” And they had three-packs of comics. And I said, “They made books out of these cartoons?!?” [Eric laughs] It was a threepack of Batman comics, and I was hooked right from the get-go. DRAW!: Do you remember how old you were at that point? CS: I was five or six. It was the Tom Mandrake run, really inappropriate for my age. There was a stripper in it, there was Two-Face… way too adult for a six-year-old. I think that’s why I liked it. I was like, “I shouldn’t be reading this stuff.” [laughter] I started copying Mandrake and [Jim] Aparo, and the guys from the mid-’80s. Those were my way into comics. My grandma bought me a roll of butcher paper, so I’d look at the comic and try to copy it to the best of my abilities, which was awful, but it was fun. DRAW!: You became familiar with the artists’ names early on. Were you following certain artists at that point, or were you just kind of grabbing whatever you could find?

Chris’ finished inks for the variant cover of Elektra #2. Elektra © Marvel Characters, Inc.

DRAW! SPRING 2015

(this page) Layouts for a flashback sequence in Fantastic Four #5. (next page top) The tightened pencils for Fantastic Four #5. (next page bottom) And the finished inks for that sequence. Fantastic Four © Marvel Characters, Inc.

before! What’s The Crow?” For an eight-year-old, it was like, “What? They make comics like this too?” Every weekend, it would be something completely different. DRAW!: Did you ever find How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way? CS: I was probably twelve when I got a copy, and I looked at it so much it just fell to pieces. DRAW!: Is that where you first saw what tools you’d need to use to be a real comic book artist? CS: Probably. That’s probably where I started, if nothing else, trying to figure out panel composition, and trying to be dynamic with figures. Going to conventions since I was like eight or ten, that’s where people were really telling me what tools I needed to use. I met Mike Docherty, who was drawing Conan at the time. He gave me an old Marvel board, and said, “This is what I draw on.” He just gave me a blank piece of Marvel board that he had in his portfolio, and I never drew on it. It was this artifact of what people really used. Somewhere stashed away I have this old, yellow piece of board [laughs] that he gave me when I was a little kid.

DRAW! SPRING 2015

DRAW!: Were you seeing original art pages at that point? CS: Yeah, he had a stack of stuff for sale on his table. I’d seen pages for sale before, but they just seemed so otherworldly, I never realized what size they were. It was like, “Oh, my gosh, this is from a real thing!” He said, “This is the actual size—11" x 17".” But all of the dotted lines and stuff it had on there—it was mind-boggling. I didn’t know what part I was supposed to draw on or not, so I used to get poster board from Walmart that was 11" x 14", and I’d just do the best I could with whatever materials were available to me at the time. DRAW!: How early were you starting to try to use a pen or brush? Did that come much later? CS: I never knew that I was going to be inking. I was always planning on being just a penciler. The first job that I did for Gary Carlson was for Big Bang Comics—Image published those in black-and-white. It was a Silver Age sort of book. DRAW!: Where he did Knight Watchman instead of Batman, Ultiman instead of Superman, and so on. CS: Right, yeah. I was way into manga at the time. I found a whole bunch of old Go Nagai books and things like that, which again didn’t seem age appropriate, but I was into it.

DRAW!: What kind of things were you seeing? That was pretty early on. Macross and Robotech, things like that? CS: On TV, there was Robotech and Voltron and stuff like that, but when they first started bringing Japanese comics to America, there were very few being translated. You could find Ranma ½, or Devil Man, I think, or Patlabor maybe. It was very sparse, so if it was translated into English, you could get it all. I had a big collection of everything I could find. I was way into that. So, I drew a story called, “Knight Watchmanga,” [in Big Bang Comics #10 (May 1997)] which was a very odd choice. It was the first time I tried inking anything. I was using a calligraphy pen. I wasn’t using the right tools, I knew it, but I didn’t know how to use the proper tools. I was offered the chance to have something in print, and there was no budget for an inker. There was no budget for a penciler—I did it for free. It was just a chance to be in print. DRAW!: I haven’t seen those pages, but with a calligraphy pen, you can still get thick and thin. Were you trying to use a thick-and-thin approach? CS: Yeah, I was trying. There was more fail than win, [laughter] but, yeah, I tried it to the best of my abilities, which admittedly were not great. But you can’t get better unless you do it. I was really excited. I think I penciled eight pages in one night, and then I inked it over a week. DRAW!: Wow! CS: Well, I was kid! What else did I have to do? I would go to school, and then I’d come home and that was all I’d do for the rest of the night. I’ve always been a bit of a homebody. I didn’t go out and play. I lived back in the woods in a log cabin, so there weren’t a lot of kids to play with or things to do. I could go play basketball with my brother, but that didn’t sound fun at all. [laughter] So I sat inside for years and learned how to draw comic books. DRAW!: You said you were going to conventions all the time when you were a kid. Were you going to three or four shows a year?

CS: Well, I think it was more than that. We were going every couple of months. There used to be the Great Eastern Conventions. Every couple of months, there’d be a good St. Louis show. DRAW!: So you were seeing real professionals work. Were you able to watch them draw at all?

DRAW! SPRING 2015

CS: Some of them were doing sketches, like Rick Leonardi, right when Spider-Man 2099 started. I watched him doing some sketches for people, and that was pretty neat. Tom Artis, who passed away a few years ago, he was really, really great. He was working on The Web for DC at the time. I watched him work. He was an amazing talent that nobody really talks about nowadays. He was really nice. His wife made cookies, and he was giving all the kids at the table cookies while we watched him work. There were a lot of guys like that, just really kind and giving with a couple of baby-faced kids staring at them trying to figure out how to make comics. It was

really easy to say, “Hey, come around this table, and see how we do it.” DRAW!: You decided not to go to art school. Was it a financial reason, or something else? CS: [laughs] Yeah, there wasn’t really a decision not to go. In high school, all of my art projects were meant to be stepping stones to the Kubert School. I would get a pointillism assignment, and I’d go, “All right, I’ll do a pointillism drawing of the front of the Kubert School.” [laughter] But I didn’t know how to get a grant, and we didn’t have the funds. DRAW!: Well, art school isn’t cheap. CS: School isn’t cheap. I went to community college for a few semesters, and I lost my grant at one point, and I said, “All right, I guess I’m done with school!” [laughter] I had a million crummy day jobs, but the whole time I was like, “I’m going to break in at any minute.” I was full of hubris. I was sure that I could do it. Looking back now, I’m like, “No, kid, you’ve got a long way to go.” But I was only thinking, “I’m not going to get a career, because my career is going to be comics. So, I’ll sweep up cigarette butts at the flea market, I’ll make pizzas, I’ll be a cable guy,” for a few years, I worked at Borders in the café, I shelved books… I did so many crummy jobs. “Nope, I’m not getting a real job. This is just to hold me over until my comics career kicks in.” [laughs] I was so stupid! DRAW!: You were meeting artists, but had you had a chance to meet editors yet? At that point especially, meeting editors face to face was a big advantage to getting a foot in the door. CS: Well, I think the first real editor I met was Bob Schrek in 2000. I didn’t get a chance to sign up for a portfolio review—I showed up a day late at the convention— but he’d always take anybody who asked him nicely outside whenever he was ready for a cigarette break. He’d take a look through a half-dozen guys’ portfolios and tell them the stuff they needed to work on. I got a chance to do that. And I still had a long way to go in 2000, but it was nice of him to take the time. He was really helpful in telling me things I needed to work on.

Thumbnail cover designs for Wolverine #606. Wolverine © Marvel Characters, Inc.

DRAW! SPRING 2015

DRAW!: What were the things you needed to work on in 2000? CS: Everything? [laughter]

DRAW!: Was there one thing specifically that stands out, that’s being printed now, and characters in Eisner’s book are going to act, and there’s not a whole lot of that going around that really made a difference in what you were doing? CS: I think in 2000, I still had a lot of manga influence, nowadays. You can get more across in something simpler and and he was just like, “Stop worrying about all these slanted brushier, than you can in something stiff and closer to realism. I think Blackbird came from Golden Age comics Chris was panels and this crazy pacing and action lines, and worry about real storytelling. Do you know who Hugo Pratt is?” I showing me that he was really into. Porkpie was really a throwsaid, “No, I have no idea at all.” He said, “All right. Corto back to the Little Wise Guys from the Golden Age Daredevil Maltese, go into the convention, find that, study it, and next comics, and all the kid gangs Kirby used to draw, those ugly time you see me, you’ll probably be ready.” [laughter] So little kids from Boy Commandos, and stuff like that. that’s what I did! I went inside, I went to every dealer that was selling comics, and I tried to find Corto Maltese. I spent ten bucks on 50-cent and dollar copies of reprints of Corto Maltese comics. That was one step along the way for me in figuring out how to really draw. I started going backwards with a whole lot of artists, figuring out who their influences were. My family took a vacation to Colorado, and they asked me if I wanted to go, and I said, “Fresh air and trees? I’m good.” And they said, “If you come with, we can go to a comic book store out there.” While Chris’ drawing has greatly improved since the days of Blackbird, you can see similarities “What?!? Okay. If you take me to in how he handled facial expression and body language then and now. Inks by Chris Irving. Mile High, I will totally go with Blackbird © Marvel Characters, Inc. you to Colorado.” [laughter] So we went to Mile High, and I stocked up on Comics Inter- DRAW!: But with your early professional work, it looks like view magazines—the stupidest thing for a little kid to get so you’re trying to be more… I guess “traditional” would be the excited about, but that’s all that I bought! I bought a short best word to use, in your approach. You toned back the carbox full of these interviews with comics creators, because tooning. Was that because you thought you had to draw that that’s what I was really into at the time, trying to figure out way to get work, or was that just a natural evolution in finding who artists’ influences were, and where they came from. It your way to your style? just made all these people who made comic books seem more CS: It was just editors telling me they couldn’t hire me with real, instead of just these gods who make works of art that are the work I was doing, and not being confident enough to stick so far from what I was able to do; it humanized them. I would with what I was doing. You can only be told, “This is good, read an interview with Jim Aparo, where he would say his but we don’t know where we would put you,” or, “This is too biggest influence was Milton Caniff, and I’d say, “All right, cartoony,” or, “We don’t know what to do with it,” so many who’s Milton Caniff?” And I’d go to the library, and find out times before it really starts to sink in, and you just start having who was who, and try to track down their work in reverse. All to try different things. This is really what I wanted to do for my influences from probably the age of 18 to 20 ’til now have a living, and being told that I couldn’t, “Well, I’m going to come to the fore from those magazines. have to try something else.” I just kept trying different things until I settled on something that felt right. I still am strugDRAW!: And that brings us back to 2003. I want to mention gling with that to this day, I’m still trying to find how I draw. something in Blackbird. There’s a character called Porkpie, My sketches feel like me, but my pencils, I can just see too and his design looks like it could fit in with what you’re doing many of the influences from my childhood popping in. “Oh, now. Would you say the type of cartooning you’re doing now that looks like a Caniff nose,” or, “That looks like so-and-so’s has been your natural tendency all along? ear,” or whatever. They all pop in. I’m still trying to excise CS: I’ve always been into the cartoonier stuff, and that seems some of that old stuff and just draw how I draw. easier to me. I think of myself more as a cartoonist than a comic book artist, because “comic book artist” just seems so DRAW!: Was that kind of a struggle to begin with? The stale. I’m trying to make the characters emote and act, and Capote book was probably your first big project of note. there’s more of that in old comics than current comics. You CS: Well, that’s probably where my career really started. It can look at a Will Eisner book, and then look at anything snowballed from there. 2005 was where it really hit.

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On the left, Chris tightening the pencils over his layout. On the right, the cleaned up results. Page 1 from Daredevil Vol. 4, #8. All characters © Marvel Characters, Inc.

DRAW!: How did you get that book? CS: I was taking around samples to every convention, like I had been doing my whole silly life, and I saw that Mike Allred was coming to town, and I asked my wife if she wanted to go with me to that show. We went together but Allred cancelled at the last minute; he was sick or had something going on in the family where he couldn’t make it. I was disappointed and said, “I guess we’ll just go home,” and my wife was like, “No, no, no, there are guys over here. There are other guys who make comics. Let’s go talk to them.” “Well, I just really wanted to see Allred.” “It took 40 minutes to get all the way into the city. Let’s just talk to the other guys here, see what they’re doing.” It turned out to be Brian Hurtt and Cullen Bunn, who are now great friends of mine, though they were just a couple of local comics creators who hadn’t made a whole lot of stuff at that time. Brian was working on Hard Times for DC’s Paradox Press imprint. Every other book in the line had fallen away, and Hard Times was still going. Brian was working on that with Steve Gerber, and Cullen was still trying to work his way in. He had a day job, and he was writing horror anthology stuff, and just trying to make his way in as a writer.

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I went over and showed my portfolio to Brian. You could see on his face, like, “Ugh, I hate doing portfolio reviews!” but I asked him if he would look at mine, and he said, “You know what? This is really good!” He turned around to Cullen and said, “You should look at this guy’s stuff. I bet you’d work well together.” I got Cullen’s number, and a couple of days later we went out for drinks, and talked about comics. We did a couple of pitches, and nothing ever went anywhere, but I got a couple of great friendships out of it. I ran into Brian at San Diego, and he was friends with the guys at Oni. He said, “Come on over to the Oni table, I’ll introduce you to some folks. I know you’re trying to get work.” They had a specific way they did their portfolio reviews, and I didn’t have anything Oni-related, or anything close to what they wanted. All I had was Fantastic Four samples, but they were like, “You know, this is really good. We have a book we need an artist for. Would you want to try out for it?” So, I tried I think five or six pages—it was all of the script that Ande had done for Capote in Kansas—and I turned that stuff in, and they said, “Yeah, this is it. It’s your book.” Those are the first five pages that are in the book.

DRAW!: Did working with Ande, an inker himself, make things easier for you in any way? CS: Well, that was the first thing I’d inked with real tools. I took on the job thinking, “Well, Ande’s an inker. He can ink it!” And he was like, “No, I’m hardly getting paid anything anyway, I’m not going to ink it too!” [laughter] He was like, “You’re going to have to figure it out. You’ll figure it out.” I started out inking with wedge brushes, and all of my brushes were the wrong shape, and I was using the wrong ink, but as I progressed through the book—there’s 120 pages; it took me about a year to do while working at Borders—by that time I had a computer, and we’d email back and forth. I didn’t have a scanner that worked very well; I only had an 8½" x 11" scanner, so I was mailing all of my pages to Ande, and Ande would scan and send them to Oni, and then mail me back my pages. [Eric laughs] It seems so archaic now. Ande was really helpful in telling me what tools I needed to use, and he used to do a column in DRAW!—his favorite white-out, or brush, or ink. I’d cut those out of the magazine and stick them on my wall as a reminder of what to get. I’d go to Dick Blick or whatever art supply store I could find, and I would get the stuff that Ande told me to get. [Eric

The finished inks, above, and gray tones, left, for Daredevil Vol. 4, #8, page 1. All characters © Marvel Characters, Inc.

laughs] Well, he was the only professional inker, besides Brian, that I knew. Those two guys were my heroes in 2005, so whatever they got, I got. If Brian got Pitt pens, I would buy Pitt pens. If Ande says he likes Pentel white-out, that’s the one I would buy. I would go to Brian’s apartment, and I’m sure I was just annoying the hell out of him, but I’d be there for hours, and I’d ask why he made this choice on a page, or why he did this. What did he use to make this effect? I’m surprised he still talks to me. [laughter] I must have been so annoying, but to finally know somebody who made comics, it was so wild. I may have abused our friendship at the beginning. DRAW!: Well, that book got you a nomination for the 2006 Russ Manning Award. Was that surprising to you? Did you feel like you had a shot at it?

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Two cover layouts for Magneto #2, both playing off the shape of Magneto’s helmet. Magneto, Professor Xavier © Marvel Characters, Inc.

CS: To be nominated was bananas. I was proud of what I was doing at the time, but certainly didn’t think it was worthy of any sort of accolades or nominations or awards. But that was when my wife was like, “Maybe you can make a career out of this!” [laughter] I mean, she’d been supportive for so long. When she met me at Borders, I told her I made comics—that’s what I wanted to do, I didn’t want to be at Borders forever. We moved in together really soon after, we got married really quick—I was married at 23—and she’s been supportive all along, ever since the beginning. She was like, “If we can get you a regular job at Marvel or DC, and you can quit Borders, I’ll keep working here for the health insurance. If you can get an OGN or ongoing or something big, we’ll make it work.” And we did! After I finished Capote, I did a few little things here and there, and then in 2006, I was offered Area 10 for Vertigo while I was driving home from Borders one night. Jon Vankin called and said, “I’ve got a book here for you,” and I said, “I’ll take it!” “You want to know what it is?” “It doesn’t even matter. Whatever it is, I’m on it. I’ll do it.” I was just so ready

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to be done with Borders. I just wanted to be making comics. That’s what I’ve always wanted to do, and that’s the only thing I’m really good at. [laughter] I would take any job that was offered to me. It took a while for the script to be ready, so I think for six months, I would constantly email Jon Vankin and say, “Is the script ready yet?” He’d say, “No, but while you’re waiting, here’s an American Splendor, here’s an issue of Exterminators, another story of American Splendor.” He was trying to keep me busy until the script was ready. In the interim, I got to do some really neat stuff. DRAW!: How closely did you work with Harvey Pekar? CS: Not at all, really. I never talked to him. He didn’t have email. I got really bad copies of pages from his notebook. That was his script, these stick figure drawings, and one of them had messy hair, and that’s how I knew it was Harvey. I just had to guess who the stick figures were. [laughter] It was rough! This was all stuff that didn’t make it into the original American Splendor, and when Vertigo got hold of the rights to it, they said, “Harvey, whatever you have in your drawers, we’ll take

it.” It was basically Harvey’s slush pile, and they’d say, “Here, make this into a comic strip.” [laughs] Some of them were just one sheet of paper, but with 24 panels, and Jon would say, “Okay, can you make this into six pages?” “What?!? No!” I didn’t know how! That was jumping into the deep end on trying to do storytelling from bare bones. It was cool. Otherwise I never would’ve gotten to work with Pekar. I mean, I know that we didn’t work hand-in-hand, but I did do his story. I don’t know if he ever saw it. DRAW!: Your inking with that, you really went into chiaroscuro mode. What were you looking at to feel your way through that process? CS: I was looking at the later Steranko stuff—the black-and-white stuff he did, Red Tide—and I found a bunch of scans of black-and-white “V for Vendetta” pages. I was really into David Lloyd at the time. All the blown-out line and stuff, that’s mostly from Steranko and David Lloyd.

page rate, and my wife and I were crunching the numbers, and we were like, “We could totally survive if I got this every month!” No, we couldn’t. [laughter] That was all I did then, so we could pay our bills in our little apartment. Oh, gosh, I’m thinking back to our tiny little apartment and working for Oni when Oni was a three-man operation. I don’t know, I’ve always been into mainstream comics, so my style might have been more indie at the time, but that was because I was experimenting and trying to teach myself how to ink. Even after a whole graphic novel or two, I was still trying to find who I was. Area 10 looks totally different to me

DRAW!: Yeah, you weren’t doing a solid holding line all the time. CS: I knew it was going to be in blackand-white, so I felt I was free to experiment. I was already trying some of that in Capote in Kansas, and I just carried it through into the next few things. All the American Splendor was in black-andwhite, I knew Area 10 would be in blackand-white, and I was just trying to get comfortable with inking and trying new things. I was never great at contour lines, I didn’t have a steady enough hand, and when I was trying to teach myself inking on Capote in Kansas, I went simpler and simpler, because I thought the less lines I had to draw, the less chance I would have to screw up. [laughter] I was just trying to make it as simple as possible so there was less of me botching things up. DRAW!: After that you started getting more work from the big publishers. You did Checkmate, and in 2008, you got work from Marvel for the first time. Were you feeling more comfortable working in the more traditional approach? Did you ever really get to a place where you felt like that was something you could do forever? CS: I did four issues of Queen and Country somewhere in there for Oni, and I remember it was a really, really low rate. It was a per-issue rate, not a

Pencils for the cover of Magneto #2. Magneto, Professor Xavier © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Finished inks for the cover of Magneto #2. Magneto, Professor Xavier © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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than Capote in Kansas. To most people, they look very similar. Queen and Country is the bridge in between those two. And then there’s a big shift between the first three issues and the last issue of Queen and Country, because I was learning so much in between. Greg [Rucka] was working on 52, the weekly book DC was doing, so between two issues of Queen and Country, he worked on that exclusively, and I was waiting on scripts. I did all of Area 10 in between issues of Queen and Country. I’m trying to remember if I got the wrong paper, or if somebody sent me rough paper from DC by accident, and I was like, “No, no, no, I’m just going to draw it on my own paper.” But I ran out of paper, and I didn’t have time to buy more, so the last issue of Queen and Country was really, really rough-looking, and looked like Stefano Gaudiano [Walking Dead] inked it or something. I was fighting the paper for five or six weeks, and that was after a year of me trying to figure out how to ink on this other paper. It’s odd, but the last issue was just me fighting to get it done. But I’m kind of proud of that last one. I didn’t have to come back. I was already doing stuff at Vertigo, so I didn’t have to. Everyone was saying, “You’re already doing all this other stuff, you don’t have to finish Queen and Country,” but I said I would do it, so I wanted to stick to my guns. If I say I’m going to do something, I’ll do it, so I had to squeeze it in before my next job. I kind of cranked it out on the wrong paper—but it was interesting.

say. If it’s a MAX book, you know what you’re getting into. It’s not my bag, but I did the best job that I could. I did little things to make me laugh or try to turn something that was bloody and gory and horrible into things that’d cheer me up, because otherwise, I would get depressed and sunk down in miasma. One of the villains I turned into Tony Moore. [laughter] The main bad guy had these big muttonchops and glasses, and it was, “All right, that’s Tony. [laughs] I think I showed him after the fact, and said, “I hope you’re cool with this. I made this bad guy you.” He said, “You just made my day!” [laughter] I mean, that’s how I got through it. Trying to picture Tony doing these things was just so funny in my head, that I could get through these imaginary people doing terrible things.

DRAW!: From that you went to The Mighty, so I guess that was a nicer change of tone. CS: That’s where I felt like I started hitting my stride. I still look at The Mighty pages and feel like, “I could’ve done that a couple of months ago.” It doesn’t look that far off from what I’m trying to do now. Pete [Tomasi] came to me because he saw my stuff on my blog, and he felt I had a tone close enough to Peter Snejbjerg’s— which it was. We weren’t polar opposites. But they embraced the cartoony in my style, and said, “Go for it!” I sent them a few pages, and said, “I think I need more black on these pages. What do you guys think?” DRAW!: Talking about how your style for my first issue, and they said, “You’re doing it. was shifting, Devil-Slayer you did at Whatever you want to do.” When I got that email Marvel was another shift. back, I was like, “Oh, okay! So I can do CS: Oh, yeah. It was more of a horror whatever I want to do!” So that’s where I book, and I’m not really a horror guy, so I finally felt like they accepted me enough was fighting against all of my wholesome to do cartoony, and I could just kind of be insides. [laughter] It was zombies, and me, and that’s where I felt like I arose, and Color sketch of Marvel gun-for-hire, monsters, and gross stuff, and Iraq. I’d really started to come into my own. The Enforcer. already done so much Iraq war stuff with Enforcer © Marvel Characters, Inc. Queen and Country, I said, “I’ll never do DRAW!: You mentioned the blog as the another book that’s set in the Middle East. I can’t handle the initial point of contact. Do you think having the blog really research!” I would get online and do image searches, I was made the difference as to which way you went? like, “Oh, there’s another dead body in the gutter. Ugh. I can’t CS: Oh, definitely. There’re still jobs I get just because they look at it anymore!” [laughter] I’d get a script from Brian saw stuff on my blog. I did redesigns of classic Marvel charKeene, and it’d describe a dead body, “Do an image search acters for Thor: The Mighty Avenger, and they’re still up on for a dead body that’s been in the water for a week.” “Ooooh, my blog. Wil Moss, my editor at Marvel, dug the ones I did of Ant-Man, and that’s how I got the recent job I did, redesignthis is not for me!” I’m not a zombie guy by nature. I’m not really into horror ing Scott Lang’s Ant-Man costume in the new comics. and gore, but I had to take what I was offered. Nobody came a-knocking. I was the one begging for work, so if I got some- DRAW!: At what point did you get involved with the Twart thing offered, I’d take it. I mean, it was for Marvel! They said guys? “Devil-Slayer,” and I had no idea who that was. I looked him CS: Well, that was through Twitter. Some of those guys I knew up and said, “Okay, I can do this!” Then they sent me the cos- in person, most of them I didn’t, but I was a fan of online, and I tume designs, and it was just a U.S. soldier with a scarf, and think it was just sort of a mutual admiration society. We would they said, “Okay, this is his costume.” And I said, “Dammit! joke around. I think by chance, Evan “Doc” Shaner and I had It’s not tights, I’m not doing tights. This is something else.” It drawn Thor on the same day. We were all sort of talking in a was a Marvel MAX book. I think that’s all you really have to circle on Twitter, and it was like, “Ooh, I’ll draw Thor,” and,

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“I’ll draw Thor too!” Then someone said, “Okay, what are we going to draw tomorrow?” and one thing led to another. We started emailing each other, and DM-ing each other, and it was like, “We should do this all the time! We should make our own blog, and post sketches, and we could come up with a theme every week!” “Yeah, that sounds great!” My wife was trying to find domain names while everyone was emailing back and forth, and nothing was available. We were like, “Comic Art Blog,” “Comic Twitter Blog,” “Twitter Art Blog,” and that’s where “Twart” came from, was from “Twitter Art Blog.” We just mashed it together. I don’t know who came up with it; I know it wasn’t me. My wife typed it in, and, “It’s available!” It’s the first one we came across that was available, and that’s the one we went with.

(above and below) Layouts for a preview teaser for the new Ant-Man ongoing series—variations on two themes. Ant-Man © Marvel Characters, Inc.

DRAW!: That got all of you a lot of exposure. It was kind of like Tumblr before Tumblr. CS: Yeah, I mean, just seeing where everybody is now and where we were then is just amazing. Everybody is a full-time comic artist—proper professionals. It’s bananas! Most of us were still trying to break our way in back then. I think Mitch Breitweiser was probably the biggest name when we started, and by the time we were done, Dave Johnson asked if he could join in. “What?!? Yes, please!” We started with 16 or 18, I think we ended with 20-something guys. I think Francesco [Francavilla] is the only one who participated every single week. The longer it went, the more jobs we started to get, and it just got harder and harder to maintain. [Mike] Hawthorne, believe it or not, he’s busy enough on Deadpool, and he’s doing French comics, he’s busy all over the place, and he didn’t tell anybody, but he’s going back and hitting all the weeks that he missed, so the Twart blog is still updating. DRAW!: I just went there last night, preparing for the interview, and I noticed a couple of you had just posted something within the past month. There’s about a twoyear gap there, but it’s still going. [laughs] CS: I drew Two-Face a week or two ago, and [Nathan] Fairbairn, the only guy who wasn’t trying to make it only as an artist—he was a colorist by trade, but he wanted to try to draw too—colored my Two-Face sketch, then “Doc” Shaner drew Two-Face, and Fairbairn colored a bunch of sketches, then started posting those back to the blog. “Should we go ahead and post this?” “Why not?” Fairbairn still pays the dues every year for the domain, so we might as well post something there! Maybe someday we’ll all get back to it, but we’re all pretty busy these days. It’s fun to think where we came from. DRAW!: In terms of today’s artists breaking in, everyone’s got a Tumblr page, and a lot of people find work that way. Editors are scouring through Tumblr now, but like I said, this was kind of like Tumblr for you guys. You got a lot of emulators out of that too.

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CS: There were already other art blogs starting, just a few months later. I think there were some that had maybe started before us. DRAW!: Yeah, but you guys blew it up. I would see links to Twart everywhere. Can you equate that to all of those times going to conventions, and all the scrambling you had to do to find work in the early days, compared to that blog? CS: I think I got more work from that blog than I ever did hoofing it. It’s kind of depressing when I think about it. I went to my parents’ house to grab some stuff, and there are still Manilla envelopes with sample pages stapled together. How many hours did I waste putting packets together, when really all you have to do is put some stuff up on a blog? Spend half an hour drawing something and posting it up. Such little effort, and you could make a career out of it. DRAW!: Now you’ve got a Tumblr, you’ve got your blog, you’ve got Twitter still. How much time do you spend these days doing social media to keep your name out there? CS: Not as much as I should. I mean, I pretty much rely on the monthly comics to keep my name out there. I’m on Tumblr a lot, mostly just trying to pimp whatever book I’ve got coming out, and that’s pretty much what I do on Twitter too. I wish I had more time to be social, and I know it’s social networking, and I’m not using it properly. I miss being able to get on there and chat with people, but I made friends through Twitter, so for those folks, I just text them, or email them. There’s not a whole lot of doing that out in the public. I can’t send the newest Daredevil pages to people online, but I can text Brent Schoonover and see what he thinks, and we’ll bounce it back and forth. It’s a friendship we made online, but I’m not spoiling any story points for anyone else. I spend maybe a couple of hours here and there. For Inktober, I’m trying to post something every day, but I don’t get in front of the computer enough to scan it and put it on my blog, so I’m just going to have to do that at the end of the month. Most of what I do is I’ll spend ten minutes on a little doodle. I’ll draw Nick Fury, or whoever, and take a picture with my phone while I’m at my office, and from my phone I can post it to Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram all at the same time. So, ten or 15 minutes a day, and for the full-size ones, about 30 or 45 minutes, and those are usually done in the morning if I’m feeling rusty, or mid-day in

Pencils for the Ant-Man promo (above), and Chris’ redesign for Scott Lang as Ant-Man (left). Ant-Man © Marvel Characters, Inc.

between pages. If I really need to recharge my batteries, I’ll do a full-size 9" x 12". DRAW!: Was it The Mighty that got you the job on Thor: The Mighty Avenger, or was it the blog? CS: You know, I don’t know how I got Thor. I think it was probably—one of the first jobs I did for Marvel was Marvel Adventures Spider-Man with Paul Tobin. It was just a fill-in, but Paul Tobin and Nate, the editor…. When you’re young and you start something, everything is new and fun and fresh and exciting, and we were all just having a ball, and were emailing back and

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forth. It just was so much fun, and I made such good friends with them straight away. We got along so well that I think Nate was probably thinking of me whenever something came across. “Maybe this would be right for Chris.” Thor came across his desk, and they needed an artist for it. They tried out Gurihiru, the Japanese studio—they did Thor and the Warriors Four—but Roger thought it was maybe too far towards cartoony, and he wanted to do something a little closer to straightforward superhero Silver Age comics. I’m not sure how far down the list I was. Somewhere down the line, they came asking if

I would do it, and I was like, “Thor? I don’t know, am I the right guy for Thor?” Nate told me, “Don’t worry about it. It’s not the Thor that you are thinking of.” There was already a Thor book, but I think they wanted to have another Thor book on the shelves for when the movie came out. Sometimes publishers just want more of a product because the more that’s out there, the more money they can make. I don’t think they were really worried about what the book was, they were just like, “Yeah, let’s just make another Thor book, and have it out there.” The more we started to work on it, the more we said, “We can kind of make this allages.” Nate was the all-ages editor, but I don’t think that was originally the intent. Roger had kids, I’d been wanting to do something that skewed more “wholesome,” and that’s just sort of where it went. A lot of folks called it allages. There were two different designations for 14 and under, and then another for 10–16. It was a really convoluted rating system, but this was supposed to be the one up for all ages. There was sex that happened off-screen, so that kind of bumped up our rating to a little older. DRAW!: It was rated T. CS: Yeah, yeah. We got kind of lumped in with all-ages, and that’s why a lot of people didn’t want to read it. We were supposed to be a little above all-ages, but it is what it is. I mean, I think you could look at how cartoony my stuff was on that book, and see how it made a lot of people just jump to conclusions. DRAW!: Well, as soon as that book hit the stands, it immediately became my favorite thing Marvel was doing at the time. They were in a particularly dark and gritty place then, and Thor: The Mighty Avenger shone out like a beacon of light against the darkness. CS: Thank you very much. I do appreciate that.

Chris’ finished inks for the Ant-Man promo, along with the colors by Matt Wilson. Ant-Man © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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DRAW!: Did you feel that it was an opportunity, in a way, to do something so different from everything else Marvel was doing? CS: I don’t know if I was trying to do something different. We were all just having fun. We weren’t even thinking about

what the rest of the Marvel Universe was doing. We had to create our own, and we were just talking about Silver Age Marvel, and how much fun that stuff was. I got a chance to redesign Ant-Man. I must’ve done a dozen different redesigns of him, and I ended up settling on almost what he wore in the ’60s, just slightly updated, because that’s what felt right for the book! It didn’t need bells and whistles, and nothing in the book was bells and whistles, it was all right there. It was what it was, and to try and, I don’t know, put a shiny sheet on it just didn’t feel right. I’m still really proud of that book. I think that’s one of the books I could give to anybody, and they can read it without knowing any sort of backstory. All these characters have such a long history, that it’s one of the few books where you don’t have to know anything before you jump in. It’s just good, classic comics. Roger did such an amazing job on that book. On Daredevil with Mark Waid, we talk about story, and what the character is going to do, and who I want to draw, and what’s going to happen. We get on the phone and talk a lot. With Thor, before the run started, Roger asked who I wanted to draw, what I wanted to do, and I said, “I want to draw Namor being a jerk.” And that was the only thing I asked for, everything else just came in. The scripts were perfect as is. I hardly ever added a panel or anything. Roger, being a cartoonist as well by trade, knew exactly what he needed, and how much space to leave. It was a great experience. DRAW!: And it got a lot of critical acclaim too. Obviously the sales weren’t fantastic, but they weren’t terrible. Did it make you feel good that the critics were responding to what you were doing? CS: Well, critics or not, I was just happy when people would send me pictures of their kids reading it. It’s one thing for just a bunch of 30- or 40-year-old dudes reading comics, but to have started reading comics as a little kid, and seeing another little kid reading it…. It made me feel like I was doing good, you know, to see kids reading and enjoying something I did. I don’t know. It gave me the warm fuzzies.

Cover thumbnail layout sketches for Thor #2, featuring an all-new, all-female Thor. Thor © Marvel Characters, Inc.

DRAW!: What kind of things were you looking at for visual inspiration during this time? CS: Gosh, I think I’d gotten to the point where I was so busy, I wasn’t reading anything. Definitely there’s some Bruce Timm in there, and Shane Glines. There’s a lot of simpler stuff. There’s a lot of Toth. I was just starting to get

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Pencils and finished inks for the cover of Thor #2. Thor © Marvel Characters, Inc.

into Noel Sickles when I started Thor, so I was playing a little bit with the lighting, but Sickles was still pretty new to me at the time, so I hadn’t… DRAW!: Internalized it yet. CS: Yeah, I hadn’t broke it all down in my mind yet and figured out how he was doing it. Caniff has always been a big one. I was reading Meanwhile… the biography about Caniff by R.C. Harvey, I found out about his studiomates, and that’s how I got into Sickles. I don’t think I had much time to look at anything else, because while I was doing Thor, I was also drawing Shepherd’s Tale for Dark Horse. So, that was six or eight long months of doing one book during the day, and then putting my wife to bed, and going downstairs and staying up all night drawing another book. Thor was drawn during the daytime, and Shepherd’s Tale was drawn at night. DRAW!: Shepherd’s Tale is obviously a licensed property. Was there a lot of hassle involved with that, as far as getting approvals? CS: You would think there would’ve been, but Joss Whedon had a deal—I think it still works that way—where you draw the character once, and if his company thinks that’s close

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enough, that’s close enough, and that’s the only time they give approvals. If they sign off on your design, that’s it. DRAW!: Maybe Whedon, working in comics himself sometimes, gets it a little more than a corporation would. CS: Maybe. I think Joss had one note where he said, “Shepherd’s hair looks like Cool Whip in one panel,” and that’s like the only thing he said about the whole book! And that’s all that had to get changed. His hair was too white in one panel, and had to get changed. DRAW!: Were you binge-watching Firefly during that period? CS: Yeah. I downloaded the soundtracks from Serenity and Firefly from iTunes, and they were on my iPod running on random, and I was putting on the show, and fast-forwarding through shots trying to find specific locations I was trying to draw, or costumes you can’t find reference of online. I watched the show over and over again. DRAW!: Did you ever try to match cinematography from the show? CS: Maybe here and there. I was trying to draw it like a western, but since I’ve never drawn a western comic to begin with,

Cover art for another Joss Whedon project, Angel & Faith: Season 10 #2. Angel & Faith © Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp.

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I was only thinking of western movies. I may not have done the job I intended when I took it on. But I’m still happy with the way it turned out. I don’t think I knew enough western cinematography to try tricks like that. It was mostly just what I read in the script. When I read a panel description, I get a picture in my head, and I’ll do a quick scribble of it in the margins of the script, and nine times out of ten, that’s what I’ll draw on the page. DRAW!: Was it around this time that you moved out to Portland? Was it 2009, 2010, somewhere in there? CS: Our first was born between issues of Captain America and Bucky. And that was in Oregon. I was still working on Thor: The Mighty Avenger when me moved to Portland, but I think I only had an issue or two left. DRAW!: So it was late 2010, maybe? CS: Maybe. That sounds about right. I’d finished all of Shepherd’s Tale, but hadn’t had a chance to scan it yet, and I remember getting emails from Dark Horse, and them saying, “We can come to your house and pick up the pages and scan

them if you don’t have time to scan them,” [laughter] because I was unpacking the moving van while I was getting emails. I was like, “No, no, I’ll scan all the pages. Just let me get them done, and I’ll turn them all in.” They were trying to hurry up and get pages to Dave, because Dave only had a small window to get all of his stuff done. I think he colored that entire OGN in a week. DRAW!: Wow. CS: That guy is a workhorse. He can crank it out, and I didn’t have a single note. 80 pages, and it was just glorious He’s just a master. DRAW!: Indeed. Was the move to Portland so you could be in an area with a lot of other artists? CS: Well, we were looking for something different. We’d lived in Missouri our whole lives, and we were just… trying something different. We were looking for places to go. We went to Minneapolis for a weekend, and I really didn’t care for it. It was so cold when we went, that’s what I thought of when I thought of Minnesota. I sort of vetoed that.

A wraparound variant cover for Uncanny X-Men: Battle of the Atom #12. X-Men © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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The next one down the list was Portland, and that’s really because I’d made friends with Jeff Parker through Twitter, and we did X-Men: Agents of Atlas together, and then I found out how many other people lived in Portland, and I thought, “Holy crap, that’s where I want to go!” My wife and I had made plans to go out there and look for houses we could rent, and I kept taking on more work, and the more work I’d take, the more we’d have to cancel plane tickets and reschedule. It got to the point where I’d taken on so much work that I couldn’t go at all, so my wife went out by herself and looked around, and she’s the one who figured out where we were going to go. Jeff drove her around his neighborhood, telling her what houses were good, and I think we rented out first house based on Parker saying which one was good, and then looking at photos online. We sort of jumped in with both feet. We just wanted a change of pace. The caliber of creator out there was really what pushed me over the edge. Then the weather and kids were the biggest reasons to get us back out of there. DRAW!: Did you do much socializing while you were there? CS: You know, we really didn’t! [laughter] It’s so awful. I moved out there so I could see folks, and then I’m always so busy, I don’t get to be as social as I’d like. I was part of Periscope after about a year. I was in Portland for two years, and after about a year, I asked if I could join the studio. They had to take a vote, but [Steve] Lieber and Parker and everybody were cool with me hanging out there. I got to sit at Kieron Dwyer’s old desk, and it was cool to be around other creative people. DRAW!: Who else was there? There was Parker and Lieber, and I guess Sara Ryan was there, and…. CS: I’m not sure that she was. It was separated into two halves, so I really only saw most of the folks that were on the left side of the studio. Parker, Rich Ellis, Colleen Coover, Paul Tobin, Steve Lieber, Erika Moen, Ron Randall, and Karl Kesel were all on my side. I didn’t see a whole lot of Karl. I saw Ron there about every other time I was there—sometimes I’d use his desk. But mostly I was chatting with Parker and Colleen and Tobin, just because they were right around my desk. And then on the other side, I talked to Ben Dewey a lot, my Portland twin. I got mistaken for him several times while I was in Portland. There’re a lot of bearded, hatted, bespectacled gentlemen in Portland. [laughter] We had a few mix-ups between folks. Dewey does a webcomic called Tragedy Series. He’s really great; he’s going to be a household name before you know it. Natalie Nourigat worked next to Dewey, and I’d talk with them a lot in the mornings when I

Attention Marvel: Make this a real comic and not just a variant cover. X-Men © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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went in and was still working on my first cup of coffee. Next to them was Dustin Weaver, who did the SHIELD book with Hickman. Who else? There were a few other people I didn’t see a whole lot of. There’s the guy who did the Sonic the Hedgehog books, but I never actually saw him in person, so I can’t remember his name. Ron Chan was there as well…. It was a big group! DRAW!: There’re more people than I remember being there. CS: There’re a ton of folks in there. There’re a lot of folks who do indie comics, or do web strips. It’s actually a working studio too, so they do storyboard work. Some of them may be doing more storyboards than comics, so that’s why they aren’t big comic names. There’re a lot of real talented people there.

More variant cover goodness, this time for New Warriors #1. New Warriors © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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DRAW!: While you were there, did you get involved with any of that other studio work, or were you mostly just focused on your own stuff? CS: No, I mean, they asked if I would do a few things here or there, but really, I usually overbooked myself with comics anyway, so it was hard to take on anything else. Even if it was just something offered straight to me through email, or on the phone, I would have to turn it down. Comics take up most of my life. It’s hard to take on anything else. DRAW!: You mentioned hanging out with Tobin and Coover—you all seem to have the same sensibility as far as what Colleen and Paul are doing with Bandette now. It’s that same kind of joyous cartooning thing you did with Thor and carried into Daredevil.

CS: Well, it’s weird that you bring up Bandette. That’s one of those things where I got to be a fly on the wall while they were creating the book. They couldn’t come up with a title. They were talking about what to call it, and I feel like I was a little part of history as they were putting it all together. They were doing designs, and we were all talking about what the first cover was going to look like. It’s really neat to think of what that book has become. They’ve won an Eisner. I got to be at the Eisners when Paul and Colleen won. It’s cool. It’s comics. DRAW!: Speaking of Eisners, you’ve had your share of Eisner recognition. CS: Yeah, I’ve been nominated a couple of times, and I’ve brought one home. It’s pretty crazy! When you walk off stage, they take your picture. I was beet red and just had the craziest look on my face! [laughter] I looked like a wild man. I’m pointing at it, and my mouth’s agape. “I won this!” It’s just crazy. From a kid begging to get his portfolio looked at to winning an Eisner is just… it still doesn’t feel right. I have my Eisner and Harvey in a little glass case in my office, and sometimes I look at it, and I’m like, “How is that even in there?” [laughter] DRAW!: You were in Portland when you did the three issues of Ultimate Spider-Man with Brian Bendis. What was that process like? Since you were both in Portland, were you able to actually physically get together and talk things over? CS: Well, we’d been chatting a bit. I think we were joking on Twitter more than anything. He’d found out how close I lived, and I was the closest to him in Portland. I was just down the street, and he’d tweet about Cover art for Daredevil #0.1, printing the digital-first Daredevil: Road Warrior story. smelling something, and I’d say, “Oh, yeah, Daredevil © Marvel Characters, Inc. I smelled that five minutes ago.” And that’s really how we first started communicating, and I found out I you want to draw some of this?” and I didn’t even realize was so close. that’s what was happening. Before you know it, I was getting He rode his bicycle over to my house one day, and he told an email from the editor saying, “When can you start?” I was me his idea for Miles Morales, and I said, “Oh, that sounds like, “Start on what?” “Oh, Ultimate Spider-Man,” and I was crazy. That’s awesome. You’re going to really piss off some bowled over. I had no idea that the conversation I had with racists, but that sounds awesome. Good luck with that.” He Brian was actually going to lead to me drawing some of it. was like, “Is that something you’d be interested in?” I was Yeah, I did one issue of the Peter Parker Ultimate Spiderlike, “Oh, gosh, yeah, that would be great. That sounds cool.” Man, and then two or three issues of the Miles Morales, and I didn’t realize he was actually saying, “Hey, do you want before I was done with my last one, I’d already lined up a to draw this book?” I just thought we did that, “How cool. fill-in issue on Daredevil, and one thing led to another with Is that the kind of thing you’d like?” because that’s how we Daredevil. Paolo [Rivera] decided to do creator-owned stuff, are. We want to make sure what we’re talking about, other and I signed on for one issue, and started working on it, and people would be interested in. He was actually saying, “Do everybody seemed happy with it. Then I think we’d decided I

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would be the alternating regularly with Paolo, and then Paolo was like, “Okay, I’m getting ready to go,” so I went from the guy who was just going to be doing the fill-in to a co-regular to the full-on regular guy in just a matter of weeks, I think. My sense of time is pretty messed up, but it felt like weeks. Who knows? It may have been six months. Working at a desk all day, my sense of time really gets skewed. It felt like a really quick process, one thing led to another, and I’ve been the regular guy on it since, almost three years now. DRAW!: When you’re preparing for something like Thor, where you’re creating the designs from scratch, versus something like Ultimate Spider-Man, where it’s a short stay, versus something like Daredevil, where you’re coming in for a long haul, how much design work, preliminary sketching, etc., do you do ahead of time, according to those factors? CS: Well, Miles already had been designed. Sara Pichelli had designed him, so they sent me her turnarounds of Miles, and I’d already seen the first two issues of stuff that she’d been doing with the supporting cast, so there was really zero prep for Ultimate Spider-Man. I just jumped in. I already knew how he looked. My biggest problem was just trying to figure out how I was going to ink those webs. So, I did some notebook sketches testing out different kinds of white-out, because I knew it was going to take me forever if I was going to ink around each of those red webs. Then I tried maybe inking webs, and then inverting them in PhotoShop, but that seemed like it wouldn’t work for time. It seemed like it was going to take longer than just using white-out. But that’s really all the prep I did for that. I already had a pretty good idea of how I was going to draw him.

Chris’ “very specific idea” of how Matt Murdock should look. Daredevil, Matt Murdock © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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For Thor I did a whole lot of cover sketches ahead of time. I think we were originally approved for twelve issues, and Roger had an idea of who the villains were going to be in each issue. So I just sat down one day, and I think I did two or three options for all twelve covers, and that’s really where all my designs originally came from. I took maybe half an hour to an hour for each of the characters. The first designs I did for Thor are the ones we went with. It all just came tumbling out of me. It was really natural. It felt like every time I did one, the first try is what we went with. Ant-Man was the hardest, and then I went back and did the Silver Age costume for the most part. And I tried to redo Wasp, but there really wasn’t any need. I liked her old costume, I just gave it a bit more high-techy earphone things. With Daredevil, I’m mostly doing it on the page. I’ve been drawing Daredevil for years. He’s one of the first Marvel characters I was really into. I was exclusively a Batman/DC reader as a little kid. The first Marvel books I bought were reprints of when Daredevil met Spider-Man, and I was like, “These guys are awesome,” so those were my first two Marvel characters. I started buying Gene Colan Daredevil comics. I think Romita Jr. was the artist at the time, but as I said, it was hard to get current comics when I was a kid. Most of the Daredevil I read was Colan. If it could come out of my hand that way, it would be Gene Colan and Wally Wood, but it ends up looking like me. In my head, I picture Gene Colan’s Matt Murdock talking, but by the time it gets on the paper, it looks like I drew it. [laughs] DRAW!: Do you see things in your compositions that look like something Colan might have done? CS: Composition-wise, I never think about what other artists do. I’m just trying to figure out what works best for the panel and for the page, and for the flow of it. Composition isn’t something I’ve tried to glean from other artists; my composition is just how I do it. People have tried to show me Wally Wood’s “22 Panels That Aways Work,” and that’s all well and good if you can use one of those in your story, but I feel like if you’re looking at that too much, you’re going to try to shoehorn those angles into your story, even if that isn’t the angle that you need. I’m just trying to service the story as best as I can. But just the style of how Colan did it, like Matt Murdock’s features, how his hair looks. The first thing I did when I came on as the regular artist on Daredevil was to ask if we could cut Matt Murdock’s hair, and Ellie Pyle said, “No, I like his long hair! It looks like he’s too busy being Daredevil to cut it!” And I was like, “Well, it just doesn’t look like Daredevil to me. That’s not the Matt Murdock that’s in my head. He needs a sharp black suit with no highlights, and hair like a lawyer. It needs to be shorter on the sides and a little longer on top, and have some Brylcreem in it.” I just have a really specific idea of what it should look like. [laughter] I sent in some turnarounds of what my design for Matt’s new haircut would be, and I think I waited until the new arc for Matt to get a new haircut. I think it was like issue #23 where I could finally start drawing my Matt Murdock.

Daredevil character designs. Daredevil, Stilt-Man © Marvel Characters, Inc.

But most of my designs are done on the page, which is why Foggy has really evolved over the years. I’d never drawn Foggy just for fun, but Daredevil I’d done dozens of drawings of long before I ever got the job.

after cancer treatment. I made the decision that Foggy wasn’t going to lose his eyebrows. It’s too hard to make him act without them. Some people do lose their eyebrows, some people don’t; some people lose all their hair, some people don’t. Everyone is affected differently by chemo, so I had to make the decision that Foggy wasn’t going to lose them, because it’s just too hard to get anything across with a blank forehead.

DRAW!: With Foggy going through cancer treatment, did you have to do much research as far as how it was going to affect the way his face looks? Did you look at stuff like that? CS: Well, a lot of Foggy is me. In my head, I DRAW!: What about the move from New York to empathize with Foggy the most. I identify with San Francisco? Was it a relief that you didn’t have to him as a character, so all of his facial acting and draw all those buildings anymore, or was it kind of a his posture, that is what I look like. In the latest hassle, because you had to build up a new photo referarc, he’s wearing a hoodie and a hat! [laughter] ence stockpile? He’s wearing my uniform. I don’t know, I mean, CS: Well, New York has always been fun for me, Matt Murdock is sort of what I wish I looked because it’s all fiction. I’ve never been to New York, so it’s the New York Universe I’ve grown up reading like, and Foggy is what I feel like. [laughter] I was heavy as a kid, but I was never as heavy as in comics. It’s not a real thing. Hell’s Kitchen is just I’ve drawn Foggy in the past. Whenever I draw Hell’s Kitchen in a comic; it’s not the gentrified area heavy Foggy, I feel like I’m drawing heavy Chris, it is now. I don’t have that as a reference in my head, and when I’m drawing him with cancer now, it’s a because I’ve never been. I’ve always been drawing the little closer to my actual weight. grimy, dingy New York that Colan or Mazzucchelli or If I had to pick a face for Foggy, it would be Lee Weeks has built for me in the back of my mind. San Francisco has been more of a chore, because Damien Jurado, who’s a folk rock musician. He used to be a heavier-set guy, and he lost a whole we’re trying to find real places and landmarks to lot of weight. I’ve seen pictures of him before and help set it for people. You can’t just say, “Okay, after, and that’s really where heavy Foggy/thin we’re in San Francisco now,” and still draw it Foggy is coming from. It’s an odd reference, exactly like I draw New York. So, it’s a little bit Serpent Society thug design for Daredevil. but that’s where it originally came from. more work, but hopefully it helps give people a You can do Google searches of before and sense of place. It was good for me to try and do © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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something a little different. It sort of feels like with volume four and the move, it gave me a shot in the arm, like I’m taking on a new book. DRAW!: Does it feel more like “your book” now? CS: It does, it does. When I did my fill-ins, Javier [Rodriguez] colored me like he’d color Paolo, and when I took over as regular artist on the book, I asked if he could color me a different way, how I would prefer to be colored. So, when he colors Paolo, it’s a little flatter, it’s a little more modeled, and there’s a little more airbrushy stuff going on, and I think that sort of flattens my stuff out, because I already don’t do a whole lot of shading. There’s a lot less to the color, so I asked him if he could do more like a cel animation cut line style. After a whole bunch of emails back and forth, between Javier and Wacker and I, I think we found a perfect marriage of what I want him to do and what he had in mind. Issues #14, 15, 16, I think he was still trying to figure it out. Allred came

in on #17, and I think #18 is when it really started kicking in. We were having conversations all along, and when it was decided I was officially going to be the go-to guy, that’s when we really made the big push for bright colors and cel shading. DRAW!: It’s funny, I was talking to Paolo about this about a month ago, and he said that he really likes what Javier’s doing over you more than what he did over him. He said that if he ever went back to Daredevil, he’d want Javier to do what he does over you. CS: Really? [laughs] That’s interesting! I mean, I think Javier said he was trying to color Paolo like Paolo would color himself. Javier being an artist himself, maybe he misinterpreted it, or maybe he was picking up on things that Paolo did but wasn’t crazy about? I don’t know. That’s amazing. I didn’t know about that. That’s funny, I was steering him in a different direction. I had no idea I was steering him in a direction that was actually what Paolo wanted him to do! DRAW!: Yeah, Paolo was talking about when they first started with issue #1, Javier was doing a lot more of that modeling, and he asked him to tone it down, and tone it down. I guess they got to a place where they were pretty satisfied with what they were doing. It’s funny, when he saw what Javier was doing with you, he said, “Oh, that’s what I wanted.” [laughter] CS: That’s really interesting. I was a big fan of what they were doing from issue #1. I was talking about it online, and telling people on Twitter they should buy it, and people were saying, “Oh, you could draw some of that!” I was like, “No, no, no, I’m a fan of it, but I don’t think I’m the right guy for that.” And then less than a year later, being offered the job to work on it. I was just like, “Whaaat? I don’t know. Yes, but… it’s a little odd.”

Chris’ design for The Shroud for Daredevil. The Shroud © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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DRAW!: It seems like since you’ve been on the book—maybe this is just because of the way the stories have been—there doesn’t seem to be as much of that radar sense effect Paolo developed for the book. CS: Oh, it’s a pain in the ass. [laughter] It’s my least favorite thing when I have to do it. I really like the ones where it’s the POV of sound. I really like doing the sound effects. All of the sound effects in Daredevil are hand-drawn. That’s a lot of fun for me to do, but the radar sense thing, it takes me two or three times as long to do each panel, because there’s the wireframe, and then there’re all the lines across the object. For a guy who’s way into less is more, that’s just

more and more and more. I curse Paolo every time I have to do one of them. [laughter] DRAW!: Paolo was approaching it as someone who’s also a sculptor, and he’s always thinking of that 3-D image. Your stuff is flatter on the page, but you’re also trying to give a sense of volume as well. What do you do to imply volume into your style? CS: Well, a lot of it is just in spotting blacks, really, how I create the illusion of depth. I do a little bit of feathering—nowadays it’s a lot more than I used to do—and I use a lot of china marker and pencil. I do a lot more textures than I used to. After a couple of issues of Daredevil without any feathering, I realized I could start playing with texture and it would still work. So I do a lot of texture stuff, and a lot of patterns. But most of it is just spotting black, and changing up the outlines around things, and light sources. It’s the only way I can figure out to create depth. And just ripping off Toth. [laughter] DRAW!: You mentioned your markers, let’s talk about the tools you’re using now. I know your tools have changed over the years, as far as you used to use a lot of traditional brush and ink, and now you’re doing a lot more with markers and brush pens. At what point did you start switching over to what you’re using now? CS: Well, the more shows that I did, at conventions with tools that would travel, is where I really started making the big switch. After Ande taught me all the proper tools I should be using, that’s where I really thought like, “This is what professional artists use. This is what I should be using.” So, I have my Raphael #3, and #4, and #2, and I have the right ink, and I was using what I was told to use, but whenever I would do a show, I’d bring out a Pentel color brush and my Pitt pens. I’d just use whatever was handy and traveled well, and didn’t spill ink on my friends. [Eric laughs] Because I’ve knocked over ink bottles, and spilled water on Brian Hurtt’s pages, and… I’m just too clumsy to carry around all of these things, because I’ve ruined other people’s work and my own. It just seemed a whole lot easier to just grab a pen bag and shove a few pens in it, and hop out the door. I realized that people were really liking my sketches more than they were liking my pages, and I was like, “Well, why am I fighting it? Why am I trying to use the proper tools, when I’m not using what’s comfortable?” I did so many shows and I felt so comfortable using these tools, it was slowing me down to use something else at home. So, what I use on pages now are the exact tools I was trotting around to shows with. It’s easier, and it made it so I could hang out on the couch and watch a movie with my wife while working on pages. I wasn’t trying to grab a bottle of India ink and make it to the couch. I guess digital would be the next step, but I am an old dog, and I’m not prepared to learn new tricks just yet. DRAW!: So no Cintiq yet? CS: No, I have one. It is gathering dust right next to my disk of Manga Studio. [laughter] I haven’t found the time to devote to trying to learn how to do something like that. I’m trying to

Chris does his best Toth for this variant cover for The Fox, a character Toth took a few turns at himself. The Fox © Archie Comic Publications, Inc.

teach myself how to color in Photoshop, just because I feel like that’s a good thing to know. When I was a kid, I tried to learn everything so I could be able to do it if I needed to, but it helped me to see it from the other creator’s perspective. I like to do all my own sound effects so I know where the letterer is coming from, if I want to make a note. I feel if I don’t know my way around it, I shouldn’t be the one giving notes. And I give a lot of color notes, so everyone who works with me, I appreciate their patience. Thank you very much to Bettie Breitweiser, and Jordie Belaire, and Dave Stewart, and Matt Wilson, and Javier Rodriguez. Everybody puts up with my really anal-retentive, “Hey, there’s a little bit of white on this eye that you didn’t quite get.” [laughter] I spent almost all of yesterday going through Daredevil #10 with a fine-toothed comb, because I’m anal-retentive that way. I can’t help it. I’m trying to make every issue the best that I can, and if a color is too bright here or there, and it’s not making the story read just right, then I’m going to try and steer the colors in the best way that I can, and trying to learn that stuff in my free time makes it so I don’t feel so bad giving notes, because I can sort of put myself in their shoes.

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DRAW!: Are you looking at maybe doing something creator-owned in the near future? That’s the big thing right now with Image going gangbusters, and all these guys doing their own thing. Do you have any aspirations to strike out on your own? CS: Yeah, I’ve got a couple of irons in the fire. There’re a few things I’d like to do. There’re guys I want to work with, and there’re ideas, too. At some point, I’d like to do some creator-owned work. I mean, I can’t do mainstream superhero comics forever. I feel like at some point I need to own something. I mean, technically, Area 10 is creator-owned, Capote in Kansas is creatorowned; I own half of each of those. So when I’m asked, “When are you going to do creatorowned?” those are creator-owned, they’re just for bigger companies. You know, I’ll get there. It’s a goal, but right now, I’ve got bills to pay, and only so many hours in the day, so the creator-owned stuff is going to take a little while longer to come out, but I am slowly working on some things. DRAW!: Speaking of hours in the day, how do you divide up your day? I think you said you work in two different shifts.

CS: I do, yes. My girls wake up between 5:30 and 6:00 every morning, so I get up with them, make breakfast, get everybody changed, and try and be out of the house between 9:00 and 10:00. I have a studio in the house I work in at night, and a studio outside of the house that I work at during the day. It’s just office space that I rent.

Samples of Chris’ coloring efforts done in his spare time. Batgirl © DC Comics. Captain America © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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DRAW!: Is that just to keep your mind free of distraction? CS: A lot of time in my house is downstairs, and with two kids bombing around up there, it’s hard to concentrate. I mean, somebody’s always screaming about toys, or they’re playing really loud. I can hear every single thing, and it’s just hard to concentrate. I hate to have to leave the house to get work done, but sometimes that’s just how it is. I wish I could be like Allred and be around my family all the time, but I don’t get any work done that way. So yeah, I work from 10:00 to about 5:00, then go home, have dinner with the family, put the girls to bed, have them both in bed by 8:30 or so, and hang out with my wife for a little bit, watch a movie or something, then I go back to work. I’m back down at the table usually from about 10:00 to 2:00, and that’s usually

when I try to get my scanning all done. I don’t have Internet access or anything in my office outside of the house; it’s just a closet to get my work done in. I have windows I can barely see out of, and some AC, and a desk and a lamp, and that’s it. It’s really just my work hole. It’s where I go to cram as much work in as possible. DRAW!: That’s a long day. CS: Yeah, but getting to break it up makes it feel like it’s not like a super-long day. I used to do 16-hour days before I had kids, and that’ll take its toll on you. But if you can break it up, and give time to your family…. I fix breakfast in the morning and get to hang out with them, and I’ll see them for dinner, and I hang out, and then everybody gets to bed, and I get to see my wife. It’s not ideal, but unless I’m really fighting a deadline, that’s only six days a week, and then I can see all of them for a whole day. Ideally I get to see them for a day on the weekends, and I’m always trying to make time for—right now I’m taking my oldest daughter to bug classes, so we go to the butterfly museum, and we learn about bugs every day, and there’s zoo stuff that we do. We get to hang out, and the little one’s sleeping more than not. We try to hang out as much as we can. I’m trying to make it so comics aren’t my entire life all the time. Before we had kids, I started to lean that way for a little while. Now that my career has gotten to a point where I don’t feel like I have to constantly punish myself to try to get all this work in, it’s gotten a little easier. I’ve moved from a four-week schedule to a five-week schedule on Daredevil. I only have to do a book every five weeks, and that’s made it so I can take days off, and I’m not killing myself 24 hours a day.

that needs to be done, but then it’s just jumping right in to inks, and that’s where there’s a real discrepancy. It’s really easy to pencil a page, it takes a little bit of slogging to get it inked. Inks can take anywhere from three hours to twelve hours, depending on how complicated the page is. It’s a little rough, because we’re always just trying different things with pacing, and Mark lets me try things all the time. Sometimes he’ll say, “Pages 12–14, here’s what happens,” and then it’s up to me to work out the pacing, and I’m my own worst enemy. If it’s up to me to do pacing, then we end up with a bunch of 12- or 16-panel pages. [laughter] I like to parse out as many beats as I can. I like to be the storyteller in

DRAW!: Good, good. On average, how long would it take you to pencil a page? CS: Gosh, to pencil a page? About an hour and a half. DRAW!: So you’re working pretty loose? CS: They’re tight enough. I mean, my layouts are really tight. I do layouts that are about 4½" x 7½"—I can do two of them per piece of typing paper—and then I scan those and blow them up to 11" x 17" and print them out in blue, and I tighten them up in wherever I can in an hour and a half, things like laying in where panel borders went astray when I was doing them by hand so small, and tightening up some facial features. There’s always a little tightening up

Pencils for Daredevil #8, page 14. Daredevil, Purple Man © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Inks and Chris’ gray tone guides for Daredevil #8, page 14. Daredevil, Purple Man © Marvel Characters, Inc.

balloons for Joe, so he can figure out how I cut things into pieces. That’s what slows me down the most.

that way. I like to slow down moments. I think that’s a lot of the manga influence bubbling back to the surface. I really like small moments, and there aren’t a whole lot of small moments in superhero comics—there isn’t the space for it, there isn’t the time for it, let’s get these guys punching—and I really like the beats in between. Especially with a lot of the Matt and Kirsten stuff, or Matt and Foggy, where they’re talking. All the talking scenes end up with at least half a dozen extra panels. [Eric laughs] I’m always dropping in silent panels, or beats to slow down the conversation, so it feels like you’re living the conversation with them in real time. I really hate seeing too many balloons in one panel. I’m trying to catch the certain moment in the speech balloon, and I want you to be able to identify what they’re saying in the panel with the balloon that corresponds to it, and to do that—there are a lot of notes in my layouts, “I’m sorry, I cut this panel into two or three, and I cut this panel apart.” I number all of the word

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DRAW!: You might have one, maybe two half-page or full-page panels in an issue. You’re not like some guys where you throw them in all over the place. You really save them for that one moment. Is that something where Mark’s adapted his writing to fit what you like to do, or is it something he leaves up to you? CS: We got so used to 22-page books, so we’re both still fighting for 22 pages. We only have 20 pages of content now, so we’re just trying to shoehorn as much in as we can into these 20 pages, and in doing so, we have to get as much bang for your buck as possible. So whenever there is a splash page, we have to really earn it. We can’t just have a splash page of a character getting punched, there isn’t the real estate for it. If it’s a really big moment, then sure, but we really have to earn it. There’re a few in issue #1, but the big splash page in issue #1 of volume four was a shot of New York. [laughs] It’s radar senses and smell POVs, and it’s just a giant circle radar sense of New York, and it took me like a day and a half to ink the whole thing. So yay, splash pages! Even the splash pages that should be easy, I never take the easy way out. In the issue that’s coming out next week, issue #9, Mark wrote in the script that he wanted Daredevil on top of a roof, crouched on a gargoyle, and I was just like, “Ugh,

I’ve seen that shot a million times. Can I do something different?” And he said, “Yeah, man, do whatever feels right! What would you rather do?” The script said, “The story of Daredevil, don’t get me started,” or something like that, and it’s supposed to be showing a depressed Daredevil, like a Sad Sack sitting on top of a gargoyle in the rain sort of shot. “Ugh, it’s been done, I don’t feel like there’s anything new I could bring to it.” It’s like trying to draw Dracula. I mean, it’s been done a million times, there’s no point in me doing it. So, okay, what really is the most awful part of the story of Daredevil? He can’t save people, and all his girlfriends die. [laughter] So I have Daredevil kneeling down and screaming and a pile of 30 dead bodies all around him, and there’s a puddle of blood, and a looming Bullseye and Kingpin above him, and rain is coming down, and there’s a cityscape behind him…. I could’ve just gone with that gargoyle shot, and it would’ve been a fairly easy day, [laughter] but I had to fight myself, and do what felt right for the story. That one wasn’t a quick one. But that was the first page I did for the issue. I usually do the splash first, because it’s usually the fastest, if there is one, and it’ll help get the kinks out, and I’ll just jump in with both feet the next day.

DRAW!: Okay, so you don’t necessarily work in order, but you thumbnail everything first. CS: Yes, having everything in thumbnails makes it easy to jump around. I know when I need a costume change, I know when somebody had a bruise on their eye in one page that doesn’t have it on the next, so it’s easy to keep track of that sort of thing in thumbnails. It’s sort of like movie directors. They don’t shoot in sequence, they shoot whatever they have available for that day. So when I know I have a short day, if I’m going to take my oldest to school and I’m going to start my day late, then I’ll try to do the pages that I already know I can get done faster, and save the ones I know are going to take longer for the days I know I’ll be at the barn longer. The barn is where I work; it’s a renovated dairy barn. I just say “the barn” when I’m going to work. DRAW!: Going with the movie director analogy, a lot of the guys that you track back to, Toth and Colan and so on, were really big movie buffs. They would analyze the cinematography of movies. You’ve tracked back various artists and their artistic influences, but have you taken it where, “These guys like these movies, so I’ll study these films that influenced them”?

Layouts complete with color for the cover of Daredevil #9. Cover A ended up being used for the next issue. Daredevil, Purple Man © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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CS: Not as much. I mean, when I first started trying to go backwards, I was really just trying to find stylistic influences, not so much storytelling influences. I think maybe some of it has come through subconsciously. I know that [Bryan] Hitch likes Michael Bay movies, but that’s really about it. [laughter] He’ll gladly own up to that. I’m not saying that like a smack on his big screen style. He says he likes Michael Bay movies. Most of the stuff that I watch is “watching” with quotes around it. I put on things and listen while I’m working, but I

don’t watch a lot of stuff. When we get the kids to bed, I usually just watch a little TV with my wife, whatever’s on Netflix or Hulu, usually a TV show. She’s really into The Good Wife, but I don’t have the patience for The Good Wife. There are a lot of shows that she’ll put on, and I’ll give it an episode and say, “Well, I’m going to go to work.” The new season of How I Met Your Mother we’ll watch together, but there’s not a whole lot of meat in stuff like that. I’m not picking up storytelling from a three-camera sitcom. DRAW!: You mentioned listening to the soundtracks when you were working on the Firefly graphic novel. Do you prefer to have music in the background rather than TV shows or movies? CS: I probably listen more to music. Lately, I’ve been getting back into podcasts. I had a ten-year lapse with podcasts. I lost a lot of my patience with the machine of comic book podcasts and their reviews. They sort of blurred together after a while, and I wasn’t reading enough to keep up, so I started giving up on listening to comic book podcasts. But I’ve started trying to get back in and listen to a few of those again. I listen to music that’s on my iPod that hasn’t been updated in ten years and whatever movies my wife has downloaded onto iTunes for me.

The finished inks for the Daredevil #10 cover—a play on the typical gargoyle pose. Daredevil, Purple Man © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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DRAW!: Do you prefer working during the day, or do you prefer working at night? CS: If I can get started really early in the day, that’s great. As soon as I roll out of bed, if I can get straight to my desk, that’s my best work. The longer I go, the slower I go, and I start slogging through it, and start trying to beat the clock and get stuff done. But that doesn’t happen. I’ve got to get everybody up and fed and showered, and then I get to the barn, and my first couple of hours I’m a little rough, a little rusty, and that’s where doing pencils so fast, I can make up for that. That helps me shake off the cobwebs, so I’ll get a page done of pencils while I’m drinking my first couple of cups of coffee, and

Layouts for Chris’ contribution to Marvel 75th Anniversary Special, detailing the beginnings of the Marvel Age. All characters © Marvel Characters, Inc.

then jump right in and start inking away. Then I’ll get halfway through the day and have lunch, and I’ll sketch while I’m having lunch—that’s where my ten-minute doodles come from that I post online—and answer emails and all that junk. That usually recharges me a bit. Then I’ll jump back in, and if I’m having a good day, I’ll start penciling my second page, and if I’m not, I’ll finish inking my first, then go home, get everybody to bed, scan that page, and get it cleaned up and uploaded to the FTP, and start the next page. Hopefully I can have that next page penciled and started by the next day. DRAW!: You’re doing clean-up in Photoshop I assume? CS: Yeah, I mean, there’s not a ton of clean-up, maybe a half hour to an hour per page. But I always end up getting behind, because the littlest one will be teething or sick or what have you. Every time I plan to be home and working on the computer, something happens. Somebody’s up, or somebody has a nightmare—there’s always something happening that keeps me from my desk. That’s why it’s important for me to try to get as much work crammed in as possible while I’m away from the house.

DRAW!: And you said you don’t have a computer at the office? CS: No, there’s literally just a desk, a chair, and a lamp. That’s it. I have a little refrigerator here with two bottles of water in it, because I keep forgetting to refill it, and that’s where I put my lunch when I get here in the morning. That’s about it. There’s nothing on the walls. It’s white walls all around, and a window that has so much stain on it over the years you can barely tell when it’s raining outside. [laughter] It lets in just enough light that I can see, and there’s a fluorescent light above me. It definitely keeps me focused; there are zero distractions. I can check Twitter or whatever, and I try to do that as little as possible when I’m at home, but being at the barn, staying off Twitter is a lot easier, because having no Internet connection, I’m using up my data plan every time I sign on to the Internet, and the more I do it, the closer I am to whittling down how much I have, and I start having to pay for it out of pocket at the end of the month. It accidentally works out in my favor. I shouldn’t be on the Internet anyway.

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The Right Way, The Wrong Way, and The

OrdWay ! CAPTURING THE PICTURE IN THE MIND’S EYE by Jerry Ordway

’

ll start out this time with an example that shows how things don’t always go smoothly from layout to finished art. I had a straightforward assignment, to draw a Batman piece including Commissioner Gordon, as well as the Bat-Signal. I had an idea, and with my eyes closed, could visualize exactly what I wanted to draw. I rarely capture that mind’s eye picture on paper as perfectly as I see it in my head, but I keep trying, year after year, regardless.

I began to sketch out my image at a reduced size, 5½" x 8", on copy paper. I had my Fairburn System book (Set 1, Book 1) open as reference for a trench coat (see right), which Commissioner Gordon would be wearing. I could have made it up but wanted the added detail only a photo or the real thing could provide. The BatSignal spotlight is in the middle ground, easily cobbled together from various Google images, while the Batman figure is in the background. The story to tell here, since every picture tells a story, is that Batman always has a way of sneaking up on Commissioner Gordon!