#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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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
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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,
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RIGHT WAY, WRONG WAY—ORDWAY!
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Butch Guice
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comic art bootcamp
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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!
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Jamar Nicholas reviews the tools of the trade. This month: A pen nib and a pocket sketchbook
www.twomorrows.com
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Chris Samnee
A LEAP OF interview conducted by Eric Nolen-Weathington and transcribed by Jon Knutson
C Daredevil Š Marvel Characters, Inc.
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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
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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
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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
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 Š Marvel Characters, Inc.
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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
The Right Way, The Wrong Way, and The
OrdWay ! CAPTURING THE PICTURE IN THE MIND’S EYE by Jerry Ordway
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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!
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In the finished layout (right), now tightened up, I re-worked the Batman pose. I was still not happy with it, but I committed to it because the other elements worked fine. I was ready to start light-boxing, or tracing the image onto my Strathmore 3-ply Bristol paper.
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The final piece with the addition of a little Pro white paint and razor blade scratching across the projected light of the signal, is finished. I’m a big fan of the effect you get with a razor blade, or an X-Acto knife, but it works best with a fresh blade, and an angle almost parallel to the surface of the paper. You have to do it quickly, and know when to stop, or you’ll have a torn up surface. Practice it on decent paper scraps, over inked in black areas before you try it on a drawing you care about!
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butch guice
Walking in a WinterWorld Wonderland interview by Mike Manley transcribed by Jon Knutson
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rom the Microverse to the DC Universe, Acclaim, and now the frozen arctic of WinterWorld, prolific and versatile artist Jackson “Butch� Guice pulls back the curtain on his process and career.
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Butch’s rough sketch (above) and full pencils (right) for a cover for the recently reformed Valiant. All characters © Valiant Entertainment, Inc.
DRAW!: You just finished the WinterWorld stuff, right? Butch guice: Just finished WinterWorld, and currently, the main project is a book called Paradigms, which Nick Spencer and I are doing together for Image now. So, that’s coming up, and I’m also doing some work for Valiant, a backup feature in Ninjack of all things. DRAW!: I’m trying to remember, you worked with them before, right? BG: Yeah, in the Acclaim days. I worked for them for three years or so. DRAW!: I worked for them for about a year when they did the big relaunch. Were you…? BG: I was with them too, yeah. I was on Eternal Warrior, and then they yanked me off of that and I was all over the place. As people were going to other companies and stuff, I was filling in on Bloodshot, and Turok, and X-O—an issue here, an issue there kind of thing—for about a year toward the end. DRAW!: Was that hard to jump from character to character if you didn’t necessarily have any feeling for the character? BG: It definitely made it more of a job. It’s hard enough, you
step into the tail end of a storyline, or you just are there for the issue, and you don’t know who half the characters are, so you sort of fall back to—I’m sure you’re well aware—just focusing on the craft of filling in the story, but you just don’t have any inherent emotion involved with it from that standpoint. DRAW!: Right, I’m kind of doing that right now. I’m doing a miniseries for DC, and I’m drawing the Justice League International, the Kevin Maguire days version…. BG: Yeah, it’s not like you have this history with the characters. You know how it is: the more you work with the characters, if you’re having a pleasant experience, the more you get involved with it, you start getting little personal touches in, and you develop personal characters you actually like drawing and try to make your own, as opposed to doing the standard costume designs of this character or that character. That’s a real gravy for the job, is being able to do something special with it. DRAW!: Yeah, exactly. Comparing that to when you were working on WinterWorld, and following the miniseries that Jorge Zaffino did, how did that compare to, say, doing an issue of Bloodshot?
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DRAW!: The thing I do remember was that was a bad batch of pages. BG: Yeah, as soon as you put ink on the paper, it bled all over the place. [laughs]
normally would and then shrink it down and paste it back in in Photoshop so it will hold up properly. You’re going for a bunch of thin lines, and stuff, and you just can’t do it on the paper that you’ve got anymore.
DRAW!: The quality of the paper has really declined, especially in the last four or five years. Are you going to be doing everything in Manga Studio soon? BG: I still do everything, for the most part, on the boards. Sometimes it turns into more of a patch-and-paste job, because if the paper’s bad, or the brush is just not working, sometimes I’ll have to draw it two or three times larger than I
DRAW!: What paper are you using now, Strathmore? BG: I’m actually having halfway decent luck with some Tinson Bristol that I bought, the Foundation series. It’s the smooth, and that’s only because I was busy trying to find something. I kept buying pads of paper, and two or three pages in, setting the whole pad aside, because I was so frustrated with trying to do any kind of pen work. You almost are forced into using Microns and things like that. I’ve bought a lot of that stuff too, and I just don’t have the ability to comfortably make that stuff work with a life to it—the Microns and stuff. I really prefer the dip pens. As a matter of fact, most of the pen points I use, I go on eBay and buy vintage pen points from the ’50s and ’60s, pay extra money for them, but at least I know I’m still getting some good quality material on occasion.
The background for this Captain America pinup was imported digitally, but that’s about as far as Butch will go in his process. All characters © Marvel Characters, Inc.
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DRAW!: I do the same thing, and I know other guys that do the same thing. Jerry Ordway switched over to using this old fountain pen, because he was having a problem with the 102 and 108 actually tearing up the paper. He’d get a little gob of paper at the end of the nib, so he was using the fountain pen, because that would give him the line, but it wouldn’t tear up the paper, and then he’d go in and use the brush. But Terry Beatty does Rex and The Phantom in Manga Studio. BG: There are a lot of guys using Manga Studio right now, and there’s a whole debate about the future of inking going on as well. I know a lot of people, particularly a lot of people trying to break in, are switching to it, and they’re doing the digital inking thing. Honestly, it would take me the rest of my career to figure it out, to get a comfort level with it. After 30-plus years of doing it on the board, I just would not have the connect to be doing it digitally. The eye-hand coordination just wouldn’t be there. Depending on the paper, depending on the pen point, depending on the brush, your instincts will lead you, because that’s what you’ve done for three decades, going, “Okay, I’ve got to go a little heavier with this. I’ve got to watch that stroke, because the brush keeps wanting to split on me.” [laughs] DRAW!: What kind of dip pens do you like?
T
he ear is one of the great defining features of a character or personality. My mom used to say “little children have big ears” in regard to my ability to sometimes hear things I shouldn’t have been privy to. She also used to say I “heard what I wanted to” in regards to me suddenly being hard of hearing when it came to doing chores and cleaning up my room or piles of loose comic books. We can see how important the ear was to great illustrators like Norman Rockwell and Albert Dorne in helping to define a character type, as well and other features that were often exaggerated, like the nose, head shape, hands, and feet to get a great character type. To the caricaturist, the ear is one of the main features that gets exaggerated to push a likeness.
“The Shadow Artist” (above) and “The Gossips” (right), both by Norman Rockwell. Artwork © respective owner.
The hallmark of a handsome head of a male or female are well-defined and well-placed features, including the placement of the ear in its proper place on the head and in its proper proportion. Too far forward or back, too large or too small, and the head will start veering towards caricature. While this might be true, there are well known actors and actresses who are thought of as beautiful or handsome that do have some features one might term “off model.” Cary Grant is a perfect example of this. Certainly one of the most handsome and iconic leading men of all time, his features were striking and distinct, including his rather smallish ears in comparison to another rugged leading man, Charlton Heston, or Clark Gable, who was known for having rather large ears.
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If we take Clark Gable’s ears (center) and put them on Cary Grant (left), well, it just doesn’t work, does it? Photographs © respective owner(s).
Anatomy of an Ear
The ear’s anatomy is actually quite complicated with many tapering and shell-like segments and cartilage. This is of course all designed to capture sound, and unlike many animals, the human ear is much smaller in proportion to the head, and for most people has little movement, though some are able to “wiggle their ears” via the Auriculares muscles. The ear perches on the back of the zygomatic arch. The amount the ear is tilted back (angulation) varies from individual to individual, but the average tilt is about 20º (see the cyan lines on the male and female heads at right). Helix canal Helix antiHelix
anterior Notch
concha
lobe
The ear breaks down into four main segments: • Helix • Antihelix • Lobe • Concha or cymba cavity, the deepest depression, which leads directly to the external auditory canal. Sometimes the earlobes are attached and sometimes not. This little detail can also be played up to express a type of character and define their personality and look. Women’s ears tend to be smaller than men’s, and the zygomatic arch on a female skull is much less pronounced than on a male. Their ears are also more delicate in general. I am stressing this here for the sake of drawing the ideal types of features and relationships. Almost no one has all the ideal features, and no one except identical twins has the same features as anyone else.
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UNDER REVIEW TWO-FER: OF PEN NIBS & WALLET/SKETCHBOOKS
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elcome back, all and sundry, to the corner between Ark VW\OH DUFKLYDO YDXOW EXW WKHUH LV VRPH VWRFN WKDW H[LVWV RXW the pages of DRAW! where the Commandant of in the wild. IF YOU ENJOYED THIS Col-Erase, El Capitan of Eberhard-Faber, the PREVIEW, 2QH RI P\ &UXVW\ $JHQWV LQ WKH ÀHOG KLSSHG PH WR %UDQCLICK THE LINK TO ORDER THIS person who puts the prestidigitation back in Presto! Correcdon’s Etsy store, where he sells classic stock of Esterbrook ISSUE IN PRINT OR DIGITAL FORMAT! tion Pens, returns! It is I, Jamar Nicholas, your Crusty Critic, nibs, and even though this Crusty Critic doesn’t use nibs in my back again to give you the what-for and why-izzit on art sup- daily practice, I jumped at the chance to buy these, which were plies, tools tricks, and (unfortunately, as the job entails some- affordable, and worth delving into the great history lesson. WLPHV WUDSV I’ve missed you all. During my absence I have traveled the world and back—literally, as I got to visit Tokyo last year and will be returning again, about which I will do a Crusty 'HEULHÀQJ LQ D IXWXUH DUWLFOH %XW WKLV LVVXH D PLOHVWRQH LVVXH IRU VXUH WKH ELJ KDV PH UHWXUQLQJ KRPH WR ÀQG D SDLU RI WUHDWV IRU WKLV ZULWH XS LQ P\ VWXGLR PDLOER[ 7KLV FROXPQ features reviews of two separate products: one is a blast from the past, the other a signal from the future. Let’s get started, DRAW! #30 shall we? We focus the radar on Daredevil artist CHRIS SAMNEE (Agents of Atlas, Batman, Avengers, Captain America) with a how-to interview, comics veteran JACKSON GUICE (Captain America, Superman, Ruse, Thor) talks about his creative process and his new series Winter World, columnist JERRY ORDWAY shows his working process, plus more Comic Art Bootcamp by BRET BLEVINS and ed5IF TUFFM QFO JO UIF øFTI‰UIF JOGBNPVT OJC itor MIKE MANLEY! Mature readers only.
THE “CRUSTY CRITIQUE� SYSTEM
These product reviews will be judged under my trusty beret VFDOH³IURP RQH EHUHW QRW ZRUWK WKH WLPH PRQH\ HIIRUW WR $8.95 UIBU NBEF Peanuts QPQ (84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) (Digital Edition) $3.95 ÀYH EHUHWV D &UXVW\ VXFFHVV %X\ LW LPPHGLDWHO\ DV PXFK DV DOES IT WORK? \RX FDQ FDUU\ (YHQ WKRXJK WKLV FULWLF GRHVQ¡W H[SHFW WR LQKHULW WKH FDUWRRQLQJ ESTERBROOK RADIO PEN #914 traits of Schulz, it is a nicely balanced nib, which works a little First off, a tip of the beret to my new friend Brandon McKinney, KHDY\ EXW LV à H[LEOH DQG FDQ WDNH SXQLVKPHQW RQ WKH SDJH a collector and history buff of the Esterbrook line of pen nibs HOW MUCH DID IT COST? ZKR UXQV D WRS à LJKW (WV\ VWRUH ZKHUH , SXUFKDVHG WKH SURGXFW Most cartoonists worth their salt know the legacy of the $ VWHDO DW D QLE DQG WKHQ %UDQGRQ ZDV JUHDW HQRXJK WR 5DGLR &KDUOHV 6FKXO] DIWHU KLV ORYH DIIDLU ZLWK XVLQJ toss in some freebie nibs, the transaction highlighted by his WKH ERXJKW RXW WKH HQWLUH VWRFN IURP (VWHUEURRN EHIRUH personalized labeling in an elegant hand-written script, showthe company was sold to a pencil company. Some say that casing the descriptions of the new nibs in my Crusty Clutches whatever Sparky didn’t use is sitting in a Raiders of the Lost which added a great touch of class. http://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=1182
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