Draw! #31 by TwoMorrows Publishing

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

#31

FALL 2015 $8.95 IN THE US

J.G. JONES

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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! #22

DRAW! #23

DIEDGITIIOTANSL BL AVAILA

DRAW! #19

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! #24

DRAW! #20

DRAW! #21

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!

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!

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

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

DRAW! #25

DRAW! #26

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!

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!

(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! #27

DRAW! #28

DRAW! #29

DRAW! #30

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.

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 editor MIKE MANLEY! Mature readers only.

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THE PROFESSIONAL “HOW-TO” MAGAZINE ON COMICS & CARTOONING WWW.DRAW-MAGAZINE.BLOGSPOT.COM FALL 2015, VOL. 1, #31 Editor-in-Chief • Michael Manley Managing Editor and Designer • Eric Nolen-Weathington Publisher • John Morrow Logo Design • John Costanza Front Cover • J.G. Jones DRAW! Fall 2015, Vol. 1, No. 31 was produced by Action Planet, Inc. and published by TwoMorrows Publishing. Michael Manley, Editor. John Morrow, Publisher. Editorial address: DRAW! Magazine, c/o Michael Manley, 430 Spruce Ave., Upper Darby, PA 19082. Subscription Address: TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Dr., Raleigh, NC 27614. DRAW! and its logo are trademarks of Action Planet, Inc. All contributions herein are copyright 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.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

J.G. JONES

Mike Manley interviews the artist about doing creator-owned work versus work-for-hire

RIGHT WAY, WRONG WAY—ORDWAY!

Khoi pham

comic art bootcamp

The crusty Critic

Capturing the picture in the mind’s eye

The defiant artist reflects on the many changes he’s made in his life, career, and art.

This month’s installment: 20 steps to improve your art and career

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: The Crusty One goes to Japan!

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DRAW! FALL 2015

-ING AHEAD

e are living in a second Golden Age. I was talking to a young artist friend of mine over Messenger the other day, remarking to her on just how different things are between her life and art education and mine when I was her age. She’s currently enrolled at one of the big West Coast schools for concept design, in fact the school I wanted to go to when I was finishing high school: Art Center. I think we are at the beginning of a second Golden Age of art education, powered by technology that, like Messenger which we were chatting on, didn’t exist 30 years ago. The media is full of stories about how expensive college and art schools are now, and how the outcome isn’t looking good for so many young artists starting out with lots of student debt weighing them down—and that includes me (I just finished with my Master’s), though I’m not so young and have a career. The figure I have always been given is that only 2% of art school students go on to actual careers in art. Not a great percentage to be sure, and with many schools costing upwards of $60K a year with room and board, that’s a big pile of debt! The great thing, though, is the wave of new online opportunities to take classes and learn drawing, painting, cartooning, and just about everything, it seems, that you can learn in a classroom today. These virtual ateliers are a great alternative for many who can’t afford to move and uproot their life, or afford the crazy tuition at many schools today. This wasn’t something I could have ever imagined when I was 19 or 20 years old. It seems there are hundreds of videos on YouTube alone on everything from inking to oil painting. I even have an old one on using the razor blade for inking (https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=teKXRlT-LF8). So while technology does have a downside, it also has a big upside in this way. We have already covered Steven Silver’s school in Draw!, and in the coming issues we’ll be covering more of these schools like the Watts Atelier. Between all of these alternatives, I think students have a world of options when it comes to learning how to draw, animate, character design, etc., and I’m happy to have Draw! be a part of this new era! Now go DRAW! something!

NEXT ISSUE IN FEBRUARY! Bwah-hah! DRAW! #32 (80 FULL-COLOR pages, $8.95), the professional “how-to” magazine on comics and animation, yuks it up with superstar penciler Howard Porter (Justice League 3000, JLA, Superman Beyond) as he monologues and demos the creative process that has made him a top-tier penciler for DC Comics. Then we heckle power penciler JAMAL IGLE (Supergirl, Molly Danger, Zatanna) into spilling his guts about everything from storyboarding to penciling for the big boys, as he gives a breakdown of his working methods. Plus our regular lineup of columnists: Crusty Critic Jamar Nicholas, Jerry Ordway (demonstrating the “ORD-way” of drawing) and “Comic Art Bootcamp” by Draw! editor Mike Manley and Bret Blevins. No matter how you frame it, this issue kills! NOTE: May contain nudity for figure-drawing instruction; suggested for Mature Readers Only. SUBSCRIPTIONS: Four issues: $34 Standard, $41 First Class, $11.80 Digital Outside the US: Canada/Mexico: $43, Elsewhere: $52 Subscribe Now at: www.twomorrows.com

DRAW! FALL 2015

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

#32

Fall 2015 $8.95 in the US

HOwArd POrTer in A lEAGUE Of hiS Own

JAMAl Igle in DAnGEROUS tERRitORy

plUS! REGUlAR cOlUmniSt

Jerry OrdwAy AnD mikE mAnlEy AnD BREt BlEvinS’

J. G. Jones WANTED ARTIST

rom Final Crisis and Wanted to Before Watchmen, J.G. Jones has worked in the big leagues on big books for a long time—but now Jones turns his brush to his most personal work to date, Strange Fruit. Draw! catches up with Jones from his Philadelphia home as he works on his new series with writer Mark Waid. Interviewed by Mike Manley and transcribed by Jon Knutson

DRAW! FALL 2015

A wraparound incentive cover for Strange Fruit #1. Strange Fruit © Jeffrey Jones and Mark Waid

DRAW!: What are you working on right now? J.G. JONES: Oh, God. [laughter] I am fully enmeshed in Strange Fruit right now. It’s pretty all-consuming. DRAW!: Since you’re going out and doing full illustrations, what are the stages that you go through when you start it? JGJ: Yeah, it’s a fully painted comic, so I’ve collected and continue to collect tons of reference material. Because it’s a period piece, it requires a lot of preparation before I even begin. I can’t draw something as simple as a room without knowing what’s in that room. I go through a lot of my reference stuff, and do the traditional thing of breaking down the script page by page, panel by panel, and then decide what I need for that page, and kind of collect everything together. I also have some models who I work with for the regular characters in the book. DRAW!: What about for the cars? Did you buy tin toys or models of the cars so you could get them at different angles? JGJ: No, that never really looks right. It looks kind of wonky, so I don’t have any toy cars. But my father was always into old cars. When I was a kid, he was always rebuilding and restor-

DRAW! FALL 2015

ing some old car or other. He and I actually bought a ‘32 Ford Model A a few years back for him to tinker with, so my dad’s really knowledgeable about all the old vehicles that I use in the book. And then there’s the Internet, which is a great resource. DRAW!: I suppose you can probably type in “1930 Model A Ford Door” and somebody has 30 pictures of the door. JGJ: Oh, yeah, especially on the auction sites. Because they are selling the cars, there will be pictures from the undercarriage to the roof, inside and out… it’s pretty great. I have used some of my dad’s old pictures along the way, because he’s had them from different cars that he’s owned over the years. It’s kind of in my blood, the old car stuff. I grew up with it. DRAW!: Well, I’m sure that helps a lot. There’s a lot of work that goes into trying to make things authentic. JGJ: Absolutely. DRAW!: You’re from the South. I forget exactly where you said you were from. JGJ: Louisiana, out in the sticks.

DRAW!: If you’re drawing that environment, you can probably rely a lot on memory and feeling, too. JGJ: Oh, sure. It was very rural where I grew up. A lot of the stuff was still Depression-era. Some of the houses and barns were very old and had been around for a while. When I was a kid, my grandfather would still plow his garden with a mule. It didn’t take a lot of imagination to see how things were in the ‘20s and ‘30s, and that rural landscape was in my head when I decided to do this. DRAW!: When I shared Al Williamson’s studio, I lived in Holmesdale in Northern Pennsylvania near Scranton, and it’s like a time capsule up there. There’re so many little towns and cities, and buildings that literally looked like you walked through a time warp back into the early part of the last century. JGJ: A lot of Pennsylvania’s that way when you get outside of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. DRAW!: I think one of the things that kept it that way was there used to be trains that went up to Scranton, and you could take trains from Scranton into New York or from Holmesdale to New York, and then they stopped that at some point, and I think because they stopped that, they stopped time in a way. So I would go to these places like Galliley, Pennsylvania, little towns along the border, and all you would have to do is make it black and white! [laughs]

How much time do you spend each issue, before you start drawing, actually doing the research? I imagine you don’t want a process where you’re like, “Oh, I’ve got 30 pages where I don’t know what this car looks like.” You don’t want to have holes in your process because of your reference. JGJ: I generally have so much stuff already, and I kind of have in my head where it is. I have a dynamic file for the book, divided up into cars, buildings, farms, all this time period stuff. The first place I go to is that file. If I can’t find exactly what I’m looking for, then I go to the Internet. I try to break down a particular sequence, and focus on an entire scene all at once, and if we’re going to connect to that scene later, I just do all the work on the one scene so I have all the material I need. But I try not to have an entire book all mapped out ahead of time, because then it gets boring for me. I generally end up eating my lunch and doing any online research I need at the same time, I’ll be goofing around looking for, I don’t know, a newspaper office or something I need to draw, a teletype machine…. I mean, you don’t think about it, when you have to draw, what kind of things they had in 1927 in a newspaper office. DRAW!: I remember those series of illustrations Rockwell did, “Norman Rockwell Visits a Country Doctor,” and then “Norman Rockwell Visits a Country Newspaper,” and you’re really doing the same thing. You have to, to make it authentic,

J.G. does his thumbnails in a 8.5” x 11” sketchbook, and often works through several different layouts for each page. All characters © DC Comics

DRAW! FALL 2015

Thumbnails for covers for Marvel’s Original Sins. All characters © Marvel Characters, Inc.

DRAW! FALL 2015

Panel from the opening page of Strange Fruit #1. Strange Fruit © Jeffrey Jones and Mark Waid

go in and find what they had in a place like that in 1920. Even if it might only be in one panel, one master shot, at least it’s there. JGJ: And you also have to think about things like, “It’s in the sticks, maybe not everything’s up to date.” I don’t have the latest television every year; mine is a few years old. So the stuff they have might be twelve or 24 years old. So I’m not going to have everybody driving around in a 1927 Ford or Chevy or Buick, somebody’s going to have an old beater from the teens, or maybe they can’t afford a car, and still drive a wagon with a horse or mule.

JGJ: Yeah, sometimes I have lighting and backdrops and stuff. A lot of times I just use natural light. It’s tough working on this, because it’s raining throughout the entire book.

DRAW!: When you’re breaking it down, do you go through and read the script? Do you thumbnail it? JGJ: Yeah, always.

DRAW!: What I always find interesting is how people work with photographs. In the case of Al, sometimes he would draw from the photograph, and sometimes he would use his Lucy to would trace the photograph, but then there’s always that camera distortion that’s not your eye distortion, so you’re trying…. JGJ: Right, you’ve got to be careful and correct.

DRAW!: And then you try to find reference that will work with the thumbnail? JGJ: Yeah, I thumbnail it all out, and when I need my models for that particular scene, I try to get a photoshoot together. Thinking about a panel, I may leave myself some options when shooting the models. I’ll shoot what I first had in mind, and then move the camera around to the other side, shoot from different angles so I have some options when I get to work. I like to have the ability to shift things up if I think it makes the page work better. DRAW!: Al was from the era where a lot of guys like him, [Leonard] Starr and John Prentice and Stan Drake, all those guys used a lot of photo reference, and he would combine something that he would draw naturally, and then shoot reference for those hard angles or dynamic foreshortening, or to get that really dynamic lighting. I noticed you have a lot of very dynamic lighting. What are you using as far as your photography? Are you setting up a little platform or stage? How do you go about setting up your models?

DRAW!: So you use diffused lighting. JGJ: Yeah, I can’t really do that beautiful double-lighting or hard lighting unless I have some odd lighting thrown in the background, which I did some in the first issue. If you get some interior unnatural lighting, you can get around a little more with that kind of stuff.

DRAW!: I was looking at the first issue you sent me, and you have a great shot on the first page. You have the cafe in the background, and then you have the old Ford truck with the guy and the dog in the bed. Are you using reference and then sort of drawing that, as opposed to what Al would do? He would, especially for cars, try to find an angle, or shoot the angle, and basically trace the photograph off and work from there. Here, it looks like you’re drawing it, and you’re using reference, so that it all fits in your artistic space, so to speak. JGJ: Yeah, I use any technique that works, but it’s all filtered through the particular “look” that I’m going for. I’m not being as precise with the specifics as Alex Ross would be. I’m not going for that crystal clear photo effect finish, I’m going for something that’s a little rougher. Sometimes I’ll even leave pencil lines on the page, so you can actually see the drawing process, as well as the painting process.

DRAW! FALL 2015

Thumbnails for DC’s First Wave Doc Savage series . Doc Savage © Condé Nast Publications

DRAW! FALL 2015

Thumbnail sketch and finished painting for Doc Savage #6 from DC’s First Wave imprint. Doc Savage © Condé Nast Publications

DRAW!: I like that. Maybe it’s just because I’m an artist, but I always enjoy the pentimento, as they call it, where you can see the process, you can see the artist’s hand. It’s like a little secret thrill if you buy an original, and you can still see some of the pencil that wasn’t quite erased. I have some old Buscema Sub-Mariner pages that were inked by Giacoia, and you can still see some of Buscema’s pencils underneath the inks. JGJ: Fantastic. DRAW!: Now, you’re doing these really beautiful, complicated crowd scenes, so— JGJ: I hate crowd scenes. [laughter] DRAW!: There’s an amazing amount of beautiful work in this first issue, but I was really impressed by the crowd scenes, because they are hard, and there’s really no easy way to do them. Were you setting up multiple models at one time to try to work around, like basically block it out like they do in Hollywood, where they have backers or stand-ins sit in on the set so the director or director of photography can get the lighting right, and get everybody where they need to act? JGJ: I think about it in layers. I usually put whatever is the important action in the foreground, and I start thinking about everything else in layers, like a stage set. That makes it easier for me. It’s like everything here is foreground, then there’s middle ground, and the final layer is background. The lighting can be different in all three of those layers, and that creates depth. A room is not going to have the same lighting all the way across the scene.

DRAW!: Do you do tonal thumbnails to break that down for yourself? JGJ: Yes, my thumbnails will generally have that kind of thing in there. I mean, they don’t look like anything to anyone but me, they just look like scribbling, but my shorthand means something in my head about the light. DRAW!: You have a color palette for this which helps give it the feeling of being in the past. It seems mostly to be cool colors. Even the warm colors are kind of cool. JGJ: There’re a lot of maroons and browns. Even the greens are kind of browned down a little bit. I’m trying to avoid this looking like a spandex hero project of any kind. It’s not illustrating the era exactly, but I want it to have the feel of a little bit of age. I have the palettes that way, like an old poster that’s kind of faded. DRAW!: Yeah, I definitely get that, especially towards the end when the big guy shows up. The splash page has the feeling of something left in the window, and all the yellow faded away.

DRAW! FALL 2015

JGJ: It’s partly because all the reference I’m finding is old black-and-white stuff. That might be in my head as well. Even though it’s color, it tends to be a little washed out. DRAW!: I take it this is mostly water colors with maybe a little wash, or is it ink? JGJ: Yeah, both. I use them both indiscriminately. They’re all in my palette. DRAW!: Do you have a particular brand that you like? JGJ: The one thing I always tell people who ask me what I use is, “Don’t use cheap products, because you pay for it.” [laughter] DRAW!: It’s true. A lot of Frazetta’s stuff has faded because he used cheap products. JGJ: There you go, just going for that “get it done and get it published.” DRAW!: He used those fugitive pigments, and they don’t store well. JGJ: Especially the reds and some yellows. Some of the pigments were vegetable dyes, and the sun just annihilates them. DRAW!: Even some of Neal Adams’ Tarzan, those Dr. Martin’s fade, too! JGJ: Yeah, Dr. Martin’s are horribly fugitive. I’m so old, you know this, they used to use Dr. Martin’s for the coloring guides in comics. The colors are brilliant, but they don’t hold up over time. DRAW!: You could’ve done it all grayscale, like Richard Corben... JGJ: I didn’t want anybody to color it, you know that.

Finished inks (with ink wash) for the cover of Before Watchmen: Comedian #3. Comedian © DC Comics

DRAW! FALL 2015

DRAW!: Yeah, but I was thinking like Richard Corben, and then coloring it in Photoshop. Did you ever think of doing something like that? JGJ: I don’t have the Photoshop skills to do that, and I’m a control freak. It’s easier for me to just pick up the brush. I would have to learn a whole new skill set and fight my way through it to get that. I mean, it’s something that could be done, but watercolor is what I’m comfortable with. I’ll do little fixes in Photoshop if I screw up a panel and need to repaint it. I’ve done that here and there along the way, but I don’t do a lot of actual work in Photoshop.

DRAW!: How did you go about getting your models for this? Did you go on Craigslist and say, “Needed: Buff—” JGJ: I just use friends. DRAW!: I guess that’s good, because friends work cheap, right? [laughs] JGJ: Generally! [laughs] I’m buddies with the guys at Atomic Comics, so a couple of them have been helping me out. You know, anybody I can get that I think has the right look for a particular character. I have a cousin in Austin who is the foreman character, and he’s just great. He’s a musician and a parttime actor, so he’s a natural. So is my friend Joe, who models for the Sonny character. I just give him the script, show him the sketches for the scene, and he basically acts it out for me while I shoot the photos. He gives me great, expressive images to work with. He’s perfect. Since my cousin is in Austin, I’ll do a thumbnail of what I need and email it to him, and then he sends me back the shots I need for the scene. They are usually just great. DRAW!: Wow. Al had a huge array of guns and props and different coats, and that safari hat and safari jacket that he would use. Have you built up a collection of props yourself? JGJ: I had over the years, but you know, part of staying married is letting stuff go, [laughter] because they’re cluttering up the house! When I got rid of my separate studio, and added the new studio onto the house, part of making that happen was purging a lot of stuff. I don’t have a lot of props, but I’ve always had a lot of hats, old fedoras and things. That’s helpful, because I don’t know if you’ve had to try to draw a fedora, but those are a bitch if you’re not used to it! [laughs]

A Doc Savage commission piece. Doc Savage © Condé Nast Publications

JGJ: My empty, styrofoam head.

DRAW!: Even cowboy hats are tough. Do you have one of those styrofoam heads you can put a hat on at different angles? JGJ: [laughs] No, I don’t. I usually just put them on my head and have somebody take a picture for me.

DRAW!: I take it you’re not tracing the reference, but you’re actually drawing the stuff. And by tracing, I mean that you can trace something down, but you can also then draw on top of it. So are you drawing it all by hand on the board? JGJ: Yeah, I’m doing all things, any and all techniques. My usual technique is, when I’m pencilling, I like to be able to move things around until I’m happy with them, so I’ll draw the figures separately, rough them out on tracing paper, and set them where I want, then I’ll flip the tracing paper upside down and tighten my drawing up, and I’ll flip it back over, put it into position on the page, and burnish it down, rub it down onto the page.

DRAW!: Well, it’s the same thing, you’re your own styrofoam head.

DRAW!: So you’re basically making an old-style transfer sheet, sort of.

DRAW!: Yeah, I have some fedoras. Since I started shaving my head, I need to wear a hat all the time. It’s funny, if you go back to the ‘60s, a lot of people still wore hats, but today everybody wears baseball caps, except now people wear those hipster hats. JGJ: A lot of hats are making a comeback.

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In this panel from Strange Fruit #1, J.G. forgot to include the dogs. He had to paint them separately and Photoshop them into place. Strange Fruit © Jeffrey Jones and Mark Waid

JGJ: Yeah. When you’re working with watercolor, the one thing you don’t want to use is carbon paper, because you can’t paint over that carbon. It’s greasy and causes the paint to bead up. DRAW!: What are you using? JGJ: A graphite pencil, usually a soft HB or something that is soft enough. Then I can tighten up the drawing before I place it on the page. You can’t be doing a lot of erasing on the watercolor paper. You can erase a bit, but if you do too much of it, you will destroy the surface, and that is going to affect the water and the pigment when you apply it to the page. DRAW!: So what surface are you painting on? JGJ: I like the Arches hot press. I like the rough surface of the cold press paper for landscape painting and fine art, but that paper texture will show up when you scan the art, so it’s not ideal for illustration work. Dave Johnson straightened me out on that many years ago, and now I use a hot press paper to get a smooth surface. DRAW!: Are you scanning your originals and then sending it to them so you can adjust things? Set your white point or whatever, so you can also make something a little lighter or a little darker? JGJ: Yeah, I can always play with the settings a little bit. DRAW!: Are you doing them as pages, or are you doing them sometimes as individual panels that you’re assembling in Photoshop?

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JGJ: I do them as pages unless I have to go back and fix something. For instance, I did a scene in the first issue of Strange Fruit where the Klan guys are suiting up to go up to the house, and I forgot to put these dogs in that were going to be important later, so I had to go back and paint the dogs in as a separate piece of paper and Photoshop them into the final image. Because I was an idiot and forgot to put them in to begin with. DRAW!: Well, I guess it’s nice that you can actually do that now. In the old days, you would’ve had to cut or mortar them in, paste them on top. JGJ: You had to have good knife skills for that. That’s what I used to do. DRAW!: You’ve actually done that before, to wrest things in that way? JGJ: Before I was in comics, when I was trying to be a fine art painter in New York, my day job was working at the newspaper doing all the production work. Yeah, I have mad knife skills. DRAW!: [laughs] That’s funny, because I did the same thing. I started as a teenager working in a small ad agency in Ann Arbor, but eventually ended up working for the Detroit Metro-Times. I was the art director there. You get great matte knife skills working that way! So, why don’t you tell us a little about your fine art life in New York? JGJ: [laughs] Well, there’s not a whole lot to tell. I wanted to get out of Louisiana, so…. DRAW!: You picked the exact opposite place to work!

JGJ: I went to grad school first. I got a scholarship to go to SUNY Albany, and did that for a couple of years, got my degree, and moved down to New York, where I thought I’d be a painter. Probably not the most brilliant idea anybody ever had. I lived hand to mouth for a few years, had a few shows, but I could see that it wasn’t going to be a settled life, working two or three jobs to get by so I could paint. DRAW!: What years were this? JGJ: I think I moved down from Albany to the city in ‘89. I moved over to Jersey City in 2000, a couple of blocks from the Hudson River. Had a great view of downtown Manhattan from there.

JGJ: They were a little bit of everything, I would say. The canvases were shaped like architectural elements, like Renaissance decorative wall paintings, as if they were made to fit in the niches of the walls and ceilings—a very Rococo kind of thing. So I’d start with a shape that was based on an architectural element, and then I would have some figurative stuff, and then I would just paint in different art historical styles—from early Renaissance to Modernism…. I would put a little bit of everything into every painting, so it ended up being a confusing collage of stuff. There’d be some very realistically painted

DRAW!: Did you have a gallery you were working with, or an agent? JGJ: No, I was taking whatever I could get. I did a little show here, a little show there. But I was making these gigantic paintings. Before Greenpoint in Brooklyn blew up into the hipster heaven it is now, I had a huge studio space that I shared with some friends, and I was doing these paintings that were so big, when I finally moved out, I had to tear them all apart. They wouldn’t fit out the door! It was ridiculous. I don’t know what I was thinking. DRAW!: Well, you know, in art school, they always push you, “Do a big painting! Do a big painting!” Which is great and fun, but unless you have a clientele that can buy your big painting, no one will buy your big painting, because nobody has 6’ x 8’ walls in their home, and then you end up storing your big giant 6’ x 8’ foot painting forever! I actually have a couple, myself. I did a few of these big paintings in art school, and everybody was, “Oh, great, do a big painting,” but then you realize... at least in theory, nobody’s going to buy a big giant painting. JGJ: Yeah, nobody has a place for your giant, genius project. [laughs] DRAW!: What were the matters of your work in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s? JGJ: Boy, it’s…. You know how hard it is to describe that kind of work. I was doing things that were basically trying to shoehorn all of art history into one big painting. DRAW!: Oh, something easy then, right? JGJ: Yeah, something easy! I was going to make it easy on myself. DRAW!: I take it they were creative narrative paintings?

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things, and then there would be other areas where the paint just ran down the canvas over everything else. It was a big mishmash of everything I loved about painting. DRAW!: At the same time, were you also doing illustrations, were you into comics? JGJ: Yeah, besides having the newspaper job, I was doing spot illustration work. I had some friends who worked in ad agencies in the city, and they would call me up, and I would do ads for Playbill, spot illustrations, whatever I could get on the side. I always had several advertising jobs going on in

addition to my newspaper job, my art assistant job, and my painting. DRAW!: Were you into comics, though? Were you a lifelong comic book fan, or did that develop later? JGJ: I grew up with comic books, like a lot of my generation. But when I was in college in the ‘80s, I kind of dropped away from comics, and got more interested in fine art. When I was in grad school up in Albany, as part of my scholarship I taught figure drawing. A couple of classes a week. My students were reading these books that I’d never encountered before, like Watchmen, and Dark Knight Returns, Moebius. I was like, “Oh, wow! Comics have changed in the few years I’ve been away from them!” So I found a comic shop, which was a new concept for me, because when I was a kid, we went to the spinner rack in the store, and that’s where you got your comics. I found Mike Mignola’s early stuff, and that just set me on a new path. I was thinking, “Maybe this would be a fun thing to do,” and the newspaper job in Brooklyn was very near a comic book store, so every Wednesday, that was lunch. Me and my buddy from work, Jonathan, would walk up to the comic shop. All the Image stuff was just starting to blow up, and I finally decided I could give it a go, so Jonathan and I wrote a story. I got five pages of the art done, and we took it to a comic con at the Javits Center. It was the dead of winter, and we had to walk through two feet of snow to the Javits Center, seven blocks or whatever interminable distance it was. DRAW!: The most inconvenient convention center in the world! [laughter] JGJ: And they have this convention in the dead of winter! DRAW!: So only the most hardy fanboy can make it. JGJ: [laughs] That was a great show, though, because the first people I saw when I walked in were Kevin Nowlan and Mike Mignola, signing books.

(above) Another Doc Savage thumbnail. (next page) Cover painting for Dark Horse’s Creepy #15, something of an homage to a Frank Frazetta Creepy painting. Doc Savage © Condé Nast Publications. Creepy © New Comic Company.

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DRAW!: Wow. When you were reading comics before, when you were a kid, did you know any artists, or was it that you bought whatever there was? JGJ: Oh, no, I was very discerning. I had my favorite artists, big time… I was mostly a Marvel kid. So, John Buscema was like [makes exploding sound], and

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Ross Andru was my Spider-Man guy, though I also liked Romita Sr. inking Gil Kane. I tried to imitate John Buscema, you know, my heroes. And then those Bantam paperback books came out, the Art of Frank Frazetta, those blew me away. I still have my original copies. They’re falling apart. If you try to open them, the pages end up on the floor. DRAW!: Yeah, I still have mine, too. ‘77 was a big year, I think, for us as artists as teenagers, because Frazetta books were coming out, you had Star Wars, and Heavy Metal started the same year. JGJ: And don’t forget the Lord of the Rings Hildebrant calendars. The first paintings I ever sold as a kid were my own Lord of the Rings paintings, inspired by looking repeatedly at those calendars. I still have my original calendars. DRAW!: In the late ‘80s, there was an art gallery in Philadelphia that actually had some Moebius stuff, and had the Hildebrant stuff. That’s where I actually met Moebius a couple of years later. I got to see a couple of those Hildebrant paintings from that Hobbit calendar in person, and they were just amazing to see, because they were working with acrylic, but when you were looking at them, you don’t think they’re acrylic. JGJ: Right, it’s incredible stuff. DRAW!: Obviously you’re discerning enough to say, “I prefer these artists over these artists.” Were you thinking you wanted to do comics, or was that just not part of your dream at the time? JGJ: When I was a kid, I wanted to be a comic artist, for sure. Then I wanted to be an illustrator like Frazetta or Michael Whelan, the Hildebrants. I was always moving the bar up for myself a little bit, until college came along and just blew that dream up.

J.G. didn’t draw the first appearance of DC’s Red Volcano, but he did design the character. Red Volcano © DC Comics

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DRAW!: Were you doing your own versions of that type of material when you were in high school? JGJ: Yeah, absolutely. They did not have art classes in my high school at all, but my parents found this guy, Larry Casso, in the next town over. He had this little art academy, where he taught you to paint, watercolor and oil. He was a good instructor, but he taught what he did, which was painting ducks and old abandoned shacks on the bayou, mostly in watercolor. Very nice, picturesque scenes.

DRAW!: Well, you’re using that now, right? JGJ: Oh, yeah! DRAW!: Your old shack technique is coming in handy now! JGJ: This nice man is trying to teach me how to do nice, bucolic scenes of nature, and I’m doing barbarians cutting monsters in half, and babes with their assets hanging out of diaphanous scarves used as loin cloths. [laughter] Mr. Casso was probably looking at me and thinking, “I’m not really sure what to make of this, but hey, your technique’s pretty good, kid!” DRAW!: [laughs] Yeah, and it’s funny, now that would never be an issue. I tell that to people all the time, how different it is now, growing up and wanting to be a comic book artist or an illustrator, because that stuff is common core now in art education. If you wanted to paint a barbarian or Conan or something, everybody knows who Conan is, so that wouldn’t be like, “Oh, that’s weird! Why are you painting demons? Are you possessed?” [laughter] JGJ: My neighbor had me paint a giant Conan figure on the hood of his ‘68 Mustang, and that was the highlight of my career back in high school. DRAW!: I guess that’s one step up from painting on the side of a van. You have it on the hood of a car. JGJ: Oh, yeah, on the hood of a muscle car? Hell, yeah! [laughs] Good times. DRAW!: So you were thinking originally of being a comic book artist, or a fantasy illustrator, but then you decided to go to fine art school. Did you sort of figure, “Well, I’ll do that later,” or did you just figure you’d go in a different direction? JGJ: I really just changed my direction for a while. It was coming from the small town and finally getting to go to college, so it was kind of a big deal to me. I was trying on new hats, getting exposed to new things, as happens with a lot of people exposed to new ideas like that. DRAW!: I think it’s interesting that that’s what you wanted, or that’s what you were thinking, and then you kind of put that aside, and you went and did the fine art thing, but then you went back to your first love. JGJ: I think I needed to see what the fine arts was all about. But when I got to New York, and saw what it really was…. At first you have this idea that everybody in fine art is in a

Another of J.G.’s design sketches of Red Volcano. Red Volcano © DC Comics

big club, and we’re all pals or something. But you find out everyone is super-competitive. They all hate each other, and would stab each other in the eye to get a show. [laughter] So many people were so nasty. Finally, it was like, “This is not the club I want to be in.” DRAW!: Commercial art might be cutthroat, but it’s basically much more directly competitive, like, “I need to get this job,” or, “My rate is higher,” or, “My rate is lower.” But, at

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JGJ: I agree with that one hundred percent. That’s my assessment of it as well. We’re pretty collegial in comics. I mean, there’re a few people who make themselves obnoxious and you can’t stand them, but you don’t worry about that. You get the job or don’t get the job based on your own ability. DRAW!: Yeah, and I think that may be because, even though the field has become bigger, it’s still smaller than fine art. There’re probably several million “fine artists,” and there’s not a thousand comic book guys. JGJ: And one of the differences is, outside of a few very rich art patrons who buy a few things, they’re turning out a zillion MFAs with basically no prospects of any kind of future. DRAW!: Well, I just went through that MFA process myself. The difference was I had a 25-plus-year career in comics and commercial art before I ever went back to art school. But yeah, I have a lot of my good friends who I went to school with, one or two have decent jobs, and everybody else is really scraping by. It’s tough to be a painter, and make your living totally off it. I mean, I do know some people who do, but it’s the same way with comics, if you’re not on the “A” or the “B” level, your likelihood of getting work or continuing to get work is pretty much nonexistent. It’s just not going to be there. JGJ: It’s true, it’s true. DRAW!: And I think the MFA path is coming to an end, because you cannot charge people $100,000 for two years of art school, and they graduate, and there’re basically no teaching jobs. Finished inks for page 7 of the graphic novel, Wonder Woman: The Hiketeia. JGJ: No, no. There are now tons of Wonder Woman © DC Comics MFAs every year, and there’re maybe least the people I know, they seemed more supportive, whereas 35 jobs around the country available every year. you’re right, there are a lot more haters in the painters’ camp. But I think it might’ve always been that way, because any art DRAW!: Were you aware of that when you were in school? movement lasted no more than a few years, because some- Was that something you were dealing with? body would get successful, and some other person would say, JGJ: I think about the time I was getting out of school, I was “Well, you’re not following up on the manifesto exactly the starting to see the writing on the wall. Because of the way I had way we said it, so you’re not in our little camp any more.” grown up, I’ve always had jobs, usually multiple jobs, and findThere’s a lot more hating going on between the various art- ing work of any kind so I could continue to make art. I never ists and art camps. There’s always a little bit in comics, but it even bothered to apply for teaching jobs because I assumed seems to me there’s a lot more, in my experience, in fine art. it would be so unsettled. You know, some of my friends were

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moving every year to take an intern job that paid next to nothing, and you couldn’t keep a relationship together… nothing! Like you were picking fruit, following the seasonal work! DRAW!: The only positive might be is if you were teaching three classes, you would get health care, or you’d get some benefits. But yeah, that’s up and down every year. There’s no loyalty to anyone as an adjunct, just like there’s no loyalty any more in comics to anyone who’s been working for a really long time. You could work like me for 30 years, but that doesn’t mean that the companies are going to be at all loyal to you. JGJ: Oh God, no. Especially now that the Internet has made it possible to go abroad and find people who will work for half of what we were getting paid ten years ago. DRAW!: I take it that’s one of the reasons you decided to work on this project, because you own the whole thing? JGJ: Absolutely. It’s been a long time coming. I’ve been writing for years, and writing projects for myself, but every time I would get ready to leave, another good project would come along, and I would get to work with a writer I liked, or I’d need the money. There was always a reason not taking the leap into doing my own thing. DRAW!: Do you have something lined up for yourself after Strange Fruit? Do you sort of figure you can jump back and forth between something you own, and then something the big boys own? JGJ: I’m keeping it open right now, I Finished inks for page 8 of the graphic novel, Wonder Woman: The Hiketeia. have another graphic novel completely Wonder Woman © DC Comics written, and I’m working on three other projects simultaneously. I think the idea is to have something JGJ: Yeah, absolutely. for me to draw every year, as well as a project or two for another artist that I’m just writing. Not sure what the publish- DRAW!: Are you sort of thinking of doing the whole packing is going to work out, but that’s sort of what I’d like to do. age yourself, too? The art, and the whole nine yards? I’d like to have my own hand in creating whatever I decide to JGJ: Oh, yeah. I think part of the reason I’m working with Mark Waid on this current project, I usually pick projects do. I really enjoy the writing and creating process. because I want to work with a particular writer, and he’s been DRAW!: Well, that’s interesting. My buddy Ande Parks, who on my “get” list for a number of years. I wanted to do Strange started out doing inking, has completely turned the corner and Fruit myself, but I also wanted to work with Mark, and I thought that co-creating this project with one of the best writers become a really good writer.

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Thumbnail sketches for the cover of Wonder Woman #226. All characters © DC Comics

in comics would be a great way to learn to be a better writer. I thought it would be sort of a transition into doing the whole thing myself. I don’t know if that makes any kind of sense. DRAW!: Oh, no, I think it totally does. I think that’s the ultimate goal for many people, is to do the whole thing. It’s actually, to my mind, more of a European approach if you do the whole thing. Our version of that, I suppose, is the underground guys, like Corben, who wrote a lot of his own material. Or even somebody like Crumb. So people think of you as the whole package, as opposed to the downside of being the hired gun to come in and do the project. Some people do very well with that, but I also think the nature of the business today, because there is so much more emphasis on turning these things into movies, your participation or freedom as a creative person at that end of the game is actually a lot more limited than it used to be. JGJ: Yeah, everybody’s trying to get that Hollywood buck, angling for what they think somebody else might want. DRAW!: The two issues of Convergence [Justice League International] that I did, my input was trying to do nice storytelling and nice drawings. I had no input into what the story was. I still don’t even know what the whole story was,

because I didn’t read all the other 900 books that came out! It was, “Here’s a script.” I tried to make it as interesting, but it was really different from working on comics in the late ‘80s or early ‘90s where they didn’t really have all that stuff. There was Secret Wars, but most comics weren’t like that. Now it seems like everything is part of a big, huge multi-part story. I know you were working on things like that at DC, but I take it that sort of wears on you after a while. JGJ: Yeah, yeah. You know, just my personal taste, I like smaller, tighter stories generally, even with the movies I like. I tend to be more a Road to Perdition guy than an Avengers guy. I’d go see No Country for Old Men before I’d go see the latest blockbuster, big kaboom movie. I like storytelling that’s tight, and characters that are nuanced and actually develop through the story. DRAW!: One of the things I feel that’s been lost a lot in the modern stuff that you had in the older Marvel and DCU was you felt there was a real personality to the characters. It was started by Stan and passed down to everybody else. The Avengers movie had some of the taste and feel, the aroma of an old Marvel comic… JGJ: I agree.

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(this page and next) Thumbnails for pages 4–9 of Final Crisis #1. All characters © DC Comics

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DRAW!: …but in the end, ultimately, I don’t give a sh*t about any of those characters in the movie. If I never saw The Avengers again, I wouldn’t really care. Not that it was bad. JGJ: It’s entertaining, but it doesn’t make me think a lot about it afterwards. I generally judge how much I liked a film by how much I think about it the next day, and a lot of stuff, I’ll watch it and enjoy it, and I don’t care the next day. DRAW!: This is what we do for a living, so we’re probably way more critical than the average fan who’s just happy to see somebody who’s dressed like Captain America or whatever,

but I’m trying to think, the only superhero film I really wanted to see again immediately was The Incredibles. JGJ: Oh, that’s my favorite superhero movie, too! My favorite film from a comic is Road to Perdition. DRAW!: Yeah! Do you still do fine art on your own? Do you still do just drawing or painting? JGJ: No, I haven’t got the time. There is no time. DRAW!: Not even between projects? JGJ: I don’t have time for fine art anymore. What I do between projects and for entertainment is reading history and anthropology. A lot of my ideas for new projects come out of my reading. The book I’m doing now is based partly on growing up down South, and partly on reading about the Great Flood of ‘27. I read this really great book about it, and the wheels started turning, and next thing I know, I’m getting in trouble with this book. DRAW!: You’re getting some flak for the series. JGJ: Some, though it’s mostly been positive. I don’t want it to affect what I’m doing when I’m creating. You can’t let the reviews change your art, for better or worse. Say you’re an actor, and you go out and read your reviews before your next performance. You’re going to screw up what you’re doing, trying to try to please the reviewers, and I just think that’s a way of working that’s counterproductive. DRAW!: Did you feel the same way when you were working on other stuff before for DC, where you didn’t want to read the reviews because people would say, “You are the worst at drawing Superman’s ‘S’ of any artist in the history of the world!” [laughter] JGJ: You know, I don’t like to get too pumped up on people loving it or too down about people hating it. I basically want to be successful enough on a project that I am allowed to do another project. That’s pretty much my goal, to not blow myself out of the water so much I can’t get the next job.

Page 3 of Strange Fruit #1. Strange Fruit © Jeffrey Jones and Mark Waid

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DRAW!: I take it you don’t participate much in message boards or things like that? JGJ: No, that’s a rabbit hole with an entrance and no exit.

DRAW!: I know some guys, like John Byrne, I guess that’s a big thing for them, is to do that kind of stuff. JGJ: Yeah, well, that’s their entertainment. My life is too short, and the world is too interesting. There’s so much other stuff I can spend my time on. DRAW!: I think it’s really interesting that you like to read nonfiction, which informs your fiction. I find that I’m the same way myself. I didn’t like history in high school, or maybe I just didn’t like it because of the way they taught it, but I actually find I like history now. I also like nonfiction now, and I think that if you’re creating fiction based upon nothing but other fiction, there’s no real root in what you’re creating. JGJ: I agree, yeah.

saw his stuff, I was like, “How was he doing this?” It seemed like he was doing magic drawing! The color didn’t look like anybody else’s color, and then later, I learned how he did the grayscale, and then he did the coloring on the different layers. Were you into Jeff Jones or Wrightson or any of those guys? JGJ: Oh, sure. All those guys. I had that Studio book that came out back in the day. We already talked about Frazetta and the Hildebrants, Whelan, and those guys. I probably liked everybody, just looking at everything.

DRAW!: It’s the same if you make your art up out of looking at other people’s art, then you’re really nothing but a Frankenstein of other people’s -isms. And you’re usually a more severe version of their -isms. JGJ: You get these kids that come to you with their portfolio, and they’ve learned to draw by looking at other comic book art. It’s like, “You need to just learn to draw before you try comics.” DRAW!: Well, I was probably one of those kids. JGJ: Oh, I was, too. DRAW!: I was lucky enough that my grandfather gave me a Loomis book when I was eleven or so, Fun with a Pencil. I was exposed to other stuff, but everybody wants to emulate their art heroes. Who were your top five guys when you were 15, and thinking about being in comics? JGJ: Oh, let’s see… I loved Ross Andru. I loved Corben a lot, that early stuff he was doing in the ‘70s and early ‘80s. DRAW!: Are you talking about the stuff he was doing before Neverwhere? Like the stuff that he was doing in Slow Death? JGJ: Yeah, anything I could get hold of that said “Corben” on it. DRAW!: His stuff looked like nobody else’s stuff. I remember when I first

A Scarlet Witch painting for the cover of Avengers #70. Scarlet Witch © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Painting with inkwash—the first page of J.G.’s story (with Dan Didio) for Batman: Black & White, vol. 4, #2. Batman, Man-Bat © DC Comics

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Thumbnail cover sketches for Savage Wolverine and Black Widow, along with the finished art for the Black Widow #3 variant cover. Black Widow, Wolverine © Marvel Characters, Inc.

DRAW!: Were you into people like Andrew Wyeth, or any fine artists, or was that later on? JGJ: I really didn’t care for Norman Rockwell. Now I appreciate what he was about, but at the time, I loved Wyeth and Pyle and the old illustrators. The Brandywine School, that kind of stuff. I was an omnivore. I loved Brian Froud. Some people might think that’s weird coming from me, but I devoured that Froud stuff. DRAW!: Why, because you’re not painting fairies and little gnome people? Have you ever thought of doing that kind of material? JGJ: Not really, although I am interested in the old Irish folktales and stuff. I’ve done a lot of reading just because it’s interesting to me. Some of the stuff I like to read crosses over with some of the things I find in Hellboy. You can tell Mike loves to read tons of folktales from around the world and incorporate that into Hellboy. DRAW!: So if you were to do something that was more fantasybased, it would be something more in the folktale tradition? JGJ: Yeah. I like a little bit of this, a little bit of that. See what I feel like doing when it’s time to do it. I like to leave my options open. DRAW!: How do you marshal your energy on a project like this?

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DRAW!: Do you keep office hours? I know some guys with families say, “I get up at seven.” I think Jack Kirby was like that. He worked during the day, and then he was there for his kids, and maybe he’d put in a little time afterwards, when the kids went to bed or whatever. You’re married. You don’t want your wife to be like, “I think there’s somebody else living with me! I’m not sure, but sometimes the bed sheets have been changed, and I didn’t change them!” [laughter] JGJ: You know, for us, it’s a lot about me trying to be flexible, even though I have to put in long hours. Because I work at home, there’s always stuff that’s going to come up, and I’m there to take care of it. So maybe I have to work later or whatever. I just have to stay flexible, and if I have to go back to the studio after dinner for a few hours, especially like on this project, after dinner, my wife usually says, “Well, bye. I’ll see you later,” and I’ll go on back upstairs until the middle of the night. She makes it all possible, though. She handles a myriad of bullsh*t that would just drive me insane, otherwise. DRAW!: But you’re still trying to keep it balanced, right? You’re still trying to keep a basic more or less nine-to-five kind of flow? JGJ: No, there’s never any such thing. It’s just work as much as you can for as long as you can, and then if you have to stop, stop. I don’t have any kind of shift time. DRAW!: Between projects, what do you do? Recover and clean the studio up? JGJ: Yeah, exactly, vegetate.

Finished inks for the cover of Catwoman #14. Catwoman © DC Comics

JGJ: [sighs] It’s a daily battle. It’s just so exhausting. I put in completely stupid long days, and still try and find time to spend with my wife. Take care of the priorities, and still have some kind of a life away from the drawing table. DRAW!: So if you weren’t married, you’d just be drawing until you were wearing rags and eating cheese sandwiches? JGJ: Yeah, that was my life, pretty much. That was it.

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DRAW!: Some artists I know, like you, have a fairly regular schedule—even though you’re putting a lot of hours in—and then there are other people who absolutely have to have the “house is on fire” mentality, and that’s when they’re completely creative, and all artistic blocks are removed. We’re all using pens, we’re all using pencils, we’re all telling a story, we’re all

kind of doing the same thing, but some people have a radically different lifestyle and approach to creating their art. JGJ: Well, for me, it’s generally chaotic. I try to keep myself organized, but it never seems to last very long, because life has a way of reshuffling the deck on a regular basis. So, for me, it’s about dropping into the zone to get into a head space where I’m drawing well, making good decisions, and things are clicking. When I get on a roll, I just want to ride that wave for as long as possible… to get the best ride I can on each wave. Really, when the outside world impinges on that good flow, it can make me completely insane and frustrated, because that’s the time I’m enjoying the craft, and what I’m doing. It’s when I’m completely focused and there’s nothing else is in my head except making the work. DRAW!: Generally, projects like this are a sponge. They’ll just absorb all your time. You can spend literally, I’m sure, 24/7 working on this. I’m sure you look at the first issue and go, “Oh, boy, I wish I could go back and redo that panel.” [laughter] JGJ: That’s a killer! It’s so damn true, because all I can see are the flaws, and it’s just too damn painful. That’s all I can see. I don’t usually go back and look at my old books, because I can’t stand to see all the missed opportunities and poor decisions. DRAW!: No? So a year from now, you won’t look back on this and….

JGJ: No. It hurts me too much. I only ever see the flaws in my old work. DRAW!: So when people are bringing up comics for you to sign at a convention, it’s like, “Oh my God, why are you bringing this to me?” JGJ: [laughs] I’ll happily sign it, because it’s no longer about me. If they enjoyed the work, then I’m happy to sign it for them. DRAW!: Well, I think that’s probably natural. I feel the same way. Sometimes years go by before I can honestly look back at something. By then, it’s sort of like it is what it is. I no longer choose to completely satisfy myself as an artist simply from doing comics. I really choose to completely satisfy myself—although I never am—by doing my personal art. It’s not that I can’t enjoy the craft of doing comics, I just know that one of the biggest differences for me now is that when I only did comics, it made me super miserable if I couldn’t be happy with what I did. It was so depressing for me to not be able to ink it, or to do a decent job and then the colorist ruins it, or, “Why did they put the word balloon over the guy’s head?” or whatever. I take it you’re doing your word balloon placements on this? JGJ: Mostly, yes. I try to. I try to do everything, which is of course completely self-defeating. DRAW!: This is full script, or is it a plot?

Cover sketch for DC’s weekly series 52, along with the published cover. Booster Gold, Kandor © DC Comics

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JGJ: We’re working full script. Mark and I do all the plotting work together on the phone, and then he’ll usually go break it down and polish it up. Then I’ll read it and add any additional thoughts, and we’ll get back on the phone and go back through it and tighten things up further. [laughs] Mark can incorporate some of my alterations, or feel free to tell me to shut the hell up. We just work out what we think will work best for the story.

DRAW!: Locust Moon’s a pretty cool place. JGJ: Absolutely, I love those guys. And look at those Eisners, huh?

DRAW!: You just had a signing the other day, right? How did that go? JGJ: Actually, it went really well. I got a lot of positive feedback. Everybody was great. I think the comments I heard were passionate and heartfelt. Good discussion.

DRAW!: “I remember when we used to use rubber cement!” JGJ: “We walked through the snow to the Javitz Center!” [laughter]

DRAW!: There seems to be a lot of local passion, which I think is great. JGJ: We get to play “Old Men of Comics” around here.

DRAW!: I was going through a bunch of originals the other day, and now no one ever has to worry about rubber cement yellowing their pages. JGJ: Oh yeah! Remember the old wax machines? DRAW!: I used to have one of those. The rolled wax machine, the rubber cement, all that. But I think there’s a training of your eye that comes from doing stuff that way, that if you grow up only using the computer, or only letting the computer make the decision if something is straight or crooked, you never fully train your eye. The guy I worked with, Rocky, was an old drill sergeant who ended up running a small ad agency. He was a drinker, he had his three martini lunches, and some days he’d be a gruff old son of a bitch, and sometimes he was a taskmaster. That definitely gave me skills that I could still use today. JGJ: Oh, absolutely, yeah. Coming up through the newspaper, I had a whole skill set. I tell people now how I used to do full color covers for the Sunday magazine, but I never did them in color. I’d cut them out of Rubylith, with a big color chart on the wall, so I had to be able to picture in my head what the final art was going to look like.

The final page of Strange Fruit #1. Strange Fruit © Jeffrey Jones and Mark Waid

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DRAW!: Or you could use pen opaque and paint stuff that way. But yeah, you had to imagine how to put the paper together, and flow out pages. That actually came in handy later when I started self-publishing, because I would put together books myself, because I’d done stuff like that. So, it did give you a really good understanding of the entire process, which I think can inform. So you were basically doing what Richard Corben was doing. You were doing overlays, and you had to imagine, “This percentage of this color, and this percentage of this color, is going to equal this color.”

Cover sketch and finished inks for DC Universe: Legacies #1. All characters © DC Comics

JGJ: Yeah. The first time I had to do one of those color separations for my first newspaper job in Louisiana, I didn’t really have an understanding of what I was doing, and I think I did about twelve plates. Our print plant was on-site, and the head printer— we never saw those guys at all, so I knew I was in trouble—came strolling up to my desk, wiping his hands, and said, “Come with me.” He walked me through the plant, showed me the entire printing process, and when it was done, said, “I don’t ever want to see twelve plates of anything back here again. You get three, plus your black.” [laughter] That was the conversation, the end! DRAW!: How did it look? JGJ: I worked overtime to do all those extra plates. I learned! I learned how to get around the limitations, and turned a vice into a virtue. It was a great learning tool for how to do more with less, how to solve problems with a design instead of the color, and how to maximise the minimal. DRAW!: He didn’t use twelve plates, did he? JGJ: No, they made me redo the piece. From then on, I learned to think about it the way you would a silkscreen, where you have maybe three or four colors. I would do recombinations with the percentages, which is how I got around that. I

would do different screens and things so the plate could have different values on the yellow plate and different values on the red plate to give you a particular orange—stuff like that I could play around with a little bit. DRAW!: You were making him do fine art silkscreen printing by giving him twelve plates! JGJ: Yeah, and this was for the newspaper! [laughs] It was great learning how to get more within limits. DRAW!: It doesn’t appear that you use an airbrush at all. JGJ: Oh God, no. I can’t make those things work. When I try to airbrush something, it looks like something I bought at the mall. [laughter] Some people are really great with that tool, but I’ve never been able to figure it out. I’d rather have that hand in it, like you and I were talking about earlier, where you can actually see the materials, rather than having that more slick, finished look, which is not something I’m interested in doing. I’m not saying it’s not great for people who do that, but it’s not what I’m interested in doing. DRAW!: Have you ever thought about doing something in oil, or do you want to keep everything in watercolor?

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Thumbnail sketches and the published cover for 52 #44. All characters © DC Comics

JGJ: I don’t know how to deal with the reproduction on all of that. I’d have to shoot photos of them. I wouldn’t be able to get them on my flatbed and scan them, so I’d have to become a photographer and figure out how to shoot them. I just don’t want to mess with oils in illustrations. I’d love to do oil paintings for illustrations, but the technical aspects of photographing them eludes me. DRAW!: What’s your computer set-up? Do you have a 12” x 18” scanner? JGJ: Yeah, I have the biggest scanner I could find, and that’s the size I work to. I work to the edges of my flatbed. I think it’s an Epson, 11” x 17” or a little bigger. DRAW!: Are you using a Mac? JGJ: Yes, I’m using Mac, because I just like it. DRAW!: I take it you scan everything, then you just upload it to the publisher’s server, and they take it from there? JGJ: Yeah. I usually clean up the gutters, do whatever color fixes I need to do, and then I’ll drop the file on their server. DRAW!: Do they send you a PDF from the printer to make sure everything is good before it goes out? JGJ: We go back over everything. First we go over the balloon placement, then read the thing to make sure the typesetting is correct on the balloons and captions. Sometimes it happens where the wrong person gets the word balloons, “No, that’s this guy talking over here.” The general last-minute fix-ups. DRAW!: I remember you saying you were in the weeds deadline-wise.

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JGJ: This is an entire year of weeds. I’m in the Congo. I’m looking for Livingston. [laughter] There are weeds every day. DRAW!: Your tone of voice sounds like you’re excited about doing it, so even though you’re in the weeds, you’re not ready for the poisonous sting to end your misery just yet. JGJ: [laughs] Well, I think that may have something to do with this being my project. If it was just working for a paycheck, I’d probably just be dying, hoping it’d be over already. But to be able to get up and work on your own stuff every day is a real treat. It’s the dream! And it’s been a dream deferred for so many years, it’s good to be able to get up and do this every day. DRAW!: Is this available overseas as well? JGJ: I think it is… only in English, at the moment, but we are definitely in conversations about getting it in translated editions. DRAW!: We haven’t talked about your big show! You went over to France! JGJ: Yeah, we’ve been to Europe for shows once or twice a year… France, Belgium, Spain. This year I’m sitting tight, I haven’t traveled at all this year. DRAW!: How did that come about, and how was the audience over there, and their reception to your work? From what I remember you telling me, it sounds like it was pretty awesome. JGJ: Yeah! European fans are really knowledgeable. Not only about the traditional European albums, but the American monthlies, as well—usually in collected editions, but also in single issues. I love the album idea, by the Painting for the cover of Codename: Knockout #19. way. I’d love to work in that way, where you Codename: Knockout © Robert Rodi, Louis Small, and DC Comics. go away for a year and make an entire book, and they don’t publish it until the entire thing is completed. JGJ: Yeah, I would much prefer to work that way, and have But now most of my catalog for DC and Marvel has been pub- the whole thing come out as a unit. You have to make sure that lished in several languages, so they know my work. They’re you have your ass covered financially for that year, if you’re extremely knowledgable of everything. So yeah, we get a going to be doing nothing but working on that. great reception, the fans are terrific, and I get to travel and meet artists and see new places. We always have a great time. DRAW!: Your publisher would basically have to pay you all up front. DRAW!: I’ve always wanted to go to Angoulême, but now I JGJ: That, or I make sure I have enough money in the bank, which is sort of what I’ve been doing for this project, hear it’s so huge that it’s sort of like San Diego. JGJ: San Diego in a tent, outside in winter. That’s what I because I knew it was going to take me a while to paint it. I had to make sure my finances were in order before I hear. I have yet to attend. swallowed this big chunk, because it’s mostly against the DRAW!: Do you think maybe for one of your upcoming backing. There was some advance against the back projects you would just do it as a graphic novel as opposed to end, but not enough to eat on unless I really speed a series of comics that are then collected into a graphic novel? things up! [laughs]

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The Right Way, The Wrong Way, and The

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

’ve been thinking about comic book covers and the sketches that are produced for either editorial approval, or as a precursor to the finished art. Over the years, I have done quite a few cover ideas for many editors, with the process and the politics changing a bit over time. When I got into comics at the start of the 1980s, I was not assigned to covers, as I was still pretty new, and covers at that time were prime assignments that paid a higher rate. These were most often assigned to “name” artists, mostly living in proximity to the editorial offices in New York City. For practical reasons, they could meet with an editor, and either sketch out something right there for approval, or pick up a design drawn by a staff artist to finish and return. This changed a bit at DC when artist Ed Hannigan was hired to design almost all of the DC covers. Many printed DC comics from the early 1980s until 1985 were designed by Ed and drawn by others, no longer limiting where an artist lived, or if they worked through the mail as I did. I worked from a few of his cover designs, and while they were always great compositions, I generally had problems with them. I mean to say, my artistic instincts were such that I rebelled against working from them. If I was hired to ink from one of these, I would have tightened them up and put my ink lines to good purpose. But to draw from one, I just struggled to adapt my method of figure drawing, point of view, and approach to someone else’s idea. I started in comics as an inker, and was constantly trying to get penciling work and also cover assignments. After a while I wore down Len Wein, the All-Star Squadron editor. He assigned me penciling and inking on a cover for the AllStar Squadron Annual #1, providing me with an Ed Hannigan sketch. I struggled mightily with it, but with some corrections, finished, and then produced a color marker guide

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Jerry’s first pass at All-Star Squadron Annual #1, working from Ed Hannigan’s sketch. All-Star Squadron © DC Comics

(for the colorist). I should have been done, and yet it bothered me enough that I produced a second version, from my own design. I mailed both versions to DC, allowing editorial to decide which one to use. I was only paid for one. Is one better than the other? For me, it came down to a comfort level, something hard to define other than calling it “artistic instinct.” My second version, on the right, became the published cover. Even looking at them both now, it’s not clear-cut which is better. If I had sent my first attempt, it likely would have become the published cover. Drawing is very personal, and mostly a solitary endeavor. We’ve all struggled with impediments to getting something done, from procrastinating to not delivering work that meets our own critical eye. We all develop our own methods and work patterns too, which is why there is so much confusion in trying to determine what is the “right” way to do anything. You can apply all sorts of academic drawing rules to your art, but ultimately, you find that those rules are subservient to what’s in your mind’s eye. By the 1990s, many editors started asking for multiple choices when submitting cover ideas. Fair enough, I guess, as they could pick and choose. I would invariably zero in on the design I saw in my head as the best one, and then draw Jerry’s second pass at All-Star Squadron Annual #1, a variation on the first drawing. three more variations with less All-Star Squadron © DC Comics conviction, and in some cases, less detail. The idea was to showcase the sketch that I felt of commitment to the now compromised design! My reaction was strongest, and try to steer the editor to choose it. When was always to accommodate the editor, though it meant strugthey did, the cover sailed along smoothly to finish. When they gling with the finished artwork. I was not in a position to be chose my least favorite idea, or asked to combine elements inflexible, or act like I knew better. In comics you are always of two or more, I struggled. On more than one occasion, an working to the client’s satisfaction, and to get paid. Was I to editor would like my own favorite, but give me additional argue artistic integrity over every change? I only asserted instruction, such as, “Lower the camera angle,” or, “Flip the myself on rare occasion, or else would draw two versions to composition from left to right.” Any change altered my level allow for the editor to choose.

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When I was wrapping up my work on All-Star Squadron, I had become the penciler and also regular cover artist. After several smooth cover experiences, I hit another roadblock with the cover to All-Star Squadron Annual #2. I drew it from my own sketch (left), which is now lost to time. But the composition was bothering me again. I repeated my mistakes from the previous example, forging through to the inks without feeling confident in the drawing. Finishing it, I had that sense of doom, knowing my only recourse was to start over, which I did. I don’t believe I submitted both covers for the editor to choose from this time. I felt confident that my second version (below) solved the problems I had with the original. Again, I was only paid for one cover, so the extra effort was on me.

All-Star Squadron © DC

Comics

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Superman, Jimmy Olsen © DC Comics

When I worked well with an editor, as I did with Mike Carlin on both Superman and Power of Shazam!, the cover process went pretty smoothly. Mike would often supply his own cover sketches (see left) on Superman to keep the assembly line moving. His sketches were drawn in a very cartoony style, and were somewhat open to my interpreting them.

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Having the freedom to interpret Mike’s cartoon sketches resulted in some great finished covers, yet, when that translation didn’t feel “right” to me, I couldn’t let it go. With the examples shown here, the one on the left followed Mike’s idea, yet looked too silly to me. It didn’t fit what we were doing in the stories, and had to be revisited. The printed cover below sells the visual gag much better without being over-the-top silly.

Superman, Mr. Mxyzptlk © DC Comics

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A few years later, when we were finally allowed to create a time-travel story arc on the Superman books, I chose a World War II setting for part of my storyline, with the idea of evoking the iconic 1940s Superman cover of the character riding a bomb (Superman #18). Mike Carlin liked this as well, since we didn’t need to submit a cover sketch since we used the original as the basis. Any time-saver was welcomed in order to keep that monthly schedule moving! But sadly, it saved me no time at all. While in the process of inking in the main figure, I started laughing hysterically at what I had drawn (see right). Anyone who has seen Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove will flash on the ending of that film when seeing this image. I think you’ll agree that it wouldn’t have represented the serious tone of the story I created for the interior of the comic. Starting over, I changed the pose, hopefully giving it more dramatic intent (see below).

Superman© DC

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Jerry’s sketch for the cover of Crisis on Multiple Earths Vol. 2 (left), his preliminary pencils (below), a false start on the tones for the painting (below), and the finished painting (next page). All characters © DC Comics

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All characters © DC Comics

No matter how long you do something, or how accomplished you might feel with years of experience under your belt, you’re never perfect. You will always second guess your work. Most times you will just have to turn it in, in order to make your deadline, with the thought that next time, you will do better. If something in your drawing is not working the way you want it to, it’s sometimes better to start fresh, no matter how much time and effort you have put into the troubling piece. It can be heartbreaking to work for hours on something, erasing and redrawing, erasing and redrawing, only to scrap it, but some things can’t be saved, no matter the effort. I’ll leave you with this last cover, painted on a tight deadline, with a serious mistake I noticed well into it. I nearly cried to think I had to start fresh, but I did. Can you spot my error? In this case, I confused myself and painted the modern day Superman on the side with the Golden Age heroes, and the Golden Age Superman with the modern age heroes.

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Defying the Odds

Khoi Pham Abandoning the law profession, in his early 30s Khoi Pham completely changed directions in his life and career and worked to become a professional artist. And he beat the odds. He made a name for himself in the comic book industry. But it wasn’t always easy…

Interviewed by Mike Manley and transcribed by Jon Knutson

DRAW!: I think one of the most interesting things about your life, and I remember you mentioned it briefly when we met at the Wizard World Con, is that you were a lawyer before you became a full-time cartoonist. Khoi Pham: Yes, that’s what I did. Although I always dreamed of drawing for a living, it was always just that—a dream. So I repressed those crazy ideas and ended up going to law school and practicing law for a few years. I got myself into a miserable marriage and died slowly. The American Dream, right? I kept drawing as a hobby, though. But one day I noticed a comic shop in my neighborhood, Tyred Tyger Comics was its name, and that childhood dream was rekindled. I think you live in that area, right? DRAW!: Yes, and I’ve been to the comic store you went to on Burmont Road? KP: Yeah. It’s called Effin Comics now. DRAW!: It’s funny we’ve been to the same store locally. Which college did you go to for law? KP: I went to UPenn Law School.

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DRAW!: At what point do you think, “Well, I’m studying law,” which is a pretty intensive field to study, you had to be really hitting the books to pass the bar, but when were you starting to think, “Oh, well, maybe I want to be a comic book artist”? KP: Well, like I said, the law really… wasn’t my life. My parents set me up for that. It really wasn’t for me. DRAW!: So this was something your parents wanted. They were pushing you to be a professional? KP: Exactly. The job, the brain-dead Vietnamese wife, the whole thing. I started working a few years with the law, and even earned my MBA in an attempt to get out of that life. Little did I know that comics would be the thing to save me. So the day that I walked into the comic store? The store guys were meeting to discuss setting up for Wizard World Philadelphia. Now at that time, I didn’t know that there were comic book conventions outside of San Diego. I thought San Diego was the only one. So the realization that there were conventions everywhere, one in Philadelphia, completely blew my mind. I felt like my mind was finally waking up.

DRAW!: How old were you? This was the early 2000s? KP: 2003, 2004, so I was already 30 years old at that point. I started late. So that was my very first comic convention. Before the show, we talked about selling sketches, which seemed really weird to me because nobody in the group was published. I stayed up all night the day before and did a bunch of sketches on comic backing boards. I brought them to the show and charged $5. In the first half-hour, two people scooped up everything. For the rest of the con, I charged $15. DRAW!: You were doing more at the show as it went on? KP: Yeah, and it felt really weird. But also pretty cool. Besides the sketching, though, this was my introduction to the con portfolio review. I think I had a few months leading up to the show, so I spent much of that doing up some samples. I think I still have them. But yeah, Marvel portfolio review. I met with Stephanie Moore, who was an editor with Marvel at the time. DRAW!: Was this at the show, or after the show? KP: It was at the show. I think this was the last time Marvel had an official presence at Wizard World. I think they were thinking about relaunching the Epic line. Anyhow, I met with Stephanie, who was very helpful, and you know how it goes, nothing came from it right away. Some time goes by, and I email Stephanie with updated samples and let her know I’m still interested. She passes it on to C.B. Cebulski, who emails me. I send him more samples, and then wait some more.

night, drawing them getting caught and beat up by superheroes. As a matter of fact, during my first year law school orientation, sitting among Yale grads, Columbia grads, Harvard grads, we were asked to fill out a questionnaire, and one of the questions was, “Who is your favorite lawyer?” Some folks wrote down Thurgood Marshall, others put Sandra Day O’Connor… I scribbled down “Matt Murdock,” and passed it in. [laughter] As you can see, law was not my future. At least not the real kind. DRAW!: You were in your early 30s when you went to the Wizard show. At what point before that did you actually start practicing? How did you train yourself to get to that stage? KP: I kind of scribbled and drew my whole life. I never went to art school, I’ve never taken an art class, and I’m sure it shows. But what happened was, when I showed my portfolio to Stephanie, she commented that the way I drew faces needed work. As an artist, as a kid, that’s the first thing you focus on, faces, so it was a bit of shock. I saw what she meant, but I was surprised that I missed it myself, and at how I failed

DRAW!: So you showed your stuff to Stephanie Moore, and she showed it to C.B. Cebulski, and then he contacted you, and then you were waiting for your date on the corner, and nobody shows up? KP: Yeah, but I figure there are only so many books, so I understood. So I’d email him a few more times and send in more samples. Several months go by. But that was cool. I had a day job. I wasn’t in any hurry. At that time, I switched from doing contract law to working for the Public Defender’s Office in West Chester. It paid less, but the quality of life was way better. I actually had free time to draw. I essentially worked when the courthouse was open and left when it closed. DRAW!: It was more of a nine-to-five job? KP: Exactly, so that—and getting divorced and remarried to the right person—was definitely what I needed. It was kind of complementary: by day, defending criminals, and by

A recent commission piece of the Hulk. Hulk © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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to develop in that particular area. That was a real eye-opener for me. I was encouraged to keep drawing, but I knew I had some work to do. I told myself, “I’m going to basically not draw for months,” knowing I didn’t have the education. I was going to have to teach myself how to do this correctly. For the first month, I bought Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, and I got Countdown to Wednesdays, the Top Cow DVD, in which Marc Sylvestri says, “If you’re 30 years old and trying to break in, forget about it!” [laughter] DRAW!: You didn’t take it back to the store and ask for a refund right away? KP: Right? But fast forward several years later, I’m drawing Cyber Force at Top Cow with Marc, so that cracks me up.

DRAW!: I actually think that’s an important point, because age is a factor, but only, I think, in the fact that usually as you get older, your life becomes more complicated. But I know plenty of people who started late, as I’m sure you do too, who have second careers well past 30! KP: Yeah, exactly. But starting at that age, I really wanted to make it count. So I went to the store, and I bought a bunch of books after doing my research on who the hot artists were at the time. I grew up on John Romita Jr., Paul Smith, Art Adams, Walt Simonson—those guys. I stopped reading when Image became popular. I loved the artwork, but felt like I had outgrown the stories. Anyhow, I grew up with an old school sensibility. So I told myself, “I can’t draw like Barry WindsorSmith, because people aren’t buying that stuff these days, or at least that’s not what the current trend is.” So I soaked up artwork by Leinil Yu, Olivier Coipel, Steve McNiven… I rediscovered Travis Charest, who by that time had evolved into an art phenomenon—amazing stuff. I really studied up on these newer guys, teaching myself how to draw in that certain style, and I think that’s what got me in. I worked really hard to kind of fuse these newer styles together, but you can’t really shake your old sensibilities. I still found elements of John Romita Jr., Art Adams, Walt Simonson, Frank Miller, David Mazzucchelli, and so many others seeping into my work. So I began with a very deliberately market focusoriented approach to my art—not very artsy. Because of that, I was always uncomfortable being called an artist. I was more comfortable with being a professional illustrator. DRAW!: You did almost the same thing you would do in a legal case where you had a period of discovery, where you would do all that research, and you’re trying to find the holes to build your case. You basically built your case for doing comics, saying, “Who are the current top artists?” and you very logically studied it in a way you would’ve studied some discipline for law. KP: Yeah, that’s right. Did my due diligence and read up on case law to come up with a winning strategy. Exactly.

A quick digital warm-up sketch. Thanos © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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DRAW!: And that has nothing to do necessarily with physical age, but it probably has something to do with maturity, where maybe if you’d been 15 years younger, you may not have applied that clarity to win your case. You wanted to change from being a lawyer to being a professional cartoonist, so you took a very logical path to do that, which, if you think about it, is what everyone should do anyway.

Khoi’s inks for a variant cover of Deadpool Vs. Thanos #1, based on Jim Starlin’s cover for Thanos Quest #1. Deadpool, Thanos © Marvel Characters, Inc.

How did your parents feel about that? Were they like, “Oh my God! My successful son, you’re a lawyer! What are you doing?” [laughter] KP: They were pretty skeptical. They were hoping that it was just a phase. They still hope it’s a phase, I think. They try to fake support. They do stuff like, “Have you heard of Dilbert? Why don’t you create a Dilbert?” DRAW!: If you say you do comics, it’s very common for people north of 40 to say, “Oh, what newspaper do you work for?” Peanuts, Dilbert, Batman, The Simpsons—it’s all the same thing to them. I mean, if you had created a Dilbert, you would be very rich right now. KP: Yeah, exactly! At least you have a newspaper strip! DRAW!: Yeah, but Judge Parker doesn’t make anywhere near the licensing money Dilbert does. You won’t find any Judge Parker material in Bed Bath & Beyond. KP: I suppose. DRAW!: Backing up a little bit, you were looking at artists who were popular. It’s one thing to say, “Okay, these are the

top people, or the people that I think are top that I like,” but what was your specific training regimen? You had a regular day job. How did you spend your free time? Did you say, “I’m just going to draw arms today”? KP: I believe in practicing. To me, drawing is about observation. So I would spend my entire day observing the shape of a car, observing walls, observing rafters, observing the most menial boring things. That to me is the hardest part. The drawing is easy. If I see it, I can draw it. That part has never been a difficulty for me. For me, it’s “What do I see?” For me, the training wasn’t really the eye to hand… that took a

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little practice, but not that big a deal. I felt like I needed to understand what I was actually seeing: shapes, lights, shadows, proportions to other elements. During that time, I spent a lot of time observing things, observing faces, observing shapes, observing shadows. I needed to populate my mind with all these images, and then go home and practice. This included observing other artists’ work, their lines, their interpretation of the world that they saw. What happened was, after a few years of just trying to absorb the world and absorbing how other people do things, I started to realize it was a frustrating way to approach art. It wasn’t fulfilling for me. I needed a different approach. Of course, this is after several years of telling people this exact advice. I remember telling my wife Heather, “I’m really unhappy with this stuff. I’m unhappy with my work. I go online and other people are disliking it, and I’m just not happy.” And she basically said, “How

would you like to draw?” I said, “If I draw my way, it takes me about five seconds. It doesn’t feel like I’ve earned anything! People like it, but if I draw really detailed, I feel like I’ve earned my paycheck.” So, this was a real difficult time for me to learn to become an artist, as opposed to an illustrator. I realized that, for me to get any fulfillment out of my work, as well as my life, I needed to learn to be a true artist. I started to understand art as a way to communicate me. But what is my message? What am I trying to communicate? To me, that’s art, whether it’s drawing, or music, or speech, or acting, or whatever, it’s a person being able to effectively communicate a message. So I really started to process that a little bit more, and said, “I’m going to focus on communicating the message the way I would communicate it, the way I would draw it, whether other people like it or not.” That’s how I’m doing it today. Does it change from time to time? Yes, but so do I as a person.

From sketch to inks to color, Khoi’s digital art process for a Lady Phenom cover. Lady Phenom © Paul Jamison

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(above) Quick digital warm-up sketches. (next page) Khoi’s inks for a variant cover of Secret Wars #1. All characters © Marvel Characters, Inc.

DRAW!: In the beginning, what were you working on during this transformation? KP: I was working on Mighty Avengers. Of all the times to have a professional crisis! DRAW!: A book with 900 people in it. KP: Exactly. I’ve got a team book, I was killing myself, and I thought, “What’s going on here?” It didn’t help that you’ve got your rabid Avengers fans, fans of George Pérez, who like it a certain way, and that’s the way they like it. DRAW!: There’s a down side today with a certain element of fandom who think they are the “keepers of the flame” of certain things. You do something and you see on the Internet that people are completely dogging it. But I think that’s a minority of people, because most people who like something don’t write to say they like it. I find it interesting that you studied the people who were

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contemporary and popular, and thought, “Well, that’s what I need to do in order to break in,” and work like that. Then you’re in and working, and you’re making your way, and realize, “But that’s not the way I’m happy doing it. What I really want is to be myself.” KP: Yes. Yes, I wasn’t confident enough to be myself. I was so accustomed to not living my own life, and I wasn’t confident in trying to discover who I was. I was trying to be a big law guy, professional, overachiever, and that’s not who I am. I was always kind of afraid to explore that. It was a very challenging point in my life, a crossroads, because I was about ready to quit comics. I think when I kept seeking out the haters, I really was just looking to kind of justify to myself that even I didn’t like my art. I didn’t like it. I can’t be happy if I, personally, don’t even like it. I’ve been going through a transformation. I do find I like my art a little more these days. I know artists are hypercritical, but you’ve got to at least like some part of it!

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DRAW!: I’ve had similar experiences. That’s one of the reasons why I went back to art school, because I didn’t find comic books totally fulfilling, and I’d always wanted to do and was interested in other art. I find that having gone back to art school has helped my comics in a way I didn’t actually think might happen. You’re talking about having a crisis of confidence three or four years into your career. A guy like Kirby, how many different permutations of his style were there over the course of his career? His stuff in the ‘40s was really energetic and kind of loosey-goosey, and then in the ‘50s it was more straightforward, and a little more conservative, and then in the ‘60s, he had that total revolution in his work. I think it’s common for people working over a long period of time, maybe you just had yours a little bit sooner than some people might have.

Another quick digital sketch drawn during a work break. Zorro © Zorro Productions, Inc.

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KP: Yeah, yeah. That’s the progression, and really, it’s interesting. At first I’m a new guy, no art school, starting at 30, 32, and I’m going to take whatever I get. That’s not sustainable. I read an interview with Esad Ribic where he said he only took stories that suited his style, and I thought, “Whoa!” Because when I started, I thought I’d change my style for every single project. Try to be a jack of all trades. That didn’t work well for me. DRAW!: I think that depends on the artist’s personality. It’s sort of saying, “I’m going to be a character actor,” and on this film, you’re a villain, and in the next one, you’re not the villain. I don’t know if I was talking to Kevin Nowlan or Bret Blevins, but I remember him saying that Al Milgrom said, “You can be a person who is fast, or you can be a person who is slow,” and a guy like Nowlan, who never really did a monthly book, he’s kind of slow. Or you look at a guy like Mike Mignola, who you mentioned, a great artist, but he very rarely did monthly books, and he did it for very small periods of time. His style is sort of like a casting agent saying, “Well, Mike is very good doing this, or Mike’s really good at doing that.” That’s a very different approach. It sounds like at a good point in your career, early on, you had to change your philosophy about who you are and what you wanted to do. I’m more that way now, but when I started, I just wanted to be working all the time. I wasn’t as choosy as maybe some people were. Some people just want to draw monsters, or girls, or whatever. I was like, “I’m going to be like John Buscema. I’m going to do whatever!” KP: My guy was John Romita Jr. “I’ll draw whatever.” That was my approach. DRAW!: Well, he very much comes from that old school sort of mentality because of his dad. I’ve always loved his work, because I think he incorporated the best of the newer way of working with a great solid foundation from the old school. KP: Yeah, I love Johnny’s work; he’s awesome. I feel like now I can do all these different books, but it would still be in my voice. I don’t have to change the way I communicate. I just need to channel different aspects of my own persona— happy, excited, scared. I can take facets of my message and craft it to the specific project without overhauling my style. If it requires being an artist, it requires knowing who I am, and what message I want to impart. The best artists, I find, if you look at their art, you get a glimpse into that person’s personality. That to me is art. If I know something about the person by looking at the art, that’s what impresses me. That’s what I’m trying to do these days. If my art conveys what I want, or what I want people to understand about me a

Finished inks for the Irish historical fantasy series, Tir na Fuil. Tir na Fuil © Brian William Donnelly

DRAW!: So you’re much more about choosing the book you feel will allow you to express yourself in a way that you want? KP: I try. Sometimes it’s unavoidable, but I try to not commit too much to those sorts of projects.

KP: I have, and it really is about finding the time to hone my message and finding the time to work on it. We have four kids, the youngest one just finished kindergarten, so I don’t expect to be able to take that on right now. I’m cool with that. It’s in the back of my mind, and I waited 32 years to break into comics, I can wait a few more years. But I’m thinking about it. I’m thinking about drama versus melodrama, about comedy versus situational comedy. Take comedy for instance. To me, comedy is intertwined with the person. Like, Ellen DeGeneres—she says the dumbest stuff, but it’s funny because she is funny, not so much the joke. Or with drama, I find it more compelling when I care about the character versus melodrama, where I’m supposed to care about the dramatic situation. That stuff. I also think about that authentic message, once again. Is it something of interest to anyone else? If I don’t have anything interesting to say, then I don’t have a story. What would be the point?

DRAW!: Have you thought about doing your own book and your own characters as a result of that?

DRAW!: With four kids, I imagine your work schedule must be fairly regimented.

little more, I feel like I’ve succeeded. Technically, it doesn’t have to be as precise or as orthodox as I used to think I needed to be, as long as what I’m drawing is communicating who I am. It’s the message I’m trying to communicate, because what I’m an expert in is who I am. I can’t speak for anyone else. For example, I’m feminist, so in my art, you’re not going to see big boobs. In the past, perhaps, but that gives people an incorrect perception about my views and values. It’s not wrong or right, it just wouldn’t be me, and I’m more interested these days in getting that correct moreso than the technical aspects of the artwork itself. I can overlook technical imprecision now. No more obsessing over every little drafting detail. That’s made my life much happier.

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KP: I’ve tried everything, and I find the schedule that works best for me is I get up, I “go to work” till eight o’clock, and I go home. And whatever happens, happens. I find that works for our family better than some strict regimented approach, at least for the time being. Basically, I’m on electronic home monitoring, so to speak. [laughter] I can do whatever I want, I can sit on the couch and do nothing, and that’s fine. But I can’t leave the house until eight o’clock. If I get distracted, I can do laundry, I can wash dishes, you know? But ultimately, by eight o’clock, I have to stop. If I want to play basketball, I play basketball, but by eight o’clock, I have to be done. And I find that gives me enough freedom that I can get my work done and still contribute around the house. And it’s not like I lock myself up for hours and hours. I chose this job because I wanted to spend time with my family, like Charles Schultz, you mentioned Peanuts earlier, how his family had a great childhood from all accounts, and he worked from home, worked on the farm, and all was good. That’s what I want. To me, it’s not about regimen, it’s about getting my message out. It’s not about me as an illustrator. I’m an artist in everything I do now. The whole thing works together. My wife and kids know I can’t leave the house. And if I do need to leave the house, I can only leave by myself. I can’t go with anybody. So if I want coffee, I can only go by myself to go get coffee, so I can get back, and it still feels like I’m at work. I guess you could say it requires discipline, but not in the traditional sense of setting up rules that minimize my distractions. There are distractions; you can’t avoid those. But there are distractions that wreck your day. Those are the ones I try to avoid. DRAW!: If you’re going to do anything akin to drawing a monthly comic book, you really have to develop a discipline to sit down and produce the work, however that particular slicing of the pie works for you. Your butt’s got to be in the chair doing the drawing, or you’re not going to be able to make your deadline. What kind of set-up do you have at home, as far as your studio? KP: This is going to sound insane. Our house is constantly being worked on, and so I haven’t had an office in this house for about three years. So basically, I travel light. These days, I’m pretty much exclusively digital. It has made my life way easier. DRAW!: So you’re not working on paper now? KP: Not now. The bulk of my work now is with Disney Publishing, the Marvel stuff—it’s Avengers and Spider-Man stuff. Working digitally goes well with my life the way it is now. There really isn’t a big original art market for that kind of stuff, which I’m cool with. Also with digital, there are tons of edits that I can make without much hassle. If I didn’t do digital, I would have a breakdown. DRAW!: I did a series of Star Wars kids’ books last year the same way. I penciled them, but everything else was digital. I inked them digitally, I colored them digitally, for the same

(previous page) Khoi’s inks for a Spider-Verse #1 variant cover. (above) A quich digital sketch of Staunch Ambition’s Azarus. Azarus, Staunch Ambition © Brian E. Lau

reason. Because, “Change C-3PO’s eyeball,” all these teeny little changes! KP: Isn’t it a nightmare? It’s a freaking nightmare. I thought, “This is great. It’s not comics. I don’t have to worry about sequential storytelling, I can just focus on splash pages. It’s all cool,” and it’s like, “My God, I never have gotten edits for any of my comic book work ever!” Maybe one, but I’ve never gotten this many edits! DRAW!: I think what happens is that licensing person’s job is to find something wrong and to say, “That nose on that witch is a little scary!” I’ve done kids’ books and activity books all through my career, and you’re right, the amount of changes you get in a comic is almost zero, but the amount of changes you get on a kids’ book is like a million little teeny things. KP: Some issues are legitimate. When I hear this one hyphenated word, it drives me up the wall: “off-model.” “This character seems to be off-model.” If you have a comic and you have a wonky body, no one cares if it’s not exact. Although it has made me a better artist, to make sure everything is consistently on model, it’s still aggravating.

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Khoi still does work traditionally for certain projects, such as with this painted commission piece. Winter Soldier © Marvel Characters, Inc.

DRAW!: So you’re not doing a monthly comic book now, you’re mostly working for Disney Publishing? KP: Yeah, I’m doing the Disney Publishing stuff, but I also have two side projects I’m doing. And there are some odds and ends, too, but the Disney stuff is keeping me busy. So everything’s digital. DRAW!: Do you miss working on paper? KP: I do. This is why I’m always eager to do commissions. But it’s not even commissions. Today I’ll do a drawing, and then see who wants to buy it. It’s added income. It also gives me the joys of having a tangible finished work. It’s more fun. But the digital work really offers a great way to get better faster with the ability to make corrections on the fly, the ability to experiment with “paints” and other techniques. It’s cool. I’m perfectly happy doing both. DRAW!: You don’t have a studio per se. Are you sitting near the dining room table working on your Cintiq? KP: Yeah, I sit at the table, I sit on the couch. I’ve read recently that sitting for extended periods is bad for your

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health, so I move around a lot. A lot of times I’ll just stand at the kitchen counter and draw. I use the Cintiq, but I have a little piece of plywood when I come out to conventions, 11” x 17” paper, and a lot of times I draw that way. DRAW!: Do you find that not having a specific space for work works better for you than when you had a specific space for work? KP: That’s hard to say. I think the way I see things now, I do what works and for what I need. There isn’t the option for me to have an office right now, so I don’t even think about it. DRAW!: You can’t put all the kids in one room, where they’re all piled on top of each other, and say, “Sorry, Dad needs a studio?” [laughter] KP: I’m used to it. I think being an art nomad has actually helped me. I used to be a process junkie; I was very technically oriented—also tool dependent. I was constantly looking for the perfect pen, the perfect brush, the perfect nib, the perfect ink—everything. The perfect lead pencil, the perfect lead holder. Then I was, “You know what? I don’t have room

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for all this crap.” So now, because there’s simply no room, I use a lead holder, pencil lead, eraser, a crowquill, a couple of brushes, and some ink. DRAW!: 102 for inking? What size Winsor & Newton brush? KP: Yup, 102 for nibs. For brush, I use whatever I have. I use the cheap stuff. But I usually use between 0 and 4 round. And I use Pelikan ink, I think that’s the most critical thing. The other crap, how you get ink on the paper, not that big a deal. I’ve found that Pelikan ink works really well for me. DRAW!: This is the new version of the old version of Pelikan ink, right? KP: Oh, really? Yeah, I’m a newcomer to the game, so I don’t know the difference. I like what I have now. DRAW!: I haven’t gotten a bottle because I still have some of the old stuff. Yeah, they stopped importing it because of a health issue with the way it was made. Then they started making this other stuff, which was really watery. The old stuff had shellac in it, so when you put it down, it gave you that

nice, dark, dense, even coat. Then they changed the formula, and it wasn’t as dark or as dense. I think they’ve reformulated it now. I’ve been doing this a long enough time that I’ve seen so many things change, materials-wise. Markers are so much better now than when I started. KP: I’ve inked with a bunch of stuff. Travis Charest is always asked about what he uses. His answer that really struck me was, “I use whatever’s in front of me.” Wow, that’s cool, that makes sense to me. Whatever you have in front of you, use it, make it work. That’s the approach I’m trying to do. I’m not wasting time trying to find the right stuff, I’m just making it work. Traveling light, not having an office actually helps me not get distracted. DRAW!: When you’re doing your digital stuff, what programs are you using? KP: I’m using Manga Studio pretty much exclusively. I have Photoshop and all, but I’d rather use Manga Studio. I used to do pencils and scan, but now I do everything digitally. DRAW!: If you were to do a comic book now, would you work in Manga Studio? KP: Well… Joe Quesada says he works digitally for everything except for pages worth selling. I do that, time permitting, of course. DRAW!: So if you were doing a cover, you’d do it traditionally now? KP: Yes, if I were to do a cover, I’d try to do it traditionally. But it would depend on how much I have going on. DRAW!: There are some people who will produce one hardcopy of that digital cover to sell to the buyer. I don’t know if they print it out and ink it, or…. KP: Or re-mark it. DRAW!: Yeah, because working digitally, to me that’s the only real drawback, other than backup and storage. Did you worry about storing your files, and how do you do that? KP: Exactly, I file some of my artwork. It’s just sitting there. I’ve got it down to a manageable amount, but I try to keep everything at this point. That’s a consideration, too, because the speed in terms of how many pages I can get done at a higher quality versus the added income of original art… it’s probably a wash, or a little more towards the digital stuff. Original art sales on dialogue pages isn’t exactly booming, you know?

A quick digital sketch of the six-armed Spider-Man. Spider-Man © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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DRAW!: Right, nobody wants Wolverine talking to the Sub-Mariner. They want them slicing and punching each other while they talk.

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Tir na Fuil © Brian William Donnelly

Quick digital sketches. The Yukio sketch on the left was a 15-minute sketch. Wolverine, Yukio © Marvel Characters, Inc.

KP: Exactly. To me, the trade-off of losing original art sales is the increase in page pay. Plus, the original art stuff requires marketing. DRAW!: Do you have an agent that sells your work? KP: I used to, but now I take care of it myself, which means they sit there for the most part. [laughs] DRAW!: Since you’re so dependent on technology at this point, what do you do when you have a problem with your Cintiq? Do you have a contingency? Do you have a backup? KP: I back up my files, and if I need to, I can use my laptop with older Wacom digital tools. But basically, if anything happens, pencils. I do have to get a secondary Cintiq one of these days though. But yeah, in case of total catastrophe, I’d go back to pencil and paper. No big deal. DRAW!: If you have to put it in the shop, you’ll switch to analog until you can get your replacement? KP: Exactly. Once I start drawing and get it in my head, it comes out pretty fast. The prep work really takes a while. I think it’s like a Rubik’s Cube. Some of these people I do

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not relate to, but they’ll stare at a Rubik’s Cube, then they’ll close their eyes and solve it. The bulk of the work was done just staring at it and breaking it down. That’s kind of how I work. DRAW!: You sort of pre-visualize what you’re going to do then? KP: Yeah, I’m very big on it. I don’t know any other way, I’m so damn busy…. I have to pre-visualize, because when I sit down, I don’t know exactly how much uninterrupted time I’ll get, so I need to make it count. DRAW!: You’re the first interview in a while who’s mentioned pre-visualization. Some people take a pencil and kind of scribble it around, like a piece of clay, until they get what they want. It’s always interesting to find out what each person’s process is. I also think that you were older than the average person starting to break in. I think that’s great, because it proves that if you’ve got the goods, that’s all that matters. The age doesn’t really matter. KP: Exactly. I like being defiant, I don’t like being told I can’t do something. [laughter]

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TO MAKE YOUR ART

WORK

20 BETTER S T AND YOUR CAREER E P S

very spring at the end of the school year I receive many emails, Facebook messages, etc., from graduating students and young arts asking about the next step in the journey of being a professional artist. Sometimes they even send along emails with their art attached (more about that later). Recently I spoke to a class of graduating Illustration students at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia on the final day of their spring semester as they ate pizza and pondered their futures as artists leaving the safe harbor of academia, headed out into the choppy and stormy waters of freelance, armed with slick new portfolios of their work. I brought along samples of my recent work as well as a sampling of animation, comic, illustration, and storyboard work from the past decade or so. I was invited by Al Gury who teaches the class and is the head of the painting department at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts where I went to school. As I answered questions and talked about my work and my journey as an artist, I found I gave mostly the same advice that I give to all young artists I meet starting out, advice I used myself when I started out. When I started my climb up Art Mountain in my quest to be a pro, the times were a lot harsher. I wasn’t as fortunate as students are now. There are so many resources available now that I would have died to have. The enormous development of online access to the “how-to” environment we have today is really amazing— “Trax Rover” was a comic story I took to show as samples at the Chicago Con in the early ‘80s, which showed both my storytelling and my skills there are even online college-level courses on with cartoony work, as well as with environments and mechanical elements. comics and cartooning. YouTube alone is filled My Batman samples I took along got me nowhere, but this work led to me with hundred and hundreds of demos by artists working at DC and eventually Marvel on Transformers. doing everything from coloring to digital inking, Trax Rover © Mike Manley plein air painting, character design, etc. But accessing all of that knowledge is no guarantee of work and practice and to take those steps to your goal. You reaching your goal. I have learned, like so many others strug- really have to be in love with the whole process, because you gling with the huge debt of student loans, that school is not will be disappointed, challenged, and knocked down while a guarantee of anything but debt, and even the best teacher working, and you have to get back up and get back on the can’t make you a star. In the end it’s all up to you to do the horse as they say.

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After talking it over with Bret, we’ve come up with a list of 20 steps that you can take to really help you keep on track as you move toward your goal:

2. Draw like it’s the keystone for your career. Drawing is the foundation of it all in art, just about anything man has made probably started with a drawing. In art it’s the root from which everything sprouts—from sketching to painting, sculpture, you name it. It is certainly the backbone and the strength of my career. It has allowed both Bret and myself the ability to move from genre to genre, style to style, and industry to industry. Drawing is thinking. Drawing is analyzing. You can draw for pleasure and you can draw to learn, but as a professional, drawing is the key to solving the problems of the job or assignment at hand. The process of making a film, a comic, or an illustration, becomes visualized from taking a script and drawing. The drawings might be just thumbnails, but through a process of successive drawings, eventually those thumbnails evolve into the finished product, a rich visual feast, regardless of the media or medium. Drawing passes through all domains: traditional, digital, tra-digital, and whatever new media there will be in the future. 3. Always have a portfolio ready. This means your portfolio must be ready to send at a moment’s notice, so you should have folder of you work, broken down

Transformers © Hasbro

Step 1: Be a detective. Who publishes work you like, or that is similar to work you do? How many animation companies are in New York? L.A.? What jobs are they hiring for, and who or what is the way you submit your work? All of this is vital information to know. You go to jobs; jobs don’t come to you. You need names and contacts, addresses and where to send the work. Call people on the phone if possible and ask for the appropriate people at each company—the art director, Human Resources, etc. You have to be like a detective: who, where, why, what, how? A simple walk through Barnes and Noble should give you a huge list of publishers to contact. If you see something you like, write down the publisher and contacts—author, art director, etc.—and call them up and ask about submissions. With the web it’s even easier to contact companies today, even if you have to go through a robot receptionist.

into the various categories or subjects and zipped or stuffed in a file size that will be easy for the person you are sending the work to receive and open. One folder might be for environments, another for inking, coloring, vehicles, or character design, etc. Have a business card. 4. Social Media: Websites, Tumblrs, portfolio sites. You should have as big a social media footprint as you can. Have them all, and keep them updated and full of your best work. It’s so easy to just send people a link to see your work. However, if your site is dead, abandoned… full of work from months, even years ago that won’t make a good impression, or doesn’t show what your are capable of now…? Keep your social media feed fresh

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with new work. Post a piece of work and talk about your process as you finished the piece and solved that problem. People love to look behind the curtain and read about your process. 5. Network. Use social media to constantly wave the flag of you. Self-promote, and don’t be shy about it. You have to constantly keep people’s attention in today’s overstimulated world. I know so many great artists who could do better if they just Facebooked.

That same skill set that first got me work served me well in the ‘80s while working for Western Publishing on a host of coloring and activity books like this Tiny Toons cover. I never liked the show, but I did many books like this, including for Barbie. Tiny Toons © Warner Brothers Entertainment, Inc. Barbie © Mattel.

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6. Don’t stop. One of the biggest mistakes so many students make is to take a break after the school semester ends or after graduation. They lose the white hot energy and forge of ideas and momentum they have built up. This is a big mistake, as it is often hard to get the boiler heated up again. I never stop training as an artist, and continue to push my technical skills as well as my intellectual aspect of the work. It’s a tough balancing act at times because jobs can be very demanding with deadlines which are always forcing me to seek shortcuts or ways of making the deadline that don’t always serve the artistic/esthetic side. But the benefit of work is momentum, and momentum leads to better work through application—better known sometimes as the “daily grind.” That grind in my 20s was a very important part of my career, as I improved as a working artist the most in that decade.

The skill set of drawing backgrounds and cityscapes which I had from the start, I kept building on while drawing a ton of comics, so when storyboards were done on a season at Warner Brothers, I was able to switch over and do backgrounds on Batman Beyond. Batman Beyond © Warner Brothers Entertainment, Inc.

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I employed that same knowledge to work on my fine art paintings of urban and city scapes. I continue to build these skills from life now through plein air painting. For me there is nothing more challenging and invigorating than painting and drawing from life. That experience is stored in my memory and pulled out and used when drawing from invention. I wish I had done a lot more of this when I was younger. Spring Thaw © Mike Manley

7. Make time for your own art, away from commercial concerns. This is something that I know now in my 50s is far more important than I thought it was in my 20s. In my 20s I was breaking in and working hard to establish myself. I always took some classes, attended life drawing sessions, etc., but deadlines often meant I had to curtail those activities. I wish I had made more time for my own art away from the commercial deadlines than I did, as I would have ended up down the road a bit further. Now doing my own personal work is way more important to me than any commercial job, outside of the ever present financial needs. I also think I would have found “myself” sooner as an artist—and that is an essential step or place to arrive at for every artist. Some artists only end up as gears in a machine, and when the machine replaces them or goes bust, they struggle for a sense of identity and happiness—they don’t have a voice or know what to say.

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8. Take classes and workshops. Cross train. Not good with animals or drapery, or with drawing backgrounds? Take a class in landscape painting, work on your color theory. It all adds up. Comics was a great trying ground for me, which helped when I switched over into animation because I had skills that I could apply to character design and background design. 9. This isn’t High School

One of the drawings I did while participating last October in the online art challenge, “Inktober,” where the object was to do an ink drawing every day of the month. It was another way to stretch my skills, but also use social media to promote myself and my work, and meet other artists. Rainy Streets © Mike Manley

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10. You are an adult—act like it

13. Challenge yourself.

11. Bring your A+ game

14. Create every day. Draw every day. Paint every day. Animate every day.

12. Be willing to sacrifice short term for the long term. That means everything: games, relationships, partying, and all sorts of B.S. If it isn’t making you a better artist, cut it off or cut it out.

15. Keep your tools in excellent condition! Not having the right tool, or having it in crappy condition when you need it, can knock you out of the game! 16. Don’t shirk crits from the few teachers or editors who will give you the real gold. Ask your teachers for as much as they can give— recommended books, artists to study, after-hours talks—as possible. Seek extra learning whenever possible, and involve friends if you can. Two, three, four minds working at the same problem is awesome! 17. Keep multiple sketchbooks. They can be for anatomy, imagination, landscapes—a wide variety of subjects. They are your gym, live in them. They are cheap in price but priceless in what they can store for you as an artist. 18. Attack your weakest link. We all know what we are weak at drawing, so attack it straight on, whatever it is, and make it stronger. This requires honesty, sometimes brutal honesty, which isn’t always something we as artists like to face. 19. Surround yourself with a strong crew of like-minded artists on the same path. 20. Don’t argue and cry and apologize for sh*tty work. Suck it up. Get better.

Here is a sketch of a fella having a cup of coffee in a local Starbucks a few years back. I always have a sketchbook with me and take any opportunity I can to use it to sketch and store information, and flex myself creatively. For the cost of a pencil and six-dollar sketchbook, I can get a million dollars’ worth of skill and learning to use later. Drawing from imagination is drawing from stored information, and there is only one way to get that information into your head—draw it in. I think the samples I chose to show clearly demonstrate that, while I did have some good skills at the start, I kept building upon them, which allowed me to take many opportunities and jobs as an artist I might not have come by otherwise. I wasn’t the most talented artist in the room, nor am I now, I just work very hard at it—and love doing so.

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And have fun! I know this should go without being said, but I remember many times when I was younger and suffering over a drawing issue or bad deadline that “fun” seemed to be the first victim of the process of being a working artist. Good luck! —Mike

Natural born talent is all well and good, but knowledge and the willingness and desire to put that knowledge and talent to use will make all the difference.

here are many examples of successful art careers, but the job addressed by this article is that of a traditional workfor-hire commercial artist, someone who is commissioned to use their skill to create imagery or design by a client who is purchasing and directing the artwork for their own use and purpose. My first thought for the best career advice anyone can give consists of only two words: be lucky. Glib, and at face value, useless, but the underlying truth is that luck favors the prepared and determined. In my case that meant working hard to become skilled at many aspects of picture-making: storytelling, design principles, and how the tenets of composition work, in addition to the technical knowledge of anatomy, perspective, lighting, and understanding form and how to draw it. The broader your set of skills, the more choices and chances you will have over the course of a career. Life and circumstances constantly change. Flexibility and versatility are the best means of adapting. An important truth to undertand about an art career is often obfuscated by all manner of nonsense theories and beliefs— and that truth is: raw talent is overrated. Talent is like physical beauty—everyone is attracted and impressed by it, but alone it doesn’t make a person admirable, capable, accomplished, or even interesting. Physical beauty is a genetic happenstance of birth, as is raw talent for any endeavor. It is no achievement in itself. How hard one works to build on an innate amount of ability is what matters. The word “talent” itself is intimidating, and should be

demystified. All it means is a degree of natural aptitude for some endeavor or skill. In the case of visual art, it describes an instinct or inherent grasp of translating input into visual form that most other people recognize and respond to. A popular modern term for this is a “right brain” tendency—a feel for accurate spacial relationships and the means of translating and expressing them in a visual medium: drawing, painting, sculpture, etc. I’ve labored over this point because so many young artists fret and stress over the quality and extent of their “talent.” In purely aesthetic terms, this may be relevant. In terms of an art career, innate ability is only a component. There are endless examples of very successful artists who have very limited technical ability and imagination, and fabulously gifted and skilled artists who struggle to make even a modest living. These are the realities and they can be maddeningly confusing. So the best advice I can offer is to teach yourself about as many aspects and elements of art-making as possible. As mentioned above, this isn’t always necessary for a successful career, but it certainly offers one more opportunities and lessens the dependence on arbitrary happenstance, fortunate timing, and other varieties of “lucky.” I always feel awkward about giving career advice because my own ambition was to learn and improve for its own sake, and use my “career” as an opportunity to do so by the experience of completing a wide variety of challenges and projects. If you have very specific ambitions, you may want to concentrate on the skills required for that endeavor. For instance:

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A career in storyboarding for animation or live-action film doesn’t require high levels of rendering skill or draftsmanship—here an understanding of film language, drama, and visual storytelling tenets of cinema are the crucial elements.

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Illustration requires a different set of skills.

Here the ability to create pleasing final renderings will broaden your opportunities. A strong, solid grasp of drawing form is a great asset, plus an understanding of the principles of effective color, how to structure compositions that work within all sorts of specifications, as well as how to gather and use reference as an aid and not a crutch. Then all the above abilities must be combined by skill into images that communicate with clarity and impact, while meeting the deadlines. .

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Cartooning is another endeavor with its own potential and principles, from simple broad graphic stylizations to extremely detailed representational drawings with complex compositions, lighting, and color. Comic books require enormous stamina to produce a steady flow of work—the amount of effort required is staggering, and is not for everyone. That is why one person rarely creates all the artwork when working as a hired artist on company-owned or licensed properties.

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Somewhere between Cartooning and Illustration

lies the job of comic book cover artist.

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Children’s book Illustration

GRAPHIC NOVEL Cover

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I feel compelled to acknowledge that the field of commercial art has changed radically and drastically over the course of my participation, a span approaching 40 years. Some of the advice offered in this article may be less relevant than it has been in the past— the standards for both skill and invention have lowered and narrowed dramatically. Many once vibrant arenas of experimentation and design, such as paperback book covers, movie posters, CD (or album!) covers and interiors, all manner of editorial and advertising illustration, and many other venues have been replaced with often bland and mediocre digitally manipulated photography or crude simplistic graphic line art with little verve or character. The massive increase in visual information of all kinds that assaults us all in the digital age of instant and constant interconnection has blunted both discernment and appetite for pleasing aesthetics, it seems. Animation and CGI demand very high levels of imagination and skill, and there is a place for excellence in children’s books and comics, thus most of the best commercial artists today can be found in those fields, but elsewhere the lowest common denominator of functionality seems to be the standard. That doesn’t mean there are not opportunities to be found in any field, but the breadth of creative venues has contracted since I began working. So with the above qualification, the remainder of the article is a sampling of various types of subject matter and technical methods I’ve worked with over the years, each representing a set of skills, a store of knowledge and disciplines that apply to each particular assignment or project. I was always eager to tackle something new or different, and it has been and continues to be a rewarding journey.

Editorial illustration

$500,000 PAID FOR ORIGINAL COMIC ART! COLLECTOR PAYING TOP DOLLAR FOR “ANY AND ALL” ORIGINAL COMIC BOOK AND COMIC STRIP ARTWORK FROM THE 1930S TO PRESENT! COVERS, PINUPS, PAGES, IT DOESN’T MATTER! 1 PAGE OR ENTIRE COLLECTIONS SOUGHT! CALL OR EMAIL ME ANYTIME!

330-221-5665 mikeburkey@aol.com OR SEND YOUR LIST TO:

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P.O. BOX 455 • RAVENNA, OH 44266 CASH IS WAITING, SO HURRY!!!!!

ROMITAMAN ORIGINAL COMIC ART

IF YOU LOVE COMIC BOOKS, THEN YOU “MUST” CHECK OUT THE LARGEST INTERNET WEBSITE IN THE WORLD DEVOTED TO BUYING, SELLING, AND TRADING ORIGINAL COMIC BOOK ART AND COMIC STRIP ART! YOUR BEST ARTWORK INTERNET SOURCE IS RIGHT HERE! CHECK OUT OVER 8000+ “PICTURED” PIECES OF COMICBOOK AND COMIC STRIP ART FOR SALE OR TRADE. ALSO CHECK OUT THE WORLD’S “LARGEST” SPIDER-MAN ORIGINAL ART GALLERY! I BUY/SELL/AND TRADE “ALL” COMICBOOK/ STRIP ARTWORK FROM THE 1930S TO PRESENT. SO LET ME KNOW YOUR WANTS, OR WHAT YOU HAVE FOR SALE OR TRADE!

www.romitaman.com DRAW! FALL 2015

Caricature

Private commissions

Animation

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The two randomly chosen pages above are from my first comic book job for Marvel, a movie adaptation of the Dark Crystal film. I lucked into the project because I had sent in sample pages featuring the characters while working on an unscheduled Shanna the She-Devil try-out story for editor Al Milgrom, whom I had been pestering with submissions for seven years by that point. Louise Simonson, the Dark Crystal book editor, saw them, showed them to the Jim Henson people, they approved, and I was given the job to pencil. That was 1982, and almost none of these circumstances exist anymore. To my knowledge there are no “try-out” stories to learn your craft on, no licensed movie adaptations, and it’s very unlikely that a more than double-length book (already behind schedule) would be given to a young tyro with no experience meeting deadlines. But those circumstances existed then and opened the door into illustrating comic books for me. The point of this story is to be prepared. Though I had never tackled that amount of work before (as I recall I had around five weeks to draw the 49 interior pages plus three covers and a few spot illustrations), I worked around the clock and made my best effort to meet the challenges on the fly. Though I’d never been able to attend art school, I had been seriously studying on my own since childhood, and all that effort enabled me to complete the work to everyone’s satisfaction and continue on to further assignments. Make every effort you can to be in the path of a lucky break, then prove yourself capable when it comes. Over the ensuing years I continued to work hard and study, and found opportunities to tackle all sorts of styles and assignments. It was important to me to be versatile. Because I loved so many different kinds of illustration, cartooning, caricature, and painting, I wanted to explore as many as possible. Changes in technology also forced me to learn how to work digitally, use ever more complex programs and sophisticated equipment. Along the way I learned

icons & Widgets

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enough about type and purely graphic design to enable me to create logos, app menu icons, and other kinds of strictly symbolic artwork. In recent years I’ve also taken workshops with painters I admire, and improved my abilities as a painter.

Graphic design/web page banner

My final suggestion is an important one: you need to decide how badly you want to be a commercial artist for hire before approaching it seriously as a career. It is not an easy life, and is certainly no job for a lazy person, or a personality that has insurmountable difficulty coping with rejection, criticism, or interference, or someone who can’t handle stress and performing under pressure. The hours are often brutal, and your

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work belongs to the client who is purchasing it. Once it is paid for, you no longer have any rights or control over how it is used, changed, or even ruined beyond recognition. All these are common occurrences, and are not easy to accept. To cope with this you must have an abiding love for the craft of creating the work itself apart from all the other considerations. If that is strong, as long as you are facing and solving visual challenges and problems every day, in any commercial field, you can always find reward in the effort and accomplishment. Everyone has different interests and circumstances, so every career is unique, but the key is to understand your own goals, and be willing to work hard to reach them, as hard and long as circumstances demand. As I mentioned above, it’s not an easy path for most of us, but if you love the craft, that will drive and sustain you. Best of luck to you all! —Bret

UNDER REVIEW

BIG IN JAPAN!

onnichiwa (good afternoon) to all and sundry! Welcome back to the hallowed halls of HB pencils, the column crafted from the comic book gutters, which is a good thing—the Crusty Critic returns! I am fortunate to travel out of the U.S. from time to time, and on two occasions I found myself in the Mecca of manga, Tokyo, Japan—the place where Otaku dreams are made— with time on my hands and a little bit of yen in my pocket. I couldn’t wait to get shopping for art supplies in the Far East, and man was there sure a lot there! This is less of a review and more of a book report of sorts. If you have ever wondered about the cartooning scene in Tokyo and know the difference between a manga-ka and a cartoonist, you’re at the right spot in this issue of DRAW! as I run through a few things I found out. First and foremost, Akihabara, a.k.a. Electric Town, is the place to be in Tokyo if you’re on the hunt for all things otaku (pop culture enthusiasts who sometimes take their fandom to an extreme). There are manga shops that go up for floors and floors that can answer any call you may have (even 24-hour manga “cafes” in which you can rent rooms to read manga in private), but have very limited English-written books (though there were a few places your Crusty Critic went that had an “American” section, which had a lot of Spider-Man/Obama comics). But I’m pretty sure you’re not going to Japan to pick up a copy of Watchmen, right? All of that is great, and I could wax rhapsodic for pages about the sheer overwhelming experience of visiting Japan, but during my time there, I was on a focused mission to find art supplies. Full disclosure: It was incredibly hard to find something I couldn’t find here in the States, as the Internet and the shrinking of the world has made it so much easier to get Japanese

The view from outside the Sekaido store (www.sekaido.co.jp/) near Tokyo’s Shinjuku-Sanchome Station. Six floors of art supplies!

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tools today (my review of supplies from Jetpens.com in DRAW! #20 does a great job of covering your Japanese supply needs), so I spent more time looking for creative needles in an inspiring haystack. Sorry to say, your crusty traveler didn’t purchase a lot of supplies, but I did come back with scores of one hard to find brushpen and some other ephemera. I will share my findings with you, but first….

Best Little Big Art Supply Shop in Tokyo: Sekaido

If you find yourself traveling abroad and feeling adventurous, Take a quick ride on the JR Line or Tokyo Metro subway and make your way to Shinjuku, which is stated as being one of the busiest subway stops in the world—over four million commuters a day! I saw it firsthand, standing in the middle of a crush of commuters. An offshoot station in Shinjuku, the Shinjuku-Sanchome station is a few stops away. Swim through the crowd and climb up the stairs, and you will lay eyes on Sekaido, the flagship store of a chain that has several stores across Japan, but my crusty luck put me on the path to this one. With six floors of art supplies, Sekaido reminded me of the old Pearl art supply stores here in the States that are sadly closing or gone as of this writing. There is so much going on here—the floors are broken down into themes, and fittingly the ground floor houses more office supplies and things the nonartist would show up for in an art supply shop. Things get more specific the higher up into the store you go. On the second floor is where the manga supplies are housed (see left)—and wow. Aisles and aisles of art papers, markers and rulers, and a very impressive aisle of screen tones, something that is a very outdated mode of comic creation nowadays yet still popular with the manga-ka.

Kuretake No. 7 Brush Pen—Fine

My one pickup was the Kuretake No. 7 Brush Pen, which I filled my crusty basket with, and didn’t buy much else. For some reason I didn’t go crazy with purchases, mainly because there was only so much room in my crusty carry-on, and also I didn’t want to buy things I can easily get at home. Back to the No. 7: It’s notoriously hard to find this fella in the States. Several of my cartoonist pals use this one religiously, mainly for its flexibility of nib and line variation, and also because after you’ve beaten one of these into submission and it begins to dry out, it can be refilled! You’ll know which pen it is immediately by its approximately eight-inch green body; in the sea of questionable brush pens, it stands out like a lighthouse beacon of cartooning hope. If you’re like me and your studio looks like a set in the Wizard of Oz after the tornado, you may misplace your brush pen before it needs to be replenished. I like to keep a few on hand for those situations, so I bought extra stock to keep on ice. This plastic, hollow-barreled vessel easily unscrews to showcase a refillable cartridge chamber, which can be gently popped off and

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WHAT DID YOU THINK OF IT? Keep one of these in your cartooning kit, one in the vault and one extra to give to your cartooning pals—they’ll love you for it!

CRUSTY CRITIC SCORE: A must-have. Long lasting and built to work long hours, and a nice price. Two extra ink cartridges puts this in the Crusty Hall of Fame. replaced. The pen comes with two extra cartridges to keep you in the race. Refills are harder to find, but I believe most of the Kuretake line use the same cartridges. The infamous Kuretake Brush Pen No. 13 (with the synthetic sable hair and $40 price tag) comes with a box (or did I buy it extra?), but I’ve never had luck with that pen. That’s the brush pen you find in a fancy box under glass at your local art shop. The No. 7 has a hard, fiber tip which is as flexible as the pressure you exert on the pen, nothing like the 13, which for this Crusty Critic is indeed, an unlucky number. The price of one of these bad boys ran about 500 yen in Tokyo, roughly five dollars U.S., and are more expensive here, probably stemming from export costs. You can get these at jetpens.com for $7 USD as of this writing, and from my last check, they didn’t carry them at all! Progress! But a great pick-up if you can grab them. You may also find them sometimes if your city has a Chinatown neighborhood, but YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary). DOES IT WORK? I’ve used the Kuretake No. 7 for a few projects and it’s a nice change of pace from my normal brush pens. With this and a thinner lined pen like a .01 Micron or ‘S’ sized Faber Castell Pitt pen, you can probably get through most cartooning tasks with a nice line variation. HOW MUCH DID IT COST? In Japan, you’re looking at a nice pricepoint at about 500 yen, but look to pay more in the States (if you can locate them! If you can, buy ‘em out of stock!) WHAT DID YOU USE IT ON? This pen works like a dream on a nice toothy Bristol, though be careful on plate because some of the more worn pens may leave bloops of ink and also may pool. It doesn’t happen often enough to warrant a real warning.

Also if you find yourself in Tokyo, ask around for the nearest Daiso shop. Daiso is akin to our Family Dollar General Trees and are scattered all over the inner cities, but the stuff inside is of so much better quality and interest than our stores stateside. The office supply sections are sometimes aisles to themselves and you can easily spend all of your money on good-quality merchandise with a bunch of brands we see here all the time like Zebra brand office supplies. Close in scope to the Daiso is the 100 Yen Shop which is exactly like the Daiso, but is a dollar store in essence. I picked up a ton of markers and erasers, some very Kawaii (cute!), but your Crusty Critic is also comfortable with himself, so sometimes you need to buy cute things!

So in an odd summary—if you find yourself in Japan on a shopping jaunt, try your best to find things you can’t buy here in the States, which is getting increasingly more difficult, which is a good thing! But I’m sure you’ll find something to fill your basket with! You can find several videos on Daiso shops and the like on YouTube. Go check it out. That’s it for this issue! If you’ve been to Tokyo, or are planning a trip abroad, I’d love to hear about it—maybe you’ve been places I haven’t, so let’s trade stories! You can always drop me a line on Twitter @jamarnicholas. I love to talk shop! A sneak preview: Next issue, I do product reviews of some innovative markers new on the art scene! Until then, keep digging and stay Crusty!

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This fall, faithful TwoMorrows readers have likely been scratching their heads, wondering what’s going on in the last pages of our magazine line, featuring a parade of super-heroes and other famed comic book characters all in a super-rush, running, flying, galloping, and leaping to… where? Well, looks like more than 75 contributors know the destination, including top comics artists (and a few TwoMorrows editors), and we share here a key to the characters and who drew what for your elucidation. As for what’s at the finish line, you’ll have to run out and get Alter Ego #137! It all started in…

136

1. Man-Thing by Peter Kuper 3 2. Starman by Ashley Holt 3. Daredevil by Keith Pollard 4. Death from War is Hell 4 by Rick Parker 5. Conan the Barbarian by Tom Grindberg 1 6. Doc Samson by Russ Maheras 5 7. Ma Hunkel/Red Tornado by Sergio Aragonés 8. Superman by Arlen Schumer 9. Millie the Model by Mike Vosburg 10. Black Bolt 13. Golden Age Human by Cliff Galbraith Torch by Bill Black 11. Thunderbolt 14. Captain Britain by Rick Parker by Arlen Schumer 12. Captain Marvel/Shazam! 15. Crazy mascot by P.C. Hamerlinck by Mort Todd

21 18

11 13 7

20 10

16. The Thing by John Lucas 17. Amazing Man by Keith Carter 18. Alter & Captain Ego by Shane Foley

19. The Fin by Donald Simpson 20. The Silver Surfer by Tom Scioli 21. Spider-Man by Chip Zdarsky

22. The Black Panther by Dean Haspiel 23. The Thin Man by Batton Lash 24. The Cat by Paul Chadwick

29 # 25. Doctor Fate 85 35 by Ashley Holt 26. Thor by Steve Rude 27. Elric of Melniboné 25 28 by José Villarrubia 28. Toro by Phillip Hester 29. Jade by Jerry Ordway 34 30. Dawns Earlylight by Daniel Acuña 30 31. Arak, Son of Thunder 27 by Ernie Cólon 32. Mr. Mind by Scott Quick 26 33. Plastic Man 31 by Bob Burden 36 34. Hoppy, the Marvel Bunny 33 by Scott Quick 35. The Spectre by Ashley Holt 36. Cyclops 32 by Joe Rubinstein 37. Goliath by Mark Badger 39. Johnny Thunder 42. Quicksilver 38. Nick Fury, by Luke McDonnell by Rick Parker Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. 40. Batman by Ashley Holt 43. Thundra by Randy Reynaldo 41. Hourman by Bill Alger by Ramona Fradon

45 43

46 42

44. Doctor Doom by Joe Staton 45. Blue Beetle by Will Meugniot

46. Johnny Quick by Jay Piscopo 47. Captain America by Allen Bellman

3-D Man, Ant-Man, Black Bolt, Black Knight, Black Panther, Brother Voodoo, Captain America, Captain Britain, Captain Marvel, Crazy mascot, Cyclops, Daredevil, Death from War Is Hell, Doc Samson, Doctor Strange, Dr. Doom, Dracula, Forbush Man, Goliath, Grim Reaper, Havok, Hawkeye, Hercules, Human Torch, Iron Fist, Iron Man, Ka-Zar, Kid Colt, Killraven, Lockjaw, Luke Cage, Man-Thing, Medusa, Millie The Model, Morbius, Nick Fury, Patsy & Hedy, Quicksilver, Rawhide Kid, Red Sonja, Red Wolf, Rick Jones, Satana, Sgt. Fury, Silver Surfer, Spider-Man, Spitfire, Sub-Mariner, The Cat, The Fin, Thin Man, The Thing, Thor, Thundra, Toro, Ultron, Union Jack, Valkyrie, Vision, Warlock, Wasp, Werewolf by Night, Whizzer, Willie Lumpkin, Wolverine, Yellowjacket, Zabu TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

OUR SUPER-SIZED SUPER-SALUTE!

Amazing Man, Arak, Batman, Blue Beetle, Capt. Carrot, Dr. Fate, Guardian, Hawkman, Hoppy the Marvel Bunny, Hourman, Jade, Johnny Thunder, Jonny Quick, Ma Hunkel, Mr. Mind, Plastic Man, Power Girl, Shazam, Son of Vulcan, Spectre, Starman, Superman, Thunderbolt, Tsunami, Valda, Wonder Woman TM & © DC Comics. John Carter TM & © Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. Conan TM & © Robert E. Howard Estate. Elric TM & © Michael Moorcock. Tin Woodman TM & © Estate of L. Frank Baum. Alter & Capt Ego, Alter Ego, Captain Thunder & Blue Bolt, Dawns Earlylight, Joy Holiday TM & © Roy Thomas ZigZag & Sojourner TM & © Roy Thomas & Rich Buckler.

74 55

48. The Human Torch #10 66 by John Trumbull 60 63 48 71 49. The Whizzer 52 by Rick Parker 56 70 50. Rick Jones by Rick Parker 51. Sgt. Fury 64 49 57 by Graham Nolan 61 72 68 52. Red Wolf 51 by Will Meugniot 53. Union Jack by Jay Piscopo 59 65 62 69 54. Tin Woodman of Oz 53 58 73 by Eric Shanower 54 55. Hawkman 50 67 by Rick Hoberg 75 56. Iron Fist by John Morrow 61. Dracula by Rick Geary 65. Luke Cage, Hero for Hire 69. 6 Satana by C. Michael Hall 73. Valda a from Arak, Son of 57. Medusa 62. The Guardian by Dan Brereton 70. Warlock by Jay Piscopo Thunder hunderr by Ron Randall by SteveLeialoha 66. The Black Knight 71. ZigZag and Sojourner & Thomas Y Yeates eates by Tom Scioli 58. Red Sonja by Joseph Warriors arriors by Brent Anderson from Forever W 74. Captain Marvel 63. Doctor Strange Michael Linsner by Rich Bucklerr,, Sr. by Jim Starlin 67. Forbush Man by Kevin Nowlan 59. Kid Colt, Outlaw by Stephen DeStefano 72. Ka-Zar & Zabu 75. Willie Lumpkin 64. Patsy & Hedy by Thomas Yeates 68. 3-D Man by Jim Craig by Fred Hembeck by Craig Y Yoe oe by Dan Parent 60. Spitfire by Lou Manna

# #

76. Morbius and 66 83 80 The Vision by Shane Foley 77. Ultron by Mike Manley 81 87 78. Yellowjacket 84 76 by JonB.Cooke 79. TheGrimReaper by RafaelKayanan Kayanan 86 80. PowerGirl 79 by JohnW orkman 89 81. TheW aspby CarlPotts Potts 82. TheRawhideKid by RonRandall 77 82 85 83. IronMan Manbyby BobLayton Layton 84. Ant-Man by GregoryBenton Benton 90 85. Killravenby Joseph MichaelLinsner 86. JohnCarter CarterofofMars Mars by AlanW eiss 90. Hercules by Ronn Suttoon 94. Brother Voodoo 87. Captain Carrot 91. Captain Thunder & by David Roach by ScottShaw! Blue Bolt by Shane Foley 95. Alter Ego 88. WonderW oman 92. Tsunami by Rick Hoberg by Ron Harris by JayPiscopo 93. Lockjaw 96. Hawkeye 89. SonofV ulcan by Zander Cannon by Ed Hannigan by MichaelT .Gilbert Gilbert Continued in…

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137

Not too long from now, on a magazine rack not so far away, readers can find BrickJournal rickJournall magazine’s salute to the recipient of this unprecedented attention, a spread that will fit to the right of the “Big Reveal” in Alter Ego o #137! Jared K. Burks has composed, brick by brick, an awesome panoramic appreciation, one none will want to “Lego”! Join the fun in BrickJournall #37.

92 98 101

94 102

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9 Havok 97. by Bill Sienkiewicz 98. Sub-Mariner by Michael Netzer 99. Wolverine by ShaneFoley

100. Werewolf by Night by Don Perlin 101. Valkyrie by ShaneFoley 102. JoyHoliday by WillMeugniot

SPECIAL ABOVE & BEYOND THE CALL OF DUTY THANKS! We could not have completed this gargantuan project without the great help of Shane Foley, Jay Piscopo, Rick Parker arkerr, Randy Sargent, and Colorist Supreme Tom Ziuko. See the final spread in…

FREE TWOMORROWS CATALOG

ALTER EGO #135

ALTER EGO #136

ALTER EGO #137

ALTER EGO #138

Features all available back issues and books! Download the INTERACTIVE PDF DIGITAL EDITION (click on any item, and you’ll automatically be taken to its page on our website to order), or for a FREE PRINTED COPY, just call, e-mail, write us, or go online to request one, and we’ll mail it to you at no cost (customers outside the US pay a nominal shipping fee)!

LEN WEIN (writer/co-creator of Swamp Thing, Human Target, and Wolverine) talks about his early days in comics at DC and Marvel! Art by WRIGHTSON, INFANTINO, TRIMPE, DILLON, CARDY, APARO, THORNE, MOONEY, and others! Plus FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), MR. MONSTER’s Comic Crypt, the Comics Code, and DAN BARRY! Cover by DICK GIORDANO with BERNIE WRIGHTSON!

BONUS 100-PAGE issue as ROY THOMAS talks to JIM AMASH about celebrating his 50th year in comics—and especially about the ‘90s at Marvel! Art by TRIMPE, GUICE, RYAN, ROSS, BUCKLER, HOOVER, KAYANAN, BUSCEMA, CHAN, VALENTINO, and others! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER’s Comic Crypt, AMY KISTE NYBERG on the Comics Code, and a cover caricature of Roy by MARIE SEVERIN!

Incredible interview with JIM SHOOTER, which chronicles the first decade of his career (Legion of Super-Heroes, Superman, Supergirl, Captain Action) with art by CURT SWAN, WALLY WOOD, GIL KANE, GEORGE PAPP, JIM MOONEY, PETE COSTANZA, WIN MORTIMER, WAYNE BORING, AL PLASTINO, et al! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY, and more! Cover art by CURT SWAN!

Science-fiction great (and erstwhile comics writer) HARLAN ELLISON talks about Captain Marvel and The Monster Society of Evil! Also, Captain Marvel artist/ co-creator C.C. BECK writes about the infamous Superman-Captain Marvel lawsuit of the 1940s and ‘50s in a double-size FCA section! Plus two titanic tributes to Golden Age artist FRED KIDA, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

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BRICKJOURNAL #37

BACK ISSUE #85

BACK ISSUE #86

BACK ISSUE #87

BACK ISSUE #88

“Christmas in the Bronze Age!” Go behind the scenes of comics’ best holiday tales of the 1970s through the early 1990s! And we revisit Superhero Merchandise Catalogs of the late ‘70s! Featuring work by SIMON BISLEY, CHRIS CLAREMONT, JOSÉ LUIS GARCÍALÓPEZ, KEITH GIFFEN, the KUBERT STUDIO, DENNY O’NEIL, STEVE PURCELL, JOHN ROMITA, JR., and more. Cover by MARIE SEVERIN and MIKE ESPOSITO!

“Marvel Bronze Age Giants and Reprints!” In-depth exploration of Marvel’s GIANT-SIZE series, plus indexes galore of Marvel reprint titles, Marvel digests and Fireside Books editions, and the last days of the “Old” X-Men! Featuring work by DAN ADKINS, ROSS ANDRU, RICH BUCKLER, DAVE COCKRUM, GERRY CONWAY, STEVE GERBER, STAN LEE, WERNER ROTH, ROY THOMAS, and more. Cover by JOHN ROMITA, SR.!

“Batman AND Superman!” Bronze Age World’s Finest, Super Sons, Batman/Superman Villain/Partner Swap, Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane go solo, Superman/Radio Shack giveaways, and JLA #200’s “A League Divided” (as a nod to Batman v. Superman)! Featuring work by BRIAN BOLLAND, RICH BUCKLER, GERRY CONWAY, JACK KIRBY, GEORGE PÉREZ, JIM STARLIN, and more. Cover by DICK GIORDANO!

“Comics Magazines of the ‘70s and ‘80s!” From Savage Tales to Epic Illustrated, KIRBY’s “Speak-Out Series,” EISNER’s Spirit magazine, Unpublished PAUL GULACY, MICHAEL USLAN on the Shadow magazine you didn’t see, plus B&Ws from Atlas/Seaboard, Charlton, Skywald, and Warren. Featuring work by NEAL ADAMS, JOHN BOLTON, ARCHIE GOODWIN, DOUG MOENCH, EARL NOREM, ROY THOMAS, and more. Cover by GRAY MORROW!

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LEGO STAR WARS! Amazing custom ships by ERIC DRUON, incredible galactic layouts by builder AC PIN, a look at the many droid creations built by LEGO fans—truly, the LEGO Force has awakened! Plus JARED K. BURKS on minifigure customizing, step-bystep “You Can Build It” instructions by CHRISTOPHER DECK, BrickNerd DIY Fan Art, MINDSTORMS robotics lessons by DAMIEN KEE, and more!

TwoMorrows. A New Day For Comics Fans! COMIC BOOK CREATOR #10 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #11

KIRBY COLLECTOR #66

KIRBY COLLECTOR #67

The Broadway sci-fi epic WARP examined! Interviews with art director NEAL ADAMS, director STUART (Reanimator) GORDON, playwright LENNY KLEINFELD, stage manager DAVID GORDON, and a look at Warp’s 1980s FIRST COMICS series! Plus: an interview with PETER (Hate!) BAGGE, our RICH BUCKLER interview Part One, GIANT WHAM-O COMICS, and the conclusion of our STAN GOLDBERG interview!

Retrospective on GIL KANE, co-creator of the modern Green Lantern and Atom, and early progenitor of the graphic novel. Kane cover newly-inked by KLAUS JANSON, plus remembrances from friends, fans, and collaborators, and a Kane art gallery. Also, our RICH BUCKLER interview conclusion, a look at the “greatest zine in the history of mankind,” MINESHAFT, and Part One of our ARNOLD DRAKE interview!

DOUBLE-TAKES ISSUE! Features oddities, coincidences, and reworkings by both Jack and Stan Lee: the Galactus Origin you didn’t see, Ditko’s vs. Kirby’s Spider-Man, how Lee and Kirby viewed “writing” differently, plus a rare KIRBY interview, MARK EVANIER and our other regular columnists, unseen and unused pencil art from FANTASTIC FOUR, 2001, CAPTAIN VICTORY, BRUCE LEE, & more!

UP-CLOSE & PERSONAL! Kirby interviews you weren’t aware of, photos and recollections from fans who saw him in person, personal anecdotes from Jack’s fellow pros, LEE and KIRBY cameos in comics, MARK EVANIER and other regular columnists, and more! Don’t let the photo cover fool you; this issue is chockfull of rare Kirby pencil art, from Roz Kirby’s private sketchbook, and Jack’s most personal comics stories!

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