Draw! #34

I AM #34

Winter 2018 $8.95 US

The Professional “How-To” Magazine on Comics, Illustration & Animation

GREG HILDEBRANDT

Guardians of the Galaxy TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

LEGENDARY FANTASY/ SCI-FI ILLUSTRATOR

REGULAR COLUMNISTS

JERRY ORDWAY & JAMAR NICHOLAS

BRAD WALKER

MAKING A SPLASH WITH AQUAMAN

Plus MIKE MANLEY & BRET BLEVINS’ 1

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

NOTE: Some issues contain nudity for figure drawing instruction. INTENDED FOR MATURE READERS.

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

DRAW! #25

DRAW! #26

DIEDGITIIOTANSL BLE

AVAILA

DRAW! #22

DRAW! #23

DRAW! #24

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!

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DRAW! #27

DRAW! #28

DRAW! #29

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

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

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

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

DAVE DORMAN demonstrates his painting techniques for sci-fi, fantasy, and comic book cover, LeSEAN THOMAS (character designer and co-director of The Boondocks and Black Dynamite: The Animated Series) gives advice on today’s animation industry, new columnist JERRY ORDWAY shows his working process, plus more Comic Art Bootcamp

by BRET BLEVINS and Draw! editor MIKE MANLEY! Mature readers only.

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

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

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

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

TwoMorrows.

The Future of Comics History.

DRAW! #30

DRAW! #31

DRAW! #32

DRAW! #33

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.

How-to demos & interviews with Philadelphia artists JG JONES (52, Final Crisis, Wanted, Batman and Robin) and KHOI PHAM (The Mighty Avengers, The Astonishing Spider-Man, The Mighty World of Marvel), JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews of art supplies, JERRY ORDWAY demos the “ORD-way” or drawing, and Comic Art Bootcamp by MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS! JG Jones cover!

Mature readers only.

Super-star DC penciler HOWARD PORTER demos his creative process, and JAMAL IGLE discusses everything from storyboarding to penciling as he gives a breakdown of his working methods. Plus there’s Crusty Critic JAMAR NICHOLAS reviewing art supplies, JERRY ORDWAY showing the Ord-Way of doing comics, and Comic Art Bootcamp lessons with BRET BLEVINS and Draw! editor MIKE MANLEY! Mature readers only.

Interview and demo by Electra: Assassin and Stray Toasters superstar BILL SIENKIEWICZ, a look at THE WATTS ATELIER OF THE ARTS (one of the best training grounds for students to gain the skills they need to get the jobs they want), JERRY ORDWAY shows the Ord-Way of drawing, JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews the latest art supplies, and BRET BLEVINS and Draw! editor MIKE MANLEY take you to Comic Art Bootcamp.

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

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

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THE PROFESSIONAL “HOW-TO” MAGAZINE ON COMICS & CARTOONING WWW.DRAW-MAGAZINE.BLOGSPOT.COM

TABLE OF CONTENTS

WINTER 2018, VOL. 1, #34 Editor-in-Chief • Michael Manley Managing Editor and Designer • Eric Nolen-Weathington Publisher • John Morrow Logo Design • John Costanza Front Cover • Greg Hildebrandt DRAW! WINTER 2018, Vol. 1, No. 34 was produced by Action Planet, Inc. and published by Two-Morrows 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 2018 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 ©2018 Action Planet, Inc. and TwoMorrows Publishing and may not be reprinted or retransmitted without written permission of the copyright holders. ISSN 1932-6882. Printed in China. FIRST PRINTING.

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

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GREG HILDEBRANDT Mike Manley interviews the artist about Tolkein, Star Wars, pin-ups, and more!

36 42 65

RIGHT WAY, WRONG WAY—ORDWAY!

Jerry shows you how to “massage the collage”!

BRAD WALKER

Mike dives into a deep conversation with the Aquaman artist extraordinaire.

COMIC ART BOOTCAMP This month’s installment: Tips from the Pros!

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

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THE CRUSTY CRITIC

Jamar Nicholas reviews the tools of the trade.

This month: Wacom MobileStudio Pro.

www.twomorrows.com

DRAW! WINTER 2018

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-ING AHEAD

am so jazzed about this issue of DRAW! Oh, sure, I’m proud of every issue, but I’ve wanted to do an interview with Greg Hildebrandt ever since I meet him a few years back at Illuxcon. We had such a great conversation about art and craft that first time we met, and I have been a fan of him and his late brother Tim’s work since I was a teenager. They are giants and have been for decades, and that not only speaks to the quality of the work, but the passion Greg still has for each new illustration. I even still have my original Star Wars poster by them which hung in my studio at school for years. I still hope to get Greg to sign it the next time I see him.

I’d especially like to thank Jean Scrocco, Greg’s manager and agent, for helping me with setting up the interview and getting me the art.

And here’s a tip of the hat to all my friends who gave some pointers for this issue’s Comic Art Bootcamp. I do know a lot of talented, smart artists!

I’d also like to think Brad Walker for taking time out of his busy schedule to talk to DRAW! Besides being one of the best artists working today, he’s also a super dog owner.

Big thanks as always to my regular contributors, Jamar, Jerry, and Bret, and to Eric and John for getting this issue out to China and back to you.

Happy Holidays and draw yourself straight into a New Year!

Drawing by Bret Blevins

Next Issue: Summer 2018!

DRAW! #35 (80 FULL-COLOR pages, $8.95), the professional “how-to” magazine on comics and animation brings it to you again. This time we travel from King’s Landing and the Mother of all Dragons to Middle Earth, the distant galaxy of Star Wars, and all worlds in between. DRAW! goes in-depth with multiple award-winning (Hugo, Society of Illustrators, World Fantasy, Spectrum Gold) fantasy and sci-fi illustrator and fine artist, DONATO GIANCOLA. Then we take to the wild blue yonder with ace artist GEORGE PRATT (Enemy Ace: War Idyll, Batman: Harvest Breed)—a comic book artist, illustrator, fine artist, and teacher with a long and illustrious career. Plus we’ll have our regular lineup of columnists on hand: Crusty Critic JAMAR NICHOLAS, JERRY ORDWAY (demonstrating the “ORD-way” of drawing), and DRAW! editor MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS with another installment of “Comic Art Bootcamp”. So join us on another epic quest in the never-ending search for artistic knowledge!

May contain nudity for figure-drawing instruction; suggested for Mature Readers.

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

#35

Spring 2018 $8.95 in the US

sci-fi/fantasy illustRatoR

donATo GIAnColA ace painteR & comic aRtist

GeorGe PrATT

plus! RegulaR columnist

Jerry ordwAy and mike manley and BRet Blevins’

DRAW 35-Cover.indd 1

TwoMorrows.

The Future of Comics History.

11/10/17 1:04 AM

Single issues: $8.95 US • Digital Editions: $4.95

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Phone: 919-449-0344 E-mail: store@twomorrows.com Web: twomorrows.com

GREG HILDEBRANDT

Making Art for the People DRAW!: Are you still painting your giant Kingpin?

GREG HILDEBRANDT: Kingpin giving Daredevil a wallop, yep.

DRAW!: Is that a cover or a commission?

GH: It’s a cover for Marvel—one of their variant covers. I’ve been doing a lot of stuff for them over the last year or more. I must have done 20 covers for them now.

DRAW!: You did a series of trading cards for them back in the day.

GH: Yeah, that was with my brother back in the ’90s. That was 1994, I think. There were 150 cards in the first set, then we did a bunch of partial sets, posters, covers—tons of stuff.

Then I dropped off from that and went on to do other stuff. But now I’m back, and it’s a lot of fun. It’s the first time I’m doing it without my brother.

DRAW!: Is that different for you? How is your workflow

different? Would he lay out stuff, or would you lay out stuff?

GH: Yeah, it’s a different gig. There wasn’t one specific thing that one of us did over the other. It depended on who was doing what at any given time. One of us would start a layout for one image, and the other would start a layout for another image. Tim preferred me to do more of the rough layouts. He enjoyed doing the finished painting more than starting from scratch, even though he did do that. I was always the one who was more enthusiastic about that, as I am now.

DRAW!: I noticed your original is gigantic. I’m used to seeing the typical 11" x 17", but yours can’t be scanned. You have to get that shot, right?

GH: No, we can scan it. Jean’s [Scrocco, Greg’s art rep] been working with a guy for years. He can scan a 60' painting.

DRAW!: Wow! How does he do that?

GH: I don’t know. I’ve never been there, but he’s got a great big scanner. He’ll scan the painting in sections and then

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GH: Exactly. So I like to paint big. N. C. Wyeth painted large for all of his illustrations, and I guess I took a cue from that.

DRAW!: I was just out at the Brandywine a few weeks back with some students. And there was the World War I show at the Academy up until last month. There was this huge 20' painting by John Singer Sargent there.

GH: Whoa!

DRAW!: What was really impressive about that painting, besides just the massive scale of it, was that the calligraphy of his brushstroke was very similar to his smaller paintings. He was somehow able to recreate that at a massive scale.

GH: He worked at that. He worked for that painfully broad look, and if he wasn’t getting it, he’d scrape it all off and start again. It didn’t just happen. It looks very spontaneous, but it’s extremely studied.

DRAW!: It was the same with Nicolai Fechin. His work looks like he did it in five minutes, like it was done in great haste.

But that was the illusion—that it was done with this verve and gusto—that they worked hard to create.

GH: And that always surprised me. As far as line treatment goes, you look at Al Hirschfeld’s work, that sweeping, beautiful art deco linework, it’s done with a scratchy crow quill pen, slowly building it up. It isn’t just a “whoosh” of a brush, like I thought it was. No, it was scratched out and built up slowly.

The final sketch for a variant cover of Marvel’s Old Man Logan #5.

Old Man Logan © Marvel Characters, Inc.

assemble it. I’m not sure how he does it, but you can give him anything, and he does a fantastic job.

Jean doesn’t trust it to only a digital file, so she has that scan sent off to someone who makes an 8" x 10" sheet of film out of it. When that proverbial asteroid goes by and everything goes down, we’ll still have all my artwork on film. [laughter] DRAW!: You’ll be able to trade your film negatives for hamburgers. [laughter] GH: Exactly. But I like painting big because the movements are bigger, as opposed to small and picky. I work all kinds of ways, but when it comes to these kinds of things, I like a bigger, broader approach, which happens when you paint bigger. It’s just an automatic. Your brushstrokes are larger, and you have a tendency to be more physical with it and painterly, for lack of a better term. I don’t paint super-tight; it’s kind of loose. This is almost four times up from the size it will be reproduced. Once it’s reduced, it will get tightened up.

Joe Kubert always said that your artwork should always been blown up huge from your original or reduced huge from your original. It looks really neat when you blow up a sketch and you can see the pencil work increased in size.

DRAW!: I think that’s very true. That’s what the pop artists realized: When you take a Jack Kirby panel or a Russ Heath panel, and you blow it up 5000%, it looks really awesome.

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DRAW!: That’s something I’ve come to learn studying painters like Sargent and [Anders] Zorn and Fechin, and their influence on people like Andrew Loomis, who then influenced you and me and everybody else. That illusion is what they were going for, and how they got there wasn’t necessarily as important.

Several years ago right after I moved to Philadelphia, there was a gallery that was showing your work, and Moebius’ work, and a couple of others’ work. They had one of the paintings you and your brother did for Lord of the Rings. It was huge. It was one of the ones towards the end of the story where they’re all dressed in white.

GH: “At the Grey Havens” probably? The really wide one.

DRAW!: You and your brother must have been influenced by seeing the work of N. C. Wyeth.

GH: Oh God, yes. We grew up on N. C. Wyeth. Our parents had Treasure Island, Robin Hood, and all those books, so I saw that stuff as a little kid. I was always an N. C. Wyeth fan, going way, way back. I didn’t know anything about how he worked or anything, because nobody talked about that stuff back then, but he was always a huge influence. But many people were.

My first main influences were the comic strips, because that’s the first art I can remember seeing. The newspaper was there every day, and when it got to the Sundays, oh geez. Hal Foster and Prince Valiant—I’d be copying that stuff, and Terry and the Pirates. Alex Raymond wasn’t doing Flash Gordon at that time, because he was in the Marines when I started reading the paper.

The painting in progress. Greg has a reference photo taped to his board as he paints the skull (left), and a shot with his palette for the painting prominently featured in the foreground (right).

Old Man Logan © Marvel Characters, Inc.

DRAW!: It was Austin Briggs.

GH: Right! I read later that he hated doing it.

DRAW!: Yes. In the old days, the fine artist was at the top.

The fine artist looked down on the illustrator, the illustrator looked down on the cartoonist, and the guys who drew the strips looked down on the guys who drew the comic books.

The guys in the comic books wanted to be in the strips, because then at least you were “legit”.

GH: Yep. What a terrible conversation that was. I was never aware of that as a young kid. It wasn’t until much later that most of the comic book artists would admit they drew comic books. “I’m an illustrator.” Whew! Thank God I was never aware of that stuff and never got sucked into that conversation of elitism. It’s ridiculous to me, the whole conversation.

DRAW!: They had a painting at the Brandywine the last time I went there by N. C. Wyeth, which I had not seen. It was one of those weird, ugly paintings he did at the end of his career when he was having that crisis of confidence. I love his stuff so much, and it was so horrible compared to what he could do.

GH: There was a biography on him about 15 years ago that really gets into that whole psyching out of him and [Howard] Pyle—the grandfather of illustration and the father of American illustration. These are the guys that basically create the conversation of, how they put it, picture-making—that’s illustration—and gallery work. The distinction of fine art and commercial art, in a sense, starts with these two masters. “Oh, that’s merely an illustration.” And Wyeth tore himself up over that. When you read his letters, he’s in agony all the time over this. He would try to do those still lifes, which were beautifully done, but when you see his Boy’s King Arthur, that’s the stuff that makes me shout.

DRAW!: His best Treasure Island paintings—I always remember the one where they’re playing dice or cards—.

GH: With the lighting.

DRAW!: With the little parrot. The last time I saw the painting, I actually counted the strokes. He did that parrot inside of the cage in 27 paint strokes.

GH: What a genius. Andrew [Wyeth] had his studio below

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N. C.’s, and he said there was a path worn where he would hear him tromping back and forth, bum, bum, bum, walking up to the painting, swoosh, swoosh, swoosh, then tromping back. Meanwhile, Andrew was downstairs picking away. It’s a great contrast.

he wouldn’t be tempted to noodle with it. I took that trick. I'll work on a painting, and I’ll swap, swap, swap on it. Then I’ll say, “That looks good,” and I'll turn the light off and leave.

Because the point when you should leave the picture is when you feel good about it, not when you feel bad about it. [laughs]

DRAW!: It’s interesting in that Andrew’s work is powerful in a way his father’s isn’t. His father’s strength comes through his arm. He’s like a pitcher who can throw a 1,000 m.p.h. fastball, and Andrew throws it at 50 m.p.h., but he throws it in a very different way.

GH: He was incredible. He can blow you away. When he’d do something like “Christina’s World” and the field of grass, he’d drop it in, rub it in, and then he’d splatter it, and splatter it, and splatter it. Then he’d turn the light out and leave the room so

DRAW!: But that’s the illusion we’re fed to us as youngsters, that artists are supposed to suffer. It’s Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh [in Lust for Life].

GH: Oh, that’s one of my favorite movies! [laughter] It really is! I have very little formal art education. I had six months of art school in Detroit—Meinzinger Art School. The reason Tim and I went there was because we kept writing letters to Disney, because we wanted to be animators. That was my first love: animation. We kept writing letters, and their PR department wrote us back and said, “If you want to apply as an animator, you need to go to a school that focuses on life drawing, perspective, and anatomy.” This was 1957.

We graduated high school, and we enlisted in the Army to get it out of the way so we wouldn’t get drafted. We did a six-month active duty reserve assignment, and when we got out of that we started to look for an art school in Detroit, of which there were quite a few.

DRAW!: Did you apply at the Art Institute?

GH: No, we looked at a couple of them.

One of them was misnamed Arts and Crafts, and it had nothing to do with William Morris or the Arts and Crafts movement. We went down there, opened the door, and the pictures on the wall of the entrance to the school were all abstract expressionists. It was just smears, so we said, “That’s not for us.”

The next one we went to was Meinzinger, which was started in 1929 by Frederick Meinzinger. Bill Meinzinger was running it; his father had died. But it was one these old-time schools. The professors all wore bow ties and pinstripe suits.

It was great. It was on Woodward Ave. in the art center where the art museum and library are downtown. It was an old walkup over a store front in an old building that had been there since the 1910s. We had a six-month basic art course, which was Anatomy, Perspective, Color Design, and Life Drawing.

The final sketch for a variant cover of Old Man Logan #5.

Old Man Logan © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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DRAW!: How did they break it up? Did you have different classes each day?

GH: You couldn’t screw around. The

teachers were fantastic. We had Perspective for one day, Anatomy for an entire day— they had skeletons and you learned all that stuff. Then they had Color Design two separate days, and then a workday. Then the next week you had five days of Life Drawing. That was the focus, and what they considered to be the most important. The class was filled with painters and beginners. As beginners, we drew charcoal drawings from model poses—everything from 60-second poses to four-hour poses. And we did that for an entire week. That was incredible, and we did that for six months.

We were 18 when we graduated the course, and they wanted us to go on and select specialties. You could select Illustration, Engineer, Fine Art Painting, all kinds of stuff. We were going to take the Illustration course, which was three years, but my dad worked for GM. He had started in the stock room, and had worked his way up to head of office supply for Chevy, and he had a lot of contacts in the city. He asked Tim and me if we wanted to go check out the Jam Handy Organization.

I’d driven by the building with my parents many times, looking at this sign with big lettering, “The Jam Handy Organization’s Path Along to Know-How. Help Make Meetings More Effective.” I didn’t know what it was. At first I thought it was a jam factory. [laughter] I was a little kid.

Jamison Handy was the man who founded it in the ’20s. Handy had started in New York City in the 1910s at the Bray Productions studio, which was one of the premiere “Angel of the Gods”, a 1980s painting done for a cover of Heavy Metal magazine. animation studios in New York and defined Angel of the Gods © Greg Hildebrandt much of the animation industry. He started there along with the Fleischer brothers, Max and Dave; they people, and they hired us on the spot for a dollar an hour. That were friends. The Fleischers went on to theatrical cartoons was minimum wage in ’58—40 bucks a week. But working with with Betty Boop, Popeye, and the fantastic Superman shorts. all the people there—they had an animator who had worked on Handy went to Detroit and started this industrial film house. Pinocchio, Fantasia, Snow White, Bambi, and Dumbo. He’d He did training films for the Navy, the Air Force, Chevy, Ford. worked in the special effects department under Josh Meador It was an incredible operation, the biggest in the country. I at Disney, and he was now at Jam Handy working as one of talk to people about it, and some people in Detroit have never the directing animators. They also had two animators from heard of it, which kind of blows my mind. Somebody should Max Fleischer’s studio who were still there, who had worked do something on this, because it was a major institution in on Betty Boop, Popeye, and those Superman cartoons. It was America. When Fleischer’s studio folded for the umpteenth pretty mind blowing. I was 18, and all of a sudden I’d fallen time after the Mr. Bug Goes to Town fiasco, Handy invited him into this freaking great place to work. Animators are a special to come to Detroit, which he did along with some of his ani- breed. They do this ball-busting work, and then when they flip mators and Fred Goldman, who was a friend of the Fleischers out, they carry on these charades and skits and do all this crazy stuff. It was hysterical. Plus, Mr. Goldman was like the old man and who had a processing lab on Long Island.

So my dad sets up this meeting for Tim and me—this is who takes you under his wing, a grandfatherly figure. He was 1958—with one of the VPs, and he likes the portfolio we had teaching us all kinds of things—stop-motion animation. We brought. We go to the animation department and meet all these worked on this stop-motion puppet TV commercial.

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did a great Groucho Marx imitation.

He’d be in the middle of a Groucho Marx routine, and one of these guys from across the street would come over. He’d pitch a fit to Bob, and Bob would tell him, “Listen, these guys…”, you know what I mean? I loved working there. I did that for about six years.

The sketch for a possible poster collaboration by Greg and Tim. Moon Flight © Greg and Tim Hildebrandt

DRAW!: So a lot of this was driven by the auto industry and ads for things like that?

GH: Yep, and U.S. Steel, Campbell Soup…. The first thing we worked on was a training film for the Air Force. A pilot had come up with new combat maneuvers in Korea in ’51, ’52, and in ’58 the Air Force decided to put them into practice, so they commissioned Jam Handy to produce a film showing these maneuvers. The treatment of the film was these little pie cuts with a fan on the back that were fully animated—pencil on paper, and then inked by an inker. They would fly around to show the formations, and be followed by a ribbon that would stay on the screen to show how the loops and the movements went. Our job was to take these cels—there were two colors of blue for friendlies, and two colors of red for enemies—and paint these tiny pie cuts, between ¼" and 3" wide. We did that for seven months, put cotton gloves on and opaqued cels, and we were ready to blow our brains out after two months. [laughter] DRAW!: That’s the bottom rung.

GH: That’s it. [laughs] Sweeping floors would have been more interesting. But Bob Kennedy was the immediate boss of the animation department, and he understood artists. He knew how grueling this was. You’d flip out at work and put the stuff aside and do something crazy, and he’d come back and see us and be completely cool with it. Except for when the VPs would come tromping in from the back steps to spy on the animation department. Frank, one of the assistants,

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DRAW!: So you were 24 or so when you left?

GH: Yeah. I went to New York for, of all people, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen.

He was a Catholic bishop who used to be on television in the ’50s. He was huge in the ’50s—cover of Time magazine and everything. There were three stations. Milton Berle was on one network, Frank Sinatra on another, and Bishop Sheen on the other. Bishop Sheen had this incredible charisma on-screen. For lack of a better comparison, he was a lot like the present pope. He was very concerned about social issues, let’s put it that way. He certainly was ecclesiastic and lived by the laws of the church, he nonetheless was quite progressive when it came to social reform. He hired Tim and me to come to New York and make films on world hunger, to make Americans aware of the third world.

DRAW!: What did that entail? Did he write a script, and then you’d have to film it?

GH: He saw some work we had done, and it was totally synchronistic how the series of events happened. I had the opportunity at that time to go work for Disney on miniature sets for the Flushing Meadows World Fair, and it came down to going to work for Disney or going to make films for Bishop Sheen.

I flipped the coin and chose to work for Sheen with my twin brother.

Bishop Sheen would come up with the concepts. There was one film called The 30th Parallel. If you drew a line around the globe at the 30th parallel, all the wealthy nations are above that line, and all the poor nations are below it. So it became a contrast movie between the Haves and the Have-Nots. We took a mondo type approach, and he’d be narrating. He was an unusual man, because he’d be assaulting the rich church, and it was mind-boggling to me, because I grew up Catholic—a pre-Vatican Council, very conservative world. My mind was blown by this guy. He was throwing out facts on the World Health Organization and UNICEF and CARE and the UN. It was overwhelming.

He never went to a studio. He had a tape recorder, very professional, and we’d go to his residence and set it all up for

him, and he would record for several nights. Then we’d get the tapes, and one of the girls in the office would transcribe them. We would then take the transcriptions and boil them down to a doable script contained with a 20-, 25-minute film. I would juggle them around, re-edit them, change sequences, make it more filmic. Then he would sit with that script, approve it, and we’d record him reading that edited script. Then we would shoot footage on ¼" tape, generally on an Aeroflex or an Éclair camera, and send that off to a place called Magnosound, where they would transpose it onto 16mm film. We would travel around gathering footage of the “Haves” here in America. Then we’d go to CARE and get footage there of, say, a family in India. We’d go to Magnum or BlackStar [suppliers of stock photography] and get shots of starving people in Biafra, and cut it all together into a film.

DRAW!: Did he ever give you specific instructions, like, “Go film this part of the city,” or anything like that?

GH: Never. I was hyper-enthusiastic and working like crazy on these things with no concerns over hours or time of day, and he saw that and saw we had a sense of grasping it. He completely trusted us, and let us do our thing.

DRAW!: How long did you work A 27" x 36" concept painting for a possible poster collaboration by Greg and Tim. The image with him? was renamed “Pixie Flight”, and changed from a horizontal to a vertical.

GH: He was there about four years Pixie Flight © Greg and Tim Hildebrandt before they kicked him out. What I said about him taking on the clerical establishment? Cardinal inner city parish—without going through the red tape—to Spellman was the head of the archdiocese of New York at the government to provide housing for the poor. That was the that time, and he did not like the bishop. The bishop never last straw, and they kicked him out of there. He kind of ended aired dirty laundry; it was not his way. I didn’t find all this up as a man without a country. out until later. To make a long story short, they booted him He was such a great man, and I still love him, even though out of that office and put him out to pasture in Rochester, I have nothing more to do with the religion. He was an amazNew York, to get him off the scene. He gets to Rochester— ing human being, and I was really fortunate to have worked this is 1968—and refuses to live in the bishop’s residence with him. because it’s too ostentatious. He takes a tiny apartment, which freaks everybody out, pisses everybody off. Then he DRAW!: What did you do when they kicked him out? Did gets involved with a black activist who was seeking to get you go looking for other work? blacks into white-collar positions at Kodak. He was doing GH: They brought in a new regime quite the opposite of him. ecumenical services, having rabbis come to the church and They basically said, “We’re not Bishop Sheen. He’s not us. having priests go to the synagogue. He then hands over an Are you going to be okay with that?”

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Before they fired Bishop Sheen, he said to Tim and me, “Boys, I want a film aimed at American teenagers, making them aware of these horrible situations.” That’s all he said to us, so Tim and I started gathering footage of all-American teenagers. This was 1967, and you know what was happening in 1967. [laughter] We had already been to Columbia to shoot footage. He had sent us there two years earlier to film poverty. We spent about five months there. That was when I lost all my naiveté.

When this new regime took over, Tim and I were deep into this film. We were about ¾ through editing it. There was no narration; the bishop did not narrate this one. We were pretty much hip to what was happening, so we started this non-linear movie, with no voice over—only real sound and music. It was very much a fast-cut, pop in edits, contrasting black-&-white and color. We had a rough cut and about four soundtracks, and this new regime kept bugging us, “C’mon, let’s see the picture.” We kept holding them off, but finally we show it to them on the Moviola. We’re trying to control the

The finished sketch for “Eowyn and the Nazgul”.

Eowyn and the Nazgul © Greg and Tim Hildebrandt

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foley track and the music and everything, and these guys are flipping out because they’re arch-conservative. Just filmically they couldn’t buy it, because we were using extreme wideangle lenses, zooming around, moving camera shots, protest marches. They went nuts. “We can’t use this! This is not representational of our church!”

They were ready to scrap the whole thing, and the girls in their publicity department, who were friendly to us because they had worked for the bishop, went to bat for the film. My approach was, “I’m not changing one frame of this film!” [laughter] But they basically talked these people into having a screening for teenagers. “Go to a Catholic school, and have the kids come to a screening, and see what they say about the movie.” They agreed to that. So we sat in the projection booth trying to control the sound levels, and the kids went nuts over it. They loved it, because it was very much hip to the moment—fast cuts, psychedelics, and rock music. After they got the reactions of the kids, they grudgingly said, “Okay, go ahead.” So we finished up the production work, the lab work, and they released it around the country. Ultimately I found out that a lot of non-Catholic schools were showing it around Thanksgiving Day, making their kids aware of the Have-Nots of the world. We Are One was the name of the film, and I’m still proud of it.

DRAW!: Do you still have a copy of it?

GH: I have it on film. I've been meaning to have it transferred to DVD, but I haven’t still haven’t done it yet. I have three films I worked on for the bishop I want to get transferred at some point.

In any event, they finally approve it.

Then they say, “We’re going to West Africa,” Ghana particularly, “to film missionary activity.” I’m not trying to be political, be these were more conservative people. They said, “First we’re going to Rome and shoot interviews with all the bigwigs in the Church.”

They wanted another film for American teenagers. They figured that going to Rome and interviewing old, doddering cardinals was going to inspire American teenagers in 1968. [laughter] That’s how out of it and naïve this new guy was.

So we get to the Vatican and film all these interviews. That was an eye-opener.

We leave there for Ghana, and start a tour of Ghana, filming missionary activity.

At the same time, Tim and I were gathering non-official footage of students at the university, anthropologists, African historians, priests who were quite disillusioned to put it mildly.

We gathered all this information and came back and cut this film together that basically probed the whole

question of what is missionary activity? What does that mean?

What happened to Africa when we came there and carved it up? It was a very probing documentary, and he fired us immediately after seeing a rough cut of it. Out the door, boom!

DRAW!: All the feedback you’d received, it didn’t matter.

GH: It didn’t mean anything, because this was an authoritarian regime. “You’ve got two weeks to clean everything out. Now get out.” Fortunately, we had our ears to the railroad track, and we knew maybe this was going to happen. I had been doing art at home for quite a while—painting, drawing, with the possible objective of illustrating some children’s books. Before they fired us, we’d begun taking our portfolio around the city, starting with Carlo De Lucia at Golden Books—Western Publishing. In those days you could call an art director. “Hi, I’m an artist and I have a portfolio.” “Sure, come on over.”

Carlo loved our work. He didn’t have anything for us, but he sent us over to Frank Lamacchia at Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Holt did textbooks, and they were redoing all their textbooks. They provided us and about 300 other illustrators

work for about three and a half years.

DRAW!: This was in New York. So once you moved from Detroit to New York, you never went back.

GH: Well, I lived in New Jersey, not in the city, but no, I never went back to Detroit other than to visit. But we illustrated for about seven years, doing everything from Reader’s Digest spot illustrations to editorial art to magazine covers to advertising art to children’s illustration—you name it.

DRAW!: Most of your work I’ve seen is acrylic, but did you work in watercolor or gouache?

GH: Yeah, back then we worked in pencil, ink, watercolor— never oil. You’re knocking out illustrations that had to be taken in the next day, and oil would not dry fast enough. I tried oil once later on after we started Lord of the Rings, but I couldn’t deal with it. I was used to working in a fast-drying medium, you know? I was working casein paint along with watercolor, and a painter friend of mine said, “Try acrylic.”

This was 1968, ’69.

“Eowyn and the Nazgul”, a painting done by Greg and Tim for the 1976 J. R. R. Tolkein Calendar.

Eowyn and the Nazgul © Greg and Tim Hildebrandt

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DRAW!: Were the acrylics different then?

GH: No, it was the same stuff. It took a little getting used to because it’s a little more slippery than casein. I got into it, and that’s all I’ve worked with since then.

DRAW!: I hear the formulation of the paint is better now than it used to be.

GH: I’ve been using Liquitex all these years, so I don’t know.

People keep telling me about different kinds of acrylic, but I’ve never tried anything else. You stick with the thing that works for you, and I use Liquitex—that or Grumbacher, depending on the colors that are available.

DRAW!: Back when you were taking classes in Detroit, did you work with acrylic at all?

GH: No, I never even heard of it until around ’67 or so.

DRAW!: You guys use it so well, and it’s not an easy medium to use, especially the way that you use it.

GH: I think it’s just what you get used to using. You stay with it, and you keep figuring it out and learning how to use it.

DRAW!: When you’re on a large area, like you’re working on today, you must mix up a huge mass of the basic colors.

GH: I do, and I keep them in airtight containers. I work on a strip of heavy duty aluminum foil. With, say, Daredevil’s red costume, there are six values from highlight to shadow. I mix those up in clean, neat piles of paint. In this case the primary true color is cadmium red medium, so I scoop out a pile of cadmium red medium. I don’t want it exactly straight out of the tube; I added a tiny bit of white to mute the tone. That’s my main primary color, right in the center of the strip of aluminum foil. For the next color over moving towards the shadow area, I use cadmium red deep right out of the tube. The next pile over getting darker is cadmium red deep with a little dioxazine purple added to it. Dioxazine purple is my color of choice to move towards dark with.

DRAW!: Because it still has that vibrancy?

GH: It adds color to it as opposed to black. Do you remember in Lust for Life when Van Gogh is sitting with Pizarro on the beach, and Pizarro says, “Look up at the leaves. There’s color everywhere. Throw away your black!” Tim and I went home after the movie and threw away our black. Then we looked at each other and said, “How are we going to get to a dark?” [laughs] Many years went by, and we’re using this and that, mainly burnt umber. That’s why with The Lord of the Rings they all look so brown. That was not a design choice. That was because I didn’t know what to use to get to a black. [laughter] DRAW!: In school I had a teacher who said, “Never use black.” Some teachers say, “Never use white.” Other teachers say, “Where is the black?” It’s all over the place. It sounds like what you’re doing is pre-mixing your string. In oil it would be wet, so you could mix up your string as you go, but with acrylic it would dry out.

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Painting for the cover of the Urshurak novel.

Urshurak © Greg and Tim Hildebrandt

GH: That’s the thing with acrylics. For ourselves, sometimes Tim would take the color home with him and work with it.

Sometimes I would take it home and work with it. We had to develop those means. Like I said, these concise pile of paint, pre-mixed values.

As for the light values for the Daredevil piece, the next color up is cadmium red light. So you’re moving towards yellow. The way that everything works from me when I paint, and it’s the most valuable thing I learned from Bill Meinzinger, if there’s a warm light, use a cool shadow, and if there’s a cool light, use a warm shadow. My light in this scene, the top light hitting Kingpin and Daredevil and the whole foreground, is basically a whitish yellow light. I have to understand and know the color of the light before I mix anything up, because the color of the light affects all the colors.

DRAW!: Exactly. It’s the atmosphere of your painting. Do you do that off a color study, or do you kind of wing it?

GH: Oh, I wing it. I have done color studies just because I wanted to try them, but by this point I know exactly the color of light that I want. For the color on the Kingpin, I squeeze out a pile of titanium white, squeeze in a touch of cadmium yellow medium, and mix that in. That’s my highlight color, so I know

that’s the color of the light. Everything moves down to that, all heading to dioxazine purple.

While doing our novel, Urshurak, Tim and I went to the art store. We were trying to figure out what dark color we were going to head for. I saw this tube on the rack. “Dioxazine purple? What is this? I’ve never heard of it.” Again, we had a very limited formal education, so we would go to the art store, pick a new color off the rack, and say, “What does this do?” and figure it out. We took the dioxazine purple home and squeezed it out, and it was deep and dark.

DRAW!: It’s like Phthalo blue, one little drop of that purple is like dynamite. I still have tube that I bought my first year at school. It’s not even a quarter done yet.

GH: Well that’s a main color for me. I couldn’t paint a picture without it these days. That’s the color I use for moving to a shadow. It never reproduces that way. It looks black once it’s reproduced if you’re using it straight out of the tube. The concept of “warm light, cool shadow” started for me at Meinzinger in 1958. That’s the stone hitting the surface—you hear it, you grasp it.

But for the stone to travel all the way down and go “clunk”—in other words, to translate that concept through this pigment—took some time. But once it went clunk, the whole universe came into focus as far as the handling of color.

DRAW!: When you first saw originals

by Wyeth, did that affect your process of what you were thinking? To me it seems like he’s the artist who had the most affect on your color sense.

GH: Tim and I had the old books, the first printings, and we were emulating these old Scribner reproductions.

When I saw them in person, the color was five times more intense. We were influenced by these reproductions where the color was toned way down.

After seeing them in person, I tried one project where I did not add anything to the color as it came out of the tube.

It worked with firelight, but with other stuff it didn’t come out so hot. I experimented a lot with chroma intensity, and when we got to the Marvel stuff in the ’90s, that was all souped up very intensely. It depended on the subject.

Finally the conversation about “don’t use black” came to an end. Jean had a publishing company for years, and we decided to illustrate public

domain books that we all loved, and among them was Dracula. I consciously used black for that book. Not as a crutch to get darks, but as part of a breakdown of color. It basically became my warm for the blue light.

DRAW!: You basically used your black as a blue. For a while I was using a limited palette. I was painting with enamel paints on cardboard, and I got that from Vincent Desiderio. He was teaching at the school, and one of the ways he was getting this extra luminosity in the whites on his paintings, was that he was using a white enamel, like the stuff you paint your fence with. I started experimenting with that, then the next teacher comes in and says, “Why are you doing that? I would never do that. It doesn’t make any sense to me.” Sometimes one man’s solution is another man’s poison.

GH: Exactly. It’s all very individualistic.

“Rogmun Captures Ailwon”, an illustration for the Urshurak novel.

Urshurak © Greg and Tim Hildebrandt

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top of that. If you see any old photography, the color is shoddy. It wasn’t until the ’60s that color film started to improve. And it also depended on who you took the film to for developing, and how they mixed their solution, because that would also pull color one way or another. Do you do all your photography yourself?

GH: Oh, yeah. I’ve always done it myself.

DRAW!: Do you have a stable of people you rely on as models? Or if you’re walking down the street and see someone who looks like the Kingpin, do you say, “Hey, wanna make 50 bucks?” [laughter] GH: I have done that. We have people, but anybody walking by that fits the part, I’ll grab and say, “Do you want to pose for me?” Danny, our contractor—he does all kinds of work for us around the house—posed for Daredevil. He posed for Captain America. He’s in good shape and a young guy. He’s not hyper-pumped up. I don’t want that anymore. I don’t want that extreme type of body. He’s just in good shape, so I grab him.

I was standing in line at the supermarket a coupe of weeks ago, and there was a 6' 4" guy who was exactly Kingpin. He had a shaved head, he was big but not fat. He was there was his wife, and I wanted to ask him to pose for me. He was in another line, and before I could get checked out and get outside, he was gone. Otherwise I would have asked him. So I said, “Ah, Greg at the lightboard making his finished sketch for a Marvel trading card set for Fleer. screw this. I need to get this done.” I All characters © Marvel Characters, Inc. put a suit on and Jean shot a picture of DRAW!: Rockwell loved purple. He used to do all of his me. Needless to say, I had to shave my head, make it look like a different face, and add a few pounds, but I can do that. I can take underpaintings with a reddish purple color.

GH: Someone told me, or I read it, that if he had a piece of anybody and stretch them out or broaden them out.

I don’t copy photographs; they’re just a point of reference. color reference, he had to paint it that color. In other words, he could not take a picture of someone with a green sweater on I'm altering stuff. I’m moving a leg around or twisting stuff. It’s and then translate that into red. He had to have the actual color mainly about the folds on the arm sleeve and things like that. in front of him.

DRAW!: Did you ever use Steve Holland, the model for Doc DRAW!: I don’t know if that’s true. I got that book, Norman Savage who all the old guys used?

Rockwell: Behind the Camera, which is really good. He painted GH: No. Didn’t Al Williamson say that every hero had to look a lot from life in the beginning, then he started using photo- like either Buster Crabbe or Stewart Granger? graphs. But he never painted directly from the photograph, and he would never take his color from the photograph. He would DRAW!: Or Al Williamson when he couldn’t get Stewart take a photograph of his grayscale and then put his color on Granger. [laughter]

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GH: A friend of mine was friends with Al. I met Al several times at conventions, and we would talk, and I’d go nuts over his EC comics and stuff. I’m a big fanboy. But that friend told me Al freaked out and got pissed off when Tim and me started Terry and the Pirates. But every guy in comics was. They wouldn’t talk to us. “How dare you take on that subject!” I, of course, grew up with it. Every kid on the block who drew was copying Milt Caniff. For me, he was one of the gods.

When Mike Uslan, executive producer of the Batman movies, optioned Terry. He talked with them about reissuing the strip, and they said they’d love to.

Here Tim and I are working on the Marvel trading cards in the ’90s. We had 150 paintings to do, and we were well into it. Jean opens the door to the studio—our studio was connected to Unicorn Publishing and SpiderWebArt—and says, “Guess what you’re doing next?” We said, “What?” She said, “Terry and the Pirates—a daily and Sunday comic strip,” and then she closed the door. [laughter] I went nuts.

GH: Well, first I panicked. [laughter] I did. I had a panic attack. “Oh my God! This is impossible! Ink! We’ve got to figure this out!” I asked when it was set, and New Media, who owned it, said they wanted it updated. It wasn’t going to be set in the ’30s or ’40s like the original. New Media wanted it to be set in the present or near future, Pat Ryan had to be more modern, Terry had to look more modern, so I was designing the characters. I gave Terry a butch haircut and an earring. I gave Pat Ran a five o’clock shadow—an Indiana Jones thing.

Everybody was loving it, and New Media gave all the okays.

DRAW!: That’s a lot of work.

GH: It wasn’t the work. You can’t follow in one of the gods’ footsteps.

That was my true, honest feeling.

“I don’t do ink. I’m a painter. I’ve done ink, but not…” I’m never afraid of work. I’d work 40 hours a day if I could, you know? Because I love it; I love doing it. But it was all those other reasons. I went in, and she said, “It’s a done deal. I’ve said yes already.”

DRAW!: How did you split up the work?

Greg and Tim’s painting for the cover of the 1997 novel X-Men: Smoke and Mirrors. The image was altered for the printed cover.

All characters © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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The word started to get out that we’re doing this thing. The big Milt Caniff fan club, a whole bunch of guys my age and older, were saying, “This is blasphemy!” They really got intense, and when they saw the sketches they freaked out. They saw Terry’s pomp haircut and earring and went nuts. And I felt the same way, because that was my childhood. I adulated the strip. Caniff was one of the geniuses. But we go ahead with this thing.

I posed it all. I didn’t fake any figures. I shot models for everything, and we were getting all these costumes. It was grueling. Tim and I had wondered for years about what it was like to do a realistic strip. We found out. We were working 40 hours a day.

DRAW!: On top of that, a lot of the archetype characters in that strip don’t fly today. You can’t do the Dragon Lady, you can’t do the Big Stoop.

GH: Not that way. Big Stoop was in there, but he wasn’t that type of character. The Asian-American community got freaked out too, because they were concerned we were going to carry on those pejorative aspects, which was the last thing Michael or Tim or I wanted to do. Michael met with them to assure them, and showed them all the sketches, and they were happy with it. They were fine.

DRAW!: But then the purists get mad because Terry’s not running around in jodhpurs.

GH: Exactly. We were stuck between a rock and a hard place.

The Dragon Lady was updated to be Vietnamese. She was in Saigon during the air lifts at the end of the Vietnam War to bring her into modern times. My friend told me that Al Williamson thought my design for Pat Ryan looked like a bum.

DRAW!: I knew Al very well, and I can see how he would think that. An interesting side to that, he was a big fan of Jack Kirby. He even inked Kirby in the ’50s. His Jack Kirby is not my Jack Kirby. My Jack Kirby is the ’60s stuff, but Al was not excited about that stuff. He liked the ’40s Jack Kirby. That was his Jack Kirby.

GH: Sure, with Joe Simon doing Boys’ Ranch and all that stuff.

DRAW!: There’s that 12-year-old version of you, and that world is always pure.

GH: That’s the one. For me, the greatest animated film of all time is Pinocchio, period, end of conversation. Because that’s the first film I ever saw, and is what turned me on to animation. It’s your kid that you keep alive, and that’s the stuff that turns you on.

DRAW!: You’ve been keeping your kid alive a long time.

This interview is going to be read by people who are 20, people who are your age, and people in between, like me.

You’ve had a very long, successful career. Did you ever reach a point where you were feeling burnout?

GH: Nope, because I’m all over the place. I don’t stick to one thing. I started out in animation, I went to live-action, then to general illustration, then we did Lord of the Rings, and we got a global fanbase over that. Then we did that Star Wars poster, and that zooped us up the fan ladder. I do pin-ups; I worked with the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. I love it all. My mother, I think, is the one responsible. She used to hammer into our heads, first of all, don’t follow the crowd. Don’t do what everyone else is doing. Also, your imagination is the most valuable thing you have. It’s my imagination I rely on, and if my imagination is turned on, I don’t care what it is I’m working on. I don’t want to specialize. I don’t believe in specialization. I’m not demeaning it, or saying that those who specialize are wrong. It’s not a matter of right or wrong. It’s my choice.

There’s too much stuff going on that interests me.

(above) Greg’s finished sketch for “The Emerald City on the Horizon”. (next page) “The Emerald City on the Horizon”, a 1985 painting for an illustrated edition of The Wizard of Oz. “The Emerald City on the Horizon” © Greg Hildebrandt

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DRAW!: You could have just stayed with Lord of the Rings, but you didn’t.

GH: I could have. “Three calendars is enough. I’m done with that. I want to do something else.” Then we did our own epic fantasy novel at Bantam, and we tried to get that off the ground through the William Morris Agency as a movie. That almost killed me. I quite literally nearly went nuts. I didn’t know how to deal with that. I was very much a fish out of water in the world of film in that day. Even though we had great people involved with it—John Dykstra, who did the first Star Wars

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He paused the presentation after about half an hour. He said, “Fantastic. It’s beautiful.”

Everyone’s talking, and he keeps watching me. Finally, he makes his way over and puts his arm around me, almost in a grandfatherly way, and he says to me, “Are you sure you want to get involved in this?” He really sounded concerned. I said, “Well, Mr. Levine, I’ve come this far.” He goes, “Yeah, I can see.” He really loved the art.

He collected Andrew Wyeth painting, you know. He had a private gallery of Andrew Wyeth where he would seclude himself to get away from it all. He really appreciated art. He said, “Look, what I’ve seen on the screen is going to cost $145 million to produce.” This was 1978. That sank it with William Morris, and they pulled out.

You know that scene in A Star Is Born, when he realizes his career is finished and he walks into the ocean and drowns himself? [laughter] I didn’t know what to do.

Then Jean fell from the sky like a heavenly gift, and she basically resurrected me and my career. She started a publishing company with her brother, and we started illustrating classic novels, and I got back on my feet and went in a whole new direction. But the experience was fantastic. There was a lot of suffering, but in retrospect you see the value it has in your life. Now I’m working with an animator, Scott Sava, who’s got a film called Animal Crackers. He’s got several screenings for it, and it’s coming out in September. I did one painting for the movie, but he’s a fantastic guy, and we’re talking about working on an animated film together—which, for me, is one of my unfulfilled dreams. I’m 78, and I’m still climbing up the mountain.

An 1984 illustration for “Aladdin” from Greg Hildebrandt’s Favorite Fairy Tales.

Paul O’Neill of the Trans-Siberian “Aladdin” © Greg Hildebrandt Orchestra just died, which is one of the movie [visual effects]. He was working on Battlestar Galac- most horrendous things to happen I’ve experienced in my tica at the time we met him. We went through Apogee, his lifetime. But his daughter is going to continue it, and we’re studio in Van Nuys, which was the original ILM location. He going to keep working with them. That was an amazing expebecame very committed to our project. He wanted to do some- rience I’d never had before, working with a composer. It was a fantasy fulfilled, because after seeing Fantasia, I thought, “I thing that wasn’t sci-fi.

Anyway, we worked on that for a year or so, and we got a want to work with a composer.” Are you familiar with [Sergei] lot of great reaction to our pitch. We had a little mini-film of Eisenstein’s movies? Battleship Potemkin? Alexander Nevsky the presentation. Everybody kept saying it was fantastic, down was his first sound movie, and he was working with [composer to [producer] Joseph E. Levine. He came down to a presenta- Sergei] Prokofiev [most famous for his orchestral suite, “Peter tion at William Morris one day. There were about 80 people and the Wolf”]. Eisenstein was an artist and designed all this in this conference room, and he said, “Let’s see what you’ve stuff visually, and then he’d work with Prokofiev. There’s a got.” By this point my eyes were spinning. This was not my fantastic book on the making of Ivan the Terrible, and how milieu. I was not comfortable. I was having a panic attack and they designed that film together, picture and sound. I read that was just really out of it, and Mr. Levine kept looking at me. back in 1960 or so. I said, “This is incredible. I want to do this

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someday,” and in a sense that’s kind of what I ended up doing with Paul.

DRAW!: Music is very important to you then?

GH: Yes, always has been.

DRAW!: Do you play an instrument yourself?

GH: No. I’ve fantasized about it, but I’ve never gotten around to it. But I love all kinds of music.

and slopping it on, trying to keep the acrylics wet and workable, and it was a mess. It would all bleed together. And then the next day, we’d have to get up and mix the color up again.

For that whole Lord of the Rings period, all those colors were being mixed up every single morning, trying to match them to the day before.

DRAW!: And you can never get it exactly the same.

DRAW!: Do you have music on all the time in the studio when you’re working?

GH: Yep. It could vary from rock to something much more contemplative—Mozart or something. It depends on what phase I’m at in what I’m working on. In the initial phase, where it’s just a sheet of blank paper, it has to either be dead silent, or something like Bach or Mozart—nothing with words. Once I’ve got it figured out and I’m proceeding on to finish, anything goes.

DRAW!: I’m looking at the illustration, “Flagface”. Was that a reaction from you guys seeing all that stuff overseas?

GH: Yeah. Tim and I were clowning around one night. We always “The Siege of Minas Tirith” for the 1977 J. R. R. Tolkein Calendar. had props lying around. He “The Siege of Minas Tirith” © Greg and Tim Hildebrandt slapped the flag on his face and put the straw hat on and started talking like, “I’m the ugly Ameri- GH: No, because one is wet and one is dry, and they look can.” [laughter] I said, “Tim, that’s fantastic! You should paint different. We had a friend back then who was an amateur painter—he was good, but never could make it happen. He that!” So I took a picture of him, and he painted it. was watching us slop on the water, and sat back and said, DRAW!: You were goofing around, but it has a sort of Andy “Did you guys ever think of using a plant mister?” It was like, Wyeth feeling about it too. Maybe it’s just the melancholy boing! It was so simple. I ran out and got a mister, and it was, “Oh, my God, look at that!” We asked him how to keep it wet lighting.

GH: Both of us were into Andrew Wyeth at that time. When overnight, and he said, “How about a Tupperware container?” you see that picture up close, it’s very tightly rendered, almost It took this guy to inform us about these simple solutions. crosshatchy—almost an egg tempera sort of thing. I’ve never DRAW!: Did you ever think about doing sci-fi covers back in worked in egg tempera, but it looks like an insane medium. your Detroit days?

DRAW!: What other mediums did you and your brother work GH: Not covers, no. I was doing a lot of painting, but I never thought about that until I got to New York. Between opaquing in?

GH: We tried it all, but ultimately when we started illustrating and designing for films and storyboarding, I painted tons of Lord of the Rings, everything was acrylic, and over time we science fiction stuff. I wish I still had it, but it got lost in the developed a means of how to render with it together, and we shuffle.

But Tim and I would take our portfolio around Detroit lookhad developed a means of how to keep it wet, that is to say in airtight containers with a spray bottle of ether. All through the ing for advertising work, and art directors would say, “What’s Lord of the Rings, we would mix up the color for whatever the a young guy like you doing this old stuff for?” because all our grass was and a series of six or seven values. We had no idea stuff was representational. We’d do sci-fi and fantasy, but it to use a plant mister yet. We were just taking water from a jar was always, “Why are you doing this old stuff?”

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DRAW!: When I was teenager, and I was seeing your stuff, and Frazetta, and Boris Vallejo, I was thinking, “I want to do my version of what they’re doing.” But you weren’t thinking, “I want to do what Kelly Freas does”?

GH: Nope. My two primary obsessions from childhood through our teens were animation and special effects. Even though Tim and I kept drawing and painting, making costumes and props, you name it, it came down to an obsession over animation and special effects. We grew up in a tiny, little house on the East Side of Detroit, then we moved to Rochester, Michigan, which was 20 miles out of the city. We had three acres, a garage, and a barn, and Tim and I promptly took over the garage and the barn to build miniature sets. These were the days of George Pal’s War of the Worlds.

DRAW!: And [Ray] Harryhausen and all that great stuff.

GH: Yeah, and we became obsessed with that. I still have some footage—it’s on DVD now. We built a miniature street scene in the top of the garage about 1:24 in scale. We spent about a year building the set—very realistic. We built a tripod machine on wheels, and had it coming down the street zapping buildings—we scratched the emulsion off on the film for the effect. We had powdered magnesium and we made our own gunpowder, which you could do back then.

You couldn’t find out how this stuff was done. They hid it, because they didn’t want the public to know how it was done.

So we would search and search and search, we’d go to the library, go through Popular Science, and we finally found that they used flash powder for the explosions. “Where in the world do you get flash powder?” Deductive reasoning and some detective work led us to a theatrical supply store in Detroit.

We’re 16 years old, and we go to this theatrical supply store, “Do you carry flash powder?” The old guy says, “Yeah, yeah,” and he goes to this rickety cabinet, opens it up, and there were, like, 80 jars of flash powder. [laughter] If that had caught fire, the whole block would have gone up. “Can we have five jars?”

He says, “Yeah, yeah.” We pay the guy and walk out.

For the gunpowder we needed sulfur, saltpeter, and charcoal.

In those days you could go to the pharmacist, and they would have big bins of chemicals. We go in, “I’d like a mason jar of sulfur, please.” He’d gave it to you. He looked at us funny, but this was farm country. Then we asked for the saltpeter. “What are you going to use it for?” and he wouldn’t sell it to us. We had to go to a different pharmacist to get the saltpeter.

Then we found out from deductive reasoning, and reading, and a friend who was a science nut that powdered aluminum sparkles, magnesium burns green, highway flares burn a nice red… So we got really into pyro and miniature building. We

A detail shot of the finished sketch and the painting of “Science Gone Wild”, a private commission for a friend.

“Science Gone Wild” © Greg Hildebrandt

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shot many rolls of 8mm film— slow motion, 48 frames a second.

DRAW!: My buddy John Knoll, who’s the head of ILM now, went out to ILM one summer. He came back, made up all of that stuff, and then we filmed it in slow motion to see what it did. But you couldn’t do that now. Most of that stuff is probably controlled substance.

GH: Oh, yeah. So we’d bust our butt for six months building the miniatures and shooting, then we’d animate. We built our own animation table with peg holes. I still have some of the stuff on 8mm film. It’s very crude, but you could see it.

Then we started at Handy and got totally into designing films, then moved to New York and did films there. So that was my main obsession for years. I never even thought about getting into illustration.

DRAW!: Were you reading science fiction or comics back then?

“Crucifiction”, one of Greg’s photorealistic dream imagery paintings.

GH: Oh, yeah. I was totally into “Crucifiction” © Greg Hildebrandt EC. My primary contact with comics as a kid was EC. Then we walked into the soda shop Rings, which had been published in America in 1955, and was where we bought our comics and boom! They were all gone, taking hold in the college circuit. We read that and thought you know, because of the juvenile delinquency hearings. we should illustrate it. I didn’t become and illustrator because I read Lovecraft and all of H. G. Wells and all of Jules I wanted to illustrate book covers, but because I wanted to Verne all through high school. But I never thought back then, illustrate that subject. It grabbed me. There was a ton of stuff “I want to be an illustrator,” as much as I loved illustration in there that appealed to my imagination. and admired it. Everything from children’s books—Johnny Tim wanted to keep moving in that direction. I wanted to do Gruelle and Raggedy Ann, and his fairy tale books, which he New York galleries, because I hadn’t done that yet. I wanted see wrote and illustrated, were beautiful. I have them now even. I if I could make the New York gallery scene, so I started paintliked fairy tales and that type of fantasy, and did a lot of draw- ing my dreams and surrealistic imagery. Then I got into photorealism. A friend of mine, who was an art director at the time, ings and a lot of animation along those lines.

After we got booted out of doing the films for the Catholic had an agency, and he was into photorealism. I’d never heard church, I was primarily interested in doing my own children’s the term before. He said, “There’s a show called ‘A Return to book. I was writing them and drawing them, but no one was Realism’.” I said, “What do you mean ‘return’? It never went buying them. They’d say, “Here, do this Disney book instead.” away as far as I’m concerned.” But there was a big show at the We started illustrating to stay alive and make a living. That Whitney—this was 1970, ’71. Lou Meisel, I found out much later, is the guy who coined the term “photorealism”. He was went on for about six years. repping [Charles] Bell, [Richard] Estes, and those guys. He and DRAW!: You weren’t thinking, “I want to be a paperback his partner were the ones who took up the cause of American pin-up art as fine art. In any event, my friend Bob told me about cover illustrator like James Bama.”

GH: It never entered my mind. I was completely unaware of this show, and I went to the show and it blew my mind. I started it. While we were with Bishop Sheen, we had done a paint- painting “photorealistic”, for lack of a better term, paintings of ing of a little gnome in a nature setting. One of the girls there my surrealistic stuff and dream imagery.

I knew nothing about the New York gallery art scene, but said, “Ooh, that looks like The Hobbit.” We said, “What in the world is that?” She brought the book in, this would have been Bob did. He was very hip to that world. He said, “You shoot about 1967, and we read it and said, “This is cool. We should your art on 35mm slides, and send the slides in to the galillustrate this someday.” Then we found out about Lord of the leries,” and he gave me a list of the galleries, especially all

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Finished pencils (above) and painting (next page) of “Faramir” for the 1977 J. R. R. Tolkein Calendar.

“Faramir” © Greg and Tim Hildebrandt

the top guys: Sidney Janis, Ivan Karp’s O K Harris, Leo Castelli—all the big names. So I sent them to all the studio galleries. Castelli sent them back with no comments. Janis sent them back with no comments. Ivan Karp sent them back, but with a note that said, “I’m not repping this kind of thing right now, but keep at it and you’ll find a place in this city.” That was very inspiring to me, so I kept sending my slides around. Ironically, a gallery across the street from O K Harris asked me to come in with my paintings. I went in, but my paintings were all over the place. I had portraits, I had surrealistic dream imagery, I had a buddy of mine on a Harley—I spent five months painting the headlight alone. It was that tight. So the owner is looking at the stuff and says, “You’re all over the place. This is not the way it works in the gallery scene. You need to make a statement.” He goes to the guy on the motorcycle and says, “Give me 20 of these.” I said, “What?” He said, “You have to show that you’re committed.”

It would take me ten years to do 20 of those paintings. I had a wife, three kids, a house, so I went back to Tim and said,

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“Okay, let’s try to do Lord of the Rings.” We call Ian Summers, the art director at Ballantine Books, and he said, “Yeah, c’mon over,” because you could do that back in the day.

DRAW!: You could call up a publisher, and somebody would answer and put you on the line with the art director.

GH: I didn’t even know who the art director was [when I called]. We sat with Ian, and he called in Judy-Lynn and Lester Del Rey, and they liked what they saw. They gave us a cover to do for a children’s book that Tolkein wrote, Smith of Wootton Major & Farmer Giles of Ham. It was a cartoony knight with a dragon. We did that first picture, and they approved it and said, “Okay, you’ve got a calendar. We need 14 paintings in six months.” We only had six months to do that first calendar.

So Tim and I reread the books, because it had been over two years since I’d read them. We scrambled through them, marking off scenes to illustrate, and we ended up with hundreds of them. “How do we get this down to 14?” We broke it down to good guys and bad guys. We took sketches in, they approved

them, and we went ahead on painting the pictures, which took about four and a half months.

When the 1976 calendar hit, it was incredible. It was the first time we’d ever gotten fan mail, and this was well on into our careers. I was in my mid-30s and I’d had four careers already. We got all this mail, and it the main thing that hit us was that we struck a chord with these pictures that seemed to get through to people. I grew up with Pyle and the idea of being accurate to the text as much as you could. Sometimes you have to eliminate things. When you read Tolkein’s description of Gandalf’s eyebrows, he said they exceeded beyond the rim of his hat. Clearly he never drew a picture of Gandalf. Eyebrows that are eight, nine inches long? [laughter] No. But you try to stick to the text and be honest to the story.

Pyle always said, “Put yourself in the scene.”

The calendar did well, so we did the next one. That one we had more time to do. We spent about ten months on that one. I upgraded the size of the pictures, because I still had this obsession with art galleries, and I wanted the pictures to be worthy of a New York gallery.

DRAW!: How big were the paintings for the first calendar?

GH: They were 24" x 30", maybe smaller.

DRAW!: Was that because you had to work fast?

GH: Yeah, and I was coming out of years of children’s book illustration. To me, that first calendar has more of a children’s book look to it, because I kept thinking of it as a children’s book, the way Tolkein thought about The Hobbit, as opposed to Lord of the Rings, when the group he met with said, “Okay, now take The Hobbit seriously, and write your heavy-duty story.”

DRAW!: So you didn’t really have in mind what the audience would be for the first calendar?

GH: I never thought about an audience. I did pictures the way Tim and I felt we should do them, and how we thought they should look.

DRAW!: You were just trying to please yourselves.

GH: That’s always the case. That, to me, is the first objective.

Obviously you’re doing a job, but I never felt that way doing

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Rough sketch (left) and finished sketch (right) for a direct market variant cover to the Star Wars: The Original Marvel Years omnibus, vol. 2.

Star Wars and all related characters © LucasFilm LLC. Sketches © Greg Hildebrandt.

any of the three calendars. I was doing them because I wanted to do them, and I wanted to make myself happy with them. But we were both always hypercritical of ourselves. You’re always harder on yourself than anyone else can be.

DRAW!: I teach illustration to young people in their teens, and I always explain to them how much easier it is to find reference now. You can type in “old scientist’s laboratory”, and there will be 500 pictures on Google.

GH: If you want it backlit, rim lighting, you can find it. Back then you had to go to the library and search. Half your life was spent trying to find reference.

DRAW!: How much of your production time for your first calendar would you say was spent either shooting or finding reference?

GH: At least a third.

DRAW!: The interiors of the cottages were based on Englishstyle medieval architecture. Did you go to England or do any travel to look for reference?

GH: No, we never travelled at all. We had tons of books. Tim had a bunch, I had a bunch; we’d accumulated them over the years. And if we couldn’t find what we needed, we’d go to the

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library. But mostly we had enough books, and photos we’d taken from here and there. Costume-wise, we were inventing based on medieval tunics, and faking it as we went.

DRAW!: And that’s where your experience from model making and costume making as a kid comes into play.

GH: Totally. Tim and I made tons of costumes from the time we were little kids. Masks, make-up—everything from a Tyrannosaurus costume, to Superman, to a clown—Lou Jacobs was the archetype for that. We’d spend six months working on our Halloween costumes. That, and the miniatures set building, and the photography all came together with illustration.

DRAW!: Now there are hundreds of companies that make capes and swords and all that.

GH: Oh, my God! There are zillions of them. We had to fake it all.

So the first calendar came out and we got our first taste of fandom. Then the second calendar sold more. I think one of the calendars even outsold [actress/model] Farrah Fawcett. [laughter] When the third calendar came out, bookstores would have three-foot stacks of them set up by the cash register. That’s how well they sold. They were the biggest selling calendars in history.

DRAW!: Did you make royalties?

GH: Oh, yeah. Very miniscule. They wanted originally to own all the paintings and just give us a flat rate. Tim and I had no business manager or agent back then. This was long before Jean. I wish I’d had Jean back then, but I didn’t. But at least we stuck by our guns with the first calendar and said, “No, we own the paintings, and we want a royalty.”

Finally they said okay. It was a very, very small royalty, but at least we owned the paintings.

DRAW!: That ties in to how you painted but lost the original to the Star Wars poster.

GH: Yeah. Vinny Di Fate was starting to get people together for artists’ rights, but I knew nothing about that stuff back then. All I knew was that when you finished a job, you took it in to the art director, you went home, and then they’d send you a check. Nobody ever said, “We own this,” you just kind of assumed they did, even though there was no contract that said, “We own the original.” With Star Wars we didn’t know. We just went home and they finally paid us the $4,000.

DRAW!: And you had no way of knowing what Star Wars would be when you did it.

GH: No. The agency that was handling Fox, they didn’t know. It was a little agency in Manhattan, and they called us in out of desperation because we had come through overnight with that Young Frankenstein picture three years before. The painting we did never got used, but they remembered the fact that we painted a picture overnight. Plus we’d gotten famous for Lord of the Rings, and they put that together and said, “Hey, we’ve got this science-fiction film here, and you guys work fast.” That’s how we got the job, and we banged it out in 36 hours.

DRAW!: I still have mine. When I see you at Illuxcon this year, I’ll bring my dog-eared original 1977 Star Wars poster for you to sign. [laughter] GH: Okay! So that put us on the map a little more.

DRAW!: As a fan of Star Wars, it really captured the feeling and the myth of the film. How did you come up with the lightsaber over the head?

GH: We worked that out with the guys at the ad agency.

DRAW!: Did they have a layout there?

GH: They had something we looked at, and we talked about it, and went home and painted it. We did our thing with it, but it was pretty much defined by the agency. When we asked what they wanted, they said the directive they got was to make it look comic book-y. That was the only directive we got from Lucas. We never met Lucas. I still haven’t met Lucas. We went to the ranch and got the grand tour when we worked on another project for them. We met everybody down to his right-hand man. We were there for the whole day, and at the end they asked, “Is there anything else you’d like?” I said, “Yeah, I’d like to meet George,” and everybody in the room froze and looked at each other. “Well, he’s not here right now.” It was kind of like, [deep, stentorian voice] “No one gets in to see the great and powerful Oz.” [laughter] So I never met the guy. It doesn’t matter.

That Star Wars poster—and I’m eternally grateful I did it—was a job I did. I’m glad I did it, but it was just a job because we were work-

Since the background will be predominantly black, Greg transfers the finished sketch onto a black scratchboard.

Star Wars and all related characters © LucasFilm LLC. Sketches © Greg Hildebrandt.

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Starting with the background, Greg makes progress on the cover painting for the Star Wars: The Original Marvel Years omnibus, vol. 2.

Star Wars and all related characters © LucasFilm LLC. Sketches © Greg Hildebrandt.

ing on our own thing, our Urshurak novel. That’s all I cared about at that moment.

DRAW!: How much reference did they give you?

GH: A whole bunch of stuff—the close-up of Darth Vader and the actors. They said, “Don’t worry about likenesses, because nobody knows who they are”—the two principles. You know how it is trying to get a good reference shot. There’s always light coming from the top of their heads or something. All the shots of Fisher and Hamill were at different angles with either flat frontal light or diffused light. I didn’t know these people.

I couldn’t fake that. I made it up to sort of look like them, but you had a couple of hours to do it, and they didn’t care. We brought it in, and they used it.

DRAW!: Were you painting on one side of it while Tim was painting on the other side?

GH: We generally did that with the Lord of the Rings stuff, but with this one the picture was big, but not that big. We worked out the sketch with them, then added some detail on the train coming back to Jersey. Then we grabbed a couple of people and shot Polaroids for the two figures with an old bathrobe and a negligee I threw on my first wife. I still have the Polaroid. Then we did a sketch and a layout. I think it was one in the morning at that point, and I laid down and took a nap

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while Tim started painting. He woke me up about three hours later, and I started painting while he went to sleep. We did that for several turns, and then we stayed up together to finish it. It took us about 36, 36-and-a-half hours to do.

DRAW!: Did you project your layout onto the final board?

GH: No, we did a light sketch to size of the picture. I didn’t have a projector or anything like that back then—no Xerox machine. I can’t live without it now. All I had was a pencil, a piece of paper, and a drawing board.

DRAW!: You were a caveman! How did you live! [laughter] GH: I prided myself that my studio was the pencil in my hand and a pad of paper. “I can work anywhere.” I kind of like that idea. I don’t know what I would do without my copy machine now. I’m constantly using it to blow up, reduce, flop stuff…

But we did the sketch. Took a piece of gessoed Masonite, sanded it down, and transferred the sketch with a piece of graphite paper and a ball point pen, and started painting. When we were done we went back to our novel. After the William Morris agency fell apart, Tim and I split. He went his way, and I went my way. We’d worked together so much, we wondered if we could function on our own. We didn’t work together again for about ten years. We got back together on the Marvel trading cards in the ’90s.

DRAW!: Just to go back a second, when did you see Star Wars and realize how big it was?

GH: They gave us tickets to go to the New York premiere, but I couldn’t because the Urshurak story was so close. This is the irony of ironies.

We were working on it for about a year, and had defined these characters. Ailwon wears a short tunic, clad all in white, carries a magic sword, and has blond hair, albeit long blond hair. Hugh is the male archer, the predominant masculine figure. Then we had the gwarpie, who ended up being a two-foot tall guy, but in the original story he was a hairy, seven-foot tall Sasquatch derivative. [laughter] This was a year before we did Star Wars. Then there are our main evil antagonists—Torgon, the Death Lord of Golgorath. What is Torgon? He’s an ancient relative of Ailwon, our hero—an ancestor turned evil. There’s no Dark Side, but he’s gone to the side of evil. And he is a seven-foot tall, black mailed, black helmeted—you never see his face—black gauntleted, mace wielding villain.

I go to pick up the Star Wars poster, and I see Darth Vader, and I say, “What in the world is this? And who is this eight-foot hairy guy?” It was totally a synchronistic event of co-creation with about 20 different parallels to Star Wars, only it wasn’t technology-based, it was magicbased. I freaked out. I got home and More progress on the cover painting with Greg’s reference taped to his easel. painted the picture, and Torgon was Star Wars and all related characters © LucasFilm LLC. still in my mind. I’d just painted a big picture of him. We were getting ready to pitch our story Schwarzenegger, and everybody wanted to see what that was to all these publishers with our new agent. Ian Summers had going to do before they would commit to a fantasy film. quit Ballantine and was now our rep, and he was going to start pitching it. When the movie came out, I couldn’t go see it. I DRAW!: It’s interesting to see the lengths you guys went to was too freaked out. “It won’t last. It will disappear.” with the Lord of the Rings stuff compared to what [Frank] But it didn’t disappear. My brother went and saw the pre- Frazetta did with Conan. I love Frazetta, but he was never a miere, and he said, “You won’t believe it. It’s our Torgon. It’s research guy. exactly the same character.” So I had to reduce the size of the GH: Right. He did that thing that he did very well. I liked gwarpie, and take the helmet off Torgon, because everyone Frank. Did you ever meet him? would have said, “You copied Star Wars.” That really scuttled me. I couldn’t go see the movie for eight, nine months after that. DRAW!: I never met him.

But we had to finish the book off, and I had to get the enthusiasm GH: We knew him, and we would go out to his compound a to pitch it to the William Morris Agency, and go through all that lot. He was a nice guy. I liked Frank a lot. He always played it stress that I did until the thing collapsed. Nobody wanted to try kind of cool. “Oh, I really want to be a baseball player. This is fantasy. They were shooting Conan at that time with [Arnold] all just something I do on the side.” [laughter]

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Progress photos of a black-&-white version of the painting—white and gray pencil on black board.

Star Wars and all related characters © LucasFilm LLC.

DRAW!: Al [Williamson] had very interesting stories about that. I think Al felt a lot of that was exaggerated, especially after those books came out.

GH: He claimed that he never posed a model, but there are pictures of him posing.

DRAW!: That is all B.S. Al told us that. Why did he have 500 cameras? He was always taking pictures of stuff and taking pictures of himself. My artist friend Villagran, and my grandfather, who was also a commercial artist, both told me stories of when they were younger and would go into the agency, and if someone was painting there, they would pull a sheet down over what they were painting so you couldn’t look at their technique and figure out what they were doing. People did not like to admit to using photo reference.

GH: That did a lot of damage when Frazetta spread that around like that. I taught at Joe Kubert’s school for a while, and all these kids would claim they could do it without reference. It was almost like a macho thing. If you used reference, you were a wimp. It wasn’t “pure”. I think they were all emulating Frazetta’s line of B.S. I used to say to them, “What is wrong with you? Look outside. Look at nature. Look at trees.

Look at the lighting. You’re not going to use reference? You think you can paint and draw the human figure under every lighting condition? C’mon!” They would show me pictures, and I would say, “It looks like you didn’t use any reference.”

DRAW!: You’re right. I think it did come out of him. Today there is such a wealth of knowledge about how to do this particular job. You go back to 1977 when I was 15, 16 years old.

Outside of the Famous Artist School, there was very little material available.

GH: Nobody wanted to talk about it. Like you said, they would hide it, especially in film and special effects. You would have to dig and dig and dig. You’d find a Popular Mechan-

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ics with, “First Time on the Set of When Worlds Collide! Top Secret!” Animation—you had to figure it out yourself. There was next to nothing on that.

DRAW!: Until Disney did those little bits on Wonderful World of Disney. There’s one on YouTube now of [Eyvind] Earle and all those background painters, “Four Artists Paint One Tree”. You would never see that on ABC now, four guys painting a tree while someone reads a book. [laughter] You and your brother came up with a way of working based on your hobbies, basically.

GH: Our obsessions. They were more than hobbies. We were compelled. It may sound pretentious, but it’s a fact. Art chose me; I didn’t choose it. I was obsessed from my earliest memories. I started drawing and that was it, man. Then it became rendering and painting, building and making, inventing and creating. That’s all I ever did, and it gradually ended up being what I do for a living. You'll get to the other side of the room if you keep walking, you know?

DRAW!: The technical difference in your process, I assume, changed somewhat in the ’90s when the computer came in.

More of the responsibility is pushed on the artist now. In the old days, they would sometimes shoot the models for you, or they would hire the photographer.

GH: Yeah, they were doing that big-time in the ’80s. I did a romance novel cover once, and I had to go into the city. They picked the models, and they shot the photography. I didn’t want to have anything to do with that.

DRAW!: You were basically just a renderer.

GH: Yeah, and I didn’t want to have anything to do with that.

I don’t know anything about computers. Jean does all the computer work. I know how to turn it on and turn it off, so I don’t use it.

DRAW!: You don’t handle your Facebook page?

GH: I sit with Jean, and she’ll answer stuff. She does all the typing. I don’t do anything physical with the machine. I have no interest in it. They asked Al Hirschfeld in a documentary, “What would you think about working with a computer?” He said, “What are you talking about? It took me 90 years just to figure this out.” It would take me too long to figure it out.

DRAW!: You’re what they would call a Grandmaster now.

[Greg laughs] I say that because one of the things I’m dealing with as a teacher is that the digital aspect is very important for the young illustrator coming along. You have to know how to digitally paint and traditionally paint.

GH: You can’t survive in this world without it. All this stuff is going to be forgotten. Nobody’s going to know how to create and draw perspective. Perspective was discovered in the 1400s by an Italian [Brunelleschi]. They struggled for centuries with how to draw things in perspective. If you start relying on computers to do it, you’re going to forget it all. It’s going to be back to the Stone Age again. They hit a button, and the picture is lit for them. I don’t get it.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s a double-edged sword for me. I look at what people do with computers, especially in special effects, and it’s overwhelming. It blows me away. But the handmade quality is going away. Scott Sava, who’s doing Animal Crackers, is a fantastic artist. He wrote this story, got all the backing, the film’s almost done, fantastic digital animation all designed in pencil and paint.

He painted a poster for the film. He has this quest to bring back painted posters into movieland. The distributor won’t use his painted poster. Why? “Because the painted poster makes it look old. The handmade thing is old. That’s not what we want.”

DRAW!: I think that’s going to reverse. Maybe not with this generation, but with the next generation. I taught a class on concept design a year ago, and I used your

work, N. C. Wyeth’s work, Frazetta’s work, and Syd Mead’s work. I showed the images very small, like a thumbnail, and explained to them, “You can identify each artist at the size of your thumbnail, just by their color palette.” Then I brought up a bunch of modern stuff, and it all looks like the same person.

Some may be drawn a little bit better than others. And I felt the exact same way walking through Illuxcon, and there are a lot of really great artists there. But a lot of the more contemporary guys look the same when compared to the older artists.

The finished black board drawing.

Star Wars and all related characters © LucasFilm LLC.

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GH: I totally agree with you. It’s all some uniform thing.

Films look that way too. I don’t know what it is, but there’s a certain look to them, like a banged out, repetitious, canned thing on a supermarket shelf.

DRAW!: You see a lot of interesting designs.

GH: Yeah, that’s all fantastic.

DRAW!: But the final execution looks like it was all art directed by one guy, with a blue-green filter on everything.

There’s always going to be a backlash. Back in the ’70s, there were people going back to nature. There was a movement of people getting away from the modern world.

GH: You’re right. There are always those cyclical shifts. I wake up every morning blown away by the fact that I’m actually making a living smearing this squooshy stuff around on a canvas. I’m amazed people still want it. Marvel is hiring me constantly to paint covers. They like them, and they leave me alone completely. They don’t over-art direct me, and let me do my thing. I’m really overjoyed that I’m doing it. I enjoy every

single day. It’s happening now, maybe not en masse, but that’ll start to happen again.

DRAW!: You also do the “American Beauties”, so you have different arenas that you’re playing in.

GH: Different arenas, different markets—whatever you want to call it—the initial concept was not, “Let’s find new markets.” I just woke up one morning in 1999 and said to Jean, “I want to do pin-ups.” I painted one, she flipped over it, and then Meisel gave me my first show in 2000. He was impressed, and said, “No one’s done a good pin-up in 20 years.” He’s a very opinionated guy, and I like him for that. He gave me a show, and it opened up a whole other world for me, which I love.

And, like I said, I’m working with Scott now, and we’re talking about working on an animated film of some kind. I don’t know what, and I don’t care. It will be incredible to find out what it’s going to be. I don’t want to know what’s going to happen tomorrow or the next day. The thrill for me is finding out what’s around the next bend. I don’t know what it’s going to be, but there’s always something there.

Greg wasn’t happy with the figure in his sketch, so he redrew it on a separate sheet.

“Saturday Night Special” © Greg Hildebrandt

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DRAW!: Going back to the pin-ups, there’s a line between pin-up and porn.

GH: There’s definitely a line. No total frontal nudity. I’ve got nothing against pornography, don’t get me wrong. I’m not some moralist at all. Porn is a legit art form that has roots going back to Pompeii and before. It’s part of human nature. I choose not to do it, that’s all.

It’s my choice to stay over here on this side of the line.

DRAW!: Do you think that broadens the appeal?

GH: I think it does. A lot of women love my pin-up art. A lot of women love Bettie Page. I have an equal number of female fans as male fans of my pin-up art. If I moved into that other arena, that probably wouldn’t happen. I don’t know. I think the unseen is more of a turn-on than the totally seen, bam!, in your face stuff.

DRAW!: Your stuff has more of that [Gil] Elvgren, [George] Petty feel to it.

GH: I grew up on that stuff. My grandfather had all those calendars in the basement—my dad’s father.

All the men went down in the basement in those days in the spic and span, German-Swiss house, where you could eat off the floor. That’s where all the men went, and the women went upstairs to a fancy room. I remember as a little kid, it was a 50/50 deal. I was aware of the girls, and I was aware of the painting.

Those beautifully painted Gil Elvgren pictures, man, they knocked me out One of Greg’s pin-up paintings, “Saturday Night Special”. as a kid. So that stuck, and then I saw “Saturday Night Special” © Greg Hildebrandt [Haddon] Sundblom, and Alberto Vargas, [Earl] Moran, and Zoë Mozert—she was one of the DRAW!: [John Singer] Sargent, in his time, was the bleeding very few women who did it. That Jane Russell picture she did edge. He wasn’t doing grandpa’s paintings. He was the forefor The Outlaw [movie poster]—fantastic stuff. It was all in my front of painting. If you were going to paint things like that memory banks, so I woke up one morning and said, “I want to now, people of society, you’d be painting celebrities. Because do this.” I don’t want to emulate that or copy it. I don’t want we don’t worship the Vanderbilts anymore, we worship celebit to look like it was painted in 1941. I want to paint it like it’s rities. How would you do a contemporary painting of Miley Cyrus or somebody like that? How do you face that same quesnow, looking back at that time, you know what I’m saying?

When I got to Meisel’s gallery, I’d brought the four paint- tion as an artist today with that same—I mean, nobody has that ings I’d done so far. He basically said, “Had you made these skill set anymore—but with that skill set he had as a painter? things like you were trying to make 1940s paintings, I wouldn’t GH: Yeah. Sargent was amazing. And then Thomas Eakins be interested.” He’s already got Elvgren; he wanted something was working at the same time out of Philadelphia. Every time else. He loved the idea that they were modern, but looking he would do a portrait, it would be rejected. Because he was the guy painting what he saw realistically. back to the past.

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DRAW!: He made everybody too much of themselves.

GH: Exactly. He did not fix them, or improve them, or perfect them.

DRAW!: He was kind of a caricaturist in a way.

GH: Yeah.

I’ll take care of everything else.” Aside from being extremely creative, she’s made so I can stay focused on art.

DRAW!: That’s something you can’t put a price tag on.

GH: There’s no way to. Every artist friend of mine asks me, “Where can I find a Jean?” She’s the most incredible human being. Consequently, I’m obsessed with producing. Too much is never enough, and she makes it possible.

DRAW!: You’ll finish that Kingpin cover in a couple of days?

GH: Oh, I’ll be finished tomorrow. Then I have a Star Wars cover to do for them.

I’m not sure which story they want it set in yet. I have a Wonder Woman painting I have to finish. I have three commissions I need to do.

I’ve got a plane nose cone to paint—like the World War II fighter planes. That’s coming up. I’m more busy at 78 than I was at 38. [laughs]

The first Tolkein painting Greg had done in some time, “Smaug Destroys Laketown” was done in 2010.

This is Greg’s first rough sketch for the image.

“Smaug Destroys Laketown” © Greg Hildebrandt

DRAW!: You just had a show back in the fall.

GH: Yeah, in the city at the Metropolis Gallery.

DRAW!: Are you starting to move more in that direction?

GH: Jean’s going to be working on setting up more galleries like that. Metropolis we have a relationship with, and we’ll probably do some more shows there. I was flattered by the fact that Frank Miller came to my show, and we got along very well. He came to the house here, and he’s enthusiastic. He was telling me about the projects he’s working on at DC, and he’ll be doing some more Sin City stuff, and he’s enthusiastic.

I want to meet with him again and see if we can do something together.

DRAW!: That’s great, because that means you’re doing it because you’re happy.

GH: Exactly. I never pursued art for money. I’ll take as much money as I can get; there are no two ways about that. But ever since I was a kid, that wasn’t the motivating factor. Certainly, when it comes your way, you’re going to take it. You need it.

But it was never the motivating factor—especially now. I only do what I want to do.

DRAW!: That would be interesting to see your version of Sin City or something.

GH: I don’t know what it would be. We just threw it out there, “Let’s do something together!” I have no idea what it might be, but I keep looking for new stuff to get involved in that excites me and is something I haven’t done before. I’m 78, and I want to keep this going another 20 years.

DRAW!: What would you say to the 20-year-old aspiring illustrator?

GH: I don’t know what to say to them in a digital age. All I can say is don’t listen to anyone but yourself. Don’t listen to anyone who says you can’t do it, or you shouldn’t do it. And also accept the voice inside yourself that says it’s not good enough. Don’t throw your pencil down because that voice is telling you it’s not good enough, just thank it for sharing and keep on trucking. Use that voice that tells you it’s not good enough to get better. A lot of people quit because they get stymied or they think, “I can’t do this,” or, “I’m not good enough.” That’s the death knell. That’s what, as Mae West said, separates the men from the boys. You just have to keep on going.

DRAW!: 78 is the new 40. [laughter] GH: It’s because Jean does all the work, and I get to have all the fun. We met in 1979, and she said, “You paint and draw,

DRAW!: Did you have that with your brother, where if you threw your brush down, he would say, “Shut up! Pick up the brush and paint”?

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A more refined sketch for “Smaug Destroys Laketown”.

“Smaug Destroys Laketown” © Greg Hildebrandt

GH: Yeah. We both kicked each other’s butts in that sense. I was very fortunate to have a twin, because you’re alone in that room, and it’s the loneliness of the long distance runner. With two of us, if one of us would run into problems and get freaked out and say, “I quit,” the other guy would say, “Okay, if you quit, I quit,” and we’d challenge each other. “Pick up your pencil, or I’m just going to sit here too.” Each of us would inspire the other. We kept each other going in that respect.

The other thing I’ve been working on for about 20 years is a graphic novel. It’s a little side thing I do off and on.

DRAW!: Are you drawing it or painting it?

GH: It’s all laid out, and I’m drawing it and writing it.

DRAW!: You have work we see, work we’ll see eventually.

Do you have work that’s just for you?

GH: Loads of it. I have boxes and envelopes stuffed with ideas and concepts and stories. Things I’ve written and illustrated—mainly sequential art, because I love sequential art. I especially love the European stuff. They’re really dead serious about it. My son-in-law is Swiss, and he’s a comic book artist.

We went to visit my daughter and him several years ago, and David took me to this comic shop in Zurich where he used to

go. It was four stories of the most incredible graphic novels you’ll ever see in your life. And they’re all hardcover. Those books are in all the stores there. Here you don’t get any of that.

DRAW!: No, although you can go to Amazon France and order things. I’ve ordered some Moebius stuff from there.

GH: Yeah. But I’ve been working on a book. I don’t want to give anything away, but it contains pretty much everything I love and everything I despise, let’s put it that way. [laughs] DRAW!: Do you do any life drawing? Any drawing from nature?

GH: No, no. I used to do it all the time, and I know a lot of people who will go out and set up outdoors. I just work from photos. I shoot photos like a madman—thousands of them.

I’m very isolated. We just came back from the islands. Jean needs a vacation now and then because she does all the work.

She needs to relax and get out on a beach. Me? I’d be perfectly content to spend the rest of my life locked up in my little zone with my drawing board and my easel. [laughter] DRAW!: You sound like me. “We can go to the beach, as long as I can paint.” [laughter]

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The finished sketch for “Smaug Destroys Laketown”.

“Smaug Destroys Laketown” © Greg Hildebrandt

GH: Exactly. Drawing and painting is it for me. That’s where I live. There’s nothing more inspiring to me than a blank piece of paper. There are endless possibilities there.

DRAW!: It’s funny, because that’s some artists’ biggest fear, is a blank sheet of paper.

GH: I know, but for me it’s just something to dive into.

DRAW!: It’s been great talking to you. Your work has been an inspiration to me since that first book came out.

GH: Thank you so much. I really appreciate that, man. But it’s like Bob McGinnis said, “All I’m trying to do is get something right.” You’re always trying to get it right. It’s never good enough. It’s an anxiety thing. I’m not anxious, but I have a lot of anxiety. Chuck Jones had a great quote, “Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity.”

DRAW!: That’s very true.

GH: There’s something about the whole process, and I enjoy it all, even the anxiety. It’s what makes it happen.

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DRAW!: Looking at Frazetta, there was such a trajectory of his work, that by the time those books came out in the ’70s his work was never as good after that. Mentally, he must have felt he had reached a peak.

GH: Yeah, he peaked out with those Pellucidar covers and Conan covers. To me, that was it. Then all of a sudden God only knows what happened after that. Maybe it was because he just focused on this one area as opposed to expanding and not wanting to be pigeon-holed. I hate categorization and pigeonholing. I don’t want to be labeled. “Oh, you’re a great fantasy artist. That’s what you do. You’re a fantasy artist.” “What are you talking about?”

DRAW!: That’s the nature of the business. It always wants to make you— GH: Pigeon-hole you. Categorize you. “Oh, you’re a guy who does trees. We’ll put you on this shelf over here.” Jean wanted to destroy that idea too. She was against that whole idea of pigeon-holing, so we work extremely well together.

DRAW!: In the illustration field, Jack Davis was kind of

“Smaug Destroys Laketown”, a 52" x 32" painting based on a scene from J. R. R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit.

“Smaug Destroys Laketown” © Greg Hildebrandt

pigeon-holed, but he was the only Jack Davis, so he was very successful. Then in fine art, they say, “Give me 20 of those motorcycles,” until you reach that upper level. Then you can paint anything you want, because it sells, and they don’t care what you’re painting as long as they have something by you.

And that field is changing too. The galleries are changing.

GH: And that’s a good thing.

DRAW!: It’s just another version of commercial art.

GH: That’s all it is. I always despised that categorization of, “This is fine art and this is commercial art.” Once money is exchanged for an object, it’s commercial. Fine art? You just sold it. It’s commercial art.

DRAW!: Do you still have many of your originals to the Lord of the Rings?

GH: We sold a lot of them. I’ve got a few left. Not many.

Some I choose to keep or Jean wants to keep. They were divided between Tim and me, so his wife has his half, and I don’t know what they’ve done with them.

DRAW!: Is there ever going to be a Hildebrandt Museum?

GH: [laughs] I don’t know about that. Thomas R. Benton was totally dead set against museums. First of all, they told him to take all of his stuff out of the Whitney, because he had fallen out of favor. Jackson Pollock, his protégé and almost adopted son, had ascended, and he had descended, and the Whitney

said, “Get your crap out of here.” There was a documentary

by Ken Burns on Benton. It’s fantastic, because it’s about the triumph of the artist, and how he came back and reascended.

Benton said, “I don’t want my work hanging in museums.

They’re houses of the dead.” Both he and Frank Lloyd Wright called them that. He said, “I want my art hanging in brothels and bars.” [laughter] I can relate to that.

That’s what I like about Diego Rivera, the Mexican revolutionary artist. He has a magnificent mural at the entrance to the Detroit Institute of Arts—the only surviving one. It blew my mind as a kid. I didn’t know or care about the politics, but what a fantastic work that is. His whole thing was art for the people. He was out there painting those murals, and he was taking on every revolution in Mexico because they would never fulfill on their promises. He’d paint these murals of them, and they’d keep threatening to tear them down, and he would show up on the scaffold with six-shooter strapped to his hips. [laughter] They made a movie on [his wife] Frida— it was great, and I loved it—but somebody should make a movie on him. He was a fantastic character. Art for him, he said, was “a biological function”. I really can relate to that.

That really hits it. But they told him, “Diego, you’re making too much art. You’re devaluing your artwork. Stop producing.” But he was a guy who did art for the people. He wanted people to see it. He wanted to take on causes. He’s one of the guys I really admire.

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THE RIGHT WAY, THE WRONG WAY, AND THE

ORDWAY !

MASSAGE THE COLLAGE by JERRY ORDWAY

Caricature by Rachel Ordway

H

ey, everyone. I recently completed a custom drawing for a client, and wanted to use this space to write a bit about the process. A horizontal composition, with collage elements, can be a challenge to pull off. The buyer had a short list of elements he wanted to include, with the over-all theme meant to convey a retro-origin of Batman. I’m often asked to draw retro versions of characters, I suppose due to my having drawn the DC Comics title All Star Squadron early in my career, which was set in 1941.

To evoke any era, it’s always good to gather some specificperiod comic book reference.

In the 1940s, Batman had short cowl-ears and a very square jaw, while Robin of the early days had a very round face! The Joker in his initial appearances still showed his inspirations, one of which was the actor Conrad Veidt from the movie, The Man Who Laughed. I took the extra step of digitally flipping the splash image I sourced, to make sure I didn’t lose his heavy eye-lidded look for my piece (see left).

Batman and related characters © DC Comics

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Batman and related characters © DC Comics

The layout I produced as a first stage, on a sheet of 8½" x 11" copy paper, incorporates the main elements asked for.

Around the larger figures of Batman and Robin we see (clockwise) Bruce Wayne’s parents killed, an older Bruce inspired to become Batman by the bat that flies through his window, the Bat-Signal in the skies over Gotham, a flashback to the Wayne parents dressed for a costume party, the Batmobile in the Batcave, Catwoman “taming” our heroes in a circus setting, and finally, the iconic image of the Joker holding playing cards.

These were all sourced from the reference with little changes.

The Joker cover image facing the left edge of the paper looked better to my eye. It is also more effective to overlap the Catwoman image over the Joker’s back, than if he was facing the same way as she is.

As to the swinging main figures, I struggled mightily trying to get Batman to look correct. I sketched, I erased, over and over again. This was the first thing I drew on the paper, and it was fighting me. The client specifically requested the “swinging on ropes” pose, and I couldn’t get what was in my head onto the paper. Batman and Robin needed to be done first, as they dictate the amount of space left for the background elements. After a day of struggling I decided to commit the flawed pose to marker, and then I drew in Robin without any problem. Now I was able to lay out the surrounding elements, knowing that I could edit the vexing Batman figure in Photoshop later. I made the decision to forge ahead rather than continue to struggle with a single pose, because I know from

experience that you sometimes have to climb over the obstacle in the road to complete the journey!

An aside, but I love editing in Photoshop! In days past, my layouts might be covered in whiteout and/or cut-and-pasted elements if I was doing any second guessing. Digital erasing and editing is cleaner, and offers a lot of options! For the Batman figure, I reduced or enlarged various elements, and corrected the flaws in the pose by tilting his torso, tilting his head, and moving his legs forward. When I was satisfied, I printed the file to finished art size in halves, and taped them together for light-boxing onto Strathmore 3-ply Bristol board.

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I cut the paper at 12" x 18" for this, placed the corrected layout 1 underneath on my light-box, and proceeded to lightly pencil, then ink the Batmobile in the Batcave portion (see fig. 1).

I used my handy Pitt brand brushpen to render the stalactites and stalagmites to create some texture and depth. The arched shapes serve to delineate the element shape, so that the Costume party sequence can butt up against it without confusion.

Next I trace and then ink the costume party image above the Batcave, and make a note to leave enough space for the cape of the larger swinging Batman, as it overlaps a bit (see fig. 2).

I have lightly traced the main swinging figures in the center of the paper, so I can proceed with the other surrounding elements (see fig. 3). I prefer working “piecemeal” like this, rather than tracing down the entire composition in pencils, and then inking.

Inking this way gives me a sense of instant accomplishment that penciling an entire image wouldn’t. I know it goes against the grain, but I always preach that you have to find your own methods, and ways to keep yourself inspired throughout the process. Because the large Batman and Robin poses are the most important elements in the composition, I am building up my confidence before I ink them. Even after 30-plus years of comic illustration I still get nervous!

2

3

Batman and related characters © DC Comics

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I’ve rendered the Joker, as well as Catwoman (see fig. 4), but held off inking her bullwhip until the large figures are completed, as elements will be “behind” Robin and Batman.

I used a Japanese crow quill pen and holder, to render the main figures (see fig. 5). I found these Zebra #2586 T. Ishikawa nibs online (see fig. 6), recommended by a fellow artist, and liked the flexibility and ability to easily draw thick and thin variations. My old standby, the Hunt #102 would have also done the job, but it’s always fun to try new tools.

4

6

Batman and related characters © DC Comics

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The figures rendered, but not finished, it’s time to reconsider something in my layout that isn’t working. The tiger isn’t working for me, as I need a complete animal to be drawn in this section. A partial head and shoulders doesn’t transition well against the Batcave section. I thought I could fade it into a shadow area of the stalagmites, but it isn’t looking right, so out comes the eraser, as well as a tiny tiger toy figure to help me with the pose (see fig.

7). I augment this with a few reference pictures from my files to draw it convincingly (see fig. 8).

I am going to jump ahead a bit here, as the rest of the drawing leapt forward after I solved my main problems! I started adding solid black areas, again seemingly ahead of time, but the reason was that I knew I would black in the sky behind Batman and Robin in order to make the figures pop, and show the Bat-Signal clearly (see fig. 9). Seeing the black in there gave me a feeling for how much black I would use in the images of the Wayne parents’ murder, as well as Bruce being inspired by the bat in the window.

8

The piece is finished (see fig. 10), and I think you can see how I carried the solid black across the top of the piece, as well as used it to delineate a stylized skyline across the middle of the picture. While much of it is indicated in my layout or preliminary drawing, a lot is improvised. I step back, and squint at the art, and that helps me decide where the piece needs more contrast, or conversely, more white space. My goal on a custom drawing that I know is going to hang on the client’s wall is to make it through the process without mistakes or the need to “white” anything out. On this I succeeded.

Batman and related characters © DC Comics

9

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Batman and related characters © DC Comics

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WHERE EVERYTHING OLD IS COOL AGAIN!

NEW MAGAZINE FROM TWOMORROWS BLASTING OFF SUMMER 2018

the g n i g shin n light o

BRAD WALKER interview by Mike Manley

transcribed by Steven Tice

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DRAW!: So you have your new dog. Is that interrupting your schedule?

BRAD WALKER: It is, yeah. [laughs] Yeah, it’s been really difficult. I mean, I figured it would be difficult, but we got her at three months, a little under three months, maybe, and I kind of figured, “I’m home, I can take her out every two hours. That seems totally reasonable.” [laughs] But I figured that would just give me finite blocks of time where I knew, “All right, I have to get this far on the page,” for example, “in two hours,” and it would sort of like motivate me to push, whereas when you just have all day, and you have a whole page or whatever you’re trying to get done, you can lollygag a little bit.

I kind of figured this would be a good motivator. And I got her about halfway through an issue or towards the end of an issue, and it was pretty hectic, but I made that deadline. And since then, it’s not every two hours. She can fall asleep during the day for three hours, four hours and hold it, and then in the evening she’ll need to go, like, every 30 minutes. So we’ve gotten her on a more regimented schedule, and it’s helped me a little bit, but it’s still kind of difficult for me to sleep in. I’m working on layouts right now, and I’m trying to switch to doing layouts on my iPad, so that’s sort of an uncomfortable new process anyway.

BW: I’m using Procreate on the iPad. DRAW!: And do you have a template that you created, or are you using a DC template?

BW: I traced the lines off the DC boards and reduced them 25%, and I’ve always used those. So I just scanned that, and imported the scan [into Procreate], so I’m just using what I’ve always done my layouts on. The size of it, for whatever reason I’m not tech-savvy enough to know what I’ve done with the sizing, and the dimensions I blow it up to. The physical pages,

DRAW!: So you’re switching from doing traditional layouts to doing digital layouts?

BW: I’m trying. I’m not loving it so far. It could just be having to get used to the feel of no grit underneath the pencil.

It’s certainly going to be possible, and I did it on my last cover, but, you know, covers and interiors are very different, so we’ll see. If I get in a time crunch before I need to get the layout done and move the pages, I may just switch over to what’s comfortable and go back to traditional penciling them small.

Because for years I’ve done it, I’ll do the layouts, like, 3" x 2", and then I’ll just blow them up and trace them. And I’m trying to kind of skip a step—the blowing it up and tracing—by doing digital. But that feeling of going from a pencil on paper to an Apple pencil on glass is really different.

DRAW!: Oh, yeah, yeah. What program are you using?

Brad’s pencils for the cover of Green Lanterns #30, which was later inked by Andrew Hennessy, and colored by Jason Wright (see previous page).

Green Lantern © DC Comics

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Brad’s layout (printed here at actual size) and pencils for Aquaman #1, page 13. Brad’s layouts are blocky, but are easy to read and broadly show the acting of the characters.

Aquaman, Mera © DC Comics

when I draw, I’ll blow up the layouts 400%, because I’d reduced them at 25%—it’s very uniform. But when I print it from a JPG, for some reason I have to blow it up, like, 380%. I don’t know if I messed it up somewhere, but it took a little bit of trial and error [to get the sizing right].

DRAW!: So there’s like a difference somewhere in the matrix of 20%? Maybe it has to do with the pixel size, or the resolution?

BW: Yeah, it could. I probably spoke a little too soon. It’s probably going to be different when I try to do it with interiors, and it’s going to take more trial and error, because the time that I did it was on a cover layout. I think I had cover layouts as a single sheet, but I have four interior pages on one sheet, so I don’t know if the pixel size will be different when I’ve got smaller dimensions per sheet. I don’t know. Another reason why I maybe don’t want to try to fuss with it when I’m working on a deadline.

DRAW!: Yeah, trying to invent a new system on a deadline always has its hazards and its drawbacks, especially if the deadline is super-tight.

BW: Yeah, which mine are not, but I feel like even a generous deadline ends up tight. You can stress yourself into a

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tight deadline even if you don’t have one. So many people have transitioned into different processes, and I never understand how they’re able to do it without taking large chunks of time off, either to teach themselves the process as a whole, or even just to figure out a little thing like this. How many people were working on a Cintiq ten years ago? So many people do it now, where they’re coloring their own work. I couldn’t teach myself to draw on a Cintiq, and know all the commands, and color myself in Photoshop close to a deadline without taking about a year off somehow and financing that. I don’t know. I don’t get how they do it.

DRAW!: I think people probably tinker around with it until they get comfortable with being able to do their process. And comics is fairly low-tech. You basically have linework, and then you can color on just one layer. I know people who color

their own stuff, and they’re working on ten layers. When I color stuff, I basically have a line art layer, and then I have another layer that’s coloring. Occasionally, if I have to do an effect, I’ll create an additional layer. But I know people that have layers for shadows, layers for line art, they’ve got the background broken up into different layers. And it seems to me, for comics, maybe it’s just the way my brain works, I want it as simple as possible. I don’t want that many moving parts.

BW: Yeah. I think I’m very analog by nature, and I’m sure that there are people who transition very easily, because they just have a mindset for it and they sat there and tinkered while they relaxed at the end of a regular page throughout the day, and probably pick it up very fast. I have a feeling, to the amount that I feel like I know myself, and the amount that I know myself artistically—which are not necessarily the same thing [Mike laughs]—I don’t think I would pick it up very fast, but I guess we’ll see. I think I probably will pick it up faster like this, doing it as a trial by fire, than if I just tinkered in my spare time. And I’m not even anywhere near thinking about doing actual page art digitally, and don’t really have the desire to, necessarily, but even just for early process stuff like this, to save myself a bit of headache and some physical mess, you know, just adding layouts that I’d never do anything with and just go in the trash— DRAW!: You should sell those. You should keep those. Some of those, the good ones eventually might be worth a little bit of money.

BW: You know, I tried for a while because—do you know Nick Bradshaw?

DRAW!: Yes. BW: He always posts his layouts, and they’re really cool looking because they’re pretty fully drawn, and the characters have faces even if they’re not too detailed, and costume details and stuff, and he was like, “Oh, you should sell those. I sell mine.” He told me how he makes money on them. So I took mine to a con one time, and mine are very blocky. You know, all the information is there that I need, but it’s not anything that a fan would look at on the table and necessarily know that that’s Superman, or that’s Dr. Strange or somebody when they look at them. So it’s not anything that they really gravitated toward, and they just sat on the table. [laughs] DRAW!: Probably artists are more interested in that level of process than the average fan, per se.

BW: That’s true. Or I can sit there when I have a lull at the table and I can draw little costume details on the layouts.

DRAW!: There you go! That’s right. Do another little miniversion of the page, you know.

BW: [laughs] Revisit all my old nightmares.

DRAW!: A lot of people now are doing digital as part of their process, so they may lay it out like you’re doing on the computer, print that out, ink it traditionally because they want the

Aquaman #1, page 13, after inking by Andrew Hennessy and coloring by Gabe Eltaeb.

Aquaman, Mera © DC Comics

traditional way of working, then scan that back in. Some of the guys who are doing the strips were doing that for a while, and that way they could lay it out, put the word balloons on, print it out so the word balloon would be on the actual, physical original, and then they could ink it and then scan it back in. Most people were scanning in stuff as a bitmap. That way you had the lettering actually on the board unless, like some cartoonists do their own lettering, but it’s almost impossible to get lettering done on a board now.

BW: Yeah. If you’re lettering on the digital layout like that, you’re saving yourself the time in the inks. You know, the inker’s job increased by what, 15%, when they stopped inking around word balloons.

DRAW!: That’s true. And, actually, at one point, although they obviously have discontinued that, if you inked a page that was not lettered, you got paid more. You got paid, like, seven bucks more or something. There was a little fee that you got if you inked unlettered pages. And now, of course, now every page is unlettered.

BW: Yeah. So not only do they lose that aspect, but then they

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Layout options for the cover of Aquaman #13. Option A was the design chosen.

Aquaman, Justice League © DC Comics

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also suddenly were expected to clean up their own artwork, scan it, template it, all that, which was never to be compensated.

DRAW!: Yeah, yeah. That’s something I was talking to some students about recently, that my career, because I’m not one of the old school Silver Age/Golden Age guys—I came just at the end of that—so I was forced to transition from just taking a piece of paper and a pencil and ink and doing stuff traditionally, to now I have to have high-speed internet, I have to have a computer, I have to have Photoshop. You literally have thousands of dollars of expenses now just to get started.

BW: I kind of feel the same way even though I started several years after you. It’s probably just my own sensibilities that don’t really lean towards loving to figure out a new process, and I keep it as analog as possible. I have resisted inking myself partially because my inker will do all the scanning, cleaning, and templating, and I know if I inked myself, I would have to do that. [Mike laughs] But, yeah, I definitely feel like, at least in my heart, I lean towards the generation where you started that didn’t do any of that, and I’m resistant and hesitant to get into any of these modern processes. For me to invest in getting a Cintiq or Manga Studio, all that, that’s thousands of dollars to learn to do something that I don’t really want to have to learn anyway. At least when I got an iPad Pro, and I can tinker on it in Procreate and gradually adjust to some aspects of working digital, at least it’s on a machine that I can do other stuff with also, if that makes sense. It’s not just a whole work commitment of thousands of dollars. An iPad Pro is about a grand, and you can use it for lots of different things, so I feel a little bit more like I’m putting my toe in the water that I don’t want to swim in anyway, rather than just having to go all in, monetarily and work-wise.

nal, which is always going to have some value to it, especially in the future. I mean, if everything keeps flipping to where it’s all digital, I mean, you see the prices going up for pretty crappy ’70s-era and ’80s-era stuff—not even the top-level stuff, the prices are going up. So I figure, add 20 years onto that, and the stuff that people are making now will be worth more, especially if more and more people are not drawing their comics on paper.

BW: Yeah, that’s the part that really still surprises me that so many people are transitioning, is that that many people were

DRAW!: Right. And I guess, for me, I actually like having a physical original— BW: Yeah!

DRAW!: —because my physical original does not have to be backed up, and I can sell my physical origi-

Brad’s pencils for the cover of Aquaman #13.

Aquaman, Justice League © DC Comics

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okay to give up the original art aspect, because there’s really nothing to sell otherwise. I guess people are making good money at shows doing commissions and sketches, and I guess, in fairness, original page sales, probably because fewer people are putting them out, they are slow. But when I sell some, that’s a good chunk of money. And a job like Aquaman, for example, where the schedule was so insane that I wasn’t able to do as many issues as I had hoped to, financially I got by for a year on selling covers, and it really kind of balanced things out so that I could afford to stay on that book with its crazy schedule. The people who are working all digital, that’s a huge aspect of the business that they’re giving up, which does surprise me.

DRAW!: Yeah. A lot of people assume that, because you’re working digitally, you can work faster. But I think that’s just an illusion, because you have to interface with the computer to translate your organic process, trying to get the computer to do whatever you would do traditionally. I mean, you have key commands and all that stuff, but I’ve done some strips traditionally, and I’ve done some strips digitally, and I’m still faster traditionally. Now, maybe if I spent ten years working digitally, I would compensate and I would maybe somehow get faster, but I don’t know. It’s a personal choice, and it depends upon the job. I did this series of Star Wars books, and everything had to be inked digitally, because that way they could make a bajillion changes, and lift this out, put that in. So I think we’re lucky with comics in that it’s still at the level of it being your personal choice rather than it being the company saying, “Well, if you want to work here, this is the only way you can work.”

BW: Yeah. And I almost feel like part of my motivation to try and stretch myself a little bit was because I feel like the day will come when you will sort of be side-eyed a little bit for wanting to still work traditionally at the very least, if not they’ll out-and-out expect you to work digitally, whether it’s in comics or in a different medium that I get into. But, yeah, I agree. I feel like a lot of people have started working digitally because they like it, even if it doesn’t really seem to be benefiting them deadline-wise at all, and I can’t tell if that’s because it really is just as slow, or for every minute that they shave off the drawing that they were doing, they’ve also facilitated doing more themselves. For example, if you shave time off your penciling, well, now that you’re adept digitally, you’re able to ink and color yourself. So then you’re adding that much more time to get the completed art out. I really wonder—and I don’t know if anybody would really know for sure; it’s not like art’s something you can accurately cost yourself—but I would be interested in asking people who have transitioned recently if they really think that they saved themselves that much more time, or if they just gave themselves more to do, and how it’s worked out.

The cover of Aquaman #13—inks by Andrew Hennessy and colors by Gabe Eltaeb.

Aquaman, Justice League © DC Comics

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DRAW!: Right. I was talking to my assistant the other day about this type of thing, and I was explaining to her how comics are literally going to the printer the day, or just a few hours before it has to be shipped. It’s being sent digitally, it’s being printed, and it’s in the store, like, the next week. And what technology has done over the course of the last 30 years is it has allowed people to get later and later, and the deadline to get tighter and tighter, right down to literally they’re printing these things within hours of you giving them the pages.

The last time I worked regularly at DC on a monthly book was ’96, when we had the “hot list”. You had twelve weeks. If you fell off twelve

weeks, then you were on the hot list. The last DC job I did, the pages went in, and the next week the book was printed. It was shipping the next week.

BW: Setting aside the fact that the art is done digitally, and it’s digitally sent to the printer, if you think about, in the old days, the time that it took to physically mail the scripts. The writer would mail the scripts to editorial and they would read it, then they would mail the script to the artist, and they would mail the artist physical reference—those are several days in that process of just communicating back and forth. When you do all that through email, we’ve shaved literally days off just for the editors to communicate with the team, and all that time has been eaten up who knows where. And I don’t feel it goes to us, the pencilers.

BW: I know. How would kids today deal with such a thing as an internet café? [laughter] I’d go to 42nd Street and prepay for a card, and you’d sit there at the computers. I’d go not knowing if I’d gotten a response from photocopies that I had mailed out, and I’d log in hoping that I’d gotten a response or a letter. It was crazy.

DRAW!: So now you’re working with Procreate. I’m always interested to talk to people who, like you, have worked traditionally and are sort of phasing in the digital. When you’re actually drawing on the iPad, does that affect your way of drawing, your process as far as constructing figures? Do you find that it’s different for you, mentally or ease-wise, than drawing with a pencil like you used to?

BW: Probably—well, certainly if I had figured out how to do everything that I would do on it yet.

I still can’t figure out how to draw ruled lines, and there’s got to be some easy key. I probably need to watch some YouTube videos. Mostly I’ve just done sketching to get myself accustomed to the feel of the pencil on glass. And now I’m doing the layouts, which are very sketchy. I’m not really worried too much about beautiful figure work or anything like that at that stage anyway, so that seemed like a good place to start. I was trying to think about it last night, and I can’t tell if I’m just not really in the zone with the layouts for this issue yet, or if it’s a difference in the feeling, but I was having a little trouble getting it looking very dynamic on some of the shots. I would see it in a nicer, more dynamic angle or something in my head, and it looked very static by the time I sketched it out, so I’m having trouble figuring out if that’s the newness of being on the pad, or if I’m just not feeling myself because I’m doing Actual-size layouts for Aquaman #16, page 11. it on the pad, if that makes sense.

DRAW!: Well, no. Like you said, they’d mail you everything. Then we went to faxing. Everybody was just faxing, faxing, faxing, faxing.

And so the world moved at the speed of the fax, right? Then we went to email, which still took, I would say, probably ten years for everybody to switch over and say, “Oh, I’ve got my AOL,” or, “I’ve got my Compuserve.” Absolutely everybody has email now. I clearly remember working on books where you did not have the writer’s phone number. If you didn’t know the writer personally, and they hadn’t sent you their phone number, you had to go through the editor. And the editor often did not want to give you the other person’s phone number because they wanted to keep the control of the flow of information or whatever. And now, of course, everybody has Facebook, so it doesn’t matter. [laughs] BW: Oh, I’ve had jobs over the years, definitely, where the editor sort of likes to have everybody comAquaman © DC Comics municate through them. I’ve definitely encountered that in recent years. And sometimes you can go around it just to expedite the process or because there are miscommunications. But, yeah, if you describe to somebody under the age of 30 how this used to work, with physically mailed scripts and reference, to watch the look on their face would probably be hilarious. But, yeah, even as recently as when I broke in in 2002, 2003, I didn’t have a computer, and I would go to internet cafés to check my email to see if editors had emailed me back for samples that I sent, which is just amazing.

DRAW!: That sounds so quaint that you would go to the internet café. [laughter]

DRAW!: Well, the other thing about digital is that often you’re zoomed in on a detail, where traditionally you’re seeing it at the same size.

BW: Yeah. With layouts, I think part of the benefit is that you’re not zoomed in. You’re keeping it at a distance, and you’re keeping it small, so all that comes out is the energy.

So probably the ability to zoom in kind of undermines some of that.

DRAW!: That’s what I’m wondering, because working traditionally, whether you’re working with painting, sculpting, whatever, you’re always seeing a whole object. Your personal relationship to that object, the piece you’re creating, is always

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A detail shot from Brad’s pencils for Aquaman #16, page 11, shown here at the actual size of the drawing.

Aquaman, Mera © DC Comics

very consistent. But when you’re working digitally, you’re almost never working at 100%. You almost never have the image at the same ratio you would if you were working traditionally. So I’m just wondering if, in this part of the process, that’s affecting the way you’re drawing.

BW: That’s what it feels like, which is why—today is Friday, and by Monday, when I turn in these thumbnails, I may set the digital aside halfway through the issue and blow through the other half of the layouts physically just because I don’t have time to sit there and feel the adjustment. But, yeah, I think you’re right in that I think a lot of it could be adjusting to the size. And, you know, there are the things that I don’t have to adjust to. What’s the difference, when I sharpen my pencil, between an un-sharp pencil and a super-sharp pencil? It is so minimal compared to the range that I have with the pad. On the pad I can easily change that pencil or that ink line if I’m trying to get it a little more finished looking. There are so many more options, which means there are so many more ways to

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undermine what you’re used to doing traditionally. I have spent nearly 15 years drawing every day within very strict guidelines.

I use a 2H pencil. I don’t use mechanical pencils. I use the same smooth bristle. Everything has been very uniform. I’m aware that adaptability is not my strong suit. [laughter] DRAW!: Everybody uses pens and pencils, and there are a zillion different brands. But it’s part of finding what works for you. And everybody uses Photoshop, and there is a certain sameness on one hand because there’s a preset blend. And you can customize that stuff, but you’re right. The way you like to use a certain type of pencil, on a certain type of paper, with a certain type of surface, gives you a specific type of feedback through your hand, through the tool, whereas with the glass tablet, you can change settings, and it may look different, but the feedback is always the same.

BW: Yeah. And, really, comics are such a time-sensitive format and business. Any little thing that you do that’s screw-

Pencils for the final panel of Aquaman #16, page 11.

Aquaman, Mera © DC Comics

ing with your time is not favorable. I feel like the tolerance up the ladder in editorial for fussing around with a new process is always going to be, “Hey, that’s great, as long as you can get it in on time.” Like, “I don’t care how you do it.” A lot of times I don’t even think they care how it looks. “Just get it to me.” [laughs] So at this point, if people are still tolerating physical art, and I have a method that gets it to them physically, I think the response is always going to be, “Just do it physically, man.

Don’t screw around. Just do the job.”

They understood, “He will get it done even if it’s looking bad towards the end.” So at Marvel, it was the first time that an editor wanted to see layouts before I went to board, so I was constantly hurrying to get a couple of pages of layouts done ahead of the boards, but not fall too far behind on the boards.

I didn’t really have the luxury of laying out an entire issue at once. That was when I started moving to laying out directly on the board, just to hurry up and get some stuff to draw so I that I wasn’t getting behind on any more of the pages.

DRAW!: So now, when you take your layouts, you blow them up, you print them out, what, in non-photo blue?

BW: Uh, no, because I have an all-in-one printer/scanner, which is a big monster machine.

DRAW!: Did they want you to lay out it so they could give it to the writer so he could be scripting it while you were working on the pencils?

BW: No. This was never working plot-first. The editor wanted to see the storytelling in advance of me moving to something more permanent, as much as penciling is permanent. But he wanted to point out any suggestions that he would have on the storytelling. The downside was, there were many cases where layouts would be approved, and then they would still give notes after the penciling came in, where you kind of wanted to say, “I showed you layouts for the specific reason that I wouldn’t have to redraw that.” Or they would for changes that were things that would be solved in the pencils anyway. It was a frustrating thing.

DRAW!: Is it a Brother?

BW: It have the Epson. I’d had the Brother, and I’ve had the HP, and I like the Epson best. I’m not sure if I can feed those DC boards through there. That’s something I haven’t tinkered with enough. So I just print it out and then I trace it. My layouts are not detailed, so it takes me two minutes to trace the thing, so it’s not that big of a deal.

DRAW!: You trace it with a lightbox?

BW: Yeah. I have a LightPad, which is a lot nicer than the old lightboxes I used to use, but, yeah, I just physically trace it.

For several years I was actually laying out on the board, and I think I got to a point where I just felt comfortable enough with my layouts to do it. This was while I was at Marvel for a few years, and they wanted to see the layouts. It was always a rush. By nature, I’ll start an issue kind of slow, and then I can really speed through the end. Like, if I start an issue doing three pages a week, I can easily do seven pages a week by the end. Editors were never terribly comfortable with that, though, and I don’t say that critically. I totally get why they wouldn’t be. But my best relationships with editors were always the ones where they saw that in the first couple issues we did.

DRAW!: Yeah, that’s always trouble, because they don’t know how to read a layout. John Romita could read a layout.

Some of the older editors could read a layout. But a lot of people don’t know how to read a layout. And a layout is a layout. It’s not a breakdown, and it’s not pencils. I even have friends who are portrait painters who have that difficulty, because traditionally when you do a portrait, you do a sketch, the client approves the sketch, then you work towards the finish. But if the person cannot read the sketch…. So he started taking several photos of the person, putting them all together in Photoshop, putting a filter on it so it looked like a painting, giving that to them, and it looks enough like how it would be

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(left) Brad’s pencils for Aquaman #16, page 11, and (right) the finished page, inked by Andrew Hennessy and colored by Gabe Eltaeb.

Aquaman, Mera © DC Comics

done. It isn’t sketchy, so they can read that. But a lot of times, yeah, if you take something that is a thumbnail and you blow it up, if you don’t have the language to read it, then it’s like, “Well, I don’t know, can you move that arm or move that leg?”

And it’s like, “But it’s not that definite yet.”

BW: Yeah. There are so many times when I submit layouts, they’ll send a note back, and I’ll have to say, “Yeah, I had no intention of leaving that like this, but I just have to get something out to work from.” Which is not really a concept that an editor would understand or should understand, but we’ve wasted the time having this dialogue about this insignificant aspect that I knew in my head what I was going to do. “I had to do the preliminary to get there. You wanted to see the preliminary. I kind of expressed that it wasn’t a great idea, anyway.” And I hate that I sound like a prima donna to say it this way, but really there are parts of the process that—it’s like when I’m doing a commission for a fan or something, and they’ll ask, “Can I get a preview?” I don’t want to show preliminary stuff. I don’t want to show anything before it’s done because that’s not the point, and it’s not meant to be seen, and you’re not meant to understand it yet. And I think editors understandably have an instinct to control the process and to head off problems at the pass, but

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I also have an instinct of how to get around problems with my process, and I end up explaining that to them on a daily basis throughout the course of a project because there’s no way that they would know that, and they want to see all the stuff.

At Marvel it became a thing where time was an issue, but control was also an issue, and one was undermining the other, and I think when I went back to DC, I took away some bad habits that I had formed in laying out on the fly, both laying out one to four pages at a time rather than a whole issue, which I don’t think is a great way to work, and also laying out right on the boards. On recent projects I’ve been producing slower.

I assessed some of these problems and traced them back to that period of time when I was submitting layouts every couple days just to have the pencils, and laying out straight to boards just to save myself the time of blowing stuff up and tracing it.

There’s no justifiable reason that I need to be that much under the gun that I’m laying out on the board just to save myself ten minutes of blowing up and tracing. If it’s undermining the layouts, there’s no reason to save that amount of time. These are all things that I’ve become acutely aware of just in recent years, as I’ve been trying to speed back up and figure out where I slowed down.

DRAW!: When I was younger I always did layouts. I would lay out as many as I could in one day, then I’d pencil. I don’t believe I ever laid out a whole issue at one time. I might have on something. But I would lay out maybe seven pages at one time. Now, on the strips, I don’t do any layouts.

I just rough it out on the board, and if I don’t like it, I just erase it. I used to think that drawing layouts saved me time, and maybe when I was younger it was more of a habit or a confidence issue, but I did it again for speed’s sake on that DC thing I did with the Justice League International, because I can do the roughs, blow them up, and just plop it on a lightboard, and actually do my finished pencil from there on the lightboard. It goes faster. It’s harder on the eyes, though, working on a lightbox all day.

BW: Yeah. That’s why I don’t do the layouts very tight, because then there would be no reason to not go ahead and draw it on a lightbox, and I don’t want to stare at the light that long. But I do find, and it could just be a personal thing—you were saying you’d never laid out a whole issue in advance of drawing it—I find for me it helps me a lot mentally to know where the whole thing is going when I sit down with pencils. When I just lay out a few pages at a time, there’s always an empty page in my future, but if I lay the whole issue out first, for one thing, by the end of the layouts, I’m really cranking them out and feeling good about them. And then I switch and I transition to drawing pages, and I only have to get back into that page groove once, at the beginning of the issue, rather than every couple days, and not switching back and forth to layouts. But I find it really helpful that I can at least look at the framework. I know what’s ahead of me in days to come, and it eliminates some of the panic that I can get from drawing to deadline because I know exactly what I have in store. And you can also bounce around easier that way, because you can do harder pages up front, or easier pages up front just so you have something in the can. Again, it could be completely personal, and other people might not benefit from doing it the way I do, but I’ve definitely figured out recently that it’s best for me to go ahead and get the whole thing laid out.

DRAW!: Yeah, some people like to lay the whole thing out. I think, for them, it feels like it’s much better to know exactly what you have to do. Usually, with the strips, I’ll lay out three dailies at once. For that last DC digital job I did, I was doing three or four pages at one time, just because everything is so broken up, you don’t even sometimes get the full script now.

BW: Yeah. [laughs] Getting a few pages of a script at a time is another modern way of working that I’m assuming didn’t happen back in the day when you couldn’t email the scripts around.

DRAW!: No, I mean, there are a lot of things have changed in my time from being a monthly guy to coming back. One was that you always got the whole script, or you always got the whole plot. It was always proofread.

Now it seems like you can get five pages of this, three pages of that. I’ve talked to a lot of people, and it seems likes it’s routine now to only get part of the script.

BW: Yeah, they’ve been getting better about it. I think enough artists expressed to them how difficult it was. I would always impart to editors how much more difficult that made everything, and that it’s really hard for me to get through five pages when I don’t know what’s coming after them.

It’s almost like not knowing where the story goes makes it impossible to move through those five. I had this conversation with some editors, and the funny thing is how difficult it was to get them around to seeing why that is.

And I’m not sure exactly why that is, but every artist that I talk to says it’s so difficult, and you would think that they would get the idea. “You know, all

(top) Brad’s layout for Aquaman #16, page 13, shown at actual drawn size. (above) The finished page of Aquaman #16, page 13, inked by Andrew Hennessy and colored by Gabe Eltaeb.

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Pencils for panel 1 of Aquaman #16, page 13.

Aquaman, Mera © DC Comics

the artists tell me that, so it must be,” rather than going, “Can’t you just finish the five and then that’ll give us the ammunition to get five more from the writer?” You know, it was always a thing where I was helping them coax more script pages out of the writer. [laughs] And I was on the other end going, “Just send pages from the writer that I can draw.”

DRAW!: Right. Are you still under contract to DC? BW: Yeah. I was under a two-year contract, and I’m working on a Demon six-issue series now, so as of right now, I’m just contracted for these six issues, and I think we’ll see how it works out after that. They seem happy with the six so far, and I’m hitting the deadlines, which they were concerned about after Aquaman. But again, Aquaman was a thing where there was no extra time in that schedule from when those books were monthly to when they went bimonthly. I mean, they started with the same amount of time in advance, but they were shipping twice as many issues, and I was never able to get into any sort of a groove working on those Rebirth books, because you would draw one, and then everybody was already in a panic that three more needed to be in the can. Then you were getting moved ahead five issues, four issues, whatever it was. The people who were working on those books consistently were the guys who were doing full issues in three weeks, which was just never going to be me. So it was really hard, and it made the issues that I was drawing harder. And, again, that’s another difficult thing to articulate to somebody who’s not doing it, so to editorial. It’s hard to articulate why this is so much more difficult, but I could never get comfortable with the characters or the rhythms of the script, because you’re always moving forward. So that was a really difficult experience, but I feel I didn’t fault editorial for that. I really like all the people at DC, and they’re really good to me even when they shouldn’t necessarily be, when I know that I’m frustrating them. They’re

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really good to me. I wasn’t itching to get out of there, by any means. I just wanted a project that had some more reasonable circumstances where I could prove to them that, when the circumstances are favorable, I can do this. [laughs] And it seems like people are happy with the results on this Demon book, which was all written in advance, which is so novel these days.

In the old days, like we were talking about, you would get all six, and you could discuss it with the editor or the writer. If there was something that was going to be changed, it would be because all of you talked about it being changed, not because somebody in upper editorial knew of something else that was going to be done down the line that was going to conflict with it.

DRAW!: That’s very different. Would you say that you’re changing any other practices that you did from, let’s say, Aquaman, or pre-Aquaman, to what you’re doing now?

BW: Aside from the digital layout, and the fact that I can draw entire issues at once, the only things I’m doing are stylistic things that I feel like the script warrants, tonal things that I’m trying to exercise different influences with—things that seem fun to try with the material that wouldn’t have been right on Aquaman. I tend to go into a project with different influences that I want to draw on, probably things that are imperceptible to anybody but me. When I went into Aquaman, I wanted it to be very open and very optimistic and bright, and that sort of seemed to mesh with the thrust of Rebirth, so I wanted very open line. I talked to the colorist about having it be very traditional, bright, literal coloring. And then Demon kind of has an ’80s/’90s Vertigo feel to the story, so I wanted to sort of flex some of those muscles and show my appreciation for that kind of stuff. And that’s also stuff that I don’t think people see in my work, or expect from me, so that was kind of a fun thing.

At the end of the day, though, I think your hand dictates the

finished product as much as your brain. A lot of that stuff probably gets lost or doesn’t translate, and ends up looking like an amalgam of those things and just what you do anyway. So I don’t know how much of those things will be seen on the page, or how much will translate through the inker, colorist, etc. But it’s an interesting way to go, and it keeps me interested.

DRAW!: Before each project, do you spend time drawing and sketching to work up those ideas that get that feel down that you’re going for?

BW: Yeah, a little bit. I talk it out. I talk to my inker about how I’d like to approach things. I sketch out characters as much as I can. The thing about storytelling, like I was saying, the Demon book has a Vertigo feel to it, to me. A lot of my influence that I’m playing on with that is layoutwise, storytelling type of things. I’m trying to be a little bit less overtly superhero, kind of [John] Buscema in a way. It’s ironic that I’m trying to be slightly less Kirby on a Kirby character, but I’m trying to give it a little bit more mood as opposed to overt superhero, punch-in-the-face kind of excitement. But, again, my sensibilities are what my sensibilities are, and I think they’d be that way anyway.

But to answer your question, some of that stuff isn’t stuff that you can really sketch out. I wasn’t going to sketch out different types of page designs or layouts ahead of time, but I just try to keep that stuff in mind as I go, and then my sensibilities, my instincts, also factor in there, so it’s far from staticlooking or completely Vertigo. It’s got a lot of very powerful, superheroey type design work to it, too.

DRAW!: Do you think about, say, more blacks, less blacks?

BW: Yeah, certainly. And certainly in contrast to (top) Brad’s pencils for Aquaman #16, page 13. something like Aquaman, where I really wanted Aquaman, Mera © DC Comics to do a completely open line, and only spot blacks like a local color, like a value, rather than doing shadow. With he does best, and he loves laying down blacks, so I ended up Demon, I’m going ahead and laying it on. With Aquaman, laying down more black than I originally had in my head just you know, superhero comics are always going to be work- because it suits his work well. And the colorist brings in their for-hire stuff. It’s always going to be done by a committee, sensibilities. So, you know, everything kind of factors in. So and I went in with that idea of approaching Aquaman like an it’s difficult on a work-for-hire job, I think, to ever really stick underwater fantasy comic—a very [Mike] Kaluta, Alex-Ray- to a very rigid vision of what you want to do going in because mond, Al Williamson sort of sci-fi comic, but underwater. I you’re working with a lot of people, and it’s valid for them wanted it to be very open and bright. DC had a very strong to bring what they want to, and do what they want to do best. feeling based on the last run that had sold really well, which There are some books where things are captured more like you was Geoff Johns and Ivan Reis’ run; they wanted to sort of see them in your head, and other books where it doesn’t come capture that, which was a very dark sci-fi, almost like a horror out as much like you saw it, and Aquaman was probably one comic, which is very much the opposite of what I wanted to where it didn’t come out as much compared to something like do. So we were both sort of pushing and pulling in the differ- the Lantern stuff that I did. Every job comes with its own frusent directions, and probably ended up meeting somewhere in trations, but visually, I think the Lantern stuff came out closer the middle. And there’s also the element of my inker, and what to what I saw in my head.

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DRAW!: Would you say the lyrical aspect of your pacing is different on the Demon than what you were doing to Aquaman?

BW: Yeah, definitely. I mean, some of that I think, writer to writer, will change, and I think you sort of fall into different rhythms with different scripts. But just visually, Aquaman definitely felt like there were eyes on it, whether it was because it was part of this big Rebirth push, whether it was because we started it at the beginnings of rumblings about a movie, whether it was because that Johns/Reis run had been very popular and then the book had sort of fallen with a couple runs that were less popular and not as well-received… The run right before I came on, my friend Cullen Bunn, who I worked with on Sinestro, had been writing it, and the fans were just completely brutal to him right from the start, to the point where he just said “screw it” and he left the book. Aquaman fans, I learned over the course of being on this book, are some of the most finicky—that’s probably the nicest way I can put it [Mike laughs]—fans out there. They were generally pretty kind to me, but I would get a lot of almost smugly threatening tweets and stuff.

DRAW!: Yeah, I follow all that stuff you see on the internet about the Mary Sue, and people threatening to attack a writer or an artist because they don’t like the type of work that they’re producing. There’s a weird sense of fan entitlement that’s really grown in the last 15 years, along

(above) Layout for Aquaman #16, page 14, shown at actual drawn size. (right) Pencils for Aquaman #16, page 14.

Aquaman, Mera © DC Comics

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with the internet, where they feel like they are the ones, even though they never actually created anything, they have the true love that “even you, Brad Walker, creator, practitioner, you don’t not have the pure love and the heart that I have. Signed, Troll Lord VII.” BW: But it was oddly specific. Like I said, they were strangely nice to me, but it was oddly specific with Aquaman. First of all, they seemed sort of emboldened by the fact that they had harassed Cullen to the point where he walked off that book shortly before we started, so I was getting a lot of tweets like, “You know, we can make it really difficult for you if…” It was always minutiae. It wasn’t even like, “You’ve ruined who Aquaman is.” It was like, “If you don’t draw the ‘M’ shape on Mera’s crown, we can make your life very difficult. Ha ha ha ha.” [laughs] And that’s me paraphrasing, but it was really small things like that. “I like so-and-so’s hair drawn this way,” or, “If you make the A belt buckle too big, we’re going to give

you a mouthful about it.” [Mike laughs] It was just really, really weird and specific. But I think the fact that our run was pretty straightforward coming off of a run that was sort of a departure gave me a little bit of leeway. And as much as I could tolerate, I tried to communicate with them. I feel like you give yourself a lot more room to breathe if you just go ahead and respond.

I think the creators who freeze these fans out for their own sanity probably get more abuse than if you just respond and go, “Sorry, I took this crown of Mera’s from this artist. A lot of people said that they liked that one better.”

That’s the other thing is, a fan never realizes that, however staunchly they feel they know the one best way that something is presented, there’s another fan that likes this other run that really thinks that that’s the only way it should be. There are Aquaman fans who swear by the Peter David era, who always want him to be shirtless with a beard and a hook hand, and there are Aquaman fans who really just want a Nick Cardy-esque romance comic, and then there are other fans who really just want Geoff and Ivan back on that book, and, barring that, they just want you to hew as closely to everything that they did, aesthetically, as possible. And there’s no convincing one person that there are just as strong opinions in any other direction. [laughs] DRAW!: There’s a positive aspect to fandom and being able to communicate with people, but there’s also a negative aspect because people feel that they can be very rude to you in a way that they would never be if they were standing in front of you. Some people just like to go into the middle of a room and fart. They like to go pop the balloon. They like to tell the kid there’s no Santa Claus. There’s a fair amount of people who are like that, and, because of the internet, they can write you a letter.

BW: Yeah, I think a lot of the problem with it comes from the fact that we let the median age of the audience grow, because now I feel like none of us are working on anybody’s favorite run on the comic. We’re all drawing a comic to hopefully remind someone of their favorite run. Because everybody’s favorite run of something was when they discovered it when they were a child and it meant something to them, and now we’re all just sort of doing nostalgia-bait fan-fic, in a sense, because the audience is reading it because they loved it when they were a kid, not because they love it now, and they just want you to make something that makes them feel like a kid again. It’s such a losing proposition.

DRAW!: Let’s talk a little bit about how you came into the business, your schooling, your training.

BW: I went to Savannah College of Art and Design, and I majored in sequential art. It was a really good program. I don’t know what it’s like now, but at the time, it was legitimately a really good program, but even if it had been kind of garbage, the most beneficial thing about it was that it was a way that I could go to school and get a college diploma and also draw that much, and draw pages that much, to sort of teach myself how to tell stories.

Luckily it was also a really good program, and I became good friends with several professors who either left the school to teach elsewhere, or to work in comics. I really took a lot out of it. While I was in high school, I would go to San Diego and show a portfolio and stuff like that. But after college, I moved to New York, and while I was here, one of my old professors from SCAD was going to bring up his current class of grads, and they were going to go to Walt Simonson’s house, and then into DC and show their portfolios.

I got in touch with him because I was already going to be in town, and I just was getting in touch to say, “Hey, I heard you’re going to be in town. It’d be great to see you.” And he said, “Yeah, we’re going to go to DC this day. Why don’t you come along?” I glommed onto the class trip, and I showed them

(top) Heavy is the head that draws the crown. Look, Aquafans! Mera has the “M” in her crown! (above) The finished page of Aquaman #16, page 14, inked by Andrew Hennessy and colored by Gabe Eltaeb.

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my portfolio, and I met the guys who were then the Batman group, and they liked the stuff that I showed them, and I kind of stayed in touch with them.

DRAW!: What year was this?

BW: This would have been 2002. It was back when DC groups were all much more defined and separated by editorial. I think there’s a lot of crisscrossing and overlapping now.

But when I went in to see them, they were like, “Yeah, start sending stuff in.” I said, “I mailed you photocopies once, and you sent me a reply,” and, of course, they had a big slush pile, no telling how much stuff it was under, so they said, “Bring your stuff in person next time.” That went on for about a year.

Sometime in 2003 I took something in, and I’d kind of gotten used to not getting my hopes up when I would take stuff in. I would just hang out for a minute, or they’d take me out to lunch. I just sort of expected another, “Yeah, great job.

Keep trying. Here’s another sample script.” But finally, in 2003, at some point one of them gave me a Detective back-up. And then I was pretty consistent ever since then.

DRAW!: Now, were you at the Savannah campus or the Atlanta campus?

BW: I was at Savannah. They did not have Atlanta up yet, I think. This would have been ’95 to ’99. SVA actually had a campus in Savannah. They were trying to sort of horn in on SCAD’s territory at the time, but SCAD kind of ran them out of town while I was in Savannah. At the time I think it was the only specifically sequential art major. SVA, their major is technically cartooning, I believe? There was some sort of major that was similar at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. And then I want to say there was a school in Detroit, but I can’t remember. I applied to all four of those, and I wanted to go to one in New York because I wanted to live in New York, but I think SCAD just offered me the best scholarship, so I ended up going there.

DRAW!: Where were you living before you went to SCAD? BW: I was outside of L.A. My father was Air Force, so we moved around like crazy. But for, I think, five years before college, I was outside of L.A. That was how I started going to San Diego. I got a healthy start on showing a portfolio and what that was like. [laughs] I mean, DRAW!: Back when they had back-ups. [laughs] that would be before I even got to SCAD and got to where my portfoBW: Yeah. [laughs] I think I was lio was a bit more professional and aware as a reader at the time, that serious. Even during high school, I the back-ups were a great way for would go down to San Diego, and them to try out talent. This was take this stack of pages and get in right when they started doing them line. Back then it was pretty easy for that stretch of time, and I think to get your portfolio reviewed. You that they’d announced that they didn’t have to win any kind of lotwere going to be under the banner tery or sign up somewhere. You of “a detective story,” not necescould just stand in line while the sarily a Batman story. So I was sort editor was sitting in the booth, and of expecting a grisly, noir type of Actual-size layouts for Aquaman #16, page 15. you could get a pretty beneficial detective story, and then it actually Aquaman © DC Comics portfolio review. So even before I did have Batman and Green Arrow, and I remember calling a buddy of mine in California who was got to SCAD, I got sort of a sense of like, show them your a comic fan and losing my mind when I got the script, that it stuff, shut up, don’t explain why you did something, just nod your head and let them get in feedback. Don’t get too discourwas actually the first thing that I got to draw. [laughter] aged. Take away from it what you will. Take it all in, but don’t take it too much to heart at the same time. There’s quite an art, DRAW!: Who were some of your teachers at SCAD? BW: Durwin Talon, James Sturm, Bob Pendarvis. Patrick I feel, to giving a portfolio review, and to getting one.

Welch is a guy who has passed away now, but he was one of my early professors who I really loved. This was probably less DRAW!: Right, right. And it also depends upon who’s giving than ten years after they started that major, but they were all it. I mean, if Joe Kubert’s giving it, it’s pretty awesome, but really great people, really great artists, all very different per- there are other people who don’t really quite have the lanspectives. I took a lot out of it. I’m still paying off that school- guage. So I always gravitated towards artists, even people we ing, but I did feel like I got a lot out of it, and it was because I weren’t necessarily my favorites, but who I would see at, like, ended up getting the job through a direct contact with one of a show in Detroit. I saw a couple people, I would never say those professors, I feel like it’s pretty hard for me to deny how that they were my favorite artists or anything, but they were working for Marvel and I wasn’t, so I’m going to show them beneficial it was in my career.

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Actual-size pencils for panel 1 of Aquaman #16, page 15.

Aquaman © DC Comics

my stuff. Now there’s so much online, just a wealth of material, even compared to when you were in school.

BW: I never got a lot of reviews from other artists, which maybe was a bad move on my part, because I do think there’s a lot that you can learn, but it was either an editor or it was a professor at SCAD, somebody gave me the advice, “You can talk to an artist about your work, but ultimately they’re only giving you an opinion, which could be right, could be wrong.

Only an editor can give you a job. An editor’s the only one that’s going to tell you what they want to see, and that can do something for you based on your response to that. So they were like, “Don’t waste too much of your time.”

DRAW!: I suppose that’s true. I mean, if Dick Giordano looks at your stuff, it’s different, you know what I mean?

BW: Sure, yeah. And let me just say, this is just at the tail-end of that era, where somebody like Giordano was an artist and an editor, and the late ’90s, early 2000s, was around the time they were kind of like weeding that type of thing out. When Quesada came on at Marvel, I remember him making a big statement that they weren’t going to have any more writers editing comics, and they weren’t going to have any more editors writing their comics, as if he felt that was sort of a conflict of interest. Whatever his leaning on that was, there was less of that, and you did see a lot more editors coming in at that point who got hired as editors and were not writing comics. I can’t think of any editor in the past 15 years who comes from a drawing background.

DRAW!: No, not really. Now, you were from L.A. You didn’t think about going to Cal Arts or Art Center, or try to get work being an assistant to somebody out there?

BW: I looked at Cal Arts. For one thing, I never liked California. I never liked L.A. I moved there when I was probably 13 or so, and it just never really was my thing. Cal Arts seemed,

because it was so Disney-affiliated, very animation-oriented, and at that point I was really specific about wanting to be in comic books. And SCAD was very specific about it being a comic book background, and some storyboarding, but specifically comic books, and that really spoke to me. And, also, just getting on the East Coast. It was a feeling… Like I said, I never liked California. I never really felt like it was me. I wanted to get to one of the schools in New York because I wanted to live in New York, but it just didn’t work out. I wanted to go to the SVA, and I applied to SVA, and I applied for a scholarship. I immediately got offered a scholarship at SCAD. SVA, I kept calling them to follow up, and they had lost my application.

And they were telling me over the phone that they lost my application. And I kept calling, kept calling. Then finally I got this woman on the phone and she said, “Oh, yeah. We found your application. It’s right here.” And I said, “That’s great.

What about the scholarship?” And she said, “Oh, the deadline for that is long past.” [laughter] They had lost my application and not found it until after the deadline for the scholarship had passed. I had gotten offered the scholarship at SCAD, so that was that. [laughs] DRAW!: So if you could have, you would have gone to SVA and studied with Walt [Simonson] and Klaus [Janson] and people like that.

BW: Yeah, I mean, looking at it now, I know so many—Phil Jimenez is a friend of mine, and Klaus, who I sat with and talked about art with at a DC workshop. It’s crazy thinking about the professional caliber of people that they have at SVA. I don’t even think I knew that when I wanted to go. I just knew it was a very reputable school and it was in New York, and I wanted to be there. [laughs] It all worked out.

DRAW!: It was also probably a lot more expensive than SCAD, I imagine, just living in New York.

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BW: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think the schools [tuitions] were comparable. I’m sure it was more expensive living in New York [than Savannah], but living in New York in the mid-’90s versus now… I don’t know that it would have been drastically different.

DRAW!: You did the four years at SCAD, and then you moved to New York. Or you were just visiting?

BW: After SCAD I was dating a girl from back home, and I moved back home to California for a year-and-a-half, I think.

I didn’t like being there, that relationship was going sour, and I had friends from SCAD who had moved to New York right after college, so when the relationship with that girl ended, I

just sort of took it as an opportunity to get out and go to New York, and I just kind of left everything. I graduated SCAD in ’99. This was late 2001. I went to New York with a suitcase and, like, $800 dollars to my name. I slept on a friend’s couch, and he was putting me up while I worked temp jobs and drew as much as I could. I tried to turn out as many samples as I could, and I worked at a temp agency. I went into the temp agency and I told them I would take any kind of job, “Give me the money you can give me.” I had no experience in doing anything except an art school background, which does no good at a temp agency. I was like, “I don’t want to work more than four days a week,” because I was trying to devote at least three or four days a week to drawing.

It was a fascinating time in my life because I had just moved to New York, I would work a different job every day in a different building in Manhattan, which was kind of a weird, interesting experience to just go in some different place and see what they do there, meet different people, and I would just try to draw as much as I could. I barely made enough money to get by, but I kind of did that by design because I didn’t want to get comfortable enough that I stopped focusing on drawing, on breaking in. And it was very hectic and stressful at the time, and kind of depressing, but when I look back on it, it was one of the best times of my life.

DRAW!: Would you go get a sample script and then take it back? You would go back and forth?

BW: Yeah. I guess I had samples first, because editors had come down to SCAD. I had met a handful of editors there because SCAD would have these Editor Days. I guess they have Marvel people come down there now, but DC editors would go down there some, and Randy Stradley from Dark Horse, a couple of others. You’d be able to get an editor’s contact info and they would, again, physically mail you a sample script. I was starting to get less form-letter-y responses by the time I went to New York.

Brad’s pencils for Aquaman #16, page 15.

Aquaman © DC Comics

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DRAW!: Because they knew you by then.

They knew who you were.

BW: I don’t know. I mean, I doubt that they really remembered much. I think they would get samples in the mail and be like, “I may have seen this kid.” It couldn’t have been much more than that level of recognition.

The samples were enough that they’d pause, at least, and they would send me— do you remember Dan Raspler at DC?

(above) Actual-size detail of the pencils for the final panel of Aquaman #16, page 15. (right) The finished page, inked by Andrew Hennessy and colored

by Gabe Eltaeb.

Aquaman © DC Comics

DRAW!: Yep! BW: He was notoriously brutal towards artists. He was not there anymore, I think, by the time I started working, but when I was a freshman in college, I did some Spider-Man sample pages that were just sort of like a redrawing of the origin—pretty strict to what would have been Stan’s plot, maybe decompressed a little bit. But everybody in freshman year at SCAD was like, “Oh, man, these are so cool! These are so great!” And I remember taking them to San Diego that summer, and I got a review from Dan Raspler, and he was just brutal. Like, “Why did you do this? I’ve never seen a building like this. This is not a building. You know that’s not a building. Don’t ever do that again.” Just really, really brutal to that 18-year-old kid. [Mike laughs] And I remember I was silently crushed, and I held onto that. He must have left DC shortly before I got hired, because I remember sending in some samples after I got to New York, and I got a letter back from him that was not a form letter, and I sort of took that as my vindication. Even though he was gone and I never worked for him, and he never offered me work, he did send me another sample script and was like, “These pages show promise. Do this and send it back. We’d like to see more.” So I was vindicated for my ugliest formal review. [laughs] DRAW!: Well, I think sometimes some editors’ modus operandi is, “We will push their ladder off the wall, pour the hot, boiling oil down on them, and then shoot them in the heart with a couple of arrows, and if they come back, well, maybe that increases their chances slightly.”

BW: Yeah. See if they can take it.

DRAW!: Yeah. What’s interesting, though, is that you were still in the era where you could actually talk to a human being.

In my first time up at Marvel, I went with Bret Blevins. Bret gave me everybody’s phone number. I called, made an appointment with every single Marvel editor. They all answered their phone. [laughter] I went in with Bret, took my samples, and every single editor, every one, took time and went over my work. You can’t even imagine that happening now. Well, first of all, you couldn’t even get everybody on the phone, because nobody uses a phone. You have to use email now.

BW: And the climate in those companies shifts all the time.

A lot of upper DC editorial now, since Bob Harras has gone over there, a lot of the people at DC now are, like, mid-’90s, early-’90s Marvel editorial, so current DC is more like what Marvel editorial used to be, and Marvel editorial is a completely different thing, now. I mean, as recently as when I worked at Marvel in 2008 to 2011, maybe, I would go in there while I was currently working for them, and most people wouldn’t even look up from their desks. [laughs] It didn’t seem like a fun environment there, much less taking time to walk around with some kid with samples.

DRAW!: Yeah, I haven’t been to Marvel since the mid-’90s. I think Tom Brevoort was my last regular Marvel editor.

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(above) Layout for Aquaman #16, page 17, shown at actual drawn size. (right) Pencils for Aquaman #16, page 17.

Aquaman © DC Comics

BW: I think he’s the only guy left there from prebankruptcy.

DRAW!: Right. And now, of course, if we were coming along, there are so many other venues for you to do your comics now. Who knows? You might not even end up at Marvel. You might end up being successful doing your own thing on your own as a web comic or something.

BW: Yeah, you were saying the guys at Marvel would answer their phones, and I feel like now there are probably so many people working that have only ever had a digital relationship with the editors they’re working for. I don’t think that I’ve ever directly heard a story of it, but I feel pretty confident that there are a lot of people working in comics who got noticed on Instagram, probably got DMed on social media, and got a job somehow that way. It’s such a completely different climate.

DRAW!: I know people working in animation, that’s exactly how they got hired. They got hired by putting their stuff on social media, getting eyeballs on it, and they ended up getting work from it. And the other difference is, because just about every single artist, writer, has some form of social media, you can interact with them in a way that was not even possible in 2000. So you’re staying with DC, I take it, for the foreseeable future? Are you going project to project?

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BW: Yeah, I mean, I guess that’s always probably the wisest way to look at it. I wouldn’t ever swear allegiance to any one company. If things stop going well, you don’t want to be stuck there. The difficulty with my last contract was I was contracted for a period of time, and I was on a book like Aquaman where it was coming out so much that I was rotating in with other artists, so, contractually, if I didn’t have anything to do, if I hadn’t reached out to them and said, “Hey, I’m waiting on an Aquaman script but I really need something to do,” they would give me something. And they were very upfront about that and were great about it. The difficulty that I was left with was, this other artist had already been given a three-issue arc, so it was going to be at least a month before I can get a script. Do I take a fill-in and then I’m that much less visible, possibly missing my window that I have a slot back in on Aquaman? Then I’m just doing fill-ins, hopping around DC, and undermining the book that associated with, because then Aquaman is getting

a less consistent art presence. Or do I sort of take a hit for the book and just wait it out for the next Aquaman? So it kind of put me in a difficult position, and that was something that I talked to them about going into this contract, and why we sort of decided, all right, well, we’ll contract you for a project, and we’ll come up with a project that we both feel good about, that everybody feels good about, and look at it that way. So that was the part that really helped me feel comfortable going into a contract because I knew what the book was, I knew that it was all there, I knew I would do all six in a row, and I didn’t feel like I was going to be faced with that dilemma of, “Do I just take something to have something to work on, or do I suffer for the good of my series?”

because he didn’t do a big enough body of work that was consistent. He jumped around a lot. Long-term, for your legacy as an artist, either you’ve got to have several long, well-thoughtof runs on the various books at Marvel and DC, or you have to be like Mike and create something like Hellboy, and that’s your thing that people can clearly associate you with. I think if you jump around, you never gain enough headwind for people to really pay attention to your stuff.

BW: Yeah, although I do think it’s changed a little bit because everybody is jumping around now. I feel like most people’s career trajectories now are more reminiscent of Toth’s than they are of, say, Mark Bagley’s. There are so few people draw-

DRAW!: Right. If you’re suffering for the good of your series, and it’s a series that you own, like Mike [Mignola] owns Hellboy, that’s one thing. I think to suffer for something that you don’t own, that’s not something you can always really justify or qualify, because things are always in flux.

BW: Yeah. I ended up opting that away to get more time on Aquaman, and it probably wasn’t the best decision, but I don’t know that the decision to just take whatever fill-in was available would have been a great move for me, either. I mean, I guess option C where I just leave that book and try to find something else because that book just didn’t have the type of schedule that could accommodate me and they had other guys who were super-fast who could make that book happen, that probably would have been the best thing for me, but I don’t know how DC would have thought about that. So it was nice that they were willing to sit there and, after not being thrilled with my output on that book, they Close-up panel of Officer Erika Watson from Aquaman #17. still were good enough to me that they sat there and Aquaman © DC Comics talked to me about my frustrations on my end of it, which—you work in comics—very few people care about ing now who can do twelve issues a year and stay on a title that what your problem with the job was, and these were people the companies have even sort of—Marvel will move an artist who were willing to talk to me, so that was definitely very off of a title every six issues whether the artist wants to leave or not. They have a new project they want to move them over encouraging. [laughs] to. So I don’t think that Toth would have taken the hit in terms DRAW!: Fans have no idea how the sausage is made. All of fame or popularity if he was in the business now than he they know is, like, they either like the sausage, or, “Boy, this probably did then because it’s such a more accepted thing. The sausage isn’t as good as the last one that I had.” And they have production speed and the time that it takes for the art to look no idea of all the stuff that’s going on that causes things to be the way that it’s expected to look now just doesn’t line up the that way. Also, I read and see a lot of younger guys complain- way it used to, where there are so few people who can churn it ing about things that are very alien to me from the standpoint out like Mark Bagley or John Romita Jr. There are a handful of that, when I was doing a monthly book, say, for [Mike] Carlin, current guys who can put out twelve issues or more a year. My Mike would look at every issue. He’d call and go over stuff. inker, Andrew Hennessy, also inks Mark Bagley most of the You knew that he saw it. He was like a real old-school editor, time, and [laughs] I’ll text him and I’ll be like, “Hey, sorry I which was great. Now you work with people, you send the haven’t gotten these pages done yet. I’m going to get them out stuff, and you never hear anything. You send your work into this week.” And he’ll text back and say, “Look, don’t worry the void. about it. I’ve got Bagley’s stuff. There’s always Bagley stuff.”

Also, there are certain artists you can look at—[Alex] Toth [laughter] You know, he sounds so harrowed because Mark is a great example. Every artist knows him, but no fan really can turn out eight pages a week like nothing. It helps that I’m a knows him unless they’re deep into the fandom of comics, little slower; it helps him balance out his two gigs, you know?

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DRAW!: Wow. The last time I did comics regularly, you had to do at least one-and-a-half, two pages a day minimum— sometimes three, depending upon where you were in the schedule. I usually penciled one book and inked one book, and sometimes I’d pencil one book and ink two books.

BW: It sounds brutal.

DRAW!: Those types of artists existed because the environment demanded that they needed to exist. “We need somebody who can sit down and do 22 pages a month.” And, like you said, nobody does 25 issues in a row on anything now. I think I did 27 issues in a row of Alpha Flight just as an inker. That’s really pretty rare now.

BW: Yeah, just unheard of.

DRAW!: But you could do 27 issues in a row of something you owned. Do you ever think about doing your own thing?

BW: Yeah, certainly. [sighs] My difficulty is obviously exacerbated by living in New York, and this is an expensive place to live. A writer can still do two or three work-for-hire books and make a paycheck and take a reasonable amount of time

(above) Page 17 of Aquaman #16, inked by Andrew Hennessy and colored by Gabe Eltaeb.

Aquaman © DC Comics

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and work up a pitch for a creator-owned book, or even do a couple scripts, and they can still make ends meet. For an artist, you have to either figure out how to work for a while without making much money in order to draw an entire creator-owned book to be able to sell to a publisher, or you have to find a publisher who’s willing to give you an advance and work you on a page rate that’ll come off of your back-end, and then they would have to feel confident it will sell enough copies that they can justify paying you in advance. There’s no way that I could work on pages for a creator-owned book while I was working on something for DC. There’s just no way. I barely have time to work in a couple extra covers or a commission every now and then. So the logistics of getting into creatorowned are what I get hung up on and demolish every word out of my head. If I worked on something that sold so well for Marvel or DC that I was making really great royalties which I could supplement with some commissions, or some original art sales, or some conventions, and live off of that while I put together a creator-owned book, that would be one avenue which I haven’t really gotten to yet. I’ve been on a handful of series but none of them have been a huge seller. Or you’ve got to be popular enough that a company like Image is willing to bank on you and give you an advance. It’s tricky as an artist just because of the amount of time that art takes. I haven’t really figured out how to work that out yet.

And then if you work with a writer who is a friend of yours, oftentimes they come to you with the idea, and it’s what they want to work on [rather than something you came up with together], so it’s not any more personal for you as an artist than something you would be working on for one of the Big Two. Then I’m left with the dilemma of, “Do I want to draw somebody else’s idea?” Yes, I would get some financial ownership in it, but it’s still not really any more of an artistic expression for me than the work-for-hire stuff. “Or do I really want to bite the bullet and put together a story of my own and start writing my own stuff?” So there are all sort of avenues to consider.

DRAW!: So you keep thinking about that as you move along from project to project, that maybe eventually something will pop into place?

BW: Yeah, but you could spin pondering these two questions for an indefinite amount of time. I feel like at some point it’s going to be a case of me biting the bullet and just saying, “Look, if I don’t try to branch out and do something that’s mine now, then I’m never going to do it. I think at some point, the time is going to have to come when I just find a way to do it, whether that’s leaving New York—which would suck, because I love living here—and living somewhere cheaper just to facilitate me taking some risks, career-wise, or if that’s working with a writer on their idea just to forge a relationship with a company. Again, there are lots of different ways to consider, and I don’t really know how that’s going to be, yet. But I just turned forty. I’m sort of moving more in the direction of taking fewer chances instead of the opposite, you know? [laughs] So I feel like I’m going to have to take chances sooner rather than put it off until I get comfortable.

TIPS for the YOUNG & the YOUNG at ART

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elcome to Comic Art Bootcamp. This time, instead of just Bret and myself giving forth on a particular subject as in past articles, I thought we’d try something different and turn the mic over to a big group of artists I know to get a broader selection of answers to the question: What advice would you give to the student or young artist working on their craft?

As you will find out in reading the following answers, there is a wealth of great information from this large and varied group of long-time professionals, who between them have tackled just about every problem an artist can have cross their drawing tables and imaginations.

PATRICK OLLIFFE Always paying attention to the basics of your craft is a no brainer, anatomy, perspective, page and panel layout and design, storytelling choices, that's all important, but the difference maker is training yourself to sit down in the studio and do the work, even if you're not "into it" on that day. Set schedules and reduce distractions. A career is a marathon not a sprint. Once you decide to do this professionally you have left your hobby days behind you.

MIKE DECARLO Construct, construct, construct! And visualize the scene as solidly in your mind as possible before beginning.

Mighty Samson #1, page 22, penciled and inked by Pat Olliffe.

Mighty Samson © Random House, Inc.

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Bret Blevins’ rough layout and finished pencils from Harley Quinn #18.

Batman, Harley Quinn, Joker © DC Comics

BRET BLEVINS

The difficulty in offering a general bit of good advice is the possibility that the recipient has completely different goals or taste, and the variety of successful art styles seen everywhere make a one-size-fits-all tip elusive. But I think it’s safe to assume that each artist reading this wants their work to be understood, not confusing or unintelligible. Clarity can only be an asset in any entertainment field, because commercial art exists to communicate. So my tip is this: BE CLEAR Clarity in artwork is harder to achieve than it would seem.

There are so many elements to consider, understand, and master before they can be consistently applied with confidence.

It’s so tempting to dive right into a piece when your enthusiasm is hot and the idea is fresh, but the discipline to plan at the conception stage pays great dividends. My advice is to put serious thinking time in before beginning to draw. Make sure you know what it is you want to show/express. Every storytelling image has a point, whether it’s a single illustration, a panel among hundreds in a comic book, or a frame among thousands in a storyboard.

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Decide on the point of the drawing, then arrange the content of shapes, planes, dark and light, forms, edges, tone, and/or color into a design that explains your intent clearly.

This is your composition, the most important part of picture making, and everything should begin here. No amount of virtuoso drawing or painting can make a poorly composed image more clear.

Make as many small initial studies as necessary until you find solutions for all your major decisions. At conventions, I even do small studies on a pad of yellow stickies before I begin a commission sketch. I like to know what I’m up against before I start the final drawing—it’s so much easier and quicker to work out the problems ahead of time in small doodles than it is to correct a nearly finished drawing when something unexpected has gone wrong. If the trouble is really serious, the artwork may not be salvageable. We all want to avoid that!

Concentrate on the big shapes, arranging them for the strongest visual clarity. Don’t get sidetracked with details of any kind until the large overall design of your image is clean and easy to “read”. A good composition can be rendered with almost any level of detail and still work effectively.

(above) Bret incorporates the panel borders themselves into the artwork to push the storytelling in this page from Harley Quinn #23. (right) Bret’s rough layout and finished pencils for a page from Harley Quinn #25.

Batman, Harley Quinn, Joker © DC Comics

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DAVID A. ROACH I got into comics straight after art college at the age of 21, and I thought I was pretty hot stuff, though looking back now I was clearly deluded! For the first five or six years of my career I was a regular at 2000AD drawing “Judge Anderson” and “Nemesis the Warlock”, and it was very much my inking ability that gave the work that professional looking sheen which covered up the numerous deficiencies in my drawing. I’d had the opportunity to go the Joe Kubert School, where I think I would have been the first Brit to attend, but by the time I got my acceptance letter I was already drawing for 2000AD so it didn’t seem worth the expense somehow. From my viewpoint some 30 years on, I’m sure those three years of intensive study and constant tuition would have been invaluable.

In art college I’d loved life drawing, and it was very much my strongest asset as an artist, but once the regular grind of making deadlines (or not!) kicked in, followed by the demands of a family, it just seemed too hard to find the time to keep it up. However, around ten years ago I started going every week to a local life drawing session, and incrementally I could feel my drawing ability getting stronger and more instinctive. More than anything else life drawing forces you to look intensely at the figure, and you do begin to understand how a body fits together, how it is affected by different light sources, and the different ways it can move. As a comic artist it’s easy to fall into the trap of repeating stock poses, but by working from life you can free yourself from that straightjacket. More than anything else though it’s just plain fun! I suspect most of us got into the business because we simply love drawing, and working from a live model is just about the most enjoyable thing I know. I would whole-heartedly recommend it to anybody whether they are a young hopeful or a seasoned pro.

One of David’s illos for Doctor Who Magazine (above), a Vampirella drawing by David (left), and the cover of David’s latest book, an overview of the great comic artists of Spain.

Doctor Who © BBC Vampirella © Dynamite

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JOHN HEEBINK When I’m working, I think often of Mike’s advice to strengthen the shapes by simplifying the contours. That’s a huge one.

Another classic: Using a tissue overlay to fearlessly work out black placement. I only used this about five percent as often as I needed to, but I think it still helped change my thinking on black.

Keep a wide range of ink tools at hand, including some that are drying or wearing out (mark those with white tape).

Doodle with many of them, maybe most of them, from time to time. Why? One’s ability to develop a sensitive, appropriate

touch for a range of tools is way, way more important than any one tool, any several. Doing that by doodling makes it fun, effortless.

Variation in tool, in technique, in the qualities of marks, adds richness to the art. That’s a hallmark of everybody who’s making exciting art now. Talking about the kinda’ guys who work with Rick Remender, Andrew Robinson, etc., and of course Klaus Janson. (In my foolish youth, I discriminated between tools, deeming some worthy of use on pro work, others not. Not now!)

SCOTT COHN • Learn to spot and battle tangents!

• I pose a lot in PhotoBooth so I get gestures right.

• I always work in multiple layers, and always draw the entire object needed, because clients. Then I just hide what needs hiding.

• Getting your work done early leaves you more time for life, or more work.

• Never price too high with a client. You might get that gig, but you will get no others after you fleece them. Good prices gets you more business.

• No TV. Radio, podcasts, and music are great, but anything taking your focus away from work isn’t a help.

• Choose between getting beers with friends, or hunkering down.

• Flipping (reversing) your work helps you to see mistakes.

• Learn to enjoy perspective, which leads to gridding everything. Mike pounded that into me.

Aliens, Predator © 20th Century Fox Film Corporation

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BILL REINHOLD Well, I guess I think about the basics that have helped me that I tell most every artist asking me for a critique: • At the beginning, do tons of life drawing! Three hours a day in art school for three years. There you learn anatomy, composition, lighting, and really almost everything.

• Loomis, Loomis, Loomis!

• Learn to draw seeing the planes of the figure.

• Don’t fake what you don’t know. If you’re guessing outside your knowledge, check it. When drawing comics I’ve used a mirror, or mirrors, quite a lot for figure drawing, plus photography and film of myself or other models. Over the years I collected a large reference morgue in several file cabinets of every subject, and today the internet is where you can find almost endless reference.

• Use various lighting for dramatic effect.

• Constantly ask for critiques from artist friends and longtime professionals.

• Study the work of other artists. There are many artists I learned so much from: American artists like Gil Kane, Wally Wood, Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, Neal Adams, and now to a great degree Frank Robbins; also many European artists such as, Jose Ortiz, Victor de la Fuente, Jordi Bernet, and Ruben Pellejero. I try to keep up with new younger artists for inspiration also. Some artists I look to more specifically for storytelling and layout are Alex Toth, Gil Kane, Joe Kubert, and Al Williamson.

• Study film with the sound turned down to pay better attention to how the camera moves through a scene and tells a story. For me, it’s mostly old film noir, which also serves well for its great lighting and dramatic camera angles.

• All the artists I know who have been successful have had an insatiable appetite or obsession for knowledge.

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An illustration of an American World War II soldier in the Philippines by Bill.

Illustration © Bill Reinhold

STEVE CONLEY A few I think of all the time: • Clear storytelling is more important than spectacle and stunts—but stunts and spectacle get you noticed.

• Have a reason or reasons for everything—even if those reasons are arbitrary.

• The next drawing will be better (really important to remember that after your computer crashes and you’ve lost 90 minutes of work).

• Save often.

• Iterate often.

• Identify what makes other artists’ works great, but don’t imitate slavishly unless you want to be a cover band.

• If everyone else zigs, zag.

• You can always go back to being a fry cook but until then, do everything you can to not be a fry cook.

A page from Steve’s creator-owned web comic, The Middle Age. The Middle Age © Steve Conley

THOMAS ZAHLER • Hang your figures on the horizon line to make them all look like they’re in the same space.

• Flip your drawing to catch mistakes.

• Draw through an object so that you know what you’re drawing is correct.

A page from Thom’s creator-owned web comic, Warning Label.

Warning Label © Thom Zahler

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Jerry’s rough and finished inks for a variant cover of Archie vol. 2, #1 (above), and a preliminary sketch for a Superman poster (below).

Archie © Archie Comic Publications, Inc. Superman © DC Comics.

JERRY ORDWAY If you have to draw any vehicle on a regular basis, buy a scale model, so you can rotate and draw from any angle. I learned this as an inker on All Star Squadron with planes especially, because the penciller just drew different planes to match his storytelling, and I had to make them into Curtiss P-40 Warhawks!

A photo only goes so far, and you can’t see detail in the shadows!

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JOSEPH LINSNER

Here are my words of advice to aspiring artists:

• Always work on your anatomy. Even if you want to draw simple cartoons like Charles Schulz, the more you know about anatomy, the more alive your figures will be. I always work on my anatomy—it never ends.

• Learn how to interpret opinions and advice. What may be gold for one artist is poison to another. No art appeals to everyone, so you must learn to cherry pick the parts of a critique which you feel may help you.

• Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Several comic artists who I think are awful have gone on to become millionaires, while I have not. So what do I know?

• There are really two comic markets: the corporate (DC, Marvel, etc.…) and the creator-owned. With a creator-owned comic, anything goes, but corporate comics have tougher guidelines and rigid editorial policies that must be followed. A young Kevin Eastman would probably never have been hired to draw the X-Men, but by self-publishing, he co-created the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which made him a multi-millionaire.

• If you really feel in the depths of your soul that you want to draw comics, then don’t ever let anyone stop you.

Dawn © Joseph Michael Linsner

I am currently hard at work on the next Dawn series, Endless Night, due out in 2018.

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RONN SUTTON

When I begin working on a comic page, the first thing I do is draw tiny thumbnails on the side of the script. These are extremely rough, but important since they are the first spontaneous images that come to mind. I find that usually your first visual instinct is right. I do very quick word counts so that I can block out fairly accurate space for word balloons. I also take the script and cut it apart so that now one single page of script represents one single page of art.

I begin by roughing everything in blue Col-Erase animation pencils because they have a waxy quality that glides across the paper. Sometimes as I work I will leave areas blank that I will return to later to draw.

To me, composition and clarity are the two most important aspects of drawing a page. I rarely draw directly on the art board. Possibly the two most important tools I own are my huge light table and my photocopier (placed directly behind me so that I don’t have to get up to make a copy). I draw elaborate fullsize roughs on common photocopy paper, and as I work I am constantly xeroxing sections of my rough up and down in a variety of sizes, constantly changing my composition by seeing how larger or smaller images affect the design. Sometimes I also flip a figure over (now facing the opposite direction) to see how that will affect the balance and storytelling. Flipping the figure also makes drawing errors clearer to my eye.

I work out all the design and drawing problems in the roughs, and then do a quick loose tracing onto the final art board through my light table. I try to make final adjustments in the inks.

Good, clear storytelling is the only thing that matters in comics. Jack Kirby absolutely proved that highly-refined rendering, photo reference, and medically-correct anatomy might be nice bonuses in comic art, but they are completely non-essential to good storytelling. Conveying the story in as clear a manner as possible should be the artist’s main goal.

Doing comics is a lot of work. Talk to a lot of artists about their working methods and the tools they use. You should always be thinking in terms of clarity to the reader. Don’t fall in love with your own work. If you’re not conveying the story properly to the reader, rub it out and try again. And finally, it’s absolutely essential to have a website. It’s an instant online portfolio to display your work to potential employers, as well as fans and other interested parties.

Ronn’s rough, done in ColErase blue pencil and normal pencil (previous page, top); his tightened pencils (previous page, bottom); his inks (top); and the finished strip (above).

“The Man-Eater” © Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.

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(above) Wally Wood’s famous “22 Panels That Always Work”, a field guide of sorts for how to make a scene more visually interesting. (below) Some of Hilary’s random drawings.

“22 Panels That Always Work” © the estate of Wallace Wood. Drawings © Hilary Barta.

HILARY BARTA Wally Wood’s “when in doubt, black it out” always works for me.

When changing panels in the same scene, to avoid the “jumpcut” effect, either change the point of view significantly, or change the size of the characters (such as going from a close-up to a medium or long view). Or, keep the angle and distance exactly the same. Doing the latter will focus the reader on subtle changes in body language or other details.

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ANDE PARKS Use two inks: a thinner one for pen (Calli is awesome) and a thicker one for brush (the Hi-Carb Dr. Ph. Martin’s stuff is pretty good, although most anything will work if you leave it open for a while). And put the ink in small bottles so you can slam your tool (so to speak) in there without going too deep (so to speak).

When inking, always have two pages (or pieces) going, so you can set aside the wet one (so to speak) and keep working.

Modern paper is a crap shoot, and most of it is just plain crap. I’ve settled on the Strathmore 300 pads, smooth finish—best I’ve found for pen work.

MATT HALEY The reader should always be able to tell what's going on on your page without ever looking at the word balloons.

A commission drawing by Ande of DC’s El Diablo, a series he inked over Phil Hester.

El Diablo © DC Comics

I’ll end with this great line-up of advice with a few words of my own, something I find while looking back over the years before I broke in as a hungry young artist and all the years as a pro that might be the most important factor to a great career of all: Your Attitude.

Your attitude has more to do with your success and long term continued success than anything else. Talent, natural ability, the things people often site as the reasons some artists “are so good and successful” are certainly important, but not the most important factors. Your attitude is the most important thing—the regulator of how hard you work, how open you

are to learning, going beyond your comfort zones, how honest you have to be and if you can stay hungry, are self-critical, and that’s a life-long factor to the success of any artist.

I’m still learning at 55. I’ve taught hundreds of students, known countless artists who wanted to break in and do comics, animation, illustration, etc. Those I know who have achieved their dreams and become professionals all had the right attitude, and those who failed, those who didn’t attain a career weren’t serious, honest, and didn’t have the right personality to be successful, and they fell off at some point.

So develop and keep the right attitude, be open, hungry and happy—and keep drawing!

—Mike

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UNDER REVIEW Wacom-MANIA!

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elcome back, all and sundry to the last rest stop on the DRAW! Highway before you drive off into the starry night. It is I, the purse-lipped peruser of dippens, the squinty-eyed surveyor of Sumi-E inks, your Crusty Critic has returned for another column! Raise your coffee mugs, but make sure that’s not the ink-water mug (trust me, I’ve been there).

My mission: by day I am Jamar Nicholas, mild-mannered cartoonist trying to make his deadlines, but by night I am your Crusty Critic, using my keen eye for sussing out art supplies to save you precious art table-time by letting you, dear reader, make informed purchasing decisions on your way to deadline victories!

As the world keeps spinning, and your studio, or corner of the kitchen table, or room under the stairs, gets smaller, a cartoonist has to find solutions to their work area that will reduce their clutter footprint. Most American comic artists draw at 11" x 17", and that board takes up a lot of space, but what if you could work another way? What does that do to your project output? What about getting up and stuffing your work-table in your backpack and going to draw outside? A lot of these questions can be answered by “switching to digital”, meaning creating your work on a device that can handle an artist’s needs and specifications. This issue’s review finally covers working in the digital world, as I give an overview of the latest product from one of the biggest names in digital art tools.

THE “CRUSTY CRITIQUE” SYSTEM My product reviews will be judged under my trusty “Beret” scale, from a score of one beret (not worth the time/money/ effort) to five berets (a Crusty Success! Buy it immediately, or buy as much as you can carry).

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WACOM MOBILESTUDIO PRO

(13", i7 512GB) Digital mark-making is not new, but the price of entry is still the biggest chasm between a cartoonist who wants to work electronically versus a traditional studio setup. The Wacom (pronounced most closely to “Whack-em”) brand has been at the top of the digital tablet game since before it had any competition, but there are some companies nipping at its heels, most notably Apple and Microsoft.

When my Crust wasn’t as thick, as a younger cartoonist, I was gifted my first Wacom product, a tiny 4" x 5" Intuous1 tablet and pen, and I was in heaven, using it to cement my foray into finishing cartoon projects in Photoshop and learning how to color digitally. Back in those grey times, there were people who had trained themselves to draw on a computer with a mouse—the horror!—but having my Wacom, I taught myself how to draw on a small surface on my desk, while looking up at the monitor screen. There’s a certain disconnect that happened there, but when the Wacom Cintiq line came about—tablets which allowed you to draw directly on the screen of the device, giving you a better immersion of tool-to-surface (even if it is a pane of glass or plastic and not illustration board)—that was the Game Changer for a lot of modern cartoonists. From some of the world-eating monsters like the Cintiq 27", which can take up a whole table easily, I have found a happy place with my trusty old Cintiq 12WX, a 12" Cintiq, which I have attached to an Ergotron-brand desktop arm, so I can swivel and move the tablet around, circumventing the “art hunch” Quasimodo problems that can occur when leaning over to draw.

Now we move into the future. The latest Cintiqs have gotten smaller and more portable. The call for having a Cintiq that you could toss in a bag and take to a client meeting, or take

(left) The MobileStudio Pro 13"—a sight to cradle in your arm and behold. (below) The Wacom Pro Pen2—no batteries included, or necessary.

outside and draw concepts on while sitting on a park bench, was huge, and the Companion line of tablets tried to answer that concern. But today, I talk about the newest device along that avenue, the MobileStudio Pro.

DOES IT WORK? The successor to the Companion, Wacom has rolled out this new tablet, fixing some concerns of the last generation while moving forward into the future. Consumers can choose between the 13- or 16-inch version with both being able to occupy some serious business under the hood.

The 13" I’m reviewing is packed to the gills with an Intel i7 processor, Intel Iris Graphics 550, 512GB of storage, and 16GB of RAM, running Windows 10. Wait—what? That’s right, most importantly, if you missed that, these new workhorses are also computers into themselves.

Whereas the older products had to be tethered and linked to your desktop computer to function, everything lives under one hood here. Grab the MobileStudio Pro, use the fingerprint scanner to unlock the security function, grab your Wacom Pen2 digitizer, and get right onto business using your full suite of software like Photoshop, ClipStudio Paint, etc., (none of this is pre-loaded, so these apps are BYO).

One of my favorite apps to use lately has been the amazing Autodesk Sketchbook (which I may review in a later issue), but if you have these programs on your home computer, you can purchase a product called Wacom Link, which allows you to connect the tablet to your

other laptops or desktops where your Photoshop lives. This is a workaround, but necessary if you aren’t going to shell out cash for more software.

There’s no space here to write about how well Wacom devices work—they just do, and they work well.

The Pro Pen 2, though boasting 8,192 levels of pressure sensitivity, does what you’d expect it to, but this Critic doesn’t really feel all of that from the device. I’ll take their word for it.

HOW MUCH DID IT COST? The MobileStudio Pro 13" clocks in at a little over/under $1,600.00 with the 16" being more expensive. The Link add-on device will set you back an additional $60, but isn’t necessary to run your device. Look at that as a bridge between working with your files on a desktop without having to move everything to the MobileStudio, or vice-versa.

Another thing to consider is the fact that this device does not come with a kickstand, or a way to prop it up on a table, so it lays flat. It can be used on a lap and doesn’t get too hot, but you’ll probably want to find some angle to work at that doesn’t murder your posture, or task you with cradling it in the nook of your arm. Wacom hasn’t rolled out a dedicated stand yet, so I recommend the Bräda plastic laptop tray from IKEA, which is about $5—a good deal. I have also used two flexible literature display stands to adjust the angles of support. I have a bunch of them that I use for convention appearances, and they are a snap to use.

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(above) The big Bräda—a budget-friendly IKEA solution for a surface stand. (right) Get a few adjustable display stands to combat the positioning problem.

One other thing to mention is since your new MobileStudio Pro is essentially a laptop with no keyboard, you may want to look into getting one. Probably at this point you have one laying around from some other device you needed one for, so any bluetooth compatible keyboard should work fine, and does help with toggling demands if you aren’t the type to set up hotkeys on your tablet.

WHAT DID YOU USE IT ON? Most of my time using the device was in doing layouts for comic book pages, or playing with the built-in camera to take reference shots and then import them into a drawing—a great idea—but mostly general comic book illustration.

WHAT DID YOU THINK OF IT? I’m not going to compare and contrast a bunch of lofty specs for these kinds of devices, though I believe some people really enjoy that. This Crusty Curmudgeon doesn’t really get excited by that data. Either it works, or it doesn’t. I believe, even in 2017, digital work solutions should be a bit cheaper. And even though there are cost-friendlier options—Wacom is now in a place where the Apple iPad Pro, with the iPencil and the Microsoft Surface, are squeezing the market—it’s important to consider, when you’re going to commit to such a large purchase, whether or not the device does exactly what you need it to do.

The battery life of the MobileStudio Pro was decent and seemed to register with my use of three-and-a-half to four hours before needing to be recharged, but if you’re going to hunker down for a major session, you’re going to have to keep it plugged in. I feel like that makes sense, no matter how strong a battery is. The Pen is still a marvelous piece of tech that doesn’t need to be charged, like the iPencil, which 80

DRAW! WINTER 2018

is a great plus.

Something that may work itself out the longer the device exists is the use of USB-C ports, which not a lot of people have in their studio yet. As of right now, if you want to connect anything older to your tablet, you’ll need an adapter. Also, the lack of a backplate enabling it to be screwed into an ergo-arm mount is missed, but that does work against the need for a portable device, so I’m not upset at its absence. If Wacom decides to do a Mark II of this line, I’d like to see some of these addressed, but none of these things should steer someone from owning one.

The biggest hurdle is your budget and what you can handle.

That last paragraph seemed like a lot of gripes, but is merely Crusty Criticism. To put this in college-class syllabus terms, Wacom products start the semester with an A, and it’s up to them to maintain it. These little knocks lower the average by a small margin, but it goes without saying that the MobileStudio Pro is a top-tier art tool, and I don’t need to sell you on the quality of it or how life-changing it can be to have something like this in your arsenal.

CRUSTY SCORE Some small portability/comfort needs arise from the size and dimensions of the device, but the biggest beret-remover is the price, coupled with the feeling of not wanting to damage something so expensive “in the field”. Wanting to protect a purchase like this would make me not want to have it rolling around in a backpack or case without more protection. The MobileStudio Pro is a luxury item that is still winning the digital tablet war, but just barely.

That’s it for this column! Until next time, stay Crusty, my friends!

ALTER EGO #150

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ALTER EGO #152

ALTER EGO #153

BRICKJOURNAL #50

STAN LEE’s 95th birthday! Rare 1980s LEE interview by WILL MURRAY—GER APELDOORN on Stan’s non-Marvel writing in the 1950s—STAN LEE/ROY THOMAS e-mails of the 21st century—and more special features than you could shake Irving Forbush at! Also FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), BILL SCHELLY, and MICHAEL T. GILBERT! Colorful Marvel multi-hero cover

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Golden Age artist FRANK THOMAS (The Owl! The Eye! Dr. Hypno!) celebrated by Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt’s MICHAEL T. GILBERT! Plus the scintillating (and often offbeat) Golden & Silver Age super-heroes of Western Publishing’s DELL & GOLD KEY comics! Art by MANNING, DITKO, KANE, MARSH, GILL, SPIEGLE, SPRINGER, NORRIS, SANTOS, THORNE, et al.! Plus FCA, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

Unsung artist/writer LARRY IVIE conceived (and named!) the JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA, helped develop T.H.U.N.D.E.R. AGENTS, brought EC art greats to the world of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and more!

SANDY PLUNKETT chronicles his career, with art by FRAZETTA, CRANDALL, WOOD, KRENKEL, DOOLIN, and others!

Plus FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

Remembering Fabulous FLO STEINBERG, Stan Lee’s gal Friday during the Marvel Age of Comics—with anecdotes and essays by pros and friends who knew and loved her! Rare Marvel art, Flo’s successor ROBIN GREEN interviewed by RICHARD ARNDT about her time at Marvel, and Robin’s 1971 article on Marvel for ROLLING STONE magazine! Plus FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

Special double-size BOOK! Photo editor GEOFF GRAY talks to JOE MENO about the beginnings of BrickJournal, TORMOD ASKILDSEN of the LEGO GROUP interviewed, how the fan community has grown in 10 years, and the best builders of the past 50 issues! Plus: Minifigure customizing with JARED K. BURKS’, step-by-step “You Can Build It” instructions by CHRISTOPHER DECK, BrickNerd’s DIY Fan Art, & more!

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MERCS AND ANTIHEROES! Deadpool’s ROB LIEFELD and FABIAN NICIEZA interviewed!

Histories of Cable, Taskmaster, Deathstroke the Terminator, the Vigilante, and Wild Dog, plus… Archie meets the Punisher?? Featuring TERRY BEATTY, MAX ALLAN COLLINS, PAUL KUPPERBERG, BATTON LASH, JEPH LOEB, DAVID MICHELINIE, MARV WOLFMAN, KEITH POLLARD, and others!

Deadpool vs. Cable cover by LIEFELD!

ALL-STAR EDITORS ISSUE! Past and present editors reveal “How I Beat the Dreaded Deadline Doom”! Plus: ARCHIE GOODWIN and MARK GRUENWALD retrospectives, E. NELSON BRIDWELL interview, DIANA SCHUTZ interview, ALLAN ASHERMAN revisits DC’s ’70s editorial department, Marvel Assistant Editors’ Month, and a history of PERRY WHITE! With an unpublished 1981 Captain America cover by MIKE ZECK!

FOURTH WORLD AFTER KIRBY! Return(s) of the New Gods, Why Can’t Mister Miracle Escape Cancellation?, the Forever People, MIKE MIGNOLA’s unrealized New Gods animated movie, Fourth World in Hollywood, and an all-star lineup, including the work of JOHN BYRNE, PARIS CULLINS, J. M. DeMATTEIS, MARK EVANIER, MICHAEL GOLDEN, RICK HOBERG, WALTER SIMONSON, and more. STEVE RUDE cover!

DEADLY HANDS ISSUE! Histories of Iron Fist, Master of Kung Fu, Yang, the Bronze Tiger, Hands of the Dragon, NEAL ADAMS’ Armor, Marvel’s Deadly Hands of Kung Fu mag, & Hong Kong Phooey! Plus Muhammad Ali in toons and toys. Featuring JOHN BYRNE, CHRIS CLAREMONT, STEVE ENGLEHART, PAUL GULACY, LARRY HAMA, DOUG MOENCH, DENNY O’NEIL, JIM STARLIN, & others. Classic EARL NOREM cover!

GOLDEN AGE IN BRONZE! ’70s Justice Society revival with two Pro2Pro interviews: All-Star Squadron’s ROY THOMAS, JERRY ORDWAY, and ARVELL JONES (with a bonus RICK HOBERG interview), and The Spectre’s JOHN OSTRANDER and TOM MANDRAKE. Plus: Liberty Legion, Air Wave, Jonni Thunder, Crimson Avenger, and the Spectre revival of ’87! WOOD, COLAN, CONWAY, GIFFEN, GIORDANO, & more!

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COMIC BOOK CREATOR #16

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #17

KIRBY COLLECTOR #73

KIRBY COLLECTOR #74

A look at 75 years of Archie Comics’ characters and titles, from Archie and his pals ‘n gals to the mighty MLJ heroes of yesteryear and today’s “Dark Circle”! Also: Careerspanning interviews with The Fox’s DEAN HASPIEL and Kevin Keller’s cartoonist DAN PARENT, who both jam on our exclusive cover depicting a face-off between humor and heroes. Plus our usual features, including the hilarious FRED HEMBECK!

The legacy and influence of WALLACE WOOD, with a comprehensive essay about Woody’s career, extended interview with Wood assistant RALPH REESE (artist for Marvel’s horror comics, National Lampoon, and underground), a long chat with cover artist HILARY BARTA (Marvel inker, Plastic Man and America’s Best artist with ALAN MOORE), plus our usual columns, features, and the humor of HEMBECK!

ONE-SHOTS! Kirby’s best (and worst) short spurts on his wildest concepts: ANIMATION IDEAS, DINGBATS, JUSTICE INC., MANHUNTER, ATLAS, PRISONER, and more! Plus MARK EVANIER and our other regular panelists, rare Kirby interview, panels from the 2017 Kirby Centennial celebration, pencil art galleries, and some one-shot surprises! BIG BARDA #1 cover finishes by MIKE ROYER!

FUTUREPAST! Kirby’s “World That Was” from Caveman days to the Wild West, and his “World That’s Here” of Jack’s visions of the future that became reality! TWO COVERS: Bullseye inked by BILL WRAY, and Jack’s unseen Tiger 21 concept art!

Plus: interview with ROY THOMAS about Jack, rare Kirby interview, MARK EVANIER moderating the biggest Kirby Tribute Panel of all time, pencil art galleries, and more!

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From WOODSTOCK to “THE BANANA SPLITS,” from “SGT. PEPPER” to “H.R. PUFNSTUF,” from ALTAMONT to “THE PARTRIDGE FAMILY,” GROOVY is a far-out trip to the era of lava lamps and love beads. This profusely illustrated HARDCOVER BOOK, in PSYCHEDELIC COLOR, features interviews with icons of grooviness such as PETER MAX, BRIAN WILSON, PETER FONDA, MELANIE, DAVID CASSIDY, members of the JEFFERSON AIRPLANE, CREAM, THE DOORS, THE COWSILLS and VANILLA FUDGE; and cast members of groovy TV shows like “THE MONKEES,” “LAUGH-IN” and “THE BRADY BUNCH.” GROOVY revisits the era’s ROCK FESTIVALS, MOVIES, ART—even COMICS and CARTOONS, from the 1968 ‘mod’ WONDER WOMAN to R. CRUMB. A color-saturated pop-culture history written and designed by MARK VOGER (author of the acclaimed book MONSTER MASH), GROOVY is one trip that doesn’t require dangerous chemicals!

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