Draw #36

#36

WINTER 2020 $9.95 in the US

The Professional “How-To” Magazine on Comics, Cartooning and Animation Contains nudity for figure-drawing instruction; suggested for Mature Readers Only

FEATURING DEADPOOL & INFINITY COUNTDOWN ARTIST

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MIKE HAWTHORNE

YANICK PAQUETTE

ARTIST OF SWAMP THING & WONDER WOMAN: EARTH ONE MIKE MANLEY AND BRET BLEVINS’

PLUS! REGULAR COLUMNISTS

JERRY ORDWAY & JAMAR NICHOLAS

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! #27

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AVAILA

DRAW! #24

DRAW! #25

DRAW! #26

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

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

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

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DRAW! #29

DRAW! #30

DRAW! #31

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

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

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

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

We focus the radar on Daredevil artist CHRIS SAMNEE (Agents of Atlas, Batman, Avengers, Captain America) with a how-to interview, comics veteran JACKSON GUICE (Captain America, Superman, Ruse, Thor) talks about his creative process and his new series Winter World, columnist JERRY ORDWAY shows his working process, plus more Comic Art Bootcamp by BRET BLEVINS and editor MIKE MANLEY! Mature readers only.

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.

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TwoMorrows.

The Future of Comics History.

DRAW! #32

DRAW! #33

DRAW #34

DRAW #35

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’s Ord-Way of drawing, JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews the latest art supplies, and BRET BLEVINS and Draw! editor MIKE MANLEY’S Comic Art Bootcamp. Mature readers only.

GREG HILDEBRANDT (of the Hildebrandt Brothers) reveals his working methods, BRAD WALKER (Aquaman, Guardians of the Galaxy, Birds of Prey, Legends of the Dark Knight) gives a how-to interview and demo, regular columnist JERRY ORDWAY, JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews the latest art supplies, and BRET BLEVINS and Draw! editor MIKE MANLEY’s Comic Art Bootcamp!

Fantasy/sci-fi illustrator DONATO GIANCOLA (Game of Thrones) demos his artistic process, GEORGE PRATT (Enemy Ace: War Idyll, Batman: Harvest Breed) discusses his work as comic book artist, illustrator, fine artist, and teacher, Crusty Critic JAMAR NICHOLAS, JERRY ORDWAY’S regular column, and MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ “Comic Art Bootcamp.” Mature Readers Only.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

WINTER 2020, VOL. 1, #36 Editor-in-Chief • Michael Manley Managing Editor and Designer • Eric Nolen-Weathington Publisher • John Morrow Logo Design • John Costanza Front Cover • Mike Hawthorne with color by Mimi Simon DRAW! Winter 2020, Vol. 1, No. 36 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 2019 by their respective contributors. Views expressed here by contributors and interviewees are not necessarily those of Action Planet, Inc., TwoMorrows Publishing, or its editors.

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MIKE HAWTHORNE REDUX Mike Hawthorne returns to DRAW! to update Mike Manley on his career and his approach to making comics.

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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.

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This entire issue is ©2019 Action Planet, Inc. and TwoMorrows Publishing and may not be reprinted or retransmitted without written permission of the copyright holders. ISSN 1932-6882. Printed in China. FIRST PRINTING.

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RIGHT WAY, WRONG WAY—ORDWAY! How to use photo reference the Ordway.

YANICK PAQUETTE

The artist takes us from Montreal to Earth One and back on his quest for artistic balance.

COMIC ART BOOTCAMP This month’s installment: Sparking your imagination!

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THE CRUSTY CRITIC

The Crusty Critic reviews the tools of the trade.

This month: The ultimate art marker smackdown!

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DRAW! WINTER 2020

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T

-ING AHEAD

his issue was a while forming and coming together, but well worth the wait, I think. In the time since the last issue of DRAW! I have also started a podcast with Bret and Jamar called Pencil-to-Pencil. It’s a continuation of what I have been doing for close to 20 years on DRAW!, interviewing artists from the fields of comics, illustration, and animation. You can take a listen at Penciltopencil.com or listen via iTunes and Stitcher.

I’d like to thank this issue’s interviewees, Mike Hawthorne and Yanick Paquette, for taking the time to share their process with us all. I’d also thanks Jamar, Bret, and John, and of course Eric for putting this whole thing together—I couldn’t do it without my team!

Since you will all be reading this in late 2019, I want to say that this time of the year is busy and also rich with traditions, holidays, schools starting back up, etc. Take some time to look around, appreciate what you see, and share and draw it, make a note of it visually. Photography is great, but I feel drawings are more intimate and personal, because they take time to craft. They are also a chronicle of events or images edited by the personality that created them—that’s something a photo can’t really do. Share art, share your passions in these trying times. It will make you feel better, and the people you share it with feel better too!

Best, Caricature by Bret Blevins

THE WORLD OF TWOMORROWS 25 ANNIVERSARY BOOK TH

In 1994, amidst the boom-&-bust of comic book speculators, THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #1 was published for true fans of the medium. That modest labor of love spawned TwoMorrows Publishing, today’s premier purveyor of publications about comics and pop culture. Celebrate our 25th anniversary with this special retrospective look at the company that changed fandom forever! Co-edited by and featuring publisher JOHN MORROW and COMIC BOOK ARTIST/ COMIC BOOK CREATOR magazine’s JON B. COOKE, it gives the inside story and behind-thescenes details of a quarter-century of looking at the past in a whole new way. Also included are BACK ISSUE magazine’s MICHAEL EURY, ALTER EGO’s ROY THOMAS, GEORGE KHOURY (author of KIMOTA!, EXTRAORDINARY WORKS OF ALAN MOORE, and other books), MIKE MANLEY (DRAW! magazine), ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON (MODERN MASTERS), and a host of other comics luminaries who’ve contributed to TwoMorrows’ output over the years.

From their first Eisner Award-winning book STREETWISE, through their BRICKJOURNAL LEGO® magazine, up to today’s RETROFAN magazine, every major TwoMorrows publication and contributor is covered with the same detail and affection the company gives to its books and magazines. With an Introduction by MARK EVANIER, Foreword by ALEX ROSS, Afterword by PAUL LEVITZ, and a new cover by TOM McWEENEY! SHIPS DECEMBER 2019!

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MIKE HAWTHORNE

ANATOMY OF AN ARTIST IN MOTION Interview by Mike Manley Transcribed by Eric Nolen-Weathington DRAW!: Hey, Mike, how are you?

MIKE HAWTHORNE: Hey, Mike! Good! I can’t complain. How’ve you been?

DRAW!: Good, busy, same like you.

MH: Yeah, man. You’re probably substantially busier than me. It looks like you’re doing four or five things at once half of the time.

DRAW!: Well, isn’t every artist sort of doing that?

MH: I’m trying not to, but yeah. [laughs] DRAW!: I mean, you’re still teaching, you’re doing the Marvel book, and then you, I’m sure, have some other backburner thing, right?

MH: [laughs] You’re right. I just did a little 16-page Kickstarter horror comic, and then I finally resold the graphic novel I did for Vertigo years back, and I want to beef it up.

DRAW!: Which was that?

MH: It was St. Michael’s Promise, but we’ve changed the title recently. I guess let’s call it my auto-bio book. I don’t know if you remember it. It was a long time ago, back when the New 52 kicked in [2011], and they were going to close down Vertigo. They didn’t put out the book, and I had to fight

a little bit to get the rights back. So it’s been a long time, and I just didn’t sell it. I sat on it for years. I tried to get an agent on it—I showed to maybe half a dozen agents. The last one to pass on it literally told me it looked too good so he couldn’t sell it.

DRAW!: What!?!

MH: I know, dude. I came full circle. I went from not being able to get gigs because I wasn’t good enough to now I can’t get gigs because I draw too well. [laughs] I couldn’t believe it.

DRAW!: How does that even make sense?

MH: I think what it is, in the bookstore market, they see graphic novels as kind of primitive. Even though my book was 128 pages, all drawn, agents would still talk in terms of, “Maybe if we can make the art like this or like that.” I was like, “That’s not happening. I’m not doing that.”

DRAW!: So you have a book that’s already done, it looks good, DC was going to publish it….

MH: I’m adding another 20 pages to it.

DRAW!: So he wanted it to have that “shoegazer” quality to it—that indie vibe.

MH: Ha! Yeah. You know what I think it is, Mike? These people are all writer-centric, and the art itself is a little like if you give somebody a hamburger. They could care less about the bread; it’s just a way to deliver the meat to their mouth.

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We’re sort of the bread. The meat, to them, is the writing, and I think they almost like it better when the art is more primitive because it somehow makes it more “serious” than the mainstream comics.

DRAW!: That’s such a poser idea. Would you want to eat a hamburger that has bugs in it? No.

MH: Exactly, or stale bread. It’s ridiculous. So I could not get an agent on that book. I had to sell it on my own, which is ironic. Even to the tried and true comics publishers—I tried to sell it to a more independently minded publisher who turned me down within 30 minutes. I don’t think people knew how to approach a book that was—whether I succeeded or not is not up for me to decide, but I genuinely tried to make it beautiful. And I think that is not a thing they know how to relate to.

DRAW!: If it looks like an English major who decided to do a graphic novel, but didn’t really know how to draw, that’s okay, because they would prefer to make it a movie or TV show, and the comic is the lowest delivery form they can use.

MH: I guess. Or if you take the same metaphor and use it for a novel—I think either one is interchangeable for them. It’s like, “Wait, the graphic novel market is growing, so I’ll take my crappy novel and put some ugly pictures to it and take advantage of that, then I’ll cash in on the exciting market that is graphic novels.”

DRAW!: To me, the effectiveness of the prose in a novel is completely separate from the effectiveness of the prose in a graphic novel, because if the storytelling is not clear, and the pictures are not easy to follow, irrespective of style—it could be any style—if the narrative is not crafted, then you’re not actually doing a service to telling a good story.

MH: Amen. I’m with you 100%. I’ve had this fight for years now. I also happen to think, to a lot of these folks, what is comics to them are the newspaper funnies. And let’s face it, most of them don’t look that good. They’re not going to the trouble you are with your strips to make the thing beautiful day in and day out. Most of the comic strips in the newspaper are rushed.

DRAW!: You know who Jules Feiffer is, right? A couple of years ago at the Baltimore Comic-Con, he was there for the Harvey Awards or something, and I sat next to him. I introduced myself and told him what I did, and he goes, “Oh, I never look at the newspaper strips. They’re all crap!” [laughter] “Oh, thanks a lot, Mr. Feiffer. Nice meeting you.”

MH: What you’re doing is like a whole other species of comic strip. The point is, that primitive drawing is all they can relate to when it comes to any kind of narrative art medium. It’s so short-sighted. The average audience can see if something is well drawn and if it’s appealing to them. I don’t think anybody’s going to look at my book and say, “I would really enjoy this book if the drawing was ten times worse,” you know? [laughs]

Mike’s inks for a variant cover of Black Science #32.

Black Science © Rick Remender and Matteo Scalera

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DRAW! WINTER 2020

DRAW!: Why do you think all the animated films today, in America at least, are still modeled after the

Inks for pages 4 and 5 of Mike’s auto-biographical graphic novel, as yet to be renamed.

Artwork © Mike Hawthorne

rules of appeal that Disney established decades ago? You can tweak it a little bit, but the consumer of anything wants to be able to look at it and enjoy it. Ten, fifteen years ago, you still had the Love & Rockets style indie look. Now the market has changed quite a bit, and it’s actually broadened even more.

MH: I agree.

DRAW!: But they feel they should have some homegrown look to it. Like, back when record stores used to matter, you had Easy Listening and Adult Contemporary. What’s the difference between them? Where do you put Kenny G? Does he go in Adult Contemporary or Easy Listening? I think it’s because much of the editorial depth and experience just isn’t deep enough. They think it has to be drawn in a certain way or their audience will think, “That’s too macho,” or, “That’s too commercial” or something. I don’t think the mass audience cares about that. They just want something that looks good.

MH: These guys don’t know what’s going to sell, they only know what’s sold in the past. They’re trying to find something that looks like the last thing that sold, and if we go by them and their tastes, we will only be making derivative books. I just can’t trust their opinions. Not that I don’t respect what they’re able to do, work out better deals and such. I’m all for representation at this point in my career, but when the representation becomes the dictator of style and taste, I just can’t trust them.

DRAW!: It’s like fashion trends. Whatever is hot this year, everyone tries to copy, but the next year, if that doesn’t sell, then anything that looks like that must not be good.

MH: Absolutely. My goal at this point, if this book does well, the next time I approach an agent I’m going to go sort of the opposite route. I’m going to say, “You were short-sighted in wanting to sell only these ugly books. Here’s what this book could do by not going for the lowest common denominator visually, and here’s more of that kind of thing.” Maybe I’m just stupid, but I don’t think people have given up on beautiful art. And like you said, we have narrative tools these primitive artists don’t necessarily have, so I can walk you through a story in a more clear, concise way. This book is only 128 pages, but it’s denser than the last half-dozen autobiographical books I’ve seen, because I don’t need four pages to tell you something I can tell you in one. You’re going to understand everything, and hopefully have some nice pictures to look at to boot. My suspicion is that if this book goes well, I’ll be able to turn agents down, and pick one that makes me happy. That’s my hope.

DRAW!: I talked with Jamar when he was pitching Leon.

“You’ve gone out and done your Kickstarter, and you’ve made your book a success, and now you’ve got people coming up and telling you, ‘Well, that’s nice, but let’s not make him a superhero, and let’s not make him a kid, and let’s not

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make him black.’ But if you do a couple of those books, and you’re successful, then everyone says, ‘Hey, love your stuff!

I would love to partner with you and take 90%. How’s that?’”

MH: Yep. DRAW!: Success has a thousand fathers, and failure has none. All media is fracturing. We’re narrow-casting. There are people who only watch YouTube, or only go into this bookstore, or only listen to this kind of podcast. It seems like things are being focused more narrowly on these trends. I teach a class a high school class where the average age is 15, 16. None of those kids read Marvel or DC. They read comics, but it’s all stuff online, and they read it for free. None of them know Calvin and Hobbes. None of them know any of the old characters like Popeye. How old are the students in your class?

MH: Right now I have seniors, but normally I teach sophomores or juniors, especially with the anatomy class.

DRAW!: Do they read comics?

MH: They do. Now, obviously they’re art school kids.

They’re usually a little more sophisticated than I expect. I’m usually pretty surprised. They do know the old cartoons, they know American comics, and manga, and anime. They may not know the individual artists, but that’s almost to be expected.

But you’re right. Kids are sort of all over the place in terms

of their interests, but they might consistently read manga and dip into comics, or consistently read that online Korean app.

What’s it called?

DRAW!: Webtoons? I have a thing on Webtoons.

MH: Well, that’s probably it then. But they might only read stuff on that app. But by the time I get them, they tend to be a little more diverse. My son is 13, and his go-to thing is YouTube. He’s on there watching drawing videos all the time. You’re right in that they’ll keep going back to that same well. Whatever that one thing is that made them happy, that’s what they tend to go back to until it doesn’t work anymore.

DeviantArt was big with the younger kids at the school at one point, and I heard a conversation today where they were talking about it like it was MySpace. [laughter] These things kind of dry up quickly, but I don’t think it’s that these kids are fickle as much as it is that once companies find a formula that works, they’re scared to change it, and by not adapting, kids get bored with it.

DRAW!: And culture is changing faster than people’s ability to adapt. What your son is doing with social media is different than what someone his age was doing even five years ago.

MH: I have teenagers, and it’s funny to hear them talk.

They’ve gone back to just texting. They’re not getting on social media to talk, they’re just having a group chat, and

Inks for two more pages of Mike’s auto-biographical graphic novel, as yet to be renamed.

Artwork © Mike Hawthorne

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DRAW! WINTER 2020

that’s it. They’re not getting on Facebook to talk like us old farts, or even Twitter for that matter. They’re doing these group chat things, and they’re naming them, and it’s their own little private social media. I was an early adopter of Pinterest. It just made sense to me. It was visual, and I could save references. But that’s the one I hear about from my teenage daughters. They’re not getting on Instagram and all that. They get on Pinterest and share memes with each other all the time. To me, Pinterest is so flexible because it’s just pictures, and who doesn’t like looking at pictures? There’s no tie into it. It’s like they’re simplifying their online presence, for lack of a better way to describe it. They don’t need a mimicked fan page. They have their group chats and their Pinterest page to save their funny memes, and that’s it.

DRAW!: You’ve been working in the mainstream for a while now. Do you get any editorial feedback or direction that takes into consideration how this stuff is happening now?

MH: For the most part, they leave me alone. I started out very independent, selfpublishing and small press publishers, and I probably had more input then than I do now. Part of it is the decisions I make. I tend to only work with people who are going to trust me. If I have a very finicky writer or editor, I’ll finish up the job and usually find my way to the door before things get grumpy. So I don’t know if it’s unique to me. I’m so outside the comics culture by not going to cons, that I don’t know if it’s the norm or if it’s unique to me, but for the most part I’ve been lucky enough to work with editors who hire me to come in and solve their problems, and Mike’s inks for Deadpool #22, page 5, co-written by Brian Posehn and Gerry Duggan. as long as I do that, they pretty much leave Deadpool © Marvel Characters, Inc. me alone. There are very few times when I get editorial input other than something like, “Oh, that guy’s didn’t do many cons before I realized it wasn’t for me. I’m a little too hyperactive, and it’s hard for me to sit at a table for a costume changed. Here’s the new one.” long time and behave. [Mike laughs] DRAW!: You don’t do conventions now, but you did do conventions in your formative years. Did you find that the more DRAW!: What, you’d have to get up and run around the convention hall? [laughter] successful you were, the less you did?

MH: If you remember back, I wouldn’t see you often. I’d see MH: You laugh, but Gerry [Duggan], the writer on Deadpool you in Baltimore and Philly, but those were the only ones I who’s become a really good friend, is friends with a guy who would do. I really didn’t have a long stretch of doing conven- has a couple of shops around D.C. and runs a show called tions. I decided over the course of a year or two to try it out. I Awesome Con. He said, “Hey, do you want to come by?” and set up at Baltimore twice, in New York once at a really small I didn’t think he really meant for me to set up. So I went show, I did San Diego once, and that might have been it. I just to see Gerry, and then I realized there was a table for

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tive, and the idea of sitting there all day is a drag. I’m not much of a schmoozer either. I know a lot of people want to hang out after the show, but I’d just be hanging out with the same couple of buddies.

I think you and I hung out in San Diego. I wasn’t sitting there thinking, “Let me see who I can talk to, to try to get a gig.” I’m not good at that. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just not for me.

I have come to the realization that by not doing them for so long, there are all these people in comics I don’t know. I’ll troll through Twitter, and I’ll dig a lot of people’s work, but I don’t know any of them. And that has nothing to do with old age. Even guys my age or older, I hardly know anyone. I only really know the same small circle of people I jumped into the industry with, which is fine by me. I don’t think I’d change much, except that I’m coming to the realization that I’ve probably become a little too obsessed with the work itself, and not been as mindful of the fact that there’s a community behind all this stuff which makes comics and manga unique to most other forms of entertainment. You can go to cons and meet your favorite star if you’re willing to throw 200 bucks at them, whereas you can just walk up to your favorite comic creator and have a conversation. That’s probably the part I’ve not done a good job with. I’ll get emails from people saying, “I wish you’d come to this con in our area,” and I don’t have a good answer for them.

me. I went, “Oh crap. I’ve gotta exit stage left.” [laughter] I literally did run around. At one point I chased down a dude dressed as Deadpool, and I stole his swords. I can’t behave at these things. I love meeting the fans and everything, I’m just not good at sitting at a table for eight hours a day. I’d rather just go and do a few panels and signings for a couple of hours, and then roll out. I wouldn’t make any money….

DRAW!: You’re like Scrooge—“Good say, sir!” [laughter] MH: That’s the thing, there’s no grumpiness behind it. Like, I did the cookout for nine years for when Ringo [Mike Wieringo] passed away, and that was great. I was cooking lunch for a couple hundred people, and we raised money for the Food Bank. I wasn’t behind a table. I was talking to people face to face with no table separating us. That was cool. It felt more real. I don’t know if that’s the right word. I don’t have any bad stories where you meet a fan who did something weird or creeped you out. There’s nothing the fans have done that makes me not want to do cons, there’s just something about it that’s never been a big draw for me.

DRAW!: You don’t want to sit there and do a bunch of sketches.

MH: Yeah, I don’t even mind talking with the fans. Like I said, I was a hyperactive kid, and I’m still probably hyperac-

DRAW!: You know, it is the exact opposite experience of your everyday life, where you sit at home or in your studio, and you’re working in very close quarters, to going into a room of hundreds, if not thousands, of people.

Mike’s pencils for the cover of Deadpool #298.

Deadpool, Juggernaut © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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MH: Yeah, and I get that appeals to some guys. I have a bunch of people in my life at this moment, so I don’t feel as alone in the studio, I guess, as maybe some dudes do. I’ve always had the kids around, and we have a big extended friend and family circle. But I get it. You can go hear people tell you how great you are, you can make some dough… I don’t know. Given the choice, I’d rather go to a store signing for a couple of hours and just hang out.

DRAW!: There was about a seven-year period after I went back to art school where I did very few conventions. Then I started doing them again, but during that time away things had changed a bit.

There was the rise of cosplay, which was there before, but not nearly to the extent it is now, where the cosplay is almost the reason the conventions exist at all. We are like, “Hey, there’s a comic guy.” “What’s that?” “I don’t know, but there’s some old man sitting over there with a piece of paper and a pencil.” “Well, he’s not Stan Lee, so I don’t care.” [laughter] MH: I don’t know, dude. Bob McLeod was yelling at me recently, because he used to teach at PCAD [Pennsylvania College of Art & Design], and I ran into him recently. He said, “You’ve got to get into these cons. You can make good money now.” He was finding the demand had gone way up. Every so often Albert [Moy], who’s my art dealer now, will tell me, “Hey, such-and-such con would love to have you out.” It sounds like comic creators are getting more attention than they have in the past.

DRAW!: There was that bubble in the ’90s when things blew up with the Image guys. I did these cons where they would Mike’s inks for the cover of Deadpool #298.

Deadpool, Juggernaut © Marvel Characters, Inc. fly me out, put me up in a five-star hotel, drive me to a store signing in a limo, which I thought was MH: No, it was after all that, so I had a couple of books under ridiculous. I don’t really care about stuff like that, and it all my belt, but it wasn’t anywhere near like it is now. I just never went away pretty quickly, but there are guys now who make really made a lot of dough. So I’m surprised to hear from their living going to three conventions a month. people, “Dude, you’ve gotta come do these things. People MH: I never made a lot of money at these things. Ever. I want to meet artists, and you can make money.” I don’t know barely broke even half the time. The couple of times I did Bal- what to think. timore, everybody around me was talking like, “Whoa! We’re making lots of dough!” and had I not been close enough to DRAW!: Look, you’re a top guy on a top book with a top home that I didn’t have to book a hotel room, I would have publisher. If people are wanting to pay you money to go, been in the hole. comp your room, comp your table, that’s a plus-plus. Because things flip, the way the business is. If you’re going to do it, DRAW!: Was that when you were doing Hysteria? now is probably a good time to do it. One of the reasons I

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wanted to interview you again, because you’re the only person I’ve interviewed twice for the magazine— MH: That’s weird. You know I’m a huge fan. When you asked, I almost said, “Are you sure, Mike?” [laughter] DRAW!: I’ve always loved your stuff. You know that. But I’m also interested to see the trajectory of your career, the trajectory of your art, and how things have changed. You were talking about attractiveness. Your work has always been great storytelling, strong drawing, and attractiveness, which at the majors is not really that typical now. Attractiveness, from my perspective, in my era if something looked weird, they would give it to John Romita, and he would say, “No. The face is like this,” and the bullpen would fix it. Now people would

take great offense at that. Any time John Romita would fix something on my piece, I would be stoked because, “I’ve got a freaking John Romita drawing!”

So you’ve done Deadpool. What did you do right before Deadpool?

MH: My French book. I was doing Oms en Série for a French publisher.

DRAW!: Which is being reprinted now, right?

MH: Actually, no. I don’t really know what the French publisher is doing. I was talking with a publisher here I’d worked with in the past, and I don’t want to name them, but they ended up passing on it for whatever reason, and I didn’t really try beyond that since it’s something I own. The French publisher said they’re talking with people, so I decided to let it go and see what happens. But to the best of my knowledge, they haven’t had any luck with it. I don’t know how hard they’re trying either.

But it’s one of those books that’s so uniquely French. The main character is the hero because he can read. It’s as odd a thing you can think of as compared to American comics. [laughs] So I had done that, and before that I’d done Conan for a year with Roy Thomas.

DRAW!: I did Conan when I started too, and I remember one of the editors for Conan said that doing Conan was sort of like not working in comics, because the fans don’t care if it’s not “The Death of Gwen Stacy” or something.

MH: I can see that.

DRAW!: It’s bizarre, because some of the greatest artists worked on the Conan books.

MH: I know. It was very intimidating for me. “How can I possibly do this justice?” But you’re right, the Robert E. Howard fans were sort of a group unto their own, and you get the impression they don’t read any comics other than the Conan books.

Pencils and inks for Oms en série: La vieille-terr, the third and final volume of the series.

Oms en série © Stefan Wul

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DRAW!: At the time I was doing it, it was still on the newsstands, and in the PXs, so bikers would buy Conan, and soldiers

Deadpool teams up with the Avengers in this two-page spread of Mike’s pencils for Deadpool #14.

All characters © Marvel Characters, Inc.

would buy Conan. There was a fanbase of men outside of the comic stores who bought that stuff, which probably doesn’t exist now because they don’t sell books the same way. But you got someone’s attention. Who called you to work on Deadpool?

MH: It was Jordan White, who was the editor the whole time we were on it. They had just relaunched Deadpool with a new #1. It was a big relaunch with Gerry Duggan, the writer who stayed on through the entire series, and Brian Posehn, the comedian. Tony [Moore] drew the initial run, and I think he threw my name in the hat. God bless him. The guy’s been a really great friend. Tony’s an amazing guy. Once early on in his career—I think it was pre-Walking Dead—I tried to help him get a gig on a He-Man book that was offered to me. I had this unspoken rule that if a gig came past my desk and I couldn’t take it, I wouldn’t just pass on it, I’d would say, “I can’t do it, but you ought to talk to this guy.” I don’t even remember if Tony got the gig, but he’s repaid that thing ten times over. He brought me on to help with Fear Agent at Dark Horse, and I helped with The Punisher a little, doing lay-

outs. Deadpool was double-shipping. Every two weeks was another issue, and no one guy can do that, so they wanted someone else to come in and do the next arc.

I actually turned it down at first for business reasons, but I took a liking to Jordan. He talked to me in this—I don’t want to say friendly, because lots of editors are friendly, but he talked to me in this way I took a liking to and came to respect.

So I did a couple of things I said I’d never do. I stayed on that book for five and a half years, which in the past I avoided. I like bouncing around and doing a lot of different things. And then I signed my first exclusive with them while doing Deadpool, which I thought I’d always avoid because the idea of being locked into a contract kind of scared me. But I was so happy, and I wanted to keep the team together. I thought, “I’m not going anywhere, so I might as well sign the exclusive and guarantee we’re all locking into this thing together.

So, yeah, it was from Conan, to the French books, to Deadpool. I was actually working on the French books while doing the first two years of Deadpool, because I already had that on my plate when Deadpool came along.

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my stamp on it. I’m thrilled I broke my own rule, because it has been creatively a high point for me.

And I realize I’m looking to do that now with Superior Spider-Man. I’ve made it clear I’d like to stay put and help build this thing up until whatever time it is we bow out. Bouncing around, it’s easy to get a creative recharge by just jumping to the next project. But I think I saw more growth by sticking around on one book for so long, and having to live with it. It’s kind of like being in a longterm relationship. You might have had a lot of crummy habits as a bachelor, but you have to improve when you get married, and that’s kind of what Deadpool did for me as an artist. I had to become a better artist to be able to draw all these crazy things for as long as we did.

DRAW!: Do you feel there were certain periods or certain issues that forced you forward?

MH: It might sound goofy, but each arc did that, I think, because Gerry was doing these wide-open stories with big action scenes and genuinely heartfelt moments. It got to the point that I’d get a new script, and it was like a bet. “I’ll bet we can’t get Mike to draw Deadpool fighting an entire helicarrier full of bad guys,” or Deadpool becomes an Avenger, and all of a sudden it’s a team book. Each arc had its own crazy, unique challenges. I’d been bouncing around in all these genres. I wanted to be like the old-time comic artists who could draw anything, so I did a romance book, and I did a western, and I did sci-fi. I wanted to be able to draw it all, and it was like all that stuff was training for Deadpool. We had a storyline that had some western elements, lots of sci-fi stuff, lots of horror stuff, all in one title. And it forced me to do it better than I’d done it before.

Drawing sci-fi the first time, you’re just trying to find your feet. You’re looking at Wally Wood, thinkMike’s pencils for Superior Spider-Man #4, page 1, featuring a character, ing, “How in the world am I going to do something who looks an awful lot like a certain Crusty Critic we could name. better than that?” [laughter] The second time you All characters © Marvel Characters, Inc. realize, “I don’t need to be Wally Wood. I have a DRAW!: In today’s world it is unusual for people to stay on more sure footing for what I think I want to do here.” It just a book that long. When I came into the business, you wanted flowed better, and was more fun. to be on a book for a long time. That was the goal.

The other thing was that I was deciding with each arc, “I MH: You’re right. While I was on Deadpool, I did dabble. don’t want to find a rhythm that makes it comfortable just to I did two little Superman things. They were actually trying hit deadlines. I want to find a way to do cool things with each to get me to do Action Comics, but I turned it down. Then issue.” So I would still have little panic attacks every time I they asked me to do a Green Lantern Corps thing. They also started a new arc. “Okay, this is gotta be better than the last offered me a Kamandi thing, which was hard to turn down, one. What am I going to do?” It would suck at the beginning, especially coming off of the French book, which had so much but by the end of each arc, I genuinely felt like I’d grown. in common aesthetically. But Deadpool just felt right. I’ve The other rule I made was I wasn’t going to allow myself really tried, even at the expense of financial gain, to do what to look at my stuff once it was published for a minimum of makes me feel happy, and I was so happy with the people I six months. I just read my last arc of Deadpool, and it’s been was working with and with the book, it just felt right to stay well over a year since it came out. I find that I can’t look at put, even though Superman’s a big deal, and Kamandi would the finished books immediately when they come out because have been a big deal for me. And after I while I felt a sense I’m still in the art-making mode. If I look at the book then, I of pride in sticking around on the series so long and putting find all the things I missed, and the mistakes I made, and it

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A two-page spread of pencils and inks for Oms en série: La vieille-terr.

Oms en série © Stefan Wul

makes me crazy. I can’t appreciate it until at least six months to a year later. I picked that book up, kind of dreading looking through it, and it’s got some bumps and boils here and there, but we made a pretty good funny book. I’m not ashamed to have my name on it. [laughter] It really was a big deal for me creatively.

I think the French book was also like that. I was very mindful of the French market, and it was the first time I thought, “I’m going to try to make a genuinely beautiful book. I don’t know if I’ll succeed, but I’ll at least get closer than if I’m in the American mode of ‘hit the deadline and get to the next issue’.”

DRAW!: The French approach, you’re producing an album.

You have a deadline, but it’s not like you have to turn something in every two weeks, and the editor’s calling you on the phone.

MH: Yeah, they are much more mindful of the fact that these books are permanent. The irony was that when they hired me, I was going to the French market hoping to get a breather from the American market and just slow down, and they were thinking, “We’ll hire this American guy, and he’ll be churning out books fast as hell.” I’m thinking, “My French friends might do one or two volumes a year, so that’s what I’m going to do,” and they were expecting it to go much faster than that.

We had to find a middle ground, so of course we had some deadlines, but they tended to be more like, “We want to have this book out in time for Angoulême.”

DRAW!: When you were working on that, did you get a full script?

MH: Yeah, I got a full script. I’ve only ever done the Marvel method twice. Once was with Larry Hama when I did the G.I. Joe reboot with him, and then once with Roy on Conan. I’m perfectly okay with that, but hardly anybody writes like that any more. Ironically, the script I got from J. D. [Morvan] for the French book was probably closer to the Marvel method.

There was very little in terms of description. It did have dialogue, but it wasn’t very tech-heavy. The only trick was, I can read and write a little French, but nothing as fluent as I needed for this. So I had a buddy who’s an American ex-pat who lives in France now, and he would translate it to English for me.

That made it much more doable.

Their pages are denser. The average comic page in America is between four and six panels. In France it was a given there would be between ten to twelve panels per page. Every page really felt like drawing two pages of an American comic, plus I drew them a little bigger than American sized pages to give myself some real estate to play with all those extra panels.

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it.” So when you’re laying out one of these things, you can allow yourself to meander through the story a bit, and plan for more subtle facial expressions and acting from one panel to the next. You’re not in such a hurry to move on to the next page.

In American comics you’re looking for the big action shot that you’re going to give the most real estate to, and then you cram in the rest of the panels. With this you really didn’t have that so much. You need to give each of the panels some order of importance, and not look for one action shot to emphasize, and be extra smart about where to place the word balloons.

One of the things that was tough for me to get used to, was they wanted me to place the word balloons. I think they consider the reading flow of the art part of the art. Mentally it felt like doing multiple pages per page, as you’re having to juggle more density, panel placement, balloon placement, no big action shots you can drop into the middle of a page, and be mindful that the audience has a high expectation of the level of the art.

DRAW!: They want a lot of backgrounds. In America, you can draw one or two panels with backgrounds, and the rest of the page, no backgrounds, but there it seems like they want a background in every panel.

Another page of pencils and inks for Oms en série: La vieille-terr.

MH: Pretty much. They absolutely Oms en série © Stefan Wul expect a level of density you rarely see here. Even with my American DRAW!: What was the experience of laying pages out that stuff, I tend to do more backgrounds than most folks will do, were much more dense than what you were used to? but this was beyond that. And they don’t want it mindlessly MH: This is probably where my style suited the book. Early thrown in, they want the places to feel real. If there’s a crowd on in my career I tended to be very moment to moment. I’d scene, they don’t want stiff, quick background characters like want to draw things almost like a storyboard—like this hap- you might do on a tight deadline for an American comic. They pens, then that happens—and I didn’t leave a lot of informa- want you to show off a little bit. tion in the gutters, so to speak, to cover some distance. It I was doing a sci-fi story, so some of those backgrounds was working with Matt Wagner early on, who said, “You’re were just swirly, liquid kinds of backgrounds, and they might allowed to show a guy throwing a punch, and then the other not have a lot of detail, but the publisher wanted the enviguy on the ground in the next panel. You don’t have to show ronment to feel realistic. And that’s probably what it really three panels of him throwing one punch.” [laughter] But the is. They have a certain level of sophistication in terms of French book sort of lent itself to that. Frankly, I could take one their visual vocabulary, and they want to believe what you’re of those pages and draw it in six panels, because there’s a lot showing them is a real thing. They’re not looking for someof repetition. But when I would do that, they would say, “No, thing hidden behind a stylish flourish of any kind. They want no, no. We need more panels. The French audience expects a real drawing.

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DRAW!: I was talking to somebody on Facebook a couple of months back, and they said the European market was changing and now becoming more influenced by manga. The younger readers are more influenced by that taste. Do you find yourself being influenced by manga at all?

MH: I was always influenced by manga. My wife’s family is from Greece, and she had a cousin who came over here. He got all excited when he found out I work in comics. He talked about the comics he enjoyed, and it was all this pirated Japanese stuff, so you’re right, it’s getting bigger over there.

My first book, Hysteria, which I self-published, was all black-andwhite, I used hand-cut tone—I used Japanese sound effects, for God’s sake. [laughter] I was very heavily influenced, and I still am. I think what I was reading early on just doesn’t look so much as what these kids are expecting. I was looking at Akira and anything by Otomo.

Hysteria was heavily influenced by stuff like Appleseed. And I still have that in me even now. You can see some of that in Deadpool.

DRAW!: That sense of detail you put in the backgrounds with all that grit and dirt and bits.

MH: Yeah, exactly. I don’t watch as much TV as you would think, but I still end up buying all these art books for this stuff. I was looking at [Yoh] Yoshinari’s stuff like crazy. I try to get away from the stereotypical stuff everyone perceives as manga, and find the more interesting stuff. Manga has this rap of being all big eyes and speed lines, and clearly that’s not all there is to it. There’s a mainstream look to a lot of stuff, but if you dig past that you’ll find genuine draftsmanship, and that’s what interests me.

DRAW!: Do you spend time thinking about how you’re going to alter your blend, I guess, for each project? Because you weren’t doing anything like that on Conan.

MH: Early on, from one book to the next, I sort of gained a reputation for changing my style. For me, that was an artistic decision. I would make the comparison to film and say I wouldn’t shoot a war film the same way I’d shoot a romance film. No one would question that with a filmmaker, but with a comic artist, or an artist of any kind, that’s not seen as being a good idea, especially when no one can predict what your next job is going to look like. I did a lot of that early on. Now I try to be mindful of what folks are going to expect from me, and if I’m going to make a big change, I try to make it obvious why. My mainstream stuff has all the influences we’re talking about. I might look at how smoke is drawn in an anime, and think of that when I want to draw smoke in a comic. There might be hatching in some Old World print that I want to bring over to my comics. Everything is fair game.

But my little Kickstarter horror book doesn’t look anything like my mainstream stuff, but I try to make it clear that this story is not in the realm of my mainstream world. So I still play around with changing styles up, but I’m not really going to do that with my mainstream work and have some fan going, “What just happened?”

DRAW!: I saw the Moebius stuff in Heavy Metal, and it was some time later before I saw one of the Lt. Blueberry books. I was like, “This kind of looks like Moebius,” and then I realized that Moebius was his penname, and Giraud was his real name. And it was, wow! Here’s this guy who did this brush style, with a Caniff-y kind of orientation, and

The first two pages of Mike’s new horror mini-comic, Lost by Monday.

Lost by Monday © Mike Hawthorne

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then he did the Moebius stuff, and eventually he sort of married the two sometimes.

MH: When I did the French book, he was heavily in the back of my mind, and it was by design. I decided, since I was doing this weird, futuristic book, that I wanted to nod to Moebius, and then to Frank Stella’s paintings, the kind of weird, abstract shapes, and to some Frank Gehry architecture.

I thought, “I’m going to make a style board of these three artists to reference.” And you’ll see all the influence there, but above all of them was Moebius, and the French picked up on it immediately, and they appreciated it, which was cool.

That, to them, is so old school. I got the impression sometimes when doing interview that it would be like a modern artist channeling Kirby or Toth. It was like, “Whoa! We love this guy, but we didn’t think anybody”—I shouldn’t say they didn’t think anybody was into it, but I just got that impression.

Turnaround design of Mucaro, a character from Mike’s Hysteria.

Hysteria © Mike Hawthorne

DRAW!: Moebius crosses generations. You have 60-yearolds who love his stuff, and 15-year-olds who are just finding his work and having their minds blown.

MH: Yeah, everybody loves that guy.

DRAW!: In the case of somebody like Kirby, if you grew up with him, you get it. If you didn’t grow up with him you go, “This stuff is weird looking.” I see that with a lot of the students. I just absorbed it before I got to that point where you think, “I like this more than this.” As a kid I just read comics, and I liked his Jimmy Olsen because he drew weird monsters and stuff, and there was that story where Superman’s running with the atomic reactor over his head and throwing it down a hole, and to me, that was awesome. But if I showed it to a 15-year-old today, they might go, “That’s kind of abstract and weird.” They’re coming from that anime world, where there’s nothing that aggressive. Because anime is not aggressive.

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MH: You’re totally right.

DRAW!: And Kirby is very brutal and aggressive. When [Joe] Sinnott inked him, he kind of smoothed it all out, but when [Mike] Royer inked him, it would be more aggressive.

Even when I show it to my assistants, sometimes they’ll say, “Well, I like the designs of the machines, but that dude’s head is really weird.”

MH: It’s funny you used the word “brutal”, because it made me think of brutalism in architecture, and those big, blocky, ugly buildings that got the job done, but looked like they wanted to kill you, and that’s kind of what you got from those Kirby villains. And you’re right, it took me years to understand what I was looking at with him. I would always hear from artists I respected how great Kirby was, and I’d be like, “Man, I just don’t get this.” [laughter] I started to pick up the Kirby Collector, and thought, “I’m going to figure this guy out, because I don’t know what I’m missing.” I might have inked a half-dozen pencil drawings printed in the magazine, and I think it was something about having my hand go over his lines where I was like, “Wait a minute, this guy wasn’t interested in how it looked, he was interested in how it felt.” And that’s not that far removed from the far-out anime and manga you might be into. Plus, he was older when he did all that stuff. Wasn’t he in his 40s when he did Fantastic Four?

DRAW!: Yeah, he was middle-aged.

MH: So I got this sense of, “Holy crap, I need to haul ass, because I have a lot of stories in me still.” The other thing with Kirby, I’ve heard this quote—which is usually attributed to Einstein, but part of me wonders if that’s made up—where he said he only had one original idea, and that true genius is creativity, or something to that effect. And that’s sort of the same idea that came to me with Kirby. Yes, I am classically trained, and got my BFA in Painting. All it got me was that I can draw a clavicle correctly. This guy had hundreds and hundreds of characters that poured out of him and that decades later we’re still infatuated with, and I don’t have that. That’s the magic of Kirby. He comes up with the Silver Surfer? Think about how crazy a thing that is. I love drawing Silver Surfer. I got to draw an event book he was in, and I was sitting there thinking, “I cannot imagine pitching something like this even now.

‘He’s an all silver dude who flies around the cosmos on a surfboard.’” It’s bonkers.

DRAW!: People would say, “What are you smoking?” But here’s this middle-aged guy who moves out to California, sees some people surfing, and thinks, “Silver Surfer.” Or Arnim Zola, a guy with a head in the middle of his chest.

MH: I just had to draw him recently, and I’m thinking, “Christ, this is still a compelling character, even though it’s a

Mike’s design drawings for a Venom-merged Wolverine for Marvel’s Venom crossover event.

Venom, Wolverine © Marvel Characters, Inc.

head in a TV screen in a robot body.” [laughter] It’s fantastic stuff, and that’s the thing we can’t train for, and I don’t know if any level of beautiful drawing can make up that difference. I will probably never come up with a tenth of the crazy stuff he did. He experimented like hell, like with those crazy pastedup backgrounds he did in some books. It took me a while to figure out, but the guy is still untouchable. We can all pretend, but none of us will ever—and forget just comics culture, but American culture in general. It’s gotten so big now, that kids today are infatuated with characters this guy dreamt up.

DRAW!: It’s fun to play with those toys, but do you feel the compulsion to become your own Kirby?

MH: Oh, all the time. I always do a creator-owned book while I’m doing a mainstream book, it’s just nobody ever reads the creator-owned stuff. [laughs] Hysteria was that for me. There was so much more that never got published. I have a halfdrawn issue, I have all these bonkers characters I never got to use. And one of the things Marvel often comes to me for is character designs. I’ve probably designed 25, 30 different characters for them. It scratches that itch. If it were up to me, I’d make up new characters every issue to be frank. I think it’s cool they have this deep bench we can choose all these differ-

ent characters from and do cool stuff with, but if it were up to me I’d be making up new characters all the time.

DRAW!: But wouldn’t it be better to be making them up for yourself rather than for them?

MH: Sure, but the thing is, I’d be happy making them up both ways. I understand that making characters up for them, you don’t have any ownership and all that, but I don’t know. I feel, at least visually, like I could make up a new character every issue and not feel like I’m running out of ideas. I’ve gotten to create whole cloth a handful of characters for Marvel—the Machine Team characters, one of which they used in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. It was just a dude. That particular character wasn’t very exciting, but recently I got to create a new Wolverine villain, and I was on cloud nine. I went way above what I should have done with the designs. I kept going with it because it’s just something I enjoy doing. Usually though, it’s just a redesign. You have a character that already exists, and then you come up with something new. I did a handful of designs for the Venom event. They would say, “What if Wolverine and Rocket Raccoon combined with a symbiote?

What would they look like?” And I love that stuff. I know it’s probably cheesy, but I love it.

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Design drawings for a new Wolverine villain, Persephone.

Persephone © Marvel Characters, Inc.

DRAW!: That’s one of the things I have to say. Ever since I’ve known you, you’ve always been very genuinely enthusiastic about doing the work. Much like Kirby, that has transferred from your heart through your pencil to the page.

MH: Well, thank you. That really means the world to me. You always hope that people will pick up the book and say, “Holy crap! This guy was all in.” I’m a little speechless. Thank you.

I try really hard not to get too wrapped up in the business side. If I can be pragmatic and, no matter what the market is like, or what people within comics are upset about, if I just focus on the part that is just drawing, then this is a pretty sweet gig. If Marvel decides tomorrow, “We’re done,” and nobody hires me again, I can at least say I went a couple of decades with not having to hold down a real job. [laughter] I got to draw for a living.

DRAW!: I’m sure that if they pulled the plug tomorrow, you’d still be getting plenty of work. Your skill set is applicable to many other types of work. Do you have any aspirations for doing any other kind of work—storyboards or film stuff?

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MH: I hopped out and did some boards with [Chris] Bailey on Hop, no pun intended, and that was fun. Then I did some more boards for the animated thing he’s working on. I did some concept work for upcoming Marvel shows—one liveaction show, and I helped them get the Hit-Monkey show off the ground with Hulu. I did some design work for that. That stuff is fun, but I don’t really have the desire to jump out and go work in film for a bunch of reasons. I still get offers for that stuff, but I don’t find it as fulfilling.

Early on, when my wife was still pregnant with our first kid, I was going to move out to L.A. and work on an animated TV show for Fox. That didn’t feel right. Six or seven years ago, Valve had me out for a week, and I was going to go work for them. Valve is a video game company that makes Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress, and stuff like that. I was there for a week, and it just didn’t feel right. I had been out in the cold for so long that the idea of being in a studio felt weird. I actually did some concept boards for Fortnite, back before it was the monstrosity it is now, the monolith that all the kids are playing. They asked me to come out to the studio and do a little more work, and I passed on that. None of it made me happy, I guess. It just comes down to that. And I recognize that’s probably foolish from a financial perspective, especially seeing the success of things like Fortnite—and I had fun on it! I genuinely did, and those people were amazing to work with, but I still always wanted to come back to comics. It’s also afforded

me the luxury of being home and watching my kids grow up.

With that said, there are a couple of oddball projects I’d like to do on my own. I’ve wanted to do a Gorillaz type project with a recording artist, and I came close a couple of times.

That would be a dream come true—a combination of hip-hop and comic art, I’d be on cloud nine with something like that.

DRAW!: Al Williamson had some page by a French artist named Paul Gillon, and they were huge! Bigger than Hal Foster pages. I have a couple of lithographs of Moebius pages, and they’re about the size of a [Hal] Foster Prince Valiant Sunday strip. You have to work bigger there, or you’re drawing in miniature.

MH: Exactly. I mentioned earlier that density-wise it was like drawing two pages, but physically it was like drawing a double-page spread here. That was about the size of the paper.

It just made sense. Now, later with the second two volumes, I drew the pages slightly smaller because I changed my workflow. I wasn’t penciling, and I could noodle with a really fine pen and still squeeze in all the panels.

I remember talking with Ringo before he passed, and this dude would draw every page twice. You probably remember.

He’d do a rough page, and then he’d take out that sewing machine that he’d turned into a light box, put a fresh sheet of paper on top of his rough page, and do this immaculate, beautiful pencil. I’d be like, “That’s amazing!” You might have even

DRAW!: You’ve been doing this for a long time now. How has your process changed over the past ten years? Are you doing more digitally? I mean, I loved watching those anatomy videos on your Instagram feed. Those were awesome!

MH: Thank you! I had to dust off a bunch of old anatomy books I hadn’t looked at since, in some cases, college. It was funny, I accidentally wrote that book. I would draw the handouts to give to my students every class, and by the end of the semester my daughter was curious and went through them.

We ended up scanning all the pages, and had 120 pages of stuff.

In terms of my workflow, that changes very often. Just in the past ten years, I’ve probably had at least a dozen different ways of making pages. Most recently, one of the big switches was when I hit a stride with Deadpool where I wasn’t doing layouts at all. I was going straight to the page—partly because I had done volume two of the French book without really penciling it. I would do a little rough layout, blow them up big, and ink that, not bothering with the pencil stage, and that felt pretty natural. Even the layouts didn’t really feel necessary, so going into Deadpool, I wondered if I could go straight to the page with pencils, and I did that for the longest time. My wife bought me the new iPad with the Apple Pencil and Procreate this past Christmas, so now I’m using that to do layouts, then I print it out and do tight pencils over that. Right before you called I was doing a layout in Procreate. I’ve never had one solid way of working, partly because I’m constantly tweaking the workflow so I have more time to do the rendering and detailed backgrounds. I just want the most efficient process possible.

But, frankly, there are times when I change the process just for fun to see if it makes the page more interesting. Doing digital layouts, I thought, “Oh, it might be kind of fun to sit with the kids while I do layouts, and see what happens and if it can translate to a page.” So my workflow will literally change on a whim, and sometimes it’s based on I just want to do something new so that it doesn’t feel stale. Sometimes it changes for practical reasons, like with the French stuff.

Drawing from one of Mike’s Their pages are a different size than ours, and if anatomy sketchbooks.

I had kept the dimensions 11" wide, I’d have had Artwork © Mike Hawthorne to draw a much smaller page, so I thought, “I’m going to draw these things huge.” Early on I was drawing pages that were maybe 20" x 30".

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Drawing from pulled from Mike’s anatomy and life drawing sketchbooks.

Artwork © Mike Hawthorne

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(this page and next) Mike still does layouts for cover approvals, so here is his layout, pencils, and inks for a variant cover of Marvel 2-in-One #3, with the image flipped in the finished inks.

Hulk, Thing © Marvel Characters, Inc.

made the joke, “You don’t even need to ink these. Just adjust the contrast in Photoshop.”

I used to tell him, “Your first shot is still better than everybody else’s pages. You could do twice the number of books if you didn’t draw everything twice.” I bickered with him often because, even though his work was beautiful, I know he always felt he didn’t get to do all the other stuff he wanted to do.

It kind of breaks my heart, so I want to be careful that I don’t have one way of doing everything, and then find out ten years later, “Damn. If I had have done this and that, I could have upped my production by 50% and done a couple of creator-owned books I didn’t have time to do.”

DRAW!: I don’t do layouts anymore on the strips just because of the speed at which you have to produce. I figure, “Just do it.” You just draw it, and if you don’t like it you can erase it and do another one.

MH: That’s kind of where I got to with Deadpool. Now that’s after feeling very comfortable with it, but there are times it makes for a more fun page. I had an early tendency to overplan things. Very early on, I used to draw each individual panel big, and then shrink them down on a photocopier and then lightbox each panel onto my board. It took forever, but I thought, “I’m planning things better. This is going to make

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for a better page,” but it almost never did. If I just chilled out and had fun with it—and that doesn’t mean cutting corners, but just letting it happen—I would end up liking those pages better.

DRAW!: Kirby was similar to Moebius in that Moebius didn’t do all these little layouts. He did automatic drawing.

He would just draw, and if he didn’t like something, he just erased it. Kirby never really erased. His pencils were like a tight sketch. I think the only thing that bothered Kirby was that he was really used to the old twice-up size paper, and when the page size changed in ’66, ’67, he kept drawing at the same size, but the pages were smaller. If you look at the Fantastic Four issues with the origin of Warlock, that’s the last

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of the twice-up size boards. Then look at the stuff that came after, with the Super-Skrull and the Mole Man, it’s still awesome, but you can tell that the work magnified. I feel like the stuff he did later at DC, like New Gods, was cramped compared to Thor. Kamandi and The Demon were a little bit less cramped, but when you have all those characters like in Forever People, he was not a guy who was going to draw little, tiny lines. His calligraphy, his mark was made at a certain gauge or something.

MH: That makes perfect sense. I never thought of that.

DRAW!: And you can see that with most of those guys who transitioned from drawing large to having to draw smaller, but I notice it the most when I read his work.

MH: It makes me think, because one of the biggest changes to my workflow is the gauge of the pencil. In the last five or six years, I started drawing a lot more with mechanical pencils, and really small ones, as small as .03. At first I thought I used these pencils just because I’m a junkie for art supplies, and I’ll try just about any pencil once, but now that you mention it, the other really big change is that I don’t really ink my work anymore. Once I got to a certain point, Marvel said, “We should get you an inker.” I moved so fast, it just made sense. My early pencils were really rough because I knew I could go in with a small pen or brush and fine-tune it. Now I’m having to hand these things off to people, and I don’t want to lean too heavily on them, so I’m rendering way more and with smaller pencils. You mentioned Kirby’s calligraphy, it’s almost like I’m changing my signature so to speak, because I’m using finer tools to write it.

Pencils for Superior Spider-Man #1, page 2, to be inked by Wade von Grawbadger.

All characters © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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DRAW!: I was talking with Bob McLeod the other day, and I was saying his pencils were tight. He said it was his way of trying to control the inker.

MH: I try really hard not to do that. I’ve only really worked at Marvel with maybe a halfdozen guys and mainly with two guys. Now it’s with Wade [von Grawbadger], and previously it was Terry Pallot, and I try really hard not to get in their way, because the way I see it, we’re all artists, and everybody wants to do their thing. If I’m leaning too heavily on them to do things a certain way, I’m afraid that it will make the work worse. I feel very strongly that everybody does their best work when they’re happy. I do my best work when people trust me to do my thing and aren’t trying to micromanage me, so I try really hard not to do that with inkers.

I think what I’m more mindful of is doing my job well so they don’t have to fill in the gaps. I don’t go in and say, “Hey, I don’t like how you inked this thing. Can you change it to be like this?” I’ve heard crazy stories of guys refusing to let an inker ink their faces or their hands. I don’t do anything like that. I just hand it off, and what you hope for is that you get the best possible artist to work with, and then you let them do what you admire about their work in the first place. Working with Wade, I honestly think he’s one of the best in the business.

I specifically asked if he’d be available when Stuart [Immonen] retired. I was like, “Please, I know it’s a long shot, but if he’s available it would be really awesome to do [Superior] Spider-Man with him.” I really try to just stay away from him, because he’s going to do amazing work. He doesn’t need me telling him to ink the hands a certain way. That would be

silly. The same with the colorist—I don’t really give notes unless it’s something glaring like, “Hey, this guy’s boots are red, not blue,” because it’s not really my book, it’s all of ours together. If it were Hysteria, I might be more picky about it, or just do it myself, but it’s not. It’s a big budget production, and there’s no one person controlling this thing.

I do think, though, that my tools are changing. I catch myself wanting to make up for what I would be doing with a pen naturally. I’ve gotten so used to dictating what the line looks like with the pen, that I’m almost trying to find a graphite version of that.

A live-drawing sketch from one of Mike’s many sketchbooks.

Artwork © Mike Hawthorne

DRAW!: Are you using a harder lead now?

MH: That’s pretty much the same. The very softest lead I’ll go to is an HB, but normally I use an H or an F, F being between H and HB. Anything softer makes me happy, but it’s too smudgy on the page.

Working traditionally, that’s still an issue. I don’t want to smudge up the pages and waste time later trying to clean it up for print.

DRAW!: Do you have any desire to try to work all digitally, or do you still want to have originals?

MH: I don’t think I want to go totally digital. I think if I worked totally digitally, it would slow me up in some ways, because I would zoom in too far and do things that wouldn’t show up after the printing process anyway. Plus I still favor the tactile quality of working on paper. I don’t know why, but the technical stuff feels more accurate when I’m doing it by hand on paper. Like, if I’m having to use a big twoor three-point perspective grid, the digital stuff… I just prefer doing it on paper for some reason. Now, it is nice to have the original art, because it’s a thing I love, not so much for art sales, but just to have. It’s nice to be able to go back and hold the pages and go, “Oh, this is how I was drawing ten years ago,” and be able to glean something more out of it. Not that you can’t do that with the digital work necessarily, but I prefer looking at paper. And I’m still sketching all the time. I just like drawing on paper.

DRAW!: You just like drawing. That’s one of the things I love about you. One of the greatest pleasures in my life is taking a pencil and a piece of paper and just drawing.

MH: Absolutely.

DRAW!: I interviewed Howard Chaykin for the [Pencil-toPencil] podcast the other day [go to penciltopencil.com or Stitcher to listen], and he doesn’t draw for pleasure anymore.

I talk to other artists, and it’s the same thing. They love their work, and they’re very passionate about it, but all their passion goes into whatever the project is. My projects—the strips cannot contain my passion. I can only do so much with those vehicles.

MH: I remember you doing those little ink drawings for Inktober, and those were gorgeous! It’s a whole different language than what you’re allowed to speak in those comic strips.

DRAW!: Right. When I sit down to do those, that’s completely me, my pure id without any constraints. It’s funny, when I was younger, I think I would have been more afraid to do that in a way, because I’d be thinking, “I’ll do a comic thing, because that’s real.” But the gratifying thing is that people seem to like that stuff more than any of my other stuff.

MH: [laughs] Yeah. And like you said, I do love drawing, but also I made a conscious decision early on that I wanted to be as good as I could possibly be. The way I see it, Serena Williams still practices, LeBron James still practices—I have no excuse not to keep up with the skill set that gets you here in the first place. I keep usually about a half-dozen sketchbooks,

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Edited drawings from Mike’s anatomy sketchbooks.

Artwork © Mike Hawthorne

and each sketchbook has an assigned theme to it. I have a sketchbook of just anatomical drawings. I have a sketchbook just for life drawing, usually from life when I get to an open drawing session, which used to be about once a week, drawing with the students. I have a little sketchbook for learning how to draw animals, another one of just facial expressions. I figure, I enjoy drawing, but I also need to refine the skill set, and I don’t know how to get better other than to throw effort at it. I wish I could be one of those guys who can throw it all onto the page and then turn off the light, have a beer, and chill out, but I don’t know how to do that. When I’m not drawing pages, I’ll go downstairs and I’ll have a sketchbook in my lap, sketching the kids or the dog, or working through some anatomical thing, just to stay sharp, or to find an easier way to do the things I did yesterday.

DRAW!: I’m the same way. When I did those ink drawings, a lot of times I’d do them after working 19 hours, and I’d spend another hour or two doing them just to wind down.

MH: That’s not a thing you can buy. That’s one of the things I’ve admired so much about your stuff is that, first of all, that range. You can do a Sunday comic strip, and then do a bonkers cartoony gag strip thing, and then do a 1940s-inspired rendered out illustration. That says this is a guy who wants

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to go to the grave still drawing. [laughter] And that’s what I respect above all else.

DRAW!: I appreciate that, and I’m sliding closer every day. [laughter] All the people I admired, that’s what it appeared like to me—they loved drawing, and drawing all kinds of different stuff, especially a guy like Moebius. The amount of stuff that guy produced in his life is phenomenal. He had to love it beyond doing it just for pay, because he made millions and millions of drawings. You were constantly seeing new work from him.

MH: And he was extremely good from beginning to end.

DRAW!: I just got a new book which has a bunch of his early ’60s stuff, and he was good then, but he became great.

MH: You mentioned Blueberry, and I almost had a panic attack over that book. I was doing a western way back for Beckett, and I sort of let them dictate the schedule. This was pretty early on in my career, and I agreed to draw faster than I should have. But I still wanted to make it really good. Then I discovered Blueberry, and I was like, “Jesus, this is depressing. I cannot believe how good this is, and I’m rushing through my crappy little western book.” But you kind of need those little panic attacks to remind you that you have to practice.

You cannot take for granted, “I drew a good page yesterday, therefore every page I’ll draw from here on out will be good.”

DRAW!: I remember when I interviewed him— MH: You spoke to him? Oh, my God. DRAW!: Yeah, at the Philcon in 2000, I think it was. It was pretty awesome to talk with Moebius obviously. It’s like you’re talking to God. I remember him saying that if he went a day without drawing, he felt like there was a slippage. He would notice it the next day.

MH: Oh, my God, yes!

DRAW!: This guy is one of the best who will ever draw comics or anything, and if he feels like he’s slipping if he doesn’t draw every day, then how can I do any less than that?

And I always tell that to my students, because this job is hard.

I’m sure you must have those days where, even though you’re very enthusiastic, you still have to walk in the studio, put the key in the ignition, and push the lever forward. You can only get better at drawing by drawing. You can read all the books on it, you can look at all the pictures by the most awesome artists and feel inspired, but that in and of itself is not going to make your drawing better.

MH: Amen! And I agree 100%. If that guy, who I think was legitimately a genius, still needs to practice and draw every day, who am I to skip a day? Drawing, and this is probably blasphemous, is probably as close to a religion as I have at this point. I have two or three sketchbooks on me at any given point. And I have a custom-made wallet that can hold the small format field notes sketchbooks, so that in a pinch, if I don’t have my regular sketchbooks with me, I can break out my wallet and sketch.

of them, and I probably could have, except I still have these 20 pages for my auto-bio book that I’d like to finish up, and I don’t want to compromise the look of those pages or SpiderMan, so this made the most sense.

DRAW!: Tell me about the Kickstarter you were doing.

MH: Yeah, it was me, Christine Larsen, who’s another cartoonist from Philly—she’s great—and Jeff McComsey. We just wanted an excuse to do a little project together. Basically it’s three mini-comics. I think Christine’s is the longest at 20-some pages. Mine might be the smallest at 16 pages.

It’s just a bite-sized horror story—no words, just pictures. It was just to scratch that itch of doing something creator-owned on the side for fun. It’s a totally different style. There’s no rendering and hatching, or any of that stuff. It’s more of an animated style.

DRAW!: Is this one of the Sketch Wallets?

MH: No, before they came out—or at least before I knew about them—there was a Deadpool fan who was a leather worker who had already made a couple of larger ones. I was like, “Dude, can you make me one at this size? I want it this big, and I need it to have this many pockets, and I need to fit this size sketchbook in it.”

DRAW!: That’s awesome.

MH: Yeah, I’ll send you the guy’s name. He’s reasonable, and his work’s amazing. He’ll put an extra loop on there so it can hold a pencil. He’ll even make it with two loops, where you can lock the wallet shut by sliding a pencil into the two loops. He’s pretty awesome.

DRAW!: So you’re working on Superior Spider-Man, and I saw you’re going to have a fill-in artist so you can get ahead on the book.

MH: Issue #4 ships tomorrow, and I’m working on issue #6.

I’m usually two to three issues ahead. I’m skipping from #6 straight to #9, and they’ll have a fill-in artist for #7 and 8. I’m still doing the covers. We originally talked about me doing all

Another life drawing from Mike’s sketchbooks.

Artwork © Mike Hawthorne

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the panels in the little horror book that are different than what I would have done ten years ago because of refining how I move the camera around. And that comes from the miles and miles of mainstream comic pages the came between my early cartoony work and this more recent book. Then, like I said, the cartoony work is reminding me that I need to bring some of that dynamism back into the superhero stuff I’m doing too. I feel very strongly that it makes all the work better when you goof around with style back and forth between multiple projects.

DRAW!: Do you wake up and sketch to warm up before hitting the boards, or do you do most of that towards the end of the day?

MH: It depends. For a while I was doing warm-ups in the morning and cool-downs at night. Because of adding more narrative stuff to my workflow, I’ve been just getting up and going straight to the pages lately, because I want to make sure those are done so I can get to my auto-bio book. Right now we’re still in the script-writing phase for some of that, so I’m doing less warm-ups in the mornings, which I kind of miss. It’s funny you should ask, because just this past week I was thinking I need a big sketchbook so I can get back to it. I tend to do figurative sketches for warmups, and I tend to do those bigger. I had a big Moleskine that was 11" x 18" or something.

But lately it’s been straight to the pages, and then in the evenings I’m doing little studies in the anatomy sketchbook or gestures, things like that, while still being mindful of having to keep the auto-bio on track. So I might work on the script or some layouts for that book at the end of the night.

Another page from Mike’s Lost by Monday horror mini-comic.

Lost by Monday © Mike Hawthorne

DRAW!: Do you feel that’s important? You’re on a big book, getting the big dollars, you have all the attention, but you still have that itch you have to scratch.

MH: Not only is it that, but I think things feed off of each other. You talk about the sketching you do in a style you couldn’t use in your comic strips, and it’s basically that, but I also want to add some story to it. I wanted to play around with different tools, but I think they feed into each other. I’m doing cartoony stuff, and it’s reminding me I can make the SpiderMan stuff a tad bit more dynamic—watch for silhouettes and things you would naturally do in animation. I think not only that I need to do it, but that they cross-pollinate and make both books stronger. There’s something about the composition of

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DRAW!: Do you find that process improves what you’re working on?

MH: I think so. Like you said, you learn to draw by drawing, and I find the more thinking about drawing I do sort of counts towards that. Even if I’m going downstairs and doing little anatomical studies, they’re not beautiful drawings, but it’s that constant practice so that when I have to draw a shoulder or something in a funny pose, it’s not going to be for the first time. There’s a muscle memory that kicks in, and something you studied, and you can bring that to the page. It’s a “train hard to fight easy” kind of thing. So as long as I can do it—you always worry that you’re going to put too much mileage on your drawing hand and something is going to break, but I feel strongly that all of this feeds into one big pot, and it makes for hopefully better comics, better pages, tighter storytelling, and making the work something you’re proud of.

Early on in my career I was spitting out pages like crazy, and some of that stuff I regret, because it was the result of jumping straight into pages and not practicing a whole lot— just being excited to make comics, and that’s all there was.

Those books are hard to look at because I needed to be doing the practice I was doing in art school but dumped by the wayside when I jumped into comics.

DRAW!: I think we all do that. At first you just want to get a job, and you want to jump through whatever hoops you have to so you can keep doing it. But then you get to that point where you start being more conscious about the quality of the work. Sometimes you’re at a convention, and a fan wants a sketch at the end of the day, and you don’t want to disappoint a fan of your work, so you knock out a crappy sketch while you’re packing up your stuff. Then later on you see it up on eBay, and you think, “Man, I wish they had just burned that sketch.” [laughter] I hate to see that. It’s so embarrassing.

MH: I know, and in the age of the internet, we have to live with that for the rest of our lives. I happened to see a sketch from around the time I first worked for Marvel—2005 or so.

Some guy came up to the Marvel booth while I was there and asked for a sketch of Captain America. I don’t know what it is, but I’m terrible at keeping track of costumes. So I drew Captain America, but instead of an “A” on his forehead, I drew a star. [laughter] He didn’t complain. He took the sketch and said “thank you”….

DRAW!: But you saw that look on his face.

MH: Yeah, I happened to see it years later on the Comic Art Fan website. I was just trolling around to see what art of mine was there, and I saw that sketch, and it said, “I guess this is an alternate version of Captain America.” He was very polite about it, but to this day it bugs me. You really have to treat every drawing you do for someone like it’s the most important drawing you’re going to do, because it’s going to live with that person forever. Maybe that’s the first time that person is going to patronize your work, and you have that one shot to seal the deal and make them a fan, or poof, you’re not worth following.

DRAW!: [in offended voice] “Mike Hawthorne was a total jerk to me. I just wanted a drawing of Captain America because my brother was run over by a car, and I was feeling kind of bad. It was obvious he didn’t care about my feelings.” [laughter] MH: I did a worse one than that, by the way. I forget who was with me, but they caught it. Somebody asked me to draw Spider-Man, and I don’t know what was wrong with me that day.

Spider-Man has the web pattern that goes down his chest, and then goes around his waist, right? I had it in my head that the web pattern went down into a pair of trunks like Superman.

DRAW!: [laughs] You’re like Jack Kirby. Whenever he drew Spider-Man, it was like he’d never seen him before. They’re always so bizarre.

See, Mike does know how to draw Cap. Pencils for Deadpool #300.

Captain America © Marvel Characters, Inc.

MH: [laughs] That’s exactly right, dude. So I’m drawing the webbing going over his crotch, and I think it was Neil Vokes next to me. He was like, “Jesus, dude. That’s not right.” Luckily he caught it before I’d inked the thing and before the fan had come back. The guy probably would have thought I was trolling him.

DRAW!: I’ve come across a couple that I don’t remember doing. “I don’t remember drawing that, but that’s my signature on it.”

MH: The worst for me is when they are so thrilled to get it.

I almost want to tell them, “Listen, let me get a mulligan. I want to do a better job for you. You love this thing too much.”

I catch myself wanting to talk people out of liking the stuff, which is a weird hiccup I need to get over. It’s still difficult for me, even online, when people tell me, “Oh, my God! You’re my favorite artist!” I want to argue with them. “Listen, let me make you a list of people better than me.”

DRAW!: You just have to accept the fact that you’re in the upper echelon of people working in comics.

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A quick life drawing from Mike’s sketchbooks.

Artwork © Mike Hawthorne

MH: Oh, lord. Don’t say it. [laughs] DRAW!: You have to accept how good you are— MH: I really don’t. I can give you a list. [laughs] DRAW!: Most artists can’t see what the fans see in their work. What I see in your work is different, because I’m an artist. When I started doing The Phantom, the greatest feeling was when [José Luis] García-López said I was doing a great job. That was like God came down and anointed me or something. When somebody like that tells you—not that you don’t like fans telling you, but this is a guy you totally respect.

MH: I know exactly what you mean. It’s totally not a healthy way to be. I have to learn to accept compliments, but it’s a little tricky. I have to make myself say “thank you” and move on.

DRAW!: Now they have a word for it: imposter syndrome.

I would sort of feel that way in the beginning. People would come up and be very nice, and tell me what they liked, and

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it would make me feel a bit uncomfortable. You like the fact someone is liking your work, but you’re also feeling “ehnnn…”. Now I’ve learned that if a person likes my work, I’m gracious in return, I don’t qualify it, and I don’t make a big deal out of it.

MH: Plus, I find that it can be an insult to this person too.

You’re saying, “No, no, you don’t know what you like.”

There’s a certain stink to that, that helps me get over how I’m feeling. But you see those sketches, and it’s a little like hearing a recording of your own voice. “I sound like that?” You have to remind yourself that you’re coming at it from a different place than they are, and if they’re enjoying it, why ruin it for them. Just shut up and let them dig it. Which goes back to that rule I set up for myself of not looking at my comics until six months to a year after it comes out. That makes it easier for me to accept. “Okay, it’s out there, people like it, and I don’t have to argue with them because I’m not looking at it.”

I’m not going to have a panic attack because I forgot to draw the webbing here, or Deadpool’s sword there, or whatever. It helps me appreciate it later down the line when I can look at it more clearly.

DRAW!: You’re still teaching one day a week, right? Doing a monthly book alone is a pretty heavy lift.

MH: Yeah, it’s probably crazy to continue doing it to be honest. When I’m teaching anatomy, it’s two three-hour classes, and then I have one senior figurative class that I just started doing, and that’s one six-hour class. So that’s a full day out of the studio. I never intended to teach, I just sort of fell into it.

I’d spoken at PCAD [Pennsylvania College of Art & Design], the school I teach at, shortly after I worked on Hop. They brought me out to talk with the visual development kids, and that was fun. Then they invited me to 24-Hour Comic Day, and that was fun. “Okay, I dig this school. This is pretty cool.”

While I was there for that, the head of the department asked me, “Hey, would you ever want to teach?” I was sort of on a high. It must have been three in the morning, and I was in that funny spot where you’re really tired, but you’re having a good time drawing, and you’re all hopped up on pizza and coffee, and everything is cool. So I said, “Yeah, I’ll teach. What the hell.” And then the next day after I got some sleep, I realized, “Oh geez, what did I just agree to?”

But I came to dig it, and they let me—again, it goes back to working with clients who trust you. They brought me in to teach a visual development class and a concept art class, because I was bouncing around between designing characters and comics and storyboards. They let me expand the class from one to two semesters, and write the curriculum, and that was just fun. I basically just stuck around because I was enjoying that aspect of it. Like you said, it forces you to think about the job from a different angle, and you start to see things more clearly that, when you’re stuck doing the actual job, you’re missing.

DRAW!: Do you feel you learned anything from that? Did it affect your process at all?

MH: I think what I learned was to simplify the process for myself. You’re trying to explain drawing a vehicle in two-point perspective, and you know how you do it when you’re drawing in your studio, but when you’re trying to explain it to a student.... I remember the first time I did it. It was a live demo, and I made the mistake of drawing it upside down so that the students could see what I was drawing, because I was doing it on paper, and it just overwhelmed them. I’m doing this two-point thing of a vehicle, and they couldn’t get over the technical aspect of the perspective, and then by my doing it upside down, they got intimidated. “I don’t understand what I’m seeing, and this guy’s doing it upside down.”

DRAW!: “It’s bad enough it’s a magic show, but this is an incredible magic show.”

MH: [laughs] I realized I wasn’t doing a good job of clarifying. I wasn’t presenting this material to them in a way that was equal to their experience up to that point.

So I had to force myself to simplify how I was explaining the stuff, and it occurred to me that I could do that for myself. I could allow for some shorthand when I was doing things in the studio. I didn’t have to make everything difficult for myself. In that way, it helped me chill out and find a more clear route to the same outcome. And by doing that, having a simple workflow, I could do more elaborate things. If I could find a shorthand for two-point perspective, let’s say, and I could do it without vanishing points by working out a cheat I could show the students so they wouldn’t be so intimidated by it, I could also do it on the page and draw it in half the time. So in that way it helped, I think.

In these pencils Deadpool #1 you can see Mike’s use of perspective lines.

DRAW!: Because of your teaching experience, do you have your ten points of advice you would give to today’s student?

MH: I tend to lean on the fundamentals. I believe strongly that if you study anatomy, that will make you a better artist, period. I remember being resistant in college to that. “Why do I need to know all these muscles?” I realized that I went to a stuffy art school, and the way it was presented was not reflecting an illustrator’s mind. I was resistant to it, but once I gave in and decided I needed to know where a muscle begins and ends, and how it connects, and how all these pieces work together, it made me better. It makes everybody better.

And I feel the same way about basic perspective. Clip Art Studio and Procreate pre-programmed perspective grids you

Deadpool © Marvel Characters, Inc.

can drop in and draw off, but that doesn’t make for a good perspective drawing if you don’t have the fundamentals of how that stuff works—how to X out a square to find the middle point, and how that relates to drawing a square in perspective; how to get the proportions of things right; how to hang figures on the horizon line so they all look like they’re in the same space.

If you just got good at those two things, it will make you a much stronger artist. Then if you couple that with serious study of color theory—understanding why two colors work together, what a monochromatic palette is versus a complementary palette—so that you when you need that knowledge you have it ready so you’re not just limited to black-&-white

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MH: It’s like you’re trying to teach a math class.

When I get to it in my visual development class, it’s like I’m asking them to do calculus or something. The problem is many art teachers don’t know that material themselves, so when they introduce it to students, they tend to poison the well. They create such a bad experience that students think, “This is something I can’t do.” So when we get them in college, it’s too late. They should have been introduced to perspective in high school or sooner.

DRAW!: It’s funny you say that. I was just at the Artisticon this past weekend, and Jake Parker did a call-in seminar, and he said the same thing, that the student should know perspective in high school, so in college they’re not—you don’t learn to read when you go to college. You learn to read when you’re in grade school.

MH: Exactly. When I lecture on perspective, and I explain what a cone of vision is, and why, if you go outside that cone, you’ll get distortions in your perspective, just explaining that and why you put the vanishing point where it is, there’s this moment where they look at it and say, “Holy crap! That actually makes sense!” Part of their issues with perspective is that nobody stopped to explain, “Why does my perspective look right, but when you do it, it looks wrong?” Usually it’s because they go outside of the cone of vision.

They have this weird, wonky drawing, and it doesn’t make sense, because they think they’ve done all the steps right. They put the vanishing point in, made their grid, and did the drawing, but it doesn’t look anything like what I showed them in class. When I do it, two plus two is four, but when they do it, two plus two is 19, and it doesn’t make sense. And I think it goes back to perspective and anatomy are things you cannot cheat Pencils for Amazing Spider-Man #796, utilizing a different use of perspective. when you’re teaching them. You either know it, Spider-Man © Marvel Characters, Inc. or you don’t know it, and these kids are getting drawings, you can build a career on just those three skills. introduced to it by teachers who don’t know it. They’re either Composition and those kinds of things are very important. giving them a cursory explanation and not explaining why it Some people seem to get them naturally. I think Bret Blevins works the way it works, or—I’ve talked to some students who was born with the skill to just put things in the right place. said that their perspective class was, “Our teacher put us in I’ve always been envious of that. I have to fight with that a the hallway and say, ‘Just draw the hallway,’ and then left us little bit more, but there are tricks you can do—draw a grid alone.” [laughter] on your page and drop things in. Those things you can kind of cheat a little bit, but that trifecta of anatomy, perspective, and DRAW!: When I taught at DCAD [Delaware College of Art color theory, if you get those three things solidly under your and Design], I taught the kids perspective in the Drawing for belt, you can draw or paint just about anything.

Animation and Drawing for Illustration classes. I taught them the principles of perspective, so when they were sitting in that DRAW!: I think that’s very true. What I find odd is the stu- exercise in the hallway, like you described, they knew what dent at the end of their short time in college, in their third or they were looking for and looking at. The dean was looking fourth year, who can’t draw in perspective. It’s not an expres- at the drawings on the wall, and he said, “You know, these sive tool. It’s something that flies out and trips them up. drawings are really a big improvement.” We ended up having

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this discussion, because too many teachers of that generation, that’s what they would do. They would set students in the hallway, and the kids would draw and draw and draw, and eventually it would click. “Oh… perspective.” Which rarely works for anyone. If you teach them the principles, then they know what they’re looking at. If you teach the reverse, they may never figure out what they’re looking at. They might not realize all these lines are converging.

MH: Absolutely. It’s funny to me how many of them ask me, “Where do I put the vanishing point?” They’re just completely at a loss, because it seems so arbitrary that they don’t understand the rule to it. So I’ll do this exercise where I take a piece of paper and draw a horizon line. Then I’ll take a square piece of paper and turn it at an angle, butt one of the corners to the horizon line, and then say, “Extend that left angle until you hit the horizon line, then do the same on the right side. There are your two points.” When you take a twodimensional square and show, “This is how you’re going to figure out your two points,” and then you draw a circle for the cone of vision and say, “You can’t leave that circle unless you want to distort your perspective,” keeping it that simple with those two steps, you’ll have kids who are just flabbergasted. “Why didn’t anyone show this to me before?”

“How do I draw a car in there?” But I was lucky that I had really exceptional teachers early on, both in high school and in college. Especially in high school because he also helped me get into college art school—everything from walking me through financial aid stuff to helping me with my portfolio.

Who knows how to do that early on unless you have some guidance?

I still keep in touch with him. He’s hugely important to me.

On a sidenote, his son [Neal Dodson] is actually a movie producer now. He’s done a bunch of stuff. I think he has a movie on Netflix now [Triple Frontier], a Special Forces thing with Ben Affleck and Oscar Isaac.

Drawings from Mike’s

anatomy sketchbooks.

DRAW!: The thing is, none of this Artwork © Mike Hawthorne is secret knowledge. Who taught it to you? Did you learn it in school, or did you teach yourself?

MH: A little bit of both. I was lucky in that I was in a high DRAW!: I remember reading a quote by Jack Kirby, “One school program where both the teachers I had were amazing. man can be a school for another,” and I suppose that’s really I had one in particular for three years, Nelson Dodson, and he true. If you can find that one teacher, that one artist you can was a legit painter. He was sort of the perfect example of what connect with, they can put you on the right track.

I’ve been talking about. He trusted me to do my thing, stepped MH: Absolutely. In college I had another professor, Charles in when I needed it, and wasn’t heavy-handed about it. He Schmidt, who was an old school figure painter. When I was gave me a very basic—I mean, it was high school—knowl- at Tyler, I forget how many faculty were in the Painting edge of figure drawing, figure gestures, perspective, color. He department, maybe eight different professors. Of the eight, had a really primitive digital lab—it wasn’t anything like we either six were from Harvard and one was from Yale, or six have now—where he even had us doing digital art. At the were from Yale and one was from Harvard. And then there time, Pennsylvania had the Pennsylvania Governor’s School was Chuck, who I don’t think even had his Master’s, but of the Arts, and he got me into this college-type summer pro- he was the most old school in terms of studying drawings gram that was super-intensive. of plasters, and teaching classical oil painting, so I got this Then, just like with anything, you pick up stuff here and kind of classically trained art education. My degree was in there in college. I didn’t get a lot of perspective in college painting. It was all oils and the old ways of doing things, except for this one class. I was lucky that Tyler offered this thanks to Chuck, and that probably still carries over to my class called Analytical Drawing. It was a lot more perspec- approach in comics. It certainly carries over to the practice tive stuff. One of the assignments was to draw a 360º view element we talked about. I’m not naturally gifted. I have to of a room, and that’s a huge technical challenge. So I got a throw effort at things, and usually something pays off. And lot of it there, but half of this stuff is self-taught. You take I think that comes from these two guys early on who I was that stuff and try to figure out, “How do I use that here?” and, lucky enough to work with.

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MH: I really appreciate that, Mike, especially coming from you. Early on, I would come to you and hit you up for advice. I think back to going through some storyboards with you early on. I’d done this bit with a king eating a chicken leg, and there was a peasant coming over to ask him something. I thought I’d done a good job, and you added this great bit where instead of just a regular transition from the king to the peasant, you had him rip off the meat from the bone and then toss the bone at the peasant in this snotty, crappy way. I remember thinking, “Jesus! That’s brilliant!” That’s an oddball lesson, and I doubt you even remember it, but it’s something that’s stuck with me.

DRAW!: I remember going over your board, but not that specific drawing.

MH: It was probably nothing to you, but it was a huge deal for me. You were probably the first storyboard professional I met, and it was very generous. Sometimes you get crits from people and you get a sense that they’re doing it, but they kind of half-hate you for asking them. [laughter] But you were very generous with your time, and I was always grateful. So thank you.

DRAW!: I’ve always liked your stuff, and when you meet a fellow zealot, you know right away. [laughter] You meet people who like to do it, and then you meet people who really love to do it. So tomorrow you’re up and back at the board?

MH: That’s it, first thing in the morning.

I’m up at 6:30 to get the kids out the door, and it’s back to the board. I’ve got to get issue #6 done fairly soon. I want to keep a two-issue cushion so that I don’t feel rushed at any point, so I have to get that in the can. (above and next page) Pencils and inks for a Deadpool variant cover.

Deadpool © Marvel Characters, Inc.

DRAW!: When I did my little talk and demo at Artisticon, that was something I mentioned. Everyone sees that video of the three-year-old Chinese girl on YouTube, and she’s playing Rachmaninoff. I have never met an artist like that. Even the most talented people I’ve met all were people who applied themselves and worked to get where they were. What happens now is people see the YouTube videos of people doing all this stuff, but they don’t see the process that comes before, so it looks like a magic trick. “Oh, my God! This person is a genius!” But it’s not a magic trick. It’s application. You obviously love to draw, and that comes through. Not everybody has that.

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DRAW!: Once you fall off the horse, it’s hard to get back on.

MH: Yeah, and I hate that feeling of finishing pages just to hit a deadline. You have to do that, but I like to avoid being too rushed so that I can still make decisions based on quality, not getting it in just to get it in.

DRAW!: Which is always one of the hazards. I’ve got to letter this stuff tonight, get it in, and then turn around the next week’s worth of strips in pretty much a day.

MH: Oof! That’s crazy, man.

DRAW!: It’s going to be a rough day, but then I’ll be back on the right side.

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I’m wrong, but I imagine I might be the last guy to work on Judge Parker, because there aren’t that many people interested in doing this kind of work now.

MH: Wow! You’re a wealth of knowledge when it comes to that stuff. I remember being at your house and seeing a bunch of Alex Raymond strips. I had never seen any of his stuff up close in real life, and you had this huge stack sitting on your TV or your table or something. But I tip my hat to you. Not everybody has the skill set to pull that off and keep up that tradition.

DRAW!: Thank you. But I look at all the people I admire—Harold LeDoux, the original artist of Judge Parker, did it for 50 years or something. I’ve been doing it going on ten years now. I cannot imagine doing it for 50 years.

MH: Has it been that long?

DRAW!: I started in 2010, so I’m on my tenth year on the strip. Time flies, right?

MH: Yeah! It feels like you just started on it.

(above and next page) Pencils for Guardians of the Galaxy and Infinity Countdown.

All characters © Marvel Characters, Inc.

MH: I have immense respect for that. A monthly comic is a tough gig, but a strip to me is… I don’t know. That’s insane. To keep up the quality you’re doing and keep it on time is commendable. I remember as a kid the kind of strips you’re doing stood out compared to all the goofy gag strips. It warms my heart that there are still guys like you keeping up that tradition.

DRAW!: I appreciate that. There are literally only a handful left. They’ve stopped Spider-Man now. You’ve still got Mary Worth and Rex Morgan. They stopped Mandrake when Fred Fredericks retired. They stopped Apartment 3-G. Prince Valiant is still going, but Flash Gordon is in reprints. Maybe

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DRAW!: One of the reasons I went to doing it digital was because I have such a huge stack of them. I was literally starting to run out of room. I can sell the Phantom strips, but I can’t really sell the Judge Parkers. Collectors aren’t really into the soap opera stuff. I’ve got thousands of them at this point. I’m sure you probably have a fat stack of stuff piling up now too.

MH: I do. It’s ridiculous. We have them in huge Tupperwares in the basement. The thing is, there’s not much of a market for pencils, at least not my pencils, even the Deadpool stuff. I was penciling and then sending the pages over digitally to the inker, and he inked on blueline printouts.

DRAW!: That’s crazy! I would think people would want them.

MH: That’s what I would want personally. Imagine being able to hold a Jack Kirby pencil page. Not that I’m comparing the two, but any of these guys, to be able to see the original pencils would be humongous for me. I think it’s more that people don’t know, “Well, what’s the original art then?” Unless they can buy them both together, I suppose, which my inker didn’t want to sell his inks. I guess people feel, “Are the inks on the bluelines the original art?” I wonder if there’s this mental conflict, “It’s too complicated, so I’m just not going to buy it,” whereas the Spider-Man stuff, where Wade is inking right on

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Stilt-Man, Superior Spider-Man © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Mike’s full art (including colors) for two versions of a variant cover featuring his design of a Venom-ized Red Skull.

Red Skull, Venom © Marvel Characters, Inc.

the page, that stuff sells pretty well. Now, my Deadpool covers, where I would ink, those sell pretty well. Even though I was inking on the blueline, I would sell both pieces together through Albert, and that was acceptable for some reason. But I have a ton of Deadpool pencils on Albert’s store, and they don’t move.

I have most of the Deadpool. He might have three or four issues. My wife feels strongly that it’s time to pull them all home and stash them for a while and see what happens. But I don’t have very many inked pages because of the last six years of working with other inkers. Up until now with Wade, most of the stuff is just pencil.

DRAW!: Wow. I would think people would want them, because they’re beautiful, they’re a rarity, they’re getting a one of a kind, but I don’t know. The trends of comic art, and things going for crazy prices, it’s off the wall. But I guarantee you that if you save them and don’t just dump them, they will actually be worth a lot of money at some point.

MH: I think you’re right, and my wife’s been pushing to do that. I think I’m going to have Albert pull all those Deadpool pages, and we’ll sit on them for a while. I guess it doesn’t cost anything to have them on the store, but I refuse to lower the prices any more. I’ve tried to do it so there are expensive pages, but there are also affordable pages for everyday collectors. There are a few oddball pages that are even less than a hundred bucks, but anything less than that is just ridiculous.

I think you’re right. I’ll just hold on to all those pencils. And

DRAW!: You guys never wanted to trade half an issue for half an issue or anything like that?

MH: What Albert wanted to do was treat it like he sells Jim Lee and Scott Williams’ stuff. Scott must be inking bluelines, and Albert sells them together. Terry, the guy who inked most of my Deadpool stuff, never wanted to sell the stuff. He says it’s just production art, and it doesn’t look very good. I’m not sure why he was so reluctant to part with it, but if he changes his mind, I’m sure Albert would love to sell them as a package, where you get both the pencils and the inks for one price.

The stuff with Wade, I think it’s the first time I’ve worked with someone who actually inked on the pages. That seems so cut and dry for folks that those pages sell at a decent clip. We’ll see what happens.

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JACK KIRBY’S DINGBAT LOVE

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THE RIGHT WAY, THE WRONG WAY, AND THE

ORDWAY !

REFERENCE POINTS by JERRY ORDWAY

Caricature by Rachel Ordway

W

ell, here we are, time for another hopefully help- had to draw some recognizable features to identify the setful segment on drawing comic book pages. I will ting, rather than a flat, devastated plain full of debris. While take you through the various steps I went through this story was one of several in the comic, I had no visuals on drawing a Firestorm story (“Last what the other features looked like, Christmas”) for DC’s Nuclear Winor how they handled the level of ter Special, which was published in destruction. I could have asked the December of 2018. editor, but I wanted to fully “own” I haven’t drawn the character my little corner of the future postof Firestorm much, if at all, in my nuclear world! many years doing comic books, but I I started out pulling theme park was offered the chance to work with reference I had collected over the a writer I had not previously worked years from my file folder reference with, Paul Dini, and I jumped at it. cabinets (see top of next page), and Paul is one of the best, and while I then checked out Paul Dini’s web knew the story was only eight pages, links. Once I saw what environment I figured it’d be a decent experience. settings he needed, I did my own He managed to do a heartfelt story web search on my iPad, saving phoabout a family of robot killers out tos I thought would help. I always to kill Firestorm before their power gather much more than I need, sources ran out. because it’s easier to copy reference My editor supplied me with a few when you first find it, rather than images of the current incarnation of thinking later, “I wish I had grabbed Firestorm and Professor Stein, with that shot. Where did I find that?” I whom he shares the Firestorm entity have already read through the script with. The script included some helpa few times by this point, so there ful web source links for specific are no surprises later, plus I can try reference, including theme park feato grab reference for later pages as tures such as a “house of the future” well, to be more prepared. from the 1960s. The story setting DC’s Nuclear Winter Special #1, with cover art by In drawing my super-loose Yanick Paquette, featured elsewhere in this issue. is a post-nuclear devastated theme thumbnails on the script, I am giving myself a template for the page, park, which needed to be my own All characters © DC Comics invention to prevent any legal issues. This was the most diffi- meaning, how many panels, how many dialogue balloons cult part of the assignment for me, wrapping my head around there are, and basic camera angles. With a script that includes what the place looked like. I had to cheat reality a bit, as I the dialogue balloons like this, it’s my key job to make sure

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A few examples of the exterior photographs Jerry dug up in his search for theme park reference material, and page one of the “Firestorm” script.

All images © their respective owners

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(above) Some of Jerry’s reference for 1950s-era modern architecture and style, which helped him build the exterior and interior of his “Home of Tomorrow”. The retro postcard (and Jerry’s childhood memories) provided the inspiration for the Nuclear Family’s fireplace and silver tinsel Christmas tree in panel four. (right) Jerry’s preliminary pencils (with some marker inking) for page one of “Last Christmas”.

Firestorm, Nuclear Family © DC Comics. All reference images © their respective owners.

I allow enough space to fit it all into each panel. Lettering can be reduced slightly, but it still takes up “real estate” on a page.

A panel like the first one, with three twolines-each captions on it, has to be sized right. In looking at many current comics, it bothers me to see bad balloon placements, but it bothers me more when I see that the artist did not allot enough space for the dialogue. It’s an important skill, to be able to approximate the space covered by the dialogue on a panel. When in doubt, leave more than you think you need!

As you will see later, the order of characters in a panel is often dictated by the dialogue in that panel.

On the prelim I drew for page one (see above right), I worked in pencil first, and then refined the drawing with a fine-tipped marker. This is kind of like inking, and many think it’s an extra step, but it allows me to be very loose in my pencilling stage, and refining with the marker gives me a clear line quality that translates into an easy to read blueline printout on my two-ply drawing paper. Panel one is me map-

ping out the area the story takes place in. It’s an establishing shot for the reader, but also for me as well. I will build the environment off of this for the whole story. Panel three shows the house in the distance, which is also used many times in the story, so it’s good to know what you’re drawing, and get as much figured out early on. The last panel establishes the villains, who are called the Nuclear Family, and have appeared many times before in various comic books.

The background establishes much of the main elements of the interior, with a 1950s modern design, specified by Paul in the script. I am old enough to understand the visuals, because my childhood memories of Christmas included that silver tinsel artificial tree!

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Panels one through three in their finished ink stage. The snow was all drawn during the inking.

Firestorm, Nuclear Family © DC Comics

When I scan the prelim, I place it in an official DC Comics template so as to be sure where the live copy margins are.

At this stage I adjust scale, often reducing the images inside a panel border to insure space for those aforementioned dialogue balloons.

The final line art is scanned and cleaned up. Note that another element to this story is snow on the ground. Snow is a tricky thing to draw, because you can’t add it without doing the full perspective work on surfaces. It is a blanket,

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and it kind of drapes over surfaces, softening hard sharp corners, and the like. It should also not obliterate your background elements. The reader still needs to figure out what it is covering. In panel three, we can still see the remains of a Ferris wheel, and the house the villains are in. And drawing in black-&-white, I want it clear that there are lights on in only that house. The color artist will have problems of their own to solve, but I try to make it easier for them by overthinking my work.

Just for fun, and to show you how much I value balloon placements, I’ll share what I always send in with my work so the editor knows where I’d place the copy myself. I have done this whenever possible, and I think editors appreciate it.

Honestly, by putting a lot of thought into page one, I felt that the rest of the job flowed much easier from page two on. I changed up my routine after page three, and scribbled my layouts right onto the art board for the rest of the assignment. The first three pages allowed me to get comfortable with characters I had never drawn before, and also define the setting that the story takes place in. With five members of the Nuclear Family to squeeze into most panels, as well as Firestorm and his floating head mentor, Professor Stein, it can be a challenge to do a big exciting shot on a given page. A writer can write a six-panel page with a lot of dialogue, and then ask for one of the panels to be an almost full-page action shot, but I will still look to how much of the page’s “real estate” is needed to fit the dialogue before deciding if it can be done. Making that happen is much easier when working “plot-first”, because then the artist can lay out an exciting page, and it’s then up to the writer to decide how much dialogue will fit, and where.

When I worked that way in the past as a writer, I would often marvel at how an artist could take a page description and make it into something better, or just different than I imagined it. And I often found myself writing less dialogue if the art clearly showed the story points. I still believe that plot style produces the best collaboration.

Before I wrap up this segment, I want to touch upon something. When drawing a story with a specific setting or time frame, there’s really no excuse not to research even the smallest things. Case in point, at the conclusion of this story, Firestorm takes a dusty old bottle of grape juice, and turns it into wine. Well, for a house whose interior dates back decades, I researched what the bottle would have looked like. Same with the eggnog the Nuclear kids are drinking. These are small touches, but they are so easily accessed via the internet nowadays. (top right) A low-res version of page one’s finished inks with Jerry’s suggested word balloon placements. (left, right, and below) Jerry’s photo reference for panels six and seven of “Last Christmas”, page seven.

Firestorm, Nuclear Family © DC Comics Reference photos © respective owners

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YANICK PAQUETTE

Living in Paradise Interview conducted by Mike Manley Transcribed by Eric Nolen-Weathington DRAW!: Are you in Toronto?

YANICK PAQUETTE: No, I’m in Montreal.

DRAW!: What are you working on today?

YP: I’m doing a Superman special with Brian Bendis. So far I know it’s called Superman Giant-Size Special. Beyond that I don’t know what it’s for. It’s not part of Action or Superman that he does; it’s a prelude to something else. Beyond that I

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can’t really comment. But I’m doing 22 pages of that, and I’m almost done. So that’s what’s on the program today, and by the beginning of February I’ll switch to Tom King’s Batman.

DRAW!: Will you be doing Batman monthly for a while, or are you jumping around from project to project?

YP: It’s a strange year for me. For the past four years almost, I was working on Wonder Woman: Earth One with Grant Morrison. It’s on a deadline, but it’s a very long-term type of deadline, like most of the Earth One books. So that was my life for a long time, but this year and part of 2018, I’ve been

trying to get into the fold of the proper DCU and do, not monthly, I’m getting too old for that, but almost monthly, producing three or four pages a week.

DRAW!: Are you working seven days a week?

YP: Well, I try to avoid working on the weekend, and sometimes I’m a good boy and I do all the work I need to do and don’t have to work on the weekend.

But especially during Christmas time, things get messed up. I took a solid two weeks off at Christmas, which was nice, but now I’m paying for that, and I need to work on the weekend once and a while. By mid-February I’ll be done paying my debt, and I’ll go back to having an almost normal life.

DRAW!: Is that something you thought about at the beginning? Nobody in comics works a normal nine-to-five, but to have some time off on the weekend for other things?

YP: The plan was to work a lot less.

I would say that my intention from the beginning was to get paid more to do less work. The ultimate goal would be to do one page a year and get paid a fortune for it. [laughter] I’ve never been really attached to the monthly structure.

It requires so many artistic trade-offs and cutting corners to make sure stuff’s out on time. Because I’ve grown up in the European market where people will take two years to draw 44 pages, the monthly structure of the American industry has always felt weird. When I got to do the Earth One books, it allowed me to live a normal life, or at least closer to my aspiration. But starting last year and this year, I’m trying to Finished inks for page 75 of Wonder Woman: Earth One, vol. 1. be more productive. In a way, the Earth Wonder Woman © DC Comics One books were great artistically, but drawing one book for months, years at a time, I almost disap- they were just mind-bogglingly great! They were awesome. He peared from the map. This year I will try to have much more was not doing a monthly book, still he was on the map just of a presence on the shelf. by once in a while doing these massively grandiose annuals.

I thought, “This is the type of path that fits what I want to do.

DRAW!: So at the beginning of your career, you were think- I’d prefer to be Arthur Adams, putting all I can on one book a ing more of working in the European model, where they do year, than to do a monthly or more and become a star that way.” one album a year or every two years.

At that time you could take the path of someone like Ron Lim, YP: Yes, the European model was the beginning of it, but I who you could rely on to do tons of good books every year, or remember Arthur Adams would put out an X-Men Annual once you could be someone like Mike Mignola, who would do grana year, and that book would just rock everybody. X-Men Annual diose books, but would not put out that much in a year. And I #10, #12, “The Evolutionary War”, Mojo—those issues. And felt that made more sense to me, artistically at least.

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DRAW!: The other side of that, of course, is that you not only have to budget your time, but budget your finances.

YP: Yeah, because I’m Canadian, I guess, there’s a little less pressure in terms of making ends meet. I’ve always worked, I’ve just never felt the stress of, “Oh, I need to produce a lot of books.” The first five or six years of my career, I was doing monthly books, and I was putting books out there I was not totally satisfied with, but I made a living out of it. As I shifted towards my aspirations of doing less, but doing it a little better, as it turned out, it somehow paid for itself. I was getting higher page rates and more special projects. It added value to the work from an editorial point of view, and the map balanced out at some point.

DRAW!: You can set out to take more time and do a more intense job, but sometimes you get offered an opportunity, and it always seems, especially at the beginning of your career, like you’re a fireman. You have to run in and do whatever you have to do to get the job done.

YP: Yeah. Very early on I was telling people I was not willing to do books between deadlines. They were asking for my time, but I would just not take the job. It’s a weird thing. Many people who were less secure might would have taken the job anyway, and eventually over the years they would get typecast as an artist who can do a book in two weeks, and that would be their thing. But because I was foolish enough to refuse work, even at the beginning, it somehow forced the editors to say, “Okay, we can try to find something with a schedule that fits you better,” and slowly I got to do more of those—the Earth One, for instance, which took me two years to draw 120 pages, which is very slow. Or even when I did Swamp Thing, that was one book every two months. It was a very luxurious type of drawing. But I’m convinced I would never have gotten to that point if I hadn’t said from the very start, “I’m not going to do books that require a monthly schedule.”

Once in a while I’ll work fast to save the day, but it’s on my own end. I’ll negotiate a good deadline, but then paint myself into a corner and be forced to work very fast to make up for lost time. But that’s because of my own mismanagement of time, or because I went to a convention or on a vacation.

DRAW!: Do you find that you tend to work faster on a project as you go along and build a head of steam?

YP: Oh, yeah, totally. I’ve been doing this a long time, so I don’t get nervous when I find the first five pages taking forever to draw. I always start out, “I want to do the best I can,” and it just slows everything down. But by the time I finish ten pages of any project, I’ll be moving along pretty fast. If I take long breaks—I have kids, so I like to take breaks in the summer and at Christmas—it takes me a while to get back up to full speed. It’s like a long train that needs to build momentum, and when I get that momentum, I need to keep working uninterrupted as long as I can, day after day, so I can get the work done, taking advantage of the moment.

Finished cover art for Birds of Prey #5.

Swamp Thing © DC Comics

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DRAW!: Working in the European style, do you have a stage at the beginning where you do development art, sketch, gather material, and figure out your approach?

This two-page spread from Swamp Thing #7 was done relatively early in Yanick’s transition to working full-digital, yet it still feels organic.

Wonder Woman © DC Comics

YP: No. I try to be aware of what they want from me, and I read the script a few weeks before I do anything, and then just let it grow on me. But I’m not doing the research stage at that point. I’ll do research as I do my pages. If I need something, I’ll spend some time on the internet before I work on those pages, but I don’t do pure research that often. For a bigger project, like Wonder Woman: Earth One, I would read what I got from Grant, then I would take a month just to mature the idea of what direction to take graphically. Sometimes I’ll take a walk and see something on the street, and think, “Oh, this will be useful for the project I’m going to be working on down the road.”

DRAW!: Do you do layouts for the project all at once, or do you take it page by page, or in sections?

YP: I do layout sessions—well, it depends on the book. For the Bendis project, I’m doing maybe ten pages of layouts. I try to finish a scene in the layouts when I can. I need to see the entire sequence done. And then I guess I just get too excited to draw, [laughs] and I have to draw a little. My layouts are very vague. I’ve seen some layouts on the internet where people

do these wonderful drawings that just need to be finished in ink. If I died halfway though a book, no one would be able to finish it. [laughter] It’s abstractions. Even me! If I’m doing 20 pages and it takes a month and I need to look back at my layouts, sometimes I just have no idea what I was planning to do.

DRAW!: What size do you draw your layouts? Do draw them directly on the board?

YP: I work digitally, so size doesn’t matter anymore. If anything, I might lower the resolution slightly so it’s easier to move around and there’s no lag. Then I crank up the resolution to what I work at, which is a very arbitrary 840 dpi. [laughter] A few years ago—I was on Swamp Thing, I think—I wanted to work at the highest resolution possible, because when I was drawing pages, I would reduce them to 120 dpi to send to the editor [for approval], and I preferred the drawings at that size. I liked that it would simplify some of the rendering and muddy some of the detail. It was cleaner and smoother. So it was, “How can I get that smoothing effect in the printed material?” which is printed at 400 dpi. I decided that instead of working at 400 dpi, I’d work at the highest number I could,

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DRAW!: When did you switch from the traditional tools to digital?

YP: I got a Cintiq tablet back on Batman Inc. #1 [in late 2010], and that’s when I switched. But at that point I only switched the pencils.

It would still be printed out and inked by hand. Michel Lacombe was my inker then. And sometimes on the printed out board I would re-pencil things. I couldn’t totally trust digital inking, especially since I was working with an inker at the time. But by the end of the series, sometimes we were kind of late on the issues, so we had to send the printer my “pencils”.

My Photoshop output would go [directly] to print. Looking back at it, it looked fairly acceptable. It became obvious that I didn’t need to get inked, and the digital-only could suffice for printing.

The project after that was Swamp Thing, and with Swamp Thing I figured if my inking turned out to be super-choppy and weird and bulky and strange, I could always pretend it was intentional because it’s Swamp Thing. [Mike laughs] And it turned out alright, so since Swamp Thing, I’ve been a penciler and inker all wrapped up in one.

Finished inks for Swamp Thing #18, page 20.

Swamp Thing © DC Comics

then reduce it to 400 dpi for printing, then reduce it to 120 dpi for my editor to look at. I settled on working at 840 dpi based on what my computer could handle in terms of moving things around. It turned out that 840 dpi was the point where my computer would start struggling and show weaknesses. All my brushes are fixed styles, so I don’t change the size of my brushes. I just need the resolution to remain constant so I have a reference for how thick things are when I draw.

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DRAW!: Do you think that happened because you went to penciling digitally? And did you find there was any change in your relationship with your art? Because when you work traditionally, you see the whole page, but when you work digitally, you’re zooming in, zooming out, zooming in, zooming out. Most of the time you don’t actually see the whole image.

YP: Yeah, there is a trap in that.

I’ve seen people fall into that digital trap. I try to zoom out to actual size all the time, so I have a good idea of the balance of the page, and where things belong in terms of proportion to the page. And then, as I told you, I don’t change the brush style, so as I zoom in, the brush gets bigger and bigger. As I close in on the image, I’m working with a huge, massive brush, so I don’t get into impossibly tight details and unrealistic rendering. Some people get super-close and reduce the size of the

Finished inks for page 39 of Wonder Woman: Earth One, vol. 2, and a detail shot of one of Yanick’s digital inking techniques—overlapping various scans of his thumbprints to build up texture.

Wonder Woman © DC Comics

brush so they can do eyelashes on a character in the background which would actually work better if it had no facial features at all, like the way Mike Mignola would approach it to limit the number of renderings.

DRAW!: Terry Austin used a certain Rapidograph, I think it was. He was very scientific about how thin his lines would get, and I think that’s why his stuff always printed so well on the old newsprint. Now printing is so much better, but you’re right. You can zoom in and put in all this fine detail, but then you shrink it down and you can’t see it anyway.

YP: Usually, just in terms of communicating what is going on, it’s not always best to draw all the details in. If there is a small army man in the background, it’s more efficient to have a more simplified body with a gun—just enough to say, “Oh, these are army men.” The first function of the art is to communicate. With digital, rendering everything just because you can, can easily make things less clear. You need to restrain yourself.

DRAW!: Are you inking in Photoshop or Clip Studio? And did you make custom brushes, or did you buy brushes?

YP: I made a switch. All my Swamp Thing material was done in Photoshop using the brushes that came with Photoshop. I knew Photoshop very well, and I felt comfortable doing my stuff with it. At the time Manga Studio—I think it was called Manga Studio then. They changed the name to something terrible now.

DRAW!: Clip Studio Paint.

YP: It sounds so generic. But when I started doing Wonder Woman: Earth One, I decided I needed some help with the inks. I wanted to be Joe Sinnott or Mark Farmer—some very slick, elegant inking. Photoshop didn’t really help with that.

It helped a little, but not that much. Manga Studio had just come out with a new version where all the shortcuts were the same as the Photoshop shortcuts. Before that, they’d had their own little way of doing things. You’d have to create layers for panel borders, and layers for this and that, but when I made the switch, the new shortcuts made the transition seamless. And it would give you a lot of assistance with the inking practice, allowing me to be a much better inker than I actually am. So now I use Manga Studio almost entirely. If you have a perspective ruler, you can save in that format, which keeps

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all your parameters, or you can save in the Photoshop format, open it up there, and add a little something that Photoshop is very good at. Some of the Photoshop organic brushes are very nice; some of the filters are very nice. Then I can save it and reopen it in Manga Studio and keep going. So I’m using a little Photoshop, but mainly it’s Manga Studio.

I created a bunch of brushes, actually. One of the things I’m interested in is organic-type brushes, like dry brushes. Sean Murphy does things in his inks that are pretty energetic—very graphic with great accidents happening all over the place. Sadly, this is one of those things that digital is not the best at. So I had to create a bunch of brushes that would make the effect of accidental, organic inking happen, like thumbprints, for

Finished inks for the cover of an Animal Man trade paperback collection, along with detail shots of the artwork. In the upper right detail, you can see Yanick’s use of his digital dry brushes. The detail on the right uses a textured approach to approximate the scales of the lizard.

Animal Man © DC Comics

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A page from the Batman: Lost one-shot tie-in to Dark Knights: Metal. The detail shot above shows just how minimalist you can get when drawing characters in the background.

Batman © DC Comics

instance, which I’m using a lot. I scanned a bunch of my thumbprints, and I can recombine them in different orders, or go white on top of the inks to create abstractions. And I’ve made a bunch of dry brushes because I just love the effect of it. When you look at a drawing, and there’s some unknown element in it, it feels less digital. Sometimes when you recognize a computer rendered a drawing, it can lose a little of its emotional shine, I feel.

DRAW!: Yeah. I do two newspaper strips.

The Phantom I do traditionally, and with Judge Parker I switched over a year ago to digital. What I do to keep the feeling that I had, is I use a triangle on my tablet [for straight edges], and I ink freehand using the triangle [rather than using the line tool]. It gives me the same feeling as inking traditionally. I don’t like the precision, the mechanical aspect, of creating lines [with the line tool]. It feels less human. So I just put it on my screen just like I would if I was using a marker or a pen on paper.

YP: Going back to the soldier, if I said, “I’m going to pencil and ink on paper tons of soldiers!” I’d put on my George Pérez hat and fill the page with soldiers. You’d look at that page and go, “Oh my god! It’s crazy! So much detail!” You’ll have some emotional reaction to a double-splash page done like this. But if I created a brush of one soldier in Photoshop, and filled the page with them, it would take three minutes to do, and it would still have soldiers all over the place, but when you’d look at it, you wouldn’t react the same way, because

you’d know there’s a trick. It’s inhuman. It’s obviously not made by man. You won’t get the same visual thrill, and that’s something you have to be aware of when working digitally, because it’s very easy to just import 3-D models. Doing those things will save you time, but it will dehumanize your work to a point where the relationship with the viewer will be screwed. It’s boring.

DRAW!: It’s like watching a film now, when they have 10,000 guys on one side and 10,000 guys on the other side, and they’re all fighting. You know they’re not all actors, so it’s sort of like watching a video game. I had that feeling watching the end of Wonder Woman. I liked the film, but in the final fight scene, you know it’s not the actress, so they’re basically puppets, so I didn’t feel an emotional connection.

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YP: Yeah, I try to check when I do those types of things. If I had to do all those soldiers, maybe I’d cut and paste a rough of all those soldiers, and then ink them all by hand to recapture some human element. Peter Jackson used all those models in Lord of the Rings instead of just asking his computer team to make them all. Because there’s a quality to something real.

Maybe computerized art will eventually get to a point where you can add a filter to humanize an image after you’ve drawn it. I don’t know. Maybe that’s the future. Maybe we’ll get to the point where no one will know what’s going on anymore— only the artistic vision will remain. But at this point I can tell when something is heavily computer generated, and it makes me less excited.

DRAW!: Two things happen. One, technology advances and everyone embraces it, especially in the commercial world.

Then that affects people’s tastes. Not even necessarily artists’ tastes, but the people who consume, and the second and third wave of people who consume, that art. I just saw a program in the past month that has an algorithm which can make caricatures. It looks at a real person, then that algorithm makes a caricature based upon the photo, just like Mort Drucker, or Jack Davis, or someone like that. It’s not fantastic, but it’s also not bad.

The thing about the traditional medium is, like you said, you have all kinds of accidents. When you’re inking with a brush, the brush will be a little drier here, a little wetter there, and you go with that effect naturally as you’re inking. “Oh, that’ll be good for an effect on Swamp Thing’s arm, or on this tree.” Digitally you never have that because the tool is always the same, so you have to find a way of manufacturing that accident.

YP: Which is exactly what I did. I scanned in maybe 50 brushstrokes of dry brush in different fashions. Then I created a brush in Manga Studio in which it would randomly select one of those 50 brushstrokes.

Then it’s a matter of trying a few until I get something, maybe stacking them on top of each other. But it infuses my brush with a little bit of lack of control on my part, and slightly opens the door for accidents.

I wish they would create a brush that you would need to refill. One that would gradually loose some of the black as you used it until you told it to refill. I’m pretty sure the technology will get there eventually.

Cover art for a Swamp Thing collection with multiple inking techniques on display.

Swamp Thing © DC Comics

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DRAW!: I’m sure they could write an algorithm that could define a brush of this size, after so many strokes, will run out of ink. Do you find that the interface interrupts your flow when you’re working?

YP: Not really. I think it appeals to my control freak nature. [laughter] I like to spend a lot of time thinking about what I want to do. Overly so. So that’s just one more thing to consider. Back when I was working on paper, I was a big light box guy. I had a custom-made drawing table with a light box underneath. I would do a layout, then stick another piece of paper on top of it and do a perspective grid, then I would take another piece of paper and draw my building and maybe a character layout, then I would have another piece of paper on top of that, refining that character. Then I would put my Bristol board on top and try and get all those layers filtered

down into a refined final product. It was a little like working in Photoshop, but for cavemen. [Mike laughs] The first time I used a tablet was before the Cintiq. I tried a Bamboo tablet, and I tried to do a circle, but because I was drawing on the tablet but it was appearing on a screen a few feet away, I couldn’t draw a circle.

But it was obvious to me that the moment a product came around where I could work in Photoshop but see the work on the tablet I was drawing on, it would be a dream come true. I was just waiting for it to happen, and the moment the Cintiq became available, I jumped on it. It was an obvious path for me.

DRAW!: For a lot of artists, being able to sell your physical artwork is an additional source of income. Did that affect your decision at all?

YP: Yeah, that’s the trade-off you make, because, indeed, you don’t have any original art to sell. What I found was that the people who really want a Swamp Thing drawing from me, for instance, will get me to draw something for them at a convention. I can redraw scenes or do sketches for them as private commissions. But, yeah, it is a trade-off. Before I went digital, though, I wasn’t making that much money anyway with my original art. I don’t know why, but that was my reality. And my value got bigger for the kinds of projects I did when I worked digital. Nowadays I don’t think I’d have that much of a problem moving originals if I decided to go back to paper. But a lot of the work I do now is very interlinked with the fact that I’m doing it digitally, and going back to paper would be a problem. For instance, I love symmetries. I’m doing a lot of designs based on symmetry, like on covers.

A high-contrast inked page using a symmetrical design for Swamp Thing #18.

And all of that stuff would be a pain on paper, Swamp Thing © DC Comics doing the same drawing twice.

My control-freak nature responds really well to digital. of a deadline, I’ll try to do anything else than drawing. I still The way I work, I put an afternoon into redrawing things, like to write music, for instance—classical music. So somechanging it, flipping it, moving it around and distorting it until times creative, but unrelated to drawing. I see people who fill I get to where I feel satisfied it can be published. On paper sketchbooks between projects and go, “Wow!” but I’m not that would be a problem. It would require days of white-out them. [laughter] I guess I’m too lazy, or I just need something drying, and I’d end up a tall crust of white-out on the board. else in my life. I spend so much time sitting at my desk drawAll of those things I’m happy to give up for the income. At ing comics, that if I can avoid it for moment, I’ll do it. the end of the day, the artistic product will be less satisfying.

People reading the comic will get a lesser product, but I’ll be DRAW!: What about early on in your career, or when you were being trained? Did you spend more time sketching then? getting a little more money. I guess I’m not pure! [laughter] YP: I started in my early 20s, and right from the get-go I was DRAW!: Do you work on personal stuff in between proj- working. I had a moment of reflection recently. Looking back at my career, I was never out of work. I was never thinking, ects? Do you sketch or do drawings for yourself?

YP: Not really. When I’m not forced to do a page because “Oh, what am I doing now?” I always had something that

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get out of DC and do my own thing,” but then there was the opportunity of doing volume two. There’s always something I just can’t refuse, but eventually I’ll have to man up and say no, and take a year off and go into the desert and find my true self or something.

DRAW!: Did you have any formal training?

Did you go to college?

YP: No. My first intention in college was biology; it wasn’t comics. Comics seemed to me, at the time, unrealistic for a kid from Montreal. I didn’t understand how comics were made anyway. I thought the Americans were doing their own thing, and the Japanese were doing their own thing. When I was Inks for Batman/Superman #31, along with the final cover colored by Nathan Fairbairn. growing up in Montreal, there was no real Batman, Superman © DC Comics market for comics or BD [bandes dessinées] required my immediate attention, or that I knew I’d have two in general. I went into biology, studied science, but eventually weeks of not working because in two weeks I’d be destroyed the convention scene reached Montreal and I discovered peoby the project coming down the pipe. Since the Wonder ple from here working for DC. It was Gabriel Morrissette and Woman issues I did in the ’90s, every month I knew what I’d Denis Rodier, who was one of the inkers on “The Death of be doing, and I never had the luxury of saying, “Well, I’m just Superman”. He did very well for himself. He was inking a lot going to do my own thing for a while. of Superman stuff at the time. For me it was a revelation that it was possible for a French native living in Montreal to have DRAW!: Is that something you think you might get around a career drawing comics for Americans. At that time I was 19. to doing?

YP: Maybe. It’s a fantasy I have sometimes. But I’ve been DRAW!: Were you reading the European albums at the same lucky and cursed, in a way, in my career so far. There’s always time? something exciting, or there’s a writer I want to work with YP: Yeah, I mostly read the European stuff as a kid until, I’d who’s available, and it’s, “I need to do that.” After the first say, I was ten. After that I discovered the American market, Wonder Woman: Earth One, I thought, “Well, maybe I should because there was a French-Canadian publisher doing French

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translations of Marvel comics. I wasn’t bilingual at all. I became bilingual for work, basically, when I was 20-something. Before that I only spoke and read French.

DRAW!: What French comics were you reading?

YP: All the classics: Tintin, Asterix, a little Moebius actually—some Blueberry. That kind of material. But later on I discovered [François] Boucq, who did some fantastic drawing. A little bit more realistic, but still kind of crazy.

DRAW!: Yeah, I have a bunch of his stuff. Whenever I would go to San Diego [Comic-Con] or anyplace that sold BD, I would buy as many of those as I could.

YP: For me, all of those things were available at the local library, so I just read everything they had. That’s the basic culture I grew up with. A funny thing: when I discovered the American market, the first thing I found was that “Nick Fury” stuff, translated into French in big graphic novels. I remember reprints of EC comics in black-&-white, and for a long time, to me, that was American comics. I discovered superheroes in my early teens with X-Men and John Byrne.

very well. Bernie does bony hands, where you see the underlying structure of them, and Burne Hogarth was describing every tendon, every bone in the underlying structure, and those two things crystallized my understanding of hands.

DRAW!: What was your first professional or semi-professional job? How did you break in? Were you able to show your work to somebody?

YP: I was in Montreal, so I was just sending my stuff to the American publishers—all of them. It was the second half of the ’90s, and publishers were going out of business. There was a huge crash. It somehow worked in my favor, I think.

The first two companies I worked for never paid me. They went bankrupt right away. I was working on the last project keeping them going. I can’t even remember the names of those

DRAW!: How were you learning to draw?

Were there any books that helped you? Did you take any lessons?

YP: I was learning by myself. Because of my interest in science, I approached the art of drawing in a very scientific, almost bizarre way.

I learned anatomy by looking at medical books, and tried memorize the names of things. I’ve forgotten all of that, but for a while I was studying books of arms twisting, with all the muscles described, and trying to memorize where they are—almost trying to break the code of nature, trying to see how stuff works underneath the skin, but also how the physics of clothing works. I approached it kind of like The Matrix, in a way. I tried to figure out a way to internalize reality so I could draw it. So mostly it was my own will, trying to figure out books on anatomy. Down the road I found Burne Hogarth, for instance, which helped me out a lot with hands, but most of my anatomy I learned from medical books.

DRAW!: So you’d already learned anatomy by the time you found Hogarth.

YP: I was still bad with drawing hands in different poses, even though I was looking at my own hands, and looking at the masters of the past, and the anatomy of hands in medical books.

Hogarth’s way of doing it just resonated with me and made a lot of sense. Plus, I think it combined with my appreciation of Bernie Wrightson

Cover art for Wolverine: Origins #32, penciled on paper with inks by Serge LaPointe.

Wolverine © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Batman © DC Comics

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companies. They never published the books, or if they did, they never sent me a check or my original art. Maybe they gave me work because I was in Canada, and they figured I would never come back to haunt them. [laughter] DRAW!: You said you met Denis Rodier at a convention in Montreal? Did you show him your work?

YP: I showed my stuff, but I wasn’t good. I was just starting to think about doing comics. A friend and I were both showing our art one day, trying to see if we could get some traction in doing comics. Both of us would show our work and they would take us apart. “This doesn’t work for this reason.” After ten minutes you had enough work ahead of you to improve on those things, and then six months later at the next convention, you go back with new samples. We did that for two or three years, getting better and better until we reached the point where they didn’t really have much more to say. Really, Denis Rodier and Gabrielle Morrissette were like my masters, and were instrumental in getting me to the point where I was able to be published, just through showing them my stuff.

DRAW!: Do you find yourself in their position now that you’re an established professional? Do you do the same thing for younger artists coming along?

YP: Oh, absolutely! As a rule, I tell people all the time when they come up with a portfolio— it’s a French expression which means “sending back the invaders”, for inspiration. [laughter] Because people took the time to do that for me, I feel compelled to give back. I’ll spend as much time as they need, and look at everybody’s stuff, and try to be constructively critical. Some people just want to have fun while drawing, and just Things keep evolving. Cover art for The Flintstones #12 done on a fancy computer.

The Flintstones © Hanna-Barbera want to know how they can improve. Some people want to be professional, they want to work in the industry, Everybody wants to do character design, concept design, or game design. so I’ll be a little bit tougher. I love to do that.

A few years ago there were a lot more portfolio reviews YP: Which is in a way good news for guys like me, because happening for me. I don’t know. Are there fewer people who it means there isn’t a new generation to push us out. Once in a want to go into comics? Are they scared of showing me stuff while there’s a new talent that makes you say, “Oh, he’s awenow? I don’t know, but there’s been a clear decline. It may some!” but there’s not an entire generation coming in. be that in the early 2000s, if you drew well, you wanted to go into comics. It was the main fun thing to try to get a job DRAW!: No, but I have a feeling, because a lot of this stuff in. Nowadays, I think video game design is absolutely more is driven by the industries, eventually people will get tired of attractive, and it’s where very talented people go first. That’s that. It’s like in the ’70s, everyone wanted it to be the ’50s and Happy Days. There’s a craze for older things. And one person my theory. can do comics on their own. You don’t even have to have a DRAW!: I think you’re right. I’ve been teaching since the lot of computer equipment. I think it will come back because early 2000s, and in the early 2000s a lot of kids still wanted people like to tell stories, and you don’t need a huge team of to do comic books. Now nobody wants to do comic books. people to do that. One person can make a comic book. Do

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you find that you’re getting more interest from younger artists through social media as opposed to going to conventions?

YP: I don’t know. I think the very serious people are still showing up at shows, face to face. Once in a while I’ll get someone on Facebook saying, “Look at my stuff,” but if they’re serious, usually I’ll end up seeing them at shows, which is the Mecca of people looking to get into the industry.

DRAW!: Some artists are very habitual about their social media, and they post every day. Writers tend to be more on Twitter, and artists tend to be more on Instagram. Do you see social media as a benefit to you as an artist?

YP: The jury is still out on that. [laughter] I have some colleagues who keep a healthy, sane distance from the internet.

They let their work speak for them. At the same time, being out there did open up some opportunities and collegial relationships for me. I’m in Montreal, so I very rarely get to see anybody. At least through the internet I can stay in touch with my friends in the industry, but also it’s the way I discover new talents. I don’t read many new comics, so I’ll see pictures on the internet, and I might approach them and sometimes we’ll become friends—friends in the Web 2.0 type sense.

But it does make you very accessible to everyone, including people who you probably don’t want to be too accessible with. [Mike laughs] In recent years, there’s been all sorts of drama in the industry, and it’s been fueled by this ability through the internet to directly attack someone in a way that wasn’t possible in the previous generation.

DRAW!: That’s true. Before, if you were mad about something, you could only write a letter to the editor, and you weren’t mailing letters five times a day.

YP: Exactly. Some people will discuss their entire life, but I try to focus on art.

Sometimes, when I can’t resist it, I’ll go into a bit of politics [laughs], but I try to show some restraint. Sometimes it gets to be too much and I just say “thanks”.

It’s a fairly new phenomenon, and I’m really curious to see, say in ten years, whether we’re going to look at that moment where fans, editors, and artists alike were all in the same bath, and find out, “Was it good? Or did it bring out the bad?” I’m not quite sure.

Welcome to the machine. Inks for the cover of Justice League #9.

Justice League and all related characters © DC Comics

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DRAW!: Some artists get burnt out by it, some are addicted to it.

YP: I don’t have the energy to do a Twitch drawing and stuff like that. I will post covers once in a while because it’s in Previews, but it’s just a way to have my voice join the promotion of said product more than anything else. Some people have the discipline to put out drawings and sketches, but I just don’t have the time for that. I know for some people that’s their business model, and I applaud it. Good for them. I don’t know where they find the energy to do it. I don’t think I can compete on that front, and I don’t think the payoff is that great either. I don’t think it makes a huge, huge difference in your career at the end of the day.

DRAW!: Some people seem get a lot out of their social media, and their interactions with people. No company is ever going to wave your flag as well as you can wave your flag. They’ll promote you for five minutes because your Batman book came out, but then they move on to something else.

YP: Yeah, you’re right. Chances are that if I did something for Image or a smaller press that didn’t have the promotional presence of DC or Marvel, I would probably put somewhere in my schedule, “Invest time over the internet to promote,” and that would be part of my daily routine for pumping my stuff out there. But because I work for huge companies, I don’t feel that really helps. But you’re totally right, it’s a promotional tool.

DRAW!: DC’s always going to promote Batman, Marvel’s always going to promote Spider-Man, so if you’re on one of those books, you’ll get carried along. But a lot of times the stuff that needs the extra help, they don’t necessarily promote as well as they should. Batman will sell itself, but the lower profile books need more help. We’re at this cusp where social media is such an important part of the business. And like you said, I see people getting involved in flame wars, then the next thing you know their feed is getting filled up with arguing. If you go down that road, you know you’re going to spend a lot of time combatting trolls on your Facebook page. Is it really worth doing that, or is it better to use it to say, “I just put a sketch up for sale Welcome to the machine. Inks for the cover of Justice League #9. on eBay”?

Justice League and all related characters © DC Comics YP: On paper, the internet should bring everybody together and offer a smooth channel of com- through social media? munication between diverse opinions. I think it’s actually YP: Honestly, that’s probably the main reason I’m on social been the other thing. I think it’s made things slightly worse. media, to see what’s up, and what people are doing. Because Whatever weirdo opinion someone might have—flat Earth, I’m doing a series for DC, I’m getting all their comp copies. or whatever—they can find a vast community of people who This corner of the universe I know, but it’s very hard for me to think like them and encourage that thinking. know what’s going on at Image or Marvel. I have no idea. At least through social media I find out what my friends DRAW!: You said you don’t go to the comic shop much, so are doing, and sometimes make new discoveries. But how do you stay up with what people are doing? Is it mostly I read very few comics.

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BY MIKE MANLEY & BRET BLEVINS

Sparking your

W

elcome to the latest installment of “Bootcamp”.

Bret and I have tackled a large variety of subjects on making your drawings and storytelling better over the close to 20 years I have been publishing DRAW! One of the questions both Bret and I are probably asked the most at shows or online or when teaching is, “Where do you get your ideas?” It’s a standard question I get, especially when I post non-comic drawings, or any of my sketchbook or more personal drawings on my social media. The only other question I get asked maybe just about as often is about “style”. Students and young artists are very concerned about style, and having the best or coolest one. When I was younger I also wanted to have a style that emulated the work of my idols.

I think, especially over the past few years, people seeing the more personal work or non-comic book page work I do

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IMAGINATION are interested to find out if there is some “secret way” of coming up with a cool image, of fighting that fear so many artists have of the blank sheet of paper­—the dull brain that sits there and sputters looking at a nice, white piece of paper, a new sketchbook, or empty screen on the tablet. The panicked brain screams, “What should I draw? What can I draw? Why can’t I draw or come up with anything?!

“Why are some artists so good at coming up with such cool and unique imagery? Why is it so hard for me to get something going? Everything I do sucks!

“Why are my ideas too similar? Why do they sputter and die in a haze of lackluster lines and smudges? Command-Z is getting a great workout!”

Like all of you reading this article, my Instagram feed is just an endless scroll of the imaginations of artists from all over the

world, past and present, on display 24-7.

Add in Twitter, Facebook, etc., and it’s just a massive blast of art and imagery.

I think for some artists, especially younger artists in training who are seeing so much, being washed over by so many images sometimes almost wipes them out like a surfer getting swamped by a huge wave. You can’t even begin to think or speak, to form your ideas, because of the roar of your social media feed. Where are “you” in all of this mass of imagery? How can your voice be heard?

That’s the good and the bad of the time we live in. The plus is having endless access to not only new artists and what they do, their creative processes, but more and more work by artists of the past is available every day.

I am very adamant on one point as a teacher­—I feel going forward as an artist is always built on lessons from artists of the past. They give us ideas and keys, ways of working, of thinking to solve any of our current drawings problems, even if we are not consciously aware of them, even though we should be.

There is also a big difference between blindly consuming and curating what we are exposed to. The former is just part of the “push consumer culture” of the new media and the latter takes effort, time, and consideration. When I see a great drawing, painting, or illustration, I think “Why do I like it, and how can One of Mike’s Inktober drawings.

I learn from it?” Sometimes the work is Artwork © Mike Manley executed so excellently in a technical way, but the idea or sub- body. Drawing is thinking, and your imagination is like your ject matter might be unappealing, or flawed in some way, but brain running over the countryside picking up clues and possithat also sparks a thought process to understand why that’s the bilities like a bloodhound picking up a scent. If you keep going you are bound to discover, and make something interesting! case. This is an opportunity to learn and study, to think!

In trying to develop my own work and ideas, art separate Often we older artists hear the joke about “magical tools”.

I wish there was a special technique or some magic pencil or from my daily commercial concerns, I have come to embrace brush, paint, or paper, but alas, there is not. But I have found a way of working that has opened up my mind and imaginafrom study that the artists who seem to come up with a lot of tion, something like taking the reins off a horse to truly let my ideas, the best and coolest ones, are always sketching, think- imagination run free.

Here are a couple of ideas I think will help spur you on the ing, always working, always exercising their brains and their adventure into the country of your own imagination: imaginations.

Artists I truly love, like Jack Kirby or Moebius, who influGIVE YOURSELF SOME TIME enced generations with their artistic process and work, seem First, cut back on the social media feed a bit. Give yourself like endless fountains of ideas! I think the reason they had so many great concepts is that they were simply always, always some “alone time” to be with your thoughts, and have a stack drawing and sketching. They probably did 10, 20, 30 draw- of paper or a sketchbook handy. Take an hour in the morning, ings for every one done by the average artist. I have come or at night after a day’s work, or before you hop on the web. I to believe that your imagination is like a muscle, and can be often find I am at my most creative when I have knocked off strengthened and worked out—trained just like an athlete’s for the day but I’m not ready to watch TV or go to bed.

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One of Mike’s Inktober drawings (above), and a wind-down sketch (below).

Artwork © Mike Manley

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AUTOMATIC SKETCHING

The Surrealists employed a technique or strategy in drawing that was intended to draw upon the unconscious mind and was a drawing built of loosely sketching out a series of shapes or scribbles—random marks— on paper or a canvas. They called it “automatic sketching”. Out of this random scribbling, sometimes images would later emerge or be discovered. Salvador Dali and Jean Miró used this technique, as well as Moebius. It’s like looking at clouds and seeing animals or people.

This is the strategy I employ the most of late. Often using my eraser as much as my pencils, because being reductive or erasing is drawing too. All drawings are a collection of negative and positive shapes. You can concentrate on the positive so much you ignore the strength and possibilities of the negative.

You can watch a video of this process on my YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6MTxmAFJjY where I create this drawing starting with the automatic drawing process.

In fact, all of the ink drawings here by me were done starting this way. Taking the pencil (I often like using a red Col-erase), I worked across the surface of the paper, making random marks and shapes until an image was suggested. Then I started pulling the drawing out of those random shapes. It’s like having clay, in a way, that you can add to or take away from. I had no idea or plan of where the drawing was going, but once it started, things suggested themselves to me. Sometimes I’d erase parts as other ideas came forward. We all have lots of imagery and information stored in our minds, so doing these types of drawings makes the ability to pull them out in an imaginative way, I feel, much stronger and better.

Mike drew this wind-down piece before going to sleep, not in the middle of the night after having a nightmare.

Artwork © Mike Manley

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All kinds of things can emerge from your head when you open yourself up. Another wind-down drawing by Mike.

Artwork © Mike Manley

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Artwork © Mike Manley

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Artwork © Mike Manley

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Artwork © Mike Manley

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Artwork © Mike Manley

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magination is a mysterious aspect of brain function, as it can seem to generate results that come from “nowhere”, manifesting original concepts that didn’t exist before. While that is possible and certainly appears to happen in rare cases, the far more common process is a recombination of stored impressions or a response to stimuli that draws on the accumulated memories and impressions one has experienced since birth, filtered through an individual’s personality, taste, and skill.

What is lauded as originality is usually a fresh combination of elements melded in a successful way, one that generates a strong reaction (preferably a favorable one in commercial art) from an audience. The freshness of that combination is often shaped by what is called “style”, meaning a collection of personal idiosyncrasies, mannerisms, preferences, prejudices, etc., along with a particular repetition of effect or treatment that becomes recognizable as the defining characteristic of an individual’s viewpoint, perceptions, and methods of expressing them.

One artist might love geometric precision in their compositions, and form construction measured out mathematically, another an organic, free flowing, “instinctive” feeling. One may naturally be drawn to careful photographic accuracy, another wild distortion and impressionistic effects.

As you work you will continue to discover what satisfies you—which effects and techniques please you more than others—and these discoveries will coalesce over time into your “style”. When studying, you will be most drawn to other artists’ work that strikes an unconscious positive response in

you—an accord with your own inherent sensibilities. This reaction is an important guide to discovering your own nature, but be careful not to become too fixated on particular surface features of another admired creative personality. Focus on the essential underlying reason you admire their “vision”—the big choices they make about approaching a subject, which elements they stress, which they sublimate or eliminate—not the specific technical rendering means they use. Technique is important, but secondary to concept and ideas. Conceptions can be expressed in a multitude of ways by a multitude of techniques, including yours. Surface effects are integral to the finished work, but alone they are sterile if not used to convey something worthwhile, and most importantly, personal to you.

This is an important point because it sometimes happens that a student will become obsessed with one admired artist (or style) only. If this progresses naturally as a phase of learning and is eventually left behind as knowledge is accumulated and understanding deepens and broadens, it is a valuable experience. If it ossifies into complete imitation of someone else—it will become a prison and atrophy one’s own potential, because dedicated imitation creates an unfortunate constriction of mind that limits options only to what the admired artist has already done—nothing that falls outside of that is acceptable, or even fully understood. The work will always be second-rate, because it is fundamentally disingenuous, inauthentic—in current vernacular, fake news—because it isn’t your news, it’s what you think someone else would have done. Avoid this trap. Broaden your tastes. There is so much to learn from.

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Two in a series of sketch paintings.

Artwork © Bret Blevins

Everything you see, hear, taste, smell, touch, and emotionally react to, from birth onward, is your raw reference material. This is true for all creative art forms: prose, poetry, music, sculpture, film, dance. Your lifetime of sensations becomes your library, to which you should always be adding.

A museum display, a concert, a trip to the grocery store, a good or bad book or movie, or a funny friend who tells amusing stories, or a grouchy salesperson who mars your day, can all inspire you later when you need it, as can time spent in the natural world, or an airplane, or subway, or dentist’s waiting room and chair. Being alive means storing impressions, but the artist must learn how to fluently access and utilize them to accomplish his or her work.

The marvelous illustrator Austin Briggs was fond of quoting Henry James: “Try to be one of those people on whom nothing is lost.” That means when walking in a park, register all the sounds you hear, all the colors, the smell of grass and trees, the smell of the wood or metal of a bench in the sun, or the smooth metal of a water fountain and the particular taste and temperature of water itself, the sound of a ball bouncing or being caught, the clinking of the chains of a child’s swing and the animated sounds the swinging child makes. All these stored sensory experiences should be simmering like a primordial soup of sensations and impressions you can dip into and ladle out in the form of a drawing as needed.

As already stated, for our purposes here, what is called imagination is a reshuffling and accenting of those stored impressions, whether newly researched or reaching back to

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your earliest sensory impressions, expressed in visual terms.

All your experiences, physical sensations of weight, speed, inertia, cold, heat, pain, pleasure, and emotional sensations of joy, worry, elation, fear, panic, timidity, arrogance, hope, despair, anticipation, remorse, on and on, all these become assets to your imagination. They are the pith, marrow, substance, and lifeblood of your creativity. When utilized through the acquired facilities of intense observation, study, and skill, all these and countless more shades of emotions/ physical characteristics and any combination of them all can be expressed in visual art. That is the essential lure of being an artist for me, and the sustaining crux that can support one through countless long hard hours of producing images and meeting deadlines.

If you concentrate on digging into your feelings and “releasing” your emotions in the form of drawings or paintings as an indispensable part of your study and training, you will inevitably “find your style”, because essentially your style will find you as the natural result of this process. For most of us, sketchbooks are the most direct way to mine this necessary ore. No pressure, no preconditions, no expectations—a private sketchbook is a wondrous open free world to play in and discover what may be found, and, literally, drawn out.

As for methods of coalescing your own personal “vision” in the most expedient way, Mike’s advice to draw constantly, daily, as much as you can find time to do, is the best practical approach. The important discoveries are often hammered out on the paper or screen with mark-making tools in your hand.

Monster sketches.

Artwork © Bret Blevins

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Artwork © Bret Blevins

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Ruminating and daydreaming are important, but no one else can see the beautiful ideas in your mind until you become proficient at capturing them in visual form others can perceive.

Quality of imagination is a difficult topic to discuss. My own prejudice (and it may be just that; I have no facts to present regarding this) is that prodigious or powerful, rich imagination is not something that can be taught or learned; it is mysteriously rooted in one’s psychological makeup. It can be improved, broadened, intensified, augmented, and enriched by experience and study, but imagination that can be translated into visual terms is a fundamental element of one’s mental structure. The best anyone can do is make the most of their innate ability, personality, and interests.

The nature of an individual artist’s imagination should, and usually eventually does, dictate the character of the work that they do.

DRAW! deals largely with the visual aspects of narrative entertainment, and cartoonists, illustrators, concept designers, storyboard artists, animators, and other artists who are called upon to generate imagery primarily from the depths of their creative fancies, are intrinsically very different than portrait, still life, or landscape painters, who observe their already existing subjects directly and interpret visualizations of them in aesthetic ways.

If you consistently have difficultly deciding on subjects to draw, you may not be constituted to follow the path of the essentially imagination-based approach to art that the fields of narrative entertainment demand, and would probably be happier and more successful applying your talent in a more suitable direction. Skilled rendering, in and of itself, is in high demand in many fields. Visu-

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Artwork © Bret Blevins

alizing narrative concepts is an extremely specialized ability, and far too difficult and demanding as a career if you find the process of mining your imagination, often in the service of an employer or collaborator’s ideas, and even more often under pressing time constraints, to be frustrating and never enjoyable.

Mike’s description and demonstration of automatic drawing, letting the mind wander and catching what bubbles to the surface, is a useful exercise for flexing and strengthening the “imagination muscles”, allowing the pencil or other tools to randomly flow and suggest shapes that the artist then selectively, half unconsciously, accents and refines to spontaneously “pull out” imagery is a powerful and liberating method for uncovering notions, and is thoroughly recommended. Who knows what will materialize?

Pure automatic drawing is rarely applicable to commercial assignments though, so my approach to this kind of exploration is often limited to “warm up” sketching, which entails liberal use of sketchbooks and scrap paper to just “loosen” up the flow of imagination, letting your storehouse of memory “out to play”. Often the subjects are related to the job at hand, or something I’ve just read, seen, or remembered. But the goal is the same—to “unlock” access to the imagination, encouraging its cooperation in solving specific problems that await on the drawing board.

These sketches, doodles, and occasionally more finished pieces were all done spontaneously, with no definite goal in mind—just “fooling around”, almost like a jogger might do stretches before setting off for a run. I hope the playfulness and spontaneity is evident, and encourage you to relax and enjoy some play time yourself.

—Mike and Bret

Artwork © Bret Blevins

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Artwork © Bret Blevins

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UNDER REVIEW Art Marker Smackdown!

Prismacolor Vs. Copic

W

elcome back, all and sundry, to another column featuring a glimmer of hope in the deep, dark waters of your deadline sea. Your art boat has capsized, it’s sinking fast, and as you cling for life to your lapboard, looking for salvation, I, your Crusty Critic, arrive with rescue, piloting my Col-Erase Coast Guard vessel, throwing you a lifeline of art tips, tool reviews, and time-saving tricks!

As you lay prone, coughing up cash on the shoreline, thinking about how you got there, I, Jamar Nicholas, will resuscitate you with money-saving mantras and savvy supply shopping advice.

It’s taken me a lot of years to finally get to the subject of my column this issue, dear readers. As a long-time user of markers in my studio practice, I’ve seen the art of rendering change as quickly as the seasons, as new products appear, and sometimes disappear just as fast. A few marker companies have stood the test of time, and here we will put two of the industry heavy-hitters up against each other in a Match of the Century! Which marker is better?

Which brand takes the Crusty Critic title belt? This is your main event of the evening—but some in-ring announcements first!

THE “CRUSTY CRITIQUE” SYSTEM

My product reviews will be judged under my trusty Beret scale—from a one beret score (not worth the time/money/effort) to five berets (a Crusty Success!

Buy it immediately, or buy as much as you can carry).

EYE OF THE TIGER

Berol, with humble beginnings in the 1800s, is an art supply company that’s been around almost forever, and has withstood the tidal wave of competition in the art arena. Now under a different manufacturer banner, Newell Brands, Prismacolor is a brand that has SKUs in several different parts of the supply game, colored pencils, Art Stix, pastels, watercolors, and of course, the marker.

Towards the end of the ’80s, some of the biggest brands in rendering supplies were the DeSign line of xylene-based markers (which may have been outlawed for their toxicity), AD Chartpak (a favorite of designers and architects) and Prismacolor, at one point creating more “bang for your buck” by

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A plethora of Prismacolor markers.

introducing a dual-tipped marker featuring a popular wedge shape on one end and bullet on the other. As DeSign left the market (my Crusty remembrances are of the markers being so potent of smell, they were disorienting—whew, they were strong!) Prisma slid into the pole position as one of the leading marker brands. You could go into any art supply shop and visit the carousel of colors they had available—clearly crowding the store with its product. There weren’t a ton of marker options at the consumer level, and everything else in the space had a strategic difference to Prisma, such as Tombow dualtipped markers—long, thin, and sometimes sold in a vibrant set of multiples—or the Pantone Tria markers, which boasted three different tips, and also had an airbrush system. With so many colors to choose from with Prisma, you were either shopping for specific colors for a project or buying a suit of colors, such as warm or cool greys. There wasn’t a way (at the time) to buy the complete run of colors, but that has changed in the past couple of decades.

A NEW CHALLENGER ARRIVES!

With the explosion of interest in Manga and illustration techniques based on Japanese art, the Copic line of markers invaded the States in the late ’90s, and has been converting artists to their gospel ever since. The history of the company behind Copic goes back a long way (the Too Corporation, which makes the marker, originally began life as the “Magic Marker” manufacturer—yes, that’s where that started!), but with a steep price point and the air of “professionalism” that comes with the product, the marker clearly made a statement that you were serious about your art once you began buying this brand. Copic comes in a few styles: Sketch, the more mainstream line that I’ll be covering in this article; Ciao, a budget-line of the Sketch series of markers; Classic; and Copic Wide, which is exactly what it sounds like. With some hard-to-sneeze-at extras, like the option to refill and change the nibs of the marker you have so rightly invested in, it’s easy to see how this marker cut to the front of the art supply queue.

MARKER TALE OF THE TAPE PRISMACOLOR PROS

vs.

• Dual-headed • Alcohol based • Large array of colors available (200 in the line) • Easy to buy/find • Permanent • Cost effective (About $3.50 USD) • Affordable bundled sets • Color-fast • Strong solid pigment • Good for building color

CONS

• Streaky “ribbon” layering • Blending is a skill • Disposable • Odor • Harsh bleed • Prone to roll off your table

COPIC SKETCH PROS

• Dual-headed • Alcohol based • Large array of colors available (358 in the line) • Can buy refill inks (about 10 refills) • Can replace nibs • Permanent • Color-fast • Silky smooth blending • Square design prevents rolling off of table

CONS

• Need a lot of markers to plan a project • Expensive (base cost is $5.50—up USD) • Intimidating buy-in

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THE FAN FAVORITE

On paper (heh, see what I did there?) it’s hard to say that one of these brands is better than the other. Both work great at laying down lines on paper, and that’s the biggest thing here— depending on the type of paper you’re using, it’s going to change your expectancy for what you’ll get. I will say that Prismacolors have always given off, in my opinion, a darker vibrant pigment, no matter what color you are using, which doesn’t lend itself to blending, more so to layering, lights, and building to darks. Copics are masterful at layering and building colors on top of themselves—a real skill. I’ve seen some amazing illustrations pulled off with Copics, and within there lie some of my concerns about them—my Crusty belief is that young cartoonists believe they have to own Copics to do good, professional work. That’s clearly not true, but hard to deprogram unless you can show alternatives.

THE FINISH

I’ll admit, the price point of Copics has kept me squarely out of the arena for some time.

My favorite go-to shop (which I wrote about in past DRAW! issues) is now shuttered, but before they closed I got a sweet deal on their entire display of Copics (see right). I bought the whole thing and didn’t look back. I am still slowly experimenting with them, and unfortunately my store didn’t carry the refills, so I’m hesitant to use them because of the cost. My every-con carry is an Artbin-brand storage container filled with Prismacolor markers and not the Copics. There’s something terrifying about the thought of having your ammo case full of these gems getting stolen from your table at a comic convention that keeps me from traveling with them. Clearly my own Crusty Hang-up but a concern, nonetheless.

HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION OF THE WORLD

A cornucopia of Copic markers.

I really want to call this a DRAW! (pun intended), but am hesitant to call it down the middle. I think I have to side with Copic by a small margin. This is the brand that, if anything, inspires better work out of an artist, and if I had to create an edge for letting the tools do some of the heavy lifting, I’ll acquiesce this one time.

THE SCORE

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I give Copic Sketch markers four berets! It loses one beret because of the price point, but you do indeed have to pay to play!

If you have some great art hacks, trips, or traps you’d like to share, feel free to tell me about them! You can find me on Twitter @jamarnicholas or Instagram @jamar.nicholas—I’d love to hear from you!

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

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KIRBY COLLECTOR #77

ERIC POWELL celebrates 20 years of THE GOON! with a career-spanning interview and a gallery of rare artwork. Plus CBC editor and author JON B. COOKE on his new retrospective THE BOOK OF WEIRDO, a new interview with R. CRUMB about his work on that legendary humor comics anthology, JOHN ROMITA SR. on his admiration for the work of MILTON CANIFF, and more!

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MONSTERS & BUGS! Jack’s monster-movie influences in The Demon, Forever People, Black Magic, Fantastic Four, Jimmy Olsen, and Atlas monster stories; Kirby’s work with “B” horror film producer CHARLES BAND; interview with “The Goon” creator ERIC POWELL; Kirby’s use of insect characters (especially as villains); MARK EVANIER and our other regular columnists, Golden Age Kirby story, and a Kirby pencil art gallery!

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SILVER ANNIVERSARY ISSUE! How Kirby kickstarted the Silver Age and revamped Golden Age characters for the 1960s, the Silver Surfer’s influence, pivotal decisions (good and bad) Jack made throughout his comics career, Kirby pencil art gallery, MARK EVANIER and our regular columnists, a classic 1950s story, KIRBY/STEVE RUDE cover (and deluxe silver sleeve) and more!

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HALLOWEEN! Horror-hosts ZACHERLEY, VAMPIRA, SEYMOUR, MARVIN, and an interview with our cover-featured ELVIRA! THE GROOVIE GOOLIES, BEWITCHED, THE ADDAMS FAMILY, and THE MUNSTERS! The long-buried Dinosaur Land amusement park! History of BEN COOPER HALLOWEEN COSTUMES, character lunchboxes, superhero VIEW-MASTERS, SINDY (the British Barbie), and more!

40th Anniversary interview with SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE director RICHARD DONNER, IRWIN ALLEN’s sci-fi universe, Saturday morning’s undersea adventures of Aquaman, horror and sci-fi zines of the Sixties and Seventies, Spider-Man and Hulk toilet paper, RetroTravel to METROPOLIS, IL (home of the Superman Celebration), SEA-MONKEYS®, FUNNY FACE beverages, Superman and Batman memorabilia, & more!

Interviews with the SHAZAM! TV show’s JOHN (Captain Marvel) DAVEY and MICHAEL (Billy Batson) Gray, the GREEN HORNET in Hollywood, remembering monster maker RAY HARRYHAUSEN, the way-out Santa Monica Pacific Ocean Amusement Park, a Star Trek Set Tour, SAM J. JONES on the Spirit movie pilot, British sci-fi TV classic THUNDERBIRDS, Casper & Richie Rich museum, the KING TUT fad, and more!

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Featuring a JACLYN SMITH interview, as we reopen the Charlie’s Angels Casebook, and visit the Guinness World Records’ largest Charlie’s Angels collection. Plus: an exclusive interview with funnyman LARRY STORCH, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Captain Action—the original super-hero action figure, a vintage interview with Jonny Quest creator DOUG WILDEY, a visit to the Land of Oz, the ultra-rare Marvel World superhero playset, & more!