Draw! #6 by TwoMorrows Publishing

THE PROFESSIONAL “HOW-TO” MAGAZINE ON COMICS AND CARTOONING

BILL WRAY BRET BLEVINS CELIA CALLE STEPHEN DESTEFANO MIKE MANLEY ANDE PARKS

NUMBER 6 SPRING 2003

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THIS ISSUE ISSUE CONTAINS CONTAINS NUDITY NUDITY FOR FOR THE THE PURPOSE PURPOSE OF OF FIGURE FIGURE THIS DRAWING & ART INSTRUCTION—INTENDED FOR MATURE READERS DRAWING & ART INSTRUCTION—INTENDED FOR MATURE READERS

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COMIC BOOK ARTIST #24: THE COMICS OF NATIONAL LAMPOON!

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #38: KIRBY: STORYTELLER!

ALTER EGO #25: JACK COLE & PLASTIC MAN!

• NEW COVERS by GAHAN WILSON & MARK BODÉ! • Interviews with GAHAN WILSON and NatLamp art director MICHAEL GROSS! • Interviews with and art by the mag's top contributors: NEAL ADAMS, FRANK SPRINGER, SEAN KELLY, SHARY FLENNEKIN, ED SUBITSKY, M.K. BROWN, B.K. TAYLOR, BOBBY LONDON, MICHEL CHOQUETTE, ALAN KUPPERBERG, and many more!

• Two NEVER-PUBLISHED COLOR KIRBY COVERS! • JOE SINNOTT talks about how he inked Jack’s work! • HUGE GALLERY focusing on Jack’s Greatest Hits! • New column on OBSCURE KIRBY WORK! • Columnists MARK EVANIER & ADAM McGOVERN! • Special sections on Jack’s TECHNIQUE AND INFLUENCES! • Tracing the EVOLUTION OF THE HUMAN TORCH & THE THING, rare and unpublished art, & more!

• JACK COLE remembered by ALEX TOTH, his brother DICK COLE and his colleagues at PLAYBOY! • CHRIS CLAREMONT on the X-MEN (Part 2), featuring still more never-seen art by DAVE COCKRUM! • ROY THOMAS on All-Star Squadron #1 with art by ORDWAY, BUCKLER, MOLDOFF, MESKIN, and more! • FCA with C.C. BECK, MARC SWAYZE, & CHAD GROTHKOPF—MICHAEL T. GILBERT—BILL SCHELLY—special surprise features—& MORE!!

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MODERN MASTERS VOL. ONE: ALAN DAVIS

DRAW! #5: THE HOW-TO MAG ON COMICS & CARTOONING!

First volume in a NEW BOOK SERIES devoted to the BEST OF TODAY'S COMICS ARTISTS looks at the work of a true modern master: ALAN DAVIS!

• Interview and sketchbook by MIKE WIERINGO! • BRIAN BENDIS AND MIKE OEMING show how they create the series POWERS! • BRET BLEVINS shows how to draw great hands! • The illusion of depth in design, by PAUL RIVOCHE! • Must-have art books reviewed by TERRY BEATTY! • Plus reviews of the best art supplies, links and more!

Get practical advice and tips on writing from top pros on both sides of the desk, including: • HOWARD CHAYKIN on writing for comics & TV! • PAUL DINI on animated writing! • DENNY O'NEIL offers more tips for comics writers! • KURT BUSIEK shows how he scripts! • PLUS: FABIAN NICIEZA, DeFALCO & FRENZ, & more! (Edited by DANNY FINGEROTH • 84 pages) Four-issue subscriptions: $20 Standard, $32 First Class (Canada: $40, Elsewhere: $44 Surface, $60 Airmail).

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(Edited by MIKE MANLEY • 88 pages w/color section) Four-issue subscriptions: $20 Standard, $32 First Class (Canada: $40, Elsewhere: $44 Surface, $60 Airmail). NOTE: Contains nudity for purposes of figure drawing. Intended for Mature Readers.

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SPRING 2003 • VOL. 1, NO. 6

FEATURES

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COVER STORY A FRANK AND FUNNY INTERVIEW AND DEMO WITH BIG BLOWN BILL WRAY!

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Front Cover Illustration STEPHEN DESTEFANO and BILL WRAY

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DRAW! SPRING 2003, Vol. 1, No. 6 was produced by Action Planet Inc. and published by TwoMorrows Publishing. Michael Manley, Editor, John Morrow, Publisher. Editorial Address is PO Box 2129, Upper Darby, PA 19082. Subscription Address: TwoMorrows Publishing, 1812 Park Dr., Raleigh, NC 27605. DRAW! and its logo are trademarks of Action Planet Inc. All contributions herein are copyright 2003 by their respective contributors. 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 and historical purposes with no infringement intended or implied.Batman,Superman,Bizarro,Lois Lane, Starman,Mxyzptlk, ’Mazing Man, Lobo, Aquaman, Aqualad, Batgirl, The Legion, Fight for Tomorrow, Vigilante, Live Wire are TM and © 2003 DC COMICS • Monroe © 2003 E. C. Publications Inc. • Dexter’s Lab, Samurai Jack, Zesty Relish © TM Cartoon Network • Hellboy Jr. TM and © 2003 Mike Mignola • Dennis the Menace TM and © 2003 King Features Syndicate. Storm, Wolverine, MechaniX, Spirits of Vengence TM and © 2003 Marvel Characters, Inc. • Elvira ® TM and © 2003 Queen “B” productions • Popeye © and TM King Features • Big Blown Baby TM and © 2003 Bill Wray. Ren & Stimpy, Wild Thornberrys TM and © Viacom International Inc. This entire issue is © 2003 Action Planet Inc. and TwoMorrows Publishing and may not be reprinted or retransmitted without written permission of the copyright holders. Printed in Canada. FIRST PRINTING.

INKING A STEP BY STEP TUTORIAL ON INKING AND STYLE TECHNIQUES BY DRAW! EDITOR, MIKE MANLEY

CARTOONING & ANIMATION AN INTERVIEW AND DEMO WITH STEPHEN DESTEFANO

PHOTOSHOP TECHNIQUES A STEP BY STEP TUTORIAL ON ILLUSTRATING IN PHOTOSHOP WITH CELIA CALLE

THE FIGURE IN LIGHT AND SHADOW WITH BRET BLEVINS

Figurative interpretation by Bret Blevins

FROM THE EDITOR It’s Spring! And this youngish man’s fancy has turned once again to art and the oncoming Con Season. By the time you read this I will have attended the Wizard show here in my home town of Philly. I will also be attending the San Diego Comicon again this year along with fellow DRAW! contributor Bret Blevins. Keep up on all the news via our web site: www.drawmagazine.com. I’d like to thank once again the great contributors to this issue Bill Wray, Stephen DeStefano, Celia Calle, Ande Parks (whose beautiful wife Cynthia, just gave birth to their son Henry— congrats!) and of course Mr. Blevins, who by the way has a great sketchbook available via his web site: optimisticstudios .com. I’d also urge you to check out Bill Wray’s great site: www.bigblownbaby.com and Celia Calle’s web site: www.celiacalle.com for more great work by these artists. I had to cut the letters page this issue due to space constraints and delay the comic section until our October issue, DRAW! #8. I continue to build out the web site and our message board is a great place to stay in touch for news, see sketches and cool art, or get a critique or pointer from me and some of the other DRAW! contributors. I have uploaded a continuation of my inking tutorial I started in this issue. Thanks for the continued support for DRAW! and we’ll see you this July in San Diego. Best,

Mike Manley, Editor The DRAW! message board is up and running, so please post feedback and ask questions at: http://66.36.6.76/cgi-bin/Ultimate.cgi Here is a shot of a suffering Mr. Blevins from his hotel room last year in San Diego. He’s suffering because he had to go back to the room at night to keep working on his Justice League storyboard, which he begged me to help him with. And what could I do? Those Mai Tais were strong.

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Bill Wray is bigger than he’s ever been. He’s huge. Fresh off the One man show of his paintings in Texas, Draw! Editor Mike Manley catches up with the boundary pushing artist. From the glory days of Ren & Stimpy, his own hilarious comic tribute to Jack “KING” Kirby, Big Blown Baby, to Hellboy Jr., his monthly gig at Mad magazine with “Monroe,” Wray remains one of the busiest and funniest artists working in both animation and comics.

THIS INTERVIEW WAS CONDUCTED VIA THE INTERNET AND COPY-EDITED BY THE ARTIST

DRAW!: Tell us a bit about your background, your childhood. Were comics and animation important to you? BILL WRAY: Yes, I lived for Carl Barks, died for Bugs Bunny cartoons and learned to masturbate copying Little Annie Fanny. DRAW!: OK, maybe some things should stay private! When did you start drawing or reading comics? BILL WRAY: I was looking at comics before I could read them.

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DRAW!: So you mostly grew up in California? Do you think the proximity to L.A. helped getting into the biz? BILL WRAY: Oh sure, we had the animation business—the big comic book companies were in New York, but we had cartoons, Western Publishing, Disney, and underground comics up North. Kirby moving out to Sherman Oaks was the real beginning of a West Coast access to New York. When Roy Thomas came out, we had a direct pipeline. DRAW!: Didn’t you live overseas for a while? Vietnam? BILL WRAY: I was an Army brat so we traveled extensively till

shot, so we lived in a French villa. A thunderstorm knocked a huge tree down in our back yard. My Dad had it re-planted upside down and had wood planks nailed to the root mass to from a platform. I would climb up and look all over the whole city of Hue. It rained for months on end in Vietnam; the atmosphere was literally like a river. One day it somehow rained tadpoles. I would see little boys my age leading huge oxen calmly down the street. I attacked a pack of dogs that were zeroing in on my little sister. Hong Kong, that was no big deal, but I had to get rabies shots in the stomach, that was no fun. But I did get a pile of comics after each shot. DRAW!: Wow. Were you getting into comics because of your being away from the American culture? Do you remember being attracted to certain artists or types of art? Did you see any foreign comics at all? BILL WRAY: I liked the same stuff as when I was in the USA: Barks ducks, war comics, Superman, Harvey Comics. I wasn’t into Marvel heroes yet. The comics were sold to G.I.s. I have no memory of any Chinese comics. DRAW!: Were you drawing by this time? Did you ever draw stories or just pictures?

I was about 11. Then we settled in Southern California. We were in Vietnam for about eight months, then we were evacuated during the Tet Offensive. We went to Hong Kong and that was cool, as they had comic book stalls with piles of American comics. I’m still amazed that I was allowed to roam the city alone at the age of nine. Vietnam as well... I could have easily been kidnapped. Maybe that’s what my Dad was hoping for. DRAW!: Obviously this seems like a really powerful memory and time for you. Do you feel it impacted you as an artist in any way? I mean being exposed to this type of situation? War, chaos, new cultures, danger, etc. This really has affected so many important artists throughout history, even in our business. Anytime you met Jack Kirby, you were likely to get some war story. It affected his art strongly. One of the things you are known and popular for, is taking things over the top, pushing the envelope, kicking the sacred cows right in the udder! Do you pull from those childhood experiences and put that in your work in any way? BILL WRAY: A long deep question that I don’t really know the answer for. I was lonely, but never traumatized too badly. I never saw a dead body or had a friend killed. Some quick cut memories: I saw a rabid dog shot in Vietnam. My Dad was a big

4 DRAW! • SPRING 2003

BILL WRAY: At first just pictures—lots of WWII themes, B17’s blowing up Germans and monsters. Later cars. Serious comic book drawing started in high school. I was introduced to underground comics around that time. They made me realize I could do comics, because they were so crude with stories that shocked me more that EC comics did a year or two earlier. My first major comic was my frog characters mixed with Vaughn Bodé’s lizards. The Witzend issue with the Bodé’s cover where the hooded freak is blowing the girl’s brains out blew my mind out, too. Around that time I went to the first San Diego con and found a copy of Rich Corben’s Rowolf. I still remember looking around the room to see if I was going to be arrested or something. That had me going. I never dreamed of beating off to a

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comic book until I saw a Corben girl, but when you’re 13.... DRAW!: So reading comics was encouraged in your house? I know you said your dad was an artist.

BILL WRAY: My mother gave me Peanuts collections and Tintin albums. She had a flare for art, but put it aside to be a housewife. Later she let me buy underground comics—I don’t know if she knew how raw they were or not. My Dad lost interest in me once I was past the cute toddler stage. When I was about 3 or 4 years old we did do an oil painting based on my child scribbles of sea life. It’s an abstract memory, I think based mostly on a “posed” photo of us doing it together. He helped me one other time when I was twelve; taught me how to draw an engine block when I got into hot rods. A shame he didn’t spend more time showing me drawing tips, as he could have helped me excel and lessened my resentment for his lack of attention. The irony was he wanted to be a teacher, and was an incredible artist. He gave it up for the military because of WWII. That Hitler freak ruined my childhood. DRAW!: So your parents were into comics and were artistic, at least to a fair degree, to be able to pick out some of the best material and expose you to Tintin, Peanuts, etc. Were they more into strips instead of comics? BILL WRAY: My mother just liked those collections. Those are the only ones she gave me. She wasn’t really into comics, she just would be attracted to anything that was the best of its kind. DRAW!: Did you go to art school? ABOVE LEFT: The Wray family in Hue, Vietnam, with servants and father’s assistants. You can’t tell from this angle, but the tree Bill is leaning on is upside-down. LEFT: Young Bill in Costa Mesa, California, about age 10. Bill’s favorite comic then was Turok, Son of Stone. ABOVE: Unpublished page from about ’91, Lobo’s Dog, a one-shot written by Keith Giffen and penciled by Bill that was killed because it had a concentration camp for dogs in the story and many other tasteless moments.

BILL WRAY: I tried, but the teachers at my JC (Orange Coast Collage in Costa Mesa) were into putting TVs into sandboxes and drawing your feelings with ink and sticks on rough wooden planks with your pants off and the rules out the window. People who wanted to learn to paint and draw formally were to be pitied and then shamed into enlightenment. I would bring in Frazetta and Leyendecker books and be openly ridiculed by my teachers for my ignorant desires to do crap. Color, design and lettering were helpful—they couldn’t make up convoluted manifesto for that stuff, but I dropped out and went to work for pro

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cartoonists despite the naked models and cute coeds.

DRAW!: This seems to be such a common story amongst us cartoonists and animators. The constant slapdown in high school, and often in college as well, by the art establishment. You’d think they’d be happy to have students who were so into drawing, passionate about it, driven—but I guess not. Did this type of experience harden you or drive you in some way to prove them wrong? BILL WRAY: Actually I enjoyed high school, as my teachers wanted to be hippies and fornicate with the students. More than one was fired for giving girls rides home that ended in pregnancy. My art classes were totally open to free expression, music, drugs and making out. I kid you not. I didn’t learn much, but I was pretty self-motivated so at least I was drawing all the time. My teacher, Mr. Stoia, was a great guy, but into a mid-life crisis flux. He covered for me, but was an enabler for bad behavior because he wanted to “relate” to us. His generation had just missed the free love boat and still wanted to take that ride. So we all did our thing. I won art awards—for what I don’t know— and barley passed my real classes. I have no idea where I got my drive to draw, as it was easy to fake your way through life in my little world, but by junior college I wanted more. DRAW!: I know you mentioned to me once that as a teen living in California you visited some artists and animators, did any of these old timers help you out? BILL WRAY: Yes, a retired Disney guy was helpful; he taught me some basic animation tricks, but no formal drawing lessons. He used to sculpt maquettes for Disney and Hanna-Barbera merchandising. Sadly I wasn’t aggressive enough to get a lot from him. But the encouragement and kindness meant a lot. He also helped me get work at Disney and H-B. DRAW!: Well that’s pretty great, being able to find a sort of mentor to at least put you on the road, point the way. I had the opposite experience when I tried to get into Hanna-Barbera. The old-timer I talked to told me to “Forget it kid, animation is a crap business. It’s dead, do something else.” I did find a mentor in commercial art though, and in high school he helped me out a lot. Did you have a group of fellow artists you hung around with that were also trying to break in? BILL WRAY: In high school there were guys who could draw in school, but the party atmosphere derailed them. The guy who was the best artist, a real “natural,” ended up driving a bus—art was to easy for him. Maybe that’s why I had drive. Good drawing was very hard for me grasp. I’m still hoping to do a good one day. I met guys later via comic book clubs and the San Diego con. Rick Hoberg, Dave Stevens and I were great friends in those days. We broke in about the same time. Stevens was always the one we looked up to, as his art was so accomplished from day one. Rick and I were basically a team, always trying out for jobs together. I assisted L.A. fantasy artist Bill Stout for a while. He taught me how to work hard. I worked for Howard Chaykin and he thought me how to dress. I briefly went to work 6 DRAW! • SPRING 2003

for Al Williamson on my first visit to New York, but he was so bored with his comic strip he ended up working for me doing all the backgrounds on a comic I was inking. DRAW!: That must have been fun having Al ink your work? BILL WRAY: It was a weird double-edged sword. I came there seeking a father figure, mentor type and he was working for me? But my stay there was one of the best times I ever had. I thought I had a friend for life when I left, but I realized later I alienated him with my youthful lack of tact and ABOVE: Bill’s gun phase lasted until he turned self-control. Something hippie in high school and he hasn’t owned one since. that I’m still working on. DRAW!: So you would say that by your mid-teens your were very serious about perusing cartooning and animation as a career? Or did you figure it was a step until you got into illustration? What was your method of self-study? Did you try and buy books or study old strips, painters, and illustrators? BILL WRAY: Yes. I always had a huge library and copied all the time to learn. DRAW!: What were you taking with you to each new job? BILL WRAY: You mean learning? DRAW!: Yes. BILL WRAY: A little step with each penciled and inked job. Not much with just inking, a dead-end job really. DRAW!: What was your first job and how did you break in? BILL WRAY: Doing comic book inking at Disney for their foreign comics market. I thought I was a golden child, working at Disney at 16. I liked Disney, but hated the work. Not inking comics mind you, but their convoluted methods of doing them. I had to light box everything from the penciled art on tissue. Drove my eyes crazy and the work looked traced, so I quit and went to work for Russ Manning on the Tarzan foreign comics. DRAW!: How did you meet him? Did he give you any instructions? Was he easy to work for?

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BILL WRAY: Rick and I went to work for him I think via Mark Evanier who knew every cartoonist in L.A. We aped Manning’s style for the overseas market that couldn’t get enough of Russ’s approach. As I said, Russ was the strong, silent type and I worked mostly at home for him. The only time I worked at his studio was to do corrections, so that was a “strictly business” atmosphere. Dave Stevens got to know him better, as he assisted on the Tarzan strip.

HELLBOY JR. © AND TM 2003 MIKE MIGNOLA

DRAW! Did Manning give you specific instructions or just try you out and correct you as you went? Were you following layouts? BILL WRAY: Hoberg penciled, I inked. He just swiped Russ as much as possible. I didn’t look at Russ as much as I should have; I was into Frazetta. Russ would sometimes pass a job with no changes, sometimes make me do them, sometimes he would do a major paste up himself. You never knew what would happen. DRAW!: Did you want to do comics or animation more, was there a preference or was there just a general interest in both?

ABOVE: A typical page from Hellboy Jr. showcasing Bill’s great use of dry-brush inking.

BILL WRAY: I loved animation, but I think I realized early that the business was dead and I really wanted to be an illustrator anyway. Comics were a fun way to make money from my childhood hobby, but over the years I went through different cycles deciding what my focus was going to be only to change my mind and turn in another direction. DRAW!: So you really wanted to be an illustrator then. Sort of

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like the classic American illustrators like Rockwell, Cornwell etc. BILL WRAY: Absolutely, especially when I was taking old illustrator Jack Faragasso’s painting class at the Art Students League. We were doing the “Riley Method” based on Cornwell and old master techniques. I learned to paint, but never had the drawing chops to be as good as my heroes, so I just decided to play to my strength—cartooning.

DRAW!: Can you be a bit more specific here? You are talking about Ken Riley, the illustrator who was sort of a grand pupil of Howard Pyle, the Dean of American illustration? I know there is an excerpt of Pyle’s working methods or philosophy in Andrew Loomis’ book Creative Illustration. Were you following in this way? Lots of figure drawing, etc.?

ABOVE: Sketches for an unrealized Hellboy Jr. story, “Hitler’s Big Day,” a story that may still see the light of day. BELOW: Prototype model sheet for the Cartoon Network pilot of King Crab. ABOVE RIGHT: More Hitler sketches for the unrealized Hellboy, Jr. story.

BILL WRAY: Frank Riley was Cornwell’s assistant and longtime Art Students League teacher. He created a technique based on Cornwell’s teachings and others’, old masters’ techniques refined by guys like Pyle. The Riley Method was a combination of all those things broken down to 10-value step pallet. Most of the great illustrators of the Fifties are Riley students; almost every great paperback guy took his class. I can’t explain it all here, that’s an article in itself.

BELOW RIGHT: Warm up sketches for a recent Mad Osama Bin Laden parody.

DRAW!: You worked at the old Filmation studio, was this your first animation job?

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BILL WRAY: I was at H-B first, but got fired by Doug Wildey

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for embarrassing him at the networks for being late and drawing extreme violence on a storyboard (a joke gone wrong). In those days TV animation was beyond tame. To appease parental groups the networks hired child psychologists to find something wrong with the shows. As they liked their well paying jobs and could rationalize they were saving the world’s children, they found more things to censor every year. First you couldn’t have a character point a spear, then no spear, finally threatening gestures were verboten. This was rough as the networks were mostly buying action shows. Filmation was a wasteland of drunks who couldn’t cut it at Disney when all the film studios’ animation units closed in the Sixties. The work was so demoralizing I was bordering on alcoholism myself.

BILL WRAY: A jungle girl pulled a thorn out of a lion’s paw and I drew a Monty Python-ish gush of blood pouring out. The real panel was underneath it, ready to be revealed as a joke. Doug had a wonderful sense of humor, but in the rush to finish I forgot about it and Doug didn’t catch it. After he sent it in, the network called, seriously angry, and since Doug hadn’t noticed the offending panel, he rigorously defended the board, telling the network they were crazy. So Doug had a lot of egg on his face when they showed him the bloody panel. He fired me and I was blacklisted at H-B for as long as he was there. I tried twice to clear the air with him, but he refused to admit there was a problem. My drawing sucked anyway, and I was slow. If I was really talented he might have looked the other way. DRAW!: What was your job at Filmation?

DRAW!: Can you elaborate on what was so bad about the joke you drew?

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BILL WRAY: I was in the layout department. DRAW!: And what did that entail? Blowing up and key posing from storyboards? BILL WRAY: Yep! What we did was fake layout; I didn’t learn a thing there. You were encouraged to trace the model sheet as much as possible. Never add expression or a good pose, which cost money. It was the ultimate de-evolution of character layout.

BILL WRAY: I liked comics, but the animation business in those days was at its all-time low, it sucked the life out of you. I mean I suppose some people can get some enjoyment from humping a corpse, but it kept me in a state of drunken nausea. Animation was in its death throes, thank God The Simpsons, Ren & Stimpy and Pixar revived it years later.

DRAW!: I know the ’80s was a bad time in the animation biz, but still there must have been some enjoyment in doing cartooning for a profession instead of flipping burgers?

DRAW!: So you really felt like some factory worker then. Just doing eight hours of piecework each day. Nothing exciting you? BILL WRAY: Sometimes you would get your hopes up, like when Filmation got the Terry Toons stuff. But they turned it to crap and the networks wouldn’t let you do anything resembling comedy. I’m telling you, we were not allowed to do anything creative whatsoever.

BILL WRAY: Yeah. He couldn’t get a job there, (at that point) his style was too eccentric. His girlfriend is who I met first— she was inbetweening there. I didn’t want to meet John, as I was trying to put the moves on her. She would always start to talk about what a genius he was and I would change the subject to what a great sweater she was wearing. When Eddie Fitzgerald (a storyboard artist there) showed me one of John’s drawings, I though it was horrible, but had something cool about it. Kind of like a retarded Basil Wolverton meets Hanna-Barbera. We ended up being best friends and partners for a few years and did some odds-and-ends short films (that’s when Ren & Stimpy was developed, along with other projects we couldn’t sell,) until I decided to quit beating my head against the wall. I was convinced the animation business would never improve, so I went to New York to learn to paint. Leaving John to his all night meat and beer parties. DRAW!: When did you move out East and start attending school? BILL WRAY: When I realized the work I was doing wasn’t teaching me anything except how to get high and get paid for it. I basically quit the business and decided to move to New York in ’84 and go to the Art Students League. That decision was

10 DRAW! • SPRING 2003

DRAW!: What did you do to keep going? Is this where you met John Kricfalusi?

CARTOONING

BILL WRAY

encouraged by a teacher I was take classes from privately. DRAW!: Would you say this had a big fundamental impact on you as an artist? Was there an adjustment going from one coast to another? BILL WRAY: It was huge—I felt excitement and commitment from the students and the teachers. This was a school where they didn’t offer any accreditation; you were not there for a bogus degree, you were there to learn. I had great teachers and some average ones, but they all could draw really well. The students were inspiring; the best people went there, including top illustrators taking refresher courses. Another school was opened downtown called the Academy where old masters’ techniques were being revived. It was the slow re-launch of figurative art of the Eighties. DRAW!: So you started taking classes there full time? Were you still trying to get or do comics work to pay the bills?

BILL WRAY: Yes, I did both—I was able to move because I was getting regular work doing horror stories for Bruce Jones. He quit packaging comics to write for Hollywood, so I was forced to take a job assisting Greg Theakston and through him I started getting work at DC. DRAW!: And what were these jobs? BILL WRAY: Inking mostly, but I did to some fill-ins for Mike Gold and was in an anthology who’s name escapes me. I did loads of coloring too. DRAW!: What was your first comic job for Marvel, and what were some of the early books you worked on? I know you told me once you worked on the first Star Wars comics. BILL WRAY: I inked half a Kirby book with Mike Royer and did odds-and-ends inking for Roy Thomas during most of those L.A. years in the late Seventies, early Eighties. I mostly inked

LEFT TOP: More Osama studies for MAD. LEFT: Warm-up sketches for short Aquaman parody in Bizarro Comics. ABOVE: Cover pencils for the second issue of Big Blown Baby.

DRAW! • SPRING 2003 11

CARTOONING

over Rick Hoberg, as we were party pals and broke in together. Sometimes Dave Stevens and Bill Stout helped out, as I wasn’t very fast and we were always given jobs with short deadlines. If it wasn’t for Russ Manning, Jack Kirby, Mark Evanier, and Roy Thomas there never would have been a West Coast comics scene.

BILL WRAY

DRAW!: What Kirby comic was that? Were you back in California by then, or still in NYC? BILL WRAY: “What If... the Marvel Bullpen Were the Fantastic Four.” When I did my first Marvel work, I was still living at home in Newport Beach, California. I didn’t work with Royer—he recommended me. DRAW!: Now when you are working for pros like Manning and Royer, are you picking up techniques from them? Are they showing you tricks with the pen or brush? Can you say what you were learning from them?

BILL WRAY: Pros gave me a few tips, but I already was a slick self-taught inker. Stout may have shown me a few things, so I would draw more like him. Mostly it was use this pen or this brush, go to work, and don’t sleep on my time. DRAW!: Wow. That must have been fun inking Kirby! How different it was then in the business. I mean in the Eighties you could get pick up work on short stories, jump around a bit. Polish up your craft on different subjects. BILL WRAY: I didn’t get a regular gig because I was on a skut boy skill level. I didn’t know it then, but I was handed rush fillins and f*ck-ups by others. Because I was too green for a monthly. Chaykin fell behind on Star Wars and the regular inker

12 DRAW! • SPRING 2003

ABOVE: A cover from the unpublished Lobo’s Dog.

ABOVE: Unused sketches for Ren & Stimpy video box covers.

BILL WRAY

Jones. Currently my favorites are Ketcham, Frank Robbins and Earl Oliver Hurst.

wouldn’t agree to pencil and ink an issue in a week, but hungry kids like Rick and I would. We were on fire when we did the comic because we got to see a preview of the movie and knew it was great. We didn’t sleep for a week and still our issue came out pretty good, especially since Stevens inked the main Luke heads. We drove up to Los Angeles, proud of ourselves, fried and wired. We couldn’t wait for Roy’s reaction. He couldn’t be expecting much with the rushed time frame, so we knew we had come through big time. Roy answered the door in his bathrobe and grabbed the art without looking at it and slammed the door in our faces muttering apologies about how he had to get it ready to mail. That was a sobering moment. I’m sure he had no idea how crushed we were not to get an ounce of feedback. He had been in the business to long to remember how important those early jobs were to an artist.

DRAW!: But would you say at a certain point the more “cartoony” or exaggerated work started to appeal to you more? I know when you are young you can wrongly assume that because something is less photo realistic it isn’t as good. Because Fraze-tta and Kurtzman are in some ways at opposite ends of the spectrum as far as the rendering and sweaty muscle stuff, yet both are essentially cartooning in the best sense since both idealize the form so much. Frazetta’s three legged horses and blown out anatomy.

DRAW!: That’s really true, you crave that encouragement in the beginning. When would you say you started to get steady work?

BILL WRAY: Never did have a day it happened. You pick up things over the years. I just gravitated to the best of both worlds. I don’t think one is better than the other to this day. I just think good cartooning is as valid as realistic drawing. My work blends both worlds.

BILL WRAY: I never had a real job past 16— DRAW!: When did you go back to L.A. and when did you start back in animation? Was it Ren & Stimpy? BILL WRAY: Yeah, I promised John I would go back if we could do a cartoon our way. DRAW!: Whom were your heroes coming up? Who were you studying artistically? BILL WRAY: Everybody at EC except Jack Kamen. Kirby, Kurtzman, Frazetta, Toth and Wood were the main ones in comics. Animation wise: Disney, Bob Clampett, and Chuck

BILL WRAY: I liked both equally; the “cartoony” stuff came easier. The hardcore drawing was a bitch. I don’t remember favoring one or the other when I was a kid. DRAW!: Was there a point where you started to consciously analyze this?

DRAW!: So you packed up and headed back out to L.A. in what year? Did you start right away on Ren & Stimpy? What was your job there? BILL WRAY: In 1990. I didn’t work on the short that sold the series, but started on the first show as soon as I hit L.A. I was the head of the background department, did some storyboarding, and a came up with the basic plot on the unaired “Man’s Best Friend.” DRAW!: Were you still trying to do comics work?

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BILL WRAY evolved into the thing they call Adult Swim. Of course I still think it a great concept and was a huge missed opportunity for a hit show. DRAW!: Since you were in charge of this baby all the way, what did this entail? BILL WRAY: Well I ran it, but had help from top guys like Stephen DeStefano who did the (final) character designs on most of the characters and re-drew my storyboards. Dave Cooper did the prop design, Scott Wills did some color keys and I swept the floor. DRAW!: Ha ha. What a great team. They are all so talented, they must have made your job easy. And Wills has gone on to do great stuff on Samurai Jack. How did Big Blown Baby come about?

BILL WRAY: In the late Eighties I heard Harvey Kurtzman speak at a DC-sponsored talk, just before he died. I was so shocked by the appalling shape he was in, I couldn’t listen to him, but I couldn’t walk out either. I did what I do a lot when I want to cry, I draw as an outlet. I did an angry drawing in my sketchbook I had with me. It was a sketch of a really angry

BILL WRAY: I was still doing some inking for a while, but soon stopped trying to get any more as I was so busy at work. I penciled an entire issue of a comic written by Keith Giffen called Lobo’s Dog, but it ultimately proved to be too controversial for DC to publish as it had a concentration camp for dogs sequence. I was also doing Big Blown Baby at night as an outlet for my drawing, and was painting all day long.

BILL WRAY: I developed it for Nickelodeon right after Ren & Stimpy ended naïvely thinking they would want to continue to work with us. After they turned it down (in record time) I set it aside and took a job art directing Space Jam. Later, when Hanna-Barbara was still going, they invited me to develop something for them. I brought in the Crab and they liked it. Then Turner bought them and happily Cartoon Network liked it enough to pick up a pilot. It was to be the first “adult oriented” cartoon designed to run at night. The pilot had its problems due mainly to trying to introduce an ensemble cast and complete a story in 7 minutes, but to their credit CN saw its potential. We developed it further, starting the first stories and shaping the series. Sadly they lost heart when the idea of an expensive adult show seemed too risky and it was decided to do the low budget, low risk experiment of buying edgy Japanese cartoons. That 14 DRAW! • SPRING 2003

DRAW!: Recently you had your own pilot for a show at Cartoon Network called King Crab. You produced a great pilot for it, which probably still runs. How did you go about developing and pitching this?

muscle-bound baby. I went home and started to draw the comic in my spare time. It was a form of extreme self-expression harking back to the kind of work I wanted to do ever since I saw my first underground comic. My favorite Kirby comic was Thor, so I decided my premise was: What if a Thor as a baby god came to earth with all his powers and the emotional restraint of a baby. The whole thing ended up being a rude tribute to Kirby, somehow going over the radar of the Kirby collector. I pitched it to Randy Stradley who tersely told me it was trash, and that Dark Horse would never publish. Undaunted, I decide to take it seriously and got my pal Robert Loren Fleming to punch the dialogue and decided to pitch it to Andy Helfer at DC. While waiting in Andy’s office, we ran into Scott Hampton and George Pratt. We gave them the original art and they read the entire first issue screaming with laughter from the first caption. That was a gratifying moment for us when we realized we were not the only ones who found it funny. Andy came in and immediately wanted it, but said he would have to cut the nudity and profanity. We declined, but emboldened we went to Archie Goodwin at Epic, who smiled as he read it and didn’t say a word for 20 hellish minutes. Needless to say he passed. And we sobered up. Later Bob Shreck decided that Dark Horse would be interested in it and somehow convinced Mike Richardson to publish it.

CARTOONING

BILL WRAY

would write the stories and feature all our favorite cartoonists. I think I said to Mike I wanted to do the adventures of the Ginger Beef Boy, and I still remember how he slowly repeated the name and then just gave me a free hand. Everybody wanted Mike to do a story, so he drew one and asked me to dialogue it, I can’t tell you how honored I was by that gesture. Eventually Mike tired of the book due to a combination of relatively low sales on the later issues, along with editorial being uncomfortable with my raunchy humor. The good news is it looks like there will be a collection with a new story and unpublished sketches. MONROE DRAW!: Well today your regular big time gig is doing “Monroe” for Mad. That must feel good to have a regular gig in such a prestigious magazine. I mean Mad’s probably past the heyday now, the culture has caught up and passed it with cable

DRAW!: Any plans to return to Big Blown anytime? BILL WRAY: I want to. I keep hoping Dark Horse will grow balls again and want to continue it or at least expand it a bit for a trade. HELLBOY JR. DRAW! How did Hellboy Jr. come about? Did you pitch it to Mignola? He’s like a crabby Little Hot Stuff.

BILL WRAY: Actually Hot Stuff was crabby. Mike was crazy for Big Blown Baby. Unsolicited he did two pin-ups for it. Can you imagine? One of my favorite artists was a fan of something I did. Then Bob Shreck left Dark Horse and the baby died with his exit. I can’t remember how it happened, but basically Mike felt bad for me and I agreed that we should do something together. Hellboy Jr. was never meant to be Hellboy as a child, it was a way for me to do a milder version of BBB and work with Mike. DRAW!: So Hellboy Jr. isn’t meant to be funny goofy stories of Hellboy as a tyke? More an excuse to do wacky cartoony stories. Farce, with good cartooning? BILL WRAY: Exactly. I wanted to write more and just to have fun with our favorite cartoonists, like Dave Cooper, Hilary Barta, Steven DeStefano and Pat McEown. DRAW!: How did you two work together on it? Those issues were so great, and you had such a good line-up of talent.

LEFT: Pencil layout and finished pen and ink for a personal drawing of an Amazon Woman into dressing in super-hero costumes. ABOVE: A page for Hellboy Jr.

BILL WRAY: He told Dark Horse he wanted to do the book and suddenly it was green. We agreed it would star Hellboy Jr. I DRAW! • SPRING 2003 15

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BILL WRAY

TV, Howard Stern, etc. How did this strip come about? BILL WRAY: Mad’s heyday is when you grow up with it. Nothing is fresh reading it for 40 years. After 15 years of trying to land a job, I gave up trying. Ironically they called and gave me a tryout for a job when I finally accepted I wouldn’t be working there, and after some stumbling I landed “Monroe.” DRAW!: Did you design Monroe? Did Mad give you any specific direction on this, you know, he must be this age, this tall, this geeky? Did you have any specific ideas in mind? I notice you give him this strange antennae-like hair. Was this to help make him stand out—read better?

BILL WRAY: It’s hard to remember. I think I had the script, but not actual description. To be honest, I was so busy art directing Space Jam combined with the fact that I didn’t think (after my many rejections) they would hire me anyway, that I didn’t spend a lot of time designing him. I made him a little weird kid, picturing him with Dennis the Menace proportions. That first version was rejected as being too young; they didn’t want a little kid, they wanted an adolescent about junior high age. His antennalike hair was based on two ideas: the kids then were really doing a lot of stupid haircuts and I want his to be the stupidest ever. The second part is the hair acts as an element for expression, the same way Bugs Bunny’s ears do to register surprise or sadness. Over the years I got rid of the bowl cut on the back and streamlined the hair into full-on antennas. I wanted him alien-like, a not so subtle visual to have him not fit in with his peers. The first version of his mom was considered too ugly, so she was refined. I slowly over the years brought her back to the original version except with longer proportions. DRAW!: How does the process on the strip go? Do you get a full script and reference if you need to draw someone specific? BILL WRAY: Yes, I get a panel layout with the dialogue in place. They encourage me to make suggestions and add gags. A vote of confidence I appreciate.

ABOVE: A panel from the very first “Monroe” episode in MAD. Below it, the original pencil version and design of both Monroe and his mother.

DRAW!: Do you submit pencils?

DRAW!: In what way? Compared to whom? Wally Wood?? I mean, I’ve seen the strip, and you are putting a lot in and using Duo-Shade, etc.

BILL WRAY: Yes, everyone does. DRAW!: Is there a lot of back and forth between you and Mad? BILL WRAY: Sometimes I get it right and everything goes through. On the average there are a reasonable amount of small changes. Every now and then we clash when I’m too passionate about trying to keep jokes I like. Then I cave in and do lots of redrawing. They are all saints for putting up with me. DRAW!: How much time to you have for each episode? BILL WRAY: We seem to always be on deadline, but I think I like the fact it forces me to do a stripped-down style. 16 DRAW! • SPRING 2003

BILL WRAY: I know what you mean, but if you look at enough strips you can see when I’m rushing it. TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES DRAW!: Why did you decide to go with the Duo-Shade technique on “Monroe”? BILL WRAY: They don’t make Formatt dot pattern sheets anymore. Somehow they still make Duo-Shade board. It’s a treated paper that has “invisible” lines that are “revealed” by applying a stinky liquid you apply with a brush. I love it, as it’s the fastest gray tone process and really flexible. I’ll be really sad when they quit making it.

CARTOONING DRAW!: What are your tools of the trade? Be specific: paper, pencils, etc. BILL WRAY: For comic penciling I like Clutch pencil holders with those “turquoise” pencil leads—usually HB or B. For storyboards, sketching and layouts, Tombow Mono Bs and softer— the lead is like “butta.” All the best animators love them. I draw on whatever paper they give me, but if I have to buy it, Strathmore 2-ply “kid” finish. Inking is done with the Hunt 102 or a Japanese point called Deleter Comic Pen 900. Brush inking is a Winsor-Newton Series 7 #2 or #3. I’m finishing up my last big bottle of Pelican #17 and have never been totally happy with it. I’ve been using

BILL WRAY

some Japanese ink called Comic Super Black which seems pretty good and am soon to open a big Speedball Super Black—I can’t judge them very well as I pour them all into the same open ink container. I have boxes of Hunt 102s (Speedball) I’m not using, as I’ve switched to the Japanese Deleter points, as they are tougher. The Hunts last a page or so and break; the Comic Pens last for entire jobs and beyond. I paint on Strathmore 500 Series illustration board (vellum surface—the best!) when I can afford it. When I paint for Cartoon Network I steal their Crescent cold press 300 board, but that has suddenly turned into sh*t paper. The surface starts to rip up instantly now (I think due to low rag content) so they are CONTINUED ON PAGE 51

SAMURAI DUO-TONE

Wray’s pencils and inks from the DC Samurai Jack one-shot—with extensive use of Japanese graytone scenes and dry brush. Tones were cut out with a utility knife and applied by hand.

DRAW! • SPRING 2003 17

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More pencils and inks from the DC Samurai Jack one-shot— this time on Duo-Shade, an illustration board where you bring out the graytones with a chemical applied with a brush.

18 DRAW! • SPRING 2003

RIGHT CLOCKWISE: A typical page from the Big Blown Baby mini-series. A “Sparky Bear” page from the last Hellboy Jr. one-shot, written and drawn by Bill. The back cover for Big Blown Baby #4.

CARTOONING BILL WRAY

DRAW! • SPRING 2003 19

THE CRUSTY CRITIC

ANDE PARKS

ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN HEEBINK

THE CRUSTY CRITIC

SYNTHETIC BRUSHES AND WHITEOUT PENS The critic is back, dear reader, ready once again to steer you towards the best, cheapest, and most readily available art supplies. This issue, I’ve tested a wide array of synthetic brushes and whiteout pens. You’ll also find an updated list of online vendors. As always, keep in mind that The Critic’s goal is not to test absolutely every available product, but to sample what’s available. If I don’t cover a product that you love, please write me in care of DRAW!, and I’ll check it out. SYNTHETIC BRUSHES Even for those who ink their work primarily with pens, a good brush is an invaluable tool. Some jobs call for a brush line, and even on jobs where the pen is used for all linework, a good brush helps speed the process of filling in blacks. Cartoonists ask a lot of their brushes… a good one should meet three key requirements: 1) It should, above all, come to a fine point consistently. 2) It should spring back to its original shape after every use. 3) It should hold a good deal of ink and ink should flow from it evenly and consistently. Traditionally, the brush preferred by most cartoonists has been a watercolor brush made of red sable. The most famous brand is the legendary Winsor-Newton Series 7. This humble critic happens to prefer the Raphael Series 8404. In my experience, the Raphaels are more consistent, and they’re cheaper. The same size Raphael sells for as little as half of what you’ll pay for the Winsor-Newton. Both are quality brushes, and will deliver excellent performance. They’re also fairly durable, as long as you take some care not to get ink into the metal ferrule and wash them regularly. The issue of durability is key, particularly for cartoonists, who are dipping their brushes in harsh inks instead of the mild watercolors they were intended for. 20 DRAW! • SPRING 2003

I’ve been slinging ink with sable brushes for 15 years, with few complaints. Every now and then, my favorite brand has become unavailable, but I’ve always been able to find an acceptable replacement. The Raphaels have been serving me well for at nearly 10 years now. Still, as I wander through art supply stores, I occasionally find myself gazing at the displays of synthetic alternatives… wondering if one of them wouldn’t give me sable performance for a fraction of the price. Thus, The Critic once again hit the virtual aisles of the Internet, in search of a quality synthetic brush. Would I find a tool worthy of replacing my beloved Raphaels? Failing that, might I find a tool that I could recommend to brush novices, as a more affordable way to become comfortable with a brush? The answers, dear reader, lie just ahead. THE ORDERING As always, I was determined to order my test subjects online, so that every reader could find the exact same products themselves. I hit my favorite online supplier, misterart.com. They offer a wide variety of supplies, complete with good information about most products (including customer reviews, in some cases). They also feature a V.I.P program, which enables you to buy at significant discounts by paying an annual $25 fee. I’ve used them for everything from pen points to oversized pieces of illustration board, and everything has arrived in good shape. I surfed my way to the brush section of the store, and found the round water color brush category, where I knew I would find brushes of approximately the same shape I was used to. From there, though, things got tricky. I found an overwhelming array of choices. There were 35 types of brushes in the category, and at least half of them appeared to be synthetic. The task became even trickier when I started looking at individual brushes. Sizing in brushes is not universal, so I had to look at the pictures provided by misterart.com to figure out what might be appropriate for my testing. My goal was to find brushes equivalent to what I use every day… the Raphael Series 8404 #3. I ordered a wide variety of synthetics, but once they arrived a quick round of tests revealed that I needed to re-order… some brushes showed promise, but I had guessed incorrectly on sizing. I placed another order, and my second batch of supplies brought more appropriate sizes. THE TESTING Some brushes I could dismiss just by looking at them. It was obvious that they wouldn’t come to enough of a point, or that they would not be able to hold as much ink as I wanted. That’s an important factor for me… I do not want to waste any more time than I have to dipping my brush into the ink. I ended up putting over a dozen brushes through a full test. Each brush I deemed worth testing was loaded with ink and rinsed several times. I doodled with them on a nice piece of Bristol, getting a feel for how they handled. I’m very familiar with and love the feel of my trusty Raphaels, so these synthetics had a lot to live up to. To demonstrate the differences more clearly, I also performed a standard drill with each one… using the same series of strokes with each one. I gave each brush a rating from one to five in the three categories mentioned above: Point, Spring, and Ink Flow.

THE CRUSTY CRITIC BRUSH CARE I’ve heard all kinds of stories about how cartoonists care for their brushes. Some clean them religiously, while others value the ink buildup that accumulates on their tools. Milton Caniff, it’s said, never cleaned his brushes… simply knocking them against his drawing table a few times before each use to knock the hardened ink loose. That approach may work for some artists, but most of us require a finer line that the great Mr. Caniff. With a bit of care, your brushes, whether they be sable, synthetic, or a blend, can retain their point and spring for a long while. I generally get several issues of use out of a Raphael, and I do not clean them as regularly as I might. The first key to making your brush last is to avoid getting ink under the metal ferrule (the metal cylinder you’ll find between the brush’s hairs and the handle). I try to dip my brush to within about an eighth of an inch of the ferrule, so it will grab a lot of ink. If, however, I accidentally dip too deeply, I immediately rinse it out before the ink can penetrate too deeply under the ferrule. I keep two small glasses of water on my table, so I can double-rinse. The second glass always remains relatively clean, since brushes have always been rinsed once before they reach it. I rinse whenever I’m done using a brush, and sometimes during use, if I notice the brush is getting stiff or especially dirty. Ideally, the rinse water should be changed every day, and the brushes cleaned thoroughly every few days with a good brush soap… but I often don’t get it done more than once a week. I use Masters brush cleaner and preserver, but there are a number of good choices. I’ve also heard that any mild dish soap will do an effective job. I simply swirl the brush around in the soap, and then rinse it under running water as I work the bristles around in the palm of my hand. I’ve heard that hot water can remove some of the sable hair’s natural oils (it may be nonsense, but I have heard it), so I generally use cool water.

I gave the Raphael Series 8404 #3 a rating of 5 in each of the three categories (a cumulative score of 15). No other brush scored as well, which was not surprising… sable brushes haven’t been considered the gold standard for hundreds of years for no reason. A number of the synthetics scored a cumulative 10 or 11. Of these, only 3 scored at least a 4 for their ability to hold a fine point, which I considered crucial. I will not struggle to get a fine line out of a brush. Of the brushes that rated a total 10 or 11, Grumbacher’s Academy Series 770 #6 deserves special mention. It scored a 3 for point, but I was tempted to give it a 4, and I also rated it as a 4 in the other two categories. It handles well, but it’s not an extraordinary value, at about $5. A smaller size might come to a sharper point, but I doubt it would hold as much ink as I like. The one real standout among the synthetics was actually a blend of nylon and natural hairs, the Winsor-Newton Series 239. I tested this brush in sizes 4 and 6, and liked both a great deal. The size 4 tested almost as well as the Raphael. Its point is nearly as sharp… it took a bit more effort on my part, but I

ANDE PARKS

could get it to produce an excellent and consistent fine line. It doesn’t hold quite as much ink as the sable, though. I graded the Series 239 at a cumulative 13… 4 for point and ink flow, and 5 for spring. The size 6 holds plenty of ink, but lacks the sharp spring of its little brother. The larger brush also takes a little more effort when attempting very fine lines. The Winsor-Newton Series 239 may not be a true synthetic, but it’s a good brush, and a good value… costing about half as much as the Raphaels. With a V.I.P. membership at misterart.com, you’ll pay only $3.17 for the #4, and $4.06 for the #6. By comparison, you won’t likely find the Raphael Series 8404 #3 for less than $12. Will I be switching to the Winsor-Newton blend? Not right away, but I do plan on keeping these brushes at hand, and using them frequently to see how they hold up. I’m skeptical that the synthetic fibers will prove as durable as sable, but they’re holding up pretty well after a few weeks of moderate use. Perhaps, after a few months use, I’ll be completely comfortable with them. Maybe I’ll end up liking them as well as the sables, in which case their cost would make them an easy choice. I doubt it, but I’ll keep you posted. RECOMMENDATIONS My final recommendation would be to spring for the Raphael brushes if you are comfortable with a brush in your hand and you’re serious about getting the best work out of your tools. Well taken care of, they will serve you exceptionally well. If you’re a beginner, or if you don’t require super fine work of your brushes, the Winsor-Newton will do a fine job for you. They are an excellent choice for those trying to get used to using a brush. I would recommend that you start with a small size… either a 2 or 3, working your way up to whatever size you can handle. A larger size is preferable, simply because it offers greater versatility and you won’t have to dip it as often. WHITEOUT PENS While the Crusty Critic himself rarely makes an errant mark upon his glorious pages, I do occasionally need whiteout… for effect, at least. Traditionally, opaque white paint or correction fluid has been applied with a brush. Today, though, there are a number of more convenient alternatives. I ordered and tested a number of whiteout pens… both broad-tipped pens for large corrections, and ballpoint-type pens for drawing white lines over black ink. I’m sure you’re all familiar with those silver and gold paint pens… you know, the ones that inevitably send fat globs of metallic pigment flying as you shake them in a vain attempt to get them to produce a decent line. I quickly discovered, upon studying the plethora of whiteout pens I had ordered, that a number of them were capable of the same, frustrating results. Life is too short, dear reader, to live it with bright white spots covering one’s face and clothing. Thus, I eliminated from consideration any pen that required shaking and was prone to leakage. I ended up buying some of these whiteout pens from online art supply vendors, but I also purchased several at an Office Depot store. I think all of the pens I like can be found easily at any such office supply store. DRAW! • SPRING 2003 21

THE CRUSTY CRITIC

ANDE PARKS

BRUSH TESTS – How Four Brushes Scored RAPHAEL Series 8404 #3 Point-5 Spring-5 Flow-5 An excellent red sable brush. The Critic’s tool of choice, capable of an amazing range of lines… at a fairly high price.

WINSOR-NEWTON Series 239 #4 Point-4 Spring-5 Flow-4 A blend of synthetic and natural hairs. This brush delivers performance nearly up to the Raphael, at less than half the price. I’m not ready to switch, but this brush got my attention.

WHITEOUT MARKERS For large corrections, 4 pens found their way into serious contention: the Bic Wite-Out pen, the Paper Mate Liquid Paper All Purpose pen, another Liquid Paper pen made by Gillette, and Paper Mate’s Liquid Paper AutoFlo. It didn’t take long to decide I wasn’t going to like the Bic. The directions for use are printed on the side of the pen: 1) Uncap, 2) Recap, 3) Shake, 4) Repeat as needed. I don’t know about you, dear reader, but my life is complex enough without having to follow four-step instructions just to use my markers. To make matters worse, the Bic is hard to control. Pressing it to paper usually produces an unwieldy blob. The other three large correction pens I tried are all filled with some sort of Liquid Paper, which I find leaves a decent, inkable surface. Depending on the paper you’re using, it may show up as a strange color against the white page, but it covers well and doesn’t flake easily. Two of these pens incorporate a squeezable ball into the body of the marker. This ensures that you’ll always be able to get fluid out of the pen without too much trouble. You can also control the amount of fluid by varying your pressure, but it’s often tricky to get just the right flow. The Gillette pen has a point which I have found harder to control. It often produced more fluid than I wanted, and collects dried fluid which makes control even trickier. For that reason, I prefer the Sanford model (if it helps to tell them apart, the Gillette has a black band near the cap, while the Sanford’s band is green), which has a ballpoint style tip. This seems less likely to clog, and the control is acceptable. I should point out that 22 DRAW! • SPRING 2003

GRUMBACHER ACADEMY Series 770 #6 Point-3 Spring-5 Flow-4 A decent, purely synthetic choice. I struggled to get fine lines out of this brush, but it handles pretty well.

ROBERT SIMMONS Series 86 #4 Point-1 Spring-3 Flow-4 Typical of the synthetics I found to be totally inappropriate for my purposes. To be blunt, I could not make this hairy stick produce a fine line.

none of these pens is going to give you near the control you’ll get out of using a brush with a white paint or whiteout. They’re certainly more convenient, but they are not ideal in situations where control is essential. THE WINNER Just as I was finishing up this article, I found a new pen which delivered everything I had been searching for… the Paper Mate Liquid Paper AutoFlo. It’s very similar to the Sanford pen, but it does not have a squeezable body. I was skeptical about its ability to deliver fluid without pressure, but it does a surprisingly good job. It doesn’t require excessive shaking, and its ballpoint tip offers fairly good control. I hope these pens prove popular, because I plan on using them as long as I can find them. Before I get into the finer, gel whiteout pens, I should also mentioned correction tape. I found dozens of rolls of tape, all in handy dispensers, available at Office Depot, so I picked up one to see if it might have any use. It’s easy to use… you simply press the dispenser to paper and roll. It’s not easy to control. You’ll always get the same width, and it’s not at all practical for small corrections. The tape, once applied, can be inked over, but it’s also prone to flaking. I wouldn’t recommend it for most cartoonists, but it could be a handy tool in some cases. Cleaning up outside panel borders, for instance. WHITE BALLPOINT PENS Every so often, I find that I need to draw something with a fine white line in a black area. When inking Green Arrow, for example, I like to highlight Ollie’s bowstring where it crosses

into large black spaces. I used to struggle with white ink and a pen to make such lines. It was always a challenge finding an ink thin enough to flow but opaque enough to cover. In the last few years, white gel rollerball pens have become popular. I bought three of the most widely available, and tested them to see which had the best coverage and flow. The three pens tested were the Pentel Milky Gel Roller, the Sanford Uni-Ball Gel, and the Y&C Gel Xtreme.Using both a black piece of mat board and a piece of ink-covered bristol, I drew all kinds of lines with each pen. I soon learned that the key was to move slowly. If you try to drag the pen too quickly across the paper, the ink won’t be able to keep up. All three pens made white lines fairly consistently, but a clear favorite did emerge. RECOMMENDATIONS The Pentel was definitely my least favorite. The ink wasn’t as opaque as the other pens, and it was fussier. Both the Y&C and the Sanford performed well, but I ended up liking the Sanford best. It’s ink is very white, and it almost never skipped on me once I got used to using it. These things are just too damned convenient to do without… I plan on having one at hand from now on. I wouldn’t recommend trying to cover mistakes with these ballpoints, but they’re ideal for white linework. Until next issue, when I’ll cover pen points and inks, The Crusty Critic reminds you to draw well, and carry a finely crafted stick.

THE CRUSTY CRITIC

ANDE PARKS

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WHITE OUT PENS PAPERMATE AUTOFLO My favorite correction pen. It handles well, and doesn’t require a lot of shaking or fussing. The ink is opaque and easy to work over.

GILLETTE LIQUID PAPER While I prefer the Sanford’s ballpoint, this pen will do the job.

SANFORD LIQUID PAPER A good choice, with a ballpoint style tip. I prefer not to mess with the squeezeball in the body, though… the AutoFlo delivers just as well without pressure.

BIC WITE-OUT Four-step instructions? This pen’s spotty results are not worth the trouble.

DRAW! • SPRING 2003 23

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MIKE MANLEY

THE PEN & BRUSH ARE MIGHTIER THAN THE PENCIL

By DRAW! Editor Mike Manley The job of the inker in comics is probably the most misunderstood of all of the crafts, yet the inkers skill can have the biggest effect on the drawing itself, second only to the penciler. They are called a variety of names from embellisher to finisher—and often very inventive curse words under their breath by many a comic penciler if they botch a job inking a precious bit of drawing. Being both a penciler and sometimes an inker myself of other artists’ work, simply put, inking is drawing in ink with a pen or a brush. It’s not tracing, despite that funny scene in the Kevin Smith movie. After all, once the pencils are erased, the art that’s left is what the inker interpreted from the pencils, good, bad and ugly. I liken the inker to the conductor of an orchestra. The conductor studies a piece of music intensely, and interprets the arrangement of the composer of the original work or musical score. He should have a thorough knowledge of music principles, the original composer’s work, and the various instruments. He knows where the strings come in and how loud they should be. Well that’s what a good inker should do. He or she should be a good artist in their own right, draw well, understand the fundamentals of drawing, composition, anatomy, perspective, line, and have a great skill with the pen and mastery of the brush. Where the penciler fails or there is a question, the inker will have to cover that gap, interpret and add what needs to be finished—be it a black to balance the composition, or to fix an eye, hand (sometimes whole figures) or a bit of off drawing—like a plastic surgeon. Many times I’ve had to fix eyes, add fingers, redraw entire figures (upon request by the editor) and arrange features properly on the face, etc. One of the things I advise younger students or beginners is to draw directly in ink with a pen or a brush. Fill lots of sketch paper with drawings and doodles so you loose any fear of the pen or brush. As you become used to drawing in ink as opposed to just making a slick line, you will begin to draw in ink with an authority and truth. A slick line that does not describe the form in space is just a mark on paper, not a head, or hand, a figure, etc. Diligent practice will quickly build up your skill and confidence. Most young artists feel more confident with a pen as opposed to a brush because a brush takes more skill to master. But once you do, the brush is the most incredible of drawing tools. The variety of line you can make with a brush is endless, much more varied than the pen because of it’s organic flexibility. Every inker or artist drawing in ink has a unique line, like handwriting. I suggest grabbing a selection of pen nibs and brushes and then experiment. Play around with them and see how they react. Like a test drive of a fine sports car, grab some scrap paper and go for a ride in line. You’ll naturally come to find a nib or brush that fits your way of working best. The standard nib that most comic inkers seem to prefer is the Hunt 102. Many inkers are ABOVE: The final inked illustration and the penciled sketch, for a door alarm now also using Pigma and Zig markers, as markers have gotten instruction manual. I loved being able to use the rag to add texture on the cave wall really, really good. But no marker can beat the snap of a good pen and keep the pencils loose so I can keep the inking fresh. or brush, at least not to me yet. 24 DRAW! • SPRING 2003

TOOLS OF THE TRADE A

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MIKE MANLEY

PENS After nearly 20 years as a working professional cartoonist, I have experimented and tried many, many different pens and brushes. Through trial and error I have narrowed down my arsenal of tool to a handful.

A) The Hunt 108. It’s probably my overall favorite pen nib. I can get the widest variety of line widths and flexibility. It’s flexible quill gives me a nice thin-thick stroke that’s great for lush pen inking. The nibs are not as good today as they were 10 years ago. It seems the metal they are made of isn’t as heavy a gauge. Every once in a while I get a nib that will last for 10 pages before it snaps, but sometimes they snap after 3-4 pages of heavy comic inking. B) The Deleter Free Penholder and the 200 or 250 pen point. They are larger dowel type points that give you a stiffer pen line, which is good for a steady line thickness. It’s good for doing a lot of heavy classic “hatching” with the pen. They are available from: http://www.omochabox.com BRUSHES Nothing beats a good Kolinsky sable, but they are getting very expensive and I have a batch I bought in the Eighties I’m saving for more personal work. I dole them out like Scrooge giving a raise. But synthetic brushes have also been getting better, and I’ve found a very inexpensive one which works pretty well. The Loew Cornell 795 Round: I use the #2 and #3. It’s not as flexible as a Kolinsky, and the point will wear down fairly fast, in 10 pages or so, but for an inexpensive brush, I recommend it. DON’T THROW AWAY THAT OLD BRUSH! It happens to every brush eventually. It splits, and no amount of brush soap or cleaning can save it. It gets stray crazy hairs which ruins the point and makes it unusable for fine inking. But instead of tossing that old brush into the trash, keep it! Old brushes are great for a variety of things. If they are not split too badly, they are great for filling in large areas of black, which can save a better brush from the hair-splitting punishment. Or you can use them to get some really cool textures, lines and dry brush. Take an razor or utility blade to that old brush and cut it at an angle. You can get all kinds of great textures by doing this.

RAGS I learned to ink or apply texture with a rag or sponge by seeing some art by my friend Ricardo Villagran. He had this page of comic art with this great texture on it. I asked him how he achieved this and he held up this ink soaked dish rag. So grab any old rag, or mom’s old dish towel. You can cut them into smaller pieces for easier handling. The rougher the texture the better., then dab on a bit of ink (I use a dropper or a brush) and then dab the rag with your finger on the paper. Use a few scraps of extra paper and experiment till you find a texture you like. You can also use a sponge to get a similar effect.

HUNT 108 TOWEL OR RAG

COTTON BALL

BRUSH CLEANING TIPS

DRY BRUSH DELETER

My tips on brush cleaning are simple: 1) Keep cleaning the water. I have a big jar next to my desk where I rinse my brush often. I change the water two times or so a day when working. If the phone rings, I take a second and clean out my brush. If you allow the ink to harden in the brush it will ruin the point quicker. 2) If the brush is really dirty, I will take a cap full of rubbing alcohol and roll the brush in it. The alcohol dissolves the shellac in the ink and breaks it up. Then using either brush soap or even hair shampoo (after all, it is made of hair) I wash the brush well and bring it to a point and let it dry. Consistent brush care will help keep a brush for a long time.

DRAW! • SPRING 2003 25

MIKE MANLEY

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SAMURAI JACK: Here is a page from the Samurai Jack one-shot penciled by Bill Wray. To help Bill out on a tight deadline I chipped in and inked a few pages from Bill’s rough, energetic and fun pencils. This can be a challenge but I take it as a good opportunity to stretch a bit, and the important info is already there in Bill’s pencils. And since I had worked on the Samurai Jack TV show as a storyboard artist, I was already familiar with the style. BELOW: This is the final page in ink. I added a bit of texture in the first panel with a black Prisma Color pencil.

ABOVE: Here is a commission I did for a fan where I drew it on a paper with some tooth to it and used both a Prisma Color pencil for the sky and a combo of rag and Prisma Color for the wall the ladder is attached to. Drawings like this can be a great way to experiment with techniques.

26 DRAW! • SPRING 2003

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MIKE MANLEY

LEFT: Here is a page from Dexter’s Lab #33, penciled and inked by me. I usually don’t pencil this tight for myself to ink, but sometimes on a licensed book like this, you need to draw tighter since it goes through a multi-stage approval process.

BELOW: The same page inked by me. I used a lot of pen on this as Dexter’s style is rather hard.

In this panel did use some dry brush/spilt hair inking with an old brush. Textures like this can really help give a page some variety and life.

DRAW! • SPRING 2003 27

MIKE MANLEY

ELVIRA 1. The first thing I do when inking a page is take my Rapidograph and triangle and rule the panel borders. Then I take a few minutes and study the page looking at the blacks, gray tones and textures that will have to be interpreted into either solid black in ink or into a texture with a pen or a brush. In this case I’m lucky, John Heebink’s pencils are beautiful. Jon’s also a best friend so it makes it fun as I have inked John’s work many times before. Also an added benefit is that John’s work is really solidly drawn and very textural. It is a challenge and fun at the same time as it requires me to interpret and to stay sharp on the drawings, not to lose any of the life and drawing, especially in the faces and that great detail on the skeletons. There are a lot of gray tones here in the pencils that I will have to decide how I want to handle in ink texture-wise, to keep the effect or intention John had in his pencils. My typical way of inking is to start with a pen first. I go in and do as much as I can with the pen, then go back with a brush, tickling, feathering, depending on the style of art, realistic, cartoony, etc. I select the type of pen nib based on the style of inking I am going for, and this is based on the style of the art. Some art calls for a lush brush line, some for a stiff pen nib like a Hunt 103 or a 102. Other art calls for a more sensual pen line 28 DRAW! • SPRING 2003

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like a Hunt 108 which is pretty flexible, or a brush. Choosing a pen nibs is like choosing a dance partner. Are you gonna tango, waltz, or breakdance? Some nibs like the Hunt 108 give you a line like this, sort of lush. Others, like the Deleter nib, give you a line less flexible. Every inker I know seems to have a favorite pen nib, I on the other hand choose my nib based on the line I want for the job. I usually work on several pages at once, especially since the ink line a pen puts down takes a while to dry sometimes, especially in humid conditions. If it’s humid I always run my air conditioner as I hate having the paper become limp with the extra humidity.

MIKE MANLEY

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inked in pen and I could go in and do a fair amount of good pen textures as well since this Elvira is a black-and-white comic, so I won’t have to worry about a colorist overpowering the work with some of that muddy coloring that seems to be so popular today on too many comics. Now I’m ready to go in with the brush and finish the page off. Work time at this point is about two hours.

2. I continue working on this page. I go through and do most of the major figure work with a 108 nib. I do Elvira’s figure first since she’s the main figure, then I work on the skeleton warriors. They are all done in the Deleter pen nib. Its stiffer line I think complements the hardness of a skeleton. One thing about working in pen is that I have to set the page aside and let it dry fairly often, and the pen lines take longer to dry. Sometimes I have a small clip-on fan attached to my drawing desk. If the drying time seems to be taking too long, I’ll turn the fan on and lay the wet pages in front of it to speed the drying time. A) Here is a scan where I adjusted the contrast to show the pen work done so far. The skeletons really lent themselves to being

3. Taking a Loew-Cornel #2 synthetic brush—which is pretty good, though nowhere near as good as a top-of-the-line Kolinsky Sable—I go in and fill the blacks and ink the hair, Elvira’s pants, and shadows on the ground. Next I go in and finish the background in a slightly radiating line pattern. The last thing I do is erase the page (I use a kneaded eraser, as it takes up less ink and I don’t get all those erase crumbs) and white out any little smudges, mistakes, wayward lines, etc. Then I give the page one last once-over where I may spice up a line here or there with the brush, if need be, to add a final touch to a line weight and I’m done. Total working time: around 3-4 hours. DRAW! • SPRING 2003 29

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MIKE MANLEY

LEFT: This is an example of direct pen sketching and drawing. It is a loose page from one of my sketchbooks. I drew everything here directly with a pen and brush without penciling first. This sort of direct drawing in ink, I believe, is essential to gaining skill with the pen and brush, mastery of the instrument—but it’s also fun!

The DIGITAL WAVE BELOW: What constitutes inking is only going to keep changing, morphing, becoming more impacted by the advancement in desktop publishing, as the comic publishers adapt into their production what has been common in the commercial art world for several years. DSL, FTP and high speed Internet access, CD Rom, DVD, digital tablets, you name it. I have already digitally inked illustrations and have done jobs where I ran the pencils out in non-repro blue on comic illustration board and inked the job. This Catwoman piece by Mike Oeming and myself is a prime example. To promote an issue of Catwoman Secret Files we were doing, Oeming penciled this piece then emailed it to me. I opened it in Photoshop, converted it into a non-repro blue and printed it out at 250 dpi on DC comic board with my Epson Photo 1200, and then inked it. Next I scanned the piece back in and e-mailed it off to Mike and DC. I’m still pretty old school. I think inking is best when done on 2- or 3-ply bristol with a pen or brush. I can, and do, work digitally, and I like it, but I still prefer having that ink smudge on my index finger and gray smear on the outside of my right hand at the end of the day from inking.

THE ORIGINAL GRAYSCALE FILE I RECEIVED FROM OEMING.

30 DRAW! • SPRING 2003

THE FINAL INKED VERSION.

MIKE MANLEY

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1. Here is another great page by John. there is a lot of opportunity to have fun here with all of the textures. After a few minutes study, I start by separating the foreground figures from the background (the statue of Elvira) and the middle ground (Elvira herself). 2. I finish the penwork on the skeleton and start a bit on the foliage. In this case I did Elvira last. 3. The finished page. The texture and spotting of blacks by John and strong composition make this a great page and made it fun to ink.

READ MORE FROM MIKE ABOUT INKING AND SEE ADDITIONAL TUTORIALS ON DRAW! MAGAZINE’S WEB SITE: WWW.DRAWMAGAZINE.COM DRAW! • SPRING 2003 31

INSTANT CARTOONIST

STEpheN DE STEFANO

INTERVIEW BY MIKE MANLEY TRANSCRIBED BY STEVEN TICE

DRAW!: Why don’t we start at the beginning, okay, and go over your career a little bit. How did you get interested in comics? Did you read comics as a kid? What about animation? Is it something you’ve always wanted to do? STEPHEN DESTEFANO: Okay! Well, I always wanted to be a cartoonist, because I’ve been drawing for as long as I can remember. DRAW!: So you wanted to do comics and cartooning right from the beginning, as a kid? SDS: Yeah, I just loved cartoons. And the good thing was that my oldest brother loved cartoons. My whole family liked cartoons.

nobody said, “I forbid you to be an artist,” or anything like that. They were fairly supportive, yeah. DRAW!: So when did you start drawing? When would you say you really started drawing your own comics or animation or whatever? SDS: Well, gee. I guess my first character was, like, Herbie the Pig or something like that when I was five. [Mike laughs] Or maybe earlier. And then my first super-hero was a character named Fastman, which I was really proud of. That was probably when I was six or seven. And he looked just like the Flash except that he had a cape, which I thought was really spiffy. DRAW!: It made him cooler because he had a cape.

DRAW!: So this interest was genuinely supported by everybody in your family, it wasn’t looked down on...? SDS: I think they didn’t understand it very much, but they knew that it had some notoriety to it and that it was a big business, so 32 DRAW! • SPRING 2003

SDS: Yeah, yeah! Capes made everybody cooler. But, yeah, I was drawing since I was really little. They tell me that when I was three or something that a neighbor would come by and ask me to draw Mickey Mouse and I would do it.

COMICS & ANIMATION DRAW!: Wow!

STEPHEN DESTEFANO

SDS: Well, I dunno. It was just something that I always liked to do. My dad would bring home paper. He used to work at a Ford dealership, and I don’t know what these pads were for, but they were huge pads of paper. And he’d just bring home reams of them and I’d fill them up. DRAW!: That’s similar to my growing up, because my grandmother used to work for Chrysler. She was a secretary there, and she would do the same thing. She would bring me home just tons of old papers and markers, pencils and such, because a big corporation like that is always tossing stuff out.

ABOVE: Probably the only “official” ’Mazing Man size relation chart drawn by the artist.

SDS: Yeah. My dad worked at a Ford dealership as a mechanic, and like I said, I don’t know what these pads were for, but on one side they had a grid that the mechanic would write in, and on the other side they were blank. And by the time I got through with them, they weren’t blank anymore. [Mike laughs]

BELOW: An un-inked page from the first ’Mazing Man Special. A good example of where the artist’s head was at in ’86, and how much his art would change.

DRAW!: Now, did you have favorite cartoons or favorite characters as a kid? SDS: Oh, yeah, absolutely. My favorite characters then are probably still my favorite characters today. Popeye is probably my favorite character, except possibly for Bugs Bunny. And Batman is my favorite super-hero, I loved Adam West and stuff like that when I was a kid. I just thought that was amazing. DRAW!: Well, I think for everybody who’s in our generation— I assume you’re probably somewhere around forty? SDS: Nearly, yes. DRAW!: That was like the coolest thing ever when you were a kid, watching that TV show.

SDS: Yeah, yeah! And then you grow up a little and then there’s that whole backlash against it, against the camp thing. And I guess I sort of fell in for it, Batman should be serious and it should be really dark and angry and stuff like that. I guess I fell for that for a while, but in my heart I always loved that so much. And now that’s Batman to me. DRAW!: [laughs] And they’re rerunning the Batman show on TV Land. It’s fun to watch them now, as an adult. SDS: They’re amazing! For me, they’re the best representation of super-heroes on film, ever! [laughter] Except for maybe the Fleischer cartoons, the Superman cartoons. DRAW!: Did you seriously start trying to pursue cartooning in any real way in high school? SDS: Yeah! From the time I was thirteen, I was in correspondence with Bob Rozakis at DC Comics, who was the production manager at the time. And I just wrote to him because who wrote comics that I knew? I don’t know why. He wrote the column in

DRAW! • SPRING 2003 33

COMICS & ANIMATION

STEPHEN DESTEFANO

the back of DC Comics called “The Answer Man” back when I was a kid, so I figured he was the guy to write in to. So I had been writing to him since I was thirteen, and by the time I was 15 they needed a gofer at the DC offices. So I went up and I worked there for a summer, and then I worked there the next summer as well. And when I graduated high school, I just didn’t want to go to college, because I knew what I wanted to do, I wanted to be a cartoonist. So somehow I actually made that swing. Which is astounding to me today, as an adult, thinking, “That can’t work! That’s ridiculous! Go to college, do the smart thing!” But I just.... DRAW!: You had your backup plan!

SDS: Yeah. But I just decided I wanted to go into comic books, and that’s what I did. By that time, animation just had gone by the wayside. I never really thought I would go into animation. DRAW!: So this was, I take it, late Seventies, early Eighties?

DRAW!: And that was a pretty bleak time in animation. SDS: Yeah, that’s true. There was nothing to look at. I remember the first time Duck Tales came on, and that was probably near that time, and I was thinking, “Y’know, these are famous characters, but they look so stiff and they look so dull and they don’t look anywhere near as interesting or expressive as they did in the older cartoons. DRAW!: There’s no squash or stretch or exaggeration. SDS: Yes! There was absolutely no life to the whole thing. But, yeah, cartoons and animation had gone way off the radar by that point. DRAW!: Had you thought about trying to go out to California or anything and get into animation before that? SDS: No. Not in the least. Never. I mean, animation was sort of a pie-in-the-sky sort of thing that I’d had when I was five. My family would tell me that one day I’ll work for Walt Disney or one day I’ll draw Road Runner for the cartoons or something like that. That just sort of went away. It seemed like a childhood thing, and I became much more interested in comic books as a way of expressing myself. DRAW!: So comic books became more of a real thing for you, then, at that point? SDS: Yes. DRAW!: And that could be a real occupation, you could see you could actually support yourself making a living doing that. SDS: Yes. It was also an obsession, too, because I collected them. I was buying them all the time, and that’s pretty much all

34 DRAW! • SPRING 2003

SDS: It was probably about ’83 when I graduated high school.

COMICS & ANIMATION

that I was seeing. I stopped watching cartoons with real interest, as something that was integral to me. Because there were no good Popeye cartoons anymore, there were no good Bugs Bunny cartoons being made... they were all from the past, and that’s what I wanted to be involved with, but that wasn’t going on anymore. But Michael Golden and Marshall Rogers were drawing Batman, and that seemed interesting!

STEPHEN DESTEFANO

DRAW!: So how were you educating yourself and teaching yourself about the craft along the way? Were you trying to read articles in the Comics Journal or meet guys at shows? Living close to New York, were you able to actually meet cartoonists at all or learn anything that way?

DRAW!: And who was teaching there? Did you get any courses with any cartoonists, or rub shoulders with anybody? SDS: Actually, I never did, I never had. I mean, I had a teacher who claimed he created Tony the Tiger for advertising. I suppose that might have been true, but I never really knew much about him other than that. And no, I didn’t go to very many conventions. I probably only started going to conventions after I got involved with DC as a teenager. So I didn’t really know very many people in comic books at all. I didn’t really read the fan press, either, but I bought all the sort of commercial books that you could buy, like the Smithsonian Book of Comic Books and the Smithsonian Book of Sunday Comics or something like that. And it was through that that I realized that there was some sort of pecking order, that this stuff was good, but this stuff was great. So that caught my eye. I knew the origin of Batman, but then Kurtzman’s war comics really sort of interested me, because they kept getting all this attention, and they perplexed me. They irked me, in a way.

SDS: Let’s see, the only real schooling that I’ve ever had, or official sort of schooling, I had one year at the High School of Art and Design. It was so far away from home. I grew up in Queens and it was in Manhattan, so I had to take a bus and the subway to get there, and that was a drag, so I didn’t really want to go. So that’s the only official schooling I’ve ever had.

DRAW!: Why did they irk you? SDS: Well, maybe not ‘irked’, maybe ‘irked’ isn’t the right word to use. They unnerved me, they challenged me. That’s probably a better way to put it. They were so potent, so emotionally charged, yet so stark and so simple. They kind of looked like Batman’s origin, but yet so entirely different. I knew when I saw Kurtzman’s drawings—I mean, this was something special. And to this day when I draw, I have to say, in the back of my mind I hope I’m having a similar effect on some kid somewhere reading my stuff. I hope I’m irking the sh*t outta some kid! That’d be great!

LEFT AND RIGHT: Rough layouts and rough textural inks from DeStefano’s art in Legion #9.

DRAW! • SPRING 2003 35

COMICS & ANIMATION

STEPHEN DESTEFANO

DRAW!: Now, when you were going up as a teenager, were you exposed to the craft end of it since you were going up to DC? Did you see original art? Did you start to glean little bits of information by looking at original pages or by seeing people work in the bullpen or anything like that?

SDS: Gosh, that’s stuff I haven’t even thought of in such a long time. I probably did. I remember, it must have been Joe Orlando or Dave Manak at DC who first told me what nibs to buy, and I remember trying those out. And I was really awful. Y’know, I was fifteen. I remember my first attempts at inking. DRAW!: Well, my first inking pen was a laundry pen. I had no idea. I said, “Oh, here’s a pen! I’ll buy it and I’ll try it!” [laughs] SDS: Well, it’s still good, it turns out. Occasionally a laundry pen’ll work. [laughter]

DRAW!: Well, I think that’s interesting. You go up, you go to DC, you’re exposed to a professional environment of cartooning. You get somebody like Joe Orlando, who’s been around forever, to come and say, “Hey, kid. No, you buy this brush. You buy this pen. You buy this paper.” So at least you’re not stumbling around in the wilderness trying to draw with sticks and parchment or something. SDS: Right. Yeah, I was really fortunate in that way. Mostly what I did in my first summer at DC was erase pages. And occasionally I would do mild pastey-uppy things and fill in areas on Gene Colan pages when he was doing Batman where paste-up had obliterated something, I filled in blacks. DRAW!: Well, that’s good, though. You read all the classic cartoonists, they all started sweeping somebody’s floor, they got to erase a page. SDS: Yeah. Then, after I’d erased, like, ten pages that day or something, then the production guys would jokingly tell me that the shavings caused cancer. [laughter] I guess I took it goodnaturedly. DRAW!: “Sorry, kid! Those are asbestos!” SDS: Yeah. If it ever occurred, I’d know who to sue. [Mike laughs] I didn’t know it at the time, but it actually was a real education, because I was a really lazy kid and I didn’t quite realize what an opportunity it was. But I was a teenager.

TOP: A Popeye drawing produced by the artist to somewhat “update” the characters. ABOVE: Storyboard revisions for a commercial American audiences will never see. They were created for a Japanese bank.

that’s famous for its super-heroes to sort of develop a humor style. I don’t know what I was thinking! DRAW!: Did you ever try to get in at Mad?

DRAW!: Well, you seem to have made the most of it. SDS: Well, I tried. It’s kinda funny. As I grew up, Road Runner, Popeye, Bugs Bunny sort of went by the wayside, and I concentrated so much on super-heroes. And then I got to DC and I wanted to be a super-hero artist. And it just never worked, I could never really draw that stuff to the extent that it needs to be drawn. And the funny thing is that the cartoony stuff was always in the back of my head. And that was the thing that I should have been doing. And it’s really odd that I went to a company

36 DRAW! • SPRING 2003

SDS: No, never. Mad was something that I bought occasionally as a young person. But I didn’t really have a passion for it. And it always looked—I could never draw like Mort Drucker. That was ridiculous! He’s a genius! That looked like so much work to me that it was more like... reading Mad was more like looking at advertising. “Wow, that’s for really intense people! That’s not for me! That looks too hard!” DRAW!: So you were really sort of drawn towards the classic

CONTINUED ON PAGE 57

IN FASHION

DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION

CELIA CALLE

Digital illustrator Celia Calle shares her unique insights into creating iconic covers for comics cially as a designer), I no longer sketched or painted as much. Instead, I was sent out to chase after the perfect buttons and re-naming color palettes that sounded exactly the same to my ear. Fussing over a stupid hem line, that required little talent. It was a nightmare... and complete boredom for me. I got assigned to “Illustration,” mainly because during job interviews, most of the designers awed over my presentation (portfolio) and drawing skills and usually over-looked my designs.

DRAW!:You live in the center for illustration—New York City. Were you born there? CC: I was born in Boston, raised in Texas, and have probably spent most of my life in New York City.

This interview was conducted by DRAW! Editor Mike Manley via the internet and telephone and transcribed by Steven Tice

DRAW!: You graduated from Parsons School of Design with a BFA, and you’ve won awards in fashion design. Some of your clients include Jean-Paul Gaultier Jeans, Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger. Big clients. How did you go about building this list? Do you advertise in the various advertising annuals or journals? CELIA CALLE: Not during the time when I worked in fashion, these were mainly based from my own portfolio after graduation and meeting with the designers themselves, e.g., from working with them (or with their respectives). DRAW!: Did you grow up wanting to do fashion illustration and comics? CC: Actually, neither. I wanted to be a fashion designer and do animation in-between my fashion career. Yes, I had pretty unrealistic goals. But when I worked in the “Fashion Industry” (espe-

DRAW!: You were working professionally while in school and getting paid for it? CC: Yes, I did work outside of school. And yes, I got paid for my work, but very little at the time. DRAW!: Was your first work traditional methods or did you start right away with working with the computer? CC: Pencils and paper. All traditional. DRAW!: How did you get introduced to working on a computer? Did you start out on a PC or a Mac? CC: Mac. After college, like all good children, I was searching for full-time work. After a year or two of being a full-time assistants to ‘up-coming’ fashion designers (at the time) Amy Chan and Jeffery Costello, I landed a full-time job as an illustrator with a small company that worked on “Fashion Trends” (199596). The art director/supervisor, Ben Veronis, he and I shared the same office. Sometimes, he would ask me to help him scan a few things, and every day he would show me something new.

DRAW! • SPRING 2003 37

DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION

CELIA CALLE

Soon, he helped me set up my own station at home. Since then, I am forever grateful to him. I call him my computer-Jedi-master “O Ben.” DRAW!: Did it take a while to learn to approximate your techniques in the virtual world of the computer versus the real world of traditional media.

CC: I suppose I’m still learning no matter which medium we are discussing. There’s never an end to these things. But for what I do know now, it was all pretty much by accident and having the basics placed on my plate. The rest just fell naturally into place as I continued. DRAW!: Did you start out trying to reproduce in Photoshop what you were doing in traditional media? How did you do this? Was it trial by error? CC: To be very honest with you? I really don’t remember. I definitely did not try to reproduce what I did in traditional media in Photoshop. With the tools that it supplied then, it wasn’t possible. I started off using lots of airbrushing, and stuck to the only tools I was familiar with (and sometimes still do). A lot of “trial by error.” DRAW!: How has the computer effected the way you work, your process? CC: Take “speed” for instance, I can barely remember how I got by without one. I no longer have to re-draw everything if there’s a correction needed or demanded by the client. If a client wants specific colors added/revised, it’s just a simple adjustment. The downside of all this (virtually), is that I rarely have originals in my portfolio anymore, most of my work today just sits in discs and files that no longer apply. DRAW!: How do you feel about that? Do you feel uncomfortable not having original works to hang on your wall or show later? CC: Yes, I am very sad of not having many originals to show anymore, and the physical aspects of feeling/touching actual paint. It’s sometimes not by choice. Having to do “actual” paintings for fun and for myself is very time consuming. Being able to have all this requires a pretty calm and secure lifestyle. DRAW!: Does the “virtual” aspect of the piece change your relationship with the piece? CC: Not really. My work will always be my work, regardless of what medium. Especially now, we have the technology of

38 DRAW! • SPRING 2003

ABOVE: Calle’s take on Batgirl.

getting life-size paintings printed on canvas. The options are always available when we need it. DRAW!: So most of your work interfaces with the computer now? CC: Yeah, it’s kind of like my uniform. It’s my best friend (next to my dog, of course). I’d feel unattached without one. Like with most of us, it’s a pretty big part of my life now.... DRAW!: So then I take it most of your clients don’t want the hassle of having originals scanned, etc.? CC: Most of my clients are commercial/editorial. Supplying “ready to print” artwork plays a big role in their favor. DRAW!: When you get a new assignment, do you immediately start thinking of how you will approach it via the computer, Photoshop?

DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION BELOW: An illustration done for Nike.

CELIA CALLE

sketch and then import that into Photoshop, or do you draw it directly in Photoshop?

CC: I draw it on paper first, then I scan most of my work in Photoshop. I Scan the drawing or sketch in at 600-700 dpi in grayscale, because some of the art is later used as posters and they need to be high resolution. CC: Yes, most of time it’s the same routine. Actual pencil sketch first, scan, and color.

TECHNICAL SIDE BAR: DRAW!: What’s your studio set-up like? CC: Like a Bat Cave. Only less glamourous. A Mac G4, and I have all your basic software/programs (Illustrator, Painter, Dreamweaver, Word, Quark, IE). But 99% of my work is mainly completed in Photoshop. DRAW!: Why Photoshop as opposed to Painter? CC: I’m usually a stick to “know how” kind of person. I am just more comfortable with Photoshop. But for some of the work, I use Painter mainly to capture a real paint texture. But I always finish in Photoshop. DRAW!: You work on a Wacom tablet? CC: Not really. I mainly just use the mouse (again, a “know how” and “familiar to” sort of thing). DRAW!: What size do you use? I know some artists, like me, like the larger tablets, but some are fine with the smaller tablets. CC: I have both big and small tablets. The small one just sits better at my station. DRAW!: Do you have high speed access, use Fetch or something similar to send files to clients via the web?

DRAW!: Do you have it all preset? Do you use a certain type of pencil so it looks a certain way when you scan it in? Do you scan at a saved scanning preference? CC: No, it’s just a habit of what I use and what’s convenient. I don’t really have specific pencils.... It’s just a habit of using a mechanical pencil, .5 mm lead and loose-leaf or photocopy paper. DRAW!: Like regular twenty pound copy paper you buy at Staples, etc.? CC: The color copy paper, not the plain Xerox paper. [laughs] DRAW!: Color copy paper? CC: Yeah, the color copy paper, it’s thicker and the surface is smoother. It’s just a habit of working on that. It’s not that I have a preference. DRAW!: It has a very nice drawing surface. CC: Yes, it’s smooth. It’s easy to smear without having it blow away. I also like regular number two pencils sometimes, but they tend to give you thick lines as they dull down, and I don’t want that. I mainly developed a habit of using just the basic tools and supplies prior to my graduation, because I didn’t really have much money during school, so I just used copy paper, and have since then.

CC: Yes, I do Fetch at high speed.

DRAW!: Well, a lot of artists, myself included, use loose sheets of copy paper to draw and sketch.

DRAW!: When you do an illustration, do you start with a

CC: Really?

DRAW! • SPRING 2003 39

DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION

CELIA CALLE

DRAW!: Yes. They use copy paper. I like the ink jet paper myself, because it’s a little bit heavier and it has a nicer surface. Also, when I do storyboards, it’s always on basically that same twenty pound paper, then they just run it at legal size through a Xerox machine. CC: Oh, okay. Good, so I’m not the only one. [laughs]

CC: Ah, yes, I understand. It’s a necessity when you start incorporating more objects into your subject. Especially for storyboard artists. I think for me, a light box is a nice substitute for now (as to using tracing paper). DRAW!: So once you get a sketch or the main drawing that you like, you scan it into Photoshop, and then you save it as a bitmap or a grayscale?

DRAW!: No, a lot of people work on that paper. CC: In some other tutorials that I’ve seen, most artists seem to work on tracing paper. DRAW!: Yes, some artists work on tracing paper, some work on vellum. CC: Vellum! I tried that, too, but that drives me crazy because it’s so smudgy, it smears way too fast, and my hand smudges along my drawings, and I lose the lines and the little details from my sketch. DRAW!: Right. A lot of the illustrators work on vellum because then you can put two or three different layers over and work on different elements and arrange elements in a different way, and be able to sell all the elements and then maybe do your final tracing.

CC: Grayscale. Then I will clean it up like everybody else does, clean up smudges or lines I don’t want. It used to be where you had to erase it and just trace over your drawing. Now in Photoshop, you clean it up very easily. Next I create a new “blank” layer over the drawing, have the new layer set to “multiply,” and then color over my pencils. That way you can see your pencils while you’re coloring it. That will be my first layer most of the time. It depends on how I’m going to work it. But if I want a background, I usually select my objects/drawings away from the base layers, and have them stand on separate layers. And later I would bring in the backgrounds. DRAW!: Your work has the feel of a watercolor. It looks like you’re not working at 100% opacity with the pen or the brush. That you are sort of building up the work in washes, using the brush at a lower opacity and sort of building things up? CC: Yeah! I do that a lot... how would you describe it? As far as the opacity, I don’t really calculate or save preferred settings, it’s just whatever feels right at the moment. How much color I need and how much of the density of color I want. As far as the size of the brush, it depends how big the file is, the drawing is. I will just go over the illustration in a series of washes... usually starting with the darkest areas (where the shadows are), hit the middle value, and lighten up areas where ever highlights are needed. DRAW!: So you work from dark to light? CC: Yes... mainly. DRAW!: Well, that’s a very sort of a traditional way of working, especially in oil or gouache. CC: Yes, that’s what I mainly worked with before digital medium.

DRAW!: Now, this is all in Photoshop, right? This is not in Painter? Do you ever take it into Painter and apply texture? CC: The cover to Fight for Tomorrow was all done in Photoshop. But with the “Abandoned Girls,” I started out using a little bit with Painter. So it depends on which job, and what I’m going for. 40 DRAW! • SPRING 2003

CELIA CALLE

DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION

ABOVE: Cover Art for Marvel Comics’ MekaniX #1. ABOVE RIGHT: Cover Art for Marvel Comics’ MekaniX #2. BOTTOM RIGHT: Cover Art for Marvel Comics’ MekaniX #5. LEFT: Calle’s peaceful image for her personal Christmas card, done in the wake of 9/11.

DRAW!: Do you like to generally have a texture to the surface of your work?

DRAW!: Yes, you know, like a watercolor texture or wash or dry brush? CC: No, I don’t really have a set texture applied to my work. It’s basically the paintbrush tools used in Painter and it’s the paintbrush when I use Photoshop. When people ask about how I get that painterly feel, it’s really a SMUDGE tool in Photoshop. Since I’m very familiar with working in watercolor from back in school. I’m very comfortable using wash on my paintings, or capturing that look. DRAW!: So you’re achieving that watercolor feel with the SMUDGE tool?

CC: A texture?

DRAW! • SPRING 2003 41

DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION

CELIA CALLE

CC: A little bit of the SMUDGE tool. Not too much, because otherwise it gets messy and dirty. So just a very little around the edges where some of the tones need blending. Most of the time, I select the areas I want to lighten up or darken more. Take for instance, on the boy’s face in the Fight for Tomorrow cover, with the ski cap—first, I apply my medium tones and dark areas I want. I then select highlights where ever needed (e.g., around the nose, chin, and cheekbones, whereever I feel that needs to stand out. I will select them with the lasso tool in Photoshop, then under the photoshop menu, I use levels to help bring out the areas I want lightened or darkened. I rarely paint over it. DRAW!: Oh, I thought maybe you’re using the DODGE and BURN tool or something like that. CC: No, no DODGE and BURN. It’s like the most simple tools, like using crayons. I can’t be bothered with all these fancy methods. It becomes too complicated for something so simple to me. Wherever you see an area of my work that’s shadowed (for instance, around the neck and his right side), I will usually select the area where I want darkened, and then I’ll use the levels to bring it down, instead of painting over it. But to areas where I actually paint over [BRUSH tool], it’s usually just for touch-ups, to help soften up rough edges. So it doesn’t just look generically selected and highlighted. DRAW!: Okay. So you take the tool and you go back over the edge of the form where the dark and the light hit to sort of blend it together so it doesn’t have that hard edge, the digital edge, that raster edge. CC: Yes, that’s exactly it. Like the tip of his nose, I would do the same. I would select it with the LASSO... and for some other areas, I would sometimes use the GRADIENT tool just to make it quick—for easy smooth outs. [laughs] It’s called the easiest and fastest way to color. DRAW!: Well, that’s the amazing thing about Photoshop. Every time I talk to an artist who tells me now they color something or how they paint something, they have a very different, a very personal way of using the program. CC: Yes, I can imagine. DRAW!: To me, that’s the best thing about the program, that you can come at it from a personal angle of what works for you. You don’t have to do it exactly like somebody else did. CC: There are probably easier ways to color or go about doing these steps, but this is what I find most simple and it makes sense to me. It’s 80% of how I usually work and color my drawings. It’s quick and simple. Especially since everything’s on a tight schedule here. I rarely have much time to mess around with fancy pens or try out “new, improved” tools. DRAW!: Right. Well, I take it that most of the illustration work you’re doing is high pressure deadlines, as opposed to comics 42 DRAW! • SPRING 2003

where, you might have a couple weeks to do a cover, or maybe even a month. I take it in illustration, often you’ll get a call and they’ll usually want something pretty fast, sometimes even overnight. CC: Yes. Especially for editorial. They give you last minute, and I love it. DRAW!: But then they also probably pay you fairly decently because of the bad deadlines. CC: Well, that’s why I love it. [laughter] They pay you generously for such a small amount of time, you know. [laughs] And we usually don’t have time to fuss about it either. DRAW!: So do you usually work pretty closely with the art directors? CC: For editorial, yes, and for advertisements sometimes pretty close. Because you need to understand what they want, and you want to get to that point fast and not have too many people in between. DRAW!: Do they usually supply you some sort of a comp or an idea, a sketch? CC: They would give me the basic ideas of what they want. If they have a certain positioning of how they see it [the advertisement/layout], they will probably draw it out for me first, using the classic stick figures. As for the editorial, they usually don’t. They just give out a description, and have you guessing. So you supply them with a few quick sketches until they decide which idea gears more in their direction. DRAW!: So you usually give them two or three ideas, sketches? CC: About two—three tops—rough sketches. I think any more after that it comes to a point, it’s as if I’m doing animation. [laughter] Where had you placed all the rough sketches together, and did a flip book, you can see it actually move, like “Look! He’s running!” [laughter] So yes, I would usually only provide up to three drafts, unless it’s for someone I’m very wellacquainted with, or someone I’m friends with. They can definitely have more than just three shots at it. DRAW!: Now, I wanted to ask you if you have an agent? CC: I just recently got one, but it’s not for editorial and it’s not for ads. It’s an agent for what I want to do in the long run: Animation. I would love to have my work become animated, not necessarily drawing each frame. Not storyboards, but the character and story design. So having just recently gotten myself an agent, it’ll be a while before I get myself in the works. But as far as reps and agents for my own work (past and current), none. DRAW!: You also have a pretty cool web site. How much time do you devote to that every month? Do you maintain that yourself?

DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION

CELIA CALLE

CC: A good friend of mine, Charles Lee, had it set up for me in the beginning, and then it got to the point of having to keep bothering him just for updating; it became such a pain. So he kindly showed me a few steps, and I took it from there on. I mostly update it myself now, maybe at least every three to six months or whenever I feel like it. DRAW!: So you try and keep it fresh with a bunch of new work that you’ve done? CC: Yes, I put up a few samples of new stuff that I’ve done. DRAW!: And what do you use to do your web design? Are you using Dreamweaver or Go-Live to update it yourself? CC: Dreamweaver, yeah, it’s so easy too. I never realized how easy it was. [laughs]

CC: Well, the web site has definitely saved you from expending all that energy and efforts of having to send out an actual portfolio. I think before having a web site, when art directors wanted to see your work, you had to FedEx your big fat book to them. It can become a very frustrating process because it takes a while before they have your book returned. But with the web site, art directors can just take a look at exactly what it is that you do and can either pass or contact you, or even decide whether they need your actual portfolio. Before the web, having to show your work, you had to send them samples, and you’d spend most of the time and effort just making samples, like promo kits. But now I hardly even remember how it’s done. Instead of constantly updating your promo kit and making postcards, now you get clients without even handling your actual book. They already know what you do, because you have a web site. As far as importance, I think the web-site is the best thing ever invented for self-promotion. DRAW!: I agree. And it seems like in the last three years, it’s gotten to the point where if you say to someone, a perspective client, “Well, you can check out my web site,” you don’t get that sort of weird kind of look, like, “What do you mean, check out your web site?” CC: And now it’s the question, “Do you have a web site?” DRAW!: Right. Because there seemed to be a holdover where a lot of the agencies and people didn’t have internet connections, or they had a bad internet connection, they had 56K, or 28.8 so they couldn’t go look at your web site because it would take nine hours to load. And now it seems like that’s pretty much the way to go. It’s standard to have a web site and you can refer people to it. CC: It’s exciting, yeah. It helps show your work to more people

ABANDON GIRLS © CELIA CALLE.

DRAW!: How important would you say your web site is to you as far as getting your name out, having a presence out there on the web, and generating work. Do you refer your clients to it regularly?

ABOVE: The pencil illustration for Fashion Designers, Report Anique “2003 Abandon Collection.”

without having to box it. It’s also a fantastic way to download all the energy and the creativity that you want to show. Even for film makers with their demos, instead of having to say, “Oh, I wish Disney would do something like this,” or “I want to show this to so and so,” you can basically do it yourself. Or even just something to amuse yourself for fifteen minutes and then you’re fine. [laughter] It’s instant gratification. DRAW!: Would you say that your web site brings you a fair amount of income, enough that it returns enough that it pays for itself, the maintenance of it? CC: Well, first of all, the Internet is so cheap now. I think, in the beginning—you and I probably remember when we started—it was like 80 dollars a month. Mine was at $89.99 (per month) or something—90 bucks—just to keep the host. And it didn’t even offer you that much space. Now they charge as little as seven dollars a month. That’s nothing. Mine is pretty cheap now, maybe like 20 bucks a month. DRAW!: Well, what would get me was the bandwidth. CC: Oh yes, that too. How much bandwidth do you use, on a regular basis? DRAW! • SPRING 2003 43

DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION

CELIA CALLE CALLE: Starting with the bottom layer—I would trace over the rough sketch, defining the lines, and start with a new fresh, clean pencil. Scan approx. 500dpi grayscale into Photoshop. Clean up minimum noise, using LEVELS. 1: Taking file into Painter and using the BRUSH tool, I will start with a quick light wash to areas needed. Then I bring the drawing back to Photoshop, with the painted layer, Placed on MULTIPLY. 1A: I select objects out, and place into a new layer with the girls and objects only.

ABANDON GIRLS © CELIA CALLE.

2: In Photoshop, using the PAINT BRUSH tool, I start by selecting the areas I want to color, using FILL IN [paint bucket] the clothes, jackets, pants and tops. Using solid colors, I LASSO to select the areas I want to lighten or darken. Using the SMUDGE tool to smooth out wherever necessary.

DRAW!: My site was actually fairly big, and there was a lot of images on it, so people could spend an hour looking around on my site or reading some of the comics or looking at the art that I put up there. So initially the ISP that I had my site with, gave me one gig of bandwidth. CC: Oh gosh! That’s just enough for downloading your index page! DRAW!: I was going way over that, and they were killing me. For every meg I went over, they were charging me....

3: I apply details to the clothes, such as pinstripes, burnt marks, using the selection tool, FILL IN. CONTRAST and LEVELS to highlight areas needed. 4: Touch-ups and Shadows—Redefining the images and areas. Again, using the LASSO, I select areas under LEVELS, to bring them up or down. 5: Touch up, Shading—using the SMUDGE tool, or BRUSH, to soften up hard edges. 6: Add-ons—additional objects, such as the ribbon, numbers on the measure tape, I add highlights to the screws on the ground. 7: The final shadow and detail touch-ups: Such as tip of the nose, hair, shine to their garments, the dress forms, etc. Background: The circle. I use a thick, flat BRUSH, creating an abstract “Tire-like” circle, placed behind all layers, to hold the entire illustration together.

CC: Like 97 bucks or something per extra bytes, right? DRAW!: Yeah. So I have a good web host now. He doesn’t even charge me bandwidth, he just charges me a decent monthly fee. And if I need... for instance, to do a job like this magazine, where I want to put the files up on my server. And I say, “Well, gee, I need an extra two hundred megs so I can fit the magazine up on the server and my publisher can download it.” My service guy at routerdog.com will go right in and create that for me, so I can put it up there. It’s great that way, because then I don’t even have to worry about burning a CD or anything, I can just FTP the book onto my server and John [Morrow] can download it. CC: Yeah, the bandwidth is pretty generous on mine, too, it’s unlimited. DRAW!: Would you say your web site does bring you a regular amount of work?

44 DRAW! • SPRING 2003

CC: I can’t really put that into perspective, but it helps. I can’t really answer that question, because I don’t really know where... DRAW!: Where people are seeing your work? CC: Yes. It pays for itself, that’s for sure. At the same time, it helps generate you. Maybe one out of every five hundred viewers will probably contact you for possible work. DRAW!: Like, the work for Marvel—I think you said someone contacted you via the Web? CC: That was from the Internet, so that kind of gives you an idea of a good response.

DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION DRAW!: They’ll come across your site and fire off an e-mail and say, “Well, I like your work, it’s very interesting. What are your prices, etc?” CC: Yeah, it’s not just all “Oh, I love your site!” [laughs] It can be more professional sometimes.

CELIA CALLE

their story. But like most of us, I had to go through college and make a real living (by my parents’ books). So as a dedicated “comic fan,” it somewhat tarnished along the years... but I would still race home to watch my favorite cartoons back in college. DRAW!: Really. what cartoons were you into?

DRAW!: I suppose you also get a fair amount of people asking you how do you do what you do? Young artists asking for pointers. CC: Yes, a lot. DRAW!: And do you have a tutorial on your site? CC: I have a “frequently asked questions” section. It takes you to the link, “step-by-step” magazine, so they can order that issue. I’m just not good at explaining how I work. It’s very non-literal. If you sit next to me, I can show you exactly what I do, but if you want me to describe it, it becomes very difficult. Because it’s not something I calculate when I’m working. I don’t usually like to plan what I am going to do, I like to work freely. So, it’s just at that moment of how I feel about the particular illustration, of what it needs, and what needs to be done. DRAW!: You said you give rights for one year on your illustrations, and put that in the contract on your invoice, unless the client stipulates they want a buy-out. Has anyone ever objected?

CC: Bugs & Daffy (Looney Tunes), Robotech, Batman the Animated Series. Animated films: Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, Dumbo, Katsuhiro Otomo’s Memories [mainly for the visuals], Vampire Hunter D, Iron Giant, etc.) DRAW!: Did you still collect or read any comic books at that time? CC: Collect comics? Not really. I would pop into comic stores to see what’s on shelves and shop for familiar items, but the need to collect, wasn’t at mind. DRAW!: You said you used to follow comics, but not religiously. But you were sort of interested in the different styles and art. What was it that attracted you? What types of stories, things like that? Or artwork?

BELOW: A self-promotion piece entitled “Stilla.”

CC: Usually early in the project, most agencies would ask for a price quote, they usually want the “buy out” option as well. At the moment, it’s been mostly with 1-5 years usage price. No objections. DRAW!: Do you advertise in the trade annuals for illustration, and do you feel it’s worth it to buy a spread? CC: I advertise in The Alternative Pick. Although there are so many of these trade books available to us. I have to keep my budget under control, so I limit myself with them. Buying a spread is completely for one’s own preference. I personally go for the spread... mainly for egotistical reasons. [laughs] But it’s not very practical when you’re trying to keep your budget under control.

CC: I started liking comics mainly because of the artwork, plus the easy reading. I was in love with Batman, Detective Comics was one of my favorites, the character being so fine, tall, dark and mysterious, not to mention how I loved the cape (especially how some of them were drawn). I think it’s the art, mostly, the drawings that were “flowy” and beautiful. On the other side, I loved Snoopy, a.k.a. Peanuts! From the Sunday papers, and the all the Calvin & Hobbes books for

DRAW! • SPRING 2003 45

COMICS DRAW!: How did you become interested in comics?

DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION

CELIA CALLE

CC: As for stories, they were mainly Batman. The later ones, I really enjoyed reading Batman Adventures. The drawings were great and fun. At the time I really didn’t know their names (and some, I still don’t), I saw the artwork and fell in love with it. I later found out—some of them being Alex Ross and Bruce Timm. It was their work (among a few others) that I was pretty drawn to. It was only later that I realized who they were. And there are other artists that I can’t seem to recall their names now, but I know their artwork. It’s a little more of a classic... DC comics?

DRAW!: Like the old, classic... the Detective artists like Jim Aparo or people like that?

CC: I guess it’s the art that I’ve always cared for most. Not that I don’t care about story. It’s mainly because for my own personal drawings, I like to always be better at it. So I intend to find things that attract me, or that would improve me. I also love the paintings by Ashley Wood. His work is quite unique. As well as Dave McKean. DRAW!: Yes, another big Photoshop maven. CC: [laughs] I like what he did with Batman [in Arkham Asylum.] those drawings in there were pretty twisted and I loved it! Very Francis Bacon. DRAW!: Okay, I can see that.

CC: Errr... I feel like a complete idiot not being able to give you their names right now. Since most of the old comics are stashed away at my parents’ house. DRAW!: I find it interesting to talk to an artist who comes in from outside of comics but is attracted to the imagery of comics—not a fanboy in a big geek sense—and what it is that they find attractive? Because you’re not a fan boy, you’re not, “Oh, I have to have every issue of such-and-such.” You’re attracted to the art and the images. CC: Oh, totally. It’s the artwork that I always loved more than anything, and I don’t think I hesitated on that, ever. And I admit that. Gosh, I have a cover here with... let me see if I can find the cover art. Like, this latest issue that I picked up of Wonder Woman, there is this Nazi guy and she is kind of beating him up. DRAW!: It’s a Wonder Woman comic? CC: Yeah. DRAW!: That’s probably Adam Hughes who did the cover. CC: Yes! Adam Hughes! Thanks! I picked up that because I thought that cover was just so beautiful. DRAW!: He does beautiful work. CC: Yes, he sure does! I pay a lot more attention to the art than who drew it, and it’s always been a real problem with me. But it’s the honest reason. Even with Heavy Metal magazines. I actually own more of the Heavy Metal issues because there’s just more artwork in there. And the stories, I never really had time to read them. But the artwork is less, in a way, “commercial” with Heavy Metal, I think. DRAW!: Well, it’s certainly much more European.... CC: Or that way, if you want to.... DRAW!: Because they’re importing a lot of work from overseas, so it’s not just super-heroes, it’s a lot of fantasy or science fiction. 46 DRAW! • SPRING 2003

CC: I always loved Batman the Animated Series. For the art and for their story. I remember how I’d run home from school just to watch that, at three or four o’clock on the WB. If there was a class going on, I would like, “Oh, I’ve gotta go home now! [laughter] DRAW!: Skipping class to watch cartoons! [laughter] CC: That’s what happened! So I would run home just to watch my continued episodes. And I didn’t even realize who Bruce Timm was then, until I got on Shane Gline’s board. (www.shaneglines.net) It was just something I was never very curious about. Especially having studied fashion, I was never aware or took much notice on the “comic/artist” aspect of things. Instead, I would be more curious about fashion illustrators, such as René Gruau, Tony Viramonte, and Theirry Perez. So now, I feel super-unattached in front of all these talented “comic artists.” I would get so embarrassed, [laughs] “Oh, yeah! I love your work, but I just didn’t know your name!” [laughs] But hey, I forgive the kids who do the same thing to me sometimes. “You’re a girl?” [laughter] So yeah, that was mainly my interest in comics. But as far as drawing, the interiors, the whole story, I had always thought the whole interior layout thing is too time consuming... such a lot, too much work (for so little to accommodate). But if I am asked to give you a layout of the interiors of these comic books, I would probably take forever, only because I can become so obsessed with it, and the need for it to be “perfect” can drive me nuts! BREAKING IN DRAW!: How did you end up doing the covers for Marvel and DC? CC: Marvel? The editor, Andrew Lis (X-Treme X-men and Cable), contacted me out of the blue. He found my work on my web site. As far as DC goes, I went to the Comicon International: San Diego 2001, and my beloved sister, Victoria, handed one of my promo-kits to Will Dennis (100 Bullets) at the Vertigo booth. Not long afterwards, I got a call from him. That’s how it was. DRAW!: When they approached you from Marvel to do those X-Men covers, had you been an X-Men fan before that?

THE PROCESS—Celia CALLE

STEP 2:

PENCIL CLEAN-UP IN PHOTOSHOP I scan my pencil sketch into Photoshop and clean up areas as needed, using LEVELS.

QUICK BRUSH IN PHOTOSHOP Using the BRUSH tool and variations of OPACITY, I block in covering areas.

STEP 3: BLACKTINT OVERLAY I overlay a black tint on the entire image. I select FILL in the MENU, and fill the layer at 15-30% MULTIPLY.

STEP 4: TOUCH-UP Using the LASSO tool and the BRUSH tool I select areas of

STEP 1:

dark and light. Using the GRADIENT tool or SMUDGE tool I soften breaking edges. I add pupils to the eyes and scars to the face with the SELECTION tool and BRUSH.

DRAW! • SPRING 2003 47

DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION

CELIA CALLE

STEP 5: CAP & FINAL TOUCH-UPS Again, using the LASSO tool or BRUSH tool, I create the cap and minimal texture, under TEXTURE/GRAIN I fill-in soft grain, using SELECTIONS and LEVELS to shadow and lighten areas wherever needed.

CC: I have friends who are big X-Men fans, so I was pretty familiar with who they were and what they were about. And especially after the first movie (X-Men), I think all of us (even non-comic

readers) became very aware of them.

DRAW!: Do you go to the comic shop now since you are doing more comic work? CC: Oh, yeah, of course. Although not much more than before. The comic shops are pretty close by, and many are here in the city. I will pop in just to go around, check out the book covers and walk out. [laughter] Go in, look around, and if I see something I like, maybe buy a few and then walk out. But I never had the interest of properly reading it. Again goes the same reasons and interest. DRAW!: Do you do a lot of drawing and sketching away from work, just for your own enjoyment? CC: Oh, definitely! It’s what I wake up to! I can’t wait to get on with my own projects, y’know? Sometimes when I receive new assignments, you just have to do it, because it’s work. But then you’ll get free time in between... I just can’t wait to work on my own stuff and draw my own subjects. It’s mostly things ideas that I want to download from my head. STEP 6: 1. Using the SELECTION tool, I try and capture a feel of real “shattered glass” by ran- and It’s not necessarily just to keep myself in knowldomly selecting away, in EDIT under the MENU, using STROKE, placing pieces wherever necessary, edge, up to date with skills, or anything. It’s just wherever it fits and looks balanced to the eye. Using shadows with the AIRBRUSH or BRUSH tool, and light OPACITY—selection to MULTIPLY—I go over areas, chip away edges, where I want cracks fun, and it’s something that I love to do. But and depth. Highlighting areas, using the SELECTION tool, soft GRADIENTS capture a glass-like texture. there are times when I’m not inspired, I can go on for periods of weeks or even months not 2. INVERT the entire image. doing a thing with my personal work. If I’m not inspired, I don’t force myself. I don’t force 3. I highlight areas by using the SELECTION tool and cover using the GRADIENT tool. myself to the table. There’s no point. DRAW!: You don’t sit there, just keep drawing and crunching up pieces of paper— CC: No. DRAW!: —and throwing them into the basket? CC: That will happen sometimes. And sometimes I’ll be bored and suddenly think up “Oh, you know what? I want to draw a girl hanging upside down. I think that would look cool on the web site.” So I will jump to the table and draw out a girl hanging upside down. One or the other. It’s either you’re bored and you scribble out a mess or “Oh my God, I have to do this!” [laughs]

48 DRAW! • SPRING 2003

DRAW!: Sometimes I find that the process of sketching before I work is sort of like blowing the dust off to get at what’s underneath. And you might have to do a bunch of almost noise or junk sketches to

DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION

CELIA CALLE

ABOVE: The pencil sketch and final layered version showing the couple embracing. Calle’s process here is the same as wtih the boy’s face.

RIGHT: The final illustration showing all of the layered elements.

DRAW! • SPRING 2003 49

DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION

CELIA CALLE

get everything in tune or something. CC: On a very bad day, if I can’t get it right, I can have hundreds of raw sketches (tossed away). But there are very good days, where you have one shot and you don’t want to mess up that original piece because it has all of the energy and all the movements there, that when you trace over, it becomes very stale and it looks traced over, it loses a certain energy. I hate the feeling of losing that energy.

hardly consider what I do is “work.” If it’s something you love, and get paid for it? Damn. [laughter] DRAW!: Well, I think that’s the best kind of artist to be.

DRAW!: And that first sketch always has the energy. And you may never get it again. You can never, it’s like it’s almost impossible...

CC: It all depends on your mood, like I said before. If you can, it’s great. If it doesn’t, it sucks. [laughter] Sometimes you can’t get that energy back, or it’s just that little thing that you totally need... “the inspiration.” For example, a Christmas card I did from a year ago, (a girl playing a violin with a red-cross striped over her), Something like that for instance, a thought would pop up, “I feel like drawing a girl, nun-like, playing the violin, something peaceful,” and it’s what I wanted to portray, especially after what happened to Sept 11. The inspiration (of wanting to create something pleasant or visually appealing) will come naturally. DRAW!: One of the things I like about doing the interviews with different artists for DRAW! is finding out the process and the way they go about working. Because I know many cartoonists and many artists I’ve interviewed never draw unless they’re working. They don’t keep a sketchbook or they don’t just doodle on loose sheets of paper. There are a lot of artists out there who, if it isn’t for a job, they.... It’s like not chopping wood, they’re not in the forest. CC: [laughs] Well, I think work in general has gotten me lazy with my own “personal” work, because I just feel like there’s no deadline and there’s no purpose, and it’s kind of like, “Ah, no one’s waiting on it.”

ABOVE: Cover Art for Marvel Comics MekaniX #3.

DRAW!: So there’s no pressure, there’s no external pressure. CC: Yeah, I would constantly catch myself saying, “Well, I can do it tomorrow, I can do it tomorrow.” So you actually never get the work done. And because of that, I think work has kind of spoiled me in that aspect. DRAW!: So would you say your work week is a 40-hour work week or more?

CELIA CALLE is a freelance illustrator living in New York City. You can contact her and view her work on website: www.celiacalle.com

CC: My life is about my work. I even dream about it. And some of my work is from what I dream about (no kidding)! I wake up and I’m at work! [laughs] Nah, drawing is my life. It’s everything to me. It’s my identity. It’s entertainment. And if I’m not working on it, I’m thinking about it. And if I’m with someone, I’m talking about it. Without it I am one super-bored person. I 50 DRAW! • SPRING 2003

PHOTO © WALTER BRINSKI STUDIOS.

BILL WRAY, CONTINUED FROM PAGE 17

shopping for something else. I mostly use Cartoon Color’s acrylic cel paint, but lately I’ve been delving into tube watercolor. I use lot of different brushes from Robert Simmons to Grumbacher, but I mostly use flat brushes (of all sizes) for everything but the details. For that I use the Series 7 again. Of course there are different brushes for different techniques, but I “force” the flats to do my bidding. DRAW!: You are painting or keying (color keys) backgrounds for Samurai Jack at this moment. How much back and forth do you get from the director or art director? What does this entail specifically? How much time do you have? BILL WRAY: Genndy goes over the show with me key by key and has a very clear idea of what he wants. I try and give that to him, but sometimes I go off on my own, then he pulls me back to his line of thinking. It’s challenging working on the show, as Scott Wills is such a master painter who’s work is so tight—I paint rougher, so some times my stuff confuses the Koreans who have to use the color keys for reference for painting the final backgrounds. The most gratifying thing is Scott’s confidence in me despite his superior technical skill. That shows self-confidence and opens the show to different styles. I think Samurai Jack is the best looking show ever done on TV. And is better than most full length features. DRAW!: You painted the illustrations in the titles for the show. How did you work with Genndy Tartakovsky and Scott Wills, the background supervisor, on this?

PAINTING STEP-BY-STEP

BILL WRAY

DRAW!: I notice your pencils are looser, full of a lot of energy. Do you do this to force or keep some of the drawing for the inking stage? BILL WRAY: I’m frustratingly pragmatic, for most of my technique isn’t broken down that far into a theory about look or spontaneity. In the case of pencils it usually has to do with time, subject, interest. I add more of those ingredients the tighter I go. The more time I have the more I try and vary the shots to not repeat myself, to do an angle I’ve never tried. When I have to rush, it gets to be formula to a degree. If I’m in love with the subject and if I have time, I’ll do lots of research. Another element of time is when I find that if I’m rushed, I just copy the reference. If I have more time, I design it. An example would be if a have to do a cartoon of a celebrity. If I’m rushing, I just copy a photo, creating a recognizable but stiff semi-realistic drawing. If I have time I’ll do a dozen drawings, each more cartooned (designed) then the last until it becomes a pleasing cartoon caricature. DRAW!: Since you work back and forth between both comics and animation, both pen and ink and fully painted work, would you say one influences the other more? And do you prefer one over the other? BILL WRAY: Not really. Changing up seems to keep it all BELOW: Cover Art for a Ren & Stimpy CD.

BILL WRAY: I was used mainly because Scott didn’t have enough time to do them. I worked closely with Genndy as described above, except this time I did the final art. DRAW!: You do great dry brush technique, how do you do that? Do you have a specially trained brush? It a rather painterly approach to use in a traditional comic setting.

BILL WRAY: No, I just take the Series 7 brush and brush it on a piece of scrap paper once or twice till it’s almost dry and the brush is flattened out, the hairs spread apart. Then you lightly pull the brush across your paper, barely touching the brush hairs to the surface so you literally make each hair make a tiny line. All the lines side-byside give a soft, scratchy texture called drybrush. The opposite of trying to keep your brush in a point for a clean thick-and-thin line. DRAW!: Do you have to have the ink at a certain consistency for this? BILL WRAY: There is probably an ideal “thickness” but I never pay attention. DRAW! • SPRING 2003 51

1. 1. Thumbnail idea from sketchbook: Sometimes I may fill pages with ideas to “find“ the best one. In this case the client and I came up with an image before I started drawing, so it was just a matter of the composition working out. 2. Sometimes I blow up a thumbnail and trace it. I’m this case I did it by eye with plenty of examples of Hank Ketcham’s Dennis art around me for inspiration and to keep it ‘on model’. 3. I arrived at this drawing by taking drawing #2, making a Xerox copy to size and taping a piece of Saral transfer paper to the back of the copy and then taping it to my illustration board. Then using a red ball point pen (so I can see where I’ve been) I traced the drawing to the illustration board and then cleaned it up a bit more. 4. The final painting: For a detailed painting description on painting methods see the tutorial about this issue’s cover starting on the next page.

52 DRAW! • SPRING 2003

fresh for me. The ideal thing would be to do my own show or comic book my way, but who wouldn’t want that? Doing a little bit over everything makes it easy for me to cherry pick the jobs to a degree, and if I’m going to work for others I want to be on the stuff I enjoy the most.

PAINTING STEP-BY-STEP

BILL WRAY

PAINTING THE COVER: A COLLABORATION BETWEEN WRAY AND DESTEFANO. Working back and forth between De Stefano and Wray via fax machine for this issue’s cover, I merely stood on the sideline, made a few suggestions, and watched these to past collaborators and friends come up with a great cover for this issue. I rejected the first idea by Stephen, because I felt it didn’t really communicate the idea of an artist working in his studio, which is sort of the theme I was going for, the collaboration that an artist also gets from his models or subject matter. By Stephen’s second sketch the idea was nailed. – DRAW! Editor, Mike Manley

DRAW!: You recently had a show of your work down in Texas. That must have been very exciting. You did a lot of new paintings for it. As a commercial artist entering the “fine art” STEP 1: Stephen submits cover rough via fax to Mike— realm, how did you Mike, Stephen and Bill agree that while the cowboy cover is a find the experidramatic composition, it’s not as clever as the Animal Models ence? idea. BILL WRAY: The month of painting for the show was fantastic. the freedom to do what I wanted was gratifying creatively, but a calculated financial risk. I’m glad I found out I could do 15 paintings without a work order for each one. I’m not sure if I have found myself yet as far as my “look,” and I have a daunting task ahead of selling myself to this new art world. To really get on top you have to devote yourself full time to selfpromo. That’s the STEP 2: After some discussion about composition issues hard part for me. and strengthening the gag idea, Stephen does a final pencil. I just want to This is in fax form to save time. paint and have the work magically sell itself.

DESTEFANO: My final sketch, and as good as I’d ever get it. Unfortunately, I still felt like something was lacking, like I just hadn’t nailed the composition. When Bill’s final painting came in—I freaked! I was ecstatic—Bill shrunk things, moved them around slightly and totally pulled everything together into a piece I’m entirely proud to have my name on. Brilliant, Bill—Whew!

DRAW! • SPRING 2003 53

PAINTING STEP-BY-STEP

BILL WRAY

STEP 5: This is a small Xerox copy of Step 4 with a rough working out of the gray tones as a value study for the painting. Having the value painting clear in your mind before you start your final is essential in illustration to help you create a guide to know where you’re going. STEP 3: Bill takes the faxed pencils and slightly alters the composition again after consulting with Stephen. Then using Sarel transfer paper taped to the back of a recomposed Xerox copy, he traces the image off onto Strathmore 500 Illustration board (Heavy -Vellum).

STEP 4: Bill tightens up the blue pencil with graphite.

54 DRAW! • SPRING 2003

STEP 6: This is a Xerox of the value study with the colors roughed in with Tombo brushes markers. This is a cheat only for an old experienced pro. It’s essential that the beginner do actual studies in paint to help them figure out where they are going, especially in a painting as complex as this one. If you have a short attention span and try to jump to the final without knowing where you are going, you will get as lost as if you are taking a journey to a new land without a map. If you’re not confident of where you’re going, you will end up going in a circle until you create a muddy mess of overworked color.

PAINTING STEP-BY-STEP

BILL WRAY

STEP 7: Ordinarily I paint the entire painting at once, but I this case my scanner was too small to show the entire painting so I did it in sections. I first covered the figures with airbrush frisket paper before I laid in the black and red background color. Step one (of the painting process,) is “laying in” the background. Always work from the back to the front, light to dark.

STEP 8 AND 9: I lay in the flat (mostly) mid-value colors—no blending—just keep it simple, concentrating on getting your values right. Your overall goal is to keep it as simple as possible. The lion and bear are finished, so look to the monkey for your example on this step.

DRAW! • SPRING 2003 55

PAINTING STEP-BY-STEP

BILL WRAY STEP 10: Now I have laid in the textures that I’m using in this case as middles values that round our “flat style” forms. These textures are applied with a dry brush technique, modeling the table, chair back, the guy’s pants, and small details on the skin, like the elbows. To get the soft “dot texture” on his nose, beard, shoes and elsewhere, I’ve used a Makeup Sea Sponge (taping off the area first) and careful “dabbing” on a slightly darker value of the flat color I’m working in.

STEP 11: The final tightening. I now go about adding in the “accents” generally slightly darker outlines of the flat colors and more finial details like the hair on the arms and head. I do some minimal highlighting—restraint is important at this stage. I chose not to add highlights in the eyes, as that is a cliché best used for Disney video box covers and baby animal paintings. One highlight tip: Never use pure white. Use the local color, just a little lighter.

THE FINAL COVER.

56 DRAW! • SPRING 2003

STEPHEN DESTEFANO, CONTINUED FROM PAGE 36

script cartooning like the Popeye or Katzenjammer Kids or things like that.

COMICS & ANIMATION

STEPHEN DESTEFANO

SDS: Yeah, very much. DRAW!: And there really isn’t much like that in the mid-Eighties in comics. That stuff had all pretty much died out.

SDS:: Yeah. I always read the funnies from when I was little through a teenager, and always loved it, but by the time my first professional work was published, that stuff didn’t excite me very much. Then, one day my first editor at DC—the editor on my first book, Alan Gold—suggested that I look at Krazy Kat. And he was a huge fan of Barney Google, so he showed that to me. He was also a huge fan of Carl Barks, and he kept pushing the Ducks on me and stuff like that. DRAW!: So you were not really aware of some of this stuff before then? SDS:: Y’know, when I was reading books by Don Thompson and Dick Lupoff or whatever, I’d see these articles about what a great artist Carl Barks was. I was twelve or something and I would flip past it because I’m thinking, “That’s not for grownups!” Or “That’s not real art! Where’s Batman? Where’s the origin of the Big Red Cheese?” So I was aware of things like Barks, and I was mildly aware of the history of pop art, but it wasn’t something that I really pursued until my late teens, my early twenties. Then I started to get rabidly interested. I felt like that’s where I can get a real education. I still do that today. DRAW!: Now, after you started working at DC and you started working on your first couple jobs, when did you first start getting involved in animation?

DRAW!: Yes, great comics. And around what time was this? SDS: About, ’88, ’89. Disney put out the word that they were looking for cartoonists, and there wasn’t much going on for me at that point, so I got in touch with them and I did Mickey Mouse samples. I was stunned because I got the job to draw the Mickey Mouse comic book. And that was an education, because I had never really looked very closely at the construction of the characters. If I thought about it, I might have, “Oh, that’s a circle, and that’s a bean,” and so on. DRAW!: Mickey’s difficult to draw. You draw one little thing off and he looks weird. SDS: Yeah, to this day I can never get Mickey Mouse right.

TOP—DESTEFANO: Thumbnails from a later Ren & Stimpy episode. Probably my third or fourth board. At this point I realized that I could clean up some of my thumbnails and use them as an actual board drawings, eventually doing entire boards on tiny post-it notes—not a bad idea if you’ve got character layout as a luxury on the show. ABOVE—DESTEFANO: Title card designs from the Games produced episode, “An Abe Divided,” the second cartoon I’d storyboarded.

DRAW! • SPRING 2003 57

SDS: My first animation work I sort of consider was when I started working for Disney Comics. By that point, I had discovered how great Floyd Gottfredson’s work on Mickey Mouse was.

COMICS & ANIMATION

STEPHEN DESTEFANO

He’s a really hard character to draw. But that I consider my first attempt at animation style stuff. And that felt like something to pursue. Just stylistically, not even animation as a job, just the style felt like something to pursue, for me. So I kept concentrating on that and a few years after that I got a call from Bill Wray, who said that Spumco was looking for people and would I like to try that? So I said, “Sure,” and I sent some stuff into Bill, and he showed it to John Kricfalusi and then I got a job.

DRAW!: So did you leave New York and go to L.A., then, to work in the studio? SDS: Yeah. DRAW!: And how was that experience? That must be very different from being at home, working by yourself. SDS: Yeah, that was really big for me. That was probably one of the biggest things I’ve ever had to do, because aside from working two years at DC as a teenager, I’d never really had a staff position; I’d never had an office to go to every day. So that was really hard; that was really frightening. I probably spent the first year just adjusting to the fact that I had to do that. And in the end, I don’t think I ever really did adjust, because when the show was reshuffled and I came back to work for Games Animation—the studio that took the show over from Spumco—the one thing I said was, “Well, I don’t want to work in-house, I want to work at home.” So they said okay. Because I find that I can’t actually work around people. When I’m around people, it’s time to talk and play, and when I’m alone, it’s time to work. So it’s really pretty difficult for me to work in a social situation. DRAW!: So you found that your days at Spumco were broken up between talking and trying to get yourself focused at work? SDS: Yeah, it was hard. It was an exceptional group of people that John had assembled. I’d never met such an array of talented people. It was really intimidating. DRAW!: Oh, really? So you didn’t find that something that charged you up? You found it intimidating to be in a shop that had that many good people all working on one project? SDS: I think once I got over my nervousness it got really exciting, but because I was shy and I was so nervous about being in a situa-

58 DRAW! • SPRING 2003

DESTEFANO: A sequence I like fairly well from one of my better boards, for the episode “The Space Scottsman.” It was one of my last efforts as a Ren & Stimpy board artist. By this time I’d gotten something of a hang of drawing the characters. I even got to do a voice on this short! Again, by this time I was practically doing the whole board in a thumbnail format.

COMICS & ANIMATION

tion like this—going to an office everyday, not really knowing how to be social and political and stuff in an office—it was really hard for me at first. And then, once I did click into it, it was amazing and an extraordinary education. That’s probably the best education I’d ever received. I always think of that as my Master’s Degree or something like that.

STEPHEN DESTEFANO

DRAW!: Just being around all those top artists? And what were you doing there? Were you doing layout or boards?

SDS: I was told I was hired as a board artist. And when I got there, I was told that there were too many board artists, so I was going to be—for my first two days, I think I did backgrounds for Bob Camp’s cartoons, and I was working in the basement. [laughter] They put me in the basement of the building, which I couldn’t figure out! I don’t know what that was about. And by the end of the week they had made me an assistant to a guy named Mike Fontanelli, who is an astounding draftsman. And he was a layout guy, so I was going to do assistant layouts for him. So I was a layout artist for four months or something, and then they told me that there was no background designer on the show, and since I’d done all the backgrounds for Bob, and I was doing all the backgrounds for Mike, and nobody at the studio really liked to do backgrounds, and I found out later that everybody thought background designer was a cheap-ass job. If you couldn’t draw, you became a background designer. That was sort of the feeling amongst the layout guys, they wanted to draw the characters. But I felt too intimidated by the characters. I couldn’t draw Ren and Stimpy as well as John or Chris Reccardi or Bob Camp or something. So I’m like, “Yeah! Let me draw the backgrounds!” So I became background designer for a couple more months.

ABOVE: Notes from John Kricfalusi himself on how to best design for animation. BELOW: Design notes and a lovely back ground rough by John K for “Son of Stimpy.”

DRAW!: Wow. Well, you were sort of the utility player. You obviously had the drawing chops to do that, because backgrounds are hard. SDS: Yeah! DRAW!: That’s the part of the cartoon that a lot of times, even on a “cheap” show, a lot of effort goes into the backgrounds. And you pan by the thing in three seconds, and you busted your stones designing this big, intricate background. SDS: Yeah. I thought it was a great honor to be the background designer. I mean, everybody there knew how valuable a guy like Maurice Nobel was to Chuck Jones, but nobody really wanted to design BGs. But I had experience in comic books, where you had to draw everything. So that was perfectly fine with me. I was really excited to be the background designer. Unfortunately I never got it, I never became as good as I’d hoped. Especially while I was at Spumco. I think it wasn’t until a year or two later that I finally designed backgrounds that I thought were okay. But I thought it was a great job. And I was really excited, too, because then I got to work with Bill Wray, and I got to see these drawings that I was making really blossom and turn into something really beautiful. Because Bill would take them and he’d make them into amazing paintings. Or his staff would take them—Scott Wills, Glenn Barr—and they’d make them into something really, really amazing. So that was a real treat, too. DRAW!: Yeah, those were great back-

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grounds on that cartoon. So influential to this day. SDS: Yeah, they can be. We had some really amazing painters. Like I said, when I think back, I tend to think of Spumco and Ren & Stimpy as sort of a pantheon of... it’s like the Justice League, all these super talented people come together. I was sort of like the Snapper Carr of Spumco. [laughter] DRAW!: “Backgrounds by Snapper Carr.” [laughter] So did you stay in L.A. after Ren & Stimpy ended, or did you go back to New York?

SDS: I stayed in L.A. for I think maybe eight or nine more months. Because after Ren & Stimpy ended, that was pretty much it. And the ’94 earthquake hit, and I was like, I don’t like earthquakes. And L.A. was beautiful and it was really nice and everybody was nice, but it wasn’t really where I’d lived, I didn’t consider it home. But then I got a call from Lynn Naylor, who

DESTEFANO: An example of my thumbnails for a Superman storyboard, this was fun! RIGHT: Some of the the final sequence from DeStefano’s thumbnails.

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was going to be directing on the new Felix the Cat show. And Lynn said that she needed an assistant director and she liked my stuff and she liked me and she wanted to know if I would want to work with her. And what, do you say “no” to Lynn Naylor? What am I, stupid? [Mike laughs] I said, “Yes, of course!” I wanted to work with Lynn. DRAW!: And you had worked with her, she was also a member of the Ren & Stimpy crew, right? SDS: She was. I didn’t work very closely with her. Lynn’s the sweetest person alive, I think, and we’d just chat a little bit. But

when she offered me the job, I was so flattered, because I didn’t even think that she was familiar with my stuff. But that was an opportunity I really could not turn down. Lynn, aside from being an extremely nice person, she’s extremely talented, so I felt like it was something I had to do. DRAW!: Well, yeah. And the thing I’ve found for myself, working in animation for the last few years, is that the talented people always want to work with other talented people. Talent seeks other talent. It’s like magnets and metal or something. It’s like on Samurai Jack, Genndy Tartakovsky has got a lot of really talented people, a lot of ex-Ren & Stimpy people on the crew.

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THE WILD THORNBERRYS A) DeStefano: My “writing” process. I wrote around a lot on this Wild Thornberrys assignment trying to find ideas. I passed ideas back and forth between Nickelodeon editors Chris Duffy and Dave Roman. We agreed on a basic story, then it was up to me to pull it all together... hence this story outline. Which brought me to... B & C) My thumbnails from the story and even a character sketch for a new character.

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RIGHT: The final art from the Wild Thornberry Special Magazine, penciled by Scott Roberts and inked by Willie Blyberg.

LEFT: And here we have my official layouts, which I submitted as a script to Nickelodeon Magazine for the assigned artists to work from.

COMICS & ANIMATION

SDS: Well, that’s one of the sad things about the original Ren & Stimpy crew. There was a big rupture when the show split between John and Nickelodeon, so that did split up the studio staff, obviously. Some wanted to stay with John, others felt like it was time to move on anyway. But the respect, for the most part, for one another’s talents was there, and there was sort of a big family feel to it, so they pretty much follow each other wherever they go, practically. And more people are added, some people drop out and stuff like that. Yeah, a lot of the staff on Samurai Jack are ex-Ren & Stimpy people. DRAW!: So in the mid-1990s, you’re in L.A., you’re working on Felix the Cat. Where did things go from there?

SDS: Well, the first season of Felix ended and after that I decided that it didn’t seem like Lynn was going to return to the show or even to the point where CBS wasn’t sure if they would want to renew the show, so that began to wind down. And I decided I was going to work on a pilot that Bob Camp and Jim Gomez were creating at the time, and then I felt like my time in L.A. would be over. Soon after that, I moved back to New York. And then I just started taking freelance stuff.

STEPHEN DESTEFANO

Robbie Busch. And I think it was Robbie and Mark who figured out that they wanted to do comics with people that they really liked. And they were friends with Kyle and they were friends with me, and I knew Kyle, so we all sort of got together. And then Robbie said, “I know this guy named Evan Dorkin. He’s really, really talented. We should bring him in.” And I’m like, I don’t know who Evan was, but I said, “Oh, okay, fine.” So we all got together at Kyle’s apartment in downtown New York. And Evan sort of burst upon the scene with full force, and we all fell in love with him. So that was pretty much the origin of Instant Piano. We all went to dinner and we all drank and tried to come up with a title for the damned thing. And Kyle kept insisting that the title should be called Kyle’s Big-Dick Funnies. [laughter] And we were looking at the back of the Village Voice or the New York Press that was sitting on the bar next to us, and there was an ad that said “Instant Piano,” that you could learn to play the piano instantly. [Mike laughs] So we thought that was brilliant, so that was the origin of Instant Piano. DRAW!: So was each guy able to go off and do his own thing and then you just gathered it together and put the book together? SDS: Yeah....

DRAW!: And you were not doing comics, I take it, during your Ren & Stimpy time? SDS: I wasn’t doing many comics. I did some. I did four issues of a book called Instant Piano. DRAW!: Yes, Instant Piano! I wanted to touch on that, because that book was sort of the inspiration that got me to do my Action Planet Comics anthology. SDS: Oh, cool! I’m flattered to hear that. DRAW!: Yeah, I remember walking into the shop one day and seeing this and going, “Wow, this is great! Where did this come from?” You had not started Instant Piano while you were still in L.A.? SDS: Instant Piano was created five years, probably, before it ever saw print. And it was just because five guys were drunk off their nut in a bar one night. That makes it sound more anarchic than it really was. I mean, it was sort of a planned thing. We all decided to get together, we wanted to do an anthology, and we all liked each other. So that was good. And it took an awfully long time to get off the ground, so by the time the first issue was due, I was working on Ren & Stimpy, so that’s where Instant Piano was all created. DRAW!: So who were all the guys involved in Instant Piano and how did you come to meet each other? Was this through the course of working on animation? SDS: No, it was all in comics. I probably met Kyle Baker first, at a San Diego convention. I met him and Mike Mignola at the same time. Then around a similar time I had met Mark Badger at a New York convention, and he had an assistant named

DRAW!: How was it structured? Was any one guy sort of like the ringmaster to put it together? SDS: In a way, almost. Yes and no. It was so bizarre the way the whole thing was. Mark was the oldest of us and Mark was probably the most mature, so Mark got the John Lennon position, I think. Mark was the guy who would say, “Aw, c’mon, guys... y’know... we have to do this, and this has to get done.” And so much of it was based upon how hot Kyle was at the time. So Kyle was really integral to the whole thing. Evan was getting red hot at about that time. So we all tried to pitch in as best we could. And we scheduled meetings and we’d say, “This is what I got,” “This is what I like.” Sometimes—not often enough, unfortunately—we’d sit together. I think Kyle and Evan—who were doing strips together at that point anyway for Reflex Magazine—would write. Or they’d sit and they’d come up with something. And Robbie and I would do that a lot, and Mark and I would plan to do that. I always feel sad that we never actually jammed or contributed to one big thing. But that was sort of the process. And then it got much, much harder as—Mark was the first to move out to the West Coast—he moved out to the Bay area. And then Kyle moved out to Los Angeles because he had the deal with Warner Brothers. And then a little bit after that, I moved out to Los Angeles for the Ren & Stimpy show. And Evan was left here in New York, so he sort of felt all alone. Robbie also moved out to Los Angeles and we were roommates for a time, so Robbie and I were always in touch. And the whole thing just went from five guys drinking to “put a call in to guys from the Coast and see what they’re up to,” and “what’s Illinois have to say about this” and all that sort of stuff. [Mike laughs] So it wasn’t as breezy as it was initially intended to be. DRAW!: So you did four issues, right? SDS: Yes. DRAW! • SPRING 2003 63

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DRAW!: And that was though Dark Horse? SDS: Yes.

DRAW!: Do you remember who approached Dark Horse and how that happened? SDS: I think it was probably Mark’s idea, because Mark was close with those guys. Badger had been doing The Mask, I guess, in the early days of Dark Horse. And he was friends with Randy Stradley and Mike Richardson, so he said, “I think Dark Horse would be interested in this.” And they were. ’Cause like I said, Kyle was red hot at the time and Evan was really starting to heat up, so they were pretty interested to do it, I think.

SDS: I think so. Evan always claims that it was only supposed to be four issues, anyway. I don’t remember that, actually. I remember that it was just supposed to be something that we would do until we didn’t want to. I think we were just too all over the place, and I think it sort of trickled down before it even went into print, that Dark Horse would appreciate it being just a four-issue mini-series or something like that. [Mike laughs] So that was what it turned out to be. DRAW!: There was a whisper on the wind, “We will appreciate if this is only four issues?” SDS: Yeah. I don’t really remember how that happened. Maybe we decided before. Or maybe it was decided by issue four. I’m not even sure, I can’t really remember. But I don’t have the recollection that it was originally supposed to be a three- or fourissue miniseries. I think we started out thinking that we would be the new Zap! or something like that. And we barely made it to issue four. DRAW!: From that, sort of seeing, “Here’s four buddies getting together and doing their own thing,” that was the inspiration for me to do my Action Planet Comics and invite all my buddies to do their own thing.

SDS: That’s cool. I like to hear that. Did it work out for you better...? [laughter] DRAW!: Well, we only did three issues, and I’ve done a couple other one-shots since then, but... that, we could trail off and go into a whole ’nother long subject if we start talking about the direct market. Which I’m happy to do, but I don’t want to do it in the middle of your interview. RIGHT—DESTEFANO: Two pages of layouts for the Jingle Belle story from Jingle Belle’s All-Star Holiday Hullabaloo. Shane Glines finished the art and stuck pretty close to what I drew, and only changed a few things like the last panel on the second page.

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DRAW!: So why did it end? Did you guys just—everybody was being pulled in their separate ways too much at the time?

COMICS & ANIMATION

SDS: I wouldn’t have much to contribute anyway, because the business of comics always really mystified me.

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DRAW!: So after Instant Piano and after Felix, where did you end up? You ended up back out East? SDS: I ended up back in New York. And I think the first thing that I’d worked on was probably the Earthworm Jim show, for Universal. Then Lynn Naylor called, and asked if I wanted to be involved with her work on the Hercules and Xena movie. The person that got Lynn involved with Felix the Cat was her friend, Anne Leuting, who was the executive producer of Film Roman Productions, and Anne moved over to the same position at Universal, which was a bigger pond. So Universal was trying to develop the Hercules and Xena animated direct-to-video feature. And that was pretty much all Universal did was direct-to-video, for all I know that’s all they do, direct-to-video animation. So Anne said Lynn’s got to be involved. So Lynn was the director and again, pretty much the same Ren & Stimpy crew was the whole staff on that show. And I also was part of the staff from New York, which was kind of crazy, because I had a weekly paycheck and stuff, which was really great. So I was a storyboard artist and designer on that feature.

SDS: We were in pretty constant communication, but it wasn’t the sort of thing where there was a checking-in process. It was more like, I guess they really trusted me, and Lynn and I were talking a lot. And it was just a matter of when they needed stuff, and if I thought I could get it done at that time, that’s when they got it. Or if I thought that I couldn’t get it done at that time, I would let them know, and they’d get it whenever I thought that I could do it. But it wasn’t official or anything, it was very nonchalant. So I was really grateful. Again, looking back, I’m really impressed that I had that freedom. So that was good. DRAW!: You did storyboard, eventually, on Ren & Stimpy, right? SDS:: Yes.

DRAW!: I had a similar experience working with Warner Brothers, being on staff being long-distance. Did you have to report in daily? Did you have to fax roughs in every few days? How did that work?

DRAW!: So that was your first storyboarding? SDS: Yes. DRAW!: And then you went from storyboarding Ren & Stimpy to storyboarding Felix to Xena? SDS: Yeah. And I probably had little freelance jobs for friends at that time, too. I storyboarded an episode of Beethoven, which I actually did a voice for, also. What other shows did I freelance on? It seems to me there were other things in there, but I can’t think of one; I dunno, I think I cleaned up stuff for a Film Roman show called Heap or Swampy-Joe. Jeez, I can’t even remember.

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DRAW!: How did you learn to storyboard? The actual mechanics of it? Did John K. or somebody sit you down and give you the basic, “This is how to do pans and how to mark up all the camera stuff.”

SDS: It wasn’t really technical. The interesting thing actually is that the more I storyboard, the more I realize I’m a really lousy storyboard artist. I’m a good cartoonist, I’ll say that for myself. But I think I’m a bad technical person, because when I do work now for the New York studios, which are extremely technicallybased, they’ll look at my stuff and they’ll say things like... I can’t remember, what’s the big complaint that I always get from the New York studios? “Hook-ups.” DRAW!: Oh, okay.

DRAW!: They would leave it up to the animator to hook it up. SDS: It didn’t even matter; if the story was well told, concisely and with clarity, hook ups mean crap, really. But it has to be funny. And that was the way I learned. Now, that’s not to say John wasn’t technical. John was an amazing technician and there were guidelines. I still have John’s “How to Storyboard.” But God bless John, it was less about, like, fields and stuff like that, than it was about funny and telling the story—really good storytelling. And that was the real learning point. I’m a good learner, but I don’t get taught very well. It takes for me to sit and look at stuff instead of just hear something and automatically be able to turn it out. Partly I learned from looking at what Bob Camp was doing, I learned by looking at what Chris Reccardi was doing. We had another truly brilliant storyboard artist named Pete Avonzino, and he taught me quite a bit. And then I tried myself, and then I’d fail and stuff like that. And Bill Wray was really great, too, because my first storyboard on Ren & Stimpy wasn’t really as good as I would’ve liked, and Bill came to me and said, “If you want to pitch your boards to me, I’ll give you some advice or I’ll give you my reaction, and we’ll see how that goes.” And I did for my second storyboard, and from then on things were much better. Because you can’t live in a vacuum, particularly in animation. DRAW!: Well, I found that sometimes to be a little hard. Like on the recent Turtles job I did where you get a pile of drawings and, “Okay, go make a show,” and really no other instructions. And on TV, the storyboard artist is really the director. I mean, you make everything happen, everything hits the road when you do it. If it’s a bad script, if it’s a good script, if you “plus” it, all that stuff. I was doing all kinds of little pluses, adding stuff, adding little bits of action that actually make the story flow. That all falls upon the storyboard artist to be able to do that. SDS: Right. 66 DRAW! • SPRING 2003

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SDS: But my argument always is, you’re not telling me if it’s funny or not. Because, like, nobody on Ren & Stimpy would care if things hooked up. They didn’t give a sh*t.

DESTEFANO: This page from “Dexter’s Ark” remains un-inked because I actually light boxed and finished it on Duo-Shade board. I actually lettered in the dialogue myself. I feel this is an important part of drawing the page, integral to composing how much room to leave for text. I don’t always letter in dialogue, but I do if I feel really strongly about the job.

DRAW!: Or the director to catch that you’re not doing it and say “can you add this?” or “this is not working.” SDS: Yeah, absolutely. It is really hard. Since those days at the studios, I’ve been freelancing storyboards, and it is really hard to storyboard in a vacuum. You don’t know in the end what the program is going to look like anyway, because it’s gotta go through so many different people, whereas if you’re in the studio, at least you get a sense of what’s going to happen and what happens. DRAW!: Yeah, that is true. But it seems that more studios are hiring freelancers now because it’s cheaper for them. SDS: Yeah, that’s true. That was another sort of revolutionary thing. I think. I’m not really sure what the state was before Ren & Stimpy, but John insisted that he had layouts on the show. DRAW!: Which is actually pretty unusual because most shows are not laid out here, although I think they do do some layout on

some of the Cartoon Network shows like Dexter and Powerpuff Girls. SDS: Oh, really? DRAW!: Yes, because when I worked on the comic they would send reference, so I will see that there are specific drawings they do for certain scenes, because those are styles where you have to sort of figure out things, really heavily design-oriented. “Well, what does Dexter look like if he was laying down?” You know what I mean? SDS: Right. DRAW!: It’s a flat show, it’s a 2-D show, but you want him to do something that... it’s usually just left or right, people are walking left or right. Or going forward or back. But if you want to do some guy laying sprawled down on the ground, you have to figure out, like, “How would I draw the Powerpuff Girls doing that?” SDS: Yeah. Woo. How do you draw the Powerpuff Girls doing that? [Mike laughs] I can’t even picture that! DRAW!: So you’re saying that John K. had layout. So he had to add that into his budget, I guess? SDS: Yeah. And I don’t think very many studios thought very much about layout before that. For a while, on the influence of Ren & Stimpy, layout was sort of big for studios. And then, little

STEPHEN DESTEFANO

COMICS & ANIMATION

ABOVE LEFT—DESTEFANO: A rushed drawing done in a San Diego hotel room by DeStafano with a little help from Robbie Bush, intended as a hand-out/flyer in ’94. Good God, I used everything from a crow-quill to a laundry marker on this baby. ABOVE: Oh this is a heart breaker. This is the original sketch for my final cover concept for the third issue of Instant Piano. Bill did the final painting and graciously presented it to me after it’s publication. I loved it! Unfortunately it did not survive my disastrous move from L.A. back to NYC.

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by little, they got rid of it again, because it’s expensive, so they think.

SDS: Yeah. Although I am getting more and more interested in the trip.

DRAW!: So you learned to storyboard by studying other people’s storyboards and then sort of getting little bits of technical help here and there along the way, I guess, on the various studios on the various jobs.

DRAW!: Do you think that’s because your skill level has grown so much that you find it less frustrating now?

SDS: Yeah. DRAW!: So you basically learned on the job, then?

SDS: No, I don’t. I should, and things would probably go a lot more smoothly for me if I did, but I just don’t have the energy.

SDS: Yeah, I did. My career is kind of funny, actually, because when I think back to my first printed comic book work, I cringe. It’s hideous. It’s really awful. I’ll say this: I was a teenager. Keep that in mind. [Mike laughs] Yeah, I always learned on the job. I always got paid to learn, because I really never draw for myself. I almost never draw unless I’ve got a job in front of me. DRAW!: So you don’t have a sketchbook, you don’t sit there and practice?

DRAW!: So you like the end result but not necessarily the trip.

DRAW!: [laughs] After the job, after the day at the board, you don’t have the energy to sit there—

SDS: I think I’m trying to find more things to frustrate myself with. [laughter] Because now I’m interested in printing and color and that sort of thing. And my first work, I didn’t think of that at all. It’s always more about how you can refine whatyou’re doing, how you can get more control, how you can see your entire vision through, that sort of thing. DRAW!: Now, do you think that this also comes from your continued study of the classic strips, guys like that, and seeing how they put a lot into the finished product, the way it was colored or...? SDS: Yeah, definitely. It’s sort of important to me—the stuff that I put out, that I create, that I produce, has sort of a watermark to it. DRAW!: So you really want your work to have that persistence of vision from the beginning to the end so that when people look at it, they go, “Oh, man, that’s a DeStefano job.”

SDS: No. DRAW!: You don’t start out by warming up or doodling? SDS: No, no. DRAW!: You just hit the boards and just go. SDS: Yeah. Yeah, I think about that a lot, because... I guess in my head I’m sort of doing sketches, and I try to figure out ways to solve things and stuff like that. If I’ve been given a new model sheet, I always look at it and think about it a lot. But it would probably be time better spent if I were actually sketching things. I’m always sort of torn when people ask me if I like to draw or not. I’m always sort of torn, because I’m not entirely sure I do. I’m not entirely sure that I don’t. But I do like to tell stories, and this is the best way for me to do it.

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SDS: Or even saying, “That’s a good job. That shows me something that I didn’t expect or I didn’t even know I was going to ask for.” I would like for the readers or the viewers to be entertained, to be surprised in some way. I feel like I can move that along at a better pace—this is my feeling, I don’t know if this is true—if I have more input on everything. DRAW!: So let’s talk a little technically now, since this is sort of the guts of DRAW! Magazine. When you’re doing something like

COMICS & ANIMATION that last Dexter job, “Dexter’s Ark” as an example, when you read the script, do you go through and do little layouts or breakdowns? Do you work in sections? How do you approach breaking down the job, getting the art onto the board. SDS: When I get my script... and that was a good script, because it was actually from my Instant Piano pal, Robbie Busch, and that was good because it was written by a friend. Robbie always eggs me on to do weirder stuff and cooler stuff, so that was good. When I get a script, I’ll do little thumbnails on the script. I’ll figure out what it is I want to do and how I want to tell stuff and how I might want to break down the dialogue. Bernie Krigstein has always been a huge influence on me, because I remember what he did with that story, “Master Race,” how he actually broke up the dialogue in certain ways to control the pacing, so I do that a lot these days. Mostly I start with my little thumbnails and then it depends. Usually I’ll jump right to the boards from that, but not always. Sometimes I’ll go do layouts. DRAW!: How tight are your little thumbnails? Are they scribbles that nobody but you could decipher?

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DRAW!: Now, if you go to the second stage, if you go from thumbnail to layout, do you have a grid you Xerox and then you blow up? How do you transfer it from there? What’s your process from there? SDS: If it’s something that I’ve got to do really, really quickly, I do have my layout paper which is 8.5" x 11" paper with a comic book grid layed out on it, and which I can just blow up to 11" x 17". And it’ll approximately be the correct size, but that’s if I have to go really quickly. And most likely I’ll use a felt-tip marker at that point. It depends. If it’s for somebody else, if somebody else has to see it, I’ll roughly “ink” it in felt-tip marker. Sometimes this stuff has to be faxed, and I just feel a rough black ink line translates better than a rough pencil line. If it’s for me, it might just be maybe pencil, probably just a #2 pencil. But it’s very rare that I’ll go to that stage. Like I said, if I have to get other people involved... occasionally I might need an assistant or something like that, or if other people have to see it, then I’ll do the whole marker bit, but usually I don’t do too much of the layouts anyway. DRAW!: So then you make your thumbnail, most of the time, then you just go directly and draw right on the board paper?

SDS: Pretty much. SDS: Yeah.

DRAW!: Because I know, I’ve done the same thing, where sometimes when I get an idea I’ll jot it right down on the script. And sometimes if I go back through a bunch of old scripts and I see something that I’ve scribbled on it and go, “What the hell is that? I don’t even know how I figured anything out from that.” SDS: Yeah. Unfortunately, that occasionally happens to me on the job, too. “I know I drew this last week, but I haven’t got a damn idea what the hell I’m thinking!” But not too often. Again, it’s little shorthand notes, little doodles.

DRAW!: And do you rough out first in non-repro blue and then go back in and tighten it up in pencil for your clean-up? Do you work scene to scene? How do you approach that? SDS: I guess I sort of jump around. I always sort of try to give myself variety. It’s very funny. A job like the Bizarro book, I think, was drawn in so many different ways, with plate-finished paper, with vellum-finished paper. I always try to throw myself a screwball on every job because I guess I’m trying to keep myself awake. So sometimes I’ll use non-repro blue. If I don’t have any around, I might just use a #2 and then go in with a darker pencil. DRAW!: And now you’re usually penciling for yourself to ink, right? SDS: Yeah.

DRAW!: And it’s really for pacing, right, to sort of break down the pacing? SDS: Yeah. And like I said, there might be a second step, like I said, to layouts, but mostly I’ll go right to the pages. And things will change there, too. I almost never keep what I’ve got for my thumbnails.

DESTEFANO: Character designs from Bizarro. I was really trying to find something to connect to, or call my “own” with the Mxyzptlk character. LEFT: I loved this design. Unfortunately Bizarro Editor Joey Cavalieri felt it was way to far off from the character’s original look.

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STEPHEN DESTEFANO

DRAW!: So how tight do you have to make your pencils? Do you leave a little bit of the looseness to it so you can do some of the drawing in ink? SDS: Yeah, I do. If I’m inking a job, which I generally try to do these days, I’ll try and draw enough that my editor knows what I mean. But the odd thing is, when the pages come back from the writer and the lettering process to be inked, I actually will go back in and pencil things much more tightly. Unless I feel confident that I really can draw with ink. That happens, like, 30% of the time, and the rest of the time I’ll feel like I need to go in and pencil more particularly. DRAW!: Are you mostly a pen or a brush guy?

SDS: I jump all the time. It’s really funny, when I was at DC as a teenager and Joe Orlando was telling me how to ink, somebody put a brush in my hand. And I’m thinking, “This is like inking with spaghetti! What is—? This is impossible!” So right there and then, I decided that I was a pen guy. And you know so many of the great comic strip cartoonists—George Herriman and Charles Schulz, for example—are pen guys. So that works fine for certain things. And then when I grew up and came to love guys like Kurtzman and Caniff and Frank Robbins and stuff like that, it was clear they were using brush for a lot of their work. So that really intrigued me. So for years I was using these brush pens. The Sumi brush pens. DRAW!: Those are fun to work with. SDS: They have waterproof ink. And then, to my horror, I discovered that they stopped making them! DRAW!: That always happens! That’s the bane of the artist... you find a pen, a brush, a pencil that you really like. It works really well. The next time you go in the art supply store, they go, “Oh, yeah, they stopped making those.” [laughs] SDS: Yeah, it’s horrifying! The best example, I think, of what you’re talking about is Kyle had this nib that he loved, so he bought, like, I don’t know how many gross of them, because he knew someday they were going to be extinct. So he’s got twelve crates of them in his house, or something like that. I think it was really smart! He loved this nib and he always wanted to work with it. DRAW!: He’s smart, because basically that’s what happens. Especially in the Eighties and Nineties, it was the extinction of the art products. SDS: Yeah, because of the computer? DRAW!: Because of the computer and the fact that... you know, you go back to the Forties and the Fifties and there were hundreds of commercial artists using pen and ink and brushes and nibs and stuff, because that’s how stuff was done. Now, a lot of that stuff is done in Illustrator or people are using clip art. Cartoonists are, like, throwbacks to the ancient druids

70 DRAW! • SPRING 2003

A page from the Bizarro hardcover graphic novel.

or something. SDS: [laughs] Yeah, I fully agree with that. That’s seems pretty much what we are. DRAW!: So once you find something that you like, you tell the other guy, then everybody goes, “Oh, yeah! Did you hear about those new Zig markers or the new brush?” SDS: Yeah, yeah. So, unfortunately, I couldn’t ink with those things anymore, so I taught myself to ink with a brush. On any given job, I might use both. It depends on what I want for the panel. The style of inking might change, panel to panel. I generally feel much more comfortable with a pen. I have a big lettering pen, for all I know. But I like the fact that I can’t noodle with it because it’s got such a bold line, a very thick line. DRAW!: Who made it? Was it an old Esterbrook or something like that? Or a Gillotte?

SDS: I don’t know. Who is this? [looks for it]

COMICS & ANIMATION

DRAW!: I’m always fascinated to find old pen nibs, because there were so many companies that made pen points in the past, and every once in a while I’ll stumble across a box of old pen points, and find new ones, “Wow, I never heard of that company before!” SDS: That’s cool. [examines pen] It’s a 513ER and everything else has ink on it. DRAW!: I wonder if it’s an Esterbrook, because they used to be a major company. They were a very big.... SDS: Could be. Globe? Something Globe. [laughter] So all you people out there who want to ink the DeStefano way, go out and get a 513 Globe. That’s all I can tell you. DRAW!: What’s your typical work day like? Do you just wake up and pencil in the morning and ink at night? Is every day different for you? How does that work for you? SDS: It depends. Every day is sort of different. Generally, I need something to ease into the day, so I’ll try and do the easiest work in the morning. I’ll try to save blocks of easy work for the morning and the early evening, and if I have to write or I have to lay something out, I’ll do that in the afternoon. If I have to tell a story, I can’t do any of that stuff with music on, I have to really focus. So all the hard stuff I’ll save for the middle of the day—“thinking” work. It used to be that I could actually ink in front of a television, because I used to think that was sort of... um... I don’t want to say “brainless,” because that makes it sound like an idiot does it, but it’s just sort of a Zen practice, really. Or it’s like doing basic arithmetic. It’s technical, but it’s also like you’re just sort of going along with what’s there. So I used to be able to do that in front of the television, but that’s changed a bit now. But, yeah, that’s generally my day. It also depends, I’m usually juggling different jobs, so it depends on who needs what, it depends on what’s hot or not, it depends on when something was called in. So it changes, usually, from day to day. DRAW!: So how do you define yourself now, since you’re an artist who kind of straddles both comics and animation? You might be doing a storyboard job next week, or you might be drawing an issue of Dexter’s Lab... you do Popeye art, too, right?

STEPHEN DESTEFANO

DRAW!: And it often seems in comics “cartooning” is an ugly word, it’s a four-letter word. SDS: Yes, and it’s unfortunate. I always feel it’s cartooning if it’s telling stories with pictures. DRAW!: So who are your influences right now, who are you looking at or pulling from to draw inspiration? SDS: Well, [laughs] my influences are sort of esoteric right now, actually. Well, not so esoteric, but for me it feels esoteric, because I’ve been looking at a lot of Barry Smith right now, which I never did as a kid. DRAW!: Really? SDS: Yeah! It’s really, really weird, because I’ve got this friend, and he showed me Barry Smith’s first work, a Daredevil job, I think, and he said, “I loved this when I was a kid!” And I looked at the guy and I thought, “You are insane! This is awful!” But my friend kept showing it and showing it to me, and I kept thinking, “Well, it’s got some charm to it.” And in the past couple months, I’ve decided I need all the Conans, which I’m struggling to afford, but I’m doing. But influences... well, there are the constant influences, the things that I’ve always loved and I feel continuously feed me, and then there are the day to day influences like Barry Smith, which I feel compelled to look at. DRAW!: So, who are the constant influences? SDS: Always Segar, Kurtzman, Gottfredson... Kirby always. Probably a bit of Milt Gross thrown in there. DRAW!: So artists who were really cartoonists? SDS: Yeah. And then ephemeral things, influences that I can’t feel in a tactile way, because they came from animation directors. They didn’t necessarily draw anything, so the animation guys are harder to get a tactile feel for, but someone like Bob Clampett is always in my mind. Somebody like Tex Avery. That’s always with me. The feeling of a Fleischer cartoon, that’s always in me. But I couldn’t say.... My Popeyes tend to look, I’ve been told, more like the Dave Tendlar Popeyes or the Seymour Kneitel Popeyes than they do Orestes Calpini. So there are a lot of different Popeyes that you can draw, even from the Fleischers. But there are certain animators that I really loved as a kid that I sort of brought with me up to this professional point.

SDS: Yes, I’ve been the Popeye licensing artist for the past nearly fifteen years. So, yeah, I’m a licensing artist, I’m a storyboard artist, I’m an animation designer, I’m a comic book artist, but I always define myself as a cartoonist.

DRAW!: These were Fleischer animators on the Popeye cartoons?

DRAW!: Sort of covers everything nicely.

DRAW!: So you were talking about the constant influences and the muses that are sort of there but you can’t say directly you could look at your work and say, “Oh, that’s such-and-such influence,” or whatever.

SDS: I feel so, yeah. And I don’t know of very many comic book artists who actually call themselves cartoonists, but animators always call themselves cartoonists.

SDS: Yes.

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STEPHEN DESTEFANO

SDS: Yeah.

DRAW!: I know what you mean in a way, because Chuck Jones and the Hanna-Barbera cartoons and stuff, the Warner Brothers stuff, has always been such a huge, huge influence on me ever since I was a little kid, because I just rabidly watched that stuff. Almost on a molecular level. And it wasn’t until I started trying to do my own creator-owned work that these influences suddenly rushed back to the surface, brought me back to really wanting to be doing this more cartoony work. Then I realized how much of an influence that stuff is, and how much of that stuff is just packed in there. It’s like permanently etched in your brain. It’s like being able to remember all the incidental music from the Munsters. [laughter] SDS: Right, that’s what it’s like! DRAW!: I can remember every little bit of music from the Munsters, I can tell what’s going on. I don’t have to look at the TV, because I remember watching those things as a kid. SDS: Right! Of course, now I’m trying to think of all the incidental music for the Munsters. [laughter] But yeah, that’s sort of interesting, actually, because you had an honest-to-God superhero career. I had sort of a half-assed super-hero guy instead of really doing super-hero comics. DRAW!: It’s funny. My first samples, which I ended up getting work with, were cartoon stuff. SDS: Oh yeah?

DRAW!: It was this character I came up with,Trax Rover. And my first time up at Marvel, I was showing work that was very cartoony. It was sort of like Preston Blair’s Fantastic Four kind of stuff, Preston Blair crossed with Jack Kirby. And I remember the reception was basically “Oh, no. No, no. Jack Kirby’s a bad word up here, we don’t really do that anymore.” Then I went from that into my Alex Raymond/Rip Kirby phase. SDS: Yeah. But it’s an amazing talent to be able to jump from both worlds. I mean, I can’t think of very many people who can do that. That’s very impressive, Mike. And you’re a good example, you could probably relay to super-hero people better than most how hard it really is to draw cartoony. DRAW!: It is! SDS: How hard it is to draw in animated style, in traditional cartooning style. DESTEFANO: Part of my responsibility as a background artist at Spumco was to come up with title card concepts. I loved this job, though it could be pretty hard to do. These are for the infamous “Man’s Best Friend” episode, which introduced the fully formed George Liquor to the world.

72 DRAW! • SPRING 2003

DRAW!: It’s very demanding. Those Nine Old Men at Disney, the drawing ability that those guys had was just phenomenal. Those guys were as good as Norman Rockwell or any illustrator/cartoonist you want to pull out of anywhere. But it is really hard. It’s much harder to try to draw Charlie Brown than it is to draw Conan.

COMICS & ANIMATION

STEPHEN DESTEFANO

SDS: Yeah. [laughs] I don’t think I could draw Conan very well, but I think the pervasive feel that I’ve always gotten being in comic books is that drawing cartoony—I was called a “bigfoot” artist once or twice, which sort of perplexed me.

SDS: Yeah. Well, that was a bigfoot editor who told me that. But the feeling was that cartooning stuff is easy, but superheroes are hard to draw. And I think it depends on the person, on the artist’s ability. I don’t think I could draw Conan, or Batman very well, but not because I don’t have the ability. Drawing, technical drawing, is really mostly about problem solving. I’m not a bad problem solver—if I have to, I can be a fair technician. My mind’s just not there, though, my brain just can’t adjust to a super-hero mentality. Well, “can’t” is maybe a harsh word, but it’s difficult for me to draw super-heroes. And going back to the Warner Cartoons, I don’t think there’s ever been more exceptional drawings of sheer emotion than those guys were able to create. And who’s to say what’s a better drawing? That’s not a “technical” drawing, that’s not “anatomically correct” or something like that, but what’s our point? To be anatomically correct or to get across an extreme emotion as quickly and as beautifully as you can. So somebody like Rod Scribner, an animator for Bob Clampett, that’s astounding! His expressions, his poses—again, going back to my references to Kurtzman’s sheer emotional power—that’s as hard a thing as I could possibly think of to do. Then the people that can jump from both sides, they just blow my mind. So I think that’s really amazing that you could draw super-heroes.

DRAW!: And that’s not even a term that people probably use anymore, “bigfoot.”

DESTEFANO: From the back of a comic page. I often doodle on the back of a pages (but then, what comic artist doesn’t), generally trying to feel comfortable with the characters I’m drawing.

DRAW!: Well, as a kid, there was a lot of warring going on with me, because I loved Jack Kirby and loved Neal Adams, and they’re at opposite ends of the spectrum. SDS: Pretty much, yeah. DRAW!: And for a while, when I was younger, I gave Neal’s work more weight because it was realistic, and thinking as a kid, well, realism is more important. And then the further and further I go along, the less and less that is important. Because if you want real, you just go get a camera. SDS: Right. Yeah, what’s truly amazing when you’re drawing: is it to be representational, or is it to get across the story and the emotion, to communicate? You don’t necessarily need to draw anatomically correct figures or appropriate perspective to communicate. It helps in certain things, but in other ways.... It is really interesting. DRAW!: And the most popular cartoon characters throughout the world are the simplest, are the most cartoony, because those are the ones that cross all the cultural boundaries, because then you’re really getting down to the real basics of conveying information. SDS: Yeah, it’s really amazing. Is it a matter of drawing, or,

DESTEFANO: Here is an awesome example of the sort of note I sometimes leave for myself near my drawing table. I think I made this up for myself when I was drawing a super-hero story (which was never printed) a few years ago. I was trying to convince myself that, despite the fact that characters had “realistic anatomy,” they still needed structure & charm as epitomized by the work of Floyd Gottfredson! [Mickey Mouse]

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STEPHEN DESTEFANO

COMICS & ANIMATION

ABOVE: More great expressive storyboards by DeStefano from the Ren & Stimpy episode, “A Friend In Your Face.”

when you get that point, it’s like it’s a matter of designing, and designing is an extremely hard thing to do, to get something to its most basic form, to convey an idea. It’s really amazing. 74 DRAW! • SPRING 2003

DRAW!: Well, I think the sad part is that it’s very hard now, as a cartoonist outside of animation—unless you sell a newspaper strip—it’s really almost impossible in comic books to find a gig where you can do that kind of honest cartooning. There are very, very few places left. You’ve got the few books that DC puts out, maybe Mad magazine, and then you really start running out of places. Maybe advertising, there’s some stuff, the occasional job.

COMICS & ANIMATION

SDS: Yeah, really. It’s true. I’m not super-up on what you can do on the computer, but maybe that’s a new place for things to develop. If they do develop, I’m not sure I might recognize it, because my head’s back in 1943....

DRAW!: But you know, everything old is new again. I was having a young artist help me do some backgrounds recently, and I was showing him an old art director’s annuals from ’40s and ’30s, and if you look through them, a lot of design looks modern. 50 years ago you didn’t have TV to compete with, so a lot of the top talent went into things like film or strips or advertising. Animation still needs artists. Even if it’s the cheapest show on TV, they want talented people working on it. SDS: That’s true, and that’s one of the great things. It was interesting that I spent a lot of time in my youth working in comic books, and I was trying to draw funny and I wasn’t getting much of a response. And I wasn’t getting paid very well. And for whatever reason, I decided that’s what I wanted to do. And then I went into animation and I was getting a tremendous response, and people were really complimentary. And beyond that, people could teach me things, and said, “Well, that’s pretty good, but if you do this, you can get better.” And there was constant feedback and there was a constant dialogue. And there was lots of money. [laughter] Anyway, there was a constant source of money, let’s put it that way. But it’s a weird thing, because at the same time... so now I’m back in comic books. And I like comic books. I really feel that’s the best way for me to tell a story. There’s so many layers to animation, there’s so many people involved. DRAW!: Yeah, comic books is still the best personal way to tell a story, because you can have a disagreement with the director on something, you can say “Well, I think the shot should be set up like this,” and he can say, “No, no, no, I think the shot should beset up like that.” In comics, you’re the alpha and omega, basically. SDS: Yeah, and that is what I love. It’s you and a pen—that’s pretty much a comic book. Eventually, if you haven’t written it, yeah, you have to have a writer, there’s going to be an editor, there’s going to be a letterer and colorist and production people, and then there’s going to be a printer. But that’s relatively few steps, fewer collaborations, compared to the process that goes into animation and how much can go wrong within that process. DRAW!: Well, you’re not sending your stuff to some foreign culture and having somebody over there—. SDS: “Can you Koreans finish this?” [laughter] “In a few months I’d like to see what you’ve done. I know you don’t understand English, our humor, but believe me, it’s funny!” Yeah, I don’t understand how it works, but we were making it work for a while, to an extent. DRAW!: So are you working on any animation right now, or are you mostly just back doing comics?

STEPHEN DESTEFANO

SDS: Yeah, mostly comics. But for a while I was making all my bread and butter on being hired for storyboarding pilots for the Cartoon Network. So I did Evan Dorkin’s pilot, Welcome to Eltingville, for the Cartoon Network, then immediately jumped onto this pilot for Debbie Solomon, an extremely talented cartoonist in downtown New York. She had a pilot going for Cartoon Network as well called Private-Eye Princess. It was a half-hour, just like Evan’s was. So I was storyboarding that for her, and that was like six or eight months or something like that. It was a huge job, but it turned out really well. But I felt like, man, I’m exhausted! DRAW!: It is hard. That’s the one thing, when you go from comics to doing animation, it’s a mental adjustment, and it’s not only long hours, which can be demanding on your back—physically demanding—it’s also very mentally demanding. SDS: It can be for me. There’s so much socialization and politics going on because there’s a lot of people involved. And you’re not just dealing with people abstractly and occasionally on the phone, as you would in mainstream comics, where you sort of sit around drawing for a few weeks and then you turn your stuff in. You’re working head-to-head with people. And, on the whole, they’re generally nice people, but everybody has their own idea of what they want. And really, it might be some of your product, but you’re only just helping, it’s not your product. So that’s really mentally demanding; it’s really sort of mentally draining. DRAW!: And every show is different. You’ve got to get into it, you’ve got to become the characters, you have to find some way of getting a hook. You go from doing, I dunno, Kim Possible one week, and the next week you’re doing Turtles. SDS: Oh, man, that’s really hard, to jump from style to style to style. That was really tiring, too, because from Evan’s style, I had to jump to Debbie Solomon’s style. She’s a great cartoonist; she draws really funny. I loved drawing in her style, but it’s more of a New Yorker cartoon type of thing. So that was much different from what Evan was doing. It was so schizophrenic. So after I finished Debbie’s thing, I decided, “Boy, I’m really tired of animation.” I think I just wanted to stay away from it. Then I found out that the New York animation industry had died! DRAW!: [laughs] So you didn’t have to worry about that! SDS: And even if I wanted something, I couldn’t get it! So it was like, “that’s fine,” since I was getting work at DC, and I’ve always got stuff from King Features, from Popeye, and I’ve actually started writing some stuff for Nickelodeon Magazine, so that was cool. I sort of miss it, I wish I could keep my hand in it, but not so much has come up over the past year or so. So I’ll just go where I am, and like I said, I love comic books. I feel like that’s my medium. DRAW!: Well, I think it’s great to be a jack-of-all-trades, because if you do that, you can do the backgrounds, you can do different styles, you can do comics or whatever. I loved that

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STEPHEN DESTEFANO

issue of Legion that you did. How did that come about? Because that’s kind of odd, when you think about it. I mean, you’re doing cartoony stuff, to go do sort of a straight super-hero job.

SDS: Well, that was an anomaly of some sort. [laughs] I think editor Mike McAvennie just wanted to do something different in the Legion. He just wanted to be light for an issue. And he contacted me, and unfortunately, I was right in the middle of “Dexter’s Ark.” I definitely wanted to draw the Legion, but I was pretty embroiled in turning out as fine a job as I possibly could do on Dexter. So taking on the Legion at the same time was gonna be a squeaker, but I did it. DRAW!: I just think that “Dexter’s Ark” is the job of the year. SDS: Thanks, I really, really appreciate that. DRAW!: And I think it’s great that Genndy Tartakovsky has the faith and the ability to trust other people to do their own interpretation of their character instead of making it some stale, model-sheet comic book. SDS: Yeah, that was the impressive thing. I was really, really pleased with that... I can’t thank Genndy enough, actually. I should make that clear, this should get in print, because Genndy really protected that job. I penciled that job, and it went to Cartoon Network Consumer Services or whatever, and they said, “What is this? I don’t know what this is, but this isn’t Dexter,” essentially. And editor Joan Hilty got the word and everybody said, “Well, let’s see what Genndy says, and Genndy’ll be the final word.” And Genndy said, “That’s it! That’s what he’s gonna do.” So I was really, really lucky.

SDS: [laughs] Well... “New Talent Most Deserving of Recognition.” [laughter] DRAW!: Yeah, you’ll come up with your cane and accept it, [elderly voice] “Thanks, kids!” SDS: And then, on the heels of that, I did that Legion thing, which unfortunately I had to turn out in two weeks. But that was a blast, because, like I said, I always wanted to draw superheroes. I don’t know how it came out, but at least I had a hell of a lot of fun. DRAW!: I think it turned out great! And you know, I think comics were designed to be drawn fast. All the guys that we admire, the greatest generation of cartoonists, were guys that sat down and had styles to be able to blast out two, three, five pages a day. SDS: I think that is one of the most marked differences between cartoonists of today and cartoonists from yesterday. You hear how Milton Caniff would talk in old interviews, and you know what Jack Kirby was doing, what his motivation was. Jack wanted to feed his family, and Caniff wanted to sell papers. They were two supremely talented craftsmen, but they pushed and totally broke through the boundaries of their craft. But they always put it on sort of a commercial level. And it’s us guys today who are always putting it on this artistic level, that we’re supposed to be creating something lasting, that this is a work of art.

DRAW!: Well, it’s great to have a cartoonist in charge, because then he can say to the suits, “Shut up! This is great! This is beautiful, this is great cartooning!” SDS: Yeah! And I’m glad that Genndy’s on top, because he’s in a position to not be shouted down, and because, like I said, he protected that job. I felt like I couldn’t exactly draw in Genndy’s style, but I felt like I could adapt it through certain things, through certain “common denominators” of style. I felt like I connected to enough of the show’s stylistic mannerisms that I could draw in comics. So I got out all my Kurtzman and I got out all my Gene Hazelton—who’s the guy that drew the Flintstones comic for years—and that’s how I adapted the whole thing. DRAW!: Again, I think that’s such a great job. SDS: Thank you, thank you very much. I appreciate that. That makes me feel really good, because I worked really, really hard on it, and that said, I think it’s probably the best thing I’ve ever done. DRAW!: The Eisner goes to you, my friend! 76 DRAW! • SPRING 2003

A self portrait of the artist, done in marker, and drawn in his Henry Boltinoff style.

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• drawing & painting with DAN BRERETON! • Caricatures with ZACH TRENHOLM! • An illustrator tutorial with aLBERTo (DR. CYBERFUNKEN) RUIZ

• bret blevins • PAUL RIVOCHE

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LIGHTING THE FIGURE

BRET BLEVINS

The Figure in Light and Shadow BY BRET BLEVINS

he variety of possible stylized treatments of light and shadow are virtually without end, but because DRAW! is aimed at the fields of illustration, cartooning and animation as well as traditional art disciplines, this article will present simplified principles of using light to define or dramatize form for visual clarity. Since most drawn imagery (and all commercial art) is intended to communicate with a viewer, the ability to be clear is a handy asset. I’ve included sensitive drawings made only for aesthetic ends, and commercial artwork that serves other demands—their differences must serve as an introduction to the infinite breadth of light and shadow treatments possible in two-dimensional drawing. A deeper exploration of the subject is too vast for the space we have available in this article, but I want to stress the depth of this subject, and encourage you to enhance your picturemaking adventures by further study of the myriad applications of light and shadow found

78 DRAW! • SPRING 2003

throughout the history of representational art. We’ll start with a simple explanation of the visual properties of light as it functions in the natural world; To perceive visual information our eyes are entirely dependent on the presence of light— bright or faint, we must have a degree of light that falls within the perceptive range of our optical organs. In print this sounds absurdly obvious, but stating it is the key to shifting our attention to the framework that an artist must “see through” to effectively organize the light and shadow information. To translate the enormously complex range of shades visible in nature into a compelling drawing an artist must see patterns of light and dark areas in a manner that can be simulated by his drawing medium. Usually this means simplifying the seen information, and understanding the mechanics of light falling on an object is a crucial aid to the simplification process. These two drawings of

CONTINUED ON PAGE 80

LIGHTING THE FIGURE

BRET BLEVINS

In this three-stage demonstra- ILLUSTRATION 1 tion, the first image has simplified the forms receiving light (from the direction indicated by the arrow) into clean angular planes—the plane that most directly faces the light source will be defined by the lightest tone in your drawing (usually the white paper). As the plane turns at an oblique angle to the light, receiving less illumination, we drop the tone to a middle gray—as the third plane turns away from the light we fill it with shadow. This simple illustration explains an invaluable technique for clarifying what you see and restating your perception into a form that aids drawing. Of course you wouldn’t render every form into this chiseled block structure (though it’s good training to do so), but learning to mentally break the planes apart as ILLUSTRATION 2 you look at an object helps you understand what you see in terms of drawing light and shadow. The second image has softened and melded the planes into a smooth cylinder—but because we’ve noted the changing angles of the surfaces receiving light in the blunt manner shown in the first image, we’re able to blend the tones together and achieve a convincing illusion of roundness. In the final image the cylinders have become the anatomy of an arm and simple shadow shapes convince our eyes we are looking at a human limb. The explanatory floating curved arrows following the form are wonderful tools to help work out the gradations of light on turning surface. I often use these on a piece of overlaid tracing paper to work out a tricky bit of lighting. In the portrait demonstration I’ve constructed a head by building up a structure of planes—the form-following arrows indicate how I was thinking about each change of direction—this allowed me to fabricate reasonably accurate skull, face and neck forms out of my imagination using prior knowledge gained through study and experience. In the second image I was free to focus on refining the details of interior edges and more subtle turns of form (such as the nostrils and eyes) because the big planes were safely in place. Now indicating a direct but soft light toward the left side of the head is a much simpler problem, because I know where the planes are, having made several mental and physical (drawn) excursions over the territory. Although this head is imaginary, having this process behind you is a useful aid in drawing from life, because it helps you understand what you are seeing when you observe actual light on actual forms. The important lesson described in these demo illustrations is more a tool for thinking about what you are seeing (or inventing) than a technique for making a drawing. The only difference between any non-drawing person with normal eyesight and an artist is the special way an artist sorts, interprets and translates seen information into the language of drawing. Learning to make marks on paper is physical and easy—learning to think and see like an artist takes a bit more time and concentration. I can’t stress enough the importance of using your mind more than you use your pencil. It eliminates so much frustration and stress from the drawing process. Anything that reduces frustration is welcome, because our subject is full of other complications; light and shadow can also be arbitrarily distorted to create an endless variety of visual effects and connotations. For the purposes of this article, we’ll divide our topic into two broad areas—light and shadow derived from actual optical mechanics as they function in nature, and invented light and shadow intentionally distorted toward a particular esthetic effect. These two applications can share many rules or none, depending on the image desired—needless to say, this short article can only hint at the endless possibilities. DRAW! • SPRING 2003 79

BRET BLEVINS

LIGHTING THE FIGURE

Batman explain this basic contrast in approach—the first is rendered as if the actual three-dimensional form was being struck by light from the upper left... The second is simplified into the more familiar cartoon language of an exaggerated, symbolic, flat, stylized caricature of light and shadow. This image is iconic and blatant, simplified for impact—but the distribution of light and shadow areas are extrapolated from the optics of the natural world and distorted for clarity, drama and dynamic compositional effect. As you can see, aside from the actual schematic shapes, they have little in common. Yet both are shaped by observation and the optical facts of visible light. Regardless of rendering style—using light and shadow to create an illusion of three-dimensional form on a flat twodimensional surface requires careful observation of the behavior of light in nature, and good judgment in translating what you see into the limitations of drawing. These limitations are

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severe—your paper is flat and two-dimensional, an actual figure in space contains planes of depth not available to your drawing, so you are not duplicating nature—you are symbolizing it by “fooling” the human eye with the tones and edges you indicate, chosen for their ability to create a convincing illusion. As I mentioned above, this requires a special kind of multilayered seeing. (Which any sighted person can learn.) To draw well, a “double awareness” must be developed that enables your mind to observe all the available information and simultaneously select, shape, edit or embellish this input to suit the needs of your drawing. One of the challenges of making representational figurative art is sorting out the overpowering wealth of information nature provides. Many drawings get into trouble because the artist is so conscious of the personality or physical reality of the subject that he/she loses the detachment to be aesthetically selective and the image becomes a directionless mess of observed but unharmonized details. A good drawing is not a complete depiction of what is seen—that’s what a camera is for. In representational artwork you must judiciously lie to communicate an essence of the truth! This is tough because unlike the study of form, anatomy, rhythm, movement and gesture, observation of natural light on real form is often inherently confusing—the complexity that can arise from multiple light sources, reflections, variety of surfaces and textures receiving varied intensities of light can be overwhelming. It’s important to understand that study of light and shadow (like all the elements of drawing) is a process of making prejudiced selections—you must incorporate only the information that is useful to your drawing, shape it toward an esthetic goal, and sublimate or delete the rest. I stress this because light and shadow is the most subtle, variable, ever-changing aspect of seeing, and often confuses or tricks the eye. Thus simplifying form-defining light and dark patterns is vital to successful drawing. In most drawings, it is invariably best to limit your light sources. Two sources can be very effective if handled carefully, but one is always stronger, and usually more pleasing to the eye. Howard Pyle once advised his students; “You can paint a fine painting with two values (tones). You can still do it with three, but if you find yourself facing a painting with four or more values, throw it out and start over.” This is first-rate advice for any medium—as it relates to our topic of shadows, too many light sources dilute definition of form, making it difficult to “sum up” all the important information in a strong arrangement of dark and light shapes. (I want to stress this is no hard rule— any drawing or painting is successful if it works, but as complexity increases, so do the opportunities to fail.) Another key to using light and shadow well is a grasp of the importance of edges. Not all edges are alike, and sensi-

tive handling of the edges in your drawing is crucial to creating convincing illusions of light defining form in space. The world is littered with drawings that are a mere spread of details crowded across a surface—often an attentive discernment of soft and hard, “lost and found” edges would improve the effect of volume and liberate these same drawings from their prison of flatness. The subject of flatness brings us again to the contrast shown in the Batman illustrations on the previous page—in animation and most cartooning, light and shadow is intentionally “flattened” into simplified patterns that are suggested by or extrapolated from the mechanics of natural light, but bear no resemblance to an actual three-dimensional form in light (except possibly a harsh strobe-like illumination). Part of this is due to the intended reception of the artwork—a sensitive naturalistic drawing attempts to capture more than appearance—it’s after a deeper essence of the subject, a quality of perception that a viewer will live with over time, gradually developing a relationship with the image that continues to reveal nuances of substance. An illustration or cartoon image is almost always part of something beyond its own lines and shapes—it exists as a segment of a larger whole (as in animation or comic books), or refers to something else (a book cover or advertisement image). This requires it to communicate instantly and boldly—essentially it is more important that commercial art be “read” quickly than perceived in depth. This is a root of the blatant, unsubtle treatment of light and shadow in the majority of commercial art.

LIGHTING THE FIGURE

BRET BLEVINS

So it’s important to know what kind of drawing you intend to make, then gather and arrange your information accordingly. Careful study of these examples will help clarify the differences between natural observation-based drawing and contrived stylization of the same principles of light and shadow dynamics to create impact and instant communication.

KESTREL In this set of comparisons, the first image is a subtle drawing that was made with pure observation and unconscious emotion (meaning no particular effect was intended—I was just responding to the model). The matching images are contrived illustrations—the subtleties of the natural observation drawing have been converted into telegraphic design elements. Note particularly the character of the edges and how they differ. The lovely subtlety of this gentle drawing is a response to the quiet beauty of the model seen in diffused midafternoon daylight. The gracefully curled limbs and the heavy spill of her hair fill this image with sensuous rhythm. The grayed environment allows the lit forms to swell forward and the shadows to recede into space. The contours were so appealing in this pose I’ve accentuated most of the light-receiving edges with a line—I could have erased these same edges into pure light tone, and the character of the drawing would be altered—not better or worse, just different. Each image can be handled in many ways, guided by your mood or intentions. The second image has been turned into a typical commercial line rendering, and much subtlety (and beauty) has been

ILLUSTRATION 1 1 ILLUSTRATION

DRAW! • SPRING 2003 81

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ILLUSTRATION 2

ILLUSTRATION 3

sacrificed. But the shading choices made here have been guided and informed by the observed natural light and shadow of the original image. The mannered linework and crosshatching are a long-standing device born out of the nature of pen and ink drawing, etching and offset reproduction technology. Light and shadow has been greatly simplified and rendering into symbolic language—the variation in dark and light of the actual lines is slight—variety of gray or light tones is indicated by line density,

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thickness, number and placement. This drawing is designed to be inked. The final drawing is a pattern of stylized shapes in high contrast, similar to the inked Batman portrait. Compare this drawing to the original image and note how many details of light on form have been reduced to bold shape pieces—the only attempt to vary the treatment of edges are the spiky repeated “feathering” marks along round forms where light meets shadow. The hair has been sharpened into angular design shapes—there is no softness anywhere in this drawing. This harsh boldness is a staple of commercial art imagery, especially when reproduced at a small size. It’s posterlike impact is powerful and clear, but many pleasures of drawing are absent from this approach—all the subtlety to be found in natural observation has been stripped away and the light and shadow effects are caricatured and distorted. Bearing in mind the difference between natural light on real form in nature and contrived distortion, we can now explore a few principles of manipulating light and shadow for a desired effect—. Once again (see DRAW! #1-5), rhythm is our fundamental concern—to create convincing invented light and shadow, the light and dark areas must work together in a rhythm that “feels” right to the viewer, no matter how far from reality they might be. Let’s take a sketch done from life and play around with different invented light sources.

KESTREL’S BACK The first image is a watercolor sketch done from life— the others are the same pose with imaginary light sources (indicated by an arrow) rendered in pencil. In all but one there is a single light source—the double lit drawing (#4) is by far the least immediately pleasing. It is dramatic in a brittle, brassy way, and of course this may be the desired effect in a particular instance, but you can see how quickly a solid impression of form is compromised by more than one light source. Multiple light sources create endless complexity, and require a separate article of their own. The intention here is to present an introduction to thinking about light and shadow as a tool for defining form in figure drawing. If clarity of form is the primary goal, simplicity is always best. Study these illustrations carefully, noting how the shadows create a rhythm that explains the graceful anatomy of the figure—and simultaneously a rhythm of dark and light flat shapes on the paper that make a pleasing design. Obviously, it’s crucial to do as much life drawing of models in natural light as possible to develop a sense of how the shadow shapes define the rhythm of the human body’s planes and contours (good sculptures and figurines are a great help, too—but the living body is the best source).

LIGHTING THE FIGURE

BRET BLEVINS

DRAW! • SPRING 2003 83

LIGHTING THE FIGURE

BRET BLEVINS In the following gallery of examples I’ve applied the concepts above, though in the narrative illustrations light and shadow has also been contrived and manipulated across the entire content of the images—the backgrounds and props have been shaped by light and shadow (in harmony with the figures) for dramatic effect or clarity. You can see how powerful this aspect of composing is for creating mood and atmosphere in storytelling—but that’s a subject for another day! See you next time!

Bret

RIGHT: The cabin scene is melodramatically lit from a single source— the fireplace. This allows exaggerated use of black shadow shapes to “carve” sculptural form out of the white ground, creating a spooky mood. This sort of image requires careful planning of the composition to arrange the overlapping shapes for clarity, and judicious manipulation of the facts—for example, I eliminated the strong black shadows that would logically be cast by the objects in the lower right corner of the frame in order to discourage the viewer’s eye from lingering there. The figure grouping is the focal point of this picture.

84 DRAW! • SPRING 2003

LEFT: This image of Storm uses double lighting for strong graphic effect—the outer contours of her body are delineated by smooth and crisp white-against-black shapes, in contrast to the soft-edged inner shadow rendered in drybrush technique. This suggests the softness of her flesh, as the gentle sweep of the brush strokes in her mohawk suggest the texture of hair. The mechanical gray shadows applied to the dove and gloves serve to separate their surface textures from the figure’s.

LIGHTING THE FIGURE

BRET BLEVINS

RIGHT: Wolverine is lit starkly from above, the shadows running along the planes and striations that turn away from the light source—except the exaggerated glowing teeth and eyes. Here again the distortion is intention to play up drama and impact.

LEFT: Livewire is the light source here, casting stark shadows along the turning planes of Lois’s form. The stylized interior black shapes on Livewire’s costume aren’t really indicating shadows, they are graphic conventions that add impact to her form. Their shape and placement are derived from invented “double-lighting” though.

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RIGHT: The need for clarity of body language eliminates the cast shadow again as Anarchy lands in a crouch and is stuck from behind. In panels two, three and four the scenes are top lit—with a bit of manipulation for clarity. For example, in panel three, Anarchy’s left bicep would logically be lost in the shadow of his opponent’s left forearm—but if I had done so the structure of Anarchy’s arm would be obscured and appear “flat,” awkward and possibly confusing. I dropped the shadow of the flare gun that may logically have fallen along Anarchy’s thigh in the following panel for the same reason—I sketched it in, and though it read fairly well I decided to take no chances and used the black shadow in the barrel of the gun to “grab” the viewer’s eye and telegraph the action. In panel five the light source is the shooting flare gun, casting stylized shadows that allow us to read the villain’s facial expression clearly.

86 DRAW! • SPRING 2003

LEFT: This two-page story sequence of the character Anarchy is predominately lit from above (presumably moonlight), but other light sources are indicated where appropriate—in the first panel Anarchy is catching some up-light from the motor cycle headlight. In the second panel the unconscious figures leaning against the tree are also lit by the headlight. As Anarchy is knocked from the bike, a judicious bit of double (reflected) light runs along the bottom of his figure—this illumination may or may not have been possible in a purely logical sense, but I added it for drama and clarity purposes—in complicated images such as this one, a bit of “fake” light that clarifies form and adds impact is often needed. In the fourth panel Anarchy casts a shadow on the ground—this is a storytelling decision—it leaves no doubt he has struck the forest floor and is no longer moving through space, which sets the stage for his dodge in the following panel—where his shadow has disappeared! This is also a conscious distortion for clarity—the silhouette of his left hand is crucial to a clear statement of his action—a “proper” inclusion of a cast shadow here would confuse the composition.

LIGHTING THE FIGURE

BRET BLEVINS

LEFT: The lighting in this Batman page is constructed by using the searchlight as the single light source in every scene. The only obvious “cheat” occurs in panel four—logically Batman’s face and flaring cape would be entirely in shadow, but to do so would create a confusing spiky shape that would kill the clarity of his pose and lose the drama of his facial expression.

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LIGHTING THE FIGURE

BRET BLEVINS

These two images use stylized lighting to achieve their effects—in the first panel the Spider is double-lit, surrounded by flames—the stark ridges of the floor would not logically catch light along their edges so strongly, but rendering them this way creates a dramatic radial pattern that helps to visually propel the fired arrow into the violin by sweeping the viewer’s eye across the composition. The arrow and splinters are strengthened by losing the double lighting in the top half of the foreground figure. In the second panel the scene is top lit, framed by the “knockout” shapes in the foreground, which caught a bit of light only along one inclined plane. This keeps the foreground from appearing completely flat, like cutout stage scenery.

88 DRAW! • SPRING 2003

LIGHTING THE FIGURE

BRET BLEVINS

The final page uses extreme polarization of light and shadow to achieve a powerful illusion of strong light. The sharply stylized shadow shapes are carefully composed and wherever possible the contour line along the lit side has been eliminated, tricking the viewer’s eye and mind into completing the forms. This high-contrast approach is full of dramatic power, and heightens the challenges of composition— every edge, overlapping form and cast shadow shape requires close attention, but the results are worth it!

DRAW! • SPRING 2003 89

DRAW!’s CRUSTY CRITIC’s Online Art Supply Stores Index ONLINE ART SUPPLY STORE UPDATE MISTERART.COM One of The Critic’s favorite sites. Misterart offers an amazing array of supplies at decent prices. The site is fairly easy to navigate, with an excellent search engine. Shipping prices are average. Additional discounts for V.I.P. members. DICKBLICK.COM They’ve been in the catalog business since 1911, and they run a good web site, as well. Easy to navigate and search. They offer a lot of useful products, including the Raphael brushes, with reasonable shipping costs.

JOHN POOLE PEN NIBS john@poolej.freeserve.co.uk http://www.poolej.freeserve.co.uk/homepage.html 16, Brookfield Crescent, Harrow, HA3 OUT, England PHONE/FAX: (44) 020 8204 5315. Order by mail order via fax, email or even snail mail. A unique collection of pen nibs, many of which can only be obtained from them. COMICTONES.COM They specialize in tone screens and markers, seemingly catering to the manga market. Product ordered: Neo Piko pens. Forms of payment accepted: Mastercard and Visa Note: They included a nice T-shirt free… a bit tight on this critic, but nice, nonetheless.

ASWEXPRESS.COM (ART SUPPLY WAREHOUSE) I find the layout of the site a bit confusing, but they have a pretty good variety, along with good prices. Shipping costs are pretty high, and you need a Yahoo ID to check out.

If you have a favorite online vendor, let The Critic hear about it at: ande@mchsi.com

CARTOONCOLOR.COM Specializing in animation supplies. They offer excellent cel paints, as well as storyboard pads, animation cels, etc..

ON-LINE REFERENCE SOURCES

OMOCHABOX.COM Specializing in anime supplies. An excellent source for markers, pens, and dot screens. DANIELSMITH.NET Good all-around site, with wide variety of supplies. Daniel Smith also makes their own products, which I have not yet tested. Decent site layout and fair shipping costs.

Need a picture of something, or reference for a comic or illustration? Maybe you’ll find it here: City Skylines References Links to various city skylines http://www.rgimages.com/location.htm Free Foto –Tons of FREE photos for reference! http://www.freefoto.com/

ITALIANARTSTORE.COM I often order my Raphael brushes here. Competitive prices, and fair shipping (free on higher orders). Unusual site layout, but effective.

Free Logos in Vector Format Thousands of free logos in vector (.ai) format, for PC or Mac... many major western corporations, also Russian ones. http://www.logotypes.ru/default_e.asp

UTRECHTART.COM They make a lot of their own supplies, and I haven’t tested them. The site is good, and they offer a wide variety of materials. Shipping is reasonable, and free on orders over $150.

Law Enforcement and EMS References Supplies and Gear http://www.safetyl.com Medical Supplies References pics http://www.tvmsonline.com

CHEAPJOESCATALOG.COM The site is a bit dizzying, but they seem to offer a lot of products. Prices are reasonable, but shipping is a bit high.

Taxi References http://www.checkercabs.org/pics/

REXART.COM A good site offering competitive prices and reasonable shipping. You only have to spend $100 to get free shipping.

Vehicle References Lots of images for various vehicles http://www.motorcities.com/main_vehicletypes.html

SCRAPBOOKSUPERSTORE.COM A scrapbook specialty store which carries Zigs and Pigmas. Product ordered: 5-pen set of Zig Millenniums. Forms of payment accepted: Mastercard, Visa and Discover (no American Express) Order arrived in 6 days.

Dinosaur References Links to tons of dinosaur sites: http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Lab/1638/plinks.html

90 DRAW! • SPRING 2003

History References Brief info but broad: http://www.historyplace.com

Number 11a, Spring 2003 • Hype and hullabaloo from the publisher determined to bring new life to comics fandom • Edited by Eric Nolen-Weathington

Kirby In Graphite! CAPTAIN VICTORY: GRAPHITE EDITION presents Jack Kirby’s original 1975 Captain Victory graphic novel (before it was broken up for the Pacific Comics series), reproduced for the first time from Jack’s uninked pencils! NOT SOLD IN STORES! All proceeds from this 52-page book go to scanning and preserving the 4000+ page Kirby pencil xerox archives! $8 postpaid in the US. NOW SHIPPING! AVAILABLE BY MAIL ONLY! COPYRIGHTS: Murphy Anderson characters TM & ©2003 DC Comics. Captain Victory TM & ©2003 Jack Kirby Estate. All other art and characters TM & ©2003 the respective artists.

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New Books Coming On Anderson, Evanier, Wood, & Moore! THE LIFE AND ART OF MURPHY ANDERSON Comics historian R.C. HARVEY has compiled a lavishly illustrated autobiographical memoir of the man whose style defined the DC look for a generation of fans! It covers his career from the mid-1940s to his glory days at DC Comics on SUPERMAN, HAWKMAN, ADAM STRANGE, SPECTRE, THE ATOMIC KNIGHTS and beyond! There’s coverage of his syndicated comic strip work (BUCK ROGERS) and educational comics (PS MAGAZINE), plus his recollections and stories about LOU FINE, WILL EISNER, CURT SWAN, GIL KANE, and others he worked with—and rare art from every phase of his career! 160Page trade paperback, $22 postpaid in the US. SHIPS IN JUNE!

Alter Ego #26 (July) Comic Book Artist #24 (Now!) CBA #25 (June, final issue) DRAW! #6 (June) Jack Kirby Collector #38 (Now!) Write Now! #4 (Now!) Captain Victory: Graphite (Now!) Modern Masters V1: Alan Davis (Now!) Wertham Was Right! (June) Life & Art of Murphy Anderson (June) The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore (July) Against The Grain: MAD Artist Wally Wood (September) Wally Wood Checklist (September)

CONTACTS: John Morrow, publisher, JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR editor, and for subscriptions): twomorrow@aol.com Mike Manley, DRAW! editor: mike@actionplanet.com Roy Thomas, ALTER EGO editor: roydann@ntinet.com P.C. Hamerlinck, FCA editor: fca2001@yahoo.com Danny Fingeroth, WRITE NOW! editor: WriteNowDF@aol.com Jon B. Cooke, COMIC BOOK ARTIST editor: jonbcooke@aol.com Read excerpts from back issues and order from our secure online store at: www.twomorrows.com To get periodic e-mail updates of what’s new from TwoMorrows Publishing, sign up for our mailing list! http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ twomorrows

AGAINST THE GRAIN: MAD ARTIST WALLACE WOOD and the WALLY WOOD CHECKLIST The definitive book on one of comics' finest artists! Twenty years in the making, this biographical memoir of life at the Wood Studio by former associate BHOB STEWART traces Wood's life and career, and features many artists and writers who knew Wood personally, contributing articles and essays to make it a remarkable compendium of art, insights and critical commentary! From childhood drawings and early samples to nearly endless comics pages (many unpublished), this is the most stunning display of Wood art ever assembled! BILL PEARSON, executor of the Wood Estate, has contributed rare drawings directly from Wood's own files, while noted art collector ROGER HILL provides a wealth of obscure, previously unpublished Wood drawings and paintings. It’s a colossal 336-PAGE TRADE PAPERBACK with color section, and a LIMITED EDITION HARDCOVER (with 16 extra full-color pages, plus bonus B&W plates)! Softcover is $44 postpaid in the US, or $64 postpaid for the hardcover. We’re also releasing a separate 64-page WALLY WOOD CHECKLIST ($7 postpaid in the US), detailing Wood’s published work! SPECIAL BONUS: Preorder either version of AGAINST THE GRAIN by August 1 directly from TwoMorrows, and GET THE CHECKLIST ABSOLUTELY FREE! Both SHIP IN SEPTEMBER!

WERTHAM WAS RIGHT! Writer-historian MARK EVANIER is back with a second collection of POV COLUMNS, including many never-before-published on comic book history, creation and appreciation! Included in this volume are his definitive history of the FOX AND CROW comic book, tributes to artists BOB KANE and GIL KANE, Mark’s diatribe on comic book numbering, and many more, capped off by an essay on comics’ greatest villain, DR. FREDRIC WERTHAM! This collection is profusely illustrated by award-winning MAD cartoonist (and Mark’s collaborator of 20 years on GROO THE WANDERER) SERGIO ARAGONÉS, including a new cover! 200-page trade paperback, $17 postpaid in the US. SHIPS IN JUNE!

THE EXTRAORDINARY WORKS OF ALAN MOORE From WATCHMEN to THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN, ALAN MOORE has been widely recognized as one of comics greatest pioneers, and this book tells his story, as the reclusive British author speaks enthusiastically and passionately about his life and work in an extensive series of interviews! Moore displays his trademark wit and shares his unique insight on the comics that have shaped his legendary career—from his beginnings on SWAMP THING to the current success of his own AMERICA’S BEST COMICS. Editor GEORGE (Kimota!) KHOURY has assembled rare strips, scripts, artwork and photographs of the author, most never published before. It also features Moore’s closest collaborators elaborating in comic strip form on their relationships with Moore, from NEIL GAIMAN, DAVE GIBBONS, and SAM KIETH to KEVIN O'NEILL, BRIAN BOLLAND and others! (DON’T CONFUSE THIS BOOK WITH A SIMILARLYTITLED ONE COMING FROM ABIOGENESIS PRESS IN MAY. Ours is more than just a tribute book—it’s the definitive autobiographical work on Moore, over two years in the making!) 208-page trade paperback with color section, $29 postpaid in the US. SHIPS IN JULY!

BACK ISSUE, the newest TwoMorrows mag, now debuts in October (taking CBA's spot on our schedule)! It’ll be bi-monthly, edited by MICHAEL EURY (former editor and writer for DC and Dark Horse Comics, and author of our acclaimed CAPTAIN ACTION book, as well as our upcoming biography of DICK GIORDANO), and focuses on comics of the 1970s and ’80s in a way you’ve NEVER SEEN BEFORE! TM Stay tuned for more details on THE ULTIMATE COMICS EXPERIENCE! NOTE: All prices Include US Postage. Outside the US, Add $2 Per Item Canada, $3 Per Item Surface, $7 Per Item Airmail.

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Reprints the Eisner Award-winning COMIC BOOK ARTIST #1-3, plus over 50 NEW PAGES of features and art:

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• Barry WINDSOR-SMITH • C.C. BECK • Sergio ARAGONÉS • Walter SIMONSON • Brent ANDERSON • Nick CARDY • Roy THOMAS & John SEVERIN • Paul CHADWICK • Rick VEITCH • Murphy ANDERSON • Joe KUBERT • Evan DORKIN • Sam GLANZMAN • Plus Art SPIEGELMAN, Jack KIRBY, more! Cover by RUDE • Foreword by EISNER

• An unpublished story by JACK KIRBY! • An interview with NEAL ADAMS about his SUPERMAN VS. MUHAMMAD ALI book (including unused art)! • Unpublished BERNIE WRIGHTSON art! • An unused story by JEFFREY JONES! • Extensive new ALAN WEISS interview (including unpublished art), & more!

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• New interviews with MARSHALL ROGERS, STEVE ENGLEHART, & TERRY AUSTIN on their highly-acclaimed 1970s Batman work! • An extensive look at perhaps the rarest 1970s comic of all, DC’s CANCELLED COMIC CAVALCADE, showcasing unused stories from that decade! (208-page Trade Paperback) $24 US

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Reprints the ALTER EGO flip-sides from the out-of-print COMIC BOOK ARTIST #1-5, plus 30 NEW PAGES of features & art:

Acclaimed historian Bill Schelly gives you AN INSIDER’S TOUR of comics fandom of the 1960s & ’70s. The fans, the comicons, the fanzines—they’re all here!!

• Special color cover by JOE KUBERT! • All-new rare and previously-unpublished art by JACK KIRBY, GIL KANE, JOE KUBERT, WALLY WOOD, FRANK ROBBINS, NEAL ADAMS, and others! • STEVE DITKO on the creation of SPIDER-MAN, ROY THOMAS on THE X-MEN, AVENGERS/KREE-SKRULL WAR, THE INVADERS, and more!

• Introduction by ROY THOMAS, cover by DICK GIORDANO! • Share Bill’s encounters with FREDERIC WERTHAM, STEVE DITKO, BOB KANE, JIM SHOOTER, and more! • Over 150 photos and illustrations by KIRBY, DITKO, NEWTON, EISNER, C.C. BECK, KALUTA, KRENKEL, COCKRUM, SINNOTT, GIL KANE and others!

• Over 30 pages of ALL-NEW Mr. Monster art and stories by MICHAEL T. GILBERT! • Collects the hard-to-find MR. MONSTER stories from A-1, CRACK-A-BOOM! and DARK HORSE PRESENTS! • The lost Mr. Monster NEWSPAPER STRIP! • New 8-page FULL-COLOR STORY by KEITH GIFFEN & MICHAEL T. GILBERT!

(160-page Trade Paperback) $20 US

(216-page Trade Paperback) $20 US

(136-pg. Paperback) SALE PRICE: $14 US

MR. MONSTER is back with a new book collection featuring TWELVE TWISTED TALES of Forbidden Knowledge, featuring:

“I HAVE TO LIVE WITH THIS GUY!” Explore the lives of the partners and wives of the top names in comics, as they share memories, anecdotes, personal photos, momentos, and never-before-seen art by the top creators in comics! • ALAN MOORE • WILL EISNER • STAN LEE • GENE COLAN • JOE KUBERT • JOHN ROMITA • HARVEY KURTZMAN • DAVE SIM • HOWARD CRUSE • DAN DeCARLO • DAVE COOPER and many more! (208-Page Trade Paperback) $24 US

Prices Include US Postage. Outside the US, Add $2 Per Item Canada, $3 Per Item Surface, $7 Per Item Airmail (except Warren Companion Hardcover: add $14 Airmail)

FAWCETT COMPANION THE BEST OF FCA Presenting the best of the FAWCETT COLLECTORS OF AMERICA newsletter!

COMIC BOOKS & OTHER NECESSITIES OF LIFE

WERTHAM WAS RIGHT!

MODERN MASTERS VOL. 1:

A collection of MARK EVANIER’s POV COLUMNS, featuring a NEW COVER and ILLUSTRATIONS by SERGIO ARAGONÉS! Includes his best essays and commentaries, plus many never before published on:

A second collection of MARK EVANIER’s POV COLUMNS, with a NEW COVER and ILLOS by SERGIO ARAGONÉS!

First volume in a new book series devoted to the best of today's comics artists looks at the work of ALAN DAVIS!

• Features many never-before published columns on comic book history, creation, and appreciation! • Includes Mark’s diatribe on comic book numbering! • Essay on comics greatest villain, DR. FREDRIC WERTHAM!

• ALAN DAVIS’ most IN-DEPTH INTERVIEW to date, including influences, and his views on graphic storytelling! • DELUXE SKETCHBOOK section, & HUGE GALLERY of rare and unseen Davis art! • Interviews with collaborators PAUL NEARY and MARK FARMER!

(200-page Trade Paperback) $17 US

(128-Page Trade Paperback) $17 US

KIMOTA! THE MIRACLEMAN COMPANION

WARREN COMPANION

• New JERRY ORDWAY cover! • Index of ALL FAWCETT COMICS! • Looks inside the FAWCETT OFFICES! • Interviews, features, and rare and previously unpublished artwork by C.C. BECK, MARC SWAYZE, KURT SCHAFFENBERGER, MAC RABOY, DAVE BERG, ALEX TOTH, BOB OKSNER, GEORGE EVANS, ALEX ROSS, Foreword by MARC SWAYZE, and more!

• The state of the art form (as only Mark conveys it)! • The industry’s leading practitioners (including JACK KIRBY and CARL BARKS)! • Convention-going and Mark’s old comic book club (with unforgettable anecdotes)!

(160-page Trade Paperback) $20 US

(200-page Trade Paperback) $17 US

CAPTAIN ACTION

G-FORCE: ANIMATED

THE ORIGINAL SUPERHERO ACTION FIGURE

THE OFFICIAL BATTLE OF THE PLANETS GUIDEBOOK

CAPTAIN ACTION debuted in the wake of the ’60s Batman TV show, and could become 13 different super-heroes. With over 200 toy photos, this trade paperback written by MICHAEL EURY chronicles his history (including comic book appearances) with historical anecdotes by the late GIL KANE, JIM SHOOTER, STAN WESTON (co-creator of GI Joe, Captain Action, and Mego’s World’s Greatest Super-Heroes), plus never-seen art by GIL KANE, JOE STATON, JERRY ORDWAY, CARMINE INFANTINO, and MURPHY ANDERSON (who provides a new cover)! Includes a color section!

The official compendium to the Japanese animated TV program that revolutionized anime across the globe! Featuring plenty of unseen artwork and designs from the wondrous world of G-FORCE (a.k.a. Science Ninja Team Gatchaman), it presents interviews and behind-the-scenes stories of the pop culture phenomenon that captured the hearts and imagination of Generation X, and spawned the new hit comic series! Cowritten by JASON HOFIUS and GEORGE KHOURY, this FULL-COLOR account is highlighted by a NEW PAINTED COVER from master artist ALEX ROSS!

(176-Page Trade Paperback) $20 US

(96-Page Trade Paperback) $20 US

Learn behind-the-scenes secrets of ALAN MOORE’S MIRACLEMAN, from his start as Marvelman to the legal and creative hurdles during the Eclipse series, and the unseen final NEIL GAIMAN-scripted issue!

ALAN DAVIS

JON B. COOKE and DAVID ROACH have compiled the ultimate guide to Warren Publishing, the publisher of such mags as CREEPY, EERIE, VAMPIRELLA, BLAZING COMBAT, and others. Reprints the Eisner Award-winning magazine COMIC BOOK ARTIST #4 (completely reformatted), plus nearly 200 new pages:

• New MARK BUCKINGHAM cover! • Intro & back cover by ALEX ROSS! • In-depth interviews with ALAN MOORE, JOHN TOTLEBEN, NEIL GAIMAN, MARK BUCKINGHAM, GARRY LEACH, MICK ANGLO, BEAU SMITH, RICK VEITCH, and others! • UNPUBLISHED ART, UNINKED PENCILS, SKETCHES, & CONCEPT DRAWINGS (including art from the never-seen #25)! • Special COLOR SECTION, NEVER-SEEN 8-page Moore/Totleben story, “Lux Brevis”, & an UNUSED MOORE SCRIPT!

• New painted cover by ALEX HORLEY! • A definitive WARREN CHECKLIST! • Dozens of NEW FEATURES on CORBEN, FRAZETTA, DITKO and others, and interviews with WRIGHTSON, WARREN, EISNER, ADAMS, COLAN & many more!

(144-page Trade Paperback) $17 US

(288-page Hardcover) $57 US

(272-page Trade Paperback) $35 US Also available as a Limited Edition Hardcover (limited to 1000 copies) signed by JIM WARREN, with custom endleaves, 16 extra pages, plus a WRIGHTSON plate not in the Trade Paperback.

MORE MAGAZINES ABOUT COMICS

Edited by JON B. COOKE COMIC BOOK ARTIST, 2000-2002 Eisner Award winner for “Best ComicsRelated Magazine,” celebrates the lives & work of great cartoonists, writers, & editors from all eras through in-depth interviews, feature articles, & unpublished art.

CBA #7: (132 pgs.) 1970s CBA #9: (116 pgs.) CHARL- CBA #10: (116 pgs.) WALTER CBA #11: (116 pgs.) ALEX CBA #12: (116 pgs.) CHARL- CBA #13: (116 pgs.) MARVEL CBA #14: (116 pgs.) TOWER MARVEL! JOHN BYRNE, PAUL TON COMICS: PART ONE! SIMONSON, plus WOMEN OF TOTH & SHELDON MAYER! TON COMICS OF THE 1970s! HORROR OF THE 1970s! Art/ COMICS! Art by & intvs. with GULACY, DAN ADKINS, RICH DICK GIORDANO, PETER THE COMICS! RAMONA TOTH interviews, unseen art, Rare art/intvs. with STATON, interviews with WOLFMAN, WALLY WOOD, DAN ADKINS, BUCKLER, DOUG MOENCH, MORISI, JIM APARO, JOE FRADON, MARIE SEVERIN, appreciations, checklist, & BYRNE, NEWTON, SUTTON, COLAN, PALMER, THOMAS, LEN BROWN, STEVE JIM MOONEY & STEVE GILL, MCLAUGHLIN, GLANZ- TRINA ROBBINS, JOHN more. Also, SHELLY MAYER’s ZECK, NICK CUTI, a NEW E- ISABELLA, PERLIN, TRIMPE, SKEATES, GEORGE TUSKA, GERBER, new GULACY cover MAN, new GIORDANO cover, WORKMAN, new SIMONSON kids, the real life SUGAR & MAN strip, new STATON MARCOS, a new COLAN/ new WOOD & ADKINS covers, SPIKE! $9 US cover, more! $9 US & more! $9 US more! $9 US cover, & more! $9 US PALMER cover, more! $9 US more! $9 US

CBA #15: (116 pgs.) LOVE & CBA #16: (132 pgs.) ’70s CBA #17: (116 pgs.) ARTHUR CBA #18: (116 pgs.) COSMIC CBA #19: (116 pgs.) HARVEY CBA #20: (116 pgs.) FATHERS CBA #21: (116 pgs.) THE ART CBA #22: (116 pgs.) GOLD ROCKETEERS! Art by & intvs. ATLAS/SEABOARD COMICS! ADAMS & CO.! ART ADAMS COMICS OF THE ’70s! Art by COMICS! Art by & intvs. with & SONS! Art by & intvs. with OF ADAM HUGHES! Art, KEY COMICS! Art by & intvs. with DAVE STEVENS, LOS Art by & interviews with interview & gallery, remem- & intvs. with JIM STARLIN, SIMON & KIRBY, WALLY the top father/son teams in interview & checklist with with RUSS MANNING, WALLY BROS. HERNANDEZ, MATT ERNIE CÓLON, CHAYKIN, bering GRAY MORROW, ALAN WEISS, ENGLEHART, WOOD, AL WILLIAMSON, GIL comics: ADAM, ANDY, & JOE HUGHES, plus a day in the life WOOD, JESSE SANTOS, WAGNER, DEAN MOTTER, ROVIN, AMENDOLA, HAMA, GEORGE ROUSSOS, GEORGE AL MILGROM, LEIALOHA, KANE, SID JACOBSON, FRED KUBERT & JOHN ROMITA SR. of ALEX ROSS, JOHN BUSCE- MARK EVANIER, DON GLUT, new STEVENS/HERNANDEZ new CÓLON & KUPPERBERG EVANS, new ART ADAMS ’60s Bullpen reunion, new RHOADES, MITCH O’CONNELL & JR., new ROMITA & MA tribute, new HUGHES new BRUCE TIMM cover, cover, more! $9 US covers, more! $9 US cover, more! $9 US STARLIN cover, more! $9 US cover, more! $9 US more! $9 US KUBERT covers, more! $9 US cover, more! $9 US

UE ISSE! L A N FININ JU CBA #23: (116 pgs.) MIKE CBA #24: (116 pgs.) COMICS CBA #25: (116 pgs.) ALAN MIGNOLA SPOTLIGHT, plus OF NATIONAL LAMPOON with MOORE’S ABC COMICS with JILL THOMPSON: Sandman to GAHAN WILSON, BODÉ, NEAL MOORE, KEVIN NOWLAN, Scary Godmother! Mignola ADAMS, FRANK SPRINGER, GENE HA, RICK VEITCH, J.H. INTERVIEW & ART GALLERY, ALAN KUPPERBERG, BOBBY WILLIAMS, SCOTT DUNBIER, extensive CHECKLIST, new LONDON, MICHAEL GROSS, JIM BAIKIE, and NOWLAN & cover, & more! $9 US more! $9 US WILLIAMS covers! $9 US

Edited by MIKE MANLEY DRAW! is the professional “How-To” magazine on comics, cartooning, & animation. Each issue features indepth interviews & stepby-step demonstrations from top comics professionals on all aspects of graphic storytelling.

COMICOLOGY

Edited by BRIAN SANER LAMKEN COMICOLOGY, the highlyacclaimed magazine about modern comics, recently ended its fourissue run, but back issues are available, featuring never-seen art & interviews.

CC #1: (100 pgs.) BRUCE CC #2: (100 pgs.) MIKE CC #3: (100 pgs.) CARLOS CC #4: (116 pgs., final issue) TIMM cover, interview & ALLRED interview & portfolio, PACHECO interview & portfolio, ALL-BRIAN ISSUE! Interviews sketchbook, JEPH LOEB inter- 60 years of THE SPIRIT, 25 ANDI WATSON interview, a look with BRIAN AZZARELLO, view, LEA HERNANDEZ, years of the X-MEN, PAUL at what comics predicted the BRIAN CLOPPER, BRIAN MANYA, USAGI YOJIMBO, 60 GRIST interview, FORTY future would be like, new color MICHAEL BENDIS, BRIAN years of ROBIN THE BOY WON- WINKS, new color ALLRED & PACHECO & WATSON covers, BOLLAND, huge BOLLAND portfolio, & more! $8 US DER, & more! $8 US GRIST covers, & more! $8 US & more! $8 US

IN INGST! M CO UGU A DRAW #1: (108 pgs. with DRAW #2: (116 pgs.) “How- DRAW #3: (80 pgs.) “How-To” DRAW #4: (92 pgs.) “How-To” DRAW #5: (88 pgs.) “How-To” DRAW #6: (88 pgs.) “How-To” DRAW #7: (88 pgs.) “How-To” color) Professional “How-To” To” demos & interviews with demos & interviews with DICK demos & interviews with ERIK demos & interviews with demos & interviews with BILL demos & interviews with DAN mag on comics & cartooning, GENNDY TARTAKOVSKY, GIORDANO, BRET BLEVINS, LARSEN, KEVIN NOWLAN, BRIAN BENDIS & MIKE WRAY, STEPHEN DeSTEFANO, BRERETON, BRET BLEVINS, COOPER, BRET OEMING, MIKE WIERINGO, CELIA CALLE, MIKE MANLEY, ANDE PARKS, ALBERTO with art demos by GIBBONS, KLAUS JANSON, JERRY ORD- CHRIS BAILEY, MIKE MAN- DAVE ORDWAY, BLEVINS, VILLA- WAY, BRET BLEVINS, PHIL LEY, new column by PAUL BLEVINS, new column by MARK McKENNA, BRET BRET BLEVINS, ANDE PARKS, RUIZ, PAUL RIVOCHE, ZACK section, product TRENHOLM, color section, GRAN, color BLEVINS cover HESTER, ANDE PARKS, RIVOCHE, reviews of art sup- PAUL RIVOCHE, color section, BLEVINS, PAUL RIVOCHE, color more! $8 US color section, more! $8 US reviews, and more! $8 US product reviews, more! $8 US & more! $8 US STEVE CONLEY, more! $8 US plies, more! $8 US

READ EXCERPTS & ORDER ONLINE AT: www.twomorrows.com Prices Include US Postage. Outside the US, Add $2 Per Item Canada, $3 Per Item Surface, $7 Per Item Airmail (except Warren Companion Hardcover: add $14 Airmail)

FROM TWOMORROWS PUBLISHING

Edited by JOHN MORROW JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR celebrates the life & career of the “King” of comics through interviews with Kirby & his contemporaries, feature articles, & rare & unseen Kirby artwork. Now in tabloid format, the magazine showcases Kirby’s art at even larger size.

SIMON ❏ #7:#25: (100(100 pgs.)pgs.) Companion TJKC #18: (68 pgs.) MARVEL TJKC #20: (68 pgs.) KIRBY’S TJKC #21: (68 pgs.) KIRBY, TJKC #22: (68 pgs.) VIL- TJKC #23: (68 pgs.) TJKC #24: (68 pgs.) BATTLES! TJKC KIRBY! SIMON, & issue to theKIRBY, ALL-STAR COMissue! Intvs. with KIRBY, STAN WOMEN! Interviews with GIL KANE, & BRUCE TIMM LAINS! KIRBY, STEVE RUDE, Interviews with KIRBY, KIRBY’S original art fight, JIM & SEVERIN interviews, PANION! JULIE SCHWARTZ LEE, ROY THOMAS, JOHN KIRBY, DAVE STEVENS, & intvs., FAILURE TO COMMU- & MIKE MIGNOLA interviews, DENNY O’NEIL & TRACY SHOOTER interview, NEW JOHN AMERICA pencils, intv., JLA-JSA teamups, MAC ROMITA, JOHN BUSCEMA, LISA KIRBY, unused 10-page NICATE (LEE dialogue vs. FF #49 pencils, FAILURE TO KIRBY, more FF #49 pencils, GODS #6 (“Glory Boat”) CAPTAIN KOBRA, FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE, pencils, FAILURE TO COM- unused BOY with EXPLORERS RABOY, FCA BECK & MARIE SEVERIN, HERB story, romance comics, Jack’s KIRBY notes), SILVER STAR COMMUNICATE, MONSTERS! unused 10-page SOUL LOVE MUNICATE, more! Kirby/ story, history of MAINLINE SWAYZE, BUCKLER & BECK TRIMPE, unseen Kirby art, original CAPTAIN VICTORY screenplay, TOPPS COMICS, ATLAS screenplay, more! $8 US unpublished art, more! $8 US Kirby/Stevens cover. $8 US Mignola cover. $8 US COMICS, story, more! $8 US more!$8$8USUS covers, more! Kirby/Sinnott cover. $8 US

TJKC #26: (72 pgs.) GODS! TJKC #27: (72 pages) KIRBY TJKC #28: (84 pgs.) KIRBY TJKC #29: (68 pgs.) ’70s TJKC #30: (68 pgs.) ’80s TJKC #31: (84 pgs.) TABLOID COLOR NEW GODS concept INFLUENCE Part One! KIRBY INFLUENCE Part Two! Intvs. MARVEL! Interviews with WORK! Interviews with ALAN FORMAT! Wraparound KIRBY/ drawings, KIRBY & WALTER and ALEX ROSS interviews, with MARK HAMILL, JOHN KIRBY, KEITH GIFFEN & RICH MOORE & Kirby Estate’s ADAMS cover, KURT BUSIEK SIMONSON interviews, FAIL- KIRBY FAMILY Roundtable, KRICFALUSI, MIKE ALLRED, BUCKLER, ’70s COVER ROBERT KATZ, HUNGER & LADRONN interviews, new URE TO COMMUNICATE, all-star lineup of pros discuss Jack’s grandkids, career of GALLERY in pencil, FAILURE DOGS, SUPER POWERS, MARK EVANIER column, BIBLE INFLUENCES, THOR, Kirby’s influence on them! VINCE COLLETTA, more! TO COMMUNICATE, & more! SILVER STAR, ANIMATION favorite 2-PAGE SPREADS, Kirby/Allred cover. $8 US Kirby/Janson cover. $8 US work, more! $8 US MR. MIRACLE, more! $8 US Kirby / Timm cover. $8 US 2001 Treasury, more! $13 US

TJKC #32: (84 pgs.) TABLOID! KIRBY interview, new MARK EVANIER column, plus Kirby’s Least Known Work: DAYS OF THE MOB #2, THE HORDE, BLACK HOLE, SOUL LOVE, PRISONER, more! $13 US

THE JACK KIRBY CHECKLIST: (100-Pages) The definitive checklist of Kirby’s work! Lists all his published comics in detail, plus portfolios, unpublished work, & more. It even cross-references reprints, making it easy to find inexpensive alternatives to the original comics! A must-have for eBay shoppers! $7 US

N GI MINUST! O C UG A TJKC #34: (84 pgs.) TABLOID! TJKC #35: (84 pgs.) TABLOID! TJKC #36: (84 pgs.) TABLOID TJKC #37: (84 pgs.) TABLOID JOE SIMON & CARMINE GREAT ESCAPES with MISTER ALL-THOR issue! MARK HOW TO DRAW THE KIRBY INFANTINO interviews, MARK MIRACLE, comparing KIRBY EVANIER column, SINNOTT & WAY issue! MARK EVANIER EVANIER column, unknown & HOUDINI, Kirby Tribute ROMITA JR. interviews, column, MIKE ROYER on ink1950s concepts, CAPTAIN Panel with EVANIER, EISNER, unseen KIRBY INTV., ART ing, KIRBY interview, ART AMERICA pencils, KIRBY/ BUSCEMA, ROMITA, ROYER, GALLERY, FAILURE TO COMM- GALLERY, analysis of Kirby’s TOTH cover, more! $13 US & JOHNNY CARSON! $13 US UNICATE, more! $13 US art techniques, more! $13 US

TJKC #38: (84 pgs.) TABLOID KIRBY: STORYTELLER! MARK EVANIER column, JOE SINNOTT on inking, SWIPES, talks with JACK DAVIS, PAUL GULACY, HERNANDEZ BROS., ART GALLERY, more! $13 US

TJKC #39: (84 pgs.) TABLOID FAN FAVORITES! EVANIER column, INHUMANS, HULK, SILVER SURFER, tribute panel with ROMITA, AYERS, LEVITZ, McFARLANE, TRIMPE, ART GALLERY, more! $13 US

IN ING ! M CO JULY Edited by DANNY FINGEROTH WRITE NOW!, the mag for writers of comics, animation, & sci-fi, puts you in the minds of today’s top writers and editors. Each issue features writing tips from pros on both sides of the desk, interviews, sample scripts, reviews, and more.

WN #1: (88 pgs.) MARK WN #2: (96 pgs.) ERIK WN #3: (80 pgs.) DEODATO WN #4: (80 pgs.) Interviews BAGLEY cover & interview, LARSEN cover & interview, JR. Hulk cover, intvs. & articles and lessons with WARREN BRIAN BENDIS & STAN LEE STAN BERKOWITZ on the by BRUCE JONES, AXEL ELLIS, HOWARD CHAYKIN, interviews, JOE QUESADA on Justice League cartoon, TODD ALONSO, JIMMY PALMIOTTI, PAUL DINI, BOB SCHRECK, what editors really want, TOM ALCOTT on Samurai Jack, LEE KURT BUSIEK, FABIAN DIANA SCHUTZ, JOEY CAVADeFALCO, J.M. DeMATTEIS, NORDLING, ANNE D. BERN- NICIEZA, STEVEN GRANT, LIERI, STEVEN GRANT, DENNY more! $8 US STEIN, & more! $8 US DENNY O’NEIL, more! $8 US O’NEIL, more! $8 US

WN #5: (80 pgs.) Interviews and lessons by WILL EISNER, J. MICHAEL STRACZYNSKI, BOB SCHRECK, FABIAN NICIEZA, PAUL DINI, JOEY CAVALIERI, DIANA SCHUTZ, DENNY O’NEIL, more! $8 US

TJKC #33: (84 pgs.) TABLOID ALL-FANTASTIC FOUR issue! MARK EVANIER column, miniinterviews with everyone who worked on FF after Kirby, STAN LEE interview, 40 pgs. of FF PENCILS, more! $13 US

SUBSCRIBE! THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR

Four-issue subscriptions (tabloid-size): $36 Standard, $52 First Class (Canada: $60, Elsewhere: $64 Surface, $80 Airmail).

DRAW!

Four-issue subscriptions: $20 Standard, $32 First Class (Canada: $40, Elsewhere: $44 Surface, $60 Airmail). NOTE: DRAW! contains nudity for purposes of figure drawing. Intended for Mature Readers.

WRITE NOW!

Four-issue subscriptions: $20 Standard, $32 First Class (Canada: $40, Elsewhere: $44 Surface, $60 Airmail).

GRAPHITE EDITION For the first time, Jack Kirby’s original 1975 CAPTAIN VICTORY GRAPHIC NOVEL is presented as it was created (before it was broken up for the later Pacific Comics series), reproduced from copies of JACK’S UNINKED PENCILS! • All proceeds from this 52-page book go toward the huge task of scanning and preserving the 4000+ PAGE KIRBY PENCIL XEROX ARCHIVES! • Includes page after page of prime KIRBY PENCILS, before any changes! • BONUS: Includes Jack’s original CAPTAIN VICTORY SCREENPLAY, unseen art, & more! • To maximize proceeds for archiving, this book is available ONLY BY MAIL (not sold in stores)! (52-Pages, comic book-size) NOW SHIPPING! ORDER BY MAIL ONLY! $8 US Postpaid (Canada: $10, Elsewhere: $11 Surface, $15 Airmail)

MODERN MASTERS VOLUME ONE

ALAN DAVIS

This first volume in a NEW BOOK SERIES devoted to the BEST OF TODAY'S COMICS ARTISTS presents the ultimate look at the work of a true modern master: ALAN DAVIS! • Davis’ most IN-DEPTH INTERVIEW to date, including INFLUENCES and VIEWS ON STORYTELLING! • Deluxe SKETCHBOOK SECTION! • Huge gallery of RARE AND UNPUBLISHED DAVIS ARTWORK! • Interviews with collaborators PAUL NEARY and MARK FARMER! (Edited by ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON • 128-Page Trade Paperback) NOW SHIPPING! $17 US Postpaid (Canada: $19, Elsewhere: $20 Surface, $24 Airmail)

THE LIFE AND ART OF

MURPHY ANDERSON • Lavishly illustrated AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR of the man whose style DEFINED THE DC LOOK for a generation of fans! • Covers his career in comics, from his beginning in the MID-1940s to his glory days at DC COMICS on such characters as SUPERMAN, HAWKMAN, ADAM STRANGE, SPECTRE, THE ATOMIC KNIGHTS and beyond! • In-depth coverage of little-known syndicated comic strip work (BUCK ROGERS) and educational comics (PS MAGAZINE FOR THE MILITARY)! • Includes recollections and behind-the-scenes stories and anecdotes about LOU FINE, WILL EISNER, CURT SWAN, GIL KANE, and others he worked with—and rare art from every phase of his career, including Fiction House, Ziff-Davis, and DC Comics!

(Edited by R.C. HARVEY • 160-Page Trade Paperback) SHIPS IN JUNE! $22 US Postpaid (Canada: $24, Elsewhere: $25 Surface, $29 Airmail)

HELP PRESERVE THE KIRBY ARCHIVES!

ALTER EGO BACK ISSUES! Prices Include US Postage. Outside the US, Add $2 Per Item Canada. Elsewhere: Add $3 Per Item Surface, $7 Per Item Airmail.

AE #2: (100 pgs.) All-new! AE #3: (100 pgs.) ALEX ROSS AE #4: (100 pgs.) 60 years of AE #5: (100 pgs.) JSA issue! AE #6: (100 pgs.) GENE AE #7: (100 pgs.) Companion AE #8: (100 pgs.) Bio of EISNER “SPIRIT” story, cover & interview, JERRY HAWKMAN & FLASH! ROY Intvs. with SHELLY MAYER, COLAN intv., how-to books by issue to the ALL-STAR COM- WALLY WOOD, ADKINS & KANE, FOX & SCHWARTZ on ORDWAY, BILL EVERETT, THOMAS remembers GIL GIL KANE, MART NODELL, STAN LEE & KANIGHER, ALL- PANION! J. SCHWARTZ intv., PEARSON intvs., KUBERT The Atom, L. LIEBER & JACK CARL BURGOS, Giant FAW- KANE, intvs. with KUBERT, GEORGE ROUSSOS, FCA with STAR SQUADRON, MAC JLA-JSA teamups, MAC intv., FCA w/ BECK, SWAYZE, BURNLEY intvs., KANIGHER, CETT (FCA) section with C.C. MOLDOFF, LAMPERT, FOX, BECK & SWAYZE, NEW RABOY section, FCA with RABOY, FCA with BECK & & ORDWAY, MR. MONSTER, FCA, new color BURNLEY & BECK, MARC SWAYZE, & FCA with BECK & SWAYZE, INFANTINO / ORDWAY wrap- BECK & SWAYZE, COLAN & SWAYZE, BUCKLER & BECK WOOD & KUBERT covers, more! $8 US KANE covers, more! $8 US more! $8 US KUBERT covers, more! $8 US around cover, more! $8 US RABOY covers, more! $8 US covers, more! $8 US

AE #9: (100 pgs.) JOHN AE #10: (100 pgs) CARMINE AE #11: (100 pgs) Interviews AE #12: (100 pgs) GILL FOX AE #13 (100 pgs.) TITANS OF AE #14 (100 pgs.) JSA FROM AE #15 (108 pgs.) JOHN ROMITA intv. & gallery, plus INFANTINO intv. & art, never- with SYD SHORES, MICKEY on QUALITY COMICS, never- TIMELY/MARVEL Part Two! THE ’40s TO THE ’80s! MIKE BUSCEMA TRIBUTE ISSUE! ROY THOMAS’ dream pro- seen FLASH story, VIN SULLI- SPILLANE, VINCE FAGO, seen PAUL REINMAN Green JOE SIMON & MURPHY NASSER & MICHAEL T. BUSCEMA covers & interview, jects! FCA with BECK, VAN & MAGAZINE ENTER- MAGAZINE ENTERPRISES Lantern art, origins of ALL- ANDERSON covers, Silver Age GILBERT covers, intvs. with unseen art, ROY THOMAS on SWAYZE, & TUSKA, MR. PRISES, FRED GUARDINEER, Part Two, FCA with BECK, STAR SQUADRON, FCA, MR. AVENGERS section (with ORDWAY & LEE ELIAS, never- their collaborations, plus MONSTER, ROMITA & DICK AYERS, FCA, MR. MONSTER, SWAYZE, DON NEWTON, MR. MONSTER on WALLY WOOD, BUSCEMA, HECK, TUSKA, & seen 1940s JSA pgs., ’70s salute to KURT SCHAFFENJSA, & more! $8 US BERGER, & more! $8 US more! $8 US MONSTER, more! $8 US more! $8 US THOMAS) & more! $8 US GIORDANO covers! $8 US

AE #16: (108 pgs.) COLAN, AE #17: (108 pgs.) LOU FINE AE #18: (108 pgs.) STAN AE #19: (108 pgs.) DICK AE #20: (108 pgs.) TIMELY/ AE #21: (108 pgs.) IGER STU- AE #22: (108 pgs.) EVERETT & BUSCEMA, ROMITA, SEVERIN overview & art, ARNOLD GOLDBERG interview & art, SPRANG interview & art, MARVEL focus, INVADERS DIO with art by EISNER, FINE, KUBERT interviewed by GIL interviews, ALEX ROSS on DRAKE & MURPHY ANDER- plus KIRBY, DITKO, HECK, JERRY ROBINSON on FRED overview with KIRBY, KANE, MESKIN, ANDERSON, CRAN- KANE & NEAL ADAMS, ROY CARDY, EVANS, THOMAS on Sub-Mariner, Shazam!, OTTO & JACK SON interviews, plus EISNER, ROMITA, BUSCEMA, EVERETT, RAY, BOB KANE, CARMINE ROBBINS, BOB DESCHAMPS DALL, BINDER, KURTZMAN, new CRANDALL, DAVIS & EVANS’ WALLY WOOD’S Flash Gordon, INFANTINO, ALEX TOTH, intv., panel with FINGER, “SHEENA” section, THOMAS COLAN, BUSCEMA, SEVERIN, ROSS & FRADON/SEVERIN non-EC action comics, FCA, FCA, KIRBY & SWAYZE WALLY WOOD, FCA, SPRANG BINDER, FOX, & WEISINGER, on the JSA, FCA, DAVE WOOD, FCA, BECK & EVERETT STEVENS cover, more! $8 US covers, more! $8 US & RAY covers, more! $8 US FCA, rare art, more! $8 US covers, more! $8 US LOU FINE cover, more! $8 US covers, more! $8 US ™

Edited by ROY THOMAS

N GI N I ! M CO JULY

N G I! N I T M CO UGUS A

#20:(108 (108pgs.) pgs.) VINTIMELY/ SULLIAE #23: (108 pgs.) Two AE #24: (108 pgs.) NEW AE #25: (108 pgs.) JACK COLE AE #26: (108 pgs.) JOE SIN- AE #27: focus,“Lost” INVADERS VAN interview, KIRBY unseen Golden Age WONDER X-MEN intvs. with STAN LEE, & PLASTIC MAN! Brother NOTT interview, KIRBY MARVEL with 1948 KIRBY,NYKANE, HULK covers, CON WOMAN stories examined, COCKRUM, CLAREMONT, LEN DICK COLE interviewed, Cole and BUSCEMA art, IRWIN overview BOB DESCHAMPS with LEE, SCHWARTZ, BIRO, BOB FUJITANI intv. Archie/ WEIN, ARNOLD DRAKE, JIM celebrated by ALEX TOTH, DONENFELD, Superman art by ROBBINS, panel FCA, withALEX FINGER, KURTZMAN, TOTH, MLJ’s JOHN ROSENBERGER SHOOTER, MORT MESKIN THOMAS on All-Star Squadron SHUSTER, BORING, SWAN, intv., FOX, & WEISINGER, MR. MONSTER, covers by & VICTOR GORELICK intv., profiled, FCA, covers by #1, JERRY BAILS tribute, FCA, FCA, Mr. MONSTER, covers by BINDER, rare art, more! $8 $8 US US BURNLEY & KIRBY! SINNOTT & BORING! $8 US FCA, FCA, rare art, more! $8 US COCKRUM & MESKIN! $8 US cover by TOTH! $8 US

ALTER EGO, the greatest ’zine of the ’60s, is back & all-new, focusing on Golden & Silver Age comics & creators with articles, interviews, & unseen art. Each issue includes an FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America) section, Mr. Monster, & more!

SUBSCRIBE TO AE! Twelve-issue subscriptions: $60 Standard, $96 First Class (Canada: $120, Elsewhere: $132 Surface, $180 Airmail). FOR SIX-ISSUE SUBS, CUT THE PRICE IN HALF!