Image Comics: The Road To Independence

THE ROAD TO INDEPENDENCE

by George Khoury

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“Image Comics is a comics and graphic novels publisher formed in 1992 by a collective of best-selling artists. Since that time, Image has gone on to become one of the largest comics publishers in the United States. There are currently four partners in Image Comics (Erik Larsen, Todd McFarlane, Marc Silvestri and Jim Valentino), and Image is currently divided into four major houses (Todd McFarlane Productions, Top Cow Productions, Shadowline and Image Central). Image comics and graphic novels cover nearly every genre, sub-genre and style imaginable, offering science-fiction, romance, horror, crime fiction, historical fiction, humor and more by the finest artists and writers working in the medium today.” — Image

All photographs are ©2007 the respective copyright holders.

TwoMorrows Publishing Raleigh, North Carolina

by George A. Khoury

Book design & Production by Jon B. Cooke

IMAGE COMICS: THE ROAD TO INDEPENDENCE George A. Khoury Writer & Editor

Book Design and Production: Jon B. Cooke Transcriber: Steven Tice Proofreaders: Christopher Irving, Eric Nolen-Weathington, and John Morrow Front Cover Designer: John Morrow Back Cover Designer: Eric Nolen-Weathington Consiglieres: Jon B. Cooke, Jason Hofius, Ed Mathews, and Steven Tice

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Drive Raleigh, North Carolina 27614 www.twomorrows.com • e-mail: twomorrow@aol.com First Printing • June 2007 • Printed in Canada Softcover ISBN: 978-1-893905-71-9 This book is respectfully dedicated to Erik Larsen, Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, Todd McFarlane, Whilce Portacio, Marc Silvestri, and Jim Valentino.

Special thanks: Gerry Alanguilan, Michael Allred, Hilary Barta, Bill Black, Mark Haven Britt, Jonathan Chan, Eddy Choi, John Cogan, Andrew D. Cooke, Joshua Cozine, Lauren Cross, Augie De Blieck Jr., Vito Delsante, Anthony Edwards, Jackie Estrada, Richard French, Gerhard, Brian Haberlin, Kurt Hathaway, Allen Hui, Rob Levin, Ryan Liebowitz, Jeph Loeb, Tom Mason, Dwayne McDuffie, Dan Nakrosis, Charlie Newlin, Carl Potts, Alex Ross, Erika Russo, Jim Salicrup, Nick Setchfield, Beau Smith, Michael Thibodeaux, Suzy Thomas, Roy Thomas, Maggie Thompson, Tim Townsend, Rick Veitch, and José Villarubia.

For more on the author, visit www.myspace.com/georgekhoury TRADEMARKS & COPYRIGHTS Cyberforce, Darkness, Hunter-Killer, Witchblade, Stryker, Strykeforce, Ripclaw and all related characters are TM & ©2007 Top Cow Productions. • Savage Dragon, SuperPatriot, Freak Force and all related characters are TM & ©2007 Erik Larsen. • Youngblood, Badrock, Diehard, Shaft, Shattered Image and all related characters TM & ©2007 Rob Liefeld. • ShadowHawk and all related characters are TM & ©2007 Jim Valentino. • Spawn, Violator and all related characters are TM & ©2007 Todd McFarlane Productions. • Regent, Wetworx, WildC.A.T.S., Gen13, Grifter, Stormwatch, Deathblow TM & ©2007 Wildstorm Productions, a division of DC Comics. • Pitt is TM & ©2007 Dale Keown. • Maxx TM & ©2007 Sam Kieth. • Tribe TM & ©2007 Larry Stroman and Todd Johnson. • Vanguard TM & ©2007 Erik Larsen and Gary Carlson. • Danger Girl, Wildsiderz TM & ©2007 J. Scott Campbell. • Invincible TM & ©2007 Robert Kirkman and Cory Walker. • Batman TM & ©2007 DC Comics. • Thing, Iron Man, Spider-Man, X-Men, X-Force, X-Factor, Hulk, Weapon X TM & ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc. Entire contents ©2007 George Khoury and TwoMorrows Publishing, and may not be reproduced in whole or in part, without written permission from George Khoury and TwoMorrows Publishing. The views expressed in the interviews here are not necessarily those of the author or of TwoMorrows Publishing.

IMAGE COMICS: T H E R O A D T O I N D E PE N D E N C E Table of Contents

“SCENE FROM A COMIC SHOP” George A. Khoury & Ladronn

7 INTRODUCTION George A. Khoury

8 THE SPIRIT OF INDEPENDENCE 10 FOUNDERS

COLOR PORTFOLIO 161 COUNTER TENSION 169 ASSOCIATES Steve Oliff

177 Scott Williams

185

Erik Larsen

Dale Keown

16

197

Jim Lee

Sam Kieth

46

207

Rob Liefeld

Larry Stroman & Todd Johnson

62

215

Todd McFarlane

Jae Lee

66

223

Whilce Portacio

Jeff Scott Campbell

92

229

Marc Silvestri

Tom McWeeney

112

246

Jim Valentino

Brian Michael Bendis

130 MANAGEMENT

251 Frank Espinosa

Tom DeFalco

261

138

Robert Kirkman

Dave Olbrich

263

144 Larry Marder

148 Matt Hawkins

156

DEATHMATE 244 “KING” KIRBY 273

This book is dedicated to the memory of Elvira Chang, my beloved grandmother — my second mother and the only grandparent that I ever knew in my life. July 20, 1918 to February 14, 2007.

— George A. Khoury

Scene From A Comic Shop Super sweet! The newest ish of 365!

Best daily series ever!

You guys need to give Parables a read.

It really speaks to me.

My vice is the marvelous Incestuous War! With so many tie-ins, crossovers, and spin-offS… that it’s always better late than never.

The last true renaissance period in comics was the start of Image Comics, my friends.

What the--?!

Never before had a daring band of artists gotten together - left their topselling mainstream superhero titles - to start a new company that would stand for unprecedented freedom in this industry.

sigh.

This is truly the new golden age of comics!

A-hem…

I’ve been reading comics for over twenty-five years… I don’t remember a more awesome time than the era around the birth of that company. They transcended into different mediums and made a fortune in the process. A true American success story!

Bullsh*t!

Sure they made their mistakes - but everyone was to blame for the collapse of the comics market in the mid-nineties! The speculators!

The distributors! The retailers! The publishers! The suits!

Everybody!

What!?!

Those guys nearly wrecked the industry!

There’s nothing wrong with reading comics and just having fun. That’s something that Image has done well since day one.

Are you going to be so uptight your whole freaking life?

these days Image is a lot more than just superheroes...

And they said it wouldn’t last...

The Comics Gazette has always told me to stay away from that stuff.

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INTRODUCTION

One Word: Enthusiasm As our nation celebrated its 231st birthday on Independence Day, the comics industry had their own variation of the holiday as Image Comics marked their 15th anniversary earlier this year. From the immortal Jack Kirby to the emerging talents of writer Robert Kirkman—most of our favorite comics creators have been a part of the Image family during its fifteen years of unprecedented creative freedom.

Wow! Fifteen years! It seems like only yesterday that the first Image book hit stands across the globe on April 16th of 1992. Now 15 years later, I’ve prepared a book which shows the controversial history of this ever important company through interviews, articles, artwork and photos. As a lover of comic books, I personally feel that Image is the biggest thing to happen to the medium in the last twenty years. And as a writer, Image’s saga is the great American success story that will continue to inspire so many of us that want to tell our own stories.

I’ve been writing professionally since I was eighteen. I wrote for my college paper and did the payless (and thankless) internship at Marvel Comics. I’ve had meetings with flakey film producers and personally interacted with more than my share of incompetent and pompous editors. I’ve written for no money; I’ve written for little money. I’ve had my heart broken by facing rejection more than humanly possible. Over time, I’ve done work for newspapers, magazines, internet sites and books—none of it compares to the exhaustion that I continue to feel after having worked on The Road to Independence. On the pages of this book, you’ll find everything that I could give and All photographs are ©2007 the respective copyright holders.

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conjure about this subject to you, the readers. At over 200,000 words with hundreds of art and photograph samples, I feel this effort is everything and more that I would want from a history book about comics. Don’t be fooled by my depressing tone—I love what I do and I’ve never written anything that I didn’t give my all. Despite reaching economic and emotional hardships, working on two consecutive dead book projects, and the funeral of a very close family member—the work on this little book was my brightest light in a year that would have crushed me.

Upon describing the gist of the Image project to a friend (a superstar artist in the field), he felt that what I was trying to do would be completely impossible because of the great success, inaccessibility and sheer testosterone of the Image founders and the biggest artists from the company’s fifteen year timeline. “Why should they talk to you? You’re insignificant to them.” He didn’t say that to hurt me but to let me know what I was up against. I’m a gnat in their eyes.

All of that was fine with me… this story isn’t about me. For me, it became an entertaining challenge to reach everyone that I felt was necessary for telling this story. To each of them, I explained that what I wanted to hear was their story about their career and their time at Image. As an interviewer, I’ve always believed that to get to the core of the person you need to start at the beginning—it’s a great way to understand their drive and personalities into banding together under the Image banner.

All the creators that participated allowed me the freedom to ask them anything I wanted without any

type of restraint. Although they didn’t have the time, they were quite generous when they gave me a moment via full honesty in their answers, and sharing images from their art archives. Although it took plenty of work and patience to coordinate all the interviews and research, it was quite humbling to know that so many of them participated at the end of the day. It was humbling because I would be a lying if I told you that I wasn’t keen on speaking with Erik Larsen, Larry Stroman, J. Scott Campbell, Steve Oliff, Todd McFarlane, Brian Bendis or anybody else in this book.

At the same time, I wanted this book to be brutally frank about the company and the respective careers of these men. If you read the book, my hope is that you’ll be able to experience so many different opinions that you’ll have a clear picture of Image’s saga and the state of the comics industry.

Yeah, not everything went my way. I wasn’t able to speak with the man who started the Image spark and a few other notables, but I didn’t let that get me

down. If anything... all of this made me work harder to open up the book through more research. The bottom line is that the story of Image isn’t just about one or two people. What makes their history so unique and beautiful is that Image is triumphant because everyone has a stake in their success.

The readers, the retailers, the distributors and any creator that has had an Image book are a party to the enduring legacy of the company. Without any of these factors or faith, Image simply would not be around today.

Why a history book about Image? One word: Enthusiasm. Image was the last great crossroad for comics. Its presence has provided a strong impact on the entire comics industry. From creator rights, production values, artistic influences, comic book storytelling and the marketing of comics—Image continues to be a guiding light.

George Khoury

9

THE IMAGE STORY

The Spirit of Independence The Image “I” Spawn corner box art by Todd McFarlane. ©2007 Todd McFarlane Productions.

In 1986, Marvel Comics celebrated the 25th anniversary of their rebirth since the debut of Fantastic Four #1 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. What should have been a joyous occasion in their history instead became the year that DC Comics took the spotlight with their monumental sales, mainstream acceptance and massive critical acclaim on books like Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and John Byrne’s Superman relaunch. Ironically, Miller and Byrne were part of a recent mass exodus of top talent that departed from Marvel due to issues with Jim Shooter’s editorial regime. Soon the Mighty Marvel momentum was subsided as big projects like the “New Universe” and Star Comics had little audience and unfavorable sales. Worse than the reinvigorated state of the “Distinguished Competition” was the mediocre quality of the writing and art in Marvel books, which appeared dated and uninspired next to that of DC. With Shooter’s exit in 1987, his successor Tom DeFalco would start ushering in a new wave of creators that would rebuild the “House of Ideas” from the ground up.

Among this crop of diverse artists were Erik Larsen, Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, Todd McFarlane, Whilce Portacio, Marc Silvestri, and Jim Valentino — the seven young men who would band

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together to found Image Comics.

In DeFalco’s administration, Marvel was now welcoming new ideas and cultivating youthful talent with a place to hone their craft and build a following.

Although this new troupe had grown fully devoted to and influenced by a diet of Marvel Comics, they were also prepared to bring an aura of change throughout the books. So strong were the influence and teachings of John Romita Sr. and John Buscema during the ’70s and ’80s, that their artistic style and approach became the predominant “house style” for practically the entire line. It also became painfully transparent how little had really progressed since the days that Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko helmed the stories, because now the books were littered with tales that were endlessly derivative in appearance and texture.

The Marvel super-heroes were in need of a makeover that would aid them into the ’90s and beyond. “These shouldn’t be your father’s heroes; they should be your heroes!” said Marv Wolfman in a recent interview about writing modern super-hero tales — the exact approach that Image’s architects would take to heart from Day One of their respective careers.

The Marvel metamorphoses started quite quietly.

While most of the rookies initiated on illustrating lower-tier books and random fill-in assignments, it was their enthusiasm, professionalism and hunger that earned them the pivotal loyalty of prominent editors like Bob Harras, Carl Potts and Jim Salicrup.

They would seize future opportunities and rock the very foundation of Marvel, not only by tapping into their artistic inspirations and imaginations, but by fusing trendy elements of popular culture and comics like never before. Suddenly they all hit their stride at relatively the same time: Todd McFarlane would radically rejuvenate Spider-Man’s appearance by making the character this highly poseable, bug-like figure that could shoot the most manic webbing you’ve ever seen; Whilce Portacio and Jim Lee recharged the X-Men franchise with the sort of sleekness and electricity seen only in anime and video games; Rob Liefeld’s Cable was a character that could go toe-to-toe with the Terminator and his gigantic arsenal of guns; others like Dale Keown (on The Incredible Hulk), Erik Larsen (on Amazing SpiderMan), Marc Silvestri (on Wolverine), Larry Stroman (on X-Factor) and Jim Valentino (on Guardians of the Galaxy) left their indelible sense of style unto their books, as well.

To the mainstream, this period represented the last time that a generation found the level of excitement

that they craved for in comics. These new creators ushered in a level of diverting wonderment because they, too, were part of the same audience as the readers. Their “in-your-face” visuals spoke to audiences impressed by the different array of styles and detail in the artwork. The heroes were now ripped out of Venice Beach, boiling in testosterone; the big-haired heroines were totally curvy chicks straight from any boy’s active imagination. Finally, the old mold had been broken; these Marvel heroes were hip, lively and contemporary again! The fanboys ate it up and loved this renaissance. While most of the artists began to gain notoriety on their own, Marvel would witness a surge in sales that the establishment had never experienced. The great majority of Marvel books with talent from future Image founders and colleagues easily experienced their greatest peak of profitability and popularity during the early ’90s.

A reinvigorated Marvel would expand their roster of books by seeking any opportunity to commence a new series to satisfy an audience that constantly craved more and more product. At their peak, the company put out over 80 titles a month and 85 percent of their profits came via the publishing of comics; they ruled practically half of the entire comics industry. This gold rush era allowed the company the luxury (and necessity) of bestowing new titles to their star artists. The new releases became enormous events that seemingly capitalized more on the bank-

able strength of the artists’ names than the characters themselves. It started in 1990, when McFarlane’s Spider-Man #1 sold close to three million copies, which was bested in 1991 with five million copies of Liefeld’s X-Force #1, and eclipsed later that year by the staggering eight million copies of Jim Lee’s X-Men #1. Sales were never like that in Golden Age! The bliss between management and talent would not last forever. Soon there were editorial clashes over content and the direction of the books. Scores of products started emerging using their artwork without any financial compensation or art credit. And forget foreign royalties, Marvel doesn’t share that with anyone. All of these things began to bring other grievances to light; the artists began to question their part in Marvel’s big picture. Sick of it all, Todd McFarlane would announce his “retirement.” And when Rob tried to branch out with a new title called The Executioners at Malibu Comics, his Marvel superiors reined him in by voicing their displeasure.

Although all of these artists had received their accolades and earned generous royalties, they were beginning to get frustrated with their superiors and the developing exploitive nature of the corporate culture that came as Marvel’s stock went public in July of 1991. At the height of their successes, they decided that it was time to confront the brass head-on.

On December 17, 1991, Todd McFarlane (with his wife and child), Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld had an impromptu meeting with an appalled Terry Stewart,

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From left to right: Whilce Portacio, two unidentified employees of Golden Apple Comics, Marc Silvestri, Voodoo, Rob Liefeld, Jim Lee and Jim Valentino during a 1992 appearance at Golden Apple Comics. ©2007 Golden Apple Comics.

THE IMAGE STORY

the president of Marvel Comics, and Tom DeFalco in New York City. At the gathering, the three creators began by presenting most of their disappointments and misgivings with the way things were going with the current management. Stewart would meet their points by trying to accommodate them with possible lucrative scenarios where they might have more creative control.

Although all the parties seemed unprepared for the discussion, the artists now saw that for all their successes and Todd McFarlane and Rob Liefeld at Image’s first official meeting, in 1992. ©2007 Tom Mason. accomplishments in Penciled page from Greg Capullo’s Spawn debut in issue #16. ©2007 T.M.P.

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restoring Marvel’s stature in the business, they were just replaceable “help” and insignificant to the future of the company; the characters were far more important than the creators. The attitude, tone and impression that they received from the man at the very top of the company made it crystal clear that the time had come to take a stand.

In the months prior to the big meeting, Liefeld had already spoken with his friends, Erik Larsen and Jim Valentino, about joining him in a self-publishing opportunity at Malibu Comics after The Executioners debacle. Just the year prior the trio had been presented with an open invitation to publish anything they wanted from Dave Olbrich, Malibu’s publisher.

The idea was to continue producing work for Marvel while developing characters and comics for Malibu that were entirely owned by them. Fresh off his run on Amazing Spider-Man, Erik Larsen became the first to join into Rob’s idea; Jim Valentino would soon follow. When Liefeld called McFarlane, the offer was exactly the idea to lure him out of his self-imposed retirement. Immediately, Todd became determined to recruit Jim Lee in the days prior to an upcoming Sotheby’s auction (featuring the sale of original art from Spider-Man #1, X-Force #1, and X-Men #1).

Fresh off the success of his X-Men launch, Jim wasn’t entirely sure if the timing was right for him to leave a sure thing. But after Todd and Rob convinced Jim to come along to their meeting with Terry Stewart, Jim began to see the light (and weeks later announced his commitment publicly). On the day of the auction, Todd and Rob not only recruited Marc Silvestri but began to hint to the press about their eminent self-publishing ventures and the eminent group forming of Marvel’s top artists.

After a month of planning and the additional recruitment of Whilce Portacio (which finalized the number of founding members at seven), Image Comics was formally introduced to the world during their first organized meeting in Marc Silvestri’s home on February 1, 1992. Some of them still had a degree of cold feet about leaving Marvel, but the confidence and enthusiasm of the naïve ones became very infectious. During the course of that day, they started discussions about the breed of books that they were going to create for their company. Image also solidified their one-year direct market distribution and printing plan agreement with Malibu; interacted with Gareb Shamus of Wizard magazine about marketing ideas; and lastly, began talks with Harold Anderson of Anderson News concerning newsstand distribution.

When the six founders were amongst themselves (Portacio was absent that first meeting and never became a shareholder), they agreed to the principals that would guide their company, first and foremost: No one would ever really own Image. The company would be a freestanding collective brand that would house all their creator-owned books and allow the artists to keep virtually all of their profits (with a minor percentage of the profits going to Image Central for the traffic and administrative duties of the books). No one besides the creator(s) had ownership of their

character, nor would there ever be any editorial interference from any of the founders. And if any creator or founder ever wanted to leave Image, they could do so without any repercussion and the uncontested full ownership of their properties. What Image essentially provided was an umbrella whose greatest asset was strength in the numbers: the more top artists that banded together, the more powerful their company would become. And so the founders quietly invited Dale Keown, Larry Stroman, Sam Kieth, and any major creator willing to join Image to create new comics with them.

By mid-February 1992, the news of Image Comics spread like wildfire as every major newspaper and news station picked up the story of a group of popular comic book artists that were living the American Dream by standing up for themselves. With the outbreak of the report, from The New York Times to CNN, Marvel’s then-soaring stock plummeted (a regular occurrence over the next five years); on February 17 of that year, the Los Angeles Daily News reported that the stock had dropped $11.37 a share to close at $54.62. So as the artists started to prep their Image comics, the men gave their final notices to their Marvel editors. The company was happy to continue publishing Jim Lee and Marc Silvestri books into the summer of 1992, but others, like Jim Valentino and Dale Keown, were bumped off their books and witnessed Marvel’s discontent close-up.

No one had ever done anything like Image before.

The comic book business was full of freelancers that barely communicated with one another; there had never been a united front or a successful union in the history of the industry amongst creators. With Image, the defiant artists not only became better acquainted but were also able to share their opinions and mistakes, which helped, in many ways, overcome their idealism and lack of business know-how. And when it came time to create their books, the Image artists gravitated to the type of books that they did best: books full of heroes and wall-to-wall action.

Some were bursting with new ideas and characters; others took great pride in bringing creations from their adolescence by developing them even further.

The initial launch of titles would be the same brand of adventures and artwork that made their Marvel works famous, now free of any type of censorship or restraints.

There was great nervousness and anticipation at Image about how the fans would react to their work without the Marvel Comics logo in the corner. Was the world ready for an entire new world of superheroes? On April 16, 1992, with the release of Rob Liefeld’s Youngblood #1, the answer was absolutely positive. The initial order was very successful with over 325,000 copies, but that wasn’t the final count by any stretch; the book became a euphoric sensation rarely seen in comics. Retailers did everything in their power to keep the book in stock as fans, new and old, kept buying the “hot” book — eventually the book sold over a million copies. The Image Age had begun. All their reservations and fears subsided as everyone was now in a frenzy to release their books.

As each creator’s book came out, the media and fan frenzy continued into the summer. The premiere of Spawn and WildC.A.T.s led the charge of a handful of Image books that passed the million-selling bench mark. In fact, every Image creator had a taste of economic success in their effort because practically everything that debuted would sell 500,000 copies or more. The gamble with their careers, family, future and hard work had paid off, for now.

The year 1993 had success, headaches and criticism collide full-on. Retailers and fans were frustrated by the increasing amount of late-shipping books that continued to grow on a weekly basis.

Many of Image’s founders were in over their heads in soliciting comics and way behind (and overworked) working on their books. And, from Day One, Image became the target of various veteran creators that constantly criticized the company in public. They would question Image’s purpose and violent books, critique their inexperience as writers, relentlessly comment on their art, accuse them of exploiting the

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1963 heralded the return of Alan Moore to mainstream comics with its release in 1993. Together with Rick Veitch and Stephen Bissette as his co-plotters and artists, the three creators brought a little light and humor to an industry that was in dire need of a wake-up call.

Mystery Incorporated cover art by Rick Veitch (pencils) and Dave Gibbons (inks). 1963 ©2007 Alan Moore and Rick Veitch.

THE IMAGE STORY

Above: Whilce Portacio gets ready for the launch of Wetworks #1 at Golden Apple Comics in 1994.

Photo courtesy of Golden Apple Comics. Below: Hero Illustrated, one of several ’90s magazines that covered the hobby.

marketplace, and continually point out any misstep made by any Image founder or creator to whoever would listen. Worse, they predicted that the company’s days were numbered.

If one thing could be said, it’s that Image learned from their lumps (most of these mistakes were made in the public eye). The late books did begin to take a financial toll on some founders and creators; they tried to remedy that by hiring Larry Marder as their executive director to oversee their publishing and release (or reprimand) creators with late books. As for the comics themselves, their enthusiasm and commitment to their excellence had not changed. Remember, from Day One, they were doing the superhero books that they had always wanted to do, because their readers would expect no less. The bottom line is that these books brought a lot of fun to the people that embraced these heroes with their hearts and wallets, because they were of their time.

Sure the stories were juvenile in tone, but like Frank Miller said about

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the genre, “They [super-heroes] work best as the flamboyant fantasies they are.”

The successes of Image inspired many entrepreneurs and creators, some new and some legends, to band together and start their own creator-owned imprints and/or new companies. Regardless, Image stood high because they transformed the industry. They were cutting edge by changing the way that comics were produced — top notch production values, glossy paper, digital color and lively lettering became the norm in all comics because of them. Comic readers were spoiled after seeing how beautifully and impressively the Image books were packaged. Soon Marvel and DC were doing everything in their grasp to keep up with Image — Image even surpassed DC in sales in 1992 for the first time. For better or worse, their presence and influence was felt over the entire industry — for a short window, every company in the industry reaped the financial rewards and media attention that the upstarts lured to the field. Soon Image was about to face their biggest challenge in the collapse of the short-term speculative market that had taken over and inflated the business.

“I think this summer is going to be a complete bloodbath,” Erik Larsen wisely predicted to reporter Bruce Canwell of Comic Book Week magazine in 1993, “because you’ve got 10 billion comic book companies all deciding that the public wants superhero comics. Every one of them is looking at Image and saying, ‘Hey, they’re successful,’ but they’re not looking at Impact and saying, ‘Hey, they weren’t.’ The reason we were successful is we came out with seven of the top-selling guys in comics. They can’t do that, unless they lure us from where we’re at now.

It’s not going to work when you get a whole bunch of new talent trying to form a new company that does the same thing we do — it’s bound to be another Impact Comics. This summer we’re looking at the full-color version of the black-&-white glut, and what I see is that Image Comics will survive, just as the [Teenage Mutant Ninja] Turtles survived the black-&white collapse. The good stuff that was there before is going to be there after.”

In the early stages of the market’s downfall, most of the Image creators really began to use their wits by hitting their stride creatively as they became much more confident in their storytelling and leadership. As the competition got fiercer amongst their competitors and themselves, Image also continued to aggressively cherry-pick from Marvel’s new crop of prodigies: Jae Lee, Greg Capullo and Stephen Platt. Some founders expanded into studios and companies (remaining under the Image family, of course) due to their growth

in titles, a luxury that allowed them to offer very lucrative freelance rates and aggressive royalties to top writers and artists, often much better than Marvel or DC. Many of the houses within Image developed a new generation of talent, one that was heavily influenced by their sensibilities; artists like J. Scott Campbell, David Finch, Michael Turner, Travis Charest and many of today’s top creators learned their craft at these companies. The hardest years were definitely those early years; if they could survive those first few years, Image would have a chance.

Of course, everything wasn’t always rosy. By the mid-’90s, relationships between the Image founders would strain as the economics worsened and began effecting the future of their individual studios. In 1996, Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld returned to a desperate Marvel; they were given an exuberant amount of money with the total editorial and creative control that was unthinkable before. The Marvel deal heralded major turmoil and challenged the very purpose of Image. On September 4, 1996, Rob Liefeld resigned from Image after clashes with his fellow shareholders regarding his new Maximum Press comic company, amongst other issues. Perhaps the worst day in Image’s history was August 27, 1998, when Jim Lee announced the sale of his company to DC Comics.

Image had lost one of their biggest assets and top book producers in a market that continued to shrink.

Without Lee, the company needed to find new books because they needed to publish 30 books to remain off-the-ground. By 1998, the days of hitting a benchmark of 100,000 copies sold were a fleeting memory; Image began to extend invitations to alternative and independent artists that didn’t necessarily love super-heroes. For an indy artist, these were huge opportunities. Being a part of the Image family would lead to the best placement in the distributor catalogs, more exposure, promotion, and the opportunity for financial rewards without any loss of ownership. Suddenly, talent like Brian Michael Bendis and Robert Kirkman found a larger audience for themselves after years of struggling as small press independents. In a strange twist of fate, Marvel Comics scouted Image for groundbreaking

new creators. Today’s Marvel and DC books feature a heavy influence of Image-like artwork all across their lines — there’s a stronger emphasize on the same type of hyper-detail and over-rending illustration that made the Image books famous.

Fifteen years later, Image Comics is now more vital than ever to the industry. In fact, it’s an integral part as it continues evolving by providing a reputable safe haven for some of the top names and rising stars of comics. Unlike the accusations made by their critics, the Image creators didn’t just make a boatload of money and leave the industry behind like a roadside carcass; they gave back to it far much more than they ever took. The Image founders also didn’t just make their money and run to Hollywood; the original seven creators continue to remain heavily involved in comics and create new works. In some ways, the Bohemian concept of Image has become much bigger than the original partners themselves ever envisioned. In an industry that began with artists working in sweatshoplike conditions, Image remains a living beacon for any creator that dares to dream.

“My greatest satisfaction is that everyday we exist we continue to aggravate all the people who doomed us at the beginning. Spread the word [that] we are not going away, folks.”

— Todd McFarlane Letters page, Spawn #10

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This artwork was originally featured as the cover of Wizard: The Guide to Comics Special Edition.

It’s one of a handful of pieces where the seven Image founders jammed together. ©2007 respective copyright holders.

The Image creators provided a ton of covers and content for the readers and collectors that subscribed to Wizard’s line. WildC.A.T.s ©2007 WildStorm Prod.

ERIK LARSEN

Erik Larsen Erik Larsen photo by Tom Mason at Image’s first formal meeting. ©2007 Tom Mason.

If there was ever a person born to be a comic book artist, Erik Jon Larsen would certainly fit that bill. As a teenager he started writing and drawing his own strips in his fanzine Graphic Fantasy. By 1983, the self-taught artist made his professional debut in Megaton #1 and worked his way through the independent circuit before finally getting a freelance offer from Jim Shooter, then editor-inchief of Marvel Comics. Soon other editors took notice of his talents that earned him strings on titles like Punisher, Doom Patrol, and The Outsiders. When Larsen was given the impossible job of following Todd McFarlane’s memorable work on Amazing Spider-Man, he successfully maintained the title’s highly acclaimed status and earned his own fan following with his overly enthusiastic renderings and storytelling. Upon the formation of Image Comics, Erik resurrected Savage Dragon, his boyhood creation, as the title that he would, and continues (for 130 issues-andcounting) to, write and illustrate. In 2004, Erik became the publisher of Image Central, as he hopes to usher in a new era of renaissance for the company that he helped co-found.

Savage Dragon and related characters are ©2007 Erik Larsen

I wanted to ask you something.

Does it still bother you a little bit that they constantly misspell your name in comics press circles? It’s not the hardest name to spell.

But it’s one of those names that you assume you know how to spell, that’s the thing about it, and in “Sienkiewicz” you go “I think I’d better look that up.” “Larsen” you’re like, “Pfft! I know how to spell Larsen. I don’t have to look that up.”

But you think they would know better after 20 years in the biz?

Oh, I know. Guys will get the e-mail from the end of my column and e-mail me, and my name is on the column. How are you getting that wrong? It’s spelled right in there. How are you getting it

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screwed up? How are you doing that?

So your dad was a college professor?

Uh, yeah. I’m going to stick with that.

But you dropped out of high school somehow.

Yeah, but my kids don’t know that.

Okay.

I’d just as soon to keep that out of the public record.

That’s mentioned in a lot of your interviews.

You can do that when you’re young and foolish, but when you get older and responsible and want your kids to finish school, you go, “Well, wait a minute. Maybe that’s not something I should necessarily be going out there and advertising.”

Why’d you drop out?

I was going to a school that I really liked down in Northern California, and we moved up to Bellingham, Washington; the new school was very cliqué-ish. If you had gone to school with those guys since kindergarten you could be part of their group. I was entering into their world in 11th grade and it was just like, man, you are not breaking into this group.

So that whole time you were by yourself. That was part of the reason that made you leave?

Yeah, it was just an unfriendly environment, and it’s school stuff I just don’t want to be doing. I’m just not happy here. And my dad at that point was teaching workshops in self-reliance, and he was like,

ERIK LARSEN

The cover art of Savage Dragon #1, the regular series. ©2007 Erik Larsen.

“Whatever, you’re a smart kid. Just drop out.”

He was that easy-going. Wow. I know, whoa!

Did he tell you to get a job?

No, he didn’t tell me to get a job. He didn’t tell me any of that stuff. He was just like, “Yeah, whatever.

You’re going to figure this stuff out. I have confidence in you.” Well, that’s good for you, man, but, damn.

That’s kind of harsh. And my mom was not real taken with that idea. You could say that.

Your mom was a housewife?

Yeah. She did value education and all that, and so my dad saying “just drop out,” that didn’t sit too well with her.

Did they come to a decision to do something sooner or later?

Not really. No, the idea was that I had something that I wanted to do. If this didn’t work out, I was

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screwed, since I had no skills whatsoever in anything else; it’s like, if this doesn’t happen for you, you’re just f*cked. Y’know? You’re going to spend the rest of your life peeling potatoes or something, because you’ve got nothin’. And although it could have been an unfortunate thing for me, it just happened that it worked out and that I was able to do this, but in terms of actual education stuff, yeah, there’s not a whole hell of a lot. But it worked out fine because I’m a relatively bright guy and I was able to make a go with this funny book deal.

When you were in high school you were a big time reader?

I wasn’t really — I was really, really into comic books much more than anything else. For me it was really comics and nothing else. It was like, “What other books do you read?” I read Wizard of Oz, but it wasn’t like — I read some things, but I wouldn’t call myself a voracious reader by any stretch. There were a couple of things here and there, Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend or whatever, just a few little things that I was just checking out and reading. But I was not a huge reader.

You didn’t do band, nothing?

No, none of that.

So you did everything you could to stay hidden.

Yeah. Well, I would do writing related stuff in that I would participate in the school newspaper, very actively in that. And I was active in any kind of creative writing stuff, so I was always doing that. But in terms of any other proper extracurricular stuff: no. I didn’t do a whole lot of junk, it just didn’t interest me.

I just wanted to do comic books. Nothing in particular, I just wanted to draw comics. I saw in the comics that there was a list of guys who would work on them, that there was an artist and stuff like that, and “I’m going to be like Herb Trimpe. I’m going to draw stuff that other people write.”

Was that your epiphany? Like, seeing an issue of Hulk or something?

Yeah, that was it. I mean, that’s what I wanted.

Herb Trimpe?

Herb Trimpe was the man. “It can’t get any better than this. Look at Herb; he’s working on Hulk — .”

Why wouldn’t you stay on that for 78 issues? That’s the dream job, right?

In a way, that’s a lot like you and the run on Savage Dragon?

Yeah. I wanted to get kids in my school to write stories for me but none of them would do it. So I thought, “Well, I’m just going to write it myself.

Screw you guys.”

Herb Trimpe was the first guy? No Kirby?

No. When I started reading comics at that age, Jack was at DC, and DC sucked. It was, like, it’s either Marvel or nothin’. That’s it for comics. If you didn’t read Marvel comics, what the hell was wrong with you? There was really nothing else but — what were you going to read, Archie ? Archie sucks. You’re not going to read Archie… what the hell is wrong with you?

Were there other artists who were drawing you in as well, like John Buscema?

No. When I started off, I didn’t even really read comic books, there wasn’t that much. My dad would buy comics when he was a kid, and so we had comics around the house when we were growing up.

These were all old, like the old EC comics and the old Captain Marvel Adventures and all those things.

Those were the comics that I grew up with. And then, I got an issue of Hulk fairly early, #156, and it was just like, “Wow! This is the greatest comic ever!” I guess I didn’t even realize that they were still making them. But they just had the one, “that’s good enough for me!” And I didn’t start buying it on a regular basis for quite a while. It wasn’t until it was in its 170s that I suddenly went, “Wait a minute. These still exist! There they are! That is cool!”

You might have actually bought the Wolverine debut issue when it hit the stands.

Oh, yeah, I did. I bought that issue on the stands. I absolutely did. It was like, “Ah, this guy’s pretty cool.” He fought the Hulk; he’s got to be cool!

Were there any odd jobs for you before comics?

No. No employment at all. My employment history is I’ve done comics from age 19-on.

You did a tryout for Charlton Bullseye once?

Yeah! But that was a story that I ended up putting in my first fanzine because Charlton Bullseye didn’t exist anymore. So I went, “Oh well. I guess I’ve gotta do this on my own.” My dad was doing these workshops, so he had a printing press to print his material that he would give out at these workshops. And he bought this press to print his book and stuff that he could give out, and so, “Why couldn’t we put comics on this?”

Was it a mimeograph or something?

No, it was a tabletop offset press. And so it was like, “We could do anything! We could print comics on it.” And there were a couple buddies that I knew from a comic book store, and that became this thing: my part’s already done!

Your dad had faith in you right from the beginning?

Yeah, he did. He was pretty sure that this was going to work out all right for me.

Was he artistically inclined?

Not a bit. He drew somewhere at some point, just like, “We need a drawing for our high school yearbook. You’ve got a wrist. You do that.” But it wasn’t like he ever aspired to be an artist. He really wasn’t just sitting around drawing and all.

You were like an outlet for your dad; he liked what you were doing in some ways.

Somehow. It was always something that drove me, because when I was real little, like third or fourth grade, I just started drawing my own comics and books and making my own characters. I always had a tough time at school, and at that time they were having me go to this kind of hippie school, which is a free school thing. This was up in Washington. We moved all over the place.

You were mostly in that part of the country?

Yeah, always on the West Coast. Not necessarily — but mostly Bellingham, Washington and the

Mendocino, California area.

Wait a minute, that fanzine that you were talking about…

Graphic Fantasy, yeah. That was going to be my Charlton Bullseye thing. I threw that up hoping they would go, “Oh, we love it. We’ll publish this in Charlton Bullseye.” And then I submitted it, and then they’re “We’ve canceled this book.” So I was like, “Oh.” That Charlton line was the worst comics?

They were printed on toilet paper and their plates were — everything was so bad, so chunky, and they had the worst possible paper, and the worst possible printing. But by that point several kinds of key guys had gone through Charlton and had gotten their start at Charlton. John Byrne got his start at Charlton. He was doing “Rog 2000” in the back of E-Man; it was like, “Look, you can get a start at Charlton Comics.”

So the idea that I could do something, and it was like, Charlton seems as viable a starting place as any.

Why not? Joe Staton started there. He was drawing E-Man, and then he went and started inking The Incredible Hulk over Herb Trimpe. I knew cool guys came through here, you know? John Byrne did a Hulk Annual. I know my Hulk!

Once that didn’t happen, what was the next step?

Well, we did these fanzines that I published on this

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ERIK LARSEN

The design of SuperPatriot. ©2007 Erik Larsen.

tabletop offset press. It was done, and then from there I was sending it to everybody I could think of.

Who would want this? So we sold it in fanzines, and we sent it around to anybody that could possibly give us a review to just get the word out. And then from there, once we had gotten the word out, there were a couple different people who got this fanzine through the mail who wanted to start up their own company. And, well, “there’s a guy who seems to know what he’s doing. He’s got this stuff kind of figured out. Why don’t we have him do something, see how that works for us.”

But some of these guys had you draw these pages and you’d never see anything in print, right?

Oh, yeah. Well, I’d either never see anything in print or never get my art back. There was a guy named Moses Faguirre, and I drew 50 pages for him.

I think I got paid for 20 of them. And it was, like, $15 a page or something and he kept all the originals.

“Well, this sucks!” I was creating sh*t for him and writing up the stories. He sent me the script and there was, like, six different copyright dates on it and they’re all crossed out, and I was just stupid enough to draw the damned thing. And that was something, though. I just wanted to get the word out there, and I wanted to get my stuff out there, and really each step I looked at as, “Oh, this will, this is the start. This will

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get me recognized by the next guy, and the next guy’s gonna make it so that I can do my ultimate dream, my dream job.” Y’know, “When Herb Trimpe leaves The Hulk, damn, I’m gonna be there.” And that was it.

That was the big goal. And so, “I just want to do a run on this book.”

You never did get that chance, right?

No, I never did! So it was like, whatever. And ultimately that’s what it came down to be; me just going, “At this point, I just don’t care.” And at the time, I really wanted to do it and all that. By the time I was at the age when I could have had that job, it was like “It really doesn’t interest me.”

It was offered to you once?

It was one of those cases where it was kind of up, and it was known that they’d like to have guys try out for it. And at that point I was like, “I could do that, but I don’t care. I’m kind of beyond that now, and it’s not something that interests me all that much anymore.” Which is fine. Y’know, it’s all right, I have no complaints there.

Getting in the pages of Megaton was a big break for you.

That was something. I was nineteen when I was still working on Megaton. It took it a while for it to actually come out.

He used to sell those, like, yearly, right?

Well, the idea was that it was supposed to be bimonthly, but none of the guys he worked with had their sh*t together other than me, so I was like, “Here’s my pages,” and I’d do them all in, like, a couple of weeks, and then [Gary Carlson would] go, “Well, now we’ve got to wait for everybody else.”

And he said to me years later, he was like, “I should have had you draw the whole damn book, because you’re the only guy who wanted it, who really wanted to get the work done. I should have used you for every page I could get out of you, and just had the other guys have stuff be in there when they get their — .

He was like the first guy to treat you like a professional?

Mm-hm.

And you got your art back?

Yeah. Not that it matters, since my house ended up burning up, so I didn’t end up with any of the artwork.

But it was a good confidence booster?

Yeah. Suddenly you’ve got something that you can show somebody, and that is what really matters in a lot of cases: People don’t want to be the guy who gives you your first gig, but they’ll be the guy who gives you your second. Y’know? “Oh, somebody took a chance on you? All right. You must be a professional, then.” “Yup, that’s me! I’m a professional! I’ve done six pages.”

The Dragon was created way before Megaton.

Yeah, I created it in, like, third or fourth grade.

Was he designed to be an adversary to the Hulk?

No, he really, at that point, somehow or other I had gotten ahold of some Batman comics, just comics around the house. And there was this Batman comic, and he was just Batman. And if you can imagine the fin that’s on his head — but it was smaller than that — that was a mask with a cut-out area where his

mouth was, instead. So it was this green mask with a fin on his head instead of the two big ears. And he had this big green cape, and then he had Speed Racer’s pants and shoes. It was just really a kid creation, an amalgam of everything that was cool.

“I’m going to drive around in a Mach 5, and I’m going to have Batman’s utility belt, and I’m going to have the Batman cape, mask, and say a magic word like Captain Marvel, and I’m going to have a Captain Marvel cape,” and just a bunch of dumb things all together. And as time went on, I just wasn’t that into drawing this cape all the time, and all this other junk.

“Ah, I’ll just lose that and have it be that he’s a guy.”

I wasn’t thinking, “This guy is the Hulk.” It’s just the way that worked out. I was just going, “Oh, I guess this guy, once his clothes get ripped up, he’s got some similarities to that other guy.” But that certainly wasn’t the agenda going into it. It wasn’t “I want this guy to look like the Hulk.”

I thought it might have been an influence since you had such a thing for Hulk.

It’s weird, but it didn’t. I created the Dragon before I discovered Hulk. I wasn’t really aware that my dad didn’t buy Marvel comics, my dad bought comics in the ’40s and ’50s, so those weren’t the comics that I had around the house growing up. And we weren’t getting into the new comics; we just had his old comics. So we had a huge pile of old comics, hundreds and hundreds of all these things, and the key issues of just a lot of them. He had most of the EC comics, almost all of them. And it was like, “These are great.”

Were you already making the rounds of conventions around the time Megaton came out, like going to San Diego?

No. No. By that time I was back up in Bellingham, and by that time there was a comic book store I was going to. Up until we moved up, though, up through tenth grade, there was no comic book store. If you wanted comics, you had to go to Fort Bragg and go to the Rexall Drugs. And that was a haul. It wasn’t like you could just go there. You had to either, if you were old enough, hitchhike to Fort Bragg, or wait till laundry day and have the parents pack up the crap and go to Fort Bragg, and I happened to wander over to get comics.

When you started going to cons, that’s when you started getting gigs, right?

My first real big convention was when I went to Chicago.

That must have been a big trip for you, back then? I don’t know if you went with your parents or what.

I went by

myself.

By plane or car?

Plane, yeah.

That must have left some impression.

The thing was, some years before, I had gone to New York, and my granddad gave me the money to go to New York and I’d shown Sal Amendola my stuff over at DC, and he was in charge of this “new talent” program, and he was supposed to be getting in kids and show them the ropes and all that kind of stuff, so he said, “Hey, come on out.” And I came on out, and when I got there they were like, “Sh*t, we don’t know what to do with you.” I don’t think they were expecting me actually to show up for some reason, so when I was there they just said, “Try your hand at drawing this Batman comic,” a comic that was already being done. It was a real script from a real issue of Batman. But they just wanted to see that I knew what I was doing, so I ended up drawing this whole issue of Batman that had already been drawn by somebody else. And then, I just sent it in, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. And so I made copies of it, but I sent in the original art, and never heard a thing. I also drew a Batgirl story which was awful; my work on it was awful. And the Batman thing is pretty pitiful. I wouldn’t have given me the time of day.

This is in the mid-’80s. I’m surprised you didn’t go to Marvel.

I didn’t think about it. It didn’t even occur to me — that’s how dumb I was.

When I was at Marvel, most people just went with their portfolio and that’s it. No appointment, no nothin’.

Well, I didn’t know. I didn’t know the rituals; I didn’t know what you were supposed to do. All I knew was that I was there.

You didn’t do the Marvel Tryout thing? That came out around that time.

You know, I didn’t do it.

That didn’t stop them from applying me to that, because they would say, “Yeah, you were runner-up in the Marvel Tryout book!”

You were on there?

I was one of them, and I didn’t even try out. I didn’t even draw the story that we were supposed to draw. But they just took my samples and decided I was the runner-up.

Mark Bagley won that thing. And he was bitching the whole time, “Hey, why did they pick me, they don’t call me back and they’re not giving me any work.

There’s a bunch of us who

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SuperPatriot action figure produced by McFarlane Toys.

ERIK LARSEN

©2007 Erik Larsen.

were told that we were runners-up.” It was a weird time.

When you went to Chicago, you had already done an issue of DNAgents?

No. When I went to Chicago I had done Sentinels of Justice over at Americomics, and I had done the stuff in Megaton. And so, when I showed up there, I had a stack of stuff that I’d done.

Who was evaluating portfolios?

Shooter was evaluating portfolios, and I had corresponded with Shooter, and then he had sent me one of those “close but no cigar” letters, and then I got a “closer but still no cigar, thank you very much.” And so it was a situation where it seemed good. So when he saw me and he saw my stuff, he was like, “So, you’re a professional now.” And I was like, “Yeah!

Yes, I am.”

He remembered you right away?

He remembered my name, and I think he must have recognized my work or something, so he retained some of it, and somehow or other I conned him into letting me draw a story. And I also said, “Yeah, let’s plot it at the convention.” So we did it old Marvel style, where we sat down and we just talked through the plot, the points that needed to be hit in the story, and then I drew it when I got home, and I put liner notes all over it. And it was Hulk vs. Thor, and all the liner notes were completely out of character, me just goofing off, basically. And then he took that story, he gave it to Stan to script, which I thought, “Wow! I’m working with Stan Lee.” And Vinnie Colletta got to ink it and I was like, “Oh, I hate Vinnie Colletta.”

That was, like, the worst thing he could have done to me at the time. Years later I can look back at it and go, “Yeah, he did me a favor giving me to Vinnie.” I learned some good things from that. I got to see what you need to do to basically survive. Working with Vinnie was almost a trial by fire. If your work could

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survive Vinnie, it could survive anything.

That was a helluva book to have those types of people involved in your Marvel debut.

And the cool thing is that it ended up being an issue of Thor, and so it was like the last issue of Thor that Stan ever wrote, the last issue of Thor that Vinnie ever inked, and I’m subbin’ for Jack in the classic creative team on Thor. It was, like, that’s not a bad start, as far as I’m concerned.

You even got to work closely with Shooter.

I got to work with Shooter. You know, I never had any problem with Jim. It was around the time he was leaving, wasn’t it?

Yeah, it was around the time he was leaving. I had actually drawn it several years earlier before it saw print, so that was old material by the time it saw print.

This was the first time you earned big bucks?

Yeah. Comparatively, it was big, because I’d gone from getting, I think $15 to $25 a page, I think at Megaton I was getting $25, and when you write the stuff it wasn’t any different. It was, “Oh, you’re writing it? You’re not getting any more money for that. We’re not paying writers.” So Megaton I think was $15, and then if I wrote and inked it, it was another $15.

I figured once you had those Thor pages you could just show them off in your portfolio.

I landed DNAgents from that, showing people those samples. And then I did a fill-in issue of Amazing Spider-Man somewhere around that time, so that was #287, I think. And then I did some little DC stuff here and there, because Mike Grell had gotten turned on to my stuff very early on, and I just met him at a convention. Well, there ended up being conventions that were kind of near. There was one in Vancouver Island, up in Victoria. We went up there and that’s where I met Mike Gold, who might have still been at First at the time, but he stayed in touch and he wanted me to do the Teen Titans. And whoever else was in it did not fall for that at all. But I did the Secret Origins of Nightwing, then I did two issues of Teen Titans Spotlight, one with the Omega Men and one with Aqualad, and then I did one issue of Teen Titans, #33, and that was it. It didn’t pan out. And then from there they needed somebody to do half an issue of The Outsiders because Trevor von Eeden had apparently crapped out on them. And they were like, “Well, we need this half-issue, and if you could ink it that’d be even better. And also Trevor didn’t draw a splash page and we’ll need a place to put his credits, so if you could draw a splash page as though you were Trevor von Eeden…. We’re going to use the same guy who was inking the rest of it and we’ll just put his credits on it.” Whatever. And so I did that.

And I inked that half an issue, by that point I was out of the house and I’d moved down to the Bay area. I was sharing a studio with a bunch of other guys, and I was able to get some of those guys to pitch in when there would be something I didn’t know how to ink or know what to do.

You would consider your stint on Punisher your real mainstream break, right?

Doom Patrol was my first ongoing series. It was over at DC. When I didn’t get the Teen Titans thing, I ended up on Doom Patrol. And I did that for about a year. And then, I’d always wanted to do stuff at Marvel. For a while, while I was doing Doom Patrol, they had me do half an issue of some — oh, what the hell was it? Strange Tales, I did half an issue, which was supposed to be a “Cloak and Dagger” story, but it ended up being The Thing and Mayhem or something, and Terry Austin inked it. I was like, “Wow, this is great! Terry Austin’s inks kick ass.”

But you somehow made a breakthrough with Marvel?

Well, it was that, and also by that point I had met Todd McFarlane at that same convention up in Vancouver, and Todd and I kept in touch when he was up in Vancouver and I was in Bellingham. And Bellingham is at the north end of Washington State.

It’s right on the border, I guess?

Not that far away. I could get up and get into a car and drive up and see Todd and Wanda in their little apartment. I don’t even know if he was married at that point. He was at least dating Wanda and living with her, so they probably were married.

He was doing the book you wanted to do.

When I met him he was trying to get into Marvel.

He was just starting Spitfire and the Troubleshooters.

He had done this issue where they needed it immediately, and they said, “How fast can you do this?”

They needed a fill-in, and they called him all frantic and said, “How fast can you do this?” It was Spitfire and the Troubleshooters. And Todd said, “I can do it in three days.” And they were like, “Holy sh*t!” And so, and not only did he do it in three days, but he did full pencils in three days. And so that was good enough for them, so they gave him The Hulk, and then came out of that as a regular gig, and also he was going to do G.I. Joe. And they gave him his first script on G.I. Joe, and it was just this thing where the guy who was writing it, and the editor, really wanted a certain thing, and Todd didn’t give them that. And so they had him redraw 21 out of 22 pages. And then the next issue, he had drawn the whole issue and they were giving him a whole bunch of grief about it so he ended up having to leave the book, and it was too much stuff. And at one point he had a store signing where they had set it up and it was going to be a store signing for his second issue of G.I. Joe, which is all there was. So he went to the store to do the store signing and they had had the entire issue redrawn by another artist. And so he was like, “This isn’t even by me. It’s by somebody else.” And he didn’t even know it.

Todd was always a kind of “take charge” kind of guy even back then?

At that point he was fairly humble. He was fairly, “yes, sir, no, sir.” I think he called Roy Thomas “Mr. Thomas” all the time that he dealt with him over on Infinity Inc. He’s a good guy. And so, he knew I was a fan of the Hulk, and so on the way out on that book, he managed to convince them that I should draw his last issue. And then I’d finished up, and Hulk was during the time I was doing The Doom Patrol, and I left The Doom Patrol to do The Punisher.

And I hated it.

Punisher was a huge book at the time.

Oh, the thing is royalties didn’t show up for a year.

And if you’re a dumb kid like me, you don’t even realize what those meant. And so it just was like, “Oh, I hate this book! I’m gonna leave.” And I did it for five issues, and what I really wanted to do, I wanted to write and draw Nova. And I’d talked to the editor, Terry Kavanaugh, who was doing that bi-weekly Marvel Comics Presents, and they had approved for me to do a “Nova” serial. It was just going to be five parts, and I was going to write it and pencil it.

I never understood why you liked Nova, because I always thought of Nova as a rather lightweight character, like The Human Fly. Well, the reason is, he was new. When I was buying comics, everything that was on the stands had been going since before I was born, y’know? There was no way for me to get in on the ground floor of SpiderMan, The Hulk, or Thor, or Superman or Batman or any of those things. They went on forever, and so there was no chance of me starting fresh on those things. And Nova came along, so I embraced books like Nova, E-Man and stuff like that because they were just, I can read this starting with #1? Or starting

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Erik writing and illustrating WildC.A.T.s? Well, it happened in a cool event called “Image X-Month,” in 1994. The concept simply being that the Image founders would creatively swap books (for only one issue). For the record: Rob Liefeld on ShadowHawk #0, Jim Valentino on Youngblood #9, Marc Silvestri on Spawn #25, Jim Lee on Savage Dragon #13, Todd McFarlane on Cyberforce #8, and Larsen on WildC.A.T.s #14.

ERIK LARSEN

Vanguard! ©2007 Erik Larsen and Gary Carlson.

with something really early?

Nova, I think was the first book that I actually got #1 of.

Everything else it was a couple of issues into it at least, if not 156 issues into it.

I never really thought of it like that.

Because it was the first character that was brand new to me. It was for my generation, so to speak.

[Sighs.] My generation had Power Pack.

Good for you. That’s the thing, for many years after, there weren’t any characters who stuck around for any length of time. So I left The Punisher to go do “Nova” and — .

Why’d you draw The Punisher with all those scratches and all that wear on his face?

I just thought he didn’t look very tough. I did something where I’m going to give him weird scratches on his lips that’ll be almost like subliminal fangs. And I was like, “Oh, he’s fought Wolverine. Maybe he got caught in the lips a couple of times.”

Did you ever get any complaints from any of the editors?

Nope.They just put up with it.

Yeah, because I remember Jim Lee would draw him as real pretty.

Yeah, he was all pretty and nice-looking. So my thing with the Punisher was, by that time my hairline was already receding pretty good, so Punisher should have a receding hairline and a real widow’s peak type thing, and then he should be all scratched up and all screwed up because he’s the Punisher.

He’s got to have been into a fight.

You weren’t involved in the scripts? It just wasn’t really Marvel for you?

The kind of thing I want to draw is where guys could punch each other through walls, and Punisher would never do that.

You didn’t need all this exposition, right?

Well, it’s always really kind of grounded in reality.

Even when he was belting somebody, it was never a situation where he was sending him across the state.

Maybe he’d knock him back a couple feet. And he had to have real guns, and he had to have real this and real that. I just wasn’t that into it. And so this opportunity to go do my favorite guy on Marvel Comics Presents, okay, I’m jumping to do that. And as soon as I quit The Punisher, then I found out that, “Yeah, well, you can’t do Nova because he’s going to be in the New Warriors and we’ve got big plans for him, so we don’t want him revived in this Marvel Comics Presents story. We’re going to do it over

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here, and we’re going to do things this way,” and blah, blah, blah. My first crushing blow, and they gave me a serial with Excalibur instead, and Excalibur was a book that I had not really read, so I wasn’t really that familiar with the characters. But I had no other work, so, well, I guess I’m doing “Excalibur.” And they were saying, “Oh, don’t worry, we’ll get you a good inker on it and it’ll be great,” and they were saying they were going to get Al Milgrom on it. And I was like, “Oh, he’s good. What the hell, I’ll take Al. He’s a professional.” And then a little while later they went, “Al had to crap out, so we got you Terry Austin.” I go, “Oh, thank you God.” Who was writing the book at that point?

That serial wasn’t written by the regular guy. It was written by Michael Higgins.

You also ended up helping Todd on Spidey.

It was the “Assassination Plot,” part five. The book was running super-late, and I had gone from this weird situation where when I was on The Punisher, Carl Potts was really on the ball. He was ahead on everything. I had drawn all five of the issues and been off of the book for a month before my first issue came out. And then I went from that to doing Marvel Comics Presents, which was ahead of the game, but it wasn’t crazy ahead of the game. And then I went from that to doing Amazing Spider-Man, which they needed immediately. And as soon as I was done doing my issue of Spider-Man, I went up and visited Todd in Vancouver, and he was working on the issue before the one that I had done as a fill-in.

Were you guys drinking a lot of coffee? That was when it was bi-weekly, wasn’t it?

Yeah, it was driving him crazy. The insane thing was that he was doing that bi-weekly….

Along with his cover work and all sorts of other stuff like that.

He was doing Spider-Man and he was doing The [Incredible] Hulk and he was doing Invasion at DC. There was one month that Todd penciled 120 pages.

That’s insane, y’know? And now, to get two pages out of him is practically impossible. At that point it was just — .

On Invasion, it really showed that he might have overextended himself.

Yeah. That was a little rugged, and the inkers on it didn’t pull it together, let me just put it that way. And really what he needed at that point was guys that were going to do finishes on it and turn that stuff into some solid drawing, but they were going over the lines.

He didn’t ask you to help him out or something?

Well, I helped him out on that issue before mine of Spider-Man, because what had ended up happening was that I had drawn an appearance of this guy who was supposed to show up in the issue before, and since I got my fill-in issue done before Todd had done his, he had all these pages where the guy was roughly penciled in, but his costume wasn’t figured out yet. So I came up and was visiting, and he had me pencil in the guy so he could ink him, so I figured out how the costume was drawn while he was inking the stuff. And there were a few little panels here and

there where I’d come in and help out.

I’ve seen a couple pieces where you guys worked together very well. They usually look like his stuff.

Yeah. Well, he’s somebody that inks them like, “Ah, I’m just turning this into me.” Which is fine, because that’s what, he is the guy people bought it for, really.

So when he left Spider-Man, he offered it to you?

When he leaves on Spider-Man, yeah, I had done a fill-in. The editor, Jim Salicrup, was trying to decide who he was going to have do the book, and he had had me do that fill-in, Colleen Doran had done a fill-in one time, I think Dave Ross had done an inventory story, so he was just kind of weighing, “Okay, who can follow McFarlane and not completely kill the momentum of it?” I think he was looking at my stuff going, “Well, this guy’s kind of close. It’s in the same ballpark, at least. It’s not exactly what Todd was doing.” I think that to the untrained eye, if somebody was just looking at the stuff, they might go, “Is this the same artist?” Because we both have a similar kind of cartooniness about it. And then, when I was just putting in some of the superficialness of Todd’s stuff, and going, well, I know Todd likes the big shots of Spider-Man jumping around, so what I’m doing is big shots of Spider-Man jumping around. And I know Todd likes to do webbing, so I’m going to give him lots of webbing. So, really, the sorts of things that I was doing to dress it up were fairly superficial. It was like a big shot of Spider-Man here, more webbing than I probably ordinarily would have drawn, and just funky panel border shapes. But in terms of my actual drawing itself, I really wasn’t sitting there with Todd’s stuff open going, “I’ve got to draw lips the way Todd draws lips” and like that. It was really fairly superficial in terms of it’s got to have these elements at first glance.

One of the things I noticed when you took over was there was a lot more exaggeration, that trademark stuff you like doing, a lot of detail, a lot of background characters.

Really, when I started doing it, I got out all the stuff that I liked in Spider-Man, all the old Ditko stuff and when Gil Kane was drawing him, when Frank Miller was drawing him, and incorporated that sort of thing, where he made Spider-Man more spidery, and I was looking at the old Ditko stuff to go, “Well, how did he draw Flash Thompson, and how can I make Flash talk and look like an updated Ditko guy?” Because I wanted him to look like a later version of that. And the same thing with a lot of the villains, I was trying to get that Ditko sneer that Ditko would always make out with this cockeyed mouth thing going. Doc Ock started off with a very, real specific, interesting looking, and constructed face, and as time went on and successive artists would draw him, it would get blander and blander and blander. And whereas Flash Thompson started as this big curly-haired dope, by the time it had got to where I was doing it, he had this Steve Rogers comb-over. There’s a period there where everyone in the Avengers, all those blond guys could take their masks off, they just all look like the same guy.

That’s part of the John Buscema/John Romita school,

and it has to do with that era, I guess.

Yeah. But for me, I was just a guy who was trying to fill-in, when I was doing that book.

You and Todd updated the characters for the first time in 25 years.

Yeah, well, that’s the job, in a way, y’know, trying as best we can to make it cool. And that was really the goal. That’s all there was to it was, how can I make it cool, so people will go, “Wow, Spider-Man’s cool.”

But I read somewhere that on Amazing, the sales actually went up with you.

It went up because it wasn’t like there was something else for people to buy. If you bought Spider-Man because you liked Spider-Man, the only option was to buy my version of Spider-Man or to buy Iron Man. There was an excitement to everything in the industry, too.

Yeah. Those were cool times. It was kind of fun. I had some guy actually get sick after meeting me, actually. I don’t know what I did to him, but he was like, “Oh, I couldn’t believe I met him! Bleaugghh!” Wow, that’s flattering. I just made a guy vomit. I’m not sure if that was in New York or not. I was actually somewhat oblivious. Those were fun times. I don’t tend to dwell on the past a whole hell of a lot, but it was kind of fun times to be doing comic books.

What happened after a while with Amazing, it started to get frustrating?

With me on there, it wasn’t the book that I wanted to do. I wanted to do a book like The Hulk or, like, The Fantastic Four, or like Thor or something. There were a couple bones to pick, but it wasn’t — I don’t care, y’know, it’s not my guy. There’s always something, there’s always some little frustration when you’re drawing somebody else’s stories, because there’s always something where you’re going, “Yeah, I wouldn’t have done that.” But, y’know, whatever.

You didn’t have any creative input?

25

©2007 Erik Larsen.

ERIK LARSEN

Dragon breakdowns from the early Image days. ©2007 Erik Larsen.

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Yeah, I don’t care. I didn’t give a sh*t. It wasn’t really about that for me.

At this time you didn’t have any problems with having some other guy inking you?

No, because they were good guys, and because the editor would ask me, “Who do you want to have inking this stuff?” And I would tell him, and he’d go get the guy. And because it was Spider-Man, it wasn’t a situation, and Spider-Man was doing real well, it wasn’t a situation where you’d be asking somebody, “Hey, you wanna work on this book,” and they’d go, “Oh, no, screw that!” It was, “Hell yeah!

Spider-Man, that’s a great gig! I’ll take that!”

You had Terry inking a cover or something like that?

Well, yeah. Terry to me has always been the guy. If I could get Terry Austin to ink my stuff forever, I would have been happy.

What was the deal with Mary Jane’s big hair? Did you have a girlfriend with big hair like that?

No, it was just purely a situation of “I think this is what people want to see from this character, and so that’s what I’m going to do.” Yeah. I never had a girlfriend with that much hair.

When did you start getting a little discontented about what was going on at Marvel? Was it hearing Todd, hearing his complaints?

I don’t think we really quit. I didn’t quit as, “Oh, I hate these guy, I’ll never work with them again, and I’m discontented.” It was just a situation of going, “Well, here’s another option. Let’s try this out.” And so it wasn’t this huge thing for me of, “Oh, I hate these guys,” and, “Boy, they sure mistreated me.”

Frankly, they treated me about as well as they treated anybody. It wasn’t like they were going out of their way to be a dick to me. And I followed Todd on the Spider-Man book. And I got to ink my own stuff, which I hadn’t done before, I got to write my own stuff. I got to do some pretty major things on a book that I hadn’t really done before. They were letting me ink my own stuff when I hadn’t really inked before.

They let me write my own stuff when I hadn’t really written before. And it was on a pretty major title. It wasn’t like I was doing a back-up in an annual or something, it was the real deal.

So you wanted to be a company guy like John Romita or somebody, you were already dreaming of staying there for 20 years?

It would have been fine. But what had happened at that point was, I wanted to write my own stuff, and Todd’s Spider-Man book, I didn’t really see that, and it wasn’t presented to me as being an option. It wasn’t a situation where they were going, “Yeah, we want you to go over to this book and stay on this book.”

But wasn’t seeing your art all over place, in ads and merchandising, and knowing you weren’t getting royalties for things with your Spider-Man art on it — did that sort of thing ever bother you?

At the time, it was, “I’m going to try to draw this in such a way that they’ll put it on a shirt.” But it was, “Oh, this’d be cool! This really cool shirt shot! If they don’t take that from the book and put it on a shirt, something’s wrong with those guys.” And it didn’t

really…

That didn’t register.

It didn’t register that much that these guys are ripping you off in any way. It was like, that’s the routine. This is fine.

Todd was weary of that kind of stuff.

Todd’s wife had given birth to a kid, and he was a dad for the first time, and it was, “Why am I sitting here busting my ass? I’ve got a kid to bounce on my knee. What am I doing?”

You didn’t think, once you guys started Image, that they’d blacklist you, that you’d never get work in comics again or anything?

There was always that fear. And the books that we were doing weren’t open anymore.

Well, Todd told you what Terry Stewart said, about you guys just being hired hands, you didn’t feel any resentment about that? That they could hire somebody off the street to draw Spider-Man, or something?

No, it may have at the time, I don’t remember. I think there was always some kind of camaraderie, “We’re all doing this together and we’re all in this together.” But I didn’t talk to Terry Stewart, myself. I don’t think I’ve even met Terry Stewart.

He was the one that brought you in, right? Or was it Rob? I was there before Todd.

Who brought you into Image, I meant.

Well, me, Rob and Valentino were kind of the first three guys.

Okay. So Todd didn’t even know what you were talking about at that point?

Well, Rob was buddies with Dave Olbrich and the guys over at Malibu, and at one point they just solicited a book through Malibu that was just called The Executioners, and it had a great big X in it, and the characters just looked way too much like X-Force, and the guys at Marvel really got lost in that. But that idea of going and doing something else took hold, really, at that point. I know that at one point Rob was talking to DC and they were going to do Team Titans (with an “m”), and the original Youngblood guys were DC guys. Speedy was Shaft, Harlequin was… whatever her name was in that book, I don’t even remember her name. And there was a character whose name was something like Blok, who was in The Legion of Super-Heroes. So it was just variations on different guys that were already at DC. And then DC ultimately passed on that, and then like, “Well, I’ve got these guys.” And he also had at one point created the other Youngblood team, and he was going to do that with Gary Carlson over at Megaton. Rob was one of the last guys who got on board to do Megaton stuff. He was in one of the last issues of that. He’s a couple of years younger than I am.

So it wasn’t Todd? I thought I heard it was Todd and Rob at the start.

No. I think in Todd’s world Image started when he came aboard, because that’s really, to him, when the story started, y’know? So for any of us, it’s like, when did the story start for you? “Well, the story started for me when I was involved.” Y’know? Because, to Todd,

it wasn’t even called Image Comics necessarily when it was just those guys. And really it was a situation where I was waiting for Marvel to let me do something. I pitched Nova as an ongoing series by that point, and they were getting back to me, and it took them a long time. Eventually they came back and told me, “Well, you can do it as a mini-series. We won’t commit to doing it as an ongoing book.” And I was like, “Well, a mini-series, that’s not — “ I mean, the pressure’s off, in a way there. And DC at that point was trying to get me to do something for them, and they wanted me to do a Lobo mini-series which ultimately Keith Giffen illustrated, that Lobo: Infanticide mini-series that Keith had done layouts for. I had done layouts for the first issue of that, and I drew a couple of pages for a trade paperback collection of Lobo’s Greatest Hits, and so it’s like, “Okay, I’m going to be doing Lobo. That’ll be next — I’ll do a Lobo mini-series, I’ll do a Nova mini-series, and, oh, then there’s this Image Comics thing, I’ll do a Dragon mini-series.” To me it wasn’t like, “I’m leaving Marvel, I’m leaving DC, and I’m going with these guys for good.” My intention was that I would get

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Erik’s cover for The Comics Journal #222. ©2007 Erik Larsen.

ERIK LARSEN

The luscious Dart! ©2007 Erik Larsen.

back and do these other things, y’know, and especially if this Image thing didn’t pan out, it’s like, “Well, I could still go back and do my Nova mini-series.”

And then the Image stuff did pan out, and the other stuff became, “Well, I don’t really have a strong desire to do this now.”

They killed that Nova series anyway.

They didn’t kill it. I killed it, in a way. Well, Fabian (Nicieza) and I had talked and were pretty good friends, and I’d given him a couple of ideas on things I was going to do in Nova and things I wanted to do with the characters, and he had utilized some of those things. At one point we were going to pitch, we did, actually, pitch to try and do X-Factor, and we cobbled together a team of characters that were going to be in our version of the X-Factor, and one of the things in that was a redesign of a character called Crimson Commando, we were just going to call him “Commando.” And that became SuperPatriot!

The visual that I came up with for that is SuperPatriot.

And ultimately I ended up taking the SuperPatriot design with me and using him at Image, and he took all my crappy notes for Nova and used what he could there for a Nova ongoing series he wrote. And ultimately he worked with Chris Marrinan doing that, and then Chris Marrinan took over drawing it and writing it.

Todd always felt that you guys needed to concentrate on doing just your Image books, he just wanted you to do your Image book, because it couldn’t work for Image Comics if you worked for Marvel and Image at the same time.

He might have said that. You know, Valentino didn’t have any other source of income other than at Marvel Comics, and it was his intention that he was going to continue doing Guardians of the Galaxy.

Maybe, I think he wanted one of his buddies to start drawing the book and he was going to do layouts or something. I think Marat Mychaels or someone was going to draw it, I don’t remember.

You had started becoming friends with Jim Valentino and Rob already at this point?

Yeah, I knew Rob. See, early, early on, after moving down to the Bay area — I moved down to the Bay area in ’87. Rob had come up for a convention, WonderCon, and so I knew Rob from that, and we got to be pals. We’d go down and visit Rob at Rob’s house, and Todd and I would go down there and sleep on his bedroom floor, and he lived with his parents. It was a real bunch of kids just hanging out.

And how did you meet Jim Valentino?

That was really through, as far as I know it was through Rob, and it was through some convention. I didn’t know Jim particularly well. I didn’t hang out at his place.

Were you one of the guys who looked down on Jim joining

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Image? Because Todd did.

Not really. Because it was “these are the guys who are doing it,” and I didn’t know we were supposed to be the top guys in the business; it just happened that we were.

But that’s why it worked, because it was the top guys.

Yeah, that’s why it worked, because Todd happened to be there, and Rob happened to be there. Really, the guy that we went after was Jim Lee. Were you friends with Jim Lee? No. I didn’t really know him, and I wasn’t even part of going after him because that was at a New York auction that I did not attend. And that was when Todd went and talked to Terry Stewart and all that stuff. At that auction he went and actively berated Jim Lee to get him to come onboard, and Marc Silvestri happened to be there.

I was talking to Portacio, he and Jim felt that they were starting to get a little bothered when they would see people with their art on T-shirts and all sorts of merchandise.

Yeah.

So Todd actually got them at a good time.

Yeah. The thing is that I am not a particularly money-motivated or concerned human being. That’s just my nature. And my wife gives me nothing but sh*t about it because there will be times that I’ll just sit there and go to my office and open up a drawing and there’s, like, “six checks here that you haven’t put in the bank account. What the hell’s wrong with you? You could have had interest going on those.” At one point I went and put money in the bank and they’d say, “Yeah, well, these two checks, they’re too old.” “Oh, well, whatever.”

There’s something that Todd likes to point out. In the past, comic book artists didn’t communicate with each other because you guys worked by yourselves, this was one thing that this Image thing helped, you guys were able to share experiences and see what was really going on in this business.

Yeah.

The life of an isolated freelancer isn’t exactly that great.

It was all right, though, and by the time royalties were kicking in on the stuff, I had no complaints.

So it wasn’t a sense of camaraderie when you guys started getting together? Was it, like, “I really believe in this cause. Maybe this can work.”

Yeah, well, it was, “Sure, this can work. I think this can work, and I think this would be fun.” And I think in terms of the group that there was no real groupthink involved. Because I was going, “I just want to draw 500 straight issues of Savage Dragon.” And Todd’s thing might be, “I want my character to become an icon, and that people walking down the street will go, ‘I know who Spawn is, I’m aware of Spawn.’” He wanted his creation to be part of the public consciousness. He even felt early on that, “In order for that to happen, I’ve gotta have other guys drawing my book.” Y’know, Batman wasn’t just one guy, or just one guy’s art style. Batman was numerous people coming on board and dealing with this character and taking on this character. That, to Todd, was one of the things that made a character like that

iconic was just the succession of creators that came on and did something with it. So there was that, and then I think part of Jim Lee’s was, “I just want to make a big pile of cash.” Not that Jim’s going to outright say that, but that was certainly the impression the rest of us had of him, was, “This guy just wants to get some money out of this thing.” And there’s nothing wrong with that, in a manner of speaking, as long as you couch it in the right ways. You’re saying, “I just want to provide for my family,” who’s going to fault you for that?

Rob was kind of like that, too. He had that drive right away, “let’s put out a bunch of titles.”

Rob was probably too young and too scatterbrained and too everything else. Rob had a lot of, “I just thought that would be a cool drawing.” He didn’t so much have stories that he wanted to tell as he had shots that he wanted to draw, and those two things were not necessarily compatible. And so he was just, “I want to get a million characters on paper as quickly as I can,” and his was just always a big costume party of characters jumping around.

Before you guys got together, was there some kind of a way that you guys wanted to get this organized? Like, a business plan or philosophy?

Not really. No, not particularly.

What did you guys do at the first meeting? Do you remember? Did you write the by-laws right away?

No. We could have talked it through. I think really by the time we actually got the group of us in a room together, we were already announcing it. It wasn’t something where we got together on our own, privately, and dickered around and figured it all out.

We were down at Marc Silvestri’s house in Malibu, and we kind of announced it and talked about it. We told everybody what we were thinking about doing, and then we told all the Wizard guys to leave the room. (laughs) Then we continued on and figured out what the hell we were going to do.

How did you guys pick who was going to have the first book released? Rob was already ready, right?

Yeah, Rob was already committed, and he had a separate deal, too, than the one that ultimately became the Image deal with Malibu. He had a different arrangement, and it was a different kind of profit than it was later on with us. Because Todd’s thing was, “No, 90/10. We gotta get 90 percent, they’re going to get 10 percent.” It’s like, “That’s pretty hardcore, dude. And you want to hammer that through, more power to ya.” But Rob’s was somewhat less generous than that was.

Towards Malibu?

Malibu, yeah.

Did Malibu benefit from printing these books?

Sure! They got cash out of it.

I was talking to Olbrich, he was like, “Enh, it wasn’t as big as people think it was.”

The thing was that, really, in order for them to get the same kind of money that came from any one individual comic, they’d basically have to do nine of them to get as much money as the main guy got from that one comic. They were getting 10 percent and the artist was getting 90 percent, you know, so they were

doing a whole line of books when there were only seven of us.

I thought they benefited from the publicity.

They did benefit a great deal from publicity, and they were advertising all their wretched sh*t on the backs of our books.

Uh-huh. Well, was there a falling out sooner or later?

It just seemed to many of us that, well, even at a 90/10 split, what the hell are they doing? Their 10 percent doesn’t seem like they’re — and they were getting a percentage on top of that, as well. And it eventually came down to just, “Enh, let’s just do this on our own. We don’t need them. It’s not that complicated.”

That’s what Todd said! Todd said, “The printing aspect wasn’t that hard. We can do this on our own. Again, we don’t need anybody.”

Well, Todd had an uncle who was outputting film, so he knew that, and when we were dealing with Malibu, they kept having us talk to the printers. It’s like, “We’re talking to the printers.

The only people we aren’t necessarily talking to are Diamond.” And those Diamond guys kept coming by and talking to us at the conventions anyway, so we knew them, and we knew their faces. What service were these guys providing at this point other than a way of advertising their next big thing, The Protectors, the Ultraverse, and whatever else they were going to plug the next time out?

So it just didn’t seem like any real incentive to continue the relationship.

Well, were you into the business aspect early? Or, did you just want to be left alone to draw your book?

Well, I was as involved as anybody in any of the decisions that were made.

I heard some of you guys weren’t that interested in the particulars.

Well, we’d all draw at meetings. That was just kind of the way it worked.

Some of you didn’t want to start your own studio like the other guys; you didn’t want to do an Extreme Studio or an Homage Studio?

No, because I saw the writing on the wall. You’d look at it and you’d see those kind of numbers, and you know historically where numbers have been and what those are, and you could go, “Yeahhh, I’m just guessing, this is just a shot in the dark, but I’m thinking that this is not going to stay the way it is forever.”

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The exotic She-Dragon! ©2007 Erik Larsen.

ERIK LARSEN

Variant cover for Image’s Elephantmen

by Richard Starkings. ©2007 Active Images.

You thought like that in the beginning.

Yeah.

Were you surprised that a book that you did on your own with a character that nobody knew about, sold close to a million copies?

Well, you’re pleased, y’know? And “this is all right.

Kickass.” And it just hit with enough of a buzz and got enough of a push and enough of a play, and it was helped a great deal by Wizard. Well, there’s that, and there’s people who wanted to be part of the whole thing.

When Image started, you knew right away it was just going to be Savage Dragon for you and that’s it?

Yeah, from the very, very first I was just talking about it. But I had just left Marvel, and I had just pitched, during the X-Factor book — my first inclination was just “I should do Super-Patriot and get that in print right away.” Get it out there before Fabian did.

So you wanted to do something with a Marvel vibe?

Whatever you guys did, you wanted it to have that sensibility… that it felt like a Marvel book?

I don’t think anybody really thought about it that much, really. It was certainly not that specific, “We

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want these to look and feel like Marvel Comics.” It was just that was where we came from, and so it just felt like that’s the way things ought to be.

Once you picked Dragon for your series, did you write a bible right away?

No idea. I knew when I had done that fanzine, Graphic Fantasy, years ago and so what I got out of that was something I’m building toward. I want to incorporate the story eventually, at some point I want to have Dragon be in this situation where I can just retell this story and have there be this thing going on, and that was about it. So I had an ending or a place that I wanted it to get to, but beyond that it was very vague.

That origin that you wrote for him in the Image Comics Anniversary hardcover — was that something you started with, or did that come out later?

Well, it was, pretty much — I’d never sat down and drawn it before, it wasn’t 100 percent line-forline figured out, but it’s pretty damn close. I knew the basic stuff about it. There’s no big surprise in there for me — it’s important when you’re doing the story and you’re dropping clues about the character and where he came from and like that, you better know what the hell, where he came from, before you start giving things. If you start making up that sh*t on the fly, it really shows, y’know?

Were you self-confident in your writing at the start?

Was there anybody you went to for a second opinion?

No. Not even your wife?

No. But she was your editor.

She didn’t read it; she didn’t even read the book.

You just had her name there as editor?

Yeah. Todd had put Wanda in his, so I was like, “Well, I’ll put Jannie in mine.” And really the rationale there was fans are comfortable seeing that there was an editor involved. And that was it. There was no, “Yeah, we’re going to rely on these people to keep us straight,” or anything like that. It was just fans expect there to be an editor, so let’s just say there’s an editor and let it go at that.

Would you talk to Todd or anybody?

No. When you did that first issue, that’s the first time they saw it?

Yep. And there was nobody to bounce ideas off of, nothin’.

How did that feel?

There were times when Todd called me and we talked about things in Spawn that he was thinking of, and there were different occasions when I helped him out, but on Dragon, no, it was always just me.

Would the other guys be like that, too? Would they call you and just want to talk or something?

Not so much. I think to the outside world it seemed like this is a group of guys that are all pals and they’re all hanging out together, but really the times that we hung out together, for the most part, there were other people there who were witnessing that we were hanging out together. There were very few times where we would just go, “We’re going to have

an Image meeting and nobody but this small group of guys is going to be there.” It was always a situation where we would have a meeting, and there was a convention going on.

You got married around the time the first issue came out, right?

I got married May 31st, and I think my issue came out in June.

I remember reading the letters page where you mentioned that the second issue was late because you went on a honeymoon. Was that the only issue that you got out late?

Oh, man, no. No. It was terrible.

But how did you get that self-discipline? Because, now you didn’t have an editor, you’re totally on your own to get that book out. Was that a problem?

It wasn’t a problem. The big problem was that we didn’t have anything figured out. And, like you’re sitting there trying to build a house and there’s no foundation. And that’s kind of tough.

Did you write a script, or were you writing along as you were drawing it?

I wrote a script because I knew — that part I did kind of have figured out. And that was just a situation when I was at Marvel, that’s what I did, and so it was a situation really where I just got used to that as part of the routine.

Yeah, but what did you do, you’d just write a plot?

I’d write the saddest, sparsest plot you’ve ever seen in your life. And then I’d sit down and start drawing.

I was reading this old interview: you said back in your Spider-Man days that you could barely draw one book once a month, and that was doing just the pencils. I can’t imagine what it was like when you had to do everything else, and supervise a bunch of guys to make sure the colors were ready, and all that sort of thing.

Yeah, it’s a whole different thing.

But were your books ever more than 30 days late?

Oh, hell, yeah.

What was your worst case?

My worst case was Savage Dragon/Megaton Man. That was the worst.

Was that because you were working with somebody else?

No, I was really late on my regular book, and because we’d solicited that issue to come out right away.

Was that one of the big problems: that you guys could come up with an idea and draw a cover and just solicit it and then worry about it when the deadline came around?

Yeah. Well, also, at that time the window was much bigger than it later became.

You guys changed it! Thanks to Image.

Well, it got changed thanks to us. We didn’t purposefully come along and change it, but that’s like, when we started off it was a ninety-day window.

You could literally just solicit a book, and wait and find out how good the orders were before deciding whether you were going to draw the book or not.

The guys wouldn’t have meetings about this? Like, people would have to get their sh*t together, about having books late; solicit books when they haven’t even done the

artwork they were supposed to do?

It seems like that would be a really good idea, and to start up a new comic book company, I would probably insist on that.

Well, you’re the publisher now.

But we didn’t. Well, we can’t get away with that kind of crap now.

Was Tony Lobito, Image’s first official publisher, a real softie with you guys?

Lobito had no power at all. He was Rob’s pal and that’s pretty much it. He didn’t know comics, and he was coming into this out of nowhere, and really, what was his place telling anybody what to do?

That’s like what they do now, how can [New York Yankees manager] Joe Torre tell a guy that makes $25 million what to do?

Yeah.

Was there a book that was returnable and that just crushed you?

Well, the Dragon/Megaton book had come about

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©2007 Erik Larsen.

ERIK LARSEN

A 1994 pin-up of Dragon with a handful of Image characters from the era. ©2007 the respective copyright holders.

and it was super-late. And it was so late that it became returnable, and the thing about that is, we didn’t have our sh*t together particularly well internally, and so what had happened was, I got paid. And when I got paid, I paid Don Simpson his part of it.

And then sometime later the office came back and said, “Yeah, we overpaid you and we’ve got to take this money out of your next issue.” And wow, that’s kind of severe.

That was your wake-up call?

Yeah, you’d better get your act together or, if this is going to be going on, you’re in deep sh*t and you can’t be depended upon.

And you only had one book. Could you imagine, like, Jim and Rob, who had tons of late books?

Yeah. That would be worse, to be in that kind of situation.

Was that one of the reasons you guys brought in [Larry] Marder, as executive director in the mid-’90s, to put some discipline into the line?

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I don’t know. I’m not sure what Marder’s calling was. Marder probably basically kept us from killing each other.

When was the honeymoon over for the seven of you?

Immediately, or was it good going the first year?

It all seemed like it should work, and it all did work to a certain extent, but it’s a tough thing when you’ve got a bunch of undisciplined guys. And we were starting from scratch, so it wasn’t like we were coming into this with an established universe where you could just go, “Okay, well, we’ll just use Iron Man.” We were making up the rules as we went along, and everything was fairly ill-defined.

Somebody did a really good job at the beginning of making it seem like a cohesive universe, like your own publications, there seemed to be a center, you had an Image #0 and your characters would be appear in each others books… .

No, we did our best to do that, and we liked the idea of Marvel Comics and DC Comics, and we had a shared universe, and so, part of that was, wouldn’t it be cool to do a crossover with somebody else’s guys.

And it was something really early on, even when we were at Marvel, there was always the talk between me, Rob and Todd, “One of these days we’re going to have a crossover, the three of us, the characters will just go back and forth from one book to another, and it’ll just be fun.” Rob and Todd did that in X-Force, and I did kind of crossover with having some of Rob’s characters show up in Dragon, and then eventually crossover with Spawn and Savage Dragon. So we got to kind of do the stuff that we wanted to do.

You had Badrock in one of your early issues. Like, you’re not on the friendliest terms with Rob now. Was there something in the by-laws that said you could still print it if you want to?

Well, that was really the understanding. It was never something where we all signed contracts or anything like that.

You guys didn’t plan for a falling out between the founders?

It was if you’re going to use somebody else’s characters, you had to ask if you can use their characters. That’s all it was. I thought, “That’s fine; that makes sense.” And then the other part of that is that once you’ve given permission for somebody to use your character in something, that is in perpetuity. If I reprinted a story that had Badrock in it, I couldn’t create any new art with Badrock in it, but, because Rob had given me permission to use Badrock in it in the first place, I can reprint the story until I’m blue in the face.

So at least you guys foresaw that.

These things just came up because they made sense to do things that way. To do them another way really would be just insane and you’d have guys going, “Well, I’m going to go to another company now,” and then, “Okay, well, you can’t use my guy anymore,” and it would just get really messy. So this is just a basic “let’s cover our ass.” Just ask, and Rob used enough of other people’s stuff that it would really get messy if suddenly he was to come in and go, “Okay, you guys can’t use Badrock anymore in

any of your reprints.” All right, whatever, I’ll put an eyepatch on him, y’know, color him a different color.

You could do that kind of stuff.

This shows that there was some thought when Image was started.

Yeah, well, a little bit — a small tiny amount of thought in that sort of thing. But it also just makes a certain amount of sense. Let’s do things this way rather than risk some really messy situation. So we’re not complete dunderheads, it just looks that way.

Some of the other Image founders brought along some artist friends with them to do books — did you bring anybody along?

I’m not even really 100 percent sure who everybody’s guy was, but Jerry Ordway and Al Gordon doing WildStar, that was as much me as anybody, and that is another situation. It’s like, well, this makes a certain amount of sense. We’d been going after a lot of Marvel guys, let’s get some DC guys in here who know what the hell they’re doing and can do a good comic book.

Was there more to this than just trying to help these guys out?

Well, part of it, too, was that we were blowing it left and right, so it was, “Who do we know who’s dependable? Who can we get who will actually do a book?”

So that’s how books like Tribe and others came into the old.

Well, the problem there is that those guys were, like, “We’ll do it! We can get our book done!” And they completely did not get their book done, and spent all that time getting interviewed and talking about the stuff, and not enough of their time actually doing the work, that became an issue for some of the guys. I think the problem with that is I really liked that book, and I’m sitting there, and it was another year and another New York show, and I was at this New York show, and there ended up being an Image meeting that I wasn’t at where they kicked out a whole mess of books. And one of the books that they kicked out was Tribe. At the time that they kicked out that book, I was in New York telling those guys how much I liked their comic. I get back home and it’s like, “What happened at the meeting?” “We kicked these guys out.” “Oh, sh*t.”

Who kicked them out?

Todd and Rob; there were just a number of books where everyone was like, well, we took these guys on under the impression that they were going to get their act together, they were going to be the guys who were going to be making their deadlines, and now they’re not. So if they’re not going to do that, then let’s not do this. Let’s not continue this relationship.

I was reading an old interview with Todd, and he wanted to have books hit a certain sales point, to sell I don’t know how many copies.

Well, they said that a little bit, but as far as I know, nobody’s book was kicked out because it wasn’t selling well, and I think part of that also was so they could say to the next publisher, “Yeah, they kicked

me out because my book wasn’t selling well enough, and they wanted me to be able to be selling a million copies and I wasn’t able to do that, but I’m selling this huge number, will you take me on?”

When did you feel like your house was finally in order?

Was it by the issues in the twenties or thirties?

Whatever. [laughs] Well, you took on some other series. You did that Super-Patriot, y’know — .

Yeah, well, I did those pretty early on.

You had all these characters, you had to do something with them.

Well, really the plan was to get Freak Force out by the end of ’93, because I had Vic Bridges working on it from Keith Giffen’s plots, and then I basically set up the first six issues of the Dragon book, the ongoing series, to get all of those characters in place so that they could all go off on their own. And then I had there be a SuperPatriot mini-series that Dave Johnson drew being done at the same time to get him ready to join that group. And then by the end of it, that series ended and the Dragon book kicked all the Freak Force characters out so that by the end of it they could have their own series and it made sense for them to have their own series.

And that, to me, was when everything was ready. I guess if my house was in order, that’s when it would have been, was when the Freak Force stuff started.

You had lot of momentum then? Like, you just wanted to work all 24 hours?

Well, I didn’t have kids yet, so what else am I going to do? But, yeah, we wanted to do comics, and I just liked all that stuff, and I liked comics.

Did you want to have characters spin off, like you wanted Freak Force to have their own regular series?

Yeah, definitely.

And what happened? It just didn’t get the reception?

Well, it did initially.

Vic Bridges was really good.

Whatever happened to him?

Vic Bridges? He went off someplace and that was the end of it.

You must be one hell of an editor, because no one’s gotten that much art out of Jason Pearson.

Yeah, Jason’s an interesting guy.

Were you prepared to be an editor for others?

Well, I didn’t realize just how freelancers lied so much. It didn’t even occur to me that that went on.

It was a revelation. It was like,

33

Here he comes to save the day! It’s Mighty Man! ©2007 Erik Larsen.

ERIK LARSEN

The splash to Erik’s powerful origin story for the Dragon, which premiered in the Image Comics: Tenth Anniversary hardcover, and was later reprinted in Savage Dragon #0. ©2007 Erik Larsen.

“Wow, these guys are completely full of sh*t.”

I didn’t realize that. I didn’t think that was cool.

What’s going on here?

Did the Dragon: Blood & Guts limited series come out late, with Jason Pearson?

Yeah, essentially what happened with that was I just didn’t solicit it until he was done, because I could see the writing on the wall. You look at that mini-series and you look at the covers and you go, “Oh, these are dated ’93, ’94, ’95.” [laughs] This guy took his sweet time doing this. And I was an editor on that in really the truest sense in that his scripts would come in and I would edit things and I would change words and would monkey with stuff, because at the end of the day this is my character.

And Adam Hughes really tested you, too, right?

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Yeah, you know how he is. Damn it. Damn it, you know, because — .

But you wanted his art.

I love these guys! The problem is that I really love their work, and — .

But they don’t make it easy.

No! They made it f*cking difficult. It was just a pain in the ass. You like these guys’ stuff and you want to do stuff with them, and yet you hope for the best and it just breaks your heart because it didn’t work out.

He was supposed to do an annual for you, right?

He was supposed to do, yeah, the Savage Dragon Annual, and then it just didn’t come about.

He did do a back-up story for you.

Yeah, kind of what compelled me is he did this back-up. It took forever for him to do the back-up, but it did get done. And so it was like, I had given him layouts, and he had taken the layouts and then drawn them in not sequential order, so that was the thing, I would get the pages in, “Well, here are pages one, two, six and eight.” You need to get them scripted so that it can be lettered on the board, so that the inker can be inking it. And so I would script it, but I didn’t know what the rest of the artwork looked like. But I knew what my layouts were, so I scripted it with my layouts in mind. And then when the new pages would come through, I’d have to edit them down or change them because the new artwork didn’t match what I had done in my layouts. And there were cases where I had people blathering on, and when the pages came in, “Well, there’s not that much room for copy. I’d better take this down a few notches.” And so, but that had come about [because] he actually had worked on it, so it’s “let’s try this guy on an annual.” What I really wanted was, in the comics that I drew when I was a kid, and in the Megaton stuff, the Dragon had a wife.

So my idea was, I’ll have Adam do the story that introduces Dragon’s wife. And I started laying it out, and then I got caught up in everything, so I ended up going, “Well, who can I get to write this thing?” And Tom and Mary Bierbaum were guys that had worked with Adam before, and they were good guys, and they were kind of Adam’s choice to do it, so I had put them to work on the rest of the story, and we talked through what I needed to get accomplished on it.

And Adam drew the first four pages, and he’d done rough layouts for most of the rest of it, and he did thumbnails. And he drew, like, the wrong woman. She looked nothing like the way Dragon’s wife looked. She just was somebody else entirely. I was like, “This is supposed to be introducing this character, and this isn’t the character! This is somebody else! You drew somebody else in there.” I think I’d sent the pages back and

was asking him to redraw stuff. I just didn’t get anything out of him. I didn’t get any real response out of him, and — .

You couldn’t reach him on the phone?

I didn’t get anything out of him. I didn’t get any work out of him, I couldn’t reach him. And it just went on, and it just became a huge amount of time, and I probably was not as persistent as I should have been. And so I ended up going, “Oh, just get somebody else.” And there were a couple different people that I tried out. David Williams started drawing it, and he similarly turned into a snail. I got one page more than Adam did. And then some other guy whose name escapes me, and I ended up getting Rick Mays to do it.

He’s good.

Yeah, he’s good, and he followed Adam’s layouts to a certain extent, and it was like, “Oh, this stuff will work.” Would I have rather had Adam? Yes. He’s the guy that I wanted to do it.

You were picky about the guys who drew your books.

Also, probably because I didn’t have a studio, and partially because I didn’t really, a lot of clones didn’t come along, I didn’t really have a bunch of people who drew like me that I could just go, “I’m going to do a bunch of books and they’re all going to look like Erik Larsen books.”

I think the only guy I’ve ever seen, that Vic Bridges guy is pretty close, though. He has your style — .

No, Vic is a Byrne guy. I had a bunch of guys who were clones of other guys. I look at Vic’s stuff and, I mean, there was a time when Vic was doing a book for Americomics called Faze One Fazers, and there were people who thought that was John Byrne working under a pseudonym. I was like, “Wow, that’s pretty good.”

When I was reading your early issues, I felt like there was a Byrne influence in you.

Yeah, there is. There is definitely. I think of myself as being somewhat influenced by John.

Were you crushed when Byrne and some of these other veterans spoke against Image?

Sure.

You guys were doing something that earlier artists didn’t have the cojones to do, at the time.

Well, I need to say that the opportunity had not presented itself; we’ll just put it that way. Really, it was a case where the stars aligned themselves in such a way that made it that it could work out like that. They probably could have done that a few years earlier had Pacific Comics been more aggressive.

There was a period there where you probably could have pulled Walt Simonson, Frank Miller, Howard Chaykin and John Byrne, had all those guys left from their respective books five to ten years before Image started. That would have been a big stinkin’ deal.

But it didn’t happen.

But they still did stuff after Image… Bravura.

Yeah, they kind of did, but it wasn’t a situation where they were stepping off those top books at that point. By the time Byrne was really doing stuff on his own, he was stepping off Namor and She-Hulk and West Coast Avengers, and it’s not the same thing as

had he been stepping off of the X-Men or Fantastic Four or even Superman. If you go from those to going, “Now he’s going to create his own stuff,” holy crap! Whereas now he’s not doing West Coast Avengers; it’s an issue of timing there.

All of a sudden, I think when people saw Image succeed a little, the floodgates opened for creator-driven books.

Yeah! Absolutely.

All of a sudden creators became more important.

Yeah. Yeah, and the idea that, “Oh, this could work, it worked for these guys.” There are also a number of people who looked at Image Comics and the Image Comics creators and said, “These guys suck!”

Y’know? “These guys, this is just an untalented lot of individuals, right here. How come they’re even getting any attention at all? We’re way better than those guys are. We should do this…

That’s why they’re “legends.”

And it didn’t work. And the reason it didn’t work is just an issue of timing. And the reason the Image comics did work is that same kind of timing that, it was that these guys weren’t stepping off of those top

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Holy moley! Uh… another page from “The Way It Was” — the story was also published in Savage Dragon #0. ©2007 Erik Larsen.

ERIK LARSEN

Savage Dragon #16 cover. ©2007 Erik Larsen.

books. Had it been that they’re stepping off of nontop books, it would not have had that same effect. It’s like, “Aw, he’s leaving Spider-Man, “and, “Aw, he’s leaving X-Men,” he’s leaving… holy crap! And what’s he going to do? Oh my God! When you six did the Chicago show [in the summer of 1992], was that at the high point? [GAK Note: Jim Lee wasn’t present at Chicago.]

I guess. It hurt us. In terms of me and how I like to enjoy a comic book convention, it sucked, because you’re sitting there doing a show…

But you guys were “The Show” at that show.

Yeah, but we were separated from the regular show, and just as a guy who likes to wander around looking through back issues, I wasn’t able to do that.

And okay, sure it’s great to be one of the Beatles, but I liked being able to go buy back issues of Iron Man or whatever the hell it was.

Did the opportunities just present themselves, to do the cartoon show and the toys?

Well, the opportunities present themselves, people ask. It’s like, “All right, sure. Let’s try that out and see how it works.”

When Image had these group meetings, did they talk a

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lot about the money coming in and all the deals they were going to do outside of comics?

No, not really.

All the videos and all the toys?

There were guys who would want to impress upon the other guys, “I’m doing okay.” But it really wasn’t that much of a bragging session, where we’d get together, “Oh, yeah, well.”

When your house burned, did it change you a little bit? Like, did it make you less reliable on material goods and possessions?

It cleaned out the garage.

But did it change your outlook on life a little bit? Because I know that, for a family, it just crushes you when you lose everything.

It was really a bizarre situation, because we were gone for the day, and it really was like going to the parking garage and not being able to find your car, except it was your house. There was an unrealness to it, where it didn’t really dawn on you that, “Did this actually happen? It’s really strange that this happened. This doesn’t seem real, somehow, that this could possibly have gone on.” And you don’t have some of the stuff that you had, which is a shame. Again, I’m not really that material of a human being. The only things that I was going to miss, is I had this really cool Shadow cover by Frank Robbins and now that artwork doesn’t exist anymore.

You lost all your own original art, too, right?

Everything that I had drawn up to that point, all the comics that I’d created that had the Dragon in them when I was a little kid, all that stuff was gone.

Did it totally burn down?

Completely to the ground — there were 2,000 homes that went up in this gigantic fire.

And I wasn’t there. We were gone for the day.

We were at a birthday party.

But does it change your outlook a little bit? Did you feel a little violated?

Not really. I don’t really feel like that. I don’t know.

I guess I’m a different kind of egg, that I just take things in stride, roll with the punches.

I just figure that your home would be very important.

That’s your one place where you can do what you want to do.

I’m fine wherever I’m at, and that I could live on a pile of rocks if that was the only option. I’d be like, “Oh, whatever. Do I have a drawing board? Great.”

But this was right before Image — this happened in ’91, right?

Yeah, ’91. It was right smack before the big Image days.

Is the Dragon comic still well enough today to keep going?

Yeah.

Could you survive on it?

It’s fine. I mean, it’s not like I’m getting filthy rich doing it. If it was, “Could you support your family on your income alone doing Savage Dragon?” Probably

not. On the other hand, I don’t need to do that. I’ve got a wife and my wife’s got a job, and I’m the publisher of Image Comics and I draw a salary from doing that. It works out okay.

When you returned to Marvel, was that something you wanted, to go back there in 2001? Did you have some unfinished business there?

I’m not sure why that came about. Well, I did it because I was thinking, well, this will get me some attention that may help me on Savage Dragon.

Maybe if people go, “I read this guy in The Defenders” or “I read this guy doing Spider-Man”…

It’s the same kind of nonsense that people use now.

“Now I’m going to go do a Marvel book, and then when I go do my creator-owned book, then people are really going to pay attention, dammit!” And that was the thought. But how the stuff ultimately plays out unfortunately is that the fans — give them a choice between buying Savage Dragon or buying the Amazing Spider-Man by the same guy, “I’ll buy Amazing Spider-Man,” because — .

That’s what I would think. If you stayed on the Dragon there’s no choice but to find you there.

Yeah, yeah. That’s it. I was also thinking at that point, “I’ve been doing this for a while, and there are people who — .“ You know, if Wizard magazine doesn’t cover Savage Dragon, and he’s not all over the damn place, those guys would not even know that he exists.

I thought that was one of the reasons you did crossovers, you had him team-up with Superman and Hellboy.

Yeah. Whatever. I did all sorts of crazy things for all sorts of crazy reasons. They sometimes made sense, and sometimes not so much.

But you never toured the country or something?

No. It’s just, I don’t have the energy for it, and ultimately that’s not what I got into this to do.

Savage Dragon has become his own entity, after 15 years on the stands. When you’re gone, do you want him to keep going for your kids?

You mean, beyond me?

Yeah.

No. No, not really. When I pass on, the book ends.

That’s it.

But you want them to manage your characters.

Whatever. They can collect the reprints if they want to. I don’t sit here and go, “I hope that one day Joe Larsen is drawing Savage Dragon.” I would hope that these guys have something else that they really want to do, rather than have to pick up their dad’s toys.

The first big blow that rattled Image was “Heroes Reborn”. Was that when things started changing a little bit? Or when Rob left?

I don’t know what Rob’s deal was, exactly. I know that, years after the fact, he has said that, “Yeah, I was planning on taking off.” But I know that at the time, he was kicked out of Image. Mostly because it was Marc [Silvestri] going, “I can’t stay in this company with this guy who’s actively trying to steal creators away from my end of the company. I’m trying to do my own books, and here this guy is

actively trying to take creators away.” And okay, that makes sense. Ultimately what happened there was that we got [together], y’know, and given the choice of having Marc at the company, and having Rob at the company, I’ll take Marc; because Marc’s books sold at least as well or better, and Marc’s work commanded a lot more respect. Rob’s was kind of the stuff that the retailers point to as everything wrong with Image, whereas with Marc it was not so much of a case. So it was a situation where we were looking at it going, “Rob’s publishing some stuff on his own, and he’s taking some things that were Image books and publishing those on his own. So, Marc has left because of the guy. We should just get rid of him.” So by our bylaws, we had to vote him out, and then a week later we were supposed to get together and vote him out again. We voted once over the phone, and you know the whole group of us, Marc was on the phone. At that point he had already pulled out of Image. And it came to Rob to vote, and Rob voted “no,” and everybody else voted “yes.” And

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Savage Dragon #30 cover.

In the early years of Image, the founders and their associates often shared their characters for guest-appearances within other Image titles.

It would acquaint fans with creations that they weren’t familiar with.

It also allowed fans to believe that all of the Image characters were in the same universe.

ERIK LARSEN

©2007 Erik Larsen.

then a week later the group of us got together. We had to make the final vote in-person, and we’ll wait, it’s got to be a week, so by law we can’t vote until such and such a time. And we’re all sitting there watching the clock in the room, and then a fax came in from Rob and he resigned. It’s like, “Oh, you didn’t even give us the satisfaction of voting you out.” And to this day he’ll still say, “Oh, I was planning on leaving,” and blah, blah, blah — and he may very well have been planning on leaving and it was at a point where he had written a resignation note that he was going to give to the rest of us, but, all I know is, at that time, when that vote was taken, Rob said “no.” He voted to stay. And that’s that.

The friendships had died out for you at that point?

We didn’t see each other or hang out that much together unless it was an Image meeting, really, anyway. There were just basic little internal problems that had gone on since Day One. And because the office was where — .

Right next door to him.

Right next door to Rob, Rob could kind of see stuff as it came in, and — .

Didn’t you want to put that Image Central office somewhere neutral?

Well, we should have. But, Rob’s best man at his wedding is running the company, Tony Lobito. At one point, at least. And then it just didn’t work.

After Image, in 1997’s Fighting American #1, he even thanked you for “inspiration.”

Well, after Image, after the falling out of Rob quitting the company, we weren’t enemies, and we still were somewhat in touch. Later on he did get all bent out of shape about something that had gone on, and he was like, “Okay, well, we can’t be buddies anymore.” Whatever. And I was like, “More power to ya.”

Did it hurt you a little bit? I mean, he was a guy that you’d known since you started in comics.

Yeah. You don’t want those kind of things to happen, but it was a situation where essentially he was trying to reinvent reality. Y’know? That he was going, “Well, I want everybody to think that I left the company,” and I was saying to people, “Yeah, he left the company. He left it the way Richard Nixon left

38

government.” Yeah, officially he did resign, but good God, he can’t — I mean, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that he was pushed, y’know? And Rob did not like that. He did not like that message being put out, and didn’t care for the fact that I wasn’t getting his back in that regard. Well, I’m not going to sit there and lie for somebody, that’s ridiculous. And at the end of the day, who even really gives a sh*t? It just comes down to, the end result is, you’re no longer at Image. Whether you wanted to go or that you were forced to go, why does that even matter?

But he apparently thought that this was a matter of saving face. I’m out there telling people my side of the story.

But when Jim Lee did “Heroes Reborn,” was that a blow to Image?

He did that with Rob. Yeah, but that was an interesting move.

Yeah. Well, whatever. I don’t care.

Was that maybe the first sign that he was going to leave or something? Because Todd has said that he wasn’t expecting it at all. I think you said that, too.

It wasn’t as though they came to the rest of us and said, “This is what we’ve got in mind. We’re going to try this out. Are you guys interested in playing along?”

It was really a thing where they had negotiated something on the sly without the rest of us having any knowledge of it going on, and suddenly they sprang it on us. And to me that’s like, that was kind of a sh*tty thing to do. In a similar way, Jim Lee did that when he sold his stuff to WildStorm, and that up until the week before that happened, his books were coming out through Image. And suddenly it’s, “Well, I’m not going to be in the catalog next month.” I thought, “What the hell? What’s up with that?

That’s sh*tty, dude. At least let somebody know what’s going on here. Don’t do that to your pals.

That’s not cool.”

Did he really hurt Image? He represented a big chunk of the books money-wise.

When it became us on our own, not part of Malibu, the percentage no longer kicked in — it was just a straight, flat fee. So him leaving the company did not affect us financially, really, at all, because it didn’t matter. As long as we had that same number of books, we can replace that. So initially it was, “Oh, we don’t have these guys this month.” But a couple of months later, we had all kinds of stuff. And so it really didn’t, it wasn’t as much of a blow as one might think it would be.

Lee was just starting to get his line really together; he had Alan Moore writing WildC.A.T.S, Jim was going to take over the art, and then all of a sudden he’s not going to do it. And then he does Fantastic Four, and it doesn’t make sense, at the time, to make money for somebody else when you have your own business.

Most every move he’s made is with calculator in hand. It did make sense. There’s a lot of things that have been done with this crew, and most everybody does things with some kind of plan in mind and some kind of calculation going. It didn’t necessarily work, but nobody comes in here without a plan.

I was going to ask you about becoming the publisher

position. What happened? Did Jim [Valentino] want to leave?

No, Jim did not want to leave. Jim was happy where he was at, and he was enjoying doing the job. And it was really a situation of the rest of us looking around and going, “This isn’t working as well as it should be,” and me going, “I think I can make this. I think I can do better than what’s been going on. Let me give it a try and see if I can help out in some way.”

Was the company not producing the kind of revenue you guys wanted?

It’s a situation where we don’t, we just get a flat fee off of every book, so it really doesn’t matter that much if a book does really well or just does okay.

But there was a period where Image had more books of higher profile.

I think more than anything that was what people in the company internally were responding to, that we just kind of woke up one day and looked at the books that we were doing and were going, “This isn’t an Image book.” Why are we publishing this, necessarily? And that’s not to say everything he was doing was bad or anything like that, but it was just a situation where guys were going, “Shouldn’t we be doing higher profile guys than this? And shouldn’t there be a little more attention paid to this, that, or another thing,” and it became, “Well, you do it.” And I’m pleased to do it. And I came from something of a mainstream thing to begin with, and having some of those kind of mainstream connections and it seemed like, “Oh, this guy’s a good guy to be doing this. Let’s try this out.”

So you became like a talent scout or something?

Yeah, well, that’s kind of what the publisher at Image is, in a way, in that you go, “Let’s hope we get that guy who’s in charge who’s well connected and well liked.”

But part of your job is trying to keep these guys on board once they’re there. Not to leave like Bendis did, taking his books….

Yeah, well, I think part of Bendis leaving was actually me arriving, so… what it comes down to is a lot of guys’ comfort zone. He came in around that time that to him was like, he felt Jim had his back, and he didn’t know me and wasn’t comfortable with me. And so it was just, “What’s going to happen?

And, to me, now that Jim’s not in this position, is all this stuff going to go away for me? Am I going to have more troubles with this guy this time because Jim doesn’t have my back anymore?” I think he just kind of ran off scared without really giving anything any kind of a chance. And, had he stuck around, I think he would have done just fine. He would have found that, gee, things aren’t so bad, and that I’m certainly capable of making sure things work.

There’s a lot of new talent coming up these days.

There really is. And there’s a lot of really cool guys that are sitting there waiting in the wings, and it would probably be good for me to tell you who everybody is, but I don’t want to be breaking news in a situation

like this.

Are there still meetings between the four remaining partners?

Not very much, no.

Oh, it’s over the phone now?

Yeah, mostly it’s over the phone. Unless there’s something really drastic where you go, “Oh, we really need a meeting because of this, that, or the other thing.” But if it isn’t a situation like that, I don’t look around and go, “Boy, there’s a hole and it needs mending. We’re in deep sh*t now, boy.”

Have they changed over the last 15 years? Are Todd or Marc still the same?

They’re the same guys to me.

You don’t have to go through their people?

No. Todd’s a little tougher to get ahold of than he once was, but in terms of Todd and his personality and his temperament, I haven’t really seen that change ever. You know, there’s one point in the San Diego Convention when Todd and I were just walking around and nobody was coming up to him, and he was just walking around. Mostly retailers and stuff like that were around. I don’t think success necessarily changes you so much as it changes everybody around you, and that, had it been ten years ago or 15 years ago, all these same retailers would be coming up and be his pal, but because of the success that he has had on his own, those same guys are intimidated and don’t feel comfortable coming up and talking to him out of the blue like that.

But was he concerned — something I was going to tell you, the one thing I noticed, I didn’t notice when it happened, but when did Spawn fall off the charts? It used to be a top-ten type

39

Hey, even Dragon has to chill out sometimes!

Soothing panel detail from Savage Dragon #39. ©2007 Erik Larsen.

ERIK LARSEN

Characters ©2007 the respective holders.

of book.

I don’t know. I don’t know for sure what happened.

You know what? Todd got concerned with and involved with a lot of other things that have done for him way better than comic books have. Comics haven’t been his primary focus in a while, and I think probably that has as much to do with it as anything. Since Todd hasn’t had his hand in it that much, it hasn’t been as important to him as it had been at one point.

But it’s important to him to stay a part of the comics industry.

Yeah, it is, and as time goes on, there’s an ebb and flow in that as well in that suddenly he’ll wake up one morning and he’ll go, “Ah, I really feel like getting involved in the comic book stuff and I’d better, I’m going to call Erik all the time and be a pain in the ass and want to get sent all the numbers and know how well all the books are doing and really participate in this,” whereas he wasn’t doing that for a while. And he goes through periods like that where he really wants to be part of that world, and then other times it’s, “Why would I want to do that?” He looks at it now and in some ways — “I’ve been the top guy in the field when every book was selling a million copies and everything I do was selling. Am I really going to be happy? Am I really going to feel like I’m accomplishing something to come back in the field and actively be doing a book and sell 100,000 copies, after having been on the other end of it?” In a way he just feels like, “I’ve been the heavyweight champion of the world. Am I going to feel the same way being the welterweight champion of the world?”

It puts you in a different thing. “I was on the varsity football team and now I’m playing with the junior

40

leaguers,” and it’s just not the same thing. It’s an entirely different environment.

I don’t think it is that hard for some like Todd to get back his status in this industry. For any of you guys. It’s not like DC and Marvel are doing anything that great.

Yeah. At this point they’re not doing anything that I’m even buying, which is sad. But I still go to the store every Wednesday and I look for stuff, and I don’t get that Jones to want to try some of the stuff. I really feel like I should, and it kind of bothers me that the stuff just doesn’t interest me.

The pitch that I made to [TwoMorrows publisher] John Morrow when I wanted to do this book, was I want to remind people of the last time in comics when there was this big excitement, where everyone had to buy every book, a time when everyone was really into all of the books that hit the stands.

I know. And it’s really true, and that the guys who were reading this stuff and were enthusiastic about this stuff were legions. It was a huge group of people.

There were lots of kids that were buying comics.

There had not been a lot of kids buying comics in a long time, and part of that is, y’know, Rob doing the Levi’s commercials, suddenly you’re looking at your television screen and going, “Check this out! Comic books are cool.”

What do you think happened to that readership?

I think in some ways those guys got really burned… I mean, part of the selling of comics to the general mass market was, no longer is this simply this geek thing, but you can buy a comic and sell it a few months or years later and become rich. And that, to some extent, that was a really bad message to be sending out. On the other end of it, it was like at least guys are buying stuff and they’re not feeling like they

need to apologize or feel ashamed about it. They’re buying stuff maybe for the wrong reasons, but they’re out there actively engaged in comic books and getting these things for some reason. But the real bottom of that went out when people really overordered too much stuff and really got greedy to a huge extent. People point to the “Death of Superman” as being a turning point, but it really wasn’t the “Death of Superman” that killed it, it was the “Rebirth of Superman,” and that DC had sold this as, “This is going to be as big as the ‘Death of Superman’ when Superman returns.” And “Superman’s Return” was bought in huge numbers by retailers, and the general media did not pick up on it at all. And the fans could not give two sh*ts about Cyborg Superman and Little Kid Superman, and there was all this thing about who’s the real Superman, and it turns out none of them were.

It’s not only that, but the Deathmate stuff came out right at that time, and Turok #1, and it just kept compounding.

Yeah, there was an awful lot of stuff that got oversold, and within the Image stuff what is very cyclical is that people would order way too many of some comic, and then it would come in and they’d be stuck with a bunch of them, so they’d go, “Oh, we’re not going to do that again, so we’re going to order less of the next thing.” And the next thing would come out and the demand would be greater than it was for the previous thing, and they’d suddenly be scrambling, going, “Ohhh, this comic’s so hot again! We’ve got to buy a million of this!”

When you relaunch your series, after the initial three-issue mini, did you see a big difference between the numbers?

No. The first issue of the ongoing series, the first issue of the mini-series, and the last issue of the mini-series all sold right around the same number. So those numbers didn’t fluctuate a whole hell of a lot. It went down a little bit for the second issue of the mini-series.

Well, what was the worst period; the mid-’90s, I guess?

The worst period? Now. When did it start really going down, around ’96?

It was kind of in freefall. But I could tell even in ’93 and ’94 that the first issue of Freak Force was not ordered as heavily as the first issue of Vanguard, which came out six months earlier. And, it was very cyclical, and it was just this unpredictable thing where one issue of one thing would sell a lot of copies, and the next issue of something else, they would cut their orders because they got burned on one other thing, and… so it was a real chaotic time.

And I think kids were buying a huge pile of comics and finding that they weren’t worth anything, that there really weren’t people that were sitting there ready to buy them, and stores ordered way too many copies of the “Return of Superman.” And I heard when X-Men #1 came out that something like a fourth of the stores or a fifth of the stores in the country went out of business because they just bought too many copies of that thing. Their eyes were bigger than their stomachs, as my mom used to say when I would put too much food on my plate.

And they suddenly get this book in the first go-round, and they did pretty well with that, and then the next cover came in the following week and everybody wasn’t coming in going, “Well, I’ve got to have multiple copies of that same comic that I bought last week.”

And then the third one came in, and it’s, “Well, it’s got

41

ERIK LARSEN

In the beginning, Dragon was just a man who wanted to be left alone. A good deed brings his civilian days to an end.

This page was that last moment of civility from the very first issue of Savage Dragon. ©2007 Erik Larsen.

Wolverine on it, so maybe sales will go up a little bit.”

But there were five versions of the same comic book, and there simply were not enough people interested in purchasing and investing in that many copies of the same comic book over and over and over again.

Those numbers didn’t work out. And similar things happened again and again.

Whichever ones were left by the time Superman returned… would soon be gone.

Yeah. I mean, “Superman Returns” came in and it just, ugh, decimated it. It just killed a lot of the stores and just put guys out of business. And some of those guys, they were not real sound businessmen to begin with.

This was just like the frenzy with baseball cards around that time.

Well, that’s what happened with baseball cards.

The same kind of thing with toys, except at the end of the day, kids will play with toys, and that’s going to be a constant even if the bottom falls out of the collectible toys, a kid is still going to want a toy for

42

Christmas.

Why weren’t you involved in Deathmate?

Because I hated Valiant Comics. I just thought they did sh*tty, ugly comics, and I didn’t read anything that came out of that company. Why would we do a crossover with this company that just does this wretched sh*t?

I never understood why people expected that to be a smash hit.

Well, Valiant at one point was an ongoing concern that people gave a rat’s ass about, and they sold it.

They sold that this is going to be this great thing, and they did their part of the crossover, they put it together rather quickly and — .

If the book was late, Image Central didn’t have to pay anything, right? The money had to come out of the pocket of the founders themselves. Like, if Jim Lee’s book was late, Jim Lee — .

If Jim Lee’s book was late, Jim Lee lost that money. That wasn’t Image Central that lost a thing.

But who put a stop to soliciting stuff until you guys had it done?

It was just individuals.

They had to do it themselves?

Yeah, if there’s no police in charge here.

You guys used to have some newsstand distribution, right?

Yeah. Yeah, we did.

And what happened? That just wasn’t profitable or anything?

Well, I think that it still exists to some extent. It’s not, not everybody does it. But, yeah, for the books where it works, we continue to do that sort of thing. For the books that it didn’t work, well, there’s no point in that.

So there are books that still hit the stands.

Any in particular?

I believe Spawn is still on the newsstands. At least it was the last I checked.

That’s the only one I remember seeing on the stands. Maybe Savage Dragon, in the beginning.

Yeah, in the beginning, sure, all of them. I told them to keep it on the stand until I’m losing money on the newsstand, and then eventually that did happen. So I thought, well, I guess it’s time to knock off that kind of stuff.

I was just listening to this interview with Herb Trimpe where he mentions something that you touched on in one of your columns.

Oh, yeah?

About him changing his style to Rob Liefeld’s style in the early ’90s.

Yeah?

What he said was that he liked what you guys were doing and he thought it would be fun to draw in that kind of a style, and that’s why he did it, because he was bored already drawing the way that he drew.

Oh, wow. See, I’d heard that it was an assistant editor over there that, was, “Yeah, do this,” and that he was like, “I can totally

do that.” But if he took it upon himself to do it that way, well, that’s what did him in, man.

He was doing a fill-in issue for X-Factor or something and he did it in a current Rob style, and that’s what got the editors talking, they were going to give him more books and work. One of the last things he did was that Fantastic Four 2099, just before they laid him off.

Yeah.

Like, it wasn’t fun for him doing comics anymore and that he had to reinvent himself.

I don’t know if it was ever really that fun for him. It always seemed that there is a film which somebody had made, and Herb took it to one of the conventions and was showing it to people, and in the film he was just this disgruntled guy. He was just like, “This is no way to make a living.” It was almost like he was embarrassed by it, and it just seemed like it wasn’t that fun for him — which is too bad, because I really enjoyed the hell out of his artwork.

He said he would have retired ten years earlier if he had faced facts that he was just tired of comics, that he should have left ten years earlier, and not wait for them to throw him out.

Well, yeah, because I just loved his stuff, and now they’re doing the Essentials, they’re getting to the period of Hulk when I started reading it, and I’m like, “Ah, this is the good stuff!”

In talking to someone beforehand, he said that one time you said one of the reasons you guys had such a following with kids was because they related to the way you guys drew.

We drew the way they would draw if they could draw. “Ah, if I was drawing Mary Jane, she’d have really big hair and big tits and everything!” And it was really just that kind of the way they thought: “Ah, man, if I was doing Spider-Man, he’d have a million webs and it’d be so cool!” And I thought, well, that’s what we’re doing.

And then they’d see you guys at a convention and get really excited.

Sure! Yeah. It was an exciting time for them because the guys doing the books were essentially them. They’re kids, and the guys doing the books are kids. So it was a good period of time. I wish that the quality of the stuff had been somewhat better, and I wish that as a group we could have been a little more focused on things like getting the books out, and I think all of us would say, if we could do it over again, that we would do our damnedest to get the trains to run on time.

When did Image Central move away from Anaheim?

I don’t remember. Around then I think we moved out.

And that was because you and Jim Valentino were based in northern California?

It was down at Orange until recently. So the last couple of years the office moved up to here. It moved around. It wasn’t right smack next to Rob after Rob was out. I think we moved it from Anaheim to Orange. But in terms of it being right smack next to me, that didn’t happen until later.

But none of the four partners could go there regularly when the offices were in Orange, right?

No. When in Orange, Jim could. And he did.

Because he was the publisher at one point, so he could certainly pop on over, and did. I don’t know how regularly he was in the office, but he was the guy for a while there.

How is the office set up now? Like, you’re the publisher — does everything go through you now?

To a certain extent.

The business end is handled by Eric Stephenson?

I kind of oversee everything and everybody kind of reports to me. So, I’m Eric’s boss, but there will be times when he’ll come in and go, “I’ve got a line on, this guy wants to do a book and I want to go talk to him about it.” And I’ll be, “Sure.” If he’s got guys that he’s excited about wanting to do stuff, I trust a few different people that they’re going to bring in good people to work on books. And, y’know, sometimes folks come to me, and sometimes they come to him, and anywhere in between.

But you have to approve everything that happens, right?

Pretty much. But I really do trust the guys I work with, so that if Eric feels passionate about something, I’m not going to get in his way. I’m not going to say, “Yeah, that’s a bad idea. Let’s not do that.” Yeah, there are times, certainly, when he’s said to me, “Why are we doing this?” And there’s times I do the same to him. “Where the hell this come from? I didn’t

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Savage Dragon and his friends. Centerfold pin-up from Savage Dragon #1, vol. 1. ©2007 Erik Larsen.

ERIK LARSEN approve this.” But, oh well. You do what you can.

Can you lose money if you have a title that underperforms or something?

We won’t publish it if it’s going to lose money.

Oh, you’ll kill it right away?

Yeah. You don’t go to press when the orders come in and it’s, like, 75 copies. It’s like, oh well. Live and learn. I guess that one didn’t work after all.

But if you get some new creative team, you guys will fund their advertising?

Yeah. If we were losing anything, that’s what it would be, well, we spent some money on advertising, we spent some money on posters or whatever and it didn’t quite work out. Oops. But it won’t be a situation where we’ve lost our shirt on something.

So these guys are not liable, either? You guys took a chance and that’s it?

Yeah. If we said we’re going to do the books, we took our chances. If it doesn’t work out, well, that sucks, but…

Do you like where the company is right now — working so closely with so many different creators?

I like it. I think anybody in any situation can look at what they’re doing and say, “Yeah, we could be doing even better.” And you want ultimately that. Our numbers were stronger at one point, and I certainly would like to get in a place where our books were all doing 900,000 a month again.

But you don’t want any titles with super-heroes again?

I like super-heroes. If all of a sudden everybody said, “Hey, you know what? I really miss Image doing super-heroes and I want to do super-heroes, too,” yeah, I would absolutely encourage that sort of treatment. I would not discourage anybody from wanting to do that. I think it was a fun time, and it was fun to be able to play with other kids’ toys.

No one would have thought some of the best books in comics, the critically-acclaimed ones, would be coming from Image. That’s something that took 15 years to do.

Well, we’ll take it.

But it’s a direction that the other founders are proud of?

I don’t know. You’ll have to ask them and you get to. So I’m sure you’ll get different answers from different people on that regard. Some guys are going to be going, “I think we should have just been this group of guys.” And I think there’s some folks that would rather we had stayed — if there was some way we could all be nothing but superstars, that’d be great, but that didn’t really last a year, anyway, because guys like Rob would be coming in, “Here’s my friend. Let me give him a book.” Valentino had gotten a certain amount of grief. People go, “Well, he wasn’t a huge guy right out of the gate. He didn’t have a huge selling book over at Marvel. Why was he part of the group?” But look around at who is doing books at Image really early on, and there was Supreme really early on by…

Brian Murray.

Yeah. Who the hell is he? What was his big claim to fame, y’know? Who was knocking on his door and thinking, “Yeah, this is the guy!” I mean, Marat Mychaels. What had he done before? He didn’t do anything! So what are you doing giving anybody grief

44

about Jim Valentino when there’s Marat Mychaels and Brian Murray sitting there doing stuff?

They weren’t founders, though, like Jim. They were there, right? They weren’t the first guys, but they got on the stand before Whilce did. Whilce took a couple of years before his book got completely together and was ready to come out. And he wasn’t one of the first guys to have work on the stands, he was one of the first guys to say, “Hey, I’ll be part of this outfit,” but in terms of actually getting books on the stands, there were guys who had books on the stands that I think were of questionable merit. So, at this point, I think we’ve got better books now, by and large, than we’ve ever had.

But it’s something that you want to keep developing?

You want all the guys, the independent artists, to hopefully consider Image first.

I want them all to be good. Really, that’s what it comes down to.

If there’s an independent creator and they need somebody to publish their book, you want them to consider Image first?

Sure. Absolutely. And they do. So that happens on a regular basis that we’ve got new guys coming on board that are hot sh*t, as far as I’m concerned.

When do you find time to draw?

Whenever I talk on the phone to you.

But when you’re at the office, you’re drawing.

Yeah, I’ve got a drawing board in the office, and between answering e-mails and doing other stuff, I’m drawing comics, or trying to.

You’ve seen your style evolve, haven’t you, from the beginning? Like throughout the issues in the #70s [of Dragon], I don’t know if Kirby was more present in your head or something? You had more of those dynamic poses in your storytelling.

Well, I’m always into a lot of guys. Where the characters would just be super-cartoony, sidekick or something, and I liked that. Yeah, I thought that was a cool idea. You’ve got your realistic lead guy, but then his buddy is usually a cartoon character. That was a real guy. And I was doing that some with Dragon’s kids, with Angel. And the readers were just like, “Aw, we hate this. Why is Dragon hanging out with a Muppet? She used to look kind of like a real girl; suddenly she’s got these big dot eyes, a weird mouth.

That’s not cool!”

Do readers have a lot of influence over what you do?

I try not to have that be the case. Yeah, and generally that’s what’s going on, going along with whatever it is that I came up with, and I’m pleased when that kind of thing goes on, but there are times when you go, “Okay, I’ve got to give, here.” I don’t know. I’m all over the place. Sometimes I listen and sometimes I don’t. Ultimately, I’ve got to be pleased with the book.

I spend more time with it than anybody else is going to, and if you try to please everybody, you really can’t. It’s an impossible thing.

Do you go online and look at reviews?

No, I don’t look at reviews. I don’t know if anybody even reads the book, honestly, in terms of that.

When you go on the Internet, the vibe for everything is mostly negative.

I think it’s everybody’s natural inclination to bellyache about stuff, and I’m the same way. I’ll read some comic and I’ll be like, “Aw, what a crock of sh*t. This is no good.” So I bellyache about it, and I forget that people are looking at me as somebody whose opinion matters. It’s like, “Aw, damn it. I thought I was just a guy like you” — “you” being the rhetorical “you,” you the fan. To just read a comic and say, “Wow, that was awful” — you can read a comic and say, “Wow, that was awful,” but I forget that when I say that something stinks that there’s a whole bunch of people who go, [gasps] “I can’t believe he said that!”

Was it a blow to you when that tenth anniversary hardcover became a bit of a joke, and ended up being a 13th anniversary special?

Yeah.

Whose idea was it to do that?

I think it was Valentino. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the idea, it’s just that there were people that didn’t want to do it, and that’s where it became problematic is that a guy’s going, “Aw, crap, I committed to this because I wanted to be part of the gang, but I really don’t have it in me to write the story and come up with the idea.” And actually, Todd didn’t really know what to do, and I was saying to him, “Well, you know, Todd, there’s this story that you’ve never really told and it kind of seemed like you were building up to it the whole time early on in the book, that he’s never told Wanda, “It’s me, Al.” And it’s the thing about that movie, when the movie came out, they got farther along in his life in this movie than they have in the comic book that’s been going on for years.

What’s the point that he just did a prose story?

He’s always trying to come up with something, and I think there’s a part of Todd that doesn’t want to necessarily give people what they want. Everybody expects a certain thing. I think there’s a part of him that just likes the idea of having it be something that surprises them.

When you guys got together in, what was that, 2002, for the tenth anniversary at San Diego?

I’m sure we’ve been together all over the place.

Yeah, but this was celebrating the tenth anniversary.

There was some nice momentum.

Yeah, we’re good at that; we’re good at killing whatever momentum we’ve got.

But when that book was announced, Jim was still the publisher, and you were the publisher that — .

Yeah, when it saw print, I was the publisher. And when it was announced, we did some dumb things in retrospect, because we were under the impression this book was going to get done. We’d taken out all sorts of ads all over the place, spent a lot of money promoting this thing, and then it didn’t come out. And a lot of money got wasted in promoting something that took way too long to get together. And that wasn’t such a wise use of our funds, but whatever.

It did bring a lot of attention.

It did; both good and bad. We’re always doing something to piss people off.

I thought it was a good idea when you announced it.

I thought it was cool, but I was a little like, “What the hell am I gonna do? I’m still doing my book.” It wasn’t something where I’ve been going, “Yeah, I want to tell Dragon’s origin someday.” To me it’s more interesting if you don’t know. So to know and have that origin be out there, I don’t really want to do that. I know when the book was running late; there were people who were going, “You should just print the origin in an issue of Dragon because I really want to read it.” And I was like, “No, I don’t even want you guys to read this at all. If it takes too long, maybe I won’t have to publish this thing. That’d be okay for me.”

I remember seeing that artwork and you really went to town on it. It was really Frazetta-ish in some spots, really over the top.

Well, I didn’t want it to be crappy. It’s supposed to be a big deal, so, let’s put our best foot forward in here.

Do you believe more than ever in what the company stands for?

Sure! I would hope that on my deathbed, when I finally kick off, I can look over at my drawing board and there’ll still be some Savage Dragon pages that I’m working on. Ultimately, that would be it. I would like to go out still sitting there putting out this book on a regular basis up until the end.

Would you like readers to take one more shot at it before that happens — a little spike or something?

I want the book to do well. I don’t want to be doing it for myself the same way I was when I was in fifth grade, I don’t even know, on some level. I don’t even know; I’m just happy to be here.

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Savage Dragon ©2007 Erik Larsen.

IMAGE FOUNDER

Jim Lee

Jim Lee. Photograph courtesy of DC Comics.

Since his penciling debut with Alpha Flight #51, Jim Lee made his presence immediately known on his way to the top of the industry. Lee worked vigorously on perfecting his art by blending his influences with elements of modern pop culture into his own God-given passion for detail and high-powered heroism. He rapidly found himself ushering X-Men, his childhood favorites, to levels of unprecedented success with the eight million copies sold of X-Men #1. Upon joining Image Comics, Jim co-created WildC.A.T.s (with longtime friend Brandon Choi) and a plethora of popular characters for his own outfit, WildStorm. On August 27th of 1998, Jim left the Image family and sold WildStorm and their titles to DC Comics.

Today, as an executive for DC Comics, Jim serves as the editorial director of WildStorm, where he recently had an eventful relaunch of his line. And on the art front, the influential artist currently collaborates with premiere comics writers like Grant Morrison (on the new WildC.A.T.s) and Frank Miller (on All-Star Batman and Robin).

Grifter ©2007 WildStorm Productions, a division of DC Comics.

When you were in Princeton, New Jersey [in the mid-’80s], did you have an epiphany that you wanted to get into comics?

You’ve mentioned in the past that your parents wanted you to be a doctor.

Yeah.

Was that something you didn’t want? Could you see yourself being a disgruntled doctor?

Well, I don’t think I would have been disgruntled, but I think in terms of what I loved at the time was comics, and it wasn’t the first time I thought about it. I think anyone, a kid that’s reading comics, they dream about being a comic book creator. Yeah, so I remember when I was ten or 12 I sent some drawings in to Marvel looking for a job, I think, so I certainly had the notion earlier. I don’t think I gave it real serious thought until I was in college and I had to decide what I was going to do after I graduated.

Was there a particular thing that made you take that thought seriously? Was it

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really The Dark Knight Returns?

Yeah, I think it was a number of different factors all happening at the same time.1986, that was my senior year at Princeton, and you need to write a thesis to graduate, so a lot of seniors take “easy classes,” what are called “gut classes,” slang of the time, like Music 101, Clapping for Credit, or Studio Art, to ease up their academic workloads so they could spend hours writing their theses. So I took Studio Art, and it was taught by this teacher named Fontaine Dunn, who I’ve actually reconnected with in the years since. She was an abstract expressionist artist that commuted down from New York City, and she was very involved in the art scene in New York from the ’50s, ’60s and on, and she taught a studio class. So we did life drawing, painting, and whatnot, and she really inspired me to consider a career in art, whether it’s fine art, commercial art, whatever, but the passion she had for art, the way she talked about it. We went up to her loft in New York City and got to see a little bit of how she lived, and just that kind of lifestyle was very romantic, very appealing at the time. And then also Dark Knight Returns came out that year, and at the time Princeton was a very small town, there were no comic book stores.

There are still no comic book stores here.

That year, ’86, a freshman, some girl who was really into comics, started up a comic book club. At Princeton they have all these basically student-run businesses. You can sell, like, I remember beach

1992 WildC.A.Ts promo art by Jim Lee and Scott Williams. ©2007 WildStorm Productions.

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Early Gen13 pin-up featured originally in The Art of Homage Studios, in 1993. In the book, Jim says, “Everyone in the studio was doing a dinosaur piece, so I decided to take a stab at it, as well... especially after all the young punks gave me a hard time about the dinosaurs I drew in Punisher War Journal and The X-Men.” ©2007 WildStorm Productions.

L E E

shorts being real big, or pizza delivery, and you essentially would get a monopoly if you put an application in, and she had started up a comic book club; she sold comic books out of her dorm room, and I remember that’s where I bought Dark Knight Returns.

So I think otherwise I might have missed it until I got back to St. Louis. I was still getting my subscriptions to various Marvel comics, but I wasn’t really following them very closely. The material really didn’t move me like it did when I was a kid, and I was just collecting out of inertia. So it was all those things, Dark Knight Returns, me taking this art class, this girl starting up this comic club, so that’s how I got a copy of Dark Knight Returns — .

You weren’t even into the party scene, I guess, if you were into comics at that point?

Princeton’s a pretty academic school. We would go out Thursday through Sunday, but comics was very much a closet hobby, much more then than it is now. And so, if people collected comics, you would never know it. No one would hang posters of the

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stuff up on their wall. It was a very different kind of attitude towards all things geeky. It’s much more a part of mainstream culture than it was back in 1986.

So [DC Comics editor] Archie Goodwin actually evaluated your portfolio? He was the first person that opened the door a little bit?

Yeah, after I graduated from college I put together all sorts of pages over the summer and mailed them off, with really no positive response. I got form letters from Marvel and DC. I had befriended a couple of comic book creators in St. Louis. Probably the most prominent was Rick Burchett, who still works at DC. I heard that you have to meet these people in person to get a real response to your work. So I put together a portfolio and I opened up a comic book and it said, “New York Convention, biggest convention of the year.” I didn’t realize it was for that particular organizer, not in general. But it was a con up at the Roosevelt Hotel, and I flew up there, stayed with an old college roommate of mine who was working in New York City, went to the con, and, yeah, Archie Goodwin was the guy that I convinced to look at my work, and he’s the one that told me to come in to Marvel that Monday, and I think this was, what, a Saturday? Yeah.

Then he referred you right away to Carl Potts, right?

Yeah, Carl Potts worked with a lot of new artists, and so basically, Archie looked at it and said, “Well, it looks as good as I remember it looking” — him being very, very kind, because it wasn’t that great, at all. Yeah, and then he pulled Carl Potts in, and then Carl really took me under his wing and worked with me and gave me a tryout story, and then after I did that on time and to his [specifications], he gave me a fill-in issue of Alpha Flight, and then another one, and then I got the regular book.

Do you know what Carl liked about your art, or what they both liked about it?

Probably ’cause I followed his instructions. [laughs] I don’t know. My stuff was pretty weak, John Byrne-cum-Neal Adams kind of influenced.

But there was clean storytelling. That’s what I remember, picking it up as a kid, that first Alpha Flight, it had a clean sense to it. The figure work was very clean, it wasn’t cluttered.

Yeah, I tried to keep it clean, but what I could do with my hand was not quite what I could do in my head, hadn’t quite caught up, and I don’t think anyone really took note of it other than the fact that I made my deadline.

When you saw Terry Austin inking that Wolverine cover [Alpha Flight #53] you did, were you like, “Wow, I think I made it”?

Yeah, because he changed things, he fixed a lot of the mistakes. So, yeah, I really started seeing how influential the inkers were in giving my work some polish.

So you weren’t into, like, The X-Men when Austin and Byrne were working on it?

Oh, no, huge! That was my favorite comic. X-Men and Daredevil, when Frank Miller was on it.

So seeing him ink that, did it mean something to you at

the time? Having been this big X-Men fan, it’s like, “Wow, I’m right there.”

Oh, well, my goal at Marvel was always to work on The X-Men. It was my favorite comic. Even before Byrne and Claremont were on the book, I collected a lot of the old issues. Yeah, when Stan and Jack worked on it, and Werner Roth, and Steranko, and Barry Windsor-Smith, and Neal Adams. I had a lot of those. I never had a complete collection of anything, but if I had one run on anything, X-Men was the one I had the most number of issues of, and I just loved the concept, I loved the characters. And so when Dave Cockrum and Len Wein worked on the relaunch, that just completely blew me away. And then when Byrne and Claremont worked on it, it took it to another level for me. Yeah, they were my favorite characters. I was dying to work on those characters.

Do you remember how you got introduced to Whilce Portacio and Scott Williams?

Let’s see. Whilce was the very first inker on my work at Marvel. He inked Alpha Flight #51, and me being very enthusiastic and wide-eyed and bushytailed, I got his number and I called him up and really made an attempt to talk to him just so he knew the person behind the pencils, so he’d maybe give me a little extra effort. And we talked, he was very easygoing, a very nice guy, and we hit it off. And that’s what led to the formation of Homage Studios and me moving out to California to work with him and Scott later.

Was that a particularly good period for you, when it was just you three guys? Because they’re very fond of that period. I think for Whilce, that’s the best period that he had in comics.

Yeah, it’s a very romantic period because all of us were hungry and just starting out. And the industry was different back then, too. This was before Wizard, this was before big, big conventions and any sort of media attention to comics, and so you’re really doing it because you love comics, and it’s a very small, diehard group of people that collect comics. Yeah, a very cool period. We rented a one-bedroom apartment, converted that into a studio, chipped in for a fax machine, and we’d just basically get together every day and draw and try to make our deadlines.

We were very, very focused on deadlines and trying to do our best. We were just really, really into the characters and the storylines and really didn’t have to worry about a lot of the other stuff that crept into the industry, like art sales. Even though there were some back then, it wasn’t to the same degree it is now. It was much simpler. You just focused on pencils and inks. And now you’ve got to really have the right colorist, the right paper, the right writer, the right marketing, and all that stuff. And back then, if you did get stuck, people took note.

But back then you felt, you guys would push each other in terms of art to where you wanted it to get, right?

Because I think Whilce said you guys kept pushing each other, like if something wasn’t right, you’d redraw it again until you got it right.

Oh, yeah. I mean, we worked together for a reason.

We did want to just slap each other on the back and

say, “Great job.” We were really trying to improve what we were doing, and we were very much influencing each other in terms of storytelling and style. And I think actually Whilce was influencing me more than I was influencing him partially because he was more advanced in his skills. When I was just starting out, he had already been drawing quite a bit in high school and later, and had been working professionally longer than [me], so he was teaching me all sorts of things.

But getting the X-Men book was your goal? I read somewhere, where you said you would have been happy to have done 50 issues of X-Men. Where could you have gone once you got the X-Men book? Did you see yourself staying there forever?

I tend to be impatient, and I think I did as many issues as I could before I got burned out on the deadlines. Working on deadlines, you’re talking about just working crazy hours for, like, two or three weeks, and then doing nothing for a week to recover, and then jumping back on the train and working hard

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Divine Right: The Adventures of Max Faraday #1, page 1: Jim’s debut as writer! Art by Lee & Williams. ©2007 WildStorm Productions.

J I M

Image-era promotional art. ©2007 WildStorm Productions.

L E E

again, and it’s grueling. So it was something that we could do because we were both young and none of us had any kids at the time, so we could really put our energies into just the art. Yeah, it’s hard to say how many issues I would have lasted. I think I did as many as I probably could, and I think, more importantly, there were certain characters I wanted to draw and tell stories with, and fortunately I got to do a lot of that.

Were you ever dissatisfied at Marvel by anything?

Dissatisfied? I left, so there must have been some level of dissatisfaction I think, or maybe it was just that Image represented something bigger and better, and I think I liked the idea of challenges and I liked the idea of doing new things. And I just hated, like, I just never wanted to be complacent in life, never mind just art, but it was the kind of thing where you always want to leave the audience to want more, and I think toward the end of my X-Men run I was starting to get burnt, and I didn’t want to produce a

50

lot of really crappy issues and then get kicked off, I guess.

So it wasn’t anything like seeing your art on T-shirts and you’re not getting royalties?

No, that was definitely — now you’re starting to get into the origins of Image, and I think right around that time comics was going through this huge boom.

There was a lot of speculation in comics, but also there was a lot attention on comics because they were selling so well, so you start having these video game deals and T-shirts, and movies were just starting to get going, so a lot of our art that we had been creating was used for ancillary product, like T-shirts and video game covers and manuals and whatnot. Yeah, there was no compensation for that, much less a free T-shirt. So, yeah, that irked a lot of us, and I think it had to do with… not that we were asking for a lot, it was just like, well, we produced this art, a human being produced this art. Is this necessarily a fair situation? And I think rather than stay there and work with management to come to some solution, we decided, well, we’re just going to leave and do our own thing.

But Todd was the first one to approach you about this, right?

I would say… y’know, you’re talking about something that happened, what…?

Fifteen years ago, but you would think that you would remember. That was a pretty big decision. I think it would take a lot to leave that security at Marvel.

You know what? It didn’t take as much as you would think, partially because I had one kid at the time, but I was still pretty young, and when you’re that age, you can take the chances. I never really felt like, “Oh, man, I can’t leave the security.” I definitely didn’t want to do something foolish and fail. I think I was more scared of failure rather than, oh, I’ll leave this really cushy thing behind and what if I can’t get it again. I don’t think that was an issue. It was more, like, if I was going to make this big move, I want it to be successful, and that meant having the right people involved. And, yeah, it was Todd, I think, that was spearheading it emotionally for me, and his involvement is really what brought me on board. I think every Image partner has a different recollection or story to tell, but for me, personally, it was because of Rob and Todd. We had kind of grown tight, we had seen each other at the cons, we talked a lot, and I think we were all competing against one another at the same time we were befriending one another in terms of success and sales and whatnot. And I think it was definitely Todd’s passion for it, actually, both their passion for it that really got me going, as well.

Did it surprise you when they came up to you to talk about this, or did you expect it a little bit?

It’s not so much a surprise, because it’s not like something where it came out of the blue. We had talked about doing things even before then, because we were always, I think, dissatisfied. Maybe we were dissatisfied with marketing and promotion, and dissatisfied with some of the restrictions on the art that we could draw, or some of the compensation from the use of our art in various packaging and

T-shirts and what not, and dissatisfaction with how Marvel perceived us essentially, what we meant to the company. I think they very much saw it as, “Well, you’re a popular artist, but it’s Marvel that’s really selling these characters,” and I think we had it more in our heads that, “Well, yeah, characters are popular, but we’re the ones helping sell these characters for you.” So it wasn’t just dollars and cents, it was attitude and perception, really. But as far as you were talking about Todd and marketing, here’s an example. This didn’t really come out of the blue, because we were always talking, trying to think of novel ways to do what we felt should have been other people’s jobs. For example, there was that X-Force/Spider-Man crossover, where the issues went sideways and stuff like that, that was something that Todd and Rob dreamt up, and so then they pitched it to Marvel, Marvel went with it. And then the X-Men covers and how they linked together, these were all things that we were very involved with, so it wasn’t a thing where we were just drawing the stories and mailing in the art. We were talking to each other about it; what can we do, how can you help me, what can we do with X-Force and X-Men to do something cool that’ll spike sales or get fans all into the storyline? So we were already very much in the marketing/promoting mindset, which I think was

crucial in terms of the success that Image had early on, so you can see it was all starting. So it was just like all of a sudden, [snaps fingers], hey, let’s do this all together, we were already planning things together even at Marvel, trying to do things with each other.

But when you were there, did you feel like editorialwise they would try to rein you in sometimes? You know, “No, you can’t do that. We’re the editors, we know better”; that sort of stuff?

Yeah, I think that’s pretty normal for any company.

I think, personality-wise, I got along better with my editor than some other guys did. There were some clashes on X-Men over where the direction of the stories was going and the characters and stuff, between Bob Harras, myself, and Chris Claremont.

But for the most part, luckily over time you kind of forget all the bad things and you just remember the good things, and so I have a very fond memory of that period despite the fact that I know there was a lot of angst and turmoil and infighting and whatnot; a lot.

I remember going to a New York show and Claremont was really proud of, I think it was #274 of Uncanny — Yeah.

— and he held it up, “It was two weeks ago this thing was drawn, and now here it is printed.”

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Union concept art. ©2007 WildStorm Productions.

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Top: Jim Lee inside the Spawnmobile 2. (©2007 Golden Apple); Middle & above: Recent appearance at Jim Hanley’s Universe. (©2007 JHU.)

L E E Correct.

Wow, you guys were that far behind?

Yeah, yeah. The book was shipping literally two weeks, sometimes even less than two weeks after we drew the issues, that’s how close we were. But we did it every month.

Do you remember the big meeting with Terry Stewart? That you do remember, right?

Oh, yeah. Oh, I remember a lot of this, I just couldn’t swear by every little detail about what happens all the time. Terry Stewart, yeah, it was one of those meetings where Todd really had it in his mind that we were leaving, and I think, at least from my perception was that Rob and I felt that if Marvel acquiesced to some of the things that we wanted, that there was a potential for remaining. But I think Todd set up this meeting, we went along, and he had a very belligerent stance right off the bat.

So it was a meeting that went very poorly, and we ultimately left thereafter.

And then he set up a similar meeting over at DC, and I basically tagged along, even though I really had never done any work for DC, so I basically went there and said, “I don’t work for you guys, and I never will.” [laughs] So that was kind of a funny meeting, and I remember that one pretty well.

I talked to Tom DeFalco, and it sounded like that Marvel meeting was the last place he wanted to be.

He thought, “Why did these guys call this meeting all of a sudden?”

There were all these rumors, and this imminent sense of this clash of power or whatever, and, yeah, it was definitely after hours, and I think Todd had set up this meeting with Terry, and Tom had probably

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missed his train to go home or whatever, and he actually ended up coming into the meeting towards the end, as they basically pitched the idea of giving us Epic as a line where we could go and do our own creator-owned things and things like that. [GAK note: Epic was a Marvel line for creator-owned and/or mature titles.]

Yeah, because Todd saw this meeting as a formality, “We’re leaving. This is what you could do next time to prevent talent from leaving,” that sort of thing, “if you want to hear us out.”

Yeah, I think that’s where he was at. I think he was further along in his thinking in terms of “we’re out the door already,” whereas with Rob and I, we were all different. Yeah, he had already taken a year off and already kind of planned his next move, and I think Rob and I were still in the middle of, or toward the tail-end of our runs on our books, and so we were… we didn’t realize it was just that kind of meeting, or that’s the direction that Todd wanted to take it. I think we were more there to see what they had to say, if only out of curiosity. And it was like, “Yeah, we’ll give you Epic, and it’s this 50/50 creator-owned line, we control the rights, blah, blah, blah.”

That’s what Tom said: “You guys, maybe we should do this meeting tomorrow when you guys know what you want,” and he was surprised the next day when Image was announced. “Wait a minute. I thought we were supposed to talk about this.”

Yeah, I can’t remember an exact timing on that.

And also I’m trying to think how did things get announced back then? There was no Internet. There was a press release, maybe, but then, who covers that?

Yeah, but I think there was some press at that Sotheby’s auction?

Right, we were all in town because we all had lots that were being sold, and Todd had come in so that we could all meet and decide what to do. So, yeah, I think it was announced the next day, and I think it was the kind of thing where they had thrown out this idea of taking on Epic and their standard deal. And, really, if you’re from the mindset that, “Hey, if your perception is you’re just going to give us basically the standard deal on Epic, then you don’t really understand what we’re doing for your company,” kind of thing. And so, not that we were offended, per se, but you could see how far apart we were in terms of the perception of what creators meant to the company, I think.

But did you ever get that vibe, like you guys were just help, from Terry Stewart himself?

Look, all I know is that there was a wide, wide rift between how we perceived ourselves and our value to the company as creators, and what they valued us as creators, and I think they felt that they would survive without us. And they did, ultimately. They took a hit for a short period of time, or several years, because I think they underestimated what Image would become, as well.

When that meeting was done, you were sure now that you were going to do this no matter what, right?

Well, I guess if we announced it the next day, I

was. [laughs] I want to say that actually Todd announced it, and maybe I announced my involvement days thereafter?

Yeah, because I remember reading somewhere that the original press release didn’t mention you, and I think it might not have mentioned Marc, either.

Yeah, because I think it was one of the things because we had all kind of agreed that we were going to do this, but the timing was off for everyone.

I think for Todd, he was going to do it regardless, and so this was the moment for him in terms of, like, maximum publicity, because of Sotheby’s and whatnot, and he went out and announced it first, and I think I announced mine days later when I was back in San Diego.

Did you have an idea what you were going to do? That you were going to do WildC.A.T.s or Wild Boys?

Yeah, more or less, I think. Back then it was kind of like, “Okay. Everyone do their characters. What do you got?” Y’know? And I think most people called back upon a lot of the characters they created when they were teenagers and kids. Definitely Dragon and Spawn were that. And Brandon Choi and I, who created WildC.A.T.s together, didn’t have characters called WildC.A.T.s. We had something called Wild Boys, and we had various characters from different groups that we had created that we put together to form WildC.A.T.s. But that’s something… and fans were saying, “Well, this was very X-Men derived,” and whatnot, but that just makes sense. When we were kids, we just loved X-Men, so a lot of the characters that we created were similar to the X-Men characters, but I think the overall tone of the book was different.

You knew you wanted to do a team book? Whatever you were going to do, it was going to be a team book?

Yeah, I think all of us, in order to hedge our bets; you know, I wasn’t going to go out and do a book about a lonely female teenager who doesn’t have a costume. At the time super-heroes were it and only it. Very different now, but back then, yeah. Even female characters were not that popular at the time, like they would become years later.

When you saw what Rob was able to do with his first issue, and that reception that it got — I don’t know, I think Rob’s initial orders were, like, 300,000, but the word just got out, and people couldn’t get that book, it got so hot — did you start believing in this thing when that started happening?

Yeah, I would say that’s pretty accurate. I want to say it was higher than 300,000 though…

Yeah, I think it was, like, 400,000; it was a lot, and then the reorders were so great and made that number much higher. But I’ve interviewed retailers like Jim Hanley and Steve Milo, and they were telling me how they had never seen a book like that — more so than Spawn, because people were ready for it by that time.

Right, yeah.

But nobody was expecting Youngblood to be like that.

Right. I remember Aliens vs. Predator at the time was the best-selling independent book — .

Yeah, and I think that was, like, 200,000 or 300,000 copies.

Yeah, something like that, 200,000, 250,000. And it’s like, “Wow, if we can beat that, if we can get close to that, that would be awesome!” And Youngblood’s initial orders were hundreds of thousands of copies more than that. I think it ended up being 800,000 or 900,000 for the first printing or something. Yeah, that was a definite surprise. Everything would have played out differently if the Internet was around back then, but we really were just getting little snippets of information from the front lines, from direct conversations with certain retailers, so it was hard to get a real sense for how hot or big everything was until later. So, actually, it was just like, “Wow, we’re doing good. Ah, doing even better. That’s cool.

This is great.”

What made you want to take a chance on Brandon?

Had he written anything for you prior? Had he plotted stuff?

Toward the end of the X-Men run, when I was plotting the book, he and I were essentially plotting the stories, and he had written some stories that we

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Distinctive Voodoo and Maul pencil illustration by Jim. ©2007 WildStorm Productions.

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Opening Splash from WildC.A.T.s #10 (vol. 1).

This particular issue reunited Chris Claremont and Jim Lee creatively in a post-Marvel world. In early trade articles, Claremont is mentioned as a possible founding member of Image. He never formalized his relationship with the company because he never found the right artist for his Huntsman series.

L E E had planned on doing together at Marvel. So I knew I liked the way he scripted, and we worked really well together, so it wasn’t really an issue where I felt uncomfortable with it at all. At that point I had worked with Scott Lobdell as a scripter, John Byrne as a scripter, and for a very short while with Chris, even, so I was used to working with a creator in that way.

When you were working on those early WildC.A.T.s, was this the first time you felt like you could do anything you wanted, or were you a little insecure about what people expected from the book?

Gosh. If anything, because it was the first story that I think intellectually I knew all the things I needed to have in there, but in terms of being able to pull it off creatively, I think that was probably the tricky part. With anything, I think. We had a pretty complex storyline, and first issues are always tough to plot, anyway, because you’ve got to establish the characters, make it feel like a complete story, give

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some sense of a cliffhanger, introduce all these characters. And so, it’s just a lot going on. And then, of course, with the delays in the books coming out, it was a mess. But, I didn’t feel it, honestly. If anything, it was kind of exciting.

Yeah. But you knew you wanted this to be “balls-tothe-wall” action?

Yeah, I think so, yeah. The predominant style at the time that the fans really responded to was action, big explosions, characters flying up at you. Even if they couldn’t fly, they always looked like they were flying.

Until I started doing this book, I didn’t know that you were the guy that brought Larry Stroman and Dale Keown and Sam Kieth. Do you remember why you picked those particular guys, or why they got you to get those guys, to lobby them into Image?

I think I knew them all beforehand. I met them at cons. I think also Rob was more like an evangelist.

His father was a minister, and he had a certain style of talking to people. And Todd was more like a Rasputin sort of character. And I think, if anything, I sounded probably more like a diplomat, so definitely the creators that were more gun shy about jumping in, to them maybe I sounded like the voice of reason.

And every creator responded differently to each of us, I think.

I thought you brought in the guys that were more artistic, the guys that you liked more in terms of art, and I thought that’s why you brought those guys more, because they were pretty good artists.

Oh, yeah, and I had known Larry because we had all worked in the X-office, and Sam Kieth, I can’t remember how I first met him, but I remember he had been working on “Wolverine” [in Marvel Comics Presents]. But these were guys I found that I liked their work, and Sam’s a pretty quiet, low-key kind of guy, so I think maybe Todd and Rob scared him. I don’t know. [laughs] I’m just trying to guess, here.

And Dale was another real cool guy that was very low-key and I think liked the soft sell.

But you tried getting Byrne too, right?

Yes, but here’s the thing, and I know I’ve read his take on his own message boards, and if I had the energy and the passion for it I would have gone in and argued it out, but it’s just essentially not that important to me. But, for the record, here is my understanding. My remembrance of it is that he and I were friendly at the time because he was scripting X-Men. Later he ended up understandably being very annoyed because the stories were coming in so late.

But at the time he was doing work for Dark Horse, and he was starting the John Byrne universe, kind of.

It wasn’t called that, but it was a bunch of books that he was planning on expanding. When I pitched him the idea of joining Image, he countered with me, “Oh, you don’t want to do that, why don’t you work on these books with me,” the John Byrne line of books or whatever. So it didn’t quite match with his recollection that it was pitched to him and he went running for the hills. I think it was he didn’t want to be part of our club, he wanted us to be part of his club, or something stupid like that; I don’t know.

When you joined, did you start believing in this cause?

Like, it’s all of us together, like a Three Musketeers kind of thing?

Well, we had initial meetings, and, again, I think everyone wanted it to be a different thing, and what it ended up being was closer to Todd’s vision of it, which is essentially we’re all kind of in it for ourselves, but we are loosely aligned. If I organized it completely it would probably have been more like one true company, but that would have given us a lot less freedom individually, so given all our different personalities and agendas and things that we wanted to do, it probably worked out best that we set it up as this loose confederacy of guys that each had their own companies, that published together under an umbrella imprint.

And in the end, actually, when Rob was kicked out and I left, it actually worked out to the betterment of Image that it was that easily detachable.

You could take your books away. Isn’t that one of the two rules, do what you want and you still own your books? You could leave at any time with your properties intact without any interference.

Yeah. Yeah. But it was always confusing to me at the beginning because, like, “Hey, let’s do this thing where your characters are involved in the origin or my characters.” I know Todd and Rob had some stuff like that. I’m like, “Wait. Do you not understand these two ideas don’t really work together?” There was just a lot of things like that early on, and honestly it’s because I think even Todd has said, like, we were young and stupid and we made every mistake you could possibly make, and we still survived. So I think there was just not a complete understanding of the legal issues involved with — .

I thought that was an unspoken rule, if you left, you could continue to use that character. Like, if Spawn was a guest in one of your issues, it’s yours.

Yeah, you could keep reprinting that particular issue, yeah, that was there. But, if Spawn were the guy that actually ultimately created the WildC.A.T.s, and I decided to do a WildC.A.T.s movie and I wanted to be faithful to the book, how would that work? So there were a lot of issues once you got outside of the world of comics, and I think you saw that — because I think some of the Youngblood characters were intimately involved in the origin of Spawn, and it all kind of changed for the movie. And that all goes to show you what big dorks we were, or still are, because we would consider that to be a big issue. But things in movies are changed all the time. No one really cares.

The Joker created Batman, and he killed Batman’s parents, and that’s out there, and Superman has a kid, and that’s out there, and you realize that a lot of the sturm und drang, the angst, the drama that we have in comics about these little bits of continuity ultimately mean nothing when they’re transferred onto the big screen, because they’re going to produce the best movie they can, the best storyline they can, regardless of all these other…

But it was vital when you guys started, though,

because I think that gave the line this Marvel vibe.

A uniformity.

Sure, it was, because, again, going back to the roots of us collaborating and trying to come up with cool ideas, like, “Hey, let’s do this to tweak it and really get the fans excited about this character or this storyline.” Yeah, we were playing and doing that, but at the same time, I knew that also that would be a pain in the ass.

When this started you didn’t foresee people falling out, did you?

No, I don’t think you necessarily see it falling out, but you see the legal issues involved with, “Wait a second. You own your characters, I own mine, but now my characters help create your characters?

Who owns that story?” It would only work if everyone were still on good terms, so I think I had it in the back of my head, like, well, someday it could bite them in the ass, and it sort of did.

When did you start feeling entrepreneurial?

When did you feel that you wanted it be a company, not just a couple of guys?

I think it grew out of the competition. Everyone was doing different things, and it became kind of a turf war, I think, early on. There are only X number of books we are publishing, and then Rob started really expanding the line of books, and you saw — Image Comics really should be about the six of us and not one guy publishing half the line, so we’ll hire other creators and have them publish other books as well. And then even Todd got into it, but he was slower to it. He really wanted to just focus on his one book, his name on that one book, and only later did he expand a bit with the mini-series and — .

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WildC.A.T.s logo and EMP. ©2007 WildStorm Productions.

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Characters ©2007 the respective holders.

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But what did you want from Image when it started?

Like, Todd wanted Spawn to be a household name. What did you expect from Image in four or five years, for you?

I wouldn’t say that I necessarily had a goal along those lines. I think that’s a great goal that he had, because I think that helped fuel his ambition for quite a while, still to this day, probably. I think I was probably more skeptical of that. I felt like nothing’s going to replace Superman and Batman, but Ninja Turtles really made a big dent years later. So I just realized how improbable that was. I think for me, I wanted to produce books I was proud of, and I think that’s the thing that has carried me through my career from Day One, which is I didn’t want to just put out a book and say, “Here’s the next thing,” and just hire anybody to do it. I was pretty picky about the writers we worked with, and I wanted to work with real writers and good writers, and good up-and-coming artists, and train them and not just have them follow my style, per se. So I wanted to build up a line of books that I felt proud of, and I think if you look at when we launched Homage and even Cliffhanger and the variety of books we had, I’m very proud of the types of books we produced and the quality of books we produced. So for me it wasn’t just about making my name a household name, or my character a household — it was more about, “I want to create this publishing line that’s really cool.”

So you always saw that you would eventually pass the reins of WildC.A.T.s to somebody else, right?

Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah.

In those early years, did you think you had that much energy? Were you perceptive to the kind of work you would have to put in at the beginning?

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To draw the art, or just in general?

In general.

Oh, the level of energy required was enormous.

You couldn’t sleep, I guess?

I couldn’t do it again, not on the same level, but I wouldn’t do it that way. I would use the experience I’ve gained and actually make it work for me. I just felt like I was running around in circles sometimes, doing things, without really a game plan. There was some semblance of a game plan, but it wasn’t as structured or as organized as it could have been, and I think if I’m doing something now, it would be very, very different.

But you literally had to build an office, a system. You had to get an office manager…

That, again, was part of the momentum and acceleration of the learning process. But, yeah, we would go in there and, never having rented an office space before, go and do that, and negotiate toy deals and movie deals and all that stuff, again, all for the first time. And you just use your instincts and — .

And had to draw books, because I think people were expecting Jim Lee books, they want you to draw everything, for some reason, especially in the beginning, right?

Yeah, but I think the numbers that the retailers ordered reflected that. Like, they didn’t order the same quantity of Gen13 or StormWatch. They basically started realizing, “Okay, we’ll sell this many of Jim’s books, and this many of other books that other creators in his line sell,” and so you started seeing a stratification of sales.

But at first, if they saw you plotted it, you would get pretty good orders, in the beginning.

We got good orders on everything. And at the time

I really did think, it really depended on the quality of the people we had doing the books. Looking back on it, honestly, I could have hired anybody and I think the books would have sold pretty much the same number of copies. That’s how hot it was. It was a commodity and not something that people read and enjoyed. I think people did read and enjoy the books, but that group was in the minority. The majority of the people buying Image comics were speculators that were basically looking to buy them and sell them at a profit in a short period of time.

Well, what did you do to counter that? That’s when you started getting people like Alan Moore and James Robinson, right?

No, but I had that attitude from the get-go; I just couldn’t get people to jump on board. I was one of the very first people to give Warren Ellis work outside of Marvel at the time, because I really liked his work, and I thought this is a guy that’s going to be really, really good, and he came on board and did stuff for us. Yeah, I was trying to get really good creators from the get-go, because I felt like ultimately, if this all caved in, this speculation bubble, the ones that would survive would be the ones that actually did good work. I don’t care how many copies you sell of a book, if it’s horrible stuff, no one’s going to want it ten years from now, but if it’s still a good storyline, the market, the collector base, will eventually absorb these numbers in a meaningful way because they like the story, they remember the characters, and they remember the storyline. So from the get-go I was trying to produce the best work possible both personally and for the entire line itself.

When you did that talent search, what were you looking

for? You were looking for the new wave of artists, weren’t you?

Yeah. New artists that I felt — because I think it was difficult trying to convince established guys to come on board and work for us — .

Yeah, isn’t it funny, there were certain guys that turned you down, and then as they saw you guys getting successful, they also wanted to be a founder or something?

Yeah, I think there were a number of stories, guys were sort of offered essentially positions to be part of the group early on, and they said no, and then I think they kind of regretted it later. Or guys that we wanted to bring on board, and they’d say, “Well, I want to be paid $1,000,000. If I don’t get paid $1,000,000 dollars, I don’t want to do a book for you.”

I’m like, “What? What if it ends up being $500,000 or $250,000? Why does it have to be this weird number that’s not even possible no matter whom you published or worked for? Even if you got every penny you wouldn’t be able to do that.” I think it’s because a lot of comic book creators weren’t necessarily very savvy, business-wise. They had no idea really what was going on in terms of, A) how successful Image was, and B) really what they could do for themselves if they decided to go out on their own. I think there was a lot of uncertainty that prevented a lot of people from pulling the trigger and agreeing to do something for us.

What I liked at the beginning was the way you developed the new talent you discovered. You didn’t put them on books right away like some other guys did.

Later we formalized it more, but early on the guys were pretty advanced, and they were doing trading cards and short stories, and when they got to a

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Deathblow! ©2007 WildStorm Productions.

L E E certain level, we’d give them their own title. Then later, as it became more of a formal procedure, they would come in and do a lot of commercial work, or work that wasn’t necessarily published in comics that we were doing as a company, and then after we saw they got better, we would hire them.

But it didn’t take long. Within a year or two, right away you had a nice staff of artists. You had Brett Booth, Travis Charest, Jeff Campbell, and you had Tom McWeeney — .

Yeah, I was pretty lucky. I got a bunch of really good guys right off the bat.

When you discovered Jeff, did he change the direction a little bit for the company? Because I think Jeff added a little humor to your line, and it became a little bit more about characters for a bit.

The studio was always about a good working environment. It was never like, “Okay, here’s what you guys have to do.”

Everyone’s opinion was respected,

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even if they were just a complete new guy. And I think Jeff was pretty far advanced for a kid his age, but, yeah, I think we all influenced him, and he in turn influenced us, and he definitely had more humor, he had more of a cartoony animation feel to his art. And so that was really the beauty of the art studio back then, it was really a great place for people to learn and be motivated by and inspired by one another.

But that’s sort of what you wanted. When I was talking to Whilce, one of his dreams was to have a Marvel bullpen.

Right, that Marvel bullpen that never existed.

Yeah, I think that’s what we were trying to create.

On one hand we were inspired by this book called The Studio. I remember that for sure, that was Barry Windsor-Smith and Jeff Jones and Michael Kaluta, which was an awesome book. It was very inspirational for — .

I think in a way Jeff was very key, in terms of the young guys that you developed, because for a while it maybe was too serious and grim; I don’t know if you felt it. Although WildC.A.T.s was always kind of loose, you always had a hint at humor. But they were pretty violent books back in the day, right? All of them, even Rob, would just cut people’s heads off…

We all had different editorial standards, and, yeah, like I said, there was no guiding principle. And so we often had to stand up and defend each other’s actions even though we didn’t necessarily agree with them. You would get raked over the coals over what one of your partners was doing with variants, or with editorial content, over things he was saying in public, so, yeah, that was part of the craziness.

But it doesn’t bug you — because I know it bugs some of the other guys when they classify their art, “Oh, that’s like the Image style.” That stigma doesn’t bother you? I mean, that’s your style, basically.

Yeah, I would never say it’s like my style — .

When they say, “Image style,” they’re talking about one of you seven guys.

Yeah, they usually go, “Image style, but he’s actually one of the better artists.” I mean, I’ve heard that said about Todd, Marc, whatever. Everyone has their group of fans. I don’t really dwell on it. I don’t see it necessarily as a negative adjective.

That’s what I was telling Whilce, in your case it’s not a negative. With somebody else that wasn’t part of Image, I guess it would be.

Well, there were a lot of guys aping that style, so I don’t know; at least we’re the ones that created that style, we weren’t one of the guys aping it to make a buck. So I think there’s a difference between helping create and forge and popularizing that style, and being a guy who all of a sudden changes style to jump on the bandwagon, so to speak. So I don’t look at it negatively. It’s a part of the history of my style, the evolution of my style, and I’d like to think that I’ve improved upon it.

After you left Marvel, there must have been four or five guys that were trying to do your style.

Yeah, it’s funny, because I remember Neal Adams saying once about all these guys that were copying him that they would always copy the worst elements

of his style, right? So I always felt that same thing. But then I look back on the stuff I was producing back then, going, “Ugh, I hate those elements, too, in my own work.” So you’re just blind to your own failings and your own mistakes. And I would definitely not say that my take on the Image style was better than anyone else’s; if anything I can say I was there first, and that’s about it. I can’t even say that I did it even better, looking back on it.

Did it bother you a little bit when Rob started getting competitive with you, or some of the other guys?

I think we were always competitive with each other, even when we were at Marvel. I know Larry Marder always said that you can look at the history of Image Comics as the history of the dynamic between Todd, Rob, and myself.

But it didn’t bug you when there was the thing between Rob and Marc when he was trying to hire one of his artists?

No, I can’t remember a specific instance, but I’m sure it bugged all of us, because we were all very competitive with one another, to the point where I think — and, again, Larry Marder said this to me once, that we actually competed more with ourselves than we did with Marvel and DC. Like, Marvel and DC was just like, competing with them was just ways of competing with each other, saying, “Hey, I did this to Marvel, I did this to DC,” sales-wise, or whatever.

But we really only cared about how we ranked in regard to each other, which is pretty twisted when you think about it. But like I said, Image Comics was not born out of a business plan.

But when you did Deathmate, did you want all the other Image founders to be involved?

I think that was something that was offered to everybody, but…

But it didn’t bother you when some of the other guys weren’t interested?

Gosh, I can’t remember. I think there were so many things that were done in secret, or…. Yeah, we would have these meetings and literally we would get together and say, “Hey, [snaps fingers] I’m doing this.” It was never meant as an inclusionary thing. So I think everyone got in the habit of trying to come up with cool things to do that we would basically unload on each other as these trump cards, like, “Hey, by

the way, I’ve got this toy line I’m doing,” or, “Hey, by the way, I’m going on tour with these puppets.” I don’t know, it was crazy stuff, it was crazy stuff.

You and Rob were in sync, because you did that together, and you would later do something else with him.

I think he and I, because we talked a lot on a daily basis several times a day, we definitely competed with each other, but at the same time we would often come up with ideas to do together. So I think that’s where “Heroes Reborn” came out of, and Deathmate.

Deathmate, was that a successful experiment, or did it not work at all?

Well, I would say it was unsuccessful because it

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A new generation of readers experienced a new breed of WildC.A.T.s, courtesy of Grant Morrison, Jim Lee and Scott Williams. This was the final page’s pencils from 2006’s WildC.A.T.s #1 (vol. 4) . ©2007 WildStorm Productions.

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From Jim’s Image days: Stormwatch. ©2007 WildStorm Productions.

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was so late, but it sold very well, unfortunately, which created a lot of the problems later on.

Right around the time of “Heroes Reborn,” I think it was announced that you were going to be part of the regular team on WildC.A.T.s. Why didn’t that happen?

I don’t remember, per se. There was a time when I was going to come back and do, like, layouts or something like that.

I think that was one of the things that hurt the Moore run a little bit, because I think Travis was supposed to do some of that run with him, and every issue was a different guy or two different guys.

Yeah, he was supposed to be the regular artist, so I think there was a period where lots of bad decisions were being quickly made and unmade at the same time, but I think I’d always intended to come back to WildC.A.T.s at some point, and the timing never really worked out well.

Was “Heroes Reborn” something you had to do for the greater good of your company, or was it just something

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you wanted…?

I think it was one of those cool projects.

I mean, A) it was a very cool project; B) it made headlines; C) and it was sort of… if you think about it, some of the stuff I think they would never have ever extended to us, when we left Marvel at the beginning, was offered up. Like, “Hey, you’re essentially publishing these characters. We’ll do a back-end deal with you and you control and re-envision these characters.” It wasn’t just like, “Hey, go back and draw these characters for us.” The deal was completely different, and we really were in charge of guiding these characters’ destinies.

And that’s a fun thing to do. As a creator, having that kind of control over storylines and these characters, it’s a big, big thing. I think in terms of it being a good thing for the company as a whole, yeah, for WildStorm it was, because I think it gave us a lot of notoriety, and the stuff that we were doing with crossovers. So it wasn’t just like, “Hey, we’re going to publish these four books.” It was like a much bigger deal. And also the people at Marvel had changed. It was a whole different group of owners and different people running it, and it really was, at least from our perspective, more of a joint venture between Marvel and WildStorm, Marvel and Extreme.

But it must have been a heavy burden for you, because I was an intern at Marvel at that time, and they thought that you’d come and save us or something.

I think there was probably some of that, yeah. Their sales were really low.

Fantastic Four was, like, 35,000 copies or something like that. People had kind of forgotten how bad sales were, and the new regime, they were business people, and they said, “Well, when did we sell lots of copies?” “Oh, it was when these guys were here.”

“Well, go get those guys.” And we basically told them what we needed to do that in terms of control and the business deal. And they just said, “Okay, we’ll do it.”

And that created some friction with the other Image partners, namely Todd?

Yeah, I think so, y’know, but again, it was nothing new. There was a lot of that kind of friction all along, because everyone was basically, there wasn’t a lot of…. It was very much survival of the fittest, and if you showed weakness, it meant bad things for you within the company. [laughs] In some of the interviews I’ve read, it sounded like you wanted this to be more of a fraternity, where you guys hung out more together.

I think that’s just more my personality type. Looking back on it, there’s no way that would have ever happened. So it’s not like a thing where I feel bitter,

or “Oh, it should have been.” It was what it was, and I realize that. Definitely, looking back on it, there was really no way for it to have been different, given the personalities that were involved.

So “Heroes Reborn” actually did help your line? Like, the sales, it kept it going?

I don’t know if it helped our overall line, but it helped the company. At that point we had quite a number of employees and we were doing a lot of different kinds of businesses…

But you never wanted to downsize and lay people off?

No, no. That was always my worst fear, and when I later sold the company, that was definitely one of the options.

Going forward as the bust in comic book sales kept getting bigger, it’s like, how do we deal with this? At WildStorm our choice was always to grow and do other things, whether it was DVD menus or trading cards or package books for other companies, these were all things we did to basically keep growing and keep — .

When the DC thing happened, had you hit a wall or something? Because I was talking to guys who worked for you, it sounded like you were a little more concerned about the company. You didn’t want these guys to leave; you wanted to keep this unit intact?

Well, I think whenever you would cut back an infrastructure, you lay people off, it’s a lot harder to regain that expertise and grow back, so it was a lot easier just to add more business to the structure we already had, and that was a real big focus of mine for several years, just really trying to tread water until comic book sales turned around again. And I think finally, when I settled, I think I was just physically and mentally tired of trying to play that, trying to fuel the company that way.

Did you put out feelers? How did DC become involved? Because I thought you were, like, the prodigal son at Marvel, and I thought Bob Harras would have at least tried to get you back or something. If it had happened, I thought it would have worked out like that.

No. Actually… how did it happen? I think it was Marvel, after “Heroes Reborn”, that was interested in purchasing us to then run their whole editorial line.

They saw the success we had with just the few books that we controlled, and that started the whole evaluation process, what the company is worth, and you start getting into your head, like, “Oh, this would be kind of fun,” you can see the benefits and pros and cons of doing something like that. And then when that fell through, there were other parties that were interested, a couple of media companies in Hollywood. And we were friendly with Paul Levitz at DC and met with him a couple times prior to us

basically asking them if they were interested in purchasing WildStorm, so that’s really kind of the history of it all.

You mentioned you were kind of depressed, like you sold your babies or something? Do you still have any ownership or any say in the direction?

I have equity in things I’ve created, actually.

But what about editorial-wise, do you have any say?

I still run WildStorm, so honestly it doesn’t feel any different than the way I was running it before. I think there’s just a few things that we have to be aware of editorially that doesn’t jibe with how DC handles their editorial business.

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Grifter, Voodoo, Emp and Maul in a killer splash page. ©2007 WildStorm Productions.

IMAGE FOUNDER

Rob Liefeld Rob Liefeld. Photo ©2007 Tom Mason.

Youngblood. ©2007 Rob Liefeld.

There is no Image Comics without Rob Liefeld. The seeds that would eventually grow to become the juggernaut that we know today as Image started with Mr. Liefeld’s vision. Bursting with a plethora of his own characters and ideas, he was searching for a venue where he wouldn’t have to worry about editorial restraints and the ownership of his creations and stories. Now the idea of a creator-owned title wasn’t anything entirely new… except that there had never been a fullfledged superstar artist, fresh off a multi-million selling comic to ever make the leap to the independents. Rather quickly he found kindred feelings with other top artists of like minds and together they started a revolution of a magnitude which the industry will probably never see again.

Born in Fullerton, California in 1967, Rob Liefeld was the son of a Baptist minister, raised in a very nurturing home throughout his formative years.

Although enamored with the Star Wars movies in his youth, he discovered that comics were his true calling when enraptured by the books of Byrne, Miller, Simonson, Pérez and later, Arthur Adams. By the time he graduated high school, the constant doodler had taken some art classes and set his sights on breaking into the comics industry by parading a finely tuned portfolio.

Rather quickly, he met independent publisher Gary Carlson, who published his first work in the pages

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of Megaton.

Opportunity really knocked in an offer to the big leagues from DC editor Mike Carlin for the spunky artist to pencil a new Hawk and Dove mini-series.

Despite some developing friction between editor and artist — mostly when the youngster got too experimental as he illustrated some pages sideways in the final issue — the book became a fan favorite and a decent success that earned Hawk and Dove their own ongoing series. The wünderkind was now a fullfledged comic book artist. According to Karl Kesel, co-writer and inker of the title, at the time, “Mike Carlin once said of Rob, ‘He has it. He just doesn’t have it yet.’”1 Soon copies of Rob’s published pencils made the rounds at Marvel Comics where they landed on the desk of Bob Harras, the new editor of the mighty X-Men books. Always a good judge of artistic talent, Harras perhaps saw the purity in Rob’s art, along with the tenacity in his imagination… maybe even someone that could add a different spice to the new direction that the X-books were heading in. Like all rookies, Harras gave him a chance to realize his potential and become acquainted with the demanding Marvel fans on various X-book fill-ins. In a matter of months, his dedication was rewarded with the art task on the fledgling New Mutants series, beginning with #86.

Paired with writer Louise Simonson, the artist’s arrival went below the public radar, yet month by month, his contributions to the book lured fans intrigued by Cable, the latest gritty, mysterious mutant from the distant future. The jovial nature of his overall art and panel work was ingratiated by readers of books. With Simonson’s departure on #97, Liefeld made his pitch for total control of plots in a

more aggressive direction for the mutant team that came complete with more new characters. Rob also recommended changing the title of the book after #100 when all the old plotlines wrapped. Marvel not only accepted all of these terms from their latest rising star but began to see it as a potential for a large scale retail event akin to the release of Todd McFarlane’s successful Spider-Man #1.

In 1991, Rob’s X-Force #1 would have been a success anyway, but Marvel upped the ante by releasing the comic polybagged with one of five different cards — a major key for it crossing over with speculators in the arenas of comics and trading cards collectibles of the era. And for a few months, that first issue set the sales records for a single unit with five million copies sold. Seemingly overnight, X-Force even caught the attention of Madison Avenue when Rob was cast for a high-profile Levis commercial directed by Spike Lee. In an interview, Fabian Nicieza, scripter of X-Force, mentioned one of the ways that audiences responded to the title: “Part of the charm, if you will, is that they’re not out to apprehend the bad guys, they’re out to never allow those bad guys to ever do bad things again.

There is only a few ways to accomplish that goal. [laughter] They appoint themselves, in most cases, judge, jury and executioner.”2 Throughout the years, Rob had never forgotten that he had an open offer from Malibu Comics’s publisher, Dave Olbrich, to publish anything he wanted. With his massive success, he was now ready to test the waters with a new super-team book called Executioners under his very own imprint: Image Comics. As soon as the book’s promotional advertisement appeared in The Comics Buyer’s Guide, Bob Harras phoned Liefeld to let him know that Marvel was disappointed, and were threatening to take legal action and take him off X-Force. Neither Rob nor Malibu wanted a tussle with Marvel’s allegations and Executioners was put on hold for a time.

Undeterred, he began to have discussions with his close friends about joining him in a self-publishing venture with Malibu’s help. Erik Larsen and Jim Valentino were the first of his acquaintances that he approached; both were keen on joining. When he spoke with Todd McFarlane, his timing couldn’t have been any better — Todd was in the mist of a “selfimposed” retirement and wondering about his next career move, he had no desire to ever return to Marvel — to him, Rob’s offer was a godsend.

Immediately, McFarlane was proactive with plenty of ideas for the group and did everything under the sun to convince Jim Lee to come along with them; he strongly felt that Lee was the key person to have on their team. With Marc Silvestri and Whilce Portacio on the team, as well, the dawn of a new era had arrived.

“If I had my way,” expressed Rob around the time of Youngblood #1’s release, “I would attempt to do both X-Force and Youngblood and keep them both going. But anything I create for Marvel — they’ll give me some credit and everything — but ultimately it’s just not mine. It’s not that I don’t approach it

enthusiastically; I have always approached everything enthusiastically, but now we get to create these guys and own them ourselves. And you know what? That makes a lot of differences, not so much in the money you could make from the character or stuff like that, but you can go ‘Youngblood is mine.’”3 Youngblood was chosen to be the first book to launch the Image Comics banner. At most, they hoped for sales close to Dark Horse Comics indie success with 1990’s Aliens vs. Predator #1, which sold close to 400,000 copies. The seven young artists had no idea, whatsoever, of how the marketplace would react to their books. But right out of the gate, Youngblood turned out to be a sensation that went the distance from the first day it hit the stands.

“The book initially was ordered at 350,000,” Liefeld specified, “then 800,000, and then eventually 1,000,000 copies right before it went to print. It was scary. There was a lot of notoriety with the book because it was the first book we were producing and it sold a million copies.”

The demand for Youngblood #1 was so heavy that retailers found it difficult to keep the book in stock.

The success of Youngblood served as a significant confidence booster to the rest of the Image founders, loudly affirming that there was a public ready to welcome their artistic talents with open arms, without those characters from Marvel Comics’ stable. At one time the book was the all-time best selling independent until surpassed by Image’s next release (and still the record holder) Spawn #1.

But the dawn of Youngblood wasn’t total bliss as soon some in critic and fan circles made it the textbook example of everything wrong with Image. The argument was usually that the young guns may have focused too much on the visuals and not enough in their stories and scripts. “Rob owned up to the shortcomings of those first few issues, which frankly is something he doesn’t really owe anyone,” said

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Rob at the first official Image meeting at Marc Silvestri’s home in 1992.

This photo was taken by Tom Mason, creative director of Malibu Comics in the early ’90s. ©2007 Tom Mason.

ROB LIEFELD

Rob at an appearance at Los Angeles’ Golden Apple Comics.

Photo ©2007 Golden Apple Comics.

Jim Lee and Rob at Image’s first meeting.

Photo ©2007 Tom Mason.

Joe Casey (who a decade later would re-dialogue Youngblood #1). “No one was forcing retailers to order a million copies of Youngblood, nor were readers forced to buy them. Hey, buyer beware, right? I know I bought it when it came out, because I thought Rob’s original concept was cool and fairly ahead of the curve. My gripe at the time was that the actual comics were terrible reads. And, obviously, I wasn’t the only one who felt that way.”4 Inside his Extreme line, under the Image Comics umbrella, Liefeld stayed the course and worked endlessly to produce a line of top-selling comics full of the in-your-face action and bombastic enthusiasm that made him a household name at Marvel. With Extreme Studios in Anaheim, he developed a young bullpen of artists that shared a lot of his creative ideals — many of them were discovered by him as mere teenagers, among them stellar names like Jeff Matsuda and Chap Yaep. Also, like the other Image founders, the hyperactive creator learned much of the comics business by trial and error in those early years. No matter his best of intentions, the grueling grind of producing so much art and stories, running

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a company, and efforts to get his characters into other mediums began to take a toll on his Image books and their increasing lateness.

During mid-1993, Rob announced a sabbatical that would allow him to scale back his art production. “I want to get away and kinda focus,” he said to Hero Illustrated in the early ’90s. “I went back and got my old studio that I started in about five years ago, a little shack. I mean, when your day’s full of signing copyright and trademark agreements, working with the other artists, trafficking books, trying to catch up on the deadlines that are already real far behind — I mean, it’s a miracle I’ve been able to do what I’ve done, which is still put out work. I’ve enjoyed it, but there have been some definite bumps in the road.

I’ve done some stupid things, like make promises that I didn’t keep. After a while you go, ‘Wow! I’m kind of a joke now.’ I need to go off and focus and take care of some business and just kinda get the stuff going. I think if I keep trying to run to catch up, I’m not going to make it. What I need to do is just take some time off and just get focused.”

A year later, Rob came back on interior duties with Youngblood #6 — his linework now much sleeker.

Extreme’s output was now leaner and tighter editorially, late books were now less late — he also lured away Marvel’s newest prized artist Stephen Platt to Extreme. Despite all the moves, the market was in a freefall. Relationships between Extreme and some of the other Image founders were also starting to change for the worse. In 1995, he started a new line outside of the Image Comics family entitled Maximum Press, intended to house non-super-hero books like good girl Avengylene and sci-fi fare Battlestar Galactica.

While Liefeld was preparing for his triumphant return to Marvel Comics on Captain America — via the “Heroes Reborn” launch with Jim Lee — Marc Silvestri announced his resignation from Image’s board of directors on June 6, 1996. Although not known at the time, Silvestri’s decision stemmed from Rob’s office offering work to Top Cow’s star artist Michael Turner for a possible Avengylene miniseries. Of all the Image partners, Marc was the one that Rob knew the least, and Silvestri impulsively felt that this action was unbecoming from a fellow Image partner.

Within weeks of Silvestri’s resignation, rumblings had begun between the Image shareholders about various issues with Rob, particularly about Maximum Press, the existence of which felt like a conflict of interest to those at Image — in terms of publishing, it was felt that there should be an alliance for the better good of Image over any other publisher. So on August 9, 1996, Image had their first unanimous vote to oust Liefeld. (According to their by-laws, votes to remove an Image partner have to be unanimous on two different dates.) On the day of the second (and final vote), September 4, Rob faxed his resignation on what would have been his final meeting with the Image shareholders. He had sensed that things had gotten irreparable between all of them.

In the January 1997 issue of Wizard magazine,

writer Matthew Senreich reported, “Rob Liefeld announced October 2 [1996] that he is suing Image Comics for $1 million for breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duties, libel, slander and interference with contract. Liefeld claims that Image has frozen revenue owed to Liefeld’s Extreme Comics, as a result, forcing Extreme to delay many titles scheduled to ship through Image, including Youngblood, Prophet and Supreme.”5 Image would later file their lawsuit against him.

During 1997, Image Comics and Rob reached a settlement, details of which still remain confidential.

Post-Image, Rob Liefeld had his finest moment in comics as publisher and CEO of Awesome Entertainment in the spring of 1997. With the ever distinguished Jeph Loeb as his publisher, they were able to harbinger a new line of comics that helped usher the return of classic super-hero storytelling to the mainstream.

The gem of their line was Alan Moore’s sweeping, heroic tour-de-force on Supreme, which attracted stellar talents from all over the industry to fun fare like Kaboom, Fighting American, The Coven and a reinvigorated Youngblood.

Although a huge critical success, the line slowly collapsed when its financial backers pulled out, not impressed with the small sale increases or the company’s sterling reputation.

Today, the fan favorite creator is now a happily married father of three children. He remains a constant presence in the field that he’s passionate about — providing art for Marvel and DC titles, while continuing to develop more characters for his own future projects. Despite the trials and tribulations, Rob usually looks at his Image years as one of the most exciting times in his career.

And he’s proud to have been one of the few creators who was truly the maker of his own destiny. http://goodcomics.comicbookresourcesm/2006/02/02/comic-book-urban-legends-revealed-36/ [Comics Interview #96. Interview with Fabian Nicieza by Patrick Daniel O’Neill, Page 7, 1991.]

3 Amazing Heroes #202 – Page 35 4 http://www.newsarama.com/Arcade/liefeld/maxrob.html 5 Wizard #65, January 1997, Matthew Senreich.

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New Mutants #85 cover.

Pencils by Rob Liefeld, inks by Todd McFarlane. ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

IMAGE FOUNDER

Todd McFarlane

Recent publicity photo of Todd McFarlane.

Spawn is TM & ©2007 Todd McFarlane Productions.

No matter where Todd McFarlane goes, he always seems to have to do things his own way. And it’s exactly that attitude and tenacity that has given this artist the ability to remain fiercely independent and create an empire from his character Spawn. From his humble beginnings in lowly selling titles at Marvel and DC Comics to his great successes on Amazing Spider-Man and Incredible Hulk, he’s always left his stamp and flair on anything he touches. Todd’s elastic visualization of Spider-Man radically transformed that character’s appearance and remains influential at Marvel today. Dissatisfied with Marvel’s constant editorial interference and attitude towards creators, he quit and entered a self-imposed retirement from the Spider-Man title that he successfully premiered with sales in the millions.

Soon he reemerged to help found Image Comics and made Spawn and himself into household names. The first issue of Spawn sold over 1,800,000 copies and remains the best-selling independent comic title ever. Today the immensely popular artist is president of Image Comics and owner of both McFarlane Toys and McFarlane Productions; he’s also highly sought after for his artistic vision in mainstream film, television and other mediums.

When you were growing up, you were a rabid comic book fan, right? You used to write letters and all sorts of things.

It depends on your definition of “growing up.”

I started collecting comic books probably when I was 16. I’m actually a late-bloomer. Once I started collecting, I became a freak. I think most people when they collect are a little more reasonable about their collecting.

I’ve always been sort of an obsessive kind of guy. Like, when I get into something, I dive in completely. When I started collecting, I started buying Marvel first, started practically buying every single title, and then when I ran out of those titles, I started buying DCs. And when I ran out of those, then it was the independent comic books. And then there was, “I’m going to read them, and now I’m going to try and draw them, then write letters to them.” I just fell in love with the industry as a whole.

You actually worked in a comic book store, right?

Yeah. That was in Spokane, Washington.

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When did you start taking the art seriously?

Probably, I would say, the beginning of my senior year of high school.

But you already had a scholarship in sports? The last thing on your mind was being a comic book artist?

No, not really. I was always doodling, so what ends up happening, then, is I start collecting the comic books, right? Then the comics become a focus of my artwork. I go, “Hey, you know what? Instead of just doodling, I’ll actually put it to a constructive use.” And I go, “These comic books are pretty cool.

Why don’t I start training myself to draw comic books instead of just trying — because at that point I was doing 15 different styles, y’know, in my notebooks?

There was no rhyme or reason to my artwork. So the comic books then became a focal point. I’d go, “I’m gonna teach myself to draw comic books.” And then, I started doing that in high school, especially my senior year, so by the time I graduated from high school and then I end up going to college and playing baseball, I was very realistic about the chances of being a pro athlete. Although I had delusional friends, I knew that the odds were against me. So I knew I had to get an education, and at the same time “I’ll continue teaching myself these comic books and sending off samples.” And at some point I’m going to have to make a living. So if it was baseball, if it was

Todd’s cover artwork for the black-&-white reprinting of Spawn #1 in 1997.

T O D D M c FA R L A N E

While in high school,16year-old Todd drew this cover of Spawn for his own fanzine effort.

comic books, if it was being a commercial artist or whatever, go into the printing business, I didn’t care.

If you give me my druthers, I would have put them in order, but I also knew that as a young kid, whoever was going to give me a job, I was going to take it coming out of college as soon as I got it. And even in college I was also sending off the samples. I ended up getting somebody to say “yes” in the comic book world about three weeks before I graduated, so I never really went for any real job thereafter.

Were your parents supportive of your career choice, of going into comics?

Yeah. Even when I was younger, they bought me, like, drawing tables, and they bought my tools and stuff like that. If they were at art supply places, they’d come and bring me stuff. So I don’t think that they ever imagined, nor did I, that I’d be able to have as good a career as I have, but they figured, “Hey, if he’s enjoying himself and he likes it, he could be doing worse things. And so the art, we should be encouraging him to do something he likes.” So, yeah, they were always supportive. They weren’t one of those ones that you read about, where they say,

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“Why don’t you go get a real job, son?” They were never like that. They were just like, “Do something you like to do. I don’t know if you can make a living in drawing, but you know what? God bless your effort.”

And what did your dad do, in terms of work?

He was in the printing business.

Oh, okay.

It was more of, like, putting books together and running printing presses and stuff, but… and to me, I thought I’d either go into the printing business with him or I’d become a commercial artist. I had figured that would be the reality of life.

Did your dad help you do a portfolio early in your career, on The X-Men? No, but I did that when we were in Spokane, so we just got a local one. But again, not to jump too fast forward, but what my dad did was expose me enough to printing over the course of my life that by the time we ended up quitting Marvel to start Image, one of the concepts, which was, “Oh, you poor little artist boys, this is going to be so hard, printing books.”

Like, to me, printing was going to be the easiest part, y’know? I’m going, “Drawing and printing, I’ve got both those bases covered. What are you talking about?” So I think that God inadvertently put me in a good position to help make that break away years later. I didn’t have any fear of getting stuff printed, because I had seen the magic trick of printing and it wasn’t that big of a deal.

What were your influences on your style?

Early on, when I first started collecting, it was guys who were drawing at that point, probably the first two big influences would have been George Pérez and John Byrne. To me, they were at the top of the heap for me at that point. Later on I discovered guys like Neal Adams, and then Walt Simonson, Frank Miller came a little bit later, and then Art Adams came on the scene. He had a short little burst there that was pretty cool. Mike Golden, who was terrific. Then, as I became entrenched with comic books, I got involved in, sort of, again, the history of comics, so all of a sudden I started following and reading up on the past careers of guys like Gil Kane, who I think is amazing, and Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko and these guys, and fell in love with…. At the beginning, when I started collecting comics, I didn’t appreciate their work because I didn’t understand it — because it wasn’t “contemporary.” As I got a little bit older and a little bit more mature, I was able to actually look at their artwork and get stuff out of it and put it into a 1990 version years later as a professional. So when people go, “Oh, Todd, your storytelling,” I attribute a lot of it to Gil Kane and Kirby. It’s weird when you say stuff like that. I don’t draw like Gil Kane or Jack Kirby, but their mindset of doing big, dynamic pages and giving you big melodrama with your fantasy comic books, a lot of that was derived from them.

But you pushed yourself, too. You didn’t want to be just another John Buscema clone that was common at Marvel at that point.

Well, yeah. So once I start sending off my samples and I end up getting the first job, then the reality at

that point is not only trying to have a steady gig, but how do you separate yourself somewhat from the sea of artists that are going on at any given day, right? Maybe it was just me, but I assume most other people who have read a decent amount of comic books, when you looked at a George Pérez book, you knew it was George. When you looked at a Kirby book, you knew it was Jack. When you looked at a Gil Kane book, you knew it was Gil. When you looked at a Frank Miller book, it was Frank. Each one of them, given that the rules are the same, “we need you to draw pictures to these comic book words,” you still were able to define who each one of the guys were. While I could actually argue that John Buscema was awesome in his own right, doing a watered-down John Buscema doesn’t work. But John Buscema being John Buscema was awesome.

So I think what had happened to a lot of guys, they just were doing a water-down version of somebody else, and I think what ended up happening in my career is I ended up taking little nuggets from about 10, 12, 15 different artists and putting it into a big pot, stirring it up, and calling it my style. But I can point to stuff going, “Those capes were influenced by Byrne.” And there’s another guy, named Marshall Rogers that did a run on “Batman” that did the best capes I ever saw. And then you go, “Oh, okay,” and the way the body swings, that’s these three guys, and the way this guy does machinery, and the way that that guy does aliens, the way that guy does… and it

just became a hodgepodge so that I just cobbled it together and went, “Yeah, okay, this is how I’m going to spill it out, and I’m going to call it the McFarlane look.” It ended up, luckily, having its own unique style, so years later, the things I admired about other people, which you could recognize in your artwork, I was able to pull that trick out of the bag and have people go, “Ah, yeah, that’s Todd’s stuff. Nobody draws like Todd.”

When you started, what book did you aspire the most to do? Were you just hopeful that you’d get a shot at X-Men one day, and sit at home drawing for Marvel or something?

You know what? I get that question even with my own company, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” I don’t know; wherever the opportunity is.

So I love comic books, and if comic books had maintained a steady business, I’d probably still be doing it.

But, because I started collecting at such a late age, at 16, there weren’t really one or two characters that I had grown up with that I just go, “Oh, my God, it’d be the end of my days if I could only draw this guy.”

I’ve run into guys like that. So, to me, I found, on some level, every character I drew was interesting at that moment, because I was going, “How can I make this interesting for myself to draw?” So when I was doing Spider-Man, I did the stuff I did on Spider-Man, more than anything else really to entertain myself while I was drawing. Because I’d go, “I hope to draw it for a hundred issues.” When I was doing The

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T O D D M c FA R L A N E [Incredible] Hulk, I came up with a way of making him look and move and feel in a way that was interesting to me so that I’d go, “Oh, maybe I’ll draw him for a hundred issues.” It never happens, but you have to go in with the mindset that you’ll be drawing this guy for a long time so you actually get interested in it. Although I wasn’t ever a big fan, per se, at any given time, of Iron Man, but if I had taken over the Iron Man book, Iron Man would have instantly become my favorite hero at that moment. Because I would have gone, “Ohh, Iron Man, now he’s the coolest! How can I make him look cool? And how do I entertain myself drawing?” Because if you’re drawing a book and you begrudge the character you’re pushing the pencil on, it becomes labor. It’s tough to get those pages done when you’re going, “Aw, I’d rather be doing Superman.” You can’t have that mindset. You have to go, at least for me, every character I’m working on is the best character that’s in the comic book field at that moment. Otherwise you drive yourself crazy.

When you were working at Marvel, you pushed yourself hard, because there were was a time when the books were even bi-weekly or something?

Yeah. It was bi-weekly, because they had been doing the bi-weeklies, and I remember when I came I go, “Hey, I hate bi-weeklies because you’ve got to take the regular artist off it. So if we’re going to go bi-weekly, then I’m going to stay on the book.” Now, I found that it was a little bit a foolish endeavor because I was penciling and inking at that time, and then trying to pencil and ink two books at the same time; that was very difficult. Some of the bi-weeklies had some inkers that came on, and because of that the style shifts a little bit, because I was normally inking my own stuff. So I did to myself what I didn’t like, which was shifting the style somewhat.

But again, they never asked me whether we just wanted to do a monthly book. If it was up to me, I’d have kept the book monthly and have me pencil and ink every page. But they put those styles on me. But, yeah, you just get the deadlines done. Did I have a lot of all-nighters back then? Absolutely.

You also tried to impress the fans by not letting fill-in artists do issues during your run. You always kept in mind this public persona. You didn’t want to let down your fans. You did lot of conventions, and I’m sure Marvel didn’t send you to these shows. You were in charge of your own career, right?

Well, you know what? At some level I don’t think there’s any magic to the success that I was able to get. It goes something like this: Keep your deadlines. Come up with a little bit of a style that is a little bit different than everybody else.

Be friendly to the consumer. And stay on a book for more than five f*ckin’ issues. I mean, there’s no magic. Here’s the problem: During my entire career, I never had a hankering to want to do an X-Men book, and at some point I actually got to the point where I go, “I will never do an X-Men book,” because I wanted to be one of those guys to prove to the young kid that you can have a huge career and never do The X-Men. And if you don’t believe me, then you’re not looking at me, because I’m the example. You don’t have to do

The X-Men. So would Jim Lee’s career have been bigger or less if he hadn’t? I don’t know, but Jim Lee’s a hell of an artist, and he didn’t have to draw The X-Men. So did he shortcut his way to being popular via the fast route? Maybe, I don’t know. At some point I felt that doing The X-Men as an artist was like becoming a Yankees baseball player. It’s too easy. I’ve always been like an underdog guy. I just don’t like the easy route. I never wanted to play on the winningest team when I played in sports. I always wanted to be the mediocre team that beat the winningest team because to me there was more satisfaction. So drawing The X-Men, drawing Wolverine, whatever, that’s just too easy. What’s more impressive to me was stuff like John Byrne taking over stuff like Iron Fist and making it interesting to me. And Frank Miller taking a character that had been around forever, Daredevil, that most people didn’t care about, and reinventing it. And to me those were bigger moments than going, oh, to be doing the number one book that’s been number one for 20 years. If it stays number one, it has nothing to do with you. I would rather be on a book that’s #20 and bring the sales up to #8 than to be on the #1 book and not be the guy who took it to #2. Forget it. And if you stay at number one, they’re like, “Yeah? So what? It’s been number one for 20 years.” There’s nothing there for you that will build your career. Take Captain America. I always tell kids, take Captain America and take him to #1. Oh my gosh, you’ll be a saint, y’know? Go get Batman, put him to be the biggest comic book ever. Take Wonder Woman, Flash, take Green Lantern, get another book, another mid-level character and drive them to the top like Frank did with Daredevil and they will basically name awards after you.

When they gave you your own title, the self-titled Spider-Man, was it because you wanted to tell your own stories?

Were you starting to get frustrated already at Marvel?

Not really. Well, I was always frustrated, but I wanted to draw… remember I said earlier that I’d come up with a style that would entertain me?

Again, this is maybe all part of my ego: that the easiest way to entertain you, is to actually draw the stuff you like. So what I was drawing was the characters and the bad guys in the situation that the writers liked. So I’m going, “Oh, darn it.”

They’d give me the bill and “How come you can’t have this? Oh, I love this guy.” And I’m going, “I don’t like it; it’s dumb!” I mean I draw, I’m going to do the best I could, but I wasn’t necessarily a fan of Sandman; what did I care, y’know? So I go “Ah, if I were writing the book, here’s what I’d put in.” It was the same mindset as the writer except now I go, “Cool!” I think it’s too easy for a writer to put stuff on paper that he doesn’t have to draw. So, in other words, if I’m writing and I don’t have to draw it… well, I wouldn’t ever actually write this, because I know somebody would have to draw it. But if I were a

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writer and I never drew, then I would go, “Oh! Let’s do a fleet of aliens coming down from 12 planets, about a thousand of them, and then heads are floating over the Capitol Building, make about 18,000 of them dropping down, and then we’re going to have, like, The Avengers and The Defenders coming,” and you’re starting to get into Independence Day. Well, you know what? For me to describe that scene, I can type that in about two-and-half minutes. It takes four days to draw that damn picture. Three minutes to think it up, four days to draw the doublepage spread. It’s just painful. God bless — I mean, some guys are just better at it, George Pérez, God bless him, but I didn’t have it in me. I didn’t have it in me. And so even after I’d left Infinity Inc. with Roy Thomas, I’d just go, “I will never ever do a team book again.” It’s probably why I didn’t ever want to do X-Men. I had been burnt out on a team book which is a bunch of talking heads, and each guy maybe gets nine panels, and you don’t ever get to fall in love with any of the characters.

Yet somehow they talked you into Invasion?

Oh, yeah, but a lot of the thumbnails on that were done by Keith Giffen, he’d laid some of the groundwork for me. Because, again, that was during biweeklies, too. But anyway, so for me, I just wanted to do, like, one hero, one bad guy, and I wanted it to be the bad guy of my choice. That was it. So it wasn’t that I needed to do Spider-Man, because when I quit, I was willing to take any book. But then I’d have to have control of that character, and I looked at all the 50 bad guys they had, and I picked the ones that I thought were visually appealing.

When you did that first “Torment” story, you really blossomed artwise. In terms of art, it might be some of your best work.

Well, what I was trying to do — and again, I succeeded only to the level that it was my first writing assignment; I know over the years people have looked at that story and poked fun at it a little bit, but it was the first story I wrote. Their expectation was out of whack. They were taking Todd the veteran artist and not seeing that he was being hooked up with Todd the rookie novice writer. They somehow thought that Todd the writer was going to be as skilled as Todd the artist. No! Todd the writer had zero days under his belt, and Todd the artist had years and years under his belt. Of course they weren’t going to be the same skill level. I think I’m a better writer today than I was when I wrote that first “Torment.”

That first storyline was pretty good. There’s a lot of stuff that would later show up in Spawn. It’s basically a love story of Spider-Man trying to get back to Mary Jane, y’know?

So here’s the thing with that book, I tried to make it more storytelling, more movie-esque, if you will…

I did put captions in it. So later I actually wrote a couple of stories where I actually took all the captions out, and I did that, like, in some of the Sam and

Twitch stuff. But, y’know, the sound effects that I use, I’m not a big fan of sound effects, but the sound effects that I used in that one were used as a soundtrack, like in a movie. If you actually just look at the sound effect, which was this Doom-Doom-Doom thing I did, if you look at it as a soundtrack, not as a sound effect, because people got confused. They were reading it different than I was writing it. It was that it was just this noise that was thumping in his head and the bigger the word “Doom,” the louder the noise was getting in his head. Blah, blah, blah, blah.

So I had all these theories in my head. But again, being unskilled at writing and not knowing how to project it, it confused people or wasn’t as eloquent as it could have been, but at least it was an effort, y’know? I thought it’s better to try something and fail than to not try at all, which is again why I admire a guy like Keith Giffen, too. He’s had about five different styles. They haven’t all been successful, but at least he tried, which is better than just picking one style and sitting on it for the rest of your natural life; which, again, is why a guy like Frank always reinvented his style. You take a look at what he does now compared to what he did when he first broke in, it’s dramatically different. Guys that are able to have the confidence to walk away from some of their earlier work to try things — that’s all I was trying to do. What you will see that, to me, was very obvious in my writing — if you look at all of it other than the last story I wrote, because that was sort of pushed upon me — was that I like monsters and I like dark stuff. So if you take a look at the checklist, it was Kraven’s daughter and the Lizard, and the Lizard acted like a monster at night. And the next story was Ghost

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Violator. ©2007 Todd McFarlane Productions.

T O D D M c FA R L A N E

The first meeting between Spawn and Violator, from Spawn #2. ©2007 Todd McFarlane Productions.

Rider and Hobgoblin, Monster-Monster, and then the next one was Wolverine, but again it was in the context of Wendigo and child-killing at night. And the next one I think was like Morbius the Vampire and the underground people. I don’t even know what came after that, but until we did that, did the X-Force crossover, it was all just creepy crawly nighttime stuff.

It was a prelude to Spawn.

Not really. Spawn was always there, because of, again, my fascination of Batman. I thought Batman was the coolest character to draw, because he was a creature of the night. So Spider-Man sure as heck wasn’t. Did I put him in those situations? Yeah. Did I make him more bug-like? Hanging around at night rather than hanging around when the day’s out. So I treated Spider-Man, again, as sort of a bug-cockroach.

He could perform better at night. But ultimately Spawn, it was just my love affair with, and frustration at not being able to draw enough Batman.

So Marvel had boxed you editorial-wise? Like, they

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would censor panels and suggest things that you didn’t want to hear?

From time to time. You know, they’d get you to redraw stuff. My frustration was: if everybody knew their job, you wouldn’t have to redraw what you were redrawing. The do’s and don’t’s would have already been on paper, and the writer wouldn’t have to put it on paper and I wouldn’t have to draw it, and then spend four hours redrawing it. I wouldn’t have to erase or redraw it. It was just such a frustrating, inefficient way to get to the end result. Didn’t everybody know what the rules were? “Well, yeah.” “Well, f*cking write them down!” Y’know? Why am I drawing? And you guys are getting me to fix it after the fact? It’s not a fun way to spend my time when I’m already busting my hump getting it done. So it wasn’t really any one event that led to me leaving Marvel. It was a culmination of all the events during my comic career. They just wore me out. And eventually one of the events became the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Was it anything in particular or you were just tired of everything?

No, no, no. There was a particular one. It was the panel in #16. It was the Spider-Man/X-Force crossover. There was a character named Juggernaut that was in there.

That’s the one with the Juggernaut’s eye?

Yeah. But I was writing the story, and again, to me Juggernaut was this immovable force. I had to come up with a clever way of beating him. Okay, well, I didn’t want to use the same ten ways we’ve seen before. I went, “Ah, I know. There’s actually a chink in his armor, which is he’s got an opening in the eyes, right? So I go good, we’ll take him out there. There’s a weakness. That cracked the gates open a little bit.

So when I put the sword in his eye from one of the X-Force guys, that was it. They just came in and I remember having the conversations, and it went something like, “You can’t stab him in the eye.” And I was like, “What are you talking about? I can’t stab him in the eye?” They’re like, “Well, it can’t be…”. I remember having these conversations with Tom DeFalco, and I’m like, “So explain this one to me?”

“You can’t inflict an orbital injury.” I go, “Do you remember that cool scene of Elektra getting stabbed

by Bullseye? Remember, he put the weapon right through her and it was coming out her back?” He was going, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you can’t do, also you can’t do rear penetration.” Right? So you can put the sword into somebody, but you can’t puncture the cloth from behind. This is why if you look at the drawing, the famous drawing he did, her costume was stretching. I don’t know if you remember it.

I remember it. It’s in silhouette.

It was stretching. And so I found it sort of amusing.

So it’s not that kids will be harmed by the effect of stabbing somebody, it’s that they will be harmed by the fact of them getting stabbed and their clothes torn. Yeah, wow. So it’s actually more about clothes tearing than stabbing. That doesn’t make any f*ckin’ sense. That doesn’t make any sense. But anyway, it was, “No, no, no, that’s okay, Todd. But you can’t

poke the eyes.” I’m like, “Why?” “Because the eye is very sensitive.” I’m like, “Wow. A sword through my colon is not sensitive? Wow, that’s… “. And it was just that this was how it was going to be. “Are you telling me that there’s a code in the Comics Code that you can’t have eye orbital…?” And I never did get a straight answer on it. But they were just going, “No, no, no. You can’t do it. You can’t do it.” And so I just wondered, this is like, now the twelfth time that they did it, and I go, “What’s in the code?” And they go, “No, we write the code. We’re actually the code writers. And it’s not really in the Code.” So now we’re changing stuff that’s not in the Code because it might be offensive and might not pass the Code? “Well, have we run it by the Code?” “Oh, no, we haven’t run it past the Code. We don’t think it’s going to get past the Code.” “Well, who is the code?” “Well, ultimately, Todd, we’re the Code, because we’re the ones that sponsor it.” So I just got into this circular argument with him, and I eventually just went, “Here’s how it’s going to work. I will change it, I guess. You can change it, I guess. Whatever. What do I care? You guys, it’s your company, your character, do what you gotta do, but I’m telling you right now this is the beginning of the end. This is it. This is the one. I just can’t keep going like that. I can’t be the guy that’s your number one artist and keep getting these panels redrawn.” To keep getting pulled in the office, telling me to slow down, don’t do this, because now the book’s selling so well, so many people are looking at it, we have to now get conservative, when four years earlier you looked at me and said, “Todd, Spider-Man’s in the dumper. Is there any way you can help us?”

And I took it to the top of the race, and now all of a sudden it became my curse. So I was just like, “Oh, you guys are wearing me out.”

Do you think this was just to prove to the other guys we can control Todd, we can tell him what to do?

Again, like I said, “It’s your business.” The only way I could get around it at some point was to just go away and draw a book for myself. I wanted to pencil and I wanted to ink myself. I wanted to pencil and ink, I wanted to write myself. Eventually I had to take it all over so I can stop hitting my head against a wall with some of this stuff.

Well, when you went into exile, they said Todd had quit comics, he wasn’t coming back. Was that true? That you were thinking about something like that?

No, no, no. At that exact same time, I was also having…

You were having your first child.

Yeah, and I was going to take time off anyways. I was planning on taking some time off regardless of whether I was working for Marvel or DC or anybody else. I’d never been a father. I didn’t know what the expectations would be. So I was in a position where I had some money tucked away and I could actually take time off to help my wife, and I go, you know what? Most people aren’t granted that luxury. Then I’ll take advantage of it. So I take time off, it just became a crossroads. Maybe it was my mindset at that point; I knew I was going to take some time off.

Anyway, so it was just like, “Guys, forget it. I’m done.

I’m done. I’m outta here.”

When you were working at Marvel, I’m sure you weren’t making one percent of what the book was producing — were you bothered by things like that? Did it bother you that Marvel didn’t pay foreign reprint rights?

That your art was appearing on product that you weren’t going to see a dime for? There was a lot of stuff that Marvel does and still continues to do to artists.

You know what? There was some concern there on some of those levels. I didn’t own Hulk or Batman.

I knew that.

But you were due respect, at least. A pat on the back.

Well, here’s the one that I do remember. They would have these retreats, and in the retreats plot out a year’s worth of all the major books. As you might imagine, they never asked any of the artists. I don’t know at that time if they even asked any of the writers. I think they just went away as a corporation and they took all the editors, and they say, “Hey, you know what would be good for Spider-Man? Why don’t we do this and this and this and this? Y’know, Iron Man, let’s do this!” And they come back to you and dump it on your plate. And I go, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Whooooooa. I hate those characters!” Or, “We’ve already done that!” It seemed odd that you didn’t want to get any artistic input when you were sitting having a seminar on what to artistically put in your books for the next year, from writers or from artists. It defies logic to me. And then, to combine it even more, DC comic books put together at about that same time a new contract that was going to be better for the creative community — a better contract for the creative community. Which I thought was actually charming in its theory, but they

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Detail from Spawn #13.

Words, pencils and inks

by McFarlane. ©2007 Todd McFarlane Productions.

T O D D M c FA R L A N E

Characters ©2007 the respective holders.

missed the point that just got me so angry. They never asked one creative person in the community for any input into this contract that was for the betterment of the creative community. Somebody forgot to ask the f*cking peasants about the peasant contract. You know what? Maybe I’m missing something, but it just defies logic to me. And it was thank you very much for telling me how I’m going to be happy with my life, and the rest of us are going to be happy with our lives, without asking any of us. Thank you very much. That’s impressive. And I was trying to rally people together to start a union at this point. I was going, “You know what? We’ve got to start asserting ourselves. We’ve got to start getting our voices heard.” But I soon found that the majority of artists and writers and people were living in abject fear that they didn’t want to get blacklisted. Like, “Todd, we’d join you, but if the union fails and it doesn’t work, we’d be out of work, and what’s going to happen to us?” And again, it was always sort of amusing to me; you go to the majority of the people I dealt with, and you go, “How much money do you make?” “Not much, I’m just barely squeaking by.

About 20 grand” “All right. Well, do you have a house?” “No.” “Do you have a car?” “No.” “Do you actually have any food in your refrigerator?” “Not much.” “Do you owe taxes to the government?”

“Yes.” “Well, I will promise you, you join my union, at the end of that, I promise that you will have no house, no car, no food and you will owe money.” I mean, what were you talkin’ about? A guy who has nothing to lose should be the first guy jumping on board. And I have found historically they’re usually the last, which is a bizarre concept. Usually the guys

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who actually start stuff is the guy — I should have been the guy who didn’t give a sh*t about a union.

Why? I was being paid more than anybody else in the country then. I could have just lived on the high hog for some time and not gave a sh*t. It defied logic to me.

That’s why some guys didn’t want to go to Image, because they didn’t want to lose that steady paycheck.

They were afraid of waiting for profits after the book was published.

Well, they thought they’d get blacklisted. It was like, what are you talking about? You think that if I go and draw a comic book thing and the book fails and in two years I go back to Marvel, they’re not going to take me back? Even if that were true, DC would take me in ten seconds. You just go to the other company then, whoever, y’know, the other guy’s not mad at you then. But, y’know, what is, they’re not going to hold that much of a grudge. “Oh, we won’t take Jim Lee back, and Marc Silvestri, and Todd McFarlane, we won’t take them back.” “Are you out of your mind? DC will take us in five seconds.” It didn’t make any sense.

Rob was the first guy who started something, he wanted to do Youngblood with Malibu and then you went, “Wait a minute. This is where we can do something special.” And you decided to join in right there.

And Erik was in early on those conversations.

But Rob never intended to leave X-Force.

Right. When we started Image, all the guys had that mindset pretty much, except for me. Y’know? Jim Lee was going to do X-Men. Marc wanted to finish his run on Wolverine. And, again, because they were still waffling, they didn’t know if it was going to succeed, and it was a fool’s game. I knew it was a

fool’s game. And for two reasons: Number one, “None of you guys has ever been able to do a regular book on a consistent basis. How the hell are you doing two regular books? You’re going to do a book for Marvel and a book for yourself? It ain’t going to work because what’s going to happen is that the book for yourself is gonna look like crap, and your book at Marvel’s going to look like crap, because you’re spending half the time on each book. It doesn’t make any sense! And number two, and here is a big one… I don’t care what your next character is. I don’t care what you call him. You call him Broccoli Man, if it’s the only place they’re able to get your artwork, they will come.” This was a concept that the writers miss, that the writers go and write an independent book, “I don’t know why it didn’t succeed” and whatever else. Well, the reason it didn’t succeed was you’re writing X-Men, Batman, Superman, Green Lantern and Captain America, and your independent book. And given that I’ve got a limited budget, would I rather have a big shot writer who is doing Batman and Spider-Man, or would I rather have the big shot writer do Broccoli Man? I don’t give a sh*t about Broccoli Man. But, Mr. Writer, if you quit every one of those books and all you do is write Broccoli Man, they will come, because it’s the only place they’re going to get you. It was the piece that I kept trying to harp. “Don’t let your fan base divide and conquer. They may not know who Spawn is, they may not like Spawn, but if they want to see my artwork, they’re going to have to buy my book.”

It’s that simple. And hopefully, if I do my job right, they will actually like the book, too.

But you also understood that people remember the

creators — Neal Adams’ Batman; Byrne’s X-Men — you remember the artist, not necessarily the character. The character is just a vehicle.

Well, Batman to me is my favorite, and I say that was probably predicated upon four or five artists, but I liked Batman the best. What I’m saying is that as much as I love John Byrne doing The X-Men, with Terry Austin, if they had quit that book and moved somewhere else, I would have gone with them. I would have also bought The X-Men with Paul Smith on it afterwards, but I would have figured out how to hunt down and get my Byrne stuff. I just would have done it. And I knew that it was going to be applicable here to some degree. Not the huge success that we had. I didn’t know it would be that big. But I knew that we would be able to bring enough people they’d go, “Ah, you know what? I still love Spider-Man. I’m still going to collect Spider-Man even though Todd’s not doing it. But I also like Todd, so I’m going to follow Todd’s career at the same time. So what I’m going to end up doing is either adding another book to my budget, or I’m going to drop another book on my 20 books that I buy and add the Todd book.”

That’s what I would have done, as a collector. As a collector, I would have gone, “What, of the 25 books that I’m least enamored with, I’ll drop that and I’ll get the new John Byrne book that he’s moving to a new company.”

And most people, we do follow creators. We don’t follow characters nowadays. Wherever you would go, I’d follow. If you did one issue of Cyberforce, so be it.

Actually, you know what? I’ve seen a little bit of both and I’ve done both. For me, because sometimes you get some terrific people come on to follow up

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T O D D M c FA R L A N E

Spawn ©2007 Todd McFarlane.

certain artists, right? So I’ve seen it work both ways.

But, again, I was thankful that we got as many people as we did coming over. And that they actually liked the character, too. But, some people weren’t buying it because they wanted to see Todd’s art and they actually went “It’s not a bad character, that’s okay. I’m getting my money’s worth because I don’t mind the character and I like the artwork.”

Before you officially started Image, though, you went back to Marvel, met with Terry Stewart and made him an offer, right? To take over the Epic line, to do your own thing?

No. That’s not true?

It’s not true. Something got screwed up there, and I know they even came out and said some things.

Here’s how the conversation went, and there’s seven people in that room. I’ll name them all off so you can talk to any seven of them. There is Terry Stewart.

There is Tom DeFalco. There is Jim Lee. There is myself. There was my wife. There is my four-monthold baby, Cyan, that my wife was holding. At the beginning he was there, Rob left halfway through.

But Rob was there. And the conversation, the Reader’s Digest version, went like this. “We are here as a collective group, and Erik Larsen and Marc Silvestri, who we’d just signed up the night before, we’ve got a group of us. We are leaving. We are not asking for anything. We’re not here to negotiate anything. We don’t want anything from you.

We are just saying we’re leaving. Here are our reasons why we are leaving.” And we spelled them out. “If it was us, I would actually do something about the reasons

why we’re leaving, because you might find that next week another seven guys might walk into your office, and the next week another seven guys. So if it were me, I’d actually pay attention as to why we’re leaving, what are the reasons that drove us out?” And that was it. And we walked out of there, immediately went over to DC comic books.

They thought they were going to hook us because traditionally, you leave Marvel, you go to DC, right?

Or vice versa. And we sat down with them. Jim Lee had never been to DC. He was the Golden Boy. You might imagine, they were like, “Oh my God, Jim

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Lee’s here! Thanks, Todd, for bringing Jim Lee over for a meeting!” We essentially sat down; they had everybody sitting around a table. They thought, “Oh, let’s talk about some big book.” And we basically said, “We just left Marvel. Here’s our reasons. We’re here; we’re not here to do work for you either. We’re here to tell you that we just quit you and them at the same time. Although, we don’t work for you, but here’s the reasons why. If it was us, I would actually pay attention to the reasons we left, because you guys might get seven guys walking into your office next week.” And that was it. And it was like, we never wanted anything. We didn’t say give us total freedom on Spider-Man, give me ten percent ownership. We never did any of that. That was all bullsh*t that came out later that Terry Stewart, who was trying to defend his stock report, put out some crap that was just, are you out of your mind? We served no demands. We thought, silly us, that it would be the kind, courteous thing to do to tell your employer you were leaving and a couple of reasons why you’re leaving, and when you were going to be going, so we didn’t leave them in a complete lurch. So that was it, that’s all that conversation was.

Did you get a big rush from doing this? Were you dying to start already with Image?

At that point, I think there was a thrill and anxiety at the same time. We knew we basically made a commitment to do something that a band of guys hadn’t done before, and there was no history to say whether it would succeed at any level, but we were all anxious to really get it going. That meeting at Terry Stewart’s office was at the end of December of ’91, and I think we had our first what I would call official Image meeting at Marc Silvestri’s house in January of ’92. And that was when we all sat around and we all said to each other, “Well, what character are you going to do?” And we were all supposed to talk a little about the new books we were going to do, and if we had any problems, each guy could give the other guy a bit of a helping hand creatively. And it was our first big pow-wow. It was probably the coolest meeting we’ve had. The first one’s always the best, right?

Most of them didn’t know you too well before this.

Rob I knew very well. Erik I knew okay. Jim Lee just a little bit, because Jim Lee at that time was arguably “The Golden Boy.” I had come and had my time in the sun, and Rob, y’know, I was starting to get a little mouthy and Rob was a loose cannon. So Jim Lee, in my mind, Jim Lee I felt was really the lynchpin. And I don’t want his ego to get too big, but it went something like this: I think they knew that Todd and Rob were getting discontent in their day-to-day activities, but they went, “Ah, troublemakers. Todd and Rob are leaving.” I don’t think it would have come as any surprise. I think that the guy that was going to give the most merit to them paying attention to watching out for the creative community was a

guy like Jim, who I just think they thought they had wrapped around their finger and he was going to draw for them for the rest of his natural life. And all of a sudden their Golden Boy was saying he was quitting, too. And I think it was, like, “Wow. The crazy guys are quitting, we get that. But Jim Lee, that’s… whoa, whoa, whoa, we might pay attention to what’s going on here.”

The seven of you guys had all the momentum. Even Valentino. He was just starting to get his stuff together with that Guardians book.

Well, you know what? That was another one of those guys that thought they could do both books. I think they came upon it very quickly that they could only do one book, so then it was going to be, “Well, I’m just going to finish my run on my Marvel book and jump onto my Image book.” And I was trying to stress to them, you know what? Take a little bit of time.

Catch your collective breath. Get two or three books in the can. See if you can’t get ahead of your deadlines a little bit. And there was a fear factor. It’s always there, and if you’re sort of famous and you take a day off, somehow you’re not going to be famous. That might be true for Paris Hilton or Jessica Simpson, but, y’know, which is why they gotta try so hard every day, but for Jim, again, I was living proof.

When I left from Amazing Spider-Man to the regular Spider-Man book, there was about a four, five-month, six-month gap. What ended up happening when I came back? I set sales records. So, again, you guys, having to do X-Men books and never take a break, I took two breaks in my life, and neither time did it hurt me. From Amazing to Spider-Man, and another one from Spider-Man to Spawn. So it’s okay. I mean, three, four months, you’ll — . Y’know, John Byrne left a book for four months when he was into his game when I loved him, and four months later, five months later he was just giving me creative comic book blue balls waiting for him. But I was like, “He’s back! John Byrne’s back!” I mean, what are you talking about? A little bit of anticipation is good for everybody. So, again, I think they come to the realization that they didn’t have to keep pounding it the way they were to make this transition.

How did you and Rob become so close? Why did you help him out on those New Mutants covers?

I think by that time we were pals, so one of the fun things of doing artwork sometimes is just swapping pages back and forth, so I was doing some inking at that point on my own stuff, so it was, “Hey, Rob, why don’t you let me ink a cover or two.” So there’s, I think it was actually more than one. I think I did two or three of them.

Yeah, but those New Mutants ones, especially #87 with Cable, really made his career. To me, that was Rob’s real debut on New Mutants.

Oh, really? I thought he’d sort of… he’d been around, but I knew he was going to start on the book. I think we did three in a row or something like that, but I don’t think a cover is going to make or break anybody’s career. So, covers are nice to look at, but the body of work of an artist is really what carries them.

Well, you were a hot commodity back then. To have covers from you, even on a reprint title like Marvel Tales, helped sales and commanded attention.

Oh, yeah, well, on that one, because that was a complete reprint book, so they were looking for a reason to get somebody to buy it. But if there’s original artwork on the inside, then the original artwork has to carry the day, if you will. I’ve bought plenty of books where the covers were awesome and the insides weren’t, and I was disappointed.

So Rob was talking to you about doing his book with Malibu, right? Is that when you started getting an idea of maybe getting together and doing Image?

Yeah, Rob and I would talk back and forth to each other, and I know that he was going, “You know, we should do some independent stuff.” He was talking about doing something, I was getting near the end of my rope, and then I think Erik was also sort of involved early. There was the three of us going, “We

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Recent artwork by Todd, for the celebratory cover of Spawn #150. ©2007 Todd McFarlane Productions.

T O D D M c FA R L A N E

McFarlane promo art from the first team-up between Batman and Spawn.

Batman TM & ©2007 DC Comics.

should just do it. Let’s just go ahead and do it.” The difference between what they wanted to do and what I wanted to do, is I wanted to just quit and do it, and that would be our only book. And so that was probably the biggest difference. Rob, I think, and Erik had the mindset that they could do a couple books, one inside the system and one outside the system, and I was never a believer in that. Even once we started Image, I think Jim Lee and Marc Silvestri, and I don’t know where Rob was at that time, but they didn’t want to let go of their Marvel books. And from my point of view, I just thought that the only way it’s going to really work in a big way is that you have to cut off the supply someplace else and have the consumer come to your new stop. And it’s too easy to pick and choose, then, at that point. And there’s a litany of guys that tried that, from a writing perspective. Because, as pencilers and artists, we’re slower than writers; most of us are only capable of doing one book. The answer is just take all of your work and move it from one place to another, boom.

And they’ll come.

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Did you not like the deal with Malibu? Did you right away want all the Image books out of there?

No, not really. In the beginning they served a purpose, and, again, I think what happened was that the deal that we struck with them, as time went by, wasn’t conducive to what value we were getting back. So it was that simple.

How did you get your team together? Because that’s the one thing, you were more organized than the other guys. You right away had Terry Fitzgerald, and you had Al Simmons. It sounded like you were more prepared, business-wise. How did you get that savvy? The rest of the guys weren’t really ready for anything.

Well, obviously I had a big advantage in that I’d already quit Marvel comic books. All the other guys hadn’t made that sever yet, and part of it was, as a matter of fact, a big part of it, was the birth of my first child. So when my first child was born, Cyan, I think I was two pages away from my last Spider-Man book.

So I was going to leave the book anyway, because I just had another problem with editorial over that issue, and I’m like, “Forget it, I’m out of here.” And it was a good time because I had never been a father, and I thought it would be a good time to spend some time at home.

But how did you know what you wanted to do with your company? That you needed to run yourself like an engine, you needed to get people to work with? Because a lot of artists don’t understand you have to work with other people.

No, I don’t actually think that’s true. A couple of way that I consider myself a little bit different is, I wasn’t afraid to stop my artwork and start it back up, and that was a concern for some of the other guys.

Which is why they go, “Well, let me just finish my Wolverine and my X-Men and then maybe I’ll sort of phase into the Image stuff.” And they were afraid somehow that if they were off the marketplace for a couple of months, that the fans would forget them.

And most of them were on the Wizard top ten and stuff like that. I’d already left, and I was off the stands for a while. And then I come back and I do Spider-Man #1, and the sales go bigger than what they were on Amazing Spider-Man. So I’m going, “Guys, it doesn’t necessarily hurt. If anything, it creates a bit of a hunger. People go, ‘Oh my God! Where are they? Where are they? Where are they?’

And then when they come back, whoosh, they’ll come back and get you twice as hard.” And at the time Image was going, Jim Lee was flying as high as he could. If he had taken three, four, five months off, there would have been a tremendous hunger, and everybody would have just gone crazy. I mean, they did go crazy for his book. A lot more crazy than they originally did. But that anxiety was, “They’ll forget about us because we’re going to a new company and new characters.” And to me, I was like, “I don’t think so.”

What I wanted to tell you, some of them were a little jealous that you were so organized. They went to your house in Oregon, they saw that you had a company running, and you had your cars, and you were really focused on Spawn. Even more so than they were, because

they were already starting to buy all the toys and luxuries that they never had. You were focused on the business.

Oh, well, I don’t know if that’s actually true. If they say so, fine, but I don’t know if that’s actually true. I had a couple people working for me because I was just trying to get books out. Remember, at that point I was writing, penciling and inking Spider-Man. So I was arguably doing three jobs per month, so I needed a little bit of help, there. Remember, very shortly after we started Image, all of a sudden Rob had a studio, and Jim Lee had a studio, and then Marc, who shared a studio with Jim. So they all started, had way bigger setups than I ever did. They built little miniempires there in their studio setups. I was actually the opposite. Although I had a business mind to some of it. I didn’t put out my second regular comic book until, I think, Spawn was up to #51 or 52.

But you were able to get the other deals going. I think that’s what they kind of wanted. They wanted to get the toy deal with Matchbox, or Hot Wheels, and they wanted to get the movie deal going faster.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You got all that rolling faster than they did. And even the toys, I’m sure they saw what you did and it was like, “I wish I thought of that.”

But part of that may have just been a matter of time, though. Because I was only doing, really, the one book, I probably had more time then to devote to some of the business end of getting a comic book out, but then also had a little bit more time to go and chase down some stuff in Hollywood and think about other things. If I was doing five, six, seven books like they were doing, I may have been more distracted and might not have been able to pursue those. So that might have been a byproduct of their putting out a lot of comic books and running a studio, that they just, although they would have liked to have done some of the things that I had done, they had to watch the kettle that they were trying to boil at the other end, too. But we also know that we all tried to chase all those things, and it sort of bit us in the rear in terms of deadlines and shipping problems, and that was where, again, at some point you have to be practical about what you can and can’t do in 24 hours every day. So you can’t have a studio, and 12 books, and Hollywood, and movies, and toys, and novels, and video games. I mean, something’s got to give.

Something’s got to eventually give. And what ends up giving is usually a little bit of all the above, you’re actually doing a slight disservice to all of them.

Who had the idea of making these bylaws? Like, when you guys got together, who organized you guys? Were you the leader?

Not really. Early on I thought we were fairly equal.

We knew at that point, when we started, that Jim and Rob and I were getting more notoriety than anybody else, but I don’t think we ever unduly used that weight against some of the other guys, especially as you go down the pecking order, where, let’s say, Jim Valentino was sort of sixth in line, if you will. The bylaws, the only time it came in was we had six of us after Whilce left, and we said that everybody gets an equal vote. Nobody got more value of a vote. So Jim

Valentino’s vote was just as good as Jim Lee’s vote or my vote. We all thought that was a practical way to do it. The only time it came into play was if there was a tie at three to three, then it went to, I believe, what we called, like, a super-vote, and then that was Rob and Jim and I, but that was just a practical matter of making it an odd number so that you wouldn’t come up with a tie the second time around. I don’t know if we ever went to super-vote ever, or if we did, it was once or twice. I can’t even recall. So we were pretty good about that actually, before we got into any voting, we would canvas each other and try and see if we could actually make sure that before we went to a vote, we had four votes.

But that took a lot of foresight. If there weren’t any bylaws, there could have been trouble whenever someone would have left Image.

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Greg Capullo’s debut on 1993’s Spawn #16. Greg would officially inherit the art responsibilities on #26, and proceed to illustrate more Spawn stories than anyone else. ©2007 Todd McFarlane Productions.

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High school-era doodles by Todd.

Yeah. Well, again, maybe some of the bylaws were flawed or whatever else, but we just wanted to set some ground rules a little bit. My guess is that we set some basic ones early, and then as time went by, each meeting, when somebody did something that we didn’t like, or did something that was good, and then we would come and say, “You know what? We need to actually nail this one down so that doesn’t happen again.” And then we’d come up with a set, and we’d sit there and vote. And, again, it’s funny, with you looking on the outside; it probably seems more organized than it actually was.

Yeah, but it was nice that you guys were all on the same page that day, that you had the foresight to at least wonder, one of these days you might have a falling out.

In all honesty, I gotta tell you, it was less about a falling out of any of us. We weren’t really writing bylaws to protect us from us, because we all actually liked each other, and we actually enjoyed each other’s company, and some of the best days we ever had were those Image meetings. The bylaws were more a byproduct of trying to have some organizational skeleton, because we knew now we were in competition with two big behemoths called Marvel Comics and DC Comics.

But once you guys sold more than Marvel and DC books

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for a while, you guys went into competition with each other. I know Rob and Jim were always competing against each other. I’m sure they were always gunning to beat Spawn’s numbers, too.

Yeah. And that was true. But, again, most of the bylaws at the beginning were built on us just keeping the momentum so that we could stay close to Marvel and DC, and even then, we had a couple of months there of keeping that momentum and not squandering it, where we were actually bigger than DC. Because, again, Image is, for all intents and purposes, a commune, and arguably then all the individuals still had control to do whatever the hell they wanted. But once it came into the commune of Image the publisher, then we needed to have some consistencies. There were simple things at the beginning like, what’s the price of the books going to be? That should be somewhat consistent. What kind of paper are we going to use? That should be somewhat consistent. Where are we putting the logo? That should be somewhat consistent. Just so that we gave a uniform look, somewhat, although it was six different studios turning out these books, there should be a flavor that they’re coming from one entity, which was the publisher, Image comic books. So we had to wear two hats. And these were arguably the biggest conversations we ever had behind closed doors, which were where do you have an allegiance to your own company, which is whatever it was, whether it was Top Cow or Extreme Studios or whatever, and where do you acknowledge that you are 1/6 founder of Image comic books? And those to me were the more important conversations that I would like to voice from time to time. “I understand why you’re doing that,” whoever it was, “and I understand why it’s good for you, but now, let me just play devil’s advocate. It’s not necessarily good for Image, and here’s why it’s not good for Image. And where do you care about what happens to Image, given that to correct the problem for Image, it might not be beneficial for you, personally, and your studio?”

Those were always the tough ones. Those were probably the most complicated conversations that we had. You can’t ignore the fact that you are part owner, part founder, of Image comic books, and if you just want to act autonomously, then you should not be part of Image comic books. You have to acknowledge that you’re part of Image, too. You have a responsibility to Image comic books, and that was the balance and the struggle for all of us, actually, to find what was good for us and make sure that it wasn’t at the detriment of Image comic books and vice versa.

It also became important for you to get other artists, outside of the founders. You wanted as much talent as you could get and recruited guys like Dale Keown.

Sure.

And all the big names you could get to come together.

Yeah, well, we had — .

But you guys didn’t ever think about expanding the membership as founders, like, it was locked at seven and that’s it.

Right.

If somebody wanted into Image early-on, if Joe Quesada wanted to come in, he’d have to be sponsored by somebody to come in.

There was talk, yeah, and that was it, so for people who thought that it was a closed boys club to some extent, the answer’s really no, that we actually had some by-laws that somebody could actually come in and try and sponsor somebody. But our conditions were that they would come in, keep their nose clean, and do a body of work, and show us that they [weren’t just] in it for a short term big fat check and then go out. And so now we’re, whatever, 12, 13 years into it, and at least four of the six of us are still standing here. So we put in our 13, 14, years. And Rob arguably might still be here if somehow he didn’t get out, and Jim on his own decided to go someplace, but he might be — I mean, we could argue that. So, with a little bit of circumstance one way or the other, it could be still six for six. And the argument could be made that while nobody stayed around because they weren’t founders, yeah, but nobody stayed around for, like, ten, 12 issues. I’m not asking for a decade. Nobody was staying around for ten or 12 issues.

That was a big factor with you. The minute some of these guys started getting late and later, the guys who weren’t founders, as soon as they started affecting the perception that people had of Image, with all these late books in the beginning — that bothered you, right?

Sure. Spawn wasn’t perfect by any stretch, but if I put out two or three books, it would just compound the problems I was having with one book. And so, again, that’s why I kept Spawn and any new ongoing regular title close to the vest, because I just go, “Geez, I gotta get this thing on a rhythm before I start worrying about Book #2.”

Was the immediate success of Spawn surprising to you, that people really took it in so quickly right from the get-go?

The surprise is more in the volume. We knew we were going to get a decent crowd coming over. We went from getting two percent at Marvel to arguably getting 100 percent. Actually, we had to give some to Malibu, but we got the lion’s share. So you could sell a fraction, I’m talking about if I was selling four hundred, five hundred thousand of Spider-Man, we could have actually gone down to 60,000 copies and arguably made just as much, if not more, money. So when we were able to actually keep the numbers fairly consistent, wow, those were big days. But they become, as you’ve seen and history shows us, they become very heady days. This is where temptation comes, and it takes a lot to sit there and go, “Wow, I’ve got a ton of cash in front of me. Still stay focused. Stay focused. Stay focused. Don’t go buy a yacht. Don’t go on a trip for two years. I mean, stay focused, y’know?” But if you’re only making $20,000 and all of a sudden you’re making $300,000, whew, it’s easy to get distracted, and amongst other things that were already out there distracting us. So that was really the biggest thing. And you saw it. You saw what happened when we gave a couple big checks to Dale, he was gone, and a couple big checks to

Stroman and his writing partner and a couple other guys, they just disappeared. Or they just were having so much time spending their money; it was like the book was not important to them anymore. Like, too bad. And none of them arguably ever recovered from that. So they got their money, they spent it, it went away, and then their careers have been put on hold for such a long time, and none of them ever regained it back. I’m not saying their skill wasn’t there. I’m just saying the momentum they had and their career went away.

Stroman’s books sold more than Erik’s and some of the founders.

Yeah.

You’d think if you had a baseball player that people wanted to see, you’d keep him even if he was a bad boy or something. And that was the case.

But you can’t get blood from a rock. If somebody doesn’t want to draw, there’s nothing you can do.

What are you going to do? I mean, somebody goes to the beach and they never answer the phone, unless you physically get up, go over, sit there and strangle them and say, “You’ve got to draw some pages,” what are you going to do? You can’t do that.

Why did you bring in the writers, when you brought Moore and Gaiman? Did you have any doubts in your ability? Because I thought you were doing okay.

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Collaboration between Todd and Wanda Kolomyjec, his future wife, from their high school days. ©2007 Todd McFarlane Productions.

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No. Most of the stuff I was doing back then was just to sort of antagonize and bug people.

Did it bother you to have somebody like John Byrne, who you kind of idolized, coming out with all this stuff about how much he despised Image when you guys were doing everything that he probably wanted to do?

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No, because very quickly in the equation of starting Image comic books, you were able to sort of recognize where jealousy was.

But you were surprised that you guys became a target, especially by other artists.

Right, right. But I’m just saying, to me it was almost completely predicated upon jealousy. Yes, I understand we’re not the best artists. Yes, I understand we’re not the best writers. But those two factors should not have given the volume of venom that came from them. It was “I’m better than those guys at Image comic books, and how dare they make so much money when I’m superior to them?” And so it just came out of that. And so, okay, we didn’t force these people to buy the books, they just bought it. So we’re not stealing money from people. We’re putting it out there, and people, consumers are making their own conscious decisions to do it. And it ended up being that we ended up making more money than you, and you think you’re a better artist, writer, whatever, okay, fine. I’ll agree with you. But that doesn’t mean that it’s a good cause to sit there and hold your breath and rant and rave. So like I said, very early it was like, “Whatever.” It was like, “Then go and do it yourself.”

And they did. And then finally you saw some of these guys taking a chance with Legend, Bravura, whatever else — .

But none of those exist. I get it, I get you tried, and I get you did it. But Bravura, whatever. Bravura was a bunch of writers who tried to do the artist shtick, and it will never work. I will go on record until I die; it will never, ever work. You write this down to the writers, you put this to the writers. Am I biased to artists? Yes. Am I so biased against writers that I think we’re 100 percent? No. I believe we are 51 percent. I believe that people buy comic books at first glance. They judge books just by the cover. They see a cool cover, a kid who doesn’t know the book, will flip through the book, and if it looks interesting, he will then take it home. Now it’s up to the writer to write terrific stuff, along with the artist, to keep that kid hooked for a year. But the art is always going to be the first hook that they get. So I will always say the art is 51/49. I don’t care what any of them say.

Then, #2, compound it with, there was not one of those writers at Bravura that stopped writing for their competitor. This is the one I don’t get. This is the conversation I had ad nauseum with my own founding members at Image comic books. “We are in competition with these other companies. Don’t you guys get it?” In other businesses, what we were doing arguably would be against the law. You can’t work for Intel, be the CEO of Intel, and also do work for Motorola. You can’t do it. It’s what we call a conflict of interest. So what I always thought was the clear vision, but silly me, was you pull all your work from every company, you put all your work into Image.

Why? Because you’re also a founder. Not a bad reason to do it. And you make people come to where your new work is. And those writers at Bravura thought they could still write their Marvel, DC, Valiant, and Bravura books, and it was all going to

succeed. And, buddy, I would have bet the house, I would have bet the farm, I would have bet my baby’s life on it, it wouldn’t work, and it didn’t. And I’m telling you, it will never, ever, ever work, until somebody walks away from their easy — . But you can’t be the best writer on The X-Men and go write another book and expect people to buy your other book more than X-Men. So when Jim Lee did “Heroes Reborn,” that was a big curveball.

Yeah. I didn’t get it. I didn’t get it.

As a fan I didn’t even get it, because he was just starting to work with Alan Moore on WildC.A.T.s, and he just left to do Fantastic Four. It was like, what?

Right. And I think Rob went over then.

But it was strange to see Jim, especially, because he had a company and good books.

Yeah. Well, I know, but again, this is the one that’s sort of weird. Jim’s company is allowed to sort of do whatever it wants to do, so if he wants to draw for five other companies, God bless him. But you’re also part owner of a comic company. Why do you want to do work for your competitor? I’ve got a toy company.

Are you f*cking out of your mind I would ever make a toy for Hasbro or Mattel? It would never happen. It would be like me making toys for Hasbro and Mattel.

Why own a company that makes toys? For me, it always defied my logic. So, you know what? I never understood it. But I’m a lone voice, because Erik and Jim Valentino and Rob and Jim Lee and Marc have all, since 1992, done work for competing companies.

But I think Erik kind of regrets it now.

Oh. Well, whether he does or he doesn’t, again,

some of it was just predicated upon slumps in sales.

People wanted to get some more money. You can’t begrudge people for wanting to lead a good life and providing for their family. Like I said, it just becomes odd when you’re also a co-CEO of another company, that you’re doing competitive work.

What was the purpose of doing those crossovers with Batman for you? You’re doing another crossover with Batman and Spawn.

Right. Well, the one that I do is not run through DC, it’s actually run through Image.

In exchange, you have to give them Spawn for their crossover, right?

Right. But again, the difference — I’ve done, in 14 years, what, one or two? Well, the second one hasn’t come out. One, I’ve done one, right? And that was just having a little bit of fun. I’d rather not go into that concept, but I didn’t have to give them any money.

What do I care? I didn’t have to share. All my efforts, none of it was going to be given to any competitor.

So at that point I go, “Okay. And I get to work with Frank? That’s cool.” It was a cool one. And so it wasn’t like I was in bed with the devil, giving them half the booty, and this and this. It was a hell of a deal. I’m going, “cool.”

But this was important to bring attention to the character, right? Is that one of the reasons that you did it?

Not really. I think Spawn was #1 on the charts at that point. Or it was sitting there, one and two, with Marvel’s X-Men. Spawn was #1 for a long time on the sales chart, and then just gradually went away, right? What do you think happened in terms of the sales? Was it that people missed

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A rare promotional Spider-Man piece by Todd for Marvel’s foreign markets. ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Opposite page, top & middle: Larry Marder: “Marc Silvestri and Whilce Portacio watching as Todd McFarlane explains something he just drew for a fan. In the Image Tent, Chicago Comic-Con 1992.” Bottom: Larry Marder: “Todd McFarlane drawing in a fan’s sketchbook while Rob Liefeld, and original Supreme penciler Brian Murray, look on. In the Image Tent, Chicago Comic-Con 1992.” Photos ©2007 Larry Marder.

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Cover of the infamous Spider-Man #1 by Mr. McFarlane. ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

your writing or your artwork?

No. In all honesty, I think that the marketplace shifted, and I just wasn’t willing to play the game it would have taken to stay on top. So if, again, all of a sudden we wanted the day-glo covers and we wanted big reboots and start with number ones, and let’s kill off the guy and bring him back, and all the crap — it’s crap to me. It’s reason for me to stop collecting books. And I collected every comic book there was, and I eventually got beat up and I stopped. That it was like, “No.” To me, I just want to do Spawn #1 to #500. Okay. That’s it. Every now and then on #50 or #100, I’ll do a little trick with it or something like that — .

But you would write in the letters page, you’re going to stop at a hundred or wherever that Spawnometer ran out.

Yup. And that disappeared after a while. It’s like, “Wait a minute. I thought he was going to die.”

No, no, no. The meter went away because he

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knew that he wasn’t supposed to use that power. He intuitively knew.

I thought it was one of the best things that you did. I remember it was like, “Wow, this is limited. Something is going to happen when he dies.”

No, no, no. What was supposed to happen is I’d give him 1000 points, and at about 600 he’d figure out very quickly that, “If I keep going at this rate, I’m dead.” I wanted to shift him away from being Doctor Strange or whatever with mystic powers, to being a guy who was just more about manual labor, because I was always a fan of Batman way more than Superman.

Okay. I thought you’d have the meter run out and then he’d have to renegotiate a deal with the devil or something.

No, no, no. And I think David Hines has got some things up his sleeve with it, but the mindset was that, no, at some point he just goes, “I’m not going to use it until it’s a true life or death situation.” And so I didn’t think it would be interesting anymore to say, “Oh, it’s at #557 for 40 issues in a row.”

You’d be surprised how people remember those little things. Was your wife really the editor in the beginning?

Yeah.

Yeah? Because Erik says he put his wife in there, but she didn’t do nothin’.

No, no, no. My wife was so involved that, when I did the Billy Kincaid story, that she was appalled by it, and as editor she said, “No, I’m not going to let this pass.”

But she edited that issue, though. She was disgusted by it, or just the storyline?

No, well, she quit. But she had been involved with the story up until the time she quit, then I go, “Well, it wouldn’t be fair for me to not put her name on it, but if you noticed, the next issue she was gone.

Was she your voice of reason? Would you bounce story ideas off her?

Yeah. But I just went, you know what? She didn’t have nearly as much testosterone as I do, thank God. And I’m going, “Enhh, I’ve got to do it, it’ll be cool, Wanda.” She didn’t understand the concept.

Remember, we just had a brand new child, and she didn’t quite understand the concept of killing children in a comic book.

Did you always plan it at the beginning that once you did your 25 issues that you had set the template, you had a template here that other guys could follow and take it from there and then you wouldn’t have to oversee it so closely?

No, no. The idea was, at the beginning, to just stay on it for as long as was practical. And then at some point I went, “Ennnh.” And I could see that I was cheating the artwork, and I didn’t think that was fair, and I wasn’t giving the consumer my best. So I go, “Enh, you know what? I’ll get another artist and then I’ll put all my energy into inking and I’ll have a little more time to write.” So that’s when Greg [Capullo] came on, who was a godsend at that point. And, as weird as it was, arguably I spent as much time inking his stuff as I did penciling and inking mine. So I didn’t really pick up any more time, but what I do believe to

be true was that the artwork got better.

But it was relatively easy for you to lay out a story?

Because usually the hardest part is breaking it down, isn’t it?

Enh, you get into a rhythm. Like anything else, once you do it for a while, it comes fairly natural.

Storytelling, I think, is undervalued in comic books.

I’d rather have a great storyteller and somebody who isn’t quite a great artist, per se, than somebody who can draw but then can’t tell a story. And Frank Miller, to me, is a great example of that.

You were the first of the founders, I thought, to really notice, “We need good writers. We need to change something.” And when you brought those four guys in [Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Dave Sim, and Frank Miller], that was instrumental to what Image was doing. It raised the bar for the entire line.

Right.

Again, I did think your writing was fine in the first four issues.

Well, there’s a misconception, people jump to a conclusion that — and let’s go back to Spider-Man #1. What they couldn’t divide up was that the artist on Spider-Man #1 was sort of the hot artist named Todd McFarlane who’d begun to refine his style, who’d begun to win some acclaim and some awards.

But the guy who was writing that book was a complete novice writer who also happened to be named Todd McFarlane. They couldn’t separate the growth and the time put in, that when I wrote Spider-Man #1, those were my first 22 pages I ever wrote. And somehow they wanted those to match the artwork, which was now arguably my 1500th page I had drawn. So I kept saying to people, “By the time I get to my 1500th page of writing, I’ll probably be a lot better than I am right now.” So if you actually look at the first few pages I drew, as an artist, you’re going to see that they look a lot worse than the artwork in here. And what they wanted to do was, they wanted Todd the artist, who was ready and polished, to now be Todd the writer, and they wanted me to be instantly polished. Why me? Why now? No other writer jumped in and was as good as they could get in their first crack at it, so why would I be any different? But people couldn’t seem to segregate that. And when we went to Image, some of that stigma followed.

Why would Jim Lee’s writing be spectacular when the beginning of his art career wasn’t spectacular?

So they just wanted to match the art level with the writing level, and it wasn’t really a fair comparison.

You’ve always had a nice rapport with your fans; I always felt that contributed to your success. You always looked out for their interest. You didn’t do any gimmicks.

You tried to keep your cover price down to $1.95 for a long time. And I always liked that. You always had these people that were going to support you no matter what. Was that something you were aware of?

Uh-huh. I try, for the most part, to put the books together from the perspective of a fan. So, do I like it when prices go up? No. Do I like gimmick covers?

No. Do I like it when artists get changed out? No. Do I like it when writers get changed? No. All this stuff that bugged me and I tried as much as possible to prevent. So now you can look at the first hundred

issues of Spawn, arguably the first 150, and go, there’s essentially three artists on that book, me, Greg Capullo, and Angel Medina. That’s it.

And to go back, writing-wise, there’s myself, for the most part — there’s a couple of hiccups in there, there’s an issue here and there, but for the most part the first 150 issues are Todd writing it, and Brian Holguin. That’s it. So collectively, I could break down the first 150 issues. And on top of it, Tom Orzechowski letters every one of those issues minus one, I think.

And coloring-wise, it was either Steve Oliff or Brain Haberlin. The consistency of the book, one way or the other, was very important. And then inking, Danny Miki came on and stayed, and is still there and has been for a long time. So, yeah, I hate it when I’d get ten books, or 20 issues of a book, and there’d be four different artists and five different writers. It just bugged me, and I just go, I’d rather sell less books and have consistency than to go and chase and get

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With Spawn #8, Todd does a homage to his Spidey #1 cover. ©2007 Todd McFarlane Productions.

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Jam cover between Larsen, Silvestri, McFarlane and Batt for Image’s 2004 Free Comic Book Day entry. ©2007 the respective copyright holders.

the hot artist that’ll come on for two issues and get people excited and know that I can’t keep the artist, and go get a writer and know that I can’t keep — I’m not going to go there, and I didn’t want to go there.

And so I just went, no, I like looking at the old price guides and seeing, y’know, The Fantastic Four, issue one all the way down to #375, and you could just go down by ones. And it actually bugged me when we did #4, that had, like, a coupon in it, and there were actually two listed in the price guide, with and without the coupon.

You used your letters page to have very open communication with fans, and then you had these pages that were for fan drawings and other things.

Well, like I said, even at the conventions I’d sit there for ten hours and sign when some of my counterparts were running off, doing whatever they wanted. We only exist because of the fans. So I think you’ve gotta acknowledge when they want to say something to at least give them an honest answer

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back; which is what was in those letter columns.

There were a lot of times where they said they didn’t like the book, and I wouldn’t try to talk them into it. I would say, “Then you should go spend your money on something you like. I think that would be the better solution than to be aggravated with my book.”

How long do you intend to keep Spawn going? Is there a point when you wanted to diversify?

Not really. I liked Sam and Twitch, who were extensions of Spawn, and so if I was going to do another regular book and I was going to be involved, myself, outside of Spawn, then that’s probably the book that I would take on. And how long does Spawn go? Spawn goes until many consumers don’t want it.

But comics are still important to you? You always hear, “Well, Todd’s more into the other stuff.” But I know you have a sense of pride that Image is still around.

Sure. So, yeah, is the comic book important to me?

Absolutely. Do I wish the book was selling better?

Absolutely. If selling the book means that I’ve got to do a big story arc that is a company crossover and restart the book and, y’know, do an Ultimate Spawn, nah, I won’t do it. I’m not going to do it. And it’s one of the reasons why I eventually sort of grew out of the comics. I just go, “I’m not going to play that game.” I think it’s all short-term. I think it’s short-term, and history shows us that that’s actually true. We are now selling less comic books than we did before we started all the tricks. So, okay.

Even if you drew it, you don’t think they would come back? Because I remember, I heard that Robert Kirkman, like, bamboozled you at a panel.

Yeah, in San Diego Con, there.

Like, “Hey, when are you going to draw?”

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, I understand it, because I had artists who left. I mean, what are you talking about? Once John Byrne left X-Men when I was younger, I lamented for five years that he was going to come back, and I saw I had to give up the ghost and go, “He’s not coming back.” If I come back and do comic books on a regular basis, it’s not going to be because I’m trying to show anybody up, it’s not going to be because I’m trying to make money, it’s not going to be because I’m trying to do anything else other than I just want to sit down in a room all by myself and I just want to draw again. And that would be it. And if nobody really buys it, it’s not going to be a big issue to me. I’m just going to be drawing, at that point, because I have that itch and that scratch to do so. But that unfortunately isn’t in the plans right now. I’ve got other things. Let’s be very clear about this. My moving on and doing other things is not a lack of not liking comic books. Quite the opposite; I love comic books to death. I’m angry at times that our community sh*t on itself, and on some level it’s put me in a position where I now have to diversify. Because I only had two choices: I either diversified or raise prices. Did we raise the price?

No. Did we change the paper stock? No. Did we do any big foil gimmick stuff? No, no, no. There’s a tick here and a tick there, but it wasn’t — there were very few exceptions, and the rule was “just keep the book going.” Now, in spite of all that, the comic book

market decided that it wanted to get greedy and bloated and selfimplode on some level.

Okay. At some point you acknowledge that, in spite of what I was trying to do, take the high road somewhat, that the comic book community as a whole decided they didn’t want to do it. So I had two choices. I either then go, okay, I’m going to now lose 700,000 sales because of other people’s business actions, or I can go and try and find some other places where I can get my art out there where hopefully they won’t be selfdestructive. Sorry!

Y’know? I’m sorry that I went and tried to find some firmer ground. And I found plenty of other people that went into the groundswell, and put all their eggs into the comic book business, and were not the better for it. They ended up losing jobs, they end up losing money, they end up losing houses, and they end up getting divorced. What are you talking about?

You don’t walk in and say, “Oh, yeah, now, honey, I’m making a sixth of the money. We have to cut back on everything, and the kids can’t go to college now,” whatever else, and they’re like, “Why? What did you do?” “Nothing! I didn’t do nothin’. Everybody else got greedy.” And so I’m going, “Nah. You know what? I’ll go to where there’s more stable business. And so I just went into other places where it’s not completely driven by collector mentalities that would go, “I’m going to make sure I can figure out a way to abuse my consumer so eventually they will actually not come back.” It doesn’t seem like much of a business model, but, y’know what?

Financially did you feel when the sales went down?

No, what are you talking about? I had money squirreled away, but shame on me. Shame on me if I just sat there and said, “I’m going to go down with the ship.” Shame on me. I had the energy, I had the finances, and I had the inertia to do something about it, and I decided to do something about it. And so if that’s called selling out, turning your back, whatever criticism somebody wants, you know what? Okay.

Whatever. I don’t see it that way. In my perfect world, I would love to be doing nothing else but sitting in a room drawing right now. Just me in a room drawing and selling a bunch of books. But unfortunately, that wasn’t going to happen. So now I go, okay. I’d have to do four books to keep up the pace of the sales and to keep some of the income coming in and the inertia of some of the stuff, or I go and take my art and I sell it to other people in different venues, and that’s what I chose to do. So, okay, I take my art into music

videos, or toys, or animation, or movies, whatever, video games. It’s all art.

But when Rob left Image, did that change your perception of things? That Image needed to change? Like, we need to get away from super-heroes and start doing more, getting back to the basics?

No, not really.

Because if you look at Image now, it’s a completely different line from what it once was. It’s no longer about super-heroes and all that sort of stuff that Jim Lee and Rob were doing, and it’s more about creator-driven titles about anything. Do you relate to that kind of stuff? Because there was a point at Image where if you didn’t sell a certain amount of books, you’re out of here, and that’s no longer the case.

Right. No, I think a lot of the product that we put out is a by-product of wanting to be independent, because if you have such a hankering to want to do super-hero comic books, then, yeah, why not go and do Spider-Man or Superman? The way that the marketplace is right now, unfortunately, it’s probably a safer place to go do Superman than to try to come up with your own Superman. That actually takes a little bit more work, and most guys want to get their foot in the door and try and do what they want to do.

And, like, for someone like me, as I was getting older, at some point super-hero comic books bore me. I never did like action movies, per se. I’m 45. I want adult stuff. And some of that stuff isn’t necessarily big sellers in the comic book marketplace. Okay, maybe I can take those ideas and instead of putting it in comic book form, maybe I’ll turn it into an animated show or I’ll make it a movie, okay, where people go, “Yeah, cool. Adult stuff, cool.” Doing drama, doing Rrated drama is cool. Instead of, like, well, where’s the big bazookas? Plenty of people are doing that, so better to have the people that have got their heart set on that.

But even Hollywood, you don’t take crap from anybody.

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The Prince of Darkness!

Ozzy Osbourne and Todd McFarlane at a press event for McFarlane Toys’s Ozzy action figures.

T O D D M c FA R L A N E

Let the good times roll!

Spawnmobile 1, a competitive funny car which Todd would share with his fans at his convention appearances across the country.

I read something that you wrote about when you were trying to get a movie deal, they wanted to take a cut of your character ownership, and you weren’t going to let them do that. You weren’t going to make a movie with anyone if that’s the way it’s going to be.

I’ve done different deals with different things.

Spawn is completely different than an idea I might come up with tomorrow. Tomorrow there are no ancillary rights to it, and so it’s easier to make a more standard deal, if you will. But Spawn pre-existed, so I didn’t think it was fair for them to come in there and somehow swallow everything just because they were going to make a movie. And at that point I go, “I’d rather make that movie, I’ll go and eventually find my own finance and make my own movie.” But we were able to organize a deal that made sense for both parties, and go, “Okay. I think it’s fair now,” and end up going there. When you walk into any negotiation, I don’t begrudge anybody for any negotiation.

Everybody’s an adult at that point, and you make your decisions on what you want to keep and what you don’t want to keep, and it comes to the cost, and everyone has their own opinion of what they want to give up to get it on. If somebody says, “The only way you’re going to get it on TV is if you give me everything,” and somebody says, “Okay,” then I’m fine with that. I would never begrudge anybody from doing that. And if it was the opposite, a guy like Dave Sim that goes, “No. Screw it. I’m not going to do any of it,” then I’m fine with that. Everybody who basically gives birth to a creative child to me should be able to have the luxury of saying how it gets raised. So, okay, I made decisions that were important for me. They weren’t necessarily right or wrong, they were just the ones that made sense for me.

In a way, Spawn has taken you to a lot of places that you would have never seen. All of a sudden you find yourself in music, and movies, and whatever you can imagine.

Well, once you start inertia, then the goal is to keep inertia going, which is really what my job is right now. So I have all these things that we end up doing that are still art. It’s all art. This is the thing that people don’t get. They somehow think that, because I’m not drawing in a room on a piece of paper, that I’m not doing art every day. I mean, I do art every day; it’s just in a different form. And if you do it and it’s somewhat successful, people will see it, and

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sometimes people will knock on your door and want you to do more art for them. So, yeah, does one thing turn into another and eventually become a little bit of a snowball? Yeah, absolutely. And is all my business now predicated upon comic books? No. Is it all predicated upon Spawn? No. We do lots of other things that are neither comics nor Spawn. Okay. Is it still cool art? Yeah. And so it still gets my juices flowing.

What about when people were talking about the baseballs you won. Pretty soon all you became known for is for owning those baseballs. And I think one of the things nobody ever realized, was that really got your name out there. Especially when you had a touring exhibit for them, all of a sudden people, “Oh, Todd McFarlane is a comic book artist.” “Oh, a comic book artist?” Y’know, people started talking about you, and I thought that’s the one thing nobody realized. Like, they can say you wasted all this money on these balls, but you got a lot of publicity out of those things.

Right. And we ended up getting all four sports contracts, too, thereafter. So it got me into meetings and whatever else. And this is the thing people who don’t own their own business don’t realize, that you have to spend money advertising at some level. And from time to time, I do very unorthodox advertising, if you will, where people are going, “I don’t get it. Why did you do that?” It’s like, “Because you’re looking at it from the wrong angle. You’re looking at it, ‘Why would you buy something for a million bucks, nobody’s ever going to give your money back.’”

That’s what I hear and read from the fanboys. Nobody realizes this. You’re talking about Todd, that’s what he wanted!

Right. Every time somebody asks, I probably do 50 interviews a year in which that subject comes up, and I go, “Guys, every time you bring it up, I get to amortize my cost one more time. Now you’re going to put it in there, you’re going to give me an article, and you’ll give me two more lines just on that one thing that in your newspaper would cost me $30,000 for an ad space. So thank you. Thank you for bringing it up.”

And I keep telling them, if I had spent $3,000,000 on three Superbowl ads ten years ago, nobody would ever bring that up again.

Yeah, because now they even mention you, like, when Barry Bonds is going to pass Hank Aaron, “Todd’s gonna buy that ball.” All of a sudden you’re back in the news.

Right. Every time. They come back and they start phoning me every time. And then when Barry was going to break McGwire’s record, they were phoning every day. So silly as it is, because I overspent on something, I now

become an expert. I’m an expert in the field.

So I get those phone calls. When they want to know the value of stuff, they go, “Get Todd on the phone. See if he’ll come in and do a studio thing.” Blah, blah, blah.

You always have something to look forward to. There’s never been a down period for you personally, right, in the last 15 years?

There are always ups and downs of stuff, but luckily my ups haven’t been too high and my downs haven’t been too low. So I like manageable growth. I think it’s easier on the ulcer. It makes it easier on just day-to-day living. So I’m not looking to conquer the world, I’m just looking to go, “Okay, here’s what we’ve done for the last ten years. Can we keep the momentum going, and do we feel like we’re at least half a step further ahead than we were last year?” And if the answer’s yes, then okay, good. Let’s just keep going. Opportunity will always knock.

I wanted to ask you about Miracleman. Why did you buy those Eclipse characters? Did you want to use them?

Yeah, they had some cool characters in there. And I knew Dean Mullaney and had been friends with him, so there’s stuff there that possibly could be mine in the future, if and when I ever did get aggressive. I never did put out 20 books, but at least there are characters that are still there that I can put out very easily if I polish them up and do a modern version of them, because they’re ready to go.

Going back, I was going to ask you about Rob, because, part of the reason Rob got into trouble was because he was trying to get Michael Turner away from Silvestri, wasn’t it?

Yeah, he was trying to get around the system a little bit. He wasn’t playing fair. So, y’know, and it’s not my viewpoint, it was eventually everybody’s viewpoint. Rob’s leaving was arguably us sort of showing him the door. Jim Lee just left because he wanted to. So you’re going, “Whoa, Jimmy!” Jim was the bigger blow, because people could see what was happening in the Rob situation, it was coming. Where Jim just left, he was going to take a tremendous amount of market share with him.

Did you fear that there wasn’t much left for Image after Jim Lee left?

I knew it was going to be a lot of hard work for us to regroup and keep ourselves going. Again, we all liked Jim. We didn’t have any problems with Jim, and we liked his books, and so it was, he was just leaving for a personal reason. We were all a little bit selfish in wanting to keep him on board and less about letting him have his personal needs at that point. But then we go, “Okay, he’s gone. Now how do we keep Image going here?” And that’s been the work and the maintenance we’ve done since then.

One thing I’ve always wondered, because you’ve done well for yourself, what’s the reason, why can’t you just

put Spawn out by yourself? Without Image?

I could.

But you still want Image to be around. Is that a matter of pride?

Yup. Yeah, sure, because every day we exist is one day longer than most people thought we would, right? We were supposed to be gone in two years or three years.

As a fan, I think people are really proud that you guys are still around; this embodiment of the independent spirit in comics.

Uh-huh. Yeah, again, we’ve got some pretty cool books, good guys coming through the system. Bendis came through the system before he blows up going to Marvel, so again there’s a sense of pride of the guys that go on to bigger and better, if you will. You go, “Oh, cool.” We would have liked to have kept them longer, but, “Okay, they have to do what they gotta do to do the best for their family and their career.”

I was talking to Brian, and he says you took it kinda

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Cover illustration of the first Spawn collection. ©2007 Todd McFarlane Productions.

T O D D M c FA R L A N E

Promotional image for the ill-fated Spawn and Valeria, the She-Bat, crossover by artist Neal Adams. Valeria ©2007 Continuity Studios

harsh, that he sorta took the [Ultimate] Spider-Man job over Spawn. He was surprised that it bothered you so much.

Well, there’s two perspectives. I didn’t take it harsh, and I didn’t take it hard. I dealt with reality.

Reality will tell me every single time that when a writer gets another gig that is shinier and bigger, that they will eventually drop you. That said, history tells you that to be true 100 percent of the time. So I now knew once he got the new shiny object that he was on borrowed time, and I could either wait until he decided to just leave, and I’ve seen guys just leave in the middle of books, or I could go, “You know what?

I’d better be proactive here and go… .“ Maybe he would have stayed for ten, maybe he would have

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stayed for 20, maybe he would have stayed for two, I don’t know. But he wasn’t going to stay forever. And so I go, fine, y’know, you’ve got other priorities now, I understand and God bless you with your other priorities, but I have my priorities, and my priorities are I need people who are on my books who, when they’re doing my books, that’s their priority. That’s all I ever ask when somebody comes to work for me. You can do 50 other books for 50 other companies. I don’t care, as long as my book is your priority one. You make all the other books two and under, and I don’t care, go ahead. But if you want to do four other books and my book will be your fifth priority, I don’t want that guy. I’d rather take less of a writer, less of an artist, less of a colorist, and have somebody that’s completely devoted to what they’re doing than somebody who’s just doing it because it pads some kind of thing there.

So Brian was just heading in that direction.

I don’t begrudge him, because, again, he wanted to go and do some things that he hadn’t had a chance to do with the big companies, which is cool, and he’s since done very well for himself, but I knew what the inevitable result would be, so I just took action on what was going to eventually happen anyway. So not only did he not end up working for me, he ended up taking his books over to Marvel, everything’s Marvel. So all the contracts for all guys are now, y’know, Marvel and DC, everybody’s under contract for fear that anybody, God forbid, would work for another company. I don’t get it. I don’t have anybody under contract. If you don’t want to work for me, don’t. But if you’re going to work for me, I want your focus.

That’s it, that’s all I ask for. And if you can’t focus, then I’m not going to force you by a contract to be focused, then go, go someplace else and I’ll find somebody else.

Unfortunately, sometimes the guys I have to follow up with are not nearly the skill level as the previous guy. Darn it. Darn it. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to replace Bendis with another skilled guy, but at least whoever came on was going to be focused, until I think I ended up taking over. I was completely unfocused until I found somebody. But I had to specifically go look for that person to go, hey, you want to write a book, and you want it to be your number one priority. So that’s it.

You know, nothing more important than that. Like I said, I find it amusing that — and I’ve run into this before — when I’m not willing to bend over backwards for certain creative people, to somehow think it’s something else. I’m like, “sorry.” So I’m one of the few guys that’s not willing to just completely go into the emperor’s clothes mentality.

I heard somewhere where Angel Medina said the one thing you told him was, “I don’t need any babies. You do what you have to do, but if you’re ever late, I want to hear it… I want to know I can trust you. That’s it.” And he said that you were the best boss he ever had.

Well, that’s it. Or if something was coming up, just let me know in advance. And if you needed a break or something, just let me know. Everybody let’s just be reasonable and we’ll end up doing it. What it is to me then, is the loyalty goes both ways. You be loyal to me, I’ll be loyal to you. So, “Angel, as long as you want to do the book, you’re on the book, as long as you hold up your end of the bargain.” And he did.

And then at some point he said, “Todd, I’ve got a good offer and I’m going to go do some stuff,” and I wished him luck and he went on. But I wasn’t going to kick him off as long as he wanted to keep doing the book. Maybe some of the fans and some of the critics didn’t like his stuff, but to me there’s things that are just as equally valuable as someone’s artistic artwork. Personal integrity for those guys too, that I go, wow. Angel was a good guy. Angel was painfree, and he had a good head on his shoulders, and he was very loyal. I’d rather have Angel do 50 issues for me and go, “fine,” than have somebody come in who’s just going to poop out on me in ten or 12 issues. Why? Going back to our original conversation, it is that I don’t like it when you change art teams. And so, like I said, by the time Angel left, there were essentially three artists in the first 150 issues. I’m proud of that. Whether that meant being

loyal to those workers and not wanting to cheat the customer a little bit with tricks that it means that the sales have to slide, and then you know what? I’d rather have the comics slide in sales and feel good about what we’re doing and that we’re not trying to take advantage of the consumer than to have to try and trick them into buying the book. So if I’m going to lose my sales, henceforth lose business, and henceforth lose audience that will know about the stuff, then I’ll go and take some momentum and go and put it in the music and the toys and the other stuff. So I’ll just shift it someplace else, so I don’t feel like I’m ever in a position where I have to play the game of what I have to do with the comic books just to get it into the Wizard top ten chart or something like that.

Are you keen right now about seeing what kind of reception you’re going to get when you’re done with the new Spawn/Batman book?

Yes and no, but I put in my time, and I’ve had way more accolades than a lot of other people, and my 15 minutes of fame has lasted way longer than it should have, so I’m okay. If they love it, it’s not going to change my mind. If they buy a million copies, it’s not going to change my life. If they hate it and they don’t buy any copies of anything, it’s not going to change my life. So I’m now at that actually good point in life where I can just do stuff because I enjoy doing it, and have fun with it, and don’t have to get worked up over whether it’s going to make or break me in whatever it is that I end up doing at that point.

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Spawn pin-up

by Frank Miller. Spawn ©2007 Todd McFarlane Productions.

IMAGE FOUNDER

Whilce Portacio Whilce Portacio.

Photo ©2007 Golden Apple Comics.

During his quiet childhood, Whilce Portacio was an artistic wünderkind that let his drawings do his talking. Seeking a career in art, he broke into the comics industry by embellishing the tight pencils of Arthur Adams’ debut on the classic Longshot limited series for Marvel. Quickly he became a sought-after inker at the House of Ideas but instead proved that he was more than ready to headline as a penciler on The Punisher in 1988. His distinctive intricate style fuses together many classical artistic influences, like European and Asian, with contemporary cultural expression. In 1990, Portacio’s artwork and popularity would reach a new stratosphere with his triumphant work on X-Factor and his smash follow-up on Uncanny X-Men. With the formation of Image, Whilce created Wetworks (with writer Brandon Choi) and helped to develop WildStorm Studios’ revolutionary digital coloring team. He moved to the Philippines in the mid-’90s for several years where he found himself teaching and mentoring a new wave of Filipino artists into professional comics. In 2006, a reenergized Portacio returned to the mainstream with his artwork more viable than ever on his new Wetworks book and the launch of Batman Confidential.

Wetworks. ©2007 WildStorm Productions.

Did you always have an inclination towards art?

Oh, I’ve always been drawing. In fact, there used to be a Nationwide Scholastic Arts Institute that would solicit artwork from high school students all around the country, and try to track them and try to give them awards so that art institutes and universities could keep track of who’s up-and-coming. And I’ve been winning awards in that since I was in sixth grade, so I’ve always, always been drawing. The only thing close to it was comics.

When I was in my preteen years, I was living on an island called Midway Island, which was the site of the Battle of Midway. It’s a small island, two miles by one mile, and only about an eighth or a fifth of the

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island is covered with cement, and that’s where all the military people live with their families. So the rest of the island was just forest and beaches. And obviously the rest of the island, since it used to be the site of a battle, was restricted area. But you can’t say “restricted” to 12-year-olds. So we used to just go exploring all over the place looking, finding bullets and bayonets and shovels and old bunkers. And that’s when I started drawing battles, making up military teams and stuff.

Did your dad want you to get into the military?

No, no. It is a typical minority story where, Dad wanted…

He wanted better for you guys.

He just wanted us to get a career. Just like Jim [Lee] was always supposed to be the doctor or the architect.

So what exactly happened that you got into comics?

Again, like I said, since I was in sixth grade I’d been winning national art contests all over the place, and every kind of poster contest there was, I’d enter it, and I’ve been winning money for it, too. So these art teachers started tracking me and trying to place me. In fact, when I went into the second year of high school, I was already considered too advanced for high school art, so I spent a whole two years after that taking art classes in colleges while I was still in

Wetworks. ©2007 WildStorm Productions.

W H I L C E P O R TA C I O

Page from Wetworks #2, Vol. 1, by Whilce. ©2007 WildStorm Productions.

high school. So my track has always been towards art. But then again, my family’s traditional, so when it became high school time, they would go, “Well, okay, become an architect.”

Then you went to college for architecture?

Actually, what happened was that my dad retired, and it was hard to raise four kids that were about to go into college. So we went back to the Philippines.

We’d never been there before, so I didn’t even know the language or anything.

I’m sure that was a giant cultural shock?

I mean, here I was, like, 16 years old. I’d been for four years at Hawaii, and we’re going to the Philippines, which I heard was a third world country.

Didn’t know the language, didn’t know anything about it. No, I don’t want to, as a guy, leave Hawaii. But my dad took us to the Philippines, and I somehow convinced him to let me go to art college, and I went to one of the big universities in the Philippines. And I

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ended up being so advanced over there in terms of art that, from the first semester, all of the teachers would just send their kids my way, and I’d be tutoring everybody instead of learning anything. So I did my only rebellious thing when I was a kid: in my second year of art school I purposely just failed the whole course, not doing anything. And so I went from an honor student from grade one to total failure in art in college, of all places. So my parents sent me back here. Fortunately, they sent me back to San Diego.

Who did you stay with in San Diego?

My dad’s sister — four months before San Diego Con. This was in the early ’80s?

Yeah. At that very first huge talent search that they did, that was the San Diego Con where all the Marvel editors were sent there to look for artists. So I was fortunate that they were actually looking for people, so I didn’t have to try very hard to figure out how to get in. And fortunately Carl Potts liked my portfolio.

And then I got Longshot a little bit after that.

You always managed to keep in touch with Scott [Williams], or were you able buy comics in the Philippines?

See, I did something I guess you could say was unique in comics in that, go back to when I was in high school, when I met Scott; that’s when I really got into comics. So he showed me Neal Adams, he showed me Gil Kane, showed me Gene Colan, showed me Kirby, Steranko. So I started studying these guys, and I guess even back then I was analytical, and I started noticing that if a Neal Adams comic came out that month, all my drawings would kind of look like Neal. You know, I’d do Neal ciphers.

Or if that week Jack Kirby came out, all of a sudden I’d be doing Jack Kirby squiggles. And I didn’t like that. I liked being able to mimic them and being able to be myself. Everybody, all my friends would go crazy, “Wow, that’s pretty cool!” But I was unhappy for myself because I was too chameleon-ish. I didn’t have any identity.

And so, when we went back to the Philippines, because the Philippines at the time had very little economy at the time, there were no comics at all over there. All the comics I had were the comics I had brought with me. So I don’t know how I came to the decision, but for the four years that I was in the Philippines, I actually put all my comic books in suitcases, locked them up in a closet, and made myself not look at them at all. And so, for the four years I was in the Philippines, I would bang my head against the wall every day just trying to relearn how to draw on my own, with no influences. The only influence I had at the time was what I could remember of Neal Adams, what I could remember of Jack Kirby. So I guess that’s how I was able to develop a style that’s been sort of unique in the industry.

When you were over there in the Philippines, you didn’t find out about their rich history in comics?

No. Because all those guys were now over here in the United States struggling, and the people that were left over in the Philippines, the industry over there was taking this total nosedive. Even if I did go out looking for these guys, these guys would be

nowhere to be found because the local industry was such that people were buying comic books just to wrap fish in the market with.

But do you remember what was in your samples that Carl liked? Were you able to show it to Scott before you prepared your portfolio?

Actually, no. When I left for the Philippines, Scott and I corresponded for just a little bit, and then we fell out. And then I didn’t get into contact with Scott, believe it or not, until that convention where I met Art Adams, where he handed me the pages to the first issue of Longshot. This guy comes up to the tables and it turns out it was Scott. It turned out he went to the convention every year, from Hawaii. So we met again only there. And there after that I said, “Hey, they’re going to let me ink this Longshot thing and I have no idea what I’m doing, so why don’t you come over?” So he decided he could come over to San Diego from Hawaii and be “my assistant” for a while just so that he could start getting himself known directly to the editors at the time, and we’d be able to keep our ears out for any other jobs that he could maybe get.

Had you seen Scott’s development as an artist, yet?

No, again. Remember, from my high school days, Scott was “Mister Comics.” Here I was, coming from four years in the Philippines, not knowing anything about comics. The only comics knowledge I had was from the ’70s and ’60s, the comics I had before I went to the Philippines. So I didn’t even know who Art Adams was when I got back to the States.

But your style was influenced by European artists, right?

I see even a little Patrick Nagel in some of it?

Oh, yeah. I’ve got to backtrack a little bit, there.

The only comic book type thing I was able to find in the Philippines anywhere rarely, maybe once a year or something, was a Heavy Metal compilation or something. And so that’s when I started realizing about Moebius and stuff like that.

Anime wasn’t an influence on you at that point either, right? There’s a fluidity to your artwork that reminds me of it.

The word “anime” was not coined until recently, but way back when, when I was a kid, before I went to the Philippines, I came from Hawaii, remember.

Now, Hawaii had Channel 13, which was almost all Japanese, and at the time they not only started rerunning Astro Boy and stuff like that in the ’70s, but they had showed live-action team shows that were the forerunners to Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers and so it was the same kind of stuff. And so that’s what I saw, Japanese cutting, and a lot of it was heavily borrowed from samurai movies. So that’s where I got involved in all that stuff. And then again, being a teenager growing up, I wanted to be a ninja or something, and Japan was all around me in Hawaii, so I guess I just sucked that up.

You’d think that would be truer in the Philippines, too.

They’re kind of closer to Japan? But there’s a resentment of that sort of Japanese thing.

No, no. Anime is a big thing in the Philippines. It’s a whole other story; maybe I could get into this later on. The Philippines basically has no identity, because just real quickly, because the Philippines has been invaded by the Spanish, Japanese, and then America.

And if you remember any of your empire stories,

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especially from Britain, what they do is they try to wipe out all the culture. Well, it was successful in the Philippines, so much so that there really is no Filipino style. In the Philippines there’s a huge debate whether you’re super-hero or you’re anime, but there is no Filipino. If you get a chance to watch Filipino shows, especially fantasy shows, which are popular right now, they look like Lord of the Rings. They look like Disney. They look like anything but a Filipino show, because, again, it’s not defined. But anyway, that’s another story. That’s when I was growing up, I fell into the Japanese thing — because there was nothing Filipino for me to grab onto.

So Carl Potts is the guy who discovered you, and he gave you work on some of the smaller Epic stories?

No. Terry Austin needed a little help on an Alien Legion story, which was Carl Potts’ book. So that’s where Carl figured out that I could ink. So he called up [’80s Marvel editor/writer] Ann Nocenti, who he knew needed an inker, they couldn’t find one. And I guess Ann and Art agreed to let me ink that.

But did they try you out first? Because there was an inker, Bill Anderson, beforehand, and I don’t know what happened to him.

All I knew was Carl gave me Ann’s number, said, “Hey, give her a call.” I call up Ann and she goes, “Hi. Yeah, Carl told me about you, so do you want to ink it?” I go, “Yeah!” I didn’t say, “Yeah, I need the money,” but that’s what I was thinking.

When you saw Art Adams’s first batch of Longshot pages with all this detail in the pencils, what did you think, how were you going to ink that?

Well, remember, I was stupid. Meaning that,

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remember, four years in [the Philippines] with no comics at all. I didn’t know what the new guys were doing nowadays, so when I saw Art’s pages, I go, “I guess this is typical of what’s happening right now, I need the money, so if I want to get in, I’d better suck it up.” And I just did it. And no thought… no preconceptions about it at all.

But you didn’t think to yourself, “Man, I thought this stuff should be a little looser”? Because I’m sure it has tons of lines. He was starting off himself, and I’m sure he didn’t know if he could cut corners sometimes, let the inker finish certain things.

Well, actually, that helped me, because, see, I took the inking jobs only for money. I’ve always wanted to be a penciler. And very soon after doing Longshot I started getting known as the inker guy who actually might become an artist pretty soon, so I started getting these jobs where, y’know, “Hey, help me out here.”

The worst job I got, which I turned back, was… with the hamsters, what was that?

Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters?

Yeah. I was given the chance to do the first Three-D Annual, but the pages — I couldn’t believe, I got these pages, on 11” x 16” pages in FedEx, in a box.

They basically had little funny shapes with names written in the shapes: “This is this hamster, this is that hamster, and this square over here, okay, and that’s the Winnebago.” So I was expected to redraw everything and then ink it. And so for me, being a penciler, wanting to be a penciler, and only taking inking gigs just for money, it was kind of like — every time I took a job like that I got a lot of kudos. A lot of people started really liking me and calling me up, but,

because I wanted to be an artist, I was going, like, if I spent time reworking this other guy’s stuff and making him look good, that’s time I could be doing my own pencils. The only thing he was proving to me, personally, was, “Gee, I should be penciling right now.” And so I started bitching a lot about, “I need to pencil.”

So you talked to Carl?

Well, then I came up with that brilliant idea of, “Hey, I’ll draw The Punisher on the back of all these pages.” And Carl gave me The Punisher job.

That was a big opportunity at the time, because the Punisher was a huge character when his series started in the late ’80s.

It just fit in real well with what we were. Well, Scott, and especially me, because, again, I had a very big military background. I guess I said a lot of things to Carl probably in that vein, so when he needed somebody new for Punisher — at the time he had a writer who was heavily into doing a real-time thing, with real reference for everything — we were an obvious choice for him at the time.

Once you start being a penciler and people start seeing what you can do with The Punisher, it’s like, “Whoa! All of a sudden he looks very cool.” Your Frank Castle was a lot sleeker-looking than previous versions — the fans dug it, I’m sure. Did you like the stories?

For me it was a good time, because I was learning about the industry. Actually, looking back, I’m glad that I came up at the time that I did, because coming now is kind of scary. Imagine if it was this way, the exact same timeline, but nowadays, and let’s say I was doing Punisher and Punisher became popular.

I’d be invited to conventions and then I’d have to face people. I’d have to put up this persona. I’d have to be the cool guy, because, again, I’d be known as Mr. Punisher at the time, so I’d be expected to be heavy into fighting, wrestling, weapons, tactics, and how could I draw the book if I wasn’t into all that kind of stuff? In fact, actually, that’s one of the reasons that I rallied hard to get out of the Punisher books, because I had to go to conventions and people would be talking about, “Oh, hey, how come the Punisher doesn’t bust people’s kneecaps? I’ve done it four times, it really works.” They’d feel that I’d think that was cool. And I really had to get out of it.

But Carl was the perfect editor for you at that time, too.

I think you were telling me before you didn’t have a lot of confidence yet in your storytelling at this point. Did you have to redraw stuff a lot, or did you just talk it out?

Oh, that was the great thing, too. See, he would send me books, like cinematography books and storytelling books, and they could give me these little short stories and he’d say, “Draw them.” And he would use that as a test to see if I sucked up any of the stuff from the books, and that’s how he would gauge whether he would let me pencil something after that. He was the only one who did that.

Were you in a position where you could help Scott and bring him in as your inker?

When there’s a popular style, all the inkers start to become masters at that style. So when a new style comes in, a lot of inkers can’t adjust. So when I came

in, it was like, Carl was going, “Oh, man, how am I going to find somebody to ink this?” So then we showed him some of Scott’s stuff. “Scott’s been living with me for a while now and he knows exactly what I do.” So I don’t think it was that hard of a decision, because, again, the other option was, “Okay, let’s try these big names on you.” And that was still a time of, it was either Terry Austin doing quill stuff, or Dan Green and everybody still doing brush stuff. And my stuff was so fine that it needed something thinner. It didn’t need it, but it needed something a little more fluid, like a brush, but something thinner.

How did Scott work, with a brush or a pen?

We got reintroduced into inks because of Terry Austin, so we were trying to mimic Terry Austin. So we started talking with Terry a lot, and he started giving us a lot of his pointers, and so we started using the quill. So, for the first half of Scott’s career, he was a quill guy, but before that, he was a brush guy. Nowadays, I think the last time I talked to Scott was a couple of months ago, and he was almost

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50/50, using 50 percent brush and 50 percent quill. It’s kind of funny, because he’s still known as Mr. Quill.

Along this time is when Carl Potts introduced you to Jim Lee, or got you two guys together?

Yes. What was the premise? He said, “You guys share similar interests,” he thought you guys should work together?

I have no idea. If you remember, maybe you don’t know, but Carl actually had some Asian blood in him, himself, and I think at the time I was the only Asian except a couple of the older inkers, so when Jim came in, we were the same age, Carl goes, “Hey, there’s this new guy that I just found. Why don’t you give him a call and show him around, show him how the industry runs.” And then Jim says, “Hey, I live in Berkeley. Why don’t I come down and see you guys?” So he came down and met me and Scott, and from the very first day we were talking about setting up a studio.

And Jim rightaway moved to southern San Diego to work with you?

No, there was a big debate. If you know Jim, there’s always a debate. He was trying to convince us to move to Berkeley because it’s so cool. Me and Scott were trying to convince him to move down to San Diego because of the convention and because that’s where we lived. We didn’t want to move. And I guess because of the San Diego Con, we won. So the year after that, Jim came down and got himself an apartment. Scott was in an apartment. I was renting out a house. And then we all three rented out this little apartment, this little one-bedroom apartment which became the first studio.

Between your time on Punisher and X-Factor, there was some time off, right?

Oh no, that’s right. I did the Legion of Night thing.

Oh, you took a year to do that?

Because, remember, at the time what they were doing was, they were telling us that these are open-ended contracts.

They were paying you while working on this, right?

Right. And I got a raise for that, for doing all that Punisher for them. Okay, so now I’m going to do one of their new types of books that should make some money. So they gave me a raise for that, then, too, and I took a year for that. But it was always considered that I would go to The X-Men after that.

So you weren’t worried that you were taking a year off, you didn’t think they were going to forget about you?

Oh, no, no, no. See, because, again, remember, we were close with Carl Potts, who was close with Ann Nocenti, so we were always considered for X-Men. Remember, Jim did an issue of X-Men? Okay, that issue was offered to me before that but I got this Legion of Night thing. And then, a little bit after that, we did the Homage one that all three of us worked on.

When Jim, Scott and yourself were given the assignment to X-Men #267; wasn’t there like, 14 days or something, to hand in the book and you guys drew

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the issue in half the time?

But my point is that throughout that whole period we were in and out of the X-Men office, and we were considered that we were going to go into the X-Men office. Jim was all business, and he knew that Wolverine and Storm were the number one characters.

My whole thing was that Neal Adams did the original X-Men with Cyclops and Marvel Girl, and that was The X-Men that I wanted to do. The first issue that Jim did wasn’t that X-Men, so that’s why I turned that down. So then Ann wanted me in the office somehow, and so she figured, okay, hey, let’s rearrange the teams. And, in this case, it was Bob coming at the time, which rearranged the team and give Whilce most of the old X-Men. So then we can get Whilce into the X-Men office permanently. But, again, even before that, while I was on the Legion of Night stuff, I was always in and out of that office considered doing stuff for them.

So they were planning this major X-Men push.

Oh, yeah. Imagine that, splitting up the team and having their two top artists at the time drop in on both of those books at the same time, y’know? And, again, I think Shooter proved it through Secret Wars, that if you plan these things out, pre-advertise all this stuff, that’s the road map. Let people know and they’ll come. And so that’s what they did with X-Men. The three of you guys must have been very happy, I guess, at this time, when you were starting X-Factor, and Jim was starting Uncanny X-Men, and Scott was inking both of you guys often. This was a high energy type of period, right?

For me at least, personally, that was the best period in my comics career, because all three of us were there. And when you get heavy into comics, you’ve really got to make an effort to see what everybody else was doing. And so here we didn’t have to make an effort, because I could see what Jim’s doing, I could see what Scott’s doing.

You were all 100 percent Marvel mode, let’s do this, let’s kick ass?

Yeah. Nothing else at all. It was just, how far can we get here? And because of Jim’s admission through Bob, all this stuff came in. I think it was Art Adams first. Art Adams did this big stand-up that they would put in the stores.

The infamous Wolverine pose.

Yeah. And also those kind of jobs, and then doing a cover here and there for some kind of advertisement or blah, blah, blah. That’s when we started to realize there’s a bigger business than just doing the comic books.

How were you guys able to contribute to the storylines?

That’s something I’ve always wondered. Was it something that Claremont helped you guys out with, or was it Harras? Who was receptive to you guys, the idea?

It was Harras, and it was all just lucky coincidence.

It just happened that Bob hated anything that Chris said, and anything that we said 50 percent of the time was a match-up with what Bob was thinking. So here we were already proving that we could draw the stories, and now we had kind of the same ideas. So it wasn’t too much of a leap for him to say, “Hey, do it.”

And remember, there were a couple of months where he really forced stories on Claremont which were from pow-wows with Jim and me.

But you guys never worked directly with Claremont yourselves, right?

No. No. See, I’m not sure if it was advertised that way, but Claremont was supposed to write my first issue, #281. But Jim and Bob and Rob and everybody had a pow-wow at a restaurant or something, and we decided basically what was going to happen in those issues, and that I was going to get rid of a lot of the older characters that were going nowhere.

Also, to make a big splash, I mean, you kill off ten villains and people look. So we gave that basic plot to Claremont. I’ll tell you what, let’s see how kind I can put it… I was going to kill off ten characters, introduce a whole new team, which was basically the original X-Men team. And so that baggage is, “Hey, we’re the original X-Men team. How come the other team with Wolvie is Team A?” Y’know? And we thought that would be interesting for Claremont to write, right? He could have Scott Summers and those guys throw a lot of digs at the new team, that they’re going to fumble because they’re so new and they’re eight personalities that will fight all the time. Well, the plot we get is Jean and Storm having a picnic.

Literally sitting down and having a picnic. And so we go, “Uhh, I gotta start drawing soon.” So Bob said, “Why don’t you guys flesh it out and let me look at it, and then if I approve it,” they’ll let me draw it.

And that’s how it happened. And then Byrne was called in and asked if he would script it. And throughout the whole thing, Jim and I were just like, underneath it all, just, “Hey, this is cool! This is what we want to do.”

How were those stories plotted by you and Jim? You will remember that we’re in the studio all day together. So while we’re drawing we’re just shouting out ideas. Or, like, Jim buys an anime book, or I buy an Appleseed book, or Scott gets a videotape of a Japanese movie from a friend, we’d throw it out at each other, we’d share it with each other.

I remember before you guys took over that book, it was just — not that Claremont handled it that bad, it’s just that they seemed lost for a while. He’d split up the team, and it took two or three years to get everyone back together again.

Well, see, we stumbled into the formula that a lot of super-hero comics — the way a lot of super-hero comics are done now is that, back then, there was a book store called Kinokuniya.

There’s one of those in New York.

New York, San Francisco, and I think L.A., maybe.

But we would go to San Francisco con and go to this bookseller all the time and pick up Appleseed and stuff like that. And Akira was coming out at that time.

And there was this guy whose job was to go to Japan, and he was into all that kind of stuff. So he would go and record all that stuff on VHS, come back and make friends with all the comic book guys and give all of us copies of all this cool stuff. So Jim and I would absorb all that stuff and try to put that in our comic books. And since Bob was susceptible to our

ideas, when we said, “Why don’t we have, like, cyberpunk guys,” Bob would think that was cool and would let us do it. And so we started that trend of checking out what the Japanese were doing, mimicking it, making it American and pouring it into The X-Men, and then everybody going, “Ah, that’s cool.

That’s kind of like all that manga stuff!”

So that’s where all of that velocity came from?

Exactly. I mean, remember speed lines? How did that come? Because of Akira.

I remember the cover of X-Men #285 with a lot of speed lines. That was great.

And, again, that was all from there, all from the Japanese stuff.

Before Jim and you arrived, the X-Men book had gotten really boring. It was still very successful, but it wasn’t because of the stories, it was appeal of the characters and buying habit. It just kept going. There was no reason for people to buy it. The characters were starting to show their age. Sooner or later it had to go down if nothing changed.

You’re exactly right, because Jim and I, especially at the time, were sponges. We would suck up anything

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Whilce self-portrait from his 2006 sketchbook.

Left to right: Gilbert Monsanto, Whilce Portacio, Brian Haberlin, Gerry Alanguilan, Chill (local rapper/ actress), Jay Anacleto, Leinil Francis Yu, and Edgar Tadeo. This 1998 picture was taken in the Philippines during Whilce’s return to Image (via Avalon Studios).

Photo courtesy of Mr. Alanguilan.

cool, and the last cool thing was Bill Sienkiewicz. But, unfortunately, not much of Bill Sienkiewicz translated into fan stuff. All of the artists adored Sienkiewicz’s experimentation, but a lot of it was a little too highbrow for the fans. And so when the Japanese first started kicking in, and we were in a position to collect all that stuff, we just sucked it up. There wasn’t anything really happening inside the industry. Actually, I take it back; before Sienkiewicz, the last thing was Simonson’s Thor.

Those were all at the same time, though. The only thing that stands out between you guys and that period is Art Adams’ arrival, which ushered in a different type of art. It reawakened the mentality that you don’t have to be John Buscema anymore to do super-heroes.

I think a big appeal was Art’s stuff. Remember back in the ’60s and the early ’70s, if you were a comics fan, and as you got to around 20 years old, you had to grow up and throw your comics away. But around our time, we didn’t want to throw our comic books away. And so Art, like, would show you this world of, “Hey, this is my world, but look it, I’ve got the toys you’ve got, I’ve got the Zoids you’ve got.”

And so he was, like, looking through Art’s background to see if he collected the same things you did.

Right now we have a period where people stay in adolescence for a lot longer. You and I were probably still playing video games right now, y’know, but back in the

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early ’90s, that probably wasn’t conceivable.

Right.

When was the period you started becoming dissatisfied when you were working at Marvel? Right about the end of X-Factor, or at the beginning of Uncanny, did you start to get a little, I don’t know, weary of them?

Basically it was only until Image came around.

Prior to that, again, I am my own PR. I’ve always just been the artist guy, just wanting to do what I felt was cool.

Yeah, but you’ve got to promote your artwork if you want to keep doing it, in some ways.

That’s the bane of my existence. I’ve never thought that way. So that’s why other people look at my career and think that there’s some missed opportunities. I’ve always been an artist. Ever since I can remember, I’ve always been an artist. I’ve always earned a living by being an artist. I’ve always gained attention and got stature from being an artist ever since I was a kid, so it’s like, when I started to get into the heavy spotlight of X-Men comics, it wasn’t something new to me. It didn’t feel new to me, getting that attention and getting the praise, oh, wow, and getting fans and stuff. That wasn’t something new to me, so it wasn’t something that I hungered or desired. I just wanted to draw, so if you think about it, at the time, right before the Image thing, I had Bob’s ear. Bob was the number one editor at the time, in the number one office at the time, with the number one characters, and he had just let me create my own character for use, listening to our stories. So I had no problem becoming a writer pretty soon. I’ve already now created Bishop. From a creative standpoint, which is how I always looked at things, but after we announced the Image thing, then, I started seeing that everybody else around me doesn’t look at it this way. It’s a war.

You start seeing their true colors.

Yeah. I grew up on comics sucked in with the Stan

Lee’s Soapbox. I came into the industry knowing for sure that there was a bullpen, that Jack Kirby, Gene Colan, and Neal Adams sat around chumming it up in one big room drawing comics all day long.

That’s what you thought.

I came into the industry and found out that it never happened. It was just PR. And so then when Jim and I and Scott got together, it was like, wow, okay, it never happened, but now it’s happening. And then now we’re in the top office, we’re in the X-Men office. We’re going to be able to create and control things. So it was very good until we announced Image, and then everybody — I was naïve enough to think that everybody else was in it because they loved comics, and wanted to just do some really cool stuff. But later on you find out it’s a game, it’s a business, it’s a one-upmanship thing.

You were at one point thinking you were going to die just doing The X-Men or something, for 20 years at Marvel.

Yeah. Seriously. I’d do The X-Men for umpth years, and then either create my own X-Men book or create something else that I could spin through the X-Men office if it was still strong at the time, or whatever was strong at the time.

Who came to you first about Image? Was it Jim, or was it Todd, or Rob? Jim said something to me, but they weren’t sure whether I was going to go with them or not, so they spoke in code, I think. And Todd was the one who actually called me and said — again, he didn’t speak specifically. He said something was happening, and he said, “Well, Jim and I and Rob have been talking, and we’ve been planning something, and I can’t really tell you all the details, but we’d like you to be on board. So I know you’re going to the Philippines right now, but a month later, when you get back, it should all come to a head, so when you come back, Jim and I will probably call you up and tell you exactly what’s happening, and then maybe we can come to an understanding.” So I went off to the Philippines, and about a month later Jim calls me up and tells me what’s happening. And I call up Scott, who was my best friend from high school. I knew he was there, so I knew he would know what was happening, so I asked him and he said, “Yes, I’m joining.” And so I go, “Okay, no problem. I’m joining, too.”

You were the last person to join. I think Jim and Silvestri were leaning a bit on their decision. Did you think about it in terms of, like — I think I read somewhere that you said that you basically were the head guy in your family, you supported your sisters and your grandmother.

You had a lot of financial responsibilities. You weren’t thinking about that sort of stuff, too?

Again, you’ve got to remember my little story of, even as a kid I’ve always earned a living out of art.

Even after going through going into a coma for seven days, unless my arms get — or even if my arms get chopped off, I could become a teacher. I still will

make a living out of art.

But you understood there was no turning back? Like, once you went with Jim and Todd and all those guys?

No, I understood the industry enough, and knowing how small the industry was, there were just a handful of us that could do the work. There were a lot of other artists that are better than us, but could they do that grind? Do they want to do that grind? There was only a handful of us, so, no matter what, the companies have to get the books out there. If the fans are clamoring for us to come back, “Okay, yeah, you made a mistake, you went off on your own, you thought you could do it, but we need them back on The X-Men.” And you were never worried about the money?

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I was never worried about that.

But you’re the Kuya? [GAK note: In the Philippines, “Kuya” is the respectful eldest son; always expected to think of his family, first and foremost.]

It was going to work out, one way or the other.

But the entire time, there were certain guys that Todd guaranteed to them that could make it make the same kind of money [with Image], but they just don’t have that leap of faith. It’s like, “No, I’m not leaving my security blanket.”

It was interesting. Three years to five years later, when we started more than a few signs of the market dropping, we still got calls from known artists and writers wheeling and dealing for thousands and thousands of dollars, not realizing the industry was taking a nosedive. Just thinking about that, they bugged me in Year One, and I said, “No,” and these were the numbers they bugged me about, and then, three years later, “It looks like they made it, they didn’t fall flat on their faces. Okay, I want in now, and I want these numbers that you gave me three years ago.” So it was interesting who jumped over that bridge and who didn’t.

I think you only showed up at the third meeting that Image had as a company? You missed the first two?

I was in the Philippines at that time.

Were you feeling more comfortable being a Filipino staying over there in the Philippines?

Oh, no, no, no. I didn’t even speak the language.

You didn’t even speak Tagalog?

Yeah. But I am Filipino, so I’m the sentimental one of the group, so I did my roots thing.

So you wanted to embrace your culture?

Yeah, I wanted to go back and figure out what it

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was. And I still had a lot of college friends there who were now in the industry; they were art directors, so I wanted to see what that was like. Like I said, as a kid, I liked comics. I wasn’t tied to comics. I always thought of myself as an artist. That doesn’t mean that comics is the only thing I can do. I know I can do just about anything I want to do in art, in art terms.

Did you have any ideas for what you could do at the formation of Image?

No. I knew I needed to do something military.

You had to do it quick, too, there wasn’t much time, right? Because they wanted to do PR stuff, I guess, right away.

Right. And I have to tell you that most of the key elements were from Brandon [Choi]. It’s just that, again, I grew up as an “artist,” and I grew up as a collaborative artist, so it was very easy for me to take these cues from Brandon and then build this world. I was the world builder. Brandon was Mr. Ideas.

Did you know Brandon beforehand? I hadn’t heard of Brandon until Jim brought him onto WildC.A.T.s as his writer.

Well, see, he’s Jim’s best friend. Throughout the years, while we were living in that small apartment studio, we’d see Brandon every now and then, and at Jim’s wedding Brandon was the best man. So we became friends. And then when we got into Image, Brandon moved over, and Jim said Brandon’s going to help him out doing WildC.A.T.s. And so they’re talking together, we start talking together, and, y’know, it just happened. Again, at the time, it was only going to be those two books.

I thought I’d read that, whatever Brandon told you, it was like he was telling you it was going to be like that

commando team in Predator that Arnold had, or something like The Eiger Sanction, I think? Some of these movie influences.

He goes — okay, the Eiger Sanction thing, he wanted somebody to be hardnosed like Clint Eastwood, like especially the Eiger thing. And then he said, “Predator’s a great movie because I want a team of eight personalities just ribbing each other around, and they’re all real good and they all know it,” and blah, blah, blah. And then it was in T2. What if they had all this armor? Or they had the same armor that the T2 guy had. But we had to set some specific goals. And then I go, “Okay, who are they going to fight? We can’t fight the Russians now. We can’t fight the Japanese, they’re our friends now.” So he came up with the idea, “Well, what about the old Universal monsters?

Anybody can do those. It’s public domain now. So, hey, we could take those ideas and make them our own and give them their names and stuff.” And I go, “Oh, okay. That works for me.” And then it was my turn to then build a wall to drop the Blood Queen, drop the hierarchical society of the vampire nation, that they are higher than the werewolf nation — all the other details.

So you guys wanted to make this book also more violent than the stuff you had done at Marvel, right?

When we were still at Marvel, there were a lot of times where there were a lot of edits and stuff. And I understand the Code, but they were kind of where things changed. Like, I don’t know if you remember that whole debate about exit wounds or not, stuff like that.

Yeah, that’s one of the reasons Todd left.

So there was something like, everybody’s growing up now. Our market is growing up — kids that are growing up and not wanting to drop their comic books. So let’s bop the Code and do comics for them.

And we were right, at the time.

How long did it take you to do that first issue of Wetworks? You were the last of the founders to finish his book. The book was solicited and then cancelled, right?

And then Jim had you draw the first three issues back to back to make sure you didn’t miss a deadline again with their ultimate release date.

Right, right. When I decided to get back into everything, we had two issues already done, and that was around April. So by the time Wetworks came out, I had, like, three issues, maybe the fourth issue.

Yeah, but they wouldn’t release the first issue until you finished the book. Because I think it was a three-issue mini-series format? I’m guessing Jim wanted that first story arc to come out.

Yeah, we were starting to get a lot of returns at the time, and we got nailed at the distributor at the time, and I guess I was one of the first books where they had to instigate that. We needed to have a couple of issues in the can, and I think three was the number at the time.

But there was no particular reason why you were last to launch?

I always was going to be the last one out that year because I was the last one in, so I had the least time to think about something. Then my sister passed away, and — .

Your sister actually worked at WildStorm, too, right?

Right, she was the receptionist there for a while.

Well, actually, yeah, and then when she passed away, my other sister became the receptionist there.

My whole feeling again about being an artist and about not being scared, about being able to make a living no matter what… that my pulling out of the industry for a while to just try to cope with what happened to the family, it didn’t bother me that much.

Call it a fault, but that’s how my psychology has always worked. I’ve never feared not being able to make a living.

But that has to do with self-control, right? This is the first time you’re working without an editor. It was up to you to do the story; nobody is pushing you or anything.

Yeah. I was sent back here to the United States as a Kuya — to try to get the family back on its feet, y’know? And I did it. I felt I didn’t have to struggle too

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Whilce drew his version of the barbarian from Cimmeria while a high school student. Conan ©2007 Conan Properties, Inc.

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Vas. ©2007 WildStorm Productions.

hard to do that. I’ve always been lucky in my life. So I guess my sister passing was always… hey, you know, my family’s human, too. All the things that can happen to anybody can also happen to us. So now I’ve got to do something. With Wetworks on my shoulders, I originally was going to be like everybody else and just throw it out there and develop it as it went along, but I guess more and more I started thinking, “No, this is a chance to do it the way I think it should be done, and if I’m wrong, then I’m wrong and I’ll find out about that. But if I’m right, this might be my one chance to do it the way I think I should do it.” So I guess that’s why I poured too much into Wetworks. The biggest criticism that I’ve accepted about Wetworks is that the story was too big. The cast was too huge, and we introduced everybody too quickly. And I agree to that. But, again, I just wanted to make sure all the roles and everybody, all the factions, all the political intrigue and everything fit in and worked and didn’t look like we just decided, “Hey, this is cool. Let’s throw this in.” I wanted to take all of Brandon’s ideas and make sure it worked.

And coming from science-fiction, I guess, my frame of mind for thinking in terms of creative world-building is novel style, which is much too much for 22 pages every month.

Your book was the most developed one. All of the others in Image, their books came out really quick. They developed the stories as they went along.

Oh, see, when the book finally released, I had, like, a couple of years planned out. I knew for a fact that we were going to do just a couple of issues of them as human guys, and I’ve always known it was going

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to be, “Okay, here, we’re human hotshot Delta Force guys, and with the confidence that entails, and then we’re going to get these suits that’ll make us almost invincible, which is our number one dream at Delta Force, and then how that goes into our psyche, and then it’s going to start changing us into super-heroes that everybody else is going to be into.” So then I knew that at ten issues, Dane was going to kill the Blood Queen with his psi-power that he didn’t know he had because of the Gen13 factor and stuff like that. And so at that time the other guys were going to start to be developing into super-heroes, too, so now, by #10 and #12, they’re going to be pure superheroes. So how are they going to deal with being godlike when they were once just human? And then the whole year after that was going to be them splitting apart, because now they’re each gods unto themselves. And I think for me that was my critique on the super-hero thing, that you get too full of yourself because you’re too powerful and everybody is saying “yes” to you. So I was going to have, at the end of that second year, maybe — I hadn’t decided yet, at the time, but maybe the outcome of that third year would be that not the whole team survives, that they’d have to have killed some of their own members off because they were getting too powerful. In fact, the first candidate was to kill off Mother, because Mother was going to try to take over the whole world as Big Brother.

Why didn’t this unfold like you wanted it to? Why did you leave after a while?

That’s all personal stuff.

The first issue did very well, didn’t it? I’m sure it didn’t do what it could have done if it had come out in ’93 or early ’94. I can’t even imagine what your initial orders were. Do you remember?

This is how I’ve always gauged Wetworks. On all of our accounting sheets, Wetworks always did around ten thousand less than WildC.A.T.s. Every issue that I did of Wetworks that came out, we would judge it against WildC.A.T.s. And Jim and I were always one and two.

But you and Jim weren’t competitive in the way Jim and Rob [Liefeld] were competitive, right?

No, Jim and I were always competitive artistically.

Rob and Jim were competitive business-wise, ambition-wise. I remember very early on, I think it was after we’d convinced Jim to move down to San Diego, that we did one of the Wonder Cons down in San Francisco, and we went over to the convention and they put us in a room to talk about Punisher and X-Men, or something. And this again was very early on, and all people wanted were for us to sign our comic books. So we sat and tried to get people to talk [in the panel], and they wouldn’t talk. They were just waiting for autographs in the comic book. So we figured that out, “Okay, it’s over, bring your comic books out.” So they brought their comic books out.

Okay, I’ve got this interesting signature that doesn’t look like anything. So everybody was trying to figure it out, and that’s why I was getting a little attention.

So Jim draws this quick little head in a comic book.

And I go, “Yeah?” And I drew a little head. And then Jim’s drawing a bigger head. And then I’m drawing a bigger head. And it got to the point where, when we finally stopped competing with each other and looked up, there was a line all the way down, out of the room, down the stairs, back into the convention hall, and everybody had their own sheets of paper.

Because we had now graduated from sketching inside the comic books, to the backing boards, to now people bringing over sketchbooks. We were doing free sketches down the line. And we’ve always been that way. So if there were video cameras in our apartment studios, what you would see is, that day Jim and I would draw a page and then hand it over to Scott to ink, and Scott would be going, “Oh, wow!

That’s cool!” And then Jim and I would go over and look at the other guy’s work and then, three hours later, we’d hand Scott our pages, so Scott would go, “Oh, look! That’s good, too!” And that was great, because it kept us both on our toes. It made sure that every issue that we did, we had these cool shots, and that’s how we started to figure out the Image style. But it was because of our competitiveness.

Why didn’t you incorporate when Image did? Did you not want any part of the business, or you just wanted to get out at that time?

[Sighs] Okay, that small apartment? To me, that was the bullpen. That was the bullpen that I was missing from my fan days. Come into the industry, the bullpen wasn’t real, and now here we are, we have a bullpen, and we’re now known as the X-office. And then, when Marc Silvestri and Joe Chiodo and Heisler decided to come and move over to San Diego, too, we all together rented out this big office building, office space, and that was the first Homage Studios. So now I’m going, “Oh, wow! This is my childhood dream, to be able to work in this studio that — .” And now we’re Image doing all these cool books and stuff. And Jim and then Marc, after a little while, had a falling out, and so Marc then moved back to Malibu, and it was just Jim and I. And we were still close at the time, and Scott was still there, again, we’re friends, so there was, again, the Three Musketeers again: Scott, Jim and I. At that point we were WildStorm. And before that I had taken on the reins with Brian Haberlin and Alex Sinclair to figure out how to use Photoshop to do full-color comics.

And we figured that out, and that whole experience then made it much more solid to me that here was my dream coming true, the studio was coming true.

And Jim wants to incorporate and all and everything.

Everybody wants their own little piece of the pie.

Why split up Jim and I as a team? Jim was Mr. Business, he put all this stuff together, and I was Mr. Creative, and I could figure out all of the printing and creative stuff quickly. So I was the art director and Jim was the businessman.

Jim was like Stan and you were like John Romita.

Yeah! Exactly! That’s how I saw it. I mean, naïve

as it is, that’s how I saw it.

And that’s how I always seem to treat it, even…

Even today?

Even today.

Truth be told, I go out off to the Philippines and I come back, and I’m set to do a new X-Men book, and then I fall into a coma.

And, oh, Jim and Scott go to the hospital. They say I looked like Frankenstein with liquid pouring out of all my pores. They said it looked like I’d been floating in the water for 20 days. Okay, and then it takes me about a year to recover from that point. And I come back and I can’t draw the way I did right away. Who would have given me a job? Where would I have gone? Jim and Scott got together and offered me a managerial job at WildStorm for a little while, and time to recoup physically.

But you had no regrets about not incorporating, and not being a partner in Image?

I always wondered why.

At the time, no, because here I was doing Wetworks, I had founded, I had invented the cornerstone for the new comics, the full-color comics, and the first WildStorm effects teams that made WildStorm effects famous were all my guys. I would spend my days drawing comic books and then I would spend the nights upstairs until, like, 3:30 in the morning, with the production and color guys, honing their skills. And I felt great every time Wetworks would come up on the schedule. All my guys would stay in all day long, all night long, on just doing Wetworks, and doing all my

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Whilce’s pencils for covers of Wetworks #8 and 9, vol. 2. ©2007 WildStorm Productions.

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Wetworks promotional pin-up from the Image days. ©2007 WildStorm Productions.

changes, and doing it exactly the way I wanted. So on paper it wasn’t my company, but in all other ways, I was as much a part of that as Jim was. At the time, “incorporate?” That wasn’t part of my vocabulary back then. I was making good money. I never dreamed of being a billionaire or having tickets to all the Lakers games.

Yeah, you know, stuff like that. If you read through my history, I never went to the parties.

You went to one of the Image meetings — was that a total turnoff to see all these lawyers and everybody talking about money? It just wasn’t your thing, right?

Yes. See, everybody had — . “Okay, Jim, we all like this Travis guy. Work on him.” Todd: “Okay, what about such and such? Blah blah blah.” And then the next week is, “Okay, Jim. Did you get Travis?” “Yeah, yeah. He agreed to this contract.” It was business, and as they set it up, they set up the business, it’s working. I’m Mr. Creative, I’m figuring out how to do Photoshop, I’m figuring out how to do full-color comics. Just let me go off and do the creative stuff.

You sold Wetworks to WildStorm?

Yeah.

You didn’t want that responsibility any more? Let Jim handle it?

Well, see, again, call me an altruist. At the time I was going, “Okay, wait a minute. Okay.” You know, I’m really close to all the accounting guys, I’m really close to all the editorial guys, I’m really close to all the production guys, I’m real close and I’m responsible for some other people and stuff. If I incorporate, too, me and Jim are going to be fighting over these people.

Y’know? Both of us brought all these people together.

We’re going to be fighting for all these people, and I didn’t want to think about who would win in that game, I just knew

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that it would be a losing game.

Sure.

So since we’ve already got this relationship established, the Three Musketeers — Scott, Jim, and myself — and we all agreed from the beginning to stay together, why go that route? Seriously, I made the decision to back down. Again — coming from the naïve point that I’m always going to make money out of art. I’m always going to be able to make a living. I don’t worry about that at all.

Did you intend to move to the Philippines permanently? I understand that you went there for five years or something.

When Image started, every year I would go to the Philippines.

But in the mid-’90s, what did you do?

And this is all personal, it was nothing to do with the industry. I decided I needed to take a break, to get away from everything that I was here because of family and because of comics, so I went back to the Philippines for five years.

But you didn’t have much time right away because Jim hits you with the Iron Man gig during “Heroes Reborn,” right?

Uh, yeah. I always looked at that one as a short thing, because, seriously, at the time maybe I was looking at it as a way out. I knew at the time the industry was nose-diving, and I knew that the guys were going to be butting heads. There were already feelers out from Todd and everybody about Jim and Rob’s deal. And fortunately my plans to go to the Philippines were already set up, but I didn’t rethink my plans at all. I actually thought, “Let me be in the Philippines when these guys finally start butting heads in public.” And it worked for me. When it was finally starting to happen, it was easy for me to pull off of Iron Man and to solidify my decision to take a big break in the Philippines.

Now, you did some good work on Iron Man. Do you feel that to be the case?

Oh, yeah. I look back at it and it was some of my best designing work. See, I’m a very analytical artist.

I think about everything I do. And when I was doing Iron Man, it was almost instinctual stuff. I was able to do the work and have it come out exactly — .

It’s just seemed like it came really easy to you.

That was the time when, every time there was a deadline, I would check myself into a hotel for a week and just — .

Just do it?

Yeah, just do it there, and get it all done.

When you went to the Philippines, did it refresh your point of view? Was it a better time for you, those five years over there?

Well, I met my wife right away, right when I got there. She was a pretty big figure in entertainment at the time, local movie and record entertainment at the time, and it turns out a lot of those people were fans of Wetworks and Image and stuff. And so here I was with — oh, and my wife had a TV show at the time.

So here I was with somebody who was real known, and a lot of people knew who I was, and so we got invited to a lot of things and events and things that I

would never have been able to experience, so it became so much easier to make that one year turn into two years and three years, because there really was no plan.

You were a celebrity yourself over there.

Yeah, I really thought I’d be there, at the most, for maybe six months.

It loosened you up being over there. You became your own man, I guess. No longer did you have to draw against deadlines; you were on your own.

Actually, it was a chance for me not to be Kuya, because my job as Kuya was to bring my sisters back, get them back in school, get them jobs, get them married, help them start up a family and help them get a house and stuff. And then to get my parents back to the States, get them a house, get them on their feet again. And I did that. By 1995, that was all done, so I had no more “Kuya” work to do.

And now I looked at myself, I didn’t have anything except for what fame I had in comics. And so I couldn’t be Kuya forever. And if I stayed in San Diego at the time, that’s all I would have been. So I left to the Philippines for a little while just to see what other things, what other doors could open.

When you got there, right away you had other Filipinos coming to you that were into comics, and you were like “The Komikero!,” right?

It was fantastic.

You had influenced all of these guys and you didn’t even know it.

It was interesting because I started thinking after a while, after meeting all these people and having deals thrown all over the place, maybe I could do something else here. And then I bump into Gerry [Alanguilan], Leinil [Yu] and Edgar [Tadeo], all these other wannabe artists, and they just keep badgering me. And after a year-and-a-half, I find myself in comics again, but now I’m an agent, and now I’m a tutor. And then my old alma mater that I failed out in when I went to the University in the Philippines for a little while, they come back and found out that I’m this prodigal son, and so they offer me this lucrative deal, “Hey, why don’t you put up a school for comics?” And so we formalized all that we were doing with Gerry and those guys. And now all of a sudden I was back into comics again, and I thought maybe I had weaned myself out of that. And then the bug just came back again.

And that’s when the Avalon line happened?

Yeah.

Were you able to get work for these guys through Avalon? Those guys must have been happy that you were able to make them pros, and you came back to Image in a weird way with Avalon.

Yeah.

Brian Haberlin started Avalon?

Oh, it was Brian first. We had first met when we were trying to figure out how to do Image books as full-color comics. And we had stayed in contact throughout the time I was in the Philippines, and at the time I had gotten up this business group in the Philippines and we were going to try to start local publishing just as an avenue to start, for the guys.

Gerry, Edgar, and all those guys, they started proving that they could actually do good comics, but the industry and Image was floundering at the time, so it was harder to start the vehicles, and nobody wanted to deal with overseas. And FedEx had not yet planted itself solidly in the Philippines, so it wasn’t yet as viable, a reliable service. So I said, “Okay, hey, let’s start up another industry,” because the industry had died in the Philippines, and give these guys an avenue so they can start doing stuff and getting paid for stuff, and then I could use that as leverage to go, here’s a successful line of comics done by Leinil Yu and it’s selling good here, so we can have a go at Image.

Did you discover Jay, too?

Anacleto? Yeah.

He was the first one that really caught on in the states, because people were obsessed with his Alex Ross-type work.

Yeah, yeah. But he was a pain. Not only was he a dentist, but he was a rich kid, too.

Okay.

I didn’t actually have any dealings with rich kids, but rich kids, more than me, they know that mom and dad are always going to feed them money, that they don’t have to get into anything seriously. And even though he was getting a lot of fame for it and getting his own good money, he never took it seriously. He never ever took it seriously.

That you were able to do those Avalon books, and introduce these guys into the business, is something to be proud of.

Oh, yeah. Especially, again, since I had no real intention to do this. It just happened. I never thought

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Alanguilan remembers, “This one was taken at Island Cove resort in Cavite, the Philippines, sometime in 1997-98, during a group outing.”

Whilce was a teacher and a mentor to many in the new wave of young Filipino artists within the comics industry.

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X-Force #105 art from Whilce’s brief return to Marvel Comics in 2000. ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

of teaching, but meeting up with these guys and then helping them turn their cornerstones — I mean, when Leinil came up to me, Leinil was a very bad copycat of my style. He was doing cross-hatching all over the place, and it wasn’t very good. This is how bad it was. He was Gerry’s protégé, and Gerry was my art director at the time. So I said, “Okay, Gerry, he can come into the studio.” Because I had this big, huge place where I would let in, like, ten to 12 artists, and I would tutor them and they would live in the house and they’d have free room and board. Anyways, Gerry kept bugging me about this Leinil guy, so I said, “Ahhh, okay. But he’s your responsibility.” And I really didn’t like his stuff, because I didn’t want to develop anybody who was a copycat of my style. I was trying real hard not to make clones. And one day I went downstairs on my way to a movie premiere, and I go by the artist’s studio. And they’d all gone earlier on to the premiere; I think it was Star Wars or something like that. And I looked at all of the artwork on the tables that they left there, and I turned over some and I go, “Oh, wow, check out this line stuff. There’s some artwork here which is just lines, there’s no shading, there’s no crosshatching, there’s just lines.”

I go, “Well, this is cool.” So I made a mental note to ask Gerry about it the next day. I asked Gerry about it and he goes, “Oh, that’s Leinil’s stuff.” I go, “What?”

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“Yeah! Turn over the pages.” And I turn over the page, and guess what I see on the other side? The ugly crosshatching stuff! I call Leinil over and he goes, “Oh, yeah, that’s how I lay out my pages.” “Oh, so you lay out pages beautiful like this and then you ruin them by crosshatching?” And so I forbade him to crosshatch and put in blacks in his artwork thereafter. So then I took a couple of months to help him develop his line style to the point where I thought it was ready for comics, and then I slowly said he could start dropping blacks in. And two weeks later I was invited back to the States to do the Iron Man tour, and I said, “Leinil, gather some stuff together and I’ll show it to the editors.” And when I got back to the Philippines after that tour, I think it was Bob that called up and said, “I want to check out this guy.” And so Bob gave him a tryout story, and Leinil did it on time, right away, in a couple of weeks, and was offered Wolverine after that.

So this is around the time that Bob Harras wanted you back on the X-books, around 2000?

Because of the coma — I can’t remember whether I talked to them before I left, or it only happened after I got back.

When you came back for the X-Men books, do you remember how you got yourself into that?

Huh. It’s weird, I can’t remember.

Because I know Marvel was trying to start this relaunch with Warren Ellis. I seem to remember they wanted you and Ellis on X-Force for four to five issues.

That has to have started while I was still in the Philippines.

Did you just want to come back to Marvel? What was the motivation for that? That’s all I wanted to know.

Well, the motivation was practical. I was in the Philippines, I was already married. That was a long story we won’t go into, but U.S. immigration in the Philippines is at the embassy there. It should have taken only eight months, since we were married and I’m an American citizen, right? Well, what should have only taken eight months took two-and-a-half years to get my wife in and her son a visa so I could bring them to the States, because my wife was pregnant at the time. So we met, we finally got the visas, and then left the Philippines when my wife was seven months pregnant. So if you know anything about that, they won’t allow pregnant people on a plane if they’re past eight months, so we had only one more month to get that visa, and I wanted to make sure my first born was born here, to get citizenship and everything and have no technical paper problems. And so we finally get over here, and now I’ve got two kids. I guess Bob called me up before Jim and offered me to get back on an X-book. He’s one of the top guys now, but he was starting to become one of the top guys then, so not only doing X-Men, but also doing it with Warren Ellis, I go, “It’s a good way to get back in,” as opposed to coming in with an unknown writer. And then they put out the carrot of, hey, they wanted to launch some new books, so why don’t I and his office start talking about what kind of an X-Men book I’d like to do. And I went into a coma before we could actually — .

Were you going to come back to Uncanny or something like that?

No, no, no. A totally new X-book. A totally new Xteam. I guess before Bob’s office was destroyed, I guess Bob had big plans to expand the X-line again.

And so I was going to do one of those. I can’t remember, there was a silly name to it.

It wasn’t the same energy that you were getting the first time, right?

Before I left the Philippines, I started talking to Bob, and then I get back into the states in May. A couple of months later, I’m now working with Warren, and a couple of months later, in August, I go into a coma. There was no — you don’t just drop into a coma, so what that meant was that I must have had diabetes before that.

This was the way you found out, was when you entered the coma?

Yeah, this was how I found out I have diabetes. So imagine, the month before that, I didn’t know that I had diabetes, so I didn’t know that I was pumping all this sugar into me — .

But you had lost a lot of weight, I guess, just prior to that?

No, actually, I gained weight, because I didn’t know I had diabetes. When I went into a coma because I had a blood sugar of 1600, basically my body was boiling at the time, so that’s why Scott and Jim said when they came to the hospital, they saw liquid pouring out of all of my openings. And I lost, in that seven days, I had lost 30 pounds. And unfortunately I lost a month around that time, too, so I lost connections with my nerve endings and stuff like that, which is why, again, when I woke up, I could barely sit up, and it took months before I could even walk.

Your wife was terrified, I’d imagine. Like, that was pretty early in your return to the states.

Imagine! I mean, she just gave birth. A week after she gave birth, in a country she doesn’t know anybody in, and she doesn’t know how it’s working, how it’s run… we didn’t even have enough time to get totally settled. She barely knows my parents, yet, at the time. So she was a trouper, she held up. But, again, going back to your question, so imagine then what was happening, which I didn’t know was happening, months before that I must have gotten diabetes, and I must have been going in and out of

almost getting into a coma, which is why I can’t remember when Bob called me. I do remember the week before I went into a coma I was working on some pages, and I knew something was wrong because I’d be drawing these pages, and then my wife is in front of me on the table talking to me, and all of a sudden I’d wake up and she wasn’t there anymore, and it was dark or something. I thought I was blacking out all the time, just barely getting into the coma that I was going to slip into a couple of days later. And so my brain, I’m pretty sure, for months

before then was not really working.

And it took you, like, a year, to get back your pencils to where you wanted them, right?

No, to get to the point where I thought I was penciling the way I wanted to. And it’s only been the last two-and-a-half, three years, that I’ve actually been fully aware of — the last five years I basically went back to school just totally relearning everything, because I didn’t know what was missing out of my brain. I didn’t know what brain cells were burnt or not, I just knew that I wasn’t drawing the way I was, and so I just decided instead of just trying to push that hopefully it would come out, to just go back to school, just retool everything.

So doing Stormwatch — that was like going back to school? That was your retraining.

No. Again, I was not in a right enough state of mind to understand what was actually happening, so that whole period, really, was an awakening to the full extent of what happened to me. Because I remember, when I came out of the coma, I didn’t think of anything except raising my daughter, okay?

Remember, my daughter’s born and a week later I go

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A moment from Wetworks #8 (vol. 1). ©2007 WildStorm Productions.

W H I L C E P O R TA C I O

Wetworks #3 (vol. 1) cover pencils. ©2007 WildStorm Productions.

into a coma. So I’d wake up going, okay, I’ve got to raise my daughter, I’ve got to do right by my daughter. So that’s all I’m thinking about. So the doctor says, “Okay, you’ve got to do this, this, this in order to recover.” So I do this, this, this, this, and I just recover, because I’m just thinking about my daughter. And so compared to drawing, changing diapers and blah blah, compared to drawing, drawing is really complicated. So here I am — my standards are now to be able to take care of my daughter, to not drop her, and to change her diapers, and to help calm her down.

Now, I’m not demeaning that, I’m just saying that it didn’t take, at least for me, the same amount of brain cells as to actually draw. So here I am thinking, okay, I’m okay now. I’m great now. I can take care of my daughter safely, no problem. That means I can draw!

That’s what I thought. And so I started drawing, and it looked like I was able to draw. We’re getting some feedback. But then everybody started noticing that every now and then a panel would just go off. And

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then all of a sudden sometimes whole pages would just go off. And I started to slowly realize that, okay, I can put the pencil in my hand, and I can do something that’s kind of called drawing, but I can’t do the drawing that I used to do, and more importantly, I can’t draw for more than 20 minutes before having to go to sleep, having to reenergize, having to recoup.

And that was the biggest thing, because, if you know any artist, you’ve got to spend a lot of straight hours drawing. And if you’re down to, like, 20 minutes, and then having to sleep for two hours, that’s not going to go very well with any kind of a deadline.

So when did you start to come back?

Scott sat me down one day and he asked how well I was, and I said, “I’m great.” And he goes, “So you’ve had no other effects from your coma.” I go, “No, no. I feel better than, I feel I’m drawing better than I used to, than I’ve ever drawn.” And then he took me through some of the pages, and then he said, “I can’t believe you did this panel.” And I hadn’t looked at those pages. I mean, you know how the industry goes. You draw the pages, you send them off, and they get colored, and you don’t see the pages for a month, until after it’s published. And so here I was for the first time really looking at this stuff and going, “You’re right, Scott. I can’t even believe I drew that panel.” And then I started realizing that, hey, there’s something not working here. And I decided then, after that, to quit the studio, to get rid of my managerial job, training the coloring department again, because that was taking a lot of my time, to actually go back to my doctor and figure out what was really happening to me. So that was, like, five years ago. It was a while back. So I went back to my doctor’s and find out that I had sleep apnea, also, at the time, which, if you know anything about sleep apnea, sleep apnea just means you don’t go to sleep.

If you don’t go to sleep, you don’t reenergize. So here I was and I could only work for 20 minutes, get tired, and I’d go to sleep. And I’d go to sleep, but I’m not actually reenergizing, because I don’t actually go to sleep, I don’t go into REM. So that’s what was draining me, which is why, in the very beginning of Stormwatch, it looked like I could draw again, but then, as it went on, and as deadlines would start, I would just go off.

And it’s taken all this time of just goofing off with my diet, trying this and that, and my doctor playing around with all my pills and stuff, to figure out how that coma really affected my body. And fortunately, three years ago, now I can draw for a couple hours on end, and I can draw exactly the way I used to draw, and now I’m able to pick up when I’m going off and stop and then return a couple of hours later and get back to normal. But it’s not perfect yet, I’m still struggling, but I couldn’t — but then now, y’know, I’ve gotten six real good issues of Wetworks, and I’m working on the fourth issue of Batman Confidential, and all the editors and the inkers, and Rich [Friend], the inker, and everybody is going back on those pages again and again, and they all hold up.

So I could at least draw comics again now on a regular basis.

I imagine you feel better now? You’re doing more work

than ever — I don’t think you’ve ever done two books at the same time.

Oh, yes. Remember, if you start doing something when you’re a kid, that means you instinctively have latched onto something that you could do, and so as you grow up, hopefully you are able to instinctually advance in whatever that field is. And so all these years I’ve just been doing it on instinct. I’ve just fallen into it, just learning on my own. By going back to school, by rereading books and re-figuring how to do things I used to be able to do, I now know exactly what I’m doing. It’s not just instinctual.

Because the problem with instinctual is that, especially when you get under a deadline and your brain goes wacky at the time, and every brain goes wacky every now and then, because you’re instinctual you don’t know what it is you’re not doing right, and so it’s hard to correct what you’re not doing at the time. Well, if you know exactly the steps, and know exactly what you’re doing and how you did it, then when you get into trouble it’s easier to fix the problems because you know what the problem is. And so now it’s a lot — for me — seriously, when I went back to the Philippines in ’95, I was bored of drawing. I’d been drawing since I was in sixth grade.

It was so easy for me that it just became boring. It just was drawing, drawing. Now it’s almost like relearning something, I guess because I just relearned it.

But there’s also a purpose to it now. Now you have to do this. Not only do you enjoy it more now, but you’re also doing this for your family.

Yeah, exactly. Oh, yeah, that’s a big part now, too. I mean, as my girls grow up, I want to be able to leave some stuff behind that — y’know, before it was, “Okay, what’s cool, Bob? Okay, let’s do that. And I think that’s cool, okay, why don’t you do that.” Now I’ve got, like, a lot of thoughts of lots of fathers. Like, thinking of maybe doing a children’s book later on or something, and doing other stuff that maybe my kids would like. Make sure I do things that — .

You don’t want them to see gory stuff.

Maybe not. I’ve always censored myself.

It’s only insinuated most of the time.

I always did things that way.

Do you think you would have done anything differently at the start of Image today?

I’d do it all over again. The only thing I would change is I would not have left as Mr. Artist. I would have brought my pride down just a little bit, become a little bit of a businessman, and tried to talk to everybody individually to make it the one cohesive

group that everybody thought it was in the beginning.

Because if you look back at it now — and this is only hindsight — Jim should have been running the business numbers. He should have been making the deals, because that’s what he did. [He] and Rob and his sister should have been making the deals. Me, Brian [Haberlin], and throw Marc in there, should have been handling the creative side, and then Todd should have been handling the PR side. He was a lot of times in the clouds, but he was the mouth, he was the voice, he was the energy. We should have all decided and figured out who we were other than the artists drawing these books, and who we were for Image, and stuck to that, and made an agreement to stick to that for five years. Because if we stuck to that for five years, the industry would have been strong enough, y’know, that means we would have done the books on time for five years. But the industry was so big and so strong at the time, and a total gauge of your talent, that we could have all killed each other at that five years and Image would still be strong right now, and Marvel and DC would have to be rethinking or trying to buy us out or something.

Y’know? I mean, I’m serious. We killed ourselves by not doing what we said we were going to do. But, again, we were kids.

Does this feel full circle, though? Now you’re doing a reinvigorated Wetworks 15 years later. It’s an interesting place you’re in now.

If you go back to what I was talking about, when I was doing Wetworks at the time, that I was doing everything by just going with the flow — at the time we used to say, “Okay, let’s just do it until it looks good!” Now I can look back at Wetworks and see what we did, and now I can say, “Okay, this is what I want to do. This is how I want to do it.”

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Finally, Wetworks versus WildC.A.T.s!

Artwork from Wetworks #8 (vol. 1). ©2007 WildStorm Productions.

IMAGE FOUNDER

Marc Silvestri Marc Silvestri. Courtesy of Top Cow Productions.

Ripclaw. ©2007 Top Cow Productions.

The always energetic Marc Silvestri was the first of the Image co-founders to ever experience a degree of major success when he became the regular penciler of The Uncanny X-Men in 1987. The Floridian self-taught artist broke into comics in the early ’80s via short stories in DC’s dying horror line; among the influences in his art style are Bernie Wrightson and John Buscema. After his pivotal runs on Uncanny and Wolverine, he went on to help build Image and develop his own properties. The launch of Cyberforce, his signature book, sold over 850,000 copies and gave Marc a taste that independence would be very sweet. In the mid-’90s, Silvestri moved his offices to Hollywood just as his Top Cow Studios experienced their greatest surge with the creation of Witchblade and Darkness, both among the best known Image properties. Gradually, Marc turned Witchblade into a popular TV show and successfully negotiated an enterprising deal with Marvel Comics where he and his Top Cow artists provide art for selected Marvel special events.

Recently, Marc illustrated the popular Hunter-Killer (with writer Mark Waid) and continues to have his sunny disposition as he oversees the future of Image as their acting CEO.

You were originally from Florida?

I was born there. I was raised in Chicago, but I was born in West Palm Beach. Until I was four we lived there, then we moved up to Chicago, and up until ’87, early ’88, is when I moved out to California. Just before that I spent a year in Detroit.

Your family, they’re originally from Italy?

No, my mom and dad, first-generation French, moved over here from there.

Grew up during World War II. I think my dad actually served in the Army over there for a little while. Probably some cushy assignment. I think it was just after the war that he went into the service. But, yeah, they grew up there, and my brother, my sister and I were all born here.

You’re the youngest, right?

I’m the kid. By eight years. My sister is eight years older than me, and my brother is 11 years older. So,

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yeah, I was kind of late in life.

So were they into your comic book ambitions from early on, or not?

No. I didn’t really read comics much when I was younger. My exposure to comics came from my cousin Fred, who was a huge comic book collector back when we were kids. Even today, he’s still in the collecting biz. But even back then he had a few thousand comics, which was, to me, an incredible amount. I didn’t know anyone else who was really in that hobby. And he was putting things in boxes and bags long before it became fashionable. So that’s where my exposure to comics came from. I would go to his house and just pick up a few books that I thought looked pretty cool, stuff from Kirby and Buscema… Wrightson, when he was doing comics, Swamp Thing, stuff like that. Consequently, I never really read a whole lot of full story arcs, because I would just pick up one book, and if it was continued next issue, well, too bad.

So you weren’t like most comic book guys are, you were into athletics and working out and that kind of stuff, right? Didn’t you work at a gym or something?

I worked at a gym just before I got into comics, and that was pretty much just because I had nothing else to do and they gave me a free membership.

Cyberforce and associated characters are ©2007 and trademarks of Top Cow Productions

M A R C S I LV E S T R I

Marc Silvestri at work (in Los Angeles).

Photo courtesy of Top Cow Productions.

Yeah, but you see most comic book artists, they’re not the most physical-type guys. They never did sports or lifted weights.

No, I wasn’t really built for sports. I was built for basketball. I didn’t really have the love for it. I really loved football when I was younger, but in high school, my height, which is 6’ 7”, and I weighed 165 pounds — that’s not exactly a football physique. They would have broken me in half. So, y’know, aside from just goofing around with my friends and playing unorganized sports — I mean, I was active that way.

I liked competition and such. And I wasn’t good at anything; my coordination wasn’t what it should be.

They called me “W.H.” in high school, which is “wasted height.” Yeah, it was a travesty that I wasn’t on a basketball team, but I just didn’t have the coordination. And, again, football is my sport, but I would have been killed.

What happened? You were always into drawing and doodling and sketching?

I always kind of had a knack for it, and I was one of those guys that during math class was doodling pictures of cars and stuff. I had no aptitude for math whatsoever, but I always enjoyed doodling around. I didn’t really take it seriously and I never considered it as an actual career choice until later in life. When I was younger I thought, oh, I was going to be an architect, or at one point a doctor, until I realized you actually had to be smart for those professions. That kicked me out of that idea, so I went to various small jobs, retail, I was a bouncer for a little while in a bar.

I was in the health club business for about a year or two. Finally my cousin brought to my attention that DC Comics was running a talent search. This was in ’80 or ’81, something like that, and they were running it all across the country, and Chicago was one of the major conventions. This was before San Diego really took off, but anyone that was not living on the West Coast at that time didn’t really travel to San Diego to go to the shows unless you were a diehard fan. But Chicago was a big show, and DC was running a contest, and I started drawing about six months

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before that came around. Put together a portfolio, four or five pages of a comic book story that my brother had written, and a bunch of pinups, and I went there.

Were you confident that you were good enough already to work professionally in comics?

I had no confidence whatsoever. In fact, I wanted to get out of that convention as soon as possible. I was actually relieved that they closed down the portfolio review before I got in there. Y’know, I was, like, next in line and they shut it down because they had already seen too many people, they were done.

But my brother forced me to stick to it, and we found Joe Orlando in his hotel room and kind of looking at the stuff. My brother said, “Look at this stuff, you’re going to love it.” At that point, I was going, I’ll try to do something else for a living, maybe go back to the health club business. DC hired me that very next week, and again, I think that was 1981, something like that, and I’ve been with comics ever since.

You didn’t do much for DC; you did a few short horror stories, right?

I was doing those anthology books that they were running at that time, like House of Mystery and Ghosts and Weird War [Tales] and things that nobody ever bought, but were a great training ground. Fiveto eight-page stories, and nobody noticed when you screwed up. So I did about six or seven of those.

But Orlando was a mentor to some; did he encourage you to do more work for him?

No, there was no real mentor. I had encouragement from my brother because he thought it would be a cool thing. I think he always wanted to do comics, as well, as a writer, which I was able to help him out when Image started. But for me it was like, wow, this seems like a really easy gig. You sit at home all day long and you draw pictures, and somebody sends you a paycheck. Wow, what could be easier than that? Well, as it turns out, it’s not as easy as I had thought it was.

But at DC, they weren’t going to give you a book anytime soon. You had to go to Marvel.

I was kind of stuck with the anthology stuff over at DC. And back in those days, really, the Holy Grail was Marvel, anyway. That’s when Marvel was just really kicking ass, and they were the hip company, and they had The X-Men, and they had Chris Claremont, and they had Spider-Man. They had all these cool characters that, when you were younger, that’s the kind of stuff you wanted to draw. Batman had not been reinvented yet by Frank Miller, Superman was longdead. Nobody really cared about that stuff. And you really wanted to go to Marvel; that was where you wanted to be. And Jim Shooter was the editor-inchief at the time, and I brought him what I had done at DC for the past year, plus the original portfolio that I did, and he hired me right there. He doubled my page rate, which was, wow, that’s a great selling technique.

I jumped over and I started doing little things again.

Not anthology stuff, but stuff people didn’t really pay much attention to, Conan books and….

Yeah, but you were into that. That was the genre that you were into, wasn’t it, at that point?

I like the fantasy stuff. I was never really a super-hero guy. I think that’s because I wasn’t really brought up on comics, so I didn’t get that stuff. My exposure to super-heroes, really, when I was a kid, was the Batman TV show.

Which I loved, by the way, I watched that religiously.

But I came from a sci-fi/ fantasy background. That’s the kind of stuff, when I was a kid, that I would read, and those were the kind of movies that I would watch. To this day I’m still a sci-fi fan, and a lot of my work today in a lot of stuff, a lot of stuff that Top Cow publishes, or I’ve had something to do with the creation of, has a sci-fi or fantasy bent to it. We blend in the super-hero elements, but primarily, at their core, they’re sci-fi/fantasy concepts. That really is where I come from.

When you were working on Conan, that’s when you really started studying John Buscema and the Marvel masters and that sort of stuff, trying to push your anatomy and layout?

Yeah. When I was at my cousin’s house all those years, those were the kind of things I was drawn to. I really like the dynamicism of guys like Kirby and Buscema. They really had a way of drawing the human figure that kind of leapt off the page to me.

And being a horror fan, I loved Bernie Wrightson’s stuff. I loved all the old EC books, all those Creepy and anything that Warren published. I swallowed all that stuff up. Vampirella.

Did you feel like they were grooming you at Marvel, that there were going to be phases to your career already at this point?

I don’t think there was such a thing as grooming back then that much. I think Marvel just sat back.

The joke back then was that DC was Marvel’s farm club. That’s kind of what we adopted in the early punk-ass days of Image was we were saying that Marvel and DC were our farm club, because that is the attitude that we had early on. But, yeah, I think it was just, in comics back then, if you wanted to do that for a living, you had two places to go. You had DC and you had Marvel. So I don’t think that Marvel really cared whether or not that you were going to become a superstar or what books you were going to be working on. They had an audience, and that audience bought their books. Obviously when there was a better artist or writer on one of those books, there was a spike in sales, but I don’t think there was a grooming mentality, necessarily.

All right. You weren’t, like, one editor’s main guy or something throughout your career at Marvel?

Yeah. I had a great relationship with Bob Harras.

Once you get to a certain point, I think once I got to The X-Men, obviously, I was one of those guys that editors wanted to work with.

Was that what you were aspiring to? Were you, like Jim Lee, hoping to get that Uncanny title and that would have been the thing?

I think unless you grew up loving a character and you were obsessed with drawing Batman, for an example, I think everyone wanted to work for the Holy Grail in comics, which at that point was The X-Men. In the ’80s there was really nothing higher-profile that you could be working on, unless your name was Frank Miller.

Nothing against Claremont, but one of the things about working on The X-Men is that it’s always been an artistdriven book, too. Only the top guys have worked there.

Yeah, and again, it was the ultimate. That was as far as you can go in comics. If you did have a career path, you wound up at the apex at The X-Men working with guys like Chris Claremont. I mean, if you wanted the highest sales — and at that time you were getting royalties on book sales, so if you wanted the highestselling books, and you wanted the biggest paycheck, and you wanted the highest profile, and you wanted to work with the best writers, that’s where you wound up.

What got you the Uncanny job? Working on X-Men vs.

Avengers, or on Living Monolith, or… ?

No, well, I think Living Monolith, as much as I look back at that, every once in a while I get some fan who brings a copy of that, and I kind of just roll my eyes. Yeah, but that led to the Avengers/X-Men, rather, and then the Avengers/X-Men led me to the X-Men gig. So, yeah, I guess you could trace it back to the Monolith book.

That was your first super-hero work. You didn’t get, I’m guessing, a good taste for super-heroes from that book? I thought you did a great job on that book.

Oh, thank you. I actually did Spider-Man for a couple of issues, which people don’t remember.

With Kyle Baker inking you, right?

It was Web of Spider-Man. Again, I wasn’t really used to it, and I would point at that as not being work that I was most proud of, but that was some of the first super-hero stuff that I had done, so I had a little

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Ripclaw at work (in the Image Comics Tenth Anniversary hardcover). ©2007 Top Cow Productions.

M A R C S I LV E S T R I

Cyberforce page from Image Comics: Tenth Anniversary book. ©2007 Top Cow Productions.

taste of it, and I liked it. I liked the fact that the superhero stuff was close to science-fiction. At least you could draw some fantastic worlds that didn’t exist in, like, police dramas or detective dramas.

Did you feel you were ready for Uncanny when [Ann] Nocenti offered it to you?

At that point I was a little burnt out from comics. I didn’t feel like I was really getting anywhere, and suddenly it became available, and, yeah, it was offered to me, and I jumped at the chance. I went, wow, okay, here you go. Suddenly I’m in that seat that not a lot of people were able to sit in. Yeah, at that point the biggest guy that had worked on X-Men was, as far as artists were concerned, John Byrne.

This was before Jim Lee jumped on there. And I felt, wow, this is a great opportunity for me to kind of sit on there and put my take, my spin, on The X-Men, and get to work with Chris Claremont, who was obviously, at that time, the writer to work with. And it was fun. I enjoyed the higher profile that I got from it.

I enjoyed being invited to conventions, which was something that was kind of novel for me.

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Didn’t the book become bi-weekly, almost as soon as you joined?

Yeah, that happened pretty quick. It wasn’t really bi-weekly, but they wanted 15 issues a year. Yeah, they wanted 15 issues a year, so that worked out to not quite bi-weekly, but it was hardcore, deadlinewise, and there’s a few issues in there where you can kind of see it. But, yeah, you wouldn’t be able to attempt that today, really.

What were your influences back then? Because, if you look at your figure work back then, the characters are more slender, they’re not as muscular as they are now.

I think guys like, again, even though Buscema, he drew beefier guys, he was still one of my main early influences when I drew figures, and I think that, if my characters had a little slender look to them, it was probably from residual Neal Adams influence from way back when I was first looking at comics at my cousin’s house. I was attracted to what he was doing, too, and his guys were all pretty lean and cut, and I kind of got that look from him, I think. But for me, I didn’t feel there was a template too much to follow on The X-Men. I could do my thing and see if people liked it or not. There were some great guys that came in just before me that I was looking at, and I certainly wanted to not pale by comparison, so I was doing the best work that I was able to at that time. And I thought it was a great learning experience, but the deadline I wasn’t used to.

Did you contribute to those plots, though? It wasn’t like the traditional X-Men team; Wolverine and Storm I think were at the head of your team.

That was mostly Chris. I mean, my favorite character was Wolverine, to this day, still one of my favorite characters. I think he’s one of the best comic book characters created. Storm was a lot of fun, Colossus was fun to me. But it was Chris.

But the people were always in flux, right, during that whole period? Because you had a lot of new members, like, Psylocke and some odd members.

Yeah, yeah, and I think that reflected the fact that Marvel may have wanted to get as many characters in there as possible, and I think Chris’s writing style, he likes to throw a lot into the pot and stir it up and see what comes out. And for me that was a blessing and a curse in that, wow, I didn’t quite figure out until later on in my career how to squeeze bodies per square inch into a story. So a lot of times I was a little vexed by it, but working with Chris was a pleasure.

He had a great imagination, and the guy just obviously loves the medium. You could tell that with the plots that he would send in. They were very dense, and he had a lot going on. He was asking me, “Hey, who do you like drawing, and what characters do you think we should concentrate on?” But then the stories were all his. He’d do all the plotting and I’d just do my job.

Okay, you didn’t feel like you had to give plot or any ideas to him?

Well, I was a little intimidated by Chris at that time, early on. This is the highest profile project I ever had, and this was Chris Claremont, so I didn’t, until a little bit later on, have the real desire to be creative and plot and come up with concepts until just before

Image broke.

But hadn’t The X-Men really run its course for you? At the end, there were lots of fill-in issues, and then all of a sudden you were gone.

I was getting to the point again before I got the X-Men gig, where the deadline was a drain on me.

And I’m just not one of those guys built for that, really.

Even to this day it’s a lot for me to maintain a schedule on a book. So I was at that point again where, geez, I’m burned out from drawing all these characters, and Jim Lee had just stepped into the limelight, and the timing was kind of perfect. I slid over to a single-character book, which was my favorite character, Wolverine.

You didn’t see that as a step down at that point? I mean, you really didn’t trade the top book for Wolverine, you didn’t think of it as that?

I was happy to make that move. I wanted to work with Larry Hama. I think the Wolverine stuff, to me, was probably my best Marvel work.

Yeah, because I think you really put your foot down.

I was able to do more of my stuff, as the world that Wolverine inhabited in his own book was a little bit more to my liking. It was a single character, it was more noir, I was able to experiment a little bit more with positive and negative space, which I had a good time with. Also at that point, Mike Mignola’s work started to influence me a little bit. If you look real carefully at what I do, it’s hard to find, but you can see some of his influence in there, as well, and the Buscema stuff. And, yeah, Jim Lee was really skyrocketing. It was the kind of situation where you go, you know what? You’re not going to get in the way of that. You’ve got to just move over.

That Wolverine title, I always took that book for granted until you came along and Larry did something with it. I think your artwork changed, too, right away.

It got a lot fiercer, too.

It felt more comfortable for me. And, again, I was ready for that book, I think more so than I was ready for when I got the X-Men gig. The way that I feel that I was professionally, I was a little green for that kind of responsibility. But by the time Wolverine came around, I was feeling more comfortable with myself as an artist and as a creator, and it just sort of gelled.

And that ran its course, and then again the time was perfect when Image came along, because I was ready again for a change. I remember Jim came up to me pretty soon after he took over The X-Men, and I think we were in, I don’t remember for sure, I think we were in the Northwest, somewhere over there, and he came up to me and introduced himself. He just wanted to make sure that I was cool with the fact that he was doing The X-Men now and such. I said, “Hey, man, it’s actually no problem. You’re doing great work, and it’s all good, I was ready. I was ready to move over.” And he was very concerned that I felt put out, which I appreciated from him. But he was a force that was not going to be deterred. There’s a reason why he’s Jim Lee, and that’s because I don’t think anyone really did comics the way he did.

You guys had a kind of a synergy, if you really look at it. Like, I always remember it was you, Whilce, and you

had Jim doing the core X-Men books, and that was a really exciting time.

Yeah, we had fun.

That’s the precursor to Image, those books.

Yeah. And I really liked Jim’s work. I understood it when I looked at it. There are some guys that you look at their work and you don’t understand where they’re coming from as an artist. Not that it’s good or bad. But I could see what he was doing, and I appreciated that, and I could see where Whilce was coming from, too, because they both kind of came from the same school, and you had Scott Williams coming in there and changing the way that comic books were inked, and kind of changing the way they were drawn, too, the way that Jim, with his dynamicism and his attention to detail. And his work ethic… I mean, I’ve never seen a guy able to put out so much work so quickly at such high quality in my life, especially when I got a chance to actually work with him at Homage once Image got started.

You joined Homage after Image or before Image?

Just after. Actually, Rob Liefeld and I were talking

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at one point about starting a studio up in L.A. I was in L.A. at that time, and Jim was down in San Diego with Whilce and Scott Williams, and they already had Homage up and running. And I made a decision, after talking to Jim and him offering me a spot down there and part of that partnership, yeah, I moved down to San Diego. Image was just exploding, and I was looking for a change of scenery, and I was looking to be around people that did what I did.

I’m guessing you need guys to talk shop with; you can’t just be locked in a room all day alone.

No, you start to really get flaky. You start to resent the business. That was part of how I was getting burnt out for years is that, you know, you’re up ’til three, four o’clock in the morning by yourself drawing a comic book, and the novelty of that wears off real fast. Because none of your friends, at least none of my friends were into comics, and none of them understood what I was doing up at three o’clock and sleeping until 11 or noon. Y’know? While they were doing their regular work hours, they wanted to go out or whatever. The studio atmosphere was an incredibly welcome change for me, and to this day I believe the best way to learn this craft is just being around other people that do what you do.

So you were never dissatisfied working at Marvel? It never got to, like, Todd’s point of view?

No, I understood completely what Todd’s point of view was, and I didn’t disagree with it at all. The thing about Todd, out of all us Image guys, and I think Rob also… they had the most rebellious spirit. Obviously Image wouldn’t have happened without Todd and Rob going, “You know what? We can do this on our own, and let’s show these guys.” And ultimately the

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difference with Image, as opposed to when a lot of people have tried to break off on their own, was the numbers that we had. We had seven guys that mattered in comics at that time starting their own company, not one guy who kind of went off. You’ve got a good chunk of Marvel’s best producers going off and doing their own thing. You combine that with the exact right time in the industry and stuff like Image happens.

Who extended to you the invitation? Was it Jim (Lee)?

It was actually Todd. Yeah, Todd, in New York we had a sit-down. I think at that point it was Todd and Rob, Jim Valentino, and Erik were onboard solidly. I think Jim, he had just really blown up with the new X-Men book, and he was collecting some nice paychecks, and I think he wasn’t quite sure if he wanted to make that leap. He was going to start a family soon, and he was pretty much ruling Marvel Comics as far as the talent pool is concerned, he was the guy. And I think it was a little bit easier for myself to make the decision, and Erik Larsen, to try something new and stick our necks out there. But Jim I think respected the idea, and I think he respected the people that were involved with it — you know, Todd and Rob — and I think it became exciting to him real quick, and then he got onboard. For me, when I talked to Todd, literally within 30 seconds it was “yes.”

I was again ready for something new, and again I wasn’t quite sure if I wanted to stay in comics, but this was something exciting. Yeah, I’ll take that gamble.

What’s the worst that could happen?

But you didn’t leave right away, though. I think you did Wolverine #57. That’s pretty much right into the beginning of Image.

Yeah. Even to this day, if I have a commitment, I want to stick to it. And I was committed; I was under contract with Marvel. It was real loose as far as the rules to get out of it. I think you just had a certain number of issues that you were committed to after you gave them notice and blah-blah-blah. Y’know, they were good to me, and I had a great relationship with Bob Harras, and I told him, “Look, I’m going to be part of this Image thing, but I’ll stick through my commitment to Wolverine.” And he appreciated that, regardless of issues with the top brass and the fact that they didn’t really want to give anymore to creators than what was being given, which that was the real crux of the issues, considering how many books Marvel was selling in those days. I never had a problem with the editorial staff and I wanted to make sure that I left on good terms, not because I wanted that security in case Image didn’t work, simply because, you know what? It was the right thing, personally, for me to do. I had no problem with those guys. And Image was already starting to pop and sizzle, and I’m going, “Oh, geez, I’m still drawing Marvel books, here.” I was still drawing Marvel books when I was down at Homage. “Ah, this is kind of awkward.” Everyone else was already pulling out.

Rob sold, what, I think he sold 900,000 copies the first time Youngblood was solicited, and you’re like, “Wow!” and still working on Wolverine.

Yeah. Once we saw those first Youngblood numbers, and that was before it was even part of Image, yeah, we all went, “Oops, there’s something here.” I think that’s when everybody just went, “Okay, the hell with everything else. We’re diving in.” The numbers were just so much higher. I remember Jim Lee, he was

doing some calculations, and he came up with a number that he would have to sell in order to make the same amount he was making on The X-Men. And he was making good cash on The X-Men back then.

And I think that number, especially once Spawn #1 came out — I think that number was times ten. “I think we made the right choice, here.” So it was exciting. Those were times that were filled with the excitement of something new combined with the fear of something new.

You said you were ready for a new challenge. Were you really ready for everything that was coming to you those first couple of years, emotionally?

I don’t think anyone was really ready for that, and I don’t think that it’s ever going to happen again, quite frankly. I don’t think the comic book world is the same, and I don’t think it ever will be. It was one of those moments that were exactly the right thing at exactly the right time. The marketplace was looking for something new, the speculation market was there, and you had people that were willing to buy cases of books that just inflated these numbers.

There was a hysteria that was born of the seven of us leaving at the same time. The fans caught wind of that hysteria, and I think the marketplace was looking for something exciting. It had been 50 years or whatever, not that long with Marvel, but just two companies really throwing out the same characters. And here you had these guys, these lunatic seven guys that thought they could do something to shake this up.

That was one of the things: you guys had the good will of the fans, they actually wanted to see you guys succeed.

They had faith in your names. More than the projects themselves, they believed in the cause.

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Art from Silvestri! ©2007 Top Cow Productions.

Yeah, and I think that was the big selling point for us. It was that there was this rallying cry of, “Yeah, we want something new.” And, yeah, whether the perception was real or not, suddenly the perception was that Marvel and DC were ripping off the fans.

“All they’ve been giving us is X-Men and Spider-Man and Batman all these years. You’re ripping us off!

These guys are going to give us something new!”

And everyone was pretty vocal about how we were mistreated by the system and it was like we were sticking it to “the man.” Everybody kind of bought into that, and the frenzy started real quick, and you know how frenzies are. Especially today with the Internet, once that ball gets rolling, positive or negative, the momentum alone is just going to mow everything down in its way. And we were riding that wave.

But you believed that this was the right thing to do.

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Sooner or later you guys had to branch out on your own, something had to happen like Image.

Yeah, I think, for the most part, most of us had a built-in entrepreneurial spirit. We were surprised at how many professionals not only didn’t want to jump ship with us, but were kind of pointing fingers at us like, “You guys are a bunch of assholes.” It’s like, “We don’t want any part of you.” Todd had some famous issues with another creator that were very public.

I mean, they were gunning for the seven of you, basically. It wasn’t just Todd, it was all of you. They sort of envied what you guys were doing.

It’s not as if the offer wasn’t put out there to everyone. It was like today, come on board if you want. We weren’t pulling people by their shirt collars, but we were certainly going to certain guys and saying, “Hey, do you want to be part of this?” from the get-go. And I think a lot of guys looked at us as crazy; that we were going to be out of business in six months. I know that the upper guys over at Marvel thought that, and I think they saw some opportunities to fill some of those vacuums. We were the guys working on the X-Men books and such, and suddenly there were all these openings for people that maybe weren’t going to get those books. And I think the fact that Marvel wasn’t going to be out of business in six months; a lot of people wanted that steady paycheck and didn’t want to take that risk. That’s one thing that the seven of us had in common is we weren’t afraid to take that risk. In fact, and certainly I know Todd and Rob, and I can say for myself, and surely Erik felt this way, too, not only did we want the risk, but we embraced the fact that it was a risk. Not just the opportunity to do something that we felt was going to be better, but I think we really enjoyed that steppingoff-the-precipice feel.

Was Cyberforce something that you had in mind, or was it something that you created as soon as Image was formed?

It was something I was working on that I was thinking of taking over to Marvel at one point, and introducing some new characters, introducing a new book. And obviously when Image was formed and our relationships with Marvel were broken, “Okay, well, I’ll just do it myself. I’ll just take these characters and it’ll be the first thing that I publish.”

Did you have the time to develop them like you wanted to, or was it just a big rush just to get it out there, “We need to get this book out quick”?

Yeah, unfortunately, when I look back on it I go, “Wow, I wish I could have developed this a little bit further before I put it out.” But, yeah, I was already way behind everybody else. I think I still had two more issues to do Wolverine.

And your brother was the first guy you wanted to write the script, right?

Well, it sounded like a great idea to work with him and keep it in the family and throw the ideas back and forth. He’s always wanted to write comics, and I thought, “Well, here’s an opportunity for this. I can kind of control my own destiny now, and I can hire who I want, and I can work with who I want, for the

most part.”

Did you guys work well together? Did you get combative or anything?

No, I mean, it’s family stuff, y’know. It’s going to have that dynamic. Image itself was this big dysfunctional family. If there was ever such thing as a dysfunctional family, I think Image Comics was it. Yeah, for us it was fine. We did butt heads, and there were things that I wanted and things that he wanted. And I think ultimately we kind of went our separate ways. It didn’t quite gel, I think, as much as either one of us wanted. But it was good experiences. I had a good time, and I think he’s a good writer.

But you had what you wanted, you had a team book, you had action. I think fans pretty much identified with the designs you did right away, with Stryker and Ripclaw.

It was fun. Again, it was my sci-fi that I could put in there. My love of science-fiction I could put in with the super-hero stuff. This was also kind of X-Men stuff, that’s why I was doing the X-Men for those years. And obviously the influences were there.

I wanted to do my own version of that world. And science-fiction and cybertechnology and cyber-this and cyber-that, it was stuff that always interested me. And this was also just at the dawn of the digital age, and I thought, “Wow, this kind of futuristic stuff is happening now.” So it sounds possible to me.

I thought that might have been for me, also your influences at Homage, because you were around Jim Lee and Whilce and Scott; I remember they were into the same stuff. I mean, do you see an Image style, when people tell you now, “Oh, you have that Image style.”

Yeah, yeah.

I know Whilce doesn’t like it when he gets classified with that. But you guys were the founders — who better than you guys to hear that?

We had that flashy style, all these reflective surfaces, and all this crosshatching and horizontal rendering and all this stuff. And it was a lot of fun, because, just like Image itself, it didn’t feel like we had any rules anymore. You could just draw what the hell you wanted. “Wow, I can draw as many big splash pages as I want to!”

“I can kill off as many people as I want to, and do whatever I want with these characters.”

Yeah. So, for good and bad, I think, when you let the inmates loose in the asylum, you’re going to get some great results, and you’re going to get some not great results. I think Image Comics ran the table with that. And I think history will tell what kind of an impact long-term those early days at Image had, but, yeah, we were having a good time, and I think a lot of the fans had a good time with us. For the most part I’m proud of the stuff that we did. I think we blazed some trails, and we stepped on a toe once in a while, but for the most part we changed the way things were done for the better.

Did you really want to ink yourself at the beginning, or was that just a time thing?

Oh, no, I couldn’t find anybody. Originally I

wanted Art Thibert, but he had just gotten a penciling gig, and he always wanted to do some penciling, so it was just bad timing for me. But, yeah, that also didn’t help my schedule much, because I’d never done any inking before.

Were you happy with the results of those early issues?

I look back at them now fondly, and I go, yeah, I was doing the best work that I possibly could at that time. I left it all on the page. Some of it was more successful than others, but I can look back and go, “I wasn’t cheating here.” I was giving it all. And if people liked it,

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Cyberforce ©2007 Top Cow Productions.

that’s awesome. If they didn’t, well, I’m sorry, but I gave it my best. It motivated me to always hope, at least, to get better at what I do. And I realized that once I cut loose of artistic restraints, I actually enjoy doing what I do. Hopefully people can tell that I still put it on the page every time I can, because it feels that way, it feels good.

I was looking at this quote, I think you mentioned it before, but you said, like, “The only thing I regret is not having the mindset that I have now when we started Image.” Did you have somebody you could consult with in terms of business, or you just rushed into this head-on?

I think most of us just rushed into it and figured it out as we went along.

So Hollywood came calling pretty fast?

Oh, sure. Well, Hollywood didn’t know exactly what to do with us, because there was a lot of buzz about who we were, but this was before the X-Men movie came out and proved that you actually make these things. And this was also before technology really made it possible to transfer what we do in

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comics and put it convincingly on the screen. So, yeah, there was a lot of interest, and there was a lot of meeting, and there was a lot of pitching, and there were a lot of deals made, and not a lot of movies made. This was before the Internet, so the buzz was more contained, but there was buzz. And people were just starting to notice, “What’s all this racket in this business called comic books? Maybe we should be looking over there.” So we did get some good meetings, we got some good exposure. And for us at Top Cow, that was something that we’ve always kind of maintained. We’ve always kept that foot in other media to make sure that when the day came that the publishing market would fall that we’d be prepared with other ways of making income, which I think is probably the smartest thing that we did.

That’s exactly the same thing Todd said. Did you start studying what Todd was doing? I think you became aware, you saw the crash coming to comics in the mid-’90s.

Me and Jim Lee, we used to sit and lament about the inevitable. There was all this euphoria in the industry. I don’t know at its height, but I know when Image exploded, there was probably a hundred publishers out there publishing these comics that people were buying. And we’d look at each other and go, “Wow, how long do you think this is going to last?

And how far do you think these numbers are going to fall?” And I think at that point Jim was already worried about WildStorm. I think he was always thinking of what the exit strategy was going to be.

And for me, again, I think like everyone else, wary of how long this was going to last, and how to be prepared if it didn’t. And for me, I moved back up to L.A., and I started — .

I wanted to ask you about that. Is there a point where you got tired of being at Homage, you just needed to branch out for yourself?

Well, for me, personally, it was a need to explore other media. Because I really did have the feeling, and again, those conversations with Jim, those were very frank conversations we had with each other. It was like, number one, the Image numbers, and those numbers being outrageous back then, those numbers just weren’t going to last. And then, okay, if the Image numbers aren’t going to last, then what about the industry numbers? Because those were two different things. The hype of Image, those numbers were perverted. Those numbers were tweaked by hype, so you had to kind of look at the industry numbers. And I remember John Byrne caught a lot of crap because he was making these really low estimates of how popular comics really were in reality.

Not the inflated speculator-driven marketplace. But he was saying back then, there’s only, like, a quartermillion comic book fans out there. And the industry didn’t want to hear that, but he probably wasn’t that far from really hitting the nail on the head. It was a few people buying a lot of comics. So we saw the bubble coming. And for me, if it’s going to burst, I don’t want to be stuck with just publishing, because that’s not going to support Top Cow, that’s not going to support business. So I’ve got to start looking at where the industry is going to go, where content was

going to go, and where I could have these other revenue streams. Plus, just creatively, I wanted to have some fun in all kind of arenas. This was obviously before you could really think of video games, but certainly there was the possibility of Hollywood, and Todd was already making inroads with the Spawn movie.

You were the first guy who had an actual figure, right?

I think Mattel put out some Cyberforce figures before Spawn came out, right?

I’m not sure. Todd changed the toy industry, and to this day I think Todd is one of the brightest guys that I’ve ever met, and one of the savviest business guys I’ve ever met. If you’re ever going to find a definition for “entrepreneur” and that spirit and the ability to take risks and gamble, Todd is that guy. He took an idea, which was starting a toy company, and the rest of us, we all kind of looked at each other and rolled our eyes, like, “Todd, you’re nuts. You’re going to bankroll this thing? You’re gonna be toast.” But he proved everybody, including his partners, all wrong.

He did it. For us, we made some inroads pretty quickly.

We made the Mattel deal, and along with Rob when he was doing Youngblood, we had a development deal over at Fox Kids for a Cyberforce cartoon. And Rob was over there, as well, with a Youngblood cartoon. And we had everything in place. We had Saban, which had just done the X-Men cartoon, and we had a commitment from Mattel for a toy line, and then we were going to run ads on the cartoon, and everything was in place. And we were being the place, the only place back then, for this kind of animated entertainment, and that was Fox Kids. But then, right at that point, Saban came in and cleaned house and brought Marvel with him, and we found ourselves kind of out on the street. I think some executives got their heads handed to them over at Mattel, because that toy line, they had already spent a lot of money on it, and they were counting on this cartoon. And so it was a big disappointment for us.

But, yeah, you gotta have a thick skin. You’ve got to be strong with the failures as well as the successes.

You gotta realize, “Well, this didn’t work out and this is why. Okay, so we’ll avoid it in the future. Let’s get moving on the next thing.”

It wasn’t until you left Homage that you formed your own studio, you started getting your own staff together, right?

Yeah. I mean, at Homage, Jim had his WildStorm already going, and Top Cow was already formed in there, as well. We shared the same studio space, but we had two different companies. So I already was staffed, and he was staffed. He was much larger than me back then, as far as a staff. He was growing very, very quickly, putting out a lot more books than I was. But, for me, I can’t do these two-hour drives to do a one-hour meeting in L.A., and I wanted to start having more of those meetings, and I wanted to start having more opportunities to pitch ideas, and to do that I needed to move to L.A. That’s another trap you didn’t fall in. You didn’t start soliciting books like crazy and putting out a lot of stuff.

You didn’t go crazy in the beginning.

Well, I think Image as a company put out some stuff that we can look back on and not be proud of, and I think a lot of that was because we were just kind of throwing stuff out, because we could, and people would support it and buy it. So I think there’s a lot of books that you can kind of look at in the early days of Image which you can go, “Whew, that wasn’t such a good idea.”

But you had Rob and Jim [Lee] put out a ton of stuff, but you didn’t fall into that trap, though. I think you limited it to basically your characters from Cyberforce.

I was looking for artists that I liked, that I wanted to have them work on characters that I was very closely involved with, and I wanted to have writers that I wanted to work with, and they were in short supply. And that’s around the time where Image started feeding on it, too, where your worst competition literally became your partners. Yeah. Image was being pulled apart internally, and I think if Marvel and DC ever had a worry, they really didn’t need to. They just had to sit and wait us out, because we were going to eat each other up, anyway. And it was starting

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Burning the midnight oil!

Marc Silvestri, along with Erik Larsen, are among the most prolific artists of the original seven Image founders.

to happen relatively early. Costs were skyrocketing, and you go, “Wow! Do I really want to compete with someone who’s going to be throwing a lot of cash around just to get some books made?” Even though books were selling really well, the cost of getting them made talent-wise was becoming unmanageable.

How did you get into Deathmate? Because I thought that was Jim and Rob’s thing, and then I forgot that you’re in there, too, you did a cover. How did they talk you into that?

Yeah, I was actually involved in the project.

Were you hoping this was going to be something that was a smash? Wasn’t Valiant already starting to recede?

Well, this was before Valiant made their big sale.

They were the other publisher out there that was making news, that people were paying attention to, and they were throwing a lot of money around as well. They had a business model that was a little bit different, and at least from the outside looked more organized than Image. I mean, they seemed like a real company. So for us I think it was still an opportunity again to keep the Big Two at bay. If we can keep the hype going, and at that time, wow, we’ve got a crossover with two companies that weren’t Marvel and DC that fans were supporting, well, that’ll keep interest levels high. So we did that.

Almost everything went wrong with that. It started coming out late, and then when the market crashed by the time…

Things were already starting to fall apart at that point. We were already starting to do some gimmicks, and that’s always a bad sign. Yeah, I think there was some ill will in the marketplace at that point. We already had publishers left and right starting to feel the effects of the receding marketplace, so it was a little harrowing at that point. That’s when the numbers really started to fall, industry-wide, right after that, I believe, and that’s when Jim and I would really look at each other and go, “Wow, how long is this actually going to last?”

So when you moved to L.A., you got a new outlook, or you got reenergized moving to Los Angeles and setting up

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your own place and not having to be tied so closely with Jim’s group anymore?

Yeah, I mean, Jim’s still a friend of mine, and Scott Williams and all those guys.

But you needed your own identity, basically.

Yeah, I needed to separate myself out, because I think actually there was a perception out there with some people that I worked for Jim. And well, it’s not really the case. Jim had his way of doing things, and I had mine. I had some different goals, and I really did want to take what we were publishing and branch those off into other media. I thought that would be a lot of fun, and I thought that would be exciting. And, again, my attention span is about three minutes, so I always need something to stimulate me, something that is interesting that I’m not familiar with.

With the move, you retooled everything. That’s one of the things I liked that you did, you stopped doing Cyberforce, and you concentrated, again, on getting some talent this time, too.

I really took to heart the studio mentality of bringing in some fresh people and working with them, and I also found it energized me, as well, to be around a bunch of guys who are just getting started in the business. That enthusiasm just rubs off on you. At that point I had been doing comics for ten, 15 years, and I needed to have guys around me that were just getting into it.

Most of your ex-studio guys [Finch, Batt and Turner] came from that talent search you did, right?

Yeah, and Benitez and Billy Tan, those were great times. We were in a position where we could accommodate 15-20 artists in a space, which is something you can’t really do today, but back then we really had this “big clubhouse” mentality of doing what we all loved to do, and that was comics.

And unlike Jim and Rob, you actually gave, they had a part in the creation of the character, you’d give them a share.

Yeah.

It wasn’t, “This is mine and that’s it.”

Yeah, and to varying degrees with different people.

Those are things which we still do today in the sense that I love bringing in new talent and working with them. It helps their career, it helps us, Top Cow, as a company, it helps me individually as a creator to keep enthusiastic and keep the energy flowing into me. It’s a two-way street, we all learn from each other, and we all benefit from each other.

Were you surprised that your company would get so well-known for Witchblade and some of the other characters, like Darkness, during that time? That these characters really took off, and people seemed to like the new style that you had?

Well, one of the things that I realized early on, especially when the market was starting to fall, was that we were never going to be able to compete head-to-head with Marvel or DC. So you know what?

Let’s not try to create Spider-Man, let’s not try to recreate X-Men or whatever. We need to do something different that they’re not doing. And again, the fantasy elements that I always love, and the sci-fi elements that I always love, and the horror elements

that I always loved as a kid, started to make their way into our line. So, yeah, we were superheroes, but we were super-heroes that came from maybe a supernatural seed. And this is stuff that Marvel and DC hadn’t really done with any success. For us, we gave things a little bit more of an edge. In both Witchblade and Darkness, they had more of an edge than Marvel and DC were putting out back then. And Marvel, Doctor Strange, that’s their supernatural character. And we all know how popular Doctor Strange is, because he was a boring guy.

Well, that’s because they treat him like a boring guy. If they treat him like a C-level character, that’s what he’s always going to be. That’s the perception fans get. And I don’t think you ever did that to your characters. They were all stars.

They were all important to us because of the size of our company. We couldn’t afford to have C-level characters. We weren’t big enough. We had to treat everything that we did as A-list.

Some broke out from the pack, like Witchblade and Darkness, more so than others, but we had to treat everything that we did as precious.

Why is it around that time you went back to them? After “Heroes Reborn,” I think you went back to Marvel. You did the Star Trek/X-Men book, and you did some other projects with them.

Yeah, and again, it made good business sense for us, Top Cow. And I’ll make those decisions all day long. If it makes sense for us, and for me, personally, too, creatively if it makes sense, especially these days, if I do a project for Marvel or DC, there’s talent that I want to work with on a personal level.

It feels to me like Todd McFarlane wouldn’t do anything with Marvel. And I think he even feels down when any of

the Image guys do anything with Marvel. He’s more of the mindset, “Let’s concentrate on our own characters, who cares about Marvel?”

Well, he did the Spawn/Batman thing, so he kind of started it. And again, Todd’s a bright guy, he knows how to market things. That’s what we were doing; you know, it makes sense. Marvel was making a comeback, and people were paying attention to them again, and the fans were starting to drift towards those characters again. Well, you know what? Here’s an opportunity for us to cross-pollinate a little bit and

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The Darkness. ©2007 Top Cow Productions.

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Striking pencil Pitt commission by Marc Silvestri. Pitt ©2007 Dale Keown.

keep our profile high.

Was Devil’s Reign very successful, the first Marvel crossover you did?

Yeah, that did really well for us. And that’s why we continue to do those today, as well. Not only do they make sense for us as a business, but the fans also like that stuff. They’ve got no issue with seeing

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Wolverine and Witchblade in the same universe for an issue or two. It’s especially a lot of fun for us, too. It’s not just business decisions that we do this based on.

We’re comic book fans, and this is what we do for a living and what would we like to see.

Kind of like what would we like to read, and who would we like to work with. So I’m doing a project with Brian Bendis right now, and quite frankly, if I want to work with Brian Bendis, I’ve got to go to Marvel. And if the project is interesting to me on a creative level, and if doing crossovers with Marvel or DC works for us creatively and on a business level, yeah, we’ll make those deals.

But you’re sharing talent, too. Aren’t you sharing one of your artists?

Well, all our guys are actually doing stuff.

We’re doing some issues for Marvel and some crossover stuff, and then we come back to strictly Top Cow work. But Tyler Kirkham’s doing some work for Marvel right now, and he’s doing some great stuff over there.

One of the things you’ve done, though, you’ve shrunken the Top Cow line.

You want it more manageable, right? I think you only have four titles right now.

Yeah, it was unmanageable. For a company our size, we’re a boutique operation. We realized that, as I said earlier, we’re not going to compete head-to-head with Marvel and DC, especially these days.

They woke up and started to make some good decisions six or seven years ago. Yeah, Marvel was a bankrupt company back then, and I think they responded to the change in the marketplace that I think Image had a lot to do with, and they made a turnaround. Which is fine, more power to them.

But do you have control on these projects when you do

something for Marvel? Is it like Batman/ Spawn, in which Todd has a lot of freedom, can you can do whatever you want with their characters as long as you share your characters?

Yeah, as long as you don’t kill them — unless it’s part of the storyline. There’s a Batman story that I always want to tell and one of these days I’m going to tell it.

But yeah, they’re happy to work with us, and we’re happy to work with them, and the industry has changed.

Well, you worked with other companies, too. You also worked with Dynamic Forces.

Yeah, well, Nicky [Barucci]’s a friend of mine. A good friend and we’re happy to work with him, and we develop stuff with him. We’re happy to do anything that makes sense for us, both creatively and financially. It’s an industry that allows that, and quite frankly, today kind of demands that.

Sure. When you left Image about the Rob thing, did you publish any books without the Image logo on it?

I don’t remember if we did or not. I think… I don’t know — that was a while ago. If we did, it was a brief window.

But you never left Image?

No, not technically. I think it got to the point where we were creating books with the intent of self-publishing, because, before it all came back around and that whole thing cleared itself up. I mean, we were out the door.

But you took that personally, maybe, when he was trying to headhunt Michael Turner.

“We can’t have this infighting anymore.”

Well, it goes back to when we started to feed on each other. It got to the point where it was ridiculous. It was like, the only people who are going to lose are us, and what’s the whole point of us being these guys who got together to break the mold and make it better if we’re just going to be at each other’s throats? And it got to a certain point where I was fed up. If I wasn’t going to get the support within my own partnership, why am I in it? I’d rather fight it out and not be part of it than fight it out within our own family.

But the rest of the guys, they wanted you to stay in, the Image founders?

Well, yeah, it was one of those things that, again, it all came to a head, and something had to happen, something had to give. And I’m not going to speak for the rest of the guys, and for me it’s water under the bridge, anyway. It is old news, and everyone moved on from that. But, again, it was one of those dicey times in the dicey history of Image Comics. It’s always been dicey; it’s always been good and bad.

You actually hired Matt Hawkins, who was the one who made the phone call.

Ironically, yeah. That’s still a story that Matt likes to tell, the first time I ever spoke to him, I was yelling at him on the phone. Bold stuff, I didn’t appreciate it, and I let him know.

But it’s never come to the point that you wanted to leave, since? When Jim Lee left, you didn’t ever think about taking your studio away?

I understood what Jim’s decision-making was, and I certainly never faulted him for that. Maybe he made a good deal for himself. And I think that the way his company was structured and the way that his business model was constructed, it made perfect sense for him. For me, yeah, I wanted to get to where I am right now, and for me to do that, it meant not to sell my company. But I understand why he did, and it worked

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Cyberforce ©2007 Top Cow Productions.

M A R C S I LV E S T R I

Witchblade versus Darkness by Silvestri. ©2007 Top Cow Productions.

well for him. And I understand why Todd does what he does, and obviously it has worked for him. So we all have different styles and we all have different goals, and that’s why Image was formed in the way that it was, so that theoretically whatever one partner did didn’t affect what the other partner did.

You know, you all owned your own stuff, and you owned your own business, and you could do, within a certain reason, anything that you wanted, until you started interfering with another partner. For me, all roads led to here, and this is pretty much where I wanted to be.

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Well, what about when you had the problems, when you had Turner leaving, and Straczynski, branching out into their own thing, and taking away talents and books that you had developed?

Yeah, but you know what? It’s the cost of doing business. I mean, those were the unpleasant moments, but for every unpleasant moment like that, there’s dozens of ones that make it all worth it. Mike and I, we worked it out, and we still talk and say hello at cons and stuff, and I wish him well and all the luck in the world. It’s a tough business out there. Because of decisions that we made years ago, and the fact that Image was so successful years ago, I think that’s why Top Cow is still around and we’re still able to matter.

We’ve been able to leverage a lot of what we’ve done over the years into other things that have taken us through lean times in publishing. Just ask Marvel how important that is. But I wouldn’t want to start a company today. I don’t think it’s something that can be done again. Image was the right time, the right place.

What motivates you nowadays to draw? Do you still want to do a lot more artwork, or do you want your business to grow, you want to develop more talent, more characters?

Yeah, all of the above. All those things you just mentioned plus. The new media, while it’s exciting, it’s a double-edged sword for comic book publishing because, as new generations of fans of science-fiction and super-heroes are being exposed to ever more sophisticated video games, feature films, and television shows, less and less of them are turning to comic books. That’s the bad edge of that double-edged sword, but the good edge is, those other media are available to us as businesses, and if we’re smart about things and we take advantage of things rather than just bemoaning the fact that the digital age exists, we can thrive in there, which is why we’ve made aggressive moves into video games, films, and we’ve done television as well, and will continue to do so. Comics will always be the basis for our content — we’ll always be in that business. I think there will always be at least enough of a market to make that worthwhile, but as a sole source of income, I think if anyone’s getting into publishing comic books as a business in and of itself, I think they’re in for a rude surprise. Answering that question, yeah, I still want to draw, and I still want to get better, and I still want to train new talent, and I still want to create new content, and I still want to do

video games and all these other exciting and interesting things, just more of it. I have no intention of walking away from any of that.

Right now you’re in the thick of things where you are now, you have a new office, you’ve restructured the company again, and you’re ready for whatever comes your way.

Yeah, it’s cyclical. You grow, you get fat, then you have to get lean again and get hungry again, and repurpose yourself and refocus yourself, but that’s just the nature of the beast. I think the reason I’ve been around for so long, and Top Cow’s been around for so long, is that we’re fully prepared to understand that. Again, we don’t bemoan the industry and the fact that those numbers aren’t what they used to be.

Okay, that’s fine, but we enjoy being in business, and we enjoy doing what we do, so how do we continue to do that? And we’ll just figure it out. And that’s just what we always do, and that’s what we always have done in the past, and will continue to do in the future. And I think any company in any industry has to think that way.

What about the evolution of Image?

You guys do a lot of great books. It’s very creator-driven, more so than when you even started. Now, instead of sensationalism, it’s about actual good books.

Well, I think, and, again, history will tell ultimately, but, I look back on the days of Image and I look past the hype, and I look at what opportunities were created because of that. I think the level of writing and the level of artistry has never been greater than it is today. And you can talk about whatever ages that you want in comics, and I think people will look back at comics today as an age, maybe the Platinum Age of comics, in the sense that I think, when the doors flew right open and Image showed that you don’t have to work within certain constraints, you can have creative freedom, that it brought in a whole new crop of fans, and a whole new crop of talent from that fan base of real writers who had real stories to tell. And, yeah, you look at some of the artists of the new generation, you go, “Wow, these guys can really just draw!” It’s not just about being flashy, and it’s not just about showing off on a piece of paper. Which is fine. I still do that, it’s a lot of fun for me.

But a lot of these guys just flat-out draw.

And these writers are just… you’ve got the Mark Millars today, and the Brian Bendises today, and Kirkmans, and you’ve just got these great writers that are telling these really entertaining stories.

And you’ve got people looking at comics as a legitimate art form again, maybe for the first time in this country as a legitimate art form, and that’s great. And I hope that history tells that Image maybe

had a small part in that, and the frenzy that was created because of it, and the fallout, good and bad, of Image Comics. And again, we’re still here. Not just Top Cow, and not just Todd McFarlane Productions, but Image Comics, as well, and it’s still an outlet for people to be creative and control their own destiny.

Ask me that question 20 years from now and I might have a different answer for you, but today I feel proud to be part of that whole thing, even with the tough decisions and the tough times. But I wouldn’t change it at all, and I’m happy to be exactly where I am right now. And I really believe that I’ll still be having the opportunities to create and nurture talent, and create new ideas, and just have a good time for years to come.

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Witchblade ©2007 Marc Silvestri.

IMAGE FOUNDER

Jim Valentino No single Image founder took a bigger risk in joining Image Comics than Jim Valentino, who was married with children. After years of struggling through the independent comics circuit on books like normalman and Valentino, he finally found mainstream success writing and drawing Guardians of the Galaxy in 1990.

Upon learning about Jim’s involvement with Image, his Marvel editors removed him from Guardians, although the artist had no intention of ever leaving. A firm believer in the spirit of Image’s idealism and potential of the new company’s success, Valentino never looked back and proceeded forward on his new creation.

The first issue of ShadowHawk would sell a half-million books, allowing the artist some personal security and the resources to help other artists. From 1999 to 2004, Valentino served as Image’s publisher during a transition period that ushered in some of Image’s biggest critical success and talent, such as writer Brian Michael Bendis. This year, the Bronx native has returned to his roots in autobiographical comics with Drawing from Life and continues his line of super-hero comics under his ShadowLine imprint.

Jim Valentino photo.

Courtesy of Mr. Valentino.

ShadowHawk is ©2007 and trademark of Jim Valentino.

How would you describe growing up in the Bronx with your family?

Well, I didn’t actually grow up in the Bronx, we moved to California when I was seven. That said, New York is still the only place I’ve ever been where I feel completely at home. The pace of the city is my natural pace.

How many brothers and sisters do you have?

I have two sisters, one older, one younger and a younger brother. But only one mom and one dad.

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So comics were a bond that you and your father shared? What was it about comics that just grabbed your attention?

Everything. The art, the stories, the characters, the word balloons, everything. They were an epiphany for me. I liken it to how most people describe a religious experience. From the moment I saw one I knew that was what I wanted to do. No question.

Being a teenager in the ’60s — did you get into the cultural changes occurring around then?

I’m not sure I know what you mean, but if you mean what I think you do then all I can say is read Vignettes, it’ll tell you more about my life than you could possibly need to know.

Did you stop reading comics when you discovered girls and other distractions?

Very briefly when I was in junior high school; by high school I learned how to hide it better and by the time I got out of high school I didn’t care. I figured if a girl didn’t like me because I read comics she was probably not the girl for me. Most of them either thought it was cool or didn’t care.

At least I wasn’t a jock or a geek.

Did underground comix start getting your attention back towards the art form?

Underground comix were my

1992 ShadowHawk illustration by Jim Valentino for the cover of Malibu Sun, the house publication of Malibu Comics.

J I M VA L E N T I N O

Early 1990s photo of Jim at Golden Apple Comics.

Courtesy of our friends at Golden Apple Comics in Los Angeles, California.

ShadowHawk detail from the cover of #3 (vol. 1).

ShadowHawk ©2007 Jim Valentino.

second epiphany. I was like “Wow! I didn’t know you could do that in a comic!!” They were great. As for superheroes, yeah, I went for a few years where I was an underground comix snob, but luckily I got over it. I realized you could like both… and I did.

When did you start getting serious about becoming a comic book artist?

Very late in life. Early on I wasn’t serious about much of anything. Actually, I’m still kind of that way, come to think of it.

Did you ever pursue an art school education?

No, I went to college for about five weeks [and] majored in beer parties and co-eds. I must say, I excelled at those two disciplines, sucked at everything else.

Who were some of your chief comic book influences as an artist?

Too many to name, list or remember — a few off the top would include Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Curt Swan, Robert Crumb, Vaughn Bodé, you name them, they probably influenced me at one point or another.

How did you teach yourself the craft?

According to most people, I didn’t. Trial and error, man, trial and error. Still trying to learn.

Did you have regular nine-to-five jobs beforehand?

Oh, yeah, a million of them, every rotten job there ever was — I’ve swept floors, written estimates for a printer, driven a forklift, cooked, was in training as a maitre d’ once. Worked in factories, warehouses, restaurants, moved armoires.

You name it, I did it to earn a buck.

Was your first wife understanding of your career choice?

Very. She believed in me even through all those times that I didn’t. She was supportive in every way imaginable.

Who encouraged you to self-publish?

I moved to San Diego in the late ’70s and got involved in the scene down there. There was Scott Shaw!, John Pound, Jim Cornelius, David Scroggy, Jon Hartz, Jim Cornelius, Dave Stevens… a whole bunch of guys at

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various levels. Two of them, Rick Geary and Joel Milke, were doing these wonderful little Xerox books, what we would now call small press, then were called mini-comix. At any rate, at the urging of Jack Dickens and Ken Krueger, I tried my hand at them.

That’s how I got into it.

In the ’70s and early ’80s, was it difficult for you to stay afloat even with a minor triumph in normalman? Was there ever a time you came close to quitting?

Yes to both. normalman did fine for what it was, believe it or not. And yeah, I’ve quit more times than I can recall. It never lasts.

At what point did you start trying to break in at Marvel Comics? I’m assuming that you had been trying for some time. Were you ever tired of being an independent?

I was tired of being broke, I think. Again, I met two guys at a crucial turning point in my life: Rob Liefeld and Brian Murray. Rob was on the cusp and Brian was doing a book for DC called Young All-Stars. They really gave me the confidence to change my style and to go for it. It only took about a year before I started getting work.

What was the key to getting assignments there?

I knew one of the editors, Craig Anderson. I could write and draw and I was both fast and dependable.

I think all of that helped.

And was it a struggle having to constantly prove yourself to these Marvel editors?

Still is.

After dabbling with a lot of What If? and fill-in issues, you finally got your own Marvel series in Guardians of the Galaxy — what did that take? What was in your proposal that ticked? Was it working with an editor who finally had faith in you and your work? You are one of a handful of writer/artists that was given a chance to assume that much responsibility in a traditional Marvel book.

Tom DeFalco and Mark Gruenwald were scheduled to appear at WonderCon, so Rob and I were going up. I had about three different proposals I’d worked up to show them, one of which was The Young Avengers, which Rob and I wanted to do together (I believe this was before the New Mutants gig which, in fact, I think he got at that show). At any rate, we were looking through the Handbook of the Marvel Universe and I came across the Guardians. I asked Rob what he thought of them and he thought they looked cool, but didn’t have much of a story. A few nights later the idea of setting them in the Marvel Universe 1,000 years in the future hit me, and I wrote up the proposal the day before we went to the con.

Two weird things happened: Tom had just created a teenaged Avengers-type group in Thor called The New Warriors, so that blew that idea, and Tom had been thinking a lot lately about reviving the Guardians.

He wanted to set them some 500 years after the Badoon invasion. I told him if he gave me a green light I could set that up for him and I did in #8.

As to why I was given that responsibility it was because I approached them as the writer/artist, it was my concept. They knew that I had written and/or drawn several What Ifs and a few other projects here and there, so I guess they trusted me enough to handle both; especially when Tom realized that Jim

Valentino was also “Valentino” of normalman fame, something he didn’t know until that show.

Even back then you labored with autobiographical comics like Valentino; was that one of the appeals for you being independent: To tell your own stories?

Well, on one level or another I’ve always told my own stories whether at Image, Aardvark-Vanaheim, Marvel, or in the small press.

Guardians gave you the chance to play with a lot of Marvel Comics folklore. Was it an enjoyable experience to get some mainstream acceptance? Was that work personally rewarding for you?

It was rewarding to play around with the folklore, the work was rewarding to me. I’ve never been real comfortable in the spotlight.

In many ways, the precursor to Image was that you had some of your fellow Image partners [Todd McFarlane, Rob Liefeld, Jim Lee and Erik Larsen] guest-inking various Guardian covers; when did you start becoming chummy with them?

Well, I had met all of them, but the only one I was really chummy with was Rob. At the time he was my best friend.

Do you remember your initial impressions of each of them?

Yes, I do — Rob was energetic and enthusiastic, just a ball of energy, Jim was almost too polite, Erik was kind of goofy and Todd was charismatic, funny and dismissive.

When were you extended an invitation to join [what would become] Image?

One day Rob came over to the house and said, “Wouldn’t it be great to take a book from start to finish, do everything on it?” Diane and I laughed uproariously because we’d been doing it for years at that point, so we sat him down and we taught him how to do it. We taught him about pagination guides and page marriages, pretty much everything he’d need to know — from lettering to coloring, the whole thing.

Later that year at the San Diego Con, Rob, Erik and I were at a dinner with Dave Olbrich, then the publisher of Malibu. Rob asked Dave if he’d publish us and Dave said yes, laughing. He thought Rob was joking. He wasn’t.

Rob kept working Todd and I all summer and fall; don’t forget at this time Todd had “retired” from comics. Erik was already in. In December, Sotheby’s, can’t remember which, was holding their first comic book art auction. They were auctioning off the entirety of Jim’s X-Men #1, Todd’s Spider-Man #1 and Rob’s X-Force #1. Todd and Rob were flying there together.

I get a call from Todd, “Me an’ Robby are goin’ in an’ tellin’ ’em we quit — now, I got Larsen in one back pocket, do I got you in da other?” I’m in.

I go home and tell my wife that I either made the best decision of my life, or the worst. She was totally behind it.

Was there any resistance from Todd or any of the other members to you joining?

According to Rob, none of them wanted me in.

Especially Todd, who has never made any bones about it. Rob was absolutely adamant. His argument

was that of them all, I was the one with the most to lose. I didn’t have a lot of street cred (while I don’t have much of an ego I always felt that was unfair, I deserved more), I wasn’t a millionaire or on a millionselling book and I had five kids. The others could and would get gigs, there was a lot of doubt that I could.

He went to bat for me and Todd grudgingly relented.

That’s why I defended him so vociferously for all those years until I just couldn’t anymore. If it wasn’t for Rob’s force of will I certainly wouldn’t be here. I owe him.

When Image started, were you hoping that you could stay on Guardians? What was Marvel’s reaction to your decision?

Yes. I had The Guardians plotted out until #51 and I really wanted to finish the story I had been building to almost from the start. But my editor and I were not getting along at all. In fact, he told me that he considered the colorist to be more important to the book than I was. I realized that I couldn’t write and draw both The Guardians and ShadowHawk, and deal with the whirlwind that was Image at that time, something had to give. So I requested to continue writing the book and have someone else draw it. He decided to just relieve me of the book altogether. But that was him.

There were a few editors up at Marvel who really took Image personally — guys like Ralph Macchio called us traitors and such, but Tom and Mark, the guys who were heading the company were always generous and gracious.

At least in my experience with the both of them.

So Image starts; did you have any idea what type of book you were going to do?

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The frontispiece for Jim’s return to ShadowHawk in the pages of the Image Comics Tenth Anniversary hardcover. This image and story were later reprinted in 2006’s ShadowHawk one-shot..

ShadowHawk ©2007 Jim Valentino.

J I M VA L E N T I N O

Jim and his sons, Aaron and Joel. Photograph courtesy of Jim Valentino.

I had several different ideas, but hadn’t really chosen one. In fact, I believe in the first interview I said I was going to do The Pact, a group book. But Rob, Jim, Marc and Whilce were all doing group books — only Todd and Erik were doing single characters so I decided to go that route lest there be too many groups. I did agree with the majority that we should do super-hero books. The thinking was that we’d all seen (and still see) a lot of popular creators do an “artsy” book or something their fans really didn’t want to see and watched it go down in flames.

Still happens. Give the people what they want, that was our motto. To this day I think we were right.

What was the inspiration behind ShadowHawk? Were you envisioning the character as something that would please Marvel fans? Did you want it to be a violent title?

The concept was originally pitched at Scott Fulip, an editor up at Archie who was looking to revitalize the old MLJ heroes. It was a revamp of The Fox — who I saw as a more violent Batman. That’s what I was going for. It never made any sense to me that Batman would let a homicidal maniac like The Joker go time and again. Only in super-hero comics do heroes not kill. I decided the character wouldn’t

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kill… but he’d maim.

The name came from a storyline I was doing in Guardians of the Galaxy. I changed Starhawk from a being of light to one of darkness and I wanted to change his name to reflect that. The name I chose for him was ShadowHawk. Tom DeFalco nixed the name change but told me that I should create a new character called ShadowHawk… so I dusted off the old Fox proposal and followed Tom’s sage advice.

Was there a lot of time for you to develop the character’s story and look? Relatively how quick was the transition from working for Marvel to working on your own book?

I was doing both simultaneously plus dealing with the whirlwind that surrounded Image at the time, plus setting up my office, plus raising a family. I had no time to sleep even.

Unluckily, you did break your hand early-on in Image.

Sprained it, actually. I kept the bandage on for a few weeks then couldn’t stand it anymore and cut the sucker off! God forbid I ever break a bone, there’s no way I could stay in a cast for months on end.

What went through your head when you heard the sales numbers for the first issue of ShadowHawk were over 500,000 copies? Were you able to now afford a lot of luxuries that you went without most of your life? Were you very cautious about what you were going to do with your earnings?

Well, I was ecstatic, of course! Actually the uppermost thought in my head is that maybe now it wouldn’t be so much of a struggle. Maybe we could actually afford to send our kids to college, provide for them, and not sweat the mortgage every month. I thought about it all in “dad” terms.

One of the things that I noticed that you did with your newfound recognition was help a lot of other artists by giving them work or giving them a back cover ad. You immediately realized that you were in a position where you could help others. How did you not let your ego get the best of you in 1992?

I got a swelled head when I did normalman, and then found myself unable to get another gig afterwards. I realized then that it was a pretty fast drop from the top of the molehill — so I fought to remain humble thereafter. I still fight to remain humble. As for giving away the back covers, they went to old friends — people like Scott McCloud, Jeff Smith, Colleen Doran, Bob Burden, and the like and to people whose work and books I liked. If I could help them get even one extra sale — great!

Were you able to do every project that you wanted?

Could the other founders veto you? Was it carte blanche in the early Image years to do whatever you wanted? Was this a very creative period for you, having done The Others, The Pact, Alliance and your Vignettes collection?

No founder could ever veto another; that was part of our agreement. I always put it like this, if you own the car you can do whatever you damn well please with it — that includes taking a hammer to the fender if that’s what you wanted to do. We all owned the car equally… luckily, none of us owned a hammer!

I admire the fact that you weren’t bashful in saying your books were among the lower sellers in the Image line, but that you were happy doing these comics with a

classic super-hero flavor. You were “more DC than Marvel.”

You also certainly made no bones about pointing out that your books were “reader-oriented; they’re written by people who know how to structure a story, how to create characters and how to make that entertaining.” Saying something like that didn’t cause friction with the others?

Would you bring this issue up to your partners: that perhaps they needed to work on their storytelling?

No, I would never say anything like that to any of them, nor were any of those statements meant to be a slam in any way toward them. Look, I was the underdog and I knew it — my work wasn’t as pretty as Jim’s or Marc’s, it wasn’t as energetic as Rob’s or Erik’s and I wasn’t as popular as Todd. I had to capitalize on what I had going for me as best I could.

Introducing AIDS and racial issues to the original ShadowHawk (a.k.a. Paul Johnson), and having that be a factor in his death made for a very compelling and controversial storyline; was it well-received? Was there any backlash?

Oh sure! I got threats from people who thought I ruined their whole experience by politicizing the story.

I got death threats when I revealed he was black.

But, there were far more people who were very positive about it. I got write-ups in several mainstream magazines, even in The Advocate, which I was very proud of. Thing was, in the early ’90s AIDS was still considered a “gay disease,” and one of the conceits of the storyline was that it was a disease — it really didn’t care if you were gay, straight, young, old, male, female, black, white or blue. That was the point I was trying to get across; it could even happen to a superhero. I was always grateful for those people who got what I was trying to do.

Were you in a bubble with all the attention that you were receiving almost overnight? When did it hit you that Image was extremely successful? And, do you consider this a high point in your career?

I remember the night we arrived in Chicago, 1992.

Rob and I went out in back of the hotel to get a

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Above: Jim Valentino’s Image universe. ©2007 respective copyright holders.

J I M VA L E N T I N O

ShadowHawk artwork for a wax pack of trading cards.

ShadowHawk ©2007 Jim Valentino.

glimpse of this tent we’d heard about — and both of us were laughing, it was so surreal. He turned to me and said “We’re like the f*cking Beatles, man.” I told him to remember this, that this will be “those days,” we’d never see anything like it again. We were actually turned away at the door by the security guard who didn’t know who we were. It was a very weird feeling.

The convention started the next day and all we saw for the entire day was an endless stream of belt buckles. It was absolutely the high point in my career. Most of the time it still seems like it happened to someone else. I was never very comfortable in the spotlight so it was perfectly okay with me when it all ended. Jim and Todd are still going through it; they can have it.

Your book was the first Image title to ship on time, right? You, unlike the others, soon (after missing a deadline or two) made it a policy to not solicit material that you didn’t have on-hand.

No, Todd’s first year or so shipped on time — Erik wasn’t too far off that mark, either, if I remember correctly. But Todd was the one who bragged about it constantly — Erik and I just mostly did our books.

I missed one ship date and that was because of the sprained hand — #3. The difference was that I gave ship dates — and I hit them. I don’t believe anyone else did that.

Despite the success, pretty quickly there was a backlash against the quality of Image’s work and the constant lateness from many (other artists, retailers and fans); what did you make of it? When did the partners take action to stop this trend?

We tried. That’s what the whole “Image purge” was all about (which amounted to four books getting canned, one of which was over a year late with its second issue). But, there was the problem with the non-interference policy — no partner could tell another nay, it wasn’t done. We could get pissed about one another, but that was it. We couldn’t force anyone else to do anything.

The lateness thing really pissed me off; as with the “Image style” everyone painted us with too broad a brush and it made it difficult at times to even want to try to get a book out on time; why bother when no one notices? But, at the end of the day, it was a matter of pride and professionalism for me.

Whenever you used a gimmick like a glow-in-the-dark

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or metallic cover, you left the price just the same. Why? Um, I didn’t at first, I don’t think… maybe I raised it on a couple, I can’t recall. But here was the deal — I did some really weird covers, but in every instance I tried to use the materials, be it foil or die-cut, blind embossing or whatever in a creative manner, in a way that no one had ever used it before. More, they were the only cover, there was no variant. I didn’t do the 275 different color variants others were doing.

The cover may have been wonky, but was the oneand-only cover.

In the early days, what do you remember about how the by-laws were set and those first Image meetings? Did Image bring you guys closer together or apart?

We always said publicly that our meetings were yelling sessions and we couldn’t stand to be in the same room together and all of our many critics would jump on that; “see, they’re gonna break up any day now.” Mostly our meetings had a lot of laughter ’cause we were making fun of those guys (and, yeah, we knew who all of them were). When we’d disagree on something we’d discuss it, if it couldn’t pass we’d table it. But in those early days things tended to pass with unanimous votes. Were there heated exchanges?

Yup. You can’t sit six strong personalities in a room and not expect there to be, but we always cracked each other up and we always circled the wagons.

Fact of the matter is it’s still pretty much like that.

Larry used to like to hold regular meetings because he knew there were far less fights when we were in the same room together. We went through something unique together and I think, on one level, that creates a bond of some sort. Now watch, the other guys are going to say something in their interviews that will totally go against that.

What did you originally envision for Shadowline?

I saw it more as an office to take care of my affairs and to promote my creations. I never really wanted a studio like Rob and Jim and Marc did. In fact, we were pretty much divided down the middle on that — three wanted studios, three didn’t.

Why was ShadowHawk never really an ongoing series?

What inspired you to create generations of ShadowHawks?

I knew that with all of the other stuff going on I couldn’t produce 12 issues in a year. So, by taking a couple of months in between story arcs I could keep the book coming out on time. The generational ShadowHawk thing was actually Kurt Busiek’s idea, so blame him. Alan Moore wrote the origin story and I’ve been nickin’ the two of them ever since! Hey, I figure if you’re going to nick someone they’re pretty good someones to nick!

Were you protective of ShadowHawk in terms of merchandising? Did you want him to be a household name that was featured on video games, television and other mediums?

Uh, well, the two would cancel out each other, wouldn’t they? Yeah, I wanted the character to take off and I was always up for merch’. And we did quite a bit of it — cards, mouse pads, a video game was in development, TV shows were optioned and scripts written, there were toys and hats, T-shirts and whatnot. Every creator wants to have a golden character

like that. Anyone who says different is lying. Well, except for Bill Watterson.

In terms of the high orders that you and the others were getting, when did the market burst? When did you realize that the initial boom was over? And how did you adjust?

Nineteen ninety-five. My reaction to it was to commit suicide.

No, I could see the numbers slipping in ’95 — like everyone else I went into denial at first and then started to adjust by downsizing, pulling in the belt — pretty much what everyone does when they realize the bloom is off the rose.

Rob was your closest friend in the company. Did his leaving Image ever make you rethink your future there?

Oh, sure, of course. I knew I had enemies and that Rob was the one keeping them at bay… at first anyway. It was an extremely dramatic time for me, no pun intended. There was a lot of stuff going on in my personal life, my career and the Rob thing on top of it — it was a really rotten summer for me.

Why did you join Rob on “Heroes Reborn” to write The Avengers?

Rob knew that The Avengers was my childhood favorite comic so he generously offered the gig to me. But it was his Avengers, not mine. Originally it was supposed to be me and George Pérez on the title which was great because I love George both as a person and as a creator, and we’d wanted to work together for years. Alas, it didn’t happen, but that was the plan.

Something I forgot to ask… why aren’t there more new normalman stories?

I did a 20th Anniversary Special a couple of years ago. normalman is a favorite of mine. Captain Everything is far and away my favorite creation, but it’s kind of like the auto-bio comics for me; they tell me when it’s time to do one, I can’t force it — I’ve tried, it doesn’t work. It’s like that old wine commercial with Orson Welles: “We shall serve no normalman before its time.”

By the way, your U.S. Male strip, with art by Murphy Anderson and Mike Allred was terrific. Why didn’t you do more?

Well, working with Murphy and Mike was simply great, but it was a one-time deal. Murphy did the color seps for me on normalman and a nicer gentleman you’ll never meet, which was great because he was one of my idols as a kid. I don’t know — U.S. Male just didn’t seem to have legs for me. I kind of revived the concept with Astroman in The Intimidators series.

How was it decided that you be publisher? Did you have a plan to move away from the image that Image had created, to being a champion of smaller creators and more compelling material?

Larry was going to work for Todd and I volunteered for the job. I was at a creative slump and it seemed like something that would challenge me. My goal as publisher was to diversify Image’s output — no borders, no boundaries, just good books. The only thing I set out to do was get rid of all the titillation

books that Image was publishing at the time, to raise the bar a bit, to give the company a more adult face in public. To that end I opened better relations with the other publishers and the retail community. I did my best to show that someone was actually steering this crazy ship. Whether I succeeded in that or not is up to others to decide.

Anything in particular that you are proud of during your time as publisher? Are there books that you were proud to be associated with that came to Image?

Yeah, a ton of them. I was proud of Ministry of Space and of The Pro, Powers and the hardcover reprinting of Leave It to Chance. I was proud of Invincible and Nobel Causes, of the unique format of Clock Maker by Jim Krueger, and of Liberty Meadows. A Distant Soil and Age of Bronze, both of which started under Larry, but I still gave them all the support I could. I was proud of all the people I gave a shot to, succeed or fail I was grateful to have that opportunity. I had a few clunkers, who doesn’t, but I was real proud of the vast majority of books we published and creators we were aligned with.

From Day One, what did Image Comics mean to you?

What did it stand for? And has that “meaning” changed in almost 15 years?

To me, it’s always meant Creative SelfDetermination. You decide the type of book you want to create. You decide whether or not you want to farm your property out to another writer or artist or to manufacturers or whatever. A lot of people seem to misunderstand the basic tenant of creator’s rights.

They make the erroneous assumption that one must do one’s own creation. No, creator’s rights means that the creator gets to decide what’s right for them.

If that means killing off your creation, fine. If it means making a movie or TV show, great. It’s what you want to do with your own creation. Image has empowered hundreds of creators over the years to do their vision their way.

And I’m very proud to say that hasn’t changed.

Image Comics, Inc., still to this day does not own one single character or property — just like we said those many years ago. People, including partners, have come and gone without prejudice, just like we said. Despite what a lot of naysayer’s claimed, we stuck to our original stated goals (not those which others ascribed to us).

I’m pretty damn proud of that alone.

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MARVEL MANAGEMENT

Tom DeFalco From 1987 to ’94, Tom DeFalco served as the editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics.

Under his leadership, the comic line experienced its biggest period of expansion and financial profit. DeFalco’s regime marked perhaps the last time that Marvel provided fertile ground for allowing young talent to develop — every Image founder blossomed to success throughout this period. Tom was also present at the infamous meeting with Todd McFarlane, Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld and Marvel President Terry Stewart; this fateful reunion is where the future Image co-founders voiced their grievances to Marvel. After his editorial tenure, DeFalco continued his successful freelance writing career, eventually even bringing his own creatorowned title, Randy O’Donnell is the Man, to Image in 2001.

Tom Defalco. Courtesy of Tom DeFalco.

When you started as the editor-in-chief at Marvel, did you have a clear plan of what you wanted to do with the Marvel line? Was there something you wanted to do differently from what Shooter was doing?

I wanted to reorganize the editorial department. When [Jim] Shooter was editorin-chief, I was an editor, and I felt that since I was dealing with the books on a daily basis that I had a little bit better insight to the books. I also felt that there were a lot of big problems associated with being an editor, and that sometimes the guy upstairs in the corner office wasn’t aware of those problems. I figured that I was going to take more of a backward role in terms of the individual books and try to look at them more over a period of time than individual issues.

So did you also want to bring in a new wave of creators? Because John Byrne had already left to DC, and some of the other guys from the early ’80s were gone, things were starting to change. There was a changing of the guard around that time, too, when you started.

Well, that happens whenever there’s a big shakeup. People who didn’t care much for Shooter came back to Marvel when he left. It’s not like I did anything special. I didn’t think I really had to do

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anything. At that time we were Marvel Comics. We just had to offer the best deal for our creative people that we could. If you build it, they will come.

But you were willing to gamble on some of the new guys. I don’t think Todd had done anything too big before Hulk — or Rob before he did New Mutants.

No. That was more of a function of the individual editors. The Spider-Man book, the adjectiveless Spider-Man book — do you think that was created for Todd McFarlane?

I thought so.

It was not. The reason why we did that book is because I was traveling in Europe, dealing with our European licenses, and they had such a demand for Spider-Man material that I realized that we could produce another Spider-Man title. We would make a profit on that title even if we didn’t publish it in our country. So that’s why I decided to do that Spider-Man title. When I told the editor of [Amazing] Spider-Man that we wanted to do another title — he was totally against the idea. He didn’t like the idea of doing another one.

I always thought the story was that Todd wanted to do his own thing.

No. Well, he wasn’t working too well with the writer, with David Michelinie, and basically this was a way to keep both guys happy: Todd getting his book and do what he wanted to do, and Michelinie can do what he wanted to do on Amazing Spider-Man. Nope. That had nothing to do with it. This was just purely an economic decision.

Were all of them economic decisions?

A lot of them were, yeah.

Was that part of the pressure when you were editor-in-

chief? Like, you had to keep pouring in money into the company, “I gotta think of the next big thing. We need to keep expanding.”

Nope. You’re thinking about it like a fan, and I’m going to tell you how I thought about it like a professional. We were in the publishing business, and I wanted to run Marvel Comics like any other publishing house. I just felt that as long as we were making money, that the people upstairs would leave us alone. My goal was to make money for the company and to expand the number of titles we were doing.

Here’s the simple economics of publishing: in order to make money as a publisher, you have to publish.

In those days I could see that comic book stores depended upon the monthly comic books. The individual stores would basically sell the same amount of each title every month. In order to ensure the health of the comic book stores, we needed to slowly build up our output, because the more titles we produced that sold through every month, the more money the comic book stores would make. The more money the comic book stores made, the more secure the industry was. And I wanted to be in a secure industry.

But did you feel you had enough creators to put a line of good books out there?

Yeah. I also felt that, as publishers, it was our responsibility to help develop new talent. You can only develop new talent if you’re expanding. So I wanted to be in a growing company. I felt that the more we grew, the more work we would provide to the creative people. I always saw myself as a freelancer who masqueraded as a staff person. The goal was to slowly increase the production over a period of time, and give people a chance to develop. Here’s the secret with creative people: they don’t spring full-blown. They all need time to develop as creative people. That’s why we had books like Marvel Comics Presents. That was essentially our version of New Talent Showcase. It gave a lot of people like Rob Liefeld and many others an opportunity to develop their craft.

A chance to spread their wings.

Yeah, and learn how to tell a comic book story; there’s a real craft to this business. A lot of people think that you just sit down and it just flows, that it’s just the work of genius. No, you really have to know what you’re doing.

Did you feel you had a huge momentum going on around ’89, ’90? It seemed like you had someone really good working on all the books, and you had stories that readers were into.

Well, yeah. I think we kept getting good momentum going. I also think the golden age of comics is whenever you started reading them. So that might have been around the time when you were really getting into them.

This was a key era, too; I remember it was very strong editorially. DC had nothing on you guys at that point. And that was something I wanted to get into, the superstar artists. Were you aware these guys were becoming big names for themselves, Todd and Jim Lee at that point? It happened pretty quickly. I think as soon as

Interesting X-Men piece by Jim Lee (along with Cyclops character shot). Top panel was used to promote 1991’s X-Men #1 release; lower panel was an unfinished thought by the artist.

X-Men ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Jim Lee did a couple of issues of Uncanny, right away with people, he struck a chord.

Yeah, but don’t forget, Jim Lee had been around a long time before he did Uncanny X-Men. But he was in the minors on Alpha Flight. His star started coming up when he was doing the Punisher War Journal.

Here’s the secret of comics: the characters make the stars, and the stars make the characters. If you’re a talented guy and they put you on a major character, then you’ll become a superstar.

But you were aware, when people talk like, “I like that Jim Lee run of books,” or “I like Tom DeFalco’s run on Spider-Man.” People talk like that, and in fan circles they do talk like that.

But the fans always talked like that. The guy I like is terrific. The guy you like is a bum. Y’know?

Did you ever start feeling like they were getting out of hand after a while? Because I remember

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TOM DeFALCO

Rogue by Jim Lee. ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Guido by Jim Lee. ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Todd was saying he felt that you guys were always fencing him in.

Like, he couldn’t show the Juggernaut getting his eye punctured or something violent like that.

And that sort of bothered him more than anything else.

Yeah. It did. But that’s the biz! An editor’s responsibility is to take care of the long-term health of his characters, to look at his characters in terms of the long-term. Something I always believed was that Marvel will always have Spider-Man, but it may not always have Todd McFarlane.

But you want to keep your talent happy always, too.

You want to keep your talent happy, but you cannot give them total control over characters that they may ultimately harm. The long-term health of the character is the editor’s responsibility because creative people think short-term. “I want to do this story. It’ll be a great story. I’m going to kill everybody in the Marvel Universe. It’ll be a terrific story.” And you go, “Yes, it will be, but then what do we do next month?” “Ahh, I don’t care. Next month I’m going to DC.” But most of the time, when something like that would happen, you would want the editor to take care of this.

You didn’t want to hear about it — I mean, you had other responsibilities.

Most of the time, the editors took care of this.

But if Todd had a problem, would he overstep the editor and go straight to you?

There were times, yes. Like the time when he basically wanted to puncture one of the Juggernaut’s eyes. I can’t tell you exactly how I got involved because it’s been too many years.

I don’t remember the actual details, but I know that at one point I was talking to Todd. I said to him, “Todd, we’re not going to let you put out a character’s eye, and we’re certainly not going to let you put out a character’s eye on camera.” At that time we were part of the Comics Code

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Authority, and they specifically had a rule against injury to eyeballs, because it was a common motif during the so-called Golden Age of comic books.

Whenever anybody wanted to show an exceptionally brutal scene, they would do an injury to an eyeball.

So that was one of the very specific rules that we were prohibited from doing. If we had done that issue of Spider-Man, it would not have been allowed to be distributed on newsstands across America.

But I remember Todd saying he asked, “Who is the Code?” because he wanted to go straight to them, and somebody at Marvel told him, “We are the Code.”

He’s like, “Huh?” He just felt a little defeated, I guess, or tired.

I’m sure he was frustrated because he knew he wanted to graphically puncture an eyeball and we wouldn’t allow him to do that. When I told him that we wouldn’t be able to distribute the comic book on the newsstands he said, “Well, y’know, I don’t care.”

And I said, “Well, Marvel does care, because half of our income from that title comes from distribution on the newsstands.” Now, yes, in times past Marvel defied the Code because they were doing very special stories, the famous drug story and that sort of thing. But, I’m sorry, just because a creator wants to put out an eyeball… that is not of the same stature as an anti-drug story. So I told Todd, “I’m sorry you’re disappointed, but this is not going to happen.” And at that time Todd told me, “You realize, of course, that this means that at some point I’m going to leave.” And I said to him, “Yeah, I understand that, Todd.” Because here’s something that I always understood… and I understood it because I’m a creative person, too. I knew that, at a certain point, once a creator achieves a certain amount of fame and a certain amount of power, they’ll eventually leave. It is the natural evolution of the industry. They’ll keep pushing and pushing, and eventually leave.

So you were aware of that while this was going on?

I was always aware of that. I’m just going to give you the history of Marvel: Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, fill-in-the-blank. They all left. Neal Adams, Jim Steranko. It is the natural evolution of a creative person. When you start out, you’re just thankful that you’re getting work. The more work you do, the more control you want. You eventually think that, “Hey, it’s all me.” And a great part of it is you. Because a great part of the Fantastic Four was Jack Kirby. A great part of Agent of SHIELD was Jim Steranko.

Neal Adams did a hell of a run on The X-Men and The Avengers. But at a certain point, a company can only give you so much control, so much money. And then you get to the point where the creative person just says, “Listen. I need total control or even more money or I’m leaving.”

But did it surprise you that he basically quit after Spider-Man #16? For almost a year he didn’t do anything.

Did it surprise you that he was that passionate about this?

Looking back on it, it seems silly 15 years later, that that’s basically why he left Marvel.

Maybe I didn’t express it properly. I don’t think Todd quit because we wouldn’t let him puncture the

Juggernaut’s eyeball. That’s not the reason why he left Marvel.

There were a lot of other things, but that was his exit door. He used that to stop.

Yeah, but if it hadn’t been that, it would have been something else.

Sure, sure. I know.

Let me put it to you this way, his bags were already packed. He already had his train ticket. And I think that for Todd to continue to grow as an artist, it was time for him to make another move. So he made that move, but it was an appropriate move for him to make. So I didn’t have any problems with it.

But what about when the other guys, like, Rob Liefeld actually tried to do his own book through Malibu? Were you surprised he was coming up with a concept that was very X-Men sounding? It was called Executioners.

Well, I thought if you’re going to go out and prove that you’re so creative, you should come up with some original ideas. I think that some of the guys went out there and they came up with original ideas; some of the guys went out there and they kind of did rip-offs. You don’t prove that you’re creative doing rip-offs. If you want to show how badly you were being held back, you do it by coming up with something new and original that really makes people go “ooh” and “ahh.”

I guess from a business perspective, they wanted to give the customers what they were giving them before in a different disguise.

In other words, they felt, “Hey, let’s rip things off and no one’s going to ever notice.” Except everybody did.

When did you start hearing rumbles that these guys might be starting a company?

Okay, I can tell you how it happened, how I first became aware of it. There was going to be some sort of auction at Sotheby’s. I was supposed to be there, the president of the company was supposed to be there, and a bunch of guys were in town for it.

The day before the auction I realized that I was supposed to meet the president at the auction, but we hadn’t figured out where or when we were going to meet. So about 7:00 at night I’m getting ready to leave the office, because I used to work pretty weird hours in those days, and I go upstairs just to find out where the heck we’re supposed to meet the next day. That’s when I find a bunch of the guys — who would eventually become known as the “Image guys” — sitting in the office, having a meeting with the president. I thought, “Okay, they’re having a meeting. Good for them.” And I basically said to the president, “Listen, I just want to know where we’re going to meet tomorrow.” And he said, “Well, I think you should be in this meeting here.” For which I was very thankful, because I ended up getting out of that damned thing at 9:30 at night. Anyway, at that meeting, the guys basically announced that they were dissatisfied with what they were being offered at Marvel, and they wanted concessions made. And that’s the only thing they agreed on. After that, everybody asked for something different. At one point somebody said, “Yes, we believe that we’re

responsible for the profits of the comic books, so we should be getting 75 percent of the profit.” Somebody said, “Well, why 75 percent? It should be 90 percent.”

Like I said, they didn’t really agree on what they wanted. The meeting kind of rambled, because as soon as somebody would throw one thing out, somebody else would either disagree with the person or come up with something else. I remember one guy said, “When Frank Sinatra comes into the city, he never has to pay for a drink. When I come into New York City, I don’t think I should have to pay for a single drink.” And we said, “When we invite you into the city, we already cover all your expenses.” And they said, “Yeah, but what if I want to bring my wife?” I said, “Well, we’ll pay for her, too.” And somebody else said, “Well, I don’t have a wife. How about my girlfriend?” And then somebody else said, “I travel with four people. Can they all be comp’ed, too? We think you should put us in the best hotel in the city.” One of them turned to me and said, “What do you think of that?” And I said, “I don’t even know what the best hotel in the city is.” And I still don’t!

They also wanted to be treated as superstars whenever they attended a convention. And we said, “Well, we don’t really control who gets invited to conventions or the accommodations.

The convention handles that.” And then they said, “Listen, when we leave a book, we think we should have the right to decide who follows us on a book.” And I said, “Whoa, no, no, wait a minute.

If you’re going to quit a title, I don’t know if you should have the right to decide who follows you on that book; it’s our job to figure out what to do with the comic book, not your job.”

So you didn’t feel insulted that they had gone over your head?

I didn’t really care. I have to be honest. I was looking to go home, and I was more annoyed that they wrangled me into a meeting than anything else.

Todd said one thing to me. He said that at the meeting, it was him and his wife and Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld, yourself, and Terry Stewart, and that the one thing he wanted to get across was that he was letting Marvel know that he was leaving, and he was just doing it as a formality. But I’ve heard different stories, that at the same time they wanted to do Epic, or they wanted to do other things. To me, it sounds like they weren’t completely together yet, like you said.

Yeah, I think that’s the problem. Everybody in that meeting had a different agenda. I’m going to give you the bottom line. Terry Stewart and I did not get along, okay? He was the guy responsible for me getting tossed out of Marvel as editor-in-chief. I questioned a lot of his decisions, which is why he eventually got rid of me. But he did something which I thought was very intelligent. After bouncing around from 7:00 to 9:30, Terry basically said to them, “You know, guys, we can keep

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Forge by Jim Lee. ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

TOM DeFALCO

X-Men promotional pin-up

by Jim Lee. ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

discussing and discussing, but even you guys don’t agree on what you want. Why don’t you get together, figure out what you want, and present it to us? Just present your demands to us and we’ll go over them point by point. If we can do it, we’ll do it. If we can’t do it, we’ll see what we can do to make you happy.”

I thought that was the smartest thing he could have said to them. They needed to get on the same page and decide what they really wanted. Then Marvel could say, “This we can do, this we can’t do,” and we could negotiate. I thought it was a very fair thing for Terry to offer them. The following day, I saw one of the Image guys talking to a reporter. As I walked up to him, he was essentially announcing the deal Image had with Malibu. I believe when Image Comics was first formed, Malibu was going to distribute them. I said, “Wait a minute. You’re giving the announcement with all the details? What was last night about?” He goes, “Well, we had to say we went to Marvel.” And I said to him, “So, in other words, you wasted my time for two-and-a-half hours last night.” And he goes, “Well, we had to do what we had to do.” Bottom line, the Image guys had already made their deal before they approached Marvel, and I was very annoyed by that. I felt it was natural evolution for them to decide that they

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wanted to go out and form their own company, but I was annoyed that they never really gave Marvel a chance to match the deal they had with Malibu.

But you didn’t get rid of the guys right away. You let a lot of them finish their runs on their respective titles. I think only Valentino was let go right away, from his Marvel title, but the rest of the guys were able to finish.

Yeah, we weren’t out to screw anybody. We weren’t looking to hurt anybody. Like I said, it annoyed me, but you can get annoyed at someone and still like them. It happens in families all the time.

So I got annoyed, big deal! They were still doing the books.

Did it affect, editorial-wise, how you ran the line of books afterwards?

No, here’s a funny thing which a lot of people missed in all the articles and everything else. When Jim Lee left The X-Men, did sales on X-Men go up or down?

I think they went up.

Yes. When Todd left Spider-Man, did sales go up or down?

So they continued to go up. But there was a huge momentum at that point. This was, like, the height of comics speculation.

Yeah. And not only that, when the guys left, they created all these headlines that created even more interest in comics. So sales on all of our titles went up. At one point, the editors were even joking. “Hey, we should get more people to quit!”

But that became a problem, though. Afterwards, all the editors thought that they were the draw of the books.

Every editor had their own book, and it diluted the line a little bit.

What do you mean, “Every editor”… ?

I mean Budiansky had Sleepwalker, Fingeroth had Darkhawk, Gruenwald had Quasar…

No, no. They had all that stuff previous to the Image guys.

It just seemed that the line might have grown too big, at one point.

During the time when Image was formed, a ton of other companies also popped up out of nowhere and they all went after our creative people. It got so crazy that we were convinced that other companies were just cherry-picking our people. At one point we even listed a fake creative team on an issue of X-Men, and people from some of the other companies were going crazy trying to get that fake’s phone number so that they could offer him another job. As soon as it was announced that we had assigned someone to a book, another company would call up and say, “Listen, I’ll give you $10,000 if you do this book instead.”

Once Image got their stuff together, one of the weirdest things I thought they did was, as soon as you guys started developing new talent, they right away went after them. Jae Lee and Stephen Platt were starting to become names and right away Image came in and took them away. I can see something like that ticking you off, right?

Well, yeah. Of course it did.

Because that’s one of the things, afterwards Marvel

stopped promoting the talent. That was one thing that Todd said that, in the meeting, that he got that vibe, that they weren’t important anymore to the company. He got the vibe from Terry Stewart that they could be replaced, and that’s one of the things he didn’t appreciate.

As Todd the businessman has found out, anybody can be replaced. That’s something that no creative person wants to hear and nobody ever wants to believe, but everybody can be replaced. Todd McFarlane even replaced Todd McFarlane on Spawn.

That’s true.

And I’m not saying this in any sort of vicious way.

If you can replace Stan Lee and Jack Kirby on Fantastic Four, anybody can be replaced.

But the talent doesn’t like hearing that, especially artists, because they don’t like it. Everyone wants to feel important.

No one was saying it to them. It’s not like we were going, “Hey, you can be replaced.” At the same time Todd was doing his Spider-Man book, we were doing three other Spider-Man titles. Did he honestly think we were going to cancel Spider-Man if he left? I don’t know how to respond to that, because I don’t think he really believed that for a second. Now that he’s Todd McFarlane the businessman, he knows that anyone can be replaced because he replaced himself.

Were you surprised that Image was successful, that they kept it together? Because none of them had any business experience, they’d never done anything on their own, and somehow they actually got through this.

I was not convinced that they would be able to keep it together. I really do applaud them. They really accomplished something fantastic with Image. And Image is still going strong. It is still one of the top companies, so you’ve got to give credit where it’s due. And, like I said, I have always been a freelancer who masqueraded as a staff person. Even I have worked for Image Comics.

That’s one of the things I was going to ask you.

What did it take for you to do that? Was it something where you just came to them, or they came to you? Or was it something humbling to think about it, that now you’re working with the guys that you helped start in the industry?

Well, I don’t think of myself as helping start those guys. We all have to start somewhere. See, I try to take a larger view of the industry. This is a long-term industry. You’ve got to think long-term to survive as long as I have. Was I humbled because I was working with those guys? No, I was actually thrilled that they welcomed me.

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Punisher War Journal #6 layouts by Jim Lee. ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

MALIBU MANAGEMENT

Dave Olbrich It was Dave Olbrich, Malibu Comics’ publisher, who presented Rob Liefeld, Erik Larsen and Jim Valentino an open invitation to doing creator-owned work, over a meal at a convention. It was a notion that Liefeld would never forget. When the time came to start Image, Olbrich had been social with Rob since he broke into the business in the mid-’80s. Although never officially Image’s publisher, Dave served many of those very same duties for the extremely successful initial wave of Image books in 1992 and early 1993, a great help in successfully launching the company.

For over 20 years, Mr. Olbrich has been a highly respected figure in the comics community and is the founder of Will Eisner Comics Industry Awards.

Dave Olbrich at Golden Apple Comics in 1992.

Photograph by and ©2007 Tom Mason.

Do you remember when you first met Rob Liefeld? Do you remember what you thought, or your impressions of his portfolio?

At the very beginning of Malibu Comics in 1986, Tom Mason and I were looking for comic book series to publish. I don’t remember if we met Rob in person first or if we got a submission from him in the mail.

It was probably early in 1987 that we first saw Rob’s proposal for Youngblood. The art looked great, and included a very large group of original super-heroes.

Rob’s style has changed significantly over the years.

These early samples seemed to be influenced by Jerry Ordway and George Pérez. We were excited and immediately started talks with Rob about how Malibu could publish Youngblood. Even though the industry was going through a downturn in 1987, we thought Rob’s work would generate a lot of excitement.

Did you call Rob, out of the blue, around the time he was working on New Mutants as a feeler or something else? Was it true that Rob was planning on working with Malibu and Marvel simultaneously during his X-Force days?

We talked with Rob about how to do Youngblood

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and when we could do it. My memory of these longago details are a bit fuzzy, but I believe that Malibu came to terms and sent him a contract. I even believe that he signed the contract. At that point, Malibu Comics was very, very small. We were only publishing four or five black-&-white books per month and the page rate/upfront money didn’t come close to the rates offered by Marvel and DC. But we had a couple of things going for us — we marketed our books really well, and creators retained complete ownership of their work. Before Youngblood was completed, Rob’s artwork came to the attention of someone at DC and he landed the penciling gig on Hawk & Dove.

We had become quite friendly with Rob while discussing how to make Youngblood a reality, but we couldn’t compete with Marvel/DC page rates. We graciously agreed to cancel the contract, and Rob and I always kept in touch. While he was doing comic books elsewhere, Rob continued to do a number of guest covers for Malibu. You’d have to check with a comic historian or Liefeld collection completist to tell you which ones. His guest covers always provided a boost in sales.

What was the gist of Rob’s The Executioners with Malibu? Did Marvel Comics make any legal threats over that book?

We maintained a good relationship with Rob in the years that followed. Youngblood would come up in discussions occasionally, but he was so busy with everything he was doing at Marvel and/or DC that we were never able to move forward. We were always open to doing something together and we would occasionally get calls from either Rob or from his friend Hank Kanalz about doing something.

Rob has always been a ball of energy, full of more ideas than he could ever find the time to complete.

As time went by, it became clear that after working

for Marvel and DC on their company-owned books, he wanted to do something that was entirely his own.

He had a lot of commitments at Marvel at the time, so we talked about doing something small together.

He definitely wanted to test the waters of the socalled “independent publishers,” and he wanted to do it with Malibu because of the positive relationship that we had developed. He also was tired of creating original characters that Marvel owned.

Malibu advertised a Rob Liefeld project called The Executioners, but my memory of it is extremely vague. Marvel threatened a lawsuit claiming confusion with The X-Men. Marvel had a minor background villain called the Executioner, but I don’t believe that was the basis of Marvel’s objection. I don’t think that Marvel had a legitimate case, but neither Malibu nor Rob wanted to go to court over it.

So we came up with an alternative idea — a book called The Art of Rob Liefeld. I wanted a title with a little more pizzazz, so I started brainstorming. I proposed a revision to the title, calling it Extreme: The Art of Rob Liefeld. I even created some sample logos to pitch to Rob. He liked the title and we both agreed it was a great way to accomplish some of the goals that he had. He wouldn’t have to do a lot of new work as the book would be dominated by artwork that he had already been creating in his spare time over the last few years. We wouldn’t have to create or edit a story, so it could go into production quickly. The book would also establish ownership claims for some of Rob’s original characters by getting them into print.

It was during this time, when Rob was talking to Malibu about The Executioners and Extreme that he was also spending a lot of time talking to Jim Valentino (with whom he shared a studio space off-and-on), Erik Larsen and Todd McFarlane.

Did Malibu see it as an opportunity when Rob and his friends formed Image? What sort of a deal was Image given by Malibu?

When we were talking to Rob, he would often tell us about the talks he was having with other creators.

He was never very specific about who these creators were. Rob was very good about keeping the confidence of his friends. But he would drop hints that there were a number of other creators who were feeling exactly as he was about creating characters and working on books that they didn’t own. Malibu was there from the very beginning. Rob was feeling us out about what we did, how deals could be structured, and how an arrangement might work. He sounded like someone who was really doing his homework about the marketplace. Ultimately, the creators that Rob had been talking with wanted better terms from their employers. They wanted the kinds of deals that Malibu and the other independent publishers were willing to make and that DC and Marvel were unwilling to make.

A couple of things need to be understood at this point: Image wasn’t “formed” before Malibu was involved. It all happened at once. Image came together as a recognized group later. It was just a small number of very successful creators that got together to stand up to their employers. I think they

had very legitimate complaints. They understood “strength in numbers.”

They sensed that together they could accomplish a lot more than any of them could individually.

In the months before we started talking to Rob Liefeld seriously about helping him with his plans to do something outside Marvel or DC, Malibu had been consistently a top five publisher measured by market share. We were publishing three different imprints.

We had Robotech, Captain Harlock, Sherlock Holmes, The Shadow, Ninja High School, War of the Worlds, Dinosaurs for Hire, The Trouble with Girls, and many others.

We had a sterling reputation with creators for paying what we promised and paying on time.

Throughout the history of the comic book industry, these are typical problems creators have had with independent publishers. We also had a reputation for not messing with creators at an editorial level. We picked creators we trusted; we asked them to be honest with us and create their best work and to meet their deadlines. In exchange, we let them create without a lot of interference. We also had a reputation for marketing and advertising their work effectively.

Why did Malibu decide to become involved with them?

Malibu had worked very hard to be a publisher creators could trust. This is a major reason why Rob Liefeld maintained a good relationship with us… and why we got a very important phone call from Rob in December 1991.

Rob had been hinting for weeks that something “big” was about to happen with himself and some of friends. He’d been telling them about Malibu. I continued to tell him that we wanted to help, that Malibu wanted to be involved in whatever they were putting together. We didn’t know the specifics, but everyone at Malibu had worked hard to build our company and we were confident that we could handle it.

Then Rob was on the phone telling me that if we wanted to be involved in this thing, we had to be ready to meet everyone in New York in a week or so.

Tom Mason, Chris Ulm and I (three of the four Malibu partners) packed our bags and headed for the airport.

(I’m sure that the Image guys can give you a firsthand account of what happened on that trip to New York from their perspective. All I can do is tell you what I remember.)

We arranged to meet the Image guys — although

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Ex-Mutants was among the most popular titles published by Malibu Comics. Ex-Mutants ©2007 Malibu Comics Entertainment, Inc.

DAVE OLBRICH

Dale Keown covers for Tom Mason’s Dinosaurs for Hire. Many Image creators had close ties to the Malibu Comics family. ©2007 Tom Mason.

they weren’t calling themselves Image just yet — for breakfast in New York City. They told Tom, Chris and me that they were going to take meetings during the day with both Terry Stewart at Marvel and Paul Levitz at DC. They were going to go to Marvel and DC and tell them what they wanted. Out of loyalty they were going to give Marvel and DC a chance to give them what they thought they deserved. Or else they would go off on their own. They made plans to meet us for dinner to tell us what happened.

When we met for dinner that night, we found out that their meetings with Marvel and DC had been unsatisfactory.

At the dinner, Todd did most of the talking for the group. They came prepared with a proposal for Malibu at the dinner. It was essentially a “take-it-orleave-it” set of deal points. As we flew back to California, it became clear that we had two choices.

Malibu could do the deal with the “not-yet” Image guys or we could reject the deal… and be one of the publishers trying to compete with their books. These top-selling creators were going to publish creatorowned comics, it was going to be big, and they wanted it to be Malibu.

Were there meetings where Malibu met the entire Image team? Was there any strategy in place at the start of this enterprise?

Over the next few weeks, we kept in constant contact with all the Image guys. We talked at length about strategy and had a summit meeting of sorts at Marc Silvestri’s beach house in Malibu. The creators did a lot of talking, coming up with strategies of their own — things they had always wanted to do at either Marvel or DC but which had been shot down.

Malibu had a reputation for being very efficient and effective with our promotions, advertising and marketing. We gave them all the help that we could, but ultimately it was their deal and their careers. The plans were always in flux and changed a lot as time went by and various elements changed. Each of the guys wanted to launch a book of their own. They had

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to decide how quickly they could finish their books.

They had to get all the elements lined up, like letterers and colorists.

Given the nature of soliciting comics in the direct market, we only had to finalize the plans a month at a time. So we kept our options open for a number of weeks. The strategy to make Image a successful reality grew organically.

Believe me, these creators knew the value of promoting and advertising comics aggressively. It was a good story. The story was about the creators and their creations. It was about their desire to own their work. It was about their desire to steer their own destiny.

By the time of the annual February retailer gathering in Hawaii, we had all the titles, promotional graphics and we even distributed some Spawn T-shirts.

Wasn’t this whole experiment a lot bigger than Image had ever imagined? Was your company in over their head?

I can’t speak for the Image guys or what they imagined, but it sure was big. At one point a major media outlet wanted to talk to Jack Kirby about his perspective on these “upstart” creators taking control of their careers and going out on their own.

Jack and Roz Kirby lived within a close drive of the Malibu offices. Jack told me that they would be happy to talk to the reporters (with their photographer in tow) as long as I would come along. So I went. The reporter spent about a half-hour or so politely asking questions of the King of Comics.

Jack and Roz asked me to stay around after the reporter left. We sat at their kitchen table and had soft drinks. We talked for the next hour about a wide variety of comic industry-related subjects, but most importantly Jack expressed how supportive he was of the Image creators and what they were trying to do.

The Image creators had control of nearly every aspect of their own books. The Image guys had a lot of work to do and decisions to make about how to organize themselves and how collective decisions were going to be made. While these guys were friendly and knew they had to hang together cooperatively, they were also very competitive with one another. They didn’t just want to compete with Marvel and DC, they wanted to one-up each other as well. Each wanted his book to outsell everyone else’s. That competitive drive served them well and drove them to make their books the most successful they could be.

What were your responsibilities as Image’s publisher?

Malibu provided administrative, production, advertising and marketing services. We were very good at these skills, having perfected our systems and techniques over the five years that we had been growing Malibu into a top five independent publisher. That isn’t to say there weren’t difficulties. There always are. Occasionally we would get caught in the middle of the competitive nature of the various creators.

Remember, the Image guys, at this point, had no experience with anything except the creative process. We were happy to help.

What sort of a deal was Image given?

The Image creators dictated very specific terms of

the relationship to us and we accepted. It was a 90/10 split with 90 percent going to the Image creator. Beyond that, there was an agreed-upon fee to cover Malibu’s overhead. The deal was one of the worst-kept secrets in the industry, but it was very beneficial to Malibu. We knew that the deal wouldn’t last — Image would either fracture into little companies or it would form an entity, separate from Malibu.

Rather quickly, Image and Malibu parted; were there any particular reasons?

There were several, and you’ll probably hear them from all sides. When the first publicity broke about the deal, the mainstream press positioned it as Malibu stealing Marvel’s creators, luring them with a better deal. The narrative of the creators forming their own company was lost within the David vs.

Goliath storyline. It was seen as a Malibu-Marvel story, instead of an independent Image story. This annoyed the Image creators to varying degrees.

Second, we started to field a lot of press calls — Malibu was a real company and people called us for quotes and interviews. We’d turn the calls over to the Image guys, but if they weren’t available or interested, the reporters would come back to us. So Malibu President Scott Rosenberg and I started to appear in more and more news stories about Image.

Third, Malibu started to get a lot of attention from Hollywood — studios were calling the office to talk to Jim, Rob, Todd and the others. We’d again turn the calls over to the Image guys, but they were a virtual company — six or seven independent studios — there was no central office or spokesperson. When the movie studios found out Malibu had an entire library of published material that pre-dated Image, they started sniffing around Malibu’s offices too.

Some of the Image guys were resentful that Malibu got any benefit from our joint publishing deal. They were a highly competitive bunch, competitive with each other and with Malibu as well.

The Image guys also started to resent that we weren’t 100 percent focused on Image — Malibu had other books to publish and other creators who had trusted us to promote and sell their work. As I said earlier, we were certain the Image deal wouldn’t last.

We started making plans for “post-Image” Malibu.

We began developing what would become our own line of super-hero books, the Ultraverse. The Image guys really hated that when they heard about it.

The Image creators wanted hands-on control over every detail of publishing their individual titles. I don’t know if it was true for every single Image creator, but collectively they began to resent depending on Malibu. I believe they were very inexperienced and each of the Image guys still had differing visions of what Image should become.

Remember, before Image, they had very limited, if any, experience working with/for anyone except Marvel or DC. They were each making boatloads of cash, they were being treated like movie stars within the industry and they were attempting to create a paradigm for comic publishing that didn’t exist.

I remember the basics of the phone call that ended the relationship when it came from Jim Lee. He said,

“It’s over. We don’t need Malibu anymore. We could hire four monkeys to do the same thing for us that Malibu does.” They were wrong. They learned that over time. But Image Comics was their party and their company. They were free to do as they wanted. I think that the Image creators drastically undervalued what Malibu contributed on their behalf.

Did the attention given to Image distract from your attention to the Malibu line? Do you think it helped Malibu grow?

Malibu had a good system and a great, hardworking crew. Image wasn’t a distraction. It was a very exciting time to be involved in the industry. When the books were first published, there was an Image signing at Golden Apple in Los Angeles, and the line was so long that crowd control measures had to be put in place, as if you were at a rock concert. There hasn’t been anything like it in the industry since.

Malibu benefited from the Image deal in a number of ways. It increased our visibility — it opened up new markets for our other books and brought new creators into our company. We were able to develop our own in-house digital production facility to color comic books. It opened up Hollywood to the company and helped things like Men In Black become a movie. And ultimately, it paved the way for Malibu’s own line of super-hero titles, The Ultraverse, to debut a year later.

Ultimately, Image was formed with the goal of creators controlling their own careers, their own creations and their own business destiny. They also wanted all the control of all the money. What business person wouldn’t want that? In the end, it only made sense for them to eventually take control of all aspects of Image, including those chores originally performed by Malibu.

How do you look back on that period? Was it exciting to be a part of something that changed the history of comics?

Would you have done things differently?

It was exciting at the time, and I was happy to be a part of it. There were other publishers, but the Image creators selected Malibu to smoothly transition from freelance creators to self-publishers. But at the end of the day, as the history is written, the story is about the Image creators and the bold steps that they took that many other creators were either unable or unwilling to take. There is a very long list of comic creators who have complained about their treatment at the hands of the big comic publishers.

There is a much shorter list of creators who put their careers and their own finances at risk to get what they wanted. The Image guys did that. On that score they will always have my respect.

Did Bravura start as a result of Image?

Bravura was not the result of Image, at least not directly. It was a deal that I put together with Harris Miller on behalf of several of his clients. Bravura was a brave experiment launched at the wrong time in the comic industry business cycle. I really loved working with the Bravura creators and it resulted in friendships that I maintain to this day.

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IMAGE MANAGEMENT

Larry Marder In a time of chaotic logistics and late books at Image, the founders turned to Larry Marder for help stabilizing their company in late 1993. As Image’s executive director, Marder brought professionalism and order when he assumed all responsibilities of the company’s publishing. He provided direction, mandates, guidelines, business and editorial advice and an open ear to grievances from the Image founders, comics distributors and retailers. Prior to Image, Marder worked in an advertising agency, created the alternative comic Beanworld, and served as the marketing director for Moondog’s, a pop culture store chain. In the fall of 1999, Larry stepped down from his seat at Image to accept his current position as the president of McFarlane Toys.

Beanworld. ©2007 Larry Marder.

Had you known any of the Image founders prior to the formation of Image?

I’ve known Valentino since 1984, when I started doing my comic, Beanworld. He was doing normalman. After I broke into comics, I met Marc Silvestri while he was still living in Chicago. He was working for First Comics, and I met him right before he moved to New York to do King Conan. Erik Larsen I knew from Chicago conventions. I noticed him because he always held his pencil funny when he sketched, and I had had some conversations with him. But I didn’t know Rob, and I didn’t know Todd. And I met Jim Lee early on, before Image had started, but I didn’t know him particularly well.

I was a cartoonist working in the alternative press, and somehow all of our paths had crossed at some point.

Were you successful prior to Image?

My story is a whole different

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story. Beanworld was around for a bunch of years. It got nominated for some awards. It didn’t win any, but it got nominated.

You started during the black-&-white boom?

I was part of the black-&-white boom, yeah. There was a group of artists that came up in 1984, 1985, and 1986, and I was a part of that.

But you were centered in Chicago?

Absolutely. I was living in Chicago and working in the advertising field.

Were you also working for Moondog’s?

That was a little bit later. I started working for Moondog’s, I think, in 1991… ’91, ’92 and ’93, I think were the years I was there.

That was a chain of comic book stores?

Yeah, it was a chain. At one point there were eight locations, but I think most of the time I was working at Moondog’s, there were six of what we called “popular culture stores” in the Chicagoland area.

Where’s your business experience come from?

My business experience comes from the fact that I was in the advertising business for over 20 years, and so doing business-to-business advertising, that’s where I learned most of my skills. My story is that Beanworld came out in 1985. I was affiliated with Eclipse Comics. In 1986, the San Diego trade show schedulers were looking for someone to give a talk to comic book retailers about how to think about advertising. I was suggested to them as someone who could do that. So I put together a presentation, and that got videotaped by IADD, which was the distributor cartel. That tape went around to a lot of retailers, and that got my name out there as a person who knows something about business, because at that point the direct market was very primitive. The big issues were should you have a cash register or

not. There really weren’t any national distributors yet.

It got me involved in a lot of dialogue with distributors and retailers. I was already doing a lot of the behind-the-scenes marketing work for Eclipse Comics. It was a strong independent publisher in the 1980s. Obviously you know that, because of Miracleman. In fact, the “The price is light” ads that Eclipse used to promote Miracleman, using a photograph of an outstretched hand holding three shiny quarters, hammered home the point that this was Eclipse’s first 75¢ comic book. I created all of that. I did a lot of work for Eclipse but after the tape of my San Diego speech circulated, people became interested in me as an advertising and marketing guy. I started working for Friendly Frank’s, which was a Midwest distributor. Later, Gary Colabuono at Moondog’s saw the videotape too. He asked me to come onboard and do some stuff with him. Pretty much at that point in the early ’90s, industry people were starting to know me as a marketing person in comics as much as somebody actually writing and drawing one. They were paying me a lot more too!

Did that bother you? That you were being recognized more for business than art?

At that point I didn’t care. I was just having so much fun being part of the business. You have to understand, I didn’t even break into the business until I was 35 years old, so most of my adult life I had been a fan. Just the whole notion that I was allowed behind the big mysterious curtain was very, very interesting to me, and I just kept being offered challenges. I kept taking them. But the biggest challenge anybody offered me was to come over to Image.

Being in comics you felt a lot looser than advertising because advertising was restricting?

Well, all businesses are a matter of compromise.

The only way to really do something and not compromise yourself is to self-publish your own comic. But that doesn’t mean you’re actually going to make any money.

But working in comics, you found it more involving? It was more natural?

It is a product that I enjoy helping promote. And I think that’s the most important thing. I like the storytelling.

What led to you actually getting hired as the executive director? It had something to do with you being at that Chicago Comic Con where everything went crazy, didn’t it?

Well, that was my first contact with everyone.

What impression did you get when you saw that?

Well, let me tell you what that was all about. The Chicago Comic-Con was having some trouble with attendance, and the coalition of people that owned it made an offer to Gary Colabuono saying, “If you can help us get some big guests, we’ll put you in as a partner.” So Gary came back and said, “I want to get Image Comics.” Image was just forming, and he knew at that point that I was very good friends with Valentino. So we made a pitch to Image to have them come be guests of honor. Obviously the entire convention experience, the extravaganza of the Image creators in a separate circus tent in the parking lot, was quite memorable for all involved. It’s really a

story in and of itself. I worked on the ads promoting the Image creators’ appearance, I helped put together the booklets for the show; I did a lot of the negotiating, or at least liaisoning with the various Image people.

Then the Image guys came to the show, and obviously it turned into a major event. And I think Marvel and DC made some lousy choices that summer as far as — .

Yeah, they were hardly even at that show.

That’s correct. They canceled Spider-Man’s 30th birthday celebration, and DC decided not to come to the show and instead reviewed portfolios in a hotel across the street. There was a complete and utter vacuum for Image to naturally fill. From, I think Marvel and DC’s point of view, not the smartest thing anybody ever did. It was in the process of helping organize that show that I really met and worked with Todd for the first time, and Jim Lee. Did you believe in what they were doing?

Yes, I did. I really did.

There was some vested interest to see these guys succeed.

Let me put it this way: at Moondog’s, we did a bunch of things over the next year with various Image partners, and at the same time, I’d reached the point where I knew that I was at the end of my run at Moondog’s. I found the work less challenging,

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Recent photograph of Larry Marder with the Giant Buddha on Lantau Island, Hong Kong. Picture courtesy of Larry Marder.

LARRY MARDER

The name given to Spawn originated from Todd’s old college friend, Al Simmons. During the early years of Image, Al was a regular liaison for McFarlane Productions on the convention circuit.

At some appearances, he’d even wear the Spawn costume. Today, Simmons still remains a part of Todd’s company.

Photo courtesy of Todd McFarlane Productions.

Todd art from Spawn #3.

Spawn ©2007 Todd McFarlane Productions.

more repetitive, and I wanted to go back to giving Beanworld another shot. Because I had been paid very well at Moondog’s, I saved enough money to form a small war chest so I’d be able to take a little time off and go back to Beanworld. I wanted see if I could finally make that work. And at that exact moment, I got a call from Valentino saying, “We’re looking at people to help us. Are you interested in flying out and talking to us?” And I said, “Sure.” So they flew me out to California.They were seeing lots of people, by my recollection, at the time. The Image Central office was opened after they left Malibu. I think they opened the office in January or February of 1993 and put Tony Lobito in as publisher.

They called me right after the Philadelphia convention, which I want to think right out of my head was Columbus Day of ’93.

Philadelphia was the show where the Todd McFarlane/Peter David debate was held.

Anyway, it was right after that convention

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that they called me and asked me to come see them.

So a couple of weeks later, we met in the Image Central office, and all six partners were there. We talked about all sorts of business stuff, what the job would be and what the parameters were, that sort of thing, dancing around the real questions. Then, I’ll never forget this: Todd said to me, “Well, that’s what we need. But what are you doing here, Larry? Why are you here?” And I gave a speech which was very heartfelt that I believed that the creator’s rights movement, starting with Siegel and Shuster’s problems with National, had been going on for a long, long time. There had been a lot of ups, there had been a lot of downs, then a lot of ups again. And now, somehow, at that moment all of those years of struggle had culminated in this Image Comics moment. I felt very strongly, that if they failed and went back to Marvel and DC with their tails between their legs, that this would set us all back. The gains that the independent publishers made with the distributors to wholesale non-Marvel and DC books might falter. So it was in my own self-interest to help them succeed. And I believed that then, and I believe that now.

Basically you brought some organization to — .

That was the theory.

Because a lot of them were hiring their best friends and not necessarily the most qualified individuals for the job, and eventually they saw that that wasn’t exactly working.

They basically wanted to bring in somebody that was older and more experienced…

And a little bit impartial, maybe? Is that what they were looking for?

I think so. They had put together this centralized mechanism that was dedicated to just a couple of things, and that was soliciting the books, publishing the books — and when I say “publishing,” I mean, manufacturing the books, because that was what we did. We solicited the books, we printed the books, we distributed the books, and we collected the money. And the whole time that I was at Image Central, that’s what we did, those four things.

Everything else was done by the partners and their studios independently.

And so what they did was put together a company that had this centralized mechanism that, again, solicited, manufactured, distributed, and collected the money. And that was the only thing that they really did where they all were co-joined. Because,

individually, they did not in any way, shape, or form share in each other’s successes or failures. So it is a very peculiar company.

What happened with Lobito, Image’s first official publisher, when you were hired?

When I was hired, Lobito just started working for me. Tony was my right-hand person for several years.

So he was more like your assistant.

No, he had his own agenda. Again, I just was a person that was brought in to sort of help guide everybody else. Tony was very good at marketing flair based on the reality back then, premium things — he did those chocolate bars, those crazy chocolate bars.

He wasn’t up to the task of being a publisher.

He wasn’t up to the politics of keeping the six various studios sorted out.

And you were, right? In your own book, you were familiar with the distributors and the pressures and all sorts of things.

All of the mechanics. First and foremost, I had been a cartoonist, so I certainly understood what it meant to wake up in the morning and look at a blank piece of Bristol board. I also knew what it meant to stay awake for days on end with various things. I understood distribution. I understood the printing and manufacturing. I understood publishing. And I understood retailing. I understood every segment of the marketplace.

What was the first problem? Did you relocate to Anaheim, I guess?

Yeah, I commuted back and forth from Chicago and Anaheim for a couple of years.

What were the first problems?

It absolutely was late books.

What did you do to stop that? You made them stop soliciting more books?

Yeah, what we did was we came up with a plan that no book could be solicited until three issues were in the can. We had a lot of solutions to a lot of problems. And some of them worked and some of them didn’t. But certainly within my first year there, we certainly got the books more timely. I don’t know that we ever got a lot of the books on time. They might be two or three months late, but they came out every month, so there was always a big difference. It was a semantic issue, of course, but not to a retailer.

But the idea of a book being solicited for March and coming out in May — which is a late book — if an issue of Cyberforce comes out every month two months late, then it’s a timely book. It’s sort of silly, isn’t it?

But if a founder had a book he had yet to complete but wanted to solicit new books, what could you do?

Oh, we would not solicit it — because the majority ruled. So I think that in most cases that became true fairly quickly.

You didn’t think that one of them would be angry at you?

Oh, sure. Well, first of all, the thing that I used to say about my job, which the more time that goes by and the more hindsight I put into it, the more I realize

it was true, that being executive director of Image Comics was like being the coach on an all-star basketball team where every player was an owner.

Sort of like Joe Torre?

Well, Joe Torre, yes, but if every single person on the Yankees also owns the Yankees.

Exactly, yeah.

I always looked at it like being a basketball coach, in a sense, because there were six of them out there, but the same number of players on the field, they’re all owners, and they all want the ball every play.

And if you think about it, they’re also your boss.

Oh, they were my bosses.

They might not want to hear what you had to say sometimes.

Oh, they didn’t.

How did you avoid that kind of friction?

Well, a lot of my job was just trying to stay ahead of that thing and be rational and try to solve it. We used to have marathon partner meetings quite often, where we would all meet in the same place. And we moved all over the place. I mean, we always did them at conventions and at San Diego, things like that, but we did them at Todd’s house, we did them at Rob’s house, we did them at Erik Larsen’s house. We did them in Jim Lee’s studio. We did a lot of them, and they would be marathons. I would come in with an agenda, “these are the problems that we need to solve,” and we would discuss them until we agreed upon them unanimously, or we would table them to another day. And, astoundingly, that worked for a long time.

What about decisions such as characters appearing in other creators’ books?

Those decisions were made before I got there.

Were you surprised they had a skeleton game plan?

That didn’t surprise me at all, because, again, that was part of the spirit of what they were putting together. I think what took them by surprise was that they started out as a coalition, a bunch of rebellious Marvel pencilers, and they transformed into a bunch of businessmen running businesses with payrolls and taxes and rents and all sorts of things, and obviously, of the six of them, they all succeeded at various different levels. In other words, some of them did better at it than others. But the point being that it sort of started out as a game, “let’s just design all this cool stuff and let’s put each other’s characters in each other’s book,” and then all of a sudden partners have TV

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Like Al Simmons, Todd’s old pal Terry Fitzgerald inspired the name of a character in the pages of Spawn. Terry is currently the president of Todd McFarlane Entertainment, as he’s helped guide Todd and his companies since Day One of Image.

ShadowHawk action figure by McFarlane Toys.

Shadowhawk ©2007 Todd McFarlane Productions.

LARRY MARDER

Above: Todd stands proudly amongst his output at the official McFarlane Toy Store and Showroom in Tempe, Arizona. Inset: Spawn in front of Los Angeles’s Golden Apple Comics in 1992. Photo courtesy of Golden Apple.

shows, they’re making movies, Todd starts a toy company. And all of a sudden it’s pretty serious.

Did that affect your job? Because you had less access to them as they kept getting into other mediums, right?

I never lost any access to any of them as a person, as a partner. There wasn’t a single one of them that never took my phone call. They always took my phone call — almost immediately. And I didn’t call anybody unless I had a reason to talk to them, so I didn’t abuse the idea that I needed to talk to them.

But the truth of the matter is… they all called me all the time.

They all wanted to keep their feet wet.

They wanted to know what the other guys were doing.

That’s another thing I wanted to ask you. When did they start becoming competitive with each other?

They were competitive at Marvel.

At the start, it felt like they saw the thing as one big picture, and after a while they started losing that vision.

Well, first of all, they started out competitive at Marvel. And they took those competitions to Image.

People really have a hard time believing this, but it’s really true. They never cared what anybody else’s book was selling except other people at Image.

Besides Lee, Liefeld and Silvestri, why weren’t more Image creators involved in Deathmate?

Deathmate was thought up by those guys, and Quesada was part of it too. People forget that now.

But I’m not here to dump on Joe. Deathmate took advantage of the popularity of the creators and the characters of the two hottest new companies and attempted to team them up. Steve Massarsky, who was the head of Valiant at the time, came up with the idea of getting a tour bus and putting these guys out on tour, and they were touring and promoting a book that nobody had drawn. It was insane.

But wasn’t that ever a problem? I know there were covers, they would draw a cover and just solicit the book.

I know Rob would do things like that. I’m sure Jim Lee did, too.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Rob definitely did a lot of that stuff.

You never put in an ultimatum, “I’ve got to see the

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finished book before I solicit this thing”?

Oh, sure we did.

And did that work?

It worked fairly well. Yes, we still had situations like when Extreme was soliciting for Youngblood drawn by Liefeld and written by Shooter, things that certainly never got up and off the ground. I don’t know, maybe I could be proven that my memory is incorrect, but it seems to me that most of the books that they would solicit, they would have at least two or three issues in the can, which meant that they came out. Issues #4, #5 and #6 might be late, but it would eventually be published.

Did you start getting phone calls from comic book retailers, that sort of thing?

Oh, you bet!

Overall it was just complaints and that sort of thing?

Well, sometimes it would actually be to try and solve a specific problem with a shipment or whatever it might be, but normally people I think at the time were excited by the fact that — and I’m wiggling my fingers here when I say that — there was an adult at Image Comics that they could communicate with.

But it was important for you to have a good relationship with retailers and distributors at that point, right?

Absolutely.

What was the reputation with that community? Pretty tarnished?

Oh, sure. If you go back and look at the old distributor magazines and see all these ads that I wrote, there was one that featured a big Image logo and it said, “I bet you thought that we’d be out of business by now.” Stuff like that. I just faced it straight. Image had a lot of problems; there were a lot of late books.

But we had a lot of talent, and I just faced that headon. And I gave a lot of speeches in the early days at the gatherings about what we thought Image Comics was and what we thought Image Comics would be.

When you started, had most of the distributors changed their policy to 90-day returns?

No, it was a result of Deathmate.

That was a crushing blow to Image at that point?

Maybe to them, but not to me. To me it was the greatest thing that ever happened.

But you were getting a lot of returns?

There were some. But a lot of books didn’t come out at all. To me, it was a reasonable policy that a book solicited in May has to come out by the last day of June. Otherwise it’s late.

Why did you guys go exclusive with Diamond as your distributor?

Why did we go to Diamond as opposed to…. Why did any of that happen at all? Because they offered us a better deal.

Okay. It made them more of a monopoly. It gave Diamond more power.

Well, that was actually looked at by the Department of Justice, so it wasn’t a monopoly. I always respected both companies, but at the end of the day, the opportunities that were offered by Diamond to Image collectively just made better sense. And we had no idea when we decided to go with Diamond that Dark Horse also decided to go

with Diamond. So, yes, that obviously left Capital quite in the lurch. But I have always said that the entire sequence of events was initiated by Marvel Comics.

Did you see a problem with the “Image style” art that most associated with the early years of the company? Was that something you tried to deviate from? These weren’t the kind of comics you grew up with.

I’m not sure what the “Image style” means. Jim, Marc and Whilce have a sort of classical line. To me Whilce was always the most interesting artist of all of them. Marc was by far the best all around artist.

Jim Lee certainly had just a terrific sense of line and style. Todd, obviously his layouts were superb. Erik Larsen was one of the true heirs of Kirby. Rob was very good at designing costumes, and Valentino had a very good sense of layout, too. They all had different strengths, but when you put them all together, it’s really hard to say that there’s an “Image style,” per se, because so many other people, I think, drew in a similar fashion.

Did you feel they should improve upon their stories?

It’s funny, but Marvel’s plotting became terrible after they left.

Well, actually, what happened at Marvel wasn’t that these guys left. People left all the time. Frank Miller would leave and they’d get someone else, Alan Moore would be gone, y’know. John Byrne would move from Marvel to DC, back and forth. Vacuums on top-selling books had always been left. The real thing that took them all by surprise was that, in the past when a penciler left, there was always somebody there to take their place. It was the equivalent of if Jack Kirby had left to start something like Image Comics and taken John Buscema with him. That’s what happened.

That wasn’t something you guys planned.

I certainly didn’t have anything at all do with it. It wasn’t a game plan, per se. Again, they offered a hand and said, “Hey, do you guys want to come for a ride and make more money?” But I think that’s the vacuum that was really, truly left. If you’re going to use a baseball term, if you lose your Big Leaguers, and then your Triple-A ball players, too, who would have moved up to be the next Big Leaguers, they’re gone, too, and so they were left in disarray with good writers whose — I’m talking about Marvel, left with good writers and pencilers who couldn’t quite carry the weight for a while.

They got desperate after a while.

It was a tricky time, wasn’t it?

But Image cleansed the industry from some things.

A lot of it started at Marvel, though. I mean, whatever it is that happened, it started at Marvel. And it took off, so you had extraordinary events like Todd’s Spider-Man #1, and X-Force #1, and Jim Lee’s X-Men #1, you had all that kind of stuff. And then you had the start of Image. And at the exact same time, and I don’t think you can separate these two events, at the exact same time, Wizard started. The whole notion of the monthly price guides, where they’re commodities going up and down like the stock market, and you swirl all of those things together and you have the

excesses of the early ’90s.

After a while, what Wizard was reporting was basically fluff, anyway.

Yeah, to me a moment of complete and utter insanity was April 1994 with the “Return of Superman” after he died. There was just this ungodly number of books that were sold. I don’t have any idea what we put out the same month, but I’m sure there was a whole bunch of titles that we were trying to counterprogram to it. By my recollection, somebody did statistics: it was the biggest month that comics had since 1952 or something.

The thing is that was the problem. They were marketing “Superman’s Return,” telling retailers it was going to be just as big as the “Death of Superman,” and it turned out not to be, and that’s when all these stores started closing.

Everybody participated in this greed.

And Diamond, Capital, they all sold it as being a bigger event than that.

Everybody participated in this greed. You can’t blame anyone, and you can’t blame anyone individually. Everybody participated — even the consumers.

What do you think of what Image has become now?

I always tell Erik Larsen that he is the last Image revolutionary. So he’s certainly the right person to be at the helm today, because he is the person who’s still carrying the torch of 1992, whereas everybody else is really running their own individual businesses.

Erik is 100 percent comics.

Yeah!

The others wanted to do different things outside of comics.

Oh, I think it’s very different. Obviously I’ve been exclusively with Todd for the last seven years, but Todd is still a storyteller. Our toys are storytelling devices. They’re just different. It’s snapshot storytelling as opposed to sequential art. But Todd is still a storyteller in every sense of the word.

At his heart, he’s really a fanboy.

Oh, yeah… we talk about comics all the time. In fact, yesterday we were working on something and I said, “You know, it’s like that Jerry Ordway drawing of Superman with the eagle.” And he goes, “Yes! That’s exactly what I’m talking about!” I mean, we’re just geeks here.

What about working in that office? Was it the first time you had managed a staff?

No, I had been a vice president in an advertising

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Beanworld. ©2007 Larry Marder.

LARRY MARDER

Conceived in the mind of Rob Liefeld, Splitting Image! was Image’s official parody book.

Artwork by Don Simpson.

Splitting Image! ©2007 Rob Liefeld.

agency, so it really was a very similar experience to an agency. We treated the outside partners as if they were clients.

You were somebody there to look out for their interests, right?

I was always looking out for their interests, yes.

But it didn’t bother some of the others that the office was so close to Rob, set up in Anaheim?

Well, that’s true. When I first got there, I think it was bothersome to people that it was close to Rob. But then again, they made the decision to let it be close to Rob. Then, when I came onboard, I certainly ran the office independently, and as soon as our lease was up, we moved far away from Rob. You went up to northern California, right?

No, no, no. We were in Fullerton, and I guess he was in Fullerton, too, but it was a good ten-minute

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ride away. There was no intermingling between the two staffs anymore whatsoever. But you know what?

Rob didn’t last long, okay? He was gone within months.

What was the worst thing that happened when you were there? Was it when Silvestri left? Did he call you telling you he was out of there?

No, actually. I was at Todd’s house coming in for a visit, and he told me, “Marc quit last night.” So, no, I didn’t hear it from Marc, I heard it from Todd.

But you didn’t want to lose him.

We did not want to lose Marc, no. We didn’t want to lose anybody.

But he was one of the more profitable members, wasn’t he? He had a good reputation. He wasn’t late as often as Rob was.

I think everybody had their problems. I don’t know how many books Marc had at that point in time, because when Marc came back, that’s when Top Cow got really strong.

Marc felt reinvigorated or something?

Yeah. Matt Hawkins went over there, that’s what really… from my point of view at Image Central, that’s when Top Cow really solidified.

And you were there when Jim left, as well?

Yes. And that was a phone call that I got from Jim. Erik told me there were no warning signs.

I had heard a rumor. I called up Jim and said, “I just heard a rumor.” He denied it categorically so I believed him and kept the rumor to myself. Then he called me two or three weeks later and said, “I’m sorry I had to lie to you, but I am leaving.”

So when Jim left, what did you guys have to do to reorganize? He took a lot of books away from the company.

Jim did, so we had to publish 30 books a month in order to keep the Image office alive.

Who set that number?

I did. In order to make our payroll, in order to pay our taxes, in order to pay our health care, in order to do whatever it was that we needed to do, pay bills, whatever it was, the only income we had came from the books that we published, and it was a flat fee.

We didn’t take a percentage from anybody; it was just a flat fee. We needed the flat fees of 30 books in order to survive. If we did 25 books a month, we lost money. If we did 40 books a month, we made money.

So Jim took his ten books or whatever he took, and I had to replace them. But it wasn’t fun anymore after Jim left. Because, for me, I stuck it out another year, but there were four partners at that point, and a majority of the books that we were publishing were being published by Image Central, and I always found myself increasingly on the phone talking to neurotic alternative or independent cartoonists, of which I had already been one. I’m thinking, “Why am I holding their hands? Why aren’t I doing Beanworld and why isn’t somebody holding my hand?” I was getting bored. I said something to Todd, and he said, “I need

help over here. I need somebody with your skills to help me with the toy company.”

Because the toy company at that point was spread out over three locations.

When did you start focusing on the independent creators? Jeff Smith was the first one?

No, the first person that came onboard during my tenure was Sergio Aragonés with Groo, and then later it was Jeff Smith. And then it was just a lot of people.

Some people came in through Valentino; other people came in through Erik Larsen. Some people I found, myself. And people just showed up at the door.

Did you see that change as necessary for Image’s image?

We needed a certain number of books to stay alive, and if the partners did not provide those books, I had to get those books wherever I could find them. So the reputation that you will see expressed by some people is that, in my last year at Image, that there were a lot of bad girl books and all that kind of stuff, it’s absolutely true. I had to get books somewhere. And Mike Deodato’s books always sold. They sold really well. We did a bunch of books, and they sold.

Everybody would diss them, but they sold.

But you had to be more on your toes. You had to be alert more to what was going on in the marketplace?

Yeah. I really had reached the end of — it wasn’t as interesting as it had been, and Jim [Valentino] wanted a crack at it.

I think I was reading that there were two things you changed in order to get alternative creators to show up.

Yeah. All we took was the domestic North American English language comic book rights. So for Jeff Smith or somebody else to come onboard, all we did was publish his comics in English with an Image logo on them, and then ship them off to the distributors — or in his case, there was only one distributor at that point that we were selling to, and it was Diamond. But he was completely free to cut his own deals with Semic, or whomever, overseas. That was an important thing, because it allowed them to get a comic book up and off the ground, but they were always able to leave Image Comics unscathed. That’s not true at other companies to this day. But to me it was always very important — did I love publishing Sergio Aragonés? I sure did. Did I love publishing Jeff Smith? You’d better believe I did.

That gave you guys a lot of credibility.

Right. But what gave us even more credibility was that they left happy. They left happy with their negatives, they left happy with their rights. That’s important, because that allowed more people to come onboard and say, “You know what?

I can go there and not have them put their hooks in me.”

You left of your own volition, right?

Oh, nobody pushed me out, no. They might have been ready to. But, no, no, I left on my own. I don’t think Marc was very happy that I left and went with Todd.

Obviously it was an opportunity for Valentino to take the helm of Image Central.

All Erik cared about was that The Dragon got published, and that the Image office helped put it out each month. The most complicated people to work with were Jim Lee’s WildStorm and Rob Liefeld’s Extreme. They were both very, very challenging. They were challenging as people, and they were challenging as organizations. But once they left, everything was so harmonious and smooth that it wasn’t fun anymore.

Most of your work was from those two camps, wasn’t it?

Certainly most of my phone calls.

I was reading that comment that you said, “If you fail, it’ll come as no surprise.”

That’s an old quote, yeah.

Did you ever feel like Image would fall flat on their face? You were fairly content that they were going to survive even if you left?

I was. And they have.

Will it be around another 15 years or 30 years?

In some incarnation, yeah. Because you know what? Until Erik Larsen finishes Savage Dragon, there’s going to be an Image Comics.

If you can’t laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at? The Image founding seven as seen through the eyes of cartoonist Don Simpson for Splitting Image! in 1992.

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IMAGE MANAGEMENT

Matt Hawkins At Marc Silvestri’s Top Cow Productions, Matt Hawkins is the president of dayto-day operations and the company’s chief operating officer. Since 1998, Hawkins has been instrumental in getting Top Cow properties the massive recognition that they have today in Hollywood and the rest of the global business world. Matt has been a part of the Image family since his days at Extreme Studios, where he worked in promotions, marketing and editorial. While working for Liefeld at Awesome Comics and Maximum Press during the mid-’90s, Hawkins created Lady Pendragon, which had a very devoted fan following and was eventually published at Image. Under Matt’s charismatic leadership, Top Cow is one of the most popular lines at Image as they continue to charter into new mediums.

Matt Hawkins. Photo courtesy of Mr. Hawkins.

Todd Nauck, Badrock and Rob Liefeld pose for the camera at Golden Apple Comics. Behind them is a physical Youngblood transport that Rob had built for displaying at conventions and appearances. Photo courtesy of Golden Apple Comics.

How did you end up getting hired by Extreme Studios?

I was hired in April 1993, and I went to the grand opening of the Mile High Comics store down in Anaheim. And at the time I was working for a mortgage banking company. That’s what I was doing, and it was awful work. Honestly, people hate me when I tell them this, but I wasn’t really ever into comics. But my nephew was really into comics, and he wanted to go to this signing, so we went down. And I remember him telling me, “We should go early and get in line.”

I’m like, “What are you talking about?” So I took him down, like, five minutes before the signing, and the line was 700 or 800 people. So we ended up waiting for two-and-a-half, almost three hours, before we even got to the front. And then we got closer to the line, there was this group of seven or eight guys that were all there signing. There was Rob Liefeld, Eric Stephenson, Danny Miki, Richard Horie… and I’m

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trying to remember who else, but those are the main ones I remember. They were all behind the tables there, they all had these black leather jackets on that said “Extreme Studios.”

I saw someone show Rob his portfolio right in front of me, and Rob looked at it and said, “Dude, you’re awesome! You’re hired. Get behind the table.” And I was like, “Whoa.” I was actually taken aback. Here was this guy I’d just spent the last couple hours with who was talking about how much he wanted to do this and how fun it would be, and here was Rob hiring the kid on the spot. And I remember I was just caught up in the moment, I got up to Rob, I’m like, “Hey, man, how are you doing?” And I just said, “You know, I don’t know if you’re looking for anybody that does other things, but I’ve done some marketing work, done some press release stuff, any letters pages, anything like that. I don’t know if you’re looking for anyone like that, but I’d certainly be willing to give it a shot.” And he’s like, “Yeah, we are looking for somebody to do something like that. You should talk to Eric Stephenson.” And I talk to Eric, and I had no idea that at the time that Eric had only been there for, like, a month. I don’t remember actually Eric’s hiring story, but I know that Eric was like an assistant librarian, and that Rob had hired him away from working as an assistant librarian. So here I am chatting with this guy, he was only a year or two older than me, but I was clueless. We were all clueless. It’s sort of funny in hindsight. Eric said, “Give me a call tomorrow.” So I called the next day, and I took some of the initiative, because they said they were looking for somebody to write letter pages and write press releases. I went from the signing right over to a bookstore and bought a book on how to write a press

release, and I wrote a press release based on the template in that book, showing how I would put out a press release to promote their signing at Mile High Comics the day before.

Had you ever done anything like that, just approached somebody and asked for a job?

Never. Long story short, I had a suit on, I went in to meet Eric, and he’s looking at me in the suit like, “Why are you dressed in a suit?” And I’m like, “Oh, I work in a bank, I just came straight from work.” He’s like, “Oh, okay.”

And then Eric was literally just biding time chatting with me waiting for Rob, who was doing something else, to come in. Then, all of a sudden, Rob walks in, and he’s got a tank top on, and these little short shorts and tennis shoes.

And he’s like, “You know what?

We like you. I liked the press release. We’ll hire you. How much do you want to make?”

Just like that. It was ten seconds, 15 seconds. And I was just like, things don’t happen like this. It was just so bizarre to me. And I think I made $30,000 at the bank, a very entry-level salary. I remember thinking, “Well, I’ll tell this guy I make 40 and maybe he’ll pay me 35.” So I said, “I make $40,000 over at the bank, so I’d need to make at least that.” “Fine.”

I was like, “Well, f*ck, I should have said 80.” And the funny thing, I should have, because Rob had no concept of what should have been paid at that time.

I mean, he was a young guy, too. He made $20,000,000 in that first year or whatever it was.

And so there I was. And I was thrown in pretty fast… it was pretty interesting. I think he hired me in April, so San Diego Con was a few months later where Rob sat me down and said, “Look, I’ve decided I want to keep you.” And from then on out, it was a nice relationship up until the company folded up.

I thought his sister ran the office?

His sister did run the accounting office. So she ran the accounting, and she was sort of the office manager. But, no, no, initially I was brought in to write letters pages and to write press releases and basically to help out with the marketing aspects of it.

Because he didn’t have a marketing department, so for the first couple of years I was writing letter pages doing the little Bullpen Bulletins page.

Weren’t you an editor, too?

I was getting an assistant editor credit on some of them because I was doing letters pages. Yeah, I wasn’t really editing any of the early-on books. It was

later, I actually did edit most of the books. I was the editor for the entire Maximum Press line, when we did Avengelyne, Battlestar Galactica, and those books. I was the editor for all of those, which in fact I wrote a few of them. So I started out on the marketing/editorial side, and then pretty much stayed that way. Everyone later perceived me as Rob’s right hand guy, because I became, in a way, Rob’s hatchet guy later on in the company. I was the guy who fired some people and did some things.

Did you have any involvement in trying to get the books out on time?

Yeah, everybody was involved with it. But the thing was, there really wasn’t this incredible sense of urgency to get the books out. I never felt it until later.

It wasn’t until Maximum Press had started, and that was ’95, ’96, where I really started to feel there was this strong sense of urgency to get all our books out.

And one of the most frustrating things of basically working with Rob directly on a book that he would pencil is that he’d take months and months and months to draw a book. And then finally, as it was coming down to the wire, we’d have, like, eight inkers, six colorists, and all these various people trying to get it out so that we could make it out before it was returnable. Based on the fact that he took his time, he had 20 guys working three or four days and nights straight to get his book out. And I think that was pretty common, actually, particularly on the partner-level books. You had a lot of people that would get crammed at the end. I don’t know that that’s entirely ever been remedied. I think that’s still the case in some — not entirely, not as bad, but still somewhat the case today.

Was it your job to deal with the retailers?

Yeah, I was actually the guy at Extreme that dealt

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The original concept illustration of Ripclaw

by Marc Silvestri. ©2007 Top Cow Productions.

MATT HAWKINS

Matt and his lovely wife.

Courtesy of Matt Hawkins.

with retailers, and I would spend two, three, four hours a day on the phone with retailers, talking to them, trying to get them to up orders and set up promotions and do various things. Yeah, it was interesting. A lot of retailers were… they were savage. I mean, a lot of them were bagging on Extreme, and I got a lot of negativity. I learned early on to develop a thick skin, and I think it was probably the constant barrage from retailers early on that, honestly, sort of molded me, it helped me a lot in terms of how I deal with everything in business today that — . I can sum up early Extreme and my view of early Image pretty distinctly in that none of us knew what we were doing, but there was so much money coming in that we were given the luxury of f*cking everything up and still being able to stay in business, which is almost unheard of.

Was it your job to rein Rob in? To ground him a little?

I don’t know if it was my job. With Rob Liefeld specifically — Marc Silvestri’s a whole different animal — but Rob Liefeld ran that company. He was the dictatorial head. It was his word. He micromanaged every aspect of that business. So everything that happened there, he was in charge of and running. I know he’s distanced himself from certain parts of it, but he was a very adamant, micromanaging guy, and you didn’t argue with Rob. If you disagreed with his opinion, you tried to talk around it and tell him, “Well, maybe we should think of this” or… There were a couple of times where I just thought he was wrong and I fabricated retailer stories to get the point across. But that actually happened only once or twice. You know, I can’t really fault Rob. At the end of the day, he was, we all, like I

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said, none of us knew what we were doing. He came out fast, he was young, he was sort of the visual figurehead of Image Comics initially, and everyone was telling him how great he was. And that’s hard to swallow at the age of 22, 23.

When did you see the sales numbers fall?

The orders declined from the day I started. The decline was very gradual. That’s the thing I don’t think a lot of people realize is that, although sales were dropping, people were still making a halfmillion bucks in profit. And if you’re putting out a book or two a month, and you’re making $1,000,000 a month in profit on those books, half that going to overhead or whatever, sometimes it’s difficult when you get advice to do something different when what you’re doing is making so much money. So there’s a million things I would do different going back and starting over. I don’t know.

Did anyone at Extreme worry that comics might be a fad? That they might not be around tomorrow?

None of us saw it as a fad. I mean, we all thought we were bona fide rock stars. Less so for me because I was more on the business side and wasn’t writing any books, and none of the fans gave a sh*t who I was, but…. The thing you’ve got to understand about Rob is from when I started to about early ’95, he was, I think, one of the most popular comic book artists to ever exist. Which is interesting when you think about it, you look at his status in the industry today. I was with him in restaurants, in airports, where people, random people would come up to him and ask for his autograph. It wasn’t like he was sitting at a convention at a table. You look at half a dozen of the superstars today and you go stick them in a regular mall, they could sit there at a table for eight hours and almost no one would have a clue who they were.

I don’t know if we’ll ever see a time like that again.

It seems like a whole lifetime ago. It really was.

But it was great, we had a great time. It wasn’t until ’96-ish where things started getting really bad, and I think part of it there was Rob — I mean, this is one of the things that people don’t understand about Rob Liefeld. He was so generous. He was one of the most generous guys I have ever met in terms of how he would pay people; he overpaid everyone, and he created this culture of entitlement to where guys who were making $15,000 or $12,000 a year as a clerk somewhere, were making $500,000 a year at the age of 23, 24, and thinking that they deserved it. It wasn’t being run like a business. You take a guy who’s making $15,000 a year and you pay him $30,000, and you give him ten percent a year, and occasionally you bump him up $10,000 a year, and that’s how you do it in the real world. But nothing was handled that way. I remember there was a point where Rob was going to pay me a page rate, $2,500 a letters page and all these other things. And I sat down and did the math, and I’m like, “Holy sh*t, he just gave me a $70,000 raise.” Who does that for a guy nine months into his job? Believe me, I was very appreciative.

But you had to know it wasn’t going to last forever?

Well, again, that’s easy to see now, but you’ve got

to understand, Rob was meeting with Will Smith and Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg and Jim Cameron, and people in Hollywood would stroll through our offices, people you see on TV, and people were interviewing Rob all the time. Continental magazine did a feature, a cover on him. The one thing Rob was very good at and really smart about was getting press, and he had a very, very good PR agent. I forget her name now, but she was Schwarzenegger’s press agent. For two or three years I believe that the outside world looked at comics sort of through the eyes of Rob Liefeld. He was everywhere. He would go in random magazines and there would be an article on him and what we were doing, and I think that really propped us up probably a lot longer than it should have.

Did you have anything to do with building the spaceship?

Yes. Yeah. That was actually a good buddy of mine that I still work with today, named Greg Aronowitz, who built that. I’ll never forget this. I still give Greg sh*t about it today, but he built this thing out of steel or whatever it was. The thing was ridiculously heavy, so it cost us, like, $15,000 just to rent a truck and move it across country to go to a convention. And that thing today, I don’t know if you know, is at a paintball park.

You also had an animatronic Badrock, too, right?

There was Badrock and Kodiak. In fact, I was the guy inside the suit of Kodiak. Kodiak from The New Men. That thing was insanely hot. These suits were $15,000 to $20,000 to build. But Rob was a big kid.

He was having a good time. He was turning his creations into reality, and you know what? I mean, part of it was genius….

Was he doing these things to compete with the other Image partners? He had a big rivalry with Jim Lee. Yeah, he was obsessed on a competitive level with Jim. He was really, really tight with Todd. Todd would call, and Rob and he would get on speaker and talk for three or four hours in the late evening/early morning hours, while the two of them would be drawing.

And they would do that a lot. There were a couple times I think Todd just wanted to chat with somebody while he was drawing, and there were a couple times I remember Todd calling and Rob wasn’t there, and I ended up talking to Todd for hours.

When did the incident with Michael Turner and Marc Silvestri take place? Were you already friendly with Marc?

Around the time of Maximum Press was honestly when Top Cow was ascending. Because Silvestri was always, at least from my point of view when I was at Extreme, perceived of as being, like, Jim’s guy. He was in a studio with Jim Lee, so it was Jim Lee, who was kind of the head guy, and then there was Whilce Portacio and Marc Silvestri, who were the second-tier guys. And it was interesting, because I remember at the time Top Cow started ascending with Witchblade and Darkness, the same time period, ’95, ’96, and Rob had the idea that Extreme and Top Cow should merge. And I remember very clearly meeting with Marc Silvestri at [Third Street Promenade], and Rob giving him the sales pitch that we should merge the two studios together, we’d be

stronger than WildStorm, and we could do this, that and the other thing. And to Marc and Brett’s credit, they were both very cordial about it, and they say, y’know, “We’ll think about it. Let’s talk about it, we’ll consider it.”

Working at Top Cow now, obviously I know that Marc told me that there was no f*ckin’ way he was ever going to do that. And I can remember walking out with Rob and getting in the car, and Rob’s like, “They’re not going to do it.

F*ck those guys.”

And at that point I remember we made a concerted effort to get Mike Turner, Joe Benitez and Dave Finch, and try to get them to draw books for us. And there’s an interesting sequence of events that Marc and I laugh about somewhat is, I’ve only honestly heard Marc Silvestri yell once in the entire time I’ve worked with the guy.

That was actually before I was working with him, when he was yelling at me for trying to get Mike Turner to come over to Extreme. And Rob and I were aggressively discussing, “We need these guys, we need these guys.” And I had called Mike Turner at Top Cow’s offices. I told Mike I called and I said, “Give me a call.” And I remember I was talking to Mike for a second, and he was like, “Hey, can you hold on for a second?” And I’m like, “Sure, sure.”

And I was on hold for a minute or so, and suddenly Marc got on the phone and was just yelling at me. He chewed me out, up one side, I mean, I was terrified.

And I remember I immediately walked into Rob’s office and I said, “Dude, Marc just screamed at me, “ and yadda, yadda, yadda. And Rob was sitting there saying, “Hmm. Well, let’s just see how this plays out.”

And it was the next day that Top Cow left Image.

Rob never did that to Jim Lee. He never tried to take any of his artists.

That’s not true at all. Those guys were trying to steal talent from each other all the time in the early days.

What happened to Extreme Studios over time?

The studio was pretty big. We were in an entire floor of one of the Disney buildings over by Anaheim Stadium when I first started. And that was, man, those were nice digs, really nice digs. And then we

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Ripclaw and Marc Silvestri. Photo courtesy of Golden Apple Comics.

MATT HAWKINS

Grifter drawn

by Jim Lee. ©2007 WildStorm Productions.

moved to a place in Fullerton, which was still pretty nice. These were not small office spaces. I look at Top Cow’s space today, and it’s probably a quarter of what Extreme’s space was even in its declined phase. It was still pretty big. The one thing that Rob did, and I was always interested in this, actually, if you look at the guys… Jim Lee hired a bunch of white kids, and Rob hired a bunch of Asian kids… it was fun times. I look back on those early days as those were great, fun times.

So how did you arrive at Top Cow? The interesting thing was, when Awesome Comics shut down, John Hyde actually asked me to stay on for a period of time, undisclosed, he didn’t say how long, so I could help transition everything. Rob did try to resurrect Awesome for a while, on his own. [I took Lady Pendragon to Image Central instead of publishing it with Rob], and I think he looked at that with me as being a betrayal of sorts. Rob and a lot of the Image founders were all the same way, they all were, like, samurai loyalty type guys. You were either with them or you weren’t. But all in all, a lot of people have asked me if I have any bitterness towards Rob, and I really don’t. I mean, the guy gave me my shot. I wouldn’t be sitting where I am

right now, president of Top Cow. I’m the producer of an animated series. There’s a lot of things that I have right now that I wouldn’t have if it wasn’t for Rob. And I believe everyone makes their own fortune. But he gave me my break, and for that I’ll never forget, and I’ll always owe him.

Is the relationship Top Cow has with Marvel important?

The relationship we have with Marvel is important, yes. I think what we’ve done is we’ve taken a look at, right now in the industry Marvel and DC have taken over dominance. There’s no question. So there’s no question of that. Image at one point could have been the number three publisher and stayed that way, as a strong third company to Marvel and DC, but it just didn’t really happen, for a million different reasons. It was several things. It’s a PR move, it’s a publicity thing, it’s a financial deal, it is a strategic merger for us. This administration at Marvel has been, in my opinion, the best one ever. I love those guys.

Are you happy with the current state of Image?

Yeah, I think Marc still owns a quarter of it, and we’ve been very happy with Erik Larsen and Eric Stephenson and the regime they’re running. I think that they’ve done some interesting things. The advantage right now at Image Comics is I think you have everyone that is really, really trying to put out high-quality entertainment and to do books that are important, that have value. There is no one just throwing sh*t out there just to see if it would stick.

And everything’s being run like a business now, which is the way it always should have been, but it wasn’t, of course. It was being run as a hobby.

COLOR PORTFOLIO CREDITS Page 161: Savage Dragon by Erik Larsen. ©2007 Erik Larsen Page 162: WildC.A.T.s by Jim Lee. ©2007 WildStorm Prod.

Page 163: Spawn by Todd McFarlane. ©2007 Todd McFarlane Productions.

Page 164: Wetworks by Whilce Portacio. ©2007 WildStorm Prod.

Page 165: Hunter-Killer by Marc Silvestri. ©2007 Top Cow Prod.

Page 166: Drawing From Life

by Jim Valentino. ©2007 Jim Valentino.

Page 167: Danger Girl by J. Scott Campbell. ©2007 J.S. Campbell.

Page 168: The Pitt by Dale Keown. ©2007 Dale Keown.

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ASSESSING IMAGE

Counter Tension (Or: “How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Not Solely Blame Image for the Fall of Comics”) When Phil Seuling’s Seagate Distributing Company created the direct market distribution system in 1972, he probably unknowingly changed the entire economic course of comics for the foreseeable future. By avoiding the traditional newsstand channels (where sellers can return books), he created a system where comics were bought from direct distributors for Marvel, DC, and smaller comic book publishers — this window would allow sellers to get their books earlier than newsstands at competitively discounted rates on a non-returnable basis. The creation of the direct market allowed the rise of devoted comics shops and retailers that would cater to a dedicated readership. Publishers encouraged the growth of the direct market because it was a winwin scenario that not only built customer loyalty, but provided a lucrative new source of business.

Throughout the seventies, sales were declining on the newsstands; a new market where books were non-returnable was the future that they were going to pursue to its fullest extent.

The direct market also allowed independent and alternative publishers a chance to gamble on a mechanism with which to keep their readers – books like Cerebus, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Bone would have never found success on newsstands.

“What this created was an environment where small publishers could enter the market,” said Steve Milo, the founder of American Entertainment (which during the early nineties was the biggest single retailer of comics) and the pioneer of comics retailing online.

“They could enter a market on a non-returnable basis, which was a very low risk, and they could be a lot more risky in terms of their offerings. So they didn’t have to worry about coming out with mainstream

products. They could take more chances. So this really created kind of a creative revolution, and really opened up a lot more opportunities for upcoming talent who previously had really been restricted to just Marvel and DC.” When the media’s anticipation of the Batman movie began in 1988, there were many prominent comic book distributors (key ones were Diamond, Comics Unlimited, Capital City, and Heroes World) when the boom in comics exploded wide open. In the years prior, major comics publishers had set their sights so strongly on the direct market that they practically allowed their product’s presence on convenience, grocery and drug stores to disappear by turning a blind eye to the newsstand market — more than 70% of their revenue coming from just the direct market. Stores dedicated to selling comic books and related paraphernalia began emerging in malls and local neighborhoods all across the country.

In the beginning, it was practically a license to print money from an audience of readers and speculators too eager to give it up.

“Batman was insane for the comics business,”

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Second row, left to right:: Erik Larsen, Marc Silvestri, Whilce Portacio, Rob Liefeld, Len Brown (Topps creative director) and Ira Friedman (Topps V.P.). First row, left to right: Todd McFarlane, Jim Valentino, Jim Lee, Arthur T. Shorin (Topps chairman & CEO), and Jim Salicrup (Topps Comics’ editor-inchief and former Marvel editor). This is the only known photo of the seven Image founders together.

The occasion took place on July 12, 1993, at the L.A. headquarters of the Creative Artists Agency for the signing of a Topps and Image Comics trading card set. Courtesy of Jim Salicrup and Topps.

COUNTER TENSION

Five of Image’s founding partners, during an appearance at Golden Apple Comics in Los Angeles.

Next page, top: Marc Silvestri gives artistic advice to youngsters in Los Angeles.

Rob Liefeld at Golden Apple Comics in Los Angeles.

recalls Jim Hanley, the founder of the landmark Jim Hanley’s Universe stores in New York. “The people who had the books could just sell anything Batman.

That year we had opened up a store in the Staten Island Mall, and it was the perfect year to be in a mall store. We were selling all sorts of Batman merchandise hand over fist, and we were selling all the Batman books. We’d go down to Comics Unlimited, which was our distributor, twice a week to pick stuff up, and we’d say, ‘How many Dark Knights do you have?’ ‘We have four cases.’ “Okay, we’ll take two.’ Or, ‘We’ll take all four.’ They say, ‘Can you hold on, just take two, and take more next Wednesday, because we’ll have more of them in?’ ‘Okay, we’ll take the other two on Wednesday.’ Every time we walked through the door there we took two or three cases of the “Death of Robin” trade. Marvel seemed to deliberately back off that year. But they saved stuff up, so the beginning of 1990 they put out a bunch of new #1’s.”

Without a doubt the mass epidemic of speculation took off around this time. “Oh, yeah, there was the undercurrent of that,” Steve Geppi, the Founder and President of Diamond Comic Distributors Inc. remembered. “You had what I call the baseball scabs coming over and perpetrating their fraud on the comic industry. The same thing they did with cards that they busted, that they came over here and decided to do with comics; you know, buy cases of them and have people believe that they were going to put their kids through college on cases of recent comics.”

As new readers and fortune-hunters entered the marketplace, they gravitated heavily to the emerging art

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talent coming from Marvel. “Oh, absolutely,” commented Chuck Rozanski, the owner of Mile High Comics and a prominent figure amongst comics retailers. “They had a huge fan base, and that’s why they were able to step so successfully away from Marvel and to strike out on their own. See, part of that came from Marvel’s philosophy, and Terry Stewart’s philosophy, of making stars. And so Marvel in effect created the notoriety of these guys by really, really pushing their star power and using that to sell books, but then in the end it came back and really did bite them in the tail. I think to this day it’s the philosophy of Marvel to downplay individual creators and to really emphasize the team effort and the editors and so on. Marvel to this day doesn’t send people out that much on a promotional tour. You almost never see them set up at conventions in any real substantive way. They are trying to keep their creators very much under their thumb.”

Since comics publishing was ruled by Marvel and DC, Terry Stewart probably imagined that Lee, Liefeld and McFarlane didn’t really pose any real threat to him after their impromptu meeting in 1991. He likely thought that they’d change their minds and keep in line. At the time, there weren’t many options; most major artists that went independent would come back to Marvel or DC with their tail between their legs. A key in Image’s success was not only that the top artists banded together, but for the first time the retailers showed an abundance of confidence in showing their support by ordering Image books with little worries. Milo said, “I really thought Image was going to be extremely successful because I really felt that they were really tied down by Marvel. There was definitely a Marvel method back in that time, and I think from a creativity standpoint, this was the way to go… I think Youngblood #1 we sold 40,000 copies, and I think Spawn #1 we had 50,000, and WildC.A.T.s was probably right at the 30,000 to 40,000 range.

WildC.A.T.s came out a little later. They started to dilute themselves, so the initial ones had the bigger runs because there weren’t as many of them at that point.”

“They were good for the industry!” Geppi confirms.

“Their timing was good. It was an innovative time.

And I think they made their mark, and I think they learned a few lessons along the way, and guys like Todd and Jim Lee really maintained a good business sense and made some good moves for themselves when they saw that it wasn’t sustainable… It was somewhat of a Renaissance. You might even, with due respect, compare it to Marvel in 1962. All of a sudden the market got shaken up. New things were happening. There could be an independent title that would sell huge quantities, and that was very, very... it was great exposure for the industry. Like I said, the downside was when it collapsed because it wasn’t built on solid ground, but the quality titles stayed, and the quality creators stayed. And I think it expanded the market. I’m sure Marvel and DC weren’t happy about it at the time. Particularly Marvel, because Todd had defected, and he was doing Spider-Man. But he leveraged his popularity on Spider-Man, and

his newfound fame, into a platform for Image Comics.

And Rob was doing his thing, and Marc, and all those guys... the cumulative value of their individual talent was very powerful. Individually some of them were very powerful, but it really took them all together to get the kind of attention that they got.”

After the departure of the Image creators, Marvel continued to expand their line — but with all of their star writers and artists working at Image and other comic companies, the company saturated the market with sub-par talent and novelty gimmicks to pump up their stock, wallets and shareholders. To regain the consumerism spotlight of the era, DC left their conservative role and got aggressive by playing with stunts like breaking Batman’s back and killing Superman in huge multi-issue storylines.

Although both events succeeded in their objective in generating enormous sales, print runs and media coverage – the market was beginning to show signs that speculators were starting to get weary after so many events and books from the entire industry, that they stopped buying comics by the pallets. So when did it all finally come crashing down? Was there one book in particular that began the downfall for dealers everywhere?

“I can even give you the date: it’s April 25, 1993,” answered Chuck Rozanski, “That was the day that “Superman Returns” shipped. I mean, I’m still here. That you’re even asking me did I over-order on these books, these books were the kiss of death.

Anybody who over-ordered on those saw their investment wiped out because in effect you were making an investment where you were paying $1.00, $1.10 a book for books that, a year later, on a wholesale basis, were worth a nickel, if that. So

when you have a 95% loss in an investment that you make in almost any business – I mean, forget about comic books, I mean any business – if you invest in something and you lose 95% of your investment in a year, you’re screwed.

And so the whole reason that I’m here talking to you right now is because we did require our customers to pay us in advance. We didn’t accept orders from people unless we had a credit card on file, and that’s what saved us.

Because when people were bailing out of books, yeah, we ate some, there were always people whose credit cards went dead or whatever. There’s always ways that people can get around that. But it wasn’t as bad by any means as it was for other people. In the summer of 1993, we had our Megastore that was right down from the Image headquarters, in Anaheim.

And I would go to the Image offices, and things just completely imploded. Because we would have an Image book that was selling 200 copies, and then the next month it would sell 130, so we would cut back to 130, and then the next month it would sell 65, so we’d cut it back to 65, and then the next month it would sell 35. When the bottom fell out, it fell out really quickly. It was literally June, July, August, September, October of 1993, things fell apart unbelievably quickly.”

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Typical advertisement for Steve Milo’s American Entertainment store, commonly found in Marvel Comics and Image Comics of the early ’90s.

Golden Apple Comics’ flyer promoting Jim Lee’s in-store appearance and the debut of WildC.A.T.s #1 in 1992.

COUNTER TENSION

This photograph was taken the day that filmmaker John Singleton gave Todd McFarlane a plaque at Golden Apple Comics for hitting the million-selling mark with Spawn. From left to right: Hank Kanalz, Jim Valentino, John Singleton, Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, Todd McFarlane and Cyan McFarlane. ©2007 Golden Apple Comics.

Erik Larsen in the spotlight, during Image Comics’ early days. ©2007 Tom Mason.

“’93 was when things went really bad,” Jim Hanley echoed. “April of ’93 was when the “Return of Superman” came out, the white-bagged issue. We knew that you can’t get lighting in your bottle again and again. But we still got stuck with them. We just didn’t get stuck with them the way a lot of other people did. But we had over-ordered so far across the board at that point that... In December of ’92, we were rolling in money. In December of ’92 we paid out $30,000 in Christmas bonuses to our staff. $30,000.

And we still had a 30% pretax profit. These are numbers which don’t register with you because you don’t deal with this stuff, but these are numbers that, like, I tell this to other retailers. First of all, the idea of $30,000 out in Christmas bonuses is unfathomable, and the idea that after that you have a 30% pretax profit? I mean, these guys are lucky to get a 10% pretax profit. But it was just so insane, it was like we were selling so many comics we couldn’t ramp up expenses fast enough to make it unprofitable. Yeah,

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some customers left (by 1993), but it was mostly that customers stopped buying crazy amounts of stuff.”

DC apparently began to understand the extent of damage the market was withstanding; it felt like they slowed down with publicity stunts and gimmick covers after Superman’s resurrection. Meanwhile, Image tried to lessen their biggest problem: late books. “Right,” Rozanski said, “because in those days we had no return privileges for books that were late shipping, and the Image books were what prompted that policy to change, where Diamond and Capital and the other distributors that were still around at that point, did start to enforce on the publishers that they were going to have to make books that were late after a certain amount of time returnable. I was at a couple of distributor meetings, the Diamond meeting I remember in particular, where there was a near-riot among the retailers because they were so angry because they were stuck with all these late-shipping books that they didn’t want anymore. It killed them. It put them out of business.”

But for all the faults of DC, Image, Valiant and other Johnny-come-lately comic companies, Marvel’s management helped more than any entity to bury the comics market. In a dying industry, they continued to cater to the lowest common denominator and pump more “collectibles” and insignificant comics than anyone. When they felt that the comics market started to turn to mere bones, they began to buy trading card companies by overpaying for them in market value – in the hope of combining and cornering the hype in the collector’s market in trading cards and comics. Desperation would lead them to purchase Heroes World Distribution so that Marvel could keep every nickel by distributing their own comics and avoid any middleman. This moment changed the way that comics were to be distributed

into stores for the future.

With Marvel going exclusive as their own representative, retailers and distributors had to react quickly if they were going to survive in this arena.

“Nobody was happy about that, I guess,” Steve Geppi recalled about the Marvel/ Heroes World era, “Especially the way it was communicated, or it wasn’t communicated.

We found out kind of covertly. But that said, you could argue that in my particular case, although I would have not planned on it, it worked out, because their mistake led to a lot of other things happening that led to our position today… they had no capability. With due respect to Ivan Snyder (head of Heroes World), who was a friend of mine, there was a double mistake that Marvel made.

Number one, if they were going to buy a distributor, they bought the wrong one. Mainly because, no disrespect to Ivan, he was a very good, small, regional distributor, but the capabilities you need to do it nationally, they didn’t have that infrastructure. And then secondly, when they announced they were only going to carry their own product and nobody else’s, it was a mistake, because even all of Marvel’s volume isn’t enough to justify a nationwide distributor.”

In the midst of Heroes World, Steve Milo and various other retailers were approached by Marvel to buy excess inventory. He would win the lot and create Marvel Mart stores to sell these goods. He was able to see the extent of Marvel’s disorganization. Steve related, “The unfortunate component was the fact that it really destroyed the distribution market. But we weren’t a distributor, so it wasn’t as big an issue.

I mean, Marvel Mart was kind of silly. They just were never set up to do consumer retail sales, and they knew that. Marvel literally lost control of their inventory. They literally didn’t know what they had or didn’t have, and we bought, for pennies on the dollars, 300 trailer-loads sight unseen of Marvel inventory. We literally bought 300 tractor-trailer-loads of Marvel product. Heroes World was just a little distributor, and was never set up to do national distribution, and they lost control of their inventory, and they just had inventory everywhere. And basically, they literally sold us stuff sight unseen. They had no idea what was in it. No idea.”

Not only was Heroes World a logistical nightmare, but in the heat of business other comic publishers

chose their allegiances with a distributor for standing up to Marvel in the new marketplace. In doing so, they empowered Diamond Comics by making them the only major distributor of comics. “It was very important,” Geppi stressed, “because once we got DC, it sent a message that we were the likely survivor, because arguably whoever lost Marvel and DC would really have trouble. And to Capital’s credit, they stayed afloat for another year. But Image was another linchpin for us, because when we got Image, you could argue when we got DC and Image, it made it easy for Dark Horse and all these other people to come aboard for us, because they didn’t want to be on a sinking ship whereas it was perceived. Whether that ship would have sunk or not, you don’t know, but I do believe they thought, ‘Diamond’s now got all of DC, Diamond’s now got all of Image. I’d better get with them or I’m going to be sailing on a ship that has

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Todd McFarlane displays an assortment of his action figure wares at the McFarlane Toy Store and Showroom in Tempe, Arizona.

Jim Lee and Larry Stroman of Tribe sign for fans in the early 1990s.

COUNTER TENSION The late Bill Liebowitz, owner of Golden Apple Comics, poses for a snapshot with Rob Liefeld. Mr. Liebowitz was a good friend and loyal supporter to the Image founders.

Bill helped coordinate many successful Image events in his store and with his pals in the retailing community across the country.

Courtesy of Golden Apple Comics.

Gareb Shamus and Spawn at Golden Apple Comics in 1992. Gareb’s Wizard magazine became a powerhouse in the comics industry via the early Image and the early ’90s speculation wave.

no future.’”

Retailers like Jim Hanley saw the strengthening role of Diamond’s position with great concern. “I thought at the time it was the biggest mistake that DC ever made,” Hanley said, “essentially putting all the other distributors out of business in order to annoy Marvel. And the reason they did it was because they were so terrified of Marvel’s, and especially [owner Ron] Perelman’s, disruptive effect on the industry that they believed Marvel’s buying Heroes World was going to put them at a terrible disadvantage. Capital wouldn’t have gone out of business. All the other distributors would have gone out of business, but there would have been an alternative. Marvel only lasted a year-and-a-half or two years out of Diamond. And when they went back to Diamond, they went cap in hand and made a deal that was much worse than the deal they could have made because they just had to get back into Diamond because they had to shut down Heroes World.”

By December of 1994, “Marvelution” was announced as a new publishing plan that instead became the first round of massive firings within the company. A year later, “Marvelcution” cleaned out their offices with another wave of firings (this time with security guards present at the exits). More gradual downsizing would continue into the new millennium. Marvel spent over $350 million in overvalued trading card companies like Fleer and SkyBox International — not to mention pouring hundreds of millions buying Italian sticker manufacture Panini, children magazine publisher Welsh and Malibu Comics to diversify and create corporate synergy in the doomed collectible market. It would take years for the company and the rest of the industry to slowly recover from the bankruptcy that the Ron Perelman era of Marvel caused.

In the end, all we have is a glut of worthless comics because Marvel focused on the buck rather than the books. With

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that attitude, bankruptcy became inevitable for Marvel.

“We called that period the Period of the Suit,” Chuck Rozanski uttered. “Because that’s when all these jackass pieces of sh*t people came in, and they all started wearing suits and strutting around and acting like they knew their ass from a hole in the ground, when in point of fact they didn’t know anything about comics at all, and they were basically just parasites. But they came in and, boy, did they know how to run these card companies, and they knew how to do speculative books and eighteen different variant covers and all that kind of crap, but these people didn’t know... they had no caring for what was going on whatsoever.

If the industry came, went, or died, they didn’t care.

They were strictly in it for the money. And they were just scum. I mean, all up and down the equation. And you can start with Ron Perelman, (who) would have been the head jerk, and then follow the chain from there. But you could go to San Diego and you’d have all these guys walking around with their little locking briefcases and their three-piece suits. It all just made me want to gag. It was just a terrible period in the comics industry, because you had all these people thinking that they could ride this horse to riches. And they didn’t care if they rode it to death as long as they got their money out of it.”

In the end, everyone was to blame for fueling the greed that occurred in the nineties: the comic book companies, the speculators, the readers, the retailers, the talent, the editors and anyone who forgot that comics were meant to be read and enjoyed. There’s plenty of blame to go around. Although the marketplace is no longer this enormous entity, everyone seemed to learn something from it. The few retailers in today’s market are more knowledgeable about their consumers and their methods for ordering books. Later, creators and editors began to focus more on their stories and craft than gimmicks and events. Comic readers learned to use their financial voice by laying off books that weren’t up to par as the speculators fled the marketplace. Today’s new breeds of readers are discovering comics and graphic novels via bookstores and the Internet. Yet, the more things change, the more they seem to stay the same.

Alternative and variant covers have slowly started to enter the mainstream market again. There’s also an abundance of late books from Marvel and DC over the last two years that are beginning to concern today’s readers. Let’s hope that none of us have forgotten our history lessons.

Clockwise from top left: Todd McFarlane with the Spawnmobile at Golden Apple Comics. Jim Lee sketching at Jim Hanley’s Universe on May 19, 2003. Jim Lee with Joe Kelly, Jimmy Palmiotti, Chris Cross and the boys at Jim Hanley’s in 2003. Dedicated fans holding out their Jim Lee comic books outside of Jim Hanley’s Universe. Grifter, Jim Lee, Marc Silvestri and Zealot make Golden Apple Comics their first stop of the “Killer Instinct Tour” in 1993. Travis Charest promoting his WildC.A.T.s Special with a signing at Golden Apple Comics. Images courtesy of Jim Hanley’s Universe and Golden Apple Comics. Next page: Poster for the 1992 Chicago Comic-Con, where the founders cemented their fame in a tent outside the main convention hall. All characters ©2007 the respective holders.

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I M A G E A S S O C I AT E

Steve Oliff Steve Oliff is one of the true masters of comic book coloring with a career that spans back to the ’70s and continues to the present day. He’s provided sophisticated hues to such classic stories as The Death of Captain Marvel, X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills, and Avengers Forever. With his groundbreaking artistic work for the Marvel translation of Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo, Oliff became one of the key pioneers in integrating the digital coloring age into the field. By the arrival of Image Comics, Steve and his innovative Olyoptics Studios made everyone take note of Image’s top notch production, which at the time was second to none. At the height of Image’s boom period, Olyoptics provided color and separations for over 70 percent of the line; eventually WildStorm, Extreme and Top Cow developed their own coloring departments.

Steve’s contribution to books like Spawn and The Maxx remain eye-opening in terms of how natural the colors and art came together. Oliff recently returned to comics on Bob Burden and Rick Geary’s Gumby Comics.

In the ’80s, what you were doing was kind of revolutionary at the time. No one had quite seen someone use colors in comics like you did.

Well, there was nobody doing full color, and that’s what I’ve always done. Since basically my earliest work, it’s all been hand done full-color, until we took over the computer stuff. I did a little bit of the coded color guide stuff where you have it handseparated, but I started off on the four-color Hulk magazine and Bill Sienkiewicz’s first Moon Knight story in 1978, and it just went from there.

You hadn’t worked for Todd before Spawn; he was the one who brought you into the Image fold?

Yeah, he was. We’d talked about it for a long time. He said that he liked the stuff that I’d been doing earlier. I think this was probably after Akira had started, but I remember we had talked about working on a Hulk graphic novel that he was supposed to do, and then he got the Spider-Man gig.

When it went into its own title, he talked to Marvel about trying to see if they’d be interested in having me do the color on that, but it didn’t work out.

So when Spawn came along, he sent us a test series of pages. He was basically hedging his bets and he wasn’t sure who he wanted, really, so he had some test guides done and some color separations done. Olyoptics was pretty well cruising on Akira by that time, because I think this was ’92, and we’d started Akira in ’89.

Akira was ground-breaking work.

Yeah, because that was the first comic book to be colored using a computer.

Who took that chance? Was it Archie Goodwin?

It was Archie Goodwin. I’d been interested in computers for a long time.

I’d been coloring first on photostats and different things, that was in the late ’70s, early ’80s, and then we did the graylines with Eclipse. Then we moved onto some of the blueline projects that I did for DC, like… Well, the first blueline project I did was for First Comics. It was Howard Chaykin’s Time 2, the First graphic novel, which is some of my best coloring ever, actually. And then went on to the Blackhawk mini-series for DC, which led to Cosmic Odyssey, Gilgamesh II and a bunch of other blueline projects.

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Steve Oliff.

Courtesy of Steve.

Armature, mascot for the colorist’s Olyoptics company. ©2007 Steve Oliff.

STEVE OLIFF

Akira. ©2007 Katsuhiro Otomo.

So you were keen on using computers?

I had always been interested in computers, because I started seeing the potential for them. I thought, “There’s gotta be some way that computers can do it.” So I’d done a test of a Spider-Man thing where I hired this computer graphic company, Time Arts. For one slide it cost $475—$75 an hour. I took it back to Jim Shooter and presented him with the concepts, and he just went, “Nah, computers, comics, never gonna happen.” And he was just completely dismissive of it, so I just went, “Okay.” But I never quit thinking about it. Right about the time there was the Iron Man graphic novel that Mike Saenz was doing, I met him. He had been scheduled to work with this company called Pixelcraft formed by a guy named Kenny Giordano. Mike is pretty much of a Mac-based guy, and this Pixelcraft software was a PC-based program. In 1987, I went to a convention in Philadelphia and met them. I came home and then, within a few months Mike dumped the Pixelcraft people in favor of his buddy who was working on a Macintosh system. So these guys had no place to show off their cool software that they had developed. Kenny was a color separator and a printer, and his son Khouri, wrote this program to do computer coloring. It was designed for CMYK, and you had a very limited range of things you could do with it. This was long before Photoshop. We just had top-to-bottom, left-to-right, and angle blends, and a radial gradation, but we had no airbrush function, really, or anything like that. And it was all completely numbers-based, so you really knew what you were getting. What I found out was if the colors were dialed in right on the numbers, then it would generally translate well. Anyway, so when the Akira job came up, and a friend of mine showed me the black-&-white graphic novels, I thought, “Okay, these are pretty cool. This might be a big job.” So when I got the tryout pages, I just busted my ass on them. I did airbrush on them, I used Pantone films, I did everything to make it just look sharp. Archie tried some tests to see about doing a regular kind of color separation, to use the little old ladies up in Connecticut at Chemical Color, and it just didn’t look right. So I said, “Well, listen, I’ve got these people with the computers who’ve got this software, and maybe we can work out a

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deal.” The way we worked it was that Kenny gave me a machine loaded with their software that I did the separation work on, and they did all the film outputting.

That’s how they got their money, on the backside.

And we came up with a price that worked for Marvel, so we started Akira. Right about that same time, there was another computer system that had come in over at DC. The difference was that they weren’t trying to make it look any different than the normal, flat 64-tone comic-book color. See, they weren’t really using the gradations, or any other things. So you’d be hardpressed to find what those comic books were that were coming out right about the same time. Akira was the first time that the color guide artist was also the color separator. And not only that, I was trying to do something radically different.

The majority of guys who color, when they see the final product, it never looks like how they wanted it to look, or it never looks as good as the color guides.

No, it almost never does, but that’s just because you don’t have control. Nowadays the variations from Photoshop on screen to what you get in print can be enormous. I colored the first issue of Akira myself, except for about four or five pages one of my assistants did. We had no idea what they would look like.

From #2 on, I had more and more people working on the computer side, because it was just such a massive project. I would do the color guides, give them to my computer crew, then I would go back over them and play art director, and I would go in and make corrections and fix things. For the first ten issues of Akira, we didn’t see any proofs of anything until it hit the final printed page. I didn’t have a printer that could do it. The way we worked was that I would get a disc sent to me, I would color it, copy it back to the disc, send it back, and they would output it. Then, when the comic came out, we could check proofs.

This is a slow process?

It was, kind of, but it was mostly just frustrating because you didn’t know what you were going to get until months later. But finally, with #11, I got a printer that was very accurate. It was a Mitsubishi G650 wax thermal transfer printer. What we found is that — you know, nowadays everybody’s got Epsons and HP little printers. The inkjet printers are not very accurate.

The G-650 was a big old dinosaur that cost five grand at the time, which was an enormous amount of money to me, but if the proofs came out good on the G650, I knew that it was going to look good in print. Once we had that stability worked out, that gave us a great deal of control. And then we started pushing the limits of what we could do with that. We did Akira, and then our first project for DC was the adaptation of the first Batman movie, the Jack Nicholson one. By that time we had really begun to figure it out, so when it came time for the Image revolution to take place, we were ready. Todd wanted his book to look different and better in color than anybody else had, so we provided that.

When Todd gave you the samples, were you aware of other colorists competing for the same job?

Yup. I knew about a couple. Let’s see… Clydene Nee down at In Color in San Diego. She had done a sample. And then I don’t know if anybody else had

submitted any color things. Maybe they tried Digital Chameleon. By the time Image came along, Photoshop was just starting to take off.

So you really wanted this gig? Did you have faith that this was going to be something that was going to be revolutionary in comics?

Well, no, I had no idea it was going to be revolutionary. I just figured this is an awful lot of talent leaving Marvel and they were going off on their own.

And Todd was willing to pay pretty well, too. I thought, okay, this could be great. It was perfect timing, because by the time Image came along, Olyoptics had grown into a pretty good bunch of people. Because it wasn’t just me, I just happened to have fortunately been able to collect some incredibly talented people considering the smallness of the town that I live in.

There was a lot of resistance from Marvel and DC to upgrading. They were still basically almost in that fourcolor system from the ’40s.

Yes, they were.

Until the Image guys came around, nothing progressed.

Well, they had made a few little steps forward, like they let Akira go through, but that was an isolated case. But once Todd came out, because I think Rob had the first Image book…

Yup, Youngblood came out first.

Youngblood, right, it did. And Digital Chameleon did the color, and it looked pretty much like crap. Todd didn’t want that. And then we came out with Spawn #1, and all of a sudden the whole stakes were different.

It wasn’t perfect, but we were starting to hit some things. Todd was doing smart marketing, and lots of cool things. The one thing that Todd was really good at, that set him apart from the other Image guys, was being very regular, methodical. The books came out.

What we did is he gave us a flat base rate, and instead of giving us a royalty, he gave us a bonus if we met the deadline. The bonus was several thousand dollars, so when Todd’s book came in, we dropped everything else, especially at the beginning.

It was a very artist-driven book. It was like, his art and your colors, that was the package.

Right, and then Orzechowski’s letters, because he had a very distinctive style, too. Yeah, I still have a T-shirt that they printed up called “The MOO Crew”: McFarlane, Orzechowski, and Oliff. Todd did a weird drawing of this cow’s udder.

So you were personally invested in this character after a while? You didn’t let your assistants do it for a while, right? This was the one you would do the color guides for?

Actually, no. All of us did the stuff. I was in charge, of course. For instance, the test pages that Todd had us do… I had Reuben Rude paint the actual color guides for those, because he’s so meticulous. I gave him direction on what I wanted, but Rueben’s studied down at the Art Institute in San Francisco, so he’s technically a better painter than I am. I just wanted to blow Todd away, so I let Reuben do it. And it turned out that it was a good move, because he did a beautiful job on them, and I was busy with something else. I guess at first I didn’t take it quite as seriously as I should have, but I knew that we could deliver a

total quality product, so I was absolutely confident.

Todd upgraded to better paper, I think, in issue eight — .

Well, actually, that was me. I did that, but it wasn’t all me. It was Rob Liefeld who upgraded the paper first, on Youngblood #4. Rob wanted his book to stand out even more.

Their paper stock was superior, right from the get-go, to what Marvel had.

A little bit. It was still newsprint, though.

Okay. But it was a little better; it was like that Baxtertype of paper.

Yeah, it was an upgrade. But they were doing newsprint versions and better paper versions originally.

When I started working with Rob, he said, “Well, what can we do to make it punchier?” So I said, “Well, try slick paper.” And it certainly made things pop. It got a little overblown, but now comic books are pretty much on slick paper across the board, except for a few, I think.

Once you guys did a couple of issues, all of a sudden you became the most pursued guy in comics, right?

Well, everyone wanted their books to look good. I went down to the San Diego Comicon, and I saw Erik Larsen, and he showed me the first couple of issues of Savage Dragon. Digital Chameleon had done those, and they were okay, but he wasn’t that happy with them. So he gave us that job. I was working on Savage Dragon, and Spawn, and then somewhere along the

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Steve Oliff’s savory colors, from a Spawn #14 splash page.

STEVE OLIFF

Pitt #4 cover by Keown and Williams. Steve and Olyoptics colored the majority of Image’s covers during the early ’90s. ©2007 Dale Keown.

line The Maxx came on board, then we did a few different things like Stupid and Tribe.

We did a few issues over Joe Chiodo’s guides. And then eventually we started working for Rob on Youngblood and some of his other titles.

Joe did most of the stuff at WildStorm?

Yes. Joe did the color guides. He didn’t do any color separation.

Oh, you were doing the separations for him?

Yeah, actually, I think we did the first four issues or so of Cyberforce.

Did all this work ever get to be too much for you? Was it a lot more than your studio could handle?

It was hectic, for sure. On any given day we had a bunch of deadlines going, but, see, by this time I had about 10 or 15 people working for me, and that shop was working round the clock.

Even with 10 or 15 people, once Image started growing, I could see some problems.

Well, yes. They all started noticing that when push came to shove, Todd always won on the separation schedule. And so they started finding that because they were pretty bad about deadlines, it was more economical for them to build their own in-house computer coloring shops that would be completely devoted to working on their projects.

That’s when they started headhunting some of your guys?

Well, yeah, that came along. At first it wasn’t like that. WildStorm had their bunch… well, Silvestri was in the same place as WildStorm for a while, with Top Cow, so they were all sharing computer guys. But they were all working in Photoshop. And generally on a Macintosh, because that was where Photoshop was working best, it was a completely different world. We were always PC-based.

After a few years, the headhunting did start. When Rob Liefeld offered Kiko Taganashi, I think it was $100,000 a year taxes paid — I’m not sure about that, I’d have to go back — but I remember Kiko came to me with that, and I said, “Well, you know what, Kiko?

Goodbye, and good luck!” Y’know? I couldn’t match that. Kiko was one of my top separators. He’s a guy who has amazing color sense, great design capability, and is very, very fluid on the computer. So that started it going. From there, the talent drain was on.

You took none of this personally, right, like some guys would take it?

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Yeah, I took it personally for a while, but I got over it. Hey, I had seven different spin-off companies.

Actually, nine, if you look at it in some ways, so after a while I was getting used to it. But toward the end, what I found was that after Kiko left to work for Rob, then Abel, Reuben, Tonya, Lea, and Bill all went down to San Francisco and took over working for Erik Larsen’s Savage Dragon and all of his spin-off things, it was very different. Then what was happening was all my top people were going off to start their own companies, and it was very difficult to replace those people, especially people who’d been working with me for five, six years by this time. They knew what the Olyoptics quality standards were. They’d helped set those standards.

The hardest thing I think in replacing talent is training.

Yes, and I finally found I just didn’t like doing that very much. When the Electric Pickle guys got going, I got this phone call from Malibu Comics. I can’t remember who called. It was one of the editors down there who was a friend of mine. He calls and says, “Who are these Electric Pickle guys?” What they had done was rifle my Rolodex. They got the names of my clients, called them up, used my fax machine to pitch their new business that they were going to start, behind my back. That was the one that pissed me off.

I was too open with all of my stuff. I left the Rolodexes around the office; I didn’t think anybody was going to use them like that. But after they left they started doing work for DC and Verotik. At some point we scaled back on all of our DC work, because we’d been doing some work for DC off and on. I did The Sandman for a short while, and that was a real, sad story. I wish that I had handled that a little differently.

They freaked out over deadlines, and I didn’t press my case. So eventually, because the Image stuff was paying so much more than the DC stuff, we had to drop doing the DC work. And what that did was to open the door, so then another one of my guys took off and formed a small company, Android Images. For a while there, in Point Arena, in this town of 450 people, there were three active comic book coloring companies, plus Gloria Vasquez was out in Manchester, which is just a few miles away, doing color guides and stuff, and Sam Parsons was coloring a few miles south. All of them started with me. And then another guy, one of the new guys, Nathan Eyring went up to Portland or Seattle, and he was doing work for DC. So our crew just spread all over the place.

Working on these books, were you rushed a lot?

Always. It’s kind of the sh*tty part about being a colorist, because everybody else’s little mistakes and delays put you in a bind. If the writer loses a day, the artist loses a day, the inker loses a day, the letterer loses a day, suddenly your eight days that you’ve got to do this thing is cut to four.

That must have happened a lot, because a lot of these books were coming out on the same week. There was a point, I think, where Image books would come out in batches. They weren’t coming out one week after another, they would just come out all together, especially if they were late.

Right, and that’s what they were doing. Everyone

was running into the lateness clause in the Diamond contracts. Like I say, they had to all have their own guys who could stop and work on finishing Jim Lee’s book or Marc Silvestri’s book or whoever, and just bust ass all night long to get it out the next morning.

Was Todd always your number one client for as long as you could keep him?

Pretty much, yeah. He was the one. And then it turned out after a while, after the Savage Dragon books were gone, and DC’s gone, and this other stuff, we hung onto Spawn and The Maxx. I colored The Maxx through the end of that series, and I think I did 40 or 41 issues of Spawn.

So what had happened in Spawn? He just moved in a different direction after — ?

Well, he really wanted Photoshop, and my problem with Photoshop was that I was inexperienced with it, it was expensive, and it wasn’t — I didn’t really understand how to use it. I’ve been using Photoshop now for a little over ten years, and I finally feel like I almost understand it. I know, in my limited space, what I’m trying to do with it, I can do a lot with it. But for a long time it was just alien to me.

Can you get everything you want from Photoshop without it looking too computerish? Have the colors blended better with the art?

Well, yes. But getting back to our original software, which was called Pixelcraft; it was a vector-based system as opposed to a bitmap system, which is what Photoshop is. So in order to get any of those blends of colors, we had to calculate with numbers.

We’d have to have a blend going from such and such color, say 50 cyan, 30 yellow, 10 magenta, to another color with say 50 cyan, 60 yellow, and 40 magenta, and then cut the shapes. What’s commonly known as the “cut color look” is a result of that software, which gives you a crisper edge. So what we did with our cut color look was a byproduct of the limits of the system. The thing I don’t like about Photoshop is it has a tendency, if it’s used improperly, to be mushy. If you get too much airbrush, too much soft edge stuff, it looks crappy. Real color has hard and soft edges in life. More modern colorists have been trying to emulate that hard-edgeness, because that hard-edge kind of denotes comic books. It’s kind of harking back to the old style of real cut color. But you can add in textures and things, and that’s where people have been getting incredibly sophisticated. That, and then the colored line art for the effects and stuff. But it

ended up being that, with Photoshop, man, it’s almost like a lot of these books got a little too heavily effects-oriented.

Did Malibu already do color separations when you started?

No, Malibu was sending out their stuff, but once it took off, they jumped on.

Yeah, but I always thought it was funny; I guess you know the story that Marvel supposedly bought Malibu because of their coloring, because they had digital coloring.

Yes. That’s a fact. But originally, when Marvel got those computers, they had a bunch of them at Malibu, and they started just hacking away at it. Some of their early color was just atrocious. It’s just pitiful.

Marvel did buy Malibu partially because of their color separation department, but then found out they didn’t want to run the color department. That’s when all of those machines from Malibu went over to Dublin, Ireland, to Graphic Colorworks. They signed a semi-exclusive deal with Marvel. They signed a deal to do 75 percent of their color separation. So it was a straitjacket for Marvel after a while.

That turned out to be a disastrous move. I talked to somebody about this. They couldn’t communicate with those guys in Ireland as well as they could communicate with somebody in the States.

Well, yes and no. Just mostly it’s a factory set-up over there. I went over and consulted with them. I worked with Graphic Colorworks for three months in Dublin. They actually had some amazingly talented people there who could have done really nice work.

The problem was, they were getting such a low amount of money for them that all the color separators had these huge workloads. They would have to turn out five, sometimes ten, pages a day of color separation.

And you can’t do high quality under those kinds of

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A color scheme for Spawn. ©2007 Todd McFarlane Productions.

STEVE OLIFF circumstances. The reason those Spawn pages look so nice is that sometimes a guy would work all day on one page, you know? Just working it and massaging it, and showing me a proof, and I’d say, “Fix this, fix this, fix this.” And they’d go back and they’d rework it, and then I’d say, “Fix this and this.” And after two or three proofs they’d have it pretty well down.

And without that kind of quality control and the time and/or money to be able to do that, it’s almost impossible to get really high-end results.

Spawn splash from the second issue. ©2007 Todd McFarlane Productions.

But did it affect you after a while, as the line started growing, you couldn’t devote the proper time to a book?

Well, yeah. And basically I just got burnt out on in.

It was just too much. So I came back home and I scaled back. I stopped doing color separation for a while. I was just doing color guides for Marvel, and then I kind of quit because they stopped doing color guides, it all went out to computer separators. Any old color guides that anybody sells, like I’ve still got Spawn guides and Akira guides and stuff, are ancient

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history now. There will never be color guides like that again.

Does that affect the process? Because when you do a color guide, you plan better what you want to do in terms of color scheme, right?

Yes, it does affect the process. If you’re working straight on the computer like everybody does now… doing a color guide is kind of pointless, because you’ve pretty much got it in your mind. I’ve found the more I’ve worked on Photoshop, I don’t do guides anymore. When Olyoptics did guides, we did something different with our guides than anybody else.

Most always in the early days, you’d lay in your flat colors and then you’d write the codes on it for the old system. We did fully-painted guides, where I would put in the effects. I would use airbrush. I would use any kind of thing I could, colored pencil, paint, wash, you name it, to make it look like a finished piece of artwork. Then I would give that to my computer crew and say, “I want you to match this as close as you humanly can.” That worked pretty well, but what I found is that unless you’re there looking over the shoulder of the separator, talking about things until they understand how to do what you want, a lot gets lost. If you send off your color guides, what I found when I was watching the guys work in Ireland is that they would look at the color guide, think they knew what was going on, and then plow ahead with whatever skill level they had. And often the guide would just be sitting there, and the thing that you’d get on the screen would have missed 80 percent of what I’d actually put into the guide. That’s when I got frustrated and said, “There’s no point.” Then when they switched over and eliminated the color guides, I said, well, maybe it’s for the best, because no one’s really paying attention to the guides anyway, at this point.

I was just thinking the other day, “Why did I stop reading Spawn?” And I remembered, oh, yeah, when Todd left, I just didn’t care as much. Nothing against Capullo, but it seemed different.

Well, it was a different look. I mean, Capullo has that scratchy, lots of little lines art style. Many times I couldn’t even see some of the pages until I had started coloring them. I would find some basic thing just so that I could separate the planes. That Violator miniseries that Bart Sears drew, those things, it was impossible to see until I’d finally be coloring along and go, “Oh! That’s this guy’s arm from that figure back there!” It was really confusing. And Capullo’s art was a lot like that for me. I think he started with #16, right after the Medieval Spawn/ Violator stuff.

So when was your last issue of Spawn?

It was #41. Maybe it was #42, because for a while there he was doing Spawn bi-weekly, and he had this guy, Todd Broker, who was his in-house color guy, doing every other issue. By that time he really wanted Photoshop, and he wanted Brian Haberlin. Brian Haberlin had by this time hired my #1 pick of my favorite color separators, Dan Kemp. I met Dan at a WonderCon, in San Francisco. He was the first guy I’d ever seen show me his proofs that I said: “You know what? You come up to Point Arena and you’ve got a job.” Instantly. He was a Photoshop whiz, he

had a solid color sense, and he really understood color. Dan came up here to Point Arena, looked it over and decided it was just too small for him. We’re still good friends, but Point Arena only had 450 people.

He wanted a little more action in his life (he was about 18 at the time), so he went down to L.A. and worked at Extreme for Rob Liefeld. He worked there for a while, and then went over to Top Cow and started working for Brian Haberlin. When Brian left Top Cow and Todd wanted Brian’s coloring, Dan Kemp went with him. And although Brian Haberlin’s name is on a lot of the color on Spawn, I’d say an awful lot of it is Dan Kemp. So, in a weird sort of way, the guy that I hand-picked to be working on Spawn ended up working on Spawn, he just didn’t work for me. It took them a while to get it. They were pretty eye candy. At first, man, there were colors popping every which way.

But it was beautifully rendered, nice special effects, crisp resolution, and that’s what Todd wanted. And by that time I was burnt out. I really didn’t want to do Spawn anymore. I confess, I missed the money tremendously, but the pressure wasn’t much fun. But as it turned out, there were plenty of other pressures.

Within a space of six months, first my mom dies, then I lose my biggest contract, and then my girlfriend of years splits up with me. So that was a hard year.

When the market crashed, you felt it, right?

Oh, boy. Oh, boy. By that time the other little companies had spun off. They were all doing their thing, and I’d been scaling back, so for a few years I had just a little core group of people. I finally just let everybody go. I think that was about ’97. That’s also when I started looking around, saying, well, you know what? I’ve got to do something with my Armature character if I’m ever going to do anything with him. So I put out my own comic for a couple of issues, and then ran into the deadline problem and money problems.

But you did that in ’96; you waited until the market had crashed.

Right. Therein lies the problem. My timing was a little bit late.

I remember, your character would show up sometimes in Spawn, in your ads.

Yup. But you had done very well, though. Did you have any premonition that the bubble was about to burst?

Y’know, kind of. Actually, prior to starting the Image stuff, I wanted to get out of coloring. I wanted to work on my own stuff. But I did see it as a tremendous opportunity. I saw this thing, the Image thing, was going to be big. I didn’t know how big. And basically, for a couple of years there, my company was grossing in the middle six figures, but it was cool because I could watch the paychecks that I’d give to everybody just roll right downhill and go into all the establishments. In the peak years of Olyoptics, we were paying out $300,000 and $400,000 in salaries to people. That’s just my employees. I made a certain profit, but unfortunately I was investing it in computer animation. And I was drastically underfunded and just a little ahead of the curve on that stuff, too. So I ended up spending a lot of money and then having machinery that was

basically obsolete in a few years.

That’s what I thought I’d heard, right before ’94 or something you had spent a lot of money on new computers that you were going to use.

In animation and stuff, and that’s because we were trying to break some ground. And we were. We were investing in Silicon Graphics machines, and Wavefront 3-D software. If I had been funded by somebody who had millions to spend instead of tens of thousands, we probably could have done some amazing stuff, because I had a great crew here — actually, one of the guys in my animation department went on to be one of the special effects lead animators on Lord of the Rings. He was one of the guys who did a lot of the stuff on Gollum.

What do you do now? You said you were working on some stuff.

Oh, yeah, I do a few little things in comics. I’m coloring Gumby. And over the last yearand-a-half or so, I colored a fourissue mini-series for DC, over Walt Simonson on Elric.

It was fun, but what I’ve found is, I think I’m done coloring adventure comics.

I’ve been there, done it. We used to have our Olyoptic motto, “The better you draw, the better we color.”

And what happened was that I was very fortunate in that I had some of the cream-of-the-crop projects from the mid-’80s on until the ’95, ’96 area. I had good artists, generally pretty good stories, things that were pretty cool. And what I’ve found now is I’ve gone back and tried to do some comics. I’ve worked a little bit for Brian Haberlin’s Avalon, and was coloring some odds and ends, because he’s got contracts at Marvel. I found I was getting these projects that I absolutely hated. I was coloring some Punisher stuff, and I think this stuff is crap. It has no redeeming qualities. It has no reason to exist. I just don’t really care for them. When I look at comics now, I look at the art, and I’ll look at the color sometimes, but I rarely read them, unless it’s certain graphic novels I can sit down and enjoy.

General run-of-the-mill comic books don’t interest me anymore. What I’m finding is that I didn’t really enjoy working on Elric as much as I could have. I liked working with Walt because he’s a great guy, a really

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Spawn #4 cover artwork. ©2007 Todd McFarlane Productions.

STEVE OLIFF

Spawn color scheme. ©2007 Todd McFarlane Productions.

nice guy. But on Gumby, I’m having fun. It’s simple.

It’s cartoony, I get to play with light and color… it’s hard to explain, but it’s just a whole different approach.

It’s interesting how the industry is changing. I went back east in 2004 to go talk to my editors at DC and Marvel and see if I still had a career in comics.

When I got back there, I looked around and thought, well, I don’t think I do anymore. It’s a peripheral career at best. I went around asking editors if there’s color work, and they said what’s happened now is that they don’t even assign the color artists to the books anymore; the creators get together and they pick their own colorist. They come to a project as a packaged team. Now anybody who’s got a reasonably fast computer and a version of Photoshop can sit wherever they want and color comics. People have learned a lot of tricks, and they’re better at it.

Primarily it’s these guys who are friends of the artist or the writer, their girlfriends or their little brothers or whatnot. There are still a few little studios. Brian

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Haberlin has his Avalon guys, and I see credits for guys like Studio F, but it’s completely changed.

But it’s still political for Brian; he has to be friends with certain guys, it’s who you know that gets you the job.

Yeah. Exactly. And Joe Quesada doesn’t like my work, so I don’t get any work at Marvel.

He didn’t like your work?

No. He fired me from one of these Punisher things.

He said, “Oh, it looks like a DC book!” And I got fired right in the middle of it. It was one of those stories that I just hated. There was this character who had found himself waking up in bed with this big black man, and he gets up to go into the kitchen, and he opens the refrigerator and there are severed heads and body parts there. I’m just looking at this stuff going, “I hate this stuff. This is ridiculous. It’s ugly.”

So I didn’t care if he fired me. I needed the money, but I didn’t need to be working on this piece of sh*t, which is what I considered them to be, y’know? I look at the comics now, I just don’t have any love lost for them. I could still do some good color on them, on any given story, but… I’m getting into other things. A partner and I just wrote a history book of the coast which is selling well. I have a weekly black-andwhite comic strip of my Armature character that I’ve been doing for about four years in our local newspaper. I make a little money on that, and it’s actually expanding some, but it’s given me a lot more time to write and draw my own things.

Now whatever happens at Marvel, they’ll never see the type of numbers that Image had.

You’ll never see that again. I mean, a million-anda-half [copies]! Yeah, I lobbied hard for Todd to give us a royalty, but he was pretty adamant about that.

He wasn’t letting anybody in on that pie.

Tom DeFalco was saying they were talking about independence, but once they set up their studio, you’re basically working for them.

Yeah, it was work-for-hire. I had no rights to anything afterwards, no kickback — and Todd made $9,000,000 that first year. He did give us a bonus for Christmas, which was cool, but that’s a far cry from what we’d have gotten even if we’d had a minuscule royalty.

But he did give you ads. I always remember the ads and actually writing to you.

Yeah, those were cool. There was originally only going to be one, but because they needed an ad to fill in on #11, we got it in there. That was awesome.

And the cool free stuff thing got thousands of replies.

The coloring contest turned out really cool.

All of a sudden everybody wanted that digital thing.

They wanted that shine that Olyoptics was giving. Even the readers had gotten more sophisticated.

We had upped the ante. One of my coolest memories of my entire career was walking along with Kiko Taganashi, Abel Mouton, and Reuben Rude, heading over toward the convention center at San Diego, and Frank Miller comes up and stops us, and he says, “Man, I just want to tell you that you guys have changed the face of comics. And thank you.” It was just, like, “Whoa!” Thanks, Frank. But I think that he was actually pretty accurate about that.

I M A G E A S S O C I AT E

Scott Williams Behind every great penciler, there’s a great inker; when you think of Jim Lee’s exquisite pencils, you’ll usually find Scott Williams’s bold finishes right besides it.

The legendary comic book artist entered the business by assisting his pal, Whilce Portacio, on inking Longshot. During his busy time at Marvel, Scott formed Homage Studios with Whilce (and later a new guy named Jim Lee); this would formalize their bond as an art studio to be reckoned with. First paired with Lee on Punisher War Journal, the duo made their mark, having enormous success on Uncanny X-Men and X-Men. As Homage would eventually morph into WildStorm Studios, the birth of Image Comics showcased Scott’s relentless tenacity, making him the backbone of the company when he was the only inker man enough to ink Jim Lee (on WildC.A.T.s), Marc Silvestri (on Cyberforce), Whilce Portacio (on Wetworks), and Dale Keown (on Pitt) virtually simultaneously. It’s evident from his contributions to Batman: Hush, Superman, WildC.A.T.s, and All-Star Batman and Robin, that he hasn’t slowed down one iota. For almost 20 years, Scott Williams has been the crème de la crème in this business — the inker against which all other inkers will forever be measured.

How did you get into comics originally?

Like most other professionals, I started off as a fan. I read comics, bought comics, collected comics, and borrowed comics from my older brothers. I became a fan of the medium, the art form, but also had a bit of a desire to be an artist, and some talent; it seemed like an obvious marriage. I enjoyed buying and reading and being entertained by the entire concept of comics as an art form, and combining that with a natural desire and love of drawing, with a certain amount of talent sprinkled in. And it took some hard work to hone that talent. It was a natural progression. Frankly, it’s one of those things where, if I hadn’t found comics, I don’t know if I would have taken my artistic skills and talent to a level that would have allowed me to have a career in art, and therefore I have no idea what I would have done with my life, because I’m not sure what else I would be good at. So thank God for comics and thank God for art.

You connected with what Neal Adams was at DC in the ’70s?

Yeah, I definitely was a two-pronged comic aficionado. I was a fan primarily of Marvel Comics, specifically in my early years. I liked the whole continuity aspect of their universe. I liked the approach to their comics. I liked the fact that if something happened in one book, it somehow inevitably affected some of the other books. There seemed to be cohesion about it. I liked some of the character traits, where Peter Parker would have growing up problems and girl problems, and the Fantastic Four fought with each other, and the Avengers roster, which would continually change over. I found that an appealing approach to comics, whereas with DC — as much as I enjoyed some of the iconic characters — it seemed like each issue

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Scott Williams. Courtesy of Scott Williams.

WildC.A.T.s pin-up (from #50, vol. 1) with pencil & inks by Scott Williams. ©2007 WildStorm Productions.

SCOTT WILLIAMS

Danger Girl #6 art from J. Scott Campbell (pencils) and Scott Williams (inks). ©2007 J. Scott Campbell.

was individual and standalone. Something earthshattering would happen in an issue of a DC comic, and it just never seemed to reverberate into any of the other books, and it didn’t seem to have some of the liveliness of the Marvel Comics. So the Marvel stuff was up front, as far as my interest goes, and then I would follow certain artists, and that would be Neal Adams, Jack Kirby, John Buscema, Bernie Wrightson, and Barry [Windsor-]Smith — a lot of the more illustrative artists. It’s interesting, before we started the interview, you and I were talking about how comics had become somewhat illustrative. Not across the board, there’s definitely old school simple being used, but a lot of the comic artwork has become illustrative, and definitely the artwork that I do has a bit of an illustrative bent, so it’s not surprising that guys like Adams and Wrightson and Barry Smith and artists of that ilk were early inspirations for me.

It’s a logical transition that I’d gone from admiring their work to the type of work that I do now.

You were raised in Hawaii, right?

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Yeah, I was a military brat. My dad was in the Air Force. We moved around. I rarely lived in one spot much longer than maybe a couple of years at all of his various assignments, and in the early ’70s he got an assignment in Hawaii and then retired there. I was 12 years old. And we moved there with him, and I was a Hawaii boy up through high school, and actually completed college, and lived there until 1985.

So you met Whilce in Hawaii?

Yeah, when Whilce Portacio and I first hooked up, he was a freshman in the high school that I went to in 1978, and I was a senior, and I had a real eye for other artists within the various art classes that I took throughout my four years in high school. I was always taking art classes, and had a very good art teacher named Mr. Inhoffe, and he was very inspirational. Anyway, it’s like the athletes in school where the best athletes would always form a cliqué and would kind of hang out together. Well, when I would see or meet someone in the art classes who had talents hopefully superior to mine I would form a bond with them, because I always felt like I could learn from guys whose work was superior to mine. And Whilce was amazing, as a freshman, which drove me nuts, he was 14 when I was 18. He was superior in every way, and I locked up with him immediately and picked his brain. He was a young, pretty shy Filipino kid, but he did a lot of the talking with his pencil. His drawings were just so ahead of where I was, or where anybody else in the class was, and he was just so motivated to continue to get better. He would fill spiral notebooks with drawings. As he would be taking notes in class or having conversations, he would be drawing all the time, and it was very inspirational. I began to see that talent is great, but if you put in a lot of work, if you practice, if you constantly draw and scribble and put ideas down on paper, you can’t help but get better. That was something I learned early on from him. But also, I’ve got to admit, there was a little bit of the freak show with him. I mean, there’s a little, gangly 14-year-old kid who could just draw. I still have some of his early sketches from that age, and he was honestly very close to being at a professional level even at the age of 14.

Did this drive you a little bit: “He’s 14, I can’t do half of what he does” or something like that?

He pushed me by doing nothing more than just showing up, sitting down and drawing. He was intimidating. He made it look easier than it is. But I think it was also good for me to realize, okay, here’s a guy who, on his own, took the initiative to take the talent that he was given, and get better. And I spent a year with him in high school, and over the course of the year, he started off great, and then he kept getting better. So, if nothing else, he just showed me that it’s possible. By that time I had already decided that I was going to parlay my interest in drawing and my art skills into comics, but I didn’t know if it was a pipe dream. His being 14 and showing off his work as well as he did, inspired me to think I could do this, too. I mean, if Whilce can do it, I can do it! So it was more of an inspirational kind of a thing. It was also just a way to actually see someone sit down with a blank

piece of paper and put his ideas on paper visually, almost like a magic trick. But it was no trick, just loads of talent and hard work. So he helped me see the value of practice and hard work.

So what happened after high school? Did you go to art school?

I went to college — took a general arts major, a four-year-degree and majored in drawing and painting.

I didn’t tell any of my professors that I was interested in comics because I’d felt like they wouldn’t take me seriously if I did. I was at the University of Hawaii and all the art teachers were fine artists, in the classical sense. I honestly believe they would have laughed at me and sort of dismissed me. They all thought I had talent, and I was always one of the more motivated guys in their various classes, but I always hid what I was doing from them. So they would see what they thought was sort of classical Greco-Roman drawing from me, whereas in my mind I was thinking I was drawing a heroic figure, and all I’ve gotta do is put a cape on him and some tights, and maybe some speed lines and some “Kirby krackle,” and I’d be good to go! Of course, I never took it that far, or my secret would have been discovered. So I would work on my gestures and on my figure work and on still life stuff, always with an eye towards this as basically this training ground for comics, but with-

out any of the comic book icons which would out my secret desire to be a comic book artist. By about the third or fourth year, I was talented enough that the instructors were pretty much letting me go off and do my own thing. I was able to get the practice and the experience and the knowledge from the classes without ever actually specifically drawing superheroes or painting super-hero paintings.

So when you finished college, you just concentrated on putting your portfolio together for San Diego?

Pretty much, yeah. During the last couple of years of college I was putting portfolios together and bringing portfolios to the San Diego convention, which, being in Hawaii was the closest most western part of the country where people who would provide opportunity and employment would be. So, starting about 1980, I started coming to the comic convention, and bringing portfolios and getting feedback from, at that time, pretty much it was only DC and Marvel. First Comics was beginning to publish, and Fantagraphics was publishing and whatnot, but for the most part I knew I was really targeting mainstream super-hero comics, and Marvel and DC were the guys to talk to.

So I would try to show portfolios, and put different portfolios together. I’d heard that if you’re going to show Marvel editors a portfolio, to have Marvel characters, and if you’re showing DC guys a portfolio, to

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Gen13 art for the hardcover collection with Williams inking Campbell. ©2007 WildStorm Productions.

SCOTT WILLIAMS

More Gen13 art for the hardcover collection with Williams inking Campbell. ©2007 WildStorm Productions.

use DC characters. So I would have multiple portfolios that I could show the editorial content specific to their company’s needs.

When you reconnected with Whilce, was that your first San Diego con?

No, not at all. We lost contact with each other after I graduated and he moved. I think it was probably the 1984 San Diego Comic-Con, and he had just gotten an assignment, Longshot, it was Art Adams’ first job, and Alien Legion. He had an editor named Carl Potts who had found him and had nurtured him a little bit, and he had just gotten his foot in the door with those gigs. I bumped into him at one of the Marvel tables, and it was just like we started up right where we left off. And I got in touch with him after the convention and realized that I may not be ready to go it on my own, and I may not be ready to go all the way where the comic publishers are in New York, but here’s a guy who’s a friend of mine, he’s in San Diego, he’s got his foot in the door. How about I move to San Diego, help him out, help him make his deadlines? He was struggling trying to keep up with Art Adams’ very, again, illustrative approach to comics. It was a lot of work, and he was looking for support.

Is there any reason why Carl Potts wanted you as an inker and not a penciler, initially?

Because that is the only thing that I had proven, up to that point, that I could do. Though he had seen

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some of my penciling samples; which were right on the cusp of probably being acceptable professionally.

None of these books, like Strikeforce: Morituri, that Carl Potts gave you in the beginning were big prize books, but you guys were enthusiastic about working on these things. I mean, a gig was a gig, right?

Oh, are you kidding? The enthusiasm was through the roof! Honestly, the whole process of learning and trying to get into the business was a gamble. I always had confidence; but until it actually happened, you never know. But once you do, it’s a payoff, and it’s a high, and it didn’t matter that my first serious regular gig was Strikeforce: Morituri. It was comics!

It was a goal achieved, and it was a stepping stone to be sure, but it was still a confirmation that, “Okay, I’m not crazy. These guys hired me, they’ve seen my work, they’re happy with my work. I have proven to them and to myself that I belong here. Now it’s just up to me to take this and run with it.”

The important thing is basically that they kept calling you.

Not only did they keep calling me, but I knew I was onto something when I would get called from other editorial offices. It’s pretty common for editors to steal other editors’ talent, and the fact that I was in demand early on, I definitely took that as a good sign. I think the fact, too, that I was very diligent as far as making deadlines… Which sounds like, in today’s world, where deadlines are very often not taken as seriously as perhaps they should, it was really just the fact that I was so happy to be doing comics, I was so hellbent on taking the world by storm, that it was not a tough thing for me to work 10, 12, 15 hours a day, because here I am getting paid to do something I would have done for free. And I wanted to prove myself, so I tried to do my job well, I tried to be very diligent, and I never missed a deadline. Those are combinations that other editors take notice of, so it was real early on that I was getting multiple phone calls from different editors, which eventually led toward the Punisher work, and then, not too much longer after that, getting into the X-Men office.

Did you guys get together and plan what could be done with The Punisher, really polish the character up? Because I think you were the first guys to make him look real slick.

Yeah, at that point it was Whilce’s first penciling gig, and it was my first inking gig on him as far as anything serious. We had done sketches and drawings together, but it was my first real serious inking gig on him. And again, it wasn’t so much that we were thinking in terms of taking it upon ourselves to control the character, because that was the writer’s job. But visually we were very inspired by Neal Adams, so I think we were taking that approach, but we were also big fans of what Frank Miller was doing a few years past on Daredevil, and I was looking at Klaus Janson’s ink work on that and trying to create a moodiness and a dark aspect to it. We used those as stepping stones and as points of inspiration, and, frankly, just learning on the job, continuing to push each other and learn how to approach a character as dark as The Punisher. I think the nature of the character alone made it necessary to make it moody,

and to take the art into a dark kind of noirish frame of reference.

It was around this time that you guys started working on Punisher War Journal, right?

Yeah, but that wasn’t a full-time job. I believe Jim had been seeing my work on Whilce and wanted to just kind of test me out to see what I would do, and I’d seen Whilce ink him a little bit on some Alpha Flight stuff, and…

Just looking at that book, you still have a crude Jim Lee. It wasn’t quite there yet.

No, no, it was early. He was still learning on the job, and that’s one of the things that always intrigued me about Jim’s work is that he was a guy who got in and had the talent to do the work, but was very crude, but he grew by leaps and bounds month-in and month-out. I’m always intrigued by artists whose work blossoms in front of you. As a fan, I remember following, say, Barry [Windsor-]Smith on Conan [the Barbarian]. If you look at the first issue of Conan and his last issue of Conan, it’s like two totally different artists, and you get to watch the metamorphosis. The learning takes place right in front of you. David Mazzucchelli on Daredevil, the first bunch of issues of Daredevil he did, it was professional, but there certainly was very little to indicate that he would become the artist that he eventually became. And, again, if you followed his run through that series, it was just leaps and bounds remarkable. You see the light bulb going off over the guy’s head as he would find more and more influences and bring it to bear on his work and grow in front of you. Jim was like that in a lot of ways: Very quick ascension, very quick study, and very in tune with all the other artists that were doing work around him, and what worked and didn’t work. So even by the time he was doing Punisher War Journal, he’d come a long way since his Alpha Flight days, and it really wasn’t long after War Journal that he started doing some X-Men work, and that was where he really just took off.

So did Jim seek you guys out in San Diego?

I think Jim saw in Whilce’s work and my work sort of kindred spirits. We both had an affinity for the same artists that came before us. We both had an illustrative quality, a fairly detailed style. We both had a flair. We were interested in very dynamic and… …fluid type art?

Yeah. I think just the similar approaches and the similar inspirations meant that when we talked to him about maybe coming out to San Diego and hanging out a little bit and seeing if maybe there was the making of a potential studio, that he was open to that. And we all got along well, and it created a dynamic where we could all pull for one another and learn from one another while we were still trying to put the finishing touches on becoming something of a force in the industry.

So Homage, that name comes from what, again?

Oh, Homage Studios. I think it was early on a realization that we weren’t just going to be guys who worked on similar projects, but we were actually going to form an alliance and a studio, and how cool it’d be to actually have a name for the studio. And I

think it was just one of those things where we were joking around. And, again, I’m always a little fuzzy on where the name came from, specifically who came up with it. I seem to remember joking about it, but coming from the standpoint that being artists and always looking at other artists’ work to see what we liked and what we didn’t like, that was key, too. But looking at the work of our peers and the people who came before us and trying to figure out what worked and what we could use, what we could borrow, what we could incorporate into our own work. As an artist, from a learning standpoint, that’s what you’re doing.

You’re constantly incorporating other artists’ ideas and iconography to your own work, and affectionately calling it an “homage” to, say, a Neal Adams drawing, or calling it an homage to John Byrne. Even though we weren’t “swiping,” we were using aspects of their work in our own, and so the name “Homage” just seemed appropriate, and it stuck. It was more a celebration of our admiration for those who were doing work that we responded to. It wasn’t a declaration that all our work was going to be borrowed or lifted directly from other artists or that we had no aspirations of originality, it was basically just our homage to “homaging” other artists.

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Dale Keown and Scott Williams cover art for Pitt #2. ©2007 Dale Keown.

SCOTT WILLIAMS

Jim Lee’s pencils on WildC.A.T.s #5 (Vol. 1) are faithfully inked by Mr. Williams. ©2007 WildStorm Productions.

The first book that the studio did together was X-Men #267, right?

Yeah, that was a last minute assignment by the Marvel/Bob Harras editorial staff; that they were running behind on X-Men. Jim and I had already planned on coming in on X-Men #268; that was going to be our first issue. But #267 was behind. Could we do a complete issue, pencils and inks, in less than a couple of weeks? I think we ended up doing it in about nine days.

You guys came in at the right time. The book had somewhat floundered. It didn’t have a regular artist anymore.

Yeah, that’s probably true to a certain extent. I don’t know where things were as far as sales go.

Frankly, I’m not sure. But we were definitely coming in at the right time, and we wanted to create a different visual style; I think editorial wanted to tap into our enthusiasm and potential. The collective power that we had as a studio meant that #267, which was an issue where Jim did the layouts, Whilce took the breakdowns and tightly penciled the figures, I inked

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all the figure work, and then Jim went back and completed the background, worked to our strengths.

It showed what a studio environment could bring, and how quickly and efficiently we were able to produce a book that frankly still holds up fairly well.

There are a few pages that looked a little bit rushed, but for the most part, being able to take a complete issue from beginning to end within eight or nine days and having it look pretty presentable, it’s maybe a bit of a highlight in our career. A one-issue highlight, to be sure, but still proving that you could take the nothing and turn it into something.

That issue pretty much earned you guys Bob Harras’s respect?

I think so. I think it proved that we weren’t pretenders or flakes and that we could actually provide the goods in short order and have it be reasonably successful. I think that did prove something. And then we went on immediately thereafter on the next issue, #268.

Was there a lot of planning into #268? Did you guys treat it as something special?

I did. This is our first chance to show what we can do with a body of X-Men work. Again, story, it all came from editorial and from Chris Claremont.

Obviously he had been around for a long time; we had great respect for what he was doing, so we were basically just hired guns. We would pencil and ink what he provided, but looking back at that first issue, I think we pretty much gave it everything that we had.

That’s one thing I noticed: That you guys gave your all to that first issue. I think I mentioned this to you before, that there are various art styles in that book, sometimes it’s a little cartoonier, sometimes it’s a lot finer and tighter.

I don’t know. I think we were both, and Jim in particular, trying on a lot of different things at that time. His influences were clearly defined within his drawing. You could see that he was looking at Michael Golden, which may be where a little bit of the cartooniness is coming from, and John Byrne, and he was looking at what Kevin Nowlan was doing.

And then, real early on, #268 or maybe #269, he had been up at the Marvel offices and Barry WindsorSmith’s Weapon X art was coming in, and he got a chance to look at some of those originals, and if you look at some of those early X-Men you’ll start seeing some of the Barry Windsor-Smith rendering style start to creep in. And, frankly, I was inspired by the same work, so I see him going off and doing a little bit of Barry Windsor-Smith, I’m going, “Okay, that’s cool. I’ll try some of that.” So I would enhance that in the inks. Then he would see how I would enhance it, and he would then accommodate for it in his pencils.

So there was a lot of give and take. Even though Whilce wasn’t working with us on that particular book, Whilce was starting to define some rendering techniques, and a lot of uplighting, and we’d borrow some of that. And we would all be constantly trying to outdo each other and borrow things from each other. So a lot of those experimental aspects that you see in those first few issues of X-Men again were a product of our learning from each other, and also

learning from the guys who we were taking notice of within the industry.

The three of you were on the same page, watching the same movies, and — .

We were absolutely on the same page. We absolutely were.

What impression did you have of McFarlane, Larsen and Liefeld?

I knew them somewhat personally, and I knew their work professionally, and they all seemed of a like mind. And then, for whatever reason, there was a shift, at least in the comic buyers’ practices, they seemed to be following artists as much as they were following titles or writers — again, sometimes for the better, and sometimes probably for worse. But, no, we all seemed to have very similar sources of inspiration. And everybody had their own niche and approaches, but we were all seen as something of a wave, as a group of guys coming in at the same time and sort of hitting our stride at the same time, too.

And there was a lot of energy there, and it was fun, and I enjoyed every minute of it.

Did you ever hear any rumbles, “Maybe we’re not getting our fair shake, maybe we should be getting better royalties,” and stuff like that.

No. I mean, there was a clear understanding that the sales were tremendous and that Marvel was making a lot of money off it, but that’s fine. That’s their product, and its characters that for the most part we didn’t create. The X-Men were created long ago by Jack and Stan, and so there was no begrudging that. But at the same time there was a business reality that we were getting a fair amount of exposure, a fair amount of credit for putting our stamp on the Marvel books, and what would happen if perhaps we tried the same approach on our own characters, and on our own lines. So it really wasn’t, “Let’s go do Image because Marvel is screwing us.” At least from my angle and from my end, I was very happy with Marvel, and frankly the books that we were doing were selling well enough that we were making some decent royalties, and relatively decent page rates. If Image had never happened, I would have been very happy to have continued on in the same vein. It doesn’t mean I wouldn’t at some point have tried to get some work with some of the other companies. I was very happy with Marvel, I was very happy with my arrangement. It was mutually beneficial, it was profitable for both, but Image definitely provided an opportunity to see where we could take it, how far we could go with it, and to give it as much creative control as possible. We’d been given quite a bit with Marvel, but Image promised an even higher level of creativity. In fact, with the founders, they saw it also as a way to run their own show and create a business, and as much as these guys were artists, they were pretty shrewd young businessmen, and there were a lot of potential advantages to creating their own business.

How was the idea of Image presented to you? Did Jim just approach you?

It had been worked out. I was not in at the very initial discussions. It was already being pretty well

thought out by Jim, Todd and Rob in particular. Those three, I think, in particular saw it as a possibility early on. And I think the decision had probably already been made that it was going to happen, but I think the decision was made easier when it was brought to my attention and to Whilce’s attention, and to ask what our thoughts were. And if our thoughts were negative, I think maybe there would have been a bit of a reassessment. But we were just as gung-ho on it as they were, which I think gave them a sense of confidence, “Okay, we’re all thinking the same thing.

This will probably be an interesting challenge. Let’s go for it.”

So Image happens. What do you guys do? Do you guys start planning what characters you’re going to draw, what books?

Yeah, and again, that was more of an area and an element of creativity that I was not personally involved in.

But you wanted to know what you were going to do, right?

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Scott: “The X-Men piece

by Jim is from a cover that Jim started and abandoned during the time we were doing X-Men (the before), and that I later finished up in ink (the after), so you can see the drawing skills an inker needs to have in order to perfect his craft.”

See the result of Scott’s work on page 195.

X-Men ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc

SCOTT WILLIAMS

Wetworks #4 (vol. 1) cover art by Whilce and Scott. ©2007 WildStorm Productions.

I knew what I was going to do, and I realized that we were going to take some of the models that had worked for us with Marvel, the team book concept, and see if we could put our own specific spin on it.

But the development of characters, within Homage Studios and WildStorm, WildC.A.T.s and Wetworks, that was more specific to the particular creators — Jim and Whilce and Brandon Choi. They were the ones who brought the concepts and the initial ideas to life. I was just going to come in and see if I could maintain quality control, keep at least the visuals at the same level as what we were doing that we’d gained some success with at Marvel.

Were you approached to ink three books right from the start?

No. Whilce and Jim were the guys that I really wanted to work with, and I figured with a certain amount of lead time I’d be able to handle Wetworks and WildC.A.T.s. And to a certain extent I was able to do that, although it was a struggle. And I went from working eight to ten-hour days, five days a week, to

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eventually working 15-hour days, seven days a week.

And then a little later on started doing Cyberforce with Marc.

You were able to do Cyberforce because Whilce fell behind?

I think that’s part of it. A lot of the time the books were on different schedules, so I would be finishing up with WildC.A.T.s and Jim would need a break, and then during his break I’d go straight from WildC.A.T.s to Wetworks, and then Whilce would finish up an issue of Wetworks, and obviously he had some scheduling problems with personal family issues at that time. But as soon as I would finish up something with Wetworks, then I would fall straight in Cyberforce.

For about two years I was doing a lot of juggling, and I brought in some assistants to help me with some of the more basic work of filling in blacks, and erasing pages, and doing a little bit of background work, so that took a little bit of the pressure off me. And it was a tough decision because I really felt like, “Am I being able to give each page the same amount of care and time and integrity as I was when I was only doing one book?” And there were times where, frankly, I wasn’t satisfied. I really felt like, “I’m overtaxed; this is pushing me to my limit.” But it was such an exciting sort of “getting the company off the ground” euphoria that I really wanted to see if I could push myself. And it’s not a bad thing sometimes to sacrifice a little bit of quality in order to try to get something going, to see the bigger picture. And I really felt like having my name and my touch added to some of these books gave them the added credibility and the added stability of carrying over from the Marvel stuff into the Image stuff, and I felt that that was important.

That’s something we talked about before, that you didn’t read the stories, though. You were in pure illustration mode.

I was in pure illustration mode, and rather than be involved in story ideas or in editorial meetings, I would see the stories as they came across my board.

So you didn’t even have time to read them!

No, we were also transitioning, going from having the lettering done straight on the board to having the lettering done later. And any of the books that I ever worked on in the past, as the books would come in, they had been lettered on the board and I would read them as they came in. It was interesting seeing a comic book serialized over the course of days and weeks. As individual pages would come in, I’d read it in serialized chapters so to speak. So it was like, I’d read one comic over the course of, like, a month, which is a weird way to read a comic. But with the Image books, I rarely had the time or method to read the books as I was doing them. I still had a sense of what was going on just from looking at the storytelling in the art.

Were you feeling the same synergy going with Jim? He was wearing so many hats during the early days of Image.

I felt at the time that the artwork was a nice, linear transition from the X-Men stuff, but I felt like we were doing just as good of work. And I haven’t really looked at it or tried to critique it now to see if that’s

still the case, but I felt like, when we sat down to do the pages, our love of art and our love of comics always kicked in. And so, even with terrible deadlines or being overworked, I felt like we were always giving it our best. Sometimes even when you’re giving it your best, you don’t always succeed, but I don’t think it was ever for lack of enthusiasm or effort. We really felt like in some ways we had more to prove all over again, because we no longer had the benefit of being able to fall back on, “Well, we’re doing X-Men, so they’ll buy it no matter what, because it’s X-Men.” Now, if they’re going to buy it, they’re going to buy it on the basis of our work, and hopefully they’ll be attracted to the characters and the stories and the art enough to make this a success.

Would more time in the beginning for preparation have been better for the story?

Oh, it’s always better for me. I definitely prefer to work with a lot of lead time, because I’m pretty diligent, and so the fact that I’ve got a lot of lead time won’t keep me from working. I know with Jim and Whilce in particular, and they’ll laugh, but I think it’s true, they will tend to take things down to the wire. If they’ve got four months to do an issue, they’ll spend the entire four months to do the issue, whereas I would take a month and get the issue done, and then I’ve still got this huge lead time.

Once you hit into your 40s, it’s hard to stay up late and work.

It’s much harder now. It’s infinitely harder now. I do not have the same stamina. I literally get sore, my back is sore, my hands get sore. In the same way that I would have been able to hang in there in my twenties, I’m in my mid-40s now, and the lead time is even more precious to me now, and trying to find a way to make up for lost time now, it’s just getting harder and harder. But back then, that was pretty much the way it was, and I just accepted it.

So WildC.A.T.s was everything you could hope for in terms of a story, in the beginning? As a fan, I found that one to be the least — I mean, I liked the artwork, but I thought that story went nowhere. It was confusing.

It was confusing? Yeah, we probably overextended ourselves, tried to be too many things for too many people. But, again, for me, I didn’t concern myself as much with the story. There were aspects of it that I liked, there were aspects of it that I thought were less successful, but I didn’t concern myself with that.

I didn’t feel like that was my role or my job. My job was to make the pages look as good as they possibly could and to get them done on time. And honestly, with the amount of work I had to do, I had to focus on that and that alone. I did not have the time, or the inclination, or the place, I think, to try to come up with better story ideas. That was totally within the realm, within WildC.A.T.s and Wetworks, of Whilce and Jim and Brandon Choi.

Marc was invited to Homage Studios right before you started Image, right?

Yes, that’s right. It was 1991, I think, or something like that.

So he was there regularly with you guys at the beginning?

Yeah. We had a studio. We’d set up office space.

The office studios kind of mutated. It started off as a loft in my condominium, went to a one-bedroom apartment that we all moved our stuff into, then went to a two-bedroom apartment, and then we went and got commercial office space in San Diego which was of a certain size, and then we outgrew that and went to a bigger office, commercial office space, and then eventually moved into our current office space, which is in La Jolla.

Wasn’t that the dream, that you’d have these three guys doing pencils and you would do all the inks?

Well, we wanted to be self-sufficient as a studio, which is why we continued to grow. It started off pretty humble, with a couple of pencilers and an inker. At least we could get a certain amount of the production of a comic done. And then eventually we started bringing in colorists and letterers and other artists at one point, and editors and business managers, to the point where we would be a complete and self-sustaining unit. And that wasn’t so much the goal early on, but it became pretty apparent that

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Wetworks #4 page by Portacio and Williams. ©2007 WildStorm Productions.

SCOTT WILLIAMS

A Williams pin-up of Deathblow and Sister Mary from Homage Studios Swimsuit Special #1. ©2007 WildStorm Productions.

that’s what we needed to do in order to be able to facilitate getting the books out the way we needed to get them out. It would have been too big of a challenge to send inking and lettering and coloring assignments all over the place. We needed to have everything done in-house. Especially with the way that books almost always eventually came down to the wire, we needed to have color separators and letterers right there. As the pages were still wet coming out of my hands, they’d go off and get scanned and colored, and it was necessary from a production standpoint.

It wasn’t until the talent search that that office really expanded, right?

We expanded before that. The talent search came a little bit later. We went from being just the three of us to eventually probably maybe 12 people working for us. We brought in Joe Chiodo on color. We brought in Mike Heisler as letterer. We had John Nee as a manager. We brought in editorial assistants. We were like a little, tiny miniature comic book company.

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We even had one or two office helpers. And at that point we were like, “Okay, we’re onto something. The publishing is working, so let’s see if we can expand.”

So at that point, that’s when we started putting out the talent search and bringing in Jeff Campbell and Travis Charest.

When you guys did that big talent search, you weren’t looking for the next Jim Lee and Scott Williams?

I think there’s always that hope. I don’t know that we specifically were looking for the next Jim Lee or Scott Williams, but if we found them, so much for the better. I don’t know if we ever expected to be lucky enough to find guys like Travis, and Jeff Campbell, and Alex Garner, and a number of guys. Those guys, they didn’t turn out to be just your basic office apprentices. They turned out to be just absolute studs. And that was the first wave. I think to a large degree it was a testament to their talent, but it was also a testament to the pull that the best new upand-comers really wanted to work at our studio, and what the benefits would be to working with Jim, Whilce, Marc, me and other people. Based on our own work ethic and our own creativity, I think we were able to attract some of the best new talent. It’s remarkable that we were able to land those guys with the first wave.

At the same time, those guys allowed you to grow as an inker, too.

Yes, no doubt. They were young, and they brought a lot of enthusiasm. At that point I think we were starting to feel like grizzled old veterans. Literally, we were talking seven, eight years into our careers, respectively, and here’s these brand new guys, and they’re seeing things the same way we saw things years earlier, and it definitely created a whole new sense of excitement that we were able to feed off of, and they were able to feed off of our experience and our guidance.

You were never concerned about the violent material in your comic?

Not early on. I’m far from a prude, and I’m all for any comic being published as long as it’s going to the right audience. I thought the Comics Code and Marvel was a bit restrictive in what it allowed sometimes. If Punisher shot somebody, the blood could not be red, the blood had to be black. I guess they thought that if they showed red blood, somehow that was too disturbing, too violent, too gruesome. All the Marvel blood had to be shown as solid black. And I remember having arguments with editorial, like, “Please, this is a very important story element where this character gets shot. We need to show what the ramifications are to this action. We need to show the blood as red so people know the guy didn’t just fall into some mud or some sticky ink, he’s shot, he’s dead, this is what happens.” And editorial is going, “Nope, you can’t do that. Blood’s gotta be… “ And that was the Comics Code Authority, they were the final arbiters. So I don’t think Image was created so that we could show more graphic violence, but that was definitely one of the things, we said, “Okay, now we get to call the shots. We can use more of the graphic tools in our quiver to tell stories.”

Did you ever feel the backlash of the Image style, or what people perceived as the Image style?

No. I knew it was there, but that was what we did.

I didn’t concern myself with the backlash. I didn’t fully comprehend it or understand it. It was the way we worked, yeah. I thought it was interesting that through the X-Men years and through the Image years that there was a certain tendency towards mimicking certain styles. You always kind of heard conversation, discussions about Jim Lee clones, and Scott Williams clones as far as inking. To me it “made perfect sense. It was what was commercially successful. And comics are an art form for sure, and there’s always going to be purists, but it’s also a business, and publishers and artists are always going to want to try to figure out how to be successful. And like any art form, a lot of times imitation comes up. It is a cliché, but it’s also the truth that it’s a sincere form of flattery. I do remember very specifically in the early ’90s when there were a lot of artists who were starting to adopt some of our styles, some of our tendencies, and there were a lot of comics that were coming out looking like our stuff, and I was thinking, “We need to blaze a fresh trail, go off in a different direction. We need to try to figure out how to become fresh again.” I felt like we were getting lost in the noise. We kind of looked like everybody, and regardless of who had come first…

That’s one of the things I think Jeff Scott Campbell brought. All of a sudden he brought freshness — he really brought a book that was of its time.

Right, and even he was coming and using us as a stepping stone, and you could tell where his influences were coming from, especially the Art Adams influence. It wasn’t just one or two people who were starting to adopt some of our approaches, it was that a lot of comics were starting to look the same. And, again, I don’t know if that’s where some of the negative feedback was coming from, that we’d started this trend that was getting a little bit out of control.

But I definitely noticed it, and I was very interested in trying to figure out a way to head them off at the pass and come up with something with a fresh approach. But it’s tough. We all draw the way we draw, and I guess from that standpoint we were maybe almost a little bit a victim of our own success.

But after awhile, like you said, things did change, though. I remember Jim’s drawings started appearing as if he were inspired by what Jeff Scott Campbell was doing — especially when he did his those two issues of Gen13.

Oh, yeah, definitely. I think that was a conscious decision. Jeff and Alex Garner had established a visual style that worked very well for that book. We honored that by giving our Gen13 pages a stylistic tip of the hat, an homage, so to speak, to what they did and did so well. We weren’t making any bones of trying to pull a fast one; hopefully people wouldn’t read the credits page and think that Jeff was still doing those two issues. We were doing it specifically as an opportunity to get our hands on some fun characters and not be too disruptive from a visual standpoint and radicalize a change in the look of the book. We were just kind of interested in doing a little chapter

and being as unobtrusive as possible.

When you guys went to DC, that came as a surprise to a lot of people.

Ummm… Yeah. It did. And, again, it was one that I understood. I understand the realities of the business. Our infrastructure had grown, at the same time as the comics sales were declining. There was a business reality to it. But I saw it as an opportunity that, “Oh, boy, we get to work on DC stuff now! New toys to play with!”

You weren’t concerned it was going to change how the WildStorm office was going to be?

I knew it would change more for some people than for others. I know the people who are in control vis a vis management, they would have to bend to a higher authority, that we would be part of a larger corporate structure, but, again, that wasn’t a problem for me.

I’m much more of a nuts and bolts kind of guy. It didn’t affect the way that I work, specifically. It may affect whose name is on the paycheck, but it was not

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Voila! Mutant perfection from Scott in the final inked piece. See Jim Lee’s pencils on pg. 191. ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

SCOTT WILLIAMS

Beautiful layouts from Whilce for this page from Wetworks #1, with equally crisp inks by Scott.

a problem for me, and it opened up all kinds of doors.

If it hadn’t been for DC coming in, would I have ever had a chance to do Hush with Jim Lee and Jeph Loeb? Y’know? You never know what path things are going to go, but, for me, things always seem to happen for a reason, and I have no problem with the fact that we’re now a DC entity, and I’ve had nothing but positive success ever since.

But was it a blow leaving behind something you helped build? Like Image — you guys laid the bricks there.

I didn’t have the same level of investment in Image. To me, I was getting to do comics. It wasn’t an ego-deflator by any stretch to move on from Image. It was a business decision. It was a rationally arrived at business decision. It would have been much more traumatic if the business model had shifted, if we’d have gone from being a comic company that was bought out by another company in order to

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produce some other type of widget. But we were still doing comics, and what I got in this business to do is comics. As long as I get to keep doing that, then I’m happy. It doesn’t matter specifically what’s on the masthead.

What’s been the secret in keeping you two guys together? Like, you guys never quarrel about anything? Or you just don’t interact as much as you do, anymore, maybe that helps a little bit?

I don’t know about Jim, but I think for me, what keeps me going is I’m just a big fan of his work. Regardless of business considerations, I need to enjoy the work that I’m doing, and as an inker, I need to enjoy the pencils that I’m given. Jim continues, and has continued, to grow as an artist, and I try and hope that I have continued to grow, as well. The directions that he goes off into, I agree with and I like. Does it ever become sort of “more of the same?”

Yeah, occasionally. We’ve been grinding out page after page, issue after issue; and sometimes I may be taken for granted a little bit. But then, when we come up with a new project or a new cast of characters to explore, when we started talking about doing the new WildC.A.T.s stuff, I’m excited all over again. Every first page is exciting all over again. I think it’s a respect for his vision and his energy and his artistic skills. And the other thing, too, is a lot of the new pencilers have started penciling very tight, to the point where you’re really not, as an inker, able to inject much of your own personality or much of your own approaches and instincts to the inked page. Jim puts in a lot of information, yet there’s still a lot of room, and he encourages me to add some of my own artistry and my own embellishment. And that’s a nurturing and positive environment to do the work. So, yes, there’s a bit of a redundancy to the fact that we’ve worked on so many pages together, but it never seems to get old. And I think, at the point that it does, I’ll move on. I’ll find something else to do. I’ll ink other people, or get a little more serious about my own penciling work. And he may say the same thing.

He may come to a point where it’s like, “I think you’ve said everything there is to say on my work. I want to try going off in a different direction.” And occasionally he’ll get to do that. He’ll have somebody else ink him on occasion, or he’ll ink his own work on occasion, and that’s a great dynamic, a great vitality that he brings to his own work when he inks himself.

In fact, I use his inks as inspiration for my own when I’m working on his stuff. But I think there’s a sense of trust: I trust him to always produce the best possible work, and I think he trusts me, he knows what I’m going to do, and he knows I’m going to do it quickly, or at least efficiently and professionally as possible.

But whether I’m inking Jim or someone else, or I’m penciling, the bottom line is that I get to do comics.

It’s the only thing I’ve ever really wanted to do, and not everyone is so fortunate.

I M A G E A S S O C I AT E

Dale Keown Perhaps the definitive artist of The Incredible Hulk, Dale Keown’s Pitt arrived at the dawn of Image, packing the artist’s powerful punch. An unapologetic raging alien assassin, Pitt was a massive badass killer from another planet that arrives to Earth and befriends his human little brother Timmy. Upon being freed from Marvel, Dale’s work on Pitt was now larger than life, loaded in poetic scenes of beautiful violence and action, along with his magic for awe-inspiring alien designs, impressive landscapes and bodacious babes. One could see all the excitement and relentless energy that Keown had on his superbly drawn covers and his mastery of page layouts. In 1995, Dale started publishing Pitt, from #10 to #20, through his Full Bleed brand when he left Image. The artist returned to Image with Top Cow Comics on Darkness; Keown’s is presently at work on the highly-anticipated Darkness/Pitt crossover that’ll make fanboys drool for more of his artwork.

Dale, you were one of the important guys that came to Image very early on.

Oh, thank you very much.

But you were! Did you ever see Todd’s letters page in Spawn #1? He mentions all the guys, and your name is in a bigger font.

Like, triple-bold font. I know. Yeah, that’s not enough pressure, right?

He was really excited to have you aboard.

That was probably because Hulk was doing so well, and he wanted to get one of the guys — .

Not only did he like your art, but you’re also Canadian.

Yeah.

Was it a big decision for you to join Image?

Well, yeah, it was, because I was doing so well, and things were just getting better and better at Marvel. And then I talked to Todd, it was back in ’89 or ’90. I was doing a convention in Vancouver, and he invited me to come and just hang for a few days at his place. And I remember showing up, and I didn’t know anything about Todd. I just saw a couple pictures and I liked his artwork. And then I show up and he’s got this huge, beautiful house on Victoria Island, and I just said, “Wow, I guess you can make some good money in comic books.” Even though the real estate market probably wasn’t real expensive there or anything, but I was just really impressed with his house. And his energy, he had so much energy. He didn’t really mention anything about Image back then, but I think he was just trying to feel me out a bit as to if I would be willing to do it. He didn’t say anything in particular, but he was just talking about different things. And later on he says, “Yeah, well,

what did you think I was talking about? Of course, I was trying to get you involved, or see if you’d be interested.” Yeah, but then I talked to Todd after the Image thing had broken, Jim Lee called me up and said, “Do you have any characters that we can do?”

Wait a minute… Jim Lee was the one who got you aboard?

Both Jim and Todd. Todd sort of buttered me up, and then Jim

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Dale Keown.

Courtesy of Larry Marder.

Pitt is ©2007 Dale Keown.

DALE KEOWN

Pitt. ©2007 Dale Keown.

pounded it home. He said, “I think you’d be a good addition, and do you have any characters?” And I was like, “Well… “ I said yes, but I really didn’t. I had some ideas, but I didn’t have anything fleshed out.

But you were sure you wanted to leave?

Yeah, it’s interesting, because I didn’t and I did.

The main reason I left was because, with that kind of money, it was really hard not to do it, y’know?

When you joined, you had already known about Youngblood and what Spawn had done?

No, I don’t think Youngblood was out yet.

So you had no idea of knowing what was going to happen?

No. But I really liked the idea of these young guys all getting together and creating their own studio. I liked that idea.

But that’s like the whole band concept, you come from that concept.

Yeah.

It’s all for one, and all that sort of thing. And I think Todd understood that more than some of the other guys did.

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Yeah, absolutely. But it was hard, because I really liked working with Peter David, and I wanted to continue working with Peter, but I couldn’t resist it.

But if you had stayed on Hulk, could you have seen yourself drawing Hulk, like Herb Trimpe, for 15 years?

Yeah, I was willing to do it a lot longer, absolutely.

I think I was just starting to reach my stride. As far as doing stuff, my art was finally looking the way that I wanted it to, or at least starting to. The Hulk is my favorite character to draw, period. But I don’t know if it would have lasted — everything kind of runs its course.

After a while, you probably would have wanted to leave, because it’s a natural evolution. It’s what happened to Todd, after a while… I mean, you’re happy working with the writer, but then you actually want to contribute maybe a little more, y’know?

Exactly. And I’m not a writer, and I don’t claim to be. I mean, Peter David’s a writer, Paul Jenkins’ a writer, those guys are writers. I can glue pictures together with words and I can come up with ideas, but I never wanted to be a writer. I just was the only guy around to do it, really. Brian Hotton was helping me in some of the scripting, but I came up with all of the ideas. But I remember Peter David phoning me up, and he just said, “Now? You’re leaving now?!” I said, “Yeah, sorry, dude.” And then I was supposed to do #400, but I guess — in a way, I didn’t want to do #400 of Hulk, because it was coming up. I was secretly hoping, “Oh, I really don’t want to do it if I want to get started on Pitt.” And sure enough, they pulled it from me.

But before, how did you get into comics? Because you were into music, right?

Yeah, I was into music, and I would always draw.

I used to play around northern bars and such with the band.

You never toured in the states, you never did clubs?

We played Waterton, New York once. Yeah, that’s the extent of our U.S. tour. But we were a hard rock/blues band. We played everything from Judas Priest to George Thorogood to Bryan Adams, lots of different things. I’d always drawn, because when you’re not on stage, you’ve got all day. Like, you sleep to what, noon or something, because you’re up till four, and I just ended up drawing more and more in my room during the days, just for something to do.

I guess I got better.

So you were working on a portfolio, or you were just drawing on your own?

No, I wasn’t working on a portfolio. I was just goofing around. I’d been drawing since I was a kid, and I’d always liked comic books. But I would always draw in my room. And everybody else would go get laid and stuff — I mean, I did that a little bit, but not as much as some of the other guys. That’s just because I had something else to do. I guess I got good enough so that when the band broke up, I went to look for another band to join, but it just didn’t happen. And I just ended up sending in submissions to Marvel. I’d send one submission, they’d send me a rejection slip; I’d send another one, they’d send me a rejection slip. And then when I sent in another

sample, because I kept getting better, I guess — this is actually after I started working for Aircel Comics, the Canadian independent comic book company. And I would draw, like, Fantastic Four and stuff, and I sent those in, and — all of a sudden Joe Rubinstein actually saw them. I don’t know, Rubinstein saw something I did in one of the backs in one of the books, it was like an ad I did, and he really liked it.

And he actually contacted the owner of Aircel Comics [GAK Note: Aircel later became a division of Malibu] and said, “Could you give Dale Keown my number?” And the owners just sat on it for a while. I guess he didn’t want to let me go or something.

I’ve done books on Arthur Adams and Kevin Maguire, and Joe Rubinstein’s the guy who found them sort of the same way.

Yeah, he likes to spot talent, and he likes to get people started. I think he likes that kind of thing. And finally I got his number, and I phoned him and he said, “Yeah, send some samples down.” So I sent some samples to Rubinstein, and he actually went to Marvel and DC, I think, and showed the editors.

Some of the editors liked it, and Bobbie Chase happened to be one of the editors that liked it. And she phoned me up and put me on their active list. I think the first thing I ever did for Marvel was an eight-page story for What The — ?.

You had a Byrne thing going?

Well, it started out I was supposed to do different styles. I can’t even remember what the story was about. But then they offered me Nth Man. Do you remember that book?

Yeah.

Ron Wagner, I think, was the guy; I was a fill-in for Ron Wagner. And the first thing I was supposed to do was draw the first three or four pages and sorta make them look like Jack Kirby. And I said this should be easy, right? That’s what I thought, like an idiot! And I said, “Wait a minute. This is hard.” It’s hard to draw like Jack Kirby, y’know? I’m looking at his stuff, I’m trying to make it look like Jack Kirby, and I couldn’t. I just tried my best, and it kind of looks like Kirby, but not quite. I learned a lesson there.

But Byrne was a big influence on you?

Yeah, he was a big influence. Because when I was a teenager I read comic books. I read all the Sal Buscema Hulks and stuff, I used to collect them.

The Herb Trimpe ones, too?

Yeah. I had those. And I just remember, and I then I kind of stopped. I discovered music and girls, I guess, and stopped collecting. And I was living in Vancouver, and I remember, I was in like a corner store, and they had those racks of comics, and I remember looking at Fantastic Four, and it was a John Byrne Fantastic Four, and going, “Wow! This is excellent!” So I picked it up, so John Byrne got me back into the comic book world because I was so impressed with his artwork on The Fantastic Four.

But you were into Bolland, too? You got into Judge Dredd later on.

No, I wasn’t, yet. It wasn’t until I worked for Aircel Comics, because they had a bunch of books there like Bernie Wrightson’s A Look Back, and his

Frankenstein. And I started to discover Bernie Wrightson, and I’m going, “Wow, double light sources! Wow! Excellent!” And I started to try to draw like Bernie Wrightson, and that got my style a little bit away from John Byrne. Because that was one of the critiques I got from the rejection slips from Marvel is, “You’re trying to look like John Byrne.” Of course, it wasn’t as good as John Byrne, but you could tell I was trying to draw like John Byrne.

But getting set for The Hulk, was that book the Grail you wanted?

Yeah, that was the grail.

I was talking to Sam Kieth, and he was telling me, “I tried out for that Hulk job, and Dale beat me for it.”

Yeah, he did a really great fill-in. Yeah, that’s right, he told me that, too.

He’s one of those guys that doesn’t see how good his art is.

He’s so humble, yeah, I know. But his artwork looks like no one else’s. There’s no one else that looks like Sam Kieth.

Oh yeah, definitely.

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The Darkness. ©2007 Top Cow Productions.

DALE KEOWN

Incredible Hulk illustration. ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

I think Sam would have gotten it had I not showed up.

That’s one of the things I noticed with Hulk. Between Todd’s run and yourself, the artwork wasn’t that great.

Remember when John Byrne did The Hulk? I was on Cloud Nine. I was going, “Oh, man!” Then he left for Superman. Then I started collecting Superman because Byrne went there.

That’s the only reason I got into DC books, because Byrne went there.

Same here! Because I really wasn’t a DC guy, and then I started collecting — he did a lot of Superman stuff back then, and Doom Patrol, and — .

And it was a good change, too, because we hadn’t seen those characters go through that sort of Marvel storyline.

That’s true.

So you were successful with Hulk, you got the book, it becomes yours, and then leaving it was tough, right?

It was.

But what was the biggest factor for you? You just felt a

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fellowship with these guys, like you wanted to be part of this?

I liked everybody involved. It was an exciting time. I just wanted to be part of that excitement.

I mean, that rock energy, because that’s what these guys felt like, wasn’t it? They felt like rock stars.

Exactly. It was like that. It was like, everybody’s going to do their own thing, and nobody could tell you that you couldn’t do something. Not that Marvel was doing that with me, I could pretty well do what I wanted.

But it wasn’t your toy to play with. You still had to get their permission to do stuff.

Yeah, exactly. At that time I figured, I had Pitt sketched out in my mind. He looked different at the time, but I had the name.

Because everybody was into Wolverine at the time, and I wanted to do this like, what if you crossed the Hulk with Wolverine?

That type of thing. And I wanted to have the size of the Hulk and the visceral ferocity of Wolverine. Of course, everybody did that.

Everybody at Image had their own version of Wolverine, I guess. And that’s what I did, y’know?

But you were you starting to get a fan base already, from the work on Hulk. Did you feel comfortable that people would come and see this book and check it out?

Yeah, I didn’t really know about that. I guess it’s logical to assume that the people who liked my artwork on The Hulk would pick up Pitt just to see what it was all about.

That first cover you did, that’s a great piece.

Is that airbrush? It just stands out.

It’s funny how coloring was kind of stale in those days until Steve Oliff colored Spawn, and I went, “Wow! I didn’t know coloring could look like that!” So I guess Steve Oliff just colored it in such a way that it just look more fleshed out.

You’d never seen your artwork in such high quality print like that?

No. It took it to another level.

Yeah.

Did you know where you wanted to go with this character?

No. I remember I always liked comics that had characters that contrasted with each other, and I liked the idea of having this little kid with his best friend as this big creature.

Doesn’t that come from Calvin and Hobbes a little bit, or is that an inspiration for that?

Well, kind of. I guess, subconsciously he’s in there because of the striped shirt and everything, and I always liked that weird kind of contrast.

Your best issue, I thought, was the one where — and that wasn’t for Image, it was for Full Bleed, but the best

issue was when you have the kid, possessed, and facing off with the Pitt.

At the time Terminator 2 was out, right? And I just loved that movie. I saw it four or five times, and I liked the idea of this big character and this little kid teaming up like that; so I kind of felt like I liked that energy.

He shows up on earth like that, too, just like the Terminator.

Yeah, exactly. I even had Pitt on a motorbike in one scene. That was, like, the only scene I ever did that I put Pitt on a motorbike. He just looks weird, though.

Were you really happy with how the book was coming out? Were you surprised that it was working? Was there somebody you were consulting with editorial-wise, just to see if you were on the right track?

No. It was all just intuition, and basically I had done so many Hulks by that point I knew what would work.

But it did help having that pinup in Spawn #1, and then having that preview in Youngblood.

Yeah, it was a good push. The marketing and the excitement around the whole Image thing, obviously that was a big reason why it sold pretty well.

But did you ever get caught up in that frenzy?

What frenzy?

All the fanaticism and all that stuff, that you might have put drawing the book aside or something?

No! F*ck, no.

I don’t know, Todd’s quick to point out some guys got the money but they didn’t keep working.

Well, yeah, I did that, but it wasn’t — I mean, the thing that happened with me is I got the money and all of a sudden I could afford all of this musical equipment that I couldn’t afford before. And I’m a frustrated musician, so I started spending not enough time drawing and too much time in my recording studio. And just buying basses and amplifiers and effects and stuff like that. So I just, I lost track. I mean, I still don’t produce very much.

But you did produce a lot, compared to some of the others; you did do a lot of artwork in the first couple of years.

Yeah, I did. I did more Hulks than any other book.

Then when I did Pitt, a couple of times I would knuckle down and I’d do #3 and #4 in, like, a month.

But after that, I was, like… maybe I got a little burned out or something, I don’t know, but I was so scattered.

What was the burnout from?

Well, I’m not a writer, and I only had a few ideas. I kind of used them up, and I needed a writer to come up with some ideas.

But you didn’t ask Peter David to come?

No, I wanted Peter David to come, but I don’t think Todd would have allowed it, to be perfectly honest.

Well, Peter wouldn’t have allowed it, either, because I think Sam was saying he might have talked to Peter, and Peter said no.

That’s right, too, so even Sam asked Peter and he said no. I mean, I’m sure that now it might be different. I don’t know how Todd feels.

But you were surprised that some of the other artists and writers didn’t have that camaraderie with the other Image guys; they didn’t support it at all? Wasn’t it weird how some people reacted to Image at first? There were so many people against them.

Yeah, there was, actually. But I thought that whole Peter David/Todd McFarlane debate was kind of funny.

But you didn’t talk to Peter about it?

No, I never talked to him about it, no.

It must have felt like your two parents were fighting or something.

Yeah, that’s what it was like. It was weird. You felt like the little kid caught in the middle. I don’t want to get involved. I like Peter and I like Todd.

Well, when you were at Marvel and you said you were going to Image, did they look down on that? Did they want to get rid of you that day or did they want to get as much art as they could from you?

I think because The Hulk was on a roll at the time, they couldn’t help but be disappointed. Yeah, I think they were. I got that from them, especially Peter,

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Pitt #13 cover. ©2007 Dale Keown.

DALE KEOWN

More artistic goodness from Keown. ©2007 Top Cow Productions.

because he was like, “You’re going now? What’s the deal?” I said, “Well, geez, this could mean a lot of money. I can’t turn this down.” That’s not to say I wouldn’t have made money had I stayed and done more.

But it would have taken you a few years to make whatever Pitt #1 made.

Yeah. If you break it down, that’s a lot of money for just a few books.

But you never thought, “This is me on my own, and let’s put me to the test.”

Yeah. I mean, I probably could have done better. I look back and I think, “I really should have been more productive.”

I thought your story was great — when compared to some of the other guys.

One thing I never ever got into was doing the multiple cover things. Because a lot of people say that’s one of the reasons why retailers are pissed off, because now the fans are getting pissed off because there are so many different alternate covers, and the whole greed aspect came into it. But personally, I think I’ve done one alternate cover in the whole Pitt run.

Most of the guys, with the exception of Jim and Rob, didn’t do a lot of that kind of stuff.

That’s true. I mean, I know Todd didn’t do that at all.

You went out of your way to keep the price low, too. As sales went down, you didn’t think about raising the cover price or anything.

I kept resisting that until, yeah, I think I raised it a little bit at the end, around #19, or really close to the end of the run.

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But what happened when the sales started going down? Did you become concerned?

Well, yeah! That stings. You’re going, “Oh, geez, now I’m going to have to produce more.” I was pretty lucky in that I was around at that time.

Really, it was like just the perfect time to be drawing comic books.

It gave you a lot of opportunities that you would never have gotten if you had stayed working at Marvel, I’m sure.

Yeah, exactly.

But were you ready to be your own editor? Was that another problem?

Well, the thing about editors is, for me, I need somebody to crack the whip. When I’m by myself, left to my own devices, there’s no one to crack the whip. I really do need that. I didn’t think I needed that until I realized that, geez; I’m not getting much done. I’m down there playing my bass going, “I really should be upstairs drawing, but this is too much fun. Whoopee!”

What did you do to take care of that? You just matured as it went on?

No, I’m still kind of like that. The book I’m working on now I’ve been working on it for — it’s taken me two years to do two issues. I’m still really slow. But, yeah, I’ve done a lot of covers and stuff. But I don’t draw as much as I should.

You don’t sketch on the side or anything; you don’t ever get that itch?

Not really. I don’t usually draw unless I’m at my board. But I think sketching is important. Whenever I sit down to draw… I start to draw and I’m all stiff and everything. I go, “What’s the deal?” It takes me a couple hours just to get loosened up, and all of a sudden everything’s flowing. You go, “Oh, I understand.” You should sketch and just sort of loosen, limber up before, like anything, it’s almost like a sporting event: you should limber up before you start drawing or everything will move a lot slower.

Whenever I’m doing sketches at a convention, because I don’t do a lot of conventions, I was so jealous. I was sitting beside Mike Turner watching him sketch, and just going, “Wow, man! That’s so good!” And then I do one of my sketches and I go, “Ugh.” I don’t even want to show them. I’m trying to hide it from them.

Did you get emotionally attached to your character? Did you not want to see it end after a while? Did you want bigger things for him, like movies? I mean, you tried all that stuff?

Yeah, I tried stuff, but I had a representative in Hollywood shopping Pitt around. I got close. Like, I was negotiating with DreamWorks, and I almost had a toy out.

But, yeah, I just sort of fell through the cracks.

But you never talked to Todd for advice? I’m sure Todd would put it out right away.

Todd almost did a toy a few years ago, but that fell through, as well.

Oh, that’s surprising.

It would have been great, though.

But when you left Image, what happened? You needed fresh air?

Yeah, well, I was working with this guy who was the same guy who was shopping my property around Hollywood, and he said, “You could make more money if you publish yourself.” And I said, “Well, I don’t know.” I didn’t really know what I was doing. And I was going, “Oh, okay, I’ll try it.” So we tried it, and it turns out it wasn’t true. I still made probably around the same amount of money, but I didn’t have… You know, when you’re in Previews magazine…

You didn’t have the better placement in Previews.

Yeah, exactly.

Because people go to the Image section and they order. They didn’t even know to go, they’ve got to look around for Full Bleed, and they’ve got one page…

Did anybody at Image try to change your mind, Larry Marder or anybody?

Nope.

You didn’t hear from any of the founders or anything.

No. That’s kind of strange.

Well, at that time I really wasn’t that productive. I’d never really thought about that before. Maybe I should be offended.

But now you had more responsibilities, too. You had to oversee the printing and stuff.

Yeah, I learned a lot about the behind-the-scenes stuff. I didn’t know anything about any of that stuff, like the film outputting, and the solicitation, and the advertising. But I’m glad I learned that, because that’s the only way you can really learn it, y’know?

But you have no regrets, right? Of leaving Hulk and doing your own thing?

No, I think that if I had it to do over again, I’d do it

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The Darkness. ©2007 Top Cow Productions.

DALE KEOWN

Pitt. ©2007 Dale Keown.

probably the same way.

Even with all the bumps?

Yeah! The bumps? That’s the learning curve, man!

What about now? How did you get together with Silvestri?

Yeah, after Pitt #20 came out, which was the last one I did, I just stopped doing anything. I didn’t even draw anything for, like — .

Were you tired of comics? For a while, I wasn’t sure that you quit, because you were doing an issue here, and an issue there, and then you disappeared.

Yeah, I don’t know. I guess I was feeling a little burned out, and I started to get into other things. And I taught myself a little bit of 3-D animation, and I was working in the 3-D animation applications and stuff.

I wanted to get into animation, so I taught myself a little bit of that, just enough to get by. And then I

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realized that, my God, you’ve got to have so much processing power to do anything, it just wasn’t satisfying. Because one thing about comic books and drawing is that it’s immediate. You draw something and there it is. But 3-D animation, you’ve got to wait for it to render, each frame takes hours to render; euch.

And for a guy who doesn’t want to be drawing all day…

Yeah, exactly. So it’s just kind of counterproductive.

But I like what you’re doing now. Now it seems like you’re more into the illustrator mode.

Did you rediscover yourself or something?

I don’t know. I look back at the old Hulk books, and they’re really hard for me to look at because I just see all the flaws in my drawing. I go, “God, yuck.” I mean, they are what they are, and definitely the people who collected them back then have a place in their heart for that artwork. It’s sort of like the artwork that I used to collect, like the Sal Buscema stuff, I still love that stuff.

Even though it’s not the kind of artwork that somebody would produce today, it’s still amazing, and I love it. Each time I see it I just feel really good — like Jack Kirby and that kind of thing. So, people think the same way, probably, about those Hulk books that I did. They still go, “Yeah, I remember!” And guys come up, “When I was a kid, I used to collect the Hulk you did!”

You appreciate that, I’m sure, right?

It makes me feel a little old, but it’s great, because you know that something you did sort of lives on in people’s hearts.

I’m sure you still get a lot of feedback about The Pitt, right?

Yeah, that too! It’s amazing, because Pitt, it was 1993 that it came out, kids that were ten years old are now adults, “I remember when I was a kid collecting this.” And to me it just seems like yesterday.

To me it seems like yesterday, too. Yeah, I remember waiting for that book to come out.

Yeah, exactly. So I go, “Oh, thanks for making me feel like an old geezer — “ But you really pushed yourself, when you were doing that first issue, you really thought about pushing yourself, like, “I’ve got to do something different here.”

Yeah. I was really tickled because I finally got to ink a whole book. Because I remember at the time, for some reason it was a big deal that I wasn’t inking enough. I mean, I really liked working with Bob McLeod, who was the inker — .

But he overpowered you sometimes. There were a lot of his touches on the finished Hulk art.

Yeah, a lot of his stuff. And then Mark Farmer took over, and I like Mark Farmer’s inking, but for some reason I’ve always liked to take something from the very beginning, from sketch to full ink. And when I started doing Pitt, I finally got to ink my own stuff. For

some reason, that was a big deal. I got to ink my own stuff, and I got to do full bleed off the page. And, of course, Steve Oliff was coloring it, so everything looked really cool, and everybody was really doing their best at every stage of producing a book back then.

Not that they don’t do that at Marvel, but let’s face it, some of the coloring is kind of, y’know, four-color process. I remember I’d always feel disappointed whenever I’d do a Hulk — .

It was the same thing they were using in 1940!

Yeah! And it was just like, “Oh my God! Come on!”

And they just did it really fast, I guess. I mean, I realize I was slow and they probably didn’t have enough time, but, y’know… the X-Men books that Jim was doing were colored better than Hulk books back then.

But while you were there, you didn’t feel like you were mistreated or anything by any of the other Image guys?

Yeah! Oh, yeah!

You didn’t feel left out of certain things, or you were out of the loop?

Maybe there were certain things I don’t even know I was left out of, I don’t know.

But I never really felt that way. I was in my own bubble, I guess. When you’re there in the Image studios I think more opportunities crop up and you can take advantage of them, but when you’re out of sight, you’re out of mind. That was basically the situation, I think.

But leaving Image, the minute that your manager said, “Maybe you should publish your own stuff,” that wasn’t such a big decision for you?

I didn’t want to do it. I wanted to stay where I was.

You know what I actually thought back then? I thought that he was trying to protect me because I thought that Image was going to fire me. I thought that, because I was so slow, they’re just going to say, “Oh, we’re going to clean house and get rid of Keown.”

And Todd did that with a lot of guys, but I’m sure he

liked your stuff too much — .

I know, but at the time I thought that my agent got wind of that, and he wanted to sort of quit before I got fired. So I said, “Yeah, okay,” I did it. I didn’t really think that much. I’m not too much of a businessman, so I figured it would work out. It did work out. I could have kept doing Pitt. If I was more productive, I probably could have made $50,000 each book. I sold 50,000 copies even back after the market crashed.

You were selling 50,000 after the market crashed?

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Pitt trade paperback cover. ©2007 Dale Keown.

DALE KEOWN

Pitt. ©2007 Dale Keown.

No, I was selling, like, 30,000 or something.

Those was still good numbers in that era.

That was still good numbers, and when did I, it was like 1998, 1999 — .

But your first issue sold a million. When you heard that number, you must have fallen off your chair.

It was great. It was like, “What?”

A couple of you guys actually sold more copies than some of the founders, and that must have been kind of cool.

Oh, that’s right. I forgot about that. Wow. So working with Marc now, how is that for you? It’s a much better situation?

It’s weird, because he’s kind of like my boss, but I think he still thinks of it like we’re peers. He just thinks that because we were on the same keel, we should stay that way.

But there’s something about this character

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you like, The Darkness? Is it eye-catching? Is it something you like drawing?

I like drawing monsters, and there’s a lot of monsters. And it was good practice, because I can draw monsters in my sleep. It comes really easily to me; I do it all the time. But drawing normal people has always been more of a challenge.

How many issues have you drawn?

It was a six-issue run. I did three complete, I did breakdowns on a couple.

But it was different coming back to that regular routine, right?

Yeah, it was as close as it had been in years.

Was it grueling, going through that monthly deadline kind of thing?

Yeah. They had to get a fill-in because I was taking so long. Or they had to get just me doing breakdowns, because I was taking too long, and they still wanted to have my name in there. Some people didn’t even notice that somebody else had done the pencils.

I didn’t even know you were working on those things. But the Darkness/Pitt book comes from where? Is that something Marc wanted to do, or is that something you wanted to do?

Well, actually, do you remember Jim McLaughlin?

Yeah, one of those Wizard guys.

He used to work at Top Cow, and I probably talked to him the most out of anybody, and he says, “Would you be interested in doing any Pitt stuff over here?” So finally I said, “Yeah, let’s do it.” And then they said, “Who do you want to write the series?” and I said, “I guess Paul Jenkins,” because I’d been working with him, and he’s a good writer and I like to work with him. And so Paul phoned me one day and says [British accent], “Look, mate. Maybe it would be better to — “.

Because instead of having him learn everything about the character — and basically writing a character you’re not familiar with would take longer — just to make it go faster, why don’t we team him up with Jackie and the Darkness just because he’s more familiar than that, and there’d be less Pitt in it, but he’d still be there and sort of kill two birds with one stone?

Will you ever do anything with Pitt again? Will you do a collection, just to look back?

I don’t know. Probably not.

Why not? There are 20 issues of a pretty fun book!

I don’t know. It’s such a pain in the ass getting everything together, y’know? Like, you gotta get all the film together and you’ve gotta get them printed.

Well, the art is terrific in those books.

Yeah, but most of that was just enthusiasm-driven.

Because I just love comics, I couldn’t believe — I’ve had other jobs that just suck in my life and I just couldn’t believe that I’m sitting here drawing for a living.

I M A G E A S S O C I AT E

Sam Kieth Although Sam Kieth is fondly remembered for his artwork on Marvel Comics Presents and Sandman, it was at Image Comics that the artist finally found his creative chops on his title The Maxx. Born in the pages of the 1.3 million selling anthology Darker Image #1, The Maxx was everything that Kieth wanted to say in a comic at the time — a heavy psychological exploration of the human character and the world around us. His book was real heavy material amongst the violence and “T & A” that were commonplace in early Image books; perplexing protagonists like Julie and Maxx made this the first book of substance and critical acclaimed published by Image. Despite his low-key persona, Sam Kieth put together one of Image’s best sellers, a loyal fan following, movie deals and a fondly remembered MTV animated adaptation. Still a highly in-demand cover and super-hero artist for his surreal vision, Kieth now has the freedom to create character-driven narratives like Four Women, Zero Girl and Ojo. I was looking at your work, and you had been working independently for a long time. You backed Matt Wagner and things like that.

Everybody starts on super-heroes, when they’re growing up and first reading comics. Later on I hoped to be an underground comics artist, but there weren’t any. By the ’70s and ’80s, the undergrounds were kind of dead. So I think I came back to superheroes because there was nowhere else to go.

You didn’t experience some of the black-&-white boom?

No, I just missed that. I remember when the Hamsters came out, there was a whole bunch of books that were clones of them, all these other funny animal books. When the Turtles were huge, there was a book about hamsters, and I did two or three issues of that.

You did the Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters?

That was it. I did the very last three issues before they canceled the book. And Mike Dringenberg was caught up in some of that, too, trying to get jobs.

Both of us were lamenting the fact that we just missed the funny animal boom. There would be no more booms in comics that — .

You knew Dringenberg before Sandman?

He was always running around San Diego, and he was the guy who had the best portfolio, so everybody knew that, no matter what else would happen, Mike would get in and the rest of us wouldn’t.

So were you working anywhere else in the beginning?

I did little black-&-white stories and back-up strips. Just pretty much anything anybody would give

me. I’d go six months or a year and then I’d do a five-page or nine-page story.

Were you scraping by?

No, my wife was supporting me. I wasn’t making any money doing back-up stories for $35 or $25 a page, y’know?

Trying to break into Marvel and DC took you a few years, right?

It took me too many years. People shouldn’t use me as an example at all. It took me, like, five or eight years. I couldn’t get into either one of those places for years.

About your style? It looks a little bit like Wagner’s stuff, but there’s somebody else, right?

Yeah, there’s a lot of guys from the ’70s that I was always…

Like Frank Brunner?

Well, even before him.

More like Bernie Wrightson

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Maxx. ©2007 Sam Kieth.

SAM KIETH

Unused Marvel Comics Presents cover by Sam Kieth. ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

and Frazetta. And Frank Brunner was the same school of people that was kind of Neal Adams and Bernie Wrightson influenced, and all the ’70s guys.

Wrightson and Frazetta influenced Arthur Suydam.

There was just a whole bunch of people that used to always either be in Heavy Metal or in horror comics.

You gravitated toward Marvel somehow.

Well, after I left Sandman, everybody at Marvel pretty much told me I would never get any work because my Sandman work was so bad. And I agreed. So the only thing that I got from Marvel in the beginning was when they were reviving the Nightmare on Elm Street books, and I think I did a back cover and a story that never saw print. I think I just got the chance to do the story in Marvel Comics Presents because Todd didn’t do it. And Todd was going to do maybe the one after Barry WindsorSmith. They were looking around for people, and I just happened to be on the phone that day. They said, “Well, do you want to do it?” I said, “Sure.” So I would spend all this time trying on that Marvel Presents stuff.

Your art had transformed a little bit. The characters

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became a lot bulkier, less like the Wrightson type of thing.

No, they didn’t look normal anymore. They had steroids. It was ridiculous.

Where did that come from?

It’s like everybody else, y’know? All those other guys. You’d look at Rob’s characters and say, “Well, this is what they look like if they’re all completely puffed up with air,” then you’d look at Todd and you’d say, “Well, look at the telephone cords that are all twisty.” So I can’t do Spider-Man’s webs twisty, but what if I had little strands that hung off of Wolverine’s outfit, what if those are twisty? It was just basically ripping off everybody else.

Oh, is that what that was?

My whole career is ripping off everybody else.

But you were doing something different. It was a little out of whack. This huge hairy Wolverine with these huge biceps — how long did it take you to draw that?

About as much as it looks. It took some getting used to, because there were a lot of people who didn’t like how weird it looked. Everything that people later liked about anybody that looked different at Marvel, in the beginning the fans would all say, “Get this guy off this book, he doesn’t look normal.” The feet are too big, the characters are too distorted.

Everything that everybody loved about Todd and all those guys in the beginning, at the beginning there was always the resistance. Remember when Erik came on and it was, “Oh, this isn’t Todd, this is Erik.”

And then when the guy came on after Erik…

Mark Bagley.

Mark Bagley, they gave him crap for not being Erik.

But you stuck to your guns.

I had no choice. I couldn’t draw… I tried to rip other people off, but by then I couldn’t draw like anybody else. It never looked like whoever I tried to rip off, it just always looked like me. It always looked like a weaker version of somebody else, and then I thought, well, eventually it just stopped looking like rip-offs of other people and grew into its own mutation.

Had you been friends with any of the other guys p re-Image? Were you friends with Todd and Jim (Lee)?

I didn’t talk to Todd too much, but I remember him popping up in my mind when he did that Batman: Year Two. He did a Batman mini-series that really stood out, and that’s where that whole origami cape thing that he has, I remember that showing up in Spawn later, and even in Spider-Man. And it really seemed to come to life in that Batman mini-series he did. And I remember thinking, “This guy draws great capes.”

Well, those are Marshall Rogers capes, that’s what he says now.

I think it’s cool that he passed that on and points that out, but it was some of him, too. But I didn’t really talk to any of them. I think I called up Jim Lee once and asked what he was getting as a page rate.

Out of the blue! And he basically told me, well, it’s really the royalties. The page rates are pretty much not, people aren’t making that much more than other people. And then we talked for a little bit, and that

was kind of it. It wasn’t really until I was doing the Marvel Presents stuff and the covers that suddenly — I couldn’t get a job drawing, I just was stuck doing the covers.

You were so busy on that book, you didn’t have time to do other work, did you? There were some issues that you even did two covers for.

Yeah, well, because they had a flip cover on the back, so unless they had a deal with that artist, I could do two covers, which was great, you’re right. So it just depended. But it was so long ago, it’s only people like you and me that remember it anymore.

That’s what you think.

I’m sure people still talk about — .

Well, the people that are reading this book, everybody that’s younger is, like, “Sam who?” Even if they’ve heard of Spawn or, y’know…

When they started Image, did you feel a synergy with them? Did you connect with these guys, so that you wanted to be a part of it?

You know what it was like? There was always the main guys that founded it, and they were the ones that were like the rock stars. And then there was, like, a second wave of people. And I always felt like somebody who was hanging out behind these big rock star guys, that was just lucky to be standing there next to the amplifiers. From the beginning, remember, it wasn’t like this big thing that everybody was all confident about until Todd and Jim started selling those numbers. Until then, they were trying to say to people, “Do you want to come on board?” And people were very reluctant. I was just in a crack where I couldn’t get a chance. I still really wanted to do a book. It still frustrated me to just do covers, and I couldn’t get one from Marvel. And I really liked drawing my own character. I wanted to draw Wolverine with bigger and bigger feet, and I was getting more and more fan mail from kids that were freaked out by that and wanted smaller feet. And I kept thinking, if I create a character that has big feet...

Did you have to convince your wife about joining Image?

Well, I wasn’t making much money anyway, so it

didn’t really matter. I was only doing two covers every month, so it’s not like I could retire at Marvel on what I was making, so saying I was going to go do an eight-page story for this other company that may not pay me, well, fine, y’know? There was not a lot invested.

I thought you were pretty much there, right up with these guys.

Well, there wasn’t a pecking order. In my mind I thought that they were the best. It never occurred to me that books didn’t sell a lot, or there were other artists that got bigger jobs or made more money. I just thought, “Well, this artist is the best in my mind.

Surely all the other artists get around and consider him part of the group.” I always felt that Dale Keown was the most natural guy to jump into their ranks because he looked more mainstream. And I always think that Larry Stroman had a good shot, because I remember him, he got a Wolverine gig at Marvel, and I couldn’t get one. I was always frustrated because they were getting offers for the main characters and I was still stuck just doing covers. I couldn’t get a regular gig. So a lot of the reasons I took it is because there was no other — nobody was offering anything else, y’know?

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Early development for Maxx. ©2007 Sam Kieth.

SAM KIETH

Maxx sketchbook. ©2007 Sam Kieth.

Did you have Maxx planned out?

No, not really. I just had the sketchbooks and drawings.

So he was a character in one of those sketchbooks?

Yeah. I tried to sell him to Marvel ten years before and they weren’t interested. And you know what? It wasn’t like it was that formed of an idea. And, frankly, if I hadn’t decided to try to do Maxx with Image at that time, there’s nothing about the design that’s really that more interesting than one of a million other characters. It just happened to be like, “Hey, here’s a spotlight.” It’s like, what if you were going to do a movie; what if Tom Cruise wanted you to be in his next movie, okay? Whatever idea that you slide underneath that spotlight next to Tom Cruise is going to get a lot of attention. So you dust off something in the back of your closet and say, “There you go.

Here’s this big guy and he could be purple. How about that?” It could have been anything. It could have been a big yellow guy. It could have been a guy named Big Charlie or Little Dweeby or…

Well, the book sold very well, finally getting the acceptance you were looking for.

Yes and no. I’m not trying to denigrate the whole Image thing, but I think it was great. If it wasn’t for Jim and Todd and Rob, all saying, “Look, we’re going to allow you to do your own book,” I wouldn’t have been able to go off and draw the comics that I want to draw now. It opened a lot of doors. But I always felt that, for myself, not so much them, but I always feel, like, envious of people like Alan Moore and Miller and these people who had actually, even Howard Chaykin, people that had created things not during a boom in the industry, but just written and drawn during times that were pretty flat, and just did such a good job that there was, like, Watchmen and

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Dark Knight, and they just spiked all on their own. Now, I do think that Jim and Todd, especially, caused those spikes on their own back at Marvel and DC. I mean, they started a ball rolling. It’s not like they were riding a wave. But I always felt a little guilty, for my part, for riding that wave, you know what I mean?

Pretty much you could just put anybody on top of that wave and go, “Oh, look! You’re riding the same wave as this other big guy!” And you just feel a little bit like… Do you remember that guy in Home Alone, the guy who used to narrate Wonder Years? Anybody could have been the side guy in Home Alone that just runs around and chases after Macaulay Culkin. And when you’re that actor, you go, “Well, shoot.” You know, it’s hard to take a lot of bows for just being in a big hit thing.

It’s funny you see it that way, because the way I see it is they gave you a break, but you had to keep it going. If there was no substance to this thing, people would have forgotten it right away. It would have been one issue, that’s it.

Well, a lot of them were one issue, because remember they only had a mini-series.

But your series did keep going, and it had fans, and I see the website’s there, and people are still talking about Maxx and the friends. Something went right. It’s strange to hear you say this, you did almost 40 issues of this book, and you stuck around long enough to develop a fan base, and you were able to do things that a lot of the other guys wish they would have done.

I don’t know if they would have wished that.

People have thought of Maxx as being one of the more literate strips from Image.

It just depends. I think that if people are going to respect your work a little more, then you’re going to wish you were more popular, or vice versa. But I can’t imagine Jim or Todd laying awake at night and saying, “I wish I had more respect or readers.” I think both those guys are doing fine.

How would you describe the book? For the most part it’s very subtle and quiet.

Here’s a good example of somebody that’s kind of in the same boat that I was. Erik was the “normal” version of Sam Kieth. Because he did a book, it was a super-hero book. It was everything that people wished that I would have done that liked normal super-heroes, but instead mine was always a cross between an acid trip and a Twilight Zone episode.

Everybody likes a book where somebody will at least

occasionally beat up somebody or save somebody.

Maxx was an outlet you never had before, though?

Yeah, it did give me that outlet. But I’m sure this has been covered by a lot of the other guys, and they’re all in the same boat. I mean, like Dale Keown could go off and be “the Pitt guy.” It was something he didn’t have before, right?

Every artist has something they want to say, and I think that’s what you did with Maxx.

It’s kind of two different phases, because the things that I’m doing now, because of the fact that it came out so often, people could lump it together and call it The Maxx. But there were some really rough edges and entire storylines in later issues that were really some of my weaker work in terms of my writing and drawing, but because it’s all lumped together and called The Maxx, people remember it fondly and lump them together. And the books that I’m doing now with Oni, small creator-owned books, I borrow against working with other artists, and I think sometimes they’re more thoughtful, but because other artists are involved, they have less of me in the art, so some people are like, “Yeah, I liked his old Maxx books.” But if you go back and look, there’s a lot of really ratty old Maxx books.

That’s part of the growing process. That’s what I thought when you had left, that you were ready to do something else.

Well, at the time, too, I was drawing the book, and then I’d fly down to L.A. and work on the cartoon,

and then come back, and I’d be lucky to get two or three days of drawing the comic book in, because so much was going on.

You weren’t prepared for all the time that being editor and caretaker of The Maxx took? Like, having guys call you to want to do toys and God knows what.

Yeah, all those things that turn into lawsuits and bitter, angry people that… I used to get, like, 25 messages on the phone machine. Nowadays, actually, if you go through and edit down everybody that seems to be offering you something who is really asking for something that later turns into a big headache lawsuit or lost money on your part, you actually will discover there’s only three messages on your machine.

And there’s really 22 people that are all just trying to hustle you. So it was a great lesson in learning to decipher that whenever somebody offers you something, they’re really trying to take a ride, and more than likely you’ll never hear from them again, you’ll never see the product. They’ll use your character to try to sell it, and you discover that the world sucks.

What’s the future for the character? Right now you’re keeping the stories in print, right?

Yeah, they’re in print. All I’m doing now is just doing these stories at Oni that are all a little more cerebral, a little more bizarre than even The Maxx, and the last of those will eventually tie back into the last story I did in The Maxx, which is connecting every character I created into one story arc. But now, when I think of The Maxx, all I do is think of a

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Oodles of Maxx doodles. ©2007 Sam Kieth.

SAM KIETH

The dawn of Julie and Maxx in Sam’s sketch pad. ©2007 Sam Kieth.

lot of headaches, and a lot of lawsuits, and just a lot really uncomfortable, ugly things that I’d rather let lie sleeping at the bottom — .

Why did you leave Image after a while?

It wasn’t really leaving Image. It was more like, The Maxx was selling a lot, but towards the end, after #1, I stopped putting Maxx in the book and started trying to tell stories that had nothing to do with the Maxx, and I think that frustrated readers.

Hey, he’d show up in the first panel, “I’m not going to be here. Instead, here’s a story that could be an after-school special. I’ll see you on the last page.”

People were like, “Wait. If I’m picking up Spawn, I want to see Spawn in it. Not Murder She Wrote. I don’t want a guest host.”

So you don’t see yourself coming back to the character?

I will wrap it all up when I finish all of these Trout books that I’m doing. That will be my full circle.

Ultimately will there be some big Maxx/Julie payoff? I think that I can’t really come back to try to do that because I’m not who that is anymore. It’s like everything that people thought they liked about The Maxx; if they thought they liked me doing it, I don’t even necessarily like the same kind of art that I used to do.

When did you start getting into film?

When it was optioned to be a movie and then the whole deal went south. I think the idea was planted when it was optioned to be a movie and I was signed to write and direct the big Maxx movie, and then I

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thought, “Oh, I can direct things.” And then it fell apart. I still had the idea in my head, and I made a short, and then after I made that live-action short film — which everybody in film school makes a short, y’know, it’s nothing new — but then when I showed that to Roger Corman, and then I made a bad movie with him, I thought, “Oh, okay. Well, maybe it was just, for whatever reason, I don’t have any talent as a director, but maybe my next movie will be good.” But it’s proving to be a lot harder than I thought. It’s interesting. I read somewhere that some fan said, “Hey, you know what? If going off and proving he can’t make movies makes Sam Kieth come back and do better comics, I say great.” So maybe that’s what my fate is, to actually make movies, discover I can’t make them, and come back and try to do other comics. Some people will say the problem with Sam Kieth is he had all that attention, and he pissed it away by being weird.

Where are you reading this stuff, online?

Well, no, it’s true. I’ve had people, there’s people that basically feel like, y’know, there’s people like Erik Larsen and Dale that did what everybody wanted, which is a super-hero book, and then I go off into la-la land and do my weird-ass number and pretty much, people that are weird love it and get it, and I get those people intuitively anyway, when I see them at a con or whatever. My fans are so specific, it’s like we’ve already communicated via the book, you know

what I mean? So we totally understand each other.

But the regular super-hero fan doesn’t quite get how I even slipped into the card deck. When you’re writing or drawing something you create, the focus is to actually make something that’s going to stick to your ribs after you’ve read it, and to try to add something that’s honest, you know what I mean? The best Maxxes were where I actually tried to share something, and the worst were where I would just make up a monster that month and say, “Well, how about something furry with big polka dots, and we’ll figure out what it is later?” Which is not always, in retrospect, the best way to do a story, obviously.

So you never felt that things were starting to come together for you? Like The Maxx, you finally had some money, you didn’t have to worry about bills anymore for a little bit?

You’re right, the whole thing would not probably have happened without Jim Lee saying, “Look, we’re doing this book. We’ll each do three parts. And it’s a setup for you, so basically you can give a sh*t on a shingle, it doesn’t matter what you do, because it’s Jim and Rob and me that are going to be selling the book.” That’s like the fairy tale story everybody wants. Who would say, “F*ck you guys, no, I’m not going to do that”? Of course you’re going to do that.

Wouldn’t you do it?

Sure. In a heartbeat.

Yeah. You don’t get those questions every day.

But for some reason I always felt like, when they went off, you felt that they were going to succeed, and you wanted them to succeed, y’know?

I thought you were going to say, “You felt like they were going to succeed and you wanted them to fail.”

No, I never — I bought into the whole thing. That’s why I’m doing this book. Did you have any resentment?

Because you might have expected them to support their fellow artists and stick through everything that happened at the start of Image.

Oh, hell, no. Why the hell should they support us?

Do you think they should support us?

There wasn’t that kind of camaraderie there?

No, of course, there was no camaraderie when six people were making all that money. So why would there be that camaraderie? Is it just, guys are getting mad all of a sudden? Again, I have to say, when you get into people who have done things on their own, Jim Lee, Todd, Alan Moore, Frank Miller, I’m not equating to people, but the point is that they did things and people came. They didn’t stand next to somebody doing something big or jump on something big, y’know? They drew things, whether their characters or taking other people’s characters and expanding on that, and then there’s — I’m not denigrating everybody that’s outside of that circle, but when you get into the third level people like me, I was standing next to somebody that did those things. So it seems chintzy to take bows because you’re standing next to somebody when something goes well. Yeah, it doesn’t minimize my doing the best I could, but I feel kind of goofy even just being in the book, but I think it’s strange to say, “I don’t want to participate in the book because I already did that little thing.” I tried to

do that with Sandman, and you give up, because people beat you down and say, “No, shut up and stop trying to rain on our parade.”

Well, when MTV came to you, all that stuff took you by surprise, basically?

Of course, yeah.

“They want to do my baby.”

Yeah, and again, just dumb luck. People would always think, “How did you get that to happen?” I remember Steve Rude asking me, when Nexus was popular, before he wanted to get the same guys that worked on The Maxx cartoon to work on his. And I was trying to talk to the animation producers, “You should do Nexus, yeah!” But for some reason… I remember the only two books that struck Gregg Vanzo, the guy who produced the animated cartoon, were my book and Megaton Man. Megaton Man? Wow. I know! That’s where everybody goes, “Really? I don’t see the connection.” For some reason he really liked Megaton Man and he really liked The Maxx.

And despite me trying to turn him on to lots of other people… But everybody thought because we got away with murder at MTV that we had the power to do that someplace else. But then at MTV, Beavis and Butthead was over, the new wave of cartoons weren’t selling like the old ones, and suddenly everything that gave us the freedom to do that dried up.

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©2007 Sam Kieth.

SAM KIETH

Maxx #1 cover art by Sam Kieth. ©2007 Sam Kieth.

Maxx action figure

by McFarlane Toys. ©2007 Sam Kieth.

And now, years later, when things are being sold and going into development, I’m just a lot more guarded because I know that they will turn out so far removed from the comic book version. And over and over again I see new generations of people hoping their comic book will be made into a movie, and either just really excited because they’re going to get the option money, or naïvely thinking it’ll turn out just like their comic.

That’s funny. I know a major comic artist who did one comic that was basically a pitch for a movie.

Sure, sure, a pitch for a movie. Outside of Alan Moore, every respected major comic book writer has to struggle like a salmon upstream to even get close to even write a first draft of their own material. Because the whole thing is, well, why don’t we get some new hotshot kid who basically writes the same thing as the writer on X-Men or whatever, and let’s get him to write it, because he’s… I mean, when I was talking about The Maxx movie, everything, and this happened when we were casting for another movie that I was going to be directing, all this crap. The first question that comes up

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is, okay, here’s this actress, here’s this writer, whoever, and if they’ve done TV… it’s between TV and movies, the question is, “Gee, they’re kind of TV. We really want to be heading toward a feature-quality director,” or director, producer, writer, whatever. There’s this idea of the pecking order of movies, and then TV, and then cable, and then MTV. But there’s still some gratification on proving yourself to these people. It’s more like, “If I fail, I failed on my own. There’s nobody else to blame.”

Yeah. I’m still failing. I’m failing in a totally different venue with this movie stuff. I’d love to be able to not do it in a way so that everybody can go, “Oh, yeah, y’know, it’d be nice if he could make a good movie ever.” I don’t see that happening — .

Until we talked I wasn’t even aware that you were on films. I’ve always felt that artists have to promote their work. You really want to see how people react to something, if they react like we wanted them to react to it.

Exactly, totally! Because there’s sometimes when they’re reading a comic and you think, “Oh, they’re going to love this.” And then people are laughing and you go, “Ooh, actually they’re making fun of it. That didn’t work out so well.

But then this moment that I thought would be embarrassing, they kind of like.” So it’s just growing pains. You’ve kind of got the best view of it, which is it enables doors to open and people to try things, and whether it be they’re more interested in the business end, like Jim and Marc Silvestri and these people that wanted to explore producing and optioning their creations to other people, and then the other side of it is the people that are more like me and Erik Larsen that want to just be left alone and do our own thing. So all that wouldn’t have happened without Jim Lee saying, “Do you want to do eight pages?”

I M A G E A S S O C I AT E S

Larry Stroman & Todd Johnson With the release of Tribe #1, Larry Stroman and Todd Johnson provided the single best-selling comic in history by African-American creators when it sold over 1,000,000 copies. The longtime friends from Detroit designed a black superhero team that dealt in high-tech international adventures in the underworld.

Artist Larry Stroman built his career on taking X-Factor (with Peter David) and the cult favorite Alien Legion to both of their sales heights with his ability to render pulse-pounding action, hyper detail and his intricate trademark panel work. Shortly after the release of the first issue, the Image founders voted Tribe out of their company. Larry and his writer, Todd Johnson, continued the adventures of their characters through Axis Comics, their own company, in the mid-’90s. To the present day, this super-hero title remains a fan favorite with readers that eagerly await the day when there are new adventures for Tribe.

Larry, when you were illustrating X-Factor, your career was just starting to really kick off, right?

Stroman: My career’s always been going. That’s just the first time that everybody recognized who I was. Previous to that, shoot, I was having a great time doing Alien Legion. I was doing that book for about seven years. And I was having a good old time.

As a matter of fact, at the point at which I stopped doing Alien Legion, I really started to get into it.

That was Carl Potts’ baby, right?

Stroman: Yeah.

So you had a fun time working on that?

Stroman: I had a great time working on Alien Legion. Every time you work on something and people for the most part leave you alone and let you do your own thing and they praise you and everything, you have a great time. But when you’re working on something where every five minutes they’re telling you you’ve got to change this, you’ve got to change that, which was what the experience was like working on X-Factor, you start to kind of stall down a little bit.

When you pitched Tribe to Image, what did they say when they heard what you guys wanted to do? Did you have to get anybody’s approval?

Stroman: There was no pitch. I got a call from Jim Lee. Just — “do you want to do a book for Image?” I said sure and that was that. He said you should come out to California.

Johnson: No, there wasn’t really any approval process at all.

Stroman: At that time it was just the creators and everybody just did — .

Johnson: Yeah, pretty much at that time everybody just did whatever the hell they wanted to do. They didn’t care about who your characters were or what city it was based in, they didn’t care about anything for the most part. They never even asked.

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Tribe. ©2007 Larry Stroman & Todd Johnson.

STROMAN & JOHNSON

On the convention circuit, Tribe caused a huge frenzy with fanboys!

Photos courtesy of Todd Johnson.

Were you guys called to the stage at the big Chicago show?

Stroman: No, not in the beginning. But once things got started they asked if I wanted to sit down for a few minutes.

Johnson: No, they never called us to the stage. At one time, after the tent thing was going pretty good, they told Larry if he wanted to sit down for a while, he could. We had a meeting in a home one time, McFarlane was there, and Larsen was there, and everybody was just talking about how much money

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they were going to make, and McFarlane was talking about how everybody can buy a Spawn boat or a Savage Dragon train. Everybody was just throwing out nonsense. It was just a time of dreaming out loud, shall we say.

At the start of Image, I heard the founders couldn’t even sleep at night, they were so excited.

Stroman: Everyone was hyped on their new freedom and creative possibilities.

Johnson: We never talked with them at all about any of the stuff we were going to do. We kind of just sat there and observed. We weren’t really part of their conversation.

When you get an order for over 1,000,000 copies of your book, like you guys did, can you sleep at night?

Stroman: No. It’s real after it is in the fans hands and you get a check.

Johnson: No, you can’t sleep at all. All you can do is call all your friends and family saying this is for real, we really got some orders. But it’s not the orders that really make it go, it’s the first time you walk into a comic shop and see your crap all over on people’s shelves. I think the first real show we did, and the book was supposed to have shipped, but there was a problem, they claimed there was a problem up at the printer, getting some of the covers to dry, but they agreed to send us about six cases of them. And we were already en route to the Kansas City show, so they drop-shipped six cases by Airborne to us, and to see those fans line up, it’s like Larry said, the first time you see a couple people, and then all of a sudden you see 300 or 400 people in line to get this issue, it was kind of overwhelming at first.

How long did it take to do the first issue?

Stroman: You can do an issue of a book in about a month — both pencil and ink. Like I said, that’s not the problem. The problem is everything else that is in between. All these artists, all these comic artists could probably put out two or three books a month if they wanted to, but other things get in the way. Other things, other people, other people’s decisions.

When you were working on Tribe, did you ever think you needed an editor?

Stroman: We didn’t think about no editor. An editor is something that was stuck into the comic industry against our will. Somebody decided that you needed that middle guy to tell you what was right and what was wrong, but it has been proven many times over that editors, on a lot of stuff, it wasn’t necessarily the correct input. Unless people were left alone to do it, that’s when their best work came out… You still have to have some direction, and when you have that direction is when you’re left to yourself. Because you could sit around for weeks and talk to somebody about what you want to do, and then for the next couple of months, you don’t speak to each other at all.

When Image eventually paid the money from Tribe #1, you were able to put it into your own company, Axis, right?

Johnson: Yeah, we put some of the money into Axis.

We put out two issues from Axis, and what had happened was, because it was originally solicited under the Image banner, both offerings of Tribe from Axis #2 and #3 were both returnable. We shipped them any-

way and took the loss. By that time you’ve already lost a lot of momentum.

Stroman: Also, we had a lot of people working for us, who at Axis didn’t turn in something on time, but we didn’t go around telling everybody our books didn’t come out because — .

Johnson: Yeah, Larry just made a good point. When we started Axis, we went to a lot of other creators we knew and we took on other projects and stuff like that, and a lot of those people never turned in their pages, either, but we never went out in the community and told everyone. And we paid all those guys as they turned in their stuff. But then when Axis went under, all we hear is, “Oh, Johnson and Stroman didn’t pay the creators,” and all this other bullcrap, you know? Hey, if I didn’t pay them, I don’t know who all these canceled checks are to.

What kind of orders did Tribe #2 get?

Johnson: Tribe #2 originally had orders from Image at about 425,000 copies. When we solicited under Axis, I think we ended up shipping about 200K plus, but we made it all returnable because of it being so late. So I don’t remember exactly how many we got back, but we got quite a few back.

What did you do with those things?

Johnson: Sold them. We were, like, the kings of conventions. I mean, one thing that both me and Larry can do, and I’m not saying this kind of bragging, man, but we can sell if we get in front of you. I don’t care what it is, ashcan, T-shirt, whatever, if we are in front of you, we are going to sell you something. So with a lot of the books that got returned, we hit a lot of stores, we hit a lot of conventions, and we just kept doing our thing. So we were able to pretty much have enough money to put issue two and three out, but a lot of the quality issues started occurring as far as Ronald’s, the printer, would not deal with us. I assume that was through something at Image. I don’t know; I’m not making any accusations. I know who had originally done the color separations was Olyoptics. What was that guy’s name, Larry?

Stroman: Steve Oliff.

Johnson: Steve Oliff. Steve Oliff told us he got a call from Image saying that if he did our books, he wasn’t going to do any of their books.

Well, the Image partners were competing with themselves, they were headhunting artists from each other, like Jim and Rob, or they outbid each other for colorists and letterers.

Johnson: Yeah, but you really cannot compete when you’re a one-stop mom and pop type shop; you can’t compete with the big boys that can give you multiple books to do. Now, I hold nothing against Steve Oliff. We both understand exactly why he did it.

That was a smart move on his part. But it still got in the way of us being able to do what we wanted to do.

Stroman: Years later, Steve apologized to me personally for what happened.

Was it harder for Larry to draw with all of this going on? Did it affect his output of art?

Johnson: Well, I’ll let him answer that, but I think the answer is “definitely.”

Stroman: Anytime in which you spend a period of

time being beat down by people for one thing or another, you begin to lose interest in something. No matter how much you try to keep that interest going, it just starts to die out.

But did you feel like Jim Lee didn’t — because most guys that came into Image, they had somebody that sponsored them into Image, they expected them to look out a little more for them.

Stroman: Other than the initial “me” coming in there, there really wasn’t much else that was going on. It was just kind of an “Oh, here you are” kind of a thing, and I said, “Okay,” and then that was it. There’s not much more of it to it than that. It wasn’t good or bad, it was just what it was. He treated me to In and Out [Burgers] once.

I thought once Image got a 20 percent cut, that you get your money and you pay who you have to pay, and that’s it. Once you get your 80 percent, you could do whatever you wanted to do — pay your staff...

Stroman: Everybody got paid eventually. I mean, we got our money eventually, but we were, like, the last ones that got the money.

Johnson: Better late than never.

I know that can be frustrating, you’ve got this book, you know it sold 1,000,000 copies, and you haven’t seen one cent yet.

Stroman: That’s not the first time that that kind of thing has happened. That’s what happens all the time.

Did you guys eventually get discouraged about comics?

Is that what happened with you?

Stroman: I don’t know that I got discouraged more so than I just began to kind of… you become disillusioned, you start to lose interest. Unless there’s

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Todd (left) and Larry get friendly with one of their creations. Photo courtesy of Todd Johnson.

At a convention, Larry and Todd take time for a snapshot. Photo courtesy of Todd.

STROMAN & JOHNSON

Studio portrait of Todd Johnson with Larry in the background.

Photo courtesy of Todd.

something that keeps that interest going, it just fades.

But you didn’t want to keep Tribe going? People still talk about it. Eventually the market crashed and we saw how many readers there really were, and they still ask about you.

Stroman: They ain’t really ever going to know the truth about what happens, but when you do something like that, you never really know…

You were telling me about getting disillusioned. I was asking you why you stopped doing comics. Have you stopped completely?

Stroman: I mean, I still draw stuff. I just haven’t put anything out. I’ve still got ideas for things and I still draw things, but we’re focusing on other things right now, real estate investments and all that kind of stuff.

Okay. Heroes Reborn: Iron Man #13 in 1997 — that was the last book you’ve done?

Stroman: Yeah, that was the last book that I had published, yeah.

Was this because Jim Lee asked you to do it?

Stroman: Mmm, Jim Lee didn’t ask me to do anything.

Well he was overseeing that book, that’s why I was

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curious.

Stroman: There were really no dealings with Jim Lee at all on the two books that he did, both the WildStorm Annual and the Iron Man book, even though those are both Jim Lee books.

Did you guys want to give up on Tribe? Because I noticed you guys were trying to do something different.

You guys changed how black super-heroes were perceived. I mean, most black super-heroes look like white guys just painted brown.

Johnson: Well, the difference with Tribe, Tribe was all white characters in blackface.

Oh yeah? [ laughter] Johnson: I’m joking, George.

Well, I was just reading something Larsen wrote, you guys drew the first big butt girl in comics.

Johnson: [Laughs] But that’s not true, though.

Robert Crumb made a whole living putting out big butt characters.

I meant to say super-hero books, in a time everybody’s anatomy was more based on John Buscema characters, where everybody looks the same.

Stroman: That’s done for speed. That’s all that is.

Johnson: I think also all art forms pretty much reflect what the particular artists enjoy and what’s in their environment. And maybe from our perspective big butts are better, nicer than what these other guys liked to draw. Maybe that’s the thing.

Even Marvel didn’t do a lot of black super-hero books.

When they do The Falcon, it’s going to be the hokiest thing you ever read. And you guys, I think, gave it a real contemporary feeling.

Johnson: George, what are you going to do? Are you going to find somebody who’s going to publish Tribe again?

Hey, you never know. Erik Larsen, I was talking to him about you guys, and I remember him saying he really liked that book. Erik’s actually the publisher right now. You never know, he might be willing to publish it.

Johnson: We got along well with Erik Larsen. He loaned us his character, Savage Dragon, and we used him for a couple of issues. Even after we were gone from Image, he still allowed us to use the character, which I can respect him for that.

But that was kind of defiant, wasn’t it?

Stroman: I thought so. I was surprised when he said that. I was surprised he let us use it.

Erik said there was a meeting where they decided to vote certain guys out and he said he wasn’t even there.

He wasn’t even aware that they were going to take out Tribe.

Johnson: Yeah. There’s so much urban legend associated with what happened to Tribe and what happened to Larry Stroman and all that. You just don’t know what actually happened at this so-called meeting or whatever. I, myself, if a book sells 1,000,000 copies and you take your 20 percent off the top, I don’t get why you’d get rid of it. That’s not logical to me. That sounds personal. That’s not business. I mean, you ask people in any other industry, the movie industry and the music industry, they hate each other’s guts and still do projects together — because it’s about big business and money. Now,

somebody made a whole lot of money on Tribe.

That’s a question you’d have to ask them.

Didn’t Todd McFarlane do some artwork for you guys?

Johnson: No, he said he was, but he never did.

Oh, he weaseled out, okay.

Johnson: Is he saying he did a card for us?

No, I was just looking at one of your Tribe trading card ads and it said “Art by Todd McFarlane”.

Johnson: Well, he didn’t quite keep his word, and that was something that people always acted like we would actually go to print and say something that somebody hadn’t already committed to doing. That was one of those things that got bumped on us like we were big liars or something; that we were trying to sell the cards by saying Todd was associated with it, and then all of a sudden we couldn’t deliver.

Almost everything at Image was a big problem all the time. It was like breaking locks to get something done. So many things that did happen shouldn’t have happened.

It should have been the time of your lives, basically.

Johnson: It should have been a lot of fun, and it ended up being not so fun. But in the end, from everything you learn a lesson. We learned lots of stuff, and obviously we did eventually get our check, and we transitioned that money into a whole lot of other things that still exist. So we’re satisfied with what happened. That’s old news, now. You’re talking about over a decade ago.

Stroman: It is true that we are living off the money from Tribe. [laughter] Johnson: I guess in a sense it is true that we are kind of living off #1’s money, still. Properly invested.

Along with another partner, we’re kind of Detroit landlords.

Was it a hard decision for Larry to quit comics? Wasn’t comics something he wanted to do his whole life?

Johnson: He didn’t quit, he just phased out. I see him draw pages all the time. He just hasn’t chosen to reengage to this particular industry as it is run right now. Now, if it seemed wise to put something out again, that would be a piece of cake. Everything in its proper time, y’know? There are so many things that have to happen all at the same time.

But what about you, didn’t you want to finish your story?

Johnson: Sure! I would love to work on Tribe again with Larry. As far as doing some other writing, my deals with other people ended up just being kind of a nightmare, too. I ended up doing a couple of books for Marvel.

Stroman: We never got to do the “Tribe vs.

Galactus” story that we wanted to do. [laughter] Johnson: I did a couple projects with Marvel, one under Marc McLaurin. They did a story called “Conspiracy.” I don’t know if you recall that.

Stroman: What was that, for Epic?

Johnson: That was in the Marvel Universe. It was a two-issue story, those painted books that they were doing back in the day. And they ended up sticking somebody else’s name on the book, and kind of changed some stuff around, and the book was horrible. And they put it out, I got paid, but my name’s not

on it. And I don’t get that, I guess. I don’t understand why another writer would want to put his name on somebody else’s stuff. That’s ridiculous. We did a 60-page Conan, they were trying to do this series of Conan meeting Marvel characters back in the Hyborian Age. You remember that at all?

It sounds familiar. And what happened?

Johnson: Well, Conan was supposed to meet all these different characters, like Iron Man, Doctor Doom, and all that, and I think they had different artists to all do their take. Well, we did a 60-page book with a painted cover of Conan meeting the Hyborian Age Black Panther. And this book was really beautiful. It is all completed, done, inked, he’d sent the painted cover, and what happened to it? God knows. I have no idea. They still have it! I’ve got the painted cover sitting in my basement. We started out a four-issue series for Dark Horse called The Mark, and we completed about three issues of that. Two of the issues were already colored by somebody, also, because I’ve got all the cover mockups. So, this book was almost done, and all of a sudden [Dark Horse Comics V.P., sales and marketing] Lou Bank called and said, “Oh, it’s not going to happen now because there’s some movie company that is doing a movie, Rob Liefeld is somehow involved, and it’s going to be called The Mark or something, so we’re just going to put that book in the can right now.” So after a while it started looking like there was a big conspiracy. It

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Larry’s sketchbook with various mutants from the Marvel Universe. ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

STROMAN & JOHNSON

Larry Stroman (pencils) and Al Milgrom (inks) team-up for this X-Factor pin-up. ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

was almost a joke. I mean, we got paid by [DH publisher] Mike Richardson for that full story, and for all the artwork, and then it never came out. Now, I don’t get that, I guess.

Some of the stuff that happens in this industry, you never can get a good handle on what’s going on, why people do the things they do. I’m sure they have great reasons. But after a while, when so many different things like that happen, you get a little disillusioned as far as whether you’re dealing with a straight hand. I’ll play any deck of cards that you want to, but if you’re playing with a deck and you’ve got stuff under your leg and under the table, then it’s not a fair game anymore.

But you guys eventually do want to do something, to come back on your own terms?

Johnson: Definitely.

I think that’s what happened, that bubble had to burst sooner or later. I’m sure you guys even saw that.

Johnson: Oh, yeah, definitely, because we were in it on the retail side, too, because we owned three stores at the time. So we saw exactly what was going to happen as far as the bubble bursting. We experienced the bubble bursting from the retail side and from the creative side.

You guys owned three comic book stores?

Johnson: We owned a chain of stores called the

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Comics Café in Detroit.

And how did that go? Not so good?

Johnson: We closed in ’97. We pretty much are all real estate investors now. We have condos and twofamily flats, four-family flats, apartment buildings, lots of stuff in Detroit. Entertainment centers. We converted an old nine-bedroom mansion downtown into kind of an entertainment house. We host events and parties. We do a whole lot of different stuff now.

This was in the late ’90s when you started getting into real estate?

Johnson: We started doing real estate pretty much after we got our Tribe #1 money. We had to spend it around quickly.

Stroman: As soon as Rob sent us the first million!

How many years did it take to get the money from Tribe #1?

Johnson: It wasn’t a full year… It probably took nine months after the issue came out to actually get the actual money. Everybody had already taken their pieces out of it. We never could even get an accurate accounting of what we really should have gotten. It was kind of like “take it or leave it.”

I’m surprised it didn’t strain your relationship with Jim Lee or anything.

Stroman & Johnson: We never had a relationship with Jim Lee. Okay.

Johnson: Jim Lee probably thinks about us as much as we think about him. I don’t think if you ask Jim anything, he would have anything to say about us.

Overall, the book was received well…

Johnson: I get e-mails to this day, and letters, about Tribe almost every week. I don’t know how they even find addresses and numbers. There are some forums talking about “whatever happened to Larry Stroman” constantly. There’s constantly somebody talking about his artwork as if he just put a book out last month.

That’s why I want to have Larry and you in this book.

It’s 15 years already, and most of the guys that grew up reading this book, they want to know more.

Johnson: Well, Larry has a unique art style that has never been mimicked, also. There’s a lot of guys that look like this and look like that, and you had all the Jim Lee clones and the Rob Liefeld clones, and everybody’s trying to draw like McFarlane. I mean, Larry’s style, love it or hate it, it’s unique. It’s his, and it’s his alone.

There was a recent rumor about Tribe being on The Cartoon Network with Mario Van Peebles involved as a producer or something.

Johnson: That’s just garbage. There’s always constantly somebody telling me that John Singleton’s making a Tribe movie, and the Hudlin Brothers are optioning Tribe. If they are, it’s without us. It’s their own Tribe. I mean, that stuff is garbage. We haven’t heard from anybody.

But like you were saying before, you guys don’t get a kick out of that they haven’t forgotten you guys?

Johnson: I think it’s funny. Probably about six months ago you might see some stuff if you Googled on the web. All of a sudden I got a flood of mail and

e-mails, and I assumed that it was because people were maybe talking about the anniversary of Image or anything, something like that, and I ended up sending out T-shirts and books and all types of stuff to people for free. It doesn’t mean anything to me anymore. It’s like, “Oh, I never read issue three,” or, “I never read #4.” So me and Larry signed some stuff, books, T-shirts, hats, all kinds of stuff, and mailed it out to people. On our dime, we didn’t charge them for postage or anything.

You still have stuff?

Johnson: I still have everything.

Who’d you ask for advice when you were writing this thing?

Johnson: Larry and the geeks at my comic store.

But you guys came up with Tribe together, right?

Stroman: Yes. Johnson: Oh, it was totally collaborative, everything.

Except for the artwork, he came up with all of that himself. We’re not somebody that takes a whole lot of different people’s leads. We march to our own drum.

But you guys never thought that the American public would be so accepting of black super-heroes, right?

Johnson: We didn’t know what to expect. I don’t think we had any plan as far as how it was going to be accepted, we just did what we wanted to, and that always was pure and unapologetic. We never had a plan, like, “Oh, if we do this, this will bring in the Hispanic readers,” or, “If we do this, this’ll bring in the female readers.” We were kind of just doing our own thing and hoping people would like it along the way.

Stroman: We were shooting for an audience with big butts.

What kind of reaction did you guys get?

Johnson: An overwhelming positive response.

Stroman: And not just from women with big butts.

Larry’s not going to let this go, huh? [laughs] Larry, who was a big influence in your art.

Stroman: Let me think…

Johnson: I’ll tell you, his major influence, whether he’ll tell you or not, is Marjorie Stroman. His mother.

She was an artist?

Johnson: She was influenced by everything. She was a true citizen of pop culture and she taught him well.

I don’t think Todd was a big fan of Hilary’s work. He personally canceled Hilary’s Image book.

Johnson: Todd’s a weird guy. I mean, Todd is very particular, and it could have just been something personal about the style or something. Who knows?

He’s a real eccentric kind of character, so who knows what motivates him to do any of the stuff he does.

What kind of dealings did you have with the other Image founders?

Johnson: A lot of the Image guys, for the most part we didn’t have any dealings with them. I mean, we had no conversation with Rob Liefeld, we had no conversations with Todd McFarlane, we had no conversations with Erik Larsen. We saw him walking on the street and picked Erik up in a cab in San Diego one time. That’s the only deal we had. And Jim Valentino, he was a nice guy, never had any dealings

with him. Everybody was just kind of just doing their own thing.

But this was like politics. You guys had to maybe shmooze a lot more with these guys.

Johnson: That’s probably one of our negatives, if I am to think back, we weren’t shmoozers. But we didn’t want to cause waves either, we were just kind of doing our own thing, and maybe that caused waves in itself.

But you guys were Jim Lee guys because he brought you in, even if you never talked to him.

Johnson: Well, I’ll tell you one thing I know to be true just from my own personal dealings with folks in this industry — if you talk to the fans that have had any personal experience with us — you’re not going to find any negatives. Even the people that promoted shows, in that heyday while everybody was getting paid to do shows and stuff, we were flying ourselves into many of these shows. We were paying for all our hotel rooms sometimes. We would go out to eat on our own dime. There were shows where we wouldn’t take money from folks. We treated our fans well.

We’d give away hats and T-shirts and all types of stuff that nobody ever talks about. All we hear is about how we took so-and-so’s money, or so-and-so

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Character designs from the graphically gifted Stroman. ©2007 Larry Stroman.

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Anatomy lessons from a master. ©2007 Larry Stroman.

isn’t even getting paid. You hear about nonsense that never even happened.

That’s the nature of this business.

Johnson: It is! That’s the nature of any business where you’re dealing with any type of entertainment, there’s always going to be “he said/she said.”

What you’re talking about, I think I vaguely remember that in Comics Buyer’s Guide or something.

Johnson: It was all supposedly Larry and me fell out and we were arguing. It was all just nonsense.

Stroman: Unfortunately, there’s very little neutral ground in comics. Either they take one person’s side or the other. Both people get their point across as far as what happened.

You read The Comics Journal article about Image.

Johnson: They did this whole thing where I think Rob Liefeld says, “Well, they should be happy because Stroman’s also made, like, $1,000,000, and they should be happy with that.” We didn’t make $1,000,000! So what are they talking about?

There are some things in there that don’t add up…

Johnson: All that crap was just nonsense. Most of that stuff was nonsense. Every time I read something that’s associated with us, first of all, it’s not anything we said, and nobody’s ever talking to us! And what’s really irritating is when they do stories about, say,

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“African-American comics,” there’s no mention of us. And we sold more than anybody!

I think Tribe #1 sold more than all the Milestone Comics put together.

Johnson: Exactly! We’re still the largest selling African-American comic, and Larry is still probably the largest selling AfricanAmerican artist to ever do comics. Yet they’ll do an article about AfricanAmericans and you don’t hear anything about him!

Stroman: See, the problem with that is it doesn’t even matter whether they talk about how many books we sold or whether we did the best book or not. We don’t understand why they didn’t mention us at all. That’s the part that I don’t get.

Well, you guys aren’t active in fandom.

Dwayne McDuffie’s always online talking and talking. You’ve got Michael Davis; they’re always talking about what a great achievement Milestone was.

Stroman: Well, that’s them promoting their own thing, which is okay. That’s okay. But if you’re talking about the history of something, you can’t talk about the history of the world without talking about the Roman Empire. It doesn’t make sense. You don’t just eliminate parts of history because you just choose not to talk about it. How do you talk about black comics and not mention us at all? That’s what I don’t get.

There’s not even like an honorable mention, there’s just nothing at all.

Image gave chances to some people. It was a pretty mixed group.

Stroman: But that was what was supposed to have been great about comics at the time. That’s what was supposed to have been great about the whole process. We were just putting stuff out at the time. Everybody was doing their own thing.

Unfortunately, it just didn’t all turn out good.

For some of them, the art became secondary — it got in the way when they had to do business or Hollywood.

Stroman: I think the idea when people do something like that is that they are going to deliver the work. You always feel like you’re going to deliver the work. But you get distracted by stuff. If you have a studio set-up and you’ve got two guys working for you, how can you not put your book out on time? It’s illogical that you could not put your book out on time, but it happens, because there is no organization.

And that’s why you end up with all the stuff that’s advertised that never comes out.

But did you just want to draw, or you wanted to be this business person that you became?

Stroman: I never really was a business person at that time. I really couldn’t care less about business. I felt that that was a drawback that I had. Despite everything that happened with the book and with dealing with everybody, we had a great time.

I M A G E A S S O C I AT E

Jae Lee Jae Lee came to prominence at Marvel in late 1992, during just the first full year of his career. This was also during the mass exodus of the Image founders and their associates from the House of Ideas. Barely out of his teens, Lee was recruited by Rob Liefeld for Youngblood: Strikefile, and later Jim Lee hired him for the WildC.A.T.s Trilogy, as both titles served to lure the popular artist away from Marvel. At Image, Jae Lee started his creator-owned book, Hellshock, in 1994, which forced the artist to gain a new perspective into his craft. The seasoned illustrator returned to Marvel Comics with great success on The Sentry, Fantastic Four 1 2 3 4, and his Eisner Award-winning The Inhumans. You’ll find Mr. Lee providing his atmospheric storytelling to Stephen King’s Dark Tower, Marvel’s biggest mainstream project of 2007.

What was your big break into this business?

It was actually not an editor that discovered me but a writer, Scott Lobdell. I met him at a convention in 1990. I was straight out of high school, and I was showing my portfolio around; the editors that I showed it to weren’t very interested. And, in fact, one particular editor laughed at it and made fun of it. He’s a DC guy. But I was so sad, I was heartbroken. And then Scott saw what was going on, and he felt bad for me, and so he gave me his contact information and said, “Hey, why don’t you just work up some more samples and work on your storytelling and over the next few months keep sending me work, and I’ll show it around?” And that’s what I did. He was breaking in, himself. At that point he was just doing pick-up stories for Marvel Comics Presents, here and there. But he was in the Marvel offices all the time, trying to get work.

That was a big book back then, when Sam Kieth was doing those little Wolverine stories. It was like a spotlight for a number of artists, wasn’t it?

Yeah, Sam Kieth was doing it, and before it was Barry Windsor-Smith’s Weapon X. Well, it’s funny. In Marvel Comics Presents, the stories that I took over for, there was a Beast story that Rob Liefeld was supposed to draw. It was an eight-part story, and he did the first two chapters, and then he quit to do New Mutants. And so I filled in for him. On the first two chapters there was a page or two here and there that he didn’t draw, so then I had to go back and draw those pages. And so when you see the two stories, I think it’s kind of jarring when you have Rob’s art and mine, because it’s so different. One page is really bright and characters are jumping all over the place full of action, and then you have one page that

is just all black.

Did they get somebody to ink you back then?

When I first started I worked with various inkers, but I didn’t like giving up that control.

And I was never happy with the inks, so I was determined to learn how to ink. One time, I was visiting the editors, and I was also late on an issue, so I was inking the last page of one of the issues of Namor, and I was splattering it and going in with razor blades and just cutting the page up. And then John Romita Jr. happened to walk by, and he was horrified. He said, “What are you doing? Don’t do that! The penciler’s going to get really upset! You shouldn’t be inking like that!” He thought I was one of the bullpen guys inking over somebody’s work.

Were you surprised that people accepted your art so quick when it was so different from what Jim Lee and the other guys were doing?

Yeah, absolutely! The Jim Lees

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Jae Lee, courtesy of Jae Lee. ShadowHawk pin-up by Jae. ©2007 Jim Valentino.

J A E

Splendid artwork from Jae’s Hellshock opus. ©2007 Jae Lee.

L E E and the Todd McFarlanes, they were doing great super-hero work, and my stuff was kind of out there, and it’s not everybody’s cup of tea. And I certainly had a lot of people that hated my work. I didn’t expect that style to catch on, but I was determined not to go the Jim Lee route because our names are so similar.

With Image around, you were one of the bigger names that Marvel had in their stable of artists. It happened kind of quickly. I remember it was you and a couple of others that arose. I remember when you were doing the X-Men stuff, I think that’s when people were really talking about you. I think you did, like, one issue.

I did an X-Men Annual, an Uncanny X-Men Annual, and I did three issues of X-Factor, part of the X-Tinction Agenda. Not X-Tinction Agenda, XCutioners Song. All those titles sound the same now.

Who was the first guy to contact you of the Image guys?

Well, I went to a Diamond seminar, and I was signing for somebody at their booth. Rob Liefeld approached me, and he was looking at my work, and he said, “Can I talk to you about coming over to Image?” And, yeah, I was really excited, of course, but I was really scared because at that time I was, like, 18 years old, and people were going around saying, “If you even talk to Liefeld, you’ll be fired from Marvel.”

The guys at Marvel told you that?

No, no. Just some of the artists and writers were saying, “If you even think about going to Image, you’ll be fired.” And so I was scared, because I certainly didn’t want to lose a job. I didn’t know if the job offer at Image would really come through. But ultimately, I just had to make a choice.

But you never told Marvel you were going to Image?

You kept quiet, right?

I told them, and it turned out to be one of those things where it wasn’t that big of a deal. I was

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expecting to be fired right on the spot. I guess it was all hearsay at the time.

I remember hearing that you were a big Marvel fan — that it was your dream to be there, where Jim Lee and John Byrne and all of these people had made their mark.

What was the big draw for going to Image?

Just the exposure. Certainly the money that they were offering was leaps and bounds above what Marvel was offering at the time. It was a different time in the market. Back then Marvel was paying the artists next to nothing. I was barely making minimum wage at Marvel. It’s ridiculous how little people got paid.

Your page rate didn’t go up at all, even when you were doing Spider-Man? It would go up by about $5 a page. But back then sales were a lot healthier than they are now. The royalties were certainly nice, but you didn’t see that money until, like, a year after the book came out, six months, however long it took.

Was the Image move something that you had to talk to your parents about?

The thing is that Image was offering so much money that it was more a case of, wow, this can’t be real. So it wouldn’t sink in. I didn’t think it was real, so I didn’t take it that seriously. I thought they were just throwing numbers around, and I was, like, “Yeah, right, what’s the catch?”

Did they offer you any creative control or anything?

What exactly did they promise?

Oh, it was just to illustrate Youngblood: Strikefiles.

It was just work-for-hire.

Rob never wanted you to be part of his studio?

He did at one point. But I lived in Virginia, he lived in California. But he did want me to do a creatorowned book for them. I just didn’t want to be part of a studio. I think I actually did Spider-Man while I was doing Youngblood: Strikefiles and WildC.A.T.s Trilogy, because right after Rob had called me, Jim Lee had

called me and made me the same offer, to work on WildC.A.T.s Trilogy.

So pretty quickly you were over your head with commitments?

Uhh, yes.

Yeah, but it came out real slowly, didn’t it?

Yeah. Well, Strikefiles was only ten pages, and Rob Liefeld was drawing the other half, so it was more of a case of asking Rob, “Are you done with your side yet?” And he’d be, like, “no.”

Did you get concerned there might be some backlash on you? That the bubble might burst or something?

Uh, no. Well, Jim Lee’s studio, WildStorm, was very well-run. They had everything together. Jim ran a great business, and with Rob it was a little more chaotic. I think with Rob, he would start a project and he’d be really excited about it at first, and then after a while he’d moved on to other things. And so the project that he was so excited about three months ago is no longer a priority.

But were you happy with that story when you got it?

Did you want more of a say in what you were going to draw? You wanted them to be comics that people would remember?

Oh, I didn’t care. The stories were terrible.

Terrible. I can’t even read them. I didn’t even know what I was drawing.

The Strikefiles books were coherent, but I can’t make sense of WildC.A.T.s Trilogy.

I can’t read that stuff, I can’t look at it.

Were you involved in the plotting of any of them?

No, not at all. I didn’t want to be. I’m not one of those artists that wants to get involved in the plotting.

You would get full script? It wasn’t a Marvel style kind of thing?

No, it was full script. I liked to let the writer do his job, and then I’d do my job. I was just starting out. I was a “nobody.” And Image really, really promoted

me. Good things started happening for me that I don’t think would have happened, because Marvel certainly wasn’t promoting me anywhere near that level. And I remember when Jim was putting out the ads, he would feature my name prominently. I owe them a great deal. If I hadn’t moved to Image, I don’t know where I’d be.

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Hellshock cover work by Jae Lee. ©2007 Jae Lee.

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Jae’s lineart from the first issue of Hellshock. ©2007 Jae Lee.

L E E

You’d still be doing a monthly book.

Well, the thing is, my style was so naïve. I was trying to do Bill Sienkiewicz and Simon Bisley, and I was doing a really bad job of it.

But early on it made you stand out. That’s what makes an artist. You have to have something that’s unique from the rest of the guys. But were Jim and the other Image founders helpful?

Jim helped me a lot. Not just in terms of how to approach art, but how to approach the industry and the business. Because, again, I was so young back then, and here was this guy who had been hugely successful in the business, and I really appreciated his advice back then. I don’t know where I’d be

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without all those people helping me early in my career.

Did the pressure of the work get to you at any point?

No. At that point I was too cocky, and I had the feeling of invincibility. I had youth on my side, so I didn’t care.

In fact, I remember there’s a quote in Wizard where somebody asks me how I feel about storytelling, and I think I made some comment about “storytelling’s not important. What’s cool is just great visuals.”

And you regret that now?

Yeah.

Who helped bring Hellshock to Image?

Well, when Rob had asked me to come over to Image, he had asked me to do my own book, a creator-owned book, and I told him I wasn’t ready. I just wanted to do work-for-hire and just draw. And then, when I finished the WildC.A.T.s Trilogy and Youngblood: Strikefiles, I felt I had a better grasp of where I wanted my career to go. I felt like I was ready to jump into creator ownership and writing my own story and everything. And, boy, I was not ready.

Who did you talk to, to build the story?

What inspired it?

Well, the single person that had the most influence on me at that point was José [Villarrubia]. I met him at a convention. He was a curator at a gallery in Baltimore, and he was curating a show on comic book art, and he asked me to be a part of the show.

We’ve been great friends ever since.

And José’s a teacher, and so he was able to help with this art school dropout focus on what was important in terms of my art. He made me realize my shortcomings, made me focus on storytelling, anatomy, and all that kind of stuff.

But you said you were kind of naïve when you were young. What made you listen to him?

Well, I think it’s the teacher in him. He would tell me to do something, he would suggest something, and I was so stubborn I wouldn’t listen to it for a year, and then a year later it’d dawn on me. It was kind of like a delayed reaction.

Did you have an epiphany? “I’d better take this seriously if I’m going to keep doing this for the rest of my life”?

Yeah, not just that, but I was getting tired of the work I was doing. At that point I really hated it.

You must have drawn a couple hundred pages in a year or two. You must have been burnt out.

Well, not just that, but when I started writing Hellshock, I realized the kind of story I wanted to tell,

I couldn’t tell with my art, because the art all of a sudden turned it into…

Super-heroes?

I wouldn’t say super-heroes, because my stuff isn’t very super-heroic. But it was more like exaggerated cartoons, messy cartoons.

You wanted it more realistic.

I wanted to tell a very realistic, human story. And my art had to change to tell the kind of story that I wanted to tell. That’s when I realized, hey, storytelling really is important.

Would José help you with scripts, too?

We would talk about the plot over the phone. He helped shape the story significantly. In the beginning, I think I had Hellshock as some kind of a bounty hunter for hunting demons or something like that. Tell me if that’s a concept you’ve never heard of before.

I thought he was more of a tragic figure, and that I liked that sense more.

But in the beginning it was just a generic monstershoot-’em-up kind of thing.

It changed.

Yeah, it changed. It changed a lot. Without José, I don’t know that I would have had the insight to change.

But did you commit yourself too fast to… When did the first one come out, ’94 or ’95?

I think it was ’94.

So right as soon as you finished WildC.A.T.s Trilogy, you had to sit down and do this. You turned down a lot of work, I guess?

Well, to this day, Hellshock is kind of the best thing that ever happened to me, and also the worst thing.

It’s your college education, basically.

Yeah. All of a sudden I went from doing a lot of work to doing nothing but Hellshock for about five years. And in five years, I only put out seven issues.

You were your own editor. Did you get angry at yourself?

Not just that, but I’d say the first mini-series, I was really disappointed with the way it turned out, so I really wanted to focus on my art and my writing.

But it sold well, didn’t it?

Oh, the sales were great. Back then, everything sold well, so I don’t really see that as a sign of success. It’s my own personal feeling towards the project. And I think the second mini-series held up a lot better than the first one. The first one was still very rough around the edges. But then, when I did the second one, I looked at it and I think, in terms of the writing and the art, I feel like I grew up by about ten years.

You really wanted to make this an ongoing series at one point, right?

Yes, it was supposed to be an ongoing series.

But the one that came out the latest was the last issue, right? It took a year to get it done?

Issue #3 of the second volume came out, I think, about two years after the first one did.

And it was the only work you had come out during that year?

Yeah.

What happened? Did you get married or something?

No, no. I was working on this book, and it became an albatross around my neck.

Was this your worst year, or was it a blessing in disguise?

Well, it wasn’t the art. It was never the art. It was the writing. The story just wasn’t coming together, and it’s because I didn’t have the ability to tell this complex of a story. I think I was overly ambitious in trying to write this epic that I could easily see in my head, but just couldn’t put it down on paper.

The issue was returnable. Did that affect you financially?

No, I don’t think there were any returns. It’s too late now to return it, right?

Why’d you go back to working for the Big Two after that?

Well, I was working on my fourth issue of Hellshock and then I got a call from Joe Quesada at Marvel, and they were just starting up Marvel Knights. And I really had no interest in going back to Marvel, but he told me that the Marvel Knights

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An opening sequential page from Hellshock #2. ©2007 Jae Lee.

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A rare docile moment in this two-page sequence, from Hellshock #4. ©2007 Jae Lee.

L E E imprint is going to be very different from the Marvel that I used to know. And they were going to respect the creators and — it sounded good. But, again, it was kind of scary to leave the only thing that you know for something else. But ultimately I had to trust Joe, and also Nick Barucci, who really brokered the deal for me.

Did anybody at Image talk to you?

I think at that point they were happy to get rid of me.

Had your sales dwindled a bit? Were you concerned about your place in the comics throughout Hellshock?

Well, yeah. It’s always a concern because — I mean, sales were still very high. I think they were still over 200,000 or 300,000.

But the market had crashed a little bit, hadn’t it?

You’re assuming, yes, I had a monthly book. I think my last issue of Hellshock came out in ’96, and I started working for Marvel Knights in ’98. So there were two years where I didn’t have anything come out, so I had no idea how Hellshock would do. I can honestly say that I didn’t experience a big drop in sales of Hellshock because I missed out on the big collapse of the market.

But right now you don’t want to do creator-owned work? You don’t want to have the responsibilities of the

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business end of comics?

I think I’d have to be a lot more disciplined. And I think it depends on the story, as well. If it’s a selfcontained story, I think I am ready to handle something like that. But if I ever did, I wouldn’t put it out until it was completely done. I wouldn’t solicit it until it was all done.

Right now, if this book comes out, you’ll have a lot of closure? Like, this chapter of your life will be done with?

In a way — but it’s not the end of the story, so it’s not really closure. It’s more like bridging the gap.

Okay. Did you feel like Image was a family or something when you got there?

I owe a lot to Jim Lee and Erik Larsen. When I screwed up the first time on Hellshock volume one, Jim Lee stepped in and really, really just helped me get my act together. At one point, after the first issue, the book was going to get kicked out of Image. I really screwed up on the deadline, and I made some huge mistakes. And Jim saved my ass. And the second time around, when I did the second volume, Jim was no longer at Image, and again I was really late on the book, and Erik Larsen stepped in and really helped ease things with the Image partners.

I M A G E A S S O C I AT E

Jeff Scott Campbell In the pages of WildC.A.T.s #2, Homage Studios conducted a successful talent search that discovered the phenomenal talents of Jeff Scott Campbell, as well as Brett Booth, Alex Garner and dozens of others during 1993. Hailing from Colorado, Campbell made the move to sunny La Jolla to see if he had the gravitas to make it as a professional artist. His art brought together his love for film and animation with his influences from Art Adams, Todd McFarlane, Jim Lee, and the classic humor of Mad. At WildStorm, Jeff started slowly by doing spot illustrations, trading cards and pin-ups until finally penciling and co-developing Gen13 (with Jim Lee and Brandon Choi). With the characters from Gen13, Jeff brought a much-needed degree of humor, sexiness and hipness during the grim and gritty era at the start of Image Comics; the artist’s influence was felt immediately by his peers and fans. During WildStorm’s final days at Image in 1998, Jeff co-founded an imprint with a new wave of artists called Cliffhanger that housed his successful Danger Girl series. After a short sabbatical, Campbell re-emerged on Wildsiderz with his art now more gorgeously well-crafted and lavish than ever before. At this moment, Jeff is extensively laying the groundwork for his highly anticipated debut at Marvel Comics.

What possessed you to send your submission to the Homage Talent Search [in Image’s WildC.A.T.s #2]?

Well, it just happened to be the perfect timing, because I was already actively trying to get into comics. I had actually sent some samples in.

Actually, I take it back. I hadn’t sent the samples in to Marvel. I had actually met Stan Lee. Here in Colorado they have these dinky little shows where you can meet one or two pros. And Stan Lee had come through to do one of these things, and of course his line was insane. And he was actually the first person I handed samples to.

Stan evaluated portfolios? I don’t think I’ve heard of Stan doing that [recently].

Yeah, well, I know! And I didn’t know any better to know that maybe I shouldn’t do that. So I gave him (samples), and I had read up enough to know not to give him a ton of crap and just to pick my absolutely best favorites. And they were Xeroxes that he could take so he could either toss them away or whatever.

And I showed it to him, and he was very enthusiastic, very genuine about them, and said that he would actually pass them along to the guys at Marvel, and was genuinely very positive. And he definitely must

have passed them along, because I actually did get a rejection letter, but it was very nicely put and everything like that, and I at least knew that the samples got to where they were supposed to be. But that was probably only a few months before Jim Lee put his talent search ad in the back of WildC.A.T.s #2.

And once I saw that, I was like, “Okay, listen. I’m not going to let this opportunity slip by.” And I took an extra couple of weeks to put together some samples that were specific to him. I did a fake WildC.A.T.s sequence where I was drawing his characters, because I just figured it’s probably going to help my odds if I draw something that would allow him to imagine me working with him. And then I also threw in a couple of the Marvel samples that I had done — the same ones that Stan Lee had taken.

Yeah, I sent it in. I think I did a bunch of artwork on the envelope even, which I think I still have scans of somewhere. I drew all the characters on the envelope so it would be eye-catching when he gets it and stuff like that. And the funny thing was… I think it was about a week-and-a-half later, I got a call from Jim Lee personally in the evening, and of course I was flipping out, because for me, it was as though Steven

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J. SCOTT CAMPBELL Previous page, top: J. Scott Campbell.

Courtesy of J.S.C. Bottom: Fairchild. ©2007 WildStorm Productions.

Jeff’s pencils for celebratory Gen13 #25 (vol. 2). ©2007 WildStorm Productions.

Spielberg was calling me up, really. I mean, it was the same difference. To have Jim Lee call me up at that time was unbelievable to me. And he said he really liked my samples, and talked to me for a little bit, and after feeling me out, I guess, and realizing that hopefully I wasn’t a nutcase or something like that, he more or less offered right then and there if I was interested in coming out to San Diego and being part of his internship program and potentially working for him at the studio, and I was thrilled to do so.

How did you handle it? Did he put the new guys up in a house?

No, they had kind of like an apartment situation where they had an apartment that was kind of like a rotating slot for guys who would come in. Either several of us would be in this apartment at one time, or… I just happened to be lucky enough at the time I was going there that nobody was at the apartment, so I had it all to myself for about a month. But the second I got there, I was already interested in getting my own apartment, because I was already getting paid by him to do things, so I figured I might as well just start paying for my own place. I didn’t want to

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just sponge off of their free apartment. And, like I said, I realized that at any point some other guys could be coming through there that I might not get along with, and I’ve always been somebody who likes my privacy, so that only lasted for maybe two weeks, or a maybe a month at the most, before I got my own place and was paying for it with the work I was already doing for them.

But you were into the whole thing, right? Into the books that Image founders were doing before?

Oh my God, yeah. I think my exposure to comic books, and my re-exposure to comic books, where I kind of rediscovered them in my high school years, came through basically Art Adams’ X-Men Annual #10. Once I started discovering those, it just blew my mind. And for years after, I was just basically exclusively collecting Art Adams comics, because they were the only ones that got me off in some ways.

And then, after going to this one local comic book store for years, asking for what Art Adams had done lately, or is there something maybe I’m not sure he’s done that I can get a back issue of — and I remember this really distinctly — the guy one day goes, “You

know, if you like Art Adams, you might like the guy who’s drawing Amazing Spider-Man right now.” He goes, “He’s kind of like a sloppier Art Adams.” I said, “Really?” And that was, of course, Todd McFarlane.

So then I kind of got exposed to Todd McFarlane’s work that way. I was like, “Oh, wow, this is great.”

And I really kind of got into it. I think at first I was a little bit not sure if I liked it, but of course I warmed up to it. And then very quickly after, I discovered Jim Lee’s work on X-Men. I think he had just taken over Uncanny around that time. So, yeah, I was in there with all those, during their heyday at Marvel. I was totally down with it, and that was right around the time I was wrapping up high school and decided that maybe this was what I wanted to do. So I started working on my anatomy and perspective and all of these different things that I needed to kind of focus on. I had been drawing my whole life but never really put the effort in to really learn what I was doing.

And your dad helped print those celebrity collages, right?

That’s pretty good that you know it. I was doing a comic strip in the school paper pretty much my whole high school years, and that kind of segued into doing these yearbook inserts for the school that would cover all the pop culture events that happened outside of high school, and it was a seasonal insert that could stick in the back of the yearbook. And then my dad, who’s always been kind of excited by small business ventures helped me create a situation where we could branch out and make these things for not just my local school, but for other high schools. And I did that for about four years, actually.

Like, the last two years of high school, and the first two years out of high school, I did that. And actually the night before I drove up to San Diego, I was doing the finishing touches on the final yearbook insert that evening, literally, so I was finishing it up.

Well, where does the Jack Davis influence come from?

Actually, for years previous to getting into actual super-hero comics, I was into Mad magazine. From probably the very early ’80s I had been buying Mad magazine. And yeah, it was funny. I had been learning how to do likenesses and characters way before I ever learned to draw super-hero anatomy. And, yeah, Jack Davis is amazing, but it’s mainly Mort Drucker that’s probably even the bigger influence. I loved his movie parodies so much, and Mort Drucker was and continues to be probably still one of my biggest influences.

What did Jim tell you he liked about your artwork? Did he see all those influences in it?

To be perfectly honest, I actually was really trying to hide the caricature thing for a while. I was afraid that somebody might see that as a negative.

But that’s the thing he made you do the most at the beginning.

I know. Well, that’s just it. It was only after I got hired, actually, that my dad said, “Hey, maybe you should show them these yearbook things.” And I was thinking, well, I’ve already been hired at this point, so I guess it couldn’t hurt. Honestly, I really thought that the caricature thing was almost like something I had to hide, because I didn’t want them doubting, if

they’re hiring me, that I’m going to somehow draw this way.

Did you really think he wanted more guys who could draw like him?

I didn’t know. I never really went there with the idea that I would draw like Jim Lee, although it looked that way the first few years because I think the influence of him was just impossible not to draw like him to some degree. But, no, I actually always wanted to go there and really have my own identity more than anything, so that was something I was very self-conscious of. But I guess I was just worried about the caricature thing. I was worried enough about it that even the first couple projects I did for WildStorm, I used the name Jeffrey Scott rather than J. Scott Campbell, because I didn’t want anything linked to the caricature stuff, because I kind of

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Gen13 #5 (vol. 2) cover art

by J. Scott (pencils) and Alex Garner (inks). ©2007 WildStorm Productions.

J. SCOTT CAMPBELL

Above: Before Image, Jeff illustrated various timely murals in a more cartoony tradition. With the help of his dad, he was able to sell these caricatures to high school kids for prints and yearbooks on a wider scale.

Below: A friendly in-joke between Extreme’s Dan Fraga and the young turks at WildStorm Studios.

thought that’s a separate identity in some ways.

You thought somebody would find you out?

Well, it’s not that. I just thought that maybe I should have them as two different aspects of my personality, like one is one identity and one is another identity. There’s no real explanation, it seems really silly now, but at the time I just thought that I had started creating a name for myself with the caricature stuff with the J. Scott Campbell, and then I just thought, well, if I’m doing comic books, maybe I should do it under Jeffrey Scott as a different style, so I should use a different name. But that was a very short list. By the time I was working on Gen13, I just went back to using the name I had been using for my artwork for years.

You were buying all the Image books then, right?

Yeah, I did. I would actually buy them all.

Even the ones that I kind of would admit now that I didn’t think were good.

Nothing against the guys who were working on them, but I would buy things like Brigade or something like that, which I thought was not a well-drawn book. But I bought it because I was kind of excited by the whole movement. And in some ways, sometimes

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the books that I thought were either drawn by upand-coming guys or guys that I just didn’t think were quite there yet, in some ways they motivated me more, because I would look at those and go, “I can draw, I have a feeling I can draw at least this good.”

And it would motivate me to say, “Damn it, I better get hired, because I can draw at least this good.”

You know what I mean?

Larsen was quick to remind me that he published your first work.

That’s true, that’s another thing. I totally forgot about that. Yeah, I think even before I got hired by Jim Lee, I entered that contest in Savage Dragon where you would submit your own villain that he would fight. So I sent in a villain, a self-created character that was just kind of like this demon character who was a biker. He almost looked like that Sym character from New Mutants. And I sent this character in, and I also sent a drawing of Savage Dragon, as well. And he didn’t end up picking my character — although I think by the time the contest was done, I was already hired by Jim Lee anyway, which in some ways, disqualified myself just by that action. But he did run the Savage Dragon piece in the back, in the letters page, which I was always really appreciative of. I thought that was really cool. But, no, I was very much following all those Image books. I literally would buy every one, just because I was so excited to work at Image that I kind of wanted to be wellversed in everything that was going on.

Your grandparents really drove you to San Diego?

Yeah, they did. Well, that was funny. It’s funny to think about now.

That was your first time on your own, right?

It really was, because I had been living pretty

much at my parents’ house probably for the yearand-a-half since I had gotten out of high school; I was trying to develop this comic book skill and doing commercial art on the side. Until that moment I wasn’t really anxious to get out on my own because I felt like I hadn’t really created enough of a financial security situation where I could do that. But my grandparents were nice enough to share the trip with me, basically. My grandfather and I were in the U-Haul, and my grandmother followed behind it in her car, so that they would have a ride back, of course, once we turned in the U-Haul in San Diego. It was really nice of them to do that. I was certainly more than happy to have the company going down, that’s for sure.

Who was at Homage when you arrived? Was it just Jim Lee and Marc Silvestri?

When I showed up I don’t think anybody was there. It was mid-afternoon, and nobody had shown up to work yet. It was actually kind of a funny situation. Deborah, who was the secretary at the time, Jim’s assistant, she welcomed me, and I talked to her on the phone quite a bit leading up to coming out there — I’d actually done a little bit of work for them on the Homage Swimsuit issue before I actually ever got down there. I got my first paycheck before I’d even shown up in San Diego. I think Jim eventually showed up in the afternoon and met my grandparents and was a super-nice guy. Already, right off the bat, I could see the type of personality he had, like he was just juggling so much at one time, and just darting around like a bumblebee, almost, around the office.

So you got a sense of a lot of chaos? He might have been late on WildC.A.T.s. already.

I think WildC.A.T.s already was late by a few months, and I think there was definitely a sense. It immediately became clear why that would be the case, because he was just juggling a lot. It was still very exciting to already be in that environment. And I think two of the other guys that Jim had already hired, Brett Booth and Alex Garner, were already there. So I got to meet those guys, and it was kind of cool not being the first one. Those are still my fondest memories, that first year or two being there, when we had the studio on Mira Mesa, before they expanded to La Jolla. My fondest memories are always in the Mira Mesa day, which by far is a less glamorous studio, but it was much smaller back then, and it was just a much more exciting time.

But what did Jim promise you at the beginning? That he would develop you, or that he would right away try to get a book for all of the new guys?

There was never really any promise with me, which is probably a good thing. I think it was like, “Hey, listen, you’re here. We’re going to constantly give you things to do.” Based on the fact that Rob had already developed that formula of bringing in basically undiscovered talent and giving them books, I think it was pretty obvious to me, even without any of us saying it, that he probably wanted to do the same thing with us. I knew he wasn’t going to be satisfied with just having me draw swimsuit pinups

and WildStorm Universe drawings. I think he wanted something more for me, so I always figured that that was the case.

You got more in tune with your artwork over there. At Mira Mesa, you were finally surrounded by the world of comics, day and night.

The analogy I’ve used is the scene from The Matrix where they’re on the rooftop, and I think Keanu Reeves goes, “Can you fly a helicopter?” And then you see her head jerking around a little like she’s downloading the information, she goes, “Now I can.” And sometimes I use that analogy for how it felt to be there the first few months, because I felt like information was coming at me so fast that I could almost barely comprehend it. Those first three months there, I think I’ve learned more in that short period of time than I ever have the rest of my life.

There were no points where you wanted to go back home?

No, no, no. Maybe the very first evening I was there, just because it was such a shock being out on my own and being in a different state. I literally didn’t have a car or anything. There was probably a sense of being overwhelmed, but not like I wanted to go

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J. Scott Campbell: Year One (at WildStorm). In the background, megatalented inker Jeff Garner.

Picture courtesy of Jeff.

From right to left: Jeff, Jim Lee, Alex Sinclair and Alex Garner during the early days of WildStorm/Homage Studios. Photography courtesy of Mr. Campbell.

J. SCOTT CAMPBELL

The cover to Gen13 #3 (the regular series) by Jeff (pencils) and his frequent collaborator Alex Garner (inks). ©2007 WildStorm Productions.

back home to Mommy or something.

But could you tell this was a learning curve for Jim, as well? A lot of people expecting a lot from him.

Oh, yeah, most definitely. But it was wild. Within the first week I was there, one of his first apprentices or whatever it was, Scott Clark, I think, was doing StormWatch. Maybe StormWatch #1 had just come out, but he clearly must have got some crazy advanced check or something for royalties, because I remember we all went down and he had this brand new sports car that was really impressive. And everybody who worked there seemed to have these crazy sports cars and everything like that. It definitely seemed like I was in the right place, not just because it was what I wanted to do, but also because everybody seemed to be very successful doing it, which was a really encouraging feeling.

When you were watching these guys, you’re hopefully like, “If I ever get money, I’m not going to do that kind of stuff.”

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That was definitely the sense I had, even though in some ways I kind of was a little bit like those guys, thinking, “Well, geez, comic books, what a great business. Everybody sells millions of copies and spends tons of money.” But in another way I was thinking, I don’t know, I think it’s just in my nature not to spend like that. It was wild seeing it. Flashing forward a little bit, when we finally got our numbers in for Gen13, it was a colossal disappointment to sell 173,000 copies or something like that, because — .

But the market had changed by 1994 when Gen13 #1 came out. That’s one of the things we’ll get to later, but the market had changed by the time that came out.

Oh, yeah, that’s just the thing. I kind of consider myself having come in at that really peak time, but by the time I was really doing a book, it was well on its way to crashing. I never really experienced the sales that a lot of those Image guys did.

That’s something I wanted to point out to you, because by that time you arrived, Jim had already done StormWatch and a couple of those WildC.A.T.s type books.

But in some ways it was a good thing, the bubble had already burst to some degree.

You guys had to prove yourselves if the series was to survive.

Yeah, we had to kind of prove ourselves, and the fact that the book didn’t have crazy orders like some of Rob’s early books made it that much more noticeable when the book sold out. It became a big deal.

They were your characters, basically, right?

No, no, no. I would never claim that. I mean, Gen13 was primarily — .

Gen13 was in some ways a radically different book from the previous WildStorm releases.

No, I do agree with that. I think the tone was very much me. I think I brought a lot to the book as far as the kind of book I wanted to be a part of. But as far as the characters themselves — I remember Jim Lee had this suitcase or whatever it was, and one evening he opened it up and he had these various sketches in there. And I think it was me, Brett Booth, and maybe Alex Garner—the core guys he had just brought in only a few months before. I remember he opened this up and he had some different drawings.

It looked like some StormWatch characters that he was developing, still, even though that book was already coming out, and some other things that were these upcoming ideas. Then on one board he had this really rough sketch of these four individuals, and I don’t even know if it was even clear at that point that they were teenagers, really. But there was the tall, She-Hulk looking girl that looked very modelesque, but she was holding a big barbell. And then he had another stockier guy who would eventually end up being Grunge, but at the time was just a shape. And then he had another shape of a guy who looked like he was on fire, like the Human Torch. And then a third one that looked just from the posture to be a younger-looking girl, very teenage-like, but nothing really descript as far as what her details were really going to be. And I just remember really gravitating towards that, going, “What’s this project?” And he kind of went into a little bit, like, “Oh, I had this idea

of, like, I was reading this book called Generation X, and I want a book that’s like my version of teenagers with superpowers.” And immediately I kind of like stuck a flag in it wanting to claim it as my own, “Oh my God, that’s the book I want to do.” I remember really very early on saying, “My God, if you were considering at all giving that one to me, I would be totally crazy about that.” And it seemed like, from that point on, it was going to be my book. There was never really any real discussion about it or anything like that. At the time, Disney animation was in its second golden age, whatever you want to call it, with Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast. And for years I always wanted to be an animator before I got into comic books, so I was always very much paying attention to things like the Disney animated movies, and wanted to bring an element of that to the kind of comic books I drew. I wanted to have pretty girls that smiled and were charming, the kind of girls that I wish I was dating, and things like that. So I did think that wasn’t so much unique as much as it was just, nobody was doing that, really. Everybody’s comics really had guys just gritting their teeth, and with the giant hair dryer guns and all the crosshatching. So in some ways I was rebelling against that by saying I’m going to have characters in my book that smile and show different expressions and have cute posture and gestures, and by bringing that to the book, I definitely think that was my personality coming through. Who knows if Gen13 would have been a completely different book if somebody else drew those same characters?

Why didn’t Jim resist what you were offering? They hadn’t done something breezy and youthful, in some ways.

I don’t know. If you look at the first two issues of Gen13, though, compared to the later issues, I think there was a tendency to make it more serious than it ended up being. And in some ways somebody could make the argument that by the end it got too silly, too. I think that’s a fair argument, as well — finding that balance was tricky. But I remember, like, #2 of Gen13 was really dark, and I didn’t feel as comfortable drawing that one. And #1 and #2 of Gen13 were laid out by Jim. Like, he created bubble figures so I would know how to pace the action.

I think you really got it going when you had the Pitt (in the third issue of the mini-series), and it was a little looser, you could really see the characters interacting with each other.

Exactly! Even though I did the whole series, I always felt that my first issue was #3, because #1 and #2 were basically laid out by Jim. People would start to say, “Oh, you’re kind of drawing like Jim.” Because of his layouts, I kind of thought I could just see The X-Men and stuff coming through those layouts, so I was kind of drawing it in his style in some way because I just was seeing it through his eyes.

But as of #3 on, I was a lot more involved; I basically was laying out my own artwork. I was very much almost hitting the ground running, kind of co-creating the story at that point, because I never really had a script to go from. We just would have discussions, and I would just go and try to start piecing together

bits and ideas and — .

But Brandon [Choi] wouldn’t get angry or anything?

[GAK note: Choi was the writer and co-plotter of Gen-13] No, I think he was really one of these guys who almost appreciated it if you took the burden off of him, in some ways. And Jim was still involved, telling me the things that definitely had to go in, like, “You definitely gotta put this in, you definitely gotta do that. But as far as the stuff in between, just do whatever, really.” And thank God it worked out, because it could have been a big disaster. But in some ways it’s probably why, ever since then, I’ve only done my own creator-owned, because I didn’t know how else to think. I never really had scripts handed to me, I always was coming up with my own stuff to draw, and it just always kind of worked out that way.

And in some ways this was the kind of book I expected Image to do earlier, to have them do their own thing,

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Jim Lee’s guest appearance within the celebrity packed issue of Gen13 #13B. ©2007 WildStorm Productions.

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Super-smooth Danger Girl preview cover by Campbell and Garner. ©2007 J. Scott Campbell.

this is one of the first books that delivered because it was a little smarter, and it was a lot more fun. It wasn’t about the end of the world and going to Hell and all that stuff.

Oh, totally. Like I said, that second issue, I think one of the characters makes somebody’s head blow up and stuff like that, and I never wanted to return to that, because it never felt right. I wanted to have a sexier Saturday morning kind of vibe. I just felt there was a tone that I felt good about, and whenever it crossed that line or didn’t match that tone, I always felt like this doesn’t feel like what I’m going for here. I definitely had this tone or this idea that I wanted to bring to it, and I was glad that Gen13 was the perfect vehicle to do that with. And as far as the characters, I think Freefall was the only character that was probably 100 percent my creation, and that was a character that I had from a previous comic book idea. I actually ended up realizing in this thing called The Art of Homage Studios, there was this thing called Cap’n Pyro and the West Coast Pirates. This

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concept was a group of characters that I had from high school, and Freefall was originally part of that.

So that was the only character, at least initially, that I brought to Gen13 that was a new character.

Did you feel camaraderie with the rest of the guys that were there? Like, Brett Booth and all those young guys when they were coming in?

I did, because we were all in the same boat. I think the only guy I really gravitated towards as far as professionally and friendship-wise, was probably Alex Garner. I never really hit it off with Scott Clark or Brett Booth.

There were little cliqués there, too?

To some degree — I don’t think in a way that was bad or anything like that.

Like school, certain people gravitated towards their interest.

There was the cliqué with me, Alex Garner, and, at the time, Troy Hubbs, who was an inker who eventually went from Top Cow to WildStorm. There was a group, and I think Travis, when he came in, was kind of in our cliqué. But it was either that cliqué or no cliqué in some ways. Guys like Brett Booth were always more like loners, and I think Scott Clark was a little bit more of a loner. It wasn’t like there were opposing cliqués, so much. Eventually, later on, I think there were, like, three or four different cliqués once the studio got really big. Really, I think it was the guys who liked to hang around with the other guys, and the guys who didn’t. That was kind of how it worked out.

Did you get any teasing once you got your own book and you had some success, from the other guys?

Not really. I guess, in some strange way, I wasn’t fully conscious of the fact that mine was maybe a standout book.

By the third or fourth issue, Wizard started talking about it and fans took notice.

I think for the longest time I just wasn’t aware that our book was standing out so much. I knew our first issue sold out, and that was great, and there was a sense that it was well-received. But I think it wasn’t until the whole mini-series was pretty much said and done, that Wizard was sort talking about it, and we were doing covers and things like that, and there was anticipation for the regular series that I finally allowed myself to say, hey, maybe this is unique, or maybe this is more of a special situation than, let’s say, StormWatch, or like other character books that were coming out.

When you restarted, did you really push yourself to change your style a little bit? Because I thought it was a lot looser; it was really more defined and bold.

Oh, absolutely. When I’d fantasize about getting into comic books, I would say, “Oh, man, it’d be so great if somebody gave me X-Men to draw.” But then there was another part of me going, “Man, I so hope I don’t get that situation,” because I always felt I would work out all my kinks and kind of learn how to draw on some obscure book that nobody was paying attention to, so that when I got really good, then I would do something high-profile and people would just think I was amazing out of the blue. And that was

the weird thing about Gen13, I felt like I was learning with everybody watching. In some ways, if you look at #1 to #5, it was like a totally different guy who drew both #5 [from the mini-series] and #1 [of the ongoing series], but it’s just because I was learning so much information in a short period of time.

Wasn’t this thing supposed to be a four-issue mini-series and they just added an issue or something? I just remembered that.

I think you may be right, actually. When we did the Pitt stuff, it kind of stretched it out. Yeah, you’re right, actually, because if you look at the cover we did for the solicitation for issue four, that big wraparound cover with Pitt — It was my homage to the New Mutants special edition cover that Art Adams had drawn. If you look at issue four of Gen13, that was basically what I was trying mimic on that cover. That cover was supposed to be the epic, the final battle cover. And then, when we decided we were going to do a fifth issue, it was like, geez, how do I top this cover? This cover’s insane, and it’s a wraparound. So then we just did the complete opposite, with the simple white cover, with the characters in a huddle. It just seemed like I couldn’t put any more on the cover after issue four. So I think you’re right, actually. I totally had forgotten about that.

Did Jim ever talk to you? “It looks like you got a hit, we gotta talk.”

No. There was a sense of real appreciation that one of his guys really did take off. I think it was validation for the whole program he had set up. Because I don’t know what was going on behind the scenes, maybe people were telling him, like, “Oh, you think investing all this money in all these guys is a good idea.” I felt good that Gen13 had taken off, because in some ways I felt that maybe it gave him validation that it was a good thing to bring in these new guys.

And I think to some degree, at least initially, there was a sense that maybe, because Gen13 took off, it took some of the pressure off of him to have to be the single performing guy or book at the company. In some ways, that brief period where Gen13 the mini-series finished up and the regular series took off, I think it gave him a sense that he could catch his breath and not feel like he had to constantly produce around that time, and kind of focus on the company and making sure that everything was all structured right. So I think that was kind of a good feeling of knowing that in some way the book was providing the company with that success.

Was it strange for you to see that you had an influence on him?

It’s funny, I didn’t see it at the time, but people since then would come up to me and go, “Oh, it’s really funny that Jim Lee went through a period where he was pulling your influence into his artwork.”

I talked to Scott Williams, and he admits it.

Especially when he did those two fill-in Gen13 issues, and if you look at a lot of the “Heroes

Reborn” stuff, there are little shades of your touches in there.

Believe me, if that’s the case, I don’t know how you can get much more flattering than that, because Jim Lee was and continues to be pretty much a hero of mine, and continues to influence me, so the fact that I would have any rub-off on him in any way is tremendously flattering. Maybe it was just the fact that I was trying to push personality so much in the book; that was maybe the ultimate rub-off. Some people said that Jim Lee’s eyes got bigger for a short period of time or something, but I always hated it when people just described my style like big eyes or something, because really it was just trying to invoke as much personality in the characters as possible.

A little bit, it’s like the hairdos are a little different, and all of a sudden they seemed a bit in tune with yours.

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More intrigue on the cover of Danger Girl #1. ©2007 J. Scott Campbell.

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More than just pretty pictures! Plenty of solid storytelling from the Campbell & Garner team within this scene from the page of Danger Girl #3. ©2007 J. Scott Campbell.

Most of the influences I was kind of bringing were not just the Art Adams stuff, but just this sense that animation, like the hair kind of being clumped in big, fluffy locks like you see in Disney movies. It’s weird, that was always the weirdest thing, people’d always say, “Oh, your stuff’s very anime influenced.” And I’d always kind of correct them, saying, “Well, it’s really more of a Disney thing.” It was so uncool to say that, but I wanted to be honest. I’m a big fan of these Disney movies, and I always have been, and that’s what’s coming into this.

But when the series happened, you gained more control, right?

In some ways that was probably good and bad, because I look back on it in some ways and it was just like a true basic artist who didn’t know a lot about how to structure a story and stuff like that, I was kind of just coming up with a lot of ideas of things that I wanted to draw, and kind of hoping someone else would take the reins and figure out how to make a

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story out of it. But it was a lot of fun in those issues; one through five, I think were really a lot of fun, on Gen13. And it started to spiral out of control.

When you did that Fire from Heaven crossover, it got a bit out of hand, right?

I really hated that crossover. I was so miserable doing that. I so badly wanted to be a team player, too, because I really hate the idea of this, but this is something they’re really putting a lot of effort into. I just remember getting the scripts and going, “This is a Gen13 book?” Like, I was going, “These characters are like background characters!” It was so annoying!

And I was trying my best to do a good job, but damn, I hated those books. And then you had to get reference for characters that other people hadn’t drawn, and you’d go, “Well, geez, how am I supposed to draw this character if I don’t even know what it looks like?” Oh, I hated that. That crossover I’ve almost blocked out entirely.

But it was more than a crossover. You had an internal company event.

Oh, yeah. No, it was like a whole company thing, yeah. I remember when the smoke settled after that, I really had this attitude of “we’ve really got to get this book back on track,” because this really was not good.

But you enjoyed the entire issue 13-ABC special? It was interesting seeing Gen13 interacting with characters from different companies.

The 13 ones were actually a lot of fun. Jim would come in day after day and be like, “Oh, we can put Spawn in!” He was coming up with all these random characters.

There were the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Bone, Archie, and all sorts of characters.

Yeah, and I remember the one that cracked me up the most was when he came in and said we could put in Anthony Robbins, which was the funniest thing, who motivates Grunge at the end of it. And we had all been laughing our heads off at this skit that The Ben Stiller Show had done called “Anthony Bobbins,” where he has super-white teeth, and he would kind of hypnotize people with them. So it was this kind of inside joke at the studio how much we kind of thought the Anthony Robbins character was a funny guy, and when he said that he got his permission to put him in, too, I was just thinking, “Oh my God, we can put… “ I think the only one that kind of got pulled was at the very end; I think the payoff was that the wizard that Grunge eventually sees at the end was supposed to be a play on words for Wizard magazine. It was going to be Gareb [Shamus, head suit of Wizard] at the end.

Oh, boy.

That was kind of like the payoff, and at the very last minute, that wasn’t going to go, and we had to make it this generic demon character, which made the payoff less. There’s that part where he’s walking by all the different Image camps, there was this statement spoofing what was really going on at Image at the time. I felt bad that the payoff didn’t really work at the end because everything else had analogies to the real business, which is kind of clever.

Where did Danger Girl came from? Did you just get tired of doing Gen13?

Well, I really wanted to hang in there with Gen13 a little bit more. I knew I was starting to feel that twitch to do a creator-owned book at that point, something I would have more control over, and I felt I was probably at the point where I had the clout to do that, too. But I really wanted to go out on Gen13 with something a little bit more than a whimper, which unfortunately happened. I really wanted to go out with one more really big storyline. At that point Brandon was starting to grab the reins a little bit more, and I didn’t really like the direction he was bringing to the book. Those storylines basically happened when I was only doing, like, three pages here and three pages there, so they could keep soliciting the book.

I don’t even remember what happened at the end.

I don’t either. There was something about, like, where they were going to go to the future, and Lynch was a villain in the future or something…

It was under your watch that things had changed with the maid and Lynch, right?

Yeah, that stuff I liked. I liked where that was kind of going. That was probably my last real issue where I had fun. My whole thing was, let’s really firm up the mythology of Gen13. Let’s bring back the Black Razors, let’s bring back Bliss, and Threshold, and Ivana. I really wanted to cement their mythology because I felt like we had drifted away from it too much. We had this character named Helmut, and we tried to come up with another storyline with him, because I felt like, let’s create a circle of their regular villains that can reappear, almost like in the vein of the Batman books. And I also tried to create this other character in this two-storyline thing with this little kid who ran the toy factory. I mean, it was kind of goofy, but in some ways it was very Gen13. My idea was to firm up their mythology that everybody already liked, and Brandon wanted to take it off in this whole brand new direction where they’re going to go into space, and go into the future. And I just didn’t like any of that stuff. I was really just not into it.

So that’s when I was already trying to distance myself, and the last hurrah was going to be this Gen13/Batman crossover. I was going to do this book, and then I was going to go off and do Danger Girl, basically. And that was before, of course, Jim had the relationship he has with DC now, back there was a sense that they wouldn’t really work with us to the degree we wanted them to. And every idea we would pitch them, they would say, “No, Batman wouldn’t do that. No, Grunge can’t be in the Batmobile. Fairchild cannot be in the Batcave under any circumstances.” And it started to be this crossover where nobody really did anything. And then they’re like, “The Joker’s not in the mythology anymore, and he’s been out of books for a while in Batman.” Like, they just had all these rules that made the book suck. I just was going, “This story sucks.

This is not fun.” And then I think they were saying I had to draw Batman in the movie costume because that was how he looked in the books at that time.

Like, he had all leather.

The black outfit from Batman Forever.

Yeah! I just lost total motivation for the project because I was, like, this sucks. So at that point I think I basically went to Jim and Brandon and said, “I thought I wanted to do this project, but I’ve got to say, I don’t think I’m into it. I think this is just really a drag. Unless we can totally revamp the story and try to convince them one more time to let us do more of these ideas. I just don’t want to do the story as it is.” And I think they were a little bit pissed at me at the time, but they were also respectful enough to say, “Hey, if you don’t want to draw it and you’re not happy with it, we’re not going to force you to.” And that’s when I went off and started developing Danger Girl, and the Cliffhanger [imprint] started coming together, and I never really looked back.

But you were the first Cliffhanger guy, right?

Yeah, before Cliffhanger was even Cliffhanger. I think at the time what was going on was Jim was creating a new launch or a new line called New Horizons, I think it was called. If you see the original Danger Girl promo poster, it said “New Horizons” on it. And it’s funny, too, because I was so trusting and comfortable at WildStorm, I never even thought to shop it around. I just figured Jim would give me a fair deal. And I’m sure whatever deal he would have given me would have been. But then he started talk to Joe Mad [Madureira] about doing a creator-owned book, and I think because Joe Mad was aggressive about making sure he was financially protected, because he didn’t have the relationship with Jim that I had, it allowed for a basically even more beneficial deal to come about, because Jim came to me and said, “I’m not going to give Joe Mad any deal better than I would give you, so in some ways Joe Mad being more aggressive, and the fact that we’re bringing him in, sweetened your deal.”

I said, “Well, that’s great.” Like I said, I was so naïve back then I didn’t even think about stuff like that.

But those characters are yours and your

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Development sketch of Sydney. ©2007 J. Scott Campbell.

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Playful preliminary illustration of Abbey Chase. ©2007 J. Scott Campbell.

Natalia! ©2007 J. Scott Campbell.

friend’s, right?

Yeah! Basically Danger Girl was created by me and a guy named Andy Hartnell who I’d befriended at the studio for a few years. He was a colorist, but was a longtime friend of Sarah Becker who I worked with on Gen13 for years.

Does Jim still have a stake? But those are yours, right?

I own those characters 100 percent. I can take them wherever I want. Only if a movie or something had come about when I was getting the book published there would Jim and WildStorm have had a cut of that, but since then the deal has reverted back to me, and if anything were to come about now.

That first limited series was the last thing that came out of Image via Jim Lee/WildStorm, right?

Yeah, and actually the company changed hands before the book was even done, so I think #4 and #5 actually were DC books.

How did that move change things for you?

You know what? I’ll tell you what. It changed things in a few areas. I remember Jim saying it wouldn’t change things, but one of the things that happened right off the bat is, at Image we got used to every book that came out through Image getting a full-page color ad. And I remember the first time we were going to solicit a book through DC, they were going to basically make a little postage stamp next to all the hundred other books that they produced.

And I flipped out. I was, like, “Jim, retailers aren’t going to acknowledge this as a superstar book if it’s advertised to them as something average.” I said, “I know that’s a little bit of a big shot attitude, but the truth is, Image would advertise the books like these were books drawn by big shots.” And it worked, because people would order more of them. And I said, “If I’m just a postage stamp next to Green Lantern or something like that, I don’t think anybody’s going to notice this.” Somehow we were able to still get our fullpage ad, but that was a big thing to push. And then another thing was a big battle that we just didn’t really know, I mean, with Danger Girl we had grown used to doing the inside front covers, using them for recaps. And people loved those, especially because, toward the end of the series, there was a bigger gap between issues, that people really needed those recaps in some ways. And I just loved it. I felt it set-up a certain tone for the whole book having those recaps at the beginning. And basically they were going to say, “Oh, DC sells ads on their inside front and back covers, so you

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can’t do that anymore.” And I was like, “We already set this as a precedent. We’ve been doing it. To suddenly take it away is going to seem weird, in midstream.” And that was a big battle, too, trying to get that resolved so we could have those inside front covers, and it almost seemed like we weren’t going to be able to do that, but somehow we were able to finagle that so we had the inside front covers. So, yeah, there were a few battles there that were kind of a drag. I think the biggest disappointment, more than anything, though, was with Image we had grown so used to doing tons of prints and posters and things like that. And the second we got to DC, they had no interest in producing posters anymore.

And it was so difficult, because people would come up to me at cons all the time going, “Why aren’t there more Danger Girl posters? Why aren’t there more prints?” and I would go, “I don’t know what to tell you. DC will not produce them.”

You couldn’t produce these posters on your own if you wanted to?

No. It was so corporate at that time, it was very difficult to figure out what we could and couldn’t do, and at some point DC did sign an amendment where they were going to produce posters and stuff, it gave them the rights to do so, but really what I found out after the fact that what I was really signing was basically a contract that said, “We’ll produce posters, but more than likely we won’t, and therefore you won’t be able to do them anywhere else, either.”

It was weird. But by the end I think what they basically said was DC only does posters of Alex Ross prints, because they’re the only thing people want.

Or something like that. And it just drove me crazy, because people would come up to me all the time wanting Danger Girl posters, and to this day there’s a minimal amount of them out there because DC had no interest in producing posters. I think they just didn’t understand that market or something, they didn’t understand our fanbase. Like, we did a cover for that issue seven, which was a wraparound cover, and I went to them and said, “Let’s solicit a doorsized poster, of this same cover the same month, or maybe the month after, because this will be a great poster.” And after a month of them debating it, they’re like, “No.” So it was so frustrating.

But did Jim approach his creators prior to going, by saying, “We’re going to DC, do you want to be part of this?”

Well, we were convinced things wouldn’t change, and we kind of liked to believe that they wouldn’t, but… and like I said, don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t hell or anything like that, but there were definitely things that we only could have known by doing it that were going to be different.

But things had changed a lot. Once DC became part of WildStorm, all of a sudden the WildStorm books seemed to fade away. Their presence didn’t seem to be what it once was. They were part of this big family; they had to share the spotlight, like you were saying.

Yeah, and I think it definitely started a slow process that continues to this day where the WildStorm books were absorbed into the DC Universe, and the DC Universe absorbed the talent in WildStorm into

their universe, kind of. I think Jim, in the time since he’s sold the company, has produced way more DC books than he has WildStorm books, and I think a lot of the talent, including the colorists and the artists, have all mostly switched over to doing DC projects vs. WildStorm projects. So I think the deal almost had more to do with absorbing that talent than the books.

That’s what I was trying to ask Scott [Williams]: when did the office start changing?

I would say almost immediately. The offices were already going through a process of becoming more and more corporate, and it didn’t have a creative vibe anymore, it had more of an office vibe. Like, in the Mira Mesa days, everybody would kind of draw — .

It wasn’t someplace you wanted to hang out.

No, no. In the Mira Mesa days, there was like a big bullpen area where everybody was amongst everybody else, and then in La Jolla everybody had these offices that fit two desks in each office, so nobody was really seeing each other anymore. And there was this sense that you had to work there from nine to five or go home. And at Mira Mesa, we never worked nine to five hours. It was always all night and on the weekends and things like that, and it got to the point where at WildStorm in La Jolla, like I said, it was nine to five, Monday through Friday sort of atmosphere, and with everybody who was there, it became a lot more the administrative that outnumbered the artistic talent, so the artistic talent started to feel pushed out, and eventually ended up drawing

at home. I drew most of Danger Girl at home; I didn’t draw it at the studio. It just wasn’t the same.

It was the end of an era, basically.

Yeah, it was really just an office and it was a business, and it wasn’t a creative studio anymore like it had been. And I think since I’ve left they’ve attempted to get a little bit more of that vibe back. I know they blew out a wall and made more of a bullpen area for the artists to draw in, and I’ve heard they’ve tried to recreate a lot more of that older feel, but, yeah, I haven’t been there in years.

So when you left WildStorm and DC, were you just tired?

Everything had kind of run its course already? You did what you wanted to do with — .

Well, by the time I was done with Danger Girl, I guess I was feeling — I’m sure guys who produce monthly books would want to throw me through the roof for saying this, but I was just feeling a little bit of burnout. Danger Girl had been immensely successful, but it was also a lot of burden when the books started becoming late, having everybody wanting to basically storm your house with torches.

I also thought you were busy because I think you had a TV deal at some point?

Yeah, we did.

We had a TV deal in development. Well, we had a movie deal in development that later turned into a TV deal that was in development. And also, I did the Todd McFarlane toys, which if you see the Danger Girl sketchbook — .

Oh, they’re great!

Yeah.

Yeah, but it was crazy how much involved I got in that because I had

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Sequential page from Danger Girl #4 by Campbell/Garner. ©2007 J. Scott Campbell.

Alluring detail via the cover of Danger Girl Ultimate Collection 2

by Campbell & Garner. ©2007 J. Scott Campbell.

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Dynamite two-page spread from Wildsiderz by Jeff Scott Campbell. ©2007 J. Scott Campbell.

such a passion for toys and stuff. And then we also had a video game that did eventually come out that wasn’t that great, but we put a ton of effort and time into it. So because of all the different aspects to Danger Girl by the end, I just felt a little bit burnt out, and I kind of pulled away for a period of time that I never felt would end up as long as it was, and I let my contract lapse at WildStorm and just started doing these covers, like those Spider-Man covers and things like that, because I just wanted to step away and give some thought as to what it was I wanted to do after that. And then, probably within about a year or two after that, I started developing what ended up being Wildsiderz, but spent just way too much time, probably, pre-visualizing it and stuff, because I just had this grandiose idea of what I wanted it to be, and I didn’t want to sell it short, so I just was way over-thinking it; doing covers and developing that series was pretty much what I did for several years after that.

Would Jim Lee give you calls to see where it was going, or what he could do to help you?

No. Unfortunately, I think Jim Lee kind of took it personally when I didn’t renew my contract with WildStorm — Joe Mad didn’t renew and ended up going to Image for what I think ended up only being one issue. But I would talk to Joe Mad a lot, and he was really saying, “It’s really not that hard, and at Image you get 100 percent of the profits.” Not that I was complaining about my cut with WildStorm,

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because it was very much in my favor. But, yeah, he was just making me think like, oh, maybe it is time to step away and be a little bit more independent. But I was thinking about what would be after Danger Girl.

I love Danger Girl a lot, but I just had this feeling that I want to develop something new, because, as a creative person, even if you enjoy a project, you always want to change it up. I think Danger Girl was just one of these projects I wanted to put aside for a little while and try something else. So, yeah, I was considering the idea of maybe going with Image.

When I didn’t renew, I think he might have taken it a little bit personal because I wasn’t with the company I had been with for all those years. But we always remained friendly, and we would talk periodically, and then of course eventually we talked enough where I ended up bringing the Wildsiderz project to them.

And what happened with that? Because I don’t think you got a big push for that.

No, I don’t think so. There are several reasons, too, I think. Cliffhanger was like a mini-Image in some ways. It was like a push of not just my book, but three guys who were really considered big guys in the industry at that point. And I think just me kind of going out there all by myself wasn’t reason enough for people like Wizard to kind of get behind it. And also the whole industry had changed in many ways, too. Like, it became way more political than it ever had been.

Yeah, but Wizard doesn’t have that kind of pull, even if they had pushed it.

I think that’s true, but it’s weird. Now with something like Wizard, it’s so much more political than it ever has been. You have to agree to do so many shows, and give them exclusives and all these things.

And honestly, Wizard knows enough, too, about the industry to know that people want these icons, and they don’t really want the creator-owned stuff like that. So it became a much tougher world to push a project like this. It’s just like I said, I tried to push it as much as I could by myself, but you’re right, I didn’t get the sense that DC was behind it enough, and WildStorm was behind it enough, and it really felt like going out there totally on my own. And as I found out, it’s just very tough to generate that kind of interest without that kind of push, or without that kind of interest of it being a character that everybody already knows. In hindsight, I kind of wish I had just done more Danger Girl, because I probably would have had a much better chance of it finding its audience, because people already knew that book and liked those characters.

But you get a kick out of doing new characters. At least you’re not limited to one thing.

Oh, exactly. Visually I love what I did with Wildsiderz, and it was this idea that I had for a very long time, actually generating about midway through Danger Girl, and I was actually going to make it more of a toy and video game/cartoon kind of pitch, but the more and more I got into the idea, the more I wanted to visualize it myself in a comic book form. It’s probably the most amount of work I’ve ever put into a project.

But I think visually it was exactly what I wanted it to be. The guys I hooked up with as far as the digital inkers and the colorists did phenomenal work on that series.

So what do you make of your career, basically, and your

affiliation with Image?

How do I feel about it? I think that it’s pretty much all positive.

Did you ever think about this when you started, that you would have had a chance to have done some books with them? You’re basically the first guy that came out of Image. Most of the guys who came in, they were already known, but you were the first guy that grew up there and had tremendous success.

Yeah, that’s kind of true, I guess. And it’s a good feeling thinking of myself in that context. No, believe me, I am so grateful and so fond of the fact that I was able to have the luck of being born in such a way where I was just the right age to break into comics around the time Image was around, and to have that experience basically be my early development in comic books. And to have had the success I had with that, really at a time when I really shouldn’t have known anything of what I was doing, it’s a great feeling. And I think in some ways that early success has allowed me in some ways to coast these last few years when I’m finding my way as to what I want to do now, because I think I’m still coasting on the Gen13 and Danger Girl success of those early Image days. Yeah, I think of all that time with Image as pretty much mostly positive. It was a really exciting, energetic time, and in many ways I think I’m not the only one who’s kind of nostalgic for that time period.

Maybe somebody can make the argument that they weren’t as intellectually where they are, perhaps, now, but I think that certainly you can make the argument they were a lot more fun back then. And I miss that sense of wonder that Image Comics represented back then, that sense that you could really do anything in comic book form, and it was all pretty exciting and fun and colorful and bright and people were excited about them.

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Wildsiderz facial studies. ©2007 J. Scott Campbell.

D E AT H M AT E

The Image/Valiant Crossover

©2007 Image/Valiant.

With an advertisement that billed it as “The Biggest Crossover Event in the History of Comics!!”, Deathmate was a joint venture between Image and Valiant Comics that was supposed to make both companies stronger and usher in a sense of fun along the way.

Consisting of six books (a prologue, four self-contained stories and an epilogue), this was a project that was doomed from the start with its lateness and saturated hype.

Although the rise of Valiant began under Jim Shooter, it was during the editor-in-chief watch of Bob Layton that the sales skyrocketed. Retailers, comic readers and speculators were buying into the tightly-constructed continuity and collectibilty of the line, with popular titles that regularly sold in the hundreds of thousands. A meeting between Valiant publisher Steve Massarsky and Jim Lee started the groundwork towards the crossover in 1992.

The 1993 event created some separation amongst the Image partners — of the six incorporated Image founders, only Silvestri, Liefeld and Lee participated in the event. Due to the abundance of work that they had on their Image books, all of the Deathmate chapters with art from the Image family were late. As fans began to lose interest, retailers who ordered heavily on the book faced the reaper. After Valiant hit their height with 1993’s Turok #1, the line lost their focus in a downward comics market and never recovered. In the end, Deathmate left a bitter taste with everyone.

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I was able to conduct a short interview with former Valiant editor-in-chief Bob Layton about the behindthe-scenes of Deathmate.

What led to the development of Deathmate? When did you become involved with the process of producing the book? Was it a project that you believed in wholeheartly?

Deathmate was a business collaboration solely between Steve Massarsky and Jim Lee. I literally had nothing to do with the creation of the project.

Deathmate was thrust upon me because [Steve] Massarsky and Jim Lee were best buddies at the time and had privately arranged the crossover. They really didn’t bring me into the loop until they had finalized the deal. I wasn’t a huge fan of the project — basically because I felt that our two companies had diametrically-opposed philosophies in terms of our approach to comics. Valiant was character and story-driven while Image was mostly about big, powerful visuals and seemed to be less concerned with story content.

Do you remember your initial impressions about the Deathmate crossover project? Did you feel that it was a letdown for the core Valiant readership that craved more storytelling than art trends or gimmicks?

I felt that most Valiant fans were going to be disappointed. As I said, what Valiant was known for was not Image’s bag.

Who had the overall idea for the story? How did you handle the job of overseeing the Valiant-side of the project and writing your script?

The overall storyline was done by committee — with all the principles getting together and ironing out the details at a huge meeting in a hotel somewhere in the Midwest. I forget the state and place. I think it was Kansas City.

The Deathmate: Prologue was edited and distributed by

Valiant. For your part, what do you remember about working with the Image-creators [Lee and Liefeld] on the book?

When did the book get to the point that things became drastic with Liefeld?

We had waited and waited but — no pencils from Liefeld. Not surprising since most of the Image artists were notorious for failing to meet deadlines.

So, at Massarsky’s request, I flew out to Los Angeles, went to Image’s offices, and refused to leave until Liefeld turned in his pencils to the Deathmate: Prologue, which I ended up inking in my hotel room. However, the rest of the guys were okay about getting their pencils to us on time for the prologue.

Although your books shipped on time, would you or the company receive complaints about the Image side of the crossovers being late?

Oh…you bet! It was a nightmare that plagued us even after the project was over. Especially with the retailers.

How did this crossover affect the company? Did it bring the type of attention that they sought?

As I alluded to — the retailers became increasingly hostile towards Image and us. A lot of them were put in financial jeopardy due to the lateness of the Image side of the project. Some even had to close their doors. I believe that Deathmate was the first volley in, what was to be, the rapid decline of the direct market.

Did Deathmate signal the beginning of the end for Valiant? Were you powerless at that point?

Yes to both questions. My personal belief is that Deathmate was the “beginning of the end” for me and for Valiant. I came to the realization, through that process, that I had totally lost control of the editorial side of the company to the guys who controlled the money.

Void and Solar by Jim Lee (pencils) and Bob Layton (inks).

All Deathmate art ©2007 their respective holders.

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I M A G E A S S O C I AT E

Tom McWeeney Tom McWeeney. Courtesy of Tom McWeeney.

Image from Gen13/Generation X crossover. Pencils by J. Scott Campbell and inks

by Tom McWeeney.

Gen13 ©2007 WildStorm Productions; Generation X ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

A graduate of The Joe Kubert School, Tom McWeeney made a name for himself in comics when he created Roachmill (with Rich Hedden) during the ’80s black-&white explosion. After working on various DC books, WildStorm recruited Tom to use his ink talents on polishing the finished art to Jim Lee’s roster of budding pencilers in 1994. At WildStorm, the highly productive McWeeney inked J. Scott Campbell (on Danger Girl and Gen13), Travis Charest (on WildC.A.T.s), and Brett Booth, who he was regularly paired with on major projects like Backlash and Marvel’s Fantastic Four during “Heroes Reborn.” Besides experiencing the growth of the studio and their acquisition by DC, the respected artist was handpicked by Joe Madureira to embellish his first six issues of the very popular Battle Chasers for Cliffhanger.

What got you to Image in the first place?

I worked for DC, and my editor was Bill Kaplan. When Jim Lee needed an editor-in-chief, he called Bill up at DC and hired him. And right as Bill was leaving, he knew that they were close to offering me a contract at DC. Two days before he flew off to San Diego, he said to me, “Don’t sign a contract with DC. I like your stuff and I think you could be good at WildStorm. I’m going to try to get you a job at WildStorm.” So that’s what he did. And thankfully I got lost in the wheels of the machine at DC, and I never had to turn down that contract

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because they never offered it to me.

Was there a formal tryout over Jim Lee’s pencils?

Well, yeah, Bill gave me this tryout at WildStorm.

And it’s not just like an in-the-mail tryout, they flew me out there. Because they were in between the old studio and the new studio, the new studio was underway in La Jolla, they had very limited space in the old studio, so I actually wound up inking most of my tryout at Jim Lee’s drawing board, which was this great big drawing board. It was awesome! It was way better than the one I have at home, so it was kind of cool to sit in the big office, I’m the tryout guy, and here I am sitting in the big office. The coolest thing was just all the stacks of original art lying around, just Jim’s stuff from X-Men days. Whenever I took a break, I would just pore over this stuff and go, oh, just amazing. Especially Scott’s inks. It was like having art books right around just to look at when you weren’t working.

So they fly me out there to try out, and I’m thinking they’re going to try me out, I figured it’d be over Brett Booth or Scottie Clark or something. No, it was an eight-page Travis [Charest] WildC.A.T.s back-up. And I had just started inking with a nib probably about three months earlier, so I was still brand new to a pen. And they hand me these absolutely gorgeous Travis pencils. I’d never seen pencils like this in my life. I hadn’t seen anything close to the level of finish that Travis was capable of. I’m pretty unflappable in terms of inking guys, but I have to admit, that it scared the crap out of me, basically. These pencils were so beautiful; why even ink these things?

This was that Voodoo story in WildC.A.T.s #8, right?

Yeah, it’s that Voodoo story, right. In hindsight I was even inking it with the wrong nib. I wasn’t inking it with a Hunt 102, which is eventually what I switched to, I was inking it with a much stiffer nib, so

every line in that story had to be drawn multiple times to build it up, to get thicker and thicker and thicker, and that’s another reason why it took so long, just because I was using the wrong tools and I didn’t want to mess it up.

It wasn’t like a formal job interview?

It was, eventually. On the last night I flew out, Bill and Jim Lee and I went out to a diner and we just talked. There was never really a formal offer from Jim directly to me. It wasn’t like, “Okay, we love your stuff, here’s what we’re going to do.” They just talked about the company, we talked about comics, we talked about movies. It just was very laid back. And then a few days later Bill Kaplan called me at home and said, “Here’s the offer.” And I actually declined their first offer. Not that it was bad, it was a good offer, but my wife and I had just moved in together, and I still was unsure if I really wanted to move 3,000 miles to be part of a studio. Not that it wasn’t exciting, trust me, it was, but it was like the timing just seemed a little off. So I turned it down initially, and then I started picking up freelance work from them, and I started getting more freelance work from them, and eventually Bill Kaplan just said, “Look, you’re getting kind of the bottom of the barrel freelance stuff.” And I thought, “Really? Wow! The stuff I’m getting’s pretty good. I can only imagine what I’d get if I were there.” Bill goes, “When you’re here, you can be right on top of projects.” So that really appealed to me. And what also really appealed to me was WildStorm, unlike any comic company except for maybe Dark Horse that I had worked for prior, didn’t seem to really care if inkers did more than just ink. Like, if I said to Bill, “Got a trading card set coming? Are there any that I could pencil and ink?”

Sure enough, I’d get some trading cards that I penciled and inked, and I liked that breakup, because inking just becomes monotonous if it’s all you’re doing. The single biggest draw was the idea that I’d be working for a studio that wasn’t run by a bunch of corporate noodnicks who when you say to them, “Hey, could I pencil a trading card,” they look at you like you have a third eye in the middle of your forehead and go, “But… but… you’re an inker. Wh-WhWhat would you want to pencil for? You want to write a story? That’s what writers are for!”

Were some other guys intimidated by you? Because you were a veteran already; a lot of the guys were guys Jim had found through talent searches.

I don’t think anybody was intimidated by me. They were all young; there was a very high confidence level at that studio. That’s what was kind of cool about it. The talent level was very, very high at that studio, so you felt like you were joining something — it was like joining the Yankees. It only made you work harder to be better. Everyone was getting so much better. Scott Williams to some degree still is my inking idol. Everything Scott does, inkwise, he so rarely makes a mistake — why aim any lower than that? So just the fact that Scott was there was one thing, and when I had my first taste of watching him work the year earlier, when I was out for my tryout doing the Travis story, it amazed me what he did. It’s one thing

Above: She’s really got a hold on Tom! A memento from WildStorm’s second European tour in the mid’90s. Look for Arthur Adams in the background.

Photo courtesy of McWeeney.

Below: Tom finishes Jim Lee’s pencils for this “Heroes Reborn” cover that the boys at Wizard magazine put to good use. Characters TM & ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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TOM McWEENEY

Make ‘em laugh! Tom lampoons J. Scott and Jim Lee in this final installment of Robot Ruckus that appeared in the pages of Gen13 #5 (vol. 2) as a back-up strip. ©2007 WildStorm Productions.

to look at it on the printed page, but it’s a completely different animal to watch the guy, or any guy, actually putting the work down on the paper. So I got a little taste of watching him work, and I was just like, “Whoa, I have a learning curve to make up here. I am not that good.” So that’s good. I mean, I’ve always used that stuff to fuel me, to make me better. I don’t let that discourage me. So then when I got out there, I saw they had hired Trevor Scott and Alex Garner, who were also very good. Trevor was good from the first stuff I saw him doing, but Garner really, really improved super-fast in that first year he was doing Gen13. He and Campbell improved almost at the same rate, which is bizarre. Usually one goes faster than the other, one accelerates. And by the second year I was there, they had Sandra Hope, who, again, just went from doing Trevor’s cleanup work to being an excellent inker in about a year. And Rich Friend, the same thing, it took him about a year

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or so, a year-and-a-half, and all of a sudden now he’s a force to be reckoned with. So the talent level was really strong. It was almost like, if you stumble, you’re going to lose your book and someone else is going to get it.

There was never a mandate, like, “We have to try to draw like Jim Lee and Scott Williams” — you didn’t get any of that?

Oh, the influence was there. I don’t think it was a mandate.

Was Jim Lee a good boss?

I didn’t really talk much to Jim. But clearly he was appreciative. Jim is by far one of the most generous people I have ever met. He was generous with bonuses; the royalty program WildStorm had was great, it could not be beat. Whenever we would go out to conventions, I went to the Chicago Con for the first time in my life, all on WildStorm’s bill. We had a big European tour .

You went to the European tour?

That was literally the highlight of the whole thing at WildStorm; that European tour was so much fun. I can’t even begin to describe it. It was just such a great time hanging out in Europe with Art Adams, Scott Dunbier, just the whole gang. It was just a lot of fun. Just to see the difference, too, between European fans and American, especially the French fans. I never realized how entitled American fans or U.S. fans seem to feel they are. It came across to me simply as more respectful. The whole thing was being paid for by the comic stores that we were doing the signings at, and that was a pretty expensive bill for them to foot. So the way they worked it out so that the comic stores could afford it was, we would come in and we’d do each store. We signed in Paris for two days. One day we did just signings, you bring books and we sign your books. The second day we did just drawing. We drew whatever we wanted just so long as we drew continuously for the whatever, four hours or five hours we were there. And the whole idea was that people bought tickets for both days, and then their tickets were all put in a raffle, and then they could win whatever the original art sketch is there. So you had a chance to win an original Jim Lee, or an original Art Adams, or whoever was there on the trip, Tom Raney, whatever.

How did the studio feel for you? Was that like going back to school? Were there cliqués?

If there were, I wasn’t part of them. I was a little older than most of the guys there. Jim and Scott and myself and Scott Dunbier were all about the same age. Everyone else was in their early, mid-20s. I was also married, I wasn’t really much of a partier. There were people I got along better with because of our likes and dislikes. Like Campbell, Campbell’s got tremendous taste. He likes a lot of the same artists I like, for the same reason I like them. He likes guys like Glen Keane at Disney, because the guy is just an amazing artist and could draw anything under the sun. So we could talk animation a lot, Jeff and I, because he was one of the few guys that was really into cartoons the way I was, and really appreciated the effort that went into hand-drawing a character

and animating them. And he also had a sense of humor, which not a lot of the other guys were into humor comics or comic strips at all. And Jeff was a big fan of Mad magazine, and I grew up on Mad magazine. Mad magazine, with the exception of maybe early Marvel comics, was the single most influential thing on getting me to draw. Early Marvel comics and early Mad magazines came into my life simultaneously. And then I shared my space with Travis [Charest], which was just like a gift that they gave me, whether they knew it or not. In hindsight I look back at that time and I think, man, how lucky was I to get to watch Travis work? Because it was the most amazing thing, it really was, like a guy doing a magic trick every day in our office. Watching him work was just unbelievable in terms of his skill level.

When did things start changing for that office? When did some of the artists start leaving, around ’95?

Yeah…

With the crash, the studio wasn’t the same anymore?

Yeah. There were a lot of reasons why the studio wasn’t the same. But the first real big change in the studio was when Mike Heisler became editor-in-chief.

Why’s that? He just cleaned house or something?

No, Mike was a sort of cold, aloof guy, and it just, the whole vibe changed. The whole vibe changed under Mike. Now, I think they were trying to basically put the chickens back in the chicken coop. When the money was really good, Jim’s policy, which was a great policy, was still let the artists be the creative force behind the studio; it was a great thing when the books were selling 250,000 copies. Well, the books started to slip, and now all of a sudden to make up that revenue, we had to start to get them out faster. If they’re not going to sell as many copies, then you have to get them out more frequently to earn that kind of money. There was a lot of resistance to that. There were a lot of guys that were used to taking as long as they wanted to do a book.

And I think Mike was installed as the head of WildStorm to try and kind of crack down on this, try to make it better. But that was it for me. That was when the vibe in the studio changed. It was not the same. The morale under Mike went right down the toilet for me. It was just a different place. It was not the same. Prior to that, it was just the greatest — it was still a good place to work, don’t get me wrong. WildStorm is still the single best place that I’ve ever worked. But it became, which was bound to happen sooner or later, it became more of a business. Okay, now our books don’t sell quite as much, so we have to start to get serious on our deadlines. And some guys were fine with that, some guys weren’t. Some guys left, and some guys just couldn’t cut it, couldn’t keep up with those deadlines. So some guys were replaced off of books simply because they couldn’t meet deadlines.

I remember after Jeff Campbell, the guy that really emerged was Booth, and you inked Backlash with

him, right? How did you get paired up with him?

I don’t remember why, but Sal Regla left the studio.

He left Brett, and so Brett was using Al Vey, Al had become his inker, and Al was inking Spider-Man/ Backlash, and he had to drop it. I just remember, I believe it was Scott Dunbier coming to me and saying, “How would you like to finish up Spider-Man/ Backlash over Brett?” And I was like, “It sounds good. I’ll ink anything with Spider-Man in it, because that sounds like fun.” And it was. I liked inking Brett.

It was never that hard on the level that Travis and Campbell were.

He had a looser, cartoonier style, right? On the surface it looked like Jim Lee’s style, but when you look at it, it’s more animated.

Yeah, yeah. And the thing about inking Brett that was good, was that his stuff was generally consistent

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About this particular piece, Marc Silvestri said, “This was actually my first rendering of Strykeforce as a group.”

Tom vividly remembers Silvestri being quite happy with his inks.

Strykeforce ©2007 Top Cow Productions.

TOM McWEENEY

Regent trading card art by Travis Charest. ©2007 WildStorm Productions.

in that I knew what to expect, page by page. And when you’re inking a guy over a long haul, that’s good, because I could look at any page he gave me and I could almost pinpoint how long it would take me to ink him. I’m not kidding you, within a half hour, sometimes, I could look at it and go, “That page will take me about eight-and-a-half hours.” And sure enough, it’d be, like, eight hours and 15 minutes. I mean, because I just got so used to the way he drew, and relatively quickly, too. Some artists, it takes a really long time to look at their stuff and kind of really gauge… I was always wrong on Campbell, because Campbell’s stuff was so hard to ink. It was so deceivingly hard, yeah, very difficult to ink Jeff, because his stuff was so tight. So, as a consequence, I slowed

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myself down. And also there was always the looming presence of Alex Garner, the ghost of Alex.

When did you decide to leave the studio, when you got hurt?

Yeah, I developed pain in my drawing hand and eventually just… I can’t do the volume that comics requires anymore. I can still draw, but I just can’t do a page a day every day, and that’s what they really want. I stayed out in California for about four years while I tried to work through disability and tried to get my hand fixed, basically. And I went through two surgeries.

So working for Jim Lee was a pleasant experience?

Oh, it was by far the best job, the best work I ever did, the best people I ever worked with. It’s what I always look back to fondly. The other thing, too, is you were talking about I came through the studio already a professional. That gave me insight that I never, ever tried to take WildStorm for granted. I never did. Because I understood, I had worked for DC for almost a year before coming to WildStorm. I had done freelance for Dark Horse and for First Comics and other comic companies, so I knew what it was like. And I knew what DC was like, I knew how the few times I tried to get little penciling jobs here and there — and I never asked for a book or a cover, I was looking for, like, a trading card, and what resistance I would be met with — that the fact that WildStorm was so free and open to the artist that, within reason, you certainly could pitch any idea. Whether it got accepted or not, that’s fine, but at least you had the option. It made me go home every night and try to think of things, to try to develop my own project. At one point they were talking about how they wanted to do as many crossovers as they possibly could, so they said, “Look around at other comic companies and think of characters you want to do crossovers with, and pitch them, because we want to do crossovers.” And they were the hot thing that year, and they were selling very well, so they wanted to do a lot of crossovers. So I wrote up a proposal for, Dark Horse had the rights to Godzilla, so I wanted to do a WildC.A.T.s/Godzilla crossover, because I wanted to have Maul and Godzilla duke it out in the middle of, like, a big city. I just thought that would be really cool. And WildStorm was great. They bent over backward to get that thing pushed through.

I M A G E A S S O C I AT E

Brian Michael Bendis Before Brian Michael Bendis’ gargantuan mainstream successes at Marvel on titles such as Daredevil, Daredevil Ninja, Elektra, Alias, New Avengers, House of M, Secret War, The Pulse, Ultimate Spider-Man, Ultimate X-Men, Ultimate Fantastic Four, Ultimate Six and Ultimate Marvel Team-Up, the Cleveland-born writer was a 1999 Eisner winner — for “Talent Deserving Wider Recognition” — with his biting narrative and cunning dialogue on his titles at Image Comics. For the independent company, Bendis proved to be a key figure when he brought over his titles from the defunct Caliber Comics in 1997; he helped solidify the Image line into genres away from super-heroes and attract a new vanguard of creators.

Amongst his written work for Image are Powers, Fire, Sam & Twitch, Hellspawn and Torso, which is currently being developed as a Hollywood film with Todd McFarlane as a producer. Today, Brian and Image maintain a relationship as they continue to keep in print many of the books that he first published with the company.

When did you become aware of Image?

I was very aware of Image because I was actually working at a comic store when they debuted, so I had kind of the typical angry fanboy view of it. Also as an up-and-coming creator, I was like, “Aw, screw them and their rich bastards.” Like, you’d hear all these stories about limos and all that stuff, so I pretty much decided I hated them, because they were successful and I was not. So that’s how you’re going to be, you’re in college and you’re pissed off.

So you didn’t root for them because they were going against the corporation? You didn’t think about that?

Yeah, I kind of was interested. It certainly was fascinating. I mean, it’s funny, like, I’ve actually met and talked to every single founder at great length since this, so I think about my attitude towards them when I would listen to the stories, and I’ve asked many of them questions about a lot of the stuff since, and my view of it now is quite different. So at the time I think I was just angry because I was personally unsuccessful, and when you’re in this particular field, where there’s no map to help you get successful or help you get out of eating Ramen noodles all day long, you get very frustrated. So I was just frustrated at them. You look at the lowest common denominator part of it and you go, “Oh, f*ck them. F*ck you!”

Anyway…

Were you reading their books?

Yeah, I definitely read the first issue of everything.

Were you reading, like, X-Force, and X-Men with Jim Lee, and all of their Marvel books?

I wasn’t a big Liefeld fan. Obviously, Whilce is the best artist of the group, and Jim Lee is really good.

Yeah, I was reading them. But I kind of liked it when Alan Moore and Frank Miller jumped in on Spawn and stuff like that. I think 1963 was probably my favorite thing they published in that era.

Yeah, I think when Moore started doing work with them, that’s when I started taking them more seriously.

Yeah, and I think they took themselves more seriously. I think they jumped in full blast, and then afterwards they kind of figured out who they were, what they were going to do with this. So that was kind of interesting.

So you were working in a store, you didn’t feel the energy, like people were

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Brian Michael Bendis.

Courtesy of Brian.

Powers. ©2007 Brian Michael Bendis & Michael Avon Oeming.

BRIAN BENDIS

Torso ©2007 Brian Michael Bendis & Marc Andreyko.

really into what these guys were doing, they were buying every copy of every comic, and multiple copies…

I was bothered, and still get bothered, but it doesn’t really happen that much anymore, even with variant covers. But they’d have me working behind the counter, I would see people order cases and not even open them. Or buy them off QVC and come in and try to sell them to us for whatever QVC promised they were worth, even though it was Deathmate or something, it wasn’t worth anything. I remember a guy coming into the store with a copy of Deathmate, he couldn’t remember if he bought it or not. He came to the counter and say, “Did I buy this? Do you remember if I bought this?” And I’m like, “It’s $4.95. If I took $5 out of your wallet and slapped you, you’d remember.” So there’s a lot of negative things going on at a retail level, all of which we saw the outcome from a couple of years later. So, for all that fun and excitement they were having at the time, the writing

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was on the wall very clear on a retail level.

Wait a minute, your store paid the consequence later on a lot of this stuff?

Yeah. I mean, it wasn’t my store, I was just working there.

Did they go out of business in the mid-’90s?

No, they’re still around. That store did go out of business, but the person who really ran the store owns his own store in Cleveland and he did fine. But, yeah, a guy would come in with a copy of X-Men #1 from Jim Lee and say, “Hey, I want to sell this to you for $200.” And we’re like, “No, that’s okay.” And he goes, “Oh, no, it’s worth $200.” And we’d open a longbox and show him how many we had. “It’s not worth $200 just ‘cause you saw on TV it’s worth $200.”

But people were collecting, like, pogs, and it wasn’t doing anything for the art form. I mean, the people weren’t reading them. And it wasn’t just Image, it was “Death of Superman,” it was a lot of things. You know this. I was trying to create comics on an independent level, which is the complete opposite of what was going on, and so you just get frustrated that you’re trying to tell a story, and there wasn’t anybody… the hysteria was kind of anti-story.

Eventually, things corrected themselves after Marvel, DC and the others wrecked it. Because everything had to start over again.

But here’s the thing, and this is the truth, and this comes in retrospect. Most of the Image founders have vindicated themselves in the fact that they have shown themselves to be lifers. They’re almost all working in comics, except for Todd. They’re all working in comics with a lot of exuberance. Nothing has stopped them. They didn’t cash out and leave. They didn’t use the business. They stayed, which I think says a lot. And the other argument is: if it wasn’t the Image guys, it would have been somebody else. It was heading toward this cliff irregardless. And it easily could have been Marvel who did it, or DC who did it, it just happened to be Image who did it, and probably accelerated it, because of the nature of the other cool rebellion story.

Were you worried, thinking like, there’s not going to be an industry anymore if this keeps going?

I was a little too young to think that. It’s hard to imagine something you’ve had in your life your whole time just not being there anymore. So I didn’t think it was that way, but I was like, “Ugh.” It was not just me, me and my friends, all of the Caliber guys, me and David Mack and Phil Hester and Ed Brubaker and all that, we’re trying so hard, and we couldn’t get arrested. Just nobody cares on any level whatsoever.

There was no press for indy comics; it was all about the collector mentality. And it just wasn’t about story and art and character, it was about the collector mentality.

And everything was crap, too. Everything DC put out around that time, and Marvel, was just gimmicks and poor stories.

Well, you know, everyone’s chasing it. And, again, it’s hard to blame. I certainly have seen it, and I don’t blame anyone for buying whatever they want to buy, too. That’s another thing. I’ve had a lot of variant

covers on some of my books, and I see that look of genuine happiness when people get to collect them all. They’re very happy, and I’m happy for them. They like to have it. So I’m not talking about that aspect of it. I’m talking about strangers, the people who were collecting this instead of baseball cards, they actually don’t care about comics, that were coming into stores and tricking, like, Valiant into thinking that they had millions of readers, and really they had about 30,000 readers.

A lot of what you’re saying comes from Wizard, which tried to create this baseball card environment, this Beckett type of mentality, put your comics in a bag and board and save them and they’ll go up in value.

Yup. And like I say, nothing makes me happier when a guy comes up to me with a copy of one of my books and it looks like he wiped his ass with it. I know the guy read the sh*t out of it. You know what I mean? And likes to show it to me in that. And that’s what I like. If it’s encased in plastic, I always kind of feel bad for them. “I hope you get to read it one day.”

Now they’re encased in hard plastic.

So you didn’t read early Image, it never ingratiated you until Alan came aboard and started writing?

No, I did, I was sitting at the counter, and you’ve got to be up on your stuff. You’ve got to be a good

salesman and people come and ask your opinion, you’ve got to know. It just wasn’t speaking to me.

After a time, it was all the same thing. If you look at all the Rob Liefeld books, it’s just a bunch of guys ripping themselves apart.

It just isn’t my flavor.

But he wasn’t the only one, ShadowHawk and Spawn is pretty much the same kind of stuff. It was all that real violent kind of teen fantasy thing.

Yeah, I worked on Spawn, I know. [laughs] So you cut to some of Caliber, and Caliber was kind of falling apart on us, sadly.

When did you start working with Caliber?

I think I published my first book, ’91 or ’92.

And what were your sales numbers? Real low?

Not good. I was not a success of the group. At the time The Crow was really selling, and Kabuki was the highest selling book, and it’s one of my best friends, David Mack, and he was outselling me, like, 40 to one.

So I was selling, and I never lost money. I always made enough that I could always make another one if I wanted to. And I was finding myself, so it was good for me there. I needed to see my books in print.

I needed to read a printed copy of my book to find out what the f*ck was wrong with what I was doing.

So it’s like how a band needs a couple of albums out

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Crime scene from Torso #3. ©2007 Bendis & Andreyko.

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Jinx. ©2007 Brian Michael Bendis.

before they figure out their sound; that’s what was happening with me. And plus, I was meeting a lot of people like David and Mike Oeming and all of these other people who were affecting my life and my career in a big way, just figuring out my line weights and stuff like that.

So Caliber publisher Gary Reed encouraged you? As long as you wanted to do stories, he would keep putting it out?

He was pretty cool about that. He certainly did believe in us. The flip side was, he wasn’t being very honest with us. Some of the money was disappearing, and a lot of the press was being deflected away from us toward books that Caliber owned. And it got ugly and… it was sad, because it was great for a while.

And then it just, something, like a switch flipped in his head, and the big deal for us, the reason I had to get out of there, was he was putting out trade paperbacks of my work that had no glue. Or the glue was faulty, or it was a bad batch of glue. It was me, it was Goldfish, Kabuki, and a book called Exit. And they

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would be glued that day, but then by the time it got to the store, the glue had disintegrated or crystallized.

It sounds like some of the Eclipse trade paperbacks from the early ’90s.

Yeah, but you’ve got to remember, when this is a book like Goldfish, I’m not making a dime on Goldfish.

Zero. I mean, like, $150 an issue for lettering, full art, full writing. And I don’t care… all I care about is making that book. So the book comes out and it’s useless. It’s just 300 pages just floating around in a cover, and you open it up and it falls apart. And I remember the most embarrassing moment was when there were a lot of people trying to buy it for film, which was a really big deal for me, and there was a very big director who had asked for a copy, got his copy, took it home, opened it up, and the pages fell out all over his belly and all over the floor. And he called up and asked if he could have one that isn’t broken, and then we found out that there weren’t any that weren’t broken. But the downside was, instead of fixing them; Gary got a credit from the printer and then never told us. And that’s when we had to leave.

I know he might have his own view of this, but that’s what happened, and it was just devastating to me because I really admired him, and was really grateful for the process. But there was just a lot of finagling going on with the finances, and then we flat-out found out he was bragging to people how he made a fortune on this glue fiasco. And meanwhile, our books weren’t being replaced. Hundreds of people were getting screwed.

And the only thing you wanted was for people to see your work.

Yeah, honestly, I don’t care if I made $10. You come to terms with it that, all right, this is how many people are going to buy it. I don’t care, as long as I get to make it. Hopefully one day I’ll have more of an audience, but you can’t even focus on that right now. You want to be heard. So it was very disappointing. And at the time, at the exact same time, Erik Larsen invited David Mack to Image, to do Kabuki at Image. And my friend Jim Hudnall got invited by Jim Valentino to be part of the Shadowline. And I sent Jim Valentino, I was in the middle of Jinx, I had just started Jinx. And I was just devastated, just distraught with myself. So I sent Jinx and Goldfish to Jim Valentino, who I didn’t know, and he called me up and says, “So, do you want to be published by Image?” And the news had come down that they had opened the gates up, and they weren’t interested in how they were doing their business before, which was all super-hero stuff and all competitive and if you don’t sell 150,000, you’re out. The market had crashed, and a couple of them had looked around, and I guess Erik and Jim particularly had looked around and said, “Listen, let’s save our souls with this company.” It was kind of the feeling I got. I think Jim flat-out said that, “We created this monster. Let’s do something of value with it. And what I would like to do is give you and a few other people a safe home with it.” And it shocked me, because just two years before, it was a circus, and now all of a sudden they’re declaring safe harbor and said I could have the same deal I had at Caliber,

which is basically you own it, and whatever you make off it you can have.

You only have to sell enough to cover the printing.

Yeah, you gotta cover your ass, and if you don’t, you’re gone. But if you can cover your printing bill, which I always covered my printing bill, and the Image printing bill was actually a better deal, because they had a better deal with the printer. So there was a better chance of me covering my butt.

And Jinx was actually selling better than Goldfish, so I was making, like, $400 an issue instead of $200 an issue, so I was on an upswing. But it was a very emotional time for me, because leaving Caliber after I had believed in it so much and been such a champion of it, but Gary — .

You were one of the stars of Caliber.

I wasn’t a star at Caliber.

You were one of the guys they would mention when they would mention the company.

Yeah, but me and my friend Mark Ricketts had made a book called High Caliber celebrating Caliber, and we did a magazine about Caliber. And I really believed in Caliber, but really I believed in the people I was working with I guess more than the company, but still it was very emotional for me, because just leaving… I’m also a very loyal person, and it’s very hard to leave a situation because it does solidify the fact that you’ve been screwed over and you have to do something like that. It was a hard lesson for me.

How long was that period between Caliber and Image?

That was, like, a year or two?

No, I was at Caliber for a few years. I think this is mid-’90s already. Yeah, I’d say ’95, ’96.

But did you go a year or two without a publisher or anything?

No, I actually didn’t even miss a solicitation. I was right in the middle of Jinx. I think I was on nine of Jinx, and I think the next issue I just did a new #1 right in the middle of the story and just started at Image.

Did you feel the change, like, once you went to Image, with the better placement in Previews?

Well, yeah, that, the difference was amazing.

Because what had happened during the time was the whole catalog had shifted where all the premier publishers were in the front and everybody else is in the back. And once you get to the front of the catalog, you can’t go back. It’s a whole different ball game, and you realize how many people just don’t even read [the rest] of the catalog. And a similar thing happened to me when I moved from Image to Marvel, and you found out people don’t even read the non-Marvel and DC parts of the catalog. But with Powers, we had solicited an issue at Image, but then moved to Marvel. The same image, the same cover image, the same solicitation, and 25,000 more people bought it. Just because it was a Marvel. But that’s a lesson. So Jim, who I didn’t know, gave me safe harbor at a time when I really desperately needed it, because I didn’t know where else I was going to go.

It was like Slave Labor, but they weren’t really making the kind of comics we were making. I’m doing genre material, so there’s very few publishers.

Because the indy publishers publish indy stuff —

autobiographical, whimsical little devils, and there’s all these little staples of indy comics, but we were all doing genre material, so it was very difficult. And I wasn’t having a lot of luck getting mainstream work, which I wanted to do.

So when you went to Image, you felt justified?

I did. Well, you’re worried is it really safe? Is it too good to be true? Because at the time it was a real sweet deal. You can’t help but look at the bloated corpses of all the companies before, and I am a bit of a comics historian, as you are, and I was very aware of Pacific and Eclipse and every other company that screwed people over, and I didn’t want be one of those stories. So you’re doing your work, but you’ve got one eye open, because they are still a new company, and there were all these stories, and Jim Lee had run away from the company already, so you can’t be stupid. You’ve got to keep your eyes open.

It was when Jim Lee left that a lot of these opportunities

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Jinx as written and illustrated by the mighty Bendis! ©2007 Brian Michael Bendis.

opened up.

Yeah, but you’re sitting there going, “Okay, are they just struggling, are they being crazy, or did they mean it?” I don’t know them as human beings, so it’s hard to judge. But I remember me and David had a long talk with Jim Valentino at San Diego our first year at Image, and it was just a phenomenal conversation where I learned how real Jim Valentino is, and how much he meant, and how he’ll fight to the death for what he believes in.

And he saw in me and David, I remember him saying, it was the nicest thing anyone’s ever said, he said we’re lifers. He said, “You guys are going to make comics no matter what happens, and I just love people like that.” And I never saw myself like that, but I realized I am like that, I just never put a word on it. Like, I don’t even care if they stop making them, I’ll find a way to make them, they’re just not going to stop me.

And knowing that I’m in bed with a guy like that just makes you feel better, and the whole time Jim was running things, it was the Shadowline, which then became Image Central. I just don’t think Jim got enough credit for what he accomplished at all. I think he really stood up and really tried to make something special out of Image, which could have, on its own, without adding all the people that he added, I think it might have buckled and folded on itself just because — if it was only about the mini-studios, I don’t know that the strength of that would have been enough to keep it going, whereas just the added energy in giving, like, Robert Kirkman a chance, and me a chance, and all these other people that he gave a chance to was a really special thing that he did.

That’s something I wanted to ask you, too. Did Todd McFarlane discover your work because of Gary Reed?

Because Gary Reed was working with him, too.

No, no. It’s funny, my theory is that Gary’s whole attitude on Caliber changed after his relationship with Todd fell apart. I think that’s when things went sour for him, but I don’t have evidence of that. It’s just, things felt different after that.

I just remember, toward the end of Caliber, all of a

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sudden there was one or two Todd McFarlane covers, and I was, like, “Where the hell did that come from? He’s not even drawing his own book!”

Yeah, I know. It was a weird time, because Gary was running Caliber separately. It was a completely separate situation. He was running Caliber and he was working for Todd’s company. And it was only a short period of time, but it was a weird period of time, because the whole time you’re like, “Okay, is Todd buying Caliber? Why would he buy Caliber? And really, we own all of our books, so why would you buy Caliber?” We weren’t sure what was happening.

But it didn’t last very long. But Gary wasn’t the same person after that. And I wasn’t there for any of it, so I don’t know what happened, but he definitely wasn’t the same person after whatever happened with Todd.

The wind got knocked out of him. It’s hard to say. But, no, Todd was, I don’t think, aware of us. I don’t think he cared. I don’t think it was comic books he was particularly interested in. I remember Jim saying, “What’s happened at Caliber that’s upsetting to you?”

And I said, “Oh, this Goldfish trade is the most embarrassing thing that ever happened.” And he goes, “Well, let’s make sure we put out a good one.”

And immediately we put out a Goldfish trade that I’m proud of, that has gone on to an amazing amount of printings, and it’s still in print. But finally the book was out the way I wanted it out. And now I’m part of the Image comps. And the way I always heard, Todd was at Marc Silvestri’s office at Top Cow and saw my book on a table. And supposedly they had some kind of argument about toys or whatever, you know, a friendly argument, but he took my book out, just to have stolen something out of his office; he just took my book and got in his car and drove back to Arizona, and the whole ride to Arizona he just read my book. He took it just to be obnoxious, but then started reading it, and when he got to Arizona, he called me. And that was a very funny phone call, because that was the last person I expected to hear from in my life. And he’d read it and liked what I was doing and said, “You know, I have a few books that I want you to maybe write.” And I’m like, “Oh, what do you have?” And he goes, “Well, I’ve got two things.

One is about a big monkey who is a Frankenstein monkey.”

Oh, Cy-Gor. Yeah. And I’m like, “What else do you have? [laughs] You read Goldfish and you want me to write a robot monkey?” And then he goes, “Oh, I’ve got this other thing about two cops.” I’m like, “Oh, I’ll do that!” I don’t even think I let him finish the sentence, because I desperately needed the work, and I was excited to do work, but it’s got to be something I would read. Cy-Gor’s not for me. There’s other guys that that’s perfect for, but that’s not my thing.

When you started working for him, was that the first time you were self-dependent? That you could finally pay your bills without sweating at the end of the month?

Well, no, the whole time I was working as a caricature artist, up until, and doing lots of illustration work. I was making my living as an illustrator. I didn’t have a job.

You did all kinds of parties?

Oh, yeah. Well, it was a great gig. You got, like, $75 an hour to do a bar mitzvah, so you work one whole night and you’re pretty much covered the whole week, so I could go back to work on Jinx all week and not have to worry about money. But it was just soul-wrenching.

But when Todd came to you, that’s like the first time someone sought you?

Yeah, I kept hearing from people, because I was getting a lot of good reviews. Not to be bragging; I was getting a lot of good reviews, but I was starving, I mean, really had no money, and no one was hiring me. And everyone kept telling me how something was about to break for me. And I’m like, “All right, stop saying that. No one’s calling.” And I was kind of focused on Vertigo because I couldn’t imagine who else would hire me, and then Todd calls and literally said, “Here, take these guys, do whatever you want.”

He was an amazing boss, because he was like, “Hey, do whatever you want.” I mean, he’s a fascinating guy. You can’t stop listening because he’ll say, like, the smartest thing you’ve ever heard right next to the dumbest thing you’ve ever heard, with the same conviction. But it’s absolutely hypnotizing. And a lot of people kind of write him off, but he’s got an Orson Welles quality to him in that you just cannot stop listening to what he’s saying.

So he would call you up when you were working for him?

All the time. No, I honestly think we were friendly for a while there, and he was a very good boss. He would literally just let you do whatever you want. I was hired to do Sam and Twitch as a mini-series, and I had a lot of ideas. I said, “Hey, can we just keep going, and if it just tanks, we’ll cancel it?” And he went, “Yeah.” And he never even asked me what I was going to do in the stories. And I know he read them. I mean, he was really into them. He was so into the book that he took it over after me when I was fired. So now I’m really at Image. I’m working for Todd, I’m publishing a book for Image Central, blah, blah, blah, I’m getting ready to start Powers there, which is a color book. So I was really entrenched at Image. And I was actually there longer than Jim and Rob Liefeld, which I thought was funny. Someone said that to me, “Do you know, you’ve been here longer than Rob?” “Wow, that’s bizarre!” So anyway, it gets a little weird here because it’s more complicated than it probably will sound in your article, but a couple of things happened. Number one, Jim [Valentino] got ousted. I’m not going to get into the backstory there because I was not involved with it, but Jim got ousted, and that was very disappointing to me on a personal level. As I said before, I don’t think Jim gets enough credit for what he accomplished, and I actually think he was kind of punished for what he accomplished. And a lot of it I think had to do more with personalities than it did with anything else.

Unless that inner circle tells it, we’re never gonna hear about it. We can just speculate.

Well, I do know what happened, but it’s not my

place to say.

When you were there, was Larry Marder still your publisher at any time?

Well, no, Larry Marder was my publisher for a while, because Jim was doing Shadowline, and then Jim was gone — .

Even when Marder was the publisher, you dealt more with Jim? Yeah, because I was in Shadowline. But also because Larry Marder was running Todd’s company for a while. It’s all mixed up in my head now, but Larry, who was also a very interesting person… you know what’s funny about Larry? Larry, and this was when he was running Todd’s company, too, the whole time we’d be in this meeting, and he’d be kind of taking notes in Beanworld cartoons. Like, I always felt he was literally transcribing everything for some big Beanworld graphic novel he was going to put out letting everyone know the truth behind Image or something. So, no, Larry was good. The difference between Image, I kind of liked the first run of Shadowline books, and then Larry took over and then there were a lot of booby books. And I remember I was doing Torso at the time, and Torso was a hard sell as it is. It was a black-&-white period piece crime thing, and bad girl books were all the rage, so every Image ad would be booby, booby, booby, Torso, booby, booby, booby. And I couldn’t even find my books in the solicitations. It was pretty intensive. But they were decent. He and Bob, who was our marketing director, they kept every promise they made.

Did you have to do a lot of the marketing yourself?

Well, that’s the deal. You’re there, so there is some help that you get. There’s certainly a higher profile place to be in the catalog, as we discussed before.

But, no, you’re self-publishing it. I handed them a complete book and they printed it, and that’s how that goes. That was the deal. I mean, the same thing I have at Icon.

So you didn’t have an editor or a censor?

No, no, no one censored anything. Never got a note. And Torso, though not overly sexual, was a very violent book just because it was about a serial killer.

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Torso. ©2007 Bendis and Andreyko.

And also, because it was black-&-white, it looked even more violent. But here’s the thing, that promise was made to me, and it was kept the entire time I was there.

When you were thinking about Powers, you wanted a higher concept book, a more mass audience kind of thing, right?

No, no, no. I just don’t think that way. But it was amazing the idea that we actually came up — .

It seemed you were evolving to that, “Finally I’ve got a color book, I’ve got a book that the general audience might want to read, that’s not just crime-driven.”

No, no. It wasn’t that easy for Powers. You’ve got to remember, Powers was just before Ultimate Spider-Man came out, so it was still hit or miss.

But there was buzz, I remember you coming around here to New York in support of the book.

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The buzz was good doesn’t mean nothin’. It does not always translate these things. I remember the numbers on Powers #1 were not glorious. And also you’ve got to remember, my highest numbers on a book, outside of Sam and Twitch (which did all right), on a personal book I never sold over, like, 6,000.

Wow, even at Image?

Oh, yeah, I never broke 10,000. Not even close.

But you weren’t thinking of the long term, like, “Once I get this out in trade paperback, people can read it”? You were one of those first writers that I always thought really studied the importance of collections.

Oh, no, what has happened since is what I believed could happen, but now, looking back, I realize how semi-deluded I was on a lot of stuff.

You’re from my generation. When we grew up, there weren’t any trade paperbacks.

That’s true.

And we had to buy back issues and overpay $10 if we want a certain issue or something. And once those trade paperbacks started coming in, it’s like, “Wow, this is actually better than reading the comics!”

Well, Caliber was a big believer in this, too.

What happened was, a book would break even, but a buzz would build. And sometimes it would take two years for a buzz to build, a long time.

People would have to hear it. And also, because it was independent comics, a lot of people didn’t believe—I found this out later, too—but a lot of people wouldn’t believe that the book would finish. A lot of books only went two issues, and just disappeared into thin air and never came back. So with Goldfish particularly, people would hear good things, and I was always written up in context to, like, Stray Bullets and Sin City, even though I was before them a little bit. But, Sin City, what are you going to do? I would always be tacked onto the end of that article, and always in a positive light. But it would literally take about two years of people reading that over and over again and go, “Ah, I’ll give it a try.” And so the trade did really well. And so what was happening was, Jinx was just catching on at Image, and Jinx was the highest numbers I had. And then I was done with Jinx and switched to Torso, so I lost a lot of my readership because — if I would have stayed with Jinx, it would probably have built and built, like Strangers in Paradise or Kabuki, but I was just done with it.

Anyway, regardless, yeah, these aspects of the company were outstanding. They always pay their bills, and still, to this day, Image always paid their bills, always.

They’re still selling books from your library, right?

Oh, I’m still in business with Image, absolutely. In fact, we just went back to print, and they just made an offer to me to do, like, a hardback library of all the black-and-white stuff, which I think I’m going to do. I believe in them wholeheartedly. The reason I left was

two-fold. Jim was no longer there, and my loyalty to the company was in Jim. And at the same time, I was having a bit of a rough spot with Todd. And that rough spot has since been evened out, which I am very happy about, so it’s almost no need to bring it up, but at the time it was enough, between the two things happening at one time where I felt unprotected, and at the same time Marvel made this offer that it was time to move on with the newer books and with Powers.

When you started on Ultimate Spider-Man, you intended to stay on all your Image titles, even Sam and Twitch?

Yeah, I would have written Sam and Twitch. This is something else. What happened was, I was writing Ultimate Spider-Man, and it took off, and finally something had hit. And it was such a great time. And what was exciting to me, too, was I was so proud of Sam and Twitch, and particularly because I was working with Alex Maleev at the time, and I had waited years to work with him. And he was the perfect artist for the book, and we really felt the book was special.

And Todd was so happy with me he actually offered me this book called Hellspawn, which was, “Here, take Spawn and do whatever the f*ck you want with it. I want to turn it into this urban horror mythology series, and you and Ashley Wood are my guys, and I really want you to do it.” And it was such an honor, because really he was giving you his golden key and saying, “Here, please do with it what you will.” And it was really an honor. And I wrote it for about six months, and I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. It just wasn’t a genre I was feeling good about. Like, there’s a magic that happens, you know this, when you’re typing and it’s flowing and it feels good, right?

And it doesn’t matter what subject matter, it feels honest. And I was getting that off Spider-Man, and I was getting that off of Sam and Twitch, and I was on Daredevil at the time, too. And I just said to him, “Oh boy, I’m just not getting my head around this Hellspawn.” And I wrote a note and I just said, “Thanks for offering it to me, but I just am not getting it the way I’m getting the other stuff, so let me just go back to do Sam and Twitch and we’ll see if there’s something else I can do down the line. I’m just not getting this one book.” Right? And he called me and said, “Did you quit Spider-Man today?” And I went, “No, why would I quit Spider-Man?” And he goes, “So you quit Spawn, and you didn’t quit Spider-Man.” And I was like [stammers] “No, I mean, what are you talking about?” And he was very angry at me, and I didn’t get this until later. Actually, Beau Smith had to explain this to me. He was the publisher at the time, and he was out of town while this happened. And I had insulted [Todd] so much by somehow relating to him the idea that I thought Spider-Man was cooler than Spawn. And that wasn’t what I was saying. Just for me, personally, something was working more. But he was very, very angry with me, and he said he wasn’t sure he wanted me working at the company anymore. I mean, literally on the flip of a switch he went from me writing half — I mean, there were only four published titles, from me writing half the titles to him not wanting me to write any titles. And I remember

very specifically him saying, “I like little Brian better than I like big Brian.” [laughter] That was news to me, too. And I was, like, “Wow!” But you knew he had this resentment against Marvel.

Well, yeah. But here’s the thing. To me, the people he resented… it’s like, “Who are you mad at?

Because the only person that’s there that was there when you were there is Spider-Man. Are you mad at Spider-Man? Because Terry Stewart is gone, they’re all gone. It’s completely different guys. Who are you mad at?” But I just didn’t realize how deep-rooted this was. Not that I would have changed my mind, but I would have handled it differently if I’d realized how sensitive he was about it, because it certainly wasn’t my point to insult him and make him feel bad, right?

So what happened was that Ashley was actually in Todd’s office when it went down, and he actually called me and said, “Boy, he was so upset.” And I felt really bad, you know? And I told my wife about it, and she was like, “You know what? Write him a letter and

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Powers is now a part of Marvel’s creator-owned line called Icon. ©2007 Bendis & Oeming.

BRIAN BENDIS

Brian Michael Bendis at a Comic-Con International: San Diego.

Photo courtesy of Jackie Estrada.

just say, you know what?

Blah, blah, blah.” So I wrote him a letter and I said all these things I’m telling you, how bad I felt, and that it has nothing to do with SpiderMan, and you of all people know what a big deal it is to actually be on Spider-Man and do well, and it certainly made you everything you are, and blah, blah, blah.

And so I sent it to him, and he called me right away and he said, “I got your letter.”

And he goes, “Yeah, I feel the same way.” And I’m like, “Okay, good.” He goes, “See, I don’t want you working here.” And that was it. And I was completely shocked.

And I remember I called Joe Quesada, who I was just starting my friendship with, and I said, “Yeah, I just got fired from Sam and Twitch.” And he goes, “Why?” I go, “Because I write Spider-Man.” And he was like, “Wow.” And he actually brought up to me how it would be like him firing Paul Jenkins from Hulk because he didn’t want to write Inhumans anymore, and just what does that have to do with anything? So that was that, but at the same time we still had our deal going with the Torso film.

That film deal never faltered no matter what happened between you and Todd?

Well, that was some of the trouble that we had, but that trouble has all been worked out. But there was a moment around the same time Jim was no longer there that there was some trouble, but it’s over now and everything’s settled, and David Fincher is attached as director and everyone’s happy and everyone’s been paid and everything’s fine. So it’s a non-story at this point.

You’re happy with the direction Image is going? It continues to go in the image that you and Jim [Valentino] started, with more independent-driven books and a lot of variety?

No, no, I like Image. I like Erik Larsen. I like the people there a lot. My leaving was related to events that were happening at the moment that I just felt it was best that I… there’s a couple of reasons. Also the reason I left was the fact that Marvel finally, after decades, was willing to start a creator-owned line, which I think is so important to the industry, and important to them as a business model company. I actually felt very positive about supporting this idea.

Because I think it’s good, I think they need to do this.

So I firmly believed and was thrilled that I could help get this started, as Marvel saw it, as a product that was pretty solid.

You said the sales were better. Is the awareness better? Do you see more new fans?

Sales were better the first year. They’re about the

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same as they were now, but I think that has more to do with the fact that we’re coming out less frequently than we were. We were pretty monthly for a good long time, but now our trade sales are phenomenal at both companies, and I think they’re feeding off each other in a nice way, in a big, big way.

But at Marvel, you’re one of many books, where at Image you would have been part of a smaller circle.

No. I think at Icon I’m one of three books, and at Image I was one of 40. There’s always 40 books, and some of them are excellent, and some of them are not.

Yeah, but you had three books out of Image’s smaller line, basically. At Marvel, you’re, sorta, bunched up with the rest of the Marvel line now.

You know what? There’s a perception, there’s a retailer perception, that there’s just more focus.

Because Icon is very specific, it’s very picky. It’s not an open invitation for solicitation. It is for creators that are in business with Marvel to express themselves. So it was just me, David Mack, Ed Brubaker, and, amazingly, Jack Kirby. And there’s a couple other things coming, but that’s pretty much the base of the whole line. It’s a lot easier for retailers to focus on it and know what it is. But that has nothing to do with why I left. I just think it’s good that Marvel was doing this. And I’m very pleased with that, and they’re doing it very well. They hold the same business model for me as I had at Image, and it’s very good.

So without Image, you couldn’t have done this.

Well, I can’t say enough about what Jim accomplished for me and for a lot of my friends. You’ve gotta remember what the crash was like, stores going out of business left and right, retailers did not — not only did they not need to buy our comics, they really shouldn’t buy our comics. They should only buy comics they know they can sell because they need to pay the rent. And instead of just putting out 50 different versions of whatever they were doing that was working, they shifted focus and said, “All right, let’s make Image something special for people who want to tell genre stories,” or whatever they want to do, they let them do. The one thing that makes it almost impossible for retailers is there’s no one genre that Image does. You really gotta read the solicitations and see what the books are, because they’re all so unique. I love the company as it is right now, as well, and that’s why I continue to publish a lot of my library through them.

It’s fascinating because I think people like to blame them for what happened — .

I don’t blame them for anything.

I know, but you know people do, because that’s the simple way of looking at it. You’ve got to point a finger, point it at them. They’re the ones that made all the money, right?

But they didn’t make the money and run. They made the money and stayed and tried to do what they could for the industry. And that’s more than most people in this business have ever done. That’s why I stand on the mountaintop and scream Jim Valentino’s good name.

I M A G E A S S O C I AT E

Frank Espinosa In 2006, Frank Espinosa brought Rocketo to Image. The cartoonist and teacher was nominated for three 2006 Eisner awards for chronicling the tales of Rocketo Garrison. Ushered in a classical sweeping manner, his passionate art and storytelling is one of the true assets to the company as it continues to intrigue readers of all ages.

You had been a successful animator for years — why did you want to get into comics? Were you prepared for all the heartbreak that comes with the art form?

My love for comics, and animation happened around the same time, I can’t say that I prefer one to another, or which one came first. Creating a comic can be a more personal form of expression than animation, although the line is blurred right now with the technology to do Flash Animation on your own computer, and make a small film from start to finish all by oneself. The type of film I would want Rocketo to be would have required that I never sleep, for the next ten years, so the medium best suited for telling the complete story in the way I would do it, would be a comic.

There is a strength to the comic medium that is wonderful, the ability to pace the story, time the plot and action and get into the readers own mind: that to me is amazing. The limits of working without sound and motion can be a power to itself. Comics are an art form and to be able to work in the field and have the story be told is an honor.

I have been lucky, and not had any heartbreak yet; the typical business blues will happen to you if you are a doctor, a mechanic, or an animator.

My only two heartbreaks is that I wish more people would read comics, and while I feel America has made some amazing strides in looking at comics we still have a long way to go. The second heartbreak is

that I would wish that more and more comic artists, writers and publishers would make stories that don’t have to have a man in a cape flying around shooting eye blasts. Although my next story is about a guy with a cape shooting eye blasts.

How would you describe your style of art? Who are some of your influences?

I have no idea how to describe it… Art deco, retro, comic strip, Japanese brushstrokes style… that is a bit too long.

My main influences have always been the old timers. Milton Caniff, Roy Crane, I love Frank Robbins, it goes on… and on… Master Jack Kirby. I love European artists, Chaland… Daniel Torres. Old animation from Japan, Europe. Picasso, the

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Rocketo! Rocketo ©2007 Frank Espinosa.

FRANK ESPINOSA

Scenic Rocketo rendering

by Frank Espinosa. ©2007 Frank Espinosa.

Expressionists, the Impressionists. Ancient art from Mexico…I think almost everything I see or read at some point gets inside and mixes in the great inkwell.

Then naturally you add yourself and something fun always comes out.

What was the inspiration for Rocketo?

The inspiration for Rocketo was the old Flash Gordon serials I saw as a kid in Cuba, The Thief of Baghdad, the wonderful original with Douglas Fairbanks, and the remake with Steve Reeves…

Sinbad the Sailor, Popeye… Marco Polo. Doc Savage. All the stuff I loved when I was young that took me out to a new world and had a sense of wonder and fun. To me all those characters took themselves seriously, they never poked fun at each other and said, “Look, this is a rubber monster” or

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“This is impossible.” The world they created was real to them… and because of that it was real to me. And let’s face it as a young kid, one believes anything. That is the wonder of childhood, and adulthood also, but sometimes we get so grim as adults… must be all the taxes we pay.

Were you inspired to bring a classic sense of storytelling back to comics?

Yes, I love the old romances. The sense that the hero was exploring unknown territory; fought the bad guy, rescued the princess. But in a more technical sense, my inspiration was always the old comic strips for Rocketo. I loved the way Caniff frames his characters, the way Frank Robbins tells so much story within a panel and still keeps your eye moving right into the next one. The nice long shots of Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon telling the story gracefully and with power. Kirby’s full figure in action; twisting torsos and strong black inks.

Has Image Comics helped introduce your work and art to a larger audience?

I think the work Image Comics have done with Rocketo is amazing. They really have backed up the book. I can never thank those guys enough. Every time I pick up a Rocketo book in the store and see the Image logo on it, I still can’t believe it. I mean it; it’s nothing to ever take for granted. That is one mighty logo. Without them Rocketo would be flying in circles right now.

Kova is in Cuba, right?

In Rocketo’s world I really don’t know if Cuba as we know it exists. I know there is an Island where Cuba used to be. There might be some remnants of the culture still around, but we never see that Island again in the stories for a long time. Originally it was going to have another name, but I wound up using it for the Island of the Birdmen instead.

When the time came to write something in, for the first book, Kova came into my head just as I was writing Rocketo’s Island origin. But to answer your question directly, yes, in my mind Kova represents the lost land, Cuba.

I M A G E A S S O C I AT E

Robert Kirkman When Robert Kirkman was a wee lad in the bluegrass state of Kentucky, instead of picking up a banjo or making bourbon whiskies, he exposed himself to the world of comics by reading Savage Dragon, Spawn, Youngblood and the rest of the titles in the early Image Universe. For better or worse, Kirkman is an undeniable product of the Image Comics generation. Making in-roads by self-publishing the cult Battle Pope, young Robert fulfilled his childhood dreams by working with Erik Larsen (on SuperPatriot) and Jim Valentino’s Image Central era (on Tech Jacket). An opportunity on Valentino’s emerging super-hero line allowed Kirkman to scratch his super-hero itch by creating the ongoing modern classic Invincible with artist Cory Walker. Robert’s romanticism for zombie films inspired him to make The Walking Dead, a compelling gritty character drama that’s helped revive the horror genre in comics.

With the help of Image, Robert Kirkman has emerged as one of the most naturally gifted writers of the medium today.

When you started getting into comics, were you already reading Marvel books?

Well, I started reading comics in 1990, so I started reading comics when Todd was doing Spider-Man and Larsen was doing Amazing Spider-Man, Rob was doing X-Force, Jim was doing X-Men, and Marc Silvestri was doing Wolverine.

There was an excitement to those Marvel books especially, right before Image started?

Yeah, yeah. Those were the books that I gravitated toward and enjoyed the most. I also enjoyed Dale Keown and Peter David on Hulk, and Larry Stroman and Peter David on X-Factor. It was all guys that eventually went to Image. I also liked Sal Buscema’s Spectacular Spider-Man stuff.

So when these guys started Image, did you think that was going to be the end of your comic book reading?

Well, I wasn’t reading comic book news at the time, because you couldn’t find Comics Buyer’s Guide or anything like that at Wal-Mart, so I didn’t know anything about it until I actually — I lived in a small town in Kentucky, there’s a larger town in Kentucky that’s close by, and my family would go there to shop and visit friends and stuff like that, and so while driving through that larger town, I saw a sign for a place called the Comic Interlude. It was either a comedy club or a comic book shop, but I didn’t know what it was. I noticed it said something about comic books on it. I didn’t even know comic book stores existed, and so I had to beg my mom to

stop and let me go to this place. And when I went in there, there was an advertisement on the wall for Youngblood. And all I saw was Rob Liefeld’s name and this new thing. I thought it was a Marvel comic. And so I remember asking the store owner, “What’s this Youngblood thing you’ve got this poster for?”

And he was like, “Oh, Rob Liefeld and a bunch of other guys from Marvel are starting this company called Image Comics,” and blah blah blah, and I started a reserve box, a folder thing — .

I remember one thing that, all of a sudden Rob’s art started disappearing on X-Force.

It started to look a little different.

Yeah, I believe that’s when Mark Pacella was doing stuff, but he was still writing it, and so I didn’t know anything was going on. I thought Rob was going to come back after a couple of issues. When I saw that, I didn’t know anything was going on. Todd had retired. He had stopped doing Spider-Man, and Larsen had come in and taken over SpiderMan, but Larsen’s Spider-Man issues

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Robert Kirkman.

Courtesy of Mr. Kirkman.

Invincible! Invincible ©2007 Robert Kirkman and Cory Walker.

ROBERT KIRKMAN

Rick Grimes, the lead character in The Walking Dead. A detail from Tony Moore’s first issue cover.

The Walking Dead ©2007 Robert Kirkman.

were still coming out. I can’t remember if Silvestri was still on — .

Silvestri and Whilce were the last to leave to Image.

Yeah, Art Thibert was doing those issues of XMen. So I didn’t know anything was going on, but as soon as I heard Image Comics and these guys were coming over there, that was when I got a reserve folder at the store and reserved all Image comics.

You didn’t notice a difference in the story quality at Marvel?

Well, I definitely noticed a shift in quality on the Marvel titles. I remember thinking, “What the hell happened?” I wasn’t too into Mark Pacella, and that Art Thibert stuff was a slight bit wonky compared to the Jim Lee stuff that had come immediately before it. And I believe Rick Leonardi did some issues of Spider-Man immediately after Erik Larsen’s “Revenge of the Sinister Six,” and Rick Leonardi’s a brilliant artist, but back then — I mean, back then I hated Mike Mignola, you know?

I couldn’t stand Mignola’s early work; why did they keep putting this guy on X-Force?

Yeah, exactly. Me and Tony Moore, we went to grade school together. We were reading the comics at the same time. Tony Moore’s the guy that did Walking Dead with me. We used to make fun of Mike Mignola and say that he drew with his toes.

Which now is like, I can’t believe we ever said that, but we were kids and we didn’t know what the hell we were talking about. But, yeah, there was a definite shift. And Mark Bagley was doing Amazing Spider-Man. I think Mark Bagley is a fantastic artist, and he was essentially really good then, but he just wasn’t what I was used to getting. So, yeah, as soon as Image came out, I completely stopped buying anything else other than Image comics. But a funny thing to note is that I had been reading comics so briefly, I didn’t know who Galactus was, and I had never read any of the historic runs of any Marvel comics.

So I didn’t know, I hadn’t read any of John Byrne’s Fantastic Four, I hadn’t read any of Walt Simonson’s Thor run, and I didn’t know much of anything about anything. So when Youngblood Yearbook #1 came out, there was basically a Savage Land rip-off, there was a Ka-Zar guy there, and there was an island in Antarctica that had dinosaurs in it, and Youngblood goes and visits it. And Eric Stephenson actually wrote that story, and so I’ve talked to him about this. He’s the executive director at Image now. And I read that and I was like, “Oh, this is totally neat! They’ve got dinosaurs, oh, this is great!” Eventually when I saw Ka-Zar and the Savage Land at Marvel, or maybe it was on the XMen cartoon, I was like, “What is

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that? Did they get that from the Youngblood Yearbook?” I totally didn’t see the stuff as derivative because I hadn’t read any of the previous stories.

I remember when Rob did the Youngblood limited series at first, I think he was ending with four, I remember there was one issue, like, he says there’s going to be a “fifth issue to a four issue limited series.” I was like, “What?”

Yeah, Youngblood #4 was supposed to be the issue, but he couldn’t…

The story was so big, that he had to continue.

Yeah. And so Brigade #4, which was running late, was also a flipbook, so you flip Brigade #4 over, it was Youngblood #5.

At the time they were coming out, those were really cool books to get. There was a lot of passion in those stories, the Youngblood stories.

Oh, yeah. I was a huge fan.

What about Brigade? Not so much?

No, I loved Brigade. I loved Bloodstrike, I loved Supreme. Oddly enough — .

There were a couple of characters, like Battlestone, where you go, wait a minute, this is Cable again?

Oh, yeah. There were, like, four guys that looked just like Cable. There was Colonel Bravo, there was Battlestone, there was Cabot…

I never liked those guys. I liked the main team. After the Brigade book, the art wasn’t as good as what was in Youngblood.

Well, then, you weren’t quite as dedicated as you should have been. [laughs] I was more dedicated than you think. I pointed out to Eric Stephenson that they did that Extreme tour in 1993, and they actually came here to New York, and for five hours we had to wait outdoors in the freezing cold, and these guys show up late. It wasn’t worth it. That taught me a lesson.

Are you recording this for the book?

Yeah, why?

Check this out: Here’s my story. Hero Illustrated, the Wizard knockoff magazine that Electronic Gaming Monthly published for a while, they did this thing called the Electronic Gaming/Hero Illustrated Tour, and they had a big map that was published on a two-page spread in the two magazines that was, like, they’re going to have video game samples for you to play, and the advertisement said, “We are going to have Image Comics artists.” So every stop they were going to have an artist from Image Comics. And so they had one stop that was in Columbus, Ohio, which is like a five or six hour drive from where I live in Kentucky. And so I’m thinking, “Image artist, Columbus, Ohio.” I remembered the date, I told my mom about it. And the day comes, I’m begging, just begging, “Oh, I’ve gotta go up there, there’s Image artists up there, I gotta go get autographs, it’ll be awesome!” And I actually somehow convince her to drive me to this mall six hours away to visit this Image artist. Like, that’s all I know. And so I’m thinking it’s either going to be Todd McFarlane or Erik Larsen or Jim Lee or Rob Liefeld, or maybe it’ll be Dan Fraga or Marat Mychaels. It could have been anybody. And so I take a short box and I fill it with the first issues of all these Image comics. I had every Image comic

published up unto a point. I think around the time Gen13 #1 came out was when I stopped buying Boof and stuff like that. But speaking of Boof, I get up to Columbus, and it’s literally all these TVs set up with video games. There’s, like, 40 of them, so if you were up there to play video games, it wouldn’t be a bad thing. But then there’s one table there with one guy sitting at the table. And it’s just out in the hallway of this mall. And I walk up to the guy, and I had no clue who he is. I’ve never seen his photo in Wizard, I don’t know what’s going on. And I go, “Yeah, are there Image Comics artists here?” And he goes, “Yeah, yeah, that’s me.” And I go, “Oh, who are you?” And he goes, “I’m John Cleary, I draw Boof.” And Boof had not even come out yet. So I was like, “Wow. Oh, okay.” And he looked at my short box of comics and he goes, like, “What have you got there?” And I was like, “Oh, nothing.” I just walked away, because I didn’t know who the guy was, and I was, like, sick to my stomach that I had made my mom take an entire day to drive me up to Ohio for this, and I felt so duped. It was so upsetting.

That’s how I felt about the Rob thing.

Well, you eventually got to see, Rob, though. It wasn’t John Cleary sitting there. [laughs] Wizard became like your Bible back then?

Oh, yeah. Wizard was all the bee’s knees back in the day. Yeah, you got the cool cards that were in every issue. And there was no Internet back then, so anything I found out about anything was from Wizard.

Did you buy Image paraphernalia, too, like shirts and hats?

I had a Spawn shirt that my dad had bought me. I think I had a Savage Dragon T-shirt. I was really big into Savage Dragon.

When did you start getting serious about becoming a professional?

Well, I’d always kind of wanted to be a comic book something. I wanted to be an artist for the longest time, ever since I found out that people actually got paid to draw them, y’know? And I wasn’t very good at it, which kind of sucked. But, yeah, I seemed to have some kind of writing talent, so I started focusing on that when I started self-publishing. But, yeah, I always wanted to create worlds and have my own characters.

As you grew up, did you get tired of the Image books?

No, no. To this day, I’ve never wavered. I’ve always been buying Image comics.

But you didn’t buy Gen13, right?

No, I did buy Gen13. It’s just that around the time that Gen13 came out was when I stopped buying everything.

That’s what Jeff Campbell was telling me, they didn’t have the kind of orders that all those other books had. He had to build his audience, almost.

Yeah. To be honest, when WildC.A.T.s and Cyberforce debuted, those were the only two that I kind of had trouble following, just because — .

They were so confusing.

They were so complicated. Yeah, it wasn’t that I didn’t like the art or I thought they were inferior to the other books, but, like, ShadowHawk breaking

people’s spines and fighting crime and stuff, that was fairly simple, fairly entertaining, and I actually liked ShadowHawk a great deal. WildC.A.T.s was about 50 guys, they’re from this planet, they fought these other 50 guys, and these 50 guys, and there were all these — .

It was a hard book to follow.

Yeah, and there were all these little asterisk captions telling you what the words meant, and it was like reading a text manual.

That book didn’t make any sense until James Robinson came on board.

Yeah! And there was a period where I just loved Cyberforce, because it was cool, because they were in the gas station, and they had this robot cat sidekick thing, and that stuff was kind of neat.

I always liked Ripclaw. For some reason he always stood out, though, that design. And then you got the guy with the arms.

Oh, that’s Stryker.

Yeah, Stryker is an awesome design. Both of those guys

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The only good zombie is a dead zombie. Artwork by Charlie Adlard from The Walking Dead #19. ©2007 Robert Kirkman.

ROBERT KIRKMAN

Rejected Invincible cover artwork by Cory Walker. ©2007 Kirkman& Walker.

really stand out.

Yeah.

Those were the days.

And then the main villain is named “Mother May I?” Which is like, that’s kind of lame, y’know?

They were all weird books. When you read them now, I think Todd was the one who most had it together.

Yeah, Spawn was the most professional, because he had, like, the real letterer and Erik had Chris Eliopoulos on Dragon, so he had it covered. But I think Jim Valentino’s wife was lettering ShadowHawk and Youngblood at the time, and so it was like, “Enh, that doesn’t look too hot.”

But then, Dale Keown comes out with that Pitt comic, like, holy crap!

Oh, yeah, Pitt was awesome. Pitt is actually a really good read to this day. When Richard Pace took over the writing in the later issues that were published by Full Bleed, and they were actually really cool. But, yeah, Pitt’s a good book.

When you were a kid, you didn’t think, “I need to go to the next level and read some Fantagraphics books” or something?

No, well, I was in eighth grade when in the fall after the summer of ’92 when all the Image books hit, when I started eighth grade, so when I was in high

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school I started reading Grant Morrison and Mark Waid DC books and kind of started reading that stuff, but I never stopped reading Savage Dragon, I never stopped — you know, I bought all the Awesome books that Rob Liefeld did — .

Yeah, that’s when he got really good.

Yeah, which were awesome books. You had Alan Moore writing Supreme and Youngblood, and Coven was entertaining.

Kaboom.

Kaboom was awesome, yeah. They were always producing good books. I didn’t read all of the WildStorm books, and I kind of dropped out on the Top Cow books early on. I tried to read Darkness because I was a big Preacher fan, and Garth Ennis was the initial writer on that, but I don’t know, for whatever reason I just never really got into those.

But I never stopped reading Savage Dragon and all the spin-offs.

Had you sent submissions to anybody at Image before, as you were starting?

I submitted to Erik Larsen’s “Create a Villain” contest, that Jimbo the Mighty Lobster won — .

Wait a minute. This is like, in the beginning?

Yeah, yeah. When I was a little kid. And then I also submitted to Youngblood’s “Create a Character” contest.

So when did you start getting serious about this, around 2000?

Well, in 1999 I started my publishing company, and I was writing and drawing a wrestling book called Between the Ropes, which was horrible, and I was writing and doing layouts for Battle Pope that Tony Moore drew.

I had seen Battle Pope for years. I thought it was some kind of manga about religion. [Robert laughs] And I have a problem with those kind of things. Having gone to Catholic school (and a Jesuit college), after you’re out, you don’t want to go back.

Yeah, well, it’s all very offensive, but…

But now I look at it, “Oh, it’s supposed to be funny.” I just see, like, a priest, it just turns me off.

Yeah. But I seemed to be able to write in an at least publishable capacity, but my art wasn’t up to snuff, and so when I was self-publishing, that’s when I drew a few pages in Battle Pope, and I inked a lot of Battle Pope stuff. But, yeah, as I got out of selfpublishing and during my self-publishing adventure, I just started focusing on the writing.

Where’d you get the money to publish? Your parents?

No. Publishing is surprisingly easy if you have good credit. I would get loans and then pay them off when the book profit came in.

Were there any times you didn’t make any profit? I’m sure there were.

No, no, I never overextended myself, and Battle Pope, I was lucky enough to always sell pretty well. I ended up being massively in debt by the time I stopped self-publishing, but that was only because I quit my job to focus on self-publishing, and what I would do is I would pay the printing bill with a credit card, and then I would take the money that would have covered the printing bill, and I would live off

that. So the books still weren’t making any money, but I was basically living off credit cards, so that’s what got me in debt. If I had been responsible and not quit my job and decided to just do self-publishing on the side instead of trying to make a living at it, I would never have gotten in debt. You can balance the numbers and do self-publishing.

Yeah, but it’s still tough, though. You gotta go to shows, and you see all these people passing your table, and like, “Why won’t they give me a chance?”

Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, there’s definitely a lot of that.

And Battle Pope did get a bit of attention. It debuted at 2,500 copies at a time when most books in the back of Previews were selling 500 copies, if they were lucky. So Battle Pope actually did really well, considering. But, yeah, there were definitely a lot of people I would have preferred stop at my booth.

Sure, when I see somebody at Artists Alley, you know you gotta buy something, you can’t just walk by.

Yeah, I feel so bad. Sometimes you get trapped. “I don’t want to buy this because it looks terrible, but I know what that’s like.”

And you’ve got to do those signings where nobody shows up, or your relatives show up, and it’s like, “Man, this is embarrassing.”

I’ve done a few of those, yeah.

So when did everything start coming together? Did you hear when Valentino took over as publisher? The focus went away from super-hero books to more writer-driven, more creative type books.

Yeah, well, I think that happened before I even started self-publishing, though.

When Bendis was there, he was pretty much the guy that brought that kind of energy, when he started doing Torso, and bringing his books to Image.

Well, Jim started his Shadowline imprint, where he published Soulwind and all those books, and I think that’s around the time he started publishing Torso, and he became the publisher of Image Comics shortly after that. That’s when he was doing Touch of Silver.

But I think he’d been the publisher for a few years by the time I came to Image in 2001. I came to Image because I was self-publishing Battle Pope and I was trying to do side projects, and I wanted to start doing books in full-color, and there was no way that I could make a profit self-publishing books in full color, so I started submitting stuff to Image. And I submitted a book called Science Dog that a friend of mine named Cory Walker was going to draw. And at the same time I had interviewed Erik Larsen for a friend of mine’s Web site, called Penciljack.com, which is still to this day a message board that people that are amateur artists can go to.

You were telling me that one of the reasons you went to Image was because you wanted to see your stuff in color.

Yeah, yeah. I had pitched a book called Science Dog. I had actually done some ads in the back of Battle Pope for this upcoming Science Dog book that I was going to do, because if Image didn’t publish it, I was going to figure out a way to do it somewhere, or self-publish it, because, I had been doing that for almost two years.

But didn’t you say you had a lot of debt? Could you have kept going?

Oh, yeah, yeah, I had tons of debt. But fortune favors the bold. So I was putting together Science Dog, and I had pitched it to Image, and I hadn’t heard back yet. I actually pitched it to Dark Horse at the same time, but they never even bothered to tell me they didn’t want it. But at the same time, the artist who was going to work on Science Dog, Cory Walker, did SuperPatriot for fun. And since I interviewed Erik Larsen for Penciljack.com, I had gotten to a point where I would talk to him from time to time online, and we had spoken on the phone a few times, so he knew who I was, and I had given him copies of Battle Pope, and I had bought original art from him, and so we were starting to get to know each other.

So Cory did this drawing of SuperPatriot, and so I showed Erik Larsen. And Erik liked it and decided to print it in Savage Dragon #93. So when Savage Dragon #93 came out, Jim Valentino and Eric

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Interior pencil and inks by Ryan Ottley for Invincible #33. ©2007 Kirkman & Walker.

ROBERT KIRKMAN

The final page from the first issue of Invincible.

Art by Cory Walker. ©2007 Kirkman/ Walker.

Stephenson, who were the publisher and the marketing director at the time, they saw the pin-up in the back of Savage Dragon and they contacted Erik and they said, “Who is this guy? He’s pretty good.” And he said, “Oh, there’s this guy name Robert Kirkman who does this book called Battle Pope, who’s putting together a book called Science Dog that he pitched to you guys.” And they were, like, “Science Dog? That sounds retarded. Why don’t you get them to do a SuperPatriot mini-series?” And so that’s why Cory Walker and I did a SuperPatriot mini-series called SuperPatriot: America’s Fighting Force.

Once the initial Image boom was over, Erik didn’t do anything with his characters outside of Dragon.

No, when he did the first mini-series, he was paying everybody top rates. And so when the books stopped selling as much as they were, he started losing oodles of money, because Erik was a really good guy and he was paying the absolute highest he could possibly pay to a lot of people. With the new

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SuperPatriot mini-series, it was a different thing, because I came from the self-publishing world. He basically gave me SuperPatriot for four issues. And he had approval, and he looked over everything, from the lettering to the stories to the art. And he basically was the editor, but he didn’t pay us anything, and so he didn’t lose any money. And so we basically did SuperPatriot: America’s Fighting Force as if it were a creator-owned book at Image.

So he didn’t get a cut, basically?

No, Erik didn’t take a cut, any of the profits. And there weren’t all that much.

That was a nice gesture. You don’t get too many guys doing something like that.

Yeah, definitely! It got our foot in the door, and it got me seen by a lot more people.

Was that a learning experience for you? Working closely with Erik?

I actually learned a lot from Erik Larsen. Yeah, Erik Larsen’s been kind of a hero of mine since I was a kid. I think I mentioned before, Savage Dragon quickly became my absolute favorite comic book, ever, and still is to this day. One of the first comics I ever remember buying was Amazing Spider-Man #344, with Rhino on the cover, and “If Kodiak Doesn’t Kill You, Rhino’s Going To!” And I just loved that cover.

So you missed the Sinister Six thing when he did it the first time, right?

Yeah, I had to get it in back issues.

That was, like, the best. And his Spidey was so different from Todd’s. I wasn’t sure what it was, but it was cool to see.

I was, like, the only guy that was like, “Oh, Erik Larsen’s taking over for Todd on Spider-Man? Sweet!” Y’know, because everybody else was like, “Todd’s leaving?” And I was like, “Oh, Larsen’s coming on? Awesome!” But I learned so much just from reading Dragon about how to pace comic books, and how to surprise your reader and lead up to big moments.

Also, you saw him learning, in his work.

Yeah, he’s learning while he’s writing the book. But I think the “Revenge of the Sinister Six” thing that he did at Marvel, which I believe was the first big writing project he did, I thought that was pretty solid.

But I learned so much just by being a fan that when I started working on SuperPatriot, it’s kind of cool that he was actually saying things like, “Don’t tell the artist to put a tall panel here if it’s… “ Y’know, there are a lot of really mechanical, weird things that I was doing, that’s not necessarily wrong, that I still see people doing on Marvel and DC books, but that Erik would kind of like go, “Yeah, don’t do that.” And I would go, “Oh, yeah, you’re right! I see why you shouldn’t do that kind of thing, and that’s totally cool.” And just stuff about, like, balloon placement and panel layout, which is, for the most part, up to the artist, but I dictate a loose panel layout in my scripts. I learned a great deal from him, especially how to pace stories to an even [greater] degree. It was a good learning experience doing those four issues of SuperPatriot. He had a lot of advice that was just kind of out of the blue. I wish I could

remember at least one example, but…

The first time you met him in person, did you get the impression he was a little distant?

A little bit, yeah.

I always thought, “Man, that guy’s weird.” But you get to know him, and he’s a pretty good guy.

Yeah, the first time I met him he was in Chicago and he was doing his usual sit around late at night and talking to fans of the Dragon at one of the tables and hanging out until the wee hours of the morning blabbing about sh*t, and so I didn’t really meet him person-to-person, I was just the guy that he had talked to who had been doing Battle Pope that just kind of walked up to this group and was like, “Hey, how’s it going,” and then I kind of sat in for, like, an hour, and then left. But I talked to him a little bit at that con. I ended up driving him to the airport, because I had driven to Chicago, and on the last day of the con I saw him walking with his bags and I was like, “Where you headed?” And he was like, “I gotta go find a cab. I don’t know where to go. I gotta get to the airport.” And I was, like, “Don’t worry about a cab. I’ll take you there!”

You’re a very political creator. Most guys would have just left him there. He’s an Image founder, he can find his own way.

But I was a big fan, so it was a treat for me to be able to take him to the airport. But the cool thing is, he was like, “So you know how to get to the airport?” And I was like, “Oh, yeah, I got it under control. Don’t you worry.” I had no f*cking clue how to get to the airport, and we totally got lost on the way there, and he almost missed his flight. But it was a lot of fun.

Once you did that book, then Valentino was telling you about this super-hero line he wanted to do?

Yeah. Well, I pitched a book called Tech Jacket to Image while I was doing SuperPatriot.

That didn’t happen, right?

No, that happened. It ran for six issues. The first issue of SuperPatriot debuted in July of 2001, and Tech Jacket debuted in November of 2001. So I got Tech Jacket approved in June, before SuperPatriot even came out, so then I was all of a sudden doing two books at Image.

And then, while I was putting Tech Jacket together and working on SuperPatriot, that’s when I heard about the super-hero line. So I contacted Jim Valentino and Eric Stephenson and basically begged to be a part of it. And Cory and I created Invincible to be a part of that.

But that book, did it take off right away? It took a while to get the rhythm, to show people what you wanted to do?

Well, Invincible struggled. It debuted with four other books, and there were five books total that debuted in the Image super-hero line that January, and Invincible debuted as the middle book as far as sales rankings were.

There were two that sold worse, and two that sold better. And by the time Invincible reached issue six, the other four books were gone. And Firebreather was a mini-series.

What kept your book alive?

Determination. Stability, I think. Our sales spiked with #4, and then #5 was running a little late, and so sales started going back down, but that spike on issue four made me think, “Well, y’know, I think people might be liking this.” And then our shipping schedule started to become really erratic. I believe there were four or five months in between #5 and #6, to the point where, in 2002, we only shipped six issues, even though it was a monthly book. And that was really frustrating at the time, and Cory and I were really butting heads. But looking at it now, I think that actually helped the book, because it gave it time to gain awareness without us overextending ourselves by doing 12 issues that year, and then having done 12 issues without making much money would have been a lot worse than doing six issues without making a lot of money.

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Splash by Ryan Ottley for Invincible #34. ©2007 Kirkman/Walker.

ROBERT KIRKMAN

The natives are restless.

The Walking Dead #21 illustration by Charlie Adlard. ©2007 Robert Kirkman.

Did you have the story mapped out from the beginning, or was it just something that comes naturally?

I had always planned on the big reveal of Nolan being evil and Mark having to fight him. That was planned to be #25 if the book lasted that long, and I was going to keep building and building and building to it until I finally did it. It’s in the actual proposal, which I printed in the back of the first Invincible Ultimate collection.

With this book, I always thought that it was something like the way the British guys write, something that you’re trying to impress people with, but it’s more like you’re coming back to a Claremont-type of storytelling, with it’s more about the characters naturally progressing, and they’re more melodramatic?

No, no. I wanted to do a very accessible, happygo-lucky kind of super-hero book.

You wanted to bring super-heroes back to their roots, basically, not going just for the shock value.

I can probably attribute it to Jim Valentino because one of his mandates for the Image superhero line was that he didn’t want gun-toting maniacs, and he didn’t want 1986 gritty super-hero comics. He wanted very straightforward, bright… I don’t think he used the word “fun,” but he wanted classic, “iconic” was the word he used, he wanted classic, iconic super-heroes, and so that kind of set the direction to a certain extent. And so that’s what we were going for. There’s definitely a bit of graphic violence in Invincible.

I haven’t read a super-hero team title where you actually become concerned about these characters in some

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time. The X-Men had that thing in its heyday, when Claremont really had it together. Is this book a tribute to all the comics that you liked before, like the best elements of every super-hero team that you liked?

Yeah, definitely.

Invincible is my love letter to super-hero comics. It’s everything I want to read in a superhero comic, and it’s everything that I’ve ever enjoyed in a super-hero comic. It’s Erik Larsen’s Savage Dragon, it’s David Michelinie’s Spider-Man, it’s XMen… I don’t think it’s derivative in any way, but I want it to have an iconic feel to it that hearkens back to all the super-heroes that we’ve all loved growing up and still continue to love to this day.

Do you have an end to this, or do you want this to be an engine that years from now, when you’re 50 or something, is still going?

I would be ecstatic to see the book reach #300 and continue. I would also be ecstatic to see the book survive me. I have no plans to quit writing it. I could see myself writing it at #300, but at the same time, if I end up stopping, if I end up being not able to write it, or if I end up running out of ideas, which I don’t see happening any time soon, rather than just end the book, I think it is a book that I would like to pass on and see done without my input, just to see where it goes.

Now, when you were pitching Walking Dead, there was some resistance to that. Like, Eric was telling that Valentino didn’t want to do a “zombie book.”

Are we putting that in there? [laughs] Why not? No, Stephenson told me about this. But he said, “Let me tell you a little story,” and he told me about how you had mentioned this book to Valentino and he was just adamant, “I don’t want to do zombie books.” So you rethought your pitch.

I had to basically lie and say, “Well, The Walking Dead is a straight zombie book up to a point, but there are going to be hints dropped that eventually it’s going to be revealed that it was aliens that brought these zombies about, and then it’s going to be a story about humans who have to fight the zombies who are brought by the aliens, and then fight the aliens to reclaim the planet from an alien invasion.

And aliens coming to Earth and bringing the dead back to life is actually the plot of Plan 9 from Outer Space, which I wasn’t aware of at the time, even

though I had watched a good portion of that movie in my youth. But, yeah, I never planned on doing that.

I just figured once I got the book approved, it would either be canceled before I had to do that, or if it sold well enough to continue, they wouldn’t care at that point. And so, yeah, I had to lie to the publisher to get it accepted. And I remember when the first issue came out, Eric Stephenson called me up and he was like, “Yeah, we got copies of the first issue in here, and I was reading through it, and God, I really like it!

It’s a really good book!” And I was like, “Oh, thanks, man, I really appreciate that.” And he goes, “Yeah.

I don’t see anything in here that’s hinting at the aliens. Is there anything in here I’m missing, or are you not going to do that until later?” And I was like, “Yeah, Eric, I’m not really doing that. I kind of lied to Jim so that he would accept the book.” And Stephenson said, “Oh, that’s cool. I think it’s probably better without that stuff, anyway.” And I was like, “Ah, sweet.”

What made you pitch this book? Were you wanting to do a horror book? Because there weren’t too many horror books, or was 30 Days of Night out back then?

30 Days of Night is a vampire book.

The horror stuff was a dead genre in comics.

30 Days of Night had started before Walking Dead.

It brought back a little bit of that horror vibe?

Yeah, it was definitely a big hit, and there were a lot of people talking about horror comics, but I think Steve Niles was the only one doing them. Walking Dead was just a product of me really liking zombie movies, and me really thinking about the potential of a zombie story that doesn’t end where the natural end of a zombie movie is, because most zombie movies always end at the same point.

But this was just a matter of timing. There was this sort of revival of Romero’s work, and Shaun of the Dead comes out, and everybody’s into zombies again.

Yeah, well, it all came from 28 Days Later, which came out after we pitched Walking Dead and after it was accepted. We pitched Walking Dead in January of 2002, right after Tech Jacket came out, before Invincible came out. And we got it accepted, but Jim Valentino wanted to hold it until October. I wanted to launch it in March of 2003, or somewhere around there. Now, it did come out in the U.K., but nobody had seen it over here. But it came out in the United States in June of 2003, and then Walking Dead came out in October of 2003, and they both started with some guy waking up from a coma and so on, and so I get to hear all this bullsh*t about how I ripped off 28 Days Later, which is really frustrating. But Tony Moore and I actually only did Brit, which is a series of three 48-page one-shots, two of which Tony drew, the other one was drawn by Cliff Rathburn. We only did the Brit one-shot because we were holding on Walking Dead until October, and we didn’t want to have nine issues done and sitting there just in case the book got canceled, and so we decided to do this 48-page one-shot instead, and so we did Brit while we were waiting to do Walking Dead.

But your book is more about characters, it’s not about… the zombies just add to the equation, right?

Yeah. That’s because I’m a big girl at the center of it all. I’m all about the romance and the character interaction and crying. That’s what I like in my comics.

Who’s your main influence as a writer?

You know, for person-to-person interaction, in high school I fell in love with a book called Minimum Wage, which was published by Fantagraphics, and it was written and drawn by Bob Fingerman, and it was this book about this guy and this girl who were dating, that got an apartment in New York, and they were struggling to make ends meet, and they just hang out and ate noodles. And it was the only book I had read at the time, because I was an Image Comics guy, that was just about two people hanging out and living. So I would say, as far as interpersonal, character-driven writing, that really inspired me a lot.

And then, most super-hero books have a little bit of character drama in it, and always have, and so those have always been my favorite part.

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Zombie infestation splash by artist Tony Moore from the first issue of The Walking Dead. ©2007 Robert Kirkman.

ROBERT KIRKMAN

The Walking Dead ©2007 Robert Kirkman.

When I was reading Invincible, I was like, “This guy’s the new Claremont.” You’ve got everything in that book. I thought that was really cool.

I’ve honestly never really read that much Claremont.

The vibe is there. Do you have a stake with the characters? Because now you see too many guys coming in and out of books, and there’s not that attachment anymore.

I really hate that, too. I’m not one of those guys who just wants to write five issues of something and then bail, because I’m not about the cut and run, I’m more of a long run kind of guy.

Yeah. Although the first Invincible book was a good story, everything wasn’t there yet. When you read the second book, it’s like, “Wow! This is a revelation.”

Yeah, I’m really bad for my first five issues or so. I look back and read those first few Invincible issues and I’m like, “Wow! This takes, like, two seconds to read, and there’s not enough going on, and I would

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have done this so much differently now.” I like to sit down, establish a foundation, and then get to telling the stories, I guess.

Did this success overwhelm you once people started looking for you?

I spend so much time in my basement with my head down typing, I don’t even… I can’t say I don’t notice that stuff, but — .

But did you notice the demand all of a sudden?

Marvel would have never come to you if you weren’t on the radar.

Yeah, that’s definitely true.

Marvel doesn’t hire people without a track record.

Well, Marvel has the luxury of waiting until somebody establishes their name before they need to hire them.

Those days of coming up through that system are over.

You gotta bust your chops on the Indy circuit.

Yeah, exactly.

So now you’re working with Marvel. You never thought of going the Bendis route and maybe going to Icon, Marvel’s creator-owned line, and bringing some of your books there? Because you have a more sentimental attachment to Image than he does.

I think I do. I don’t know, Brian definitely had his reasons, and I think that the reasons were valid for him to move to Icon, but it’s just not something that I’m interested in. It was mentioned to me briefly when I signed my first Marvel contract. When I was writing Captain America, they said, “Would you be interested in signing an exclusive contract?” I said, “Absolutely I would, I just have to make sure that I can still do Invincible and Walking Dead.” And they said, “There’s nothing to worry about there. You can still do Invincible and Walking Dead. You can do it at Image, or if you were interested in taking it to Icon, we could talk about that.” And I said, “No, I’d want to keep it at Image, because Marvel is only talking to me because of what I’ve done at Image, and it would be wrong for me to turn around and go, ‘Yay, Marvel! Bye, Image!’”

So they never pressured me, they mentioned it that one time, but it’s never been brought up since. I respect Marvel because they’ve been so cool about me doing my books at Image. Yeah, it’s kind of a cool environment to be able to be loyal to the company that gave you your start.

I don’t know if you know, those guys at Image are really proud of you. Whenever you talk to Erik or Eric, you’re the guy.

Well, I don’t know about that. I think I’m one of the first creators that’s gained any kind of prominence that’s very public about the fact that he grew up on Image Comics. I did not grow up reading Stan and Jack’s Fantastic Four, and I did not grow up reading DC Comics. My comic book fandom starts very briefly with Marvel Comics, but it quickly shifts completely over to Image comics, and that’s the kind of comics I grew up on. And so, to have a guy that, I guess, grew up on Image comics to eventually then do Image comics and gain some kind of prominence, I think it’s pretty cool.

JACK “KING” KIRBY

Jack Kirby, Greatest of Them All In the comics industry, many very successful artists and powerful comic book executives often forget to extend any nod of gratitude or appreciation to the living veteran artists who’ve paved the way for their good fortune. In 1992, that wasn’t the case with young Image founders who quickly showed their sincerest admiration to the greatest comic book creator of them all: Jack Kirby.

Although they discussed having the moniker “Jack Kirby Presents” opening every book in their line, they instead upped the ante by deciding to introduce him and his work to a new generation of readers by publishing Phantom Force.

Michael Thibodeaux, artistic collaborator and friend of Mr. Kirby, remembers how the relationship with Image began: “Richard French, publisher of Genesis West, and myself had been working on the Phantom Force for several years. Genesis West had developed several properties with Jack, and had decided to make the Phantom Force into a comic because we had fallen in love with the character designs Jack had come up with for it. We were at the San Diego Comic-Con promoting this project when Rob Liefeld caught sight of our display. After looking through the artwork, he asked if we would be interested in printing it through Image. Jack was all for it!”

The King cherished the idealistic spirit of the new company, but above all else, he admired them for having the guts to walk away from Marvel Comics and stand together like a proud band of artists in Image. The company made an agreement to publish two issues of the book; Genesis West would afterwards continue the further adventures of the characters. An animated Liefeld and his Extreme Studios oversaw the editorial duties of putting the book together. It was also Rob’s idea to have Image’s top creators re-ink the Kirby penciled pages to generate more hoopla for the title at the stands.

“Actually, it was two different super-hero stories joined together,” Thibodeaux said in recalling the origin of the book’s concept. “We had previously published Phantom Force in a couple of short stories in The Last of the Viking Heroes (Genesis West/1987). When we were preparing to publish the Force as a solo comic, Kirby thought we should expand the concept. Jack then went to the closet in his studio room and pulled out an envelope. He proceeded to pull the artwork out of its dusty sleeve and revealed 10 or 12 pages he had

begun of a story on “Bruce Lee.” He said he never could get permission from the Bruce Lee estate to pursue the project… so with a little alteration in the appearance of our hero and a name change (Gen-Seng), we threw these well drawn pages into the mix. Once Gen Seng was added to the Force, Jack then came up with the villains: Darkfyre, Kyra, Morg and Trandar. As for Richard and my role in the brainstorming process, all we did was just sit back and listen to all of Jack’s ideas. He was continuously coming up with characters, and suggesting storylines. All Richard and I did was shift through the concepts and storylines Jack provided, and began working on what we liked best.”

When the first issue of Phantom Force was solicited, it received an initial order of over one million copies at the height of the speculation age in comics.

But the book was plagued by constant lateness issues as some of the Image founders had over-extended themselves yet again. Ultimately the book was finally released at the end of 1993, but by then sales had fallen

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Jack Kirby portrait by Susan Skarr. Courtesy of The Jack Kirby Collector.

Phantom Force is ©2007 Richard French, Michael Thibodeaux and the Jack Kirby Estate.

JACK “KING” KIRBY the dedications were written by people such as Todd McFarlane, Erik Larsen, Jim Lee, Jim Valentino, Rob Liefeld, Al Gordon, Steve Oliff, Kurt Hathaway, and myself. I do feel that he felt a sense of pride and honor that all these young “hot” artists contributed their talents to the book. Still, I don’t know if Jack ever truly realized how many people he had inspired in this world… even those who weren’t artists!”

Sadly, Jack Kirby passed away February 6, 1994. He did not live to see the release of Phantom Force’s second issue. Between Phantom Force and Topps’ Kirbyverse, fans of all generations now discovered (or were reacquainted) with the greatness of his supreme genius during the final year of his life. It must have given him a sense of pride in the future of the industry that he helped form. He must have been mighty proud not only to see the sheer power and respect that many comic book artists could now command, but also to see a clearer picture of his legacy in the industry that he cared so much about.

An original Kirby “Bruce Lee” penciled page, which was reworked for Phantom Force.

back to 250,000 copies. Jack and Roz, his wife, were still flattered with the amount of copies sold and the payment from Image, perhaps the largest check the retired couple had ever received in their lifetime, at a time when they really could have used it.

All of the Image talent that worked on Phantom Force donated their time and work on the books to the Kirbys. “I do remember Roz saying that Jack was moved,” Mike said, “when, while eating breakfast, he read the dedication, consisting of comments written (in the last four pages of Phantom Force #1) by several of the head artists at Image. If I remember correctly,

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Larry Marder’s 1992 Chicago Comic-Con Album

Clockwise from top right: A very tired Rob Liefeld as he approaches the finish line for his incredibly well attended 24-hour “Autograph Marathon” session.

Erik Larsen sketching for a fan as Rob looks over his shoulder. Whilce, Rob, and Erik taking a breather between autograph sessions in the Image Tent, Chicago Comic-Con 1992. Cynthia Sullivan, of Top Cow, laughs it up with the fans standing behind Whilce, Jim Valentino, Marc, Erik, Brian Murray, and Rob. Whilce and Jim Valentino in the Image Tent.

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Clockwise from top right: Erik Larsen reading a copy of Spawn #2—from right out of the box.

Todd McFarlane, Marc Silvestri, and Hilary Barta hamming it up for the camera. Hilary was the creator of STUPID, a short-lived Image humor title. Jim Lee doing Q & A with fans at Moondog’s in the Randhurst Mall in the Chicagoland area. Jim signing issues of WildC.A.T.S. #1 while future Image Comics executive director Larry Marder watches. Dale Keown, previewing The Pitt in the Image Tent, Chicago Comic-Con 1992. Marc Silvestri, a bemused Erik, and Brian Murray in the Image Tent, Chicago Comic-Con 1992.

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THE MODERN MASTERS SERIES Edited by ERIC NOLENWEATHINGTON, these trade paperbacks and DVDs are devoted to the BEST OF TODAY’S COMICS ARTISTS! Each book contains RARE AND UNSEEN ARTWORK direct from the artist’s files, plus a COMPREHENSIVE INTERVIEW (including influences and their views on graphic storytelling), DELUXE SKETCHBOOK SECTIONS, and more!

And don’t miss the companion DVDs, showing the artists at work in their studios!

MODERN MASTERS: IN THE STUDIO WITH GEORGE PÉREZ DVD

MODERN MASTERS: IN THE STUDIO WITH MICHAEL GOLDEN DVD

Get a PERSONAL TOUR of George’s studio, and watch STEP-BY-STEP as the fan-favorite artist illustrates a special issue of TOP COW’s WITCHBLADE! Also, see George as he sketches for fans at conventions, and hear his peers and colleagues—including MARV WOLFMAN and RON MARZ—share their anecdotes and personal insights along the way!

Go behind the scenes and into Michael Golden’s studio for a LOOK INTO THE CREATIVE MIND of one of comics’ greats. Witness a modern master in action as this 90-minute DVD provides an exclusive look at the ARTIST AT WORK, as he DISCUSSES THE PROCESSES he undertakes to create a new comics series.

(120-minute Standard Format DVD) $29.95 (Bundled with MODERN MASTERS: GEORGE PÉREZ book) $37.95 ISBN: 9781893905511 • UPC: 182658000011 Diamond Order Code: JUN053276

(90-minute Standard Format DVD) $29.95 (Bundled with MODERN MASTERS: MICHAEL GOLDEN book) $37.95 ISBN: 9781893905771 • UPC: 182658000028 Diamond Order Code: FEB088012

Bundle the matching BOOK & DVD for just $37.95!

Modern Masters: ALAN DAVIS

Modern Masters: GEORGE PÉREZ

Modern Masters: BRUCE TIMM

Modern Masters: KEVIN NOWLAN

Modern Masters: GARCÍA-LÓPEZ

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905191 Diamond Order Code: JAN073903

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905252 Diamond Order Code: JAN073904

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905306 Diamond Order Code: APR042954

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905382 Diamond Order Code: SEP042971

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905443 Diamond Order Code: APR053191

Modern Masters: ARTHUR ADAMS

Modern Masters: JOHN BYRNE

Modern Masters: WALTER SIMONSON

Modern Masters: MIKE WIERINGO

Modern Masters: KEVIN MAGUIRE

by Jorge Khoury & Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $4.95

by Jon B. Cooke & Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905566 Diamond Order Code: FEB063354

by Roger Ash & Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $4.95

by Todd DeZago & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905658 Diamond Order Code: AUG063626

by Jorge Khoury & Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905665 Diamond Order Code: OCT063722

Our planned volume on Darwyn Cooke is near completion, and expected for release in 2013. Please visit www.twomorrows.com for updates.

Modern Masters: CHARLES VESS

Modern Masters: MICHAEL GOLDEN

Modern Masters: JERRY ORDWAY

Modern Masters: FRANK CHO

Modern Masters: MARK SCHULTZ

by Christopher Irving & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905696 Diamond Order Code: DEC063948

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905740 Diamond Order Code: APR074023

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905795 Diamond Order Code: JUN073926

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 ISBN: 9781893905849 Diamond Order Code: JUL091086

by Fred Perry & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905856 Diamond Order Code: OCT073846

Modern Masters: MIKE ALLRED

Modern Masters: LEE WEEKS

Modern Masters: JOHN ROMITA JR.

Modern Masters: MIKE PLOOG

Modern Masters: KYLE BAKER

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905863 Diamond Order Code: JAN083937

by Tom Field & Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905948 Diamond Order Code: MAR084009

by Jorge Khoury & Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905955 Diamond Order Code: MAY084166

by Roger Ash & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781605490076 Diamond Order Code: SEP084304

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781605490083 Diamond Order Code: SEP084305

Modern Masters: CHRIS SPROUSE

Modern Masters: MARK BUCKINGHAM

Modern Masters: GUY DAVIS

Modern Masters: JEFF SMITH

Modern Masters: FRAZER IRVING

by Todd DeZago & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 97801605490137 Diamond Order Code: NOV084298

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 ISBN: 9781605490144 Diamond Order Code: NOV090929

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 ISBN: 9781605490236 Diamond Order Code: AUG091083

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 ISBN: 9781605490243 Diamond Order Code: DEC101098

by Nathan Wilson & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 ISBN: 9781605490397

More MODERN MASTERS are coming soon!

Check our website for release dates and updates!

Modern Masters: RON GARNEY

by Jorge Khoury & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 ISBN: 9781605490403 Diamond Order Code: OCT111232

NEW!

Modern Masters: ERIC POWELL

by Jorge Khoury & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 ISBN: 9781605490410 Diamond Order Code: APR121242

NOW SHIPPING FROM TWOMORROWS PUBLISHING

STAN LEE UNIVERSE The ultimate repository of interviews with and mementos about Marvel Comics’ fearless leader!

(176-page trade paperback) $26.95 (192-page hardcover with COLOR) $39.95

SAL BUSCEMA

CARMINE INFANTINO

MARIE SEVERIN

COMICS’ FAST & FURIOUS ARTIST

PENCILER, PUBLISHER, PROVOCATEUR

MIRTHFUL MISTRESS OF COMICS

Explores the life and career of one of Marvel Comics’ most recognizable and dependable artists!

Shines a light on the life and career of the artistic and publishing visionary of DC Comics!

Biography of the multi-talented artist, colorist, and humorist of EC Comics, Marvel Comics, and more!

(176-page trade paperback with COLOR) $26.95

(224-page trade paperback) $26.95

(176-page trade paperback with COLOR) $24.95

QUALITY COMPANION

BATCAVE COMPANION

FLASH COMPANION

AGE OF TV HEROES

The first dedicated book about the Golden Age publisher that spawned the modern-day “Freedom Fighters”, Plastic Man, and the Blackhawks!

Unlocks the secrets of Batman’s Silver and Bronze Ages, following the Dark Knight’s progression from 1960s camp to 1970s creature of the night!

Details the publication histories of the four heroes who have individually earned the right to be declared DC Comics' "Fastest Man Alive"!

(256-page trade paperback with COLOR) $31.95

(240-page trade paperback) $26.95

(224-page trade paperback) $26.95

Examining the history of the live-action television adventures of everyone’s favorite comic book heroes, featuring the in-depth stories of the shows’ actors and behind-the-scenes players!

(192-page full-color hardcover) $39.95

MARVEL COMICS

MARVEL COMICS IN THE 1970s

THE ART OF GLAMOUR

An issue-by-issue field guide to the pop culture phenomenon of LEE, KIRBY, DITKO, and others, from the company’s fumbling beginnings to the full maturity of its wild, colorful, offbeat grandiosity!

Covers how Stan Lee went from writer to publisher, Jack Kirby left (and returned), Roy Thomas rose as editor, and a new wave of writers and artists came in!

Biography of the talented master of 1940s “Good Girl” art, complete with color story reprints!

IN THE 1960s

(224-page trade paperback) $27.95

(224-page trade paperback) $27.95

MATT BAKER

(192-page hardcover with COLOR) $39.95

HOW TO CREATE COMICS FROM SCRIPT TO PRINT

Shows step-by-step how to develop a new comic, from script and art, to printing and distribution!

(108-page trade paperback with COLOR) $15.95

FOR A FREE COLOR CATALOG, CALL, WRITE, E-MAIL, OR LOG ONTO www.twomorrows.com

TwoMorrows—A New Day For Comics Fandom!

TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 E-mail: store@twomorrowspubs.com • Visit us on the Web at www.twomorrows.com

“They’re a great bunch of guys.

I really respect them for having the courage and tenacity to leave Marvel and start their own business. I’m glad to be associated with them.”

—Jack Kirby, King of Comics (on Image Comics) n 1992, seven artists shook the comic book industry when they left their topselling Marvel Comic titles to jointly form a new company named Image Comics. Out of the gate, millions of readers flocked to the energetic adventures by these creators, as together they ushered in the Image Age, where comics would sell in the millions, and a comic book artist could become a mass media celebrity. Image Comics: The Road to Independence is an unprecedented look at the history of this important comic book company, featuring interviews and art from popular Image founders Erik Larsen, Jim Lee, Todd McFarlane, Whilce Portacio, Marc Silvestri and Jim Valentino. Also featured are many of their finest creators — Jeff Scott Campbell, Dale Keown, Sam Kieth, Brian Bendis, Robert Kirkman and others — who over the last 15 years have been a part of the Image family, offering behind-the-scenes details of the company’s successes and failures. There’s plenty of rare and unseen art, helping make this the most honest exploration ever taken of the controversial company whose success, influence and high production values changed the landscape of comics forever.

George A. Khoury has written and edited the 2002 Eisner-nominated Kimota!, The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore, True Brit and the upcoming Age of Heroes (co-written with Jason Hofius). Khoury serves as senior editor to the award-winning Comic Book Artist magazine and as a regular contributor to the popular Modern Masters series. Khoury currently resides in Princeton, New Jersey.

$34.95 In The US ISBN

978-1-893905-71-9 TwoMorrows Publishing Raleigh, NC