Modern Masters Vol. 4: Kevin Nowlan by TwoMorrows Publishing

M O D E R N

M A S T E R S

V O L U M E

F O U R :

KEVIN NOWLAN

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Modern Masters Volume Four:

MODERN MASTERS VOLUME FOUR:

KEVIN NOWLAN

edited and designed by Eric Nolen-Weathington front cover by Kevin Nowlan all interviews in this book were conducted by Eric Nolen-Weathington and transcribed by Steven Tice proofreading by Fred Perry

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Drive Raleigh, North Carolina 27614 www.twomorrows.com • e-mail: twomorrow@aol.com First Printing • December 2004 • Printed in Canada Softcover ISBN: 1-893905-38-1 Trademarks & Copyrights All characters and artwork contained herein are ™ and ©2004 Kevin Nowlan unless otherwise noted. Grimwood’s Daughter and all related characters ™ and ©2004 Jan Strnad and Kevin Nowlan Abel, Angel and the Ape, Batgirl, Batman, Big Barda, Black Canary, Catwoman, Clayface, Commissioner Gordon, Darkseid, Death, Green Arrow, Green Lantern, Hawkgirl, Hawkman, Inferior Five, Joker, Kalibak, Man-Bat, Mr. Miracle, Orion, Phantom Lady, Phantom Stranger, Power Girl, Ra’s al Ghul, Robin, Solomon Grundy, Spectre, Star Sapphire, Superboy, Supergirl, Superman, Talia, Teen Titans, Two-Face, Ventriloquist, Wonder Girl, Wonder Woman, Zatanna ™ and ©2004 DC Comics. Apocalypse, Aurora, Clea, Daredevil, Deadpool, Dr. Doom, Dr. Strange, Electra, Hulk, Man-Thing, Moon Knight, New Mutants, Phoenix, Scarlet Witch, Spider Woman, Storm, Valkyrie, Wolverine, X-Men ™ and ©2004 Marvel Characters, Inc. Dr. Strangefate, Jade Nova, Myx, Skulk, White Witch ™ and ©2004 DC Comics and Marvel Characters, Inc. Jack B. Quick, Tom Strong, and all related characters ™ and ©2004 America’s Best Comics, LLC. Burnout, Gen 13, WildCATs, Zealot ™ and ©2004 Wildstorm Productions. Star Wars and all related characters ™ and ©2004 Lucasfilm LTD. Alien ™ and ©2004 20th Century Fox Film Corp. Mole People ™ and ©2004 Universal Studios. Archie, Jughead ™ and ©2004 Archie Comics. Pellucidar ™ and ©2004 Edgar Rice Burroughs Estate. Vampirella and all related characters ™ and ©2004 Harris Publications, Inc. The Pepper Lake Monster ™ and ©2004 Warren Publishing. Streets of Vatican City ™ and ©2004 National Lampoon. Details ™ and ©2004 Condé Nast Publications. Dalgoda ™ and ©2004 Jan Strnad and Dennis Fujitake. Fanboy ™ and ©2004 Horse Feathers, Inc. and Sergio Aragonés. Armor, Samuree ™ and ©2004 Neal Adams/Continuity Comics. Julie Winters ™ and ©2004 Sam Kieth. Editorial package ©2004 Eric Nolen-Weathington and TwoMorrows Publishing.

Dedication To my mom, Althea McNairy, for being so proud of a son who writes about comic books—I’m proud of you, too. And to Donna and Iain for reminding me there are more important things in life. Acknowledgements Kevin Nowlan, for so much of his time and for trusting me with his files.. Terry Austin, for supplying early treasures Kevin no longer has. Special Thanks Bruce Timm, Steven Tice, Fred Perry, Sandy Jarrell Rick McGee and the crew of Foundation’s Edge, Russ Garwood and the crew of Capital Comics, and John and Pam Morrow

Modern Masters Volume Four:

KEVIN NOWLAN Table of Contents Introduction by John Arcudi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Part One: “I’m Going to Be Drawing Pictures” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Interlude: Under the Influence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Part Two: Marvel Comics and a Baptism of Fire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Part Three: Kevin Nowlan: One Man Art Team . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Part Four: Is That Inker... or Finisher? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Part Five: Jack B. Quick and the Stories of Tomorrow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 Part Six: The Theory behind “Pet Theory” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 Art Gallery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97

Introduction

“Modern Master,” huh? Wow! That’s a lot to live up to, isn’t it? Think of all that pressure. Oh, not for Kevin Nowlan. Hell, his name’s already on the cover of the book. I’m talking about me. Somehow, I’ve got to come up with enough superlatives and fulsome prose to complete the glowing paean that can match that title, and frankly I’m really not up to it. For one thing, I haven’t unpacked my Thesaurus from my last move. Fortunately for me, you don’t need any convincing. If you’re reading this introduction, that means you’ve picked up this book because you think the work of Kevin Nowlan is exceptional, and nobody has to tell you how good he is. Still, this introduction has to be about something, doesn’t it? It was a summer afternoon in 1998 when my fax machine lit up and spit out something I had never seen before: Kevin Nowlan layouts. See, I was serving as a kind of editor/co-writer for a four-page Gen 13 back-up that Kevin illustrated, and so these amazing images came my way. Keep in mind, these were layouts—done smaller than the printed size—and yet they were so detailed, and so well drawn, and so complete, you could immediately tell this guy knew what he was doing with a pencil. Any fan of illustration, not just comics, would have been impressed by the proficiency as a draughtsman Kevin demonstrates in the splash panel of that first page—and yet, there was something else about it, something more. The splash clearly was a tribute to a famous series of photographs taken by Dennis Stock of James Dean in Times Square, circa 1955. Not a swipe, but an homage to the cold and lonely looking actor skulking through a forty-year-old rain. They’re great pictures, but really, you don’t have to know anything about them to appreciate this page. You don’t even have to know who James Dean is, because what makes those pictures special is what makes this first panel special, or more to the point, what makes Kevin Nowlan special. He creates a soulful, sad, and eternally hip image of sullen rebellion with body language, expression, and, yes, amazing drawing ability. He gives us all that Stock gave us, except Kevin didn’t have James Dean as his willing and worthy subject. He made this all up

out of his own head—out of his own head, and yet, it feels like a portrait. The rest of the art of the story was similarly revealing of his skills. The characters had faces you’d expect to see on the street, not in a comic book. He added panels for clarity and to heighten the sense of drama in what was a satirically melodramatic little tale. Everything he did made it funnier, and better than it looked on the written page, and all this, it needs to be emphasized, for a quiet, little, “uneventful” four-page back-up story. That right there is just one more thing that makes Kevin Nowlan’s work exceptional. He takes every job very seriously— maybe even too seriously—but nobody can question his professional commitment to making whatever work he takes on the best that he possibly can. Now, let’s get back to that “uneventful” comment. More than a few comics’ artists can communicate dynamic action with big splash pages, but Kevin captures inaction, with eight- or nine-panel pages, or splash pages, or even covers. It’s this gift of his that makes the “Jack B. Quick” tales stand out from the other Tomorrow Stories. The sleeping dogs, the 4

slumping barns, the woeful and beset town-folk who suffer quietly through each six-page installment; these things he shows us in always engaging and expressive ways. You almost get the sense that he is documenting events rather than just making up stories, and that these people are somehow more real than those you see in the panels of other comic books. They’re not, of course, but they’re familiar enough, average-looking enough, sometimes even homely enough, that you believe in them. It’s a nofrills world that Kevin celebrates beautifully, and for that reason, the occasionally extraordinary images in his work seem just a little more... extra. Look at the cover of Adventures of Superman #614, where the common man (and woman—and dog for that matter) is attired in the outlandish garb of a super-hero to great comic effect. Another artist might have been tempted to draw these people in exaggerated poses to try to make the scene funnier, and still it would be less funny than what Kevin has done. Less funny, less interesting, and less real, for it is the conceit of “reality” of the world depicted on the cover that makes the intrusion of the absurd work so well, what makes it all seem so strange and

out of place. Not to put too fine a point on it, but they appear strange because they’re wearing these colorful outfits. In a medium saturated with hundreds of costumed humans, that’s no small feat. Yes, he also draws a very nice Superman, strong, and handsome, and humble. His Batman is rightly emulated by many other pencilers. He does a bitchin’ Hulk, too, at once more monstrous and more human than most versions. He can apply his unique artistic vision to—or more simply put, he can Nowlanize—these and any of the other mainstream trademarks, but when it comes right down to it, so what? As very talented as Kevin is, he really can only add to what others have already done with those characters. Kevin’s abilities transcend genre—any genre—and if there is any quality that transforms an illustrator into an artist, a master, than that’s the one. To find the best of Kevin Nowlan, look to the private little worlds he himself has dreamed up, peopled with the stories that nobody can tell so well as he. If we’re all very lucky, he’ll give us many more to seek out. John Arcudi

Part 1:

“I’m Going to Be Drawing Pictures”

MODERN MASTERS: You were born in Nebraska in 1958?

KEVIN: He was born in ’50. MM: Okay, so a good bit older. So you probably had comics around as early as you can remember, really.

KEVIN NOWLAN: Right. The Northwest corner of the state.

KEVIN: Right.

MM: And come from a pretty large family, in relative terms.

MM: What were the initial things you read? Did your brother get Archie comics, things like that, that were more kid-oriented, at all? Or did you just jump right into the main titles?

KEVIN: Yeah. Six kids. I have one brother and four sisters. I believe I was an “accident.” My parents had three kids, then a set of twins, so my mother had her tubes tied. Fortunately for me, the procedure failed.

KEVIN: I know we had Archies, Dennis the Menace and Casper books lying around, but I can’t remember if they were his or my sisters’. I know Mike had those really cheap black-and-white horror knockoffs. They weren’t the good ones like the Warren magazines....

MM: You said your older brother read comics. How much older was he?

MM: Like the Skywald stuff? KEVIN: Worse than that. [laughter] Terror Tales and Horror Tales—they were published by Eerie Publications, not to be confused with the Warren Magazine named Eerie. They had unbelievable cover paintings with bodies being dissolved in acid and corpses dripping blood. I think the stories were actually reprinted from old precode horror comics. I remember one of the stories where a man had his mouth sliced open on the sides to make his smile wider because he wanted to be a clown or something like that. It was pretty disturbing. I kept staring at those pictures trying to figure it out. Instead of being repulsed, I just looked closer and closer. He had Mad Magazine, CARtoons, Creepy, and Eerie, and I know he had some Blackhawk comics. What else? I remember Blackhawk very specifically because I remember sitting down and trying to draw the faces, like from the splash page and the cover, when I was really young. I would try to draw the characters’ faces. MM: Was that during their green-and-red costumes? 6

Were they still in the traditional costumes? KEVIN: No, they were still in the traditional ones. I don’t know the history of Blackhawk very well, but I believe they were drawn by Dick Dillin. They weren’t the original Reed Crandall stories, but they were still pretty good. I loved that hawk emblem. MM: So by the time you’re ten you’re seeing the DC experimentation comics. You were more DC-oriented as a kid? KEVIN: Yeah. My brother just never picked up Marvels, for some reason. I believe he had some Tarzan comics and Magnus, Robot Fighter. Not really that many super-hero titles, more like “Sgt. Rock” and Blackhawk, that kind of stuff. I’m sure he had a few Superman and Batman books. There were probably some westerns as well. I just remember comics being around all the time. You’d go to another kid’s house and he’d have a stack of comics. Or you’d go to the barbershop and they’d have a few. They were everywhere. I know that at least once I scrounged up enough pop bottles to turn in for the deposit so that I could buy some of the “black market” books at this little shop called the Newsy Nook. If you went in and whispered to the clerk and she trusted you, she’d pull out this stack of books that all had the tops of the covers torn off and sell them to you for two or three cents each. MM: So basically you were seeing more illustrative artists than you were the action, Kirby-style artists. KEVIN: Yeah. That Kirby stuff was really strange to me when I finally saw it. MM: I think with every kid, it looks pretty strange when they first see it. KEVIN: [laughs] Yeah. But at DC you had the guys who drew everything very

straight: Curt Swan, Kurt Schaffenberger, Irv Novick, John Forte. No exaggeration. The action was very restrained. MM: During DC’s experimentation period in the late ’60s, were you trying out all these goofy new titles, like Hawk and Dove and Angel and the Ape? KEVIN: Yes, Angel and the Ape, definitely. That’s one I remember specifically buying at the grocery store, the first issue of Angel and the Ape. The cover had go-go girls and a big gorilla in a Nehru jacket, playing a sitar. There was the Showcase tryout and then they got their own title, and that’s the one that I got when I was nine or ten. I just wore it out because it was my only comic, so I read it and reread it over and over. I missed out on Hawk and Dove, but I kept seeing the advertisements with those great cover images. The same thing happened with Beware the Creeper and Bat Lash. MM: Was the distribution in your area such that you were able to follow the series? KEVIN: No, no. I didn’t even see any of the other issues of Angel and the Ape until more than a decade later, when I found a comic shop and bought some of the back issues. You could never find two concurrent 7

Previous Page: A 2003 Vampirella commission piece. Above (Clockwise): The Nowlan family, 1960— front row, left to right: Michael, Joni, Jeanne, Kathy—back row: Pat, Kevin, Janine, Bill. Kevin in his cowboy boots one year later. And finally, Kevin and his twin sisters, Joni and Jeanne. Vampirella ™ and ©2004 Harris Publications, Inc.

MM: So you stayed pretty much in that science-fiction/fantasy genre?

issues so it was hard to keep up with the serialized stories like they had in the Marvel books. The self-contained DC stories always seemed more accessible.

KEVIN: For quite a while, yeah. MM: When did you start being able to pick out an artist, like, “Hey, I know who this guy is, he drew soand-so?” Was that fairly early on? KEVIN: Yeah, I think so, because DC in the ’60s, sometimes they’d have credits on some of those books— MM: Sometimes on the splash page the artist would sign.

MM: Did you have other kids that you hung out with that read comics, too?

KEVIN: Yeah! And the weird thing was, Jerry Lewis, they would have full credits on a lot of those. They would even tell you who lettered and colored it in the ’60s, years before it became a common practice on the other books. So I definitely knew Bob Oksner’s work and knew his name, because that first issue of Angel and the Ape had a credit box and he signed the cover. Other artists were easy to recognize even if you never caught their name. Toth’s work stood out. Gil Kane, too, especially if he inked his own pencils. Russ Heath, Joe Kubert, John Severin… the war books really had some great artists with very recognizable styles.

KEVIN: No. MM: No, just you? Did you hang out with other kids at all, or were you a loner? KEVIN: What time period are we talking about? MM: This would be the late ’60s.

MM: When you’d go to the newsstand, did you look for a certain artist first, or did you look for a title first?

KEVIN: Yeah, I had friends in school and stuff, but none of them were really too excited about comics.

KEVIN: I think I would go toward the artists first. Neal Adams’ stuff obviously stood out. I was also crazy about the Curt Swan/Murphy Anderson Superman. So yeah, I'd buy certain titles like Superman and Batman, but usually, when I would go browsing through the comics rack, I was looking for some unique artwork that would really stand out. And even if it was a character that I liked, if the artwork was boring, I probably would just put it back in the spinner rack.

MM: Did you like reading in general? KEVIN: Yeah, but comics were directing my choices there as well. Like, I’d pick up the DC Tarzan comics and go out and find a paperback of [Edgar Rice] Burroughs stories and read those. And the same with “Pellucidar,” because I really liked that series. I went crazy for that Alan Weiss artwork in the “Pellucidar” series at DC, so I found those paperbacks and read those. And then later I finally started reading the Conan stories that Barry Smith was doing, so I picked up a few of those paperbacks and read some of those. Lovecraft, I read a few of those after I saw references to his work in Doctor Strange.

MM: What was the first thing you remember doing where you were actually trying to draw continuity rather than just sitting down and drawing a punch-out scene or something? KEVIN: Well, when I was in high school, I tried to draw some stories. I made up 8

these fantasy characters and stuff like that, and I would try to do a story. I tried to do a Plastic Man story—that might have been junior high. And before that, I honestly don’t know. I didn’t try to do panel-to-panel continuity until fairly late. MM: So were you writing stories as well? Because you mentioned you were into the pulp kind of stuff, were you trying to write stories and then maybe do illustrations for the stories? KEVIN: Yeah. I never finished any of them. I would just start drawing a splash page and then do a page two and really have very little idea of where it was headed, which is probably why none of them ever went anywhere. [laughter] MM: What about fiction, did you ever try writing fiction? KEVIN: No. Just for school assignments. MM: You actually sent samples to Marvel when you were 15. What gave you the inspiration to do that? KEVIN: I think in one of Stan Lee’s Bullpen pages he had the specific instructions for submitting artwork. He explained what size to draw the pages and what kind of paper and he said that you should send in Xeroxes, not original art. And I thought, “There you go, that’s what you do.” So I put together a package and sent it to them.

MM: Do you remember what was in the package? KEVIN: I remember one thing which I shouldn’t have sent him. They returned it; it was a big Dracula oil painting that—that black-and-white magazine, was it Dracula Lives! that started coming out from Marvel? MM: Yeah. KEVIN: That was one of my first attempts at doing oil paintings, and it was just horrible. And I sent that to them. [laughs] And they sent it back and said something like, “Thanks, but we don’t need anything like this right now.” MM: Did you get any encouragement from the reply? KEVIN: I think so, because it was from [John] Romita, Sr. It was a form letter, and then on the bottom of it he wrote something like, “Would you mind filling out this little card”—or form or whatever that they attached—“so we can keep your name on file.” So that gave me just a little bit of 9

Previous Page Top: During the Christmas season of 1971, the local Chamber of Commerce held a “Draw Rudolph” art competition. Here’s Kevin displaying his first prize ribbon (student division) and the winning picture. Previous Page Bottom: Kevin’s first published comic art — the Inferior Five, done for The Comics Journal #63. Above: Cover art to Amazing Heroes #56. Hawkgirl, Inferior Five, Power Girl, Supergirl, Wonder Girl, Wonder Woman ™ and ©2004 DC Comics. Ms. Marvel, Phoenix, Spider Woman, Storm ™ and ©2004 Marvel Characters, Inc.

encouragement. But if I was only 15, you can imagine how bad the work was. It was horrible. MM: Did you ever try sending stuff to DC around that same time, or was it just Marvel? Below: A dour Batman (Amazing Heroes #167 cover art) faces down a graceful Wonder Woman (spot illo from Amazing Heroes #15). Next Page: A Wonder Woman sample page Kevin worked up for Terry Austin to show around the Marvel offices. Batman, Wonder Woman ™ and ©2004 DC Comics.

KEVIN: I don‘t think I did send any to DC until later. MM: Since you had the specs for Marvel, did you figure that DC would use the same format? KEVIN: Yeah, I think it was because of that Bullpen column that I sent that stuff to Marvel. It just seemed they were sort of inviting people to send in work, whereas I didn’t get that sense from DC. MM: Was it about that same time that you started working with the newspapers? KEVIN: Yes. In fact, even earlier than that. I was only twelve, 14, something like that, when I first started working. I mean, I wasn’t really doing newspaper work, I was just sweeping the floor and breaking down the lead type and things like that. But it really was fascinating, because I got to see the whole letterpress printing process first hand. MM: Did you think that maybe this would be similar to what Marvel or DC would be like? KEVIN: No, the newspapers that I worked in were so old-fashioned I couldn’t imagine that Marvel or DC would look like that. [laughter] It hadn’t changed much since 1890. They had a linotype machine, which if 10

you’ve ever seen one of those things, they look like something a Victorian mad scientist would have dreamed up. A keyboard hooked up to this elaborate contraption with flywheels and gears and things. It made a lot of racket when it was running. And then once a week this big, sheet-fed letterpress would be started up in the back and the weekly newspaper would be printed back there. It was dirty just from years and years of tobacco smoke and black ink and dust and all of that. But it was fascinating. Both of the newspapers I worked for looked like they really hadn’t changed in a hundred years. Wooden floors and antique equipment. It’s amazing they were still using it. And even though I only worked at both places for a short time, by the time I was leaving they were already switching over to offset. Actually, now that I think about it, comics didn’t switch over to offset until several years later so maybe they would have had something in common with those old print shops after all. MM: Did you work your way up to any other position? KEVIN: No. Just did the grunt work. MM: Yeah. I work at a newspaper now, but it’s all computerized. I don’t know anything about the old stuff except what I see in movies and what I’ve heard the older guys there talk about. KEVIN: Yeah. And it was neat. I really feel privileged that I got to get a glimpse of this stuff shortly before it all became totally obsolete. You won’t see any of this equipment anywhere today except in a museum. MM: So you just worked there as you were in junior high

and high school? KEVIN: Right. Junior high here in Kansas, and then for a couple of years we moved back to another town in Nebraska. My dad is in construction, so every time they’d finish a project, they’d move us to another town to start a new one. So when I started high school, we moved back to a real cow town up in northwestern Nebraska, and they had a similar weekly newspaper, and I worked there for a year or two during high school. MM: So do you think that prepared you for saying, “I can work in the print business if I don’t make it in comics”? That it could be a fall-back position? KEVIN: Yeah, and that is sort of what I did. When I graduated from high school, I went to a commercial art program at a trade school. And that’s really what they were focused on: turning out production artists; doing paste-up and preparing mechanicals for printing and things like that. They weren’t interested in teaching illustration. They kept telling us that none of us would ever get jobs drawing anything, so they really discouraged us from wasting our time drawing. I went to that school for a year-and-a-half, and then got a job with a local printer. I did logos and letterheads, designed a lot of advertisements, airbrushed photos. They did advertising work for local agricultural manufacturers, things like that. MM: Did you have an innate talent for designing logos and that kind of thing? Had you ever tried doing that with your stories before? KEVIN: Yeah, I’d already been doing that kind of work on my own. I did it on the stories, because I would always start out by designing a splash page. And this is also where I learned to do my own lettering, the story titles, balloon lettering, and stuff like that. So I would always design a logo for whatever character I was making up, or even if it was an established character, I’d design a new logo and a title for the story. I wanted the pages to look professional, so I’d dig out my Gaspar Saladino lettering samples and do my best to swipe from them. It’s just something that I did a lot through high school, just for the fun of it.

KEVIN: No, it was medium-sized. They employed about 20 people. Maybe more. It was several times larger than either of the newspapers I’d worked for when I was a kid.

MM: So you actually enjoyed that as much as drawing? KEVIN: Yeah.

MM: At what point did you say, “Well, maybe I should move closer to where the comics are?” Or did that ever occur to you?

MM: What was the environment like at the print shop that you worked at? You said it was a small shop?

KEVIN: It must not have. I think I was already getting a sense that comic writers and artists were living all over

MM: So did you feel comfortable that you could do something like that if you never made it into comics? Would you have been satisfied if you had just— KEVIN: I think I was pretty full of myself and I kept thinking, “This is great, but this isn’t what I’m going to end up doing. I’m going to be drawing pictures, I’m not going to be setting type or running a press.” I never even thought that I would end up doing that.

the country, not just in New York. I probably assumed that if they like my work they’d allow me to work through the mail.

tor who wasn’t sure about taking a chance on a new guy. MM: Let’s jump back to Fantagraphics for a second. Were you out of trade school by the time you started submitting to them?

MM: Now, had you sent anything in since you were 15? KEVIN: No, but a year or two before I actually got work at Marvel, I went up to Connecticut and stayed with the guys at Fantagraphics, because by then I’d been doing covers and spot illustrations and even some logo designs for them. So I spent a few days at their place, took the train into New York, and showed some samples to some people at Marvel. I don’t think I made it to DC, but I was able to get over to John Workman’s office at Heavy Metal. At Marvel, Tom DeFalco looked at my work and said, “It’s fine, but you’re not showing us enough panel-to-panel continuity.” So he reached in the drawer and pulled out a Roger Stern Spider-Man script and said, “Take this home and do some layouts. We’re not that concerned about the finished drawing, because we’ve already seen that here in your portfolio, but do some layouts and prove to us that you can handle the storytelling.” And I guess it was actually a fairly short time after that that Terry Austin wrote to me. He had seen covers and spot illustrations I’d done for Amazing Heroes and The Comics Journal, and he volunteered to take some samples of my work in to Marvel and DC. So the timing was pretty good, because that’s actually what I had been working on, and I had these layouts that I’d done for DeFalco. And to have Terry taking these sample pages in helped a lot, because he was a big superstar inker, and if he said that he liked my work and volunteered to ink a story, it would ease the fears of some edi-

KEVIN: Yes, I was out of school. MM: What was the thinking there? “I’m not quite good enough for Marvel or DC, but maybe this will get me noticed”? KEVIN: I think I was just itchin’ to see my work in print. I was trying to figure out how to draw better, and seeing your stuff in print seemed to be a good way to check yourself, in a way. You could do a drawing and if no one else is seeing it, you don’t know if it’s any good or not. But if you get it out there and you can see it on a page next to someone else who maybe draws better, then the areas that you need to work on stand out a bit more. MM: So you actually went in there thinking in those terms? Most people, when they’re first starting out, don’t necessarily think of doing the art for the printed page. Do you think maybe working in publishing helped you think that way? KEVIN: Yeah, I think so. Because I had done quite a few things at a part-time job while I was in school, where I produced advertising material and slideshow material and a coloring book for an alcohol and drug abuse prevention organization. So I had been seeing my stuff in print. Plus, after I started working at the printing office, I was seeing a lot of that stuff published and seeing what worked and what didn’t. MM: What exactly did you give to Terry? Did you include lettering samples? 12

KEVIN: He took in an inked Angel and the Ape page that was lettered, and a penciled Wonder Woman page. When he took those in, Al Milgrom called me and asked to see more of my work. I told him about the layouts I was working on for the SpiderMan story and he asked to see them. So it was a real mixed bag of different things, but at least one of the pages was lettered. MM: Did you ever consider asking them, “If you won’t give me penciling work, can you give me lettering work?” KEVIN: No, I didn’t say that, but I probably should have. The amazing thing is they actually gave me penciling work right out of the chute. After Milgrom got the layouts, he called and said he needed someone to pencil an issue of Doctor Strange. He had the script ready and it was due in 30 days. I wasn’t a huge Marvel fan but I really loved Doctor Strange. I wanted to do it but I’d never even finished a short story before, I really didn’t think I was ready to pencil an entire issue. He said, “Think it over and I’ll call you tomorrow.” When he called the next day, I explained to him that I didn’t think I was ready to tackle something like that yet. I don’t know if I told him this at the time, but I was already working at least 40 hours a week at the printing office. If I drew the Doctor Strange story I’d have to do it in my spare time, and all 22 pages were due in 30 days. I told him I’d love to do it, but I couldn’t. So Milgrom listened to me as I rambled on and paused for a moment, then he said, “Yeah… well, do it anyway.” So that was that. I had a little nervous breakdown, but I kept working and I got it done. I must have made the deadline, or at least come pretty close, because they had me pencil and ink the cover as well. It was a real baptism of fire. I think I started getting the hang of it as I moved through the pages, but I was so lost when it came to just working out backgrounds and props and clothing, things like that. Or even just drawing people walking down the street! I’d never tried to draw that before! The buildings were murder. It took place in Greenwich Village, and it really needed specific locations, but I had no idea where to go about finding reference and all that.

comics as reference? KEVIN: No. Well, I did for the Sanctum Sanctorum, for the building that he lives in I looked at the old comics. But the plot called for some of the action to take place at a real location, a nightclub; it was supposed to be The Bottom Line. I had no idea what the place actually looked like, and the assistant editor kept telling me she lived in the Village and she’d get some photos for me. A couple of weeks later, when I was ready to start drawing that page, I called her up and asked about the photos. She said, “Ah, just fake it.” [laughter] So I made up a building and they changed the name of the place from The Bottom Line to The Bottom End, or something like that. So I was just overwhelmed, I felt like I had to learn so much, reading a script and turning it into readable pencils that would work, plus doing them fairly quickly, when I’ve really never been any good at drawing fast. I was in over my head. I think at one point I said something to Terry about it, “Maybe I should just try to get some inking work.” And he said, “Yeah, you could, but it would be a shame for you to just settle for doing inking.” He encouraged me to stick with penciling and try to work through that.

MM: Did you cheat, just used the previous 13

Previous Page: Another sample page from Kevin’s early portfolio, this one featuring Angel and the Ape. Below: Dr. Strange—live at The Bottom Line—er, End! Panels from Doctor Strange #57. Angel and the Ape ™ and ©2004 DC Comics. Dr. Strange ™ and ©2004 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Interlude:

Under the Influence

I’m resisting the temptation to list every artist who’s had an influence on me, from the painfully obvious examples like Wally Wood and Mike Mignola to the less conspicuous individuals such as Frank Robbins and George Tuska. This is a big book, but a list like that would be gargantuan. Let’s limit it to the comic artists who not only made a strong impression on me at a fairly young age, but also continue to point me in one direction or another as I revisit their work on a regular basis:

Neal Adams

From the time I first saw his work on some of the Batman stories around 1971, I was just fascinated by the lighting effects and the way he could create textures that suggested that these characters were real. They really looked like they existed in a physical world. I’ve tried to imitate his rendering style and his lighting. I just loved that gritty textures that he got, especially when he did his own inks. His coloring was a strong influence as well. He did amazing things with flat color on newsprint.

Gil Kane Gil Kane was the guy we all swiped from him because he had super-hero anatomy all figured out. If you were trying to compose a page with two guys punching each other and one of them flying toward the camera, you’d dig out your Gil Kane comics to see how he did that, to see how he constructed the figures. His drawings were like a textbook on structure and composition. I loved his inking as well. He made the images even more poetic and exotic when he was allowed to finish the drawings himself.

Archie Comics: Dan DeCarlo and Harry Lucey

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They didn’t have credits in the Archie comics in the ’60s, but I read enough of them to identify two artists who still have an influence on me: Dan DeCarlo and Harry Lucey. DeCarlo drew the cutest girls this side of Bob Oksner and seemed to be Archie’s main cover artist. His stories had beautiful, crisp, clean storytelling, making the Archie books some of the most accessible comics a young reader could find. Harry Lucey’s work [see right] was even more animated, more expressive, than DeCarlo’s. I think Lucey was really a stronger cartoonist. You really felt the movement in his figures and he gave his characters some unbelievably vivid expressions.

Alan Weiss I was unaware of Alan’s work until I saw his adaptation of “Pellucidar” in the DC Korak comic. He seemed to be an alternative to the Neal Adams/Stan Drake school of “realistic” drawing. Alan’s work was more animated and he had his own, quirky approach to rendering. When one of his characters smiled, it just lit up the whole page.

Alex Toth

His two-part Black Canary story in Adventure Comics was the first story that I really tried to dissect: Simple, flat shadows with no rendering, natural movement and bold design work all the way through, even in the title and balloons. From then on, I was a Toth “purist.” Forget about someone else inking his pencils, I didn’t even want to see someone else handling his lettering!

When you’re a young, inept would-be comic artist, it’s easy to be dazzled by rendering and surface effects. We all seem to start out trying to imitate the inking style of our favorite artist. Studying the work of Alex Toth made me realize that structure and clarity of vision is far more important than technique. If you build the drawing correctly, inking it is effortless and natural. If you don’t, all the fancy rendering in the world won’t save it. I enjoyed Toth’s work for years before I really looked at it seriously.

Bernie Wrightson

n Publishing.

I first saw his work in DC comics, on covers and then the short stories and splash pages that he did in the mystery titles. But of course Swamp Thing was the real turning point. That first issue is unbelievable, and the second one is even better. Those books were some of the most stunningly beautiful stories ever to appear on newsprint. I think Wrightson is probably underrated as a storyteller. We all went nuts over his bold, dramatic shadows, but those Swamp Thing books all read very smoothly as well. You might stop to admire his technique, but you’re never pulled out of the story.

The Pepper La

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After Swamp Thing, Wrightson started working for Warren and his work looked even better when it was presented in black-&-white, with decent offset printing. My favorite Wrightson story might be “The Pepper Lake Monster”… either that or “Jenifer.” Like all of the people I’ve listed here, Wrightson is still a constant source of inspiration.

Bob Oksner

He worked in styles that range from big foot to soap opera, but humor seemed to be his forte. There’s something smooth and easy about his technique. Everything looks very natural and endlessly charming. He draws the most beautiful females that comics have ever seen. He catches subtleties in an expression or a pose that few others would even consider. Everything in an Oksner story has a personality, the layouts and the body language and expressions, sometimes even just the buildings. I have a great Angel and the Ape page with Sam, the Ape, jumping out a window and about to catch the ledge of a building across the street [see above]. I bought the page because I love the big gorilla drawing, but then I noticed the buildings around the edge of the panel. They’re not boring little boxes with flat windows, they’re varied and expressive. Oksner drew them with the same energy and vitality that he puts into his people… which is saying a lot.

ics.

If you came into my studio, you’d be able to tell at a glance that Bob Oksner is my favorite comic artist. Angel and the Ape, Binky, Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope, Dobie Gillis, “Supergirl.” I always have a stack of Oksner books within reach as I work. You never know when you might need a little quick inspiration. I’m not certain if any of his approach has crept into my work but I keep hoping it will.

Part 2:

Marvel Comics and a Baptism of Fire

MM: Were you surprised when you got the initial phone call from Al Milgrom offering you Doctor Strange #57? Below: DC’s “hard-traveling heroes.” This pinup appeared in Amazing Heroes and is the piece that first caught Terry Austin’s eye. Next Page: Page 4 of Doctor Strange #57. Inks by Terry Austin. Black Canary, Green Arrow, Green Lantern ™ and ©2004 DC Comics. Dr. Doom ™ and ©2004 Marvel Characters, Inc.

KEVIN: I was surprised, yeah. It was after that that Terry and I started talking a bit, because I had an excuse for calling him up because he was inking this thing and I could just ask him those basic questions, like, “Should I X in the blacks, or should I fill them in with the side of a pencil?” That kind of stuff. He was all I had for a mentor learning the ropes, the basic stuff that I was clueless about. MM: Had you seen original comic book pages before, maybe in Fantagraphics’ offices or anywhere else? KEVIN: Yeah, when I went up to stay for a weekend with the Fantagraphics guys, Gary Groth was just putting together a Neal Adams issue of The Comics Journal, and his back seat was covered, literally, with Neal Adams originals. [laughs] So in the car, from the airport, when he picked me up, I wasn’t holding up my end of the conversation because I was just mesmerized by this stuff. I was just sitting there looking at these things saying, “My God, there’s no white paint on here! How did he do this?” Gary’s just rolling his eyes back into his head. It was at one very small convention in Wichita years before that where I saw my first examples of original art. There was a 18

Wally Wood splash page that, again, I couldn’t believe how pristine it was. It was so clean and so perfect that I stood there for a long time just staring at that thing, trying to figure out how a guy would ink with a brush and make it all look so perfect. And right next to it was a Kaluta Shadow cover that had some fascinating textures of rocks—it was the side of a hill or something like that. And it was great because, again, looking at the originals as opposed to the printed cover, you could see where he used different pens, maybe even a ballpoint pen, and all kinds of different things, to create different textures. So, yeah, I had seen a few pieces of original art here and there, but really, I was pretty clueless when it came to figuring out how to lay out a page, what it should look like. I didn’t even know what size the margins for the panels should be on the board. MM: Well, you did seem to really keep the layouts mixed up. You didn’t fall back on a standard grid. You were at least trying different things as you were going. KEVIN: Yeah. And I remember Al Milgrom encouraged me; he asked me to list the artists that I admired, and I ran down a quick list, and he said, “You ought to look at Joe Kubert’s work when you’re thinking about layouts, because Joe’s really good at creating an interesting page layout.” And that’s where I started using inset panels and things like that, that I really hadn’t even thought of before. MM: How tight were your pencils? Since this is your first time out, were you overly tight, or were you just trying to get it done quickly? KEVIN: I think they were probably fairly tight, but I also remember there were some backgrounds where I wasn’t sure what to put in, and I thought, “Well, here’s a chance to find out what an inker does.” [laughter] I left

MM: This was the first time you saw your work in print with another inker. What was that like for you, seeing it inked by someone else?

them very sketchy, just sort of wispy pencil lines. And they were supposed to be New York City buildings. So Terry just—which I probably should have expected, I would have done the same thing—Terry just ignored them. [laughter] I hadn’t done my part of the job, so it wasn’t fair to ask him to draw buildings that weren’t there in the pencils. I remember the last page had to be redrawn. Again, that Doctor Strange story was done old Marvel style, with a plot and just sort of a suggestion of dialogue, and then Roger Stern went in and wrote the final script after he got the penciled pages. I don’t think he could wrap up the story with the way I had broken down that last page, so he wrote an actual script that had specific dialogue. It was a lot easier, because I could roughly pencil in the dialogue and leave enough space. I probably left a little too much space, but at least I had a better idea of what was going into each panel rather than just making it up in the true Marvel style. By the time I got to that page, I thought, “Okay. Some of these pages are really, really awful, and some of them are okay. This is the last page. The job is essentially done.” I really was breathing a sigh of relief and felt like I’d been through a baptism of fire. I felt like I was starting to get the feel of it. I wasn’t as nervous by the time I did that last page. I was starting to relax, and it went fairly smoothly. And out of this whole story, it’s the only one where I really thought that.... It’s not a great page, it’s a talking heads page, but I really felt like I was getting the hang of it. Sort of like, “Okay, now I understand how this is supposed to work.”

KEVIN: Yeah, it was pretty shocking. MM: Terry used a much thicker line than you normally would use. KEVIN: Yeah. That was during the time he was starting to use a much heavier line. A couple years before that, on XMen, on John Byrne’s work, he was using a much more delicate line. And I thought he used a fairly light line on the Mike Golden issue that came out a few years before this one. But, to be fair, I don’t think I was giving him much of an indication in the pencils. I think I was penciling with a fairly blunt graphite line, so that may have been the way he interpreted what I was putting into the pencils. I don’t know. He did a really good job, and it took me a while to realize what a nice job he did, because I was so shocked seeing my work inked by someone else. He cleaned things up, refined the images, the way an inker should. Mainly in the faces—they looked so different from the way I had pictured them— was where the artwork was changed the most. But it’s tough. I was such a rookie, and like you said, I had never worked with an inker before and didn’t really know how much information to give him. And he didn’t know what to do with my work. [laughs] I clearly didn’t know what I was doing, so it was unfair to expect him to 19

take these second-rate, third-rate pencils and turn them into a masterpiece. I look at those pages and I can just remember every moment of the struggle I was going through, the frustration of trying to figure out how to do this.

you find yourself critiquing what the other people had done on your book? KEVIN: Yeah, I did. The lettering was fine. The coloring was just pretty much standard Marvel coloring at the time. I didn’t think there was anything terribly inspired in it. And really, Doctor Strange, with all those exotic dimensions and things like that, is a book where you really can play around with color and do some wonderful stuff. It was pretty much just colored straight. I didn’t really think much of it.

MM: Do you feel any kind of affinity for the Dr. Strange character? Because it kind of fits in with your style a bit, and you have a moodier kind of book. KEVIN: Yeah, I love the character. I missed out on the original [Steve] Ditko stories until they were reprinted, but I started reading Doctor Strange when Frank Brunner was drawing the book, and he and Steve Englehart had a terrific run on that title. And I remember going to the high school and telling some of my buddies about this unbelievable story where he goes back in time and meets God. [laughter] Those stories were so trippy. And around that time they were reprinting a lot of the Ditko stuff, so I really loved discovering those. I always thought it was sort of an unMarvel-like character. He almost seemed like a character that would have been more at home at DC. He wasn’t a tough guy in big fistfights and things like that. Yeah, I always did like the character. So in a way, it’s really ironic that the first professional work I got was drawing a book like that. Usually you have to start out with a character that you have no interest in whatsoever, and have to find a way to maintain your enthusiasm for the material.

MM: Did you get much direction from Al Milgrom? Was he pretty hands-on with you, since this was your first assignment? KEVIN: A little bit. I was so needy that I think I would call up and just need some hand-holding, and I don’t think he had much patience for that. [laughter] But he had really solid advice all along. He was a busy editor, and like I said, he wouldn’t spend a lot of time with me where I’d just have so many questions and I was so lost. But, no, I did then, and still do, have a lot of respect for him. So I think he was a pretty good guy to start out with, with some of the advice he gave me. MM: The same month that Doctor Strange appeared, you had the portfolio in the back of Moon Knight #28. Did you put that together specifically for that issue, or was that stuff that you had already done? KEVIN: I think the Moon Knight stuff was probably done after Doctor Strange. Maybe it was done immediately after the Doctor Strange story, and then they both showed up in print at the same time. I think it was Ralph Macchio who called me up, and they had a few pages to fill out in that issue of Moon Knight, so they just asked me to do some pin-ups.

MM: Now, what about the lettering and the coloring? Since you had been doing a lot of that on your own, did 20

MM: Well, in the next issue, #29, you had the backup story, so it was kind of like a promotion there. Did they come out and say, “Well, we liked your Doctor Strange. You need to do more work. This is a little way to keep you busy.” Or did they know at that time that you would be taking over Moon Knight in a couple of issues? That this would be kind of like a warm-up? KEVIN: They just had some pages to fill out, and they asked me to do the backup story for that issue. And I think after that— even though that short story was such a disaster—they asked me to draw the book. Which goes to show you they were running out of people to turn to. [laughter] I turned in such a bad story, and they asked me to do the regular series anyway. That says something about their options.

Moon Knight cape is supposed to be a moon shape. MM: Part hang glider.... KEVIN: Yeah. You know what, the biggest problem with Moon Knight—and this is why, I think, I can never draw a really effective Spider-Man—there’s no face! It was the same with the Sword of Azrael character. It was a hood, and you don’t even see the bottom half of a face like you would with Batman or the Spectre or something. You feel like you can’t— MM: Does it make it harder to act with him?

MM: How did it feel following Bill Sienkiewicz on the book? KEVIN: It was a little strange, because it was obviously his character. So that always feels odd, unless it’s a character where you start out with your own idea of a different way of handling the character that would be uniquely your own. And I didn’t have that. To me, Moon Knight just looked like a bargain basement Batman, and I didn’t care about the character or the supporting cast or any of that stuff. I had no interest in the character whatsoever. I really should have just passed on their offer to do that. MM: Did the fact that it was going bimonthly have any effect on you getting the job? I mean, if it had been a monthly, were you still going to be able to do— KEVIN: Yeah, I’m sure I would have just turned it down flat if it had been a monthly. MM: So you mentioned the whole Batman correlation. You were able to do the same kind of things with the cape that you would with Batman. The cape changes length dramatically throughout. Did you experiment with that? KEVIN: A little bit, but it never really made any sense to me. I mean, not that Batman’s cape makes any sense, but the 21

Previous Page: Doctor Strange #57, page 11. Inks by Terry Austin. Below: Moon Knight has the ultimate poker face, which is one of the problems Kevin had to deal with when drawing the series. Page 10 of Moon Knight #31. Inks by Terry Austin. Inks Dr. Strange, Moon Knight ™ and ©2004 Marvel Characters, Inc.

KEVIN: Yeah! You feel like you’re drawing a mannequin. There’s no expression there. MM: Did you pay more attention to the hands, maybe, than you would have normally, to get that extra expression? This Page: Battle of the capes—Batman and Moon Knight sport what have to be the most mutable capes in all of comicdom. Next Page: Druid Walsh tries to show his softer side. Kevin’s pencils for Moon Knight #33, page 10. Batman ™ and ©2004 DC Comics. Druid Walsh, Moon Knight ™ and ©2004 Marvel Characters, Inc.

KEVIN: I might have. I don’t remember specifically doing that. MM: Issue #31 was the first full story you did something in. You were being inked by Terry Austin. Compare that to issue #32, where you were being inked by Carl Potts. KEVIN: Carl’s inks were much, much more organic. Terry’s inks, he cleaned things up and refined things, but I think he also lost some of the roughness of the drawings, whereas Carl’s were much more faithful to the pencils. I believe he inked most of those pages with some kind of marker, so they’re a bit blunt. The line quality isn’t as sharp as it would have been if he had used a quill pen, I think. But generally,

faces seemed to look more like I had penciled them, so I think at the time I really preferred what Carl was doing. It also probably had a lot to do with the fact that by the time I did that second issue of Moon Knight, I had just that much more experience, I had a better feel for what I was doing. You said it was #31 that Terry inked? The last seven pages of that story were so late. I was about to blow the deadline completely, and I think it was Thursday or Friday I promised [editor] Denny [O’Neil] that I’d have the story finished and sent out on Monday, so I did all those last seven pages in one sitting through the weekend without sleep,

drawing and drawing and drawing. And they really are awful. But, unlike the Doctor Strange story, I look at them and think, considering the circumstances [laughs], they’re not too bad. Because I had never, ever drawn so fast and worked so hard just churning out pages and not really worrying about whether things were drawn correctly or not. I don’t know how I got through that weekend.

KEVIN: Which issue was that?

MM: Did you take anything away from that experience, maybe learning shortcuts to help you out in the future?

MM: I thought it looked like you, but I wasn’t sure if it may have been Joe that was inking it in your style.

KEVIN: Maybe a little bit, but if I learned any shortcuts for drawing faster, I’d be unlikely to use them again because I think it’d be better to just take on an assignment where I’d have more time and wouldn’t have to worry about drawing fast. I really did struggle with that whole approach all the way through Moon Knight, and I kept blowing the deadlines. And again, it doesn’t help at all when you have no enthusiasm starting out. You kind of drag your feet and take too long on the pages just because you’re not really enjoying the work. But there were a few pages I remember on Moon Knight where I tried a different way of penciling. I tried breaking it down into different steps, where I would lightly lay out the page with a hard lead pencil and then go back in with a softer pencil lead and finish up the details. I just was trying to think of anything I could that would speed things up and also make the page look better. I did a lot of experimenting.

KEVIN: No, I think you could probably spot Joe’s pages. He had a heavy line. I’m trying to think, maybe I did ink some pages on two different stories. But I know at the end of the Savage Skulls story—that was a twopart story, right? Carl Potts—

MM: Issue #35, your last one. That was the doublesized issue. KEVIN: You know what? I did ink a page or two of that. Yeah, where he gets up out of the wheelchair. Yeah, I did ink that.

MM: Yeah, that was a two-parter. KEVIN: Yeah, Carl inked—was it “Second Wind”? Was that the name of the story he inked?

MM: Was it because you were behind your deadlines again that they had so many inkers in issue #33? KEVIN: I’m sure it was, yeah. All along, I kept saying to the editor, “I’d really like to ink my own pencils.” Of course, they said, “Sure, that sounds great. All you’ve got to do is turn them in on time, then you can ink them yourself.” [laughs] That never happened. I guess there was one issue where I ended up inking the last few pages, because we had a blizzard and FedEx wasn’t even flying, so I had a weekend where the pages were going nowhere no matter what. It was the last few pages for the story, so I went ahead and inked it myself. MM: It might have been issue #33, because there are a couple pages in there where it looked a lot more like your style of inking. KEVIN: I think the pages I inked were at the end of the story—I should dig out the books and make sure. MM: Well, #35 had some of that, too, I think. That was inked by Carl Potts and Joe Chiodo. 23

MM: “Second Wind” was issue #35. “When the Music Stops,” issue #32, Carl inked completely himself.

MM: Did you quit in the middle of issue #35, or was there a mutual agreement that you’d leave after that issue...? KEVIN: Yeah, it was a double-sized issue, and again, I should have known ahead of time that I wouldn’t be able to pull it off.

KEVIN: You know what? I’m sure I inked the last few pages of that Savage Skulls story. Moon Knight fights them in their dumb little clubhouse, then there’s a big splash at the end where he’s walking the kid down the street and there’s a leaf blowing. A friend of mine said, “This is supposed to be New York City! Why are you drawing autumn leaves?” [laughter] I said, “They’ve got a couple of trees, don’t they?” “I don’t know....” I’m sure I inked those last few pages. I think there were three, maybe four pages that I inked at the end of that story in #32. I don’t know if it looks like me or not, but I’m sure I inked those.

MM: Well, you did 27 pages, so that’s like a normal issue. KEVIN: Oh, that’s true, yeah. It was a double-sized issue. MM: It was a 42-pager. KEVIN: I was just being naïve and overly optimistic. Yeah, Bob McLeod stepped in and finished off that story. He did a nice job. MM: Did you do any research for those dance sequences? KEVIN: Yeah, I went to the local library and found old books, photos of ballet dancers and things like that.

MM: There are panels here and pages there where it does seem like you inked. The style changes dramatically from page to page, like they weren’t done in chunks, they were just kind of handed out as they came in or pell-mell or something. Did that sour the whole thing for you even more, seeing so many different people inking you all at once?

MM: Now, you seemed to be getting a good reception in the letters pages. Was that encouraging for you? KEVIN: I think so, yeah. I’m just glad the Internet and message boards weren’t around at that time, I’m sure I would have heard it from the diehard Sienkiewicz fans who were ready to crucify me. [laughter] But yeah, they were supportive and printed encouraging letters in the letters pages, so that helped, I think. The Doctor Strange issue, too, I think they mailed me the letters

KEVIN: No, I knew that I had no one to blame but myself. If I could just stick to a schedule, I could be inking those pages myself. So it didn’t sour me on it any more. The other struggles I was having with the series eventually made me realize it was a mistake to have taken on the assignment. 24

they got for that issue, and they were pretty much all positive, so that was encouraging. MM: Did you start doing the Defenders covers right after that? Because it seems like you picked that up right away. KEVIN: It would not have been right after that, because I think that those Marvel covers that I did were for Carl Potts.

MM: Did you come back later with the pages, say, “Look, this is why I had to—” [laughter] KEVIN: I wanted to! [laughter] I really wanted to show them, but I don’t think they cared. MM: I’m sure they’ve seen worse.

MM: But that first cover you did was published just a month after your last issue of Moon Knight. There was a three- or fourissue gap and then you had that short run of Defenders covers. KEVIN: I didn’t realize that. So Carl Potts must have started working at Marvel as an editor shortly after he inked that Moon Knight story. Or maybe he was already editing. He eventually took over a lot of Al Milgrom’s titles, and that’s where I got quite a bit of not only the cover assignments, but a lot of inking work. MM: Now, you did some National Lampoon strips sometime in here? KEVIN: Yeah. Yeah, that’s pretty strange, because I’d barely even started in comics. MM: How did you end up doing those? KEVIN: The art director, Michael Gross, called up, and I guess in the office there they kept their eyes on comics, and they saw some of my work, gave me a call, and asked me to draw some stories. MM: One-page or two-page stories? KEVIN: There was one two-page story. The first one was—gosh, was it six pages, maybe? Maybe even eight? A Tom Selleck story called “Irish Sex Tales.” I had to get a good likeness of Tom Selleck, so I went down—again, much of this reference stuff would have been so easy if the Internet existed—I went to the local bookstore and tried to find magazines with photos of Tom Selleck, and finally found one, and I was so happy. And then I look at the cover and thought, “Well, now I’ve got to pay for this. These people know me here.” It was called The Gorgeous Guys Photo Album. [laughter]

KEVIN: Yeah, exactly. And I think they thought I did a pretty good job of getting a likeness of Tom Selleck, because then they asked me to do this Ted Kennedy story, and that was tough, because it’s not just Ted and his kids, but flashbacks with Ted Kennedy as a young boy and the whole Kennedy clan and, man, that was a nightmare. They sent me some nice photos, but still, trying to keep all those people straight, and trying to get a recognizable likeness of each of those real-life characters was tough. MM: So how did that compare with working for Marvel? Obviously it was very different, because you’re doing a humor kind of thing. How did they operate? KEVIN: They were full-script, because I think all but one of them I lettered myself. So it was a little more like working for DC, where they send you a full script. And I think their rates were reasonably good, comparable 25

Previous Page: Two preliminaries and the finished piece—a Defenders commission drawing. Above: The opening panels from “The Streets of Vatican City,” which appeared in National Lampoon #67. Dr. Strange, Hulk, Valkyrie ™ and ©2004 Marvel Characters, Inc. Streets of Vatican City ™ and ©2004 National Lampoon.

KEVIN: I can never remember the chronology. I think it was because “Grimwood” sort of overlapped with some of the Marvel work. MM: The first one appeared in October of ’84, which was just a few months after Moon Knight, but you were still doing those Defenders covers in that time period, too. KEVIN: Yeah. I was new to all of this, and I didn’t know how much work I could expect to be offered, so I was very reluctant to turn anything down. I think I was trying to do Moon Knight and “Grimwood” at the same time, I think that’s what really, really messed up the deadlines on Moon Knight. MM: So you were just doing “Grimwood’s Daughter” in your spare time? KEVIN: That’s what I was trying to do, but obviously it didn’t work out very well. I was crazy to think I could do both. MM: How well did it pay compared to Marvel?

to Marvel or DC, maybe even a little higher. They let me do blue-line coloring on the Ted Kennedy story. They were pretty easy to work with. Didn’t give me a whole lot of feedback, but they gave me a fair amount of freedom and were encouraging. When I laid out the Ted Kennedy story I realized I needed more room. It was written as a shorter story, and I read the script and thought it would be tough to squeeze all that into the number of pages they had originally planned. They allowed me to expand it by a couple of pages, which always helps.

KEVIN: Fantagraphics doesn’t pay much. On the other hand, it was a really good script. Jan Strnad is a terrific writer. And unlike Moon Knight, where I always had the feeling that I was working on someone else’s character, where I had little or no affinity for the material at all, with “Grimwood” it was something that Jan and I created from scratch, so it could look the way we wanted it to. So obviously I had much more of a connection with the material. We were giving up a fair amount of money but we owned the material, so it was a tradeoff.

MM: Were you looking for more work out of them, or were you ready to get back into—

MM: Did you know Jan before then, or did you meet while doing that series?

KEVIN: Well, I think Michael Gross left the magazine shortly after that. I got one phone call from his replacement and didn’t really get a good vibe from him. Gross is terrific, a really, really talented designer, knew what he wanted and was very easy-going. I think things were starting to fall apart there after he left. As far as working for them, specifically, I kind of felt like that was the end of that.

KEVIN: Yeah, it’s strange, because he grew up in Wichita. I eventually moved to Wichita after he’d moved out to California. So we weren’t buddies, we didn’t hang out together or anything like that, but we started talking when we were working together on “Grimwood” at a convention down in Wichita. So I was familiar with his work, liked his writing a lot. But no, we weren’t friends before that. MM: Did Jan have the basic kernel of the idea and then you developed that idea together?

MM: Was it just after that that you started working on “Grimwood’s Daughter”? 26

KEVIN: No, he had a full script. It was originally written for Charles Vess, and after the script was finished, Charles said he didn’t want to do it, so he gave it to me. MM: In your bio in that first issue, it says Marvel had offered you several things— Daredevil, Longshot, a Nightcrawler miniseries—and DC had offered you Star Trek, a Batman project, the Aquaman mini-series. Was your experience on Moon Knight so bad that that wasn’t really something that you wanted to do? Did you have any regrets later about turning some of that stuff down? KEVIN: I just realized that there was a huge difference in the quality of the work when I had some kind of enthusiasm and could shape the material in my own way and had characters that I cared about. So that’s really what I was looking for, something that I could get really excited about and have fun with, and I knew I wouldn’t with any of those things. MM: Were you getting your sole earnings from comics at that point? KEVIN: Yeah. I did a few design jobs, like logos and things like that for local clients, but for the most part I was just doing comics. MM: “Grimwood’s Daughter” was a fantasy, with the elves versus man and all that good stuff. Did you enjoy fantasy more than super-heroes?

KEVIN: That’s right, the last one I colored. MM: But did you have any input as far as the palette that was being used or anything like that? KEVIN: No, I don’t think so. Ken Smith and I might have talked a little bit before, but not in any great detail. I think I gave him some suggestions for hair color on the main characters, that was probably it. MM: As the series goes along, you take over more and more of the responsibilities. In the third part you take over the lettering, in the final chapter you take over the coloring. Were you just getting more into it and saying “I want this really to be mine”? KEVIN: Yeah, I didn’t have any problem with Phil Felix’s lettering, but.... I believe I was working this way: I would carefully draw the guidelines for the

KEVIN: Yeah, at first I really thought, “I can’t draw an Elfquest thing, I’m the wrong guy for this.” But then Jan explained to me that he wasn’t really seeing it that way. Boy, it’d be a lot easier to tell someone how to do a book like that now, because you’d just say, “Look at Lord of the Rings, those kind of elves. Not cute little fluffy elves.” [laughter] So once he explained to me what he was looking for, I thought, “Okay, this could be really interesting, creating a whole world with its own history.” Once I saw that Jan was picturing something very dark and gritty, I warmed up to it. MM: “Grimwood” had a painterly quality to the coloring. Did you have any input? I know you didn’t actually take over the coloring until the last issue. 27

Previous Page: Nope, no fuzzy elves here! The opening splash panel of Chapter Two of “Grimwood’s Daughter.” Below: Just imagine if Kevin had taken over Daredevil after Frank Miller left the title. It would probably have looked a little something like this. Grimwood’s Daughter and all related characters ™ and ©2004 Jan Strnad and Kevin Nowlan. Daredevil ™ and ©2004 Marvel Characters, Inc.

MM: I assume that the story was meant to go a little bit longer?

lettering and pencil in every word. [laughter] To make sure that it would fit, that the balloons would fit in the panel and I wouldn’t have the balloons covering up someone’s face or something. So I would do all that and pencil the pages and then send them off to someone else to letter them, and it just seemed ridiculous. The lettering job is half-done by the time I do all of that, so I might as well ink the letters myself. The coloring, obviously, it started out okay on “Grimwood,” and I think also on “Dalgoda,” but then slowly the quality of the color work started to decline. So I asked to do my own coloring on that last chapter of the story.

KEVIN: No. MM: That was it? KEVIN: Yeah. MM: It had a rather vague ending. It could easily have been continued from where it left off. KEVIN: Yeah. I think we talked about that once or twice, Jan and I talked about that. But no, he felt like that was the story, and he didn’t really have a sequel in mind for it. MM: Now, while “Grimwood” is going on, you also had the portfolio in Marvel Fanfare. What was that like, seeing your work in that series? Because they had a lot of big names popping up in that. KEVIN: That was fun. And again, they let me do my own color guides. I think that was the first time that they let me do my own color guides at Marvel. MM: Were you not doing the coloring guides for your covers? KEVIN: Not at first. I think the first Marvel cover that I colored was the one with the Defenders in the cockpit of an airplane, one of the female characters sort of being electrified or something. Not terribly well-colored, but, again, it was an education to see how this stuff would look in print, what you could do with those flat colors to strengthen the drawing. And those Marvel Fanfare pin-ups, those were fun, and they pretty much just gave me carte blanche to do whatever I wanted. MM: They just said, “Here, do six or seven,” or whatever it was? KEVIN: Yeah. Six Marvel pin-ups, any characters, “We don’t care.” Yeah, those were fun. 28

MM: You did a cover for the Solomon Kane mini-series. Were you a fan of Robert E. Howard’s work?

said, “It’s Solomon Kane fighting a werewolf. Work out something there and send us the painting.”

KEVIN: I never read the original stories. I had read some of the stuff that Marvel had done in the black-and-white magazines. Alan Weiss did several really, really nice Solomon Kane stories, one with Dracula which was really inspired because you had these two characters who were such opposites meeting each other, having a confrontation, a fight. I thought it was terrific. So that’s really about all I knew about the character. I’d read some of the Conan stories, but I’d never read any of the original Robert E. Howard Solomon Kane stories.

MM: So you actually did a full-blown painting for that?

MM: Did they send you any of Bret’s pencils so you could see what it was supposed to look like?

KEVIN: Well, it might be more accurate to call it a colored drawing. MM: What size were you working at? KEVIN: 11"x17", regular comics size. MM: What did you use? KEVIN: I used India ink and watercolors. I used horrible materials. If I’d known better, I wouldn’t have used them. I used some Dr. Martins watercolors and rendered with colored pencils on top of that. I imagine that the original’s faded quite badly.

KEVIN: I don’t think they sent me any copies of the story pages. I think they just 29

Previous Page: A fantastic page from Chapter Three of “Grimwood’s Daughter.” Above: Kevin’s layouts for pages 8 and 9 of “Grimwood’s Daughter,” Chapter Four. Grimwood’s Daughter and all related characters ™ and ©2004 Jan Strnad and Kevin Nowlan.

Part 3:

Kevin Nowlan— One Man Art Team

MM: You finally start working for DC with the Outsiders Annual #1. Now, in that Outsiders Annual, Mike Barr had his little jokey commentary in the back. How much of that was true? Had you been talking before about doing a project?

KEVIN: Yeah, that’s one of those Marvel-style things, where he gave me just the bare bones of a plot for those pages and just hit the high points of the action and asked me to just work it out however I saw fit. And he said he pictured it as kind of a silent, Will Eisner-esque sequence, so that’s what I was trying to do there.

KEVIN: Yeah, we were going to do a Batman graphic novel. When he called about it, I was committed to another project—I don’t even remember what it was—so I had to pass on it. And then sometime down the road, I think Jan Strnad and I had proposed something at Marvel. Yeah, it was at Marvel Epic—Archie Goodwin. And we never heard back from them, so I thought we—I was young and naïve and thought that if you pitched something, the editors immediately got back to you. [laughter] And you just coast right into it. The thing was in limbo.

MM: Did you suggest any of the sound effects that were used in there, and the way they were integrated, or was that all Todd Klein? KEVIN: I think I probably penciled in some of those. Mike and Todd added some extras. I thought a couple of them really weren’t necessary, so I whited out one or two of them before I inked the pages. The guy was jumping from one ledge to another and there was a big scream sound effect that wrapped around him in a semicircle. I thought, “That doesn’t really work.” So I took it out. In hindsight, that wasn’t really my job [laughs], to second-guess the writer/editor. But I guess I felt like he’d given me a certain amount of freedom to use my own judgment. They could have put them back in, I guess, if they strongly wanted them in there.

MM: What was it? Was it a sci-fi kind of thing? KEVIN: Yeah. I think there was more than one. The one I’m remembering was sort of an Island of Dr. Moreau, sci-fi kind of thing, I think that might have been what it was. So I had planned on starting on that project, and then we never heard back from Epic. So I called up Mike Barr and asked if that graphic novel was still available, and found that it wasn’t—they’d assigned it to another artist. But he said, “But I’d love to work with you. I can throw something else together.” That’s how I remember the thing coming together.

MM: How was it working with Mike with him being the writer and the editor? KEVIN: It was good, yeah. He was very easy to work with. MM: I’ve gotten that from other people as well.

MM: Was it you who asked for Batman to be in the story?

KEVIN: Yeah! I wanted to ink it and color it myself, and my coloring, at least, was sort of an unknown quantity at that time, so I remember they asked me to do some sample pages before they would allow me to do my own color guides. But Mike seemed to be doing everything he could to get that stuff approved by DC. Yeah, I remember it being a pretty pleasant experience.

KEVIN: Probably. I wanted to do some nice creepy material with the character. MM: Well, one of the best sequences in the book was that little chase sequence at the beginning, where Batman’s chasing down the cat burglar. 30

MM: So that was 44 pages of pencils, inks and colors. How long did that take you? Because I believe that might have been the only work you had published in ’86. KEVIN: So I wasn’t doing covers at Marvel? MM: Some of the covers came out at the very beginning of ’87, so you probably started on them late in ’86. KEVIN: Was “Grimwood” finished up by then? Probably. MM: Yeah, I think it ended in mid-’85. KEVIN: Okay, so I probably did spend the better part of that year working on that and little else. I don’t remember exactly, but I know it took an awfully long time to finish. Again, I could be wrong, but I don’t think it had a deadline when I started. Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t have agreed to do it. I don’t think it was on the schedule when I started. But I also remember, just for economic reasons, setting out to do it as quickly as I could. ’Cause I thought, “I’m going to do everything I can to pencil this at the rate of a page a day.” So the first three pages, there’s a single page and then a double-page spread. I was determined to force myself to only spend one day penciling each of those. It was easy enough for the double-page spread, because there were no backgrounds or anything like that. But then, as I got further into the story, and things got denser and denser, I obviously slowed down. Plus, a lot of times on those jobs, you start to really get into it and you just don’t feel comfortable knocking it out quickly. You really want to do the best you can, even if it means spending a little extra time on it.

whole lot of covers. You probably had two dozen covers that year. KEVIN: In ’87?

MM: I guess the next year you really make up for the lack of production in ’86. Maybe you started some of these other projects in ’86 as well. You had a bunch of covers, like I said. You also had the six-pager in the Green Lantern Annual. I’m not sure what came out first, but I know the May ’87 issue of New Mutants, #51, you did the pencils for that—

MM: Yeah.

KEVIN: Which one was that?

KEVIN: Yeah, I had a long run of Strange Tales covers.

MM: The New Mutants #51, that was in May of ’87. And the Green Lantern Annual was an ’87 annual. And you also had a

KEVIN: At Marvel? MM: It was a mix. You had a few at DC. You had some of the Secret Origins covers and a Batman cover at DC, and then you did all those Strange Tales covers at Marvel, and some Alpha Flight covers, as well.

MM: Yeah, issues four through eight and 14 through 16. 31

KEVIN: Yeah, I really liked working with Carl Potts. He was very, very easy to work with. He even asked me to do the logos for that, so the Strange Tales and that new Doctor Strange logo were all mine. The Cloak and Dagger logo was done by someone else. So it was a pretty complete deal, especially the one issue that I inked and colored the “Cloak and Dagger” story. It was really an awful lot of my work in that one issue. MM: Let’s go back to the New Mutants issue. You worked in a slightly different style on that one. You didn’t use nearly as much cross-hatching as you normally do. What caused you to try that different inking approach? KEVIN: Well, they called me up and asked me—it was Ann Nocenti, I believe, who was the editor. MM: Yes. This Page and Next: The cover and interior art from New Mutants #51. And what do you know, Kevin got to draw several of the X-Men in this issue, as well. New Mutants, X-Men ™ and ©2004 Marvel Characters, Inc.

KEVIN: And she called up and said, “You can take your pick. You can either draw an issue of the X-Men or an issue of the New Mutants.” I didn’t want to do the New Mutants, because it was printed on the Flexograph, which was that awful printing system they had for a short time. But she said, “If you do the X-Men, we have a regular inker and you’ll have to work with him.” I wouldn’t be allowed to 32

ink the X-Men story but it would be printed normally, not on the Flexograph. If I drew the New Mutants story I could do pencils and inks, but the printing would stink. It really was a Hobson’s choice. It was also a 30-day deadline, if I remember right— MM: That was for both? KEVIN: I believe so, yeah. And I said, “Well, I’d really prefer to ink my own pencils, but I’m not sure that I could do that in 30 days.” I said, “The only thing I can think of is, I’ve been wanting to try a less complicated style, with less rendering, and simplify things a bit.” She said, “Sure, absolutely. Whatever you want to do, sounds great.” So I ended up doing this real strange-looking job, with kids who had little bumps for noses and dots for eyes. But I thought it turned out okay. MM: Yeah! You still did a little bit more rendering on the adult females, it seemed, especially in the faces. And then you go back and the kids are a little more cartoony-looking, and some of the guys are a little more cartoony-looking, as well. It was a neat little mix, kind of like you weren’t quite 100% certain of the style, or maybe that you couldn’t help going back and— KEVIN: Yeah, it was a style that I hadn’t quite—it’s a sort of self-imposed limitation, and some places, I just couldn’t figure out how to do certain things in that style, so I’d revert back to a little bit of rendering. I don’t know. I haven’t even looked at the thing in a long time, but I know that the Flexograph printing really made some of those pages look pretty strange. People who saw the pages in black-and-white or saw the originals thought they were okay, but they were in the minority.

MM: You worked with Chris Claremont on that. He was the hot guy at Marvel during that time. Was there any added pressure, not just because you were working with him, but because you were working with him on one of the mutant books? KEVIN: I don’t know. I don’t remember feeling a whole lot of pressure other than the deadline. [laughter] There was a lot of material in there. I’d always heard that about Chris’ plots, that he writes a lot and it can be a real challenge trying to squeeze everything in. I don’t think we even had a conversation about it, I think there were some things that just were left out or abbreviated. But it seemed to go smoothly enough. Sometime after that, Ann Nocenti told me that she almost called me up and said, “I know I said you could draw it in this style, but now that I see it....” [laughter] She said she almost made that call, and didn’t. And the really odd thing was, sometime after that I got a delivery of flowers and candy from Jim Shooter, and a note saying that he was really happy with the job I had done on that fill-in issue. So I thought, “There you go!” I had never had any contact with Shooter before, and had certainly heard the horror stories that were floating around at the time, and here was a nice little thank you gesture. I took it to heart, because I think I told you, I got a ton of hate mail that they forwarded to me. The X-fans were just mortified by my artwork. MM: Do you think it was simply because it was something they weren’t expecting? KEVIN: Yeah, yeah. The standard look for that book at that point was the teenagers all looked like giant super-heroes with huge biceps and adult faces, and I was trying to make them look like kids, and I was doing this style that was very cartoony. Yeah, they really hated that. I sort of expected that, too, so it wasn’t too disturbing. Mike Mignola and Arthur Adams bought all the originals, so I felt vindicated. MM: Was there any legitimate criticism in any of that hate mail, or was it all rants against the style itself? KEVIN: Yeah. They were saying things like, “It’s just ugly! I can’t believe you guys published this!” If I went back and reread the letters, I might find some legitimate criticism, but it was probably what you’d expect. “How dare you!” MM: [laughs] Somewhere around this same time period, you also did the six-page story for the Tales of the Green Lantern Corps Annual #3. And you penciled, inked and colored the story. Did you letter it as well? It looked like your lettering, but I didn’t see credits for letterer. KEVIN: Yes. MM: How much of a turnaround did you have on that? Because I noticed there weren’t a whole lot of backgrounds. First you’re in space, then you’re on a desert cliff. Was that intentional to help you get the thing out? 33

KEVIN: I don’t remember that being anything with a tight deadline. It might have been, but I just don’t know.

shoot from the pencils. He liked the texture that he saw in the pencils. The editor, Andy Helfer, strongly objected and said that most of it would drop out, and he wanted me to go ahead and ink it. So when I inked it, I tried to leave some of the pencil texture in there in places, but I inked most of it. And again, it was probably inked way too delicately for newsprint, and a lot of the linework still dropped out, even though it had been inked.

MM: So you just got lucky and had a story calling for desolate settings. KEVIN: Yeah, the script didn’t really call for anything too elaborate in the background, other than buildings when they’re on the surface of the planet. The rest is just rocks and stuff. From the very beginning, my problem has been to figure out a way to draw faster, so I’m sure I was thinking if the story doesn’t really require a whole lot of detailed backgrounds and stuff like that, just go with it, take advantage of the opportunity to get the pages done faster. There are better ways to disguise the fact that you’re doing that [laughs] I’ve since learned here and there. But I’m sure that’s what I was thinking.

MM: It looked as though that might have been the case. Also that summer, you took part in the Avengers Annual #16. It’s kind of a hodge-podge of people mixed in there. You did six pages where you were doing finishes over Butch Guice. He’s credited with breakdowns. How loose were they? KEVIN: They were fantastic, because they really looked like finished pencils, except the blacks weren’t spotted. But everything—I mean, even rubble on the ground or a brick on the wall or something like that—was carefully drawn out, so it was a blast to work on those. It was a lot of fun.

MM: You used a very muted color palette, a very pale palette. What went into your decision-making on how to choose the colors for that story?

MM: Was that the first time you had actually done a job for one of the Big Two solely as an inker?

KEVIN: Yeah, it really came out more muted than I intended it to, because it was printed on newsprint. I think it had been the first time I had colored something for newsprint. I’m not sure exactly. The Outsiders Annual was printed on good paper, with offset printing. I think my color guides were much, much brighter, and I had a lot of solid yellow and chartreuse and things like that, but the solid yellow ended up looking like a 30% tint. There wasn’t much quality control in those days and if the pressman ran the ink a little light, they seemed to just say, “Ah, close enough.” So I was just kind of learning what you could and couldn’t get away with, I guess. Also, that story, at one point somebody—I think Richard Bruning—suggested that we try to just

KEVIN: It’s possible. I’m trying to think who I would have inked before that. That’s a good question, I honestly don’t know. MM: I’m not entirely positive, but I think it might have been the first time. KEVIN: I think you’re probably right. See, and that was a good experience, which probably explains why I did more inking after that, because it really was a lot of fun. MM: So you enjoyed not having to worry about breaking down the story and all that, just being able to go in and add your touches? 34

KEVIN: Yeah. And I think you have to credit Jackson Guice with most of that, because he did such a great job laying out that story that it was very, very easy to finish. I think it was nicely colored, too. I forget who did the coloring, but I remember it being— MM: I think Glynis [Oliver Wein] did the coloring on that. All right. The rest of that year you were doing a whole lot of covers, and I think you did a few pin-ups for the Marvel Universe Official Handbook. KEVIN: I was going to look and see what year we did Moonshadow, because I was lettering— MM: Oh, that’s right! I forgot about that. KEVIN: Yeah, I did twelve issues. It’s not exactly a full-time job, but at some point I was doing that. MM: That was for Epic? KEVIN: Right. That went from late ’85 to early ’87. I did the logo design for the book, too. I also lettered another Epic book, the first issue of Alan Weiss’ Steelgrip Starkey. And an issue of Rom. But I don’t remember the dates on those. But it was fun, and I was having a lot of fun doing that lettering. MM: How quickly could you turn around a standard lettering job? KEVIN: It took a few days. Moonshadow was really fast, even though it was lettered on overlays, because of the font that we developed. It was all upper and lower case, flush left, italics, so you didn’t have to worry about positioning the lines and centering them inside a balloon or anything like that. It went really fast. I could do several of those pages in a day. But then, the book was always late, so it was always a bit of panic to try to get it out on time. MM: What about an issue of Rom, a more traditional comic? How long would it take you to do that? KEVIN: [pause] It was Rom #75, so I remember it was penciled or laid out, really, by Steve Ditko, and then Craig Russell finished it, so it was great to have a chance to see those pages before and

after, it was really amazing. But that was pretty much a straight, standard lettering job. And I think that might have been one of the reasons I started doing less lettering, because this is tough work. A lot of work. You have to squeeze in word balloons where they don’t fit; you don’t have the right to edit the scripts when a writer has written more than will fit in a space. I’m guessing I probably didn’t do more than three or four pages a day, so it’d take me a week to do an entire issue, I think. MM: How did that pay as compared to just inking or penciling? Could you do enough to make it worth your time? KEVIN: No, I wasn’t fast enough to make a good living out of it, the rates were pretty low. It’s really tedious. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to do something like that, but it’s no surprise that it’s almost all done on a computer now, because hand lettering is really time-consuming work. MM: As far as the inking goes, did you find yourself wanting to change anything in the pencils? Were you able to simply have fun inking, or did you at any point say, “Well, I would have done this differently,” and maybe get frustrated? KEVIN: Are you talking about the Jackson Guice Avengers? MM: Yeah. 35

Previous Page: A gorgeous Phantom Lady adorned Kevin’s cover for Action Comics Weekly #639. Above: One of Kevin’s covers for Secret Origins, this one #44. The word “Clayfaces” was changed to “Mudpack” for the final printing. Batman, Clayface, Phantom Lady ™ and ©2004 DC Comics.

KEVIN: Yeah, because it was considered layouts, even though things were drawn very tight. There would be a few places where I’d think, “Well, this is a good drawing, but I’m not sure I know exactly how to ink it the way it’s drawn here.” So I’d adjust the pencils a bit, put in some shadows and try to finish it. I always look at it as if I was inking my own unfinished pencils. You start inking the obvious stuff that’s all worked out and then you look at something and you’re not really sure what to do with it, so you have to pick up a pencil and try to work out some of the details. Then, when it looks right, you feel confident picking up the pen or brush and going ahead with ink. Because it’s just a mess when you’re overly confident or you’re moving too fast and you ink something that really should have been corrected in the pencils. And

you have to go in with white paint, ink back over the white paint, and it flakes off, and it just turns into a mess. This is probably why I, a lot of times, will get carried away. When I’m inking something, it looks less and less and less like the penciler, because I’m not sure how to finish it the way it was originally penciled. I’m not sure exactly how to do that. They’re asking for a technique and I don’t really know how to pull it off. Shadows on faces and stuff like that, where they’re broken up so much that I just sort of become lost. Sometimes you have to go in and simplify them, or move the shadows around, or change some structure, something like that. Not that I’m setting out to put my mark on it and take over the job from someone, but you’re just trying to do the best job you can, and sometimes that’s the only way to do it. MM: Well, I would say at this point in your career, the editor is expecting it to look like you when you’re done, when you’re hired to ink something. KEVIN: Yeah. And there’s no question that by now that’s the reputation I’m stuck with. Even if I ink a lot of people, like I have lately, and I’m fairly faithful to the pencils, they see that as an exception to the rule. Now people give me a hard time when they don’t think there’s enough of me showing through. It’s weird. MM: From that point on, you’re doing a lot of covers. Did you enjoy doing the covers as much as sequential storytelling? Did you find them challenging enough to keep your interest? KEVIN: Yeah, I did. Doing all those Strange Tales covers for Carl was great, because I loved drawing Doctor Strange. Even though a lot of them were split covers, they were still a lot of fun to do. And they were easy to do; they didn’t take a lot of time. After we’d done a few, he allowed me to color them myself, and it went pretty well. MM: How many covers were you able to do? Obviously you did quite a few that year. Did you spend as much time on a cover as you would, say, a page? KEVIN: I look back at that run of covers and I can see that I was trying on some of them to just work as quickly as I could, because I was still painfully aware of the fact that I had to pick up some speed to make a good living. And I wish I hadn’t. I can really tell the ones that I just knocked out in a hurry. They come back to haunt you. So if I had just taken a little more 36

MM: Is it something that you want finished just to say you’ve finished it? KEVIN: Yeah, absolutely. Just to have the thing done, to have it published. MM: How far along did you get on it? time on those, I think I would have been ahead of the game. It’s just... [sighs] I’m just not one of those guys whose brain is wired for speed. There’s never been any job where I couldn’t go back in and do a little finessing and fix some of the mistakes and make it a better piece by spending just a little extra bit of time. But I did have a really good time with those covers. I don’t remember a whole lot of covers for DC at that time—

KEVIN: Like 50 pages, I think. MM: Out of how many? KEVIN: 62?

KEVIN: Yes.

Previous Page: Kevin still enjoys drawing Dr. Strange. This recent commission piece comes fully equipped with Clea, as well. This Page: Preliminary sketches from the unfinished Man-Thing graphic novel.

MM: There were a couple of Secret Origins covers.

MM: Did his falling out with Marvel have anything to do with the book’s delay?

KEVIN: Yeah, for Mark Waid, and those were very easy to do and usually involved interesting characters. Again, after the first couple of covers they would trust me enough to let me do my own color guides. That helped a lot, too.

KEVIN: No, no, not at all. It was 100% me. It just basically came down to me trying to work quickly enough to make a living, agreeing to do a book where every panel was a painting, and finally getting to the point where I had to take on other work to pay my rent and stuff. What often happens with those things is they get put on the backburner and it’s almost impossible to get them back off again. But we’ll see.

MM: Was it around this time that you started working on the Man-Thing graphic novel? KEVIN: Probably. I don’t know the exact date, but yeah, I guess it would have been.

MM: Oh, so you were practically there. KEVIN: Yeah, and the other pages are at least penciled. MM: And that was written by Steve Gerber, right?

MM: How did that come about? Who pitched you on the idea of doing that? KEVIN: Ralph did, Ralph Macchio. I don’t know how much you want to talk about Man-Thing. I’ve sent a couple of e-mails and a Marvel editor is supposed to get back to me about it, because we’re trying to figure out a way to get the thing finished and published and all of that. It really has been this awful albatross around my neck since the late ’80s, and it makes me cringe when people bring it up, to this day. 37

With any luck at all, we’ll somehow get it finished and published.

MM: Well, early in ’89 you did an actual story for Secret Origins rather than just a cover, “The Secret Origin of Man-Bat.” That was with Jan. And, again, you were doing the whole job, pencil and inks, colors, and lettering. KEVIN: Yeah, I think that was one of the first times where I called up someone and just begged to draw it, because I was talking to Jan about some other project, and he mentioned that he was writing the “Secret Origin of Man-Bat” story for Mark Waid, and I just about came out of my skin. I thought, “Aw, man, I would love to do that!” And they gave me the deadline, and I’m painfully optimistic instead of realistic when it comes to my own working schedule, but they needed it fairly quickly. I think it was a month for pencils and then another month for inks. So it wasn’t impossible, but the work had to be done fair38

ly quickly. It always surprises me when I’m a day or two past the “deadline” and I’m worried that I’ve really messed up the schedule until the editor comes back and says, “Hey, do you want to color this as well?” [laughter] Obviously there was still a little time left in the schedule. And that’s happened so many times, where I think, “Oh, I would love to color this, but I don’t dare ask, because I’m turning in the inks late.” And then weeks later they call up and ask me to color it, and I realize it just sat on someone’s shelf for a while. [laughter] I was panicked getting pages out to meet the deadline. MM: Now, you went back a little bit to the approach you used for New Mutants, but you had it more solidified this time, and really had it down this time, I think. KEVIN: Yeah. And it’s so funny, because I look at those jobs as basically being drawn the same way. The New Mutants job and the “Man-Bat.” But again, New Mutants was met

with universal contempt but “Man-Bat” seemed to be well received. For a long time I just blamed it on the coloring and the bad printing on New Mutants, but I think there was more to it than that.

do with the established origin. The movie that night was a love story, and a young Bruce Wayne is bored, has no interest in the movie, so he goes exploring and he meets this kid who later grows up to be... Kyle?

MM: I think it’s a difference in the audience. The New Mutants readers versus the DC readers, they expect different kinds of art.

MM: Kirk Langstrom. KEVIN: Kirk Langstrom. Good job! And for some reason, they changed it. They changed my lettering and made me look like an idiot who couldn’t do reference, who couldn’t be bothered to draw a face that looked like Natalie Wood. And it’s a little thing, but it really bothered me, because I could have drawn a panel, I could have drawn characters that suggested West Side Story on the screen, but as Jan wrote it, it was supposed to be something very, very generic. I don’t know why in the world they would have done that, but I guess they had a reason for it. So that was sort of a strange alteration for them to make. Well, when it came to that pigeon balloon, I remember I broached the subject with Jan, and he said, “No, no. Leave it in. That’ll give us something to bargain with when they want to change other things.” [laughter] I don’t think either of us really cared that much about it, it was just sort of a throwaway gag.

KEVIN: Exactly. Plus, a character like Batman with his costume design just lends itself to simplification. There were a lot of scenes in that story where, like, he’s holding up a flashlight and he’s shining it into Man-Bat’s face. So all you have to indicate that Batman is behind that flashlight is the outline of his head with those two ears sticking up. And it just made me realize that it’s a fantastic costume, because it can be simplified so much, and it not only reads well when it’s simplified, it’s more mysterious. When he’s half in shadow, he’s a much more dramatic character. And Man-Bat himself is a blast, because he’s a terrific-looking monster—this human with giant bat wings and a bat head—and Jan’s script called for him to get more and more grotesque and animalistic-looking as the story progressed. MM: Yeah, by the end you have him drooling.

MM: So what made you think of doing that? It’s like the whole screwball thought balloon in the Warner Brothers cartoons. And you did something similar later on, in “Jack B. Quick,” where he has the old kerosene lamp instead of a light bulb over his head when he comes up with an idea. Was that you, or was it Alan?

KEVIN: Yeah, yeah. MM: And there’s almost a quirkiness to it as far as—in places it almost seems light, but at the same time serious. How much of that was you putting stuff into the story? KEVIN: I did put in one odd, little thing.

KEVIN: That was Alan. [laughs] I wouldn’t do something like that without Alan knowing about it. Jan did it again on an advertising thing that we did. We did two of these—

MM: The pigeon balloon? KEVIN: Yeah, exactly. I had Jan’s blessing on it, but it was one of those things that you do, sort of like daring them to make you change it. I think at that point they had already asked for quite a few changes. I know they made one change without us even knowing about it. Originally the movie that Bruce Wayne’s parents were seeing was a love story, so I drew a generic couple kissing on the screen and they changed it to West Side Story. It actually has nothing to

MM: For Details? KEVIN: Yeah. I don’t know if you saw those, but there’s one where some pedestrians are looking at this teenager running along the sidewalk acting strange, and Jan suggested just drawing an acorn for the thought balloon. MM: [laughs] “What a nut.” 39

KEVIN: Yeah, yeah.

those weird little subconscious things.

MM: When did you do those Details jobs?

MM: It’s so natural that it should be set there that he just assumed it was, I guess. He just mentally overwrote the history.

KEVIN: I think the first one was ’97. Jan wrote the next one in ’98, but they had a different artist. They came back and asked me to do it in ’99, I think. So it should have been ’97 and ’99, I believe.

KEVIN: Yeah, that just seemed to sort of happen by accident or subconsciously with Jan, and I just thought it was one of those really nice little touches that made the story better, where you had these two strange bat-hybrid men in a confrontation, and in the background you have statues that are a jackalheaded creature and a hippopotamus-headed creature, it just seemed to work so beautifully. But again, it was apparently an accident.

MM: We’ll come back to the Details ads later. The pigeon was probably the most overt gag, but there was a little quirkiness to the story throughout. KEVIN: I gotta say, and you can edit this out if I’ve talked about it in other interviews, but one of the most amazing things for me on that job—you know how some projects seem so totally jinxed? Like ManThing. But with “Man-Bat,” everything just fell together so beautifully. I started out thinking, “Well, it’ll be sort of a re-creation of the old Frank Robbins and Neal Adams story.” And then it turned out to be something very different. I thought I’d be swiping actual pages from the Neal Adams story, but it turns out Jan changed the story enough that there either wasn’t an opportunity to do that, or I just kind of forgot about the Neal Adams story completely. Which is hard to believe! [Eric laughs] But I look back on it, I don’t even think of is being a retelling of the Neal Adams story. And then that first page, where they start out in a museum. I said something to Jan about it, I said, “Oh, this is great, Jan, this is so perfect! Because we’ve got ‘Bat-Man’ and we’ve got ‘Man-Bat’ and they’re confronting each other, and look at this perfect setting you came up with, where they’re in the Egyptian room of this museum, so of course I’m doing reference for the backgrounds and I’m getting all these Egyptian gods with animal heads! It’s so perfect!” And Jan said, “Ummm... no, that was in the original story.” I said, “No way!” And I went back and looked, and he’s totally wrong! In the original story the scene takes place in the gem room, not the Egyptian room. So Jan didn’t even know he’d made the change, it was one of

MM: A happy accident, but there you go. [laughs] KEVIN: Yeah, I wish I could have more of those! MM: There’s a few more covers and things in ’89. Is there any specific memories you have of those, like the Hulk cover and the Wolverine covers that you did? KEVIN: No, not really. Again, the usual thing. They started out kind of weak because they either wouldn’t let me color them myself or I didn’t even ask to color them myself, and then, once they were allowing me to do the color guides, I think they got better. And then, unfortunately, with the Wolverine, I totally lost interest in them [laughs] after maybe four of them. The last two were really, really weak. I probably should have been more of a professional and just declined. MM: What was it about them that made you lose interest? KEVIN: I don’t know. I just had no enthusiasm for them whatsoever. My favorite is the one where he’s hanging out of the police car—I really liked that one. After that, I just had a hard time getting into them. 40

MM: Did you start doing the design work for Batman: the Animated Series before or after the “Man-Bat” story got published? KEVIN: After. MM: Do you think maybe that story had something to do with you getting the call to submit design work for the show? KEVIN: I’m not sure, because when Bruce Timm first called me, he asked me to do designs for a bunch of different characters, not just Man-Bat. I guess it’s possible. Maybe the look of that story, where everything is kind of simplified, maybe that suggested that I could work in a style that would be better suited to animation, as opposed to the heavily-rendered work. But I never really discussed that with Bruce, so I honestly don’t know. MM: I’ve seen your designs for Man-Bat, Killer Croc. How many other characters did you do? Was it a bunch? KEVIN: Yeah, I did a lot of them, but a lot of them were secondary characters, three henchmen for the Joker and that kind of stuff. But yeah, I did Killer Croc, The Ventriloquist, Ra’s al Ghul and the Mad Hatter. I did some Penguin designs but then they switched and made him look like Danny Devito in the Tim Burton movie. I think they used some of what I did for the Joker. And Robin. I’m not sure about Alfred. Possibly Alfred, but I’m not certain. Like I said, a lot of secondary characters, like a judge... I can’t think what others, but there were quite a few. MM: Did they give you any kind of clues about what they were looking for, or did they just say, “Do your thing and we’ll look at it from there?” KEVIN: Yeah, Bruce would call up and say, “Give me ten sketches. Give me some of this guy, and I need a couple of henchmen that appear together in one scene, so they need to be noticeably different from each other.” That kind of thing. But then, beyond that, there really wasn’t much artdirecting.

MM: Did you get into it, designing your takes on the characters? Obviously it paid a lot better than the comics work. KEVIN: Yeah, they did. I enjoyed it a lot, because it was sort of the fun part of drawing, just reworking a character and getting all the essential elements down, but then there wasn’t any of the tedious stuff. I didn’t even do the turnaround, somebody else ended up doing those. MM: Did you ever do any more animation, beyond those two seasons? KEVIN: Nope. When I was in my 20s, I went together with some friends and we bought an animation stand and we did some short little Super-Eight animated things. Basically just kind of an experiment to see what we could do. We didn’t really go very far with it other than animating some characters moving through a scene, that kind of stuff. But that was obviously long before the Batman cartoon. When they did Space Jam, somebody from Ivan Reitman’s office 41

KEVIN: Yeah, anyone from that generation.

called and asked me to do some designs for aliens, and I did a bunch of those. I think Arthur Adams and Mike Mignola did as well. But they didn’t end up using them. So that was pretty much it.

MM: Does that project mean any more to you because of that? KEVIN: Yeah. I’d certainly been a big fan of his work, because that was the Batman that I grew up reading, the “new-look” Batman of the late ’60s. It was a bit of a challenge just because the pencils were very, very sketchy. I really like the way Carmine inked his own pencils but I couldn’t figure out how to do that, so it was tough to work over pencils that were so loose. Even though some of the blacks were roughed in, you’d almost have to call them layouts because the details were so sketchy. So it wasn’t easy, but it was fun. And I remember really pestering Mark Waid, who was the editor, and saying, “I don’t know how to do this, you’ve gotta give me some guidance.” He was very encouraging, and when I turned in the first couple of pages, he said, “That’s exactly what we’re looking for.” So I guess he was happy with it, but I was a little bit lost.

MM: Have you ever actively sought out more animation work? KEVIN: No. I’d probably have to move to southern California. MM: Not necessarily. A lot of storyboarders freelance from various places.

MM: Did you ever get any feedback from Carmine about what he thought?

KEVIN: Yeah, but that’s storyboard work. I’m not sure that I’d have a whole lot of interest in storyboarding, because, boy, you do a lot of work, and very little of what you do actually ends up on the screen. Even with the character designs for Bruce Timm, there was only one character that really looked like the drawings I had done, and that was Killer Croc. The rest of them were changed quite a bit. As you probably noticed, I like to have a lot of control over the final outcome and that’s easier to do in comics than it is in animation. So I don’t know. I know quite a few artists who have done animation work like that. It doesn’t really seem to light a fire under me, for some reason.

KEVIN: Well, I’d be terrified to do that. [laughter]

MM: Okay. In Action #642, you inked a chapter over Carmine Infantino. That was probably the first time that you inked one of the legends, so to speak. 42

Previous Page Top: One more of Kevin’s designs for B:TAS. Previous Page Bottom: How would you like to play a little three-onthree with these guys? Meet Void, Null, and Nada—unused character designs for Space Jam. This Page: The legendary Carmine Infantino’s pencils and Kevin’s inks for the top half of page 33 of Action Comics Weekly #642. Green Lantern, Man-Bat ™ and ©2004 DC Comics. Space Jam ™ and ©2004 Warner Bros.

Because, really, I’m not sure how much of Carmine actually came through in those panels, so I wouldn’t expect him to be thrilled. MM: In 1990, you kind of went back to the independents for just a bit. You did a “Dalgoda” story for A-1. How did that come about? You’d broken into the big leagues. What was the impetus for going back to a smaller-scaled company again? KEVIN: Dave Elliott called and asked me to do it. Beyond that, I don’t even remember. They had put out some really nice books. I didn’t really look at them as being small time. It didn’t seem like a step backward. MM: That’s true, they did have high-quality production values.

KEVIN: Yeah! They gave me a really good deadline, Jan wrote a really, really clever story. I do remember I had at least one false start at that story, because I tried to draw it in a more rendered style, and it didn’t work 43

Above: Pages 3 and 10 of the Dalgoda story, “The Hero of the Tale,” done for A-1—a great action sequence, and the page that made Kevin feel like a real cartoonist. Next Page: Pin-up art from Wonder Woman #50. Dalgoda ™ and ©2004 Jan Strnad and Dennis Fujitake. Wonder Woman ™ and ©2004 DC Comics.

at all. So that’s why I ended up with that simpler style, because it just seemed to work, for some reason. And there were many situations where I thought the story really required actual cartooning instead of realistic illustrations. Like, there’s one panel where Dalgoda does a double-take, and so you’ve got two heads, one pointing in one direction, one pointing in the other, and it was a blast, because I really felt like I was being a cartoonist for the first time. MM: You don’t do that type of broad humor all that often. Did that story make you want to do more of that? KEVIN: Yeah, I would like to do more humorous stuff. As you might expect, it’s always a lot of fun. It’s difficult sometimes, because just like they say, timing is so important with comedy, with humor. Because setting up the gag is really, really important. You can be a little bit more 44

casual with dramatic stuff, I think. But sometimes the gags just don’t work at all if you don’t do the timing exactly right, or if the drawings aren’t as clear as possible. MM: Do you find humor more difficult than doing straight-ahead action, or more time-consuming? KEVIN: It can be. It’s sort of a trade-off. The time that you might save in doing less rendering is probably more than eaten up by the extra time required for breaking down a story and refining the layouts, and, like I said, working out the timing so that everything goes smoothly. People accept exaggeration and stylization more easily with humorous material. With drama, they want you to keep that in check.

Part 4:

Is That Inker... or Finisher?

MM: Well, you went from “Dalgoda” to inking an Uncanny X-Men cover over Jim Lee. And he’s got a lot of rendering in his work.

pencils? KEVIN: Yeah, some of them. And she called up and we had a talk about it. I apologized for just totally overwhelming what she had done. It was one of those situations where I honestly didn’t know how to ink those pencils. I love her work, I thought her Star Wars work was just fantastic, but I was just completely lost on those pencils. And it was absolutely no reflection on the quality of her work, I just couldn’t figure out how to ink those pencils. The facial features she drew reminded me of Marie Severin’s work and I think Marie would have been a good choice for an inker on that job, but they called me and were fairly persistent in spite of my reservations. Sometimes editors want to pretend they’re mad scientists and put together strange combinations of pencilers with inkers.

KEVIN: Yeah, a lot of rendering. Not really many shadows, but a lot of little lines. MM: How did you approach that job? Because that was a little bit different from what you’d been doing. KEVIN: That’s one of those things where I have almost no memory of it whatsoever, because it was penciled so tightly that it was sort of a classic “just trace the lines” situation. I remember it was shot a bit too light. I probably inked it a little lighter than I should have, but I was reacting to the delicate pencil work and trying to be faithful to it. I don’t really have much memory beyond that. MM: A couple months later you inked Wonder Woman #52 over Cynthia Martin. Did George Pérez ask for you to do that job?

MM: What was it about it that was giving you trouble?

KEVIN: No, I don’t think so. They asked me to ink a fill-in issue, and I think at one point it was going to be Jill Thompson doing the pencils, and then it ended up being Cynthia Martin. Poor Cynthia, because for the most part she was totally buried in that job, to the point that, on the last few pages, she just did little quick circles for faces, because she knew I was going to totally redraw them. [laughs]

KEVIN: The faces. I think her Star Wars work was a lot more expressive and kind of elastic and more freely penciled. These pages seemed kind of rigid, and there wasn’t that range of expression and exaggeration that I’d seen in the Star Wars stuff. Maybe she just felt more comfortable with Star Wars, I don’t know. But yeah, I was really a poor choice to work on that story, and the results weren’t very good. It would have been much better to have seen her ink her own pencils.

MM: Was she seeing your inks before she finished the 45

MM: In ’91 you did some work for Continuity. Over a couple of years, you did maybe four or five covers for them. Who approached you to do work for Continuity? KEVIN: Kris Adams, Neal’s daughter. She’d call once in a while and ask me to ink some stuff. And obviously, Neal Adams was one of my favorite comic artists, so I think the first few things I did for them were inking over his pencils on a couple of covers. His pencils were fairly loose on the first one and I didn’t handle it very well. Then he did another one, a Ms. Mystic cover that was nicely, tightly penciled, and that was a blast to ink.

Previous Page: Cover art from Continuity’s Armor #11. Right: Neal Adams’ pencils and Kevin’s inks from an unpublished Samuree tale. Next Page Top: Cover art for Showcase ’94 #1. Joker ™ and ©2004 DC Comics. Armor, Samuree ™ and ©2004 Neal Adams/Continuity Comics.

MM: In ’92, you start working with Joe Quesada, inking some things for him, pin-ups and things, and a really cool cover for X-Factor. And he was the one that kind of brought you in on Batman: Sword of Azrael? KEVIN: I think so, yeah. It sounded like it was a choice between me and one other guy and Jimmy pushed him toward me. MM: How did you set up how that was going to work? In places you really followed pretty closely to his pencils. I assume he penciled really tightly. KEVIN: Yes. MM: You came through more on the faces, especially the medium shots. How did you feel about that project overall? Was it set up going 46

in that this would be a big deal for DC? KEVIN: Yeah, Joe said it was going to be a big event. He was fairly secretive, but his enthusiasm was contagious. I didn’t know that whole thing about Batman getting his back broken and all of that. But Joe was really excited, and it was so funny because he kept calling me “Mr. Nowlan.” [laughter] I kept telling him to call me “Kevin,” and he finally relented. After he was promoted to editor-in-chief at Marvel I told him, “I’d like you to go back to calling me ‘Mr. Nowlan.’ ” [laughter] Bill Kaplan was the assistant editor on the book and I dealt with him more than anyone else. He was terrific to work with. He was very supportive and encouraging. Azrael was a lot of work. MM: It looked like it. There’s a lot of panels there, and there’s a lot going on in the panels, too. KEVIN: Yeah, absolutely. But it was also a lot of fun. Lovern Kindzierski did the coloring, and did a really nice job. That was

KEVIN: His pencils—they were detailed pencils, but everything was very, very clearly spelled out. He was also fairly tolerant of me going in and reworking areas that were, like, shadows on a face or something like that, I might not be able to figure out the best way to do that just looking at his pencils, so I’d go in and do some redrawing. For the most part, he was okay with that. Although I believe at one point Jimmy Palmiotti said that if he—Jimmy—had done that to Joe’s pencils, Joe would have killed him. [laughter] So I think Joe was giving me quite a bit of breathing room. And as far as I know, it worked well.

one of the first things that I’d done that was colored in Photoshop. And Lovern’s terrific; he’s got a really nice color sense and didn’t over-render things into something unrecognizable. I was pretty happy with that. I certainly started getting a lot more offers to ink things after that. But overall it was a very pleasant experience. MM: That kind of set you up as basically an inker for several years, you didn’t do a whole lot of penciling over the next few years. Was that a good thing for you, or do you kind of regret not doing more penciling work? KEVIN: It was okay, because there were still books that were selling well enough to be paying royalties back then, so that was about the only way I was ever going to get any kind of healthy royalty check on any assignment was if I was inking someone else’s pencils. Otherwise, if I was penciling and inking and coloring, the number of pages I could put out was so limited that it’d be unlikely I’d ever earn much extra money. MM: I assume you enjoyed working with Joe, because you had done all that work at Marvel with him, and after that, you inked a Solar cover over his pencils. What was it about working with Joe that you worked so well together?

MM: Moving up to ’93, you inked a story in Showcase ’93. It was a Jade and Obsidian story—low profile characters. Andrew Kudelka, kind of an unknown guy, penciled. How did you get attached to that story? At that point, coming off of Sword of Azrael, it seemed like that job was a little beneath you, maybe. KEVIN: No, I didn’t think anything was beneath me. MM: Well, it seems like they would have put you on something a little more high-profile. KEVIN: Oh, yeah, but I think I was probably—I don’t remember what I got offered right after Sword of Azrael, but I was probably staying away from longer assignments, and looking forward to doing some short stories, pin-ups, things like that, just so there wouldn’t be this enormous deadline hanging over me for months and months and months. That really just sort of wears you down. So yeah, that Kudelka thing—was it before or after I did a Joker cover for them? MM: It was right before. January ’94 is the Joker cover. KEVIN: Yeah. So I think Neal Posner was calling once in a while, offering me this and offering me that. And that just looked like kind of a fun little short story to work on. MM: I guess not long after that, or during that, maybe even before that, you started working with Mike Mignola on Aliens: Salvation. That’s the first time you worked together, right? 47

This Page and Next: Back in the late ’80s, Mike penciled a Clayface tale—from a hilarious script by Steve Purcell— for Secret Origins. It was rejected (though not by Secret Origins editor Mark Waid) for being too silly, even though—or perhaps because—much of the dialogue was taken from the original story. Recently, it looked as though the story might finally see print and Kevin was brought in to ink Mike’s long since finished pencils, but as yet it has not been put on the schedule. Below is a panel from page 1. The next page shows Mike’s pencils and Kevin’s inks for pages 4 and 9 of the story. Batman, Clayface, Robin ™ and ©2004 DC Comics.

KEVIN: No, I had inked several covers at Marvel years before.

Wait, I’m not even sure if I saw the third one....

MM: It was probably the first time since he had refined his style.

MM: You didn’t miss anything if you didn’t. [laughs]

KEVIN: Oh, absolutely, yeah. You could see he’d really worked out his style beautifully by the time he penciled the Aliens story. It was an amazing job to work on.

KEVIN: Okay. [laughs] Yeah, I thought the original one was really creepy. The advantage that it has is you see a little of the alien, slowly, and you’re not sure what this thing even looks like. It’s such a strangely-shaped creature that it’s completely disorienting when it slips out of the plumbing there on the little shuttlecraft and attacks Ripley. It’s a really, really scary movie to see for the first time. But after that, when there are Alien toys in the Montgomery Ward catalog, and the second movie the aliens are all over the place and there’s not much mystery to them now. Plus, the second movie kind of seems like a John Wayne movie or something, as opposed to the creepiness of the original.

MM: Mignola seems to be the guy that you do very little to the pencils. KEVIN: He asked me to do a lot. [laughs] He had seen me inking other people, and I think his exact words were, “I want to see you ink this the way you ink all these other guys and redraw everything to look like you.” [laughter] And I got these pencils and they were astonishing! They were reasonably simple, but everything was perfect, and there wasn’t any place where I could see an opportunity to make a contribution. Ironically enough, he was upset that I didn’t go in and make more of a contribution. And I kept saying, “What am I going to change? It’s your fault for doing everything perfect! There’s nothing to change!” [Eric laughs] I tried to do a little rendering with a finer line than he might have, but it still really looks like it’s 99% Mike. So yeah, I think for years— he might even still be angry about it, I don’t know. I inked this old Clayface story over his pencils and went to town in a couple of places so hopefully that will make him happy. MM: [laughs] Were you a fan of the Alien movies at all? KEVIN: Yeah, I really liked the first one a lot. The second, third, less so. 48

MM: Yeah. And Salvation had more of that creepiness to it. KEVIN: Yeah! I wasn’t that familiar with Dave Gibbons’ writing up to that point, but I thought he wrote a terrific story. Mike said that it was written more in a kind of Watchmen style, with a lot of little panels and slow progression of action and stuff like that, and I don’t know how much Mike changed that to suit his style, but the results were, I thought, really impressive. He was miserable, by the way. I don’t think I’m telling any secrets here. We were all very excited and impressed as the pencils started to arrive, but he told the editor at one point, “Don’t you think for even one moment that I’m enjoying this.” [laughter] And I look at these pages and I think, “How could he not have enjoyed this? They’re so beautiful!” But he didn’t. He was already, I think, starting to work on Hellboy, and this was just a distraction. MM: Well, you must have enjoyed it, because you came back to Aliens several times. With the Superman/Aliens and the WildCATS/Aliens. KEVIN: Yeah, it’s funny, because I started getting asked to do all this Aliens stuff. And the reason I liked Salvation was working

Right: Superman/Aliens #3, page 31. An interesting look at the page partway through the inking process. Pencils by Dan Jurgens. Below: Dan and Kevin teamed up for this cover to Capital City’s Advance catalogue, back when Diamond had a bit more competition. Next Page Top: Cover to WildCATs/Aliens. Pencils by Gil Kane. Next Page Bottom: Page 9 of WildCATs #25. Pencils by Dave Johnson. Superman ™ and ©2004 DC Comics. WildCATs ™ and ©2004 Aegis Entertainment, Inc. dba WildStorm Productions. Aliens ™ and ©2004 20th Century Fox Film Corp.

over Mike’s pencils. It wasn’t like I really had a burning desire to do more Aliens material, they just kept calling me and asking me to do this stuff. So I did a lot more than I ever would have planned on doing, just because I kept getting asked to do it. MM: Did they ever ask you to do any of the regular series as well? KEVIN: I don’t know if they asked me to do that. I did WildCATS, I did two Superman/Aliens stories, I did a one-page thing in Aliens: Havoc. MM: Not long after Salvation you did some work for Image: the Stormwatch Special and just a little later, WildCATS #25. KEVIN: Right, with Dave Johnson. MM: Let’s talk about the Stormwatch Special first. When did you first get asked to do work with Image? KEVIN: I honestly don’t remember the first thing. MM: Was Stormwatch, if not the first thing you did, at least the first interior work, I believe? KEVIN: You’re talking about the back-up story? MM: Yeah. KEVIN: Yeah. And I believe that was before Scott Dunbier started working for them. Originally I thought the two were related, because Scott and I had been friends for quite a while. You know what? It was Bill Kaplan, the editor I worked with on Sword of Azrael who moved out to California, and for a time he was an assistant editor out there at Wildstorm, and I think that’s the connection there that I’m missing. Like I said, I had worked really well with him on Sword of Azrael, and then when he started working out at Wildstorm, he gave me a call here and there about little jobs like that. MM: Is there anything in particular you remember about that little back-up? 50

mash of Dave Johnson, me, John Nyberg inked some of that. And Glen Murakami colored it, or colored part of it. It was one of those jobs almost like one of those old Crusty Bunker jobs where everybody and his mother was pitching in to get this thing done, to make the deadline. MM: Is that the first time you had worked, even if it was indirectly, with Alan Moore? KEVIN: Yeah, I bet it was. And I’ll be honest, since Dave was penciling that story, I didn’t even— MM: No contact at all? KEVIN: Yeah, I didn’t have any contact with Alan. I’m not even sure if I even saw the script. I just pretty much left it up to Dave to do all the storytelling. MM: So what exactly were you doing versus what John Nyberg was doing? Was it like, John gets a page, you get a page; or is it you filling in some backgrounds? KEVIN: Yeah, John did some pages where I got Dave’s pencils and finished the faces and the figures in pencil and then sent at least a couple of pages on to John, and John would ink

KEVIN: It was penciled by a guy who’d been doing assistant penciling, drawing backgrounds for other people, and this was his big break doing full pencils, I guess. I think I was drawing the short Sandman story for Vertigo Jam at the time, but I had a little deadline conflict and ended up inking mainly the main figures. He had penciled the entire story, so I thought if somebody else was going to help out with the backgrounds, it probably should be him. So the story went back to him and he finished the backgrounds. So again, I didn’t spend a whole lot of time on it, I’m afraid. MM: What about WildCATS #25? You were a bit more involved in that one. Dave Johnson had kind of loosely penciled that, is that right? KEVIN: No, his pencils were pretty tight, especially on the backgrounds. Back then, Dave was probably better known or more comfortable doing hardware and backgrounds and buildings and cityscapes and stuff like that than he was drawing people. So he was a lifesaver on that job, because he would turn in these pencils that had cityscapes completely finished, but then the people, the faces, the figures, and stuff like that would be just sort of blocked in or a lot less finished than the backgrounds. He even inked quite a bit of that as well. It’s a real mish51

everything, or maybe in some cases ink just the backgrounds. I’m not sure exactly. Like I said, it was a real mish-mash. Every page was probably different as far as who did what.

MM: In a similar scene where Savant and Tao kind of have that little get-together, one of the panels had little hearts around the word balloon. That looked like something you would add to it.

MM: In that story, there were little cameos there on one of the pages. Besides the whole Mr. Majestic/Clark’s Bar thing, also in Clark’s Bar there’s a Killer Croc in the background, and there are a few different versions of Wolverine sitting at the bar. Were those characters already there in the pencils when you got it?

KEVIN: No, I don’t think I did. That was either Dave or maybe even the letterer. It actually sounds to me like something Dave would have done. So yeah, it definitely wasn’t me. MM: In 1996, DC and Marvel teamed up to do the Amalgam comics line, where they merged DC’s characters with Marvel’s characters to create these new characters. And you worked on Dr. Strangefate, combining Doctor Strange, which is one of your favorite characters—

KEVIN: Yeah, I think that was Dave. I might have put in the Killer Croc guy. MM: Because that Killer Croc looked exactly like your Killer Croc.

KEVIN: Right.

KEVIN: Yeah. I don’t think Dave had Killer Croc in mind, but the whole joke there with Clark’s Bar is to have all these super-heroes hanging out. Dave probably just had a figure penciled in there and left it up to me to make him specific.

MM: —And Doctor Fate, with a little bit of Charles Xavier in there, to boot. Now, you were inking over José Luis García-López for that issue, and he has very tight, detailed pencils. That was your first time inking him, correct? KEVIN: I believe so, yeah. His pencils were beautiful... not overly rendered, but complete. MM: So it’s still open to interpretation? KEVIN: Yeah, it really is. On the other hand, there’s virtually nothing to work out as far as perspective and structure and things like that. José’s pencils weren’t quite as open as Gil Kane’s, but to my eye they were a little closer to Gil’s, and to John Buscema’s, than to other more contemporary pencilers like Adam Hughes and Terry Dodson and a few others. Everything’s there, it’s just a question of figuring out what kind of line to put on it. You just have small decisions like line weight and technique to think about. José takes care of the heavy lifting. MM: How did you get paired up? Was it just the editor calling you up and saying, “Do you want to do this?” KEVIN: Yeah, the editor just called me. I had no idea what led to them picking me to do that. I’d been a big fan of José’s work, but I don’t think I’d ever discussed it with the editor, Dan Thorsland. So I think it was just a fluke. MM: What was more interesting for you? Was it getting back to work on—well, not exactly Doctor Strange, but a Doctor Strange-like character? KEVIN: Yeah, I didn’t really even think of it as being Doctor Strange or Doctor Fate. [laughs] The interesting part was just working on José’s pencils, because I felt like it really was an education just to be able to see how he works things out and see the underdrawing and get some 52

sense of how he puts a page together, puts a panel together. And again seeing that he doesn’t try to ink with the pencil the way some people do, he stops right at the point where an inker should take over and finish things up. And also because he draws so well, because his draftsmanship is so impeccable, it’s fairly easy to ink, because you’re never correcting mistakes. You’re never trying to strengthen something that looks a little weak in the pencils. You’re just inking. MM: I’ve talked to many different artists, and when they talk about José, they always say “draftsman.” What is the definition that most artists hold for draftsmanship? They don’t talk about his layouts, per se, or anything else specifically, they just say he’s a great “draftsman.” Is that a wide range of things you’re talking about when you say that? KEVIN: Yeah. I think when people say draftsmanship, they may be being specific that they’re referring to the drawing ability as

opposed to storytelling or other things that come into comic art. When you look at one of José’s drawings you have a real sense that he understands it, inside and out. Whether it’s a figure or a costume or a background. If he draws a prop, you get the feeling that he knows how this is built and how it works, how much it weighs and how a person would move if they picked it up. There’s not a thing that doesn’t look genuine. He isn’t just focused on the surface qualities. He’s just a first-rate picture maker. He’s a terrific illustrator. And he’s also a very, very good storyteller, I think. The action always moves very smoothly and clearly from panel to panel. You’re never lost, even though his layouts have a lot of energy to them. You’re never trying to figure out what exactly is going on in a specific panel and all of that. But yeah, just his ability to draw figures and props and backgrounds, and make it look 100% authentic, and give it just enough—he elongates the figures a little bit so they’re not normal, 53

Previous Page: Enter... Dr. Strangefate. Page 5 of Dr. Strangefate. Above: José Luis GarcíaLópez’s pencils and Kevin’s inks for Dr. Strangefate, page 8. The flicked cigarette adds that extra bit of character to the page. Dr. Strangefate, Jade Nova, Myx, Skulk, White Witch ™ and ©2004 DC Comics and Marvel Characters, Inc.

Above: An absolutely fantastic panel featuring Skulk and Jade Nova, from page 15 of Dr. Strangefate. Right: Page 3 of “The Blood Red Game” from the Vampirella 25th Anniversary Special. Pencils by Michael Bair. Next Page: Place your product here. The final page of Kevin and Jan’s first 11-page comic strip ad for Details magazine. Jade Nova, Skulk, ™ and ©2004 DC Comics and Marvel Characters, Inc. Vampirella and all related characters ™ and ©2004 Harris Publications, Inc. Details ™ and ©2004 Condé Nast Publications.

everyday-man-on-thestreet proportions. They look like superheroes. They’re tall and slender and very energetic. And he doesn’t seem to stumble over anything. [laughs] He seems to be able to draw everything with equal skill. I’ve always assumed that he does a fair amount of research. He did a story [Superman, Inc.] which I did not ink, and I really wished I could have. The editor tried to get me to ink it, and sent me copies of the pencils to entice me, but I think I was busy with some other project at the time, and had to pass on it. But one scene took place in Kansas, and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing in the pencils. A guy is driving down the road, leaving Wichita and he sees little Kal-El’s spaceship crash land somewhere near the road, and he scoops up the baby. It’s not Jonathan Kent, it’s another guy, a salesman. He scoops up the baby, takes him to an orphanage, and then continues on his way to Denver. Well, I don’t think José has ever been in Kansas, but he had every single location worked out perfectly. In the first place, for central Kansas it looked perfectly flat, as it should. He had road signs along the way that had the correct number of miles from Wichita to Denver. And I couldn’t believe it! That he would—maybe it just took pulling out a map or an atlas or something like that and looking 54

these things up. The character drops off the baby at an orphanage in Hays City, which is a real town. We drive through there every time we go to Denver. In the final book they changed the name on the road sign to Mays City, which I thought was a real shame, because he had done all this work, had the correct locations and the correct mileage and everything. But it’s one thing to pull out a map and see how many miles it would be between Denver and Wichita. It’s another thing to really get a feeling for what central Kansas topography actually looks like. And he’s one of the few people that I’ve seen who’s been able to do that. I only bring that up because that’s something I’m very familiar with. And I was astonished at how accurate his drawings were. If he’s drawing the French Revolution or something, I just have to take his word for it that it’s correct,

because I don’t know. [laughter] But I knew he’d gotten the Kansas details correct. MM: Who approached you about participating in the Vampirella 25th Anniversary Special? KEVIN: I think it was the editor, David Bogart. MM: Now, you were a fan of the Warren magazines. I assume you read Vampirella as well? KEVIN: Yes, definitely. MM: So was that a project you kind of jumped at, or did you have to get talked into it? KEVIN: Boy, I don’t remember exactly. I think David sent me copies of some layouts that Michael Bair had done. I believe he told me that I would be working over layouts, so I was free to do whatever I wanted to with the layouts. That’s always a more comfortable position to be in, where the layout artist knows that the stuff is not carved in stone, and I’ll be working with shadows, and I may even move a few things around here and there if I feel like I need to. So no, I don’t think I had to be talked into it too much. It sounded like a fun job. MM: Did you interact with Grant Morrison, who wrote the script, at all? KEVIN: No, no. MM: You just got the layouts only? KEVIN: Yeah, exactly. I think they sent me a copy of the script. Sometimes editors don’t even do that. No, I didn’t have a chance to talk to Grant.

those first stories? MM: Yeah. There was a lot of humor in it. Your story didn’t have that humor in it.

MM: As a Warren fan, were you happy with the story?

KEVIN: No, not at all. And then Archie Goodwin’s stories were more dramatic.

KEVIN: Yeah, I thought it was a nice, creepy little short story. I really loved the Bruce Timm story they did. I thought that was a really great example of what could be done with the character, a nice little self-contained short story like that.

MM: Did you provide color notes? Because it seemed like Reuben Rude, who did the coloring, tried to emulate your coloring style in a couple of places. KEVIN: No, not at all. I don’t think I wrote any notes, or even talked with anyone about the coloring. Sometimes you just forget about that. The black-and-white artwork can be interpreted in so many different ways by a colorist. But they did a good job, I thought. They rendered it quite a bit, but the rendering was consistent with the line drawings, so it worked.

MM: Yeah, I know. Bruce had said that he was hoping for something more in the Archie Goodwin vein, but once he got into it that he enjoyed it just as much. KEVIN: Yeah, I always kind of felt like people weren’t really too sure what to do with the character. She’s obviously a character with a fair amount of visual interest, but originally, at Warren, it looked like they couldn’t come up with a story. MM: Well, originally she was kind of a campy character.

MM: In ’97 you and Jan Strnad did your first ad for Details. How did that come about?

KEVIN: Yeah, I remember that, when Tom Sutton drew

KEVIN: This art director called me from Details. She, or 55

they, saw the Batman: Black and White story I had done. I don’t think they really knew a whole lot about comics, but they saw that, and that’s the look they wanted. Originally it was going to be a combination of photographs and drawn artwork. Like the models, the main characters, would be photographed— MM: Like a fumetti kind of thing? KEVIN: Exactly, but the backgrounds and everything else would be drawn like a comic book. Fortunately, that idea died because they ran out of time and it just seemed too cumbersome. It just didn’t seem to work. They had a very tight deadline, and as the thing went on, the deadline got tighter and tighter. It turns out they were trying to come up with a story. They had me all ready to start drawing, but they didn’t even have a script that would tie together all of these product advertisements. And this poor woman, this art director, finally said, “Do you know anyone who could write this thing?” [laughs] And I said, “Yeah, I know just the perfect guy. He’s not only a terrific comic book writer, he’s written plenty of advertising copy.” So I called up Jan and the problem was solved very, very quickly. [laughs] He had a nice little story for them, and they were so happy. He ended up doing more of those than I did. He did a second one that was drawn by another artist, and then both of us did the third one together. MM: So was it just the three, or were there more than that? KEVIN: I think there were just three. maybe we should try doing this with other magazines, approach them and see if they would be interested in doing some of these?”

MM: Did you ever get together with Jan and say, “Well,

KEVIN: We thought about it, but never followed through on it. MM: Because I assume the pay would be better than what you would get from the comics. KEVIN: [laughs] The pay was really, really good. It’s one of those things where you do advertising stuff like that, and you come back to comics and you feel like, wow. It’s like going from a paying job to charity work. [laughter] The difference in page rates is astonishing. MM: But you never actually pushed for it or anything? KEVIN: No. And it might be just that the pay’s good, but they’re not nearly as enjoyable as doing just your average comic story, because you don’t have much freedom. Even with the tight deadline, there was a fair amount of feedback from the advertisers wanting certain 56

things to look more like this or more like that, and redrawing. And again, the time crunch was unbelievable, where I really had to work long, long hours, and cut corners everywhere possible just to get the thing done on time. But we somehow managed. MM: Well, you did get to play around a lot, with the sound effects and different things. KEVIN: Yeah, see, and that’s why it was great having Jan as the writer, because he could write panels that were essentially solid sound effects and know that it would take me very little time to draw those panels, as opposed to more backgrounds and complicated action and things like that. So yeah, it worked out well.

MM: In ’97 you inked Star Wars: Dark Force Rising, a mini-series adapting the Timothy Zahn novel. Were you a Star Wars fan? KEVIN: No. Well, I mean, I liked the movies and stuff. Gil Kane was actually scheduled to do the Star Wars story. He penciled three-fourths of the first issue, and when he sent in the pencils, Lucasfilm and Dark Horse asked for a lot of changes. They sent Gil a mountain of reference material, but Gil wasn’t the type of artist who really— his stuff is not heavily-referenced. He was a lot like Jack Kirby, and the stuff is mainly coming from his imagination and he knows how to draw

MM: Did you and Jan work like you would work together on a normal comic? KEVIN: Yes, because all of the stories I’ve done with Jan have been full-script. We didn’t ever work plot first, the way I did on some of the Marvel stuff or the Outsiders Annual. MM: Did you have to take in pages as you finished them and have them approve them as you went along? KEVIN: I think I sent in fax copies of the layouts and got all of those approved, then I did the same with copies of the pencils, then I inked it and sent in the final art. Actually, I sent the final art to the colorist, who was Laura DePuy, I think, on the first one. And she sent the color files to Details. So they were seeing fax copies of the pencils and the layouts so the advertisers could check. MM: So you weren’t having to stop and wait too much for them? KEVIN: No. They were in a real panic so there was no time to waste. MM: You said earlier it wasn’t as satisfying as doing comic book work— KEVIN: Yeah, the story just exists as a framework for a bunch of advertisements. Jan did a good job pulling it all together and I had fun with the drawings, but we never fooled ourselves into thinking it we were doing it for any reason other the money. 57

Previous Page: Page 2 of “Monsters in the Closet,” from Batman Black & White #4, and a panel from the third (Kevin’s second) Details comic strip ad. Below: Unused Gil Kane pencils for the Star Wars: Dark Force Rising adaptation, with Kevin’s partial inks. Batman ™ and ©2004 DC Comics. Details ™ and ©2004 Condé Nast Publications. Star Wars ™ and ©2004 Lucasfilm LTD.

these things and make them look authentic, but when you come to a real specific world like the Star Wars universe, it’s tough, because you’ve got millions of kids out there who know what every prop and costume is supposed to look like and they’ll be upset if you get a bushing on the wrong side of a washer. So they asked for so many changes that they drove Gil off the project. It was really a shame. MM: Were you called in because Gil was there? KEVIN: I’m not sure if they called Gil first or me. But my main interest was working with Gil. I even inked some of Gil’s pages before it all fell apart. MM: So when you were inking them, were you having to make them match the likenesses and that kind of thing? Above: Detail from the Gil Kane/Kevin Nowlan cover to the Green Lantern Gallery #1. Below: Berni Wrightson’s pencils and Kevin’s inks for page 19 of an unpublished Batman and Solomon Grundy tale. Batman, Green Lantern, Solomon Grundy ™ and ©2004 DC Comics.

KEVIN: No, I think they sent me some of the pages—some changes had already been made. Like, there was some question about whether on not one of the characters was supposed to have an eye patch and that change had already been made. And then there were some pages that they held onto, because they needed all these changes. So, no, I wasn’t having to do a lot of that as I inked the pages, but I was working on the pages that they had fewer problems with. MM: So you were already there when Terry Dodson was brought in? KEVIN: Right. I think they were really panicked trying to find someone to come in and finish the job. With anything that Gil starts and doesn’t finish, you’re left with the horrible problem that no one else can draw in that style. So what are you going to do? They 58

basically just had to start over. MM: Yeah, I was going to say, Terry’s not exactly compatible with Gil! [laughs] KEVIN: Not that anyone is, or was, but Terry definitely is not. So Terry just ended up having to redraw everything Gil had already drawn. I wasn’t too happy with the coloring on that, and again, it’s one of those things where the artwork can be pretty good, but if the coloring isn’t sympathetic and doesn’t support what’s there in black-and-white, it all kind of falls apart. So it wasn’t the most pleasant job.

MM: How do you feel about working on licensed characters?

looks completely wrong. So I think what you’re saying is work through—I’d not be surprised if you wanted to do full model sheets or something like that, on some level.

KEVIN: Maybe the way to go on those is to not use so much photo reference as—it might be better to just do a little cartooning and caricature and not be quite as literal.

KEVIN: I think you’re right, and in retrospect, that would have been a better way to approach it. I didn’t realize going into it how dense this universe is, and how few opportunities there are to do what I’m sure Gil was hoping he could do, to just go in there and have fun and make stuff up and be creative. Every character is established, every prop is established, so you find yourself just paging through a mountain of reference material, and there’s just not much creating going on. I think it’s better, for one of these Star Wars things, to find an artist who’s younger and has already made something of an obsession of all this material; then they can just have fun.

MM: Yeah. When you work from photo reference, you have a limited number of angles to look at, but when those angles don’t work for the storytelling, you might not be as consistent with those you had more direct photo reference for. I think a lot of artists have that problem when they’re doing these things, where you end up with a panel of a close-up on a face and it looks just like the actor or whatever, then you turn the page and it

MM: Now, you’ve mentioned that you had inked a Batman story over Bernie Wrightson’s pencils. Would that have been around that time? KEVIN: I thought the Wrightson story was later, but I’m not sure. MM: Because in ’98 and ’99 you stayed pretty busy, so I was thinking that ’97 might have been a logical time for you to have done that. KEVIN: Yeah, and that went fairly fast, the Wrightson thing did. Yeah, let’s assume that that’s when that was done. That’s astonishing that it still hasn’t been published. DC just didn’t know exactly what to do with it. They really wanted to put it together with something else so it would be something more substantial than just a 22-page, one-shot, saddle-stitched comic book. But I don’t know. MM: Was it originally just meant to be a fill-in issue? KEVIN: [laughs] I’m not sure what it was meant for, if it was meant for Legends of the Dark Knight or what. I believe it was started when Denny O’Neil was still in charge of the Bat-office at DC, because I know it predates Bob Schreck. Ron Marz [the writer of the story] can tell you what it was originally intended for, I just don’t know. MM: Let’s talk about Gen13: Bootleg. Again you were working with Jan on that. Was that just because you had gotten back in touch and you were like, “Well, let’s work on something else together,” or was it something that just happened to coincide? KEVIN: I think it was because Scott Dunbier sort of put this thing together backwards. He may have started with me and then asked me who I wanted to work over as a penciler, and then went to find a writer. He knew that I’d worked really well with Jan over the years, so he might have automatically thought of him when he went looking for a script. 59

MM: And you picked Sean Shaw to pencil? KEVIN: Yeah, at the time Sean and I had been talking quite a bit, and he would send me copies of stuff that he was working on. He had a nice, straightforward style that I thought would work nice with my inks. MM: What about the story itself? You’d done a couple of things with Wildstorm. You’d done that Stormwatch and the WildCATS. Did those characters do anything for you, or was it just the opportunity to work with those people? KEVIN: No, I really didn’t know anything about the characters. [laughs] I really didn’t. MM: So it was more just an opportunity to work with a team that you’d helped put together? KEVIN: Yeah, and to do something with Scott, because we had been friends for quite a while. [laughs] You put it that way and I think, “Why did I do that?” [laughter] Obviously I had no interest in the characters whatsoever. It seemed like fun, it seemed like an opportunity to work with a couple of friends and to do a—not a long story, but a couple of issues that would be a little more substantial than the usual short things and pinups that I had been doing that were being overlooked. MM: Well, that kind of brings us to Superman: Distant Fires. There’s a lot of those panels where you can still see a Gil Kane face, then there’s other panels where you see a Kevin Nowlan face. Is it just feel that determines what you need to add to the page? You want to keep a consistency, as well, so how do you balance that? KEVIN: I inked a couple of pages and sent copies in to Mike Carlin, and I had inked them the way I thought they should be inked, which was in my approximation of Gil Kane’s style, because I always preferred it when Gil handled his own inks. He worked with some of the best inkers in comics; I particularly liked Wally Wood and Ralph Reese and Craig Russell. You shouldn’t even call those guys inkers, they’re artists. But I thought, “If I’m going to ink Gil, I’d rather do it like Ralph Reese and Craig Russell did,” which was to maintain Gil’s style to a degree. But Mike Carlin, when he saw the samples, said, “Absolutely not, no way.” He said, “Gil wanted to ink this himself, but we want something different than that. If this was the look we wanted, we wouldn’t have called you.” He didn’t say he wanted me to impose my own style on Gil, but he said he wanted to see a combination of our styles. And I think that might have been the first time that I realized that I had created a monster, because instead of just giving me an inking job over someone like that, where—Gil’s stuff is so beautifully worked out that you can just ink it and finish off the details and it looks terrific. Again, like García-López, the structure’s there. It just works. But, because I had done things like Superman/Aliens over Dan Jurgens’ layouts, and had done a lot of things with shadows and stuff like that, then I guess that became what editors, or at least this editor, wanted. So I really sort of panicked and tried to draw Mike Carlin out on that and get some spe60

cific suggestions. And he said, “I can’t help you there. I can’t tell you how to be you.” Howard Chaykin had written the dialogue for that, so I talked to him, because I knew he’s never at a loss for an opinion. He gave me some suggestions. Finally, talking to Gil helped me work through all of this. And I don’t even know if I brought up the specific problem with Mike Carlin, but basically I just talked to Gil about how he’d like to see these pages inked, and what he looks for an inker to do, and it was a terrific conversation. He talked about how much he loved Wally Wood’s inking, and I said, “It didn’t bother you that he sort of imposed his own style upon yours?” And he said, “Absolutely not. What he did with shadows and all of that, that was just so beautiful.” And he said he considered that to be the inker’s job, to take the pencil drawings and finish them in ink. And I think that a lot of the artists from Gil’s generation saw it that way. Carmine Infantino and John Buscema and a lot of those guys, they didn’t ink with a pencil. They concentrated on the structure, and then it was the inker’s job to turn it into a finished drawing. So that really helped. And then I went back and reworked the pages that I had already inked and added shadows and changed the lighting here and there. In a lot of places Gil would go and draw a shadow directly under the nose, and I would move it to one side, or something like that, but still try to keep the Gil Kane structure there. I think it’s there. Some people have commented they thought I overwhelmed him. To me, it still looks like Gil Kane.

and when they ask him who he wants for an inker, he keeps mentioning my name. So I kept getting covers and little short things here and there. It was terrific. The editors kept telling me, “Every time we ask Gil to pencil something, he tells us to get you to ink it.” MM: You did a lot of work for the Legends of the DC Universe series that year. In issue #6, you’re doing the finishes over Dave Taylor’s layouts. Now, I’ve got some of the pencils for those, and they look like they’re fairly finished, at least the figures are. KEVIN: Yeah, they’re actually layouts. Some pages were finished more than others, some of the backgrounds were incomplete. MM: You really plussed his pencils. You changed the movement of the leg, or the slant of a shoulder, and especially with Robin, you changed a lot with the hair and the face. KEVIN: Yeah, the proportions of Robin's face I didn’t think were— MM: Yeah, Dave drew a rounded face, and you really narrowed the face, made him more elfin-like.

MM: Well, you kind of became his regular inker.

KEVIN: Exactly. For a little kid’s face, it’s fairly easy to get that cute look just by manipulating the proportions a little bit. They have small features and small faces, and the other part of the head is bigger. And it’s funny, Robin’s always drawn so differently by everyone. Some people draw teenagers like small adults.

KEVIN: Exactly, yeah. That’s the most sincere compliment, when the guy goes in and gets an assignment from a DC editor,

MM: And you made him look more like 13.

MM: Oh, yeah, for the most part. There’s a few places where it looks like Kevin Nowlan, but for the most part, you can still see Gil Kane throughout. KEVIN: Yeah. And the most important point for me is that after Gil finally saw the pages, he called me up and told me how happy he was to see how the job had turned out. And it just thrilled me to no end, because that was the one opinion that mattered.

Previous Page: Gil Kane’s pencils and Kevin’s inks for the Elseworlds project, Superman: Distant Fires, page 4. Below: Cover art for Green Lantern Secret Files #1. Green Lantern, Superman ™ and ©2004 DC Comics.

Below: When Kevin draws kids, they actually look like kids, as evidenced here in this Teen Titans commission piece. Next Page: Dave Taylor’s layouts and Kevin’s almost completely redrawn finishes from Legends of the DC Universe #6. Commissioner Gordon, Robin, Superman, Teen Titans ™ and ©2004 DC Comics.

KEVIN: Yeah, that was definitely my intention. It went from being a job I was very, very ambivalent about, and came very close to returning to DC because I didn’t think I could pull it off. Sitting at breakfast one morning with my daughter, she asked me what I was working on. She was probably in second grade or something. She asked me what I was working on, and I told her, “Well, I got this new job. I’m thinking about sending it back because I don’t know what to do with these layouts.” And she thought for a minute as she ate her cereal, and she said, “I think you should do it.” [laughter] And I don’t know what got into her that she took it upon herself to give me career advice. But her instincts were good, because it was an odd job, where I started out with no enthusiasm, but the more I worked on it, the more I liked it. The editor, Scott Peterson, helped quite a bit. He was just really, really terrific to work with and supportive all along the way. No matter what I ended up doing, he was supportive of it. I was really stumped by a splash page midway through the story, where Superman first appears. When I got that, it had margin notes from the editor and from Dave. And the editor just made an observation, it said, “He looks kind of thin, he looks like Miracle Man, can you beef him up a bit?” I was okay with that, but then Dave himself wrote a note, and he said, “Kevin, can you lightbox this and move him up a quarter of an inch?

He’s supposed to be floating and I have his foot too close to the bottom of the page.” And I thought, “Come on, Dave! That’s not fair!” Y’know? So I just turned that page in uninked and got out a clean sheet of paper and I drew a new splash, because if you end up changing that much, there’s really nothing there worth saving on the original board. The editor had problems with the way it was drawn, Dave had problems with the way it was drawn, and I had my own questions about it. Starting over from scratch seemed to be the smartest thing to do but I’m sure most people think I’m nuts for doing it. When the pages were all finished, Scott Peterson called me up to talk about colorists. Most editors don’t do that but I think Scott knew how much I’d put into this story. I really loved the script that Kelley Puckett wrote; I felt it was just a terrific story. As I was working on the pages and reading the story, I really fell in love with Kelley’s writing on that. I thought it was terrific. MM: I think it was the best story in the whole series. KEVIN: Oh, really? MM: Yeah! KEVIN: It was the kind of thing I’d like to see DC do more of, where it’s very innocent— MM: Yeah, exactly. That got me real excited about the series, but very few of the stories after that came even remotely close to the quality of that story. KEVIN: Yeah. It’s a shame, because it was a good idea for a series. MM: Oh, yeah. And that story, the end result really seemed tailor-made for you, because it had the whole Gotham atmosphere, lots of shadows, but it also had Robin and Superman to keep it light and play to your sense of humor as well, so you kind of get the best of both worlds. KEVIN: Yeah, I think so. And like I was saying, Scott Peterson and I came up with a list of colorists, and of course all the good ones were too busy. [laughs] And he finally asked me—this was back in the days when they still did color guides—if I'd be interested in

MM: And Kelley did a lot of those, too. And those were great stories, those Batman Adventures stories.

doing color guides, and I said, “I’d love to!” Because it’s the story that’s almost going to color itself, because you have, like you said, the dark grays of the Gotham City buildings, but then you have this character, Superman, who’s totally out of place in Gotham City. He’s supposed to be in Metropolis, not in Batman’s turf. And, of course, that theme is in Kelley’s script, that Superman is an alien, and Robin admires him, and Batman is telling him, “Watch it, he’s not one of us.” So I thought there were terrific opportunities to do things with the coloring that would reinforce that idea. And I also have to say, Digital Chameleon did the separations, and did an unbelievably faithful job taking those little marker roughs and turning them into separations, getting the colors in there the way I was hoping to see them. It went from being a job I was very dubious about to one I’m very fond of.

KEVIN: Oh, they’re terrific! Too many people overlooked them. MM: I think for most of their run they were the best Batman stories coming out at the time. KEVIN: I think so, yeah, because I’d go through my comps and give those to my son, and we’d always end up reading them together during reading time at night, because they were always terrific stories. I was never disappointed in a single one of those. I think people didn’t pay a lot of attention to them because they were drawn in a cartoony style, they’re not a real, adult, comic book. But, like you said, the writing was often much better than you’d see in the regular Batman titles.

MM: Now, I want to mention the layouts as well, because there’re very rarely more than three or four panels on the page, and I think there was never one with even five panels on the page.

MM: So I guess the next story you did was the Spectre

KEVIN: Yeah. I think that was very deliberate on the part of Scott and Kelley. I think Scott was encouraging him to work that way. I know he wrote a lot of the Batman Adventures books; Scott Peterson himself wrote a lot of those that way.

story in the 80-page Giant, where you inked over the rare appearance of Steve Ditko. What was it like going into that job, thinking, “I've got to ink over Steve Ditko.” You don’t list him in your influences. Were you a fan of his work at all? KEVIN: Yeah, definitely on the old “Doctor Strange” stories, and a little bit of Spider-Man. I definitely am partial to his version of Spider-Man because I liked the way Peter Parker was a nerd with glasses, as opposed to later on when Peter Parker became a big, muscular, good-looking guy who was something of a lady-killer; it seemed kind of ridiculous that he would even need to put on the costume. He wasn’t a loser anymore. So yeah, I always liked that. And he did terrific creepy monster stories as well. His preSpider-Man stuff was terrific. Carlin asked me to do that story, and even though it was penciled by a legendary comic artist, I did have some problems with it. I didn’t think there was any hope at all of inking it in anything like Ditko’s style, because I just didn’t even know how to do that. But again, I assume Carlin asked me to ink it because that’s not what he was looking for, just like with Gil Kane. If he wanted it to look like 100% Ditko art, he would just have had Ditko ink it. But yeah, I had problems from the very beginning. The characters weren’t in period costumes, so I felt like that needed to be fixed. The Titanic didn’t have—it was right when the movie came out, so— MM: And people were very aware of what it looked like. KEVIN: Exactly. He didn’t draw the correct number of smokestacks on the ship. There are four, and if you only put—I forget how many he put on there, but it wasn’t the right number, so that was something else that had to be fixed. I did the best I could. [laughs] I

don’t think it was at all a successful combination of styles. But I did the best I could. I’m glad I had a chance to ink Ditko that one time, at least. MM: Well, after that you did the two-part Batgirl story, another Kelley Puckett script, that was quite good, as well. And this time you were inking over Terry Dodson, and obviously he had much tighter pencils than Dave, because you stayed pretty faithful to him, for the most part. At least in the first issue. The second issue, you had to add more, but the first issue was very faithful to Terry’s pencils. KEVIN: Yeah. And again, it wasn’t because I just went nuts and started to redraw what he’d done. He did layouts for, I think, most of the second issue. MM: Yeah, I think that’s how he was credited in the second issue. KEVIN: Yeah, most of the first issue was full pencils. I think he just ran out of time, so the second issue was done much more quickly than the first one. But Terry has a pretty good sense of what to include in a quick layout. MM: Did you enjoy that as much as you did the Superman/Robin story? KEVIN: I don’t think I enjoyed it quite as much, because I didn’t feel that I’d... MM: Made as big a contribution? KEVIN: Yeah, the Batgirl thing was more of just an inking job, I think. MM: Something else that came out that year, you inked a couple of pages in Fanboy. 65

Previous Page: Kevin was teamed with Steve Ditko for a 10-page Spectre story in Legends of the DC Universe 80-Page Giant #1. This Page: A couple of Batgirl drawings done for fans. Batgirl, Spectre ™ and ©2004 DC Comics.

KEVIN: Oh, yeah, with Gil! Gil and Sergio [Aragonés]. A strange collaboration. We had three different people working on the same page. MM: Now, were you just inking Gil’s part of those panels, or were you inking over Sergio as well?

Above: Panel from page 19 of Fanboy #2. Right: Hey, Sergio! You missed a spot! Kevin does his best Sergio Aragonés impersonation while inking the Finster figure. Pencils by Gil Kane. Next Page: Evidently Jack didn’t want to be disturbed while hatching up his latest experiment.

KEVIN: I just inked over Gil. There are pages, obviously, that are all Sergio, and then there are pages that are drawn by Gil, with Sergio essentially inking Gil’s pencils, even though it’s Sergio’s character. On the page where Green Lantern appears and Finster says, “It’s you!,” well, that looks like it’s Sergio, but it’s actually me, because Gil

penciled that profile shot of the Finster character, Sergio inked the other drawings of Finster, but he missed that one. So I just went in and inked it in an approximation of Sergio’s style. I don’t think they ever noticed. Gil actually did a really good job of mimicking Sergio’s style in the pencils. That was really a lot of fun. That was such an odd project, and odd combination of styles throughout. Yeah, I’m looking at my copy of the book. Here at the beginning, on the first page of the Gil Kane segment, the Green Lantern part, where the teacher is hit by a bolt of green lightning or something, in the first panel she’s drawn by Sergio, and then in the next panel, she’s penciled by Gil and inked by me. [laughs] It’s very odd! I think it’s surprising how similar the styles are. Someone else may see it differently, but it’s not as jarring as you might expect. When Finster’s being carried by a Gil Kane character, his body language is there, it’s established by Gil, so it all fits together a bit more than it might otherwise.

Part 5:

Jack B. Quick and the Stories of Tomorrow

MM: So how’d you get involved with the America’s Best Comics line? Did Scott Dunbier approach you?

talking about all of these things, and maybe that’s why—I honestly don’t know. I don’t know if that’s how it happened, if Alan came up with an idea for a series, then Scott thought of me. Because I don’t think Alan was that familiar with my work before that, and even if he was, I really hadn’t had a chance to do something like this before, so I don’t think, looking at my work, he would have known that this was the type of thing I was wanting to do.

KEVIN: Yeah, Scott called and said he wanted me to draw this series called “Jack B. Quick,” but he didn’t give me any details. When I said I couldn’t he said it would only be six or eight pages at a time. I had no idea what kind of stories they’d be. I knew Alan [Moore] was creating a line of, not quite super-hero stuff, but more of a mainstream type of comics group. When I heard the name Jack B. Quick I just assumed it was some super-fast guy like Johnny Quick or the Flash or something. That didn’t sound very appealing to me [laughs], so I wasn’t instantly sold on the idea until I heard a little more about it.

MM: Well, there was the Gen-13 back-up story that takes place at a carnival. Maybe that showed them you could draw that type of atmosphere? KEVIN: Maybe so. But honestly I would doubt that Alan would have seen that. Yeah, Scott was the editor on that book, but.... That might have more of a nostalgic look to it or an old school look to it than I really intended, just because of the carnival and the main character sort of based on James Dean and all that. That’s possible; that might have been how it happened, but it’s still a mystery to me. I talked to Scott about it, and I think when he talked to Alan then after that, he told Alan that I was baffled by all this and had almost come to the conclusion that Alan had somehow read my mind. [Eric laughs] And Alan said, “Well, let’s not tell him any different.” [laughter]

MM: Now, Alan usually writes to the strengths and interests of his artists. Did he create that character with you in mind, do you think? Do you know? KEVIN: That’s the real strange thing about that, because we had just moved from Wichita to this small farm town and bought an old house. And I was getting more and more into stuff like antiques and local history, just the whole environment of this small farm town, which really, in a lot of ways, more than any town I’ve been in, feels like you’re stepping back in time a bit. Because some of the turn-of-the-century buildings are still standing, including this house. [laughs] And so I was sort of in the middle of this really strong wave of nostalgia. And then Alan came up, with no conversations between Alan and me, he came up with this series set in a small, Midwestern farm town, and he described it as vaguely nostalgic— something no later than the early ’60s and possibly earlier than that. And I was just dumbfounded. I said to Scott, “How did he know I wanted to do something like this?” And I have to assume it had something to do with Scott and I

MM: So how did you start off? Did you get a script first, before you starting doing the character designs? Or did you talk with Alan first, before you started doing that, and then got a script later? KEVIN: Alan called first and described what he wanted to do with the series. But I still didn’t know it was going to be a rural setting. I knew that he was a little boy who is some kind of genius, who comes up with a bunch of strange inventions. So in my first drawings of Jack, he was just wearing a sweater instead of overalls. Later, when I got the first script, 67

all that was spelled out. It was pretty startling to read his description of Queerwater Creek because it sounded just like my town, especially the term “vaguely nostalgic.” For the most part, all the information I got for the series was in his scripts. As I’m sure you know, they’re very detailed. MM: Yeah. Did he have the overalls described in the script, or did you—? KEVIN: I don’t think he did. I think it just seemed obvious, because they lived on a farm and it was set in the past at some point, so that just struck me as being the obvious clothing for him to wear. There’s a pretty strict, unwritten dress code in farm towns. If you look at old rural photos all the men and boys are wearing work boots and overalls.

Above: Kevin’s first go at Jack. Right: Officer Pete makes his first appearance in the strip. Do you think he only carries one bullet with him, like a certain Officer Fife? Next Page: The many faces of Teddy... Jack B. Quick and all related characters ™ and ©2004 America’s Best Comics, LLC.

MM: You based Jack on your son. Did you fully read the script before you started basing it on your son? Because I know you’ve said that once you realized that Jack was kind of a horrible little boy, that you almost felt bad about using your son. KEVIN: Well, I explained it to Spence, “You helped me draw this guy. Just don’t get the idea that this is in any way supposed to be you, or that you as an individual have inspired Jack in any way.” Basically, Spence was just the right age at that time that looking at him helped me figure out what Jack would look like. The one obvious change I made 68

was changing his hair from red to blonde. With Dexter’s Laboratory and things like that, I thought it was a good call. There are a lot of boy geniuses out there, I didn’t want him to look too much like any of the others. MM: How much of the rest of the cast are from real people? You have a lot of recurring characters in the cast. KEVIN: None of the others are really based on real people. When I drew the cop in the first story, he looked a little bit like Barney Fife. Not close enough to look like it was intentional, but that was just sort of the direction I was headed. As opposed to a big, burly, imposing policeman, he was sort of an undersized, wimpy, slouching, small-town cop. I think he got a name and he became more of a recurring character after that. Mayor Stuyvesant—again, he’s not based on anyone in particular. I think I was sort of going for archetypes with a lot of these. And I believe I even found a photo in a book of an overweight fellow. You couldn’t even see the front of his face, you just saw the back of his head, and he looked a little like Oliver Hardy from behind. And somehow I thought that would be the right look for Mayor Stuyvesant. And Jack’s parents are pretty much made up, although there’s a guy here in town who has his own little emporium, and it’s basically his own private museum, where he’s archived photos of people’s houses, families, buildings downtown, things like that. And when I was

MM: I was going to ask later on about that. Did you do any kind of research as to how faces age?

drawing that first story, I got some help from him, because I didn’t have things like a kerosene lamp and stuff like that, that I wanted to draw accurately. But I needed something to look at, so I just went down there and he let me look over some of the stuff, borrow a few things and take some pictures, stuff like that. Jack’s dad ended up looking a lot like that guy, but I think it was just really a coincidence at first. And then maybe once I recognized the resemblance I sort of pushed it in that direction, because I had something a little more concrete to base it on.

KEVIN: Well, unfortunately, you don’t have to do much research if you’ve got a mirror and you’re in your mid-40s. [laughter] It’ll be very obvious what happens. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but that has become one of the things I enjoy the most about drawing now. Almost all the secondary characters in the “Jack B. Quick” stories are middle-aged or older. I genuinely enjoy drawing older faces, wrinkles, double-chins, larger noses, and things like that. It’s a little bit like preferring to work with the character actors as opposed to the leading men and women, because they just have much more interesting faces, and they get more interesting as they get older. And if you want to do shadows and things like that, it’s really tough to put shadows on a supermodel face and make it look right, but if you have an 80-year-old woman, or man, with harsh lighting, it’s a breeze. You can just sculpt that stuff and play up the shadows and it’s a lot of fun. It’s also easier to get expressions from them.

MM: Right. Now, since you had these recurring characters and you were planning on being with these characters for a while, did you make model sheets or turnarounds or anything like that? KEVIN: No, I wouldn’t do turnarounds. I did a few rough sketches before I started the story. I guess I didn’t do that with Mayor Stuyvesant or Officer Pete, but I did it with Teddy, the kid in the last story, “The Facts of Life.” I think Alan may have suggested that he look like a young Beaver Cleaver. I didn’t base him on anyone in particular, but I started with the Beaver Cleaver look, and then I sort of went for a—was it Carl Switzer who played Alfalfa in the Little Rascals?

MM: Once you got that first script, what were you thinking? Did you know much about the script at that point, what the story would be like? Or was it kind of fresh when you got the script?

MM: Yes.

KEVIN: Yeah, I didn’t know a lot about the series until I got that first script, and I was really astonished. I mean, it was one of those situations where, when someone would call, I’d just have to read some of the dialogue and describe what was happening in the story. I was just dumbfounded. Even though Alan has a reputation for being a genius, I thought that six-page—it was originally written as six pages—I thought in those six pages he had just done something totally original, but also something that seemed like it could have been around forever. It just seemed like an instant classic. And he had

KEVIN: It sort of went in that direction. And then, because he had to be recognizable as he aged in the story, I gave him a few more features that were more pronounced, like the big ears and the gap in his teeth and things like that, just so we’d know who he was as he got older. I didn’t want his facial features to be subtle enough that someone might miss that, so I kind of exaggerated those a bit. 69

MM: If you would compare Alan’s script to what you drew, how closely did you follow what he suggests in the panel breakdowns?

the internal logic of this whole little universe worked out so perfectly; it felt very natural for a miniature solar system to be invading this small town as a result of Jack’s science experiment. I was just astonished. And there were certainly lots of little opportunities then for me to use things here in this town, because I did want the town to look as believable as possible. I thought that would help...

KEVIN: Very, very closely. I mean, right down to “this character should be on the left and the next character should be on the right.” And for the most part you almost have to do it that way or the balloons won’t work, because you’ll have a balloon being read out of order if you don’t compose the panel the way he’s asking you to. But he was never pushy about it at all. Every script would start out with, “As always, if you have a better idea, by all means, try it.” But needless to say, I seldom had a better idea than what Alan had in his script. Sometimes it was hard to work out the compositions and I’d fudge a bit here and there. That’s also the reason a lot of it is long shot after long shot after long shot, because he’s asking for a specific amount of information in every panel, and you can’t just come in close on a character’s face even though they’re basically just standing there talking, because the story’s not written that way. You don’t have that much freedom.

MM: Accentuate the humor? KEVIN: Yeah, exactly. And it’s much funnier if a cop is directing traffic because a gas giant is in the middle of an intersection if everything around it looks believable. It doesn’t necessarily have to be realistic. Alan asked for, I think, a sort of Norman Rockwell approach in the artwork. That might explain why the first story is sort of... a little more uptight, and I was afraid to do much exaggerating and all of that, because I’m thinking, “Alan’s not really looking for a zany drawing style; he wants, I assume, the humor to be played straight.” So I was trying to keep the drawings down-to-earth. A little later on I think there’s a bit more exaggeration in the drawings. They became a little more expressive, as I loosened up a bit. Now, that first story is almost like a short tour of this small town, and it would have been very difficult to do if we hadn’t just moved to this actual town that we could base it on. I went down and either photographed or just studied some of the downtown buildings like the library and an old church with a broken steeple, and a lot of them show up in the story. A few of them I had to get from old photos because some of the buildings no longer exist. The public library and the church across the street are drawn just as they appear downtown.

MM: You looked like you were having a lot of fun with things like the cow and the facial expressions you use there. KEVIN: Yeah. MM: You’d been mainly doing super-hero stuff for quite a while. “Jack B. Quick” was your chance to do something a little different. Is that what drew you into devoting so much of your time to the strip? KEVIN: Exactly. The cow’s another good example of how this thing was just such an odd example of synchronicity, because we had been to the state fair just a few weeks before I got that script, and I had a camera with me. A guy that we went to high school with, he and his boys had some cattle that they were exhibiting in the 4H building. Just for the heck of it, I just took some pictures. [laughs] This one cow in particular really turned around and gave me an awful look and 70

acted really annoyed that I was back there taking a photo. I didn’t have any ulterior motive, didn’t know that I would get a script a few weeks later where I really needed some good cow reference. But there it was, and that’s pretty much the shot that was on the splash page of that story. Sometime after that I showed the comic to the cow’s owner and he just stared at it. I finally said, “Do you recognize your cow?” and he just said, “Yup.” [laughter] MM: You were doing pencils, inks, lettering, color guides. How long did it take you to do that first story? KEVIN: I have no idea. It took a long, long time. Months. One thing that really did help on that story—like I said, Alan wrote it as six pages, but it was tight. I didn’t know how I was going to squeeze all that into such a small space. I asked Scott if I could have an additional page or two, and because it was the first issue, the way the book was laid out, there was room for it. But after that, it wasn’t possible. So that actually did help. I mean, it’s ironic that adding two pages would actually speed up my work on this story, but it meant there was room to breathe on those first couple of pages, and I had a title page and then still a splash page with the house two panels below it. It just meant it was a lot easier to jump right in with the drawing instead of reworking layouts over and over again trying to figure out some way to make it fit. Yeah, I was just crawling along on that first story. I’m sure it took at least a week to get the first couple of pages penciled, maybe even longer than that. And some of those pages, doing the lettering, where they’re fairly text-heavy, I know I spent a full day just simply lettering some of those pages. MM: You used a lot of white space in the word balloons. Was that kind of to help save you some time, or is that just the way you like them to look? KEVIN: Well, it might save a little bit of time, but it makes it that much harder to squeeze in everything else if you use up too much space with balloons. Basically I just liked the way it looked. MM: It’s certainly easier to read that way.

KEVIN: Yeah, that’s just a pet peeve of mine. In the old days, with hand-lettering, sometimes the word balloons would be so tightly-packed that the lettering was running into the balloon borders, and it just always looked amateurish to me. I don’t know. If it’s too congested, people don’t want to read it. You’re scaring away the reader. MM: When you finished that story, did you start on the next one right away? KEVIN: I would imagine so, yeah. I think they got the scripts to me fairly fast. By the time I finished one story, the next one was waiting for me. 71

Previous Page: In an odd bit of synchronicity, Kevin just happened to have bovine photo reference right when he needed it. Above: Kevin had his work cut out for him fitting in all the word balloons on this page. Jack B. Quick and all related characters ™ and ©2004 America’s Best Comics, LLC.

MM: With “The Unbearableness of Being Light,” there was that last page where you had to draw the afterimages of everyone. Did that cause any problems at all?

MM: I like that Alan started adding the little bits of continuity there, as well. Like the X-ray butter from the first story.

KEVIN: Yeah, it was hard to do. That panel took quite a while. The rest of that story actually went fairly fast. And certainly the page where they were just in total darkness.... [laughs] I really appreciated Alan writing that scene, so I could make up some time.

KEVIN: Oh yeah, yeah. MM: Did you catch onto that as you were doing these stories, that he was actually establishing a continuity? KEVIN: Yeah, they’re self-contained stories but you can see little details that he’s continued over the series. I can’t imagine how he kept them all straight while writing all those other books.

MM: Did you have to work that out physically in front of a mirror, or did you could just work through it in your head? KEVIN: I didn’t use reference on that page. Basically, I just drew the final image and then added the additional drawings that would lead up to that moment and just faked it. It felt a little like working out the movement animation.

MM: The fourth story kind of ties all four stories together when Jack falls into the void. Jack’s dialogue on the last page says “Heck, I might not make it back before issue ten or something,” and that’s actually when the strip shows up again. Was that planned, that you were going to take that long a break?

MM: It’s like doing animation without drawing out the in-betweening. KEVIN: Exactly, yeah.

KEVIN: I think so, yeah, I believe that was the plan.

MM: The third story is probably my favorite: “Pet Theory.” Do you have cats?

MM: Was it because he was having trouble coming up with stories?

KEVIN: No. We have a dog, but no cats.

KEVIN: No, no.

MM: Did you actually find a cat to take pictures of? Because the positions you have those cats in, it looks like you had to have seen a cat in that position to draw it.

MM: Was it deadlines on your part? KEVIN: No, it was me just needing to do something that wasn’t as labor-intensive, to pay the bills. There was no way I was going to just knock these things out fast. I felt like they had to be drawn correctly, and if it took a long time to do each one, that’s what I would do.

KEVIN: Yeah. I don’t know if you know this, but cats are hard to draw! [laughs] I couldn’t draw cats for the longest time. I finally drew one in a black-and-white “Dalgoda” story, and it was a very cartoony cat, but up until that time, I couldn’t draw a cat to save my life. So for “Pet Theory,” I went to the library and dug up a bunch of books with cat photos, so they’re based on actual cats; but, no, I didn’t have a live model.

MM: And you weren’t going to hand over any of the chores, like the lettering? KEVIN: No. 72

MM: You wanted to do it. Was that the plan from the beginning, that you would do everything? KEVIN: From the beginning. Plus, the lettering, even though that’s really tedious—and like I said a minute ago, it sometimes takes way too long to letter a page—it would seem ridiculous to hand it off to someone else, because the first thing I do when I lay out the pages is work out the lettering. When it’s a full script like this, I start laying out the page by designing the balloons and carefully penciling in the words. I want the line endings to be worked out so they look even and I want to avoid hyphenating words or breaking the lines in an awkward spot that can break up the flow of the story. I don’t want to give that job to someone else, since for me it’s a huge part of working out the layouts; I feel like I have to do it, anyway. Even if somebody else was inking the lettering, I’d feel like I would have to lay out the lettering in pencil before I passed it off to them. Like you said, for the first several stories I did color guides. There’s

one that I did not do color guides for, and I think it shows. And then the last two I did the actual separations. MM: Would you describe “Jack B. Quick” as the pinnacle of your career thus far? KEVIN: Well, it’s certainly the material that I’m most proud of. I noticed when these books would come out, if a friend or a relative would stop by the house, I’d have to show them the stories and make sure that they actually read them. I had never done that before with any of my comics work, but I just felt that not only were they beautifully written, genuinely funny stories, they were completely accessible. Someone who had never read a comic book in their life could pick one up and get a few laughs out of it. It wasn’t a super-hero series that had decades of continuity that you need to refer to. Plus, the quality of Alan’s writing is such that I just wanted people to read these things. 73

Previous Page: Kevin may seem like a glutton for punishment for adding in the bird tracking down its prey in the final panel, but not only is it a feast for the eyes, it also adds balance within the panel. Above: Page 8 of the first “Jack B. Quick” installment, from layout to pencils. Jack B. Quick and all related characters ™ and ©2004 America’s Best Comics, LLC.

MM: Did you show people around town? KEVIN: Uh-huh. I mean, I didn’t stop them on the street. [laughter] When I had a visitor, people would come by the house or something like that, I’d show them copies or give them copies of the book. MM: What was their general reaction? Is the town kind of conservative, or were they open-minded enough to get a good laugh out of it? KEVIN: Oh, yeah, it is a bit conservative, but not so much that they couldn’t enjoy these stories. No, I got a good reaction. People were genuinely proud, I think, when I’d say, “Now, here, do you see this? That’s the roof of the library there, and here’s the Methodist church with its broken steeple.” And I think people really appreciated that. MM: During your hiatus from “Jack B. Quick,” you did seven pages for The Legend of the Green Flame, which was the “lost” Neil Gaiman story. You get to play with Superman and Green Lantern again. You get to do a little bit with Phantom Stranger, as well, who you hadn’t drawn before. Did he hold any appeal for you at all? KEVIN: Yeah, except I wanted to draw the original kind of squarelooking Phantom Stranger, and I think that’s what Neil Gaiman asked for in the script, but Matt Wagner, or whoever did the earlier chapter, drew him with the turtleneck and a big medallion and stuff, so I couldn’t draw the white shirt and black tie, the original look of the character. It’s ironic. I think in the late ’60s they were trying to update the character and make him look more contemporary, but now he just looks kind of silly, and unbelievably old-fashioned, as opposed to the original look, which might have seemed kind of square in the late ’60s, but now it looks good. I always enjoyed the character so, yeah, that was fun. MM: You used an unusual layout for the first few pages: four vertical panels per page. Was that specified in the script, or was that just the way you approached the story? KEVIN: Neil’s script wasn’t nearly as specific as one of Alan’s, but he was trying to get the feeling that they’re inside this lantern and create kind of an effect for that. I think that’s why those were laid out that way. He might have asked for that specifically, but I think it just naturally fit the setting. MM: Did that cause any problems for you compositionwise, or were you able to work fairly well with that? KEVIN: Not too much, no. It was actually kind of a nice break from the “Jack B. Quick” stuff, because it was so open that—as you can probably tell, I did the story quickly. MM: Well, there’re no backgrounds. You don’t have to worry about any backgrounds because they’re inside the lantern and it’s just all fire and everything. KEVIN: Right. So it was a fairly easy story to draw, because it’s essentially talking heads with no backgrounds, so there wasn’t really much to stumble over. 74

MM: I guess after that, there was the Tomorrow Stories 64-page Giant, where you had the two one-page “Jack B. Quick” strips. Those were really fun. I noticed especially with the second one—you mentioned earlier you started to exaggerate more as you went along. You really did in that second strip, especially in the second panel. Jack’s hands are really big, his head seems a little bit bigger than normal. Then, later on, when he’s pretending to cast a spell, you had that really wild scream on his face. KEVIN: Yeah, as you can see, as I go along I’m loosening up a bit and it becomes easier to draw Jack with more expression, a little more emphasis, so it’s not as restrained as that first story was. And also, I’m drawing just out of my head more instead of using reference, because by then I sort of had....

inked a Ramona Fradon cover.

MM: Had the feel for the character?

KEVIN: Yeah. I didn’t really work over his pencils. I’m not sure why they just sent me the sketch, but it was like most of Gil’s sketches. Everything was there, because the structure was all worked out. It was easy enough to just lightbox it and firm up some of the details. Yeah, Ramona Fradon on the Doom Patrol, right?

KEVIN: Yeah, yeah. It’s easier to picture him with different expressions and from different angles. On the first story I was still trying to figure out how everything would look. MM: You also inked a couple of covers for that Silver Age miniseries DC did. Not surprisingly, you inked Gil Kane on a Green Lantern cover. But for something different, you also

KEVIN: For the Gil Kane, they just sent me a Xerox of his sketch. MM: Oh, really?

MM: Yeah. Which is another group of characters you hadn’t drawn before, I think. KEVIN: Yeah. I think I did a piece of fan art in Amazing Heroes with the Doom Patrol years before that. But yeah, I always loved that original series. The Bruno Premiani artwork is just unbelievable. They did such a nice job with the Archives. Premiani’s best work has such wonderful, fine feathering, and they reproduce it beautifully in the Archives. And then he’s also one of those guys, like Curt Swan, that it’s a delight to read a Premiani story that has such absurd, impossible situations and events, because his art is 100% sincere, so it makes the absurdity even more 75

Previous Page: Kevin’s layouts and pencils for page 34 of Green Lantern/Superman: Legend of the Green Flame. Left: For LoGF, Kevin originally penciled the Phantom Stranger in his 1950s garb, but had to change him to his more familiar turtleneck and medallion attire. Above: Gil Kane’s sketch and Kevin’s finished art for the cover of Silver Age: Green Lantern. Green Lantern, Phantom Stranger, Sinestro, Superman ™ and ©2004 DC Comics.

entertaining, because he’s playing it completely straight. MM: Was it kind of neat seeing your work with the go-go checks? KEVIN: Oh, yeah! [laughter] If it were up to me, they never would have gotten rid of the go-go checks. [laughter] Yeah, and Todd Klein, I think, did the lettering on those, and he did a beautiful job recreating the look of those Silver Age covers. MM: In 2001 you got to work with José Luis García-López again on those Deadman: Dead Again covers. Since those covers depicted key scenes throughout DC’s history, was there any extra appeal for you working on those, or was it that you were working with José again that appealed to you? KEVIN: Yeah, it was working with José. It almost didn’t matter what he was drawing [laughs], because you know he’s going to draw it beautifully. But the Superman in particular, the death of Superman, I thought, he just draws the best Superman, and that was terrific to have a chance to ink his pencils on something like that. MM: Now, this comes out about a year later than it was intended, but you finally do get another “Jack B. Quick” in Tomorrow Stories #10. Were you able to pick it back up right away, or did it take you a while to get it flowing again? KEVIN: I probably spent a bit more time on it, because other than the two one-page stories, that was the first “Jack B. Quick” story that I colored in Photoshop and actually had a chance to, instead of just doing marker color guides that are separated by someone else, I had a chance to control the final look of the colors myself. MM: Had you been working in Photoshop long at that point or had you just started? KEVIN: No, not very long at all. I did the separations on the Neil Gaiman story, as well. That was the first interior work that I’d colored and sepped. MM: Was that an easy transition for you, moving over to the computer? In some ways Photoshop is very intuitive, but some of the more complicated features aren’t as easy to pick up right away. KEVIN: Yeah, it did take a while to get the hang of it, but from the very beginning, the part that made it an easy transition was you could get exactly the color you wanted. There was no more trying to come up with an approximation of the color you want with markers or watercolor or colored pencils, and then writing long margin notes to the separator about what you were looking for. I had a good relationship with Digital Chameleon and they sepped a lot of stories from my guides. But nothing beats doing it yourself. I had a couple of false starts. I remember I colored all of page two of that story and then realized that it wasn’t done correctly and had to go back and do it all over again. So that was just me figuring out the program and figuring out technically what I needed 76

to do. Yeah, I was just delighted to have a chance to get the colors, as I saw them in my head, on the paper. MM: What about the lettering for the alien language? Did you create that whole cloth? KEVIN: Yeah, and I didn’t work up a dictionary or anything, it’s just all nonsense. It’s not consistent. You can’t translate it and figure out what they’re saying. It’s just gibberish. MM: Well, in the script, did he specify what they’re saying, just so you get the expressions right? KEVIN: [laughs] Possibly. I never even thought about that. I’m trying to remember what Alan wrote in the script. He probably just wrote, “And then the alien says something indecipherable in the alien font,” or something like that. I don’t think he actually had actual words. The reason I think he didn’t do that is, if he had, it’d be a dangerous thing to do to someone as obsessive as me, because then I’d have to work out the alphabet and the grammar for this language. [laughter] And it would just turn into an impossible job that would never get done. So it’s pretty much all fake. I don’t think they’re intended to be saying anything really specific. MM: Did you have to go get photo reference for the Glenn Miller Orchestra? KEVIN: Oh, what a nightmare. I com-

plained for, like, two months about that. When Scott would talk about how slow I am getting these stories finished, I’d say, “Come on, Scott. Look. On the last page, in this one panel, it’s like a five- or sixpanel page, did you see what he asks for?” “Oh, I haven’t read the script yet.” “Well, get it out and look at what he’s asking for in one panel! He wants, ‘the entire Glenn Miller Orchestra!’” I knew that it was going to take me a long time to do that. I think I actually talked to Jimmy Palmiotti, and Jimmy’s a very sensible guy. He said, “You’re overreacting. Think about it. They’re playing instruments, but they’re wearing black tuxedos, so you don’t really even have to draw the clothing. It’s collars and sleeves and the instruments, which you’ll have to reference.” But again, it’s almost like talking heads. You’re not really doing a lot of drawing after you get those things finished. The band members really are almost silhouetted, so it was possible to save time drawing them that way. But— MM: Did you have to make sure you got the right number of saxophones, the right number of trumpets, that kind of thing? KEVIN: Pretty much, yeah. I didn’t have to, but I knew there were people like my mother-in-law who would spot it if I was way off, if I didn’t at least come close to getting the right number of band members. Also, this is, again, where it’s kind of difficult to resist the 77

Previous Page: Layouts and pencils from page 5 of “Why the Long Face?” —Tomorrow Stories #10. Above: It turns out Alan did provide Kevin with at least the general idea of what the aliens were saying. The hydraulic hammer shows up in the next story as well, much to Mrs. Quick’s regret. Jack B. Quick and all related characters ™ and ©2004 America’s Best Comics, LLC.

Above: Ladies and gentlemen... the Glenn Miller Orchestra!... more or less. Below: If you look to the left of Jack, you can see Mrs. Quick being carted off due to giant hydraulic hammer-related injuries. Next Page: One of Kevin’s sketches done for Ang Lee. Jack B. Quick and all related characters ™ and ©2004 America’s Best Comics, LLC. Hulk ™ and ©2004 Marvel Characters, Inc.

urge to become obsessive. I was finding all these books, and there’s some surviving members of the orchestra who were not on that particular plane that went down. And I started to draw some of them. Then I thought, “Now, wait a minute.” MM: You can’t draw them, ’cause they survived. KEVIN: Exactly! They lived to a ripe old age. They wouldn’t have been abducted by the aliens. MM: So to correspond to that logic, some of the band members should be missing. KEVIN: [laughs] Yeah, so you find you sort of have to pull back and go, “It’s not that important.” In the end, I realized it wasn’t nearly as difficult to draw as I thought it would be. I spent more time complaining about the panel than drawing it, so there should be a lesson in there for me somewhere. MM: Let’s go ahead and talk about the last story, “The Facts of Life.” We already talked about the aging process you had to work through, but were there any other story contributions you made in order to get that story down? 78

KEVIN: When they have a closeup of the map of Kansas where they’re figuring out where the town of Puberty is, I put Queerwater Creek right where my hometown is, on Highway 96. I put Puberty on an empty spot just down the road a bit. There actually isn’t a town in that area. The rest of the map is pretty accurate so you could actually drive from Wichita to Queerwater Creek (if it existed) using the map. I was really tempted to add Smallville to the map. [laughter] But a friend of mine, Hiroshi Morasaki, worried that Alan might object because of his problems with DC so I left it off. And a few pages later, the hardest thing to draw was, again, that blasted hammer coming out of the ceiling and smashing Jack’s mom. There just wasn’t room for it, and I felt like it sort of had to be as large as possible to make it funny. But it really was a layout challenge, squeezing that thing in there. As you said, the people are getting more and more cartoony at this point. The townspeople are really caricatures, exaggerated quite a bit. On the next page, where the ambulance attendants pull up, and in the background they’re carting off Jack’s mom because she’s been smashed by this hammer. That was something that Alan said, “If you have room...” [laughter] “it might be amusing to have the ambulance pulling up, and the attendants going in the front door, then bringing Jack’s mom out.” It’s one of those things where I thought, “Oh, the story would be so much easier to draw without doing that, and he’s not really saying I have to do it. But it’s funny!” MM: It is funny. KEVIN: [laughs] It really adds to the story to have Jack totally indifferent to the fate of his mother, so I did squeeze it in there. But again, it did create some challenges, trying to lay it out like that. It was a fairly enjoyable

story to draw. There wasn’t a lot of stuff that was terribly difficult to pull off, and by the time I got this far into the series, I was really enjoying drawing these characters.

So I had those to send in, plus... I forget what else I packed up and sent to them—just a variety of material. And then it was really strange, because I knew they talked to a bunch of artists, and one of them, who I guess should probably remain nameless, immediately issued a press release. I guess he assumed that he had the job just because he had been asked to submit material. And he announced that he’d be going to New York and working with Ang Lee, and it turns out it wasn’t true at all. He just got a little over-excited. So after seeing the material, I heard back, and I guess they decided I was going to be the guy to go out there and sit down with Ang Lee. It was extremely preliminary. I was there at his house and he kept getting phone calls from his co-producer and writer, and they were talking about details of the plot. So the story hadn’t even been written yet. But basically he was trying to find out what his version of the Hulk would look like. And I just sat there at his dining room table, and we did sketches. He picked up a pencil and did some drawing as well. And he had still photos of several different actors who he thought might be cast as Bruce Banner, and he really wanted to get the facial features to come through in the Hulk’s face. They didn’t want a Lou Ferrigno/Bill Bixby type of thing where they don’t look anything alike. And that was basically it. He was an extremely nice guy. Just immediately put me at ease. I was a bit nervous about flying out to New York, being picked up in a car and driven out to this guy’s house, because just a few weeks earlier I had seen him on TV winning an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. After we were done I kind of looked around and saw his Oscar statue. He said, “Pick it up, it’s heavy!” He was understandably very proud of the little statue, but he really wanted me to lift it so I could see how heavy the thing was. And I was sort of afraid to do it! [laughter] I don’t know what I thought might happen, but I was reluctant, and he insisted. Just a very congenial fellow. I never did see the movie. I heard it didn’t turn out that well. But I’ve certainly enjoyed

MM: When you got that last story, did you know it was going to be the last story? KEVIN: No, it isn’t the last. I just got the script for a new 16-page story. That should give us enough material for a collection. MM: That’s great! Did you see the issue of Promethea where the whole cast is assembled? KEVIN: Yeah. MM: Is it weird for you seeing Jack drawn by someone else? KEVIN: Oh, it’s extremely weird, yeah. You don’t realize how territorial you are until you see someone else drawing “your” character. Jim Williams did a beautiful job, but it just felt odd. MM: Well, let’s talk about your little brush with Hollywood. Did Ang Lee come to you strictly because of your Hulk Smash! covers, which you did around this time? KEVIN: I’m not sure, but the timing worked out well so it’s possible. What happened was, I got a phone call from a guy who worked in whatever office Marvel has out on the West Coast, where they work doing media stuff or movie material or whatever they do out there for Marvel. And he said that they were trying to find somebody to work with Ang Lee on working out the look of this Hulk character for the movie. They emphasized that they wanted us all to send in material, but they also said, “Don’t do anything new, because we’re not hiring you. We’re not hiring anybody yet. We just want to see some samples.” So it was just fortunate that I had just done those two Hulk Smash! cover paintings. 79

Right: Another of Kevin’s sketches for Ang Lee’s Incredible Hulk movie. Below: Anything but an iconographic image, Kevin’s pencils for the cover of Adventures of Superman #621. This image was flipped and more alien kids were added to the background for the final cover image. Next Page: Page 21 of Superman: Distant Fires. A dynamic page composition by Gil Kane. Superman ™ and ©2004 DC Comics. Hulk ™ and ©2004 Marvel Characters, Inc.

a lot of his other movies. He did the Civil War-era movie with Tobey Maguire that I thought was terrific, Ride with the Devil. MM: Did the experience have any kind of impact on you where you might explore working with Hollywood again? KEVIN: Not really. This was a real fluke. I think I just experienced the best part of the job that day. I think spending months doing production art and having to work away from home and things like that would probably be a lot less enjoyable than the short time I spent on the project. I sketched that day, and when I came back home I did a handful of drawings as well, of different expressions on the Hulk face, and a couple of scenes, like the cabin. And I did a bunch of Hulk dog drawings, too. At his house we sat down and fast-forwarded through Best of Show—the comedy— just looking at dogs and trying to figure out which breed of dogs to use for the Hulk dogs. [laughs] I really thought he was kidding when he said he really wanted the poodle for one of them. [laughter] But he was serious. When you’re in a situation like that, it’s so

bizarre that you can’t really make much of it at the time, you just sort of go along for the ride. And I didn’t really think that this was going to be some new career or anything like that. I just thought, “Well, we’ll take it as it comes and see where it goes.” Which it didn’t really go very far at all. But it was a blast. Mignola said later that, “You got to do the thing that nobody gets to do unless they’ve worked for movies for a long time. You went to the guy’s house and sat down just with him, without an art director looking over your shoulder or other people giving you a hard time. You’re sitting right there with the director, just having a conversation and doing sketches. That just never happens.” So it was a real treat. MM: Well, shortly after that you started your run on the Superman covers. Was that a way for you to recharge the batteries, doing just covers for a while? KEVIN: Yeah, those were fun, and they gave me a lot of iconic images to do, which is always a blast with a character like Superman, to do the shot of him, Clark Kent pulling open his shirt to changing into Superman, the Daily Planet globe behind him and things like that. So yeah, those were a lot of fun. I worked mostly with Tom Palmer, Jr., who was really easy to work with. He tolerated all my questions about his father and what kind of pen point he used, things like that. MM: [laughs] Who else did you work with as far as editors? Did you work with Mark Chiarello at all? KEVIN: Yeah. Usually I wouldn’t work with Mark on it until after I’d sent in what I hoped would be the final version of the cover, and then Mark would usually come back and said, “You know, you’re using a lot of gray. Can I get you to brighten up these colors a bit?” [laughs] That happened over and over again. I understood his point of view. You don’t want to have so many gray covers that nobody notices these things on the shelf or in the store. But for me, those bright primary colors of

Superman’s costume just stand out all the more if you have a neutral background. Those bright, pure primaries really pop off the cover, but he was looking more at the cover as a whole, where I was looking at what happens within the image itself. MM: Did you ever get tired of doing iconic image after iconic image? Do you need the storytelling kind of image every now and then? KEVIN: Yeah. It’s like anything, you do one thing, even if you start out really enjoying it, you do the same thing over and over again and you don’t really care what the next thing is, as long as it’s something different. Those really were a lot of fun. I’m not as comfortable drawing Superman as I am a character like Batman, where there are a lot of shadows to play with and things like that. But it was a good challenge. I felt like I learned a lot working on those. MM: When did you actually start working on Superman: Blood of My Ancestors? Gil passed away in 2000 and he had penciled the first 24 pages. Had you already started inking it before he passed away? KEVIN: Yes. And I think I had all 24 pages inked before I even knew how sick he was. The pages were coming in and then they just kind of stopped at one point. And then later, Gil got really sick and died, and they—the first call with the editor was, “We’re not sure what to do with this. Can you think of anybody that we could get to replace Gil?” And obviously there’s no one. No one draws in that style. We all seem to figure out super-hero anatomy by looking at and even swiping from Gil’s work but there just aren’t any artists out there who draw in a style that resembles Kane enough to come in and complete one of his projects. But they did ask me to pencil it, and I had no desire whatsoever to take over the full art chores on that. I was actually relieved when they, for a while, maybe more than a year, decided to just let the thing die, to not try to publish it with another artist. But then at some point they changed their mind, and someone had the good sense to suggest John Buscema. At first glance, it seems like a bad idea, because he draws nothing like Gil. But then if you look at this specific book, on the surface it’s basically a Conan story. [laughs]

finish the job, because for so many years, they were the two guys drawing Conan. And I don’t think anybody complained about those stories looking different from each other. They both did beautiful work. Buscema also finished the remaining 44 pages in just a few weeks, and then again later I found out how sick he was, after he had already finished these things. Man, there’s the definition of a workhorse, even when these two guys were sick they could draw circles around everybody else in comics. It’s just amazing. MM: Did he get to see your inks before he passed away? KEVIN: I don’t think so. Starting out, there was no deadline on that book because of its strange history. And again, John Buscema drew those pages quickly without really any deadline. It’s just the way he worked. So it did sit around here for a while before I had a chance to work on them. I think finally the book was put on the schedule and had to be done by a certain day. I’m pretty sure that Buscema didn’t see my inks. I’m not sure that I would want to hear his reaction. [laughter]

MM: Well, yeah. It’s a Biblical version of a Conan story. KEVIN: Exactly. There’s very, very little of Superman flying around in his costume. My only regret with that book was there were no horses, because Gil and John were unbelievably good at drawing horses. But because it takes place on Krypton instead of Earth, there are strange little bird creatures they ride on instead of horses. So it made sense in a kind of strange way that Buscema would be the guy to 81

MM: He didn’t care for anyone’s inks over his pencils, though he did say nice things about his brother, Sal, and that’s about it. KEVIN: Yeah. But I sort of went through the thing with John Buscema that I had done on the earlier Gil Kane job, where I dug out a lot of examples of him doing his own inks, and then also went looking for good examples of other people inking over Buscema. With both Gil Kane and John Buscema, if it was up to me in a perfect world they would only have done their own inks, because I strongly prefer what they did on their own, even though both of them worked with some great inkers. So I tried to do the best job I could. John’s pencils were a bit lighter than Gil’s, and a little harder to find the structure, so they were more of a challenge. But they were still beautifully done. MM: Was it depressing at all having this book come out and not being able to share with Gil and John? KEVIN: Yeah, because with Distant Fires Gil called up after he saw the pages that I inked and just enthusiastically praised me. And I was just walking on air, because I admired Gil so much anyway. I’d hang on his every word in the few conversations that we had, but then when he was just going on about it, he said that the way I inked his pencils, he said that’s the way he saw his artwork in his own head. And I knew there were pages where I’d probably taken over more than I should have. Because of our conversation earlier about Wally Wood and how much he appreciated the finishes that Wally Wood put on his pencils, I felt like that hopefully that would be what he was looking for. MM: Was there ever a question of trying to unite the two differing penciling styles? KEVIN: No. I think they suggested that at DC. Joey Cavalieri was the editor, and I think that might have been brought up, since they wanted me to stay on the job after Gil passed away, because they said, “Since we have to have two different pencilers, we at least want the same inker so the pages will look somewhat consistent.” But I thought that was unlikely to happen. [laughter] There’s no way to make John Buscema look like Gil Kane, they’re fundamentally such different artists. But I think the transition was smooth enough. I wouldn’t want to have tried harder to make them look like one style; I think that would have been a bad idea. MM: Okay, let’s move on to Tom Strong’s Terrific Tales #8. You get to work with Alan Weiss on a “Young Tom Strong” story. That was the first time you worked with Alan, who was one of your heroes growing up. How did you approach inking him? KEVIN: It was very, very easy to ink, because Alan has this heavilyrendered style with a lot of lighting and shadows and things, and it’s all there. It was all there in the pencils. It was the only time I’ve worked with someone else and had such beautiful rendering and shadow patterns worked out in the pencils. And it was a blast. I felt like I understood the lighting, I understood what the shadows were doing, and understood what was underneath the work. Where I 82

added some textures and things like that, it sort of takes place in a dormant volcano and so there were lots of opportunities for dry brush and things like that. I think Alan was happy with that, happy the way that turned out. To me it felt like a very, very comfortable fit, where it wasn’t me struggling to interpret what was on the page or struggling to adjust what I was doing to Alan’s style. It just flowed very, very naturally, I thought. I hope we get to work together again some time. MM: In your earlier work, I can see a lot of Alan Weiss in there, because you both draw those kind of long, lanky bodies. Is that where you got it from, from studying his work? KEVIN: I don’t know that I got it directly from him other than just he was one of the artists that I looked at all the time. I didn’t ever sit down and think, “Okay, I’m going to do a drawing; it’s going to look exactly like something Alan Weiss would do.” But his work just always fascinated me, especially that one Captain America fill-in that he did with Deadly Nightshade and the werewolves. I just thought that was one of the most beautifully-drawn books I’d ever seen. His people looked like real people. They had enough exaggeration to work in the context of a super-hero story, but the lighting was so believable, and they had three-dimensional features on their faces. So I was always, always just poring over his stuff. I guess before that Captain America story, I was totally obsessed with his work on “Pellucidar” at DC

and loved the stories he was doing so much that I started picking up the paperbacks of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ stuff. I read a lot of those stories, and it was only because I liked what I’d seen in his comic adaptations. Yeah, and I think Alan is one of those guys who combines realistic lighting with cartooning, which is sort of my ideal in comics. I think if you go too far in either direction, if the stuff is too photo-based, it just doesn’t have any snap to it, and if it’s all made-up, sometimes if there’s not enough reality to it, you don’t fall into the illusion of the story quite as easily. So yeah, that’s what I like about Alan’s work. I was totally thrilled that I finally got a chance to work with him. MM: And then not long after that you worked with Art Adams on the “Jonni Future” stories. In issue #9 of Tom Strong’s Terrific Tales, you did the finishes over his inks, and it’s an interesting combination. It’s a combination of somewhere between Art’s own inking and what you were doing with the “Man-Bat” story, as far as the inking style. KEVIN: Yeah. There’s a reason for that that wasn’t necessarily intentional on my part. From what I know of the history of those stories, I think, believe it or not, Bruce Timm was supposed to do what I did, to work over Arthur’s layouts and finish off those two stories. And Bruce got really busy with some animation work and couldn’t do it. And so Scott asked me to. So the situation is already bizarre. I couldn’t quite understand why anybody thought having Bruce Timm work over

Previous Page: No, this page isn’t from a Conan book, but it would certainly fit right in. John Buscema’s pencils and Kevin’s inks for page 26 of Superman: Distant Fires. Below: The opening splash panel of Kevin’s first and only collaboration with Alan Weiss. Superman ™ and ©2004 DC Comics. Tom Strong and all related characters ™ and ©2004 America’s Best Comics, LLC.

Below: Kevin’s inks graced José Luis GarcíaLópez’s pencils in this powerful reworking of a classic Hawkman cover. Next Page: Two of Kevin’s very own creations: Terra Firma Irma and Dr. Nob. Dr. Nob, Terra Firma Irma ™ and ©2004 Kevin Nowlan. Hawkman ™ and ©2004 DC Comics.

Arthur Adams’ stuff was a good idea in the first place [laughs], and then Bruce isn’t able to do it, so you call me? [laughter] I just never ever grasped what was going on there. But that’s what happened. So Arthur did these layouts that were extremely tight, except they were drawn at print size. They were very, very small. So that was a challenge. In hindsight, maybe I should have enlarged them and done the finishes at 11" x 17", because working that small in a style like that—as opposed to something kind of calligraphic like Toth’s or Bruce Timm’s work or something—it just made the lines look kind of rough and the details were a little too fat and blunt, and it lost a lot of that crisp detail that had been in the series up until that point, where Arthur was doing his own inks. The next one he did a bit larger. Not a whole lot larger, still not up to 11" x 17" size, but a few inches bigger, and it worked a lot better. MM: You got credit for “additional inks” in that second story. How much of that did you actually work on? KEVIN: I did the first four pages of that story, and the fact that you’re not sure how much I did suggests it might have been successful. MM: Yeah, I think it was. KEVIN: It’s a lot harder to tell my style, I think, on the second one. 84

The only difference between the two chapters is the size of the originals. But it felt weird. We were talking about seeing someone else draw “Jack B. Quick.” It felt even weirder, I think, to have me on that series, where clearly this is Arthur’s baby. It’s not a job where you should see someone else handling the inks. It’s 100% Arthur, so I really felt out of place on that. MM: Let’s talk about the Hawkman covers just for a minute. Was he an interesting character for you to work on? You’d never drawn him professionally before had you? KEVIN: No, I had never drawn him before that first cover. MM: He’s got the coolest costume in comics. I imagine most artists like drawing him just because there’s so much you can do with him, with the wings and everything. KEVIN: I take it back, I just had a flashback to being about six or seven years old. I did draw Hawkman before. [laughs] When I was a little kid and I first saw a Hawkman comic, like you said, it’s the coolest costume ever. It’s just great-looking. And I thought, “Hmmm... I can take this a little further.” I remember drawing an alligator man who had an alligator head on and the same kind of criss-cross costume with an alligator silhouette emblem in the middle of it. Who knows, I guess I finally got tired of doing variations on Hawkman. But I thought it was a nice little formula for drawing superheroes. [laughter] I just remember doing that. I did little drawings on notebook paper, barely being able to draw but thinking, “Hmm, I can do something with this.” MM: So what about working on Hawkman? Did it live up to your childhood expectations? KEVIN: Just doing those covers? Yeah! He’s fun to draw. The biggest challenge for me was the wings, because, as I do with all of these things, I dug up a whole bunch of the Joe Kubert stuff, and Murphy Anderson, and the current stories, and looked at the way different people handled the wings. I liked the way Joe Kubert did them, where obviously they’re based on real bird wings, but again he exaggerates a

little bit, so they’re even more dramaticlooking and more expressive, more interesting than if you just literally traced a photo of a bird’s wings— fairly boring. So that was the most challenging part of that. But they were both fun. MM: Did inking the DC Comics Presents Hawkman cover over José help at all?

and me. As much as Alan Moore and I feel a sense of ownership with “Jack B. Quick,” it belongs to DC. Yeah, hopefully I’ll get a chance to do something like that at some point, I don’t know.

KEVIN: It did, although you can’t really see Hawkman’s wings on that cover, but there are the giant gorilla’s wings. [laughs] Yeah, that was a real treat. I think most of today’s readers might have been too young to have read that book when it came out. But you see that image of Hawkman hitting a giant winged gorilla with a mace, it’s hard to get that out of your head. [laughter] And then to see it executed as beautifully as José did it, and it was a blast. It had elements that were great for an inker, the gorilla fur, the wild expression on his face. It was just a blast. You couldn’t possibly have more fun working in comics.

MM: Would you want to write it yourself, as well? KEVIN: Yeah, I would. I have some ideas, but haven’t really gotten far enough with them to get anything published yet. MM: Is this something that you work on here and there, in your spare time? KEVIN: Not so much work on it as a quiet moment, thoughts run through your head. I did a couple characters years ago for Nick Barucci for that card set that he did, where the idea was, it had to be your characters you create, you had to come up with a short synopsis for the back of each card, and do a drawing. It was the first time I’d really had to write something. Coming up with the character and doing a drawing, that was easy. That was the fun part. But then I really struggled writing a brief description of who this character is and what their background is. I had a blast doing it, even though I rewrote the same paragraph over about six times. I was really so nervous about it every step of the way. And yeah, I’d like to do something along those lines with one or both of those characters. Probably by the time I got around to doing it, they would have evolved into something unrecognizable. Just the process of sitting down and making stuff up and putting it down on paper as opposed to reading someone else’s script and following their instructions, it’s a totally different feeling. I hope I get a chance to do something like that down the road a bit.

MM: What are you working on now? KEVIN: I’m working on a presentation drawing for what may be an enormous project and I’m reluctant to go too far with it, as I haven’t had good luck with longer projects. I’m much more comfortable doing short stories. So I may only do this presentation drawing, I may not do the series, I’m just not sure. The thing might not even get sold, I don’t know. But the usual couple covers here and there. I did a bunch of drawings for the Upper Deck card series of Marvel and DC characters. Those were a blast! I may send you some color files of some of those, because I drew them large, and they’re printed about an inch tall. Like I said, it's nice to jump from one little thing to another, because you never really get bored. I’ll be starting on the new “Jack B. Quick” story in about a week. It’ll keep me busy for quite a while. MM: Have you considered anything creator-owned? KEVIN: Yes, I’ve considered it off and on for years, just have never gotten it done. Obviously, that’d be the ultimate project. Grimwood’s Daughter is owned by Jan Strnad 85

Part 6: Below: Todd Klein provided Kevin with a template for the cover of Tomorrow Stories #3. Next Page: It took Kevin a few passes before he settled on the final composition. Jack B. Quick and all related characters ™ and ©2004 America’s Best Comics, LLC.

The Theory behind “Pet Theory”

MM: We’re going to start with the cover. Whose idea for the layout was this? Do you come up with the ideas yourself and submit them, or did they suggest ideas to you? How does it work? KEVIN: Strangely enough, Todd Klein was working as sort of a de facto art director, or at least cover editor, on that book. He would put together a template with all the type and the arrangement of the face bullets and things like that, and then—on both of the Tomorrow Stories covers that I did, he sent me a template and suggestions for a cover. And I believe he was speaking with Alan about these, but I wouldn’t swear that that was the case. So it felt kind of strange; it felt like something

I should be discussing with Scott. But Todd was the one taking care of it, and he did a really nice job. MM: Well, the first thing I notice when I look at the cover is, first of all, the mushroom cloud reflected in Jack’s glasses, but then that kind of draws you right to his eyes, which really stand out on the cover, I think. And I thought it was interesting that you made sure the glasses were down the nose so that you could see the eyes and get the expression in the eyes. KEVIN: Yeah. Jack and his dad always have their glasses down on their nose, which drives some people crazy. [laughter] But for me, it just looks right. I don’t know why. It might just be like you said: you can see the expression on their faces much better if you don’t have the glasses in the way. MM: I noticed also with this, even the characters in the headshots on the sides— KEVIN: They’re reacting. [laughs] MM: They’re reacting to what they’re seeing, too. The only one that’s not really reacting is Jack. He looks kind of stoic. KEVIN: Yeah, his reaction is much more subdued. MM: So was all that suggested, as well? KEVIN: I believe so. At least, I have no specific memory of coming up with it myself. So I believe it was suggested by Todd. MM: Do you prefer coming up with ideas yourself, or do you not mind which way it works? KEVIN: No, I don’t mind either way. If I have an idea, certainly I’m partial to that. But I don’t mind getting suggestions from someone else. And a lot of times, like on this cover, it speeds things up. You can get

caught in this trap where you do dozens and dozens of little sketches and they end up picking parts of several different ones and combining them, and it just becomes a mess. But this was a pretty nicely streamlined process. MM: Yeah, it’s a very clean cover. You’ve just got the figures there and the type. And Todd, I guess, worked up all these logos. Is that correct? KEVIN: Right. Except for “Jack,” the “Jack” logo’s mine. MM: I know we mentioned this earlier, I think you were kind of surprised to see it displayed so heavily on the cover. KEVIN: [laughs] Yeah, to make it look like Jack B. Quick, Boy Inventor #3. You have to read the fine print to realize that’s not the name of the comic. MM: Yeah, was that just the big draw for the title at that point? Were you already getting that much reaction to it? KEVIN: Yeah, I think the mail was fairly favorable. I think people really, really did like the character and love the stories. I don’t know, that’s really a question for the editor, Scott Dunbier. I don’t know if that was Scott’s idea to spotlight the “Jack” logo that way or not. It might have been Todd’s. I just don’t know. MM: Well, speaking of the logo, let’s go into your

design process. There’s almost a Deco kind of look to it. What was the thought process behind that? KEVIN: I wasn’t going for Art Deco as much as maybe Art Nouveau, and something oldfashioned that you’d see on a turn-of-thecentury wooden sign or something like that. I was just trying to go for something noticeably old-fashioned, but also kind of fun-looking. In the first script that Alan sent me, he had some ideas for the logo, with a large B in the center and he suggested something like the Chrysler logo. So that was my starting point. MM: Okay. Well, let’s move to the inside, then. You start with the lettering first? KEVIN: Right. Since Alan writes a full script, as I’m starting to lay out a page, his words are the first things that I consider carved in stone. That’s the one thing that can’t change. So I start by working out the line endings, because I don’t like to hyphenate words, so I want someone reading the book to not be tripped up by awkward things like that and by balloons covering up part of someone’s head and the kind of things you get when the lettering is done after the pages are penciled. MM: Do you ever get to a situation where you’ve got your balloons set up, and then the layout just won’t work around

lettering style? Do you have guides to make sure you remain consistent, or is it just so much a part of you that you don’t need them? KEVIN: No, I don’t look at older examples, so it may change a bit over time. But for the standard balloons on “Jack,” I was trying to do just a straight, old-fashioned font. I’m always trying to make it look like Gaspar Saladino’s lettering. Or maybe Ben Oda’s EC work from the ’50s. It never quite looks that way. [laughs] I also want a lot of thick and thin stroke, where the horizontal strokes are much thicker than the vertical strokes. MM: I think Richard Starkings has done up computer fonts for various letterers so that they can just use that and it still looks like their lettering. Would you ever consider doing something like that, or do you prefer the hands-on approach?

those balloons and you have to reformat those balloons?

Above: Kevin will often rework word balloons and move them around during the layout process. Next Page: Kevin used his own house (shown in the vintage photo with some of its past owners) as photo reference for the Quick family homestead. Jack B. Quick and all related characters ™ and ©2004 America’s Best Comics, LLC.

KEVIN: I don’t know if that’s happened, because what I’m doing is working in pencil, so I lay out the lettering in pencil, and then, right after that, I’ll start laying in the figures. By the time I’m finished roughing in the type, I have a pretty good idea of what’s going to go where. Or even just after I’ve read Alan’s script, I have a pretty good idea of what’s going to go where. But if there’s really a problem, if I have to move something, I’ll do it at that stage. If everything works out and I have a pretty good idea of where everything is going to go in the panel, I will go ahead and ink the lettering, and then after that start firming up the pencils. MM: Do you ever change fonts between stories, or do you always work more or less in the same style? KEVIN: Yeah, more or less the same style. MM: Did you at any point work out your 88

KEVIN: I have mixed feelings, because I really think the artwork looks better when it’s lettered on the boards, but it is so tedious, and sometimes it can take so much time away from drawing that on a really dense page, like page two in this story, it seems like it would be great to have that as an option. MM: I think they even have fonts where they will have variations of letters which will randomly pop up so it looks more natural. KEVIN: Yeah. It’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference. MM: Do you have a specific pen that you ink the lettering with? KEVIN: Yeah, it’s a Speedball pen that’s either sanded or filed down to get that exact shape, like I said, so that I get that thick and thin stroke. MM: And you do have a pretty condensed font, especially in “Jack B. Quick.” Are you consciously condensing the text to help you get all of Alan’s script in there? KEVIN: Exactly. I’d like to letter much larger than that, but there just isn’t room.

MM: Let’s move into layout. You said you’re laying out as you’re lettering. How do you determine what you need to do if you’ve got those big balloons. You have to basically come up with your panel layout first, I would think. Right? KEVIN: Right, and I pretty much start with the standard six-panel grid. Or five panels—a lot of times one tier will go the whole way across. So I almost always start with that. The assumption is, don’t depart from that unless there’s a reason to. I played around with more varied layouts when I first started drawing comics, and sometimes that works great, but I think for a story like one of these “Jack B. Quick” installments, you don’t really want people to notice the layouts. You want them to just read the story and have everything very, very clear. MM: I think also, with the six-panel grid, considering that you’ve got the short story and there’s a lot going on in each panel, you want a more open panel. You don’t want to try to squeeze eight panels on a page.

KEVIN: Right, and do insets and things like that. Sometimes, if it’s a novice reader, they may be totally lost and not know what panel follows which. Also, really, now that I think about it, Alan’s scripts are fairly specific about that, as well. At the beginning of each page description, he’ll say, “I see this as a standard six-panel layout,” and he describes things very, very specifically. So even if I wanted to do some more imaginative layouts, I don’t think I’d dare to depart that much from what Alan’s asking for. MM: Yeah, I think the only place where you actually depart from it is on the splash page, you’ve got the one large panel and then the two horizontal panels. That was probably just to get the crater in, I would think. KEVIN: Exactly. And also the way things are stretched out in the last panel, it just fit much, much better in a horizontal format than in the standard square format. I also realized after I started working on these that Alan was going back to a classic layout for splash pages, with one large panel and two small panels beneath it. And it was something that you saw all the time, from the Golden Age of comics through the ’50s EC, and it’s pretty much disappeared since then. And I assume, as with most things, it was a deliberate choice on Alan’s part. But I really appreciate it, because again I think it’s one of those things that just worked. There really wasn’t any reason to get away from that, because it works. I don’t know, people may have started to think of it as old-fashioned and stopped using it, but I’m very partial to it. It’s a great way to just pull the reader into the story. You catch their eye with the splash page, and they can’t help but look down, then, at the next panel, and before they know it, they’re reading the story. MM: Do you ever do thumbnails before you start laying out the page? 89

KEVIN: Yes. Almost always, just to get some idea of how things will fit.

KEVIN: Yeah. Not quite stick figures. Ovals for heads and things like that.

Rough textures on a tree or on the ground or something like that, the mud beneath the pigs as they’re marching. That’s the kind of thing where you know you don’t have to work out all those details. But things like the, like you said, expressions on their faces and the hands and things like that, if you don’t work that out in the pencils, you could really end up with a mess when you try to ink over it.

MM: Including gestures and that kind of thing?

MM: What density pencil do you use?

MM: You’re just doing something like stick figures when you’re doing that?

KEVIN: Yeah, gestures is the important thing. If you have some sense of how the characters move in the thumbnails, then everything else flows very smoothly after that.

KEVIN: It’s an HB in a lead holder. I didn’t start using those until fairly late, but I finally realized that almost everyone in comics was using a lead holder instead of a wooden pencil, and you could just get such a nice, sharp point on it.

MM: Once you’ve got the layouts in, do you ink the lettering first, before you start the penciling?

MM: And it stays consistently sharp. KEVIN: Exactly. That’s really nice for lettering and letter guides and things like that.

KEVIN: Yeah. If there’s no question about how the rest of the elements will fit together, I’ll go ahead and ink the lettering, just so it doesn’t get smeared as I’m working on the rest of the drawings. But if I’m uncertain about something, if I’m not sure if things might need to be moved around, I’ll just leave the lettering in pencil form and work out the other elements, and wait then to ink the lettering when I do the rest of the inks.

MM: It looks like a lot of times you’ll go in and you’ll pencil pretty heavy, as if there’s ink lines there. Occasionally, you even go back and thin it up later when you actually ink. How do you determine what needs to be darker there? Do you just kind of go until you see the right shape? KEVIN: Are you talking about pencils or inks?

MM: Now, when you pencil, it looks like you’re penciling a lot of the details, especially the folds in the clothes and the expressions on the faces. The only thing you really leave in question is some of the shading for larger areas.

MM: In the pencils. KEVIN: Yeah, you just go until it looks right, and you may not really be certain about shadows here and there, so it’s easy enough in pencil to lightly put in a large black area and get a rough idea of what that would look like in inks, as opposed to—it’s certainly hard to go back once you’ve inked a big shadow if you’ve changed your mind.

KEVIN: Right. Just from experience, you find out what needs to be worked out before you start with the inks. 90

MM: One thing on page two, the pigs marching through the mud there. In the pencils that I have, the lead pig—the larger pig in the front—you’ve got him shaded pretty well. It’s pretty much exactly how you want to shade it, and it’s basically how you ended up inking it. The other pigs you kind of leave blank, but in the inks you shade them all in basically the same fashion as the first pig. KEVIN: Right, exactly. MM: Was it a matter of getting one right and then you can go from there? KEVIN: Yeah. A bit like a rubber stamp, you get the first one worked out and then the others are going to fall into place without much trouble. Adding those shadows on the first pig was fairly easy so I knew that I didn’t have to work all that out in the pencils. MM: Let’s go back to the photo reference here. Earlier we were talking about how you just happened to have at the right time photo reference for the pigs, and you went and got reference for the cats. There’s also your house, which you used as photo reference for Jack’s house. How do you go from the photo reference to actually making the expressions? You obviously had to tweak what’s in the photos to give the pigs a more human look in their faces. KEVIN: Instead of looking through books trying to find a smiling pig? MM: Yeah. KEVIN: For pigs it doesn’t take much. Almost like an alligator or something, their natural expressions are almost smiling anyway. So it was easy enough to just sort of turn up the edges of their mouths and make them look a little happier. MM: Did you have any trouble drawing them upright? KEVIN: I think I just sort of thought of them as fat people [laughs] and then changed the legs. So it may not be accurate. That might not be what actual pigs would look like if we could get them to march on their hindquarters. But it works; it’s close enough. MM: When you pencil, do you work

sequentially, or do you sometimes jump around from page to page? KEVIN: I like to go sequentially if for no other reason than your hand’s not dragging over the graphite. And that’s why I ink the opposite way, I’ll start in the lower right corner and ink. Assuming that those inks are dry, before you go to the next panel, then you’re not smearing the graphite with your hand as you work. MM: Do you go back and forth between penciling and inking? Will you start inking once you have, say, a page of pencils done, so that you can be penciling while ink dries? KEVIN: Yeah, and I probably do too much of that on the “Jack B. Quick” stuff. As you work over the pencils and you have a light sketch—the rough position of a figure—and then you go a little darker, a little heavier with the pencil, to firm up the details, sometimes you feel like you need one more step so I’ll just pick up a pen and ink it—do the final rendering with ink. MM: Do you generally work with a pen first or a brush? 91

Previous Page: Page 4 layouts. Most of the lettering has been inked and some of the pencils have been tightened up. Above: Note how Kevin indicates the shading on the lead pig, but not the rest. This is all the information he needs to work out the inks for the entire group. Jack B. Quick and all related characters ™ and ©2004 America’s Best Comics, LLC.

KEVIN: Usually with a pen. There’s not much brushwork on “Jack B. Quick” because there’s just so many small details. If you’re doing Batman with a big shadowy cape and things like that, that’s great for using a large sable brush, but there really isn’t much on Jack that lends itself to brushwork. Below: Whether Kevin forgot to add it or not, the cat’s word balloon adds a lot to the panel, as does Kevin’s reworking of the cat’s expression. Next Page: Even though this is a very rough layout, Kevin makes sure he works out the complex positioning of the figures of Jack and Mr. Murk. Jack B. Quick and all related characters ™ and ©2004 America’s Best Comics, LLC.

MM: You use the Hunt 102s? KEVIN: Right. MM: Do you start with the larger areas first, or do you start with the faces? KEVIN: I usually start with the faces first and then work down and do the backgrounds last. MM: I noticed sometimes you’ll change things in the inks as you go, like with an expression, you might open the mouth or something like that. There’s a couple of specific—on page four, on the fifth panel, the cat. You changed quite a bit there.

KEVIN: Yeah, you get up in the morning and look at it with fresh eyes and you realize, “Oh, I forgot to do this. I should—.” Or even just reread the dialogue and think, “It doesn’t look right for his mouth to be closed, his mouth should be open,” or something like that. MM: And actually, that panel, in the pencils, he doesn’t have a word balloon, but in the inks, you’ve added a word balloon for him, for the cat. KEVIN: Oh, I probably just overlooked that. I’m sure I didn’t add that, because Alan’s actually pretty specific about that stuff. I don’t think I would have added a word balloon for the cat without it being in the script. I probably just overlooked it the first time.

KEVIN: The cat through the door?

MM: That reminds me of something I wanted to ask earlier. When you do the word balloons for the animal noises, you add that little curve, that little arc in the lettering. Why do you do that? Is it just to kind of indicate a kind of modulation in the voice, just to distinguish them from human voices?

MM: Yeah. You have his mouth open, you have the water coming off of him, which wasn’t indicated in the pencils. Is that something where you just thought, “Oh, well, maybe I should add a little something. This needs a little something else”?

KEVIN: Not only do I not know why I did it, I didn’t even realize I was doing it until this moment. Maybe in my head I was hearing a cat sound, where maybe he’s just meowing, start out low, and then go up, and then come down again, like musical notes. I

action and added more panels to make the pacing work better or to make an action clearer. MM: Let’s move on to the coloring. When you’re doing your separations, you use a lot of earth tones and muted tones, generally? KEVIN: Yeah. Now, this one I didn’t color. I mean, I colored it but I—

don’t know. Maybe I just thought it looked better in the balloon if it curved a little. I don’t know. That’s probably a really good example of something done so subconsciously that it never even occurred to me until now.

MM: You just did the guides. KEVIN: Right, right. I’m trying to remember who did the separation. I think they did a fairly good job. Oh, it’s Bad@$$. I was fairly happy with the way this one turned out as far as the colors are concerned. But go ahead.

MM: It just happened. KEVIN: Yeah, you just kind of feel it in your gut, so you do it.

MM: You said you use Photoshop now. Do you have palettes set up for each project, like the “Jack B. Quick” stuff?

MM: When you’re inking, when you’re spotting your blanks, do you work within the panel, or do you think of the entire page as a whole? Or do you have to kind of balance it?

KEVIN: No. I probably should, but no, I have just a standard palette that I pretty much use on everything. And actually don’t use the palette as much as just making up colors as you go along, starting with the basic coloring and creating it as you work, just going in and adding a little here, a little there, almost like mixing paint when you’re working on canvas.

KEVIN: Within the panel for the most part. I think seeing the page as a whole is a little bit like we were talking about earlier, the fancier layouts and things like that, where—I mean, it’s nice to have the entire page work as a composition, but really, as you’re reading the story, your eyes are in one panel at a time. That’s how I prefer to see it. And certainly try to make one panel flow to the next, but I actually don’t give a lot of thought to that. If I do the layouts and I reread the story after I’ve lettered in the dialogue and stuff, if I stumble over it—you try to pretend like you’re reading it for the very first time, like you’ve never seen it before. And if I stumble over something, I try to figure out what’s causing that and make it move more smoothly.

MM: And there’s not a whole lot of really bright colors. I guess that blue is the one bright color. KEVIN: The sky blue? MM: Yeah. KEVIN: Yeah. And I also thought, I don’t really see “Jack” as being a terribly colorful story. It’s not superheroish. He’s wearing denim overalls that are fairly subdued blue-gray color. So I actually think of it more in terms of light and dark, where you’ve got his hair, which if he’s out in the sunlight is almost white, the highlights are white. And his shirt, which is almost the same color. And then, when I do my own seps, I try to brighten the skin tones to the point where they really stand out. And then the backgrounds are pretty subdued so they recede and hopefully the figures will come forward, or at least their faces come forward.

MM: What about pacing when you’re penciling these stories out? Do you have much room to control the pacing in these stories? KEVIN: No, the only time I did was in that first story, where I added extra pages. And still it wasn’t really a question of me adding panels that weren’t in Alan’s script, it was just spreading out what he’d asked for over more pages. On other stories, I’ve broken down the 93

MM: That’s your main concern with the coloring is to emphasize the faces?

Below: The angles of the staircase and the window help draw the eye to Jack even without color. Kevin’s living room provides the perfect stage for the scene. Next Page: Kevin’s initial attempt at this panel emphasizes the motion of the cat, but Kevin’s final decision to go with a more static image of the cat actually gives the reader a greater feeling that the cat is stuck in mid-air, caught between landing on all fours and landing butter-side down. Jack B. Quick and all related characters ™ and ©2004 America’s Best Comics, LLC.

KEVIN: Yeah, the important elements you notice first. Like on page four, panel three, where Jack’s running up the stairs. He’s in the background and he’s fairly small, but hopefully we notice him. Because of the composition and because of the colors, we notice him before we even pay much attention to his parents. MM: I think you did. Even in the penciling there, you’ve got the angles right there that kind of stand out from the rest of the composition. You’ve got the angle of the stairs and the angle of the window frame. KEVIN: Yeah, that’s funny; that’s our living room. That’s actually almost a photograph of our living room, and where the Victrola is, that’s where we have our TV. MM: Now that everything’s digital, do you have to work differently when doing guides for a separator? KEVIN: Actually, this story was probably the last time that I did guides for anything. I think after this, I was doing my own colors and my own separations. The difference would have been, once colorists were using Photoshop, even if I wasn’t doing the 94

separations, you could get really specific and put little highlights here and there, little variations in color that you could never have expected back in the days of flat newsprint comics. Another difference is that you have more colors to choose from and can have small variations. I worked with Lovern Kindzierski quite a bit on different projects, as a separator—Digital Chameleon. I started using colored pencils more to go in and put a tiny little highlight on a nose or something like that, because Lovern pointed out that they could basically reproduce anything that you’d throw at them. Whereas, when I colored something like the Outsiders Annual, I was painfully aware of the fact that there were only three blues and three yellows, and the variations were a real challenge for the separators. I think there was even a point on the Outsiders Annual where DC had to pay the separator more money because I had put in so many different little variations in color that it took them a lot longer to do those separations. Now with Photoshop that kind of thing is very, very routine. And on something like this I’m probably getting highlights and airbrushing that isn’t even in the guides, just because that’s what separators do these days. MM: Just in general terms, you don’t go with the splashy Photoshop techniques, where you’ve got that brilliant point of light, for example. I've never seen that in your work. What do you think of those effects? Do you prefer to use Photoshop to duplicate what you would normally do by hand, or do you see potential in some of these other special effects they have? KEVIN: Yeah. You just have to use it judiciously. But there’s certainly a danger with Photoshop of over-rendering things to the point where not only does it not look like a comic book, but it’s almost blinding because you’re seeing all this airbrushing and rendering. It just doesn’t read right. It’s distracting or it doesn’t hold together. So I still try to make “Jack” look like a traditional comic, in a way. Not exclusively flat colors, but with a limited amount of render-

ing. Again, it’s a question of taste. I’m partial to the more old-fashioned look of the flatter colors.

KEVIN: The hardest thing to draw was right after Jack puts the butter on the cat’s back—

MM: Well, is there anything that I’ve overlooked here that might make an interesting little anecdote?

MM: The cat does a little somersault. KEVIN: Yeah, he does a somersault, and I was trying to draw him twisting more, and just couldn’t pull it off. So I thought, “It’s not the twisting that’s as important as the fact that his—.” [laughs] How to even describe this? What’s important is that we see that the natural forces which keep a cat from landing on his back are taking effect, and fighting with the forces that are trying to make him land on his back because of the butter. [laughter] I think it finally worked. And actually, what I’m most happy with there is the look on Jack’s face. [laughs]

KEVIN: Yeah, looking at page five on “Pet Theory,” where Jack shows up at Murk’s Dairy, Mr. Murk is holding a butter churn. And I actually saw it at my mother-in-law’s. She had this beautiful old glass butter churn up on an upper shelf in her kitchen, and I asked her about it and she got it down and explained what it was and all of that to me. And I borrowed it then to include in that panel. Even though it’s very, very small, you can’t really even see what it is, but it’s a big glass jar with a metal crank and two wooden paddles coming down. So it might look like it’s something I just made up, even though it’s—

MM: He’s very satisfied. KEVIN: Because he’s so proud that his experiment has worked. And then the next panel, when the cat’s tail is turning like a helicopter, that went fairly easily. On the next page, it was also hard to draw all those cats in the bathroom, because you want each one to look different. You don’t want it to look like a rubber stamp, but it’s also supposed to be a whole series of clones, so they have to look different, but they also have to look identical. That was a small panel, but that was a really laborintensive panel to draw.

MM: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a glass one. KEVIN: Yeah! I hadn’t, either, until I saw that one. And also, Mr. Murk is kind of strangelooking, but Alan was fairly specific about his appearance. He said he saw Mr. Murk as having a huge head and undersized facial features. So when you see this guy and it looks like his eyes, his nose, and his mouth are sort of lost in a sea of face, that’s why. He started to remind me of a guy I know. MM: He almost looks like a Plympton cartoon.

MM: One thing I noticed in your pencils on that same page, where they’re hauling off Mr. Johannasen, you actually penciled off to the side, “Noose.” I guess that was to remind you that there’s supposed to be a noose there? Do you do that kind of thing, write little reminders to make sure you don’t leave anything out?

KEVIN: Yeah, he’s strangelooking. That kind of stuff is great. Obviously, Mr. Johannasen, he’s just sort of a generic elderly farmer. And I think there’s a danger sometimes with some of the characters that I draw that I’ll just go for the stereotypes, so it’s nice to get something really specific like that from the writer, to keep it interesting.

KEVIN: I think I was afraid I’d forget about that, that it’s not just that he’s naked and being carried away by these marching pigs, they have very, very dark intentions.

MM: Did you have any problems with the cats up in the air? You draw them so that they move like helicopters. 95

MM: Yeah, I think at one other point, you said, “This guy gets lynched.”

Below: Once Jack gets caught up in his experiments, nothing else matters. Pages 97-101: Kevin recently provided several pieces of art for Upper Deck’s Vs. System trading card game. The game allows players to pit their favorite DC heroes and villains against each other or even against Marvel’s cast of characters. For more information visit www.ude.com. Jack B. Quick and all related characters ™ and ©2004 America’s Best Comics, LLC. Vs. System ™ and ©2004 Upper Deck Co., LLC.

KEVIN: [laughs] Exactly. And it’s also pretty disturbing. I think it might be one of the first times you realize how evil Jack is, because his neighbor’s about to be killed, and he’s just speeding along saying, “Sorry, I’m too young to understand politics.” [laughter] The poor guy. MM: You’re one of the few comic book artists—and I’m not talking about the painters like Alex Ross and Dan Brereton and so on—who, more often than not, colors his own work. KEVIN: One of the reasons I really like to do my own coloring on something like this is that as you’re working along, you work out the layouts, then you finish the pencils, then you do the inks. Coloring the pages just seems like the next natural step. And it’s not that I think I’m some kind of genius colorist who can do better than a professional, it’s just a lot of times I feel like it’s all sort of worked out in my head, or at least I know what needs to be emphasized, and what needs to be played down, because you don’t want the reader to be

distracted by a background element that is just part of the scene. You don’t want everyone’s eye to go to that. Well, there’s no way that another colorist could understand that, because they’re never as involved in the story as Alan and I are. I know there’s some times on some of these stories where the editor is not that thrilled with the way I might have colored something, but overall I think the effect is a story that reads a lot better, where the storytelling elements are integrated because one person is handling them, as opposed to passing it off to someone else to kind of reinterpret it as they do the next step. It’s too easy to get things pulled apart when you’re working that way. And that’s why, even though these stories take a really long time to do, I think the results are worth it because it comes together a bit better that way. MM: You’re one of the very few people who actually gets to do this in the mainstream environment. KEVIN: Yeah, it just takes too long. You can’t put monthly books out that way. MM: Is there any kind of extra satisfaction knowing you’re allowed to do that? KEVIN: Sure. That’s another reason why this is a really special project. There aren’t many assignments where you can have the luxury of handling all of those stages of the artwork yourself. But also, if you start with Alan’s scripts on “Jack B. Quick,” you realize these are special. This isn’t something that should be knocked out by a committee. These are really special stories. Plus, they’re humorous, and as I’m sure you’ve heard, humor’s really delicate. You change one little thing and suddenly it’s not funny any more. It’s really easy to spoil the punchline of a joke. So there’s no question that I worked harder on these than anything else I’ve done in comics. But I was starting with—I honestly think they were brilliant scripts. Especially this one, the floating cats story. It’s such an ingenious script that it deserves that extra effort.

Kevin Nowlan

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BILL SCHELLY tackles comics of the Atomic Era of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis! (240-pages) $40.95 • (Digital Edition) $12.95 • ISBN: 9781605490540

1960-64 and 1965-69

JOHN WELLS covers two volumes on 1960s MARVEL COMICS, Wally Wood’s TOWER COMICS, CHARLTON, BATMAN TV SHOW, and more! 1960-64: (224-pages) $39.95 • (Digital Edition) $11.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-045-8 1965-69: (224-pages) $39.95 • (Digital Edition) $11.95 ISBN: 9781605490557

The 1970s

JASON SACKS & KEITH DALLAS on comics’ emerging Bronze Age! (240-pages) $40.95 • (Digital Edition) $12.95 • ISBN: 9781605490564

us new Ambitio FULLseries of DCOVERS AR COLOR H nting each e m cu o d f comic decade o tory! book his

The 1980s

KEITH DALLAS documents comics’ 1980s Reagan years! (288-pages) $41.95 • (Digital Edition) $13.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-046-5

AGE OF TV HEROES 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:

LOU SCHEIMER

VOLUMES ON THE 1960s & 1970s

CREATING THE FILMATION GENERATION

Issue-by-issue field guides 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!

Biography of the co-founder of Filmation Studios, which for over 25 years brought the Archies, Shazam, Isis, He-Man, and others to TV and film!

(224-page trade paperbacks) $27.95

(288-page trade paperback with COLOR) $29.95

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 (bundle with companion DVD) $29.95

TwoMorrows—A New Day For Comics Fandom! TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 E-mail: store@twomorrowspubs.com • Visit us on the Web at www.twomorrows.com

KEVIN NOWLAN Kevin Nowlan is an artist’s artist—highly respected not only by his fans, but by his peers. Cover artist, penciler, inker, letterer, colorist—even writer—he has done it all masterfully. Kevin’s work on comic-book icons Batman and Superman ranks among the best in those characters’ rich histories. His humorous “Jack B. Quick” feature—co-created with Alan Moore—not only allowed him to explore his midwestern roots, but won him an Eisner Award along the way! This volume features an in-depth interview with Nowlan, fully illustrated with rare and never-before published artwork, as well as a gallery section of sketches and finished color pieces—the ultimate look at a true Modern Master. MODERN MASTERS is an ongoing series of books celebrating the lives and work of the greatest comic book artists of our time.

$14.95 In The US ISBN