Modern Masters Volume 4: Kevin Nowlan Preview 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

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

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.

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.

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.

Part 2: 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.

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? 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

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

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

Previous Page: Batman, looking rather creepy. Above: Aurora of Alpha Flight.

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? KEVIN: Like 50 pages, I think. 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—

MM: Out of how many? KEVIN: 62? 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? KEVIN: Yes.

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: 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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,

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

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

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 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

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

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

Kevin Nowlan

Art Gallery

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Modern Masters:

Kevin Nowlan

The Modern Masters series continues its look into the lives and work of today’s top comic-book artists, this time spotlighting Kevin Nowlan! 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, and done it 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 industry legend, 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. It’s the ultimate look at a true Modern Master: Kevin Nowlan!

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