Modern Masters Vol. 20: Kyle Baker

M O D E R N

M A S T E R S

KYLE AKER B

by Eric Nolen-Weathington

V O L U M E

T W E N T Y :

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TwoMorrows.Celebrating The Art & History Of Comics. (& LEGO! ) TwoMorrows • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 • E-mail: twomorrow@aol.com • www.twomorrows.com

Modern Masters Volume Twenty:

M O D E R N M A S T E R S V O L U M E T W E N T Y:

KYLE BAKER edited by Eric Nolen-Weathington front cover by Kyle Baker all interviews in this book were conducted and transcribed by Eric Nolen-Weathington

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Dr. Raleigh, North Carolina 27614 www.twomorrows.com • e-mail: twomorrow@aol.com First Printing • April 2009 • Printed in Canada Softcover ISBN: 978-1-60549-008-3 Trademarks & Copyrights All characters and artwork contained herein are ™ and ©2008 Kyle Baker unless otherwise noted.

The Bakers, Cowboy Wally, Holmes & Watson NYCPI, How to Draw Stupid, King David, Nat Turner, Special Forces, Toussaint, Why I Hate Saturn, You Are Here, and all related characters ™ and ©2009 Kyle Baker.

Martha Washington™ and ©2009 Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons.

Batman, Eel O’Brien, Flash, Hawkman, House of Mystery, Joker, Justice League of America, Letitia Lerner, Mr. Mind, Plastic Man, Robin, Supergirl, Superman, Wonder Woman ™ and ©2009 DC Comics.

Splash Brannigan ™ and ©2009 America’s Best Comics, LLC. Captain America, Cyclops, Isaiah Bradley, New Mutants, Psi-Force, Wolfpack ™ and ©2009 Marvel Characters, Inc. Goofy, Mickey Mouse ™ and ©2009 Disney.

The Avenger, The Shadow ™ and ©2009 Condé Nast.

Dick Tracy ™ and ©2009 Tribune Media Services, Inc. Olive Oyl, Popeye, Swee’Pea ™ and ©2009 King Features, Inc. The Simpsons ™ and ©2009 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp.

Bert, Ernie ©2009 Jim Henson Productions, Inc. Atari Force ™ and 2009 Atari, Inc. Classics Illustrated ™ and ©2009 The Berkley Publishing Group and First Publishing, Inc. Vibe ™ and ©2009 Vibe Media Group, Inc. Break the Chain, Superboy ™ and ©2009 respective owner.

Editorial package ©2009 Eric Nolen-Weathington and TwoMorrows Publishing.

Dedication To Donna, Iain and Caper Acknowledgements Kyle Baker, for his unbounded energy and enthusiasm, and for his time.

Heritage Auctions, for providing access to their archives or orignal artwork. Please visit them at www.ha.com.

Special Thanks Roger Ash, Terry Austin, Mike Manley, Tom Ziuko, Rick McGee and the crew of Foundation’s Edge, Russ Garwood and the crew of Capitol Comics, and John and Pam Morrow

Modern Masters Volume Twenty:

KYLE BAKER Table of Contents Introduction by Eric Nolen-Weathington . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Part One: Funny Animals and Horror Stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Part Two: A Cowboy, a Shadow, and a Trip to Saturn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Part Three: Here and There and Everywhere . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Part Four: The Truth about Marvel and DC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Part Five: One Thing Leads to Another . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 Part Six: Storytelling and the Creative Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 Art Gallery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

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Introduction

W

ay back in the early ’90s, I worked at a comics shop across the street from the university campus where I attended classes. As you would expect, the other employees and myself would often talk about our favorite books and recommend things to one another.

During one of these chats, Mike, the “elder statesman” of the bunch (he was three or four years older than the rest of us) started going on and on about this fantastic book he’d gotten a few years back. It sounded like it would be right up my alley, but unfortunately the shop didn’t have a copy and the book was out of print and couldn’t be reordered.

Lucky for us, though, Mike was so gung-ho on this book that he let any of us who were interested borrow his copy. You read that right, True Believers—a dyed-in-thewool comic book collector actually let his only treasured copy of an out-of-print book leave the safe confines of his home and be passed around from one of us to the next.

That’s how much he loved this book.

Finally, it was my turn to take temporary possession of the book, and I have to say, by that point my expectations were running pretty high. As luck would have it, I was going to be heading to the family beach house that

weekend—the perfect place to enjoy a new book. I read The Cowboy Wally Show three times that weekend, and laughed out loud every single time.

But that was only my introduction to the talent of Kyle Baker. Kyle isn’t one to rest on his laurels. He’s created as many properties in comics as anyone since Jack Kirby. The difference, of course, is that Kyle owns what he creates.

Kyle works beyond the sometimes confining panel borders of comic books. His job is to tell stories, and he’s constantly searching for the best way to tell those stories, in whatever format that may take, be it graphic novels, animation, or even video games.

And Kyle doesn’t limit himself to pen and paper. He has always been at the forefront when it comes to incorporating the rapidly changing technology into his work—even to the point of finding new ways to use that technology.

Most importantly, though... Kyle makes me laugh.

Eric Nolen-Weathington April 1, 2009

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Part 1:

Funny Animals and Horror Stories Pooh and stuff. I got all that from my dad.

My parents met in art school; they both went to Pratt. So they loved making things with us kids. I remember we used to make boats.

MODERN MASTERS: Correct me if I’m wrong — you were born in 1965 in Queens, New York?

KYLE BAKER: That’s correct, yeah.

MM: That was a great time for kids, as far as cartoons and comics. What caught your attention first?

MM: And you would sail them on a lake?

KYLE: Yeah, yeah. We would spend all day doing it.

We’d get a piece of wood from the lumber yard, spend all day decorating it, and then we’d end up losing the thing in the lake. [laughter] But it was fun. We made puppets and, y’know, everything.

KYLE: I used to like the funny papers; the newspaper strips were really good. Pogo—Walt Kelly was still alive.

Al Capp was still alive. Those were really good strips, and I liked Dick Tracy at the time. I liked Underdog, the TV show.

And Harvey comics. There were a lot of good comics for kids at the time. I remember telling Ernie Colón that I grew up reading those Harvey comics of his.

MM: So you were seeing lots of different kinds of art then, not just comics and animation.

KYLE: Yeah, but I especially liked funny comics. When I was a kid, there was a big variety of comics—much more so than when I got into the business in the ’80s.

Now it’s great; it’s gotten back to having a lot of variety, which is healthy.

I have a brother and a sister, and we all used to go to the candy store together to get comic books. What was great was that we would all be able to buy comics even though we all had different tastes. I like funny cartoons, so I would buy Donald Duck or something like that.

My sister liked girl stuff, like Archie. We both liked Steve Ditko ghost comics. He was doing these scary comics for Charlton at the time.

MM: It sounds like you immersed yourself in that world pretty early on.

KYLE: Yeah. Comics were really good in the ’60s. And Mad magazine was really good. Jack Davis was still working for Mad. MM: Were you looking at Mad at that early an age, or did that come a little later?

KYLE: Well, I was a first kid, and my dad was 22 when I was born, so he was still buying National Lampoon and Mad magazine and stuff like that.

MM: Your dad was a commercial artist, right?

KYLE: Yeah, he worked in advertising. He made junk mail.

MM: Ghostly Tales and a couple of others.

MM: Did he draw around the house much, or did he keep that at the office?

KYLE: Him and Jim Aparo. I liked the mystery stories, and then when I got a little older I got into the EC stuff. The EC books were out of print when I was a kid, and you couldn’t find them, but I liked all the EC imitations, which were done by a lot of the same guys, like Wally Wood.

KYLE: He would draw pictures for us and entertain us. I do the same thing for my kids. You know, draw pictures of Elmo and Winnie the

MM: So you were reading the Warren magazines then?

KYLE: Yeah, I was into that stuff and that fake DC stuff, 6

like House of Mystery and Tales of the Unexpected. At the time I didn’t know that they were just watered down versions of the EC stuff. Once I saw the EC stuff, I saw that it was infinitely better. But that first stuff I got into was that weak, non-scary DC stuff. It was kind of like Goosebumps.

MM: Exactly. Sergio Aragonés would do little one- or two-page framing stories for some of those books. Did you notice he was one of the artists from Mad at that time?

KYLE: That’s a good question. I’m not sure when I became aware of who drew what. I know I liked Jim Aparo’s drawings better, but I don’t know that I knew he was Jim Aparo. We really liked Steve Ditko because he had a style that you could recognize everywhere. I think he was probably the first one that I could really look at and say, “Oh, yeah. That guy drew that,” because it was such a weird style.

MM: Did you ever try to imitate those guys in your drawing?

KYLE: I used to copy Johnny Hart drawings. My favorite stuff was always the funny stuff. I sort of fell into Marvel because I happened to know somebody there. But I always thought I was going to do funny stuff. Mad wasn’t hiring until recently, but I thought that would have been a good place for me.

MM: Did you just take the normal art classes in high school, or were you able to attend special art classes since your parents were both artists?

KYLE: I went to some classes on the weekend. You can always find free classes at museums, so my parents would look in the paper for things like that.

I was very interested in animation, actually, and I used to make little Super-8 movies. I got out of it just because it was such an expensive habit. I got back into it when computers came along, because you can reshoot something a hundred times and it doesn’t cost you anything—there’s no film or developing. I don’t pay for lights anymore. But that was what I was really into for a long time. I liked Disney stuff and the Bugs Bunny stuff—all the theatrical shorts.

MM: And you could see all the really good ones thanks to television syndication.

KYLE: Right, and they were uncut at the time. The last time I saw them on TV, they had cut them up to the point where they weren’t funny.

MM: It was sad and frustrating to see them get shorter and shorter and choppier and choppier as the years went on.

KYLE: That’s the thing. I’ve been doing this 25 years or so now, and you really have to change with the times. What was a great business ten years ago is a rotten business now. When I was a kid, the dream 7

Previous Page: Kyle exhibits his love for funny animals in this gag panel of a mouse in a glue trap.

Above: Kyle also enjoyed the many DC and Charlton anthology “horror” comics as a kid, and he recently worked on DC’s new House of Mystery series. This page is from issue #10.

House of Mystery ™ and ©2009 DC Comics.

to go into comic books at all unless you wanted to end up like Siegel and Shuster.

MM: Were you actually aware of that at that point?

Did you know all the horror stories before getting into the business?

KYLE: I was, because my father was in the business. I would say, “Gee, dad, I sure would like to be an artist when I grow up. I wouldn’t mind being like Jack Kirby.”

And he’d say, “Well, Jack Kirby didn’t make a dime.”

And I’d say, “Okay, well I don’t want to be Jack Kirby.

How about Wally Wood?” [laughter] “Well, no, Wally Wood didn’t make a dime, either.“ That’s why I didn’t end up at Walt Disney. He was not good with the workers; he was a union buster and all that stuff.

MM: Well, then, how did that lead up to you interning at Marvel while you were in high school?

KYLE: At my high school, you had to get an internship somewhere to get a credit.

Well, you didn’t have to. You could take more classes instead, but I didn’t want to take more classes. I’d rather get credit for hanging out at Marvel Comics. And a friend of mine had been an intern at Marvel and had done a good job, so they said, “Well, if anybody from this school wants to be an intern, send them over.”

Because interns work for free, so what the hell? [laughter] And like I said before, at the time it was a really rotten business, which meant it was a really easy business to get into. People today ask me how to get into comics, and I have no idea, because it’s actually competitive now.

If I was a guy starting out, I don’t know. Now it’s hard to get in. People actually want a job at Marvel Comics, because there’s profit sharing and things like that. But at

was to be in the funny papers. Those guys were millionaires. But that was because you had, like, 10,000 papers.

Now you’ve got 2,000 papers. Even the success stories are quitting, because it’s just not worth it. Guys like Gary Larson and Bill Watterson and Aaron McGruder all quit at the top of their popularity because it’s not worth it. And at the time, comic books was just a rotten business. Anybody who’d ever made up a successful comic book character had gotten screwed, so you didn’t want 8

the time it was where everybody started their career. Basically, all the successful people in comics had gotten out. Guys like Jack Davis, who I consider a success story, or Frank Frazetta, started their careers in comics and then became successful and never did another comic book again. Neal Adams is another example.

So I saw it as, “Well, gee, maybe I can get my portfolio together and get the hell out of the business like all the winners.” [laughter] MM: Who did you hang out with as an intern? Were you able to get advice from the guys there?

KYLE: I would just pester all the artists that would come in and show them my drawings and get their advice. And most of them were really nice to kids. Guys like

Walter Simonson had good advice. I remember Al Milgrom was very helpful, and Larry Hama. And Jim Shooter—he had a lot of good advice.

MM: What exactly were your duties? Were you just shuffling papers, or was there more to it than that?

KYLE: I was working in the mail room.

We would sort out the fan mail, because everybody thought that Chris Claremont worked at Marvel Comics. Xeroxing was the thing I liked doing. And I did a lot of filing, because I seemed to be the only intern that knew the alphabet. [laughter] But I enjoyed the xeroxing, because I’d get these John Buscema pencils that weren’t inked, and you could really learn something looking at some good pencils like that. I would make an extra copy for

9

Previous Page: Another page from House of Mystery #10, and, what do you know, there are funny animals involved.

Below: Early inking work from Kyle. These pages from 1986’s New Mutants #44 and 46, respectively, were both penciled by Jackson “Butch” Guice.

House of Mystery ™ and ©2009 DC Comics. New Mutants ™ and ©2009 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Below: Caricatures of Milton Glaser (left) and Silas Rhodes (right).

Glaser is one of the most prominent and influential commercial artists in American history. Silas Rhodes was, along with Burne Hogarth, one of the cofounders of New York’s School of Visual Arts.

Next Page: Kyle’s inks over Bob Hall’s pencils for 1987’s Psi-Force #14.

Psi-Force ™ and ©2009 Marvel Characters, Inc.

myself and practice inking on top of the pencils. That was fun, to get to look at real artwork.

And I used to get to hang out in the bullpen and watch the guys draw. There would be guys like Jack Abel, and John Romita would sometimes sit in the bullpen and draw. At the time I didn’t know anything about what ink to use, or what type of pen to use, so I’d ask a lot of questions like that. “Why are you using that white pencil?,” or whatever.

MM: Was that just an hour or so a day, or one or two days a week?

KYLE: I don’t remember. It must have been during business hours, so it probably was half a day of school or something like that. It was my senior year, and that was sort of their way of preparing you for whatever you’re going to do with your life.

MM: Did your experience reinforce your thoughts that you didn’t really want to go into comics, or did it open your eyes that it might be a good option?

KYLE: I was still trying to be funny, and I had been submitting strips to syndicates with no luck. It’s very hard to get into a newspaper syndicate. Jim Shooter and Stan Lee both tried to help me get into the syndicate that does the Spider-Man strip.

Shooter liked me—I was doing some Marvel stuff, too, a bit later—but he felt that I was just all wrong for Marvel, because they didn’t do any comedy. So he was always trying to get me set up at the syndicate so he could get rid of me. [laughter] That was nice of him—I’m not knocking him.

MM: So your internship ended as you graduated high school. What happened then?

KYLE: While I was interning, I was picking up some assistant work from some of the inkers. I was an assistant to Joe Rubinstein—I was doing background stuff for him. And I was doing background stuff for Vince Colletta. That’s how I started, and because of that I ended up inking some books. I think [then-editor] Jim Owsley [now known as Christopher Priest] may have been the first guy to give me some inking—I think it was Transformers. That was sort of the way things went back then.

MM: So you were getting a little paid work even before you graduated high school?

KYLE: Yeah, yeah. I worked my way through college as a Marvel artist. Finally I couldn’t juggle the two, and I gave up college. I was going to art school and the chances of actually making a living once you got out of art school were pretty slim.

And I actually had a job, so I figured I should focus on that.

10

MM: You went to the School of Visual Arts, right?

KYLE: That’s right.

MM: What were you focusing on in your classes?

KYLE: I was studying graphic design and print-making. At some point around that time, I started working for Milton Glaser, and that was sort of the kind of thing I wanted to do. Milton Glaser was a graphic designer, and did a lot of advertising stuff. That’s where I saw myself ending up, was advertising. At the time— and it’s amazing how things change—there was a big advertising business for illustrators. Not really anymore; styles go in and out, and now it’s mostly about photographs.

I was friends with Bill Sienkiewicz back then, because both of us were dreaming about doing movie posters, like Bob Peak. Back then all the movie posters were painted. That’s what Bill and I were trying to get into. I think Bill has done some movie posters. He does some pre-visual production work for movies, and since everyone uses photos now, he does a painting and they shoot a photo that looks like the painting for the movie poster.

MM: Did you get anything out of your time at SVA that you didn’t get working at Marvel or for Glaser?

KYLE: Just for a year, if I remember correctly. I was doing that and Howard the Duck at the same time. I wasn’t sleeping much, and I would get confused in my styles. The Glaser thing I was working on was a set of kids’ books with bunny rabbits, and then Howard the Duck was this duck character, but he’s drawn more realistically, like Gene Colan, not Disney. In the daytime I would be drawing these funny animals in a simple style, but then I would slip sometimes and start putting shading on an arm or something and have to throw the page out. [laughter] But it all worked out.

KYLE: I learned a lot from Glaser and at Marvel, just because I got to talk to guys that were actually doing it.

Guys like Milton Glaser were guys I respected and I wanted their opinons. He had a lot of knowledge, and he was also a teacher at SVA at the time. That’s how I ended up working for him; he would hire guys out of the school.

MM: How long did you work for him?

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Part 2:

A Cowboy, a Shadow and a Trip to Saturn Also, the guys—and they may still do this, but I don’t go up there so much anymore because I have all these kids—would socialize on Friday nights. All the Marvel guys and DC guys would go out to a bar or a restaraunt and socialize. It wasn’t competitive or anything. Again, that was probably because there was no money at the time. [laughter] Everybody was doing it out of love. I don’t imagine Marvel and DC guys hang out together anymore.

MM: You started getting a lot of inking at Marvel, but you did pencil a couple of entries in the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe in 1984. I believe that’s your first penciling credit.

KYLE: Joe Rubinstein inked that series, and I was working for him at the time, so that’s how I ended up doing that. I was also doing funny strips for Salicrup in Marvel Age.

MM: You mentioned the Howard the Duck comic book adaptation. That was your first big project for either of the Big Two. KYLE: I think so. That was the first book that I penciled. I mean, I penciled a couple of pages of Transformers, but if you were around.... Back in the old days, if somebody screwed up a deadline, they would just give their pages away. You would see a lot of things signed “By Many Hands” back then. You can’t really do that anymore, because if some guy’s paying ten bucks for a Bernie Wrightson comic book, it better have Bernie Wrightson in it. But at the time it would be, “Aargh, soand-so just screwed up the deadline on Dazzler. You want to do Dazzler?” [laughter] That’s how Vinny—Vinny is the one dead guy I never worry about speaking ill of. He was a pretty rotten guy. [laughter] He wasn’t a very good artist, and people always wondered how he got so much work. It was because he

MM: In 1986, you were all over the place, and not just at Marvel, but at DC, too.

KYLE: Working over there, two guys I learned a lot from were Dick Giordano and Joe Orlando. I think that’s why I didn’t need school. I mean, if you can ask Joe Orlando how to draw.... He was teaching at SVA, too.

MM: Were you going into the offices all the time looking for jobs? Did you make a point to go in and get face time with the guys at Marvel and DC? KYLE: In the old days, back before security and terrorism, freelancers would just walk up to Marvel Comics, walk in the door, and ask if anybody had any work. There were ten or 15 editors in offices in a row, and, like, me and Vinny Colletta would go up there and Vinny would just knock on all the doors and say, “Hey, what have you got?”

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could do a book in a night, and he’d save your ass. And if it looked terrible, it wasn’t his fault—he did it in a night. That’s where I learned how to be really fast, working for Vinny. And Dick Giordano had a lot of good tricks for working fast.

MM: Like what, for example?

KYLE: Dick used to work with a timer. He would say, “If you’re on a tight deadline, you put a clock on your desk, and you figure out how much time you can spend on each page. You ink all the figures and the important props and major things like that first. Then you look at the clock and realize time’s almost up and you haven’t finished the page, so you paint everything else black.” And the funny thing is, it actually makes it a better composition, because you have these really strong shapes, you’ve

got all the important story elements, and you’ve blacked everything else out that would have distracted the reader.

MM: Going back to Howard the Duck, it was a chance for you to work on a humor book. Is that why you got the gig?

KYLE: Yeah, ’cause I could do the two styles. Most people can do the funny stuff or the straight Marvel style, but I can do both.

MM: Going into the book, were there any expectations about how the movie would do and what kind of attention the book would get?

KYLE: No. The thing about movie adaptations is they tend to be the job nobody wants. It’s a terrible job, because the deadlines are awful, and it’s always super-secretive, which means you can’t get what you 13

Previous Page: Convention sketch of Cowboy Wally in the Shadow’s outfit.

Above: Pages from Atari Force Special #1—Kyle’s first work for DC—with Kyle’s inks over James Fry’s pencils.

Cowboy Wally ™ and ©2009 Kyle Baker. The Shadow ™ and ©2009 Condé Nast. Atari Force ™ and 2009 Atari, Inc.

Below: Kyle inked Ron Wilson’s pencils on this cover for the debut issue of Wolfpack.

Next Page Top: This series of panels likely came from the newspaper strips Kyle had worked up.

Next Page Bottom: Cowboy Wally sketches.

Cowboy Wally ™ and ©2009 Kyle Baker. Wolfpack ™ and ©2009 Marvel Characters, Inc.

need. I was trying to draw Howard the Duck, and I said, “I need to know what the monster looks like at the end.” And LucasFilms said, “Oh, it’s a secret. We can’t tell you that.” So I had to make up a monster.

Plus, it was my first job, so I didn’t know what I was doing. I had to redraw a lot of stuff. But you’ve got to start somewhere.

MM: Do you see that as a big stepping stone in your development as an artist?

KYLE: I guess. At the time I wasn’t thinking about it that way, because I really didn’t see any future for myself there. I was trying to get some experience and learn how to draw.

MM: Which came first for you, Wolfpack or The Shadow?

KYLE: I don’t remember. I was probably doing them both at the same time. I used to do a lot of books at the same time—I still do. I had five books come out last year.

That was one of those things, you were talking about expectations people might have about a book, I always find that you never know. Dick Tracy came out the same year Why I Hate Saturn came out. And Dick Tracy was the book everybody bought; nobody bought Why I Hate Saturn. You never know. But if you do five books, the chances of somebody buying one of them.... So each year I worked on one thing that was successful. I might have had four books that didn’t succeed—four Wolfpacks out there [laughter]—and one or two Shadows or Dick Tracys.

MM: It seemed like Marvel made an effort to push Wolfpack. It started out as part of their new graphic novel series, which then led into the ongoing series.

KYLE: There was a little break there when I did Cowboy Wally. I was inking a lot of Marvel books and trying to get my own thing going. I was trying to sell Cowboy Wally as a newspaper strip, so I had done samples—a couple of months’ worth of daily strips. Then Maus came out, and was a bit hit. Suddenly everybody decided they wanted to publish graphic novels, but they didn’t know anything about the business. Doubleday wanted to publish graphic novels, but they didn’t want to actually pay any money for them, so I ended up giving them Cowboy Wally.

I had done Spider-Man the year before, and I quit Spider-Man to do this book of my own for Doubleday for a $5,000 advance.

But having done Spider-Man the year before and making Spider-Man money, I owed more than $5,000 in taxes. I had just done my first book, and—going back to earlier—I thought that was what was really going to help my career, because it was the first thing that came out that had my name above the title. So I really needed money— the IRS was really coming after me, threatening me and stuff. I think I started doing more work for DC because the IRS started

14

garnishing my wages from Marvel. They had figured out I was working for Marvel Comics from my tax form and were taking all my Marvel income, so I went over to DC. I’ll bet that’s what happened. [laughter] MM: Changing Cowboy Wally from a newspaper strip concept to a graphic novel concept, how much reworking did that involve?

KYLE: Well, basically most of the first 20 pages or so is made up of the comic strip samples, with a punchline every four panels. I kept the gags, but I had to redraw the stuff to fit the format. But that was fine, because I had started it when I was so young—I was in college when I drew the strips—and I was getting better so quickly.

Now, if you look at something I did two years ago, it doesn’t look much worse than something I did one year ago.

At that point, though, I had gotten a lot better.

Then I had to write the rest of the book. The funny thing was—I was talking with Neil Gaiman about the book once, and he said that he got halfway through the book before he realized that I had no idea what I was doing. [laughter] I remember meeting Jules Feiffer right after the book came out, and he had read the book. He said, “That was a really good book, but I have a question. Did you just make that book up as you went along?” [laughter] It looked like it, because I was still in that daily newspaper gag strip mode. I didn’t know how to write a story. I would just get up every day and do a page or two until it was done.

now, and I know the ending. I know how the villain is going to be destroyed. Now it’s just a matter of getting the characters from where they are now, on page 15, to the part where they destroy the villain. That’s the part I kind of make up as I go along. But at the time I didn’t know what a story was at all.

MM: How did you make the connection with Doubleday? You said they were looking to publish graphic novels, but how did you come to work with them out of all the other publishers?

KYLE: A friend of mine at Marvel Comics named Ron Fontes was friends with an editor at Doubleday. So it all fell together.

MM: So it was almost a stream of conscious work. You were just writing it as the ideas came rather than writing around any kind of structure?

MM: You didn’t use word balloons, which is something you do quite a bit in your own work. Why did you decide to work that way?

KYLE: Usually I know where I’m going. I’m working on Special Forces right 15

KYLE: I really like Doonesbury and Jules Feiffer. If you look at Doonesbury from that time, the camera never moved. Now he’s gotten better and he changes the angles, but it used to be whatever the first panel was, the drawing wouldn’t move from that. The same thing with Jules Feiffer. He would just do a head, and then he would repeat that head twelve times with a caption. So if you look at Cowboy Wally, you’ll see a lot of close-ups of the same basic composition with huge blocks of text.

Doonesbury and Feiffer’s strips were both very talky. And I think Trudeau and I were working that way for the same reason, which was that we couldn’t draw. [laughter] The reason Cowboy Wally looks like W.C. Fields is because I’m a fan of all those old slapstick movies. I

would have liked to have done more of that in the book, but you have to be able to draw to do slapstick. I was barely able to get heads done. Basically, my first two books are just drawings of the same heads over and over and over, because that was the best I could do.

MM: Was the book successful as far as sales or recognition, or did it take time to catch on?

KYLE: At the time it didn’t do very well for two reasons.

One, was that nobody knew who I was or what the property was. You’ve got a book that nobody’s ever heard of, and two, it was in a format that was a brand new business. There weren’t a lot of graphic novels. I was interested because of Will Eisner’s work, but books that people were calling graphic novels, like Maus and Dark Knight, were actually collections of previously published material. With the exception of Eisner, there just weren’t many people doing 125-page stories—especially black-&-white with no superheroes.

MM: Did Doubleday have a marketing plan for the book? Were they going specifically for the mainstream bookstore market?

KYLE: Yeah, they were thinking that, because of Maus and Dark Knight, the world was going to jump on the graphic novel bandwagon. It just took 15 or 20 years. [laughter] Now people are into graphic novels; there’s a whole section of the bookstore devoted to graphic novels. But at the time I would tell people I did graphic novels, and then I would have to explain to them what they were. “Yeah, I do graphic novels.” “Oh, what’s that?” “Well, it’s kind of like a comic book, but it’s, like, 200 pages long.” Now when you tell people you do graphic novels it’s, “Oh, you mean like Road to Perdition or Chris Ware or Persepolis?”

Everybody can name one now.

16

MM: Did they do any kind of promotion— a small signing tour or anything like that?

KYLE: No, no, no. They just put the book out, and nobody bought it. I’m sure they were all returned, because they offered me an opportunity to buy them before they were remaindered. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the money to buy the print run. [laughter] As a matter of fact—this is kind of funny—it ended up being remaindered, and I think most of them wound up in IKEA. You know when you go to IKEA they have these fake props—like the fake TV—just to show you how a room would look? They always put a bunch of books on their bookshelves to make the room displays look lived-in. I’ve met so many people who told me, “Oh, yeah, I stole that book from IKEA.” [laughter] MM: I was going to ask if, being a firsttime author, you had gone into bookstores to find the book sitting on the shelf, but I didn’t expect to hear that you had to go to IKEA to find your book.

KYLE: Well, I do remember seeing it on the shelf the first time it came out. It was well displayed and well distributed, there was just no interest because nobody knew who I was, or what the property was, or even what the format was. By contrast, years later, when I did Nat Turner, it sold a

lot to people to had never heard of me but were interested in the concept of a Nat Turner graphic novel. That’s how things have changed.

MM: Did people in the comics field—the people at Marvel and DC—know about Cowboy Wally?

KYLE: Well, even though nobody published humor at the time, everybody in the office liked my stuff. I was showing them my samples and things, and they were always looking for something humorous for me to do. Andy Helfer and I had been working together on The Shadow, and I think he edited something I had worked on— maybe Atari Force—and he had been interested in Cowboy Wally originally and had been trying to get Paul Levitz to publish it before Doubleday picked it up.

Paul wasn’t interested. What was funny was that after Cowboy Wally came out, Paul came up to me and said, “Why don’t you do something like this for us?”

He forgot that he had turned it down.

The big thing for me about Cowboy Wally was that it was the first opportunity I had to develop my own style.

Back in the ’80s, when you were working on a Marvel or DC comic, you had to pretty much stick to a certain style. A lot of my inking for them during that time looks kind 17

Previous Page: This page was not used in the Cowboy Wally book, but was published later in Kyle’s book Underground Genie.

Left: Panels from Cowboy Wally. Funny, funny stuff.

Bottom: The Cowboy Wally character is a blend of two comedians: W.C. Fields and Fatty Arbuckle (caricatured here), who was blacklisted in Hollywood after being accused of the rape and accidental murder of small-time actress, Virginia Rappe. He was eventually acquitted, but his career was effectively ruined in the process.

Cowboy Wally ™ and ©2009 Kyle Baker.

18

of like Dick Giordano or Tom Palmer—that was what everybody was doing at the time.

Mike Carlin called me, and he wanted me to do a fill-in on The Shadow inking over Marshall Rogers. Bill Sienkiewicz had quit, and Marshall Rogers was just doing a fill-in.

I needed a job, so I said, “Hey, can I take over the book?” They hadn’t seen my new style yet, because Cowboy Wally hadn’t been released yet. So I had them give me a yearlong contract, because I figured that once they saw my new style they’d fire me. [laughter] MM: Well, you were following Bill Sienkiewicz, and his run had followed the Howard Chaykin mini-series. Both those guys have very distinct, non-traditional styles, and your style fit very well with the tone they had established for the series.

KYLE: But people called me up because I could ink like Dick Giordano. That was what I was known for; that was my job.

They would very often give me artists who did very sketchy work, like Ron Wilson. He would do breakdowns—very rough pencils.

Because they knew that I would go in there and “Tom Palmer” it up and put in all the shading and the details. That was what they pretty much wanted me to do, so I knew that if I came in with this weird looking job that didn’t look a thing like Tom Palmer, they were going to kick me out.

MM: Did the fact that it was labelled as “For Mature Readers” and in a nicer format from the standard comics appeal to you now that you were a creator of graphic novels?

KYLE: I just needed a job. I’d really done myself in with Cowboy Wally. They were going to kick me out of my apartment. I was in pretty bad shape. Like I said, I was still paying off my taxes from two years ago, so I was just saying yes to anything.

MM: It was a different kind of series. Did you like the material?

KYLE: Oh, I liked the material. I mean, Andy was a friend of mine—still is—so we would talk about what kind of things I wanted to draw. If I said, “I like robots,” he would put a robot in. I remember saying I thought Lisa Bonet was cute and he should put a character in that looked like her, so we put in somebody who looked like Lisa Bonet. [laughter] MM: Were there ever any problems with the owners, Condé Nast, that you were aware of?

KYLE: No. It’s funny, everybody always thought Condé Nast shut us down, but it was just that we weren’t making any money. When you work on a licensed book, the owner of the license gets half the royalty check. Andy and I, on one of the later issues, ended up splitting a $20 royalty check, and we decided it was time to go. [laughter] The thing about comics is that it’s more about characters than it is about the talent. Anybody who works on Spider-Man is going to sell 100,000 copies. When I do Captain America, it sells the same as when someone else does Captain America. So we just felt there was no point in working on 19

Previous Page: Meet Lamont Cranston... or rather, the man who often pretends to be Lamont Cranston—The Shadow! The Shadow #10, page 3.

Above: The Shadow and his two sons take to the night sky. Yes, that’s right—it’s a flying car.

Definitely not you grandfather’s Shadow. From The Shadow #10.

The Shadow ™ and ©2009 Condé Nast.

20

The Shadow. We might as well go and do Superman or something.

MM: So why did you do Justice, Inc. then?

KYLE: I was doing the two books simultaneously, but being a painted book it took a lot longer to do. And I believe it was my only painted book. It took so much work.

That’s why I use computers now—you don’t have to wait for the paint to dry.

MM: What were you using?

KYLE: Watercolors and colored pencils.

Watercolors take time to dry. You can’t put the next color on until the underpainting has dried.

MM: Would you work on several pages at one time and just go back and forth as things dried?

man who is constantly changing his identity. Was that your idea, or something Andy suggested...?

KYLE: At the time, I was looking at an artist named Mark English, and he used to paint in that style. I added the outlines, but he had that style of painting. I’m always trying to look for something new to do.

MM: So it wasn’t a storytelling decision, but rather a technique you wanted to explore.

KYLE: The technology was changing, so it was possible to get better reproduction than we had been getting back in the old days. So I got excited about that, but even then a lot of it got lost in the process. It was still new technology.

KYLE: Yeah, I would have three or four pages going at the same time. The way I was doing the watercolors—I guess a lot of guys do this—is I would tape the boards down to something solid, like a piece of wood or a heavier board, because when you put the paint on, the paper curls up.

So I had three or four different drawing boards with pages taped onto them. And I still do the same thing when I’m inking, because ink takes time to dry. I’ll ink a couple of panels on one page, then move on to the next page, and so on, then go back to the first page when the ink is dry, so I don’t smear it with my hand.

MM: Your technique on this series is very interesting. The figures have these bold, dark outlines, but the details are almost washed out. It fit the book pretty well, considering the story revolves around a 21

Previous Page: This version of the Shadow is every bit as ruthless—if not more so—as the Shadow of the original pulp stories.

Left: Richard Benson, a.k.a. the Avenger, the man of a thousand faces.

Panels from DC’s Justice, Inc. #2.

Below: The Shadow frightens his friends and allies every bit as much as his enemies. Panel from The Shadow #12.

The Avenger, The Shadow ™ and ©2009 Condé Nast.

Right: Kyle’s first design sketches for Dick Tracy—and it’s definitely not Warren Beatty’s profile he drew.

Below: Another early design sketch for Dick Tracy.

Next Page: Beatty was rather hard to please, as shown by this rejected cover for Dick Tracy.

Dick Tracy ™ and ©2009 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

MM: What size were you working at? Were you working larger since you were painting?

KYLE: I think I worked on the regular paper—the stuff DC gives you for free.

MM: In 1989, the only thing you had published as far as comics went was a back-up story in Classic X-Men. KYLE: With Ann Nocenti, yeah. We did a lot of stuff together. I inked New Mutants for her for about a year or so. We got along pretty good.

MM: I assume it was during that year that you were working on Why I Hate Saturn and you also signed on to do Dick Tracy?

KYLE: I think I was working on Dick Tracy, the Classics Illustrated, and Why I Hate Saturn all at the same time. The weird thing about comics is that if you don’t do comics, even if you’re doing other things, for some reason people think your career is over. I had picked up a bunch of clients outside of DC and Marvel. I was working for First Publishing on the Through the Looking Glass adaptation, and Dick Tracy was through Disney. So I hadn’t 22

been up to the Marvel or DC offices for about a year or two. What I didn’t know [laughs] was that everybody was talking about how I had fallen completely off the face of the earth, and that my career was in the toilet, because they didn’t know that I had two really good clients. So I had to do some damage control.

MM: Were you doing full color on Dick Tracy or just separations?

KYLE: That was done in what they called blue line coloring. The black-&-white artwork would be copied onto a drawing board in non-repro blue ink through some type of photomechanical process. Then you would paint over that. Steve Oliff used to do that stuff a lot. It was a common way of working for a while.

I was friends with Bill Sienkiewicz because we were both very interested in painting. He was one of the first guys to start painting covers at Marvel, and he painted those Daredevil/Elektra books. It was a real challenge for him to get any kind of decent reproduction, because we were moving from hand separation to this next thing. You never knew what was going to happen to a painting.

But Dick Tracy was done with watercolor and colored pencil. The last issue was done really fast—64 pages in a week.

MM: Wow!

KYLE: Well, it was because they were about to fire me. [laughter] What had happened was Disney had started a new comic book company. Usually they licensed out their books to Gold Key or Gladstone or whoever, but they had decided to start up their own company. So they didn’t really know what the hell they were doing.

And then Warren Beatty started asking for a lot of changes. So the book just kept getting later and later and later, and it was running so far behind that they were just going to cancel the third issue. I said, “Just give me a week before you make that decision.”

So I just sat down, and I had five assistants, I think.

One guy doing blacks on the backgrounds, and four doing colors. The way Dick Tracy was set up, there was a palette of nine colors you had to use. If you look at the movie, everything that’s red is the same shade of red.

They were really trying to make it look like a four-color comic strip, so everything had to be the same color blue and the same color green, and that made it easy for me to hire people to help, because they didn’t really have to have much talent or make any decisions. I just bought nine tubes of paint and told them, “Use these colors on the book.” Then I did the lettering on the computer, and one of them would cut it out and glue it on the page.

MM: With most licensed projects like this, there’s usually a big approval process to make sure everyone is happy with the likenesses. You were working in broad caricatures, so did you have any problems in that area?

KYLE: The problem for me was that I took the job because I’m a big Chester Gould fan. I said, “Oh, this will be terrific. I’ll be able to draw all those crazy, ugly characters—Flattop and Pruneface. And I’ll be able to draw Dick Tracy with that big, crazy chin and that nose,” you know? I thought it would be a lot of fun. Halfway through the job, Warren Beatty decided Dick Tracy had to look like him. And that was where the problems came in, because Warren Beatty—at least at the time—was very hung up about his looks. He was just starting to show his age. And he just kept sending the drawings back. He was doing this to the marketing people, too. I ended up using the artwork from the T-shirts, because he finally gave approval to those.

We just cut the heads off the T-shirt artwork and glued them into the book. So I drew everything in Dick Tracy except for Dick Tracy. [laughter] That’s the only way we could get the thing done. The editor, Bob Foster, thought that was the best issue of the three. [laughter] And I agree.

I was offered a chance to draw a comic based on Tom Cruise’s new movie [Valkyrie] recently—it’s a war story about Hitler. War comics are a struggle anyway, because you have to do so much research, so I’m thinking, “Man, I’m going to have a tight deadline, and I’m going to have to draw accurate military gear.” My attorney was trying to get me to take the job, but I told him, “I don’t want a repeat of the Dick Tracy job. I’ll only do it if you can promise me that Tom Cruise won’t be a crazy control freak.” So that was the end of that. [laughter] But I just knew I was going to end up doing that job 300 times. I don’t know if the comic ever even came out. It’s just not worth it—well, that’s not true. It’s probably 23

rarely worth it. The only comic book adaptation I’ve thought was really terrific was Walter Simonson’s Alien book. That was really creative.

actually a logic to it, and if you try to cut things then you have to fix the logic.

MM: Did they give you options to choose from as to which book you would do?

MM: Were you able to get any enjoyment out of the series?

KYLE: The editor—a guy named Larry Doyle—was familiar with my style and said he thought I would a good job on Alice in Wonderland. I said, “I think Alice in Wonderland has been done way too many times, so let’s do Through the Looking Glass.”

KYLE: I really enjoyed working with Bob Foster. He was one of the few editors I’ve worked with that could suggest ways to improve the story. Usually when you work with an editor, the editor is not an artist. The editor is usually a writer, and he may say to change something, but not really know how to change it. What Bob would do was actually sit down and give me a sketch. And that was just terrific. I love getting suggestions if someone actually has a constructive way of making something better. It was really nice working with somebody like that.

MM: Was there any type of instruction as to make it look like the original drawings so as to avoid looking too much like Disney’s take on the story?

KYLE: They didn’t have to tell me that. I can do Pinnochio, I just can’t make it look like those Disney drawings or I will get sued. So I approached it that way; I copied the original Tenniel drawings. The Disney movie is inspired by the same drawings, and those drawings are in public domain, so I felt that was safe. Maybe TweedleDum and Tweedle-Dee looked like the Disney version, but they also looked like the book version, so if Disney wanted to sue me I could say, “Well, I got it out of the book.”

Because the drawings were public domain, and very good drawings, I copied the ones that I could, like the Jabberwocky. I drew it in my own style, but I pretty much took the same layout and design from the original Tenniel drawing.

MM: With your first Classics Illustrated book, Through the Looking Glass, you wrote and illustrated it.

KYLE: Well, I transcribed it from Carroll’s story.

MM: Okay, you didn’t have to create a story wholecloth, but you still had to figure out what to show, what to leave out, how to pace it in a comics format, and so forth.

KYLE: Well, it’s a really short book. One of the things that always bugged me about Classics Illustrated is that they had to edit these things. I mean, Bill Sienkiewicz did Moby Dick. If you’re doing a 44-page adaptation of Moby Dick, you’re going to have to cut something. [laughter]

MM: Was there much editorial input into the book?

Was there a series of approvals you had to go through with the adaptation?

MM: Even chopping out Meville’s long descriptions, you’re going to lose something in the editing.

KYLE: I don’t remember. I guess I didn’t have to submit a script, since it was based on the book. I might have shown them the pencils—maybe.

One of the big issues I have with a lot of folks is that I don’t pencil. Because I do everything, I tend to skip a lot of steps. When you’re penciling for someone else to ink, you have to be very specific. If someone else is coloring your work, you have to have a very distinct outline around your shapes so the guy will know where the

KYLE: It’s not going to be very faithful. This book was only about a hundred pages long, and so what I did was just crossed out all of the stage direction, because I could put that in the drawing. And I think it kind of worked. It was a little cramped, but in the case of Lewis Carroll, the stuff is so weird and abstract, I couldn’t really figure out how to make those decisions on what to cut. The whole book is kind of nonsense, but there is 24

color goes. But if I’m coloring it myself, I can do a picture with no outlines if I want.

I don’t have to indicate to the colorist that I need something there. By the same token, when I do pencils, I don’t need to make it clear for an inker. So very often, I just put in a stick figure.

time they had figured out that they didn’t want to be in the graphic novel business anymore. They didn’t really know the business and they hadn’t really had any luck at it. So they turned it down, and, like I said, Paul Levitz had said that he liked Cowboy Wally, so I said, “You can have this book.”

MM: Do you go so far as to pose the stick figures at all? Will you indicate gestures?

MM: Had Piranha Press just started up at that point?

KYLE: Well, like, with The Shadow, it was lettered before it was inked. Since I was inking it, too, I would just put stick figures to show where people were supposed to be.

Like, if the Shadow was holding a gun, it would be a circle with the letter S on it. [laughter] Then the letterer could make sure the word balloon was over the right character’s head. And you can kind of tell by looking at it that a lot of that stuff was being drawn without being penciled. [laughter]

KYLE: Yeah, that was the other thing: They were looking for something to publish. Right after Maus and Dark Knight, everybody realized they were selling a lot of books in bookstores and malls. That had

MM: You worked with Peter David on the Cyrano de Bergerac adaptation.

KYLE: Yeah! Peter and I had worked together on Spider-Man, so he had said, “Gee, the way you draw those funny looking guys, I’d bet you could do Cyrano de Bergerac.” I said, “Okay, that sounds like a good idea.” [laughs] I always enjoy doing projects on things I’d like to learn more about. The great thing about the Classics Illustrated books was that it was an opportunity to read these books that I normally wouldn’t have time to read.

MM: That brings us to Why I Hate Saturn, which is one of the lynchpins of your career. Did you create that specifically for DC, or did you pitch it around to different publishers?

KYLE: Because they had done Cowboy Wally, Doubleday had a first-look option on the book. But by that 25

Previous Page: Rough pencils of Alice for First Publishing’s Classics Illustrated #3, adapting Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass.

Below: Sketches for Classics Illustrated #21, adapting Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac.

Classics Illustrated ™ and ©2009 The Berkley Publishing Group and First Publishing, Inc.

working and stuff, but I wasn’t really doing my own thing at Marvel or DC. I knew that the future, for me at least, was that I had to have my own characters. So whatever it took to get something published—again, I had only had one book published, so I think anyone who had made me an offer at the time, I would have taken it.

MM: With this book you got further away from your old crosshatching style, which was still evident in places even in Cowboy Wally. Your line became a little looser, a little more cartoony. Was there any thought going into what you were doing, or was this just your natural style coming out?

KYLE: I was still looking at a lot of Jules Feiffer’s books, and Feiffer used to use magic marker and do these giant, close-up heads, so that was kind of the idea, was to give it a Jules Feiffer look.

MM: Was DC/Piranha Press pretty hands-off, or were you having to send them pages to show them your progress?

KYLE: I had to turn in 20 pages at a time. I think I had to do that to get paid.

MM: You said the book didn’t do very well. At what point did it catch on? When did it become your calling card?

never happened before, so this was a big deal that people were actually buying books at the Barnes & Noble or B. Dalton or wherever. So DC was specifically trying to create products for that market, and Why I Hate Saturn fit into that.

KYLE: It never has. [laughter] MM: When anyone brings up the name Kyle Baker, the immediate response is Why I Hate Saturn. The book’s been reprinted at least four times.

MM: Once the book came out, were there more sales coming from the mainstream bookstore market or the comic shops?

KYLE: The kind of thing people talk about and the kind of thing people buy are two different things. People tend to respond to characters more than creators. There’s an old saying in marketing: Buyers are liars. If you’re a car salesman and you ask a guy, “What are you looking for in a car?,” the guy’s going to say, “I’m looking for safety and value, economy,” and this and that. Then the guy goes and buys a chick magnet. If you ask people, “What kind of TV do you watch?”—“Oh, I don’t watch TV,” or “I only watch educational programming and PBS.” But they don’t; they’re watching American Idol just like everyone else. So if you ask people what kind of comic books they buy, they will all talk about Why I Hate Saturn and Nat Turner, but the books they buy are like Special Forces—books with people blowing stuff up. [laughter] And no critic is going to come out and defend Special Forces. [laughter] It’s not going to make you look particularly

KYLE: Well, I don’t think it did very well. I think more people were buying Dick Tracy.

Again, it was a book that did not have any well known characters, and people still weren’t really talking about graphic novels yet. It came out and nobody really knew what the hell it was, and it just sat there. It got a good mention in Rolling Stone magazine and one other place I can’t remember now, but it was a new medium. The idea of doing a 200-page book in black-&-white with no super-heroes was just... stupid. [laughter] I wouldn’t do it today. [laughter] MM: Did you spend much time on development of the story before you got into it?

Were you more deliberate this time, or right after Cowboy Wally was it, “I’ve got to pitch something else as soon as possible”?

KYLE: I just wanted to focus on doing my own stuff. I wasn’t fitting in—I mean I was 26

intelligent or classy if you say that’s your favorite book—or even that your favorite book of mine is Truth or something—but you can really knock them out at parties by saying, “Oh, yes, I read Why I Hate Saturn,” because nobody’s read it. [laughter] There’s a lot of that. For example, everyone talks about how much they love The Shadow, and that was cancelled for lack of sales.

MM: They must be finding them cheap in a back-issue bin somewhere.

KYLE: Exactly. Because it didn’t sell, you can still buy The Shadow for cover price in a back-issue bin, and then you can say you were a fan all along. [laughter] It goes with the territory.

Everything has a bit of a curve. I remember the year that Joey Ramone died. They do those things in the newspaper at the end of the year looking back on famous people who died that year. That year— this was in The New York Times—the lead singer of a hair metal band called Ratt had died, and they pointed out that The Ramones saleswise were nowhere near Ratt. Ratt was on MTV all the time and had sold millions and millions of albums and they were in heavy rotation on Top-40 radio, whereas The Ramones were always an obscure punk band. They never got on MTV; they never got on the radio. But in the year-end roundup, most people talked about Joey Ramone being dead, because that’s the kind of stuff critics like.

So you have to try to strike a balance, I’ve found. I try to do stuff critics will like, but then follow that up with something more mainstream. Nat Turner is the kind of book you know you’re going to get a good review for, but no comic book fan is going to walk into a store and say, “Hey, do you have Final Crisis and Nat Turner?” [laughter] It doesn’t happen, so if you want to stay in the game you have to do a couple of books like Final Crisis.

Cowboy Wally didn’t make any money, and I went into debt because of it, but because that book was the only one I had done in my own style rather than in the Marvel Comics house style, that’s the book that caught the eye of an art director at Spy magazine. He called me up and said, “Cowboy Wally looks great. Can you give us an illustration that looks like that?” They’re never going to call you up and say, “Can you give us something that looks like that Spider-Man page you did?” So it’s important that I keep doing my own things.

The fact that I did Nat Turner established me as a history guy, so Harper-Collins called me up and asked me, “Would you like to do a black history book?” That’s why I do it.

Like you said, that’s the stuff people think of when people think of me, even though what I really get paid for is doing stuff like Bugs Bunny. But the Bugs Bunny jobs don’t come along unless you do the Cowboy Wallys.

27

Previous Page Top: Panel from Why I Hate Saturn.

Previous Page Bottom: Laura in her guise as the Queen of the Leather Astro-Girls of Saturn.

Above: Sketches of the cast of Why I Hate Saturn.

Why I Hate Saturn ™ and ©2009 Kyle Baker.

Part 3:

Here and There and Everywhere

MM: In 1991 you finally had a chance to do some humor work for Marvel: Damage Control #1 and an Al Space story in Epic Lite #1. How did you hook up with Evan Dorkin and that crowd? Was Epic Lite the first time you worked with them in an anthology format?

artist. Evan Dorkin I met through some of the other guys. Robbie Busch had started as Mark Badger’s assistant. We used to get together and hang out and go to each other’s houses and stuff, and we always talked about ideas for cartoons and things like that. At the time, most of the guys, except me, hadn’t really had much luck doing their own things. We were all of the opinion that we needed to have our own things going sooner or later, but they’d never had the opportunity to do that. So they had this idea to do this book, Instant Piano. Originally we were just going to publish it ourselves as a mini-comic, something small-scale, and give it away at cons or something, but then Mike Richardson got involved. I think that was through Mark, because Mark had worked on The Mask.

KYLE: Well, I had known those guys from living in New York. When I was younger I used to go out a lot.

Those guys were the same age as me.

MM: Who was in that group? There was you, Evan, Stephen DeStefano....

KYLE: Stephen I knew from DC; he had drawn some DC comics—a book called ’Mazing Man. MM: Yeah, and you inked a few pages of one ’Mazing Man Special #3 in 1990.

MM: Well, before Instant Piano, some of you guys worked on the Fast Forward anthology series for Piranha Press.

KYLE: That’s right, I did. Mark Badger was a Batman

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KYLE: Yeah, and I seem to remember that came out a lot later than expected. By that time the Piranha Press experiment was not working out. They had put out a few books and they weren’t selling. Fast Forward was supposed to be an anthology book, but they took the stuff and made it into a threeissue comic series. It took them so long to publish it that some of the dialogue had fallen off my pages. [laughter] The rubber cement had died, so there were a couple of missing captions, but nobody seems to have noticed. [laughter] When I reprint it, I’m going to put in those missing captions.

something in a story, it’s because I have an idea in my head of what it will look like. It might not sound that good on paper. If I say “a flock of sheep,” for example, it’s because I have an interesting visual in my head of a flock of sheep, you know what I mean? I can’t really put across in words why that would be good. So what happened was I turned in an outline for a 22-page story, and they just didn’t get the story at all and they only gave me eleven pages. So there’s, like 16 panels on a page.

MM: It does look a bit cramped. Was it meant to be published in the larger 8-1/2" x 11" format, like Why I Hate Saturn?

MM: Assuming you can remember the text.

KYLE: Oh, I remember the joke. It was a good joke. [laughter] MM: Your story for Fast Forward was another case of you being ahead of the times—it was a zombie story.

KYLE: It’s time to reprint that. And it would be nice to reformat it. When I started the thing I wrote a synopsis. This is something I generally don’t do anymore, because it’s hard for people to imagine how something’s going to look based on a few sentences. If I put

KYLE: Yeah.

MM: And then they published it at standard comic size, which just makes it that much more cramped looking. How did Break the Chain come about? Was that something you came up with or did KRS-One come looking for you?

KYLE: That was something he came up with. It was funny, because coincidentally I had just read something he had written in the paper and said to myself, “Oh, what an interesting guy. I wish I could work with a 29

Previous Page: Sequence from “Lester Fenton and the Walking Dead,” the lead feature of the Piranha Press anthology book Fast Forward #2.

Above: Panels from Kyle’s three-page autobiographical strip which ran in Instant Piano #1. The big guy is Kris Parker, better known as rap star KRS-One. Left: Cover art for Break the Chain.

Break the Chain ™ and ©2009 respective owner.

KYLE: He had designed all their house brand logos. He was an expert on product design. So it was exciting for me that I got to design the sleeve that the audio cassette came in. I’m always looking for new challenges, and that was something I had never done before.

guy like that.” He sounded interesting; he made sense.

They had this idea for a comic, him and a guy named Marshall Chess, who is best known for running Chess Records. His father had founded that old blues label.

They had this idea that they wanted to do a kids’ book, teaching kids to read, and they had pretty much figured the story out and all the characters. Then I came in and kind of put a couple of things in. Since I was “the new guy,” I didn’t really want to rewrite their stuff or anything.

MM: What was the animation process for the video?

Did you have a team of assistants?

KYLE: I did it all by myself. It was an incredibly slow computer—it was so long ago. Up until very recently, I was always butting up against the technology. When I did a book like Break the Chain or You Are Here, I was using the technology to do things it wasn’t actually designed to do.

Break the Chain, for example, even though it was in color, it was done on a black-&-white monitor. You had to type in the color codes. Marvel had rented computer time—because they didn’t have any computers at Marvel; it was that new. So we had to rent time at Kinko’s or Office Depot or wherever it was and work there.

MM: How did that lead to the video?

KYLE: The video was what really interested me. Again, I was always looking for opportunities to get my own stuff going. This was finally an opportunity to direct animation. That was the thing I thought was cool about it. I don’t remember if Marvel paid for it or someone else, but it ended up getting all over TV. The timing was pretty good, because Marvel had been trying to get into doing some musicrelated stuff. They had an Alice Cooper comic, a Bob Marley comic, and I think they had an Elvis thing, so this fit into that plan. When we started on the video, the way we had broken it down was that Kris [KRS-One] and I were pretty good at generating the publicity, because I had been doing all this magazine stuff. So we said, “Okay, we’re going to get in the magazines, we’re going to have a thing on MTV”—we had it all figured out. All Marvel had to do was get the book in the store. We said, “It’s very important that you get it in on this date, because that’s when it’s going to hit MTV,” and they just couldn’t make it happen. So we had a video in heavy rotation on MTV [laughs] and no product in the store.

MM: How long did it take you to do?

MM: KRS-One was huge at the time.

KYLE: It went pretty fast, because I wasn’t being paid. [laughter] I was working at Warner Brothers in Los Angeles at the time. They had wanted to develop Why I Hate Saturn as a television show, so they offered me an overall deal and I had an office there. I was being paid for that, so I took the opportunity to do lots of really experimental, weird comic book ideas that I wouldn’t have been able to do if I was depending on them to make a living. I wouldn’t have been able to do Instant Piano if I hadn’t been at Warner. We did that for no upfront money in exchange for total creative freedom. That was part of our deal—if Mike didn’t like it, he couldn’t touch it.

KYLE: He was a Top-40 act. Marvel really dropped the ball on that one.

MM: When exactly did you move to L.A.? Was it specifically to work for Warner Brothers?

MM: Did you design the packaging?

KYLE: Yeah, Warner Brothers Television. That’s what DC really exists for, is to generate properties for Warner, so they’re always looking at the comic books to see what to make into their next series or movie. That was part of Jenette Kahn’s job as publisher of DC Comics, and she had suggested to them that Why I Hate Saturn was a good idea for a sitcom. I didn’t really see

KYLE: I did all the packaging. That was one of the things that excited me about it. Having worked for Milton Glaser—I don’t know if you remember the Grand Union chain of grocery stores.

MM: They didn’t extend as far south as where I’m from.

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any future for myself in comics; the kind of things I wanted to do were not selling in comic book stores. So I figured, “What the hell? A chance to do sitcoms—I’ll give that a shot.”

MM: Did you have a staff position? What exactly did you do for them?

KYLE: It’s what they call an overall deal. I don’t know if they even do this anymore; the economy has changed so much over the past ten years.

But at the time, they would pay you and basically, if you ever came up with another idea, they would have first option on it. But nowhere in the contract did it say you had to come up with new ideas. [laughter] MM: Was there anything else you worked on for them while you were there?

KYLE: I created a couple of bad ideas for shows. The first one I developed was the Why I Hate Saturn show. The thing about Hollywood is nobody has any clout. Everybody has these huge development budgets, but at the end of the day, nobody can really get anything done, unless they’re Johnny Depp or have access to Johnny Depp. If we had gotten Janet Jackson to say she wanted to star in Why I Hate Saturn, then it would have been a go project. But CBS said that it was too New York-y and that everybody was the same age so it appealed to too narrow a demographic. In other words, nobody would want to watch a show about a bunch of young people in New York City. [laughter] Seinfeld and Friends hadn’t come along yet.

I had written Why I Hate Saturn pretty much to feel like a sitcom. I had actually based a lot of it on the comedy style of Jerry Seinfeld. He didn’t have a TV show

yet—he was just a guy on The Tonight Show a lot doing stand-up. He was very funny, and I wrote the jokes in that kind of style.

Once Seinfeld and Friends came along, I lost interest in that whole genre, because those two shows did it just fine. Everybody was like, “Why don’t you go back to that now that you’ve been proven right?” Well, now it’s been done, and it’s been done great.

MM: How long did you stay with Warner Brothers?

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Previous Page: It seems Kyle is always doing something musicrelated, like this James Brown gag panel.

Above: A page from Why I Hate Saturn featuring some rather Seinfeld-esque dialogue.

Why I Hate Saturn ™ and ©2009 Kyle Baker.

Right: Hooray for Hollywood. This illo was done for Inside magazine.

Below: This Tracy Chapman caricature appeared in Details magazine.

Next Page: This gag page which was done for Instant Piano #3 is not only an art lesson, but it’s pretty darn funny!

Artwork ™ and ©2009 Kyle Baker.

KYLE: I was at Warner for two years, and I was in Los Angeles for about seven years, and then I finally figured out how Hollywood works and left. It’s still there; I’m doing a show for Fox now. But like I said, nobody has any clout at all except for the heads of the studio and the bank. If you’re not the head of the studio but you have a hundred million dollars to put into a movie, then your movie is going to get made.

And they develop tons of things. They develop a hundred TV shows for every one they actually air. So I saw that I could probably have a pretty long career doing TV shows and movies that would go nowhere. In that whole time, I can only think of one thing I had that was actually produced and aired on television, and that was after seven years of getting paid to write tons of scripts.

I was developing some show for NBC, and they decided not to pick up my show, but they picked up Jenny McCarthy’s show. She was a Playmate and had another TV show, so she was all over town and everybody thought she was the next big thing. Her projects were automatic go projects, and history has proven that she wasn’t that great.

MM: Yeah, I remember those six months.

KYLE: But I saw that’s the way things get done, and I realized it was more important for me to go back to writing books, because the only way I was actually going to get a movie made was if I wrote a book that sold.

That’s the way it works. If you look at all these movies coming out now, they’re all based on comic books. The main reason I’m doing stuff for Image is so that I’ll own it and I can take it out to Hollywood.

I was out there a couple of years ago with one of my books. I was having a meeting with a producer and he really liked the stuff, so he was going to take it to his boss.

Like I said, nobody has any power—you take it to your boss, who takes it to his boss, who takes it to his boss.... So I said, “Ooh, don’t forget to tell him that I worked on this movie and this movie,” and I’m trying to give him the résumé so that he know what to tell the guy. And he told me, “Y’know, the funny thing is, in the current climate, they’re going to be more interested in the fact that you did a comic book than in the fact that you’ve worked on a couple of movies.” Now you’re seeing guys like Richard Donner and Reggie Hudlin writing comic books. They’re doing that because comic books are the fastest way to get into development.

MM: From 1991-92 up to around 1999, I guess—the time you were out in L.A.— you didn’t have much of a presence in comics. We talked about Instant Piano a little earlier. Was your material done specifically for the series, or was it stuff you had lying around?

KYLE: Yeah, I did that stuff specifically for that book. I was also doing a weekly strip for New York magazine called “Bad Publicity,” which consisted of jokes about people in the news and stuff.

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MM: How did you start getting work in the magazines, because you’ve been in a wide variety of publications?

KYLE: Yeah. Well, for example, Larry Doyle, who I did “Bad Publicity” for in New York, used to be an editor at First, which was where I met him.

Back in the ’80s, comics was where a lot of people started their careers. Guys would start in comics, then they’d move on to advertising or magazines, and they would remember me from their old comic book days. And a lot of art directors are comic book fans, so, like, the art director of Details magazine would see Cowboy Wally and think, “Hey, he should do a picture of Tracy Chapman.”

MM: In the comic book business, it’s often a case of out-ofsight, out-of-mind. Does that hold true in the magazine business, as well? Do you have to stay in touch with editors and art directors in order to keep getting work?

KYLE: Everything is about timing. That whole business has sort of vanished, because advertising has been dropping and magazines have been losing pages. When you start cutting pages, the easiest things to cut are things like the crossword puzzles and the cartoons. Things change, and you just have to find other things. As one business goes away, another business gets created.

I’m always looking for areas that have the maximum exposure, so being in Esquire magazine in the ’80s, you’d have an audience of a million people. Being in Esquire magazine today, you might as well be in Uncanny X-Men. It’s not what it was.

KYLE: That just goes back to the fact that the original things I wanted to get into just did not exist. Marvel wouldn’t publish any of my funny jokes—nobody would. I tried Mad magazine at the time, and they weren’t hiring back then. They still had Jack Davis and Mort Drucker, so they didn’t need anybody. So it was a matter of if I wanted to do the cartoons I wanted to do, I was going to have to find a business to do them in.

When I came up with the idea for doing Nat Turner, there wasn’t going to be any market for that. DC Comics has money to burn, so they’ll publish your book

MM: So what do you do to stay on top of things? You’re very proactive compared to most cartoonists I know.

Does that go back to your time with Glaser?

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Below: Dramatic page from Nat Turner.

Next Page: Drawing for Kyle’s “Noah’s Ark” pitch.

Nat Turner ™ and ©2009 Kyle Baker.

just to publish a book. I knew if I went to DC and said, “Hey, I’ve got a Nat Turner comic,” they’d say, “Sure, we’ll put it out!”

But, you know, they’re not going to do anything with it other than put it out.

They do that all the time just to stay in the game. They put out those manga books that they didn’t support, and the girls’ books, and the kiddie books. They don’t

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get behind them, they just do it to have a finger in the business.

When it came to Nat Turner, I saw a niche there. I said, “I’d really like to be the ‘black history guy.’ There’s an unlimited amount of stories to tell. If I can establish myself as that guy, that would be great.”

That’s why I self-published Nat Turner. It was the only way I saw myself getting it done the right way. In my experience, when you make a contract with someone based on just a pitch, they can’t visualize it, and when you bring it in, it’s not what they thought you were going to bring in.

I once pitched an animated movie based on Noah’s Ark. It was a real easy pitch, and the producer went, “Oh, yeah, sure. I get it. Noah’s Ark.” And then I brought in the first draft and he said, “Gee, everybody drowns.” [laughter] I knew it was going to be the same thing with Nat Turner, that if I went into some editor’s office they were going to say, “Oh, sure,” make a deal, and then when I brought in the book they’d say, “It’s a little violent, and there’s some racism in it. Maybe we should tone it down.” But once I had a book that was shown to work—and I picked up a couple of decent reviews in the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post—then it would be easier to find a real publisher who wouldn’t ask me to take out the part where he kills a kid or something.

The same thing with The Bakers—it’s really hard to pitch an idea where the gimmick is there’s no gimmick. I could go into a producer’s office and say, “I’ve

got an idea for a family of superheroes,” or a family of ghosts or that kind of thing, but if you go, “Yeah, it’s just an ordinary family,” they’ll go, “Well, does the baby talk?” “No, the baby doesn’t talk. It’s a baby, and there’s going to be a twominute joke about me changing diapers.” That sounds awful, but once people saw it, they got the concept.

MM: While you were out in L.A. you did a year’s worth of covers for Doom Patrol.

KYLE: We talked about Lou Stathis before. After being in magazines for a while, he went over to DC. He remembered me and got me to do the Doom Patrol covers.

MM: Were you doing those digitally?

KYLE: Yes. That was some of my early Photoshop stuff.

MM: Some of those later covers look very similar to your work on You Are Here. Had you already started work on the book?

KYLE: No, I was still writing screenplays at that time. It was actually Image that got me back into comics, because as a result of their success, DC changed their contracts. When I left, there was no profit-sharing—that was the main reason I left. When Image came along and all the talent was going there, DC couldn’t find people to hire, so they had to change their deals.

Back then you were always pushing up against the technology. You could never get the thing to do what you wanted to do because it wasn’t powerful enough. I did the New York strip in Adobe Illustrator specifically because the file sizes were smaller. But that would limit it you with how much shading you could use—all that stuff would add to your file size. Back then the modems were so slow, it would take me four or five hours to e-mail one strip.

That was a crazy deadline, because we were doing jokes about the news. I loved it because it was a weekly deadline, and you did the joke about what was going on in the news before it got old. It also sped up the learning curve with the computer stuff, because I could get immediate results. One week it might come out too dark, the next week too light, and then I’d finally get it to come out the right way. Whereas if I had been doing that in comic books, by the time I would have realized I screwed up, I’d have already done six or seven jobs that way.

MM: When you first started doing digital painting, were you talking with other guys who were doing it? Were you exchanging tips and ideas with anyone? There weren’t many others doing it.

KYLE: There weren’t many guys doing it, and a lot of times clients would have problems with it. New York magazine had to buy a modem just for me, because I was in California. They had never dealt with receiving digital files before. I wasn’t going to FedEx stuff to New York City, because I’d lose a day on my deadline. All my friends in illustration were getting an extra day, because they didn’t have to go to the mailbox. That’s when I decided to start e-mailing my work.

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MM: Steve Oliff was one of the first guys to work digitally. Did you talk with him about it?

Above: Kyle’s inks for a panel for You Are Here.

Kyle would scan in the pages and color them digitally. The blacks were colored as well—a trick brought in from the field of animation that is fairly common today, but was rarely seen in comics at the time.

You Are Here ™ and ©2009 Kyle Baker.

KYLE: I don’t remember. A lot of people were calling me. Lynn Varley called to get my advice when she started doing the Dark Knight book—that was her first digital project. I remember talking with Tom Orzechowski about lettering, because I first started using computers for lettering.

Why I Hate Saturn was my first book that I lettered on the computer. As the technology advanced, I was able to do more and more. Within a couple of years, the coloring was good enough that you could do it on the computer. Now the computers are so good that you can actually draw right on the computer.

MM: You have a Cintiq?

KYLE: Yeah, yeah. It’s great. It really makes life easier—no scanning.

MM: In Instant Piano, you had a few stories under the name “You Are Here,” but they’re nothing like what the book You Are Here turned out to be.

KYLE: I had been working on You Are Here as a screenplay for a couple of years.

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When I finally got the first draft done, the only thing that was working were the action scenes. The characters all sucked.

So I ended up just throwing all the characters in the garbage and keeping the locations and action scenes. When I decided to get back into comics, I took the script and adapted it into a book.

MM: Why did you decide to do the whole book digitally?

KYLE: The great thing about computers is that you can use them to do things better than you can do them physically. I had given up painting for years, just because it takes too long to dry and it’s not very efficient for commercial art where deadlines are really important. It wasn’t until things like Photoshop came along that I got back into airbrushing, because in Photoshop you don’t have to clean the airbrush, you don’t have to mix the paint. When I first started using computers to letter, I tried to imitate my hand lettering style, but then it occured to me that my hand lettering style isn’t very good and I could pay a hundred bucks and get a professional font. I’ve been using 3-D, because that thing draws backgrounds a hundred times better than—like, I’m doing a big action scene now for Special

Forces with lots of hardware and tanks and soldiers. If I had drawn it by hand I would have had to take a lot of shortcuts and put in silhouettes just to make the deadline. With the computer I can render out 300 helicopters no problem. That’s what I love about computers is that I can do all these great things that I would never have time to do by hand.

And that’s part of the reason I went into self-publishing. I really wanted the Bakers book in a certain format; I wanted a certain kind of paper. Paper is one of the more expensive considerations when printing a book, and it really effects the quality of the artwork. DC was using, in my opinion, on the last book I did for them, King David, just the cheapest paper I had ever seen. It really pissed me off that it was a 160-page book and it was thinner than some 100-page books I’d done for DC. By being in charge of the production on The Bakers, I was able to find a paper that looked good, but was cheap. It was a kind of paper called “wood free” paper, and it was a nice compromise. Then I could color knowing what type of paper I had. That made for a nicer book, and once that format was established, I could go to Image Comics or wherever and say, “Make the next Bakers book look exactly the same.”

We had a lot of discussions on King David. Amie Brockway, the art director, had actually been pushing for better paper on that book. She saw what I was trying to do with the colors, and she told them that if they used the paper they ended up using that it was going to suck.

And she was right. [laughter] When you get into selfpublishing, you realize at the end of the day that you are arguing over something like 50 cents a book, which is ridiculous. Just by adding an extra 50 cents per book, you can add another $10 to the cover value.

MM: With your early digital projects, like You Are Here, did you have any problems in the production process once it left your hands? The comic book industry was still rather behind the times.

KYLE: I remember there being problems, but both Marvel and DC were interested in becoming more digital. The art director at DC, Amie Brockway, was also doing covers in Quark and Photoshop. Some guys would still send in a painting, but then Amie would composite it on the computer.

Another thing I love about computers is the complete predictability. For example, when we were doing Justice, Inc., if you compare the actual, physical paintings to what ended up being printed, it’s completely different. That was just the nature of the technology at the time. You would have to photograph the painting, then they would scan the photograph, then separate the scan, and then print the book. You’re going through four or five steps, each one removing something from the original painting. Whereas with a computer I can type in 20% Red, 30% Blue, and it’s going to look the same no matter where you print it.

MM: One other thing about You Are Here—are you a Robert Mitchum fan?

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against you, but you’re going to be killing people. You’re going to be dealing drugs and blowing people up. You’re going to kill a kid. Are you okay with that?” [laughter] He thought it was funny.

But I think everybody does that. I know that Geof Darrow is a villain in Sin City. You just want to make sure everybody looks different. A lot of guys, you can recognize their drawing style because they only know how to draw one or two heads. I don’t want to name any names, but we all know who they are. [laughter] Or Batman and Superman look exactly the same except for the costumes.

I always liked that John Romita had a different face for Peter Parker. If you saw that face you would instantly recognize it as Peter Parker. It wasn’t just a generic, squarejawed super-hero that everybody draws.

KYLE: Yeah, yeah. What I used to do when creating a character was kind of think of a type of person. I might say, “Okay, this person is going to be kind of a Robert Stack kind of guy,” or a Harrison Ford type of guy or something like that, and I would draw it out of my head and no one would really guess that it was based on Harrison Ford. But over the years, especially after doing the caricatures for New York magazine, I guess I got really good at it, so when I drew a Robert Mitchum type of guy out of my head, everybody at DC looked at it and said, “Hey, it’s Robert Mitchum!” “All right, it’s Robert Mitchum.” [laughter] The same thing happened when I made a Nicholas Cage type of character for I Die at Midnight, for the same reason. It’s not supposed to be Nicholas Cage, but that’s who I was thinking of and it ended up looking like him.

MM: Let’s talk about the “Letitia Lerner, Superman’s Babysitter” story.

MM: Do you generally work that way when creating characters? You think of archetypes—actors you could envision playing that role in your story?

KYLE: Oh, yeah! Dan Raspler was the editor, and he hired me to do an Elseworlds story. I think it’s retarded that they call these things “imaginary stories” since all these stories are imaginary. [laughter] This was supposed to be for a book of imaginary stories about Superman. I wanted to do this babysitter story—I had a brand new baby who was tearing the joint up, so that’s what gave me the idea. It was very much inspired by a Chuck Jones cartoon about a guy who accidentally adopts an alien baby [Editor’s note: “Rocket-Bye Baby,” 1956]. He adopts a little Martian, but he doesn’t know it’s a Martian, so he starts chasing the baby around thinking it’s going to get hurt. There’s a lot of cartoons like that. Popeye did the same kind of jokes. Babies in trouble are a cartoon staple.

KYLE: Yeah. You want everybody to look different. It doesn’t have to be a Hollywood actor; it could also be someone I know. You just want to make sure that everybody has different faces and different body shapes. I used to put my girlfriends into books all the time. You see my wife in a lot of things now. Joey Cavalieri is in a lot of books. I just told Dwayne McDuffie that he’s going to be a villain in my next book. I think he’s very villainous looking, you know?

MM: I can see that. He’s a big guy.

KYLE: Yeah, so I’m going to make him the Kingpin type of guy. I had to warn him, because I used to do jokes about people and they’d get offended; they didn’t get that it was a joke. So now I always call people up and say, “Okay, I’m going to make you the villain. I’ve got nothing

MM: There’s the Popeye cartoon where Swee’Pea crawls into the construction site, and Popeye tries to save him.

Swee’Pea crawls out untouched, but Popeye get the crap beat out of him.

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KYLE: Yeah, exactly! So I knew that that had a lot of comedy potential. But Paul Levitz, for some reason, didn’t like it. It’s funny, because I didn’t really care one way or the other whether it got printed or not, because I got my check. But everyone else got very upset. Me, I’m used to having things changed. That’s the nature of the business. I’ve done tons of movie scripts that nobody ever saw, and drawings for advertisements that got changed or rejected.

MM: Well, why wasn’t there just a simple, “Change this and this and we’ll print the story”?

KYLE: I really don’t know what the problem was, and it didn’t bother me. I was willing to forget about it. Dan called and said, “I’ve got bad news. Paul doesn’t like your story.”

“Okay, whatever.” These things happen; they happen all the time. But Frank Miller really liked the story, and he started campaigning to get this thing an Eisner Award. [laughter] He was talking it up in Sin City, and he ended up getting the thing an Eisner Award for Best Story of the Year. [laughter] It got leaked to the Internet, so people could read it online. After it won the Eisner Award, they put out a book around it.

MM: Only in comics.

KYLE: When I was doing the story, I thought that it was pretty good, actually. I thought, “Oh, they’re going to love this story so much that they’re going to want to build a series around this character,” and I was very surprised that they didn’t like it.

But what are you going to do? I’m used to people not getting my stuff. I’m always trying to do something creative or different, so very often when I come in with something creative or different the client doesn’t get it—he hates it. So, I honestly didn’t worry much about it.

It’s another reason I self-publish my stuff now: I don’t run into those problems. Special Forces is full of offensive things. Every page is designed to be offensive. [laughter] But now if I take it to a real publisher or a movie producer, they know what the story is and they’re not going to be surprised.

KYLE: Karen Berger called me up and said they wanted to do something for the Millenium. They were planning a big event for Vertigo. I guess they had a couple of other books—Howard Chaykin did one. She suggested doing something that ended at Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Years earlier I had come up with this idea of a guy who poisons himself. I had a good first act, but I could never figure out how it ended. And the thing I liked about the Times Square aspect was that it had a built in ticking clock counting down to midnight. You’re always looking for a good “ticking clock” for the end of your story, and this was a literal ticking clock. So I put the two ideas together.

MM: Do you approach a project differently when you have an idea coming to you from an outside source, where it might not develop as organically as when it begins and ends with you?

KYLE: I’m usually happy to get any ideas I can. The most important part of anything is having a good idea. Most people have their own formulas and stuff, and it’s good to have some outside input. I tend to do the same types of stories all the time unless somebody challenges me and says, “Hey, we need something for six-year-olds,” or something like that. So I like that. I like the variety, because you’re always in danger of repeating yourself.

MM: What was the impetus behind I Die at Midnight? How did that book develop?

39

Previous Page Top: “What’s your name?”

Could it be... Robert Mitchum? Okay, it’s not really Robert Mitchum, but it’s a pretty good likeness, don’t you think?

Panel from You Are Here.

Previous Page Bottom: No, this isn’t Larry from I Die at Midnight. It’s actually Nicholas Cage.

Below: Was this the panel that incited DC to pull the plug on their Elseworlds 80-page Giant #1? Whatever the reason, “Letitia Lerner, Superman’s Babysitter” won Kyle an Eisner Award before it was eventually published in the Bizarro Comics anthology collection.

You Are Here ™ and ©2009 Kyle Baker. Letitia Lerner, Superman ™ and ©2009 DC Comics.

Part 4:

The Truth about Marvel and DC changed everything, I wouldn’t like it. So I figure if I get a script, I should just do whatever he put in the script.

I’ve gotten scripts from some people that I didn’t even think were very good, but I didn’t think it was my job to rewrite them. I just said, “Well, this is what the guy wanted to do,” and drew what was written.

MM: In 2001, you worked with some legendary writers.

First up was Bob Kanigher, who wrote a “Batman: Black&-White” back-up story for Batman: Gotham Knight #11.

KYLE: Mark Chiarello, the editor, called me up and said he had this Bob Kanigher story. When the hell am I ever going to get another chance to work with Bob Kanigher? It turned out I was right. That was one of his last stories. Occasionally something like that comes along. I get calls all the time, so I get to pick exactly the kind of thing I want to do. If somebody says, “Hey, do you want to work with Bob Kanigher?”.... I did Bugs Bunny for that reason—it’s Bugs Bunny.

MM: You haven’t actually written a comic book story for someone else to draw have you?

KYLE: Not in comics, no.

Animation, yeah, but I don’t think I have in comics.

MM: That same year you worked with Stan Lee on the back-up story in the Superman Just Imagine... book. I imagine that was much like your working experience with Bob Kanigher.

MM: Did you actually get to work with him, or did you just get a script?

KYLE: That was another one of those fun projects. I like those kind of things that are fun to do for maybe a day or two. When you commit to something like Plastic Man, that’s two years of your life. That New York magazine strip lasted three years. You’re just locked in. You can’t quit if it’s good, if it’s a steady job. I’m working on a TV show now, and if the thing gets picked up I could end up working on the same thing for ten years. So you have to think, “This is something I want to be part of for ten years.” I’ve worked on other things where I sort of prayed they wouldn’t get picked up just for that reason. [laughs] So I love quick jobs like that.

I’m doing little things for DC now—I’m doing a Wonder Woman story. It’s only 22 pages; I can deal with that. I don’t know if I want to do Wonder Woman for the rest of my life.

KYLE: No, they gave me the script. I heard it was originally written for Alex Toth, and then Toth decided he didn’t want to do it, so it came to me.

MM: What was your experience like working with Alan Moore on the “Splash Brannigan” story for ABC Special #1?

KYLE: The way he writes scripts is very strange. He puts in very specific details about things, like how big something should be in the panel and where it should be. It’s such a detailed description that I would just draw whatever he wrote down. It was so complicated, I couldn’t see it in my head. He would say something like, “In the left-hand side of the panel, there’s a hand, and it takes up two-thirds of the panel and should be pointing at a 45º angle.” Yeah, I would just do whatever the hell he said. [laughter] But I’d get it done and say, “Oh, I guess that’s what he meant.”

I’ve got my own books, and I can do whatever I want on them. But if I were writing a story and some guy

MM: Let’s talk about King David and why you chose to do a graphic novel based on a Bible story.

40

KYLE: I am a big fan of Bible stories.

They always have lots of action and all the elements of a good super-hero story.

They have the good versus evil, people with magical powers, spectacular special effects, and the stories are terrific. And everybody’s heard of them, which always helps. The audience is pre-sold; somebody is going to want it. My biggest problem with it was that DC insisted on putting a “Mature Readers” label on the book. I said, “It’s a Bible story. How could you put a ‘Mature Readers’ label on a Bible story?” I didn’t change anything. Everything that is in that book is from The Bible.

And that’s another thing. I really wanted to change as little as possible. These stories have a following. People go to church every weekend to listen to these stories, and The Bible is the best-selling book ever. I remember seeing the Prince of Egypt movie, and they toned down the plagues. I went for the plagues. [laughter] If I’m seeing King David, I want to see David and Bathsheba and I want to see David and Goliath. That’s what you‘re paying for. I had to put a little humor in it to make DC happy, because I just wanted to do it straight. But the “Mature Readers” label just killed it.

with didn’t want it—I don’t remember exactly what happened, but they didn’t want to carry the book, and I wasn’t at liberty to take it anywhere else. Now I’m actually looking for places to do something with it, because I have all the rights back.

Between that experience and a couple of others I was having at DC, I began to feel I could get stuff done faster if I didn’t have to go through the organization. It was around that time that I realized my books weren’t in Barnes & Noble. I first called up DC Marketing, and nagged the guy in charge there for a while. I sent him some books to send to the distributor, but I wasn’t able to just call up Barnes & Noble on my own and make things happen, because I’d be stepping on someone’s toes and pissing them off. Once I started self-publishing, I was able to go to the book fairs and walk up to the distributors and ask them,

MM: Did the label keep it from getting into Christian bookstores? There’s a pretty big market there.

KYLE: Warner Brothers has various connections, and the original plan was— [laughs] and I’m always going for this synergy and it never works. You’ll notice it’s a theme in this conversation. I said, “Yeah, I’ll do this book for them, and then they’ll take it to the people that—”. But because the Christian group they were connected 41

Previous Page and Left: Inked sketches of the Dark Knight.

Below: Panel from the Splash Brannigan story— written by Alan Moore— “Specters from Projectors,” which appeared in America’s Best Comics Special #1.

Batman ™ and ©2009 DC Comics. Splash Brannigan ™ and ©2009 America’s Best Comics, LLC.

Below: David takes on Goliath in this page from King David.

Next Page: Isaiah Bradley, in his makeshift Captain America costume from Truth: Red, White & Black #5.

King David ™ and ©2009 Kyle Baker. Captain America, Isaiah Bradley ™ and ©2009 Marvel Characters, Inc.

“How can I get you to buy more of my books?” They would say, “Do this and do that,” and I did what they said and now you can buy my books in Barnes & Noble.

If I had done The Bakers at DC, it would have been developed in-house for Cartoon Network or something. Then they would have decided it wasn’t right for Cartoon Network and my hands would be tied.

MM: On the other hand, though, having to handle all the paperwork and the other business aspects, does that take too much time away from the creative side?

KYLE: I gave up on that stuff. Nat Turner was very successful, and I found I was spending too much time at the post office filling orders. That wasn’t why I had gotten into self-publishing. That’s why I’m doing stuff at Image now. With the direct market, it doesn’t seem to matter what you do. If

you do X-Men, you’ll sell 100,000; and if you do Captain America, you’ll sell 30,000; and if you do an independent book, you’ll sell 2,000. That’s just the way it is. It really doesn’t matter if you put a lot into the marketing or not, as far as I can tell.

And like I said, that wasn’t why I got into self-publishing. The reason I got into self-publishing was to get these things done properly. I wasn’t happy with the paper I was getting, I wasn’t happy with the printing I was getting, I had problems with distribution.... Once I got all that stuff straightened out, I was able to go to Image and go, “Look, here’s the stuff I figured out that does work.” I had talked to distributors, and they had said to change the format to 6" x 9", because bookstore shelves hold 6" x 9" books better. That’s why the comic book shelves at Barnes & Noble are always weirdly shaped. They were telling me, “If you want to sell more books, change the size. It’s just that easy.”

That’s the nice thing about Image is that I can have those discussions. I can say, “I want to have this paper and this format.”

I also knew that, since they’re Image, they couldn’t bust my balls about deadlines. [laughter] I’ve learned, for me at least, it’s more important to do a good job than to have the thing come out on time. If a book of mine is done properly, it will stay on the shelf for years and continue to sell.

There are still people reading Why I Hate Saturn today. I can look at Why I Hate Saturn and say, “Gee, I wish I had taken another week to change that page.” There are a couple of typos. You’re always pushing up against a deadline, no matter what. I’m doing Special Forces today, and I’m up against a deadline, because Diamond was threatening to cancel it. [laughs] MM: How did you get involved with Truth: Red, White & Black? I believe you said you were friends with Robert Morales.

KYLE: Yeah, we had worked together at Vibe. We both used to do comic strips for Vibe magazine. He was doing some Marvel stuff, and they said they wanted to go for more of a young, black audience, because that’s where the entertainment business is going. Morales knew me from Vibe, so he told me the idea, and I said, “Oh, what a

42

KYLE: Nooo. It’s Marvel Comics. That’s why I don’t do too much of that stuff. With Marvel or DC, you know that if it’s a good idea, they’re going to run with it and not cut you in. [laughs] If you come up with a great, new idea for Batman, they’ll put it in the next movie and not pay you. I worked on those Venom stories, but none of us get anything from that movie. But you know that going in. I’m not complaining, I’m just saying that’s why there’s not much sense in doing that stuff.

great idea for a comic.” So I broke my “No Marvel” rule.

I don’t usually like to work on other people’s characters, but it was such a cool idea. And seven issues wasn’t that much—at the time it was supposed to be six issues.

MM: How far along were you when the seventh issue was added? When the second issue came out it still said “2 of 6,” but the third issue said “3 of 7.” Were you fairly far along in the series when it was decided you needed another issue?

MM: Did you have any input into the plot, or did Robert have it pretty well set?

KYLE: I don’t really know how they do things at Marvel. They tend to change plans a lot—or they did when I was working on that stuff.

One week they’d tell you, “This is our plan. We’re trying to do this.” And while you’re in the middle of the job, they’d say, “Oh, no, it’s going to be this many issues.” By the time it came out, it ended up being something else entirely.

Originally, it was all geared towards the paperback, but then Bill Jemas got fired and they killed all his projects. Truth was one of his pet projects, so they didn’t print many of the paperbacks. But now it’s back for some reason.

MIKE: Robert was the writer, but Marvel seems to—from what I hear—have a lot of input. They basically tell the writers what to write. I think DC does that, too.

It has to do with having to get all those different stories to match up together. The stuff I do is for special issues and things, so I don’t have to deal with that. But if you’re working on, say, a Hawkman story, they’ll tell you, “Hawkman has to say this, and he has to do this, and he lives in this city, and his wife’s dead,” or whatever.

I remember Bob was telling me how many changes he had to go through, and I guess that’s how the series ended up being seven issues long.

MM: Did you have to make any changes artwise, or were all the changes made before they got to you?

MM: Well, the Isaiah Bradley character is still around and pops up now and then.

KYLE: I just drew whatever was in the script.

MM: So you didn’t have to redraw anything?

KYLE: They tried to kill the property, because it was a Jemas thing—and I think it had something to do with the Joe Simon [co-creator of Captain America] lawsuit.

They only printed as many copies had been ordered, which was around 2,000 copies, and took it out of print immediately. But I guess the character caught on, so they brought it back in print recently.

KYLE: No, I don’t do that. If I have done something that was already approved, I don’t redo it. If I give somebody a cover sketch, and they approve it, then I give them a cover that looks like the sketch. They’re not allowed to have me redo it again unless they want to pay me again. I consider the script locked down. If they give me a script, then it must have been approved by the editor.

MM: Do you see any money off of that character?

43

Pearl Harbor, and Captain America was created before Pearl Harbor. That was their big issue. [laughter] Actually, maybe that’s why they added the seventh issue. Maybe they put something into the story to explain the chronology in order to make people happy. [laughter] MM: Did it surprise you that that was the big complaint?

KYLE: Well, like I said, I really try to differentiate between the so-called critics and the actual fans. If you’re the type of person who takes it upon himself to write a 400-word critical essay about an issue of Captain America, you’re probably a little more into it than the casual fan. It’s the kind of person who goes to a Bruce Willis movie and says, “You can’t jump a motorcycle onto a helicopter from on top of a building.” [laughter] Of course you can’t. You know what I’m talking about.

Truth was designed to appeal to people who weren’t normally reading Captain America. They said, “We’re trying to get the black audience.” So I was looking at it as, “What would make me want to read Captain America, if I was a young, black kid?” I put in the things I wasn’t seeing in other Captain America books. If you’re a die-hard comic fan, you already liked Captain America the way it was, and if it’s something different, you’re automatically going to dislike it.

MM: Did the series achieve what Marvel was looking for? Did it bring in more young, black readers?

KYLE: When I go out to conventions or bookstore signings or whatever, I’ll have hundreds of black people come up to me and tell me it was a terrific book. But none of those people have websites, and they’re not writing for Entertainment Weekly. [laughter]

MM: What kind of reaction did you get to the story?

KYLE: The critics didn’t seem to like it, but I met people at conventions who really liked it.

The whole idea of the thing—at the time, they were doing all of these controversial things, like the gay cowboy.

MM: Really, though, the comic book Internet sites represent just a small portion of the comic book community.

KYLE: Well, the comic book community is small to begin with. Stop me if I’m repeating myself, but one of my favorite movie-makers is Arnold Schwarzenegger. That guy never got a good review, and they keep saying the same thing about every one of his movies, which is “the guy can’t act, there’s no story.” But when I go to an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, that’s not why I’m going. I go to see him show off his muscles and blow up a bus. [laughter] And there’s always a hot chick, like Vanessa Williams or somebody, in those movies. You

MM: The Rawhide Kid mini-series.

KYLE: When you’re doing something like that, you’re trying to push buttons. When you do a black Captain America, you’re expecting that somebody’s not going to like it. That’s kind of the plan. So we got plenty of those letters. But the funniest thing was that we found out that what most people had problems with was not the racist stuff— which we thought was controversial—but the continuity, because it didn’t match up with Captain America #1,

by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon. Our story started with 44

can’t criticize everything as if it was a Dustin Hoffman or a Meryl Streep picture.

An issue of Captain America is simply not War and Peace. [laughter] You can’t judge it by those standards—or shouldn’t.

I used to get into this a lot with—and I like the guy— Gary Groth. Gary thinks that comic books are an art form and should be considered as fine art. I think that stuff has its place, but that’s just not why I’m buying comic books.

I buy comic books for fantasy entertainment.

If I want to read something classy and thought-provoking, I’ll go buy a James Baldwin book.

I get into that stuff, too; I like Chekhov. But if I’m buying Captain America, I’m not really looking for the answers to the world’s problems.

MM: No particular medium should be relegated to having one type of message. Dumb and Dumber isn’t going to lessen the impact of Citizen Kane. A velvet painting of Elvis isn’t going to make a Picasso painting any less meaningful.

KYLE: If you’re working for The Comics Journal, though, your job is to treat comic books like fine art, because Gary’s paying your bills and that’s what he wants. I’m always going to fail by those standards. [laughter]

There’s a certain kind of movie that goes up for an Oscar. They’ll never nominate a dumb comedy for Best Picture; it’s got to be somebody dying of cancer, or being retarded, or being retarded and dying of cancer. [laughter] Like that movie, Crash— that’s the type of thing that gets an Oscar.

That’s fine—whatever. I’m never going to be on that list.

MM: You don’t think Dark Knight has much of a chance then?

KYLE: Dark Knight is one of those films that appeals to critics, but not really to me. What everybody liked about the movie was that it took the subject so seriously. But for me, if I’m going to see a movie that dark and edgy with that much action, I also want to see the girl take her top off. [laughter] It’s a Batman movie you can’t take a kid to, but it’s also not satisfying by adult standards. [laughter] I’m looking at it going, “Well, if you’re going to be this violent, go more violent.” But they still had to have that PG rating. But obviously I’m wrong. I mean, it’s the biggest movie of all time, so clearly I don’t know what I’m talking about. [laughter] That’s why it might actually get an Oscar—that and the fact that the supporting actor [Heath Ledger] died.

MM: And just because your focus in on producing entertaining work rather than introspective work, doesn’t mean it takes any less craft to produce the story.

KYLE: Oh, sure. At the end of the year, I get all these Academy Awards screeners through the Writer’s Guild—they send you all the movies that are being considered for Oscars.

45

Previous Page Top: The Truth mini-series didn’t stir up as much controversy as one might have thought it would, even with scenes like this one. Truth: Red, White & Black #4, page 14.

Left: An inked Joker—the star of 2008’s Dark Knight movie in most people’s opinion—head sketch.

Below: The meeting of two Captain Americas, from Truth: Red, White & Black #7.

Captain America, Isaiah Bradley ™ and ©2009 Marvel Characters, Inc. Joker ™ and ©2009 DC Comics.

had more space. The original origin story was only four pages, or something like that, so I had a little more room to play.

Yeah, I used the same drawings; that was fun.

MM: Did you gain more appreciation or insight of Cole’s work through that process?

Above: When Kyle did his version of Plastic Man’s origin story in Plastic Man #1, he often used very similar (or, as in this case, the exact) dialogue and layouts Jack Cole himself used way back in Police Comics #1.

Here Kyle flipped the layout to make the action flow along the same line as the reader reading the story, thereby improving the original storytelling.

Next Page Top: Superboy introduces his babysitter, Letitia Lerner.

Panels from Plastic Man #9.

Next Page Bottom: Kyle was kind enough to draw this Plastic Man sketch for ye editor at 2003’s Comic-Con International: San Diego.

Eel O’Brien, Letitia Lerner, Plastic Man ™ and ©2009 DC Comics. Superboy ™ and ©2009 respective owner.

MM: Speaking of dumb fun and awards, let’s talk about Plastic Man. Plastic Man got some critical acclaim, even though it was clearly aimed at kids.

KYLE: Yeah, that was fun. That I enjoyed doing. And the thing about that was that I was just trying to return it to the original Jack Cole formula. You were asking before about working with other people. One thing about working with an existing property is that you don’t really have to do any creative work. If I’m doing Winnie the Pooh or something, I already know where he lives and that his problem is going to have something to do with honey. [laughter] It’s easy to write. And the same thing with Batman or Wonder Woman. I’m working on Wonder Woman now, and I know that she’s an Amazon and she has a magic lasso... all the hard work is done.

KYLE: Yeah. That’s one of the big reasons for me in choosing to do any of these things is that it’s stuff I want to spend more time with. I’m always so busy that I don’t get to enjoy myself unless I make it my job.

For example, working on Bugs Bunny was great, because I got to watch all the Bugs Bunny movies; I had to do it for work. If I’m working for Mad magazine, I get to sit around and read Mad magazine all day. This was another one of those opportunities.

MM: What was your overall goal with Plastic Man? What was the age group you envisioned reading the book?

MM: You mentioned earlier that you used actual dialogue from the original Jack Cole strip in your retelling of Plastic Man’s origin. When you compare the two, there is quite a bit of word for word dialogue there, and even more dialogue that’s basically the same just updated to modern slang.

KYLE: Originally it was supposed to be a one-shot hardcover. When I started on it, I was working on Looney Tunes [Back in Action] at Warner Brothers Animation. All the departments there were in the same building—Cartoon Network, Kids WB, and a couple of other things. So there was TV being made in the same building as the movies. What I was actually trying to do was keep my contract at Warner Brothers, and I figured if I could sell Plastic Man as a Cartoon Network show, I could stay at Warner Brothers Animation after my Looney Tunes contract ran out.

I had two kids at the time, and I was looking for a steady job. I thought that was the way to go. So the first Plastic Man issues are designed to look like a Gendy Tartakovsky cartoon.

KYLE: And I used a lot of the same layouts. I expanded the story a bit, because I

MM: Is that why there are no black holding lines in those issues?

46

KYLE: Well, there’s that, and the designs are kind of ’50s retro, which is what Gendy Tartakovsky was doing on Dexter’s Lab....

MM: And Samurai Jack.

KYLE: Samurai Jack, exactly. So I figured I would pitch it to Cartoon Network as a show. They ended up doing it as a pilot, but not with me. I ended up working on the Andre 3000 show [Class of 3000]. They had Stephen DeStefano and Tom Kenny do Plastic Man, and they basically used my designs. It was very weird. But you always know when you work on these things that they can take them away from you and have someone else do them.

So it was supposed to be a hardcover book. From what I heard, Paul Levitz decided that they were having a problem with their regular monthly comics, because all the A-listers were doing one-shots or mini-series and not enough good artists were doing, like, Superboy month after month. Paul felt that was where their bread-and-butter was, so he said he’d rather see Plastic Man as a series. So I broke the book into six parts—and the idea appealed to me, too, because I was looking for something steady.

every client. At the beginning of the job I always ask, “Who’s your target audience?” At Disney, they’ll say, “We want something that appeals to seven- to twelve-year-old girls.” So I asked Joey, “Who’s our target audience here?”

And he says, “I think it’s middle-aged fanboys.” [laughter] One of the things I like about working on well known characters and properties is that I know what the audience expects of me. I did some stuff for Nickelodeon magazine, and you know that the target audience is kids and you don’t do dirty jokes, etc. The funny thing about Marvel and DC is that their whole brand has changed over the years. Winnie the Pooh and The Muppets are exactly the same as they’ve always been. Spongebob and The Simpsons—I worked on the Simpsons comic [Treehouse of Horror], and it was easy. Bart Simpson’s still Bart Simpson and Homer is still Homer. I knew that it was G-rated stuff, and it was easy to write. But at DC it’s, “Who’s our audience?” You try to put in the stuff that you thought was really cool as a kid. I was talking to Brian Azzarello, and he wants to do Aquaman, and he wants to bring back the giant seahorse that Aquaman rides around on. I think he said he was having arguments with DC about it, because they think it’s kind of silly and childish and they’re trying to make these things more serious these days.

MM: And you drew Plastic Man—at least that first story—completely on the computer?

KYLE: Yeah, yeah.

MM: And in later issues you drew line drawings on paper before finishing it off digitally, right?

KYLE: Yeah, I like to mix things up.

After I wrapped up each story arc, I would try something a little different. I did two issues where there were no outlines, one issue I worked with a marker—just to try something different.

MM: With a series, I can see marketing Plastic Man for a younger audience, but you were originally going to do this as a hardcover OGN. What was the target audience for the book supposed to be? I can’t imagine many kids picking up a $20 hardcover.

KYLE: I remember actually having this conversation with Joey Cavalieri, because I have this conversation with 47

Above: Hawkman is a violent character? Just because he swings a huge mace around and throws swords at people? This “Hawkman” panel was done for the upcoming Wednesday Comics series from DC Comics.

Next Page: A castle and a prince on horseback— looks like something Disney would be happy to call their own.

Hawkman ™ and ©2009 DC Comics.

Anyway, basically, Joey was telling me that the target audience for Plastic Man was the same guys that are now buying All-Star Batman and Robin, which is basically Maxim with super-heroes. [laughter] It’s for grown men; it’s not for a kid. I just don’t know how to do that. I mean, I’ve got nothing against doing adult stuff—I do plenty of it, like Special Forces or You Are Here, so I can do that stuff. What I don’t get is changing the brands that drastically. I just can’t figure out how to do it. I’m trying to learn. I’m doing a “Hawkman” story now, and it’s incredibly violent. I figure maybe that’ll keep me in the game if Hawkman just beats a bunch of terrorists to death with a mace. [laughter] It’s just not where I as a consumer go to see that kind of stuff. If I want to see something really violent, I’ll go check out Quantum of Solace.

MM: How did you rectify all that internally when you sat down to write Plastic Man? KYLE: I said, “I guess I’m just going to write a book that nobody buys.” [laughter] The nice thing about DC is that you can kind of get away with that, because—and I hope I don’t get in trouble for saying this— they’re not in the book business. They’re in the properties development business. They can afford to keep Vertigo going. Vertigo is 48

probably not profitable, but it might be the place they find the next Watchmen.

MM: They just announced that Fables has been optioned to ABC television.

KYLE: Exactly. And once that gets on TV, they’ll be making toys out of it and a cartoon... that’s what it’s for. So you can get away with doing a Plastic Man book that doesn’t sell if Cartoon Network has Tom Kenny and Stephen DeStefano develop it without you. [laughter] MM: Did you pitch the cartoon as having the same tone and feel as what was in the Plastic Man series?

KYLE: I was giving the cartoon to producers around the building and saying, “Here’s my idea for Plastic Man. I want to do a TV show like this.” It was fun, because everybody was putting me off and acting like they weren’t into it. Somebody said they didn’t think they’d be able to get the rights. There’s this thing at Warner: They don’t like the guy who did the comic to do the TV show.

They let me work on Class of 3000, so it wasn’t that they didn’t like my work. They would rather have Stephen DeStefano draw like me than actually have me do the work.

I’ve seen them do that to a couple of guys.

MM: How did it feel to win Eisner Awards for your work on Plastic Man? KYLE: I’m sure it was nice. [laughter] I like winning awards. My goal for that book was to do something my kids would like. I’ve really gotten into kids’ stuff over the last ten years.

Once you have kids, you start to look around your house and you realize how much money you’ve spent on really bad cartoons. I’m looking at it like, “Wow! If I had created Dora the Explorer....” [laughter] We have so much Scooby Doo crap, and Dora the Explorer, you start to realize, “I gotta come up with the next Harry Potter.” And you watch some of these movies and they’re so bad, you think, “I can do better than that.” I’m watching Dora the Explorer and I’m thinking, “Wow, this is the worst animation I’ve ever seen.” I don’t feel bad about saying that, because I’m sure none of the Koreans who did it are going to read this. [laughter]

anything in a studio system. I basically took a couple of jobs just so I could put them on my résumé, that I directed this TV show and I directed that TV show.

One of the things that really surprised me when I got into Disney was that I was probably the only guy in the building who had actually made a cartoon. It’s so departmentalized. There’s the guy who does storyboards, and the guy who—everybody knows how to do one aspect of the job, but nobody knows how to do the thing as a whole, which I think is important. When I was directing at Warner, what was nice was that I had done everybody’s job at least once. So even if I wasn’t writing it—which I usually was—at least I knew how to write. If I was talking to the storyboard artist, I had done his job before. I knew what was involved in animating something, so I wouldn’t put something in the storyboards that was going to be hard to animate. Or if it was going to be hard to animate, I would factor that in and make the next scene easier to animate so we wouldn’t go over budget.

Working alone, I know how to get the most out of everything. I’m forced to, because I’m on a tight budget. I’m really good at making a dollar look like a thousand dollars.

Working for these studios is the exact opposite. [laughter]

MM: They might even agree with you if they did read it. I’m sure they were told, “We want it cheap and fast.”

KYLE: Yeah, all that stuff is done in a sweatshop. It’s terrible stuff.

MM: The animation business probably changed quite a bit even during the few years you were heavily involved with it.

KYLE: I used to do it a lot by myself, independently.

When you want to get a job at Warner Brothers or something, it’s not enough that you’ve done the work, you have to have done the work professionally. So even though I’d done hours of animation, I’d not produced

49

That was the hardest thing for me to learn. When I first started at Warner Brothers I was thinking, “Okay, I’m just going to knock these guys out. Once they see how much talent I have, I’m gonna just rise to the top.” The first weekend I was there, I did an entire Bugs Bunny storyboard. I came in, wrote it, drew it, and put up the whole board. I’m used to freelancing, where if I want to make more money I can do one of two things: I can either work more—produce more pages—or I can do better work. If I write a hit, then it will sell and I’ll get more money. That’s an incentive for me to do more work and better work. That’s what keeps me going. “If I want to succeed, then I’ll work harder and I’ll work better.” Whereas when you’re at a studio like Warner or Disney, everybody gets paid the same, no matter what. You get paid by the hour. It doesn’t matter who does better work or who does worse work—nobody seems to know. It’s relatively anonymous, and it all gets changed around. So the game becomes, “How can I do less work than the guy who’s getting paid the same as me?” I 50

saw it all over the place. Everybody would take three days to do a one-day job, and you don’t want to look like a jerk. You become the enemy if you’re cranking out three boards a day. [laughter] I remember when I directed my first cartoon at Warner, there was a production assistant whose job was to scan the boards so they could be put together into an animation reel. I ask the guy, “Hey, how long does it take to scan a board?” He says, “Oh, about a day.” I say, “Okay, terrific.” So I worked that into the schedule. I get the boards done and bring them in the day before the delivery date when I’m supposed to show it to the executives. I give them to the guy and say, “Okay, get these scanned and show them to me tomorrow.” He says, “I’m not going to show them to you tomorrow.” “What are you talking about? You told me it took you a day to scan a board.”

He goes, “Yeah, but I’m not telling them that. I told them it takes three days to scan.

You’ll see me in three days.” [laughter] That’s the way the game is played.

The other thing I saw that drove me nuts was they had four animators on staff, and two of them were really, really good. They had worked for Disney and knew how to do that cool animated style. And then they had these two guys—I don’t know where they came

from. They were somebody’s friends or something, and they were awful. I was doing Truth at night, so I would still be in the studio at night, and those guys would still be there because they were terrible animators. Every week the executives watched what they call the dailies, which are the pencil tests, and they’d say, “Change these scenes,” or, “Keep these scenes.” Every week they would approve the scenes done by the good Disney artists and reject the scenes by the two crummy artists. “Change these two scenes.” The two scenes that needed to be changed would then be given to the two good Disney artists, because they didn’t have anything to do since their scenes were approved.

MM: So the two good artists end up doing all the work anyway.

KYLE: Exactly. At the end of the day, you had a movie that was entirely drawn by two guys, but four guys were paid for it and also were paid exactly the same. Not only is it a waste of money, but it would be demoralizing for you if you were one of the animators.

I’m doing a thing for Fox now, and the nice thing is they’re just giving me the entire budget and leaving me alone. I was developing a Nickelodeon show a couple of years ago, and we spent six months just kicking around the concepts, and we had to have meetings to get to the approval of the outline of the

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Previous Page Top: Characters for one of Kyle’s as yet to be published projects. You can’t really go wrong with squirrels and birds, though.

Previous Page Bottom: Every story has to have a little drama and excitement, so why not have your heroes fall off a building?

Below: And every story needs a villain, as well. In this case, a cat—even one as cute and adorable as this one—fits the bill perfectly.

All characters ™ and ©2009 Kyle Baker.

Above: Our squirrel hero dreams of adventure.

Next Page: Mickey is definitely the thinker in this group.

Squirrel ™ and ©2009 Kyle Baker. Goofy, Mickey Mouse ™ and ©2009 Disney.

treatment, and on and on. I had been on the payroll for a year and had tons of meetings, and we still had nothing on film. Just for the heck of it, I had been doing short films on the side. I wanted to show them how long it took me to produce a film when there weren’t any meetings. So every time I came to a meeting I’d say, “Oh, and by the way, I’ve made another film.” [laughter] In the time it took them to get to the point where they were thinking of approving a budget to produce a six-minute film, I produced 20 minutes on my own.

The nice thing about Fox is that they figured out that in all their years of developing animated shows, the only successful shows they had came from outside, where an independent animator, like Mike Judge, would make a short film in his garage and then they would buy it and develop it as a series. Or Seth MacFarlane—he created Family Guy as his college thesis. Matt 52

Groening was a famous independent cartoonist with the Life in Hell strip. They developed those as the Tracy Ullman shorts, which were very crudely done—apparently

by Matt Groening himself—but that’s how The Simpsons caught on. So they finally figured out that instead of having a hundred meetings, let’s just give the guys the money to make the cartoons.

MM: That’s actually quite surprising to hear.

KYLE: With most of the executives in animation, it was not their first choice for a job. Most of them ended up there because they failed in live-action. Most of the guys who are writing cartoons, don’t want to be writing cartoons, they just weren’t good enough to get a job writing for Seinfeld. So a lot of these guys—and I saw this at Disney all the time—have the training for live-action. There’s a formula for creating a hit live-action show. You have to have the

MM: You worked on Shrek, too, right?

three-act structure and this, that, and the other thing— characters arcs, all those buzzwords. So you get these guys who come from the three-act movie training, and they’re sitting there looking at your six-minute cartoon, and they start saying things like, “Well, you’ve got to put your first act in, and you’ve got to have the character’s backstory,” and the next thing you know, your sixminute cartoon is 20 minutes long. And then you have to cut it. You can’t cut any of the executives’ notes, so what you’re going to end up cutting is all of the jokes, because that’s the only thing that can go. [laughter] They had this whole formula, “You have to establish the character, and you have to have the backstory,” and I kept saying, “You never did that with Donald Duck.” I mean, two minutes into a Donald Duck cartoon, you know who the character is. You don’t have to have that scene of Donald saying, “Today I’m going to build a boat,” and somebody goes, “Well, Donald, you know that you have a temper, and you know that when you fail to build that boat....” [laughter] You know?

“Here comes Goofy. He’s kind of retarded.” [laughter] You can figure it out.

The guy’s name is Goofy and he’s dropping stuff.

Working on Phineas and Ferb, they were like, “Oh, we need to have a scene where we see that the father loves the daughter.” I’m like, “It’s his daughter. Why do I have to set that up?” Or, “We have to know why it’s important for the kids to buy a birthday present for their sister.”

“It’s his sister.”

I’m finishing up Special Forces now, and one of the best things about it was I didn’t have to set it up. They’re in Iraq fighting terrorists. I don’t have to sit there and give you the whole backstory. The bombs are blowing up on page one, and I assume you’ll figure it out.

KYLE: Yeah, I was reading the Mike Ploog book [Modern Masters Vol. 19: Mike Ploog] you sent me. What they did was they gave me his drawings and suggested a direction to take it in. And then I’m guessing they gave my drawings to somebody else. [laughter] MM: How long did you work on Shrek? Mike was there for a long time before he got frustrated and left the production.

KYLE: I was only on it for about two weeks. But the funny thing is it was an important two weeks. They wanted Donkey to look more like Eddie Murphy, so I took his drawings and made it look more like Eddie Murphy, and they took it from there to 3-D, which has a whole other design aspect to it.

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Part 5:

One Thing Leads to Another

MM: How did you hook with Aaron McGruder for Birth of a Nation?

vary my style depending on who the client is. With Aaron being from the newspapers, I felt his fans were probably fans of newspaper strips. The people who read Boondocks, probably also read Calvin & Hobbes and B.C. and the other newspaper strips. We went back and forth on that style, because Aaron actually likes more of an anime style.

The funny thing about Aaron is—I guess he doesn’t really draw much anymore—but when he was drawing Boondocks, he could only draw, like, two heads.

He could draw a guy from the front and from the side.

So they really wanted me to do a more elaborate Neal Adams/Brian Bolland type of thing.

But I didn’t think it was appropriate for the audience. Whether it’s right or wrong, I always try to not freak out the client. Whatever it is you’re buying, you’re used to a certain thing. If you’re buying a DC comic, you’re looking for a certain type of thing. DC comics have an identity, and the same goes for Aaron McGruder. I figured if you were an Aaron McGruder fan, you’d be expecting that type of style. I think comedy should be done in a cartoon style. But because they’d written it as a screenplay, they had seen real human beings in their head and actual special effects. I think it came out great, and the people that read it liked it.

KYLE: I had known Reginald Hudlin for a long time. I met him in 1990, I guess. We’d worked together on some TV projects back in the ’90s, and he knew Aaron McGruder. Reggie called me, because Aaron was wanting to quit the Boondocks strip—this was before the TV show happened. Reggie is a producer and Aaron was a new guy. Reggie knew that you kind of had to have a strip if you wanted to have a TV show, but Aaron was missing his deadlines and just wasn’t very interested in the strip anymore, so they were talking to me about possibly ghosting the strip. I wasn’t interested, and suggested maybe Gilbert Hernandez could do it. But that’s how we all met.

Then they came up with this story that they couldn’t sell to the movie studios.

People were just not ready for a black president. [laughter] It was too farfetched. They told me the story, and it was so funny I decided to do it. I had turned them down at first, because I don’t like to collaborate with people for the simple reason that you have to split the money three ways. But it was such a good story I said I’d do it. And it was an opportunity to work with Aaron, who has his own fanbase.

MM: You did Birth of a Nation in a pretty stripped down style, even for you. What was your thinking on the style you used for the book?

MM: Did they just give you a complete script?

KYLE: Yeah, they gave me the movie script they had written. They had wanted Cuba Gooding, Jr., so I was thinking of him when I drew the character.

KYLE: I was going for a newspaper strip kind of feel. We were talking before about how I 54

MM: I can see that.

KYLE: I wasn’t really trying to make it look like him, but that was the idea.

MM: What led you into to self-publishing and the creation of The Bakers?

KYLE: At some point I decided I really needed to start self-publishing. It had been a dream of mine for a long time. One thing that really put me into the idea was I had gotten a bunch of money for the Bugs Bunny movie [Looney Tunes: Back in Action], but the economy was all cockeyed. I couldn’t put the money into the stock market or anything like that. I looked at it and I decided that the safest thing to do with my money would be to invest it in my own work. I figured that if my stuff is good enough for Marvel and DC to gamble on, that I should probably have faith in myself and put the money into my own books. I did the math, and I ended up doing better than I would have if I had put it in the stock market. [laughter] I didn’t make a killing or anything, but you know....

MM: Why did you decide to start off with a humor comic? Humor books traditionally don’t do well in comic shops.

KYLE: I don’t traditionally do well in comic shops. I think we talked about this before, I

do the comics because I like doing them and they come out the way I want them to. But I’ve always paid my bills by doing advertising or television or stuff like that.

I wanted to do cartoons that I owned, because I think there are other places to sell cartoons.

Marvel and DC really focus on that direct comic book market, and I think that’s good for certain products, but, for example, I don’t ever see children in comic book stores. I don’t see a lot of women in comic book stores. So, if I had anything for those people, I’m not going to have very good luck in comic book stores.

I tried to do the kind of humor that’s adaptable to other formats, like the singlepanel gag format. The original plan was that I could sell some of those to magazines, like The New Yorker or something. The problem was, because I had no editor, I was able to go crazy with the cartoons. I started looking at them and I went, “Wow, The New Yorker would never publish any of these.” [laughter] I had always wanted to do a family cartoon. My favorite comic strips are about families, and are usually based on the cartoonists’ families, like For Better or Worse.

And Dennis the Menace is based on his family, Hi & Lois—even Dagwood. And The Family Circus. It’s not as funny as it used to be, but the first couple of years of The Family Circus were really funny. As a fan of family strips, I’ve noticed that most of those strips stopped being funny as soon as the kids grew up and stopped giving the writer material. The first few years of Dennis the Menace are hilarious; the first few years of The Family Circus

55

Previous Page: This Bakers gag panel is elegant in its simplicity— one simple image and one word say it all.

Above: Caricature of Cuba Gooding, Jr. done for Vibe magazine.

Left: The cast of The Bakers letting you know just who they are. Okay, the mouse isn’t exactly part of the family.

The Bakers ™ and ©2009 Kyle Baker.

are funny. Then they have to start making up their own jokes. Hopefully, I’ll stop doing the strip by that time. [laughter] I wasn’t sure who was going to buy those strips, but I thought that they were good ideas. I know there is always going to be a market for family cartoons, and there is always going to be a market for random, single-panel gag cartoons. The idea was that if I published it myself, I’d have more control over these things and I’d eventually find where they belong.

When you do something with Warner Brothers through DC Comics, they have all these options on the stuff. They want to develop these things for their own movies and television shows and video games, so the contract is constructed in such a way that they get first crack at those things. The thing is they own Superman and Wonder Woman, but they haven’t made a Wonder Woman movie yet, so they’re never going to get around to making your movie until you’re dead. I mean, Watchmen—it took them 20 years to make a Watchmen movie? Alan Moore has no control whether or not they make his movie, and he can’t stop them from making his movie if there’s something he doesn’t like.

Warner Brothers might not be interested in making King David into a movie, but then I can’t take it somewhere else, either, for a certain amount of time.

With The Bakers, I knew somebody would like it. I didn’t know who. I originally started The Bakers in a comic strip format, but then the stories kept getting longer and longer, and I found that the slower paced ones were funnier for some reason. So I gave up on the newspaper strip idea, because the jokes were coming out at ten-, 15-panel long jokes, which you can’t do in the newspaper. But I got a good response to the first book [The New Baker #1].

Everybody said they really liked “The Bakers,” and that I should do some more of those. I started putting a lot of stuff up on my website.

It’s free, and people can read stuff for free.

MM: Is that something you started doing when you got into self-publishing, or had you been doing that for a while?

KYLE: I’d been doing it off and on for a while. The biggest thing about the Internet is that the technology has improved over the years. I started my website in 2000, and the 56

pipes were so slow that you couldn’t do any decent graphics. You could only do an image that was tiny, and it would still take an hour to load. You couldn’t do any animated films or anything like that. I would do really short animated things—ten seconds long—and it would just take forever.

Now everybody has iPods, so you figure, “I’ll put something in iPod format.”

I tend to have ideas that I know somebody will like, I just don’t always know who. Like Nat Turner—if I’m interested in buying a Nat Turner book, then somebody else will be interested, too. Even though it might not be appropriate for the comic book store market, I figure once I get that Nat Turner book out, somebody will see it and then they will steer me in the right direction. With Nat Turner I ended up getting a couple of offers, and that’s how I ended up at Harper-Collins.

MM: Is that the way you have to approach things these days in order to be successful?

Do you have to go into a project thinking, “I’m not going to make any money with this comic, but it may make me money in another market”?

KYLE: I just try to come up with ideas I think someone will like. I don’t know what format it will end up in, because media changes every day. Today everybody is downloading things on their iPod, but next year maybe everybody will be getting it on their telephone—I have no idea. When I started in comics, comics were a popular medium and were distributed in candy stores and grocery store racks. That was a good way to get stuff out there. Now I’m looking at the world of video games, because that’s a growing world and the graphics have gotten pretty good and you 57

Previous Page: This Bakers gag strip is sure to tickle a funny bone or two. As with most of the Bakers material, the joke is told in pantomime, giving it an even broader appeal.

Above: One of many dramatic panels from Nat Turner.

The Bakers, Nat Turner ™ and ©2009 Kyle Baker.

shows anymore. You don’t see that anti-war comedy on TV now, but there is a place for it. Maybe it’s independent film, maybe it’s video games.

It might turn out to be successful as a graphic novel—you never know. People might find that in Barnes & Noble and say, “This is really for me.” The most important thing is to get it done the right way.

MM: Why did you decide to do Special Forces? It’s something of a departure from what you normally do.

Above: This illustration of Felony in action was used as a background element for the inside front cover of each issue of the Special Forces miniseries.

Next Page Top: The cover of Special Forces #1, featuring its many stereotypical—and, for the most part, soon to be dead—cast members.

Next Page Bottom: Felony is in a precarious position in this panel for Special Forces #4.

Special Forces and all related characters ™ and ©2009 Kyle Baker.

can actually tell an interesting story. Ten years ago I wouldn’t have wanted to be involved in video games, but today I look at it and say, “Hey, maybe I could do a good story in a video game format.”

Because the media changes every year, I think the most important thing is to own the content. This year Harry Potter is a movie, the next year it’s a video game, and in the future it might be a 3-D thing projected into your brain. Whoever owns Harry Potter is going to adapt it for whatever format comes along.

Take Special Forces—I know there will always be a market for war comedies, because there always has been. If I had created Special Forces 30 years ago, I would have sold it to the network that produced M*A*S*H. But the market has changed and you don’t see as many scripted television 58

KYLE: Nat Turner and The Bakers were basically ideas I didn’t know where they belonged. I didn’t think they would work too well as comics, but I didn’t know where to put them and I just wanted to see them come out. So I said, “Okay, the next thing I do is going to make some money.” Special Forces is my idea of an Image book. When I think of Image Comics, I think of Jim Lee and huge splash panels and explosions. I really wanted to make this one that kind of a thing. I’d say the last five or six comics I had done were really experimental and really out there. Everything from King David on was really weird and challenging.

I said, “Let me just go back to doing an old-fashioned, really accessible, actionpacked comic book that people will enjoy.”

So that’s what this is. It’s just blowing stuff up like a good Marvel comic, and I think there’s a place for that.

MM: Did you do any special research for the book?

KYLE: I’ve been reading the newspaper.

There’s enough books out there about

Iraq—Generation Kill—there’s tons of them. Plus, I love war movies. I’ve watched Blackhawk Down 150 times.

Basically the only research that was necessary was to find out what weapons they’re using. I mean, there’s not much difference between this and Saving Private Ryan. All war stories tend to have the same formula, which is you meet a bunch of strangers with some kind of backstory.

“I’m from Kansas.” “I’m from Brooklyn.”

And then they all get killed. [laughter] A big thing I was doing for research, actually, was I was reading a lot of Bob Kanigher Sgt. Rocks and a lot of Kurtzman stuff. Whenever I do anything, I want to find somebody who already did it right. Kubert really does great war stories. So I just steal stuff from there, but substitute the Nazis with terrorists. [laughs] It writes itself.

MM: How did you develop your two main characters? They’re not typical war heroes.

KYLE: I read this story in the newspaper about an autistic kid who got inducted. I thought, “What an interesting story.” I thought it was such a cool idea for a Forrest Gump type of character. Because it was in the newspaper I thought, “I’d better get this out right away before somebody else takes this great idea.” So I did a cover and solicited it through Diamond before I had any idea what the book was about. I had the title Special Forces, because the guy’s mentally handicapped, but that was all I had.

The original concept I came up with was basically a rip-off of Bill Murray’s Stripes, where a bunch of misfits join the army, they get their sh-t together and defeat Communism. That was the original formula. I was going to put a bunch of stereotypical characters together, and then they get their sh-t together. So the first cover has the fat guy and the gay guy—just like Stripes.

I’m working on the story and I get the first draft of the first issue together, and it was awful. It was just full of clichés. Because I had taken the most clichéd concept and the most clichéd characters. [laughter] But my fat jokes are about as unoriginal as everyone else’s.

There was just nothing there. The only two interesting characters were the hot chick and the autistic guy, because those were two characters I had never seen before. I said, “These two guys are really interesting, and everybody else is just really lame,” so I killed them all in the first issue. [laughter]

The ending is stolen from a “Sgt. Rock” comic. In the first “Sgt. Rock” story, he gets his name “Rock” because he won’t fall down. They keep bombing the crap out of him, but he keeps standing up. The panels are almost swiped from the scene where he keeps getting up. There’s a bit with a mirror in the first issue, and I took that out of Saving Private Ryan, where the guy sticks a mirror to his rifle with a piece of chewing gum to peek around a corner. I’d seen that in a couple of movies.

MM: It’s common in prison movies, too.

KYLE: Yeah, they do it a lot, so I figured I’d just update it and put it in Iraq.

MM: And now you’re working on a biography of President Barack Obama.

How did that come about? Was it a direct result of Nat Turner or Birth of a Nation?

KYLE: I like to do the kind of work I want to get. Nat Turner was the kind of book I’d always wanted to do. I’m a big fan of black history stories and I read a lot of those books. So I did one hoping somebody would like it and hire me to do more.

Harper-Collins had seen Nat Turner, and they wanted me to do a biography of Toussaint Louverture, the Haitian revolutionary. Danny Glover was developing a movie

Above: Possible cover art for the unfortunately aborted biographical graphic novel on Toussaint Louverture.

Next Page Top: A panel intended for Toussaint.

Next Page Bottom: The President of the United States, Barack Obama.

Artwork ©2009 Kyle Baker.

about him starring Don Cheadle. Then the economy went to hell, and he couldn’t get the money, so they stopped development of the movie. Harper-Collins called me up and said, “Well, if they’re not making a movie, we’re going to have a hell of a time selling this book. Can you change it to Obama?” That’s how it came together.

I do that stuff on my own because I want to do it. But it’s also fun to do it in a corporate setting, because then you’re doing something specifically designed to be marketable.

When I’m doing books about my kids, I don’t 60

think anybody cares about my kids. I’m just doing it because I like my kids. Then some corporate entity will see it and say, “If he can do that, then he’ll be good at this.”

MM: What kind of format are you using?

Is it more of a traditional book size?

KYLE: It’s 96 pages, black-&-white. They know who they’re going to sell it to already, and they want it to be educational.

MM: What kind of editorial input is there for this book? Is this a book you can go off

and do and turn it in when it’s done or are you having to go back and forth with an editor?

KYLE: They said they needed something educational that they can sell to schools. I looked at all the different Obama books—because there are two or three different comic books about Obama right now, not counting his appearances in Spider-Man or whatever. The one thing I bring to the table that other people in comics aren’t capable of doing is getting those emotional reactions. With Nat Turner or even You Are Here—or any of my books—you get emotionally worked up about the characters. The other Obama comics are more straight educational, textbook stuff.

One thing I’m looking at is—I’m fascinated by people’s failures. It doesn’t matter who it is, whether it’s Obama or Michael Jordan or Picasso, these guys have always been miserable failures for most of their lives until they figure it out. I love that kind of thing. A big part of the book is going to be him losing a major election.

I read a great Harvey Kurtzman story once about George Washington in one of those Frontline Combat books. It was about when he had his first command, and he was just the worst general ever. Nobody would listen to him, and everybody ran away after he lost. I thought that was really cool, because everybody knows that General George Washington was one of the greats. To see that aspect of him....

One of the things I’ve found interesting in doing this book is that Obama said that when he was young he was shy. I would imagine that politics would be an awful job for a guy who was shy. I love that kind of thing. Everybody always thinks folks have a natural ability for something, 61

Above: Artwork for Kyle’s upcoming comic book biography of Barack Obama (seen here with wife, Michelle).

Next Page: Artwork for the cancelled Toussaint project.

Artwork ©2009 Kyle Baker.

but 99% of the time somebody has an idea of something they want to do, and then they have to figure out how to get it done.

That guy, really, was not built to be the president. There’s just nothing in his life that was going to lead him in that direction. I love that. So that’s my angle. It also proves that anybody can be president.

That’s what they always say in America.

MM: And now you can actually believe that.

KYLE: He’s an interesting guy. He wrote two books I had to read. He seems to get it.

MM: As a black historian, were you surprised that he won the election?

62

KYLE: Yeah! I never thought I’d see the day that there would be a black president—not in my lifetime. I thought sometime in the future, like on Star Trek, but it just goes to show you you’re never too old to learn something. It makes you think about what else you think you know. I’m 43 now, and I remember my grandfather fought in World War II and hated Germans. They never got over it because it was recent history to them. I grew up in 1965 with Martin Luther King, Jr., and I live in New York City, where it’s still pretty much legal for the police to kill an unarmed black guy. Every year at least one unarmed black guy gets shot, like, 50 times

there would be a black president in my lifetime—that’s just the way I was raised.

by the police. It’s always something insane.

The last one, the guy was on his way home from his bachelor party, and they shot him, like, 60 times. You’re reloading on a guy who hasn’t fired on you because he doesn’t have a gun.

MM: Have you ever experienced any racism in comics? When you came in, there was still a lot of the old guard hanging around, and as you said, they grew up in a different time.

MM: [sarcastically] Well, they thought he had a gun.

KYLE: I don’t know. There was only one black editor that I can think of in comics—like ever. [laughter] The first guy who hired me was Jim Owsley. He works by the name of Christopher Priest now—I think he still does comics.

KYLE: How do you shoot 50 shots and not notice that the guy hasn’t taken a shot? My point is that it’s legal in New York. This happens every year, and the cops never go to jail. So I just thought that’s the way the world was.

Obama also has a similar perspective to mine, in that I have a very racially diverse family. I can’t hate anybody, because anybody you can name, there’s probably one of them in my family. [laughter] If somebody starts talking about black people or white people or Chinese people or Irish or gays, I can probably think of some relative who’s an okay guy. So I like everybody, and he’s sort of the same way. He’s got a broader perspective.

One of the reasons I married my wife was that she had travelled a lot, so she also had this big picture of the world. I think a lot of people tend to believe what they hear or see on TV. The same way I never thought

MM: He pops up every now and then.

KYLE: He was a black guy, and he was the one who got me in. He hired a lot of guys, like Denys Cowan and Ron Wilson. I don’t know about racism so much as you always want to help out people like yourself. If I hear about a job, I’m going to call up one of my cousins or friends, you know? I don’t know if it’s racism so much. The more successful I get, the fewer black people I see—I know that. When I worked at Warner Brothers, there were, like, three black guys, and the awful thing is it’s always the same three black guys. It’s always me, 63

Below: This cutthroat rooster probably wouldn’t be welcome at Disney.

Next Page: Squirrels sure do love nuts.

Artwork ©2009 Kyle Baker.

Dwayne McDuffie, and Denys Cowan. [laughter] You go to Cartoon Network, it’s me, Denys Cowan, and Dwayne McDuffie.

You go to Warner Brothers, it’s me, Denys Cowan, and Dwayne McDuffie.

There’s also the thing of a lot of black guys just aren’t going to want to get into this business. It’s a chicken and egg thing.

If nobody is doing any comic books that are interesting to a black person, then a black person is not going to want to work in comics. The reason I got into cartoons is because I saw a Disney movie and I said, “Oh, this is terrific. I’ll do this.” If you’re not a fan of comics, you’re not going to want to get a job in comics.

I try not to think of those things. The whole world is the haves trying to screw the have-nots. I don’t think it has anything to do with color at all. You’ve got some greedy guys who have everything, and they try to screw the little guy. The thing I like about this country is it theoretically rewards work. If somebody like me wants to bust his ass and do a lot of work, I can actually set up my own little business and

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be successful at it. I don’t worry about racism so much as business monopolies.

My biggest issue in trying to get my cartoons out there is competing with Disney, and the fact that there’s one comic distributor, and things like that. It’s all about money. If you come up with something that sells, they don’t have to like you.

They’ll take your book as long as it sells.

MM: Speaking of which, is the new Diamond policy raising their minimum sales number from $1,500 to $2,500 going to effect you at all, do you think?

KYLE: I don’t know. Everybody will just have to raise their prices, right?

MM: But you can’t raise them too much or you’ll lose too many sales.

KYLE: I haven’t paid too much attention this year to the health of the business, because I’ve stopped publishing. I had five books come out last year from five different publishers. My biggest problem is getting stuff done, and their biggest problem

MM: And it’s a growing market.

is selling it. I don’t really know what the state of the business is now as far as comics. I like to focus on the cartoons. [laughter] We’re in a weird time, and I’m working on cartoons now that I honestly don’t know where they’re going to end up. I’m doing an action, super-hero type team, and I’m not sure where it might end up. It might end up on a video game or something if that’s the way the world is going.

KYLE: Comic books were created because of the existing printing presses at the time. The first comics were just republishing newspaper funnies. That turned into its own business, but the format came out of the trim size of a newspaper. As other things come along, new areas open up. For example, animation used to be theatrical shorts back before television. Once television came along, they stopped making theatrical shorts and all the animators had to go into television and the medium changed into something else. It was the same guys, and they were still making cartoons. There will always be comic books. I don’t know if people want to pay $4 for 22 pages— maybe they do, maybe they don’t. Thirty years ago there were no graphic novels. I love the fact that I can do a book that’s $20 with a thick spine, and that’ll be in style for a while or something else will come along.

For me it’s about focusing on the story, because the medium always changes. And the audiences change.

When I started, comics were for kids. But as that audience got older and kept buying comics, the stories got

MM: Is there a point where you say to yourself, “I can’t do comics anymore”?

KYLE: As the world changes, I just try to fit in wherever the medium is. Like I said, when I was growing up, comics were in the newspaper and that would have been a good place to go then. Today, people are still calling me about comic books, and as long as that’s still going, I’ll keep doing it, but I do notice that the business seems to be moving towards other media, like video games.

Video games is a really cool medium for action/adventure stories, definitely.

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older. Now comics is a medium for older people. It’s hard to find children that are into comics. I’m interested in what the kids are into these days. My daughter spends a lot of time on a thing called Club Penguin.

MM: What is that?

Above: Kids these days seem to have far more interests besides candy and comics, but Wonder Woman and the Flash do their part to share some holiday cheer.

Next Page: Panel from the Kyle’s upcoming “Hawkman” strip for Wednesday Comics.

Flash, Hawkman, Wonder Woman ©2009 DC Comics.

KYLE: It’s an Internet social network, but it’s got games and crap. [laughter] There are all kinds of ways to take your money. It’s like MySpace, but for kids. My point is that’s what kids are doing all day instead of reading comics.

Comics became popular because they were so cheap. You were a little kid and you only had a dollar in your pocket.

You’d go to the candy store and buy a gumball and a Superman comic and play a video game. That’s how they became popular, and that’s why Superman used to sell millions of copies. For kids to get into something, it’s got to be within their budget.

When I was a kid, I’d read the funnies in my dad’s paper. Now there’s no newspaper in the house, because we’re all reading it on the Internet. So it’s possible that cartoons might end up on the Internet. I might be doing comic strips for MySpace in ten years. Who know?

I’ve read about the history of music, and originally the money made in music was made from selling the sheet music.

Everybody had a piano or a guitar in their house, so your goal was to write a hit song 66

so that you would sell a million pieces of sheet music. When the radio came out, everybody said, “Oh, my gosh! It’s the end of the music business, because you’re going to get music for free in your house now.

You’re not going to need a piano anymore.

It’s the end of the world!” [laughter] But they figured out another way to make money. They said, “Okay, nobody’s buying sheet music, we’ll sell the record.” It’s the same way with comics.

For years, I’ve been putting a lot of my stuff online for free. I always think of Garfield, in that Garfield is something you can get for free every day—or very cheap in the newspaper. Everywhere you go— online or whatever—you can see Garfield for free. By the time you get to the shopping mall and you see a Garfield mug, you say, “Oh, that’s that cat that I’ve seen a hundred million times. I love that cat, because I’ve seen him so much.” A lot of it is just getting the characters out there, giving it away in any medium possible. There may be a day when comics are free and you make the money back by selling the toys. I have musician friends, and they’ll give the music away for free and hope you come to the show or buy a T-shirt. Four dollars for a comic book... that’s getting kind of crazy, to me.

MM: I have to buy a lot of comics for books I may want to do down the road, but it’s getting to the point where I can’t take as many chances trying out new books, new talent.

KYLE: Jim Shooter used to have a thing called “The Popsicle Principle.” This was back in the ’80s, and Shooter would say, “Your competition is a popsicle. Your product can never go above the price of a popsicle. Your customer is this kid, and his dad gave him a buck, and he goes to the candy store and he says, ‘Oh, I can buy a popsicle or I can buy a Spider-Man comic or I can play Space Invaders.’”

That was the world we were thinking of.

When it gets to be $4, it becomes, “I can buy a copy of a Spider-Man comic or I can rent the Spider-Man movie or this video game.” Things change, but there will always be a business because people love those characters.

Part 6:

Storytelling and the Creative Process right now, like working on “Hawkman” or Phineas and Ferb—you get paid right now, but I’ll never get a risidual check for Phineas and Ferb. So I always have to balance things that pay right now with things that will build towards a future.

Nat Turner was self-published and took a lot of work.

Considering how much work I put into it, because I had to do heavy research, it’s probably a break-even project even though it sold pretty well. But because I did it, now I’m getting those other jobs, like the Obama job. If I hadn’t done Nat Turner as a break-even thing, I wouldn’t be doing the Obama thing now.

I made out a schedule for this year that I have to create three new characters, three new properties. I don’t know what they are yet, but I’ve got to create three new properties and I have to get the books out by certain dates. I’ve got the Diamond schedule on my wall. It’s a balancing act.

I’m doing a lot of work in 3-D now—backgrounds and things—and the nice thing about it is that it’s reusable. It’s a way to help me stay on schedule. I’m building skyscrapers, because I’m doing a Supergirl story where she fights a giant monster, so I have to build a bunch of buildings for

MM: What’s your typical day like? You work on a lot of different projects, so I imagine you jump back and forth between things quite a bit. Do you have a specific structure to your day in order to keep everything under control?

KYLE: I usually try to figure out what’s more important.

This week I have to do a job for DC, because DC pays in three weeks, and I need to have a check by the end of February because my rent’s going to come up. I also have this Barack Obama book I’m doing, but we’re still negotiating the contract, and I’m thinking the chance of me getting a check for that within the month is pretty slim. So the priority becomes the Hawkman story, because that’s the one I have the best chance of getting paid for this week. What ends up happening is I put things like Special Forces or Nat Turner on hold, because I’m the publisher and I can delay those. That’s why some of my books take a hundred years to come out, and others always come out on time. Plastic Man had to come out on time.

But then next week, I will probably have to end up working on the animation thing. It’s always a balance of the stuff that’s going to put the money in my pocket

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the monster to knock down. You know, it’s that Godzilla stuff. But then I’ll also be able to reuse those models for other books, because a city is a city is a city.

Next month I need to seriously start hiring people. [laughter]

going to Fox, because they’re not going to tinker with it since it’s pretty much thought out and developed.

MM: Do you have an assistant now?

KYLE: I don’t know. I don’t draw so much; I’ve used computers for everything for years. There’s some drawing, then there’s compositing.... With something like Special Forces, if there’s a shot of a helicopter you can take a photo and trace it or work it over in Photoshop.

Sometimes I’ll make a 3-D model—whatever gets the story told, basically. It’s mostly getting the images in whatever way that might be. Some of my books even have photographs in them that are distorted so that they fit in with the rest of the book.

I just tend to stay in front of my computer all day and have about four or five windows open at the same time. Like, today I’m working on two scripts at the same time. I’ve got to work on the Hawkman story—that one’s pretty much figured out, which means I have to start building the models for the story. It’s a fight on an airplane, so I’m building the airplane in 3-D.

MM: How much of your day do you actually spend drawing?

KYLE: I have nothing. Well, I have a wife, but she has four children [laughter], so I don’t really feel right asking her to help me with even mailing a package.

The last couple of years I really wanted to establish the kind of stuff I wanted to do. When you’re working on other people’s cartoons and somebody else is paying the bills, then you can afford an assistant. I had an assistant on Plastic Man. But for something like Nat Turner, it was going to be something like two years before the money started coming in—my wife and my lawyer are mad at me, but I still think it’s the best way to work. We discussed this before. If you take the money upfront, then they have editorial input. So I’ve spent the last three years creating stuff, and now that I’ve created what I wanted to create, like The Bakers, I feel comfortable 68

The Obama thing, on the other hand, because he’s been photographed so much and so well documented, that I probably don’t need 3-D models for reference. I can probably just use photos.

I’m always just trying to generate the images first. I have a story in my head, but I think that what drives these things is the pictures. I’ll give you an example of how I did Special Forces the last couple of weeks. I started with the big fight scenes, because I always want to have a big fight at the beginning and a big fight at the end, because it’s an action story. I had these guys fighting on a helicopter, so I had a 3-D helicopter and 3-D figures, because it had such complicated choreography. The helicopter is flying around this building, and they’re jumping off the building onto the helicopter, and a guy jumps a motorcycle off the building onto the helicopter—it’s so complicated I figured it was best to do it in 3-D. Also, because it’s Baghdad, these things are real. Very often I’ll have a photo, but you’re not allowed to use other people’s photos—it’s against the law. So what I do is take the photo as reference, say a Baghdad street, and I’ll turn it into a 3-D model and shoot it from the angle I need it. Then I’ll touch it up in the computer and make it look good.

So, I did all the big fight scenes first, which were really complicated and took weeks. There were a lot of models to build, so it was very slow-going and I was only doing maybe ten pages a week, which is pretty bad for me. Then last week, now that I had all the fight scenes worked out, you have those boring talk scenes in between. I spent a couple of days doing close-ups of faces talking and exteriors of buildings—all the boring stuff that’s easy to do.

There’s a great piece of art that everyone should have called “Wally Wood’s 22 Panels That Always Work.” Have you seen that?

MM: Oh, sure, yeah.

KYLE: So, now I’m, like, three days from the deadline, so I just get into the “22 Panels That Always Work.” Here’s the character from the top, from the side, just standing there talking. I shoot a couple of close-ups of eyes. Then I put it all together in InDesign and start writing the text. I used to use Quark, but I switched this time. I get it all laid out visually to make sure that the pictures are hot, because that’s really what’s going to make it work, then I write dialogue on top of that to make things more complicated or clearer.

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Previous Page: Cover art for the upcoming trade paperback collection of Special Forces.

Below: The beginnings of a panel for the climactic helicopter fight scene in Special Forces #4.

Special Forces and all characters ™ and ©2009 Kyle Baker.

I got to the last day and I realized there was a big, four-page talk scene. And it was really funny, because there was a huge talking scene where I had all this information that had to be taken care of. There’s always one part in every story where you just have to explain a lot of crap and it’s really boring because there’s no action. So, instead, I just wrote that dialogue on top of already existing artwork of a big shoot-out. Now they’re having this

really boring conversation while they’re having a shootout, so it’s interesting. But I realized I needed one more picture of the girl for the conversation, and I was really up against the deadline. It was the last picture I needed to do, so I took an existing close-up of the girl and then flopped it over and made it a totally black silhouette making it a new piece of art. You wouldn’t recognize it.

That’s how I work. I get the big, hard stuff out of the way first. In the climactic battle they’re fighting amongst the weapons of mass destruction. They’re these giant nuclear missles, maybe 20 or 30 or them, in a silo, and they’re fighting on a big catwalk. It took a long time to make the models and two or three days to do these two double-page spreads, but then for the rest of the fight I shot the same picture from different angles and just cut it differently.

MM: It sounds like you don’t write a lot down in the beginning.

You just know where you’re going in your head, and then you work towards that.

KYLE: I really think that we’re buying these things for the pictures. I learned this from reading a book about Hitchcock, the way he did North by Northwest. North by Northwest is my favorite Hitchcock movie, by the way. You Are Here is my attempt at North by Northwest. The way he would write is he would make a list of cool things he wanted to see, like, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if a guy was fighting on Mt. Rushmore?” “Wouldn’t it be cool if some guy got chased by a plane in a cornfield?” “I’d really like to see him making out on a train with a hot chick.” Then they would try to figure out some kind of story about that. I do the same thing. Like, Special Forces, “This month the problem will be a car bomb,” and I start thinking, “What can I do with a car bomb? What would be an interesting angle to show the car bomb? Who would be in it?”

That way I know I’ve got the action down.

Right now I’m doing a super-hero thing, and the first thing I’m doing is creating the characters. I don’t really know the story yet, but first I’ve got to have some cool-looking heroes with some cool costumes. Nobody’s going to buy it if they look dorky.

MM: Once you have the designs down, do you look for those to imply the direction of the story? “This guy would obviously do this.” Is that how you develop the story?

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KYLE: Well, for this thing I’m thinking, “I’ve got to have a good-looking guy, and I’ve got to have a hot chick, and they’ve got to be young.” The boy and girl—I’ve got them figured out. I’ve got the villain figured out. I’m still trying to figure out whether or not they fight giant monsters.... I think they will. [laughter] Again, it’s something cool to look at.

And flying—I know that one of them is going to have some kind of cool transportation device, because that’s what I like in a fantasy story. Some kind of cool flying machine or crazy bike or car—I’ll think of something. Once I’ve got all that figured out, then I’ll focus on the fights—the action, the conflicts.

MM: You’re pretty in-tune with how and why you do what you do. Did you have to do much self-analyzing when you did the How to Draw Stupid book? What made you think of doing a “how to” book? Not that it’s your typical “how to” book.

KYLE: I have been wanting to hire people for the last couple of years. I’ve been needing more help, and I’ve found that nobody does what I need people to do anymore.

The thing about animation is it’s all outsourced now; it’s all done in Korea or

somewhere. So you’ve got a whole generation of people coming into animation now who just don’t know anything about drawing or animation or anything, because there are no jobs and there’s no point in learning that stuff. I’m doing this Bakers cartoon, and I keep trying to hire people to help me—and I had the same problem on Bugs Bunny, we couldn’t find anybody to actually animate Bugs Bunny. I put this book out just so people can learn how to do what I do, which is the character stuff.

Most DC and Marvel comics, they don’t get to much into the acting. It’s mostly in the dialogue. I don’t see a lot of acting. I don’t see a lot of use of camera work. People aren’t using the medium the way they could.

The other thing is I think that in the very near future—the same way we were talking about the music business—Hollywood is, whether anyone wants to admit it or not, going down the toilet. Everything’s changing; everything’s being outsourced.

You’re even seeing major publishers going under. BantamDoubleDay-Dell just shut down. Animation budgets are going down. I’m better off just 71

Previous Page: Closeup shot of Felony, the heroine of Special Forces.

Above: Kyle didn’t get very far on Toussaint, but he did do a few action scenes such as this one.

Below: Kyle’s recent How to Draw Stupid.

How to Draw Stupid, Special Forces, Toussaint and all related characters ™ and ©2009 Kyle Baker.

Above: Kyle could have easily downloaded an already generated model of a Tyrannosaurus rex, but he much prefers to generate the models himself.

Next Page Top: A panel from Kyle’s story, “Blood Curse of the Evil Fairies!” done for Bart Simpson’s Treehouse of Horror #12.

Next Page Bottom: Character designs for an upcoming Supergirl/ Wonder Woman story Kyle will be doing.

The Simpsons ™ and ©2009 20th Century Fox Film Corp.

making animation independently and then using Warner Brothers as a distributor, because they’re not going to give me any money to make this thing anymore. “Okay, we’re going to give you no money up-front, but we’re still going to push you around and tell you what to do.” “The only reason I was putting up with that was because you were giving me money up-front.”

I was planning to outsource myself, but once I got my software set up and started editing stuff and putting it together I realized you can do television quality animation on a computer now. You look at what’s on television now, like Dora the Explorer, only the mouth moves and the hand.

Dreamweaver can do that.

I got sick of jumping through all these hoops and doing all these insane proposals and all this work to try to get somebody to give you the money to make something.

Whether it’s a book or a cartoon, it used to be you couldn’t do it yourself. I got tired of it, and there’s less money up-front for doing that now. I might as well just make the cartoon myself, own the cartoon— there’s tons of ways to distribute things.

So, How to Draw Stupid—getting back to your question—I’m surprised that more people aren’t making their own books and movies now.

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MM: With the rise of YouTube, I think making short pieces, at least, is coming into vogue.

KYLE: Yeah, I was at a 3-D website the other day. I like modeling, but you can download models of anything you want if you don’t mind paying for them. If I didn’t feel like building a Tyrannosaurus rex, I could’ve downloaded one, but I like building it. But they have a little art gallery of customers who have uploaded all this stuff—guys fighting dragons, rocketships— all these cool things. It’s funny, because it’s all very professional and slick since it’s done on a computer, but they were very poorly composed because it was all done by amateurs. Each one has a beautiful, slick sheen to it—every hair is rendered and everything—but the pose is awkward, because the person doesn’t know what the hell they’re doing. I think if somebody read How to Draw Stupid, they could take that and get some software and make their own comic book. It would be so easy. You don’t really even have to be able to draw. You could download some software.

MM: You’re saying that it will always come down to the story and having a good idea, not necessarily what looks the best.

Hawkman story now, and I’m also doing Superman and Wonder Woman, and the problem is they do not have those etched-in-stone personalities like other characters have. When I did the Simpsons, it was really easy. My daughter wanted to see a fairy story, because she likes fairies, so I said, “Okay, Homer meets a fairy. What does Homer do? Homer’s stupid and he’s going to think the fairy is a bug.” Bart is acting like a jerk, Lisa is into jazz and studying, and Marge is Marge. The characters are all very well thought out.

In the case of the Supergirl and Wonder Woman story I’m doing, I’m like, “Wow, who is Supergirl?”

KYLE: It’s always about the story and the character.

That’s what the book is about is showing no matter what style I use, at the end of the day it’s the personality of the characters that you’re responding to. You like the Ninja Turtles as people. They’re fun guys that you want to hang out with.

I was just watching the new Indiana Jones movie on DVD, and it’s the same thing: You like that guy. There’s an interview with Steven Spielberg on the DVD, and he and George Lucas were worried about Harrison Ford being in this movie, because they thought maybe he was too old to be Indiana Jones. What they hadn’t realized until they were working on the movie was that Harrison Ford makes the character work. DC and Marvel do these franchise characters where they can put just about anybody into the role. It doesn’t really matter who’s playing Iron Man. Robert Downey will do three movies, and then they’ll get somebody else. Same thing with James Bond. Spieberg and Lucas thought of Harrison Ford the same way. But once you saw him in the role, it became, “Oh, I like that character.” Yeah, the character is old, but it’s the same guy.

I like Sherlock Holmes. He’s a great character. I like him in movies and in books—I just like Sherlock Holmes’ personality. That’s what I focused on in How to Draw Stupid, because I don’t see that in Marvel and DC comics really. I’m doing a

MM: They keep rebooting the characters every six or seven years, and sometimes they change them dramatically.

KYLE: That’s what I’m saying. Sometimes she’s a happy teenaged girl, sometimes she’s this serious, dark woman.

And the same thing with Wonder Woman. I think she’s a goddess and lives on Paradise Island, but they keep changing it.

There was a teacher I had, Howard Beckerman, in animation. He used to say, “The mark of a good character is that you can predict what he’s going to do in any given situation.” He gave us the problem of a stuck window. “What would Donald Duck do?” Everybody said, “He’d lose his temper, and he’d smash the window.”

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“What would Goofy do?” Well, he would come up with some stupid thing like trying to open it with a crow bar and end up breaking the window. Mr. Magoo wouldn’t even know it was a window. Bugs Bunny would trick Elmer Fudd into opening the window for him, etc., etc. Those are good characters.

The same thing with Indiana Jones. He acts the same way every time. He hates snakes, etc., etc. I think that’s something I do in my stuff that I don’t see at the big companies, except at Archie. Archie has a pretty well defined universe. I could write an Archie story.

MM: Though they have updated the look recently.

KYLE: Yeah, but Veronica is still rich and a jerk, and Reggie is still a jerk, Mr. Weatherbee has no sense of humor, Big Moose is the jock and don’t touch his girlfriend or he’ll hit you. That’s good stuff.

MM: Does your approach change when you do advertising work or illustration?

KYLE: The thing about advertising is they pretty much tell you exactly what to do.

It’s not creative at all. If you work for these big ad agencies, they’ll give you the completely finished sketch and say, “Do this.”

But the magazine stuff is interesting just because it’s got no shelf life. I just did a story about this rapper, Rick Ross. He’s got a Top 40 record right now, but I guarantee you in five years, probably nobody is going to care about that story. I’ve got a closet full of OJ cartoons. When the OJ thing happened, everybody wanted OJ cartoons.

I made a lot of money drawing OJ cartoons, but those things just have no shelf life. I mean, the guy went back to jail so maybe I could publish them again. [laughter] I got into magazines because the same way I was into newspaper strips, I also liked magazines. All of my heroes had come from magazines, and I hadn’t realized that world was dead. Norman Rockwell used to work for magazines, Ernest Hemmingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and when I was young, that’s what I thought it was going to be. Now magazines just exist to promote other media.

The only jobs you ever end up getting are,

“We need a caricature of Bruce Willis.” It’s a different kind of work, but it’s fun.

MM: Is there anything you can take from your magazine work that you can apply to comics? Are there techniques that you find work well in one medium and not in another? Do you have to alter your approach going from one medium to another?

KYLE: The magazine work is usually just a one-shot illustration, so you’re creating something that’s going to be looked at in the context of reading a story and then thrown in the garbage. When I’m creating a comic strip, I’m thinking of entire worlds.

I’ve got to think of all the characters and the story and what it’s going to be about, and I’m hoping that it’s going to go on for a while. I’m hoping that Special Forces will go on forever. Whereas a painting of Barack Obama for Vibe magazine is something you do very quickly.

MM: Is there one thing that you can’t do on the computer that you wish you could?

Or one thing you would like the computer to be able to do better?

KYLE: I don’t know. Right now it’s at a weird spot, because people don’t like computer-generated art to look like it’s computer-generated. When I do a watercolor painting, I try to make it look watery.

You drip paint all over it, and you might use a grainy paper to get that quality. When I do pastels, I’ll blend the pastels and really make it look like a pastel drawing. When I do computer stuff, I really want it to look computergenerated. But for some reason people are more comfortable if you render it to look like a painting.

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Previous Page: Line art for a one-page story on rapper Rick Ross done for Vibe magazine.

Below: The Rick Ross story as it appeared in print, with full text.

Vibe ™ and ©2009 Vibe Media Group, Inc.

Above: Cartoon playing off the Halliburton scandal.

Next Page: Obama cover art for Vibe magazine.

Artwork ™ and ©2009 Kyle Baker.

MM: Do you think it’s a matter of, “Well, if he did it on a computer, then so could I”? Do people look at it as cheating maybe?

You’re still having to use your knowledge of anatomy and perspective and all of that, but people don’t necessarily think of it in that way.

KYLE: I think people just don’t like new things. Comics, especially, because it’s mostly a nostalgia business. It’s the only art field I’ve seen where styles change slowly. If you look at the history of American illustration, it changes with the technology. Thomas Nast’s style [Editor’s note: Thomas Nast was a famous editorial cartoonist in the 1800s] came out of the existing technology of the time—that lithographic plate. Then you’ll look in the ’20s and you’ll see that Art Deco style. In the ’50s, 76

everybody’s doing airbrushed art. But comic books, with very few exceptions, have been drawn with exactly the same tools for the last 80 years. I don’t get it. If you’re a painter doing book covers, let’s say, you’re always looking for the new style. You don’t want your book to look like the ’60s, you want it to look current.

But in comics, everybody is still using a brush dipped in an ink well, and it’s getting harder to find an ink well.

MM: I hear that a lot, where the style of brushes a guy uses isn’t being made anymore, or the ink he uses doesn’t have the same formula.

her—things that I do know.

One of the things I’ve always disliked about 3-D animation is that the characters always seem to be somewhat weightless. Because he’s computer-generated, Yoda doesn’t really seem real.

There are traditional animation techniques that the guys at Disney used to use that I know—and that they used to teach you in animation— that give things weight. I apply those when I do 3-D animation, and I don’t have those problems.

KYLE: Yeah, because nobody uses that stuff anymore. It’s obsolete. There’s no point to it. There’s no reason we should still be using the dip pen like Thomas Jefferson. [laughter] And what happens is when you use a computer, you end up putting a Photoshop filter on it to make it look like a line drawing. People are more comfortable with it. I don’t know why.

MM: Do you think there’s any visual difference in quality between digital work and hand-drawn work?

Above: Kyle used 3-D modeling to create this image of the JLA satellite.

Next Page: Anyone for a game of jacks?

Justice League of America ™ and ©2009 DC Comics.

KYLE: All tools are dependent on who’s using them. When I started doing 3-D, I had certain biases. There were certain things I didn’t like about 3-D art I had seen. Once I got into using it, I realized that the problems were not with the programs, they were with the artists. It’s just like paint or anything else. You give a guy a box of watercolors, and if he’s good he can give you the “Mona Lisa.” If he’s not good, he’s going to give you crap.

I think a lot of the computer-generated stuff that comes out is created by guys who know about computers, but don’t know about art. I was just looking at the Mortal Combat website the other day, and they have the characters posed out in 3-D so you can look at them. The woman was very well rendered—she looked very realistic—but the pose was awkward, because the guy didn’t really understand how people shift their weight, or that her wrist shouldn’t have been bent backwards like that, or that gravity should be working on 78

MM: With younger generations coming into the comics industry, do you think that will change? Kids these days are growing up with computers, and they may not have those same biases that are in place now.

We’ve already seen comic book coloring switch over almost entirely to digital.

KYLE: I don’t know. I think the reason that comic books have taken so long to catch on is that it’s rare that people can develop that many skills at the same time.

I’m now, in my 40s, finally doing the kind of work I like doing. I had to learn how to draw, I had to learn how to write, I had to learn how to paint.... There’s all of these things that have to be learned, and it’s rare that someone can learn how to be a great writer, let alone a great writer and a great artist. When you see a guy like a Joe Kubert—Joe Kubert’s amazing, because he just gets better every year. He still cares. That’s the challenge: staying interested.

MM: Is that why you do so many different things, to keep your interest up?

KYLE: I just do a lot of stuff because I honestly don’t know what’s going to work and what’s not. A lot of times you have an idea and you think, “Wow, this is going to be a homerun,” and it does nothing, and then you have another idea you think is a piece of crap and it’s the biggest hit you ever did. [laughter] You just never know.

Kyle Baker

Art Gallery

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Pages 80: A page from The Shadow.

Pages 81: A rejected page intended for the Dick Tracy mini-series.

Page 82: Character sketches for Classics Illustrated #13, adapting Lewis Carroll’s children’s classic, Through the Looking Glass.

Page 83: Sketchbook material from the early ’90s.

Pages 84: Rough sketches for a series of “Popeye by Jules Feiffer” strips that Kyle did for Instant Piano #3.

This Page: Drawings done when Kyle was developing Cowboy Wally as an animated series.

Cowboy Wally™ and ©2009 Kyle Baker. The Shadow ™ and ©2009 Condé Nast. Dick Tracy ™ and ©2009 Tribune Media Syndicate, Inc. Olive Oyl, Popeye, Swee’Pea ™ and ©2009 King Features, Inc.

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Previous Page and This Page: More drawings done for the Cowboy Wally animated series Cowboy Wally™ and ©2009 Kyle Baker.

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Previous Page: Images from the abandoned Toussaint graphic novel.

This Page: Images produced through 3-D modeling of an Egyptian queen and Augustus Caesar.

Artwork ©2009 Kyle Baker.

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Previous Page and This Page: Images for an as yet unpublished story featuring some squirrels along with a couple of their bird friends.

Here we can see a bit into Kyle’s working method. The main figures are drawn separately from the background, and the two are then composited together.

Artwork ©2009 Kyle Baker.

Above: Our heroes try to get a ride in a horsedrawn carriage.

Right: This aye-aye was drawn for Kyle’s Noah’s Ark project.

Next Page: The butler is clearly the star of this high society affair.

Pages 94-97: Kyle likes Sherlock Holmes so much that he made his own version of the character.

Page 98: Our intrepid squirrel hero is in a spot of trouble.

Page 99: More character designs for the Noah’s Ark project, along with a gag panel.

Pages 100 & 101: Images featuring Kyle’s take on “Jack and the Beanstalk.”

Page 102: Felony from Special Forces.

Page 103: Cover art for Special Forces #3.

Holmes & Watson, NYCPI ™ and ©2009 Kyle Baker. All artwork ©2009 Kyle Baker.

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Artwork ©2009 Kyle Baker.

Artwork ©2009 Kyle Baker.

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Above: Batman on monitor duty.

Left: Two ambiguous worlds collide.

Below: Mr. Mind—the most evil insect on Earth.

Next Page Top: One of Kyle’s “It’s Genetic” gag panels done for Marvel Age. Next Page Bottom: Hard at work on a new comic.

Batman, Robin, Mr. Mind ™ and ©2009 DC Comics. Bert, Ernie ©2009 Jim Henson Productions, Inc. Cyclops ™ and ©2009 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Artwork ©2009 Kyle Baker.

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Artwork ©2009 Kyle Baker.

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Artwork ©2009 Kyle Baker.

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Artwork ©2009 Kyle Baker.

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Artwork ©2009 Kyle Baker.

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Artwork ©2009 Kyle Baker.

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Artwork ©2009 Kyle Baker.

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Martha Washington™ and ©2009 Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons.

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Artwork ©2009 Kyle Baker.

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Artwork ©2009 Kyle Baker.

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THE MODERN MASTERS SERIES Edited by ERIC NOLENWEATHINGTON, these trade paperbacks and DVDs are devoted to the BEST OF TODAY’S COMICS ARTISTS! Each book contains RARE AND UNSEEN ARTWORK direct from the artist’s files, plus COMPREHENSIVE INTERVIEWS (including influences and their views on graphic storytelling), SKETCHBOOK SECTIONS, and more!

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COMICS MAGAZINES FROM TWOMORROWS ™

A Tw o M o r r o w s P u b l i c a t i o n

No. 3, Fall 2013

01

1

BACK ISSUE

ALTER EGO

82658 97073

4

COMIC BOOK CREATOR

DRAW!

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR

BACK ISSUE celebrates comic books of the 1970s, 1980s, and today through a variety of recurring (and rotating) departments, including Pro2Pro interviews (between two top creators), “Greatest Stories Never Told”, retrospective articles, and more.

Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

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

Edited by ROY THOMAS.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR is the new voice of the comics medium, devoted to the work and careers of the men and women who draw, write, edit, and publish comics, focusing always on the artists and not the artifacts, the creators and not the characters. Edited by JON B. COOKE.

DRAW! is the professional “How-To” magazine on cartooning and animation. Each issue features in-depth interviews and stepby-step demonstrations from top comics professionals. Most issues contain nudity for figure-drawing instruction; Mature Readers Only. Edited by MIKE MANLEY.

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR celebrates the life and career of the “King” of comics through interviews with Kirby and his contemporaries, feature articles, and rare & unseen Kirby artwork. Now full-color, the magazine showcases Kirby’s art even more dynamically. Edited by JOHN MORROW.

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazines) $8.95 (Digital Editions) $3.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazines) $8.95 (Digital Editions) $3.95

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BILL SCHELLY tackles comics of the Atomic Era of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis!

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CREATING THE FILMATION GENERATION

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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

KYLE BAKER Kyle Baker may well be the funniest man in comics.

With books like The Bakers, The Cowboy Wally Show, Why I Hate Saturn, and Plastic Man on his résumé, along with four (of his eight) Eisner Awards in the “Best Writer/Artist Humor” category, it’s hard to argue against him. But he does serious, too—and you can’t get much more serious than Nat Turner. He is an all-around cartoonist—he can write, pencil, ink, and color with the best of them— whose work has appeared in such diverse publications as The New York Times, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and Mad. He has also worked in animation for both Disney and Warner Brothers. Did we mention he’s a funny guy?

MODERN MASTERS is an ongoing series of books celebrating the lives and work of the greatest comic book artists of our time.

ISBN-13: 978-1-60549-008-3 ISBN-10: 1-60549-008-3

51495

$14.95 In The US ISBN

9 781605 490083

978-1-60549-008-3