Modern Masters Vol. 20: Kyle Baker Preview by TwoMorrows Publishing

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 :

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

Part 1:

Funny Animals and Horror Stories

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

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.

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.

Part 2:

A Cowboy, a Shadow and a Trip to Saturn

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.

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.

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?” 12

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

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

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.

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.

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. 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. 30

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.

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. 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. 38

Part 4:

The Truth about Marvel and DC

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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? 70

Kyle Baker

Art Gallery

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.

Previous Page and This Page: More drawings done for the Cowboy Wally animated series Cowboy Wallyâ&#x201E;˘ and ÂŠ2009 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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Modern Masters:

Kyle Baker

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Kyle Baker may well be the funniest man in comics. With books like The Cowboy Wally Show, Why I Hate Saturn, Plastic Man, and The Bakers on his resume, 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 the all-around cartoonist—he can write, pencil, ink, and color with the best of them. His work has appeared in such diverse publications as The New York Times, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and Mad. Without question, Kyle Baker is a Modern Master, and this book presents a career-spanning interview and discussion of his creative process, plus plenty of rare and unseen art, including an 8-page color section, and a gallery of commissioned work!