Modern Masters Vol. 22: Mark Buckingham

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 - T W O :

MARK BUCKINGHAM

By Eric Nolen Weath ing

ton

& © DC Characters TM Comics.

A plea from the publisher of this fine digital periodical: TwoMorrows, we’re on the Honor System with our Digital Editions. We don’t add Digital Rights Management features to them to stop piracy; they’re clunky and cumbersome, and make readers jump through hoops to view content they’ve paid for. And studies show such features don’t do much to stop piracy anyway. So we don’t include DRM in our downloads.

At

However, this is COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL, which is NOT INTENDED FOR FREE DOWNLOADING ANYWHERE. If you paid the modest fee we charge to download it at our website, you have our sincere thanks. Your support allows us to keep producing magazines like this one.

If instead you downloaded it for free from some other website or torrent, please know that it was absolutely 100% DONE WITHOUT OUR CONSENT. Our website is the only source to legitimately download any TwoMorrows publications. If you found this at another site, it was an ILLEGAL POSTING OF OUR COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL, and your download is illegal as well. If that’s the case, here’s what I hope you’ll do: GO AHEAD AND READ THIS DIGITAL ISSUE, AND SEE WHAT YOU THINK. If you enjoy it enough to keep it, please DO THE RIGHT THING and go to our site and purchase a legal download of this issue, or purchase the print edition at our website (which entitles you to the Digital Edition for free) or at your local comic book shop.

Otherwise, please delete it from your computer, since it hasn’t been paid for.

And please DON’T KEEP DOWNLOADING OUR MATERIAL ILLEGALLY, for free. If you enjoy our publications enough to download them, support our company by paying for the material we produce. We’re not some giant corporation with deep pockets, and can absorb these losses. We’re a small company—literally a “mom and pop” shop—with dozens of hard working freelance creators, slaving away day and night and on weekends, to make a pretty minimal amount of income for all this hard work.

All of our editors and authors, and comic shop owners, rely on income from this publication to continue producing more like it. Every sale we lose to an illegal download hurts, and jeopardizes our future. Please don’t rob us of the small amount of compensation we receive. Doing so helps ensure there won’t be any future products like this to download.

And please don’t post this copyrighted material anywhere, or share it with anyone else.

Remember: TwoMorrows publications should only be downloaded at

www.twomorrows.com TM

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-Two:

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- T W O :

MARK BUCKINGHAM edited by Eric Nolen-Weathington front cover by Mark Buckingham front cover color by D’Israeli 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 • March 2010 • Printed in Canada Softcover ISBN: 978-1-60549-014-4 Trademarks & Copyrights All characters and artwork contained herein are ™ and ©2010 Mark Buckingham unless otherwise noted.

Scene But Not Herd, Phibi, Zeb, and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Mark Buckingham.

Duck & Cover, Haemerrhoids Rabbit ™ and ©2010 Mark Buckingham and Andrew Elliott.

Fables and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Bill Willingham and DC Comics.

Aqualad, Arsenal, Batman, Books of Magic, Clayface, Darkseid, Death, Flash, Hellblazer, Kid Flash, Merv Pumpkinhead, Mr. Freeze, Nightwing, Poison Ivy, Robin, Sandman, Speedy, Superman, Tefé, Tempest, Titans, Troia, Wonder Girl, and all related characters ™ and ©2010 DC Comics.

Ben Parker, Captain America, Dr. Doom, Dr. Strange, Fantastic Four, Galactus, Gen-X, Ghost Rider 2099, Giant-Man, Immortalis, Invisible Girl, Iron Man, Kraven the Hunter, Lizard, Mr. Fantastic, Mysterio, Peter Parker, Sandman, Spider-Man, Thing, Thor, Vulture, Wasp, and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Marvel Characters, Inc. ABC Warriors, Ace Garp, Future Shocks, Tyranny Rex ™ and ©2010 2000 AD. Channel Evil and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Renegade Arts Entertainment Ltd. Mice Templar ™ and ©2010 Michael Avon Oeming and Bryan JL Glass.

Odd and the Frost Giants and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Neil Gaiman.

Star Trek and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Paramount Pictures.

Snow Cherries from France ™ and ©2010 Tori Amos.

The Lionheart ™ and ©2010 Chris Opperman.

Bull Damn City, Fun with Leonardo, Miracleman, and all related characters ™ and ©2010 respective owner.

Editorial package ©2010 Eric Nolen-Weathington and TwoMorrows Publishing.

Dedication To my Snow White, Donna, and our two cubs, Iain and Caper.

And to the happily ever after.

Acknowledgements Mark Buckingham, for being so enthusiastic, so generous with his time, and such a nice guy.

Irma Page, for helping Bucky with scanning and other technical details.

Special Thanks D’Israeli, Heritage Auctions (www.ha.com), George Khoury, Rick McGee and the crew of Foundation’s Edge, Russ Garwood and the crew of Capital Comics, and John and Pam Morrow

Modern Masters Volume Twenty-Two:

MARK BUCKINGHAM Table of Contents Introduction by Neil Gaiman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Part One: The Benefits of Society Life. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Part Two: Every Moment of Light and Dark Is a Miracle . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Part Three: Going Where the Action Is . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Part Four: Fables and the Reconstruction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 Part Five: Storytelling and the Creative Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 Art Gallery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

Artwork ©2010 Mark Buckingham

Odd and the Frost Giants ™ and ©2010 Neil Gaiman

4

Introduction

I

think what drew me to Mark Buckingham’s art, all those years ago, was the lightness.

The feeling that there was a real person drawing this, and that he had a sense of humour and that the world he drew was not heavy. Mark drew things flying as if they weighed nothing at all.

I’ve loved working with Mark: there’s nothing I’ve asked him to draw he couldn’t do, no style, no madness I’ve pulled him into where he was not happy to do more and go madder than I had ever dreamed.The awards stack up until I doubt there’s much room in his flat, and his wife (her name is Irma. She is Spanish and both beautiful and bossy. She even bosses me around) will have to start gluing them to the ceiling, and this makes me happy, because I like Bucky’s art and I want everyone else to like it as much as I do.

He is a master. There’s no doubt of that. In my head, he’s still about 22. I don’t know how he did all this work.

Death, Sandman ™ and ©2010 DC Comics

Neil Gaiman

5

Part 1:

The Benefits of Society Life

MODERN MASTERS: Let’s start with the basics.

When and where were you born?

BUCKY: The nearest city is Bristol, famous for being an important merchant port in past years and also home to a lot of engineering work, like Rolls-Royce and British Aerospace. It’s by the sea, but it’s also very rural. It’s part of the agricultural heart of the UK, as well.

I have that duality, myself. I need the sea, I need the countryside, but I like to be close to city life. I’m not really a country boy, but I can appreciate that lifestyle.

It was a really pleasant place to grow up. I always felt very safe there. It was a quiet seaside town. Not a lot happening, but at the same time not a lot of danger either.

MARK BUCKINGHAM: Born in Clevedon—a seaside, Victorian town in the southwest of England—on the 23rd of May, 1966. I spent the large part of my life there. Apart from a brief period away studying when I was doing my design degree and the last three or so years where I’ve been spending a lot of time in Spain, I’ve pretty much always lived there.

MM: What is that area of England like?

MM: What were your expectations of what you could do career-wise when you grew up? What did your parents do for a living?

BUCKY: Most of the time I was growing up, my father worked in electrical generation. He was a plant operator at a power station. He was also a retained fireman. He was on call at a moment’s notice to go to the local fire station. We didn’t have full-time firemen in our town; they all had other jobs. My grandfather had been a fireman as well.

My mother worked selling new homes for a while, and also was a hairdresser when she was younger. She had a lot of other skills, but focused a lot of her time on bringing up the family.

MM: You have siblings then?

BUCKY: I have a sister named Claire, who’s two years younger than me. We’re a relatively small family. My mum’s parents lived in town as well, so we grew up having them around.

MM: Where did your interest in art come from?

BUCKY: I think it kind of grew out of a period of time when I got sick when I was four years old. I was very sick for a few weeks with a lung infection, I think it was. Straight after that I had gastroenteritis. Mum says I was just skin and bones. They were very worried. I had to spend a lot of time at home and keep myself amused. My parents, very sensibly, gave me Plasticine [a type of non-drying modeling clay] and pens and paper. And I just drew and made 6

things, and that was the start of it all really. That became the one thing that I would always want to do. It kept me going and was the one thing I began to excel at. You know, I did okay with things like English and stuff, but I wasn’t the greatest when it came to math and other subjects. I was pretty average in those, and I was very poor when it came to sports, so having something I could feel special about myself was really important to me. It gave me a focus.

My parents also started buying me comics pretty early on, and that, I’m afraid, was terribly influential on me. [laughter] All I cared about after that were comic books and animation. My parents bought me a Super-8 camera when I was about ten years old, and I used to make my own animated films— Aardman-style claymation stuff. Of course, I ended up working for Aardman eventually.

MM: It’s funny. You’re the second British artist I’ve covered in this series—not counting John Byrne who spent most of his childhood in Canada—and both you and Alan Davis mentioned Plasticine as something you spent a lot of time working

with as children. Was it popular in England at the time?

BUCKY: Oh, extremely popular with kids.

Very unpopular with parents, because it tended to get trodden into carpets. But for anyone with an imagination, any sort of toy that allows you to be creative without being in any way restricted, I think, is marvelous.

And it’s one of the things that saddens me a bit with a lot of modern toys and games is that all the thinking’s been done for you.

They whirl, they buzz, they make funny noises, they zip around the room, but that’s it. The fun and the potential of the toy is already accounted for.

Things like Lego or Plasticine—anything that allows you to build and to explore alternatives.... Lego was another big thing for me growing up. I would always make the truck or the petrol station or whatever it was the kit was supposed to be, but then once that was done, they’d immediately get ripped apart again, and the pieces would join the hundreds of others waiting to be turned into something that looked a bit like the spacecraft I’d just seen on the front cover of 2000 AD. 7

Previous Page: Sciencefiction was a big part of Bucky’s childhood, so it was only fitting he tried his hand at a sci-fi strip early on in his career.

These 1987 pencils were for an unfinished strip called, “Hieronymus Blunt.”

Above: Some of Bucky’s first professional work was for The Truth, a British satirical magazine, and the place where Neil Gaiman also got his start.

“Haemerrhoids Rabbit” wasn’t so much satire as potty humor—literally.

Haemerrhoids Rabbit ™ and ©2010 Mark Buckingham and Andrew Elliott.

Below: A one-page gag strip for Harrier Comics’ Trident. Like Leonardo da Vinci, Mark was an artist who also studied science —at least while he was still in school.

Next Page: Character designs for another of Bucky’s strips for The Truth, “Duck & Cover.”

Fun with Leonardo ©2010 respective owner. Duck & Cover ™ and ©2010 Mark Buckingham and Andrew Elliott.

And the same with the Plasticine. I used to make models of characters I liked from comics and things. But then I would also create monsters and things of my own, and after a while I learned that if I combined that with the drawing and used them as a reference tool, suddenly a creature that might be tricky to draw from more than one angle wasn’t anymore, because I had this thing I could turn around and look at.

I remember some of my very early—well not that early, because I was drawing comic strips of my own and inventing my own characters from about the age of six or seven. I used to actually produce whole

comic books and distribute them around the playground. By the time I got to about 16 or 17, I would do things like build interiors of spaceships and photograph them in order to have accurate reference with lighting and everything for things I was having to draw.

MM: Did you have any like-minded friends who would join you, or were you doing things on your own?

BUCKY: Not so much. I used to rope the odd friend into drawing things, but there weren’t many. I think one of my best friends, Andrew, was the only one I persuaded to draw strips, and that was more for the fun than from any real desire to do comics seriously. It wasn’t until I got to university that I got in with a group of people that were seriously trying to make comic books and fanzines. That was when my desire to be a comic book artist really took off, because suddenly I was surrounded by people who were encouraging me. That made a big difference.

MM: I assume you went into art for your A-levels while you were in grade school.

BUCKY: I just stayed on in sixth form, to do my A-levels, at the same comprehensive school I had been attending. I don’t think I would necessarily have benefited from going elsewhere, and I had very supportive teachers at the school. I’d always gravitated towards art and been enthusiastic in doing stuff like artwork for school magazines, so they knew my strengths. I was keeping my options open a bit, also studying sociology and biology.

MM: Well a good artist has to be aware of the world around him, and that’s what sociology and biology deal with to some extent.

BUCKY: Yeah, I guess so. I think part of the thing with biology was wanting to understand living things, except that when I got to the A-level of biology, I suddenly realized it was more about chemistry. It wasn’t really about what made things tick in terms of structure, which was what I was more into. In the end I left the biology course halfway through, and I did a twoyear ceramics course in one year and got an A. So I think I realized then what path I was supposed to be on. [laughter]

8

strained by a desire to work specifically in a uniform way.

I think a lot of people, when they break into the industry, get obsessed with this concept of trying to establish a “style” and show that they have a particular way of doing things. Whereas I think I’ve spent most of the last 20 years in comics trying not to have a very specific way of doing things. [laughter] That’s probably one of the reasons I’ve survived so well. Fashions would come and go, and I was always the chameleon of comics. You didn’t necessarily know who I was, but I seemed to crop up everywhere, and my work looked slightly different every time.

Then I went to Filton Technical College to do a oneyear foundation course. That was in Bristol. It was very beneficial; I learned a lot doing that. Right after that I ended up working at Aardman for a while. That came, funny enough, through the teacher I did the ceramics course with back at my old school. She went to Aardman to arrange a school visit for the kids from my old comprehensive school, and she asked me if I’d like to come along. So I did, and being a horribly cocky and overconfident youngster, I immediately asked at the end of the trip whether they ever took anybody on. I had taken a few bits and pieces with me to show them my modeling skills, and they actually rang me up a few days later and gave me a week’s trial. That week’s trial turned into about a year’s worth of working for them, so it worked out very well. I only left because I needed to focus on my degree.

MM: How long were you in university?

BUCKY: After Filton, I was at North Staffordshire Polytechnic, now Staffordshire University. I was there for three years, from 1985-1988.

MM: How big was Aardman at the time you worked there?

MM: What did you focus on in your coursework? Or were you still trying to get a broader education?

BUCKY: There were six fulltime staff, including Peter Lord and David Sproxton who ran it. Nick Park arrived three or four months before I started there. He was still finishing his college project, which was the first Wallace & Gromit film. That was being worked on in a little corner of their studios while I was there. It was enormous fun, and I learned so much.

BUCKY: I was still going for broad at that point. I deliberately picked a course that was called Multi-discipline Design, for a very good reason, because they did everything. During my first year there I did Ceramics, Industrial Ceramics, Glass Blowing, Fashion Design, Photography, Filmmaking, Graphics, Illustration.... I’m sure I’ve missed something, but there was a huge range of classes that were available. Towards the end of that first year I expected I would end up focusing on graphics/illustration and filmmaking, but, funnily enough, for some reason I didn’t go into the film side of the courses as much as I should have. I wasn’t getting the reaction I’d hoped for in that department. I guess, partly because I’d had the experience at Aardman, I thought I might do better in that area, but I actually struggled a bit. Whereas in Graphics and Illustration I found my feet immediately and achieved good results, as far as the teachers were concerned. So I thought, “Well, obviously this is the better route for me, and maybe the more secure in terms of being a base for work in the future.” But the longer I was on that course, and especially the more I

MM: What kind of lessons were you able to take from such a physical medium that you could apply to your drawing?

BUCKY: I was coming to understand a lot about storytelling and about lighting, pacing, and the way to structure a scene and how to move through it. Any new skills you acquire in any aspect of art can be translated further into your own work. If you look at some of the early stuff I did when I went into comics proper—especially the Miracleman stuff—you can see there were things, like the big poster we did that ended up being the UK cover of The Golden Age trade paperback, where it was a mixture of three-dimensional construction incorporated into the paintings. Whenever I acquired a new skill I would carry it with me to whatever I did next. I’ve never felt con9

started to drift into the comic work and to persue that in my free time, the more I realized that actually I’d made an error, because the more time I spent in the Graphics and Illustration department, the more I realized that it was really about designing letterheads and typography. The illustration part of it was not something I was getting as much opportunity to develop. The comics work I mostly had to do away from class.

In my final months at university, I returned to the Audio-Visual Department to make a claymation sequence for a pop video. I was told it was one of the best pieces of animation made at the college and realized I probably, in retrospect, would have benefited more if I’d specialized in that department. There were tutors in that department with more storytelling experience that might have helped my comic work more.

MM: So while you were in university you were mainly working towards a career in comics?

BUCKY: No. I’d always been thinking about comics. I dreamed of doing the things I wanted to do, but I’d always focused on keeping the base broad and acquiring as many skills and abilities as I could along the way that would give me openings if those things didn’t materialize. The broad studies didn’t keep me from doing everything I could to make those dreams happen, especially once I met up with a crowd of people who were living in Stoke-on-Trent, where the university was—local guys who were trying to break into the business. They were very productive in terms of creating material and putting together fanzines and stuff.

There were a whole bunch of things that were being published there, including a bi-monthly fanzine called Hardware and another indie magazine called Killing Stroke, both of which I ended up contributing to while I was there.

But we all had our eyes set on greater things. You know, sitting there on a Wednesday evening trying to work out how we could take over the comics industry. [laughter] As I’m sure

10

plenty of teenage comics readers do now.

“If only they gave this job to me, I’d show them how it should be done.”

MM: Were you looking specifically at the British comics market, or—?

BUCKY: Oh, I had my sights set on the industry as a whole. I didn’t really limit myself. I mean, I went through a period where I got quite anxious about whether or not I had what it took to do an adventure strip, which is kind of what I’d always imagined I’d be doing, and I started to focus more on cartooning.

While I was studying at Staffordshire University, I was getting to know these guys through the North Staffs Comics Society— people like Shane Oakley, Gary Crutchley, Andrew Elliott, Chris Ski, Andrew Yoxall, and various others who were all trying to break into the business, and also friends of theirs from neighboring cities, like Matt Brooker [a.k.a., D’Israeli] who lived in Sheffield. I got to know Matt a bit better, and he encouraged me to join The Society of Strip Illustration, which was a body of professional comic book artists and writers that was established in London. They used to meet at this old gentlemen’s club called The Sketch Club in Chelsea—it was all very posh and nice. [laughter] It was also the home of The Cartoonists Club of Great Britain, so you had all these silhouettes of famous cartoonists and illustrators from a hundred years previously around the top of the wall of the main room. It had a great atmosphere and gave you a sense of tuning in to something special and historic, which was wonderful.

So Matt encouraged me to come along, and I ended up signing up as an associate member. I joined the same month that Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean did. I think, as much as anything, it was very indicative of what was happening at that moment in time, that there was a whole new generation of us that were coming into the British comics scene together and immediately bonding with and encouraging each other. I think that was really where my career got its start.

MM: How did you initially find out about the North Staffs group? Did you meet one of them through university or at a comic shop...?

BUCKY: It mostly came down to luck. I found out about the North Staffs Comics Society through a British comics magazine called BEM—Bug-Eyed Monsters. It was a comics news fanzine that was very popular in the mid-’80s, and there was a full-page advert in there with a big guy with a gun and a woman draped over him screaming the word “Sex!” Then it said, “Right. Now that we have your attention, we want to talk to you about comics.” It was an advertisement for the North Staffs Comics Society, but also it had a thing at the bottom saying, “Now available, issue #1 of Killing Stroke fanzine. Send 35 pence to this address for your copy.” So I dutifully thought, “Oh, that’s something to bear in mind. There’s actually an organization of comic fans that meet up in this town that I’m moving to to go to university. I should try and get in touch with them. I should try the fanzine, too.” I sent my money off for that, but I didn’t receive the comic. [laughter] So part of my motivation for going to the North Staffs Comics Society was to say, “Where’s my comic?” [laughter] Who knew that it would launch me into a career that’s lasted 22 years so far?

It was being with those guys in Stoke that really started me thinking more seriously about comics. When I first went along, I was really just a comics fan with my attention more on my degree and possi11

Previous Page: “Duck & Cover” one-page gag strip and illustration.

Above: In 1990, the old Stoke-on-Trent gang got back together for a Killing Stroke four-issue horror anthology mini-series.

Shown here is Bucky’s painted cover art for the first issue.

Duck & Cover ™ and ©2010 Mark Buckingham and Andrew Elliott.

bly returning to animation. But all the fanzines they produced excited me and gave me a focus. I started writing and drawing my own stories again, as well as drawing some that others such as Andrew wrote. I also learned a lot from inking Chris and Shane, and Shane inked a strip of mine. It was Shane Oakley in particular who really fueled my enthusiasm. We’d ride the bus home together after meetings, and he was always bursting with imagination and encouragement. I owe him a huge debt.

A lot of things happened because of the connections I

made with those guys and the things that they would find out. One of the very first strips I had published was a one-page strip I did for a charity comic called Strip AIDS. It was raising money for London Lighthouse, which was a charitable organization that looked after AIDS sufferers. My friend Andy Yoxall, who edited the fanzine Hardware, told us all about this thing and basically said, “I’ve only just found out about it. The deadline’s Friday.” This was on Wednesday night. “They’re looking for contributions for this charity comic.” So, I very quickly did this one-page strip—I persuaded my tutors at college to let me work on it the next day, because I wouldn’t have gotten it done in time otherwise—called “The Party Trick.” Basically, it was just the old joke about someone sticking a condom over their head and inflating it until it explodes, and I had lots of fun with the bizarre sound effects and things like that. It was very simple, a very straightforward strip, and I got it sent off in time.

They liked it and put it in, which I was very pleased about, because all of a sudden there I was in print alongside Dave Gibbons and Alan Davis and people like that.

That was a big deal for me, but what was especially nice about it—and for which I’m very grateful to Don [Melia] and Lionel [Gracey-Whitman], who were the editors—was they were approached by a guy who was setting up a new humor magazine in the UK called The Truth. He had gotten a copy of the book and went through it looking for artists, and I was one of the artists he picked. So Don and Lionel put me in touch, and not wanting to miss out on any opportunity to develop my career a little bit further, I went to see him and agreed to do absolutely everything I possibly could for this magazine [laughter] in order to get more practice and more work in print. The pay was not enormous, but I’d been doing stuff for free, so the fact that I was getting any money at all was a huge bonus.

MM: What kinds of things did you do for the magazine?

BUCKY: I did a one-page strip every month called “Duck & Cover,” which was sort of jokes in a pub with a recurring 12

group of characters. I had a newspaper style strip—a very ridiculous thing called “Haemorrhoids Rabbit.” I did a few bits and pieces with clay models for covers and some of the photograph pieces inside the magazine.

I also illustrated a few of the articles. The main one I did every month was this series of articles called “Around the World,” where they would take on a different subject matter each month, like “Pornography around the World,” or “Sitcoms around the World,” and satirize it. That was written by a three-man writing team, which consisted of Eugene Byrne, who was based down in Bristol; Kim Newman, who then went on be a very successful horror writer and film critic; and this guy called Neil Gaiman, whose name keeps cropping up in my life. That gave me an additional reason to talk more with Neil and to become better friends with him when we’d meet up in London, because now we were actually working on something together. That’s really where our relationship developed from.

At that point, as I said before, I got very anxious about my abilities as a serious adventure strip artist. I really didn’t think I had what it took to be able to do that. I seemed to be getting a lot of good reaction from the cartoony stuff, so I thought that might be where I was headed. But then I got a call from Don and Lionel to say they were doing this new magazine called Heartbreak Hotel. It consisted of a series of four-page strips that were based on song titles, and each issue had a different theme.

The second issue had a Wild West theme, and they gave me a song called, “The Wild Side of Life.”

I ended up creating an adventure strip— a sci-fi thing with this robot girl ending up in the jungle. It was quite a bittersweet thing. I did it in a serious adventure strip

style, with a big Alan Davis influence, because Alan was absolutely one of my biggest heroes at that point in time, and I was trying my best to learn from what he did. Certainly, I was also a fan of Dave Gibbons, Brian Bolland, Ian Gibson, Kevin O’Neill, and many other British artists, but Alan, I think, was the one who seemed to resonate most with me.

I showed this thing to Neil at the SSI Christmas party, and, much to my amazement, he said, “I really like this. I’ve just been asked by Alan Moore to take over Miracleman, and I think this style would be perfect for it. Would you like to draw Miracleman?” [laughter] This a 20-year-old boy sat having a beer at a Christmas party in London suddenly being offered a comic that I absolutely adored. It was unreal. And it didn’t end there. Neil also said to me, “Oh, and I’m also working on this thing called Sandman, and maybe I can get you in on 13

Previous Page Top: Another “Haemerrhoids Rabbit” strip.

Previous Page Bottom: Bucky’s entry for the Strip AIDs benefit book.

This was the first time Bucky saw his name in the credits next to some of his artistic heroes.

Above: This 1987 illo was used as a cover for a Society of Strip Illustration newsletter.

Bucky has further plans for these characters in the works.

Haemerrhoids Rabbit ™ and ©2010 Mark Buckingham and Andrew Elliott. Scene But Not Herd, Zeb and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Mark Buckingham

that. Give me some stuff and I’ll show it to Karen [Berger].” It was all a bit bizarre, but he did show some stuff to Karen, and she said, “He’s not really ready as a penciler, but he’s got good possibilities as an inker.” But I didn’t pursue that. I told Neil, “Don’t worry about it. I’ve got college and everything. It’s probably the wrong time.

But keep talking to me about Miracleman.” We knew that was going to take longer to happen.

BUCKY: Yeah, the Moore and Totleben stuff was coming out at that point. But I had to kind of step back a bit, because I had all this college stuff to do. And then I started to panic, because I thought I’d just thrown away my one opportunity to actually get into the business. So I got in touch with Neil again and asked, “Is there anything else I can do?” He said, “I’ve met this guy called Richard [Piers] Rayner, and he’s going to be taking over Hellblazer when Ridgway leaves. Why don’t I get you two together, and maybe you could ink him.” So we met up at a meeting of the SSI. The SSI was really important for me back then. It was a really influential meeting point for so many of us that were breaking into the business at that point. We met up, and we got along fine, and Richard said he’d send me some stuff so I could do some inking samples. He sent me some pieces mostly from Solthenis, which was the indie comic that he was self-publishing at the time. So I inked a couple of bits from that—in a hurry, I must admit—and got it sent off. Not surprisingly, I didn’t get any reaction from Karen. When I finally plucked up the courage to ring her and find out whether they’d like to use me or not, she basically said, “It’s not really good enough, but thanks.”

And, of course, I was devastated. It was like, “Oh, God, what have I done?” I spoke to Neil, and he said, “Don’t give up yet. Do a second set of samples and really razzle-dazzle them. Show them what you’re really made of.”

So I got in touch with Richard again, and at that point he had actually penciled the first few pages of his first issue. He sent me stats of some of those, and I think in the end I only inked a page and a half. I didn’t even finish two pages, but I really took my time over it. I spent, I think, at least a whole day on the first page. I really focused

MM: Miracleman had hit the States by that point and had gotten a lot of attention.

14

on it and took my time.

The day that Karen got those samples from me, she also got a phone call from Dave McKean and a phone call from Neil, both saying, “Oh, we’ve seen Bucky’s new samples, and we think they’re really, really good, and we really think you ought to consider giving him the job.” [laughter] Karen rang me at home—I was back in Clevedon for the Easter holiday—and I can distinctly remember picking up the phone and her saying to me, “You know, Bucky, you have some very influential friends.” [laughter] Then she said, “Okay, we’re going to give you a trial run. You can have this issue of Hellblazer to ink, and we’ll see how it goes.” And that was it. I immediately arranged an extra two weeks off from classes. I told my tutors, “An important job’s come in—a proper comic job in America. I really need some space to focus on this.”

They were nice and gave me two weeks leave from my classes so I could work on it, and I just poured everything I had into it.

When the two weeks were up, I was still working on that first issue, and I switched to a routine that I stuck with through the last three or four months of my time at university when I finished the course, where I would get up at eight in the morning, go and spend the morning at the university, come home for lunch at one o’clock, have a sandwich, and then just start inking solidly ’til about four in the morning. I was working every day on just four hours of sleep. But I was absolutely determined I was going to make this job happen. And it worked. They were very happy with the first issue. It was one of those things where you keep waiting for them to tell you whether you’re doing okay or not, but they don’t actually tell you—they just send you the next issue.

That, I learned later, was the sign you were doing it right. [laughter] I ended up doing “Sex and Death” and the two-part Newcastle story while I was still trying to finish my degree in 1988.

15

Previous Page and Above: It was this story, “The Wild Side of Life,” which Bucky wrote and drew for Heartbreak Hotel that convinced Neil Gaiman he would be the perfect choice of artist for Miracleman. Looking especially at page 4 (above right) it’s easy to see why.

Artwork ©2010 Mark Buckingham.

Part 2:

Every Moment of Light and Dark Is a Miracle

MM: Was Hellblazer the first time you had inked someone else’s pencils?

onto the job, and completed my degree. Then I returned to my hometown of Clevedon and rented a studio, because I was still living at home with my parents, and just carried on.

One of the first things that happened once I moved back home was I got another little bit of work via Neil.

He arranged with Mark Waid, who was the editor at the time of Secret Origins, for me to draw the secret origin of Poison Ivy, which Neil had written.

That was great for me, because having gotten into DC as an inker, I was immediately getting an opportunity to show what I was capable of as a penciler, as well. That was a lot of fun, and I inked myself.

One thing that was apparent in that strip—and something that crops up a lot with me throughout a big chunk of my career—is that the penciling I did was very much me appropriating qualities of Richard Rayner from what he’d been doing on Hellblazer. As Neil used to say, I kind of consume my co-creators. [laughter] I absorb lots of their qualities and attributes and learn everything I can from the way they approach their work, and then fold that into what I do. Especially being very early on in my career, I stole big chunks of what Richard was doing in terms of the photorealism.

BUCKY: No. That was probably the one thing in my favor, was that I’d been working with some of the guys in the North Staffs Comic Society, inking some of their strips while we were learning our craft. There was one friend in particular, Chris Ski—I inked quite a few pages of his stuff. That helped me a lot. Also, Shane Oakley and I used to sometimes ink each other’s work; we had very different styles, but it was a good learning experience.

The other thing that helped me a lot was that Matt Brooker gave me my very first brush—a proper Winsor & Newton series 7, #3 sable brush—and said, “This is what real comic artists ink with. You’ve got to go and learn how to use this, because I am, too.”

Basically, Hellblazer was my big learning curve. I’d only been learning to ink with a brush for a few months before that job arrived, and by the end of my time on Hellblazer I couldn’t ink with anything else.

MM: Would you still use a pen for fine detail work?

BUCKY: I used to do some bits and pieces with Rotrings—eyes and little details. I didn’t rule lines with a brush; I used technical pens for the fine straight-line stuff. But I learned to do everything else with a brush.

MM: There’s a panel in the story that really stands out for me. It’s the panel of Pamela Isley as a little girl, and on the floor to one side of her there is a kid’s crayon drawing, and on the other side there is a tube of lipstick and a string of pearls, and you only see her from the knees down as she’s trying on her mother’s high heel shoes. It’s a great composition, as well as a nice allusion to the sensual woman she will later become. How much of that was in the script, and how much was your interpretation of the scene?

MM: That Hellblazer work is very detailed.

BUCKY: Richard poured acres of little bits of hatching, little detailing on buildings and things, into every panel of his pencils, so it was a lot of work. But I survived it fine, hung 16

BUCKY: I’m sure he specified her wearing her mother’s shoes, but I can’t remember if he specified it being a close-up shot. But all of that stuff was personal. The family photograph where you see her with her parents I partly based on a photograph of my parents with my sister. There’s another panel with the young Pamela surrounded by flowers which was based on a photograph of my sister sitting on the front porch. There were a lot of little bits and pieces that I put in that were quite personal, but they seemed to help build a reality into what I was trying to convey in capturing her childhood.

MM: And you had to portray a gamut of emotions with her character. At times she’s very innocent looking, at times she’s seductive, and then there’s the psychotic rage. Was that daunting at all so early in your career?

BUCKY: No, to be honest, that was something that I latched onto very early on as something I enjoyed doing and something that came relatively easy to me. The irony is that for a lot of people going into comics what comes easy is the super-muscled people in tights hitting each other through buildings, whereas for me that was always the thing that I struggled with. I didn’t really knuckle down and get to grips with that side of my work until right up to when I was drawing Spider-Man around the year 2000. But one of the reasons I think I hung around so much doing work at Vertigo was subject matter-wise I was far more excited by trying to convey the subtleties of emotion—little glances, little moments, a turn of a head or a body posture that can convey so much about what a person’s going through. That was always something I got very excited about and really enjoyed pursuing and developing, so that’s why myself and Vertigo were such a good match.

But the Poison Ivy story was fun. I got to draw Batman and Robin, which was cool, and everyone seemed to be happy with it. What worked out to my advantage there—and I’m sure it was all part of Neil’s master plan—was that he was helping me gain experience as an artist in my own right with the idea that Miracleman would be the endpoint. Because at some point that was still hopefully going to happen, if all the negotiations with Eclipse went well.

As it worked out, Richard went through some personal things that meant he had to leave Hellblazer, and I used that Poison Ivy strip as my audition piece. I asked Karen if she would consider giving me a chance to carry on the book, sort of maintaining some of Richard’s style, because part of the problem was that we’d lost Richard in the middle of “The Fear Machine” story arc.

So I jumped into that, and that meant we needed to find an inker. My first attempt to pass on the good luck that had been coming to me via Neil was that I tried to do the same for Matt Brooker, who had inked a horror strip of mine for Shriek, which was a magazine-sized companion to 17

Previous Page: Miracleman commission drawing.

Above: This page from “Pavane” in Secret Origins #36 gave US audiences their first inkling that this Buckingham guy may be someone to keep an eye on. Bucky personalized this story by using family photos as reference for the first and third panels.

Miracleman ™ respective owner.

Poison Ivy ™ and ©2010 DC Comics.

Above: Two-page spread from Hellblazer #18, Bucky’s first issue as penciler. Inks by Alfredo Alcala.

Next Page: When inking Val Semeiks on Dr. Fate #12, Bucky took it upon himself to use duoshade to represent Darkseid’s skin.

Darkseid, Hellblazer ™ and ©2010 DC Comics.

Gore Shriek, a horror anthology. I tried to get Matt in as the inker by showing examples of him inking me on other stuff, and, as Karen had with me, she gave him a onemonth trial. Unfortunately, they weren’t as happy with the results. Although, in retrospect, that probably had something to do with the fact that Alfredo Alcala was suddenly requiring work. He was under contract to DC, and they had to give him another book, so I think the decision was probably influenced by that and partly because I was still new and they wanted to bring in an experienced inker to even out my inconsistencies.

So I ended up with Alfredo, and he did a fantastic job. I mean, it didn’t look like me by the time he finished [laughter], but it did look good, which, to be honest, was the more important thing. I had a huge amount of confidence, funny enough, when 18

I was drawing comics for pleasure while I was trying to break into the industry, and, of course, the moment I actually got in was the point at which I started to doubt myself and question everything. That’s kind of haunted me a bit for most of my career. But he did me a big favor in terms of the quality of the finished result, so I was very happy in the end, and I stuck with Hellblazer for the five issues that was required to complete the “Fear Machine” story arc, at which point Miracleman was starting to become a reality and I arranged to leave the book.

MM: You inked yourself on Miracleman.

Did that make a difference in your confidence level going into the series?

BUCKY: I used to worry a lot in those early days about things like style. “Who am I? What am I trying to say?” For a long time I couldn’t come up with an answer. In

a funny way, when we finally did get to Miracleman, the decision was as much Neil’s as it was mine to capitalize on that and to say, “You’re kind of the artist who can do anything but doesn’t have a specific style, so let’s make that a plus in what we try to do in the Miracleman stories and let’s play with different styles for each story.” Each story is a different world view for a different character living in the world that Miracleman has created, which meant from issue to issue we could go from extreme cartoony to something expressionistic with lots of rich lines to something very clean and simple to photocopy montage to all sorts of different things.

I also was starting to explore painting, and I did a short story with Neil for a British magazine called Revolver. It was a Halloween special story called, “Feeders and Eaters.”

I was looking to do other things and keep pushing myself to explore different avenues and try different things—and to maintain my skills. Obviously, I was inking myself on Miracleman, but I didn’t want to lose the skills that I’d acquired being able to ink other people, as well.

MM: You inked Val Semeiks in Dr. Fate #12, but you captured a lot of what Shawn McManus, the regular artist, was doing on the series.

BUCKY: I probably paid more attention to that sort of thing as my career progressed, but when I inked that strip I really wasn’t looking at all at the other issues of the series. I had been reading it, but I wasn’t in any way trying to emulate or fit in with what had gone before.

But I did relish the change of tone and pace, and I think the fact that it was a style that was slightly more cartoon-based was probably very relaxing for me as much as anything. I was connecting back to what I had always thought was my strength, which was a more cartoony core to my drawing, and also it was nice to be able to work on something that allowed for a lot of fluidity in the brushstrokes.

Some of the Miracleman stuff I’d been doing in the early issues had been very intense, with more pen work. It looked expressive, but that style didn’t come easily to me.

In order to achieve that effect, I was actually doing the opposite of what it looked like. It wasn’t free and simple; it was actually something I was agonizing over and quite intense about. So Dr. Fate was very relaxing by comparison.

MM: Do you think not having a set style enabled you to work faster, or did it slow you down because you were thinking in a different way from job to job?

BUCKY: I was painfully slow, to be honest. The Miracleman stuff used to take a long time. But then that got a bit compounded by the fact that as we got towards the end of our time on Miracleman we noticed that the checks took longer to come. So we would wait until we were paid for the last issue before we would start on the next one. Plus, we were both starting to get busier doing other things as well, especially Neil with the increasing success of Sandman. He found himself with a lot more people asking for his services. It was bound to make a difference.

MM: You worked on a few different things during your time on Miracleman.

BUCKY: I think I was fairly consistent doing just Miracleman the first year or so, although I did pop back to help out with inking a couple of issues of Hellblazer over Ron Tiner during the “Family Man” story arc.

MM: It was also your first opportunity to draw Kirby characters. The story was even set on Apokolips.

MM: You inked a couple of issues of Dr. Fate as well.

BUCKY: It was very nice to have Darkseid in those pages. That was a treat for me.

BUCKY: The first issue of Dr. Fate I did [#12] I actually inked during the month’s gap between finishing Hellblazer and starting Miracleman. That was one of those things where I wasn’t looking for a regular gig, but something came up that fit the spare time I had while waiting for the final contracts for Miracleman to be agreed upon. I did another issue [#21] about a year later.

MM: Were you using duotone shading for the Darkseid figures?

BUCKY: Actually, that was my decision. [laughs] I remember I did get a slight telling off, because they were expecting a certain type of finish to that strip 19

based on previous experience with the way I’d inked. Of course, me being me, I used a completely different technique and played around with tones and things just because I thought, “That will be fun!” It seemed appropriate, but if you’re going to try something different, tell your editor first. [laughter] It wasn’t a case of them not being happy with the job, but I surprised them a little.

But for me it seemed perfectly natural, because that was the way I was headed, into this zone of constant experimentation. In that particular moment it hadn’t crossed my mind that it might be inappropriate to ink that way over someone else.

In the subsequent jobs after that I sort of went to the other extreme, but for the past ten, 15 years, whenever I ink someone I tend to study what they do first. I try to find examples of them inking themselves, or look for

examples of where they were inked very well by other people, and get a sense of the way that they work and the flow that seems to be right for them, so that when I come to ink them it’s a very natural fit. I learned from that experience that it’s not my job to inflict my personality on the penciler. That’s really not what I’m there for. I’m supposed to enhance and bring out the best in what’s given to me in pencil. And that’s the way I’ve worked ever since.

MM: That leads us to about a year later when you inked Dr. Fate #21 over Joe Staton.

BUCKY: Oh, that was a joy! That was one of the nicest experiences of inking I think I’ve ever had. It just flowed so beautifully. I loved the way he drew; the movement, the life that was there in the pencils was just fantastic.

That was a great pleasure.

MM: Your first issue of Miracleman, #17, opens with a series of large, majestic spreads and splashes.

BUCKY: It was a six-page sequence that starts with Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square in London, except that Nelson’s been replaced by Miracleman in his dress uniform with the little cape. Then we pan out from that to see more of London, but with part of the giant Olympus Tower rising up from the part of London that was ruined by the battle with Bates. On the next page we’re higher up, into the clouds, and we’re seeing the top of Olympus and a sort of futuristic airplane whizzing by. Then we pull out even further and there’s a doublepage spread of planet Earth as seen from outer space, and you can still just make out the top of Olympus Tower poking through the clouds. And in the final spread we pull out deep into space, looking at the world as a whole, and there in the foreground is a figure of Miracleman looking down on the world that he’s now created.

MM: Were you using photostats in that sequence?

BUCKY: There is some photostat material. Part of the London landscape is taken from photo reference, but there’s also a lot of me working into it with crayon and different medium—pastels and things— trying to create a misty sort of quality.

It was a very definite statement of intent of, “Okay, this is something different. This is me going a bit arty, I’m afraid.” [laughter] 20

It was Neil and I, with our first issue, wanting to make it very clear that we were doing something that wasn’t like Alan [Moore] and John [Totleben], who we were following on from. I think we were both a bit scared, to be honest. I mean, the last thing we wanted was a direct comparison. If we had gone in issue #17, “Hi, everyone. Carrying on from the last panel of the previous strip, here we see more of the Miracleman family gathered around in Olympus chatting away,” it would have been hell. That weight was definitely on us, both because of our admiration for the people who had already worked on it, but also because of our love for the material itself. Both of us were huge fans of Miracleman, or “Marvelman” as we knew it from the pages of Warrior magazine.

Our answer to that was, “Well, let’s forget about Miracleman himself and the family.

Let’s change our perspective and look at it from the ground up instead of from the gods down. That way we’re taking a very different approach to the story and making it our own.” We knew that wouldn’t be a perma-

nent situation, but we knew that was the right way to go to make our first statement in the series and give “The Golden Age” a distinctive feel. Obviously, there were things we were doing from the outset that were prepping everyone for the stories that would come afterwards where we would then change our focus back to the Miracleman family, which is why we did the “Retrieval” back-up strips that were running in each issue, where it was basically Miracleman sending a probe into the Qys wardrobe, looking for the body of Young Miracleman and extracting tissue so that a new Young Miracleman could be brought to life. That was all preparing us for what we would have then done in “The Silver Age.” From Neil’s point of view, he wanted to write different types of stories from a different viewpoint. From my point of view, the last thing I wanted to do was be directly compared to Totleben. [laughs] I absolutely adored his work, but it would have killed me to try and draw like that for a page, let alone whole issues. [laughter] If I 21

Previous Page: And so it begins. The opening splash page to the Neil Gaiman/Mark Buckingham era of Miracleman, shows a statue of Miracleman in Trafalgar Square.

Above: Bucky makes use of vertical panels when depicting the climb to the top of Olympus Tower. And in these pages the reader is literally seeing things from the ground up through the eyes of the narrator—a normal man seeking help from a god.

Miracleman ™ respective owner. Artwork ©2010 Mark Buckingham.

22

was going to be like anyone—and I think this was the way I was originally leaning— it would have been more like Alan [Davis]’s stuff. Certainly the four-page strip I did for Heartbreak Hotel, which was the thing that originally got Neil to offer me the job, was very much me working in that vein, that approach. But a whole year had passed from that point to when we actually started working on the book. By the time we got to Miracleman proper, we’d given it a lot of thought, and from Neil’s point of view, “I want you to go elsewhere. I want you to push the boundaries and see what else you can do and where else we can take this book.”

MM: The book has a very collaborative feel to it. And I would hope that no writer would ever just hand an artist a script and say, “Here, draw this like Andy Warhol,” without working it out with the artist first.

What process did you and Neil go through when putting together these stories?

BUCKY: Neil and I had, I’m glad to say, become very good friends in the run up to Miracleman. We’d meet up at the SSI or ring each other for chats. We got to know each other and get inside each other’s heads a little.

We did a short story, actually, prior to Miracleman #17 called “Screaming.” It’s about Jason Oakey from the Alan Moore/Alan Davis episode, and he’s grown up and talking about his friends who died when Bates destroyed London. We did that before we did anything else on “The Golden Age,” because it was published as part of the Total Eclipse crossover event [Ed. note: It was later reprinted in Miracleman #21].

They wanted a Miracleman piece by the new team to be in there. So we did this strip, and it was the testing ground for us wanting to experiment more. It was a story taken from the viewpoint of someone else in Miracleman’s world, and I was playing with art styles. It starts off quite realistic, but when you get into the flashbacks, I’m using a cartoony style. It was a good opportunity for us to practice a little.

When it came time to start “The Golden Age” proper, I actually went to stay with Neil. He was living in an apartment in a rural part of East Sussex at the time, and I

went and stayed with him for a few days.

We spent a lot of time chatting, going for walks in the woods mulling over ideas— not necessarily in a completely focused way. I remember one afternoon sitting with old episodes of The Addams Family playing on the TV drinking Drambuie [a Scotch whisky liqueur]. I don’t know how that added to the creative process [laughter], but it worked. I would doodle away and sketch out ideas and thoughts, and we just discussed the way the story would unravel and thought about the characters we were going to focus on and what kind of viewpoints would be appropriate for them.

We also talked about a lot of very technical things. We were very big on 23

Previous Page: The pilgrims make their way through the Hall of Mirrors in Olympus Tower. Miracleman #17, page 8.

Above: Page 5 of “Screaming,” the first Gaiman/Buckingham Miracleman story, which first saw print in the Total Eclipse anthology.

Miracleman ™ respective owner. Story ©2010 Neil Gaiman. Artwork ©2010 Mark Buckingham.

Above: In his second issue, Bucky switched from the scratchy, expressive style to an open, graphic style with only two tiers of panels throughout the book.

Pages 4 and 13 of Miracleman #18.

Below: That issue’s back-up story, “Trends,” was a cartoony tale explaining the new world order from a kid’s point of view. Jackie’s look owes much to Jaime Hernandez’s Love & Rockets character, Hopey Glass.

Miracleman ™ respective owner. Story ©2010 Neil Gaiman. Artwork ©2010 Mark Buckingham.

using distinctive grid layouts for different people’s tales. “Oh, this has to be a ninepanel grid—three tiers of three,” or, “This one’s going to be 16 panels.” Each story we kind of mapped out fairly early on.

Some of the stuff, like with the Warhol issue, was really me taking off [laughs] to another world, really, with the photomontage and the crayon on black paper, and then getting into the paste-up montage pages with the cartoony things and the Warhol replication imagery. That was pushing it to the extreme, but to me that was the most satisfying thing I could possibly have done, because it was unlike anything anyone else was doing at the time. I was learning a lot from what Dave [McKean] was doing and Bill Sienkiewicz and people like that, and I was trying to pick up on a lot of their qualities, but at the same time that eagerness of youth was making me want to push things further and see what I could get away with and 24

still convey the story and maintain the emotional weight of it.

MM: How early in the process was Sam Parsons brought on? He was painting over your work.

BUCKY: To be honest, Sam wasn’t really involved in the process beyond the fact that he was already coloring the book.

And it was the one part of the process that we didn’t even really think about. It was just, “Well, Sam will carry on.” In those days I knew nothing about comic coloring.

From my point of view, I liked Miracleman, I liked the way it had been colored previously, so it didn’t cross my mind to do anything different. And Sam just came along for the ride. The poor guy was just doing his best to keep up with all of the strange stuff I kept sending his way.

MM: Would you send detailed notes about what you were thinking about?

there’s a bit of Hopey in the girl. As far as the other characters were concerned it was very much me using the style that I’d been developing when I’d been doing the funny strips before I’d made it into American comics and wanting to see if I could make that work in this context.

BUCKY: Nothing. I actually feel bad now that you’ve brought the subject up. [laughter] These days on Fables I have a very direct relationship with Lee Loughridge. I send him comprehensive notes, and I get to see jpegs of the colors and make corrections. And when I do work outside of Fables, I usually get D’Israeli to color it, because he’s an old friend and I very much trust his approach and we’re able to figure things out together, which I really like. But back then, I must admit I didn’t ever really get involved in any other aspect of the job beyond my own requirements. Once those inked pages left my hands, I had no idea how they were going to be lettered, I had no idea how they were going to be colored.

There was a case with one issue of Miracleman where a couple of word balloons got left off. You came to the point in the scene and suddenly there was silence. “Oh, that wasn’t supposed to happen.” [laughter] Other than that, it was not something I was particularly conscious of. Although, having said that, I liked what Sam was doing, but there was a level on which I wanted to bring someone else in who I could communicate with more directly. I wanted to bring D’Israeli in. After we had done a few issues I started to realize that I wasn’t seeing the variety in the color that I’d been hoping for.

My thinking was that if I brought in Matt, who had been doing a lot of painted work at the time, and I really liked his pallette and the approach that he was taking, that maybe being a friend he’d be someone I could more comfortably get on the phone and thrash out ideas with. I used to meet with him on a regular basis anyway, so I thought it would be much easier to develop different approaches and try different things together with him and maybe I’d be able to push things even further to the end results I was starting to see in my mind. So Matt came in with issue #21, “Spy Story,” which was good, because I really wanted to go with a more muted pallette and get into the moodier, cooler atmosphere of that story. And he captured it perfectly.

MM: But it starts and ends with a more photorealistic look.

BUCKY: We were playing with people’s perceptions and world views. It was wanting to drag it back to reality at the end in order to counterbalance the humor of the strip. That was my old secondary school that you see at the start of the story.

That cartoony side of me is always there, but has tended to be repressed for big chunks of my career. It really started to come out again when I got onto Fables—and not immediately on Fables.

MM: I want to talk about the back-up story in issue #18, “Trends.” It’s a story with a bunch of kids and you use a very cartoony style.

BUCKY: That was very much a quality of my own work at the time. There’s a bit of Love & Rockets going on in there, as well. I was a big fan of the Hernandez Bros., and I was trying to pick up some qualities of theirs, so 25

26

MM: Earlier you touched on your use of white pencil on black paper in “Notes from the Underground.” Let’s talk about Miracleman #19—the “Warhol issue.” Why Warhol? Did you admire his work, or was it because he had a recognizable style that fit into the story...?

BUCKY: He was someone that both Neil and I were interested in and had an admiration for his work. It was also, to be honest, because as a personality and as an approach to art it lent itself to the story and gave rise to the story simultaneously.

It wouldn’t have worked necessarily with any other artist. With Warhol, the concept of someone actually thinking it’s a good idea to reproduce themselves—that wouldn’t have been a notion any other artist would have come to. From a stylistic point of view, it was an absolute gold mine delving into those pop art sensibilities and the nature of multiple reproduced imagery and playing with found imagery and day-today objects. It was just lovely. Everything about it felt right when I was doing it. I really enjoyed it.

There are things I might now do differently just because of how the reproduction came out. The pages were shot directly from the white pencil on black drawings, and some of it came out a lot weaker than I would have liked. I found that the bits that worked best were the bits where I’d made stats and worked with the stats of the original drawings. And there are line weights that don’t quite work—little bits and pieces that bug me now. But as a whole, it’s still a magical moment for me in my career.

Certainly it was the first time I got recognized for my contribution in the business, because it got me my first Eisner nomination. That gave me a big boost at the time.

MM: Production-wise, were you doing each panel as an individual drawing and then assembling the drawings on the page?

BUCKY: I was basically cutting out squares of black paper and pasting them onto a white board. Some of them I was drawing and then cutting out and pasting into place; other things I drew once I’d put the piece in place. Obviously, there were times I was playing with repeated images

where it’s all photostats. The stuff with the montage was me playing with bits of actual photographs of Warhol, but also collaging—taking bits of tone and texture from other images and using them to build up shapes and forms. Which funny enough kind of lent itself to the technique that I’ve been using a lot on and off for the last eight or nine years, which is where I blow up a newspaper photo to the point where it breaks down into a dot tone and then I use it like Zip-a-tone, but it’s more irregular. It gives me a more organic feel than a straightforward, mechanical tone, because 27

Previous Page: The final page of “Trends” fades from cartoony to photorealistic.

Above: Andy Warhol fit perfectly into the story for Miracleman #19, and at the same time it gave Bucky an opportunity to stretch artistically.

Miracleman ™ respective owner. Story ©2010 Neil Gaiman. Artwork ©2010 Mark Buckingham.

was something of the time where you could do those sorts of nods to different things and get away with it. On other pages there’s a Mr. Fantastic walking past a chap selling chicken satays, there’s a huge, overweight Starfire standing next to an old man version of Nightwing in a wheelchair—lots of weird bits and pieces I was throwing in. I’m not really sure why. [laughter] I look back on it now and, “What was I thinking?” I was just having fun, I think.

The nice thing about that particular issue was that it was the culmination of “The Golden Age” story arc, and we were bringing together all the characters we’d introduced in the preceding short stories. It was very nice to play on the different structures that we’d used for those stories—the different techniques and lighting and stuff like that was all alluded to in that issue. Matt helped a lot with that, because he used different colors to emphasize the different characters, which is the sort of thing I’d brought him in hoping to do.

there are all these variations and different weights of dot. Then I play with that on the page and build up sections in order to create textures for rocks or some types of foliage or things like that.

MM: Did this issue take longer to put together than the others? It sounds pretty labor-intensive.

BUCKY: They all took a long time. [laughter] I don’t think there was ever a quick issue of Miracleman. They were all a lot of work. Certainly, the ones that were more photorealistic and illustrative tended to take a long time for me. The “Winter’s Tale” [Miracleman #20] stuff I loved, because I really did want to do a children’s book with Neil. It was something we decided on at that point. “We should do a children’s book together one day. This will be our test run.” Of course, it took me until last year to actually do a children’s book with Neil, Odd and the Frost Giants, but the intention was there.

MM: “The Silver Age” starts out with a more straightforward art style—a more typical super-hero comic book style. Was the story arc heading in that direction?

MM: In issue #22 there’s a little crowd scene with people wearing different super-hero costumes. There’s a Dr. Fate, a Spider-Man, a Batman.... You don’t see the full costumes, but they are easily recognizable. Was there any concern that Marvel or DC would take action against Eclipse?

BUCKY: The thing with “The Silver Age” was we knew that we were going to have to settle down a bit, because we were going to be telling one continuous story over six issues, and the primary focus of that story would be concerning Miracleman and his relationship with Young Miracleman. So there was a conscious decision to try to be more consistent. I think there was a level of fear that drove me to be a bit more conformist in terms of the approach I took to that story.

On that first issue I worked at quite a small scale—if not actual print size, then pretty close to actual print size. When I came to the next issue I went back to the regular 11" x 17" proportion, but I changed approach again. I went for a much more streamlined style. It was more about black placement and less fussy. It was a bolder style, but at the same time I was playing a lot more with Zip-a-tone and textures and design patterns.

I was very happy with issue #24. It worked out very well, and it was also indicative of the work I was doing

BUCKY: Nobody said anything that I’m aware of. I was primarily trying to allude to characters that I’d drawn or that Neil had worked on. There’s a Black Orchid in there, there’s a Batman, a Poison Ivy. I don’t know quite why I put Spider-Man in except that I probably just wanted to.

MM: There’s also a fat guy in a Wonder Woman costume.

BUCKY: That was actually one of the old gang in Stoke, Dave. I don’t know if he ever forgave me for that. [laughter] In that same issue Shane Oakley crops up in the background of one of the pages. I was always trying to put in little references to friends and things I liked into the strips. Now it’s not something I would consider doing, because we’re in a world of litigation where even the subtlest reference to anything owned by someone else can get you into heaps of trouble. That 28

outside of Miracleman at the time. I’d been doing some work for 2000 AD on a character called Tyranny Rex. I did illustrations for the 2000 AD Sci-Fi Special, and I’d been doing some other small things where I’d been moving more into that stylistic approach, and I seemed very comfortable with it. Then for some reason there was a slight break between issues #24 and #25, and during that time I had a bad experience with 2000 AD. It had nothing to do with the people at 2000 AD or writer John Smith, or my attitude toward the work; it was a payment issue.

In those days Fleetway was owned by the Mirror Group, who were going through a difficult time and the money wasn’t flowing. I was half-way through my fifth episode and I hadn’t received any payments, and I was panicking, because I had a £4,000 overdraft I was very concerned about. Salvation came with a royalty check for the Death mini-series that was, funnily enough, the same size as my debt.

That kind of made my decision that I wasn’t going to carry on with “Tyranny Rex” anymore. For some reason it also changed my opinion of that stylistic approach, as well. That style and that period of time blended together for me. When I look back at that work now I wish I’d had the confidence to forge on in that style through the ’90s. I think I was on to something that would have been a great core style for me. In recent years, I’ve been looking back fondly on that period and elements of that style have been reincorporated into my current drawing style.

With the next issue of Miracleman, #25, Chris Bachalo’s influence had kicked in from me inking the Death mini-series. I had qualities of his work creeping into what I was penciling. It was a nice looking issue, but it wasn’t the right decision to make.

MM: When did you find out that Miracleman was over?

29

Previous Page: An unused white crayon on black paper drawing for Miracleman #19.

Above: Pages 4 and 20 of Miracleman #24, the finally issue to date of the series. You can see a bit of Bucky’s Alan Davis influence in the poses of Young Miracleman.

Miracleman ™ respective owner. Story ©2010 Neil Gaiman. Artwork ©2010 Mark Buckingham.

30

BUCKY: I’m pretty sure Neil phoned me to tell me what had happened. And my first thought was, “Oh, God, they haven’t paid me for issue #25 yet”—I was working on #26.

My second thought was, “Oh, hell, this is my favorite book. This is what people know me for in comics. And I love it, and I feel safe and free doing this book.” Suddenly I was lost, and that was very, very scary. I don’t think at the time I appreciated the extent to which it had crushed me, but looking back I realize that it completely tore the foundations out of my work and my confidence in my work. It took a decade to put myself back together, but it didn’t feel like it at the time. I just got on with the job. But it was a major psychological hurdle in my career path.

MM: Marvel’s announcement at Comic-Con International: San Diego 2009 regarding Marvelman took you by surprise, didn’t it?

BUCKY: It did take me by surprise. I was aware over the last couple of years of the negotiations that were taking place between Marvel and Neil. Things had become further complicated by the situation with Mick Anglo and the Emotiv people who were working with him to regain his rights to the original Marvelman source material. What I wasn’t aware of was that it in some respects helped to coalesce everything in the background. I wasn’t sure if we were ever going to find a resolution with all the various parties that were all involved in trying to clarify or establish a right to material pertaining to Marvelman/Miracleman. Basically, when I went to San Diego this year, I wasn’t aware that we were any closer to an endpoint. I was minding my own business wandering around the con and was suddenly told, “I think you’d better turn up at Joe Quesada’s panel, because there’s going to be an announcement about Marvelman.”

It really did catch me by surprise. It was a very happy surprise, and certainly I’m very pleased and excited by the prospect of all that old material being back in print. That’s the primary thing. It’s been 16 years since the stuff Neil and I did was available to buy, and I’m still very proud of that work, so it’s a shame for me that such an important part of my career has been in limbo all this time.

My understanding of the situation at the moment is that Marvel is going to begin by

presenting some sort of archive release of material from Mick Anglo’s original Marvelman series. Hopefully, after that we’ll be able to see the Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman periods of Miracleman—retitled as Marvelman—released, although that still requires lots of negotiations and agreements to be struck. All being well, I’m hoping that Neil and I will be able to finish, at long last, the story we began all those years ago.

MM: None of that is set in stone yet, though.

BUCKY: No. We’re closer to the return of the character and the old material, as well as new material, than we have been since the demise of Eclipse, but we’re still not to that point where I can be concrete about what’s coming. The only thing that’s certain right now is the Joe Quesada Marvelman poster and the Mick Anglo Marvelman material.

31

Previous Page: Dickie Dauntless, a.k.a. Young Miracleman, watches a documentary to get caught up on what happened to the worldwhile he was dead.

Miracleman #24, page 2.

Above: Illustrations for the “Tyranny Rex” story in 2000 AD Sci-Fi Special 1992.

Miracleman ™ respective owner. Story ©2010 Neil Gaiman. Artwork ©2010 Mark Buckingham. Tyranny Rex ™ and ©2010 2000 AD.

BUCKY: That’s their hope. That’s my understanding from talking with the people at Marvel. They would like Neil and I to return and carry on from where we left off.

MM: After so long, would you be able to pick up right where you left off?

BUCKY: I’m certainly happy for “The Golden Age” to stand as it was done. It’s of its time, and I think it’s still valid now. It deserves to be seen as it was, because it has influenced people, and it was considered an important work for the time. I feel less connected to “The Silver Age.” We got half of it done, but my problem is that it’s supposed to be a consistent tale following consecutive actions and each issue is done in a different style from the previous one. My gut instinct, whenever I think about “The Silver Age,” is that I would want to go back and start from the beginning in order to do a six-part story that works as a unit, taking on board what I’ve learned since, but also reconnecting to what I was doing back then. I’d like to get playful again, but in a way that’s more focused and consistent.

That would be my hope, and I’m still desperate to do “The Dark Age,” the final story arc.

Neil and I had very clearly planned it out, and visually I know exactly how the last issue was going to be drawn. The fact that I’ve been sat for the last 16 years not being able to do it is pretty irritating. [laughter] MM: Would you be concerned at all about people’s expectations? It’s taken on a sort of mythical aspect, and there are so many comic fans who haven’t read it who probably expect it to be the greatest comic ever done and would be disappointed by anything less.

Above: Miracleman mourns the loss of his comic book heroes in Miracleman: Apocrypha #2.

Now he’s joined them.

Next Page: Designs for the 20th anniversary Sandman bookends.

Miracleman ™ respective owner. Story ©2010 Neil Gaiman. Artwork ©2010 Mark Buckingham. Tyranny Rex ™ and ©2010 2000 AD. Death, Sandman ™ and ©2010 DC Comics.

MM: The immediate fan concern about the announcement was that Marvel would try to integrate Marvelman into their universe rather than allowing it to be a separate, unique universe on its own.

BUCKY: I think a lot of that will depend on how clearly they are able to negotiate with everyone over the existing material.

I’m not aware of Marvel’s plans for the character beyond the archival projects and the completion of my stories with Neil.

MM: So Marvel is open to you and Neil finishing the story you started at Eclipse?

32

BUCKY: Maybe, but I’m still prouder of Miracleman than I am a big chunk of the stuff I’ve done in my career. It wasn’t until Spider-Man with Paul Jenkins and Fables with Bill Willingham where I really felt that I was starting to do work of a standard that could beat the Miracleman stuff. The Miracleman stuff, for me, was a much purer work of art in terms of it being something produced by Mark Buckingham. There was a large chunk of my career where my confidence in my work was so low that when I penciled it didn’t feel like it was me. It was me trying to fit in just to get work rather than any statement in my own right.

Part 3:

Going Where the Action Is

MM: As you mentioned earlier, during your time on Miracleman you did work on a few other projects. In 1991 you inked Bryan Talbot on Sandman Special #1. How was that experience for you?

Sandman statue, I did the Sandman and Death bookends recently, so there always seems to be something related to Sandman in my work load. It’s nice, because I’ve been strengthening my relationship with Neil again in recent years, and it’s been wonderful to have these little projects that give us an excuse to be in touch and working together again, even if it’s not something on the scale of Miracleman.

Part of the problem of us having not really worked together in a fuller way in the years following Miracleman was the very fact that we kept thinking Miracleman would be back. There was a pressure there that if we worked together on another project the first question everyone would ask would be, “When are you bringing Miracleman back?” It’s like we’ve got unfinished business. It got to the point where we’d done virtually nothing together for four or five years, and we said, “This is silly. We should at least be doing some bits and pieces together instead of just waiting for the book to come back.”

BUCKY: That was good fun. I like Bryan a lot as a person, and I love his work, so it was a great pleasure to work with him. As a British artist growing up on his stuff, reading Luther Arkwright and the Brainstorm Studio stuff he did in the ’70s, his work is very important to me—his work on “Nemesis.” He’s a sweetheart. He’s very easy to work with and a nice friend.

In another world I would’ve been a lot more involved with Sandman than I ended up being. Certainly, there were other opportunities where I could have contributed to Sandman, but it didn’t happen because of other commitments. If I’d had a bit more confidence and hadn’t bottled out when Neil first spoke to me back in ’87 about Miracleman and Sandman, there’s a part of me that thinks that if I really pushed I could have been involved with Sandman earlier on as well.

But it’s fine; I’m very glad to have been part of it. I worked on that annual, and then I came back and worked with Bryan on the framing sequences for the “World’s End” book. And I did two Death miniseries. And these days I seem to be involved with Sandman-related stuff more than ever. I did the design for the 20th anniversary Sandman poster, I did a

MM: In 1993 you penciled and inked the 42-page lead story in Swamp Thing Annual #7. You mentioned wanting to do a children’s book earlier, and you got to play with some aspects of that in this story, which was part of “The Children’s Crusade” Vertigo crossover event. How did the job come about?

BUCKY: I think Stuart Moore and Julie Rottenberg were the editors on that. Neil must have had some influence in that, because it came about around the time that Miracleman died.

33

MM: It was released a little before Miracleman #24, I think.

had in my head that I was trying to be one of the arty crowd in comics—one of the guys doing the serious, moody Vertigo comics. But when it came along, drawing all that stuff with Toy Town and the animal park, I adored it. It was a real pleasure to draw, and I’m still very proud of that one, actually. In fact, my parents still have some pages from it hanging in their home. I think it probably wasn’t until Fables came along that I appreciated to what extent I actually prefer drawing animals to people.

My only regret was that there wasn’t more of Swamp Thing himself in it. That would have been the icing on the cake for that job if there had been five or six pages where Swamp Thing actually did something instead of just sitting there.

It also came at the time where I had just started working in a studio with Kev Sutherland, a friend of mine who had moved to Clevedon. He was doing a bunch of different UK comic books and realized he needed an office space. He had just hired an assistant and rented space for a studio. I’d been working from home in this tiny, little shoe box of a room going loopy, because I just couldn’t focus and concentrate properly. I was feeling too claustrophobic. When he told me he was setting up this studio I said, “Please! Do you have room for me? I want to be with people and have more space around me, even if I’m only occupying a small part of it.” My strongest memory of working on the Swamp Thing Annual was working for the day in the studio he’d only set up the week before. I basically went in, grabbed his spare drawing board, and just sat in a corner and laid out the first six pages of the Swamp Thing Annual in that one day. I said, “Okay, can I stay?” [laughter] It was just fun all the way through. The only problem was that I had a vacation booked and there was no way I could get out of it, because my wife at the time and I hadn’t had a holiday in three years, and this was a big, going-to-the-Caribbean type of holiday. So I brought Kev in to ink some of the book at the end, and that was the beginning of us working together as a team. We ended up doing a lot of books together for Marvel. We were together in that studio for four years.

BUCKY: I think I was working on my final, unpublished issue of Miracleman around the same time as that book. I suspect it came via Neil, because Neil was always trying to maintain a busy workload for us both. Because he was writing the bookends of “Children’s Crusade,” I imagine he put in a word for me, plus I was always trying to maintain a good working relationship with everyone at DC. I think they must have felt it was appropriate for me because of the subject matter; it was dealing with children and animals and fun fairy tale stuff, which now, after seven, eight years of Fables it’s like, “Well, why wouldn’t they ask me?” [laughter]. But at the time, I don’t think I appreciated quite how appropriate it was for me. I still

MM: That brings us up to Death: The High Cost of Living. You were finishing up Miracleman when you got this job. Had you met Chris Bachalo? Did you know who he was?

34

BUCKY: No. Death basically came about, again, because of Neil telling me about the project. I remember I tried out both for Death and Shade, the Changing Man. MM: You inked an issue of Shade [#31] where you inked Colleen Doran.

BUCKY: Yeah, a little later, I think. First I inked some samples over Chris with Death in mind. They were looking for an inker for the book, and they seemed to be very happy with the way I was inking Chris. The combination of the two of us seemed to be working very well. I think at the time Chris was still working with Mark Pennington on Shade, and the combination of their styles was slightly more scratchy and expressive, whereas when I inked Chris it was slightly more grounded.

It was feathery and had a different quality.

MM: It seemed like he was feeding off of your inks as much as you were feeding off of his pencils.

BUCKY: Well, in those early days we were definitely collaborating in a very fluid way.

I picked up lots and lots from Chris. I actually felt like I’d found someone who was working in a style I understood and could relate to. There were a lot of things in Chris’ work at that point that reminded me of things I was doing myself. I felt like I could acquire a lot of qualities from his work that would be good for me. I didn’t anticipate that it would [laughs] swamp my own style, but as I said before, I’d kind of lost my way. After the demise of Miracleman, I didn’t really believe in myself as an artist anymore, so I was always looking for other people to point the way. I think that was the case with Chris more so than anyone else.

I liked what he did; I saw how we could combine in a way that felt right for me.

Then both our careers were given higher profiles thanks to the Death mini-series.

Chris had the opportunity to go to Marvel and do projects for them—Ghost Rider 2099 and Generation X—and I said, “I’m coming with you.” [laughter] That was my first move away from DC. I mean, I’d been doing Miracleman for Eclipse and a bit of 2000 AD, but my other work in those early years was focused around DC Comics.

Because Chris and I had such a good working relationship and seemed to under-

stand each other so well, when we went into Marvel it was decided that Chris’ real focus needed to be on developing the Generation X book. That was the big deal for Marvel. But he already had the commitment to launching Ghost Rider 2099, so Chris was just doing very loose layouts for that book and I did the finishes and put in all the details and qualities that made it look like our other work. Right from the second issue I took over doing the covers and most of the designs for new characters, so it really became as much my book as it was his. But it was me doing what I went on to do a lot, which was, “When Chris isn’t around, I’ll be Chris.” That kind of became my calling card to the industry. “Hi, I’m the substitute Bachalo. Anybody need Chris on something? Here you go.” [laughter] “Chris 35

Previous Page: Bucky got a taste of children’s fantasy with Swamp Thing Annual #7.

Above: When Marvel decided penciler Chris Bachalo should focus his time on Generation X, Chris went to drawing layouts for Ghost Rider 2099, leaving the finishes to Bucky and his studiomate Kev Sutherland.

Opening page of Ghost Rider 2099 #3.

Swamp Thing, Tefé ™ and ©2010 DC Comics. Ghost Rider 2099 ™ and ©2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

needs to move on and do something else? Ask Bucky. He can keep things moving.”

MM: Did that help you get work? I mean, did Marvel know what to do with you otherwise since your style changed from project to project?

BUCKY: It made me, I guess, a more categorizable commodity. It made it easier for them to know what to give me, which at that time seemed to be everything. [laughter] Because what we were doing was very successful. Generation X, when it launched, sold phenomenally well. We sold a quarter of a million copies of the first issue at a time when the sales were starting to fall. It was probably the last of the X-books, of that period, that made big money. So there was no shortage of work. I took on a lot of additional books which I was doing with Kev, where I would do breakdowns and Kev would do finishes. We carried on for a while with Ghost Rider 2099, we did Dr. Strange for a while, Star Trek Unlimited, lots of odd jobs like covers and merchandising, all alongside me regularly inking Chris on Gen X. The nice

thing was I got fast enough that I could ink an issue of Chris’ Gen X in a week, so I had a lot of extra time to take on other work and develop other projects as well.

MM: You were very productive during those years. And that was really the first opportunity you had to draw covers.

BUCKY: To be honest, part of the reason I went with Chris to Marvel was that I wanted to break out a little bit from the Vertigo world. Not because I didn’t like it, but because I wanted to stretch and experience other things and try drawing different types of books. Since the Poison Ivy strip, I hadn’t really done a super-hero book. Miracleman was technically a super-hero book, but it involved so little costumed character material that it felt more like another Vertigo book. I wanted to do some action/adventure stuff.

36

MM: But even when Marvel would give you an action/adventure book, it was still not too far removed from Vertigo. Dr. Strange was part of the “Over the Edge” line. Immortalis was even closer to the Vertigo material.

BUCKY: Immortalis was a Marvel UK book.

That was a different beast altogether. But it was fun, and it did allow me to draw a few super-hero characters, like Spitfire and Baron Blood.

Another part of moving to Marvel with Chris was that I was an unknown commodity there. It meant that I wasn’t prestamped with a particular type of work in mind. I’d reached a point at Vertigo where I was appreciated as an inker and valued and used a lot, but I wasn’t necessarily getting much penciling work, and certainly I wasn’t getting any penciling work from the DC universe, which is what I would’ve liked. I thought moving to Marvel with Chris would help me make that transition, and right from the first month or two we were there I started getting penciling jobs.

It made a big difference to me and helped to boost my confidence a little. Although, since it was in the shadow of Chris, I was more confident, but not really being me.

MM: There were three books where you started out inking Chris and then took over as penciler after he left. There was Ghost Rider 2099, the second Death miniseries— BUCKY: Ghost Rider 2099 was first, and that was early on in our working relationship. It was certainly me trying to push myself to do more work and learn more of the craft.

It was a new experience, being at Marvel, so there was a lot of energy and enthusiasm going into that project. And it was a chance for me to be more creative in a project, as well, because I was designing some of the characters and I was doing covers, rather than just being an inker.

MM: Do you enjoy doing covers?

BUCKY: I love doing covers. I always wanted to do covers, and I did a lot at Marvel. I think I’m a lot better at that sort of stuff than I used to be. I remember at one point early on saying to Bill on Fables that I don’t really like doing splashes and double-page spreads. Now if they gave me whole issues of splash pages and spreads, I would be the happiest man in the world, because I really love them now. It was one of those things where I needed to change my approach to drawing in order to enjoy those sorts of things more. The more delicate penciling approach I had back then, and the lack of confidence I had when I drew, meant that something as important as a cover or a splash—I wanted to do them, but they scared me. Now it’s the sort of stuff I really gravitate towards, because my style has become more dynamic and more immediate and it lends itself to those sorts of images.

37

Previous Page Top: Bucky inked one of the last smash hits in comics before the speculator crash of the mid-’90s.

Generation X #1, page 31.

Pencils by Chris Bachalo.

Previous Page Bottom: Bucky did the full art for this story. Immortalis #1, page 1, from Marvel UK. Below: Promotional art for Ghost Rider 2099.

Generation X, Ghost Rider 2099, Immortalis, and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Below and Next Page: Bucky pulled out his very best Chris Bachalo impersonation in order to finish the second Death mini-series once Chris had to back out midway through. Pages 7 and 8 of Death: The Time of Your Life #3. Inks by Mark Pennington.

Death ™ and ©2010 DC Comics.

Shade was around the midpoint of our collaborations. It was a chance for me to follow on from Chris on a book that I really liked. We did a couple of issues together—his last two, #49 and #50—where there were sequences he gave to me to pencil. He penciled the rest, and it was all inked by Rick Bryant. Basically, I asked for the job when Chris left. Part of the reason I did it was because it had some interesting elements to it, and I liked the way the character looked. I thought it would be fun for me visually.

But there was a three-issues story arc that Sean Phillips drew in between Chris leaving and me taking over. What I wasn’t aware of until they were already getting on

38

with it was the fact that they were completely reinventing the look of the character. They suddenly gave him this short jacket and a mod haircut, and it completely threw me. I couldn’t relate to the character anymore. The crazy thing was that I found myself taking over a book with a main character that I no longer liked or could draw. I mean, it looked fine, but it felt wrong. It felt very uncomfortable. So I was in a strange situation where again my confidence was undermined. Instead of drawing Shade my way, more like Miracleman #24 or the “Tyranny Rex” stuff in 2000 AD, I got nervous and fell into drawing it the Chris way.

I liked all the supporting characters, but I just couldn’t get on with the lead character. I really struggled with the book right from the moment I started on it. We ended up having to bring in another artist to do chunks of the story in order to keep on schedule—for which Michael Lark owes me a big favor, because that was his starting point in mainstream comics. [laughter] But, basically, I just gave up. I reached a point where my confidence was nonexistent, and I didn’t feel I could carry on and I left. That was the lowest point in my relationship with Vertigo, and in particular with the editor, Shelly Bond. I literally said, “I can’t do this anymore, I’m going.” I sent in the last pages of that issue and that was it. And she vowed she’d never work with me again. [laughter] I thought that was probably it for Vertigo and possibly DC. Then the strangest thing happened.

Basically, I got a phone call from Shelly a few months later about the second Death miniseries. There was an obligation that I should return as the inker on the book. Obviously, that’s what Neil wanted and Chris wanted, so Shelly phoned me up and said, “I want you to understand that you’re only coming onto this book because of the understanding from the first series and because Neil and Chris want you there.” But she also acknowledged the fact that she’d always had a good relationship with me as an inker. So she gave me a chance, but she watched me carefully to make sure I was working properly and keeping schedule. And I did. I worked very hard to win back some trust, at least as an inker if not as an artist.

I was still inking Chris on Generation X at the time when he took eight months off to

39

draw like Chris. Give me a chance. I’ll carry on where Chris left off and maintain the look and the structure and the design elements. We’ll just carry on the series and keep it consistent.” Shelly gave me a chance, and I really threw my heart into it.

We got Mark Pennington in to ink and maintain a look that was similar to what I had been doing over Chris’ pencils in the previous pages, and everyone was really pleased with the end result. We got the book in on time, and it took me from being persona non grata to being valued and appreciated again at Vertigo. That was what saved me, I guess. And I’m still very proud of the two Death mini-series. I still wish we’d gotten the chance to do another one, and maybe we will one day. It was an important project for me with a character I love, and thankfully it’s still a book that people love.

MM: Are you a Star Trek fan?

BUCKY: Yes, I was. At the time I was still watching the old stuff, which I loved, and I was pretty keen on Next Generation and Deep Space 9, so I was quite excited to be offered the gig—especially getting original series stuff.

MM: Did they make you do likeness samples before giving you the book?

Above: Page 9 of Death: The Time of Your Life #3.

Inks by Mark Pennington.

Next Page: Bucky penciled stories for the first four issues of Star Trek Unlimited, a 60-page quarterly. Inks by thenstudiomate Kev F. Sutherland.

Death ™ and ©2010 DC Comics. Star Trek and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Paramount Pictures.

work on Death: The Time of Your Life. Things had been running behind, and we got to the end of his eight-month hiatus and were only halfway through with the mini-series.

Chris told me he was feeling the pressure from Marvel to get back to work on the Generation X series. There was a lot going on at the time regarding the pilot for the Generation X TV series, so he was very much focused on that project. So all of a sudden Chris let everyone know that he had to go back to work on Generation X. He was asked if he could at least provide layouts for the rest of the series, but unfortunately he wasn’t able to. So I said, “Look, you know I can 40

BUCKY: Yeah, I did two or three sheets of sketches—one of Kirk, one of Spock, an Enterprise, and a few other bits and pieces—to show that I had a grasp of the likenesses. Then we got cracking on it. It was something I thought would be a lot of fun. In the end it wasn’t as much fun as I had hoped. There were plenty of instances where the artwork kept being amended— noses and different things were tweaked all the time—which got to be quite infuriating after a while. The sad thing was that by the time we finished our year-long commitment on Star Trek, I’d gone off it so much that I don’t think I’ve watched a single episode of any Star Trek series since. [laughter] And that was more than ten years ago. It was a case of “beware of working on things you like,” because turning it into a job can often ruin it. I’m still a big fan of sci-fi TV. My main great love is Doctor Who, and has been ever since I was a little kid. I was one of the faithful few who was championing the

the end of the studio with me and Kev. When the bankruptcy hit, although I still had work, a lot of the extra jobs we had been doing together for Marvel just disappeared, and we no longer had enough money coming through the studio to justify us maintaining it. Kev switched his focus back into comedy and writing and performance. I tried to look positively at Marvel, but realized that I was feeling too insecure with the situation there and made the switch back to DC. And so the studio ended, and I went back to just being an artist on my own.

But it was also the point I realized I needed to focus on being an artist in my own right. I knew I had to move away from my working relationship with Chris. I made the decision to leave Generation X, because I wanted to focus on drawing my own stuff. I needed to make the break and try to find my own voice again.

series long after it stopped being on the telly. I went to Who conventions and bought VHS tapes of the episodes.

MM: Did you ever try out for Marvel UK’s Doctor Who series?

BUCKY: Funny enough, Kev was actually contributing to the Doctor Who magazine while we were in the studio together. He was doing a single-page humor strip for that, and it did cross my mind on many occasions that it would be something I would like to do, but, again, after my experience with the Star Trek stuff, there was a little bit of reticence there. Having said that, it still sits there in the back of my mind as something I would like to do at some point. I’ve been talking with Tony Lee about maybe doing something with him for IDW’s Doctor Who line at some point, but there’s 101 things that I would like to do.

The trouble is fitting it all in. Fables has become such a dominating part of my workload, I have trouble nipping out for more than a few pages of anything else.

MM: Once you had worked a while for both companies, did you notice any difference in editorial approach at Marvel as opposed to DC? BUCKY: I always found Marvel editors to be quite laid back. With DC and Vertigo, I always found that the editors were really involved in every stage of the process much more directly. I got a lot more feedback and discussion about the work as it would go along at DC/Vertigo. With Marvel it always felt a bit more loose, but it was also done at breakneck speed. With Marvel, deadlines were always immediate and hanging over you at every turn. There was a sense that we were flying by the seat of our pants. It was a constant dash from one issue to the next, from one project to the next. But it also felt quite free and exciting. I think that also had something to do with working from plots most of the time instead of full scripts.

I tended to appreciate the relationships with the people at DC more, though, because it felt more stable and a bit more like family. With DC I always got the sense that we were in it for the long haul. Marvel always had that element of danger, [laughter] like you were racing along, but it could end at any moment without any warning.

Which, I guess, came to a head with the whole Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which, unfortunately, not only saw the end of most of my work for Marvel, but also was 41

MM: In late ’96 you worked on The Books of Magic Annual #1. Dick Giordano inked a lot of that story, but I get the feeling this book was a big stepping stone in your evolution as an artist. A lot of the design elements of your current work start to show up in this annual. Did you feel this was a turning point in your career?

BUCKY: At the time, I didn’t. I certainly enjoyed doing it. In that job there was still a reasonably strong influence from Chris in the look of the art, but I think some of my own personality was surfacing because of the subject matter and the fact that there were several design elements that went into that strip that were very indicative of where I was headed. There was a double-page spread with a flock of birds.

MM: That’s the very spread I wanted to talk about.

BUCKY: That meant a lot to me at the time, and when it came to Fables later on, that spread always stuck in the back of my mind as the sort of thing that I wanted to do—to evoke that kind of feel and dreamlike quality. The other thing was working with wildlife. There are a lot of birds of prey flying around in that book, and that to me was the most pleasurable part of the project.

MM: You inked about half the book yourself. Is that right?

BUCKY: I think my intention was to ink it all myself. I think Dick was brought in to help get the thing published on time. It came at a time when I was doing a bunch of other stuff as well. I think I was still inking Gen X, and probably penciling a few pieces for Marvel at the same time. Dick did a beautiful job on the pages that he inked. They were lovely.

As I’ve found certain people who have inked me well and brought out nice qualities in the finished art, it’s made me more and more relaxed about not needing to do that part of the job, to be happy and confident in just concentrating on the pencils.

MM: What about the story itself? As you said, it was well suited to what you like to draw. Was this a collaborative effort with John Ney Rieber, or did you just get a script?

BUCKY: Unfortunately, I never actually spoke to him. Or if I did, maybe I had one conference call with him and the editor at the start of the project. It was one of those jobs 42

earlier, again, I can look back on that now and realize that a lot of the joy and energy that came out of it meant so much to me—but it wasn’t a conscious thing. “Oh, this is what I should be doing. There’s something special about working with fantasy elements and animals and natural environments.” It was fun, and it was going really well, but I was too busy to stop and analyze why, and that was the case with The Books of Magic Annual, as well. It’s blatantly obvious to me now why it was fun, but at the time it was just another job, which is why I didn’t immediately pursue another project like it. I wanted to jump about and try lots of things. I wanted to do more super-hero books and action/adventure stuff.

MM: And that brings us to Batman.

But before you started on Batman: Shadow of the Bat, you drew a Mr. Freeze movie tie-in special.

BUCKY: Yeah, the Mr. Freeze special represents the crossover point for me, in that I was still doing a fair amount of stuff for Marvel. I was coming to the end of my run on Dr. Strange, working with DeMatteis which I was really enjoying. I had joined the team with Warren Ellis. We were brought in on the understanding that the book was about to get canceled.

Our main job was to keep it from getting canceled. Nobody had any expectations that we would turn it into a big seller or that it would even last long. It was just a case of bringing fresh blood into it and seeing what we could do with it.

I came up with the strange concept of the Thousand Year War and Dr. Strange being conscripted into it, in the process burning out all the new powers he’d been given in the preceding story arcs. We wanted to bring him back to a base point where we could build him back up again and also revitalize his look. It was still different.

We went for this almost Edwardian cut frock coat and a long shirt with an elaborate pattern.

where I agreed to do it, the script arrived, and I drew it. [laughs] I get the feeling you’re trying to angle this as being some really important, pertinent moment in my career, and it wasn’t. I can look back on it and see hints of what was to come, but I think often when you work on something, you don’t really see it in that context. The same way with the Swamp Thing Annual we were talking about

MM: He was more like a gentleman’s sorcerer.

43

Previous Two Pages: A sign of things to come?

Books of Magic Annual #1, pages 5 and 6.

Right: Warren Ellis and Bucky took the doctor in a very different direction from the prior hipster version of Dr. Strange.

Below: Batman: Mr. Freeze opens with lots of bats.

Oh, and Batman, too. Inks

by Wayne Faucher.

Next Page: Page 1 of Batman: Shadow of the Bat #1, the start of Bucky’s year-long run on the title.

Inks by Wayne Faucher.

Dr. Strange ™ and ©2010 Marvel Characters, Inc. Batman, Books of Magic, Mr. Freeze ™ and ©2010 DC Comics.

BUCKY: In part that was me wishing it was Doctor Who, I suppose. [laughter] But the idea was to start his power base up again from scratch, and with it being Warren there was a horror element as well as making it more pertinent to today, dealing with subject matters like pollution. And that was fine.

We did three issues together and then Warren was off to do other stuff. But we managed to do enough that the book didn’t get canceled during our run. Then in came DeMatteis, and I worked with him for a while. We went slightly more into spiritual territory, and we kept the book going for another year before it finally disappeared.

So I was working on that, the Star Trek stuff, and I was kind of winding down on Gen X. Then along came Scott Peterson, ringing me from DC saying, “How about doing one of these Batman specials to tie in with the Batman and Robin movie?” I was a big fan of what was happening in Detective at the time, with Doug Moench and Kelley Jones, and I thought it would be fun to play around with Kelley’s interpretation of Mr. Freeze as he is now with the big, bulky armor, and because it was an origin story, I could also play with that retro look and some of the qualities of the animated Batman Mr. Freeze.

And it was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed that one a lot. It felt like my own personality was starting to come through again. Again, I didn’t know why I was enjoying it so much, but I look back on it now and starting on page one I’m focusing on the bats. [laughter] I get polar bears, I get seals, monkeys... there was plenty of wildlife in that one. And I really enjoyed Batman as a character to draw. I immediately felt very comfortable with him. And it was the first thing I’d been offered that was me penciling in the DC universe, which was a really big step.

MM: Paul Dini wrote the special, and he brought in a lot of the ideas he had explored in the Mr. Freeze episodes he wrote for Batman: The Animated Series. Had you seen those?

BUCKY: Yes, I had. I was aware of the animated series, and I liked Paul’s work as well. It was wonderful to be working on a Batman project with him.

Obviously, we were all a bit disappointed when the actual movie came out. [laughter] I think everybody involved in the tie-ins to that movie were hoping that it would do us all some good, but, of course, 44

when the movie came out and it ended up being a chaotic, multi-colored affair... it just seemed to damage the franchise, and our books just disappeared.

When that was over, it coincided with the Chapter 11 bankruptcy at Marvel.

The Star Trek book continued a little longer, but a lot of things were ending at Marvel. I got nervous about where things were headed there, but I wasn’t necessarily imagining that I would go elsewhere.

Then I got two offers from DC. One from Vertigo, where Karen Berger approached me about trying out for Steve Gerber’s Nevada series. The other was from Scott, who called wondering if I would consider being the new artist on Shadow of the Bat, which up to that point had tended to have a rotating team with each new story arc. They wanted someone to come in and be a regular artist.

It was an interesting situation to be in.

I did try out for the Nevada job—I did a few sample pages—but I knew I was one of two or three people they were considering. I loved the concept and would dearly have loved to work with Steve Gerber, but I don’t think I would have been right for the series. The Batman offer was a flat-out “you want it, you’ve got it” that also came with a contract. It was the first time I’d ever been offered a contract to do a year’s worth of work.

Everything else up to that point, with the exception of Miracleman which we were contracted at the very beginning—I could have been sacked any given month and that would have been it. All in all, with all the insecurity at Marvel, it seemed like the right moment to go with the DCU job, and I loved it. Initially, there was still a bit of Chris’ influence going on. There was also a healthy dose of Kelley Jones there. But after a few issues I started to settle into it, and I could start to see some style and feel of my own coming into it.

and Batman would flow through it. That in itself is part of the reason I was enjoying it so much, is that I was playing with form and shape. It didn’t rely on having to draw a muscular, straight figure. He was a muscular super-hero, but that wasn’t what you were dwelling on.

It was the cowl and the cape that made it work.

And Alan Grant was a wonderful writer to work with.

He really seemed to pace things perfectly. I don’t think I ever questioned a single thing in any of his scripts in terms of it being comfortable to draw. My only regret was that we had a two-parter where it was going to be Batman versus the Riddler. It was also going to introduce a new villain called the Answer, which I was really happy with. I’d done the design work for it, and we got about the first seven pages of it drawn before it got shelved because we were

MM: Kelley drew Batman with really long ears, and you followed suit, but what struck me was how you used Batman’s cape. It was very organic and lengthened or shortened as required.

BUCKY: I really enjoyed that aspect of it, and I played that up. He was kind of a silhouette with this billowing cape that was, to me, almost a living thing. I used it as an organic device in the way that the page would flow 45

46

moving into a big crossover [“DC 1,000,000”] and it wasn’t going to fit what was needed. Unfortunately, we never got back to it. That was a great shame.

When I took on the contract to do Batman, basically, I gave up inking. I had a contract to do nothing but penciling, and I decided to take full advantage of that and do nothing else. I’d always suffered from being insecure and stealing elements from everyone I inked, and I was desperate to get past that.

MM: As someone who inked other artists, did that make you more or less sensitive as to how other artists inked your work?

BUCKY: It can make you pretty sensitive about who inks you. Wayne Faucher was inking me on the Batman stuff, and I was actually quite happy with it. I thought he was doing a nice job. Not to my taste now, but at the time it was exactly right for the kind of books that were coming out, and he complemented the way I was drawing very well. I don’t think I ever complained about anything Wayne ever did. In fact, I asked for him as my inker, because of how pleased I’d been with the Mr. Freeze book. It was Scott Peterson who had initially suggested him to me as an inker. I wasn’t aware of his work before that, but I was very pleased that we meshed together so well, and he was very flexible in coping with me as I wobbled in and out of different styles while I was trying to find my way on that book.

MM: What kind of fan reaction did you get on Shadow of the Bat? BUCKY: I don’t remember there being much negative response, but I think Scott was surprised that we weren’t more popular. We weren’t doing anything wrong, and I could have continued drawing Bat-books for a lot longer than I did if I’d wanted to.

Everyone at DC was pleased with what I was doing, and it was going fine, but after Miracleman up until the year 2000 I was never an artist that fans particularly noticed or got excited about. [laughter] But I think that’s understandable, because I never felt that way about my own stuff, either. It was nice to have plenty of work, but I never saw myself as someone that would be a fan-favorite.

MM: Comic fans all seem to have one particular artist they identify as the Batman artist, be it Neal Adams or Jim Aparo or someone else. Did you have to deal with that at all, where you may have felt like you had to live up to someone else’s name?

BUCKY: No, I felt like I was fitting in fine. When I did the Mr. Freeze book, there was a bit of influence from the Neal Adams/Jim Aparo end of things, and when I started doing the regular book, I started out with a bit more of the Kelley Jones thing going on, but also a bit of sourcing back to Bob Kane and the early Batman work. There were also elements of other things coming in. I was looking a lot more at Eisner by then, which is why I was starting to be more playful with the title pages, working text into the art and so on.

MM: How did you go from Shadow of the Bat to the Titans relaunch?

BUCKY: Things were in a state of flux with the Bat-books. They got rid of all the writers who’d been doing Batman for the past ten years, including Alan Grant, in order to revitalize the Bat-line. There was no question of me leaving. They were happy with me and were going to give me another year’s contract, but A) I was unhappy about losing Alan, because he was a big part of why I was enjoying the book so much; and B) I wouldn’t have my own book anymore. The way they were restructuring things was that the stories would run across the different Bat-books, so if it was a three-part story, it might be part one in Shadow of the Bat, part two in Detective, and part three in Batman. So I would have three issues come out in one month and then I wouldn’t be seen again for maybe three or four months until my next story arc would come around. That felt uncomfortable to me. I liked the sense of having a specific book that was mine and having a consistent point in the market place where people could find me.

And then along came Eddie Berganza and Titans. He was revitalizing the book with Devin Grayson, and I’d been a huge fan of the Titans when I was a kid. I’d absolutely adored the Wolfman and Pérez run, so for me the main attraction was that sense of nostalgia for the characters, 47

Previous Page: Bucky went all-out on his opening splash pages for Batman: Shadow of the Bat, and this one for issue #75 was no exception.

Notice Batman’s cape in the lower panel and how it acts as a design element to draw your eye to Batman, but also seems to be a living thing.

Batman, Clayface, Mr. Freeze ™ and ©2010 DC Comics.

because I knew this new Titans book would be bringing back a lot of the core characters.

The problem was I’d gotten used to doing a book with one main character. And, as we discussed before, I’d spent more time drawing capes than actual people. I wasn’t prepared for the shock. All of a sudden I was doing a team book, and it hadn’t really crossed my mind, but I had a cast of ten regular characters who were constantly being put up against armies or teams of super-villains of equally large numbers—usually accompanied by an army. [laughter] It just drove me mad. I couldn’t cope with it. I did a four-page epilogue to the JLA/Titans mini-series that Phil Jiminez drew—Phil sent me layouts for the four pages—and I was like, “There are so many characters! There’s so much in the panel in all these panels. What’s all this about?” I was used to five panels, most of the time with one person in them. “I think I may have made a slight mistake here.”

And although I was enjoying the design element of it—designing Tartarus and revamping HIVE and all of that—the actual dayto-day mechanics of trying to draw a book that intense in terms of cast was a shock to the system. My confidence went, and stylistically I was all over the place, going back to bits of Chris and bits of Alan Davis and anything else other than me. I was desperately flailing around trying to come to terms with what I was working on, and I never really did. I struggled all the way through it, which is why we had so many fill-ins. It was a very difficult 16 months.

Ironically, my last two issues, where it focused on the core original team members being trapped on an island and going up against the Gargoyle, that ended up being a delight. There were a lot of sequences of

48

them as the kid sidekicks in their old costumes, and I really enjoyed drawing that. But at the end of it I had vowed I would never do team books again. [laughter] That series made me question my position in the industry, and I was starting to seriously consider going back to being an inker, or at least stop doing regular books and just work on specials and mini-series. I felt completely destroyed as an artist. I couldn’t see where I was going.

MM: Did they give you any lead-in time before starting it up?

BUCKY: No, not particularly, because I was working on my last three issues of Shadow of the Bat at the same time I was starting to get things moving on Titans. What saved me, I guess, in the end was, while I was working on Shadow of the Bat and having such a great time, I was approached about taking over Amazing Spider-Man at Marvel with Tom DeFalco, who I did an issue of Generation X with as penciler after Chris left. We got on very well, and I liked his work a lot. And after drawing Batman I’d realized that working on one iconic character was a lot of fun. Marvel was supposed

to be putting a contract together for me, which never materialized, but I did some designs and a cover and I invented one of the four alternative identities that Spider-Man took on: Slinger, the one that had the little disc things. That was all I ended up doing, but I maintained a very good relationship with Ralph Macchio, and we kept in touch and talked from time to time.

When I got to the end of my last Titans issue, I didn’t know where I’d end up. I put in a few calls to see what might be out there.

So I rang Ralph, and it was one of those perfect moments where I gave him the call and he rang me back and said, “Mark, you won’t believe this, but there are plans afoot for the Spider-Man books to go to 15 issues a year.

Would you be interested in doing the overlap issues?” John Romita, Jr. would do twelve issues and I would do the others. I thought, “Spider-Man! I could do Spider-Man—one character! No big teams, just one guy with a mask over his face.” A couple of years earlier I’d done a Valentine’s Day special featuring Spider-Man and Mary Jane [Marvel Valentine Special #1 (1997)], and that had been an absolute pleasure. So I said, “Yes, I’d love to.”

49

Previous Page: The foreground illustration was used on the inside front cover of Titans #1, and reflected Bucky’s childhood affection for the Teen Titans. But his hopes going into the series weren’t exactly met, though issue #16— Bucky’s last issue as penciler—gave him a taste of what he’d been looking for.

Next Page: Make room Peter, Bucky’s moving in!

Bucky’s design for Peter Parker’s pad for his run on Peter Parker, Spider-Man. Aqualad, Arsenal, Flash, Kid Flash, Nightwing, Robin, Speedy, Tempest, The Titans, Troia, Wonder Girl ™ and ©2010 DC Comics. Peter Parker ™ and ©2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Part 4:

Fables and the Reconstruction

MM: How did you go to being the regular artist of Peter Parker, Spider-Man?

had to look at it, so I picked it up and it was Mike Mignola inking Kirby on the cover of The Jack Kirby Collector [#24]. I had never seen this magazine before, and it was, “Wow! What’s this then?” I looked through it, and it was filled with all these pencil stat images of Kirby artwork. The stuff was amazing!

What really connected with me was the freedom that was there in his pencils, the energy. They weren’t like my pencils, which at the time were very, very soft, very delicate, very light. Much of it was drawn with a propelling pencil rather than your old-fashioned wooden one. I kept looking at the stuff thinking, “Wow! There’s so much energy here. Why haven’t I got this?

This is what I’ve been doing wrong. This is how it should be.”

BUCKY: John Byrne left Spider-Man and John Romita, Jr. switched over to fill his spot. Suddenly, the plans to do 15 issues a year of each book went out the window, and I was the new regular penciler on Peter Parker, Spider-Man. But they didn’t know who was going to be writing it, so, since I didn’t have a script, I spent about a week and a half just doodling away drawing Spider-Man and getting into the right frame of mind for it. I did some cover sketches and pin-ups and that sort of stuff.

What also happened— and this is very important to what happened to me

from that point onward— was I went and did a signing in Bath, a nearby city to where I was living in Clevedon. It was myself and an old friend of mine, Mike Collins, and we were in a comic shop called The American Dream Gallery, which was named that way because, besides being a comic shop, they also had a gallery where they sold original artwork. As I sat there on a Saturday afternoon having a good time, my eyes kept getting dragged to this one book that was sitting on one of the shelves to one side of me. It was this big, green monster fighting these Roman-looking soldiers. I

So I bought it, took it home, and it lived beside me for the next few weeks and completely transformed the way that I worked. Just looking at that stuff, I immediately threw the propelling pencil away, went to the local newsagent, bought a pack of ten of basic, eraser-on-the-end pencils, and sat down and started drawing again. Everything was suddenly bolder; it had more energy, more freedom. There was less agonizing over every detail. It was just energetic, straight down on paper.

50

That, combined with being paired with Paul Jenkins as my writer—who I hadn’t worked with before, but we chatted on the phone and made an instant connection.

Paul has family in the same part of the UK that I’m from, and we found a lot of common ground. We chatted away, and we both understood what we wanted to do with the character, to kind of get away from all the strange, convoluted plotlines with clones and things. We wanted to get back to Peter at home with his aunt dealing with day-to-day problems while having fun adventures as Spider-Man that were self-contained—an issue or a short run— and were such that you’d never have to read another Spider-Man book to “get” it.

And that’s what we did.

Paul kind of came into it late, so he rang me up and said, “This book is already due, so here’s what I want to do in the first issue.” A lot of that first issue was just plot-

ted verbally. The next few were a combination of telephone planning followed by Paul writing me a plot. It was probably half a year into our run before I started to get full written scripts. We would just talk on the phone, and he’d tell me what we were going to do and I’d get on with it. The freedom I felt working that way, combined with the energy I was putting into the art thanks to the influence of what I was seeing in Jack’s stuff, completely transformed me.

That’s when my confidence came back with real force. That’s when all the anxiety started to disappear. I just believed in my ability to draw again. It saved me. I honestly don’t think I would be doing comics now—certainly not penciling—if it wasn’t for those elements coming together as they did.

MM: You were on Peter Parker, Spider-Man for quite a while. One issue that stood out for me was the story where Peter is 51

Previous Page: An unused spot illustration of the webslinger.

Page: This two-page spread from Bucky’s first issue of Peter Parker, Spider-Man (#20 if you’re keeping score) made an early statement about the type of run he and writer Paul Jenkins were about to embark on. Like the title of the book says, it’s about Peter Parker and the things that make him special as a character.

Peter Parker, Spider-Man ™ and ©2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Below: Bucky’s pencils for the opening page of Peter Parker, Spider-Man #20.

Next Page: Spectacular Spider-Man #27 was a last hurrah for the Spidey team of Jenkins and Buckingham, and sent them out on a high note.

Parts of the issue have a definite Calvin and Hobbes vibe to them.

Ben Parker, Peter Parker, Spider-Man ™ and ©2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

remembering his annual trips with Uncle Ben to see the Mets play. You and Paul seemed to excel at the more introspective stories. Did it feel that way to you?

BUCKY: To be honest, all of those stories about Peter and Ben were the most important stories for me and Paul, I think. For us, it was getting back to the core of what made Peter tick. And it was the type of story that worked best for us as a team. We made that statement of intent right from the very first issue we did together, which was a “Peter at the graveside” story. The very final story that we did together [“The Final Curtain,” Spectacular Spider-Man #27 (2005)], which was the one set at Christmas

time was, for us, a real triumph. It was one of our best moments and a perfect way to reconnect and give the readers one last chance to see what we were trying to do in the series. That was really what we wanted to do when we took over the book was to tell those smaller, more personal stories.

Another one that a lot of people love, and which meant a lot to Paul and I as well, was the one about the little African-American kid with a drug addict for a mother and no father figure apart from a distant uncle who’s looking out for him. He had this one trading card of Spider-Man and fantasized about Spider-Man being his secret pal. When we do the reveal at the end and show him taking his mask off, we’re showing him to be the little lad’s fantasy creation of a father figure.

That was a very special story for us.

Those were always the sort of moments where we were at our strongest. Whenever we got involved in storylines that had more typical villains and their schemes—it’s not that we did them badly, but it wasn’t really where our strengths lay. I left the book at the point where they were getting into story arcs running across the various Spiderbooks. Continuity was kind of weighing everything down and restricting us.

MM: Is that the reason you left the book?

BUCKY: No, I left because there were an awful lot of changes taking place at Marvel.

I’d already survived two major revamps of the Spider-Man line, where Paul and I had been the one book to remain intact.

Basically, we reached a point where there was going to be another change, and this time they wanted to cancel Peter Parker and launch a brand-new Spider-Man book. This was in light of the J. Michael Straczynski revamp of Amazing and the fact that Kevin Smith was being lined up to do Black Cat— they were taking the line in a new direction.

I could have hung around and done more Spider-Man stories. They didn’t want me gone, but the problem was Humberto Ramos had just been brought in under exclusive contract, and he was given two choices. One was more of a creator-owned type project, I think, and the other was to do Spider-Man. He wanted to do SpiderMan, and the only book they could give him was mine, unfortunately. [laughter] The

52

53

offer was made to me of becoming the regular fill-in guy, and they were offering me other things to do alongside that—some of which I did, like the two-part Fantastic Four story. They were lining me up to do some Thor as well, but, to be honest, I kind of knew it was time to move on. I wasn’t getting excited about any of the super-hero projects that were being presented to me, and at the same time I’d started working on Fables. I’d done the “Animal Farm” story arc while I was on the latter stages of my Spider-Man run, and I’d just had far more fun doing Fables. It felt like I’d found the right direction for myself. The subject matter and the pacing and the feel of those stories was something that I could really get excited about.

And it wasn’t weighed down in 40-odd years’ worth of continuity like most of the other books. It was fresh and creator-driven rather than a corporate beast that I would only be nominally involved with.

This was something I could get fully involved with and create a look and feel for the series that would be lasting and unique, so there wasn’t really a choice in my mind.

MM: How did you get involved with Fables to begin with? Was it Shelly Bond that suggested you?

BUCKY: Shelly and Bill. I had worked with Bill while I was early into my run on Spider-Man on the Merv Pumpkinhead: Agent of D.R.E.A.M. one-shot, a Sandman spin-off book.

MM: Right. And like Fables, that was a fantasy book, though it was much more humor-oriented.

BUCKY: The subject matter was very fun. The types of things I got to draw in that were just crazy and silly. And I realized immediately that Bill was a writer I could match with very comfortably.

He wrote in a way that was incredibly comfortable for me to develop and turn into comic pages. Because he’s an artist in his own right— we interpret things in a different way, but we seem to have a core understanding of comics that’s compatible, which made it very easy to work with him.

Above and Right: Before Fables came around, Bucky worked with Bill Willingham on the Sandman Presents one-shot, Merv Pumpkinhead: Agent of D.R.E.A.M. Inks by John Stokes.

Next Page: Before leaving Marvel, Bucky drew a two-part fill-in story for Fantastic Four with then-regular writer Mark Waid.

Merv Pumpkinhead ™ and ©2010 DC Comics. Fantastic Four, Thing ™ and ©2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

54

MM: Does the fact that he’s a skilled artist help in the way the two of you communicate as opposed to other writers you’ve worked with?

BUCKY: Personally, I found that it helped a lot. Not that it made us understand each other better so much as it meant that he wrote with an understanding of flow and pacing. He mostly works to a five panels per page structure, and he never overcrowds a panel with word balloons. The pacing is very well considered, and if there is a lot of dialogue and a lot of characters talking at once, he opens things up and gives everything more space. I’ve encountered this with some newer writers where this is something they just don’t get. They just assume they can do an eight-panel page and have three different conversations going on in each panel and that somehow it will work and be fine. And, yes, if you’re George Pérez or Phil Jiminez you can make it work and it’ll look fantastic. I always find those kind of scripts a struggle.

So working with Bill is great.

MM: With the “Animal Farm” story arc, compared to the rest of your run, your drawing style was a little different. Was it because you were still focused on Spider-Man, or was it Steve Leialoha getting used to your pencils, or—?

Also, you have to bear in mind that at the same time I was drawing issue #6 we had Lan Medina come on board and start drawing issue #1. We were actually doing our two story arcs simultaneously, and Steve was inking both. So part of the reason that story arc looks different from what came afterwards was that Steve was dealing with two different approaches to penciling at the same time, and he was doing his best to create a cohesive ink finish that made both arcs work. In many ways Steve was underpinning the feel of the series. He was the one person who was lined up for the longer haul.

BUCKY: If I look at my pencils from back then and the stuff I’m doing now, they’re not so far apart. In fact, there have been bigger changes in between. If anything, I’m probably closer now to the style I was using in “Animal Farm” than to other points in Fables history. Part of it does come from the fact that Steve and I were working together for the first time. What you now see as the Fables look is something that developed as our relationship evolved and as we got a better understanding of one another’s working methods and styles.

55

Below: Viva le révolution! Rose, Shere Khan, and some smaller allies pose for a Fables statue.

Next Page Top: Snow finds her secret weapons in this two-page spread from Fables #8. Inks by Steve Leialoha.

Next Page Bottom: Bucky drew this piece as a warm-up before getting started on “Animal Farm.”

MM: Were you originally going to do just one arc or were you going to do every other arc?

BUCKY: I talked with Shelly early on when Bill was putting the book together, while I was working full-time on Spider-Man. I’d been maintaining the relationship with Vertigo and I wanted to continue doing more work for them, but I was still so involved with what Paul and I were doing on Spider-Man that I couldn’t imagine that I would have time to do a whole other regular series. I wanted to work with Bill again and I wanted

Fables and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Bill Willingham and DC Comics.

to do a story arc for Fables. It seemed that they wanted to follow the model of Sandman.

Bill is the creator of the series. He did a lot of preparatory work—sketches of the lead characters, street plans for Fabletown, layouts of certain parts of some of the buildings, and that sort of thing.

I was the first artist to sign up for the series, and they very kindly gave me a choice. Bill had already written part of each of the first two storylines, so I actually had a chance to read scripts from both and make a decision on which story I wanted to draw. I picked “Animal Farm” because it was the one that appealed to me the most. I mean, I’d been drawing Manhattan streets long enough in the Spider-Man book. [laughter] The “Legends in Exile” story was familiar territory; it wasn’t going to give me anything different. Whereas with “Animal Farm,” it had all the stuff I wanted to draw: lots of animal characters, organic environments, fairy tale cottages, dragons and giants, and not that many human characters. Basically it was just Rose and Snow.

Two pretty girls and everything else I wanted to draw. For me there was no choice.

And it was the right choice. I had so much fun drawing it, that I then wanted to make the series mine. It was like, “I don’t want to do anything else. This is the sort of stuff I should be doing.” I think if I had actually made the mistake of picking the first story arc I don’t know if I would have enjoyed it enough to want to stick around.

MM: It’s funny, I’ve seen lots of people on various message boards who said they didn’t like the first story and that it was “Animal Farm” that got them hooked on the book.

BUCKY: And I think that’s still the case. Even now I’m still hearing that a lot. People tend to have to give the first couple of trades a read before they get it. The first story is the setup. It’s about getting to know the characters and introducing the concept. But “Animal Farm” is where it starts to get fun. You can then see the stranger and wilder aspects of what this story is all about. And I think it has a much more interesting momentum and drive to it. There’s a lot more going on with all of the intrigue and the conflict between Snow and Rose. There’s a lot more meat in it as a story.

56

MM: At what point was it decided that you would be the regular artist? Was it before or after you finished “Animal Farm”?

BUCKY: I got to the end of “Animal Farm” and I rang up Shelly and said, “I have had a lot of fun doing this, and I know we were working on the principle of you’re doing the book in terms of story arcs, but would you consider having me come on as the regular artist?” Thankfully, both Bill and Shelly thought that was exactly the right thing to do and were very pleased with the idea. So that was it. There was no debate, no discussion. It was just, “Yeah,” and I was on.

They already had, at that point, Bryan Talbot drawing a one-off story about the Civil War and Lan getting started on a two-parter about a journalist who thought the Fables were all vampires and werewolves and was going to expose them. So the next available story arc was “Storybook Love.”

MM: It was with that story arc where you started playing with the designs and the page layouts. Your first story arc was just straight-ahead storytelling.

BUCKY: Definitely. In that first story arc, the Kirby influence was very apparent, because I was doing every page, as much as possible, as three tiers of two panels—a very rigid six-panel grid structure.

And that, for me, worked perfectly. I was very comfortable with that. My real focus when I was doing “Animal Farm” and also SpiderMan was to get back to a principle of solid basic layouts. What’s important is what you put in each panel. It’s the storytelling, it’s the structure, it’s the flow—that’s all I was interested in.

And I think, in a way, it was me trying to be an antidote to what I 57

58

felt was the norm in so many comics at the time, which was this tendency to cram a million panels onto one page or to make it a splash page and to play around with strange, wonky angles. Anything other than telling a proper comic book story seemed to be what everyone was on about, and I really didn’t want to be a part of that.

I really felt that was the wrong way for people to be going. The experience for the reader was to me the most important thing—to convey the story in an immediate and comfortable fashion and never to assume too much understanding in a reader, because I don’t want to just preach to the converted. I want new people to discover the comics I work on and start reading them even if they’ve never read a comic book before. And that remains my guiding principle on Fables.

I was a little bit more playful during “Storybook Love” and some of the following arcs, where I allowed decorative elements and floral borders to permeate into the art itself, but never in a way that it

would detract from a straightforward understanding of the storytelling component. After playing around with that stuff for a while, I eventually pared it all down to the concept of the border art device.

MM: And that really took effect in issue #30.

BUCKY: For a while I was changing the header motif displaying the page number, but that became problematic because A) it was taking up a lot of space on the page, and B) sometimes it was actually getting in the way of things I was trying to do in the panels. But the framing device of the strips down the side of the artwork really came into their own, especially as I could use them as a visual clue to the reader as to what plotline we were following. That, to me, helped a lot.

MM: There’s such a large cast of characters you have to deal with, each following their own subplots, that it really is a great device for helping the reader keep up with things.

59

Previous Page: During the “Storybook Love” arc, Bucky began incorporating decorative elements, such as the leaves shown here, to help establish changes of scene. Fables #16, page 19. Inks by Steve Leialoha.

Above: With issue #30, Bucky began using the border art format that continues in the series to this day. This page of border designs was done for “The Dark Ages” (issues #77-81).

Fables and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Bill Willingham and DC Comics.

Below: Mowgli and his brother wolves track down the biggest, baddest wolf of them all. Pencils for page 8 of Fables #49.

Next Page: Writer Bill Willingham gives Bucky room in his script for things like this half-page splash panel from Fables #61.

Fables and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Bill Willingham and DC Comics.

BUCKY: Exactly. That was what I was trying to do. “Let’s create border devices that tell you, ‘Okay, we’ve now switched environments. We’re not at the farm anymore, we’re now in the Homelands.’” And they can tell the reader which character we’re following or convey a certain mood in where the story is going.

When it came to “Wolves” [Fables #4849] and issue #50, I thought, “Well, I’ve been doing the border art for a while now, and I may be overplaying this particular motif. Maybe if I do it too much it will become passé and the readers will no longer enjoy it. I should stop.” I did “Wolves” and issue #50 without it. I went

back to straightforward panel grids without any of those touches, and the one thing that everyone asked me was, “What happened to the border art? We miss it.”

So it all came back, and now it’s an established part of the look of Fables.

Recently I’ve taken a little break from it, whilst working on “The Great Fables Crossover”—the big event that ties together Fables, Jack of Fables, and a miniseries that I drew called The Literals. I drew the first episode in an issue of Fables, then all three issues of The Literals, and I didn’t want my stuff to be jarring when the reader then goes to Tony [Adkins] and Russ [Braun]’s pages and have them done in a different approach. Before we started, I basically said, “Look, I’m going to go back to standard comic proportions without any design borders or extra bits on the page. Let’s all fit to that same purpose so we create a consistent reading experience.” We exchanged e-mails and sent each other pages and designs for characters and things like that, so that we were all working in a consistent way so that the final book would hold together as one reading experience and not be confusing.

That sort of thing is really, really important to me. In some ways, I’m more suited to being an editorial art director than maybe being a comic artist, because I actually worry an awful lot about that side of things, especially on a book like Fables that’s been so precious to me.

MM: Were the design elements also your way of making the book your own to some degree?

BUCKY: Yeah, to be honest, that really was the case. With “Animal Farm,” I was just part of the team. I was working on a product that belonged to Bill, and he had certain visions in mind for how characters would look, he had plans prepared for the layout of Bullfinch Street, and even little sketches of the shop fronts. Bill, being a very good artist in his own right, was keen to pin a lot of this stuff down early on. So I took a much more laid back approach to my involvement in the project. I wasn’t expecting to be involved beyond that story arc, and I didn’t want to do anything that would be problematic.

60

MM: Once Bill started seeing those changes in your penciling approach, did he start writing towards that?

Since Lan and I were doing our story arcs simultaneously, as he designed things like the interior of the business office and I designed the look of the farm and we designed the looks for different characters in our arcs, that stuff was being sent back and forth so that we could make sure the likenesses and designs were consistent through both stories. And what I was doing stylistically was taking on elements of Lan’s style and what Bill had done in the sketches and trying to homogenize it all in a way that it would make for a consistent style for the book. I thought that would be the best thing for the series as a whole.

With the “Storybook Love” arc, it was like, “Okay, now that this is going to be my book and not just a book I contribute to, I have a little more freedom. I can take advantage of that and play around with design elements and style and see where it goes.”

BUCKY: That’s a good question. I think as things developed with the arcs that followed I could see a few changes. I think it also helped that Shelly arranged for us to have monthly conference calls so we’d have a chance to sound ideas off each other. I was able to start contributing ideas for the plots and to suggest things that might expand what Bill was doing in the main stories. I don’t think I’ve noticed a major change in the way Bill writes at any point. We just naturally work well together. His way of plotting and pacing pages suits me incredibly well.

What’s been nice for me working with Bill is I don’t have to read through a script and think, “How can I 61

work all of these elements into the issue?”

Bill breaks it down in a way that just feels right.

He doesn’t overcrowd panels with multiple characters talking, and he creates a lot of space in his stories. He’s not afraid to have two- or three-panel pages and allow space to establish new environments or to create splash pages for important moments in the story. As I’ve gotten more excited about working with splashes and double-page spreads and playing with the flow of the story across spreads, Bill seems to have jumped to that challenge and writes more with that in mind. With issue #75, the climax of the “War and Pieces” story arc, we decided from the outset that it was going to be a series of doublepage spreads and that he wouldn’t break down the page in the script.

He left it to me as to how each scene would play out across each spread. The fact that it went so well and we both came away from it feeling it had been a good and useful experiment has been liberating, and every so often a sequence will come up where he’ll leave it to me again to plan the best way to choreograph it. I do regularly throw in plotlines and suggest things we could be doing.

Soldiers.” He was originally going to be one of the casualties. I could see that there was far more to this character than just being a background guy that we can make one or two fly-eating jokes about. There was something about him that could make him a much more significant part of the story, and, of course, we ended up with “The Good Prince” arc.

I had a chat with Bill a few weeks back and ended up suggesting a major story idea for what we’re going to be

MM: Is there anything significant that you’ve contributed?

BUCKY: Well, early on I was the guy who stopped him from killing Flycatcher in “The March of the Wooden 62

I have for this project. I live with Fables seven days a week. Being that immersed in this world, it’s hard for me not to consider possibilities and look for the pathways of where we go next and which characters we could bring to the fore.

For me, that’s part of the process. I would like to be writing. I would like to be creating my own worlds, but for now the fact that I have some ability to contribute to that side of things in this book is very satisfying in itself.

MM: In “Storybook Love” we first get introduced to the trio of Boy Blue, Flycatcher, and Pinocchio, and it turns out they’re comic book fans. Did you come up with the titles of the comics they read?

BUCKY: Yes, that’s another thing you can blame me for. Actually, that was probably one of the first instances of me really taking hold of the book and starting to put more of myself into it in a very obvious way. It was at that point I thought, “I’m going to make the characters mine.” That’s when I started developing all the musical elements to Boy Blue’s costume.

Pinocchio suddenly took on that cartoony look with the miserable face with the bottom lip jutting out and the frown. Flycatcher suddenly acquired the frog hat and his hair got a bit scruffier and he became lankier.

Basically, that was me doing the cartoon stuff I’d always wanted to do in the context of a serious American adventure comic.

doing from now up to issue #100, which Bill seemed to be greatly inspired by. He immediately started seeding elements of it into the latest scripts.

I feel very good at this point to be an active part of the whole process. I mean, The Literals, the mini-series I drew in the spring—I named those characters the Literals. That’s my fault. [laughter] I’ll have to take the blame for many bits and pieces as we go along. [laughter] But, for me, that’s just part and parcel of the enthusiasm 63

64

MM: Did you know at that point that Baba Yaga would be disguised as Red Riding Hood in the next story arc when you came up with the Red Hood: Little Riding Returns homage to the cover of The Dark Knight Returns #1?

BUCKY: I knew she was coming back, and I knew it was going to be bad. It was fun to do that as a sort of preemptive for what was coming up. Most of the others were just me having fun. I liked the idea of instead of The Inhumans, The Un-Mundy, and instead of Iron Man to do Tin Man, and Stalk Thing instead of Swamp Thing. If we get the chance, I’m hoping I can play with it a bit more. When the “Burning Issues” issue of Fables came up, I was secretly hoping that someone would ask to see more of what those comics are like. [laughter] I want an excuse to draw two or three pages of one of them.

One of the things I’ve tried to do with Fables is bring a lightness to it in terms of the tone—to bring more humor and maybe a bit more innocence, a bit more heart to cut against some of the horror and the drama and some of the grim things that are happening sometimes—so that we end up with something much more fulfilling as a whole and something that will make people feel good. I think there are far too many comics around these days—and not just comics, but films and other media, as well—with too much emphasis on the dark, that try to look for the bad in everything. We’re playing with the fairy tale elements, and we’re quite often putting a dark twist on them, but at the same time, I want to make this book something that feels fresh and invigorating and positive. That’s what I’ve tried to do.

Sometimes it actually plays to our advantage, because it means the darkest moments hurt that much more for the reader, like when a favorite character dies.

There is a certain amount of levity and bounce to the way that I draw and the way that I tell the story that makes those things seem more shocking. If we made the mood too dark too often, I don’t think it would necessarily give the same shock.

BUCKY: My fault again. That was something I suggested to Bill before we started, because I loved the idea that when Blue traveled from one world to another, it would almost be like he was stepping from one storybook into another, and that the feel of each land would be like stepping into a different artist’s interpretation. In a way, it sort of harkens back to the stuff I was doing in Miracleman.

We actually made that trip with Boy Blue quite quickly, and we didn’t really spend that much time in that many different worlds for me to play with that to the extent that I wanted to. The barren world, where Blue

Pages 62 and 63: Twopage spread from the climactic battle with the Adversary’s forces in Fables #75.

Previous Page: Blue, Flycatcher, and Pinocchio make a trip to the comic shop in Fables #15. Inks

by Steve Leialoha.

Below: For Blue’s journey to the Homelands, Bucky used different styles to represent the different worlds he passed through.

Here Bucky used a black colored pencil to depict a desolate, dangerous land.

Fables and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Bill Willingham and DC Comics.

MM: Let‘s talk about “Homelands,” where Blue is traveling through the different worlds. You change the style in which the backgrounds are drawn from world to world.

65

Below: A commission illustration of Bigby, Snow, and their cubs.

Next Page: These days Rose Red looks a good deal like Bucky’s wife, Irma. Fables #24, page 4.

Inks by Steve Leialoha.

Fables and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Bill Willingham and DC Comics.

encounters the dragon in the cave, the style I was using there with the black pencil I was really pleased with, and that’s something that I’ve played with a bit more since.

MM: Was that a grease pencil you were using?

BUCKY: No, just a regular black coloring pencil. I tend to use the cheapest, most basic materials I can find. [laughter] This

thing about an artist blaming his tools, I’ll use anything—with the exception of brushes for inking; I’m quite specific about that: a Winsor & Newton series 7, #3. Apart from that, I’m not at all fussy about anything.

The pencils I draw most of my books with are just cheap HB pencils from a big stationery store in the UK—the ones with erasers on the end. I buy packs of ten for about a pound; they’re not expensive, but they work for me. The same goes for most things when it comes to painting and other mediums, too. I make whatever I can find work for me. I don’t go searching for specific tools which I think will make the work better. Because, really, at the end of the day, what makes it good is what you do with it.

MM: I want to talk a bit about the age progression of Snow and Bigby’s children.

Have you found that to be a challenge through the series, to age them but to keep them easily recognizable?

BUCKY: It can be. It’s worse if we don’t see much of them and they suddenly have to jump a year or two just for one page and then they disappear again for a while. I find that slightly more of a strain. When I get to draw them for a while, like in the Christmas issue where they were the focus of that tale, that kind of thing I like better, because then I have a little time to get used to them. To be honest, anything that allows me to have fun with characters other than standard male or female figures makes me happy. I like drawing children. I like drawing old people, babies... anything that makes me work a bit harder and think things through a bit more.

But give me a crowd of handsome people in their 20s or 30s and I get quite bored. I find it a strain to make it interesting.

MM: Do you have a favorite character?

BUCKY: I have lots of favorite characters.

Flycatcher is probably one of the ones I like the most, and I’m still campaigning to stop Bill from finding an excuse to kill him. [laughter] But Boy Blue I like a lot, as well, so I’m sad that he’s gone. Pinocchio I like a lot. I like Rose Red immensely as a character to draw.

That’s partly because I ended up slowly tweaking her appearance until she looked an awful lot like my wife, Irma. So there are personal reasons why I like to draw her. [laughter]

66

Part 5:

Storytelling and the Creative Process the same time period my editors were in their offices in New York. I was effectively working to a New York schedule, and that worked very well.

At the moment she has a new job that is focused more in the morning. I am working more of a regular day now. I guess I’m working from about 10:00 in the morning ’til about 2:00, then stopping for a while for lunch and maybe getting going again around 4:00 or 5:00 and working into

MM: Do you ever use Irma as a model?

BUCKY: Yes, and myself. I used to be much more reliant on things like mirrors and Action Man—sort of a British equivalent of [the original, 12"] G.I. Joe. I still have one of those lying around, which I find quite useful for figure work. But digital cameras are great. It’s become the most useful tool in my office, really, because it’s so convenient to be able to set the timer, pose in a way that’s appropriate for something I’m struggling with on the page, and be able to work from that in an immediate way to be able to get something more genuine and realistic down onto the page, and I’m afraid I’ve made Irma pose from time to time. [laughter] It’s a very good way of clarifying things in your mind. I don’t think in terms of taking photographs when I’m planning an issue. I always lay everything out just drawing straight on the page. But as I’m tightening things up, I do find sometimes that if I can take a quick snap to make sure a body posture looks natural, or that if someone falls down on the floor they will land in that way, it’s really useful. And I don’t even print them out or anything. I just turn the camera around and take a peek at the image I’ve got, and usually that’s enough to make the adjustment I need to make it right.

MM: What’s your typical working day like? Do you try to stick to a set schedule, or does it vary from day to day?

BUCKY: It varies depending on all sorts of different factors, really. I do try and make my day coincide with Irma’s. For a while she was presenting a late-night political discussion program on local regional television. That meant her working day mostly ran from about 5:00 in the afternoon through to about 1:00 in the morning, which are horrible hours for any normal person to have to contend with. But for me it actually worked out to be perfect, because it meant I was drawing at my desk during 67

Above: Character designs for the Three Little Pigs done in preparation for the “Animal Farm” storyline.

Below: This preliminary sketch of Br’er Rabbit was tweaked a bit for Fables #9, page 9, panel 4.

Next Page: Design sketches of Mr. Dark, along with the pencils for page 22 of Fables #83 with Mr. Dark standing in the ruins of Fabletown.

Fables and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Bill Willingham and DC Comics.

the evening. How long I keep working depends on whether I have other obligations or how well the work’s going. I tend to operate on the principle that if things are going well I don’t like to stop. If things are going really badly, it usually pays for me to give up and go do something useful [laughter] and come back to drawing later.

As far as how I actually structure the work itself, I try and keep the amount of preparatory work to a minimum, in terms of drawing. I like to study the script thoroughly. I do thumbnails for the entire issue before I draw anything, just to make sure I get the flow right in my mind and in the roughs. I find that’s best, because I like to have rhythm, and I like to have a flow that seems natural, and I don’t like to play too much with structure and do things that are going to be jarring. I like to be able to take on elements in the story and reflect them as it develops and to see little visual elements that will lead you on the path to the pertinent moments of the story. I like to give myself time to consider all that before I get going. And I also try to gather as much reference material as I can before I get started, so if I notice a lot of stuff in the story that involves going to different locations in other parts of the world or drawing things that 68

I’m not familiar with—for example, if it’s anything military, Bill’s quite good about giving me links where I can find that type of gun or airplane or whatever. That helps me a lot. If I’m drawing lots of animals, I’ll try and dig out material for that, so I’m not inventing how an animal looks. I like to at least start as close to reality as I can, so that as I play with it I’m not taking it away from the basic structure.

MM: Is that a case where you may do a few preliminary sketches to work out how you want it to look?

BUCKY: I used to do a lot more of that in the early days with “Animal Farm.” I’d have sheets where it might be mostly shots of rabbits or mostly shots of moles or hedgehogs. I did quite a few drawings of the pigs, because I wanted to give each of the Three Little Pigs a very distinctive body shape and facial look so that you were never confused which character you were with. For me, that’s always been essential when it comes to things like the animal characters, because they are as important as all the human cast and I want them to be distinctive. I wanted to make sure they had personalities that really came through.

So I worked very hard on the animal characters early on. Now that kind of stuff comes a bit more instinctively, and I don’t have to prepare quite so much.

If a new character is being introduced, I’ll do a page of sketches before I get going.

I did that with Freddy and Mouse in “The Dark Ages.” But that’s also because with [cover artist] James [Jean], and now with our new guy, Joao Ruas, sometimes I need

to provide them with reference material. I could leave it to them. For the design of the Emperor puppet in “Homelands,” James came up with that himself and I then used his design in the book. But most of the time I try to be the one who gets the design done first. The last thing I want is for someone who’s only going to draw the character once to leave me having to work with a look I might not like for a hundred pages—or maybe a thousand pages depending on how popular they become and how long they stick around.

Of course, it can backfire, because sometimes it means I spend a lot of time developing the look for a new character and then I get the script and the character dies on page 13. [laughter] “What did I do that for?” [laughter] Sometimes it actually works to my benefit, because Bill may see a design for a character and like it so much that he’ll give it a new level of importance in the story. These things feed into each other.

But as far as a lot of initial drawing, I don’t do that. I don’t do rough versions of pages. Once I’ve got the idea shaped in my head and the little thumbnails to refer to—which I can usually fit a whole issue onto one sheet of paper. They’re not big; they’re maybe an inch and a half high 69

Previous Page: Lancelot tells of the downfall of Camelot. Fables #62, page 5.

Left: Design sketch for Grinder the Troll.

Below: Flycatcher—or rather King Ambrose— stands to meet his challenger, Grinder the Troll.

Fables and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Bill Willingham and DC Comics.

and an inch wide or so. I then lay out the board and start drawing straight away. To me, that always seems to be what works best, because I like it to feel as fresh and immediate as possible. If I do a lot of pre-work and labor on the design and structure and start tracing things onto the board, for me it destroys all the energy and the enthusiasm I have for the page and the book. I need it to feel fresh. I need to get it down onto the paper as quickly as possible. Whenever I revisit a drawing I always lose something. It’s often the quickest and roughest drawings that fall exactly right. You look at it and say, “That’s it. I don’t want to mess with that.”

When it comes to actually working on the page, I have the most insane working method. It’s a bit like musical chairs. I like to work to music. I like to listen to the radio, especially BBC Radio 4 for all its news, documentaries and comedy, but since I came to Spain I’ve tended to work more listening to CDs. I’ll stick a CD on, grab a page and start working on it. I use the length of the CD as the imperative. I know that when that music stops I’m going to pick that page up and put it to one side and grab a different board and start drawing again. I’ve found that that’s been incredibly helpful in terms of keeping my focus and troubleshooting and solving problems as quickly as possible.

It’s also helped to kill most of the instances of artist’s block, where I’d be working and working and working on a page and be frustrated with something and unable to see the way to fix it. Now that page disappears from my desk. If I get stuck on something, I 71

lots of ’70s progressive rock anyway, but with that story I was listening to a lot of Yes and Gentle Giant. That kind of taking a trip off to strange, other lands seemed to suit going to another world and the armor and the armies—that epic quality was being reflected in the music I was listening to. Other times it’s more appropriate to go with something sharper and spikier and a bit more pop and immediate.

Other times I listen to things more relaxing, like new age or classical. I do let music influence the tone of what I’m doing, and I choose what I think is appropriate for what I’m trying to do. Sometimes it runs counter to the type of story I’m doing. During a big chunk of “The Dark Ages” I was mostly listening to folk music, which doesn’t sound like a good combination, but it seemed to work for me.

I started working this way during the “Sons of Empire” story arc, and I started timing myself. I actually make a note at the top of the page on the amount of time I’ve spent working on it. And that seems to have helped, as well, because if it’s the third or fourth time I’ve gone back to the page and the total amount of time I’ve spent working on it is moving up to four or five hours, then I start to think, “Maybe I’m laboring on this one a bit too long.” It’s quite invigorating and encouraging if I come away from a couple of sessions of drawing on a sheet and the page is more or less finished.

I feel very positive about that, because I feel I’m making immediate progress.

Above: This page came fairly easily for Bucky, with Lumi the Snow Queen falling under the spell of Sleeping Beauty.

It clocked in at three hours and 25 minutes.

Fables #74, page 17.

Next Page: This page clocked in on the high end at a whopping nine hours and five minutes, but it certainly was worth the effort. Bigby’s expressions and body language are priceless.

Fables #83, page 11.

Fables and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Bill Willingham and DC Comics.

know that the maximum length of time I’m likely to be sitting there staring at the thing is probably an hour. At that point the music stops and I need to put something else on. And usually I solve the problem in my head while I’m drawing something completely different on the next sheet of paper. By the time I get back to that page, which will probably be later in the day or sometime the next day, I’ll know what was wrong.

MM: Will you listen to certain CDs when you’re drawing something with a certain mood?

BUCKY: I do choose music to suit subject matter sometimes. With “The Good Prince” I was listening a lot to—well, I listen to 72

MM: Do you sketch at all outside of your paid work?

BUCKY: I started painting a little bit more to practice in advance of doing painted covers, which is the latest addition to my working life with covers for The Literals, a cover for Fables, and a few other bits and pieces I’m doing. It’s been nice to get the watercolors out again and just play around and see what I can come up with. I like to draw away from doing comic pages, but I don’t get to do as much as I like, primarily because I spend far too much time working on comic book pages. [laughter] The problem is that usually when I stop, what I want to do is not do anything.

That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy drawing

73

think you’ll get around to taking the plunge and working on one in earnest? What would it take to give you the impetus to do your own book?

or that I don’t want to draw more, but I’ve always tended to draw for a reason. I don’t tend to doodle just because doodling is fun. I tend to sketch because there’s an idea brewing in my head for a project, or there’s something I’d like to do and things are sparking off related to it. So most of the drawing I do that’s not for Fables is me planning and developing ideas for other projects. Inventing scenarios and characters—that’s something that’s growing with time, something I’m looking to develop as the years progress.

BUCKY: Being faster. [laughter] All I need is more time.

That is the real problem for me. I invest an awful lot of effort into Fables, and I don’t really want that to decline.

For me, that is my primary motivation: working on Fables and making it as good as I possibly can. Because I know that it’s unlike any other book I’m likely to be given, and I want to make sure that it survives. I want to make sure I do all the things with this book that I want to. But, really, it’s just a matter of time. As my confi-

MM: We’ve talked before about creator-owned things of your own you’d like to do at some point. When do you 74

Previous Page and Left: Art from Bucky and Irma’s adaptation of Tori Amos’ song, “Snow Cherries from France,” for Comic Book Tattoo.

Below: Frontis piece artwork for Neil Gaiman’s children’s book, Odd and the Frost Giant.

Snow Cherries from France ™ and ©2010 Tori Amos. Odd and the Frost Giants ™ and ©2010 Neil Gaiman.

dence builds, as my drawing ability becomes more refined and my ability to produce pages speeds up, I’m hoping that I will be able to create more opportunities for myself to take time out to do personal work.

At the moment, that tends to be relatively small amounts. There was a five-page strip I did with Irma for the Tori Amos book, Comic Book Tattoo. We did that in a weekend; it wasn’t a major commitment, but it was something that felt very good and very fresh, and it was something personal to us.

That meant a lot to me, because it wasn’t a company job. It wasn’t me drawing a superhero book for a month. It was something that was unique to us. And other things I’ve done in the last year or two, like the illustrations for Neil’s Odd and the Frost Giants book wasn’t a big commitment in terms of the amount of time it took for me, but it was very satisfying and allowed me to experiment a little and try some different things.

And it helps to reinvigorate then what I do in Fables. It’s not a question that I want to make time for these other things, but I know I have to.

For my own growth as an artist, I can’t allow what I do on Fables to stagnate because I’m not refreshing myself on a regular basis in terms of trying different things and playing with where I’m going with the art. As much as I like to do that on Fables, the problem with Fables is that we’re usually dealing with story arcs that are four or five issues long. So if I do experiment, it’s an experiment I’ve got to live with for half a year, 75

Above: One of the “bits and pieces” Bucky has done over the past few years is this pin-up for Mike Oeming and Bryan Glass’ Mice Templar.

Next Page: Back in 2001, Bucky did a “Future Shocks” story for 2000 AD entitled “Accessory.” Shown here is page 1 of that story.

Mice Templar and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Michael Avon Oeming and Bryan JL Glass. Future Shocks ™ and ©2010 2000 AD.

whereas if you’re doing short stories and bits and pieces, you’ve got the ability to try different things and if something doesn’t work you can move on immediately and take a different path. It’s a lot more fluid and immediate. And that’s what I really want to do.

But I think in terms of that kind of experimentation, it doesn’t work for me to just sit and sketch. If I don’t have a purpose, if I don’t have an end result that usually involves getting it out to an audience, I lack the purpose to finish it. That’s why I don’t do much in the way of sketches and commissions and things for fans, because that’s not really why I do what I do. I don’t want to just draw and get some money or whatever. For me, there has to be a story to tell. There has to be a very solid sense of this being something. So I do sketch and I do stuff that isn’t Fables, but it tends to be quite directed.

I think I should be ready for the first of my own projects to surface soon. I’ve started writing more again. I just wrote and drew a six-page “Merv Pumpkinhead” strip 76

for the House of Mystery Annual. I’m following that with a ten-page prose story for Fables #100. All these things have helped boost my confidence, and I’m now far more focused on finally bringing some of my own creations to life. I’m determined to make more time for them in the coming months.

I just spent a long time answering a question that could have been answered in about three words. [laughter] MM: If you answered every question in three words, it would be a pretty dull interview.

BUCKY: No, Irma goes with me—because she’s a big comics fan and she’s involved in helping out with various comics festivals and events—to most cons, and she’s always telling me off, especially when she has to translate for me at foreign cons, because I do babble, and she says, “Take a breath.

Just say a sentence or two and let me translate.” [laughter] I do tend to waffle on. It’s one of my bad habits, I’m afraid. [laughter]

77

Right: Panels from 2008’s Comic-Con International Fables panel giveaway.

Below: A Bigby and Snow commission.

Next Page: Art for the Nexus 4 bookstore in Santander, Spain.

Fables and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Bill Willingham and DC Comics. Batman, Death ™ and ©2010 DC Comics.

Spider-Man ™ and ©2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

MM: Speaking of cons, I want to ask you about the one-page Fables strips you’ve done the past two years as a giveaway at the San Diego Comic-Con Fables panel.

Was that Bill’s idea?

BUCKY: The first one was just Bill and Matt [Sturges].

Bill and Matt wrote it and Bill drew it. I remember saying to Bill at the con, “I would have liked to have been

involved in that.” I like to be involved in the fun stuff for the fans. So we came to a deal that the following year I would actually contribute the artwork for whatever the next giveaway would be. We had something a little more elaborate in mind, which I won’t mention here in case we get to do it for this year instead, but in the end time was against us so we came back down to doing a one-page strip again, but this time DC jumped in and they printed it themselves. The previous year it had been just Bill printing it himself.

I think the reason DC wanted to get involved was that the audience kept growing.

Every year we have to try and get a bigger room, because we keep having to turn people away. And because we weren’t able to give everyone Bill’s strip the previous year, I did an additional limited print illustration of some of the characters from the one-page strip to give those who missed out. It’s something we’ve created a tradition for, so now we’re going to have to keep coming up with little freebies for the fans. I think we all feel we like to maintain a good, close relationship with the readership of Fables.

Certainly Bill, through the Clockwork Storybook site which used to be Fabletown Forum, is making it accessible for all the readers to be able to reach all of us who work on the book. They can ask us questions directly and speculate on where they think things are going with the book and discuss what we’ve done so far, and I find that very encouraging. Our fans have been extremely loyal and supportive of us, and we like to keep finding ways to thank them.

78

Mark Buckingham

Art Gallery

80

81

82

Page 80: Cover art for Peter Parker, Spider-Man #20, Bucky’s first issue.

Page 81: Splash page pencils from Peter Parker, Spider-Man #20, featuring many of the biggies from Spidey’s rogues’ gallery.

Left: Two-page spread from Fantastic Four #65.

Page 84: Galactus is coming! Pencils for Marvel Knights Spider-Man #16, page 19.

Page 85: Page from “The Magician,” a ten-page back-up story in Stan Lee Meets the Silver Surfer #1.

In the story Stan the Man helps a young lad from England create his own comic books. Hmm... that sounds kind of familiar.

Captain America, Dr. Doom, Dr. Strange, Fantastic Four, Galactus, Giant-Man, Invisible Girl, Iron Man, Kraven the Hunter, Lizard, Mr. Fantastic, Mysterio, Sandman, Spider-Man, Thing, Thor, Vulture, Wasp ™ and ©2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

83

84

85

Right: Two-page spread from the Merv Pumpkinhead: Agent of D.R.E.A.M. one-shot special.

Inks by John Stokes.

Merv Pumpkinhead, Underlord Sketchtale ™ and ©2010 DC Comics.

86

87

Above and Right: Pencils and inks for the variant cover of Superman:World of Krypton #9.

Next Page: This 2007 piece was done for the Bristol Comic Expo’s convention booklet. 2000 AD was celebrating its 30th anniversary that year, so guest artists were asked to contribute artwork with the theme, “What will 2000 AD’s characters be like in another 30 years?” It appears Ace Garp came out on top.

Superman ™ and ©2010 DC Comics. ABC Warriors, Ace Garp and all related characters ™ and ©2010 2000 AD.

88

89

Above: CD cover art for Chris Opperman’s 2010 release The Lionheart.

Right: Pencils for a commissioned illustration of Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw accompanied by his two most famous creations, Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins, from his play Pygmalion.

Next Page: Artwork for a limited edition print for the Athens Comic Con 2008.

The Lionheart ™ and ©2010 Chris Opperman.

90

91

92

Previous Page: Cover art for Bull Damn City #2, a Spanish anthology series.

Above: Artwork for a poster celebrating the 10th anniversary of The Dragon, a comic shop in Ontario, Canada.

Top Left: Unused panel of Shere Khan for Fables #8.

Left: Prior to working on the “Animal Farm” story arc of Fables, Bucky drew this preliminary sketch of some of the animals involved in the story.

Fables and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Bill Willingham and DC Comics. Bull Damn City ™ and ©2010 respective owner.

93

Left: Design sketch for Boy Blue’s “Homelands” outfit.

Below and Next Page: Design sketches for Throk and Ogren, two goblins with a relatively large role in Fables #36, the first chapter of “Homelands.”

Fables and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Bill Willingham and DC Comics. Bull Damn City ™ and ©2010 respective owner.

94

95

96

Previous Page: Snicker-snack! Throk and Ogren meet their doom at the end of Blue’s vorpal blade.

Left: Acrylic painting for the cover of the Miracleman: Apocrypha trade paperback collection.

Below: For the cover of Miracleman: The Golden Age trade paperback collection, Bucky used mixed media, including acrylics and clay, creating a three-dimensional piece of art.

Fables and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Bill Willingham and DC Comics. Miracleman ™ and ©2010 respective owner. Miracleman artwork ©2010 Mark Buckingham.

Page 98: Page from 2000 AD #853’s “Tyranny Rex” prog. Bucky used ink, marker pens, and watercolor for the finished piece.

Page 99: Uncropped watercolor painting for the cover of Fables #82.

Fables and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Bill Willingham and DC Comics.

97

98

99

Left: Uncropped watercolor painting for the titlepage art of “The Christmas Pies,” the story Bucky painted for Fables: 1,001 Nights of Snowfall.

Above: A watercolor test piece of Reynard the Fox for “The Christmas Pies.”

Page 102: Watercolor cover painting for Channel Evil #2. Channel Evil is a three-issue mini-series from Bucky’s old friend Shane Oakley.

Page 103: This watercolor painting was printed as a poster which was given free to attendees of the Aviles Comics Convention in 2009.

Page 104: Artwork for Scene But Not Herd, one of the creator-owned projects Bucky is currently developing. Pencils and inks by Bucky, with color courtesy of another of his old friends, D’Israeli.

Page 105: Artwork for a trading card set sold for charity at the Bristol Comic Festival 2003.

Fables and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Bill Willingham and DC Comics. Channel Evil ™ and ©2010 Renegade Arts Entertainment Ltd. Aviles Print, Scene But Not Herd, Phibi, Zeb, and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Mark Buckingham.

101

102

103

104

105

Right: Bring on the bad guys! Design sketches of Geppetto.

Below: Design sketch of Lumi, the Snow Queen.

Below Right: Design sketches of one of the Adversary’s top agents and all around jerk, Hansel.

Fables and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Bill Willingham and DC Comics.

106

Right: Character design sketches for the “Arabian Nights (and Days)” story arc in Fables #42-45.

Below: Someone let the d’jinn out of the bottle.

Pencils for Fables #43, page 22.

Fables and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Bill Willingham and DC Comics.

Pages 108 and 109: Pinocchio tries to convince Geppetto and his advisors of the foolishness of going to war with Fabletown.

Pencils for Fables #55, pages 2 and 3.

Pages 110 and 111: King Ambrose and his squire, Trusty John, enjoy the day in the newly established kingdom of Haven.

Pencils for Fables #66, pages 4 and 5.

Pages 112 and 113: Fabletown uses mundy artillery and tactics for “Operation Metal Storm.”

Pencils for Fables #74, pages 2 and 3.

Page 114: Bigby gets made a monkey of—or, rather, a chimp.

Hey, who doesn’t love a chimp?

Pencils for page 22 of the Fables tie-in mini-series The Literals #1.

Page 115: And speaking of monkeys, how can we ignore Bufkin the flying monkey of doom, hero of Fabletown, as he rallies his troops for the big showdown with Baba Yaga.

Fables and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Bill Willingham and DC Comics.

107

108

109

110

111

114

115

116

Previous Page: Perhaps the epitome of Bucky’s storytelling is his ability to convey feeling and emotion in his artwork. Take the guilt-ridden grief of Rose Red in these pencils for Fables #91.

Left: But let’s end on a happier note with the tender affection Snow and Bigby share as shown in this sketch.

Above: A 2004 self-portrait.

Fables and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Bill Willingham and DC Comics.

117

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!

And don’t miss the companion DVDs, showing artists at work in their studios!

Digital Editions are now available at www.twomorrows.com, and through the TwoMorrows App for Apple and Android!

MODERN MASTERS: IN THE STUDIO WITH GEORGE PÉREZ DVD

MODERN MASTERS: IN THE STUDIO WITH MICHAEL GOLDEN DVD

Get a PERSONAL TOUR of George’s studio, and watch STEP-BY-STEP as the fan-favorite artist illustrates a special issue of TOP COW’s WITCHBLADE! Also, see George as he sketches for fans at conventions, and hear his peers and colleagues—including MARV WOLFMAN and RON MARZ—share their anecdotes and personal insights along the way!

Go behind the scenes and into Michael Golden’s studio for a LOOK INTO THE CREATIVE MIND of one of comics’ greats. Witness a modern master in action as this 90-minute DVD provides an exclusive look at the ARTIST AT WORK, as he DISCUSSES THE PROCESSES he undertakes to create a new comics series.

(120-minute Standard Format DVD) $19.95 (Bundled with MODERN MASTERS: GEORGE PÉREZ book) $29.95 ISBN: 9781893905511 • UPC: 182658000011 Diamond Order Code: JUN053276

(90-minute Standard Format DVD) $19.95 (Bundled with MODERN MASTERS: MICHAEL GOLDEN book) $29.95 ISBN: 9781893905771 • UPC: 182658000028 Diamond Order Code: FEB088012

Bundle the matching BOOK & DVD for just $29.95!

ALAN DAVIS

GEORGE PÉREZ

BRUCE TIMM

KEVIN NOWLAN

GARCÍA-LÓPEZ

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) $14.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781893905191 Diamond Order Code: JAN073903

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) $14.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781893905252 Diamond Order Code: JAN073904

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781893905306 Diamond Order Code: APR042954

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781893905382 Diamond Order Code: SEP042971

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781893905443 Diamond Order Code: APR053191

ARTHUR ADAMS

JOHN BYRNE

WALTER SIMONSON

MIKE WIERINGO

KEVIN MAGUIRE

by Jorge Khoury & Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $5.95

by Jon B. Cooke & Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) $15.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781893905566 Diamond Order Code: FEB063354

by Roger Ash & Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $5.95

by Todd DeZago & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781893905658 Diamond Order Code: AUG063626

by Jorge Khoury & Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) $14.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781893905665 Diamond Order Code: OCT063722

More volumes are coming soon! Go to www.twomorrows.com for updates!

CHARLES VESS

MICHAEL GOLDEN

JERRY ORDWAY

FRANK CHO

MARK SCHULTZ

by Christopher Irving & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781893905696 Diamond Order Code: DEC063948

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781893905740 Diamond Order Code: APR074023

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781893905795 Diamond Order Code: JUN073926

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781893905849 Diamond Order Code: JUL091086

by Fred Perry & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781893905856 Diamond Order Code: OCT073846

MIKE ALLRED

LEE WEEKS

JOHN ROMITA JR.

MIKE PLOOG

KYLE BAKER

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781893905863 Diamond Order Code: JAN083937

by Tom Field & Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) $14.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781893905948 Diamond Order Code: MAR084009

by Jorge Khoury & Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) $14.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781893905955 Diamond Order Code: MAY084166

by Roger Ash & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781605490076 Diamond Order Code: SEP084304

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781605490083 Diamond Order Code: SEP084305

CHRIS SPROUSE

MARK BUCKINGHAM

GUY DAVIS

JEFF SMITH

FRAZER IRVING

by Todd DeZago & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 97801605490137 Diamond Order Code: NOV084298

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781605490144 Diamond Order Code: NOV090929

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781605490236 Diamond Order Code: AUG091083

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781605490243 Diamond Order Code: DEC101098

by Nathan Wilson & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781605490397

RON GARNEY

by Jorge Khoury & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781605490403 Diamond Order Code: OCT111232

CLIFF CHIANG ERIC POWELL

by Jorge Khoury & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781605490410 Diamond Order Code: APR121242

by Chris Arrant & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781605490502 Diamond Order Code: OCT131328

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

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazines) $8.95 (Digital Editions) $3.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazines) $8.95 (Digital Editions) $3.95

(100-page FULL-COLOR mag) $10.95 (Digital Editions) $4.95

BOOKS FROM TWOMORROWS PUBLISHING AMERICAN COMIC BOOK CHRONICLES: The 1950s

BILL SCHELLY tackles comics of the Atomic Era of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis!

(240-pages) $40.95 • (Digital Edition) $12.95 • ISBN: 9781605490540

1960-64 and 1965-69

JOHN WELLS covers two volumes on 1960s MARVEL COMICS, Wally Wood’s TOWER COMICS, CHARLTON, BATMAN TV SHOW, and more!

1960-64: (224-pages) $39.95 • (Digital Edition) $11.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-045-8 1965-69: (224-pages) $39.95 • (Digital Edition) $11.95 ISBN: 9781605490557

The 1970s

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

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

The 1980s

KEITH DALLAS documents comics’ 1980s Reagan years!

(288-pages) $41.95 • (Digital Edition) $13.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-046-5

AGE OF TV HEROES Examining the history of the live-action television adventures of everyone’s favorite comic book heroes, featuring the in-depth stories of the shows’ actors and behind-the-scenes players!

(192-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95

MARVEL COMICS:

LOU SCHEIMER

VOLUMES ON THE 1960s & 1970s

CREATING THE FILMATION GENERATION

Issue-by-issue field guides to the pop culture phenomenon of LEE, KIRBY, DITKO, and others, from the company’s fumbling beginnings to the full maturity of its wild, colorful, offbeat grandiosity!

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

(224-page trade paperbacks) $27.95

(288-page trade paperback with COLOR) $29.95

HOW TO CREATE COMICS FROM SCRIPT TO PRINT

Shows step-by-step how to develop a new comic, from script and art, to printing and distribution!

(108-page trade paperback with COLOR) $15.95 (bundle with companion DVD) $29.95

TwoMorrows—A New Day For Comics Fandom!

TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 E-mail: store@twomorrowspubs.com • Visit us on the Web at www.twomorrows.com

MARK BUCKINGHAM Mark Buckingham has quietly built up one of the most impressive résumés in the comic book industry.

From his early days illustrating the infamous Miracleman, to his work on the Sandman spin-off Death mini-series, Peter Parker: Spider-Man, and now the multiple Eisner Award-winning Fables, he has continued to entertain and amaze with a style that is both charming and sophisticated.

His flair for design imbues his artwork with an extra bit of magic and helps to set him apart from the rest.

But it is Mark Buckingham’s wonderful approach to storytelling and his unsurpassed ability to convey emotion that earn him the title of Modern Master!

MODERN MASTERS is an ongoing series of books celebrating the lives and work of the greatest comic book artists of our time.

ISBN-13: 978-1-60549-014-4 ISBN-10: 1-60549-014-8

51495

$15.95 In The US ISBN

978-1-60549-014-4

9 781605 490144

All characters TM & ©2010 their respective owners.