Modern Masters Volume 22: Mark Buckingham Preview

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

cs. & © DC Comi Characters TM

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 Š2010 Mark Buckingham

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]

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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.

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?

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.

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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.

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.

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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?

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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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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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.

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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

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Part 5:

Storytelling and the Creative Process

MM: Do you ever use Irma as a model?

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

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

Mark Buckingham

Art Gallery

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Modern Masters:

Mark Buckingham

Mark Buckingham has quietly built up one of the most impressive resumĂŠs in the comic book industry. From his early days drawing the infamous Miracleman, to his work on Sandman, Death, Peter Parker: Spider-Man, and now Fables (recently optioned for an ABC TV series), he has continued to entertain and amaze with a style that is both charming and sophisticated. Now Eric Nolen-Weathington explores the world of this master storyteller and designer.

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