Modern Masters Volume 15: Mark Schultz Preview

M O D E R N

M A S T E R S

V O L U M E

F I F T E E N :

Modern Masters Volume Fifteen:

MARK SCHULTZ

Table of Contents Introduction by Clayburn Moore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Part One: Of Dimetrodons and Coelacanths . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Part Two: Xenozoic Age! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Part Three: Cadillacs, Dinosaurs, Spin-offs and Tie-ins . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 Part Four: Expanding Horizons. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 Part Five: The Barbarian and the Prince . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Part Six: The Barbarian and the Prince . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 Art Gallery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97

Part 1:

Of Dimetrodons and Coelacanths

MODERN MASTERS: So, Mark, you were born in western Pennsylvania?

MARK: About half, I guess, of my youth in western Pennsylvania. But a lot of my particular interests and my sports loyalties were formed while living in the Pittsburgh area. Many of the interests that play throughout my life, like my interest in dinosaurs, are tied up for me with that city. Pittsburgh has the Carnegie Institute, which features a natural history museum with a magnificent collection of dinosaurs.

MARK SCHULTZ: No, actually I was born in Trenton, New Jersey. I’ve been a lifetime resident of Pennsylvania; my parents were lifetime residents of Pennsylvania, but at the time they were living just outside Philadelphia, which is smack up against New Jersey, and my mother’s obstetrician was associated with a hospital in Trenton.

So I was born in Trenton. Much to my chagrin, I have a New Jersey birth certificate even though I’ve never lived a day of my life in New Jersey, or indeed any place other than Pennsylvania.

MM: Do you remember about what age you first went there?

MARK: Absolutely, it was a life-changing experience. I think I was probably six. I was aware of dinosaurs already; I don’t know where I first learned about dinosaurs, but I had already developed an interest and I had been after my parents for a long time to take me to the Carnegie so I could actually see dinosaur fossils.

Actually my parents were probably the people who told me about fossils at the Carnegie, and once I heard that, I constantly pestered them to go see the skeletons. It probably didn’t take very long actually, but for me it seemed like it was forever.

MM: Wow, that explains so much about you.

[Mark laughs] Then you spent most of your youth in western Pennsylvania?

MM: Was this the first time you had seen a dinosaur skeleton?

MARK: Oh absolutely, other than in books. Standing under that Tyrannosaurus—and the Tyrannosaurus skeleton that is at the Carnegie is the type specimen from which all Tyrannosaurus rexes are described.

There’s this huge thing, and at the time they had a big mural on the wall—a depiction of the living creature roughly life-size—just behind it. I don’t think the mural is still there but that made a big impression on me, too. Although it wasn’t that great a painting, at that age I was pretty darned impressed.

This was about the same time that the movie Gorgo was in theaters.

Not a great movie, but as a young kid I was so impressed by the ads 6

in the newspaper. I didn’t get to see it in the theatre; I couldn’t get my parents to take me. But the ads showed an upshot of Gorgo, this giant dinosaurian creature over the city, and the mural at the Carnegie of the tyrannosaur kinda took that same angle, looking up at it. The two images tied together in my mind and reinforced my interests in motion pictures and dinosaurs.

MM: Had you been much of a doodler then? Had you been drawing?

MARK: I’ve been drawing as long as I can remember. I can’t remember a time I haven’t drawn.

MM: Were you drawing dinosaurs before then?

MARK: I don’t think so. It was right around that period that I started drawing dinosaurs. In fact, the first thing I can remember drawing, sitting at the kitchen table with a little tin of water colors you got in a kit, was a water color of a brontosaur. It was the first time in my life I had a direction for what I wanted to draw, something other than every day reality, like a house or my family. Dinosaurs fascinated me.

MM: And then it took off? You filled your room with your drawings of dinosaurs?

MARK: Actually, I started putting together little books. I’d already come across children’s books about dinosaurs, like the How and Why Wonder Book series. I got really interested in the idea of books, collections of writings and drawings working together. I was actually drawing lines to indicate where the text should be in relation to the drawings. I’d assemble the pages and staple them together.

MM: Were the books you were reading about dinosaurs fiction or primers for children?

MARK: It was all non-fiction. I have vague recollections of seeing comic books with dinosaurs in them, but we didn’t actually have comic books at home. I assume I saw them on the newsstand.

MM: What were you reading other than the dinosaur books?

When did you start reading Edgar Rice Burroughs or Robert Howard?

Previous Page: Hyner, Pennsylvania, as it may have appeared circa 350 million B.C. Above: Original poster art for Gorgo.

Left: T-rex sketchbook illustration.

Artwork ©2008 Mark Schultz.

Gorgo ™ and ©2008 King Brothers Ltd.

Right: Pencil drawing of Tarzan.

Below and Next Page: Mark’s pencils and inks for the cover of Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar, a 1999 Dark Horse comic reprinting Gold Key’s comic book adaptation (with art by the great Russ Manning) of the novel of the same name.

Tarzan ™ and ©2008 ERB, Inc.

MARK: The earliest fiction I can remember reading was what you would expect at that age, Little Golden books like Tuffy the Tugboat. That book impressed me because it had this great double-page spread of the harbor that Tuffy the Tugboat was sailing out into. It just gave the impression of a much bigger world beyond the world of the page. There were all these different ships unloading cargo, passenger ships coming in. It gave the impression there was a bigger world out there, and it made a big impression on me.

I guess it was only a couple of years later, which seems forever when you’re that age, I picked up an abridged version of Tarzan of the Apes. I should preface that by saying that since I was five or six, I was seeing the classic Tarzan movies on television, primarily the Weismuller stuff.

That’s the series that made the biggest impression on me, but there were other jungle adventure movies, too, which I just loved. And then at some point, I discovered the book Tarzan of the Apes. I was about eight, maybe nine; I think I was about eight.

But, you know, it didn’t really make a huge impression on me.

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MM: Burroughs would be hard for an eight-year-old.

MARK: At that age, he was a little too subtle. It sounds silly to call Burroughs subtle, but for that age it was hard. It just wasn’t all that exciting. I’m guessing it’s because he wrote in a very staid Victorian manner that early in his career. This was also an abridged version, so I’m guessing they might have taken out some of the bloodier stuff. So anyway, I didn’t really start to appreciate Burroughs until I was about 13 or 14.

MM: Were you buying those books or checking them out from your library?

MARK: I was seeing them on the newsstands, the paperback versions with the [Roy] Krenkel covers, and they were fascinating covers. But, as intriguing as they looked to me, those books were 50 or 60 cents each, which at the time felt like a small fortune. Sixty cents was like five comic books at that time, and I was really into comics. So, given the decision between getting five comic books or one book that had a really interesting cover but I didn’t know anything about the inside, I bought the comics. But then, Ace published what I consider to be the bible about Burroughs’ oeuvre: Richard Lupoff’s Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure. And it cost all of 95¢. It was an important investment. [laughter] But looking through that book and seeing the gorgeous black-&-white interior art that was done by Al Williamson, by Reed Crandall,

by Frank Frazetta, it just blew my mind.

There was enough there that intrigued me that I thought, “There must be a lot to this Burroughs guy,” and I started to investigate him.

MM: So were you reading any Tarzan when you got that book?

MARK: No, I hadn’t picked up any Burroughs since that abridged version. I moved away from it completely. But I learned about all the different, to me much

that they didn’t show Kong on TV, at least not at a time when I could see it. But I wanted to see it badly.

MM: How did your perception of it change?

MARK: It lived up to my expectations.

Although, I was a little disappointed, because I knew the story pretty well by then, and the broadcast I saw at 14 cut out the whole sequence with the guys being chased by the brontosaur, I guess so they could fit it into a time slot. You know, the scene involving some guy being treed, and it just was gone. It disappointed the hell out of me. I was waiting and waiting for it and thought maybe I had my storyline wrong, maybe it would come later in the movie, but no, it was cut out.

But you know, I was at the right age to see it the second time. It had an enormous impact on me.

MM: Were there other films that affected you like that?

MARK: I’m sure there were. There were always films constantly coming out to theatres that I wanted to see, but I was too young.

The first film I went to see with

friends on my own was Planet of the Apes. I was probably eleven or twelve.

MM: Did you like it?

MARK: Oh yeah. Very much. It might have been that or it might have been Thunderball, one of those two.

But previous to that, I had to get my parents to take me, and they were not interested in that kind of film. They took me to a lot of great films; they took me to Hatari! which was a very influential film for me.

MM: John Wayne.

MARK: John Wayne in a Howard Hawks film. Running around in Land Rovers, capturing big game. That was a really important image that became a big part of Xenozoic Tales. John Wayne is a big part of Jack. And just the whole ambiance, the group dynamics that Hawks put in most of his films is really evident in Hatari!.

A bunch of guys and women working together; they’re all professional and really good at what they do.

MM: And really smart ones too.

MARK: Really smart, and they work together. You know, they have conflicts but there’s none of this sort of contemporary storytelling where one of them is a traitor or a ratbastard and there’s a lot of group tension.

These are people that enjoy working together and you want to be there with them.

MM: So, by the time you’re in high school, you’re reading comics regularly....

MARK: Yeah, pretty regularly.

MM: ...and you’re getting books from the library. How soon did you run into Cordwainer Smith?

MARK: Probably my junior or senior year in high school.

MM: In some ways that’s a completely different impulse from the kind of science fiction you’ve mentioned so far.

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Previous Page: Kong’s grand entrance.

Above: Original poster art for Hatari!—a film which heavily influenced the feel of Xenozoic Tales.

Left: Sketch of Jack “Cadillac” Tenrec, whose character was partly inspired by John Wayne.

King Kong ™ and ©2008 Universal Studios. Hatari! ™ and ©2008 Paramount Pictures. Jack Tenrec ™ and ©2008 Mark Schultz.

Part 2:

Xenozoic Age!

MM: We talked about the art you were doing when you graduated, but clearly, Xenozoic Tales involves both writing and art for you. I was curious about what kind of writing you were doing before you started Xenozoic Tales and the story that was in Death Rattle or if this was something you did cold and was the first thing you had written in a decade.

MM: The book helped you study the process of writing fiction, but what did you know about writing proposals for comic series?

MARK: Pretty much the latter. I went into this not having written anything for myself or for publication since my early years in college. But, as I became more and more aware that I did have a serious interest in telling stories through comics, I realized that I had to have some kind of guide to teach me how to do this. So I began to study not only the works of comic creators I admired, like Harvey Kurtzman and Will Eisner, but also a great little book I found at the library called something like How to Write a Short Short Story. It was a primer, a writer’s guide to short short fiction, a prose format that isn’t seen anymore. The format is only two or three pages long and because of its size and the tight structure it follows, usually the idea is to save some sort of kicker to the very end. I guess O. Henry was considered a writer of the form.

MM: What did the proposal consist of, then?

MARK: Absolutely nothing. Looking back at the proposal I sent out for Xenozoic Tales, I’m embarrassed. I think I’m lucky that my art samples carried the proposal.

MARK: It was basically a one-, maybe two-page summary of the background of the Xenozoic Age. It talked a little bit about the characters of Jack and Hannah. It talked about how the construct of the Xenozoic Age would give me the freedom to tell different types of genre stories. I was interested in being able to play around and experiment in different genres.

MM: And the art you included?

MARK: I drew up an eight-page story that eventually evolved into “Mammoth Pitfall,” which we later published. I sent copies of pencils, copies of the inked piece... I can’t remember if I sent them the script. I tried to downplay that because in those days I was writing everything by hand.

MM: I was thinking of James Thurber.

MARK: Oh, excellent, yeah. Thurber, too. It just seemed to me that the format fit very well with six-, seven-, eight-page comic stories. Those were the formats I was looking at from EC and Will Eisner’s Spirit stories. This book offered a great deal of help beyond what I could get from studying Kurtzman and Eisner’s work.

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MM: When did you start sending the proposal around?

Below: The beauty of Xenozoic Tales was that it allowed Mark to mix prehistoric creatures of any and all eras, including mammoths.

Next Page: An early Xenozoic Tales attempt.

Xenozoic Tales and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Mark Schultz.

MARK: Death Rattle was published in November of ’86 and the first Xenozoic Tales was in February of ’87. So it must have been late May of ’86.

MM: Wow! That’s a fast turnaround!

MARK: Yeah. I worked all through the early months of ’86 on the proposal story, “Mammoth Pitfall.” Basically I would work on it between paying jobs. The thing I remember most was that I was working on it one morning when the news

came over the radio about the Challenger accident. That was one of the moments that really stuck with me because here was this almost inconceivably horrible thing that happened while I was working on something that was going to change my life.

I finished the proposal story in May, made up seven different packages and mailed them. I think of the seven publishers I sent it to, six of them got back to me, either with “thanks but no thanks” or offers for work.

Kitchen Sink was actually the first I heard from; I got a letter from Dave Schreiner, the editor there, expressing interest. That was one of the red-letter days of my life, one of the happiest moments of my life. Because up until then, I really didn’t know if I was going to be able to do this. Did I have the talent to do it? Would anyone be interested in the type of thing I wanted to do? I didn’t even know if it would logistically work, living in Pennsylvania and dealing with a publisher elsewhere.

MM: Who was the other?

MARK: I also got a call from Pat Redding, an editor at Marvel under Larry Hama on The Savage Sword of Conan, asking me if I would be interested in inking a “King Kull” back-up story. I accepted. This was going on at the same time that Kitchen Sink offered me a chance to develop a Xenozoic story in the pages of Death Rattle, so I was working on them concurrently. So I had to focus on Conan to get it done quickly that summer.

It was actually the first professional comics job I finished, but I can’t remember if it was the first job I actually had published.

MM: Your Xenozoic proposal contained a story that turns out to be towards the beginning of the cycle, and you had descriptions of your characters and the Xenozoic world. How well developed was that world? How long had you spent working it out? What inspired it in the first place and how did you go about working it out?

MARK: What inspired it was my frustration with my day job doing commercial advertising illustration. I wasn’t happy doing that. I had drifted away from fine art, the kind of

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painting I had studied in school. I was frustrated by the hypocrisy: the fine arts gallery scene is completely controlled by special interests... by money interests, I should say. I was not happy; I had drifted away from fine arts to the point where I was illustrating how-to books. But I still loved comic books and movies—all sorts of storytelling, actually—so I just started wondering if I had my own comic book, what kind of thing would I be doing. So, at first it was all theoretical. But over a period of about three years, Xenozoic evolved and became something more concrete, more obtainable, in my mind.

MM: It was more like you had an object you were writing toward rather than just creating a world for the heck of it? You said, “I want to write a comic book and here’s the kind of comic book I want to write based on what I know”?

MARK: Except when I started this, I really didn’t have any kind of plan. That was alien from my existence. I had never gone to a comic convention, and I had no contact with anyone who was working professionally in the industry. So I really didn’t have any kind of game plan—I didn’t know the first thing about the business side of comics. I was just frustrated and just daydreaming.

MM: It really was just an outlet for you.

MARK: Absolutely. It was just exercising creativity with no specific goal in mind. But, as I started to firm up my ideas for Xenozoic, I would drop by a comic shop to see what independent comic creators were doing. I began to get excited about the potential and what could actually be put out in the marketplace and sell.

MARK: A very sketchy one. Again, I had story ideas and I had the basic background concepts, but I hadn’t worked out any kind of detail or even worked out the relationship between Jack and Hannah—how did they get together? There were a lot of holes.

MM: 1983 was the beginning of the independents, really.

MARK: Actually, I think the concept of the Xenozoic was first. I can remember very early on doing a picture of a Tyrannosaurus chasing a classic 1950s automobile with the proto-Jack and the proto-Hannah. But they were very different; they were wearing jury-rigged armor-like devices. As I think about it, I remember that they were warriors but I got away from that before too long. The first illustrations of Jack and Hannah were influenced by the Mad Max movies.

I didn’t sit down and organize a coherent reference bible. I had a little bit on this piece of paper here and some over there. It was all done by hand; I was never any good with a typewriter.

MM: Were the characters first?

MARK: Right. I would go to the store and I would see early issues of Rocketeer, early issues of Love and Rockets; I would see American Flagg. I’d see Death Rattle and The Spirit. I loved all these books. So I just got to thinking that maybe there was room for the kind of thing I wanted to do.

You’ve got to remember that in the ’70s I was driven away from comics by the stuff coming out of Marvel and DC. There just wasn’t much to be excited about. All this new alternative stuff got me thinking in terms of “maybe there’s a chance.”

MM: Did you start writing a bible for your potential series?

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Dave was very instrumental in helping me getting my mind working developing all the important background pieces that gives the stories coherence. If you want readers to buy into your make-believe world, there need to be rules and details carefully observed. So it was largely Dave who said “try this,” and I did.

MM: So you sent them a proposal and they said, “Give us another story”?

MARK: Pretty much. They wrote me back and said they were excited about the story and wanted to talk further. We actually spent some time writing back and forth for a month or two about possibilities, and Denis finally said he’d like to give me a shot in Death Rattle. We talked about the fact that “Mammoth Pitfall” wouldn’t be appropriate for Death Rattle; they wanted something more science-fiction oriented.

much the way I still do it, although I’m a little more confident about certain things now. I now know how much to pull back in certain scenes, how much detail to put in. Back then, I hadn’t even seen good examples of original comic book art. I was trying to figure out how to do things by looking at back issues of comics. So I had old EC issues out with Wally Wood’s work, trying to figure out if I should use a brush here, should I use a pen here. How was he holding the brush to get that kind of line?

MM: And a little horror too?

MARK: Right. Science fiction/horror.

Exactly.

MM: How long did it take to write “Xenozoic” then? Was it something you had in mind?

MM: They must have been really enthusiastic about it when they got it—there were only two months between Death Rattle and the first issue of Xenozoic Tales.

MARK: No, I don’t think I did, but it didn’t take too long to write it. It took me months to draw it, because I was still working my security job and producing commercial illustration.

MARK: Denis offered me Xenozoic Tales before the Death Rattle story was published, so he must’ve felt pretty confident about it. I should say that I came along at a good time because this was right at the heyday of that black-&-white explosion that came on the heels of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The Turtles did so well that everybody and their mother thought that black-&-white was the new hot thing.

You know, when I sent my proposals around, I always had in the back of my mind that if anyone would be interested in Xenozoic, it would be Kitchen Sink, just because of the vibe I got from

MM: And you were also learning the process of drawing for a comic book.

MARK: Oh, absolutely.

MM: Did you go through a number of sketches or were you trying to get it right the first time?

MARK: Oh, sketch after sketch after sketch. Pretty 31

MARK: Probably. [chuckles] I was just very very shy at conventions for a long time, and now I’m nothing but obnoxious. But back in those days, it was hard for me to relax.

MM: Along with the fans’ response, critical response was pretty good too.

MARK: Yeah, it generally was.

MM: Did Denis send you articles or did you find them yourself?

MARK: No, Denis was really good at keeping me apprised of what was happening. It was very gratifying is about all I can say. The response was better than I had hoped.

MM: Did you find any irony when you won the Eisner? I mean, you had been putting Xenozoic Tales bi-monthly to good response, but you began to slow down. And then when you got to putting out an issue a year, you win an Eisner. Why would you want to put out more than one issue a year?

MARK: It was complex. In the first couple of years I was able to get out eight issues, four issues a year, which as I look back on it was miraculous. I was working long hours and I was exhausted. I couldn’t keep that up. But then after the first couple of years what began happening was I started to get interest from Hollywood, and more of my time was going into dealing with the promoting and developing the property as a TV show. And when that went into full swing, 45

Previous Page: An alternate take on the cover to Xenozoic Tales #7.

Above: Pencil art for the cover of Xenozoic Tales #14.

Left: Mark wasn’t satisfied with Hannah’s pose so he drew this overlay as a replacement.

Xenozoic Tales and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Mark Schultz.

Part 3:

Cadillacs, Dinosaurs, Spin-offs, and Tie-ins

MM: Let’s talk some about the different projects that came out of Xenozoic Tales while it was being published.

The first one, I think, was the colorized version, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, that came out of Epic. Do you remember how that came about?

MARK: And Michael Newhall and Randall Brendt did some of the work also. They did really fine work, though they were testing the water since Xenozoic Tales was created to be published in black-&-white. When I created the original art I used a lot of black areas and gray-shaded areas that wouldn’t be there if it was created for color; they actually take the place of the color. I love working in black&-white, but I approach a piece very differently if I know color is going to be added. They are two different things; I don’t put in a lot of texture and shading technique that I would if I was working in black-&white. So when they added color to work that was originally intended for black-&-white, it tended to be a little too heavy. There was too much going on, and it obscured things so that the images became confused. So, I’ve got mixed emotions about the work that was done on the Epic series.

When we recolored another story a year or so later for the Cadillacs and Dinosaurs oneshot that was published to promote the toy line, Ray Fehrenbach colored that one, too.

And by that time, Ray and I had gotten a better feel for how to color black-&-white artwork. He was still working with art originally intended for black-&-white, but he had learned to pull back, using a lighter coloring scheme and allowing a lot more white areas to remain.

That was a coloring job that really worked.

MARK: At the time, Marvel’s Epic line featured properties that were creator-owned, which was a real break from the Marvel tradition of publishing house-owned properties only. They were looking for creatorowned properties to publish or republish, and Denis Kitchen had always maintained good relationships with all of the major comic publishers. I can’t remember who at Marvel we originally dealt with, but they expressed interest in reprinting the first six issues of Xenozoic Tales colorized. Things worked out well, and Tom DeFalco, the editor-in-chief, really came to bat for us. We asked for specific contractual items— protections that allowed us to retain certain key rights—and he made sure that we kept them.

MM: How much input did you have on the coloring process?

MARK: Well, the coloring process was actually done through Kitchen Sink. We hired the colorists ourselves.

In fact, I believe Denise did her first coloring work for that project.

MM: I know that Ray Fehrenbach, who did some of the color work for the covers of Xenozoic Tales, did some of the coloring in Cadillacs and Dinosaurs.

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I think it was the same coloring job.

MM: How was this one-shot supposed to be displayed at the store? Was it something that sat on the shelf with the toys or was it something a customer would pick up at the cash register?

MARK: I think the idea was that it would be on the shelf with the toys. It was distributed primarily, and perhaps totally, to Toys ‘R’ Us which was, at the time, the largest toy retailer going. There were one million copies printed.

MM: Holy cow!

MARK: Yeah, it had the potential to give us the greatest exposure Xenozoic Tales ever had. Unfortunately, there wasn’t really good follow-through. They were distributed to the stores, but I’ve talked to a number of managers through the years who have said they got the boxes of comics without any instructions about what to do with them. So most of the boxes were just dumped into storage, and the comics never hit the racks. I think some enterprising stores did put the comics out as point-ofpurchases at the cash register.

MM: So they had a price—they weren’t free?

MARK: No, no; they were giveaways.

MM: So somewhere, there’s a treasure trove of....

MM: Were any of the stories in that oneshot repeats of any that were done for the Epic Cadillacs and Dinosaurs series?

Above: Cover art for Epic’s Cadillacs and Dinosaurs #1.

Next Page: Cover art for Cadillacs and Dinosaurs 3-D. Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, Xenozoic Tales, and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Mark Schultz.

MARK: The promo comic contained “Last Link in the Chain” from Xenozoic Tales #9.

The second story is “The Opportunists” from Xenozoic Tales #1. I can’t remember if we used the same colorization for that second story or not.

You know, another issue with the Epic series was that they used a really glossy paper that bounces the color back into your face, making it look garish. I like the look of a softer paper, because the color sinks in and looks more integrated.

Looking at the one-shot, the coloring of the back-up story looks different because of the difference in the types of paper, but 48

MARK: I think some people in the various stores were in the know or savvy enough to take some boxes home. But as I said there were an awful lot printed up; it’s not exactly a rarity.

MM: Well, it is somewhat, if all the copies are sitting in a basement somewhere.

MARK: I guess, if people are looking for them. But I do signings and they show up fairly regularly. But, to get even more obscure, when the TV show came out, there was another one-shot associated with it. They took the 3-D comic that Kitchen Sink produced and put a new cover on that.

MM: How was a customer supposed to get the promotional 3-D comics?

MARK: It wasn’t meant to sell; it was another giveaway.

It might’ve been distributed to toy stores to get kids aware of the TV show. Or it might have been something given away at trade shows. I forget.

MM: It continues to sell?

MARK: Back when Kitchen Sink went belly up, they remaindered as much of the stock they had as possible. I picked up the remaindered 3-D books pretty cheaply. It was really popular when it came out; it actually went back to press at least a couple of times. It’s a cool gimmick, so it pulled in a lot of people who would not have picked up Xenozoic Tales on its own merits. They pick it up now either because they collect 3-D or they just see it as a neat package because it comes with its own glasses enclosed. I take it to shows with me and it continues to be a good seller, because it does appeal to such a wide variety of interests.

MM: Let’s jump back to what we were talking about before we got distracted by Xenozoic collectibles. Did you have input on the colorization process for the Epic Cadillacs and Dinosaurs series?

MARK: I was busy trying to get out Xenozoic Tales as well as trying to be involved with the production of the animated show, so I really wasn’t on top of that stuff as much as I might have been otherwise. Also, at that point in my career, I didn’t know enough about the coloring process to have a lot of input. It was an evolving process for me too, and certainly the colorists we had knew more about it than I did.

So I pretty much let it go.

MM: Did the glasses have some design from you as well?

MM: Not even looking over Denise’s shoulder?

MARK: Not too much. Well... you know, she’s been incredibly helpful in different aspects of Xenozoic Tales but there’s always the fact we are married. It keeps us from having a truly professional relationship. Even though I try to explain to her that, while I always appreciate her opinion, when it comes to Xenozoic Tales, this is not a partnership—I am the boss, I am the decider. But that doesn’t wash with Denise. [Fred laughs] I say, “I appreciate your opinion here, but I am going in another direction. End of discussion.”

And she says, “Yes, but...”. [laughter] MM: You mentioned earlier the Kitchen Sink 3-D comic. How did anyone come up with the idea of making a 3-D comic?

MARK: Most of the schemes for keeping Xenozoic Tales in front of the audience by recycling and placing the content in different formats came from Denis Kitchen. He’s very creative about marketing and can get a lot of mileage out of any given piece. For that 3-D project, basically all I did was a new cover. The process to create the 3-D image, the anaglyph, was all done by Roger May. Roger did an excellent job; some of those panels have 13 layers. I did a new cover and that was it. It was a very good seller, and it continues to sell real well.

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MM: Was there a lot of conversation about minimizing technical difficulties in the sculpture?

find the time to actually execute the whole deal. But more important than what we have actually released, we bounce ideas off each other all the time and look for the other’s opinion, because we do seem to be on the same wavelength.

MARK: As it turns out, not so much. All of the sketches I provided Clay had Hannah in a supine position, and I don’t think there was really anything particularly technically challenging about it. All the limbs are integrated together, or grounded. There weren’t any dramatic extensions or balances that would prove difficult. Clay had done a lot of fine art sculpting and was just beginning his career as a comics-related sculptor.

He had a commercial reputation to build, and was concerned about getting Hannah just right and especially getting the sabertooth right, because cats are just hard in general. He did a fantastic job.

MM: Was the sabertooth cub on the sculpture part of the original design or added through collaboration?

MARK: No, that was added on the second edition. The sculptures that were done through Bowen, we did a coldcast sculpture that had a black veneer and a bronze. Some years later, probably the late ’90s, Clay suggested we reissue the sculpture through his company, but this time as a fully painted coldcast with a few additions to differentiate it from the first.

Clay added the sabertooth cub and the scrolled banner on the front of the base. We added a new drawing by me on the certificate and Randy Dahlk did a beautiful job designing some very distinctive packaging. I’m pretty darn proud of the entire package.

MM: You’ve done other projects together?

MM: That leaves something I know you have a great deal of fondness for, the Songs from the Xenozoic Age CD. The CD was a lot of fun.

MARK: Well... lots of talk about other projects. [laughter] Let’s see, what have you seen that we have done together? Not that much. I helped design the Nemo Girl statue that Clay produced.

It’s a cheesecake figurine. She’s in a Jules Verne-inspired, deep sea diver outfit. It’s a Victorian bikini—how’s that for an oxymoron? I also just drew a portrait of Robert E. Howard’s Kull, to accompany Clay’s new sculpture of the character.

And we have a joint project in the works—a “space girl abducted by alien ape” subject. Sure, you’ve seen that a millions times before, but if we didn’t think we could bring something fresh and special we wouldn’t be doing it. We just need to

MARK: The CD was just a project between Chris Christensen and myself. Chris is a professional musician out in Los Angeles; he’s a studio musician, he’s played in various bands, he has a production studio right in his house, and he writes music. And, to my benefit, he likes Xenozoic Tales, as well. I met him at my first San Diego Convention.

He had previously worked with Kitchen Sink by writing music for Will Eisner’s Spirit Picture Disc. He took lyrics Will had written as background for the strip and actually set them to music as well as coming up with some original music.

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Part 4:

Expanding Horizons MM: In 1993, you did a cover for Classic Star Wars involving a giant squid.

MM: I’d like to talk about the work you were doing unrelated to Xenozoic Tales. The first thing I found is a King Kong cover from 1991.

MARK: There’s an interesting story behind that—I drew the cover so that one of the tentacles and a spear overlapped the Star Wars logo, and Dark Horse actually printed it that way. But when Lucasfilm saw that, they made it clear that, going forward, no art could ever visually obscure their logo again. So I like to think that I created my own special place in Star Wars history by making such a terrible blunder that called for a policy notice.

MARK: There were two covers actually, one that I penciled and inked and one that Al Williamson inked over my pencils. They were done for Monster Comics, which was an imprint of Fantagraphics that had the rights to adapt the novelization of Kong. The comics featured a pretty good line-up of artists, including Bill Stout and Dave Stevens.

MM: That had to be a dream for you, working on King Kong. I don’t recall seeing any other King Kong art you might have done.

MM: And this was a creature originally created by Al Williamson.

MARK: Well, my version of a creature created by Al Williamson. I tried to draw it just like Al drew it but I just couldn’t pull it off. Al’s got his unique stylizations that I can’t do—I did the best I could.

MARK: I have done some commission pieces but this is my only published Kong. One of my favorite subjects.

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MM: Al had been doing the covers until then, so how did this one come to you?

MARK: Al asked me to do it. He had been doing the covers for the series and I guess had fallen a little behind or needed to create some free time, so I and a few other cartoonists did some fill-ins. It was my first contact with Lucasfilm and, as I worked with them a number of times after that, I guess they didn’t hold my logo gaffe against me.

They probably didn’t even know who did it.

MM: You wrote a short story for the third series of Death Rattle, called “The Probability Chamber.”

MARK: Actually, I drew the cover as well as wrote the story, which was drawn by Roger Petersen. It was a science-fiction piece that ended up not making a heck of a lot of sense. I tried to play around with the idea of probability allowing a kind of second chance at redemption, but it ended up not hanging together very well.

MM: Did you enjoy writing it? It sounds sort of like you were given a topic rather than having free rein.

MARK: Oh, no, it was my idea and I enjoyed writing it. It just didn’t work particularly well.

MM: You followed that up with a twoissue Flash Gordon mini-series, working again with Al Williamson.

MARK: Yeah, that was so much fun. Al approached me about that. Al had been inking at Marvel for years and Tom DeFalco, editor-in-chief there, had been a fan of Al’s art since way back and wanted to figure out a way to get Al to draw again.

Al told Tom that if he could get the rights to Flash Gordon, he would love to draw that again, and that Al would have me write it.

So Tom got the license from King, agreed I could write it, and there you have it.

Al had all these ideas for different scenarios that he wanted to draw, and my job was to take all of the scenarios and somehow tie them together in a story with some semblance of a plot. But if you know Flash Gordon, you know there’s not a heck of a lot of plot. It was a great experience because I got to see Al do panel-by-panel breakdowns

working from a full script, comparing how he drew it with how, in my mind, I would have drawn it. And we bounced ideas back and forth about what could be found in unexplored regions of Mongo. At one point, Al told me he had some reference art for an elephant charge, and he wanted me to work out a scene with Mongo elephants charging. So I did, featuring whatever passes for elephants on Mongo, and months later when he actually started to draw, he calls me and asks, “Why the hell did you put this scene in here? How am I supposed to draw this?” So I reminded him he had asked me to. He said, “Oh, yeah, I guess I did...,” laughed and eventually found the stampede reference he had pulled.

But it worked both ways. There was a page I wrote that required, because of space restrictions, a lot of creative visual storytelling involving a sinking spaceship and people that lived underwater rescuing Flash.

I knew when I wrote it that there was an awful lot of storytelling to be done in just a few panels, and it wouldn’t be easy to fit it all in. I didn’t think it would be pretty.

Under normal circumstances, I would’ve stretched out the storytelling, but I just didn’t have the space. And I gave it to him thinking I was really asking a lot, and darned if he didn’t work out the storytelling just beautifully. The whole thing was just a lot of fun and I learned from Al at the same time.

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Previous Page: Mark’s take on the world of Flash Gordon.

Above: Al Williamson preliminary sketch for Marvel’s Flash Gordon series.

Flash Gordon ™ and ©2008 King Features Syndicate, Inc.

MM: A couple of years later, you worked with Al again in a story for Dark Horse Presents called “One Last Job.” Below: On top of drawing the covers and writing 1997’s Predator: Hell & Hot Water miniseries, Mark also designed this proposal for the Predator diving armor.

Next Page: Cover art for Predator: Hell & Hot Water #1.

Predator ™ and ©2008 20th Century Fox Film Corp.

MARK: Actually, that story was started in the late ’80s. Someone was starting up a science fiction anthology magazine, and had asked Al to contribute to it, so Al asked me to write a story three or four pages long. I did and Al started it, getting about halfway done, but the anthology never happened.

So Al didn’t finish the art. Then much later, Dark Horse approached Al for a story for Dark Horse Presents. Al pulled the story back out of the drawer and finished it up.

MM: Not long after that, or maybe even about the same time, you worked on a Predator mini called Hell and Hot Water with art by Gene Colan. You appear to be getting into a lot more licensed material about this time.

MARK: I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to continue Xenozoic Tales and make a living wage. I was casting about for work, and Dark Horse offered me the series. It was really great since it showed I could do work outside Xenozoic Tales. And it was great because I got to work with Gene, whose work I’ve always liked.

MM: Did you work closely with him?

MARK: Less closely than with Al. I didn’t get a chance to talk to Gene a lot, and most of the interaction went through Bob Cooper, the editor.

MM: You didn’t get to tell him how much you had liked Tomb of Dracula?

MARK: Well, of course I did. As we were working together, I remembered that he had worked on DC’s Sea Devils before he got to Marvel and I had enjoyed reading those. So it turned out to be really fortunate that we got to write a story where so much takes place underwater.

MM: Did you have an inspiration for the creatures in this series?

MARK: I have a fascination with organisms that live in extreme environments.

Life that manages to flourish in such places as mid-oceanic volcanic rifts or in caves far below the surface of the Earth. So the creatures that the Predator is hunting in the series are based on them, as well as on the shapes of various microscopic organisms that exist all around us.

MM: And then you went to the other licensed property, working on Aliens: Havoc, which had to present some unique writing problems.

MARK: Yeah, that one turned into an awful lot of work. It was an ambitious concept that didn’t quite come off. The editor, Phil Amara—who I had worked with at Kitchen Sink before he’d moved over to Dark Horse—approached me with the idea of writing a story to be drawn by a different artist on every page. I thought about it and figured out a storyline that would make the change in artist with every page logical. I didn’t want the changes to be arbitrary— there had to be a reason. So I came up with

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My work started tailing off creatively, because by then I had said about all I could say about Superman under the circumstances. I began to run out of steam.

MM: Weren’t the Superman titles eventually divided by theme, and Man of Steel became the science-based title?

MARK: When Joey Cavalieri brought me in on the title, I actually arrived in the middle of a big story arc, and I was getting up to speed while basically being the player brought in off the bench. Then Eddie Berganza was made the editor of the Superman line, and of course there was a shift in editorial direction.

Eddie decided that he wanted to give each title a specific flavor. For example, one title would focus on Superman’s relationship with Lois. I was only too happy to take on the “science fiction” banner.

so I guess it was considered logical to put him back in MoS. I wrote him as Superman’s go-to science support who evolves into an actual friend. I liked the idea, because Steel was an engineer, and I played up that aspect of him. I really liked the character and had fun with him. I would have liked to have developed him and his relationship with Superman even further, but there’s never enough space. I loved that I got to create his base of operations, the Steelworks. I got to play to my interest in taking abandoned urban structures and putting them to new uses. Steel creates his laboratory and workshop, not in a bright and shiny pie-in-the-sky lab, but in an old brick and iron mill.

MM: Do you feel like you left a personal mark on the character?

MARK: Probably not. I don’t know anything about the current continuity. I’m told that the tesseract Fortress of Solitude is gone.

So I doubt there’s anything much left to mark my tenure. Maybe Krypto. We brought back Krypto as a character.

Maybe our Krypto is still being used.

MM: I would say that you made Steel a fairly essential character to the Superman family.

MM: You did an interesting story involving Superman and the effects of a hurricane....

MARK: That was something I was asked to do. He had had his own title which was being cancelled. He had originated in Man of Steel and DC wanted to keep him around,

MARK: It was called “What He Didn’t Do,” and I get asked about that often. I’m proud of that story—I got to wax philosophical as Superman works with Supergirl 68

Part 5: MM: Earlier, we talked about your love of Robert Howard and Conan. Is there a Conan story you could say is your very favorite?

MARK: Absolutely. “The Queen of the Black Coast.” For me, it’s one of the more powerful stories because, first of all, there’s a love interest. Conan actually has a personal relationship, and we get some insight into his character as well as the woman’s. And it really rises to high tragedy. The reader becomes invested emotionally in Conan’s relationship and when it concludes, it has an impact.

MM: And you get flying monkeys.

MARK: And you get flying monkeys. You get the best of everything: Howard’s penchant for lost civilizations, the great sequence where Conan learns the history by falling under the spell of the black lotus and having a sort of memory-dream. I think just for pure beauty of prose, the last chapter—which is only a page or a page-and-a-half long, just a kind of coda—is brilliant.

Howard was capable of lyrical, powerful description.

MM: When you got together with Wandering Star, the publisher of Conan of Cimmeria Volume I, did you ask to illustrate that story?

MARK: It just worked out. Because Wandering Star was publishing the stories in the order that Howard wrote them, it just happened that the first volume included the story. But it made me very happy. I would have been a little disappointed if I had not been able to illustrate that one.

The Barbarian and the Prince MM: How did it come about then that you were asked to work on the book?

MARK: Gary Gianni had been working with Wandering Star, having illustrated the Solomon Kane volume, and then he was working on the Bran Mak Morn book.

Marcello Anciano, the publisher at Wandering Star, called me cold.

Previous Page: Cover art for Action Comics #836.

Below: Sketch of Conan.

Lois Lane, Superman ™ and ©2008 DC Comics. Conan ™ and ©2008 Conan Properties International, LLC.

Actually, I think Gary had told me I might expect a call. Marcello had gotten my name from Gary and was aware of my interest in Conan and wanted to know if I would be interested in illustrating those stories.

MM: I guess we should take a further step back: how did you know Gary? I don’t think you had done any work with him before then, had you?

MARK: No. But, Gary and I had known each other for a while, from the early ’90s.

I was, of course, aware of Gary’s work, but Al Williamson had met him at a convention, probably Chicago. And afterward, Al told me he had gotten to know him and had a wonderful evening talking with him.

Al told me that Gary was going to be at that year’s San Diego Con and suggested we meet up. So Gary and I did; I think we may have been planning to get together anyway, but this was just a little extra incentive. Of course we have similar interests, and our aesthetics are in the same neck of the woods. We just got along really well. The fact that we get to work together on Prince Valiant is just an added pleasure.

MARK: They are oil paintings. Remember, my major in college was painting, and I had painted up to the mid-’80s. As I became more involved in being a graphic artist, working more in black-&-white and in ink, drawing comics, I abandoned painting. It was very difficult to keep up with both.

MM: Was it like exercising a muscle you hadn’t used in a while or did you have to teach yourself all of that again?

MARK: Pretty much, yeah. Because I had such a solid grounding in college, it wasn’t like learning a new language, but I was rusty and not used to it. I’m using a different part of my brain when I paint. When you draw, you’re thinking in terms of the line; since I work in black-&-white, I have to think in terms of contrast. When painting, you’re

MM: So Marcello Anciano approached you—was there any hesitation on your part?

MARK: Not really. First of all, it was not that cut-and-dried; they did not yet have the rights to do Conan. Conan is not part of the Howard estate; it had been carved out as its own property in the ’70s. So, when Marcello approached me, he had a deal with the Howard estate for other Howard properties but had no deals with the people who owned the rights to Conan. It was a couple of years later that they got the rights to Conan. And over that time, Marcello kept in touch with me.

Basically, I wanted to do it very badly, but it was a big project—it would take at least a year to complete—so it all came down to timing; I had to get the timing right with my other commitments. Luckily, it worked out very well; everything dovetailed nicely.

MM: The Conan book has lovely colored paintings inside and on the cover, using what appears to be a different style than what you had used even on the covers of your comics.

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Previous Page: Full page illustration for “Queen of the Black Coast,” from The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian.

You can’t go wrong with flying apes.

Below: A rejected idea for the cover of a Bran Mak Morn collection.

Conan ™ and ©2008 Conan Properties International, LLC. Bran Mak Morn ™ and ©2008 Robert E. Howard Properties, LLC.

I did one painting for Almuric which was eventually used in the Howard promotional book, The Art of Robert E. Howard.

MM: We should point out that Almuric is Howard’s space-based fantasy writing.

MARK: It’s a short novel. I guess what happened was, relatively late in his life, Howard’s manager approached him about doing an interplanetary story. His manager was Otis Adelbert Kline who was himself an author, well known for writing stories in the style of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ work.

He’s best remembered for his swashbucklers set on Venus. They’re well done, but it’s obvious they owe a huge debt to Burroughs. So Howard tried his hand at the form, and Howard being Howard, he did it on his own terms. It really didn’t matter what genre he was writing in, his heroes are all the reflections of Howard’s own beliefs and obsessions. The hero’s name is Esau Cairn, and he’s so physically powerful he has no equal on Earth. The poor guy can’t even play competitive sports because he always winds up inadvertently mangling his opponents. Howard describes him as being a throwback, a primitive specimen born out of his appropriate time.

Somehow he winds up accidentally killing a crooked politician and going on the lam. He retreats to the laboratory of a scientist he happens to know, and by lucky coincidence, the scientist has just put the finishing touches on an interplanetary, interdimensional machine called the Great Secret.

You never really learn what exactly the Great Secret is, but it projects Esau to another galaxy. And then you get down to the typical Howardian gripping adventures, but with some marginally derivative Burroughs stuff, somewhat like Pellucidar with its primitive tribes. It’s fun stuff but not great, and he never finished it. Someone wrote an ending to it that has been included in all publications. The likely suspect is Kline or another of Kline’s clients. But there is hope that someone, someday, will find the speculative long-lost ending in Howard’s notes!

MM: Would you like to someday get back to Almuric?

MARK: I’d love to do it. It’s just a fun story. Lots and lots of spectacularly visual

characters, scenes and scenery to choose from.

MM: Let’s move to Prince Valiant. On the one hand you got to flex your artistic muscles doing the paintings for Conan and here you get to do some more work in the strip format. Again, how did you get started on working on it?

MARK: Once again, it was Mr. Gianni. Gary Gianni had, several years ago, started assisting long time Prince Valiant artist, John Cullen Murphy. The plan was that Gary would take over when Murphy retired. And, indeed, he retired shortly thereafter. John Cullen Murphy’s son, Cullen Murphy, was writing Prince Valiant and he felt he was ready to move on, as well. So Gary recommended me as the new writer. I submitted some story ideas; King Features wanted to get an idea of 85

Previous Page: Some of Mark’s preliminary work for a new edition of Almuric, which was never published.

Above: Mark’s sketch for what would become an Almuric painting that appeared in The Art of Robert E. Howard.

Almuric ™ and ©2008 Robert E. Howard Properties, LLC.

Part 6:

The Shape of Things to Come

MM: Mark, tell me about Bone Sharps, Cowboys, and Thunder Lizards.

needed a cover, and he and I were sort of on the same wavelength, thinking it would be cool to do it in the style of the late 19th century lithograph circus posters

MARK: Jim Ottaviani, the publisher—are you familiar with Jim’s work?

MM: Were you familiar with the story of Cope and Marsh before Jim contacted you?

MM: A little bit. He’s popularizing science through comic books.

MARK: Oh yeah. It’s one of the great stories out of paleontological history—and out of the American West. I remember back in the ’80s, Steve Bissette did a great riff on the story that appeared in Bizarre Tales, one of those Marvel adventure anthologies. It was a fantasy version of the feud, involving the discovery of a living dinosaur. It was a pretty cool little story, which I don’t think has been reprinted since. It should be. The Cope-Marsh feud is a very dramatic story and only slightly less than the perfect story in truth, but Jim’s script adheres a little more closely to the facts than Bissette’s telling.

MARK: Exactly; I couldn’t have said it better. His company, G.T. Labs, has produced a number of graphic novels over the last decade, all aimed at getting the public excited about science. He’d been in touch with me, since ’89 or ’90, about the potential for working together. And he eventually approached me with the perfect project, a fictionalized history of the paleontological feud between Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh that opened up the American West as one of the great hotbeds for dinosaur research. He

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MM: Do you remember how many revisions you went through to get the look you wanted for the circus feel?

MARK: Oh, it wasn’t too difficult. I just referenced some reproductions of actual circus posters contemporaneous to the period. I had a couple of concepts for the cover and ended up sending Jim two comps that could both work.

He ended up choosing the one that I thought was the best. That’s one time I was able to come up with what both I and the publisher were looking for fairly quickly.

MM: Did you have any harsh words for him for having such a long title for his book? The full title is Bone Sharps, Cowboys, and Thunder Lizards: A Tale of Edward Drinker Cope, Othniel Charles Marsh, and the Gilded Age of Paleontology.

MARK: You know, it was a little difficult working out the lettering for the cover title, but it kept very much in the Victorian style of the time which tended to get wordy and ornate in its description.

When I looked at posters for things like the Barnum and Bailey Circus, you’re talking about a relatively type-heavy graphic anyway.

MM: And wasn’t there some associated work on Charles Knight at about the same time?

MARK: While I was in the process of working on the Bone Sharps cover, Jim mentioned that he had another project going on which was actually not a comic. He had been in touch with Charles R. Knight’s granddaughter and estate holder, Rhoda Knight.

And I’m not sure how it came to the surface, but she had discovered a manuscript for an autobiography that her grandfather had begun. It was in a rough state and only covered parts of his career. She and Jim decid-

ed that it should be published. Jim cleaned it up a little bit—I guess there was a lot of repetition in it—and then he asked me if I would like to illustrate it. So working on the Bone Sharps cover led to illustrations for this book, Charles R. Knight: Autobiography of an Artist. I did the plates in carbon pencil, using a technique that was popular back in the historical period in which Knight worked.

So that was a lot of fun.

MM: So, from that, you’re working on a book on genetics. Was there a logical step from this work to the genetics book?

MARK: Not that I’m aware of. Other than the fact that I do incorporate science, especially the biological sciences, into a lot of stories I work on. I think that helped me get the work with Jim Ottaviani and then I think it probably also helped with the genetics book that was packaged by Howard Zimmerman.

MM: First of all, what’s the title of the book going to be?

MARK: The Stuff of Life: A Graphically Explicit Guide to Genetics and DNA. MM: Are you going for the mature audience by describing it as explicit?

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Previous Page: Preliminary sketch for the cover of Bone Sharps, Cowboys and Thunder Lizards. That’s Charles R. Knight holding the paint brushes. Though legally blind, Knight became renowned for his paintings of prehistoric creatures. The dinosaur battle depicted in this sketch is a take on one of his most famous paintings. His last museum piece was created for the Everhart in Scranton, PA, near Mark’s home.

Above: An alternate preliminary sketch for the book cover which was not used.

Bone Sharps, Cowboys and Thunder Lizards ©2008 Jim Ottaviani.

Below and Next Page: Pencil illustrations for Charles R. Knight: Autobiography of an Artist.

Knight Artwork ©2008 Mark Schultz.

MARK: Mature? No, just general prurient interest. [laughter] Howard Zimmerman, the packager, came up with The Stuff of Life, and I suggested the subtitle just because it’s a little titillating, although there’s pretty much nothing titillating in the text. Let’s just say the subtitle promises more than the book delivers.

MM: Well, there’s the sort of winking reference to sexuality in the title, so what is the book really?

MARK: Soft-core porn. [laughter] All the good stuff’s taken out. Seriously, it’s called a graphic novel, but it’s not fiction. It’s a graphic novel because that’s the publishing

world’s term for the extended comics format it takes. It’s 138 pages of science primer that gives you a solid, basic understanding of how genetics works on a molecular level—the level of DNA, that is—and on a cellular level. And how genetics transmits traits down generations— heredity. It discusses how our knowledge of all this is applied to better our health and our understanding of ourselves. And it talks about the potential for technologies that may or may not become reality.

MM: You and I have talked some about the problems you’ve been having with the section on cloning.

MARK: Yeah, we’re trying to defang the idea of cloning. I’m trying to get across some general messages through the course of the book, and one of them is that people have to learn to carefully read news reports about scientific research. Let me put it this way: news reports will take a very narrowly-focused study that implies something might be true, but requires much more study and verification before it should ever be accepted as fact, and presents the tentative findings of the study as proven, accepted fact. So people have to learn to pay attention and be skeptical about how the media misrepresents science. They also have to learn that there are segments of the media that deliberately sensationalize things. Imagine that.

Sometimes misinformation is transmitted to us as an unintended result of a reporter or editor believing that they need to boil a complex story down to the point where it no longer communicates a difficult-to-digest truth. But sometimes it’s absolutely done simply to sensationalize. And a lot of news stories covering developments in cloning tech have been purposefully exaggerated to take advantage of the public’s understandable skittishness about the subject.

Certain religious affiliations have muddied the waters with superstitious claptrap, too.

MM: You’re writing The Stuff of Life, but who is illustrating it?

MARK: It’s a group called Big Time Attic out of Minneapolis that’s comprised of Zander Cannon, Kevin

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Mark Schultz

Art Gallery

Conan ™ and ©2008 Conan Properties International, LLC.

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Conan ™ and ©2008 Conan Properties International, LLC.

IF YOU ENJOYED THIS PREVIEW, CLICK THE LINK BELOW TO ORDER THIS BOOK!

Modern Masters:

Mark Schultz The mid-'80s was the age of independent comics. It was also the age of the dinosaur, thanks to Mark Schultz and Xenozoic Tales! Evocative of the master illustrators of the early 1900s, but with a decidedly modern flair, Schultz's artwork stood out like a beacon from the fare of the day. And it still does—Xenozoic Tales even spawned the Cadillacs & Dinosaurs cartoon and toy line.

Schultz has also written various Superman, Aliens, and Predator comics, as well as a novel featuring DC's Flash, and is currently writing the Prince Valiant newspaper strip. But his drawing alone—including his exquisite Conan book illustrations—makes him a true Modern Master! Modern Masters Vol. 15: Mark Schultz takes an exhaustive look into Schultz’s career and creative process. This 128-page book features a career-spanning interview with tons of art, including many rare and unpublished pieces, as part of a huge gallery of stunning artwork by this true Modern Master!

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(120-page trade paperback with COLOR) $14.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 http://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=95_70&products_id=603