Modern Masters Vol. 12: Michael Golden by TwoMorrows Publishing

M O D E R N

M A S T E R S

V O L U M E

Batm an T M

Com ics.

MICHAEL GOLDEN

By Eric Eric By Nolen-Weathington Nolen-Weathington

T W E L V E :

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Modern Masters Volume Twelve:

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

MICHAEL GOLDEN edited and designed by Eric Nolen-Weathington front cover art by Michael Golden all interviews in this book were conducted by Eric Nolen-Weathington and transcribed by Steven Tice and Eric Nolen-Weathington proofreading by Fred Perry and Christopher Irving

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Dr. Raleigh, North Carolina 27614 www.twomorrows.com • e-mail: twomorrow@aol.com First Printing • July 2007 • Printed in Canada Softcover ISBN: 978-1-893905-74-0 Trademarks & Copyrights All characters and artwork contained herein are ™ and ©2007 Michael Golden unless otherwise noted. Tunuki and Spartan X ™ and ©2007 Little Eva Ink. Aliana, Batman, Bat-Mite, Big Barda, Birds of Prey, Black Canary, Demon, Detective Chimp, Granny Goodness, Guillotina, House of Mystery, Klarion the Witch-boy, Lightray, Man-Bat, Metron, Mister Miracle, New Gods, Nightwing, Oberon, Orion, Sinestro, Superman, Wonder Woman ™ and ©2007 DC Comics. Tesla Strong ™ and ©2007 America’s Best Comics LLC. // Wetworks ™ and ©2007 WildStorm Productions. Ambara, Ancient One, Angel, Annihilus, Arcturus Rann, Avengers, Baron Mordu, Beast, Blob, Bucky, Bug, Cable, Captain America, Clea, Colossus, Crystar, Deadpool, Defenders, Devil Dinosaur, Dr. Strange, D’Spayre, Eternity, Exodus, Fantastic Four, Galactus, Giant-Man, Hawkeye, Hellcat, Howard the Duck, Hulk, Human Torch, Impossible Man, Invisible Woman, Iron Man, Jubilee, Kitty Pryde, Lady Daemon, Lilandrea, Magneto, Marionette, Marvel Girl, Mr. Fantastic, Moonboy, Mutant X, The ’Nam and all related characters, Namor, Nightcrawler, Nighthawk, Nomad, Professor X, Punisher, Rogue, Sabretooth, Sentinels, Silver Samurai, Silver Surfer, Spider-Man and all related characters, Spider-Woman, Storm, Thing, Thor, Valkyrie, Vision, Wasp, Wolverine, Wonder Man, Wong, X-Men ™ and ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc. Armor, Bucky O’Hare and the Toad Menace ™ and ©2007 Continuity Graphics Associates, Inc. The Crow ™ and ©2007 James O’Barr. // Vampirella ™ and ©2007 Harris Comics. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ™ and ©2007 Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird. Acroyear, Baron Karza, Micronauts ™ and ©2007 Mego Corp. // Rom ™ and ©2007 Parker Brothers. Destro, G.I. Joe, Snake Eyes ™ and ©2007 Hasbro. Conan ™ and ©2007 Conan Properties International LLC. // King Kull ™ and ©2007 King Kull LLC. Dejah Thoris ™ and ©2007 ERB, Inc. Indiana Jones, Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Star Wars ™ and ©2007 Lucasfilm Ltd. Jurassic Park ™ and ©2007 Universal Studios and Amblin Entertainment. Kiss ™ and ©2007 Kiss Catalog, Ltd. Amidamaru, Shaman King ™ and ©2007 respective owner. Editorial package ©2007 Eric Nolen-Weathington and TwoMorrows Publishing.

Dedication To Donna, Iain, and Caper. Acknowledgements Michael Golden, for allowing us into his home, for his time and for his elephant joke. Renée Witterstaetter, for making it happen. And for more information about Michael, contact Renée at: evaink@aol.com Albert Moy, for all the great scans. Please visit his website to see (and purchase) a lot more great art at: www.albertmoy.com Special Thanks Bill Alger, Roger Ash, Terry Austin, Buzz Aw, Rich Cirillo, John Dell, David Fink, George Khoury, Steven Lee, Zaddick Longenbach, Mike Manley, Kirk Melton III, Al Milgrom, Albert Moy, Kevin Nowlan, P. Craig Russell, Mitch Wilson, Rick McGee and the crew of Foundation’s Edge, Russ Garwood and the crew of Capital Comics, and John and Pam Morrow

Modern Masters Volume Twelve:

MICHAEL GOLDEN

Table of Contents Introduction by Kevin Nowlan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Part One: “I Guess I’ll Just Go Draw Comic Books” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Part Two: Small Beginnings at Marvel Comics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Part Three: Savage Worlds of Past and Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Part Four: Editorially Speaking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 Part Five: Comics and Creativity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 Art Gallery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69

Introduction I’ve only seen actual Michael Golden original art twice, but both times I had a similar reaction: After admiring the drawings I started looking a little closer, hoping to detect some small signs of a struggle. Nope. The penciled piece appeared to have been drawn confidently with no preliminary sketching and the inked pages looked like reproductions. No whiteout or erasures. It felt like that scene from Amadeus where Salieri sees a Mozart manuscript for the first time and is horrified to discover that it was written as if Mozart were dictating; there were no corrections or false starts. They were perfect, as if he had the composition complete in his head before he put pen to paper.

y my count, it looks like this is Michael Golden’s 30th year as a comic artist. One of the most accomplished creators in our industry is beginning his fourth decade as a professional and I think this is a good time for me to pay my respects.

Golden’s work stands out in so many ways, it’s difficult to catalog. For one thing, he draws like no one else. We all have mentors or art heroes, so much so that when we first start working professionally people say, “Oh yeah, you draw like that other guy.” Not Michael. The only people who draw in a style similar to his came along after Golden and were influenced by him. He also understands the importance of exaggeration in comic art. Straight photo realism and literalism have their place, but to get the most out of gestures, expressions, proportions and lighting, an artist—especially a comic book artist—has to break those rules from time to time. Or as Gil Kane said, “Bypass the real for the ideal.” The clothing, buildings and props that he draws always look specific and authentic. If he draws a crumbling old building he’ll show you the re-bar under the concrete or the lathe between the plaster. When he draws a gun it looks like a centerfold for the NRA. His work is very seductive because he makes everything look so appealing: rocks, trees, furniture, Hind helicopters. Golden can make boring things look interesting and the lamest super-hero costume look cool. I’ll resist the urge to cite examples. There are probably a few in this book.

Michael also has a gift for drawing three-dimensional movement on a flat, still page. He bends, stretches and compresses his figures and props so that the action seems to leap off the page. That’s a rare talent in comics, where many artists draw figures that look frozen in action, like a flash photo or a movie still. Golden’s ability to create the illusion of movement puts him in rare company. Personally, I’m humbled and inspired by his work. He draws like a virtuoso, but never fails to make it look like fun. Here’s to another thirty years. —Kevin Nowlan

Part 1:

“I Guess I’ll Just Go Draw Comic Books” course, back then I didn’t know it was in any other language. [laughter] I remember reading it and always enjoying it. Because it was serialized, it was really the only thing where I would look forward to the next issue showing up so I could read the next installment. It was in black-&-white, and that’s all I really remember about it. I remember reading it and enjoying it, but I was also reading [Robert] Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, and they weren’t an influence on my artwork, or at least as far as I know. Maybe some of these things creep in without us really knowing. [laughs] As I said, because of where I grew up on the plains out west, I didn’t grow up with exposure to a whole lot of this stuff other than what was in the school libraries at any given point in time.

MODERN MASTERS: I find it interesting that you didn’t read comics all that much as a kid. Most comic book artists of your generation were heavily into comics growing up. Was there anything else you were looking at that spurred your imagination? MICHAEL GOLDEN: It’s not a knock on comic books, it’s just that where I was growing up, they were not really available. Do you mean anything else as far as comic books? MM: Comics or anything else— books, television, movies.... You said you read some of Hergé’s work as a kid.

MM: You didn’t draw that much as a child, but did you have an interest in art at all? MICHAEL: Interested in the sense that I seemed to have a knack for it, sure. I did artwork in school just like everybody else, back when the schools at least attempted to have art programs, but I don’t recall giving it any kind of special attention other then whenever a teacher asked me to do something apart from

MICHAEL: My mother bought this thing called Children’s Digest, or something like that. If I remember correctly—and I might be wrong—it was a monthly periodical she got a subscription to, and it was basically a kids’ magazine. It had games in it and puzzles and children’s news and stuff like that, but it also had a comics section where they ran the Tintin series in English. Of 6

the other kids. And that was just one of the perks of having a natural talent, I guess. I didn’t really have any creative focus when I was a kid. I never thought of doing it as a living at the time. Actually, I enjoyed reading much more than I enjoyed artwork. I read adventure books, Dickens—one of my favorite writers is Dickens. And I guess that’s why, even with my art, I look at my job more as a storyteller than anything else. MM: I brought it up because even though you weren’t very familiar with the language of comic books, you had little trouble catching on to all the tricks and nuances of comic book storytelling. Right out of the gate it appeared like you pretty much knew how to work in the comic book format. There didn’t seem like you needed much of a learning curve. MICHAEL: At the risk of blowing my own horn, I’ve had other professionals say that, and people who have been there right from the beginning, like Larry Hama, say that, and I guess I always blow it off as I just had a knack for it. It seemed to come natural to me. MM: How did you get involved in doing commercial art? In a way, you almost fell into it. MICHAEL: I got into commercial work just by climbing the ladder. It wasn’t until my mid-teens that I actually started doing artwork with any kind of intent, but that intent was basically as favors for friends, doing little sketches, little drawings. Then when I was doing my walkabout around the country in my mid-teens—being a hippie, basically [laughter]—I found that I could trade for a place to sleep or some food or other sundry favors of the late ’60s, early ’70s [laughter] by doing drawings. And that sort of mutated into doing paintings on skateboards and surfboards, which eventually turned into doing vans and murals. At that point, of course, it became commercial art, because by the time I had mutated to vans and trucks and murals, I started to get paid for it, as opposed to just doing it in trade for services rendered. During the course of one of those jobs, I bumped into a guy who was a friend of a

friend of a friend who said my artwork was very comic-bookish or cartoony looking. He was originally from Manhattan, and he had a friend of a friend who was working for DC or Marvel—I can’t remember which. I believe it was DC. He kept pushing me to give that person a portfolio. I kept procrastinating and putting it off, because even though I was interested, I wasn’t really that interested at the same time. It was like, “Well, that’s kind of neat.” I was familiar with comic books by then, I’d always been telling stories as I said, and I was familiar with a lot of the underground stuff of the early ’70s. In that regard it interested me, but I didn’t really want to make the effort to get into the business. 7

Previous Page: A strange raccoon from another world. Penciled by Terry Austin and inked by Michael—how’s that for a switch! Terry says this was done soon after the release of 1978’s Superman: The Motion Picture. Above: Page 6 of Defenders #53, one of Michael’s first jobs for Marvel. Inks by Terry Austin.

Below: Opening page of Marvel’s adaptation of the Edgar Allen Poe classic, “The Cask of Amontillado.” Next Page: Page 6 of “To Catch a God” (House of Mystery #257), and page 3 of the Twilight Zone-esque “Phantom City” (Ghosts #88). Marvel Classics Comics ™ and ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc. Ghosts, House of Mystery ™ and ©2007 DC Comics.

But he kept pushing me, and we circulated in the same social circle. A lot of people in that circle started pushing me to go ahead and pursue this. I finally met with the friend of a friend of a friend from New York City who worked for DC or Marvel. I handed her my portfolio, which was basically a bunch of stuff on typing paper, and she disappeared with it. She called a couple of times and said, “Look, you really need to get up here. People are really interested in your stuff; they really like it, blah, blah, blah.” I still didn’t give it much thought, then about a year later, out of the clear blue, one of these people from our social circle just handed me a plane ticket to New York and

said, “Go to New York. Here are some people to stay with. Go do this. You need to do this.” They basically kicked me out the door, put me onto the airplane, and made me go to New York. The day after arriving I went to DC and got work. Either that same day or the day after—sometime within the next 24 hours—I went down to Marvel and got work there on that same visit, as well. And the rest is history. [laughter] After that it was like, “Okay, fine, they both gave me work.” I went back to Florida and went back to my job as an electrician. I really did enjoy doing the comic book work—or at least, I enjoyed it much more than being an electrician, let me put it that way, because that was the only winter that it snowed in central Florida. I was out wiring chicken feeders and got minor frostbite in my hands, so I said, “Okay, I guess I’ll just go draw comic books.” So I went back up to New York for about another month or two. They just started handing me work. It was mostly anthology stuff—the horror stories— for DC and some fill-in work for Marvel, but the jobs were really, really steady, so at that point I said, “Fine, this is what I’m going to do.” And I started my career in comic books at that point. And two years later I walked back out because it was too much of a pain in the butt and started doing commercial work again. [laughter] MM: Do you remember exactly what your first job was? MICHAEL: That’s open to debate. I worked for DC almost an entire year before I worked for Marvel, but there are those who say a Marvel job came out before any of the stuff from DC, so I don’t know, to be honest. Some work was completed first and then sat around and was published later, so work was not published in the order that I actually did it. MM: Well, I know that it was 1977 when your work first started appearing. I’m not sure exactly when you.... MICHAEL: Right, because I was working for DC in ’76. MM: Yeah, exactly. Let’s just start with the Marvel stuff. The first full story, really, is “The Cask of Amontillado” [Marvel Classics

Comics #28]. It was a nine-page story adapting the Edgar Allan Poe short story. Were you familiar with the story before you took on the job? MICHAEL: Well, far more than I remember the job, yeah. [laughter]

some of those stories, as well. Do you find that kind of, not having experience with it, did you find it unusual at all that you were allowed to write and draw some of your stories?

MM: Since it was an adaptation, did you work from a plot, or did you have a full script to work from? Do you remember at all?

MICHAEL: No, not at all. No, it’s actually more interesting that now, all of this time later, that I have to validate myself to editors that are totally unaware that I’ve been writing since the day I started in this industry, for the most part. Like I said, I am essentially a storyteller, no matter if that is with art or words or both.

MICHAEL: I don’t remember. That’s the short version of that answer. But I would also quickly add that almost all of that anthology stuff, the little mystery stories and stuff like that, were almost all done full-script. Plus, of course, I was very familiar with the original Poe story. MM: Okay. And you inked that job yourself, I believe.

MM: Was there a pen name that you used, or was there just a writer who would offer a plot or something like that? How did the credits go? Do you remember at all? There’s a Barry Jameson; does that name sound familiar?

MICHAEL: Yes I did, because it was very early on and it was all just filler stuff, so they weren’t going to invest in the production line just to produce those stories. And in truth, I prefer to always ink myself.

MICHAEL: No. It worked in various ways. It was either I was asked to rewrite something, or I just wrote something and then, for one reason or another, they had another writer rewrite dialogue so that he got the writing credit.

MM: And with DC, with your ghost stories, you inked yourself a lot, too, and you said you had actually written 9

You know, it was very convoluted, and it was just all part of the way of doing things back then. I never really thought much about it until, like I said, all of these years later, now I sometimes have to validate that I’ve been writing since Day One. And actually, I have a file of stories that I’ll be working on within the next few years. MM: There was one story that you did a couple years into your career called “The Phantom City” [Ghosts #88]. It was about a motorcycle gang riding into this town and terrorizing the citizens. They kill this kid’s father who comes back as a spirit and helps his son destroy the bikers. Do you remember that story at all? MICHAEL: No, can’t say I do. There were so many. MM: Well, I was just asking because it looked to me like you had penciled, inked, and maybe even lettered that story. Were you lettering some as well during that time? MICHAEL: Oh, yeah, I’ve been lettering, too, and coloring, since the day I came into the business. MM: Did you enjoy doing the ghost stories at all? MICHAEL: “Enjoy” is kind of a tricky word. It was fun telling stories, but, as we’ve discussed before, I tend to look at everything as a job. I go into it looking at it as to how I do my part of the work to express it to a reader, to do the best job that I can, and in that context I get my enjoyment, or not, depending on the end product, I guess. But as to whether I enjoyed it in some sort of nebulous, all-inclusive aspect of the genre, I can’t really answer it as enjoyment or not enjoyment. It was always about the end product, for me. It always has been.

MM: I just wondered if before then you had seen some of the EC reprints. MICHAEL: No, I wasn’t much of a comic reader before I came into the industry, like I explained. It just wasn’t around me. 10

MM: That was kind of your first—you had the “Man-Bat” strip that was ongoing, somewhat. I noticed in the second “Man-Bat” story, you drew yourself into it as an incidental character, just in one panel. You’re in a café, and the character is addressed as “Mike,” so I figured it was you. Do you remember doing that? MICHAEL: Well, see, now you caught me. I don’t remember doing that, but it’s not above me to do an Alfred Hitchcock [cameo]. MM: Did you have any kind of preference at all about doing Man-Bat stories, or any other stories, or was that the character you got picked to do and that was that? Since ManBat was kind of a grotesque monster of sorts, did that perhaps appeal to you more than doing a more standard super-hero? MICHAEL: If I understand what you’re asking me, it wasn’t a choice. It was, that’s what they had for me to do, and that’s what I did. I was the new kid on the block. I didn’t get to pick and choose. MM: Having said that, did the visual impact of the character make any difference to you? MICHAEL: Again, I was just trying to do the job the best that I could. I think I was working from somebody else. Somebody else had been doing it before me. I don’t remember who. MM: When you were on Batman Family, that was kind of your first—

MM: I don’t remember who was doing the back-up before you. [Note: Marshall Rogers started the back-up series, with Howard Chaykin filling in on one story before Michael took over.] Frank Robbins [along with Neal Adams] created the character back in 1970.

MICHAEL: Okay, I remember some of that stuff. [laughs]

Previous Two Pages: A mind-blowing 2-page spread from the “ManBat” back-up strip in Batman Family #20. Inks by Joe Rubinstein. Above: The Demon unleashed! From Detective Comics #482. Inks by Dick Giordano. Right: Bat-Mite detail from “Bat-Mite’s New York Adventure,” also from Detective #482. Next Page: Once Steve Gerber took over Mister Miracle, he began playing up the “Mr. Miracle as a messiah” aspect of the Kirby stories. Opening splash from Mister Miracle #25. Inks by Russ Heath. All characters ™ and ©2007 DC Comics.

With issue #18 and 19, Craig Russell inked your stories, and it looks like that had an effect on your penciling somewhat. MICHAEL: Oh, dramatically, yes. It opened my eyes a lot just seeing my stuff inked by somebody who knew how to translate the pencil work in a very clearly defined, reproducible way. And looking at the final product, again, see, it was always about the final product. I mean, once I saw how this reproduced, and that it reproduced so much better than what I had been doing up to that point—because I think I had been inking most of my own stuff up to that point—it did oblige me to change the way I proceeded in my work. MM: Is there any particular aspect of his work that you remember having affected you, maybe the way you cross-hatched, or the way you drew faces? MICHAEL: Well, the rendering, yeah. Nothing more specific than that. It was all about the rendering. I freely confess that I was not versed enough in the end product back then, in the printing—which back then was pretty bad—as to how to approach producing the work until I worked with Craig Russell, and then after him Russ Heath. 12

I said, you’d have to ask Larry as to whether there was an actual conscious choice to give me that opportunity, or I just happened to be standing there.

MM: In the issue following the two where you were inked by Craig Russell, Joe Rubinstein inked you. You had the lead “Batman” story and the back-up “Man-Bat” story, and it looked like even your layouts had changed somewhat. You just appeared to be more confident, more bold, perhaps.

MM: Did you consider that a step up from the Batman Family stuff, even though it was more of a secondary character?

MICHAEL: Well, I was also getting used to telling stories in a graphic narrative format. That just came with experience.

MICHAEL: No, I didn’t think in those terms. It was just another job. It was interesting in the sense that it was a change of... I don’t know what would be the word I would use... story concepts? It was definitely more super-

MM: You include two-page spreads in those, and just a more dramatic approach, I guess. MICHAEL: Well, I’m glad you think so. [laughs] MM: After that it seemed like you were kind of the heir apparent to the Mister Miracle title. You had three issues, and would you have kept on going had it not been for the DC Implosion? MICHAEL: Oh, yeah. In fact, I think there was at least one issue in the drawer that never saw print for Mister Miracle. And there was an ongoing storyline that just never got finished. MM: Yeah. And Larry Hama was the editor of that. Was that the first time you met him? MICHAEL: Yup, he was the editor on that book. MM: Did he hire you, or was that just how the assignment went? Was he responsible for assigning you to the book? MICHAEL: I don’t know that Larry made that choice. You’d have to ask him. Again, it was sort of like, “We’ve got a title that we need an artist on, and here you go.” Marshall Rogers had been the penciler up to that point, and he was, I think, devoting himself completely to Batman, so they needed a penciler, and I guess I was the closest warm body. Well, you know, I’m saying that jokingly, but that’s the way, more often than not, things like that happened. But, then again, like 13

MM: One of the things that really stood out to me with him inking you were the faces, especially the eyes—the way he finished your eyes. I think your eyes were getting a little larger and more expressive at that point, and he really laid it on with Barda’s lashes. What did you take from him inking your work? MICHAEL: It was from Russ Heath that I learned to ink with a brush. To that point I’d been trying to work with pen, and it was seeing what Russ Heath did entirely with a brush—because he inks entirely with a brush—that I realized I was wasting a lot of time trying to learn how to ink with a pen. And it was from that point on that I basically just gave up in that regard, and focused all of my attention on working with a brush. MM: Did you get to talk with Russ during that time? MICHAEL: I met him in passing, because he was working up at the old Continuity at the time, and Larry Hama and I were just walking through one day. He goes, “Oh, and this is Russ Heath.” And Russ said hi, I said hi, then we left. I’ve met him in passing a couple other times, but it’s all been basically that same sort of situation, just a hi, hi, bye, bye sort of thing. Recently we were at a convention together in California, and I wanted to talk to him there, but we never connected. Above: Mister Miracle #25, page 15. Inks by Russ Heath. Next Page: This cover intended for Mister Miracle #26 was printed in DC’s Cancelled Comics Cavalcade. Mister Miracle and all related characters ™ and ©2007 DC Comics.

hero, so I was a little more uncomfortable with it, but the stories themselves were almost science fiction-oriented, so I was able to move into it a little bit easier than if they had just handed me Superman, which I had absolutely no concept of at the time. MM: You mentioned Russ Heath earlier, and this is where Russ Heath inked you.

MM: With the “Bat-Mite” story you did for Detective #482 you were able to explore the cartoonier side of your work, and I think that’s probably the first time you got really into that cartoony style in comics. You also drew caricatures of all the guys in the office there that were involved with the book. Did you fancy yourself much of a caricaturist?

MICHAEL: That I remember very well. [laughter]

MICHAEL: More of a caricaturist, if anything. I mean, I’ve done it, professionally.

Below: Jack Kirby’s New Gods, plus Aliana—the character created by Steve Gerber along with Michael in Mister Miracle #24. Next Page: An early ’80s sketch of Bug and Acroyear of the Micronauts.

I’ve done that sort of thing before. As to whether it was relevant to that story or not, well, again, it was just another job, with a story I had to convey, and I had to pick the best art look to do that. But it is a lot more fun doing the cartoony stuff. That job I think is what segued into, ultimately, “Bucky O Hare,” because I found I was very comfortable working with that animated style. And no one else was, at the time, other than in the kids’ books.

MM: Did you have the guys pose for you at all, or did you do it from memory? MICHAEL: No, I think I had a Polaroid camera, just took a couple of snapshots, and that was about it. MM: After that you moved over to Marvel. Was that because of the DC Implosion? MICHAEL: It was absolutely because of the Implosion. One day I had work, and the next day it was all gone. MM: Did you kind of regret having to leave DC? MICHAEL: Yeah, because I was very comfortable doing the work that I was.... I was doing “Batman,” “Man-Bat,” and Mister Miracle—basically three books a month—and I was just set. Batman was a super-hero, but the “Batman” stories that were appearing in Batman Family weren’t really super-hero stories. Marshall was doing those in the regular titles. And the “Man-Bat” stories were like, weirdness all over the place, which kept my attention. And the Mister Miracle stories, the writer [Steve Gerber] was doing this whole weird messiah thing that I guess I sort of wanted to see how it turned out. But also that gave me a venue to try a different art style, because it exposed me to the Kirby work. That was my first exposure to all of the Kirby stuff, in Mister Miracle, and it provided me with the opportunity to try some visual things that I couldn’t really do on the other titles. So I was set. I had no inclination to leave DC whatsoever, except for the Implosion and that Marvel offered me ten bucks a page more. So it was a no-brainer at that point. “Okay, I gotta go to work for Marvel.”

Part 2:

Small Beginnings at Marvel Comics

MM: Your first continuing work at Marvel was Micronauts.

MM: Now, as far as the licensing aspect of it goes, did you have to turn in your art for approval from anybody, or did the license...?

MICHAEL: Right. MM: Did your commercial art background have any impact on you getting a licensed book?

MICHAEL: No, there was no approval process that I was aware of. That might need a big qualifier. You might ask Allen about that, I’m not sure. As far as I know, there was no approval process, and I would probably stick by that statement seeing as how that book was late from the word go.

MICHAEL: No, I think it was that nobody else was interested in doing it because it was a licensed product, and, again, I was the new kid on the block, so they threw it at me, and I said, “Sure,” because I didn’t have any work. [laughs]

MM: So, what, it was already behind schedule even before you started working on it?

MM: Did they send you toys to work from? MICHAEL: Yeah, they gave me a whole big giant box of toys—which I then, in turn, passed off to the next artist, who I think was Pat Broderick.

MICHAEL: Well, it was my first exposure to a situation that occurred to me repeatedly at Marvel, where I was told that they wouldn’t schedule the book until they had four issues completed, in the drawer, then, like, a couple weeks later they’d call me up and tell me I was four months late. And that’s what happened on the Micronauts is that I said I’d do this book, and we got everything together. I was wrapping up my stuff at DC. I then moved across four states, and as soon as I got a phone in the new state, I called up and they said, “Oh, by the way, you’re four months behind schedule.” And from that point on it was just me cranking out work.

MM: Yeah, I think Pat took over next. Al Milgrom was the editor of that book. How was your working relationship with him? MICHAEL: Great. Al’s a nice guy. Nothing but good to say about Al Milgrom. I got along with him just fine, and he covered my butt a couple of times, more often than not, and he was put in, y’know, some uncomfortable positions sometimes that he handled quite gracefully, in my opinion. I have nothing but good to say about working with Allen, ever, in any context.

MM: You didn’t do much else while you were doing Micronauts, I 17

Right: Page 17 of Micronauts #1. Trusty transcriber, Steven Tice, asked Al Gordon about the Micronauts. Here’s what he had to say: “...Sometimes licensors were so eager to get Marvel to do books based on their properties that they were lax in overseeing the material. They trusted us to do a good job. And in the case of the Micronauts, several of the cast were created by Marvel, so in those cases, no approval was needed. ... Michael was experimenting with the look of his pencils. He was using a finer line—quite lovely and illustrative, but lacking in power and impact. This was more evident on the interiors than on the covers. ... As I recall, we were using very crappy paper to print the books on back then—very thin. The fine lines employed by Golden and faithfully inked by Joe were all but covered up by the color. I spoke to Michael about giving his work a more robust look—and I’m sure I cited Kirby as a guy to look at, not only for the dynamism of his work, but also as an example of how to deal with poor paper and weak reproduction and color. Michael took my suggestions and ran with them. He ramped up his approach and immediately started turning in much bolder, more dramatic work. Next Page: Michael’s claustrophobic cover to Micronauts #18.

guess. I don’t think there’s anything you worked on concurrent with that. MICHAEL: It wasn’t enough? [laughter] It was down to, y’know, I had to turn out a book every two weeks, and I don’t know that I ever did get caught up. MM: Well, you were able to get twelve issues out, so you must have been doing something right. That’s actually one of your longest runs on any book. What kept you there for so long? Was there any particular...? MICHAEL: It was a matter of honor. [laughter] I said I would do it, and by issue four or five, I decided I’d done enough, “Okay, as of issue twelve, I’m off the book. I’m leaving.” So they just arranged everything, and whatever Mantlo had to do to rewrite, we sat down and replotted the storyline and wrapped everything up in twelve issues, because I made it clear that I wasn’t going to go beyond that. MM: In 1980, after Micronauts was winding down for you, you made a transition to cover artist. You drew tons of covers for Marvel during that time: Doctor Strange, more Micronauts covers, Rom covers, Savage She-Hulk. Was that just to get a change from the monthly grind of having to crank out Micronauts? MICHAEL: No, I was doing commercial work then. I got fed up with comic books and just went off and started doing commercial work. But I kept gravitating back 18

to comic books, not necessarily as a conscious thing on my part, but because editors would call me up and ask me to do stuff, and I would be quite blunt about it and say, “Look, I just don’t have the time.” “Well, can you do a cover?” “Sure, I’ll do a cover,” just to keep my fingers in the pie. It was after Micronauts that I did the Marvel Team-Up story where it eventually became Marvel Fanfare #1, and that sat around for a couple of years before they decided to put it into a Marvel Fanfare, and then Allen called me up and said, “Well, do you want to do the second half of the story?” Following that I did the Avengers Annual, and then the G.I. Joe thing, and then The ’Nam, and so on, and so forth. So, they pulled me back in—Allen and Hama, mostly.

MM: In the meantime, though, in 1980 you did a Star Wars story. MICHAEL: Star Wars, oh yeah! I forgot about that one. MM: Yeah, Archie Goodwin wrote it. But you did the plotting, and you also did the coloring. I don’t know if that was your first interior coloring or not, but that might have been—at least credited. MICHAEL: Yeah, possibly, I think it was. Well, the one that I got credited for, yeah. MM: So on that work, did you just come up with a plot and pitch it? MICHAEL: Actually, I think right after the first movie Archie had.... During the first movie, I think Archie was editor-in-chief, or had just had been or something. But he was feeding me little eight-page back-up stories at that point. And I just walked in one day, and we were just sitting around talking, and I said, “Well, I’ve kind of got a science fiction story in my head that might work for Star Wars,” and I just told it to him. And he said, “Yeah, go ahead and do it.”

And so basically I just sat down and I drew this twentywhatever page the story was, and turned it in. And it sat around for a while—quite a while, actually. I guess there was some sort of hang-up with the adaptation to the second movie and they needed something to stick in there real fast. And Archie called me up one day and asked if he could just write the dialogue and get it out. And I said, “Sure, go right ahead.” And he wrote just this incredible dialogue, just tied the whole thing together. It ended up being a real spooky little story. And meanwhile, Terry Austin was inking it, and I asked Archie for the favor if I could go ahead and color it, and he said, “Sure, but we need it really fast.” So, like, in two days I turned the color guides in, and off it went to the printer. [laughs] MM: Were you a fan of the movies at all? MICHAEL: I liked the first one. MM: Not the second one? MICHAEL: Well, the second one was okay. The 20

second one struck me as more obviously a multi-media tie-in. The first one was just a good story. And you know, I’m going to say this out loud, it’s a shame that nobody today can see the original version before they made it PC. Because the first movie, the way it was, was just fine, George. MM: Yeah, it was, it was. [laughs] Let’s talk about Avengers Annual #10, then. How’d that come about? Because that was a larger story than you were used to doing. Was there any extra work on your part? Obviously time-wise there were more pages, but as far as doing an annual, gearing up for an annual? MICHAEL: Extra work? MM: In terms of planning and that kind of thing? MICHAEL: No, no. It just so happened that it fit into the schedule that I had just fine, at the time. MM: Now, that was the introduction of Rogue— her first appearance. Was that just part of the story? MICHAEL: Yeah, it was incidental to the story. MM: You had no idea she would become an ongoing character, much less an integral part of the X-Men? MICHAEL: No! As far as I was aware, she was a one-shot villain, and I worked with her that way in the course of the story, designed her that way in the course of the story. That she went on to be the popular character that she is is very gratifying, and I’ll go ahead and blow my own horn that, okay, cool, I got to co-create her, but what became of her after that was by virtue of many hands, and, of course, Claremont’s directive. I think it’s really cool that it happened, yeah, that the first time she showed up, that I was part of that. MM: Is there anything else from that story that stands out for you? That was your first really big super-hero story. MICHAEL: Well, yeah. And, in fact, I don’t know if I actually asked to do it or somebody called me up to do it, but I do remember agreeing to do it because in my mind Avengers was Captain America, Thor, and Iron Man. And 21

Previous Page Top: What originally was intended to be an inventory story for Marvel Team-Up, eventually became the first two issues of Marvel Fanfare. Previous Page Bottom and Above: Two pages from Star Wars #38, which featured Luke and Leia. Left: Convention sketch of Michael’s co-creation, Rogue. Angel, Rogue ™ and ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc. Star Wars ™ and ©2007 Lucasfilm Ltd.

Above: It’s scenes like this panel (shown here at actual size) from page 3 of Avengers Annual #10, that add warmth and richness to the characters. Top Right and Next Page: Pages 7 and 28 of Avengers Annual #10.

I was sitting here going, “Well, if I’m going to do super-heroes, and if I’m going to do Marvel super-heroes, I might as well do, like, the Big Three.” A Spider-Man project that I had been attached to fell through by then, and so I was going, “Okay, cool. I’m going to draw Captain America, Iron Man, and Thor. This will satisfy this super-hero part of my career.” Well, of course, as anybody who’s read that book knows, Captain America, Iron Man, and Thor all get knocked out in one page, and the rest of that book was all characters that I had never heard of. MM: You not only penciled the back-up story in Doctor Strange #46, but you colored that story, too, and you did some very interesting things with the color effects. I don’t know how well you remember this, but on the first page, Clea’s basically all in red, and she has this kind of butterfly effect going on around her, and it’s all color holds. There’s no black to it. Did you have any problems with getting that to work, given the technology at the time? MICHAEL: No, I had plenty of experience making that work with the stuff that I had done in Micronauts. Basically it’s just overlays. I’d done it a dozen times in newspapers and advertising stuff. When I tried it in the Micronauts, I got a lot of flack about it. And I’m not sure why, because John Byrne had already done the exact same stuff over in X-Men. But for some reason they wanted to give me a lot of grief about it. But we’d already worked out all the kinks, and by the time I did that Doctor Strange story everybody else in the business was doing the same stuff, so by then the production people or whoever was antsy about it, by 22

Michael’s pencils to the opening page of “A Moment’s Peace,” a back-up story in Doctor Strange #46, as well as additional work he did on a separate page in order to facilitate the art production, complete with notes. Clea, Dr. Strange ™ and ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

then they’d gotten used to it and it wasn’t going to be a problem. MM: I find that a lot of artists have a fascination with Dr. Strange as a character, at least from a visual standpoint. Did you find you had any sort of affinity for the character? MICHAEL: I can’t say that I had any particular affinity, or even familiarity, with the character before I drew him. In fact that little back-up story was probably the first time I drew him. And actually, I try not to have favorite characters so that I give them all the same attention and same weight when I draw them. MM: You had already established yourself by that point, but Doctor Strange #55 is what most people point to as seminal Michael Golden work. You kind of changed your style a little bit for the story—there’s some development there in your style. Above: Proposed Doctor Strange cover cornerbox art. Right: Dr. Strange meets his creators, Ted Tevoski (a.k.a., Steve Ditko) and Les Tane (a.k.a., Stan Lee). Page 10 of Doctor Strange #55. Inks by Terry Austin. Next Page: Cover art for Doctor Strange #55.

MICHAEL: I don’t think I really actually “changed my style.” I think by then I’d been doing commercial work enough that I had actually grown as an artist. I’d become a better draftsman is what you’re trying to pull out. MM: Yeah, there’s an evolutionary step there in your artwork is what I’m trying to say. [Golden laughs] It’s a little more noticeable, I guess, because you had gone from odd job to odd job, and we don’t get to see the smooth transition. All of a sudden, bam, it’s there in Doctor Strange. 26

MICHAEL: Well, it also demanded that. Even if we wanted to stick with the “change of style” definition, that story basically demanded it. It was not a superhero story. In fact, it wasn’t even really a typical mystical Doctor Strange story, y’know? It was a giant head-trip story, so it had to be presented in as realistic an art style as I was capable of mustering at the time, just to pull it off. MM: What was your thought process while working on the story? MICHAEL: Get it done. [laughter] They had said it would be a fill-in, and then after I got the first page laid out it changed to, “It’s on the schedule. You’ve got two weeks to get it done.” I’m really flattered and honored—and a bit bewildered, to be

honest—as to the popularity that that particular work has enjoyed, but it was a hard job at the time, and quick, and I guess that adds to the fluidity of the work. I was originally supposed to pencil, ink, and color it, like I had done for the 8-page Doctor Strange story several issues before with Craig Russell. That was the goal, but all of that went away as soon as it was put on the schedule. Let me add, the emotional content of the story was, in fact, in the script. As I know I’ve said before, when I work with a script I’ve always considered it my job to not only give what the writer asks for, but to enhance it to the best of my abilities. So that was my focus. MM: So you were working from a full script rather than a plot? MICHAEL: I remember it being a full script. I might be wrong on that, but I’m pretty sure it was a full script. MM: Do you have a preference between working full-script versus plot-first?

Above: Panel from page 2 of Doctor Strange #55. Check out the “rain on window” effect. Inks by Terry Austin. Right: Page 12 of X-Men Annual #7. The book ended up being inked by eleven (!) different artists, counting Michael, himself. This page inked by Terry Austin. Next Page: Opening page of Batman Special #1, done during a brief foray back to DC. Dr. Strange, Wong, X-Men ™ and ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc. Batman ™ and ©2007 DC Comics.

MICHAEL: My absolute preference is for a full script. I want to know what the writer wants. I want to know the words the characters have coming out of their mouths so that I can make them act appropriately. I want to know that the writer knows how to tell a story from beginning to middle to end, that they know what a climax is, that they know what an introduction is, that they know what an ending is. It’s not my job to tell the story—unless I’m the writer, as well—it’s the writer’s job. My job is to make the story work. And that’s why I demand a full script. MM: I assume you had to work plot-first at least a few times while you were breaking in. MICHAEL: Well, yeah, I worked “Marvel style,” “Stan Lee style,” whatever you want to call it, with Bill Mantlo and on what ultimately was the 28

first two issues of Marvel Fanfare with Chris Claremont, as well. And it’s not because of those guys—in fact, I really enjoy working with Chris—but I’d prefer to never work that way again. MM: Your Doctor Strange work also led to a portfolio. MICHAEL: Sal Q. [Quartuccio] came out of the woodwork one day and decided he wanted to do a Dr. Strange portfolio. I did the envelope piece, and two or three years later [laughs] bothered to sit down and do the plates themselves over the course of about a week. MM: You can see, when you go from this step to The ’Nam within a couple years—there are a lot of similarities with what you’re doing there. But before we get into that, let’s deal with X-Men Annual #7, which... I don’t know, maybe it’s all the different inkers. Have you seen that job recently? The X-Men Annual? Have you looked at it? MICHAEL: No. If I know the job that you’re talking about, that’s a job I would just as soon forget.

an inker.” It’s not the way I wanted it to go, and it wouldn’t have gone that way if the production schedule had not been changed. It became a rush job not only for me, but for the inkers they had to find as well.

MM: Yeah, I would assume so. MICHAEL: That was another one of those jobs where I was told that I had X amount of time. In fact, I even started inking that job because that was how it was supposed to be done, I was supposed to do all of the line art for that job. Then all of a sudden I get a call that says, “Oh, well, it’s been moved up on the schedule.” And so basically I broke the whole job down in a couple of days. And then I got another call that said, “Oh, well, it’s been moved up again. At which point I said, “Well, there’s just no way I can do this job. I’m going to need

MM: And they found several different inkers to do it. There’re, I think, eleven different inkers here. MICHAEL: Well, I found out later that they, in fact, moved it up even further on the schedule, to where they had no choice but to get any warm body they could grab to ink it. I don’t know why that happened, and I’ve had to bear the brunt of that ever since, since my name is on the book. But that’s how that job ended up being done. 29

Part 3:

Savage Worlds of Past and Future with [Bucky O’Hare creator] Larry [Hama] before.

MM: And then we come to “Bucky O’Hare,” which, as you were talking about earlier, you got to do the cartoony style. Was that something you played around with at all? How did you develop that cartoonier style? I mean, because it’s so different from your super-hero work.

MICHAEL: Right, Larry was one of my editors over at DC. You’d have to ask him about his thought process as to why he asked me. I’ve had plenty of suppositions on my part as to why. We were both model makers. We both thought of things in terms of three-dimensional objects. We got along well at DC. I’ve always gotten along pretty well with Larry ever since. He’s one of the few people I’ve known in this business since the time I came in. I don’t remember the exact course of events as far as him asking me to be involved in it, but I did some presentation work for him when it was still called Buck Bunny. Over the next year or so I went to work at Marvel, and about a year later so did he as an editor, because of the DC Implosion. During that course of time, Neal Adams and Continuity picked up the property and, again, I’m not particularly privy as to how all that happened, but I ended up working with Continuity and Larry when they renamed the project Bucky O’Hare. They started serializing the story for an anthology comic book that Neal was doing called Echo of Futurepast, which eventually was turned into the first graphic novel.

MICHAEL: It s actually my natural drawing style. [laughter] I like doing the cartoony stuff, the animation kind of style stuff much more than doing any kind of realistic rendering. I’ve never considered myself a competent enough draftsman to work my way through any sort of serious, hardcore realistic rendering, although I probably could.... But the reproduction in comic books has never really been conducive to doing anything other than very simple line art and flat color stuff, up until just recently, with the advent of computer separations and finally getting to work on paper that isn’t recycled from chicken poop, and stuff like that. The drawing style on that was simply an extension of my regular drawing style working off of the stuff that Larry Hama had already put down or conceptualized for the characters. MM: How did you get involved with Bucky O’Hare? You had worked 30

Seven or eight years later, the license was picked up by Hasbro, and the thing was turned into a multi-media event for about three or four years. And it was quite successful. I’m not trying to blow my own horn on that; it was a major player for a while. And now Vanguard Productions has just released a manga version of the work, and Continuity has optioned it for a movie, so it will continue, it appears.

designs for “Bucky O’Hare.” MM: When the serialized story was republished as the Bucky O’Hare comic, it was reformatted. What was behind the reformatting? Why not just print it the way it originally ran in Echo of Future Past? MICHAEL: What do you mean reformatted?

MM: You said both you and Larry were model makers. Was that something you were thinking about when you were designing the characters? MICHAEL: Yeah, it was an understood prerequisite between both Larry and I that this would, in fact, be designed to be—to quote Larry—“held in a little kid’s hands.” By the time we actually got going on it full-bore, I had already had the experience with the Micronauts, and I took a lot of the things that I learned about injection molding, about playability, about adaptability and interchangeability from the Micronauts and used it in the 31

Previous Page: Jenny shows her true power. From Bucky O’Hare. Left: Opening panel (in the original printing anyway) of the Bucky O’Hare saga. Below: Sketch of Bucky O’Hare’s lead protagonist, Willy DuWitt.

MM: Yeah? That’s great! MICHAEL: It was amazing! It’s like, it’s gone! You can’t get it anymore, kids, it’s gone! Although they have gone back for a second printing now, and we did the signed and numbered edition through Image Comics and Eva Ink. MM: Did you like the digest format? MICHAEL: Yeah.

MM: Some panels were enlarged or removed or moved around. MICHAEL: Oh, well, you’d have to talk to Continuity about that.

Above: A “Bucky O’Hare” panel as it originally saw print on page 2 of Echo of Futurepast #1 (left), and as it saw print on page 5 of Bucky O’Hare #1. Not only was the panel moved and the dialogue changed, but the background was erased and Bucky’s eyes were redrawn. Right: Sketch of the first mate of the Righteous Indignation, Jenny. Next Page Top: Jenny uses her wily charms on Willie to convince him to join the team. Next Page Bottom: Sketch Bucky O’Hare’s Dead-Eye Duck. Bucky O’Hare and the Toad Menace ™ and ©2007 Continuity Graphics Associates, Inc.

MM: Oh, okay. So you didn’t have anything to do with it? You didn’t redraw anything? MICHAEL: No, no. They actually found an artist who could mimic my art style enough to where even I wasn’t sure whether I had done it or not, and he went in there and filled in all the gaps. Like you said, they blew up some panels. You’ll have to talk to Continuity about all of that. MM: Did you do any of the covers for the new reprinting? MICHAEL: Not officially. There was some promotional stuff sitting around that I seem to recall was turned into covers. I did ink one cover that one of the artists had done, but—again, I don’t know if officially it was supposed to be a cover, but I think it eventually did become a cover for the comic book. MM: Let’s just step back just a minute. MICHAEL: Well, you’ve got to talk about Bucky O’Hare. Bucky O’Hare is great! [laughter] The Vanguard book sold out!

MM: Yeah, I mean, it’s obviously playing on the popularity of the manga books now. MICHAEL: You know, when they told me they were going to publish it in that format, I was thinking, “Gee, why didn’t anybody think of this before?” I thought it was a brilliant little idea. And I guess it was! I’ve been validated, because it’s gone. It sold out almost immediately on that first printing, as I mentioned.

MM: Do you know what the print run was on that? MICHAEL: I have no idea. No idea. I mean, it could have been, like, only 5,000 copies, but I think it was actually considerably more than that. But they were gone, I had to act fast just to get some for myself and my agent. MM: So with seeing it in black-&white, it’s kind of a dingy paper, but still, it’s out there, right? MICHAEL: Well, the dingy paper doesn’t bother me. Even on the old Savage Sword of Conan thing that Marvel did, if there’s no color on it, it doesn’t seem to muddy up as much. So it didn’t hurt it. In fact, it sort of helped it. At least now you can see the artwork. [laughter] And that’s not a slight against the colorist, it’s a statement about the reproduction. It just seemed to work better in black-&-white. And it was the same with Spartan X. The color version of Spartan X was okay, but when it was printed in black-&-white through Image and Eva Ink it seemed to work better. It seemed to be far more readable. I don’t hate newsprint, and as I said, in some cases, I think the art looks great on it. It was a good choice for Bucky in black-&-white.

vans and skateboards and stuff like that, so I had a fair amount of experience with painting before then, but not really for this kind of reproduction, and I had never really worked with gouache before. It’s a very difficult medium to master, and some of those covers proved that. [laughter] But then some of the covers turned out pretty well, once I got used to working with the stuff and realized what the limitations of them are.

MM: Speaking of Savage Sword, you did several covers for Kull and Savage Sword of Conan. I believe you painted some of those, right?

MM: What size board were you working on? MICHAEL: It varied. Originally I was working on, like, really huge, like, 3' x 4' board because I thought that would cover some of my mistakes, and it did. Once it was all shrunk down, it did in fact hide some of the mistakes. But after I started to get comfortable with it, I started working on regular 11" x 17" illustration board, because I’d learned how to use the medium and how to use it for reproduction.

MICHAEL: Yeah. MM: Was that something you did to just try something new, painting for comics? What kind of medium did you use? MICHAEL: Well, it was gouache, and that, I’ll confess that those covers were more me getting paid to experiment than anything else. I’d been painting.... Part of my commercial experience was airbrushing

MM: What were the extra challenges of doing something like that for reproduction? MICHAEL: Well, when you work with gouache, you have the illusion of getting 33

Next Page: Cover art for Kull the Conqueror #7. While Michael painted several covers for the series, this particular cover was colored in the traditional manner. Below: Gouache painting for a Savage Sword of Conan magazine cover. King Kull ™ and ©2007 King Kull, LLC. Conan ™ and ©2007 Conan Properties International, LLC.

color. Gouache has this real nasty habit with those old style cameras and reproduction to just completely flatten out and turn gray, and if you’re not blending it all with white, or conversely, for your dark colors, using, like, the black—not the ivory black, but there’s another kind of black. If you’re not blending it correctly, the camera light tended to pick up all of the layers of color and everything started to look like a topographic map, and the colors would all flatten out, like I said. It took a while, it took me seeing a lot of this stuff in print before I began to understand how to use it. And I also learned it was easier to use it with airbrush, too. I tried to shy away from

working with an airbrush, because I didn’t want it to look like the stuff I’d been doing on vans, or a lot of other stuff that was being done at the time. I tried to shy away from using airbrush except for highlights or backgrounds or whatever. Once I realized how to blend the colors, I realized it was just easier in certain instances to just go ahead and airbrush it. MM: Let’s talk about The ’Nam. You started out with a little story in Savage Tales. MICHAEL: Several stories. MM: Were those meant to be tryouts for a regular series? MICHAEL: They were just supposed to be exactly what they were. For Savage Tales, Larry [the editor at the time] had this writer, Doug Murray, who was writing these little one- or two-page Vietnam vignettes that he, I guess, thought were really cool, and he was telling me about it one time. And it was very clear that there weren’t really stories, they were just sort of like anecdotal onepage things—narratives. And I said, “Well, why don’t you send me one down one day and let me take a look at it and see if I can turn it into a story.” And that was the first story. I sat down and turned it into a story, and he said, “Oh, well, I’ve got a couple more sitting here.” And I said, “Well, send them on down and we’ll do them.” And after, like, the second or third story, Larry decided that he wanted this to be an ongoing feature, even though I hadn’t produced them in any kind of regular timeframe because I was working a whole other job outside of comic book stuff at the time. But he wanted it to be ongoing. And just about the time

Below and Next Page: Pages 9 and 10 of “The ’Nam,” from Savage Tales #1.

he made that decision, they canceled the magazine. And so the first stuff was sort of like a fluke; it existed in and of itself. It wasn’t any kind of lead-in to the ’Nam book. MM: Was the book generating any enthusiasm within the company, or was there a response from the magazine that kind of...? MICHAEL: Uh, no, there was no enthusiasm as far as I could tell. Or from what I’ve

understood—let me rephrase that, from what I understood inside the company. I mean, it was a war book for a dedicated super-hero publishing company. And that’s ultimately, I think, why the Savage Tales magazine was also canceled was because they just didn’t want to have anything to do with it. The ’Nam comic book, I can relate my side of this [laughs], but I’m not exactly sure about the chain of events or the course of those events, or the motivations or the agendas of those events. But as I understood it, or how I remember it, depending on how you want to approach this, is that Dick Giordano called me up from DC one day and asked me to do Batman ongoing—the regular monthly book, either Batman or Detective, I can’t remember which. And at the time I was playing with this whole “well, I want to do comic books for a while” thing that I periodically go through. I guess I just don’t get enough abuse. [laughter] So I was actually entertaining it, and basically told Mr. Giordano that, yeah, sure, why not? Batman’s okay. It’s not like super-hero superhero. It’s not like somebody shooting ray beams out of their eyes or levitating cars or anything. From what I remembered of Batman, he was a detective who just happened to wear a super-hero costume. So I was cool with the idea and I basically told him, yes, I’d do this. Literally, and I mean literally, the next day I got a call from Larry Hama telling me that he had just gotten off the phone with

Above: The cast of “The ’Nam” as they appeared in Savage Tales magazine. Next Page: Truly beautiful cover art for The ’Nam #13.

Denny O’Neil, who was the Batman editor, and that he had been told that I was going to do Batman, and then he launched off into this big tirade about me not actually wanting to do Batman. [laughter] I mean, we’re laughing about it, but ultimately he was right. I really didn’t want to do Batman. I really didn’t want to do super-heroes at the time. I did want to work for DC. I was tired of working for Marvel. But out of his mouth spews this whole thing about, “Well, we’ve got this concept for this Vietnam historical book, it’ll be an ongoing monthly series, blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah.” And what I found out later is basically he made it up on the fly. And I said sure, I’d like to do it—because it wasn’t super-heroes. I would have loved to have told a history of Vietnam as it happened, and as being part of that generation, I wanted to do this. It sounded like a great idea, it sounded very cool. And I said, “Okay, fine. I’ll do it.” So I called Dick Giordano and told him, “Hey, look, I’ve got this other thing. I’m not going to do Batman.” And Dick has probably held that against me ever since. I’m sure Denny O’Neil’s happy as a clam, because then he didn’t have to put up with my nonsense. [laughter] So meanwhile I’m sure that Larry and Doug Murray were slapping this whole proposal together for this book, and pushing it past Jim Shooter, and Shooter’s sitting there going, “Oh, okay, sure, fine.” Only expecting it to last a couple of issues, you know. And thus The ’Nam was born. And the first issue outsold X-Men the month it came out. MM: It definitely made a big splash. I remember as a fan, even outside of regular comics it garnered some attention from the national media. Did that give you any extra satisfaction, to see that reaction? MICHAEL: Well, see, I was totally unaware of that. 38

MM: Oh, really? When did you find out what kind of splash it had made? Was it several years later, or was it as you were still working on the book? MICHAEL: You know, I have to confess I was really not aware of any splash it had ever made until maybe when I was an editor at DC, or probably even later, actually. I don’t think I really ever understood just how big of an impact that book had made. For me it was a job for Marvel with the same old parameters. MM: With The ’Nam I think you really settled into a place where it was a happy medium between your naturally cartoony style and your more realistic style. You see really detailed uniforms and everything, but then the kind of exaggerated faces and cartoony aspects to it, at times. Which I think really helped, since the stories were so serious, having a little bit of that exaggerated feel to it kind of.... MICHAEL: Well, I felt that the whole property

kind of demanded it. MM: Yeah, because if it was just photo-realistic work, I don’t think it would have made the same impact. MICHAEL: Well, I agree. The Vietnam War wasn’t something that can be approached from some sort of nostalgic photo-realism. It wasn’t this great national cause like World War II was, where we can all go in and we can do all of these Norman Rockwell moments. It was a confused, nasty, embarrassing moment for this country. And almost to the point of being surreal for those of us who lived through it, because it was on the nightly news every night, and you could never tell what was real and what wasn’t. It was just this thing that permeated our entire society at the time. And so I really felt that approaching it as some sort of realistic venture was inappropriate. But I also freely confess that the production demands of the book really kind of obliged me to take 40

that extra step over the line. I don’t know, like, the first issue is not quite as surreal as the rest of the series or my run on that series became, only because later in the series it was, again, it came down to just getting the work published. So I was not being quite as meticulous in trying to rein myself in later on as I had been at the beginning. And I felt that that whole presentation worked really well on the early stuff because it gave it a little bit more animation as well, dramatic animation. It made the characters a little bit more real and accessible to the readers. MM: By the same token, though, you were being meticulously accurate with the costuming and weaponry in the series, so that even if it’s only subconsciously, the reader knows exactly when and where they are in the story. How important was that, do you think? MICHAEL: That’s just an obsession. I try to be accurate when I’m doing historical stuff, knowing full well that it’s only important to me. More often than not, the editor doesn’t have a clue and the reader doesn’t care. Just as long as it gives the suggestion of the historical content, that’s all that’s really important. It has to be close enough to where the reader’s not going to nitpick, but more often than not, the reader doesn’t care beyond getting that initial impression. MM: Did you have any particular character that stood out for you? MICHAEL: No, no.... MM: Are you still pretty satisfied with it? MICHAEL: Well, I’ll say yes [laughter], in the sense that ultimately I found out that those who had read the book and enjoyed it did so on a very deep, emotional level. In other words, it told the story that ultimately it was meant to tell. Was I professionally and personally satisfied with it? Who knows. I don’t think in those terms. But, as in all things, let me be quick to add, I try within the constraints that are given to me to do the best work that I can. And ultimately I feel validated and satisfied in that context by the fact that all of these people have expressed such an enjoyment. Or—I don’t know if even enjoyment—their own satisfaction in the product that was ultimately produced and the story that was told. MM: Let’s move on up a couple years to Marvel Fanfare #47, with the Hulk/Spider-Man story. MICHAEL: Ah, yes, the last Fanfare story. MM: You were co-plotter on that? MICHAEL: Yes. MM: And you did the pencils and the inking and the coloring. 41

Previous Page Top: Back cover of The ’Nam Magazine #4. Previous Page Bottom: A completely different take on war from the pages of G.I. Joe. Below: Drawing from the back of an original page for “The ’Nam.”

MICHAEL: And some of the lettering. And some of the writing; I rewrote parts of it, too. MM: Oh, okay. Obviously, you had some personal investment in the story then. Above: Two-page spread from Marvel Fanfare #47. Next Page: Spidey and the Hulkster don’t feel so well.

MICHAEL: Mmm, why do you think so? [laughs]

Milgrom] could get it put into the slot before that book was canceled. And it ultimately was just easier for me to just sit down and do it myself. MM: So whose idea was the basic storyline? MICHAEL: Mine.

MM: Well, you had your hand in every aspect of the story.

MM: Okay. So were you a fan of War of the Worlds? Was that something...?

MICHAEL: It was just easier. But, yes, we’ll go with your statement. [laughter] I’ll agree with it, and all kidding aside, I’ll agree with it in the sense that I had by that time understood that the only way to get it done right was to do it myself. And in that particular instance, in that particular story, ultimately it was just easier, because the job had to be done within a month or two of when it came to me so that he [Al

MICHAEL: You know, that’s the first time anybody’s ever asked me that, and I had never thought of that before. I had never made that connection until this very moment. That’s funny. I had never thought of that.

MM: Well, I didn’t know if you had enjoyed the George Pal movie or read the book.

MICHAEL: No, I had never made that connection until just now. That’s funny. That is very funny. No, it was always just exactly what was ultimately done. Well, not exactly, but it was just, the Hulk was supposed to get sick and that’s how it killed the alien. That’s all it was ever supposed to be. I’ve never made that connection with the War of the Worlds thing. That’s funny. MM: I tell you, when the Hulk finally gives in, you make him look terribly miserable. MICHAEL: Well, thank you. He’s supposed to be. MM: There’s a nice touch where he’s running his hand through his hair—he just looks pitiful. MICHAEL: Well, you’ve got to take it the next step, when Spider-Man starts coughing up inside his mask. [laughter] Originally there was a whole scene where he puked in his mask. But we didn’t go that far. MM: It looks like you had a lot of fun doing the story, at least. Do you have fun when you draw stories? MICHAEL: I don’t look at them that way. Again, it’s a job. I actually go out of my way to divorce myself from any kind of emotional context or investment in it. I find that that interferes with me doing my job effectively, because then I tend to address agendas that aren’t relevant to the job. MM: So you don’t drop your pen sometimes and kind of tickle yourself, just let it slip through sometimes? MICHAEL: Right. MM: Well, like with, like you said, Spider-Man’s about to barf in his mask.

MICHAEL: No, that just would have been a funny part, a funny little scenario in the course of the story. That’s not me sitting here saying, “Oh, well, I enjoy when people puke in their mask.” MM: No, I mean you don’t get a chuckle out of the look on his face? MICHAEL: No. It would be to inject some sort of relevant and pertinent bit to the story. That’s ultimately why it was never done, because it was irrelevant. But, it would have been funny. [laughter]

Part 4:

Editorially Speaking him in mind?

MM: When did you become a DC editor? That was ’91, ’92, somewhere in there?

MICHAEL: Oh, yeah. Well, that’s what I’m saying. We knew what this story was going to be before I sent it to him.

MICHAEL: I believe it was ’90. Yeah, ’cause I was there for a couple of years.

MM: It was a wordless story until the last couple of pages. Where did the idea for the story come to you from? The idea of the displaced Japanese-American....

MM: Okay, yeah, that would explain why you didn’t have a whole lot coming out during those years. One of the books you edited was the Sgt. Rock Special. And you wrote one of the stories there with someone else drawing it. Was it kind of odd seeing someone else illustrate one of your stories?

MICHAEL: I don’t know, I just sort of had an epiphany. I don’t know. That’s an interesting question. It was just a story I just thought up. I don’t think it was prompted by anything in particular. It just struck me as one of those great ironies that this kid is fantasizing about being this great American ace pilot, and ultimately he’s not considered an American. And that’s what that story was all about. It takes eight pages to get to the point, but then when you get to the end of it, it’s going, “Wow. That’s crazy stuff.” And anybody who has never experienced that is suddenly hit by that reality.

MICHAEL: No. And the reason why is because I wrote a full script and I picked [Ron] Wagner to do it. And he was happy to do it, and he did it the way I told him in the script. So it wasn’t quite the way I would have done it, per se, but that’s just fine, because that’s the way he did it. That’s the way it works, I write the script and he draws the pictures. I mean, it’s just like when I’m drawing stuff, I don’t put that kind of emotional investment in it. It’s do my job, do my job well, and hope that everybody else down the line does the same thing. But in this particular case I knew what the art was going to look like, because I had seen his art before and I asked him to do the job for me. MM: Did you write it specifically with

MM: Were you more 44

of a special projects editor, or did you have any regular books that you oversaw? MICHAEL: No, I was in Mike Gold’s group, and I guess that was the special projects group, but it was more the special projects group that didn’t have anything to do with the regular DC Universe. I always had the impression, and I don’t know that I should say this out loud or not, but I always had the impression it was the editorial group of all the projects that DC wasn’t that invested in—and maybe I’m wrong. I mean, we had the Impact line, which ostensibly was meant as a super-hero primer for the kids, and some of the books qualified for that and some of them didn’t. We had the Sgt. Rock book, which when I first stepped in it was nothing more than a reprint book that wasn’t given the time of day. It was whoever happened to make the mistake of not looking like he had something to do got stuck with it. After I took over, I started giving it a lot of thought, and by the time I left DC that book was actually making a profit. And I also got Joe Kubert to finish a Sgt. Rock story that had been sitting there for, like, 15 years. It ended up being a really good comic book as opposed to just a throw-off war book that nobody wanted to see. I had Shadow Strikes!, which when it was handed to me was four months late. By the time I finished it, it was two months ahead of schedule, and it had some pretty darned good stuff going on. MM: Oh, yeah MICHAEL: When I came in, I stepped up the coloring and punched up the production values on that book. I sat there and did the production work myself, because it would never make it through the production department because they were told to

have other priorities. By the end of that book, it was selling well and it was ahead of schedule. And then they informed me that they had already let the license go, and it went off to Dark Horse Comics. And I’d already had it all set up, I was going to turn it into an anthology book and get separate artists and writers and creative teams to do individual stories. I had it all set up and was ready to go, and then they tell me, “Oh, sorry, man. We already got rid of that license.” And that’s why I said, because of that whole thing, I had the impression that my editorial group was where they sent old elephants or something, but we tried. I actually really enjoyed being an editor, and who knows, I may do it again someday. MM: Were there any other projects you remember that stand out for you during that time? 45

Previous Page: Convention sketch of DC’s leading lady, Wonder Woman, along with a captive Howard the Duck. Above: Rough sketch for a Sinestro trading card for the Versus game system.

MICHAEL: [pause] No. I tried to get several projects going with varying degrees of success, which I might add that it was an eyeopening experience in a very positive way. Once I got my legs underneath me as to how things worked, who you had to grease, and the politics of the situation, and all of this stuff, I really enjoyed being an editor. And it’s something I would do again if anybody wanted to put up with my nonsense—and would pay me sufficiently to do so. It was ultimately, for all of the negatives, it was balanced by the greatness of the few positives. And, like I said, I would do it again if the conditions were right. I enjoyed it immensely. MM: Were you still able to do creative work on the side?

MICHAEL: Oh, yes. I was doing commercial work at the time, and I was actually doing some comic book work, as well. MM: So you were able to keep a balance? MICHAEL: Yeah, basically. But the qualifier to that is that, yes, I was doing commercial work on the side, but I was in the office as an editor from nine to five, ostensibly, five days a week. I had a two-hour commute—two hours in, two hours out. So a lot of my time was spent being an editor. And that is ultimately why I quit being an editor, because that particular job was taking all of my time, and I still wanted to tell stories. During the time that I was an editor, Bucky O’Hare was an ongoing licensed property. That’s when the toys and the animation and all of that stuff was going full guns, so I was also having to spend a lot of time addressing that— doing toy designs and helping out in whatever way possible in order to make that license move forward. What ultimately made me choose to not be an editor anymore was that I went through seven full days where I only had 17 hours of sleep and got into a real bad traffic accident because of it, and the next day I turned in my resignation. MM: Let’s skip ahead to a story you did for Marvel: Shadows and Light, a Doctor Strange short story. MICHAEL: Another one of those stories with no room in the schedule. [laughs] MM: I was wondering, because it’s very differ47

Previous Page and Left: A page of Michael’s pencils and finished inks for The Many Worlds of Tesla Strong #1. Above: During Michael’s tenure as editor at DC, Bucky O’Hare was blasting off into the world of television with an animated series and its requisite line of toys. Tesla Strong ™ and ©2007 America’s Best Comics LLC. Bucky O’Hare ™ and ©2007 Continuity Graphic Associates, Inc.

ent from a lot of your other work, where did the story come from? You’ve got the kid sitting by the TV, then the weirdness happen.

Above: Pencils for pages 3 and 4 of “Strange Reflections” from Marvel: Shadows & Light #1. Next Page: Cover art for Kiss: Psycho Circus #3.

MICHAEL: Well, anybody who’s ever been around me for any amount of time will hear me go on these diatribes against American media, how hypocritical American popular culture is, how contradictory it is, and I just really wanted to tell a story about it. And I thought mirroring it against Doctor Strange realizing who and what he is was the perfect way to do this, and that’s what the story is all about. That’s why it’s called “Strange Reflections” is that Doctor Strange is confronting himself as the Sorcerer Supreme, and his history, and what has made him ultimately what he is today is directly balanced against a little kid being bombarded by our popular culture with the understanding that this is what defines him, ultimately, in our society. And that’s a scary thought—at least in my mind. Like I said, anybody who’s ever been around me has heard me go off on this. That’s where that story came from, because it’s one of my favorite soapboxes. MM: Did someone approach you about doing a black-&-white story, or was this something you pitched? MICHAEL: Joe Andreani called me up. He was putting this book together and asked me to do it. And when he asked me, the deadline was open-ended, because in hindsight I think it wasn’t really on the schedule at that point. But when they decided to do it, they suddenly just put it onto a production schedule. I know it sounds familiar, but believe me, this happened all the time. And Joe was very apologetic and he was very outgoing trying to put this thing together. I full-penciled the job and it went off to John Beatty to ink. It didn’t take me 48

comic book character come to life. And since her idea is that comics are really movies on paper anyway, she wanted me to take up the task of translating that. They put this project together and came to me and asked if I was interested in drawing it. The proposal that they had put together was fascinating, because it wasn’t super-heroes, which immediately got my attention. Something different. I tend more towards a less melodramatic and fantastic feel to the stuff that I want to do.

long to write the story because, like I said, this is one of my favorite rants, so I was very prepared how to do it. MM: You did some interesting covers for the Kiss: The Psycho Circus mini-series. Are you a fan of the band at all? MICHAEL: They’ve done some interesting stuff, and were/are certainly a force. They were groundbreakers for their time, and ya gotta respect that. I also like rock-&-roll. MM: So how did you get that gig, because that was something somewhat out of left field? MICHAEL: From Todd McFarlane, and it just sort of came out of the blue. He just asked me if I was interested in doing it. I was doing more commercial work then, so I could only commit to doing some covers, and that’s where that came from. MM: How did you get hooked up with Spartan X and Jackie Chan? Were they seeking out someone, or did you find them? MICHAEL: I had gone back to doing commercial work, and had been doing it fairly ongoing when Renee Witterstaetter— who was an editor that I often worked for, and is now my agent—had a project that she and an associate of hers had put together called Spartan X, which was not really a Jackie Chan project as much as it was inspired by a Jackie Chan character from one of his movies, and a grouping of other Hong Kong movies and universal themes. Renee had put this whole thing together. She’s buddies with Jackie Chan; she knows him personally, and so does her associate, Ric Meyers, the co-creator of this property. Ric Meyers is known as an authority on Hong Kong films and kungfu films, and Renee just thought Jackie Chan was a 49

But it also wasn’t a chop-sockey kung-fu proposal. It wasn’t somebody jumping around constantly getting into kung-fu fights—it was an action/adventure, and that got my attention. I said yes. I stayed with it because it was a project I wanted to be involved with. Now we are working on putting the trade paperback out from Image and Eva Ink. MM: Where do the stories originate? Do you have to clear the stories with Jackie Chan? MICHAEL: The Spartan X story as it exists now was all part of the original proposal that Renee and Ric put together. I just took it the next step, added some stuff—or detracted—and some concepts that were similar in nature, and mixed it all up and got a Spartan X story out of it. There’s a beginning, middle, and end to this first story. That’s not to say we didn’t do 51

Previous Page: Cover art for Jackie Chan’s Spartan X: The Armor of Heaven #3, published by Topps Comics. Above: Spartan X does his thing, as inspired by the stunt work of Jackie Chan. Left: Jackie Chan’s Spartan X #2, page 2. Below: Spartan X promotional art. Spartan X ™ and ©2007 Little Eva Ink.

Below: Page 10 of Spartan X #4. Next Page: Destro on the lam. Cover art for Marvel’s G.I. Joe #116.

Spartan X to honor that character or Jackie himself. Renee showed him all the work, and it’s my understanding that he was relatively pleased with the final product and the homages to him and his work. Sort of how he pays homage to [silent film star] Buster Keaton in some of his movies. Renee went on to write a book on Jackie’s movies called Dying for Action: The Life and Films of Jackie Chan, from Warner books. She’s also worked on a lot of his

movies with him, so she was a stickler for quality control and capturing a feel for those type of adventure movies. She trusted me to be the director, costume designer, and cinematographer. MM: Was it difficult to translate that Hong Kong style of action onto the page? MICHAEL: I didn’t find it particularly difficult, because it was all right there. The trick, if there was one, was making it believable in the comic book format. On the big screen it’s always easier to pull off a character, because you’ve got an actor acting. You’ve got an actor saying the lines, you’ve got stunt men doing the action, you’ve got special effects. In the two-dimensional format of a comic book, you’ve got to pull out all sorts of graphic narrative tricks in order to pull this stuff off. But, like I said, in this particular instance it wasn’t that difficult because it was all there. MM: That series came out in ’97 and ’98. I think you took over as Marvel’s senior art director in ’98. MICHAEL: That sounds right. MM: How did that position come about? MICHAEL: I became senior art director at Marvel after John Romita left. I filled his position because I applied to be an editor. [laughter] I had heard that there was an editorial position open at Marvel, and I called up and said,“ I would love to do this job.” John Romita had just left, so they offered me the senior AD position as an alternative for a couple of reasons: 1) they needed a senior AD, and 2) they could offer me the salary that I needed with that position as opposed to the editorial position. They were looking for entry-level editorial, so they

couldn’t offer me the money that I was asking. MM: How did you feel working with the artists in that capacity? I assume you were working a little more closely with the artists as art director than you had as an editor.

MICHAEL: My position as senior AD ostensibly was to maintain a certain level of quality and integrity to the product as it went out the door. A true senior art director has to take into account many, many, many things, all the way from working with the talent, to the editors, to production, to manufacturing, as well. The situation at Marvel at that point in time wasn’t really that, because they had changed the editorial structure, so that each editorial arm had more power. The situation at Marvel had been set up to where all these various aspects of what Marvel as a publishing company was ran as separate autonomous units, each with their own agenda. So, I tended to be distanced from the editorial aspects of the production, by virtue of this system, so the position wasn’t what I had hoped it would be. I felt confined, for the lack of a better word—not in any negative sense, just that that was my role—to proofing the final product, instead of being able to actually influence any output. Because of this, unfortunately, I didn’t really interact much with creators, as I wanted. It wasn’t a case of I didn’t want to, it wasn’t a case of I didn’t make the effort, it’s that the editors in the autonomous offices felt that was their job, and maybe didn’t see the validity of having a senior AD involved. I worked a lot with the production people, because, like I said, I chose to confine myself to making sure that the end product met a certain level of standards. And I think I got along just fine with the production people. Great group of folks.

MM: What were you able to take away from your time as an editor at DC and senior art director at Marvel that you could apply to your work as a creator? MICHAEL: Well, what I took away from being an editor was that I learned how that job worked, which gave me a lot of insight into what I demand from an editor now as a freelancer. I know what’s possible and what isn’t possible. Not that that gives me any less conflict. [laughter] In fact, some people might say it generates more conflict, because I know something’s not happening because of.... My experience as senior art director over at Marvel... was insightful in the sense that it gave me a whole different perspective on the political ramifications of production itself. I now know that I don’t want to be an administrator—ever—because I’m just not up for it. I’m not cut from that kind of mold. I’m not that type of person, I cannot deal in that kind of environment. But I’d love to be an editor again, because that’s a part of the creative process. Being senior AD at Marvel was administrative and not what I want to do. If it were a true senior AD position, that would be different, however.

lot more cover work than interior work due to your commercial art career. I just want to touch on the Jurassic Park covers you did. There’s so much texture in the dinosaurs.

MM: Over the past several years you’ve been doing a 55

MICHAEL: I worked with Renee Witterstaetter on those, as well, when she was an editor at Topps. I like to think that I do whatever is necessary to pull off a visual. If it’s organic, I’ll try to make it look organic; if it’s mechanical, I’ll try to make it look workable. I’m sort of a forensic artist. I take things apart. It doesn’t matter if it’s an animal, vegetable, or mineral. I try to figure out how it works, how to make it work visually, and that’s my whole focus when I work, is to tell the story by virtue of understanding what it is I draw for the person who is looking at it and reading it. MM: Will you go the extent, say if it’s something you’re not familiar with, of getting a 3-D model of that thing?

MICHAEL: Not necessarily a 3-D model. Once I have the basic understanding of a machine, whatever it is, be it human being or be it a tractor, generally I can pull it off by just getting picture reference. But there have been many instances where the only way to get that basic understanding is to go out and see the real thing. For instance, people say I must love guns because I take the time to draw real ones. Well, it’s not so much that I love guns, it’s that I grew up with them, I know them, I’ve taken the time to familiarize myself with a wide variety of firearms— how they work, how you hold them, what it’s like to shoot them. Nowadays, unless it’s some sort of new firearm technology, generally I can just look at a picture and figure it out. Same thing with cars, same thing with airplanes, same thing with horses, elephants. Same thing with dinosaurs. [laughter] Once you’ve figured out the basic machinery, you can usually fake it from there. But that’s a qualifier for a lot of artists. A lot of artists either don’t take the time or don’t have the time, or simply don’t have the wherewithal to comprehend and understand the workings of whatever it is that they’re drawing. So sometimes it is very hard for them to pull off a believable drawing.

Part 5:

Storytelling and the Creative Process

MM: So you’ve got the comic bug again?

that was Marvel or DC, so you were sort of obliged to do super-heroes whether you wanted to or not. But now, within the past, say, five years, from what my understanding is, and certainly from what I’ve seen going to conventions now—which has been the whole purpose in going to conventions was to acclimate and scope this stuff out—is that this whole predilection in the American industry toward one genre, or variations of that one genre, no longer exists in the marketplace. And that’s the important qualifier there: in the marketplace. You can sell anything as long as you’ve got a good, solid story, and comprehensible artwork, and that has sort of put that bug in my side again to sit down and start telling stories, which is what I have always just wanted to do. Being stuck doing covers is—as much as it’s been fun experimenting sometimes, or learning things sometimes through doing that—it really ultimately wasn’t satisfying my need to tell graphic narrative, to get from Point A to Point B to Point C over an extended narrative length of time. So I’ve got all my own stuff, which we’ve sort of talked about and not talked about, but now I’ve been talking to some other writers who have expressed an interest in working with me, so I’m hoping this will all pan out and get all this other stuff going. There’s no “hope” about it, they’re going to happen, because we’re already talking about these things. Even though we haven’t quite defined what they are, we have defined that it’s a done deal, we’re going to do them. So I’m going to finally get the chance to just tell stories, which is what I’ve always wanted to do.

MICHAEL: The whole reason for me diving into it more than I normally had, is because the whole nature of the industry has changed dramatically since the last time I considered this. The reason I kept gravitating back to comic books instead of just going and doing commercial work is because I enjoy telling stories, and the only venue for doing that is the graphic narrative format. In America, up until recently, the only venue for

MM: Excellent. 58

MICHAEL: And the added qualifier to all of this is that, also, anybody who’s ever known me for any length of time has heard me go off down this hallway and say if I could do it all myself, I would. It would solve all of these problems, I wouldn’t have to deal with all of these politics, blah-blahblah-blah-blah. Well, now that technology exists. I’m sitting right in front of it. And I can do it literally all myself, so I’m very excited about the possibilities, because I can work with it now from the ground up, and see an end product of my investment of time, effort, and experience. And that’ll make it all worthwhile for me, and that’s what I’m really looking forward to. MM: How much has the computer become a part of your creative process? MICHAEL: The computer can be an important tool for editing from time to time, and for a special blur effect when I want to achieve that on the computer. However, I do most of my work without the computer. There are limitations that I impose on the computer to keep the integrity of my work, but they’re not limitations because the technology is not capable of covering that base. MM: Have you ever tried working on a Wacom tablet?

MICHAEL: That’s what I use when I do work on the computer. MM: Oh, you do have one, okay. Do you do your penciling straight from that for the most part, now? MICHAEL: Well, that is one of the limitations. I still do the penciling on paper. Periodically, depending on the project, either commercially or in comic books, I’ll produce line art on paper. I’m just as capable to produce the line art on the computer, but my agent has this idea that I need originals. [laughter] Many people are now utilizing the computer for the lettering or the coloring, and it’s a useful tool. I can still do all of that as a hard copy though, you know, on paper or on canvas or whatever, but when I need it, I’ve got this other tool that lets me contain and/or control that process all the way to the printer, which is something that had never existed before. And like I said, I can’t be more overjoyed. But even then, I do the line art before ever going to any computer. MM: Are you using Photoshop or Illustrator? MICHAEL: I’m almost completely Photoshop now. I’ve worked in Illustrator, I’ve worked in Painter; I run the whole gamut. I’ve 59

Previous Page and Above: Deadpool as done for the Versus trading card game. We start with Michael’s rough pencils, then his tightened pencils and finished inks. Notice that the final inks are spotted a bit differently than indicated in the pencils. Below: A convention head sketch of The Crow. Deadpool ™ and ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc. The Crow ™ and ©2007 James O’Barr.

done all of the exercises and all of the little experiments, and I’ve done everything from full digital paintings to just cartoon flatline color. And ultimately, to get to a point where I’m comfortable working in any of these contexts, but also to define what I want to see, to know what it is that I’m putting into work that is going to be reproduced. And, again, imposing my own limitations in those degrees, in that context.

Above: Michael’s pencils along with Mike Manley’s inks for page 7 of Birds of Prey #66. Next Page: When working out perspective for a complicated panel—such as the first panel of Birds of Prey #66, page 20, shown here— Michael will often work it out on a separate sheet of paper first. Birds of Prey ™ and ©2007 DC Comics.

MM: It seems that you have an optimistic view of the comic industry at this point. Is it very optimistic, or do you still have some reservations about where the comic industry is going now? MICHAEL: Well, as far as personal creativity, I’m very optimistic. I’ve only gone to a handful of conventions, but the stuff that I’ve seen being produced outside of what is commonly referred to as “mainstream comics” is very exciting. It doesn’t matter that everybody might be sitting around saying some of it’s stupid, or some of it’s great, or anything like that. The fact of the matter is that it is totally varied, and that all of it, all of it, has the opportunity to not only be successful in its own right, but to expand outside in multimedia, which never existed for anybody before now. In that context, I’m just, like, totally optimistic. I’m so happy to see it. And it’s like, I just keep pounding my fist that it’s taken so long to get to this point, but that’s because I will now pull back and say the reason this hasn’t happened is because the deathgrip of a handful of individuals is finally starting to loosen, not because they chose to, even though that’s the spin they like to put on it, but because the medium itself, if not the actual industry, has by sheer impetus moved beyond them. I think a lot of people in those contexts do understand the possibilities here, and may in fact be making efforts. Who knows? We may start seeing it even more. 60

MM: What, for you, goes into creating a character? Do you start with sketches of the characters to get a feel for their personalities? Does it start with the writing? MICHAEL: Well, I rarely sit down and do any kind of sketching, whether I’m creating something from the ground up or not. I rarely draw anything unless I’m getting paid. Creating a character is, simplistically enough, defining the character. I think about it a lot. In other words, I don’t do anything for a while [laughter]—I think about it. I think about what a character would do, or how that character would act or stand or gesture, and that has nothing to do with sketching for me. MM: When you’re working on a story, do you see the page as a whole or do you prefer to work from panel to panel? Do you worry about page design? MICHAEL: When I put something together, it’s all about the story. The story is what’s relevant. If the page design works out, fine. If the blacks are spotted, fine. I don’t live by formula. I realize that to accommodate production, a lot of the time many people have to formulate some sort of mantra way of doing things. You spot blacks this way, you 61

have a headshot here, or this is an action shot. I know that whole weird definition of storytelling that most of the industry has. I call it weird, because that’s not storytelling; that’s some sort of design agenda that is there to accommodate people who don’t really know what they’re doing. For me, I see the story, and that’s how I put everything on the page. It has nothing to do with “we need a headshot here” or “we need an establishing shot there.” If we need an establishing shot, it’s because we need it for the story. If we have a headshot, it’s because we need to punch up the drama of this character—it has nothing to do with, “Well, it’ll look good on the page.”

MM: Graphically, visually, there have been a lot of changes in comics, all the different influences and such. You see lots of different art styles now, it’s not just either Dan Barry/Curt Swan or Jack Kirby like was still somewhat prevalent when you broke into the industry. Would you like to experiment more in just telling your stories in different ways, different styles, just to try things out? MICHAEL: I’d like to say yes to that, yes, I would. But, like I alluded to earlier, I’m not really that interested in experimenting that much, myself. I know the kind of stories I like to tell and that I want to tell. I might try variations on a theme, like I told you about with the Tunuki story I’m working on, but it’s still basically a pretty straightforward kind of storytelling that I like to tell, because it’s important to me, as a storyteller, not to make people guess about what it is they’re reading. I like the kind of storytelling where you give them the information and all the reader has to do is read it. He doesn’t have to figure it out. He doesn’t have to redefine some sort of imagery or perceptualization, if that is such a word, by virtue of the graphics or the way things are worded or whatever. I like to just give them information that makes the story move along. But, like I said, I might do variations on a theme, but I know what works, I know what doesn’t, and I know what makes people work at it, and I prefer not to make people work. I want them to enjoy the story, not have exercises in some sort of existential, tenuous perception. I just want them to read the story and enjoy it and know what’s going on. MM: What are you looking at that kind of excites you? Anything specific that stands out for you? MICHAEL: Oh, no, no. I’m not going to sit here and point to any one thing, I’m going to say all of it does, because that’s a true statement. There are some things I would probably say I personally like or something, but the fact of that matter is that it’s all exciting, and it’s all worth the effort that these people put into it, because it is taking the industry to the next step that it needs to go. And I stress the word “needs” to go.

MM: What do you look for in a story? What makes it a good story for you? Is there anything that really has to...?

Above and Next Page: In order to avoid a lot of confusion during the inking stage, this cover for Ultimate Spider-Man Special #1 was penciled in two layers, resulting in a stunning finished image.

MICHAEL: I can speak with my editor hat on. It’s got to have a beginning, middle, and end, first and foremost. And I mean a very definite beginning, middle, and end. And by “beginning,” you have to set the premise of the story, and you have to set the premise of the story with the understanding that it will have a middle and end. It’s got to have character development. It’s got to have plot development. And that doesn’t mean that, well, you just move from panel to panel, or you have one big head shot and one middle shot and one shot with speed lines; it means that you have to have characters actually interacting with one another and developing the plot through that interaction toward a logical climax, and then have a resolution, an honest-to-God end to the story that hopefully is satisfying. But that could be argued to be subjective, but at least have it make sense. Don’t just end the story because you ran out of pages. Don’t just end the story because you ran out of little plot devices. End the story because this is how the story needs to end. That’s what I look for in a story. MM: So as you’re developing these new projects, given the new formats that are acceptable now, do you see yourself working without a page limit in mind anymore? I mean, do you figure out your story and then define the format of the project from there? MICHAEL: Yes. That was actually a very simple answer: yes. Back in the days, one of the things that drove me crazy about “Bucky O’Hare” was that I was told from Day One this was going to be 48 pages, period, and it is going to be defined by eight-page segments, because that was how everything was done. And you could never argue that any other way. And it’s 64

Above: Another panel from Birds of Prey #66, from layout to pencils. Next Page: Artwork for a trading card game based on the manga and anime series, Shaman King. Birds of Prey ™ and ©2007 DC Comics. Amidamaru ™ and ©2007 respective owner.

the same thing with the comic books, they were all 22 or 24 pages. Period, that’s it. You didn’t have any leeway. Now I don’t think that that’s actually all that relevant, particularly outside of the mainstream comics. You tell the story that needs to be told. If you end up with 150 pages of story, as long as it covers all of the bases that I just said, it’s okay. But if you can do it in three pages, well, that just gives you more room to make up another couple of stories. And it doesn’t matter. Like I said, people, if you package it right, you market it right, you get it in the right retail context, it doesn’t matter, because people will pick it up and read it. MM: Where did the idea for Tunuki originate? What’s the basic theme of the story? 66

MICHAEL: Tunuki is a children’s fantasy. Before anybody gets a vision in their mind of what I’m saying by using that term, it’s going to be a children’s fantasy in the same vein as, say, Through the Looking Glass or the original Wizard of Oz—not the movie version. It’s going to have a dark edge to it in the sense that it deals with things that all children are confronted with in our reality, but it’s going to be done by virtue of an unreality. That’s why I used the analogy of Through the Looking Glass. I can’t tell you too

much about it other than that since we are considering movie options now. The original concept of Tunuki has been floating around in my head for 20, 30 years. I can’t really say much more about it without giving something away. MM: Can you talk about the style you’re using for the series? MICHAEL: I’m playing with various kinds of styles for the project. The mythological concepts, at this point in time, I’m thinking of doing as full-rendered paintings. The fill parts will be regular graphic narrative—the pseudo-realistic art style that I normally tell stories in. All of this is to not only define the various aspects of the storytelling, but also to punch up the supernatural

unreality of these other stories being told—not just Zoe’s [the main character] part. Right: Michael at Heroes Con 2007 in Charlotte, North Carolina. Below: Cover art for Jackie Chan’s Spartan X #2

MM: Have you been talking to retailers at all, as you’re gearing up for these new things? Have you gone that route? MICHAEL: Well, that’s part of the reason for going to the conventions. MM: So you’re actually talking with retailers while you’re there, or at least making contacts? MICHAEL: Oh, yeah. Trying to, anyway. MM: That’s the thing. Because, you know, that’s part of the problem, I think, that so many retailers are locked into a certain idea of what they can carry and what they think will sell for them. MICHAEL: Well, that’s the sense that I’m getting from a lot of them, yes, is that, unfortunately, the distribution system still kind of, on that end, as far as comic books themselves are concerned, sort of restricts their options. Sort of. But the thing is that there are other venues now. Well, like the company that does the manga stuff.... MM: Viz and TokyoPop are the big ones. MICHAEL: Yeah, TokyoPop, right. They’re in record stores, y’know, and all of a sudden, out of the clear blue, for some reason, people are now suddenly discovering Spartan novels. [laughs] For some reason this is like a new venue, but it has to be packaged right. And there is online. Ultimately, when push comes to shove, if you can’t find a retail outlet, publish it yourself. What’s it cost you to set up a one-page website? You put your product on a website, and you get a decent printer, and you publish the stuff yourself. Every order that comes in is gravy after you’ve done the work. That’s what I’m saying. The entire industry has changed, and it’s all changed for the good. It’s just a matter of learning how to utilize it. And that’s a good thing. That’s a real good thing. 68

Michael Golden

Art Gallery

This Page: Convention sketches of Micronauts team members Marionette and Acroyear. Next Page: Cover art to the licensed comic book, Rom #9. Page 72: Classic Avengers pin-up art. Page 73: Avengers Annual #10, page 35.

Previous Page: Cover for Saga of Crystar, Crystal Warrior #3, featuring Dr. Strange. Left: Dr. Strange convention sketch. Below: Cover art for Doctor Strange #42 (right) and 43 (left). Pages 76 & 77: Pencils from the back-up story, “A Moment’s Peace,” in Doctor Strange #46. Pages 78 & 79: Doctor Strange #55, pages 14 and 15. Inks by Terry Austin. Ambara, Ancient One, Baron Mordo, Clea, Crystar, Dr. Strange, D’Spayre, Wong ™ and ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

This Page: Proposed cover cornerbox art—one with Clea, the other with the good doctor—for Doctor Strange. Next Page: Clea is up front and center in this plate from the Dr. Strange Portfolio. Page 82: Page 12 of “By Virtue of Blood,” featuring Lady Daemon from Bizarre Adventures #25 (1981). Terry Austin: “Michael had an idea of combining photographs and stats with the artwork in those pre-computer days. I spent several days at Marvel on the lightbox cutting and combining the various elements, but the whole thing printed so badly it wasn’t worth the effort.” Now see what it should have looked like! Clea, Crystar, Dr. Strange, Lady Daemon, Wong ™ and ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Pages 83: Cover for What If? #42. Pages 84 & 85: Batman Special #1, pages 2 and 3. Page 86: Cover for Indiana Jones #25. Page 87: Page from G.I. Joe Yearbook #2. Page 88 & 89: Legends of Dark Knight Annual 1991, pages 44 and 45. Page 90 & 91: Pages 5 and 6 of a charming Wolverine story in Marvel Holiday Special #2. Annihilus, Fantastic Four, Human Torch, Invisible Woman, Mr. Fantastic, Wolverine ™ and ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc. Batman ™ and ©2007 DC Comics. Indiana Jones ™ and ©2007 Lucasfilm Ltd. G.I. Joe ™ and ©2007 Hasbro.

Left: Cover for Cops: The Job #3. This Page: Cover for Armor vol. 2, #6. Page 94: Cover for Nomad #19. Page 95: Smile for the Punisher! Page 96 & 97: Pencils and finished color for the cover of Nightwing #77. Bucky, Captain America, Cops: The Job, Nomad, Punisher ™ and ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc. Armor ™ and © Continuity Graphics Associates, Inc. Nightwing ™ and ©2007 DC Comics.

Previous Page: Cover art for Heroes for Hire #9. Left and Below: DC’s Detective Chimp and Guillotina for the Versus trading card game system. Page 100: Dr. Strange Versus trading card artwork. Page 101: Wetworks vol. 2, #2 cover art. Page 102: Cover art for Stormwatch: Team Achilles #15. Page 103: Vampirella illustration. Page 104 & 105: Cover color and inks for Mutant X #8. Detective Chimp, Guillotina ™ and ©2007 DC Comics. Colleen Wing, Devil Dinosaur, Dr. Strange, Heroes For Hire, Misty Knight, Moonboy, Mutant X, Shang-Chi, Tarantula ™ and ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Page 106: Cover for X-Men Chronicles. Page 107: Age of Apocalypse 2-page spread. Page 108 & 109: Wraparound cover for Wolverine Annual ’96. Page 110: Sabretooth pin-up art. Page 111: Hulk sketch for Universal Studios theme park.

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Above: Sketch done for the Modern Masters: In the Studio with Michael Golden DVD. Right: Convention sketch of Edgar Rice Burrough’s Dejah Thoris—the female lead in his John Carter of Mars novels. A Princess of Mars—the first novel in the series—happens to be one of Michael’s favorite books from his childhood. Dejah Thoris ™ and ©2007 ERB, Inc.

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Above: Cover for Impossible Man Summer Special #2. Right: Michael in self-parody.

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THE MODERN MASTERS SERIES Edited by ERIC NOLENWEATHINGTON, these trade paperbacks and DVDs are devoted to the BEST OF TODAY’S COMICS ARTISTS! Each book contains RARE AND UNSEEN ARTWORK direct from the artist’s files, plus COMPREHENSIVE INTERVIEWS (including influences and their views on graphic storytelling), SKETCHBOOK SECTIONS, and more! And don’t miss the companion DVDs, showing artists at work in their studios!

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Shows step-by-step how to develop a new comic, from script and art, to printing and distribution! (108-page trade paperback with COLOR) $15.95 (bundle with companion DVD) $29.95

TwoMorrows—A New Day For Comics Fandom! TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 E-mail: store@twomorrowspubs.com • Visit us on the Web at www.twomorrows.com

Simply put, Michael Golden is one of the most respected and influential artists working in the comic book industry today. From “Bucky O’Hare” to Dr. Strange to his groundbreaking work for The ’Nam, he has shown the ability to adapt his unique style to any genre, with amazing results. Penciler, inker, colorist, writer—Michael Golden is the complete artist, and during his career has served as Art Director for Marvel Comics and Editor for DC Comics. Now comes a rare glimpse into the life and career of a true Modern Master—Michael Golden! MODERN MASTERS is an ongoing series of books celebrating the lives and work of the greatest comic book artists of our time.

$14.95 In The US ISBN 978-1-893905-74-0 TwoMorrows Publishing Raleigh, North Carolina

MICHAEL GOLDEN