Modern Masters Volume 12: Michael Golden Preview by TwoMorrows Publishing

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MICHAEL GOLDEN

By Eric Eric By Nolen-Weathington Nolen-Weathington

T W E L V E :

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

Part 1:

“I Guess I’ll Just Go Draw Comic Books”

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?

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.

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

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. Arcturus Rann, Bug, Marionette ™ and ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc. Baron Karza, Micronauts ™ and ©2007 Mego Corp.

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

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: 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

Part 4:

Editorially Speaking

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

him in mind? 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: 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?

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.... 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.

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. Dr. Strange ™ and ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc. Kiss ™ and ©2007 Kiss Catalog, Ltd.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Michael Golden

Art Gallery

The Defenders â&#x201E;˘ and ÂŠ2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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.

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