Modern Masters Vol. 27: Ron Garney by TwoMorrows Publishing

M O D E R N

M A S T E R S

V O L U M E

T W E N T Y - S E V E N :

RON

GARNEY By Jorge Khoury & Eric Nolen-Weathington

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Modern Masters Volume 27:

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

RON GARNEY edited by Jorge Khoury and Eric Nolen-Weathington front cover by Ron Garney all interviews in this book were conducted by Jorge Khoury and transcribed by Stephen Tice

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Dr. Raleigh, North Carolina 27614 www.twomorrows.com • e-mail: twomorrow@aol.com First Printing • December 2011 • Printed in Canada Softcover ISBN: 978-1-60549-040-3 Trademarks & Copyrights All characters and artwork contained herein are ™ and ©2011 Ron Garney unless otherwise noted. Deadstar, Walking Time Bomb, and all related characters ™ and ©2011 Ron Garney. Batman, Big Barda, Black Canary, Black Lightning, Captain Marvel, Connor Hawke, Crime Syndicate, Flash, Green Arrow, Green Lantern, Johnny Quick, Justice League, Lightray, Martian Manhunter, New Gods, Orion, Owlman, Plastic Man, Power Ring, Speedy, Superman, Superwoman, Ultraman, Wonder Woman and all related characters ™ and ©2011 DC Comics. Alicia Masters, Aunt May, Beast, Blade, Blaze, Cable, Captain America, Daredevil, Deathlok, Dr. Strange, Flux, Frank Drake, Gambit, Ghost Rider, Hannibal King, Hobgoblin, The Hulk, Human Torch, Iron Man, Jean Grey, Juggernaut, Kingpin, Lilith, Mary Jane Parker, Moon Knight, Mystique, Namor, Peter Parker, Professor X, Punisher, Red Hulk, Rogue, Shalla Bal, Sharon Carter, Silver Surfer, Skaar, Spider-Man, Steve Rogers, The Thing, Tyrannus, Vengeance, Wolverine, X-Men, and all related characters ™ and ©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc. I Am Legend © Warner Bros. Productions. Creepy, Eerie © New Comic Company. G.I. Joe ™ and © Hasbro. Editorial package ©2011 Jorge Khoury, Eric Nolen-Weathington and TwoMorrows Publishing.

Dedication My efforts in this book are dedicated to Ron Garney, the consummate professional and Marvel’s best comic book artist. — Jorge

Acknowledgements Ron Garney, for giving so much of his time and his enthusiasm to this book. Spencer Beck, for his considerable help in gathering the artwork for this book. Anyone interested in purchasing original artwork by Ron (as well as many other great comic book artists) should visit Spencer’s website: www.theartistschoice.com.

Special Thanks Jason Aaron, Heritage Auctions (www.ha.com), Jason Keith, Sam Newkirk, Tom Palmer, Dan Panosian, Howard Porter, Alex Ross, Tim Townsend, Rick McGee and the crew of Foundation’s Edge, and John and Pam Morrow

Modern Masters Volume Twenty-Seven:

RON GARNEY Table of Contents Foreword by Howard Porter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Part One: Ron Throws His Hat into the Ring . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Part Two: From Unknown to Suddenly in Demand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Part Three: The Good Soldier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Part Four: Branching out in Art and Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 Interlude: Friends and Colleagues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 Part Five: The Real Ron Garney Shines Through . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 Part Six: Storytelling and the Creative Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 Art Gallery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 Afterword by Alex Ross. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117

Foreword ome 20 years ago, while lurking around a party attended by many well-established comic book artists, I came across a group being entertained by a colorful fellow who had just received his first professional work. This character had dubbed himself “Jazzy Rong” in celebration of becoming a paid professional and held a captive audience. He had convinced the group of comic-artist-gods that they had been transported back in time to a debaucherous festival in medieval times and that beautiful barmaids served them flagons of mead as they dined on large haunches of roasted meats. Jazzy Rong the Barbarian had them visualizing the small yard as a sprawling, mountainous vista populated with hideous creatures soon to be felled by their blood-thirsty swords. Rong the barbarian would rather die on his feet then live on his knees! I knew then Rong and I would get along just fine.

I have witnessed the birth of his career, had the pleasure of watching it grow, and after decades of great success it is still continuing to grow. He has managed to perpetually hone his craft, and amazingly his latest work is always his best. When I see a book that Ron has drawn, I am shown exactly what I should be doing with my own work and I am truly inspired. He never compromises or backs down from the challenge of a difficult composition or storytelling sequence and works at it until it is clear and concise. Ron has the discipline to be completely honest with himself and is not afraid to throw away an idea and start over again if there is a better solution.

These are just a few of the many reasons why I am proud to call myself the biggest fan of my friend, Ron Garney, the Modern Master.

Since then, I have had the great fortune of knowing and working alongside my good friend Ron Garney.

Green Lantern ™ and © DC Comics.

—Howard Porter

Skaar ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Part 1:

Ron Throws His Hat into the Ring

MODERN MASTERS: Who was the artist in the family? Where do you think that comes from? RON GARNEY: My grandmother was a painter, and my father had some artistic ability. I think what influenced me to draw early on was seeing my grandmother painting. When I was only three I was taught how to draw Bugs Bunny. I think I saw the attention I got from it. I think somewhere I have some of the drawings I did at three years old of Superman and Batman. I started there and kept drawing.

Thing versus the Hulk on the George Washington Bridge. For some reason the image of the Thing wrapping up the Hulk in one of the suspension cables from the bridge has always stuck in my head. You really felt the Hulk being wrapped up in this thing. There was just something about Kirby’s work that had so much weight to it. I can remember looking at that, thinking he really felt it when he was being squeezed by the Thing. And I also very vividly remember John Buscema’s stuff. Those two guys, more than anyone else, I remember.

MM: Were you interested in comics as a child? Do you remember having books around?

MM: Were there any art teachers that were important to you growing up?

RON: Yeah, sure. I mean, I grew up in a very rural area, so there wasn’t a lot of access to them, but every now and then my mother would come home with some comics or a Famous Monsters magazine—I got into that kind of thing for a while. I was really into Star Trek early on—in the early ’70s I got into it after it went into syndication. And Godzilla—on Saturdays I would watch Godzilla movies on Chiller Theater. Lots of different things like that.

RON: My art teacher in grammar school, and actually he became my art teacher in high school, somewhat, too— MM: The same person? RON: Yeah, yeah. He worked at both schools. His name was David Orrell. I just talked to him again on Facebook recently. I hadn’t spoken to the guy since probably the late ’70s, and I found him on Facebook, funny enough. MM: Did you send him some of your comics?

MM: You were into Batman, too, right?

MM: Did you recognize different art styles early on?

RON: Yeah, he asked me to. Maybe I could send him one of these books, too. So, yeah, yeah, he was very influential. I remember him telling me to squint my eyes because it would make the composition make more sense. It helps you eliminate some of the distracting details. You can see the composition as a whole if you just squinted your eyes at the piece. I never forgot that, and I do it to this day. If you see me drawing sketches at conventions, people wonder what I’m doing with my eyes. It became a habit, and I can’t get out of it. I’ve tried to get out of it, and I can’t.

RON: Yeah, definitely. I remember looking at Kirby’s stuff, gosh, as far back as ’60-something. I remember reading the

MM: Early on, where did the desire to draw come from? Was it just the attention you were getting fueling that?

RON: Yeah, the Batman TV show, the Adam West thing. I loved the opening credits with the comic book stuff. I just thought that was the coolest thing. You see all the villains going by to the left in this sort of graphic shape, and then with a “Biff!” and a “Pow!” they’d be flying off to the right. That was pretty cool, you know? I was drawn to it early on, that sort of graphic, comic book look.

RON: Back when I was growing up, there weren’t many people around me that drew. I was the only guy at the school. I got the art award when I left grammar school. I don’t remember what happened in high school, but there was a guy one year ahead of me—his name was Jim Lawson—and he actually draws Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I don’t know if he knows we went to the same school. I mean, because he was older than me, I remember seeing his drawings in high school, thinking how cool they were. Especially coming from an area where nobody else drew pictures. MM: He works for Peter Laird now, right? RON: Yeah, and he went to Valley Regional High School. I might have talked to him once or twice, but I don’t know if he’d remember me, because I was younger than him, but I remember him and his distinct Kurtzmany style, and thinking how great he was. I had forgotten about him and years later rediscovered him, found out that he was doing all that. It was cool to see that he went into the same field I went into. MM: Did you get to a point where you were tired of comics as a kid? RON: Yeah, I wasn’t into comics that much, I would say, right around high school. I really got into music. I started getting into girls. I was always into sports. I played sports all through grammar school, but that didn’t stop me from geeking out, as they say. Now it’s hip to be a geek, but back then it wasn’t. But, yeah, I was into girls, into sports. I got to high school and played a little basketball, but I got more into music at that point. As you’re growing up, you’re developing new friendships. You go to a new school, and you develop new friendships with different people based on things you’re into. A couple of my friends were in a band, so I was all, “I gotta learn guitar.” I could play guitar, but not really well at that point. So I really started focusing on that, because my friends at that time were into it. There weren’t a lot of guys my age who were into comic books and that kind of thing where I grew up. So the exposure to music and sports was more prevalent back then, as opposed to Star Trek. I was the only Star Trek fan in my whole grammar school, you know? I was looked at as, “Who’s this kid talking about the f-ing Enterprise?” That’s was my experience.

MM: But you didn’t stop drawing? RON: Oh, no, I kept drawing. That’s what I was really good at. I would draw from TV shows. Like, I remember this guy had a TV show—Captain Bob I think his name was— and he would draw wildlife, which I loved to draw—manatees, dolphins, alligators—and he would teach you how to do all that stuff. I would sit there on Sunday with my sketchpad and draw along with him, and I had them all pinned up in my room. And then, in high school, I drew and painted and sculpted and all that stuff. That’s when I really got into Frazetta; that was my junior year. MM: What was it about him? Just his technique? 7

Previous Page: The Hulk temporarily gets the worst of it in his rematch with the Thing in Fantastic Four #25, drawn by Jack Kirby with inks by George Roussos. Above: Ron got to do his own take on the classic rivalry in Hulk #9. Inks by Sal Buscema. Hulk, Thing ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Right: Frank Frazetta’s cover of Creepy #91 and Boris Vallejo’s cover of Eerie #34. Below: One of Ron’s fantasy paintings from the early ’80s. Next Page: A 1979 pen&-ink illustration. Creepy, Eerie © New Comic Company.

RON: Oh, yeah. I don’t remember what the first thing I saw of his was, but I was just floored by it. I started getting into Creepy and Eerie magazines, too, and Boris [Vallejo]. A lot of Boris’ covers were on those magazines. It was through these periodicals that I first saw things by Frazetta, then I actively started seeking him out. I would go to a bookstore and see if they had any of his books, or I would place orders through the magazines to have the books sent to me. I got into it, and that’s what really got me into the painting. I started doing fantasy illustration like Frazetta. I was doing that all the way through college, and then all my paintings were stolen, and that sucked the wind out of me. Then I became a nightclub manager and a bouncer, and I got really distracted for a while there from all that stuff. MM: Did you have a plan after high school for what you were going to do? RON: Well, if I had never gone to college, I probably would have been a fantasy illustrator. I was looking at guys like Don Maitz, Michael Whelan, and Frank Frazetta. That’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a book cover artist, a painter like that. But then I decided to go to college after high school, and that was an eye-opening experience, because all of a sudden I was around people who could draw and paint as well as I could. I saw so many talented people that it was a little bit intimidating. Very eye-opening. It made me realize how much harder I really needed to work. But, then, with college came the other distractions, as well—again, girls and partying and stuff like that. I made it through college, but don’t ask me how. [laughs] 8

interest in film and things like that, and I loved storytelling. I remember watching Citizen Kane and thinking how cool all the compositions were within the frame. I just loved the idea of composition and photography. And then I started looking at comic books, and I realized you could apply all that there. Really, your mind’s eye is sort of a camera, anyway. And you had to use all those principles within the craft of storytelling for a comic book. It also appealed to me because it was super-heroes, and that whole fantasy/scifi aspect that I was already interested in anyway. It had everything kind of rolled into one. MM: What were some of the titles that got you back into comics? RON: Marvel’s Secret Wars was the first thing I read. I was intrigued by the idea of all the heroes being together on one planet, you know, and there being this conflict. Here you’ve got this character called the Beyonder, who was basically God, who could do anything, but he’s playing games with the heroes on this world like he was a child playing with little toys. Which is a clever story in that that’s what kids do with their little dolls, except the Beyonder was this big entity who could make things happen. MM: I thought it might have been the Mike Zeck artwork that clicked with you. RON: Yeah, there might have been some of that, too. I liked Zeck’s work a lot. It had a lot of energy in it and a very distinctive look. But, to be perfectly honest, it was more the idea of all the heroes being together on this world that got me interested in reading the next issue. It was like, “Oh, what’s going to happen with Captain America and Wolverine? Are they going to fight?” That kind of silly, very base interest. I thought it was a cool premise, and the Zeck art helped a lot, so it was probably a combination of the two.

MM: So you didn’t fully apply yourself? RON: No, I did. By the time my fourth year came around in ’84, that’s when I rediscovered comic books. MM: You were also working during college? RON: I didn’t come from any money at all. We had zero money, basically. I had won a couple of scholarships in high school to go to college for art, but they only went so far. I worked all through college. I became a bartender, and then I went to nightclub managing. So you can imagine, with that kind of lifestyle, it got to a point in the back half of the ’80s where I didn’t have a lot of time to even apply my craft. I was busy trying to make money and survive at that point, and I started thinking I was never going to make it as an artist.

MM: And that led you to the other Marvel books of that era? RON: Well, what happened was I asked the bartender where he got the issue, and he told me he got it from this little 24-hour bookshop which was right down the street from our bar in New Haven. It was great. I lived on my own in a little apartment uptown, and late at night after hours I would walk down there and start perusing the racks for every comic book I could find. John Byrne’s Fantastic Four was the next comic I started reading. The first issue I got was called, “Season of the Witch,” where the FF lived in Connecticut under assumed disguises.

MM: You didn’t want to be a club manager. You didn’t want to keep doing that type of work. RON: No, I didn’t want to do that. In ’84 or ’85, the bartender had a comic book behind the bar. I picked it up and I got hooked on it right away. I really wasn’t sure I was going to make anything of myself as a fantasy artist. There wasn’t anything like that available, and I really had zero guidance. But I did rediscover comics, and once I started reading them, I got hooked on them again. I thought, “You know what? This is something I really could do.” I always had an

MM: I remember that. Jerry Ordway inked that, right? RON: Yeah, and it had Mephisto. I was intrigued by the fact that Mephisto came up through the ground. I thought it was the coolest thing having this super-hero mixed with the supernatural sort of slant. It was so much fun to just go 9

Above Left: Mid-’80s painting of Lt. Col. Oliver North, best known for his involvement in the Iran-Contra Affair. Above Right and Next Page: A three-page sequence featuring Hulk and Thing (are you sensing a pattern?) from one of Ron’s portfolio samples which helped him land a job at Marvel Comics. Hulk, Thing ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

and read these things. I was so into it. The reason I started trying out for Marvel is because of something I said to the guy behind the counter. I said, “Boy, I would love to draw these. I’m an artist. How would I go about drawing for Marvel?” And he said, “You have to send stuff in. But...” and he pointed me over to this Marvel Comics Try-Out Book they had for sale that I hadn’t even seen sitting there. It was this huge book, and I was like, “Oh, wow! I’m going to enter this.” Everything was there in it. It had the paper, it had the story. I think John Romita, Jr. had drawn it. You could ink it and send it in, or you had blank pages you could pencil, and they had a whole script in there. So I brought it home and I worked my ass off on it. I was determined to win it. I sent it in, but I didn’t win. Actually, I think Mark Bagley won it. 10

MM: Mark Bagley won it, and I think Erik Larsen came in fourth place or something. RON: Oh, did he? It’s funny how the timing works; they both worked on Spider-Man at the same time. MM: Did you get a letter? RON: I did get a letter, basically saying, “Thanks, but no thanks.” MM: Did that experience make you want to quit? RON: No, because my ego was bruised. I was used to winning awards. I was always being noted as the best artist in the class. So I knew I was a good artist, I just was clearly not good enough at drawing comics. I had a lot to learn. Up to that point I had predominantly

been a painter, so my sensibility wasn’t about tightness of line. It was more about the painted cover. It wasn’t so tight. I was more of an abstract thinker when it came to color and form, and that’s what I was really into. When you look at Frazetta’s stuff, none of it looks really tight when you look at it closely. The arrangement of color and the way he laid the brush down is a technique all unto itself, and it’s completely different than doing a tight pencil drawing. MM: Did you find yourself struggling with that Marvel Tryout book, or did it come relatively easy for you? RON: Well, the only thing I struggled with was having no feedback on it to tell me what was good. You know, all my friends and family, and I don’t know how serious they thought I was about it, but they always supported me. “It looks great,” you know? So I was always second-guessing myself, and redoing it, and redoing it, and redoing it. As a matter of fact, I redid so much that I might have even sent the thing in late, [laughs] past the deadline, which may be the reason I got a “no, thank you” letter. I think I might have sent it out the day before the deadline. So, you know, I didn’t have any feedback to tell me this was good, or that was good, and I was second-guessing myself a lot. When I got the rejection letter, I was crushed by it, because I didn’t know what else I was going to do with my life at that point. I didn’t want to work as a nightclub manager forever, but what was I going to do? I had started doing graphic design for a newspaper in New Haven and odd jobs here and there, but I was really giving up on the idea of an art career. But that letter lit a fire under me that pushed me to keep working at it until I got in. A couple of years went by. I kept working on samples, because I was determined. And then, just by chance, somebody told me that Zeck happened to live, like, ten minutes away. [laughs] I looked him up in the phone book, and, sure enough, there he was. I wouldn’t suggest that anyone else do that. MM: To you? [laughter] RON: Yeah, please don’t do that to me. But I did it to him. I called, left him a message on his answering machine, and said I was an artist interested in drawing for Marvel, and could he look at my stuff? He called me back and said, “Yeah, send me some stuff. I’d be happy to look at it.” So I sent it to him, and then he called me back, and I was so in awe that this guy from Marvel Comics had called me back. I think I saved the answering machine message, because the fact that this guy who actually did work for Marvel was calling me meant I was one step closer to working for Marvel. MM: It’s a small world, right? RON: Yeah, it’s like one of those “meant to be” scenarios where you go, “What the heck? What are the odds of this?” I happen to be working at a bar, my friend picks up Secret Wars, it’s Mike Zeck’s work, then I find out Zeck lives basically next door. MM: Did he tell you how much he loathed doing that series? 11

RON: Yeah. We had conversations about it, and about problems he was having with editorial and the editor-inchief at the time—Jim Shooter, I guess it was—and some of the things that were going on there. We actually became quite friendly. He gave me a critique on my work, and he thought I had a ton of potential. He said, “I’m really interested, because I see something in your work.” So I kept at it; I kept working on the samples. In the meantime, I invited him out to the bars where I worked, and he ended up inviting me to a small, local convention here in Connecticut. So I went, and he invited me to sit behind the table with him, and I drew sketches for people. I didn’t even work for Marvel at that point, but it was just the coolest thing ever. I was like, “Wow, this is awesome!” I was there with him, Mike DeCarlo— who I think was inking Batman—and a couple other local guys. It was cool, y’know? To even be invited was very gracious of him. And then he invited me to come play volleyball, so I was on a volleyball team with him. Because we were all local, we started to hang out together.

was Larry Alexander—into New York together on the train. I got to go to the Marvel offices, and it was just, “Whoa.” I went to DC with him, and he showed me around there. Mike walked me around the offices and introduced me to editors, and then he started showing the editors my work because he thought I was good. And it paid off. Marvel said, “Oh, we’ll call you if we’re interested.” I could tell Ralph Macchio had an interest. You know how editors are, they’ll act like they’ve seen it all, but I remember Ralph’s face when he started looking through my stuff. He was pausing and looking, and he was like, “Wow, these are really good.” MM: But he didn’t want to be the first guy to hire you. RON: Yeah, he didn’t say much, he just was looking like, “What the hell? This guy is pretty good.” I think they get so many submissions that they just get desensitized to it, and a lot of the artists they see are probably not ready. I guess I was ready, because when Mike took me over to DC an editor immediately offered me an Animal Man series. But first I had to do an eight-page sample sequence to show them I could do the work on time and that kind of thing.

MM: When did you start getting your portfolio ready? RON: I worked on the samples, and when I brought them to him again, he seemed to think I was ready to take some in. He brought me and this one other guy—I think his name

MM: This was the Grant Morrison series, right? RON: Yeah, it was! So, I did the eight-page sample and got 12

it in on time. I was pulling all-nighters, which I wasn’t used to, but I had to make it good. I sent it in, and then I got dogged, because the guy who was initially supposed to draw the series but had turned it down, changed his mind and decided to take the job. I think his name was Chas Truog. So he got the job. But within a day of my visit, I got a few offers from Marvel on my answering machine: one from Bobbie Chase and one from Danny Fingeroth. I guess Ralph had shown my stuff to Bobbie and Danny or something. I don’t know. Anyway, those two were the first—actually, all three of them, because Ralph offered me a Daredevil story. So right away I had all these offers on my answering machine. I didn’t know how to say no. I didn’t want to overextend myself, but I didn’t want to turn anything down, either. So I took a G.I. Joe story that Bobbie had offered. That was my very first comic credit: G.I. Joe #110 [March, 1991]. MM: You did get paid for those Animal Man samples, right? RON: I did. I got paid for the samples. And when that issue came out, Chas Truog’s layouts looked a lot like mine, interestingly. So I drew the G.I. Joe story, not knowing that Bobbie wanted to offer the book to me as a regular gig. I finished the issue in good time, and I think part of the problem she was having with the regular artist was that he wasn’t turning his stuff in on time. I was so determined to work for Marvel and succeed that I did everything on time; I pulled all-nighters and I got it all in. So, evidently, Bobbie was going to offer me the book as the regular artist. In the meantime, Danny Fingeroth had called me and offered me Moon Knight as a regular gig without my even having to try out for it. MM: Did you feel like you were ready for such a load of work? RON: No. [laughter] I wasn’t ready. I didn’t know what to think. MM: When I read that G.I. Joe comic, it was like, “They gave this guy a whole war to draw in one issue.” RON: It was awful. That turned me off to it quite a bit, actually. It’s funny you mention that, because they had licenses for the vehicles and the action figures and stuff like that, and they wanted it pretty accurate, so I had to

reference everything, and that was a task. I had never drawn a comic book before—a full, 22-page comic book. The opening scenes were just hundreds of tanks, battalions, the SAW-Vipers, and all this stuff. [laughter] I remember reading the script, going, “How am I gonna draw all this stuff? Oh, my God, I’ve never had to do this in my life.” It was really eye-opening. I wasn’t prepared for the amount of work you had to— MM: Did you ask Mike for help? RON: No, I was on my own. At that point, Mike had helped me so much. And I didn’t want so much of Mike’s help, because if Mike came in and started redrawing things for me, then it’s him, not me. But on a couple of occasions I asked him, “What can I do with this?” He was very helpful. Mike was known 13

Previous Page: A panel and page from another of Ron’s samples, this time featuring Spidey. You can see that Ron has already developed an eye for interesting camera angles. Above: The first page of Ron’s professional debut in G.I. Joe #110. Talk about diving in at the deep end! G.I. Joe featured a large cast and a ton of vehicles, all of which had to be drawn to model. Inks by Fred Fredericks. Spider-Man ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc. G.I. Joe ™ and © Hasbro.

for that, actually. He used to help out a lot of guys. He helped Jerry Ordway quite a bit. Right: You can see a little of Ron’s Mike Zeck influence in this drawing of the Joes’ commander. Below: Panels from Moon Knight #27, Ron’s second issue on the title. Inks by the legendary embellisher, Tom Palmer. Next Page: This page from Captain America #450 is one of Ron’s favorite pages of the entire series. The foreshortening of the Cap figure is tricky to capture from this angle, and Ron shows his command of perspective by getting it just right. Inks by Scott Koblish. Captain America, Moon Knight ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc. G.I. Joe ™ and © Hasbro.

MM: And it’s the only book that you did that has a little bit of his influence in it. Like, some of the faces look like his. RON: Yeah, I know. Well, not surprisingly, because he was the main influence on me at that point in my life, as far as helping me with camera shots, how to set up pages, and stuff. MM: How many copies of this comic did you buy when it came out? [laughs] RON: I don’t remember. I know it was a few. But I remember the thrill I got walking into the comic shop and seeing it there. It’s just the coolest thing ever to see your name on

something. I can’t explain it. It was like seeing your name on a movie screen or something. It was just the coolest thing. And here I had achieved it. I had made the commitment to get into Marvel years and years earlier, and I didn’t quit. I could have quit, but I didn’t. So here I was achieving it—actually achieving it— starting out pretty well. But the editors ended up getting in an argument; they had it out at a meeting, because they both wanted to offer me a regular book. So it was kind of like, “Wow.” I went from getting turned down on the Marvel Comics Try-Out Book to having editors offer me all kinds of stuff. It was the best experience of my life, and I was very honored and grateful.

Part 2:

From Unknown to Suddenly in Demand

MM: Was everything starting to come together, what you learned from art school, what you’d learned from Mike, what art techniques you’d learned at school?

RON: Oh, really? MM: Yeah, because they were really intrigued. They’d never seen that angle, that overhead camera shot where you could see the Oval Office. It was cool.

RON: The craft and applying what I was taught? Yeah, I was particularly good at graphic design—like designing logos—when I was in college. I see that to this day, some of the impact that had on me. I always did well in figure drawing classes, probably because of the Frazetta influence. And Buscema, who was a great figure drawer. I was always drawing figures anyway. So I think that definitely started showing through. Even if you look at G.I. Joe, for a first comic, when I look back at it, I think it looks pretty seasoned for somebody who had never worked before. Some areas need a lot of work, but, you know, for a first comic, I thought it was pretty good. But I think a lot of that, too, was due in part to Zeck’s help. It’s about making choices. Mike helped me make choices. There were certain times that I couldn’t make a choice. I remember in a sample page I had drawn, it was just a simple page of Mary Jane and Peter Parker putting up their Christmas tree together, and Peter’s up on the wall because the tree is so high. He’s up on the ceiling and the wall, trying to put the angel on top of the tree. I couldn’t figure out how to do that angle. Mike simplified it for me. He said, “Just go from the angel down. Draw a picture of the angel up close and do it from that perspective, looking down at the floor. I had been doing it in reverse with Mary Jane looking up, and I didn’t think to zoom in on the angel and make that the focus, close up, and then reverse the camera so you see Peter putting it there with Mary Jane in the background. So it was stuff like that. And, of course, it made so much more compositional sense—and it made sense for the story, because the angel is the focus of the panel. He helped me with a lot of that kind of thing.

RON: I chose an extreme downshot so you saw the desk and Bill Clinton, and then the angle of Cap—I mean, it was tough to pull off. To get that foreshortening just right and make him look like he was standing was the actual challenge of it.

MM: That idea carries on throughout your career. There’s a page in Captain America—I think you did an overhead shot where he hands the shield to Bill Clinton. I remember Ralph Macchio looking at that like, “Wow, how did he do that?” 15

Below: Ron plays with the camera angles in this page from Captain America #445. Inks by Scott Koblish. Next Page: This version of the cover art for Captain America #454 was rejected. For the final version, the pile of dead soldiers Cap is standing on was changed to a hilltop. The Cap figure remained unchanged. Captain America ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

See, a lot of times, for me, the payoff is worth the effort. That angle, again, that’s where my directorial interest came in. I love playing with camera angles. That’s how my mind works. It’s like, “Oh, I get to play director here, and I can put the camera anywhere. Let me find the most interesting place to put it.” Sometimes I’m good at it, sometimes I’m not so good at it. I have moments where I could have done better, but that one shot I was particularly proud of because it worked. And even [Mark] Waid called me and said, “You know, I didn’t even think of that angle. I wasn’t thinking of that set-up for that page when I wrote it, but, man, the way you drew it here was remarkable. It’s better than what I had pictured.”

My stuff was stylized, and it had a cartoony feel to it. It had a look, definitely, but it wasn’t overly rendered and stylized like Jim Lee. But I made up for it with my camera shots, camera angles, and interesting ways of looking at the story, of moving the camera along, and that’s where I had the most fun. I think that holds true to this day. I’ve gotten more stylized over the years, but it’s not something I’ve ever predominantly focused on, which is very obvious. There are a lot of guys out there who do that, who are very stylized. My style comes from just having fun being a director and moving the story through the pages, getting it to come to life, making it look like you’re watching a movie. That’s what I try to go for. That’s where the fun lies for me, and I think it shows sometimes. My friend Howard said to me recently about something I did, that it was just like he was watching a movie. That’s a high compliment and high praise, and it’s gratifying to hear that because that’s where my interests are. MM: During my internship on your Captain America run, you were like our quarterback. When your pages came in, that was something that everyone looked forward to. RON: Quarterback? MM: Yeah, because you were the star of our roster. We had to make sure that we took care of you. RON: Really? I wish somebody had told me that. MM: Well, that’s the problem. The guys in editorial don’t generally articulate that kind of thing. RON: Wow, but it’s nice to hear. Yeah, and then I got the rug pulled out from under me. MM: Well, it wasn’t Ralph’s fault. That move came from the top. RON: What did Ralph do when he first heard that? MM: It was weird. I think he kind of knew it was coming. Maybe he didn’t know, because he was surprised. He didn’t know what to say. I think he was the guy that called you. It was either him or Matt Idelson. RON: I think it was Ralph who called me and told me.

MM: We thought we were going to keep doing what we were doing. I remember it was early December [1995] when it happened. Bob Harras came down and told us [about “Heroes Reborn”] before they told everybody else.

couldn’t say no. I was always very insecure about getting work back then, because I had struggled so hard to get there, and I didn’t want to go back to bartending and not having a career, so I didn‘t want to say no. I wanted to be a good soldier, like I said. So I said yes to Ralph. I did his book, and I did Moon Knight. I kind of overextended myself.

RON: I think the problem with all that crap back then was the money that was rolling in. It brought out the worst in people, and all of a sudden the company saw something it had never seen before with Jim Lee. They’d had successes, but not like Todd McFarlane and Jim Lee. All of a sudden they exploded, and the money rolled in. I mean, it wasn’t just those guys, it was the timing of everything that happened. Greed is like food, water, and sex. It’s an immediate gratification that you need taken care of, and when it comes to money and the fix that you get from making that kind of money, they needed it right then and there, y’know? So they didn’t see that in the long run maybe Mark’s and my run could have grown to that height. Maybe not.

MM: The Marvel Holiday Special [1991] story, too. RON: I did that, too, yeah! What was I thinking? But I was willing to take it all on because I was so honored to get the work. MM: At the same time, I’ve read you had problems getting used to working on your own, the isolation and so on. RON: Yeah, that was difficult. You go from being a very social animal, being in a nightclub, being around girls all the time, hot women—and just people. Even if some of the atmosphere was negative—you’d get into fights or whatever—you’re around people all the time, so to go from that to being at home all day sitting in a chair with no one around you all day and night, that was a tough, tough adjustment.

MM: I do remember this: Captain America was the only book that was going up in sales at Marvel at that time. It was the envy of the whole office, because it was the only one that was doing something. RON: Yeah, I know. And after that my career was just a rollercoaster ride there. I was unhappy with Marvel at that stage. The environment was just too unstable. And it started showing in my work. I was getting things done quickly, because the editors needed the stuff, and I was caught between wanting to be a really good artist and wanting to please the editors, so my work was very inconsistent. That’s the other criticism I have of it is that they’d call me up, “Oh, we need it by next week, Ron.” “I don’t know.” “Okay, whatever.” And I would play the good soldier, and I would get the stuff done in, like, eight days, or nine days. And the work suffered for it. I had the potential to be much better, I thought, but there were just too many ups and downs.

MM: What did it take to get that discipline to stay at the table and get the work done? RON: The fear of not having that job, of not succeeding. MM: Did you have any problems with deadlines early on when you accepted all these projects? RON: I think I was good with deadlines, and that’s why I was getting offered so much. But it stifled my potential for growth. I mean, I wasn’t taking as much time as I needed to do the stuff well. With the first G.I. Joe issue, this one issue I did, it was all I had to do, and I worked hard at it, and it looked pretty good. But when I was on both Moon Knight and Daredevil—plus all the different inkers I was working with—stuff can get watered down and not look quite as good.

MM: Let’s back up a bit. Right after G.I. Joe you did two issues of Daredevil. RON: Yeah. I had already started Moon Knight, so I was doing Daredevil while I was doing Moon Knight. And that was like, “What am I doing? I’m killing myself, here.” But I

MM: I thought that first issue of Daredevil looked great. And you didn’t have much to work with. 18

RON: Yeah, I liked it. I had to follow Lee Weeks, and I remember looking at Lee Weeks’ work, and that was a real eye-opener, because I was really into J.R. [John Romita Jr.]. I loved his work; I loved Silvestri’s work. Back in the ’80s, there were periods where I would get into different artists whose work I just adored. It was Silvestri, J.R. Jr., and my favorite book of all time was Thor with Walt Simonson drawing and writing it. Those were the things that kept me hooked on the comics. Silvestri’s art was so naturally drawn, and I just was like, “Wow. If I could just draw as easily as he makes it look.” MM: In Daredevil #296, I thought that last sequence with Daredevil and the Kingpin, the build-up—that last page came out really nice. Al Williamson inked your pencils on that issue. RON: Yeah, that was a kick, because I knew who he was, and he had inked J.R. You’ve got to understand, for me, reading the stuff that J.R.

did with Ann Nocenti and Al Williamson— you know, there are certain runs that stick out in my head from that time. When I was reading them, I didn’t have any idea that in my future I’d be working for Marvel. I wanted that, but it just seemed like one of those lofty dreams, kind of like wanting to be a movie star, that I’d never get there. Sitting in my little apartment in the middle of nowhere in Newhaven, I mean... I looked at J.R. the way somebody might look at a movie star. Or Ann Nocenti’s writing. Walt Simonson, to me, was like watching a Scorcese film. You know what I mean? It was a far-removed concept at that point. Because I had been rejected, I was just like, “I’ll never get in.” All of a sudden I was working for Marvel, and the fact that it was on Daredevil and Al Williamson was working on my pencils, was just, “Wow! How did this happen? Here I am.” It was a dream I had, now I’m living this dream, and this guy’s working on me. I had the same feeling with guys like Tom 19

Previous Page: Cap in freefall, just as Ron felt when he was taken off the Captain America series to make room for the “Heroes Reborn” line. At least Ron was able to ink his own covers by this point. Above: This two-page spread from Daredevil #296 was inked by the amazing Al Williamson, one of Ron’s favorite collaborators. Captain America, Daredevil ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Below: Tom Palmer’s heavy inks were fitting for this rainy scene from Moon Knight #31. Next Page Top: Bud LaRosa’s inks in Daredevil #304 were a marked change from Williamson’s. Next Page Bottom: Ron suggested the idea that sparked the Hobgoblin storyline in Moon Knight. Daredevil, Moon Knight ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Palmer. I remember reading a Dracula issue back in the ’70s that Gene Colan had drawn and Tom had inked. The page that always stuck in my head was where a guy is in a gym lifting weights, and Dracula comes into the gym to ask this weightlifter some questions about something. The weightlifter is just like, “Yeah, well,” and he throws a 200-pound barbell at Dracula. Dracula catches it with one hand, throws it back at the weightlifter, and it goes crashing through the wall. Back in the ’70s, I didn’t know who Tom Palmer was, and it didn’t occur to me years later that he was the same guy. But when I started working with Tom, Tom said, “Oh, here’s some of my old Dracula stuff,” and that page was in there,

of the guy with the barbell. It all came flooding back, and here I am working with this guy 15 years later. Those things keep you going. It’s a real kick and an honor, and that’s what makes the job fun. MM: Did you like the way Palmer inked you? RON: Yeah, but sometimes I didn’t think it was the best marriage, because Tom had such a signature style that just was Tom, y’know? I had a little bit of an artistic ego, and I knew eventually that I wanted to graduate. I was happy having him ink me, and I learned from it, but by the same token I knew that I wanted my work to show through more. I wanted to show what I could do eventually. MM: After you got these two fill-in issues, did you think you might have a shot at being the regular artist on Daredevil? RON: The assistant editor, maybe even Ralph suggested I could do it on a regular basis. Now, I had seen Lee Weeks’ stuff right before I did #296, and that stuff was eyeopening. I couldn’t believe how good he was. I remember opening it and reading it. It took a while for it to all settle in, and when I started looking at it, I could see the brilliance and the talent behind Lee, and how great he was in his compositions. He had a lot of attributes I wanted in my work, and usually that’s what draws you to a guy is when you see things in their work that you want in your own. I really liked the way Lee would set up shots. So I knew, going into #296, that I wanted to try some of that in the storytelling. But I remember the editor saying he was having trouble with the deadlines—I don’t know if he was or wasn’t, but that’s what he said—and that they might want me to do that as a regular book, but I was doing Moon Knight at the time. MM: What did you think of the environment at Marvel at that time? Because the Image guys were still there, and the sales explosion was beginning. RON: I didn’t know anything about the Image guys when I first started there. I was just so excited to go in there and see the process. I felt so small, really, because I was just getting in, and there were all these brilliant artists like Zeck, who was doing these amazing Punisher pin-ups with so much detail, stuff I couldn’t comprehend doing until I got much

better. But I didn’t know anything about Jim Lee; I didn’t know anything about Rob Liefeld. All I knew was Silvestri, J.R. Jr., John Buscema, Walt Simonson, and Lee Weeks. Those were the guys I looked at. When I really got hooked into the Image guys was when I ended up working out at Homage Studios with Jim Lee for a couple of days. MM: You did? I didn’t know that. RON: I do remember when McFarlane and the Spider-Man book took off. I think that was just before I got into Marvel. But I didn’t know anything, really, about Jim Lee. I remember seeing a Punisher cover he did and thinking it was good. It was a little bit anal for my tastes at the time, but you never know what kind of impact it’s going to make. You see somebody’s art and you go, “Wow, that’s good,” but you don’t always realize the potential is there right away. It wasn’t really in the forefront of my imagination or anything. But then I went out to California with Greg Wright to the San Diego convention. Greg was working with

Jim Lee, and Jim and his girlfriend picked us up at the airport, and he invited me to come work at his studio for a couple of days. So I went over there, and that was something, seeing the way those guys worked. It was him, Whilce Portacio, Scott Williams, and one other guy. MM: Joe Chiodo? RON: Joe Chiodo, yeah. He was really great. It was fun to go there, and I was learning a lot just watching them. Watching Jim Lee work was cool, because he did some of the things that I do, like turning a page over and looking at it from behind. When you turn the pages backward and you see the stuff in reverse, you can spot mistakes very easily, but he would do it differently. He would do a little piece in a panel, pick it up, turn it around in the light, look at it backwards, turn it back over and fix it, and just keep doing that, whereas I would pencil the whole page before I would turn it over, and then I would redraw all the mistakes at once. 21

Jim Lee riffs and Scott Williams riffs. It became quite a horrible time, visually, for the industry. MM: Did they ever ask you to join Image? RON: Yeah, Silvestri asked me, “When are you going to come over to Image?” and that kind of thing. I don’t know. It had taken so long to get in at Marvel, I guess the fear of leaving the big company kind of kept me there. And I’m still there, fortunately.

Above: A nice action scene from Moon Knight #33, and the cover art for Nightstalkers #1, both inked by Tom Palmer. Next Page: Introducing the Nightstalkers, from the first issue of their ongoing series. Blade, Daredevil, Frank Drake, Hannibal King, Lilith, Moon Knight ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

The thing I really got from it was how competitive these guys were. Chiodo has a competitive personality, and they were ballbreakers. I remember Andy Kubert’s pages coming in for Scott to ink and the guys tearing them apart. [laughs] It wasn’t like they were mean about it, but Jim was kind of perturbed because Andy was hooking into his style and kind of swiping things Jim was doing, I guess. I like Andy’s stuff. They liked it, too, but they just didn’t like the fact that he was trying to ape Jim Lee. When you look back on it, I don’t know. Only Jim could really speak to the horrors of the industry aping him, because the whole industry started doing Jim Lee. There were 22

MM: Before you left Moon Knight you were thinking about doing both Moon Knight and Ghost Rider simultaneously. Were you that fast? RON: I don’t know if I was that fast, it was more that I was just—well, it was a combination of things. I was ignorant to the actual work I needed to do to get better, and I wanted to make more money, which is never a good motivator in the arts field as far as getting better. But I always wanted to write, too. I remember when John Byrne was writing and drawing, and it was kind of my dream to write and draw a book. I was always keen on the idea of having total control over the direction of a character and the world that they occupy. I was always fast, but in hindsight it probably wouldn’t have been very good.

MM: Moon Knight was your first series. Were you reluctant to leave it?

RON: I don’t know. It was funny, because I was so willing to do anything that was new and exciting, but I really was more of a straightforward, straightlaced super-hero type guy. That was my desire. I always wanted to do Superman, but I was getting offered all this supernatural stuff, with Moon Knight and Nightstalkers.

RON: It wasn’t necessarily that I didn’t want to leave it, but there were a lot of things that I had contributed as far as the direction of the story, and I kind of wanted to see it through. In the end I left the book, but a lot of the stuff that I came up with got utilized for the storylines that came afterward.

MM: What did you think when you read the first Nightstalkers script? Was it full script? Because those were some wordy stories.

MM: Did DeMatteis write full script?

RON: It was Dan Chichester. I had worked with him on Daredevil #304. I don’t think it was full script, but it was very wordy. The scripts were very long and detailed, which was good, but it was a long script.

RON: Well, it was close to it at a time when, for the most part, writers at Marvel weren’t doing that. He had a very particular tempo and vision, and it was very spiritual, so it was very defined, what he was looking for. So anything I had to offer or thought about really didn’t fit within the context or the framework of his vision for Moon Knight. I started having meetings with Terry Kavanaugh, the editor. Once we had a few meetings about that, I was able to contribute more, come up with ideas to make him more appealing to our younger audience. MM: Did Moon Knight’s relationship with Stained Glass Scarlet appeal to you? RON: Yeah, DeMatteis had that romantic thing going with her. I honestly didn’t pay attention so much after I left the book. My changes were more cosmetic. I came up with the crescent dart shooters on his wrists. [laughter] Rather than just having him flicking them with his fingers, I thought, “It’d be cool if he had these little shooters around his wrists where he could just fire them.” So it was more that kind of stuff, not really so much the direction of the storyline. I did come up with the idea of him being infected with the goblin virus when the Hobgoblin came in. And I think that spawned a long storyline that year. I left Moon Knight for Nightstalkers because I got the hard sell from Bobbie Chase and Bob Harras. They were creating a whole supernatural line of books. Marvel was changing up the editorships, where each editor would be the editor-inchief of their own line of books basically, and Rise of the Midnight Suns was Bobbie’s line. They asked me if I wanted to be a part of it and if I was interested in doing Nightstalkers. MM: Did they see you only drawing motorcycles and demons? 23

MM: When I saw that character with his rib cage exposed, I was like, “Wow, the Comics Code approved this?”

started working on my own and developing a style without having a breakdown inker do the finishes.

RON: Yeah, they were pushing the envelope. Marc and I did, too, but that felt more supernatural. When I think of “supernatural,” I think of the old Hammer films I grew up on, like the Christopher Lee Dracula movies. With that stuff there was always this sort of religious undertone, a spiritual undertone. By the time I was drawing Nightstalkers, I think the attitude about that stuff started going more towards Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. It wasn’t quite so supernatural, and it became more of a horror book.

MM: A lot of the storytelling was already very tight. It was very traditional and straightforward. RON: It was a very experimental phase. It really wasn’t until Cap that things started appearing in my head. I started having visions of what things should look like, and that’s what happens over time is you get these flashes. That holds true to this day. When I read a script, I’ll get flashes of the scene in my brain from years and years and years of constantly trying to envision things.

MM: But it wasn’t even that sophisticated. It was more graphic. RON: It was very graphic. It was very Clive Barker-ish in a lot of ways. MM: Did you read a lot of Fangoria to get in the mood? RON: No, I just read the script. Dan Chichester is another great writer, but, again, it wasn’t the kind of stuff I really wanted to do with my career. It was very grotesque horror. I think there was a character called Innards who squirted stomach acid at people, and that, to me, was not horror. Horror for me was the Wolfman and Dracula—the old versions, where there was an unknown spirituality that made it a mystery as to why these creatures existed. When you’ve got a guy pulling out his intestines and squirting acid at people, it just loses that romantic flair, y’know? MM: At that time, did you feel like your career was going places? RON: No, not really. I mean, it looked good, but I just felt you couldn’t see exactly who I was underneath Tom’s inking. An editor showed me a letter from a writer. I was one of the artists that this writer was requesting to work with. I can’t remember who it was. It was someone of note at the time—maybe Chuck Dixon. I remember thinking, “Oh, wow, this guy noticed me. I must be going in the right direction.” But at the end he wrote, “I still need to see what Garney’s pencils look like, because I don’t know how much is him and how much is Tom Palmer that I’m actually attracted to.” That made me realize that I wasn’t going to really get noticed until I 25

Previous Page: While Nightstalkers did have supernatural moments such as this one from issue #2, the series tended more towards the gory and horrific. Inks by Tom Palmer. Below: Ghost Rider may not have been as gory as Nightstalkers, but it was still graphic in its violence. Inks by Chris Ivy. Ghost Rider, Hannibal King, Vengeance ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Now it just flashes in there, and usually when that flash comes, that’s the first thing I start drawing. It may not come out exactly like I first saw it in my mind, but it’s always something like it. But I wasn’t able to do that back then. I was just working through the storytelling and trying to set it up, and it was hard to capture what I might see in my head. I wasn’t able to grab that snapshot and put it on the page at that time. That’s something I developed over years and years of doing it. I think I was able to draw well enough, but as far as really seeing it, that was a growing process back then.

RON: Yeah, I agree with that. I think you should be able to read a book and not have to go buy something else. It’s good business to get people to buy the other issues, but it’s very annoying. MM: It must have been frustrating for you, because there you were telling stories that didn’t conclude in your own book. RON: I don’t know. I had so much to focus on. A lot of people forget that I have the script the longest. By the time I’m done with the script, I’m the closest one to the story, even more so in some ways than the writer is. So by the end of that, I’m pretty drained, and I don’t care as much. [laughs] I’m just like, “Okay, I’ve gotta get on to the next one.” You want to know where it’s going, but after four to six weeks of drawing, you’re just so spent, emotionally, from doing all the acting on the page. Because you’re actually acting these characters out, too. When you have even secondary characters and they’re responding a certain way, they have to have certain facial expressions and body languages. You’re acting and directing, and it’s an emotional experience. It’s just very draining.

MM: Did they bring you in for those editorial meetings? RON: I went to one or two of them, but I think they caught on quick that time at the editorial meeting was time away from the drawing table, so they stopped inviting the artists. Now it’s exclusively a writers’ thing. MM: When you read those stories, you can’t make a lot sense of it if you don’t read the other Midnight Sons books.

MM: Would you take a couple days off after you were done with an issue? RON: I still do, yeah. You have to. You have to regroup. After you’re done with an issue, you need to cool off a little bit, but you still need to stay warm enough so that when you sit back down it all comes to you quickly. If you go more than a couple of days, you starting losing that looseness in your work, and that ability to make decisions about the work right away. The big thing is if you’re looking at a script, it sometimes takes a while to make a decision about a panel, the shot. Is it overhead or is it a worm’s-eye-view? Are you going to use a vertical panel shape or a horizontal? Deciding how to break down all that stuff can take a while if you’re cold. MM: How was Howard Mackie to work with? Was he a lot looser? I get the feeling he worked totally Marvel style. RON: Yeah, he was a pretty loose plotter. MM: I read that you thought he was a little tired of the Ghost Rider series. He was obligated to the series, because he helped originate it. 26

RON: He was tired of it, yeah. I talked to him about it. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do. I don’t think he was particularly happy with my work, either. I mean, he was used to working with guys like Adam Kubert on Spirits of Vengeance. Adam’s always been great, and he was great on that book. He’s a brilliant artist, and I had a long way to go to get to that level, I thought. In hindsight, I can see why Howard may have felt that way. It can be motivating or demotivating depending on who you’re working with. MM: I think you did a good job. You had some inspired moments in there. RON: I don’t think the inks looked good at all. I mean, that’s just me—no offense to Ivy. It just wasn’t a good marriage, and that’s what I’ll always say, because I’ve seen all these guys do good work on other guys. But it’s like anything, sometimes an inker and a penciler don’t work together well. My stuff can be loose and more impressionistic in some ways, especially back then, coming from a painting background. I had a hard time being very tight. I could see things in tones very easily, as opposed to in a tight line. That holds true to this day, although I’m much tighter than I used to be. MM: What would be your reaction to seeing the finished product? RON: Well, I tend to pick it all apart. I pick apart my work; I pick apart the inkers, the colorists. I find what I like and what I don’t like about all of it. I’m never unfair about it, even with myself. I look at the stuff I do and I say, “Yeah, I really liked that,” or, “Oh, my God, I wish I had time to change that. That just doesn’t look good.” The same with the inkers. I’m fair about what looks good to me and what doesn’t. MM: When you look at those books now, they’re a product of that time. I think there was a page where you had, like, twelve panels, and every panel had three or four word balloons. RON: Yeah, there were lots of panels. I don’t mind doing ten- to twelve-panel pages. They can be kind of fun if they’re handled correctly. MM: It doesn’t let the art breathe, though. RON: Well, yeah, it depends. If it’s used as a storytelling device, then I love it. But if it’s just a gratuitous way to jam in all kinds of information, then it’s a pain in the neck.

MM: Ghost Rider seemed like a step in the right direction, career-wise. He was a big character at that time, right? RON: Yeah. Tex [Mark Texeira] had worked on it, and it was such a great book. It was very popular, and it was so cool to look at. Then Andy was doing it and his father was inking him, and that just looked phenomenal. I think Bret Blevins had done it before me, too, and that was awesome. So, to be offered a book on the heels of those guys was an honor to me, and it made me feel like, “Okay, maybe I’m moving in the right direction, because they’re seeing something in the work that maybe even I’m not seeing. They’re seeing some potential there that 27

Previous Page: Johnny Blaze character designs for Ghost Rider, along with the opening page of Ghost Rider #45. Above: A rare quiet moment in the Ghost Rider series from issue #45. Inks by Chris Ivy. Blaze, Ghost Rider ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

MM: I read that when you got to draw the Hulk and Spider-Man in Ghost Rider, that’s when you started remembering that what you wanted to do was super-heroes, that Ghost Rider wasn’t necessarily your thing. RON: Yeah, I did. Honestly, Nightstalkers and then Ghost Rider, it was all so dark. It was affecting my moods negatively, because it was all death and gore, especially the Nightstalkers stuff. Ghost Rider was a little better because it didn’t have so much gore. There was a little more of a supernatural feel to it, which I was okay with. But, again, I was really getting burnt out on all the dark stuff, and when I’d go to the gym after being cooped up drawing that stuff all day, I’d be feeling very glum and dark. [laughs] You’ve got to remember, we’re doing this stuff twelve hours a day, drawing and trying to act out these horror books, and it affects you over time. The follow-up book to Hearts of Darkness [Ghost Rider, Wolverine, Punisher: The Dark Design] was really the final nail in that coffin for me. I was just so done with it. RON: Actually, I was being courted by DC. Again, the whole inker thing was on my mind all the time because I knew I needed to be with somebody I gelled well with. And I was supposed to do a book over at DC; they offered me something. I’m trying to remember what book it was. MM: Batman? RON: Yeah, I think it might have been a Batman book, or a Batman special, four issues of something. I don’t remember who they offered me, it might have been Scott Hanna, and I just wasn’t familiar with them. And when I went in there, they didn’t give me a choice as to who to work with. After all the long hours of work I’d put in on the penciling and stuff and then having it come back and not look very good, or having it be a bad marriage with whoever I was

means I’m worthy of doing a book that these other guys were doing.” Or you could look at it and just say I was getting their scraps. [laughter] MM: You earned more freedom from your editors at that point, because they gave you the ability to design things if you wanted. RON: I think Bobbie wanted to keep me happy, and I was trying to keep her happy. I was trying to keep the deadlines as best I could. It was fun to be a part of that. I liked that book. It’s just, again, growing as an artist, I could see the potential, and I think that my biggest issue at the time was getting an inker on me that really accented what I wanted to do. It just wasn’t gelling well with Chris Ivy. So I asked for a few different guys, and I ended up getting Al Williamson and Tom Palmer. For an issue, I think, they swapped pages or something, and having Al over me was amazing. It was nice to be able to look at the stuff and say, “Okay, this is a better marriage.” 28

working with, I just didn’t want to go down that road because it was too frustrating. So I turned the job down because they didn’t give me a choice of at least a list of guys I could work with on it. So that was that, and it was around that time, on the Hearts of Darkness sequel, I was offered Captain America. MM: But, before that, you did an issue of X-Men. You mentioned that Bob Harras was talking to you about possibly doing the X-Men, too? When was that? RON: It was earlier. Actually, it was the first time I worked with Mark Waid. It was on Uncanny X-Men #321. Everybody wanted to work on X-Men at that time, and I actually was offered X-Men while I was on Ghost Rider. MM: You didn’t take it? RON: Oh, I did, but Bob Harras had a habit of changing his mind every other day. Which is understandable, he was the editor-in-chief, and those were his big books. My Ghost Rider book was the very first Marvel book that got

the Photoshop coloring. It was very exciting to see, and I remember Bob coming up to me at the San Diego convention. He walked up to me, put his arm around me, and asked me if I was happy on Ghost Rider. I said, “Well, why?” He said, “How would you feel about doing Uncanny X-Men?” And I was like, “Oh, of course! Are you kidding me?” And then he was like, “All right, well, I’ll be talking with you in about a week or so.” Then I never heard from Bob again. I was going to the city, to Marvel, and I would see him, but he was sort of avoiding me. [laughs] I guess over that week he had other people in mind, or maybe somebody said, “I don’t want to use Garney. I want Madureira,” or whoever it might have been, and he just changed his mind about it. MM: Were you happy with that issue of Uncanny X-Men? Because there were, like, three inkers in there. RON: No, it was two: Dan Green and Joe Rubinstein. MM: Isn’t Tim Townsend’s name on it? 29

Previous Page: Morbius drinking blood from a decapitated rat wasn’t exactly what Ron wanted to draw. Ghost Rider was a little more to his liking, especially when the Hulk and Spider-Man were brought in for guest appearances, but he was ready to move on to something more upbeat. Above: A two-page spread from Ron’s fill-in issue of Uncanny X-Men #321, plotted by Scott Lobdell and scripted by Ron’s soon-to-be partner Mark Waid. Hulk, Vengeance, X-Men ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Below: Cover art and page 2 from Ghost Rider, Wolverine, Punisher: The Dark Design, inked by Al Milgrom. Next Page: Promotional art for the Captain America series. When offered the title as regular artist, this image came immediately to Ron’s mind. All characters © Marvel Characters, Inc.

RON: Oh, yeah, yeah. He only did the first page. To see Dan Green inking me was a kick, because he had inked over Silvestri on X-Men and Wolverine, and I loved the marriage of those two guys. So it was nice to have Dan on me, and it was a good marriage, I thought. My stuff was evolving and getting tighter at that point, too, and I was drawing better. You could see a definite transition from Ghost Rider to that X-Men issue, and again to The Dark Design. I had Al Milgrom on me, and he was very true to a lot of the work I put down, and I thought it looked really good. It was another step in the right direction, because in that Dark Design book I was able to draw not just Ghost Rider, but also Wolverine and the Punisher, which were more mainstream super-heroes. Not that Ghost Rider wasn’t mainstream, but you know what I mean, more towards the Captain America type thing, or X-Men. I thought it was a good-looking book. I think Paul Mounts did the blueline, and, really, to see my stuff airbrushed like that, I just loved it so much.

MM: Was there ever a time you actually went a couple of months without working? RON: I don’t think there ever was. I remember I needed a vacation. I told Bobbie after Ghost Rider that I really needed a break, and then maybe a couple of weeks went by and she asked me if I would do The Dark Design, because J.R. [John Romita, Jr.] wouldn’t do it, and she needed to get it done. I guess they were giving her all kinds of crap about it. “Where is this book? This book was supposed to be done by now.” Blah, blah, blah. So she called me up because she knew I could get it done in a decent amount of time. I just told her I would do it because she asked me. It almost felt like a favor, in a way. But I was happy to do it, too. Again, it was a followup to Hearts of Darkness, and J.R. had done the first one, so, again, I always felt honored that I was considered to do these things, considering the guys who had done them before me.

Part 3:

The Good Soldier

MM: How did you hear Captain America was available?

MM: How did this collaboration start? Did they introduce you guys to one another?

RON: Ralph Macchio called me up and asked me if I would be interested. He said they were revamping a bunch of books, and he gave me a choice of a couple of them. It was Avengers, something else, and then Cap.

RON: Me and Mark? Yeah, I went in to the city for a meeting to meet Mark. MM: Was there any awkwardness in having Mark Gruenwald [Captain America’s writer for the previous ten years] present in those meetings?

MM: Avengers, Thor, and Cap. Those were his books, at the time. RON: Yeah, I think that’s what it was. As soon as he said “Cap,” I just had it in my head. I knew what I could do with it. It was one of those things where I started having those flashes. That was probably the first time where somebody offered me a character that I started getting that flash in my head of what it would look like. So I went with that, because that’s basically your artistic instincts speaking to you. Right away I said, “I’ll do Cap.” Then he said, “We’re really looking for a new face on Cap. We want to give an actual look to him.” And I said, “I know exactly what to do.” And that’s when I did that promo piece of him running over the city, over London. It was a shot of Steve Rogers on the left, and then Cap over on the right, running over a cityscape.

RON: No, not really. Mark had been on the book for so long, and I think even he knew that it needed—I’m sure he wasn’t happy, because he loved that character. I know he wasn’t. It’s a bittersweet thing. But I think he knew. I got pretty friendly with Mark before he died, and I talked to him a little bit about it. I think he had a sensible head about it. He had been on it a long time, and it was time to move on. MM: What sort of approach did you have to Cap? Did you start looking at World War II films or looking at all the Kirby work? RON: Not at all. The funny thing is that I did not look at one single person’s work when I was on Cap. I had in my head what to do with it. It just came to me as soon as it was offered to me. I could see it. I take that back. There was a European artist named Enrico Marini who did a book called Gypsy. I loved the faces and the way the guy drew, and I remember thinking what a great Cap this guy would do. So, once I got on Cap, I did look at that book a few times and think, “Wow, that’s a great face.” But as far as the style and everything else, I had in my head what I wanted to do with it.

MM: This was before Mark Waid was brought on board, right? RON: I think so. But I had worked with Waid on that XMen issue, and I liked the story he’d written, so when I was told it was him, I was happy about it. 31

Below: Cap revived and ready for action. Captain America #445, page 12. Inks by Scott Koblish. Next Page: Cover art for Captain America #447. Captain America ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

MM: You wanted to make it cartoonier than what you had done before?

MM: So you were reacting to all the books of the time.

RON: It was sort of a backlash. I wanted to do something completely fresh and different than everything that was out there. I think I’d been trying too hard to follow in everyone else’s footsteps. Everybody was doing Jim Lee riffs, and probably it was my artistic ego, I finally got sick of that. I went to the mountaintop and said, “Be yourself and stop aping everyone else. Stop trying to be Andy Kubert or Jim Lee or Marc Silvestri,” or whoever it was who I might have been experimenting with at that time. “Just be yourself.”

RON: It was such an eyesore. The shelves were flooded with Jim Lee clones, and it was awful. Literally, my eyes hurt from looking at some of that stuff because it was so thirdgeneration Scott Williams. MM: You wanted your art cleaner. RON: Exactly. I just went the opposite way that everybody was going, because I just couldn’t stand it. I wanted to have fun with it, and I wanted it to look clean and be easy to read and easy to follow. With most of the books I would open up, I couldn’t tell what was going on. And if I can’t read it, I can’t imagine the average reader can read it. So that was always my focus: clean, clear storytelling. My whole thought about Cap was giving it a fresh sense of adventure, where we travel to different places—just have it be something different. I loved European art at the time. There were those large format books, and the compositions and the storytelling in those were so easy to read and so pleasing. That’s sort of the way I wanted to go with it. MM: The first two storylines came from your first conversations with Mark? RON: Yeah, pretty much. I sat down with Mark, and he asked me, “So, what do you want to do with it? Where do you want to go? What do you want to draw?”—that kind of thing. True Lies had come out recently, and I liked the idea of secret agents. I liked James Bond. That was always fun for me. And I said to him, “Well, you know, I would love it if we could do a True Lies sort of secret agent character, where he gets to go on adventures outside the US. Maybe not have him just be about the US, but he’s defending the US by going on these covert missions and working for the President or what have you. And then maybe he gets extricated, somehow, and he has to clear his name.” MM: Which was more fun to draw, “Operation: Rebirth” or “Man Without a Country”? RON: The more fun for me to draw was the second story, “Man Without a Country.” I loved the sense of adventure of it. The first one was more of a traditional Cosmic Cube/ Red Skull story. Don’t get me wrong, I loved it, but “Man Without a Country” spawned

Below: Ron retells Cap’s origin with a series of overlapping inset panels. Page one of Captain America #448. Inks by Denis Rodier. Next Page: Ron tackles the Invaders in a Cosmic Cube-induced World War II. Captain America #448, page 22. Inks by Denis Rodier. Captain America, Human Torch, Namor ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

more from my expression to Mark of the kind of stuff I wanted to do, so it was more in sync with my thoughts of the character. MM: I think that was the first book where you were allowed to do whatever you wanted. And I don’t think Editor Ralph Macchio interfered at all. RON: No, definitely not. He just told me to have fun, so I really went to town doing the things I knew I was capable of. I wasn’t trying to be anything else but me. I wanted it to be special. MM: You started believing in your own voice a bit more.

RON: Oh, yeah, definitely. Absolutely. With my first couple of issues I was still experimenting a little, especially the very first issue [Captain America #444]. But by the time “Man Without a Country” came around you could see the evolution, and the book started to have a definitive look to it. And it was sad, because it could have gone even farther. It would have been nice to have stayed on it for a few years and see what would have happened. MM: Did you guys have enough stories to last a few years? RON: I don’t recall, but I’m sure Mark did. I think he actually used some of them later, once he was working with Andy. MM: Did Mark Waid and yourself talk a lot? Because when I worked in Ralph’s office, I never knew what you guys were up to. RON: Well, we didn’t talk a lot, but we talked. I’d call him if I had questions or whatever, or he might call and say, “Hey, it really looks great,” but it wasn’t like we were talking every day like this warm, fuzzy brotherhood or anything. About once every couple weeks or so we’d talk. MM: As an intern, that was the part that was weird to me. We didn’t talk about the story. I didn’t even know what was going on in that book until the issue came out, and the guys in the office barely talked about the plots. RON: Mark would call whenever he was stuck, actually. He would say, “What do you want to draw?” That was usually a cue for him to get ideas for what he wanted to write. A lot of guys say, “What do you want to draw,” because they genuinely want to know if there’s something you want to put in there, but with Mark I think it was—especially because a whole storyline was spawned out of our first conversation of what I wanted to draw, I think he probably knew he could rely on that to get some ideas. MM: In terms of choreography, how did you go about staging fight scenes in Cap? RON: I still do it to this day, even when I’m working from a full script, I still try to stretch it a bit to where I think the movement can work from panel to panel. But, for me, it was all about rhythm. I tend to use music. If you look at some of the panel set-ups, there’s a rhythm to them. One, two, three, four, pow!

One, two, three, pow! One, two, three, four, pow! One, two, three, pow! It’s all about getting the eye to literally find its way through each panel into the next panel. I see a lot of guys that don’t realize that the eye stops if it’s obstructed inside a panel. Usually my best pages are where the eye just follows an avenue through and around the figures, around whatever is in the panel, through an open space, into the next panel, into the next panel, into the next panel. And it will follow the movement of a figure through that. It’s hard to explain, but if Cap’s swinging on a tree limb, your eye tends to curl around and follow that swing, and then it’ll follow the momentum almost as if it’s a real, physical act being performed. So if he’s swinging on a limb, your eye tends to follow that momentum, and follow through to the next panel, and then that punch hits here, and then... The eye will do that. Your brain will actually live out those moments if you give it the opportunity. So that’s how I approach the storytelling is to make it actually live and move.

RON: Yeah, yeah. Y’know, it’s weird with him. I don’t know, I work well with him because something about his work is more in tune with my line of thought, but it’s still never fully the storytelling I would choose to do. That’s kind of why I protested it, because I was really doing my own storytelling back then, and it was very unique, I thought, and it was true to me, and that was the art for me. It wasn’t so much the texture I put down on a boot, it was more the way I got a figure to move through a panel. That was my art, as opposed to it being how well I could render a figure. So, for me, it became, “No. I have this good thing going with my storytelling, and it’s getting killed because I have to follow a full script. Now I can’t do what I want to do.” MM: You had three different inkers on Captain America, but your pages were so strong that the changes didn’t really affect the storytelling. RON: No, the storytelling was definitely the strongest aspect of my art, and I think that was what was separating me from the pack at the time, maybe, without trying to sound too egotistical or anything. I just think a lot of guys weren’t doing storytelling then. They were just doing a lot of Image-y sort of poses and stuff. I’m more interested in storytelling, being as interested in film as I am.

MM: I think you were very particular back then, because even in sequencing the pages, you made sure the ads didn’t break up the action. RON: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember that, actually. I would ask Ralph where the ads were going to appear for that reason. But I had a lot more freedom then. I don’t get that opportunity any more, and that’s why I protested the full scripts for so long. I don’t any more, because I was fighting a losing battle; it’s just the way everything’s done now.

MM: This was the first time your peers started coming to you, right? I think you said Alex Ross told you he preferred your style of art. RON: That’s right. I remember meeting him for the first time, but I don’t remember if it was during that run or the next

MM: Does Jason Aaron write full script? 36

one that I actually met him. I think it might have been during the first one. Yeah, there was a very palpable, tangible change in how people were approaching me at conventions and stuff.

quiet about it. He didn’t know how to react to it.

MM: You became an overnight sensation. [laughs]

MM: The sales on Captain America kept going up, and while he would be there talking to Ralph, people would come over and say, “Great job on Cap! This is the book we should have had.”

RON: Yeah, kind of. People like success, and they gravitate towards it. And they liked what we were doing. That’s just the way people are. They huddle around something and go, “Ooh, ahh,” for a while, and they’re examining it, examining it. And then someone else says, “Hey, look over here,” and then there’s another artist over here, and then they all huddle around that artist. It’s just the nature of it. At that time I was the one being huddled around, me and Mark. MM: People didn’t expect you to break out like that. I remember even Bob Harras was

RON: Really? What do you mean?

RON: Well, if Bob didn’t know what to make of it, it’s probably because he was responsible for Jim Lee, and Rob, and all those guys, and I wasn’t like that. I was different. His sensibilities were somewhere else as far as the business end was concerned. This is probably what Quesada has hooked into is that there doesn’t have to be one style of art. At that time it made good business sense to have everything look like Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld. But the problem is, it’s a creative field, and it’s okay—actually, better—to have a lot of different kinds of art. 37

Previous Page: Nothing says “action” quite like jumping off a train. Captain America #451, page 14. Inks by Scott Koblish. Above: Cap and Sharon travel to the Far East (the fictional Tap-Kwai to be precise). Captain America #454, inked by Scott Koblish. Captain America, Sharon Carter ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

In the early ’90s, Marvel was very rigid in their thinking as far as what could work and what couldn’t work. They wanted to stay with what made money, which was Jim Lee.

RON: Well, that was the thing. I remember begging for glossy pages and better paper, and it was always, “Oh, yeah, we’re gonna get that.” But it always came down to costs; everything was costs. What they should have been doing was stopping the editors from taking so many long lunches [laughs] and using those credit cards. But who knows.

MM: What about the early digital coloring on Cap? Did that bother you? RON: It was the best of times, the worst of times, really, because it was great to see what you could do with it, but the separations were terrible. They kept breaking up the black lines, and I didn’t know whether it was the inker or the coloring process.

MM: Did you hear much about all the turmoil, the layoffs, and all that stuff? RON: Oh, it was awful. I mean, it was a bloodbath. It was pretty sad that there were so many people who had worked there for so long...

MM: It was the coloring. And they blurred out your backgrounds a lot, too.

MM: Once you found out about “Heroes Reborn” and Rob Liefeld taking over Captain America, did you consider going to DC?

RON: I don’t mind blurred backgrounds, because I think those work really well, in a way, to create that sense of movement. But the breaking up of the black line made everything look ugly in spots, because it looked unfinished. But it was a very experimental stage back then.

RON: It was something I just wasn’t prepared for. It was a harsh wake-up call to the realities of a business. It killed some of my childhood enthusiasm about wanting to work for Marvel—enthusiasm I carried with me into adulthood. It sort of sucked the life out of me. I wasn’t as into it after that, and I was ready to leave Marvel.

MM: And the newsprint paper didn’t help things. I remember the Malibu guys saying, “I could do better if we used glossy paper.” 38

Bob Harras called me up saying, “Are you going to punish Marvel now?” And I laugh at that, how ridiculous is that, that I’m punishing Marvel somehow? Oh, yeah, I’m the bad guy. It’s funny the way he tried to turn it around. I understood it as a business decision. If that’s what the stockholders wanted, I could see how they were looking at it. All they saw were the huge numbers they had been making, and now their business was completely tanking, and they were like, “Well, what’s the difference here?” Then they looked and saw that Jim Lee and these guys who were selling millions of copies for them had left. I could see how the deal went. I could sort of picture myself at one of those meetings. This is where Bob Harras probably came into it, and Marvel made Jim and Rob this offer. I don’t know who they made the offer to first. I assume it was Jim Lee. From what I heard through the grapevine, Rob Liefeld wanted to get on board, too, or something.

MM: When you restarted, you and Mark didn’t go back to the plot from your first run. RON: No, which I thought was a mistake. Mark had originally broached the idea with me about jumping right back where we left off, which I thought was a brilliant idea. He said, “What would you think of Cap on top of a bullet train, and the first line being, ‘...And now back to our story.’” I thought that was brilliant. That would have been perfect, and I was really looking forward to that, but then he ended up going in a completely different direction. It became more of a metaphoric story about America and Japan and all that stuff.

MM: That’s exactly the story I’ve heard. RON: I just wasn’t prepared for it. It was a shock. I was having a lot of fun, the press we were getting was great, and the fan reaction was great, so I just didn’t know what to say. When I first heard the rumor that we were going to get taken off the book, I was like, “No way. Why? That’s ridiculous.” Somebody called me asking if it was true. I said, “No way, I haven’t heard anything like that.” And then, boom, a couple days later I got the call from Ralph. Then Bob Harras called, and I told him I was going to leave, and he was like, “You’re going to punish Marvel,” and this and that, and I just didn’t know what to say. I was under a big contract. At that time, Marvel was offering “super-contracts,” as they were called, and I was under one of them. And it was hard to walk away from that. They offered me any book I wanted to do, basically, as a sort of balm, and I had always wanted to do Silver Surfer. Interestingly, I was more motivated in a way, artistically, to become better, because deep down I felt like it was a blow to my artistic ego that I couldn’t hold onto the book. Even though I eventually came to terms with the fact it was a business decision because of the money involved, it was still a blow to me, artistically. I lost confidence in what I was doing on the book. 39

Previous Page: The cinematic pacing in this twopage sequence provides a slight break in the action. Captain America #454, pages 10 and 11. Inks by Scott Koblish. Below: The Surfer and Alicia Masters travel back in time. Inks by Bob Wiacek. Captain America, Sharon Carter, Silver Surfer ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

MM: What changed his mind?

Above: Ron’s take on the Silver Surfer (left) was heavily influenced by the work of Moebius (right) on the character. Next Page: Ron wanted to draw aliens and space adventure, but during his run on Silver Surfer he rarely got outside of Earth’s orbit. At least he was able to draw one issue set on the Surfer’s home planet, Zenn-La. Shalla Bal, Silver Surfer ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

RON: I don’t know. I’m not sure it was editorial, or Bob Harras; maybe he just wanted more of a Cap rising out of the ashes kind of feel. I think too much was made out of the run ending. It became this sort of sacred idol, and I think maybe Mark was trying to utilize some of that by making Cap this legendary figure in Japan rather than just going back to what I think made the series successful to begin with, which was just Cap going on an adventure, something different than all the other books. Instead, it became a little preachy. It was still good, don’t get me wrong, but I think it would have been a better idea to just go right back to where we left off. That would have had more balls. MM: You did two issues of Spider-Man while you were waiting for Silver Surfer. Was that a tryout for a regular gig on Spider-Man? RON: I don’t know that it was a try-out. I think it was just he needed a couple of fill-in issues and I had nothing to do. So I just jumped on those and did a couple of issues. Al Williamson inked. Those were okay. But I was going to go on Surfer, which I was pumped to do, because I was a huge fan of the Stan Lee/Moebius book, 40

Parallels. Like they say in Crimson Tide, “I’m a Moebius fan.” [laughter] Even though that guy got his butt kicked in the movie. MM: How did that come about? RON: I asked for Surfer, because I love that character, and it just so happened the timing was good. Pérez was already writing it, and I was excited to be working with him. And then, after one issue, that got shot to hell because of some disagreement over the direction of the book between George and Bob Harras. Pérez quit because Bob wanted the direction of the book to go the way he wanted it to go, and that didn’t fly with George. Cap was just the beginning of many tumbles and turns over the next few years. MM: That was still good work. I thought what you did with J.M. DeMatteis was very good work, some of your best art. RON: Yeah, I loved drawing the Surfer. I mean, it wasn’t what I wanted to do at the time. It was more metaphysical, and I wanted to do cool space alien stuff. I wanted to do cool alien landscapes, do something really artistic with it, and once I knew it was going to be back on Earth... well, I just wasn’t as pumped. I was a little disappointed. I still, someday, would like to do a Surfer mini-series

using the image in my head of how I wanted it to go. That’s another character that I can just see in my head. Like I said previously, I was starting to be able to see things in my head very clearly, and Surfer was another one of them. MM: I thought you were pretty fearless, because you sort of reinvented him. There was something graceful about his movement; he was very sleek. RON: Yeah, I liked the grace Moebius brought to him. I wanted more than anything for him to feel alien, to have this weird look on his face like he’s just not of this world. Kirby captured that alien-ness a bit, I think—something in his eyes—and I wanted to combine all of that. I liked Moebius’ grace, I liked Buscema’s athleticism, and I liked Kirby’s cold, alien feel, and I tried to sort of imbue that into the work, but I think it came out feeling more like Moebius. I think it was successful, and it kind of made it its own. I had a lot of fun doing it. I still see it in my head, and, depending on how the story went, I can see how it could have gone, artistically, but I wasn’t really given as much of a chance as I would have liked. MM: Well, you certainly chose excellent influences. RON: I’ve always been influenced by other artists. Certain guys I would be jazzed on for a while and I would say, “Oh, that’s cool. Let me try something like that.” This was the first time I really tried to stylize to get that feel, just for fun. So it was a real evolution and growth for me, in some ways. And, also, it sort of changed me a little bit too much for the time Cap came back around. MM: The issue where Surfer and Alicia Masters go to 1947 is the one that stood out the most to me. It looked like you had a lot of fun doing that one. RON: Yeah. I liked it. I remember the splash page of them in New York. I liked doing him in the fedora and stuff. It was fun. I like period pieces, anyway. I got to do a real nice one in “Get Mystique” [Wolverine #62-65]. There are certain eras that are so stylized and fun to draw, as opposed to current stuff. You don’t really get a sense of the decade when you’re living in it. So I like doing the ’30s and ’40s, and the ’50s and ’60s, so much. They’re just fun to draw. MM: How did Silver Surfer do? Did you get any feedback? RON: Yeah, I got a lot of good feedback. When my first issue came out, sales jumped up a lot, so that was a good thing. But I was also getting a lot of compliments from people about what I tried to do. I think the first issue I did with him fighting the jet and stuff created a really unique look at that time. Again, I was trying something different, so it was a lot of fun. A lot of people tell me it’s some of their favorite work of mine. MM: When did you get word that you would be returning to Captain America? RON: While I was on Surfer. I don’t think “Heroes Reborn” was a huge success. I mean, it was successful for that time, but I don’t think it was what they were hoping for. Obviously we 42

were asked to do it again, Mark and I. And, at first, I was like, “I don’t know,” because I had a feeling we weren’t going to be able to hit the nail on the head the way we did the first time, and there was just so much expectation. When you capture lightning in a bottle and then you let it go, it’s no longer lightning in a bottle. But I loved the character, and I hadn’t gotten him out of my system, yet, so, “Yeah, sure. Why not?” And it sold well; it sold very well. But I think the expectations were a little bit too high for it. MM: Was the Marvel environment totally different at this point in time? RON: Yeah, it was different. It was more of a big company push than it was just me and Mark on Cap. It was like, “Okay, here are all these books, we’ve got all these new teams, with Kurt [Busiek] and George [Pérez], and Mark and Ron.” It wasn’t just a singular title

that we came on and turned around. Now it was part of this big thing. And it had started becoming more corporate at Marvel. From the time we left Cap to the time we came back, there were a lot of transitions at Marvel. I think Gruenwald at that point passed away, and it started becoming a much more corporate atmosphere. MM: During the first run you were able to plot with Mark. Did that continue? RON: I don’t recall having as much play with Mark on that. Well, actually, I do remember he did call me up. I’m a huge fan of submarine movies, and I remember Mark asking me what I would like to draw, and I said that some of my favorite movies were Crimson Tide, The Hunt for Red October, and Das Boot. I think that might have spawned the thrust for the second issue, where Cap’s in a submarine. It was really cool, because being in a sub inhibited 43

Previous Page: The Surfer comes to Dr. Strange for some literal soul-searching in Silver Surfer #126 and, along with Alicia Masters, is blown back in time to 1947 in issue #129. Above: Two-page spread from the third issue of the re-relaunched Captain America series. Inks by Bob Wiacek. Captain America, Dr. Strange, Silver Surfer ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

his movement, his ability to throw the shield, and it was very claustrophobic. I was a huge Crimson Tide nut, so it was a lot of fun for me. MM: You were only there for the first five issues of Captain America, vol. 3, right? RON: Yeah, and then I started hearing grumblings that I was going to get taken off again for Andy Kubert. I think somebody called me and warned me. I can’t remember who. Again, I didn’t really believe it, and then I got a call from Matt Idelson saying they wanted to start this new title, and all this stuff. I was mad about it. I didn’t think they needed to create a second title. Why not just stick with the first? But that’s what they do. MM: When they were talking about a second title, could that have been your opportunity to take over a book as both writer and artist? RON: You know, I’ve always wanted to write. I think I’d be a good writer. I lack the confidence in it—and time. I mean, the ability to draw and write, I’m too active a guy to be able to sit and do that 24-7. It’s either one or the other; I’d have to write or draw. I couldn’t do both unless I was working like Byrne and I was just drawing the story as I was going along, which he was doing at one point, where the art was sort of writing the story. I always had aspirations to do that, and I had helped coplot, but the drawing aspect takes me so much time—not so much because I spend every minute at the board, but because I have other things going on in my life. MM: The art and stories in Sentinel of Liberty are different from the prior Captain America work. The vibe is very different. Here it’s straight-up action, a little more serious. The tone is quite different from the prior run. RON: Again, I had evolved, and I wish I hadn’t been taken off Cap, because when you stay on a character, it helps evolve your art style somewhat. I don’t know, maybe that’s a cop-out. I just know that when I was on Cap the first time I was evolving a certain style, and then when I got taken off it aborted that baby, so to speak. So I started second-guessing myself, and I started trying other things with the Moebius riff, just trying to have fun as best I could. I lost some confidence in what my stuff could look like, and through that came a different sort of evolution. I was starting to get more realistic. I was friends

with Alex Ross, and still am, but the industry was going realistic, and, like I said, I lost confidence in what I was doing. So I started trying other things, and I kind of regressed a bit. I think it shows in some of that work. It wasn’t as fresh. It wasn’t quite as bouncy and different. MM: That wasn’t a good time. RON: No. I was still drawing fairly well. I think I had improved in some areas. But my heart wasn’t in it. Again, really, the industry at that point was killing me. I mean, it went from being taken off Cap; then getting on Surfer with Pérez, who then quits; then the book wasn’t going in the direction I was 45

Previous Page: Opening splash page from issue #4 of the re-relaunched Captain America series. Inks by Bob Wiacek. Below: It wasn’t long after the relaunch that Ron was shifted over to a new second Cap series, Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty. CA: SOL #1, page 11. Inks by Dan Panosian. Captain America, Sharon Carter ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

promised that it would go in; then I left that and did Cap again, only to be taken off for a more popular artist. How many times could I keep getting kicked off the books I was working on? I just felt like I was never going to get to do what I really wanted. It sounds like a big crybaby scenario, but, hey, look, it was just my experience. It’s not a situation that I created, it was just my experience there at that time. I think Wizard even coined me as the human volleyball that Marvel didn’t know what to do with. MM: You never got to fully explore artistically what you wanted to do. RON: Yeah, I just kept getting taken off books. And once I got taken off Cap for Andy Kubert, that really bummed me out. I just didn’t care about it anymore. I was just like, “Look, it’s my job. It’s their company. They can do whatever they want,” and I just stopped caring. I felt like I was never going to get anywhere with it, and I was so burnt out from the emotional roller coaster of being on a book, being taken off, with my artistic ego getting crushed all the time. Again, I’m not trying to sound like a crybaby because I’m past it—this was many years ago—but that’s what I experienced at that time. And eventually it led to some personal troubles in my life and a very dark period for me.

One of the high points, though, coming off of that, was working on Hulk. After Sentinel of Liberty I just wanted to get away from anything to do with Cap, including Waid—no offense to Mark. I just wanted to get away from it all, because it was nothing but a bad experience. I’m not saying Mark’s to blame or anything; it wasn’t his fault that we got taken off the first time. I was just really tired, so I wanted to start fresh on something else. Then I found out that Hulk was available. Peter David was leaving, the artist was leaving. I think it was Bobbie Chase who told me, and I asked if I could do it. So they offered me Hulk, and that was a new emergence for me. I was pumped about the work again. MM: You were looking for a chance to go wild on a book? RON: Yeah, yeah. I just wanted to have fun. That’s all I wanted was to have fun. When Cap became a hugely popular book, it became, politically, a nightmare. All of a sudden everybody was peeing on it trying to mark their territory. I didn’t want to be a part of anything like that. I wanted to have fun on something that I could make my own. And then the Hulk came along, and I was like, “Oh, wow, that’s a character I would love to draw.”

Previous Page: After many disappointments, Ron wanted to do something fun, and for a few issues at least he got that with the Hulk series. Hulk #1, page 11. Inks by Dan Green. Below: Semi-trailer truck or Hulk? I’m betting on the Hulk. The heavy blacks in this panel from Hulk #2, inked by Dan Green, are not only dramatic, but give the Hulk an added sense of weight and power. Hulk ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Below: The flow of Tyrannus’ cape in panel one leads the eye into the Hulk’s shadow in panel two, which in turn leads the eye to the looming figure of the Hulk in panel three, all in the brief seconds in which the action takes place. Next Page: Design sketches of the misguided Flux for Hulk #17. Flux, Hulk, Tyrannus ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

MM: But there was a lot of pressure with Hulk. You were coming in after Peter David’s big run. RON: I didn’t care about that, so I didn’t even think about it. It didn’t bother me. MM: You wanted to bring him back to the basics. RON: I just wanted to have fun drawing a big, green monster. It was a chance for me to shed all this other nonsense that went on with Cap and all that stuff. It was a chance to go onto a book and not have to think and just have fun drawing a big, green monster. Matt Idelson, I think, asked me who I’d

want to write it, and I said, “Oh, John Byrne would be a good writer to do a big, green monster,” because he had done Hulk years earlier. Little did I know what a disaster that was going to turn into. [laughter] So, once again, like, six issues in, it became a disaster, and he ended up getting fired off the book. [laughs] It was just one thing after another there. MM: You had befriended Byrne before that, right? RON: I was friendly with him, yeah. I mean, I was chatty with him. We talked on the phone. Before I got in the industry I went to his house for a couple of parties and stuff, so we spoke here and there on the phone, yeah. MM: Was he letting you do what you wanted? Were you co-plotting? RON: No, I didn’t really co-plot it, but he left the layouts open for me. He was writing a full script, but I was free to maneuver it the way I wanted. He liked doing full scripts at that time. I don’t know why. It was probably quicker for him. I didn’t want to work fullscript, and he didn’t want to work plot-first, so we set it up where he wrote the whole issue panel for panel, but without really setting up the pages. I could arrange it any way I wanted to as long as it made sense with what he was writing. For instance, I think it was the second issue we did, I rearranged the whole opening scene and made it more my own. I looked at what he wrote, and I fit the panels to what he wrote, but differently than the way he had it set up. So I was able to have fun with it. MM: Would he comment on your art, or ask for anything specific? RON: No, not really. MM: He was pretty laid back? RON: Yeah, it was pretty laid back. He called up and said he liked the first issue. MM: I know you wanted Hulk to be a simpler book. You didn’t want it to be philosophical and heavy. RON: I loved the adventure in the first run of Cap, and that got thrown to the wayside a bit in the second run. There was Hydra, and I loved the stuff on the submarine, but it wasn’t the same. Then Surfer was more philosophical,

and teary, and metaphysical. I just wanted to have fun on something that wasn’t figures standing around crying. So with Hulk, I just wanted to draw a big, fun, green monster. That’s really what the bottom line was for me. But when Paul Jenkins came on, he did a whole psychological thing similar to Peter David’s run. I just wanted to draw the Hulk. But I was burnt out by the end of that run, too. I did 20-something issues of it.

band at the time, and I was really into that and didn’t even want to be a part of comic books because I had such a bad taste in my mouth from the seeming backstabbing, and the whole Wizard magazine mentality of “Who’s Hot, Who’s Not,” and the snobbery at conventions. I just didn’t like it very much.

MM: After this, you took a break. Did you just stop? RON: After Hulk, towards the last half of the ’90s, I was emotionally spent. I mean, it was such a roller coaster ride, and I just wasn’t happy. And then some things in my personal life started happening.

MM: So you were seriously thinking of quitting? RON: Yeah. If I’d had another avenue, I don’t know if I would have come back. I really wanted my band to do well, but that’s such a huge pipe dream to be a rock star, especially at my age at that time. All I know is I needed a break from comic book work. It can feel very slavish to just sit there at a board; it’s very laborious. I just needed to get away from it.

MM: Did they keep calling you during this period? RON: I knew I needed time off. Joe Quesada asked me to do Daredevil after he left the book, I think. I expressed to him that I just wanted a vacation. I knew I was shot because I didn’t care any more. I didn’t want to work at Marvel—or work on comic books in general. I had a rock 49

Part 4:

Branching Out in Art and in Life

MM: I wanted to ask about your artistic influences—your top five guys. Who are the guys that get you going?

abstract composition. They do, and that’s one of the things I found beautiful about his work, not to mention his draftsmanship. I can remember reading the Prince Valiant Sunday strips and being amazed at Hal Foster’s work. There are just so many.

RON: The top five? I’m just thinking about the people who had influence on me in my life, when I was very young. It’s a wide range, but I remember being influenced by Norman Rockwell—the stories he told in his paintings, those Saturday Evening Post covers—even though he was just churning them out to make money. Sometimes the artists themselves aren’t really aware of their own brilliance, and I think he was like that. I was very affected by the realism, and the caricature within the faces, and the stories that were told inside of just one composition. My grandmother was a painter, and I remember as a very young boy sitting transfixed looking at, feeling the mood of the oil paint, the light that she used. That was very influential, because I ended up wanting to be a painter, and I was for a long time.

MM: Are there any current artists that if you see their name on a book, you’ll buy it right away? RON: There are certain guys that have affected me over the years, like J.R., or Lee Weeks, or, obviously, Mike Mignola. A lot of the same guys most people like. Travis Charest. I’ll always buy their stuff. MM: Of the newer artists, is there anybody you’re excited about? The guys you see that are working at Marvel now? RON: Leinil Yu and Olivier Coipel. I love Leinil Yu’s work. It’s breathtaking, to me. Some people don’t like his rendering, but he creates real beauty with a very rough texture to the work, and I just find him beautiful. So there’s him, and Olivier Coipel, who I think is brilliant... There are just so many guys out there. There are guys who come up to me at conventions now who say I was a big influence of theirs, and they show me their ashcans or their sketchbook, and their work is so unbelievable. I can’t think of any of their names off the top of my head, but I can’t believe I could be an influence on them. I don’t know what they’re seeing, because they blow me away. So I’m influenced by everything I see, artistically, that I think is good.

MM: Was this just a hobby for her? RON: It was her hobby, but she had art showings—gallery shows and stuff. Leading from that into comic books, John Buscema was probably my biggest influence. Out of all the comic artists I know, right from the get-go, the image that pops into my head is his work. He took Kirby’s compositions and really expanded on them— the compositions within the panel, the frame—to create a point of focus. And the way he arranged shapes... I think he even alludes to it in his How to Draw the Marvel Way book that he did with Stan Lee about how if you broke down his shapes, how they would work as an

MM: Was there any advice that served you well once you got on your way?

RON: I’ve always asked questions. I tend to sponge a lot of little things. Like, I can remember John Romita, Sr. being at Marvel, and I had a Ghost Rider cover I was working on. I brought it into his office and asked him, “What’s wrong with this figure?” He drew one little line around the kneecap of Ghost Rider’s bent leg that changed the whole thing and fixed it. It was just one little change. And I never forgot that. I still use that little thing in my work. It’s amazing how much you can actually learn if you just ask the right questions. If you’re open to the criticism, the stuff will make sense, and you’ll retain it. MM: And you never stopped wanting to learn. You kept at it. RON: Yeah, I would pick up drawing books. There’s a book on anatomy by Mayberry Brown that’s just phenomenal. I learned all about S curves, and the form, and the way rib cages work—stuff like that. I love that stuff. I could look at those figure drawings all day long, as opposed to a comic book even. I just love the natural drawing—it’s so classic and impressive—of those figures and the way they sit. Because it’s very tricky the way gravity works, and the way gravity pulls your ribcage down, or bends your bones, or the way drapery falls. Stuff like that, to me, is fascinating. MM: Do you have time to go to the malls and see how people move about? RON: I used to do that. I used to go to the tops of buildings and draw the streets and the people, and go to parking garages and sit on the edge and just watch people and draw them. I would always take a sketchbook on the train with me, and I would draw people on the train, their faces and heads. It helps. What you’re doing in those moments is creating a catalog in your brain. As you observe you start taking snapshots with your mind and with your sketchbook. You create a catalog, and the more you do it, the more you can use it as reference, and it starts to come out on its own and you don’t have to reference so much. MM: And it’s good for picking up trends and fashion, too, right? RON: Yeah, yeah. That’s actually a weakness of mine, keeping up with that stuff. There are guys that do that stuff very well, like Chris Bachalo, who’s very trendy and a terrific artist.

MM: Your Wolverine books looked pretty cool and modern. RON: Well, I made a concerted effort. MM: Back in the ’80s, the way some of those comics were illustrated, they could have just as well been drawn in the ’60s. There wasn’t a lot of effort being made to keep up with the times. RON: Well, the new guys that were coming into the business at the time changed that. Guys like Chris Bachalo who some editor took a risk on and gave them work, who had a more insightful, detailed, contemporary view of the world in their art. 51

Previous Page: In this rough sketch of Hulk and Juggernaut for Hulk #6, Ron grouped the figures into a powerful triangle shape. Above: We see Afghanis on the news every night, so when a story is set in that environment (as was Wolverine #62) it is important to research the clothing worn there. Hulk, Juggernaut, Mystique, Wolverine ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

MM: He thought outside the box. RON: Exactly. Exactly. More of an innovator. MM: Do you think experience has made you faster? There was a comment I read where you said you dwell on things more now than before.

Above: Ron’s breakdowns, which measure at about 5" x 8", and the finished art for page 17 of JLA #114. As you can see, the layouts are often tweaked or changed after the breakdown stage. Next Page: Ron’s layouts for JLA #115, page 21, shown here at full size. The layouts are a mix of pencil, pen, and marker and will be used as the basis for the finished pencils. JLA and all related characters ™ and © DC Comics.

MM: Even Todd McFarlane had a little bit of that. RON: Yeah, sure. Todd’s great. Actually, speaking of John Romita, I remember having a conversation with John Romita about Todd McFarlane, and us both agreeing that we liked his work. Todd was getting slammed for his lack of draftsmanship, which is fair. He’s certainly got his host of problems, but what he brought to the table was far more interesting and he could get away with it, whereas there were other artists who couldn’t get away with it because they didn’t have what Todd had. What Todd had was a very creative, ingenious sort of view of depicting his artistic language. It was very different, fresh, and very interesting to look at. Yeah, I could look back and pick it all apart, but it was still fun. 52

RON: I wouldn’t say I’m faster. I could be. When push comes to shove, I’m faster than I used to be because I can draw better. MM: But you dwell more now on what you’re doing? RON: Well, I’ll get to a point where I do a breakdown of something, and it’s a slow build-up. I sit there, and I look at it, and then I put it aside, and I go ahead and start doing breakdowns on other pages. I don’t do one page at a time because I can’t. If I muscle through one page, there’ll be so much wrong with it when I go back to it that it’ll drive me crazy that I spent all that time on it without seeing all the things that needed to be fixed. So what I do is I get the breakdown done, and the basic shell of the drawing that I need to work on, and I put it aside. Then I go back to it a day or two later, and I start spotting all the mistakes. It could be that I’m looking at a

figure that’s in perspective, an upshot of a figure, and it could be that his nose isn’t placed correctly on the head— things like that that you don’t see right away. If I muscle through it on the first try, I won’t catch all that stuff. And then I flip the page over and use a light table. When I flip the page over it’s a ghastly wake-up call, because when you reverse art like that, or you look it in a mirror, you can see all the mistakes instantly. It’s a painstaking process to get all that drawing correct. Some guys get it right without having to do all that. I’m not one of them, unfortunately.

MM: Some guys draw straight on the board. RON: I can pull it off, I can do it fast enough if I have to. MM: But you know this work is going to be collected and will be around for a while. RON: Yeah, and it’s been a heartbreaking journey in some ways for that reason, because I’ve had to let things go that I just wasn’t happy with. I go back and I feel a little bit heartbroken when I look at that stuff, because it could have been so much better. And I feel that way about work of mine that has been inked or colored poorly. Once it’s out there, it’s out there. I feel that way now about my convention sketches. That’s why I stopped doing quick convention sketches—I’m never happy with them. There are some convention sketches I’ve done where I think they look good, and then I see them posted online, and I go, “Oh, my God. The nose is so wrong.” There’s a recent one I did of Wolverine which was a big head shot. When I did it, I was like, “Oh, this looks really good.” I gave it to the guy, and it seemed like he was happy with it. But he posted it on comicartfans.com, and I was just aghast, because it looked like Pigeon Man or something, because he had a big beak for a nose. I saved it to my hard drive and redrew it just for my own sanity, because I couldn’t believe the mistake I’d made on his nose. Stuff like that I’m not as willing to let go of anymore, because I don’t think it’s fair to myself or to the people I’m giving them to. MM: It’s just a sketch, though. RON: Yeah, I know, but it’s pride, y’know? MM: Between working at Marvel and DC, did you feel there was a difference? RON: It was definitely different. Without a doubt. And the Marvel I’m working for now is a different Marvel than I worked for previously. It’s gone through so many phases, and it’s like that with every company. I’m sure DC would feel a little bit different now that it’s changed somewhat. But the difference between the two was that at DC it felt like they had much more control over how their characters were portrayed. It felt much more of a licensing house than Marvel did. Superman and Batman are such iconic licensed characters, as opposed to Spider-Man and the Hulk, which are more creative. MM: With the Marvel characters, they’re a lot looser. They’re also more hip. 54

RON: Yeah, they’re a little more hip and what have you. You can’t do as much with the DC characters. They’re very concerned with that stuff. The Marvel characters have changed. Like, you can change the Hulk and create a red Hulk, and people seem to be more accepting of that, over time, than they are of taking Superman out of his costume and putting a lightning bolt on it. It just doesn’t seem to work with the DC characters the way it does with Marvel. You’re able to get away with some of that at Marvel. But, as far as atmosphere is concerned, yeah, Marvel was a much looser place when I started. They were trying to get it together, and trying to become more organized and everything, but it wasn’t quite—I wouldn’t say it was less organized, it was just different. DC felt very corporate to me back then, whereas now Marvel’s very corporate, too. But I think it’s still a creative place, regardless. I only worked at DC for a couple of years, so I don’t know what it’s like now. I didn’t have a horrible experience there or anything. MM: Working on the icons comes with certain pressures. RON: Yeah, I didn’t get to do what I wanted to do. I was initially offered Superman, but I never got to do it. I ended up getting shuffled onto JLA, which I really didn’t want to do. It’s nobody’s fault, it’s just the way it went. But I just wasn’t into it, and it was a transitional point in my career, as well. I was coming out of a bad time in my personal life, aside from comics, and I was transitioning through some things. MM: When you got married, did it change your perspective? Did you still worry about the politics, the editorial stuff going on? Did that stuff still affect your work? RON: For the first ten years of my career I was cooped up in a room, living by myself. I ended up getting a dog for that reason. I had a girlfriend. We split up. It was a very isolated existence. I live out in the country, and it was driving me mad, to be honest. And I felt underappreciated because I spent so many hours trying to make deadlines, being a good soldier. That’s all my world was: Wake up, do the comics, lift weights at the gym, come home, draw more comics, and it just really was a waste of life. I hate to say it, but anybody who puts that much time into one thing like that, it’s not healthy to make that your life. I

needed to socialize, to get out of the house and have a life. So when I got married and started a family, it changed things dramatically—and Marvel had changed, too. It became a better environment and a lot more fun. I mean, I’d hated it at one point. I left for six months. I couldn’t even pick up a pencil for six months, I was so drained from it—the politics, and all these things were always going wrong—and I just needed to just get away. MM: Now comics gives your work another purpose: to provide for your family. RON: Well, yeah. And I was able to start taking more pride in it and not be so competitive about who was getting what work, and who was taking my book. Now I’m on for an 55

Previous Page: A preliminary sketch of Superman. Above: Doesn’t this page make you want to read a Ron Garney-drawn Superman series? JLA #101 focused on Superman and is as close as Ron has gotten to drawing a solo Superman story. Superman ™ and © DC Comics.

Below: Wolverine #62 marked the first time a comic book was printed straight from Ron’s pencils. Next Page: A two-page spread from Uncanny X-Men #423 drawn around the time Ron and Howard Porter formed their studio. Inks by Dan Green. Wolverine, X-Men, and all related characters ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

arc, and that’s fine with me, because I get to enjoy that arc and try to have some fun with it, and then I get to do something else. Back then, there was so much pressure to be on one book, and you were on that book for two years, and nobody should take it from you. I don’t care about that as much now. I like working with one guy, like I’m working with Jason Aaron, but I don’t care if I do a four-issue arc on one book and then jump onto another arc somewhere else. That’s more fun, actually, in some ways. It lends itself to a better creative process. MM: So it never got to the point where you were ashamed to be a comic book artist?

RON: No, I was never ashamed of it. It was always kind of cool. People always treated me very well because of it. It was kind of a cool thing. You had a little bit of celebrity status. Then, at one point a number of years ago, comics really hit a low point. It wasn’t quite so attractive to people. You don’t meet so many people who do it, although you meet a lot of people who identify with the characters and comic books from when they were growing up and seeing them on TV. Everybody has some connection to the characters, and to the books, but most people don’t meet a lot of comic book creators, so when people meet me, they think it’s really cool. MM: But there are always people who, when you tell them you’re in comics, think you lack maturity. RON: No, I don’t feel that way. I don’t think I’ve ever really felt that way. Even more so now, I think people are actually more thrilled by it. I did an art show with my wife out here in Orange, Connecticut. She put up some of her paintings, and I put some of my original art up and some prints I had. A lot of people showed up, and it was fun to see the reactions of the people who came to see it. MM: Your wife’s an artist, too? So she wasn’t shocked or anything by what you do. RON: Oh, no. I never dated anybody who didn’t think highly of it. There was one girl I dated who was a bit clueless about it, but there was never a down attitude about what I did. Because when people see the tangible book, or the bookshelf with the graphic novels, something tangible that you have created, they’re more impressed than anything else, because most people don’t get to do that. They don’t get to hold something they created in their hands and take pride in it. They’re busy being IT technicians or whatever they’re doing. To have something tangible like that that’s yours I think is impressive to a lot of people. That part of it’s never gotten old for me, being able to see the final, printed piece. MM: You’re always keen on waiting for that next book to come out? RON: Oh, yeah. I always like seeing it, and opening it up and reading it. It’s always a thrill. MM: Who do you talk shop with? Howard Porter’s one, I guess?

RON: Yeah, he’s the main guy. He’s like my brother.

I talk to other guys here and there, but not that often any more. I did that more when we were younger. I talked to Dan Panosian quite often; he’s a close friend. There are others.

MM: He’s the only guy you’ve shared a studio with? RON: Yup.

MM: When Howard left comics, were you concerned?

MM: How many years did that last?

RON: Back in the early 2000s, he left for a couple of years. He took off to New York to work for a bank designing web pages or something, and I didn’t talk to him for a long time.

RON: Well, we were always going to each other’s houses to work when he lived closer, but we shared an actual studio for two years. I was just down at his house last week working for a few hours. We still do that once in a while. But we talk every other day at least—just goof off on the phone while we’re working. It’s good for our sanity. We actually saved each other, because he went through the same isolated feeling that I did. We just couldn’t take it. So we saved each other, because we could look at each other’s work or bounce things off one another. One of the reasons we got the studio was to get out of the house, because emotionally we needed to get the hell out of our homes and stop feeling like we were locked up like Howard Hughes.

MM: You weren’t concerned that it could happen to you? RON: Oh, I envied him. I was so miserable back then because of everything we spoke about. The competitive, cutthroat nature of everything, I just hated it, and I didn’t like being cooped up, and I felt I wasn’t appreciated enough. When the editor’s busting your balls to make a deadline, and you work all these all-nighters, and you get the book in, and then you don’t even get a call saying it’s appreciated—it just sucked. I’m not saying it was like that all the time. The editors are cool people. It’s just that they’re so desensitized 57

about it, and I said, “Yeah, absolutely.” So we started looking at places that were halfway between where we each lived, and we found a spot. He had just started working in Flash. It was a good experience; we had a lot of fun. MM: Did you push each other to be better?

Above: Breakdowns and finished art for page 18 of JLA #114. Next Page: There will always be nitpickers among any fan base, but there are a lot of costumes to keep up with and it seems many are constantly being tweaked or updated, often without the artists’ knowledge. JLA and all related characters ™ and © DC Comics. Spider-Man and all related characters ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

to the all-nighters you’ve pulled, because they’re in there trying to get the books out, and their jobs are on the line. It was tough back then when it didn’t have to be. MM: At the heart of it, Howard is an artist. Was being a web designer enough of an outlet for him? RON: Well, he had a good career. He was being paid well, but then they started laying people off. He was missing comics, and that was one of the reasons he came back, but I know they were going through layoffs after 9/11, and it was around that time—I think it was 2003—that we got the studio together. When he came back, he called me up and asked if I’d be interested in getting a studio together with him, because we’d always talked 58

RON: Yeah, we were always looking over each other’s shoulders. The thing that was great about him at the time was he hadn’t done it for a couple of years, so he came back fresh. And fans had missed him. He’s a guy who didn’t get a lot of the credit he should have gotten, like when he was doing JLA. He’s a very talented guy. I think he’s brilliant. I would look over his shoulder and I would be amazed. He’s a very detailed guy in his work, and it’s just impressive to watch him draw. MM: Do you still look forward to conventions? RON: I used to. I don’t really want to go to conventions as much these days. I do if they’re local, like I’ll go to a local New York show. I like meeting the people, but the travel time is draining. MM: It’s also the only feedback you get, right? RON: I love the fans; they’re great. It’s the best of times and the worst of times with them,

though. The worst of times is if there are people who don’t like your work and they’re venomous about it, but the best of times is spent with people who do like your work, because they’re so wonderful and gracious and kindhearted.

MM: Critique the work, not the person. RON: Yeah. I remember one time this guy got so mad that he went on a tirade about me for years. It started when somebody said, pretty much verbatim, “What gets me is Garney can’t ever draw the costumes right. Seems like a pretty serious problem for someone specializing in super-hero stories.” It’s the acerbic nature of a comment like that which pissed me off. So I wrote something back like, “Yeah, you know what? I can’t seem to get Galactus’ ears right. It drives me crazy.” And then this other guy pipes in, and he starts telling me to go screw myself and, “You’re a piece of crap.” He just went off the deep end. But then it turned into, “Ron Garney was completely classless.” He called me classless, and said the other guy was giving me a perfectly acceptable critique, and that I couldn’t handle it, blah, blah, blah. And all I did was make a sarcastic comment in response to his sarcasm. Some of them can’t handle it when you step in. They think you’re supposed to be bigger than that, and that you shouldn’t get on boards to defend yourself. But it’s inevitable that people do it. I recall seeing lots of guys— George Pérez; John Romita, Jr.; Chris Bachalo; all these guys— going on boards to fight with these dudes, so I’m not the only one.

MM: Do you go online to see what people say about your books? RON: No. Well, I used to. Everybody’s done it. I can’t say that I’ve not done it. Of course I have. I definitely look at reviews because sometimes you just want the feedback. If I can get a healthy critique, even if it’s one that is negative, if it’s done in a way that’s constructive, then I really enjoy it. I’m trying to think recently what I read about something, but whenever I hear stuff about a panel was loose here or there or something, I might go back and go, “Yeah, they’re right about that.” And some of that is just because you’re so behind the gun with the deadline and everything that you can’t spend the time on the stuff that you want. I don’t know anybody who completely ignores that stuff, but there was a period of time there where it was too easy to get into arguments with some of the fans, because, like I said, they can be so venomous. Some of them don’t seem to understand that you can critique someone in a way that’s just completely destructive. I’ve seen it happen to everybody, not just me. “Ron Garney flat-out sucks. Marvel’s on drugs. Why do they keep giving this idiot work?” Stuff like that. There have been times when I’ve gone on and made a sarcastic comment back, and then it blew up into this big flame war, where how dare I defend myself, and all of a sudden I’ve become a bully because I tried to defend myself. And, really, all I’m defending is the fact that they’re not giving me a good critique. If you have something to say about the work, say it in a constructive fashion so I can actually look at it and say, “Okay.” But don’t make sarcastic remarks. That’s the stuff that gets me.

MM: Do you think it’s a mistake and a waste of time now? RON: I don’t even bother anymore. At first, I liked going on the boards. Who’s to say just because I work in the business I’m not allowed to do that? The criticisms are hurtful when they’re said in the wrong way, so why can’t I say anything in response? But now I’m, like, “It’s not worth it.” There are so many different opinions out there. Why get into a fight over it? Because you can’t change people, and they can’t change you. MM: Do you still sketch outside of what you do for work? 59

Above: Peter Parker and the Kingpin throw down in Amazing Spider-Man #542. Inks by Bill Reinhold. Next Page: Layouts for JLA #105, page 18. The breakdown and layout stages are where the storytelling is explored and fine-tuned, and where Ron excels, so it’s no wonder other artists tap into his knowledge and expertise in this area. Kingpin, Spider-Man ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc. Superman ™ and © DC Comics.

RON: Yeah, I do, sometimes. I’ve got a clothing company that I’ve started with a few other guys, actually—Howard’s a part of it— that we’re trying to get off the ground, so I get to do things aside from super-hero stuff and be more of a designer. I’ve been talking to some other comic artists who want to be a part of it. MM: Is that comics-related at all? RON: No, it’s more sports-related, MMA [Mixed Martial Arts]. I’ve always been impressed with Affliction Clothing and some of that stuff. A lot of those guys are tattoo artists and they put their designs on T-shirts and stuff. It seemed like it’d be fun to try. MM: How did that come about? Was it your idea? RON: Yeah, it was my idea. The name of the company is ALKO. I love MMA, so I just 60

figured I’d get something off the ground. Plus, I co-own a jujitsu school. MM: Have you always been into the martial arts? RON: I’m mainly into jujitsu, but I did take karate and aikido. I did some boxing in high school. Then I did karate, did some aikido. I didn’t enjoy that stuff all that much; I never got hooked on it. Then jujitsu came along and I got hooked. And I’ve been into the UFC [Ultimate Fighting Championship] since its inception back in the early ’90s. MM: When did you open the jujitsu school? RON: In 2010. It’s been about a year now. MM: Are you the head master? RON: [laughs] No, I have two other partners. It all started because I was doing jujitsu at

another school, and one of the teachers that I had become relatively friendly with left. He called me up one day because the guy he was partners with over at the new school they had opened left him high and dry, just took off, and he needed somebody to teach. I happened to be friends with a black belt from another school, and we had been talking about opening up a school someday, and here was our golden opportunity. So, basically, I went over there and got his school together for him, and then we closed that one down and opened up a brand new one under a different name at another location.

and over the Internet quite often. I had a guy who was in the business, actually, recently ask me to help him with his layouts. He sent me his pages, and I went over the top of them in Photoshop and just fixed all of the things that I saw that could have been better. That was kind of cool. MM: There are guys within comics that tell me, “Ron’s a regular guy.” You know, the guys at Marvel would always look at you as somebody who actually had a life. RON: Oh, people said that? Well, it’s true. You know, I was a nightclub manager, and a bartender, and a bouncer. I dated girls. I had a rock band, too, for a while. It’s two different schools, there, because I look at Alex and I say, “There’s a guy who committed his whole life to comics and now he’s Alex Ross, and he’s an obviously phenomenal artist.”

MM: How is that going? RON: It’s doing well. We’re increasing memberships all the time. MM: You’re teaching classes, too? RON: Yeah, I teach sometimes. The black belt is the head instructor. I’m not a black belt; I’m a purple belt at this point. In a few years I’ll be a black belt. MM: Do you like teaching? RON: I like it. It’s fun. You know, I’m getting older, so I don’t have as much scrap in me as I used to. My joints hurt a little bit now. But it’s fun to teach and watch how your knowledge helps others improve. MM: Do you use it as an outlet? RON: Absolutely. And it also separates me from the work, and it makes everything more enjoyable for me. I’m not married to it, y’know. MM: And you’re around all sorts of people, I guess, so that’s cool. RON: Yeah, I have a social life, I have my family, and my jujitsu, my clothing line. And then I have the Marvel work. MM: You’re busier right now than ever. [laughter] RON: Yeah, it’s ridiculous, how busy I am. I never have time for anything now. Of course, my life in the ’90s was the opposite. All I did was sit around and draw. MM: Do you hope to one day teach art as well? RON: I’ve never had a jones for that, no. I’ve helped people out at conventions 61

MM: Yeah, but you worked just as hard as he did.

RON: Yeah, I have much more fun setting up a story than I actually do with all the stylizations; that’s not my thing. I see guys like, let’s say, David Finch, who clearly puts so much work into his pages. And it’s not that I’m not capable of that, but I don’t have that well in me. I’m capable of doing that, if I really applied myself, but I would go crazy, because I need to get out, and I need to do my jujitsu and have my mind somewhere else. I don’t know. I shouldn’t really be comparing, because I do work very hard. It’s just different, I guess.

RON: I’ve done art my whole life, too, but when I was younger I didn’t have quite the commitment he did. And I wonder sometimes, had I had the commitment and the love for it that he did, where I might be at this stage. I think it shows in some guys. I’m just not that kind of animal. I mean, I work very, very hard. Probably too hard, sometimes. And yet, there’s something I see in other guys, that seem like they... I don’t know. It’s hard to say.

MM: You come from a different place than where Alex comes from. He’s one of the few guys that’s like that in the industry.

MM: Alex is one of those guys that bleeds super-heroes. RON: I don’t. I can’t.

RON: Yeah, he has a serious love for it. When I got into comics, I had to refamiliarize myself with most of it. I was reading comics before I got in, but only a select few. I read Thor, because I love Simonson’s work, and I read a couple of Byrne comics, but I didn’t know any of the history of the characters. Alex is like Waid in that he knows everything about every character. I’m not like that. I couldn’t tell you who the hell half these guys are.

MM: You’re more about being a storyteller. You’re making your compositions and telling a story.

MM: You did some film work. Was that something you were hoping to do more of? RON: Yeah, actually. MM: How did the offer come about? RON: The costume designer on I Am Legend had worked with Moebius on Blade Runner, I think. He wanted another comic artist to work with on I Am Legend, and it was referred to me. So I said, “Sure,” and I came into the city and met with him. It was a great experience. I had a wonderful time meeting all the people, being on set. It was fun having the guy right over my shoulder as I’m illustrating the costumes and the creatures in costume and having him say, “Well, that doesn’t look quite right.” It was very rewarding to have somebody give you a critique where you could say, “Okay, this is a guy who has a wealth of experience under his belt.” He’s a friendly guy to boot. So it was really a wonderful time. At some point I’d like to go back. I had an offer to do another one, and I couldn’t do it. My wife was pregnant at the time, and I couldn’t leave. They wanted me to move into Brooklyn or somewhere for a couple of months, and I couldn’t leave my wife at home, pregnant, with two other kids. So I had to turn it down, unfortunately. MM: Is designing characters something you like to do? Is it easier for you now? RON: I don’t know. I’ve designed characters, but they’re never really super-hero-like. I mean, I never have come up with super-hero type characters. I’ve got a whole sketchbook full of characters I’ve designed, and who knows if I’ll ever get to anything with that. But, I’d like to eventually do a book that isn’t super-hero-related at all. Jason Aaron and I 62

have talked about doing something like that, that would be creator-owned, so I’ll probably go down that road at some point. A Road to Perdition-type thing. MM: You’ve said the Hulk book was your best art. Do you still feel that way? RON: Not anymore. I think “Get Mystique” [Wolverine #62-65] was my best. That was the most fun I’ve ever had on a book. Hulk was fun, but it was tainted by Byrne’s problems with the editor. If I could go back in time, I wouldn’t ask John to do the book. You can quote me on that one. MM: You’re still exclusive to Marvel. What does that entail? Do they offer you projects? Can you turn things down, or do you have to take what they give you? RON: No, it’s not so dictatorial. It’s in your contract that you have the right to refuse a project. That was the problem over at DC: I wasn’t happy going on JLA; I didn’t want to do a team book. And you have to be happy with what you’re working on. If you refuse a project, you might have to wait for another offer. You never know what’s going to be available. But most of the time they’re pretty good about offering me stuff that they think I might like or be good on. I wasn’t too crazy about Skaar, but Quesada called me up thinking I’d be good on it and asked if I would do it. I didn’t want to turn the guy down, because when I came back he was good about helping me, and he offered me Spider-Man, which was a great thing to come back to do. MM: Was Skaar the first time they shot directly from your pencils? RON: No, “Get Mystique” was. When Skaar came around I wasn’t really into the idea behind it. There was just something about it that didn’t feel right to me, and I should have just trusted my instincts and Previous Page and Left: Two of Ron’s many Darkseeker designs for the I Am Legend movie. Above: A page from Wolverine #63, part of the “Get Mystique” storyline, which Ron considers to be his best work to date. I Am Legend © Warner Bros. Pictures. Wolverine ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

turned it down. You have to trust your instincts. If the idea sounds great to you, then do it. If it doesn’t, then don’t. And it wasn’t that I thought it wasn’t going to be a good book. The idea of it just didn’t appeal to me.

RON: It was okay. There were some atrocious moments, I thought. I just felt the pencils weren’t really translating well under Paul Mounts’ colors in some spots. So it just wasn’t a success for me, personally.

MM: I thought you might be using that book to do your own take on Conan.

MM: Do you prefer solo characters?

RON: That wasn’t me, that’s what the character was. I really wasn’t into it. I don’t know why, I hadn’t even read the scripts or anything. When he told me it was about the son of the Hulk, I just wasn’t interested. I agreed to it because they called me up, “Oh, we really want you to do this book.” They were all excited, so I really had a hard time saying no. The book was very heavy in lore, and it was tough to go back and try to read all the backstory. There were even maps of the land, and it was making my head spin a little bit. I’m a simpler guy in that regard. I just couldn’t focus on it the way I should have been able to. That’s why I knew I wasn’t the right guy for it. MM: Yet you still did good work on it.

RON: I like single characters. I can infuse some personality in there that makes the book my own. When you’ve got a team of characters, you can’t really focus on any one character. It’s tough to make the characters come alive. Part of what makes a book successful for me is like when I was doing Cap, and I was able to infuse something into that one guy that made him interesting and set him apart, both visually and personality-wise. So in essence that book becomes your book, your character. When you’ve got a team, you just can’t do that. MM: Your Wolverine books were great for reminding me how cool a character he was. When you read the X-Men book, you don’t usually get that because there are just so many characters in that title. The effect is different. 65

Previous Page: As with his Wolverine work, Skaar, Son of Hulk was done from Ron’s finished pencils, which were very tight and also darkened in Photoshop, as shown in this cover for issue #2. Above: Breakdowns for Skaar #5. Skaar ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Below: Ron was able to really dig into the 1920s architecture and costuming with this splash page from Wolverine #63. Next Page: A Ron Garney/Tom Palmer collaboration from Nightstalkers #5. Mystique, Punisher, Wolverine ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

RON: Yeah, Wolverine’s one of those guys. Most of the characters I’ve been successful with are characters that I get instantly. If somebody says, “Hey, do you want to draw this character,” I just know I would be good on it because I could see how I would approach it. Skaar wasn’t one of them. I didn’t get that feeling about it. MM: I picked up the first issue because I was excited you were doing it. RON: Well, I appreciate that. I mean, it wasn’t all bad. I’d hate to make it sound like that. Greg’s stories were great, they were fun. I just didn’t feel right for it. There was a lot of stuff going on that I couldn’t wrap my head around. Even though I read the whole

“Planet Hulk” thing to try to acclimate myself to it, I just never felt that connection. And the artists on “Planet Hulk” were terrific. Carlos Pagulayan, what a fantastic artist. I remember saying to the editor, “How come you’re asking me and not one of these guys?” [laughs] Come to find out, they knew they could count on me to turn it in quickly. I only had four weeks to draw the first issue, so it was a nightmare. I was already in deadline hell, but they knew I could turn it around. MM: Did you know Jason Aaron’s work before you started working with him? RON: No, not really. MM: What intrigued you about working with him? RON: The story. Axel [Alonso] called me up and explained the story to me. After talking with Jason we found out that we were both into Spaghetti Westerns. And this being set out in Mexico, in early ’20s Kansas City, and then cutting back to present-day Afghanistan, I love that kind of stuff, and I instantly connected with it. I love drawing period piece stuff. I wish I could do more of it. I’d love to do an 1800s kind of thing, with the style of clothes, and the wagons. MM: “Get Mystique” was very much like an action movies. It has a beginning and an end. It isn’t about Marvel continuity, it’s more about telling a story. RON: Yeah, and that’s the other appeal is I don’t really like doing the continuity-heavy stuff where it has to cross-pollinate with the other books. I like doing self-contained stories of a character, where you can make your own world, and “Get Mystique” was just like that. It had brief appearances of other characters, but that story, in and of itself, became Wolverine’s own adventure—his pursuit of Mystique. We got to see some backstory, and all these new characters, and these sort of circus freaks, which were fun to draw. And the bank heist. Just fun, man. It was like directing a movie, and that’s what I enjoy.

Interlude: MM: What sort of an initial impression did Ron leave with you the first time you met/talked to him?

Friends and Colleagues

MM: How has his artwork matured over the years? JASON AARON: Ron is an all-around great artist. He can draw anything. But in particular, I think he’s one of the best at interpreting action scenes. When he draws people fighting, I buy it. I buy every movement of it. Whether the fighters have super-strength or unbreakable claws or are just a couple of Joes off the street. No matter the circumstances, Ron draws a world I can believe. And one that I can lose myself in as a reader.

TOM PALMER: We met at a Marvel Christmas party in 1992 which was held at the historic Players Club in Gramercy Park at a time when you could have that sort of thing in a small venue. I don’t remember how we started talking. He was new at Marvel and was meeting everyone at the party, but we hit it off immediately and have remained friends to this day. I suppose we’re kindred spirits in some way, although we have different backgrounds.

TOM: I don’t recall the timeline or issue numbers, but we were first connected on Moon Knight, which was something I was working on. Ron came in and penciled an issue which I inked, and my first impression was that he was an experienced comic artist. I’m not sure if it was his first assignment

DAN PANOSIAN: I met Ron at one of the Greenberg Comic Book Conventions at the Penta in New York City in 1991. I doubt he remembers our first encounter. I had just started working for both Marvel and DC Comics and noticed this guy just slightly older than me behind the Marvel Comics booth wearing a really nice Marvel Comics leather jacket. He was signing comic books and I thought, “I wanna be where he is! I want that jacket and I wanna be behind that booth!” Ron’s a big, handsome guy with a natural charisma, so it was hard to miss him. Once I took a look at his work I was really impressed. For a young guy, he drew a lot like a mixture of Mike Zeck and Gene Colan! At least that’s how I perceived it at the time. TIM TOWNSEND: I first met Ron back in... oh... 1994 I believe it was. He and I shared the same close group of friends, but up until that point we hadn’t crossed paths. I was attending San Diego Comic-Con with Dan Panosian and Jeff Johnson. Ron was there as well, and soon thereafter the planets aligned and the mountains shook. I’m sure most people have experienced meeting someone and having things just “click.” This is how it was with Ron. Dan, Ron, Jeff, and I all share the same bizarre sense of humor and penchant for spectacle. Translation: We liked to have fun and raise hell. I vividly recall on the second day or so that weekend walking through the lobby of the Marriott with the guys. Suddenly we began to hear this beautiful piano music. As I turned to look around I immediately noticed that Ron was no longer with us. There he was, seated at the grand piano off to the side of the lobby, tickling the ivories and doing it well. Here was this big, burly, hell-raising party-animal turned sensitive musician. As soon as he’d started, he popped up and fell right back in to step, as if it had never happened. That was the moment I realized there was a lot more to this guy than met the eye. 67

Below: A page from Wolverine: Weapon X #1, Jason Aaron’s favorite collaboration with Ron. Next Page: Three of Ron’s roughs for the cover of Wolverine: Weapon X #1. Wolverine ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

with Marvel, but I was impressed with his drawing abilities and his storytelling skills. Scripts at that point were written describing graphic images which were difficult to put on a page at times, and Ron took great care to interpret those descriptions, ignoring the ones that were impossible to illustrate, and used those to tell the story. That ability early on has no doubt made him the star he is today. It isn’t the art so much as the storytelling that grabs a reader, and some have it and some don’t. I see it like a director of a movie—you have a script and you have to interpret it in a visual way where the reader absorbs the graphic, and you have to make the story understandable.

TIM: I’d have to say his first run on Captain America stands out in my mind. Ron just owned that book. He still does as evidenced by his latest work on the title. Ron has that rare combination of classically grounded draftsmanship and solid storytelling. I put him in the class of guys like John Romita Jr. His work isn’t “flashy,” full of tons of rendering and noodling that the stereotypical fanboys drool over. His figures are simple and incredibly powerful. The beauty of his art is in its simplicity. You look at it and it makes you believe you could do it... until you actually try. As with most masters, he just makes it look easy. He does so much with so few lines, which I believe is a big part of the reason his work retains such energy, such power. Artists like Ron are a dying breed in this industry. He’s one of a handful of old-school masters that are still bringing “it.” He’s also one of those guys who can just sit down and work anywhere. I’ve sat down to chill out and watch TV with Ron before, and by the time the show was over Ron had a fully penciled, amazing page sitting on the coffee table. What I’m trying to say is that Ron sickens me... in the best possible way. DAN: Like everyone, I gravitate to Ron’s Captain America work. Every time he re-visits the book he brings a different approach. His storytelling is always improving, and he has some kind of connection to the character. He must. The subtleties he brings to the expressions, the action, the intensity—it’s all right there. When you’re reading a Captain America book drawn by Ron, you know you’re reading something substantial about the character. There’s an authenticity to it. MM: Do you have a favorite collaboration from the work you’ve done with Ron? JASON: Of the stuff that I’ve done with Ron, I’d say my favorite is our first arc of Wolverine: Weapon X. The “Adamantium Men” arc. It’s got amazing character work and probably the best action scenes we’ve ever done together, including a terrific two-page spread where I just wrote, “Two guys fighting,” or something like that, and Ron drew a dozen panels or more of exquisite violence. TOM: Our collaboration didn’t last long, as he moved on to different books. Each of his new assignments were with different editors, and I had my own path to follow. Our friendship is

outside a working relationship so I’ve never thought about any favorites. He was rising in the field, and I consider our friendship as a collaboration as we commiserate over the varieties of life surviving as freelance artists. Obviously, the fact that TwoMorrows is doing a book on his career work is authentication that he has not only arrived but has made a mark in the comic book field. His best work will be his next assignment.

taking a swim. As we’re walking, we suddenly heard a big splash. There he was, doing the backstroke through the fountain. The guy didn’t even take out his wallet before diving in. I also recall Ron “cutting in” on my wedding dance. ’Nuff said. There was also the three-day pre-bachelor party in South Beach that Ron and Dan Panosian treated me to. I’m having difficulty coming up with a story from that weekend that is appropriate for the publication. Use your imagination. In closing, I just want to say that Ron is one of the most unique, eclectic, and deep people I’ve ever known. His talent is only surpassed by his heart. Spend five minutes with the guy and you’ll never forget him. Talk to him for five minutes and you’re likely to learn a thing or two. Watch him with his kids for five minutes and you’ll see a grown man turn to mush. He’s my friend, my big brother, and an inspiration. I’m honored to know him.

MM: Do you have a favorite story/adventure from hanging out with Ron at conventions? TIM: This seems like such a simple, straightforward question, doesn’t it, George? Wow. I literally do not know where to begin. In all the years I’ve known Ron, every single time we have ever gotten together something crazy has happened. Some of the stories are legendary... in our minds at least. I can recall walking back to our hotel in Charlotte [Heroes Con] one night after being out at a club. As we walked by a fountain I casually mentioned something to Ron about 69

Part 5:

The Real Ron Garney Shines Through

MM: What type of music did you play, and what instrument?

RON: I still play, and I have a baby grand piano in my house. Most days I’ll sit down and tinker with it. The nerves in my first two left hand fingers got injured doing jujitsu, so I can’t really play guitar as well as I used to.

RON: I think the first thing I ever played was guitar back in fourth grade—just messing around—then I picked up drums. By the time I got to high school, I started playing guitar more. And from guitars you learn some bass, too, so over the years I’ve been playing all those instruments.

MM: Did you guys try to get a recording deal? RON: It was going in that direction. To be perfectly frank, I thought we had a rare collection of talented guys. We had a lead singer who had a lot of stage presence, and he had a powerful voice that could project well. And the drummer was one of the few drummers I’d ever met who could actually play off sheet music for drums. The bass player was a young kid, he was a prodigy. He plays with very established musicians now, and he’s only in his 20s. It’s amazing how musically talented he is.

MM: When were you in the band? RON: I had a band back in 2000 with Howard Porter. We worked all day on comics, and he was married, but I wasn’t, so we just got together on Wednesday nights and started jamming together. From there it just kept going, and the next thing you know we were playing venues all over the county. We were the hired band for a couple of clubs every month, so it was amazing how fast we were growing. We recorded a couple of CDs, too.

MM: Do you read music?

MM: What happened?

RON: I can read some, yeah. I don’t, as a general rule, play off music sheets. I can tell what notes are, what they mean and everything, but I could never sit down and play the piano off sheet music. It would take me a long time to actually make the connection from my eyes to the keys; it would take a lot of practice for me, because I just don’t do it normally. I did take a semester of beginner lessons in college, but at that point I had been playing around with it on my own for a few years. For the most part, I taught myself.

RON: Personalities. It was like one of those VH1 Behind the Music things, except on a smaller scale. There were too many personalities and personal conflicts going on. A few days before a gig the drummer and bass player quit the band to start up a death metal band. We liked doing STP [Stone Temple Pilots] and Nirvana, The Beatles, all kinds of stuff, but they wanted to do death metal exclusively, so that fell apart. MM: Do you still play these days? 70

MM: It’s different when you learn by ear than when they’re trying to teach you to read music. RON: Yeah, the course was good because it taught me all the basics: where the notes were and how to look at the keys and read them, what the sharps were, and the flats, and chords, chord structure. I love the piano probably the most out of any instrument. I love the sound of it. MM: On a podcast, I heard Simone Bianchi was a little disappointed when he worked with Warren Ellis because he just got scripts, and not a chance to collaborate with the writer personally. Do you find that’s usually the case these days, that you can’t get that access? RON: I can’t speak for all of them, but over the last bunch of years most of the writers I’ve worked with I haven’t even spoken to. I do speak with Jason Aaron, which is good.

But even there it’s not like I’m saying, “Listen, I want to draw this, I want to draw that.” But at least with Jason I’ll make a couple of suggestions as far as panel count or something like that just for my own sake. I didn’t talk to Judd Winick, or maybe I talked to him once. With Straczynski, I worked with his scripts for over a year and I never even got one email from the guy saying he liked it or didn’t like it or anything, and I found that kind of offensive. I’m not saying we have to talk every week, but at least acknowledge the guy who’s spending hours and hours and hours on your script. I worked with Jeph Loeb, and I remember him calling me up and talking to me, asking me what I wanted to draw. He told me he was going to structure the script to be a lot of double-page spreads, because he loved my double-page spreads. Which I was flattered by, it was very nice of him to say. But most of the time I don’t really speak much with the writers. 71

Previous Page: Ron didn’t talk much with Judd Winick during their brief collaboration on Green Arrow. Breakdowns for page 4 of issue #55. Above: Ron did confer with Jeph Loeb when working on the JLA: Our World at War one-shot. Jeph really must have liked Ron’s double-page spreads, because he wrote in eight of them into the 38-page story. Inks by Mark Morales. Black Lightning, Flash, Green Arrow, Green Lantern ™ and © DC Comics.

MM: He works to the strengths of the artist.

Below and Next Page: Ultimate Captain America isn’t your father’s Captain America. He’s more cynical and will do whatever it takes to get the job done. Captain America ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

RON: That’s what I’ve heard. I didn’t really talk to him too much about it after that. Once or twice. I had my head up my ass back then, too. I actually had a good relationship with some guys like that early on in my career. I worked with Terry Kavanagh on Moon Knight, and Howard Mackie a little bit. That’s back when it was plot-first. And with Mark Waid it was plot-first, and we talked a lot and came up with some good ideas. And he utilized a lot of them. But Mark was good like that. He would call up, “Hey, what do you want to draw this month?” And, usually, based on that, it would give him ideas.

MM: It’s a creative step that gets the artist excited about the book. RON: Yeah, you can get good ideas and story ideas from these collaborations, but a lot of the writers now have become control freaks. Obviously, it’s their craft, so I understand in one sense. But, in another sense, I don’t, because we, as artists, spend the most time with the script. I spend up to six to eight weeks sometimes on a script, so I’m, in the long run, much closer to the story than they are in some ways, at least visually. It’s a collaborative effort, but a lot of these guys don’t want to approach it that way. They want to just send their scripts off, and they don’t want to make changes. The artists have become more like work horses, and I don’t like that. I find that a little bit offensive. MM: What was the appeal to come back to Cap with Ultimate Captain America? RON: It wasn’t Steve Rogers, exactly. It wasn’t the same. It’s a different universe, so his personality is a little different, so that was fun. I was coming right out of Wolverine, a gritty title, understanding that this Cap was a little bit grittier, so it made sense to me, but I also love the character of Captain America. He’s fun to draw. And also working with Jason, a guy I worked well with, on that character was an idea I liked, because I knew I would have fun with Jason’s scripts. MM: Were you conscious of making this Cap different from past interpretations? RON: I don’t know. I draw him the way I draw him, and if it works, it works. Visually he doesn’t have to be very different. I made his hairstyle a little different. I didn’t give him quite the military cut. His hair is a little longer, and I have it styled differently than the military cut because it’s a different universe. But the way he looks and holds himself is still the same, it’s just his attitude that’s different. The only way I can describe it is that the way he handles situations is probably the way a real soldier would. When he kicks Bruce Banner out of the helicopter in Ultimates with Hitch and Millar, that’s something Steve Rogers in the Marvel universe probably wouldn’t do. This guy is more of a hard-nosed soldier. MM: When they announced the mini-series at New York Comic-Con 2010, they were promoting the fact you were coming back to Cap.

RON: Yeah, I wasn’t there for the panel, but I heard that people were getting excited. That was a nice feeling. I would have liked being there when they announced it to see the reaction.

that again.” It’s on a computer harddrive somewhere. As people’s attention spans get smaller and smaller, the idea of an application comic like that is more appealing, but I don’t think printed comics will ever lose their appeal.

MM: What do you think the future of the industry is? Are you going to do your creator-owned book?

MM: How did you start working with Jason Keith? Was he the first person to give your pencils the digital treatment?

RON: Yeah, I’m going to do a creator-owned book at some point, maybe with Jason, maybe not. We’ve been talking about this thing we want to do together for a while, so I’m hoping that gets done. I like the idea.

RON: No, Matt Milla was doing my covers. It started when I was the cover artist on Spider-Man. At first I was inking them, but when I got to “Back in Black” I really wanted a much grittier view artistically, because of what SpiderMan was going through. I thought the roughness of the pencils would make his emotional world a little more convincing, and Matt Milla was very nicely coloring those. I liked the effect, and when I got to do “Get Mystique,” I made the suggestion, “Why don’t you just color my pencils?”

MM: Looking to the future, do you still see yourself doing comics? RON: Well, I obviously want to do creator-owned stuff. I do have other ideas for where I want my life to go. But I’m sure I’ll be drawing comics for a long time. I don’t know what the future holds, I don’t know what my future projects are at this point, and I don’t know where the industry’s headed. Sales have consistently dropped. The technology keeps changing and growing, so it’s hard to predict whether printed comics are going to die or not. It’s hard to say how each generation is going to react, and what it’s going to be like in 20 years.

MM: You didn’t get any resistance? RON: No, not really. Marvel was supportive of it. I think they’ve become more supportive over the years of artists’ sensibilities and how they want to grow, artistically, and I think that’s in large part because of Quesada being an artist himself. And maybe because they liked what they saw in the Spider-Man covers.

MM: What do you think of digital comics?

MM: How does the process work? Does the colorist send you files when he’s done so you can look over it?

RON: I love the motion comics. I think those look really, really cool. I haven’t seen that with anything I’ve done yet, but I would love to see it. To hear it and to see it actually performing in front of you, it’s the next best thing to watching a movie. I love the idea of that. And the digital comics are fine. It’s a cool idea to be able to get one on your iPad, to be able to download it and flip through it right there. I’m sure that’s the wave of the future. Personally, I love seeing the printed version and having it on a shelf. I don’t know if that will ever lose its appeal. Not for me, it won’t. I’ll always love the idea of having something on a shelf, and being able to pick and up and read it again and again and again. On the iPad, it’s a colder experience. You can’t just look at it on the shelf and go, “Oh, I want to read

RON: I scan the pencils in and I make some adjustments to the darkness. I do leave him some room to make adjustments—not a whole lot—on the lightness of the pencils. Then I try to clean it up as much as I can and leave the rest to him. He sends me the colored piece, and then I make correction notes. Sometimes I love what he does and don’t have any, and then other times I see things that probably affect me differently when I look at them and aren’t what I’m thinking in my head of how it should be. And then there are times when I look at something, say I’m not crazy about it, and then it grows on me, and I change my mind about it. So it’s all a process. 73

MM: Was this the first time you felt like people could finally see, “This is what my art looks like without any filter?” Below: Cover art for Hulk #12, inked by Sal Buscema. Next Page: Deathlok is born, in homage to Robocop. Wolverine: Weapon X #14, page 3. Deathlok, Hulk ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

RON: Pretty much, yeah. Honestly, it definitely was; that was a conscious reason on my part. I had always felt like, no matter how good the inker was that I worked with, it was going to eventually wear on me. In Sal [Buscema]’s book [Sal Buscema: Comics’ Fast & Furious Artist] he made a good point. He said something about me being quirky, and that I loved what he did inking me in the beginning, but then I started having problems with it. And it’s not that I was having problems with it, it’s just that over time you start seeing things that aren’t you anymore. And I just wanted to do something that was all me. I know what the

pencils can look like, and I know what the art can look like, and I think no matter what inker I’m working with—whether it be Sal, or Tom Palmer, or Bill Reinhold, or Dan Green— there’s always something different being brought to the table that changes what my initial vision was. So I just wanted to be able to get my work out there and have it be what I wanted it to be. That’s no slam on any inker, that’s the thing. A lot of inkers take it personally, like it’s a slam on them. It’s not. It has nothing to do with their abilities or whether I like them as an inker. I love Sal Buscema, I absolutely love his inks. He’s one of my favorites on me. I love Klaus Janson. Klaus’ style really changes a lot of the penciling, but I love his work. I love Dan Green, I love Palmer, I love all these guys and their work. That said, in the end I wanted something to just be exclusively me, without any other personality over the top. Moebius can’t be Moebius with someone else inking him. And I’m not saying I’m Moebius, I’m just saying there are certain stylistic things I was trying to put into the pencils that I couldn’t explain to the inker. It would take too much time, and over the course of all these issues that stuff is just going to get lost. You have one issue in which, let’s say, the inker changes the way a hand is drawn, just a little bit. But then, in every panel, over the course of three issues, all these hands are being drawn differently, and I didn’t want to go through that this time. MM: It’s part of the evolution of an artist, too. You didn’t have that control in the beginning. RON: It was very frustrating in the beginning, too, to work with guys who weren’t really very good yet. Not to say they didn’t have ability or talent, just that they were very underdeveloped and had a long way to go. It’s very frustrating to get stuff back where so much of the drawing gets lost. A good inker needs to know how to draw to be able to understand what it is he’s interpreting in the pencils. And there were a lot of guys I worked with that were just... I hate to use the word “slaughter,” but they were slaughtering what I was putting down. It was a frustrating experience. My stuff was very illustrative, with lots of blacks and rendering, back in the early days of Ghost Rider and Moon Knight and that stuff. By the time I got to Hulk, I started doing very graphic work. I was trying to make it very easy for the inker to

interpret. When I worked with Sal on Hulk, his inks were very graphic, and they matched well with the graphic approach of my pencils. Later on I worked with Dan Green, and he had a very organic approach to his inks. I loved what he did with Silvestri. It was very organic and lush, and had so much life to it. I liked that. Well, they’re just two completely different animals there, Sal and Dan, and yet here I was working with both those guys. So you can imagine what a different experience it was for me, putting the pencils down and then seeing how much they changed. MM: There seemed to be an influence of Richard Corben in the Weapon X work. I thought a lot of the Deathlok scenes evoked that Corben vibe. RON: You mean like “Den” in Heavy Metal or something? It’s interesting you would say that. And the funny thing is, yeah, back in the ’70s I loved Richard Corben. I couldn’t wait to read his stuff. I haven’t looked at his work much for many years, but I used to follow him intensely back in the ’70s, when I was young and working as a painter. I loved his sense of color, and his sense of side lighting and reflective light was unparalleled. Maybe somewhere in my psyche some of that came out. There’s a strong possibility. MM: One of the things I liked about Jason Aaron’s story was that he gave you a ton of interesting character stuff, but it’s all very cold and twisted. RON: That Deathlok scene where he’s kind of coming to life was a little bit like Robocop, too. Jason likes to throw little homages of all the movies he likes into the stories, and that’s fine. Deathlok was created before Robocop, anyway. MM: When did you start incorporating those floating heads that you use sometimes?

got the idea. I’m not sure where I got it from, but I know it works for my stuff.

RON: I call them cutaways. I like to use negative space, and it frees up the page and solves a lot of tangent problems. I probably started doing that around Civil War. I’ve always done cutaway stuff for figures, and I use that open space to create some breathing room on the page so the page is easier to take in. One of things that drives me crazy is when I look at a page and my eyes hurt because there’s no resting place—it’s just lines and color and word balloons, and there’s just nowhere for your eye to go. The cutaways help create tempo, help create space, and help create breathing room for your eye to comfortably go through the story. And they add a nice, little artistic flair.

MM: How did you like working with Chuck Austen? RON: It was tough, probably for him and me, because at the time I wasn’t at the top of my game. I didn’t mind working with him, it’s just that my head wasn’t into anything back then. It had nothing to do with Chuck. But the expectations on Uncanny X-Men were high, and people were very disappointed with me and him. The reaction to his writing became so venomous and negative. I mean, he became—I don’t know if this is a good comparison—sort of the Rob Liefeld of writers. Whether that was fair or not isn’t the point, it’s just that it took on a life of its own, and people just became such Chuck Austen bashers and haters. So that became very weird, working on stuff that everyone was hating on. And I wasn’t on top of my game, so I started experiencing a lot of that negativity. It was a dark time for me in my career, which had nothing to do with Chuck. I think his stories were fine. Then we did the JLA stuff, and a lot of the thrust of that was a combination of me, him, and Mike Carlin. My initial story idea was to have each issue focus on one character, separately. It was going to be a story about these aliens who were taking each character and putting them in these

MM: They worked really well in “Get Mystique,” the 1920s sequences. RON: Lately I’ve been trying to get away from doing it too much, because I feel like I’m doing them all the time now. On this last issue I’ve been working on, I’ve been trying to find ways around using them, because I don’t want to get too repetitive. There are guys out there who do it well, too. I’ve seen Travis Charest do it. Maybe that’s where I initially 75

situations which they had to get out of to save the other JLA members—it was a big test. Carlin didn’t like that idea. Carlin wanted to do more of a human interest thing, and the story evolved into “Pain of the Gods.” So I got my wish in that I got to do single stories with each character in each issue, but it wasn’t exactly where I wanted it to go. It wasn’t my idea to do the human interest stuff. MM: I thought Chuck actually did a good job writing those JLA stories. RON: Oh, he did. MM: The only problem with the story was it was a downer from beginning to end. RON: Well, it was “Pain of the Gods.” At the end of the fifth issue there was an ad for the last issue saying, “The pain ends in 30 days.” [laughter] MM: Each issue has a slightly different approach to the art. RON: Well, it was the first full comics run that I was going to ink myself. I felt like it was something I really needed to do to grow. I couldn’t really complain about other inkers until I walked the walk myself, you know? And I never complained so much as make honest assessments about the way I was being inked—not necessarily negative or positive, just honest. So I needed to do that for myself. It was definitely an eye-opener. And, as you saw, with each issue there was an evolution of my inking. There are parts of that stuff that looked very Klaus-like or Sienkiewicz-like, and then I started getting cleaner in areas. I was experimenting with a lot of different techniques. Whether or not that was the place to do it is beside the point. It probably would have been better to experiment on a lower-profile book that wouldn’t piss the fans off so much. 76

MM: Was that the kind of reaction you got?

MM: There’s a lot of stuff going on.

RON: Yeah, well, it was either love it or hate it. I remember Carlin saying to me, “I get people coming in here saying they absolutely hate what you’re doing on the inks, and then I get other people who think it’s absolutely incredible and love it.” It was polarizing, and that’s fine. I took a lot of the criticism, and it was very valid, a lot of it. There were parts that were just out-and-out sloppy. A lot of it was due to the schedule and having to rush, but some of it was also bred from a lack of experience with page after page after page of inking work to get it done on deadline. And then there were pages that I thought came out very nice, that I’m very proud of.

RON: Yeah. And to be honest with you, artistically, I think the work I did on that was underrated. I don’t like what the colorist was doing on a lot of the coloring work. I’ll come out and say that. He wasn’t really putting anything into it. Part of the problem was it was very flat coloring, and it was very dark. It was just very muddled-looking, color-wise, and that didn’t complement my rough inks very well. And then a larger part of the problem was the paper. It was printed on newsprint, and it just looked very washedout and dull and dark. MM: The trade looks like that, too.

MM: I think the first issue was probably the best, where you added a European flair to the art. RON: That was definitely an experiment. I was just being an artist, and using a brush, and being very painterly with a lot of the ink. MM: But it looked great! RON: Thanks. Obviously, it wouldn’t look like that now, because I could probably show you what worked and what didn’t work, and things that I needed to change. I was constantly reinking pages on that issue because I wasn’t happy with what I was doing, and because I was learning so much. It’s not like I couldn’t come up with an end result that didn’t look artistic, it’s just that I didn’t have experience with maintaining a technique that I was happy with. I was always trying different things. MM: There was a big contrast between the JLA arc with Chuck and the next arc with Kurt Busiek, where it’s more of a standard, by-the-numbers, super-hero story. RON: It went from a human interest story to an outer space story, which is funny, because I wanted to do an outer space story, I just had a very particular story in mind for the JLA. But it was two completely different animals with Chuck and Kurt. Kurt loves to write the type of stuff that George Pérez is great at drawing. Team action stories are not one of my strong points. I’m better at doing single character development. God, I remember that planet-sized Death Star-like spaceship I had to draw, and the JLA fighting that in space, and the Qwardians, and this army of— 77

Previous Page: Quiet moments from the “Pain of the Gods” storyline. Below: The JLA, the Crime Syndicate, New Gods, and Qwardians— not to mention a giant spaceship—there was a lot to deal with in the JLA storyline, “Syndicate Rules.” JLA #113, page 4. Inks by Dan Green. Justice League and all related characters ™ and © DC Comics.

RON: Yeah, just very ugly. Like I said, the colorist was just laying flat colors over everything. I don’t know how much work he was doing at the time, but he just wasn’t putting any care into it. When I asked him if I could make suggestions, he said something to the effect of, “Yeah, if it fits into my style,” so I just never bothered with it again. If it fits into his style? His style was nothing but flat, overall monochromatic pages that really didn’t require a lot of effort. So I didn’t feel like arguing with him about it. He is what he is, and it just didn’t work for me. I will say, in fairness to the color work, that once we got the glossy paper with Kurt’s arc, it looked much better and was much more vibrant. MM: Are there jobs you have a problem looking at, that you don’t want in your house?

RON: It was faithful to the pencils. He had some nice technique with his line. I really liked his line. MM: Green Arrow was your first collaboration? RON: Green Arrow was the first thing we did together. What did I do before Green Arrow? MM: It was JLA with Busiek. RON: Yeah, yeah, that was Dan Green. MM: I’m not a huge fan of the Dan Green stuff. RON: In fairness to all the inkers, I will say I tend to love the work when I like what I did, and I can always tell when the inker’s having fun with something I did and when they’re not.

RON: There’s stuff I don’t look at, yeah. A lot of the X-Men stuff I can’t bear to look at. It’s just so bad, some of it. And I don’t think Mark Morales was a good marriage with my pencils. I think he’s a fine inker, I just don’t think it was a good marriage. His work is very, very technical, and my stuff isn’t as good when somebody is very technical with it. If an inker is going to ink me, it needs to be less technical. Like, Klaus is good with it. That was a very good marriage. It looked very handsome at the end of its day. He works well over a lot of guys, like J.R. There’s a sensibility with J.R. that is similar to mine, and I guess Klaus picked up on that in my work, and I’ve always liked the results. The first cover of Sentinel of Liberty is a wraparound cover. Klaus inked that, and it looks great. MM: Bill Reinhold inked you pretty well, too. RON: Yeah, I liked it. I had wanted to work with him for years. I remember seeing his stuff over Adam Kubert—I think it was Spirits of Vengeance or something—and I liked his technique and the way he rendered with the brush. He’s a great artist, himself, and we had talked for years about working together. The timing happened to be right this time, and I enjoyed it. I think it was heavy in spots, especially with the coloring. His stuff tends to be heavy, and I don’t think heavier inks work as well with a lot of color modeling. They tend to compete with each other, and that’s what happened there. But I think Bill’s great. MM: It looked more faithful to your pencils. 79

Previous Page: While Dan Green inked the interiors for Ron’s second arc of JLA, Ron inked the covers— such as this one for issue #111—himself. Below: Bill Reinhold, a great artist in his own right, inked Ron’s threeissue stint on Green Arrow. Green Arrow, Justice League, and all related characters ™ and © DC Comics.

I think Dan was like that. When he slows down his hand speed a bit, I think there’s nothing like it, it’s just gorgeous. But when he’s working on overdrive, making the deadlines, and the stuff is loose, then it becomes too soft and goopy, and it loses some of its beauty. But when he’s a little bit tighter, I think it’s absolutely gorgeous. A lot of that can be said about my work. There’s a huge disparity in the way my work looks when I’m focused and paying attention and slowing down, as opposed to when I have to make a deadline. I think the inkers pick up on that, and it just doesn’t look as good because I don’t look as good. MM: From that arc of Green Arrow on your work has remained strong and consistent. It’s been evolving to what you’re doing now. It’s true to that style. RON: A lot of that was a conscious decision. I stopped looking at outside influences. I stopped looking at other guys, and trying to be other guys. I was doing that a lot over the years. I was always evolving, but a lot of times I would look at an artist’s work, and I would say, “Oh, man, I’m not doing that. I should really try that.” And I would get on a kick where I would start doing that in my work.

I stopped doing that a number of years ago and just started drawing. Whatever was coming out of me personally was coming out onto the page itself, and I let it evolve into what it was going to be. I stopped being so competitive with trying to be someone else or be better than someone else, and tried to be myself. I think it really coalesced once I did “Get Mystique.” That was the first job where it wasn’t going to be inked, it wasn’t going to be anything but me, so I wanted to draw what is me. Even on Spider-Man, because I loved J.R.’s work on that, you can see some of that influence there. We have similar sensibilities, anyway, and similar influences, I think: Gil Kane, and Romita, Sr., and I think some of that shows through. When “Get Mystique” came around, I just shed everything, and I was going to draw the way I draw, period. “I’m going to render things, the way it looks right to me; when the page looks done, it’s going to be done. I’m not going 80

to tailor it to an inker, I’m not going to tailor it to a viewer, I’m just going to let it be what comes out of me.” And what ended up coming out of me on “Get Mystique” was the best work I had ever done. MM: Your confidence was growing. You didn’t worry anymore about storytelling because it was already there. RON: Yeah, the storytelling I don’t worry so much about. That’s one thing I’m pretty confident in. The way I’ve learned it over the years, I stand back and look at the work, and I read it without words. I’ll put three or four pages on my board in order, and I’ll just keep reading them over and over. If something is in the script that doesn’t make sense, I’ll change it on the page to make the movement work. And there are certain shots that don’t work well together. Like, say, the script calls for a close-up, but the panel next to it, if you draw it from a certain angle, doesn’t work well next to that close-up, so you have to take the camera and move it to the other side. For instance, there’s a panel in Wolverine [#11] where Deathlok walks into a hospital and is fighting all these security guards in the hallway. One guard comes at him with an axe, and they’re firing their guns, and Deathlok’s slaughtering them. Then he walks off quickly to a maternity ward. There was one panel where Jason had asked for Deathlok to be in the foreground with all the slaughtered guys in the background in front of him. It just didn’t work timing-wise. All of a sudden there was this jump from Deathlok standing in the foreground before all these guys he’s just slaughtered, to the point where he’s walking through the maternity ward doors in the background. He never actually walks by the guards. I needed to make it feel like Deathlok just slaughtered all these people, and we’re walking into the future with him. So I moved Deathlok far into the background, and the slaughtered guards into the foreground, like Deathlok had just walked past all the bodies. That way there’s not a gap in time. That’s where the strength of a good visual guy comes in.

close-up of Wolverine’s face, let’s say. Well, when you put it on the page, it might throw the whole page off, because of the angle, or because the edge is too close or not close enough. You have to adjust all that stuff. People don’t realize how hard it actually is. MM: I heard somebody say that the other day, that people just don’t realize how hard it is to draw a comic book. RON: They don’t. They have no clue. I’m so drained at the end of every month trying to draw these things, and I don’t know how I do it sometimes.

MM: You’re the director, basically. RON: Yeah, I’m the director. I have to change things sometimes. Each page of storytelling is an art unto itself. Certain shots work well on the page together and certain ones don‘t. If you take a standalone panel and it’s a beautiful 81

Previous Page Top: While the art itself is fantastic, this page from Wolverine #63 is all about timing and storytelling. Previous Page Bottom: A loose sketch, trying to capture a strong pose. Below: Ron went a bit off-script with this page to improve the timing of the story. Deathlok, Spider-Man, Wolverine ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Previous Page: Cover art for Amazing Spider-Man #531. Left: Cover rough for Amazing Spider-Man #533, wherein Peter reveals his secret identity. Below: This opening splash page of Amazing Spider-Man #539 has no background. The reader’s attention focuses solely on the emotions of the figures, as this moment is the launching point for the “Back in Black” story. Aunt May, Captain America, Iron Man, Mary Jane Parker, Peter Parker, Spider-Man ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

MM: Editors sometimes think that if they call enough, the art will just come out. RON: I believe editors and writers should actually try to draw one issue, because I don’t think a lot of them have any clue as to how hard it is, and they take it for granted. There are so many decisions that have to be made, not to mention the fact that you actually have to get what’s in your head onto a piece of paper with your hand. It’s taken for granted. To be honest, I feel we’re not paid enough. MM: And you also have to keep a rhythm going, and the book has to read well. The movement has to be continuous in some way. RON: When I had plots to work from, that was better for me, because I had a unique way of telling a story. I think I still do, but it’s definitely hampered a bit by working from full scripts. I don’t get to let loose and set up the pages the way I’d like to with quite the same freedom I was able to working from plots. MM: Getting Spider-Man was what got you to come back to Marvel, right? Was that the first book they offered you? RON: Yeah, that was the first thing, and I was very happy about that. At first I wasn’t sure if I was the right guy for it, but it was mostly the jitters. It was a big, high-profile book, and I had just been through the wringer with a lot of negative criticism about the work on JLA. Coming back to Marvel and knowing I was going to do a character like SpiderMan, I had some pre-fight jitters, so to speak. Then I talked to Quesada, and he told me I was overthinking some things. I agreed with that, so I got on board, and I ended up having a great time. 83

MM: Was it cool to see all the attention your Spidey arcs received? It was during your run that Peter Parker revealed his identity to the world. Above: Two alternate layouts for the promo piece/cover for the start of the “Back in Black” storyline in Amazing Spider-Man #539. Next Page: Cover art for Amazing Spider-Man #539. The two-source lighting separates the black costume from the black background while ensuring the reader that the story inside will not be a happy one. Spider-Man ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

RON: When I did my first Spider-Man issue coming back to Marvel, clearly there was trepidation about me, because my quality had suffered over the last couple of years. But my life was getting better again. My personal life got straightened out, and I was recharged a bit. So by the time I did Spider-Man there was a huge jump in the quality of my work and in my enthusiasm, and it showed. Everybody came up to me after our first issue [Amazing Spider-Man #529] with the new costume came out, and I was getting a lot of people from Marvel coming over and congratulating me on such a great issue. So I think their fears were quelled, as were mine. MM: What did you think of Spidey revealing his identity, because you had him in this impossible situation? 84

RON: It’s interesting, because it probably had to happen somehow that he went back to the old Spider-Man where nobody knew who he was, but as far as “Back in Black” and Civil War and all that, it was probably the most realistic and mature evolution of a story in a comic book for the reason that you could never hide your identity like that forever. I think it was a very mature way for it to happen; his identity was revealed in a very insightful, realistic way. I think that’s just how something like that would go. But in the comics world Spider-Man works better when he has a secret identity. Without it there would be no point to him wearing that costume, really, anymore. MM: But in your run he lived in a very intense, chaotic, and interesting world. RON: It had to end there. There was nowhere else it could have gone after that. It was a very intense world, very realistic, and it was almost too much so. If it had stayed that way, I think you would have lost the soul of that character somewhat.

Part 6:

Storytelling and the Creative Process

MM: Schedule-wise, how do you start your day, in terms of when you’re working on a book?

RON: I try to get a page done a day. What I tend to do is work like a production line. Like, right now I have 15 pages of layouts that I’ve gotten done in the course of a couple of weeks, just trying to get all the storytelling on the boards, and get it all worked out to the point where I’m happy with what it looks like and how it reads. I can’t do one page at a time, so I’ll go through the 15, and I’ll read through them and keep adjusting them until it gets to the point where I can read it and it’s interesting to me and it works. Once I’m happy with those pages, I go back and I do the tight penciling. Once I have everything laid out—the figures are all in place, the compositions are all in place, the storytelling’s in place—then I do all the tight work. That always comes at the tail end. It’s always a push the last couple of weeks to get the tight penciling done.

RON: Well, in general I try to structure my day like a regular job. I get up at 5:30 a.m. or so, and with kids it’s been different, but over the years my normal schedule has been to get up early, have breakfast, walk the dog, and then sit down and work until mid-day, walk the dog again, have some lunch, and then work until three or four. I take the rest of the afternoon off and go to the gym or whatever I want to do to just relax for a while, and then I work for a few hours at night. I still try to keep to that schedule. I like working at night—my drawing comes out a lot easier—but I try as best I can to get up and start early in the morning. If I wait too long, like, let’s say 9:00 or 10:00 rolls around, I tend to be very unproductive, so I need to start very early. I take my breaks throughout the day, and then I work at night for a couple of hours. Even if it’s for just two hours, as long as I get some night work in, it’s good.

MM: Are you working in your own office separate from the rest of the house? RON: Nah, I have an office above my garage. It’s at the end of the house, but it’s like Grand Central in here. My kids are always running in and out, getting their fingers into stuff. [laughs] It’s definitely been a challenge trying to keep my productivity level up. It’s definitely gone down over the last few years, since I have a three-and-a-halfyear-old, a one-and-a-half-yearold, and an 11-year-old; the productivity has definitely gone down, and I do the best I can to keep working through that. I don’t want to be the type of guy who puts a lock on my door. I want my kids to always have access. I never want to have my door closed to my children. But it’s challenging.

MM: You don’t do late nights anymore? RON: No, I don’t pull all-nighters anymore. I gave that up because it was really unhealthy. It was killing me, and nobody really gave a crap—nobody really understood that you would be doing that. The editors don’t care that you’re pulling all-nighters, they just care that you get the work in. But you’re pulling all-nighters, trying to be a good soldier, and all it does is kill you slowly. So I made the promise to myself that I won’t do that anymore. Nobody’s worth that, no company, nothing. Nothing’s worth your health and well-being. So if I don’t get it done, then too bad, y’know? You’ll have to adjust, because I’m not going to make those kinds of sacrifices anymore. I did it a lot early on in my career, and it took too much out of me, so I won’t do it anymore.

MM: Do you usually have a TV on, or music? RON: Yeah. I didn’t used to. It just depends on my mood. Sometimes I put music on, but more often I have the TV on for background noise, because sometimes when you’re alone in a room with your thoughts, your drawing, that drives you a little nuts. Your personality has a tendency to over-think things, especially if you’re a deep person, and

MM: How many pages do you set yourself as a goal for a day’s work? 86

most artists I know are. If you’re left in a room all day by yourself, just thinking, without any distraction, you can go crazy. You read into things, or things that bother you become magnified—they bother you even more. I’ve found that it’s best to have some kind of background noise to distract me from myself. You can’t be alone in a room by yourself in a career like this. It’s just not mentally or emotionally healthy, and that’s part of what contributed to my somewhat of a downfall at the end of the ’90s, early 2000s, where I had to get out and stop working for a while, because I was cooped up too much. Now it’s different with a family and a dog and the distractions and all. I rescued myself from that abyss. And it’s a much better career for it. I do much better work, and I’m emotionally healthier—mentally, spiritually—if you want to call it that, and it’s definitely better. It’s a good career to have if you have a family, but if you’re by yourself living in the hills somewhere, it’s the worst career you can have, because it sucks too much of your life away.

RON: I tend to read through it, peruse it a little bit. I don’t read it. I have to read it in layers almost. I look through it and get an overall feel for what it is I’m going to have to accomplish. And there are things in it that I might get intimated by for the amount of drawing I’m going to have to do, so actually I have to prepare myself for that, and it takes me a week or so to get into a rhythm between each issue. As I start laying it out, I have to go through and figure out what shots work. It’s not easy. You think you might have a shot of a doctor giving a kid a serum injection, and it’s just, how do you that fit that into the page? Should it be a big panel? Should it be a small panel? Should it be vertical? Horizontal? There are so many options. Square? Could I do it in a circle? And how is it going to fit into the composition of the rest of the page? How am I going to fit all these elements together to make it flow? It’s a real craft, this comic book stuff, and it’s really not just about laying panels down and drawing in the panels. The panels all have to work together, to unify, to create a theme all the way through. It’s a daunting task sometimes.

MM: Before you do your breakdowns, how long does it take you to soak in the script, to start visualizing the story?

MM: Do you sometimes think, “Give me something to do here. Give me something interesting”? 87

Previous Page: How could you lock this little guy out of your office? There are definite advantages and disadvantages with working from home, and kids fall into both categories. Above: Breakdowns are a quick way to get down ideas, and they often get tweaked before the artist is satisfied with the storytelling. Here are two different takes on page 15 of JLA #103. Ron would add one more small panel at the start of the middle tier of the layout on the right in the final pencils. Green Lantern ™ and © DC Comics.

Above and Next Page: Shown here are most, but not all, of Ron’s layouts for the cover of Wolverine #64, some much tighter than others. This is typical of the amount of thought and work Ron puts into each cover he designs. Mystique, Wolverine ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

RON: I’ve mentioned that I’m a great action artist. At least, people say I’m a great action artist. And I’ve said to Jason that’s not all I’d like to do. I don’t want to just be strung up drawing the same crap over and over again: punching, slashing, or fast-moving action. That can become very boring. People may wonder, “How can an action scene be boring?” But, believe it or not, it can be from the point of view of the artist. I like drawing quieter scenes and more human interest stuff. I don’t want to be pigeon-holed as an action artist. I like doing a variety of things. Because Captain America was such a high-paced adventure, I think that label gets put on you, and you tend to attract that kind of script. But there are times for action, and then there are times for non-action. I enjoy both, but only when it’s in the correct amount, in the correct context. I don’t want to just do gratuitous action scenes. MM: Do you have a different mindset when you do covers? 88

RON: I look at my covers and I think I’m not that great at them. I’ve seen some great designers out there. But then I look back and go, “Well, actually that wasn’t so bad. That’s kind of a cool idea.” I like drawing covers, but they can be quite challenging. But I like the feel of one visceral image that can tell a story, as opposed to a page full of panels. I like doing covers for that reason. MM: You don’t do a lot of inking these days, right? RON: No, I haven’t in a while. I haven’t. But I want to get back to it at some point. MM: Are you using brushes or pens? RON: I’ll use both. A lot of times I’ll start out with pen and then just lay over with a brush to thicken up areas and such. Using brush exclusively, it becomes tough to get real detail. It always ends up feeling much looser and more organic, which is fine if that’s what you’re going for. It’s just tougher to pull it off

Above: The big reveal. Rough layout and finished pencils for the final page of Wolverine: Weapon X #15, the end of the “Tomorrow Dies Today,” story arc. Next Page: Once the layouts are settled, sometimes additional sketching is needed to tweak the pose of a figure. This initial sketch of Batman was flipped and turned a bit in the final drawing for JLA #110, page 14. Deathlok ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc. Batman, Martian Manhunter, Superman ™ and © DC Comics.

in this day and age, when readers are very detail-oriented, and the scripts are detail-oriented, and there are a lot of small things you have to draw. To get in there with a brush and get into those tight areas is difficult, so I use a combination of both. MM: Do you do any digital work, yourself? RON: Yeah, yeah. I’ve done lots of stuff. I’ve done a lot of paintings in Photoshop. I have some stuff on Facebook that are completely Photoshop paintings. So I’ve definitely played around with it. MM: Can you see yourself in the future doing your own colors and even the detailing afterwards? RON: I’ve done colors for a few of my covers. I colored the first two issues of Wolverine: Weapon X. It just takes time. I would love to do more of that, but when you’re the penciler of a book, it’s not as if all you have to work on is the cover and then you can do the inking and the coloring yourself throughout the week. You also have to get to drawing the interior pages, so it’s just not easy to pull both off all the time. I get it in when I can. 90

MM: You don’t send originals in to Marvel anymore, right? RON: Right. I scan them in and load them to a file-sharing server. MM: It’s interesting how things have changed. RON: Oh, yeah. I used to have to rush to FedEx, and I love that I don’t have to do that anymore. You used to have to go to FedEx every time you needed to get pages out, and that was a pain in the neck. Then it got to where FedEx was picking stuff up. That was fine, but now it’s much more convenient. I just pop it in the scanner and I have the file, and I just connect to this file-sharer, and I load it up there. It’s really so different now. The coloring’s different. Everything’s just so different; it’s just amazing, the changes. And it’s all going to keep changing. MM: It’s more professional, like you said, than when you started. RON: Well, it’s nice, because my office is like the helm of my own ship, really. I have all the stuff I need here, and everything happens right here.

MM: What’s your pencil by choice, a mechanical pencil? RON: No, I used to use a lead pointer, but now I use just regular pencils. I use special artist pencils like Derwent or Staedtler Mars pencils. I use different thicknesses for different reasons. When I’m just laying in the forms initially, I’ll use something harder, maybe I’ll even start with a 4H. Then I work my way down to a 2H when I really start laying in some lines and I need a softer lead that doesn’t dig into the paper as much. The paper I’m working on is a kid finish Bristol board that Marvel sends me, and if you use a hard pencil and try to apply some pressure, it digs into the paper, and then it’s harder to erase. MM: Do you have any advice for younger artists? What mistakes do you commonly see?

RON: They tend to avoid all the things that bore them— learning perspectives or composition. They just want to get to the cool stuff, which is drawing a cool, muscular guy fighting some bad guy. They avoid learning the things they need to learn because it’s not fun. When guys come up to me at conventions, I can’t really tell them what they’re doing wrong without showing them, because it’s pointless. They end up looking like a deer caught in headlights. So I take a piece of paper and go over what they did on their pages and show them, “Okay, here‘s what you did, and here’s what you could do.” It could be about avoiding tangents, where a lot of guys tend to jam things into the corners of the panel borders— real tangent problems that draw your eye to those areas. It’s tricky. It’s not easy for them to get things to work inside a panel, because they haven’t learned yet that the box is actually

Below: Breakdown sketch for a page from Amazing Spider-Man #537. Next Page: Rough pencils for the cover of Amazing Spider-Man #537. Captain America, Punisher, Spider-Man ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

a camera view-finder. They tend to just draw inside the box and think that’s a panel. They don’t think in terms of three-dimensionality. You should be able to sort of reach into that box and it should feel like there’s space in there. It’s a tricky thing to do, and that’s why a light table is an invaluable thing, because it mimics a camera. With a light table, you can take that square and put it over your drawing and maneuver it around to adjust the composition. It really does act like a camera for your mind’s eye, so it’s an invaluable tool. But that’s what I see the most of: tangent problems, positional problems, and perspective, stuff like that. Learning how to make figures fit into a space and have them all be proportionate to one another. They might

have a guy standing next to a car, and the car looks like it’s the size of a building because it’s on the wrong plane, or has the wrong perspective. There’s so much to learn, and it takes time, but eventually you start getting it without having to work so hard at it. MM: What do you want readers to get from your books? RON: I want them to be able to read one and have it feel like a movie, without it feeling like a comic that just has a lot of garish pictures in it. I guess I do that more for myself, hoping the reader enjoys it, but for me, it’s about readability and getting a sense of being there. When you work on a page, there are certain guys—Frank Quitely, for instance, comes to mind. He has such a strong style, such a strong sense of space and design, and the way his figures work in space and negative space. It’s such a strong look that it makes you believe in what you’re reading. That’s what a strong style brings: a strong sense of space inside the panels. It makes you believe in what you’re reading, and that’s where the escapism comes in. It’s not an easy thing to pull off. That’s where style comes in and allows the reader to become a part of that world through the artist’s eyes, if that makes any sense. MM: I understand what you’re saying. My last question would be, would you go this route again if you had to go back to 1989? RON: I might. Am I saying I wouldn’t do some things differently? Yeah, I would, probably. I don’t tend to live with regrets. There are some things I would probably do differently, but overall I’ve been blessed. It’s been bumpy along the way, but it’s also brought me a lot of good fortune. I have a wonderful family, a home. So while I might change a couple of things here or there, overall it’s been a good career. I’ve gotten to meet a lot of wonderful people. And some not-so-wonderful people. [laughs]

Ron Garney

Art Gallery

Above and Left: Breakdown sketches and finished pencils for Wolverine #64, page 12. The lack of panel borders and use of cutaways gives Ron room to play with the choreography of the fight. Next Page: In his pencils for Wolverine: Weapon X #2, page 10, Ron uses a dramatic downshot with a perspective that’s tricky to draw. Pages 95 and 96: Pencils and color for the cover of Wolverine: Weapon X #2. Ron blurred the pencil linework during the coloring process to give Wolverine’s attackers a greater sense of movement. Mystique, Wolverine ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Previous Page: Design work for I Am Legend, which starred Will Smith, as you can see from Ron’s drawings. This job required Ron to research then-current fashion and think about how the clothing would deteriorate over time. Notice the Darkseeker in the upper right-hand side is wearing a shower curtain, complete with rings. Above: When Ron saw this pencil sketch by fellow artist Jeff Johnson, he just had to paint it to see what he could do with it. Right: Preliminary painting done in Photoshop. Ron hopes to complete a full-blown painting of this image down the road. Top Right: Conventions make Hulk Ron angry! Hulk Ron will smash stupid convention! I Am Legend © Warner Bros. Pictures. Fantasy paintings © Ron Garney.

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Previous Page and This Page: More of Ron’s personal digital paintings. Page 102: At the top of the page are three of Ron’s color guides: the cover of Wolverine: Weapon X #1, Wolverine #63, and a Captain America poster. At the bottom of the page is a preliminary digital painting of Wolverine stalking his prey. Page 103: A preliminary digital painting of the Silver Surfer. Page 104: Cover art for Wolverine #19. Colors by Jason Keith. Page 105: Ron works in a more open style with these nude studies. Page 106: “The Hippy and the Fish,” done in pen and ink with an ink wash. Page 107: “Tracey’s Secret,” done with a mix of traditional and digital tools. Captain America, Mystique, Silver Surfer, Wolverine ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc. Paintings © Ron Garney.

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Previous Page: A portrait from Ron’s sketchbooks. Right and Below: Humorous and horrific sketches from Ron’s sketchbooks. Pages 110: “The Warrior,” done in pen and ink with ink wash. Page 111: Two as yet unrealized creator-owned projects Ron hopes to complete one day: Walking Time Bomb and Deadstar. Page 112: (Top) A breakdown of a panel for JLA. (Bottom Left) Ron was happy with the bounce of this sequence from JLA #107 inked by Dan Green. (Bottom right) Layout sketch for the cover of JLA #105. Page 113: Preliminary sketches of Superman for JLA. Pages 114 and 115: Preliminary sketches from Ron’s run on Amazing Spider-Man, along with the finished cover art for issue #531 and the cover layout for issue #530. Deadstar, Walking Time Bomb © Ron Garney. Flash, Green Lantern, Martian Manhunter, Superman, Wonder Woman ™ and © DC Comics. Spider-Man ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Left: This not-quite-finished illustration was done in pencil and white paint on textured paper. Next Page: The making of a hero. Captain America #448, page 2. Captain America, Wolverine ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Afterword fter a while, the stories about Ron Garney begin to sound like the tall tales of folklore. A big, brawny guy who lives life to the fullest and has many misadventures while making his living drawing comic books sounds a little fictitious. I’ve not been around for some of the more salacious events, but in my time with Ron I’ve gotten to truly know a man who is as big as the myth.

Being a huge fan, like so many others, of Ron’s breakthrough work on Captain America, I was in awe of his dead-on interpretation and dynamic drawing style. To then meet him and find out he was Captain America was quite a revelation. Ron is one of those rare people who just looks like a big, beefy, square-jawed super-hero. In a way, meeting him was like meeting one of the characters I’ve been reading since I was a kid.

Ron and I have always gotten along with our similar views of the potential for our art form, with an expectation for ourselves to always endeavor to do better. A very uncompromising view of right and wrong is something Ron carries over from his work, from the inspiration that comes from believing in this stuff. Our similar views, as well as how those views aren’t so commonplace in the people we work with and for, has made us two of a kind, so to speak. Don’t get me wrong now; Ron is a wild man and a far more impetuous force than me. I may have journeyed up the side of a mountain in Spain with the man, or caught part of the experience of his having physically debased one of comics’ businesspeople we all wanted to see humbled, but I know I have only been a passenger on the bullet train that is the life of Ron Garney. Ron is a cool guy to know. His evolution as an artist has been a joy to watch, knowing that when I see his Hulk, Superman, or Captain America, I see something very strongly of the man himself. Ron is a man’s man kind of guy who loves this creative, fanatical stuff just like anybody else, but he has the talent and drive to embody the comic book ideal in his work and his life. —Alex Ross

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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 a COMPREHENSIVE INTERVIEW (including influences and their views on graphic storytelling), DELUXE SKETCHBOOK SECTIONS, and more! And don’t miss the companion DVDs, showing the artists at work in their studios!

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MODERN MASTERS: IN THE STUDIO WITH MICHAEL GOLDEN DVD

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

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

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Due to circumstances beyond our control, we’ve been unable to complete our planned volume on Darwyn Cooke as originally scheduled. Please visit www.twomorrows.com for updates as they become available.

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RON GARNEY Ron Garney really knows how to tell a story. The same can be said of many comic book artists, but few do it with as much style and panache as Garney. He can draw cinematic blockbuster action with the best of them, as his iconic runs on Captain America, Hulk, Wolverine, and Weapon X will attest. But he also excels at depicting the quiet moments. There is emotional nuance in his work, which elevates every story he illustrates, no matter if the subject matter is introspective or straight-ahead action. Combine this with his eagerness to experiment and his constant professionalism, and the result is Ron Garney, Modern Master! MODERN MASTERS is an ongoing series of books celebrating the lives and work of the greatest comic book artists of our time. ISBN-13: 978-1-60549-040-3 ISBN-10: 1-60549-040-7 51595

$15.95 In The US ISBN

978-1-60549-040-3

9 781605 490403