Modern Masters Vol. 28: Eric Powell by TwoMorrows Publishing

M O D E R N

M A S T E R S

ERIC

V O L U M E

T W E N T Y - E I G H T :

OWELL P

By Jorge Khoury and Eric Nolen-Weathington

Modern Masters Volume 28:

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- E I G H T:

ERIC POWELL If you’re viewing a Digital Edition of this publication,

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edited by Eric Nolen-Weathington and Jorge Khoury front cover by Eric Powell all interviews in this book were conducted by Jorge Khoury and transcribed by Steven Tice

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Dr. Raleigh, North Carolina 27614 www.twomorrows.com • e-mail: twomorrow@aol.com First Printing • June 2012 • Printed in Canada

www.twomorrows.com

Softcover ISBN: 978-1-60549-041-0 Trademarks & Copyrights All characters and artwork contained herein are ™ and ©2012 Eric Powell unless otherwise noted. Chimichanga, Mog, The Goon, Satan’s Sodomy Baby and all related characters ™ and ©2012 Eric Powell. Billy the Kid’s Old Timey Oddities ™ and ©2012 Eric Powell and Kyle Hotz. Batman, Bizarro, Bizarro Wonder Woman, Darkseid, Demon, Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane, Magpie, Poison Ivy, Superman, Swamp Thing, and all related characters ™ and ©2012 DC Comics. Bombu, Defenders, Devil Dinosaur, Dr. Strange, Elektro, Fantastic Four, Fin Fang Foom, Googam, Gorgilla, Hulk, Manoo, M.O.D.O.K., Monstrollo, Moonboy, Namor, Reed Richards, Silver Surfer, Spider-Man, Thing, Wolverine ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc. Madman ™ and © Mike Allred. The Spirit ™ and © Will Eisner Estate. Razor ™ and © Everette Hartsoe. Hellboy ™ and © Mike Mignola. Hard Boiled ™ and © Frank Miller and Geof Darrow. Bone ™ and © Jeff Smith. Temptress ™ and © Tom Sniegoski and Caliber Press. Pug Davis ™ and © Rebecca Sugar. Star Wars ™ and © Lucasfilm Ltd. Godzilla and all related characters ™ and © Toho Co., Ltd. Angel, The Simpsons ™ and © 20th Century Fox Film Corp. Bride of Frankenstein, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy © Universal Studios Licensing, LLLP. Conan ™ and © Conan Properties International LLC. Luca Brazi © Mario Puzo. Lord of the Rings © J.R.R. Tolkein. The Saturday Evening Post ™ and © The Saturday Evening Post Society. He-Man and the Masters of the Universe ™ and © Mattel, Inc. Editorial package ©2012 Jorge Khoury, Eric Nolen-Weathington, and TwoMorrows Publishing.

Dedication Para Sr. Eric Nolen-Weathington, mi amigo y mi colega. Ha cido un placer y un honor trabajar contigo en tu hogar, la seria de libros de Modern Masters. Muchisimas gracias por su apoyo y amistad. — Jorge

Acknowledgements Eric Powell, for all his time and for fighting the good fight in championing creator-owned comics.

Special Thanks Scott Allie, Heritage Auctions (www.ha.com), Ben Garant, Tom Sniegoski, Dave Stewart Rick McGee and the crew of Foundation’s Edge, and John and Pam Morrow

Modern Masters Volume Twenty-Eight:

ERIC POWELL Table of Contents Introduction by Robert Ben Garant. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Part One: A Guy Walks into a Book Signing… . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Interlude One: Tom Sniegoski . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Part Two: “It Ain’t the Name, It’s the Rep” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Interlude Two: The Gist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Part Three: The Goon Rides a Dark Horse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Interlude Three: Scott Alie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Part Four: Hollywood and the Big Two . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 Interlude Four: Dave Stewart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 Part Five: Storytelling and the Creative Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 Art Gallery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

Introduction (Here’s a tip for you, kids: if you want to grow up to be the “undisputed master of your genre,” it helps if you make up a brand new genre, all your own.) I often ask myself… why The Goon? Why did that tight-lipped puncher of zombies strike such a chord when it did? Was he a symbol of our times? Was it that inside every jaded, effete hipster there dwelled a great untamed id, an inner Goon, who longed to drink bathtub whiskey and beat the crap out of people and score with a curvy broad who was just no good? We may never know. And now, alas, we cannot ask the late Mr. Powell. When the publishers asked me to write something about Eric, as an introduction to this posthumous collection of his work, I said it would be an honor. A great, great honor. But, for the sake of principal, would there be any money involved? They said about forty, forty-five bucks. I said, well which is it? Is it forty, or forty-five? They said forty-five. I said they would have something in a few minutes. Yes. Eric may be dead, but—like the slack-jaws in the alley behind Norton’s Bar—he will sorta live forever, (and of course, sorta rot away gradually). He may be dead and buried, but we must not forget what he stood for.… Wait.… What? He’s not dead?…

eep in the mysterious cedar forests of the unexplored Cumberland Plateau, there once lived a great spinner of yarns. His name was Eric Powell. And it was from the whiskeysoaked trenches of his dark and troubled mind that sprang forth the iconic anti-anti-hero of our times, the man known only as… The Goon. The Tiger Woods of hitting zombies in the face with wrenches. I once had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Powell and observing him in his natural habitat. Very few nonnatives had ever climbed the Cumberland Plateau, and those who did came back with strange tales—stories of mythic beasts and moonshiners. Of backyard wrestlers, roller derbies, and zombie-like men walking around in a trance still unaware that the Civil War had ended and who had won.… So when I received an invitation to meet this man— this… legend, this misunderstood recluse—I snapped at the chance. I hired a guide, armed myself to the teeth, and headed into The Unknown. Turns out there were no mythic beasts up on the Cumberland Plateau. Just a lot of meth-heads and gas-huffers. Which kinda explains most of the tales of mythic beasts and stuff.… And at last, I found myself face to face with the one and only Eric Powell. He took me into his well-defended compound, he threw some gasoline and what looked like evidence bags onto the fire, and we had a nice fireside chat.

Oh… …Do I still get to keep the forty-five bucks? I do?

So… who was this Eric Powell, really? I learned he was a man who worked hard, played hard, and lived life to the fullest. And I don’t mean Richard Branson, skydive-and-see-the-world kinda lived life to the fullest—I mean more like Lynyrd Skynyrd drummer, drinks-a-lotof-Ripple-and-throws-firecrackers-at-people kinda lived life to the fullest. He came from humble beginnings, raised by blind sharecroppers in an abandoned Sudafed factory, brought up on rotgut and hate and the zombie movies of Lucio Fulci. And no one suspected that this quiet, strange, and very possibly dangerous young man would rise to become the undisputed master of his genre. And what was that genre? It was a genre of Bowery bums with lead pipes and undead carnies who’ll rip off your face for a plug nickel. Of talking spiders and zombie priests. Of sexy dames who reach down your throat to pull out your heart—only you don’t mind, ’cause it gives you a chance to look down her shirt at her Double-Ds. Of hobo jungles, and Flesh-Eating Eyes. Carnage and cleavage. Booze and bullets and a knife in the eye.

Anyway. I guess he’s still around so… a lot of what I said still stands. He wrote stuff, he was weird, and I guess he’s still around. Hooray for him. So now gentle reader, sit back and prepare to be entertained, aroused, and slightly confused by the tome before you. You’re gonna dig it. For the late, great Eric Powell is truly a master in his own right—and, like many of the characters in his dark tales, probably should have been buried a long time ago. I wish you all good health, long life, and a knife in the eye! Robert Ben Garant, Undisputed Master of playing Travis Junior on Reno 911!

Part 1:

A Guy Walks into a Book Signing...

MODERN MASTERS: How do you look back at your childhood? Is that pretty much what defines what you do today?

the trash, so I saw it and put it back in her room. [laughter] That’s a typical story of how I used to just terrorize her. MM: Would she often babysit you?

ERIC POWELL: I kind of think so. It’s weird. I’m sure everyone says this, but your childhood through high school really forms who you’re going to be down the road more than any other time in your life. Yeah, I had a pretty good childhood, but it’s weird. I grew up in the rural South, and to me this place has always been kind of creepy. It’s woods and sheds. Where I grew up looks like a backdrop for a ’70s slasher horror movie. But even when I think about it now, this time of year [November] makes me think even more about it. The Fall is a pretty vivid childhood memory, when the trees are all kind of scraggly and dead, and there are leaves on the ground. Just old ramshackle sheds and things like that, and playing around in old barns and stuff. And it’s just inherently creepy, and I think that atmosphere probably shaped the kind of content I find appealing.

ERIC: Yeah. We didn’t really have babysitters. Back then you got left home by yourself when you were kind of young and you could go down the highway sitting in the back of a pickup truck, which you can’t do now. MM: So the television became your babysitter? ERIC: Oh, yeah. I spent a lot of time sitting in front of the TV watching reruns of The Twilight Zone and The Andy Griffith Show. MM: What got you into art? Were you always artistically inclined? ERIC: I was always drawing. One of the last things my grandmother gave me before she passed away was a drawing I did as a very young kid. It’s the earliest drawing of mine I have. It’s Superman flying through the air, and a plane getting struck by lightning, on fire and stuff. I was probably three or four when I drew it. I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t drawing. I was always drawing and always making up stories to go with the drawings.

MM: Do you have other siblings?

MM: In school you were the “art guy”?

ERIC: Yeah, I have an older sister. [laughs] I could tell you a bunch of stories about how I tormented her as a kid. I have a twisted sense of humor, so my older sister took the brunt of lots of teasing. My room was right next to hers, so any time she would walk out I would sneak in there and take this one specific doll and move it around the room. Just subtly, at first, so she would start noticing that the thing had been moving. After a while it got to the point where she was like, “Are you moving the doll?” Of course I denied it. “No, it’s not me. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She ended up throwing it away. But it was my job to take out

ERIC: Yeah, especially in junior high and high school. T-shirts and posters for my friends who had bands—stuff like that. I was always the guy they came to. Sometimes it got me in trouble, because I would [laughs] draw little things I probably wasn’t supposed to. I remember one time one of my teachers’ rooms had, I don’t remember if it was the presidents or something lining the top of the room, but I think I drew Pinhead and stuck it up there with them. She went a long time without seeing it. And when they were electing class 6

Previous Page: Eric drew this preliminary Superman sketch in preparation for his three-issue run on Action Comics. This image was used as a starting point for the cover of Action Comics #855. Left: A Defenders illo from Eric’s sketchbooks. Below: A Spider-Man pencil sketch from Eric’s sketchbooks

Superman ™ and © DC Comics. Defenders, Dr. Strange, Hulk, Namor, Silver Surfer, Spider-Man ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

presidents I drew Judge Death from Judge Dredd in a “Judge Death for President” poster, a kind of gory poster. Some of the students were allowed to work in the school office, so a friend of mine who was working in the office stuck it in the office window with the other posters, and it was up there for a while before any of the faculty noticed it, so we kind of got in trouble for that. MM: Did you ever think of studying film at any point, or was comics it for you? ERIC: I really wanted to do special effects make-up at one point, but being in the middle of Tennessee.... When you live just outside of Nashville and you’ve never really been out of the state very much, going to Hollywood and learning how to do make-up, effects, and stuff didn’t really seem very realistic. MM: We were growing up in a time when there were guys making it look like you could do it. If you look at Clerks, you’d think, “Anyone can do that.” It wasn’t inconceivable. Robert Rodriguez wrote that book [Rebel without a Crew: Or How a 23-Year-Old Filmmaker with $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player] where for $5,000 you could make your own film. ERIC: That stuff came right as I was getting out of school; I didn’t really catch on to any

of that while I was in school. So to me it seemed like making films was just unachievable. I thought you had to have some special “in” somewhere so that you could get into a school that would teach you that. Or that it was a tradecraft, like you would have to live in the same town that Rick Baker lived in and then somehow know him, and then he would teach you and you would get a job. I felt like it wasn’t something that you could discover how to do yourself and just work to achieve. You had to somehow mysteriously fall into it. I never really thought directing a movie or doing special effects would really ever be anything that would happen, so it wasn’t anything that I ever tried to pursue. MM: What made you think comics were achievable, that you could get to Marvel or DC? ERIC: It just seemed simpler, because I would read a magazine about comics, and the guy is like, he’s working at home, he’s sending in 7

the pages, all that going through FedEx. I could do that. I could draw at home and FedEx pages to the publisher and I wouldn’t have to live in New York or L.A. or anything like that. So it seemed more achievable, and the fact that I could do it all by myself—I didn’t need a film crew to go out and make something. I could sit at my table and pencil and ink a comic and not need any other assistance. It just seemed like an easier goal to reach. Plus, I loved comics, and I’m kind of introverted, so the idea of sitting in my room by myself and doing a book seemed appealing and less stressful than trying to go out and do something else. MM: When did it become obsessive that you wanted to get into comics? Straight out of high school? ERIC: Well, I’m one of those guys that grew up with comics and just let it go and rediscovered it later on. When I was in junior high I had this friend, Andy Day, who was into comics. I can’t remember what books he loaned me, but I’m drawing all this crazy, weird stuff, and he goes, “Do you like comics?” And I said, “Well, I don’t have any, but,

yeah, I kind of like comics.” And he started telling me about this stuff he was reading, and it was so—this was after Dark Knight Returns and comics were getting grittier. I found it really cool, so he started letting me borrow some. And then another friend of mine who liked to draw, he let me borrow Aliens vs. Predator and Hard Boiled. I saw Hard Boiled and, just, “Oh, my God. You don’t let your parents see this, right? How the hell did you even buy this?” It really blew me away, because as a teenage boy there’s nothing better than an über-violent, crazy, oversexed comic, y’know? I didn’t even know anything like that existed. It blew me away. And then I was really getting into the Bernie Wrightson stuff. At that time he was doing Batman: The Cult. There are so many great books that I look back on from that time. Even if they weren’t done specifically at that time, I was just discovering them then. Like The Killing Joke and Brian Bolland’s other work, like his Judge Dredd stuff, and that Kent Williams and Jon J. Muth Havok and Wolverine mini-series. MM: Who was the first artist you recognized by his art? ERIC: That was Bernie Wrightson, because an uncle of mine had a bunch of Swamp Thing comics just sitting in his basement. 8

That sounds creepy, but it’s not. [laughs] He had a bunch of Swamp Thing comics sitting in this little woodworking area in his basement, and I would go down there and play with my cousins and look through these comics. The style of it automatically drew me in. You’ve got all the light work that he does in there and all the feathering. All of my love for the EC stuff, and Frazetta, and Wally Wood, Jack Davis, and all the stuff that really influences me sprouted from Bernie Wrightson. I really got into Bernie, and I read stuff about him and his influences, and I just started looking for that stuff. It all flowered out from Bernie Wrightson. MM: You certainly appreciate the way they used to do comics, like, the way Frazetta and Williamson would do comics, in that they’d sketch it out, and then they’d pose and photograph it, and then they’d draw it. It’s a long, tedious process, I guess, to the guys today to do comics that way. ERIC: I don’t even think it’s that thought out. The process is not what hits me about it. It’s just that immediate impact of looking at the image. People just have different tastes, and that’s what I’m drawn to. I don’t know why. Will Eisner, Jack Davis, Wally Wood, Frazetta, Williamson, all that stuff. I think I just appreciate that those guys are real artists. You look at their work, they know the anatomy. They distort it, but they really know the stuff, and there’s something about the way that they ink the pages. That classic comic art just appeals to me. MM: You didn’t go to art school. Were there any key art books that you read that helped you? ERIC: Well, I think the thing that really helps me is that I’m kind of overly analytical. I really look at something and try to see how it works, and I think that I applied that to art. I really studied and looked at a lot of different kinds of art. Something that’s also helped me is that I didn’t just study comic art. I’m not being as repetitious as some people, I think, just because I looked at other types of art. I had a high school art teacher who really got me into the Renaissance painters. He was always letting me borrow his art books, so I was looking at the way they did things. And I’m a big [Norman] Rockwell fan, so I studied a lot of his work. And then I mixed comics with that, just experimenting and studying other people’s work and not limiting myself to comics. MM: What about the comics that were coming out when you were in high school, like the Jim Lee work and the Image style? Did that do anything for you? ERIC: Oh, yeah, it did. I was right along with everybody else buying all the big stuff of the day, the Jim Lee and Todd McFarlane stuff.

Previous Page: Two of the big, early influences on Eric: Hard Boiled (issue #1 shown here) and Swamp Thing as drawn by Bernie Wrightson (original art for page 13 of issue #10 shown here). Above: In 2006, Eric began a nine-issue run as the cover artist for Swamp Thing. Shown here are the pencils for the cover of issue #24 of the series. Left: Sketch idea for the cover of Swamp Thing #29, Eric’s last issue and the final issue of the series. Swamp Thing ™ and © DC Comics. Hard Boiled ™ and © Frank Miller and Geof Darrow.

Bottom Left: The beginnings of The Goon harken back to the early ’90s and this first drawing of a kid monster Eric named Mog. You can really see the influence of Todd McFarlane in Eric’s early work. Bottom Right: A short time later Mog evolved into a half-human/halfogre monster hunter and picked up a sidekick. Next Page: Definitely not John Byrne’s Wolverine! A drawing from Eric’s sketchbooks.

Mog ™ and © Eric Powell. Wolverine ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Todd McFarlane was a big draw to me at the time. His stuff was really fluid and crazylooking, which was really appealing. Now, where Hard Boiled was really appealing to that teenage kid, I still appreciate Hard Boiled and love it. I’ll always be nostalgic about the Todd McFarlane stuff I liked when I was a teenager, but I don’t pull it out and go, “Wow!” I don’t look at it for inspiration. Not to put it down or anything, it’s just, I kind of grew out of that stuff. When you’re a kid you want McDonald’s. When you’re an adult you want filet mignon. MM: It had its day. ERIC: It had its day. People rag on some of that stuff. I mean, Rob Liefeld catches a lot of heat. That poor guy has become the scapegoat of bad comics. But somebody was buying those comics. He didn’t make himself famous. MM: Where did you get such a grounded point of view? Because you didn’t want to do X-Men. I mean, you wouldn’t have minded the work, but that wasn’t your long-term goal. Your goal was to create comics, not to just pencil X-Men. ERIC: When I started out, I really wanted to do that stuff. But it was always a fifty-fifty thing in the beginning. I was always drawing my own characters, and I wanted to do my own book, but at the same time, it was like, “Oh, it’d be so great to draw Spider-Man,” or

do this or that. But I quickly found out, as I started getting more work in comics and I got to actually work on some of those titles that I was excited about, it wasn’t really as fun as I thought it would be. If your goal in life is to draw X-Men, and you want to draw John Byrne’s X-Men, you can’t do that. It doesn’t exist anymore. John Byrne’s X-Men only existed when John Byrne was doing it. So if I get to draw X-Men, I’m just doing a derivative of John Byrne’s X-Men, which is not the same thing. And the storylines have moved on, the characters have changed. Oh, and, by the way, you have people telling you what you have to do, so you’re not really getting to do that classic comic that you always dreamed about doing. You’re doing a knock-off. And I’ve never felt that way doing my own book. When I’m doing my own book, it’s just 100% fun, because I’m doing my own ideas, I’m doing what I want to do, and I don’t feel like I’m just following in someone’s footsteps. I’m doing my own work. MM: Did you have any friends that were looking to get into comics, any fellow artists? Because there’s a big scene now in Tennessee. Or there was. ERIC: Yeah. There were several artists here. We were all trying to break into comics at the same time. There was Mike Norton and Shawn Alexander— MM: How did you guys find each other?

ERIC: I was kind of the outsider. I lived outside of Nashville. They were Nashville guys; they all knew each other. We met each other through small, local conventions and stuff. They worked together a little bit and hung out, and I was just a guy who would see them from time to time. And I’m the only one left here, I think. I don’t know if there’s anyone else in Tennessee doing comics right now. MM: Were they encouraging you to go pro in the mid-’90s? ERIC: Yeah, I think we were all encouraging each other to go pro. I think I was the first one to land a paying job. I did some work on Razor for London Night Studios, and it felt like a big deal even though it wasn’t, because I was going, “Yeah, hey! Look, I did a comic and I got paid! Whoa!” It felt like a big deal to me. And then everybody slowly moved away, and Mike moved to Chicago. I’m not sure where Jason moved to, California or something. MM: When you started, did you give yourself a timeframe, like, “If I don’t make it in a year or two, I’m going to quit comics and do something else?” ERIC: I didn’t have a time limit on it. I was just trying to figure out what I was going to do with myself if it didn’t work, because I had no real idea. “Well, I guess I’ll go back to working construction, or I’ll mop floors, or something.” I didn’t really have a Plan B.

MM: Did you do a lot of samples? How did you get your portfolio out? Were you rejected a lot in the beginning?

MM: Did you have pressure from your parents? “What are you going to do with your life?”

ERIC: Oh, yeah. I was rejected a ton. I was doing samples all the time, mailing them out to every company out there: Marvel, DC, Dark Horse. I don’t even remember what other publishers were out at that time, but I was sending stuff to everybody. Got nothing but rejection.

ERIC: No, they were pretty supportive. They didn’t pressure me too much. They stuck by me through the whole thing. MM: But your then-wife was pregnant, right? That was pressure.

MM: I’m sure you were looking at the books that were coming out and saying to yourself, “I’m better than a lot of these guys.”

ERIC: Yeah, my girlfriend and I got pregnant right out of high school, so there was that added pressure. I was thinking about going to school at the Memphis College of Art, but having a baby on the way, I couldn’t see living that far away. It’s about a six-hour drive. I couldn’t see how I could afford to take them with me to Memphis to go to school, and I couldn’t see going to school and leaving them behind, so that kind of got knocked out of the equation. I got a couple of jobs, and I did any kind of artwork I could come across while trying to break into comics.

ERIC: Yeah. Near the end, right before I started getting work, I was doing a few samples, and it was really clear that I was better than—I can honestly say that now. I have such a low self-opinion that sometimes it’s like, “Maybe I just suck and I don’t see it.” But now that I look back on it and I can honestly critique the work, at the time there were several Marvel books coming out that I definitely could have done a better job on. 11

MM: In the mid-1990s I was an intern at Marvel, and I was looking at your Razor work thinking half of the guys at Marvel couldn’t draw that well.

ERIC: Yeah, which is the dumbest thing to ever tell anybody. I mean, it’s ridiculous. I’ve luckily survived in this business for 15 years or so now, and the only way I was able to put food on the table over that time was by being able to take any work that came my way. Telling someone that they should only pencil or only ink is stupid. You don’t really see people saying that anymore. You don’t see anyone telling artists that they need to learn how to do one thing, and one thing only. You see so much stuff like that in this business. If you had to grade the overall intelligence scale of this industry, it would be pretty low. There’s a lot of backwards thinking.

ERIC: I had just gotten a pretty nasty rejection letter from Marvel, and then I saw some fill-in artist on a Marvel book that was so bad, so horribly bad. And I’m like, “This guy got paid for this! I’m begging these guys for work and can’t get a job.” I’m definitely one of those people who thinks you have to be your own worst critic. You have to put yourself down more than any editor will, because you’ll never grow if you don’t. If you don’t pick your own work apart, you’re not going to get any better. But in that instance I can say they were wrong. It was just bad.

MM: Did these things start making you selfconscious about the industry? Like, “Maybe they’re right? What am I doing wrong?”

MM: Wasn’t there was an editor at Marvel or DC that made you draw some sample pages, and then, when you turned it in, they criticized it to death?

ERIC: I had a weird, self-deprecating opinion, and at the same time I had a weird confidence. I don’t know how you combine those two. Like, “You suck! But you can do this!” I don’t know how that works. When I know something, I have enough confidence to put my foot down on that. But when I look at my work, I overly critique it and myself. So when I got rejection letters, I automatically thought, “Oh, wow, I suck. They’re right, I suck.” But when I hear someone say, “You should only pencil,” or, “You should only ink,” I’m like, “You’re an idiot.” [laughter] Why? Why? That’s like telling a director, “You should learn how to cast people, but you shouldn’t learn composition or cinematography, because you don’t really need to know any of that. The cinematographer will take care of all that stuff.” It’s ridiculous. I didn’t understand that at all.

ERIC: I had sent in some samples, and I got a letter back from a submissions editor along with a script—that was the first time that had ever happened. He sent me a script and said, “Hey, you need to work on this, this, and this. Here’s a sample script. Do some work on it, send it back to me, and let’s see what it looks like.” And I was just like, “Oh, my God! I’m going to show him I can turn this around, and that I’m reliable and I’m fast.” So I sat down with the sample script and drew the pages and did the best I could on them in a short amount of time. I think I FedEx-ed them to him just to show that I could stick to a deadline or that I was fast, thinking that would help me get a job. And he tore me apart for sending it back too fast. He said, “Why are you sending this back to me immediately? You should be working on this stuff.”

MM: When you have to review somebody’s portfolio, do you remember the ordeal you went through? “I’ve got to give these guys my time.”

MM: Did you had editors telling you to either pencil or ink, that you couldn’t do both? 12

MM: So that’s how you got your foot in the door! You needed to network, you needed a connection.

ERIC: Yeah, I’m horrible at that. Everyone should know that if you ever show me your work, you’re getting a horrible critique. Because I can’t do it! I can’t give someone an honest appraisal. I mean, what I’ll do is just go through and try to encourage them and go, “This looks good. This looks good. This looks good. You’re pretty good at this. You might want to try working on this.” But I can’t do it, because I’ve had those really negative reviews, and I know how it just rips your heart out, and I have a hard time doing it to other people. MM: When you finally got that four-issue story with London Night Studios, how long did it take to do that work? Did you have the self-discipline to handle that workload? ERIC: Yeah, because I was so driven to do it. I wasn’t one of these guys that was like, “Hey, I’m going to do some comics after I play videogames today.” I was so driven to do comics that I pretty much just jumped into it and tried my best to maintain a decent schedule. I believe those were on a monthly schedule. MM: Who helped you get that assignment? That was through Tom Sniegoski? ERIC: Thomas Sniegoski, yeah.

ERIC: Exactly. None of this stuff happened because I sent in a submission and a submission editor said, “Oh, this guy’s pretty good. Let’s give him a job.” I actually met Tom because Bernie Wrightson was doing a store signing in Nashville, and at the time Tom was writing Vampirella. I think it was around October, because the store was doing some kind of horror tie-in or something, so it was going to be the creators from Vampirella and Bernie Wrightson signing at this store in Nashville. I loved Bernie Wrightson, so I was like, “Oh, I’ve gotta go meet Bernie Wrightson!” I took my portfolio hoping he would take a look, and he agreed to, and I put it up there on the table. Tom likes telling this story. I don’t remember this happening, but this is the way Tom tells it. He says I walked up to the table all slumped like I was defeated and just plopped it down in front of Bernie and said, “Will you tell me if I have a chance?” [laughter] Bernie started looking at the stuff and was like, “Hey, this is pretty good.” And Tom was kind of looking over his shoulder while he was flipping the pages, and Tom gave me his card. I think it was within a week or two Tom had lined up that Razor story arc for us. MM: It had everything you liked, right? Horror, girls, and blood. [laughs] ERIC: Yeah, well, I think the things I draw the worst are pretty people. It was hard to draw a hot chick. I’m not too sure how well I did on that. 13

Previous Page: After being repeatedly told by editors that he should pencil or ink, but not both, Eric drew up this Mog sample page of only pencils. Above: Eric’s first professional gig was penciling a four-issue arc of Razor Uncut, where he got to draw monsters (in the form of werewolves) but also had to learn to draw “hot chicks.” As to be expected, Eric wasn’t yet comfortable drawing pretty women, and while there is some inconsistency in that regard throughout the story arc, Eric did a much better job than he gives himself credit for. A page and panel from his first issue, Razor Uncut #32, are shown here. Mog ™ and © Eric Powell. Razor ™ and © Everette Hartsoe.

Below: Original art for Razor Uncut #34, page 20. Next Page: Eric’s first jobs for Dark Horse, the eventual home of The Goon, were fill-in issues of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and Angel for editor Scott Allie. Pencils for Angel #8, page 12.

Razor ™ and © Everette Hartsoe. Angel ™ and © 20th Century Fox Film Corp.

MM: I think it came out pretty good. The werewolves looked great. ERIC: Yeah, the werewolves, that’s the easy stuff. I can draw the monsters. MM: What about having Wrightson review your portfolio and say you were all right? Did that mean a lot to you at that point? ERIC: Oh, it was huge, because up until that point I had gotten nothing but negative comments, really. I had never gone to a big convention, I’d never really gotten any kind of exposure to other comic book artists or the industry or anything. And the only other critique I got from a comic book professional

was that I would never work in comics. I’m not going to name the name, but I met an inker at another tiny, local convention, and I said, “Will I ever work in comics?” and he said, “No, you’ll never work in comics.” And I had to agree with his opinion at that time. If someone had shown me that portfolio, I would have to agree with it. But I was also a 13-year-old kid, so that’s a little harsh for a critique of a 13-year-old. MM: Once you got Razor, could you survive on the page rates? I can’t imagine they were that great. ERIC: The page rates weren’t great, but I was doing enough work, and I had enough freelance art projects on the side that I could just get by. I was able to make a very meager living. MM: Were some of those covers painted, or was that just a blurred computer effect? ERIC: That was all painted. Some of it was airbrushed. None of that stuff was done from photos. There was also a nude variant cover— that was their big deal. They always used to do variant covers. This was in the ’90s, when those “bad girl” books were popular. MM: Was it satisfying to finally get published? Did you show the comics to your parents and your friends? ERIC: Yeah. It was weird. “Mom, I’m doing it! I did this! I’m not sure I want you to see it.” Because, you know, there were ads in the back for the nude variant covers, and all the T&A in it and everything. It was kind of like—bringing it back as an example of being a director— “We’re going to do movies,” and then your first paying job is doing Skinemax porn. MM: Hey, you gotta start somewhere. ERIC: Yeah, and I was very grateful. I’m still very grateful to London Night, Everette Hartsoe, for giving me my first job. He’s got a little bit of a rough reputation for not paying some of his creators, [laughs] but he paid me for those first books, and I still appreciate it. MM: Where did you want to go after you were done with those four issues? What was the plan? To try Marvel and DC again? ERIC: With Tom’s help, I started getting a lot of independent work. So I was just seeing

what would come. There was always that feeling in the back of my mind that if I wanted to keep doing this stuff that eventually I’d get offered some big Marvel gig, or some big DC gig, and it’d be my breakout moment. But I was always scribbling down ideas for my own books and my own characters. I always thought that those would come about after I got the big Marvel break. You know, “I’ll draw some big X-Men project, and then after I become famous I’ll get to do my own book.” It obviously didn’t work out that way.

comments like, “Oh, that Eric Powell guy, he’s really hit or miss. Some of his stuff looks good, and some of it just looks like crap.” And that hurt me emotionally, because, “Wait! I did that book in a week-and-a-half because I was trying to help them out!” Y’know? So that’s something I learned: It’s not necessarily a good thing to rush a project thinking it’s going to help you out down the road, because everything you put out there has your name on it. MM: Was he the first editor you built a relationship with?

MM: But even after you got your first book, you had some lean years. You couldn’t make a living inking Angel.

ERIC: Yeah, working with Scott on the Buffy and the Angel stuff.

ERIC: It was very hit and miss. It was an emotional roller coaster, because when you’re working freelance you’re always going to have those moments when money’s rolling in and you’re feeling good about yourself, and then, two months later, you can’t get a job, and you’re scraping your paintings together just trying to pay bills. I actually started getting some inking work for Marvel. I did a few little projects here and there, and I wiggled my way into Dark Horse doing some fill-in issues for Buffy and Angel, which I was not suited for at all. Like I said, I’m least talented at drawing really attractive people in hip clothing.

MM: Wasn’t Scott the guy who brought The Goon to Dark Horse?

MM: Scott Allie was the editor of those Angel books. Was he impressed with what you were doing in those early days? ERIC: There were a few issues that I believe I did a good job on, and I believe he liked them, too. I screwed myself at one point; I think this led to the end of the Angel stuff. I filled in for another artist, and it was like, “You have a week-and-a-half to pencil this book. Can you do it? We’ll put six inkers on you.” I thought I was doing them a favor. “Oh, some other artist let you down. I’ll come in and step in and do this book for you, and then, since I’ve taken the bullet for you here, you’ll give me more work down the road.” Well, when you do a book in a week-and-a-half.... MM: It looks like it was done in a week-anda-half. ERIC: Well, yeah. So I did the book, it looked like crap, and then— MM: They stopped calling? ERIC: Kind of, yeah. I think Scott got a complaint about the book looking bad, and I know for a fact some people started making 15

Below: One of Eric’s first sample pages after switching from inking with a crow quill pen to inking with a brush. Next Page: A 1995 Mog illustration that was likely one of the pieces in Eric’s portfolio he showed to Tom Sniegoski and Bernie Wrightson. Mog ™ and © Eric Powell.

ERIC: Well, he was definitely a big part of getting it to Dark Horse. I don’t know how the inner workings went, but I did pitch it to them. They rejected it initially, which everybody did, and then I started self-publishing it. When it came out, everyone at Dark Horse started reading it. Scott was like, “We’ve gotta do this book,” and he went in and put it in front of Richardson, and Mike really liked it. MM: You’ve said that one of the biggest things you did was changing the way you inked when you went from a pen to a brush on The Goon. That was a key move, because it gave The Goon a more classic appearance and made the art really stand out.

ERIC: I think switching to a brush from a pen really came from, “I want to be like Bernie Wrightson, so I’m gonna ink with a brush and put all this feathering and stuff in there.” I think the stuff started looking too much like Bernie, so I pulled back from that, because I didn’t want to be one of those guys that was just aping another guy’s style. But inking with a brush, it was just like an athlete having to train. It was part of training myself as an artist. You have to have so much more control with a brush than with a pen. Everything in my work just started clicking during that time, because I was starting to put in the hours, and I was getting the control to start putting better stuff on paper. MM: In the early 2000s, were you starting to realize that you needed control over everything, that if you were going to get your name out there, you needed to write, and draw, and do everything? ERIC: Yeah, well, [laughs] that was out of necessity, too. I was doing all this inking work, just trying to pay the bills, and waiting for the big project to come along. Then the Dark Horse job where I did a really crappy job led to me not getting as many calls from them; everything started drying up. So I was left with the options of, “I’m going to have to do something else, or it’s time to really try to do my own book.” I never really felt like I was getting a chance to show off what I could do with the work I was getting offered. I felt like I was capable of doing more. Like I said, I wasn’t playing to my strengths on the Buffy stuff. I wasn’t good at that stuff. I needed to do something where I could show off in the areas where I thought I was the best. Writing Goon just came out of that. “I’m only going to put the things in there that I want to do.” And I think you can read those first few issues of The Goon and you can see that. [laughs] They’re not the greatest books in the world. MM: Yeah, but you had to start somewhere. ERIC: Exactly, yeah, I had to start somewhere. And it’s all sprouted from that.

Interlude 1:

Tom Sniegoski

lifted his portfolio and said, “Would you please look at this for me and tell me if I have a chance?” He just looked like, “Can you just tell me something? Am I wasting my time?” He just had that look. I will always look at portfolios. I love looking at portfolios. I love to see what new talent might be hiding out there, so I was more than happy to do that. But I saw this stuff that was just blowing my mind. It was really, really nice. He would probably say it wasn’t all that good, but I gotta tell you something. I had done a lot of work in independent comics, and I’d worked with a lot of up and coming guys. This stuff just blew me away. Now, as I’m opening the portfolio, he’s telling me he’d sent copies of his work to all the major publishers multiple times, sent follow-up letters, and he couldn’t get anybody to even respond. He’d just told me this seconds earlier, but as I started flipping these pages all of that was completely gone from my head, and I was like, “Who are you working for now?” He said, “Nobody. I can’t get anybody to talk to me.” I was literally dumbfounded, because he had such a unique look, but at the same time ridiculously familiar. All I could think of were people like Mike Ploog and a lot of the old horror artists from EC. Throw in a little Sam Kieth, throw in a little Jack Kirby. You know what I mean? It was just really exciting. Bernie was right next to me, so I said, “Bernie, look at this.” I slide it over to Bernie, and Bernie’s flipping through it saying, “Wow, this stuff is really nice. Who are you working for?” “Nobody. I can’t get anybody to respond to my letters.” Ed came over and was praising it up and down. I actually saw a glimmer of, “Oh, my God. This is great. Somebody’s actually talking to me.” [laughs]

MM: What do you remember about meeting Eric?

TOM SNIEGOSKI: What’s interesting is that when I first met him he hadn’t gotten any work yet. I was doing a signing with Bernie Wrightson [in 1995], and I believe Ed McGuinness was there, too. This was one of Ed’s first signing tours, and we’d been flown down there. Ed and I were promoting Vampirella, because Ed had just done an issue or two of the regular series with me. This guy approached the table with a portfolio. His wife was with him, holding a baby. I believe that was Eric’s first child, Gage. He really looked sad. That’s the one thing I remember. He’ll poo-poo it, though. He looked as though the world had been pulled out from underneath him. He just looked really bad. I said to him, “Hey, how are you doing? What’s going on? Blah, blah, blah.” He just stood there for a minute, then

MM: You gave him hope. TOM: How could you not? As a writer working in comics and trying to do all kinds of different projects, I saw him as the golden egg. So I gave him all my information right away and took information from him. When I got back to Massachusetts I was on the phone with him a day or two later saying, “What do you want to do? Let’s do something.” How could I let this go to waste? We did up all kinds of crazy character designs for original ideas I had, but the first work—I had been doing some work for London Night Studios on a book 17

Below: In 1997 Tom and Eric collaborated on Temptress: The Blood of Eve, a two-issue series for Caliber Press. Next Page: Pencils and inks for the opening splash page of Marvel Monsters: Devil Dinosaur, along with pencils for a panel from the story.

Temptress ™ and © Tom Sniegoski and Caliber Press. Devil Dinosaur, Moonboy ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

called Razor. It was a good girl book. It was fun; it was a check; it was a way to pay the mortgage. But when I showed Everette Hartsoe—the guy who owned the company and created Razor—Eric’s artwork, his response was the exact same response as mine and Bernie’s and Ed’s. “Oh, my God. Let’s get him on a book.” Within, I don’t think it was even two weeks of meeting him, he was doing a story with me for London Night. We did a Razor storyline about werewolves.

TOM: Oh, completely. But what’s so interesting is that even after that, when he started to go to conventions, I could see people not knowing how to respond to it. I don’t know if it was because of the fact it had a uniqueness to it and it didn’t look like the flavor of the month. I was always dumbfounded by the reactions he got initially. It was like they didn’t get it. It was so frustrating.

MM: Looking at that artwork and comparing it to most of the guys working at Marvel and DC at that time, he was just as good.

TOM: Yeah, I could definitely see it. Again, there were setbacks, like when he was trying to decide what to do with The Goon. He wanted somebody to publish The Goon, but couldn’t find anybody. I had some connections with some guys at Image at the time. I think it was at a Chicago Con that I brought him over to the guy I knew—whose name escapes me; he got out of comics—and Jim Valentino, and yet again there was this, “Oh, we really like this! This is fabulous! But, hmm, I’m not sure how people are going to react to it. We have to think of a way to present it to them.” And they were coming up with all this crazy nonsense. It was the idea that people wouldn’t react to it, that people wouldn’t be as impressed as me and lots and lots of other people were by what they were seeing on the page. He left that convention pretty depressed, and I believe that was when he decided to take out a loan and did the first issue of The Goon through Albatross Exploding Funny Books. He’d had a little bit of a run-in with Avatar prior to that with the original printing. He didn’t care for that at all. [laughs] Dark Horse turned it down, and he was hoping Image would be the savior. When that didn’t happen he was pretty depressed. I think the decision to take out a loan was a good one. [laughs]

MM: Could you see him getting more confident with each issue?

MM: How has he changed over the years since you’ve known him? TOM: He’s still the same guy. He’s probably a little bit more confident sometimes. He still has that, “Nah, I really don’t like that.” He’ll send me artwork and he’ll say, “Yeah, that’s all right,” and I’m like, “No, that kicks ass! That’s amazing!” He’s very, very hard on himself still. MM: What I like about him is that he’s very strong-willed. He’s very focused on his book and not looking at Marvel and DC and whatever money they’re throwing at him. 18

TOM: Oh, yeah. He’s a really strong voice for that creator-owned mentality. He firmly believes in his work.

MM: You still keep up with him? TOM: Oh, yeah. I haven’t talked with him as much as we used to talk. We used to talk two, three times a week. But with his schedule, my schedule, we don’t get to talk as often as we’d like to, but we still touch base.

MM: The last time you worked with him was on the Marvel Monsters project. TOM: That was a blast. That was so fun. For one thing, we’re both huge Kirby nuts, which is why when they called him and asked him if he wanted to do a Devil Dinosaur one-shot, he called me up immediately and said, “You’d hate me if I didn’t call you about this.” I was like, “Oh, my God! This will be so much fun!” And it was; it was amazing.

MM: Do you get a sense of pride in knowing that you were able to help him get into the comics industry? TOM: The one thing about Eric is I can look at him professionally and see what an amazing job he does on his books, his covers, and whatever else he’s working on. But I can also look at him as a fan. I mean, I love his work. I’m standing here in my living room looking at framed artwork of his. His stuff just blows me away. He’s just an amazing artist.

MM: You guys plotted that together? TOM: Pretty much. I would throw out an initial idea, and then he would tweak my visuals. [laughter] He’s got amazing comedic timing with his visuals. 19

Part 2:

“It Ain’t the Name, It’s the Rep”

MM: What’s your earliest memory of the Goon? Where did he come from?

profile shot of him with the big buckteeth, and then I did another drawing with his giant hand holding out a pistol, and that was the very first drawing I ever did on him. I did a little synopsis of a story breakdown which was much more serious than what the book ended up being. It was all about this mob enforcer. It’s kind of like Luca Brasi from The Godfather except in reverse. It wasn’t his thug that was assassinated, it was his boss who was assassinated, and then he goes on a killing rampage to get revenge for his boss’ death. And I was just like, “That’s too serious. I want this to be funny and fun, and I want to have fun drawing it,” so I made it a little bit crazier.

ERIC: Well, I remember doing the first drawing. The whole idea actually came from just the word “goon.” I was trying to think of a creator-owned thing to do, because I just felt like I wasn’t getting to do the stuff that I was good at and wanted to show what I could do. I had this thing I was doing, which was this ogre character that got sentenced to Earth, on probation or something like that, to hunt down monsters. It was a pretty weak idea. At one point I drew a flat cap on him, but it wasn’t like a 1930s look, it was more of like a punk rock look. He had a leather jacket on, and I just put a flat cap on him. He had long hair sticking out of it and stuff. I thought that looked cool, but I didn’t like the character. One day I was just doodling around and working on some stuff, and I was thinking of all the stuff that I like—gangster movies, the 1930s, and all that stuff. The word “goon” just popped into my head, and I wondered if there was already a character called Goon. Pretty common slang term for a bad guy. But apparently not. I just started drawing this big, long-armed guy in a wife-beater with a flat cap on. I don’t know why, but for some reason I put these giant buckteeth on him. [laughs] It was like, “Oh, no one will have the balls to put buckteeth on their main character, because it looks so goofy and stupid.” I did three little drawings on one piece of paper. One was just a back shot, so it was his silhouette. I stole the pose from a Frazetta painting with some kind of a demon silhouette against the moon. I stole that pose and just drew this big, long-armed thug with a flat cap on, and beside that drawing I did a

MM: And this was all in the mid-’90s? ERIC: Yeah, it was somewhere between ’94 and ’96. I don’t remember exactly. MM: So you spent five years thinking of stuff, developing this character? When you started at Avatar, did you have enough of the landscape ready? ERIC: With Avatar, I gave them the first issue a year before the book even came out, so by the point that the first issue did come out, I already had ideas for stuff. I’d been thinking about it for quite a while. MM: You waited a year for it to come out? ERIC: There was some reasoning they had behind it. They were going to do a bunch of new books or something, and I think that had something to do with it. I don’t remember the exact reasoning, but I sure remember waiting a long time for it. MM: Did you pitch them a series? ERIC: Yeah, it was supposed to be a series, but it didn’t go that way, and we parted ways. 20

MM: What happened? Did you get any interest from the public for the book? Did you see people start coming up to you at shows telling you they read it? ERIC: Well, the book didn’t make a ton of money for them, because just starting out and doing a black-&-white independent comic, you’re not going to get a whole lot of sales. So I don’t begrudge them anything as far as that goes. We had some conflict over the quality of the production. I wasn’t happy with it, and it wasn’t making enough money for them to bump it up. I was pretty disappointed after waiting a year for it to come out and then having it on really not the best paper; the quality was pretty poor. So after three issues I decided to go in a different direction. MM: In those first Avatar issues you can see a heavy Mignola influence in the art. It looked like the Goon could have fit into that world.

ERIC: Well, he’s definitely a big influence, but I don’t see it in those issues. With all the little crosshatching stuff I was trying to do in the first few issues, I always thought it seemed more Bernie Wrightson-ish. MM: What happened after the problems at Avatar? ERIC: I had to wait for the contract to expire with Avatar before I could publish The Goon again. During that time I started doing work for Dark Horse on the Buffy comics and started doing some inking for Marvel. But then all of that dried up. And in hindsight it seems kind of weird how I had to wait out the contract just when I got some other work, and then the work ended right when I needed to start doing The Goon again. It was actually a pretty bleak time, because I really thought my career was over. MM: Why keep going with The Goon when it wasn’t a sensation right away? 21

Previous Page: Eric’s first sketches of The Goon. Above: The opening page of The Goon and a key page from the third issue which shows the source of Goon’s motivation—the death of his Aunt Kizzie. Though Eric only had three issues published by Avatar, his style evolved considerably during that time. Printing from the pencils when depicting flashback or dream sequences is a technique Eric continues to use in the series.

The Goon ™ and © Eric Powell.

ERIC: I didn’t think it was given a chance. Three poorly produced issues—not just from a production standpoint, but on my part, too. This was the first book I had ever written myself and put out there. Plus, I was still developing my art. It wasn’t the best stuff I’d ever done. It’s pretty painful for me to look at those three books. I don’t know... I just liked doing it. That’s the main thing. I like doing the comic, and I like the characters. And it was the only platform where I could do anything I wanted to do. MM: You just kept getting ideas for it?

Above: Design sketch of the giant zombie chimp that appears in The Goon vol. 1, #1. Right: Franky’s look didn’t come together as quickly as Goon’s, as shown in these early design sketches. Next Page Top: The first mention of Chinatown came at the end of the first issue. The basic story behind it was one of Eric’s first ideas for the series, though he didn’t get to tell the story until several years later. Next Page Bottom: Unused art intended for the cover of Eric’s first foray into self-publishing: The Goon Color Special. The Goon ™ and © Eric Powell.

ERIC: Exactly. I have a little notebook, and I get a funny idea and scribble it down. That’s the great thing about The Goon. If there’s something I want to draw—the issue I’m working on now, I wanted to draw a giant, demonic gorilla with glowing eyes. All right, I can work that in there somehow. MM: Anything goes on Lonely Street, right? You can have zombies, you can have aliens, and nobody’s going to be surprised. ERIC: Not only can I do that, I can do any tone of story I want to do. I can do a really off-the-wall Looney Tunes kind of episode, or I can do something like Chinatown, which is really somber. It’s just a great way to go back and forth and have a lot of freedom. MM: Do you see the Goon being an extension of your personality? Is he saying the stuff you want to say sometimes? ERIC: Oh, there’s definitely stuff in there I wanted to say to people. [laughs] I’ve never murdered anyone with a hammer, so I can’t say it’s too much of an extension of my personality, but I think anyone who writes anything, there’s always a little bit of themselves that they put into the characters. I vent in some ways in the comic. [laughs] I know that I vent a lot. There are some jokes in there that are aimed toward stuff that’s pissing me off at the time. 22

MM: The Goon can’t ever love a woman, because it will always be a downfall. ERIC: Yeah, he’s cursed. He’s cursed. The whole last story arc that I did before we just relaunched was about him realizing and expecting that he’s never going to be happy. And he’s come to the point where he’s like, “All right, that’s my lot. So be it.” MM: And Franky is just insane. There are no rules for him, are there? ERIC: He’s Joe Pesci from Goodfellas. He’s just going to stab you in the face with a pen. He’s extremely loyal to his friend and would kill for him. But that’s his only redeeming factor. [laughs] MM: When you started, did you have the idea that, “I could take this concept to a hundred issues”? Did you have your Goon stories mapped out?

ERIC: No, because it’s not a concept book. It’s really just the characters, and that’s the reason I can do so many weird things with it, because you take these characters who are defined and you look at them. You don’t even have to read anything that they say. The first time that you see them, you get the gist of what they’re about. You have the big, burly guy and a little, mean-looking sidekick with beady eyes, and you can almost hear the conversations already. It makes it easy for me. You take these two guys and you plop them down in any situation and you just let it go. The very first issue had a reference to Chinatown in it. The idea for Chinatown came from the first time I did a drawing of Goon and put scars on the side of his face. I was like, “Where did he get those? Oh, he got them from this bad thing that happened to him in Chinatown.” So stuff kind of snowballs from there, but it’s not like, “Here’s how the arc is going to go.” Of course, [laughs] I do have a Goon project that—I don’t know how to put it without giving stuff away. It kind of shows where things are going. It’s not like the story has a beginning, middle, and end, because that’s not really what I’m doing with it. I’m just letting the thing flow organically. But it is bleak. [laughs] The basis of the whole thing is that this is a town that has a curse on it, so nothing’s going to be happy. I’ll just say that. [laughs]

MM: Where’d you get the money to self-publish after Avatar? ERIC: I got a $5,000 loan from the bank. It was pretty frightening, actually, because I had no idea how I was going to pay it back. I was going to start mopping floors or something. Because, like I said, all my other work had dried up, and I got to the point where I felt, “I’ve got to give this one more shot, showing what I can do, and if it doesn’t work, I’ll at least know.” If I was going to go out, I was at least going to show people what I was capable of. And by that point in time I had become a better artist and a better writer, so the issues that I self-published were much stronger all the way around, and I think that’s really what propelled the book. MM: Did you set a plan for yourself, in terms of marketing, for how you were going to get the word out? Did you have a business plan? ERIC: Yeah, I did. I did some illustration work for a printer company that was trying to show off this new printer that they had just gotten. In exchange, I told them I didn’t want any money, just free printing. So I got a ton of color comics—the Albatross Color Special—printed up for free, and I just sent them out everywhere. I found the address of every comic shop I could and wrote a letter and sent those books out everywhere. I think that helped out a lot, because so much independent stuff gets put out there, and I can understand why it’s hard for shops to be able to order a lot of that stuff, because, along with all the good stuff that’s out there, there’s a lot of bad, and I’m sure they get burned a lot. I think it helped that the shops got to see the level of quality of the book before they decided whether they could sell it in their stores or not. MM: How much work did you have ready? When you got that $5,000, what did you do first? 23

Above: This panel from The Goon vol. 2, #1 is a prime example of Eric’s sophisticated sense of humor. Next Page: One of Eric’s more controversial moments of the series came with this scene from The Goon #26, where Goon tortures and kills Merle the werewolf in retribution for having been set up for an ambush.

The Goon ™ and © Eric Powell.

ERIC: I had it worked out where, as long as I broke even, I could get at least three issues out. And, fortunately, I did better than breaking even. I actually started to make a little money off of it, so it started snowballing right from the start. As soon as those first issues came out, the book seemed to get a buzz on the Internet. And then it just seemed to snowball. I only got, I guess, three or four issues out before Dark Horse said, “Hey, let’s do that book together.” MM: What’s the meaning behind the name of your company, Albatross? ERIC: I’m a big Monty Python fan. I wanted something that had the same crazy sound of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.” Plus, if you have an “A” in your name, you can get your company at the head of the catalog. That was totally a marketing thought. I had the idea “Exploding Funny Books,” and I thought it sounded cool. And then I thought, “Well, I need something that starts with an ‘A’ so I can get it into the front of the catalog.” I’m an Iron Maiden fan, and I always liked their song, “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” based on the poem. Plus, there’s the whole “albatross around your neck” thing, which was kind of how I was feeling. Taking out a loan with no idea how to pay it back was the albatross around my neck. At the same time there’s that Monty Python albatross bit. So I thought: Albatross Exploding Funny Books. And then I made up a fake publisher. A buddy of mine from high school posed as Albatross. 24

MM: Was it your intention to make this book as far from politically correct as possible? ERIC: I don’t enter into that consciously and go, “Oh, I’ve got to make this politically incorrect. I’ve got to do this, and piss people off.” That’s never the intention. I think you can’t censor yourself if you’re trying to be funny, because you can’t be fake and be funny. I totally believe that. You can’t try to make people happy and be funny at the same time, because, no matter what, you’re going to offend somebody. You can say anything and someone in the world will be offended by it. And comedy is never safe. One of the things I hate is when stand-up comedians talk about other stand-up comedians they admire, they always say, “This person’s so brave. When they get up there on the stage there’s no fear.” It’s because you can’t be afraid to say something. You can’t be afraid to make the joke. You can’t censor yourself. And I take that into The Goon. If I think it’s funny, and it doesn’t hurt anybody for me to say it, then I’m going to say it. MM: Does it bother you if a reader gets offended by something you’ve written? ERIC: If they do, they shouldn’t be reading it in the first place. It’s not for them. If you don’t like it, don’t buy it. I don’t understand that. For the most part, I think people get that. But there’ve been one or two instances where I’ve gotten mail complaining about something I had in there, and I usually don’t take it too kindly because I don’t understand why you get mad at someone over a joke. You’re trying to make someone laugh. How is that a bad thing?

MM: It’s a tough world. You’re not buttering it up or making it look pretty. Below and Next Page: Goon and Franky meet Buzzard. It was with this story (The Goon vol. 2, #2) that Eric began to feel more confident about his writing ability. Again, the transition from inks to pencils is used to represent a flashback sequence.

The Goon ™ and © Eric Powell.

ERIC: No. I had one instance in one of the more serious stories where the Goon finds out that Merle the Werewolf betrayed them and got one of their group killed, and the Goon slowly murders him. Because he’s a werewolf and he can’t die, the Goon just basically tortures him and then finally kills him with a silver bullet at the end of the book. Someone wrote me to say they were really offended by that. “That was uncalled for. That was really out of line and disturbing.” And I was like, “He’s a mafia hood. This is what happens when you betray him and you get one of his guys killed.”

MM: I was worried about that, because I think you killed one of your best characters. [laughs] ERIC: That whole year I was killing a bunch of characters off, because I just don’t want to get stagnant. I hate this mentality in comics where it’s, “Hey, we’re going to kill a guy,” and then he comes back three issues later. I hate that. MM: But you gave him a son. [laughs] ERIC: Yeah, well. [laughs] I actually like that character much better than the one we killed, because he’s so sad. That character is much more interesting. I don’t want this book to become repetitive. I want it to be different every issue and keep people guessing and entertained. MM: How did you develop your ear for the dialogue? Did you watch a lot of James Cagney movies and The Godfather over and over again? ERIC: Well, I watch a lot of movies, and I like that era. It’s not even gangster movies, for the most part. I’ll watch old ’30s and ’40s movies, and you pick up on the tone for the way people talk. And, also, I grew up in the South, and I grew up working in construction. I think I just have an ear for the way people talk, and it interests me. Not necessarily grammar, but how people say things, the slang. I always try to write the characters like they’re having a real conversation with someone, instead of, like, having perfect diction, because no one really speaks like that. MM: When did you feel comfortable with the writing side, that you understood the voices, that it was coming together? ERIC: I think the first thing I did where I was like, “Oh, I’m actually getting okay with writing,” was the first Buzzard story [Albatross’ The Goon #2]. That was the first time I was able to balance the crazy, weird humor with a little bit of a serious story going on at the same time. And everyone really liked that issue. When I got done with it, I looked over it and thought, “That wasn’t horrible.” Which is the best thing I can say about my own stuff. MM: Why did you take that Dark Horse offer when you could have kept it going yourself? Why give up some of that control?

Above: The quality of books like Mike Mignola’s Hellboy and Mike Allred’s Madman were a large part of Eric’s decision to bring The Goon to Dark Horse. Shown here are a Hellboy sketch from Eric’s sketchbooks and a one-page Madman story written and drawn by Eric for Madman 20th Anniversary Monster. Next Page: Hellboy even showed up in the pages of The Goon #7.

The Goon ™ and © Eric Powell. Hellboy ™ and © Mike Mignola. Madman ™ and © Mike Allred.

ERIC: I knew I could self-publish it and sell a few thousand copies and keep all the money, but at the same time I was realizing how hard it was to do everything yourself, because you’re having to not only do your book, you’re having to coordinate the distribution, and the printing, advertising, and do all this other stuff by yourself. Plus, they were publishing most of the books that I liked, so I thought it would be cool to be amongst that family of books. They were doing, in my opinion, all of the best creator-owned books: Hellboy, Sin City, Madman, Nexus. They were doing everything at the time. It was awesome. And I just felt like they had a good sense of how to handle a creator-owned book and get it out there. At that point in time, all I was really worried about was getting my circulation up, and it would definitely help to get the circulation up by being with Dark Horse. It would take an immediate jump. MM: When you’re independent, you can’t have any shame. You’ve got to go out there and sell your book. The hardest thing to do is get someone to give you their dollar. 28

ERIC: Oh, yeah, and I hate that. I hate having to sell something. I’m not good at it at all. I guess some people who turned down The Goon thought I was a little bitter. I’ve made jokes about it, that, “Ah, this company didn’t think it was good.” But I understand why they didn’t pick it up, because I’m a horrible salesman. [laughter] I wouldn’t buy a book from me, either. I’d go to conventions and try to pitch them the book, and they’d ask, “What’s it about?” and I’d say, “Oh, it’s a guy, and he hits stuff.” MM: But at the same time, this is your baby. You’ve got to do what you have to do to get the book out there. ERIC: Yeah. I’m a believer in letting a thing speak for itself, though, so it was a good thing to get a few books out there and let people see what it was about.

Interlude 2:

ERIC POWELL: The guy who’s responsible for all of this.

ISABELLA (BELLA): The dame who stole the Goon’s heart.

The Gist

THE GOON: The titular protagonist of Eric Powell’s opus and the badass of Lonely Street.

FRANKY: The Goon’s longtime right-hand man. Although insane and crude, there’s no one more loyal to the Goon than this pipsqueak.

MIRNA: The temptress of Lonely Street. Try as she might, she has yet to seduce Goon.

AUNT KIZZIE: Goon’s late aunt and the only person who ever gave a damn about him.

ZOMBIE PRIEST: Goon’s pain in the ass. The nameless priest will stop at nothing to take over Lonely Street.

LABRAZIO: The Goon assumed this wretched gangster’s entire operation… after murdering him.

DR. HIERONYMOUS ALLOY: A beautiful mind trapped in a golden, metallic body. What’s to worry about?

LULA THE BEARDED GIRL: She’s just your average sweet, little bearded circus freak girl.

BUZZARD: A tormented figure from the Zombie Priest’s past and an occasional ally and advisor of the Goon.

WILLIE NAGEL: The most cunning zombie you’ll ever meet.

CHIMICHANGA: The monster with a heart as large as its appetite. 31

BILLY THE KID: The Old West badass joins a freakshow and has gruesome adventures with his pal JEFFREY TINSLE.

Part 3:

The Goon Rides a Dark Horse

MM: When I saw Hieronymous Alloy for the first time [in The Goon #2], I thought he was a Mexican wrestler. Are you ever going to have something like that in there? It seems like Goon should face-off with Mil Mascaras or someone like that.

ERIC: Yeah, I was actually thinking about doing something like that, but then Mignola did that Hellboy in Mexico story, so I’m not going to do it now, because it would just seem like I was copying him. MM: It would be a natural fit. ERIC: Yeah. Maybe down the road people will forget about the Hellboy story. [laughs] MM: I liked the Spanish-speaking monster in Goon #6. Who does the Spanish dialogue for you? ERIC: Oh, I do. Me and www.freetranslations.com. [laughs] And this is just me being a jerk. I wanted to get someone to try to translate the Spanish and then not be able to translate it. So it starts out as gibberish. It starts out as, “That monkey swine spanked my chicken.” And then I translate it through freetranslations.com, which, I mean, it’s a website, so it’s not going to translate it perfectly. I take a sentence that doesn’t make any sense and run it through a bad translation, so it really doesn’t make any sense. Some people actually got mad about it. This guy was telling me, he’d taken it up to his friend at work who’s Latino and asked, “Hey, what does this say?” And the guy was like,

“It doesn’t make any sense. He’s a total idiot that can’t speak Spanish.” I replied, “Yeah, I know I can’t speak Spanish. It’s supposed to be funny.” MM: It felt like you had a lot of fun with the football issue [The Goon #9]? I think that was one of your best stories. ERIC: Well, I’m a big Green Bay Packers fan, so I thought the Goon’s world needed its version of the Green Bay Packers. That was a lot of fun. MM: That’s one where we started seeing your art shift. It seemed like you were beginning to trust your storytelling a little more. You didn’t over-render; you gave it a classic and nostalgic feel. Were you aiming for that? Were you looking at old football pictures from the ’50s? ERIC: I was. I was looking at a lot of old leather-helmet era football photos. MM: They romanticized the game more then, right? They were these tough guys. ERIC: Well, it’s guys in leather helmets and wearing sweaters out there smearing each other in the mud. It was just grittier than today’s football. MM: The Christmas story you did [in Goon #10] was all in pencil. Were you trusting your pencils more? ERIC: It’s all just in context of the story and what I’m trying to get across. So if it’s like, “This scene would work really well in pencil, because I want it to feel gritty,” then I do that. It’s all about setting a mood for the story. MM: Where did Willie Nagel come from? He’s a great character. ERIC: Yeah, he’s the only zombie I’m keeping around. All the other zombies are gone. At first, he was a throwaway character. I thought, “I should have a zombie just wander into the bar like, ‘Hi, guys,’ just oblivious to the fact that he shouldn’t be there, and then the Goon kicks his butt and throws him out.” It was just a little throwaway gag. And then the next issue, I was laying it out, and I thought I should have that same zombie come back wearing a human mask, like he’s trying to sneak back in and get another drink. And then the Goon sets him on fire

and kicks him out again. I don’t remember if it was that issue or the next one, I had him sneak into the bar again, and the Goon looks at him and says, “Forget it,” and leaves him there. But that’s a character that just totally grew out of nowhere. It wasn’t like I had an idea for this guy I was going to throw in. It was just a throwaway gag, and I ended up liking him. MM: Willie never took it personally. No matter how they treated him, he kept coming back. ERIC: He was also the perfect way to explain how some of the zombies were talking and some of them were just brain dead. It came to me, Willie Nagel’s got personality. That’s why he’s talking. MM: I think that’s one of your best lines, where he says some people were zombies to begin with. ERIC: Yeah. Willie Nagel is sitting on a couch talking to Franky, and Franky’s like, “How come you can talk and you’re not a mumbling slackjaw like the rest of the zombies?” And Nagel says something like, “Well, I guess I wasn’t a zombie when I was alive. I had personality, I was a free thinker, and it just kind of carried over when I died.” 33

Previous Page: A pencil sketch of El Hombre del Legarto (the Lizardman) for the cover of The Goon #6, along with a panel from the story. Above: An ink wash panel from The Goon #9, wherein Goon became the star halfback and linebacker for the local football team, The Canners. In true timeambiguous fashion, Eric drew the teams in equipment from the early to mid-1900s. The Goon ™ and © Eric Powell.

MM: Who do you talk to about plot and story ideas? Do you talk to your editor or to your family? Above: Goon and Franky take the Sodomy Baby to a priest for advice. Below: A bit of selfdeprecating humor from the Satan’s Sodomy Baby one-shot. Next Page: Cover art for Satan’s Sodomy Baby. The Goon, Satan’s Sodomy Baby ™ and © Eric Powell.

ERIC: I sometimes talk to my editor and then give him a rundown of what I’m thinking, but we don’t have a whole lot of plot conversations. I don’t really have a whole lot of plot conversation with many people just because it’s like I was talking about pitching the book, it’s really hard for me to explain, “There’s this thing, and it’s got three eyes, and it farts.” [laughter] You know? That’s the way my plot conversations or discussions would go with somebody. [laughs] MM: When you pitched Satan’s Sodomy Baby, surely you had to talk to the editor. You had to talk to Mike Richardson, too, I imagine. ERIC: Nah, it was just supposed to be an issue of The Goon. It was a bunch of innuendo and

off-panel humor, and then I wanted to put the word “sodomy” on the cover—“Beware Satan’s Sodomy Baby”—and Diamond freaked out and said, “Well, this has got to go with the porn.” See, it wasn’t anywhere near that bad. It was a bunch of bad jokes and bad taste, but there wasn’t anything obscene about it. It was a whole lot more tame than half the Vertigo comics, and definitely more tame than an episode of South Park. But they flipped out about it. And that’s the point when it got really bad, because I was like, “You’re going to make me release it with porn? Okay. The gloves are off then.” So, just out of spite, I made it really bad. It wasn’t supposed to be that bad. The gist of the story, which is pretty racy, was that Satan molests a hillbilly and the hillbilly births a baby. But it wasn’t going to be that graphic. Seriously, South Park shows stuff way worse than that in every episode. It was going to be the Goon and Franky chasing around this little demon baby and have a bunch of sick jokes and stuff. MM: And that book paid off, right? It did well? ERIC: Yeah, it did really well. For that year it was one of the most profitable comics for Dark Horse. So, in the end I got the last laugh. [laughs] MM: You should do a follow-up. ERIC: I’m actually thinking about self-publishing a sequel right now. MM: Do you feel dirty drawing that type of stuff? ERIC: Well, here’s the thing. A foreign publisher wanted to reprint Sodomy Baby in a

ERIC: Well, I made them some money, so they at least should be happy about that. In the end, they made money off of it. MM: The irony of life. ERIC: That’s the irony of every comedian or comic who has to put something out through an enterprise or a company, is that they complain about it, and then they end up making money off of it.

Above Left: Pencils for the cover of The Goon: Chinatown and the Mystery of Mr. Wicker. Above Right and Next Page: Pencils and inks for page 81 of Chinatown. This is the final page of a six-page sequence—five of which are full-page close-ups of Goon’s face—where Goon looks into a mirror and breaks down after Bella leaves him. The Goon ™ and © Eric Powell.

collection of pornographic comics, and I told him, “No. No. Absolutely not.” Because it’s not porno. It’s not spank material. It’s satire. And that’s what bothered me about it, because if you’re getting off on this, there’s something wrong with you. You are screwed up. Because this is satire. This is comedy. This is not spank material. If you’re finding this sexually appealing, there’s something wrong with you.” I don’t feel dirty for doing that comic, because everything in there had a satirical point. There was nothing base about it. It was all over-the-top and offensive, but it was to smack you in the face and make a point. MM: And in some ways it’s more of a reaction to Diamond. 36

MM: In 2007 you put the series on hold in order to do Chinatown. It was the perfect entry for newbies to get into the Goon books. It’s as accessible as it gets; you get his whole story. ERIC: I was doing something different, and I didn’t want to chop it up, because you have that point in the middle of the book where the Goon is staring into the mirror and crying, and The Goon is this goofy comic. Do you want someone picking up an issue at that point in time and going, “Oh, he’s crying in the mirror! Bwa-ha!”? MM: You wanted the book to mean something. ERIC: Yeah, yeah. If I’m going to do this story, I’m going to do it all in one chunk, because the people have to understand what’s going on. They have to get the entire story. They can’t just read one issue and then, two months later, pick it up and get the same emotional impact.

MM: Was that intense experience for you? Were you trying to raise your game?

MM: There’s a guy code in The Goon, a “bromance” between these guys, that really comes across in Chinatown.

ERIC: Yeah, it definitely was. I wanted it to be the best thing I had ever done to that point. I wanted it to be my best work. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best I could do at the time, I think.

ERIC: There is a guy code. I wouldn’t say it is necessarily a “guy” code, it’s just a friendship code. I’m a firm believer in friendship, whether that’s male or female, or whoever it is that you’re friends with. Stories about friendship always choke me up. There’s something about them. I was never a Dungeons & Dragons kid, but I loved the Lord of the Rings books. And a big reason for that is the theme of friendship. At the end it comes down to two friends, with one friend carrying the other on his back up a mountain. There’s no better metaphor than that. You’re carrying your friend on your back up a mountain. Stuff like that always chokes me up. Any story about friendship will get me every time. On the other hand, betraying friendship is something I don’t forgive easily. See Merle.

MM: Did you get the feedback you wanted from that book? ERIC: I got feedback better than I ever expected. I really thought it was going to hurt me, because I thought the response I would get would be, “Go back to doing the crap jokes.” [laughs] “You’re not a writer. Don’t try to write seriously. I want to see the funny.” I thought there was going to be a backlash and I thought people were going to hate it, and the exact opposite happened.

MM: You had a note in the back of Chinatown where you said, “In real life, guys like the Goon don’t end up with a girl who looks like Mirna or Bella.”

MM: That’s one of your strengths, the way you can go back and forth between comedy and drama. ERIC: I was shocked by how many people liked it. I don’t think I got a negative comment until I went on my message board and said, “I haven’t gotten one negative comment about Chinatown yet.” Which is just setting it up for some jerk to come along and say something nasty.

ERIC: Did I say that? MM: Something to that effect. You were referring to stories where they’ll have somebody like Paul Giamatti end up with somebody who in real life he probably couldn’t get. 38

ERIC: I don’t know. It’s funny, I have a lot of really attractive women tell me that they have a crush on the Goon. Even yesterday, one of the burlesque performers who had a cameo in the last issue, Angie Pontani, was like, “Oh, throw me in The Goon anytime. I’ve got a crush on him.” I think it’s funny. I don’t know. My girlfriend’s very attractive, and I look like a lump of dirty laundry, so I don’t know. Maybe it does happen. MM: It was at this point when Dave Stewart came on board as the colorist. When you work with Dave, do you have a different mindset? His colors are really starting to come out. ERIC: Dave is so good about catching an atmosphere that I really don’t have to go over a whole lot with him. I gave him very basic, simple direction at the beginning, and then I’ve given him very few notes since. The only direction I gave him was that nothing should look new and no one should look healthy. I gave him a palette I wanted with lots of browns, lots of sepia, and he just ran with it. I never had to give him any other notes.

ERIC: I actually do, and we’ve been working on that lately, because I’ve been over-rendering. I would go in and do a bunch of pencil shading and washes, and then he comes back in and lays the colors, and separately they look good, but together, when it’s printed, your stuff usually prints a little darker. It kind of muddies things up. So we’ve been going back and forth and talking about it. I’ve been pulling back a little bit on some of the washes and pencil tone in certain areas just so we’re not muddying up the page. And the stuff we’ve been doing lately is much better. MM: You can see the progression. It’s one of the most vibrant comics out there right now. ERIC: Yeah, it’s all Dave. Issue #36 came out great. That’s the one where we really started

MM: When you’re inking, do you render a little less now, telling yourself, “Dave can do something here”?

Previous Page: Pencils and inks for page 105 of Chinatown. The friendship of Goon and Franky is one of the underlying themes of the series. Below Left: Christmas card artwork featuring Eric and one of the Nashville Rollergirls. Below Right: The Pontani Sisters, led by Angie, track down Roxi Dlite. The Sisters and Ms. Dlite are all well known burlesque dancers. The Goon ™ and © Eric Powell.

Below: Labrazio makes his “return” known in this page from The Goon #22. Next Page Top: Goon’s short stint in prison gave Eric the opportunity to reference classic prison movies. Next Page Bottom: A seven-panel page (a rare sight in The Goon) from Eric’s collaboration with Evan Dorkin in The Goon #35. The Goon ™ and © Eric Powell.

talking about it and figuring out how to compromise our two styles and really meet in the middle, and I think we really started hitting our stride with that one. MM: In 2008 you had a big marketing push with “The Year of the Goon.” How did that come about, and did it work? ERIC: We hit this level where we got a good readership, a really loyal fan base, and The Goon just kind of hovers at this spot. And I was like, “I really want to try to expand and get it out there to more people.” I had this return of Labrazio story, a Goon story that was not just a one-off. Because this story was going to carry over into multiple issues, and because I felt that the bimonthly schedule was too long of a wait to get the story and

remember it, I decided to do it monthly, both to try to boost up readership and so that story would make a little bit more sense. MM: You also did a lot of appearances and interviews. Did it pay off? In the end, did the sales bump up? What did you learn from that experience? ERIC: I don’t really know if going to shows helps your sales or not. You can sell a few books at the convention or whatever, but I really don’t know. It’s a hard thing to gauge whether or not it actually helps your sales. MM: Basically, you’re mostly meeting fans that you already have, right? ERIC: Pretty much. I mean, they just come up and they want you to sign the books that they already have, so I’m not sure it does very much. I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t really like conventions anymore. You get over them after a while. But when you’re first starting out, and you’re sitting in your room drawing comics, and you’re there by yourself all the time, and then you go to a convention and people come up to you and tell you how much they like the work, it’s really rewarding. MM: “I’m not wasting my time.” ERIC: Exactly. MM: You’re not a Twilight fan, I take it. [laughs] ERIC: No, not a fan of the Twilight. [laughs] MM: You used the baseball scene in issue #34. ERIC: I don’t have Showtime, but they had a free weekend, so I was flipping channels, and they were showing the first Twilight movie. I’d heard it was really lame, but I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I watched about half an hour of it before I had to turn it off. I turned it off right after it got to the baseball scene. I was like, “You have to be kidding me. Vampires playing baseball? Seriously? You thought this was a good idea?” MM: In the rain! ERIC: “We have to play in the rain, because we’re so strong, it makes thunder!” It was the worst. [laughter] It was uncomfortable to look at. MM: How did you like working with Evan Dorkin [The Goon #35]? It must have been weird for you, working with somebody else’s script.

ERIC: That was great, though. It actually has changed the way I’ve been approaching the book, because he works in a really dense style. If you look at Milk & Cheese, there’re a hundred panels on a page. He’s got this really condensed story and art style, and when he hands you a script, he’s trying not to do that, but I think he can’t help himself, so there’s a lot going on the page. And while I was working on it, it just made me realize how much more I could be doing. How much more content I could be sticking into the comic. I think I got away from that a little bit and got too enamored with doing big images and big panels, but after working with Evan I realized I don’t need that and I don’t necessarily like that. So I’ve been really upping the content in the new issues I’ve been working on.

something weird—like the crossover I did with Dethklok, the band from Metalocalypse. I just thought it would be funny to do that kind of Scooby Doo/real-life celebrity crossover thing, but, “I’m going to do it with a stripper.” I just thought it would be a funny thing to throw in there. I approached her about it, and she thought it was funny, so we just ran with it. MM: Speaking of cameos, I’ve seen Robert Duvall in the book. I think I saw Oliver Reed in the last story arc. Was that him as the original zombie priest? ERIC: Yeah... that does look like him. I’ve done some little cameo stuff, like the story where the Goon goes to prison [The Goon #13]. I pulled out every old prison movie and did a little reference. I had the Birdman of Alcatraz, and I had Papillon, and I had Brooks from Shawshank. I think I had Clint Eastwood from Escape from Alcatraz. I like those little cameo things. I can get away with it because it’s satire. [laughs]

MM: How did The Goon #36 and the [burlesque dancer] Roxi Dlite appearance come together? ERIC: Well, I had been friends with Roxi for a while, and I always liked the idea that if I’m going to do a crossover, I’m going to do

MM: How is your book cheaper than most of the Marvel and DC books? 41

ERIC: Yeah, actually, just today I drew him in a panel. He’s back in an interesting way. Not the same way. MM: Cool. Because he’s been like a lightweight lately. ERIC: That’s what you have to do, though. This is your villain. If you want to bring in another villain, you’ve gotta make him badder than the last guy, so that’s kind of what happened. He got his butt kicked by the new villain. [laughs] Check out Goon #37 and you’ll get a little glimpse of what’s going on with him. MM: You said you didn’t plan this out a hundred issues into the future, but do you have an ending planned? ERIC: It’s not an ending, per se. It’s just a moment in time that I want the reader to see, and when they see it, I think it’s going to affect the way they look at everything else in the book. Because it’s kind of like, “All right, if that’s where this is going, that’s where everything I’m reading right now leads up to.” MM: Do you have other ideas you want to do, or is your loyalty solely to Goon?

Above: Sketches for a possible upcoming creator-owned project. Next Page: Okay, so the Psychic Seal isn’t exactly as helpful as Lassie, but he sure likes to run his mouth. A page from the three-page Goon story in Dark Horse Presents #157, which marked Goon’s first appearance at Dark Horse.

The Goon ™ and © Eric Powell.

ERIC: Probably because I’m the only guy working on it. [laughs] MM: But the production values in the last couple of issues has been incredible—the paper, the color, everything. ERIC: Well, I mean, it’s just me and Dave working on the book. I don’t know why comic book prices are so high, especially when these guys are selling 50 times as many copies as my book. Their books should be cheaper, in my humble opinion. MM: Will the Zombie Priest ever have his day again? 42

ERIC: Oh, I have a lot of other ideas I want to do. Unfortunately, I just can’t draw everything. Tracy Marsh, my co-writer on Godzilla, and I have an idea for an ongoing series we’re going to pitch around and try to find an artist for, because I really want to do it, but I just don’t have time to draw it. But there are a bunch of one-shot stories that I want to do. Shortly, though. They’ll probably be coming out within the next year. MM: You’ll also do side stories with Buzzard and things like that? There’s no end to what you can do with the Goon characters. ERIC: There’s really not, and that’s the key. Like I said, it’s not a high-concept book. It’s all about the characters. You just drop the characters in the situation you want and let them run with it. There’s not going to be an end to the story, because I don’t want there to be. When I’m 70 years old, if I want to do a Goon comic, I can just sit down and do a Goon comic and I’m not screwing up any kind of continuity or anything, y’know?

Interlude 3: MM: Do you remember how you first encountered Eric’s artwork? And what was your opinion of the Angel work he did for you?

Scott Allie

MM: Do you have a favorite anecdote or experience about working with Eric? SCOTT: I’ve had a lot of good times with Eric. A lot of the most notable ones were at Dragon Con, so not the most repeatable stories. Often there was a camera involved, so there’s evidence out there, but maybe my favorite in an anecdotal way was just a couple years ago, when the Mignolas brought their daughter to Dragon Con, and Eric and his girlfriend, Sam, took Katie running around at night taking pictures of inappropriate costumes. The Mignolas kept saying they were terrible parents for setting Katie loose with Powell and Sam, but the truth is they were the perfect companions to let her get as goofy as she wanted, going right along with her, but keeping her safe amidst all the insanity.

SCOTT ALLIE: My first run-in with Eric Powell, he was a minor character in a Hellboy novel by Chris Golden. Chris told me the kid was real, and he was a promising young artist. I did my best to ignore him, but eventually I realized Powell was indeed an amazing young artist. I loved his Angel issues. He does not look back on that stuff fondly, but it was the best part of that original run. I think he felt like he was slavishly laboring over the likenesses, but I think there was good life in the work. MM: What led to Dark Horse picking up The Goon? What was the attraction? SCOTT: Chris kept pushing Eric on me for work-for-hire jobs, so I started using him on some Buffy tie-ins, most notably those fill-in issues of Angel. Eric showed me The Goon, and I loved it, but he was gonna do it for another publisher. That went pretty badly for Powell, so he offered it to us. I wasn’t able to get it set up as a series, but we put it in an issue of DHP, and Eric prepared to start self-publishing. That wound up being the final issue of the original DHP.... Eric started self-publishing, and there was a scene in the second issue of that run that I took to Richardson and said, “We have to publish this book.” Mike read it, agreed, and that was how we got it going—that one scene. MM: As an artist and a person, how has Eric changed over the years? SCOTT: His writing has grown a lot more sophisticated, without losing the humor and the raw imagination, so that’s good. His drawing has evolved a lot over time, going in various directions that are fun to watch. His stuff was originally very busy, and he slowly stripped some of the detail away, but I think he eventually decided he shouldn’t simplify too much, so he’s been enriching the work a little more again recently. I think the last few issues have been the best looking ones ever. As a person he’s grown a lot in the time I’ve known him, in every way, but it was especially rewarding to see him go from a shy, young kid to a confident and hilarious personality in the comics scene. I doubt that the high-school version could imagine the professional success he’s enjoyed, but I really doubt he’d foreseen the sort of things he’d eventually be doing in front of a room full of people. 43

Part 4:

Hollywood and the Big Two

MM: Is it true you get a lot of fan mail from prison inmates?

reselling the same thing to people. Maybe that’s why our industry keeps shrinking, because we’re selling the same product over, and over, and over again.” And I love that stuff. Jack Kirby’s run on Fantastic Four is probably my favorite comic book series of all time. But we can’t keep selling that. We have to create new product, just like any other industry, to keep people interested. In my humble opinion, that’s the reason the comic industry has been shrinking for the past few decades is because we’re just selling people the same stuff. And then the new stuff that comes out gets no real push. It has to have a movie or some other kind of tie-in to get people to even look at it.

ERIC: Yeah. Yeah, I get a lot of fan mail from prison. [laughs] MM: What do you think of that? ERIC: I guess I’d want to laugh if I were in prison. Maybe it’s because he’s a thug and they can identify. I don’t know. [laughs] But it’s funny, all the mail I get from prison is the sweetest mail and so nice. It’s odd, because I get some mail from regular comic book fans that’s—to be honest, some of it’s really rude and just mean-spirited and nasty. And then you get a letter from some guy in prison that makes you want to cry. It’s an odd thing. It’s an interesting little social experiment.

MM: Or to get your story picked up on Newsarama or Comic Book Resources—if you’re not Marvel or DC or some big-name creator, you’re going to have a tough time getting coverage.

MM: That’s why, in this industry, you have to do things for yourself. Because if you just look at the comics fans, all they seem to want is more Marvel and DC books. Reading up about the video you put together, I was surprised to see how many folks were, like, “How dare you speak badly about Marvel and DC?”

ERIC: Yeah. It’s the truth. If you can say, “Well, I worked on X-Men, and I’m doing a book over here,” then you might get some attention off of it. And there’re so many shops out there that won’t even carry your book unless it’s for Marvel or DC. It’s just sad.

ERIC: It was a weird thing with the video. For the most part, it got a really positive response. But the people who got pissed off about it didn’t want to hear anything I had to say, and probably don’t even read my book anyway, because they’re just sucked into the superhero universes and don’t want to see anything else. That’s where all the crap came from. And the argument got so twisted out of what I was trying to direct it towards. I was trying to get some unity in the comic book industry, to get creators and publishers and everyone to say, “Hey, we need new content. We can’t keep just

MM: I saw a comment in your book where you were trying to get your book into Diamond’s Top 100 chart. I would have thought that was automatic! ERIC: That was a half-hearted joke. It’s an attempt to boost my sales, while also making a joke about the fact that there’s no way it’s ever going to be in the Top 100. 44

MM: Why not? You’re a good artist. ERIC: Well, that’s the sad state of the industry. I’m just using myself as an example, so I don’t want this to come off as arrogant or anything, but my book has 13 Eisner nominations. It’s a five-time Eisner Award-winner. In any other industry where there’s that kind of critical recognition, you see a boost in the sales. And, as much as I think the Eisner Awards are vital to the industry, especially to—as Will Eisner put it—give some recognition to books not based on sales, it doesn’t help, because people won’t pay attention to it unless it’s a Marvel or DC book. You cannot crack the Top 100 comic books unless you have some kind of tie-in, some kind of film or television show, or you have fame in some other way. It just doesn’t happen. Honestly, I just bang my head against the wall, because I don’t understand this business. Marvel and DC should be publishing creator-owned comics to revitalize the industry, too. MM: You would think they would, because they have the money for it. But they don’t. ERIC: I understand that it’s a completely new regime there, but Image Comics should have never happened. Marvel should have said, “You want to do your own book? We’ll publish it.” That’s what book publishers do, right? They publish books. And instead, these two giant companies which are controlling the industry are really only concerned about making the quick buck and pushing these properties that they own. I’m not sure that even rates as a publishing company. MM: It’s more evident than ever now. They’re not even trying anything different. ERIC: Oh, yeah. Because the industry is in such a bad state right now, and you have comic shops closing left and right, and the amount of shelf space out there keeps shrinking and shrinking, so they’re fighting for that limited space, and they’re trying harder and harder to push everybody else out of the way. MM: I think other publishers were concerned that DC’s New 52 was going to take away shelf space from their books, because shops were ordering heavy on that and not ordering the independent books. ERIC: It’s true. It did happen. My sales dipped. My sales dipped when that launched.

And it’s a shame, because we put out a great issue. It was the issue that Evan Dorkin wrote. I thought he did a great job, and I wanted it to get a lot of exposure and get out there because he wrote such a fun comic. And our sales dipped because it came out during the 52 relaunch. MM: Are the collections where it’s at for you nowadays? ERIC: Yeah, if I were living off of the floppy comics, I would be broke. The collections are where I’m able to make a living. MM: Were you surprised when Marvel and DC came calling? Did that mean you’d finally arrived? 45

Previous Page: A Fantastic Four drawing— complete with a Kirbyesque machine— from Eric’s sketchbooks. Above: A page from The Goon #39, which parodies the superhero tropes prevalent in today’s comic books.

The Goon ™ and © Eric Powell. Fantastic Four, Reed Richards, Thing ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

This Page and Next: Preliminary sketches and finished pencils for the cover of Arkham Asylum: Living Hell #5. A rough background for the image was drawn separately. Eric then combined it with several different preliminary figure sketches in Photoshop until he found the composition he liked best. Using that composition as his layout, Eric then did the finished pencil drawing shown on the opposite page, which he then painted over. Magpie, Poison Ivy ™ and © DC Comics.

ERIC: I remember the first job I was offered. Mark Chiarello called me and asked me if I wanted to do some Batman covers, and I was like, “Oh, my God! They actually called me!” That was a really awesome moment. MM: You’d never met him before? ERIC: I had never met him. That was a really nice moment, because someone was approaching me, and I wasn’t the one begging for the work. I just want to touch on this. Some people criticized me for making that video, saying, “Well, you worked for Marvel and DC. You’re a hypocrite.” No, I’m not. Because I’m sticking my neck out there. If I’m criticizing these guys, I’m also taking the risk that they’re never going to offer me work again. I’m doing this because I want to help the business, and that means that I’m putting myself at risk for the sake of other people. So that really irritated me when people were saying I’m a hypocrite for taking work from Marvel and DC. That’s not the case. I am very thankful for any job anyone has ever given me, but those guys made money off of my name as well. I can criticize them and still be appreciative that they gave me work.

vention. “Don’t worry. Just keep chugging away. One of these days you’ll get another job at DC.” That is so insulting and condescending. If I wanted to quit working on The Goon and go work on a superhero book, I think I could have already done that. I think I have enough name recognition at this point that I could have made the leap, if that’s what I really wanted to do. MM: You worked at Marvel early in your career. What books did you work on? ERIC: I haven’t done much for Marvel. I did some inking work on Hulk and Black Panther. That was actually on Kyle Hotz—Kyle was drawing that. Then I did some cover work for them, and a one-shot that was Devil Dinosaur versus the Hulk for Marvel Monsters. MM: But before 2003? ERIC: Just inking work before then. MM: And it wasn’t like they were looking for you, it was Kyle who helped you out. ERIC: Not as an inker before I did The Goon. No, no one was looking for me.

MM: These are the same people who think if you don’t work for Marvel or DC you can’t survive as a comic book artist.

MM: With both the Superman story and particularly the Marvel Monsters work, I felt they were capitalizing on you. You were now “Eric Powell.”

ERIC: Yeah, I mean, it’s the same thing. I’ve had people come up to me at a convention and go, “Don’t worry. One day you’ll get a job at Marvel.” That’s the most insulting thing anyone has ever said to me at a con-

ERIC: I don’t know, that’s hard to say. They might have had that project in mind before I came along. In fact, I think they offered the Monsters book to Mignola before me. But I was happy to take the job.

MM: Did you have any input on the [2005] Marvel Monsters project, because you did a lot of covers for that? Above: Cover art for the Marvel Monsters: Fin Fang 4 (based on the iconic cover of Fantastic Four #1) and Marvel Monsters: Where Monsters Dwell one-shots. Next Page: Pencils for a splash page from the Marvel Monsters: Devil Dinosaur one-shot. You know if there’s a giant monster around Hulk is going to have to punch it.

Bombu, Devil Dinosaur, Elektro, Fin Fang Foom, Googam, Gorgilla, Hulk, Manoo, Monstrollo ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

ERIC: No, they gave me pretty strict cover direction. They knew exactly what they wanted, and I just drew it. They’d say, “We want a recreation of the Fantastic Four #1 cover, and we want these four monsters on it, doing this.” So it was very deliberate art direction on that. MM: Had you read those old monster titles from the ’50s? ERIC: I had read a few of the old Jack Kirby monster comics, but not a lot of them. MM: How did your Devil Dinosaur one-shot develop? ERIC: I don’t remember if I picked that one or if the editor wanted me to do that one, but I was like, “Oh, yeah, I want to do Devil Dinosaur, and do the Hulk versus Devil Dinosaur.” That was fun. It was ironic, because 48

my friend Tom Sniegoski—who helped me get started in comics—and I were talking on the phone about what old Marvel property would be fun to play with, and we thought Devil Dinosaur would be hilarious. “That would be great to work on, because it’s so crazy.” And then I get a call from a Marvel editor saying, “Hey, do you want to do a Devil Dinosaur comic?” So I called Tom and said, “You have to write this with me, because that is too much of a coincidence.” When we sent in the original pitch, it was going to be really crazy. It was going to be pretty funny and just insane. And then, unfortunately, they didn’t want to go that direction, which makes me sad, because it would have been a much better comic. I mean, how do you take that seriously? They wanted us to play it straight, and we were doing it thinking, “This is insane.” It’s a Neanderthal monkey boy riding on the back of a giant red dinosaur, and the Hulk’s going to punch it. Y’know? [laughs] How do you play that straight? It would have been a much better comic if they just let us run with it.

ERIC: I think it was well received. It wasn’t exactly what we wanted to do with it, but we still made it a pretty fun comic as much as we could.

awesome, and it would be really cool to draw Superman at least at one point in my life, but I’m working on Chinatown. I don’t think I can do it.” And then they go, “It’s a Bizarro story.” [laughs] “Aw, man! I’m not suited to draw Superman, but if you’re going to put Bizarro in it, I could see myself doing that.” And then they hit me with, “Geoff’s going to write it with Richard Donner.” And that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Geoff Johns, Richard Donner, Superman, and Bizarro—it was hard to say no to.

MM: Did the Superman story [in Action Comics #855-857, 2007] offer come from Geoff Johns or an editor at DC?

MM: Is Geoff Johns one of those guys that’ll call you to talk over plots and run with whatever ideas you want to do?

ERIC: I don’t remember whose idea it was to put me on the book, but I was in the middle of doing the Chinatown book, and I was like, “Nope, not taking any work, not doing anything else. I’ve gotta put Chinatown out there and make sure it’s the best comic I can make it.” And then DC calls and says, “Hey, do you want to do a Superman comic with Geoff Johns?” And I’m thinking, “Ohhhhh... Geoff Johns is

ERIC: Not really. He asked me what characters I wanted to turn into Bizarros, and I do remember saying, “Oh, I want to do a Bizarro Mxyzptlk.” I do remember saying that. But, other than that, it was all Geoff.

MM: Was there a thrill to be doing those Kirby-type poses and drawing the Hulk the way Kirby would have drawn him? ERIC: Oh, yeah, definitely. I was trying to give the Hulk that Kirby look. MM: How was it received?

Above: Eric based his Superman on the Joe Shuster/Max Fleischer Superman design. Below: A preliminary sketch of Bizarro. Next Page: Pencils and inks for Action Comics #855, page 2, and a sketch of Frankenstein from Eric’s sketchbooks. Much like the Superman: The Animated Series, Eric wanted Bizarro to have a Frankenstein look and feel.

Bizarro, Superman ™ and © DC Comics.

MM: What was Richard Donner’s involvement? ERIC: That was all them. I just got scripts, so I don’t know what the interaction was. MM: Do you prefer it that way, “Just give me the words and I’ll take care of it”? ERIC: Well, on something like that, where you’re working with one of the top writers in the business, it’s kind of like, “Yeah, just give me a script.” Because you trust him. You’re not going to get something that’s going to be too hard to dissect and lay out and everything. MM: Was it your idea for Superman to look like the Max Fleischer Superman? ERIC: Yeah, I was definitely trying to go for that. I wanted to do that stylized Fleischer version of Superman. MM: And that Frankenstein homage, did that come from you? The Bizarro sequence with the little girl and the flower? Because that was right in your wheelhouse. ERIC: There was actually a discussion about that. I can’t remember exactly how that came about. I do remember that I suggested that we

color that segment in black-&-white. I think the Frankenstein scene evolved from the way I was drawing Bizarro. They made a little maquette of Bizarro from the Superman Animated show, where he’s very Frankensteinish, and that’s the kind of look I was really going for, that kind of Frankenstein look of Bizarro. It was a lot of fun to draw. MM: It looked like you had a lot of fun. You had the Fortress of Solitude from the movie, the Superman spaceship that he uses in Super Friends, that sort of stuff. Were you like a kid at a toy store? ERIC: It was fun. I just don’t want to do a Superman book as my regular gig. That’s not my goal. It’s one of those things like, here’s four issues. I did it, it’s fun, I got it out of my system, and I’m not sure I want to do it again. [laughs] I’ve done it. I’ve got other things I want to do. MM: Do Marvel and DC keep coming at you with more pitches? ERIC: DC will periodically contact me about something, but it’s a matter of scheduling and most of the time it doesn’t work out. Marvel not so much. They’ve offered me a few things here and there, but for the most part it wasn’t anything that I was even remotely interested in. MM: You can’t say yes to everything. You have to keep a level of consistency to your own book. 51

ERIC: Yeah, I have more fun doing my own stuff. There’s a line from Ed Wood where he says, “Why spend your life making someone else’s dreams,” or something like that. MM: That Treehouse of Horror [#12, 2006] story you did, I think that’s probably the sickest thing you’ve ever written. ERIC: [laughs] And I got away with it! MM: That’s what I want to know! How did that happen? ERIC: I know! I was as shocked as you are! I’m surprised they let me do that. I mean, I submitted that story, and I’m thinking, “There’s no way they’re going to let me do this.” And then they say, “Sure, go ahead.” MM: Was this the idea that immediately came to you when they offered you a short story? ERIC: I don’t know where the idea came from other than I wanted to do something with Groundskeeper Willie. Something about mail order brides was going through my head. I think Maxim had just started coming out, and it was a big thing. It’s Playboy without the nipples, which I think is stupid. MM: Groundskeeper Willie having off-camera sex with the emu was one thing. But Homer eating that emu for supper... there’s something weird and taboo about the story. ERIC: I’m shocked I got away with it, but, actually, I really like that story. [laughs] It’s a shame I can’t take that story and put it in a collection of my stuff, because Fox owns it. 52

MM: Wow, there were no objections at all? ERIC: No, they let me run with it. I don’t remember them giving me any objection, which was awesome. And that story, believe it or not, got nominated for an Eisner for Best Short Story. [laughter] How awesome would that have been to win an Eisner for something that has bestiality and cannibalism? [laughter] MM: In 2006 you did a Conan story [Conan #28] which Kurt Busiek wrote that was a tribute to Robert E. Howard. Do you say yes to everything Dark Horse offers you? ERIC: No, I’ve turned down a lot of Dark Horse stuff. [laughs] Mostly covers that I don’t think I could do a good job on. When they present me with a one-off story like that, something I can basically just do and move on and not have to spend six months to a year of my life on, then those things are easy for me to accept.

away, and no one knows that he saved everyone. MM: When you write the Billy the Kid books for Kyle Hotz, is that a full script? Where did this idea come for that series? ERIC: Kyle and I were talking on the phone one day and he said, “You need to write something for me. We’ll plot it together, and you’ll write it, and I’ll draw it.” We just started brainstorming and talking about all the things that we liked and found interesting, and somehow out of that conversation evolved us doing Billy the Kid joining a carnival freak show, and we just went from there. “Oh, it’ll be Billy the Kid and carnival freaks versus Frankenstein and mummies and all this other stuff.”

MM: That was a really sweet story. The Robert Howard-like character has his day in the sun, but there’s nobody there to witness his heroism and acknowledge it. ERIC: I thought it was a really good story. I actually really liked that story. At the end of the book, they’re calling him a coward and everything because they thought he ran

Previous Page Top: Pencils for a twelve-page Greedo story in Dark Horse’s Star Wars Tales #6. Previous Page Bottom: A disturbing panel from Eric’s Eisner Award-nominated story in Bart Simpson’s Treehouse of Horror #12. Below: Pencils and inks for Conan #28, page 17. Star Wars ™ and © Lucasfilm Ltd. The Simpsons ™ and © 20th Century Fox Film Corp. Conan ™ and © Conan Properties International LLC.

MM: Do you get aggravated if a fan says, “Well, he just wrote it. He didn’t draw it.” ERIC: Oh, yeah. There’s a lot of that. I think if I wrote something and it was drawn better than I would have done, some people would still complain about it. I don’t understand that. MM: I thought the Billy the Kid stuff was just as good as anything you would have drawn. ERIC: I’ve gotten both sides on that. I’ve gotten some people complaining, “Oh, it’s a shame you didn’t draw Billy the Kid,” and I’ve got people going, “Kyle did an amazing book.” MM: Do you get the feeling sometimes people want too much from you? That they have that feeling of ownership? ERIC: Yeah. What’s really funny is when you send out a tweet or something, like, “Went to the movies tonight,” and somebody responds, “Why aren’t you doing funnybooks?” [laughter] It’s like, “Are you slave drivers? I mean, come on, I’m doing a lot of work here. I’m apparently not getting it done fast enough for you.” Every once in a while I’ll mention I’m doing something not related to comic books, and I’ll get a little, “Hey, get back to the drawing board,” kind of thing from people. Not all the time, but every once in a while some guy’ll pop up like that, and you’re just like, “You come work my hours. You come work 12 to 14 hours a day and draw comic books, and then you begrudge me going to a movie.” MM: Is Billy the Kid a misunderstood soul? Is that kind of what the book is about? ERIC: I think he’s a character unwittingly searching for redemption. That’s kind of the way I look at it. He doesn’t even realize that he’s looking for redemption, but that’s what he’s trying to do. MM: He’s your kind of character. He doesn’t give a squat about anybody, except for his freaks. ERIC: Well, it makes him more interesting. You can’t just have your hero be squeakyclean and everything. He’s really kind of unlikable. Part of his group is really cool— they’re decent people that just look weird. And then you have this person who looks fine, but he’s really a jerk.

MM: I assume Todd Browning’s Freaks movie was a bit of an influence? ERIC: Oh, it definitely is. I even have scenes of it in one of the early Goon issues, where I kind of spoof it, and then Evan spoofed it again in The Goon #35. All the horror movies from that era, no matter how bad they are, I kind of dig ’em. But that one’s pretty disturbing. MM: Do you have an affinity to that carnival ambiance? Even Chimichanga has a carnival setting. ERIC: That wasn’t really a conscious thing, like, “Oh, I love weird carnival freak show stuff, so I’m going to put it in all my books.” 55

Previous Page and Above: Cover art for Billy the Kid’s Old Timey Oddities and the Ghastly Fiend of London #3 (opposite) and #4 (above).

Billy the Kid’s Old Timey Oddities ™ and © Eric Powell and Kyle Hotz.

Right: Panels from The Goon #35 with dialogue lifted from Tod Browning’s 1932 cult horror classic, Freaks. Below: Cover art for Dark Horse’s Chimichanga graphic novel collection. Next Page: Page 13 of Chimichanga #1, showing how Chimi gets his name. Eric made sure he kept the dialogue in the series kid-friendly. Chimichanga, The Goon ™ and © Eric Powell.

It’s not a conscious thing. Just, somehow, that happened. When I was brainstorming, that’s the idea that popped up. I don’t know if it’s just an easy way to put weird, strange characters in there and that’s why it came about, or what. I definitely think there’s that bit in everybody where they kind of feel like an outcast and feel misunderstood. Maybe that’s where it came from. But I didn’t realize that all of my books have some kind of freak show element to them. MM: I think that’s one of your themes, that people judge others by what they see on the surface. They don’t talk to them. They don’t see what’s inside them. Chimichanga had that. I thought that was really nice. ERIC: Well, it’s definitely a more obvious element in the Chimichanga book than any of the others, the “Don’t judge the book by its cover” theme. MM: Did you want Chimichanga to be an all-ages book that anybody could read? Did you have to restrain yourself? ERIC: I just had to watch the language a little bit more. At the same time, I don’t think you should dumb down anything to kids. This is a book that I want kids to be able to read, but, again, I’m doing it for myself. That’s a firm rule of mine whenever I’m doing anything. If I’m not entertained by it, no one else is going to be entertained by it. If I’m not having fun doing it, no one’s going to have fun reading it. So I never try to do anything that’s like, “Oh, well, I have to cater to these people, or this demographic.” I think the moment you do that is your surefire failure. MM: With Chimichanga you went back to your roots. You’re doing it on your own dime, and you put it 56

Right and Below: Illustrations for IDW’s edition of Huckleberry Finn—one of the author and one of the scene where Huck stumbles across the runaway Jim. Next Page Top: Pencils for the tri-fold alternate cover of Godzilla: Kingdom of Monsters #1. Next Page Bottom: Eric touched on workers’ rights issues in The Goon #37, but it was also on his mind during Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

Godzilla and all related characters ™ and © Toho Co., Ltd.

out when you want. Will you come back to this series, or is this one and done? ERIC: I actually want to do another story that’s going to be more of a picture book kind of thing, if I can ever get around to doing it. Yeah, I want to do another Chimichanga story. MM: Did you get any letters from kids after it was done? ERIC: I haven’t gotten a lot of letters, but I have gotten some photos that parents have taken of this one little girl dressed up as Lula for Halloween, which is pretty awesome. And, also strange and awesome at the same time, a couple of my adult friends dressed up as Lula and came to a Halloween party I was at. They didn’t know the other one was dressing up like that, so it was pretty cool.

MM: Why the name “Chimichanga”? ERIC: Well, I was trying to think of a weird title for this thing, and there’s an awesome Mexican restaurant ten minutes away from my house that probably contributed to the choice of title. MM: I think I saw somewhere that Scott Allie was disappointed you didn’t bring the book to Dark Horse. ERIC: Well, I did, eventually. I gave them the hardcover collection, which they had colored and everything. MM: Why did you want to do it yourself? ERIC: Because it was the first creator-owned thing I’ve done that was all my own since The Goon, and, I don’t know, for some reason I wanted to stretch my legs a little bit and test the waters, and I wanted to keep my label out there. MM: The upcoming Huckleberry Finn book you’re doing, you’re just doing spot illustrations for the original version of the book? ERIC: Yeah. MM: Why do you think the world needs that book to remain uncensored? ERIC: At the time when there was the big story about them censoring the book, I made a funny offhand comment to Chris Ryall at IDW, and he goes, “Oh, by the way, we actually do illustrated books, and we’re talking about doing an illustrated version of Huck Finn. Do you want to do it?” And I replied, “Yeah!” I’m a huge Mark Twain fan. I love Mark Twain.

MM: Do you enjoy working with IDW?

He was probably the greatest satirist to ever come out of this country, and if someone has a problem with Huck Finn, they’ve either never read it, or they’ve missed the point of the book entirely. Censoring Huck Finn when that word is being thrown out so much in every other kind of fiction and literature—I can’t think of one Stephen King book that hasn’t had that word in it, but who’s censoring Stephen King, y’know? You’re going to censor Huck Finn when it’s a period book, using period language? Sweeping our history under the rug isn’t going to solve racism.

ERIC: They were great to work with. MM: Did Dark Horse get jealous? ERIC: Maybe. I don’t know. [laughs] They may have gotten a little worried. “Don’t jump over to IDW.” I don’t know. MM: What’s your commitment to that book?

MM: Exactly. Watering it down isn’t going to help. ERIC: Censoring one of the greatest American authors of all time so your feelings aren’t hurt, or because you’re going to be some ultra-liberal, politically correct person, it doesn’t help anything. It hurts, in my opinion. Because we have to understand, this is the history, and it’s not pretty. That was just my view of it. MM: Some people thought just by electing a black president we weren’t going to have any more racism. Yeah, right! ERIC: I think it’s clear that, by electing a black president, all we did was bring the racism to the forefront, if you read some of the signs people hold up to protest. MM: And you think some of the comic fans are angry. ERIC: Yeah, exactly. I can look at that stuff and go, “Well, at least I don’t have the Teabaggers mad at me.” Not that I know of. I’m sure there are some. MM: I thought it was cool when you had him in Godzilla dropping the F-bomb. That’s probably the best Obama cameo in comics I’ve seen. [laughs] ERIC: We thought that was a good idea. [laughs] 59

ERIC: Tracy Marsh and I have wrapped up our run on it. It ended with issue #8, so there’s a new creative team coming along. MM: How was the experience? ERIC: It was fine, but it was really stressful at the same time. Toho is very protective of that character, all their characters, and rightly so. Not that we were out to disrespect any of those characters, but we had to jump through a few hoops for them. So it was more work than I’ve probably done on any writing project, just to keep everyone happy. MM: What did you want to do on Godzilla? Did you want to reinvent the character a little bit, or just raise the stakes? ERIC: Because this was the first time that Toho was allowing someone to put all the characters in a comic, we really wanted to do a big, global story and have a sense of realism to it, and have the monsters kind of represent all the things that we, as a race, are having problems with right now. Because it seems like we can’t solve big problems anymore. You know, Katrina, the BP oil spill.... We used to be the innovators. We used to be the go-getters. We used to be able to handle big problems and big situations. And it just seems like we’re completely inept now, and that’s kind of the point we were trying to make with the Godzilla book. Some people got it and really enjoyed it, and some people were just like, “I want more monsters punching.” MM: You’re a fan, obviously, of roller derby. Do you own part of a team?

Previous Page and Above: Design sketch and inks for the cover of Godzilla: Kingdom of Monsters #7. Left: A Godzilla sketch from Eric’s sketchbooks.

Godzilla ™ and © Toho Co., Ltd.

ERIC: I’m a sponsor of the Nashville Rollergirls, and I do posters for them. MM: Did you become a fan of roller derby from watching it on ESPN in the ’80s?

This Page: Illustrations done as part of two separate Nashville Rollergirls promotional posters. Next Page: The first page of an eight-page story promoting the Nashville Rollergirls. The story featured many of the actual Rollergirls. Artwork ™ and © Eric Powell.

ERIC: No, actually, I was doing a little convention in Nashville and there were some Rollergirls promoting their bout that was going to be happening the next day at the Nashville Fairgrounds. I’m always putting crazy stuff in the letters column, so it was just a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing, and I asked them, “Hey, do you guys take sponsorships?” And they said, “Yeah, we have sponsors.” And I said, “Oh, I want to be a sponsor,” because I thought, “How hilarious would that be if The Goon sponsored a Roller Derby team?” I had no idea what this reincarnation of roller derby was. I was thinking, “Oh, it’s the pro wrestling stuff, right? They go and punch each other in the head and everything.” So I started sponsoring them before I realized that it’s actually a legitimate sport now. I went to the first game, and I was like, “Holy crap! This isn’t like wrestling. This is actually a sport. And it’s fun!” And so I got really into it, and really got into the sport of it.

MM: Where does the Goon movie stand now? ERIC: [laughs] It’s still in the “maybe” stage. Until someone in Hollywood writes a check, we’re still banging on doors trying to get someone to pay attention to it. MM: Is that what you hope, that it’ll get picked up as a movie and maybe people will notice the book finally? That the mainstream market might pick it up? ERIC: Well, that’s inevitable. Even if the movie comes out and doesn’t do so hot—which I don’t think will be the case. I think it would do well. We have such a good team together to do this thing. You can’t beat David Fincher’s creative judgment, and you can’t beat Blur Studio’s prowess with putting together stunning visuals. As soon as they’re advertising a movie, my book sales will spike because more book stores will carry it. It would be plastered all over the place. It’s just a bunch of advertisement. Honestly, that’s the only way for me to break out and take the book to the next level is for it to be adapted into some other medium, because it’s plateaued as a comic right now without some kind of outside help.

Right: A still from the trailer for The Goon (hopefully coming to a theater near you in the not-too-distant future) directed by David Fincher and animated by Blur Studio. Below: Design sketch and finished inks for a Goon metal lunch box. There’s also a Goon Zippo lighter and shot glass—not to mention the usual T-shirts—in case you want to share your love for The Goon with the world. Next Page: Cover art for a French collected edition of The Goon.

The Goon ™ and © Eric Powell.

MM: There’s nowhere else for you to go. You’ve basically got all the readers you’re going to have in this current format.

MM: These are the kind of people that get you, though. They understand where you’re coming from.

ERIC: Yeah. I have a really great and loyal fan base, but it has stayed steady at that mark—which I’m very happy about. You don’t want your sales to fluctuate up and down every issue. I’ve maintained a really steady readership, and they’re really loyal, and they’re really awesome. I look at what some readers say to some of the creators on the books they read, and there are some venomous, nasty people out there who claim to be their fans. But I have to say, as far as Goon readers go, they are really cool people. I don’t think it’s the typical comic book crowd. I think I just got lucky and got a good, large readership of people that don’t take anything too seriously.

ERIC: Yeah, they get it.

MM: They probably know more about you than your family does. ERIC: [laughs] They might. I don’t know. Because I try to hide my books from some of my family. I don’t want them to see what I’m doing. MM: Is there anything that spooks you? Like, if people come up to you with Goon tattoos, is that a scary thing? ERIC: Well, last San Diego a guy came up to me and said, “Can you do a quick, little doodle of the Goon on my leg?” And I was like, “Uhhh, okay.” I did it, and he goes, “I’m going to get that tattooed.” And I said, “Dude, I would have done that better if I’d known you were going to get it tattooed.” [laughter] But then he comes back the next day and he had it tattooed on his leg. So that was pretty awesome.

MM: I would be baffled by that.

MM: Do you find yourself not having enough time to do the all things you want to do?

ERIC: Yeah. But it’s really cool and touching at the same time. “Wow, that’s awesome that you like the book that much. I hope I don’t screw it up for you at some point.”

ERIC: Every day it seems like I scribble a new idea down on my notepad, and there’s no way I’m going to live long enough to do half of them. But I’m trying. [laughs]

MM: Are you writing the film? And why is it animation instead of live action?

MM: You let the momentum carry you?

ERIC: I am writing it. I was kind of against animation at first just because I thought, “Unless it’s singing animals or something, you can’t have a violent, dark animated film.” But Blur and David Fincher approached me, and they showed me some of their test footage, and I just thought, “Yeah.” The only way to really do the book justice is to do it as an animated film. I mean, you could do a green screen movie or something like that and have live actors, but if you’re going to have a decent adaptation, I think animation is the way to go. Every time I see something come out of Blur, it really reconfirms that for me.

ERIC: Yeah, I think I’ll produce the best work I can that way. I don’t want to do something just for a paycheck. I’ve always let the project dictate what I’m going to do next. If I feel like doing a certain kind of story, I’ll switch gears and go do that.

MM: Is the Hollywood business stuff just as tedious as comics? Do you mind the waiting game and wondering, “When is this going to happen? Is the money out there?” ERIC: Admittedly, I have limited Hollywood experience, but comic books and the movie industry are really different, although each have their own major flaws. [laughs] It seems like comics are desperately trying to turn into that kind of an industry. You definitely have people fishing around for material that they can option off, so it seems like the used car salesman mentality is trickling its way into the comic book industry. MM: When you guys did the film presentation at San Diego Comic-Con, what was the expectation, that word of mouth would create more of a demand for the film? ERIC: Yeah, that was our goal. We wanted to get the word of mouth out there to try to build interest and make it easier for us to sell this thing. And all the stuff that Blur has put out there has gotten a huge response. It’s just getting someone, to put it bluntly, to have the balls to want to do an animated film that’s not.... MM: A sequel to something else? ERIC: A sequel to something, and it’s not a singing animal movie. 65

Interlude 4: Below: Goon does his own alligator dance. Next Page: Jeff Smith’s Kingdok and Will Eisner’s The Spirit—from Eric’s sketchbooks.

The Spirit ™ and © Will Eisner Estate. Bone ™ and © Jeff Smith.

MM: How did you infiltrate The Goon’s inner circle as the book’s colorist?

DAVE STEWART: Well, Eric flew to Portland and tested my metal through the traditional alligator dance. I didn’t know you could check a ten-foot reptile, but he did. And the dance hurt bad, but look who’s coloring The Goon! Me!

Dave Stewart

MM: What are some of the challenges of working on Goon? How do you approach an issue?

DAVE: Coloring The Goon is always smooth as silk. Soft as hand-churned butter. I approach every issue carefully. Like the gator in the gator dance. Really, I just break the issue down into scenes and color code those for mood and setting. We try to make the Goon’s world a little off when it comes to color. Everyone has a slightly unhealthy skin hue. The sky’s never blue and the grass never green. I’m just trying to accent Eric’s vision. MM: Is working with Eric’s art and work process different from the other artists you collaborate with? DAVE: Not so much. It’s fun to get to know people through their art. I can tell if Eric is stopped up or his big toe is suffering from the gout again. All through the art. That’s how close the colorist is to the artist. MM: Over the time you’ve been working with him, what sort of growth have you seen to Eric’s artwork and storytelling? DAVE: Eric is always getting better. It seems like he’s come to some sort of genius or modern master level these days.... MM: Your work on the most recent issues have given the book a lot more texture and vibrancy. The artwork from yourself and Eric has never looked better. Are you feeling more comfortable working on the book with each issue? DAVE: Now that I have the full use of my arm back—the infection from the multiple gator bites left me limp and withered—I do feel more comfortable. Recently we shifted gears a little, and I think it’s made a nice difference in the work. I love that guy.

Part 5:

Storytelling and the Creative Process

MM: Who are the five artists you feel were your biggest influences?

ERIC: As far as modern guys, I think my biggest influences have been Jeff Smith and Mike Mignola for a number of reasons. I mean, their writing and their art and their business model. They really inspired me to try to go out and do my own book. I followed their lead. With a lot of guys, they’ll do a comic and build a little popularity, and then they’ll jump off and go do some work for Marvel and DC to get a decent paycheck, but then the thing they created loses all its momentum. So I look at what those guys did. They stuck with one thing and kept their focus on that. I’ve followed that model of, “I’m going to stick with this book, get it off the ground, and make it as big as I can.” Will Eisner is a big influence, the way he really looked at the comic page in a different way. It’s not just going to be a bunch of boxes. You see a lot of guys who try to say, “Oh, I’m thinking outside the box. Look at the way I’m designing this page.” But you can’t read it. [laughs] “Look, I have panels like shattered glass on this page! Isn’t this cool?” Well, graphically, that’s nice, but I can’t read it. I can’t follow it. Whereas Will Eisner could break down something and it still reads like a comic, but it doesn’t look like a typical comic book page.

ERIC: Well, it depends on which thing I’m working on at the time. When I’m writing, I have to turn everything off. I can’t listen to music, I can’t have the TV on as background noise. It has to be kind of quiet, otherwise I get distracted. And when I’m laying stuff out, it’s usually structured. I have a schedule worked out where I need to get this many pages laid out today, I need to ink two pages this day. When I’m laying stuff out, I usually listen to music or something, but it still is something where I can’t be too distracted, because I’m going back and forth between the script and concentrating on turning my stuff out. But once the stuff is on the paper, once there’s something for me to go by and I’m just tightening up pencils or inking, I usually listen to audio books or the news or something like that— audio commentary for a movie.

MM: That’s three. [laughs] ERIC: I’m narrowing it down. It’s hard. Wrightson is definitely one. I was really influenced by him. Wally Wood and Jack Davis have to be in there. This is insanely hard. I’ll say Wally Wood, Jack Davis, Frank Frazetta. [laughs] See, I can’t narrow it down to five without, “Well, that guy’s just as much of an influence as this guy.” Then there’s Kirby. And Alan Davis—his work has influenced me. So that’s way more than five. [laughs] MM: When you’re in book mode, how do you go about your day? Do you follow a schedule? Do you shut off the phone? 67

MM: There’s a lot of isolation, right? ERIC: Yeah. If you’re not cool with being by yourself a lot, you’d probably need to get another job. It’s a pretty lonely existence. I understand why guys start studios, but, unfortunately, I live in the middle of nowhere, and there’re not any other comic book artists around. I’ve actually thought about opening up a tattoo shop just so I would have a studio atmosphere. Starting a comic book studio in Tennessee isn’t really a viable option. Now, if I was in Portland, it’d be much easier. MM: Have you thought of relocating? Above: A doodle from Eric’s sketchbooks. Below: One of Eric’s life drawings. Next Page: A study of a woman’s back... among other things, along with a humorous sketch of who could have been his model at his first life drawing class. Artwork ™ and © Eric Powell.

ERIC: I have, but the more time goes by, the more I’m just really happy where I am. No place is perfect, but I’ve been able to travel enough to know that I like the good things about where I live. The good things far outweigh the bad things. MM: Is there anything you do to loosen up before you start penciling a page? Do you doodle a little beforehand? ERIC: My day is kind of a slow build. When I sit at the table, it’s not like I’m going a hundred miles an hour. I’ll just kind of doodle around on a panel a little bit and get warmed up. I don’t really pull out a sketchbook and do a couple of sketches to get fired up. To me, that feels like I’m wasting time. I have to get started. I don’t dive right into a page and start going at it, but

I’ll skip around on pages and go around a little bit to get warmed up. I usually don’t start doing anything major on the pages until later in the day. MM: So you don’t doodle outside of your work? ERIC: Oh, yeah. It’s funny, I have a sketchbook compulsion. If I’m out somewhere, a bookstore or an art store, I always come out with a sketchbook. And I’ve got tons of sketchbooks I haven’t even filled up yet, and probably won’t be able to fill up, because I have so many. MM: Do you ever go to the park or the mall to observe the scene? ERIC: No, I might throw a sketchbook in my pocket if I know I’m going to be sitting somewhere for a while. Like, my girlfriend plays roller derby, so if I’m going to a roller derby bout, I have to be there early because she has to be there early, and I’ll put one of the sketchbooks in my pocket and go have a beer and doodle a little something. Or if I’m just at home, a lot of the times I’ll pull out a sketchbook. MM: Have you done any life drawing classes? ERIC: I never went to college or anything, so I missed out on those life drawing classes. I have tried to take some locally, but they weren’t very appealing. I remember one where I wanted to study muscle tone, and I’ve always had a problem with backs. Backs are extremely hard for me because, depending on the position you’re in, they change. It’s weird. I saw that this place was offering life drawing classes, and I call in and say, “Well, what are your models like? I’m not prejudiced against different body types, but I’m looking for a specific thing. I’m trying to learn musculature.”

And they’re like, “Oh, yeah, our models are in great shape.” So I went in, and it was a 70-year-old lady. If I was going in to study that body type, that would have been fine. But I was looking for someone who was muscular. I didn’t go back to that class.

ERIC: Pencil, I just use a mechanical pencil. Brush, I use Winsor & Newton sable brushes. I use Winsor & Newton ink, which has lacquer in it, which isn’t too good for your brushes, but it’s the most dense ink I’ve been able to find. I also use Dr. Martin’s watercolors to get some of the effects I want. I use black colored pencils to get some pencil tone over the inks and stuff like that.

MM: What’s your equipment of choice, pencil and brushwise?

MM: When you send the art to Dave Stewart, do you just send him scans? ERIC: Yeah, I scan everything. MM: What is the most challenging part of doing The Goon nowadays? Just sitting down and drawing it? ERIC: Yeah. Like everyone else says, it’s the blank page, and that’s the hardest thing. The easiest thing is when the page is laid out, not even drawn, just laid out, so you have a roadmap of where you’re going. I think I waste more time just staring at a blank page than anything else, trying to figure out what the hell I’m doing. MM: When you write the book, where do you start? You said you don’t really write. ERIC: No, I think I work in a non-typical way. I don’t work from a full script. I’ll just go through and kind of map out the story. I do

Below: Pencil sketch for the cover of The Goon vol. 2, #3, based on Norman Rockwell’s 1922 Christmas cover of The Saturday Evening Post. Next Page: Cover pencils for The Goon #10, an adaptation of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, with Goon in the role of the Ghost of Christmas Present.

The Saturday Evening Post ™ and © The Saturday Evening Post Society.

kind of a layout of what I want the book to be. Like, “I want the Goon to go wrestle alligators” or whatever. And then I have a Point A, a Point B, and a Point C that I want to get to, and having those in mind and having a little layout, I go through and write out all the dialogue like I’m listening in on conversations. I think that really helps, because I’m not going back and forth and trying to break down the page and then write a little dialogue, then break down this and then write a little dialogue. I’m just thinking about what’s going on, and what they’re doing, and what they’re saying. I take that dialogue, and that’s what I do my thumbnails off of. I don’t have a script that tells me, “This page has five panels, and this page has four panels.” I just have this dialogue, with no panel descriptions or anything in it, and I do my layouts based off of that. So I’m kind of still writing the script when I’m doing my layouts. MM: It all just starts coming to you, like, “This page could use a couple of panels here,” that sort of thing?

ERIC: Yeah, because, for me, you can get the flow of the story better, visually, like that. If I’m looking at a page and I’m like, “All right, the Goon needs to punch this taxi driver on this page, and he’s having this conversation with Franky before he does it,” when I’m laying out the art, it’s better if I can see visually that, “There needs to be a good beat here,” and I can add something in there that I wouldn’t have written into the script. And it doesn’t interfere with the following pages, because I’m still laying those out, whereas I’d have to restructure things if I was using a full script. MM: Do you write in arcs? ERIC: I set up a lot of stuff in the monthly series a couple years ago that needs to be resolved. That is something I’m thinking about in an arc. But, for the most part, the stuff I’m doing right now is episodic, because after Chinatown, the monthly series ended on a really sad tone, and I just want to do some crazy, fun stuff for a while. Like, in issue #36 we had a real-life burlesque superstar in the story, and we did all these really blue jokes. MM: You mentioned earlier that repeating yourself is something you’re conscious of. That’s part of the challenge, isn’t it? ERIC: That’s something I’m really worried about. I don’t want to give the readers the same thing over and over. Eventually, you’re going to unconsciously parody yourself or someone else. I did this Goon Christmas book, and there were these little monsters running around that turn out to be Santa’s elves. Scott Allie calls me one day and he goes, “Hey, I read that Goon Christmas book you did.” And I was like, “Oh, yeah, what did you think?” He goes, “You realize that Gary Gianni did that same story in Monster Men.” And it was. It was different, but it was eerily similar. I think he had two little monsters running around, and they end up being Santa’s elves. And, if I remember right, even the monster design, while not the same, was kind of similar, because mine were just kind of like heads running around with arms and legs. In Gianni’s story, they were kind of torsos running around with arms and legs and no head. My stomach was in knots after I realized that had happened. It’s inevitable. At some point in time, you’re going to do something that you’ve already done or that someone else has already done. But I try my best to keep the book fresh and original.

MM: What about choreographing fights? I’m sure you’re enamored with certain poses, and there are ones where you go, “I don’t want to do that one again.”

Above: One of Eric’s trademark slow-motion fist-to-the-face close-ups. This one comes from The Goon #33. Next Page: Pencils with dialogue balloons attached for page 13 of The Goon: Chinatown and the Mystery of Mr. Wicker. You can see the outlines of the dialogue where it has been printed, cut out, and then glued to the board.

The Goon ™ and © Eric Powell.

ERIC: Yeah, I’ve noticed that I’ve been doing a lot of close-up shots of the Goon punching someone in the face. Because, it’s really fun to draw. [laughs] And it’s just kind of fitting. The Goon punches a guy, and there’s his fist connecting in that kind of slow-motion boxer fist to the face. But I think there’s a difference between being repetitive and having a signature. Like, I know there’s a pose I have of the Goon, again, punching something, where he’s just really laying into it. And I know I’ve drawn that pose 500 times, but that’s kind of a signature, you know? That’s what the Goon looks like when he punches somebody. So, yeah, I think there’s a fine line. MM: What’s the typical amount of time you spend on an issue, start to finish? ERIC: Well, that depends on how much time I have left in the schedule. [laughs] If it’s laid out, and I have the dialogue ready to go and everything, it’s usually about three or four weeks. MM: Once you start drawing, will you power through and make sure you finish at least one 72

page each day? ERIC: It depends on how tired I am. If something’s not right about it or whatever, then I’ll call it a day if the page is half-done. And then there are days where I do four or five pages a day. I don’t really do finished pencils. My pencils are really loose, because I do so much drawing in the ink. But I’m a really fast inker, so if the pages are laid out and I have a clear definition in my head of where I’m going with it, then I can work through it really fast. But if I don’t, and there’s stuff that doesn’t look right, and I’m going over it and over it and over it, trying to fix something, then I probably won’t even finish that one page that day. But usually it doesn’t matter, because I usually end up hating it anyway. There is not a single issue of The Goon that I wish I didn’t have more time to do, because there’s something wrong with all of them. There’s no issue of The Goon where it’s just like, “Boy, I nailed that one!” because you have the time constraints. And you can only really get something right when you’ve had time to look at it. That’s one of the reasons I think my paintings are so much better than my interior work, because I’m able to take a little bit more time with them. I’ll sketch something out and then put it on the canvas,

and you’re looking at it over the course of three or four days from when you started with the sketch, and you can see where the problems are once you’re a little bit removed from it. When you’re doing the interiors, you’ve got to go. “All right, if this page is done, move on to the next one.” And there are so many mistakes that when the book comes out, I don’t really see the stuff that’s good about. Every little flaw sticks out like a sore thumb to me, and I end up not really digging what I’ve done. MM: You just need to move on for your own sanity. ERIC: Yeah, you move on. You go, “Well, that one sucks. I’ll move on to the next one.” But, y’know, a friend of mine said that, “The stuff that’s sticking out to you, no one else will even notice,” and I’m sure that’s true some of the time, but it’s not true all of the time. But you’ve got to look at it that way. You’re being obsessive over something because you’re so close to it, but if you have a few panels in there that look good and that you are happy with, I mean, that’s the best you can hope for.

MM: How conscious are you about word balloons? Will you cut back your dialogue in order to let the art breathe? ERIC: I definitely believe that the economy of word is underrated amongst writers today, in everything. You’ve got the Kevin Smith/ Quentin Tarantino overwriting method going on. And all that stuff is great, but I think everyone is trying to be, “Look how witty I am! Look how great I write these characters! All of my characters have something great to say!” It can be distracting. I follow the rule that if you can get away with saying nothing and letting the reader make a decision about what this character is going through internally, it’s much better than holding their hand and guiding them through every step. That is definitely something that I have learned from Mignola. He’s really good at that, the way he sets up a story and will just throw in a creepy panel with no dialogue. It sets a mood. He has a character shot or something, and you’re internalizing what’s going on. He’s not holding your hand through it. I try my hardest to not have to explain things to people. You need to 75

Previous Page: Partially inked pencils for The Goon #38, page 8. You can see here just how loose Eric’s pencils have become. Above: The Goon #33, pages 4 and 5. There is no dialogue in this issue. Instead Eric employed iconography in thought balloons to convey purpose and intent, though on many pages the art alone carried the storytelling.

The Goon ™ and © Eric Powell.

let them think about it, and let them come up with their own reasoning for what’s going on in the story, and I believe they’ll like it more for that. And, also, I think I’m one of the last guys that still puts the balloons on the page. Above: Eric’s pencils and Mark Farmer’s inks for Marvel Monsters: Devil Dinosaur, page 7. Next Page: A more classical approach to figure drawing—and a bit of self-deprecation— from Eric’s sketchbooks.

Devil Dinosaur, Hulk ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

MM: You hand-letter it yourself? ERIC: Well, it’s printed out. I lay out the text on the computer, and then I print it out on label paper and paste it onto the page. Hardly anyone is doing that anymore, and I think it kind of hurts, because I think designing your panels around the balloons and positioning the characters with the balloons in mind helps the page design. Now it’s just people drawing panels, and the poor letterer comes in and has to cram them in there somehow. MM: That seems to be one of those things that people overlook about comics, that it’s a combination of the words and the art. There has to be a flow to it. ERIC: That’s why I still put them on the page. Not to sound snobbish or anything, but it’s 76

not a comic if you can’t read it, and to me the original artwork is as much a part of the comic as the final product. So I like having the words on there. If I flip through my artwork, I want to see the art, but I also want to be able to read it, because, to me, there’s no separating the two. MM: Have you ever thought of having anybody ink you to speed things up? ERIC: I have, and I’ve actually worked with Mark Farmer, who’s my favorite inker, not just on my stuff, but in the industry. I love what that guy does. I worked with him once on that Devil Dinosaur book, and it was a great experience, but my pencils are so loose that, when I work with an inker, I have to tighten them up so much that I think it’s actually counterproductive. I think I’m actually faster inking myself. Plus, I do so many washes and pencil stuff that I couldn’t have someone inking. There’s no way I can pencil something and go, “Yeah, and splatter some ink out here.” There’s no way for me to tell an inker what I

want to do with the page, or give an inker my skill set to do exactly what I’m doing with the inks. So I’m kind of shoehorned into inking myself. MM: Will you always be a guy who prefers to use a brush? Would you ever consider going digital? ERIC: I totally understand how people get sucked into it, because I got a Cintiq tablet, and just the ease of using it, it’s like, “Wow, this thing’s the devil.” You can easily get sucked into doing all your stuff on it, just the speed of it. But, for me, part of my enjoyment of doing the work comes from doing it on the paper and using the paintbrush and inks and washes and everything. It just wouldn’t be as much fun if I were doing it digitally. Just my personal preference. MM: When you look at the portfolios of younger artists, what do you commonly see wrong? Is it mostly in the storytelling? ERIC: No, actually, the thing I’ve been noticing is that the storytelling is actually getting better. You can follow what they’re doing, the story. I think the drawing is getting lazier. I think people are not willing to put in the time to really learn how to draw. I don’t know. I think some of the animation stuff, where you have South Park and some of these shows where the drawing’s really crude, you can get away with that—movement takes away from some of the crappy drawing. And people follow the story through the voices more in animation, because they’re just sitting back and watching it. But when you’re doing a comic, all the images are stagnant, so any flaw you have is really what your eye is drawn to. And I’m wondering if some of the animation stuff hasn’t gotten people thinking, “Oh, I can get away with doing half-assed drawing.” There’s a lot more stylized art coming out, where everyone’s trying to be Mike Mignola or Humberto Ramos or someone, where they have a really stylized sensibility. But you have to learn to draw before you can have a style. You have to learn anatomy before you can start drawing someone with deformed anatomy. So I just think there’s a little bit of laziness going around with this generation’s comic artists. You have to draw every day. What’s that saying? You have to put in 10,000 hours to become good at something. You have to look at it that way. Go buy five sketchbooks 77

and fill them up with figure drawings and perspective studies and things like that. Put in some work before you start diving into, “Look, I did a 300-page graphic novel and printed it at Kinko’s, and now I’m stuck with them.” MM: Does the storytelling come easier now? As the years go by, you get pickier and pickier about what your doing. ERIC: I do. I’m just insecure, I think. When I was in my 20s, I was looking at other artists, and I noticed that when they reached about 35, that’s when they really hit their stride and started doing their best work. I was always shooting for that number, like, “Yeah! When I’m about 35, I’ll be doing my best stuff, and it’ll look great!” I’m going to be 37 this year, and I’m looking back at some of the stuff I did thinking, “Stuff I did a couple years go when I was 35 looks like crap.” [laughs] So I’m still not happy with myself, and still striving to get better. I think I look at what I do more like a sport than art. In a weird way, I think a lot of artists have that hippie mentality of, “Oh, it’s great, man. Everyone just be happy. That’s so wonderful. Let’s make art!” And I’m internally competitive, where it’s just, “That sucks. You have to do better. You have to do better than this.”

a modern car that’s really straight, simplistic lines, or you’re drawing modern office buildings, where it’s all geometry and it’s all straight, perfect lines, that’s where I start to fall apart, because I can’t do that stuff. That’s why I felt so out of place when I was drawing those Buffy books, because all those characters are supermodels and actors, attractive people, and it’s like, “Oops, I put one line on Buffy’s nose and now she looks 45.” It’s a weird thing that way. You have to be careful about putting character on anything because you make it look old. I love putting character on stuff, so I want to overdo it. That’s why you see so many raggedy houses and gnarly trees and old, banged-up trucks and stuff in The Goon is because that’s the stuff that I naturally feel

MM: Is that how you persevere with the work? Because a lot of artists let it get to them, and some of them would rather quit than keep drawing. ERIC: I’ve never really thought of it that way, but, yeah, I think so. A lot of people can’t handle the criticism. They’re insecure about what they’re doing and they quit, whereas I’m really insecure about it, I think I suck and I don’t want to show my work off, but at the same time I’m internally competitive and striving to do better. MM: Are you finding vehicles and architecture easier to draw now? I know that’s something you aren’t a big fan of drawing. ERIC: No, I’m not good at that stuff at all. I can naturally draw organic stuff easily, like a twisted, gnarly tree, or some swampy land, or landscape, or anything like that—some ugly person with character in their face. But once you start getting into an economy of line, like when you’re drawing a very attractive person, so you can only get away with putting so many lines on the face, or if you’re drawing 79

Previous Page: Figure drawing (and what a figure!) and structure drawing from Eric’s sketchbooks. Below: A beautiful woman turned hideous— and more fun to draw— by a gypsy’s curse. Page 7 of The Goon #36. The Goon ™ and © Eric Powell.

Right: Eric employs highly complicated equations to bring you the funny. A panel from The Goon #32. Below: Kids love comics, and they’ll do whatever it takes to get them, so hide your medication! Next Page: A print sold at a Nashville Rollergirls event, featuring Goon and a member of the Nashville team.

The Goon ™ and © Eric Powell.

like I can do. I love stuff with character, and I don’t like anything slick. MM: What do you want your readers to get from your books? Do you just want them to be entertained? You want them to come back, obviously. ERIC: For the most part, I just want them to be happy. I want the work to evoke some kind of emotion, whether they laugh, or they’re sad, or it just makes them happy to read the book. If I can get some kind of emotion out of them, that’s all I really want. That’s really it. Because the worst thing I can think of is if someone picked up a comic and just set it down and was apathetic. “I didn’t hate it,” y’know? If it’s just forgettable, if someone picks it up, reads it, throws it down, and then two weeks later forgot that they read it. Because I’ve had so many experiences

like that. A movie, a book, music—if you just watch it, or read it, or listen to it, and you’re like, “Enh,” and you forget about it two weeks later, that’s the worst to me. I never want anyone to pick up The Goon and feel that way. I want to get some kind of meaningful, memorable emotion out of it. MM: You want them to have some anticipation for the book. ERIC: Yeah, that would be the best way to put it. When they walk into a comic shop and it’s on the stand, they go, “Ooh!” That’s the easiest way to put it. They know they’re going to get something out of it, so they’re excited to see it on the stand. MM: What’s the best part of doing The Goon? ERIC: The best part is being my own boss, just working on the book and amusing myself every day. Coming up with something and being, like, “Baaa, that’s funny.” Just being able to draw what I want, and write what I want. I don’t have anyone standing over me, going, “You can’t do that because someone else is doing it in this other series,” or “You have to do this because we’re tying it in with these other books.” I can do anything I want, and that’s the best part. MM: Do you ever catch yourself thinking, “Man, I can’t believe this is actually working.” ERIC: Yeah, I still do that. I’m extremely lucky. For one, I’m able to do comics for a living, and, two, I’m able to do my own comic, which a lot of people don’t get to do, and make a living at it. So I feel extremely lucky. And I realize that fact every day.

Eric Powell

Art Gallery

Top: Wraparound cover art for The Goon Fancy Pants Edition vol. 2, a hardcover collection of The Goon. Left: Cover art for a French collection of The Goon. Above: Artwork for the 2009 DragonCon guest badges. The Goon ™ and © Eric Powell.

Below: Live bands, burlesque dancers, and comic books— now that’s a 10th Anniversary party! Right: Cover art for The Goon: Noir #2. The Noir threeissue mini-series featured Goon stories written and drawn by other creators. The Goon ™ and © Eric Powell.

Page 84: Cover art for a Masters of the Universe (a.k.a., He-Man) mini-comic that was packaged with the action figure toy line. Page 85: Cover art for the first Pug Davis trade paperback collection. Below: 2009 poster art for the Music City Burlesque show. Right: “The Bad”—part of a promotional poster entitled “The Good, the Bad, and the Derby” done in conjunction with the Nashville Rollergirls. Below Right: One of Eric’s many NRG bout promo posters. Next Page: More NRG poster art. Pages 88 and 89: More promotional art for various NRG posters.

Previous Page: Pencils for an NRG promotional poster. This Page: Sketchbook drawings of the female form. Artwork © Eric Powell.

This Page and Next: More lovely illustrations from Eric’s sketchbooks. Page 94: (clockwise from top left) Cover art for Super-Villain Team-Up: MODOK’s 11 #1. Spider-Man illo from Eric’s sketchbooks. Sketchbook Batman drawing. Pencil drawing of the Demon done for Wizard magazine. Pages 95: Pencils the cover of Arkham Asylum: Living Hell #6.

Previous Page: (clockwise from top left) A sketch for the Boris Karloff Frankenstein monster. A Bride of Frankenstein strip from Eric’s sketchbooks. A cartoony take on Frankenstein’s monster. A Bizarro Wonder Woman commission drawing. Cover pencils for Dark Horse’s Universal Monsters: Cavalcade of Horror collection. Above: Layout sketch and inks for the cover of Action Comics #856. Left and Right: Preliminary sketches in preparation for “Escape from Bizarro World,” though Darkseid does not appear in the story, and Lois and Jimmy appear only as Bizarros.

Bizarro, Darkseid, Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane, Wonder Woman ™ and © DC Comics. Bride of Frankenstein, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy © Universal Studios Licensing, LLLP.

Previous Page: Cover pencils for Swamp Thing #22. Above: Sketch ideas for the cover of Swamp Thing #23. The larger image was the image chosen. Right: A Swamp Thing sketch for Wizard magazine.

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Previous Page: Cover inks for Godzilla: Kingdom of Monsters #7. Above: Preliminary sketches in preparation for the Godzilla: Kingdom of Monsters series. Left: Layout sketch for a Godzilla: Kingdom of Monsters teaser ad. Godzilla ™ and © Toho Co., Ltd.

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Previous Page: “Luca Brazi” from The Godfather and the inspiration for the scene in The Goon #3 in which Goon gains his reputation. Above: Eric’s sketchbook depiction of Frodo, Samwise, and Gollum in the realm of Mordor from The Two Towers. Left and Right: Darth Vader and his minions. Pages 104 and 105: Cover art for The Goon Fancy Pants Edition vol. 1 (top) along with various Goon sketches, illustrations, and preliminary work. Luca Brazi © Mario Puzo. Lord of the Rings © J.R.R. Tolkein. Star Wars ™ and © Lucasfilm LLC.

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Previous Page: (clockwise from top left) One of Eric’s Christmas cards. Preliminary artwork for the cover of The Goon Vol. 5: Wicked Inclinations. Goon animatic drawings. Preliminary sketch of a changeling for The Goon #17. Cover pencils for The Goon #12. Above Left: Preliminary sketches for the return of the harpies. Above Right: Goon and Franky from Eric’s sketchbooks. Right: An appropriately ghoulish Buzzard sketch. Page 108: Cover art for Buzzard #2. Page 109: Eric’s illustrative side is shown in these sketches from his sketchbooks. Buzzard, The Goon ™ and © Eric Powell.

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Page 110: Cornfields always make a good horror setting, as this drawing from Eric’s sketchbooks will attest. Page 111: Horror with a sci-fi twist. The boy in the Halloween outfit is Eric’s son Cade. Page 112: Cartoony drawings from Eric’s sketchbooks. Page 113: This one-page strip featuring Eric’s son first appeared in Negative Burn #1 (2006) and later in Dark Horse’s hardcover Chimichanga collection. Pages 114–117: Concept sketches, doodles, and illustrations from Eric’s sketchbooks. 115

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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

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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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(240-page trade paperback) $29.95

QUALITY COMPANION

BATCAVE COMPANION

ALL- STAR COMPANION

AGE OF TV HEROES

The first dedicated book about the Golden Age publisher that spawned the modern-day “Freedom Fighters”, Plastic Man, and the Blackhawks!

Unlocks the secrets of Batman’s Silver and Bronze Ages, following the Dark Knight’s progression from 1960s camp to 1970s creature of the night!

Roy Thomas has four volumes documenting the history of ALL-STAR COMICS, the JUSTICE SOCIETY, INFINITY, INC., and more!

(256-page trade paperback with COLOR) $31.95

(240-page trade paperback) $26.95

(224-page trade paperbacks) $24.95

Examining the history of the live-action television adventures of everyone’s favorite comic book heroes, featuring the in-depth stories of the shows’ actors and behind-the-scenes players!

CARMINE INFANTINO

SAL BUSCEMA

(192-page full-color hardcover) $39.95

MARVEL COMICS IN THE 1960s

An issue-by-issue field guide to the pop culture phenomenon of LEE, KIRBY, DITKO, and others, from the company’s fumbling beginnings to the full maturity of its wild, colorful, offbeat grandiosity! (224-page trade paperback) $27.95

MARVEL COMICS IN THE 1970s

Covers how Stan Lee went from writer to publisher, Jack Kirby left (and returned), Roy Thomas rose as editor, and a new wave of writers and artists came in! (224-page trade paperback) $27.95

STAN LEE UNIVERSE The ultimate repository of interviews with and mementos about Marvel Comics’ fearless leader! (176-page trade paperback) $26.95 (192-page hardcover with COLOR) $39.95

HOW TO CREATE COMICS FROM SCRIPT TO PRINT

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

FOR A FREE COLOR CATALOG, CALL, WRITE, E-MAIL, OR LOG ONTO www.twomorrows.com

TwoMorrows—A New Day For Comics Fandom! TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 E-mail: twomorrow@aol.com • Visit us on the Web at www.twomorrows.com

ERIC POWELL Eric Powell is a sick, sick man. Sick... but brilliant. How else would he have been able to come up with a concept like The Goon? A smarter-than-he-looks brute raised by carnies who runs the city’s underworld while protecting it from being overrun by zombies? How could anyone not love that idea? Especially as told through the words and illustrations of Eric Powell. He’s an amazing penciler, a wizard with a brush, and shows a great sense of color and composition in his painting. He also has a blazing wit and a storytelling style that complements his artwork perfectly. And Powell’s five Eisner Awards merely confirm the fact that he is truly a 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: 978-1-60549-041-0 ISBN-10: 1-60549-041-5 51595

9 781605 490410

$15.95 In The US ISBN