Modern Masters Vol. 29: Cliff Chiang

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 - N I N E :

CLIFF CHIANG

Wonder Woman ™ and © DC Comics.

By Chris Arrant and Eric Nolen-Weathington

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Modern Masters Volume 29:

Modern Masters Volume Twenty-Nine:

Cliff Chiang

edited by Eric Nolen-Weathington and Chris Arrant front cover by Cliff Chiang interviews conducted by Chris Arrant and transcribed by Fred Perry, Eric Nolen-Weathington, and Chris Arrant

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Dr. Raleigh, NC 27614 www.twomorrows.com First Printing • January 2014 • Printed in the USA Softcover ISBN: 978-1-60549-050-2

Trademarks & Copyrights All characters and artwork are ™ and © Cliff Chiang unless otherwise noted.

Life of Grime © Cliff Chiang Josie Mac © Judd Winick and Cliff Chiang Anthro, Aquaman, The Atom, Barbara Gordon, Batgirl, Batman, Big Barda, Big Book of Grimm, Black Canary, Black Manta, Captain Fear, Captain Marvel, Catwoman, The Creeper, Crimson Avenger, Deadman, Death, Doctor 13, Elongated Man, First Born, Flash, Gen. Jeb Stuart, Genius Jones, Giganta, Green Arrow, Green Lantern, Human Target, Infectious Lass, I… Vampire, Jack Smart, Jimmy Olsen, Justice Society, Lois Lane, Nightwing, Orion, Phantom Stranger, Primaul, Riddler, Solomon Grundy, Spectre, Super Friends, Superman, Swamp Thing, Traci Thirteen, Two-Face, Wildcat, Wonder Woman, Zatanna, Zatara © DC Comics Planetary © WildStorm Productions/DC Comics Ariel, Avengers, Black Cat, Captain America, Colossus, Daredevil, Dazzler, Dr. Doom, Fantastic Four, Hawkeye, Human Torch, Invisible Woman, Iron Man, Kitty Pryde, Lockheed, Mr. Fantastic, Mysterio, New Mutants, Nightcrawler, Rogue, Scarlet Witch, Spider-Man, Storm, Thing, Thor, The Vision, Wasp, White Queen, Wolverine, X-Men, Yellowjacket © Marvel Characters, Inc. Archie, Betty, Jughead, Reggie, Veronica © Archie Comic Publications, Inc. Transmetropolitan © Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson // The Spirit © The Will Eisner Estate // Sadie Dawkins © David Lapham // The Rocketeer © The Dave Stevens Estate // Grendel © Matt Wagner // DMZ © Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli Dr. Girlfriend, The Monarch © Cartoon Network // Baroness, G.I. Joe © Hasbro // Buckaroo Banzai © MGM/Sherwood Prod., Harry Bailley Prod., and Earl Mac Rauch // O-Ren Ishii © Mirimax // Snoopy © Peanuts Worldwide LLC // Red Sonja © Red Sonja, LLC // Gatchaman © Tatsunoko Production // Rocky © United Artists Corp. // The Creature from the Black Lagoon © Universal City Studios, Inc. // Greendale © Neil Young // Zorro © Zorro Productions¸ Inc.

Special Thanks Rick McGee and the crew of Foundation’s Edge, Fred Perry, Paul Pope, John & Pam Morrow

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Modern Masters Volume Twenty-Nine:

CLIFF CHIANG

Table of Contents Introduction by Paul Pope .................................................................................... 4 Chapter One: The Little Professor ...................................................................... 6 Chapter Two: Breaking In, Breaking Out ......................................................... 18 Chapter Three: Heroes and the Green ............................................................ 31 Chapter Four: Woman of Wonders .................................................................. 64 Chapter Five: Passion, Process, and Viewpoints................................................ 76 Art Gallery........................................................................................................... 83

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Introduction

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t was with Cliff’s work on Beware the Creeper, a reimagining of the classic Ditko character—in this case, set in Fin de siècle Paris—where I felt like he was onto something. I was familiar with his earlier efforts, but here he was really hitting onto something all his own. In The Creeper, Cliff seemed to find his sonic range. He was already good, lots of guys are good, but this was arching toward the unique. The work was distinct and had an aura of European cartooning, clean-lined and crisp, yet still playing within the arena of American contemporary comics. The brush was his evident weapon of choice, the work breathed. One could see the thumbprint of Vittorio Giardino, a little Crepax, Steranko, and even Javier Pulido

in Cliff’s work. Some Mazzucchelli. There was a grace and urgency coming to the front, his stuff stood out, and happily it still does.

I know for the artist himself, The Creeper was a sort of personal achievement, and for me it will always be what I think of first when I think of Cliff as an artist. Cliff has told me that was the place where he felt like he was actually doing the sort of cartooning he was thinking of, but up to that point hadn’t been able to pull off. So I would mark that project as his turning point as a young, emerging master cartoonist.

Cliff and I first met in the DC/Vertigo offices around 1998, when he was working as an assistant editor for Karen Berger and I was hand-delivering pages of Heavy Liquid to Shelly Bond. He showed me some of his self-published work (it’s an open secret that most editors and writers and even some publishers have aspirations to be cartoonists). It was clear he was working on his craft. I admired that, and it made his work worth checking out.

Within those five years he did some professional work, eventually landing The Creeper and hitting a high watermark. After that, he was riding a curve, getting better and better. The Human Target, his clever mash-ups of album covers and ’80s film posters with superhero icons, his current sprint on Wonder Woman with Azzarello... it’s all quality. It’s tops.

Wonder Woman © DC Comics

There are lots of stories I could tell you about the man; we are friends. He’s thoughtful and loyal and dedicated to The Prestige. Maybe my favorite memory of Cliff is the evening he and I did spontaneous drawings of trapeze artists on a placemat at a French resto in Brooklyn. Our drinks and dinner were covered in exchange for giving the owner that drawing. It was a great moment and it was a thrill to draw with him. Hope you enjoy this book dedicated to one of our finest young American cartoonists: Cliff Chiang.

Paul Pope NYC, 1/8/14

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The Creeper © DC Comics

Part 1:

The Little Professor

MODERN MASTERS: Tell us about the young Cliff Chiang. When and where were you born?

CLIFF CHIANG: I grew up in New Jersey, but I was born in Manhattan in 1974. I pretty much lived in the suburbs for most of my life until becoming an adult.

My earliest memory of anything relating to comics would be watching cartoons. I watched a lot of television as a kid when my grandparents or neighbors babysat me while my parents went to work in New York. My grandparents didn’t really speak that much English, so I conversed with them in sort of broken Taiwanese and watched a lot of TV. I remember watching Speed Racer, Sesame Street, and Electric Company.

CLIFF: Yeah, there was always a piano in the house—a pretty large grand piano actually. She would play it, and I’d always hear her singing. She was an opera singer too, when she came over in the 1960s. She performed with—I think it was called the New York Opera. One of her mentors was encouraging her to go pro and get an agent. Apparently there was some interest from a record company to sign her, but it meant she would have to tour a lot, and my dad didn’t like that. She’d given birth to my older brother already, and I was on the way soon. It just didn’t seem like a good idea to them at the time. She put all of that on hold and basically became an accountant.

MM: You mentioned an older brother. How many children are in your family?

CLIFF: I have a brother six years older than me, and another brother four years younger.

MM: What did your parents do for a living in New York?

CLIFF: My dad was a civil engineer. He’d work on things like hydroelectric dams. My mom worked in the financial department for Pan Am Airlines. That’s what she ended up doing as a career, but she’d been a music major and had gotten her Master’s in education to teach music as well.

Once she got married, it seemed less practical for her to do that though.

MM: Are there family stories of you drawing as a child that they look to as evidence of your later career?

CLIFF: My mom claims that I was always drawing from an early age, but I don’t remember when I started drawing or how much I really drew. It’s something you just do as a kid, you know? All kids draw and mess around with paper.

She tells a story where one of her friends looked at one of my drawings—I was only a couple of years old, maybe four at the oldest. They noticed that I was drawing airplanes, but I was drawing them in some sort of primitive perspective. You weren’t getting a flat airplane. The wing was kind of disappearing behind the fuselage, and her friend was surprised by that. “There’s something going on here.” I’m really skeptical of that. It sounds like the kind of story that your parents tell—tall tales. I’m guessing that I was copying some other drawing.

MM: Even though she didn’t end up doing it as a living, was music a big part of your household?

MM: What is your own earliest memory of drawing or tracing something?

CLIFF: It’s pretty hazy, but along with watching a lot of cartoons, it was Peanuts. I was really big on Snoopy as a kid, so that was one thing I would read all the time and draw.

That 1970s Charles Schulz hits me in a weird spot; it’s like comfort food.

MM: Do you still feel that way toward Peanuts?

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CLIFF: Yeah, I recently bought a lot of those great collections from Fantagraphics, but I stopped once they hit the 1980s when I wasn’t reading that stuff anymore. I read a lot of Peanuts. I would pick up those little paperback collections in airport bookstores.

Because my mom worked for Pan Am, we’d get employee discounts, so we’d go to Disney World every year. Sometimes we’d travel internationally, but every summer we took some sort of vacation where we were flying, so I had lots of opportunities to hit airport bookstores, and I tried to pick up as many consecutive Peanuts volumes as I could to try to follow the stories.

MM: Is that your first memory of reading comics—the Peanuts strip collections?

CLIFF: Yeah, it probably is.

MM: Do you remember the point where you transitioned into comic books?

CLIFF: We didn’t have comics around the house for a while. I remember going to a family friend’s house and meeting their kids for the first time. It was kind of awkward because we had nothing in common and our parents just expected us to hang out. They were a little bit older, and they had a couple of comics lying around. There was an Iron Man comic, and it was pretty magical—the colors. Maybe I had caught some of those cheesey 1960s Marvel cartoons in reruns, because I had some inkling of what those characters were, but seeing the actual comic and getting to look at it….

The kid was older, probably a teenager, and he had the comics on a table. I picked up the Iron Man comic and said, “Can I have this?” He said, “What do you mean, ‘have it’? Do you want to take it?” I didn’t understand, because I just wanted to borrow it so I could draw from it in another room. Once I explained that to him, he was like, “Oh, yeah, sure. No problem.” And I think that made comics seem more special seeing his reaction of not wanting to give it up.

I just wanted to look at it more in-depth.

That was the first comic I saw. It wasn’t until a few years later that my older brother Joe started buying them. He was probably in high school at that point. So I was reading what he was reading. This was 1983, or so, and the first comics he brought home were Uncanny X-Men and Fantastic Four.

MM: With that Iron Man comic, you said you

wanted to examine it further, but you also mentioned wanting to draw it. Were you actively processing the art by redrawing the comics? Did that help you understand it?

CLIFF: I never really thought about that to be honest. Probably, yeah, taking things and redrawing them was a way of assimilating it.

I never really made that connection before.

Part of me felt like I could own that comic by bringing that drawing home with me.

MM: Did you have a special place you drew, or special pencils or paper you used only for drawing when you were at this age?

CLIFF: No. There was always lots of office paper. Dad would bring back old letterhead from work. Actually, because of his job there were lots of pencils and erasers—not normal pencils with the pink eraser tip, but the blue Ticonderoga drafting pencils and the classic gum erasers—graph paper, protractors, compasses, and rulers that my dad always had around.

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Previous Page: Snoopy is on the case in this 1983 drawing.

Above: Another of Cliff’s childhood drawings from 1983, this one featuring The Thing hot on the heels of Cliff’s first exposure to Fantastic Four.

Snoopy © Peanuts Worldwide LLC. Thing © Marvel Characters, Inc.

CLIFF: I was too young to recognize whether or not they were being supportive of it. As a kid, I would get engrossed in things really easily and kind of get lost in books, science, and things like that. My family would sometimes call me “the little professor.” [laughter] I would play with calculators and things like that. There’s definitely part of me that was into learning and reading.

Dad worked a lot, and we didn’t really entertain a lot, so the dining room kind of became this mass of blueprints and pencils and pens and notes and notebooks. But I could use his pencils and mess around with some old graph paper, although I didn’t like drawing on the graph paper.

MM: After your brother started bringing comics into the house in 1983, did you become much of a comic collector yourself? Did you have a stack that you would read and reread?

CLIFF: We had a limited budget for comics. In fact, there was no budget for comics at first, when we were getting into it. My brother brought back an issue of Uncanny X-Men, and it’s funny because the first X-Men comics I ever read are still my favorite. Part of that is nostalgia, and part of that is that they’re Paul Smith issues. He brought back that and an issue of Fantastic Four, which John Byrne was writing and drawing, and those were just so great.

Right after he brought those home we went on one of the few road trips we took to Florida. I think my parents had grown tired of the idea of flying there for some reason.

So we were on this 20-hour car trip from New Jersey to Florida, and we stopped off as much as we could at every 7-11 along the way in order to find back issues and to make sure we didn’t miss the new issues coming out. It wasn’t so much about collecting as it was about wanting more of the story. Those comics were so great at implying a larger world and a larger backstory.

I think when you get interested, you’re trying to inhale that stuff and get as much as you can. There were always compelling snippets in the dialogue. “Oh, so-and-so was in Japan,” or references to Dark Phoenix.

“Wow! That sounds really cool, and I have no idea who that is.” [laughter] We just wanted to read as much of it as possible. It wasn’t a habit yet, but we were begging money from our parents to buy comics. Luckily, they did not have any prejudice against comics. To them it was just reading, and they were happy with that.

MM: It seems like your parents were big into work and having a career. Was there a point where you realized there were people making comics for a living?

CLIFF: When I was reading comics, I was very aware of who was working on them. Once Paul Smith left Uncanny X-Men, I kept reading because I liked the characters, but I wasn’t in love with the art anymore.

I’d buy anything John Byrne did; I followed him to Alpha Flight. So I was always aware there were people who had jobs in comics, but I don’t think I actually thought of it as a possible profession for me. I didn’t think about what I was going to do as an adult; I was living in the moment. You know when you ask young kids what they want to do, and they’ll tell you crazy things like, “I want to be an astronaut,” or, “I want to be a firefighter”? I don’t think I could have answered that. I liked drawing; I liked science; I liked reading.

Comics was a hobby. The idea of guys making money drawing these things was the furthest thing from my mind.

MM: At what point did you first think you wanted to do comics—not necessarily as a career, but— CLIFF: I would say that I never really considered art as an actual career until I was out of college. It was always a possibility, but I never actively pursued it or did anything to make it a reality.

MM: Can you describe yourself as a teenager? Did you have a job or any special extracurricular activities?

CLIFF: I did really well in school, so they always put me in “gifted” programs with lots of testing. One of the results of that was going away to a sleep-away summer school for a couple of years, if our family’s finances allowed.

One program was the CTY academic summer camp at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania. I would take a math class in the morning for three hours, then an English

MM: Was there any other art in the household? Were you being encouraged at home or in school to draw or work with clay or other mediums?

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class in the afternoon for three hours. There would be activities in the evenings, and every weekend there’d be a dance. You would socialize with other nerds, get crushes—the same kind of things that happen at every summer camp only you’d have to pay more and you’d get a certificate at the end.

But the good thing about it was that it prepared me for being on my own in college. It wasn’t like I was being thrown into the deep end of the pool as far as having to manage your own time. “Oh, I remember this.” And you’d meet smart kids who were into Dungeons & Dragons and who you could talk with about comics. And we’d go to the university bookstore and see the weird stuff they were selling. There were a lot of comics at the camps.

I got out of comics around the time I hit eighth grade. I became much more interested in hanging out with my friends and trying to talk to girls. I think my younger brother might have kept up his subscriptions.

MM: Comics or not, did you keep drawing in high school?

CLIFF: I had some mandatory art classes at some point. I took one that was ostensibly advertising art. I learned how to do paste-ups with rubber cement. It was almost a trade class, but I kept drawing, and the teacher was very encouraging. I enjoyed it when I was in class, but I didn’t do a lot of drawing at home really.

MM: Not that you were working to become a practicing artist, but do you remember any breakthroughs during that time? Did you take any figure drawing classes?

CLIFF: I liked reading, and I’d get a lot of magazines. When I was younger, there was a kids’ magazine called Dynamite that had, for several months, excerpts on how to draw comics by Joe Kubert. This was probably around the time he was starting the Kubert School. I saw these, and I was fascinated, because, as a kid, you don’t know where to start drawing comics; all you see is the finished drawing. How to get from A to B is a complete mystery, but I looked at this thing, and it was the classic spheres and cylinders to build up a mannequin figure, then adding details to it. By looking at that, I realized, “Oh, it doesn’t show up out of thin air. You can build these things to make them look solid.” That was an eye-opener. Up to that point I would just draw the pictures and hope things worked okay.

MM: You said you got out of comics just before going into high school. Did you still see them from time to time? Was there still some interest there?

CLIFF: I got out of comics around the time the direct market started taking over, and it was getting harder to find them. The comics I was subscribing to got kind of crappy so I was losing interest. Every now and then we’d go to the mall, and there was a comic shop there—a dedicated direct-market comic shop. It was a lot like The Android’s Dungeon from The Simpsons. [laughter] It was in the basement of the Bergen Mall for years. None of the shops wanted to be in the basement.

It was dank and kind of moldy. [laughter] The shop was at the end of this dimly lit hallway.

I’d go in there, and I remember seeing all these cool comics that I hadn’t had access to—things like Dark Knight Returns, Ronin, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But the only place I could get them was at this mall—where 9

Previous Page: The first two comics Cliff’s older brother Joe brought home: Uncanny X-Men #173 and Fantastic Four #259.

Above: A 2010 convention commission flashing back to the Death of Jean Grey storyline.

Fantastic Four, X-Men © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Above: A Batman sample from Cliff’s 2001 portfolio.

Next Page: Another sample from Cliff’s 2001 portfolio, this one of Superman.

Batman, Superman © DC Comics

I couldn’t drive to, so I’d have to bug my dad to take me there—and they were really expensive. The stuff was really interesting, but I couldn’t get it regularly enough to make it a habit.

But they had an art contest there one year, and I was super into it. I drew three entries.

One was a Batman beating up a thug, and the background was Superman flying off; it was very Dark Knight-inspired. [laughter] Another was an Art Adams-esque drawing of Colossus.

I don’t remember what the third one was, but what I do remember is that I lost. [laughter] I put a lot of effort into those drawings, but I lost out to a very—to me—exaggerated Joker drawing that might’ve been a Brian Bolland rip-off.

It crushed me, but I learned at that point that there’s no accounting for taste. [laughter] MM: When did you reacquire that comic habit?

CLIFF: My freshman year of college. I hadn’t been reading comics with any regularity for the past four years.

MM: And this would be 1992, which was a pretty big year for comics.

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CLIFF: Yeah. I was in the dorm with a bunch of my friends. In college you have a lot of free time to goof around. You have some money as well. Part of my financial aid package for school was a work-study program, so I had to work, and that covered part of my housing costs. I was at Harvard, and one of the Cambridge institutions is Newbury Comics, a chain store selling music—CDs and import CDs—and comics. It was great! We’d go there and pick up new stuff, and then find some other comics stores in the neighborhood: Million Year Picnic and New England Comics.

Again, I was interested in comics, but I wasn’t going out and buying them regularly at that point. My friend had started picking up some of the new Image books. Spawn had started, the Valiant books had kicked off, and my friend was trying to find a copy of Harbinger #1—I think that was the big one. I had no idea all of this stuff had happened. My friend was like, “No, it’s a new market now. There’s all this cool stuff, and it’s worth something.”

And they were different. You read Sin City, and it’s, “Wow, this is cool, adult, and interesting.” It got me back into comics. There was a wide range of material that didn’t exist before.

I started picking up Hellblazer and Sandman— Madman was going then too.

But it was freshman year, and my friends and I were reading all these comics, playing video games, and goofing around. That year New England Comics had an art contest. [laughs] It was for “Death of Superman.” It was a fun contest. They were asking, “How would you redesign Superman if he comes back?” This was before they introduced the four replacement Supermen. I hadn’t told any of my friends that I liked to draw, and I went back to the dorm and started drawing. My memories of them now are that they were probably pretty horrible, completely over-the-top Image-style drawings of Superman, but he’s “dark” because he’s come back from the dead. And I did a one-page comic showing off the new design. It really was horrible—a mash-up of Spawn and Superman.

He didn’t have a mask, but he had chains and a tattered cape!

But I did it—I even colored it in with markers—and submitted it to the shop. I didn’t hear anything for what felt like a long time, but I kept going into the shop. After a month of that I’d started to forget about it, but my friend Avery called me from a payphone nearby the shop, “Hey, man, you need to get over here.”

“What is it? What’s going on?” I went over and there it was: my name on a posterboard.

The prize was $100 or $150 in store credit. I was superpsyched because there were all these books there that I wanted to get but didn’t have the money for. The store was probably disappointed. They probably wanted me to go through their back-issue bins and pick out their most prized possessions, but I took that money and bought trade paperbacks—all the Sandman catalog that existed to that point, all the Hellblazer trades… I think Jim Starlin’s Breed was one too. Suddenly, I had my own library of trades and it was the perfect time for it.

I was an English major because I liked literature, and I figured that was what would get me through college.

It wasn’t going to be social studies; it wasn’t going to be economics, like some of my friends; it wasn’t going to be math. Reading Sandman at that time was really eye-opening because of how Neil Gaiman brought in this larger world of storytelling. He brought mythology into it, Shakespeare, Milton. It felt like I was reading comics, and they were good for me.

other applications, which meant that if I didn’t get in, I’d have only two weeks to apply to other schools. I would really have been screwed if I hadn’t gotten in. [laughs] MM: But you made it. Did you know what you wanted to do once you made it?

CLIFF: When I got to Harvard, I really didn’t know. I had an interest in art, but it had really gotten away from me while I was in high school. I never thought about going to art school.

I wasn’t really thinking of it as a profession. I had friends of mine who were dedicated to becoming bankers or doctors as they came into Harvard, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do.

I knew I enjoyed studying and reading, so I chose English Literature as my concentration with the idea of perhaps becoming a lawyer. “That’s a degree that would be useful to a law career.” But that was pretty much the extent of it. I was pretty hazy about what I was going to do after school, but I imagine a lot of other people were the same way.

MM: So would you say winning that contest and the prize money is what got you back into comics?

CLIFF: Yeah, I was definitely looking for other Vertigo-type or indie stuff to read. Stuff outside of regular superhero comics, like The Crow, or Bone. There was a lot of material that was cool and different and not what I was expecting. It was a great time to be reintroduced to comics. Up until that point I had only read superhero comics, but seeing all the independent material coming out—and the Vertigo line—it all dovetailed and made me realize that artistically I could peruse whatever interest of story I wanted in comics, and feel more natural doing so.

MM: After graduating high school in 1992, you jumped at the chance to attend Harvard. What led you to choose Harvard?

CLIFF: I had visited there while I was a junior in high school; a friend of mine was going to summer school there, so I went up on a road trip in August. I had a great time up there, and just fell in love with Cambridge and the idea of going to Harvard. It’s certainly very romantic. Harvard was always my top choice, so I applied early action, which meant I would find out if I got in by mid-December. But I got lazy and didn’t work on any 11

Below: A 2011 convention commission piece featuring Neil Gaiman’s Death, one of the stars of the early Vertigo years.

Next Page: Cliff knows a bit of French Literature too. This 1995 illustration is Cliff’s interpretation of a scene from À rebours, a popular and influential 1884 novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans.

MM: Harvard is a pretty elite school. What can you say got you accepted into that prestigious college?

CLIFF: They like to brag that they could fill their entire class with valedictorians. But instead they say they’re trying to look for some kind of diversity in viewpoint, so as an applicant you want to sell them on academic merit but also your potential artistic and social contributions to the community. I did film/video work in high school, as well as quirky stuff like Modern Dance which I did my senior year, even going so far as to perform on stage. It made me seem, at least on paper, kind of interesting. I sent them video of the work I had done, but I don’t know if I sent in any actual drawn artwork. My focus at that point was on film. I hadn’t given a thought to drawing other than for crafting preliminary storyboards.

Death © DC Comics

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To some people my application might have looked scattershot. I had a lot of different interests. But they want well-rounded students to give back to the school in some way, in terms of making it a fertile place for creativity.

MM: Although you were reading comics at the time, your first passion was actually film—doing it in high school and your early years at Harvard. How did you fall into that?

CLIFF: Yeah, it started in high school with me screwing around with friends with cameras and stuff. I was learning to edit on video tape and putting together little short movies.

For the first two years of college my interest in filmmaking was really strong.

When I let comics go in high school, I started messing around with the AV club.

There was a guy a year ahead of me who started making these short films, and that became really, really interesting to me. I did that in high school with some friends of mine.

We’d make these really stupid comedies. Part of the reason we made them was because it was fun, but also it would allow us to take a couple of days off from school because they would bring us to some statewide High School Arts Festival, or something like that.

We’d go to some college, and they would screen our crappy film, which would be critiqued by someone who was “in the industry.”

So we’d go there with these proto-Farrelly Brothers short films—they had really crude humor, but there was some kind of structure to them—but the other films would be these artsy, grainy videos set to the music of The Smiths or something.

I was thinking, “Oh, that’s nice. It’s not what we were doing, but okay.”

My senior year I was even more into it, and I had kind of taken over as the director of the club. That year I started to get into Nine Inch Nails and other industrial music, so I ended up making my own video about some guy who was a drug addict. It was embarrassingly bad, but I sent stuff like that in with my application to Harvard.

My first year at Harvard, I got into this very challenging seminar class with Spike Lee, who was teaching there either during or after the release of Malcolm X. It was an overview of AfricanAmerican cinema beginning with the exploitation stuff and going forward.

Learning from a working director, getting a practitioner’s point-of-view on the history of film, was really exciting. We talked about race issues with Spike, and we’d get his practical knowledge of making films, and financing films, and how films actually come to be, and there were grad students helping out and putting some of the stuff into context. That was great, and it really helped me think about storytelling and film and placing it in a social context.

The class was open to every level so the room was a mix of everyone from freshmen to seniors. It was pretty intimidating however, it being the ’90s and at the height of political correctness. People were ready to jump down your throat if you misspoke in any way. I admit I wasn’t very vocal. But I observed people talk about issues of race, commerce, film, and art, and it was illuminating. It also revealed my big hurdle in making films: having a story to tell. I wanted to tell stories, but I didn’t feel like I had a voice yet. I ended up visiting Spike during his office hours, and explained that I wanted to make films and I had a lot of respect for his work. “What do I do?” He told me that it takes time. It’s not always there, and you can’t force it. That wasn’t helpful to me at the time, and frankly it was a little disappointing.

But it was the truth, and as I’ve gotten older I realized he was right that there was nothing I could do, but it made me think about what I was doing and why I was doing it. It also made the whole film endeavor feel a lot more difficult.

I was really lost in the woods. [laughs]

MM: But it was during college that your father passed away. Did you have any formidable talks with him about your interest in storytelling, first in film, then literature, or finally comics?

CLIFF: I don’t think I ever realized that he wasn’t going to be around. At Thanksgiving break I talked with him about it. I wanted to make sure he was cool with it. He passed away a month later, and I felt really glad that I was able to talk with him about this stuff. As I continued with the art classes and all the comics stuff, I didn’t feel as if he would have disapproved.

I never thought of art as a career. When I was in high school, I never thought of going to an art school. I didn’t have a portfolio. I knew other kids who were getting stuff together to apply to Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).

The closest I got was saying, “Maybe I’ll apply to Brown, because I could then take classes at RISD.” If I was serious, I could have done that, or applied to Yale, which had a more robust art program, but I was on this route to become a lawyer or a consultant or whatever. I got into Harvard, and it was probably ranked number one at the time. “All right, I’m going there.” I never considered art as a career. I liked cartoon strips, but I knew my parents were never going to

MM: Your dad seems to have always had something more business-like in mind for your career. Can you talk about your conversations with your parents about aiming for film, literature, or comics?

CLIFF: I have to admit, I don’t really think I talked with my parents specifically about what my career goals were when going to college. I didn’t have a good idea, and growing up they never really pushed me other than to do well academically. They never pushed me toward being a doctor or going into business, so I didn’t go into college having a strong direction from my parents. And being 19, I really needed those years to figure it out for myself and hope they would be game when I finally did figure it out.

At some point my fallback became being a lawyer or a consultant. I wouldn’t have needed to run that by them.

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then ten minutes of him doing performance video. It was really cool to do, because it was blackand-white, kinda grainy, and we had great sound and light. It wasn’t a very good short, but I thought it looked pretty nice.

MM: What was the tipping point when you decided to take a step back from film and focus on other things?

CLIFF: There were things I really loved about the filming process.

But something about just how mechanically complex it was scared me off, and the idea of working with others seemed to dilute what I was trying to achieve at that point. Our big end-of-theyear project was a mess. You have to pick a great subject, and we didn’t. We thought the Girl Scouts of America might be an interesting subject. They had an office in Boston, so we said, “Let’s go see how they go about recruiting, and how their office works.” There was no glue to hold it together, so it was a mess. But we went out with black-and-white cameras, and we had to get film developed, and we cut it together on flatbed editing machines, which is rare. We didn’t have to pay for anything either. At most film schools, you have to pay for your film and developing.

You’d sign out a Bolex camera and a light meter, and you’d have a friend run sound with a boom mic. This was a couple of years before digital was widely available, so they only had one or two DAT machines for sound—most of the time you were running big reels of magnetic tape. But this whole process— as much as I liked being behind the camera and composing the shots, and I really liked editing—I learned that I hated how finicky the cameras could be. For one project, I had checked out a light meter from the lab, but I didn’t know they had to be set and calibrated a certain way, and someone had flipped it a little too far in one direction. So even though I was taking readings with the light meter, because the marker was off, all of my footage came back really dark.

It was a horrible experience. I couldn’t go back and reshoot it, so I had nothing. My frustration with that, my frustration with the some of the documentary team, their ugly footage, their lack of coverage…. There would always be somebody not focusing on the most interesting thing in the scene, and you’d try to rescue it in editing, but you couldn’t.

be okay with me going to art school, so I never even asked them. And because I never asked them, it was never a possibility in my mind, so I never had to change it. It wasn’t until my junior year, when I’d had about a year’s worth of more dedicated art classes, that I started thinking more creatively and seriously about my future, that I admitted to myself, “I would like to do this. I really would like to draw comics.”

As much as I loved film, I eventually realized it wasn’t for me. My second year at school, I took the introductory filmmaking class, which was Documentary Filmmaking. I met a lot of cool, creative people in class and watched a lot of cinéma vérité documentary films—no talking-heads at all, just, say, an entire evening night at a hospital, just observing the different cases coming in. The idea of the camera as an observer still really influences me.

With a friend in class, I did a short following an avantgarde jazz musician around Boston. I was trying to get a sense of what his day looked like, at work teaching kids and 14

That bred into me the realization there were things I did not want to collaborate on.

And I realized that film, by its nature, was going to be a lot more collaborative than I was comfortable with. I was going to have to deal with the camera screwing up on me, I was going to have to deal with actors, and with scripts if I wasn’t writing them myself.

As much as I was interested in film, I saw this was going to be a big problem for me.

After that year I realized that film was a long shot, and that if I wanted to do any kind of storytelling I was going to have to find another medium. Because I’d been reading so many of them, I started to think of comics as a viable alternative for me.

MM: Were there specific stories that you wanted to tell or kinds of genres you wanted to play with? Were there things you were setting out to do when you got into film?

CLIFF: No, not really. But this was the ’90s, and I was inspired by the DIY film spirit.

Clerks, El Mariachi, Reservoir Dogs… the idea of maxing out your credit card to make your movie. I guess a lot of this stuff was genre, but it wasn’t blockbuster studio stuff.

have been thinking at the time. It’s very figurative, very much about subject matter.

It was great to see his work and take this class where we focused on parsing images, much in the same way one would parse a sentence, breaking it down into nouns and verbs. We would look at a painting and say “What’s going on here? Why is this image compelling? What kind of story is it trying to tell? What is the effect of it? How is the artist achieving that?” That kind of art criticism and focus on narrative was not fashionable then. So Douglas was really bucking a trend and doing so with his own work by teaching us ways of looking at images.

We were looking at all this fantastic stuff, painters down through the years.

MM: The first mention you made of doing sequential storytelling was for that Superman redesign contest. Did you make any attempts before that at breaking down a story into comic panels or pages?

MM: Trying to work in some comics aspects here, do you remember ever doing storyboards of the films you were doing? Did any of your drawing come into play?

CLIFF: No, because it was all documentary, so we never knew what we were going to get. And there was no set-up. There may be some sense of composition involved, but not much of a link.

MM: I found an article in the local Harvard paper where you were quoted as saying that a lecture by Douglas Blau was really instrumental in putting your sights on comics. Can you tell me who Blau is to you and what he said that put you on that path?

CLIFF: Yeah, this would have been, I believe, my junior year. It was a very hazily defined class, but it was basically about world-building and the idea of world-building in art. I think to this day it still informs a lot of my feelings about narrative and what can be achieved with illustration.

Blau is an artist himself, and he does a lot of installations where he curates images and frames them and puts them on the wall, like a gallery. But the combination and number of images takes you through a narrative, almost an overview of what the artist might 15

Previous Page: This 2008 commission piece is based on Steven Millhauser’s novella, “August Eschenburg,” which first appeared in the Winter 1983 edition of Antaeus.

Below: An illustration for Cliff’s college thesis.

Artwork © Cliff Chiang

Below: Another illustration for Cliff’s college thesis.

Next Page: You can see a bit of Frank Miller in the posing of this Daredevil convention commission.

Daredevil © Marvel Characters, Inc.

CLIFF: A few years earlier, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was big, so I doing my own version with a samurai panda. It was bad, but I was trying to do Frank Miller Daredevil with a panda and a samurai sword. It wasn’t very good [laughs], and I didn’t do another one.

That was it. But I did do four pages of this horribly over-dialogued…. I didn’t go back to it. I didn’t have any more stories that I wanted to tell; I just wanted to draw.

None of my friends did art, and I didn’t really hang out with any other artists. Maybe if I’d been around other people who were consumed by it, maybe it would have pushed me in that direction. When I wasn’t in art class, I was trying to figure out how I was going to get a job as a business consultant.

MM: It seems like you built up your work ethic separately from art, but once you applied your determination and drive to art, maybe you were better prepared for it.

CLIFF: I don’t regret going to Harvard as

opposed to going to a dedicated art school.

It’s part of who I am now. I learned so many things that are important about fiction and literature and storytelling and history, and having that type of background is vital.

But there are times I wish I had gone to art school. I don’t know how to paint. I’ve learned how to color digitally thanks to Photoshop, but I don’t know how to physically paint, and that’s a big regret because I feel that it’s something I really want to do.

Once I started working in comics, I just had this feeling of needing to catch up. I spent so many years not admitting to myself that I wanted to be an artist and just being carried along by the inertia of needing to find a job. It wasn’t until about a year after I started working for Vertigo that I realized what I truly wanted to do and that I needed to change my mindset about how I approached the work, and business, and clients, and the company.

What helped me get to that point was that I’d moved in with a friend of mine, Greg Benton, who had an extra room. He was a freelance artist, and I would watch him take jobs and see his attitude towards the clients and how you had to look out for yourself and protect your interests. Up to that point, I was a grade-A company man at DC Comics. He said, “You know, if you’re going to be an artist, you’re going to be working for Cliff Chiang. That’s your company. Their interests don’t always intersect with yours.

You have to look out for that, even though you work there as an editor.”

Living with another artist was fantastic.

We’d sit around and talk about art, and he’d show me great comics from his collection.

Greg loves superhero comics, though his own work is more alternative. I still get inspired every time I talk to him, because he’s got such a pure artistic perspective that I didn’t have.

MM: Coming home from work to that environment must have been eye opening for you.

CLIFF: The first few years after college were a huge learning experience. Becoming an artist and accepting that I was—I wouldn’t say it was difficult, but it was a slow, grudging process. Once I realized this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, I could have smacked myself in the head. “If I’d only known this five years ago, ten years ago, I’d be a much better draftsman now.” I felt that pretty strongly, but at the same time, my experiences have shaped me in a unique way, and I wouldn’t trade any of that either.

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17

Part 2:

Breaking In, Breaking Out

MM: You graduated in 1996, and your first job in comics was editing for Disney Adventures magazine. How’d you get from college to Disney?

CLIFF: After getting out of college, I worked for an advertising agency for six months. I knew that comics was a difficult field to get into, and it certainly wasn’t guaranteed I would find my way into comics. So I applied to a minority recruitment program for advertising agencies, the idea being that agencies were a little too homogenous and they needed more people of color in order to function more effectively. A lot of agencies would hire smaller companies that specialize in the black community or other very specific cultural perspectives that you need to have to understand the psychology of those buyers, and this was a way to bring that diversity in-house.

So I came in as a junior graphic designer for a direct mailing company. I did six months of designing junk mail, like the inserts you get with your credit card statement.

This wasn’t interesting, creative stuff. I wanted to go to an

ad agency and draw polar bears drinking Coke. It was a bad six months.

The summer before my senior year, I had interned at Marvel and at a gallery in SoHo called Thread Waxing Space, and spent time going back and forth between the two.

You can’t intern at Marvel unless you get college credit for it, and luckily I could. I interned at Marvel for Joey Cavelieri, who was working on the 2099 books at that point, and I met Matt Idelson, who was working next door assisting Ralph Macchio. I learned there how you put comics together.

I was Xeroxing a lot of the day. Penciled pages would come in from Humberto Ramos to then go out to an inker.

Inked Spider-Man 2099 pages would come in from Al Williamson. I had to mail comp copies out to Warren Ellis.

I got a real sense of how the office worked, what editors needed from freelancers, and I got to see what full-size pencils looked like and what inks looked like.

Nobody talked to me. I barely ever talked with Joey, and it wasn’t because he was being unfriendly, but with the pace of the office, everybody was just trying to get stuff in on deadline. I recognize that now, having worked at Vertigo and having had interns. You just need to give them busy work and get things off your table, and in your spare time you try to teach them something.

I’d work at Marvel that part of the week, and the other part of the week I’d go to these interesting art exhibits at Thread Waxing Space. I’d watch as the artists set up their installations, so I got this high/low, commercial/non-commercial education in art that summer. More importantly at the time, I went back to college that year with some contacts in the industry.

Joey knew that I wanted to draw. I brought in some horrible Daredevil sample pages while I was interning, and he ripped them apart—kindly. I remember working on them after the internship had ended. I had gotten my wisdom teeth taken out, so I was home for a few days on 18

painkillers. I had nothing to do, so I feverishly drew this over-rendered, two-page Daredevil sequence. I needed to finish it so I could show it to Joey the following week. I think he’d agreed to meet with me for dinner or lunch or something like that. Basically he said, “These aren’t very good, but keep working at it.”

That winter, Joey was let go as part of what was later called “Marvel-cution.” I read about it online and my heart sank. “I guess I won’t be working for Marvel.” But he ended up at DC a few months later, and I stayed in contact with him. I told him, “I would like to work in comics. I know my art is not good enough, but I would like to get a job in editorial.”

Since he was just starting up his office at DC, I think there was an assistant spot, but it had just been filled. But he told me he would keep me in mind if he heard of any openings.

After six months of working at the ad agency, I got a call from Joey. “It’s not at DC or Marvel, but my friend Heidi MacDonald is the editor of Disney Adventures magazine, and she needs an assistant. I recommended you. Go meet with Heidi and see what happens.” I was super-psyched, because I was having a horrible time at the ad agency, watching the clock tick.

My favorite part of that ad job was not even one of my duties: I would make comps of fold-outs and things like that, and try to get as creative as possible. They had a whole dedicated bullpen department of guys with rubber cement, X-Acto knives, and cardboard that would put together what the envelopes should look like, inserts and things like that.

We were pitching to American Airlines, so I made this cool folder that looked a little bit like an airplane, and I was trying to come up with all these kitschy die-cuts. It was for a pitch meeting, so they wanted it as flashy as possible. That was my favorite part of the job, and I was not supposed to be doing it, but there were always turnaround problems getting things from these guys, so I would just go down there and do them myself.

Anyway, I met with Heidi, and she was great. She asked me, “Why do you want to do this?” and I gave her my spiel about film. “I love storytelling, but I hate cameras and the idea of working with actors. I’ve been reading all these great comics, some of which have an auteur vision. I’d like to do that.” She looked at me and said, “You’re a smart guy, and you really have some talent.

Go away. You might have a future doing this, 19

Previous Page: Cliff would often spend his time after work putting together mini-comics. This image is the cover art for the first issue of Cliff’s Life of Grime mini-comic. He never finished the second issue.

Above: Sample pages in the Batman Adventures style from 1998.

Life of Grime © Cliff Chiang.

Batman © DC Comics

Below and Next Page: Pages one and three, along with a panel from page two, from a three-page sample story Cliff wrote and drew in 1999.

Artwork © Cliff Chiang

but the industry is really messed up right now. I’d feel bad hiring you, because I don’t know what the future will be. I don’t want to ruin your life. Do you really want to do this?” I looked at her and said, “Yeah.” All the obstacles that had been in my way before made me want it even more. I said, “I know it’s a competitive business, and I know it’s a little shaky”—this is 1996, 1997—“but I love the medium, and I definitely want to be a part of it.” She said, “Okay then, you’ve got the job. I tried to talk you out of it.” [laughter] And it was great. I learned a lot. Disney is a very tightly run company, and they like to do things in a very particular way. We edited about 20 pages of comics a month—a lot of short stories with properties from the Disney portfolio, like Timon and Pumbaa from The

20

Lion King. Hercules was coming out, so they sent us the design material for Hercules, and we had to get these four- to eight-page stories done that would have to be approved by different departments to make sure they had the right tone, to make sure the art was on model…. I met a lot of really solid, veteran comics pros through this process, because even though it was only 20 pages of comics, there were three or four creative teams working on different short stories, all at the same time.

It was a lot of fun, and Heidi knows everybody in comics. Through her I met a lot of people. She was also able to get me a plane ticket to San Diego Comic-Con that year as part of her support staff, but really I was showing my portfolio around and trying to see what else I could learn. I met Paul Smith, who was really kind and gracious. After working with him on Disney Adventures’ reprints of Bone, I finally met Jeff Smith. I also sat through my first Eisner Awards ceremony. So it was a really lucky break, because Joey landed on his feet at DC and had his ear to the ground.

I’m really grateful to Joey and Heidi.

There aren’t a lot of assistant jobs to go around. Once they get staffed, they get staffed for years. Comics editorial is one of those fields where openings are made by attrition—someone moves on or gets fired.

I was lucky to be able to work with Heidi at Disney, but I knew I wasn’t going to be there forever. It was freelance, not a full-time staff position, because the company didn’t want the additional expense of paying health benefits to the assistant comics editor. My hours were weird.

And then at night I started taking drawing classes at SVA taught by Joe Orlando—a Comics 101 type of class. It was a lot of work.

Class was on the East Side and went from seven to nine, which meant I always missed the 9:20 bus back to Jersey, so I’d end up getting home at midnight. I wasn’t making very much money, so I had to live at home.

It was really tiring having to commute, but it made me want it more. And working at Disney Adventures, I was able to bide my time and wait for an opening at Marvel or DC. Ideally I wanted a job at Vertigo, as that was the stuff I was reading. But there were maybe three editors and just a handful of assistants there at the time, so there wasn’t a lot of opportunity to go around.

Almost a year into my time at Disney, [Vertigo editor] Lou Stathis passed away.

He was a really beloved and respected,

and you could feel the shock and sadness in the industry.

I didn’t know Lou myself, but I remember Heidi going to the funeral. Lou’s passing meant the department was being shifted around, which also meant that Vertigo needed more assistants. I went in for an interview with Stuart Moore.

He was going to have an assistant he was going to share with Shelly Roeberg [now Bond]. I went in for that interview superexcited. “This is my shot. I don’t know how often an opening in Vertigo will come up.” I put a lot of pressure on myself, but I thought I interviewed pretty well. I didn’t hear back from them for a week or two, then Stuart got back to me and said, “I’m sorry, but we’re going to go with another candidate. I know you’re disappointed, but I’ll definitely keep your résumé on file.

If anything else comes up, I’ll give you a call.”

That was a tough week. I was still working at Disney, so I had a job, but it really started to grate on me that I didn’t have health insurance, and the way Disney kept me part-time even though I was there five days a week. I figured I’d give it another year to see if anything else came up. And then on the commute home one night I noticed an Asian girl reading a Xeroxed comic, and I remembered seeing those during my time at Marvel and thought, “Oh, she’s proofing comics.” I didn’t give it much thought beyond that.

Another six months went by and I got a call from Stuart.

“Would you come in? My assistant’s leaving.” It was Julie Rottenberg, who worked with Stuart for many years. She was a playwright and wanted to do more creative writing. She went on to work on Sex and the City and have this really great career. For me this was like lightning striking twice. Vertigo was a small department, and here were two openings within a year. So I went in and interviewed; Stuart really just wanted to run me past the boss, Karen Berger. I was doing my tour of the office, and they introduced me to Jenny Lee, who I then realized was the girl I’d seen on the bus.

If that’s not enough coincidence, there’s more. I shared an office with Jenny for two years, and we became very good friends. We started dating five years after that, and we’re married now. [laughter] She left comics and is now a film editor, and is editing some of Mark Millar’s Kick-Ass books on the side, but she grew up ten minutes from where I grew up, went to the sister high school, and basically had the same story I’m telling you now: her brother got her into comics, and she spent a year at a publishing house before she started working at Vertigo. It’s funny that we led these parallel lives, but didn’t meet each other for many years.

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There was never any kind of romantic interest while we were both in the office, but years later it ballooned, and now we’re together. I can’t tell you how awesome it is to be able to talk about my work in such an “inside baseball” way with her. She knows everybody that I work with. She knows the minutiae of comic-book production, so it is really great that she can sympathize with my problems and suggest solutions.

DC and Vertigo mean a lot to me. It’s where I got my start as an artist, it’s where I met my wife, and it’s where I met a lot of my good friends whom I work with now.

Those two years in the trenches at Vertigo were absolutely crucial.

So my job entailed following up. Editors would figure out a schedule for everybody, and it was up to me to call the freelancers and check in, to remind people about deadlines, to make sure they all had supplies, and make sure they all got paid. This was years before the Internet and scanners made art submission easy, so all the artwork was mailed to DC’s offices. Pages would come in by FedEx Express morning delivery, so usually by noon we’d have them in our offices. My job was to Xerox them at 100%; in case any art got lost, you had some sort of copy you could print from or re-create. And then it got shrunk down, sent to letterers, and compiled. If a book was done, I had to route it for proofreading. So a lot of logistical stuff, but it was great.

I’d sit there in the morning and look over art. I knew the scripts really well, so I was able to identify what choices artists would make to interpret those scripts. I got to see so many different artists’ work each day, and it became a crash course on comic storytelling.

I was also having conversations with professional comic creators on a daily basis. I had to call them to make sure they had checks and vouchers, and to check in to see if they were having any problems. You develop a friendliness with them, and my own curiosity made me ask questions about their work. Many of them were more than happy to talk, because creating comics can sometimes be a very solitary experience. I think a lot of artists, then and now, have a wired headset so they can plug it in and gab away while working. A lot of them were more than happy to chat and break down their process.

MM: What exactly did you do as an editor at Vertigo? The job duties, especially at the assistant and associate level, are pretty murky to outsiders.

CLIFF: When you’re an assistant editor, you’re support staff for the main editor. Editors have to deal with a lot of larger issues that go into book editing, doing reports, and working with writers and artists, and long-range planning.

MM: Did your co-workers at DC know you ultimately wanted to segue into drawing comics yourself?

CLIFF: I think it was pretty well known. As soon as I got there, even during the interview, I told Stuart Moore that I loved art and would hopefully someday be drawing comics as well. I showed samples, and I remember them being liked, so it wasn’t an impossible dream. When I was getting to know other editors during my first month there, it was something I might mention, but I didn’t want to push it too hard. It was a workplace, not an audition. So mostly I figured it would be rude to be humping for work while there, plus DC’s more restrictive policy on staffers doing freelance made it a little more difficult and not something to be done lightly.

DC wanted to avoid editors assigning themselves, or each other, gigs on DC books, so any freelance work would need to cleared with the brass.

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I did try to make some mini-comics after work, but it was rare as I usually didn’t have the time or energy after a full day in the office. I did manage to get a couple of them done, and I went over to editors and handed them out or slid them under their doors, so at some point everyone realized I was drawing and was semi-competent. I kept at it and talked to editors, and a few opportunities almost materialized. One of the guys I ended up working with later, Peter Tomasi, really liked my stuff and wanted to use me on one of their fifth week event issues. It was one of the JSA Returns books with those great Dave Johnson covers—Doctor Midnight or Hourman or something like that which Peter thought I might be good for. Unfortunately, Peter was overruled by his boss, who didn’t think I was ready or thought someone else might be better. I was really heartbroken over that. Stylistically, it would have been a great place to debut, and those books were promoted heavily. It felt like the train was leaving the station.

MM: What was the tipping point that pushed you over the edge to leave DC and enter freelancing?

CLIFF: You know, it was a scary proposition to leave a steady job for freelance. And not having any personal experience with freelancing, the idea of leaving a regular paycheck was pretty frightening. I was lucky in that the decision was taken out of my hands. Staffing was in flux at DC and Vertigo with Axel Alonso, whom I was working with, and Shelly switching offices, and in that re-organization I realized that it would take me six months to get a handle on the new books I’d be working on. At the same time I realized that Jenny had seniority over me, which meant that if there were any promotion then it would be going to her first. I figured it’d be at least another two years before I’d see any real advancement, and it had been about six months since the offer of the JSA one-shot, so I was feeling more and more confident in my art. I had done a couple stories for the Big Book Of... series, and while I wasn’t flush with work, I thought I could at least find something if I went freelance.

I wasn’t looking for a monthly gig right off the bat, though; I knew it wasn’t in the cards, and I didn’t deserve it either. But I was feeling pretty good about my prospects.

MM: So did you put in your notice right away, or think about it a bit?

CLIFF: It took me a couple weeks to get up the courage to feel secure about it. I realized I wasn’t going to be able to stay in editorial, and that I should use this as an opportunity to go freelance. I knew everybody there and people liked me. I was known as being dependable and trustworthy, which is ninetenths of the battle in being a freelancer. But I knew I’d have to leave New York and move back home to New Jersey to make it happen. I couldn’t have a monthly rent payment hovering over me without any dependable work. It was definitely a life-changing decision, but in a weird way it never felt like a decision to me.

It was the only option I had. It gave me time to devote all my energies to getting better at art. It was the right time for me to go.

MM: So here you were in 2000, without a steady income but humping for work as a freelancer. As you said you did some work for Paradox Press’ Big Book Of… series, Flinch #11 with John Rozum, a Swamp Thing issue 23

Previous Page and Above: Presentation art for a Super Friends comic book Cliff pitched in 2000.

Aquaman, Atom, Batman, Black Manta, Flash, Green Lantern, Superman © DC Comics

CLIFF: I think a lot of the appeal in my work is in the characters and bringing out their personalities in action and body language. It hopefully humanizes the story and allows the reader to connect with it on a fundamental level. To be able to see emotions play across a character’s face and be able to relate to it—it’s not flashy, but the cumulative effect of that sets off a recognition: “I know what that feels like,” or “I’ve been in that situation.”

Because I was working in a bolder thick-line style—I was very influenced by [Alex] Toth, [David] Mazzucchelli, Frank Robbins, as well as guys like John Paul Leon, Tommy Lee Edwards, and Jorge Zaffino—I knew there was a “crudeness” to what I did, but it was very deliberate.

And I didn’t want to be pigeon-holed with period stories, or doing only crime stuff. I wanted to tell lots of different types of stories, so it was important for me to be a moving target and for editors to see a range of material from me.

with Brian K. Vaughn before he was “Brian K. Vaughn,” and Golden Age Secret Files & Origins with John Ostrander.

What was it like for you hustling for work and getting these small jobs?

CLIFF: I knew I wasn’t going to get a lot of work, but I didn’t want to just take any job that was available, partly because I wanted to play to my strengths. It all worked out.

Each of those stories allowed me to try something different and make each one distinct, and I saw each of them as a showcase to get the next job. I’m still proud of everything that I’ve done. There are very few things I look back on and wince. I might wish the drafting were better, but in terms of effort, I put everything I had on the page. You’re only as good as your last job, especially at the beginning of your career.

Since I wasn’t working regularly, I did make a point of giving myself a schedule. I’d work by myself a few days, go into the offices once a week for beers and Chinese food, and I was assisting Walt Simonson, who I’d met while at Vertigo, and Stephen DeStefano, for a few days a week.

It was invaluable to watch professional artists at work and observe their processes and workspaces. I absorbed as much of their wisdom and experience as I could, and I’m really grateful for the time I spent with them.

MM: Before your first big gigs like “Josie Mac” and Beware the Creeper, what stands out to you now as something you really enjoyed doing or something where you felt you’d made a breakthrough?

CLIFF: The Big Book of Grimm job I did while I was still on staff. I was working on this really large paper. I was inspired by the classic illustrators. Paul Pope worked really large too. I did it to get more art movement and also more precision because it would get shrunk down so much. I laugh about it now, because there was nothing really intricate about what I was doing. [laughs] I had a lot of fun with it, and when it was printed it had a tight Steve Rude-ish look to it. I showed it to Greg Benton, and he said, “Oh, that’s great. How did you feel after drawing it?” “It was really exhausting.” He said, “Well, then maybe you don’t want to draw like that again.” He was right!

Ever since then, I’ve kind of been fighting that impulse to slick things up, to add that polished veneer. It does look clean and nice, but it can also rob it of energy and strip away a lot of personality.

The Flinch story was a parting gift from Vertigo.

Joan Hilty was the editor, and it was assigned as I was leaving Vertigo. It was four pages, but the intended artist dropped out, so it just worked out for me. It was a tight, grisly piece that relied a lot on emotion and being able to contrast the everyday environment with the horrible situation the guy was in.

It allowed me to play with ink. I remember sending pages to everyone I knew to see if it looked okay. A lot of my early development came from friends of mine giving me art critiques on every job.

MM: I know it’s hard to judge yourself, but since it’s been a decade, what did you think your strengths were at that time?

MM: When you say friends, are you talking about artists you’d met or editors you’d worked with at Vertigo?

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CLIFF: Both. Some of them were friends at work, and some were people I’d met through work and become personal friends with— other freelancers like Brett Lewis and Chris Jordan, Jennifer Graves. None of them were particularly interested in Wizard Top 10 style art. A lot of the people in my life whose opinions I respected had broader interests and influences. It always helps to get an outside point of view, but with them it was also an informed one, and it helped me to grow quite a bit.

The Transmetropolitan: I Hate It Here story was really rewarding for me after having worked on the book editorially. That job I loved because it wasn’t just two pages of comics, it was how to best summarize this bit of text in the most visually exciting way possible.

MM: It was more like doing magazine illustration work than comic book work.

CLIFF: Yeah, it was like an older style of illustration, more like the stuff you’d find in Collier’s or something. I was thinking, “How many things can I put here to add up to a narrative in one picture?” Sometimes it is just about having a simple graphic idea, and sometimes it’s about loading it up with narrative detail. It was just a few captions, but Warren’s script implied a lot, and I did my best to dig out and extrapolate from it. I was really proud of that piece, and I recall that Warren mentioned it was one of his favorite pieces from that issue.

The Swamp Thing job came about because my friend Jenn Graves was working on it. She also had a full-time job doing animation storyboards. It was a scheduling problem, and I’d started doing layouts to help her out, but Jenn wasn’t able to finish it. I was actually in Heidi’s office when she called Jenn to fire her, and five minutes later I called Jenn to ask if it was 25

Previous Page: Art from “Little Red Cap” for The Big Book of Grimm.

Above: Cliff’s two-page spread for the Transmetropolitan: I Hate It Here oneshot, which consisted of many artists each drawing one or two pages.

Big Book of Grimm © DC Comics. Transmetropolitan © Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson.

Right and below: Cliff’s layouts for the 16page “Bitter Fruit” which appeared in Vertigo Secret Files & Origins: Swamp Thing #1.

Next Page: Another page of layouts for “Bitter Fruit,” this one at full size.

Swamp Thing © DC Comics

cool if I showed Heidi the layouts I’d done.

It felt mildly tacky, like the corpse wasn’t cold yet, but she totally understood. The book was running pretty late, so I told Heidi, “You’ve got five pages from Jenn, and I’ve got the other 17 pages of the story already laid out.” In general I tried not to be too forward in asking for work from friends like Heidi, to keep it all above board, but in this case it just

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made sense. The book was due in two weeks, and I had more than half of it done already.

Heidi said, “All right, go for it.”

At 16 pages, that was my first long story.

Brian [K. Vaughan] has a real gift for writing characters you believe and empathize with, so the script really worked for me, and we’ve been trying to work together again ever since. But even though that job turned out great, I felt like I managed to sneak off with it rather than really earn it, whereas the Golden Age Secret Files story was the first job I got on my own merit.

DC was doing a lot of those Secret Files back then. It was great to pick up short pieces or pin-ups, but this was going to be the main story. The editor, Tony Bedard, wanted something that would feel a little Golden Age-y. I said, “Okay, I can do that. No problem.”

I penciled the story, did the balloon guides, and then started inking it. I inked maybe the first five pages and brought them in. It was always a good policy to drop into the office and show the stuff. You want to make a connection with editors and see what they’re responding to and what they’re not responding to. I showed the pages to him, and he didn’t say anything for a while.

I had to ask, “What do you think?” He said, “Well, I saw the pencils, and they looked good, but this looks kind of... crude.” I had worked really hard on these pages, and I knew they had a specific look, but I was proud of them. I thought it had a nice graphic feel to it. He was being very honest, and I appreciated that, but it wasn’t what I was hoping to hear. I had spent a lot of time on the layouts, making sure the characters had mass and felt appropriately Golden Age-y without looking too “retro” or primitive. I wanted it to straddle a Golden Age and modern sensibility. So my

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heart sank. I told Tony I’d see what I could do on the rest of the pages.

I left his office and went to talk to some friends in the shipping/copy room, trying to collect myself. I was really disappointed and distraught. Tony came in and started Xeroxing the pages, shrinking them down.

He looked at them in the bright florescent light of the shipping room, and he came over and said, “You know what? I’m an ass. These look great. I just needed to shrink them down, and they’re awesome.” I felt so much better after that. If I had gone home without hearing that, I probably would have been second-guessing everything. I have a lot of respect for Tony that he was very honest in his criticism, and yet was able to take it back when he felt he was wrong. I also learned that when you show editors artwork, you want to show it print size, especially when you’re working in a brushy, clean style.

I knew what those pages would look like shrunk down. I read somewhere about Alex Toth using a reducing glass, which is the opposite of a magnifying glass, so he could see what his art would look like shrunken down and tightened up. I had also seen pages from Darwyn Cooke and Michael Lark, so I knew what it should look like at full size.

All that experience from Vertigo was informing me artistically. I was trying to put it all together, and with each job I was trying to find some element I could take, almost as an academic lesson.

The whole thing about period stuff is drawing it convincingly. It doesn’t help to have a very exaggerated style. You want people to feel the scratchy wool costume. [laughs] A lot of the Golden Age stuff was pretty rough, but if you go back to it with a different sense of proportion and detail, you can bring it to life, almost as if it was a film. I tried to bring to it a sense of being observed, like photojournalism. I was looking at a lot of John Paul Leon stuff at the time too. I was trying to figure out how his figures have such weight and believability to them, and I was trying to impart that in my own way. A kind of casual realism.

MM: After that you did some pages in Martian Manhunter and Wonder Woman. What was it like for you, who are more interested in characterization, to be doing so many superhero stories over a short period of time?

CLIFF: I was just thrilled to be working. One of the great things when you’re starting out is

you can learn from everything. Every choice feels like a big step forward. Even though it was only a couple of pages of Martian Manhunter, I was thinking, “What’s the goal with these two pages? What do I need to get across to the reader?” It was all useful. I was openminded and trying different things.

The Wonder Woman flashback sequence in some ways came out of the Golden Age Secret Files story. Pete Tomasi was now an editor, and he had seen it and liked it, and I knew the writer, Phil Jimenez, from working at Vertigo. Phil had always been really enthusiastic and supportive of my art, and for this Wonder Woman one-shot, he needed somebody who would bring a certain kind of life to it and be really diligent about the details. They also 29

Previous Page and Above: The opening splash page and page 20 of the feature story in Golden Age Secret Files & Origins #1.

Crimson Avenger, Superman © DC Comics.

Right: Sketch ideas for the cover of All-Star Comics Archives,Vol. 7, featuring the Golden Age adventures of the Justice Society of America.

Below: Wonder Woman gets “big” to deal with Giganta in an early 2000s portfolio sample.

Next Page: A March 2001 model drawing of Detective Josephine “Josie Mac” MacDonald.

Giganta, Justice Society, Wonder Woman © DC Comics. Josie Mac © Judd Winick and Cliff Chiang.

needed something that looked different from the modern day scenes, and that played in my favor. This was the point where I started feeling like I didn’t want to get stuck doing Golden Age material all the time, because a big chunk of this book was set in the Golden Age. But, you know, it’s fun drawing superheroes. You’re playing with different visuals when you’re drawing them.

You’re playing with ideas of power and grace, and less so with the smaller moments, especially in a one-shot historical overview like this was. But I got to draw scenes from comics I had read, and I got to draw my first idea of what Wonder Woman should be like. A friend of mine later said, “I like the way you drew her. She’s a big girl.” And I think that still carries over to the way I draw her now. She’s a really tall, big woman, and that’s what I’ve always felt she should be. Just her features have changed. Back then I was going for a more classic look to her face—a rounder face, smaller features.

MM: Had you looked for work outside of DC, or were the short stories and things DC was giving you enough to keep you busy?

CLIFF: I knew some people at Marvel, but it wasn’t until after Axel Alonso went over in 2000 that I started to go there more and get to know the editors better. But I felt like I kind of had my hands full, and I had a good thing at DC already. And I didn’t think I’d fit in with the prevailing art style at Marvel at the time so I never really pursued it.

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Part 3:

Heroes and the Green

MM: After several years in the business doing short stories, guest issues, and some fill-in work, in 2001 you got your first regular assignment: a Detective Comics backup strip called “Josie Mac.” How did that feel, especially since you were co-creating the character?

CLIFF: That was a big deal to me. This wasn’t a short story or a one-shot, this was Detective Comics, a flagship title, and I liked the idea of working in short and controlled bursts. They let me take as much time as I needed with each eightpage chapter. I didn’t have to worry about rushing anything.

I did them over about two or three weeks each.

I was surprised when they asked me, actually.

What I’ve always appreciated about my editor, Matt Idelson, is that he likes taking chances. If he has a gut feeling about something, he’ll go with it. Even if it stunk, it was only eight pages a month, so why not try this out?

and I said to Matt, “I can see how you’d want to just keep this a crime story, but it’s a gang war in Gotham City. Let’s have Batman in it.” He and Judd thought it was a good idea, so I was able to influence the project a bit and make it a little sexier. Without Batman, I don’t know if it would’ve gotten as much attention.

MM: That story seems to have been a rough template for Gotham Central in terms of tone and subject matter.

CLIFF: “Josie Mac” came out about a year before Gotham Central, but I know they were already working on Gotham Central at the same time we were developing “Josie Mac.” We just came out sooner because it was only eight pages a month. There was a mutual feeling that you could do interesting stories in Batman’s world without having Batman be the main focus.

MM: During the time you were working on “Josie Mac,” before it had been published, 9/11 happened. What was that day like for you as someone who worked in New York and was born in Manhattan?

CLIFF: My wife, Jenny, was working at Marvel then as well. They looked down Park Avenue and saw the smoke rising.

I was coming into the city to drop off pages that morning. I got on the bus around 7:30, and someone called one of the bus passengers and said a plane had flown into one of the World Trade Center towers. Everyone thought it was crazy. Part of the bus route goes along the Hudson River, and you can see the skyline. We saw smoke coming from the towers, and then everyone started making calls to find out what was going on.

We got to the tunnel, and they had shut down all traffic, so we turned back. By the time we got back to the part of the route along the Hudson, both towers were down. It was surreal.

MM: It was sort of moving to the next level for you.

CLIFF: It was the kind of stuff I wanted to do at that point too—drawing Batman here and there, but mostly focusing on one character and making her world believable. It meant drawing a lot of day-to-day things; it meant drawing her brownstone, drawing the squad room…. All that stuff is really interesting to me. Trying to be a set designer for this made me realize how much work goes into creating a comic. Going back to the film analogy, you’re doing everything: set design, costume design, production design, cinematography, lighting. You have to keep all those disciplines in mind.

MM: Was kind of collaboration was there with Judd Winick in creating Josie?

CLIFF: I got an outline from Judd, and it was just the synopsis—a Gotham City cop, Josie MacDonald, has the psychic ability to talk to objects. Early on it was just her protecting the Anotelli kid,

MM: It must have been hard for you being on a bus full of strangers.

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CLIFF: Nobody was thinking about themselves at that point. My older brother was working on Wall Street as an e-trader, so we were pretty worried about him. We managed to get word from him early, but then we didn’t hear from him for the rest of the day. After the second plane, he had gone up to the roof of his building, smelled the air, and said, “This is not good.” He considered leaving, but it was too chaotic out on the street. When the towers came down, there was too much dust and debris, and he had to stay inside for a couple of hours. Eventually he wrapped something around his face and walked uptown 70 blocks to a friend’s apartment. We finally talked to him around 9:00 p.m.

Being on the bus, there was definitely a sense of helplessness. It was hard to get through to anyone on the phone, so you had to rely on other passengers’ radios for news.

I’ve never been so glad to get off a bus.

MM: How did that experience affect your piece in the 9/11 anthology that came out later? I believe this was the first time you both wrote and drew something.

CLIFF: I didn’t draw a story, per se. Being in New York, I was having trouble processing it. The idea of the tribute books made sense to me, but I, personally, couldn’t wrap my head around doing a story. So I did a pin-up of my reaction to the first responders and the people who volunteered afterwards. That kind of heroism made me want to contribute to the book.

I was dreading the kind of stuff that would appear, because superhero comics are so rarely subtle. I thought they might focus on the violence and loss of life—or that they would be overly sentimental. I imagined a book full of crying firemen, which to me would be equally dishonest. When you have something that over the top, it doesn’t resonate; it doesn’t reflect the reality of what happened. So I tried to make a very plain image. You don’t know if it’s happening right during the attack and the guy’s just figured out he needs to go help, or if it’s days or weeks later. The idea was that people were offering to help, and their service involved personal sacrifice. But no, I could not see myself working on a longer story. I wanted to draw something, and I did what I could.

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Previous Page: Batman takes advantage of Josie Mac’s unique abilities in this page from Detective Comics #770.

Above: Cliff’s earliest concept drawings of Josie Mac and the opening page of “Josie Mac” from Detective Comics #771.

Josie Mac © Judd Winick and Cliff Chiang. Batman © DC Comics.

MM: While all this is happening you’re drawing your first regular assignment “Josie Mac,” but you also reached out and did your first non-DC work with a story for Grendel: Red, White, and Black #4.

CLIFF: That was a lot of fun. Michael Lark was supposed to draw that story, but was unavailable. It’s a cop story with a female detective reading a crime scene C.S.I.-style, reconstructing what happened. Anytime there was blood, it was red, and any kind of flashback scene was also done in red. Matt Wagner’s script was very tight, and it was great to draw a character like Grendel and work extensively in black-and-white.

MM: This was the first time you did work outside of DC, correct?

CLIFF: Yeah. Diana Schutz was the editor, and she had called Bob Schreck to ask about my availability.

MM: And after dancing around Batman in “Josie Mac” you were given the chance to take him on, head-on, with the prestige-format Elseworlds book Batman: The Golden Streets of Gotham.

CLIFF: There were a lot of interesting teams on those Elseworlds books. They allowed people with less mainstream styles to work on something that made a great little package when they were done. Those books were all exercises in style more than anything.

Batman: The Golden Streets of Gotham was in the works for a long time. Jan Van Meter wrote it. She had done her grad school research on poverty in turn-of-the-century New York, and a lot of that research was turning up in this story. She flipped the idea of Batman being a wealthy orphan.

Now he was a poor immigrant, and how does Batman exist without that wealth and privilege behind him? It was a lot of fun. I enjoy history, and while doing the research was a lot of work and tiring, it was really worth it.

The real challenge for me was that Tommy Lee Edwards had already completed a lot of pages for it. He was supposed to do the whole book on a very open timeline, which allowed him to do his other illustration work. But the book had been commissioned by a different editor, and once the book changed hands, DC wanted to get it off the schedule, and Tommy wasn’t able to finish it as planned.

Instead of the new six-month deadline, he needed a year, or whatever it was, so unfortunately they needed to go with 34

someone else to finish the book. But Tommy’s work is so unique, and they had a hard time finding someone to fill-in.

I had seen the artwork when I briefly returned to staff to work for Schreck while they were between assistants. I saw the book in a drawer and thought it was fantastic.

Being a fan of Tommy’s, being aware of what his influences were, I felt I could do a decent job of continuing in that style. I’ve never used very much reference, but finding ways to incorporate reference into my work was one of the big things I learned with Batman: The Golden Streets of Gotham. I had many of the same books that Tommy had, so I could see how he used reference. The collage aspect of working with reference was new to me, but I appreciated it, and hopefully the artist change wasn’t too big of a switch. And it’s helped by the fact that Dave Stewart colored the whole thing.

MM: With all the detail you put into the work, and the research you had to do, and the fact they wanted to get the project out the door, and that you were coming on for Tommy, whose work you admired, did you consider this book to be more of a challenge?

CLIFF: Yeah, there was a lot of self-imposed pressure. I didn’t have any published work that looked like Tommy’s, but I showed Bob some sketches, which tend to be a lot looser and brushy, more like what Tommy was doing, so Bob had faith that I could do it. I just wanted to maintain the quality Tommy had established. And this was a passion proj-

ect for Jan Van Meter, so I couldn’t let her down either. But I welcomed the challenge.

At that time in my career, taking this on was pretty ambitious. I actually worked on Golden Streets at the same time as “Josie Mac,” since eight pages monthly wasn’t too hard of a grind. Now that I think of it, I actually enjoyed switching gears between the two projects.

MM: With “Josie Mac” you drew a little bit of Batman, but it wasn’t a Batman story. With this you were drawing a Batman story, but it wasn’t the Batman everyone knows. What was your approach in coming to terms with how a pauper Batman should look?

CLIFF: That was one of my first real design challenges, coming up with a look that evoked Batman but still made sense in the world of the story. The gag here is that Bruce 35

Previous Page: A crime scene investigator recreates Grendel’s actions in a story for Matt Wagner’s Grendel: Red, White, & Black #4.

Above: The original layout and revised pencils for the cover of Batman: The Golden Streets of Gotham.

Grendel © Matt Wagner. Batman © DC Comics

Right: A character study of Batman and The Cat’s “faces.”

Right: The finished inks for the Golden Streets of Gotham cover.

Next Page: A preliminary mood sketch for Beware the Creeper done to help Cliff establish the look and feel of the series.

Batman, The Creeper © DC Comics

steals the costume from a rich guy, and it has an opera mask with it. It had to be more period than you would get from a regular Batman costume.

Schreck had shown me this crazy movie called Begotten by E. Elias Merhige, the director of Shadow of the Vampire. It was this silent, grainy black-and-white movie. It kind of reminded me of Anton Corbijn’s work. It was super-creepy. It was a strange hardcore horror art film—kind of grisly, with weird bits of gore and sexuality. After watching it, it made me think about this Batman costume differently. Even though it had the mask, I wanted to make it kind of faceless and creepy. So even if I wasn’t drawing the regular Batman, the design concept behind it made it really exciting for me.

The interesting thing about the book too, was that it wasn’t really an action story. It was about social activism. It wasn’t meant to be this rock ’em-sock ’em thing; it’s a story about people.

MM: Your next project was in a slightly similar vein, to a degree, with Beware the Creeper. This miniseries brought you back to your old home of Vertigo. How did you get involved in the project?

CLIFF: Will Dennis was the editor, and he had taken my position when I left Vertigo. We quickly became friends. I, he, Axel Alonso— even after he went over to Marvel—Peggy Burns, and a few others would go for Chinese 36

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food every Thursday night and then have beers in Little Italy. We all got really close, but as with Heidi, I wouldn’t push Will or Axel for work. I’m a freelancer; I think it’s kind of understood that I’m looking for work, you know? [laughter] But Will had always been really supportive of my stuff, and after “Josie Mac” was done, I wanted to do some different material.

Will had been fielding pitches from people, trying to develop his first project as an editor, and he got an interesting one from Jason Hall— some kind of circus story with a colorful gang of freaks. He showed me the proposal and said, “What do you think of this? Do you think you could work with this guy?” I really liked it. Will couldn’t use this proposal, but he said, “Why don’t you guys get together and come up with something?”

Every now and then Vertigo would try to leverage some of the old DC properties. “See what you can do with one of these characters.

Think along the lines of what Neil Gaiman did with Sandman, where it’s Sandman in name, but it’s not really tied to the original concept.”

Jason and I both thought the Creeper was cool, and that it might be interesting to do an Elseworlds take on the Creeper and tie it in tangentially to Jack Ryder. We could do a female Creeper, and set it in the near future. Will disagreed, “Nah, that’s the easy way to do it. Everybody goes to the near future when they can’t think of anything better. Why don’t you set it in the ’20s?” I think he had just seen Moulin Rouge. “Why don’t we do it as a period piece? It could be anywhere, maybe Paris.”

That really anchored the story, and it allowed us to play with Art Deco visuals, Surrealism, flapper fashion…. It was a huge gift to tie the story to such a rich time in history, because this was the first time I was able to art direct a book, from the overall look, to the characters, and even the covers, and it gave me so much inspiration to draw from.

We talked a lot about who would do the covers, and we’d gone through the usual roster of Vertigo people but couldn’t think of anyone who would be a hundred percent right, until finally Will said, “Why don’t you do it?” I was really hoping he’d say that.

Right and Below: Preliminary sketches for Beware the Creeper, and Cliff’s designs for the Benoir sisters, Maddy (a.k.a. The Creeper) and the outgoing Judith.

Next Page: Layouts and finished pencils for page 4 of Beware the Creeper #4.

Scenes like this required a lot of research on Cliff’s part to get the clothing and architecture accurate.

The Creeper © DC Comics

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So I did a couple of cover treatments using the idea of 1920s Paris and Art Deco poster design, trying to do something more graphic. That first cover was a tricky balancing act. In my mind, we needed the cover to be interesting— show the unique locale and show that it’s a female protagonist. It should have some period elements but not announce overtly it’s a period book, because that might be a turn-off to some. The first cover showed a tiny Creeper leaping off of a building and above her was a large title, announcing “Beware the Creeper.” I sent it to Will; I also sent it to Darwyn Cooke. Darwyn sent it back with a note that said, “I hope you don’t mind, but I took the liberty of tweaking this a little bit.” He had enlarged the Creeper and laid her right on top of the text. It was such a simple solution, and it worked beautifully. It made me reassess my design choices. There are always simple solutions to give something more impact.

Milligan were set to do a monthly Human Target series, but I think Darwyn was also preparing New Frontier at the time.

I saw him in Los Angeles after San Diego 2002. It was me, him, and Dave Bullock—I think we had gone for pancakes somewhere. He was saying that they wanted him to do this monthly and he knew he couldn’t do it all by himself, but maybe if he penciled and I inked and then we’d swap places every few issues…? This sounded like a really great idea, but once New Frontier was up and running, he realized he wouldn’t have the bandwidth to work on two monthly books. He pulled out of the project, but he’d spoken with Karen Berger about my interest. By that time I was already working on The Creeper, so I wasn’t available for a monthly, but on one of my visits to the Vertigo offices, Karen asked if I had any ideas on who could do the book. I thought Javier Pulido was perfect because he had done that really great Human Target graphic novel for them. I didn’t hear anything about it for another six months or so, when she asked me to alternate arcs with Javier.

MM: People started seeing you in a different light after The Creeper, but you zigged instead of zagged into a lesscostumed and more realistic vein. You started on Human Target with issue #6 in March 2004. Can you talk about being approached to do Human Target and your thinking as you joined the series?

CLIFF: Yeah. Funny thing is that the first person to approach me about Human Target was Darwyn. He and Peter

MM: Did you have any trepidation about joining a series after it has been started, especially given you would be part of a rotating team of artists on the book?

CLIFF: It wasn’t so much trepidation as I wanted to honor the work that had been done before. I really did love that 39

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Previous Page: The finished inks for page 4 of Beware the Creeper #4.

Left and Below: A panel and page from Human Target #7, featuring a somewhat stripped down, but “chunky” style.

book. I remember reading Peter Milligan’s synopsis for the mini-series years earlier when I was on staff and wanting to draw it even then.

And when it finally came out with the fantastic Edvin Biukovic art, it was a really special book to me. The second graphic novel with Javier was fantastic as well, and I just loved the series as a fan and wanted to make sure my contribution wasn’t letting the franchise down.

MM: Speaking of Toth, when I was reading your issues of Human Target as they came out, I was also reading Alex Toth’s Zorro.

Neither were stereotypically pulpy, but they didn’t have any problem doing action

MM: Thinking of the art style you took on, it’s obviously different than The Creeper, but it seemed you were finding out what you wanted to do.

CLIFF: Yeah, I definitely bounced around a little bit more. Part of me was wondering if I should strip things down because of the schedule, see what would happen if I simplified things. So the first few issues were a lot more… chunky, I guess, than what I had done before. I was trying to find my way, trying to differentiate what I was doing from Javier’s approach which was so different from what he had done before. His drawing had become very linear, and the storytelling style was much more flat and graphic. It was stylish and intellectual, formal and smart, where I wanted to be a little more visceral, emotional. Javier’s was Stanley Kubrick and I was doing the popcorn Steven Spielberg-y thing.

MM: When I was reading it, I thought his approach was like David Mazzucchelli, very cerebral. It had emotion to it….

CLIFF: Yes, but more like City of Glass than “Year One.” There are a lot of cropped closeups, backgrounds drop out. The panel layout is contributing to the page as a whole. It’s much closer to Alex Toth than to Jack Kirby.

I thought it was really awesome, to see him push the envelope like that. But for me, personally? I wanted to preserve that action-filmon-paper feel that Eddie had established.

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The Creeper, The Human Target © DC Comics.

Below: Page 12 of Human Target #10, Cliff’s favorite issue of his run.

At this point Cliff’s linework was cleaner and less brush heavy.

Next Page: A panel from Human Target #14, with a more angular minimalist approach, and the opening page of Human Target #21, by which point Cliff’s new approach had begun to fully gel.

Human Target © DC Comics.

sequences and gun battles either. They weren’t like Rambo.

CLIFF: Absolutely. Milligan was playing with the pulp feel throughout, and I was trying to pick up on those things and clue the reader in to those influences. The fifth issue, #10, “Five Days Grace”—that’s probably my favorite issue out of the run. I love that story.

I thought it had a nice twist, and art-wise I started to figure it out and move away from what I had done in previous issues and focus on a clear line style. It felt right; I had a long way to go, but it was liberating to keep moving in different directions, to keep learning. Maybe that’s the thing: sometimes you hit a wall with your current approach and you just need to mix things up to keep yourself interested and open your eyes a little bit.

I enjoyed the script for that issue so much that I was trying to figure out ways to add more significant storytelling detail to the drawing without weighing stuff down. Part of it was in response to what Javier had been doing. It was in response to Darwyn’s work as well. It was moving away from that thicker brush line to something that was more penbased. I was still searching for a style, but was open to possibilities.

MM: You seem like you were really soaking up what you were reading and who you were talking to at the time.

CLIFF: Every few years, it’s like a pendulum swing. You spend some years with the door closed, not looking at anything and trying to focus on yourself, and other times you’re hungrily looking for anything you can digest and assimilate artistically. At that point, I was trying to find my voice. Maybe that’s also part of the Eddie Biukovic influence there, my admiration for his precise, uncluttered draftsmanship and clear, effective storytelling.

MM: Human Target #10 marked a unique milestone for you back then—your longest continuous work on a series at that point. Doing it month in and month out, you were able to spend some time thinking about storytelling for these characters, doing things specific to the style Milligan was writing. You spoke about being inspired by Biukovic, Cooke, and Pulido, but with this extended run, were you able to make your own mark there?

CLIFF: Michael Lark’s Gotham Central was on my mind as well. But I was also trying to move away from those guys. As much as I loved their work, I was trying to find a way to differentiate myself.

MM: Would you say Human Target was when you were beginning to find your own style?

CLIFF: I think there is a style there, but it isn’t quite developed or very natural yet. But it was important for me to try something different at that time. The fun thing about Human Target was that each arc was a different story, and each story had different characters.

I had the latitude to try something different.

Each arc was its own mini-series. When you are reading the series the art change isn’t drastic, but when you’re looking for it and you put them all side by side, I think you can see how my work begins to change. By issue #14, in the “Pop Star” arc, that more linear style is a lot more apparent, but still a little

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2005 and 2006 that you began doing covers that you weren’t doing the interiors for. What was that like for you?

CLIFF: I was really excited to do more covers: the challenge of illustration versus interior storytelling, and me being more interested in design and finding graphic solutions to things. I didn’t know Human Target was the last Vertigo I would do for a while, but I was feeling an itch to try to increase awareness of my stuff. I loved Human Target; I loved working on that book. My biggest disappointment is that more people didn’t read it. We put so much into it, and to have it slowly peter out was heart-breaking.

I didn’t think about it at the time, but working on covers is really a big responsibility. It’s your first impression of a book, and it’s highly visible, from the image in solicitations to being on the rack. A lot of people end up seeing a cover image, even if they have no interest in the interiors. In the first couple of covers I did for Gotham Knights, I was moving

clumsy. By the end of the series, the last three issues, that’s when it started to feel like I was making progress. I was figuring out how to integrate line and shadow… for Human Target.

And that’s a big thing—it’s about what’s appropriate for that book.

MM: What was it like at the end of that series where you’ve done eleven issues on one title, doing a year’s worth of work with this one writer and with one editor, with the same people every day?

CLIFF: It was very smooth. The problem with jumping from project to project is you spend the first few months getting your rhythm down. You put a lot of hard work into that first year, but then you reap the benefits of it later. A lot of the fun is in setting things up as well. It’s also a philosophical thing—do you want to stick with things and follow through, or do you want to build them and move on to the next?

MM: Human Target was your last work for Vertigo for some time, and you were about to step into the Bat-universe. At this time, you also began doing a lot of covers not just for the Batman books but also for Green Arrow. Before talking about drawing interiors for the Bat books, I want to talk about how you see covers. You had done some covers for your own books before—Beware the Creeper, Human Target, and some things here and there—but it was at this point in 43

away from the traditional black-and-white line art to something more like painted illustration where colors play a bigger part. I was developing my color palette, and learning about color theory at the same time. A lot of those early colors were learning on the job, but I had a safety net. If a cover needed a color tweak, Mark Chiarello would fix it, and I’d learn from his choices.

I also had a very open-minded editor in Matt Idelson.

I would throw him some ideas and sketches, he’d be excited by the less conventional ones. Those covers were a valuable training ground for me, and I still have a soft spot for those images.

MM: You seemed to be developing that as a different skill set. Some cover artists treat covers like a single panel in the book….

CLIFF: Yeah, I really didn’t want that.

MM: But you weren’t afraid to do a different style that maybe you couldn’t do for an entire book but served just the cover. At the time, you and James Jean were doing a lot of covers for DC, and the quality was really amazing. It was Cliff Chiang, but it was illustrating rather than doing sequential art.

CLIFF: It was a lot more work to do the “cover style,” but to me it represented a premium version of my art.

Really, any colorist could go in and knock out the line work and do all the stuff I was doing on the covers, but for me it was going that extra mile to present the ultimate vision of what my art could look like.

MM: You were doing the coloring yourself on most of that, right?

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CLIFF: Yeah. I’ve almost always colored my covers; there may be one or two I didn’t color.

MM: There’s a Batgirl very early on that you didn’t color?

CLIFF: Yeah, that’s right.

MM: How did these covers affect your sequential art? You can’t take the same amount of time to do individual pages, but were there things you learned about composition and storytelling that you could take back to the sequential art?

CLIFF: I can’t think explicitly of any things that I learned on covers that I could apply to the interior. Maybe I should think about it harder. In my head, the challenges are so different.

When you’re drawing a cover, the last thing you want is for it to look like a splash page. That’s something that can happen a lot until you turn that switch. But as a result I’ve kept them so separate in my head that some of the things I’ve learned about being graphic on covers have not translated to the interior work. A big part of that is color, so when I am not coloring the interior, those tools aren’t there for me. But I think the cover work made me better at composing images, how to weight things to draw the eye.

One of the things that did help my sequential work is looking at a lot of Eduardo Risso’s work. He often designs a large master panel on a page and then uses black to simplify an area but also give you a sense of light and shadow. Then you can overlay the other simpler panels on the page on top of that and move them around a little bit to give you the best composition.

It anchors the page and at the same time allows other panels to breathe.

and Bob Schreck on Batman: Golden Streets of Gotham. I kept in touch with those guys, and they were my first stop when Human Target ended. Maybe they had some Batman work I could do.

The Nightwing stuff was a little breather; I was just penciling, which I hadn’t done since the Wonder Woman issue. Ande Parks is a fantastic inker, and I thought it was a good opportunity to learn how other people would interpret my pencils. Maybe pick up some tricks in the process. And it’s Nightwing, so

MM: How did you move from working with Vertigo to the Bat titles?

CLIFF: Well, I knew the editors already from having worked with Matt Idelson on “Josie Mac” 45

Previous Page and Below: The cover for Green Arrow #53: three sketch ideas, finished pencils, and inks.

Green Arrow © DC Comics.

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it was an opportunity to try to work on more conventional mainstream superhero stuff.

I started looking at a lot of Kevin Nowlan, which was really helpful to me to rationalize the two parts of my personality—the part that really loves the shadowy Vertigo material and the brighter superhero stuff. Nowlan’s atmospheric drafting and figurework straddle the two easily. So Nightwing was me trying to figure that out in pencil and then seeing how Andy worked with that, which affected how I would attempt things later.

MM: You were already doing action work from Human Target and had done a variation of Batman before, but when it came to doing straight-up superheroes in the DC universe, were there any growing pains?

CLIFF: It wasn’t the easiest transition. You go from doing a kind of normal reality that

you want to be believable in Human Target to working with superheroes that have to be exaggerated. A lot of it was me learning how to showcase the physical side of the characters, learning the superhero proportions. How far do you push it to make a character like Nightwing look strong while keeping him sexy and bring out the panache that Nightwing has? I also wanted to get better at anatomy. I realized I would be doing more superhero work eventually, so I had to think more about muscle groups and how light would hit different kinds of fabrics. It was new to me on a professional level but it’s not like I had never read superhero comics. So it was trying to take the ideas I had when I was growing up and reading this stuff and putting them in action—“If I could draw superheroes, this is what I would do.”

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Previous Page and This Page: Cliff colored the covers for the Crisis Aftermath:The Spectre mini-series himself, so he worked out his sketch ideas in color in Photoshop. Going from sketch 1 to 2, Cliff enlarged and repositioned the scene (drawn on a separate layer) inside the Spectre.

In sketch 3, he lightened the palette and added skulls and a spotlight to the background. In sketch 4, he changed Spectre’s head. In the final sketch, he enlarged the new Spectre head, replaced the scene in the Spectre’s form with bullet wounds, and reused the skull background. From there, pencils and inks.

The Spectre © DC Comics.

Above: Layouts and pencils for Nightwing #111, page 3.You can really see the Kevin Nowlan influence in the main Nightwing figure in the bottom panel.

Next Page: Pencils for Detective Comics #815, page 10. Again, the Kevin Nowlan influence is apparent, especially in the large Batman figure.

Batman, Nightwing © DC Comics

MM: After your brief stop with Nightwing, you came back to Detective Comics, this time not as a backup but as the primary artist. You had been there before with “Josie Mac,” but this time you had two entire issues in the “Victims” story arc. Do you remember your thoughts as you took on the two full issues?

CLIFF: It was a fun story—Shane McCarthy wrote it. It was the last two issues before James Robinson took over, before 52 and One Year Later and all that. It was a short thing that Schreck needed, just ending the old run knowing that when Robinson took over it would be a new story and new direction. The story didn’t tie into anything so it felt a little bit like an inventory story, but Shane wanted to rethink Mr. Zsasz, and I really liked his ideas.

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I had a lot of fun working on that story because it had some good visual moments and things I hadn’t drawn, like a Batmobile chase scene. It was a chance for me to do something different, a classic ’70s superhero-y kind of Batman, because it was that kind of story. It didn’t feel like it would benefit from a Mazzucchelli “Year One” approach. So I thought about who I would like to draw this, and I was still very much on my Kevin Nowlan kick. He draws such a creepy yet heroic Batman. He was my main touchstone for that story. So much that it’s embarrassing to look at some of the art, because I was trying to synthesize Nowlan’s approach but didn’t have the drawing chops to pull it off. [chuckles] I was learning on the job, but I think there’s nothing better than putting your work out there publicly for people to see so you can catalog and chart your progress.

It keeps you honest. I enjoyed working on that story even if I feel like that art is not the most sincere that I have ever done. But there are certainly things about it that I like.

There were lessons there that I brought to superhero work afterwards. It was overworked, but I wouldn’t figure that out until halfway through the Spectre stuff—how to pull back on it in a way that made sense and to make it something more distinctively me and honest.

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in their DNA. As a result it pushes you and it makes you better by working on that kind of story. There’s a big audience, so you know there’re a lot of people reading Batman. There are a lot of cultural associations with it. You come into it knowing all this stuff and you know you’re drawing in a pretty long and rich tradition of great work.

MM: Have you ever had a serious talk with people at DC about doing that kind of run?

Maybe the schedule didn’t line up or something like that?

CLIFF: [chuckles] Yeah, there were times I wanted to do stuff and I wasn’t available or it just didn’t happen. I remember talking to Ed Brubaker once about trying to do some Batman stuff with him when he was on Detective Comics.

A couple of years ago, Brian Azzarello and I were seriously going to work on a Batman book. We were going to follow up on his First Wave mini-series with a young Batman in a pulp universe using guns and fighting gangsters and drug pushers. It was going to be a noir-ish crime book, like if you combined The Shadow with Batman. We actually made the Batman: Black and White statue to promote that book.

Above and Next Page: Two pages of Cliff’s unpublished story intended for an issue of Batman: Black and White.

Batman © DC Comics. Zorro © Zorro Productions¸ Inc.

MM: For a long period of time, you were known for your darker shadowy work that is quintessentially Batman, but you never worked with the character himself for more than a couple of issues. Did you have any desire to work on a longer story?

CLIFF: Yeah. I was talking with Paul Pope about this once. Frank Miller told him: Batman is very generous. You can do a lot with the concept of Batman—it’s so flexible and you can pull it in all these different directions. But at the same time it remains Batman. As a result, it’s very rich. There are a lot of things you can do with it, it can push you in different directions, and it is very rewarding. Artistically, it forces you to think about mood, atmosphere, and shadow where other titles may not have that so ingrained 50

MM: I can’t let that mention of Batman: Black and White go. When we were preparing for this interview, you told me you actually did a short story for the original Batman: Black and White comic anthology that never saw print.

Can you talk about that at all?

CLIFF: Sure. Bob Schreck edited it, and it was written by G. P. Austin. He’d written a really nice short story for Diana Schutz at Dark Horse. Bob described it to me at a bar one night, and it sounded really cool. Bruce Wayne is confronted with his childhood idol when he attends a costume ball and Tyrone Power is there wearing a Zorro costume.

Bruce himself is wearing a Batman costume, but it’s a last minute, ridiculous knock-off that Alfred picked up as a joke. I drew it to look like the movie serial with the real pointy ears and the cape way too long. Bruce has a crisis of confidence thinking this might be how the public sees him, especially after everyone laughs at the costume because it’s such a joke to have playboy Bruce Wayne dress as Batman. But of course thieves show up to rob the charity ball, so movie serial Batman ends up teaming up with Tyrone Power Zorro to take down the thugs. It’s a really sweet story about how important it is

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CLIFF: I’m still holding on to them because I have a real sentimental attachment to them. It’s lettered on the boards

by John Workman. I toyed with the notion of sending it to Alex Toth to see if he would enjoy it, because his work means a lot to me. But I never acted on that. I don’t know if I could’ve handled an honest critique from him.

for Bruce to team up with his childhood hero, “Zorro.“ I approached it a little differently from some of the other things I had worked on. I inked over layouts, trying to homage or at least capture the feel of the Alex Toth Zorro comics, make it a love letter to that. Unfortunately, Tyrone Power in a Zorro costume was a “no” for the legal department. It got all the way to the printer when they realized they didn’t have permission from Zorro Productions to use Zorro. We went up and down trying to explain it wasn’t the character Zorro but a guy in a Zorro costume, but they didn’t care—it was a comic book, it was Zorro. At the last minute they had to pull it, and it never came out.

MM: Has there been any talk about…?

CLIFF: I’ve thought about it but it’s not been high on my priority list. I should ask Nick Barrucci over at Dynamite since he has the Zorro license now. Maybe with DC’s permission, they could print it with an acknowledgment.

MM: So are those pages sitting in a drawer somewhere at DC all these years later?

MM: How many pages is the entire story?

CLIFF: Eight pages.

MM: Although you didn’t get to do Batman then, you did get another caped hero in Gotham, the Spectre for Crisis Aftermath: The Spectre. You’ve told me in the past that the subject matter and tone of this story really affected you since you were looking at it and thinking about it all day. Can you talk about that?

CLIFF: It was a really dark story. After he’s murdered, Detective Crispus Allen, from Gotham Central, returns as the host for the Spectre and is forced to dispense God’s judgment. The old “Spectre” comics did all sorts of crazy stuff, like the Spectre turning criminals into wax candles and then melting them.

Very lurid and ironic punishments.

We did some of that in the book, but primarily it was about Crispus coming to terms with his death and learning to submit to God’s will.

I enjoy dark material, but somehow this felt relentless to me. Will Pfeifer did a great job with the script, but as the artist I had to inhabit that world for months, and it was bleak. By the time I’m done with a book, I’ve read the script at least ten times as I go over each page and try to figure out the storytelling. And mentally I do my best to put myself in the character’s shoes. But this was such a sad story, with a really touching but downbeat ending, and by the end I was emotionally drained.

MM: Although not Batman, you could feel him—and his city, Gotham—all over this. How’d you go about developing the tone and atmosphere of the book?

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CLIFF: Well, a lot of the groundwork was already laid by Gotham Central. The book needed to fit into that world, but have this creepy vibe as well. For some scenes, it demanded the kind of naturalism that Michael Lark does so well, and at other times it was allout crazy horror. I guess I was pulled in different directions, which only added to the stress.

Because I was having a hard time with the pages, I did learn to streamline my process.

For years I was drawing print-size layouts, the exact size of a comic, which I’d enlarge and refine in multiple stages until I’d lightbox the tight pencils onto 11" x 17" Bristol board. It allowed me to tackle problems with figurework or perspective on separate sheets of paper without worrying I’d ruin the drawing surface of the final page with lots of pencil erasing. It worked for years, but now it felt redundant, and I started drawing directly on the boards with blue pencil. It felt like I’d taken the training wheels off.

MM: I realize we’ve been dancing around him, so let’s talk about Spectre. He’s a

superhero but far removed from the action hero of Batman, almost like a ghost at times, of vengeance and retribution—more ominous than action-oriented. What was it like drawing the Spectre himself, and the unique spot he took in the story compared to other heroes’ stories?

CLIFF: The Spectre really doesn’t work as a conventional superhero. He’s too powerful and his divine mandate feels too serious next to someone like the Flash. If you draw him literally, all you’ve got is a half-naked white guy wearing just panties, gloves, elf boots, and a cloak, so I tried to approach him like an angel.

He’s a giant alabaster sculpture brought to life, lit by God’s light from above. I wanted him to feel alien, removed. I think it worked.

MM: From that you went over to do the backup story in 2006’s Tales of the Unexpected, which for many became the most memorable story, “Doctor 13.” This is quite the different type of book for you, and also the first time you collaborated with Brian Azzarello.

How’d it come together?

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Previous Page: The Crisis Aftermath:The Spectre mini-series marked a significant change in Cliff’s work process, where he began working in blue pencil on the board rather than go through a long refinement process on several sheets of paper.

Above: Detective Crispus Allen fully accepts his role as The Spectre in these pages from Crisis Aftermath:The Spectre #3.

The Spectre © DC Comics.

Below: Cliff’s inks for the cover of the trade paperback collection, Doctor 13: Architects & Mortality.

Next Page: Doctor 13 and company face off against the ersatz icons of the DC universe.

Anthro, Captain Fear, Doctor 13, Gen. Jeb Stuart, Genius Jones, Infectious Lass, I… Vampire, Primaul, Traci Thirteen © DC Comics.

CLIFF: The timing was perfect. I needed a change of pace after the Spectre, and Brian called. He pitched it as “Jonny Quest on acid” and told me I’d get to draw vampires and pirates and gorillas and haunted tanks. Sold! I knew it was going to be light-hearted, but I was really surprised by how funny the first script was. Brian’s work ’til then was so hard-boiled, and this bubbled with dark wit and charm.

MM: Doing something so irreverent, was it more troublesome to run by DC? With your background as a former editor, you must have special senses to feel this kind of thing.

CLIFF: No, as an assistant, I never had to navigate those kinds of waters. Schreck stood by us though, and never asked us for changes we weren’t comfortable with, and Dan DiDio really loved what we were doing too, even if he wasn’t aware of how far we’d eventually go with it.

MM: About the work itself, you and Brian really brought back some old DC characters

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with a great twist, especially Traci Thirteen.

How do you think you and Brian did?

CLIFF: I’m really proud of the book, and it still makes me smile. When you think of DC, you think of A-list characters like Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, but these guys were at the bottom of the barrel. They were so forgotten that they weren’t even included in DC’s future plans, so we had free license to do whatever we wanted with them. For me, it really solidified the notion that story is everything. Even with a Z-list cast, you can do something compelling and entertaining.

MM: Any chance or want to go back to these characters, or some how incorporate them into Wonder Woman?

CLIFF: I’d love to do a sequel, and we have ideas for a story, but I think we were lucky to get away with it the first time. True to the book’s title, it really was unexpected.

It was such a middle-finger to the idea of reboots that if we did another one, Brian and I would have to be the villains of the

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piece. After Wonder Woman, we’re as guilty as the Architects.

Below: The Avengers piece Cliff drew for the 2006 Heroes Con art auction that eventually led to him getting the Green Arrow and Black Canary assignment.

Next Page: The Hard Travelin’ Heroes commission piece that sealed the deal.

Avengers © Marvel Characters, Inc. Black Canary, Green Arrow, Green Lantern © DC Comics.

MM: After this you plunged into what, after eight years in the business, was your first chance to launch an ongoing series—Green Arrow and Black Canary. I felt like at the time this zeroed in on some style ideas you’d been doing in your cover work but hadn’t been able to bring into the sequential art. Why’d you take on this project?

CLIFF: I was really curious about drawing superheroes regularly. I felt like I’d figured some things out with “Doctor 13” that I could apply to a monthly superhero book.

At HeroesCon that year, Dan DiDio saw the Avengers piece I did for the show auction and wanted me to swing by his office when we got back to New York. A week later, I

brought in a recent commission of Green Lantern, Green Arrow, and Black Canary— the “Hard Travelin’ Heroes”—to show Dan as a sample of what I could do. He didn’t say a word to me, but he grabbed it and walked down the hallway to Mike Carlin’s office and said, “We got our guy.”

MM: So when you switched over to Green Arrow and Black Canary, which was a married couple, both superheroes, swashbuckling/ romance, what was it like to have a more cheery book to work on?

CLIFF: I was really looking forward to it. I have always liked those two and the combination of action and romance, and I was happy to work with Judd Winick again. Because of the way Judd writes his characters, full of sass, I knew there would be lots of opportunities for humor, to get some good facial expressions in there and do some fun scenes. It was pitched to me as a superhero version of Hart to Hart, a married Green Arrow and Black Canary going off on adventures, but unfortunately that’s not really what the book turned out to be. For three or four whole issues they’re not even together because of all the tie-ins to other books. First, Green Arrow is supposed to be dead and it turns out he isn’t, then they gotta go find him…. The book was tying up loose ends from another event rather than having its own voice right away.

MM: This would be one of the first titles that put you in the middle of the DC Universe in terms of sharing characters and working with continuity. What was it like working on a book that tied into the main storyline of the DC Universe at that time?

CLIFF: Honestly, I just want to tell a good story. I get that it’s a shared universe and you have to accommodate the bigger picture.

Sometimes that can push your story in a good way, but in this case it felt like we were taking a detour from the book’s actual appeal. But I got to draw a lot of Black Canary in the first few issues, which helped build a reputation for drawing pretty women, and I got to draw Green Lantern and even Granny Goodness at the end, even if it felt out of the blue.

Even if the book wasn’t what I thought it’d be, I’m still really grateful for the opportunity. It was the right project at the right time for me. It gave me a vehicle to develop a more graphic, pop-superhero style. Visually, Green Arrow and Black Canary is slick and heavy and flat, with thick outlines around

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characters. It was fun to do, and it felt like the book had a distinct visual identity.

13’s” 16-page chapters. The “Doctor 13” scripts were very dense, while Judd’s were very open and needed fewer panels per page. It felt like a bigger canvas that I was required to fill.

There were a lot of panels where I just had to come up with something and make it look pretty. It was actually more difficult, somehow, when you don’t have a lot of things going on.

You just have to fill up the page with something, and it made me think differently about page layout.

MM: It felt like Chaykin’s American Flagg! work, with lots of clean slick lines. Your storytelling was very different from “Doctor 13” and things you had done before.

CLIFF: Well, the scripts were very different. The pacing was different because we had a full 22 pages compared to “Doctor 58

MM: After “Doctor 13” and Green Arrow and Black Canary, you were floating around….

CLIFF: Greendale was right after Green Arrow and Black Canary. I planned to keep on working on Green Arrow and Black Canary, but my Mom had been diagnosed with breast cancer. So I was shuttling back and forth between New York and New Jersey, trying to take care of her. It was surreal—I was drawing issue #4 of Green Arrow and Black Canary, which took place in a hospital, while I was in the hospital with my mom. So all the reference was really fresh, but it was really stressful and exhausting. By issue #6, I didn’t have anything left because of the emotional strain. I just didn’t feel like it was good for me to take on that monthly schedule. I just wanted to be with my mom more.

She was recovering, but I couldn’t keep my mind on what I was doing, and I didn’t want to slow things down. So it was better for the book that I left, and better for my sanity.

MM: I remember covering Greendale when it initially came out, and I heard that you initially turned it down.

CLIFF: Yeah, I was asked about it a few times.

The first time was during “Doctor 13”—I actually did a couple of sample pages for Greendale then—and the second time was six months later when I started working on Green Arrow and Black Canary. Both times, although it was an interesting project, I had prior commitments.

Also, I balked at the prospect of spending that much time on a graphic novel. I was going to be off the market for a year or more and no one was going to hear from me. But the third time, after I left Green Arrow and Black Canary, it was exactly what I needed, to get focused on the art and do it at my own pace. I could concentrate on the art and enjoy the work.

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Previous Page: This panel from Green Arrow and Black Canary #2, which went fully across two pages as part of a spread, shows Cliff “coming up with something and making it look pretty.” Talk about an understatement!

Above and Left: A model drawing of The Stranger, the villain of Greendale, and one of the early sample pages.

Green Arrow © DC Comics.

Greendale © Neil Young.

Above: Two pages from DMZ #57. The issue provided an emotionally charged story ideal for Cliff to explore a more illustrative approach.

Next Page: There is so much right with the storytelling and artwork in this page from Zatanna #8, it’s easy to see why Cliff says his three-issue run on the series was his best work to that point.

DMZ © Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli. Zatanna © DC Comics.

It happened in a roundabout way. After the second offer a year before, I thought Vertigo and Karen Berger had moved on.

But when I got an email directly from Neil Young asking me to reconsider, I knew I’d have to talk to Karen. She’d asked me to do the project twice before, and I really couldn’t turn her down a third time. I owed Karen a lot, and still do, and as personal a project as it was for Neil Young, it also was for Karen.

Neil wasn’t going to budge from his vision of the book, which for some reason involved me, and I didn’t want to be the reason the book didn’t happen. And creatively, it was exactly what I needed after Green Arrow and Black Canary. I was really lucky it worked out.

MM: How do you think doing that affected you and your work?

CLIFF: I learned things doing that book I wouldn’t have learned elsewhere. The experience of doing a long book on a generous deadline enabled me to grow and do other things as well. During Greendale I also began messing around with illustrations promoting 60

myself on the web, pin-ups and whatnot.

Maybe if I was doing a serialized project or something else I wouldn’t have had the need to do that, or wouldn’t have put myself out there in that kind of way. There was a huge upside to Greendale.

MM: And after Greendale wrapped you were looking around for other projects. You did some one-off issues of Brave and the Bold and a short for Supergirl, but also a great little issue of Brian Wood’s DMZ, #57. It was only one issue, but it really sticks out to me here as you consciously stepping out of your comfort zone.

What was the impetus for you doing this?

CLIFF: Azzarello and I were eager to start our Bat-Man book, but it hadn’t been officially greenlit so I was biding my time doing smaller jobs. And after two years of drawing Greendale in a very specific way, I wanted to experiment with something different. [Vertigo editors] Will Dennis and Mark Doyle were to be the editors on The Bat-Man, and they asked if I’d be interested in drawing a one-off issue of DMZ.

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CLIFF: It actually started with another project. After “Doctor 13,” Brian and I were to do a mini-series called Jimmy Olsen: Super-Friend. It would have been similar in tone to “Doctor 13,” with Jimmy interacting with the entire DCU. It would even feature some of the funny, passiveaggressive Superman stuff from the Silver Age. Unfortunately, around the same time, DC started using Jimmy Olsen all over the place, and we had to back away from it.

Brian and I were pissed, and in “Doctor 13” you can see us venting. There was a scene in Chapter 5 with Jimmy Olsen in turtle monster form, but after I’d drawn it we were told we couldn’t use Jimmy. So we replaced Jimmy with Azzarello’s Mount Rushmore monster from Superman: For Tomorrow, which we then turned into the Architects, the guys writing the 52 series. Not that they deserved any of our ire, but we just had a strong desire to screw with people. So Jimmy Olsen was off the table, and while Brian and I were making new plans I was offered the monthly Green Arrow and Black Canary gig.

When that ended, Brian and I began talking again about an Aquaman graphic novel. It was approved, and Brian had a great story in mind: it was a Pixar take on

Will and Mark have great taste and a wide range of interests, so they appreciate a lot of different things. I knew I could experiment with my work on that book and they’d encourage me to explore. That does a lot for your confidence, to know you have an editor in your corner. I’d talked with Brian Wood about doing something together over the years and when this came up, between the characters and the feel of the story, it was perfect; I needed something gritty.

Still waiting for Bat-Man, I followed up DMZ with a few issues of Zatanna, which I felt was my strongest work to date. DMZ #57 was a turning point for me. It helped me approach my art with a more illustrative bent. I felt I’d gotten locked into too much of a traditional “comic book” way of drawing, and my approach started to feel very stale to me. These jobs allowed me to press “pause,” reevaluate and explore new ways of doing things.

MM: This is where the fateful, never-seen Bat-Man project by you and Brian Azzarello comes in. This is before you and he were talking about Wonder Woman, and well before the “New 52” relaunch. How’d it all start?

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Aquaman. I don’t really want to say any more in case it does happen; I’ll hold out for a great story, which this was. It even made me tear up a little bit. It had the right level of nostalgia and sentimentality while also being unabashedly heroic. It didn’t have any of the irony of “Doctor 13”; it would have been pretty pure and a good change of pace for both of us. And then Neil Young emailed me about Greendale….

Halfway through Greendale, Azz and I started making plans again. First we talked about All-Star Green Lantern featuring John Stewart, but that was part of a larger project that went away. Then Azz called me about First Wave, a series of books he was spearheading, tying together characters like Doc Savage and The Spirit with DC characters like the Blackhawks and Batman into a pulpinspired universe. We were supposed to do a First Wave: Batman series, but those plans changed when the First Wave books were abandoned.

After Greendale, First Wave: Batman morphed into The BatMan for Vertigo. Vertigo had a reputation for reinterpreting classic DC characters, so we thought, what if we did that with Batman, perhaps as part of the Vertigo 20th Anniversary? We got the go-ahead, and Brian wrote the first script and I started doing the visual development. My Batman: Black and White statue was intended to come out the same month as the book, to help promote it. If you look at that statue of Batman with his guns drawn, it would have made more sense if you saw the book. It would have featured this young and inexperienced Batman who still relied on his guns, fighting police corruption, gangsters, and Mexican drug cartels in a West Coast version Gotham City. L.A. Confidential meets Batman.

Brian and I were really excited. After Jimmy Olsen, after Aquaman, we’d been talking about it for so long, it was finally going to happen!

[laughs] Then one night Brian called me and asked, “What do you think of Wonder Woman?” He’d just been asked to write the book. Brian was very convincing, but in the end I stuck to my guns. We’d been working to get this Bat-Man book off the ground for so long, I couldn’t walk away from it. I would have loved to draw Wonder Woman, but not before this Bat-Man book.

MM: But it never happened, and instead you did Wonder Woman anyway?

CLIFF: [laughs] Well, three months later DC rescheduled The Bat-Man just as I was about to start drawing pages. They said they wanted to release it two years later, in 2013!

In hindsight, I think they really wanted Brian and me together on Wonder Woman.

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Previous Page: Cliff’s original pencils for pages 15 and 16 of the fifth installment of “Doctor 13” from Tales of the Unexpected #5.

Below: Preliminary character design sketch of The Bat-Man intended for a Vertigo mini-series.

Batman, Doctor 13, Jimmy Olsen © DC Comics.

Part 4: Below: Promotional art for the release of Wonder Woman #1.

Next Page: Cover art for the Red Sonja: Monster Island one-shot.

Wonder Woman © DC Comics.

Red Sonja © Red Sonja, LLC.

Woman of Wonders

MM: Before we jump into this, I wanted to talk about something rather overdue. You’re almost exclusively known for your DC work, but you’ve done some other work from time to time as well. You did a Red Sonja cover, a pin-up for X-Men Unlimited, and some Marvel Team-Up trading cards. We talked earlier about how you didn’t look outside DC when you started because it was comfortable.

Can you talk about what it was like to look outside DC? CLIFF: Well, I’ve been exclusive with DC since 2003. As a result I haven’t had to look for outside work. But occasionally some illustration work will come my way. It’s great because it spices things up a little bit.

MM: I hate to discuss it as a binary sort of thing, either Marvel or DC, but have you thought about doing more Marvel work?

CLIFF: Before the exclusive contract, I thought about getting some Marvel work.

But I was also afraid that Marvel’s audience might have different tastes, and I didn’t want to squander an opportunity with a bad showing. To me, my art just didn’t feel appropriate for a Marvel superhero book for a long time, and by then I was exclusive. Early on, Axel mentioned a J. Jonah Jameson arc for Tangled Web, but I was already working on something else. I don’t like juggling too many projects at once. I like to make sure everything gets the time and attention it needs.

I once did some Fantastic Four pieces for an editor, character sheets to show a visual approach. I never heard back about those, though I did get a call from James Sturm when he was looking for someone to work over his layouts on Fantastic Four:Unstable Molecules. It was tempting, as I do enjoy and respect Sturm’s work, but I would’ve felt like just another pair of hands if I weren’t handling the storytelling myself.

Pencilling is such a grind.

You’re doing a lot of precise busywork, but for me the reward for all that work is getting to figure out storytelling and lay down the final ink lines.

MM: Do you think you’re more attuned to the DC characters?

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CLIFF: No, not really, I grew up reading Marvel. I didn’t really read DC books. It’s not a question of interest in the characters; it’s just that career-wise, having good working relationships is more important to me than drawing, say, Spider-Man or Superman.

It’s not the company or the characters; it’s the quality of the script and the quality of the people you work with. That’s your life, not getting to say, “Hey, I get to draw my favorite character.” That’s only fulfilling in a limited sort of way.

MM: Okay, picking up from where we were, your project with Brian Azzarello on Bat-Man had been put on hold, so you jumped over to the Wonder Woman book he had mentioned to you previously. Despite the events of how you came to be on the book, you took to it pretty quickly. How did it all come together?

CLIFF: We had our first Wonder Woman conversation in January 2011 and had mapped out the story and an approach. It was fun breaking it down and figuring it out, but later that week I told Brian I’d rather do The Bat-Man. Three months later, we were back on Wonder Woman, but I did have three or four months to digest that stuff in the back of my mind. Even as I was doing prep on The Bat-Man, I kept having ideas for Wonder Woman. Once we started officially, it was just getting our hands dirty, talking about the character design, locations, and the overall feel of the book.

Once the book had been announced, Brian, as he usually does, likes to poke the bear a little bit, so he said to the comics press that Wonder Woman wasn’t a superhero book but a horror book. It was a great comment because it helped people realign their thinking about the book, even if it wasn’t 100% true. I think it has horror elements and that’s what distinguishes it from previous runs, but the comment helped people realize that this wasn’t going to be Super Friends. It wasn’t going to be strictly capes and tights.

It was going to be more macabre and there would be mystery. It would use mythology in a way that contemporized it and made it fresh. I think that comment helped people judge the book on its own merits.

MM: It prepared people to not just expect the same Wonder Woman as before and not be surprised at the difference. It forced them to approach the book with a more open mind.

CLIFF: Yes. His saying that made me want to take more chances with the artwork too. We talked about the story being a little bit darker, and I worked on doing that with my style, which I think is generally pretty approachable. Even with the heavier inking, I think it is pretty friendly. So I was trying my best to accommodate and add atmosphere.

MM: You were doing new takes on a lot of key aspects of Wonder Woman, revising the costume not only for her but the other characters, and creating new roles. What was it like trying to figure out what yours and Brian’s Wonder Woman would be and also what it wouldn’t be?

CLIFF: We knew what it wouldn’t be first.

We said, “The gods are not going to be guys 67

Previous Page: Cover art for the first issue of the new Wonder Woman.

Above: “A god walks into a bar…” only he doesn’t look like your typical mythological entity.

Brian and Cliff wanted to contemporize the Greek pantheon a bit, as seen in the characters of Apollo and War in this page from Wonder Woman #4.

This issue also marked Cliff’s first go at penciling digitally in Photoshop.

Wonder Woman © DC Comics.

in togas and sandals. That’s been done before.” George Pérez did it, and there was no reason to go back to it. If we were going to present any of this as being new and exciting, we had to dump that classical imagery precisely because it’s so expected. It was more interesting to go into urban fantasy mode. It allowed us more latitude in designing characters, and the reader wouldn’t know what to expect. Every time a new god showed up, you’d wonder what they would look like and what their personality would be. That allowed us to focus on character, so it’s not just “Hey, that’s Apollo.” Now we were asking “Who is Apollo? What does he look like, and how does what he looks like evoke his personality and role in the book?”

So we spent the first month just working on design. For a while they hadn’t told us that Jim Lee was designing all the Justice League characters, so I had done my own Wonder

Woman design. Once I got Jim’s, I had to figure out how to adapt it to my style, tweaking and simplifying things a little bit so it wouldn’t look out of place with everything else I was drawing.

With the gods, we had a conversation each time about what they did and their role in the story. What are their powers? Each one had a distinct take, and I would send Brian lots of sketches. He would okay it or I would give my reasons for it and then maybe we’d go back and forth a couple times. Apollo had a shaved head before, and now he actually has hair that’s more reminiscent of Greek statuary. We went five or six rounds on Hermes. Initially he was supposed to be a naked cowboy. He had a really long duster with nothing underneath, and then instead of his Mercury FTD cap, he was going to have a flat-brimmed hat like Hailee Steinfeld is wearing in True Grit.

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We started with this western version and then we had this avant-garde fashion version. Brian himself ended up sketching a weird World War I doughboy. Halfway through the design process we decided we had to give him bird feet which really pulled it all together, I think—bird feet with little wings on the ankles.

MM: Although you weren’t able to use your original design for Wonder Woman at first, you did sneak it in Wonder Woman #8 as an alternate outfit Diana wore. What were your thought processes behind that design?

Was it part of the darker look you were trying for?

CLIFF: It came out of the story. I came up with the design months before we knew about the “New 52” reboot. We had to change the costume in order to signal this shift in the storytelling. We knew we wanted her to feel more like a warrior. We wanted to take her away from what had come before and create something less of a superhero and more a mythological hero come to life. If she had been wearing that design from the beginning, I think expectations would have been different as well; it was a clear signifier of our creative direction. I think the costume we originally came up with made more sense in the context of the story we’re telling, but I’m happy with the way she looks in the book now. The New 52 look evokes so much of the classic Wonder Woman iconography, and there’s power in that.

MM: Let’s step back a little bit so people understand this fully. The Wonder Woman design now, the one she’s been wearing since issue #1, that’s done by Jim Lee? CLIFF: Yeah, that’s Jim and Cully Hamner.

I’ve tried to simplify her top a little bit, to make it look more graphic and have it make more sense to me as a piece of tailoring.

But there are a couple of differences: our Wonder Woman has much bigger hair and a bigger nose, bigger eyebrows… she’s bigger overall. [chuckle] That was also a very deliberate decision. The hair is like Batman’s cape in that it helps frame her face. It’s also an unapologetically feminine touch for her to be running around with hair that’s not tied back. It’s almost an invitation for someone to grab it, so it’s a weakness, but it’s one she flaunts. Physically, we wanted her to be imposing, the way a six-foot woman usually

is when she walks into a room or onto a subway car—all eyes go to her. There’s a tendency in comics for women to be drawn too suggestively. They might be sexy, but they’re not built for anything like fighting. [chuckle] So, with Wonder Woman, I wanted to see if I could draw a convincing brawler.

I always had a lot of admiration for how Adam Hughes would draw such a beautiful face on a ferocious body builder’s physique.

And it really works—there’s a real stature to his Wonder Woman. And I wanted to bring some of that to our interpretation as well.

MM: I felt it was a Darwyn Cooke New Frontier kind of Wonder Woman who could really grapple with pretty much anyone— sexy and strong.

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Previous Page: On the left, Cliff’s original idea for Wonder Woman’s new look. On the right, his first pass at adjusting Jim Lee and Cully Hamner’s design to fit his style.

Above: Cliff uses Wonder Woman’s hair not only to depict the Amazon’s feminine side, but as a design element, as shown in this cover for Wonder Woman #8.

Wonder Woman © DC Comics.

CLIFF: Yes. Darwyn’s version of Wonder Woman is one of our favorites. We discussed it at the beginning, and we felt like that was the best take on it that we could remember. We loved it, and in a lot ways that’s the way we felt Wonder Woman should be done. Very strong…. I like the idea of an aggressive Wonder Woman. I like confidence in Wonder Woman. What we’ve done is make that character a bit quieter. She’s not loud. She’s more like the Man with No Name. She’s more liable to act first and then try to explain later. She doesn’t speak that much, but when she does, it’s meaningful. She’s not without emotion but she’s not bubbling over with it. She’s very internal in that way; she’s very guarded about expressing herself unnecessarily. But she has no qualms about letting people know what she thinks. I think this all made for a character that is interesting and subtle as opposed to being an over the top caricature of the idea of feminism.

MM: You talked about keeping your style approachable but giving it more grit, making it more threatening. When you were drawing the pages, did you have something specific in mind in terms of the style and structure?

CLIFF: You know, it was tough because we were encouraged and wanted ourselves to do something new. We had fewer direct influences. Visually, I was trying to continue doing what I had done with Zatanna, using an almost shaky, organic line style combined with bold black shapes.

I still think it could be pushed further in that direction, but I’m trying to speed things up for deadlines as well as simplify for clarity. It’s trying to combine the way I drew Zatanna with a noir-ish sensibility.

It’s hard to work with Brian and not feel Eduardo Risso’s shadow. Eduardo is a friend, and I love his work so much and learn so much from it. It’s a constant source of inspiration. Whenever I get stuck on a page, I’ll look at one of Eduardo’s and I’ll immediately have new ideas of ways to compose the page. I look at Eduardo and Marcelo Frusin a lot as I work, because they’re able to draw with a minimal amount of fussiness in their artwork, but huge amounts of atmosphere. Brian’s dialogue hits like a truck with the right storytelling.

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MM: You didn’t know the New 52 was going to happen, but did the clean break that the New 52 provided allow you and Brian to expand what you had planned for the series?

CLIFF: Yes it did. We started working in earnest sometime in March, but we didn’t hear about the relaunch until a month later in Chicago during C2E2. We had dinner with Dan DiDio, and Brian and I were looking at each other, just raising our eyebrows every time Dan laid out another piece of his ambitious plan. We had no idea. We just thought that we were rebooting Wonder Woman and maybe they were going to put some different teams on some of the other books. But he slowly laid it out: 52 new number ones, same-day digital for all the books, setting the universe back to zero. And it was really ambitious and it made me feel like there was a real commitment to trying something new… to shaking things up. To me that was pretty exciting.

But I think we had even bolder ideas that we weren’t able to implement because of the mandate of the New 52. Originally we wanted to embrace all of Wonder Woman’s publishing history, so she was a lot older than she looked. We were going to have her around in the ’40s as a crazy European folk tale fighting Nazis. Steve Trevor would now be an old man, and she would be there for him in the hospital as he died. But with the New 52 reboot all the World War II stuff went away, which I miss. It would have been great to do a 1940s or a 1960s Wonder Woman. These are things that get adjusted along the way. We lost those elements, but we gained new ones.

I think we knew we could go as far as we needed to. There were some ideas that we weren’t able to implement, but overall I don’t think we ever felt stifled creatively. DC’s response was “Yes! Great! What else do you have?”

forward. I loved what we were making but I was nervous about a couple of things. First, I didn’t know if people were going to respond to it, if long-time Wonder Woman fans would embrace the book. Second, we were also pushing the content.

Wonder Woman #1 was originally conceived and approved as a “Teen plus” book, which meant it was for a slightly older audience, and we wanted to take advantage of that. We were going to push the horror angle a lot more. It was going to be like Azzarello’s Hellblazer run, but with Wonder Woman. [chuckle] But they later decided that the Justice League books should be all ages and we had to pull back a bunch of stuff. In the first issue there was gore that we had to color a little less vividly. We were going to play around with more adult situations, like that moment you see in Wonder Woman #1 where she jumps from bed and dons her armor. Her getting dressed was an important moment in that

MM: When you were working on the Wonder Woman pages themselves, what was your feeling about it, being essentially the first person to see the comic since you’re the one drawing it?

CLIFF: I was excited and nervous. I did feel like it was all coming together really well.

All the experience that I’d had working with Brian on “Doctor 13” was coming into play when we talked. Ideas would go back and forth. We weren’t shooting each other down.

We were working together and moving 71

Previous Page: The digitally penciled pages from Wonder Woman #4 showcase Diana’s size, strength, and quiet intensity.

Below: While Brian and Cliff weren’t able to keep their idea of a much older than she seems Wonder Woman, they have been able to play with her past in other ways, as in Wonder Woman #0.

Wonder Woman © DC Comics.

issue. It was a character moment. Her casual nudity and lack of self-consciousness were a big part of that scene, and while we weren’t planning to show her completely nude, it needed to be heavily implied or teased. Luckily we were able to keep the scene, but we haven’t skirted with anything like that since then because later issues were written with the new rating in mind.

Los Angeles, that book played around a lot with the idea of celebrity and appearance, so it seemed appropriate.

Back to Wonder Woman and Wesley Willis: Brian Azzarello knew him. He had seen Wesley in Chicago and went to his shows, bought tapes from him, and Wesley knew Brian by name. Brian based the character of Milan on Wesley, and when he told me about the personal connection, I realized we should make Milan look exactly like Wesley, almost in honor of his memory. We didn’t think it would be a big deal, and he was exactly the kind of character we needed in Wonder Woman and proved very memorable. But I guess someone in DC’s legal department was a Wesley Willis fan, which surprised me. They made me change some things, but in the original inks it’s full-on Wesley Willis; he even had Wesley’s callus on his forehead, from giving people headbutts. We had to get rid of the callus and change his facial hair, but luckily people still read it as Wesley.

MM: I have to ask you about some of the likenesses in Wonder Woman. There are several characters whom look very much like real people, be it [singer/songwriter] Wesley Willis or Brian Azzarello himself. Intentional or not, I’m sure you’ve heard readers wonder about it, so can you say what’s going on and the intent behind it?

CLIFF: I think a lot of artists look to movies and actors for likenesses when trying to cast their characters. It’s shorthand, to bring everything that actor has done to play on your character and to provide an instant familiarity. If you look at something like Adi Granov drawing Tom Cruise as Tony Stark in Iron Man: Extremis, it can bring additional layers to the character.

For me, the first time I remember consciously doing it was in Human Target. There was a rich father there that I drew to look like Gene Hackman. I don’t know if I captured it close enough, but I tried. [laughs] Taking place in

MM: Going from Wesley to War, you cast Brian Azzarello—or his image at least—as War in Wonder Woman.

CLIFF: For War we knew we wanted something different.

We didn’t want him to be a young blonde guy in armor. He’s an old god who’s weary of the mantle and weary of the way war is waged in the modern world. And when we introduced him in Wonder Woman #4, he’s in Darfur. This is how War 72

lives, and these are the places he has to visit.

War is no longer a macho thing. Instead you have kids running around with guns and gangs committing atrocities. When we first talked about War, we knew he was going to be a man in a rumply suit, much like an older C.I.A. operative pulling strings in a foreign country.

The initial inspiration for War was actor John Hurt, but very skinny, very frail. So we talked about it, but he wasn’t showing up until issue #4, so I got to work on other things. Truthfully, I had been putting off War’s design because a lot counted on getting it right. And so when I started issue #4, we talked about John Hurt but I also asked for any other inspiration. Brian mentioned Father

Christmas with that big, long beard. I couldn’t resist being a wiseass. “A tired, old man with a crazy beard? That sounds like you, Brian.” He laughed. “Yeah, he should look like me.”

When I drew War the first time I did a caricature of Brian to see what it would look like. It started as a joke, but it really worked.

We needed War to be striking, and that’s Brian. He has that crazy wiry beard and the kind of sinister look which War needed. And the metatextual implications of it were pretty great too. War is Wonder Woman’s mentor, and for him to look like Brian—who shepherded this Wonder Woman project—it was a nice parallel. This is his Grant Morrison/ King Mob moment, although a bit less glam.

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Previous Page: Brian and Cliff waste no time in establishing Diana’s confidence and lack of self-consciousness with this scene from Wonder Woman #1.

Left: Underground singer/songwriter Wesley Willis—minus the callus on his forehead—serves as the inspiration for Milan. Rock over Paradise Island. Rock on Apokolips.

Below: War, on the other hand, is a blending of John Hurt, Father Christmas, and a healthy dose of Brian Azzarello himself.

Orion, Wonder Woman © DC Comics.

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MM: You two are well into the series, but do you and Brian have a larger long-term vision for the series?

CLIFF: Yeah, one of the things Brian says all the time is that you have to know your ending, and we have an idea where this is all going to end up. There are detours along the way, which makes it interesting, but you have to have an endpoint in mind or else you are going to go wildly off the mark. So yeah, we do have an idea of where this story ends and what Wonder Woman is like at the end of it. It would have been impossible to start the project without that.

MM: And now that you’ve had input from fans, is their response what you expected?

Or do you think about that very much?

CLIFF: I think the people who like the book get what we are trying to do. The ones that don’t want a different product—maybe something more in line with the stories they had been reading before. And that’s fine, that’s their prerogative. But we want to provide a different kind of Wonder Woman story for new and old readers to enjoy.

I think the best fan response I get is from new readers—lots of women who hadn’t read comics before and this is their first Wonder Woman. I think there’s a gulf between the perception—the icon—of Wonder Woman, and what the character has been in comics. How has the idea of Wonder Woman changed with time? I’ve heard derogatory comparisons with Xena, Warrior Princess, but that was a really popular show! So I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

When you think about Wonder Woman now, a lot of women and men want to see a kick-ass physical character; they want to see a little grit to it, a little danger, which is the opposite of the classic Wonder Woman who pines over Steve Trevor. I think that stuff is antithetical to what we perceive as a strong woman these days. At her heart, Wonder Woman should be transgressive, and I hope we’re doing that.

MM: How has your approach to the series changed compared to when you were just starting on it? Now that you’ve been working on it for more than two years no, has your perception of it changed?

CLIFF: The longer I work on it, I feel more and more responsibility. I want to make sure what we do with the character is quality work. It’s not just doing one issue and goofing around—now we’re responsible for something. Now that we’re so far into it, we

have to stay focused and make sure it pays off for the reader. But it’s nice to have gotten comfortable with the characters and the setting. If we can keep it up, we’ll have something we can be proud of.

MM: Can you say how long you see yourself doing this?

CLIFF: I’d rather not say, but I do feel the siren call of creating my own book. You put a lot of effort into making a book like Wonder Woman, and it’s great when people respond as they have. But we put so much of ourselves into this, and it’s clearly our take that people are responding to, positively or negatively. It would be nice to have even more freedom to put myself into it and feel as if I were building something for myself in the process.

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Previous Page: War’s beard gone wild. Cover art for Wonder Woman #23.

Above: Wonder Woman teaches the First Born a thing or two about a thing or two. Page 4 of Wonder Woman #21.

Wonder Woman © DC Comics.

Part 5:

Passion, Process, and Viewpoints

MM: As a comic fan, what is your experience as a reader like now? Do you have a regular store?

CLIFF: I have a regular store—Bergen Street Comics—and they have a well-curated variety of stuff. I find myself less and less interested in superhero comics because all of it feels a little too familiar to me now. I think people are still doing great work, but I can accept now that most of it is not for me. When I think about the books that have gotten me most excited creatively in the last few years, they’ve not been superheroes; they’ve been European or manga.

Pluto, by Naoki Urasawa, was fantastic. Every now and then I find a book that really inspires me to write and draw, makes me want to create comics. Reading Pluto was like reading “Batman: Year One.” It was the same experience for me—taking an older story as a starting point and updating it with a more complex storytelling style, with modern sensibilities and interests, evolving the subtext, and making

it so much richer. I really loved Pluto and have tried to track down as much of Urasawa’s work as I can.

I really like Christophe Blain’s work. Gipi is another, and again, his books make me want to draw. Garage Band is such a great expression of what it’s like to be young, a little aimless, and love making music. I’m still waiting for that third Gipi volume in the Ignatz line from Fantagraphics. The little crime stories he does? They’re fantastic. My Italian friends hate his work, but I think maybe they’re too close to it. They complain he’s writing about himself all the time, but I probably have similar complaints about some American cartoonists. I find his stuff to be really moving and inspirational. The Innocents is as perfect a comic as I can imagine.

MM: It’s interesting that you talk about Pluto, since it is a reimagining of Astro Boy, sort of in the way that you and

PAGE 21: PANEL 1 This page, Cliff, is four page-wide panels on top of each other. The backgrounds are largely black, or at least dark and featureless, with the figures of Allen and the Spectre in the middle in straightforward head-and-shoulder shots.

In this first one, Allen stands with his back to us.

Caption: THE MOST IMPORTANT MATTERS OF ALL, AS IT TURNS OUT. Allen: OKAY. Allen: WE CAN’T PREVENT CRIMES. WE CAN ONLY PUNISH THEM. Allen: FINE. 21:2 Same basic shot, with Allen starting to turn and face us.

Allen: SO LET’S PUNISH A CRIME. Allen: LET’S PUNISH A MURDERER. 21:3 Head-and-shoulder shot of the Spectre, staring out at Allen (off panel) and the reader.

SILENT PANEL 21:4 Same basic shot as 21:1 and 21:2, except Allen is facing us.

Allen: LET’S PUNISH JIM CORRIGAN.

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Brian are reimagining Wonder Woman. Did you read Astro Boy or have that connection to it?

CLIFF: It’s funny because just recently I finally read the original Astro Boy story that Pluto was based on. Like Akira, it’s one of the classics of manga. It’s in the manga canon. And talking about Osamu Tezuka is like talking about Jack Kirby. Because of that, I figured that Urasawa was just retelling Tezuka’s story with just a few modern flourishes, but no. He added a ton. He added so much depth and so much more story to what’s there. It’s an incredible achievement.

Astro Boy is really just a starting point for the story, and Pluto is so much more than what I got out of the original manga.

MM: As a comics reader, do you stick to print or have you jumped on the digital bandwagon? I know that for your work you sometimes only have digital work to go by, but when you’re not at work do you prefer the tactile experience?

CLIFF: I like reading manga on the iPad. I find it works really well on the iPad because of the smaller page size and faster pacing.

I’m currently reading Bakuman, which I just think is fantastic. It’s such a romantic view of comics as a creative endeavor. If I feel less than inspired, I think about those characters.

They’re so driven and so idealistic. What would Muto Ashirogi do?

I like print as well, but I have a small apartment and I’m running out of space for all of it. As I get older, I realize there are fewer and fewer comics I want to own. I’m okay with reading and getting rid of them now, because I don’t need to hold on to them as reference. I think that was a habit that carried over when I was younger. Everything I read felt relevant to my own work, so I held on to all of it because I didn’t know if I could use it in the future.

MM: Taking into consideration your work station and your drawing board, I’m interested to know which books are within arm’s reach of you when drawing?

CLIFF: In all my studio set-ups I’ve always had a couple of bookcases nearby for reference. Walt Simonson has bookcases lining the walls of his studio, but he also has this little library cart that he keeps next to his drafting table, and every day he’ll pick out books to put on it and the others go back on the shelves. Seeing how Walt would use his library provided a model for me.

Nine times out of ten, I’ll be thinking of a specific panel or book, and after I find it, I realize it’s not how I remembered it at all.

You spend 20 minutes looking for the right panel or the right sequence or the right issue, and it’s not what you wanted! But hopefully that search process helps you clarify your thinking. You’re looking for inspiration, and when you can’t find it, it forces you to ask, “Well, what am I looking for? What am I trying to achieve here?”

MM: What would you say are the big things that you have around to look at in reference to your Wonder Woman work?

CLIFF: You know, it’s changed a lot over the years. There were years when all I had was Toth and Jordi Bernet around, Zorro and Torpedo.

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Previous Page and Above: Crisis Aftermath: The Spectre #2, page 21, from script to inks. The script calls for four wide panels, but the difference in height between Allen and the Spectre makes that impractical. Cliff went instead with one large downshot panel (providing dynamic impact) and five small inset panels.

The two panels with the cigarette not only add visual interest, but help the pacing of the scene.

The Spectre © DC Comics.

Above: A progression of pencils for page 21 of Greendale.

Next Page: Sketch ideas, pencils, and inks for the cover or Green Arrow and Black Canary #7.

Greendale © Neil Young. Black Canary, Green Arrow © DC Comics.

Other years, it was Steve Rude’s Nexus and World’s Finest. These days, I look at Eduardo and Marcelo a lot, as I have in the past. I have a wonderful book that my friend Davide Gianfelice gave me—a copy of Massimo Carnevale’s black-and-white work on Dylan Dog. It’s a small volume but it’s fantastic. That’s been inspirational as well. That, and I keep around the few volumes I have of Dino Battaglia’s work.

But it always changes. Hopefully all of these informed my work to some degree.

Maybe I should keep other stuff out that I could absorb through osmosis.

MM: What materials do you use now as opposed to when you started? I know you went from inking with a pen to inking with a brush. What’s your set-up like?

CLIFF: Whenever possible, I try to set up near a window so that I have somewhere to look out from. It’s crucial that I have a wall as well to put some artwork on. I keep a photostat of a page from “Batman: Year One” up on the wall. I have an original page from Human Target. I have an unused 100 Bullets 78

page given to me by Eduardo; he gave me the original after he redrew it completely, which was a great gift because it’s an outtake.

He decided, “I know a better way to do this, and I’m going to do it.” That kind of commitment to quality is a reminder for me to love and respect what I do to the point where I’m willing to start over to get it right.

When I was drawing Human Target in my first studio apartment, the computer was on the other side of the room. Over the years it’s crept closer and closer. In my last apartment, when I was working on Greendale, I had a little computer hutch behind my drawing desk, and I could just spin around like I was in a tank. [laughter] Now it’s right next to me.

I don’t know if that’s had a good effect on my productivity. Certainly the less time I spend online the better, but it’s become invaluable for searching for reference.

I’m doing more digital work. I pencil my pages digitally, then print them out and ink traditionally. The computer has become a really important tool for me, though I can’t give up the feel of ink on paper. Right now

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Above and Next Page: Wonder Woman and Zatanna treat Batgirl to a night on the town in Brave and the Bold #33.

Notice the difference in body language between the confident Diana and Zee (ever the performer), and the fish-out-of-water Barbara. After the digital pencils are done, Cliff adds word balloons and sound f/x on a separate layer to ensure he’s left enough room for them, and that they flow properly.

Batgirl, Wonder Woman, Zatanna © DC Comics.

I’m actually trying to figure out a way to use the Cintiq as a physical drafting table for inking. I’m a little tight on space here, but I also like the idea of forcing an expensive piece of technology to do double duty, because it also happens to incline and is shaped like a table. Sometimes you have to be the boss of your tools and not let them dictate how you work. Sometimes a brush tells you what kind of lines it can make and what it can’t, or a pen tells you what kind of lines it wants to make, and that can affect how you draw.

MM: You speak very eloquently and openly about your trade. Have you ever thought about teaching?

CLIFF: I’ve been approached multiple times to teach, and it’s something I’m interested 80

in, but not having gone to art school and not having attended many instructed classes, I don’t really know how to put a course together. I’ve taught in short stints, maybe speaking for a day or two at the Savannah College of Art & Design, but that’s different from a semester-long course.

I feel that I have information to give to people, but putting it in any kind of framework is really difficult for me. Ideally, I’d like to assist a teacher who knows what they’re doing and then modify their curriculum based on my strengths.

I want to do it, but I want to do it right.

I’ve had poor, loosey-goosey art instruction in the past, and I don’t want to visit those sins upon anyone else. Teaching is a very separate skill from practicing. You can have great practitioners who can’t teach for crap because they’re not empathetic; they’re not putting themselves into the minds of their students or thinking about how information is related. Conversely you can have great teachers who are not great practitioners, but teaching isn’t about being great at a particular skill. It’s about being able to recognize and articulate what is good about something.

That’s a more valuable skill in teaching art than being a good artist.

MM: I’ve heard about, back in the ’80s, Marvel would have John Romita or John

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Below: Not one of Zatanna’s better days, as Oscar Hampel has done a reverse-Pinocchio on her. But even though she’s wooden, Cliff provides life in her figure.

Zatanna © DC Comics

Next Page: A 2005 commission piece.

Batman, Catwoman © DC Comics. The Spirit © The Will Eisner Estate.

Buscema give a talk to their other artists. I don’t know how often this is done, but I’ve heard occasionally Klaus Janson will do that now. Have you ever participated in anything like that?

CLIFF: No, but I would love to. I’ve heard about Marvel’s class with Klaus and Howard Chaykin, and those are guys I love on a personal level, and I have so much respect for their talent. I would love to sit in on that.

The opportunity to have those guys look at your work, which might cause chagrin for some professionals, would be really interesting to me.

MM: Do you look at portfolios at conventions?

CLIFF: Yeah. Unfortunately, conventions are the worst place to review anything because you’re so pressed for time, but I try to do a couple of portfolio reviews when I can. Most are not very good, but hopefully you can get them to think a little more critically about their art and make those changes themselves. You have to be specific in your advice, but you want the critique to tackle larger problems. It’s not going to help to point out minutiae. You want to get at what their global problems are and help them understand how to improve. Teach them how to fish instead of just pointing to where the fish are.

A lot of times my advice is to do more under-drawing. They may be trying to get everything perfect on an expensive piece of Bristol board. Doing things on layout paper—tracing them off, compartmentalizing the stages so that they’re not overwhelming—really helps. When you’re drawing 82

on a board you paid a dollar for, you’re not going to draw as freely or as naturally as when you’re drawing on a crappy piece of copy paper you can throw away easily. Draw on that crappy copy paper and use it as a foundation for something you move over to the finished piece of Bristol board. That’s a piece of advice I give quite often, because it’s about how you approach the process more than what pencil lead to use.

MM: Last question—you and your wife just had a baby. If one of your children wanted to work in comics, would you encourage them?

How would you feel about it?

CLIFF: That’s an interesting one. It’s probably too early for me to think about discouraging him from anything. [laughter] I don’t think I would discourage my kid from comics. Looking at the Kubert sons or John Romita Jr., you can see how having someone in the family who draws for a living makes it possible for them to imagine doing it too.

And that’s so important, being able to model behavior on someone.

And having a parent who is a freelancer is becoming more and more prevalent these days—the days of the corporate salary man are going away. People are moving on and doing different things at different stages of their lives. In a way, we’re all freelancers, and I think that mentality is good to have. You can’t really rely on anyone but yourself. If you can study someone who is a successful freelancer, the chances are they have good work habits. You won’t succeed if you’re not productive. That’s another trait that can be passed on by example.

Creatively, in terms of being fulfilled, if this is what my son wants to do, and it’s as satisfying for his soul as it is for mine, then by all means. What I would dread is for my child to not be passionate about something. If you can combine your passion with your vocation, that’s ideal. So yeah I would encourage him, but I’d sleep better if he wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer. [laughter]

Cliff Chiang

Art Gallery 83

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Previous Page: Cliff did this study of Wildcat in 2001 as part of a pitch with Joey Cavalieri. His notes to himself reveal his artistic direction.

This Page: That same year Cliff drew up these Fantastic Four samples for a Marvel editor in hopes of getting work there.

Wildcat © DC Comics. Fantastic Four © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Previous Page: A 2001 pin-up for X-Men Unlimited, which may not have published. It harkens back to Cliff’s childhood love for the Paul Smith-era X-Men, along with a few other childhood favorites.

This Page: 2011 and 2012 convention sketches featuring the lovely X-Ladies.

Dazzler, Kitty Pryde, Lockheed, Storm © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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This Page and Next: More commissions and convention sketches featuring Cliff’s favorite characters from his early days of reading comics.

Daredevil, Dr. Doom, Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, White Queen © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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This Page: Commission sketches come in all shapes and sizes—not just comic book superheroes. Dr. Girlfriend (a parody of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis) and the Monarch reenact the Kennedy assassination in true keeping with the spirit of The Venture Bros.

And Cliff happens to be a big fan of the Japanese anime Gatchaman, so the Ken and Joe pieces were a welcome change of pace.

Next Page: Given Cliff’s film background, it’s not surprising he’s done a few film-related commissions. Here we have The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Rocky (and Adrian), and Buckaroo Banzai.

Dr. Girlfriend, The Monarch © Cartoon Network. Gatchaman © Tatsunoko Production. The Creature from the Black Lagoon © Universal City Studios, Inc. Rocky © United Artists Corp. Buckaroo Banzai © MGM/Sherwood Prod., Harry Bailley Prod., and Earl Mac Rauch.

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This Page: Preliminary design work for the “Josie Mac” backup feature, and a “Josie Mac” page from Detective Comics #771.

Next Page: Preliminary “mood” sketches for Beware the Creeper.

Page 94: Preliminary design sketches for Batman:The Golden Streets of Gotham.

Page 95: Cover sketches for the Doctor 13: Architects and Mortality trade paperback cover, and a two-page spread from the “Doctor 13” backup in Tales of the Unexpected #3.

Josie Mac © Judd Winick and Cliff Chiang. Batman, The Creeper, Doctor 13, Jack Smart, Two-Face © DC Comics.

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94

95

Thor © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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97 97

X-Men © Marvel Characters, Inc.

98 98

Mysterio, Spider-Man © Marvel Characters, Inc.

B Malack rve Ca l C t, S ha pid rac erter Ma s, I n © nc .

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All characters © their respective owners

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© Cliff Chiang

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Wonder Woman © DC Comics

Black Canary, Green Arrow © DC Comics

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104104

Mockingbird, Ms. Marvel, Spider-Woman © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Baroness © Hasbro

106 Planetary © WildStorm Productions/DC Comics

This Page: More commissions, including a Bat-Man in the style of Cliff’s aborted The Bat-Man project with Brian Azzarello.

Batman, Catwoman, Riddler © DC Comics

107

This Page: Cover sketches for Green Arrow and Black Canary #2 (two at top left), 5 (four at left), 8 (top right), and 11 (above).

Next Page: Pencils for Brave and the Bold #33, page 14.

Page 110: Inks for page 19 of Zatanna #8.

Page 111: A convention sketch of Sadie Dawkins from David Lapham’s Young Liars.

Batgirl, Black Canary, Green Arrow, Wonder Woman, Zatanna © DC Comics. Sadie Dawkins © David Lapham.

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109 109

110

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This Page and Next: More commissions and con sketches.

Page 114: A Wonder Woman piece for the 2012 Heroes Con Art Auction.

Page 115: Cover art for Wonder Woman #7, evoking the propaganda art of the 1940s and ’50s.

Page 116 and 117: Perhaps the coolest image in the history of cool: Wonder Woman and friends rock out, à la Joan Jett and The Runaways.

The Rocketeer © The Estate of Dave Stevens. Batgirl, Big Barda, Black Canary, Lois Lane, Superman, Wonder Woman, Zatanna © DC Comics.

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CLIFF CHIANG As the artist of DC’s New 52 breakout hit Wonder Woman series, Cliff Chiang’s star has never shone brighter. His bold, graphic style has a classic feel with a modern sensibility, and it’s no wonder he’s become one of the industry’s top illustrators. What’s more interesting is Chiang’s journey from promising assistant editor at DC’s Vertigo imprint to in-demand freelance artist—not the normal career path for any artist, much less one with such talent as Chiang. But it is a path that has served him well and has helped him develop his unique artistic voice. Now the voice speaks out, revealing what makes this truly Wonderful artist a Modern Master!

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9 781605 490502

$15.95 In the US

ISBN 978-1-60549-050-2 All characters ™ and © their respective owners