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Modern Masters Volume 30:
Modern Masters Volume Thirty:
Paolo Rivera
edited and designed by Eric Nolen-Weathington front cover by Paolo Rivera front cover designed by April Rivera interviews conducted by Eric Nolen-Weathington and transcribed by Jon Knutson and Eric Nolen-Weathington
TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Dr. Raleigh, NC 27614 www.twomorrows.com First Printing • January 2015 • Printed in the USA Softcover ISBN: 978-1-60549-060-1
Trademarks & Copyrights All characters and artwork are ™ and © Paolo Rivera unless otherwise noted. Absorbing Man, Avengers, Black Widow, Bucky, Captain America, Chameleon, Colossus, Coyote, Daredevil, Dr. Doom, Dr. Octopus, Electro, Falcon, Fantastic Four, Ghost Rider, Green Goblin, Guardians of the Galaxy, Hobgoblin, Hulk, Iron Man, Kingpin, Klaw, Kraven the Hunter, Lizard, Magneto, Mary Jane Watson, Miracleman, Mole Man, Mysterio, Nick Fury, Peter Parker, Punisher, Red Skull, Rhino, Sandman, Scorpion, Spider-Man, The Spot, Thor, Venom, Vulture, White Queen, Wolverine, X-Men, Young Allies © Marvel Characters, Inc. Batman © DC Comics / Blackout © Dark Horse Comics, Inc. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles © Viacom International, Inc. and Viacom Overseas Holdings C.V. The Tick © Ben Edlund / Walking Dead © Robert Kirkman, LLC / Hellboy © Mike Mignola Five Ghosts © Frank Barbiere and Chris Mooneyham / Madman © Michael Allred / God Hates Astronauts © Ryan Browne Panthro © Warner Brothers Entertainment, Inc. and Ted Wolf. / Voltron © World Events Productions Mickey Mouse © Disney Enterprises, Inc. / Green Hornet © The Green Hornet, Inc. Alien © 20th Century Fox Film Corp. / Army of Darkness © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Inc.
Dedication To Jamie Dallessandro, one of the good guys who left too soon.
Acknowledgements Paolo Rivera, for his time, his thoughtfulness, and his great record-keeping. April Rivera, for her interest and for looking out for Paolo.
Special Thanks R. Kikuo Johnson, Jon Knutson, Rick McGee and the crew of Foundation’s Edge, and John and Pam Morrow
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Modern Masters Volume 30:
PAOLO RIVERA
Table of Contents Introduction by R. Kikuo Johnson ........................................................................ 4 Part One: Stuck in a Corner, Surrounded by Art .................................................... 6 Part Two: Breaking in While Breaking Out ......................................................... 11 Part Three: Back to the Drawing Board .............................................................. 28 Part Four: The Book on Everyone’s Radar ............................................................ 43 Part Five: Storytelling and the Creative Process ................................................... 64 Art Gallery .......................................................................................................... 77
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All characters © Marvel Characters, Inc.
Introduction
I
n comics illustration, instant readability is paramount. As a consequence, the medium rarely produces artists whose work is at once perfectly lucid and layered with subtext. Paolo Rivera is that rare exception to the trend. Paolo’s work rewards a close read. The first thing that strikes me in one of his drawings is always the elegant draftsmanship. The figures are graceful even as they collide. The linework is as delicate along a woman’s curves as it is along a spatter of blood. It takes a moment to register how unorthodox the palette often is, especially in the cover work; only a seasoned painter could make a deep salmon hue and bizarre shades of teal feel so luminous. As I zoom back out and take in the composition as a whole, I often laugh as I suddenly notice Paolo winking: the rings of razor wire encircling Daredevil’s head stand in for his sonar sense; in another piece, Sleepwalker transforms SpiderMan’s webs into a hammock; in another, the rivets on Dr. Doom’s mask become braille under Daredevil’s fingers! An instant after first glance, I move from technical awe to “Hey wait, that’s hilarious!” These sight gags do more than offer a quick chuckle. As Daredevil carves an angel in the snow on a New York rooftop, the irony of the image conveys the conflict at the character’s core. A fifty-year-old narrative oddly becomes new. Paolo authors content with his illustrations in a way few of his peers do, and he does it with panache and a sly grin.
R. Kikuo Johnson
All characters © Marvel Characters, Inc.
I first met Paolo as his classmate at the Rhode Island School of Design. I was there when he got his first big commission from Marvel, and I spent our senior year watching it unfurl in oil paint across absurdly large canvases. After college, we moved to New York together, and his paintings gradually shrank to fit the small apartment we shared. From my own drafting table, I watched Paolo transition from oils, to acrylics, and finally to inks and digital color. The most striking thing about witnessing this evolution first-hand was how seamlessly he transitioned from practiced styles to completely new ones. This apparent ease was as much a testament to his craftsmanship as it was to his humility; parading a signature style has never been Paolo’s priority. As with all great designers, the content came first. Form followed function.
When we first moved to that humble Brooklyn apartment, Paolo ominously joked, “This place is great! ... as long as we’re not still here when we’re 30.” After eight years of shop talk, deadlines, all-nighters, beer, girls, birthday parties (we were born a day apart), and hundreds and hundreds of drawings between the two of us, we finally parted ways just after our 30th birthdays. Losing instant access to a friend who for years had been a sounding board, a troubleshooter, and a cheerleader all in one made me a little nervous. But, spend some time with Paolo’s work, and you’ll find that a voice as keen as his stays in your head long after he leaves the room.
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Part 1:
Stuck in a Corner Surrounded by Art
MODERN MASTERS: You were born in Florida. What year was that? PAOLO RIVERA: 1981.
had done, and my dad’s dad told him to get a job with the government like he had done. They were both artistically inclined, but never really got full support.
MM: Most of your fans know a little about your father now, but what did your parents do for a living when you were growing up? PAOLO: In ’82 my parents opened a framing shop/art supply store. My mom basically ran it. It was just me and my mom, and I was stuck in a corner all day, every day, with unlimited art supplies and the means to stay quiet. [Eric laughs] I had a lot of time on my hands, so I just kept drawing. My mom did professional framing, and even though it was my dad’s business, she ran it, and he would travel the country doing caricatures wherever he could— malls and whatnot. I think it was mostly caricatures at that time, but the reason they settled in Daytona Beach was that my dad would do airbrush T-shirts, and back in the ’80s, Daytona was a spring break Mecca.
MM: Did either of them have any formal training? PAOLO: Not really, no. They met in a drawing class in Orlando, so they took at least one class, but no real formal training. My mom does have a degree in textiles, but my dad is pretty much self-taught. His dad was, for a time, a butcher, so my dad literally drew on butcher’s paper. [laughter] MM: They didn’t get the full support of their parents, but I assume they gave you that support. PAOLO: Oh yeah, definitely. They always made it very apparent that I had to support myself, but at the same time, they weren’t going to tell me not to do it. MM: And in the environment in which you were raised, you could see that artwork was something that you could do for a living. PAOLO: Yeah, at the very least it was an option. Whereas with my parents… all my mom’s sisters are nurses for the most part, and she’s the oldest of eleven. That’s saying something. MM: Was being an artist something you aspired to from an early age, or did you go through different phases of wanting to do something else? PAOLO: It was definitely something I always wanted to do. I started drawing basically as soon as I was in the corner of the store. I don’t think it really felt like a real option until high school when I saw that I could go to an art school, and that art schools had scholarships and I would maybe be able to get one. Our teacher in high school passed away a couple of years ago, but she was very good at getting me on the right track for going to art school. You know, there are a lot of kids in art class, but only a handful of us were considering that as a real option.
MM: So you grew up surrounded by art. Did you ever go with your dad on any of his work trips, or were you stuck at the store? PAOLO: No, not really. It was pretty much just me and my mom. I think he would be out for months at a time. He didn’t really come back full-time until I was in grade school—kindergarten or first grade. He came back and started working at the mall in Daytona doing airbrush T-shirts. My mom ran the store from 1982 to 2000. MM: Was she artistic as well? PAOLO: Yeah, and that’s the thing with my parents. Neither one of them got the support they would have preferred from their parents. My mom’s mom told her to become a nurse like she
MM: Being in the art store, you must have been surrounded by instructional 6
books. Were you interested in those, or did you just experiment? PAOLO: Yeah, definitely. Because of where I grew up, I was heavily influenced by airbrush. Much to my mom’s chagrin, I would copy my dad’s Spring Break design, so it would be the Tazmanian Devil holding a can of Budweiser in one hand and a bikini top in the other hand saying, “Spring Break ’87.” [laughter] It wasn’t something my mom liked very much, but it was what I wanted to draw. They were a good couple to play off of each other, because my dad was always doing that kind of stuff. He eventually made the switch from airbrush T-shirts to doing custom motorcycles and cars, but it’s all kind of the same stuff. My mom was much more graphically oriented, much more into textiles and pattern and composition. Looking back on it now, I think it was very tough for her to work in that store and be surrounded by people who, to give you one example, would come in to show her artwork they did that was obviously copied from an issue of Playboy, and it wasn’t particularly welldrawn either. She always had very, very high standards, which were above most of the stuff she saw, which in Daytona was airbrush art—which was almost exclusively copied from photos and popular culture—and tattoo art. She came from a more cultured background. MM: Did you see much fine art growing up? Were you interested in that as well? PAOLO: Yeah, definitely. Even though my dad did airbrushing to make a living, he always wanted to be a fine artist, I think. He bought a printing press at one point and would do his own fine etching, but it’s pretty tough to make a living doing that. But the store was a gallery of sorts. We had Van Goghs on the wall; we had a Rembrandt etching. These were all prints and posters, of course, but some of the classics. MM: Did either of your parents ever talk about those paintings with you on an analytical level? PAOLO: If they did, I don’t really remember. If I ever got any kind of specific instruction, it was probably more from my dad— how to draw an ellipse on a car, and that kind of thing.
[laughs] In high school, my mom was very upset with my color ability. I did a mural right after my freshman year for my biology teacher. She taught marine biology, so I did a big mural in her classroom. And my mom was appalled at the color, [laughter] so she sat me down and made me do a bunch of color exercises in paint. I was pretty decent at drawing, but painting was something I didn’t really do. I give her crap about it now, but I’m glad she did it. MM: Did your dad draw for pleasure, or was it all work for him? PAOLO: It was pretty much all work. I did come across a sketchbook he had, but I think that was from when he was younger. He was working so many hours during the day, I don’t think he wanted to draw very much when he got home. He did the airbrush Tshirts until ’94 when somebody saw him in the mall and asked him, “Do you want to do that but make more money?” That was Chris Cruz Artistry in DeLand, Florida, and he’s pretty much been working there ever since. MM: Was there any kind of art community built up around the art store? Were there regulars you could talk to and get input from? PAOLO: Not really. What happened with the store mirrored what happened in Daytona. All of those airbrush artists eventually had to find other work, so they started travelling to other places. They’d have us send them supplies, and eventually the store morphed into a straight-up mail order airbrush supply 7
Previous Page: A 1995 drawing of Venom from Paolo’s early teens copied from a Tom Lyle figure from the “Maximum Carnage” crossover. Above: Another “Maximum Carnage” Venom drawing from around the same time period, this one copied from a Ron Lim panel. Venom © Marvel Characters, Inc.
Below: Paolo drew this mock-up Panthro (of ThunderCats) cover in 2002, just before first being hired by Marvel, for one of Wizard magazine’s cover contests. Next Page: Two of Paolo’s teenage obsessions, The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990) and The Tick (1995). Panthro © Warner Brothers Entertainment, Inc. and Ted Wolf. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles © Viacom International, Inc. and Viacom Overseas Holdings C.V. The Tick © Ben Edlund.
company. In 1995, I think, we moved it to a much smaller space that wasn’t a gallery at all. The ’80s was the heyday for Daytona. After that we went to straight-up mail order, and that’s when I started working there more. 1994 is when I started helping out and getting a paycheck. MM: What exactly were you doing, just packing and shipping? PAOLO: Yeah, it was just a summer job— packing boxes, answering phones. Even though I can’t airbrush myself, I can take one apart, clean it, and put it back together. I can put together manifolds for a compressor, put in an inline moisture trap—all that stupid crap I’ll never use again. [laughs]
MM: If you didn’t airbrush, what mediums did you use? PAOLO: That was the one thing my mom did not want me to do. My dad wanted to teach me, because at the time it was pretty decent summer money. He went away for the summers until 1998. He would go up to Old Orchard Beach [in Maine]—he went there a couple of summers. He went to Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, a couple of summers, and the last summer was Virginia Beach. My mom said I was absolutely not allowed to do it, so I was limited to pencil, pen, marker. Once I started working, I got myself a marker set, and they got me a huge Prismacolor marker set in ’97, and that’s when I started using color more. I didn’t really paint or use color very much until high school when I had to use it for class. Which is weird, since I had access to everything, but it was much easier to draw, and I was good at drawing and bad at color. [laughs] MM: When you got a little older, were you still mostly drawing pop culture things, or did you start doing more serious work? PAOLO: It was pretty much always pop culture stuff. My dad had a friend who drew the Ninja Turtles, Ken Mitchroney. He was drawing them for Archie when they were at their height. He gave me an original page when I was eight or nine, and I still have that framed. But, yeah, I went through my pop culture phase—Ghostbusters, G.I. Joe, Ninja Turtles, ThunderCats. Ninja Turtles probably lasted the longest. In 8th grade I loved The Tick, X-Men, and, of course, Marvel and DC stuff all the way through. Mostly I was getting that from movies and TV, not so much from comics. I didn’t really start buying comics until I got a car and could drive myself to the store. My dad did have some comics. He had a really odd assortment, and I was never quite sure where they came from, if they were his when he was a kid, but we had Amazing Spider-Man #33, the famous issue where he has all the metal on top of him. I would read that one over and over again, but never the issues before or after.
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MM: If you had to get one, that’s not a bad one to have. [laughter] PAOLO: I had another Spider-Man issue that was drawn by Art Adams with a backup story by Mike Mignola. Basically, when I draw Spider-Man, I’m drawing an Art Adams Spidey from that issue. That anatomy is what I think of when I draw Spidey. MM: When did you start to think you could do art for a living? Did you know how to apply to art schools, how to make a portfolio and what to include? PAOLO: That was definitely thanks to my art teacher, Mrs. Hadley. My mom brought me in to meet with her before I went to the high school. She looked at my portfolio, and at the time I was obsessed with The Tick. She looked at it and said, “Yeah, he can draw. We’ll cure him of all this stuff.” [laughter] She did a good job of telling me what I needed to do in order to get noticed by art schools, but she never quite cured me of what I really wanted to do. I never really rebelled against it. I always did what she asked, which was a lot of life drawing. She sponsored an afterschool drawing program that included more life drawing for the kids who were really serious about it. It was there that I met some of the upper classmen, and saw what they were doing and what their plans were. There was one kid who ended up getting a full scholarship to Savannah College of Art and Design. I looked at that as my ticket. It’s about four hours away from Daytona, so I could drive, but it wasn’t too close. We ended up visiting SCAD four or five times over the course of high school, starting my sophomore year. For all intents and purposes, I was all set to go there, but when it finally came down to it, I was eligible for four or five scholarships, and they said, “Great, but you have to choose one of them.” I was like, “What? I thought I could use all of it.” Nope. Fortunately RISD gave me almost a full scholarship as far as tuition goes. They gave me about 19 grand a year, which was insane. MM: What was your official major? PAOLO: Illustration. You don’t start until after your freshman year. Everyone takes a foundation year their freshman year—we’re all together—which is actually what I liked about RISD. If I had gone to SCAD, I would have been able to opt out of a lot of beginning drawing classes because of the AP Art exam. With RISD, they don’t accept that, which I think is a good thing. My roommate majored in Glass. They divide you up into sections of about 20 kids, and you’re with those same kids 9
Below: The inks for a 2007 print of the anime classic Voltron. Next Page: A panel from “Masks” for Marvel Double-Shot #2. Voltron © World Events Productions. Dr. Doom © Marvel Characters, Inc.
for every single class. Classes are three times a week, but each class is eight hours a day, so you get to know everybody pretty well. Some of them might go into Apparel, some into Painting, Architecture… any number of things, and it’s really nice to have that diversity. MM: Going from high school, how big of a jump was it going to RISD? PAOLO: For me it was pretty glorious. [laughter] I couldn’t wait to leave home. And not only that, but to draw full-time. I was pretty academically focused in high school, because I knew that was my ticket. And that was a good move, because that’s what helped me get the scholarship to RISD. So it was really nice to be able to focus on what I truly wanted to do.
Freshman year you have five classes: Drawing, 2-D Design, and 3-D Design, along with English and Art History. It’s not school in the traditional sense. A friend of mine who went to a “real” school asked me, “So what do you do? What kind of math are you taking?” [laughter] “Well… we don’t have that.” There was just a nice variety of things. Like, in 3-D Design it was more about mechanical engineering and sculpture and making things that actually worked. We had to make a chair out of cardboard, and then I made a table out of cardboard just for fun, and I used that table all throughout college. [laughter] A $7 piece of cardboard—a 4' x 8' sheet I folded into a sturdy little shelf. Even though I don’t build things much anymore, I still use those principles. MM: Being around people who were going into so many different areas, did you waver in what you wanted to do at all? PAOLO: Well, I did enjoy the 3-D design aspect of it, and the only other choice I seriously considered was Industrial Design. My mom definitely wanted me to try that, because she saw that I enjoyed it, and you can actually get a job doing that. [laughter] My dad convinced me to go the other route. He basically told me industrial design was something I could pick up on my own. I know there are industrial designers out there going, “What? That’s not true!” but in terms of man hours needed to master those skills, illustration takes a lot longer. So he said, “You can spend the next three years learning illustration—and it will actually take you ten years—or you can take industrial design and pick up illustration skills here and there.” At the same time, I met Jim Krueger of Earth X fame at Mega Con in Orlando when I was still in high school. I kept in contact with him, and I actually did some pin-ups for him after my freshman year at RISD. After that, he hired me to do some more pin-ups for him, so I had technically already gotten some professional work, and it was Jim who introduced me to Marvel at the end of my junior year. That’s when I started working regularly. I tried to get in pretty early on because I saw a path for myself, so I figured Illustration could possibly work.
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Part 2:
Breaking in, While Breaking Out
MM: You had David Mazzucchelli as one of your teachers, right? PAOLO: Yes, I had him at the beginning of my senior year. He was a major influence, because prior to that I had really only focused on drawing. He was the first to make me understand what storytelling was. One of my best friends and eventual roommates, R. Kikuo Johnson, was a huge influence on me as well. He could draw, but he was also making his own stories starting all the way back to our freshman year. He knew what he wanted to do and what he needed to learn, while I was more focused on rendering. He was in the same class with Mazzucchelli that I was, and we still keep in contact.
PAOLO: He would give me very objective advice. There was one panel at the end where a woman was about to jump off a cliff. It was a fully painted close-up, and I had taken shots of a model that I was basically just copying. He took a look at the panel and said, “This is a nice painting of a woman, but we need to see that she’s on the edge of a cliff,” so I had to zoom way out and show this small figure at the top of a very tall cliff. Without that, I don’t think you would understand that she was about to jump. It was little things like that. I was decent enough at painting, but I wasn’t thinking the panels through at the level I should have been. MM: While you were working on that story, you were just learning the process for how to produce a comic. What was your process like at that point? I assume Marvel asked to see pencils before you started painting. PAOLO: Yeah. My editor at the time, Tom Brevoort, helped me out quite a bit. In June 2002 I did my first Marvel cover, which was Iron Man #63. Right after that is when they offered me my first story. I started on it the summer of 2002, and that fall is when I got into Mazzucchelli’s class. But I used basically the same process I do now. I did little thumbnail layouts, and at the time I was taking model reference for everything. I took those photos and painted in my parents’ garage on big 20" x 30" canvas in oil. It was roughly the same process I do now. I would submit it to my editor, and they would provide me with some notes, but I always had a general sense of storytelling just from reading comics and watching movies.
MM: So you never did sequential art on your own, even back in high school? PAOLO: Not really. I always drew that kind of stuff, and I read comics, and I always saw comics as the only option for me as to what I wanted to do. My dad always told me, “You don’t want to do animation, because you’ll just end up being a tweener [Ed. Note: An inbetweener draws the movements in between the key frames].” [laughs] It’s funny because now I know people who tween. At the time it paid really well, but there was a lot more glory in comics, and I liked being more of an author as opposed to being part of the production line. MM: What did you take out of Mazzucchelli’s class? PAOLO: That was the first time I had to break stuff down and tell a story. And it was funny, because I was technically already working for Marvel. My first Marvel gig was an eleven-page short story written by Christopher Priest for Marvel Double-Shot—a Dr. Doom story. I was actually doing that while I was in Mazzucchelli’s class. He knew this, and he did the same thing when he was at RISD, so he let me go easy on some of the class assignments and focus on that story. He knew I was doing that, and he knew he could help.
MM: Did you have any interaction with Christopher Priest, or did they just hand you the script? PAOLO: There was very, very limited interaction. We did a couple of back-and-forth emails, but pretty much everything I needed was in the script. Almost everything I’ve gotten from Marvel has been full script. The only time I’ve done anything Marvel-style was a couple of pages of Daredevil.
MM: Were you showing him your layouts and asking him what you could do to improve them? 11
MM: The core of that Dr. Doom story is emotion. Did you have any qualms about conveying the proper tone considering Doom is wearing an iron mask? PAOLO: Not really. I actually made a mask in sheet metal. I used puff paint to make the rivets all over it. But basically he just looks angry in every single panel. [laughter] If I didn’t want him to look angry, I would draw him in a different angle. I still treat him the same way. If I want him to look angry, I have him looking down and up, and if I want him to look a little more vulnerable, I have the reader looking up at him so that the arch of the mask reads kind of like arching eyebrows. I was there, I didn’t get to meet Quesada, but I got his email address. I emailed him some jpegs that night, and he got back to me the next day and said I was hired. [laughter] It was the next month that I did the Iron Man cover. When I turned that in, he emailed me again and said, “We love it. We want to bring you back to New York.” He wanted to fly me up and put me in a hotel so we could talk, which was amazing. I told him I was working at Olive Garden and couldn’t take the time off, [laughter] but I was going to go up anyway on my way back to RISD for my senior year. They ended up putting up me, my parents, and my friend R. Kikuo Johnson in a hotel in New York City just so I could say hi and meet all the editors. That was in the midst of working on the Dr. Doom story, and when I finished that, they put me on Spectacular Spider-Man #14 with Paul Jenkins. It was a pretty quick rise. People still come up to me and say they loved that initial SpiderMan story. Right from the beginning I was getting choice projects. Right after Spider-Man, they basically made a project for me, which was Mythos, and I spent the next four years on that.
MM: What kind of reaction did you get from Marvel about the finished story? PAOLO: Well, they hired me again, so that was good. [laughter] When Jim first took me into the Marvel offices to introduce me to a few editors, none of them knew what to do with me because I had a fully painted portfolio. But while
MM: You did several covers during that time too. Were you working primarily in oil those first few years? PAOLO: Yeah, pretty much everything was in oil. I think the last time I worked on canvas was the Dr. Doom story, then I switched to Masonite. “Dr. Doom” and Iron Man were 20" x 30". After that I moved down to 16" x 24". I worked in oil into Mythos. The first issue of Mythos: X-Men was painted all in oil. Then I started on Hulk. I painted the cover in oil and the first page in oil—that’s when I said, “I can’t do this anymore.” [laughter] I switched to Acryla Gouache. MM: As a time-saver, because the oils take so long to dry. PAOLO: Yeah. That’s the year I doubled my income. [laughter] 12
MM: How long did it take you to do a typical cover back then? PAOLO: I would give myself a month, but actual painting time was maybe a week or two. X-Men, I took my sweet old time on that. That took me ten months, but I was doing all the Books of Doom covers at the same time. With Spider-Man, I literally didn’t go outside. That was when we moved to New York. It took a month or two to build our loft, and I painted that story in three-and-a-half months. MM: That was a 23-page story, though. PAOLO: I literally did not go outside at all while I was working on it. MM: Did you feel more confident by the time you started working on the Spider-Man story? Did you feel you were able to push things more? PAOLO: Most of my pressure was timebased. Obviously I gave a lot of thought to the story, but my main concern was just getting it in on time. That was always the main challenge for me. I was still using models for pretty much everything, so it was like I was directing things more. I always thought of it as acting in a certain way. I took drama classes in high school—I was part of that community, American musical theater and that type of thing. I don’t know if it helped. Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t, but it’s why I have the “Wacky Reference Wednesday” [on my blog]. For me, it’s a two-step process: You put yourself in the mind of the character, and then you put yourself in the mind of the reader. You have to figure out how to convey the character’s emotions to the reader. Honestly, I’ve always found it to be fairly easy. You just act it out and translate it to the page. It’s not something I’ve thought about a whole lot. It just kind of happens naturally. I think it comes more from watching a lot of movies. MM: When it came to the reproduction of your work, was there a long process of figuring out how your work would translate into print? PAOLO: Oh, yeah, definitely. I struggled with that. I don’t think I really figured it out until probably 2009. [laughs] It took about seven years, and what it came down to was that I was working in CMYK when I should have been working in RGB during the process and converting to CMYK at the end. I know that now. [laughter]
MM: There are some RGB shades that don’t translate into CMYK. PAOLO: Yeah, exactly. I was working in CMYK, and so in order to get the colors I wanted, I would use too much virtual ink, so when it would go to the printer, they would print it way too dark. The way to get it right was to work in RGB and do the conversion at the very end to CMYK. It took me seven years to figure that out. MM: Did you take any computer classes at RISD? Did they offer much instruction in that area? PAOLO: Yes and no. I actually took Illustrator classes in high school, so when I got to RISD I was a little ahead of the curve. I knew a good bit about Photoshop. When I say I took a class in high school, it was me, 13
Previous Page: A panel from Spectacular Spider-Man #14 (top) and the pencils for the first page of Mythos: X-Men (bottom). Above: Paolo’s gray tone painting (done in Acryla gouache) for page 1 of Mythos: Hulk. He originally painted this page in oil, but didn’t even scan it. He switched to the gouache, repainted the page, and never looked back. The color was added later digitally. Hulk, Magneto, Spider-Man, X-Men © Marvel Characters, Inc.
a computer, and a book—which is actually how I prefer to learn. But to give you an idea of how little instruction I got, to zoom in, I would go to Image Size, change the actual dimensions of the piece, and sometimes it would zoom in and other times it wouldn’t. [laughter] I had not only no idea of what to do, I had no concept of what it was that I was doing, but I eventually came around. As far as RISD, I took a little Form-Z class in the winter session. That was not fun. And I took an HTML class my senior year, which is when I built my first website.
My first jobs for Jim Krueger—I did some stuff for Foot Soldiers—I did a lot of digital, but that was because I didn’t know how to paint. By the time I graduated from RISD, I had a much better grasp on color. With “Dr. Doom” I did pencil layouts, but for Spectacular Spider-Man #14 I did digital color studies in Photoshop. I started getting much better colors when I started doing color studies for every page. MM: Did you have any specific goals with your early covers? Were you trying different approaches to find the most comfortable way for you to work, or to push yourself to get better in certain areas? How much editorial direction were you getting? PAOLO: I basically worked with Tom Brevoort, and later Steve Wacker, almost the entire time I was at Marvel. It almost always worked the same way: I would submit some sketches, and they would tell me what they liked. They’re the best editors you could hope for. I always hear horror stories, but I don’t really have any of my own. I’ve worked with a few other editors now for some other companies, and it’s been pretty much the same. I do remember around 2005 around the time I was doing the Books of Doom covers, I submitted some stuff, and Quesada brought me into the office to talk to me about composition. [laughs] He said I was doing “the quiet moments of the Marvel Universe.” [laughter] They wanted me to be a little more splashy. I know what they were talking about now, but in my defense, the stories I was given were pretty emotional stories, so there were a lot of quiet moments overall. But they wanted to keep the covers pretty splashy in general. So I did learn a lot about graphic design over the years after hitting my head against the wall. When I first started, I definitely struggled with covers a lot more than I do now. I still hit my head against the wall, but not as many times. [laughs]
MM: With those early jobs, how much were you actually doing digitally? PAOLO: Not a whole lot. Mostly I was just trying to get the scan to look like the original. I didn’t start doing a lot of digital work until 2008 when I made the switch to linework.
MM: When you started out painting, were there any particular artists you looked at for inspiration and the direction you wanted to go? 14
PAOLO: I was a huge Alex Ross fan in the beginning. He was the one who basically made me want to get into painting comics. I think one of the reasons I was so set on oil in the beginning was because I loved his work, but I wanted to be different. I was afraid that if I used his medium, it would end up looking like his work. Which I think was a good move, because now I can use that media in a different way, and in the beginning I don’t think I could have. Growing up my big four were Alex Ross, Adam Hughes, Joe Madureira, and maybe Jim Lee in no particular order. MM: Four very different approaches. PAOLO: Yeah, and that’s what I like about it. I never set out to have a style. In some respects I still don’t feel like I have a style. I have an approach, and that’s one of the reasons I was able to make the switch in 2008 from painted to inked work without really missing a step. For me, it’s more fundamental than that. It’s all about composition, and as long as you have a good composition, it doesn’t really matter how you draw the figure. When most people think about style, I think what they’re really talking about are faces. People will say I draw a Ditko Spidey. I don’t think I draw a Ditko Spidey at all. What I draw are Ditko eyes on an Art Adams body. [laughter] Obviously, people have styles when it comes to the body, but what most people really focus on is the face. So if I all of a sudden started drawing a Jim Lee face
on every single figure, people would say, “Whoa! All of a sudden you’re drawing like Jim Lee!” whether or not I actually am or not. MM: When you’re doing a set of covers, like for a mini-series, are you looking to do something cohesive as a group, or are you just concentrating on finding the best image for each individual issue? PAOLO: I always like doing the series, because when Marvel asks me for a one-off cover, they always want the same kind of thing: a big money-shot iconic cover. If you do a series, you can explore the character a little more, and you can have covers that speak to each other. I haven’t always done it with the most success, but Books of Doom I’d say was the first time I put a lot of thought into it. Three of them have a small action happening in the foreground, and a background that gives a little more detail and is in a tan motif. The other three are more central figure images with more color, mainly red, green, and blue. That was the first opportunity where it was like, “Here are six covers, all with one character. Let’s see what you can do.” MM: Earlier you said Mythos was in some way created as a project with you in mind. How did that come about? PAOLO: I saw Quesada in 2004 in Philly, and he said, “We have an awesome project for you,” but he wouldn’t tell me what it was. Later on I got the full concept, which 15
Previous Page: Paolo’s rough pencils for the cover of Books of Doom #3. Above: Paolo demonstrates his love for Art Adams’ lithe take on the ol’ Webhead in a couple of sketches. As it turns out, Paolo later discovered that Art had in turn lifted the pose on the left from Steve Ditko. Dr. Doom, Spider-Man © Marvel Characters, Inc.
was perfect. It was exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted variety, I wanted to paint as many characters as I could, and origin stories were always my favorites. The thing that kind of got lost, in the beginning it was meant to be a bridge between the movies and the comics. I didn’t think it would really work, but I thought it would be a nice comic to do anyway. Their thinking was, somebody goes to see Ghost Rider, and then they go into their local comic shop and say, “I want a Ghost Rider comic,” and we hand them this. This was right around the time Marvel was becoming a movie-making machine. I don’t think it ever worked on that level, but it was a great place for me to showcase my painted stuff. And they
were great stories translated by Paul Jenkins. He did an awesome job of capturing the first issue, while also updating for a modern audience. MM: You said it took you ten months to paint the X-Men book. How much lead time did you have? PAOLO: Roughly they wanted them to come out with the movies, but some, like X-Men, had already come out. I guess that’s why they had me do X-Men first. I was offered that job in 2004. I did the first X-Men painting in December 2004, and then started work on the book in January 2005. They never gave me a strict deadline for it, which is probably why it took me so long. On the later books they definitely did, because they were trying to coincide with the movie releases, but the project also coincided with my first exclusive contract. In 2004 I signed a three-year exclusive, and after that I did the one-year extensions all the way up till last year. MM: When did you start making maquettes for reference? PAOLO: I did the first one for Spectacular Spider-Man. And I had made the mask for “Dr. Doom.” It wasn’t tiny, but I was always looking for any reference I could use to learn what it was I had to draw. I need less reference now, but I still use it whenever I need help. I sculpted a lot at RISD. I had one figure-sculpting class, but that wasn’t until my senior year because I wanted to take at least one straight sculpture class. I always sculpted on my own. Freshman year in my 3-D design class, one of the assignments was to make a chess set based on an artist’s work, so I chose H.R. Giger and made an Alien chess set. That’s really when I started sculpting a lot, and I still basically use the same material, which is Super Sculpey. Those skills translated into making maquettes, and now I pretty much do it all digitally. MM: It seems like the maquettes made had an impact on your painting style. You went from 16
using heavy photo reference, as with the “Dr. Doom” story, where you were working a bit more photorealistically, to using the maquettes, and your work became more stylized. PAOLO: It allowed me to get a little more personality in there rather than being so subservient to the photo reference. MM: Was that your goal with using the maquettes and relying less on photo reference, or just a side effect? PAOLO: I think it was both. My mom made a comment, “I’m tired of seeing your friend Steve in your comics.” [laughter] After that is when I started making maquettes. It also helped me with my drawing. When students ask me for drawing advice, I tell them, “Sculpt. It’s the best way to learn to draw.” The best draftsmen, it’s not that they can copy things well, it’s that they have a three-dimensional figure in their mind that they can turn around at will. And the best way to get that figure pounded into your skull is to actually sculpt it in three dimensions, because once you do that, it’s in there for good, and you can call on it at will. MM: I know you were making heads for your characters. Were you making full bodies as well? PAOLO: I bought a maquette from anatomytools.com back in 2006 or 2007. I did one full figure back in college that I never quite finished, but right now I’m actually working on a digital full figure. MM: When you sculpt, do you start with a basic pose and then build up the figure in layers, or do you work more by subtraction like the classic sculptors? PAOLO: In the figure sculpture class at RISD, that was the first time I had a strict set of rules laid out as a foundation, so I sort of rebelled against that a bit. I knew what he was going for. He had one technique I tried, and I felt the benefit of it. You would have your basic armature, and you would sculpt out the center line from the armature. What that’s really helpful for is if you are sculpting something that needs to be a specific size. For me it doesn’t matter much because I’m just using them as maquettes. It’s a tool I use, not the finished product, so it doesn’t matter what size it ends up being just as long as it looks right. But it is a nice way to plan things out so you can see the full form before you go there.
As far as my actual process, I would say I build things up in layers, rolling them up in little tubes. But if I’m sculpting quickly, if I need something fast, then I’ll use a more subtractive process. I’ve done two professional sculpting jobs. The first was actually my first real pro job. I did a Mystique bust for Dynamic Forces right before my senior year. I think I was using a dental pick and my fingers and that was about it. [laughter] I learned a few things along the way. What I like about Super Sculpey is that you can smooth it down with your fingers. The first one I did where I felt more like a professional was the Red Sonja sculpture I did in 2004. That was done in layers and also in separate interlocking pieces, which is a lot more difficult, but it was fun. With that I was using a rake, a traditional sculpting tool, and a rubber brush—it looks like a brush but it has a rubber tip—to smooth things out. I 17
Previous Page: The X-Men run through their paces in the Danger Room in Paolo’s pencils for page 8 of Mythos: X-Men #3. Above: A photo of many of the maquettes Paolo sculpted to use as reference for the Mythos series. The stylization Paolo applied to these maquettes carried over into his paintings and allowed him to be less reliant on photos. All characters © Marvel Characters, Inc.
would also use an actual brush to apply oil to help smooth things out. I picked up a lot of little tips and tricks along the way.
This Page and Next: Penciled panels from Mythos: SpiderMan. (above) Following Romita’s lead, Paolo tries to make sure his women don’t share the same pretty face. Here you can see differences in the eyes, the eyebrows, the lips, etc. (right) Paolo stuck with the dorky Peter Parker established by Steve Ditko in the early issues of Amazing Spider-Man.… (next page) …Though his Spidey is a bit more graceful.
MM: Looking at your Mythos maquettes, I see a bit of Romita in the forms. PAOLO: When I think of Marvel characters, I almost invariably think of Romita. He codified those characters in a way I don’t think anyone else did. Kirby defined so many of those characters, but he always kind of drew the same face. Romita did to a certain extent,
Spider-Man and all related characters © Marvel Characters, Inc.
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but he made them distinctive. I think that came from his work on romance comics. You’d have two leading ladies and the one guy trying to choose between them or vice versa. You always had the same archetype, but he would always add those little clues, like the two dimples on Mary Jane. He was just very good at designing a character on a subtle level. Gwen Stacy has a hair band and these bangs, while Mary Jane has these bangs. Even though it’s almost the same face, they still look completely different, which is a testament to his work. So whenever I think of Marvel characters, I think of Romita, unless it’s a character that I associate with a specific artist. When I did Mythos: Spider-Man, I tried to look mostly at Ditko’s Spidey, especially since it was the origin story. We wanted him to be in high school and be dorky. When Romita got on there, he was a pretty good-looking guy and dating hot girls. [laughter] MM: You were still painting in oil, so were you going back and forth between the penciling and the painting, doing more penciling during the drying process? How were you working then? PAOLO: With X-Men I would do a layout and get approval, then do a color study on top of that. The next step was the pencils, which were pretty tight. I would project those pencils onto the 16" x 24" Masonite,
MM: What went into your palette decisions for Mythos? PAOLO: If you look at all the pages as a group, I tried to have a color scheme for each book, and within each book, every scene has a different color scheme. In X-Men, it starts out with Magneto, and the first three pages are all red and purple. From there up to page eleven, it’s either the X-mansion or the Danger Room. My high school’s colors were gold and blue, so I basically made it look like my high school from the bathroom to the locker room. A lot of the script dictated certain colors, like if it’s a night scene or if there’s a fire, but I do also try to think of the characters involved. With X-Men, the book as a whole is mostly blue and gold with more gold towards the end. With Hulk, it’s purple and green until he hulks out, and then it gets red. Ghost Rider is all orange. It’s pretty simple conceptually speaking, but it’s also a pretty subtle effect. It’s not something you really notice until you’ve read the whole book.
and then trace it in oil as a line drawing. From there I would do the full-on painting. Sometimes in the middle I would go back and do a more refined color study if some things weren’t working out. In the case of page six, which was the Danger Room, I got most of the way through it, and I wasn’t happy at all. So I took a photo of it, took it into Photoshop, and drew on top of it and changed the composition until I was happy with it. Then I went back to the oil. MM: Did you use reference for the buildings as well? PAOLO: For the Danger Room I had a folder filled with all kinds of reference, anything from the obstacle course on American Gladiators, to the Hoover Dam, to gun emplacements at Normandy—anything I could think of that would give me a real world corollary to what I was trying to reproduce. That was half the fun of those Mythos stories. I was almost like a movie concept artist. I would design a whole world, do a lot of research to try to make it look a certain way, and then do the final render. So a lot of research went into those things—probably more than I should have done. [laughter] But it’s what I really enjoyed, and still what I really want to do, but it was definitely time intensive.
MM: Do you have a favorite from the series? PAOLO: I’d probably say Captain America. I love all of them in different ways. I worked on it for four years, and each one is etched into my memory as a certain point of my life—like certain girlfriends. [laughter] I listen to audio 19
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books when I paint, so certain pages are associated with certain books. That’s the thing about working on anything for that long: it becomes a part of your life. Fantastic Four is when I met my now-wife, and Captain America is when I first felt like I had my life under control, I guess. I was starting to get a lot of recognition, Mythos was almost over, and I felt like it was the best looking of all the issues. Everything was working out very well. It was not only the book itself, but my life in general. MM: With Ghost Rider you had to depict a lot of fire. Was there anything specific
you looked at to help you get the look you wanted? PAOLO: Well, I looked at a lot of fire. [laughter] I remember reading an article with Alex Ross about Marvels and how he’d painted the Human Torch. One of the things he said as an aside was that he’d burned most of the things he owned. [laughter] I never went that far, but I also had access to the Internet. The most helpful thing I found was a stuntman who had posted all these pictures of himself on fire. That was super-helpful. Now I have an internal sense of how fire works. The other thing is more about composition and color. One of the main things I 21
Previous Page: Part obstacle course, part industrial factory, and all Danger Room. Pencils for Mythos: X-Men, page 6. Above: An Alex Schomburg-esque penciled splash panel for Mythos: Captain America—Paolo’s favorite of the series. Captain America, X-Men, and all related characters © Marvel Characters, Inc.
Below: Pencils for page 21 of Mythos: Ghost Rider—the page Paolo uses as an example of how to depict light in a painting. Right and Next Page: Paolo’s tone guide and finished gray tone acrylic painting of Mythos: Hulk page 17. Ghost Rider, Hulk © Marvel Characters, Inc.
learned at RISD was in a drawing class my sophomore year. Lenny Long was my teacher and he basically said, “You don’t create light through light, you create it through darkness.” If you want something to be bright, make sure everything around it is dark. One of the things I do in my lectures now is I show a slide of page 21 of Ghost Rider. First I show the page with everything taken out but the white of the fire— the brightest part. Because you can see the individual paint strokes of the white paint, you can see it’s actually darker than the pure white of the page. I ask them, “What do you think that is?” and no one has any idea. Then I show them the next slide with all the context, and what looked before like a gray splotch
now looks like bright fire. It’s about creating a context, and that’s why composition is always so important. After that I would say color, just learning the way that light works and pigment works and putting it all together—which really the only way you can do that is to do color studies ahead of time. Unless you’re painting from light, you really need to plan things out in a way that you can find out how they interact. MM: When you switched from oil to acrylic, was there an adjustment period in terms of getting the painting to look the way you wanted? PAOLO: There was a small adjustment period. The first thing I did was in Acryla Gouache. Hulk is actually painted in gray scale, and I colored it digitally because I thought it would be faster. I don’t think it was that much faster in the end. [laughs] I much, much prefer the acrylic—and now I’m mostly gouache—to oils. Mainly it’s because I paint on paper now, and paper is much more absorbent. It’s a lot faster. When I paint something now, it’s much closer to what I consider my true hand, because I’m not putting it down and then reworking it and reworking it. What you see is, for the most part, my initial try. If it doesn’t work, I can wipe it out and try again. 22
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Above: Tone guide and finished acrylics for page 10 of Mythos: Hulk. Next Page: Pencils for Mythos: Fantastic Four, page 10. As the brave crew is bathed in cosmic rays, notice how Sue Storm is trying to hide, to become invisible, and Reed Richards is stretching out his arm to reach her. Paolo wants to set the record straight that Jenkins asked for this specifically in his script. Still, Paolo handled it fantastically. Fantastic Four, Hulk © Marvel Characters, Inc.
With oil, it was so labor intensive. It took so many layers and so many days, the spontaneity was completely lost. I’ve heard some people say they wish I’d go back to oils, but I don’t think I ever will. Anything I could do in oils, I can do in acrylic or gouache. The reason that I don’t is because it’s not how I paint anymore. I just don’t want to. MM: Was Hulk the first time you’d done a significant amount of coloring on the computer? PAOLO: Yeah, I think so. I’d done smaller things and color studies, but that was the first time I’d done a full book. I did it to save time, but to give you an idea, I did Hulk in six months, but I did the next one, Spider-Man, in three and a half months—that one was fully painted on 11" x 17". It came down to me getting faster at drawing. It’s not so much the painting, for me it’s the drawing that takes a lot of time, and all the research that goes into every panel. MM: The Fantastic Four issue seemed to be the brightest of the stories. Was that because 24
of the switch to acrylics or because of the subject matter? PAOLO: I had just met my wife. [laughter] Fantastic Four to me was a much more familyoriented story. And also everything is either orange or blue throughout the whole story. More than any other issue, it adhered to the orange-and-blue color scheme. With Ghost Rider, he’s on fire, but it’s just his head, which is just a skull. It’s a very dark story. With Fantastic Four, Human Torch is completely on fire and it’s a more light-hearted story. It was something I thought about, but it also happened naturally. MM: After Mythos you did the covers for Marvel’s adaptation of The Iliad. Are you into mythology at all? PAOLO: I’ve always liked mythology from afar. That job was nice because it was a chance to work for Marvel, but to do something completely different. I was working on that while I was working on Mythos. 2007, I believe, was when I started, and it was for the same editors, Tom Brevoort and Lauren Sankovitch. I got more into mythology as I went along. I was listening to The Iliad while I
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was working on it. I never really studied mythology, but it’s seeped in over the years, and I have more of an interest in it now. I’ve listened to lectures on it. There’s just so much of it out there. What’s interesting is you’ll see a modern take on some story and you won’t realize the connection until later, and then you’ll see that story in other modern things. Now that I’m actually trying to write something, I’m trying to study it a little more and bring some of that into the story without being too overt about it. Basically, I want to give people the same pleasure I get from it now, where you can see certain parallels. It’s all about classic themes that come up in any kind of human story or endeavor. The same themes show up time and time again. You want to pay homage to that without being
cliché, so I think it’s important to read that old stuff and realize that nothing’s changed, but you can still make it fresh. MM: Your covers were a bit more graphic. Was that intentional? Were you trying to make them look more like book covers? PAOLO: I was getting more confident in graphic design in general. And that’s around the time I really started thinking about composition in a more sophisticated way. I also started thinking more about type and logos and leaving space. Those covers all have plenty of space and allowed the title to be its own block of color. Thinking back to my mindset ten years ago, I just wanted to make a cool painting. That’s not how I think anymore. There’s still a little bit of that in there, but my main goal now is to have something striking within the context of the cover. MM: That leads nicely to your covers for The Twelve. I assume you were looking at a lot of pulp magazine covers for inspiration? PAOLO: Oh, yeah, definitely. I was always very into that whole style. My favorite painter is H.J. Ward, who did a lot of stuff for Spicy Mystery and that type of thing—Spicy This and Spicy That. [laughter] I love that style, and if I ever get around to doing “real” art, [laughs] it would probably just be my own take on those pulp novels. The Twelve was a perfect fit, because that’s what they wanted anyway. I came in on issue #6. Kaare Andrews did #1–5, and I did the rest of the series. MM: Did they ask you out of the blue, or was that something you expressed an interest in doing? PAOLO: Kaare was supposed to do all of them originally, but I think he got bored with it after #5, and they immediately thought of me, and I thought it would be a great opportunity. It was all pretty seamless, and, again, it was out of the same editorial office. MM: Ward’s work wasn’t so much photorealistic as it was stylized. PAOLO: Exactly. I still hold him up as my ultimate goal. That’s where I want to be. It is photo-referenced, but it’s another world. It’s not the same thing. 26
Previous Page: Paolo’s take on “the face that launch’d a thousand ships” for the cover of The Iliad #1. Left: Two Spicy Mystery covers by the great pulp illustrator H. J. Ward. Ward would perhaps be better remembered today if he hadn’t died in 1945 at the age of 35 from lung cancer. Below: Paolo’s pulpinspired cover for The Twelve #8, featuring the original Black Widow. Black Widow, The Iliad © Marvel Characters, Inc.
I’ve got the big book on him, and I saw a lot of covers I’d never seen by him. His color is incredible! And a lot of the best ones are ones I’d never seen before; they were kind of lost to time. I was lucky enough to see a gallery show of his work at the Society of Illustrators a year or two ago, and to see those things in person was absolutely amazing. I hold him up as the pinnacle of illustration. I don’t see how you can get any better than that. MM: You were talking about thinking more about type and logos at this time, and those pulp covers usually had a lot of type. With The Twelve, were they giving you all the type they wanted, and were you blocking it in with your thumbnail designs? PAOLO: By that time I was asking them for the logo and trade dress before I started sketching. I would give them digital sketches to approve, and they usually included the type. That’s something I still do. Whenever I submit sketches, they always have the trade dress on them, especially now with the Marvel Now banner across the bottom, which is basically an inch of red. You have to forget about that area; it’s not yours. [laughter] And there are good aspects to that but there are also bad. It would be one thing if that was the only place the image was going to be shown, but in the case of comics, the cover is usually previewed as a full piece without type. The tough part about that is that it has to work both ways.
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Part 3:
Back to the Drawing Board MM: Did you spend time practicing your inking before you started on the job, or did you just kind of jump into it? PAOLO: I did a couple of character studies just to get the feel of it, but mostly I just jumped right in. I think for that particular one, I didn’t even do layouts. Usually I do a 4" x 6" pencil sketch and submit that to the editor, get the approval, and then start on pencils. I did that for the first four pages, and then, I think to speed things up, I just started drawing straight on the final board, and I’d show them a rough at some point in the process.
MM: Next up was Amazing Spider-Man #577. You actually did the interior story and the cover for that. PAOLO: Yes, that was 2008, and it was the first book where I did pencils and inks. MM: Why did you decide to do pencil and ink rather than painting. Was that something the editor suggested, or something you wanted to try? Or was it more financially based, so you could do more work? PAOLO: It was a little bit of all that. I’d just finished Mythos, which took way, way too long, and so we were all interested in getting me to be faster, which of course translates to me making more money, so that helped too. The other thing that helped was I had done a commission for my art dealer. It was a Wolverine and Colossus “fastball special” piece for a book he was putting together of his artists, and when I showed it to my editor, he was like, “Why didn’t you just do this for us?” That’s when they decided to put me on Spidey.
MM: Were you making your pencils tighter for your inking than for your painting? PAOLO: It’s about the same, I think. I don’t know. MM: Were you doing much of the drawing in the inking stage? PAOLO: Not at the time. I was doing a lot of the texturing in the inking stage. Once I got the basic forms down, then I would kind of go “off-script,” so to speak, and kind of add things here and there. All the major points were locked down.
MM: Had you been doing much pencil and ink drawing, say, in sketchbooks or something, while you were doing all the painting for Marvel? PAOLO: I’d done a little bit here and there. In 2004 I did an Army of Darkness cover that was pen and ink, but it took me a really long time to do it. Beyond that, I think everything else I’d done for Marvel was painted.
MM: Did you just start working from panel one on through, or did you jump around at all? PAOLO: I pretty much drew from the beginning to the end. You can start jumping around, and the pages you don’t want to do never get done. [laughter] It never fails. With any script there’s always going to be some pages that are necessary, but aren’t necessarily as cool as a big splash page. The only time I would jump around was when I was painting in oils, and I had to, because I would get to one point on one, and have to let it dry, so I would move to the next one and come back to it later. MM: What about the comfort factor? Were you thinking in color still, and tones? Did your painting experience inform your inking at all? PAOLO: It did. I had to kind of make a transition where I realized that I couldn’t think in values. I actually think it helped me a lot, because it made me create stronger compositions. When you’re painting, you can almost make anything work, because you can fudge it. 28
There’s an anecdote from the Howard Pyle School of Art told by N.C. Wyeth, where they used to sit around and draw each other the worst possible composition they could think of, and then they would hand it off to the next person, and they would take it and, using just the value, try and improve it. So there’s a lot you can do with lighting, because you can use it as a spotlight to accentuate things or downplay things. There’s just a lot more give and take. With black-&-white, it’s either a good composition or it’s not. MM: You stuck with a pretty clean style. Do you think that carried over because you were used to drawing for painting? There’s some rendering, of course, but there’s not a lot of intricate crosshatching or things like that. PAOLO: I don’t know. I just do what I like. I was looking at a lot of Milton Caniff for inking. Really, I think that’s where I get my inking style. I don’t draw like him, but I ink like him. I just draw my regular way of drawing something, whatever the figure is, and then I’ll just put his inking on top of it, and that’s kind of what my style is.
PAOLO: I was pretty happy with it. I remember at the beginning, my style did sort of change. I’m definitely less “noodly” than I used to be. On that issue, I would draw every hair on the Punisher’s face, and I still kind of do that. I still love giving him that eight o’clock shadow, but not as much as I used to. I used to really get in there and draw each and every line, and I would actually take this one brush that I have that was super old, and I never took care of it—and I specifically didn’t take care of it so it would age, and the fibers would split out so you’d get with one stroke, four
Previous Page: The “fastball special” piece that won Paolo a job on Spider-Man.
MM: Were you inking mostly with a brush, or did you use pen at all? PAOLO: Always the brush, yeah. I’m just more comfortable with a brush. I use a big fat one, #6, which is bigger than what most people like, but for me, I find it easier because it has more variation in line width, and just texture overall.
Left and Above: Preliminary sketches as Paolo warmed up for Amazing Spider-Man #577 featuring the Punisher. Paolo made the interesting decision to go more cartoony and organic with the Punisher’s skull emblem.
MM: What about the smaller detail work, like the Spider-Man webbing and that kind of thing? Were you using a smaller brush or a pen for that? PAOLO: I still used the big brush. Occasionally I’d use a small one if I had to do a whole lot of it, but the nice thing about a big brush, it has what’s called a “cat tongue” shape to it, so it’s big and fat when it gets close to the barrel, but as it gets closer to the tip, it kind of thins out, so it’s almost like having a very, very fine brush with a very big brush behind it. The big brush can hold all the extra ink, but the fine brush is what gives all the detail.
Colossus, Punisher, Wolverine © Marvel Characters, Inc.
MM: What did you think when you were done with the job? Was it like, “Oh, I’ve still got a learning process to go through?” or were you fairly happy with it? 29
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little lines. It took a while to get it to that point, because you have to wet it, and dry it out, and wet it again, and make sure it’s splayed out the right way, and then you can just dip it once, and get four lines at a time. It was like a weird kind of crosshatching in a sense, but I used it primarily for his beard. MM: The next story you did was the SpiderMan/Wolverine story [in Amazing Spider-Man: Extra! #2], it looked like you might’ve taken the same approach with Wolverine? PAOLO: Yeah, definitely. MM: Did you jump right between those two projects? Was it one right after the other? PAOLO: I’m trying to remember. I think so, but I can’t remember for sure. I want to say I remember doing the Wolverine story towards the end of 2008, and it came out in 2009, but I can’t remember specifically. But the Spidey #577, I think I finished it in August 2008. Somebody else colored it, and the Wolverine story I colored myself. MM: Spidey #577 was probably the first professional work you did that someone else was coloring, or maybe there was a Red Sonja cover that someone else colored. Were you giving color notes to them, or did you just kind of let them do their thing? PAOLO: I gave them some. When it comes to color notes, I pick out the main things that are important to the story. So if something needs to pop out, I’ll let them know, or if it needs to be a certain color, or time of day... most of the time, if it’s things like that, the writer’s already explained that in the script. MM: Did you have any trepidation over seeing how someone else would color your work? PAOLO: A little bit. I haven’t done it for a while, but it is always jarring for me to see someone else’s color. I usually like it, but I have to warm up to it. The first time Javier Rodriguez colored me on Daredevil—and I can’t make a huge fit, because I really wanted Javier Rodriguez—after he gave me back the first four pages, it looked really weird to me, and I think that’s just because I’m not thinking in color when I’m drawing it, but obviously somewhere in the back of my mind, I have an idea of what I think it should be. Once I see it, and once I get used to it, I love it. It’s just the initial jarring quality where you’re expecting one thing and getting another.
MM: The Spidey/Wolverine story was the first time you digitally colored a full story from start to finish. Was there much of a learning curve? PAOLO: I was already pretty familiar with Photoshop, because I did all my digital color studies for my paintings. I got an intern in 2007 named Orpheus. He helped me with Mythos, and later on he became my assistant for planning all my color stuff. I’d send him my inks, and then he would send me back a flatted file, and I would change the colors. We still work together. Other than that, it was a pretty simple transition. MM: With the Wolverine story, there are a few scenes where there are a lot of talking 31
Previous Page and Above: Page 1 finished inks and page 2 pencils for “Birthday Boy” in Amazing Spider-Man: Extra! #2. Paolo went the extra mile to make the mostly talking heads tale visually interesting. Spider-Man, Wolverine © Marvel Characters, Inc.
Above: Inked layout and finished pencils and inks for page 3 of “Birthday Boy” for Amazing SpiderMan: Extra! #2. Next Page: Warm-up sketches—some actually painted—for the Young Allies 70th Anniversary Special. Paolo tried to capture the spirit of Kirby’s character designs for the original series. Bucky, Captain America, Red Skull, Spider-Man, Wolverine,Young Allies © Marvel Characters, Inc.
heads. Since you hadn’t done a lot of interior work up to that point, especially a lot of heavy, intensive talking head stuff, did that take some getting used to, how to stage that kind of thing so it wouldn’t completely bore you? PAOLO: From what I remember about that script, the one particular page where it’s nothing but talking heads.... MM: Yeah, there are ten, twelve panels on that page. PAOLO: Yeah, that was my fault, because I had it where it was one kind of long conversation, and they just went back and forth. I don’t like reading that as a reader, so if somebody’s going to have a conversation that long, I want to see the reactions as each new line is said. I don’t know how many panels he wrote it as, but I broke it up and spread it across the page. MM: You went a little cartoony with Wolverine’s expressions. Was that something to help liven up the scene, or was that part of your thinking in the way you drew him? 32
PAOLO: I don’t know, I was just kind of having fun, and also the fact that he was halfway drunk through half of it. He would get drunk, and then his mutant healing factor would sober him up, so I really wanted to get the difference between that in each panel, in terms of progression of time, and also the fact that you can’t see Spidey’s face. I still can make it expressive, but just not as expressive as Wolverine’s. So a combination of all those things: he’s drunk, he’s telling a story, and he’s talking to Spidey. It just made sense. That was a fun little story. MM: Do you have much communication with a writer before you sit down to draw a story, or do you just get the script? PAOLO: Usually, I just get a script. I’ll turn in my layouts and see how they like them, see if they have any notes. Daredevil was the only project where they came to me ahead of time, and Steve Wacker kind of organized the whole thing, and from the very beginning, we were involved in the process. That was cool. If I do anything again, I’d like to do it more like that. He asked what I wanted to
draw. Mark Waid was always really good about that. He’d say, “What do you want to draw?” Like Klaw, in that first arc, he said, “What villain do you want to draw?” and I said, “Klaw!” [laughter] And I’ll be damned, he wrote a freaking Klaw story! That’s always fun. But that being said, I also enjoy just picking up a script cold, and kind of warming it up as I go.
They want something that is iconic, and can be used either as a poster, or a cover for a trade paperback, or whatever. If you’re doing a series of covers, that’s the time when you can start experimenting. MM: Was there any extra editorial direction to what they wanted, or was that just all on your part? PAOLO: Steve came to me and said, “Daredevil’s going to Japan, so do something Japanese.” And so, of course, as soon as he said that, I thought Japanese woodprints. I showed him a sketch, and he said, “Good.” That’s still one of my most popular covers; people just loved that. It makes me want to do more of them.
MM: After doing a couple of pencil-and-ink jobs, did working in just black-&-white have any effect at all on your painting? Did you notice any kind of change in the way you look at it? PAOLO: Yeah, like I was saying before about the improvement in the composition, I think it’s forced me to look at my paintings in a different way. The sketches I would do in preparation for painting were more legible than they used to be. So it definitely helped both... the painting helped the inking, and the inking helped the painting. MM: It seems like your early painted covers have very simple backgrounds for the most part, but once you had been doing more inked stuff, you had a little more background detail in your paintings. PAOLO: With the paintings, the main thing is, it just takes so long, so if it’s going to have an intricate background, that panel needed to be about that intricate background. So, I would go full on out with, let’s say, the X-Men Danger Room. I would put everything into that one painting, but there wasn’t anything else going on—it was about the Danger Room. And if one panel was all about the action, I would focus on that, because I didn’t have time to put all that detail in to the background. MM: You did a short stint as the cover artist for Daredevil, and that was when you got a little more “design-y” in the covers. PAOLO: Yes, that was three covers. I think it was in 2009. I don’t know why that transition happened, but I guess because I was getting more done, I just felt like I could experiment a little bit more. That was one of the things I learned from Marvel is that if they ask you for one cover, they want a specific kind of cover. 33
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It was really a series of threes. That was fun with six covers. The first one was the one with the rising sun. Yeah, I don’t know. I think at that point, I just had a little more time to try some different things. MM: You did a cover for a Marvel Mystery one-shot. I think that might’ve been an actual Schomburg cover that you adapted, the Sub-Mariner/Human Torch cover? PAOLO: That’s one of my favorite covers. [laughter] MM: Did they want a Schomburg-type cover, or was that something you wanted to do? PAOLO: They knew that I loved that kind of stuff, and we were going on the 70th anniversary of Timely. Originally, I was going to do another one, but I ran out of time. It was going to be awesome. I still want to do it! [laughter] MM: What was it going to be? PAOLO: A D-Day piece with Captain America swinging off a P-38 Lightning. I still want to do that, I don’t know when I will, but it will be fun. When they gave me the Young Allies story, that was kind of a left-field offer I jumped at because it seemed like a whole lot of fun. I like World War II stuff. MM: Everyone’s tied up, and with your Red Skull design, that whole early Kirby design where his head really is a skull, you really captured that Alex Schomburg feel.
PAOLO: Yeah, that’s the kind of stuff I love. Those kinds of things are like anything goes, and for me, that’s kind of like how comics are. I don’t read too many “serious” comics. I don’t necessarily read comedies, either. That’s one reason I like the Marvel movies—they hit that right tone of a serious situation, but they’re not taking it that seriously, you know? MM: Did you do much research for Young Allies? Did you make sure you got the uniforms right, and that type of thing? PAOLO: I think they gave me a bunch or reference for that. They gave me one of the early comics, and I think I bought a little army motorcycle and a little tommy gun. I love having those 1:6 scale weapons. I have a little gun rack full of them. Any time I have an excuse to buy a toy, I do. For Ghost Rider, I bought a die-cast Harley for myself. MM: [laughs] You had a lot more action scenes to work with than usual. It was probably a more fun project to draw than some of the talking-head things you were doing. PAOLO: Yeah, I definitely like drawing action, just because there are fewer rules. MM: After that you were doing covers for Amazing Spider-Man, one of the cornerstone titles. Did that come with any kind of sense of accomplishment at all? PAOLO: I don’t know. Marvel always treated me really well in terms of the projects they were giving me. The first thing I 35
Previous Page: Paolo’s cover for the Young Allies 70th Anniversary Special would fit right in with Jack Kirby and Alex Schomburg’s 1940s covers. Above: Scenes of 1940s Paris required heavy reference and made for some very nice backgrounds. Captain America,Young Allies © Marvel Characters, Inc.
Below: Painted (mostly) warm-ups for a two-part Sandman story which didn’t happen. It wasn’t completely wasted, though, as he did at least paint the covers. Next Page: Mary Jane remains stoic in public, but reveals her troubles to her aunt in “One Moment in Time.” Amazing Spider-Man #639, page 13. Mary Jane Parker, Sandman, Spider-Man © Marvel Characters, Inc.
did was an Iron Man cover, the second thing I did was a Doctor Doom story, then bam! They gave me an issue of Spider-Man. I was kind of amazed that I got into that so early on. Then beyond that, they always gave me good projects. I don’t know, I think I did have that sense, but I think I always had that sense, because they were always giving me exactly what I wanted to do. MM: You were doing some pencil-and-ink interior work inside some of those issues, so this was pretty high profile work. PAOLO: Yeah, it was huge. The way that year panned out, I was originally going to do a two-issue Sandman story with Fred Van Lente, and I still did the covers for that—it
was issues #615 and 616—but as I was literally laying out the first page, I got a call from Steve Wacker, and he said, “How do you feel about dropping what you’re doing and starting on a bigger project?” I was like, “Ah, I don’t know.” I wasn’t sure, I had already talked to Fred about it, and he said, “Okay, let me rephrase that: We’re pulling you off this and you’re going to do this much bigger project with Quesada.” So I was super happy about that, but I always felt bad that I was all pumped, ready to work with Fred, and then we never got to. MM: You weren’t doing every page in that story with Quesada [“One Moment in Time,” Amazing Spider-Man #638–641]. You were doing certain scenes, and there’d be framing sequences around it. Did that kind of throw you off your pacing at all, or did the script compensate for that? PAOLO: I didn’t give it a whole lot of thought. The script had Quesada’s pages in there, so I didn’t see what his finished work looked like until the very end. The one funny thing about the project, as he would always say, is that he gave me the challenge of kind of mimicking that wedding annual [Amazing Spider-Man Annual #21] style. He said that I did it too well. [laughter] He’d done that with his work before, and there’s a pretty stark difference between... like, he showed me a page of his, where he’s mimicking a Ditko scene. There’s a pretty wide gap between those. For me, there wasn’t a whole lot of difference, especially because I matched the color as well. MM: Exactly, I think that was probably what made the biggest difference. I had to look back at the credits to make sure it wasn’t a reprint page! [laughter] PAOLO: Yeah, it was definitely my coloring, but it doesn’t look very different. MM: So you just pulled out the old comics and said, “I’m going to match this exactly”? PAOLO: Yes, pretty much. They gave me a PDF of that issue. MM: Did you limit yourself to the 32-color palette or whatever they were using at that point? PAOLO: I didn’t quite do that. I thought about doing that, but I just didn’t have enough time to mess around with it. I just picked the colors I wanted and did them.
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I kind of wanted to challenge myself with that, because I think it would be really difficult to do. I had just finished up a Weird Science cover for Mondo Posters, and originally they were like, “Do it in seven colors for the screen print,” and I tried to do it, but I just couldn’t. [laughter] I just couldn’t do it. I tried and tried, and I got it down to eleven colors where, “If you layer these, it might work.” I said, “Can you layer these and create a new color with it?” They said, “Sure,” and I recounted, and I realized I’d missed two colors—it was actually 13. I have great respect for the colorists who did it back in the day, because it’s really difficult. MM: That’s why you ended up with guys wearing purple suits. PAOLO: Yeah, yeah! MM: What did you key in on when trying to match the original style? Did you have any difficulty going back and forth between matching the old style for some pages and doing pages in your own style? PAOLO: It’s weird, I think the style part of it has more to do with the inking than the drawing. If you strip away the inking, the penciling looks about the same, the only difference is when I put black on top of it. The old school panels have a very clean line, not a whole lot of extra rendering at all. MM: Another difference I noticed is that in the flashback pages you used the traditional nine- or twelve-panel grid format. You might have one panel going across an entire tier, but you stick to the grid. Then you go to the “modern” pages, 38
you had a lot of four- and five-panel pages. It was more open. PAOLO: I think that had a lot to do with Quesada. That was the first time I’d worked with a writer who was also an artist, and his scripts were... I don’t know if I can say they were more detailed than what I was used to, but it was very clear, reading them, what the final page should look like. For instance, on the ASM #577, with Zeb Wells, there were some pages where I was really struggling with how to convey the action, and with Quesada’s scripts, he’s an artist, so there was never any doubt in his mind what would be the clearest way to show something. So yeah, as soon as I read his script, a picture would already form in my mind. I knew exactly how I needed to draw it. He would often say “big splash panel,” or “panoramic scene,” or “the whole city” or something like that. MM: Did you like having that more detailed script, or do you prefer to have more freedom? PAOLO: Quesada’s scripts, it wasn’t that they were more detailed, they were clearer in terms of what needed to be shown. Zeb Wells would describe a sequence, whereas Joe Quesada would describe a scene, or an object, or something that needed to be seen. MM: So you’re saying Quesada’s scripts were more clear about how you should break down the page. PAOLO: Yeah, I don’t think he was thinking about it. He just was thinking like an artist, and when he’s writing it down, it’s almost a translation of what he sees in his mind’s eye. MM: Did you have much lead time? PAOLO: I think I had a pretty good amount of time on it. I’m trying to remember the exact sequence of events. I think it was spring of 2009, and unfortunately my nowwife and I had broken up right about that time, and so I was a mess! It all worked out for the best, we’re married now, but around that time, she had broken up with me, and I just... I couldn’t do anything! [laughs] I was lucky enough that Steve Wacker knew what kind of shape I was in, and I don’t know what he did, but he moved around the schedule to accommodate my poor emotional self. The story was about this wedding.... MM: The worst possible story you could be drawing at that time, right?
PAOLO: There were days where I trying to draw M.J. in a wedding dress, and I just couldn’t do it. It was physically impossible for me to do that. I’d never experienced anything like that before. I think if a friend had related that to me, I’d be like, “Come on, dude! Shut up!” [laughter] “This is your job! Get the stuff done!” I literally couldn’t do it, so I think he sent some covers my way, and I did that for a little bit. That may be when I did the Daredevil covers, now that I think about it. Once I was kind of okay—and I can’t remember how long that took—I started on it again full bore. Yeah, he really accommodated me, because I was a mess!
Previous Page Top: This lush panel from Amazing Spider-Man #639. nicely juxtaposes Mary Jane’s sadness with the vibrancy of life around her. Previous Page Bottom: A quiet but intense moment from Amazing Spider-Man #639. Above: Paolo’s pencils for page 10 of Amazing Spider-Man #638. Due to the timing, probably the hardest thing Paolo has ever had to draw.
MM: How do you feel looking back on that?
Spider-Man and all related characters © Marvel Characters, Inc.
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Below and Next Page: Pencil and color studies for a poster that was given to the cast and crew of Captain America: The First Avenger, and the finished pencils for that poster. Captain America and all related characters © Marvel Characters, Inc.
PAOLO: Honestly, I haven’t read it in a while. I’m sure a lot of those memories would come back if I did. [laughter] That whole experience was strange, also because I thought it was some of my best work up to that point. There are certain scenes that I think are better than my Daredevil work, but then it was this weird thing where people hated the story. They would always say, “Oh, love your artwork. I’m not going to say anything about the story.” [laughter] I got a lot of publicity for it, and there’s no such a thing as bad publicity, but it was very weird because of that. It was very different from what I got on Daredevil, which was a whole lot of publicity, and it was really a turning point in my career. I got invited to conventions, and that kind of stuff. It happened before, but only at local shows. I would actually get flown places, and that
kind of thing. It was very, very different, the reactions to those two projects. And I don’t think it necessarily had anything to do with me. I brought my best work to both, but the reaction had more to do with the story. MM: After that you did a mix of painted covers and pencil-and-ink covers. There’s one I wanted to mention—it was kind of a weird thing. It’s the X-Men #7 variant cover, but it features the Fantastic Four. It has an old ’50s/’60s illustration vibe. PAOLO: Yeah, they wanted a ’60s take on them, because I think it was their 50th anniversary, so I kind of crossed the Fantastic Four with Mad Men. MM: It has a Robert McGinnis feel in terms of composition and tone. PAOLO: Yeah, I was looking at McGinnis, Al Parker, and Coby Whitmore. MM: Were those illustrators you were interested in before? PAOLO: I’d always liked their work, especially once I made the switch during Mythos from oil to gouache. I’d look at a lot of their work. I had the realization that I could do the same thing in gouache that I could do in oil, and it would be a lot easier, and it would work a lot better. I looked to their work for inspiration, and I still do. I’ve got tons and tons of Robert McGinnis paintings that are on constant cycle on my computer desktop. I go to Heritage Auctions, and I have my account with them, but I never buy anything. MM: I do the same thing. PAOLO: Yeah, because they have such beautiful scans! MM: Nice, big scans too. They let us use their scans for publication, and I’ve used a lot of them over the years for various projects. They’ve been a huge help. PAOLO: Oh, nice! I’ve often seen where people credit them. MM: You did a Captain America poster that looked like it could have been used as the movie poster. PAOLO: I actually just did another one for Captain America: The Winter Soldier. They haven’t released it yet. That one was literally based off a McGinnis painting. They wanted something like a ’70s thriller, so I based it off of The Man with the Golden Gun poster.
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Below: An exclusive propoganda-styled variant cover for Captain America #1 (2012) for Hastings. Inks by Paolo’s dad, Joe Rivera, though all but the border inks were knocked out in the coloring. Next Page: Paolo’s first depiction of Daredevil’s radar sense in action from Daredevil #1. Inks by Joe Rivera. Captain America, Daredevil © Marvel Characters, Inc.
MM: Were you able to stylize it some? PAOLO: I always plan on that, and it just ends up being my style of painting. [laughter] I start by looking at the painting, and trying to copy it. If I was actually talking strictly the painting technique, I could, but it’s tough to run the McGinnis filter through a different photo to my brain. MM: The one you did for The First Avenger was more photorealistic than most of your work tends to be, I think. PAOLO: It is. It’s different from what I usually do, but it’s still me. The same thing with what this one was. There are some portraits I did better than others. Part of it is, McGinnis is really good at painting opaquely, and I can do it, but on a much more limited scale. I’m
still mostly transparent. I’m building things up slowly, and with a few flecks of paint at the end. I get the sense that he goes right in there, and it looks amazing. MM: How does the approval process for those posters work? Who has final say on what you do? PAOLO: Yeah, this last one, I was working with a different producer. The Captain America one and the Iron Man 3 poster were both through one producer, and the Cap 2 was a different producer. It’s kind of the same people. They all know each other, but Marvel Studios is split up. Those guys are working on several things at once. It always goes to him, and they get final approval from the producer. Once he says okay, we’re good to go. MM: Is the initial process any different working with them than working with the comics end? PAOLO: Yeah, with this last Cap 2 painting, we were in the sketch stage for a very long time. I would say I did at least a dozen very different takes on what the final poster would be, whereas with Marvel, a couple of weeks ago I got an email from them saying, “Hey, can you get this done on Monday?” And I said, “Yeah, I think so. How’s this sketch?” And they said, “Beautiful!” and I did it. It’s a very quick turnaround on those jobs compared to working with the studios. Also, when I’m doing work for the studios, it’s kind of like a pet project to them. It’s just a present that goes to the cast and crew. It’s not something they need. I’m sure if I was working for the actual production, I would be under the gun. MM: Well, they still have a cut-off date, they just have more room to work with. PAOLO: Yeah. Cap 2 doesn’t come out until April, but I think they already sent the posters out, because principal photography is done.
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Part 4:
The Book on Everyone’s Radar
MM: Daredevil was your first regular monthly ongoing. How did you get that assignment, and were you kind of nervous about keeping a monthly schedule? Was it pitched to you as being alternating arcs with another artist? How was that all settled? PAOLO: Well, Steve Wacker, the editor, pitched it pretty well. He knew basically what my speed was, which was slow, and he pitched it to me as alternating arcs with Marcos Martin. I think Marcos visited around that time, so we got to meet briefly in New York. Steve really organized the whole thing. He put us together and figured it all out, and we agreed, and that was that. I’d done four [consecutive] issues of Amazing Spider-Man, and he said it wouldn’t be any more insane than that. The thought was that since I wouldn’t be coloring, and I wouldn’t be inking, I could hit the schedule a little more easily.
interesting things with the sound effects. But I don’t think he actually used the radar sense. MM: No, he didn’t. A lot of artists have done different things with the radar sense. Were those things in the back of your mind, “I don’t want to look like anybody else,” or was it all based off of Mark’s idea of that 3-D look? PAOLO: Really it was just based off Mark’s description. It just seemed like the best solution. Later on, I found an issue of Daredevil where Gene Colan had done something very similar, but for completely different reasons. Daredevil had gotten two seconds behind reality, and saw a ghosted image of himself, so the technique was nothing new, it was just how I used it was something new. MM: Did you have much of a head start before the series was launched to get going on it? PAOLO: I can’t remember exactly how far, but Steve knows what he’s dealing with when he deals with me. I had plenty of lead time. If I remember correctly, Mark Waid gave me the first ten pages of the second half, just to give me something to get started on.
MM: In that meeting with Marcos and Mark, did you work up how you wanted the visual effects to work, like the radar sense? Did you work together to come up with that approach? PAOLO: Mark basically asked for it in the script. He didn’t know what he wanted, but he knew how he wanted it to feel, which was three-dimensional but not visual. At one point he said, “Maybe it could be painted,” but I really didn’t want to mess with that. It just seemed like the cross-contoured drawing style was the best solution. I think just because I went first, I was the one who had to come up with it, and so we just went from there. Actually, Marcos had the backup story in that first issue. He did some
MM: Did you do a lot of preliminary drawings and design work before getting started on it, or did you have time? PAOLO: I did about one page of it; it wasn’t very much. I wasn’t going to do anything much different with Daredevil’s look. I thought it was good the way it was. The main thing I’d do was change the cane. During the little research I did online, I came across
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The Other Murdock Papers [http://www. theothermurdockpapers.com] by Christine Hanefalk. She just had a whole lot of Daredevil history, and I hadn’t really read most of it, so I needed all the help I could get. Her website was just very helpful to me to figure things out, enough to see what some of the past problems were that I could potentially rectify some of them, one of them being the cane. I don’t think Mark asked for anything in particular, but he was very specific about Matt always having the cane. One of the panel descriptions said, “Remember, he’s always got the cane, no matter what, especially when he’s out in public. You should always see it in the background, even if it’s just sitting there.” I just made it three sections instead of two, and I extended his billy club holster to fit that. To bring it up into the modern world a bit, I made it more in line with the white cane’s properties. I made one of the sections red, and adjusted how long it was. I think it’s supposed to hit right on the sternum when it’s standing up right next to you.
MM: Did you work up your concept for the radar sense while you did the pages, or was that part of your process as well? PAOLO: I think I did it on the fly! I do layouts for every page, little 4" x 6" drawings, and I think I did it there, but as far as any designs, or any extra stuff like that, I didn’t really do anything. I just looked at my layouts for the first issue, and it looks like, on page 2, I hadn’t figured out the radar yet. I think I had some semblance of an idea by page 18. [laughter] I just kind of drew in silhouettes, and figured I’d just figure it out. Eventually I did. MM: You mentioned that the idea all along was you’d have an inker. Did Marvel try to pitch you on inkers? How did your dad come into the picture? You obviously came up with the idea, but did he have to submit samples to Marvel? Did you have to get approval, or did they just trust you? PAOLO: It was an organic situation. Originally, before Daredevil started, I was going to do Amazing Spidey #665 or #666 with Dan 45
Previous Page: The page of preliminary studies Paolo sketched in preparation for his run on Daredevil. Above: On the left is Paolo’s layout for the opening page of Daredevil #1. He imported an image from Google Earth for the first panel and a stock photo for the stained glass windows in the splash panel, though, as you can see in the finished inks on the right, he changed many of the details of the photos in the penciling stage. Daredevil © Marvel Characters, Inc.
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Slott. I had mentioned having my dad inking to Wacker at some point previously in passing. I think I mentioned it to Quesada as well, but they wanted to do something that wasn’t a big deal. We thought that one-issue Spidey would be a good place to start. And then I think I had some personal crap that got in the way, and I fell behind on a bunch of stuff, and couldn’t do that issue, and Daredevil was already stepping up, and I just kind of went at it. Oh, wait, we did one cover, a SpiderMan/Punisher cover for Spectacular Spider-Man #1000, and that was the very first thing my dad inked for Marvel. But prior to that, I had given him plenty of my own inked pages, and just had him print them out in blue line and trace them in ink. MM: For the cover for the first issue of Daredevil, did you do all the lettering? PAOLO: Oh, yeah. That one took me, like, 70 hours. When they first made the announcement about the series and the creative team, I hadn’t finished yet. That was a tough start to the year. I’d gotten super sick around
March, and so I couldn’t finish the cover in time for the debut. I think I finished it in Florida. That whole year started out weird. I got punched on New Year’s Day and ended up in the hospital, and I was incapacitated, basically, for at least a couple of weeks, if not more. I could get around and stuff, I just didn’t feel like working. [laughs] I just felt bad! I think in March, on my birthday, I got some kind of stomach bug. I was totally incapacitated for about a week. So that whole beginning of the year was kind of rough, and I just kept getting more and more behind, and that’s one reason I couldn’t do that Spidey issue. I actually went home to Florida—I was living in New York at the time—and stayed with my parents for a month, both to kind of recuperate, and also to teach my dad how to ink. It was kind of nice to get away from New York out of the cold, and then show my dad how to ink exactly the way I wanted. MM: When you pitched the idea for the cover, did you realize what you were getting into? It was a very nice use of typography.
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Previous Page: The finished cover of Daredevil #1, which took Paolo a whopping 70 hours to complete. Time well spent. Below: Layouts for page 13 of Daredevil #2. Paolo started with a loose sketch of the page (left). He then imported that into Photoshop where he added perspective lines, tightened the drawing in places, and made adjustments. For example, he slid panel two over so that Daredevil is more towards the middle of the page. Daredevil © Marvel Characters, Inc.
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Did you use Photoshop for coloring all of that? It looks like there are gray washes on the background. Did you draw the background separately from the figure? PAOLO: No, that’s all in the original painting. I did a little bit in Photoshop just to kind of mute the colors a bit, but you wouldn’t be able to tell if you looked at it. We were going to do Mythos: Daredevil, but that was cancelled, but that’s what I was going to do for the cover. I had the idea to do the cover years before, and I was just waiting for the chance to use it, and couldn’t have asked for a better chance than that. I knew it was going to take forever, but I knew this was a number one, it was potentially the debut of something big, and it all just worked out. MM: You must have drawn a ton of perspective lines on that, or were you doing a lot of it guesstimating? PAOLO: Oh, yeah, when I draw something like that, I actually draw out the backgrounds. I lay out all of the perspective lines, and then go in with the words and lay them in on top of that. It’s almost like the way you would draw a normal background, it’s just that the finish is different. MM: That opening sequence is one of the best Daredevil sequences ever put down. PAOLO: I had a blast. As soon as I read the script from Mark, I was like, “All right, this guy, he gets it.” I was never a huge Daredevil fan. I liked him, and I’d read “Guardian Devil,” and I’d read “Born Again,” and that was it. Both really awesome stories, but I’d never really read the monthly or anything like that. Even with that, I read Mark’s script and was like, “This guy knows what he’s doing and really loves the character.” The choice of The Spot, the choice of the setting, it was all kind of perfect.
MM: Speaking of The Spot, when you’re drawing him, there’s that one panel where he’s drawn in that 3-D perspective radar sense, and you see all the holes in him. Previous Page and Above: The finished pencils and Joe’s inks for Daredevil #2, page 13. Left: The spot, as he appears to Daredevil in Daredevil #1. Daredevil, The Spot © Marvel Characters, Inc.
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Right: Paolo’s spot inset panel draws attention to the spot where The Spot is about to make his entrance. What a spot on idea! Below: The faux newspaper front page layout for Daredevil #1, page 9, is the perfect endcap to the story’s fun, exciting opening sequence. Next Page: DD discovers the lair of Klaw(s)— who is not quite of sound body—in this two-page spread from Daredevil #2. Daredevil, Klaw, The Spot © Marvel Characters, Inc.
PAOLO: Yeah, that was in the script. That’s kind of what I mean. The way Mark was thinking about it was different, and it immediately made perfect sense to me, and I knew exactly what he wanted. If you gave him a pencil, he may not be able to draw it, but he knew in his mind what he wanted. It’s kind of a perfect pattern between us. MM: You used a lot of circular inset panels, which plays on that spot motif. Was that your idea, or was that in the script as well? PAOLO: I think that was mine. I could look that up in the script, but I’m pretty sure that I did that. It’s funny, when I look back on these pages, I was using a lot of white. I guess it didn’t really occur to me at the time, I was just trying to get it in under deadline, but I ended up liking the overall design, and it’s not necessarily something I’d planned on, but I liked the way it ended up, thanks to Javier Rodriguez, who colored it. MM: Being a painter, did you provide any color notes, or did you leave it up to Javier? PAOLO: Not really. Well, no, I always gave notes, but they were story-related. So there’d be things like, “Make sure his third cane section is always red.” Just really specific stuff like that that’s pertinent information. When I saw those first four pages, when he sent them to me, I hadn’t given it any thought, but obviously in my mind I’d already colored it, because the way he colored was so different than what I had in mind, but I ended up liking it in the long run. It just wasn’t the same way I probably would’ve colored it. I was really happy with him for the entire run. 50
MM: For the radar scenes, were you expecting the magenta line work? PAOLO: I think in the notes I’d said, “Whatever you choose, just keep it consistent.” So he did a great job. Not only does he do that, but if we have a shot of the radar sense with Daredevil, then Daredevil gets toned down to a magenta instead of a bright red. As far as I recall, that was all him.
There’s a great quote, I think it might be Andrew Loomis, but he said, “Draw the unseen ear.” When you’re drawing any character in a three-quarter profile, you only see one ear, but you should know where that other ear is, regardless. Another quote is, “Draw through the figure.” It was a Marvel artist who said that. Even if you’re drawing the figure, and they’re covered up by another figure, you should still know where every appendage of the background figure is, even if you can’t see it. You’re creating a world, not drawing just one image, so you have to make it believable, and the only way to do that is to represent it in three dimensions.
MM: For that second issue, you had to do the same thing that you did with The Spot with the Klaw echo figures, where they were half there and half not. We touched on this when we talked about your sculpting, but did that experience from sculpting and painting in terms of volume help you at all with capturing those shapes? PAOLO: Well, here’s the secret: It’s always like that. When aspiring artists ask me what should they do to get better with anatomy, I always tell them to sculpt. If you don’t have a 3-D image in your mind of what all your characters look like, then you’re not going to be able to draw them from every angle. I’ve got that in my mind, and I still need help. I still need to take reference photos and all that kind of stuff. I’m better than I used to be, but I still require it.
MM: You mentioned the sound effects that Marcos had done in the first issue. Did you take cues from what he did in that backup story? PAOLO: Not so much with the sound effects, but page layout. The main thing I took from him was that, no matter what Mark wrote in the script, I could do whatever I wanted. As long as the story was told, it really didn’t matter. In Marcos’ story, the one that started with a zoo, that was a whole bunch of little panels on the page, and I don’t think Mark said anything like that, but that’s what Marcos wanted to do, so that’s what he ended up doing. It mainly gave me the freedom to experiment, and do whatever it was I wanted to try. 51
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MM: Have you ever really strayed from the script? PAOLO: Not really. If I did, I was a little more cautious about it. I remember in the past, there’d be certain scripts where I’d really struggle to do what they were asking within the way that they asked it. There’d be a certain sequence, and they’d plan it out a certain way, and in a certain number of panels, and I’d try to do it exactly as they said. By the time I started working with Mark, I realized that what’s important is not the panel count or what they’re asking for, it’s just the story, and the certain pace that you want to get, the emotional impact at certain times. Once I realized that, it was kind of a free-for-all. And never just to do it for experiment’s sake, but always in the service of the story. MM: Your cover for issue #7 is probably the most graphic cover I’ve seen you do—starkly graphic. What was your concept? Where did the idea come from? PAOLO: I think it just came to me. Steve Wacker said, “We’re going to do a special Daredevil,” and I was like, “Uh-oh.” It’s not that I’m not sentimental, I just groan a lot. Put it that way. So, as soon as he said that, I groaned, and then I was like, “Okay, here’s how I’m going to do it: Daredevil making a snow angel,” and I drew it, and it was real big—he took up the entire cover, the entire composition. I sent it to Wacker, and he said, “Why don’t we zoom out a bit?” And I did, and that’s what we got. I think he knew what the story was going to be, and I don’t know if I did at that point or not. MM: Was that the first time you had to draw so many kids? PAOLO: Probably. I think I’d drawn kids before. Yeah, that’s really not a thing at Marvel Comics. It’s mostly white people, mostly attractive, and mostly of sexual maturity, I’ll put it that way! [laughter] I’d drawn kids in the background, and there was one kid, I think, who “attacks” Mary Jane in “One Moment in Time.” I did a Books of Doom cover, the fifth one, where I’d drawn a bunch of children being forced to stand with Dr. Doom for a photo op. Other than that, not a whole lot of kids. MM: When it’s a type of figure you’re not used to drawing, do you have to get more reference material than you might normally?
PAOLO: Well, it’s just kind of the standard reference research I do. I think for that one I looked up a lot of kids on field trips. I’m pretty good at this point at finding random apt pictures that I know are out there, but aren’t necessarily on a public forum. I’ll go to Flickr, and I’ll be a total creep, and just look at pictures of kids, and you only have to search for “such-and-such third grade field trip,” or whatever, and you’ll find something. I prefer those because they’re candid photos. I always prefer that to any kind of stock photography. I’ll use stock photography if it’s very specific, and I know exactly what I need, and it’s just something generic I need, but otherwise I always prefer candid shots on Google Image Search. 53
Previous Page: DD escapes the clutches of Klaw in this energetic and wonderfully designed page from Daredevil #3. Inks by Joe Rivera. Above: Paolo went graphic with his cover for Daredevil #7. Notice how the negative space of the snow on the rooftops loosely mimics the shape of a snow angel. Daredevil, Klaw © Marvel Characters, Inc.
Below Left: The blind leading the blind through a sea of white. Daredevil #7, page 9, inked by Joe Rivera. Below Right: A preliminary sketch warming up for Daredevil #7. Next Page: From white to black, DD goes underground where his figure is defined by highlights. Daredevil #9, page 6. Daredevil © Marvel Characters, Inc.
MM: Was it nice to draw a story set in the outdoors, as opposed to the city for a change? PAOLO: If I could, I would draw every single issue outdoors in the snow. [laughter] I did that comic so fast! I told Wacker, “Can I do this every couple of issues from now on?” It was pretty easy, but a lot of fun. I got to try things that are a little bit different, and not draw so many backgrounds. That is kind of the problem, just from a working standpoint: Marvel Comics take place in New York City. That just gets hard to draw after a while. MM: Is it more not trying to repeat yourself all the time—not draw the same buildings every time? PAOLO: It’s about drawing buildings and time. It takes a lot of time to draw all the
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windows, and that’s all New York is. It’s not buildings, it’s windows. MM: In issues #9 and 10, you got away from the city again, but you went underground. There’s a lot of black in those stories. PAOLO: [laughs] It’s the exact opposite, it’s great! It was all freeform. It was all white or all black. MM: How did you figure out how much lighting to do on the figures? A lot of the time, you’re just getting a sliver of lighting on the figures, just enough to give you an idea of who the character is. What went into your lighting choices for that issue? PAOLO: I was trying to go in between reality and the idea of it. So if there was fire or
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Below: Pencils for the Gustave Doré-inspired cover of Daredevil #10. Next Page: A full-size detail shot early in the inking process. Paolo started with Mole Man and then his Moloids, working from the darkest areas to the lighter areas. Daredevil, Mole Man © Marvel Characters, Inc.
any kind of source of light, I would totally use it, and use it as an excuse to make Daredevil look cool, but then if there was supposed to be pitch darkness, I would still draw something, just because we had to tell the story. You had to see where Daredevil was, and the basic setting. Whatever each panel called for, I was just trying to find some kind of solution that would work. MM: Did you have a lot of trial and error, or did it come pretty easily?
PAOLO: Pretty easily, as I recall. Issue #9 was the first one I started doing all digital layouts. I’d just bought a Cintiq, and that made the process pretty easy compared to pencil sketches on 4" x 6". I’ve worked that way ever since. It’s just so much easier to move things around and experiment. The way I worked before with the pencil sketch, I’d do a little thumbnail scratch—chickenscratch, unintelligible to anyone but me— and once I would figure out the panel, I’d try and place that within the page. It’s just a whole lot of trial and error, and you can do trial and error with the digital stuff, but it’s just much more trial and a lot less error. MM: When you started using that process, did you print the layouts out, or use them as a guide off to the side? How do you work it? PAOLO: Even prior to the digital layouts, I would still be doing my perspective guidelines in Photoshop, and I’d print that out on the board, and pencil over the top. Once I started doing digital layouts, I would do an even more refined sketch, also digitally, and then I’d print that out and pencil on top of that. A lot of the real work was being done digitally. That’s kind of the way I’ve continued to work since then. If and when I start doing my own book, I might do the whole thing digitally, just because it’ll be faster. MM: Interesting. That leads us to the cover of issue #10, and as soon as I saw it, I thought Gustave Doré. Were you looking at a bunch of his work for inspiration for that cover? PAOLO: Oh, yeah, definitely. Mark Waid had actually suggested that. He knew the feeling he wanted for those two issues, so he said, “Gustave Doré. That’s perfect.” I knew I couldn’t do the crazy, crazy style for both covers, so on the first one, I just made it as if it was his radar, like a trumped-up version of his radar, and had the one Moloid in relief, and then issue #10 is when I went full out.
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MM: It probably took extra time to add that much detail. Was it an inordinate amount of time you had to put into it? PAOLO: It took about 70 hours, which is about the same amount of time I put in on the first cover. Yeah, it took a while. I remember that week, because my now-wife had left to go somewhere for pretty much the entire week, and I didn’t leave the house. [laughter] Because I did that, and that same week, I did #12, the last cover.
but I thought Daredevil was going to give me a little more leverage than it actually did! [laughs] I said, “I’m going to leave or get a raise,” and well, you know how that ended up. I didn’t expect it to be. I thought they’d give me something, even a little bit. I asked for a lot more, and they basically said, “Absolutely not,” but I thought they’d give me something. They offered me something under certain conditions, like if it sold over a certain amount, and I was like, “Well, it’s not going to, and it’s got nothing to do with me.” [laughter] But I didn’t know, and I even penciled the first five pages of issue #17, or what would become issue #18 maybe, whatever the Coyote story was. Because that whole arc was an idea I wrote out and gave to Mark. It was going to be my story. I was totally into it, but at the same time, I realized what kind of risk I was taking, so I was completely fine with not doing it in the end. I always knew that was going to be a possibility. I had so much fun drawing The Spot in those brief eight pages, that I knew I wanted to draw him again, but make him a little more menacing. I enjoyed reading the story, just as an observer.
MM: There are a lot of figures on that cover too. PAOLO: We’re talking 140 hours, a little over a week. It was balls to the wall, painting or inking! MM: Going into those last two issues of Daredevil, did you know they were going to be your last issues of interior art? PAOLO: No, I didn’t. That was February of 2012, and I knew that my contract was coming up in April. Daredevil was doing way better than I had hoped for, but at the same time, the last couple of years prior to that, I’d asked for a raise, but they told me no. Which was fine, I was still doing all right, 57
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MM: So, no hard feelings? PAOLO: Oh, no. I thought Chris did an amazing job, and Mark did an amazing job, and the only reason I wasn’t involved was my own fault. [laughter] I always have regrets, but that’s in general. [laughter] It’s not that I didn’t order something when I went out to eat! Like I said, I enjoyed the story, I was happy to be a part of it, whatever little bit I could be. MM: I guess that’s kind of why you transitioned into just being a cover artist, basically, because of the contract? PAOLO: Yeah, that was the big transitional year. I’d always gotten offers from other places, I just started accepting them instead of turning them down. MM: But you’ve still done more work for Marvel than anyone else since then. PAOLO: Yeah, mostly. I had two monthly gigs. One was Marvel, Superior Spider-Man Team-Up, which started out as Avenging Spider-
Man, and the other one was Green Hornet for Dynamic Forces. Everything else was just kind of random jobs for Marvel, and one for DC, and a couple for Valiant. But yeah, Marvel was always the primary one. MM: The cover for Daredevil #12, I’m sure everyone looks primarily where you’d expect them to look, at the torso region, but I especially liked the hands you drew in that one. Did you have someone pose for you to get the feel you wanted for that? PAOLO: Oh, I did that myself. I posted the pictures on my blog. It’s just me with little girly hands unbuttoning my shirt. [laughter] The best part of doing those “Wacky Wednesdays,” because it’s hilarious to me while I’m doing it, and it’s funny to me after I’ve done it. [laughter] One of these days, I’m going to do a time-lapsed video of all of the photos I’ve taken of myself. MM: That would be funny. 59
Previous Page: Paolo converts his pencils to blueline in Photoshop and prints that out to ink over. Here are his finished inks with some non-repro blue pencils still showing underneath. Above: Paolo’s many thumbnail layouts for the cover Avenging Spider-Man #15.1, the first cover in his run on the series, and the finished inks. Paolo did his best Steve Ditko impersonation for the flashback scenes reflecting from Dr. Octopus’ tentacles. Daredevil, Dr. Octopus, Mole Man, Spider-Man © Marvel Characters, Inc.
Below: Stop the presses! It’s time to break out the scale model weapons. The cover to Dynamite Entertainment’s Green Hornet #6. Next Page: A lot of blood, sweat, and tears went into this cover for Daredevil #18… but mostly blood. Daredevil © Marvel Characters, Inc. Green Hornet © The Green Hornet, Inc.
PAOLO: I’d actually come up with the idea for that cover as one of the pitches for issue #3, but Wacker had a good point. He said, “When #3 is solicited, no one will have seen the radar sense yet.” So, I was like, “Okay, we’ll save it for something else,” and issue #12 was Samnee’s first issue. It ended up being a date issue, as I recall, so it fit. MM: With the cover for issue #15, I thought it was neat that you used the barbed wire to mimic the radar sense. Was that just an idea you had because of the story, or was that a pitch to you like, “Do something with the barbed wire”? How did that come about? PAOLO: I think either Waid or Wacker had said it was going to be like The Great Escape, which I still to this day haven’t seen. As soon as I looked it up, I saw the barbed
wire fence, and I think I just saw the spiral and thought, “Got it!” MM: Then we get to issue #18, going back to that Coyote story arc, that’s the cover where you showed Daredevil as a circulatory system. PAOLO: I think that was one of the few times I came up with the idea on the phone. Wacker and I didn’t talk all that much, but we would talk to each other occasionally, and he explained what they needed, and I said, “I’ve got it,” and when I explained it to him, he said, “That is not what I expected to come out of your mouth!” [laughter] And I was like, “I know, it’s crazy. Can I do it?” And he’s like, “I guess.” [laughter] Which is why I love Wacker. He kind of let me do whatever I want, which is not that common. That’s why I was sort of disappointed to see he was being promoted out of Marvel. I hope he gets a chance to do something like he did before, but I really don’t know if he will. MM: Did he have a better response once he saw it finished? PAOLO: [laughs] Yeah, he loved it. He trusts me, just because he knows I’m never going to phone it in. If I have a simple idea, I can make it look good. Even if it’s kind of an empty idea, I’ll put something into it that’ll make it worthwhile. MM: Was issue #20 just an excuse to buy more miniature gun replicas? PAOLO: [laughs] Yeah, pretty much. I think that was just everything that I already had. I don’t think I bought anything new for that. MM: [laughs] Just checking! PAOLO: My dad just got me a miniature grenade launcher. I totally could’ve used it. [laughter] I collect cute things, but that’s kind of my one thing where I let myself go. They don’t take up a lot of room, but they look really cool sitting there. MM: We talked earlier about The Twelve, but because of some delays you did the last three issues of the series during this time. I felt those three, in particular, were the most pulpy-looking of the things you’ve done. PAOLO: Yeah, definitely. MM: We already talked about your pulp influence, but was there anything in particular you were looking at when you were coming up with these compositions?
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PAOLO: What it actually was, was that I switched mediums from Holbein Acryla Gouache to just straight gouache. What it meant was, I was painting with a medium that was closer to oil. It’s made by the same company, but the Acryla Gouache is just acrylic paint, so when you put it down and let it dry, it stays there, and there’s nothing you can do about it. I would use it very cautiously, almost like watercolor. To really get that pulpy feel, you have to use thick paint. Not so much where it’s thick in the sense that it’s coming off the page, but thick in the sense that it’s very bold. Like, “I’m going to mix this color and that there,” whereas with a more watercolor/wash approach, you build it up, build it up. So, that was the main change, but also it was just I got better at painting. I could get closer in reality to what I had in my mind. MM: Since then, you’ve done a variety of covers. Are there any that stand out for you, that you particularly like? Are you coloring all your covers, even when you’re doing a penciland-ink thing, rather than painting? PAOLO: Yeah, I’ve colored, I think, everything—definitely all the covers, and almost all the interior work except for Daredevil. MM: And you’re using Photoshop? PAOLO: Yes, it’s all Photoshop. MM: Have you tried Paint or any program like that? PAOLO: No, when it comes to my two different styles, I either like paint or I like flat. MM: I was just talking to Farel Dalrymple for Draw! magazine last week, and he said the exact same thing. Why do you feel that way? PAOLO: If you do a graphic line, and then try to model the surface, I think they’re just competing with each other. Those black outlines are screaming, “We’re flat!” and then you’ve got this fully rounded thigh, and it’s just... why are the lines there at all, basically?
PAOLO: Oh, yeah, that bugs the hell out of me. Those are among the kind of notes I’d send to Javier. I’d be like, “I haven’t drawn it here, but the light’s where it should be from this side,” or something. Sometimes it’s obvious, and other times it’s not. When Chris Samnee got on Daredevil, Javier was still coloring him, but Chris asked him to go even flatter, and just do the two-tone. If I work with Javier again, I’m going to ask him to do the same thing, because I actually like his coloring on Samnee better than what he did on mine.
MM: It seems like, in general, artists who paint are more interested in flat coloring over line art than colorists who only work digitally. PAOLO: Well, I find a lot of digital colorists want to be painters in some sense—they really want to render things. For me, I feel like the rendering has already been done.
MM: There were two more comic covers I wanted to talk about. There are a couple of Guardians of the Galaxy covers you’ve done in the Wally Wood/EC science fiction cover style. PAOLO: Oh, yeah, those were a blast.
MM: Exactly. When you have somebody try to do a lot of lighting effects in the coloring, they’re often working against the lighting of the line art.
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PAOLO: That was all Wacker. He knows I love that kind of stuff. He emailed me, saying, “Here it is, go at it.” And I was like, “Yes!” I think, usually, I’ll send a few sketches; that one, I think I sent one for the first one, one for the second, and maybe a couple for the third. Or maybe for the third, it was the ones I hadn’t used for the first or second, I can’t remember. It was just one of those dream projects for me. I didn’t really know the Guardians of the Galaxy at all, but I decided to have fun with it. MM: Do you think about the inking differently when you’re working on something like that, because you’re trying to emulate a certain look, in this case that lush, Wood inking style? PAOLO: Yeah... I think I’d mentioned it to my dad. I sent him some different examples of Wally Wood and whatnot. I guess I maybe penciled it a certain way, but the differences from my normal style are so subtle that it’s not something I even had to think about consciously.
MM: Do you see trying to get more of that kind of work, or can you even pitch for that kind of stuff? Does that kind of have to come to you? PAOLO: It just comes to me. It’d be awesome if more of it came. I don’t really seek it out, except for that first time, and I’m kind of letting it dribble in. What I’m hoping is that The Young Ones poster is actually going to be a real movie poster, instead of a cast-&-crew thing. If it’s actually distributed, it’ll actually be in theaters. The hope is that I might get more work from that than the Marvel movie stuff. We’ll wait and see. I’m in no hurry to do it. I always love it when they call, but it’s not something I seek out because I’ve got other stuff that I want to try and get done.
MM: What have you got coming up in cover work? You’re working on Superior Spider-Man still? PAOLO: I’m on my last one. I’m actually kind of in a weird state right now where I’m trying to finish up a bunch of random stuff, and I’m also trying to plan the rest of the year. So, immediately, I’ve got random covers here and there, a couple of things from Valiant, and I’m doing a Captain America/Black Widow cover for Marvel today! The big thing I’ve started this year out with was a movie poster for The Young Ones— it’s by Jake Paltrow of Gwyneth Paltrow fame. I got the job because I did the Iron Man 3 cast-&-crew poster that they gave to Gwyneth Paltrow, and she had it hanging in her house, I guess. He saw it, and said, “Who is this guy? Can I contact him?” and that’s how I got the job. MM: One thing leads to another. That’s pretty cool. You never know where it might lead you. PAOLO: Exactly. That whole movie poster thing I started with back in 2010. I just did a Captain America movie piece on spec, and that got me the Captain America 1 poster, which got me the Iron Man 3 poster. I just did the Captain America 2 poster, and the Iron Man 3 poster led to me doing The Young Ones. 63
Previous Page: This Guardians of the Galaxy variant cover is an homage to the fantastic Wally Wood covers for EC’s Incredible Science-Fiction and Weird Science-Fantasy, complete with the rocket blasting off on the lefthand side. Below: Paolo’s Captain America/Black Widow variant cover for New Avengers #17. Black Widow, Captain America, Guardians of the Galaxy © Marvel Characters, Inc.
Part 5:
Storytelling and the Creative Process
MM: Do you try to get up early, or are you more of a late night guy? How do you schedule your work? PAOLO: I’m naturally more of a night owl, but ever since I started living with my wife—I think 2011 is when we moved in together—I’ve tried to stay on her schedule, and she has a normal work day. So, at this point, I get up around 7:30, but my mind isn’t ready to do anything until about 8:00. So, I just try and eat, and lately I’ve been studying Spanish, because I want to know it. [laughs] I did it for every year of school ever, almost, and I don’t know it, so
I’m kind of disappointed in myself. [laughter] Today I did it for about 45 minutes in the morning. From there I work until about noon, doing whatever it is I need to do. Today I spent an hour just packing up and shipping things. I need to work on that. Work until noon, have lunch... it usually takes me about an hour to actually get back to work, then I’ll work until, basically, my wife gets home. And I have like a third work shift after dinner until I go to bed. It can be anything from just answering emails, to blogging, to something I’ve been meaning to do for a while. Lately, it’s been writing, to try and write my own story. It’s kind of an eight-hour work day, plus something extra tacked on the end. MM: During that extra time, do you try to say, “I’m doing things other than drawing during this period,” to give yourself a breather? PAOLO: It really depends on what’s pressing at the moment. Right before I went to Amsterdam, I was trying desperately to finish that Young Ones poster, and I was painting nonstop for a week. I haven’t calculated how many hours it took me yet, but there was a week where I was just solid painting, every waking hour. That’s why I don’t paint any more, it just takes so much freaking time. I’ll have one idea, and I’ll be like, “Oh, I’ll turn that into something,” then you just get tired of that idea. It’s kind of not worth the time you put into it, I guess. MM: But it sounds like you do a pretty good job of keeping track of how long you’ve put into a job. PAOLO: Oh, yeah, definitely. I’m about to do a blog post about it. I use iCal, the standard calendar that comes on a Mac, and I link it to Google Calendars. Aside from putting it in the cloud and making it accessible from any device, it allows me to use this other website that will actually tally the hours for each job. So, I use my iCal not so much as an appointment book, but more as a log. And a to-do list—it’s like a cross between the two. I put in a block of time, and I’ll put what the project is, and the aspect, whether it’s layout, pencils, sketching, or painting, or coloring, and I’ll label each one. Once a month, I go to this website and 64
they’ll tally it all up for me. So I have good records on everything going back to, oh, maybe 2007? Maybe before. Almost down to the hour, after a certain point. MM: Is there a point where you say, “I’ve put way too many hours into this. I’ve got to find a way to finish it off now?” PAOLO: Not specifically, but I must get that feeling at some point. It always happens when I’m painting. I’ll get to the point where it doesn’t need more work, and, “You need to start on the next thing. There’s a deadline coming.” With the Young Ones poster, it started to look done pretty quickly, but I just pored over the portraits, just hours and hours, making the most minute changes to everybody’s face, eyes, mouth, nostrils, whatever, and who knows if it made it any better. [laughs] After a certain point, you can’t see it, so that is one reason I try to break up projects. I try to work on several things at once, because when I do get tired of one thing, I can switch to the other, but you don’t always have that luxury. MM: I should’ve asked this before, but for the poster you’re doing, what size are you working at? PAOLO: 16" x 24". I actually would’ve preferred to work larger, but 16" x 24" is the biggest I can do and still get it scanned in two pieces. Bigger than that, it’s just hard to manage. I’ve got space for 16" x 24" pieces. Right now, I’ve got two Captain America posters, and then this Young Ones poster, and they don’t take up too much space. I’m not willing to part with them unless it’s for tons and tons of money, and nobody’s offered. [laughter] So I’ll just keep them. I’m pretty excited about the Captain America 2 poster, because they wanted something like a ’70s political thriller, and I did a bunch of sketches, a lot of them I liked, but in the end, what they went for was kind of the joke one, which was a 1975 Bond poster by McGinnis. It’s not figure for figure, but there are a lot of elements in it, like the border, and the lettering, and the tiny figures that are just crazy ’70s colors. It’s not all-out ’70s, but it’s pretty ’70s. It was just a lot of fun, and I got to paint it at 16" x 24", which is just nice to work a little bit bigger. MM: What about your workspace? Do you have a separate painting area from your drawing area, or is it all more or less together?
PAOLO: It’s all together now. We moved to San Francisco last summer, and now I have a dedicated studio. We have a two-bedroom, and I take up the other bedroom. It looks kind of like crap now, but it’s on its way to being my ideal workstation. I just got two Craftsmen tool chests, and they’re the best. I don’t really roll them much, but I could if I wanted, and one’s got a middle chest on top of it, and they all have what are essentially big flat files, but for half the price. If you look up flat files, they always gouge you, but if you put a Craftsmen logo on it and call it something else, it’s the same product at way less money. They’re big and metal and red, and I just love them. [laughter] Actually, I’ve got two of them. One is the painting workstation. I have a big two-and-a-half gallon container of distilled water which I use as a faucet whenever I need brush water or palette water. The other tool chest has all of my packing and shipping supplies and printing supplies. 65
Previous Page: Pencils for the cover of Mythos: Captain America. Above: Painted head sketches for Mythos: Hulk. Paolo painted the book in gray tones, which he then scanned and colored in Photoshop, so he included his “palette”—a gray tone chart—at the bottom of the page. Captain America, Hulk, and all related characters © Marvel Characters, Inc.
Below: Paolo’s digitally drawn layout for a page intended for Daredevil #17 which wasn’t used. Each panel is done on a separate layer to make it easier to adjust them if the layout isn’t working. The text is on its own layer as well. Next Page: Inks for Paolo’s one-page story for the Little Nemo: Dream a Little Dream anthology book. Daredevil © Marvel Characters, Inc.
Where I actually do the work is a drafting table that I’ve had since my parents’ store in the ’80s. I keep it flat and high, so it’s a standing desk, and on top of that I have my computer and my Cintiq. I have a pullout tray for my keyboard. Next to that I have a slanted drawing board that’s kind of cantilevered off the table. And behind that is my gun rack! [laughter] MM: What about your computer set-up? You said you’re doing a lot more stuff on the Cintiq now. How has that changed? Has it become a bigger part of your set-up now? PAOLO: Since 2012 when I got the first one, I’ve had pretty much the same set-up. The first one I had was the 12". Now I have the 13", and it just sits right in front of my computer, so it’s almost like a second screen.
The keyboard’s right below that, so I can use all of my Photoshop hot keys and whatnot. My 27"¸ iMac pretty much does everything I want. I’ll probably be in the market for a new one in a few years, because this one’s starting to seem slow. But you know, computers are fast enough now where a new one doesn’t really blow my mind when I get it in terms of speed. For a while there, there were literally things you couldn’t do because the computer wasn’t fast enough. But at this point it’s finally catching up—unless I start doing video stuff, or things like that. I have noticed when I do my video tutorials, it’s pretty taxing on my computer. MM: What about Photoshop? Do you have specific palettes set up, or do you make it up depending on what you’re doing? PAOLO: I experimented with using a bigger palette, but there are really only about twelve colors, and once you have those, it’s fine. And then there’s a hot key where you can press down three buttons, and it’ll bring up an onscreen color picker, and if I have to do any subtle changes to colors, I’ll use that instead of a big palette. I think they came up with that in Photoshop 5, and that makes things a lot easier. It’s like a heads-up display, instead of it being off to the side. MM: You said you do your layouts digitally, and then go into the penciling. You’re thinking about doing the whole thing digitally now, so how do you think that will change how you work, once you get to that point? Have you experimented with that at all yet? PAOLO: Not yet. There’s a Little Nemo anthology that’s coming up called Little Nemo: Dream a Little Dream, and I’m doing one page for that. I’m going to try doing it all digitally. I just got Manga Studio 5, and I don’t really know how to use it yet, but I’m planning to learn on that particular project. As far as working digitally, I’ve done it for different projects already, so I can get a pretty decent final product that I’m happy with. The reason I’m thinking about doing it for my own book is mostly because I don’t need to worry about creating original art that I can sell, but in the back of my mind, that’s why I never went all the way digital with Marvel, because it’s like, I don’t know, a third of my income, and I don’t think doing it digitally I would get so much faster that it would make up that third. It might make up a little bit, but not a third—definitely not.
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something that’s kind of in that vein. I had an idea in the mid-2000s about this character that is a robot that ends up killing its own creator accidentally. That was the core scene that everything built around. There’s much more to it now, but at this point, it’s a rumination on the ship of Theseus. Have you heard about that? MM: It sounds Greek to me. PAOLO: [laughs] Exactly. Theseus was a mythological figure who had a ship. The story gained popularity because of a Greek historian and philosopher, Plutarch. Basically, the idea is that you have a ship, and if over time you replace every part of that ship, is it still the same ship? That basic idea [called “the ship of Theseus” or “Theseus’ paradox”] has been around for a very long time, and this story is kind of an exploration of that. They usually introduce it as a paradox, and I don’t think it’s a paradox at all. I think that the paradox comes from the way we think about things, rather than the way things actually are. The story is about what happens when one character gets duplicated, then has to fight itself, basically.
Above: Paolo’s made this model of an Alien facehugger from Elasticlay. It has bendable armature! Next Page: These drawings for The Marvels Project were intended to mimic the sketch book pages of a scientist, but they reflect Paolo’s own thought process (Paolo wrote the text himself) when creating and designing new characters. Alien © 20th Century Fox Film Corp. Sea Soldier © Marvel Characters, Inc.
With this one, who knows how it’s going to do? It might do great, it might suck, and I might have 200-some odd pages that I’ll never sell. In that particular case, it pays for me to just do it as quickly as possible, rather than try to create an original piece of line art. MM: Can you talk about your idea yet, at least in general terms? PAOLO: I’ve always loved sci-fi. I love super-heroes, but I think I love the sci-fi aspect of them. That’s maybe why I’ve been more attracted to Marvel comics in the past than, say, DC—although I haven’t read enough DC. There might be stuff that would give me the same effect. Anyway, I’ve always liked sci-fi movies, so I’ve really wanted to do 68
MM: So it’s basically Superman IV. [laughter] PAOLO: Exactly! I’ve never thought about it that way, but in some way, I have, because the main character, the robot, she’s got the Superman problem, where you’re basically invulnerable, so the story has to revolve around something else that people care about. The main challenge for me has been to come up with something that will have that emotional impact when the status of the hero is not in question. I finally figured out how to do it, but it took me a while to figure out what the main conflict is, because there’s definitely conflict, but the conflict comes from where your loyalties lie, and what you’re going to do to save someone when your life isn’t necessarily at risk. The other main question is, if people are given the chance for immortality, will they take it? I think they will, undoubtedly, because it’s kind of what we’re programmed to do, and I wanted to explore the ramifications of a species that had finally achieved it, but then didn’t quite know what to do when their brains started to rot. [laughs] That’s a whole bunch of philosophy, not a lot of story. The big story is five robots, one creator, they run out of fuel, and they have to go find fuel, and in the course of finding fuel,
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certain secrets about their origins are revealed that change the dynamic of the whole group. MM: That sounds very interesting. Have you thought about how you’re going to get it out there, as far as a platform? Are you going to try Kickstarter? Are you going to try to do it as a graphic novel or miniseries first? PAOLO: My initial idea was to do a graphic novel. I toyed with the idea of doing Kickstarter, but at this point I’m pretty confident that I can put it out through Image, and the way I started writing it was to break it up into single issues. It started out as a five-act graphic novel, and now I’ve split each act into two issues, so it would be ten issues. But I want to do the first one double-sized and the last one double-sized, so a total of eight issues with the first and last being 44 pages. MM: Wow, ambitious! PAOLO: It is pretty crazy! [laughter] There’s no doubt about it. I’m about halfway through writing it now; I’ve got it all plotted out. I want to have a finished script so that I can send it to my friends, like Mark Waid, and ask them if it sucks, and then go from there. My goal right now is to get a polished halfway done script that I can send to Mark, have him read it and tell me what sucks by March 12, when I see him in Mexico City. MM: That sounds great! Has the recent Image upsurge given you more confidence in the project? PAOLO: Yeah, most definitely. I think it was part of something that had already started to happen by 2012. I saw what was happening at Marvel—and this is nothing new; it’s not like something no one else did—but it was just the slow realization over ten years that, not that they treated me badly, but they’d treat me exactly the same for the next ten years, and so if I was going to make any kind of change in my career, I had to make it myself. July 2012 was my own personal deadline. There was a ten-year mark, and I was like, “Okay, it’s going to be easier to break out on my own now than it will be later when I have more responsibilities, like children.” But above and beyond that, Image is going gangbusters right now. I’ve already contacted them. I’ve spoken to Ron Richards, their director of business development, and I know that they’re looking at me, so that’s why I have more confidence than maybe I would otherwise. Also, Robert Kirkman con-
tacted me last year about possibly working together, and I told him I was working on something of my own, and I wanted to get that done before I tried anything else, but that I would get back to him as soon as that thing was ready. MM: So he might pull some strings there to get you to work with him. PAOLO: Yeah, it could happen. I’m not opposed to working with anyone, basically. This is just an itch I have to scratch, and I have to do it now as opposed to later. This is just the easiest time for me. So yes, the goal for me is to get it ready to go by next year. I went to the comic shop one day, just randomly—there’s one close by in my neighborhood—and I heard the cashier talking about the Image Expo, and I was like, “What’s that?” It turned out it was going on that day, so I couldn’t go to that, but I went to the after-party later on, and learned more about the Image Expo and everything. I decided that night I wanted to be in their announcements next year. 71
Previous Page: More character creation for The Marvels Project. Above: Sepia tone painting done for a cover as part of Hero Initiative’s The Walking Dead #100 Project. Air Soldier © Marvel Characters, Inc. The Walking Dead © Robert Kirkman, LLC.
Below: Pencils for the header art for Paolo’s blog, The Self-Absorbing Man (www.paolorivera. blogspot.com). Right: Tom Brevoort drew this digital thumbnail sketch to show Paolo what he wanted for the cover of the Marvel 75th Anniversary Omnibus. In case you can’t read the notes: 1) Logo. 2) The heroes and events of the Marvel Universe play out in panorama behind Peter. 3) Young early Ditko bespectacled Peter Parker reads Marvel Comics #1 from 1939. 4) Actual front and back cover (recreated?) to Marvel Comics #1. For more, here’s Paolo: “For this particular cover, I was given a very rough sketch by my editor, Tom Brevoort. Although drawn with just a mouse, it was enough to get the idea across. In the vast majority of cases, I would create a few rough layouts from which to choose. Since 2012, I’ve been doing all my preliminary work in Photoshop on a Cintiq (currently the 13HD).” All characters © Marvel Characters, Inc.
MM: Well, good luck with it. Maybe if you get more of those movie posters, it will help fund you through the end of this year, and you won’t need to do as much busy work to pay the bills. PAOLO: The thing is, I’ve been saving up for this thing for a while. At first, I was just not going to work for three years, and get it done. Now I’m realizing that it’ll be much easier if I do it issue by issue. That way I can draw the next issue while I’m getting paid for the last two. That’s really my goal now. I mean, that’s what comics already do. It’s a good business model, because you can often sell things two or three times, and it’s the same exact material—it kind of acts as its own advertising. If I put something out there, I won’t be a first-time artist, but I’ll be a first-time writer, and there’s no reason why anyone should read it. So what I’m hoping is that the first issue is good, and it will build that kind of momentum, so people will start reading. It’ll essentially be a miniseries. MM: You’ve mentioned your blog a few times during our conversations. When did you start it? What was the impetus to start it? Do you look at it as a marketing tool? PAOLO: Yeah, at first. It started in 2007 as just a way of getting my name and my work out there on a more regular basis, because I was painting so slowly. It bothered me that people would assume I wasn’t doing anything! Comics are really rude like that. I’ll see something of mine solicited, and then somebody will go, “Oh, Paolo’s back!” and I didn’t leave! It was just an easy way to put stuff out there every week, and just show people that I wasn’t completely gone. It’s served a lot of purposes: marketing, feeding my desire to be a ham. All the way around, it’s worked out really well. And also, people would contact me and ask me questions, and it was just an easy way to answer more questions more easily, because people were always asking for advice, like how to break in. I would rather answer someone’s question and let everyone read it than answer that one person’s email. MM: You sound like you’re pretty analytical about what you do. Do you think that’s helped you figure things out, by doing the blog?
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PAOLO: Yeah, it certainly forced me to think things through in a way I normally wouldn’t. I do tend to think that way anyway, but it’s one thing to think that way, and it’s another to express that to another person. It does certainly help to clarify things, and think about it in a way that I wouldn’t if I was just painting. Occasionally, it’s really nice. I just got a blog comment from somebody— I can’t remember what they have, but essentially, they have tremors—and they, for obvious reasons, didn’t want to ink their own work, but they still like to draw. I’d done a blog post about inking where I described having a big brush as being beneficial because it acts as a shock absorber. I hadn’t really thought about it like that, but for a lot of people, they think “big brush—scary.” We corresponded a bit through the blog, and he got the brushes I suggested, and he said, “This is like a miracle!” Stuff like that would never happen without the blog. That person might never even go to a con, so stuff like that makes me really happy. That doesn’t happen all the time, but when it does, it’s really fascinating.
This Page: Paolo continued: “I refined the sketch further, trying to decide between a montage approach and panel divisions. The panels won in the end for various reasons. For one, montages are fairly common, so I thought it would be a more novel look. Color was another major factor. Because the image required so many characters, each with their own distinctive hues, it would be easier to modulate the patchwork with clearly defined borders. “The characters included were completely up to me, so I just drew my favorites in whatever situation or pose came to mind. Some were based on particular covers or panels, even my favorite Marvel corner boxes. Brevoort also provided me with highresolution scans of Marvel Comics #1, which the Ditko-era Peter Parker was to be reading. I superimposed these in Photoshop in order to save time. “Because I planned to print the composition onto the final art board, most of the drawing was done digitally. I collected reference as I needed it, including photos taken of myself with my iMac’s webcam. Although not ideal for most photography, it gives me just enough information to get anatomy and lighting right.”
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Paolo: “Once the drawing was sufficiently detailed, I printed out the image onto 13" x 19" Strathmore 500 Series Bristol board, vellum surface, 3-ply. The thickness, coupled with the fact that it’s made from cotton, prevents any warping from my water-based paints. It can often be tough to get through the printer, but it’s well worth the effort. Before printing, I modified the image with a Hue/Saturation/Brightness adjustment layer to make every line a light yellow or sienna. This allowed me to see the image initially, but wasn’t strong enough to show through after paint was applied. “I typically paint with Holbein gouache, watercolor, and acrylic. Almost every painting begins with an underpainting in Sepia, Burnt Umber, or Burnt Sienna gouache. I tend to work very thinly, leaving the thickest strokes for the end. This approach is faster for me, since I can cover a wider area very quickly, but can still zoom in and detail certain areas. I paint with a Winsor & Newton Series 7 brush, #3 and #6, and sometimes my collection of Silver Brush Black Velvets, a natural/synthetic hair blend. “Since this was a detail-heavy composition, much of the color was blocked in with watercolor washes. These can be applied right over the monochromatic layout without disturbing the paint below.”
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Paolo: “The two main figures, Peter Parker and Spider-Man, have more opaque passes than the background. This required mixing specific tints and shades prior to application. I use a Masterson Sta-Wet Palette for this process, which prevents the paint from drying and can be sealed up to keep it fresh for days or weeks. The palette paper rests upon a sponge that I keep saturated with distilled water. “The gutters were kept clean with 1/ 8" masking tape, but the final panel borders were rendered in Photoshop. I also adjusted the levels and color balance, mainly to give the background panels a similar cast, unifying the lot and pushing them back in space. “In the end, the cover required 127.5 hours to finish—35 hours were spent drawing and coloring in the computer, 91¼ painting, and 1¼ editing in Photoshop. It was a long project, but easily one of the most rewarding and well-received covers I’ve done. Marvel even liked it enough to use it on two separate books.”
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Page 77: A 2009 commissioned painting of Emma Frost, the White Queen. Page 78: Painting for the cover of Spectacular Spider-Man #14 (July 2004). Page 79: (clockwise from top left) A 2010 commission of Hellboy done in acrylic, gouache, and watercolor. “Precious Cargo”—a 2012 poster-sized print done completely in Photoshop. A 2013 variant cover for Blackout #1 done in Photoshop. A 2009 piece drawn and painted on the day Disney announced it had purchased Marvel Comics. Previous Page: A poster made for the cast and crew of Captain America:The Winter Soldier, painted in gouache, watercolor, and acrylic. Above and Next Page Top: Comps and preliminary sketches for the cast-and-crew poster of Captain America:The First Avenger. Next Page Bottom: Paolo drew this sketch idea for a Marvel Universe poster in ballpoint pen on the back of an Olive Garden order form in the summer of 2002. Paolo was working at Olive Garden that summer (and the two previous) about to enter his senior year at RISD. Paolo was soon too busy finishing school and working on other projects for Marvel, so the image was never finished, and the poster project was dropped. Page 83: 2006 pencil sketches of the sculptures of Degas done at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Black Widow, Captain America, Falcon, Nick Fury, Red Skull, Spider-Man, White Queen, and all related characters © Marvel Characters, Inc. Hellboy © Mike Mignola. Blackout © Dark Horse Comics, Inc. Mickey Mouse © Disney Enterprises, Inc.
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Previous Page: Sketches done in preparation for Mythos: Ghost Rider. Above: Head sketches for the title page of Mythos: Ghost Rider. Right: Layout for page 19 of Mythos: Fantastic Four. Below: Detail of the pencils for page 22 of Mythos: Spider-Man. All characters © Marvel Characters, Inc.
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This Page: Sketches of the Punisher done in preparation for Amazing Spider-Man #577. Next Page: Design studies for the backup story in Amazing Spider-Man: Extra! #2. Page 88: More design studies for Amazing Spider-Man: Extra! #2. Page 89: Inks and tones for the cover of Wolverine #5.1. Page 90: Inks for Young Allies Comics 70th Anniversary Special, page 2—a flashback montage. Page 91: The Kingpin plans revenge in these pencils for page 6 of Amazing Spider-Man #640. Page 92: A beautiful splash page from Amazing Spider-Man #640. Page 93: Mary Jane’s nightmare. Paolo’s inks for page 10 of Amazing Spider-Man #641. Page 94: Layouts for the first four pages of Daredevil #2, done on a standard 11" x 14" Bristol board. Page 95: Page 4 of Daredevil #2. Inks by Joe Rivera. Pages 96–97: Pages 2 and 3 of Daredevil #2. Inks by Joe Rivera. All characters © Marvel Characters, Inc.
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Previous Page: Daredevil in the grip of Klaw! The closing splash page of Daredevil #2. Inks by Joe Rivera. Above: A Kirby-rific flashback montage panel from Daredevil #3. Inks by Joe Rivera. Pages 100–101: A suitably creepy two-page spread from Daredevil #9. Inks by Joe Rivera. Page 102: Paolo’s design studies of Coyote. While Paolo didn’t get to draw the Coyote story, he did put a lot of thought into the character and his costume. The costume design is meant to reference The Spot, from whom Coyote derives his powers, but without it being obvious. So those aren’t actually triangles on his costume. Paolo explains: “I inverted the old Spot costume: mostly black instead of mostly white, his portal spots dominating to the point where the negative white shapes became positive. This left me with a pinched triangle motif that I employed on the eyes, hands, and chest. Eventually, I treated the spots as giant discs that were draped over his body, peeling up to form sartorial embellishments.” Page 103: Variant cover for the relaunched Daredevil #1 (2014). Inks by Joe Rivera. Pages 104–109: Design sketches and turnarounds for the Ultimate Spider-Man cartoon. Page 110: Variant cover for Wolverine MAX #1. Inks by Joe Rivera. Page 111: Not an Army of Darkness cover, but it should be! Page 112: Pencils for the variant cover of Avengers #34. Page 113: Inks for Paolo and now-wife April’s wedding invitation. Have fun going through the guest list! Avengers, Coyote, Daredevil, Doctor Octopus, Klaw, Mary Jane Watson, Spider-Man, Wolverine © Marvel Characters, Inc. Army of Darkness © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Inc.
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All characters © their respective owners
Right and Below: Variant covers for Guardians of the Galaxy #5 and #7 based on Wally Wood’s covers for EC’s Incredible Science-Fiction and Weird Science-Fantasy. Inks by Joe Rivera. Next Page: Paolo contributed this piece to the 2013 “It Didn’t Rot Our Brains” show hosted by Mondo Gallery in Austin, Texas. The show was a tribute to EC Comics and their Tales from the Crypt, but Paolo went the sci-fi route. Page 116: Cover art for Green Hornet #8. Inks by Joe Rivera. Page 117: Variant cover for Miracleman #3, reprinting the classic Alan Moore (a.k.a., The Original Writer) series. Guardians of the Galaxy, Miracleman © Marvel Characters, Inc. Weird Science ™ William M. Gaines, Agent, Inc. Miracleman © Marvel Characters, Inc.
Page 118: Variant cover for Hawkeye #10, featuring Iron Man in armor based on his second costume. Inks by Joe Rivera. Page 119: Cover art for Superior SpiderMan Team-Up #7. Inks by Joe Rivera. Chameleon, Electro, Iron Man, Mysterio, Sandman, Spider-Man,Vulture © Marvel Characters, Inc.
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Previous Page: Pencils for Paolo’s—and writer Ivan Brandon’s—story for Batman: Black & White vol. 4 #5. Above: Joe Rivera’s inks (left) and Paolo’s edits to the inks (right). Seeing them inked, Paolo wasn’t entirely happy with his pencils, so he added detail, particularly to the clouds, to strengthen the composition of individual panels and the overall page. Right: The finished artwork. Paolo added the gray tones and panel borders digitally. In panel 1, he also knocked out the figure of Batman enveloped in the rocket’s exhaust. Page 122: Pencils for a variant cover of Five Ghosts #7. Page 123: Cover art for the Madman 3-D Special. Inks by Joe Rivera. Page 124: Variant cover for Ryan Browne’s God Hates Astronauts #4. Browne is a former college classmate and roommate of Paolo. Paolo inked this himself and went a bit more organic in his textures than usual. Page 125: More God Hates Astronauts! Paolo created this poster to be an incentive for Browne’s Kickstarter campaign to print the series as a hardcover collection. Again, Paolo inked this himself and really went to town with his Winsor & Newton Series 7 #6 brush. Batman © DC Comics. Five Ghosts © Frank Barbiere and Chris Mooneyham. Madman © Michael Allred. God Hates Astronauts © Ryan Browne.
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Paolo’s N.C. Wyeth-inspired “Wolverine Appreciation Month” cover for Ms. Marvel #38. Next Page: The cover for Superior Spider-Man Team-Up #1, inked by Joe Rivera. Avengers, Cyclops, Sentinels, Superior Spider-Man, Wolverine © Marvel Characters, Inc.
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THE MODERN MASTERS BOOK/DVD SERIES MODERN MASTERS DVDs GEORGE PÉREZ
Get a PERSONAL TOUR of George’s studio, and watch STEP-BY-STEP as the fan-favorite artist illustrates an issue of WITCHBLADE! Also, see George sketch for fans at conventions, and hear his peers and colleagues— including MARV WOLFMAN and RON MARZ—share Pérez anecdotes and insights!
MICHAEL GOLDEN
Go behind the scenes into Michael Golden’s studio for a LOOK INTO THE CREATIVE MIND of one of comics’ greats. This DVD provides an exclusive look at the ARTIST AT WORK, as he DISCUSSES THE PROCESSES he undertakes to create a new comics series.
Modern Masters: ALAN DAVIS
Modern Masters: GEORGE PÉREZ
Modern Masters: BRUCE TIMM
Modern Masters: KEVIN NOWLAN
by Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905191 (Digital Edition) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: JAN073903
by Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905252 (Digital Edition) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: JAN073904
by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 ISBN: 9781893905306 (Digital Edition) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: MAY121305
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Modern Masters: GARCÍA-LÓPEZ
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Modern Masters: JOHN BYRNE
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by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905443 (Digital Edition) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: APR053191
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by Roger Ash & Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $5.95
by Todd Dezago & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $5.95
Modern Masters: KEVIN MAGUIRE
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Modern Masters: MICHAEL GOLDEN
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by George Khoury & Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905665 (Digital Edition) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: OCT063722
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by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 ISBN: 9781893905849 (Digital Edition) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: JUL091086
(Standard Format DVDs) $19.95 each (Bundled with the matching MODERN MASTERS book) $29.95 each
Edited by ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON, these trade paperbacks and DVDs are devoted to the BEST OF TODAY’S COMICS ARTISTS! Each book contains RARE AND UNSEEN ARTWORK direct from the artist’s files, plus a COMPREHENSIVE INTERVIEW (including influences and their views on graphic storytelling), DELUXE SKETCHBOOK SECTIONS, and more!
Modern Masters: MARK SCHULTZ
Modern Masters: MIKE ALLRED
Modern Masters: LEE WEEKS
Modern Masters: JOHN ROMITA JR.
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by Fred Perry & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905856 (Digital Edition) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: OCT073846
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by George Khoury & Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905955 (Digital Edition) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: MAY084166
by Roger Ash & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781605490076 (Digital Edition) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: SEP084304
Modern Masters: KYLE BAKER
Modern Masters: CHRIS SPROUSE
Modern Masters: MARK BUCKINGHAM
Modern Masters: GUY DAVIS
Modern Masters: JEFF SMITH
by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781605490083 (Digital Edition) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: SEP084305
by Todd Dezago & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 97801605490137 (Digital Edition) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: NOV084298
by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 ISBN: 9781605490144 (Digital Edition) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: NOV090929
by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 ISBN: 9781605490236 (Digital Edition) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: AUG091083
by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 ISBN: 9781605490243 (Digital Edition) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: DEC101098
NEW!
Modern Masters: FRAZER IRVING
Modern Masters: RON GARNEY
Modern Masters: ERIC POWELL
Modern Masters: CLIFF CHIANG
Modern Masters: PAOLO RIVERA
by Nathan Wilson & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 ISBN: 9781605490397 (Digital Edition) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: MAY111225
by George Khoury & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 ISBN: 9781605490403 (Digital Edition) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: OCT111232
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by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 ISBN: 9781605490601 (Digital Edition) $5.95 Ships February 2015
More MODERN MASTERS are coming soon. Check our website for release dates and updates!
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BACK ISSUE! (8 issues)
$67
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TwoMorrows.A New Day For Comics Fans! TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 E-mail: store@twomorrows.com • Visit us on the Web at www.twomorrows.com
PAOLO RIVERA Eisner and Harvey Award-winning Paolo Rivera grew up in his parents’ art store, so it’s no wonder his life’s path is that of an artist. And not just your runof-the-mill comic book artist, but a painter, penciler, inker, colorist, and sculptor—Paolo does it all! From the pulp magazine feel of Mythos to the cinematic adventure of Spider-Man and the sleek stylings of Daredevil, Paolo brings a fresh storytelling approach to each project he illustrates. And his grand sense of design is on full display in the many covers he’s drawn. Whether he’s wielding a paint brush or a pencil, Paolo’s thoughtful work shows he has the Modern Masters touch! MODERN MASTERS is an ongoing series of books celebrating the lives and work of the greatest comic book artists of our time. ISBN-13: 978-1-60549-060-1 ISBN-10: 1-60549-060-1 51595
$15.95 In the US
ISBN
978-1-60549-060-1 9 781605 490601
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