Fantastic Four ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.
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
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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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.
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
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
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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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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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.
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
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.
Paolo Rivera
Art Gallery 77
IF YOU ENJOYED THIS PREVIEW, CLICK THE LINK BELOW TO ORDER THIS BOOK!
MODERN MASTERS: PAOLO RIVERA Eisner and Harvey Award-winner 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 run-of-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! Eric Nolen-Weathington goes behind the scenes with Paolo to explore his career and his technique with access to his archives of published and unpublished work, including an extensive gallery of commissioned pieces, many in in full-color. (120-page trade paperback with COLOR) $15.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781605490601 http://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=1190
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