comicfoundry.com » 2005» May

How the DEAD WEST Was Won

Rick Spears burst into the comics scene with Rob G (artist) with Teenager From Mars, a monster hit (pun intended). Rick and Rob self-published the book after being left in the cold by every major publisher. The duo didn’t have that problem with their newest graphic novel, Dead West, because instead of pitching it to other companies, they decided to start their own. Rick talked with CF about Dead West and what he’s doing differently this time around.

What did you learn in film school that’s served you in the comics field?

Film school got me thinking visually, you know, “Show, don’t tell.” Comics and film are both visual story mediums and so you want your stories to unfold through images. Film school really drills that into you, and it’s served me well.

What weren’t you prepared for?

I was a Boy scout. I’m always prepared.

How did you meet up with artist/collaborator Rob G.? How did you build that professional relationship?

Macon (who, yes, is a real guy) was friends with Rob’s roommate, and they put us together.

To this day, the hardest part of comics for me is finding the right collaborator. Artists can be a tricky bunch to navigate, and a lot of the ones I’ve talked to just can’t cut it, either on skill level or more frequently because of a lazy work ethic. It took a year to find Rob, but once we came together it was gold. We’ve worked together very well right from the beginning.

What are the biggest challenges of self-publishing?

Well, money is always the bitch. Our books sell very well for independent books, but still that doesn’t leave much after all the costs are deducted. Comics as a whole is a sort of depressed medium. Even the big guys have to deal with that, but for independent books with a smaller cut of the market it’s that much worse. So we have to be very smart with all of our choices and savvy with how we spend money.

Press is another one. With little money for advertising you have to really work all the angles, get the reviews, get on the Internet, get in Wizard and get it all for free.

What advice do you have for someone interested in self-publishing?

My No. 1 bit of advice is to look clearly at your work and be honest with yourself about it. It’s hard, but you have to be your own worst critic. If there are problems, address them. Fix them. Fatigue is no excuse. You can save yourself a lot of pain and bankruptcy this way.

Teenagers from Mars deals with subversive themes like censorship and politics. What other themes do you hope to explore?

As I write more, I think the themes I’m most interested in exploring are the secret worlds behind the things we take for granted and then working them through genre fiction.

What’s your thought process when you approach a project?

I’m sure I have one, but I couldn’t really explain it. At this point, with starting Gigantic Graphic Novels, things are going, reversing, backing up to back on track so fast and crazy that I hardly have time to really think about it all. I’m just go, go, going.

What are the differences between self-publishing and work-for-hire, which you’ve done for DC and AiT/Planet Lar?

The AiT/Planet Lar wasn’t work for hire. It’s creator-owned, and the product of that union, the 96-page OGN titled “Filler,” which came out earlier in May. (Plug, plug, plug.) But the major difference is getting a check! With work for hire, you get a check and walk away. That has its own benefits, but in my heart I prefer self-publishing because I’m a masochist.

What’s the one thing every aspiring writer needs to know but probably doesn’t?

Know when to bail. Know when to quit. Everyone writes a bad story sooner or later. Don’t let it drag you down. Realize it sucks, learn from it, move on and make the next one better.

What did you learn from your experience on “Teenager From Mars” that helped in creating “Dead West”?

With Teenagers, we were working from obscurity and had to bring our game all the way up. Now we have a lot of contacts, we understand how to talk to the printer, we have relationships with distributors, retailers and press. With “Dead West” we had a running start so the thing is to take it that much further.

—Interview by Tim Leong

Dead West will be available from Gigantic Graphic Novels in June. For more information, visit their Web site at www.giganticgraphicnovels.com
Posted by Tim Leong on May 23rd, 2005 filed in Story Archive | Comment now »
Liven Up Your Logo

It’s hard enough to create a visually stimulating piece of cover art that encapsulates the tone of your story. It’s even harder to come up with a logo that does the same. That’s why Comic Foundry spoke with Tom Marvelli, creative director of creative services at Marvel, about tips and techniques to lighten your logo load.

At what point do you start the planning for the creation of a new title design? What is the process? Who has editorial oversight and input?

Our creative process I imagine is very much that of traditional publication design like that of dust jackets and paperbacks for novels. For traffic flow I am given advance notice on all upcoming titles and any special marketing pushes (such as House of M). It is then that I will meet with the respective editor to hear his or her idea on the approach and tone of the book. There is nothing worse from a design perspective then to see a horror genre book with a sci-fi aesthetic to the logo. Clearly, in those cases people aren’t communicating. I try to avoid these types of pitfalls by speaking up front with editorial. What is great about this bunch of guys and gals is they are working in a visual medium and most have a good sense of design because of their day-to-day. So it makes my life a lot easier in having people who can visualize before we even begin.

Once I have a point of reference (communicating with the editor and/or a copy of the story synopsis) we then can begin. Usually while we’re working on getting the logo right, editorial is getting together cover sketches and/or final covers that we will use later in the process. Knowing who the cover artist will be for the duration can sometimes be very important to the process. Traditional style versus someone who maybe very stylized in their respective art. It helps sometimes to play off that style.

When conceiving a logo I will then work from what I have gathered from editorial and/or the writer’s synopsis, I will then turn it over to one of my designers. I am very fortunate to be surrounded by a very talented and motivated staff. Some are very passionate about the material and that helps me a great deal. One thing I tell them and I think this is good advice in general, and that is to be able to separate yourself from the work. This helps to be able to look at the work objectively, take criticism and apply it effectively.

Once my assigned designer to the project has some varying options to show me, we will meet and discuss. Depending on initial direction, I usually ask for the following:
1) A couple of options as editorial envisioned the logo to be
2) One the way the designer was thinking it might go
3) Something that is completely from a different perspective

After I have reviewed the designs I may knock it down to a select couple to show to the editor of the book as well as Joe Quesada (editor in chief) and our marketing person, John Dokes, at my weekly meeting with them. Everyone will weigh in and for the most part we are good to go. Sometimes we may have to revisit the approach and start with redesigns, etc. Once the logo is completed we pass it off to the production team. And it is their responsibility working alongside editorial to make the logo work from month to month with color variation etc.

What’s the typical method for creating a title design? What programs do you use? Are they hand-drawn or with fonts?

The method and approach I use is very simple. As mentioned earlier we will get our hands on the story and cover art. When we have this material I try to find something within that pulls from the high concept for the book and when possible try to incorporate the artist’s style to it. An example is the Elektra logo I personally did a few years ago. In this case I met with the president of the company at the time and the writer Brian Bendis. We discussed the approach to the book and what the overall concept was. I knew that Elektra was going to be a big push for us from a brand and marketing standpoint so I took the information and played with it. I knew who was on cover art (at the time it was Greg Horn) and I knew some background information on the character. I also researched what logos had been done before and looked at what they were attempting. Some may remember the “Grecian” style logo and a mid-nineties “high-energy” logo. What I wanted to bring to the logo was a little more danger, Asian influence, and what I thought the others didn’t have, a level of femininity. So I then went and looked at Asian influence in the entertainment world (movie posters, etc.). The conclusion I came with was to go with a dry brush for some part of the logo.

For the text I based the type on Trajan, a very bold yet slender typeface. It has been used to death on theatrical posters in recent years (Perfect Storm to name one). So I had base type and approach. I substituted the “E” with a dry-brush, hand painted “E” that extenuated behind the type. For the top and bottom I curled the edges. When turned sideways it is an abstract sai (her weapon of choice) To hold the brush style to the type I used an inner line where the color would connect to the type to help make it read. And finally I extended the descenders to add a little extra bit of “danger” to the type. The theatrical logo for Elektra picked up on these same things, but with a more literal sai translation. The programs I used to make this logo, like most were Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.

Other logos that I did that I tried to add a little touch of something in this same context was The War Machine logo (with a Desert Storm style tracer fire abstraction). I figured anyone who was watching television during these events would have that kind of imagery associated with serious warfare. Another was The Thousand, a story within the Spider-Man Tangled Web series. Here I used text within text because as revealed later in the book the idea was that a thousand spiders would inhabit a host body. Thus the grotesque type within a very normal structured type. And finally, Born, the origin of The Punisher. The concept was that he was “born” in the jungles of Vietnam long before his family was executed. So I went with a bold typeface and silhouetted in jungle brush at the bottom so the logo was rising from the jungle (much like the lead character) So I hope this exemplifies to some degree the approach that I try to bring to the logos.

What trends have you noticed over the years it title design?

As far as trends in logo design goes when I came to Marvel, both the big two as well as some of the smaller publishers were doing vector-based (Illustrator) logos solely for the most part. When I came aboard I wanted to bring some level of approach like that of theatrical poster logos. Traditional publishing like monthly article driven magazines (GQ, Cosmo, etc. They all use flat vector-based logos). Movies, when applicable, use more Photoshop textural design. I see our covers acting more as movie posters in nature and theme then I do a GQ magazine. So when it is right for the book and the art is simplified I use a “shopped up” version of the logo. When the art is too busy I pull back and used a flatter version of the logo. I have noticed that after the Ultimates line with their Photoshop aesthetics a lot of others have picked up this approach. The main thing is to find balance between the two. Some will overwork a logo in Photoshop making it illegible. Sometimes we too fall into this, and we have to assess from time to time what is working and not. At the end of the day, the logo in regards to publishing is to compliment the art and to establish the brand. In the end it will always be the content that sells a comic, not a fancy logo.

What does “content-driven” mean?

I think content driven is primarily that of knowing what approach to take with a logo thematically. As stated earlier, knowing the genre the book is playing in helps to define the designers course of action when coming up with a logo. The Star Wars logo type would not work on “When Harry Met Sally.” It would take on a totally different meaning. The love life of a couple of robots or something…so knowing what the content of the book and what genre it resides in, in a nutshell helps to focus the design approach.

Why is title design important - other than letting the readers know what they’re reading?

I think a designer would be very disillusioned if they thought their logo was driving sales of a comic. Sales can be traced two ways: character-driven and talent-driven, depending on the reader casual or fan. However, the logo as a “tool” helps a casual reader or passer-by stop and take notice. I think this can best be some upped with a little exercise. For example, the next time you are at a magazine rack, pick a title of any kind and I can almost bet, take GQ for example. You are looking for that initial logo, not some photography of some celebrity that is on a million other covers that month. So if a logo is that good it can be used as a quick identifier. It is then up to the content if the book is sold or not. However a logo can translate over for licensing and directly effect sales via branding. There are no two better iconic logos then the Punisher skull icon and the Fantastic Four “4″ seal. These two perfectly model how a logo is applied from character design, to comic logo, to the outside world for various merchandise tie-ins.

What are some tips to make an amateur logo look more professional?

To make something that separates the amateurs from the professionals is very similar in nature to someone in any art field. You either have it or you don’t. Like an illustrator, anyone can pick up a pencil — not everyone can draw with it. The scary thing is with today’s technology, computers and programs can take you through some design layouts and lead one to believe anyone can do this. What people fail and some times take for granted is that this requires a whole different skill set. From having an eye for layout, type and imagery to overall artistic composition. Very few people can design, paint, draw, etc. So I guess the answer to your question is there is no magic button that is going to take someone to the next level to look “professional” schooling can help, but I’ve seen people go through, that you know just didn’t have it.

What are the characteristics of a poorly designed logo?

Some pitfalls to stay away from when designing logos and/or compositions is not to over do it. Don’t use every Photoshop tool because it’s a click away. Don’t over-design either. It can distract and take away from the main point. If you have a lot of information that you are dealing with pull what is important to the facts and play down the rest. Not everything has to be a headline. I equate this to a writer who overwrites. It’s a visual medium at the end of the day. I don’t need captions explaining every detail that I am seeing. That’s overwriting, as a designer, do not overwrite the cover and/or any project you are working on. Let it balance.

Where do you draw your typographic influence from?

I pull typographic reference from everything I see on a daily basis. It depends project to project. It could be from print media or television, a movie poster or a local magazine. There are always places to inspire either on what to do, or not to do. Not to sound overly geeky, but once you know and learn about design, it’s all you see. Sales and marketing doesn’t work on people like us, because you know what they’re doing and where it’s coming from ahead of time. It’s like Neo seeing the Matrix. You look around you and you see what is working and failing. There is nothing worse for a design geek then to be sitting on a train for an hour looking at bad kerning on an information heavy poster. Pathetic aren’t I?

How versed in leading, kerning, ligatures, etc does an amateur artist need to be to create a logo?

When it comes to technical stuff like kerning, leading, etc. I think those are the things that separate a good designer from a great one. So many people don’t take the time to go through those types of things and I think, to your earlier question may be one of many things that separates pros from amateurs.

Where do you get your fonts?

For all of our typography we either will buy specific typefaces that we feel work for any given project or create something from existing type structures making a completely new typeface from it.

Is there a set art stylebook for Marvel? How do you have regulate design consistency throughout all the books?

For our library of books since I have come over to oversee all the Marvel Publishing output, I believe we have been better about a lot of the way the books have rolled out. Small stuff like when books are shelved spine out, the Marvel logo, title and volume number are consistent in placement. Look a few years back and you will see a “stepping” of the spine titles etc. This when shelved makes the books look too busy. A simple tweak and we have a cleaner library. And there are bigger projects that we have done such as The Amazing Spider-Man 500 covers book and our new Visionaries program I believe have been some of our most solid offerings in terms of design. You may have noticed if you look for these sort of things like the design geek I am, we have just about eliminated all of the clipped out versions of the art from inside the books. Yet again when I came over I noticed that a story would end and a figure will be clipped out and applied to some kind of background. This may be fine but too many times it either gave away a reveal or looked too much a part of the story. So I revamped the way we approach these design pages. If you look you will see for the most part that we now use collages, textural or patterned design pages. This helps to clearly delineate content from design. I try to approach the few lead-in pages that we are given to try and lead the reader into the material. I think of those pages as the open credit sequence to a film. Astonishing X-Men Vol. 1 TPB is a prime example of what I am trying to achieve. By pulling concepts of the characters (DNA, the “X,” etc.) I think is more visually interesting then a clipped piece of art that you will see later on in the book.

—Interview by Tim Leong
Posted by Tim Leong on May 19th, 2005 filed in Story Archive | Comment now »
PART 2 of NEAL ADAMS: Uncensored, Uncut, Untouchable

This is Part 2 of Comic Foundry’s interview with Neal Adams, the legendary comic artist that helped Batman, the X-Men and the comics industry. Part 1 is available here.

I know you’ve done a lot to help artists with their rights, help protect themselves …

Not enough.

What kind of advice would you give to young artists to protect themselves?

First of all, I would not advise anybody in any school anywhere to not take a business course. If you want to be an artist, you will make more money taking a business course than you will studying art. If you can take a really good business course while you do all the good artwork that you want to do, then you’re more likely to make a better living than you are if you take all the art you ever want to do and no business course.

Most artists are very bad businessmen. I’ve held myself back from bashing the brains of young artists who don’t have the common sense to stand up for themselves. They don’t represent themselves well. The typical picture of a comic book artist, certainly in the ’50s and the ’60s — things have changed a little bit today because there are people like me around nudging them — the typical picture of a comic book artist is a guy in a closet with a drawing table and a light and a radio and a telephone and paper and ink. And the closet door is locked. And they have paper and they fill the paper with drawings and then they slide the paper out from under the closet so that people will give them more paper. Not to make money, just to get more paper to draw on.

There’s a part of the artist that has to step aside at times — and you can do it in a very pleasant way, you don’t have to be nasty or mean-tempered, in fact, you don’t do good business if you’re nasty or mean-tempered. But in a very pleasant way, say the right thing at the right time. And if you do that, you can make a living. I’ll give you an example: Put this in bold type. Let’s say you’re going for a job and they have a sliding scale of money that they’re willing to pay for this kind of a job for this book cover. Let’s say the sliding scale is between $600 and $1,200 for a book cover. Let’s say you come in, you show your work, they really like it. Now they can say to you, “For starting artists, we pay $600 a cover. Is that OK with you?”

Well, you’ve just made the first mistake. You haven’t really done anything, but you’ve made a mistake. You’ve let them dictate the terms of the agreement. What you sorta have to hope for is that they’re going to ask you how much you charge. And one of the ways you can do that is that you can lay eggs throughout the conversation as you’re talking. You can say, “Yeah, I’ve done a few jobs like this,” which will raise their eyebrows. And then they’ll want to know who for, and if you haven’t got a good lie at the tip of your tongue, you’re in trouble.

So you try and convince them you have some experience — not a lot of experience, nothing that will bother them — so that they will then say to you, “How much would you like to get for this, because we do want you to do it.” Once that happens, they’re the fool, you’re in charge. What you do is, you say in your mind: “What would I like to be paid for this?” You don’t know what their rate is. You’ve heard that it’s around $600 or $800 or $1,000 or something like that. But you say to yourself, “What would I like to get? I’d like to get $1,000.” So what you say is, “Well, the last time I did a job like this, I charged $2,000, but I want to work with you, so I’m willing to work for less.”

Now, that does a number of things. First, it puts them in a defensive posture, because they don’t pay any more than $1,200. So you’ve pretty much dropped the $600. That’s one. Their highest rate is $1,200. Are they going to pay you $1,200? Well, how are they going to pay you $1,200 if you told them your normal rate is $2,000? But you have said you’ll bring your rate down for them. Will you bring it all the way down to $1,200? Maybe – just maybe, they’ll extend themselves and say, “Well, the best we can do is $1,500.” Or maybe they’ll say, “The best we can do is $1,200.” Whatever they say, you then say, “Well, I want to work with you guys, and I think it’s a great project so I’ll go for it.”

Now what have you done? First of all, you’ve done them a favor. You’ve taken your price down. That guy will go into the next office after you leave and say, “You know what, I got this guy to bring his price down.” He’ll be very proud of himself. You’ve done him a favor — even a personal favor: helped him do his job.

Another thing you’ve done is you’ve doubled the price you were going to get. You didn’t get $600 you got $1200 and maybe if you were lucky you got more. But let’s just say you got $1,200. The fact of the matter is that you can go home and you can work on that job and maybe you can work two days on it, maybe three days on it, maybe you work four days on it, but however much time you put into that job, it was worth $600. The half a minute it took you to say what I told you to say, you earned $600. Half a minute. $600 for four days, $600 for half a minute.

These are the kinds of things you have to learn if you go into business. And this is just not for a freelance artist. If you go into other kinds of business you have to know those things like sales tax. You can’t just leap into things. You, for example, you got a Web site. You start to sell things, you need to know what taxes you have to pay, how to put your money away. You have to pay attention to these things. Not very easy.

Speaking of money, what should a young artist expect, rate-wise?

All the people that you’re talking about — of those that will try to do comic books — so few will make it that it almost doesn’t matter. And if they have common sense they’ll try and do something else. They’ll try and do storyboards for advertising agencies, they’ll try and become an art director or they’ll go out to Hollywood and try to do animation or other things like that.

To become a comic book artist … very, very difficult. Generally, the rate, because there have been people stumping for better rates for a long time, are better than what they used to be.

For a comic book penciler can expect to get $200 a page. A comic book inker, $125, $150, $175, somewhere in that range. A colorist can get $100 a page because it’s mostly computer now. It’s not bad, at the end of the week if you can do a bunch of pages you’re doing all right. It’s better than it used to be. Not tremendously long ago it used to be $50 a page. So things have changed. It is nice if they’re willing to give you work.

But because it’s gotten better, it’s gotten more competitive. There’s a lot more backstabbing going on. There’s a lot more politics. It’s a good idea to have a backup plan. Because I know guys that have been out of work for three months. They say, “What’s going on? I’ve been out of work for three months?” The response will be, “Oh really, didn’t I send you a script? Let me look through what I have here …”

If you don’t have work for three months, what do you do in the meantime? You make better money doing commercial work — doing storyboards, stuff like that. It’s much smarter. And there’s lot s of advertising agencies in all the big cities in America these days. Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit … they need storyboard people, and they pay more. You can do a storyboard frame from between $50-$200 a frame. That’s just one frame. A comic book page has six. So you can make as much doing one frame as you can, in some instances, as you can doing a whole page. It don’t seem right, but thems the facts.

And if this person were lucky enough to go on catch a break, how do you recommend someone to deal with the initial fanfare?

Fanfare?

The attention.

They get attention? Is that what happens? Hmm. That’s an interesting question. Usually those people only get attention at a comic book convention. There is no other place for them to get attention. They’re not stars. It’s not like a movie star. You don’t walk down the street and people recognize you. You work at home. So maybe somebody sends you a letter. Things are changing. There’s a lot of e-mail going on so maybe somebody will recognize you and send you e-mail. But most guys stay pretty level-headed because it’s not a kind of stardom. If it is, it’s a very low-echelon stardom.

One of the things I like about comics is that I can run my business, I can be talking to people all day — nobody knows that I’m Neal Adams the comic book guy. They think I’m Neal Adams, Continuity’s storyboard guy. Unless I go to a convention where I’m recognized, then it’s a different story. And even then, if I don’t do sketches, then everybody fades. But if you sit and do sketches, people gather around. But if you don’t do sketches and you just sign stuff, you got a certain a number of people and it’s not bad. And if you’re smart you try and do business and you try and sell properties and you try and generate interest in the things that you’re doing.

Except for idiots — if they get complimented or somebody says good things about them it inflates them and builds them up into something that they’re not. And I just feel sorry for those guys.

This idea of taking yourself seriously … I’ve always told people, look, I draw comic books. People give me money to draw pictures. It’s almost a sin if you think about it. I do what I want and they give me money. Who gets to do that? So, I don’t really expect more than that. And if people want to make a fuss over it, I think that’s really great, but that’s already enough. That’s better than what most people can expect.

It’s almost like being an actor without being bumped and pushed around. So there’s a good side to it. But then there’s this thing where certain fans will push artists because their view of the artist is that the artist is great. The artist is this, that or the other thing.

And I have seen situations where a couple of artists who let their heads get filled with this adulation and some of these fans have money and they can buy their originals and give them money and finance them. And what happens is that you get an altered perception of how the world is. And what happens then is that at some point — and I’ve watched this from the outside, I’ve never participated — is that you watch this rocket take off and after a certain point it can’t sustain itself and then crash. It’s non-sustainable. There’s no place for it go. You can’t operate in a forum of adoration. You can’t do it. You have to get real.

This happened to me in high school. I found that when people were complimenting my friends because of the work that they did, they’d be falsely humble. And when they were falsely humble, people would compliment them more. And I realized I was doing the same thing. People would compliment me, I would be falsely humble, I would say, “Oh, well, it’s not that good,” and they would say “No, no it’s great! No, really, it’s fantastic!”

And then it’s one thing when it happens to you, but when you see it happen to other people, you start realize that means they’re accepting all this appreciation but it’s not helping their work because the next job that they do is pretty much the same as the last job because they got appreciated so much on the last job, so how is that benefiting them? So then what I started to do, just for the hell of it, at first I would come in with something, I would show it to people, they’d say, “That’s great” and I’d say, “I know.” And they’d say, “Go to hell.” I’d say, “Look, you don’t think I know it’s good? It’s good. What’s the big deal?” And then they’d walk away. And then I discovered that that hurt me — but it helped me. It made me realize that if I ever really wanted to get complimented — if I got complimented in the face of that — in other words, if someone would then come up to me and say, “Look, I know you’re an asshole and I know you think it’s great, but I’ll tell you, this is better than anything you’ve ever done.” And then I can afford to say thank you. But if I do it every time I get a compliment, I’m not going to see the forest through the trees.

So, I don’t let myself have that false pleasure. It’s a bad thing. So how do people do with that? I guess it’s the way good actors deal with being complimented too much and getting too many awards — they start to go back into themselves and pay attention to what’s real. Or else, poof, crash.

I was never fortunate enough to meet or talk with Will Eisner. But everything I read there’s just this overwhelming response of how much he single-handedly changed and set the landscape for the comic world. What would you want people to say about you?

He’s a prick. I don’t think of myself as old enough for people to think about that sort of thing. Everybody has their own personality. Will is well-loved. I’m liked by tougher people. I’m not liked, necessarily, by weak people, people who are too sensitive, people who are concerned about criticism. I’m not an easy guy.

But if you fall in a puddle, I’ll help you up. If you need a buck, I’ll give you a buck. I’ll do the things that need to be done for brotherhood and all the rest of it. But if you make your way through to me and shove a piece of art under my face and demand that I criticize it, I will criticize it, and that will be bad thing. If you do that to Will, if you did that to Will, he will always have some nice thing to say and probably help you along the way because he’s a genuinely nice person.

I’m nice up to the point that I can be nice. I try to be as nice as I can, but I have trouble looking someone in the eye and not saying what I believe to be the truth. I have a lot of trouble with that. So, of the people that I think are the best people in the business like Will Eisner and Joe Kubert, I’m maybe second tier down in “good guy.” I’m first tier if you need help. I’m second tier down if you really want to like me. I don’t do that. Will was. Will did. And maybe he did it too well for whatever that doctor was that operated on him that let that blood vessel go. That pissed me off. If I were down there right now I’d punch that guy right in the face. Oh well, fuck it.

—Interview by Tim Leong

For more information on Neal Adams, check out his Web site at www.nealadams.com
Posted by Tim Leong on May 18th, 2005 filed in Story Archive | Comment now »
NEAL ADAMS: Uncensored, Uncut, Untouchable

Not everyone can be incredibly successful at what they do.
Not everyone can change the way the industry works. Not everyone can stand up for what they believe in. Not everyone can be Neal Adams. Comic Foundry sat down with Adams, the living comic legend that redefined Batman, Green Arrow, the X-Men and the visual medium, to talk about what it takes to be a comic artist.

A lot of people ask you to look at their work. What are some of the common problems you see?

The common problematic areas for someone who wants to be an artist in the comic book field or elsewhere is the assumption that you can become an artist without an education.

The difficulty with art is that you tend to draw at a young age. The assumption is that if you can draw, that’s what makes you an artist. Unfortunately, that’s not what makes you an artist. What makes you an artist is your general education, your point of view, your ability to tell a story, your ability to actually have stories to tell that anybody should give a darn about.

Most people who are young, first of all, they haven’t lived long enough to have stories. They usually don’t know how to tell stories. If you have a conversation with somebody you can pretty much tell if they’re a storyteller. They’ll tell you a story – and either be interested, or you won’t be interested. If I tell you a story, I can pretty much guarantee you’ll be interested. I know how to tell a story. Then you add art to it and hopefully those things can go together.

But then the art has to be learned art. It can’t just be what somebody likes to do. And there are just too many parents out there telling their kids how wonderful they are. There’re too many friends slapping their friends on the back telling that they’re as good as so and so and they ought to be in comics and they ought to do this and that. And what those people are are the enemy of the aspiring artist. Because all they do is convince this person who does not have the ability that he does have the ability, and then he starts smashing into walls. Then you go through this process of smashing into walls and then you run into somebody who is good enough and takes the time, which there generally aren’t too many of those in reality.

The reality is that you have to study perspective. You have to study light and shade. You have to go to life-drawing classes. You have to work from photographs. You have to do the hard stuff. Sorta like somebody says, “Gee, I want to be a doctor – I’m good with people.” Well, just being good with people is not going to make you a doctor. You have to understand the circulatory system and how bones work, and if you don’t understand that, then you don’t understand medicine and you’re not going to become a doctor.

In art, people fool themselves into thinking, “Well, it’s not learning medicine; I don’t have to learn all that stuff. It’s not like the law; I don’t have to learn all that stuff. I can just draw.” And so that’s what they do. That’s why every school in America, every elementary school, every high school and whatever the in between school is called nowadays, which was called junior high, I guess it’s called middle school now — every one of those schools has somebody in the school that they call the school artist. Always.

Now, considering that there are tens of thousands of those schools in America, and there only about 1,000 jobs, chances are all those guys and gals aren’t going to become artists. There is something that sets the person who’s going to succeed apart much more than “they’re the school artist.”

The bad thing is that there is no school, per se, to teach an artist to become a successful and good artist. Even the best art schools, when you have an artist who has the ability of say, Drew Struessan, or Alex Ross or people like that, there’s nothing about the school, really, that’s going to teach them what they want to be because already they’re ahead of the teachers. They can learn the tools, they can learn the techniques, they can learn some things but it’s very, very hard who’s going to become an artist and is going to become successful to deal within that fraternity.

It’s always the guys at the very top that really move off into the business and get work. And I don’t know any of them that went through a typical schooling process where they learned through school and they could get there. And I don’t know any of them that didn’t smash into walls along the way.

And when you’re talking about the 1,000 – tens of thousands of kids – what sets them apart?

Nothing. If I knew I’d be able to write a book and tell everybody. I couldn’t any more tell what people were going to be successful at than I could in high school.

When I was in high school there were lots of guys that seemed like — it was an art high school – and there were lots of guys that seemed like they were headed for success. But in the end they washed out for one reason or another. To be able to spot that thing that’s going to cause them to wash out – I don’t know how you can do that. One guy shot himself, one guy who seemed to be more advanced than everybody else became a cab driver.

Other people go into other fields – they go into art direction, a much more sensible thing to do where you can actually make a living and work eight hours a day and not have to go crazy.

There’s a certain kind of madness to doing comic books. Where you give up much of your social life, you work 10-15 hours – well, not 10. It would be a blessing to work 10 hours. You work 13 to 15 to 16 hours a day. And very often a lot of guys work seven days a week. Why would anybody expect anybody to do that? How would you be able to tell in advance that this guy’s stupid enough and loopy enough to go ahead and do that? You can’t predict it. I have no idea.

And when they happen, they’re like miracles. You know automatically what they go through – I know. I know this guy has been through hell, if he’s good. Everybody’s hell is different. But none of them ever do: You go to school, you do some drawings at home, you take some extra classes and then bingo, you’re a comic book artist.

What kind of practice would you recommend for a seasoned and for a young artist?

You should be asking these types of questions to people who will lie to you. It’s much better because they have so much better answers and they all seem to make sense. And my answers are essentially not going to make sense.

Almost every artist out there that’s going to become good does everything wrong – yet he makes it. I don’t know why. Every artist should go to life-drawing classes – they don’t. Every artist should have a sketchbook with them at all times and should be sketching things all the time – and they don’t. Every artist should be studying anatomy from medical books and from body-building books – and they don’t. They should be taking photographs and tracing photographs to find out how things really work – and they don’t. They should be studying perspective to find out perspective really works as opposed to how they think it works – and they don’t. So, the things that they should be doing are the things they often as not don’t do.

How they muddle through things is a mystery. There are things that they can do. And if I am in a position to give advice to a young artist that I think has some potential, the first thing I would tell them is to take the next three months off, if he can, or take off as much of the next three months as possible – and sometimes I say six months depending on his inability. And then to take photographs, find photographs in magazines and make Xeroxes of them – make two copies of them and then trace the photograph. This is called work. You trace the photograph and you try to make the drawing look as much like the photograph as possible.

Why do you do this? Because it’s cheating? No. You do it to learn and that will teach you. It will teach you more than an art teacher can teach you. It will teach you how things work. Well, it won’t really teach you how things work, it’ll teach you basically how shadows fall and how they fall and if you have a brain you’ll learn from that. If you don’t, all you’ll be doing is tracing photographs. So if you have a brain, that exercise will teach you a whole lot of stuff.

The next thing you should is get a sketchpad – a nice, sturdy sketchpad and you should draw in your spare time – on the subway, on Saturdays at various times and in various places and do sketchbooks. Then you should try to get to life-drawing classes, and you should draw the human figure as much as possible to get used to it. Beyond that, you have to go and buy the drawing books and learn from them.

Study and draw, study and draw, study and draw. That’s step one.

All that stuff I told you is step one. That’s basic. That’s what you have to do before you can go on and do other stuff.

Nobody does that. If they’re luck they learn it along the way. It’s sort of like you’re going down a hallway and somebody sticks a cattle prod up your ass and suddenly you go, “Maybe I should be doing this.” And you get another jolt, and, “maybe I should be doing that.” If you get prodded enough times, maybe you’ll do enough of the right things that it’ll all come out in the end and you’ll be a talented artist. Or, you’ll just be some schmuck who can sort of draw but really hasn’t got any discipline at all. It’s very hard.

Makes it sound like the wedgies I got in high school were nothing.

Yeah, too bad there wasn’t some advice each time you got ’em.

This is something I’ve always wondered. When you draw something, how do you know it’s good?

You ask your mother, she’ll always tell you it’s good.

When people do a drawing a lot of times they have a preconceived notion about them. I mean, a lot of people like their own stuff, but how can you tell something you do is good?

You don’t. You live under fool’s paradise. That’s another problem with drawing and learning to draw. You’re as blind when you look at your own work as you are when you’re doing it.

Whatever inabilities you have when you look at it are the same inabilities you have when you tried to do it. The only thing you can really count on if you’re really, really lucky, is that you will be frustrated. In other words, you will say to yourself, “I see it in my head, but I can’t get it down on paper. I see it in there, and somehow when I try and put it down, I can’t do it.” That kind of frustration will make you learn and that kind of frustration will, in the end, will cause you to recognize that it’s better.

That on the paper is the way you saw it in your head. That’s one of those magic moments. And they happen every six months if you’re working very, very hard.

You mentioned asking your mother – of course she’ll tell you it’s great. Who should you be asking, if not her?

Unfortunately there’s nobody. I mean, I can’t be around to tell everybody what a pile of shit they’re doing.

If you’re around someone like me all the time and they’re always berating you and telling you how terrible something is, you could become discouraged very quickly. So it actually is good to have encouragement.

I mean the way I started was I copied an Old Maid card at the kitchen table where my mother was having coffee and smoking cigarettes. And I showed it to her and she thought it was great. So because she thought it was great I did it again. And when she saw the second one she thought it was great so I did it a third time. So as long as she kept on saying she loved it, I kept on doing it – just to get the reward of my mother loving it. So even though your mother’s advice might be the worst advice in the world and you can’t depend on it, you really need it to be able to go on, to be appreciated - because that’s all we do it for.

You don’t really draw in a vacuum. You draw for people. And when other people say it’s great that’s a good thing. The bad thing about it is when you use that as a standard of quality. You just can’t use it as a standard of quality. You can use it as something to make you happy, just not a standard of quality. And beyond that, if you think in terms of and, this is not to denigrate high school art teachers, but, very, very few art teachers have been out there making a living doing art work in the public. There are a very limited number of artists who will actually stop doing what they’re doing and teach in an art school, like Joe Kubert’s school or the school of visual arts. And they usually pay pretty well and it becomes worth it to them do that.

To go to an art high school and sit and draw – the one thing you’ll know is that you are the school artist. That’s what you discover. Big deal. That’s a good thing, and that’s a bad thing. So your teacher pats you on the head and says, “He has a future in art.” And all the kids around you say, “Yeah, yeah, you want somebody to draw that? Joey can do it. Joey’s the school artist. He’s the best. He can beat Jack Kirby!” That kind of stuff happens all over America and all over the world. It’s good, but it’s not good.

Over the years your work has influenced so many people. Is it bad if too many replicate your style?

Replicating? Nobody’s replicating. Imitating.

Replicating means they’re as good as I am. Well, that’s not the case because if they’re replicating, they’d just be doing what I was doing – just doing it over again.

You can’t crawl into somebody’s mind to find out what he does. You can find some of the things he does. There’s certain people, if you read their stuff, and you read it 20 years later somehow you still get some big kick or some big joy out of it. Why is that? That’s the intangible intangible.

That’s not to say that people who imitate don’t have some quality of their own. But, like DC Comics is reprinting my Batman, and these volumes that sell for $50 and $75. There are people that have imitated my work. They’re not reprinting their work. They may have imitated it very well, but they’re still not getting reprinting. What is that intangible intangible that causes that to happen? Obviously they’re not replicating. Because if they replicate it, same thing would happen.

So from my point of view, I don’t have to worry about it. It’s not a problem for me. Is it a danger if people imitate too much? I think for those people who think that’s it’s a danger, it’s a danger. For those people who don’t think it’s a danger, it’s not a danger. I think it’s very nice for people to have opinions, and I think they should go around and have these opinions and really, really enjoy themselves and argue with their friends and carry on. They have nothing to do with me.

Most of the people that I help don’t imitate my work. I mean I’ve helped Howard Chaykin – doesn’t imitate my work. I’ve helped Frank Miller – doesn’t imitate my work at all. I’ve helped lots of artists and none of their work is imitative of mine. The people that imitated me are the people that sit quietly in their own place, tracing or drawing from or imitating or trying to find whatever the magical secret is – quietly, never asking me anything. Then maybe they come and show it to me or maybe they avoid showing it to me out of embarrassment. I don’t know what that is. I know when I was a kid I imitated. I imitated Mort Rucker, I imitated Joe Kubert, I imitated Russ Heath, I imitated Stan Drake. I imitated a lot of artists along the way and for a period of time my work looked like theirs, but I thought I was learning from them. I felt I was absorbing them, understanding what they did, and then moving on.

To a lesser degree, I think these other people are doing the same thing. Sometimes they cling too long. Sometimes they use it as a crutch. Sometimes who really gives a darn? If they do good work and people like it, what does it really matter?

I know you’ve done a lot to help artists with their rights, help protect themselves …

Not enough.

What kind of advice would you give to young artists to protect themselves?

First of all, I would not advise anybody in any school anywhere to not take a business course. If you want to be an artist, you will make more money taking a business course than you will studying art. If you can take a really good business course while you do all the good artwork that you want to do, then you’re more likely to make a better living than you are if you take all the art you ever want to do and no business course.

Most artists are very bad businessmen. I’ve held myself back from bashing the brains of young artists who don’t have the common sense to stand up for themselves. They don’t represent themselves well. The typical picture of a comic book artist, certainly in the ’50s and the ’60s — things have changed a little bit today because there are people like me around nudging them — the typical picture of a comic book artist is a guy in a closet with a drawing table and a light and a radio and a telephone and paper and ink. And the closet door is locked. And they have paper and they fill the paper with drawings and then they slide the paper out from under the closet so that people will give them more paper. Not to make money, just to get more paper to draw on.

There’s a part of the artist that has to step aside at times — and you can do it in a very pleasant way, you don’t have to be nasty or mean-tempered, in fact, you don’t do good business if you’re nasty or mean-tempered. But in a very pleasant way, say the right thing at the right time. And if you do that, you can make a living. I’ll give you an example: Put this in bold type. Let’s say you’re going for a job and they have a sliding scale of money that they’re willing to pay for this kind of a job for this book cover. Let’s say the sliding scale is between $600 and $1,200 for a book cover. Let’s say you come in, you show your work, they really like it. Now they can say to you, “For starting artists, we pay $600 a cover. Is that OK with you?”

Well, you’ve just made the first mistake. You haven’t really done anything, but you’ve made a mistake. You’ve let them dictate the terms of the agreement. What you sorta have to hope for is that they’re going to ask you how much you charge. And one of the ways you can do that is that you can lay eggs throughout the conversation as you’re talking. You can say, “Yeah, I’ve done a few jobs like this,” which will raise their eyebrows. And then they’ll want to know who for, and if you haven’t got a good lie at the tip of your tongue, you’re in trouble.

So you try and convince them you have some experience — not a lot of experience, nothing that will bother them — so that they will then say to you, “How much would you like to get for this, because we do want you to do it.” Once that happens, they’re the fool, you’re in charge. What you do is, you say in your mind: “What would I like to be paid for this?” You don’t know what their rate is. You’ve heard that it’s around $600 or $800 or $1,000 or something like that. But you say to yourself, “What would I like to get? I’d like to get $1,000.” So what you say is, “Well, the last time I did a job like this, I charged $2,000, but I want to work with you, so I’m willing to work for less.”

Now, that does a number of things. First, it puts them in a defensive posture, because they don’t pay any more than $1,200. So you’ve pretty much dropped the $600. That’s one. Their highest rate is $1,200. Are they going to pay you $1,200? Well, how are they going to pay you $1,200 if you told them your normal rate is $2,000? But you have said you’ll bring your rate down for them. Will you bring it all the way down to $1,200? Maybe – just maybe, they’ll extend themselves and say, “Well, the best we can do is $1,500.” Or maybe they’ll say, “The best we can do is $1,200.” Whatever they say, you then say, “Well, I want to work with you guys, and I think it’s a great project so I’ll go for it.”

Now what have you done? First of all, you’ve done them a favor. You’ve taken your price down. That guy will go into the next office after you leave and say, “You know what, I got this guy to bring his price down.” He’ll be very proud of himself. You’ve done him a favor — even a personal favor: helped him do his job.

Another thing you’ve done is you’ve doubled the price you were going to get. You didn’t get $600 you got $1200 and maybe if you were lucky you got more. But let’s just say you got $1,200. The fact of the matter is that you can go home and you can work on that job and maybe you can work two days on it, maybe three days on it, maybe you work four days on it, but however much time you put into that job, it was worth $600. The half a minute it took you to say what I told you to say, you earned $600. Half a minute. $600 for four days, $600 for half a minute.

These are the kinds of things you have to learn if you go into business. And this is just not for a freelance artist. If you go into other kinds of business you have to know those things like sales tax. You can’t just leap into things. You, for example, you got a Web site. You start to sell things, you need to know what taxes you have to pay, how to put your money away. You have to pay attention to these things. Not very easy.

Speaking of money, what should a young artist expect, rate-wise?

All the people that you’re talking about — of those that will try to do comic books — so few will make it that it almost doesn’t matter. And if they have common sense they’ll try and do something else. They’ll try and do storyboards for advertising agencies, they’ll try and become an art director or they’ll go out to Hollywood and try to do animation or other things like that.

To become a comic book artist … very, very difficult. Generally, the rate, because there have been people stumping for better rates for a long time, are better than what they used to be.

For a comic book penciler can expect to get $200 a page. A comic book inker, $125, $150, $175, somewhere in that range. A colorist can get $100 a page because it’s mostly computer now. It’s not bad, at the end of the week if you can do a bunch of pages you’re doing all right. It’s better than it used to be. Not tremendously long ago it used to be $50 a page. So things have changed. It is nice if they’re willing to give you work.

But because it’s gotten better, it’s gotten more competitive. There’s a lot more backstabbing going on. There’s a lot more politics. It’s a good idea to have a backup plan. Because I know guys that have been out of work for three months. They say, “What’s going on? I’ve been out of work for three months?” The response will be, “Oh really, didn’t I send you a script? Let me look through what I have here …”

If you don’t have work for three months, what do you do in the meantime? You make better money doing commercial work — doing storyboards, stuff like that. It’s much smarter. And there’s lot s of advertising agencies in all the big cities in America these days. Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit … they need storyboard people, and they pay more. You can do a storyboard frame from between $50-$200 a frame. That’s just one frame. A comic book page has six. So you can make as much doing one frame as you can, in some instances, as you can doing a whole page. It don’t seem right, but thems the facts.

And if this person were lucky enough to go on catch a break, how do you recommend someone to deal with the initial fanfare?

Fanfare?

The attention.

They get attention? Is that what happens? Hmm. That’s an interesting question. Usually those people only get attention at a comic book convention. There is no other place for them to get attention. They’re not stars. It’s not like a movie star. You don’t walk down the street and people recognize you. You work at home. So maybe somebody sends you a letter. Things are changing. There’s a lot of e-mail going on so maybe somebody will recognize you and send you e-mail. But most guys stay pretty level-headed because it’s not a kind of stardom. If it is, it’s a very low-echelon stardom.

One of the things I like about comics is that I can run my business, I can be talking to people all day — nobody knows that I’m Neal Adams the comic book guy. They think I’m Neal Adams, Continuity’s storyboard guy. Unless I go to a convention where I’m recognized, then it’s a different story. And even then, if I don’t do sketches, then everybody fades. But if you sit and do sketches, people gather around. But if you don’t do sketches and you just sign stuff, you got a certain a number of people and it’s not bad. And if you’re smart you try and do business and you try and sell properties and you try and generate interest in the things that you’re doing.

Except for idiots — if they get complimented or somebody says good things about them it inflates them and builds them up into something that they’re not. And I just feel sorry for those guys.

This idea of taking yourself seriously … I’ve always told people, look, I draw comic books. People give me money to draw pictures. It’s almost a sin if you think about it. I do what I want and they give me money. Who gets to do that? So, I don’t really expect more than that. And if people want to make a fuss over it, I think that’s really great, but that’s already enough. That’s better than what most people can expect.

It’s almost like being an actor without being bumped and pushed around. So there’s a good side to it. But then there’s this thing where certain fans will push artists because their view of the artist is that the artist is great. The artist is this, that or the other thing.

And I have seen situations where a couple of artists who let their heads get filled with this adulation and some of these fans have money and they can buy their originals and give them money and finance them. And what happens is that you get an altered perception of how the world is. And what happens then is that at some point — and I’ve watched this from the outside, I’ve never participated — is that you watch this rocket take off and after a certain point it can’t sustain itself and then crash. It’s non-sustainable. There’s no place for it go. You can’t operate in a forum of adoration. You can’t do it. You have to get real.

This happened to me in high school. I found that when people were complimenting my friends because of the work that they did, they’d be falsely humble. And when they were falsely humble, people would compliment them more. And I realized I was doing the same thing. People would compliment me, I would be falsely humble, I would say, “Oh, well, it’s not that good,” and they would say “No, no it’s great! No, really, it’s fantastic!”

And then it’s one thing when it happens to you, but when you see it happen to other people, you start realize that means they’re accepting all this appreciation but it’s not helping their work because the next job that they do is pretty much the same as the last job because they got appreciated so much on the last job, so how is that benefiting them? So then what I started to do, just for the hell of it, at first I would come in with something, I would show it to people, they’d say, “That’s great” and I’d say, “I know.” And they’d say, “Go to hell.” I’d say, “Look, you don’t think I know it’s good? It’s good. What’s the big deal?” And then they’d walk away. And then I discovered that that hurt me — but it helped me. It made me realize that if I ever really wanted to get complimented — if I got complimented in the face of that — in other words, if someone would then come up to me and say, “Look, I know you’re an asshole and I know you think it’s great, but I’ll tell you, this is better than anything you’ve ever done.” And then I can afford to say thank you. But if I do it every time I get a compliment, I’m not going to see the forest through the trees.

So, I don’t let myself have that false pleasure. It’s a bad thing. So how do people do with that? I guess it’s the way good actors deal with being complimented too much and getting too many awards — they start to go back into themselves and pay attention to what’s real. Or else, poof, crash.

I was never fortunate enough to meet or talk with Will Eisner. But everything I read there’s just this overwhelming response of how much he single-handedly changed and set the landscape for the comic world. What would you want people to say about you?

He’s a prick. I don’t think of myself as old enough for people to think about that sort of thing. Everybody has their own personality. Will is well-loved. I’m liked by tougher people. I’m not liked, necessarily, by weak people, people who are too sensitive, people who are concerned about criticism. I’m not an easy guy.

But if you fall in a puddle, I’ll help you up. If you need a buck, I’ll give you a buck. I’ll do the things that need to be done for brotherhood and all the rest of it. But if you make your way through to me and shove a piece of art under my face and demand that I criticize it, I will criticize it, and that will be bad thing. If you do that to Will, if you did that to Will, he will always have some nice thing to say and probably help you along the way because he’s a genuinely nice person.

I’m nice up to the point that I can be nice. I try to be as nice as I can, but I have trouble looking someone in the eye and not saying what I believe to be the truth. I have a lot of trouble with that. So, of the people that I think are the best people in the business like Will Eisner and Joe Kubert, I’m maybe second tier down in “good guy.” I’m first tier if you need help. I’m second tier down if you really want to like me. I don’t do that. Will was. Will did. And maybe he did it too well for whatever that doctor was that operated on him that let that blood vessel go. That pissed me off. If I were down there right now I’d punch that guy right in the face. Oh well, fuck it.

—Interview by Tim Leong

For more information on Neal Adams, check out his Web site at www.nealadams.com
Posted by Tim Leong on May 16th, 2005 filed in Story Archive | Comment now »
Get Lost In The Middle Man

Writer and supervising producer on the TV series “Lost,” Javier Grillo-Marxuach, has a hit show, Hawaii and beautiful people. What else could he want? His own comic, for one. Grillo-Marxuach launches The Middle Man (Viper Comics) in July, a sci-fi tale of a secret government agent and his 20-something female sidekick. Grillo-Marxuach talked with Comic Foundry about The Middleman and revealed what that monster on “Lost” really is. Just kidding.

Why write comics? What does the medium offer that the screen doesn’t?

I’ve been writing television professionally for 10 years, and I love it to death. But when you work on other people’s shows you are never truly writing your own vision and voice, but rather adapting your voice to someone else’s format. The Middle Man is a quirky, weird piece that would not necessarily find full expression in a broadcast medium — nor would I be able to afford a huge tentacled-ass monster, well, at least not a convincing one — on a TV budget. So after all these years, I figured it’d be fun to do something that truly encompassed a more “Javi-centric” world view.

How is writing The Middle Man different than writing an episode of “Lost”?

Apples and oranges. “Lost” is a 14-character ensemble drama that tends to be very serious and is driven by the voices and concerns of its creators. It is very much Damon [Lindelof] and J.J. [Abrams]’s show. My work there is to apply my own creativity to best execute their shared vision. With The Middle Man it’s just me and a very tight relationship between two characters, The Middle Man and Wendy, and some very unreal situations that have a comedic edge … Also I’m the ultimate arbiter of what gets on the page — I don’t have to answer to a network or a studio, so I can take larger leaps of fancy. (Which means that without the consult of a writing staff, I also have higher to fall from if the material doesn’t land!)

In a more interactive medium such as television, a project can rely on an actor’s ability to communicate emotion. How do you make up for that in a static medium such as comics?

I have the good fortune to have for a partner a very talented artist who brings a huge amount to the table. He does the job of the actors and the director — and what we try to do is to create something that isn’t static at all. When I write dialogue, I work very hard to imbue it with a rhythm and movement all of its own. And when Les [McClaine] does his breakdowns and layouts for the piece, that is our main concern, to give it a sense of life and motion. Done well, comics are not a static medium at all, but one where the fusion of words, pictures and design come together to create propulsion through the page.

You’re active in the Writers Guild of America. Any advice you give young screenwriters applicable to aspiring comic writers?

The great thing about comics is that, unlike films and TV, all you really need is a vision. An hour of “Lost” costs seven figures to produce and employs a crew of over a hundred people for several months — you can’t do it on your own. A comic book is 32 pages, a cover, two staples and your own unique vision; especially considering the options for self-publishing, Web publishing and indie press out there, I would imagine that the advice I give all screenwriters would be even more fulfilling for people doing comics: write, write and write some more.

With comic books it goes further: Can’t get an editor to look at it? Self-publish, put it on the Web — in short, cultivate your own unique vision until the big boys have no choice but to employ you.

You do a lot of sci-fi and fantasy writing. Is there a certain hook or secret for success in the genre?

The best episode of “Boomtown” is no different from the best episode of “Jake 2.0″: Character. Unlike that great Blues Traveler song, it’s not the hook that brings you back, it’s your attachment to the characters. If you can get the audience to love the characters, it’s not the mysteries or the monsters that are going to keep them coming back for more, it’s going to be their desire to spend time with people they have come to love and admire. It’s great to have a sci-fi idea that no one has had before, but without great characters to anchor it, what you wind up with is a jaded audience that stares at the screen and says, “OK, I’ve seen 5 million stormtroopers duking it out with 5 million Wookiees — what else do you have?”

What’s your take on racial diversity in comics? Is it lacking?

I grew up in Puerto Rico … but to me Batman was Batman and Superman was Superman. I never thought of them as “those great Caucasian supermen.” I also watched a crapload of Santo movies and I liked him and Blue Demon as much as any DC or Marvel characters. Here’s the thing — I’d love to do a comic book with a Latino character, but that has to be a function of character and of a story I am dying to tell at the moment, not of political necessity. I don’t think I am going to write a good story if I say, “By writing a character of a certain ethnicity I am going to make a STATEMENT” or, “Hey, let’s market this character to Latinos!” If I came to you and said, “I want to do Blade but here’s the twist: He’s WHITE!” you’d probably look at me and say, “Yeah, but what’s the story?” And that’s why I think that a lot of books marketed as “diverse” really don’t hit their mark. Do readers want role models that they can relate to on the level of race and culture? You bet. Do they want cool-ass superheroes in awesome stories? Even more.

In television, you’ve worked on a wide range of different shows. Are there any key components between them that lead to successful storytelling?

I think that the answer is the same as two questions up — make the audience like the characters, put those characters in great stories that are consistent to their genre and they’ll come back whether it’s a $2-plus million production or a 1960s BBC show shot half on film and half on video.

You’ve worked on a lot of dramas. A signature move of the TV drama is an event scene that features no dialogue between characters but works very well from a storytelling standpoint. How does that type of narration play into comics?

I don’t really write The Middle Man any differently than I would a TV script … and Les is quite masterful at giving me those pauses and expressions. He has a pretty daunting job — being my director, cinematographer and playing all the parts, but comics is a visual medium just the same, and I have yet to encounter a device that works for me in TV that we haven’t been able to adapt to the page.

TV allows for easier methods for characterization. How do you provide adequate amounts of characterization in comics without relying on all the “extras” television provides?

You know, characterization is not a function of all the bells and whistles you may or may not have in terms of narrative devices and other artifice — it just is. You’re either writing good characters or you’re not. If you are not, you get a crappy comic just the same as you do a TV show. The same litmus tests apply: Do I care where the story is going? Is the dialogue “landing”? Does the story feel flat? Are the characters actually talking to each other or just swapping exposition? How you answer those questions, and how honest you are in asking them of yourself determines your success in any medium.

A lot of the shows you’ve worked on have big episode endings so that the viewer is sure to tune in to next week. How did you use that approach in The Middle Man?

The Middle Man started life as a TV pilot in a traditional four-act structure, and that structure dictates that every commercial break end with a cliffhanger, or at least a compelling question that will bring the audience back. When Les and I broke down the script for comics, it turned out that an act an issue was pretty much dead on. So every issue ends with a cliffhanger.

What about on a technical level? Is the way you format your scripts different than for the screen?

Nope, and I see no reason to do it any other way. I don’t have a college degree in sequential storytelling like Les, so it seems unnatural for me to tell him how many frames to put in a page and what to put in each frame. We have settled into a nice groove where I make it clear in the scripts — as I do for a TV show — what needs to happen, and he adapts it to the page. It allows us to achieve a synergy; we both work to the highest of our individual capacities.

In The Middle Man, how do you get into the mind of and go about writing a young, 20-something girl?

Other than — secretly, I am a young, 20-something girl? Any time you write a character, you are digging them out of personal experience or empathy anyway. Wendy represents a set of feelings I’ve had and situations I found myself in, but which I can best bring to the fore in a dramatic way by replaying them through the lens of a character who isn’t me. That’s pretty much the way of all writing anyway. We have to be good actors, if not on a stage, at least on the page, and bring our own experiences to bear in a dramatically compelling way. I assure you, no one would want to read The Middle Man if it was about a pudgy Puerto Rican television producer.

Why are you producing The Middle Man in sets of four? Why is that the magic number?

Only because that’s the teleplay structure in which I am used to writing, so I am trying to stay in my comfort zone. It is the best and most efficient way — right now — for me to tell a story with a beginning, middle and end that hits all the notes. It wouldn’t surprise me if, as I get more used to the medium, I don’t start playing with the length of the stories and arcs a little more.

What’s more important - having a story be plot-driven or character-driven?

Plot without character is mere motion. Character without plot is stagnancy. You need the two elements to truly create story. But if I had to choose between the two … I wouldn’t. Because I am a perfectionist, and I want to give the audience a piece of entertainment that fires on all cylinders.

Knowing what you do now, is there anything you would do differently about creating a comic, either in technical, creative or process terms?

Nope. I’m a lucky guy. I found the right artist and the right press right off the bat on my first project, and I can’t tell you how grateful I am for that. I know that it’s a rare thing to find such great collaborators. That’s not to say that The Middle Man is perfect in any way, but within the ongoing process of my striving to become a better storyteller, it has been a great experience, and one I hope becomes the template for all of the other things I do in this field.

—Interview by Tim Leong

The Middle Man debuts from Viper Comics at the San Diego Comicon International in July. For more information, visit www.ViperComics.com
Posted by Tim Leong on May 16th, 2005 filed in Story Archive | Comment now »
Member of the Week: Wes Molebash

RATE WES’ PROFILE HERE

As told to Comic Foundry…
Wes Molebash has been drawing comics since he was but a wee child.
When he was in fourth grade, his mother bought him an instructional video cassette on how to make your own comic strips. Wes fell in love with the tape and was soon creating his own comic strips to take to school and show the ladies. But fifth grade ladies are hard to please. Unless you let them borrow your glue stick, then it’s all good.

Wes created the “Andy” character when he was ten years old, and, over the years, Andy went through several evolutions. When first created, Andy was an idiot who was prone to getting the crap kicked out of him by other comic characters Wes created. When Wes was in junior high school, Andy was a six-year-old kid in a comic strip that was a blatant “Calvin and Hobbes” ripoff. By the time Wes was in high school Andy had developed into a young man dealing with dating, homework and tests in Wes’ high school newspaper and local newspaper.

Nowadays, Andy is married to the beautiful Katie, and you can catch their adventures at www.vipercomics.com/webcomics/yht . The site averages around 2000 unique visitors per day, and Wes is always looking to increase that number. So tell all your friends to read his comic!

Wes decided to join Comic Foundry.com to increase his street cred. He also believes it is a great way to get feedback on your work and make contacts with other artists and writers. So, if you’re thinking about joining the Foundry, Wes strongly urges that you do so. If not for you, then for the kids.
Posted by Tim Leong on May 16th, 2005 filed in Story Archive | Comment now »
Can Comics Kill Your Eyes?

You’ve been staring at your computer screen for hours, working on your latest masterpiece.
Your vision is blurred, your eyes are tired and the throbbing in your head serves as a constant reminder that you’re not exactly in paradise. Is it just a bad case of writer’s block? Maybe. But there’s also a chance that you could be suffering from Computer Vision Syndrome (CVS).

So what is CVS?
According to the American Optometric Association, CVS is “the complex of eye and vision problems related to near work which are experienced during or related to computer use.” CVS is characterized by eye discomfort (such as dry eyes and/or red, itchy and watery eyes), fatigue and difficulty focusing the eyes. These symptoms can cause additional problems, like headaches, backaches and muscle spasms.

Causes of CVS
Anyone who spends two or more hours a day working on a computer is fair game for CVS. Images on a computer screen are made up of individual pixels, which are difficult to focus on. Your eyes must regularly refocus in order to keep images sharp, which could lead to eye-strain and CVS.

What to do
Geoffrey Weaver, O.D., Clinical Care Director for the American Optometric Association recommends getting an eye exam if you think you have CVS. Having an eye exam can determine whether your vision problems are related specifically to computer use or not. “Your vision may be 20/20, but even the slightest stigmatism could be an issue when dealing with computers,” explains Weaver.

Depending on the results of your eye exam, your doctor may prescribe glasses for general use or strictly computer use. “There are no ‘magic’ computer glasses,” says Weaver. “But glasses designed specifically for computer use do some of the focusing for you so that your eyes can relax.”

But corrective lenses aren’t the only answer. For those of you who are scared of glasses and the stigma attached to them (no pun intended), here’s some ways to avoid being called “four eyes” and looking like Elijah Wood in Sin City:

GIVE YOURSELF A BREAK. Taking time off every so often will give your eyes a chance to rest. Make phone calls or look out your window. Do anything that doesn’t require your eyes to focus on something up close.

ADJUST YOUR SCREEN. Your computer screen should be 4 to 9 inches below eye-level, and 20 to 26 inches from your eyes.

TURN DOWN THE LIGHTS. Minimize the glare on your computer screen and invest in drapes, shades or blinds. You can also get a glare reduction filter, or—if you already wear glasses—ask your optometrist about eyeglass lens tints and coatings that can reduce glare.

CLEAN YOUR SCREEN. Dust and fingerprints can reduce clarity and make your eyes do more work than they have to.

—by Emily Hebert
Posted by Tim Leong on May 9th, 2005 filed in Story Archive | Comment now »
How to Get GIRLS

You usually don’t hear “girls” and “comics” in the same sentence, but it’s a trend the Luna Bros. are starting to buck. Jonathan and Joshua Luna’s debut comic, ULTRA, drew fans and acclaim alike and the Lunas are hoping to repeat their success with their follow-up project, GIRLS (Image, May 25). The brothers Luna revealed to Comic Foundry what they’ve learned since ULTRA, and what it takes to be a storyteller.

Is the process any different — technically or creatively — from ULTRA to Girls?

JONATHAN: Technically? Not really.

Creatively? I think the closest thing is that we’re working in a different genre — a story that’s almost the complete opposite of ULTRA.

In GIRLS, our protagonist is a male, and it’s set in a small town, with a much bigger cast. And I don’t think it will be your typical comic book.

How has your writing and planning differed from ULTRA to GIRLS now that the central character changed from a woman to a man?

JOSHUA: I wouldn’t say it changed too much. Well, obviously, there are some major differences that must be considered and applied when you jump from female to male points-of-view, but for the most part it’s a relatively organic process. My main priority is just to figure out the character as a person and not as a sex. Because once you start getting too gender-specific, you run a risk of turning the character into a stereotype, as opposed to an individual. So, I just keep it human. The rest is window dressing.

What have you learned from your experience with ULTRA that’s helped the most with GIRLS?

JONATHAN: In terms of craft, you can definitely see a difference in my art looking at ULTRA No. 1 and No. 8. It wasn’t until ULTRA No. 2 or No. 3 that the “glove” was beginning to fit. Even the lettering took a while to get a hang of.

Being an indie creator, you learn a lot about business — a crash course of sorts. In the beginning, I thought Image would hand me some “booklet” that explained how to do everything I needed to know to get by. I was so wrong, and till this day, I’m still learning new things about how to make comic books.

On ULTRA, I didn’t really learn anything revolutionary — just a bit of tweaking here and there. It was in college where I learned all of the major stuff.

Did you see an evolution in your work from issues 1 to 8 in ULTRA?

JONATHAN: Absolutely. In ULTRA No. 1, I was attempting make the book highly detailed. But in order to do a page a day, I had to streamline the way I did things a little. This was pretty much all subconscious, but I began to draw fewer lines — each line represented more.

Also, I think my staging and shot construction improved. It became easier to read information.

Lastly, I think I fine-tuned my coloring. I use colors as a thematic element in scenes, and I learned how to accentuate each mood a little better.

JOSHUA: It’s difficult for me to gauge that kind of thing because I’m such a nitpicker. Even if I think the dialogue, for example, starts to flow a bit smoother, I’d probably find weak points in other areas such as plotting, pacing, etc. Sometimes, weaknesses don’t really go away — they’re just displaced. So, if there was an evolution, they were most likely baby, Cro-Magnon steps. I’m a constant work-in-progress.

Doing it the Write Way

How does the plotting and writing aspect for Girls work between you two?

JOSHUA: Well, during the conceptual phase, we’d get together to discuss the story and lay down some loose plot points along the way. Once we’re pleased with a foundation, I write the script for the first issue, and then Jon gives it a read to add any additional comments or criticisms. When we’re happy with a final draft, he makes the art while I stretch out on the couch and eat peanuts. Just kidding. I have to stay a script ahead of him, so I’d work on the next issue and we’d repeat the process.

A lot of people say you have to have a lot of life experience to really tell stories. At 23 and 25, you guys are relatively young. How do you combat that notion?

JOSHUA: Yeah, that’s true. Writing what you know definitely keeps a story honest, but sometimes, life experience can be overrated. If it isn’t complemented with an imagination, or the ability to find scenes and events that carry the audience to a meaningful climax, then those experiences won’t do you much good as a storyteller. But of course it never hurts, so yes — the living part is a constant process.

But more so than “life experiences,” I think a lot of good writing is gained from “bad experiences.” Since life is basically conflict, the most memorable and rewarding experiences in life are the ones that traumatized the piss out of us. I definitely draw inspiration from those because they teach us something. So, thankfully, I still have many more years ahead of me to accumulate scars.

JONATHAN: I’m not a master at writing, but to me it takes five things to be a storyteller.

1. Imagination. You have to be good at making things up. If you’re not daydreaming or thinking “What if?” all the time, you can never be a writer.

2. Dedication. The only way to get better at writing is if you write all the time and constantly.

3. Taste. This is where subjectivity comes in, but if you’re writing about stuff no one cares about, who is going to call you a good storyteller?

4. Structure. You have to know what a story is before you can write one. There are ingredients to a story — if you ignore some of them, your story won’t taste right.

5. Pain. Stories are about conflict and problems. Meaning: Every writer has to have gone through pain. So, yes, that means EVERYONE can be a writer. Every time I see a great movie or read a book that touched me, I think, “Damn… that writer went through a lot of shit.”

Sex on the Brain

There’s definitely a notion of sex appeal to your work — is that something you consciously pursue?

JOSHUA: I guess it’s mostly unconscious, considering I never realized my work was that sexed. But I like putting my characters through sexual situations because that’s when you find out what they’re really about — when they’re naked and uninhibited.

What do you think of the ULTRA characters being compared to the girls on Sex and the City? When you first wrote the characters, were you thinking more about single female characters or superheroes?

JOSHUA: Honestly, I’ve only watched that show once or twice, so I wouldn’t really know what to make of that comparison.

Well, I didn’t really look at the characters that way because that would’ve led to a lot of generalizations. Instead of labeling her as a “single woman” or a “superhero,” I just made Pearl as real to me as possible. The purpose of the book, ULTRA, was to strip away that archetypal mask and reveal a human being underneath. So, I was just basically thinking about Pearl, the individual — a woman who happened to be a single superheroine.

On Production

You had to learn to letter things by yourself — what were some of the better lessons you learned that helped smooth out the transition? What fonts do you use?

JONATHAN: Comicbookfonts.com was the big and only help I got on how to letter. That’s also where we got a few fonts from.

It took me a while to figure out how to letter with ULTRA No. 1. I had to figure out the right stroke width for bubbles; I learned that I needed to overprint my bubbles to avoid “halos”. And figuring out the right size of font and spacing was very time-consuming. I’m sure I lettered all of our first issue 20 times. It was hell.

How has your design sense influenced your comic work?

JONATHAN: In terms of the magazine theme of ULTRA, it’s more about our cynicism towards media that influenced our comic work. The magazine design is something I had to learn to do in the process of parodying media — it’s not my personal style. Though, I had little previous experience as a graphic/web designer, so that might have helped slightly.

In my opinion, the covers to ULTRA will look nothing like the ones to Girls.

You have to pencil, ink and color a page a day. What have you learned that’s helped speed up your process?

JONATHAN: Add “lettering” to that.

To this day, I’ve worked on 10 issues of comic books, and I have to say that there’s absolutely nothing to make all of those tasks any easier or done faster.

Do you think that your educations at Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) gave you a leg up on the competition? How did courses there help you along the way?

JOSHUA: Absolutely. We actually majored in sequential art, so we were fortunate enough to develop our skills within every aspect of that discipline: writing, penciling, inking, conceptual design, etc. Even some electives that seemed to deviate from my core curriculum, such as acting or art history, really helped me become a more dynamic storyteller.

I’ve read that you learned from comics how to draw people, and that left you with some bad habits — What were they? Why were they bad?

JONATHAN: I’m not going to name any artists that I’ve emulated in the past, but from my experience, learning to draw comics from comics is not exactly the way to go. I can’t place what bad habits I was left with, but I know that, if anything, drawing from comics is mostly greatly inspirational. Every artist’s art will always look like someone else’s. It’s inevitable. Though, I would recommend more life drawing or drawing from photos and magazines.

In Good Publishing Company

You’ve mentioned that you went through four other concepts before deciding on Girls. What does a story take to be solid enough to move on to the next step?

JOSHUA: If we love a concept, sleep on it for a night, and then still love it the next day, it’s good to go.

How is publishing through Image?

JOSHUA: It’s great. They’ve basically given us complete artistic freedom. What more can you ask for?

Was your process of being picked up by Image the standard submission — no backdoors or inside tracks? What did you do when you got the call that they were interested in ULTRA? What was the next step?

JONATHAN: Yes, just five colored pages and a cover. We didn’t know anyone at Image, or in the industry, for that matter.

At first, Jim Valentino e-mailed us and said something like, “Hey guys, we like this one.” After a couple weeks, Erik Larsen became the publisher, and it was like starting all over again. I sent Erik the pages, and called him up. We had a good talk and he gave us the green light. He told me to start drawing pages. I’ve been doing a page every weekday ever since.

ULTRA was the second thing you submitted to Image — what was the first? Obviously, it didn’t progress, but what did you learn from that experience?

JONATHAN: Josh and I have agreed to never talk about our first submission. We might use it down the road.

Our submission process was pretty ironic. For our first submission, we did an entire book. Twenty-two pages and a cover — penciled, inked, colored and lettered. It took us three months to complete it, and it didn’t go through. ULTRA was submitted as five pages, and that went through. I guess we learned to follow the submission guidelines on the Image Web site.

On the other hand, the experience from working on our first submission was invaluable. If we didn’t work on that, I doubt ULTRA would have been as strong.

What have you learned along the way that has made your pitches stronger?

JOSHUA: Looking back, our first pitch was very raw and unpolished. We were so eager to tell a good story that we tried to tell multiple stories within the story. It lacked focus and clear direction — too much characterization, not enough structure. But I’d like to think that we’ve gained a better sense of balance in that aspect.

For more information about the Luna Bros. and GIRLS, visit their Web site - http://www.lunabrothers.com/

—Interview by Tim Leong
Posted by Tim Leong on May 6th, 2005 filed in Story Archive | Comment now »
Member of the Week: Shawn Feeney

SHAWN FEENEY

RATE SEAN’S PROFILE HERE

As told to Comic Foundry…
I consider myself to be primarily an intermedia artist, creating work that falls conceptually between established art forms. I use comics in conjunction with other media, but I also think of comics as a kind of intermedium; even though the art form does have a fairly lengthy history, comics still seem to sit somewhere between art and trash in the American cultural imagination. It’s something between drawing and writing, between looking and reading. I’m interested in the gaps between and the fusions of these activities. Who sleeps in the gutters between the panels? What happens to a word balloon when it’s filled with helium? Could a comic also function as a musical score?

I’ve always been fascinated with black and white art created with pen and ink. It’s so far removed from that which it represents – no color, no depth – yet it can look so convincing and real. To develop my pen and ink style, I studied Dürer, Moebius, Bernie Wrightson, Jim Woodring, and the excellent book, “Rendering in Pen and Ink.” I’m currently most interested in artists such as Chris Ware who are really pushing the boundaries of the medium.

I’ve been interested in creating “sonic comics” for a few years now: comics that have soundtracks. These are somewhat inspired by old children’s books I had as a kid that came with records – when you heard the bell, that was the signal to turn the page. In my pieces, instead of turning the page, you look at the next panel. I originally created some on paper and have since made Flash versions (an example, The Family Tree, is available on my website: http://www.shawnfeeney.com/intermedia.html). Adding sound to comics gives each panel a defined length of time the reader can spend on each panel, and so rhythm and counterpoint become elements you can work with very directly.

I think experimenting with sound, motion and interactivity will lead to more successful developments with web comics. A lot of web comics, like works in many new technologies that simply mimic older ones, don’t seem very compelling to me. I’ve always loved the subversive underbelly of comics, and I enjoy watching (and helping) it mutate and evolve.

Want to be the Member of the Week? Better your chances by uploading to your portfolio…
Posted by Tim Leong on May 4th, 2005 filed in Story Archive | Comment now »
David Hollenbach: The New Artist You Need to Know

Never heard of David Hollenbach?
Don’t worry, you will. Hollenbach’s art comes from a technique typically rare in comics — collage. David talked with Comic Foundry about his part of the new comic Fragment and how he comes up with his unique visuals.

How has your experience as a commercial illustrator helped you in your sequential work?

The commercial illustration work has just helped me hone my image-making skills. It’s helped me work faster and has made me more aware of what communicates well and what doesn’t. What communicates well (for me) are things that aren’t obvious but more surreptitious in communication, ideas that just sneak in and before you can realize you were communicated to, I guess mainly with the illustration. With comics it’s a lot of communicating through the visuals instead of the text.

Can you take us through your process for sequential work? It’s very collage-like.

It is very collage-like mainly because that’s how my work has developed in everything I do. I did quick thumbnail sketches of the panel layouts and the action going on in the panels. Then I just looked at the thumbnails and pondered how I was going to make each panel so they would be interesting and move the story. I decided to do the main character’s face as a drawing because the face would have to be consistent throughout the story and being that I didn’t know any old men I could photograph. Plus I have a hangup with people thinking I can’t draw because I do collage. Anyway, enough of my neurosis. For the comic, it was just found materials from magazines and other printed material. … For the shirt, I actually just made photocopies of an actual shirt I had.

How do you go about intertwining photos and elements you draw/paint?

I collaged everything together in Photoshop and printed them out on cardstock. That is when added paint, pencil, and whatever to pull everything together as a whole.

Why do you think there’s very little collage work in the comic world?

I don’t know for sure. I think it is a little tricky to create a comic with collage with it because it can be very easy to stop the narrative flow with the technique and take a reader out the story.

How did Pratt prepare you for the comic world?

I didn’t know anything about comics when I got to Pratt. Then my junior year I had George Pratt as a methods and media teacher, and through him I was introduced to it. I took a painting class with him outside of school, and we became friends. When hanging out with George, you can’t help but have his love and knowledge of comics and storytelling rub off on you.

What’s the most important lesson you learned from George Pratt?

Everything was to further the story because the story is what it’s all about and if you just wanted to make great pictures, go make cool pictures, not a comic weighed down with a lot of things that have nothing to do with the story.

After you finished your first issue, what did you realize art school didn’t prepare you for?

Though they tried, they didn’t prepare me for what do with work after it was done. Granted, this is my own fault for not paying attention when they tried. I was thinking that if you work hard enough on the art it wouldn’t matter. I have found it doesn’t really work that way.

How did Hard Left Press start?

I had met Matt Dicke at a show at the Society of Illustrators, and we became friends. Matt brought up the idea of creating an anthology and went out and found Vince and James.

How are you marketing Fragment?

We’re not really marketing Fragment that much yet. We had sold copies to Diamond, and were going to money and put it into advertising but it’s become a debate on whether a couple people in the group want to do that.

How did you condense your story into eight pages?

When doing the original thumbnails, I had just drawn eight rectangles and started there. It just about fitting the panels in the space I had. It was just a lot of back and forth, what’s more important, what to keep, etc.

How did you decide how to group the four different stories?

Matt had decided that. He kind of came up with the design and layout of the stories. He figured that Vince and my stories started with single images and that would be the best way to get into it.

What were problems you encountered while putting out the first issue?

I had a problem with the type I used that we had to change after we got the first print to make sure everything was all right. Something about what I was using didn’t print right. It was all pixilated. I had to change typefaces. Also, we didn’t see how much a problem for the reader the combination of stories with no title pages was going to be. We were just trying to save space for the stories, but we should have found a way to split them more.

Look for David’s portion of Fragment at http://www.hardleftpress.com/

—Interview by Tim Leong
Posted by Tim Leong on May 4th, 2005 filed in Story Archive | Comment now »
Launching the Mech-a of Comics

Ivan Brandon and Andy MacDonald seem to fit right in here. The scene: a bar on New York City’s Lower East Side — a watering hole much like one you would find robots from their Image-published creation, NYC Mech. The pair sat down with Comic Foundry to talk about their new book, NYC Mech: Beta Love, New York grit and how they overcame the obstacles of starting their own series.

Let’s start with NYC Mech. How is this one in the series, Beta Love, different from the first?

Ivan Brandon: It’s different in that, all the Mech stories so far have been different little operas within different neighborhoods, different characters. This one has some crossover with one of the earlier stories; the plot line is a progression, but it sits pretty much on its own. It’s different in that, thematically, it doesn’t deal with similar situations; this one is more of a romance, as usual I guess the crime is similar.

All new characters?

IB: Pretty much all different characters, but with two crossover characters.

Who came up with the concept of NYC Mech?

IB: I think the first sentence came from Miles (Gunter, co-writer) and basically ended up as a conversation between the three of us. We had a lot of things that we wanted to accomplish. Andy is a pretty new artist to the scene, who I’ve been working with for a while, and I thought he deserved more attention than maybe he had been getting. A lot of it was just trying to find a book that would showcase him the best. And when you’re doing an independent book, it’s a lot of work. The first arc is something like 140-something pages; that’s the first six issues. The second is at least that long. When it takes a day to do a page, you’re looking at a year’s worth of work.

Andy MacDonald: Yeah, that’s the thing. If I had just been drawing regular humans, it would have been easier, or I could do it on the fly. But I had to keep remembering where the joints are, stuff like that. But with every book, I’ve been more excited each time. Visually, this story arc is better. We have Nick Filardi, who does the color on this book. He’s a smart guy, really knows what he’s doing with the color.

IB: The obvious thing in a New York City book with robots is the robot design. But a lot of what we try do is the little minute things, like a bus or something. I think there’s an inherent marvel in anything, and especially in a city like this. In any mood or any situation, you can look at just about anything and be enthralled by it. And that’s Nicks’ greatest strength, to do something like color a bus and make it look great. I’ve had people say that’s their favorite thing about the book. That’s the thing, is when people saw the previews, they really noticed things like the bus, and people love it.

AM: You don’t want to do it to a fault where you’re making a series like this, about New York, but there are certain New York experiences, like the bus, that you couldn’t see somewhere else. And you may forget it the next day, but that’s real New York. It may sound cliché, but it’s true.

IB: If you look just around this bar, and obviously people reading this aren’t here, they can’t see it. But if you notice things like the tile on this floor, or there’s a green light shining behind that couch. Nick’s really good at picking up on those little tiny elements that other people would miss. He really adds a lot to the book. He’ll notice things that I didn’t see, that Andy didn’t even see, and really bring those things out.

The City

NYC Mech stories take place in a gritty New York, sort of Lower East Side. Why did you choose that?

IB: In the second story, I think we delve a little more into the different parts of the city. I think for my point of reference, it’s my experiences. A lot of what I do, socially, oddly enough, a lot of what I find interesting sort of work in that world. But to a degree, in the second story, there was some socialite/Upper East Side aspect of things. I do deal with the grittier world because in my dealings with people, everyone sort of has that story in them, whatever they do. Everyone’s got some sort of stories and a past, and those stories seem to overlap.

You’ve got your Martin Scorsese New York and your Woody Allen New York, and they are very different. So you’re more of a Scorsese New York?

IB: I deal more with Scorsese’s New York, but I think also that I skirt the line. There’s a certain softness and comedy to the Woody Allen New York. It’s its own creation, and a lot of people faulted him for that, but I think it’s his own interpretation of his environment. But for us, I think there is a certain randomness that he captured, the humor in mundane, everyday situations. And I think we do that, not with comedy per se, but I do try to bring out just the absurdity of the everyday. My personal taste, though, I guess I do end up doing more along the lines of Scorsese. The main character so far has had sort of a nasty streak to her, but in this one there’s a little more love story, and a little more New York City.

When you’re drawing New York, what’s your reference point? You’ve said that the New York in NYC Mech is more realistic than other books.

IB: Andy would never say that! I said that.

AM: A lot of times we’ll actually map a route of where the story is going to be. For the last story, we were up on the East side, in the 70s somewhere…

IB: We’ll go out and scout the locations, figure out what the shots are, take as aerial as we can get, depending on the location, take shots of just about everything. We’ll get pictures of phone booths, and just the minutiae of everything.

Doing that together, do you think that makes the visual story easier/better?

AM: It’s easier, when he’s just like, we’re gonna need this shot, I may not know for what, or if there’s something interesting visually.

Are you ever somewhere and you say, “I want to draw that; write a scene here”?

IB: I try to throw it in, yeah. The interesting thing about working with real sets is that I think sometimes the set will dictate to Andy, as he’s doing something, that maybe not even be in the script. It affects the character such that it adds a little twist to the script. It’s interesting how after we’ve scripted it and after we’ve laid it all out, how the environment sort of just molds the story.

It’s almost as if the city itself is a character.

IB: Oh, absolutely. I mean, a lot of people say that about the city, that it lives and breathes, but I really strive for it to be a main character, if not the main character. I mean, doing a comic here versus doing a comic anywhere else in the world, is that we get to use real sets. And that shouldn’t be wasted. I mean, not that I didn’t like Spider-Man, but all those books just sort of use [New York] as a backdrop, and there’s a lot of creators, and a lot of writers and a lot of artists who have either never been here, or are just not very familiar with it. And that was a super concentrated effort on our part, not to do that at all. But rather, to get in there and really learn what we were talking about. There are environments that we scouted out that we had never been to, or really weren’t that familiar with. And we’ve got to learn that environment so that we can express it properly.

AM: That’s kind of part of keeping it fresh. Finding a little corner of New York, like this place we scouted out a couple of days ago, someplace we never would have really thought of, total right angle.

IB: In a really grungy, gritty way, this was a place that even a set designer really couldn’t have thought of. It was this old school ground, directly across the street from a bridge. Part of it was underneath the bridge. And you get the idea it was just all shadowy and you have this schoolyard, so there’s all these kids playing basketball. It’s just this whole world there.

Yeah, you couldn’t really have that happening in say, Sheboygan. Sheboygan Mech.

IB: No, not really.

On Pitching

How did you pitch the book to Image?

AM: I’ll be honest, I went for a walk. I was in San Diego, and I just went away. I find that’s the best way for us to communicate the book, is for me to shut up and leave.

IB: We were all sort of nervous and giddy at the time, and we were trying to work out a way to give the book to Image, and Andy went to get some food or something. He literally left for 10 minutes, and then the opening appeared and we (Ivan and Miles) walked over. I’d like to say that it was a very intense and profound meeting, but we literally walked over and showed them Andy’s art, and they said, “Okay.” And then we re-pitched it to Eric Stephenson. It’s a funny story, I guess, because we presented it to Eric Stephenson and left it at that. And he showed it to Jim Valentino, the publisher at the time, and he got very excited about it.

Was it a mini-book?

IB: We did the whole first issue.

What do you think of mini-comics and using that to get your foot in the door?

IB: Andy’s done some of that. I personally haven’t, but I’ve read a lot of mini-comics that I love. I’m a very impatient person, and I just like to just run in and do the whole finished thing, so I’ve never done that. Since I’ve been in comics I’ve just been obnoxious that way. But for a lot of people, it’s great because they’re able to work their craft, and in the process learn more in an on-the-job sort of way. One of my favorite comics, Street Angels, started out as a mini-comic, about three years ago. And then Slave Labor loved it, so obviously that worked out for them. It’s incredible. I can’t think of any book out there right now that’s more respected.

AM: Yeah, for something that started out as a mini-comic, it’s really got a lot of creator respect.

IB: Yeah, it gets a lot of press respect. To call it a comedy would be selling it short, but for a book that’s pretty well-founded in comedy, I can’t think of any book that does as well.

On Image

Have you found differences now that Erik Larsen has taken over as publisher?

IB: It’s been pretty smooth sailing for us. I guess there are stories out there about Jim Valentino and others about Erik Larsen. But Jim is the one who brought us in, and it’s been really cool working with him. He has had some really good advice to give on the book. He sort of brought us in the door. As a fan, the lineup right now under Larsen is about as strong as I can ever remember at Image.

But I’ve been happy to work with both Jim and Larsen. They’ve both been very, very cool. They have slightly different approaches, but they both have a real love for the game.

Do you interact with other editors at Image?

IB: Not much, really. I’ll ask for advice every once in a while, especially from a marketing aspect, but I really don’t get much else. We pretty much present our book finished.

AM: They’re pretty big picture about the whole thing. When Erik came to New York for the last show, some kid came up to him and asked about some detail on like, page 16 of a book he didn’t work on, and he just said, it’s not like that.

IB: I mean, with Savage Dragon, he’s there every day, but overall at Image, he’s the big picture guy. He’s not poring over every issue. He’s there for us if we ever need him, of course. But we haven’t really needed it.

So if NYC Mech were being published by DC, would it be a totally different book?

IB: I don’t think we would ever bring NYC Mech to DC. No offense to DC, but the way we consider the book to be, the way it exists, it needs to stay the way it is. We need the freedom to do that.

AM: Image gives us a lot of creative freedom.

IB: DC puts out a lot of great books, don’t get me wrong, but I just know that there’s a lot more of an editorial control. Image was our first choice for NYC Mech, and luckily it was our last choice.

You only pitched NYC Mech to Image?

IB: Yes.

A lot of people are going to read that and say, ‘Those bastards!’

IB: I know they’ll say that. I know it sounds misleading.

What did you say during the pitch? It must have been great.

IB: It was all Andy’s drawings.

AM: I wish I’d have been there! He might have been sweet talking, you say that it was all Andy’s drawings, but I can’t believe that.

IB: It was!

AM: Well, it turned out. I feel like if I had been there, something would have gone haywire.

IB: I hate answering this question because I know it’s misleading. I know it’s not that easy.

Nope.

IB: Not at all. The project just came together in such a way that Image appreciated it, and they ran with it. It might be a once in a lifetime thing, but luckily it happened to us.

AM: When you said people will say, ‘Those bastards,’ it’s probably legitimate because if I was reading this, I would probably say the same thing if someone told me that story.

IB: And there’s a certain symbiosis, I think, with what Image is trying to do on a bigger scale, and what our personal goals are as creators. It’s just working out that way. Other people’s mileage may vary.

The Robots

Where do you get the references for the robots you draw?

AM: A lot of it comes from different stuff I’ll see; a little while ago it was mopeds, the back of scooters and Vespas. If you ever look at the back of a scooter, you’ll notice there’s a lot of little stuff going on. The other half of it is, my grandfather is kind of a packrat of a lot of World War II technology. He just has a lot of crazy things in his shed. There’s like a thing with glass and metal things sticking out of it, and I have no idea what they do, but they’re definitely inspiration for the robots.

How do you draw faces and put emotions on a robot?

AM: I try to find out what kind of people they are, and it comes from that. The rest of it is just trying to give them a natural smile, and how they talk, not make them all look like marionette puppets. That’s probably the hardest thing.

The characters are all robots, but they have a lot of human qualities. Why did you make them susceptible to drugs and alcohol, and even love?

IB: I have to be a bit elusive here. There’s some stuff I’d have to divulge that I’m not quite ready to divulge. But I will say that I think that when reading about these characters, the reader has to be able to identify with them in some way. The readers have experienced what the robots experience. If you can anchor the robots’ experiences to things that the reader has experienced, in terms of emotion, or in terms of drinking a beer, I think it just makes it easier to relay the story.

One of the concerns we had early on in terms of the violence was that if you shoot a robot, will anybody care? It became my job, and mostly Andy’s job, to relay it in a way that was actually moving. To relay drama and emotions in such a way that it wasn’t just fun, flashy sci-fi.

On the top Robots of All Time

So what about the top 5 robots of all time. There’s C3PO…

IB: You caught me on a good day. I’ve been very anti-Star Wars lately, but I just saw the Clone Wars thing, the animation, it’s just so great. Genndy Tartakovsky, the guy who started Samurai Jack, Dexter’s Laboratory, he really went in and found the old school charm of Star Wars, and the core of what excites us. And it’s just so much better than the film. I feel better about it now because it’s exciting again.

AM: So in the top five, is it R2 and C3PO?

They’re not really worth more than one spot, no.

AM: Small Wonder?

IB: I would definitely say Small Wonder.

AM: Absolutely.

IB: You know, there’s Alien vs. Predator. I would like to see Alien vs. Predator vs. Small Wonder. If nothing else, we’re available for that, by the way. It would at least be nice to see Small Wonder spin off into its own miniseries.

AM: There are personally a lot of things that they didn’t explore on the show that I would like to see. There are questions that I have that I want answered.

Maybe a mini-comic?

IB: Maybe. And then there’s Marvin …

AM: And the one from Buck Rogers.

IB: Twiki?

AM: Yeah, Twiki.

IB: Twiki was awful and not well put together, but I have a soft spot in my heart for him.

I liked Rosie the maid from The Jetsons.

IB: Rosie, I like. But she’s kind of like the Alice from the Brady Bunch,

People are scared of robots. They don’t want them in their houses. And what’s up with Robocop?

IB: I didn’t really get Robocop. It’s just like a cop, except more metallic.

Other Projects

So what else are you guys working on?

AM: I’m working on … well, I’m supposed to be working on a book with Rick Spears, the guy who did Teenagers from Mars, called Full Fathom Five. It’s basically like Aliens, but with giant squid. It’s like an old school giant squid, running for our lives kind of thing.

And what about you, Ivan?

IB: I’m trying to think of what I can really talk about. I have a book coming out with Mike Oeming. It’s very cool in that it’s something that we co-wrote. My script, his plot. And he’s actually drawing it; he’s halfway through the first issue right now. It’s very, very gritty, and we’re trying a lot of new things. We’ve been working on it for about three years, so I’ve had to wait for it.

AM: I’ve only seen like five or six pages, but from what I’ve seen, I wouldn’t be surprised if people are really wanting more after Issue 4.

IB: It’s similar to Powers, but it’s really much more gritty, and more in the vein, visually, of NYC Mech. The environment is very specific.

Powers really isn’t very gritty.

IB: We had intended very early on to get very gritty with it. It’s called The Cross-Bronx, and it’s set in the Bronx and the Bronx is a very big part of the story. We spent a lot of time observing, and taking photos. And Mike gets very specific with it, like having plastic bags in the trees, things like that. He’s really good at getting into the environment.

The Look

When you were creating the look of NYC Mech, was that all Andy or a collaboration?

AM: I like a good amount of collaboration. I know what I’m bringing to the table, but I really want to know what Ivan and Miles have in their mind because it really helps to realize the book more and make it more of an experience. Nobody really said, “I want it to look like this.” We all want out parts shown, and hopefully I can do that.

IB: Depending on the characters, sometimes we’ll go in and say, I want something that looks like this, and you’ll want something very specific, and give very specific input. I’ll want a character to have this type of hat, or this mannerism.

Or a character who looks like your mom.

IB: Yeah, like background people, definitely. Issue 5 has Brian Azzarello, Jim Lee, Dave Johnson. They’re all in Issue 5, most of them at the same table. All the people who’ve influenced us. Part of the fun is going through the book and looking in the background and finding all the little stuff Andy hides in there. He’s constantly hiding little jokes, little phrases, slogans. There are messages all over the book.

How very Disney.

AM: I do my best. There’s a naked little mermaid in every issue.

The Process

What have you learned since the first book?

IB: A lot of things we do now, we did then. But on a progression level, there are some things. …

A better or faster process?

AM: There are production things, yeah. Like now, I understand how long it’s going to take to do XYZ, and better figure out timing, and that’s pretty valuable in a deadline-oriented world.

Do you have any time-saving tips for someone who’s doing a comic?

IB: Andy has a lot of black on the page, and when he started out he would have to fill in a lot of stuff by hand. And I think he’s learned to fill a lot of that in using Photoshop. And when we’re under deadline, that’s important. Time he would spend just coloring in a wall, that’s just a waste of his time.

AM: Ironically, I’m really not that friendly with computers. I’m not a big computer person at all. So it took me a lot of convincing, them saying, “Oh, just do it in Photoshop; don’t worry about it.” It really took me about two or three issues before I started doing that.

IB: And a bat.

What’s your work dynamic like?

IB: Andy and I work as close as we could possibly work without actually working in the same space. A lot of it I’ll just send scripts over e-mail, and we’ll go back and forth like that. It’s sort of weird, like, wedding thing …

AM: Uh …

IB: No, you know, like when you have a girlfriend, you can say two words and they know what you mean. My scripts for Andy are sparser than almost any other artist that I work with. And he knows immediately what I mean. And when I’m putting a script together, I can pretty much visualize what Andy will do with it, and how he’ll interpret it, and that really helps.

Do you give him angles?

IB: Sometimes. Once in a blue moon, like if I’m really dead set on an aerial shot or something. But usually, Andy obviously has a better set of eyes.

And what about Miles?

IB: Miles’ interaction is mostly with me.

Were you guys friends before NYC Mech?

IB: Yeah, I’ve known Andy probably four or five years. I’ve known Miles a little longer. Miles and I are very, very different writers, and our personalities in general are very different. I’m a cigarette smoker; he does yoga. We’re the odd couple of comics. But we’re very sympathetic on certain things. But in terms of the day-to-day, I interact a lot more with Andy. We see Miles about once a year at the convention. But we’ll all still be friends, if and when NYC Mech ends.

The Business

Terry Moore told Comic Foundry it’s harder to stay in the business than to get in the business. What do you think of that?

IB: I would have to say yes and no. The business can be very frustrating and I understand that, but I think it can be avoided. And I’ve never met Terry Moore, so I’m not saying this applies to him, but I think a lot of creators have the same experiences in comics that they have in life otherwise. I’m a very easygoing guy. I get along very well with pretty much everyone, and I’ve found that to be true in comics. It can be very frustrating, but the passion helps you get through it, I’ve never had anything happen bad enough that would make me want to walk away.

There are things that I want to do, and things that I am doing outside of comics, writing-wise. But being able to sit down and write down an idea from scratch, and Andy a week later draw that idea, I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of that. There’s something overwhelming about that. And when you have a good collaboration, I think it’s a really amazing thing, and it’s very, very hard to get it right. But if you can find an artist who gets what you’re trying to say, and you can understand what the artist is trying to say, that’s the essence of all this. And I personally don’t think I’ll ever get tired of that.

AM: In a lot of other media, it’s either one person or a team of tens or hundreds of people. But in comics, you can get two or three guys together and put out a product.

And it’s immediate.

AM: Yeah, you have it in your hand a week later.

When we talked to Geoff Johns, he said he likes the immediacy of comics.

IB: I can write a screenplay, and it will never see the light of day, even if it were to get bought and optioned. A lot of people complain about comics, but I’ve worked a lot of jobs, and to complain about getting to sit down and write out stories for a living? I don’t think that will ever be something to cry about.

AM: The thing is, it’s an attractive prospect, when you do some comics, and all of a sudden people are calling you for writing screenplays or doing background art for some movie. I mean, who doesn’t want to be in Hollywood? It could be that you either get shit on so much that you have to leave, or you just start thinking, why comics when I could get paid thousands of dollars more for less work?

IB: But when you look at someone like Mike Mignola, he’s got a No. 1 movie, but he’s still drawing comic books. A lot of it for us, working in New York and having a book based in New York, is about turning people onto comics who wouldn’t be into them otherwise. A lot of the people that we know who read the book aren’t really comic book people.

AM: Yeah, a fair amount of non-comic book people have really been down with the book, and that’s always rewarding.

Advice

A lot of advice we get for aspiring artists is to treat comics like it’s a business.

IB: I agree to a point, but I think the most important thing is to have the passion for it. Yeah, act like a professional, but I’ve worked with people who didn’t act professional who were geniuses. I think that’s part of the problem, with Marvel and DC, so much of it is worrying about what people are going to buy. For me, as a creator, don’t worry about the market. If you have a story that you want to see on paper, see it on paper. Let them worry about the rest of it. Have the passion, and you have to be ready to fall on your face. If its not going to work, it’s not going to work. I hate to contradict everyone, but I almost think we could use a little less business. It’s art.

AM: You have to do thousands of pages to get where you want to be. But even after that you have to be ready to take that blow to the chin, where someone is going to hate what you did. You have to have the passion to create it, but once you create it you have to back off a little bit to the point that you say, it’s yours now, do what you want with it. If you want to take a shit on me, go ahead.

IB: You just have to practice constantly and work constantly to get better. I think a lot of people don’t do that. If you want to draw pages, draw pages! A lot of people come up to you and go, look at this page that I did, and we’ll say, yeah you’re on the right track. And they go, well, but I already did this page. What can I do with this page?

AM: You can draw another page, I mean, that’s your job. If you want to be an artist.

IB: If you want to be a writer, write scripts, it you want be an artist, draw some pages.

AM: This is all assuming we know what we’re talking about.

IB: Yeah. Anyone’s mileage may vary. There are people in the business who are very stagnant and very stubborn who think they’ve gotten to the point where they think they’ve achieved their goal of where they are in the business. For me, that’s just such an absurd idea. The idea of progress that I have is so contrary to that. I need to constantly keep progressing. A project that I do with another artist will be completely different than what I do with Andy. Every day as an artist should always be different than what I did the day before.

AM: There’s always more to learn.

IB: Nobody’s “there.” I don’t care how great they are, nobody is “there.” One of the few people you can look and say he is “there” is Alan Moore. But he evolves, too.

Influences?

AM: Can I say the moped? I would say my grandfather, which is true, but also very cheesy. I grew up reading comics in the ’90s, and they’ve all had their effect. Nolan, Adams, the dude who did City of Lost Children (Jean-Pierre Jeunet). That changed my life. If you can use that many rivets in a movie and make it work, I’m down for it.

IB: I try to make most of my influences just some schmuck I met in a bar. Comics-wise, I would say Frank Miller. There’s no one writing in an urban vein who comes even close to that. For NYC Mech, it could be something like a video by Michel Gondry, or some DVD. But the guy in the bar more so than anybody else. The people I run into just being in New York are so much more surprising than anything I could think of. For example, my apartment has a fireplace, and the landlord hired a chimney sweep, but the guy never made it because he died of a heart attack on the day he was supposed to come. I couldn’t write that! It would be almost too convenient. Something like the blackout. Something you would never expect. You never know what you’re going to get.

NYC Mech: Beta Love hits stands May 4.

—Interview by Amber Mitchell and Tim Leong
Posted by Tim Leong on May 2nd, 2005 filed in Story Archive | Comment now »
You Asked, He Answered: The Antony Johnston Q&A

First, you demanded we interview him. Then we let you ask the questions. Now we have the answers you’ve been waiting for. Comic Foundry proudly presents our very first reader interview, with acclaimed writer Antony Johnston as the inaugural star.

With the release of The Long Haul, (Brian) Azzarello’s upcoming Loveless, and Beckett’s surprise hit, The Ballad of Sleeping Beauty, do you think comic readers are once again ready to accept Westerns the way they re-embraced the horror genre a few years ago?

Perhaps, although we’re a long way off of having a Western hit on the scale of 30 Days Of Night or The Walking Dead. If that happens, then by definition people will have accepted it, but you could say that about any genre.

The recent popularity of horror comics is because of great books that everyone wanted to read, not the other way around. You can’t predict what comics people will go nuts over, whatever the genre. Apart from romantic comedies, of course. No one buys those.

You’ve been getting a lot of praise from established names in the industry, like Warren Ellis and Alan Moore. If you could write your own ticket, would you be interested in scripting an established monthly title, or would do you have a special project you’re preparing for us?

Why can’t I do both? Seriously.

Taking over an established monthly title isn’t something I’m especially chasing (although I was in the running to take over a DC book recently – no, I didn’t get it), but there are a few books out there I could do interesting things with. So if I had complete carte blanche and control, sure, I’d do one. Although with my sense of humor, I’d probably decide to take over X-Men just so I could get a rise out of the fans by killing every last one of them. (The X-Men, not the fans.)

As for “special projects,” I have a ton. Every one of my graphic novels is a special project to me, and there’s a load more where they came from. There is one thing I’d like to do that requires complete control and lots of money: a swords-and-sorcery book I’ve been working on for a few years now. But to do it properly would take at least five years of monthly issues, full color and a single brilliant fantasy artist for the entire run, which is pretty much a pipe dream, especially in that genre. So it’s probably going to have to be a novel instead.

How has your friend Alan Moore influenced you?

Alan’s influenced me in ways I can’t even begin to measure, but most of it was years before I got to know him. He and Grant Morrison were the two biggest influences I had from comics when I was younger, and they helped shape my attitude and approach to writing. Since getting to know him – and I can’t emphasize enough that Alan really is the nicest bloke you could ever hope to meet – Alan’s influenced me in a more direct and practical sense, helping me look at things in a different light and encouraging me to simply think more about what and how I’m writing.

But it’s important to remember that influences are only that, and ultimately we must all make our own decisions. Much as I respect Alan, for instance, I don’t always agree with him. Keeping that kind of perspective and sense of your own veracity is vital. Otherwise, faced with someone of Alan’s stature, intellect and presence, you could easily succumb to idle mimicry. That doesn’t serve anyone, least of all yourself.

(And if you’re wondering, the single best piece of advice Alan ever gave me was this: “When I was starting out, whatever job I took on, I always tried to do it in a way that would make it fun for me to write.” I’m paraphrasing, and it’s a very simple thing, but sometimes the simplest things are the ones we overlook and so bear repeating. For anyone looking to earn their living as a writer, I think that one certainly does.)

How do you write a comic set in the past while keeping it applicable for readers? Are there universal themes you try to stick with?

In a sense, yes. Those themes tend to come out of the story without needing to be imposed by The Author, though, because the human experience is ultimately universal.

We’re all people. We all need shelter, food and water. We all have the urge to procreate and protect our young. And we all need the means to obtain those things. If that makes us all sound like animals, well, that’s because we are. It’s not so long ago, on the evolutionary scale, that we were lolloping around on all fours and grunting at one another. Humans still have strong natural instincts, and those don’t change.

Which means that The Long Haul may be set 140 years ago, but all that’s really different is the details. The outfits, the technology, the day-to-day lifestyles. But people still had the same base concerns; shelter, food, procreation and the means to obtain them. In the case of Cody Plummer, that means robbing a train full of money so he can buy shelter and food to raise a family. If that were a modern scenario, it might be breaking into a bank vault to do the same thing. But nothing about Cody’s base nature would be different: only the details.

Don’t sweat the themes. People haven’t changed that much in the last thousand years, let alone a hundred. The details are what make a period piece, and if you concentrate on them and your characters’ motives, you’ll come out the other side with a story as relevant to a modern audience as one set 10 minutes ago.

Queen & Country is one of, if not my favorite, comic. Greg Rucka is my favorite writer. What are you bringing to the book/what are you going to do to keep fans of Q&C coming back? Also, why is Rucka leaving? And will he be back?

Let’s make a few things absolutely clear: Greg is not leaving Queen & Country, and I am not taking over the regular series. I’m writing a single Q&C: Declassified miniseries, featuring Nick Poole in his previous career as an SAS trooper. The regular series of Q&C will continue, just as it always has, with Greg at the helm. So on that score, you have nothing to worry about.

Now, with that out of the way … I don’t want to give too much away about the series because it’s coming out fairly soon anyway. What I can say about my approach is that I bring my own particular style, and a certain amount of authenticity regarding Britain and Ireland (where the miniseries is set) to the book. This Declassified is a lot more straight-up and action-oriented than the previous ones, mainly due to the subject matter. I had a great time writing it; Chris had a great time drawing it, Greg loves the result, and I hope everyone else does too. Expect violence.

How much of a challenge will a book like “Queen and Country” pose?

It actually posed a very big challenge, or rather several. One: I’m a huge fan of the book, which made me concerned about living up to its high standards. Two: Greg is a good friend, so I was worried that the situation might be awkward if he didn’t like what I produced. Three: Greg is also a large part of why I’m actually here right now because Whiteout was one of the books that made me get off my arse five years ago and start writing comics. Again, this made me nervous of living up to what I regard as a very high standard.

But you can’t let things like that stop you. Sometimes you have to swallow your fears and dive in, doing the absolute best you can, and trust that the people around you – editors, colleagues, and so on – will tell you if you fuck up. If you let your fears and insecurities stop you even attempting to write something, then you’re in the wrong business.

The horrid truth is that no one believes they can live up to other people’s (or evern their own) expectations. Sure, there are moments where you chuckle to yourself with glee because you’ve written a few great lines, but those times are rare and fleeting. I don’t know any writer – not me, not Alan Moore or anyone in between – who truly, honestly believes they’re utterly brilliant. And that’s healthy, because as soon as you think you’re perfect, you’ve lost. You’ve stopped growing, stopped learning, and you’ll stagnate for the rest of your career.

So when faced with a challenge, you do your best to ignore it and just pound that keyboard. It’s the only way the work gets done.

Do you ever feel stifled when going through the process of scripting a story you’ve already written in your head? A problem I have is that I’ll have everything down exactly as I want it, mentally, but it bogs me down as I type it out because it feels re-treaded. How would you deal with this?

I get this sometimes, yes. There are tricks you can pull on yourself to stop it happening, depending on how you write. For example, one of my favorite areas is dialogue, so I’ll often forbid myself from writing any dialogue at all until I’m actually at the script stage. It keeps me wanting to get to the script, wanting to bash through it so I can get to the dialogue. Sounds corny, but it works.

You should also be absolutely sure that this is the story you want to write. Sometimes, I’ve had this problem because I just don’t find a scene that interesting, so it isn’t very interesting for me to write. And if you ever suspect that’s why you’re feeling stifled, stop and fix it immediately. Don’t find your own story very interesting? Then why on earth would anyone else? Look at it again, find a more interesting way of doing the scene, and write that instead.

Occasionally, though, there’s nothing wrong per se, you’re just exhausted by this particular story. But when you have a deadline to meet, that’s not much of an excuse. In these cases, and this ties in with the previous question, you just have to suck it up and battle through. Get back to that keyboard. Hit those keys, one after the other, and by such artifice a line is written. Now do it again.

Writing is work, and hard work at that. I always know when I’ve had a really productive day because even though I’ve barely moved from my desk, I’m knackered by the evening.

How has your previous magazine design experience helped you?

It’s allowed me to design all my own creator-owned books, which is nice! But mainly, working in periodical publishing gave me a healthy respect for deadlines. I spent five years working for a national UK publisher, producing 13 issues a year, with over 100 pages of editorial content in each one. I never had more than two designers working for me, and the standard deadline was just 19 days from blank page to finished, print-ready magazine. Then, after day 19 was done, we had to do it all over again, and again and again.

Under those circumstances, being late simply isn’t an option. Quite apart from the knock-on effect it would have on the staff’s schedules, there are several enormous, outrageously expensive machines waiting to print that magazine. One of those machines standing idle for a day costs tens of thousands of pounds in lost print time, so the magazine absolutely has to be there on deadline – and obviously, you can’t send blank pages. So the work just has to be done. No excuses.

Being a graphic designer helps me think visually, which is an advantage in comics, but that’s not specific to magazine work. The main thing I took from it was punctuality, and I’m pleased to say that since I started writing comics I’ve only ever missed one deadline – and that was because I bought a house and had to take two months off work just to make it habitable!

Look for Antony’s new miniseries, Queen & Country: Declassified Vol. 3, when it debuts May 11. In the meantime you can visit his Web site at www.mostlyblack.com.

—Interview by the Comic Foundry readers
Posted by Tim Leong on May 2nd, 2005 filed in Story Archive | Comment now »

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Archive for May, 2005

How the DEAD WEST Was Won

Liven Up Your Logo

PART 2 of NEAL ADAMS: Uncensored, Uncut, Untouchable

NEAL ADAMS: Uncensored, Uncut, Untouchable

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You Asked, He Answered: The Antony Johnston Q&A