comicfoundry.com » 2005» September

Comic Foundry & MoCCA Networking Event!

Come on out, New Yorkers!

This is the second one of these we’ve had and we’re looking to top our last effort. Come join in the fun and meet your peers!

Posted by Tim Leong on September 21st, 2005 filed in Story Archive | Comment now »
Chris Bachalo’s Unfinished Business

In Chris Bachalo’s case, you can go home again. This month Bachalo goes back to the drawing board for Uncanny X-Men where made a name for himself during his run in the late ’90s. Bachalo talked to Comic Foundry about how this time around will be different and what goes into producing an issue of his art.

You’ve done all the X-Men gigs before - how is taking over on Uncanny X-Men, again, different for you as an artist this time around?
This time around Marvel isn’t in Chapter 11. That was a small distraction. The creative hierarchy at Marvel is solid — a good thing. They talk to one another. They plan. Stories have been plotted for up to a year plus. Chris Claremont shows no signs of holding back. I was on the phone with him the other day, curious to see if his creative light was still burning bright. It was — a lot of good ideas, hope they see print. I’m looking forward to The End of Greys arc. I see it as my legitimate starting point of the series as I landed in mid-arc on the M crossover featuring characters and a story conceived by someone else. I felt like a stranger at the party. What the hell is going on? Who are these people? The first two issues have their moments but nothing like what I hope lies ahead.

Creatively, what are you hoping to do that you weren’t able to in your previous run
Well, for one, I hope to stick around a little longer. Last time, I was just getting comfortable with the water and the next thing I knew I was treading water in a different pool. My purpose creatively on Uncanny and everything else I work on, is to keep moving forward. I want to shake the tree and see what falls out — see if the creative Gods have anything else to offer. I mean, what else is there? Regurgitation of the tried and old? I don’t think so. Stick me in the deep fryer and serve me with fries. Creatively, I don’t know what is going to happen. I’m slightly uneasy about it, procrastinating a little. That’s normal. Let me know I’m alive and scratching and that I give a damn. Whatever happens I hope that it looks good. I hope that Chris and Mike (Marts, editor) understand.

What type of visual style do you think Uncanny X-Men calls for? How is it different from 10 years ago when you were first on the title?
Man, I think these characters have seen a little of everything so I can’t say with any certainty that there is a style that is relevant or not for Uncanny. I moved about a year ago and find myself still — where’d I get all this damned stuff?— digging through boxes. So many comics. I think, if I bought a slurpee instead of a comic every time I went to 7-eleven I’d be fat like Jabba and have an unimpressive collection of yellowing superhero plastic cups. Awful. Instead, I bought a comic and now I have a marginally impressive amount of comics filling up the closets of my house and pissing off my wife. Anyways, I was digging through a box and landed upon my (Barry) Winsdor-Smith Marvel Comics Presents with Wolvy. Just dumb amazing work. That style was definitely called for. So are many others: Jim Lee’s, Joe Mad’s, that Byrne guy. I can’t say that any one style is better than the other. It just has to be good — the best there is. What makes the style the best style? Who knows? I don’t. I crank out the work, come up with something I feel is competent and up to speed and hope others agree. We’ll see. I’ll do my best. I always have a vague idea of what I ‘d like to do, but that often changes just past page one, issue one.

Is there anything you want to change, visually, during your return to Uncanny X-Men?
I’d like to be better this time around. Why? Well, because it’s better and achieving to do better is better than achieving to do worse. I was hit and miss the first time around — the creative environment didn’t help. Plots would change from issue to issue. We started on a cool Rogue arc and then it was dropped. An anniversary issue surfaced unexpectedly. Issue #360? What? I felt bad for (Steven) Seagle and (Joe) Kelly. They really wanted to make a mark on the series. Then they were gone, then I was gone. Interestingly enough, issue 465, my second issue back, will mark 100 issues from my last Uncanny issue. Back then my style wavered all over the map. I look at what I was doing from 349 to 365 and, well, did my head split? Felt like it. My favorite issue was probably 462. Man, I was feeling good then. Found a groove. All up hill, you know. Then I was gone. Now I’m back. A little gray around the seams this time around, but better. Right?

Do you adapt your style to the different books you’re on?
Yeah. The writing, the tone, the pacing, they all dictate the style, feel and presentation of the book. I’ve been crazy fortunate to work with the best writers on the best series the past 14 plus years. I think I’ve touched all the genres. Maybe not the Archie genre, though, Veronica would be good to get to know sometime. It’s important to inject each series with its own character, its own look and feel.
That’s a cool challenge about working in comics — visiting different series. Typically, I read a script, address the topic and make a decision on the best way to tell the story. That’s why High Cost of Living doesn’t look like Steampunk, Steampunk doesn’t look like Captain America, Captain America doesn’t look like Batman: Black and White, Batman doesn’t look like Shade. Steampunk was, for me, very greasy and broken to pieces. Fragmented. Held together by rusty bolts and chains. Witching Hour was much more methodical. A deceptively straight forward nothing-what-it-seems tale. I can’t imagine drawing Captain America the way I drew that series. I was invited to create a Batman: Black and White entry. I had a dark, creepy story, with black and washes in mind. A small spin about an obsessive Batman groupie. It would be spooky, like the Ring movie — the first one, not the second. According to the rules, an individual is not permitted to both write and draw Batman at the same time…unless incorporated. That sounds complicated, so, I invited Brimstone writer/creator Cy Voris to help me out — Brimstone was a great TV series buy the way. They should collect it on DVD. C’mon, Cy! We created our little 8-pager and it was fun and dark and creepy like the first Ring movie and the point is that the subject matter dictated the style and look of the book. Creepy story, creepy art. Lots of black and scribbly, edge of vision, things-crawling-out-of-the-black-goodness kind of stuff. Not a look that would apply to, say, Gen X. The teenagers there are only a little black, with a semi-gloss coating. Definitely not Batman black. Batman doesn’t eat sugar bombs and have groin sensations for the hottie across the dorm room hall, if you know what I mean.

In the same vein, do you think you’ve matured as an artist over time?
Yes. That tends to be acquired, hopefully, with experience. I know a lot more now than I knew back then. I have more to offer. More options. Changes one’s perspective, you know? Sometimes this is good, sometimes not. I wonder why Creatives are often at their best when they’re young. Does the Muse leave? Drugs fail them? Do they get tired? Do they stop exploring? Maybe they become less desperate? Maybe too desperate. Maybe they have too many obligations sucking at the well? Kids. Family. Creditors. I’m aware of the burn out that comes with
creative pursuits and hope that, in my maturity, that I recognize this and continue to push myself to think outside of the box and to never grow complacent.

Chris Claremont is writing the current run — how does that change things for you as an artist and a collaborator?
Changes everything, really. It’s the difference between eating pizza and an apple. They’re both food, but the experience eating them is completely different. Everyone brings something different to the table. Working with Jeph Loeb on Witching Hour probably my best experience in working with a writer. He was very easy to communicate with and was a good listener. I never felt like I was crossing creative boundaries with him. He made it comfortable to share ideas, good or bad, which created a wonderful creative environment. He would call at 12 AM — I don’t think he sleeps very much — and share that he had seen the new pages and would then proceed to discuss them with me. He’d discuss likes and dislikes. He’d ask questions. He wanted to understand. He noted the details, the subtext. It was cool to know that some one was really paying attention. In turn, I gave him everything I had. I didn’t hold back. Witching Hour is one of my favorite efforts. Probably top three with Steampunk and Death: TOYL. Others send me a script, give a few notes and that’s enough. Mark Millar writes great scripts. Wonderful idea man. He continues to amaze me. Great energy. I want to punch something when I read his scripts. Everyone brings something to the table. A chimichanga here. Deviled eggs there. Potato salad. You know. We’ll see what Chris brings. BBQ ribs would be nice. Something meaty.

The advances in computer coloring technology in the past decade have certainly made color a much more prominent part of the visual equation. How have you adapted your pencils, if at all, to compensate in your details and figures?
If I’m coloring, I will make short cuts or adjust creative decisions and think about the colors during the conceptual stage knowing that I’m going to get another look at the page. I may not draw clouds in a background if I know I can put them in later. Stuff like that. It was computers that made it feasible to color my own work, which I’ve always wanted to do. Passing on the art for someone else to color has always been uncomfortable for me. It feels like starting on a sentence, getting two-thirds of the way through and having someone else finish the thought. I continue to color all my covers and pin ups and Upper Deck cards, concepts, etc. That seems to fill the void. Turning around interiors on a monthly basis proved to be a little tough. I tried it on Cap but the drag was heavy. When I’m not handling colors, I continue focus on the black and white page as I always have. I supply color notes to the colorist and leave them to do what they do best. The really cool part regarding the computer generated coloring aspect of the biz is the ability to make changes on a dime. I grew up with paint and brushes. Tested my patience a million times with them. I liken Photoshop to that of the invention of the wheel. It’s that amazing. I can change colors on a whim. Erase just like that. Use photography. Mine only. No stealing others photos, folks. Make things bigger. Smaller. Everything.

A lot of people have described your art as anime-like. What effect, if any, has the popularization of manga and anime had on you?
Anime really wasn’t the poison here, it was Joe Mad. He was affected by anime, but I thought he drew a lot better than most of the Japanese offerings. I couldn’t help but be affected some way. I looked a lot at what he was doing on Uncanny and picked up a few details of his work that I enjoyed. I do this with a lot of artists. (Mike) Golden is my favorite. I ‘m an avid collector of his work. I’ve been looking at (Travis) Charest’s art of late. I’m sure you’ll see a few influences from him in creep into my offerings. The key is not to copy another artist out right. Every artist that has ever been successful has his own identity. They are all influenced by others but, as they mature, they develop they’re own style and inject their own personality into their work. They become unique. Bill Sienkiewicz was a Neal Adams disciple. Check out his Moon Knight and Rampaging Hulk work. It was cool to see him rapidly evolve his own unique style on Moon Knight, New Mutants and Elektra.

How do you figure out panel structure?
Man, that’s a big one. I could write a book on that. I treat each individual page as a work of art while at the same time keeping in mind that each page is a piece of a bigger pie. In my first action I simplify and note, usually right on the script, the beats of each page. Then I’ll pick out the strongest image, make that the dominant element of the page and design around it. That’s where 2D design comes into play. Best class I took in University. The play between black and white and gray and the use of shapes is what separates the men from the boys. Too often artists think they’re being creative by over lapping panels, turning them, stacking them. Mostly it creates anarchy. Simple panel layout is often the best way to go — especially if you’re new to the game. (John) Cassaday and (Bryan) Hitch are great with limited panel layouts. But I don’t want limit creativity either. At some point is it’s great knock out the panel borders and float a few images. Frank Miller is amazing at design. Mike Mignola. Tim Sale. Eduardo Risso. They know how to design the page to create harmony, focus and drama. They also use black very well. The subject matter often dictates the layout of a page. Lots of talking, lots of panels, conservative placement of panels. Action, preferably, big panels with guts and bits of everything being sprayed about and bold panel layouts with lots of contrasts using either color or black and white.

There’s so much action and fight scenes that go on in your books — as an artist, how do you handle it all?
I’m not famous for my fight choreography. Infamous, maybe. I’ve lost one or two souls along the way. I put a lot into the fight scenes and I suspect that I lose many because they tend to read the books a little fast and skip past the details. Often, there are two or three actions occurring in any one panel and, unless you stop and savor, it looks like muck. One would offer that my job is to offer up clarity. A good point and I try to please, but I also try and be creative in the way that I handle the action, to try and think outside of the box and offer up something new. Sometimes this works, other times not. The main goal is to sell the action that the writer has called for. With the layering of actions within one panel I can often combine two beats at once leaving room for bigger, more dramatic panels.

How do you approach creating a cover?
Another chapter in my book. I should write one some day. My first objective with covers is to sell the book. My cover is going to compete with five hundred others covers on the book shelves, so I need to find a way to arrest the eye. The best way is to be graphic and simple. Look at Miller’s work. Stark and dramatic. You can see a Sin City book from across the room. I really liked the Cassaday Astonishing X-Men cover with Professor X. That big, black and white head shot one. I could see it from 20 feet at the Borders bookstore. Effective. I bought it. The second objective is to try and sell the story or the topic of the book, so it’s important to sell the prospective reader on what the book is about. You wouldn’t put Marv shooting someone’s guts out on a Betty and Veronica book. On Uncanny, my objective is grab the reader with a simple, striking image, with as few characters as possible, using a narrow range of color—the more colors on the cover the more it will blend with the other riff raff on the stands—and sell the buyer that this is a dangerous, over the top, super powered, sci-fi adventure book worth their three bucks. Media is important. Note the starkness of the Sin City work. Black and White. Hard lines. Sharp contrasts. Really sells the idea of Sin City, doesn’t it? The (Dave) McKean covers on Sandman effectively sold the feeling of that book. Very different media on those. Adam Hughes’ style on Wonder Woman sold the idea of that title. All three styles are very different from one another but effective in advertising the content of their respective books.

— Interview by Tim Leong
Posted by Tim Leong on September 16th, 2005 filed in Story Archive | Comment now »
James Sturm: Center of Attention

Today the Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS) opens its doors for the first time for classes. Founded by James Sturm, creator of the award-winning The Golem’s Mighty Swing, CCS is a new cartooning school based in White River Junction, VT that features an impressive faculty and enthusiasm for the medium. Comic Foundry talked with Sturm a month before today’s grand opening about what he hopes to accomplish and what you can learn from CCS.

What is it about the industry that this school necessary?
I don’t know if there’s poetry departments or creative writing departments that need their legitimacy or reason for existing depended on the industry. I mean, I’m glad the industry seems to be going well and branching out and that will certainly help our students. It’s exciting, don’t get me wrong — I’m not industry bashing here. But, I guess I see comics as an art form and I think the students coming here are a little less concerned about getting a job in the industry than they are with making comics that are important to them.

I guess that ties into my next question, which is, what are you hoping to offer your students that they can’t get from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) or the School of Visual Arts (SVA) or the The Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art?
That’s a very good question. We can offer them more money in the bank account — we’re a lot less expensive than any of those schools you mentioned. I think we’re a small school that’s just focused on comics. If you go to SCAD, I don’t know how many sequential art majors there are there, but let’s say 250 students out in a school of 4,500 students. The thing with SVA, it’s a cartooning program in a much bigger institution. And the thing with big institutions is that the resources get spread around. Here, every visiting artist we have will be relating to the curriculum they are studying. I can speak a from little bit of SCAD because I taught there for four years and I can talk about SVA because I attended there — every school has its strengths and weaknesses, of course.

When I look at the visiting artists we have this first year, it’s just unparalleled. We have different people coming almost throughout the whole year, including Chris Ware, Ivan Brunetti, Seth, and the list goes on and on. I don’t think in terms of faculty with James Kochalka and Steve Bissette, Rick Veitch, obviously myself — of course I’m biased but it’s the best faculty for a cartooning program that one could have. Not that there’s not great teachers at the other schools, of course, but we’re a small school and the curriculum works together really well. You take course a la carte and a lot of times all your courses can pull you in different directions so you’re concerned about, “Well, do I do this homework or that homework.” With this program all the classes are working in unison, so something you’re writing in one class you’re drawing in another, and you’re learning to layout in InDesign in the third class and you’re silk screening the cover of your mini comic project in another class.

You mentioned that you taught at SCAD for a while — how did working there make you a better teacher?
When I first started at SCAD, I was one of 50 incoming teachers, which is astounding. When I left four years later there were three or four of us left. I think SCAD, in the industry, is known as a place that’s a bit of a teaching boot camp. It’s on the quarter system so you three quarters a year and maybe a fourth if you teach in the summer. A full course load is four classes so, you’re preparing for 12 classes a year and it’s a brutal pace. It really is like boot camp and I think one of the reasons so many of the professors leave there is because nobody can make comics and keep their own professional practices going. I learned there to teach, basically. I learned how to structure classes and understand the ebb and flow of a classroom and I learned how to break down what I know in a way to transmit to students and really examine process as a cartoonist, which has really helped me.

And why is CSS two years?
Well, we’ll have a one-year program actually. It’s not on the Web site yet, but there’s a one-year program as well.

And why do you decide to offer them in those increments?
Well we wanted flexibility for students, of course. In the two-year, you can kinda think of it like taking apart the engine of a car, look at every component and second year you put it back together and decide where you want to go. I think you have to walk before you can run and I think a lot of cartoonists have dreams of their 400-page graphic novel and have time composing a single scene that flows and makes sense. The first year is really taking stock and getting a real intimacy with the process of making comics. And then with the second year, however you choose to employ that knowledge you can focus more on that.

And how are you condensing that into the one-year program?
Well I don’t think we’re going to. With the one-year program, we’re small so we’re incredibly flexible on how we can service students and don’t want to make any blanket statements, but if you learn all the basic skill sets in the first year — learning how to color stuff on the computer, writing, design, to doing thumbnails of books and figuring out your process of making comics, then the second year some students will be on their on and won’t need a second year. I don’t think with education one size fits all and we’ll probably have some students who just come for a semester and we’ll have some that come for two years. We definitely don’t have the bureaucracy of a big art school and we can really be flexible to a student’s needs.

What’s the most valuable lesson you’re hoping to get across to the students?
I think just trying to have a realistic expectation of what it takes to make comics. For each individual cartoonist to create a level of intimacy with their own creative process. And I think what frustrates people is when they think, “Oh, this is how you do a comic” and they don’t understand and they get frustrated. But I think if you had a realistic set of expectations about what this medium demands based on your own creative disposition, we can provide that service to students. I’d be happy with that.

One of the biggest complaints I hear from art school graduates is that they’re never really prepped for the business side of things. How is that something you guys are addressing?
We have an actual course that deals with that stuff, but more importantly everyone teaching here is a working cartoonist and we just signed a book deal, the Center for Cartoon Studies, with Hyperion Books for children and we’re doing a series of graphic novels and we’re talking to some other publishers about doing some projects as well. So besides being a school, we’re also a studio and the students will be able to participate on various levels in the production of these things and actually see cartoonists working on this stuff. It’s not like this thing you do after you graduate, it’s this thing you do while you’re in school. And I think that, more than anything else, will help demystify the process of getting work and prepare them for what it takes. Education isn’t this thing where you pay some money and you get a degree and then you hand that degree to some employers and get a job. You have to create opportunities and learn to do such things. At the school we’re creating opportunities — we’re starting a school from scratch. I think the students that are coming here are pretty healthy and have a pioneer spirit and hopefully they’ll thrive here.

And this book deal you referenced, is that for the established faculty or a student-based work series?
I think it all depends on the students. I think they’ll be some opportunities to do some visual research — there are students right now that will be drawing the stuff. These books aren’t going to be student work; they’re going to be professional work. The cartoonists that will be working on these books will be coming through White River Junction and will see the process from meetings with editors, to thumbnails, the editorial process and for me, as a cartoonist, is the type of stuff I would’ve killed to have a front seat to.

You’re about a month out from opening day — what’s the biggest roadblock you’ve got?
Oh, just falling down from exhaustion. We’re doing good. Jean Schulz is underwriting our library and that’s getting put together. We’ll have 20 students moving in from all over the country and getting settled. Right now it’s just resources. We’re doing this on a very tight budget — we’re going into year one after renovating a building, and after all the startup costs we’re entering with zero debt. And with a project of this scale, it’s really an accomplishment.

—Interview by Tim Leong
Posted by Tim Leong on September 14th, 2005 filed in Story Archive | Comment now »
Ink Well: The Ultimate Klaus Janson Interview

Many people know Klaus Janson from his work with Frank Miller on Dark Knight Returns and Marvel’s Daredevil. He also penciled and inked the original Punisher series, Batman: Gothic with Grant Morrison and most recently Batman: Death and the Maidens with Greg Rucka. During his long career he’s inked just about every penciler of the last 35 years and has literally wrote the book on penciling and inking. I met with him in his New York apartment to talk about the past and his illustrious career and what he sees for the future of comics.

What do you think most people think inkers do?
I was having this conversation yesterday with an editor from Marvel and that question is still one of the biggest mysteries in comics. I think most people think inkers are tracers. Neal Adams in an interview once said that inkers prepare the pencils for reproduction. Couldn’t really be much more derogatory, or dismissive. To some degree, he was right in the sense that the reproduction and printing process in the past was so archaic, even as short as 25 or 30 years ago, that much of an inkers contribution was limited to getting the pencils ready for repro. And I think that’s probably when he said it. Nowadays, you could reproduce pencils and have them shot and printed. But people still think that inkers are tracers and are somehow less than artists. The point I would want to make is this: An inker who knows what he’s doing is a better artist than an uninformed penciler. The category doesn’t define the level of skill. It’s a question of individual talent and what the person brings to the drawing board.

What makes an inked page effective?
That’s a good question. The word, “effective,” is the word I would use, too. The answer is a complicated one, though, and involves several layers and categories of examination before we can judge art as “effective” or not. There are certain standards and criteria that are objective and agreed upon. And then on top of that, there is that individual vague category where one looks at things subjectively, which is really what people mean when they say, “I don’t know much about art but I know what I like when I see it.” One category, for instance, where we can judge effective art and inking, is the ability to overcome the problems of working on a two-dimensional piece of paper or canvas. Effective inking has the ability to overcome that limitation and create the illusion of the third dimension: depth. And pencilers and inkers and colorists have the artistic responsibility to create the illusion of three-dimensionality. Otherwise it looks flat and unreal. So at least one characteristic of “effective” art and inking is to create depth. Objectively speaking, if someone’s art fails in its ability to mimic the reality of three dimensions, we would be on pretty safe ground assessing that work as “ineffective” and grading it as unsuccessful.

Could non-effective inking make for non-effective storytelling?
Absolutely. You know, effective storytelling is the point. The ability to communicate is the goal. We can start with something as general and basic as trying to communicate the illusion of depth, for instance, but the goals of storytelling are as varied as each individual story. One of the most interesting things about storytelling in this medium is the unpredictability of the challenges from story to story. From an artist’s point of view, I can tell you that it is necessary to be able to think quickly and be adaptable. The notion that one size fits all is not a productive way to approach storytelling. I’ve found that each page, each panel, often has its own set of problems that need to be overcome in unique and new ways. And that applies to both penciling and inking. The point of a comic book, the point of inker, penciler and colorist is to be able to communicate information. Sometimes it’s in a general way and sometimes it’s in a very specific way that is unique to the problems of a particular story or scene. Whether it’s to communicate a point about the story or character or it’s the ability to communicate to the reader that the scene takes place on a cold day, try convincing the reader it’s cold through your art, for example. The goal of storytelling is to pass information from the writer/artist to the reader. And then on top of it you fucking have to be entertaining, too.

Why is that?
I would always include entertainment as part of the definition of effective storytelling, and the reason is very simple: if you’re boring, you’re going to lose the reader. If you’re boring, the reader is going to start thinking something else and “leave” the story. You have to be interesting and you have to be entertaining to maintain the connection between the storyteller and the reader. It’s the same with a film. If the viewer starts to think about dinner or homework or whatever, the director has failed in one of his responsibilities. If you are so boring that the reader drifts away before the story is done, you’ve failed as a communicator and a storyteller.

How do you attain that level of entertainment?
Well the point of that is to sustain the connection between the reader and the storyteller so the storyteller has many different options — and some, again, specific to a particular story or scene. Some storytellers do it by increasing the body count or the level of violence or sex in the story. Titillating the reader is one way of being “entertaining.” Sometimes we can hold the reader by emphasizing the drawing, the anatomy, the detail — kids love detail. You can do it by being bold and bodacious in your compositions and designs. And that makes the art vibrant, strong and compelling, like (Jack) Kirby. There’s a trend in comics right now that seems to work with the audience and that is a riff on being “realistic” - using photos and such as a basis to get closer to reality. Although, personally, that just makes me absolutely vomit.

Why is that?
I don’t think that comics are about photorealism, and I tell you that if
I had one wish for this medium it would be to pull back from that. I think
it’s the thing that’s going to kill comics. Don’t get me wrong, there have always been artists and comics that rely on photorealism including myself, I might add, but it’s going too far. The problem is that the attempt to mimic realism in comics results in work that is very limited and constrained. By definition, you can only draw what you photograph or swipe from movies. The result is often panels that are very static and motionless. There’s no movement. Neal Adams is an artist very influenced by photography and reality. But he was able to combine that approach and integrate it with a very dynamic page layout and exciting panel composition. He’s a very smart guy and I’m sure that was a conscious choice on his part. As a result, he was able to get beyond the limitations of photographing everything. Al Williamson, Gene Colan, Craig Russell, Brian Hitch, to name a handful of artists at random, all use photos extensively to varying results. And I’ll be the first to tell you that I use photographs and photo reference a lot in my work. But If that’s the only thing you’ve got, I think it’s really, really boring. My fear is that every comic will start to look the same. What I look forward to in a comic is the opinion of the artist and writer. Their point of view is what attracts me both as a consumer and as an artist. If everything is photographed, then things start to look like a fashion catalogue. Just, you know, people standing around modeling clothes. I find that boring. It’s a snoozefest. Comics are not about reality, it’s about reality plus.

Do you think that’s a sweeping thing across the board? I can see that for superhero books, but what about more realistic, grounded books?
You have a valid point, and I understand what you’re saying, a book like
“Gotham Central” or “The Pulse,” which are non-superhero books. The point that I would want to make is there’s nothing wrong with using photos as a reference, but you have to be able to generate and create some kind of excitement on the page, and it really requires more than achieving a photorealistic look.

I think there are some artists who are relying too much on that and not bringing any of their own particular vision to it. It really doesn’t take that much talent to have your friends pose for pictures and then trace them off. That lacks a point of view, the artists’ point of view, and that’s what I want to see. What is the artist thinking about? I can’t get beyond the photorealism. I want to see how the artist, the storyteller tells the story, whatever it is, in his own vibrant, opinionated point of view. And I think the photorealism stuff can really get in the way of that. But like you said, not always. Believe me, I use photos, absolutely, for all different jobs, whether it’s backgrounds or faces, but there is a way of incorporating it in your work and not letting it get in the way of the artist’s vision.

In that vein, do you think it’s bad to have a more realistic quality to today’s art?
Not really. I just want to see more than that. It’s certainly been an ongoing practice since comics began. Artists have always relied on photos for their reference or drawing. Guys like (Milton) Caniff, (Alex) Toth, (Noel) Sickles, (Burne) Hogarth and many more, all were heavily influenced by photos and film, for instance. The advances in printing and technology recently make it possible to be more realistic than ever in this medium and I fear that we will become homogenized to some degree.

When I buy a book, I almost never buy the book for the character; I buy it for the people who are doing the project. And I also reject the book based on the people that are drawing or writing it. I want to see somebody’s opinion. I want to see their point of view. A lot of people might point to someone like Steve Ditko or Carmine Infantino as being very quirky and having a very unusual non-realistic style. But after looking at some of the books these days I find it refreshing. I see it as a breath of fresh air and I can appreciate their quirkiness. I may be overstating the problem. I absolutely realize that this is a personal burr under my saddle, so to speak. The elevation of “realistic” drawing at the expense of other, more important components of art like composition or design or storytelling, irritates the crap out of me. On the other hand, I am relieved that the other trend in comics that is running parallel to the photorealism stuff is the anime and manga influence, which I think is reassuring in some ways.

How do today’s comics’ quality compare?
I don’t think there’s any doubt that the comics these days are better.
What do you think?

I like them better. I don’t have as much to reference as you do; I haven’t seen as many.
There’s something about having actually lived during the period, rather than going back and trying to catch up. But I think comics are better than they have ever been, and I also think that the alternative press is extremely healthy. A great deal of variety and a great deal of art and story and subject variety, but business-wise still very, very thin and fragile. But healthier than it has ever been, with Top Shelf and a lot of other publishers of equal quality, I think they are doing amazing work. I think of Craig Thompson’s “Blankets,” a very, very good piece of work on a lot of different levels. But even mainstream comics, the printing is better, the coloring is better. I don’t really think the art is better, it’s about the same. You can’t go back too far, but 50 years ago, think of the EC comics, Harvey Kurtzman, Will Eisner, there were a lot of good artists even at that point. So I don’t think the art is better, but the overall presentation is better, the printing is better, coloring is better. I think it’s much, much better.

You also teach at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) - what lessons do that you try to hammer into your students?
The first thing I try to focus upon is the theory, rather than the mechanics of it. I’m generalizing here, but most young artists tend to think that drawing comics is about, say, anatomy. That’s part of it, but it’s not the focus of what I try to do at SVA or any classes I teach. I try to broaden the definition of what storytelling and comic art is about and introduce the theories and responsibilities and obligations that artists have. The idea that the artist is totally and completely responsible for what is on the page sometimes scares people away. Other students, upon hearing such a concept, find it freeing and embrace it.

One of the biggest mistakes that young artists make at a convention is they show a portfolio to editors and try to defend it or explain it. “I didn’t get to finish this page last night because…” whatever. And you can’t do that. It’s a destructive mind-set to have. And if you approach your work and your job as an art with an excuse, you’re doomed - you’re doomed from the get-go. There are no excuses, and you have to accept full responsibility for your work and what happens on the page. You cannot ever say, “Well, the writer gave me a bad script, or the writer did this and I couldn’t figure it out.” There’s always a way to figure things out. There is always a solution. You may not be able to get to it, but believe me, someone else will because there is always an answer, you just have to find it. And the artist has to accept responsibility for those answers.

A lot of what I teach, at least initially before getting into the mechanics, how to lay out a story or what makes a good composition, what’s a good design - is theory, the theory of art, storytelling and good communication. And the artist’s responsibility for embracing his obligation. The first couple classes I try to scare the kids as much as I possibly can. Comic book storytelling is one of the hardest things anybody will ever do. And if you want to do it well, it’s really, really difficult. You can count on two hands the number of people who have been able to do it well, effectively and “correctly.” A lot of people do it not as effectively, and that’s fine. But if you really want to do it well it’s very, very difficult. The cliché is that in film, everyone has their department. The director directs, the cinematographer does the cinematography, the set designer does that, the costume designer does that, the editor does that. In comic books it isn’t divided like that; the artist does it all. And if you want to do it with any degree of expertise, you have to know all those different disciplines, and it’s a challenge. The specific challenges change with time, but there are challenges everyday and every time you sit at that damn drawing table. And if you’re not prepared to really make those sacrifices that are necessary then I urge people in my class to get out.

How many people do you have leave?
About four or five out of 25. So we narrow it down to 15-20. And then by the second semester they’re really cooking. Because they’re really committed.

How well do they understand the lessons?
That’s always difficult to tell, but I have to take what I hear from the students on face value. Generally they’ve been pretty positive about the classes and I appreciate that a lot. I take teaching pretty seriously and I put a lot of effort into it. It’s not a casual thing for me. If there’s one thing that I emphasize above everything else, it’s that this is a tough job to do well and comic books and storytelling deserve a lot of respect.

And here’s another generality, but what do you think is biggest problem with students’ work?
I think that probably falls into two categories. One category that comes up a lot is just underdeveloped talent. I don’t know how else to phrase it. Right now I’m teaching sophomores, and it’s very hard to be adept or facile or effective at that age; they’re just too young. That’s why they’re in school. Storytelling requires some organizing point of view that most of them don’t have. It isn’t just about sitting down and drawing whatever the hell you feel like. You have to do what’s right for the story. You have to serve the story and a lot of students can’t or don’t want to sublimate their own agenda to do that. A lot of them come into class and don’t know perspective, which I think is criminal. They are at a very fragile and vulnerable age, they just don’t have the chops yet. It’s funny, you can usually tell which ones are going to make it. The average has been one out of ten, so far throughout the years.

The second category, which I’m fascinated by, is the psychological and emotional problems. Sometimes I’ll get students who are obviously able to draw well and obviously able to understand the mechanics of storytelling but they don’t have the psychological and emotional stability to get further. And they undercut themselves; it’s amazing and tragic in some ways to watch. I would rather have a so-so average student with emotional and psychological grounding than a genius artist who has emotional or psychological block. The former will succeed; the latter will not. I see that scenario play out every year without fail.

Does that hold true inside the industry as well?
Yes, yes, it does. The psychological or emotional problems don’t necessarily prevent someone from working within this medium. Some of them do fall by the wayside in school, but some get past that point and are employed. It’s like any industry — film, music, insurance, firemen, whatever. But the ability to deal with people and deadlines and the responsibilities of being an artist are often not as developed as their ability to draw or story-tell. As a result, you can safely say that there is a lot of self-sabotage to their behavior. I mean consistently missing deadlines is one example. Everyone will miss one every now and then, but a life of that will get you nowhere. There are a whole slew of artists who take on jobs and disappear. And we’re just scratching the surface here.

We’re not even getting deeper into the psychological and emotional issues students or people may have.
One of the best things I ever did was go into analysis. Although I think I spent too much time there! It’s one of the best things I ever did because it made me understand that you can often be your own worst enemy, and whatever type of upbringing you had or what situation you currently are in, the ability to sabotage yourself manifests in many, many different ways, including not making deadlines. And there’s no real reason to not make deadline; it’s almost always something you create for yourself. And being in analysis, I was able to understand what I did that was counterproductive. And I worked at that, and tried as much as I could to rid myself of all the drama and baggage that I bring so I could focus just on the work. I just wanted to work, to draw, to be an artist. I didn’t want to have drama. I’m still working on it.

Do you think you’ve become a better artist as a result of your teaching?
Without a doubt. I shudder to think where I would be without teaching. I think I often learn much more than the students do. I find it extremely invaluable. I don’t think I could give it up.

What are you learning?
Everything. I’m learning something every day that I prepare for class and everyday that I teach. I learn everything. It’s amazing. Every interaction with a class brings up something new. And look, if you’re going to teach, you have to be able to verbalize and understand and bring to the surface all of the things that you might do by instinct. And in order to do that you have to educate yourself, apply yourself and learn about it yourself. And at this point
I’m fairly verbal about the medium, its limitations and its advantages. I’m by no means saying I know it all, but I know I can at least have a conversation about it. I have opinions now that did not at all exist before I was teaching. And what teaching has forced me to do is to come up with answers to the questions students have. I’ve tested those theories every day and eliminated those that don’t work and tried to nurture the theories that do work. And that’s made me a much better artist. In a fundamental way I think I understand the medium better as a result of teaching. No doubt. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done in my life. Absolutely.

How has the role of inkers changed, or has it?
Inking has become less important, much to my chagrin and disappointment. Inking has become less important, and color has become more important. And a lot of color dominates and overpowers the art, both penciling and inking. One of the comic companies called a few weeks ago and they were coming out with a black and white horror magazine, looking for artists. And they asked me to do a story. I jumped at it because it was an opportunity to do a complete pencil and ink job and have that work be the final product. Just for fun. I’m not saying that the coloring is horrible by any means — I think I’ve been pretty lucky to work with some amazingly talented people, Steve Buccellato on Batman: Death and the Maidens and Dean White on Black Panther for instance, but I’ve had to adjust my style as a result of the coloring, and to not do so would be naïve and dumb.

How have you adjusted your style?
The combination of Photoshop, the paper and the printing is so powerful, it can overwhelm the line work pretty easily. The color saturates the panels and seems to coat the art. On the plus side, in a general way, I don’t need to do as much work anymore in terms of communicating shape, volume, depth or form. I used to be very, very brutal in trying to communicate those things on paper, and I don’t need to do that anymore as much. I put in less lines because the colorist does what the lines used to do. One of the first things I always ask when I’m asked to do a job is who is the colorist, and I will adjust my inking according to the colorist, because they are all different with different approaches. And if the colorist is very heavy-handed, I will pull back and let the colorist do the heavy-handed approach they want to do.

And if the colorist has some artistic ability of their own, which means they have some art background, I’ll work with the colorist in tandem — we’ll work on scenes together. The color process is great if the colorist has some art education and is an artist in their own right. I think the days when you can pull someone off the street and let them color a comic are long gone. You have to know what you are doing. And you have to know what you are doing not only technically with the software, but theoretically with color theory. But it definitely affects my inking, and anyone who doesn’t adjust because of Photoshop or the coloring is being naïve. You have to adjust as time goes by.

Do you think inkers will be around in 10 years?
Yeah, but I think probably not as many. I suspect that there will be more books published with only pencils. But inkers will never be eliminated entirely because in order for a penciler to have his pencil shot (from the pencils) and colored, it has to be very, very tight, can’t be loose, and no gray lines. It’s gotta be crisp and sharp — and pencilers will tell you that takes extra time, and I think purely from an economic point of view, inkers won’t be eliminated. Because there will always be some pencilers who will not want to spend twice as much or one-and-a-half as much time doing a page when clearly they could be doing another page entirely and getting another page rate for it. So not from a technological but from an economic point of view, inkers won’t be eliminated.

What do you have yet to learn as an artist?
I would like to be able to draw better. That’s really a source of constant irritation. I walk down the street and think, “You stupid fuck, you should be able to draw better,” you know, just torturing myself. I think I have a decent understanding when it comes to the theoretical underpinning of art and storytelling but I really would like to be able to draw better. I’ve never had any formal training; never gone to art school, almost never take classes. I feel like I am undereducated in terms of technique, especially. And the flip side of that, of course, is that I’d love to be less critical of my own work. I think the better word might be “tortured.” I’d love to be less tortured about my work.

Have you had goal setting in the past?
I’ve always been goal-driven. It’s funny that being an inker was not my first choice. My first choice was penciling, and I remember going to one of the early conventions in New York when I was still living in Connecticut with mom and dad, and showing Gil Kane some of my pages and asking him, “For God’s sake, how much longer do I have?” And I was 19 or 18, and I said, “How much longer before I can break in?” The stuff was horrible. You look at it back then and it was sincere, honest but just totally uninformed. It’s very difficult for an 18, 19, or 20-year-old to be informed about the medium. But Gil, in his gracious way, said “About a year or two,” and I thought, “God, I can’t wait that long.” And the he said, “Eh, but your inking is good.” So I started picking up Xeroxes at Marvel and DC and inking them on vellum, which immediately makes the work look horrible. There’s no way you can make it look good on vellum. So I did inking for economic reasons: I wanted to get out on my own and move to New York and be an artist and live in the East Village and do the bohemian artist living in the cold water flat thing. I couldn’t wait.

But my goals have always been, in a general way: more. I wanted more. When I thought I had inking fairly well in control, although looking back that was naïve too, I would go and learn how to color. And then I got interested in coloring, and theory of color and how to use it in this medium. And after that I started focusing back on the penciling, which was really risky for me at the time. I had already established myself in one way as an inker and to switch gears is a bit of a mind fuck for the people who are hiring you. And after I started getting penciling work, I started writing a little bit. But I’ve always been goal-driven and I always want to do the next thing. I have to say, though, that this is the first time in my life that the goals are not as clear. The goal that keeps on coming up for me at this point falls more in the “don’t torture yourself” category. I’ve worked so hard for the entire duration of my career that I’d like to sit back and enjoy it and have fun playing with the skills that I have developed rather than being so goal-driven. The problem with that is I deeply feel that I have not achieved my full potential and that there is more that I can do. I think finding the balance between those opposing forces is the trick.

Do you ever consider retirement?
When I think about retirement, I always assume I’ll be working on my own non-commercial material, whether for publication or not. So If I’m gonna retire, which I don’t think I really will, I would still be working on my own stuff — and it would certainly involve comics and storytelling. I’m not sure I could turn it off, so to speak. Creativity is pretty hard-wired into my system. I might be able to transfer it to another medium, but I couldn’t turn it off. I’d love to have been an architect or graphic designer or landscaper, or musician. It’s always about design, you see. It’s always about figuring out how things fit together and look next to each other. But I can’t imagine turning off that curiosity. I really enjoy this medium; it’s exactly what I’ve wanted to do since I was 5-years-old. I’m still ferociously ambitious. I certainly haven’t explored everything there is to do in this medium. And I’m still hungry; I still want to do it. I still think I have more to say and more to enjoy.

How has your art evolved during your career?
I wouldn’t even know how to answer that, Tim. I don’t know. I think the thing that’s helped me a lot is teaching at SVA, so I have a solid theoretical, intellectual base for a lot of decisions I make on the page. Maybe somebody else could answer that for me. I’ve become simpler, more direct. It takes me less lines to say something than it did 20 years ago. That’s a simplistic description of it. That’s a tough question for me to answer because I’m really too close. People have always said to me that they recognize my work pretty immediately when they see it and that surprises me. I don’t see that — I’m just too close. I think I’ve become more direct and I would say most artists follow that trend. The work becomes simpler. You can see it in music, for instance. You could mention anybody: Miles Davis, Steven Spielberg, John Lennon, Matisse. You can make a pretty good argument that they all stripped away a lot of the stuff that gets in the way. There’s something to be said about shortening the line between the artist and viewer/reader/listener, and that’s intriguing. Getting rid of the detritus to achieve a more immediate connection between the artist and the audience.

What is it like with inkers, as far as credit and recognition? Is the inker the odd man out? How do you deal with that?
In one of his many interviews, Gil Kane was once asked, “Why are you doing this?” And he said, “For the love.” You know, I want to be recognized. And anyone who denies that recognition is not a need is foolish, uncredible. The inker is the odd man out in a lot of ways. What’s even funnier is that the royalties used to be divided in a certain percentage – writer, pencil, inker. Now it’s writer, pencil, inker, colorist. But they didn’t expand the incentive pool, they took the money out of the pockets of the inker and gave that part to the colorist. I certainly think that colorists deserve that recognition, but they decreased the amount of money the inker gets, and so you think, “Okay, what are they actually saying here?”

And they’re saying exactly that you’re work is worth less now than it was before. And they didn’t think it was worth that much in the first place! It’s absurd. It’s irritating, honestly, to have that sort of stigma. It’s like being a stepchild or non-citizen or something. I comfort myself with the fact that I have the ability, if I wanted to, to do other things besides inking. So that even though in theory inkers are an odd man out, I find a certain amount of security in that people do ask for my work and as an artist, I think I have a pretty good reputation. Maybe at some point I’ll find out that’s not true, but I console myself with that right now.

What about when you were first starting out and you didn’t have that reputation?
I really railed against the status of second-class citizens. I was very angry, very indignant at the whole notion of second-class status. It’s ignorant and uninformed. It doesn’t bother me as much these days because to a large degree I am past it. I save my indignation for other things like the utter incompetence of our political leaders. There is still a lot of second-class status reserved for inkers but it just doesn’t bother me as much as it once did. As long as I can bring something to the work, which I think I always do, and make a living at it, I think I’m doing okay.

You’ve worked with incredible people throughout your career. What have you learned from, say, Dick Giordano?
I learned a lot of very fundamental things from Dick. He was my mentor and a very pivotal and important influence on me. He still is today. But because he was the first professional with whom I shared discussions about comics, he laid the groundwork for everything that was to follow. In addition to learning about how to do comics, I learned a lot about personal responsibility and work ethic from him. And though I later picked up other theories about art and storytelling, the personal work ethic that I learned from him remained the same. It was a very, very good lesson to learn and one that I think has served me well.

What about Frank Miller?
What I learned from Frank? (Laughs) I admire Frank’s ability to realize his dreams. When we were hanging out, if that’s the correct phrase, when we were doing “Daredevil,” he was always interested in film, for instance. I don’t know if he ever said, “I want to direct,” but it wouldn’t surprise me if he did. I don’t have a clear memory of that. But what I admire about Frank and what I learned, though I suspect too late, was his ability to make his dreams and fantasies and goals a reality. A lot of people will say, “I want to direct,” and not even come close. He was able to do it. That’s something that you cannot take away from him. That’s a real accomplishment on his part. Not the directing part, but the fact that he was able to make it happen. It’s not an accident. It’s a very integral part of his personality, to make these things real. The ability to make real your dreams is something that not everybody can do.

We’ve been talking about the industry for a little while now — Where do you see it going in the next few decades?
In terms of business, it’s going to go into bookstores, Barnes & Noble, Wal-Mart, Target, whatever. The graphic novel department will get bigger. Mainstream comics will be more homogenized. Comics for a younger audience will develop. The connection between Hollywood and comics will become permanent. I think that to some degree comics will become more corporate and more business-like, certainly Marvel and DC in the last 30 years have traveled down that road already. Both have become bigger businesses. Twenty-five years ago, it was like working in a circus. Comics were a bit more under the radar, a lot more fun and a lot less serious. So I think in business, the characters will be owned by and dictated by a much stronger business sense, rather than a story or character sense. That old Stan Lee mythology of him getting up on the table and acting a story out for Jack Kirby, stuff like that really doesn’t happen too much anymore. I mean it happens between creators, writers and artists, but it doesn’t happen on a higher level. People are much more serious about this business. What I’d like to see happen is a greater recognition, which I think is inevitable, of the medium as a legitimate art-form. I’d like to see the alternative press become healthier financially. And I think a lot of people are going to be doing comics in their basement. A lot of non-corporate, non-business, non-Marvel, non-DC publications. Because the technology is so cheap, people are going to be printing comics in their basement, which I think is good. Just in the same way that people are making movies in their basement.

You mentioned this serious aspect in the industry. Do you think that’s a good thing?
I don’t think it’s a good or bad thing. I think it’s inevitable. Similar to Batman, Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, all those characters, it’s branding. It’s inevitable, it’s like IBM. I think that those fun or looser publications will emerge from someone’s basement, or smaller publishing houses. There are tons of publishers in this country that publish comic books — some of them just regional — and something will emerge from those publishers. Whether it’s IDW in San Diego or Moonstone in Chicago, or some guy in Podunk in his basement. When Marvel and DC business people sit down to consider a story or event, their concern is revenue. They think, “How many sales is this going to generate, how is this going to platform into something else, something bigger. How are we going to get an event out for the summer of 2005, or whatever.” And there’s nothing wrong with that. It is what it is. Smaller publishers don’t really think like that and people in their basements don’t have to think like that. So that particular kind of energy that used to be Marvel and DC will be taken up by other publishers. And it’s okay that Marvel and DC are more business minded these days than they perhaps were in the past. It can even be quite beneficial.

Do you think it’s the kind of thing where you have to take yourself seriously if you want other people to take you seriously?
Well it depends on what your criteria is for being taken seriously. There’s at least two different benchmarks we can use. Certainly the fact that Hollywood has had success with comic book characters on a level never experienced before means that they are taking comics seriously. So if your criteria is box-office receipts then we are being taken seriously. The other standard might be one of being taken seriously as an art form. Although I think we’ve made inroads in that area, too, we’re further away, I think, from achieving any real artistic validation. If we compare comics to another American art-form like jazz, for instance, you can see that comics doesn’t even come close to that level of respect. Although, interestingly enough, both are respected more abroad than they are here in America, where they more or less originated. But have we made some progress in shedding our reputation as “juvenile disposable entertainment?” Very incrementally, yes. And I think we are picking up steam. So I expect much more progress in the immediate future.

hat is the most important thing you’ve learned since entering the industry?
You know that’s a really tough question for me to answer. I have to really think about that one and honestly I don’t know if I have a good answer. I don’t know if it’s the most important thing I’ve learned but I can tell you the thing that surprised me the most, I guess. When I think back on my fantasies I had as a kid about what it would be like working in comics, I never anticipated how important the economics of the business were. I guess when you’re young you have no concept of business or money or that kind of stuff. So the fantasy was always a bit more innocent than the reality. And the reality is that so much of the decision-making is motivated by economics. There’s a constant tension and struggle between the creative side of the business and the money side. And maybe that’s the most important thing I’ve learned, too. Coming to terms with that is probably a healthy thing. Oh yeah, that and the fact that the industry is just like high school. (Laughs)

—Interview by Tim Leong
Posted by Tim Leong on September 12th, 2005 filed in Story Archive | 1 Comment »
TAKing on a Runaway Hit

Takeshi Miyazawa, known for his teen depictions in the hit series, Mary Jane, has returned to another hit teen series, Runaways, for a two-issue guest spot to pencil. This is Miyazawa’s second time around the Runaways as a guest artist, as he also filled in on the original incarnation of the series. Comic Foundry talked with Miyazawa on his art style and process for both Runaways and Mary Jane and how his art evolved in between.

You’re coming back to Runaways for another two-part arc. How have you grown as an artist since you were last on the title?
I’ve mostly been looking back to my previous run and nitpicking problems and mistakes made then. For example, noticing that some of the faces were a bit off and the angles and shots not as clear. Smooth storytelling is what I focus on and try to improve constantly. That includes facial expressions and subtle body language as well. I think Mary Jane has helped me tighten that aspect of my craft the most. I’ve also gotten a lot more comfortable with perspective and I’ve learned to bend walls, slant edges and implement more diagonal lines to show depth. I rarely use vanishing points and try and freestyle it a bit so that I’m not as bound to the rules as much.

How is drawing this art of Runaways different than the one you previously drew?
I’d say I’m more comfortable with the characters this time around. I’ve been following the book ever since my fill-in and the characters have grown and changed a lot, allowing me to add touches of their respective experiences and traits into the current arc. I like to really know the characters before drawing them since it makes my job a lot easier by adding quirks and physical ticks into the drawings.

How much do you try to differentiate styles on the different books you’re on? (Mary Jane, Runaways, etc)
Not all that much actually. The book and writing set most of the tone. I just try and keep up to what’s happening. Of course, action sequences require more attention in terms of adding speed lines and choosing more dynamic angles and shots but, otherwise, I try to stay as consistent as possible.

As an artist, do you feel like you get pigeonholed into mostly drawing teens?
It’s what I’m good at and most comfortable with. I can’t say I draw the coolest Wolverine or giant robot so I leave that up to the people who can. I’ve always looked to life for inspiration and I base most of my designs from what’s readily available like magazines, photographs and people watching. When I see something I like I’ll make a mental note of it and try to fit it in somewhere while I work. The stories with teens have more to do with everyday issues I can relate to which I enjoy. Events don’t have to be world encompassing to be meaningful and there doesn’t always have to be a villain. With the current push towards comics for girls and younger audiences I feel really lucky to be able to help make these reader-friendly books.

You’ve mentioned that some of your early influences are Captain Tsubasa and Dragonball. What do you think the pros and cons are of the growing manga influence over American comics?
I think it’s a good thing. Any type of cross-referencing and merging of ideas only helps the art to grow into something new. We need more unpredictability and a palette of fresh ideas right now to shake things up and what better way for this to happen than looking to what’s coming out from Japan where it’s more creator-centric. Stylistic stereotypes aside, I like cinematic sequences and storytelling and I’m sure the kids who are reading and consuming this visual language of manga feel the same. Narrative boxes that tell you everything is SO yesterday. Like, c’mon! It’s also been great to see comics shifting towards the book market more which, five years ago, was next to unheard of. The entire art-to-business and distribution aspect of manga has been a great model to learn from for us in North America.

How do you adjust your art to match tones suited for a younger audience?
There are certain rules on all-ages titles like no piercings, exposed belly buttons, cleavage, etc. As long as I follow those rules I pretty much have free reign. Everyone tells me I draw cute girls so I guess that’s a bonus.

The visual aesthetic of Mary Jane is much softer than that of other mainstream books. How does that affect your pencils, if at all?
Not all that much. I’ve never been pressured to draw in a “house” style so I just do what I do, which I feel very fortunate about. Christina Strain has been coloring most of my Marvel work and she has a great grasp of the look I’m going for. She does this cool thing to make solid areas look like dot-toner and adds great life to the characters by using just the right colors. Her work has just as much to do with the success of the art as my pencils.

Mary Jane isn’t exactly a “powers” book. Visually, how do you keep the excitement going for the reader?
When there’s no action you have to rely on storytelling and the more subtle aspects of a scene. I like throwing in visual pauses like a hand reaching for a cup or a quiet stare from the corner of an eye. Letting the reader participate in the quiet moments and work out what he/she is thinking is, to me, part of a successful story.

I just cruised your blog and it seems like you’re pulling some really tough hours. What’s the hardest part about working as an artist in this industry?
Oh, man. Time management! I’ve been pretty terrible at scheduling pretty much my entire life. I’m not one of those “list” people who can prioritize and get things done efficiently, which inevitably leads to me playing catch-up and pulling all-nighters around deadline time. It all seems to work out in the end, though. Motivation has been another big issue for me. When I was in university taking fine arts, I had tons of like-minded creative people to throw ideas around with and get inspired by but now it’s just me. Some days drawing is the last thing I want to do so that’s when I jump on the internet and look for artist Web sites with cool art. Then I look at how young they are and how awesome their work is and the guilt and envy fires me up. I’ve been toying with the idea of getting a bigger or separate studio to distinguish between life and work as well. I hear from friends who have made the move that it increases productivity 110 percent.

Do you think girls, in general, like Mary Jane? Does it matter?
Not really, no. The book is only “suggested” for girls to read. It’s not a hard and fast rule. I get a lot of father-daughter combos visiting me at cons and telling me how they appreciate having something they can both share and talk about or fans that have followed my work for years and enjoy anything I do regardless of target audience. It is always humbling when I hear either of those comments.

You live in Vancouver - what type of perspective does that give you on the American comics industry?
It’s pretty boundless as is comics in general. We read all the same comics and news sites up here. There are lots of creators in Vancouver who work for DC, Marvel and other publishers. One of the great things about comics is that nationality and race don’t really apply.

What’s the most important thing you’ve learned since entering the
comics industry?
This is such a stale answer but how it works. Knowing and understanding the process of creating, marketing and selling a product makes you aware of just how many obstacles there are and how to overcome them with reduced stress. Doing freelance is a bit different since all I have to do is worry about the penciling and staying on schedule but with my webcomic, it has been an upward battle of completing pages, updating the site, maintaining interest and, finally, going to cons and promoting it. There are a bunch of other headaches in between that sorta popup once in a while and a natural reflex to all that crap is disciplining yourself enough to stick with it. Falling behind makes climbing back almost impossible. So, yeah, in short, basically knowing what you’re getting into and having plans to deal with it.

Takeshi Miyazawa’s first issue in his two-issue Runaways arc is on stands now. While waiting for the concluding issue, check out his Web site and ongoing Webcomic.

— Interview by Tim Leong
Posted by Tim Leong on September 12th, 2005 filed in Story Archive | Comment now »
Clayton Crain on the Brain

Clayton Crain is proof that computers make life easier. Crain, the illustrator behind Marvel’s upcoming Ghost Rider re-launch (written by Garth Ennis), relies on computer programs and imagery to create his art. Crain talked to Comic Foundry about what it’s like working with Ennis and Ghost Rider and how he creates his mind-boggling art.

How did you get this project?
I was working on the Venom vs. Carnage book and they (Marvel) asked me which of two titles would I like to do. One was Ghost Rider and the another was…I don’t remember, but it was more superhero-oriented, and I went with Ghost Rider, which was probably the best choice because I think the darker stuff is more interesting for me.

Because of your style?
Because of my interests. I think I like drawing fire and skulls and stuff. I never put myself in that vein, but it seems to be easiest for me to do. I would never search out for a dark story title, I would love to do a Spider-Man but this just happens to be the kind of work that I find myself doing.

Can you take us through your process?
It’s all done by the computer. I sketch in the computer. I have a few sketchbooks around but they’re nothing grand. I’ve seen some with certain artists’ sketchbooks and they’re nothing like that. Anyway, I start in the computer and pretty much just work in Photoshop and I make a layer called thumbnail and I use a Wacom tablet to draw my images and when I’m done with the thumbnail, I size it down and send it as a jpg to Marvel. They approve it and my sketch is already on my file so I dim it a bit and start blocking things out, using a lot of layers, locking layers.

So I end up with a lot of layers. I have a file that’s 7” x 10.5” at 300 dpi and I create layers and work in them — I’ve been learning how to make the comic book look clean, just figuring out how to use Photoshop. I knew very little about Photoshop when I started, I had about four years of just playing, but getting around to actually drawing in Photoshop all the time I learned a lot.

What do you think is the best Photoshop technique you’ve learned in all that?
Those clipping masks…I use them in my panels. I’ll create a clipping mask in a folder and it keeps everything nice and clean in my panel and it’s very useful. My favorite thing is creating depth masks and having backgrounds blur out or the foreground blur out. It’s probably the most fun thing to do. Because after you’re all done and you create a flat image and have a depth mask, you give it some strength and some focus by blurring out the background.

How long does this whole process usually take you for a single page?
It takes me about two days a page.

But that’s because you’re doing the whole process as well.
I sketch it out, and most of canvases start black, so I just end up adding color to it.

And why do you start it with black?
Because if I quit at any time it’s in the dark, because you can quit at any moment and it’s all filled in for you. It rarely ends up that I can just go in and add a little light in there because I get so interested putting in the backgrounds and I just end up drawing everything. I think that’s the real reason why it takes me so long to do a page, which is about 8-10 hours a day, it’s because I keep working on the backgrounds and I’m really trying to pull back from doing so much in the backgrounds. It’s probably a sign of weakness that I can’t trust the design or something, but also I enjoy doing it.

Do you use a lot of reference for Ghost Rider?
When I got Ghost Rider, the big thing that helped me out was I went online at one of those anatomy stores and I bought a skull. It has a working jaw, and I can move it in any way so I can have a complete understanding of what I’m drawing.

Do you ever use any photo work? Would you ever photograph the skull and bring it in?
I’ve taken a shot of the skull and used it as reference, but I’ve never taken the skull and put it on the comic page. That’s no fun at all. Also, I don’t think it’d fit. It’d look weird. One big reference tool I’d use is I’ve incorporated into Ghost Rider is using 3D. I’ve been using LightWave 3D and when I got this book I took about a week – it took me about four days, I think – and I created the bike and modeled it in LightWave. Since then I’ve changed it and put textures through it and every time you see the bike it’s been rendered in a LightWave program. I still have to do a lot of things to it. Every time I take a shot of it I have to match it to the page, I have to draw or paint a spherical map, that way anything reflective in the map would come out in the render. Then any time I bring it into Photoshop I lock the layer, draw on top of it and make it fit in the book.

Why do you use choose to go the digital route?
I enjoy traditional work, like working with acrylics or ink wash — I like them. But in terms of speed, I’m not a very clean artist, so I just know if I were to do it traditionally, it’d be quite a mess and there’d be a lot of problems with that and the computer gives me so many more choices. I have no original artwork, but I guess that will make having the comic book worth it. Once it gets printed, that’s about as original as it gets.

Do you feel like the computerized style pigeon-holes you at all?
I think it’s opened more opportunities for my artwork than penciling. Penciling, I have almost all my pages that I’ve ever penciled. I hated selling them – I had a hard time figuring out how to put a price tag on them, so it wasn’t worth it. So with doing the digital stuff, not having to worry about selling my original artwork has been pretty nice. And being able to draw almost anything, with pencils, I’ve never been too good at the shorthand – This is how you draw a nose: you put a line here and there. I never really got a decent grasp of that, so coloring in the computer, I could possibly do artwork for all sorts of different mediums, like magazines or videogames or whatever. Not that I’m going that direction yet – comic books have been my interest. But I think it opens up that door eventually if I need to go that way.

What do you think this computer style allows you to do that a regular penciler wouldn’t be able to?
It lets me get the mood that I was going for. When I was penciling I thought of an interesting effect, an extreme with a light. And I really don’t want to tell the colorist what to do, because they know how to dodo their job and they know how to get it done. And with this, if I want an effect I can do it myself. And this is a big thing – you can go and finish the book and say you didn’t like something you did at the beginning of the book you can go back and fix it. You don’t have to concern yourself with you fixing it, the inker fixing it, the colorist fixing it, and you end up needing two other people to get it done. I can just open the file and fix it and save it as a new layer. Then I still have the previous version and can see if that works. It’s pretty flexible.

You know, there really aren’t too many people doing this type of rendering. Where are you looking to for inspiration?
I usually use photographs for referencing, and if I see a movie scene that I like I’ll bring that in. But as far as other artwork, I did reference a bit in the New Avengers to determine how dark their comic book was versus how dark it printed. That’s one concern of mine – the printing. I will really only know when it comes out if it was correct or not.

And how do you check for that?
My editor gave me some files from the New Avengers and it allowed me to look at the comic book in front of me and look how it comes out on screen so I can see how close it came out and how dark it is versus how dark mine is. There’s a lot of dark scenes so I was trying to figure that out.

What were you looking for specifically? Just how the CMYK configurations print?
I think the printing of Ghost Rider will be a lot better than the Venom vs. Carnage, because I didn’t prep my configurations to go from RGB to CMYK, so I did that before Ghost Rider and I also learned to sharpen my pages up because I noticed that a lot of my Venom vs. Carnage pages were blurred. So now when I look at the New Avengers it’s a lot of looking at the darkest point on the page, excluding the black- just mainly the color….It’s a little bit of guesswork, but I’ve seen the cover printed for Ghost Rider and I’m pretty pleased with that and I think it’s coming out a lot sharper than Venom vs. Carnage. Because coming from a computer monitor where it looks really sharp, to going to a printed page, it’s a bit different.

Is your monitor color-calibrated?
I don’t calibrate it constantly. I really don’t concern myself with it deeply, as long as it comes out looking okay.

I guess because you know how it’s going to print.
Yes, and if it really became a problem I think they’d tell me.

I guess your style also has a more realistic feeling than just a straight pencil. Do you ever have the fear that this realistic style takes away from this suspension of disbelief that’s imposed in comics?
I don’t try to make everything look too real. I try to make it look a little cartoony. I probably don’t try to keep it that way, I just allow it to be that way. I don’t try to make everyone look realistic, if I even could. Sometimes you’re drawing people and trying to make them look real but you’re not. I think keeping it kind of light and not going too far into realism and keeping the colors bright – even sometimes the characters don’t have real eyes, sometimes I give them little fake eyes. There’s some painted stuff that I’ve seen and they try and get really real. The page kinda looks like a dream. It has a bit of a wash through it. I think this is a little lighter than that.

How do you go about depicting fire? I mean, it has this lively feel to it and is almost unpredictable. How do you button that down to the page?
Sometimes I still struggle with that and it comes out not to my liking. A lot of it is trial and error. A lot of it’s looking at fire. A lot of times I’ll take a snapshot of a movie with fire, or a scene from Smallville, or an explosion. What I saw when I started drawing the fire I was using a linear dodge or with a screen, and they just weren’t doing anything for me. So I just used a normal layer and I put down the orange with a brush and had it on screen. And every time I overlapped it, it would get a little hotter in the center and do a lot with that brush. Then I’d go in with the smudge tool and use that on certain parts but leave other parts with a clean edge. Then doing a few more layers over other layers so it doesn’t seem so flat. I may do another layer under that, behind the fire. A lot of it’s trial and error.

How conscious do you have to be of the upcoming film?
You know, I’m interested in seeing it but I only think about it when I see something about it. Being that I have no contact with anybody from the movie, you know, my contact is Marvel, and if they liked something I’ve done, they can send it off to them or however far down the chain they can actually send it. I don’t concern myself with the movie because even if I liked what they were doing, I probably couldn’t do it because I think Marvel would have to get the rights to the character design from the movie. Maybe they have the rights, I don’t know.

When I look at Ghost Rider I go by what I imagine for Ghost Rider or what Garth has created and what previous readers expect from Ghost Rider, not from what Hollywood has come up with.

Seeing that you have this different style than most, how did it go working with Garth and him trying to plot out scenes and pages?
I’ve just been doing what Garth tells me to do. When they said I was working on the book Garth said he was excited, and that was good enough for me to know that we’re going to be working as a team on this. I haven’t spoken to him yet. A lot of times he’ll write something to see what I’ll do with it and it is interesting in the end. It’s Garth’s idea, but what you see is me trying to interpret his written word. For the most part, I think we work pretty well together. So far he hasn’t said, “Hey, change this.” I’ve never sent in a thumbnail that deliberately does not follow his storyline. There have maybe been one or two pages where they said, “Hey, where’s t his guy?” And I completely missed it between reading it and sketching it out. I’ve been doing comic books for a while and I’ve had my moments of not being professional and not being a very good team player with some writers, but once I started working for Marvel, being more professional is probably the best way to stick around.

What have you changed that’s helped you with that?
I have a lot more respect for the writer. After I worked for Top Cow I started writing some of my own stuff. I would’ve loved to have it printed, but I’m a horrible writer. It’s more because I wanted to draw particular things and I wanted to draw particular moods. And then when I got this work for Marvel, I had no problem doing what they wanted to because I think I’m pretty decent at working on a concept, but creating one on my own, a whole spectrum of a story, I think I’m a second man. I kinda embrace that.

The funny thing about working with Garth is that he writes dark stuff and I’m trying to make what he wrote dark and I’m trying to add my own sense of darkness to it and then there’s Marvel who, right before even starting it says, “Let’s try and keep it back a little bit,” because they don’t want it to get out of hand. You can’t just go out and do whatever you want — you have to think of a lot of people. I think it’s just being more responsible.

And I have to wonder, what happens if your computer crashes? That’s everything, right?
If it crashes, usually everything is saved on my iPod every time I back it up. Every now and then Photoshop will freeze on me and I might lose 15 minutes of work, but it’s better than losing an hour of work.

—Interview by Tim Leong
Posted by Tim Leong on September 9th, 2005 filed in Story Archive | Comment now »
Ink to Inc: The Klaus Janson Interview - Part 2

This is the second and final part of Comic Foundry’s exclusive interview with inking legend Klaus Janson, a veteran of comics industry for 35 years and part of the art team for Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. For part one, click here.

How has the role of inkers changed, or has it?
Inking has become less important, much to my chagrin and disappointment. Inking has become less important, and color has become more important. And a lot of color dominates and overpowers the art, both penciling and inking. One of the comic companies called a few weeks ago and they were coming out with a black and white horror magazine, looking for artists. And they asked me to do a story. I jumped at it because it was an opportunity to do a complete pencil and ink job and have that work be the final product. Just for fun. I’m not saying that the coloring is horrible by any means — I think I’ve been pretty lucky to work with some amazingly talented people, Steve Buccellato on Batman: Death and the Maidens and Dean White on Black Panther for instance, but I’ve had to adjust my style as a result of the coloring, and to not do so would be naïve and dumb.

How have you adjusted your style?
The combination of Photoshop, the paper and the printing is so powerful, it can overwhelm the line work pretty easily. The color saturates the panels and seems to coat the art. On the plus side, in a general way, I don’t need to do as much work anymore in terms of communicating shape, volume, depth or form. I used to be very, very brutal in trying to communicate those things on paper, and I don’t need to do that anymore as much. I put in less lines because the colorist does what the lines used to do. One of the first things I always ask when I’m asked to do a job is who is the colorist, and I will adjust my inking according to the colorist, because they are all different with different approaches. And if the colorist is very heavy-handed, I will pull back and let the colorist do the heavy-handed approach they want to do.

And if the colorist has some artistic ability of their own, which means they have some art background, I’ll work with the colorist in tandem — we’ll work on scenes together. The color process is great if the colorist has some art education and is an artist in their own right. I think the days when you can pull someone off the street and let them color a comic are long gone. You have to know what you are doing. And you have to know what you are doing not only technically with the software, but theoretically with color theory. But it definitely affects my inking, and anyone who doesn’t adjust because of Photoshop or the coloring is being naïve. You have to adjust as time goes by.

Do you think inkers will be around in 10 years?
Yeah, but I think probably not as many. I suspect that there will be more books published with only pencils. But inkers will never be eliminated entirely because in order for a penciler to have his pencil shot (from the pencils) and colored, it has to be very, very tight, can’t be loose, and no gray lines. It’s gotta be crisp and sharp — and pencilers will tell you that takes extra time, and I think purely from an economic point of view, inkers won’t be eliminated. Because there will always be some pencilers who will not want to spend twice as much or one-and-a-half as much time doing a page when clearly they could be doing another page entirely and getting another page rate for it. So not from a technological but from an economic point of view, inkers won’t be eliminated.

What do you have yet to learn as an artist?
I would like to be able to draw better. That’s really a source of constant irritation. I walk down the street and think, “You stupid fuck, you should be able to draw better,” you know, just torturing myself. I think I have a decent understanding when it comes to the theoretical underpinning of art and storytelling but I really would like to be able to draw better. I’ve never had any formal training; never gone to art school, almost never take classes. I feel like I am undereducated in terms of technique, especially. And the flip side of that, of course, is that I’d love to be less critical of my own work. I think the better word might be “tortured.” I’d love to be less tortured about my work.

Have you had goal setting in the past?
I’ve always been goal-driven. It’s funny that being an inker was not my first choice. My first choice was penciling, and I remember going to one of the early conventions in New York when I was still living in Connecticut with mom and dad, and showing Gil Kane some of my pages and asking him, “For God’s sake, how much longer do I have?” And I was 19 or 18, and I said, “How much longer before I can break in?” The stuff was horrible. You look at it back then and it was sincere, honest but just totally uninformed. It’s very difficult for an 18, 19, or 20-year-old to be informed about the medium. But Gil, in his gracious way, said “About a year or two,” and I thought, “God, I can’t wait that long.” And the he said, “Eh, but your inking is good.” So I started picking up Xeroxes at Marvel and DC and inking them on vellum, which immediately makes the work look horrible. There’s no way you can make it look good on vellum. So I did inking for economic reasons: I wanted to get out on my own and move to New York and be an artist and live in the East Village and do the bohemian artist living in the cold water flat thing. I couldn’t wait.

But my goals have always been, in a general way: more. I wanted more. When I thought I had inking fairly well in control, although looking back that was naïve too, I would go and learn how to color. And then I got interested in coloring, and theory of color and how to use it in this medium. And after that I started focusing back on the penciling, which was really risky for me at the time. I had already established myself in one way as an inker and to switch gears is a bit of a mind fuck for the people who are hiring you. And after I started getting penciling work, I started writing a little bit. But I’ve always been goal-driven and I always want to do the next thing. I have to say, though, that this is the first time in my life that the goals are not as clear. The goal that keeps on coming up for me at this point falls more in the “don’t torture yourself” category. I’ve worked so hard for the entire duration of my career that I’d like to sit back and enjoy it and have fun playing with the skills that I have developed rather than being so goal-driven. The problem with that is I deeply feel that I have not achieved my full potential and that there is more that I can do. I think finding the balance between those opposing forces is the trick.

Do you ever consider retirement?
When I think about retirement, I always assume I’ll be working on my own non-commercial material, whether for publication or not. So If I’m gonna retire, which I don’t think I really will, I would still be working on my own stuff — and it would certainly involve comics and storytelling. I’m not sure I could turn it off, so to speak. Creativity is pretty hard-wired into my system. I might be able to transfer it to another medium, but I couldn’t turn it off. I’d love to have been an architect or graphic designer or landscaper, or musician. It’s always about design, you see. It’s always about figuring out how things fit together and look next to each other. But I can’t imagine turning off that curiosity. I really enjoy this medium; it’s exactly what I’ve wanted to do since I was 5-years-old. I’m still ferociously ambitious. I certainly haven’t explored everything there is to do in this medium. And I’m still hungry; I still want to do it. I still think I have more to say and more to enjoy.

How has your art evolved during your career?
I wouldn’t even know how to answer that, Tim. I don’t know. I think the thing that’s helped me a lot is teaching at SVA, so I have a solid theoretical, intellectual base for a lot of decisions I make on the page. Maybe somebody else could answer that for me. I’ve become simpler, more direct. It takes me less lines to say something than it did 20 years ago. That’s a simplistic description of it. That’s a tough question for me to answer because I’m really too close. People have always said to me that they recognize my work pretty immediately when they see it and that surprises me. I don’t see that — I’m just too close. I think I’ve become more direct and I would say most artists follow that trend. The work becomes simpler. You can see it in music, for instance. You could mention anybody: Miles Davis, Steven Spielberg, John Lennon, Matisse. You can make a pretty good argument that they all stripped away a lot of the stuff that gets in the way. There’s something to be said about shortening the line between the artist and viewer/reader/listener, and that’s intriguing. Getting rid of the detritus to achieve a more immediate connection between the artist and the audience.

What is it like with inkers, as far as credit and recognition? Is the inker the odd man out? How do you deal with that?
In one of his many interviews, Gil Kane was once asked, “Why are you doing this?” And he said, “For the love.” You know, I want to be recognized. And anyone who denies that recognition is not a need is foolish, uncredible. The inker is the odd man out in a lot of ways. What’s even funnier is that the royalties used to be divided in a certain percentage – writer, pencil, inker. Now it’s writer, pencil, inker, colorist. But they didn’t expand the incentive pool, they took the money out of the pockets of the inker and gave that part to the colorist. I certainly think that colorists deserve that recognition, but they decreased the amount of money the inker gets, and so you think, “Okay, what are they actually saying here?”

And they’re saying exactly that you’re work is worth less now than it was before. And they didn’t think it was worth that much in the first place! It’s absurd. It’s irritating, honestly, to have that sort of stigma. It’s like being a stepchild or non-citizen or something. I comfort myself with the fact that I have the ability, if I wanted to, to do other things besides inking. So that even though in theory inkers are an odd man out, I find a certain amount of security in that people do ask for my work and as an artist, I think I have a pretty good reputation. Maybe at some point I’ll find out that’s not true, but I console myself with that right now.

What about when you were first starting out and you didn’t have that reputation?
I really railed against the status of second-class citizens. I was very angry, very indignant at the whole notion of second-class status. It’s ignorant and uninformed. It doesn’t bother me as much these days because to a large degree I am past it. I save my indignation for other things like the utter incompetence of our political leaders. There is still a lot of second-class status reserved for inkers but it just doesn’t bother me as much as it once did. As long as I can bring something to the work, which I think I always do, and make a living at it, I think I’m doing okay.

You’ve worked with incredible people throughout your career. What have you learned from, say, Dick Giordano?
I learned a lot of very fundamental things from Dick. He was my mentor and a very pivotal and important influence on me. He still is today. But because he was the first professional with whom I shared discussions about comics, he laid the groundwork for everything that was to follow. In addition to learning about how to do comics, I learned a lot about personal responsibility and work ethic from him. And though I later picked up other theories about art and storytelling, the personal work ethic that I learned from him remained the same. It was a very, very good lesson to learn and one that I think has served me well.

What about Frank Miller?
What I learned from Frank? (Laughs) I admire Frank’s ability to realize his dreams. When we were hanging out, if that’s the correct phrase, when we were doing “Daredevil,” he was always interested in film, for instance. I don’t know if he ever said, “I want to direct,” but it wouldn’t surprise me if he did. I don’t have a clear memory of that. But what I admire about Frank and what I learned, though I suspect too late, was his ability to make his dreams and fantasies and goals a reality. A lot of people will say, “I want to direct,” and not even come close. He was able to do it. That’s something that you cannot take away from him. That’s a real accomplishment on his part. Not the directing part, but the fact that he was able to make it happen. It’s not an accident. It’s a very integral part of his personality, to make these things real. The ability to make real your dreams is something that not everybody can do.

We’ve been talking about the industry for a little while now — Where do you see it going in the next few decades?
In terms of business, it’s going to go into bookstores, Barnes & Noble, Wal-Mart, Target, whatever. The graphic novel department will get bigger. Mainstream comics will be more homogenized. Comics for a younger audience will develop. The connection between Hollywood and comics will become permanent. I think that to some degree comics will become more corporate and more business-like, certainly Marvel and DC in the last 30 years have traveled down that road already. Both have become bigger businesses. Twenty-five years ago, it was like working in a circus. Comics were a bit more under the radar, a lot more fun and a lot less serious. So I think in business, the characters will be owned by and dictated by a much stronger business sense, rather than a story or character sense. That old Stan Lee mythology of him getting up on the table and acting a story out for Jack Kirby, stuff like that really doesn’t happen too much anymore. I mean it happens between creators, writers and artists, but it doesn’t happen on a higher level. People are much more serious about this business. What I’d like to see happen is a greater recognition, which I think is inevitable, of the medium as a legitimate art-form. I’d like to see the alternative press become healthier financially. And I think a lot of people are going to be doing comics in their basement. A lot of non-corporate, non-business, non-Marvel, non-DC publications. Because the technology is so cheap, people are going to be printing comics in their basement, which I think is good. Just in the same way that people are making movies in their basement.

You mentioned this serious aspect in the industry. Do you think that’s a good thing?
I don’t think it’s a good or bad thing. I think it’s inevitable. Similar to Batman, Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, all those characters, it’s branding. It’s inevitable, it’s like IBM. I think that those fun or looser publications will emerge from someone’s basement, or smaller publishing houses. There are tons of publishers in this country that publish comic books — some of them just regional — and something will emerge from those publishers. Whether it’s IDW in San Diego or Moonstone in Chicago, or some guy in Podunk in his basement. When Marvel and DC business people sit down to consider a story or event, their concern is revenue. They think, “How many sales is this going to generate, how is this going to platform into something else, something bigger. How are we going to get an event out for the summer of 2005, or whatever.” And there’s nothing wrong with that. It is what it is. Smaller publishers don’t really think like that and people in their basements don’t have to think like that. So that particular kind of energy that used to be Marvel and DC will be taken up by other publishers. And it’s okay that Marvel and DC are more business minded these days than they perhaps were in the past. It can even be quite beneficial.

Do you think it’s the kind of thing where you have to take yourself seriously if you want other people to take you seriously?
Well it depends on what your criteria is for being taken seriously. There’s at least two different benchmarks we can use. Certainly the fact that Hollywood has had success with comic book characters on a level never experienced before means that they are taking comics seriously. So if your criteria is box-office receipts then we are being taken seriously. The other standard might be one of being taken seriously as an art form. Although I think we’ve made inroads in that area, too, we’re further away, I think, from achieving any real artistic validation. If we compare comics to another American art-form like jazz, for instance, you can see that comics doesn’t even come close to that level of respect. Although, interestingly enough, both are respected more abroad than they are here in America, where they more or less originated. But have we made some progress in shedding our reputation as “juvenile disposable entertainment?” Very incrementally, yes. And I think we are picking up steam. So I expect much more progress in the immediate future.

hat is the most important thing you’ve learned since entering the industry?
You know that’s a really tough question for me to answer. I have to really think about that one and honestly I don’t know if I have a good answer. I don’t know if it’s the most important thing I’ve learned but I can tell you the thing that surprised me the most, I guess. When I think back on my fantasies I had as a kid about what it would be like working in comics, I never anticipated how important the economics of the business were. I guess when you’re young you have no concept of business or money or that kind of stuff. So the fantasy was always a bit more innocent than the reality. And the reality is that so much of the decision-making is motivated by economics. There’s a constant tension and struggle between the creative side of the business and the money side. And maybe that’s the most important thing I’ve learned, too. Coming to terms with that is probably a healthy thing. Oh yeah, that and the fact that the industry is just like high school. (Laughs)

—Interview by Tim Leong
Posted by Tim Leong on September 7th, 2005 filed in Story Archive | Comment now »
The Ultimate Devin Grayson Interview - Part 2

This is part of Devin Grayson’s exclusive interview with Comic Foundry. For part one, please click here.

How are politics prevalent in the comic industry? What are the slips a new artist or writer should avoid doing/saying?
The more money that’s involved, the thinner the political tightrope you can expect to be walking. I think there are three very important things to remember.

The first is: BE WILLING TO LEARN. As much as you may know about your own skill and the characters and what you do or do not like in a comic, the people you start working for will invariably know more about the business of making comics than you will. You must be willing to listen to them and treat them with respect. They are responsible for answering to business higher-ups and putting out X amount of comics every single month and believe me, they don’t care nearly as much about “fixing” that one continuity mistake that’s been driving you crazy since 1987 as you do. You are there, ultimately, to make someone else money. That sounds harsh, but it’s just a bottom line of business that you have to keep in mind. It doesn’t mean that you can’t do work that you find meaningful or that no one cares about your passion – they do. It just means that unless you’re willing to dig into your own wallet to produce your own vision, you’re going to have to cooperate with the people who are. And by “cooperate” I mean “do what they say.” You can always argue, you can make your case, you can quit, you can refuse to work with certain editors or freelancers … but at some point if you’re doing a lot of this you need to recognize that you may be in the wrong line of work. Being an independent contractor means using your skill to deliver your client something made to his or her specifications.

The second is: BE FLEXIBLE. Comics are a serialized medium that demand fresh product every month. You may have the best idea in the history of fiction, but if you can’t immediately change 14 things about it on request (such and such character is unavailable, so-and-so can’t do that because we have him selling toothpaste in a major national campaign next month, this-or-that was destroyed in the last big event and can’t be used now, or – I swear to god, the worst one I ever heard about – “This doesn’t seem very visual, but what if they were all cats?”) and develop it into 12 other ongoing story arcs, your one story is, quite frankly, not going to be worth an editor’s time. They’re not going to develop you as a writer because of one great idea when they could instead put their effort into someone who consistently coughs up 20 OK ideas. Comics are about flexibility and quantity, not continuity and quality. To be successful, you have to be someone who loves the process of writing — the thinking and the starting over and being all alone in front of a keyboard and sweating it out part — not just someone who loves comics. I’m sure you guys already know not to get into comics for fame (if you need a reminder of how nice readers are to comic writers, type my name into any comics-related BBS search engine and enjoy the love), and I can tell you right now that there hasn’t been money involved in it since that last X-Men boom in the ’80s. And I wish I could tell you that it’s worthwhile to go into it for love of the characters, which is what I tried to do, but the truth is, even that ends up pretty badly: the characters are corporate-owned entities designed for marketing deals, and chances are good that there’s a reason no one has ever yet tried your One Great Idea. Chances are, we’re not allowed to. The only reason to work in comics as a writer is because you love writing. Any other motivation will bring you grief.

Last but not least: BE NICE. As outlined above, a lot of people are involved in constructing a comic. It’s a team effort. You’re not going to like everyone, and you don’t have to. But you really do have to be professional and polite. There are a few heavyweight, well-established talents who get pretty vocal when they’re unhappy and I guess it works for them, but I really don’t recommend it for those just starting out. This doesn’t mean you have to be obsequious, just that you need to recognize that everyone is there because someone believes they have something to offer. And actually, there are an unusually high number of extremely talented people in this industry and there’s probably something you can learn from almost every single one of them.

So that new writers don’t get shortchanged — What can a new writer expect as a salary range?
With DC and Marvel, you receive a starting page rate (receivable in full when the project is completed and accepted), which is increased slowly over time (unless you’re doing a prose project – the novels are generally 75K words for a set price). Beginning page rates, last time I checked (which was quite a while ago) are around $70 per. It tops out around $120, unless you have a special deal (like an exclusive contract with a special page rate or bonus). The big companies are not going to shortchange you, it’s not in their best interest. The smaller companies often pay less because they have less capital to play with, but sometimes you can get more autonomy on a project or have more say in picking your team.

And remember, too, that it’s not salary. It’s contractual pay. Even if you are working on an exclusive contract with a guarantee of X amount of work over the course of a year, you do not get paid until that work is completed, and you cannot complete that work until those projects are cleared. There is never a guarantee that the next check is coming. Your series can be canceled. You can be replaced. You can removed from a book for a few months while something else happens. You can be stuck in clearance limbo for months at a time. Freelancing, by definition, is not a secure line of work.

The other tricky thing to remember is that this is untaxed income. The companies keep track of what they pay you in any given year, but they do not withhold tax money. Full-time freelancers (in the U.S.) pay quarterly taxes, including self-employment tax. The minute you get paid, put 40 percent of it away for the government and try not to cry.

Terry Moore said it’s harder to stay in the business than it is to break in. What should writers do after they finish their first gigs?
BEFORE you finish your first assignment, you need to be networking with the editors and drumming up new work. Unfortunately, self-marketing and artistic skills don’t often go hand and hand, but you have to learn both to survive. A common mistake is to wait until something’s finished to start looking for your next project – if at all possible, you want it lined up well before you voucher (turn in and request payment for) your previous project. Lulls can be perceived as a “loss of heat” (“You were so hot last month but now I’m not hearing anything about you …” – “Uh, well, you would if you’d let me do this next project.” – “Well, I’d let you do that project if you were generating heat.” – the old Catch-22). As I think I said earlier, the editor is the only one who can assign work to you (though if you only know one editor, you do want to turn in the work you owe him or her before asking for more – the hope is that you’ve managed to meet more than one).

You also need to build up a reputation … for almost anything. Just something that distinguishes you from the pack. I’m known among the editors, for instance, as being good with characterization, so I tend to be one of the first freelancers they think of when they have a very character-driven story they want to assign. Other writers are known for being great with action or crime drama or team dynamics or even just for being reliable and fast. Usually, the guy known for action can also do characterization and the chick known for characterization can also do action, but that doesn’t matter (you’ll get a chance to prove that once you’re actually working), what matters is that you’re associated with something. Same goes for artists.

There’s an old adage in the business: “A perfect freelancer is talented, fast, and easy to work with. But two out of three will do.” Early on, you really need to hit all three.

And Terry Moore, by the way, is one of the genuinely nicest and smartest guys you’ll ever get a chance to talk to.

On Writing:

What is a theme and why is it important to a comic story? Is it necessary?
Theme is one of several key elements involved in story structure. I’m happy to discuss it here, but be aware that we’re doing so out of context. To really explore theme, you need to look at where it fits in the complete structure of a story. For that I recommend formal story-structure training, either via a fiction class, a seminar (Robert McKee’s “Story Structure” is a famous and high-quality workshop you can often find offered in L.A. and New York), or some good, old-fashioned reading (there are tons of books available on story structure these days, but a few I can personally recommend are: Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey, Bonnet’s Stealing Fire from the Gods, and McKee’s Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting).

The theme is the value the story is exploring on an emotional level. This is different from what’s actually happening in the story (the action), who or what is being operated upon in the story (the protagonist, closely tied into the story point of view), and also different from the world the story covers (the subject). Though obviously Batman stories cover many different themes, in general I’d say by way of example that the over-arching legend of Batman is a story about a tragic hero (Bruce, our protagonist) struggling to become and remain a hero (the action) dark and powerful enough to defend virtue (the dominant plot) in a threatening, violent urbanscape (Gotham, our subject). The theme of the Batman legend is vengeance (and by extension, its opposite, forgiveness).

Theme is important in any story – comic book or otherwise – because it is the essence of what the story is communicating. It is the why of the story, the essential truth behind the allegory. To make up a spur-of-the-moment allegory to explain this, imagine that we’re sailing. The plot is our boat. Without that, we’re going nowhere. The subject is our ocean – everything we might include or refer to during our journey, the world in which our travels take place. Theme is our destination. Without it, we might have a really cool boat and a beautiful (or turbulent) sea to ride, but we’ll never get anywhere. We’d have nowhere to go.

Now, it is possible to write a story without intentionally having a theme, but usually one will suggest itself to you along the way, or be evident to your reader even if it’s eluded you. And usually the parts of the story not directly commenting in some way on the theme will feel superfluous and out of synch with the rest of the story. You can see this sometimes in a monthly comic that’s been interrupted by a crossover event – the writer’s exploring a theme in the series, and then there will be two to four pages introducing or commenting on a new action that just seem incredibly out of place. That’s ’cause they are. They’re part of another, larger story, with, more often not, a completely different theme.

Where do I get themes? Do I just make them up or is there a list I should choose from?
There’s no list. You get it from your head (or, if you’ll allow some sentimentality, your heart). The theme is what you’re talking about, what you’re sharing. If you don’t have anything you want to talk about, it’s going to be difficult to convince other people to care about your story.

Superhero comics are interesting in this regard because there’s already a default theme in place, like vengeance for Batman or altruism for Superman. But to really make your mark – to get readers excited about your story – you’d probably better find something new to talk about. My main theme for the Batman stories in Gotham Knights, for example, was sacrifice – the stories were about Batman and his family and they were exploring the nature of sacrifice – what you have to give up (and, by extension, what you can keep) to be effective in that particular mission. Vengeance is still present as an undercurrent, but those stories aren’t exploring that particular theme in any depth. Though there are lots of different characters and story lines, thematically what tied my run on that book together was an exploration of personal sacrifice.

Can I have more than one? How many is too many?
You can explore different themes in a story, but then you’re splitting your focus. I guess the answer to how many is too many is: one more than how many you can keep track of and articulately comment on or authentically explore. But I think unless the themes are wedded somehow – jealously and revenge, for example, or altruism and self-sacrifice, you’re making the story unnecessarily complicated for your readers and yourself. That’s a tricky questions though, I’d have to think of a few more examples. My hunch is that looking at too many themes means that none of them get explored very deeply, and it’s more powerful to stick with one and really delve into the true nature of it. If you have a story thematically exploring love and jealousy and sacrifice and ambition and grief and betrayal and passion and pride, for example, I think nine times out of 10, you’ll end up with histrionic mud. In fiction, too, you don’t state the nature of a theme – if you want to tell me what love is, then write an essay. In fiction we explore what things can and might mean. And to do that with any honesty, I think you need to commit yourself story by story to specific explorations. Otherwise, every time you got close to a thematic value that surprised or confused you, you could just shift thematic focus, and nobody would learn anything.

How do thematic development and character development work together?
Well, there’s two separate levels of character development. The initial character development happens independent of theme, it’s the deepening and fleshing out of character creation. At least the way I write, the characters come first, and they get to be pretty whole and three-dimensional well before I even start thinking about what I want to explore with them and then what that means will have to happen.

But then yes, there is character development that happens during the course of the story, and there will be a thematic parallel. To oversimplify (and still be completely incomprehensible), you are attempting, in a story, to have your protagonist integrate the lessons of the nature of the theme into his being. Going back to our Batman example, then, if our theme is vengeance, Batman’s character begins developing as someone in pursuit of this rather nebulous concept. His defeats and victories continually teach him more about the true nature of vengeance – that, for example, it will not heal the pain of his grief, but that the continuing desire for vengeance will be a quality from which he can continue to draw strength. As he integrates these lessons, he develops as a character. Eventually, depending on which version of the story you like, he either finds the man who murdered his parents, or realizes that he probably never will find him – and in both stories, he nonetheless goes out again the very next night, and all the nights thereafter. He has at this point integrated vengeance into his character and, essentially, transcended it. And here we explore another important quality of vengeance – it is fiery and taxing and not endlessly sustainable. Batman, our hero, continues on.

Character development, by the way, is one of the trickiest things to tackle in serialized drama, because if a book is running for 60-odd years, there’s a status quo that the character will have to be returned to. With an ongoing project like Nightwing, the story has no clear beginning or end, so it’s not just a matter of getting Dick from Point A to Point Z and then ending the story. In ongoing comics we have to work with story arcs and the “illusion of change.” To actually have a character grow is very tricky, and must be approached with great subtlety and patience.

What if the reader doesn’t pickup on the theme?
Then they probably will say something like “I didn’t get the story” – it won’t connect for them or mean anything to them. That may be a matter of individual taste, or it may be that you as the writer weren’t clear or focused enough (or, as we’ve explored earlier, that you were knocked off course by an element beyond your control). Theme is a difficult thing to work with clearly and it takes continual practice. When it does work, it’s very rewarding and when it doesn’t, well, you have an opportunity then to play with that theme again and see if you can go deeper.

It’s also possible that your reader will respond to the story and think it’s powerful even if they can’t consciously identify or summarize the theme. That’s OK. That means that thematic value was present for them in some way, and that’s good enough. Not everyone knows how to deconstruct a story, and that’s fine, that’s not a requirement. What’s more problematic is when people don’t know how to read a basic story structure, and that happens in comics quite a bit. The clearest example of this I can personally relate concerns Relative Heroes. The theme of that story is grief (and, by extension, denial). That’s what’s being explored. But one of the most common criticisms I heard about the story, in the words, even, of one professional reviewer who should have known better was that, to paraphrase, he didn’t like the story because the kids weren’t dealing with their grief. Well … that’s what the story was about; the journey from denial to expression. The reason the reader expected the characters to be grieving was because I had put that on stage and identified it as the problem. Now, it’s certainly possible that I didn’t resolve the issue satisfyingly or well, but this was a six-part story, and if you read to the end, you would see the issue addressed. These complaints and this review were based on the second or third issue. It’s completely legitimate to criticize a writer for not handling a theme well, but to read half of a story and criticize them, essentially, for presenting a conflict that hasn’t yet been resolved is a little odd and shows ignorance of basic story structure (of course it’s not resolved in Act II, it’s not supposed to be!).

I actually ended up contacting that reviewer and asking him if DC had mentioned, when they sent him those issues to review, that it was only a six-part story (with, then presumably, a beginning, middle and end) and he admitted that he hadn’t even realized that. He had reviewed it as if it were a continuing serial. He might still have not liked the story, which is fine, but in no other kind of writing that I’ve been involved with do readers point out story conflict – the key component of drama and rising action – as the element they want removed from the story. Conflict is set up and put on stage in stories to be resolved. A reader who panics the minute they see conflict in a story and assumes that it will never be addressed simply does not have experience with reading structured fiction (which may be a criticism of the comics industry as much as any individual reader). You may not like the way a writer solves a problem, but you have to understand that when they put a problem on the page, they are doing so in order to address it. To assume they’re unaware of the conflict (that they themselves have set up) is a kind of dramatic structure illiteracy that I find both very interesting and very frustrating. I’ve really started to wonder if this points to a larger structural failure in serialized fiction, but so far, I haven’t seen that.

Is there any practice you can suggest for working on thematic development?
As mentioned above, it’s critical to study story structure in its entirety. There’s no point in mastering theme if you don’t understand rising action and archetypes and dramatic conflict and story wheels. If it sounds intimidating, don’t worry. The cool thing is, once you absorb all of it, you kind of get to put it aside – it’s the technique you fall back on, not the unbreakable law. And, of course, there are probably plenty of great writers who never studied formally, but why not avail yourself of the knowledge of those who did? Better to know and choose to disregard (or use) than not to know.

Also, read! Not just comics – read novels and poetry and short stories and movie scripts and song lyrics and essays, both to develop vocabulary and awareness of structure. Find out what moves you, what you’re interested in – not just in terms of subjects, but in terms of themes. What are the themes currently dominating your own life? Can you identify them? Are there themes you find yourself drawn to over and over again in songs or movies or TV shows? What do you most want to talk to the world about? What do you really wish you understood? What are you most afraid of? What are your own core values and have you explored them? Talk to everyone. Try to resist judging people, or when you do judge them, try to imagine what series of events might have created them, try to find something about them you can respect, even love. Invite questions and uncertainty and exploration. Learn to live with flux.

And write! Every day. About anything. Just keep doing it. It is, at the end of the day, the one thing that absolutely all successful writers do.

And last but not least, live! You won’t be able to explore themes very deeply if you don’t have authentic experiences to draw from. The best thing about being a writer is that absolutely everything is relevant – every friend you speak to, every place you visit, every bit of technical jargon you memorize, every skill you master, every event you attend, every food you taste, every mistake you make, every emotion you feel – all of it is usable. And don’t make up your mind about anything. Fiction is about truth, not reality. To explore truth we need to be open-minded and experimental and fearless. We need to understand how many different ways there are to live one’s life, how many choices we make every day, how we come to be who we believe we are. Everything is germane, from the smallest detail to the broadest generality. When you put writing out into the world, you’re asking for people to listen to you.

Have something to say.

—Interview by Tim Leong

Posted by Tim Leong on September 7th, 2005 filed in Story Archive | Comment now »

Shades of Grayson

Devin Grayson has been around the industry long enough to know how it works. She’s had a strong presence in the Bat titles (Nightwing) for some time now and has her a creator-owned series, Matador, on shelves. Now, in this exclusive Comic Foundry interview, Grayson talks about what she’s learned from her time in the comic industry and gives insight to what’s it’s like to be a freelance writer.

How have the idiosyncrasies of the comic industry changed in the past few years?
There are a couple of noticeable shifts that seem to work cyclically. The industry goes back and forth between featuring more literate, less mainstream work that is often able to attract new readers to the medium, and more bombastic, continuity-heavy work that keeps the long-term readers invested. There’s no inherent reason that any given company couldn’t do both, and, indeed, Marvel had that going for a little while with the Ultimate line running side by side with the regular series titles, but usually the person in charge of a publishing company’s marketing objectives will have a strong preference in one direction or another.

Likewise [there’s] a constantly seesawing emphasis on either characters and story content or high profile, creator “stars.” Again, there’s no reason a high-profile writer can’t create a great story that honors and promotes the characters, but usually the emphasis ends up being more on their celebrity than on the development and marketing of the character with whom they find themselves working.

Maybe because the people who end up running the major mainstream publishing houses are usually grown-up fans themselves with obvious and reinforced preferences for stories like the ones they grew up reading, or maybe because the industry as a whole seems always to be just on the brink of financial collapse, the product often has a hard time settling into a reliable identity. Just in one year of reading a single Batman title, for example, you could find yourself starting with a reasonably universe-integrated story line created by and playing to the strengths of a seasoned comic writer for three months, then find that the book has been swept into a much larger crossover story “event” with new writers rotating through. And then four months later, the book is under the control of a really exciting movie/TV/fiction best seller “auteur” who creates tremendous buzz and kind of reinvents everything from scratch with total carte blanche from the editors, but the year finishes out under a new editor and a “stable” writer who work together to try to pull it back into the continuity of the previous year, which is the last time either of them had any idea what was going on. If someone who didn’t read comics then asked you to say what that series was like, you’d be kind of at a loss for words. And an ill-defined product is deathly in marketing. I think many of the higher-ups in the industry understand this, but financially, there often isn’t enough time to set out on a venture and stick with it until it finds its audience and begins to generate consistent sales, so instead there’s a lot of panicking, a lot of perpetual reinvention, and a lot of “No, no, wait – this is gonna be SO cool!” bravado that pans out well slightly less than half the time.

I broke into the industry in the late ’90s when college students and twenty-somethings were breathlessly discussing Vertigo comics and the average reader was happy to put down money for small, independent titles and mainstream titles alike. DC was publishing mini-series, specials and anthologies featuring new talent and experimental ideas, and the big offices (i.e., “The Bat-Office,” “The Superman Office,” “The JLA Office,”) were by-and-large run as independent fiefdoms, each producing different and usually nonassociative, but also highly identifiable character-related content.

Today, I work for the same company, but I’m getting very different directives. I wish I could freely discuss the specifics because I think they’re illuminating, but part of the change is the tremendous level of continuity tie-in and the vast amount of secrecy this generates. The team responsible for choosing direction is much smaller, yet they’re making much more broadly reaching decisions. New guidelines and old events alike are being applied to books regardless of office of origin. Will the fans enjoy a universe with tighter continuity? Almost certainly. Will they be disappointed by how much the quality of writing suffers when four people are laying down the marching orders for forty? We’ll see. There are good and bad qualities in both models, but there’s no denying that they’re really, really, really different models. It will be interesting to see whether or not most readers even notice the change. I think externally those kind of changes feel to the reader like a slow evolution that maybe has as much to do with one’s own (theoretically maturing) taste in comics as anything else, but in reality, they can usually be traced to a single person in a prominent position in one of the two major publishing houses.

What is the most important thing you’ve learned since joining the comics industry?
That there’s a huge difference between working in the comics medium and working in the comics industry. The medium, when you begin to explore it, quickly reveals itself to be capable of handling almost any kind of storytelling. It’s great for pulling readers into the emotional life of a story and has a powerful, interactive aspect not precisely mirrored in any other type of fiction. I really feel like it’s still evolving as an art form and is open to a tremendous amount of redefinition and growth.

The industry, on the other hand – by which, by the way, I always mean the mainstream industry, since that’s where my experience lies – is one of the most limiting and circumscribed producers of fiction going. Though richly layered with decades of creator contributions and sometimes so archetypally pure as to survive almost any embarrassing mutilation, most mainstream superhero characters work not at crime-fighting or entertainment so much as at marketing. At the end of the day, Superman has to go sell Underoos and Batman gets his head planted on the top of a Pez dispenser. It is difficult to even begin to explain the ways in which this fundamental truth necessarily dominates and regulates character and story development. No one ever mentions it, but it is the financial driving force of the industry and ultimately influences every decision ever made about a superhero comic book. The next time you catch yourself balling your fists in frustration over a story line and yelling “Why don’t they just – ” I can almost guarantee you that the answer is “toothpaste.”

Second most important fact: there’s a huge difference between knowing everything about a comic character and knowing how to tell a story about that character.

How does working for a large corporation like Marvel or DC affect your job as a writer?
Um … you mean as opposed to working independently or for a smaller company? I actually find both companies fairly pleasant entities to work for most of the time, though certainly, in all industries, the larger the company the more virulent the bureaucracy. These are comic book people, though, and it doesn’t really take that long, once you’re in the industry, to have access to and get to know the major players, which can be very rewarding. Someone like Paul Levitz, for example, is not just the publisher, he’s also an extremely talented writer and a brilliant guy. I love talking to him just to glean wisdom. When I was working on The Titans I asked him how he plotted out his Legion story arcs and he drew me this great chart and really took the time to talk to me about subplots and the importance of individual characterization in team books. It was so generous of him and so inspiring for me. And Joe Quesada, of course, is “one of us.” Most of us “knew him when” and he remains one of the nicest, realest, most approachable guys in the industry. He’s also an artist, so just as Levitz really does know what it’s like to be a freelancer, Joe was one, figuratively speaking, yesterday. He totally gets it and is a tremendous asset to the industry balancing both those roles.

No matter which company you’re working for, comic-book writing is not an office job. We’re technically independent contractors, paid by completed project and working independently from home offices or studios. The only exception to that rule that I can think of is CrossGen, where creators were asked to actually report to an office and sit there every day, and although I imagine that worked reasonably well for certain types of creators, by and large I think it’s a crummy idea as, apparently, does providence (for those of you who don’t follow industry politics, CrossGen was a vanity publishing company in Florida that tanked after three years of operation). What that means in terms of your question is that even though I’m working for a very large company, I’m sitting here in my pajamas blasting the Eels and drinking home-brewed ice tea. On a day-to-day basis, the corporate culture doesn’t affect me very much. But it does come into play in terms of both the initial conversations about and clearance checks on the work I do, and then again during the final acceptance and marketing stages of that work.

For example, doing a Batman script for DC means that:

- My initial idea has to be cleared by my editor who may, if it’s controversial enough, have to get it cleared by the Batman Group Editor (Bob Schreck) who may, in turn, have to get it cleared by the VP (Dan Didio), the legal department, and/or the publisher (Paul Levitz).
- This means that, though I’m all excited and ready to work, I cannot start that script until all those people chime in and agree. Sometimes that’s a matter of three minutes worth of e-mailing, and sometimes it takes four months (during which, if that’s the only project I’m working on, I receive no pay, even if I’m rewriting the idea – or pitch – every week to address various concerns).
- It’s even possible that, after four months of trying to get this idea to work, someone decides it just won’t. Bam! I’m out four months pay and have to start at square one (unless the company agrees to a project “kill fee,” which is a way of paying me for my time even though there will be no published project).
- Assuming everyone does finally agree and I get the green light, the project can still be torpedoed in progress (i.e., while I’m writing it) by any of the following: a) another writer initiates a continuity status quo change that affects my story line (the editors are supposed to stay on top of this and usually do, but things do fall through the cracks sometimes), b) a crossover event begins, either derailing or postponing my story arc, c) an artist either makes a mistake or decides to change something in the script (again, this isn’t supposed to happen, but sometimes does), resulting in the editor calling me apologetically to tell me that it’s faster for me to change the dialogue than for the artist to redraw the page, d) a major motion picture and/or licensing deal is announced that somehow changes the requirements of what I’m doing (for example, when Greg Rucka and I were working on the ending of No Man’s Land, we at one point received a list of characters we couldn’t kill, no matter how much sense it made for the story, because they were either marketable action figures, appearing on a cartoon regularly, or were in some way considered essential to the Batman “franchise”; e.g., anything that can be sold. That left us, as I recall, with two viable choices out of something like seventeen).
- If I finish the product and someone in the hierarchy objects to it, it can still be pulled (or “shredded” as we like to say at that point).
- If I finish the script and turn it in and voucher (request payment for it) but then the artist draws something totally different than what I asked for and/or the editor changes dialogue, etc … I have no recourse to get my name removed from the final product even if I hate it, because it was created for DC under contract and becomes their property the moment I turn it in. I have at least one book I can think of that came out with my name on it that retains maybe two of my original sentences, tops. That feels pretty awful when it happens, but it’s part of the reality of freelancing. The same thing can happen to the penciler if he doesn’t like the inker’s work – his work is compromised, very few people know the difference between what he did originally and what appears on the page, but he’s going to shoulder the blame because the book will come out with his name on it.
- Even if I have strong ideas about how the story should be marketed, chances are I won’t even be consulted about copy for Previews and/or “house ads” (advertisements for DC Comics that appear within DC Comics). The nightmare example of this is the crucial plot twist that you’ve worked so hard to keep secret ending up printed in Previews or Wizard because someone in marketing has never spoken to you and didn’t understand that it was a reveal.

Those are some of the realities of working on a contractual basis with franchise characters for a major publishing house. The flip side is that your product is usually quite well-funded (which means it will come out nicely packaged and strongly marketed with no effort on your part), you get to work with other professionals at the top of their game without having to go searching for them (the editor is usually in charge of assembling the creative team for any given project), the product is published at no financial risk to you (meaning you make your page rate even if only two copies sell), and, of course, you have the amazing honor of receiving access to some of the most dynamic, iconic fictional characters in the history of literature.

What role does an editor play? How much influence does an editor have on the work? In the end, who wins the argument?
The editor is extremely important in mainstream superhero comics. He or she is responsible for assembling the team (pairing writers and artists who will work well together, finding an inker that will complement the penciler, getting the right colorist, and figuring out how to get all of those people on the same schedule), “traffic copping” (which sounds menial but is actually the terrifically important job of making sure that the assembly line work flow keeps moving … if I’m late with a script, for example, the artist can’t start, and the inker can’t do anything until the artist turns in his or her pencils, and of course the colorist is waiting on the inker, etc.), troubleshooting (which can include anything from getting art references for a penciler to talking a writer off a ledge to fixing something that has already gone horrifically awry), continuity-proofing (which entails knowing what’s going on in every other book that’s being produced and being able and willing to communicate with other offices to, for example, make sure Ra’s Al Ghul isn’t dead in one book and paddling down the Suwannee River in another, or to make arrangements for a Bat-writer to use Superman or the Flash in a story, etc.). He or she is also the creative team’s advocate (“What!? Why can’t I show condoms on Dick’s bedside table!? We’re not supposed to advocate safe sex!? Dammit, go talk to Paul!”) and, most importantly, the corporate guardian of the characters (“Okay, here’s the deal. I spoke with Paul, and he talked to Burbank, and you can show crumpled foil near the bed, but that’s it. The Warner Bros. office is concerned about explicit sexual content in a Bat-related book that could conceivably be picked up by a 10-year-old in Utah … etc”).

Generally, a good editor’s work is invisible. He or she has put together a strong creative team, helped clear the way for them to get where they wanted to go corporately, assisted them in getting there creatively if necessary, delivered the product to the company on time and helped to make everyone feel relaxed and happy (and/or excited and pumped up) about what they were doing. There are, of course, bad editors who put together ill-suited teams (which usually results in said editor then having to field a lot of calls from unhappy freelancers), won’t go to bat for their freelancers (“Let’s just not make any waves, OK?”), and/or, most egregiously of all in my opinion, feel the need to “put their mark” on everything that comes out of their office, either over-steering projects or indulging in heavy-handed editing (personally, I think an editor should never change a writer’s dialogue without first asking the writer if he or she would like a crack at it, but it happens). There are also great editors who occasionally fall into one of these holes.

The cream of the crop operate like muses for their freelancers, laboring with creative talent to get the very best work out of them and inspiring the creators to strive for and achieve greater goals than they could or would have without the encouragement. Creating can be lonely work, and sometimes the editor’s job is really to function as a cheerleader, touching in by phone or e-mail just to stroke a little ego or make sure the creator feels like they’re part of a team instead of an isolated workhorse. Though this may feel undignified or banal to the editor, it’s actually hugely important. I once had an editor show me the list of artists he called every single day just to say “hi,” because that’s what they needed to keep going. And damn if he didn’t get great work out of them.

The final say is always the editor’s (or, truthfully, the editor’s boss’), except on a creator-owned projects where the writer does have the option of pulling the project to shop it elsewhere. If a Batman editor and I are arguing about a Batman story, though, I’m allowed and even encouraged to present my case, but we both know that at the end of the day, what editorial says, goes. This is a basic function of ownership. Who owns the character? They have the final say.

What about the publishers and upper management? How do their roles affect you as a writer?
They set the general tone, both in terms of workplace culture and creative direction. And, of course, they vary tremendously in terms of how hands-on they are – Mike Carlin was the head of editorial at DC for years when I was first working for the company, and although big, new projects had to get his OK before they could be pitched to the publisher, in general my sense was that he encouraged the group editors (i.e. Batman group, Superman group, JLA group) to follow their own hearts and set their own tones, the result being diverse, and to some extent separatist, material. In comparison, current VP Dan Didio is extremely involved on the creative level, working with a (very) small group of writers to create binding continuity events for the entire DCU, the result being tight continuity, but much less autonomy for individual creators and far less product diversity.

Upper management (VPs or editors in chief) also has a lot of influence on hiring practices, so when you see, for instance, a lot of fresh, new talent, that’s a new editor or an edict from upper management. Similarly, when you see a trend towards, to put it bluntly, “star fucking,” when every book is suddenly being assigned to someone outside the industry who has some kind of major pop culture cred, that’s usually the result of upper management wanting to attract a certain kind of publicity and cache.

Can you take us through the life of a script? What happens after you write it and turn it in? What are the steps?
An editor would be even clearer on this than I am, but here’s my understanding of what happens. I send my script in to the book editor as a Word file attached to an e-mail. For a regular series, like Nightwing, often no one else needs to look at it, but for a larger project, like the Ra’s Al Ghul “Year One” thing (or during a crossover event), the script itself may also have to be approved by the other editors in the editorial group, and possibly even by upper management and/or the company publisher. During crossovers, they also get sent to other writers working on the same event. If any of those people have a problem with it, a good editor calls or e-mails the writer and talks him or her through the changes they want. The writer then has a day or two to make those changes and turn the script back in. A bad editor just changes stuff without calling the freelancer. The only thing I hate more than being asked to change things is not being asked to change things.

Once the company has a script they’re happy with, the editor sends a copy to the penciler. Very new pencilers will be asked to send in a breakdown, or “spring board,” of what they intend to do; a regular series artist may do that for him or herself but will otherwise pretty much just dive in. If reference material is needed, the artists may call the scriptwriter or the editor (whichever he or she tends to get faster responses from), ditto questions (it frequently happens that you’re working on the sixth script for a series and the artists calls with questions about the second or third issue, which can be a little disorienting for a second).

As the penciler finishes batches of pages (the standard comic book is 22 pages of art), he sends them in to the editor, who indicates where the balloon placements for the dialogue are going to be if the penciler hasn’t already done this, and then forwards the pages on to the inker. The inker goes over the penciler’s work, refining it and adding weight and texture to the lines.

From the inker, I believe the art pages go back to the editor and then out to the letterer, who also receives a copy of the script from the editor and gets the proper text into the captions and balloons, sometimes by hand but with increasing frequency by computer. When all the pages have been penciled, inked, and lettered, the editor sends a copy back to the writer, called the issue “black-and-white.” This is usually the first time the writer has seen the art work, and it’s usually a month or two after having finished the script – the good news is that the writer now has time to correct any mistakes in the text – either typos or dialogue corrections that help the text work better with the art. The bad news is that it’s usually way too late at this point to change any of the art, so if something has gone wrong – say the penciler has strayed way off the original script and the editor didn’t check the art pages against the script, so now there’s a major missing element in the story or and unexpected, extra beat – it’s up to the writer to fix it. That, as you can imagine, has been known to cause some tension between writers and artists – there’s nothing like turning in a really tight script that achieves everything you want it to only to get back art two months letter that bears no resemblance to what was requested and then be asked by your editor to change the dialogue to match the artwork instead of the other way around. So much for auteurism! But as much of a pain in the neck as this is, the reasoning for it is obvious – it takes the penciler and inker easily twice as much time to patch a finished art page as it takes the writer and letterer to change some dialogue, and any business that puts out monthly products isn’t about perfection, it’s about getting something – sometimes anything! – out onto those shelves.

The writer sends in any text and very minor art corrections back to the editor, who forwards those changes to the letterer and inker, and then the black and white gets sent to the colorist.

As the writer, I don’t see or hear anything about the book again until it shows up in my comp box, but after it gets colored, it gets resized, printed, shipped, and distributed.

How does the relationship work between the writer/penciler/colorist? Does anyone have veto power over anyone else’s work?
Technically, the editor has veto power over everyone’s work, but beyond refusing to work with each other, freelancers don’t have much say once a project’s rolling. There’s just no time. Vetoing something would mean it would have to get done over again, and that practically never happens – the book would miss the ship date, which would lose the publisher money, and no one cares about anyone’s ego enough to let that happen. Now, I’m talking about mainstream DC and Marvel comics – it’s a little different if the project is creator-owned and potentially quite different if the project is self-published. But if you’re working for The Man, you learn real quickly how you fit into the assembly line. That the quality of most comic books is as high as they are is actually something of a miracle, and part of what I love about the business. Knowing what everyone goes through and how frustrated everyone sometimes gets, it’s amazing how well things work out so much of the time.

And think about this too for a minute in terms of artistic ego: The writer puts their all into a script, which then can be literally rewritten by an editor or figuratively reinterpreted by an artist, and as freelancers, we don’t have the legal right to get our name off of the book even if we loathe the final project. The penciler puts a whole month or more into these 22 pages … and then literally has someone draw over his or her work. God help you if you don’t like your inker, you’re totally screwed. By the same token, the inker usually never even sees the script and has no say in the penciled pages that arrive, but he or she has to make them work. And all three of these people have to ask how high if the editor, at any point in the project, says jump. And the editor, to be fair, is answering to God knows how many higher-ups, trying to keep both the company and the freelancers happy. It utterly astounds me when people talk about wanting to break into comics to be recognized or to “finally have control over the characters.” I think this is part of the reason why comic creators get as defensive as they sometimes do about virulent criticism – I certainly don’t feel, and I know that few of my colleagues do, that most readers truly understand what goes into the creation of these products and how much compromising we’ve already had to do before anyone even opens the book. That’s just the price for working with such high-level characters and, as far as that’s concerned, it is, ultimately, worth it. It’s an incredibly cool job, but it is a job, complete with bosses, co-workers, company policies and all kind of other things that can be either blessings or curses on any given day.

How does your job work with a letterer? Can you ask to go back in and change a line break?
I don’t tend to speak directly to the letterer (though I’m always happy to), but after I see the black-and-white, I can contact the editor and ask for changes, and they’ll get made if they’re reasonable and not too time-consuming. Generally, a line break is not something you’d make a letterer go back in and fix, but a misspelled word (even if it’s my fault from the original script) or a serious punctuation error is, assuming that we catch it in time. Every now and then a line that worked great in the script reads off on the page, and again, if there’s time, we’ll change it. But by the time the writer receives the issue black-and-white, express shipped from the editor, there’s usually less than eight hours to indicate those changes.

How are politics prevalent in the comic industry? What are the slips a new artist or writer should avoid doing/saying?
The more money that’s involved, the thinner the political tightrope you can expect to be walking. I think there are three very important things to remember.

The first is: BE WILLING TO LEARN. As much as you may know about your own skill and the characters and what you do or do not like in a comic, the people you start working for will invariably know more about the business of making comics than you will. You must be willing to listen to them and treat them with respect. They are responsible for answering to business higher-ups and putting out X amount of comics every single month and believe me, they don’t care nearly as much about “fixing” that one continuity mistake that’s been driving you crazy since 1987 as you do. You are there, ultimately, to make someone else money. That sounds harsh, but it’s just a bottom line of business that you have to keep in mind. It doesn’t mean that you can’t do work that you find meaningful or that no one cares about your passion – they do. It just means that unless you’re willing to dig into your own wallet to produce your own vision, you’re going to have to cooperate with the people who are. And by “cooperate” I mean “do what they say.” You can always argue, you can make your case, you can quit, you can refuse to work with certain editors or freelancers … but at some point if you’re doing a lot of this you need to recognize that you may be in the wrong line of work. Being an independent contractor means using your skill to deliver your client something made to his or her specifications.

The second is: BE FLEXIBLE. Comics are a serialized medium that demand fresh product every month. You may have the best idea in the history of fiction, but if you can’t immediately change 14 things about it on request (such and such character is unavailable, so-and-so can’t do that because we have him selling toothpaste in a major national campaign next month, this-or-that was destroyed in the last big event and can’t be used now, or – I swear to god, the worst one I ever heard about – “This doesn’t seem very visual, but what if they were all cats?”) and develop it into 12 other ongoing story arcs, your one story is, quite frankly, not going to be worth an editor’s time. They’re not going to develop you as a writer because of one great idea when they could instead put their effort into someone who consistently coughs up 20 OK ideas. Comics are about flexibility and quantity, not continuity and quality. To be successful, you have to be someone who loves the process of writing — the thinking and the starting over and being all alone in front of a keyboard and sweating it out part — not just someone who loves comics. I’m sure you guys already know not to get into comics for fame (if you need a reminder of how nice readers are to comic writers, type my name into any comics-related BBS search engine and enjoy the love), and I can tell you right now that there hasn’t been money involved in it since that last X-Men boom in the ’80s. And I wish I could tell you that it’s worthwhile to go into it for love of the characters, which is what I tried to do, but the truth is, even that ends up pretty badly: the characters are corporate-owned entities designed for marketing deals, and chances are good that there’s a reason no one has ever yet tried your One Great Idea. Chances are, we’re not allowed to. The only reason to work in comics as a writer is because you love writing. Any other motivation will bring you grief.

Last but not least: BE NICE. As outlined above, a lot of people are involved in constructing a comic. It’s a team effort. You’re not going to like everyone, and you don’t have to. But you really do have to be professional and polite. There are a few heavyweight, well-established talents who get pretty vocal when they’re unhappy and I guess it works for them, but I really don’t recommend it for those just starting out. This doesn’t mean you have to be obsequious, just that you need to recognize that everyone is there because someone believes they have something to offer. And actually, there are an unusually high number of extremely talented people in this industry and there’s probably something you can learn from almost every single one of them.

So that new writers don’t get shortchanged — What can a new writer expect as a salary range?
With DC and Marvel, you receive a starting page rate (receivable in full when the project is completed and accepted), which is increased slowly over time (unless you’re doing a prose project – the novels are generally 75K words for a set price). Beginning page rates, last time I checked (which was quite a while ago) are around $70 per. It tops out around $120, unless you have a special deal (like an exclusive contract with a special page rate or bonus). The big companies are not going to shortchange you, it’s not in their best interest. The smaller companies often pay less because they have less capital to play with, but sometimes you can get more autonomy on a project or have more say in picking your team.

And remember, too, that it’s not salary. It’s contractual pay. Even if you are working on an exclusive contract with a guarantee of X amount of work over the course of a year, you do not get paid until that work is completed, and you cannot complete that work until those projects are cleared. There is never a guarantee that the next check is coming. Your series can be canceled. You can be replaced. You can removed from a book for a few months while something else happens. You can be stuck in clearance limbo for months at a time. Freelancing, by definition, is not a secure line of work.

The other tricky thing to remember is that this is untaxed income. The companies keep track of what they pay you in any given year, but they do not withhold tax money. Full-time freelancers (in the U.S.) pay quarterly taxes, including self-employment tax. The minute you get paid, put 40 percent of it away for the government and try not to cry.

Terry Moore said it’s harder to stay in the business than it is to break in. What should writers do after they finish their first gigs?
BEFORE you finish your first assignment, you need to be networking with the editors and drumming up new work. Unfortunately, self-marketing and artistic skills don’t often go hand and hand, but you have to learn both to survive. A common mistake is to wait until something’s finished to start looking for your next project – if at all possible, you want it lined up well before you voucher (turn in and request payment for) your previous project. Lulls can be perceived as a “loss of heat” (“You were so hot last month but now I’m not hearing anything about you …” – “Uh, well, you would if you’d let me do this next project.” – “Well, I’d let you do that project if you were generating heat.” – the old Catch-22). As I think I said earlier, the editor is the only one who can assign work to you (though if you only know one editor, you do want to turn in the work you owe him or her before asking for more – the hope is that you’ve managed to meet more than one).

You also need to build up a reputation … for almost anything. Just something that distinguishes you from the pack. I’m known among the editors, for instance, as being good with characterization, so I tend to be one of the first freelancers they think of when they have a very character-driven story they want to assign. Other writers are known for being great with action or crime drama or team dynamics or even just for being reliable and fast. Usually, the guy known for action can also do characterization and the chick known for characterization can also do action, but that doesn’t matter (you’ll get a chance to prove that once you’re actually working), what matters is that you’re associated with something. Same goes for artists.

There’s an old adage in the business: “A perfect freelancer is talented, fast, and easy to work with. But two out of three will do.” Early on, you really need to hit all three.

And Terry Moore, by the way, is one of the genuinely nicest and smartest guys you’ll ever get a chance to talk to.

On Writing:

What is a theme and why is it important to a comic story? Is it necessary?
Theme is one of several key elements involved in story structure. I’m happy to discuss it here, but be aware that we’re doing so out of context. To really explore theme, you need to look at where it fits in the complete structure of a story. For that I recommend formal story-structure training, either via a fiction class, a seminar (Robert McKee’s “Story Structure” is a famous and high-quality workshop you can often find offered in L.A. and New York), or some good, old-fashioned reading (there are tons of books available on story structure these days, but a few I can personally recommend are: Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey, Bonnet’s Stealing Fire from the Gods, and McKee’s Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting).

The theme is the value the story is exploring on an emotional level. This is different from what’s actually happening in the story (the action), who or what is being operated upon in the story (the protagonist, closely tied into the story point of view), and also different from the world the story covers (the subject). Though obviously Batman stories cover many different themes, in general I’d say by way of example that the over-arching legend of Batman is a story about a tragic hero (Bruce, our protagonist) struggling to become and remain a hero (the action) dark and powerful enough to defend virtue (the dominant plot) in a threatening, violent urbanscape (Gotham, our subject). The theme of the Batman legend is vengeance (and by extension, its opposite, forgiveness).

Theme is important in any story – comic book or otherwise – because it is the essence of what the story is communicating. It is the why of the story, the essential truth behind the allegory. To make up a spur-of-the-moment allegory to explain this, imagine that we’re sailing. The plot is our boat. Without that, we’re going nowhere. The subject is our ocean – everything we might include or refer to during our journey, the world in which our travels take place. Theme is our destination. Without it, we might have a really cool boat and a beautiful (or turbulent) sea to ride, but we’ll never get anywhere. We’d have nowhere to go.

Now, it is possible to write a story without intentionally having a theme, but usually one will suggest itself to you along the way, or be evident to your reader even if it’s eluded you. And usually the parts of the story not directly commenting in some way on the theme will feel superfluous and out of synch with the rest of the story. You can see this sometimes in a monthly comic that’s been interrupted by a crossover event – the writer’s exploring a theme in the series, and then there will be two to four pages introducing or commenting on a new action that just seem incredibly out of place. That’s ’cause they are. They’re part of another, larger story, with, more often not, a completely different theme.

Where do I get themes? Do I just make them up or is there a list I should choose from?
There’s no list. You get it from your head (or, if you’ll allow some sentimentality, your heart). The theme is what you’re talking about, what you’re sharing. If you don’t have anything you want to talk about, it’s going to be difficult to convince other people to care about your story.

Superhero comics are interesting in this regard because there’s already a default theme in place, like vengeance for Batman or altruism for Superman. But to really make your mark – to get readers excited about your story – you’d probably better find something new to talk about. My main theme for the Batman stories in Gotham Knights, for example, was sacrifice – the stories were about Batman and his family and they were exploring the nature of sacrifice – what you have to give up (and, by extension, what you can keep) to be effective in that particular mission. Vengeance is still present as an undercurrent, but those stories aren’t exploring that particular theme in any depth. Though there are lots of different characters and story lines, thematically what tied my run on that book together was an exploration of personal sacrifice.

Can I have more than one? How many is too many?
You can explore different themes in a story, but then you’re splitting your focus. I guess the answer to how many is too many is: one more than how many you can keep track of and articulately comment on or authentically explore. But I think unless the themes are wedded somehow – jealously and revenge, for example, or altruism and self-sacrifice, you’re making the story unnecessarily complicated for your readers and yourself. That’s a tricky questions though, I’d have to think of a few more examples. My hunch is that looking at too many themes means that none of them get explored very deeply, and it’s more powerful to stick with one and really delve into the true nature of it. If you have a story thematically exploring love and jealousy and sacrifice and ambition and grief and betrayal and passion and pride, for example, I think nine times out of 10, you’ll end up with histrionic mud. In fiction, too, you don’t state the nature of a theme – if you want to tell me what love is, then write an essay. In fiction we explore what things can and might mean. And to do that with any honesty, I think you need to commit yourself story by story to specific explorations. Otherwise, every time you got close to a thematic value that surprised or confused you, you could just shift thematic focus, and nobody would learn anything.

How do thematic development and character development work together?
Well, there’s two separate levels of character development. The initial character development happens independent of theme, it’s the deepening and fleshing out of character creation. At least the way I write, the characters come first, and they get to be pretty whole and three-dimensional well before I even start thinking about what I want to explore with them and then what that means will have to happen.

But then yes, there is character development that happens during the course of the story, and there will be a thematic parallel. To oversimplify (and still be completely incomprehensible), you are attempting, in a story, to have your protagonist integrate the lessons of the nature of the theme into his being. Going back to our Batman example, then, if our theme is vengeance, Batman’s character begins developing as someone in pursuit of this rather nebulous concept. His defeats and victories continually teach him more about the true nature of vengeance – that, for example, it will not heal the pain of his grief, but that the continuing desire for vengeance will be a quality from which he can continue to draw strength. As he integrates these lessons, he develops as a character. Eventually, depending on which version of the story you like, he either finds the man who murdered his parents, or realizes that he probably never will find him – and in both stories, he nonetheless goes out again the very next night, and all the nights thereafter. He has at this point integrated vengeance into his character and, essentially, transcended it. And here we explore another important quality of vengeance – it is fiery and taxing and not endlessly sustainable. Batman, our hero, continues on.

Character development, by the way, is one of the trickiest things to tackle in serialized drama, because if a book is running for 60-odd years, there’s a status quo that the character will have to be returned to. With an ongoing project like Nightwing, the story has no clear beginning or end, so it’s not just a matter of getting Dick from Point A to Point Z and then ending the story. In ongoing comics we have to work with story arcs and the “illusion of change.” To actually have a character grow is very tricky, and must be approached with great subtlety and patience.

What if the reader doesn’t pickup on the theme?
Then they probably will say something like “I didn’t get the story” – it won’t connect for them or mean anything to them. That may be a matter of individual taste, or it may be that you as the writer weren’t clear or focused enough (or, as we’ve explored earlier, that you were knocked off course by an element beyond your control). Theme is a difficult thing to work with clearly and it takes continual practice. When it does work, it’s very rewarding and when it doesn’t, well, you have an opportunity then to play with that theme again and see if you can go deeper.

It’s also possible that your reader will respond to the story and think it’s powerful even if they can’t consciously identify or summarize the theme. That’s OK. That means that thematic value was present for them in some way, and that’s good enough. Not everyone knows how to deconstruct a story, and that’s fine, that’s not a requirement. What’s more problematic is when people don’t know how to read a basic story structure, and that happens in comics quite a bit. The clearest example of this I can personally relate concerns Relative Heroes. The theme of that story is grief (and, by extension, denial). That’s what’s being explored. But one of the most common criticisms I heard about the story, in the words, even, of one professional reviewer who should have known better was that, to paraphrase, he didn’t like the story because the kids weren’t dealing with their grief. Well … that’s what the story was about; the journey from denial to expression. The reason the reader expected the characters to be grieving was because I had put that on stage and identified it as the problem. Now, it’s certainly possible that I didn’t resolve the issue satisfyingly or well, but this was a six-part story, and if you read to the end, you would see the issue addressed. These complaints and this review were based on the second or third issue. It’s completely legitimate to criticize a writer for not handling a theme well, but to read half of a story and criticize them, essentially, for presenting a conflict that hasn’t yet been resolved is a little odd and shows ignorance of basic story structure (of course it’s not resolved in Act II, it’s not supposed to be!).

I actually ended up contacting that reviewer and asking him if DC had mentioned, when they sent him those issues to review, that it was only a six-part story (with, then presumably, a beginning, middle and end) and he admitted that he hadn’t even realized that. He had reviewed it as if it were a continuing serial. He might still have not liked the story, which is fine, but in no other kind of writing that I’ve been involved with do readers point out story conflict – the key component of drama and rising action – as the element they want removed from the story. Conflict is set up and put on stage in stories to be resolved. A reader who panics the minute they see conflict in a story and assumes that it will never be addressed simply does not have experience with reading structured fiction (which may be a criticism of the comics industry as much as any individual reader). You may not like the way a writer solves a problem, but you have to understand that when they put a problem on the page, they are doing so in order to address it. To assume they’re unaware of the conflict (that they themselves have set up) is a kind of dramatic structure illiteracy that I find both very interesting and very frustrating. I’ve really started to wonder if this points to a larger structural failure in serialized fiction, but so far, I haven’t seen that.

Is there any practice you can suggest for working on thematic development?
As mentioned above, it’s critical to study story structure in its entirety. There’s no point in mastering theme if you don’t understand rising action and archetypes and dramatic conflict and story wheels. If it sounds intimidating, don’t worry. The cool thing is, once you absorb all of it, you kind of get to put it aside – it’s the technique you fall back on, not the unbreakable law. And, of course, there are probably plenty of great writers who never studied formally, but why not avail yourself of the knowledge of those who did? Better to know and choose to disregard (or use) than not to know.

Also, read! Not just comics – read novels and poetry and short stories and movie scripts and song lyrics and essays, both to develop vocabulary and awareness of structure. Find out what moves you, what you’re interested in – not just in terms of subjects, but in terms of themes. What are the themes currently dominating your own life? Can you identify them? Are there themes you find yourself drawn to over and over again in songs or movies or TV shows? What do you most want to talk to the world about? What do you really wish you understood? What are you most afraid of? What are your own core values and have you explored them? Talk to everyone. Try to resist judging people, or when you do judge them, try to imagine what series of events might have created them, try to find something about them you can respect, even love. Invite questions and uncertainty and exploration. Learn to live with flux.

And write! Every day. About anything. Just keep doing it. It is, at the end of the day, the one thing that absolutely all successful writers do.

And last but not least, live! You won’t be able to explore themes very deeply if you don’t have authentic experiences to draw from. The best thing about being a writer is that absolutely everything is relevant – every friend you speak to, every place you visit, every bit of technical jargon you memorize, every skill you master, every event you attend, every food you taste, every mistake you make, every emotion you feel – all of it is usable. And don’t make up your mind about anything. Fiction is about truth, not reality. To explore truth we need to be open-minded and experimental and fearless. We need to understand how many different ways there are to live one’s life, how many choices we make every day, how we come to be who we believe we are. Everything is germane, from the smallest detail to the broadest generality. When you put writing out into the world, you’re asking for people to listen to you.

Have something to say.

—Interview by Tim Leong

Posted by Tim Leong on September 6th, 2005 filed in Story Archive | Comment now »

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Archive for September, 2005

Comic Foundry & MoCCA Networking Event!

Chris Bachalo’s Unfinished Business

James Sturm: Center of Attention

Ink Well: The Ultimate Klaus Janson Interview

TAKing on a Runaway Hit

Clayton Crain on the Brain

Ink to Inc: The Klaus Janson Interview - Part 2

The Ultimate Devin Grayson Interview - Part 2

Shades of Grayson