Carpe Noctem Interviews, Vol 3
Page 2
…even Todd McFarlane?
Well, Todd McFarlane, at least, is a part of something that is alive. It is going. I am a naysayer who believes that Lucas has been telling people for the last twenty years that he’s going to make more of these films and he will never do it. I am taking all bets that, before the end of this century, you will not see any new Star Wars films, because he is making over a hundred million—or is it up to a billion?—every year on the toys. It is an obscene amount of money he’s making and for what? A dead franchise. It’s not like these kids are buying it because they’re thinking, ‘Wow, Star Wars will always be the best movie ever!’ No. They think it’s alive. They don’t think that it’s dead. They don’t think that there’s nothing else coming around. Collecting toys of Star Wars is the same thing as collecting toys from Forbidden Planet. There will be no more.
It’s even scarier when you start looking at Star Wars web sites…
Oh, god…
And we thought those Dr. Who guys were bad… Speaking of collectability and odd things, I hear that you have a 1950 Studebaker…
Oh, god…
Does this thing really convert to a Batmobile?
Not that question… You probably read this where everyone else did, in Wizard. Let me just sum it up by saying I was nineteen. My brother made the fiberglass parts for me. I’ve never actually driven it around with those parts on it because I’m too much of a chickenshit. It seemed like a really cool idea at the time because seven or eight years ago when I did that, I thought I wanted to be attracting a lot more attention to myself. The thing is, that was before a lot of other stuff, which happened to me since. I look back and figure, ‘I don’t need that much attention from cops.’
Nothing picks up the chicks like a Batmobile though…
Oh yeah. [Sigh] I’ll have to test it out someday. Right now, I don’t even have a license for it. I’ve got to get an antique license for it. I’m not legally supposed to drive it.
I’m curious about when you sit down to blank page, how do you start to go about composing each panel and think how you want the page to flow? Can you walk us through that?
Basically, it’s that I don’t just sit down and approach the page with nothing on it and just go. I do exhaustive thumb-nail work. I do three by four size thumb-nails that are very tight, tight to the point where you can make out every detail, more or less, of what’s happening with the action and the characters, in some cases indicate lighting to a certain degree. I do this before I shoot any photo reference so that I can fax it back and forth to my writer and my editors. I’ve worked this way since I started Kingdom Come and I’m still working this way on Uncle Sam. I did this kind of thumb-nailing for myself with Marvels, but I ultimately was getting comments back from the writer to change little things back then. I found that it’s a bigger pain in the ass to change pencils than to know right off the bat what I shouldn’t do before I take my photo reference. I mean, if you need a completely different pose because somebody says that you did this wrong here and you should completely re-draft the scene… It’s a huge pain because I can’t just go and re-take another picture of that model…one shot on a twenty-four shot roll. It becomes a real pain. The fact that I have to go out and take any pictures of models at all is really going above and beyond to begin with. So, I ultimately want to keep the process as cooperative as possible. I want to allow all the people I’m working with as much input into my thought processes as they can care for. Most often they don’t want it or they don’t take advantage of it. In the case of Kingdom Come, it was my editor who gave me pretty much all of the comments I ever got for the material I did. In the case of Uncle Sam, I’ve got everybody working very closely: the editor, the assistant editor and my writer all have individual comments for me every time I turn in a batch of thumb-nails. It gets a little crazy some times. At a certain point, I have to say, ‘Enough input already! You have to trust me on a few of these things! If I say the storytelling works, then it works, dammit!’ Anyway, I shoot reference and that could involve one to five people sometimes. Depending upon, of course, what happens within those ten pages that I do within that given month. When I sit down to work on the actual boards, many times I can start before taking any reference and just start to re-layout everything that is on my thumb-nail in a larger size. I just eyeball this up, no projection or anything like that. I just want to get the feeling of re-drawing it lightly and loosely. I use a very light pencil lead on the paper. I have the roughest impression of everything in there so that when it comes to figure integrated with background or figure integrated with other figures, there is an approximate figure shape or specific details of the face that are already there. When the reference comes in, if I don’t like the way the reference would have me compromise my original design, [I can change it] because ninety per cent of the time you can’t match what you were originally looking for with the model. You have to go with what the model gave you or you can throw out what you just took a picture of to go for what was in your head. A lot of time, I will compromise what the photo of the model gave me and, basically, go for something that’s much more illustrative, just something that was impossible to photograph or something I couldn’t get the model to hit just right. That happens constantly. So, I lay in the photographs, which is actually a pretty quick process where I go through and knock in all of the specific photographs. A lot of times I don’t detail a lot of other elements because I get lazy and I want to get one main thing in there that I feel strongly about. A lot of times, I get the main figures in, and I feel stronger about detailing the figures in the background that I have to make up out of my head. Say I do have a particular crowd scene that I’ve only got a couple of people I’ve shot as examples of members of the crowd for, and then the rest of it is going to be made up. Well, a lot of time I want to get in that one perfect reference thing first and then I have this feeling about the whole drawing. There’s an anchor to it that, essentially, is of that central image that is going to be enough to guide me through the rest of the piece. It takes me the first couple of weeks or so of the month to get those pencils done. Usually I like to finish by the halfway point of the month before I start to paint. That’s what used to happen until I got off course. Also, this is predicated upon whether or not I have a lot of other illustrations that are begging away for my time or if I’ve been doing any traveling for conventions and all that kind of crap. Most often times, even if I’m doing ten story pages, I wind up doing a total of ten to twelve different paintings all told in that month because there are other covers that I have to do. I always have to do an Astro City cover each month and invariably there is some god-forsaken cover I’ve committed to on the outside, or maybe it has to do with Uncle Sam. It could be the project I’m working on that maybe I’ve got to do the promo poster for this thingamajig and knock that out or maybe it’s something completely unrelated like within a couple of weeks I’ve got to knock out the cover of Legends of the Dark Knight issue 100. Now, that’s not something I had in my schedule for the last year. It’s just that they called me and it was just sort of an offer I couldn’t refuse. There is a handful of things like that I’ve got in my schedule, but for the most part I like to program everything very, very well in advance, almost knowing what it’s going to be like for the next year what I’ll be doing and not let me be rocked about by all different offers that come in. Basically, I could wind up having to do a hell of a lot of different illustrations in one month, but covers are far easier than story pages. Going to the painted part of the pages, I first go through with a black and white page where I paint everything on all the pages in black and white tones. These involve warm and cool tones of certain blacks I use that give me warm tones for fleshy areas and areas that I know are going to be warmer in color and cooler in areas that will be the opposite. I go through deep, full blacks to areas. I’m not the kind of artist who says that you should never use black. I think that black is your friend. It’s very much like inking before a colorist comes in. It�
�s just that the inking stage is a tonal one and it involves a lot of rendering. I mean, it’s pretty much fully rendered in black and white before it ever sees a drop of color. It’s only if something is a bright light that’s held in color that I leave it alone. For the most part, everything is all there once I’m done with that grey stage and then I go in with color and usually those ten pages will take, say, a total of five days to color because I’ll do two of them a day, knocking through putting in color. Sometimes a page could take me three to four hours to put in all the color on and sometimes it can take ten to twelve hours to do the color on one page. Most often times it’s a pretty simple procedure and it allows me to look at the page in one tone already and imagine things as monochromatically as I possibly can because I’m trying to force myself to think a little bit more monochromatically and having a color harmony that affects all the objects in a particular piece. I’ve never really been too good at that. I’m still striving to get that, but it’s an on-going process to achieve that. I don’t think I have it yet.
I’d like to talk a little bit about your volume of work. Was Marvels the first thing that you did professionally?
No. The first thing I did professionally in comics was a five issue mini-series for Now Comics called Terminator: The Burning Earth, a full painted color [book] back in 1989 and very, very few people remember it, thank god. I basically got into the project because I was really hot to get into this business and I was working a full time job in advertising at the time. I did it on the side and I was doing twenty-two painted pages a month while I still did my nine to five job and I just about died. In fact, I did die back then. Whereas that was my first job in comics, my first kind of comics-related job (just because it’s a product that’s carried within the same store that sells comics), were illustrations published in the very first roleplaying book for the Shadowrun game series. They were pen and ink illustrations that I did. There was like maybe seventeen illustrations all told I did in this one hard cover book, that came out before any of my comics work.
What was it about Kurt Busiek’s writing that made you want to work with him?
[Laughs] Oh, god… Well, absolutely nothing, that’s what, because I had never read any of his writing. What happened is, after I did the Terminator thing, I got a call from the writer of that project who said Marvel was trying to contact me and he’d passed on my number. Of course, I was really hot to get in touch with a real company. So, Busiek was the one who was hunting me down. He was compiling painters for this project he was editing called Open Space, which, I believe was the only product he ever edited over there at Marvel. It was a short-lived venture that was sort of trying to launch a sci-fi line through Marvel Comics. I was under the impression that I was going to be working under this specific Marvel imprint and it lasted like nothin’. It was there and gone. It’s like Star Comics from the eighties. In any case, as soon as I finished up my other painted project, I had a story ready to do for Marvel, my first gig, which was a twelve page painted story. This is one that I actually did go to the trouble and took all pictures of reference of a model and everything. I tried to make it more realistic than anything I’d accomplished through the Terminator book because there was no time for that there. Even though it was in full rendered color, it pretty much was just created out of my head because there was no time for anything else. What happened is, he was the contact point at that time. I did the job, turned it in, pretty much didn’t hear another word from them, then I moved and I think I dropped off the face of the earth. What I was considering was that I was working towards utilizing that contact I had with him by using him as the person I wanted to pitch stuff to at Marvel. So, I devoted myself towards the process of putting together this proposal I had this big inspiration for that involved the Human Torch and the Submariner and all of these other characters that I ultimately wanted to do an anthology book, much like Hellraiser, painted that featured Marvel characters instead of those Clive Barker characters. So, I devoted myself to this big proposal, which featured a lot of art and this whole twelve page Human Torch origin story. All of which I did and I was doing with another wanna-be-writer friend of mine in Chicago here. Towards the end of that year, I went about the process of trying to get a hold of Busiek again and realized that he had quit [which meant that he was no longer] a checkpoint man there so I no longer had an “in” at Marvel. I did talk to him anyway about trying to get my original artwork back, which actually never got returned to me for that one story. It’s floating out there somewhere. Some rotten crook-ass dealer has got it or something, maybe Scott Dunburen has his hands on it or something. Go ahead and include that because I could give a shit about that guy. I didn’t know what to do as far as this proposal, so I figured, at least, I could use this guy for his advice about how to go about the process of getting it in there. It didn’t deter me from the whole proposal, making it, but, ultimately, I was going to send it to him first as the only authority figure that I knew. At that point, he was just a struggling writer. I had no idea how struggling… I had no idea what the comics were that he was writing. The only thing I ever owned that Kurt wrote, which I had never read myself, was this Legend of Wonder Woman thing they did with Trina Robbins. In any case, Kurt basically will have a big excuse as to why he wasn’t anywhere before the time I hooked up with him, why all the jobs he had gotten previously [were] shitty jobs or why nobody appreciated the work he had done before or blah blah blah. Ultimately, what it comes down to is that a lot of people, since he was out in New York and he did work in the Marvel offices for a period of time, a lot of these comic book guys can rub each other the wrong way. I mean, if you ask around and find out what Mark Waid’s reputation was before he got Flash and got Kingdom Come, he had made a lot of enemies for himself just by working at the main office. He was actually fired from DC as an editor. He was the only editor in twenty years that ever got fired. I don’t know, maybe it’s ten years, but in either case, nobody gets fired at DC and Mark was out-and-out fired because things were that bad. You know these people develop these animosities between one another that are almost laughably absurd, but these things happen. I think that happened, to a certain degree, with Kurt. There were a lot of people he rubbed the wrong way. For example, I knew him and Mike Carlin never got along. Of course, it seems like you can talk to just about anybody and they didn’t get along with Carlin except for me. I always got along with Carlin. [in a sarcastic tone -ed] I’m his buddy. I’m everybody’s best friend. So, basically, when I got in touch with Busiek, he looked over everything I had. At that point, my writers from home that were supposed to help me with the proposal and give me some story stuff to put in it had bailed on me. So, I had nothing story-wise to put in it except this twelve page illustrated and with text Human Torch origin story and then I had an opening letter which detailed the basic idea of this anthology and I told about the kind of characters that I wanted to work with. There were also illustrations in color of all those characters and the way I might draw them. If you looked at it, it was a very visual proposal that would hopefully inspire you to think that this is a very possible thing. Well, for Kurt, it didn’t. It made him think, ‘Wow, that’s a really good Iron Man. We should do an Iron Man proposal together.’ He didn’t really want to jump on board this Marvels… actually, Marvels was the title he gave it, I simply was calling it Marvel, but at least two years before Marvels Number 1 came out, I had in my hands that painting, that cover painting with a logo that looked exactly the same, that said Marvel up top and a black border went around the whole image. I came up with that in such early advance of when it finally saw the light of day. He thought that the proposal would not have any life to it once it was in there, that you can’t really propose an anthology, and you can’t propose it to a specific editor, because who can edit all of those particular characters? Editors are divided up by what characters they control and they can’t just have some book that they can use everybody else’s characters in. He was explaining to me the logistics of why it
shouldn’t work when I’m looking at it from the fan mentality of ‘You’re kidding me. You can’t get something as simple as this together?’ They have a book like Hellraiser, which most of their fans could not appreciate, and they do the opposite thing with their own characters, and that’s too hard to figure out. The logistics, he would explain to me, were politic and all different manner of things. It was just really repugnant to hear what the bullshit story was. So, in any case, he talked me into sort of forestalling my Marvels book to go in on an Iron Man proposal with him, which would involve me doing pen and ink work instead of painting it. I did up two pages of samples for that and a painted cover design. We did that proposal and that one wasn’t even looked at. We did the proposal and the editor never glanced at it for a second. I don’t know if it had to do with Kurt Busiek or maybe it was simply they weren’t going to be catering this series to anybody who was coming in as a pitch, that they just switched it off to people they knew of in-house and that is pretty much the way things usually go. If you’re trying to get in and take over a book when it’s changing hands, that’s what was happening, the old writer was going out and the old artist team and everything, and the whole book would be up for grabs. For the most part, companies don’t think in terms of accepting what are seemingly outsiders to come in and take it over. So, his proposal was the one that was not going to be responded to. Mine was the one that, once it did get in somebody’s hands over there, they were receptive to, but it got in their hands through a roundabout way because Kurt did help me out extremely well by showing my samples off to people at Eclipse, who then they threw a short story my way and then had a lot of other work they wanted to me to do. Before I could get into any of that stuff, somehow through some strange means, Clive Barker wound up with my entire Marvels proposal. He was being shown my stuff because Eclipse wanted me to do some of those Tapping the Vein things, or some of the individual graphic novels they had planned based around Clive’s stories. Before they officially offered to me, they wanted to get the artist approved by Clive. Well, Clive saw my stuff and he said, ‘Oh, you know I would love to get this guy to do this Hellraiser story over at Marvel, I’m going to be re-directing the narrative in it and creating these new characters and he should be the guy to draw the story and design the characters and whatever.’ So, he called me up out of the blue and then hooked me up with the editor over at Marvel who had somehow seen the same samples which made me think, ‘What the hell did Eclipse do? Did they just hand off the entire package and it got all the way over to Marvel and they proposed my book for me?’ Lo and behold, this editor of Hellraiser was now interested and I didn’t even have to work at selling them. It was already — boom — it was right there. How do I get hooked up with Kurt Busiek? I say to the editor, ‘Well, I’ve been talking to Kurt Busiek about writing this proposal. Is that ok?’ He’s like, ‘Sure!’ Then, I call Busiek about it and Busiek thinks I’m a fuckin’ liar. He thinks I’m full of shit. So, he’s got to call up the editor and make sure that ‘young artist type’ Alex Ross is not full of shit and that this editor was legitimately interested in a formal proposal and then, of course, Mr. High-and-Mighty can get off of his crown horse and finally write something for me. In the months before that, he had said he would work on this proposal for me, but he didn’t have any faith that it was going to go anywhere. The reality of it is, I kind of got hooked up with the guy without knowing, at all, how good of a talent he might’ve been. It was at that point where I wanted to make the project happen no matter what. It’s kind of like the same story with Kingdom Come because, aside from the fact that I did read a bunch of the comics they’d sent me of Mark’s which were a lot of Flash comics and Legion Ninety-whatever the comic was he wrote for a little while, and I thought, ‘Well, this guy’s a good storyteller and he has good characterization and whatever…’ I figured he had the rough skills I was looking for and, by all accounts, Mark was the biggest fan of all of the characters that there ever was and this I had to believe on hearsay. So, more or less, I jumped into that relationship in much the same way, without really being a follower of that person’s work, without really knowing that person’s work, because I wasn’t going to chance not getting the proposal happening. Even though people gave me a lot of credit, as if nothing I would try to do would be rejected. At that time, Kingdom Come was so important to me that I was going to deal with the devil to make it come true within the period of time I was looking to get started on it, absolutely make that the next project I do, but when I finished Marvels I did not have the proposal in yet and the writer I originally hooked up with (who was a famous name, James Robinson) stiffed me. He bailed on me.