Comic-Con 2007
The
Secret of
Comic-Con special guest Adam Hughes talks about his 20-year career in comics A Adam Hughes is one of the leading comic book artists working today. He started his professional career during the independent comics boom of the 1980s, and worked his way from small black and white titles onto more mainstream books. When a gig at Comico eventually led to being hired by DC to work on Justice League. Hughes quickly became known for creating covers that sold issues, and his ability to depict female characters with incredible strength alongside gorgeous femininity landed him memorable runs as the cover artist for Wonder Woman, Catwoman, and Tomb Raider; more recently, Hughes illustrated the Star Wars-themed cover for Comic-Con’s 2007 Souvenir Book. During a special “Spotlight” panel on Hughes, Comic-Con awarded him an Inkpot Award for outstanding achievement in the comic arts. Here are some highlights from that event. Scott Klauder of Sideshow Collectibles, for which Adam has designed a series of statues, interviewed Adam. On his 20-year career in comics, Hughes said, “I’ve rounded a strange career corner where I’ve now got this weird, and I think rather undeserved, respect. I’m reminded of a John Huston line in Chinatown: ‘Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.’ I guess I’ve made tenure. People are required to like me now.” When did your artistic career begin? I opened up one of my diapers and said, “Oh, look, the MTV logo.” (The audience laughs.) No, my mom had some artwork from when I was five-years-old, drawings of Spider-Man, Batman and Robin, and shows nobody remembers, like Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons and Ultraman. We only had one other artistic person in my family—my uncle—and he was one of the first people that showed me art. He taught photography at the Smithsonian, and that’s only because he went to Da Nang, in Vietnam, for 20-months and got to come
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back and go to college. My uncle would visit with cigarettes, a Manhattan, and Percocet, and actually sit there and say (in a gravelly voice), “Hey, yeah, you ever heard of perspective?” I was six. “Here, I’m going to draw you a barn in perspective. Now go get me another Manhattan.” So ever since I was a little kid I learned to draw and mix cocktails. Do you use Photoshop? Not when I was six, no. No, I mean… I haven’t touched real paint in, I don’t know how long. In 1996, I was doing a book for Jim Lee called, Gen 13: Ordinary Heroes. [They] put me up in a furnished apartment in La Jolla, California, and an office overlooking the ocean. I didn’t have a car, so I used to lurk at WildStorm Effects where they do the coloring, and they showed me the basics. Do you have any preliminary sketches for your All Star Wonder Woman work? Absolutely not. I can’t keep a secret. When I finish something, I want to show it to my friends, and I felt that this would be the one time I should shroud myself in complete Pentagon secrecy. I’m not going to show anybody anything until it’s ready to come out. I want my All Star book to ship every thirty days, [so] I want all six issues in the can, done, and then we