Comic Book Artist #25 Preview

THE ABC COMICS OF ALAN MOORE & FRIENDS

™

No.25 June 2003

$6.95

Promethea TM & ©2003 America’s Best Comics, LLC

In The U.S.

O’NEILL • SPROUSE • BAIKIE • BARTA • DUNBIER • KLEIN • VILLARRUBIA

VOLUME 1, NUMBER 25

CELEBRATING

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THE

LIVES & WORK

OF THE

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GREAT CARTOONISTS, WRITERS & EDITORS

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JUNE 2003

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THE FRONT PAGE: WE’LL MEET AGAIN….

Ye Ed bids adieu to TwoMorrows and gives thanks to all who contributed to CBA’s initial run............................1 EDITOR’S RANT: EMBRACING THE UNKNOWN Existential comments by Ye Ed on his brief encounter with the Great Beyond and the meaning of Moore ..........4 THE AMERICA’S BEST COMICS CELEBRATION KHOURY’S CORNER: DESTINATION NORTHAMPTON George dishes the dirt on Ye Ed and their sojourn to the Alan Moore abode deep in the heart of England

Editor/Designer JON B. COOKE Publisher

TWOMORROWS JOHN & PAM MORROW

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ALAN MOORE INTERVIEW: THE MAGIC OF COMICS Ye Ed & Khoury visit the world’s finest comics scribe for a long, trippy talk on comics and magic ......................8 SCOTT DUNBIER INTERVIEW: IN THE HEART OF WILDSTORM The ABC editor on the magic of Alan Moore and the British writer’s ingenious collaborators............................43 BONUS ALAN MOORE INTERVIEW: AMERICA’S BEST APOCALYPSE The magic man chats about his creations for the America’s Best Comics line and possible retirement ..............46 CBA EXTRA: TODD KLEIN AND THE ABCS OF DESIGN The award-winning letterer/logo designer on his exquisite work for America’s Best Comics..............................56 KEVIN O’NEILL INTERVIEW: AN EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMAN The superb artist gives us a look at the early days of 2000 AD and working with the Magus, Alan Moore ......58 J.H. WILLIAMS III INTERVIEW: PROMETHEA UNBOUND! Jim Williams talks with George Khoury about his mind-expanding collaborations with Alan Moore ................74 CBA EXTRA: PICTURE PERFECT JOSÉ VILLARRUBIA The photographer/colorist/digital artist discusses “Me and ABC,” a look at his Promethea contributions ........80 CHRIS SPROUSE INTERVIEW: OF TOM STRONGS AND SUPREMES George Khoury chats with the artist on his life beyond Supreme and into the strange worlds of Tom Strong ..82 HILARY BARTA INTERVIEW: MAKING A SPLASH WITH ALAN MOORE The EC-inspired cartoonist tells George Khoury about his work with Britain’s Best Comics Writer ....................88 JIM BAIKIE INTERVIEW: THE FIRST ORKADIAN From Skizz to the First American, the artist from the Orkneys regales Khoury about his life and long career ....94

Assistant Editor GEORGE KHOURY Associate Editors CHRIS KNOWLES DAVID A. ROACH CHRISTOPHER IRVING Consulting Editors JOHN MORROW ROY THOMAS Cover Art & Color J.H. WILLIAMS III Flip Cover Art & Color KEVIN NOWLAN Proofreader ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON Transcribers JON B. KNUTSON BRIAN K. MORRIS SAM GAFFORD LONGBOX.COM STEVEN TICE

COMIC BOOK ARTIST™ was published as often as we could get it out by TwoMorrows, 1812 Park Drive, Raleigh, NC 27605, USA. 919-833-8092. Jon B. Cooke, Editor. John Morrow, Publisher. Editorial Office: P.O. Box 204, West Kingston, RI 02892-0204 USA • 401-783-1669 • Fax: 401-783-1287. No subscriptions are available as this CBA is the last of the TwoMorrows run. See you on the Top Shelf, people! All characters © their respective owners. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © their respective authors. ©2003 Jon B. Cooke. Cover acknowledgements: Promethea and Jack B. Quick ©2003 America’s Best Comics, LLC; Batman ™ & ©2003 DC Comics. First Printing. PRINTED IN CANADA.

Conducted by Jon B. Cooke & George Khoury Transcribed by the LongBox.com Staff Special Logo Treatment by Todd Klein As my esteemed colleague George Khoury relates in the “Destination: Northampton” article prefacing this piece, the following took place during a marathon nine-hour interview session in Alan Moore’s humble rowhouse home in Northampton, England, in May of 2002. Excised portions will appear in the forthcoming Khoury/Cooke book, Swampmen: Muck Monsters of the Comics in 2004. We trust that the renowned, award-winning writer—widely heralded as the medium’s finest scribe—needs no more introduction, but let’s just add that the man, looking surprisingly vibrant-eyed and youthful for his 48 years, is exactly the towering, long-haired, bearded, deep-voiced, dressed-all-in-black, amiable fellow we expected him to be. His living room, where we sat, had wands, strange symbols, and other various magician accessories decorating the walls, and the ceiling was painted as a starry night sky. On the wall behind the writer’s reading chair was a curious pattern of painted stars, which seemed to shimmer as endless swirls of delicate smoke (exotic fumes giving off an intoxicating, pungent scent) danced about Alan’s head, as George and Ye Ed fell under the spell of the storyteller’s magical presence. The writer copyedited the final transcript.

Above: Harbinger of the coming ABC Apocalypse (honestly, it’s a good thing!), Promethea.

Detail from JHW3’s cover art for the second collection. Courtesy of the artist. Opposite top: Imps of the divine and perverse, details from Promethea #12 (Feb. ’01). Art by JHW3 and Mick Gray. ©2003 America’s Best Comics, LLC. Opposite bottom: José Villarrubia portrait of Alan Moore. Courtesy of and ©2003 José Villarrubia..

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Comic Book Artist: [After a discussion of under-appreciated fiction authors] Do you think, comparatively speaking, early in your career you were appreciated and loved? Is that relevant? Is that enough to drive the art itself?

Alan Moore: Early on, when I started to get into comics, it’s difficult to remember exactly what my motives were. I’m probably lying or editing here, but I think what I really wanted to do above anything was earn my living for just a short time doing comics, either drawing or writing them. At the start, when I first realized I was supporting myself by actually doing these two [“Maxwell the Magic Cat” and “Roscoe Moscow”] comic strips per week, I felt so incredibly successful. I was earning £45 per week. This is £2.50 more than I would have been getting on the dole.

CBA: That’s like $100 a week?

Alan: Right, it might be about $100 bucks a week. This would have been back in 1979 or something like that. It was not very much money. Not with a newborn baby and two adults and a cat.

CBA: But it felt good?

Alan: As soon as I got the £2.50 more, I realized I was earning my living doing something I loved. I felt so privileged and also realized that this was not going to last. But if I could just do it for a year, however long, then I could say, later on in my life, that I was a comics COMIC BOOK ARTIST 25

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professional once for a year. I managed to keep at it, though for the first couple of years, I expected it to all fall apart. I just thought this could all end at any moment and then I’d be back to signing on the dole or finding a job somewhere.

CBA: Was this ingrained fatalism? Or didn’t you have enough confidence in your own work?

Alan: There wasn’t a reason to have very much confidence in my work at that time. I hadn’t done very much and it wasn’t very good. I still viewed myself as an artist and not a very good one.

CBA: Did you think you had potential?

Alan: As an artist, when I started I thought maybe I’d learn. That’s what I hoped.

“If I just do this weekly strip, surely to God, I will learn to do something that is both fast and acceptable to a certain standard.” But, no, that did not happen. I talked to people like Steve Moore and he said that, “I think that most professionals I know use a brush.”

It would look horrible, so I would abandon the brush halfway through the drawing and cover everything with stipple. I learned early on that you don’t need talent at all to stipple; you just need manic patience. [laughter] CBA: Look at Maxon Crumb.

Alan: You do all kinds of chrome effects and things like that. Most editors of British music papers at that time were not incredibly sophisticated in their visual tastes. They would be impressed by the stippling or just sorry for you because you were obviously going to go blind by the time that you were 30 and they thought, “We might as well give him some work while he still has his sight.” No, I couldn’t produce anything of a standard that I felt was adequate with enough speed to make a living out of it. I could just about scrape up a living, but it was after about two or three years of doing that when I started to figure that I was never going to be able to compete with people I was seeing in the issues of 2000 AD, which I was buying back then. People like Brian Bolland, Dave Gibbons, Kevin O’Neill, Ian Gibson… these were incredible, accomplished artists who seemingly could turn out remarkable work very, very quickly.

When I originally quit my job at the Gas Board and decided to make a go at comic book work, I started upon some insane space opera that I was going to write and draw myself purely on spec for 2000 AD. The editors would, of course, see it, realize how brilliant it was, and agree to publish it. I’d gotten the whole thing worked out. Three whole books, about 400 pages long. I got the entire continuity, interesting characters, and everything like that. I had one page finished and one page penciled and half-inked and one page half-penciled, and that was in six months. I suddenly thought, “Why am I doing this to myself? I know I’m not going to finish this.

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I’ve not got the talent. I’ve not got the patience. I’ve not got the time, the craft, anything, so why did I start this huge epic that I am not going to finish?” The answer came to me, “You started it because you are not going to finish it.” Suddenly, my inner workings were made clear to me. “If you finish it, you will have to send it in and it will be judged and it might turn out that all the talent you thought you had wasn’t there. You might do this work and you might send it in and someone might say that it is rubbish or, ‘It’s okay, but we can’t use it,’ and then you’d be crushed. You’d be crushed and you wouldn’t have your dream anymore.”

So I was trying to manufacture a situation where I never had to actually prove myself, so that in the future I could always say, “If I’d tried, I could’ve been a contender,” and I thought that was some of the most f*cked-up thinking that I had ever heard. Because of this peculiar cowardice, it’s better to throw away any real chance of actually being able to use and develop your talent for the sake of having this sad little wistful old man’s might-have-been? That was part of realizing I was my own worst enemy and that I had to ignore these attempts by the mind to avoid taking responsibility.

At that point, a light went on, and I thought, “This is entirely up to me. I know that if I put some work into it, I can do something that can sell, and I know what to do: Do a couple of short episodes that I think are manageable.” Little half-page things to sell and I did a couple of them and sent them in and I knew that this was going to work out fine.

CBA: Because you had that epiphany?

Alan: As soon as I drew these wretched “Roscoe Moscow” strips for Sounds, put them in an envelope with a little note saying, “I’m a cartoonist. I noticed that you used to run two half-page strips a week and for a long while you’ve only been running one. If you are looking for another strip might you consider this one?”

We didn’t even have a phone, so I got a telegram back from him, the only telegram I’ve ever received in my life.

CBA: That was urgent.

Alan: Yes, at the end of every sentence it said “STOP.” “Alan Moore. Stop. Loved your comic. Stop.” [laughter] He wrote, “Phone me up.” So I phoned him up from a pay phone in the middle of wasteland of the sink estate where I was living at the time, and I kept having to put more coins in the slot. He said, “The second strip will need redrawing, but we like the style” He said he could use the strip and it was as easy as that and I was working.

I got the “Maxwell the Magic Cat” strip shortly after, and I was expecting it all to end at any moment, but at least I was doing it and it was working. When it didn’t end after a little while and when I managed

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Above: Typical British comics weekly (though this issue is technically a seasonal entry), The Seaside Comic, #6 (June ’35).

Comics in the British Isles have been hugely successful over the decades as a cheap form of children’s entertainment. ©1935 C. Arthur Pearson. Below: Courtesy of Robert Miller and his fabulous Sarge’s Comics of New London, Conn., here’s a Mick Anglo spread from the 1959 Miracleman Annual. ©2003 the respective copyright holder.

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to make the move gradually into comic writing, gradually by realizing that I was never going to be able to draw quickly enough or well enough to make a living, but I had learned something about telling stories with pictures even if I couldn’t actually draw the pictures myself very well. I realized that I’d learned something about dialogue, about short story structure, and things like that. I mainly learned it by making terrible mistakes, but I learned it nonetheless. I said to Steve Moore… Steve is one of the major influences on my life.

I met him when I was 14.

CBA: Did you seek him out?

Alan: Yes, I did. Back in the ’60s, when I was 12, 13, 14, a lot of the British comics at the time were the DC Thomson titles—Beano, Dandy— juvenile titles which had wonderful work in them by some great artists. In the ‘60s, there was a company in London, Odhams, that decided to compete against DC Thomson by getting artist/writers like Leo Baxendale and Ken Reid to come work for them down south.

Odhams offered them more money. The publisher was also trying to be a bit more modern in their outlook, as this was the ’60s. They wanted to be more up-to-date. They were aware what Marvel Comics was doing in America, so they got a license to reprint, in black-&-white, most of the Marvel stories which they spread across two or three titles. These were weekly British comics titles. Alan Class was publishing these thick black-&-white books, Creepy World, which had reprinted Atlas stories quite often.

CBA: The Marvel/Atlas mystery stories?

Alan: Yes, but Odhams was reprinting the Marvel super-hero stories. They first brought out three titles, Wham!, Smash!, and Pow! Wham! reprinted, in short six-page sections, Fantastic Four from #1 onwards. Pow! reprinted Spider-Man, and Smash! had The Incredible Hulk, or something like that. They were reprinting, in black-&-white,

the very early Marvel super-hero stories.

Now, in the same issues of Wham!, Smash!, and Pow! were these great new scripts by British comic professionals and they were a mixture of super-hero and comedy (British comics had a very eclectic mix back then) and Odhams was also modeling themselves after Marvel in terms of style. They started calling themselves Power Comics with a picture of a fist in a circle as a logo.

CBA: Coming at you or going up?

Alan: It was coming at you, so it didn’t get confused with the Black Panthers or anything like that. They started to run a Bullpentype page… I forget what they called it; did they call it the Sweatshop like we did in [the early 1990s Image comic] 1963?

Anyway, it was something like that and the two editors, middle-aged British blokes who had been working in comics for years, suddenly thought, “Wow, look at all this Marvel Bullpen Bulletins stuff, all this Stan and Jack stuff! We’ll call ourselves Alf and Cos,” and they’d talk to the readers through the Power Pack, or Sweatshop, or whatever it was, and they created this great atmosphere.

CBA: They didn’t act like they were staffers?

Alan: They talked like it was a bullpen and gave names to whoever was working there. They wouldn’t mention Marvel; they would just be the editors of Power Comics, and they’d gab and talk about anybody who was around the office, and what projects they had coming up. When these titles were doing well, they brought out two titles in a slightly different format, Fantastic and Terrific.

CBA: They weren’t stapled, right?

Alan: They weren’t much better than the average comic, a little bit bigger. They got better quality covers and mainly had American reprint material. If I remember correctly, Fantastic reprinted The X-Men and The Avengers was reprinted in Terrific.

CBA: Isn’t that where Barry Smith got his start?

Alan: Barry Smith used to draw the back covers. I remember buying a color proof of one of Barry’s back covers when I was about 15 and getting him to sign it when I met him back then. I thought he was the most glamorous individual I had ever met in my life.

CBA: He was cool yet classy, well-dressed, well-groomed.

Alan: I can’t remember if he was actually wearing a panda-skin coat when I met him… perhaps that’s what I’ve added to my memory.

CBA: Did he have a goatee at the time?

Alan: I think he was clean-shaven, but he had the long golden pre-Raphaelite hair. He was great. He knocked me out. Barry had drawn this picture of the Angel from The X-Men of which I remember he told me it had been printed incorrectly as he meant for the character to be upside-down, swooping with his head downward, but they printed the character right-way up.

CBA: He was pissed?

Alan: He was pissed.

CBA: Did he tell you that long afterwards?

Alan: No, this was when I was 14. This was the only time I ever met or spoke to Barry.

CBA: So how old was he at the time?

Alan: He was 20, something like that.

CBA: So he had already been published in the U.S.?

Alan: That’s right. I’d already seen that first Daredevil or X-Men he did and he was t here at the second British comic convention in ’69.

CBA: That was real early on his career, when Barry was still aping Kirby?

Alan: I loved it. It was terrific.

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Above: Though we trust Alan’s experience wasn’t quite so disgustingly rude as in this 1991 Glasgow Comic Art Convention souvenir book cartoon by Davy Francis, legend has it that the writer ceased making convention appearances in the mid-’80s after being virtually stalked by fans, sometimes into the W.C. (that’s restroom, for us Yanks), obviously invading the poor guy’s personal space. In England, his celebrity status is more widespread (even inspiring a ’80s U.K. song, “Alan Moore Knows the Score”) to such a degree that he basically just travels around his own neighborhood. ©2003 Davy Francis. Below: Proof that talent runs in the family lies in Alan’s youngest daughter Leah’s stories for the ABC line. This panel is from her first effort, “King Solomon Pines,” drawn by the indomitable Sergio Aragonés, for Tom Strong’s Terrific Tales #5 (Jan. ’03). ©2003 America’s Best Comics, LLC.

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Alan: I’ve not got a passport. When I went to Wellingborough prison to talk to the inmates, they said I needed some identification.

My friend, a writer-in-residence there, came over to me and asked, “Do you have a passport?” I said, “No.” He said, “You haven’t got a driver’s license?” I said, “No.” He said, “You’ve got credit cards?” I said, “No.” He said, “This is going to be a problem, right?” So he went back to the prison governor [warden] and said, “He hasn’t got a passport, driver’s license, or any credit cards. He hasn’t got any identification at all.” The governor laughed. The governor is a kabballist, really into Kabbala, so he said, “All right, we’ll write him a pass but he’s obviously a complete anarchist, and you should keep your eye on him.” [laughter] It was pretty cool.

CBA: Do your mates get into trouble?

Alan: A lot of my friends are in the working-class and, at least 10 to 20 years ago, they were in the criminal-class, as well. But they’re my friends, and the younger generation of local criminals probably know somebody who knows me.

CBA: So what is your process in writing? Do you write on a computer?

Alan: I do it on a notepad.

CBA: In longhand? Doesn’t that hurt?

Alan: Yes, but one of the better British TV comedies, Father Ted, is about a group of Catholic priests in Ireland, and there’s a bit where there’s an old lady who looks after them, Mrs. Doyle, and makes

them tea every five or six minutes. Somebody gets her a new teamaking machine, and says, “You’ll love this, Mrs. Doyle! It will take the misery out of making tea.” She looks at him with contempt and says, “Perhaps some of us like the misery.” [laughter] That’s my attitude. [Handing over a pad with handwriting] This is the first five pages of Tom Strong.

CBA: This is impressive!

Alan: I was performing some magic a couple weeks ago, doing an intense ritual about one of the spheres of the Kabbala I needed to reach (but hadn’t before) for the next issue of Promethea. So we did this and, after I had the experience, I was so full of this enthusiasm to try to express what just happened and to interpret it for all 24 pages of Promethea #22, that I had it all written in three hours. I laid-out the visuals, breakdowns, for every panel. The page layouts, the spread layouts, I know no one will be able to make sense out of it but I know what every single squiggle and line means. I know that this is somebody’s head in the foreground and somebody’s full figure in the background.

CBA: So you are using the form itself, as well? It’s not only writing, it’s also visualizing.

Alan: Yes, I can see how a page is going to look even if it’s only in squiggly form.

CBA: How do you constantly infuse your material with meaning all the time? Don’t you sometimes find yourself falling back into genre where it can become rote or routine?

Alan: If I fall back on routine then I’m going to have to rip it up.

And I still do that.

CBA: Have you done it?

Alan: I rip it up afterwards. I always throw it away. I have to wait until I write something good because otherwise it goes in the rubbish.

CBA: [Looking at the squiggles and tiny handwriting on the pad] Do you have to go through another stage, something better visualized? Is this just a guide to get to the next stage?

Alan: What I’ll do is….

CBA: Look how dense this is! How is your eyesight? Do you use glasses?

Alan: I’m nearly completely blind in that eye. My focal length with this one is here [gestures a few inches in front of his face] and I’m almost completely deaf in that ear, so I have one functioning sense organ on each side of my side that I use to balance. I’m partly blind and partly deaf, giving me enough disabilities to get a good parking space. I rather like being shortsighted and partly deaf.

CBA: Your depiction of 17-year-old dialogue in Promethea seems so authentic. I was astonished how entertaining it was and it sounds to me how girls really do talk to one another.

Alan: I know a lot of young people and try to keep my ear open.

CBA: It must be delightful. In England, there is something to be said about staying in the same place where you grew up, and having ancestors that reach back who were here as well. In America the statistical average is that people move something like 11 times in their lifetime, and I fear we live pretty anonymous lives from our neighbors. And the Internet has made us more anonymous than ever.

Alan: One of the reasons that I avoid the Internet is that extension of loneliness. That’s not a human means of communication to me.

CBA: Do you write every story in a single sitting? Do you sit down, write a story until you’re satisfied, and then sit down again later and write another story until that one is over with?

“If this is Tuesday, it must be Promethea”?

Alan: The Promethea breakdown I just showed you was one the quickest I’ve ever done. Not COMIC BOOK ARTIST 25

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only do you have the little sketches, but this is also all the dialogue for the first 12 pages. It’s all on one page so I don’t have to keep turning pages over. All the dialogue for the entire 24 pages was written in six hours. Laying-out the pictures took three hours and typing it up took another six. That entire issue took 15 hours over two days.

The Tom Strong issue you see there is only five pages of three issues I’m doing at once, and that’s only as far as I’ve gotten so far.

I’ll try to get a few more done tonight to send over to Chris [Sprouse] so he’s got seven or eight pages to start off with.

CBA: Do you sometimes frustrate artists?

Alan: I don’t think so. I don’t think that I make any artist late. I stand to be corrected on that, but generally if the ABC books have been late it hasn’t been because my scripts were late, I think.

CBA: You’re always on time?

Alan: I’m not saying I’m always on time, but I’m doing so many so it’s very often that I’ll give an artist four pages and when those are done I’ll have another four. I try to make so that the artists are not waiting for work even if that means that I have to switch titles in midstream. I’ll do four pages of one story, six pages of Promethea, three pages of something for Tomorrow Stories, and ten pages of this. I do a lot of that.

CBA: So you are a multi-task type of person?

Alan: I seem to be able to compartmentalize the different assignments.

CBA: Don’t you ever just get into a mania and total focus on one thing for longer stretches?

Alan: Sometimes. I can get a real surge of enthusiasm, like that Promethea story I mentioned, and finish it within two days. That’s unusual. When I was starting out and not handling so many books, it would normally take me three days. On Swamp Thing, I did eight pages a day, handwritten and then typed.

CBA: How long does it really take? For this one you said 15 hours, but did you include pondering and mentally conceptualizing in that time frame?

Alan: There was really wasn’t any pondering at all.

CBA: Do the stories take a life of their own and you’re just the conduit?

Alan: Sometimes they take a lot of thinking about.

CBA: Do they take over?

Alan: Sometimes they take over, but it varies.

CBA: Do you think that you are the master of the ship or do sometimes you think that you channel the story? That thing you said about Superman is the most profound I’ve heard in years.

Alan: That wasn’t me that said that; that was Alvin Schwartz, ex-Superman writer, in his book, A Most Unlikely Prophet, where he mentioned his belief that there actually was a platonic, ideal form of Superman that existed somewhere, and I just believe there was some truth to it.

CBA: [Looking around Alan’s living room] So, imagine what you are doing now. I see boxes of your comics here. There’s Watchmen #1 over there. You’ve created things that may never go away, generally, unless the world turns into Fahrenheit 451 and all paper is destroyed.

Alan: Perhaps a lot of people don’t see it, but I think Promethea is the most important thing I’m doing at the moment. Some probably think that there should be more action, but when we get finished with this Kabbala storyline around #24, there will be action and the readers will then wish there wasn’t so much. It’s going to get very active around #24. The readers sticking with Promethea are getting something from it that they don’t get from other comics. There is something genuinely weird about Promethea.

CBA: It is very educational.

Alan: Especially with these Kabbala issues. Jim [J.H.] Williams told me that he’s seen some discussion that there is no plot and no story and nothing really happens. Someone said, “I don’t think the plot or the story is what this issue is about. It’s about how did it make you feel to read this issue.” That was exactly what I’d hoped for, that it would be how you felt after you read it. I know that working with this material has very strange roots. For me to work with these spheres of awareness, I have to be there to fully understand it. To me, these are real spheres. To me, they are states of being, they are states of consciousness, and they are exactly what they say they are.

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CBA: To me, much of what you talk about in Promethea makes sense. Someone can really translate any high spiritual goals, whether Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, whatever, as being very similar. Whether you’re talking about the Kabbala or the yin and the yang of Taoism, it’s all a part of the same fabric.

Alan: It is all related and that’s why I thought there’d be something for people to discover in reading Promethea.

CBA: You’re a writer who doesn’t depict violence against people with great frequency. You can be a gentle writer, but you can be monstrously horrific. I don’t think there has ever been a more violent comic than Miracleman #15.

Alan: What I was thinking about when I did that story was what if these super-heroes were as powerful as they were supposed to be and what if these super-villains are as powerful and evil as they are supposed to be, then why is it that these powerful super-villains never really do anything that is powerfully evil? Why do they always come up with a stupid plan that never works and never hurts anybody? I thought what if you have someone who is as strong as Superman who has gone completely mad and become a serial killer? What if life was a psychotic dream to him and he just didn’t care what he did, so long as he enjoyed what he was doing? I thought that would be a cool ending, with most of London destroyed.

Below: If man were God, would He have the capacity for mercy?

While the writer certainly has since continued to toy with concepts involving super-humans, from Supreme to Tom Strong, no better statement—by any writer, in Ye Ed’s humble opinion—has been made than in Alan Moore’s 15issue Miracleman epic (1985-88), where he juxtaposed the ideals and desires of omnipotent beings into a terrifying, sublime mix of the real and the supernatural. This magnum opus begs to see print again. (So, what’s up, Neil and Todd?) John Totleben superbly delineates the consequences of unchecked power in his cover art for Miracleman #15 (Nov. ’88), the issue containing the masterpiece’s final, apocalyptic conflict. ©2003 the respective copyright holder.

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CBA Interview

Heart of the WildStorm Group editor Scott Dunbier on doing comics the ABC way Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Steven Tice Despite how enormously helpful America’s Best Comics group editor Scott Dunbier was with CBA and, after being so generous with his time, the poor guy really got the shaft this issue, and for that, we apologize. Because of space constraints, we had to severely edit his interview, plus the photo the man lent us could not be found at press time. (Well, at least, there’s hoping this ish does move some books, buddy!) We virtually excised all discussion of not only his early years as a comics fan, but also his former career as an original art, but the reader need to note that Scott was a significant player among dealers before he jumped on board as an editor at Wildstorm. This interview was conducted via phone and Scott copyedited the final transcript (or, at least, what little that remains).

Comic Book Artist: Where are you originally from, Scott?

Scott Dunbier: New York.

CBA: What was your first original art purchase?

Scott: [ponders] I can’t remember, actually. That’s funny. When I was young, I used to call up artists on the phone and beg for sketches, because back in those days the artists still had listed phone numbers. I remember calling Al Feldstein, who did a nice drawing for me.

Alex Toth did a beautiful Batman marker drawing for me that I framed and hung on the wall of my bedroom, in direct sunlight, which I treasured—until it eventually faded into oblivion. Little did I know. The best, though, was Jack Kirby. When I was about 15, we were living in California, and I went to the local comic shop, a place called Fantasy Castle. I went up to the register to pay for some old Kirby comics I had picked out, and the guy behind the counter for some reason mentioned that Jack lived nearby, in Thousand Oaks, California, and he had a listed phone number.

CBA: That’s all you needed! [laughter] Scott: Why he told me this I have no idea. So, of course, I called up Jack Kirby, and he was the nicest guy in the world. We talked for about 20 minutes, then he invited me up that weekend to his house.

He said, “Get your mom to drive you up here. I’ll sign some comics for you and we can have lunch together.” God bless my mom, she actually drove me up there, and Jack and I spent about four or five hours together while my mom chatted with Jack’s wife, Roz. I brought him a big stack of 50 or so comics to sign, definitely too big a stack to be considered proper comic etiquette. As I was taking them out of the bag I noticed Roz sort of rolling her eyes when she saw how many I brought. I never really understood her reaction until a few years later and all of a sudden it dawned on me, “Oh! So that’s why she was rolling her eyes!” [laughter] But Jack was a sweetheart and he signed every single one of them. He opened the covers, signed them on the first page. It was great. Then we had lunch together, he gave me a couple of portfolios, and he did this really nice sketch of Captain America waving, saying, “Hi, Scott!” It’s hanging up in my office at home.

CBA: Do you still have those signed Kirby comics?

Scott: Some of them.

CBA: So were there any other personal encounters with comic book artists? Was that ongoing?

Scott: That was really the highlight early on. But there were plenty of guys who would do drawings. I called up Harvey Kurtzman once when I was 16 and asked him for a drawing. He was a nice guy and said, “Just send me a letter with your address and I’ll mail you someJune 2003

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 25

thing. I wrote a letter, actually just a couple of lines that said, “Thank you very much for agreeing to do this drawing for me.” He sent it back and on the same sheet of paper and did a self-portrait with his finger up saying, “I don’t do drawings.” [laughter] Jack Kamen did a sort of risqué little one for me of a girl in a shower!

CBA: So did you ever have those drawings published? Did you ever contribute to fanzines?

Scott: No. I was a member of a comic book APA [amateur press association] for a little while but that was only for a short time, and much later.

CBA: When did you start dealing in original comic art?

Scott: I started buying and selling art in the early ’80s. I remember having a table at a Creation convention, the 1981 Thanksgiving show in New York. I think that was the earliest show I set up at. I mainly sold comics but was always more interested in the art, and selling it as a full-time occupation slowly grew out of setting up at those early shows. I think it was about 1987 when I went into it full steam.

CBA: Obviously, you were getting in contact with some top-notch artists. Did you seek out top-caliber art? Is that what your interest was?

Scott: You know, I was just interested in picking up what I felt was good art, either to collect or to sell. I was never good at selling art that I didn’t care for, I’m not much of a salesman if I don’t actually like what I’m selling. I used to sell art for Mike Mignola, Brian Bolland, José Luis Garcia-Lopez, a whole bunch of really great artists.

CBA: So how long did you sell art full-time?

Scott: From 1987 until about ’95. Then sort of a little bit off and on. When I went to WildStorm, we were still dealing in original art, but as my duties on the editorial side increased, my art selling decreased at a matching pace. After a couple of years, I had nothing to do with the art sales anymore.

CBA: What was your first editorial job in comics?

Scott: It was actually for A1, a British anthology magazine put together by two friends of mine, Garry Leach and Dave Elliott. They were putting this magazine together around 1987 or so. I wasn’t an official editor, per se, but I did help them contact some American

Above: Penciler Chris Sprouse and inker Alan Gordon’s portrait of the America’s Best team, used to promote the launch of ABC in 1999. ©2003 America’s Best Comics, LLC.

M.I.A. As longtime readers know, this wouldn’t be Comic Book Artist if, in virtually every single issue, we didn’t extend our apologies to those creators who should have been included in the celebrations, but were omitted due to lack of space. And our ABC Comics extravaganza is no different in that we truly regret not having the participation of quite an incredible array of talent who have contributed mightily to the imprint. To RICK VEITCH, GENE HA, ZANDER CANNON, MICK GREY, AL GORDON, MELINDA GEBBIE, ARTHUR ADAMS, ALAN WEISS, PAUL RIVOCHE, KARL STORY, JEROMY COX, and the many others, please accept our appreciation for your fine efforts and our disappointment at not having a 500-page issue to give you all full measure. Mea culpa.

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CBA Interview Extra

America’s Best Apocalypse?

The scribe on ABC and his possible retirement from comics Opposite page: Detail from the cover of The America’s Best Sketchbook (’02) featuring the finest of the ABC art stable. ©2003 America’s Best Comics,LLC. Below: Check out the writer’s awesome rings on this José Villarrubia photograph of Alan Moore, taken on the streets of Northampton. Photo courtesy of and ©2003 José Villarrubia.

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Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Steven Tice As the preceding interview, which took place in Alan Moore’s Northampton home, didn’t cover too many specifics of the America’s Best Comics line (and given the fact it transpired over a year ago), Ye Ed thought it prudent to ring up the scribe to get the lowdown on his thinking behind the characters populating the America’s Best imprint, as well as to ask about rumors of his impending retirement from comics writing. The following took place in early May via telephone and was transcribed in lightning fast time by Our Man Tice.

Comic Book Artist: I’d like to ask you specifically about the ABC Comics line. Promethea: Was the intention originally to do your own version of Wonder Woman?

Alan Moore: No. All the ABC books, to a degree, were created in the wake of Awesome Entertainment going under. At that time, there were a lot of artists I was working with at Awesome I was enjoying working with. These included Melinda Gebbie, Rick Veitch, Chris Sprouse, and others. This also included Steve Skroce, who I worked with on Youngblood and who obviously was able to draw lots of interesting characters in a scene. So I had originally come up with the idea of Top Ten as something geared toward Steve’s talents.

I’d been working with Brandon Peterson on Glory, which obviously had been a Wonder Woman knock-off in its original inception, but which I was trying to turn into something more magic-oriented. Now, when Awesome went belly-up, I was thinking of coming up with a raft of titles that would enable me to carry on working with the artists I was already comfortably working with and I would be able to have more say in how the comics were presented. Because, although I’d enjoyed a lot of the stuff we’d done at Awesome, there’d been problems with some of the presentation that I thought could be very easily sorted out. Bad covers, things like that.

I then found this list of names I’d written some months earlier, just in an idle moment, including Tom Strong, Promethea, Cobweb, Top Ten. But they were just names with no concepts attached to them. I started to see how Tom Strong could be a character perhaps suited for Chris Sprouse. Cobweb would be a character perhaps suited for Melinda. Greyshirt would perhaps suit Rick. Top Ten, I took that name and tried to work it into a concept that might suit Steve Skroce, and Promethea sounded female, sounded like the sort of thing that might work for Brandon Peterson. Now, at this point, both Steve and Brandon bowed out, saying they had other projects so they wouldn’t be able to continue. But I liked the way these new concepts were developing, so [WildStorm editor] Scott Dunbier found me artists he thought might be suitable, in the shape of Gene Ha on Top Ten and Jim Williams and Mick Gray on Promethea.

I suppose there is something in the fact that Promethea sprung out of a character—Glory—who herself sprang out of Wonder Woman. If you’re going to do any female character connected to mythology in any way, I suppose she is going to end up looking something like the Wonder Woman archetype. While I was aware before taking over the strip that Glory had been a Wonder Woman knock-off, with Promethea, I tried to reference those things that came before Wonder Woman. So, in #1, I gave this brief history of Promethea in the strip, as well as in a text article, talking about newspaper comic strips at the turn of the century, where there were some quite interesting woman artists and female newspaper strip characters. I’ve worked that into Promethea through the Little Margie storyline, this imaginary comic strip done at the turn of the century that had a Winsor McKay quality to it. It had a wise woman guardian figure called Promethea. We also talk about pulp books, where I can remember all of these great Amazon characters, some of them written by women like Leigh Brackett or C.L. Moore that would be in things like Weird Tales, perhaps with covers by Margaret Brundage.

So we reference that through the Grace Brannagh character, who is a pulp cover illustrator for a Promethea pulp magazine. And yes, we’ve also got a reference to a comic book incarnation of this pulp character, who is congruent, at least, with Wonder Woman, from the ’40s to the ’70s. But no, there’s no real interest or intention in pastiching or parodying Wonder Woman. With Promethea, we’ve got a characCOMIC BOOK ARTIST 25

June 2003

ter potentially much more interesting than Wonder Woman. That’s what we’ve been trying to explore.

CBA: Scott said it was in very short order when you turned around an entire proposal for the ABC Comics line?

Alan: I did do it in very short order, but the tapestry wasn’t complete in that initial proposal. What you’d got was my thinking upon these very titles that I’d found in one of my rough-books and the thoughts they had inspired in me, the kind of characters I thought might be possible. I’d got an idea for roughly how many books all of this would be done in. We’d have an anthology book, Promethea, Tom Strong, and Top Ten. The initial proposal for Top Ten had lots of characters who never made it to the final book and hadn’t really got the whole concept completely worked out where everybody in the city would be a super-hero. I don’t think that was completely worked through, but there was enough there for Gene to start working on designs; similarly with Promethea. When I actually started writing Promethea from the initial proposal, I think I’d written between four and eight pages and then just had to tear them up, because it didn’t have any of the life or vitality I wanted, which I added to the strip partly by talking with Jim Williams and coming up with a wildly different vision of New York, and partly by throwing in seemingly irrelevant, absurdist elements, like the Weeping Gorilla posters, the Five Swell Guys… those things added to the mix seemed to make the thing, give it a freshness, an originality and a life. It was the same with all the books.

Tom Strong was perhaps most closely worked out as this kind of primordial pulp character a bit like Doc Savage, very much drawing upon the pulp figures who came in immediately before Superman. I suppose, for a large part of the ABC line, that was the premise: I was trying to wind the tape back to a point before Action Comics #1. Or at least, insofar as that was possible, to wind the tape back and then play it forward along a different direction. So I was looking back to the early newspaper strips, weird fiction of the late 19th century, pulp magazines, all things that preceded the modern comicbook character, and then imagine a way forward from that point that would end up with characters who were distinctly different from the way the super-hero comic has played in reality. So it was an attempt to come up with some super-heroes from a parallel world, where they didn’t necessarily have all the same baggage that contemporary comic book super-heroes with their 60 years of history tend to have.

CBA: Was your thinking to do an Eisner homage with “Greyshirt”?

Alan: Not originally, but with the first issue, I realized you couldn’t really get a better model than Will Eisner for that sort of story. The main thing I wanted to do was not pastiche or do a homage to The Spirit, but to do a homage to the spirit of The Spirit, if you like. The very best thing about Eisner’s Spirit was the incredible experimentation, the constantly attempts at new storytelling techniques. All of that was the most thrilling aspect of The Spirit. So that’s why, yeah, we did that first “Greyshirt” story, which is a nice little twist-ending mystery, that doesn’t necessarily use any clever storytelling techniques, but by the second issue we were pushing for things like that “How Things Work Out” story, with the four levJune 2003

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 25

els of the building in different times. Remember: There’s not really a vehicle around now to carry on the innovations Eisner was reaching for. I mean, even Eisner doesn’t do The Spirit anymore! There’s really no vehicle around now where you can do those wildly experimental stories within that kind of framework. So that became something I enjoyed exploring, and continue to enjoy, with “Greyshirt.” Though some of them are fairly conventional, most of the stories in the run are based around some interesting little visual storytelling device we thought of trying out.

CBA: Now, did Rick request to write and draw the mini-series, Greyshirt: Indigo Sunset?

Alan: Oh, I felt perfectly comfortable with Rick, who is a superb writer as well as a fantastic artist. I forget who suggested it, but whoever it was had my full support right from the beginning because it was a tremendous idea. That Indigo Sunset story was wonderful, one of my favorite comics of last year, just because of the way Rick had taken all of these insignificant, trailing threads from the continuity of the regular “Greyshirt” series in Tomorrow Stories and woven them into this coherent narrative that had all these wonderful, bizarre pulp touches in it, and where he was roping in people like John Severin and people like that on the back-up

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The ABCs of Design Beyond the letters and logos of Moore’s comics with Todd Klein Working with Alan and the artists of the ABC line has been a terrific experience. From the line’s inception, I’ve not only lettered the pages (except for League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and “Jack B. Quick”), I’ve been involved in the design of covers, collections and text pages. Since the lettering is evident, I thought I’d write a few words about the less obvious area: Design.

When Alan and I first began discussing the look of the line, particularly covers, he expressed a desire to have each book be unique, an individual gem with it’s own style and flavor, in the manner of Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library, or in earlier times, the original comic-book version of Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad. While WildStorm limited our approach somewhat to the traditional comics size and format, I think we’ve succeeded in presenting quite a variety of styles, especially on Tom Strong and Promethea. For both titles, the initial plan was to reinforce the idea that the characters and concepts had already been around for decades by utilizing graphic styles from across the whole century. Over the first 14 issues of Tom Strong, for example, we referenced pulp covers of the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s, present-day Science magazines, computer game graphics, men’s adventure magazines from the 1950s, science-fiction paperbacks of the 1970s, Tintin albums, Tom Swift novels from the 1910s, and DC, Marvel, Fawcett and EC comics.

Design ideas usually begin with my calling Alan and talking over what might work best for a particular issue, outlining his ideas, then talking to the artist to see what sounds most attractive. J.H. Williams, artist on Promethea, often has ideas he wants to work in where we can, and I’ve come up with a few on my own, as well.

When everyone is on the same page, I usually put together a layout, doing research as necessary, design the logo and rough-in the type, run that past Alan and editor Scott Dunbier, and send it to the cover artist to produce the art. The artist (or inker) sends the finished art to WildStorm for coloring (either in-house or by the regular colorist).

The colored art file comes to me, and I put it all together in the page layout software program, QuarkXPress, adding and choosing colors for the date, price, UPC box, credits, logos, and any other copy

needed. Color approval copies then go out to Alan, the artist, and Scott, who has been very gracious in allowing us all to work together this way, and most helpful in getting some of our stranger ideas okayed. (He only winced slightly at the idea of a different logo on nearly every issue of Promethea and Tom Strong!)

With the second major storyline on Promethea, the Kabbalah Quest, J.H. Williams carried the design concept even further, not only incorporating a particular artistic style into the cover and interior art, but using colors and symbols from each level of the Kabbalah.

Together with colorist Jeromy Cox, we’ve had great fun making that work as best we can.

The other two main books I worked on, Top 10 and Tomorrow Stories, had challenges of their own. Tomorrow Stories, being an anthology, had to have a lot more information on the cover than the usual comic, but we managed to work in some good layouts there, I think. Top 10 I saw as more of a traditional super-hero book, albeit with a delicious Moore twist, and the covers have played to the drama rather than unique designs, though I’m happy with the video game cover on #8. I wasn’t involved with Volume One of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, though I got on board with the second series, designing text pages as well as covers, and have enjoyed working with Alan and Kevin O’Neill on those.

For the book collections, we talked about various approaches.

Alan was attracted to the oversize European album look, but I felt we wanted something that would really look good in a bookstore alongside any other fine work of fiction, and that was the direction we took for the hardcovers. Large type with vignette painted art on a subtle background pattern has continued to be the plan there, with full-art covers on the trade paperbacks, to appeal more to the comic shop buyer.

I love working on the ABC books; it’s challenging and fun. I’m able to talk to some of my favorite creators regularly, and I even get paid for it! The hours are long, but when those books come from the printer, I get a fanboy frisson every time!

—Todd Klein

All logos by Todd Klein and are ™ & ©2003 America’s Best Comics, LLC.

CBA Interview

An Extraordinary Gentleman Kevin O’Neill’s long career in British comics and his LXG work Inset right: Portrait of Kevin O’Neill, cartoonist extraordinaire.

Courtesy of the artist.

Below: With his oft collaborating partner, writer Pat Mills, artist Kevin O’Neill created the gritty science-fiction saga of Nemesis the Warlock for 2000 AD. This promotion piece appears courtesy of Kev. The hardbound compilation, Nemesis the Warlock: Death To All Aliens, is currently available from Titan Books (in association with 2000 AD). ©2003 Rebellion.

Conducted by Jon Cooke Transcribed by Steven Tice Wow! Who would have expected the nifty cartoonist of the biggest hit of the ABC Comics line, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, to have such expert knowledge of the history of British comics and also to boast such a distinguished career, starting in the very belly of the industry itself back in the 1970s?

While Ye Ed considers Kevin O’Neill’s stylings on LOEG to be a perfect fit with writer Alan Moore’s audacious ideas and one of the finest Brit comic book artists to boot, I certainly didn’t intend to conduct such an expansive interview (which had we hoped not to edit so severely—begging our readers’ and Kev’s forgiveness—but we had to squeeze Dunbier into the book, and don’t forget that the group editor controls the ABC checkbook!), but the artist’s erudite insights and charming anecdotes proved irresistible! We hope you enjoy the following, which took place via a transatlantic phone call on February 3, 2003, and the transcript was meticulously edited by Kevin.

Comic Book Artist: Where are you originally from, Kevin?

Kevin O’Neill: I was born in London in 1953. The ’50s were a fertile period in British comics. [The boys adventure comics weekly] The Eagle had been launched to great acclaim. All our British weekly comics were in their glory, so to speak, and I was steeped in them, as I was later with American comics.

I was about ten years old when Marvel Comics’ rebirth happened.

A strong demarcation you get in British comics is the idea of boys’ and girls’ titles. Our comics were very strictly segregated, as they were gender specific. Romance and girls’ comics were usually quite beautifully drawn, often by artists who would go on to work for Warren Publishing and have big European careers.

There were these great Italian, Spanish, and South American

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artists who began their professions working for Fleetway, drawing romance comics, for which they were admirably well suited.

CBA: When I was in England in 1970 and ’71, homegrown movie serials were still popular when kids would go to spend half of their Saturdays in the cinema. Perhaps England paralleled the ’30s U.S. experience by the ’50s and thereafter…?

Kevin: The kids’ Saturday film matinee performances were hugely popular when I was a kid. The Children’s Film Foundation supported and subsidized Britishmade kid movies which they screened all the time, but we also got to see the classic American chapter plays, so it was fascinating to see The Adventures of Captain Marvel and King of the Rocket Men, and things like that. The Superman TV show was also popular in Britain, even if nothing much ever happened on it. [laughs] There was a great deal of material imported from the States, but the ’50s were also a curious time over here, because there was a fear in Britain that we were becoming too Americanized. All the vulgar U.S. horror comics, as well as super-hero comics, were considered to be bad for kids, leading to juvenile delinquency. Fleetway and DC Thomson were seen as publishing comics that were perhaps more wholesome, which probably wasn’t actually true. So we only caught flashes of American comics for a period—and the operative word here is “flash” because American comics were four-color, more expensive, with strange advertisements, and particularly enticing because mum and dad considered them as being bad for you. They were banned in school, as well.

CBA: Really? [laughs] Obviously that just made you want them more, right?

Kevin: Of course! There was this whole subculture of comics. We were fascinated by the American imports and we’d trade these strange comic books. Kids would throw out their British comic weeklies or rarely keep them in good condition, usually only held onto for a couple of reads, but American comics were carefully looked after and traded.

I went to a Catholic school, as I had a very strict Catholic upbringing, and the worst thing being caught with wasn’t pin-up books; it was to be found reading Mad magazine! To have that happen was seen as the end of the road for you! You were just going to go straight to Hell if you read Mad. [laughter] (Originally, I misunderstood its title and thought it was intended for actual insane people.) [laughs] CBA: With The Beatles coming to the fore in the early ’60s, even as you were a 10-year-old, was there a feeling of freedom that came in with them?

Kevin: Oh, totally! Even though for a couple of years into the ’60s, the ’50s kind of lingered on. (Decades actually don’t have exact beginnings and endings, regardless of what the calendar says, as the ’50s lurched over a bit.)

CBA: You mean with the Teddy Boys in their boots and ducktails?

Kevin: A lingering presence of the ration book, if you know what I COMIC BOOK ARTIST 25

JUNE 2003

mean. We didn’t dress particularly well. It always seemed very grim.

You had Harold MacMillan in power. It just looked grim and gray and Edwardian in this country. But when The Beatles kicked in, and with the arrival of Marvel Comics, along with the whole swinging London thing, fashion changed. Teenagers became more of a force to be reckoned with. It completely changed things, I guess, during the period when National Service was gradually coming to an end and people had more time on their hands and money in their pockets. It was a good time to be in Britain, I’d say.

CBA: Are you of Irish descent?

Kevin: Yes, Irish father. My mother’s English, but there’s Irish blood in her family. My older brother read a few comics as a kid, but no one else in my family was interested in comics, illustration or anything like that. My indulgence was tolerated.

CBA: Was there any prejudice against Irish Catholics?

Kevin: I was told by my father that there was, but I guess we moved within our own community, through our own schools and the Church and so on.

CBA: Oh, so you were really in a Catholic neighborhood?

Kevin: Pretty much. In the days when I was growing up, there was a lingering persecution of Irish people in general, regardless whether they were Catholic or Protestant, but it was dying away. In the early ’50s, you would have seen notices above the “Rooms To Let” signs that said, “No Irish, Blacks, or Dogs.” I think that even lingered into the ’60s in parts of London, which is extremely shameful. But that was a prejudice from the 19th century.

CBA: But you didn’t feel persecuted particularly?

Kevin: No, I didn’t. But where I lived in London, it was quite near Woolrich. The Woolrich Arsenal was down there, with the docks and so on, where merchant ships would come in, and they carried American comics as ballast. So they were very freely available around the dockyard news agents. That always fascinated me as a kid, because they had a huge range of publications from America which I never saw in any other shops. But the selection was always inconsistent, because these things were brought over as ballast. So you could seldom follow a monthly title.

I acquired the collector mentality very early on. DC comics were far more common than Marvel. Some shops only had spinner racks with Harvey comics, which were colorful, but hardly what we were really looking for. [laughter] The Marvel comics were always the most difficult to track down, but the hunt was part of the joy of collecting back then. We were on hunting expeditions just for the pleasure of tracking them down, finding an 80-Page Giant or something. It was a big part of growing up being interested in comics and how difficult they were to find sometimes.

We had Marvelman, which was actually another curious thing when I was a kid, because you could never get consecutive runs of the title Marvelman, so you’d only find them randomly, with their staples pretty rusty because they had been warehoused for a couple of years and then released again in batches. Marvelman grew out of the Captain Marvel reprints, and they too were circulating well into the late ’60s. So I was certainly aware of all that stuff as well.

CBA: Well, that’s odd to hear. Wasn’t Marvelman created because of the demise of Captain Marvel?

Kevin: Yes. I don’t know whether it was a phenomenon of where I grew up in South London, but L. Miller and Sons Comics were overprinting so a lot more of their titles were returned to be warehoused.

Over years, certainly one distributor in South London was releasing them in random patterns for certain shops. You’d just suddenly see June 2003

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 25

a bunch of old ’50s reprints of Captain Marvel, Jr. which were the original printings.

CBA: These contained stories

by Mac Raboy?

Kevin: Yeah! Virtually everything was out there.

Odd books like Gene Autry were also around, along with other Western stuff. Lash LaRue would suddenly pop up. It was very, very strange. Those IW Comics, with reprints of The Spirit….

Comics created specifically for the British market were hugely profitable. If a title’s circulation fell below 200,000 or 150,000 a week, the publisher would more likely axe the comic or merge them with another similar title.

You need to consider that this is a pretty small country, and it was easy to distribute comics in Britain. But the publishers wouldn’t hold onto anything that wasn’t very, very profitable.

They were also quite impatient with new launches, which had to be hits from the start. They wouldn’t really hang on to something for very long to see if it worked.

CBA: Some truly renowned British artists worked for the comics, such as Frank Bellamy.

Did you clue into “Dan Dare” in The Eagle?

Kevin: A cousin of mine would save copies of The Eagle and give them to me when we came to visit. I always loved the artwork on “Dan Dare” and “Heros the Spartan,” as well as anything else by Frank Bellamy, and the Peter Jackson strips on the back cover. But I was never a big fan of The

Above: Outside of his co-creation of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, perhaps Kevin O’Neill’s most acclaimed property—co-created with writer Pat Mills—is the super-hero hunting Marshal Law. (Titan Books was very helpful when Ye Ed pleaded for help with material, so be sure to check out their brand-new Marshal Law collections!) ©2003 Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill.

Above: Move over, Bruce Banner!

Courtesy of the artist, here’s a character design of Mr. Hyde, charter member of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. This piece was previously unpublished. ©2003 Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill.

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CBA Interview

Promethea Unbound!

Under the spell of the magical and mystic art of J.H. Williams III Inset right: Decorating the mailing envelope containing a print of Promethea, penciler J.H. Williams III and inker Mick Gray rendered this iconic image of our heroine.

Courtesy of Jerry K. Boyd. Below: JHW3 design for Promethea from Wizard #93’s ABC Preview (’99). ©2003 America’s Best Comics, LLC.

Below: While we were unable to secure a photo of the artist, this image of Jim and his beloved wife greeting Alan Moore was in the Underground sequence in Promethea #16 (June ’01). JHW3, pencils; Mick Gray, inks. ©2003 America’s Best Comics, LLC

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Conducted by George Khoury Transcribed by Steven Tice Jim Williams, after toiling in the industry as an artist on such books as Chase, Deathblow, and Judge Dredd, has emerged as a major contender since beginning his extraordinary collaboration with writer Alan Moore on the ABC title, Promethea. obviously an intensely personal book for both creators. We thank the exceptional artist for his superb rendering of his character with Alan for the cover to this ABC issue. Jim was interviewed by phone in late 2002 and he approved the final transcript.

Comic Book Artist: Are you originally from California?

J.H. Williams III: I pretty much grew up here in California my whole life, but I was actually born in Roswell, New Mexico.

CBA: Whereabouts in California did you grow up?

J.H.: Mainly in the Bay area.

CBA: When were you born?

J.H.: December 18, 1965.

CBA: Were your parents nurturing towards comics? How did you get into art?

J.H.: Well, that’s kind of weird. My parents would buy comics for me as a kid, but I didn’t really get jazzed over them. I was jazzed over the art in them, but I really didn’t experience any impact from them as far as what comics could be, as far as storytelling. A little bit later, when I discovered The Micronauts, Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s X-Men, and stuff like that, that’s when I started to realize, “Oh, people actually draw these things.”

CBA: So Michael Golden became a big influence early on for you?

J.H.: Yes, definitely.

CBA: Were you a big super-hero fan in the beginning?

J.H.: Yes. I was always

trying to draw the characters I encountered, old Spider-Man comics, old Iron Man comics, and stuff like that.

CBA: Did you have any siblings who went into art?

J.H.: No. CBA: You were an only child?

J.H.: Yes. CBA: So they pretty much spoiled you with comics and toys?

J.H.: Yes. [chuckles] CBA: When did you decide you wanted to become a comic book artist?

J.H.: As I said, I was drawing the characters out of the books. Some of them I can’t recall, but I was completely blown away by The Micronauts. The story was really cool, and I was very impressed by that title.

Then a friend of mine said, “If you like this, you need to see this other book.” It was Uncanny X-Men by Claremont and Byrne. So I saw that and was also blown away by that. That was pretty much all it took.

“This is what I want to do.” So, even as a little kid, I knew I wanted to draw comics.

CBA: Did you go to a particular high school for art?

J.H.: Not really. I had basic art in high school and stuff like that.

What probably influenced me the most in what I’m doing with comics is in the design aspects of the material. For two years in high school, I took an advertising art design class, which focused more about not the quality of the drawing, but the thoughts and the ideas behind the drawing, and it made you think about what you were putting down more. I’d say that was probably my biggest influence. We do all this crazy design stuff in Promethea which has become almost second nature to me, because a lot of that class taught me about thinking and realizing an unusual concept that would be in your head. I just kind of naturally applied that to my comics work.

CBA: What happened after high school? Did you go into comics right away, or try something else?

J.H.: I kept trying to get into comics, but breaking in, as everyone knows, was extremely hard. There are very few people that bounce in overnight and become successful. So I had to keep working as a waiter, a job I held for quite a few years. I just kept doing that, and also drawing practice pages on the side and trying to show them to professionals at conventions.

CBA: So you’d take the annual drive to the San Diego Comic Convention?

J.H.: Oh, yeah! [laughs] CBA: What was the first break you received?

J.H.: Well, it was kind of interesting, because certainly after I met my wife, I was taking all these practice pages and showing them to different editors at conventions. It would be kind of weird because the editors would say, “Oh, we want to see more of this.” Then I would do more of what they requested, come back the next year, and they’d tell me that’s not what they wanted to see anymore. It was very frustrating. So I just decided, “I’m going to start drawing the way I want to draw,” and started showing that stuff around. One year at WonderCon up in Oakland, I showed some of the work to Howard Chaykin, and he really, really liked what he saw. He COMIC BOOK ARTIST 25

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seemed really impressed by it. But at the same time he was quite critical, which was actually very good because he’s a really important person to learn from. So he took my stuff over to the DC table and said, “Hey, somebody look at this guy. Give him something to do.” He even said he’d be willing to write something for me to do (which didn’t happen until quite a few years later). But the end result was people saw what I could do, and saw that Howard liked what he saw, so people handed me their business cards. So I was just persistent after that about calling all these people. Bugging them to death and hoping they’d call me back.

CBA: Did your wife know she was marrying a struggling artist?

J.H.: Oh, yes.

CBA: But she’s supported you all the way?

J.H.: Absolutely.

CBA: So what was the first major assignment you had? Chase was the first ongoing book you had for a while, right?

J.H.: Yes. CBA: Who was the editor for that?

J.H.: Eddie Berganza.

CBA: That got you more work at DC? J.H.: Yes. Well, actually, just before the Chase stuff happened, it was interesting because I had done some small stuff here and there like a Batman fill-in, I did a Batman Annual… Judge Dredd, which they actually put me down to be the regular guy on that, but when Andy Helfer quit writing it after #12, I thought it might be better not to work with someone else and just leave and find another assignment.

So that title continued without me. I can’t remember who took over after I left.

CBA: Was it strange working on Judge Dredd? That’s a British comic book, right?

J.H.: Yes. It was cool. I mean, Judge Dredd is a really cool character when handled properly, and I think Andy had a really good grasp of what to do with the character, and he wrote pretty cool stuff. Then I also did a Legends of the Dark Knight book, and all that took place before Chase. So I did quite a bit of little pieces of stuff before Chase, but Chase was still the project where people really started taking notice of my work.

CBA: With Chase, did you get to do whatever you wanted? You did designs and contributed to the story….

J.H.: Right, exactly. Even though sales-wise it didn’t do well, and it didn’t have much support as far as advertising and promotion, so there was a lot of people that weren’t aware of it until it was cancelled.

CBA: But now you had a body of work to show around?

J.H.: Yes. The people who did see Chase, apparently really loved what we did with it. I still get e-mails and people coming up to me at cons saying, “Oh, that Chase book was so great!” People discovered it after the fact, and I think that helped propel people recognizing my name. Even though it didn’t sell very well, it has longevity, I think, as a competent body of work.

CBA: So while you were doing Chase, you were first paired with inker Mick Gray?

J.H.: Actually, I worked with Mick before that. After Judge Dredd, he and I got together. I did all that Batman work with him, as well as a bunch of other little things in-between there.

CBA: Did an editor pair you two up, or did you guys just became friends and decide to become a team?

J.H.: It was pretty much me pushing for it. I just wanted that feel Mick was so adept at giving my work. He did a couple sample pieces over some drawings I did, to show me what he could do, but we became friends way before this. I just loved this approach and convinced him to work with me. From that point on, I worked very diligently with all the editors. They would call me up and… for example, the Flash Annual that I did back in ’96. [laughs] They called me up and said they wanted me to do it, but they’d hired the inker before they’d hired the penciler. I was like, “What?” I wanted Mick.

They’re like, “Oh, we already have the inker assigned.” I’m like, “Well, that doesn’t make sense. You should hire the penciler first and get his opinion. Well, I’m not going to do it without Mick.” They ended up calling me back and giving me what I wanted, so I just held firm in the negotiation stage until people just accepted that if they wanted my pencils, Mick came with me. [laughter] June 2003

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 25

CBA: What does Mick have that other inkers don’t have when they work over your pencils?

J.H.: He’s very faithful to what I put down. It’s kind of hard to put my finger on it. He’s super-precise, crisp, and really good. I’ve had a lot of guys ink my stuff before, and they were good, but there was something missing. Some of the precision, based on what was there in the pencils, was gone. My pencils are pretty tight. If I were to go and fill in all my blacks with pencil, you could probably print a comic straight from the pencils, they’re so tight. So I really needed somebody who was willing to put that kind of effort into capturing what was there, and he was good at that, so we’re a team.

CBA: Did you try inking your own work in the beginning?

J.H.: Yes, on a couple of the independent things I did, I was inking myself, but the stuff wasn’t as good as what I can do inking myself now. Because I just wasn’t very proficient. It was a bit messy. I think it had more to do with not necessarily how good of an inker I was, but how good of an artist I was. It had to do with how well I could draw, period. I’ve grown so much more as an artist since those earlier days that the stuff I ink now, I’m pretty happy with, because I think I’ve come quite a ways in the good drawing side of things that I can pull off… I don’t think inking myself now ever looks like what I do with Mick, just because he’s got a different look, more polished. But the

Above: Cover art by J.H. Williams III and Mick Gray for the third trade paperback collection of Promethea. Courtesy of JHW3. ©2003 America’s Best Comics, LLC.

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CBA Appreciation

ABC and Me

Digital artist/photographer José Villarrubia on his labors of love Having just finished reading Promethea #25, the final chapter of the phenomenal “Kabbalah Quest” Alan and J.H. began almost two years ago, I feel totally privileged in having been a part of this important series, especially considering the fact only the extraordinary Charles Vess and I have been guest artists in the series. It is an honor and a great satisfaction to have worked with Alan in what is currently his most personal work. In addition, J.H., Mick, Jeromy, and Todd were absolutely delightful and cooperative.

It all began four years ago when I approached Alan about doing a theatrical adaptation of his story, “The Mirror of Love.” Since then, we’ve talked on the phone once in a while, and after my graphic

Above: Actor, singer, and 1996 Mr. Gay U.S.A., Douglas Bayne in a digital illustration by José Villarrubia. Douglas also modeled—along with Audrey, seen opposite—for the digital artist/photographer in the poignant Promethea #7 (Apr. ’00) story, “Rocks and Hard Places,” where they played Promethea’s male alter-ego Bill Woolcott and Promethea herself in the issue’s realistic sequence. This 1996 image is by José and starring Douglas, reproduced from an 8” x 11” dye sublimation print.

Courtesy of & ©2003 J. Villarrubia.

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novel, Veils, was published by Vertigo in, Alan told me that the aesthetic I had developed for it—a combination of photographs, paintings and computer-generated imagery—would be suitable for Promethea’s surreal Inmateria. A few months later, he conceived of the appropriate chapter, a back-story of a previous incarnation of Promethea that was really a gay comic book artist who found himself transformed into a transsexual Promethea. Pretty outrageous stuff, but I was definitely up to the challenge. Alan asked what type of images I wanted to do, and I told him that I pictured creating mythical type of illustrations, in the vein of most of the fine artwork that I had done until then. In particular, I wanted to do an image of Prometheus Bound, a subject that I had done before as a large oil painting and was very willing to revisit, given that the heroine of this comic book was named after the Greek god. Alan figured out a way to make the regular artwork in the series transform into photographic characters fitting the story.

I also suggested—and sent to Alan—acclaimed early 20th

century illustrator Maxfield Parrish’s painting of Prometheus as inspiration for the style of the sequence: a surreal juxtaposition of photographic imagery in very saturated colors and lush textures.

Parrish’s work also exhibits a kind of chaste eroticism, and in this particular image of homoeroticism, appropriate for the secretive and repressed tone of the story. Curiously enough, Alex Ross had also incorporated this image by Parrish, changing the gender of the figure from male to female instead and using the costume for one of his preliminary designs for Promethea. A sketch of this was reproduced in The Comics Journal. This costume—basically a Greek helmet—and a swirling piece of fabric strategically covering the naughty bits) was used by J.H. for one of the previous Prometheas, the one that fought in World War One. Casting Promethea was relatively easy. I knew that my friend Audrey Causilla, a classical concert pianist who had modeled for me many times before, would look the part and was able to play the role effectively.

The rest of the cast was a combination of models and friends, all of which were very enthusiastic about participating in such a ground-breaking project.

Douglas Bayne, actor/singer/ performer (chosen Mr. Gay U.S.A. in 1996), played Promethea’s alter ego, Bill Woolcott. Tom Burke, also a performer and pianist, had the enviable task of acting in the double role of Dennis Drucker and his fantasy alter-ego Dirk Dangerfield and see himself aged from his early twenties through mid-forties to midseventies. The hardest thing for Tom was to pose wearing David Page’s straightjacket. Tom got very claustrophobic, and that anguished look in his eyes in the picture where he is bound, is pretty authentic. Another piece of trivia is that David Page’s creations <http://www.davidpageartist.com> were featured in the recent motion picture Hannibal. The last important role to fill, that of Sophie, was played by Jeannie Lobato, an art student at the time at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Casting a Latina in this role was a stroke of luck, since Alan had not revealed at this point that Sophie’s long-gone father was, as a matter of fact, a Hispanic.

Alan made an exception and, so I could get a head start, phoned me with a detailed description of my sequence, instead of sending a finished script. I scribbled it down in several pieces of paper and got to work right away. A couple weeks later, I got a fax with the same information written in Alan’s own words. I worked frantically for about six weeks to get the work done. I wanted to include everything that Alan wanted in the artwork, but in addition I also want to include another layer of information that made it my own. I did all the shooting in Baltimore, and my friend Aleksey Zolotaryov COMIC BOOK ARTIST 25

June 2003

CBA Interview

The Strong and Supreme Artist Chris Sprouse on his collaborations with Alan Moore Inset right: Chris Sprouse shared an astonishing array of artwork with CBA, including quite a bit of unpublished material, and among those repros, we found this great group shot of the Family Strong and associates, detailed here. Art ©2003 Chris Sprouse. Characters ©2003 America’s Best Comics, LLC.

Below: Portrait of the artist in repose. Photograph by Xan Sprouse and courtesy of the artist.

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Conducted by George Khoury Transcribed by Steven Tice Though he worked in professional comics prior to his association with writer Alan Moore, Chris Sprouse’s artistry quickly captured the attention of the entire comics world on Supreme and, most significantly on Tom Strong and that ABC Comics title’s multiple spin-offs. A humble, grateful and eminentlytalented artist, Chris was interviewed via telephone in late 2002 and he copyedited the final text.

Comic Book Artist: Where are you originally from, Chris?

Chris Sprouse: The Washington D.C. area, in Virginia, about 15 minutes from D.C. CBA: You just moved to Ohio?

Chris: About three years ago I moved to Ohio.

CBA: When did you get into comics?

Chris: Professionally, in 1989. But as an art form, when I was really young, somewhere between three and six years old. We—my older brother, younger sister, and our parents—lived overseas, in India. My father worked for the U.S. government and was stationed in New Delhi. There was a big flea market where you could go and buy comics. Basically, people working for the American embassy, and other embassies as well, would keep coming back, and it was like a lending library. You bought your first couple of comics and then came back and dropped them off the next week to exchange them for a new batch. It’s kind of scary to think about some of the stuff we had.

We had early runs of The Avengers, Fantastic Four, stuff like that,

from the 1960s. Kids basically just read them, took them back, and picked up others they hadn’t yet read. The first comics that we owned were foreign comics, which my parents bought. We were able to get all kinds of European comics, or more specifically British translations of them. The one that stuck with me was Tintin. We had a complete set of Hergé’s Tintin—complete at that time, at least, and that’s what I really got into. My brother got into super-heroes, the Marvel stuff, but I was into Tintin, Asterix, and stuff like that.

CBA: Your father was in the diplomatic service?

Chris: He worked for the General Accounting Office at the U.S. embassy. I don’t know whether he was auditing the embassy or auditing some overseas project. He spent a lot of time going out on trips, inspecting dams.

CBA: How long did you live overseas?

Chris: Three years.

CBA: When you got back to the States, did you pursue your love for comics right away?

Chris: No, actually, I was more into sci-fi stuff like Ultraman, Star Trek comics, and other stuff like that.

CBA: The Gold Key comics?

Chris: Yes. My brother kept buying the super-hero stuff, and eventually, in the late ’70s, he showed me—well, we got the Star Wars adaptation but even though it was Marvel, it was still a sci-fi comic.

But in ’78, The Micronauts came out, and my brother said, “Hey, maybe you’ll like this. It’s super-heroes, but it’s sci-fi stuff. It has kind of neat art.” I was hooked after that. I collected The Micronauts, because I fell in love with Michael Golden’s artwork.

CBA: So when you were in high school, did you pursue more art?

Chris: Yes. I had always been drawing. Since we were overseas, my dad would basically sit down at night and draw with us, because, as I should have explained earlier, there was no TV over there, and not much else for kids to do. We couldn’t go out because there were snakes and stuff in the yard. We were pretty much trapped inside.

CBA: Was your dad a pretty good artist, too?

Chris: It’s hard to remember. As far as I know, he just drew for us kids the way a lot of parents do. We would say, “Dad, draw me an airplane,” And he could draw one. I don’t have any of that stuff left, so I can’t say, but I haven’t seen him draw since, so I don’t think he really was an artist. My mom had a lot of creative stuff going on.

She doesn’t really draw, but she does craft-type things.

CBA: What were your influences for your art style? I can’t see anybody who draws similarly to the way you draw.

Chris: Michael Golden was a big influence. Like I said, Micronauts got me hooked on him, and since ’78, I’ve been collecting everything he’s done. I didn’t collect too many series; I collected artists I liked. So I’ve got Golden’s work, and that’s what inspires me most, I guess. But a lot of ’70s guys like Howard Chaykin, Marshall Rogers, Walt Simonson—guys from the late ’70s, when those guys were getting in, COMIC BOOK ARTIST 25

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that’s when I really started to get into it.

CBA: Do you appreciate Art Adams’ work as much as Golden’s?

Chris: Not as much as Golden. I like Art Adams a great deal as a person, but because I was at that age when I first encountered Golden, I’m still more into Golden’s work. I did like Art’s stuff, and as a matter of fact, probably pieces people don’t expect, like that X-Factor issue inked by Bob Wiacek. But yeah, I’ve got a ton of Art’s stuff, I just never was into him as much as those ’70s guys. I hope he’s not offended by that, but the ’70s was when I first fell in love with the art of guys like Chaykin, Mike Nasser, and the rest. They’re not necessarily all artists who worked at Continuity. But those artists who all had unique styles back then (at least unique to me).

Now I know a little bit more about where they were coming from.

Golden was really into Steranko, but at the time I’d never seen Steranko’s work.

CBA: After you finished with high school, did you go into art school?

Chris: I wanted to draw comics, but my parents talked me into going to a “real” school. “Why don’t you go to school and get a decent education in case this comic thing doesn’t work out.” So I went to a small college called James Madison University. It turned out that’s where Matt Wagner went for a while. My final portfolio didn’t have any real comic work, just a lot of painting and drawing. I went to become a graphic design major, but became disenchanted because all my design classes seemed to be grooming me for a career where I wouldn’t actually get to draw, which is all I wanted to do.

CBA: When did you graduate from college?

Chris: ’88.

CBA: What was your first comic?

Chris: Hammerlocke #1. That was 1989. It was a mini-series for DC. CBA: Did you have a hard time finding a job in comics?

Chris: No, actually, it was very simple. I mailed in samples after seeing ads saying that DC needed artists. I mailed in four pages of continuity, a Mister Miracle action sequence. Two weeks later, I got a call back from DC, and they said they would send me work. Another two weeks went by and then I was actually working on my first job with them. I’ve since found out that the submission editor’s desk had just been cleaned off, and I was lucky enough to be the first person to send in samples that week. They had a hundred the week before, then mine came in first thing on Monday. I was very, very lucky.

CBA: You were at DC a long time. Did you enjoy the books you did over there?

Chris: I loved Legionnaires. That was a fun book for me. I left after #12 because I was really unhappy with my art. Basically I wanted to spend more time working on it but just couldn’t find the time. It felt like they were really, really strict with the deadlines back then, and the books had to be in a lot earlier than they do now. There was a lot less tolerance for late artists. I can’t remember the details specifically, but it just seemed like I started on the book and suddenly they moved up the shipping date. I think originally it was going to ship in six months or something (which I really needed, because even then I wasn’t very fast), and they pushed it up to three months from when I started, and I lost a lot of lead time. It just went downhill from there. I was late from then on, and the stress just got to be too much. I wanted a break. I think I was holding up other people, including the writers, Tom and Mary Bierbaum. They were doing it Marvel style, sending a plot and they wouldn’t get paid until after I was finished with my part. I was keeping everybody from making money, so the pressure was grinding me down. I needed a break.

CBA: What do you think the appeal is to the Legion books for the comics fan?

Chris: I think it’s because it’s about family. Actually, it’s not quite like the FF, where they’re a real family, but this group of kids get together in their clubhouse as friends and all kinds of strange and unusual people coexisting. Beyond that, I think there’s just some real fun stuff that’s goofy and appealing. For others, like me, it was the sciencefiction aspect. At the time I got into the Legion as a fan (the first Giffen run), they had toned-down costumes and had aliens running around, and spaceships—all that stuff. That appealed to me. I have to imagine that appealed to lots of other people, as well.

June 2003

Above: Chris Sprose’s black-&white line art for the cover of the second Tom Strong collection, courtesy of the artist. ©2003 America’s Best Comics, Inc.

Inset left: Certainly there’s at least a creative lineage from Alan Moore’s Supremes to the Strongs, if only in the superb delineations of artist Chris Sprouse, who first teamed with the superstar scribe in the Awesome title in 1997. This previously unpublished picture of Supreme, girl sidekick Suprema, and Krypt… I mean, Radar, the Hound Supreme! (What, you think the Dalmatian spots would fool us?). Art ©2003 Chris Sprouse.

Characters ©2003 Awesome Entertainment.

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 25

83

CBA Interview

Hilary Barta Makes a Splash The wild cartoonist on his Tomorrow Stories collaborations Conducted by George Khoury Transcribed by Steven Tice

Below: Courtesy of the artist, a detail of Hilary Barta’s cover for Tomorrow Stories #7 (June ’00). ©2003 America’s Best Comics, LLC.

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It’s gotta be said that this field needs a lot more material featuring the manically delightful stylings of Chicago-based cartoonist Hilary Swank, who’s been working in comics since the ’80s, most prominently on the 1988-89 Plastic Man mini-series, Stupid, What the—?!, and others. Though he’s inked a zillion books for Marvel and DC over the years, it’s his humorous drawing ability—so expertly showcased in his collaboration with Alan Moore in Tomorrow Stories, “Splash Brannigan”—that’s simply killer. The artist was interviewed by phone in late 2002, and Hilary copyedited the final transcript.

Comic Book Artist: When did you get the desire to be a professional?

Hilary Barta: Probably high school, though I was into art before then. My parents were very supportive of creative work in general.

My mom had some notions about inspiring kids and giving them room creatively. She disapproved of the coloring book approach to drawing. She’d read somewhere early on, that if you took the kids’ crayons and took the paper off them and broke them in half, they were less likely to draw outlines and more likely to draw textures, and use the sides of the crayons and things like that. I don’t know if that worked or not, but that’s one of the ideas she had. If she was doing things like that, I’m sure she influenced me in ways I don’t even remember. My parents brought us (I come from a family of seven children, and have three brothers and three sisters) to art museums and the theatre and things like that, exposing us to art. So that was a cultural education.

CBA: Are any of your siblings artists besides you?

Hilary: A number were artists early on. I have two sisters who went to art school, but didn’t pursue it as a career, though they’re still creative. My one sister became a potter and still does that, though she’s also a speech therapist, and that’s really where she spends most of her time as a career. But I’m the only one who pursued art as a career, though there’s a wide variety of careers in my family. My younger brother is the only one who really succeeded. He works for NASA and puts me to shame.

CBA: [laughs] When you went to art school, did you want to be a comic book artist?

Hilary: Yes, I definitely did go into art school with a preconceived idea of what I wanted to learn. So, since I was so focused on what I wanted to learn and wanted to have taught to me, I tended to quickly leave classes that didn’t seem to fill those needs. I eventually dropped out of school because I found there were certain teachers I met through school who had drawing workshops, so I just simply followed them around and studied with models. Actually, I learned most by just watching these guys draw. When you actually see the hand moving, and the guy is articulate enough to tell you, “What I’m drawing here is this muscle underneath the skin,” that’s just an amazing education. You can have all the anatomy books in the world, but when you see a guy doing it, somehow your brain makes—at least for me—the connection. I said, “Oh, okay. This is what those marks mean; this is how you do it.” So I aped their style, learned from it, and hopefully developed my own after studying another person’s technique.

CBA: Was Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine the first professional gig you had?

Hilary: Yes, I did a couple of illustrations for that magazine, but not many. I had stage fright when I first started, but had some great editors over the years, who, as they were looking through my portfolio and published samples I was sending in, would say, “We want more of this portfolio material.” That stuff, which was me just having fun and being loose, was the style they wanted.

When I began in science-fiction illustration, I read Kelly Freas’ book where he talked about how he was COMIC BOOK ARTIST 25

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inspired by the stories he was assigned to illustrate, and how, in his illustrations, tried to suggest the story’s theme or give a clue if it was a mystery. But, in my work, I was trying too hard. In any case, very few of my science-fiction illustrations—and there were only a few, anyway—but only one or two of them were successful by my definition of “successful.”

The thing about science-fiction illustration, too, is the money is so bad. Artists do it solely for the love of it. Even more so than comics, the money’s not very good. You’d spend a day or two drawing illustrations and you’d get a check for $25 and you’d say, “Maybe this isn’t a good idea.” But if I’d been better at it… if I had actually felt better about it, I’m sure I would have done a lot more of that stuff. I think it was my failure. Similarly, when I first started drawing in comics, I didn’t really find my way for a few years. I just did some terrible work.

CBA: How did you break into Marvel? Did you hit Marvel first when you were doing your freelancing thing?

Hilary: Yes. I was submitting illustrations to things like Rocket’s Blast/Comicollector, an old fanzine, and meeting other artists through the fan field. That led to comic book conventions, because I was going to comic books stores where I would hear about these shows. I just presented my work to Al Milgrom, at a Chicago convention, and he was nice enough to get me some work. Like I said, everything I did for the first few years was pretty bad, so I was always amazed when I realized that I would get another job! [laughs] CBA: You never felt comfortable when you were doing your stuff at Marvel?

Hilary: It wasn’t that I didn’t feel “comfortable.” I was doing things like trying to ink brush strokes with pens, because I hadn’t seen any comic book artists working, I didn’t know how they did things. I just learned a lot of really bad habits early on that took a long time to get rid of.

CBA: Did you aspire to be a super-hero artist in the ’80s?

Hilary: I don’t think I’ve ever drawn a real super-hero strip. I drew super-hero parodies, and that’s probably the best stuff I’ve done at Marvel (besides inking a few different people where I liked the results).

CBA: Didn’t you ink a story or two by Rob Liefeld?

Hilary: Yes, I inked Liefeld on a few issues of New Mutants. I inked Jon Bogdanove for a long time on Power Pack, and that was a lot of fun. Jon and I really work well together. I just loved his drawing. As an inker, I’ve always felt, if you like the art you’re given, you just want to do it justice. I’ve never been someone who would try to change stuff too much. I try to bring out the strengths of (or at least not screw it up too much) whatever I’m given. Bogdanove is one of those guys who just inspired me. There would be these beautiful drawings of Franklin Richards in Power Pack. Jon would use his own son as a model, drawing him sleeping on the couch, for instance, and they were just the most vividly rendered drawings. I realized, “Oh, God! I’ve got to ink this perfectly! I’ve got to nail this!” So that was a blast. Here I was, inking for years, doing very little drawing of my own. So I don’t think I really knew what I wanted to do. I was having fun, depending on who I was inking, but it was more like marking time, I suppose, trying to discover what it was I wanted to do.

CBA: The Plastic Man mini-series was one of your first assignments as a penciler?

Hilary: That was definitely one of the big things for me. I’d done some pencil and inking at First Comics, and that led to work at DC. I got that job sideways through Doug Rice and Phil Foglio, because Phil was living in Chicago, and they asked Phil if he wanted to do Plastic Man, and he said, “I don’t know if I want to do Plastic Man or not.”

And I had heard about it and I said, “Oh, you gotta do this! He’s this great character!” But he didn’t want to pencil it or didn’t have time, so he ended up writing and co-plotting with Doug Rice and me. It was fun. It was kind of a strange experience, because I felt that the worst that could happen in drawing Plastic Man was that I could only fail. [laughs] Because the standard is so great, and there was no way we could even hope to approximate the work of Jack Cole—and, by no means did we—so that realization took off the stress. But we definitely were not trying to modernize the character in a way that would hurt it. We were under orders to modernize it and to sort of explain Plas. It was kind of weird because they said, “You’ve gotta June 2003

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 25

come up with some reason why this is cartoony.” We were like, “Huh?” So our idea was that the acid that turned Plastic Man into Plastic Man also sort of distorted his perspective on the world, but he saw the world in a cartoony way. And as lame as that is, it would have been better than, say, coming up with an Earth-Cartoony or some other science-fiction explanation. Unfortunately, we were saddled with that, and we did the best we could with it.

CBA: Did you model for Alex Ross for Marvels? I was looking at it today and noticed your name.

Hilary: I’m trying to remember who I was: I know I was holding up the sign that said “The End Is Near” in the park. Alex used me for crazy old dead guys and stuff. In Kingdom Come there’s a Civil War Army prison, and I’m every single guy in that scene. [laughter] I have this long, lean face, with dark circles under my eyes most of the time: maybe it’s just Alex’s joke. But he’s very good at casting with people he knows. Whenever he needs somebody who looks a little bit insane, or at the end of his rope, Alex will hire me.

CBA: Why are there so many great cartoonists from Chicago?

Is there something going on over there that we don’t know about? [laughs] There’s Chris Ware, yourself, Ross, Bill Reinhold.

Hilary: There are more. Ivan Brunetti lives here, and Gary Gianni.

CBA: Jill Thompson.

Hilary: Jill and Brian Azzarello. Actually, I don’t know if we have more great artists than New York City per capita. New York obviously has a bigger population of artists given it’s the center of publishing.

So does the West Coast, because there’s a lot of animation and publishing there.

I don’t know how it happened, but there is a neat little group of people here. We used to have meetings. This was a few years ago now, but we had a Thursday night thing where we’d meet at this certain comic shop and then all go drinking at this bar afterwards.

I guess it’s sort of the “good old days” kind of syndrome. I guess none of us can drink as much anymore (with the exception of Brian perhaps, who is always talking about doing his research in bars).

But that was a blast.

I’m going to forget everybody who was there, but there were probably a dozen people, and we’d do these comic book wars.

Someone would start a fight in the first panel, and then you’d pass the drawing back and forth and do these panels. It is rather juvenile, but you’d find a hundred different ways to kill the other guy or whatever, and then he’d come back from the dead and attack the other guy. I dunno, it sounds pretty silly, I suppose, but it was a blast.

CBA: Your first work with Alan Moore was Supreme #44 with Bill Wray. You told me that happened by accident?

Below: Artist Hilary Barta first gained prominent notice in the field as doing a damn good job penciling in faux Jack Cole style for the four-issue Plastic Man mini-series. Here’s the cover of #2 (Dec. ’88). ©2003 DC Comics.

Below: The wiley artist himself, Hilary Barta. Courtesy of H.B.

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CBA Interview

The First Orkadian Jim Baikie talks about his long comics career and Alan Moore Conducted by George Khoury Transcribed by Steven Tice

Below: Portrait of Jim Baikie.

Courtesy of the artist.

Those Americans who may believe Orkadian (that’s someone from the Orkney Islands) artist Jim Baikie leapt full-form onto the comics scene as Alan Moore’s collaborator on the hilarious “First American” strip in Tomorrow Stories will be surprised to learn the talented artist’s career stretches back well into the ’60s and that, among other notable work, his partnership with Moore writer began with the early ’80s “Skizz” series in the British comic weekly 2000 AD. This interview was done via phone in late 2002 and was copyedited by Jim. Comic Book Artist: Were you born and raised in the Orkney Islands?

Jim Baikie: Yes. I’d better make clear for geographic perfectionists who know there are two lots of Orkney Islands—one close to the Antarctic, the other nearer to the Arctic—that I’m up here in the northern version.

CBA: What kind of place is that?

Jim: It’s a bunch of 60 or so islands sandwiched between the Northern tip of Scotland and the Shetland Islands. It’s amazing to approach it from the sea because the islands that look perfectly flat from the air, in fact have the highest sea-cliffs in Britain. It’s a great place to work. Very quiet— between gales—with all the live reference for sheep and cows you’ll ever need.

CBA: What year were you born?

Jim: I was born in 1940, so I’ll be 63 by the time this appears.

CBA: And you started working in comics at a young age?

Jim: In my heart, yes. I used pictures to communicate before I could write, as most kids do, but when most kids abandon drawing in favor of writing, I didn’t. I was lucky to live where I do because there was no psychiatric social worker to say, y’know… ”still using drawings to communicate at age ten? Must be retarded/abused/autistic!—I rest my case.”

Comics and pulp novels were my staple entertainment in an environment that had no main electricity—at least on the island of Hoy which was my specific part of the Orkneys. It got that name from the first Vikings who saw it, and it means “high island” because of those high sea cliffs.

When I was 14, I sold a drawing to the Vargo Statten Science Fiction Magazine and I sat back after that and waited for the commissions to roll in, but they didn’t! I went into the Royal Air Force when I was 16 because I heard the R.A.F. Training station had a cinema that showed actual Cinemascope movies. After training, my first job was connected with the demobilization of guys who were finishing their two years mandatory National Service, and one of the

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people I was doing clearance procedure on was an ex-editor of a weekly kids’ comic, Beano (still going strong), that was published in Dundee, Scotland. I showed him some of my drawings and he told me right away I should get out of the R.A.F. and get into the comics.

He gave me some phone numbers which led to an interview with a senior comics editor at publishers DC Thomson in Dundee who gave me a tryout script and a load of illustration paper, plus huge encouragement. If I got out of the R.A.F. I was to let them know, and they would fix me up with accommodation in Dundee and a career in comics. I applied for release from the R.A.F. and they responded by posting me to Cyprus, ostensibly to show me what I’d be missing if I left. The truth was I’d be missing not only my girlfriend in Scotland who would now be thousands of miles away, but the chance of a lifetime drawing comics for Thomson. But, George, I have to say Cyprus was good for me. I got a spare time job as a cartoonist with a local Greek newspaper and an evening job as bass player in a rock and roll band, from which I made enough cash to fly home, get married and bring Wendy back with me to Cyprus.

To cap it all, my R.A.F. station decided to start a monthly magazine, and were looking for someone with some background in publishing. Myself and a Hungarian flying officer were the only applicants, and we were shown a pile of crates with parts of an offset printing machine and told to “get on with the magazine.” We built the printing machine from scratch, then went out to sell advertising space to local Greek businesses. The Hungarian, being a commissioned officer, was in charge, and all I had to do was write copy, illustrate it, and finally print it. I learned more about publishing in the year that followed than at any time since! During this time Wendy had presented me with a daughter, Jacqueline. Realizing I now had everything my heart desired, a family, an art job, I was a rock musician three nights per week, and we were living in the palmy tropics, my ambitions to leave the service and seek a career in comics seemed suddenly a precarious option. But… [sighs] my old “Application for Discharge by Purchase” chose that moment to resurface, and £250 later I was a free man! Freedom is seldom without conditions, though. Back in Britain I found it hard to get decent housing without having a regular job, and nobody looks less financially secure than a “self-employed artist.” So I took a series of jobs in London as a studio artist doing commercial design work and so on before the comics work started for real in mid-1966.

CBA: What kind of comics were you into growing up?

Jim: “’Oor Wullie” and “The Broons” are Scotland’s undisputed favorite comic characters, and they were running weekly in the Sunday Post newspaper before I was born. I remember my first encounter with them one day when I was trotting around a wet floor that had been covered with newspaper. There, amid a sea of grey print, a page of “’Oor Wullie” caught my eye. I was no more than four, and couldn’t yet read, but the pictures grabbed me. And I stayed grabbed! The art, I learned later was by one of the absolute masters of British comic art—Dudley D. Watkins, who was just as spectacular with realistic illustration. His rendering of “Blind Pugh” in Treasure Island frightens me still.

In Britain, we had these whole sub-genre of girls comics, and they were desperate for artists because all the portfolios they were seeing from artists were heavily slanted toward war and football.

The girls comics didn’t care if you showed a car with three wheels as long as the people in the story were attractive and functional.

CBA: Were you pegged as a girls artist because you did those kind of comics going on? Because you always seem to do strong females.

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Jim: Yeah. Women are stronger than men. [laughter] They have to be! My first concept sketches for Gerta Dammerung showed a ferocious Teutonic warrior with muscles and attitude. Alan asked me to think more along the lines of a manic-depressive female with a weight problem who would destroy the world if she didn’t get a man.

It was the same with the female version of Deathblow Alan and I did.

My concept sketch for the lead female was a “warrior vixen” cliché pandering to the adolescent male readers’ supposed appetites. Alan wanted a more “natural” female character, and I have to admit it wasn’t easy to find her looking back at me out of Michael Cray’s gross personage. But to answer your main point, George, when I started out on the comics trail in the early ’60s, I was trying to sell what I thought was long overdue in British comics, i.e., female characters interacting with males, being strong in the female sense of the word, not just substitute males, or sexy stereotypes. I wanted the kind of balance you had in America in the Sunday funnies, you know… a Dale Arden in there with Flash Gordon… and stuff like Leonard Starr’s On Stage or Stan Drake’s Juliet Jones. Even Olive Oyl and Daisy Mae brought something more to their respective roles than being mere foils for the male characters.

Here in Britain in those days, we had sexual apartheid. There were “boys” comics, which were mostly about war and football, and “girls” comics, which were… at the juvenile level, mostly centered on girls’ school situations, or at the teenage level “romance” stories.

These often had beautiful artwork, but here all the story advancement was through the female characters, and the males were just props for them to play to. But having said that, those romance titles gave me my start in comics. I’d taken my samples ’round every boys comic in London, and found no takers. A few of them showed me examples of what they might be looking for in the future, but invariably it was about some muscle sport or speedway driving and stuff like that. It was depressing. My theory was that people who were interested in sport were out there doing it, not reading about it in comics. So I started on a circuit of the girls comics.

Valentine was a romance weekly that was selling a quarter of a million copies each week. The editor was in a flap because that week’s issue was due at the printer, and a three-page story hadn’t arrived from Spain (where most of the romance titles were drawn). I showed the distracted editor my ‘romance’ sample. I’d written a three-page story to hang my art sample on. The editor stared at it for a few minutes, then promptly bought it, script and all! What had been no more than a hopeful foot in the door for me was in the very next issue of the comic, and I left the office with a second commission clutched in my unbelieving hand. And that is how I became a girl artist, George!

CBA: What comic did you do with Steve Moore?

Jim: “Twilight World,” for Warrior. That serial got me the Society of Strip Illustration’s “Best British Adventure Artist” award in 1983. I met Steve through a fanzine, Comic Cuts, put out by a Manchester glassengraver, Dave McCulloch. I’d seen science-fiction fanzines before, but this was the first ’zine dedicated to comics in Britain. Through that, I heard about some people in Birmingham who were putting together what would be the first British comic convention, around 1966, ’67. Events stemming from that led to Steve contacting me, and we started to meet quite regularly just to swap comics and talk.

And he was incidentally, a friend of Alan Moore (no relation).

CBA: You used to travel from Scotland to London regularly?

Jim: That was the plan, but I soon discovered that an artist couldn’t get freelance work in those days unless he lived in the elevator of the publishing house. Everything north of London was remote, and where I hailed from… they were still waiting for Neil Armstrong to land on it!! So we were actually living in London from the time I left the R.A.F. until around ’72.

CBA: How long were you living in London?

Jim: From ’63, when I got out of the Air Force, until about ’72. With no real hope of coming back up here because editors wanted artists to be close at hand, and you could never be more than a train ride away from the company, so I was stuck with having to be down there in a tiny house with a growing family. Then suddenly a few Australian guys who’d been working with the comics managed to get a deal where they could go back to Australia and work from there, and I said, June 2003

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“Look, these guys have gone halfway around the globe. Why can’t I go back to up to Scotland?”

So that’s what I did.

CBA: Did you have any formal art training?

Jim: Nope, nothing. Just a scraping of native talent, I suppose. A couple of my mother’s brothers were very good painters, and they used to encourage me a lot. I’m descended from Vikings and Celts, so maybe the blood gave me something.

CBA: Who were some of your influences early on?

Jim: My earliest interest on the American side was probably Burne Hogarth on Tarzan. My father was a huge fan of Hogarth, and he used to get American comics from the naval base and bring them home when I was a little kid. I told Hogarth about this when I met him in 1985, and he said “How about that!” We also liked The Katzenjammer Kids and Li’l Abner.

CBA: Your father was also in the service?

Jim: My father had been in the R.A.F. during WWII, but in these post-war years he worked for the Admiralty in a civilian capacity. My interests really started quite young; seven years, eight years old. Hogarth Tarzan stories in the late ’40s, early ’50s, are fantastic. There was also an interest in the humor strips, Gasoline Alley and all those.

I just read and consumed everything that came in comic form, because we didn’t have television in those days, and comics were the pictorial medium of choice.

CBA: Did your father actually encourage you to draw?

Jim: Absolutely. He was a wonderful guy, he used to pick up anything he’d find lying around on the naval base. He was working there building oil tanks for the war and maintaining them after the war. Quite a few people were reading comic books in those days before mass media and they left them lying about at the end

Left: U.S. Angel and First American leap into battle in their unique super-hero fashion in a panel detail from Tomorrow Stories #6 (Mar. ’00). Courtesy of the artist. ©2003 America’s Best Comics, LLC.

Above: Previously unpublished sketch of Alan Moore & Jim Baikie’s Skizz and friends.

Courtesy of the artist. ©2003 Rebellion.

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No.25 June 2003

™

$6.95 In The U.S.

Batman TM & ©2003 DC Comics.

Jack B. Quick TM & ©2003 America’s Best Comics, LLC

CBA Interview

Seduction of the Art: The Jack B. Quick’s inspired delineator reveals the intelligence Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Steven Tice While the man has spent a good part of his career as an outstanding and highly-regarded inker, colorist, and letterer (and sometime writer), Kevin Nowlan is quite simply one of the finest comic book creators working today, in any capacity. His thoughtful and intelligent work—as you will see in the following pages—is breathtaking, and his characterizations of many of the industry’s most renowned icons, whether Batman, Superman or the Hulk, quintessential. Though much in demand today as a cover artist (currently on the monthly Superman flagship title), Kevin is perhaps most appreciated for his Tomorrow Stories collaboration with Alan Moore “Jack B. Quick,” quite probably the most popular series in the ABC line. The following interview, conducted via telephone in two sessions (on Nov. 4 and 5, 2002, respectively), also reveals a man with a deep abiding respect and affection for the form. Kevin copyedited the transcript.

Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Steven Tice Comic Book Artist: Kevin, where are you originally from?

Kevin Nowlan: I’m from the panhandle of Nebraska, the northwest corner of the state, which is a very, very sparsely populated part of the country.

CBA: Is that where you grew up?

Kevin: Until I was ten. Then we moved to Kansas.

CBA: What was life in Nebraska like, very sparse?

Kevin: Yes. We lived in a town with a population of about 5,000. In fact, it probably still has about the same number of people. It had a college, and the town was originally established, I think, by the railroad.

CBA: So was it farmland?

Kevin: A lot of ranch land. Not a whole lot of farming, but lots of cattle.

CBA: Did you live in the town itself?

Kevin: Yes. CBA: So you were able to go down to the corner store and stuff like that?

Kevin: Yes. They’ve got a great little newsstand, just the perfect place for a kid, because you’d walk in there and it was just wall-to-wall comic books, monster magazines and candy.

CBA: When were you born?

Kevin: 1958.

CBA: So did you get into comics at a young age?

Kevin: Yes, even before I could read, because I have a brother who is much older, and he would always go down to this newsstand and pick stuff up. You’ve probably heard of retailers, back in the days before direct sales, who would tear off part of the covers of comic books to return for credit and then sell the coverless comics for a few pennies. So, every week or so, my brother would bring home this stack of coverless comics.

CBA: Did you basically read anything?

Kevin: Uh-huh. My brother was very partial to DC, a prejudice I inherited from him, so I didn’t really look at a Marvel comic until many years later. But he also read tons of horror magazines and hot rod magazines as well.

CBA: Pretty much everything?

Kevin: Yeah, I think so. He always had a lot of those black-&-white magazines.

Those were always great, even as a kid, because they had me admiring artwork in black-&-white. I quickly grew to appreciate artists like Alex Toth, Warren Tufts, Mel Keefer, to name a few. Seeing their work in black-&-white was the great thing about those old days. Every little rendered line on a Reed Crandall story in Creepy or Eerie was visible, and if it had Left: Detail of Kevin Nowlan’s art featuring Jack B. Quick for the variant cover of Tomorrow Stories #1. ©2003 America’s Best Comics, LLC. 2-B

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Genius of Kevin Nowlan behind his work with an enduring passion for the art form been in a regular, color comic, a lot of the linework would have been obscured by color.

CBA: How much older is your brother?

Kevin: Mike is seven years older.

CBA: Is he your only other sibling?

Kevin: No, I also have four sisters.

CBA: Where are you in the line-up?

Kevin: I’m the last.

CBA: Ahh, the baby.

Kevin: I guess you could say that. [laughter] CBA: What did your brother go on to do?

Kevin: He went into the Army, and then to work for the U.S. Postal Service. He’s been there for at least a couple of decades.

He’s one of those jack-of-alltrades guys, which is funny because he can do anything, but I can only do one thing.

CBA: But you do it so well, Above: Kevin Nowlan in a candid moment. Courtesy of K.N. Kevin! [laughter] Kevin: Maybe, but it is a little handful of comics, you can tell the ones you thought were the best scary that I focused on this one little thing. You know, he could fix because they’re falling apart. Way beyond dog-eared, they’re just the car or do construction. He’s a real alpha male and I always felt almost shredded because they were read over and over again. really in awe of him. I believe he was a frustrated artist, but just CBA: What were your favorites? didn’t pursue it.

Kevin: The first book I remember having that actually had CBA: Did he admire your work? a cover on it, that was actually mine, as opposed to getting Kevin: I think so. I was so much younger that I think it was hard for him to get past the idea that I was just a pest. So we certainly got from my brother, was the first issue of Angel and the Ape, from 1968. along much better when we were both grown up. [laughter] Before CBA: The Bob Oksner title? that, he just wanted to get rid of me.

Kevin: Right, and that’s still a book that’s just CBA: Are either of your parents creative? absolutely mesmerizing to me.

Kevin: Not really. My father is retired, but for all the time I was growing up, he was a construction superintendent, building buildings CBA: What was it about it?

Kevin: Well, it’s got this great gorilla character who and stuff like that. wears suits and lives with a human being, plus he’s a CBA: Another alpha male thing. hippie! [laughter] He plays a sitar, wears love beads, Kevin: Yes, really! He’d bring home these big stacks of blueprints and everything! That issue in particular, in addition to and I’d watch him study these plans. You look at it and it’s like a Angel wearing her skimpy little outfit, it was all about foreign language! I was always very impressed by that. He could the Go-Go Girls, a gang of robbers that were hypnonot only build buildings, but none of them fell down. [laughter] tized go-go girls. So it’s not hard to understand why I My mother worked as a bank teller. Neither of them painted, drew loved that book! [laughter] or anything like that.

CBA: Did you get an essence of the ’60s CBA: So it was a pretty much middle-class upbringing? experience, so to speak, even out in Nebraska?

Kevin: Maybe lower middle-class.

Kevin: I think so, to some degree. By watching CBA: Working class?

TV, I had this vague idea that suddenly people were Kevin: Yeah. We were pretty poor. letting their hair grow long, etc.

CBA: Did you collect comics as a kid or just basically a reader?

CBA: Why did your family move to Kansas?

Did you save them?

Kevin: Once he became a construction Kevin: I don’t think I’d use the verb “collect,” because I would superintendent, my dad pretty much had to just move us just accumulate and read them. It’s funny, I can always tell, looking to a new town every time a project was completed to start on a back at something I’ve held onto since I was a little kid, just a small June 2003

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Below: Detail from Nowlan’s “Monsters in the Closet.”

Batman: Black and White #4. ©2003 DC Comics.

3-B

Above and below: Much of artist Kevin Nowlan’s earliest work can be found in Fantagraphics publications, often on the covers, as seen on these early 1980s issues of The Comics Journal and Amazing Heroes. ©2003 Fantagraphics Books, Inc.

4-B

new one. He worked on a lot of high-rise buildings, that kind of stuff, so they’d finish one and then move to another town and start another project. He started working for the construction company a year or two before we left Nebraska. Then we moved to Kansas because their home office was down here. So it would depend. Some of the jobs would be nearby and he would just drive to the site in the morning. Others would be far enough away that we would have to move to another town.

CBA: Was it traumatic to move?

Kevin: Yes, I hated it. Until finally we moved to this town—it’s where my wife grew up and where I spent one year of junior high and two years of high school, and I always felt that this was the place that felt the most like home. We were determined to just stay here and let our kids grow up in one place and have them consider this home, because I hated moving so much. Every couple years, you’d have to leave your hometown, start all over in a new school and say goodbye to your friends.

Sterling, the town we live in, has a population of about 2,000. It’s a small farming town, with a small private college, not too far from the larger cities in the region.

CBA: Does it feel like Nebraska?

Kevin: No. It’s much nicer here than in Nebraska. [chuckles] The difference between a ranching community and a farming community is that farmers are just very laid back and easy-going, while ranchers are out to raise hell, chewing tobacco… the guys that I went to high school with were always looking for something to rope. [laughter] Like I said, once I thought about it, when our kids were very young and my wife and I were talking about my doing comics as a career, we understood that, these days, I can live wherever I want and still do the work. We talked about moving back here and having a nice, quiet place for the kids to grow up, pretty much the way we did. Grandparents are nearby, so it works out nicely. I really like it here.

CBA: Did you start drawing as a youngster?

Kevin: Yes. I would copy things out of the Sunday funnies, sometimes out of comic books. I’d mainly do sketches. Sometimes I would try to do a story, but I would maybe do a page or two and realize I didn’t know where I was going with it. [laughs] CBA: Were you known in school as an artist?

Kevin: A little bit. As I got older, they would start to give me chores like designing the homecoming float, and those kind of projects.

CBA: Did you have lots of friends or were you introverted?

Kevin: Pretty introverted. I still am.

CBA: Did you get into television and the typical pop culture trappings of being a kid?

Kevin: Yes. CBA: So you do recall the Batman TV show?

Kevin: Oh, yes. Remember, my brother was older, and because I was so nuts for that Batman TV show, he said, “You do realize that this is a big joke, that this is comedy, right?” It was like telling a kid that Santa Claus didn’t exist! I’m like, “What are you talking about?!” [laughter] Still, it’s fun to watch that show now and get all the jokes you missed as a kid.

CBA: So did you have ideas as you were growing up that you wanted to have a career in art? Was that the plan?

Kevin: Yes. When I got older, around high school, I was really sure that I didn’t want to be “just an artist,” I wanted to draw comics.

CBA: So were you able to go to any conventions as a teenager?

Kevin: No, no.

CBA: Did you have any inkling what the real life situation of a professional comic book artist was like?

Kevin: Things you watch on TV. Did you ever see that Jack Lemmon movie, How to Murder Your Wife? That’s what I thought it would be like. [laughter] CBA: Swigging martinis and “‘Deadline’? What 'deadline’?” [laughter] Kevin: With Virna Lisi coming out of the cake, and Terry Thomas as your valet. [laughter] CBA: Now, that’s the life. Ahh, to be a smarmy cad. [laughter] So did the fanzine work come first?

Kevin: No, not really. I actually sent in some samples to Marvel when I was about 15 and got the nice rejection note from John Romita who replied along the lines of, “Keep working at it, get better and maybe we’ll give you some work when you’re grown up.”

CBA: Was it an epiphany to discover Marvel, or did you always know they were there?

Kevin: I kind of knew they were always there, but they seemed sort of inaccessible because you would be jumping into the middle of this big, epic story. You wouldn’t know who all the characters were, and it’d be frustrating because you’d get to the end of a story with no real resolution. Whereas the DC books, especially in the ’60s, had those Mort Weisinger Superman titles and books like that, with these nice, self-contained short stories, two or three in an issue.

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The problem with Marvel was, in a place like Nebraska, you could never really find the next issue, so if it was continued…

CBA: …you were doomed?

Kevin: Right.

CBA: So when did you get into Marvel?

Kevin: I would have been 12 or so, when we moved here to Sterling. They had two drug stores here just a couple blocks from our home. I had a part-time job, so I had some spending money. That was in the early ’70s. In my eyes, comics were having a Golden Age then, with just all kinds of great stuff coming out of both Marvel and DC. I was developing this insatiable appetite for comics. They weren’t putting out DC books fast enough, so I started to branch out and read some of the Marvel books.

CBA: Did you appreciate the older pros like Jack Kirby while at the same time getting into Barry Windsor-Smith?

Kevin: Yes. It’s funny. At first, I didn’t like Kirby’s work. I would have if I had seen the earlier Fantastic Four stuff, but I didn’t. I was always seeing something like Thor or something else, inked by Colletta, which just didn’t work for me. But if it was a slow week and there weren’t very many good books coming out, sometimes I’d pick up New Gods or Mister Miracle or something like that, even though I really didn’t like his work. I’d end up reading and rereading and rereading them, and kind of begrudgingly finally admit that I did like his work. Then, much, much later, they started reprinting some of that early FF stuff, and his imagination was so incredible!

CBA: So at this point you became a collector and not just a reader?

Kevin: I don’t know that I’ve ever been a collector. I finally put a few comics in bags and things like that, but I never followed a certain title or characters; I would usually just go for specific artists.

CBA: Were Wrightson and Kaluta important to you?

Kevin: Absolutely, yes. That whole group of guys from The Studio.

CBA: Did you aspire to illustrative art or did you want to go the Kirby/super-hero route?

Kevin: I leaned more to The Studio guys.

CBA: Did you draw the pin-ups? You know, the iconic poses kids always drew?

Kevin: Yes, I did a lot of those. Like I said, if I would get really ambitious over the summer vacation and tell myself I was going to draw an entire story before school started. I would start out with a big splash page, and then, of course, do my own lettering and a logo and all this stuff… then maybe two or three other pages, and then finally realize I didn’t know what I was doing, so I’d just drop it. [laughs] CBA: Were they established characters or were they your own creations?

Kevin: I did both. I tried to do a Justice League story, and made up some kind of science-fiction/fantasy characters, as well.

CBA: At the same time, in the early ’70s, The Great Super-Heroes had already been out for a long time, and Steranko’s History of Comics was out, and there was a real renaissance regarding the history of comics, as well. Did you clue into that?

Kevin: I don’t think I did then, because I wasn’t able to find any of those books until much later.

CBA: Did you have a curiosity about the Golden Age and further back?

Kevin: Yes. Actually, DC was doing something really cool back then with their larger books which had reprints from the ’40s and ’50s. In these 100Page Super Spectaculars, they’d have new material as well as old reprints. It was the first time I’d seen artists like Lou Fine and Jack Cole. It was incredible work. This was around 1972, I believe, such a wonderful time in comics because you not only had these incredible young artists—Barry Smith, Wrightson, Kaluta, Jeff Jones—but you also had a lot of guys from the older generation just hitting their stride. Gil Kane, Kirby, Alex Toth, Wally Wood were doing great work all over the place. Two generations at the same June 2003

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 25

time doing fantastic work! It was wonderfully inspiring.

CBA: It’s really quite interesting just how inspired and enthusiastic the Young Turks were at that time. Perhaps it was a holdover from the impact of the underground comix arriving on the scene… you know, the freedom being expressed in the comix.

Kevin: It’s possible. Even Marvel was doing outstanding stuff. They started doing those monster books with Mike Ploog, which I thought looked very, very un-Marvel-like. Ploog was a wonderful comic artist, but absolutely not a super-hero artist. He was a most wonderful little exception to the rule at a place like Marvel, which was pretty solidly into super-hero stuff.

CBA: Did you start looking at particular artists who inspired you?

Kevin: Yes. All the obvious ones like Neal Adams, Bernie, Russ Heath, Bob Oksner, Toth, Wally Wood….

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Above: Outside of a short stint on a strip produced for Fantagraphics, Kevin Nowlan’s first professional comic book assignment was on Doctor Strange #57 (Feb. ’83), where he was inked by fan favorite Terry Austin. Kevin also drew the cover seen here. ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc. Left: The artist designed a statute of the Sorcerer Supreme in recent years. Courtesy of Kevin Nowlan. Doctor Strange ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc. Art courtesy of and ©2003 Kevin Nowlan.

#25: ALAN MOORE AND KEVIN NOWLAN

Focus on AMERICA’S BEST COMICS! ALAN MOORE interview on everything from SWAMP THING to WATCHMEN to ABC and beyond! Interviews with KEVIN O’NEILL, CHRIS SPROUSE, JIM BAIKIE, HILARY BARTA, SCOTT DUNBIER, TODD KLEIN, JOSE VILLARRUBIA, and more! Flip-side spotlight on the amazing KEVIN NOWLAN! Covers by J.H. WILLIAMS III & NOWLAN!

(122-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $3.95 http://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=98_56&products_id=541

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