M O D E R N
M A S T E R S
V O L U M E
T W E N T Y - O N E :
CHRIS SPROUSE By Todd Dezago and Eric Nolen-Weathington
M O D E R N M A S T E R S V O L U M E T W E N T Y- O N E :
CHRIS SPROUSE edited by Eric Nolen-Weathington and Todd Dezago front cover by Chris Sprouse all interviews in this book were conducted by Todd Dezago proofreading by Fred Perry
TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Dr. Raleigh, North Carolina 27614 www.twomorrows.com • e-mail: twomorrow@aol.com First Printing • June 2009 • Printed in Canada Softcover ISBN: 978-1-60549-013-7 Trademarks & Copyrights All characters and artwork contained herein are ™ and ©2009 Chris Sprouse unless otherwise noted. Ber-Mander ™ and ©2009 Chris Sprouse. Fantastica ©2009 Chris Sprouse and his friend Bobby. Nathan Kane, Ocean and all related characters ™ and ©2009 Warren Ellis and Chris Sprouse. Batman, Blue Beetle, Cosmic Boy, Ferro Lad, Ice, Justice League, Legionnaires, Live Wire, Martian Manhunter, Metamorpho, Mr. Miracle, Mon-El, Poison Ivy, Saturn Girl, Shadow Lass, Superman, Ultra Boy, and all related characters ™ and ©2009 DC Comics. Global Frequency and all related characters ™ Warren Ellis and ©2009 Warren Ellis and DC Comics. Engine Joe, Gen 13, Jakita Wagner, Midnighter, Number of the Beast, WildC.A.T.s and all related characters ™ and ©2009 WildStorm Productions, an imprint of DC Comics. Dhalua Strong, Pneuman, Solomon, Svetlana X, Tesla Strong, Tom Strong, Val Var Garm and all related characters ™ and ©2009 DC Comics. Banshee, Bishop, Phoenix, Wolverine, X-Men ™ and ©2009 Marvel Characters, Inc. The Spirit ™ and ©2009 Will Eisner estate. New Men, Prophet, Supreme, Youngblood and all related characters ™ and ©2009 Rob Liefeld. WildStar ™ and ©2009 Al Gordon and Jerry Ordway. Ex Machina ™ and ©2009 Brian K. Vaughan and Tony Harris. Grendel ™ and ©2009 Matt Wagner. Hammerlocke, Phase and all related characters ™ and ©2009 Misc. Mayhem Productions. Armorines, Ninjak, Timewalker ™ and ©2009 Acclaim Entertainment. C-3PO, Darth Vader, Leia Organa, Luke Skywalker, Padmé Amidala, Star Wars ™ and ©2009 Lucasfilm Ltd. Aliens ™ and ©2009 20th Century Fox Film Corp. Micronauts ™ and ©2009 Mego Corp. Zaphod Beeblebrox ™ and ©2009 Douglas Adams estate. Miracleman, Superboy ™ and ©2009 respective owner. Editorial package ©2009 Eric Nolen-Weathington, Todd Dezago, and TwoMorrows Publishing.
Dedication To Han Solo, Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Spock, and all the other characters who fueled my young imagination. And to Donna, Iain, and Caper — the stars of my constellation. Acknowledgements Chris Sprouse, for his enthusiasm, his time, and his love of science fiction. Terry Austin, for his generosity and his always insightful comments. Special Thanks Cully Hamner, J. Hiroshi Morisake, Xan Sprouse, Karl Story, Rick McGee and the crew of Foundation’s Edge, Russ Garwood and the crew of Capital Comics, and John and Pam Morrow
Modern Masters Volume Twenty-One:
CHRIS SPROUSE Table of Contents Introduction by Karl Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Part One: Elephants in India and Doodling in Dale City . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Part Two: Chris Goes to College . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Part Three: Marvelous Monsters. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Part Four: Adventures in Outer Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Part Five: The Team Supreme—A Strong Combination . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 Part Six: Storytelling and the Creative Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Art Gallery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
Part 1:
Elephants in India and Doodling in Dale City
MODERN MASTERS: So, let’s start at the beginning; you were born in Charlottesville, Virginia, July 30, 1966. Do you remember any of that?
secretarial work in the ’60s, then worked as a substitute teacher while we were growing up, and later worked in a daycare center before doing day care for commuting parents out of our home while I was in college.
CHRIS SPROUSE: [laughs] I have essentially no memories of anything from that early on. I can tell you that, while I was born in Charlottesville, my family actually lived in Arlington, Virginia at the time, just outside Washington, D.C. My clearest earliest memories are from the first year or two that we lived in New Delhi, India, which would have been 1969-70—we can get to that later.
MM: Any brothers or sisters? CHRIS: One older brother and two younger sisters. MM: What are the age differences? Did you all play together? Were you close as children? CHRIS: My brother is three years older than me and my sisters are one year and six years younger, respectively. We were close as children, probably because we didn’t play with/hang out with lots of other kids while in India, and then we went on lots of family vacations and road trips together all the time after we came back to the US. My brother and I shared all the same interests until we were teenagers and he discovered cars and girls and rock music while I just continued plodding along as a super-nerd, drawing comics and reading sci-fi and fantasy like I always had!
MM: Were your parents originally from Charlottesville? Do you know how they met? CHRIS: My dad is originally from Charlottesville, Virginia, and my mom is essentially Pennsylvanian, but her family moved around a lot. They met in college in Tennessee. I think she was dating someone he knew, and they hit it off. MM: What did your dad do? Did your mom work? CHRIS: My dad worked as an auditor for the General Accounting Office in Washington DC, which is now known as the Government Accountability Office. He basically audited various US Government projects throughout his career, including construction projects overseas early on and hazardous waste disposal later. My mom did
MM: Would you consider yours a “happy childhood”? CHRIS: I would say I had an atypical childhood, at least at first. My childhood started out with lots of travel and unusual experiences and then settled into your typical 1970s-’80s suburban upbringing. In 1969 or early 1970, my Dad was sent to New Delhi, India to audit some US Embassy dam construction projects, and he took his family along, luckily. As I said above, my earliest memories are from our time in India—elephants, snakes in our yard and in our house, elaborate palaces and steamy weather—all kinds of “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” stuff that you might expect to make an impression on a young boy. [laughs] We went to an international school for embassy kids, so we were around lots of different nationalities and cultures all the time. We had no television and we couldn’t really play outside all that much due, partially due to the aforementioned snakes, so we amused ourselves inside with 6
Previous Page: Chris drew this spot illo of his character Ber-Mander for a notepad he made in his high school industrial arts class. Left: Chris (far left) and his family riding an elephant in India. Below: Chris’ first published work, done for his high school paper, The Hyphen. Chris says this accompanied “a hardhitting exposé on overactive water fountains.” Artwork ©2009 Chris Sprouse.
Viewmaster reels, G.I. Joes, model kits, drawing, and, of course, comic books. While we were able to bring some comics from the US with us—I know my brother had a copy of Fantastic Four #1 while we were in India, and I’m pretty sure he still has it—we bought lots of British editions of European comics in New Delhi—Asterix and Tintin, mainly. Tintin was my favorite from the start, and we were able to assemble a nearly complete collection of the albums before returning to the States in 1972. I think the time in India had a definite effect on us as kids and on our family as a whole. We came back to the US with lots of unusual experiences behind us and with a love of reading and—speaking for my brother and myself at least—drawing and comics. I know that I definitely felt a little different, like a little bit of an outsider, when I started school in suburban Virginia, and I continued being kind of a loner, doing all the same solitary things that I did overseas: reading books and comics and drawing constantly. My parents always encouraged us to be creative, and my mom even came up with lots of arts and crafts projects for us to do. My brother and I were both into comics, but he played sports and just generally got out of the house more, while I stayed inside doodling or building models and turned into more and more of a nerd as time went by. I think my brother and I drew a few
comics together, but I mostly drew alone or with some like-minded friends later. MM: Wow! A lot of traveling already for such a little guy! So, that would have put you in, what, third grade? Did you make many “likeminded” friends upon your return? CHRIS: I was six or seven years old when we arrived back in the States, and I think that means I must have been in first grade. I think I may have been in third grade before I ever really made any friends. That’s when I met my best friend to this day, Gary. We—my siblings and I—had, of course, become typical suburban US TV addicts by then; we still read constantly and did creative stuff, but we were hooked on Ultraman and Speed Racer and lots of cartoons. I always liked cartoons and probably picked up some of my art style from Hanna-Barbera and Filmation series. My wife impressed me 7
Below: A Ber-Mander illustration. Next Page: “During my freshman year at college I was still drawing super-hero comics and suffering some serious ridicule for it! This panel is from a Micronauts story I abandoned before my second semester.” Ber-Mander ™ and ©2009 Chris Sprouse. Micronauts ™ and ©2009 Mego Corp.
yelling. We scattered and ended up back at the home of the DM thinking we had gotten away scott free. Wrong! It turned out that the owner of that last car worked for the FBI—remember, we were in the DC suburbs—and he wasn’t going to let a bunch of snot-nosed D&D geeks get away with anything. He called the cops and somehow they tracked us down, and I remember one very large, angry policeman yelling in our pimply, terrified faces until dawn! Our parents were called, and that was pretty much that! I have to say that this incident was
completely atypical of what I usually got up to with my friends. A typical night out with the guys would consist of Gary, Steve, and me riding around in Gary’s car griping about the usual teenage problems or shuffling aimlessly around the local mall too nervous to talk with any of the girls we’d see, or maybe we’d shut ourselves up in someone’s rec room with a case of Mountain Dew and some horror movies for the evening. Not a lot of partying or shenanigans, considering this was the ’80s. More Mark Ratner from Fast Times at Ridgemont High than any of the highschoolers from Dazed and Confused, if I had to use movies about that general time period for reference. MM: Did you have a job while you were in school? It seems like you were doing an awful lot with all of your extra-curricular activities. CHRIS: I “sort of” had a job during high school. My mom worked in a daycare center and somehow convinced me to apply for a job cleaning the center up after hours. I roped my drawing pal Bobby into helping me out, since it was really too much work for one kid. We didn’t earn very much, and what we did earn we probably just blew on comics and Big Gulps at the 7-11 next door, but we started plotting our own comics out verbally while we worked there at night, so it wasn’t too bad.
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Part 2:
Chris Goes to College
MM: So after high school, was it right on to college? Was the idea of a future in art the next natural step?
MM: What comic books were you reading then? CHRIS: A few years before high school, I was pretty much reading only movie or TV adaptations: Star Trek and Star Wars. I tried a few superhero books like Iron Man and the Hulk, and I even collected Howard the Duck for a while for some reason. My brother read and collected tons of Marvel stuff like X-Men, Spider-Man, and Conan, so I was aware of what was going on in those books, but nothing really set me on fire until my brother showed me a copy of The Micronauts #1. That book grabbed me like nothing else had. Some of it was that I had lots of Micronauts toys already and loved them, some of it was that it was—at first anyway—science-fiction space opera, but most of it was Michael Golden’s artwork. I hadn’t seen anything like his art before, and the way that he created an entire world for these characters just fascinated me. Everything looked so interesting and so darned cool in that book! I loved the design of the Micronauts’ ship, the Endeavor, and I used to trace the pin-up Golden drew of the Endeavor in the back of issue #4 over and over until I got it right, I was so obsessed. Years later, after I got into comics professionally, I was able to buy the original art for that pin-up. I started looking for Golden’s name in the credits of other books, snapping up the Mr. Miracle and Batman Family books he drew for DC around the same time he
CHRIS: Yeah, it was always assumed that I’d go to college right after high school, and I had decent enough grades to earn a tiny bit of scholarship money, so off I went! I was determined to do comics for a living by this point, so I knew I wanted to take art classes and I didn’t really want to go too far away from home. My parents wanted me to go to a liberal arts school so I could get a decent well-rounded education and have something to fall back on if the comics thing didn’t work out. They had always supported my interest in art and comics, but neither they nor I really knew much about the business side of comics—whether a living could be made was a mystery to us all then—so their concerns weren’t misguided. I applied and was accepted at a lot of Virginia schools, but settled on James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. I decided to major in Graphic Design in a nod to my parents’ concerns, thinking I could get training to be an art director or product designer if my plans to make it in comics did indeed fall through. However, I was still determined enough about cartooning for a living that I loaded up my schedule with every figure drawing or life drawing class I could fit in. Either way I was going to go eventually, I never even considered a non-art career for a second.
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Above: “The cover of a very limited run selfpublished comic that I worked on with a few other cartoonists in the JMU art program near the end of my time at college.” Next Page: Previously unpublished pin-up of The Phade intended for the Hammerlocke miniseries.
Artwork ©2009 Chris Sprouse. Hammerlocke, Phase ™ and ©2009 Misc. Mayhem Productions.
and studios at night finishing projects or, horror of horrors, just doing art for the fun of it—not to mention working on all of the illustrations for the local paper— so I never really had time to watch a lot of TV anyway. I didn’t feel like I was missing much. These were the years of Who’s the Boss and The Facts of Life, after all. I did miss the first few years of Star Trek: The Next Generation, though. During summer breaks and holidays I tried to catch up on sci-fi movies with my friends, Steve and Gary, or my brother, Mike, with whom I saw The Terminator, Aliens, and whatever Star Trek movies were out. I really wasn’t into any movies or TV shows or influenced by anything new at this point—I was just really into comics art and music to the exclusion of almost everything else. Everything except girls, that is, but I was way more successful at the comics, art, and music.... Comic-collecting music nerds who spent all their time in studios covered in graphite and paint and smelling like printer’s ink just weren’t very appealing, apparently— surprise, surprise! MM: And toward the end of college, were you already preparing a portfolio that you could take to conventions and shows, to 26
show to editors and artists? CHRIS: I was! As I’ve mentioned, I had done several non-super-hero comic strips and books for various class projects, but I had stopped working on my own more traditional super-hero comics before my sophomore year. It wasn’t until my last year of school, feeling sick-to-death of my design classes and with graduation looming that I picked it up again. I was more determined than ever to do comics for a living by the time my four years were up. I had bought the first Marvel Comics Try-Out Book in 1983 or ’84—it contained sample script pages, blank Bristol board pages for pencillers to work on, blue-line pencil pages for inkers, inked pages for colorists, and guides on every step for prospective cartoonists— and I think I had taken a shot at pencilling some of the pages then but abandoned them. Well, in ’87 or ’88 I finished all four or so of the pages and sent copies to Marvel. When I didn’t hear anything by the time I graduated, I knew I had to keep working at it, but I was blindly confident that I would get into the business eventually—I just had to keep practicing and getting better.
Part 3:
Bringin’ Down the Hammer(locke)
MM: You graduated in ’88 with a degree in Graphic Design... and were still in your cap and gown when an as-yet-unnamed DC editor approached you with a script and a contract, right?
folks in Dale City, then I started sending out résumés for graphic design-related jobs. I had decided I had to do something to make a living while I continued trying to get into comics, so why not go with what I had just gone to school to learn? I quickly learned from a few of the companies I contacted that I had actually graduated with a pretty comprehensive knowledge of tools and techniques that were no longer being used in the design field. It seems that while I was learning how to use typesetting machines and stat cameras and such, the graphics world had been completely revolutionized by computers and needed computer graphics specialists, not whatever I was. I don’t want to slam JMU too much, but it wasn’t a huge school and I don’t think they could afford too many computers, so we had only the briefest introduction to the Macintosh. I left school knowing pretty much how to turn on a computer, how to do basic word processing, and how to use a mouse. I think also that the instructors were very much old school design guys and thought that a good grounding in the basics should see us through, while completely misjudging how thoroughly and how quickly computers would change the field. Whatever the case, I was almost unemployable in my major! I was finally hired by a company that still used the old physical paste-up methods and all those other things that computers had made obsolete. That company was NTW (National Tire Wholesale), whose corporate headquarters happened to be in Dale City. At NTW I did absolutely no drawing—not like my time at The Rail Company; I was just one of the people tasked with doing the newspaper advertisements for all of the NTW locations across the
CHRIS: [laughs] It wasn’t that easy or that quick, unfortunately! MM: Knowing what you wanted to do and having prepared for that, what did you do once you got out of school? What was your game plan? CHRIS: I took a week or two off and moved back in with my
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Above: Double-page spread from the opening battle scene of Hammerlocke #8. Next Page: Convention sketch of the core members of the Legion of Super-Heroes as Chris designed them for Legionnaires. Hammerlocke ™ and ©2009 Misc. Mayhem Productions. Cosmic Boy, Legionnaires, Live Wire, Saturn Girl ™ and ©2009 DC Comics.
look at it. Hammerlocke was a big break in that it was my first real job for DC. It languished in approval limbo for so long that I did a full year’s worth of work before ever coming back to work on Hammerlocke #2, and in that year I did the two Legion jobs—Secret Origins #42 and Legion #8—which led to me being chosen as the artist on Legionnaires. I consider my Legion work to be my real big break, because almost every job I managed to get until after I worked on Supreme was offered to me because of Legionnaires, either because of the connections I made while working on Legionnaires or because editors had seen my work on that book. Getting back to Hammerlocke, though, eventually it was approved, and I did have fun with the series. Tom Joyner and Keith 38
Wilson were overflowing with ideas and this was definitely infectious. We poured everything we had into that book. I didn’t actually design any of the good guys— those were all pre-existing designs Keith had drawn himself for the proposal before I came along—but I did design the villain, Hugo Tharn, and all of his robot bodies. As for the near-future locations and technology, Tom and Keith supplied plenty of reference material, both written description and visual, and I took what they supplied and ran with it, adding and refining things sometimes. I loved being able to work on a science-fiction series and I loved being a part of the “world-building” process for the book—something that has become my favorite part of any series I’ve worked on.
Part 4:
Adventures in Outer Space
MM: Which brings us to the Legion assignment. Though Hammerlocke had been steady, monthly work, it had always been under the “mini-series” umbrella. This would be your first on-going assignment on a rather high-profile title. How did that all come about?
CHRIS: It’s all a little hazy now due to the number of people involved and the twists and turns the project took, but I’ll try to answer this as accurately as I can. Mark Waid had been the editor on the Legion-related Secret Origins story I drew, and I think even then DC was considering a “young Legion” book; I seem to recall Mark mentioning this to me at some point. At the very least, he mentioned that he’d love to see me do more Legion work. Later, by the time I was offered the story in Legion of Super-Heroes #8 retelling the origin story, there was definitely a new Legion book in the works. Here’s the part I can’t quite remember: either they were already considering me for the new Legion book when I drew that origin story, or the story made them consider me for the new “young Legion” series. Either way, by the time I finished that issue, I had been offered the ongoing series, which was originally proposed as just a modernized retelling of classic Legion history with a less dated look and feel. First I had to finish everything else I’d already committed to draw, such as some Justice League covers and the remaining eight issues of Hammerlocke, which were finally green-lit around the time I was offered the new Legion series. Just to complicate the matter a little more, I was offered the job as regular artist on JLA just as I was finishing Hammerlocke. There was almost no question of which book I’d rather do, since I really wanted to do a science-fiction series and I loved the Legion, but I hated turning down the JLA gig because it was the first time I’d had to turn anything down since starting in comics, and I had no idea if I was burning a bridge. Plus, it was a much bigger and better-selling book at the time. I turned it down anyway, and it became only the first of many times I turned down more lucrative work to draw what I wanted instead. Anyway, while I was finishing up my other projects, the new Legion book acquired a name, Legionnaires, and started to get more complicated behind the scenes. The powers-that-be started to get nervous about retelling existing history, which seems really funny now in light of how many relaunches there have been of not only the Legion books, but just about every series out there. But back in 1991, ’92, there just hadn’t been many relaunches or reboots... Byrne’s Superman comes to mind, but not much else. Plus, since we weren’t allowed to use Superboy in the history of the Legion anymore, retelling the old stories started to seem too messy. I’m not sure who came up with the idea—I think it was 39
Below: Terry: “By the fourth issue, the new editor wanted to replace Chris because he had fallen so far behind the deadline. I assured him I could make up the time by doing all the lettering corrections and production myself—happy ending! Chris wasn’t fired and the project was completed as intended.” Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, Star Wars ™ and ©2009 Lucasfilm Ltd.
MM: And most importantly, were you able to remedy your desire to re-draw things and develop a rhythm again? CHRIS: Um... no... I still fell behind and probably became editor Diana Schutz’s least favorite freelancer for a while! Nothing she could do or threaten me with made me want to sacrifice any quality or hack pages out. This was the highest profile job I’d ever done, and I wasn’t going to hack out something that was going to become a part of this thing—the Star Wars saga—that was so important for me. Not very professional and I’m not at all proud of it. It has not escaped my notice that
Dark Horse Comics hasn’t been falling all over themselves to hire me again, but I still have fans telling me that our adaptation is one of the best Star Wars series ever done, and that’s something I am proud of. Having said that, and no matter how long I labored over the series, it was a big flop at the time. Someone once told me it was the first unsuccessful Dark Horse Star Wars comic in terms of sales. I feel horrible that late shipping played a part in that, but issue #1 hit the stands right when the comics industry’s X-Men/Spider-Man/Imagefueled bubble burst in late ’95/early ’96. I’m sure that didn’t help! I had turned down an X-Men stint to do Splinter, much like I had turned down a regular job drawing the JLA to do the significantly less popular Legionnaires, so, boy, did I feel like I was making all the wrong career choices, moneywise! Not that I had chosen comics as a getrich-quick scheme or anything, mind you... I’m not that crazy! MM: That was indeed a tough time for the industry, and yet a great reason why the book didn’t do all that well rather than your being a little late. I find that fans are very forgiving as far as timeliness goes if the reason for the delay is quality. That said, you did put your all into this, it being a Star Wars property and a childhood dream come true. Were you exhausted once it was finished? CHRIS: Not at all. These days, I feel like I need to take a week off after finishing a mini-series, and the last few pages are always nightmarish all-nighter affairs, but I actually have no bad memories of doing the actual work on Splinter. I was very jazzed to do it and kept excited after it was all over by getting the series ready for the trade paperback—my first collected work. I provided tons of extra material for the back pages, and they even asked me to write commentary for this stuff, so I guess it wasn’t just my first collection, it was my first published writing as well.
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Part 5: MM: Following Splinter of the Mind’’s Eye, what came next?
CHRIS: I don’t remember the exact details, but someone from Rob Liefeld’s company called me—I don’t remember what it was called at that point, maybe it was already Maximum Press—and offered me work doing a Youngblood Annual. I was itching to draw super-heroes again after a bit of a break from them, so I jumped in and drew about 3/4 of the annual before being asked to stop. The annual’s writer, Eric Stephenson, was also the writer and editor of New Men, a young-mutant team book kind of series, and he asked me to work on that series with him and put off the annual for a while. He wanted to change the direction of New Men a little, so we had lots of character and plot discussions, and I even redesigned the cast and all of their costumes, something I always enjoy. I love designing characters and working out all the little details, something I hadn’t done very much since Legionnaires. A lot of friends and peers kind of scratched their heads, wondering why I was going from Star Wars
The Team Supreme— A Strong Combination to some virtually unknown book for a smallish company. Well, the phone just wasn’t ringing with offers, and I’d rather work on a book where I was instrumental in the design and overall look than work as just another guy in a long line of fill-in artists on JLA Annuals or Wolverine one-shots anyway. Plus, if it was good enough for the likes of Alan Moore and Rick Veitch, then it was good enough for me.
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Below: Cover pencils for New Men #22 and one of the book’s stars, Bootleg. New Men and all related characters ™ and ©2009 Rob Liefeld.
Above: Layout sketch and finished pencils for an alternate “incentive” cover of 2006’s Justice League of America #3. Next Page: Convention sketch of Star Wars’ Padmé Amidala in a ceremonial costume Star Wars designers based on Mongolian royal fashion. Justice League, Superman ™ and ©2009 DC Comics. Padmé Amidala, Star Wars ™ and ©2009 Lucasfilm Ltd.
almost nothing except work and sleep during that time—but I actually enjoyed the work and was happy with the quality, even when I had to do less-finished pencils on some issues to meet the deadlines. By the end of the year I was more exhausted than I’d ever been in my life, but every issue shipped on time, and I felt pretty proud of the whole thing. I don’t know if this series actually did [anything to] polish up my image in the industry, but I do know that it helped give me my confidence back, something I desperately needed. It also gave me a glimpse of how comics could work for guys like me: getting most or all of a limited series done before it’s solicited is definitely the way to go. MM: So, to bring this home so to speak, and bring this up to current, were there any other jobs or projects that you did between Number of the Beast and the waycool, I-can’t-wait-to-see-it, new Tom Strong and the Robots of Doom? 78
CHRIS: I did two short back-up stories which were follow-ups to Number of the Beast—they haven’t been published yet. I was asked to draw two issues of Superman, but DC killed the assignment before I ever started. That’s just as well, because I just hardly ever draw a decent Superman. I have no idea why! I did draw four covers for the various Superman books, one of which remains unpublished, and of course, that was easily the best one. Which brings up a point I may not have mentioned yet: I don’t enjoy drawing covers much at all. I’d rather do storytelling stuff any day over pin-up shots and covers. I feel like I’ve only done a handful that worked well and they always take far more time than they should—too much pressure, I guess... I don’t know. That’s why I often ask editors to hire other artists to do he covers for books I work on.
Part 6:
Storytelling and the Creative Process but I find the people they drew or painted a little disturbing now, kind of dead-looking. The only trace of any of these influences that I still see in my art is that of the Star Wars designers and illustrators. I don’t draw like any of them, but they made me realize that if you’re going to build a fictional world for characters to inhabit, it’s best to really work it all out on paper in advance. I don’t know if I can always pinpoint another artist’s influence on my own style. It seems more like I’m constantly taking in everything I see and it sits in my mind percolating, working behind the scenes.
MM: Once bitten by the comics bug and then taking pencil to paper yourself, would you say that there were artists at the time that you were trying to emulate?
CHRIS: I don’t remember trying to emulate anyone in particular early on, and I especially don’t see any of my influences coming through until my high school work. I see Michael Golden’s Micronauts art interpreted really poorly in all of my early homemade comics, especially Fantastica with all of its bug people and armored characters. It’s not always obvious to everyone, but “BerMander” is blatantly screaming out Frank Miller’s Daredevil when I look at it now. I started using those wide, horizontal action panels and heavy Zip-a-tone on that strip because of Miller’s Daredevil. I even had ninjas attack Ber-Mander in at least one strip!
MM: Do you feel that your style is still malleable? Do you continue to be influenced by artists today? Or do you feel constrained to stick to the “Chris Sprouse style” because that’s what’s expected of you?
MM: Do you feel that you were influenced by artists and illustrators outside of comics? What did they bring to your burgeoning style?
CHRIS: As I said, I feel like I take in everything I see and it’s inside influencing how I do things even if I don’t consciously know it. Even work I don’t like is an influence— it makes me realize how I shouldn’t approach something. My style is definitely malleable, because I’m still trying to improve when I notice problems or deficiencies or I realize I’m falling into lazy or bad habits—too many of one type of panel, not enough of another; shortcuts being relied upon too frequently; too many similar poses, etc. Often I don’t even notice my work has changed until I go back and look at old photocopies. For example, I recently went digging through my Tom Strong photocopies from the last two issues of the series—from only a few years ago—and I was really surprised at how I was handling faces differently now without even realizing I was! I definitely do not feel constrained to stick to any style. As I may have mentioned while talking about my college art classes, it was important from even early on that
CHRIS: A few non-comics people were influential—way overshadowed by my comics influences, but they were there nonetheless. I started noticing and seeking out Arthur Rackham’s illustrations somewhere around high school and college. He illustrated many children’s stories and fairy tales. In college I got permission to see some very rare and very old books in the JMU library that Rackham had illustrated. I also know I was influenced by all of the designers for the Star Wars films and collected all of the “Art of” or “Making of” books I could find, especially the sketchbooks featuring nothing but pre-production sketches for the original trilogy. In my college art classes, some teachers introduced me to figure artists like Egon Schiele and Klimt, and I liked them at the time, 79