MM: Do you actively look for illustration work, or is it just one of those things where you take it as it comes? FRANK: I’ve been lucky. They usually come to me. Lately, I just make the project I want to work on happen. I actually have a couple of jobs lined up—they’re just waiting for me. One is with Christopher Golden. He recently did the book, Baltimore. MM: Right, with Mignola illustrations. FRANK: Chris and I are doing an actionmystery novel set in the Victoria era. I’ll be illustrating it in a Franklin Booth style, like Bernie Wrightson’s Frankenstein. I’m really excited about working on it, but I’ve got to finish some comic book work first. I also have a Burroughs type project a friend and I have been talking about, but it’s way too early to make any announcement. Some days I’m really excited about doing comic book work, some days I’m really excited about doing comic strip work, and then there are other days when I’m really excited about doing illustration work. I often end up juggling all three at once. MM: When you’re writing for comic strips, you’re pulling stuff from everywhere. Do you keep a notebook with ideas for gags, or do you just take it a week at a time? How do you work? FRANK: I used to keep a notebook, but that quickly fell apart. What ended up happening is I would scribble on scrap pieces of paper and on the backs of envelopes, and completely neglect my notebooks. So I gave up on keeping a notebook. If you look at my desk, you’d see piles of post-it notes with little sketches and phrases and stuff like that. My desk is a mess, bunch of scrap pieces of paper everywhere. When I was doing Liberty Meadows for the newspaper, I would write and draw one week at a time. It was pretty stressful. I made sure to try to get two really funny ideas for that week, and then try to build a story around them to support those two strips. For each individual strip, I would write the punchline on the final panel and try to figure out the set-up for that punchline. So I wrote everything in reverse. And,
of course, the actual execution of your idea on paper is another whole set of trouble. There’s still further evolution, because you still have to figure out the physical pacing and timing. That’s always fun. If something is off, you can kind of sense it right away. When I was doing Liberty Meadows for the newspaper syndication, I would kill myself every week. First part of the week, I would watch TV, read books, and just wander around trying to get an idea and a story for the week. Then, the last two days I would crank out seven strips—three-anda-half strips a day. There were several times where I ended up doing all seven strips in a little over a day, and you can tell. During that five-year period, I would try to spend two days writing and do five days of drawing, but that never worked out. It was always five days of writing and two days of drawing. 77
Previous Page: Illustration for Jimgrim and the Devil at Ludd. Above: Preliminary sketch and finished inks of a panel for a Liberty Meadows Sunday strip. In the preliminary sketch, Frank draws Jen’s entire body to ensure proper placement of her knees in the final drawing.
Jimgrim illustration ©2007 Frank Cho. Liberty Meadows ™ and ©2007 Frank Cho.