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Image-era promotional art. ©2007 WildStorm Productions.
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again, and it’s grueling. So it was something that we could do because we were both young and none of us had any kids at the time, so we could really put our energies into just the art. Yeah, it’s hard to say how many issues I would have lasted. I think I did as many as I probably could, and I think, more importantly, there were certain characters I wanted to draw and tell stories with, and fortunately I got to do a lot of that. Were you ever dissatisfied at Marvel by anything? Dissatisfied? I left, so there must have been some level of dissatisfaction I think, or maybe it was just that Image represented something bigger and better, and I think I liked the idea of challenges and I liked the idea of doing new things. And I just hated, like, I just never wanted to be complacent in life, never mind just art, but it was the kind of thing where you always want to leave the audience to want more, and I think toward the end of my X-Men run I was starting to get burnt, and I didn’t want to produce a
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lot of really crappy issues and then get kicked off, I guess. So it wasn’t anything like seeing your art on T-shirts and you’re not getting royalties? No, that was definitely — now you’re starting to get into the origins of Image, and I think right around that time comics was going through this huge boom. There was a lot of speculation in comics, but also there was a lot attention on comics because they were selling so well, so you start having these video game deals and T-shirts, and movies were just starting to get going, so a lot of our art that we had been creating was used for ancillary product, like T-shirts and video game covers and manuals and whatnot. Yeah, there was no compensation for that, much less a free T-shirt. So, yeah, that irked a lot of us, and I think it had to do with… not that we were asking for a lot, it was just like, well, we produced this art, a human being produced this art. Is this necessarily a fair situation? And I think rather than stay there and work with management to come to some solution, we decided, well, we’re just going to leave and do our own thing. But Todd was the first one to approach you about this, right? I would say… y’know, you’re talking about something that happened, what…? Fifteen years ago, but you would think that you would remember. That was a pretty big decision. I think it would take a lot to leave that security at Marvel. You know what? It didn’t take as much as you would think, partially because I had one kid at the time, but I was still pretty young, and when you’re that age, you can take the chances. I never really felt like, “Oh, man, I can’t leave the security.” I definitely didn’t want to do something foolish and fail. I think I was more scared of failure rather than, oh, I’ll leave this really cushy thing behind and what if I can’t get it again. I don’t think that was an issue. It was more, like, if I was going to make this big move, I want it to be successful, and that meant having the right people involved. And, yeah, it was Todd, I think, that was spearheading it emotionally for me, and his involvement is really what brought me on board. I think every Image partner has a different recollection or story to tell, but for me, personally, it was because of Rob and Todd. We had kind of grown tight, we had seen each other at the cons, we talked a lot, and I think we were all competing against one another at the same time we were befriending one another in terms of success and sales and whatnot. And I think it was definitely Todd’s passion for it, actually, both their passion for it that really got me going, as well. Did it surprise you when they came up to you to talk about this, or did you expect it a little bit? It’s not so much a surprise, because it’s not like something where it came out of the blue. We had talked about doing things even before then, because we were always, I think, dissatisfied. Maybe we were dissatisfied with marketing and promotion, and dissatisfied with some of the restrictions on the art that we could draw, or some of the compensation from the use of our art in various packaging and