Modern Masters Vol. 4: Kevin Nowlan by TwoMorrows Publishing

M O D E R N

M A S T E R S

V O L U M E

F O U R :

KEVIN NOWLAN

MODERN MASTERS VOLUME FOUR:

KEVIN NOWLAN

edited and designed by Eric Nolen-Weathington front cover by Kevin Nowlan all interviews in this book were conducted by Eric Nolen-Weathington and transcribed by Steven Tice proofreading by Fred Perry

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Drive Raleigh, North Carolina 27614 www.twomorrows.com • e-mail: twomorrow@aol.com First Printing • December 2004 • Printed in Canada Softcover ISBN: 1-893905-38-1 Trademarks & Copyrights All characters and artwork contained herein are ™ and ©2004 Kevin Nowlan unless otherwise noted. Grimwood’s Daughter and all related characters ™ and ©2004 Jan Strnad and Kevin Nowlan Abel, Angel and the Ape, Batgirl, Batman, Big Barda, Black Canary, Catwoman, Clayface, Commissioner Gordon, Darkseid, Death, Green Arrow, Green Lantern, Hawkgirl, Hawkman, Inferior Five, Joker, Kalibak, Man-Bat, Mr. Miracle, Orion, Phantom Lady, Phantom Stranger, Power Girl, Ra’s al Ghul, Robin, Solomon Grundy, Spectre, Star Sapphire, Superboy, Supergirl, Superman, Talia, Teen Titans, Two-Face, Ventriloquist, Wonder Girl, Wonder Woman, Zatanna ™ and ©2004 DC Comics. Apocalypse, Aurora, Clea, Daredevil, Deadpool, Dr. Doom, Dr. Strange, Electra, Hulk, Man-Thing, Moon Knight, New Mutants, Phoenix, Scarlet Witch, Spider Woman, Storm, Valkyrie, Wolverine, X-Men ™ and ©2004 Marvel Characters, Inc. Dr. Strangefate, Jade Nova, Myx, Skulk, White Witch ™ and ©2004 DC Comics and Marvel Characters, Inc. Jack B. Quick, Tom Strong, and all related characters ™ and ©2004 America’s Best Comics, LLC. Burnout, Gen 13, WildCATs, Zealot ™ and ©2004 Wildstorm Productions. Star Wars and all related characters ™ and ©2004 Lucasfilm LTD. Alien ™ and ©2004 20th Century Fox Film Corp. Mole People ™ and ©2004 Universal Studios. Archie, Jughead ™ and ©2004 Archie Comics. Pellucidar ™ and ©2004 Edgar Rice Burroughs Estate. Vampirella and all related characters ™ and ©2004 Harris Publications, Inc. The Pepper Lake Monster ™ and ©2004 Warren Publishing. Streets of Vatican City ™ and ©2004 National Lampoon. Details ™ and ©2004 Condé Nast Publications. Dalgoda ™ and ©2004 Jan Strnad and Dennis Fujitake. Fanboy ™ and ©2004 Horse Feathers, Inc. and Sergio Aragonés. Armor, Samuree ™ and ©2004 Neal Adams/Continuity Comics. Julie Winters ™ and ©2004 Sam Kieth. Editorial package ©2004 Eric Nolen-Weathington and TwoMorrows Publishing.

Dedication To my mom, Althea McNairy, for being so proud of a son who writes about comic books—I’m proud of you, too. And to Donna and Iain for reminding me there are more important things in life. Acknowledgements Kevin Nowlan, for so much of his time and for trusting me with his files.. Terry Austin, for supplying early treasures Kevin no longer has. Special Thanks Bruce Timm, Steven Tice, Fred Perry, Sandy Jarrell 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 Four:

KEVIN NOWLAN Table of Contents Introduction by John Arcudi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Part One: “I’m Going to Be Drawing Pictures” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Interlude: Under the Influence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Part Two: Marvel Comics and a Baptism of Fire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Part Three: Kevin Nowlan: One Man Art Team . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Part Four: Is That Inker... or Finisher? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Part Five: Jack B. Quick and the Stories of Tomorrow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 Part Six: The Theory behind “Pet Theory” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 Art Gallery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97

Part 1:

“I’m Going to Be Drawing Pictures”

MODERN MASTERS: You were born in Nebraska in 1958?

KEVIN: He was born in ’50. MM: Okay, so a good bit older. So you probably had comics around as early as you can remember, really.

KEVIN NOWLAN: Right. The Northwest corner of the state.

KEVIN: Right.

MM: And come from a pretty large family, in relative terms.

MM: What were the initial things you read? Did your brother get Archie comics, things like that, that were more kid-oriented, at all? Or did you just jump right into the main titles?

KEVIN: Yeah. Six kids. I have one brother and four sisters. I believe I was an “accident.” My parents had three kids, then a set of twins, so my mother had her tubes tied. Fortunately for me, the procedure failed.

KEVIN: I know we had Archies, Dennis the Menace and Casper books lying around, but I can’t remember if they were his or my sisters’. I know Mike had those really cheap black-and-white horror knockoffs. They weren’t the good ones like the Warren magazines....

MM: You said your older brother read comics. How much older was he?

MM: Like the Skywald stuff? KEVIN: Worse than that. [laughter] Terror Tales and Horror Tales—they were published by Eerie Publications, not to be confused with the Warren Magazine named Eerie. They had unbelievable cover paintings with bodies being dissolved in acid and corpses dripping blood. I think the stories were actually reprinted from old precode horror comics. I remember one of the stories where a man had his mouth sliced open on the sides to make his smile wider because he wanted to be a clown or something like that. It was pretty disturbing. I kept staring at those pictures trying to figure it out. Instead of being repulsed, I just looked closer and closer. He had Mad Magazine, CARtoons, Creepy, and Eerie, and I know he had some Blackhawk comics. What else? I remember Blackhawk very specifically because I remember sitting down and trying to draw the faces, like from the splash page and the cover, when I was really young. I would try to draw the characters’ faces. MM: Was that during their green-and-red costumes? 6

Were they still in the traditional costumes? KEVIN: No, they were still in the traditional ones. I don’t know the history of Blackhawk very well, but I believe they were drawn by Dick Dillin. They weren’t the original Reed Crandall stories, but they were still pretty good. I loved that hawk emblem. MM: So by the time you’re ten you’re seeing the DC experimentation comics. You were more DC-oriented as a kid? KEVIN: Yeah. My brother just never picked up Marvels, for some reason. I believe he had some Tarzan comics and Magnus, Robot Fighter. Not really that many super-hero titles, more like “Sgt. Rock” and Blackhawk, that kind of stuff. I’m sure he had a few Superman and Batman books. There were probably some westerns as well. I just remember comics being around all the time. You’d go to another kid’s house and he’d have a stack of comics. Or you’d go to the barbershop and they’d have a few. They were everywhere. I know that at least once I scrounged up enough pop bottles to turn in for the deposit so that I could buy some of the “black market” books at this little shop called the Newsy Nook. If you went in and whispered to the clerk and she trusted you, she’d pull out this stack of books that all had the tops of the covers torn off and sell them to you for two or three cents each. MM: So basically you were seeing more illustrative artists than you were the action, Kirby-style artists. KEVIN: Yeah. That Kirby stuff was really strange to me when I finally saw it. MM: I think with every kid, it looks pretty strange when they first see it. KEVIN: [laughs] Yeah. But at DC you had the guys who drew everything very

straight: Curt Swan, Kurt Schaffenberger, Irv Novick, John Forte. No exaggeration. The action was very restrained. MM: During DC’s experimentation period in the late ’60s, were you trying out all these goofy new titles, like Hawk and Dove and Angel and the Ape? KEVIN: Yes, Angel and the Ape, definitely. That’s one I remember specifically buying at the grocery store, the first issue of Angel and the Ape. The cover had go-go girls and a big gorilla in a Nehru jacket, playing a sitar. There was the Showcase tryout and then they got their own title, and that’s the one that I got when I was nine or ten. I just wore it out because it was my only comic, so I read it and reread it over and over. I missed out on Hawk and Dove, but I kept seeing the advertisements with those great cover images. The same thing happened with Beware the Creeper and Bat Lash. MM: Was the distribution in your area such that you were able to follow the series? KEVIN: No, no. I didn’t even see any of the other issues of Angel and the Ape until more than a decade later, when I found a comic shop and bought some of the back issues. You could never find two concurrent 7

Previous Page: A 2003 Vampirella commission piece. Above (Clockwise): The Nowlan family, 1960— front row, left to right: Michael, Joni, Jeanne, Kathy—back row: Pat, Kevin, Janine, Bill. Kevin in his cowboy boots one year later. And finally, Kevin and his twin sisters, Joni and Jeanne. Vampirella ™ and ©2004 Harris Publications, Inc.

Part 2:

Marvel Comics and a Baptism of Fire

MM: Were you surprised when you got the initial phone call from Al Milgrom offering you Doctor Strange #57? Below: DC’s “hard-traveling heroes.” This pinup appeared in Amazing Heroes and is the piece that first caught Terry Austin’s eye. Next Page: Page 4 of Doctor Strange #57. Inks by Terry Austin. Black Canary, Green Arrow, Green Lantern ™ and ©2004 DC Comics. Dr. Doom ™ and ©2004 Marvel Characters, Inc.

KEVIN: I was surprised, yeah. It was after that that Terry and I started talking a bit, because I had an excuse for calling him up because he was inking this thing and I could just ask him those basic questions, like, “Should I X in the blacks, or should I fill them in with the side of a pencil?” That kind of stuff. He was all I had for a mentor learning the ropes, the basic stuff that I was clueless about. MM: Had you seen original comic book pages before, maybe in Fantagraphics’ offices or anywhere else? KEVIN: Yeah, when I went up to stay for a weekend with the Fantagraphics guys, Gary Groth was just putting together a Neal Adams issue of The Comics Journal, and his back seat was covered, literally, with Neal Adams originals. [laughs] So in the car, from the airport, when he picked me up, I wasn’t holding up my end of the conversation because I was just mesmerized by this stuff. I was just sitting there looking at these things saying, “My God, there’s no white paint on here! How did he do this?” Gary’s just rolling his eyes back into his head. It was at one very small convention in Wichita years before that where I saw my first examples of original art. There was a 18

Wally Wood splash page that, again, I couldn’t believe how pristine it was. It was so clean and so perfect that I stood there for a long time just staring at that thing, trying to figure out how a guy would ink with a brush and make it all look so perfect. And right next to it was a Kaluta Shadow cover that had some fascinating textures of rocks—it was the side of a hill or something like that. And it was great because, again, looking at the originals as opposed to the printed cover, you could see where he used different pens, maybe even a ballpoint pen, and all kinds of different things, to create different textures. So, yeah, I had seen a few pieces of original art here and there, but really, I was pretty clueless when it came to figuring out how to lay out a page, what it should look like. I didn’t even know what size the margins for the panels should be on the board. MM: Well, you did seem to really keep the layouts mixed up. You didn’t fall back on a standard grid. You were at least trying different things as you were going. KEVIN: Yeah. And I remember Al Milgrom encouraged me; he asked me to list the artists that I admired, and I ran down a quick list, and he said, “You ought to look at Joe Kubert’s work when you’re thinking about layouts, because Joe’s really good at creating an interesting page layout.” And that’s where I started using inset panels and things like that, that I really hadn’t even thought of before. MM: How tight were your pencils? Since this is your first time out, were you overly tight, or were you just trying to get it done quickly? KEVIN: I think they were probably fairly tight, but I also remember there were some backgrounds where I wasn’t sure what to put in, and I thought, “Well, here’s a chance to find out what an inker does.” [laughter] I left

MM: This was the first time you saw your work in print with another inker. What was that like for you, seeing it inked by someone else?

them very sketchy, just sort of wispy pencil lines. And they were supposed to be New York City buildings. So Terry just—which I probably should have expected, I would have done the same thing—Terry just ignored them. [laughter] I hadn’t done my part of the job, so it wasn’t fair to ask him to draw buildings that weren’t there in the pencils. I remember the last page had to be redrawn. Again, that Doctor Strange story was done old Marvel style, with a plot and just sort of a suggestion of dialogue, and then Roger Stern went in and wrote the final script after he got the penciled pages. I don’t think he could wrap up the story with the way I had broken down that last page, so he wrote an actual script that had specific dialogue. It was a lot easier, because I could roughly pencil in the dialogue and leave enough space. I probably left a little too much space, but at least I had a better idea of what was going into each panel rather than just making it up in the true Marvel style. By the time I got to that page, I thought, “Okay. Some of these pages are really, really awful, and some of them are okay. This is the last page. The job is essentially done.” I really was breathing a sigh of relief and felt like I’d been through a baptism of fire. I felt like I was starting to get the feel of it. I wasn’t as nervous by the time I did that last page. I was starting to relax, and it went fairly smoothly. And out of this whole story, it’s the only one where I really thought that.... It’s not a great page, it’s a talking heads page, but I really felt like I was getting the hang of it. Sort of like, “Okay, now I understand how this is supposed to work.”

KEVIN: Yeah, it was pretty shocking. MM: Terry used a much thicker line than you normally would use. KEVIN: Yeah. That was during the time he was starting to use a much heavier line. A couple years before that, on XMen, on John Byrne’s work, he was using a much more delicate line. And I thought he used a fairly light line on the Mike Golden issue that came out a few years before this one. But, to be fair, I don’t think I was giving him much of an indication in the pencils. I think I was penciling with a fairly blunt graphite line, so that may have been the way he interpreted what I was putting into the pencils. I don’t know. He did a really good job, and it took me a while to realize what a nice job he did, because I was so shocked seeing my work inked by someone else. He cleaned things up, refined the images, the way an inker should. Mainly in the faces—they looked so different from the way I had pictured them— was where the artwork was changed the most. But it’s tough. I was such a rookie, and like you said, I had never worked with an inker before and didn’t really know how much information to give him. And he didn’t know what to do with my work. [laughs] I clearly didn’t know what I was doing, so it was unfair to expect him to 19

Part 3:

Kevin Nowlan— One Man Art Team

MM: You finally start working for DC with the Outsiders Annual #1. Now, in that Outsiders Annual, Mike Barr had his little jokey commentary in the back. How much of that was true? Had you been talking before about doing a project?

KEVIN: Yeah, that’s one of those Marvel-style things, where he gave me just the bare bones of a plot for those pages and just hit the high points of the action and asked me to just work it out however I saw fit. And he said he pictured it as kind of a silent, Will Eisner-esque sequence, so that’s what I was trying to do there.

KEVIN: Yeah, we were going to do a Batman graphic novel. When he called about it, I was committed to another project—I don’t even remember what it was—so I had to pass on it. And then sometime down the road, I think Jan Strnad and I had proposed something at Marvel. Yeah, it was at Marvel Epic—Archie Goodwin. And we never heard back from them, so I thought we—I was young and naïve and thought that if you pitched something, the editors immediately got back to you. [laughter] And you just coast right into it. The thing was in limbo.

MM: Did you suggest any of the sound effects that were used in there, and the way they were integrated, or was that all Todd Klein? KEVIN: I think I probably penciled in some of those. Mike and Todd added some extras. I thought a couple of them really weren’t necessary, so I whited out one or two of them before I inked the pages. The guy was jumping from one ledge to another and there was a big scream sound effect that wrapped around him in a semicircle. I thought, “That doesn’t really work.” So I took it out. In hindsight, that wasn’t really my job [laughs], to second-guess the writer/editor. But I guess I felt like he’d given me a certain amount of freedom to use my own judgment. They could have put them back in, I guess, if they strongly wanted them in there.

MM: What was it? Was it a sci-fi kind of thing? KEVIN: Yeah. I think there was more than one. The one I’m remembering was sort of an Island of Dr. Moreau, sci-fi kind of thing, I think that might have been what it was. So I had planned on starting on that project, and then we never heard back from Epic. So I called up Mike Barr and asked if that graphic novel was still available, and found that it wasn’t—they’d assigned it to another artist. But he said, “But I’d love to work with you. I can throw something else together.” That’s how I remember the thing coming together.

MM: How was it working with Mike with him being the writer and the editor? KEVIN: It was good, yeah. He was very easy to work with. MM: I’ve gotten that from other people as well.

MM: Was it you who asked for Batman to be in the story?

KEVIN: Yeah! I wanted to ink it and color it myself, and my coloring, at least, was sort of an unknown quantity at that time, so I remember they asked me to do some sample pages before they would allow me to do my own color guides. But Mike seemed to be doing everything he could to get that stuff approved by DC. Yeah, I remember it being a pretty pleasant experience.

KEVIN: Probably. I wanted to do some nice creepy material with the character. MM: Well, one of the best sequences in the book was that little chase sequence at the beginning, where Batman’s chasing down the cat burglar. 30

MM: So that was 44 pages of pencils, inks and colors. How long did that take you? Because I believe that might have been the only work you had published in ’86. KEVIN: So I wasn’t doing covers at Marvel? MM: Some of the covers came out at the very beginning of ’87, so you probably started on them late in ’86. KEVIN: Was “Grimwood” finished up by then? Probably. MM: Yeah, I think it ended in mid-’85. KEVIN: Okay, so I probably did spend the better part of that year working on that and little else. I don’t remember exactly, but I know it took an awfully long time to finish. Again, I could be wrong, but I don’t think it had a deadline when I started. Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t have agreed to do it. I don’t think it was on the schedule when I started. But I also remember, just for economic reasons, setting out to do it as quickly as I could. ’Cause I thought, “I’m going to do everything I can to pencil this at the rate of a page a day.” So the first three pages, there’s a single page and then a double-page spread. I was determined to force myself to only spend one day penciling each of those. It was easy enough for the double-page spread, because there were no backgrounds or anything like that. But then, as I got further into the story, and things got denser and denser, I obviously slowed down. Plus, a lot of times on those jobs, you start to really get into it and you just don’t feel comfortable knocking it out quickly. You really want to do the best you can, even if it means spending a little extra time on it.

whole lot of covers. You probably had two dozen covers that year. KEVIN: In ’87?

MM: I guess the next year you really make up for the lack of production in ’86. Maybe you started some of these other projects in ’86 as well. You had a bunch of covers, like I said. You also had the six-pager in the Green Lantern Annual. I’m not sure what came out first, but I know the May ’87 issue of New Mutants, #51, you did the pencils for that—

MM: Yeah.

KEVIN: Which one was that?

KEVIN: Yeah, I had a long run of Strange Tales covers.

MM: The New Mutants #51, that was in May of ’87. And the Green Lantern Annual was an ’87 annual. And you also had a

KEVIN: At Marvel? MM: It was a mix. You had a few at DC. You had some of the Secret Origins covers and a Batman cover at DC, and then you did all those Strange Tales covers at Marvel, and some Alpha Flight covers, as well.

MM: Yeah, issues four through eight and 14 through 16. 31

Above: Pages 3 and 10 of the Dalgoda story, “The Hero of the Tale,” done for A-1—a great action sequence, and the page that made Kevin feel like a real cartoonist. Next Page: Pin-up art from Wonder Woman #50. Dalgoda ™ and ©2004 Jan Strnad and Dennis Fujitake. Wonder Woman ™ and ©2004 DC Comics.

at all. So that’s why I ended up with that simpler style, because it just seemed to work, for some reason. And there were many situations where I thought the story really required actual cartooning instead of realistic illustrations. Like, there’s one panel where Dalgoda does a double-take, and so you’ve got two heads, one pointing in one direction, one pointing in the other, and it was a blast, because I really felt like I was being a cartoonist for the first time. MM: You don’t do that type of broad humor all that often. Did that story make you want to do more of that? KEVIN: Yeah, I would like to do more humorous stuff. As you might expect, it’s always a lot of fun. It’s difficult sometimes, because just like they say, timing is so important with comedy, with humor. Because setting up the gag is really, really important. You can be a little bit more 44

casual with dramatic stuff, I think. But sometimes the gags just don’t work at all if you don’t do the timing exactly right, or if the drawings aren’t as clear as possible. MM: Do you find humor more difficult than doing straight-ahead action, or more time-consuming? KEVIN: It can be. It’s sort of a trade-off. The time that you might save in doing less rendering is probably more than eaten up by the extra time required for breaking down a story and refining the layouts, and, like I said, working out the timing so that everything goes smoothly. People accept exaggeration and stylization more easily with humorous material. With drama, they want you to keep that in check.

Part 4:

Is That Inker... or Finisher?

MM: Well, you went from “Dalgoda” to inking an Uncanny X-Men cover over Jim Lee. And he’s got a lot of rendering in his work.

pencils? KEVIN: Yeah, some of them. And she called up and we had a talk about it. I apologized for just totally overwhelming what she had done. It was one of those situations where I honestly didn’t know how to ink those pencils. I love her work, I thought her Star Wars work was just fantastic, but I was just completely lost on those pencils. And it was absolutely no reflection on the quality of her work, I just couldn’t figure out how to ink those pencils. The facial features she drew reminded me of Marie Severin’s work and I think Marie would have been a good choice for an inker on that job, but they called me and were fairly persistent in spite of my reservations. Sometimes editors want to pretend they’re mad scientists and put together strange combinations of pencilers with inkers.

KEVIN: Yeah, a lot of rendering. Not really many shadows, but a lot of little lines. MM: How did you approach that job? Because that was a little bit different from what you’d been doing. KEVIN: That’s one of those things where I have almost no memory of it whatsoever, because it was penciled so tightly that it was sort of a classic “just trace the lines” situation. I remember it was shot a bit too light. I probably inked it a little lighter than I should have, but I was reacting to the delicate pencil work and trying to be faithful to it. I don’t really have much memory beyond that. MM: A couple months later you inked Wonder Woman #52 over Cynthia Martin. Did George Pérez ask for you to do that job?

MM: What was it about it that was giving you trouble?

KEVIN: No, I don’t think so. They asked me to ink a fill-in issue, and I think at one point it was going to be Jill Thompson doing the pencils, and then it ended up being Cynthia Martin. Poor Cynthia, because for the most part she was totally buried in that job, to the point that, on the last few pages, she just did little quick circles for faces, because she knew I was going to totally redraw them. [laughs]

KEVIN: The faces. I think her Star Wars work was a lot more expressive and kind of elastic and more freely penciled. These pages seemed kind of rigid, and there wasn’t that range of expression and exaggeration that I’d seen in the Star Wars stuff. Maybe she just felt more comfortable with Star Wars, I don’t know. But yeah, I was really a poor choice to work on that story, and the results weren’t very good. It would have been much better to have seen her ink her own pencils.

MM: Was she seeing your inks before she finished the 45

KEVIN: Oh, yeah, with Gil! Gil and Sergio [Aragonés]. A strange collaboration. We had three different people working on the same page. MM: Now, were you just inking Gil’s part of those panels, or were you inking over Sergio as well?

Above: Panel from page 19 of Fanboy #2. Right: Hey, Sergio! You missed a spot! Kevin does his best Sergio Aragonés impersonation while inking the Finster figure. Pencils by Gil Kane. Next Page: Evidently Jack didn’t want to be disturbed while hatching up his latest experiment.

KEVIN: I just inked over Gil. There are pages, obviously, that are all Sergio, and then there are pages that are drawn by Gil, with Sergio essentially inking Gil’s pencils, even though it’s Sergio’s character. On the page where Green Lantern appears and Finster says, “It’s you!,” well, that looks like it’s Sergio, but it’s actually me, because Gil

penciled that profile shot of the Finster character, Sergio inked the other drawings of Finster, but he missed that one. So I just went in and inked it in an approximation of Sergio’s style. I don’t think they ever noticed. Gil actually did a really good job of mimicking Sergio’s style in the pencils. That was really a lot of fun. That was such an odd project, and odd combination of styles throughout. Yeah, I’m looking at my copy of the book. Here at the beginning, on the first page of the Gil Kane segment, the Green Lantern part, where the teacher is hit by a bolt of green lightning or something, in the first panel she’s drawn by Sergio, and then in the next panel, she’s penciled by Gil and inked by me. [laughs] It’s very odd! I think it’s surprising how similar the styles are. Someone else may see it differently, but it’s not as jarring as you might expect. When Finster’s being carried by a Gil Kane character, his body language is there, it’s established by Gil, so it all fits together a bit more than it might otherwise.

Part 5:

Jack B. Quick and the Stories of Tomorrow

MM: So how’d you get involved with the America’s Best Comics line? Did Scott Dunbier approach you?

talking about all of these things, and maybe that’s why—I honestly don’t know. I don’t know if that’s how it happened, if Alan came up with an idea for a series, then Scott thought of me. Because I don’t think Alan was that familiar with my work before that, and even if he was, I really hadn’t had a chance to do something like this before, so I don’t think, looking at my work, he would have known that this was the type of thing I was wanting to do.

KEVIN: Yeah, Scott called and said he wanted me to draw this series called “Jack B. Quick,” but he didn’t give me any details. When I said I couldn’t he said it would only be six or eight pages at a time. I had no idea what kind of stories they’d be. I knew Alan [Moore] was creating a line of, not quite super-hero stuff, but more of a mainstream type of comics group. When I heard the name Jack B. Quick I just assumed it was some super-fast guy like Johnny Quick or the Flash or something. That didn’t sound very appealing to me [laughs], so I wasn’t instantly sold on the idea until I heard a little more about it.

MM: Well, there was the Gen-13 back-up story that takes place at a carnival. Maybe that showed them you could draw that type of atmosphere? KEVIN: Maybe so. But honestly I would doubt that Alan would have seen that. Yeah, Scott was the editor on that book, but.... That might have more of a nostalgic look to it or an old school look to it than I really intended, just because of the carnival and the main character sort of based on James Dean and all that. That’s possible; that might have been how it happened, but it’s still a mystery to me. I talked to Scott about it, and I think when he talked to Alan then after that, he told Alan that I was baffled by all this and had almost come to the conclusion that Alan had somehow read my mind. [Eric laughs] And Alan said, “Well, let’s not tell him any different.” [laughter]

MM: Now, Alan usually writes to the strengths and interests of his artists. Did he create that character with you in mind, do you think? Do you know? KEVIN: That’s the real strange thing about that, because we had just moved from Wichita to this small farm town and bought an old house. And I was getting more and more into stuff like antiques and local history, just the whole environment of this small farm town, which really, in a lot of ways, more than any town I’ve been in, feels like you’re stepping back in time a bit. Because some of the turn-of-the-century buildings are still standing, including this house. [laughs] And so I was sort of in the middle of this really strong wave of nostalgia. And then Alan came up, with no conversations between Alan and me, he came up with this series set in a small, Midwestern farm town, and he described it as vaguely nostalgic— something no later than the early ’60s and possibly earlier than that. And I was just dumbfounded. I said to Scott, “How did he know I wanted to do something like this?” And I have to assume it had something to do with Scott and I

MM: So how did you start off? Did you get a script first, before you starting doing the character designs? Or did you talk with Alan first, before you started doing that, and then got a script later? KEVIN: Alan called first and described what he wanted to do with the series. But I still didn’t know it was going to be a rural setting. I knew that he was a little boy who is some kind of genius, who comes up with a bunch of strange inventions. So in my first drawings of Jack, he was just wearing a sweater instead of overalls. Later, when I got the first script, 67

Part 6: Below: Todd Klein provided Kevin with a template for the cover of Tomorrow Stories #3. Next Page: It took Kevin a few passes before he settled on the final composition. Jack B. Quick and all related characters ™ and ©2004 America’s Best Comics, LLC.

The Theory behind “Pet Theory”

MM: We’re going to start with the cover. Whose idea for the layout was this? Do you come up with the ideas yourself and submit them, or did they suggest ideas to you? How does it work? KEVIN: Strangely enough, Todd Klein was working as sort of a de facto art director, or at least cover editor, on that book. He would put together a template with all the type and the arrangement of the face bullets and things like that, and then—on both of the Tomorrow Stories covers that I did, he sent me a template and suggestions for a cover. And I believe he was speaking with Alan about these, but I wouldn’t swear that that was the case. So it felt kind of strange; it felt like something

I should be discussing with Scott. But Todd was the one taking care of it, and he did a really nice job. MM: Well, the first thing I notice when I look at the cover is, first of all, the mushroom cloud reflected in Jack’s glasses, but then that kind of draws you right to his eyes, which really stand out on the cover, I think. And I thought it was interesting that you made sure the glasses were down the nose so that you could see the eyes and get the expression in the eyes. KEVIN: Yeah. Jack and his dad always have their glasses down on their nose, which drives some people crazy. [laughter] But for me, it just looks right. I don’t know why. It might just be like you said: you can see the expression on their faces much better if you don’t have the glasses in the way. MM: I noticed also with this, even the characters in the headshots on the sides— KEVIN: They’re reacting. [laughs] MM: They’re reacting to what they’re seeing, too. The only one that’s not really reacting is Jack. He looks kind of stoic. KEVIN: Yeah, his reaction is much more subdued. MM: So was all that suggested, as well? KEVIN: I believe so. At least, I have no specific memory of coming up with it myself. So I believe it was suggested by Todd. MM: Do you prefer coming up with ideas yourself, or do you not mind which way it works? KEVIN: No, I don’t mind either way. If I have an idea, certainly I’m partial to that. But I don’t mind getting suggestions from someone else. And a lot of times, like on this cover, it speeds things up. You can get

caught in this trap where you do dozens and dozens of little sketches and they end up picking parts of several different ones and combining them, and it just becomes a mess. But this was a pretty nicely streamlined process. MM: Yeah, it’s a very clean cover. You’ve just got the figures there and the type. And Todd, I guess, worked up all these logos. Is that correct? KEVIN: Right. Except for “Jack,” the “Jack” logo’s mine. MM: I know we mentioned this earlier, I think you were kind of surprised to see it displayed so heavily on the cover. KEVIN: [laughs] Yeah, to make it look like Jack B. Quick, Boy Inventor #3. You have to read the fine print to realize that’s not the name of the comic. MM: Yeah, was that just the big draw for the title at that point? Were you already getting that much reaction to it? KEVIN: Yeah, I think the mail was fairly favorable. I think people really, really did like the character and love the stories. I don’t know, that’s really a question for the editor, Scott Dunbier. I don’t know if that was Scott’s idea to spotlight the “Jack” logo that way or not. It might have been Todd’s. I just don’t know. MM: Well, speaking of the logo, let’s go into your

design process. There’s almost a Deco kind of look to it. What was the thought process behind that? KEVIN: I wasn’t going for Art Deco as much as maybe Art Nouveau, and something oldfashioned that you’d see on a turn-of-thecentury wooden sign or something like that. I was just trying to go for something noticeably old-fashioned, but also kind of fun-looking. In the first script that Alan sent me, he had some ideas for the logo, with a large B in the center and he suggested something like the Chrysler logo. So that was my starting point. MM: Okay. Well, let’s move to the inside, then. You start with the lettering first? KEVIN: Right. Since Alan writes a full script, as I’m starting to lay out a page, his words are the first things that I consider carved in stone. That’s the one thing that can’t change. So I start by working out the line endings, because I don’t like to hyphenate words, so I want someone reading the book to not be tripped up by awkward things like that and by balloons covering up part of someone’s head and the kind of things you get when the lettering is done after the pages are penciled. MM: Do you ever get to a situation where you’ve got your balloons set up, and then the layout just won’t work around

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