M O D E R N
M A S T E R S
KYLE AKER B
by Eric Nolen-Weathington
V O L U M E
T W E N T Y :
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:
KYLE BAKER edited by Eric Nolen-Weathington front cover by Kyle Baker all interviews in this book were conducted and transcribed by Eric Nolen-Weathington
TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Dr. Raleigh, North Carolina 27614 www.twomorrows.com • e-mail: twomorrow@aol.com First Printing • April 2009 • Printed in Canada Softcover ISBN: 978-1-60549-008-3 Trademarks & Copyrights All characters and artwork contained herein are ™ and ©2008 Kyle Baker unless otherwise noted. The Bakers, Cowboy Wally, Holmes & Watson NYCPI, How to Draw Stupid, King David, Nat Turner, Special Forces, Toussaint, Why I Hate Saturn, You Are Here, and all related characters ™ and ©2009 Kyle Baker. Martha Washington™ and ©2009 Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons. Batman, Eel O’Brien, Flash, Hawkman, House of Mystery, Joker, Justice League of America, Letitia Lerner, Mr. Mind, Plastic Man, Robin, Supergirl, Superman, Wonder Woman ™ and ©2009 DC Comics. Splash Brannigan ™ and ©2009 America’s Best Comics, LLC. Captain America, Cyclops, Isaiah Bradley, New Mutants, Psi-Force, Wolfpack ™ and ©2009 Marvel Characters, Inc. Goofy, Mickey Mouse ™ and ©2009 Disney. The Avenger, The Shadow ™ and ©2009 Condé Nast. Dick Tracy ™ and ©2009 Tribune Media Services, Inc. Olive Oyl, Popeye, Swee’Pea ™ and ©2009 King Features, Inc. The Simpsons ™ and ©2009 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp. Bert, Ernie ©2009 Jim Henson Productions, Inc. Atari Force ™ and 2009 Atari, Inc. Classics Illustrated ™ and ©2009 The Berkley Publishing Group and First Publishing, Inc. Vibe ™ and ©2009 Vibe Media Group, Inc. Break the Chain, Superboy ™ and ©2009 respective owner. Editorial package ©2009 Eric Nolen-Weathington and TwoMorrows Publishing.
Dedication To Donna, Iain and Caper Acknowledgements Kyle Baker, for his unbounded energy and enthusiasm, and for his time. Heritage Auctions, for providing access to their archives or orignal artwork. Please visit them at www.ha.com. Special Thanks Roger Ash, Terry Austin, Mike Manley, Tom Ziuko, Rick McGee and the crew of Foundation’s Edge, Russ Garwood and the crew of Capitol Comics, and John and Pam Morrow
Modern Masters Volume Twenty:
KYLE BAKER Table of Contents Introduction by Eric Nolen-Weathington . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Part One: Funny Animals and Horror Stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Part Two: A Cowboy, a Shadow, and a Trip to Saturn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Part Three: Here and There and Everywhere . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Part Four: The Truth about Marvel and DC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Part Five: One Thing Leads to Another . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 Part Six: Storytelling and the Creative Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 Art Gallery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Part 1:
Funny Animals and Horror Stories Pooh and stuff. I got all that from my dad. My parents met in art school; they both went to Pratt. So they loved making things with us kids. I remember we used to make boats.
MODERN MASTERS: Correct me if I’m wrong — you were born in 1965 in Queens, New York? KYLE BAKER: That’s correct, yeah. MM: That was a great time for kids, as far as cartoons and comics. What caught your attention first?
MM: And you would sail them on a lake? KYLE: Yeah, yeah. We would spend all day doing it. We’d get a piece of wood from the lumber yard, spend all day decorating it, and then we’d end up losing the thing in the lake. [laughter] But it was fun. We made puppets and, y’know, everything.
KYLE: I used to like the funny papers; the newspaper strips were really good. Pogo—Walt Kelly was still alive. Al Capp was still alive. Those were really good strips, and I liked Dick Tracy at the time. I liked Underdog, the TV show. And Harvey comics. There were a lot of good comics for kids at the time. I remember telling Ernie Colón that I grew up reading those Harvey comics of his.
MM: So you were seeing lots of different kinds of art then, not just comics and animation. KYLE: Yeah, but I especially liked funny comics. When I was a kid, there was a big variety of comics—much more so than when I got into the business in the ’80s. Now it’s great; it’s gotten back to having a lot of variety, which is healthy. I have a brother and a sister, and we all used to go to the candy store together to get comic books. What was great was that we would all be able to buy comics even though we all had different tastes. I like funny cartoons, so I would buy Donald Duck or something like that. My sister liked girl stuff, like Archie. We both liked Steve Ditko ghost comics. He was doing these scary comics for Charlton at the time.
MM: It sounds like you immersed yourself in that world pretty early on. KYLE: Yeah. Comics were really good in the ’60s. And Mad magazine was really good. Jack Davis was still working for Mad. MM: Were you looking at Mad at that early an age, or did that come a little later? KYLE: Well, I was a first kid, and my dad was 22 when I was born, so he was still buying National Lampoon and Mad magazine and stuff like that. MM: Your dad was a commercial artist, right? KYLE: Yeah, he worked in advertising. He made junk mail.
MM: Ghostly Tales and a couple of others.
MM: Did he draw around the house much, or did he keep that at the office?
KYLE: Him and Jim Aparo. I liked the mystery stories, and then when I got a little older I got into the EC stuff. The EC books were out of print when I was a kid, and you couldn’t find them, but I liked all the EC imitations, which were done by a lot of the same guys, like Wally Wood.
KYLE: He would draw pictures for us and entertain us. I do the same thing for my kids. You know, draw pictures of Elmo and Winnie the
MM: So you were reading the Warren magazines then? KYLE: Yeah, I was into that stuff and that fake DC stuff, 6
like House of Mystery and Tales of the Unexpected. At the time I didn’t know that they were just watered down versions of the EC stuff. Once I saw the EC stuff, I saw that it was infinitely better. But that first stuff I got into was that weak, non-scary DC stuff. It was kind of like Goosebumps. MM: Exactly. Sergio Aragonés would do little one- or two-page framing stories for some of those books. Did you notice he was one of the artists from Mad at that time? KYLE: That’s a good question. I’m not sure when I became aware of who drew what. I know I liked Jim Aparo’s drawings better, but I don’t know that I knew he was Jim Aparo. We really liked Steve Ditko because he had a style that you could recognize everywhere. I think he was probably the first one that I could really look at and say, “Oh, yeah. That guy drew that,” because it was such a weird style. MM: Did you ever try to imitate those guys in your drawing? KYLE: I used to copy Johnny Hart drawings. My favorite stuff was always the funny stuff. I sort of fell into Marvel because I happened to know somebody there. But I always thought I was going to do funny stuff. Mad wasn’t hiring until recently, but I thought that would have been a good place for me. MM: Did you just take the normal art classes in high school, or were you able to attend special art classes since your parents were both artists? KYLE: I went to some classes on the weekend. You can always find free classes at museums, so my parents would look in the paper for things like that. I was very interested in animation, actually, and I used to make little Super-8 movies. I got out of it just because it was such an expensive habit. I got back into it when computers came along, because you can reshoot something a hundred times and it doesn’t cost you anything—there’s no film or developing. I don’t pay for lights anymore. But that was what I was really into for a long time. I liked Disney stuff and the Bugs Bunny stuff—all the theatrical shorts.
MM: And you could see all the really good ones thanks to television syndication. KYLE: Right, and they were uncut at the time. The last time I saw them on TV, they had cut them up to the point where they weren’t funny. MM: It was sad and frustrating to see them get shorter and shorter and choppier and choppier as the years went on. KYLE: That’s the thing. I’ve been doing this 25 years or so now, and you really have to change with the times. What was a great business ten years ago is a rotten business now. When I was a kid, the dream 7
Previous Page: Kyle exhibits his love for funny animals in this gag panel of a mouse in a glue trap. Above: Kyle also enjoyed the many DC and Charlton anthology “horror” comics as a kid, and he recently worked on DC’s new House of Mystery series. This page is from issue #10. House of Mystery ™ and ©2009 DC Comics.
Part 2:
A Cowboy, a Shadow and a Trip to Saturn Also, the guys—and they may still do this, but I don’t go up there so much anymore because I have all these kids—would socialize on Friday nights. All the Marvel guys and DC guys would go out to a bar or a restaraunt and socialize. It wasn’t competitive or anything. Again, that was probably because there was no money at the time. [laughter] Everybody was doing it out of love. I don’t imagine Marvel and DC guys hang out together anymore.
MM: You started getting a lot of inking at Marvel, but you did pencil a couple of entries in the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe in 1984. I believe that’s your first penciling credit. KYLE: Joe Rubinstein inked that series, and I was working for him at the time, so that’s how I ended up doing that. I was also doing funny strips for Salicrup in Marvel Age.
MM: You mentioned the Howard the Duck comic book adaptation. That was your first big project for either of the Big Two. KYLE: I think so. That was the first book that I penciled. I mean, I penciled a couple of pages of Transformers, but if you were around.... Back in the old days, if somebody screwed up a deadline, they would just give their pages away. You would see a lot of things signed “By Many Hands” back then. You can’t really do that anymore, because if some guy’s paying ten bucks for a Bernie Wrightson comic book, it better have Bernie Wrightson in it. But at the time it would be, “Aargh, soand-so just screwed up the deadline on Dazzler. You want to do Dazzler?” [laughter] That’s how Vinny—Vinny is the one dead guy I never worry about speaking ill of. He was a pretty rotten guy. [laughter] He wasn’t a very good artist, and people always wondered how he got so much work. It was because he
MM: In 1986, you were all over the place, and not just at Marvel, but at DC, too. KYLE: Working over there, two guys I learned a lot from were Dick Giordano and Joe Orlando. I think that’s why I didn’t need school. I mean, if you can ask Joe Orlando how to draw.... He was teaching at SVA, too. MM: Were you going into the offices all the time looking for jobs? Did you make a point to go in and get face time with the guys at Marvel and DC? KYLE: In the old days, back before security and terrorism, freelancers would just walk up to Marvel Comics, walk in the door, and ask if anybody had any work. There were ten or 15 editors in offices in a row, and, like, me and Vinny Colletta would go up there and Vinny would just knock on all the doors and say, “Hey, what have you got?” 12
could do a book in a night, and he’d save your ass. And if it looked terrible, it wasn’t his fault—he did it in a night. That’s where I learned how to be really fast, working for Vinny. And Dick Giordano had a lot of good tricks for working fast. MM: Like what, for example? KYLE: Dick used to work with a timer. He would say, “If you’re on a tight deadline, you put a clock on your desk, and you figure out how much time you can spend on each page. You ink all the figures and the important props and major things like that first. Then you look at the clock and realize time’s almost up and you haven’t finished the page, so you paint everything else black.” And the funny thing is, it actually makes it a better composition, because you have these really strong shapes, you’ve
got all the important story elements, and you’ve blacked everything else out that would have distracted the reader. MM: Going back to Howard the Duck, it was a chance for you to work on a humor book. Is that why you got the gig? KYLE: Yeah, ’cause I could do the two styles. Most people can do the funny stuff or the straight Marvel style, but I can do both. MM: Going into the book, were there any expectations about how the movie would do and what kind of attention the book would get? KYLE: No. The thing about movie adaptations is they tend to be the job nobody wants. It’s a terrible job, because the deadlines are awful, and it’s always super-secretive, which means you can’t get what you 13
Previous Page: Convention sketch of Cowboy Wally in the Shadow’s outfit. Above: Pages from Atari Force Special #1—Kyle’s first work for DC—with Kyle’s inks over James Fry’s pencils. Cowboy Wally ™ and ©2009 Kyle Baker. The Shadow ™ and ©2009 Condé Nast. Atari Force ™ and 2009 Atari, Inc.
Part 3:
Here and There and Everywhere
MM: In 1991 you finally had a chance to do some humor work for Marvel: Damage Control #1 and an Al Space story in Epic Lite #1. How did you hook up with Evan Dorkin and that crowd? Was Epic Lite the first time you worked with them in an anthology format?
artist. Evan Dorkin I met through some of the other guys. Robbie Busch had started as Mark Badger’s assistant. We used to get together and hang out and go to each other’s houses and stuff, and we always talked about ideas for cartoons and things like that. At the time, most of the guys, except me, hadn’t really had much luck doing their own things. We were all of the opinion that we needed to have our own things going sooner or later, but they’d never had the opportunity to do that. So they had this idea to do this book, Instant Piano. Originally we were just going to publish it ourselves as a mini-comic, something small-scale, and give it away at cons or something, but then Mike Richardson got involved. I think that was through Mark, because Mark had worked on The Mask.
KYLE: Well, I had known those guys from living in New York. When I was younger I used to go out a lot. Those guys were the same age as me. MM: Who was in that group? There was you, Evan, Stephen DeStefano.... KYLE: Stephen I knew from DC; he had drawn some DC comics—a book called ’Mazing Man. MM: Yeah, and you inked a few pages of one ’Mazing Man Special #3 in 1990.
MM: Well, before Instant Piano, some of you guys worked on the Fast Forward anthology series for Piranha Press.
KYLE: That’s right, I did. Mark Badger was a Batman
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KYLE: Yeah, and I seem to remember that came out a lot later than expected. By that time the Piranha Press experiment was not working out. They had put out a few books and they weren’t selling. Fast Forward was supposed to be an anthology book, but they took the stuff and made it into a threeissue comic series. It took them so long to publish it that some of the dialogue had fallen off my pages. [laughter] The rubber cement had died, so there were a couple of missing captions, but nobody seems to have noticed. [laughter] When I reprint it, I’m going to put in those missing captions.
something in a story, it’s because I have an idea in my head of what it will look like. It might not sound that good on paper. If I say “a flock of sheep,” for example, it’s because I have an interesting visual in my head of a flock of sheep, you know what I mean? I can’t really put across in words why that would be good. So what happened was I turned in an outline for a 22-page story, and they just didn’t get the story at all and they only gave me eleven pages. So there’s, like 16 panels on a page. MM: It does look a bit cramped. Was it meant to be published in the larger 8-1/2" x 11" format, like Why I Hate Saturn?
MM: Assuming you can remember the text. KYLE: Oh, I remember the joke. It was a good joke. [laughter] MM: Your story for Fast Forward was another case of you being ahead of the times—it was a zombie story. KYLE: It’s time to reprint that. And it would be nice to reformat it. When I started the thing I wrote a synopsis. This is something I generally don’t do anymore, because it’s hard for people to imagine how something’s going to look based on a few sentences. If I put
KYLE: Yeah. MM: And then they published it at standard comic size, which just makes it that much more cramped looking. How did Break the Chain come about? Was that something you came up with or did KRS-One come looking for you? KYLE: That was something he came up with. It was funny, because coincidentally I had just read something he had written in the paper and said to myself, “Oh, what an interesting guy. I wish I could work with a 29
Previous Page: Sequence from “Lester Fenton and the Walking Dead,” the lead feature of the Piranha Press anthology book Fast Forward #2. Above: Panels from Kyle’s three-page autobiographical strip which ran in Instant Piano #1. The big guy is Kris Parker, better known as rap star KRS-One. Left: Cover art for Break the Chain. Break the Chain ™ and ©2009 respective owner.
Part 4:
The Truth about Marvel and DC changed everything, I wouldn’t like it. So I figure if I get a script, I should just do whatever he put in the script. I’ve gotten scripts from some people that I didn’t even think were very good, but I didn’t think it was my job to rewrite them. I just said, “Well, this is what the guy wanted to do,” and drew what was written.
MM: In 2001, you worked with some legendary writers. First up was Bob Kanigher, who wrote a “Batman: Black&-White” back-up story for Batman: Gotham Knight #11.
KYLE: Mark Chiarello, the editor, called me up and said he had this Bob Kanigher story. When the hell am I ever going to get another chance to work with Bob Kanigher? It turned out I was right. That was one of his last stories. Occasionally something like that comes along. I get calls all the time, so I get to pick exactly the kind of thing I want to do. If somebody says, “Hey, do you want to work with Bob Kanigher?”.... I did Bugs Bunny for that reason—it’s Bugs Bunny.
MM: You haven’t actually written a comic book story for someone else to draw have you? KYLE: Not in comics, no. Animation, yeah, but I don’t think I have in comics. MM: That same year you worked with Stan Lee on the back-up story in the Superman Just Imagine... book. I imagine that was much like your working experience with Bob Kanigher.
MM: Did you actually get to work with him, or did you just get a script?
KYLE: That was another one of those fun projects. I like those kind of things that are fun to do for maybe a day or two. When you commit to something like Plastic Man, that’s two years of your life. That New York magazine strip lasted three years. You’re just locked in. You can’t quit if it’s good, if it’s a steady job. I’m working on a TV show now, and if the thing gets picked up I could end up working on the same thing for ten years. So you have to think, “This is something I want to be part of for ten years.” I’ve worked on other things where I sort of prayed they wouldn’t get picked up just for that reason. [laughs] So I love quick jobs like that. I’m doing little things for DC now—I’m doing a Wonder Woman story. It’s only 22 pages; I can deal with that. I don’t know if I want to do Wonder Woman for the rest of my life.
KYLE: No, they gave me the script. I heard it was originally written for Alex Toth, and then Toth decided he didn’t want to do it, so it came to me. MM: What was your experience like working with Alan Moore on the “Splash Brannigan” story for ABC Special #1? KYLE: The way he writes scripts is very strange. He puts in very specific details about things, like how big something should be in the panel and where it should be. It’s such a detailed description that I would just draw whatever he wrote down. It was so complicated, I couldn’t see it in my head. He would say something like, “In the left-hand side of the panel, there’s a hand, and it takes up two-thirds of the panel and should be pointing at a 45º angle.” Yeah, I would just do whatever the hell he said. [laughter] But I’d get it done and say, “Oh, I guess that’s what he meant.” I’ve got my own books, and I can do whatever I want on them. But if I were writing a story and some guy
MM: Let’s talk about King David and why you chose to do a graphic novel based on a Bible story. 40
KYLE: I am a big fan of Bible stories. They always have lots of action and all the elements of a good super-hero story. They have the good versus evil, people with magical powers, spectacular special effects, and the stories are terrific. And everybody’s heard of them, which always helps. The audience is pre-sold; somebody is going to want it. My biggest problem with it was that DC insisted on putting a “Mature Readers” label on the book. I said, “It’s a Bible story. How could you put a ‘Mature Readers’ label on a Bible story?” I didn’t change anything. Everything that is in that book is from The Bible. And that’s another thing. I really wanted to change as little as possible. These stories have a following. People go to church every weekend to listen to these stories, and The Bible is the best-selling book ever. I remember seeing the Prince of Egypt movie, and they toned down the plagues. I went for the plagues. [laughter] If I’m seeing King David, I want to see David and Bathsheba and I want to see David and Goliath. That’s what you‘re paying for. I had to put a little humor in it to make DC happy, because I just wanted to do it straight. But the “Mature Readers” label just killed it.
with didn’t want it—I don’t remember exactly what happened, but they didn’t want to carry the book, and I wasn’t at liberty to take it anywhere else. Now I’m actually looking for places to do something with it, because I have all the rights back. Between that experience and a couple of others I was having at DC, I began to feel I could get stuff done faster if I didn’t have to go through the organization. It was around that time that I realized my books weren’t in Barnes & Noble. I first called up DC Marketing, and nagged the guy in charge there for a while. I sent him some books to send to the distributor, but I wasn’t able to just call up Barnes & Noble on my own and make things happen, because I’d be stepping on someone’s toes and pissing them off. Once I started self-publishing, I was able to go to the book fairs and walk up to the distributors and ask them,
MM: Did the label keep it from getting into Christian bookstores? There’s a pretty big market there. KYLE: Warner Brothers has various connections, and the original plan was— [laughs] and I’m always going for this synergy and it never works. You’ll notice it’s a theme in this conversation. I said, “Yeah, I’ll do this book for them, and then they’ll take it to the people that—”. But because the Christian group they were connected 41
Previous Page and Left: Inked sketches of the Dark Knight. Below: Panel from the Splash Brannigan story— written by Alan Moore— “Specters from Projectors,” which appeared in America’s Best Comics Special #1.
Batman ™ and ©2009 DC Comics. Splash Brannigan ™ and ©2009 America’s Best Comics, LLC.
Part 5:
One Thing Leads to Another
MM: How did you hook with Aaron McGruder for Birth of a Nation?
vary my style depending on who the client is. With Aaron being from the newspapers, I felt his fans were probably fans of newspaper strips. The people who read Boondocks, probably also read Calvin & Hobbes and B.C. and the other newspaper strips. We went back and forth on that style, because Aaron actually likes more of an anime style. The funny thing about Aaron is—I guess he doesn’t really draw much anymore—but when he was drawing Boondocks, he could only draw, like, two heads. He could draw a guy from the front and from the side. So they really wanted me to do a more elaborate Neal Adams/Brian Bolland type of thing. But I didn’t think it was appropriate for the audience. Whether it’s right or wrong, I always try to not freak out the client. Whatever it is you’re buying, you’re used to a certain thing. If you’re buying a DC comic, you’re looking for a certain type of thing. DC comics have an identity, and the same goes for Aaron McGruder. I figured if you were an Aaron McGruder fan, you’d be expecting that type of style. I think comedy should be done in a cartoon style. But because they’d written it as a screenplay, they had seen real human beings in their head and actual special effects. I think it came out great, and the people that read it liked it.
KYLE: I had known Reginald Hudlin for a long time. I met him in 1990, I guess. We’d worked together on some TV projects back in the ’90s, and he knew Aaron McGruder. Reggie called me, because Aaron was wanting to quit the Boondocks strip—this was before the TV show happened. Reggie is a producer and Aaron was a new guy. Reggie knew that you kind of had to have a strip if you wanted to have a TV show, but Aaron was missing his deadlines and just wasn’t very interested in the strip anymore, so they were talking to me about possibly ghosting the strip. I wasn’t interested, and suggested maybe Gilbert Hernandez could do it. But that’s how we all met. Then they came up with this story that they couldn’t sell to the movie studios. People were just not ready for a black president. [laughter] It was too farfetched. They told me the story, and it was so funny I decided to do it. I had turned them down at first, because I don’t like to collaborate with people for the simple reason that you have to split the money three ways. But it was such a good story I said I’d do it. And it was an opportunity to work with Aaron, who has his own fanbase. MM: You did Birth of a Nation in a pretty stripped down style, even for you. What was your thinking on the style you used for the book?
MM: Did they just give you a complete script? KYLE: Yeah, they gave me the movie script they had written. They had wanted Cuba Gooding, Jr., so I was thinking of him when I drew the character.
KYLE: I was going for a newspaper strip kind of feel. We were talking before about how I 54
MM: I can see that. KYLE: I wasn’t really trying to make it look like him, but that was the idea. MM: What led you into to self-publishing and the creation of The Bakers? KYLE: At some point I decided I really needed to start self-publishing. It had been a dream of mine for a long time. One thing that really put me into the idea was I had gotten a bunch of money for the Bugs Bunny movie [Looney Tunes: Back in Action], but the economy was all cockeyed. I couldn’t put the money into the stock market or anything like that. I looked at it and I decided that the safest thing to do with my money would be to invest it in my own work. I figured that if my stuff is good enough for Marvel and DC to gamble on, that I should probably have faith in myself and put the money into my own books. I did the math, and I ended up doing better than I would have if I had put it in the stock market. [laughter] I didn’t make a killing or anything, but you know.... MM: Why did you decide to start off with a humor comic? Humor books traditionally don’t do well in comic shops. KYLE: I don’t traditionally do well in comic shops. I think we talked about this before, I
do the comics because I like doing them and they come out the way I want them to. But I’ve always paid my bills by doing advertising or television or stuff like that. I wanted to do cartoons that I owned, because I think there are other places to sell cartoons. Marvel and DC really focus on that direct comic book market, and I think that’s good for certain products, but, for example, I don’t ever see children in comic book stores. I don’t see a lot of women in comic book stores. So, if I had anything for those people, I’m not going to have very good luck in comic book stores. I tried to do the kind of humor that’s adaptable to other formats, like the singlepanel gag format. The original plan was that I could sell some of those to magazines, like The New Yorker or something. The problem was, because I had no editor, I was able to go crazy with the cartoons. I started looking at them and I went, “Wow, The New Yorker would never publish any of these.” [laughter] I had always wanted to do a family cartoon. My favorite comic strips are about families, and are usually based on the cartoonists’ families, like For Better or Worse. And Dennis the Menace is based on his family, Hi & Lois—even Dagwood. And The Family Circus. It’s not as funny as it used to be, but the first couple of years of The Family Circus were really funny. As a fan of family strips, I’ve noticed that most of those strips stopped being funny as soon as the kids grew up and stopped giving the writer material. The first few years of Dennis the Menace are hilarious; the first few years of The Family Circus
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Previous Page: This Bakers gag panel is elegant in its simplicity— one simple image and one word say it all. Above: Caricature of Cuba Gooding, Jr. done for Vibe magazine. Left: The cast of The Bakers letting you know just who they are. Okay, the mouse isn’t exactly part of the family. The Bakers ™ and ©2009 Kyle Baker.
older. Now comics is a medium for older people. It’s hard to find children that are into comics. I’m interested in what the kids are into these days. My daughter spends a lot of time on a thing called Club Penguin. MM: What is that?
Above: Kids these days seem to have far more interests besides candy and comics, but Wonder Woman and the Flash do their part to share some holiday cheer. Next Page: Panel from the Kyle’s upcoming “Hawkman” strip for Wednesday Comics. Flash, Hawkman, Wonder Woman ©2009 DC Comics.
KYLE: It’s an Internet social network, but it’s got games and crap. [laughter] There are all kinds of ways to take your money. It’s like MySpace, but for kids. My point is that’s what kids are doing all day instead of reading comics. Comics became popular because they were so cheap. You were a little kid and you only had a dollar in your pocket. You’d go to the candy store and buy a gumball and a Superman comic and play a video game. That’s how they became popular, and that’s why Superman used to sell millions of copies. For kids to get into something, it’s got to be within their budget. When I was a kid, I’d read the funnies in my dad’s paper. Now there’s no newspaper in the house, because we’re all reading it on the Internet. So it’s possible that cartoons might end up on the Internet. I might be doing comic strips for MySpace in ten years. Who know? I’ve read about the history of music, and originally the money made in music was made from selling the sheet music. Everybody had a piano or a guitar in their house, so your goal was to write a hit song 66
so that you would sell a million pieces of sheet music. When the radio came out, everybody said, “Oh, my gosh! It’s the end of the music business, because you’re going to get music for free in your house now. You’re not going to need a piano anymore. It’s the end of the world!” [laughter] But they figured out another way to make money. They said, “Okay, nobody’s buying sheet music, we’ll sell the record.” It’s the same way with comics. For years, I’ve been putting a lot of my stuff online for free. I always think of Garfield, in that Garfield is something you can get for free every day—or very cheap in the newspaper. Everywhere you go— online or whatever—you can see Garfield for free. By the time you get to the shopping mall and you see a Garfield mug, you say, “Oh, that’s that cat that I’ve seen a hundred million times. I love that cat, because I’ve seen him so much.” A lot of it is just getting the characters out there, giving it away in any medium possible. There may be a day when comics are free and you make the money back by selling the toys. I have musician friends, and they’ll give the music away for free and hope you come to the show or buy a T-shirt. Four dollars for a comic book... that’s getting kind of crazy, to me. MM: I have to buy a lot of comics for books I may want to do down the road, but it’s getting to the point where I can’t take as many chances trying out new books, new talent. KYLE: Jim Shooter used to have a thing called “The Popsicle Principle.” This was back in the ’80s, and Shooter would say, “Your competition is a popsicle. Your product can never go above the price of a popsicle. Your customer is this kid, and his dad gave him a buck, and he goes to the candy store and he says, ‘Oh, I can buy a popsicle or I can buy a Spider-Man comic or I can play Space Invaders.’” That was the world we were thinking of. When it gets to be $4, it becomes, “I can buy a copy of a Spider-Man comic or I can rent the Spider-Man movie or this video game.” Things change, but there will always be a business because people love those characters.
Part 6:
Storytelling and the Creative Process right now, like working on “Hawkman” or Phineas and Ferb—you get paid right now, but I’ll never get a risidual check for Phineas and Ferb. So I always have to balance things that pay right now with things that will build towards a future. Nat Turner was self-published and took a lot of work. Considering how much work I put into it, because I had to do heavy research, it’s probably a break-even project even though it sold pretty well. But because I did it, now I’m getting those other jobs, like the Obama job. If I hadn’t done Nat Turner as a break-even thing, I wouldn’t be doing the Obama thing now. I made out a schedule for this year that I have to create three new characters, three new properties. I don’t know what they are yet, but I’ve got to create three new properties and I have to get the books out by certain dates. I’ve got the Diamond schedule on my wall. It’s a balancing act. I’m doing a lot of work in 3-D now—backgrounds and things—and the nice thing about it is that it’s reusable. It’s a way to help me stay on schedule. I’m building skyscrapers, because I’m doing a Supergirl story where she fights a giant monster, so I have to build a bunch of buildings for
MM: What’s your typical day like? You work on a lot of different projects, so I imagine you jump back and forth between things quite a bit. Do you have a specific structure to your day in order to keep everything under control? KYLE: I usually try to figure out what’s more important. This week I have to do a job for DC, because DC pays in three weeks, and I need to have a check by the end of February because my rent’s going to come up. I also have this Barack Obama book I’m doing, but we’re still negotiating the contract, and I’m thinking the chance of me getting a check for that within the month is pretty slim. So the priority becomes the Hawkman story, because that’s the one I have the best chance of getting paid for this week. What ends up happening is I put things like Special Forces or Nat Turner on hold, because I’m the publisher and I can delay those. That’s why some of my books take a hundred years to come out, and others always come out on time. Plastic Man had to come out on time. But then next week, I will probably have to end up working on the animation thing. It’s always a balance of the stuff that’s going to put the money in my pocket
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