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MARK BUCKINGHAM By Eric Nolen Weath ing

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& © DC Characters TM Comics.

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- T W O :

MARK BUCKINGHAM edited by Eric Nolen-Weathington front cover by Mark Buckingham front cover color by D’Israeli 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 • March 2010 • Printed in Canada Softcover ISBN: 978-1-60549-014-4 Trademarks & Copyrights All characters and artwork contained herein are ™ and ©2010 Mark Buckingham unless otherwise noted. Scene But Not Herd, Phibi, Zeb, and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Mark Buckingham. Duck & Cover, Haemerrhoids Rabbit ™ and ©2010 Mark Buckingham and Andrew Elliott. Fables and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Bill Willingham and DC Comics. Aqualad, Arsenal, Batman, Books of Magic, Clayface, Darkseid, Death, Flash, Hellblazer, Kid Flash, Merv Pumpkinhead, Mr. Freeze, Nightwing, Poison Ivy, Robin, Sandman, Speedy, Superman, Tefé, Tempest, Titans, Troia, Wonder Girl, and all related characters ™ and ©2010 DC Comics. Ben Parker, Captain America, Dr. Doom, Dr. Strange, Fantastic Four, Galactus, Gen-X, Ghost Rider 2099, Giant-Man, Immortalis, Invisible Girl, Iron Man, Kraven the Hunter, Lizard, Mr. Fantastic, Mysterio, Peter Parker, Sandman, Spider-Man, Thing, Thor, Vulture, Wasp, and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Marvel Characters, Inc. ABC Warriors, Ace Garp, Future Shocks, Tyranny Rex ™ and ©2010 2000 AD. Channel Evil and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Renegade Arts Entertainment Ltd. Mice Templar ™ and ©2010 Michael Avon Oeming and Bryan JL Glass. Odd and the Frost Giants and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Neil Gaiman. Star Trek and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Paramount Pictures. Snow Cherries from France ™ and ©2010 Tori Amos. The Lionheart ™ and ©2010 Chris Opperman. Bull Damn City, Fun with Leonardo, Miracleman, and all related characters ™ and ©2010 respective owner. Editorial package ©2010 Eric Nolen-Weathington and TwoMorrows Publishing.

Dedication To my Snow White, Donna, and our two cubs, Iain and Caper. And to the happily ever after. Acknowledgements Mark Buckingham, for being so enthusiastic, so generous with his time, and such a nice guy. Irma Page, for helping Bucky with scanning and other technical details. Special Thanks D’Israeli, Heritage Auctions (www.ha.com), George Khoury, 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-Two:

MARK BUCKINGHAM Table of Contents Introduction by Neil Gaiman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Part One: The Benefits of Society Life. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Part Two: Every Moment of Light and Dark Is a Miracle . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Part Three: Going Where the Action Is . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Part Four: Fables and the Reconstruction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 Part Five: Storytelling and the Creative Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 Art Gallery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

Part 1:

The Benefits of Society Life

MODERN MASTERS: Let’s start with the basics. When and where were you born?

BUCKY: The nearest city is Bristol, famous for being an important merchant port in past years and also home to a lot of engineering work, like Rolls-Royce and British Aerospace. It’s by the sea, but it’s also very rural. It’s part of the agricultural heart of the UK, as well. I have that duality, myself. I need the sea, I need the countryside, but I like to be close to city life. I’m not really a country boy, but I can appreciate that lifestyle. It was a really pleasant place to grow up. I always felt very safe there. It was a quiet seaside town. Not a lot happening, but at the same time not a lot of danger either.

MARK BUCKINGHAM: Born in Clevedon—a seaside, Victorian town in the southwest of England—on the 23rd of May, 1966. I spent the large part of my life there. Apart from a brief period away studying when I was doing my design degree and the last three or so years where I’ve been spending a lot of time in Spain, I’ve pretty much always lived there. MM: What is that area of England like?

MM: What were your expectations of what you could do career-wise when you grew up? What did your parents do for a living? BUCKY: Most of the time I was growing up, my father worked in electrical generation. He was a plant operator at a power station. He was also a retained fireman. He was on call at a moment’s notice to go to the local fire station. We didn’t have full-time firemen in our town; they all had other jobs. My grandfather had been a fireman as well. My mother worked selling new homes for a while, and also was a hairdresser when she was younger. She had a lot of other skills, but focused a lot of her time on bringing up the family. MM: You have siblings then? BUCKY: I have a sister named Claire, who’s two years younger than me. We’re a relatively small family. My mum’s parents lived in town as well, so we grew up having them around. MM: Where did your interest in art come from? BUCKY: I think it kind of grew out of a period of time when I got sick when I was four years old. I was very sick for a few weeks with a lung infection, I think it was. Straight after that I had gastroenteritis. Mum says I was just skin and bones. They were very worried. I had to spend a lot of time at home and keep myself amused. My parents, very sensibly, gave me Plasticine [a type of non-drying modeling clay] and pens and paper. And I just drew and made 6

things, and that was the start of it all really. That became the one thing that I would always want to do. It kept me going and was the one thing I began to excel at. You know, I did okay with things like English and stuff, but I wasn’t the greatest when it came to math and other subjects. I was pretty average in those, and I was very poor when it came to sports, so having something I could feel special about myself was really important to me. It gave me a focus. My parents also started buying me comics pretty early on, and that, I’m afraid, was terribly influential on me. [laughter] All I cared about after that were comic books and animation. My parents bought me a Super-8 camera when I was about ten years old, and I used to make my own animated films— Aardman-style claymation stuff. Of course, I ended up working for Aardman eventually. MM: It’s funny. You’re the second British artist I’ve covered in this series—not counting John Byrne who spent most of his childhood in Canada—and both you and Alan Davis mentioned Plasticine as something you spent a lot of time working

with as children. Was it popular in England at the time? BUCKY: Oh, extremely popular with kids. Very unpopular with parents, because it tended to get trodden into carpets. But for anyone with an imagination, any sort of toy that allows you to be creative without being in any way restricted, I think, is marvelous. And it’s one of the things that saddens me a bit with a lot of modern toys and games is that all the thinking’s been done for you. They whirl, they buzz, they make funny noises, they zip around the room, but that’s it. The fun and the potential of the toy is already accounted for. Things like Lego or Plasticine—anything that allows you to build and to explore alternatives.... Lego was another big thing for me growing up. I would always make the truck or the petrol station or whatever it was the kit was supposed to be, but then once that was done, they’d immediately get ripped apart again, and the pieces would join the hundreds of others waiting to be turned into something that looked a bit like the spacecraft I’d just seen on the front cover of 2000 AD. 7

Previous Page: Sciencefiction was a big part of Bucky’s childhood, so it was only fitting he tried his hand at a sci-fi strip early on in his career. These 1987 pencils were for an unfinished strip called, “Hieronymus Blunt.” Above: Some of Bucky’s first professional work was for The Truth, a British satirical magazine, and the place where Neil Gaiman also got his start. “Haemerrhoids Rabbit” wasn’t so much satire as potty humor—literally. Haemerrhoids Rabbit ™ and ©2010 Mark Buckingham and Andrew Elliott.

Part 2:

Every Moment of Light and Dark Is a Miracle

MM: Was Hellblazer the first time you had inked someone else’s pencils?

onto the job, and completed my degree. Then I returned to my hometown of Clevedon and rented a studio, because I was still living at home with my parents, and just carried on. One of the first things that happened once I moved back home was I got another little bit of work via Neil. He arranged with Mark Waid, who was the editor at the time of Secret Origins, for me to draw the secret origin of Poison Ivy, which Neil had written. That was great for me, because having gotten into DC as an inker, I was immediately getting an opportunity to show what I was capable of as a penciler, as well. That was a lot of fun, and I inked myself. One thing that was apparent in that strip—and something that crops up a lot with me throughout a big chunk of my career—is that the penciling I did was very much me appropriating qualities of Richard Rayner from what he’d been doing on Hellblazer. As Neil used to say, I kind of consume my co-creators. [laughter] I absorb lots of their qualities and attributes and learn everything I can from the way they approach their work, and then fold that into what I do. Especially being very early on in my career, I stole big chunks of what Richard was doing in terms of the photorealism.

BUCKY: No. That was probably the one thing in my favor, was that I’d been working with some of the guys in the North Staffs Comic Society, inking some of their strips while we were learning our craft. There was one friend in particular, Chris Ski—I inked quite a few pages of his stuff. That helped me a lot. Also, Shane Oakley and I used to sometimes ink each other’s work; we had very different styles, but it was a good learning experience. The other thing that helped me a lot was that Matt Brooker gave me my very first brush—a proper Winsor & Newton series 7, #3 sable brush—and said, “This is what real comic artists ink with. You’ve got to go and learn how to use this, because I am, too.” Basically, Hellblazer was my big learning curve. I’d only been learning to ink with a brush for a few months before that job arrived, and by the end of my time on Hellblazer I couldn’t ink with anything else. MM: Would you still use a pen for fine detail work? BUCKY: I used to do some bits and pieces with Rotrings—eyes and little details. I didn’t rule lines with a brush; I used technical pens for the fine straight-line stuff. But I learned to do everything else with a brush.

MM: There’s a panel in the story that really stands out for me. It’s the panel of Pamela Isley as a little girl, and on the floor to one side of her there is a kid’s crayon drawing, and on the other side there is a tube of lipstick and a string of pearls, and you only see her from the knees down as she’s trying on her mother’s high heel shoes. It’s a great composition, as well as a nice allusion to the sensual woman she will later become. How much of that was in the script, and how much was your interpretation of the scene?

MM: That Hellblazer work is very detailed. BUCKY: Richard poured acres of little bits of hatching, little detailing on buildings and things, into every panel of his pencils, so it was a lot of work. But I survived it fine, hung 16

BUCKY: I’m sure he specified her wearing her mother’s shoes, but I can’t remember if he specified it being a close-up shot. But all of that stuff was personal. The family photograph where you see her with her parents I partly based on a photograph of my parents with my sister. There’s another panel with the young Pamela surrounded by flowers which was based on a photograph of my sister sitting on the front porch. There were a lot of little bits and pieces that I put in that were quite personal, but they seemed to help build a reality into what I was trying to convey in capturing her childhood. MM: And you had to portray a gamut of emotions with her character. At times she’s very innocent looking, at times she’s seductive, and then there’s the psychotic rage. Was that daunting at all so early in your career? BUCKY: No, to be honest, that was something that I latched onto very early on as something I enjoyed doing and something that came relatively easy to me. The irony is that for a lot of people going into comics what comes easy is the super-muscled people in tights hitting each other through buildings, whereas for me that was always the thing that I struggled with. I didn’t really knuckle down and get to grips with that side of my work until right up to when I was drawing Spider-Man around the year 2000. But one of the reasons I think I hung around so much doing work at Vertigo was subject matter-wise I was far more excited by trying to convey the subtleties of emotion—little glances, little moments, a turn of a head or a body posture that can convey so much about what a person’s going through. That was always something I got very excited about and really enjoyed pursuing and developing, so that’s why myself and Vertigo were such a good match. But the Poison Ivy story was fun. I got to draw Batman and Robin, which was cool, and everyone seemed to be happy with it. What worked out to my advantage there—and I’m sure it was all part of Neil’s master plan—was that he was helping me gain experience as an artist in my own right with the idea that Miracleman would be the endpoint. Because at some point that was still hopefully going to happen, if all the negotiations with Eclipse went well.

As it worked out, Richard went through some personal things that meant he had to leave Hellblazer, and I used that Poison Ivy strip as my audition piece. I asked Karen if she would consider giving me a chance to carry on the book, sort of maintaining some of Richard’s style, because part of the problem was that we’d lost Richard in the middle of “The Fear Machine” story arc. So I jumped into that, and that meant we needed to find an inker. My first attempt to pass on the good luck that had been coming to me via Neil was that I tried to do the same for Matt Brooker, who had inked a horror strip of mine for Shriek, which was a magazine-sized companion to 17

Previous Page: Miracleman commission drawing. Above: This page from “Pavane” in Secret Origins #36 gave US audiences their first inkling that this Buckingham guy may be someone to keep an eye on. Bucky personalized this story by using family photos as reference for the first and third panels.

BUCKY: That’s their hope. That’s my understanding from talking with the people at Marvel. They would like Neil and I to return and carry on from where we left off. MM: After so long, would you be able to pick up right where you left off? BUCKY: I’m certainly happy for “The Golden Age” to stand as it was done. It’s of its time, and I think it’s still valid now. It deserves to be seen as it was, because it has influenced people, and it was considered an important work for the time. I feel less connected to “The Silver Age.” We got half of it done, but my problem is that it’s supposed to be a consistent tale following consecutive actions and each issue is done in a different style from the previous one. My gut instinct, whenever I think about “The Silver Age,” is that I would want to go back and start from the beginning in order to do a six-part story that works as a unit, taking on board what I’ve learned since, but also reconnecting to what I was doing back then. I’d like to get playful again, but in a way that’s more focused and consistent. That would be my hope, and I’m still desperate to do “The Dark Age,” the final story arc. Neil and I had very clearly planned it out, and visually I know exactly how the last issue was going to be drawn. The fact that I’ve been sat for the last 16 years not being able to do it is pretty irritating. [laughter] MM: Would you be concerned at all about people’s expectations? It’s taken on a sort of mythical aspect, and there are so many comic fans who haven’t read it who probably expect it to be the greatest comic ever done and would be disappointed by anything less. Above: Miracleman mourns the loss of his comic book heroes in Miracleman: Apocrypha #2. Now he’s joined them. Next Page: Designs for the 20th anniversary Sandman bookends.

MM: The immediate fan concern about the announcement was that Marvel would try to integrate Marvelman into their universe rather than allowing it to be a separate, unique universe on its own. BUCKY: I think a lot of that will depend on how clearly they are able to negotiate with everyone over the existing material. I’m not aware of Marvel’s plans for the character beyond the archival projects and the completion of my stories with Neil. MM: So Marvel is open to you and Neil finishing the story you started at Eclipse? 32

BUCKY: Maybe, but I’m still prouder of Miracleman than I am a big chunk of the stuff I’ve done in my career. It wasn’t until Spider-Man with Paul Jenkins and Fables with Bill Willingham where I really felt that I was starting to do work of a standard that could beat the Miracleman stuff. The Miracleman stuff, for me, was a much purer work of art in terms of it being something produced by Mark Buckingham. There was a large chunk of my career where my confidence in my work was so low that when I penciled it didn’t feel like it was me. It was me trying to fit in just to get work rather than any statement in my own right.

Part 3:

Going Where the Action Is

MM: As you mentioned earlier, during your time on Miracleman you did work on a few other projects. In 1991 you inked Bryan Talbot on Sandman Special #1. How was that experience for you?

Sandman statue, I did the Sandman and Death bookends recently, so there always seems to be something related to Sandman in my work load. It’s nice, because I’ve been strengthening my relationship with Neil again in recent years, and it’s been wonderful to have these little projects that give us an excuse to be in touch and working together again, even if it’s not something on the scale of Miracleman. Part of the problem of us having not really worked together in a fuller way in the years following Miracleman was the very fact that we kept thinking Miracleman would be back. There was a pressure there that if we worked together on another project the first question everyone would ask would be, “When are you bringing Miracleman back?” It’s like we’ve got unfinished business. It got to the point where we’d done virtually nothing together for four or five years, and we said, “This is silly. We should at least be doing some bits and pieces together instead of just waiting for the book to come back.”

BUCKY: That was good fun. I like Bryan a lot as a person, and I love his work, so it was a great pleasure to work with him. As a British artist growing up on his stuff, reading Luther Arkwright and the Brainstorm Studio stuff he did in the ’70s, his work is very important to me—his work on “Nemesis.” He’s a sweetheart. He’s very easy to work with and a nice friend. In another world I would’ve been a lot more involved with Sandman than I ended up being. Certainly, there were other opportunities where I could have contributed to Sandman, but it didn’t happen because of other commitments. If I’d had a bit more confidence and hadn’t bottled out when Neil first spoke to me back in ’87 about Miracleman and Sandman, there’s a part of me that thinks that if I really pushed I could have been involved with Sandman earlier on as well. But it’s fine; I’m very glad to have been part of it. I worked on that annual, and then I came back and worked with Bryan on the framing sequences for the “World’s End” book. And I did two Death miniseries. And these days I seem to be involved with Sandman-related stuff more than ever. I did the design for the 20th anniversary Sandman poster, I did a

MM: In 1993 you penciled and inked the 42-page lead story in Swamp Thing Annual #7. You mentioned wanting to do a children’s book earlier, and you got to play with some aspects of that in this story, which was part of “The Children’s Crusade” Vertigo crossover event. How did the job come about? BUCKY: I think Stuart Moore and Julie Rottenberg were the editors on that. Neil must have had some influence in that, because it came about around the time that Miracleman died.

Part 4:

Fables and the Reconstruction

MM: How did you go to being the regular artist of Peter Parker, Spider-Man?

had to look at it, so I picked it up and it was Mike Mignola inking Kirby on the cover of The Jack Kirby Collector [#24]. I had never seen this magazine before, and it was, “Wow! What’s this then?” I looked through it, and it was filled with all these pencil stat images of Kirby artwork. The stuff was amazing! What really connected with me was the freedom that was there in his pencils, the energy. They weren’t like my pencils, which at the time were very, very soft, very delicate, very light. Much of it was drawn with a propelling pencil rather than your old-fashioned wooden one. I kept looking at the stuff thinking, “Wow! There’s so much energy here. Why haven’t I got this? This is what I’ve been doing wrong. This is how it should be.”

BUCKY: John Byrne left Spider-Man and John Romita, Jr. switched over to fill his spot. Suddenly, the plans to do 15 issues a year of each book went out the window, and I was the new regular penciler on Peter Parker, Spider-Man. But they didn’t know who was going to be writing it, so, since I didn’t have a script, I spent about a week and a half just doodling away drawing Spider-Man and getting into the right frame of mind for it. I did some cover sketches and pin-ups and that sort of stuff. What also happened— and this is very important to what happened to me

from that point onward— was I went and did a signing in Bath, a nearby city to where I was living in Clevedon. It was myself and an old friend of mine, Mike Collins, and we were in a comic shop called The American Dream Gallery, which was named that way because, besides being a comic shop, they also had a gallery where they sold original artwork. As I sat there on a Saturday afternoon having a good time, my eyes kept getting dragged to this one book that was sitting on one of the shelves to one side of me. It was this big, green monster fighting these Roman-looking soldiers. I

So I bought it, took it home, and it lived beside me for the next few weeks and completely transformed the way that I worked. Just looking at that stuff, I immediately threw the propelling pencil away, went to the local newsagent, bought a pack of ten of basic, eraser-on-the-end pencils, and sat down and started drawing again. Everything was suddenly bolder; it had more energy, more freedom. There was less agonizing over every detail. It was just energetic, straight down on paper. 50

That, combined with being paired with Paul Jenkins as my writer—who I hadn’t worked with before, but we chatted on the phone and made an instant connection. Paul has family in the same part of the UK that I’m from, and we found a lot of common ground. We chatted away, and we both understood what we wanted to do with the character, to kind of get away from all the strange, convoluted plotlines with clones and things. We wanted to get back to Peter at home with his aunt dealing with day-to-day problems while having fun adventures as Spider-Man that were self-contained—an issue or a short run— and were such that you’d never have to read another Spider-Man book to “get” it. And that’s what we did. Paul kind of came into it late, so he rang me up and said, “This book is already due, so here’s what I want to do in the first issue.” A lot of that first issue was just plot-

ted verbally. The next few were a combination of telephone planning followed by Paul writing me a plot. It was probably half a year into our run before I started to get full written scripts. We would just talk on the phone, and he’d tell me what we were going to do and I’d get on with it. The freedom I felt working that way, combined with the energy I was putting into the art thanks to the influence of what I was seeing in Jack’s stuff, completely transformed me. That’s when my confidence came back with real force. That’s when all the anxiety started to disappear. I just believed in my ability to draw again. It saved me. I honestly don’t think I would be doing comics now—certainly not penciling—if it wasn’t for those elements coming together as they did. MM: You were on Peter Parker, Spider-Man for quite a while. One issue that stood out for me was the story where Peter is 51

Previous Page: An unused spot illustration of the webslinger. Page: This two-page spread from Bucky’s first issue of Peter Parker, Spider-Man (#20 if you’re keeping score) made an early statement about the type of run he and writer Paul Jenkins were about to embark on. Like the title of the book says, it’s about Peter Parker and the things that make him special as a character. Peter Parker, Spider-Man ™ and ©2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Below: A commission illustration of Bigby, Snow, and their cubs. Next Page: These days Rose Red looks a good deal like Bucky’s wife, Irma. Fables #24, page 4. Inks by Steve Leialoha.

encounters the dragon in the cave, the style I was using there with the black pencil I was really pleased with, and that’s something that I’ve played with a bit more since. MM: Was that a grease pencil you were using? BUCKY: No, just a regular black coloring pencil. I tend to use the cheapest, most basic materials I can find. [laughter] This

thing about an artist blaming his tools, I’ll use anything—with the exception of brushes for inking; I’m quite specific about that: a Winsor & Newton series 7, #3. Apart from that, I’m not at all fussy about anything. The pencils I draw most of my books with are just cheap HB pencils from a big stationery store in the UK—the ones with erasers on the end. I buy packs of ten for about a pound; they’re not expensive, but they work for me. The same goes for most things when it comes to painting and other mediums, too. I make whatever I can find work for me. I don’t go searching for specific tools which I think will make the work better. Because, really, at the end of the day, what makes it good is what you do with it. MM: I want to talk a bit about the age progression of Snow and Bigby’s children. Have you found that to be a challenge through the series, to age them but to keep them easily recognizable? BUCKY: It can be. It’s worse if we don’t see much of them and they suddenly have to jump a year or two just for one page and then they disappear again for a while. I find that slightly more of a strain. When I get to draw them for a while, like in the Christmas issue where they were the focus of that tale, that kind of thing I like better, because then I have a little time to get used to them. To be honest, anything that allows me to have fun with characters other than standard male or female figures makes me happy. I like drawing children. I like drawing old people, babies... anything that makes me work a bit harder and think things through a bit more. But give me a crowd of handsome people in their 20s or 30s and I get quite bored. I find it a strain to make it interesting. MM: Do you have a favorite character? BUCKY: I have lots of favorite characters. Flycatcher is probably one of the ones I like the most, and I’m still campaigning to stop Bill from finding an excuse to kill him. [laughter] But Boy Blue I like a lot, as well, so I’m sad that he’s gone. Pinocchio I like a lot. I like Rose Red immensely as a character to draw. That’s partly because I ended up slowly tweaking her appearance until she looked an awful lot like my wife, Irma. So there are personal reasons why I like to draw her. [laughter]

Part 5:

Storytelling and the Creative Process the same time period my editors were in their offices in New York. I was effectively working to a New York schedule, and that worked very well. At the moment she has a new job that is focused more in the morning. I am working more of a regular day now. I guess I’m working from about 10:00 in the morning ’til about 2:00, then stopping for a while for lunch and maybe getting going again around 4:00 or 5:00 and working into

MM: Do you ever use Irma as a model?

BUCKY: Yes, and myself. I used to be much more reliant on things like mirrors and Action Man—sort of a British equivalent of [the original, 12"] G.I. Joe. I still have one of those lying around, which I find quite useful for figure work. But digital cameras are great. It’s become the most useful tool in my office, really, because it’s so convenient to be able to set the timer, pose in a way that’s appropriate for something I’m struggling with on the page, and be able to work from that in an immediate way to be able to get something more genuine and realistic down onto the page, and I’m afraid I’ve made Irma pose from time to time. [laughter] It’s a very good way of clarifying things in your mind. I don’t think in terms of taking photographs when I’m planning an issue. I always lay everything out just drawing straight on the page. But as I’m tightening things up, I do find sometimes that if I can take a quick snap to make sure a body posture looks natural, or that if someone falls down on the floor they will land in that way, it’s really useful. And I don’t even print them out or anything. I just turn the camera around and take a peek at the image I’ve got, and usually that’s enough to make the adjustment I need to make it right. MM: What’s your typical working day like? Do you try to stick to a set schedule, or does it vary from day to day? BUCKY: It varies depending on all sorts of different factors, really. I do try and make my day coincide with Irma’s. For a while she was presenting a late-night political discussion program on local regional television. That meant her working day mostly ran from about 5:00 in the afternoon through to about 1:00 in the morning, which are horrible hours for any normal person to have to contend with. But for me it actually worked out to be perfect, because it meant I was drawing at my desk during 67

Left: Uncropped watercolor painting for the titlepage art of “The Christmas Pies,” the story Bucky painted for Fables: 1,001 Nights of Snowfall. Above: A watercolor test piece of Reynard the Fox for “The Christmas Pies.” Page 102: Watercolor cover painting for Channel Evil #2. Channel Evil is a three-issue mini-series from Bucky’s old friend Shane Oakley. Page 103: This watercolor painting was printed as a poster which was given free to attendees of the Aviles Comics Convention in 2009. Page 104: Artwork for Scene But Not Herd, one of the creator-owned projects Bucky is currently developing. Pencils and inks by Bucky, with color courtesy of another of his old friends, D’Israeli. Page 105: Artwork for a trading card set sold for charity at the Bristol Comic Festival 2003.

Fables and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Bill Willingham and DC Comics. Channel Evil ™ and ©2010 Renegade Arts Entertainment Ltd. Aviles Print, Scene But Not Herd, Phibi, Zeb, and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Mark Buckingham.

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Modern Masters Vol. 22: Mark Buckingham