Issuu

M O D E R N

M A S T E R S

V O L U M E

S I X T E E N :

MIKE ALLRED

By Eric NolenWeathington

MODERN MASTERS VOLUME SIXTEEN:

MIKE ALLRED edited and designed by Eric Nolen-Weathington front cover art by Mike Allred front cover color by Laura Allred all interviews in this book were conducted by Eric Nolen-Weathington and transcribed by Steven Tice and Eric Nolen-Weathington

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Dr. Raleigh, North Carolina 27614 www.twomorrows.com • e-mail: twomorrow@aol.com First Printing • April 2008 • Printed in Canada Softcover ISBN: 978-1-893905-86-3 Trademarks & Copyrights All characters and artwork contained herein are ™ and ©2008 Michael Allred unless otherwise noted. Astroesque, The Atomics, Chow Yun-Fat, Citizen Nocturne, Dead Air, Frank Einstein, The Gear, G-Men from Hell, The Golden Plates, Grafik Musik, It Girl, Madman, Mott, Muscleman, Red Rocket 7 and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Michael Allred. They! ™ and ©2008 Michael Allred and Lee Allred. Everyman ™ and ©2008 Bernie Mireault and Michael Allred. Atom, Batgirl, Batman, Bat-Mite, Bigby Wolf, Bizarro, Black Canary, Brother Power the Geek, Catwoman, Clayface, Death-Man, Delirium, Doom Patrol, Dr. Fate, Ferro, Flash, Forager, Green Lantern, Hawkgirl, Hawkman, Hour-Man, Lightray, Lori Lemaris, Metal Man, Metamorpho, Mr. Freeze, Mr. Miracle, Mon-el, Orion, Plastic Man, Prez, Proty, Robin, Sandman, Scarecrow, Shade the Changing Man, Spectre, Supergirl, Superman, Teen Titans, Wildcat, Wonder Woman ™ and ©2008 DC Comics. Ancient One, Ant-Man, Avengers, The Beetle, Black Panther, Captain America, Daredevil, Dead Girl, Dr. Octopus, Dr. Strange, Doop, El Guapo, Fantastic Four, Green Goblin, Gwen Stacy, Impossible Man, Inhumans, Iron Man, Lizard. Mysterio, The Orphan, Peter Parker, Phat, Sinister Six, Spider-Man, Spike, Thor, Tike Alicar, U-Go Girl, Venus DeMilo, The Vision, The Vivisector, Wasp, X-Force, X-Statix, Yellowjacket ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc. Next Issue Project ™ and ©2008 Image Comics, Inc. Flaming Carrot ™ and ©2008 Bob Burden. Mister X ™ and ©2008 Jaime Hernandez. Savage Dragon ™ and ©2008 Erik Larsen. Hellboy ™ and ©2008 Mike Mignola. Big Guy ™ and ©2008 Frank Miller and Geof Darrow. The Jam ™ and ©2008 Bernie Mireault. Jaguar Stories ™ and ©2008 Steven Seagle. The Rocketeer ™ and ©2008 Dave Stevens. Conan ™ and ©2008 Conan Properties International, LLC. Chewbacca, Han Solo, Leia Organa, Luke Skywalker ™ and ©2008 Lucasfilm LTD. Superfolks ™ and ©2008 Robert Mayer. Editorial package ©2008 Eric Nolen-Weathington and TwoMorrows Publishing.

Dedication To Donna, Iain and Caper, the greatest family in the world. Acknowledgements Mike Allred, for his time and contagious enthusiasm. Simon Miller, for his invaluable help gathering artwork. Please visit his website, www.gotsuperpowers.com, where among other things he sells Mike’s artwork. Tell him Modern Masters sent you. Special Thanks Laura Allred, Lambert Sheng, 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 Sixteen:

MIKE ALLRED

Table of Contents Introduction by Darwyn Cooke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Part One: The Journey—a Long Road to Comics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Interlude: Under the Influence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Part Two: All the Madmen—the Making of an Icon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Part Three: It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll—and Comics and Film . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Part Four: Bohemians Like You—Beatniks and Mutants . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 Part Five: Who Are You—the Mind of a Madman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Part Six: A Day in the Life—the Creative Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 Art Gallery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84

Part 1:

The Journey— a Long Road to Comics and other friends’ houses. In the summertime, when it was suppertime, my mom had this cow bell that she would ring, [laughter] and we’d come running out from our secret, underground forts that we dug out. I have incredibly fond memories from my childhood. They’ve been rekindled recently, because my dad just died and I’ve been back there with family recounting all these things. And I’m sure I haven’t idealized it. I’m sure that it was really just that special. My dad had all these great art books, and we always had any number of art supplies and paper. There were books on cartooning, there were New Yorker cartoon collections. Dad had all kinds of different magazines—photography magazines, art magazines—an incredible library of material that just seemed endless. Every time we’d go to the bookshelves you could dig through and find something new, and they probably were new at the time. But there was always something fun and exciting. He would go on trips and come back, and we’d wake up and there would be toys there, whether it was a big, die cast metal plane or Peanuts figures. It was ideal—it really was. Until I guess I was about eleven years old when my parents split up. Soon after that puberty hit, so that idealized childhood was officially at an end.

MODERN MASTERS: You were born in Roseburg, Oregon. Is that correct? MIKE ALLRED: That’s correct. MM: Was Roseburg a small town? MIKE: I think it’s somewhere around 40-50,000. MM: So it’s not that small, but not too big. MIKE: It was a nice size. It really did have a classic American, Norman Rockwell vibe to it. MM: So you probably had fairly open access to the rest of the world then. MIKE: Right. There was a local TV station that was affiliated with one of the large networks, and they had a local cartoon show host. But the best thing about my childhood, as I remember it, was how safe it felt—how warm and comfortable and, I guess, freeing it felt. For instance, we lived up on a hill, but could walk down by ourselves to the main downtown street— which, again, had that Norman Rockwell string of shops. It had a large Payless drugstore that had the classic comic spinner rack, and other drugstores which had comics on the shelves. If you didn’t have the quarter you needed on that day, you would just slide the comic behind the back of the shelf and come back for it later. [laughter] You think back on it now, you think, “Where in the world can people live like that any more?” We walked to school and cut through people’s backyards and over hills. We had our own trails to get around from school

MM: You said your dad had a lot of art and photography books, but he was a psychologist by profession. Evidently he had some artistic leaning, as well. MIKE: Very much so. He was really a unique person. 6

We just had his memorial Saturday, and it was actually at the art center in Roseburg. The art center gave one of its big showrooms for the memorial, and it was packed. I can’t imagine having that many people show up for a funeral or memorial for me. I live a pretty isolated existence locally. I can honestly say my best friends live either several hours away or cross-country. Other than my childhood friends who live very far away, the closest friends I’ve made over the years have been people I’ve gotten to know at comic book conventions or through professional contact. So the idea of building up this kind of communal, enthusiastic representation... I was blown away. It was a day full of people sharing all kinds of amazing memories, and the thing about my dad, he was never satisfied with one thing. He went from hobby to hobby. For instance, he would scuba dive, he would sky dive, he flew gliders, he was an aviator. He built two old-style, open cockpit bi-planes in our basement. He built a single-seater, and after that he built a double-seater. He took a VW Bug that had been wrecked by a friend and turned it into a dune buggy, which he would drive on the hills behind our house. He was a hiker, and he also got into studying wildflowers and insects—butterfly collecting. He never stopped taking art courses—everything from watercolor to sculpting to eventually doing bronzes of his own sculptures. Man, I could go on—he was a writer. He was in a writing class when he was a kid, and they were tasked to send out their work with the idea that the teacher would then instruct them on how to take their rejection letters and apply them constructively. Well, my dad was accepted by The Saturday Evening Post! MM: Wow! MIKE: Yeah! Photography—he built a darkroom in our basement. One of his friends read one of Dad’s short stories at the memorial, and it got a crazed ovation it was so entertaining. [pauses and exhales] Honestly, if this was Friday and I was relating this stuff, I’d be bawling my eyes out. I miss him terribly. He had this deep, soothing voice that—he was just a really charming, friendly, nice, enthusiastic guy. Always looking at the humorous side of things. He worked with Ken Kesey at the VA hospital before Kesey wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. MM: It sounds like you had a truly great environment in which to explore your creative side while growing up. Obviously, you’ve gone not just into art, but film and music. MIKE: Right, I guess that was the point I was trying to make. There was this environment growing up of “you can achieve whatever you want as long as you set your mind to it. You never have to take no for an answer or take criticism as a dead end.” Music, that was more from my mom. It’s no secret my dad lost his left hand—and this is one of the mysteries 7

Previous Page: Mike and brothers, Lee and Curtis, make the rounds through Roseburg, from Solo #7. Left: Mike (left) and big brother, Lee. Below: They!—Mike’s first serious attempt at creating a comic book, with Lee Allred as writer and Laura Allred as letterer (hence the “Allred x 3” credit). They! ™ and ©2008 Michael Allred and Lee Allred. Sandman ™ and ©2008 DC Comics.

Interlude:

Under the Influence

Jack Kirby I’m not alone in finding him to be one of the most powerful and inspiring artists ever. His work had surrounded me in my youth; I just didn’t know that. It was years later when I rediscovered comic books and approached them in a more historical way that I learned the genealogy and significance of comic book creators, and that’s when I realized that all this stuff which made an impact and was very present in my head was work done by Jack Kirby. I admire his energy, his passion, and, as I’ve learned more about him, even the way he lived his life. He was a man of great integrity. He was very dignified, the way he handled himself through adversity and through success. He was a humble man. I had the great honor of meeting him a couple of times, and he was an extremely generous and kind person. His work just explodes with energy. Even the quiet moments in his work, where there are just a couple of people walking down the street, there’s still something that crackles about it, there’s something that’s just alive about it, and that’s something that I want in my work.

Fantastic Four, Inhumans

Alex Toth Here, again, somebody that was very much in my childhood, but I didn’t realize it. A lot of the cartoons that I would see when I got home from school would be stuff that he had designed, the most famous being Space Ghost, The Herculoids, and all that crowd. But, also there were a lot of comic books that he had done. What’s different about Alex Toth, say, from Kirby, is he was all over the place. There’s not really a seminal work that you can point to and say, “This is where you can find why Alex Toth is great.” It’s more of a treasure hunt, from the books that he did for Standard-everything from romance to science fiction and horror comics-up through his work with DC Comics in the ’70s, like the stories in House of Mystery. What I keep going back to with Toth is his economy. He only put on the page what absolutely needed to be there. There isn’t a lot of flourish or showing off or over-compensating with texture that just doesn’t need to be there. He could draw a very simple, pure line drawing, and it would have all the energy and impact of another drawing flooded with bursts and crosshatching and washes. There was so much confidence in his work that he could make it simple and know that, “Okay, it’s done. That’s all that was needed.” I love that about his work. Doom Patrol ™ and

Bruno Premiani Bruno Premiani is one of my biggest influences. I shout his name from the rooftops whenever I have the chance. He doesn’t get nearly the attention he deserves. He’s up there with Kirby and Toth in my book. He wasn’t as prolific or diverse as those guys, but his style and the energy in his work are fantastic.

Part 2:

All the Madmen— the Making of an Icon just thought, “That’s cool. I’ve already thought of Frank Einstein, so what does ‘Frank’ represent?” Frank Sinatra had this sort of cool, confident, tough image that worked perfectly as a contrast to Albert Einstein. So when I came up with the story and had the scientists naming this poor John Doe after two of their heroes, it just seemed to fit; it worked really nicely.

MM: Let’s talk about the process you went through developing the Frank Einstein character into Madman.

MIKE: Frank Einstein was my favorite character and was becoming my most popular character based on the letters and feedback I was getting. At this time our kids were starting school and they were telling their friends what their dad did for a living, and I wanted to do something that they would enjoy, too, because my work up ’til then was a little esoteric and experimental and, honestly, flailing in many ways. I was still trying to find what I really wanted to do. So I dug deep into my childhood and my affection for the characters and books that I loved then, and I decided I would bring that to my Frank Einstein character. Initially he was going to be this kind of ghostly character, and in many ways an homage to Will Eisner, and it was going to be called The Spook. I printed up these glow-in-the-dark Spook t-shirts and made up a dummy book with a cover and put it in a bag and board so it would look like a published book. WonderCon was coming up—I guess this would have been ’91, because that’s when I met Kevin Eastman.

MM: How did the first Madman mini-series come about with Tundra? MIKE: One thing that worked to my benefit was Kevin Eastman with Tundra—I don’t know if you’re familiar with Apple Records, but with the phenomenal success of the Beatles, they created their own record label. It was to be this place where musicians were treated “the right way” and the creators came first. Tundra was kind of presented by Kevin Eastman in the same way: “Creator rights come first. This is going to be the model for all publishers.” So I just felt really grateful to be a part of it. Also, Kevin Eastman was, and is, a very generous person in giving these advances, and a lot of big names were going to have their personal creations spotlighted through Tundra. Let’s just say that some of them weren’t as fast as Kevin had hoped they would be, and so a lot of stuff either came out quite slowly or just not at all. At that time, I became really good friends with a young, phenomenally talented creator named Al Columbia. He was being tasked to take over Big Numbers from Bill Sienkiewicz, and this was going to be one of the big releases from Tundra. I would go to North Hampton a lot, where Tundra was headquartered and Al was living there. He was a huge inspiration to me— amazingly talented. I’ve got a couple of his Madman pieces in the Madman Gallery book. There’s this legendary story of how he was working on the fourth issue of Big Numbers—and I saw it, by the way. It was beautiful work. But it just disappeared, and Al ended up disappearing, too. It’s a story that’s become quite mythical.

MM: Frank Einstein is a terrific play on words that fits the character so perfectly. Not only do you have the homages to Frank Sinatra and Albert Einstein, but you have the obvious Frankenstein reference. Not to mention the word frank itself means open and honest, which Frank certainly is. What was the stroke of inspiration that made you settle on that name? MIKE: It’s the kind of thing that, once you think about it, you want to make sure nobody else gets it before you do. You’re just terrified and paranoid, just like when I thought up the name Madman. I mean, Superman, Spider-Man, Batman, Madman... I was like, “Oh, please let this be mine.” Around that time I had opened myself up to other music outside the rock ’n’ roll that had filled my head for so many years, and I had been listening to a lot of standards, particularly a lot of Frank Sinatra. And I 20

MM: Yeah, I was working in a comic shop when all this was going on, and all the rumors were flying around. MIKE: I consider myself very lucky for having seen this amazing work, but there were stories that it was destroyed, that it was stolen... but it was the death of this monumental project of Alan Moore’s. This was his next big thing to follow Watchmen. So this was the kind of stuff that was surrounding Tundra, but Al was my best buddy in this new Tundra family that I had. Being new and relatively unknown—both of us—we would be at the shows together, and this is when we’d go to every single comic book show there was. It was a lot of traveling and we bonded through that. And I learned a lot from him and just what real, pure talent was. But because of how hard I was forced to work in the Air Force.... I mean, I couldn’t just call in sick. They would make you go to sick call and prove that you were sick. [laughter] That’s one of the downsides to being in the military, at least from my experience. But what happened was you’d develop a really strong work ethic. Getting out of that situation and having this great opportunity with my own creation at this company that was generating a lot of excitement, I would have felt foolish if I hadn’t applied the work ethic I had learned in the Air Force to my now chosen profession. So I did; I worked passionately all day and night to make sure my book was ready to go when it was scheduled to. Because of that I was rewarded again and again, because, “Hey, this guy is doing the work, and we like what he’s doing.” So the people at Tundra would talk about it and call and every department would have ideas about marketing it. Going to all these different shows I had an

illustration of Frank Einstein in this swirling time warp. As I was making new friends and meeting other creators I admired, I would be working on it. Nobody really knew who I was. It’s not like people were lining up to get me to sign anything. “Here, I’ve got an issue of Grafik Musik I want you to sign”—that didn’t really happen. [laughter] But people were seeing what I was working on, and Dave Stevens, who became a really great friend, drew something on there; Al drew something on there. People would come up and say, “Ooh, what’s that?” And they would see guys like Dave Stevens and Geof Darrow drawing on it and they would say, “I want to draw something on it.” All of these amazing creators over the course of that convention season drew all over this thing. Tundra just got really excited about promoting anything that I was doing and they made a big print out of it and came up with a big contest, “How many creators can you name?” They just put a lot of promotion not only into the first series, but then had the faith to allow me to do a full-color series. MM: At that point, had you developed a plan of where you wanted to take the Madman series? MIKE: I was really getting into Tintin at the time, and I loved these self-contained adventure books. The idea 21

Both Pages: The evolution of a Madman. From Frank Einstein as he appeared in Creatures of the Id (inked by Bernie Mireault), through name changes as The Spook and The Goon, and finally the emergence of Madman in the Tundra mini-series. Frank Einstein, Madman ™ and ©2008 Michael Allred.

Below: Madman Comics #7, page 9. Next Page: Red Rocket 7 promo art.

MM: He’s a really fun character. I take it you were watching a lot of John Woo films at the time? MIKE: Absolutely. MM: He’s named after Chow Yun-Fat, obviously, complete with a matchstick permanently in his mouth.

MIKE: No doubt about it. We were at a comic book show, and it might have been Bob Schreck again. He was always introducing me to cool stuff, and I think he might have been the guy that got me excited about John Woo movies. Hard Boiled was playing at a midnight show, and I remember we were with Frank Miller. “Hey, let’s go see this Chinese Hard Boiled.” And I remember Frank saying, “I’ve already done my Hard Boiled,” and he didn’t go. [laughs] But, yeah, I loved those movies, The Killer and Hard Boiled are two of my favorite action films ever. It’s funny because when Laura and I watched The Killer—it might have come on HBO or something—we didn’t even know what it was, didn’t know who John Woo was. We were watching it, and Laura kept going, “He’s cute!” She just had this crazy crush on Chow YunFat. MM: He does have a certain charisma to him. That’s one of his strong suits, I think. MIKE: Yeah, when you look at somebody like Steve McQueen or Clint Eastwood or Alain Delon, they’ve got something. It’s that actual crackle, and Chow Yun-Fat has that, no doubt about it. I don’t care where you’re from, if you’ve got it, you’ve got it, and he has it. And I’ve been happy to see him enjoy some success in America. He definitely translates. I think Geof Darrow might have been a big fan, too. MM: That would make sense, yeah. MIKE: That might have been another reason for bringing that character into it. And that character is in the Madman movie script, too, and it’d be the dream of dreams to get Chow Yun-Fat to play Chow Skip-Wang! [laughter]

Part 3:

It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll— and Comics and Film

MM: After a time Madman went on hiatus as Hollywood became interested in the property. What’s the story behind that? MIKE: Well, while it was still at Tundra, the first interest was from 20th Century Fox, and it was really weird because they must have just been fishing because we got a phone call and they asked to have a bunch of books sent so everybody in this particular office could see it. Which we did, and then we got a letter saying, “Thank you for your interest, but we’re....” It was weird. [laughs] They showed interest, and then I got a letter that kind of sounded like I had approached them. That was my first experience, just this quick in-and-out flush. MM: Was that part of the aftermath of Tim Burton’s Batman movie?

MIKE: Well, after that. It was actually closer to the time when The Crow was huge. Tundra had picked up The Crow, and Madman was second only to The Crow as far as commercial success at Tundra. And I think maybe The Crow’s success as a book and then also as a film is why there was some interest shown. And, also, Tundra was becoming active, especially considering that also around that time the

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies were really big, too, and Kevin Eastman was doing well with that. But it was after the next level of success at Dark Horse that I was approached by a guy who wanted to be my manager and we “took meetings.” [laughter] I’m trying to remember the Hollywood lingo. Universal Pictures picked it up, and that was really great, at least from a confidenceboosting, ego-boosting standpoint. They would constantly fly me in first class, put me up in four-star hotels, and it was the complete red carpet experience. But what I soon realized was that nothing was moving forward. It was a really strange process in that they would fly me down for a one- or two-hour meeting, and I would go back home the next day with no real sense of forward momentum. At that point I took some of the money that they had given me and, in order to kind of exercise my passion for film and also maybe to show them that they should consider me to direct the film, keeping in mind my television experience.... The way I’ve always looked at it was that comic books are essentially like still frames from a film, and your captions and word balloons place your dialogue. An individual can take their film idea and adapt it to the comic book medium. And, as I said before, that’s kind of how I got pulled back into the medium to begin with, with my movie-going pal

Part 4:

Bohemian Like You— Beatniks and Mutants

MM: Well, let’s move on to X-Force then, where you and Peter Milligan threw out the old team and created a whole new cast of characters for the X-universe.

have to create twice as many, because in the first issue we’re going to kill all the new characters.” It was the kind of challenge that I was ready for. Now, at this time I was working on Atomics.

MIKE: That started with Joe Quesada and the editor, Axel Alonso. I had known Joe way back from when he first came on the scene. He showed up around the same time that I did, and we would see each other at shows and stuff, so we had this history. When he got the editorin-chief job at Marvel, I read all of his intentions and what he hoped to do at the company, and it sounded like, again, that party. It was like bringing back the Bullpen atmosphere. So I called him up and said, “Hey, if there’s any place for me at this party, I’d be really interested.” He immediately sicced a bunch of his editors on me to get an idea of where I could fit in with some of the things that they were planning. But it was Axel Alonso who, almost embarrassed, asked if I’d be interested in revamping X-Force. And his initial instincts were correct; I was, like, “No way.” [laughter] But then he told me that Peter Milligan was on board. I had always admired him, and had done that Shade story with him years earlier. And then I was told, “We’re trashing....” Well, maybe I shouldn’t use the word “trashing.” [laughs] “We’re getting rid of the team entirely. It’s going to be X-Force in name only. This is a Marvel mutant book using the X-Force name, but we’re going to need you to create new characters.” Then I perked up. That was, like, “Yes! This sounds great.” Just like the Watchmen example, here in the big spotlight, creating all new characters that would be ours. I immediately started doodling while we were still having this conversation on the phone. All these mutant character ideas started coming to me. He told me, “Not only are we going to need you to create all new characters, you’re going to

MM: Right, I was going to bring that up, because there seem to be some similarities there. The same kind of thing, you’ve created these mutated street beatniks for Atomics, and here with X-Force you have mutants. MIKE: Exactly. Taking a small step back, after this recommitment to comics following the Red Rocket 7 project, Robert Rodriguez, after he passed on Universal, told me that he wanted to do Madman, and if the rights ever reverted to me that he would pick them up. Because of that, and also because the red carpet treatment really gets old after a while when that’s all it is and nothing happens. I just didn’t want to spend more time flying down there and having lunch and.... It was so tiresome. It was really easy to just stop providing input and let it lapse. MM: Did a full script ever get written? MIKE: Yeah, a terrific guy named Dean Lorey wrote a draft and then went on to produce and write on Arrested Development. Robert Rodriguez was the first person to give me any constructive feedback on my draft. The problem with that was the script that I had written started with the plot thread from the original series, but worked really hard to get in elements that were in the current books, like Mott the alien from Hoople. It was just a real mish-mash, and it was really forced, just shoving everything in there. But at the time I wrote it I was thinking that’s the thing 50

to do, jam as much stuff in there as I can. The option lapsed about a year after that, and in the meantime Robert and I got to be really great friends. He came up and stayed at our house, I went down to stay at his house. And calling his house a house is kind of an understatement. [laughs] He’d just finished his palace the first time I went there, and it’s become Disneyland since then. So, by when the option lapsed, Robert immediately snatched it up, and next year is going to be our tenyear anniversary of him optioning the Madman project. We can talk about that later, but what’s most important about this time period was my recommitment to comics. I got with Mike Richardson and told him, “Okay, I’m going to stay away from these esoteric projects. Right now I’m going to completely commit to what I do best.” I had the idea of spinning off the mutant beatniks into a super-hero team, which was The Atomics. With Red Rocket 7, I’d been largely successful with the monthly schedule, and I thought, “Well, I’ll do that now, alternating between Madman and The Atomics.” But Mike was only interested in Madman at this point. They had lost money on Red Rocket 7. I don’t know if they broke even on Feeders and Eyes to Heaven or not. So he really wanted me to do Madman and nothing else. And I don’t blame him. He’s a businessman, and Madman was what sold, Madman was what was proven, so it would make sense to go to a monthly schedule with Madman, which was bi-monthly up until then—if that. It became more sporadic as time went on. During the time period leading up to

this, Jamie Rich—who had been Bob Schreck’s right-hand man, and who would become one of my very best friends—and Schreck left to form Oni Press with Joe Nozemack. Jamie was the heart of Red Rocket 7. There could not have been a better editor for Red Rocket 7. Jamie’s an encyclopedia of music knowledge, and he knew things that we could get excited about in music and films. He’s also a film critic and a novelist. An extremely talented guy, and I couldn’t say enough nice things about him. This is where I’ve really been blessed, 51

Previous Page: The Orphan—the leader of X-Force/X-Statix. Above: Cover art for The Atomics #11, from Mike and Laura’s AAA Pop Comics.

Below: More actionpacked storyboards for the Madman movie. Next Page: Mike’s inks over Darwyn Cooke’s pencils for Catwoman #4, page18.

Josh Hartnett. That shows you what kind of guy Robert is. So when he met with Frank, he was already able to show him what it would look like. Of course, Frank was blown away, and the rest is history. After that, the Madman movie became just a matter of breaking the code and making the right screenplay. I have to take full responsibility in the Madman movie not being closer to production, because I kept waiting for Robert to offer up his ideas for the screenplay when he was trying to direct me into taking another stab at it. When I’d go down to Austin, we’d keep building this outline, and it was really on me to start putting it together in screenplay form, and I would always put that off. Eventually, he hooked me up with one of his oldest friends, George Huang. When he first went to Hollywood, he slept on George’s floor, a guy who worked at Columbia, and later, inspired by his experiences there, wrote and directed Swimming with Sharks. It’s a great movie with Kevin

Spacey and Frank Whaley. A brilliant movie. George is a genius on story structure and that sort of thing. So George came up here and stayed in our houseboat, and we locked ourselves down there and got the initial story down that we could present to Dimension, which is where Robert wanted to take it. We created this treatment, and, through George, it was almost like therapy. You know, “What do you want? How do you see the film? What elements do you want in there? Why is the character doing this, and what’s going to bring this around?” It was really great how George just kind of broke it down. And this is how he works with Robert. He’s worked with Robert on most if not all of his films. And it broke the code. This takes us up to about a year ago, when we finalized our deal with Dimension, and now they’re paying us to finish the screenplay. We’d done a draft, but now we can’t do any more work because of the Writer’s Guild strike. Another holding pattern.

Part 5:

Who Are You— the Mind of a Madman

MM: Catwoman came about during your run on X-Force. How did you get involved with that?

this stuff and it was so fully formed and unique and electric, I just loved it. Ed called up Darwyn and we met at a restaurant somewhere, and Darwyn and I just hit it off. We like the same things—the same movies, the same music. So I signed on, and it was just incredibly therapeutic. It was the kind of thing that I could just let my brush go, and it just seemed very natural, and I absolutely loved it.

MIKE: In regards to revamps and not being a fan, I do have some examples of revamps which I think are successful and which I celebrate, and the most obvious one, for me, would be Ed Brubaker and Darwyn Cooke’s take on Catwoman. I had seen one promo piece on it, and soon after was at a comic book show, I think San Diego, and ran into Ed Brubaker, who I’ve known since our very first WonderCon. He told me that the artist, Darwyn Cooke, was looking for an inker, and, when asked for his dream list, put me at the top. I told Ed that he was full of it, but he told me, no, really, sincerely, that Darwyn loved my work, and if he could pick any inker, he would want it to be me. MM: Did you know Darwyn’s work at that point? He hadn’t done much yet, as far as comics go—only Batman: Ego and maybe something else. MIKE: Batman: Ego was probably the only thing that I was familiar with. And I liked it, but I probably just saw it as in the Bruce Timm school of cartoonists. There would be these Batman specials that would utilize the folks that worked on the animated series, and Ego had that look. So, at the time, I didn’t look deep enough to see what was special about Darwyn’s stuff. It was successful on that level, but didn’t strike me the way that Catwoman did. I just thought that was some of the most exciting stuff I’d seen in years. MM: So they sent you several pages to look at before you signed on? MIKE: Actually, I think it was the hotel hallway where Ed and I were talking, and he opened up his bag and showed me some of the pencils, and I think right then and there I said, “If you’re telling me the truth and Darwyn wants me to be a part of this, I’m there.” Because I just looked at 63

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Modern Masters Vol. 16: Mike Allred