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M O D E R N

M A S T E R S

V O L U M E

N I N E T E E N :

MIKE PLOOG

by Roger Ash and Eric Nolen-Weathington

MODERN MASTERS VOLUME NINETEEN:

MIKE PLOOG edited by Eric Nolen-Weathington and Roger Ash front cover painting by Mike Ploog all interviews in this book were conducted and transcribed by Roger Ash proofreading by Fred Perry

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Dr. Raleigh, North Carolina 27614 www.twomorrows.com • e-mail: twomorrow@aol.com First Printing • November 2008 • Printed in Canada Softcover ISBN: 978-1-60549-007-6 Trademarks & Copyrights All characters and artwork contained herein are ™ and ©2008 Mike Ploog unless otherwise noted. The Artfull Dodger ™ and ©2008 Mike Ploog. The Stardust Kid and all related characters ™ and ©2008 J.M. DeMatteis and Mike Ploog. Abadazad and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Disney Enterprises, Inc. Dr. Strange, Ghost Rider, Man-Thing, Monster of Frankenstein, Sludge, Weird World, Werewolf by Night, Tomb of Dracula ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc. The Spirit and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Will Eisner Estate. The Perhapanauts and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Todd Dezago and Craig Rousseau. Conan ™ and ©2008 Conan Properties International, LLC. King Kull, Thulsa Doom ™ and ©2008 King Kull, LLC. Lone Wolf and Cub ™ and ©2008 Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima. Eerie ™ and ©2008 Jim Warren. Connie Rodd, PS Magazine ™ and ©2008 Department of the Army. Planet of the Apes ™ and ©2008 Twentieth Century Fox. Wizards ™ and ©2008 Ralph Bakshi. Shrek and all related characters ™ and ©2008 DreamWorks Animation, LLC. The Thing ©2008 Universal Studios. Gremlins, Little Shop of Horrors, The Witches ©2008 Warner Bros. Editorial package ©2008 Eric Nolen-Weathington, Roger Ash, and TwoMorrows Publishing.

Dedication To K.C. Carlson for his assistance and encouragement, but mostly for being a good friend. — Roger To Donna, Iain and Caper — Eric Acknowledgements Mike Ploog, for laughter-filled conversations and allowing us the pleasure of talking with him. Jim Warden, for contributing many hitherto unseen treasures and for being a Caps fan. Heritage Auctions, for providing access to their archives or orignal artwork. Please visit them at www.ha.com. Special Thanks Glenn and Marjorie Ash, Terry Austin, Dave Ballard, Jerry Boyd, Leonard Chuah, Sean Clarke, Ferran Delgado, J.M. DeMatteis, Todd Dezago, Scott Green, Scott Reno, John Roche, Craig Rousseau, Juame Vaquer, David West, Scott Williams, John Yon, Tom Ziuko, 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 Nineteen:

MIKE PLOOG Table of Contents Introduction by J.M. DeMatteis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Part One: A Cowboy in the Marines. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Part Two: Where There’s a Will... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Part Three: Marvelous Monsters. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Part Four: A Life in Film . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Part Five: Creating Fantasy Worlds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 Part Six: Storytelling and the Creative Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Art Gallery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74

Introduction The truth is Mike is a kind of Paul Bunyan—but instead of an axe, he’s got a giant pencil slung over his shoulder; and he uses it to create astonishing worlds of imagination. Mike is one of the greatest fantasy artists on the planet: There may be some artists out there who are as good, but—take my word for it—there’s nobody better.

Paul Bunyan With A Pencil

thought he’d be taller. I’d been working with Mike Ploog for a couple of years—communicating through phone calls and e-mails—but I didn’t actually meet him face-to-face until the spring of 2006. We were in New York City to meet with the folks at Hyperion Books for Children, publishers of the Abadazad books, and then we were heading to Washington, D.C. for the official launch of the series at Book Expo America. We made a plan to meet outside a restaurant in Union Square. I’d seen photos of Mike—bushy white beard, mischievous twinkle in the eyes—so I didn’t think I’d have a problem recognizing him; but when I arrived at the Union Square Café, I couldn’t find him. Oh, sure, there was this man standing there who kind of looked like Mike—but he was so much smaller. Understand: it’s not that Mike’s short—he’s not—it’s that the Ploog I’d imagined in my head was about thirty feet tall. Talking on the phone; listening to that booming laugh; hearing those amazing stories of Mike’s boyhood adventures in Minnesota and Burbank (think Huck Finn in the l950s), in the Marines (where he was part of—no kidding!—the Marine Corps rodeo team), in Hollywood (where he worked with everyone from Terry Gilliam to Roman Polanski), and in the comic book business (this is a guy who started his career working with Will Eisner), I’d imagined a kind of Paul Bunyan character: a towering giant striding through the Manhattan streets.

I’ve been a Ploog fan since his Marvel Comics work of the 1970s—especially his extraordinary run on Man-Thing with the great Steve Gerber. I always responded to the flow of Mike’s art, the almost palpable texture, the impeccable storytelling and—most important—the heartfelt humanity. But being a fan and working well with someone aren’t always synonymous. I’m happy to say that, from Day One, Mike and I have had a wonderful creative interplay, both professionally and personally. (I think what really cemented our friendship was the fact that we both still believe in Santa Claus. And, no, I’m not kidding.) Watching him bring both Abadazad and The Stardust Kid to visual life has been one of the great joys of my career in comics. Time after time I’d get new pages from Mike and be stunned by what a brilliant job he’d done. Hell, I was absolutely giddy. “This looks just like Mike Ploog!” I’d say to him—and he would laugh that remarkable laugh. I don’t think he realized that I was paying him the highest compliment possible. J.M. DeMatteis 8/08

Part 1:

A Cowboy in the Marines called Man of a Thousand Faces. I think Leo G. Carroll played the part of the guy. I loved that character because he was everyone. There was something magic about him.

MODERN MASTERS: You were born in Minnesota in 1942, correct? MIKE PLOOG: Right. Mankato, Minnesota. It’s a pretty remote place. Well, not any longer. It used to be.

MM: You mentioned in your Moonshadows sketchbook that you used to draw pictures at the local store and get a grape soda, and you always drew the same picture. What was the picture you always drew?

MM: Do you have any siblings? MIKE: Yes. I had two brothers and a sister.

MIKE: It was Roy Rogers. [laughs] Whoever was doing Roy Rogers in comic books at that time only drew him from a 3/4 profile. I got that down pat. Basically, I would draw whatever was on my mind at that particular time, but Roy Rogers was my staple.

MM: When did you start drawing? When did you become interested in art? MIKE: To be honest, interest was different than starting to draw. The main entertainment as a kid was the radio. I spent endless hours in the evening listening to the radio and the old radio shows. That’s what stirred my imagination. I needed to see a face. I drew on everything. I drew on the walls. I drew on the radio. I drew continuously. Sergeant Preston of the Yukon was one of my favorites. I drew him over and over again. The day that Quaker Oats brought out a Quaker Oats box with a picture of Sergeant Preston, I was absolutely shattered because it didn’t look anything like what I thought he was going to look like. I think the radio was the first incentive to sit down and make a picture. It seems like I’ve always drawn.

MM: Did you see many comic books or comic strips growing up? MIKE: Not really. I saw a lot of comic strips. I don’t think we ever really got a newspaper because where I was being raised, I was raised in St. Thomas, Minnesota, there was just a church, two stores, and a very small school that I went to. People used to save the comics for me. I was quite a fan of newspaper comics, not comic books. We didn’t get to town all that often and the only books that were really on the drug store’s shelf were things like Donald Duck and Archie and Roy Rogers, obviously. I can’t remember super-heroes. If they were there, I had very little interest in them. MM: What comic strips did you particularly enjoy? MIKE: I loved Li’l Abner. I liked Flash Gordon and Hal Foster’s work on Prince Valiant. The goofy thing is that I can never remember reading them. [laughs] I’d just sit and look at the pictures.

MM: What sort of radio shows did you like listening to the best? MIKE: Oh, dear! I loved the Westerns like Gunsmoke, and Sergeant Preston. There was one called Bobby Benson B-Bar-B Riders, Red Rider, and Little Beaver. Things like that. The other ones that I loved were the scary ones like Inner Sanctum and Tales of Horror. And the detective shows. I think I pretty well covered the gamut. There was one

MM: So it was the art in these strips that attracted you? MIKE: Oh yes. Definitely. Still, to this day, I buy comic books and I don’t read them. I have a lot of friends who are writers who’d probably shoot me for that. [laughter] 6

MM: Eventually, your family ended up moving to L.A. MIKE: Yeah. My mother and father separated when I was about ten years old. We left the farm and piled into a brand new Chevrolet. I’d never been in a new car before. When my mother and dad sold the farm, mom bought a brand new Chevy and the five of us piled into it and drove across country. A very leisurely drive, mind you. We stopped everywhere. Anywhere that took our fancy, we stopped. I think that has always given me this strange wanderlust because the most exciting period of my life was that trip from Minnesota to California. MM: What sort of places did you stop? MIKE: Everywhere. We took turns choosing motels. Any time we saw a national monument sign or something, we had to stop and read it and take our picture by it. Every state that we went through, at the border where it says you’re now leaving Iowa and going into Kansas or whatever, a picture had to be taken. The biggest memory of stopping was in the Southwest when we got into Arizona and New Mexico because that was my fascination. That was Indian country. My first sightings of an American Indian absolutely blew my mind because there they were, The American Indian. That wonderful person that fascinated me all my life. MM: Did you see the opportunity to see many movies?

MIKE: I think Le Suer had a movie theatre, but I don’t remember going to it. St. Thomas obviously didn’t have one. It wasn’t until I got to California. We went to a lot of drive-in movies. My poor mother. She used to have to sneak us in because of the fact that we couldn’t really afford to go to movies that often. So what we’d do is we would pop all of our popcorn and put it in buckets and big bags and hide under a blanket. They probably knew that when they let us in the damn theatre [laughter] because this woman is going to a movie theatre all by herself, and in the back seat on the floor board, is this lumpy blanket and the smell of popcorn. Obviously the drive-in movies at that time let us get away with it. We used to go to drive-in movies on a regular basis. Television was the thing that blew my mind. When we got to California, my mother acquired a used television with a round screen. There were pictures to these stories. For somebody that had tried all of his childhood to picture stories, to actually see pictures with stories was absolutely wonderful. MM: How old were you when you moved to California? MIKE: I was about ten or eleven. MM: Did you enjoy the same sorts of movies and TV shows as radio shows? Westerns, for example? MIKE: Oh yes. The whole family was into Westerns. We ran a relatively poor farm. We did a lot of horse trading and there were a lot of animals through the farm. I loved the horses, I really did. That was my first love. The whole family loved the Westerns and from the first time we turned the TV on, we were seeking out the Westerns.

Previous Page: Mike loves Westerns, so here’s one of his cowboy drawings. Above: Another cowboy, this time as part of a birthday greeting. Left: Okay, not quite a cowboy, but the samurai genre isn’t all that different from Westerns, really. Artwork ©2008 Mike Ploog.

Part 2:

Where There’s a Will... MM: Was that one of the few times in your career that you’ve worked on super-heroes?

MM: How did you end up at Filmation?

MIKE: I can’t tell you how it came about, I attribute it to an old friend at Leatherneck magazine named Duane Wells. He was a dear friend. He still is a dear friend. He kept telling me, “Mike, you can really make a good living at this. You’ve got the ability to make a living at this.” That was always in the back of my mind. One day I decided. “That’s it. I’m going to try it.” I spent about a week putting together a portfolio of drawings. Obviously, during a week you’re not going to put together anything that’s going to knock anybody’s socks off, but it was an example of what the hell I could do. A lot of things I ripped off out of comic books. [chuckles] I stole things wherever I possibly could to put them in this portfolio. I went down to Filmation and I showed Don Christensen my portfolio. He said. “Okay. You’re hired.” It blew my mind. It was that easy. I was hired. He put me in the back doing cleanup where I would clean up other people’s drawings. Don did me a wonderful favor. He said, “We want you to do other things, but you’re going to have to learn how to do them.” Don would stay late with me in the evenings and show me how to do layouts, which is kind of the next step up from cleanup; to actually do the layouts yourself. He got me doing layouts which was absolutely fantastic because it was more money than I’d ever made before in my life. That blew me away. I spent one season with Filmation. That’s how loyal I am. [laughs] I spent one season with them and Hanna-Barbera offered me more money and so I left.

MIKE: As a matter of fact, it was the only time. MM: Once you went over to Hanna-Barbera, what were you doing for them? MIKE: I got over there and that season they were doing all this goofy stuff. I worked on Wacky Races and Motormouse and Autocat. The only good thing was that towards the end of my tour there, they were doing the pilot for Scooby-Doo and I got a chance to do some drawings for Scooby-Doo. Prior to that, I was doing goofy cars and goofy airplanes and things like that. Anything that could carry Autocat and Motormouse around. [laughter] MM: Were you still doing layout for them? MIKE: Yeah. It was mostly layouts. Towards the end, they were having me do more detailed drawings for some of the designs on the cars and things. But talk about boring. [laughter] MM: Did you happen to work with Alex Toth while you were there? MIKE: No, I didn’t. I only met Alex on a couple of occasions and, for some strange reason and I don’t know what it was, Alex took an instant dislike to me. At evening cartoonist meetings, we nearly went outside for a fist fight. I found Alex a very difficult man to deal with and talk to. I once called him for some advice, and he cut me off so quickly that I thought I must have said something terrible. He was his own man. I had an enormous amount of respect

MM: What did you work on at Filmation? MIKE: Batman and Superman were the things that I worked on when I first got there, then they put me off onto other things. The Batman/Superman Hour was the major thing. 12

for his work. He was a brilliant artist. Absolutely brilliant. Personally, he was a very difficult man to get on with. And fortunately, I didn’t have to work with him. [laughter] MM: Tell me about your move to PS Magazine. MIKE: One day—I wish I could remember the guy’s name, he was a hell of a good artist—a co-worker came in and said, “Mike, I belong to the National Cartoonists Society, and we just got this newsletter where Will Eisner has put an ad in saying that he’s looking for an artist with military experience and who has a tendency to draw in his style.” He showed me the letter and it had a Will Eisner PS Magazine drawing in it. I said, “I know this work.” Little did I know that I’d spent four or five years drawing Will Eisner’s stuff. He was the guy who was doing PS Magazine and PS Magazine was like the Training Aids stepping off point. Everybody went back to PS Magazine, so I was continuously emulating Will Eisner’s style without even knowing who Will Eisner was. He wanted somebody to come to New York. I didn’t send him any artwork, I called him up and said I’d be interested in doing this. He said, “What have you been doing?” I told him that I had been working in Training Aids, and the goofy thing was, I’d been drawing his stuff for years. He said, “I’m gonna be in L.A. in about a week. Can you meet me at the Beverly Hills Hotel?” Somebody else must have been paying for it because Will wouldn’t have sprung for the Beverly Hills Hotel! Anyway, he said, “Bring some drawings along.” So I met him at the hotel. I brought the drawings and I had to do some new because I had nothing to show from my Training Aids days. He looked at them. We sat and chatted for a while. He said, “What day is it? It’s like Monday or Tuesday, right? Can you be to work next Monday in New York?” And I said, “Sure!” [laughter] I was single. The idea of going to work in New York next Monday? You’ve got to be joking! This was absolutely amazing. So that’s what got me from Hanna-Barbera to PS Magazine. MM: I think a lot of people have heard of PS Magazine, but it usually doesn’t go

beyond the fact that Will Eisner was involved with it. What is PS Magazine? MIKE: PS Magazine was a postscript to the military manuals. The military manuals covered everything. There was a manual three to four inches thick for every vehicle and every weapon that the military had. PS Magazine’s job was to break down these manuals into the simplest cartoon form so that the actual guy in the military who can’t even read this stuff—the people who wrote it can’t even really read it—could understand what this manual was saying. You were literally doing a monthly book 13

Previous Page: Caricature of Mike’s former boss, Will Eisner. Above: One of Mike’s contributions to PS magazine, featuring Connie Rodd.

Part 4:

A Life in Film

MM: You left Marvel for a few years to work with Ralph Bakshi.

So it was kind of a trick just to get me over there to get me to work on Wizards. I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing. He called them “history drawings,” or something like that. They were just still drawings. They would put voice-over on it and then they just plugged the still drawings in. It was to fill in the story gaps he’d skipped over while doing the regular animated part of the film. It was great fun. I enjoyed it, but it was very strange.

MIKE: When I left Marvel, I actually went to work with a guy by the name of Takashi who was doing an animated film called Winds of Change. I’d worked with Takashi at Filmation many, many years ago, and now he was producing. I worked there for about six months, I guess. One day I got a telephone call from Ralph Bakshi. Ralph said, “Mike, I’m you’re biggest fan. I love ya. You’re the greatest. [laughs] I want you to work on a special project. It’s right down your alley. It’s Lord of the Rings.” I said, “Wow. You’re kidding.” “We’re starting pre-production on it. Get over here. I gotta talk to you. You gotta go to work for me next week.” I went over and I talked to him. He didn’t have anything done yet on Lord of the Rings, but I was going to start next Monday on design and concept. I got over there and he said, “Well, yes, Mike, I’d like you to do the Lord of the Rings stuff, but first I’d like you to help me finish off Wizards.” [laughs]

MM: How long did it take you to do all of those? MIKE: It didn’t take all that long. I worked on them off and on because we were holding meetings for Lord of the Rings. I even did some background drawings. It took about six months, I guess. MM: Once you did get going on Lord of the Rings, what was that like?

MIKE: [chuckles] It was like any other Ralph Bakshi production. It was genius chaos. Ralph is one of the most creative people I think I’ve ever worked with, except that it’s totally unharnessed. It’s totally out of control. I really enjoyed working with Ralph. Lord of the Rings was great fun. I did an awful lot of different things on Lord of the Rings. I did character designs. I did a lot of backgrounds. I did storyboards. I even played the part of Gimli in several sequences. And I was a ringwraith on horseback, which was great fun. I enjoyed it because Ralph had no idea where to get these horses, so I went to a lot of old friends and they brought in all the horses. I designed the costume. We shot it out on the Salton Sea on the salt flats so that there would be no background. It was hot. Really hot. And I designed these things so that you weren’t going to see any face in the helmet. There was a big cowl that went way up, almost to the horns of the helmet, so you never really saw a face. They were made out of a heavy, woolen sort of material so that it would flow when the horses were running.

Inside

that cowl, it was like an oven. Better men than I were passing out from heat exhaustion in those damn costumes. Ralph was absolutely terrified of horses, so when all of the scenes with horses were shot, he was directing from the trailer. It was a lot of fun because I was involved in a lot of different parts of the production. I really felt we were going to make a damn good animated film, but what happened was that too many people started to influence Ralph. We’d taken characters out because we didn’t have time to introduce them properly and you wouldn’t know who in the hell they were. They’d just pop up and then disappear again, which would make no sense. It would just confuse everything. But people would say, “You have to have this character in there. It’s a must.” So Ralph would come in the next day and say, “Okay guys, this character’s back in.” And we’d go, “Oh, no!” [laughter] It was quite an experience. I’ve got to tell you one story. We had shot this sequence with this young bull rider. It was shot on a horse that wasn’t used to the particular bridle that we had on it. The kid was Frodo and it was the Flight to the Ford. The ringwraiths were chasing him. He pulled up to stop in front of the camera and, because of the bridle, the horse’s head

Part 5:

Creating Fantasy Worlds

MM: You didn’t do much comic work in the ’80s and ’90s. Was that intentional or were you just really busy working on movies?

kind of went through the roof. Everybody’s taking themselves very seriously. The films just weren’t fun to work on anymore. There were too many people in charge. It was nothing to work on a film to where you’d go to work on it and you’d find that they didn’t have a script. You, as the story department, and the director, more or less sat down and worked out the script, or at least worked out the sequences. I worked on films where there were six producers, and each producer was looking out for his own interest. As soon as you felt like you’d gotten someplace, then suddenly it would go before these producers and each one of them would have something to say about it. Many times you’d have to start from scratch again. There was so much money involved in the production of a film that everybody just kept their heads down. There was just no fun on the sets. There wasn’t any fun in the art departments anymore. Everybody was just taking everything very, very seriously. I guess when there’s that much money involved, you have to take it seriously. It’s supposed to be a job where you’re dealing with an art form of some kind, but it doesn’t seem that way.

MIKE: I was really busy with the movies. They all came one right after another during that period of time. In film, it’s kind of a goofy thing. They kind of know when you’re coming to the end of your project and the phone starts to ring. Which is good. MM: What made you decide to get back into comics? MIKE: The film industry changed enormously; about ten years ago it really changed. It was changing prior to that, but ten years ago it just

MM: One of the books you did do during the ’90s was the Classics Illustrated version of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. How did that happen? MIKE: I think I was approached by First Publishing and asked if I would be interested in doing a Classics Illustrated. I said I would love to do one, and I’d love to do Mark Twain. They said, “Would you like to do Tom Sawyer?” I said, “I’d love it, and I’d also like to do Huck Finn.” Actually, I wanted to do Huck Finn 56

first, but they wanted me to do Tom Sawyer first. That was just great fun. I really enjoyed that because I’m a big Mark Twain fan. I think those two stories are just absolutely magical stories. MM: After hearing a bit about your childhood, I’m curious if you feel an affinity for Tom and Huck. MIKE: Oh, yes. Definitely. I was reliving my childhood. The funny thing is, when I wrote and illustrated that book, I drove everybody in the building nuts. I had a studio above a coffee shop in a small town in Wiltshire, England. I played “Dueling Banjos” over and over and over. I had it on a loop, and it just kept going over and over again. Believe it or not, I paced that entire book—the artwork, the dialog, everything—to “Dueling Banjos.” MM: You did some interesting layouts in the book. In the whitewashing sequence, for example, you just had the fence in the background instead of traditional panel borders. What led to that experimentation? MIKE: It really wasn’t experimenting because I did quite a bit of that when I was working on PS Magazine. That’s kind of an old Will Eisner stunt: leave the page open and just get into the acting. What always comes to mind for me is that wonderful Saturday Evening Post cover that Norman Rockwell did called “The Gossips,” and it’s just people’s heads. I like that kind of feeling. If you don’t have to confine the panel, it’s really great fun to do it. You have to give a lot of thought to it, so it does take a lot more time. MM: Why did Huck Finn never happen? MIKE: First Publishing went out of business. That was about the size of it. I had worked it all up, and broke it down. The hardest part of it is taking a big story and breaking it down to however many pages you had. They had even given me extra pages on that, if I remember right. I did want to get in the hucksters who picked Huck up and took him through town and the old lady he ended up living with. I no more got it broke down and was ready to go to work, than they went out of business.

MM: Around that same time, you also did the adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. What attracted you to that story? MIKE: Santa Claus. I always wanted to do a Santa Claus book. That book was brought to my attention years and years before. When I read it, I found that it’s a 57

Below: The Spirit amidst some of his many foes. Next Page: A 1974 unpublished illustration intended for one of the Marvel magazines.

selves entangled in crime, or they somehow get involved with even stranger characters that are also not within the picture. I like those kind of characters. I like the people who don’t live in the wonderful picture that we’ve created called the 21st century. MM: Are you doing more beyond that two-part story? MIKE: Oh, yeah. They want me to do as many as I have time to do. 68

MM: What’s next for you? MIKE: I don’t know. Something always comes down the pike. I think it’s books. I love doing comics. I’ll keep working on The Spirit as long as they’ll tolerate me. I love writing it because, suddenly I realize I can write Spirit stories, and I have a hard time writing a grocery list. I wrote this story and everybody loves it, so that’s a good sign. That’s the thing we all look for— appreciation. As long as it continues, I’ll keep doing it.

Part 6:

Storytelling and the Creative Process of the writers I worked with did it like that. Believe me, some of them took advantage of it. [chuckles]

MM: What artists influenced you? MIKE: That’s always a trick question. It depends on what I’m doing. Painting-wise, I fell in love with N.C. Wyeth so long ago that he’s always been a big inspiration. There are so many other artists. If I’m doing watercolors, I look at different artists. If I’m doing oils, I look at different artists. As far as line art and comics go, I think that Milton Caniff was a big influence. He used these great blocks of black, and everything was so dramatic. I loved that. Even before I knew what it meant, I loved it. And his storytelling was very good. There was a lot of emotion in it. I always have to go back to Caniff, but there have been so many others that it’s impossible to name them all. Everybody influences me in some way or another. It’s like I walked into this life with no identity and I just borrowed it from so many different people and so many fantastic artists. Hopefully, one of these days I’ll find my own style. Then I’ll probably be out of work, so it won’t do any good.

MM: How so? MIKE: Sometimes it wouldn’t even be a written plot. It would just be a telephone call. Most of these stories are monster of the month or villain of the month. They gave me an idea of what the villain did and I had to get to the villain and, somehow or another, defeat him. It could be nothing more than a ten-minute telephone call and then I’d sit down and start drawing. That’s not to say that any of my writers were lazy, because they weren’t. They were damn good writers. MM: Could you tell me a bit more about how you broke down the plots? MIKE: I’m somebody that has to think with a pencil. I’ll read a script or a plot just to get the impression of where it’s going, what it’s going to do, and what’s going to happen. Then I sit down with a pencil and I go through one scene or situation or page at a time and let it build, always keeping in mind where I have to get to. I’m just building up to a point, then I build up to another point, until I end the story. So it’s all in thumbnails.

MM: When you were working at Marvel, did you mostly work Marvelstyle off of a plot, or were you given full scripts?

MM: Do you transfer the thumbnails up to your completed pages?

MIKE: I was working off plots, which made it a lot more comfortable for me. I’d worked in animation and film, so I had a good sense of laying out a story knowing that I needed a beginning, middle, and end. A plot would allow me to pace the book. I could start it off with the introduction of the story, and then in the middle have them come into the conflict, and then wrap it up in the end. I enjoyed working that way. Most

MIKE: Sometimes I do, if I’ve got a good layout. Thumbnails aren’t always good compositions. What you’re doing is you’re just trying to tell a story in pictures. You’re not always thinking about composition and how you’re filling the space. If you’ve got a good one, you throw it on the computer, blow it up, and just trace it off. Nine times out of ten, it’s not a good composition. Something always has to be changed. 69

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Modern Masters Vol. 19: Mike Ploog