Modern Masters Vol. 06: Arthur Adams

M O D E R N

M A S T E R S

V O L U M E

S I X :

Characters TM & ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

ARTHUR ADAMS

By George Khoury and Eric Nolen-Weathington

Modern Masters Volume Six:

MODERN MASTERS VOLUME SIX:

ARTHUR ADAMS edited by Eric Nolen-Weathington and George Khoury designed by Eric Nolen-Weathington front cover by Arthur Adams front cover color by Tom Ziuko all interviews in this book were conducted by George Khoury transcribed by Steven Tice

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Dr. Raleigh, North Carolina 27614 www.twomorrows.com • e-mail: twomorrow@aol.com First Printing • February 2006 • Printed in Canada Softcover ISBN: 1-893905-54-3 Trademarks & Copyrights All characters and artwork contained herein are ™ and ©2006 Arthur Adams unless otherwise noted.

Monkeyman & O’Brien ™ and ©2006 Arthur Adams.

Angel & the Ape, Batman, Blue Devil, Catman, Catwoman, Cobra, Creeper, Cyborg, Deadman, Deadshot, Deathstroke, Dr. Sivana, Flash, Geo-Force, Green Lantern, Jade, Joker, Martian Manhunter, Metamorpho, Obsidian, Penguin, Riddler, Robin, Scarecrow, Superman, Troia, Two-Face, Wonder Woman ™ and ©2006 DC Comics // Jonni Future, Solomon, Tom Strong, Young Tom Strong ™ and ©2006 America’s Best Comics, LLC // Apollo, the Authority, Swift ™ and ©2006 WildStorm Productions // Baron Mordu, Baron Zemo, Beta Ray Bill, Black Cat, Black Widow, Cable, Captain America, Cloak & Dagger, Daredevil, Dazzler, Defenders, Dr. Doom, Dr. Octopus, Dr. Strange, Enchantress, Fantastic Four, Gargoyle, Generation X, Ghost Rider, Giant-Man, Green Goblin, Hobgoblin, Hulk, Human Torch, Inhumans, Invisible Woman, Iron Man, Juggernaut, Lizard, Loki, Longshot, Magneto, Marvel Girl, Mr. Fantastic, Mojo, New Mutants, New Warriors, Phoenix, Psylocke, Punisher, Quasar, Red Skull, Richard Buzznick, Scarlet Witch, Silver Surfer, Spider-Man, Spiral, Storm, Sub-Mariner, Thanos, Thing, Thor, Vision, Wasp, Wolverine, X-Factor, X-Men ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc. // Moon Beam McSwine ©2006 Capp Enterprizes, Inc. // Vampirella ™ and ©2006 Harris Publications, Inc. // John Carter of Mars, Tarzan ™ and ©2006 Edgar Rice Burroughs Estate // Micronauts ™ and ©2006 Takara/A.G.E. // Conan ™ and ©2006 Conan Properties International, LLC // Gumby, Pokey ™ and ©2006 Art Clokey // Appleseed ™ and ©2006 Masemune Shirow and Seishinsha // Creature from the Black Lagoon, King Kong ™ and ©2006 Universal City Studios, Inc. // Fish Police ™ and ©2006 Steve Moncuse // Star Wars ™ and ©2006 Lucasfilm Ltd. // Godzilla, King Caesar™ and ©2006 Toho Co., Ltd. // Xena: Warrior Princess ™ Universal TV Distribution Holdings LLC and ©2006 Universal Television Enterprises LLLP // Gen13 ™ and ©2006 Aegis Entertainment, Inc., dba WildStorm Productions // Final Fantasy ™ and ©2006 Square Enix Co., Ltd. // Cousin Eerie, Uncle Creepy ™ and ©2006 Warren Publishing, Inc. // Danger Girl ™ and ©2006 Atomico // Buffy the Vampire Slayer ™ and ©2006 20th Century Fox Film Corporation // Double Dragon ™ and ©2006 Atlus Games, Inc. // Madman ™ and ©2006 Mike Allred // Nocturnals ™ and ©2006 Dan Brereton // Tellos ™ and ©2006 Todd Dezago and Mike Wieringo // Lady Death ™ and ©2006 Avatar Press // Witchblade ™ and ©2006 Top Cow Productions, Inc. // Red Sonja ™ and ©2006 Red Sonja Corporation Editorial package ©2006 Eric Nolen-Weathington, George Khoury, and TwoMorrows Publishing.

Dedication To Caper Glee Nolen-Weathington, born during the making of this book. You were worth the wait.

And to Donna, for bringing you into this world, and to Iain, for being a super big brother.

Acknowledgements Arthur Adams, for his time and energy, and for his sense of humor.

John Fanucchi, for his valiant efforts in always finding the best art, and being the biggest Art Adams fan on the West Coast.

Joyce Chin, for always being so nice and understanding during the making of this book.

Terry Austin, for his continuing help and support.

Special Thanks Will Allred, Rich Cirillo, Chris Claremont, Jon B. Cooke, Scott Dunbier, David Hamilton, Jason Hofius, Frederic Massa, Marc McKenzie, Steve Miller, Steve Moncuse, Hiroshi Morisaki, Steven Ng, Stuart Ng, Scott Reno, Eric Delos Santos, Mike Wieringo, Fog City Art Exchange (http://home.pacbell.net/adbm3/comicart.htm) 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 Six:

ARTHUR ADAMS Table of Contents Introduction by Chris Claremont . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Part One: Comics, Monsters, and Dinosaurs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Interlude One: Under the Influence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Part Two: A Longshot Pays Off . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 PPPart Three: The Fantastic Voyage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 PPPart Four: Riding Solo on a Dark Horse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

Part Five: The ABCs of Comics... with Authority . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 Part Six: Storytelling and the Creative Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Art Gallery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89

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Introduction out as a New Mutants Annual and mutated, quite naturally it seemed at the time, into an opus. I mean, Art has his own memories of this collaboration, which mostly involve lots of sobbing on my end of the phone line, an episode of the original series of Star Trek (Boyoboy, I really cannot wait to see that giant optical effect amoeba in High-Def, not to mention the masking tape holding together the set panels), and a shade under a million pages of plot, mainly about the ongoing saga of Loki’s (Norse God of Mischief: Arch-enemy of his half-brother Thor, God of Thunder and all-around Marvel good-guy) plain-spoken but spirited Filipino housekeeper Lupe.

Me, I’d just written this really cool story with Paul Smith where the X-Men go head to head with the aforementioned Loki and had ended with him vowing vengeance, and I wanted to see what would happen next. I also wanted to have some fun with this other book I was writing, The New Mutants and was figuring the X-Men for once, could take second fiddle. I thought Art would be perfect for the job. He, living in California, had no idea what he was getting into (you think we’re kidding about that packet of plot pages?), and what the hell, Annuals are only 38 pages, how hard could it be?

I dunno what I was thinking. The more I wrote, the more there was to write, sort of falling under the heading that this was probably the only time the mutants would be able to visit Asgard, be a shame to miss out on any of the really cool sites and characters. And if we’re going to showcase the place they’re visiting so comprehensively, it’s only fair to give the characters their due. And since we’re gueststarring Storm, and since she’s one of the mainstays of the X-Men—well, she of course would have to dominate the story and somehow make it All-About-Her! (Basically by becoming Loki’s Object-of-Ultimate-Desire—which is in fact her true mutant power, to make the Baddest of Bad Guys fall head over heels in Desire for her! But I digress.)

Not much to ask for in a story: sublime characterization of a cast that includes teenagers of all ages, human heroes, Asgardian Gods, demi-gods, demons, critters, elves, dwarves, sorceresses, settings that range from the Greek Isles to all the fabled realms of the Norse mythos, battles, bar scenes, seductions, brutality, heroism, costume changes, lots of meals, an occasional bath, a girl and her (winged) horse, loathsome spells, broken hearts, low drama and high comedy.

Oh yes, and when we got to the end, we’d discover this was only Part 1. There’d have to be a sequel to wrap things up, in the X-Men Annual.

(We could do silly things like that in those days.)

So here’s Arthur, blithely accepting what he thought

The man loves Godzilla.

And Gumby.

For me anyway, if you want to know about Art Adams, that’s where you have to start, with a character who lays waste to cities and is brought to life by a man wearing a rubber suit, and an animated piece of clay, a classic of stop-motion whose every movement has to be adjusted one frame of film at a time. One is in many ways the ultimate wide-screen spectacle, while the other remains one of the most personal and intimate of creations.

Same holds true for Arthur’s art: on the one hand, he can give his writers the most majestic and outrageous of widescreen spectacles, be they in space or the realms of fabled Asgard. And yet focus in on moments so individual and personal, they can’t help but win your heart, or break it.

His first gig teamed him with the woman who was then my editor on X-Men, Ann Nocenti, on a book they created called Longshot, and within the first few pages it was abundantly clear that we readers were in the hands of a pair of creators whose vision was as wacky as it was idiosyncratic. First of all, the hero only had three-fingered hands, which I couldn’t help wondering—then as now—if that wasn’t Ann and Art’s deliberate, albeit subtle way of telling us the character and his book were derived as much from the world and ethos of animation as much as the more formal and “realistic” environs of the Marvel Universe. Longshot was pure of heart, innocent in a way that was rare then and virtually non-existent today; his power was to be lucky. His adversary was Mojo, a monumental bloat of a being who was so obscenely corpulent (dare we even say, crapulous) that whatever legs he might once have possessed were no longer able to support him. Instead, he was mated to a powered cradle, which allowed him to scurry about on multiple crab-legs. In addition, he had no spine. Literally.

Which meant that his body was supported by an external, articulated, bionic frame. He took great pride in this condition. For Mojo, being spineless was the summit of sentient evolution; the only point to him of possessing a backbone was to see it smashed to bits. Mojo’s game was what we call these days a “content provider.” His world, his people, demanded constant entertainment; he gave it to them. The higher the ratings, the greater the glory, and the raw power that went with it. Longshot was his star, who for some strange and inexplicable reason was determined to develop a mind of his own and some serious free will. He escaped. Mojo wanted him back.

And therein lay the genesis of that wonderful, eightissue roller-coaster ride.

My chance to work with Art came with what started 4

New Mutants and all related characters ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

was a light-hearted gig to while away a couple of weeks’ quick work... ...only to discover he’d been sucked into the maw of a monster that would ultimately run so many pages it would end up with a (much reprinted) trade paperback all its own.

And damn, if he didn’t do it.

That thing about being a writer in this business is that, while we often have to think up this crazy stuff, we really do depend on the visual facility—the talent, the skill, the creative genius—of our artists to bring it to life. What looks spectacular in our heads, what has the potential to rock the world when we finish typing our little fingers to the bone... ...doesn’t always see print in quite the same way.

It takes a mind, an imagination, a sensibility that’s simpatico with that vision, to finish the job. To look at those words and, after the requisite growls and curses, use them as a springboard to come up with something even better.

Art Adams is just such an artist. He does the big things well, he does the little things even better. Demon warriors charging out of a hole in space, a young woman giving up because the fight to go on with her life has become just too damn hard. He does drama, he does funny, he does just about every genre a writer can throw at him.

Best of all, he has that rare and ineffable knack of creating characters who are immediately empathetic, with whom the readers cannot help but bond and care for. I look at these images and I see folks who are imbued with a sense of charm, I really can’t help but like them and want to see more of them—even the villains.

(Hell, even the monsters.) Within the context of his personal style, which is pretty much unique unto himself (another rarity in our profession), they’re very real folks.

I mean, this is a guy who created an entire series about a sentient ape and his gloriously beautiful, not to mention brilliant, gal companion, and after more than a decade I’m still waiting eagerly to see what happens next!

Back last century, I had a brief and shining opportunity to write an arc for the JLA. A rare, possibly my only, shot at the Great Big Guns of the DC pantheon. I thought the story was fun but what made the series personally memorable was that the editor, Dan Raspler (my wife’s cousin, what can I say?), managed to finagle Art as the cover artist.

Six pages out of 130-plus—but for me they were the encapsulation of everything I was aiming for with my story. Here was a visualization of the movie that unspooled past my mind’s-eye when I took pen to paper and started sketching out my ideas. And he even took one of the crazier notions I ever had, the idea of wearing Plastic Man as a survival suit (which, when you really think about it, turns out to be something you probably really don’t want to think about), and not only made it work, he made me smile to look at it.

Art’s the kind of artist who makes writers think they really do have a clue. He’s the kind of artist whose work doesn’t fade with time. His work is very much an extension of himself, the characters come across as nice people because he’s nice people. No small achievement, either way.

In fact, these days there are just a couple of things I regret when I think of him: that he always lived on one coast and I on the other (because it would be so much easier to drop those 900K-page plots on his doorstep without the intercession—and, dare I say, expense—of FedEx), that he always liked his Godzilla action figures, and Gumby, and going out for dead-raw-fish, and strolling to the movies (even if it was just to the TV in the next room) and hanging with friends, way more than slaving away at the drawing table. These days, he works for one company, and I for the other, so that means I get to enjoy his work solely as a reader. But writers, especially in comics, are always fools for hope. In the meantime... ...I really can’t wait to see what happens next.

Chris Claremont Brooklyn, New York 5

Part 1:

Comics, Monsters and Dinosaurs ARTHUR: He was what was called a loadmaster, which nowadays, and now that I’m much older, is filled with all kinds of weird connotations. In the Air Force, what a loadmaster does is make sure the airplanes—because he was mostly doing planes that were shipping massive equipment—are loaded evenly to make sure the plane doesn’t snap in two as it’s in the air.

MODERN MASTERS: First things, first: you’re not related to Neal Adams, right?

ARTHUR ADAMS: Not to my knowledge, no.

MM: But people must’ve asked you about that in the beginning, right?

ARTHUR: Some people were even irritated that I signed my name Arthur Adams. When I first started, I would just sign my name “Adams,” and that would somehow get people very upset, even though Neal had always signed his stuff “Neal Adams.”

MM: And your mom was just the housewife?

ARTHUR: She occasionally took jobs out of the house. She was a receptionist at a hospital for a while. She worked with a dog groomer for a little while, because she really liked dogs—and still does. But for the most part, yes, she was a stay-at-home mom.

MM: Have you ever met him?

ARTHUR: I’ve met him several times. We’ve never really spent much time together, but we’ve met several times, and the first couple times he opened his arms wide and said, “My son,” much to the confusion of everyone all around. He’s been very nice to me the few times we’ve met.

MM: Where do you think your artistic ability came from?

ARTHUR: My clearest memory of when I was really fascinated by someone drawing was, I believe, when we were moving away from where we were living in West Virginia. I can’t exactly remember which town we were in, but we were moving away from West Virginia, and we were loading up boxes. And my dad, on one of the boxes, drew some stick figures of us kids, just

MM: What year were you born?

ARTHUR: I was born in 1963 in Holyoke, Massachusetts.

MM: When did your family move out of Holyoke?

ARTHUR: I think my dad was in the Air Force when I was first born, and we moved around a little bit. We were in Massachusetts for a little while, and then he got out of the Air Force and we moved to West Virginia. But my mom and dad kept on having more kids, so my dad rejoined the Air Force. It was a good, reliable income. So we ended up moving to Philadelphia for about a year, where we stayed with my grandmother until I was about five. My dad was overseas most of this time.

We didn’t really see much of my dad, then.

MM: Was your dad a pilot or a mechanic?

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on the side of a box—just big figures of us loading boxes—and for some reason I found that really fascinating.

MM: Was your dad strict?

ARTHUR: My dad was—especially early on, at least for the first, gosh, maybe even for the first six or seven years of my life— gone a lot, because he was in the Air Force.

He would often spend as much as a year away from home. So he would be gone, and then he would come back, y’know, for the month of June, and he’d have to go off again for months on end. When I was about maybe seven or eight, he wasn’t traveling quite as much, but he was still in the Air Force, and he worked at the air base every day for eight or ten hours a day. My mom was the disciplinarian.

MM: Are you the eldest?

ARTHUR: I am.

MM: When you were growing up, did you hang out all by yourself since your family moved around so much?

ARTHUR: I was mostly on my own. It’s not that we didn’t have friends; I played with some kids in the neighborhoods. And there were five of us boys, so we were always playing together.

MM: So you didn’t find these moves kind of hard?

ARTHUR: You know, it’s just what we did, so it never occurred to me that it was difficult. And because my dad was in the Air Force, we were going to the school on the Air Force base, so everyone I knew was in the exact same situation. You could be hanging out with somebody one year and they just don’t come back ever again, or they get shipped off somewhere else.

MM: So you felt like they were shipping you off? Like you were in the Service?

ARTHUR: I guess I never really thought about it like that. I just knew that I didn’t want to join the Air Force at that time because I just knew that wasn’t for me.

MM: Wasn’t that something your dad encouraged?

ARTHUR: For me, no. He did encourage that in some of my brothers, but he knew that I was more—I had an artistic leaning, and he wanted me to pursue that.

MM: When you say that your dad was the first person to give you comics, is that how you discovered comics?

ARTHUR: Well, I’m sure I must have gotten comics before that. I must have, because we had all the usual kids’ books, and my mom would go to the thrift shop on the base and buy just stacks of comics for a dollar. It’d be this ten pound pile of comics wrapped in twine or whatever.

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Previous Page: An early ’80s fantasy drawing.

Above: A 1983 portfolio piece.

Hobgoblin, Spider-Man ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

and I was just really amazed by them. I thought they were really cool, especially the Holiday Grab-Bag, because they reprinted those two issues where the Fantastic Four and the Avengers fought the Hulk, and it had a Wally Wood Daredevil story, and a Gene Colan and Bill Everett “Black Widow” story. And what else? I think it reprinted the first issue of Marvel Team-Up. It was just a really nice collection that had all of Marvel’s main super-heroes in it.

MM: It was for you and your brothers?

ARTHUR: Oh, yeah, for me and my brothers. But I was the oldest, so I was always skimming off the top, if you know what I mean. I was always taking the best stuff. I wasn’t necessarily a really good big brother. [laughter] Ah, we all saw ’em. But my dad did bring— because he knew I liked drawing and monsters and all that sort of stuff—on one of his trips overseas, one of the guys had a couple of the old, big Marvel Treasury books. I believe it was the first Marvel Treasury Holiday Grab-Bag, and then, I think it was the Spectacular SpiderMan one where they reprinted Ditko’s Sinister Six story.

MM: Was this book—it wasn’t all of a sudden you wanted to become a comic book artist. This happened gradually?

ARTHUR: Well, yeah, I didn’t want to become a comic book artist immediately. What I thought originally I was going to be was a paleontologist, because I was really, really into dinosaurs, and I loved drawing dinosaurs. I would just draw them all the time, and I would just drive everyone in school nuts, because I was always keeping up with dinosaur stuff.

MM: Those are both from the ’70s, right?

ARTHUR: The Treasury Editions? Yeah. They’re from the earlier ’70s, yeah. I must have been, like, eight or nine when I got these. I wasn’t really, really young, but I could have been ten; I’m not really sure. So, yeah, he got those, 8

MM: But when you were a kid, you weren’t into, like, the Spider-Man cartoons?

ARTHUR: I watched them, I watched all the old Ralph Bakshi Spider-Man cartoons, and I watched all those weird Marvel cartoons with the static figures just zipping across the screen. Sure, I watched all those.

I knew they were crappy, but I watched them ’cause they were super-heroes.

MM: But would you say you were child of pop culture, growing up? Did you watch a lot of television?

ARTHUR: Most people my age probably are.

MM: Would your mother put you in front of the TV with your brothers to watch TV show after TV show?

ARTHUR: Mom was always telling us to go outside and play, but I did spend time in front of the TV watching Super Friends or the Spider-Man cartoons or whatever was available to watch at that time. I think I probably even watched those crappy Godzilla cartoons, and I used to watch the King Kong cartoon.

And then on Saturdays where we were, as I’m sure they were in lots of places, there were a couple of channels that would have their creature feature shows, either in the morning or the afternoon or the evening.

And so I ended up watching all that stuff. Or the Tarzan TV shows or Flash Gordon serials they would run, and all that sort of stuff.

MM: What did that stuff have that today’s stuff doesn’t have? Y’know, because a lot of that nostalgia is in your work.

you discovered comics?

ARTHUR: I’m sure it must have been all around the same time, but— MM: What was the biggest thing for you when you were a kid? What was your absolute favorite thing?

ARTHUR: Y’know, even when I was a kid, I never would have thought to pick something that was my favorite. I just liked it all.

I liked Godzilla, I liked dinosaurs. I knew Godzilla wasn’t really a dinosaur, but I was willing to go along with it. You knew it was a guy in a rubber suit, but I liked it. I loved King Kong; it was probably a bigger influence on me than a lot of other things. That was one of the movies I saw when I was a kid that just really blew me away, that made me really interested in fantasy and adventure and romance and that sort of stuff.

MM: Did you have a teacher who encouraged you to draw more? How did it all start rolling?

ARTHUR: Well, I really just always drew. I never had anyone say, no, I can’t draw. Pretty much all of my teachers and my parents were perfectly happy with the idea that I was drawing. And, as things for a kid to do, it’s one of the

ARTHUR: Y’know, I can’t say that I found that stuff more exciting than I find stuff now, because there really is a lot of really good stuff now. But also I can’t look at the new stuff through a kid’s eyes. I have to look at it through my own experiences, so I can recognize what’s done now is actually probably a lot better than a lot of stuff I liked when I was a kid. I mean, a lot of the stuff I liked in the ’70s, the animation was really limited. I mean, I was watching the Super Friends, and I knew it was no good. I love it on some level now, but it’s still no good.

MM: Did you discover Godzilla before 9

Previous Page: In this 2000 print from Dynamic Forces, Arthur revisited the comics of his childhood.

Below: Welcome to Dogpatch! Arthur displays his Frank Frazetta influence in this illustration of Li’l Abner supporting character, Moon Beam McSwine.

Frazetta worked as a ghost artist on the strip for several years.

All Marvel characters ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc. Moon Beam McSwine ™ and ©2006 Capp Enterprises, Inc.

cheaper things you can have a kid do. [laughs] MM: When you were in high school were you “the artist”? Like, if somebody wanted something drawn—a poster or something—they would come to you?

ARTHUR: Pretty much, pretty much. Yeah.

A fellow student and I painted a big mural at my high school in—can’t remember which year in school it was. Fortunately, it’s been painted over, so no one need go to that Air Force Base to look for the mural, because it’s long gone. Thank goodness, because it was pretty crappy.

MM: So there wasn’t one teacher? Were you going to college for art?

ARTHUR: Let’s see....

It’s hard to remember all their names now, but there was a good teacher my freshman year in high school who was teaching how to do newspaper cartoon strips. He taught me to try to keep storytelling clear. I think he probably wouldn’t be too crazy with the way my drawing has evolved, with all the weird little noodling.

This Page: Two early ’80s Vampirella drawings.

Next Page: This 1984 portfolio piece was later printed in 1987’s Marvel Fanfare #37.

Black Cat, Hobgoblin, SpiderMan ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc. Vampirella ™ and ©2006 Harris Publications, Inc.

MM: What was he encouraging?

ARTHUR: Clear storytelling and learning perspective. Through most of school, I breezed through mostly on my grades from art classes, and this one teacher, Mrs. Kilgore, would not let me just breeze through.

She told me she was grading me twice as 10

hard as everyone else, which meant that I didn’t always get A’s, although I sometimes did. But she was good. See, I don’t think she was crazy about the idea that I was interested in drawing comic books, but then I brought in a couple of Creepy covers by Sanjulian and Einrich, and she could see that those were actually really well done paintings.

MM: I read somewhere you wanted to be an actor at one point?

ARTHUR: I did want to be an actor for a while. In high school, I can’t remember which grade, but there was a girl I liked— as most of the stories go—who was getting into the acting club. And, as always, they have trouble in high school finding guys who want to be in acting classes, so the girls who were volunteering would try to get guys to come in as well. So she talked me into going into the acting club, and I really liked it. I found I really enjoyed it.

For years and years my mom and dad were after me, saying, “Well, we know you want to draw comic books, and you probably will draw comic books”—which, y’know, I’m sure they had [laughs] no thought that I ever would, because we certainly didn’t know anyone who drew comic books.

“We know you want to draw comic books, but please try to find something else.” And then I found that I liked acting, so I finally told them, “Well, if I don’t become a comic book

artist, I’ll become an actor.” To which they responded, “That’s not really what we meant at all.”

MM: Were you a stagehand, or did you get to act?

ARTHUR: I was acting, memorizing lines, and taking whatever parts, usually ending up with the lead.

MM: The lead? What kind of productions, what shows did you do?

ARTHUR: There were no musicals or anything like that, they were generally just light, really safe comedy sorts of things.

MM: All right. No Shakespeare or anything like that.

ARTHUR: We did a little bit of that. And I don’t recall ever having any of the leads in any of the Shakespeare stuff. It was just pretty simple stuff. And it was a lot of fun. And then I got into Community Theater for a couple of years. I pretty much stopped all of that by the time I turned 19, because I just felt, “I really need to concentrate on drawing.” By the time I was 18, I started submitting stuff to Marvel, and showing my work to other artists at conventions, and they were giving me tips. So I finally decided I just needed to buckle down and get my drawing figured out so I can get on to what I knew I was supposed to do.

MM: What happened after you graduated high school? Did you go to college, or did you think about it?

ARTHUR: Well, my grades were pretty crappy when I finally graduated from high school, so.... I’m sure I could have found a college to go to. I’m sure I could have gone to some community college. I took Driver’s Ed when I was 17, but I just hated driving. If the college had been right next door to the house, I might have gone. It wasn’t. [laughs] I didn’t want to drive, so basically I stayed home for a couple of months after graduating from high school, just drawing, and then my mom and dad said I had to get a job somewhere else. I’m not in high school anymore. So I worked at Round Table Pizza for about a year. And so I would do that and then draw at home.

because I was having nightmares about pizza.

MM: But during all this time, you were working on your portfolio?

ARTHUR: Pretty much. I would make up little four- or five-page stories. And, really, not many of those. I only did two or three of those. And they would just be really basic things. I would take some secondary character. I did a few pages of, like, the She-Hulk and SpiderWoman fighting some monster at Round Table Pizza. I can’t remember what the one that I finally did that I sent to Marvel that got me some work.

MM: How far did you get at Round Table Pizza? Did you become an assistant manager?

ARTHUR: I was moving, I moved up pretty fast, because I’m a go-getter. [laughter] I started out washing dishes, and I quit just before I would have started becoming a manager. I just couldn’t take it anymore,

MM: You were living in the San Francisco area, right?

ARTHUR: I was living in a town called Vacaville, which is about 50 miles from San Francisco.

11

assistant, Linda Grant, asking who I wanted to draw this story I had written. I said, “Well—what? Huh? Um... well, I want to draw it, because that’s what I want to do. I want to draw comic books.” “Well, okay.”

So I penciled it up and sent it in, and I got paid for it all, and Joe Rubinstein ended up inking it. And thank goodness Bizarre Adventures was canceled before that story was published, because it was pretty darned ugly. [chuckles] I asked if they had any more work for me, and Linda told me, “Don’t worry; we’ll call you if we have more work for you.” [laughter] About a year went by, and so I sent in some more samples.

MM: Would you make an annual trip to San Diego, or not?

ARTHUR: Not to San Diego, no. This was around 1980, ’81, or ’82. There were lots of comic book conventions around at that time, and they would have three or four a year here in San Francisco, or in Oakland, which is just across the bay from here. So lots of the local Bay Area artists would come out and would go to these shows and some folk, like Chris Claremont and a few others would come out from the East Coast ’cause they just liked to visit San Francisco and Oakland.

MM: Is that pretty much how you got your break, or was it just sending submissions through the mail?

MM: So you basically went back to square one, and then you connected with Ann Nocenti?

ARTHUR: I finally got Longshot by sending submissions through the mail, but there is—we should back up a little bit. When I was about 18 or so, I didn’t really know anyone at the conventions, so one of the first things I went to was a Creation Convention, and I just had my portfolio with me. I had no idea how to go about getting a table, so I asked the various people in charge of the convention—and fortunately those were relatively small conventions, so there weren’t that many guys. But Bob Schreck used to work for Creation Conventions, so he was in charge of the Artists Alley, and I said, “Could I sit at one of the artists’ tables?”

And he said, “Well, do you have any of your work with you?” “Yeah,” and so I got out my stuff, and Bob very nicely said, “Sure, take a table, that’ll be fine.” So then I started being able to get a table at the Creation conventions, because I knew Schreck.

Joe Rubinstein was at one of these shows, and I was showing some of my stuff to him. He thought I was doing okay, so he took my samples back to New York and to Marvel and showed them to Denny O’Neil. Denny at that time was working on a book called Bizarre Adventures. So they said, “Oh, sure, come up with a story—just a threeor four-page thing—and we’ll see what we can do with that.” Well, how cool! Finally I’ve got a real job for Marvel; I’m finally a real comic book artist! So I wrote and thumbnailed a little three- or four-page thing and sent them copies of this. And then I got a call back from Denny’s

ARTHUR: Exactly. I sent in a bunch of samples— and this is a time when you could send copies to, I guess, everybody. They didn’t really have an art— MM: Submissions director, or whatever it is.

ARTHUR: They did at DC, I guess, at that time, but not at Marvel. And so what I did is, I just went to the back of some Marvel comic I had and found absolutely all the editors’ names, and sent out the same Xeroxes to every single editor whose name I could find. And fortunately, one of those packages ended up in Al Milgrom’s office, and just as Al Milgrom was getting ready to quit being an editor to go freelance. Carl Potts was taking over from him, and Al was cleaning out his office, going through the pile of submissions, and just handed over a small handful to Carl and said, “I think these have potential.” And fortunately my samples were in that stack. I got a call from Carl asking if I wanted to try doing a couple more pages of samples, so that’s what I did.

MM: How long did you work those shows before you got Longshot?

ARTHUR: About two years before I got Longshot.

Something like that. I think I started going when I was, like, 17 or so. And when I got Longshot, I was 19, or just a couple months before I turned 20.

12

MM: And then what would you do at the conventions? Sketch for about $20 or something?

ARTHUR: It’s hard to imagine now, because I can’t even imagine drawing as much as I do at shows now as I did then, but I would probably do five or ten sketches at a show. And they were always odd stuff, because I had, like most guys at these shows, they have the same handful of people that keep coming back. There was this one woman who was really nice, but really odd, who worked at the post office, and she always wanted drawings of Harrison Ford as different things. Harrison Ford as an elf, or Harrison Ford as whatever. Not doing anything that I didn’t want to draw. [laughs] But it was just very strange that she just wanted Harrison Ford drawn as different characters.

And I could never draw likenesses, so these drawings don’t look anything like Harrison Ford. [laughter] But I would get my ten or 20 bucks a pop, and I think I would end up spending almost all of the show buying back issues or hardcover books or something.

MM: What kind of things would the editors say when they would turn you down?

What would they say about your portfolio?

ARTHUR: I didn’t really get much by way of rejections. There was that first one with Denny O’Neil and Linda Grant, and it wasn’t a rejection. I got the job and they just weren’t really crazy about what I did, so....

But I didn’t really get back what was wrong with it. Other artists would kind of give me pointers. Like, Steve Leialoha was really helpful. Y’know, I can’t remember exactly what he said, but it was just a matter of trying to keep things clear, trying to make different objects separate, just making things clear and understandable. But most of the editors, when I was sending in samples to Marvel, it’s not like I was getting back responses saying what was good or bad about my work. I just didn’t get any response back.

MM: I think your art has this charm, always light-hearted. It’s not that constant, in-your-face, Marvel style. Was that something deliberate?

ARTHUR: That might have been it. I’ve

never really understood whatever success I’ve had. I’m happy to have it, but I’m not really sure what the basis of it is. And people have said that that’s what it is, that there’s a certain light-heartedness, but I think that’s fine. I think that’s a good thing.

MM: When you first came in, it’s like, “Oh, it’s not that same old John Buscema stuff. Finally we’ve got somebody from our generation drawing a book.”

Previous Page: This 1984 illustration entitled “Waiting for the Prince” was done for a Peter Pan portfolio.

Below: A sketch done for inker Terry Austin in 1983.

Artwork ©2006 Arthur Adams.

ARTHUR: Y’know, that’s probably partly it. Even though there were other young guys at that time. I mean, when Frank Miller started, I think he was 18 or 19 when he started. And I guess Shooter was writing stuff at that point, but, heck, when he started, he was 13 or 14.

MM: But you’ve always had that pop culture thing down.

ARTHUR: Yeah, I guess so. I guess maybe I was one of those guys who was just really bringing it to the foreground.

When Warlock turns into the Starship Enterprise, all that sort of stuff.

MM: When you look back at your artwork from the ’80s, what do you see different?

All the figures seem to be a lot leaner.

ARTHUR: Back in the early days, certainly. It’s weird, because when I was drawing that stuff, I didn’t see it that way. I didn’t think I was drawing weird, long, skinny people. It’s just not how I was looking at it when I was drawing it. It looked right 13

Below: A 1983 piece inked by Arthur’s buddy, Mike Mignola.

Next Page Top: Page 7 of “One-Eyed Jack”— written and drawn by Arthur in 1982—from High Energy #1, along with a photo of Arthur which appeared in the issue.

Next Page Bottom: A 1984 development drawing for Longshot.

Vampirella ™ and ©2006 Harris Publications, Inc. One-Eyed Jack ™ and ©2006 Arthur Adams.

to me. I was doing it to the best of my ability.

For about five or six years, when I would look back on that stuff, I would just kind of wince, “Oh, man, that stuff. That’s really no good. I don’t know what that guy was thinking.” But now I look back on it and I think it has a certain charm. I can separate myself from my actually having done it. [laughs] So I can see that it’s kind of funny and kind of—I guess it has a certain charm. But what’s weird is that that cycle seems to continue throughout my career. I look back on a lot of the stuff I did in the later ’80s or early ’90s now with some unhappiness.

MM: When did your figurework start changing? It’s always evolving. You have different influences, I guess.

ARTHUR: It just kind of keeps on going.

I do get different influences as time goes by, and I suppose some of those get incorporated. I guess in the ’80s and ’90s, I was starting to look more at Japanese stuff, and then, when I first started working on “Jonni Future,” I was looking more at guys like [Italian artist, Paolo] Serpieri and a couple other fellows.

MM: Who would you say was a big influence on your storytelling? How did you learn how to lay out a page and get a point across sequentially?

ARTHUR: It might have been that early high school teacher, Mr.—I want to say Mr. Vandenberg. I think that was it—Mr. Vandenberg. When I was doing comic book stuff, he just said, “Try to make things as clear as possible, even if the drawing might not be”—I don’t want to say not as exciting, but that’s kind of what I’m saying. He was not into me sacrificing storytelling for a really big, slam-pow kind of drawing; it’s more important to make the storytelling clear.

MM: And it was at these conventions that you started meeting other artists from your area? Did you meet Mike Mignola at the same time?

ARTHUR: I met Mike when I was about 17 years old.

MM: At those conventions?

ARTHUR: Yeah, because we would often be in line to show stuff to some other artist like Steve Leialoha or someone like that, and we would often be getting advice at about the same time, so inevitably we’d just start hanging out together.

MM: Were there other artists, as well, from that area?

ARTHUR: No, there was Mike Mignola, there was a fellow named Art Nichols we’d hang out with occasionally, but there weren’t that many other local guys, no.

MM: And you guys used to get teamed together— ARTHUR: There was a big underground community, but I was always afraid of those guys. [laughter]

MM: So you guys used to encourage each other?

ARTHUR: Oh, sure.

MM: And you learned from him, as well?

ARTHUR: Oh, sure.

Mike’s a really smart and funny guy. Yeah, he was really helpful.

MM: At least it motivates you, once you see what they’re going through—the growing pains of the industry and stuff.

ARTHUR: I mean, when Mike first got hired, he moved out to New York, and [laughs] he just had a really rough time in New York, so that’s one of the things that made me think, “Maybe I don’t need to move to New York.”

MM: You never did, right?

ARTHUR: I never did, no. Though to some degree I wish I did just so that I would have been around the offices a little bit more, and not sort of—I think I would have learned sooner a little bit more about— MM: Who these were people were that you were working for?

ARTHUR: Well, you know, we talked on the phone a lot, the people I was working with, so it wasn’t so much that. But I think it took longer for me to find out more about what goes into making a comic book after it leaves my hands. Not that I know a whole lot about that now, but I learned a little bit more when I was living in Portland, Oregon, not that far from Dark Horse Comics.

MM: You had a story in High Energy #1, right? Was that selfpublished?

ARTHUR: Yeah, early on, but that was unpaid, meaning I didn’t think of it as professional work. That was just me trying out stuff.

MM: That was with other friends, or how did you put it together?

ARTHUR: Mostly it was just guys who were all trying to get into comics, and I think those other guys knew each other. I just knew one of them I guess just from going to shows, and he just came by and asked if I wanted to be in the book.

MM: Did you have to pay to be in it?

ARTHUR: No. For your own sake, please don’t look for it. My part in it is no good! [laughter] 15

Interlude 1:

Under the Influence

Frank Frazetta

At some point I realized I was never going to be able to draw like Frank Frazetta, so I started looking at other stuff.

16

s Estate.

Rice Burrou gh Tarzan ™ an d ©2006 Ed gar

I didn’t know anything about oil paint or acrylic paint or even what to do with watercolors, but I did have watercolors at home, so what I would do is I would just mix up the watercolors as thick as I could get them, but have them still look good enough to put on paper.

Then I would take Xerox copies I had made of the black-and-white drawings from those early Frazetta books, and I would just pile the watercolors really thick and chunky on the paper, trying to get an oil painting effect. This was just on Xerox paper, so after I’d pile the paint on and then let it dry, I’d pick it up and the paint would just fall off.

rs ™ and ©2006 John Carter of Ma

s Estate.

Edgar Rice Burrough

When I was 13 or 14, I discovered Frank Frazetta. He was a huge influence on me, especially early on. On the days I wasn’t thinking about being a paleontologist, I was thinking about being Frank Frazetta. His work was just so powerful and dynamic; his drawings are so good, his painting is so good. I was going to work really hard and figure out how to paint and draw just like him. Which would have been stupid, of course, but I was 13 or 14, what did I know?

Michael Golden

Micronauts ™

and ©2006

Takara/A.G.E .

I was collecting comic books from the mid’70s, and then I discovered Michael Golden working on Micronauts. And I don’t know exactly what it is about the very first issue of Micronauts. Something about it just blew me away. That was the book that made me say, “Yeah, this is what I’m going to do for my career, for the rest of my life. I’m going to find a way to draw comic books, man!”

Walter Simonson

Beta Ray Bill, Thor ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

The most important influence on my career was probably Walt Simonson. Right at the very beginning of my career, Walt was working on Thor, and that stuff was just awesome! I was familiar with Walt’s Alien comic, and I really liked that. And I’d liked his stuff on Rampaging Hulk and various other things I’d seen him do over the years—Battlestar Galactica and so on—so I knew I liked his work, but the Thor stuff just really impressed me. And then he did the X-Men/New Teen Titans crossover, and that one was hugely helpful for me when I was working on the first New Mutants Special and the first X-Men Annual that I did. For me, it was all about how to tell a really clear story with that many characters. It was just the perfect team book for me.

Walt’s work is just really immediate and dynamic.

Also, Walt’s one of those guys that can do the stuff that’s kicking-doors-in powerful, and then also draw something really delicate and nice.

17

Jack Kirby I think, like a lot of young artists, even though I enjoyed Kirby comics when I was a kid as I looked at them through innocent eyes, I kind of poo-pooed Kirby’s stuff because the drawing just wasn’t pretty enough for me. I was looking at Devil Dinosaur and a lot of his mid-to-late ’70s stuff—which is just not as good as his late ’60s stuff—and I was looking at it as, “Well, this is that old guy’s stuff and I don’t like it.” But then, when I actually became a comic book artist, I ultimately developed a very deep respect for Kirby’s work.

All characters ©2 006 Marvel Chara cters, Inc.

On almost every book I work on—especially a book like the Fantastic Four—I try to go back to the source material.

It may not even show, but I was looking at a lot of Jack Kirby when I was on Fantastic Four. I learned so much from Kirby about making things clear and dynamic and not necessarily worrying about drawing absolutely every little, tiny detail. I do that now anyway, but I’m doing it with a purpose.

Barry Windsor-Smith

06 Conan Conan ©20

l, LLC. Internationa Properties

And, speaking of pretty drawings and guys who started out being strongly influenced by Jack Kirby, Barry Smith evolved into a really terrific artist. Barry Smith was a big influence on me, because I was getting some of his Conan comics. I had the Marvel Treasury Edition featuring Conan, which had “Rogues in the House,” one of my favorite Conan stories.

Barry inked me on one X-Men cover, which, gosh, I would love to redo, because that was a pretty crappy cover. It was one of those last-minute jobs I drew overnight and FedExed off to Marvel, and then he inked it really quickly. He did a great job, but my drawing was pretty crappy.

18

Part 2: MM: After High Energy, that’s when you started sending submissions to the other companies, right?

ARTHUR: That’s when I started sending out submissions to Marvel and DC. I’m not sure if I was sending out stuff to Pacific or First. I’m not even sure whether they existed at that point.

MM: So how did it work? Who hired you first, was it Marvel or DC? Because I think you had something published in Captain Carrot.

ARTHUR: One of the things I sent in was a drawing of a character in Captain Carrot called Farrah Foxette, who, as you may guess, was based on Farrah Fawcett. And me being the super-genius that I am, I found the double poster of Farrah Fawcett where she’s wearing a one-piece

A Longshot Pays Off swimsuit and right behind her is a multicolored, striped piece of cloth or something; I’m not sure what it is, just a multicolored, striped background. So me, being a supergenius, I copied that poster and changed her head to Farrah Foxette. I sent that to Captain Carrot, and I got a call, like, a week or two later from Roy Thomas—which was pretty exciting, because I’d been reading Roy Thomas Conan comics and all sorts of other comics for who knows how long—asking if they could use that for the letters page. And they only had a certain budget for the letters page, but he’d be happy to pay me $10 for the piece. I said, “Sure, why not?”

MM: This was long before Longshot?

ARTHUR: Yes, it was before Longshot, but that would hardly be counted as a submission, I think.

That was almost a fan letter.

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Below: In 1987 Arthur was asked to redesign Longshot for the X-Men title. These are some of the samples.

Longshot ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

MM: When that pin-up came out in Captain Carrot, did you think you’d made it? Was that a good feeling?

That was at least a year before I got hired to do Longshot.

I was still 18 at that time when Joe took my samples and showed them to people at Marvel, and I can’t remember now if it was Denny O’Neil or Linda Grant, but they said they’d be happy to have me do a three- or four-page thing. So I did a tight layout for that, and it had a short little script that was just a silly little cruel joke for Bizarre Adventures. And they got that, and this, apparently, was going to be published in the issue right after the book got canceled, so.... I’m actually not too sad about that.

ARTHUR: Ummm, I don’t know that I thought I’d made it. I thought it was pretty cool, but I also thought it was pretty silly. I knew that the rest of my career wasn’t going to be based on the same $10 pin-up.

MM: Was it one of those things, where you went out to buy as many copies as you could to show it to your parents and your—

MM: You mentioned you weren’t happy with that art.

ARTHUR: I must have bought ten or 15 copies, because I like to keep extras for myself, and then I got some for the rest of my family, yeah. But, I wasn’t bragging about it too much. It was ten bucks. It’s hard to remember now from the beginning of my career, but being published, I don’t know if I thought it was as big a deal to me as actually being able to have a career doing it.

ARTHUR: I just wasn’t ready to be a professional artist yet at that time, and as nice as Joe was to get me that job, I just don’t know if Joe is actually the inker for me, even then. But the funny thing was that I’d done the script and did the really tight layouts, and I got a call back from Linda Grant asking me who I’d like to have draw the story.

So I was kind of surprised, because I had never had any intention of going into comics to write comics—I just wanted to draw. So of course I said, “Me. I want to draw it.” And they let me do that, and I sent it in. I can’t remember what I got paid. It was probably two or three hundred bucks. That was a pretty good deal. Actually, it probably

MM: So then, as you mentioned before, Joe Rubinstein helped you out a little bit, showing your portfolio all around at Marvel, and somehow it ended up on Ann’s lap. That was the story that never got published, right?

ARTHUR: That’s the story that never got published.

20

wasn’t that much, but either way, it was more money than I’d been paid for any one thing at one time, so it was still pretty cool.

But I called up Linda Grant and asked if they had any more work for me, and I got the expected answer, which was, “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.” A couple months after that I realized I wasn’t going to get any more work out of them, so I decided to do some more samples.

MM: And that took you another year to prepare these new samples, right?

ARTHUR: Enh, like most of the things in my career, it probably took a week or two, but I ended up taking a year doing them.

So I did those samples and I sent them to absolutely everyone I could think of at Marvel Comics and at DC Comics.

MM: And that’s when Ann found the portfolio, right?

ARTHUR: Yeah, what happened was, Al Milgrom was ending his stint as an editor to go freelance, and he was cleaning out his office and he apparently had a stack of submissions that he’d kind of gone through a little bit, but not too much. So as he was cleaning his office, he was quickly going through them, tossing the ones that he thought had some potential to Carl Potts. Ann Nocenti at the time, I think, was just coming on as an assistant editor, and she was going to be Carl Potts’ assistant. And so Al was going through these submissions and was tossing the ones he thought had some potential over to Carl, and Carl went through them and thought mine was okay, and called me up and offered me a script for some issue of The Defenders—I can’t really remember what issue number—and said, “Here, go ahead and do layouts for 15 pages out of this thing—about ten or 15, it’s not important—and we’ll see what we think about.”

21

Previous Page: Pages 2 and 3 of “The Return of Richard Buzznick,” which was intended for an issue of Bizarre Adventures before its cancelation.

Inks by Joe Rubinstein.

Above: Two of The Defenders pages Arthur penciled as samples for Marvel.

Beast, The Defenders, Gargoyle, Richard Buzznick, Scarlet Witch, The Vision ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

MM: Is this when The Defenders was made up of former X-Men members?

ARTHUR: I was just at the beginning of that point, I think. It was Angel and Beast and Iceman... Moondragon, I think, and that Gargoyle character they had.

MM: And this was published?

ARTHUR: No, this was never published.

This was from a script for a job that was being worked on at that time. This is just samples, which is apparently something that Marvel did at the time. I don’t know if they still do, but they would send you a script for something that was actually going to be used, but not with the intention of ever actually using the artwork that you did. They were just trying to see if you could handle the job. And I can’t remember what it paid; it was, I don’t know, probably 20 bucks a page, something like that. I honestly can’t remember.

Could have been a little more, could have been a little less.

MM: How did Ann lure you to Longshot?

ARTHUR: I did those pages and, for the most part, they weren’t crazy about many of the pages. Most of my action was not very good, and my proportions and anatomy were all a little bit odd, but there were a couple pages where I had some character just washing dishes and just kind of hanging out, and they liked those. I guess they thought that showed that I did have the characters act.

Because comics aren’t just people punching each other, they actually have to sometimes look like they’re just doing regular stuff.

Apparently, Ann in particular liked these couple pages of the character thing. At that time, I think Marvel had a policy that if you were going to become an editor at Marvel, you had to have written something for them, or possibly even have created a character for them. Don’t hold me to that, that’s just what I recall. So she’d made up this character, Longshot, apparently about a year before she’d come across my samples. And as I recall her telling me, everyone she’d shown her script to had turned her down. They said they didn’t have time, or they just could not possibly understand the character. And so they went in and took a chance on me doing it.

MM: Did you get it right away?

ARTHUR: Longshot is kind of an odd character to me. Believe me, I really liked working on it—it was a lot of fun, and Ann was a lot of fun to work with—but I never quite got the idea of the character, that his super-power was that he was lucky. That seems to be the case with lots of super-heroes and lots of action/adventure characters. But that was his actual power: he was lucky. And there were other little things. He was an alien 22

and he was lighter than everyone else, so he was a little more acrobatic. But I had fun with that kind of stuff.

MM: Did Ann test you for it, or did you have to do anything to get the book?

ARTHUR: They pretty much just hired me to go ahead and do it, as I recall. Carl Potts had done a design of Longshot that looked kind of like the first of the Star Trek: The Motion Picture costumes. It was just kind of a form-fitting thing, and it was nice, but I just—I think I was trying to make Longshot look different from everything else that I could think of at the time, and I guess I did that. No one then, or since, has used that stupid mullet haircut.

MM: Where did that mullet haircut come from anyway?

ARTHUR: That was from the singer of some group at the time called Kajagoogoo or something like that. The guy had kind of spiky hair that was long in back, and I said, “Well, I can’t think of any other super-heroes that have that haircut. I guess I’ll give him that.”

MM: And all his pouches, where did that come from? Because that struck a chord, I guess, with the Image guys as they grew up. [laughs] ARTHUR: I can’t remember, I don’t think Frank [Miller] was working on Dark Knight yet at that point, but I think I just thought it was a good idea for him to have little pouches to carry stuff in. I never liked when superheroes somehow had secret pockets in their cape that no one ever knew about, or were carrying stuff in their boots. It just didn’t make sense to me. So I wanted my character to actually have a place to put stuff. He didn’t use it, but that weird purse he had— MM: It seems like, with Longshot, you changed the accessories that super-heroes had from then on. [laughs] ARTHUR: I’ve never really thought about it like that. I must have swiped it from somewhere, but I can’t think of what it was now.

MM: Was Michael Jackson a bit of an inspiration at all?

ARTHUR: No, not at all.

MM: But you had him in the book, as well, right?

ARTHUR: He was in one of the stories, and I’m not exactly sure why that was, because, then or now, I have no Michael Jackson albums. The only thing I can think of is that Mark Beachum had just started working at Marvel Comics at that time, and Ann liked him and thought he was kind of a funny guy, and was telling me at work during one phone conversation that he, at that time, was kind of dressing like Michael Jackson. So maybe I just thought that was funny or something, I don’t know.

MM: And Rita’s based a little bit on Ann? ARTHUR: Rita’s based on Ann, yeah.

MM: She told you that right away?

ARTHUR: I wanted a character that didn’t look like other comic book characters, and I thought it would be great if she was based on a real person, and so, to a degree—I mean, I’ve always been terrible at drawing likenesses, so she looked barely like Ann does. But I think it was good to have that foundation, that basing a character on an actual person.

MM: And where exactly did Mojo come 23

Previous Page Left: Character designs for the Longshot mini-series.

Previous Page Right: Longshot—have mullet, will travel. Pencils the fourth panel of Longshot #3, page 10.

Below: Longshot #6, page 41. The character, Rita—shown standing beside Longshot—was based visually on the story’s writer, Ann Nocenti.

Dr. Strange, Longshot, Spiral, and all related characters ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

from? Was he written like that in the script?

ARTHUR: Oh, Ann just wanted some guy that was kind of disgusting and unpleasant, and I tried to make him disgusting and unpleasant and a bit frightening.

MM: So you weren’t thinking about, say, Jabba the Hutt or anything like that?

ARTHUR: Oh, not at all.

MM: The story at Marvel was that they gave you a two-year head start to do this thing.

Above: An unused page intended for Longshot #4.

Next Page: Arthur’s pencils for Longshot #1, page 21 and Longshot #4, page 15.

Dr. Strange, Longshot, Spider-Man ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

ARTHUR: It did take me two years, that’s for sure. [laughs] A ridiculous amount of time.

I think the thing that worked out for me was that my editor at the beginning of that book was Louise Simonson. She took on that job—well, hell, she had it for quite a while. I had started the job well before she’d stopped editing, but I took so long on it that she ended up being the editor on a freelance basis after she quit, because we didn’t want to change editors. Which meant that she was doing other stuff and she was freelance editor. She didn’t care what we were doing. So somehow we were able to stretch the thing out over two years, which was just really odd. And really fortunate for me, because if I’d really had to crank that thing out from the very beginning, I think it would have been a different series. I realize they gave me a chance to—I think each issue the drawing got a little bit better. Whether that would have happened more quickly if I’d been 24

working on it faster, I don’t really know. But, yeah, I think the first issue I took at least eight months to do. It’s six issues, but the last issue is double-sized, so that’s like, y’know, a little more than three months per book, and I did ink a fair amount of the last issue.

MM: Why did it take you eight months to do the first issue?

ARTHUR: I think I was scared. And I was living at home at the time, so I wasn’t worried about paying any bills or anything like that; I was just trying to do the best job I could.

MM: For storytelling, who would you ask for advice?

ARTHUR: Louise is really smart with that stuff. She had me lay out the first ten page just roughly on scratch paper. I sent that in to Marvel, and there was a fellow named Elliot Brown who went over it and pointed out everything I was doing wrong. Because Ann’s script was so dense—and it’s not as though it was full-script. It was a plot, but she was just asking for so much stuff, I was sketching out pages that had ten, twelve, 15 panels. And that just wasn’t going to work for the whole book, because every panel was going to be postage-stamp size.

Fortunately Elliot Brown went over it and wrote me good notes about how to tighten stuff up and have multiple things happening in the panels rather than just drawing a tiny panel for each tiny action. So he was really helpful. Who else was I looking at for storytelling? I was reading and enjoying comics for quite a while before I started, but to a degree, I probably absorbed so much from comics that a lot of it was kind of natural. But who would have been a big influence? Let’s see, Walt was working on Thor, so I was looking at Walt’s art a great deal. And I was looking at Golden’s Micronauts, I’m sure, and—I’m not sure when his Dr. Strange book was done, but it might have been around that time, too.

MM: It might have been ’84. [Note: Doctor Strange #55 was published in 1982— three years before Longshot.]

ARTHUR: Yeah, it might have been right about time, and that Michael Golden/Terry Austin issue of Doctor Strange was really

amazing, I thought.

inked the first half but had to go on and find actual work, so he could support himself.

Fortunately Whilce Portacio came around, and I thought his stuff was—this was a long time ago, but I thought his stuff had a nice, organic quality. But it’s not like I discovered Whilce. He had submitted samples to Marvel, and Ann or Louise—I don’t know which—called up and said, “Oh, we have this new guy who we think might be good to ink you. Do you mind if he inks some samples?”

So he inked some stuff on vellum and he did a swell job.

MM: Do you think some of the acting you did ever helped you out with staging?

ARTHUR: I think probably so. I think that probably helped a little bit. And being an artist, I’ve always been a little hammy, so it was easy to get into—because, as I’m sure other comic book artists you’ve talked to have said, one of the main things in doing comics is making all the characters act. And so I get to play all the characters when I’m working on this stuff.

MM: Did you have any say in who was going to be your inker for that story?

MM: I was looking at the book today. It’s funny, but I see a lot of Whilce’s style now. When it came out, I thought it was an Art Adams book.

ARTHUR: For some strange reason, yes. I have no idea why they were so nice to me right from the very beginning. But I asked for a guy, Bill Anderson, who I believe was inking—who’s the guy who’s writing Fables now? Bill Willingham? Yeah, Willingham was drawing Elementals at the time, and I think he was pretty influenced by both John Byrne and, probably, Mike Golden. Bill Anderson was inking his stuff, and I thought it looked pretty good, so I thought we had to give him a try. And as I recall, because I took so damn long working on that book, he

ARTHUR: Sure. Y’know, I’ve always had mixed feelings about any of my inkers, even the best of them. And it’s not because I’m a fussy guy—which I am—but even then, when I would ink my own stuff, there were just things I would change just a little bit, either add weight where others didn’t—I just had a different idea how to ink my stuff, I think, than other folk. And I think I’ve been really lucky with the people who’ve inked me. I can’t think of anyone who I thought did a really bad job, I’ve just always preferred the comics where the artist inks

25

penciling the New Mutants, and then Whilce couldn’t finish inking the last issue of Longshot, so somehow, right after New Mutants, I ended up inking— Mike Mignola, fortunately, lived in the same apartment building, so Mike ended up helping out with the inking, too, on the last issue of Longshot.

And then I think from there we went to the X-Men Annual. So right at that time, suddenly I had, what, eight books come out in a period of six

himself.

months.

MM: Did he call you a lot during that?

ARTHUR: No, we talked very little.

MM: And you’d had no problem when he turned it in?

Above: Layout for the cover of New Mutants Special #1.

Next Page: This unused page was intended to be the opening splash page of X-Men Annual #9.

Enchantress, Loki, New Mutants,

ARTHUR: I actually don’t recall ever having a phone conversation with him. I’m sure we must have talked once or twice, but I don’t really remember anything about that.

I met him occasionally around that time at conventions, but we never really spent a lot of time hanging out or anything.

MM: So when Longshot came out and it was well received, were you surprised?

Storm, X-Men ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

ARTHUR: I was surprised and flattered and very happy. That was kind of a weird time. I don’t know if you were reading comics at that time?

MM: I was.

ARTHUR: Right after I’d done Longshot, I got right to work on a New Mutants Special.

And I’d worked on that for a couple of months. It was odd, because I was done penciling Longshot, and I got to work on 26

MM: When you were working on these things, did Marvel have a plan for how they were going to market you or something? Because it seemed like— ARTHUR: I don’t know how things work nowadays—I don’t even know how things worked then.

MM: It seemed like they were holding these back for some reason.

ARTHUR: Planning my career.

MM: Exactly. Because it seemed like, y’know, Longshot and the annuals and even the cover to Heroes for Hope all came out at the same time.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I think that was just a lucky coincidence. I think it was just lucky that I had taken so damn long to work on Longshot.

MM: So they weren’t telling you, stroking your ego, “You’re going to be the next big thing.”

ARTHUR: Oh, no, no, not at all. I mean, everyone was really nice. Like I said,

everyone was nice to me, but I had very little contact with people in New York. The only person I really talked to on a regular basis was Ann Nocenti, and we talked pretty often. It was just nice to be able to talk to someone I was working with. But no, no one was ever saying anything like that, and I don’t think—I mean, the next big thing for any comic book company is someone that can produce a lot of quality work. I wasn’t going to be the next big thing, because I just wasn’t doing much work.

ARTHUR: We had every intention of doing more. Ann had written a script for a first issue of a continuing series, and she also wrote a plot for a graphic novel. All of which I really wanted to do, but right after I did Longshot, and then New Mutants and the X-Men, suddenly I was just swamped with work, and it was just taking forever to get on to doing the Longshot stuff. So eventually it just kind of faded off into the distance.

MM: Growing up in the ’80s, I kind of felt like the XMen was at its height at that point, and whoever did any artwork or anything for X-Men would be the next big artist. And you were one of those guys.

ARTHUR: I don’t know that it ever got a lot better. I couldn’t tell you for absolutely sure. I don’t think the sales were ever super-great.

MM: Towards the end, were sales better?

MM: I thought it did very well, because I remember the back issues going for, like, 20 bucks, back in the late ’80s. [laughs]

ARTHUR: I guess George Pérez had done one, but George was already a well known guy.

MM: Well, you came out around the time that Paul Smith and John Romita, Jr. worked on the book.

ARTHUR: I just don’t think there’s any telling what people are going to like. Like, when Longshot came out, I think the first issue sold around 110,000—something like that—which at the time that was just above Marvel’s cancellation point. Any book that was selling under 90,000, they weren’t that crazy about.

MM: But this was a limited series based on a character nobody had ever seen.

ARTHUR: It was originally going to be a continuing series, but I think everyone caught on pretty quick that that just wasn’t going to happen with me doing it.

MM: Longshot was supposed to be an ongoing series?

ARTHUR: It was going to be an ongoing series, yeah. It was just as we were working on issue #6 that we started to work on the New Mutants Special and the X-Men Annual, so there was just no way I was going to be able to do both, and I think everyone knew it. I think that’s why issue #6 kind of has a rushed feeling to it. And I don’t think issue #6 was intended originally to be double-sized. I don’t recall that for absolutely certain, but as I recall, it was supposed to be a regular issue, but because we knew it was going to be the last issue, Ann wrote a lot of stuff to go in there, and there was just no way I could have fit it into a regular-sized issue.

MM: Did she ever end her story? It seemed like she wanted to come back.

27

swell guy, trying to give us a leg up on getting the series. “If you do the mini-series now, or if you go on to do an ongoing series, it’ll be featuring an X-Men character instead of just ‘that guy who was in that mini-series.’”

ARTHUR: Yeah, but you can get them now for about the same amount, or even a little cheaper.

MM: You said in an interview that H.R. Giger was sort of an influence on Longshot. Is that true?

MM: Did you feel an attachment to Longshot from then on?

ARTHUR: If I said it at the time, I’m sure that must have been the case. I don’t really remember. I know I had a couple of Giger books around, and I’m sure I was looking at them at the time. Because I loved the film, Alien; I think, if you’re a comic book guy, you’re actually required by law to love that film. So I’m sure he must have been an influence in some way, but I couldn’t say exactly how.

ARTHUR: Well, to a degree, sure.

MM: Do you have any ownership with that character?

ARTHUR: I do believe, supposedly, they were doing some creator incentive thing at the time that if you made up a character for Marvel, you got 3% of a share of whatever happens with it. But that’s for one person, so because it’s Ann and I, it’s 1-1/2% per person. And there’s been so little Longshot stuff since then.

MM: Before Longshot came out, you were already working on the X-Men Annual and the New Mutants Special?

ARTHUR: Yeah.

MM: What exactly happen to Longshot’s career? It seemed like he was a popular X-Man. He just sort of faded away.

MM: Did Ann have anything to do with that?

ARTHUR: She was the editor on both, and Chris [Claremont] was famous at the time for stealing artists.

ARTHUR: I think he’s one of those odd—because I think they tried doing some specials with the character, and I don’t know, I guess they just didn’t catch on.

MM: At any point did they ever ask you if you wanted to take over the monthly X-Men title?

ARTHUR: I think Chris and I chatted about it once or twice, and I suppose if I’d told Chris I was interested, that might have happened. Because, let’s see, that would have been—I guess if I had done it, it would have been probably after Paul Smith or maybe John Romita, Jr. was working on it. Oh, I wonder if I would have done it, or they would have got me to do some fill-in issues or something like that. I imagine if they’d wanted to just keep doing XMen Annuals, they probably would have been happy with that, as well.

MM: They’ve never asked you and Ann to come back?

ARTHUR: Again, no formal request. I sometimes get calls from various folks at Marvel saying, “Whatever you want to do.”

MM: But that’s not something you want to do at this point?

ARTHUR: I’m not opposed to the idea of doing it at some point, it’s just not something I think about very much. Really, at this point in my career—and for most comic book guys, really—you’re better off making up

MM: But was that part of the intention? When they gave you the first annual, was it like, “You’re going to do annuals from now on.”

ARTHUR: Oh, no. I just was kind of lucky; it just kind of worked out that way. I think I did the one the year after that—that’s why Longshot ended up joining the XMen. That was Chris being a 28

own thing.

MM: So was Chris Claremont part of the reason you went to do the X-Men stuff? Were you a big X-Men fan?

ARTHUR: I mean, it was a fun—“love” is not quite the right word, but I really liked the X-Men, and it was a fun read.

MM: I was going to ask you about your Wolverine poster, very similar in composition to what Paul Smith did with X-Men #173.

ARTHUR: Well, as I recall—that’s a little bit on the way-back machine— when they asked me to do the Heroes for Hope cover, Ann said, “Could you do the Wolverine so it’s kind of like the one on Paul’s cover.” “All right, I’ll try to do something like that.”

And I think they’re probably pretty close. I didn’t trace it, but it’s pretty close.

your own thing. Because, saleswise, you’re just better off making up something you own for yourself, instead of making up a new character for either Marvel or DC. Nothing against those companies—I’m happy working for DC right now—but it’s hard to imagine that I would actually make up a character to give to DC. MM: But it’s something that’s become part of the comics industry. You don’t see a lot of guys creating characters for the companies since Image and that kind of thing.

ARTHUR: Yeah. So at this point in my career, I feel that if I’m going to do something for either Marvel or DC, it has to be something that has some small guarantee of success, something that’s going to sell well, just so that it’ll help me advertise my own thing when I go back to doing my

MM: I think you did one better when you did that poster— ARTHUR: When I did the poster, that’s whoever was in charge—I think Bob Budiansky was in charge of posters at the time.

“We want a Wolverine poster. Could you do one based on your Heroes for Hope cover?” [laughter] Okay, whatever!

MM: Removed it by, like, two degrees. That poster was huge, that poster was everywhere.

ARTHUR: That one made me some pretty good money.

After Marvel went through the 29

Previous Page: Pencils from Longshot #3, page 18, panel 4.

Left: Artwork for a 1985 New Mutants poster.

Below: Before the legendary Wolverine poster, Arthur used the pose for this drawing for a life-size standee for retailer stores. Inks by Terry Austin.

New Mutants, Spiral, Wolverine ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

right? You did posters and folders—all sorts of weird things.

bankruptcy, I think a lot of the royalty stuff got kind of messed up. ’Cause for years I was seeing royalties off of that poster.

ARTHUR: A couple of little things like that. Not a whole lot, but I did a couple of little things like that. I did a piece for Marvel that was for some presentation pack, as I recall. I don’t even think I have one around the house, I don’t know.

And then I did a style guide for one character for DC.

MM: That was a poster you would see at every comic book shop or— ARTHUR: Oh, definitely. That was a fun job, because I think I did the thing and they gave me some ridiculous advance, just because they knew what the sales were, so I think I got, after I turned in the artwork, a check for, like, a grand, or something like that. It’s sort of amazing.

You know what, it might have been four grand and there might have been a royalty later on for eight grand, it was something like that.

MM: What kind of work went into doing the New Mutants Special?

ARTHUR: It was just a weird one, because I was working Marvel style—from a plot. And Chris always has— well, this was the first time Chris and I had worked together, so maybe this is something else. Chris always asked for a lot of stuff in his plots, and you use what you can, and, as I recall, I tried to use all of it and then add my own stuff, so there’s just lots of odd stuff there in that one. There’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t really make much sense. But, as I recall, it was just a lot of fun, because it was right around the time Bill Sienkiewicz was working on New Mutants, and that was a lot of fun at the time. And it was

MM: Did the other posters do well? Like the Mutants and the X-Men? ARTHUR: Oh, they did well, but I think the X-Men was—and also, part of why the Wolverine one is funny is because, y’know, it’s just one figure. It wasn’t like it was a lot of work. In one of the X-Men Annuals—I think it was #12— in the back-up story with the X-Babies, the first one with the X-Babies, there’s a big close-up of Mojo in that story, and I think I drew that thing in, like, a half-hour. And so the idea of that was just so funny that I just couldn’t work for the rest of the day. I’d work for a half-hour, and I’d make whatever my page rate was at the time; it was probably $100, $150, something like that. In fact, I was in my early 20s, living in San Francisco with my girlfriend. That was a pretty good day! Just a half-hour of work.

So the Wolverine poster, it was kind of similar. It wasn’t a lot of work, but it was a lot of money. The other two posters with all the Xcharacters, I felt like I put a little work into those.

MM: Was this something that you wanted to pursue, doing more posters, or did it just soon dry out?

ARTHUR: I had an interest in doing more, and they had interest in me doing more, I just, as with lots of things in my career, I just never got around to doing it. And by the time I was even interested in doing more, I think the poster craze had kind of faded.

MM: But you started doing a lot more things for licensing, 30

at the time that Walt was working on Thor, so it was playing with other guys’ characters and—heck, I sure did love Walt’s stories. Those were just fun to look at. And also, that was my first time drawing a team book, so I spent a lot of time looking at Walt’s X-Men/New Teen Titans crossover, which I thought was just the perfect example of how to do a team book, especially with so many characters. So that was certainly a big help. I just remember that one being a lot of fun. That’s not to say that the rest of the annuals were not fun, because they were, but what ended up happening was, when Chris, as a writer, finds out that you can put more stuff in, he’ll ask for more stuff.

Now that I think of it, I think the New Mutants Special and the X-Men Annual were really supposed to be drawn by Paul Smith.

MM: I was just looking through the annual. Were you surprised you didn’t have to do the X-Men full-costume and all of that stuff?

ARTHUR: I kind of missed that. On one hand, it was fun to make up my own costumes and not have to worry about looking at what other people did, but it’s me, so I was still always looking at what other people did. And I liked drawing the characters in their costumes. That’s part of the fun of doing comics is having the characters look like who they are. I guess it did happen enough in the comic, and maybe that’s one of the reasons people liked it, because it was a bit of a change of pace from the regular series. I dunno.

MM: Was this something you got a kick out of? Because this might be the first time you had to draw children?

ARTHUR: The very first time I had to draw a baby was the first issue of Longshot.

The first issue of Longshot was funny because usually, I’d just been doing drawings of super-heroes fighting other super-heroes. I never sat down to draw people sitting in a living room. I had never drawn a baby, but then for the first issue for Longshot I had to draw a baby and cars and a windmill. And my powers of perspective were not so great at the time, so that was quite a challenge.

MM: Okay, I just noticed the baby looks kind of tiny.

ARTHUR: Yeah, the baby looks really odd.

And so I think by the time I got to the XBabies, which are not particularly realisticlooking by any stretch of the imagination— MM: John Totleben always tells me kids are a pain to draw.

MM: Were the X-Babies your idea, as well?

ARTHUR: No. [laughs] No, no. Those were Claremont. Claremont called up and thought that this would be a great merchandising idea for Marvel to do X-Babies. I think someone might have given either him or Dave Cockrum a little baby version, a stuffed doll of Nightcrawler. Chris thought that would be a great idea to get Marvel to do all of the X-Men characters as these weird little baby characters. Heck, I think this might even have been before Japanese toy companies started doing their various super-deformed characters. You know, with all the cutesified, little big-headed things.

God, it’s hard to remember now.

31

Left and Above: Preliminary sketches for Excalibur Special #2 of Spriral with the X-Babies, and of Mojo.

Below: Bottom half of X-Men Annual #10, page 21. Inks by Terry Austin.

Mojo, Spiral, X-Men ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

MM: Yeah, that was a special.

ARTHUR: That was one of the jobs that’s been the least fun for me. I think that might be my most hated job, still.

MM: Why? ARTHUR: Because the editor on it just kept changing the deadline on me. Because I’m a slow guy, and I take as much time as you give me, so if you tell me I have a month more than I actually have, that’s not going to work out well. [laughs] So I ended up really cranking out, like, at least ten of those pages got done in a week, and I think even the last page I drew in that book, I think I drew in a half-hour. And looking at it now, it’s hard to believe that I drew it in a half-hour. It’s not the most horrible page that’s ever been printed in the history of comic books, but it was still a really—it was just an unhappy experience.

ARTHUR: They can be. I don’t have a problem with it anymore, but certainly a lot of people kind of draw them as miniature adults, and that doesn’t really work out.

MM: I think the X-Babies did really well, especially when you did the Excalibur book.

ARTHUR: That apparently did all start out as a scam by Chris to get some X-Men merchandise going. Which, of course, Marvel never, ever did. We don’t know why. I guess nowadays they probably would do them if we were—well, Chris and I should make up some baby characters for DC, and then they’ll immediately become DC Direct action figures—that would be a good thing. The Excalibur Annual sold really well. I think one of the best paychecks I ever got was out of the Excalibur Annual. Or, no, it was an Excalibur Special, wasn’t it?

MM: In the beginning, how did you schedule yourself? How fast were you at the beginning? Would it take you, like, a week to do a page, or a couple of days?

32

ARTHUR: It’s weird. I seem to be getting slower. I used to be able to do a page a day fairly comfortably, but then I would take time off. Because I’m not that smart.

Basically, if I have money in the bank, I feel like I don’t need to work. Which is not really a good way to think.

MM: So you work a lot slower when there’s money in the bank? [laughs] ARTHUR: Yeah, often I was taking two days to do a page. These days it seems to be taking a lot longer, I don’t really know why. At that time I could turn around a cover in three or four days. Nowadays it seems to take about twice as long as that.

MM: Were you looking for more cover work? You did that Classic X-Men stuff for a long time.

ARTHUR: I was not, really, no. That was another one—Ann asked if I would be interested in doing those covers, and I figured, “Well, there’s not much thought involved in those. Those’ll be pretty easy ones—all I have to do is get the old comics.”

MM: But it’s something you liked. You’ve done it a

couple times after that; you did, like, eight gorilla covers for those DC Annuals a few years back— ARTHUR: Kind of fun to do.

MM: There are some guys that just do covers, but you always wanted to stay doing sequential work?

ARTHUR: Yeah, that’s right. I always wanted to be a comic book artist, not just a comic book cover artist.

Not that I’m saying there’s anything wrong with that, just drawing comic book covers, but I just don’t think that’s what sticks in people’s minds. There are some guys who do really amazing covers and people buy the comic just because of the cover. I mean, I’ve seen plenty of comic books that I probably wouldn’t know if Adam Hughes hadn’t done the cover for them. And any number of other guys. But I think, you know, I want to draw the adventures of the characters, not just one drawing at a time.

MM: I always thought it was kind of a let-down if you buy a cover, and when you open the book, it’s somebody else. [laughs] ARTHUR: I agree.

Well, sadly, it was one of my strongest memories from when I was a kid. I had gotten some old Marvel reprint monster books. Maybe it was a monster book; I didn’t know anything about comics being reprinted at the time, so it 33

Previous Page: Layouts and finished inks for Excalibur Special #2, page 2. Inks by Terry Austin.

Above: Cover sketch for Classic X-Men #10.

Left: Cover art for Classic X-Men #15. Inks

by Terry Austin.

Excalibur, Juggernaut, X-Men ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Right: Frontis piece for Classic X-Men #8.

Below: Cover art for Generation X #67.

Next Page: Gumby Winter Fun Special #1 cover art.

Generation X, X-Men ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc. Gumby, Pokey ™ and ©2006 Art Clokey.

was a brand new comic book to me. But on the cover it featured this monster coming up out of the swamp, menacing this young couple in a boat.

And then I read the story, like, I say, “Well, that looked like an interesting story.

There’s a swamp monster, all right, but he’s menacing an old couple. It’s just not the same.”

MM: It’s like those movie posters that show you a certain scene, and it never happens in the movie— ARTHUR: It’s just not fair. It’s not fair advertising. I think on almost every cover I’ve been asked to do, I think I’ve almost always asked, “Why isn’t the guy who’s drawing the inside of the book drawing the cover?” Because to me having someone else draw the cover, sometimes it’s false advertising. Also, nowadays, it’s harder to draw covers, often because—y’know, I’m sitting here drawing the cover. I don’t know what’s happening in the book. And if I am doing a comic book cover, I kind of still want to be telling a little bit of the story, so I kind of want to have a story going on in the cover, and if I don’t know what’s going on inside the book, I can’t really do that.

MM: Because you did those Generation X covers— ARTHUR: Oh, the Gen X covers, that’s one of the things I’m talking about. There’s a couple of those covers where I just didn’t know what was happening in the book, and it’s just not a fun position—for me, anyway—to be in.

MM: Are you happy with those covers?

ARTHUR: No, overall, no, I’m not particularly happy with those covers. I think, looking back on some of them now, I can see there’s things I like about them, but overall I don’t find them to be particularly satisfying covers.

MM: I always found those covers to be a little bit too busy for your style.

ARTHUR: I think I was starting to try something a little bit different there, so that’s probably where a little bit of that is happening. And also it was probably a little bit of my just trying to make something look like it’s happening when there isn’t really anything happening. And Steve Pugh was doing the interiors on that book. Steve Pugh is a terrific comic-book artist. Get him to do the covers.

Part 3:

The Fantastic Voyage

MM: I always felt the Action Annual you did with John Byrne was a key moment in your career. I mean, a lot of people don’t talk about it, but there was big change in your style from what we’d seen before. Did Giordano have something to do with that, or was that just you—?

comfortable drawing Superman—at that time I wasn’t even really comfortable drawing Batman—but I think that I was working on that right after Frank’s Dark Knight came out, so that was probably a big influence on what I was doing.

ARTHUR: I think it’s a combination. This is more story than you actually need, really.

MM: It shows a lot.

ARTHUR: Sure. And, gee, I was drawing Superman’s chin really big; I would get calls from Carlin saying, “Could you please not make his chin so big?” And me, being a jackass, I would—

MM: But I always thought that the art was really good. I mean, is it one of those things you don’t like talking about?

ARTHUR: No, it’s one of those things where real life is kind of influencing what is going on in the page.

At the time I was working on the Action Annual, I was also, for whatever reason, working on the first Gumby special, the first Summer Fun Special.

And, at that exact same time, my girlfriend broke up with me. So [laughs] I was just miserable for a month, and I was just trying to get this work done. Like, I was working on the Action page, Mike Carlin would call up and say, [whining] “Are there any of those pages? I need them now.” “But Mike, I can’t draw, my girlfriend broke up with me.” “Arthur, so your girlfriend broke up with you. I don’t care. I need pages.” So I was trying to get those done.

I’ve never been

MM: Make it bigger?

ARTHUR: I would make the chin bigger. [laughs] So somehow we got that one done.

And it’s not one of my favorites now, but, you know.... You mentioned not a lot of people talk about it, but, you know, a lot of people do tell me that it’s one of their favorite books.

MM: But consciously, were you trying to change your figurework? The figures are a lot bulkier in this story.

ARTHUR: Because I was looking at Frank’s Dark Knight a great deal, so I’m sure that must have been a big influence.

MM: When you were drawing, putting aside the breakup and all that stuff, did you find it fun?

35

was full script, but I’m not absolutely sure about that. But it was, as I recall, really direct, and it was really easy to draw.

MM: What about the vamp girl? Did they ask you to draw that Mr. Peanut on her shirt for the whole story?

ARTHUR: [laughs] My girlfriend who had just dumped me had that exact T-shirt. [laughter] [whining] I went and drew it because I thought it was cute.

MM: So you didn’t have any problem with legal over that?

ARTHUR: Surprisingly enough, no. It’s one of those weird pop culture things. There’s only been a couple of times where Marvel or DC’s lawyers said, “Please don’t do that.” I think the last one was either the New Mutants Special or the X-Men Annual, where I drew, like, Hagar the Horrible or something in the back of one panel in Asgard. [laughs] Y’know, it was stupid, because I drew him pretty much like Hagar the Horrible.

There’s no good reason for that character to be there, but I drew him anyway. I think someone in legal said, “Please don’t do that.”

MM: This story also has Don Knotts in it, too. That was pretty cool, I thought.

ARTHUR: [laughs] Where was Don Knotts?

MM: You made him the deputy to the sheriff.

ARTHUR: Oh, yeah, that’s right. Oh, yeah.

That’s one of those things writers are asking for, and if I had done more work, maybe writers would be onto me by now. He asked for him to be kind of an Andy Griffith—

ARTHUR: I’m sure I was trying to do something different. It’s kind of a blur now. I think I actually, for all of my complaining about my not getting it done quickly enough, I think, for me, it actually went relatively quickly.

MM: See, that’s one of those things I was telling you before that I thought was charming about your work, because you helped bring Marvel Comics into the 1980s. Those little nuances went a long way.

MM: Did Byrne write this just for you? Was that the story you got?

ARTHUR: Yeah. That’s one of the few where one of the pages, I guess John and Carlin didn’t like my storytelling, so they rearranged some panels on one page, which kind of drove me nuts.

ARTHUR: Well, I appreciate that. [laughs] I don’t know if I would have given myself credit for that, but I will now. So thank you. So yes, I was thinking of an Andy Griffith Show sort of vibe for the thing, so there’s Don Knotts. Like, in “Jonni Future,” the writer, Steve Moore, asked for Jonni Future’s house to look kind of like the Psycho house. So I was thinking, “How can I draw something like the Psycho house? How can I draw something like the Psycho house? I know! I’ll draw the Psycho house!” [laughter] Me being all smart and stuff.

MM: I think your storytelling looked better on this than anything up to that point.

ARTHUR: You know, I think you’re probably right. I think it was pretty clear. And John’s really direct and really—again, I believe it was a plot; I don’t believe it 36

MM: What did you think of Dick Giordano’s inks on your work on that comic?

ARTHUR: I was quite thrilled and honored to have Dick Giordano inking myself, but I think don’t know if he had enough time to ink my stuff.

MM: It seemed like he was pretty faithful to whatever you put down on the page.

ARTHUR: As I recall, he was. I think I just wasn’t crazy about his line weight.

MM: Okay, because I always thought it was a strange case. I know he can do everything, but it was a strange choice for your style.

reason, I brought my Longshot pages with me—I guess because I was showing off to Mignola and Purcell—to show folk at Comics and Comix. Diana was there and she saw them and got a kick out of the little Gumbys drawn in the corners.

Years and years go by, and she finds herself as an editor at Comico Comics. And when they were looking for stuff to do, she remembers that I had drawn these weird little Gumbys in the corners of this Longshot job. “We can get Arthur to draw Gumby comics! That’ll be something for Comico to license, and it’ll get Arthur Adams working

ARTHUR: Yeah, I don’t think it was a match made in heaven. Again, I was honored and flattered that he was willing to do it. I just don’t know if it was really a great combination.

MM: How did you get yourself into the Gumby thing? I thought I read that you weren’t even a big fan of Gumby growing up or anything.

ARTHUR: When I lived in West Virginia there was a little boy down the street named Rusty who one day stole my Gumby and Pokey toys that I was playing with outside. But he was an older kid, this Rusty, and he was running away and I couldn’t catch him, and I was crying because I wanted my Gumby and Pokey back. He threw Gumby in a bush where I couldn’t get it. So I have bad memories of Gumby and Pokey. [laughs] I think on the second issue of Longshot—for whatever reason—on various Longshot pages I was drawing Gumby as various super-heroes. I don’t know why I was doing it, I was just doing it. So there was a little Superman Gumby and a SpiderMan Gumby and Thor Gumby and whatever else. Occasionally when I visited Mignola, who lived in the Oakland area, we went to Comics and Comix and visited with Diana Schutz—because she knew about comics and she was a girl, so we could talk to her. For whatever 37

Previous Page: Page 2 of Gumby Winter Fun Special #1.

Below: The “Psycho house” makes its first appearance—from the “Jonni Future” story in Tom Strong’s Terrific Tales #1.

Jonni Future ™ and ©2006 America’s Best Comics, LLC. Gumby, Pokey ™ and ©2006 Art Clokey.

on while on the Action Annual, right?

on something for some Comico comics. I guess that’s a good idea.” And so she calls me up and asks me if I’ll draw this Gumby comic, and I said, “Well, I don’t know”—and inside I’m saying, “Oh, God! I don’t want to draw Gumby!

If I draw Gumby”—I have no idea why I would think this, but I was thinking, “Oh, if I draw this Gumby comic book, I’ll always be ‘the Gumby guy’. I’ll never be able to get a regular job again.” Whatever that means, in comics.

ARTHUR: Yeah, I took that job right at the same time, so I was somehow working on the two books at the same time. I’m often working on more than one thing at the same time. I don’t really like just having one thing going. I like being able to change.

MM: But another thing, all these books came out the same summer, right?

MM: You weren’t thinking, “I could be doing two X-Men books?”

ARTHUR: Yeah. I don’t know if they came out the same month, but they came out around the same time. I think at some point I was concentrating more on Action. I think I probably penciled a chunk of Gumby and then I penciled a big chunk of Action, and back and forth. And then Action was done, and I was the one inking the Gumby comic book, so it probably took another month or two after that.

ARTHUR: No, I don’t think I was; I’ve never been that smart about my career. I don’t know what I was thinking, what else I could have been doing. Maybe I was there thinking, “Hey, I’ve been drawing X-Men and I’m getting some acclaim for that. Why would I want to draw Gumby?”

I don’t know. But I thought, “Well, I know. I’ll make it hard for Diana. I’ll make it so there’s no way I can get it done.

I’ll ask for some writer who’ll be impossible to get. I’ll get some guy who’s doing a creator-owned book that I know he’s working on, that he’s writing and drawing, so there’s no way he’s going to have time to write those things.”

I’d met Bob Burden a couple times. I was a big fan of Flaming Carrot, and we’d had dinner or drinks or something a couple of times, and we always had a good time hanging out. So I said, “You know what? If you can get Bob Burden to write Gumby, I’ll draw it,” thinking, “This is impossible, they’ll never be able to get him to write it.” Naturally, a half-hour later she calls back and says, “Bob would love to write it.” [sighs] So I ended up somehow having to draw the Gumby comic book.

MM: So did Art Clokey [creator of Gumby] himself have to approve it, as well?

ARTHUR: My understanding is that either Art Clokey or his people had some approval over it, and as I recall they were okay with it. What was funny is that they started making new Gumby cartoons after I’d done the first Summer Special; they were making new cartoons right when Purcell and I were working on the Winter Fun Special. And when I would see the cartoons, I would actually see weird little things that I’d drawn in the comics. When Gumby was grimacing at some point in the story, I had drawn him with gritted teeth. There’s no reason in the world for Gumby to have gritted teeth, but I drew him with gritted teeth. And then, when the cartoon showed up, if something shocking happened, he had gritted teeth.

MM: Was it a good experience? This is something you were working

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MM: With the Action Annual, was that your start at DC, or was there something else before that?

ARTHUR: The only thing before that I had done— MM: Did you work on Batman #400 before you— ARTHUR: I had done four or five or six pages for, I think it was Batman, was it Batman or Detective?

MM: It was Batman #400.

ARTHUR: That was by a whole bunch of different artists.

MM: Was it a big deal for you at that point?

ARTHUR: I’ve always been intimidated by Batman, because I was such a big fan of Batman from when I was, like, three years old. So that was pretty intimidating. I was

really flattered to be asked to do, to be part of that book, because it was by a bunch of good guys, as I recall. My favorite comment after I had done that job was from Steve Leialoha, who was describing his experience of looking at the book. He was saying, “Yeah, I was looking at the Bill Sienkiewicz pages, and there was Batman, and I was, like, on acid. And then I turn the page and there’s you, and suddenly I wasn’t!” [laughter] Oddly enough, I take that as a compliment. Or at least something funny that’s been said.

MM: How much work was it at that point? This is, like, ’86, right around the time Longshot was ending?

ARTHUR: I’m not sure when. I think— who was the editor?

MM: It was Len Wein.

ARTHUR: Len Wein? Could have been. I honestly don’t remember having talked to him about it.

39

Left: First panel from page 7 of Gumby Winter Fun Special #1.

Above: Arthur was one of many contributing artists in Batman #400.

Here are pages 27 and 28. Inks by Terry Austin.

Batman, Robin, and all related characters ™ and ©2006 DC Comics. Gumby, Pokey ™ and ©2006 Art Clokey.

Below: Splash page pencils from Cloak and Dagger #9.

Next Page Top: Cloak and Dagger #9, page 13, panel 1. Inks by Terry Austin.

Next Page Bottom: Appleseed cover art.

Cloak and Dagger ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc. Appleseed ©2006 Masemune Shirow and Seishinsha.

MM: So you don’t even remember who called you first from DC?

MM: But he never gave you any work at Marvel?

ARTHUR: No, no.

ARTHUR: Well, I was working with Ann on Longshot or on the X-Men stuff. And as you know from hanging around the Marvel offices, basically all the editors talk about the artists and writers like meat. “I’m gonna get such-and-such to do something at some point!” And I’m sure that I was going to do something for everyone eventually.

MM: Did Batman #400 lead to more DC work?

ARTHUR: By the time I did the Action Annual, I’d known Mike Carlin, because Carlin used to work at Marvel, so I’d spent a little time with Mike, and I knew him and I liked him.

MM: Do you remember how you would choose your projects back in the ’80s?

Did you have to see the script, or were there things you turned down for certain reasons?

ARTHUR: One of my problems, and I think one of the reasons why I ended up not doing more Longshot work, is that, especially at that time, I had a lot of trouble saying no when I was offered jobs, so it would get to the point where I was telling people, “Thank you for offering me this job, and I’d be happy to get to it. I already have these other jobs here, so if you’d be willing to wait two years, I can start on your job.” And people would say yes! So what can you do?

MM: This is how you ended up on Cloak and Dagger?

ARTHUR: What was the deal in Cloak and Dagger? I wasn’t in New York. I was definitely still living at home at that time, and for whatever reason—I’ve never really known why, because Carl’s always been nothing but nice to me; I pretty much started my career because he felt my samples were okay—I really was intimidated by Carl Potts. Again, I have no idea why. So he called and offered this job, and I said yes, because I was saying yes to almost everything then. But he’d said that I’d only have three weeks to do it. I think he gave me 21 days to do it, and I was worried, because I think on day 21 I told him I needed one more day, and he just laughed and said, “I think that’ll be okay.” But I always thought that was an example that I could do a book in 21, 22 days if I had to.

40

ARTHUR: Watercolors and colored pencils and black ink and whatever I had laying around, pretty much. You know, I guess for some guy who doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing, they’re not the worst thing in the world, but they’re pretty crappy. I paint so seldomly that every time I do, I have to kind of relearn what I’ve forgotten and then maybe learn some new stuff. So I always feel like with every painting job I’m on the verge of knowing what I’m doing, and then the next job I do is not in color, so I forget it all over again.

MM: Which of those five covers were you happiest with?

ARTHUR: I like the last one best.

MM: But that didn’t encourage you to do it again, did it?

MM: I like that one a lot for the mood you set there.

ARTHUR: It was exhausting! I’ve done it a couple of times. When I was working on the Fantastic Four stuff, I think the third issue I drew in three weeks. But I think those are the only two books I’ve done that fast.

ARTHUR: I think that one worked a little bit better, and the figures were a lot smaller, so that’s less for me to mess up. [laughs] MM: What would you say, in the first five years, was the best thing you did? Or that best exemplifies what you were capable of doing?

MM: About your Appleseed covers: How did that come about? Is that your first color work?

ARTHUR: That’s certainly the first stuff that was published that I painted. And I don’t really look back on those with much fondness.

MM: You’re not a big fan of anime or manga?

ARTHUR: No, I loved it. That’s part of the problem is that I loved the Appleseed comics. I thought they were terrific, and I think Shirow Masamune’s a terrific artist, but I was really intimidated by that stuff. And it’s one of those odd situations where I think they would have been better off using his already existing work as the covers, because there’s no way that I could do anything to match the way he draws. We just don’t draw the same.

MM: But they were well received when they came out, weren’t they?

ARTHUR: They were, for some reason, relatively well received. I think there’s only one or two of them that I can look at without wincing, because I think my drawing is really bad on them. I was trying to make it look kind of like his stuff, but I couldn’t really make it look like his stuff, and I wasn’t really used to painting, it had been so long since I’d done it before.

MM: What kind of materials did you use? Was it acrylics or watercolors?

41

always liked Dr. Strange. He’s one of those characters I think has a lot of potential, but it’s a potential seldom realized. And at that time I guess She-Hulk had just started being in the Fantastic Four. I think she’d been in the Fantastic Four for a little bit at that point, but, again, that was a series I got when it first started coming out, because I was into comics and I had to get issue #1 and all that stuff. I thought she was a character that had a lot of potential which just hadn’t been realized, so it was kind of fun to draw her, even though it’s kind of hard to look at her now with her headband and her leg warmers. [laughter] MM: So what happened after X-Men Annual #14?

Was that when you decided that was going to be your last X-Men thing, or annuals were not— ARTHUR: I think Annual #12 and #14 weren’t as much fun to draw because they were both part of a continuing series that I wasn’t drawing. And me being the control freak that I am, I want to draw the story from beginning to end. I don’t want to draw part of a story. I mean, that’s happened occasionally where I draw just, like, a couple of pages in some particular story, but I knew that when I went into this. But it’s not my favorite situation. And also, at this point in my career, I don’t think I need to be doing things that are just a part of something else; I need to be doing the whole thing myself.

MM: So it was a very conscious decision.

ARTHUR: I did not want to be part of an overarching story at that time, certainly.

ARTHUR: The first five years—let’s see—that would be Longshot—

MM: So you were starting to get a yearning to do something on your own already?

MM: Longshot, Gumby, Batman.

ARTHUR: Probably of all of those, my favorite would probably be the New Mutants Special, just because it had so much stuff in it. You know, some kind of funny stuff, and some kind of scary stuff, and I was drawing—even though Longshot had one issue that had Spider-Man and She-Hulk in it, when I got to the New Mutants Special there was just a whole bunch of characters in it. There’s Loki and Hela and just a whole bunch of characters that I liked from when I was a kid, so....

ARTHUR: I was interested in doing so. I think I must have been.

MM: You’ve never had any problems with any editors or anything? I’m sure there’s some that— ARTHUR: Well, maybe one whose name is escaping me, on the Excalibur— MM: Oh, Terry Kavanagh?

MM: When Spider-Man and Dr. Strange and She-Hulk all showed up, was that a good thing?

ARTHUR: Uhh—was it him or—?

MM: He was the editor of the Excalibur Special—

ARTHUR: Oh, yeah, ’cause I loved those characters.

ARTHUR: Yeah, that was not great. And I didn’t have a great time with the editor on the Web of Spider-Man Annual I did. I want to say Jim Owsley, but I’m not exactly sure.

MM: Because it seemed like you were a lot happier, by that issue, on the artwork?

ARTHUR: Spider-Man was one I loved as a kid, and I 42

MM: What happened with that Web of Spider-Man Annual? You were upset with the coloring?

ARTHUR: Oh, that was in the early days of them trying out their flexograph printing, and so it just printed really, really badly, and it’s really bright yellow in a lot of places, as I recall.

MM: Did you help Mike get the back-up story in that?

ARTHUR: I’m not absolutely sure; I don’t recall. I would tend to think not, because Mike’s always had a good reputation for being a hard worker.

yeah, that’s the one where I was going to give him a three-month break so he could get ahead on Fantastic Four, and as I recall, he didn’t draw anything the whole time I was working on Fantastic Four, so when he got back to it, he was just as late as he had been before! [laughs] MM: How far in advance did they give you? How many months?

ARTHUR: Not a lot. I remember for the first issue I was supposed to have taken four weeks to do it, and I took five. And then the next issue was, of course, already late because I’d taken five weeks for the first

MM: It was kind of strange that both of you showed up in the same issue.

ARTHUR: Yeah, and that’s happened a couple of times, because we lived in the same apartment building and they thought that we had the same phone number. But I—well, you know what? I don’t know if you’re like this with any of your friends. Editors would call both Steve Purcell and Mike Mignola and myself and not be sure who they were talking to on the phone, because we kind of picked up each other’s cadence.

MM: Maybe we can go into the Fantastic Four a little bit. Was that the first time you worked with Walt?

ARTHUR: Well, he’d inked, of course, the cover for X-Men Annual #9. But that was the first time that I had worked with him as the writer, yes.

MM: How did this thing come about?

Did he approach you, or was this— ARTHUR: Oh, no, no. We would talk every once in a while, and, for whatever reason, he was falling really behind on his deadline, and for some reason someone thought it would be a good idea if I helped Walt on his deadline. [laughs] MM: Was it Walt or Ralph [Macchio]?

ARTHUR: Oh, I’m sure it was Walt. It wouldn’t have been Ralph. [laughs] Oh, it could have been; Ralph might not have known any better at the time, who knows?

But I’m sure it must have been Walt. And, 43

Previous Page: Splash page pencils from New Mutants Special #1.

Below: Warlodzilla— who bears a striking resemblence to a certain King of the Monsters— rampages through page 18 of Web of Spider-Man Annual #2.

New Mutants, Spider-Man, Storm, Warlodzilla ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

issue, so that I did that in four weeks, and the last one in three weeks, just because that’s how much time I had.

But, as I recall, it was almost after the deadline when I first got the thing.

MM: A lot of artists always complain about too many characters and it takes a lot of time, but you don’t seem to mind that, do you?

ARTHUR: No, I actually find that—at least when I’m working on the page, I find that easier, because I don’t have to concentrate so much on making a single figure look really good. I can kind of disguise what’s going on by having just a bunch of characters moving around and doing things.

Above: Arthur did have a chance to draw Daredevil, along with Black Widow, in this cover to Marvel Team-Up #141.

Next Page: Arthur’s designs for Joe Fixit—the grey Hulk with the gangster attitude—for a line of mid-’90s Hulk action figures.

Black Widow, Daredevil, Hulk, Joe Fixit, Spider-Man ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

MM: So if you had to do Daredevil, do you think he would take too much time?

ARTHUR: It would drive me nuts. I don’t think I could do it unless we went back to the old days where it was Daredevil and the Black Widow, so I could at least work in some other characters just to hide my bad pages, because I’m so—

was being inked by Tony DeZuniga. I was just a big fan of Walt’s stuff. All he had to do was ask, and I was more than happy to do it.

MM: So was it Walt’s or your idea to do the new Fantastic Four?

ARTHUR: Walt went to the marketing people, as I recall, at Marvel, and said, “Who are the four top-sellers?” So Walt must have had the idea to have a new Fantastic Four right from the very beginning. He just wasn’t exactly sure who that was going to be, so he went to the marketing people and asked who the four topselling comic book characters at Marvel at the time were, and that was Spider-Man, Wolverine, Ghost Rider, and the Punisher.

I never liked the Punisher. When Walt told me this, I said, “You know what? I don’t really like the Punisher, but I kind of like what’s going on in the Hulk’s comic these days.” He was kind of a gangster or something, he was less powerful and he was grey and he was doing whatever gangster stuff he was doing. “I’d much rather draw the Hulk.” And Walt thought that was a pretty good idea. He said, “What old Fantastic Four characters would you like to draw?” And I said, “Well, I like the Skrulls, I like the Mole Man, I like the Sub-Mariner, whatever.” And, I don’t know, because then he said the one Fantastic Four character that he would rather we didn’t use was Dr. Doom. I seem to remember that. I just reeled off a lot of the characters, things that I thought would be fun to draw in the Fantastic Four, and he said, “Great, I’ll get to work on it.” And I got the script to the first issue, and it had all of those things.

MM: And right away sales took off?

ARTHUR: I guess. I think the first issue— was that the first issue that went back to press?

MM: What was the appeal, then? What was it that Walt told you that enticed you to do this thing?

MM: Yeah, I think the first issue sold, like, a million copies. It even had a second printing or something. I’m not sure.

ARTHUR: Oh, well, he didn’t have to say anything. I’d been such a big fan of Thor and a big fan of Walt’s work for as long as I could remember. I mean, I was getting Walt’s issues of Thor from the beginning, when it

ARTHUR: If it was a million, I’d be surprised. I’d never heard that before. I think it went to a third printing. Either the first one or the second one went to a third printing.

44

MM: Yeah, they had the first gold cover.

ARTHUR: And then I think there was a bronze or a copper one after that.

working against the deadline when I took the job. And somehow it got done.

MM: Did you get a big kick out of that?

MM: That’s what a lot of people don’t seem to realize when you’re working on things. I mean, I don’t know if that’s something you learned from working with Alan Moore: take your time and do your best?

ARTHUR: I felt that was funny and pretty weird, but at the time I was just under pressure to get it done, because that thing, like I said, was late when I first got it. I think I might have been working on issue two when issue one came out, so I don’t think I had time to enjoy— [laughs]

ARTHUR: No, not at all. It would be nice to say that I actually picked up anything from Alan, because I’m really a fan of his stuff and had enjoyed his work for years, but we really didn’t work particularly closely, so I can’t say I really picked up anything. As an artist, I always think the most important thing is to do the best job you can. Within reason, though—you can’t take forever on it. And to hear myself say that out loud while I’m looking at something I’m working on right now which is taking forever to do.... But, y’know, ultimately people will respect the work.

MM: But when the third one came out, that’s when things got really hectic, right?

ARTHUR: Well, that’s when things got really, really tight, yeah. That’s when— MM: The third issue came out late, if I remember right.

Was it late?

ARTHUR: You know, I don’t think so. I think it came out on time, but I couldn’t tell you for absolutely sure. If it was late, it wasn’t really, really late. If it was late, it was no more than a week or two.

MM: Because I think Alan’s philosophy is that you need to take your time doing this stuff, because once you’re done, it’s going to get reprinted forever.

ARTHUR: Well, that’s certainly been the case with Alan’s stuff, certainly. And I guess a lot of my stuff has been reprinted. I don’t think all of it, but a fair amount of it has been reprinted, sure.

MM: Was Ralph calling you a lot?

ARTHUR: He was calling me a lot, yeah. Oh, Ralph was calling me at least once or twice a day. I might even have been sending out pages every day.

MM: You have a lot to be proud of. I mean, the Fantastic Four stuff is still around.

MM: Did you feel like you’d worked yourself into a corner with this thing?

ARTHUR: That’s true, they just reprinted them not that long ago, in, of all places, and X-Men Legends book.

Whatever.

They can do whatever they want. But, you know, that still counts as one of my favorite jobs I’ve worked on. I mean, the ultimate finished product. And, you know, when I was working on it, I wasn’t crying or losing too much sleep. I lost a little bit of sleep, but not too much. I was not suffer-

ARTHUR: I wouldn’t say so. I knew I was going to be

45

ing while I was doing it. It was fun to do.

MM: So you never let him get to you, the editors, or the pressure, or anything?

Below: Cover art to Fantastic Four #347.

Next Page: Page 32 of Creature from the Black Lagoon. Inks by Terry Austin Fantastic Four ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc. Creature from the Black Lagoon ™ and ©2006 Universal City Studios, Inc.

ARTHUR: Well, y’know, Ralph was never bad with me. He was never telling me he was going to fire me or anything like that.

He’d call up and he’d say, “Y’know, Arthur, you’re really late.” And he still tells people this, and I’m sure he must have had it.

Apparently he was calling to yell at me, but he said, “Arthur, you’re really late.”

And I said, “I know, Ralph. I’m a f*ck-up.” [laughter] And he wasn’t expecting that. I guess he was expecting me to be defensive.

doing quite tight thumbnails that were about half the size of the printed comic book pages, but they were pretty tight layouts. So I would do these layouts and then I would send Xeroxed copies of those to Walter, then he’d script it from that. And then, what I did with those layouts is either I or my girlfriend or someone I hired would trace those. I would blow them up to page size and someone else would trace them out in blue pencil onto the full-size paper, and then I would go in and tighten all that up and clean it up and do whatever perspective stuff or all the stuff I needed to do on it.

MM: Did you have all the thumbnails done right from the beginning, for the whole story?

MM: It never got to the point that he was going to get somebody else. “If you don’t have time, we’ll get somebody else to finish it up.” That would have been worse.

ARTHUR: No, it was issue by issue.

ARTHUR: Oh. No, not that. Y’know, it’s not impossible he was saying that to somebody in the office, but I don’t recall him having said it to me.

MM: On the cover of Fantastic Four #347, it says, “Even the kitchen sink is in the book.” but I still can’t find that kitchen sink. [laughs]

MM: Did you have a lot to do with the story?

ARTHUR: The way I worked on that one— and you can kind of see that in the back of the reprints that they’ve done— Walt would send me a plot, and then I was

46

ARTHUR: Uh, he did ask me to draw it, and—hold on a second, I bet it’s in here somewhere. Of course, it’s not impossible that I might have drawn it and it might have been covered up by a balloon. Let’s take a quick look, because I know I drew it in here somewhere, and I think it was in the second issue.

MM: Oh, it’s in the second issue? I thought it was supposed to be in the first one.

ARTHUR: Mmm, well, see, he does mention it in the first one, but I think someone sent him a wiseass letter saying, “Where’s the kitchen sink?” And he asked me to draw it in— MM: [laughs] I’ve spent 15 years looking for that kitchen sink.

ARTHUR: Like I said, it might be behind a balloon. I know I drew one in there. [Art finds the kitchen sink on page 273 of the collection.]

MM: That’s real tiny. [laughs] ARTHUR: It doesn’t matter, it’s there. [laughter]

Part 4:

Riding Solo on a Dark Horse

MM: So then how did you get over to Dark Horse? Is that something that you were planning?

ARTHUR: Well, I was certainly not planning, no. Again, “planning” is not a big part of my career. Schreck had just become an editor. I guess both Bob Schreck and Diana Schutz had become editors at Dark Horse, and, of course, I’d already had a long, friendly relationship with both of those people. When I’d been working—I can’t remember what job I’d been working on. I was probably working on one of the X-Men Annuals. I got a call from Mike Richardson right at the beginning of their days at Dark Horse Comics, asking me to draw one of their Aliens books, which I had absolutely no interest in doing. That’s not fair; I can’t say I had no interest in doing, because I liked the Aliens stuff.

I just didn’t think it was my cup of tea.

And I was busy working on whatever the heck I was working on. So I’d been offered work from Dark Horse before they got there, but I just couldn’t do it.

Bob was at one of the WonderCon conventions in Oakland, having just come to Dark Horse

Comics, and he was asking what I’d be interested in doing.

And he was saying they were getting the license for— because he was always a big monster fan—all the Universal monsters. Would I be interested in doing those? And I said, “Well, yeah! Definitely!” You know, the Universal monsters, I loved those. So I was saying I’d like to do something with the Creature from the Black Lagoon. He said, “Well, we need someone to do adaptations of all the movies.” I said, “Well, I don’t really want to do a movie adaptation.” I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen plenty of the Marvel ones—pretty rare for those to be any good. I think Walter’s Alien for Heavy Metal was about the only really good movie/comic book adaptation I could think of at that time.

MM: Some of the Williamson Star Wars stuff wasn’t too bad.

ARTHUR: No, that’s true, that’s true. That was great. That was absolutely— MM: Those are the rare exceptions.

ARTHUR: Yeah, I think those are the rare exceptions. So I was not interested in doing a movie adaptation, but I was interested in doing maybe a new, original—I don’t know what the hell I was

thinking—but a new, original Creature from the Black Lagoon story. And so Schreck was saying, “Well, we’d love to have you do that, but we really need to get the movie adaptation first, or else we just can’t get permission to do the rest.”

So finally they wore me down and talked me into doing the adaptation.

MM: You were faithful. I thought that came out really well.

ARTHUR: I thought it came out pretty well, too, which is why I now have a standing policy that I’ll only adapt movies that are at least 50 years old.

MM: So you wanted to do a new story with the Gill Man? ARTHUR: I did. I had no plans, no plot, no real idea of what I was going to do with the creature. Somehow I was going to come up with some all new, original thing.

Again, I have no idea what that would have been.

Above: A 1986 illustration for Fish Police, a creation of Steve Moncuse.

Right: The Gill Man stalks the lovely Kay Lawrence. Panel details and page 28 from Creature from the Black Lagoon. Inks by Terry Austin.

Fish Police ™ and ©2006 Steve Moncuse. Creature from the Black Lagoon ™ and ©2006 Universal City Studios, Inc.

MM: So doing this adaptation got it out of your system already?

ARTHUR: I’m very happy with the finished product, but it was hard work to do, because this was before DVDs. Universal— which had given us permission to do the various adaptations that Dark Horse was doing—for whatever reason couldn’t find a script for Creature from the Black Lagoon, even though there’d been a book printed with the script. Which will get me to the “Walt Simonson Curse” in a moment.

We just couldn’t get a script, so I got a 48

friend of mine, Steve Moncuse—who’s the creator of Fish Police, and who was also a big Creature from the Black Lagoon fan, so I knew I could con him into doing this job that I didn’t want to do—to watch the film over and over and over again, and to write the script, and to describe what was going on in each scene. I had the videotape and would just watch, like, a minute of it every day and just draw what was happening in that one minute of the movie.

MM: Were you guys still a fan of the film after that?

ARTHUR: I was still a fan of the film, but I could not watch it for, like, four or five years.

MM: What was the “Walt Simonson Curse”?

ARTHUR: Walt early on in my career had described this particular curse for every comic book artist, and probably all artists of every sort. Whenever you need reference for something you can never find it. No matter what it is, you can never find it.

Unless you own it already, you can never find any of the reference you need until immediately after you do the job. With the Creature from the Black Lagoon, we’d not been able to find a script. I’d been up to Portland, Oregon a couple times at that point, and they have a huge, huge book store that has everything there, and I knew Universal had just published a bunch of their old Universal monster film scripts with various other stuff in there. I knew they must have the script there, they must have it. So I was sending people there, I was going there myself, and could not find the script anywhere. Immediately after I finished the job, I went to visit Powell’s Book Store. Not only did they have the script and synopses of

proposed scripts, there was also a novelization of Creature from the Black Lagoon. So it would have been everything that I needed early on, and I wouldn’t have had to go through all that other stuff.

When Joyce, my wife, was working on some tryouts for a book called Nevada, there was some character in it that was supposed to be an ostrich. I have all sorts of wildlife reference here in various books and stuff. And, of course, we’re living in San Francisco—there’re bookstores everywhere. We could not find a good photograph of an ostrich anywhere to save our lives.

When she was working on a book called Wynnona Earp, someone was supposed to be in a Hum-V right when the Hum-Vs were getting popular.

And, you know, I’d seen toys and all sorts of stuff with the Hum-V. But as soon as she had to draw it, we went looking in toy stores all over the city and could not find a Hum-V toy.

That’s the “Walt Simonson Curse.” Whenever you need reference, you cannot find it.

MM: You were a little tight on some of the pages. Did you feel like you couldn’t do all the splash pages and semi-splashes?

ARTHUR: Oh, definitely not. I would have preferred—because it was a 48-page book—I would have been much happier with what would be the next increment up. Even 52 pages would have been better. Yeah, I really needed breathing space on that thing. But I was able to get in almost everything in the movie. I only had to cut one small scene, but somehow I was able to get everything else in. And I think it worked out all right, and certainly a lot of people seem to like that one. But that’s, as I’m always telling people, the one job I’ve done that I know lost money for the company, at least initially.

MM: They said that?

ARTHUR: Oh, yeah. There was a good reason why it lost a lot of money. They were doing four or five adaptations of the old Universal monster movies. I think they put out Dracula first, or Frankenstein? I’m not really sure, but either way, the first one did not sell particularly well, and the second one sold marginally worse, so the lady who was in charge of advertising for Dark Horse at the time for solicitations and buying ad space and all that stuff, decided that it was not worth advertising the Creature from the Black Lagoon because it wasn’t going to make money anyway, so why bother advertising it?

MM: Oh, God. [laughs] ARTHUR: When it came out, people were just surprised. Initially I think they only printed 14,000 or something like that, and somehow that didn’t cover things for the book, because it 49

was a—I don’t know as much about the numbers on the books as I should. It had a pretty good cover price. It seemed like that would have covered 14,000, but to my understanding it didn’t.

MM: Did you ever have a shot to do King Kong as a part of that deal?

ARTHUR: At that time, no. Because I was asking them about the rights to that, but at the time, the rights were all confused. I guess the rights have been sorted out to whatever degree now, but I imagine there’s going to be so many Kong-related things coming out, I don’t know if now would be the time I’d want to do a Kong thing.

MM: I think the first thing you did for Dark Horse—I’m not sure if it’s the first thing, but I think it was the first thing that came out—was that Star Wars cover you did.

ARTHUR: That could be, could be.

MM: What was the story behind that? You were just to put everything you could put into it? Has that always been your motto since the beginning?

Above: Cover art for Classic Star Wars: A New Hope #1.

Right: King Kong—as he appeared in King Kong vs.

Godzilla, gorilla suit and all—from 1998’s The Official Godzilla Compendium, published

by Random House.

Next Page: Final art and thumbnail script for Monkeyman & O’Brien #3, page 30.

Star Wars ™ and ©2006 Lucasfilm Ltd. King Kong ™ and ©2006 Universal City Studios, Inc. Monkeyman & O’Brien ™ and ©2006 Arthur Adams.

ARTHUR: It’s my motto, because it kind of goes with what I was telling you a little while ago, that I have trouble saying no to jobs. But also I sometimes have trouble deciding what to draw in a single scene, especially when it’s something as—I don’t if big is the right word, but let’s say as big as the first Star Wars movie. It had lots of stuff that I really liked in it, and I wanted to find some way to get it all in one piece. I got quite a lot of it in there, I guess. [laughs] MM: I always thought that was a great piece. You even won an award from it.

ARTHUR: Somehow I have an award here from some guys in Spain that run a convention out there. It’s a really nice one. It’s this big, brass guy on a block of marble. I could probably kill a bunch of people before the cops took me out, with this thing. It’s big and scary.

But, yeah, I just wanted to get as much stuff on the cover as I could, and somehow it seemed to work okay. But what was funny about that one is in my initial layouts for it— because Dark Horse needed to see a couple of 50

layouts because they needed to get approval from Lucasfilm—and my layouts were kind of cartoony in the Japanese manga sort of style. Not necessarily purposely, it’s just kind of how it worked out. But I kind of liked it. They went to get approval for it, and the Lucas people said, “Well, we prefer this layout, but do not make it look like manga.

We do not do manga.” Of course, years later there’s all these manga comics that are pretty good. But ah, well. Back in the day. Who knows.

work for them, and I’d known both of them for quite a long time before they got there, so I was real happy to have another comic book company where I knew some of the people there.

MM: Were you happy at the prospect of having your first real chance to write?

MM: What was the main attraction of working at Dark Horse?

ARTHUR: On that first Godzilla, I wrote most of it, but I was having trouble with writing some of it, so I think Stradley ended up writing about ten or 15 pages of it.

This sounds silly, and certainly reading my own stuff I don’t think I’m a particularly good writer, but what I found was that it was surprisingly easy. I think the holdup for me when I started scripting Godzilla was that, for some reason, I thought I should type it, and I ended up taking, like, one whole day to type one page. [laughs] That wasn’t going to be a way to get anything done. So I think I finally either convinced Stradley, or Stradley— it’s been a while, but somehow it turned out to be okay if I just wrote my script on a piece of paper.

ARTHUR: Well, the reason I became interested in working at Dark Horse—because I didn’t really know many of the guys there yet, but.... Let’s see, what was the first book I did at Dark Horse? Was it Godzilla?

MM: It was Godzilla.

ARTHUR: That’s right. I think I was just happy at the prospect of working on a Godzilla comic, and then I became friends, over the course of that, with Randy Stradley, because Randy Stradley was my editor on that.

Yeah, I got to be friends with Randy, and so, after a while, I felt more comfortable with Dark Horse.

MM: Randy’s, like, your liaison, I guess, at Dark Horse?

Is he your main liaison?

MM: I’ve always thought that you write the way you think. From what I’ve seen, you can convey your thoughts, and we get your sense of humor on the page.

ARTHUR: He is now, certainly. Well I talk to Mike Richardson occasionally, as well, so that’s pretty much the two main guys, isn’t it? I think so. The other thing that got me interested in doing more work for Dark Horse was that Bob Schreck and Diana Schutz went to

ARTHUR: I think in some cases it works better than others. I think some of the Monkeyman & O’Brien stuff is written okay. I think it’s all right. And I think you’re right, I think my humor comes across. I think that sometimes my humor can be a little too cute, so that’s 51

something I guess I have to think about. But the few times I’ve tried writing for other people, I’ve found it kind of uncomfortable.

you did on “Target: Godzilla”? Like, when you start doing some work for the series as only a writer?

ARTHUR: Oh, I see. Um, yeah, except I did a little bit bigger kind of thumbnails. I can’t remember the exact size of those—I guess it’s not terribly important—but they were probably, like, TV Guide size. And then with the dialogue written in there and whatever written suggestions to try to describe the action. But, yeah, they’re very homemade-looking. It’s hard to believe that anyone would be willing to pay for that.

MM: When you were working on Monkeyman & O’Brien, how would you go about writing? Would you draw first, or have a script?

ARTHUR: I would kind of do both. What I would sometimes do is just draw little thumbnails, just the little tiny sketch—it’s like a little 2" x 3" sized drawing—and I draw little panels with little stick figures or whatever in there, and then write—just try to convey what was going on, if I needed to write with captions or word balloons or whatever.

MM: How exactly did Godzilla come about, do you remember?

Was this something that they tried to use to entice you to come over to Dark Horse?

MM: So was this similar to what

ARTHUR: The first one that I drew of the other issues of Godzilla was— MM: The Godzilla Color Special—that was first, right?

ARTHUR: —the Color Special. By that point, I guess I had a reputation for liking Godzilla and I had any number of Godzilla toys and models and such, so they knew I’d be interested in a Godzilla project.

MM: That story isn’t based on any film or anything; that’s original?

ARTHUR: It’s original. One of the monsters in it is based on a monster called Majin, Monster of Terror, but that was a monster that was owned by another company, but it was a monster that I always liked. So, yeah, it was an original story in that it’s inspired by other things, but it’s, for the most part, an original story. And I think in that one I was the one who— oh, I also wanted to have some characters that were kind of like the Fantastic Four or the Doom Patrol, so that’s why I came up with G-Force—clever, huh?

MM: They weren’t the Battle of the Planets guys.

ARTHUR: [laughs] No, not so much, no. Although it’s funny, I don’t think that cartoon was called “GForce” at that time.

MM: I think the team was called G-Force in the cartoon.

52

ARTHUR: Maybe, that might have been it, but I never really watched that cartoon. But what was funny is that, in some of the later Godzilla films, after that Godzilla Special, they had a group to fight Godzilla called G-Force.

MM: Is this something that you’ve always been attracted to: Eastern culture?

ARTHUR: I didn’t know so much about that, I just liked giant monster movies. [laughs] And sushi; I also like sushi.

MM: What is your favorite Godzilla film? Is there a particular one that stands out?

ARTHUR: If I have to pick a particular favorite; I think probably the very first one. I like the first one a lot. And there’s various others that have elements that I like. I can recognize that they’re kind of crappy, but, y’know, it’s still something from my childhood that I like.

MM: You’ve said that a lot of the work you’ve done during your career has something to do with what you liked in your childhood. Is that true, to this day?

ARTHUR: I try to go for that, because I just find that’s a pure source for myself to try to—or maybe it’s my comfort zone, I’m not exactly sure. I’m not exactly sure how to say it. I just like what I like is all.

MM: When they started this Godzilla series, were you supposed to take over as a writer? What exactly happened?

ARTHUR: No, I just did the special, and then they went on and did some other stuff. And I’m not exactly sure how it came about that I ended up writing a handful of issues. Did I write the first six or the second six?

MM: I think you wrote the second six.

ARTHUR: I think that’s right. I don’t really know exactly how that came about. Whoever was editor on it must have just asked, and I probably just said, “What the heck, why not?” As I wasn’t going to be drawing it, I figured it would be an easy job, and, as I recall, it was easy enough, I guess. I don’t think it came out particularly well.

At least on that job, I think the way I work, having drawn the thumbnails, probably wasn’t doing the artist on that job any favors. I think he may have been intimidated or thought he should have been intimidated, I’m not really sure. But I’ve found that’s kind of the case if I do little layouts for people, that it’s easy for them to feel crippled by that, I think.

MM: You haven’t collaborated too many times in your career with other artists. You haven’t inked too many people, either.

ARTHUR: No, not too much. Although I’d like to do more of that. It’s a different sort of 53

Previous Page: Preliminary sketch and finished inks from Godzilla Color Special #1, page 3.

Above: Preliminary sketch for page 36 of Godzilla Color Special #1, page 3, featuring Gekidojin, who was based on Majin, Monster of Terror.

Left: An illustration of King Caesar—Ye Editor/Designer’s personal favorite Godzilla kaiju—from The Official Godzilla Compendium.

Godzilla, King Caesar ™ and ©2006 Toho Co., LTD.

challenge, and it’s something I would like to do more of.

Right: Arthur’s inks over Joyce Chin’s pencils for the cover to Xena: Warrior Princess #4.

Below: An early Tool & Dy... er, Monkeyman & O’Brien concept drawing.

Next Page: Cover art for issue #3 of 2001’s Angel & the Ape mini-series.

Monkeyman & O’Brien ™ and ©2006 Arthur Adams. Xena: Warrior Princess ™ Universal TV Distribution Holdings LLC and ©2006 Universal Television Enterprises LLLP. Angel & the Ape ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

MM: In a lot of stuff where you’ve inked other guys, I don’t see you that much. When you ink your wife, you two work pretty well together. I remember the Overstreet cover as one that stood out. But some of the other guys, were you a little intimidated? Did you want their style to come out more?

ARTHUR: Well, I’ve always thought that the inker’s job is to try to make the pencils look as much like the penciler’s work as possible. And ultimately that’s not really possible, because still there’s some flavor of the inker that just has to come through; their personality just has to come through. But with the few times I’ve inked other people, I’ve just tried to be really faithful to the pencils.

MM: But when you’re inking your wife, you two just totally understand each other.

ARTHUR: I think that’s true. Let’s see, who have I inked? I’ve inked Jim Mooney and Don Heck, and their penciling style was very clear. There really wasn’t any fooling around. I think partly because Joyce has known that I’ll be inking her work the few times that’s happened, she leaves things a little looser, knowing that, y’know, I can draw.

MM: The results look different from either style.

ARTHUR: Well, also, we look at a lot of the same stuff around the house, so often when we’re working on something, we’re probably being influenced by the same comic book artists or whatever else we might be looking at the time.

MM: When you inked Jim Mooney, I didn’t really see a lot of your stuff there, and it kind of looked like a little bit of Chic Stone.

ARTHUR: [laughs] Interesting. I certainly wasn’t thinking about that, I was just trying to stick as close to the pencils as I could.

54

apparently similar admiration for me, it was just strange.

MM: Let’s talk about Legend, how that came about.

That came out as a result of Image, right?

MM: Who was the person that extended the invitation?

ARTHUR: Pretty much, yeah. Image had come about and they were really successful almost right away, so that got a lot of other artists and writers thinking that, “Maybe we need to get in on some of this action.” And I think it was just that the guys who were at Image and the guys who ended up becoming the group that was Legend, I think it was just about finding a comfort level.

ARTHUR: Erik Larsen called up one afternoon and very nicely invited both myself and Mr. Mignola to join up with Image, and I told him I had no idea what I would possibly do for them, but it hadn’t even occurred to me to do a creator-owned series. And I think I thought for about a half hour and thought, “Well, what did I love most when I was a kid?” And that was probably King Kong. And I knew I couldn’t really get away with just doing a comic book called King Kong, so I figured it was going to be some sort of big gorilla. And I thought about how much I liked the Fantastic Four and how much I liked to draw girls, and next thing I knew, I had made up Angel and the Ape. But, of course, I couldn’t call it that.

MM: You’re the one guy, I think, that could have been in either group. You could have been with the Image guys, or Legend group.

ARTHUR: I think that’s probably true. And who knows how that would have gone if I had gone with Image.

There’s no telling now. I don’t know. I don’t know that I would have done more work or less work, because certainly, of the creator-owned stuff I’ve done, I haven’t done that much of it. [laughs] Yeah, see, I think it was just that we wanted—Frank and John were already at Dark Horse, and even though, at the time when we first started, I guess Mike [Mignola] and I would have been the young guys in that group, I think we were just more comfortable with the old guys. It was really just a matter of “We can hang out with these guys who we’ve known and admired since we started our careers, or we can hang out with these new guys who were influenced by us,” meaning Mike and I. And it’s, at least for me—I mean, I can’t speak for Mike, but for me, especially at that point, it was just hard to take anyone who was influenced by me seriously.

MM: For Dark Horse, who called you when Legend started?

ARTHUR: Like I said, I talked with Erik, and he very, very nicely had extended this invitation, and Mike and I talking on our own just weren’t that comfortable with that. But we had had some dealings with Dark Horse at that point. I don’t exactly remember who I called at Dark Horse. I can’t remember whether it was Bob or Diana or Mike or Randy. I just called and asked if they were interested in us doing some creator-owned thing, both Mike and I, and they said they were. I don’t remember who came up with Legend. It’s not impossible that it was either Frank or John, or it might have been both of them together.

MM: Bossing you around?

MM: I thought it was both of them together. I thought they were more in charge of that group.

ARTHUR: No, not that, just to hang out. It was just a weird situation for me to be in. I’d admired these other artists so much, to have other new artists have

ARTHUR: It was both of them together, yeah, and somehow we just kind of got invited in on 55

ARTHUR: Was it?

that. And I can’t remember who invited us; I can’t remember whether it was John or Frank, it could have been one or the other. I honestly just don’t remember at this point.

MM: I think it was. It felt longer, because I remember as soon as the last issue came out of Hellboy, the “coming soon, Monkeyman & O’Brien.”

MM: It wasn’t that formal of a gang.

ARTHUR: Yeah, yeah.

ARTHUR: Oh, no, not at all. I mean, even as we were putting it together, we were saying, “Well, what does this actually mean?” And all it really meant was that it was a vote of confidence from all the other guys. It would be like Frank and John saying, “Well, if this symbol is on one of the Dark Horse books, this is a book that we would be interested in reading, so hopefully you, the reader, will be interested, as well.”

MM: It thought it was something like that.

ARTHUR: It could have been that long. It’s hard to remember. Time just flies for me. Joyce and I were just out to dinner last night and talking about how time is just disappearing. I still can’t believe that we’re done with 2003. I don’t know what happened, we’re almost done with 2005! It’s ridiculous.

MM: But you think the word “Legend” was too much at that point?

ARTHUR: Of course it was too much! [laughs] But, y’know, we came up with-- It was either going to be Dinosaur or....

But, you know, Dinosaur—I love dinosaurs and dinosaurs are really cool, but then someone else said, “Well, does that mean you guys are old and extinct? [laughs] What does that mean?” And so we went through a whole bunch of different names, and I can’t think of all of them at the moment, but Legend was the best—you know, what the hell. And then Mignola came up with that really cool Easter Island—the little head icon. So that was nice.

MM: ’Cause I think that came out in ’94, and then two years later you finally, I think, finished it.

ARTHUR: That sounds about right.

That’s scary and depressing. Thanks, George. [laughter] MM: So what happened with the series? Did you feel pressure right from the beginning? I was going to ask you, what’s the worst period you ever had in your career?

ARTHUR: Oh, gosh.

MM: Working in comics—has it been enjoyable the whole 20 years?

ARTHUR: We were all going to be doing either series or miniseries. So, knowing how slow I was, Mike generously offered that I could be in the back of his Hellboy comic, and then the intention was that after his mini-series I would go on to do my Monkeyman mini-series, and there would be “Hellboy” back-up stories in that. And, of course, I dropped the ball right away. As soon as the Hellboy mini-series was done, I was way behind on Monkeyman.

ARTHUR: Y’know, there’ve been a few bumps, but nothing that was really serious.

Like, deadline pressure, well, y’know, how bad is that? That’s not that bad, really. I was thinking a little bit more about what we were talking about with the Fantastic Four—on the last couple of issues—and I was thinking, well, I was doing a lot of work, but I was, like, sleeping four to six hours a night, and I really was working all the time. I wasn’t really going out or anything. But, y’know, that’s not really that bad. I was making good money for that, too.

MM: There was, like, a two-year period between the series and those back-up strips, right?

MM: There wasn’t a point when you were working on Monkeyman & O’Brien, before the mini-series came out,

MM: So once the ball got rolling, were you supposed to do a series right away?

56

when you were kind of nervous, like, “This is the first time I’m all on my own.”

ARTHUR: I can’t say I wasn’t nervous. I was a bit nervous about it, and I think the biggest negative in my career is that maybe I’m too prideful, and maybe not as good as I would like to be. So when I look at my work, I’m not immediately crazy about it. But there’s other days that I’m thinking that I’m pretty darned good. [laughs] But there’re plenty of days when I just don’t know what the heck I’m doing, and I’m sure I’m going to be found out any moment, and they’re going to, whoever would be in charge of telling me I can’t draw comics anymore will be calling up and saying, “Time to go get a real job.”

MM: That’s not going to happen any time soon. [laughs] ARTHUR: It doesn’t seem like it is any more, and mostly I’m realistic about that. I know that’s not really going to happen.

But, y’know, bad times? I can’t really think of anything that’s been particularly bad. I’ve been unusually blessed in this, I think.

MM: Did the backup stories on Monkeyman & O’Brien give you a clue to what kind of feedback you were going to get for the series?

ARTHUR: People seemed to like it, but even at that time—let’s see, so that would have early ’97—comic books just don’t get as much mail as they used to. But we got good response on the sales. Y’know, the sales were decent, so.... And I get more response from Monkeyman & O’Brien now, it seems, than when I was actually doing the book, which I guess makes a certain sense. No one had really seen much of it. But, really, right after Monkeyman & O’Brien came out, and then for a couple years afterward, people were still asking me when I was going to draw more X-Men. MM: [laughs] Well, that’s always going to be a question.

Previous Page: Early promotional art.

Below: Pages 1 and 4 of the “Monkeyman & O’Brien” back-up story from Hellboy: Seed of Destruction #1.

Monkeyman & O’Brien ™ and ©2006 Arthur Adams.

the standard shape. Although I’m probably fooling myself, she’s probably— MM: But she’s supposed to look like Little Orphan Annie a little bit?

ARTHUR: Annie? Oh, no, not at all.

MM: I thought she had similar eyes.

ARTHUR: Oh, no. I think that was just me trying some different drawing. But no, that was never my intention that she look like Annie, no. Now, her name is Ann Driscol O’Brien, so she’s named directly after the Fay Wray character in King Kong, and after Willis O’Brien, who was the animator on King Kong.

MM: And then Monkeyman comes from your love of monkeys, I guess.

ARTHUR: I wanted a giant gorilla, and

by God I got one.

MM: Why did you make him a genius?

Above: The opening splash page to a 4-page Monkeyman & O’Brien tryout story.

Next Page: Cover pencils for Gen13/ Generation X. Monkeyman & O’Brien ™ and ©2006 Arthur Adams. Gen13 ™ and ©2006 Aegis Entertainment, Inc., dba WildStorm Productions.

Generation X ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

ARTHUR: Yeah, I suppose so. And I’ll probably draw more X-Men someday, who knows.

MM: But when you started Monkeyman & O’Brien, did you have an idea where you were with these characters, or did you have a backlog?

ARTHUR: I think I had a pretty good idea. I knew that I wanted Ann to be fun and sexy, but really muscular. Kind of an unusual sort of sexy, an unusual sort of attractive, but with a really strong nose. I didn’t want her to have a little button nose, but I didn’t want her to have quite 58

ARTHUR: Because I didn’t think there’d be much story potential with a constantly raging gorilla. And he makes a face and he’s already pretty cool lookin’. Or when he’s in action, that’s already plenty of fun to draw.

And I wanted someone with kind of a dry wit, someone who was really smart. And that actually turned out to be a bit of a problem when I was writing Monkeyman, because I was trying to write a character who’s smarter than me—and that doesn’t take that much effort, really, but it was—I mean, the being smarter than me part. So that was a little bit difficult. But then my plan for the first three issues was to have them, of course, each be self-contained stories, and to have all three have completely different settings to kind of set the pace for the series, to say that anything could happen, and anywhere. In fact, I have even a Western ghost story that I wanted to get to, as well.

MM: You have it plotted out already.

ARTHUR: Which I’m sure I will. Strangely enough, I have plot ideas for at least 24 more issues. I have them written down in one of my little books around here somewhere. And there were some pretty fun ideas, and I’ll get to them sometime. I have two or three stories that are thumbnails; I

popular at that time. I’ve never been one to keep track of how sales are going for everyone else. All I care about is my own book. [laughs] So I was thinking, “Well, maybe if I do something for Wildstorm or Marvel or something like that, it’ll kind of increase my fan profile.”

have one, like, 80-page story which is kind of my Cthulhu story. And I’ll get to them eventually.

MM: Why did Dark Horse or you just stop doing more?

ARTHUR: Well, Dark Horse didn’t stop. Dark Horse would quickly act if I would do more, trust me. I think we talked about this: I have trouble saying no when I’m offered jobs, and immediately after Monkeyman came out, I started getting more offers for just little jobs, like covers or little tiny short stories, or whatever. And me being the dork I am, I said, “Well, sure, I’ll just do one cover. How long can that take?” And then one cover, and then another cover, and then another cover, and eventually years have gone by and I’m asking, “What the heck am I going to do with Monkeyman?” Somewhere around this point my friend, Scott Dunbier, who had become an editor for Wildstorm, and he called and offered—I can’t remember what the first job I did for him was.

MM: Your stature. [laughs] ARTHUR: Whatever. And it would at least get people who may not know my stuff to look at my stuff, and then I would go back and do Monkeyman & O’Brien and maybe bring some of those people with me. But, of course, I never got around to doing that.

MM: I’m looking at the book; Scott was the editor for Gen13/Generation X.

MM: That Tom Strong short story, I guess.

ARTHUR: No, I think that I’d done some other stuff before that.

MM: Authority?

ARTHUR: Gen X or something like that?

MM: Yeah, you did a back-up story in Gen13.

ARTHUR: There was one whole comic that was Gen13 meets Gen X from Marvel Comics.

MM: Okay. Oh, he was the editor on that?

ARTHUR: Yes, as I recall, he was. I think he was the editor on that. If he wasn’t, he at least arranged me doing the job. And for some reason I thought it was a good idea. I don’t really know what—well, I think my thought was, as I recall, that Monkeyman & O’Brien had sold pretty well—I mean, not great, but it sold pretty well. It sold, like, in the 30,000s, which when you’re doing a creator-owned book, that’s not bad.

You get a lot of money out of that one. But I was thinking if I did something from Wildstorm, which I guess I was thinking was really 59

ARTHUR: Bingo. Yeah.

MM: And what’d you think of that story?

Right: Pencils for page 4 of the back-up story in Gen13 #34.

Below and Next Page: Two of four variant covers for Gen13/Monkeyman & O’Brien #1—one with the heroes, the other with their “Mirror Universe” counterparts.

Monkeyman & O’Brien ™ and ©2006 Arthur Adams. Gen13 ™ and ©2006 Aegis Entertainment, Inc., dba WildStorm Productions.

ARTHUR: I was so-so on it. I thought it was an okay story. I even ended up finagling another two or three pages out of Scott on that one. I think it was actually supposed to be even a little shorter than it was. I think it was one of those stories that needs a little room to breathe.

MM: So there’s nothing you look for—I know you can’t say no but a lot of times you don’t ask for the script? [laughs] ARTHUR: Y’know, often when these things are done, you just kind of agree to do it and then kind of hope for the best. You know, you’re right; I probably should do something more like that. And, you know, some things seem to be working out a little bit better now, but then, I think I was probably just being a little too obliging. I dunno, maybe I was trying to be a nice guy, I can’t really remember exactly now. It seems kind of unlikely, doesn’t it? Um, anyway, I wouldn’t have minded a little more room. But I think in that whole job, I think there’s really only one page I actually like quite a lot. I don’t think any of it’s really bad, but it just needed more room. Jeff Campbell and I have talked about, not necessarily this particular job, but about the Gen13 characters themselves.

MM: Was Jeff one of the reasons you did this book? Because he’s always been a fan of your work.

ARTHUR: I don’t recall if I knew Jeff particularly well at the time. I liked the Gen13 comic. I liked it well enough—I didn’t love it, but I liked it well enough. But as I was about to say, when Jeff and I talked about Gen13, there wasn’t much to that book, really. As Jeff has said himself, it’s kind of the Seinfeld of comics. It’s a comic book kind of about nothing. It’s just a bunch of characters, some things happen, but it isn’t really about anything.

MM: But it did the things that were contemporary at the time.

60

ARTHUR: Yeah. Part of the popularity of it—especially when Jeff was doing it—it had a kind of snappiness to it.

with the giant turtle. I think that one was the purest to what I was thinking about for that as a series.

MM: Exactly, because that’s what sort of something you had, when you started. I’ve seen too many John Buscema clones and that take that book as their Bible—How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way.

MM: But you didn’t have a bible. I thought I read that you didn’t have—I mean, you had an idea, but you didn’t have a full origin for them, or you didn’t know where you were going to take them at the beginning.

ARTHUR: Sure, sure.

ARTHUR: I had a bunch of ideas, but they weren’t quite gelling in a way that I want to pursue, because I was thinking.... Well, it’s been long enough now, and....

I’ll just go ahead and say it: Basically, he was supposed to be Reed Richards from the gorilla world, which kind of would imply that he would have some sort of power—well, I should back up. He was the Reed Richards of the gorilla world, who was the leader of a Fantastic Four of that gorilla world. So I was eventually going to have this big gorilla who was on fire, and a girl gorilla who could turn invisible, and a big rock gorilla— which I did a drawing of, and he looked pretty cool. But then I was kind of, well, does he not have any powers besides what he’s gotten from coming through this extra-dimensional rift? Did he used to have a stretching power? And that’s also all a little bit too cute, so that’s another reason I think I didn’t pursue it.

MM: And you and Jeff are kind of similar, and he’s always said that I think he’s been influenced by you.

ARTHUR: Sure, sure.

MM: And I thought you might have some attachment to the Gen13 characters.

ARTHUR: Because of that? No, that book was selling well at the time, it was really just a blatant attempt on my part to kiss up to the fans. Don’t get me wrong, I love Jeff’s work—and he’s a swell guy, too.

MM: What’s your favorite issue of Monkeyman you did?

What’s the best story? ’Cause I like the “Invasion of the Froglodytes!”

ARTHUR: That’s one of my favorites. That was of course inspired by the second issue of the Hulk, with the frog people, the toad people, I can’t remember exactly.

MM: And there’s no romance between him and Ann— it’s all platonic.

MM: Was that your idea to make this little quasi-Star Trek crew?

ARTHUR: Yes, oh, definitely. Star Trek has also been a big influence on my career. I’ve liked Star Trek since I was a kid, as well.

MM: I mean, that story works well, because I think it gets the sense of humor of Star Trek, and you expect— ARTHUR: I hope so. I look at that now and I kind of grimace a little bit that some of the interiors on that are a little too Star Trekkie.

MM: But that’s what works! [laughs] ARTHUR: That might be, and I kind of revisit some of that in my Monkeyman & O’Brien/Gen13 book, with the alternate universe with the evil Monkeyman with his goatee and little Fu Manchu mustache and all that stuff. [laughs] But what the hell was I even thinking about on that; that’s so silly. It’s a cute one drawing, that’s not a reason to do two issues of anything. [laughs] I think that was a fun one. My favorite might actually still be the very first, not those couple of little, four-page things I did, but the first ten-page story I did, 61

didn’t mean it in jest; I think it’s a cool honor to do something with Dave Stevens.

ARTHUR: No, I was thrilled. I did not know then, and I still cannot imagine for the life of me why Dave Stevens would have asked for me to do that, and I can only guess that the only reason he got to me is because about a hundred other guys had said no. But aside from all that, I think, at that point, The Rocketeer was being done by Comico?

MM: I think those were done by Dark Horse.

ARTHUR: No, the first two issues were done for Comico, and then the final, third issue, which is the one I did help on, came out many, many years later, after— MM: Oh, this was very old work, then?

Above: Splash page pencils from Monkeyman & O’Brien #2.

Next Page Top: Interior illustration for PlayStation Magazine featuring the top video game characters of that year.

Next Page Bottom: Cover art for PlayStation Magazine #37.

Monkeyman & O’Brien ™ and ©2006 Arthur Adams. Final Fantasy ™ and ©2006 Square Enix Co., Ltd. All other characters ™ and ©2006 their respective owners.

ARTHUR: There was never going to be any actual physical sort of activity, but— well, there’s a porn version, but that’s a whole other story. [laughter] That was going to be for later. That’s for later in my career.

MM: They’re strictly platonic there.

ARTHUR: Yes, they’re strictly platonic, of course, yeah. There might be some moments where they might think, “Oh, I wish you were a giant gorilla.” or, “Oh, I wish you were a man,” or whatever, but they would never actually... y’know.

MM: Well, that could have been a story in itself; you could have turned him into a man for an issue or something.

ARTHUR: And, in fact, I probably would have gotten to that at some point. If I was a little more diligent in my work habits.

MM: You also worked on Rocketeer and those “New York Adventures.” How’d you get pulled into that? [Arthur laughs] No, I 62

ARTHUR: When it finally came out, yeah, that was years after I’d actually done the penciling work on it. And mostly I just did it because I was really honored that Dave had asked that I do it, ’cause, as I recall, the pay was pretty crappy. [chuckles] But David has been, and to a degree has continued to be, quite an influence on the way I draw. So, yeah, I was really flattered. As I recall, he got Bob Schreck to call me. That’s why I’m thinking this must have been still at Comico, because I know Comico had done the first two issues, and they were supposed to do the third, but they went out of business during the gap between the second and third issues, and so Dark Horse ended up, I think, reprinting all of it. I think they might have printed the third issue by itself first, and then printed the collection.

MM: Okay. Do you remember the particulars of what you did?

ARTHUR: I did ten pages in there. I can’t tell you right at this particular moment which pages, if the book was in front me.

Actually, when I’ve had the book in front of me, there’s some pages I’m not quite sure about, but there’s some I’m definitely sure—

MM: He just inked them heavily or something?

Did he give you any criticism or anything?

whatever I wanted with them, and in some places I changed them a little bit.

But that was a big decision. That took a few days of decide, “You know what? I’m not going to quite follow what Mr. Kaluta did here.” So that was pretty weird the first time I sat down to do a page that had Kaluta pencils on it. Really, really loose pencils, not much more than stick figures.

And you know, I sat down at that page and got out my eraser and erased some Mike Kaluta scribbles. And that was kind of an odd day. [laughs]

ARTHUR: In some places. You know, not that heavily, no.

He was quite faithful to my pencils. I think my pages stand out pretty clearly. My anatomy’s a little stiffer and my figure construction’s just a little stranger. I can’t remember who else, but there was a couple of other guys who I think actually did some pencils in that. I think what’s-his-name....

MM: Sandy Plunkett.

ARTHUR: Sandy Plunkett, that’s right.

Sandy Plunkett penciled a couple of pages, and I think—I can’t remember who else. I think some other people did— that’s a real weird book. God bless Dave for all the good work he’s done, but that was a strange book to work on. It felt like a bunch of people penciled it, and actually the pages I got had been laid out to begin with by Mike Kaluta.

MM: What’s the story behind the Playstation covers you did?

ARTHUR: Playstation Magazine is a local deal, and fortunately I just had some fans there in the office, and one of them found out that I was here in San Francisco and called up, and they were offering pretty good money to do those things, and— MM: But you weren’t a video game guy or something?

MM: That was a pretty big deal in itself.

ARTHUR: I’ve played video games a couple of times. I’ve gotten—I can’t remember exactly. I had the Sega Genesis and the Playstation 2 or whatever, years and years ago. I find that, with the video games, I have a very addictive personality. I would get a game, and I

ARTHUR: Yeah. This is part of what I was saying a little while ago about people maybe being intimidated when I do layouts, because I had these ten pages of layouts by Kaluta, and clearly they were just layouts, so I could do 63

would end up playing it for a couple of days on end, just desperate to get to the end of the game, and trying to figure out how to get the thing done. And I did this for a couple of months where I was buying new games and I’d play them and play them to the end. Of course, you never play them again after you get to the end. And I found that I was dreaming about these video games and not getting any work done, so I decided maybe video games really weren’t for me.

“Sure. My stuff will be in an arcade? Sure, what the hell, why not?” But I did the big side art for it, and then there’s the front art. Unfortunately in arcades, though, they put those games together—no one ever sees the sides. So that was actually a little bit disappointing when I first saw it, but it was also kind of cool seeing my drawing on top of an arcade game.

MM: Do you have at home one of those Marvel arcade games that you did art for?

ARTHUR: No, I don’t. I don’t even know if I’d want one. [laughs] MM: Was that a big job for you? Do you remember what the particulars were on that?

ARTHUR: Someone at Marvel just called up and asked if I wanted to do that, and I said,

64

Part 5: MM: Is this all a result of working with Scott Dunbier, you working with Alan Moore?

ARTHUR: Yeah. Scott was at Wildstorm, and with a lot of the ABC stuff, Scott is actually the guy who arranged a lot of the people who were drawing the various things.

MM: “Trampling Tokyo” predates that, right?

ARTHUR: Oh, yeah. Oh, way before, yeah. Let’s see, how did that one come about? You know, I can’t remember the name of—

The ABCs of Comics... with Authority MM: That’s the guy from Caliber, right?

ARTHUR: That’s who ended up publishing, but I ended up getting the job through Roxanne Starr I think. She was a letterer. I think she was doing some lettering maybe for Bob Burden? Somehow I knew her through Bob Burden, and she got in contact with me and told me that Alan Moore was doing some albums and one involved a lot of giant monsters, and wondered if I wanted to do the illustrated giant monster thing.

MM: So you never had to talk to Alan or anything?

Previous Page: Playstation Magazine #35 cover art.

Below: Two-page spread from “Tramplin’ Tokyo,” Alan Moore’s ode to Godzilla, which first appeared in Negative Burn #18.

Hulk ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc. Tramplin’ Tokyo ©2006 Alan Moore (words) and Arthur Adams (artwork). Dino Crisis ™ and ©2006 Capcom Co., Ltd.

ARTHUR: I couldn’t tell you, I don’t know. I just remember we were all in a bar hanging out, and he came in, as I recall, with Diana Schutz. They were hanging out, and he came in, and he was wearing, as I recall, black denim pants, a silver sports jacket, and matching silver cowboy boots, and maybe like this faded black T-shirt, and he had his giant beard and mustache and all of his hair. He looked like some big English silver shrubbery sort of thing.

MM: It’s hard to forget meeting somebody like that.

ARTHUR: [laughs] It was pretty strange.

I’m going, “Well, I like his comics, but that guy needs a haircut!” [laughs] MM: When you did the story for Tom Strong, was that supposed to be a tryout for more stuff?

ARTHUR: No. Scott had asked if I was interested in drawing—I can’t remember which one, but he’d asked if I was interested in drawing one of the series, and, while I was interested and flattered, I think at that time I was thinking if I was going to do a creator-owned thing, I should be doing my own thing. Maybe—I don’t honestly recall—for whatever reason, I just couldn’t, ’cause I didn’t have time. I think they might have floated several ideas by me, and I think the only one that I was really interested in at the time was Tom Strong, because I was getting into

ARTHUR: At that particular point, no. I’d met Alan at least once, when I was doing a book tour and a couple of conventions in England. I’d met him one time, but we didn’t really hang out. He was hanging out with the grownups, as I recall, because when I went to England, I was probably 22, 23, something like that.

MM: Was he aware of your work at that point?

66

the Doc Savage books at that time, and that was clearly a big influence on Tom Strong.

So I think that was the only one I was really interested in, and, of course, Chris Sprouse was already working on that one.

MM: So after a while, then, I guess Scott offered you “Jonni Future”?

ARTHUR: A couple years later, yeah. I talked to he and Alan briefly about “Jonni Future,” and after I’d been enjoying all those ABC books that I’d foolishly said I didn’t want to draw before, I immediately jumped at the chance.

MM: So this was your first ongoing series in a long time?

ARTHUR: Yeah. And I thought it would be really easy, because it was only going to be, what was it, eight or nine pages per story? And, of course, I found a way to drag that out forever. [laughs] But it was fun to do. That was a fun series to do.

MM: Did you have a lot of meetings or conversations with Steve at the beginning, to, like, discuss the characters?

ARTHUR: Sadly not. I kind of wished that we had. That was kind of a weird situation, because, as I recall, they’d already written the character description, the proposal.

They might even have written the first couple of scripts. I don’t really recall. But I had plenty of input on at least how everything looked. Jonni Future ended up looking quite different than what Alan and Steve had asked for her to look like. I think originally they’d—are you familiar with the character called—she was in Penthouse Comix. She was the one that was kind of based on Doc Savage or Pat Savage.

MM: I remember.

ARTHUR: But Jonni was originally supposed to be wearing some sort of helmet, some sort of Adam Strange-ish— MM: She used to wear a lot of parachute pants and stuff, right?

ARTHUR: Well, she was supposed to be wearing tight pants; I think that was the only difference. And then just some regular

kind of boots, and then a big, billowy blouse, but it was supposed to be a transparent blouse, and I just couldn’t really figure out how I was going to draw a transparent blouse, which is why she still kind of has the transparent blouse underneath some really big shoulder pads. [laughs] MM: But this was part of the thing to make this character sexy?

ARTHUR: Yes. She was always intended to be ridiculously sexy.

MM: Risqué—sort of like Barbarella or something.

ARTHUR: Not quite, but yeah, kind of in that vein. Something that was clearly supposed to be titillating, but not actually porn. So that actually got to be a bit of a problem as I was working on it, because often as I was drawing I was like, “Well, why don’t we just make this porn? Why are we just going to this half measure, which isn’t quite satisfactory? Let’s just go ahead and make it porn, why not?”

MM: But some of your artwork that you did in those books is among the best things I’ve seen from you in a long time.

ARTHUR: I think that’s true. I think I got through something, I don’t know exactly what.

MM: I guess you found a middle ground or something— ARTHUR: Kind of a cartoony period?

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Previous Page: Cover art for Tom Strong’s Terrific Tales #2. For the published cover, the extreme foreground POV figures were blacked in to help distinguish them from the other figures on the page.

Below: Preliminary Jonni Future sketch. Arthur actually sketched this in blue pencil.

Jonni Future ™ and ©2006 America’s Best Comics, LLC.

MM: I think you’ve always been kind of hard on yourself that you put too much detail into it. But then that came back, but you knew what to do much better.

ARTHUR: I think that might be true, but certainly the detail came back, and with a vengeance, didn’t it? [laughs]

Above: Thumbnail cover sketches for Tom Strong’s Terrific Tales #5.

Next Page: Page 2 of “The Garden of Sklin,” from Tom Strong’s Terrific Tales #6.

Jonni Future, Solomon, Tom Strong ™ and ©2006 America’s Best Comics, LLC.

MM: Because there’s one story—and it’s funny, I didn’t notice it when—I was reading these things when they came out, but when I started doing these interviews with you I really started looking at the art, and this one story that you did, “The Garden of...”—what is it?

ARTHUR: Oh, “The Garden of the Sklin.”

MM: How long did you take doing each page? There’s so much detail.

ARTHUR: It’s hard to remember on that one. I would guess four or five days a page.

MM: Was it worth the pay? [laughs] ARTHUR: Y’know, it’s a weird world that we live in nowadays. The pay, if I just had to go by the pay from what I was getting—y’know, it could be worse. I think I was getting, like, $500 a page. So, y’know, $500 is $100 dollars a day— MM: It’s okay. [laughs] ARTHUR: It could be worse. But even if, say I took seven or eight days on that page.... But, y’know, I sold all the original art from that, or almost all the original art, 68

and I got quite a lot of money for that stuff.

MM: Looking at these pages, it felt like you were working at your own pace. The first couple of pages don’t have any script, and you’re able to tell the story; you were in control.

ARTHUR: Well, certainly that was one of things that I had problems with, working with Steve Moore. I thought he was doing really good; he had really good ideas for stories— MM: Did you feel that he knew your strengths?

ARTHUR: I didn’t have the room that I needed to draw what he wanted me to draw, so that’s why a lot of the stories are a page or two longer than they really should have been.

They were all written, as I recall it, as eightpage stories, and some of them I just had to have more room, because he was asking me to draw stuff that was really cool, but he would often suggest that I draw something that was really cool in a little 5" x 5" square when it really needed to be, like, at least half a page at the very least, and if not half a page, maybe even two pages, like a two-page spread. So I think that was the only frustration I had with “Jonni Future” is that I just often didn’t have as much room as I thought the thing needed, because it really was supposed to be a very visual kind of series.

MM: So is that one of the things that made you want to take this work, like, “I’m gonna show people what I can do.”

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Above: Pages 3 and 4 from Jonni’s Tom Strong’s Terrific Tales #5 episode.

Next Page: Page 5 of “A Cure for Cancer,” part two of the Cancer Blue story, which appeared in Tom Strong’s Terrific Tales #10. While Kevin Nowlan inked the first four pages of this chapter, Arthur finished up the remaining pages himself.

Jonni Future ™ and ©2006 America’s Best Comics, LLC. Batman ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

ARTHUR: Well, there was a little bit of that. Certainly I was trying to draw a little more realistically than I had been for about the decade before, I guess. Because I was trying to draw a little more realistically, as least as realistically as I can, and I was looking at a lot of Serpieri’s stuff at the time—pretty obviously, I think—because I really like the way he draws, I think he draws really well.

And what else was a big influence on that?

MM: There’s a lot of romanticism. Was any of the black-and-white Warren stuff an influence, or was it...?

ARTHUR: Sure, yeah, a little bit of the Vampirella stuff, sure. That was an influence, definitely. Also, you know, one of the strange things that was an influence was, I have one of these Capcom video game character books.

70

MM: The Final Fantasy one?

ARTHUR: No, it’s not the Final Fantasy one. This is an older one. It actually has a lot of, like, Street Fighter and some other stuff in it. Some of the character designs were drawn in a really fun, kind of sketchy sort of way, so I was trying to bring that a little bit into “Jonni Future,” and, me being me, I can’t make anything look really sketchy, but I was trying to bring just a sense of....

MM: Elegance?

ARTHUR: I wanted it to look like it was drawn. And by “drawn” I mean, look like it’s handmade. So I made a point of not really using too much by way of templates or straight edges. I tried to draw everything with just a free, loose hand, and I inked it all with felt tip pens to give it a little bit looser

feel. At least for me. And I was just really comfortable with that, so I could just kind of scribble away with that, not feel—I was just more comfortable. And also, part of my thinking on “Jonni Future” and the work I’ve been doing since is that there’s a lot of stuff in comics these days that is.... I want to say that a lot of the things that are popular now are the black-and-white stuff that really—I don’t want to say “simple,” because I know the guys who are doing the black-and-white stuff are putting every bit as much work in the stuff as I am, they’re just making it look a little starker. So what I’m saying is, I’m thinking of—

stream comics was doing, to just go completely nuts on the page, just fill it up, just make almost gray, so that there’s black spots and there’s white spots, but it’s mostly gray.

MM: Technically, I’ve always liked your work, but I think that this is your best.

ARTHUR: I think so, too. I think it probably is my best work.

MM: So what happened after that issue? Did you become a little more disillusioned or—?

MM: But it’s something very noticeable when I was looking at the work; it reminded me a little bit of Wrightson.

ARTHUR: You mean after that particular story?

MM: Yeah, I think then you were inked by Kevin Nowlan—

ARTHUR: I understand what you’re saying. It looks a little bit like older illustrations.

ARTHUR: After that, that was only, I think, issue #4, and then I wasn’t in issue #5. I think I drew all of them up to issue... #9?

MM: A little more old school.

ARTHUR: Yeah. And that is one of the things I was trying to do. But I was also trying to do things that I thought no one else in main-

MM: Yeah, but you were starting to get inked by others. They were treating your art differently. Was that part of an experiment?

ARTHUR: It wasn’t so much that, but I was just going so darned slow on the stuff that we thought that we would try an experiment.

Now, this is an odd one, but, yeah, I would have been really curious to see how it worked out. I was at one of the conventions here in San Francisco—Wonder Con—and Scott Dunbier and I were hanging out with Bruce Timm, and we were just kind of chatting.

And then Bruce saw some of my layouts, and Bruce said that he would be interested in maybe inking over my layouts at some point, just because I drew them up at the size he liked, and my layouts are a lot simpler, naturally. So he had some interest in inking them, and we thought, well, hell, that would be a really cool experiment. Let’s see how that works out. Unfortunately, by the time I got the layouts done, he had no time to work on it, but Scott really wanted to try to get someone else to ink it, someone else to finish it, just to kind of get things moving. And I figured what the heck, so we tried Kevin Nowlan. And I think that worked okay. I think, unfortunately, Kevin was too nice to me, and he kind of followed my layouts a little too much.

MM: Because he usually overpowers everybody.

ARTHUR: Exactly, and that’s what I wanted! [laughter] I wanted to see Kevin Nowlan redraw my stuff. I thought that would have been really cool. Not to say that he did a bad job—he did a swell job with what I gave him. I just wanted to see more Kevin in that.

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Sprouse draws him. I think, especially early on, Chris was drawing him with such really crazy heroic proportions. I can never quite get that without it looking to me like it was some sort of parody, and that was certainly not what I wanted to do, because I really liked what Chris was doing.

And then with the Young Tom Strong, when I first heard what the series was going to be, I just kind of had a different view of how the series was kind of going. Not to say that Alan Weiss or anyone working on that was doing a bad job, it’s just not quite the way I saw it. It was kind of hard to reconcile that when I was doing the covers. I kind of wanted to do my version, but I knew that that would not really be cool. [laughs] Because it’s not my book. I think they’re okay covers. I don’t think those are the strong suit on this series; I think that really my interior pages were by far the better part of what I did on that book.

And also, to be fair to Kevin, and this is pretty important, it was drawn really small. It was drawn the printed size, which is the size Bruce likes to work, but there’s not many people who like to work that small.

MM: So the Kevin Nowlan story was the one Bruce was supposed do?

ARTHUR: Exactly, the first one. And then the second one, because I knew Kevin was going to ink the second chapter, I drew it a little bit bigger. It’s still not a whole lot bigger, but it’s a little bit bigger so that Kevin would have a little more room, but also Kevin just kind of ran out of time, so I actually inked the second half of the second chapter.

MM: You don’t draw on regular-sized boards?

ARTHUR: Oh, yeah, I draw on boards. But that’s also the funny thing with “Jonni Future,” because it was so visual, for the first three stories, I think, they were drawn twice-up; they’re drawn really big.

And then there’s the Bruce Timm job, which became the first Kevin Nowlan job, which is drawn to printed size, which is actually a quarter the size of the first couple of chapters. And then I just went ahead and did it—I think starting with “Garden of the Sklin,” I think that was drawn pretty much standard size. It might be a little bit above. Actually, come to think of it, it probably is a little bit bigger. It’s kind of between standard size and the twice-up.

And then, I think, with the one where she goes to the death cult planetoid, that one I think is standard size.

MM: There is one issue I’ve gotta ask you about: #7.

What was Phil Noto doing with the colors that make it look so weird? [laughs] I usually like his work.

ARTHUR: Sure. No, Phil’s a terrific artist, and we were thrilled to have him working on it. The problem, I think, whatever problem there is when they’re working with me, I’m always turning in these things really at the last minute. The colorists really have very little time to do what needs to be done. And I’m sure that if he’d had a little more time, he would have fine-tuned it a little bit.

There’s stuff in there I like, that’s fine, and there’s some stuff that looks a little funny. I don’t think any of it’s horrible, but there’s some stuff that looks a little funny.

MM: Was the cover an afterthought when you were working on these? Because the covers were all strong, but there was more detail inside.

MM: But these were fully inked pages, right?

ARTHUR: There were only a couple of the covers that I think are okay. I’ve never been comfortable with my Tom Strong. I don’t think I draw him particularly well. I think there’s a couple of the covers where I think he’s okay, but I don’t think he’s—I could never quite get how Chris

ARTHUR: Oh, yes.

MM: Okay. Because I thought he might have been constructing some inks or something.

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ARTHUR: Oh, no, no. It was all fully inked.

It was just some cases where some black lines probably got dropped a little more than really made sense. It was an experiment, and it was the first time that he’d worked on my stuff, so he was just trying some stuff. And that’s okay.

MM: How did the end of the series come about? Did they just tell you it was over, or was it a limited series from the beginning?

ARTHUR: I think it was intended to be twelve issues from the very beginning. I think if it’d been selling better than it was, it could have continued on. Not to say that it was ever selling really badly, but it wasn’t selling particularly well. Strangely enough, none of the ABC books, when they initially came out, did particularly well, as I recall. They all did okay, they all paid for themselves and everything, but— MM: But it’s just, like people have said, the anthology is dead.

ARTHUR: You know, especially when we did the two-parter with Cancer Blue—I guess that was issue #9 and #10. So I think that might have been more how we should have done “Jonni Future.” I think it should have been a continuing series that had cliffhangers— you know, one story leading into another—instead of the separate chapters. I think it might have worked a little bit better if there’d been more reason for people to buy each and every issue.

MM: So what happened after this was over? Did you find yourself without a book, or did you have work right away lined up?

ARTHUR: Oh, yes, I had work right away lined up, yeah. So there was never any hold back.

And, also, to go back to Tom Strong’s Terrific Tales, I kind of did screw things 73

Previous Page: Cover art for Tom Strong’s Terrific Tales #8.

Above and Left: Preliminary cover sketches for Tom Strong’s Terrific Tales #6, along with the finished cover for Tom Strong’s Terrific Tales #10.

Jonni Future, Tom Strong, Young Tom Strong ™ and ©2006 America’s Best Comics, LLC.

how the whole thing just ended up—I think they thought they were going to be doing me a favor by giving more time, so I ended up taking even more time than they tried to give me.

MM: Didn’t they make you redraw pages, as well?

ARTHUR: And that’s the unfortunate thing. And that kind of goes back to what we were talking about: unfortunate things in my career. And this is a fairly minor one, but it was a little annoying at the time. Yeah, so I’d done the first issue. It had taken too long, granted, but we’d gotten the first issue done, and I was getting to work on my second issue, which would have been the third part of that story. And during all this time I think Mark Millar was sick. He was having trouble getting work done because of whatever illness he had going on, and so—

This Page: Panel breakdowns for the last page of “Upon the Bridge of Time,” from Tom Strong’s Terrific Tales #11. Next Page: The Authority #27, page 13.

Mmm-mm, cigar soufflé.

While Tim Townsend inked most of Arthur’s Authority work, Arthur inked this page himself.

Jonni Future ™ and ©2006 America’s Best Comics, LLC. The Authority, Swift ™ and ©2006 WildStorm Productions, Inc.

up almost from the very beginning. I think I penciled and inked the first issue, but then Frank [Quitely] had left Wildstorm and DC to go do some Marvel stuff, and they were left right in the middle of a story that was going on in The Authority— which was a series I was really enjoying.

When I heard that they needed an artist on it, I called up Scott Dunbier and offered to help out, thinking that it was going to be something I could get done right away, thinking that they had a script for the next issue and that they needed it right away, so I was going to try to go back to that old Fantastic Four mode and bang out a couple issues. But instead it turned out we didn’t even actually have a script for the next issue, or we only had a couple of pages for the script, and then DC got wind that I was interested in doing a couple of issues, so some-

MM: Did you feel comfortable doing that kind of material? Because it wasn’t the type of thing readers had seen before from you.

ARTHUR: I wanted to do the job, because I’ve always said to myself— MM: You wanted to do something violent?

ARTHUR: No, that I can draw anything.

I can draw any subject, I can draw whatever, it’s just a matter of just sitting down and doing it and I’m just never asked to do that sort of job. So when I volunteered for it, I had been reading The Authority for a while, so I knew what I was doing. I just looked at it as a challenge. And I thought I did an okay job on it, but unfortunately that was right at the time that we had the attack on the World Trade Center, and DC got squeamish about what was going on in the books and they asked us to draw back

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a lot of it. And so I did have to go back and redraw stuff. And, you know, I understood why, but it was still kind of frustrating to go back and purposely make a book that I thought was pretty good, to make it less good.

Above: Two different takes on the cover for The Authority #27 depicting a severely beaten Apollo.

Next Page: Superman #165, page 13—penciled and inked by Arthur.

Apollo, The Authority ™ and ©2006 WildStorm Productions, Inc. Flash, Superman ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

MM: It kind of watered it down a little bit.

ARTHUR: It kind of watered it down.

Ultimately, I think that book that was published was not as good as the first one we had done. So that kind of took the steam out of the thing for me, unfortunately, just to get the second issue done. Which I got done, but by the time I got that one done, I guess my third part was pretty late, and Scott wanted me to get back to “Jonni Future,” so that’s what we did. Someone else went in and finished the last chapter.

Which is too bad, I really would have liked to have finished it up. But, y’know, there you go. I went back to “Jonni Future” 76

and that seemed to have come along.

MM: Did you have a feeling like you passed that test; that you can do that kind of work in the vein of The Authority?

ARTHUR: Oh, I think so. I haven’t done straight-out porn yet, but I’ll get to that, or something of that sort. [laughs] MM: Well, I remember seeing those issues. I love your artwork but it— ARTHUR: Gumby... yeah, I can do everything.

MM: You can do it all, but I don’t think I want to see you drawing any more guys bleeding to death. [laughter] ARTHUR: I mean, it’s not my favorite subject in the world, but you know, if it’s part of a good story, then that’s fine.

Part 6:

Storytelling and the Creative Process or whatever little snack, and then I’ll make dinner at around five or six. I’m a slow cooker. It usually ends up taking two or three hours for me to make dinner. [laughs] And then, after dinner, I’ll sometimes come downstairs and work for another two or three hours.

MM: What’s a typical day? Where do you start?

ARTHUR: A typical day. Umm....

MM: What’s your schedule?

ARTHUR: I generally try to be at my drawing board— Joyce will laugh at this, but I try to be at my drawing table by between nine and ten in the morning. I would get more work done if I got down here a little bit earlier, but unfortunately I’m kind of a night owl. That doesn’t mean I’m necessarily working late at night, or, if I am working, I’m working much more slowly later at night. So I try to be at my table at about ten o’clock, and I generally work till four or five, with a couple of little snack breaks, and maybe spending too much time looking at the computer. And, because I’m getting older, I’ve been trying to exercise a little bit, so every other day I may go out and walk around for two or three hours.

MM: Do you have to get yourself in the mood to do the work? Does everything have to be right?

ARTHUR: You know, I don’t think so. Somehow things just seem to get done when they need to get done.

But it’s not really a mood thing. What I find is that if I don’t work, I kind of get more grouchy if I don’t do at least a little bit of work every day.

MM: What type of equipment do you usually use? Do you have a favorite pen or a pencil?

ARTHUR: For pencils, well, I usually start out a page using a non-photo blue pencil, a Prismacolor nonphoto blue pencil with an eraser on the back end, because it’s not too waxy, it erases fairly easily. And then I’ll usually tighten up those nonphoto blue pencils with a light blue pencil, also with an eraser. And then I will tighten those up further with a Ticonderoga, just plain old #2 pencil.

MM: But you no longer burn the midnight oil?

ARTHUR: Oh, it depends, it depends.

I sometimes do, and I’m often working pretty late. Lately, because I’m feeling way behind on my current project, I’m generally starting work at about ten o’clock, and have a break for lunch

MM: When you ink your work, do you usually use a marker, or do you use— 77

ARTHUR: For almost the last decade or so, I’ve been using the Staedtler Pigment Liner, which comes in a variety of sizes. It’s permanent ink, but it’s in a felt-tip pen, yes.

Above: Layout and self-rejected finished pencils for the cover of Classic X-Men #1.

Next Page: Cover thumbnails for Armageddon: Inferno #1 and Vampirella Summer Nights #1. Both were drawn at 1/4-size on the same board (along with two Godzilla splash page thumbnails).

Superman and all related characters ™ and ©2006 DC Comics. X-Men ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc. Vampirella ™ and ©2006 Harris Publications. Cousin Eerie, Uncle Creepy ™ and ©2006 Warren Publishing, Inc.

MM: You don’t use a brush?

ARTHUR: No. I learned how to use a brush fairly early on in my career, and I like that just fine, it’s just I feel a little looser when I’m using the pen. It feels a little bit less like a real job. Which may explain my career. [laughs] MM: But you can get those thinner lines, I guess, with that pen?

ARTHUR: Sadly, I do too much of that, which is one of the reasons I don’t have cable TV here in my studio. But I have a fairly large selection of DVDs. MM: Do you usually work on a lapboard instead of an art board?

ARTHUR: I have a nice big old drawing board that I work on here in my studio. I only use the lapboard when I’m upstairs.

MM: You find it uncomfortable after a while, working at the drawing board?

ARTHUR: Well, I can do that with a crow quill or even with a brush just as well, it just takes a little more concentration. With these particular pens, here, these big permanent markers, they’re just really easy to have around. And sometimes I’ll take work upstairs and just sit on the couch with my lapboard and just ink away.

MM: Because I thought that’s why you were using the lapboard, to just move around the house more, or watch television—

MM: Do you watch television while you work?

ARTHUR: For some reason, my wife insists on seeing me occasionally every day.

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ARTHUR: Oh, no, no, no. I’ve been doing it for so long that I find it more uncomfortable if I don’t do it every once in a while.

MM: What are common mistakes that you see when folks show you their portfolio at shows?

ARTHUR: The main thing I notice when people show me things is they just generally need to work more on their anatomy. And this was certainly true of me early on, at the very beginning of my career—hell, it’s still true. Most people just starting don’t have their perspective quite figured out yet, either figured out how to actually do it right, or to fake it. Like, I do a little bit of both, just drawing things until I think they look about right.

MM: But did you have a lot of figure drawing books and stuff at the beginning?

ARTHUR: Yeah, I have quite a lot of figure drawing books. I don’t look at them as much as I probably should, but let’s see, which are my favorite? I have two favorites here, which were suggested to me by Al Gordon a long, long time ago, and they’ve been very handy ever since. There’s Andrew Loomis’ Figure Drawing, which is very, very helpful, and a book that used to be called Fun With Pencil, I think, but now it’s most recently been released as The Art of Drawing, by Willy Pogany.

MM: Do you use a lot of reference when you’re working?

ARTHUR: Well, it really depends on what I’m drawing. If I’m drawing something I’m not used to drawing, I’ll certainly have a lot of reference. If it’s some characters I’m fairly familiar with, I might have some of what I think are the better examples of how that character’s been drawn. But, I have a fair amount of reference.

Like, the story I’m drawing right now takes place in a big city, so I have several books out on my drawing table of New York and Chicago and San Francisco.

MM: But do you find yourself, as the years go by, that you don’t need so much reference, that you can do it all straight to the page?

ARTHUR: Again, it depends on what I’m drawing, and it depends on what I might be using some piece of reference for, but I’ve always used reference as a jumping off point, not necessarily to do dead-on swipes of, say, photographs, or anything like that.

MM: I’ve seen a lot of thumbnails from when you were working on those X-Men Annuals. Are you still doing that now?

ARTHUR: My thumbnails aren’t quite as tight as that. They’re not thumbnails—although I probably could Xerox them and blow them up to regular page size and just go ahead and lightbox them. But I found that even though I was doing that, I would still alter them so much over the course of drawing the page, that it was better off just to go ahead and start with a blank page and just look at my thumbnails over on the side of my drawing table.

MM: How would you break down a page?

ARTHUR: What I usually do is, I’ll get a script or a plot. And I’ll either do this sometimes upstairs, while I’m sitting around watching TV, or sometimes I’ll take these off to a nice pub or a nice lunch 79

it’s a full script, I certainly keep track of where there needs to be room for someone talking, and also, especially if you’re working on a script by, like, Alan or Steve Moore—the scripts are so clear that you pretty much have to have the figures laid out in a certain way just so the word balloons go in the proper order. But if you’re working from a plot, you can just figure that you need to leave about a third to a quarter of the panel with enough room for there to be some sort of writing.

MM: Do you ever, when somebody gives you a script, cross out stuff? “Oh, I can’t put this in, but this I can do—” Like, Garry Leach once told me a story. When he was working on those “Miracleman” comics in the beginning, he would just cross out stuff that he didn’t think was necessarily important to a panel.

Above: Page 3 pencils from “Delusions of Grandeur,” part of Danger Girl Special #1.

Next Page: Thumbnails from the Armageddon: Inferno mini-series.

Danger Girl ™ and ©2006 Atomico. Flash, Martian Manhunter, Superman, Troia, Wonder Woman and all related characters ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

place, and so I’ll take the script and then, on the side, wherever there’s any open space on the plotted page, I’ll do, like, a really tiny little thumbnail about how I think the page should be. And often I’ll do two or three different versions, if not the full page, then various panels on that page.

MM: So you’re very conscious the whole time about word balloons and things like that? Or is that second nature?

ARTHUR: I know to leave space. And, if 80

ARTHUR: I’ve never done that, that I can think of. That may have happened at some point, but I certainly can’t remember that. I’ve always tried to the best of my ability to put everything through that any writer I’m working with asks for.

Granted, I was a younger guy then, and I don’t know if I would do exactly this, then or now, but I think there’s a couple of pages in the first Longshot mini-series that have, like, I dunno, twelve or 15 panels for a page. And that seems kind of unlikely I would do that now. I would not say it’s absolutely impossible, and there’s certain things that that might make sense for. But I don’t really recall having ever just X-ed anything out. If anything, I will generally put what the writer asks for, and add extra of my own stuff.

MM: How do you pace yourself in the story? Do you usually break down a whole issue before you start?

ARTHUR: I prefer to break down the whole issue before I start so I have a good idea of where things are going from beginning to end, and also so I don’t become repetitive in my panel layouts. If I do a handful of pages at the very beginning and

MM: I think I might have mentioned it before, but when you do these group pages that are really busy, you always try to give everybody a distinctive face.

then lay out later pages, I find that sometimes the general layout of the panels may work better later in the book than it did earlier in the book. So I prefer to have it all pretty well nailed down right at the very beginning.

ARTHUR: Well, I try to make sure that they’re all distinctive characters, ’cause I like them all.

MM: On the story you’re working on now, are you getting the pages, the scripts, as it comes along, or do you get full scripts for each—?

ARTHUR: The first issue I have a full script on. As the story goes along, my writer’s telling me I may get less than full scripts if things go along, but hopefully all things will be moving along well enough by that point.

MM: But it usually helps you to have an idea what’s going to happen that issue?

ARTHUR: Nowadays it seems to me most comics are written to be either four- or six-issue story arcs, because so many books are collected these days, so I think a lot of writers—and this isn’t necessarily one of my favorite things, but I think a lot of writers are purposely writing six-issue stories. So, in that case, it’s pretty unlikely that I’m going to get a script for all six issues right in the very beginning.

MM: Do you like pages with more group dynamics? I think we talked a little bit about this, like, busier pages?

ARTHUR: I prefer group books just because it’s easier for me to hide my bad layout skills. But I think I’ve gotten to the point that I’m okay if it’s a single character book.

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Above: Thumbnail cover sketches for 1988’s Spectre Annual #1.

Right: Rough layout based on the fourth thumbnail. Note that the background crowd scene has been replaced by a ghostly skull image.

Next Page: The final inked version. The crowd scene has been restored, and if you look closely you’ll find several cameos. Among others: The Gill Man, Star Trek’s Mr. Spock— both of whom had to be modified slightly for publication— Angel and the Ape, Dr. Sivana, Plastic Man, Sam & Max, and many of the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and X-Men characters.

Deadman, Spectre ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

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MM: That Deadman cover—the Spectre Annual cover that— ARTHUR: It was just me being stupid. [laughter] MM: But it’s just interesting to see this nice group shot, and everybody’s got a different kind of expression.

ARTHUR: Yeah, I don’t know why exactly I did that on that particular one. That one I just kind of went nuts on. It’s not necessarily appropriate to— what was it? The Spectre, I think was the book.

MM: Yeah, It’s the first annual.

ARTHUR: Yeah, and I think all the happy people looking up to the Spectre and Deadman probably wasn’t entirely appropriate.

MM: But then there’s another piece I’ve noticed that you did, something similar to that, but there was more rendering to it.

It was that Marvel poster that was inspired by the Michael Golden poster from the early ’80s, where you have all the Marvel characters looking at the Hulk, jumping up, and Galactus, and other things going on.

ARTHUR: Oh, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah. That first poster that Mike Golden, I guess, did for Sal Q Productions, I think?

MM: How do you approach something like that? Like, do you just break it down? I don’t know how many characters are on that poster—like, 80 or something.

MM: Yeah, that famous Michael Golden ’80s poster.

ARTHUR: That’s a great poster.

MM: You did one sort of like it, and it’s kind of interesting to see all the Marvel characters—

ARTHUR: That particular one, yes. I did a tight layout for it, which I would pencil not super-tightly, but then I would just generally go over it with a marker just to kind of outline the figures. Because in that case, I believe, I needed approval

ARTHUR: I’m sure I must have had that out when I was doing the one I was working.

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ARTHUR: Well, it’s been very rare that something that a finished cover of mine has not been published. I can’t think of another example besides that Impulse cover. It may have happened, I’m not really sure. I think sometimes, when I’m doing a cover, I’ll do a handful of sketches. Unfortunately, I’ll often do, like, five or six, which is probably too many, and almost inevitably the editor picks either the one that I least want to do, or the second to the least one I want to do. [laughs] So maybe I should just not show those particular covers to editors. [laughter] But, y’know, those books, to be fair, sometimes those turn out okay.

Sometimes the ones that are a little more work, you put a little more effort into, and those—you can get a pleasant surprise, at least for me, the guy working on the darned thing.

MM: All right. What do you think are the fundamentals of storytelling, in terms of art?

ARTHUR: One of the pages I’m working on right now I just totally redrew. Which is another reason this thing’s going so slow.

The original page was not bad; but it wasn’t particularly good storytelling. It was a little too, “Oh, look, here’s a big character hitting another character.” It was more confusing. The confusion I thought that it caused was not worth the big, cool images, so I’ve redrawn it so that the storytelling is a lot more clear. I think that’s the main thing about storytelling, just make sure things are clear, and remember that the people who are reading your comic book don’t necessarily know the same stuff that you know. from Marvel, so I wanted to make it clear enough to be able to fax it to them, or however the heck I got approval for it.

MM: How long did it take you to do that, redraw that whole page, to figure the right tone you wanted?

MM: And what’s your approach to a cover nowadays?

ARTHUR: In fact, it was a two-page spread, so it probably took, like, four or five days.

ARTHUR: Covers can be kind of difficult these days because companies need the cover to solicit the book, often well before the interior of the book is done, and that’s not really my favorite way of working. I’d like to be able to work off of what the actual book is. Again, like I think we mentioned before, my preference as a comic book buyer is that whoever’s drawing the inside of the book draws the cover. I think that’s just fair salesmanship.

MM: Just that one spread?

ARTHUR: Yeah, I’m not that smart. And, for some reason, this particular job so far, I think ’cause I’m so worried about making a good impression, because I haven’t done such a big job for quite a while. I just want it to be good, so I think I’m stressing over it a lot more than I probably need to. I’ve worn out more erasers than I have in a long time.

MM: Have you had something you thought was a good cover design, only to have it rejected by the editor?

MM: So with this job, are you leaving space for the inker, or are you going to be the inker? Do you know?

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ARTHUR: Not exactly sure at this point.

My preference is that I be able to ink it, but considering how fast I’m going on the thing, DC may feel otherwise. [laughs] MM: Well, how do you handle a situation like that when you’re drawing it? You just do everything you can?

ARTHUR: This particular case, because it’s been so long since I worked with an inker, I’m working with my editor to make sure that I get to pick my own inker, and that I’ll probably do some co-inking. Even if I don’t end up getting any credit, I want to at least be able to look at the inked pages and touch them up as I feel they might need to be touched up, because of

the way I draw these days, I finish a lot of the drawing as I’m inking a page, so even though an inker can follow exactly what I penciled, I still may not think it looks quite right. So I still might go ahead and fiddle with stuff. Like, I thought Tim Townsend, when he inked me on The Authority, I could not have asked for anybody to do a better job than he did on those two issues. But still, for me, they didn’t look quite right, just because the way I work these days, I would have not inked myself exactly the way I drew myself. And, you know, no inker can possibly know what I would do, so, again, he did the best possible job he could have done.

MM: After working with all of these writers,

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Previous Page: Cover art for Buffy, the Vampire Slayer #1.

Below: Arthur was unhappy with the way this page from 1988’s Wonder Woman Annual #1 was going, and re-drew two panels to be pasted in by DC’s production staff.

Wonder Woman ™ and ©2006 DC Comics. Buffy the Vampire Slayer ™ and ©2006 20th Century Fox Film Corporation.

do you want to work on your own again?

ARTHUR: Well, I guess I want to do my own thing at some point. Right now I’m working with Jeph Loeb, and he’s really easy to work with. He somehow knows what I want to draw, and it seems to be working out all right so far.

MM: I have an idea to end this thing. I’m going to ask you the famous ten questions

by Bernard Pivot. [laughter] ARTHUR: All right.

MM: The first question is: what is your favorite word?

ARTHUR: My favorite word. [laughs] My favorite word. I need to call Regis Philbin on this. Favorite word. I guess it could be “me.” “Mine.” “I,” “me,” or “mine.” [laughs] No, no... today my favorite word is monster.

MM: The next question is what is your least favorite word?

ARTHUR: Arty.

MM: [laughs] What turns you on creatively, spiritually, or emotionally?

ARTHUR: But I’m always creative, spiritual... but maybe not so emotional.

MM: What turns you off?

ARTHUR: What turns me off? Bad drunks. [George laughs] Bad drunks.

MM: What, do you have a lot of them around town or something? [laughs] Are you in a rough part of town?

ARTHUR: Oh, no, not at all, we’re just talking about—it’s not something I necessarily have to deal with tonight, but y’know, sometimes when you’re hanging

87

Previous Page: Arthur’s preliminary sketch for the cover of Uncanny X-Men Annual #9 (along with Walter Simonson’s inks) and the pencils for cover of Uncanny X-Men #214 (beside Barry WindsorSmith’s inks).

Below: The humorous “How to Draw Comics the Art Adams Way,” written by Steve Moncuse and (of course) drawn by Arthur.

X-Men and all related characters ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc. “How to Draw Comics the Art Adams Way” ©2006 Steve Moncuse and Arthur Adams.

out with friends, they bring an extra friend who isn’t necessarily particularly good at holding whatever it is he’s containing.

Above: Panel inset pencils for TSTT #2, page 6.

Below: Arthur in his studio. Photo by Greg Preston.

MM: What is your favorite curse word?

Photo ©2006 Greg Preston.

Jonni Future ™ and ©2006 America’s Best Comics, LLC.

ARTHUR: My favorite curse word?

Probably “f*ck.”

MM: Which sound or noise do you love?

ARTHUR: Sound or noise that I love.... I like the sound of rain.

MM: What profession other than your own would you have liked to have tried?

ARTHUR: Ummm... acting.

MM: What profession would you not like to do?

ARTHUR: What profession would I not like to do.... Hmm, I don’t think I’d be a good executioner. I would not be a good one.

MM: If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?

ARTHUR: Oh my goodness. [laughs] Well, I don’t believe in any particular god, but if there is one, what would I like to hear God say? “Yes, you can do it all again.”

88

Godzilla ™ and ©2006 Toho Co., Inc. Creature from the Black Lagoon ™ and ©2006 Universal City Studios, Inc. Arthur Adams ™ and ©2006 Arthur Adams.

Arthur Adams

Art Gallery

Micronauts ™ and ©2006 Takara/A.G.E.

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Longshot, Mojo, Spriral and all related characters ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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New Mutants, Phoenix, X-Men and all related characters ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Phoenix ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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95

X-Factor and all related characters ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Double Dragon ™ and ©2006 Atlus Games, Inc.

Left: Thumbnail sketch for the Showcase ’93 #1 cover.

Below: Back cover art for Showcase ’93 #1. Originally the Joker was part of the cover image, but after the cover was drawn it was decided he would not appear in the book that year. Arthur and inker Terry Austin had to modify the Joker’s outfit to that of Two-Face’s and create a patch of Two-Face’s head and flipping coin to be pasted over the original art.

All characters ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

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All characters (except Santa Claus) ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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99

Madman ™ and ©2006 Mike Allred.

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Nocturnals ™ and ©2006 Dan Brereton.

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Tellos ™ and ©2006 Todd Dezago and Mike Wieringo.

Godzilla, Godzillasaurus ™ and ©2006 Toho Co., Ltd.

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X-Men ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Dazzler ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Lady Death ™ & ©2006 Avatar Press. Witchblade ™ and ©2006 Top Cow Productions, Inc. Vampirella ™ & ©2006 Harris Publications, Inc.

Psylocke ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

This Page and Next: Preliminary sketches for a Spider-Man Christmas ornament.

Spider-Man ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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107

Quasar ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Phoenix ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

110

Artwork ©2006 Arthur Adams.

111

Artwork ©2006 Arthur Adams.

Artwork ©2006 Arthur Adams.

112

Red Sonja ™ and ©2006 Red Sonja Corporation.

113

ng, Hulk, Thi

d ine ™ an , Wolver Wendigo

c. racters, In arvel Cha ©2006 M

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Batman, Joker, Metamorpho, Penguin, Riddler ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

116

Fantastic Four, Inhumans ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Fantastic Four, Gorr ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

118 Monkeyman & O’Brien ™ and ©2006 Arthur Adams.

Monkeyman & O’Brien ™ and ©2006 Arthur Adams.

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Monkeyman & O’Brien ™ and ©2006 Arthur Adams.

Monkeyman & O’Brien ™ and ©2006 Arthur Adams.

Vampirella ™ and ©2006 Harris Publications, Inc. Gen13 ™ and ©2006 Aegis Entertainment Inc. dba WildStorm Productions.

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TwoMorrows publications should only be downloaded at

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122

Solomon ™ and ©2006 America’s Best Comics LLC.

123

Wonder Woman ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

124 Artwork ©2006 Arthur Adams.

Artwork ©2006 Arthur Adams.

THE MODERN MASTERS SERIES Edited by ERIC NOLENWEATHINGTON, these trade paperbacks and DVDs are devoted to the BEST OF TODAY’S COMICS ARTISTS! Each book contains RARE AND UNSEEN ARTWORK direct from the artist’s files, plus a COMPREHENSIVE INTERVIEW (including influences and their views on graphic storytelling), DELUXE SKETCHBOOK SECTIONS, and more!

And don’t miss the companion DVDs, showing the artists at work in their studios!

MODERN MASTERS: IN THE STUDIO WITH GEORGE PÉREZ DVD

MODERN MASTERS: IN THE STUDIO WITH MICHAEL GOLDEN DVD

Get a PERSONAL TOUR of George’s studio, and watch STEP-BY-STEP as the fan-favorite artist illustrates a special issue of TOP COW’s WITCHBLADE! Also, see George as he sketches for fans at conventions, and hear his peers and colleagues—including MARV WOLFMAN and RON MARZ—share their anecdotes and personal insights along the way!

Go behind the scenes and into Michael Golden’s studio for a LOOK INTO THE CREATIVE MIND of one of comics’ greats. Witness a modern master in action as this 90-minute DVD provides an exclusive look at the ARTIST AT WORK, as he DISCUSSES THE PROCESSES he undertakes to create a new comics series.

(120-minute Standard Format DVD) $29.95 (Bundled with MODERN MASTERS: GEORGE PÉREZ book) $37.95 ISBN: 9781893905511 • UPC: 182658000011 Diamond Order Code: JUN053276

(90-minute Standard Format DVD) $29.95 (Bundled with MODERN MASTERS: MICHAEL GOLDEN book) $37.95 ISBN: 9781893905771 • UPC: 182658000028 Diamond Order Code: FEB088012

Bundle the matching BOOK & DVD for just $37.95!

Modern Masters: ALAN DAVIS

Modern Masters: GEORGE PÉREZ

Modern Masters: BRUCE TIMM

Modern Masters: KEVIN NOWLAN

Modern Masters: GARCÍA-LÓPEZ

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905191 Diamond Order Code: JAN073903

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by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905443 Diamond Order Code: APR053191

Modern Masters: ARTHUR ADAMS

Modern Masters: JOHN BYRNE

Modern Masters: WALTER SIMONSON

Modern Masters: MIKE WIERINGO

Modern Masters: KEVIN MAGUIRE

by George Khoury & Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $4.95

by Jon B. Cooke & Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905566 Diamond Order Code: FEB063354

by Roger Ash & Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $4.95

by Todd DeZago & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905658 Diamond Order Code: AUG063626

by George Khoury & Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905665 Diamond Order Code: OCT063722

Due to circumstances beyond our control, we’ve been unable to complete our planned volume on Darwyn Cooke as originally scheduled. Please visit www.twomorrows.com for updates as they become available.

Modern Masters: CHARLES VESS

Modern Masters: MICHAEL GOLDEN

Modern Masters: JERRY ORDWAY

Modern Masters: FRANK CHO

Modern Masters: MARK SCHULTZ

by Christopher Irving & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905696 Diamond Order Code: DEC063948

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905740 Diamond Order Code: APR074023

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by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 ISBN: 9781893905849 Diamond Order Code: JUL091086

by Fred Perry & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905856 Diamond Order Code: OCT073846

Modern Masters: MIKE ALLRED

Modern Masters: LEE WEEKS

Modern Masters: JOHN ROMITA JR.

Modern Masters: MIKE PLOOG

Modern Masters: KYLE BAKER

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905863 Diamond Order Code: JAN083937

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by George Khoury & Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905955 Diamond Order Code: MAY084166

by Roger Ash & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781605490076 Diamond Order Code: SEP084304

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781605490083 Diamond Order Code: SEP084305

NEW!

NEW!

Modern Masters: CHRIS SPROUSE

Modern Masters: MARK BUCKINGHAM

Modern Masters: GUY DAVIS

Modern Masters: JEFF SMITH

Modern Masters: FRAZER IRVING

by Todd DeZago & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 97801605490137 Diamond Order Code: NOV084298

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 ISBN: 9781605490144 Diamond Order Code: NOV090929

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 ISBN: 9781605490236 Diamond Order Code: AUG091083

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 ISBN: 9781605490243 Diamond Order Code: DEC101098

by Nathan Wilson & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 ISBN: 9781605490397

More MODERN MASTERS are coming soon, including RON GARNEY! Check our website for release dates and updates!

OTHER BOOKS FROM TWOMORROWS PUBLISHING

STAN LEE UNIVERSE The ultimate repository of interviews with and mementos about Marvel Comics’ fearless leader!

(176-page trade paperback) $26.95 (192-page hardcover with COLOR) $39.95

CARMINE INFANTINO

SAL BUSCEMA

MATT BAKER

PENCILER, PUBLISHER, PROVOCATEUR

COMICS’ FAST & FURIOUS ARTIST

THE ART OF GLAMOUR

Shines a light on the life and career of the artistic and publishing visionary of DC Comics!

Explores the life and career of one of Marvel Comics’ most recognizable and dependable artists!

Biography of the talented master of 1940s “Good Girl” art, complete with color story reprints!

(224-page trade paperback) $26.95

(176-page trade paperback with COLOR) $26.95

(192-page hardcover with COLOR) $39.95

QUALITY COMPANION

BATCAVE COMPANION

FLASH COMPANION

The first dedicated book about the Golden Age publisher that spawned the modern-day “Freedom Fighters”, Plastic Man, and the Blackhawks!

Unlocks the secrets of Batman’s Silver and Bronze Ages, following the Dark Knight’s progression from 1960s camp to 1970s creature of the night!

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(256-page trade paperback with COLOR) $31.95

(240-page trade paperback) $26.95

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(280-page trade paperback) $34.95

MARVEL COMICS

AGE OF TV HEROES

EXTRAORDINARY WORKS OF ALAN MOORE: INDISPENSABLE EDITION

HOW TO CREATE COMICS

Covers how Stan Lee went from writer to publisher, Jack Kirby left (and returned), Roy Thomas rose as editor, and a new wave of writers and artists came in!

Examining the history of the live-action television adventures of everyone’s favorite comic book heroes, featuring the in-depth stories of the shows’ actors and behind-the-scenes players!

Definitive biography of the Watchmen writer, in a new, expanded edition!

(224-page trade paperback) $27.95

(192-page full-color hardcover) $39.95

Shows step-by-step how to develop a new comic, from script and art, to printing and distribution!

(240-page trade paperback) $29.95

(108-page trade paperback) $15.95

IN THE 1970s

IMAGE COMICS

THE ROAD TO INDEPENDENCE An unprecedented look at the company that sold comics in the millions, and their celebrity artists!

FROM SCRIPT TO PRINT

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TwoMorrows. Celebrating The Art & History Of Comics.

TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 E-mail: twomorrow@aol.com • Visit us on the Web at www.twomorrows.com

ARTHUR ADAMS Arthur Adams burst onto the comic book scene with the widely acclaimed Longshot mini-series in 1985 and has remained a star in the field ever since. His unique style has earned him both the Russ Manning Award and the Eisner Award, as well as a legion of fans. From super-heroes such as the X-Men, Fantastic Four, and The Authority, to pop culture icons including Godzilla, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and even Gumby, Adams’ range of work only adds to his appeal. But it is his energetic cartooning combined with his painstaking attention to fine detail that truly amazes his fans and peers alike. One look and you’ll agree—Arthur Adams is a Modern Master.

MODERN MASTERS is an ongoing series of books celebrating the lives and work of the greatest comic book artists of our time.

$15.95 In The US ISBN

1-893905-54-3

Characters TM & ©2006 their respective owners