Comics Above Ground by TwoMorrows Publishing

How Sequential Art Affects Mainstream Media By Durwin S. Talon

D EDICATED TO M ARK K NEECE AND B OB P ENDARVIS Teaching is a challenging job. Teaching the art of comics even more so. Mark and Bob not only teach how to create comics, they also teach how to love, enjoy and communicate through comics. It is my honor to have taught beside them. I would also like to thank all the talented individuals interviewed in this book for their vision and their stories. I would also like to thank Brian Ludwick, Dan Baldwin, Clint Koch, Scott Hampton, Mark Chiarello, Bob Shreck, Markus Creasy, John Morrow, Steven Tice, and especially Karen Hankala for their support in this process. I would finally like to thank my students for being the inspiration to make this book happen.

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Table of Contents Introduction

A D A M H U G H E S on Comics & Covers G R E G R U C K A on Comics & Novels D AV E D O R M A N on Comics & Illustration L O U I S E S I M O N S O N on Comics & Children’s Books D AV I D G U E RT I N on Comics & Video Games J E P H L O E B on Comics & Hollywood C H U C K W O I T K E V I C Z on Comics & Storyboards B E R N I E W R I G H T S O N on Comics & Concept Art J O H N VA N V L I E T on Comics & Visual Special Effects B R U C E T I M M on Comics & Animation Closing Thoughts with P H U U Z E N T E RTA I N M E N T

Adam Hughes

on Comics & Comics Book Covers

The first thing that captivates a comic book reader is the cover. A good illustration clues the reader into the narrative, style, and excitement within the pages of the book. A good cover demands the reader to pick up and buy the comic. Many comic book illustrators take care of the nuts and bolts narrative that unfolds over many pages. Few of these illustrators also illustrate the cover, and even fewer specialize in this. Adam Hughes is a renowned comic book cover artist. Fans will buy comics solely because his art graces the cover. He blends traditional comic book production techniques with tried and true illustration concepts–all on the computer. His artistic journey began growing up in New Jersey reading Marvel Comics.

ADAM HUGHES: In my formative years, I read Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four, since there wasn’t a lot of that being produced, just reprinted. I got into George Pérez. From George Pérez, I got into John Byrne. These were the comic book guys, the superhero guys that I was–sort of the guardians of my childhood. When I got a little older, I discovered a couple comic book artists who were a little different, not your usual Marvel/DC type of approach to drawing comics. In a perfect world, you’re going to get to a point where you go, “Hey, there’s more out there than just mainstream superheroes.” There comes a day when you discover your first Will Eisner and you go, “Oh my goodness! This doesn’t look like SpiderMan, but this is amazing!” There comes a point where you appreciate a wider scope of things, and at the right time in a young man’s life, I discovered other artists. Guys like Steve Rude, Jaime Hernandez, those are the ones who opened new doors for me. All along the way, I did not and still don’t have much of an art education. Or a regular one, now that I think about it. Damn, am I ignorant!

I loved Rockwell, because my mom was into Rockwell and had Rockwell books floating around, so I appreciated that, as a kid. When I got older, I started to understand why that was the sort of thing that I appreciated. Always loved the movie poster art of Drew Struzan. I think it’s one of the reasons why I’m more interested in illustration than in traditional comic books, “Oh, here’s how you draw a superhero, here’s how you do feathering with a crow quill for a superhero comic.” There’s enough of that going on by better guys than me. People are like, “Oh, you don’t do much comic book stuff.” I’m going, “Well, I don’t feel like a comic book artist.” I feel like an illustrator who works in comics. And that isn’t a deprecation upon comic book artists, it’s just that there are guys out there who can pound out 24 pages of great stuff a month, plus a cover, and they have a blast doing it. And I’m not one of them. When I work on a piece, I’m just like, this is a baby that needs to be nurtured up until birth. So I started to gain appreciation for a lot of the illustrators. I’ve learned more about them as I’ve moved along.

“My favorite work was probably Gen 13: Ordinary Heroes, as far as interior stuff goes. That was my first experience writing and drawing a comic, and I produced it under very unusual circumstances. I went and lived at Wildstorm out in La Jolla, California, for the duration of that project. It stands out, I think because it wasn’t just somebody handing me a script and I’m going, “Okay, whatever you want.” I was actually in charge. “Who was asleep at the switch here? You’ve got me writing and drawing a comic book! What were ya thinkin’?”” Gen 13 TM & ©2004 DC Comics/Wildstorm.

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Greg Rucka on Comics & Novels

Though comic books are a visual art form, they are still books. The smell of paper and ink used in comic book production serve as a bridge for older and modern comics readers’ sensibilities. Captions, dialogue and thought balloons ground characters to the sometimes fantastic worlds in which they operate. Words are at the heart of a comic book and are gaining importance as visual art forms like sequential art mature. Greg Rucka is an emotional writer. He is passionate and prolific. Though he has developed an impressive comic books resumé and has earned awards that reflect his stature in the field, Rucka was first a fiction writer, even though comics always held a special place in his heart. GREG RUCKA: I think I was influenced most by my mother. I was an early reader and I started reading mysteries very early. I started reading mysteries with a series of books by a writer named Stuart Kaminsky. My mother had given me one of these thinking it was a kid’s book, and it wasn’t. And I loved it. I think that was about fourth or fifth grade. And I started chasing all those down, I went to the library and got the rest of the books in that series and just loved them. I have an older sister who has Down’s Syndrome, and she was just fascinated with the Incredible Hulk–the TV show, with Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno. Roughly the same time, I seem to remember being out with her at some point and going into a comic book shop and picking up a Hulk magazine that used to have these “Moon Knight” backup stories–I think Doug Moench wrote pretty much all of them; I don’t remember who drew them. The one I picked up was the Incredible Hulk versus a nuclear reactor. I had gotten it ostensibly for my sister, but she really didn’t have

much interest in it because it wasn’t the TV show. And I spent a lot of time poring over that magazine and trying to copy illustrations out of it, trying to teach myself how to draw off of that, and just failing abysmally. And that’s the first real, cognizant link to comics that I can remember, actually picking up a physical comic. It wasn’t until eighth grade that I started reading comics regularly. I fell in with a group of miscreants and malcontents that were Marvel zombies, and we ended up spending a lot of time with the X-Men. That’s what really triggered that field for me, that art form. I wasn’t really aware of comics until just before high school. And then it took off, and all throughout high school I was a big fan of the medium. Now, up until that point, I was a voracious reader. And I was pretty much bored by most of the schoolwork that I did. I would sit at my desk, which was independent of the chair, and rest my head on my arm on the desk and scoot my chair back and put a book in my lap and read for as long as I could possibly get away with it, over and over and over again. And I read a lot of mysteries. I read Sherlock Holmes early. My father read stories to me when I was very young, then I started reading them myself, sort of chasing those down, too. Other writers who were writing pastiches of Holmes; Loren D. Estleman, he’d written two books that I remember reading that were pastiches, and Nicholas Meyer’s Seven Percent Solution, things like that. So it all sort of conflates.

In the introduction for Queen & Country: Operation Morningstar, Stuart Moore writes of Greg Rucka: “I remember Greg Rucka over the convention table, telling me about Afghanistan. He’d been trying to decide on a plot for the second arc of his new comic book, Queen & Country. His wife, the very talented Jen Van Meter, had suggested to him that he always did his best work when he wrote about something that made him angry. And the Taliban regime–its human rights abuses, its endorsement of international terrorism, and particularly its treatment of women–made him very, very angry.” In the following pages, Wallace and Kittering experience this firsthand. Queen & Country and all related characters TM & ©2004 Greg Rucka.

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Dave on ComicsDorman & Illustration

As much as comic books rely on the written word to tell a story, the stunning visuals within the panels make the form unique. The art often attracts many life-long readers. There are just as many visual styles as there are kinds of stories that can be told. Most comic book production techniques include a traditional pencil-to-ink process which is colored and separated on computer. However, painters also use the medium for their stories. Dave Dorman is an acclaimed painter, but it is illustration work that excites him the most. Fine art painting is about self-exploration and reinvention. Though Dorman exhibits these traits through his illustration, he’d much rather be telling stories and refining his technique. Comic books played an early and dominant role in his formative years.

DAVE DORMAN: Well, I was definitely a Marvel junkie when I was growing up. The first books I can recall creating an influence on my psyche were books like Tales of Suspense and Tales to Astonish with Iron Man and Dr. Strange and Captain America. I definitely read Fantastic Four. And I was pretty exclusively into Marvel comics for a very long time. I didn’t have any real interest in reading Batman books, or Superman, or JLA, or any of the DC books. The Marvel books are very dear to me because they’re the ones that got me into drawing. I can remember copying those comics when I was a kid–sitting down and doing tracings, stuff like that. But comics also got me into reading. And that was a real big thing because I think just to be well-educated overall, you have to be well-read. And having started reading comics and finding there was more to the written word than the boring stuff you read in school, it certainly opened up a lot for me.

I moved on from reading comics to reading adventure books like Doc Savage and Conan the Barbarian, which were fairly popular in the mid- to late-Sixties. From there I started reading more hardcore science fiction stuff and then I branched off into detective books and mysteries and a little more mainstream fiction. And that leads to where I am today, which is pretty much reading anything that might interest me, no matter the subject matter. So comics probably had a greater influence on me overall than just artwork. These days what I’m reading in comics is just oddball stuff. I read all of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy stuff when it comes out. I think he’s just a wonderful storyteller and always imaginative. I read Heavy Metal. I like the European material, so Heavy Metal is something that I keep up on whenever it comes in. I buy a lot of European graphic novels, even though I can’t read them, because the storytelling is done very well. You don’t necessarily have to read the text to enjoy the stories. So I’m constantly on the lookout for European material and Japanese material, for the artistic sake of what they’re producing.

“I’ve been working on this Wasted Lands project for about six or seven years now, and I don’t mean the Rail graphic novel I’ve been working on. I mean just developing Wasted Lands concepts and characters and stories. There are a lot of stories that I want to tell within the world of Wasted Lands.” The Wasted Lands storylines center around Mortal City–a megalopolis of industrial overgrowth and decay caused by the Iron Wars. These wars were orchestrated by the eight Rail Barons, who used the Rail to control transport and lives. Using black line drawings with wash technique, Dorman tells a full comics story in a graphic novel format greatly inspired by European comics. ©2004 Dave Dorman

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Louise on Comics &Simonson Children’s Books

Though there are differences between children’s books and comic books, there are also a surprising number of similarities. In a perfect world, both are mediums for children–old and young. Children’s picture books rely on art for visualization and words to tell the story much like comic books. With juvenile books, the narrative still must unfold and excite the reader–it just does so page to page instead of panel to panel. Louise Simonson understands stories and storytelling. She understands that a good yarn will be a good yarn no matter who reads it or at what age. For Simonson, telling a good story started with reading many good stories.

LOUISE SIMONSON: I read comics in the usual way kids read comics. I wasn’t a collector; I wasn’t a fanatic reader of comics. I read the usual things kids read back in the Fifties: cowboy comics, Little Lulu, Archie comics, Superman, all that stuff. But I read many, many more books than I ever read comics. I probably read three hundred books to every comic, partly because I got a small allowance and I could either buy an ice cream cone or a comic book. And every week my mother took us to the library, where my sisters and I could get hundreds of books for free. Books definitely influenced me more than comics did. That may make my approach and the kind of comics stories I tell a little different from the work of some of the other writers, just because I come at it from a different area of influence. When I was a kid I loved the Louisa May Alcott books. I liked the Jim Kjelgaard Irish Setter books. I loved anything Robert Heinlein wrote. I liked the magic books by Edward Eager. I think those were my favorites. Oh, and Marguerite Henry horse books. I read a huge

gamut, a large spectrum of types of books, of genres of books–historical fiction, science fiction, adventure books, plays, biographies. And anything with a horse in it. Robert Heinlein and Edward Eager were my two major influences. But in comics, I would say mainly Heinlein…just because his stories were adventure-oriented, with heroes and heroines who were intelligent and extremely resourceful with a strong moral code. Those character traits defined Heinlein’s juvenile novel protagonists and influenced the kind of characters that I myself find heroic. Later, Heinlein moved into other kinds of science fiction with less clear-cut characters who exhibited different types of heroism. But smart, resourceful, moral heroes were what I really liked when I was a kid. I think quite often what children’s book authors enjoyed reading when they were kids influences what they end up writing as adults because a lot of writers try to create for other people the kind of wonderful experiences they had as readers. And when I was a kid, I just loved, loved, loved reading. It was–and remains–one of my two or three favorite things to do.

“Of all the comics I’ve written, I probably had the most fun with Power Pack, partly because it was the first comic I wrote. The first thing you do is often the most fun because it’s different and it’s new and it’s kind of scary. Also, probably because I created it. It was a vision that was close to my heart and... was almost a homage to the stuff that I had loved when I was a kid, only done in a comic book hero context.” In the following pages, the Pack attempt to thwart their parents’ alien kidnappers. Power Pack TM & ©2004 Marvel Character, Inc.

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Chuck Wojtkiewicz on Comics & Storyboards

Storyboards are used to plan the narrative sequencing of visual productions like Websites, video games, and video and film production. Every major commercial, music video, television show, and motion picture relies on storyboards to plan for the camera, the actors and a variety of elements used in production. A good storyboard artist can establish the scene, move all of the actions, and plan for props or effects on the screen. Chuck Wojtkiewicz has had a long career in comics, but finds the challenges and rewards in storyboarding and pre-producing film and animation (Rockfish, inset) both satisfying and rewarding. His roots are in comics, even if he never knew what was on the covers of what he read.

CHUCK WOJTKIEWICZ: I was one of those kids who always drew pictures, from kindergarten on up. I constantly drew the robot from Lost in Space. I thought it was the coolest thing. I just couldn’t get enough. I’d build little clay models of it. Teachers finally asked me to stop doing it, but I just wouldn’t. My grandfather would crustily remind me, “Artists stave to death, boy!” My dad, who ran a neighborhood tavern, would barter with people for all sorts of things and one guy would come in with shopping bags full of comics that had the covers torn off. Back in the day, magazine dealers could tear off the covers of unsold comics and send them back to the distributor for a refund. Well, the guts of the comics got dumped in recycling with newspapers. This

friend of my pop’s worked at the homosote factory in Trenton, New Jersey, where I grew up. Homosote is a kind of particle board made out of newspaper. Well, he’d bring my bartender dad a couple of shopping bags of comics and my dad would slip him a beer or two, I guess. As a result, we were drowned in comics as kids. Thanks, Dad! We didn’t know what the hell the covers looked like for the most part, but we loved comics. My fate was sealed at that point. There was a candy store at the corner by my elementary school; you could go in those days with twelve cents and buy a regular comic book, a quarter would land you one of big ones–specials and annuals. Ah, that old spinning rack! The first book I remember ever seeing and buying was an old Viking Prince comic, believe it or not. He was standing boldly in the prow of his ship and there was this giant, white arctic snake rising menacingly out of the stormtossed sea before him. I thought, “Wow!” and plunked down my pennies–the first of many. The Fantastic Four really stood out in my childhood. The first book I remember being able to read was Fantastic Four Annual #1, “The Sub-Mariner Conquers the Human Race.” I’ve always loved the Four–and Jack Kirby’s phantasmagoric art style, and it’s just a wonderful thing those characters are still around–so cool. My good buddy Mike Wieringo is drawing them now!

Chuck Wojtkiewicz entered comics as a penciler. The following pages are from original pencils to Secret Files of the Legion of Superheroes, #2. “I most enjoy drawing comics about kids. Kids express themselves so dramatically, so effusively–it suits the way I like to act out in my drawings...heck, in everyday life! Here’s a selection from Secret Files of the Legion of Superheroes #2, in which our youthful charges fight to survive and escape the doomed asteroid on which they’ve been marooned. I particularly enjoyed this sequence because it had all the challenges a comic book penciler could want: a large and varied cast; a complicated panel layout; a unique setting; and lastly, action to spare. The writers deftly focused on each of the many characters in the successive panels of this, the culmination of the plot. I had to include the primary players and as many of the doughty crew as possible in each panel as they battle (no kiddin’) zombie alien apes.” Note the detailed layers of each composition– foreground, middleground, background, extreme background–a colorist’s dream...or nightmare. Legion of Superheroes TM & ©2004 DC Comics

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Bernie on ComicsWrightson & Concept Art

Concept art is the other half of preproduction necessary in creating motion pictures. Along with storyboards, concept art allows the director to develop a vision that can be shared with the rest of the crew before the first frame of film is shot. Concept art can dictate vision for special and visual effects, wardrobe and costumes, model makers and props masters. A good concept artist can create a visual tone that can be carried throughout the duration of the film. Bernie Wrightson has been working as a freelance professional artist for over 35 years. He started as a production assistant/editorial cartoonist for the Baltimore Sun newspaper and eventually found his niche in comic books. He co-created Swamp Thing in 1971 and has dabbled with most of the more well-known superheroes, including Spider-Man, Batman, and Superman. He’s expanded his career into book illustration, magazine illustration, posters, prints, and currently finds himself in Los Angeles doing conceptual work and storyboards for motion pictures.

BERNIE WRIGHTSON: I always had a pencil and paper. I always loved to draw. I think most kids do. Or most kids did, before video games. Nowadays young kids seem to be wasting their time on that, but we didn’t have any of that stuff. And there was a TV show on Saturday mornings called Jon Gnagy. And it was a drawing show. He would start every show by drawing basic shapes. He would draw a circle and a triangle and a square, and then show you how to three-dimensionalize things and turn a triangle into a cone, and turn the rectangle into a cylinder and make the circle into a ball. And by using the three basic shapes, he would show you how you could draw anything. I used to watch his show with a pad and pencil and just follow his lessons. I think a lot of kids from that era did the same thing. I know that [Michael] Kaluta grew up learning to draw from watching that show, and Jeff Jones. And later

on, a lot of us took the Famous Artists correspondence course. And we talked a lot about that. Interestingly, nobody I ever met actually finished the course. The reason is that the course was so good that we all started working professionally before the course was ever finished. Comic books and movies were probably my biggest influences. I watched all the Universal Monster movies on TV over and over and over. I think everybody has a favorite Universal monster. Everybody from my generation, anyway. Some people just fell in love with the Creature from the Black Lagoon, or Dracula, or the Wolfman. I’m just one of the people that fell in love with Frankenstein. Well, I grew up with the movies that I saw on TV. It was a black-and-white TV, so I don’t know, I guess I just tended to think more in terms of black-and-white. I read EC comics and all the other comics in the Fifties. When I was very young, I was all about drawing and reproducing and printing. I would study comics very closely, and I saw that the color was laid down in little dots, and the dots would overlap the different colors and form little patterns. And I don’t know, I guess over time I figured it out, that this was the printing process, and this was how you made a soft gray in color, was the little dots of red, blue, and yellow laid down, superimposed on top of one another with just this much white space between. So for me, comics and movies absolutely go hand-in-hand. I still go to the movies and I’m still a big fan of science fiction and monster movies. So yeah, of course, movies are an influence [on my art]. Nothing has been the same since Alien. That changed everybody’s ideas about science fiction monsters.

When asked what has been his favorite comic book work, Wrightson mentions Captain Sternn: Running Out of Time. “I got to do Running Out of Time pretty much start to finish. I wrote it, laid it out, and drew it. I had a lot of help with inking and coloring, because it was such a huge project. But that was probably the most fun, I think, that I’ve had in comics.” In the following pages, Captain Sternn makes a rather unorthodox escape from prison, much to the delight of Mr. Coffers. Capt. Sternn TM & ©2004 Bernie Wrightson

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Bruce on Comics &Timm Animation

Of all of the sequential art forms, animation is probably most similar to comics in the way both are produced. Cartooning, sequencing, visual development, style, scope, and pacing are skill sets that overlap in both fields. It’s no coincidence that many animators had aspirations to become cartoonists and that many comic book artists found their way into animation. Though he created precious few flip books growing up, Bruce Timm has made his mark as producer of ground-breaking animation. Comics inspired him early on in his life–they launched his imagination and inspired his love for art in general. Not a classically trained artist, Timm nonetheless drew from this childhood inspiration to develop his love for the animation. BRUCE TIMM: I was definitely into comics, even from an early age. I was a child of the Sixties, so I watched a lot of TV–a lot of monster movies–and read comic books. Money was always fairly tight in our household, so we rarely got comics on a regular basis. Another problem was availability. Distribution was pretty spotty back then. So it was a combination of not having a whole lot of money and that the places that sold comic books were a little bit out of my bike range. But when I was twelve or thirteen, some of the local stores started carrying comics on a regular basis and I was getting more money for allowance and lunch money, so I basically starved myself or dug through the couch on a regular basis trying to find loose change to feed my comic book fix.

My first hardcore exposure to superheroes as a genre was the Adam West Batman show. I was at the perfect age for it, five or six when it first came on, so I didn’t realize it was camp or that it was a spoof. I took it absolutely seriously and I thought it was the coolest thing on the planet. I was a hardcore Batman fan from then on. I kind of got into animation as a fluke. I wanted to be a comic book artist when I grew up; that was my life goal. I learned how to draw from copying comic books and drawing, drawing, drawing all the time. I had enough awareness of my own limitations even though I was the proverbial “best artist in my school” and everybody was telling me, “Wow, you’re going to be a millionaire because you’re the best artist ever!” But I could look at my own stuff and compare it to the actual comic books and go, “Well, I’m not quite ready for comics.” But as it happened, I was very fortunate living out here in the San Fernando Valley, where the animation industry was based. Filmation Studios was about ten miles away from my house, so one day I got tired of working retail and really wanted to draw for a living. I went in and applied over at Filmation. Didn’t get in the first year that I applied there, but I did the second year. Kind of off and on for the first couple of years, but then pretty soon I was working pretty steadily in the animation business.

When Mad Love was published in 1994, it won critical acclaim and nabbed both the Eisner and Harvey Awards. Paul Dini wrote the script and Bruce Timm created the art, which was almost a return to his roots. Being able to produce a sequential narrative himself was a personal high point in Timm’s career. When asked to name his favorite sequence in Mad Love, Timm didn’t hesitate. “I really liked the silent sequence, the flashback to Harley’s origin, leading up to where she puts on the costume for the first time. I really like that sequence a lot, because it’s all done silently, with no dialogue or sound effects. I think it’s really neat. That’s probably my favorite sequence in the story.” Batman, Joker, Harley Quinn TM & ©2004 DC Comics

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