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#28 SPRING 2014 $8.95 IN THE US

FAREL DALRYMPLE

The professional “HOW-TO” magazine on comics, cartooning and animation

MAKING A PROPHET

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DRAW! (edited by MIKE MANLEY) is the professional “HOW-TO” magazine on comics, cartooning, and animation. Each issue features in-depth INTERVIEWS and DEMOS from top pros on all aspects of graphic storytelling, as well as such skills as layout, penciling, inking, lettering, coloring, Photoshop techniques, plus web guides, tips, tricks, and a handy reference source—this magazine has it all! NOTE: Some issues contain nudity for purposes of figure drawing. INTENDED FOR MATURE READERS.

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Other issues available, & an ULTIMATE BUNDLE with all issues at HALF-PRICE!

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RON GARNEY interview & demo, GRAHAM NOLAN on creating newspaper strips, TODD KLEIN and others discuss lettering, “Draping The Human Figure, Part Two” by BRET BLEVINS, ALBERTO RUIZ on Adobe Illustrator, interview with MARK McKENNA, links, and more!

STEVE RUDE on comics & drawing, ROQUE BALLESTEROS on Flash animation, JIM BORGMAN on his daily comic strip Zits, BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY on “Drawing On Life”, Adobe Illustrator tips with ALBERTO RUIZ, links, a color section and more! New RUDE cover!

KYLE BAKER on merging traditional and digital art, MIKE HAWTHORNE on his work, “Making Perspective Work For You” by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY, Photoshop techniques with ALBERTO RUIZ, THE VENTURE BROTHERS, links, and more! New BAKER cover!

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DRAW! #16

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Demo of painting methods by ALEX HORLEY, interview and demo by COLLEEN COOVER, a look behindthe-scenes on Adult Swim’s MINORITEAM, regular features on drawing by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY, links, color section and more!

In-depth interviews and demos with DOUG MAHNKE, OVI NEDELCU (Pigtale, WB Animation), STEVE PURCELL (Sam and Max), MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ COMIC ART BOOTCAMP on “Using Black to Power up Your Pages”, product reviews, and more!

Covers major schools offering comic art as part of their curriculum, in an ultimate overview of collegiate-level comic art classes! Plus, a “how-to” demo/interview with BILL REINHOLD, MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ COMIC ART BOOTCAMP series, and more!

In-depth interview with HOWARD CHAYKIN, behind the drawing board and animation desk with JAY STEPHENS, COMIC ART BOOTCAMP on HOW TO USE REFERENCE and WORKING FROM PHOTOS (by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY), and more!

Interview and tutorial with Scott Pilgrim’s BRYAN LEE O’MALLEY on how he creates the acclaimed series, learn how B.P.R.D.’s GUY DAVIS creates his series, more Comic Art Bootcamp: Learning from The Great Cartoonists by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY, reviews, and more!

Interview & demo by R.M. GUERA, Cartoon Network’s JAMES TUCKER on the hit show “Batman: The Brave and the Bold,” plus product reviews by JAMAR NICHOLAS, and Comic Book Boot Camp’s “Anatomy: Part 2” by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY!

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DRAW! #19

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DOUG BRAITHWAITE demo and interview, DANNY FINGEROTH’s new feature on writer/artists with R. SIKORYAK, BOB McLEOD critiques a newcomer’s work, JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews art supplies and tool tech, COMIC ART BOOTCAMP on penciling & more!

WALTER SIMONSON interview and demo, BOB McLEOD critiques a newcomer, DANNY FINGEROTH spotlights AL JAFFEE, JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews art supplies, MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS offer “Comic Art Bootcamp” lessons, and more!

DAN PANOSIAN talks shop with MIKE MANLEY, DEAN HASPIEL interview by DANNY FINGEROTH, MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ “Comic Art Bootcamp”, critique of a newcomer’s work by BOB McLEOD, art supply reviews by JAMAR NICHOLAS, and more!

Inker SCOTT WILLIAMS discusses his work, FRANK MILLER interview, MILLER and KLAUS JANSON show their working processes, MANLEY & BLEVINS’ “Comic Art Bootcamp”, critique of a newcomer by BOB McLEOD, art supply reviews by JAMAR NICHOLAS, and more!

PATRICK OLIFFE interview/demo, AL WILLIAMSON’s work examined by TORRES, BLEVINS, SCHULTZ, YEATES, ROSS, VEITCH, and others, MANLEY & BLEVINS’ “Comic Art Bootcamp”, critique of a newcomer by BOB McLEOD, supply reviews by JAMAR NICHOLAS, and more!

GLEN ORBIK demos painting noir covers, ROBERT VALLEY on animating “The Beatles: Rock Band” and Tron: Uprising, Comic Art Bootcamp on “Dramatic Lighting” with MANLEY & BLEVINS, critique by BOB McLEOD, supply reviews by JAMAR NICHOLAS, and more!

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DRAW! #25

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LEE WEEKS (Daredevil, Incredible Hulk) gives insight into the artform, YILDIRAY ÇINAR (Noble Causes, Fury of the Firestorms) interview and demo, inker JOE RUBINSTEIN shows how he works, “Comic Art Bootcamp” with MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS, “Rough Critique” of a newcomer by BOB McLEOD, “Crusty Critic” JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews art supplies and software!

JOE JUSKO shows how he creates his amazing fantasy art, JAMAR NICHOLAS interviews artist JIMM RUGG (Street Angel, Afrodisiac, The P.L.A.I.N. Janes and Janes in Love, One Model Nation, and The Guild), new regular contributor JERRY ORDWAY on his behind-the-scenes working process, Comic Art Bootcamp with MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS, reviews of artist materials, and more!

Top comics cover artist DAVE JOHNSON demos his creative process, STEPHEN SILVER shows how he designs characters for top animated series, plus new columnist JERRY ORDWAY presents “The Right Way, the Wrong Way, and the ORDWAY!”, “Crusty Critic” JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews art supplies, and hit “Comic Art Bootcamp” with Draw editor MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS!

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THE PROFESSIONAL “HOW-TO” MAGAZINE ON COMICS & CARTOONING WWW.DRAW-MAGAZINE.BLOGSPOT.COM SPRING 2014, VOL. 1, #28 Editor-in-Chief • Michael Manley Managing Editor and Designer • Eric Nolen-Weathington Publisher • John Morrow Logo Design • John Costanza Front Cover • Farel Dalrymple DRAW! Spring 2014, Vol. 1, No. 28 was produced by Action Planet, Inc. and published by TwoMorrows Publishing. Michael Manley, Editor. John Morrow, Publisher. Editorial address: DRAW! Magazine, c/o Michael Manley, 430 Spruce Ave., Upper Darby, PA 19082. Subscription Address: TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Dr., Raleigh, NC 27614. DRAW! and its logo are trademarks of Action Planet, Inc. All contributions herein are copyright 2014 by their respective contributors. Views expressed here by contributors and interviewees are not necessarily those of Action Planet, Inc., TwoMorrows Publishing, or its editors. Action Planet, Inc. and TwoMorrows Publishing accept no responsibility for unsolicited submissions. All artwork herein is copyright the year of production, its creator (if work-for-hire, the entity which contracted said artwork); the characters featured in said artwork are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners; and said artwork or other trademarked material is printed in these pages with the consent of the copyright holder and/or for journalistic, educational, or historical purposes with no infringement intended or implied. This entire issue is ©2014 Action Planet, Inc. and TwoMorrows Publishing and may not be reprinted or retransmitted without written permission of the copyright holders. ISSN 1932-6882. Printed in China. FIRST PRINTING.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

FAREL DALRYMPLE

Eric Nolen-Weathington interviews the writer/artist about world-building and surviving in the real world.

RIGHT WAY, WRONG WAY—ORDWAY!

Dave Bullock

comic art bootcamp

Shazam! step by step, from plot to finished art.

Mike Manley interviews the director/storyboard artist/comic book artist—what doesn’t he do?

This month’s installment: In with the In Crowd: Drawing Multiple Figures

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DRAW! SPRING 2014

-ING AHEAD

y the time you read this, I will have passed another big milestone in my personal journey as an artist. I will have graduated with my Master’s Degree in Painting from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. This event draws to a close one rather long, enjoyable, and specific portion of my journey as an artist—that of the student. I entered the Academy at the age of 45 after having an already successful career as a professional comics artist and illustrator, and also working in animation and starting DRAW! magazine. When I started teaching art classes in 2000 in Delaware, I actually became rather jealous of my students and wanted to become one myself again. I found my first time in college right after high school rather disappointing and frustrating, as this was in the hippie-dippie, modernist ’80s where people were much more interested in drawing what they “felt” and being free from all the constraints they felt were placed upon them by the classical tradition of art education. Well, brother, let me tell you, that classical tradition was exactly what I wanted, but I was unable to find it in a school until I moved to Philadelphia and found out about the Academy. Despite the fact I did not have a good teacher or a college art education, I did not let that stop me from achieving my goals of working in comics and animation. As I tell my students at the beginning of every semester, spending a lot of money going to college will guarantee only one thing: owing a lot of money for your college education. It will not guarantee that you get a job in the industry and achieve your goals and dreams as an artist. Only diligent, hard, and consistent effort will achieve that, and

most importantly—not giving up! I cannot stress this enough. It’s going to be an all-out assault trying to get your dream career, and the person who has the most effect on you achieving your dream is you! You only have to ask yourself one question: Are you willing to do whatever it takes to achieve your goal? In going back to school as an established artist, I had to lay aside my past successes in order to open myself up to the process of learning from my teachers and not let my ego trip me up. My goal was to become a better painter. If I had gone into the endeavor of being a student with the idea that I knew better than any teacher, then I’d have set myself up for not only conflict, but the possibility that I might miss some Golden Nugget I had overlooked on my self-taught journey—perhaps a new perspective that might launch me toward something grand as an artist. But even though I am leaving the world of academic learning, I will never stop being a student; no real artist ever does. Big thanks to this issue's feature artists, Farel Dalrymple and my buddy Dave Bullock—we couldn’t have done it without you! And once again, hats off to my publisher John Morrow, my main man and right hand Eric Nolen-Weathington, and my fellow DRAW! contributors: Jamar Nicholas, Jerry Ordway, and my best buddy Bret Blevins, who issue after issue still struggles to get my likeness in these little caricatures. Now go draw something! Best,

NEXT ISSUE IN SEPTEMBER! In DRAW! #29 (80 pages, now in its new full-color format, $8.95 print/$3.95 digital), we "cover" illustrator extraordinaire Dave Dorman! Best known for his Star Wars related work, Dorman is a top painter of science fiction, fantasy, and horror novel covers, and an in-demand comic book cover artist. DRAW explores his career, and the techniques he mastered to become a success. ALSO: LeSean Thomas is a quickly rising star in the field of animation and comics. He garnered acclaim as the supervising character designer and co-director of The Boondocks, and his work as a producer and director has helped make Black Dynamite: The Animated Series an instant cult classic. Now he tells us what it takes to make it big in today’s animation industry. PLUS: "The Right Way, the Wrong Way, and the ORDWAY!" with new columnist Jerry Ordway, and "Comic Art Bootcamp" by Draw editor Mike Manley and Bret Blevins! SUBSCRIPTIONS: Four issues US: $34 Standard, $41 First Class, $11.80 Digital Only Outside the US: Canada: $43, Elsewhere: $52 Surface, $141 Airmail SUBSCRIBE NOW At: www.twomorrows.com

DRAW! SPRING 2014

Farel Dalrymple Pop Gun Warrior

Pop Gun Warrior

Interview Conducted and Transcribed by Eric Nolen-Weathington

DRAW! SPRING 2014

A drawing from Farel’s sketchbooks. Artwork © Farel Dalrymple.

DRAW!: You’ve been pretty busy. FAREL DALRYMPLE: Oh yeah. [laughs] DRAW!: You finished up The Wrenchies just a few months ago, and Delusional came out recently. Let’s talk about Delusional first. What went into your editing process? How did you decide what to include and what to leave out, and how did it come about in the first place? FD: The book came about because Chris Pitzer from AdHouse contacted me. I had done some stuff for some of his books, like Project: Superior, and he just asked me if I was interested in doing a book with him. I had been thinking about doing a collection of sketchbook stuff and/or a comic book collection of all the anthology work I’ve done over the years, so I told him, “Well, I want to do this, and I want to do this.” He was like, “Why don’t we just do them together?” so I gave him pretty much everything I had. [laughter] I think it was around 500 pages, and I laid each page out sort of how I wanted it. He sent me back some PDFs of the design he did on it. A lot of things he blew up or repositioned; he added tones to certain pages. Since I was trying to finish up Wrenchies, I asked him to do all that stuff. [laughs] It was a lot of work for him. We went back and forth a couple of times. The book comes out at a little over 200 pages,

DRAW! SPRING 2014

so half the stuff I gave him, he didn’t use. I think most of that was sketchbook stuff. I think most of the comic stories I gave him, he used. A lot of the sketchbook material ended up on the cutting room floor. DRAW!: So he took over most of that process, and you were mostly just approving his designs as things went along. FD: Yeah. I gave him all the pages formatted, but he did all the design. He’s good at that sort of thing. [laughter] Generally I like doing my own design on things like that—or at least making it look more like me—but it was kind of a mishmash of art, and I really like the work that he did. He always produces really good books. He did James Jean’s art books, Paul Pope’s, Sterling Hundley’s—I really like the way that book looks. I figured he knows what he’s doing, [laughter] and I had other things to worry about. That’s what he does for a living, [laughs] so I trusted him and I was really happy with the results. It’s kind of neat just giving someone some artwork and seeing what they come up with. I mean, we went back and forth a lot on things, so he didn’t surprise me with anything. DRAW!: Was there anything you wanted to get in the book that didn’t make the cut?

FD: There were a couple of things. None of it was too precious to me. There were a couple of things I insisted on, and there was one illustration that I wanted in there, and he was like, “Ennh, I don’t like that,” [laughter] and I just said, “Whatever.” It wasn’t a big deal. DRAW!: Let’s go back to your beginnings. You went to SVA? FD: Yeah. I graduated in ’99. I went from ’96 to ’99. DRAW!: But you didn’t go there right out of high school, right? FD: No, I actually dropped out of high school and got a GED a couple of years later. I worked for a few years at a publishing warehouse. I think I was 24 when I transferred to SVA. I transferred as a sophomore because I had done some junior college—a little bit in California and three years in Oklahoma at the Tulsa Community College.

FD: Yeah, I was always drawing and making my own comics that I would never show anyone. I might show a friend, “Oh, here’s this comic I want to do,” and I’d have eight pages of pencils and not work on it any more. But at the junior college I was taking mostly art classes, so I was drawing and painting and practicing. DRAW!: When you started at SVA, were you thinking of going into comics from the beginning, or were you thinking more about illustration?

DRAW!: So how did you hear about SVA and decide to transfer there? FD: A recruiter for SVA came to the community college. I was taking art classes, and I was considering going to a university or art school. I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to further my education, I just knew I didn’t want to work in the warehouse any more. [laughter] “I should get better at art, because that’s what I want to do.” I was thinking about going to the Kansas City Art Institute, and I applied there. Then this recruiter came by. I’m blanking on his name, but he was a really nice guy. He showed a bunch of slides from the senior portfolios, and I was kind of intimidated by it. I was like, “That’s good. I should go somewhere that’s intimidating, because that means I’ll get better rather than be comfortable.” DRAW!: You need a challenge to give you that extra motivation? FD: Yeah. It’s weird thinking back on it now. I feel like a lot of the work was the super-glossy, rendered stuff I kind of hate now, [laughs] but at the time I was, “Wow! That looks really professional. I should go to that school because it will kick my ass.” I like making things hard for myself sometimes for the improvement factor that comes from conflict. That was my idea, I guess, when I decided to go there. And I visited New York and fell in love with the city. I’d never lived anywhere like that before. I guess there isn’t anywhere else really like that. But it was neat after being in Tulsa. I didn’t really know a lot of artists in Tulsa, so it was exciting being around other people making interesting art and music. I think too that being a little older, it didn’t seem as scary. Like, if I was right out of high school, there’s no way I would have gone there because it would have seemed like a crazy, scary place. It was still a little scary. [laughs] DRAW!: Do you think being a little older also helped with your confidence in terms of your art, since you’d taken art classes before transferring there?

Artwork © Farel Dalrymple.

DRAW! SPRING 2014

with him. I’ll put him on the superhero team.” [laughter] There’s a guy in the book who’s this big, grey dude who wears jeans. He’s a scientist, so everyone calls him The Scientist, even though he has a name. That character came from a comic I was supposed to draw a long time ago. The guys who were doing the comic said, “We’re not into your design, so we’re going to go with another artist.” I liked the design though, so I used it.

Two more of the Wrenchies, Bance (left) and Tad (right). The Wrenchies © Farel Dalrymple

DRAW!: For something like Wrenchies, because it has a pretty big cast, how many of the characters came out of that sketching process, and how many came when you sat down to write the book? FD: Most of the characters in the book were used for something else originally, or I had thought about using them for something else originally. Like, the Hollis character was a character I used for the anthology stories I did for Chris Pitzer. The Wrenchies itself is inspired from a short story I did for the last Meathaus collection, S.O.S., and I’ve included that story as an afterword at the end. Most of the adult Wrenchies—because there are two groups of Wrenchies. It sounds so ridiculous. [laughter] The designs for the adult superhero Wrenchies came from a couple of old failed comic proposals back when I was still living in New York. Some of them are from a story I was trying to develop with Ann Nocenti, the writer. That project never manifested, but I used some of the character designs to inspire some of the guys in The Wrenchies. I guess it’s a mish-mash. I did some character designs in my sketchbook specifically for The Wrenchies, but there are a few characters from random other places. “I like this guy, even though I don’t know what to do

DRAW! SPRING 2014

DRAW!: Do the characters stick with you, or do you have to look back through your sketchbooks when you’re trying to flesh out the cast of a story? FD: It’s kind of hard to remember with that one in particular, because so much has changed since I originally designed him. But I feel like I had those drawings and some folders of different things I want to use one day, and I picked all that stuff out specifically for The Wrenchies. “Yeah, these characters will work well with the story.” I had some kind of attachment to the scientist character, and when I looked at him, I said, “I’ll use him as this guy.” I wanted a really smart person who invents gadgets, and something about the way he looked seemed antithetical to that type of character—he’s a big strong dude, but he never uses his size or strength at all in the story. He just happens to have this big robot body. I love stuff like that. Not to pat myself on the back too hard. [laughter] Maybe nobody else will like that. DRAW!: Going back to Omega the Unknown, the book got quite a bit of critical acclaim. Did you have more people coming up to your table at shows, or anything like that after the book came out? FD: I don’t think so. It’s kind of hard to tell. It didn’t seem like there was any big response that came out of it. Even at the time I was working on it, I didn’t get emails from anyone about it. [laughs] I don’t know how well it sold for Marvel— probably not too well. DRAW!: It must have done reasonably well, because they did a hardcover collection. FD: I don’t know what the deal was with that, because the production on that book is amazing. Paul Hornschemeier was responsible for that. We wanted to print it on matte paper, but that was the one thing Marvel insisted on—“No, we have to

have it on glossy paper.” But other than that, they let him do pretty much what he wanted, and it might have even gone over budget. But they haven’t done a paperback collection. You said it was critically acclaimed, but at the time it was coming out, I didn’t really hear much about it at all from anybody, including Marvel. [laughter] Considering the writer is a New York Times bestselling author—I’m not trying to slag Marvel, because I appreciate them, but I felt like they dropped the ball on promoting it. Maybe that’s just sour grapes on my part. [laughter] After the collection came out—maybe even a couple of years after—I started to get a lot of positive response to it, which was really weird. I mean, it was cool, I like the job I did on it, and I’m glad I got to work with Jonathan, but it was a couple of years later that I heard, “Hey, I meant to tell you, I really liked Omega the Unknown.” “Okay, cool, thanks. A couple of years after the fact, but thanks.” [laughter] At the time I was doing it, people were telling me, “This is going to change your life.” Maybe it did. Maybe that’s why First Second picked up The Wrenchies. “Oh, this guy’s doing work for Marvel. Let’s give him a book.” I don’t know, but no one said that. It wasn’t ever spelled out for me like, “Now that you’re doing Omega, your life is changing.” [laughs] It was cool getting to do it. I was and still am a fan of Jonathan, so it was awesome getting to work with him. And it was neat to fulfill a childhood fantasy of doing a series, even a limited series, for Marvel. I feel like people really didn’t know what to make of that book, because it had an indie vibe to it, but it was still Marvel.

DRAW!: It came out after Fantastic Four: Unstable Molecules, right? So Marvel had already done something with a similar tone. FD: Guy Davis drew that, right? DRAW!: He penciled and inked from James Sturm’s layouts. FD: Craig Thompson did the covers, and he was supposed to be the artist on that. DRAW!: Yeah, he bowed out to work on Blankets. FD: That was a cool series. That was even more subdued than Omega. We actually had fight scenes and action. [laughter] DRAW!: We’ve brought up Brandon Graham a couple of times already, and Prophet has a pretty strong following. FD: Yeah, I feel like that is the most mainstream thing I’ve done in a way. I don’t know if it’s just the strength of Brandon Graham’s rep in comics, but I’ve gotten more feedback from those two issues of Prophet I’ve done than almost anything else I’ve done in comics—even my own work. It’s been good exposure. And they were fun to do too. I like working with Brandon, and I love science fiction. It’s pretty much Conan in space, and I like drawing space barbarians. [laughter] DRAW!: I’ve mentioned this to you before, but the book seems like it belongs to you guys—you and Brandon and Simon Roy and Giannis Milanogiannis—more so than it does Rob Liefeld. It doesn’t feel like you’re doing a work-for-hire job.

A finished panel from The Wrenchies. The Wrenchies © Farel Dalrymple

DRAW! SPRING 2014

(this page and next) Farel’s thumbnails for Prophet #4. Prophet © Rob Liefeld.

But I still kind of stick to thumbnailing five pages at a time. I don’t thumbnail a whole book or a whole story. Otherwise it gets too overwhelming for me. I generally have four to eight pages I’m working on at once, where I’ll pencil them all, then ink them all, and then color them. If that’s a process, I guess that’s the way I do it. [laughter] DRAW!: Do you say, “I want to work on thumbnails for an hour, and I’ll pencil the rest of the day”? FD: Every day I’ll tell myself, “I’m going to spend two hours thumbnailing. And I’m going to spend two hours on this, and two hours on this, and then I’ll have dinner at this time.” But usually by the end of the day I’m like, “Oh crap! I was supposed to finish that page! Okay, I have to forget everything else and get this page done.” [laughter] I just finished a page for Prophet—the penultimate issue, issue #44. I did the one page, the last page, and I’m doing a few pages for the very last issue as well. I had it penciled, and Brandon just emailed me a couple of days ago, “Hey, when do you think you can get me that page?” He’s super-chill about it. [laughter] I think he needed it this week to have it colored in time for the printer. I spent all day inking it, and scanning it, and cleaning it up, and then my day was over. “Oh, well, at least I got that done.” [laughter]

DRAW! SPRING 2014

DRAW!: Do you have a set number of hours in the day in which you work, or is it random? FD: It’s random. I want to do that. I write schedules down constantly. “Every day I’m going to wake up at this time.” And I’m pretty good at waking up at a decent hour. I usually wake up around 8:00 a.m., but I don’t put pressure on myself. I’m not Jeff Smith by any stretch of the imagination. Even if I’m supposed to be working on something, I might say, “I feel like working on this today.” But I am always working. I do a little bit of messing around, but I’m not completely unproductive, it’s just not always the thing I feel like I’m supposed to be working on. I kind of do that on purpose. Otherwise, like I said, I feel like I would never get anything finished, and my work would start to feel too much like work. It’s like, “Okay, I’m going to procrastinate, but at least I’m going to be making something else. It might not be the thing I ought to be working on right this minute, but at least I’m making something.” DRAW!: What’s your work space like? FD: It’s not great right now. [laughs] We’ve been in this house for over a year now, and we keep saying we need to move. We have a big yard, so I can look out the window and see grass and trees and birds—that’s the best thing about it.

I have a long convention-style table I work on. I do most of the inking and painting on that desk. Penciling, if I’m not out doing it at a coffee shop, I’ll do it in the little loveseat I sit in. I have my computer and scanner set up on another desk, and there’s a bookshelf that separates them which holds my inspiration and reference books. I don’t have a normal art desk, which I should get. I feel like I bang my head against the wall a lot. A nice ergonomic chair would probably be way better for my back. Instead, every day I complain, “Oh, my back hurts! I should get a better chair,” but I never do it. [laughter] DRAW!: You said you typically pencil in coffee shops. I guess background noise doesn’t bother you. Do you have music or a TV on when you work at home? FD: If I’m in a coffee shop without headphones, I’m miserable. I’m kind of misanthropic, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it. [laughter] I go to the coffee shop, but I definitely try to put out the vibe of, “Don’t talk to me! I’m not here to entertain you. I’m here to get work done.” But sure enough, almost every time, someone will come up and say, “Oh, you’re doing artwork, huh? That’s neat.” [laughter] So I haven’t really been going to coffee shops too much lately. But, yeah, I have to be listening to something just to drown out all the conversations I don’t want to hear. When I’m trying

to think, I don’t like to listen to anything that has lyrics. Sometimes I can listen to metal, because you don’t have to focus on the lyrics. It can be sort of droning in the background. I listen to a lot of books on tape—well, audio books. I guess I don’t really listen to them on tape anymore. [laughter] But that’s when I’m inking and coloring and don’t have to concentrate. Writing, thumbnailing, penciling, it’s got to be classical music or metal or soundtracks that won’t distract me. DRAW!: What are your go-to tools? FD: For just drawing in my sketchbook, I usually use the Faber-Castell Pitt pens. Lately I’ve been using something similar, but it has replaceable nibs, the Copic Multiliners. For my more finished stuff, when I pencil, I typically use a brush. It’s a Raphael 8404 #4. It’s like the Raphael version of the Winsor & Newton Series 7 that most of the pros use. I started buying it because when I was in Walter Simonson’s class, he had just started using it. He had mostly used a dip pen up to that point, but he recommended it to me. I had gotten one of the Winsor & Newtons, and was like, “I am not good at this. I don’t know if it’s the brush or me, but I kind of suck at this point.” So Walt recommended one of those, and I think Tom Palmer was also using them. He was teaching at SVA at the time too. I just fell in love with that brush. That

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The Right Way, The Wrong Way, and The

OrdWay ! The Power of writing and drawing shazam! by Jerry Ordway

n this installment, I want to show the steps I followed in bringing an issue of the Power of Shazam! from start to finish. A little back story will be helpful for any readers not familiar with my past work as a writerartist. One of my most enjoyable projects for comics was re-introducing the original Captain Marvel to DC comics readers. I created a fully painted 96-page origin story, The Power of Shazam!, which was published both in hardcover and softcover. A year later, I helped launch a new monthly series, as writer and cover painter, with artists Peter Krause and Mike Manley. With issue #42, I took over as penciler, in addition to my writing and cover painting chores. With any comic, you start with a script. At the time, the most popular method was to write a detailed outline, or plot, which gave the artist the ability to lay out each page to his own liking. The writer would then customize his or her dialogue (the word balloons) to the artwork provided by the penciler. In the situation on Shazam, being the artist as well as writer, I could get away with writing a barebones outline. As you can see from the sample pages of plot, I described enough for the editor, Mike Carlin, to know what was going to happen in the issue. We had previously discussed the direction for the whole year’s worth of stories, so none of this happened in a vacuum. For this particular issue, the plot was written a few months before I was ready to draw it.

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The Plot Thickens! (previous page and this page) The plot pages Jerry faxed—remember faxes?—to Power of Shazam! Editor Mike Carlin for approval. Power of Shazam! © DC Comics

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The time gap from my writing the outline until the start of drawing was helpful because it gave me the time to chew over the story beats and allowed me to second-guess what I’d written earlier. In drawing the layouts, I formulated the dialogue while I sketched. On the first two pages, I drew them at around 6" x 8" size, each on the clean side of a sheet of reused copy paper. I used a hard lead in my mechanical pencil, and scribbled in the shapes and forms loosely, creating a mess of lines in graphite. Once the motion of the scene looks right to me, I will “ink” the scribbles, picking out the shapes with a Sharpie permanent marker, or a fine-tipped Pentel marker for smaller details. Working with the markers allows me to be quite messy with my pencil, and refine the drawing in ink. Then I erase the graphite, leaving a relatively clean image to photocopy. Marker also insures that the lines you draw will be dark enough to show through when you put the photocopy under the sheet of two-ply Strathmore paper on the lightbox.

PRELIMINARY Examination Pages 3 to 22 were drawn smaller, with two prelim pages per sheet of paper. My only reason for doing so was to force myself to complete the layouts faster. I don’t know why it works for me, but I could do two pages on one sheet in the same time I was drawing one larger prelim on a whole sheet. The larger layout size had me drawing tighter prelims, which made the enlarging and tracing a bit more monotonous. For this monthly comic to be completed, I had to lay out the whole book in under a week, which left me about two weeks to pencil the pages onto the actual comic paper. Next I had to type up all the dialogue and captions, and mark up where the balloons fit, on accompanying copies of the pages. These were sent to the editor, who then sent them on to the letterer, John Costanza. Oh, and somewhere within that month I also had to reserve time in which to paint the cover and write another issue’s plot! The deadline was tight.

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(previous page) Prelims for pages 1 and 2 of Power of Shazam! #42, done at roughly 6" x 8". (above and left) Prelims for pages 3 and 4 and pages 5 and 6. From here on, there are two pages of prelims on each 8½" x 11" sheet of copy paper.

As you can see, the prelims are still rough drawings, with plenty of art spilling past the panel borders. That’s okay, as I can size it up or down on the photocopier, and move the image around while tracing. This is the most freeing aspect of doing prelims on a separate sheet. I have always tended, when drawing layouts directly on the final art board, to run out of space, drawing too big. Early in my career, an editor referred to that as a “crowded page.”

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Savage Brush the

Dave Bullock Interview conducted by Mike Manley and transcribed by Jon Knutson DRAW!: What are you up to these days? I think the last time we talked was when we worked on New Frontier, and then you were working on He-Man—the new-new He-Man. Dave Bullock: Well, we worked together in 2008 on JLA: New Frontier but last saw each other around 2000 when I was helping out on the He-Man series. He’s on his way back again I think.

Hasbro. They’ve come out with something new... I don’t know if they’ve announced it yet. I know there’s a new series, but I don’t know if they’ve mentioned the name of it publicly yet. But I’ve wrapped up with Hasbro, and now I’m doing some work for Valiant, and I’m helping out on a couple of little side projects that are pretty cool. DRAW!: Valiant—you mean the comic book company? DB: Yeah, I’ve mostly been doing some covers with them, but I’ve just started on an eight-pager with those guys.

DRAW!: So every ten years they dust off Castle Greyskull, and a new generation of kids get to…. DB: Well, they’re selling toys like crazy, I know. I’ve got a few of the new toys, so maybe it’ll be back with a new cartoon. We’ll have to wait and see, I guess.

DRAW!: Let’s go back to the beginning. We actually worked on a lot of the original Batman toons back at Warner Brothers, and the one I remember specifically, was it “Heart of Ice”? DB: You were probably there before me. I was there doing some Superman shows.

DRAW!: And you worked on the adaptation of The New Frontier. DB: That’s right. I directed the toon adaptation of Darwyn [Cooke]’s great comic.

DRAW!: Bret Blevins and I started on the same show, Superman, which was the Lobo two-parter. DB: Yeah, you guys were there probably three months prior to me getting on board.

DRAW!: And then you did work on Transformers, or am I misremembering that? DB: Yes, I was on for the full run of Transformers: Prime, probably about five years or so, maybe even six I was with

DRAW!: Where were you before that? DB: I was in college! [laughter]

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DRAW!: Oh, really?

DB: Yeah, I was in college… You know what? I had actually done some work on the Fox Spider-Man cartoon. So I did put some time in on production, probably about a year prior to making the move over to WB. I had grown up a huge Superman fan, and when I saw a couple of images where WB was putting together a new Superman series, I figured I’d try to get involved. It was all about Clark Kent, and his story there. So yes, I went over to WB, and came in on a crazy episode with a demon called Karkhal. DRAW!: Yeah, I remember that. DB: You and I were on Dan Riba’s unit. I remember seeing you had done some really fun stuff with the demons flying around the Daily Planet there.

DRAW!: It’s funny, because so many people I know in comics want to work in animation, and almost everybody I know in animation wants to do comics, so there’s a real crossfeed back and forth. I think I was so burnt out on comics in a way that coming into animation was like a new territory, and I was very excited to do that. It didn’t seem to matter to me that my name wasn’t going to be out front. You still got your name on the credits as being the storyboard guy. Now, when you watch a show, they shove the credits over to the side and run them really super-fast so nobody can really read the credits anymore!

DRAW!: That was the show where a demon was turning people into other demons, or something like that? DB: Right, and you had a great Lois Lane demon. DRAW!: I enjoyed working on Superman. That’s actually when it seemed like the pressure was kicking up, and things were changing in the landscape of television cartoons. DB: Right, and I didn’t know any better, because I hadn’t been in it for too long, but that’s when cable started to really open up, and WB launched their own network. But I can tell you from my point of view, the explosions got bigger, and Lois’ skirt got shorter. [laughter] DRAW!: It wasn’t too long after that that Saban got out of making the stuff, and everything really changed. DB: The Lion King movie really blew up big, and opened up a lot of the animation. There was a lot more starting to happen. I guess that was the mid-’90s, about ’96. DRAW!: Yes, because I came on in ’99. I was still working for DC, inking Power of Shazam!, which was the last monthly comic book regular series that I did, and I stayed on that while I started doing the boards. When the boards worked out, I stopped doing the regular comic books. DB: Looking back, did you miss having your name directly on the front of the material as a comic book artist? I guess there are pros and cons to both, being a storyboard artist and a comic artist.

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industry wanted to work on Spider-Man. I would sit and stamp their storyboards as a young guy, and number their shots, and things like that. That was probably the best training I could recommend to anybody getting involved in it, being an assistant to a director, and see all that come across your desk, and see how they’re cutting it together, and see what was getting a lot of revisions by Hank, and what wasn’t. DRAW!: But you must’ve had that storytelling instinct, to be able to do that. To me it’s become really apparent that there’s the illustrator brain and the storyteller brain, and there’re people that can do fantastic storyboards, who would actually kind of suck at doing an illustration. They wouldn’t be able to put the finish to it or whatever. And then you have other people who are obsessed by finish, and could do a fantastic illustration or a painting, or even a comic book, but they couldn’t parse the film language. They couldn’t get into how they mix and hook everything all up. It’s like a different sort of brain.

DB: As much time as I spent doing storyboards, I feel like I never am putting in enough time on my comic book pages. I feel like I don’t have enough patience to really be a full-blown illustrator. That’s why I think my comics work leans more towards the storytelling than the illustration side. DRAW!: In comics we have a history of people who are really into doing storytelling, and then other people who are really into doing illustration. Take Kirby versus someone like John Severin or Russ Heath—just beautiful illustration, you know what I mean? Kirby could never draw a tank with a convincingness of Russ Heath. DB: And that tank wouldn’t look the same in any two panels. [laughter] DRAW!: The only time I visited Warner Brothers when I was working on staff, Glen Murakami and Shane Glines were sitting there, arguing about Parademons having two toes or three toes. [laughter] Because Kirby never drew any of that stuff the same! Every time he drew a Parademon, it looked completely different than the last time he drew a Parademon. DB: That’s right. That’s why I was attracted to what WB was doing at the time, because I had grown up a huge comic book fan, and I liked the idea that they were more rooted in comics from their perspective of how to design a cartoon, and what kinds of stories they were going to tell. The studio’s since evolved. I know Bruce used to call that “the golden age of cartoons.”

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DRAW!: I think so too, when I look back at it, for a couple of reasons: You had a lot of really super-talented people who all loved the same kind of stuff and synched very well together. You had really good source material to work on. It was successful enough that it seemed like the studio didn’t want to come in and mess with everything. The business was actually still expanding in ’96, ’97. Pixar was still growing, and everything was growing, so there was such a huge demand to get talent into the pipeline. It seems very different now in that regard. DB: It was a wonderful place for a guy like me at the time to be situated. It was like Christmas every time a Bret Blevins board came in, and to work with guys like yourself, and Lee Weeks, and see these things was so inspiring, that all I wanted to do was keep my ass in the chair.

The rest of the “Kim hops down and kicks a couple of guards” storyboard sequence. Kim Possible © Disney Enterprises, Inc.

I was fortunate enough to be on a story team with, I guess he’s a producer now, but James Tucker was next to me, and Darwyn Cooke came in—he was on the other side of me. We would have these story meetings just on the fly, and I think it really came down to always wanting to outdo the other guy. DRAW!: You know, being on site was great. I would get Dan to send me everybody’s boards, and I still remember when I started working on Kim Possible. I have the animatic that you did, the one where the dragon was melting Wisconsin? DB: They were in a giant cheese wheel, I think. DRAW!: They were in a giant cheese wheel. I got Chris to send me the animatic for that, and I’m just so incredibly impressed by what you did on that.

DB: Thanks, man. DRAW!: That’s the one thing I give the students an actual board from. I almost worked on the show, but for some reason I didn’t, but I ended up getting a script and a bunch of model sheets. I tell them to read a passage that says, “Kim hops down and kicks a couple of guards on the way down to the switch.” You took that and made something really cool and visually interesting out of it. Sometimes you’ll read these scripts, and you don’t laugh when you read it, or you don’t get excited when you read it. It doesn’t jump off the page. You have to make it jump off the screen, and I was just really impressed by the storytelling, and the hook-ups, and everything on that. You broke the model and made it work better than the model.

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In with the In Crowd

by Mike Manley and Bret Blevins

igurative artists—especially cartoonists, animators, and illustrators—in pursuit of their work constantly face a wide variety of challenges when creating visual narratives such as illustrations, comics strips, storyboards, and comic pages which depict the human figure in various scenarios. Composing pictures with even one or two figures can tax an artist’s compositional skills in getting the pose right, looking for a good angle, or choosing something that’s dynamic and visually interesting but also clear. The more complex the image, the more the artist has to pay attention to compositional issues such as being careful to avoid tangents. When you add multiple figures—let’s say four or more figures—into a scene or a single composition, then things can become complicated very fast. The complexity of the composition and the primary issue of strong and clear staging of the figures for good storytelling in the scene then takes extra work and planning to make the composition and staging both clear as well as interesting. Artists have wrestled with multiple figure compositions for hundreds, even thousands of years. With the invention of perspective in the Renaissance in the 14th century, artists were able to create pictures with the visual depth and complexity of real life and had a greater ability to make more realistic and illusionistic space. Multiple figure compositions have been with us since the beginning of visual art by humans, for they were seen in the cave drawings by our ancestors featuring hunters and their prey they hunted, animals that were important to them and their survival. These were mankind’s first stories. When we jump 20,000 years to Michelangelo’s great Sistine Chapel, ad we find another grand example of dynamic multiple-figure compositions telling stories of God and man and stories from the Bible and history. Michelangelo had the entire ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to play with his figures, but we humble cartoonists and illus-

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trators have a less grand canvas to play with, yet we still deal with the same issues of multiple figures in space as well as Gods of Thunder and figures of great ability. Team books— comics filled with teams of battling heroes—is a standard. X-Men, Fantastic Four, and Justice League are just a few examples of comics that have a lot of panels and pages featuring multiple characters fighting and battling each other. Some artists seem to revel in this type of comic. Jack Kirby, George Pérez, John Byrne, and John Buscema handled these types of comics with multiple-figure action well. But these types of comics can be a lot of hard work and the complexity of the compositions can trip up the artist as a result. In dealing with comics or illustrated stories that have many figures, you must work a lot harder at the layout stage. The type of script—full script or plot—also makes a difference in the amount of space the dialogue will take up. If it’s a full script then right away the artist knows who is speaking and how much room the dialogue will take up. If it’s a plot to be scripted later, that means the artist must plan spaces into the composition to allow multiple characters’ dialogue to be scripted later by the writer. Whether it’s a scene in a bar, the cabin of a starship, the hero’s secret hideout, or a restaurant, in team books we often have scenes with multiple characters sitting in non-action poses, talking away to reveal a plot or story points. Interior scenes with a group of characters are a bit more difficult due to the fact that you do not have the visual motion of characters moving in dynamic poses in the compositions, and often the interiors are smaller in nature, such as a kitchen table, so they are not always in spectacular settings. Then there are the battle scenes featuring multiple characters in grand landscapes fighting it out with each other. While these scenes offer the artist many opportunities to give the reader wild moments and spectacle, they also tend to be extremely complicated when trying to make everything not only clear but dynamic.

Here are a few concepts and lessons to learn from artists who handle this type of work well:

The Map Staging from above for clarity. One of the best ways to stage a crowd scene is to raise the camera angle up so we are looking down on the scene we are drawing. This gives us a landscape view of the scene, or what I call “the map.” In this great illustration by Albert Dorne for The Saturday Evening Post we can see Dorne has employed the map to help separate the crowd of kids cheering on the soap box racers. Dorne built the illustration in three clear groupings. The kinds in the foreground, the leading racer, and the kids behind the racer who mass together in a clear shape/layer. This helps keep the grouping of figures clear as shape masses. Dorne paid a lot of attention to the way each massed grouping laid on top of another to avoid tangents and shape/layer confusion. Dorne was an expert at this type of illustration and a leader in the field for decades.

Dorne also employed the perspective grid to work everything out like a stage in this illustration. By working out his perspective correctly, it allowed him to drop out the ground and still have the figures feel planted and not floating in space.

The map and grid is employed here in this splash page from the Avengers by George Pérez. Pérez built his career and appeal to fans on scenes like this. Pérez takes care to work out and layer each character on top of the other, almost like the old Colorforms puzzles where you laid each figure carefully over an intricate “Where’s Waldo” type of background. Fans enjoy searching his richly filled, multi-character scenes.

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