The Grey and The Black: An Interview with Bob McLeod

The X-Men, Bob McLeod style

Our big interview subject this week is the exceptionally talented comics illustrator Bob Mcleod. Bob offers us a view into his own development as an artist, his entry into the business and subsequent career. HHe also offers us his informative insights into the changing role of artists and inkers in the comics industry.

Sam: Tell us about your early life. Where were you born, where did you grow up?

Bob: I was born in Tampa, FL in 1951, and lived there until I went to college. No one else in my family had art talent except my older sister, Linda, who basically quit doing art in college.

In retrospect, I really had a great childhood. I was the middle child with two sisters, and I was fortunate to make a best friend at age 5 or 6, and we played together all through our school years. I enjoyed neighborhood pickup softball and football games, biking and roller-skating. I had an HO slot car track on a 4’ x 8’ sheet of plywood suspended over my bed on pulleys rigged up by my dad. We had a ping-pong table, and I had a cheap pool table and played a lot of pool as a teenager. We had a large back yard with an aboveground swimming pool, and we even had a ski boat. I did a lot of water skiing and could ski backwards. I even went scuba diving quite a bit.

I was very busy doing all sorts of things other than drawing. But I always wanted to leave Florida and live in a big city.

A stunning rendition of the Batman,
sadly, a title Bob never had the
opportunity to draw.

Sam: When did you first get interested in comics and when did you decide to make a career of it?

Bob: I could draw better than my parents at age 5, and decided right then I wanted to be a cartoonist when I grew up. I drew often, copying the comic strips from the newspaper, and became known as the school artist in elementary school, decorating the classroom door for holidays. But I took my drawing talent for granted and didn’t work hard at it because it came so easily to me. Art classes weren’t even offered in my school until 12^th grade, and then my teacher said I drew better than she did and she couldn’t teach me anything. So, she told me to just sit in the corner and draw whatever I liked, which was very frustrating for me, because I was desperate for instruction. I could draw, but I knew nothing about composition, perspective, anatomy, color theory, or anything else about art.

It wasn’t until I went to college that I received any instruction of any kind in art. I was a huge Mad magazine fan, and wanted to either work for Disney or write and draw a newspaper comic strip. I wasn’t ever into comic books that much, and missed the whole Marvel comics revolution in the ‘60s. I preferred humor comics. I only decided to try to work in comic books because a friend of mine at the grocery store where I worked was a big comic book fan and pleaded with me to go to work for Marvel.

I worked at many jobs before getting into comics. I’ve been working all my life. I had a paper route when I was a kid, and I also mowed lawns for $2. At fifteen, I got a job as a bagboy for a grocery store, and worked my way up to stock boy, which I did for several years, off and on. I’ve worked as an elevator operator, construction assistant (to my dad), night watchman, drive-in theater popcorn maker, short-order cook at Lum’s restaurant, paste-up and mechanical artist at an ad agency, and even patio salesman.   

Sam: Have you had any formal art training?

Bob: I attended Auburn University for four quarters majoring in visual art, where my teachers totally denigrated cartooning. I did have good classes in anatomy and perspective there. Following that I wasted a year at the Art Institute of Ft. Lauderdale, learning absolutely nothing. I quit college and art school because I couldn’t find anyone to teach me cartooning. I decided I had to teach myself.

Sam: A lot of cartoonists and illustrators from that time complain that art schools had no respect for their aspirations. Do you think that was a product of the prevailing shift toward abstract and pop art?

I'll take this over Pop Art any day.

Bob: Yes, schools were evidently less focused on realism at that time, but there was also this general snobbishness about cartooning being the ghetto of art. I didn’t really understand where that attitude was coming from, and I had no patience for it. If they couldn’t appreciate the genius of artists like Mort Drucker and Jack Davis, and even Charles Schulz, I figured I needed to move on.

Sam: Obviously your self-training approach worked very well. How did you go about teaching yourself?

Bob: At that point, I had decided to try drawing comic books, because at age 19 I had done a newspaper comic strip proposal that got rejected, so I studied comic books as if they were textbooks, and I went back to the pioneers of the comic strip art form and studied the masters, Milton Caniff, Hal Foster, Alex Raymond and others. I thought Neal Adams and John Buscema were the best dramatic comic book artists, so I studied their work intensively. I studied and drew and inked every waking hour, pretty much, for several years, without much of a life otherwise, desperately trying to learn and improve. I felt I was way behind my peers in comics because up to then I had been much more interested in cartooning than in “realistic” comic book art. My mother always told me “anything worth doing is worth doing well”, so I wanted to learn everything, and I studied the fundamentals: anatomy, composition, perspective, lighting and visual storytelling.

I just got books and comics, and studied and analyzed them, trying to figure out what the artists were doing. I wrote and drew and lettered sample page after sample page, and each one taught me something and made me a little better, because we learn from encountering problems and making mistakes. I tried to get critiques of my samples, but no one would take the time, so I had to critique them as objectively as possible myself. It was a great help working in the production department at Marvel, seeing the original art of all the various artists come through there, and comparing them, and seeing what was brush and what was pen, and where they made mistakes, etc. I really learned a lot working in the production dept.

Sam: Were your parents supportive of your interest in the arts and comics specifically?

Bob: My parents were always 100% supportive, even when I quit college, then quit art school, and eventually traveled to NYC trying to start my art career and was repeatedly rejected by Marvel and DC Comics. My parents had total faith in me and wanted me to follow my dreams. My dad was my biggest fan, and I owe everything to my parents.

Sam: What was your first job in the comics biz?

Bob: Marvel had refused to even look at my portfolio, and Joe Orlando at DC had told me to go back to school and learn how to draw. After three months of knocking on doors, I finally met Neal Adams and showed him a sample of my drawing. He called John Verpoorten, the production manager at Marvel, who hired me on the spot for the Marvel production department doing lettering corrections, just on Neal’s recommendation.

After a couple months, I graduated to doing art corrections. I used to add zip-a-tone to other artists’ work in the black & white kung fu magazines. I finally started doing free-lance penciling and inking about six months later.

Sam: Run down some of the highlights of your career. The big breaks, the high profile jobs.

Bob: My first freelance job was penciling and inking a satire of the Yul Brenner movie WestWorld for Marvel’s Crazy magazine. They paid for me to see the movie and gave me glossy photos from it for me to use as reference. My dream had been to draw for Mad magazine, but I thought my style was too similar to Mort Drucker’s, so I never applied there. But I was thrilled to work for Crazy. I did several satires for them, including Apocalypse Now and The Empire Strikes Back, as well as the Teen Hulk humor strip. That was some of my favorite work. I also drew a couple full-color strips for Playboy called Singlewoman, which was a bit of a coup at the time, for a comic book artist. They paid several times what Marvel and DC did.

His true calling:
An example of Bob's work for Crazy magazine.

Sam: I’ve heard that Hugh Hefner was very hands-on with the cartoons in the magazine. Did you find that to be true? If so, what was it like working with Hef?

Bob: I just worked with the cartoon editor, Michelle Ury. I never met or talked to Hefner. My girlfriend at the time was writing the scripts. She met Michelle at a party and got us the tryout. I did the art and they printed it. It was supposed to be a regular feature, but I broke up with the writer and we stopped after 2 strips. I had decided that I didn’t really want to draw adult cartoons anyway. I wanted to draw things I wouldn’t be ashamed to show my children one day.

Of course my big claim to fame is co-creating the New Mutants, debuting in Marvel’s fourth graphic novel in 1982. I then penciled Star Wars for several issues, inked Conan over John Buscema, The Hulk over Dale Keown, and the highly acclaimed Death of Kraven mini-series over Mike Zeck. Then, for two years I penciled and sometimes also inked Superman in Action Comics, which was the main comic I read as a kid. I also inked Batman over Graham Nolan in Detective Comics for several issues, Wonder Woman and The New Titans over George Perez, and I penciled and inked two 3-issue miniseries, Spider-Man and the Punisher and Venom: The Enemy Within. I also penciled and inked several Spider-Man fill-ins over the years.

I believe I inked the first jobs at Marvel of George Perez, Keith Giffen, Frank Miller, and Bill Sienkiewicz.

A comparison of pencil layouts
and inks from New Mutants.
Layouts: Sal Buscema Finishes: Bob McLeod

Sam: What job gave you the greatest satisfaction and pride?

Bob: Really, my work for Crazy Magazine was my favorite from my comics career, and in some ways, my best. I’m proud of co-creating The New Mutants, but it was a very frustrating experience. I was also very honored to pencil Superman and Star Wars. But my Superhero ABC children’s book is perhaps at the top of my list because I did it all myself, whereas in comics I was always collaborating with other artists and writers.

Sam: Tell us a bit about how the creation of the New Mutants came about, and what was positive and negative about the experience.

Bob: I’ve gone through this in so many interviews already, so it’s difficult to make it fresh for your readers. Basically, I penciled X-Men 152 and the editor offered to let me continue penciling the X-Men, or help co-create this new spin-off title. I decided to co-create the New Mutants with Chris, and after meeting with him and discussing various things, I designed the characters physical appearances and started drawing the first issue, months ahead of schedule.

Coincidentally, Marvel had just started up their graphic novel line, and they were looking for projects to make into graphic novels, and they chose the New Mutants for #4. But the GNs were on a different schedule, and suddenly we were a month behind. With very little penciling experience, I then had to pencil 50 pages as quickly as I could, and either turn the inking over to someone else, or frantically try to ink it myself. I ended up inking all through my honeymoon to get it finished, and then immediately had to pencil the first issue of the comic, and the second and the third, and the pressure and pace were just too much for me at that time.

I didn’t like the inking I was getting because I couldn’t take the time to draw the pencils tightly enough for Mike Gustovich, who was under as much pressure as I was, with even less experience. I really wanted to ink it myself. I finally decided that I could control the look of the book better if I was inking it over someone’s breakdowns, so with issue four Sal Buscema stepped in and I inked three issues over him, pretty radically changing his breakdowns to fit my vision of the book.

Chris wasn’t taking the book in the direction I was interested in drawing, and I wasn’t happy just inking Sal every month when his style was so different from mine. I just hated the way the book looked and felt it wasn’t my art and I decided I wanted to do something else.

More New Mutants art

Sam: You’ve been an inker and a penciler, and even inked your own pencils. Which do you prefer?

Bob: Of course I prefer to pencil and ink my own art. Inking other artists is always fun and challenging, but ultimately unsatisfying. I now wish I hadn’t spent so much of my career on it. I should have been creating my own art instead of trying so hard to make other artists look good. But as a freelance self-employed artist raising a family, I felt I had to take work where I could get it, and inking paid well because I was fast at it.

Sam: As an inker who was your favorite penciler to work with, and as a penciler who gave you the best inks?

Bob: I loved inking John Buscema’s extremely loose breakdowns, because he gave me so little to work with, and yet so much, because nothing needed “fixing”. I could take more pride in it because so much of the resulting art was mine.

Bob inks from layouts by Big John Buscema

I always preferred breakdowns, so the Howard the Duck jobs I did over Golden, and the Spider-Man jobs over Mike Zeck are also some of my favorites. Tom Palmer has always been my favorite inker, and I loved what he did over my breakdowns on Star Wars. Mark Pennington also did a nice ink job on my finished pencils on a Team Superman job I did. Joe Rubinstein did a good job on my pencils on X-Men #152.

Bob's wash interpretation of Michael Golden's
Howard the Duck

Sam: The nature of penciling and inking (and coloring) seems to have evolved a great deal in the last few decades. Can you give us your thoughts on this?

Bob: I hate this question, because it’s depressing to me. I feel my career has been one of constant frustration. I was always out of step with the comics industry, preferring humor when the business was steam rolling into ever-darker superheroes.

When I entered comics, there was every genre of fiction among the top selling titles: westerns, sci-fi, fantasy, monsters, romance, humor, mystery, war, and superheroes. I actually preferred all of those to superheroes. The job of the penciler used to be mainly layout, due to time constraints. It was the inker’s job to add lighting and rendering where needed, and to imprint it with his personal style. Joe Sinnott, Frank Giacoia, Murphy Anderson, etc. didn’t worry about adhering to the penciler’s style all that much. They “interpreted” the pencils within the parameters of their own inking style.

The coloring was usually abysmal, in my opinion, because it paid next to nothing and was done as quickly as possible. Because we only had flat colors, the inkers developed techniques to show the gradations from dark to light, and whatever special effects were needed. The pages were hand-lettered, each letterer having a distinctive, personal style. Young artists reading comics in the ‘70s and ‘80s saw what inkers like Palmer, Rubinstein, Janson and myself were doing and naively assumed it was the penciler doing everything, with us just tracing. So they grew up and entered the business putting everything into the pencils, leaving nothing for the inker to contribute.

Computers did away with hand-lettering, and digital colorists now have a full range of color, usurping much of what the inker used to do. So today’s inkers are often left with little to do but lay down clean lines and “trace”. Of course it’s still far more complicated than that, as anyone who attempts it can tell you, but it’s a far cry from what we used to do. Many new inkers were unwilling or unable to conquer the brush and nib, so they began using rapidographs, then markers and now computer styluses to ink. There is some wonderful comic art being done today, of course, but I doubt we’ll ever see the likes of Bernie Wrightson’s or Jack Davis’s long, flowing brush lines again. Today’s pencilers are no longer concerned with the reader’s eye movement through the page, or even effective visual storytelling.

As with today’s movies, it’s all about excess: excess detail, excess drawing, excess action, excess special effects, and excess close-ups. There’s too much illustration and not enough comic in the business today.

Sam: As you can tell by some of my other blog entries, this is a very hot topic for me. I believe that one of the factors in the decay of the craft of comics storytelling is a new editorial class who come out of business schools rather than out of the creative side of comics. I believe these new editorial people have no real understanding of the craft or the medium and often hire artists who display flash over those with solid skill sets. Would you agree or disagree with this statement? Do you think there are other factors contributing to this decay in storytelling?

Layouts by Bob, inks by the versatile Tom Palmer

Bob: Yes, I blame the editors for a lot of it, although it isn’t really their fault because they haven’t been educated to do their jobs well. So it’s upper management that’s really responsible. Many current editors can’t tell mediocre art from good art. They’re apparently more interested in current stylistic fads than in competent storytelling and art. I recently had an editor tell me he shows my inking to young artists and tells them to study how I ink and master the brush and pen, as I have. And yet, he didn’t offer me any subsequent work.

The current artists are asked to pencil very completely, so nothing is left to chance for the inker. They’re not required to do good visual storytelling, because the editors don’t know what’s involved in good visual storytelling and are unable to ask for it. And no one seems to care about it, anyway. It seems to be more important to just kill off some superhero, or make some longtime superhero suddenly become gay or lesbian, or put a new person in Spider-Man’s costume, or substitute a woman for a man, or whatever.

In other words, it’s all about gimmicks and getting ever darker and more violent and supposedly “mature”. They’re constantly alienating longtime readers by changing everything about the comic those readers love, as if there were a new generation of readers to take their place. But the new generation doesn’t read comics. They play video games and watch movies to get their superhero fix.

No one seems to realize that comics don’t need to be written or drawn differently than they used to be. They don’t need to be changed just because the editors and writers are bored with them. They just need to write and draw interesting stories that normal people of both sexes and all ages can understand and enjoy, like they did for decades. There’s plenty of room for a variety of art styles, old and new. Everything doesn’t need to look like the latest fan favorite artist drew it, because there are still a lot of fans of all the other artists. Fans aren’t nearly as fickle as editors seem to think they are, and the ones I’ve talked to prefer substance over style. They just want good storytelling, in the art and the writing. 

I simply had to add this hilarious
Frazetta pastiche featuring one
of my favorite oddball villains:
The Mighty Modok!

Sam: I’ve been really enjoying your blog and Facebook posts comparing pencils with inks. Not only is it fascinating to see the relative level of detail in the pencils, breakdowns and layouts, but it’s also a useful guide to inking basics and more. What led you to begin posting these?

Bob: I’ve long felt that today’s fans don’t appreciate the enormous contribution inkers made during the 70’s and 80’s to the comic art so many people hold dear to their hearts. And of course it’s not just about my own inking. I show my work mainly because that’s what I have scans of. Sure, I want people to know my own contribution, but it’s more than that. I also show what Tom Palmer, Brett Breeding, and Klaus Janson for example, did over my breakdowns and pencils. And of course I don’t mean to disparage the efforts of the pencilers I inked. As I’ve said, their job was chiefly to provide the layout, not the style, and not even exact drawing.

Beautiful ink and wash interpretation
of some amazing Gene Colan pencils

Sam: Do you think the art of inking is being lost?

Bob: Oh, definitely. The job of the inker is often nothing like what it used to be. Joe Kubert is a wonderful inker, but his art can be a mess of slashing ink lines and pen mixed with brush in a haphazard way. No inker today could get away with inking like that. No penciler would want them touching their work, and no editor would hire them.

Everyone wants “tracers” now. By “tracing”, I mean slavishly following the pencils exactly with regard to feathering, detail and even strands of hair; not changing anything of any import, and being primarily concerned with making clean, very controlled ink lines. It still requires a lot of expertise and skill. But it’s mostly now just a service provided to make the pencils printable, which is what Neal Adams used to claim it should be. One inker can easily be substituted with another with little discernable difference.

 

Bob inks Bill Sienkiewicz

Sam: Give us your perspective on how the comics business has changed since you started and what do you think are the most positive and negative aspects of those changes.

Bob: Well, I’ve already said quite a lot about this. On the positive side, digital coloring and good quality paper and printing have made it possible to do things not possible before, and the color is at least never off-register. Comics used to be written and drawn by writers and artists who couldn’t get work in higher-paying fields, but now artists grow up wanting to draw comics and many very talented artists and writers work in comics. Comic artists can now also earn a large part of their income from selling their original art, which had just started when I entered the business, but the market price for comic art has grown tremendously since then. There are many more women involved in all areas of the business, which can only be beneficial. The explosion of graphic novels has been wonderful to see, and offers some hope for the future. If there is anything else on the positive side, it doesn’t come to mind easily. 

On the negative side, good quality paper and printing have caused cover prices to rise from 10 cents to four dollars. The digital coloring is often heavy-handed and overpowering, obscuring much of the inkers’ efforts. The relegation of all genres other than superheroes to small and indie publishers has been sad to see. Thankfully, graphic novels have reclaimed those to some extent. The major loss, in my opinion, is the change from publishing mass-market comics primarily for kids to publishing direct sales comics primarily for a small sub-culture of adults. Superman used to be fun for anyone to read, like Archie, and both were read by millions. Now Superman has to be violent and adult, and Archie has to be manga-fied. Superheroes now kill people. Their sex lives have become relevant. Is this progress? Many comics now are unreadable unless you read them as a series. Many are unreadable even then. Many artists spend days on a single page, creating very detailed, jam-packed pages of art, but making it very difficult to just read the comic and see everything clearly. Collaborations between pencilers and inkers, which produced some of the greatest comic art of the past, such as Kirby /Sinnott, Colan/Palmer, Adams/Giordano, and Buscema/Anybody are now very rare. The inker has become far too often irrelevant, and many comics are being printed directly from the pencils, with no inker at all.

Bob adds Mood and clarity to these terrific Zeck layouts.

The loss of black & white comic magazines is also very sad. Marvel and Warren published so many wonderful b&w jobs by top artists. The loss of mainstream humor comics, not to mention the Harvey line of funny animal comics, is extremely distressing to me.

In addition, Marvel and DC have become very corporate and cold. When I started, Marvel was like a family, and you could walk in and say hello to Stan Lee and hang out and get to know the editors. We had a volleyball league with Marvel & DC people on the same team against other publishers. Stan Lee pitched at a couple of the regular afternoon Marvel softball games. Free-lancers like Ross Andru, Mike Esposito and Frank Giacoia even used to work right in the Marvel offices. Once you were good enough to get work in the business, you stayed in until you left voluntarily or dropped dead. Now you need an appointment to get into the editorial offices, and are shuffled out as quickly as possible. You might work in comics for a year or two or twenty and suddenly be unable to get work again.  

Bob's exceptional vision of John Carter,
one of my favorite subjects.

Sam: This seems endemic in not just the comics biz but in almost any large company today. There appears to be no respect for the creative people who actually do the work. (In the animation business, artists were often referred to as “wrists”.) Not to get all “Occupy Wall Street” on you, but do you think the large corporations that now own the comics companies have been a negative factor?

Bob: Yes, certainly. It’s all about the bottom line and making profits for the stockholders, not publishing entertainment for children and young adults, as it should be. The comic book business isn’t fun anymore, for the artists or the fans. The artists and fans still want it to be, and they’re trying to enjoy it, but you can see them sweating from the effort.

Sam: Do you think the comics medium has a future, or will it eventually be eclipsed by other, flashier media?

Bob: I think it can and should have a future, but they’ve been trying hard to kill it for the last two decades. I think in the near future it may evolve into a longer form like graphic novels that can be sold in Barnes & Noble. Paper publishing may someday become unfeasible, so maybe digital comics will be come more dominant, possibly becoming interactive. I don’t think the future of comics is in dark superheroes for adults. If they get back to making comics with broad appeal to both sexes of all ages, they can have a good future in some form.

Storm commission art

Sam: Are you working on anything now? Can you give us a teaser?

Bob: I’m not actively seeking work in comics anymore, because I’m not interested in drawing or inking most of what they’re publishing these days, and the pay has stagnated and even dropped from a decade ago, while the workload per page has greatly risen. It’s too much work for the money, and not fun like it used to be.

My skills as an inker/finisher aren’t appreciated anymore, as discussed above, because penciling has changed. I still usually accept comic book jobs when they’re offered to me just to keep my name out there, but I’m happy to do other things. I teach part-time, I sketch at conventions, I visit elementary schools, I do occasional illustration jobs, and I do a lot of commissions for art collectors.

I’m hoping to do more painting, and more children’s books. At the moment I don’t have any comic book projects planned, but that could change tomorrow. If you want to keep up with me, friend me on Facebook, and occasionally check my web site. 

You can find Bob’s web site here: http://www.BobMcLeod.com/

I urge you all to check it out, and I’d like to thank Bob for this great interview, and for chopping out a chunk of his valuable time.

Muchas Gracias! Let's finish with another stunning full-color commission piece.

Lost Horizon

An American teacher helps express my feelings.

For those few hearty souls who may have been following my blogs, it’s obviously been some time since I’ve posted anything. There are several reasons for this, but the most prominent among them is the imminent collapse of western society.

At such a time it seems both egotistical and pointless to enumerate the tiny failures and successes of my writing and drawing aspirations. There is a lot happening out there, mostly bad but some hopeful, that demands more consideration than my daft scribbling does right now.

I confess I’ve never been particularly political. Sure, I vote, and I try to see the big picture, but I’ve never been an activist or an advocate. I’ve just been living my own little life, naïvely believing that our politicians and businessmen ultimately had our best interests at heart.

Well, they didn’t.

The entire political process, worldwide, has been revealed as deeply corrupt and unrepentantly oppressive. Surfing the wave of globalization, the rich bought out democracy and have steadily eroded the dream of western capitalism in the name of base avarice. Now the chickens have come home to roost and we are all paying a premium price for our benign neglect.

I was definitely part of the problem.

I was a chump.

When I was a young man, I was a real optimist. I actually believed the human race was on its way to something magnificent. I thought we were going emerge from our troubled adolescence, triumph over war, poverty, racism and greed and mature gloriously into a utopian adulthood where all human beings were able to become their best selves. I even had the temerity to believe I was living at the dawn of this golden age, and that much of this would come to fruition during my own lifetime.

Seriously.

No shit.

I really did.

Perhaps this delusion was partly due to the social activism of the 60’s and 70’s, which I witnessed during my childhood. It was a time when so much ground was gained for African-Americans, women and homosexuals that it truly seemed like we were on the right track. What can I say? I got infected with the Hippie Virus, and never fully recovered.

Perhaps too, my interest in genre fiction helped foster my idyllic misapprehension. To my fresh, young eyes the great promise of science and technology seemed fully up to the task of dealing with the problems of pollution, sustainable energy and famine. The utopian and dystopian visions of the future I discovered in science fiction and fantasy novels seemed so powerful and so self evident that I felt the world couldn’t possibly ignore the danger.

I mean, surely we wanted a better world, didn’t we? Surely we wanted to live in a world of equality, tolerance and peace, right?

Apparently not.

Instead of being embraced as cautionary tales, the enduring works of Orwell and Huxley have been cynically employed as handbooks for oppression.

As I grew out of adolescence into adulthood, I became distracted. The pressures of making a living, exploring my own creative drives, and finding my place in the world, took up so much of my time and energy that I took my eye off the ball. Confident in my belief that those in power wanted the best for us, I embraced my own egotistical concerns, got my head up my own ass, and took my eye off the goddamn ball.

The optimism and social activism of the 60’s and 70’s gave way to the conspicuous consumption and empty materialism of the disco era, and I paid no attention. Financial colonialism and the glamorization of the stock market sprang up in the 80’s and I let it slide.

I was too distracted by VCR’s and home computers to pay much attention.

By the middle of the 90’s I was beginning to realize things were not going to turn out the way I’d expected. The humanist utopia I had so boldly anticipated was, clearly, not materializing. But, by then it was too late. The horse was already out of the barn. I was getting married, buying a house, and switching careers. I felt I just didn’t have the time and energy to get out there and work for a better world.

That’s what they counted on.

They want us poor, uneducated, stressed out and scared. That distracts us from noticing all the vile shit they’re up to.

I let them get away with it.

I am ashamed of myself.

So now, at age 50+, I find myself searching for ways to get back in the game. I should be thinking about retirement, but now that’s off the table. Instead I have to get out there, get involved, and see if there’s anything people can do to save civilization. It’s probably too late, and the whole thing is likely to come crashing down before we finally grow the fuck up and fix things. And man, that would be no less than we deserve.

But I guess I’m still fundamentally a hopeful person because I still want to try. So, I’m going to work at getting more involved out there, and try to find like-minded people and make my voice heard. It may just be sad, Quixotic tilting at windmills, but it’s all I have left. I still believe in people, and I still believe in the fundamental ability of humans to overcome their baser instincts.

If you believe this, I hope you will become more active too.

I never meant for these blogs to be political, and I don’t intend to change that now. The next entries will be back on point, discussing my writing and drawing.

Because, that’s me. That’s my thing.

But I’m not the same guy. This guy is no wide-eyed optimist. This guy is no chump. This guy is gonna call you on your evil shit.

Gene Colan: Master of Darkness

Gene Colan died today.

I am a great admirer of his work, and I will keenly miss his forceful presence in the comics medium.

My first encounter with the work of Gene Colan was in the pages of Daredevil. As was the case with many of the artists I came to admire most, I wasn’t immediately impressed. This was partly because, at the tender age of eight, I found the earthbound adventures and balletic athleticism of Daredevil somewhat less compelling than the grand cosmic adventures of The Fantastic Four and the raw mountain-smashing power of The Incredible Hulk.

Click thumbnails for larger images

It was also partially due to the fact that, in my opinion, Gene’s style didn’t perfectly fit the open, four-color grappling of the superhero genre. Though his storytelling and dynamic figure drawing were superb, his moody, illustrative approach would have been much more appropriate for a tough noir detective story, a bleak dystopian vision, or perhaps a certain Master of the Mystic Arts.

A superb example of Gene's tonal rendering style.

In addition to this slight stylistic miscasting, the usual rank and file Marvel inkers didn’t really know how to handle Gene’s pencils. These were not bad inkers by any means, guys like John Tartaglione and Frank Giacoia. Given a more typical Marvel penciler, these guys were perfectly suitable. However, with Gene, their simplified approach seemed to battle against the delicate chiaroscuro of the pencils, pushing it toward the higher contrast Kirby style. (Dan Adkins did a bang up job on issue #42, but sadly that one didn’t cross my field of vision until years later.)

Daredevil #42

Dan Adkins was also able to
get inside the logic of Gene's
unique penciling style.

My full appreciation of Gene’s art didn’t gel until the seventies when the loosening of the Comics Code guidelines allowed Marvel to explore previously verboten terror tropes.

This set the stage for me to fully discover the greatness of Gene Colan.

By age twelve, my tastes had shifted from the cosmic to the macabre. Having recently discovered the classic Universal monsters on late-night TV, I was hungry for more horror. I’d already immersed myself in the DC horror books like House of Mystery, House of Secrets, and The Witching Hour, so when Marvel launched their monster line, I positively pounced on mags like The Monster of Frankenstein, Werewolf by Night, Man Thing, and, of course, The Tomb of Dracula.

Tomb of Dracula #20

Gene’s shadowy, illustrative approach, so drenched in blacks, so moody and mysterious, perfectly suited the night-world of the Great Vampire and his pursuers. In a superb move, the primary inking responsibilities were handed to the astounding Tom Palmer, one of the best inkers ever to draw back the brush. Tom seemed able to get into Gene’s head like no inker before or since. He was able to preserve the verve of Gene’s pencils, and delineate the tonal range with deep blacks, misty feathering and judicious use of Zip-a-tone dot patterns.

So damn creepy!

The synergistic power of the teaming was perfect. Each exciting, creepy little page seemed coated in a palpable layer of cobwebs and coffin dust. I became a life-long fan of The Tomb of Dracula, and Gene Colan.

In my opinion Tom Palmer
was best able to capture the
energy and tonal range of
Gene's pencils

While I never knew Gene personally, his work has affected me in many ways. It has influenced my own drawing style, it has afforded me insight into the subtleties of visual storytelling, and most of all, has entertained me and enriched me.

And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

Gene Colan: 1926 - 2011

Shuffling The Deck

DOOM!

            

             My search for more sketch card work is progressing nicely. I recently sent a few sample cards to the Rittenhouse Archives people and garnered a very positive response. Rittenhouse has the Marvel characters and my samples must now go to editorial people there for approval. I will let you know how that turns out.

Click for magically larger image.

There is action brewing at a few other companies as well, so I may have more news soon.

In the meantime, have a peek at my Marvel sample cards.

Click it!

Click, or Hulk smash!

Putting My Cards On the Table

Click for larger image.

In a continuing effort to shore up my shrinking income, I have recently embarked on a journey into the wonderful world of sketch card production.

For those who don’t know, collectible “art trading cards” are a strange variation on the old “bubble gum” baseball cards of the past. The stick of bubble gum has long since been excised from the package and the collecting and speculative selling of such sports-themed cards has become big business.

Meanwhile in the alternate nerd universe, Dungeons and Dragons style gaming morphed into fantasy adventure card games like Magic: The Gathering and Call of Cthulhu. These cards featured fantasy art by some pretty talented illustrators, and later art cards without games attached were produced. It wasn’t long before the comics industry jumped on the bandwagon and began creating collectible card sets featuring reproduced renderings of their characters by top industry pros.

In addition to the printed art, many sets of collectible cards include a small number of original art renderings drawn directly onto blank cards.

This is where I come in.

With the help of experienced sketch card artists and generous amigos, Elaine and Tony Perna, I was quickly ushered into a job for Breygent Marketing, and their manager Tom Breyer offered me 25 original sketch cards for a Vampirella card series. These pics have recently been approved, and I’m now able to post a few on-line.

A terrific sketch card by old pro Tony Perna
For more of Tony's work, click this!

While the pay for individual cards is not high, one is also sent a certain number of extra blank cards known as “artist proofs” which are officially sanctioned cards in the series and can be sold by the artist on the open market for the best negotiated price. This, presumably, is where the artist evens up the pay rate, and I am curious to see how that pans out in the end.

Thanks to Breygent Marketing I now have some good samples to show and hope to land some new clients soon.

Flesh for Fantasy

Chester Brown’s “Paying For It” is, ostensibly, a memoir about Chester’s experiences with escorts and his rejection of a typical monogamous lifestyle. However, it may actually be a plea for the decriminalization of prostitution and a minor screed against the concept of Romantic Love.

            Chester is the talent behind several noteworthy comics and graphic novels including the award-winning “Ed the Happy Clown” and “Louis Riel”. Over the years, Chester’s material has varied from black comedy, to personal biography, to history and religion, to outright confessional. On the surface “Paying For It” falls into the latter category, but the book seems to have a specific political agenda, which is missing, or is at least much less obvious, than in his earlier work.

Chester's more recent work is a
long way from the twisted black
comedy of his Yummy Fur days.

            While comics from the autobiographical school aren’t always my cup of tea, I have enjoyed work by Chester and his indie comic cohorts Seth, Joe Matt and others. But ultimately, if I have my way I am usually going to choose straight-up fiction. That said I believe “Paying For It” is an important book and well worth reading, though I do have some reservations about its overall success.

           

            I doubt Chester Brown would categorize himself as a brave man, but he certainly is by my reckoning. Outing one’s self as an unrepentant “whoremonger”, (as Joe Matt refers to him in the book), in a culture as deeply conflicted about sexuality as ours, is a singular act of courage.

           

            Chester begins by chronicling the demise of his last so called “normal” relationship and walks us through the thought processes that lead him to hire a prostitute rather than seek another girlfriend. His motivation boils down to this: Romantic relationships draw out people’s pettiness, possessiveness and jealousy, and the good things about monogamy, like companionship and regular sex, are outweighed by the negative.

That’s the nutshell version, of course, and it’s quite fascinating to read the book and get the full story. We follow Chester’s almost Spock-like logic stream as he concludes that paid sex is the way to go. I found the scene where he hauls out a calculator and sensibly works out his hooker budget for the year particularly hilarious.

            When I was in my late 20’s I occasionally paid for sex, but for very different reasons than Chester. For me it was sheer hormonal overload. I was without a regular sex partner, horny as a three-peckered toad, and knew beyond any doubt that masturbating for the one-hundredth time that week simply wasn’t gong to cut it. And, on one or two occasions I chose the pay-for-play route because I was feeling depressed and craved an ego boost. As I aged and my libido began to wane a little, I became much less interested in paying for sex.

            For Chester it all seems to be about avoiding the drama and satisfying his sexual urges with minimum aggravation. Or, at least that is what he tells us in the book, and it’s hard to believe he’s being anything but truthful about the matter.

Between a rock and a hard place.

            The sex in “Paying For It” is presented in a very frank and graphic manner which will undoubtedly shock some, but which I found refreshing. His encounters with the various prostitutes are sometimes compelling, and vary from erotic, to humorous, to disappointing. It’s also enlightening to learn more about this rarely discussed subculture. As Chester gradually discovers the subtleties of interpreting ads, and the hidden etiquette of contacting, meeting and paying prostitutes, we learn along with him. (During my own foray into paid sex, I ended up in the realm of the rub ’n’ tug, which is occasionally mentioned but never depicted in “Paying For It”.)

During his erotic encounters with these ladies of the evening, Chester reveals himself in a blunt “warts and all fashion”, which often casts him in a negative light. He depicts his thin body in positively cadaverous terms, and has no trouble pointing up the personality shortcomings of himself, his friends or his hired lovers. The work is unflaggingly straightforward, and while Chester is always courteous and financially generous with the women he hires, he is also very judgmental about their appearance and performance.

One might make the case that this is reasonable when purchasing a service. Before hiring, say, a landscaper, I might well go online and see what previous clients had to say about his work and professionalism, as Chester does with some of the prostitutes. And, if that landscaper did a lousy job and overcharged me, I certainly wouldn’t feel bad about never hiring him again. However, in light of the fact that this is sex, not landscaping, it does come off a bit cold-hearted.

Though that may just be my own repressive cultural conditioning talking.

Between his encounters with the hookers, Chester debates the topics of prostitution, Romantic Love and monogamy with his friends and family. For the most part they take up a negative view toward Chester’s whoring ways, or at least a pro monogamy stance. Via these conversations the pros and cons of prostitution are explored, and while some feel quite natural, several descend into speech making. Having only met Chester a few times, I can’t say for certain he doesn’t talk this way, but certain conversations seemed overly didactic. His conversations with the hookers are generally more believable.

After the comic itself Chester includes a section of appendixes which functions essentially as a dissertation on the subject of prostitution and refutations of the arguments against its practice and decriminalization. I wish Chester had confined the speechifying to this supplemental section and minimized it in the narrative proper. No one likes being preached at, including Chester himself, as he makes abundantly clear in the book.

Chester delved into the sexual
motivations of his younger self
in The Playboy.

The Playboy

            When I picked up “Paying For It” at The Beguiling, the first thing I noticed was how small it is. While this is understandable considering the financial limitations of an independent publisher like Drawn & Quarterly, I’m not sure it’s the best size to present the work. Chester sticks to an absolutely rigid eight-panel grid, and the pages include a lot of white space around the art and in the gutters. Each panel is less than 2 inches wide and this smallness is exacerbated by the open framing of the scenes, which are mostly what I would describe as medium to wide shots. The sex acts are generally depicted in high angle shots, which further removed me from the action. In the interest of preserving the anonymity of the women he hires, Chester never depicts their faces, which further limited my ability to relate to them as people.

On the prowl for hookers.

            Chester also does a fair bit of talking about being jealous and arguing with girlfriends but we don’t actually see any of this. He seems deeply dispassionate in the narrative, and though his friends sometimes accuse him of repressing his emotions, there is little evidence in text or subtext that this is so. Perhaps including some of that girlfriend drama at the beginning would have helped us better appreciate his choice to reject traditional pair bonding.

Ultimately, all this distance and emotional detachment left me feeling somewhat disconnected from the story.

It’s entirely possible that visual and emotional distancing from the subject was completely intentional, as a way of avoiding a voyeuristic or prurient atmosphere. I can understand that Chester, espousing a non-exploitive position regarding prostitution, would want to avoid any appearance of titillation. However, by the end it really started to erode my interest in, and connection to, the events.

The choice to hide the faces of the call girls limits my ability to connect with them, and diminishes their individuality. They become, by virtue of this anonymity, somewhat interchangeable. Many would argue this amounts to objectification. If they are faceless and anonymous, doesn’t that prove that they are being perceived merely as receptacles for lust and less than human?

In this case I don’t think so. I believe it was Chester’s genuine desire to maintain the privacy of women in question. But, unfortunately, I can see such an argument being successfully made against the narrative as it stands. Chester works hard to make the prostitutes individuals by way of the dialogue, and in my second reading of the book, those differences certainly became clearer, but not in the visceral way that giving them a face would have individuated them.

Here is where a little creative fictionalization might have served the story better. If Chester had given these women any random faces, (that were not their own), they would have been more clearly perceived as individuals, with expressions, thoughts and individuality. In other words they would have been more complete persons. Not only would this have involved me more, it would have served to better humanize these women, and support Chester’s argument for the decriminalization of prostitution.

Chester's more challenging work
is worthwhile, but I sometimes
long for the weird humor of
his earlier creative period.

But, man, with a subject this packed with emotional, religious and political TNT, it’s difficult to fault any of Chester’s choices. I mean, this is a real snake pit of a subject, and even though I found it a bit emotionally remote, it is still compelling material. And if his readers can’t imagine Chester’s path as a viable alternative for their own life, it’s eminently clear it works well for him.

“Paying For It” is deeply honest and courageous. It’s poignant in places and amusing in others and it explores an interesting and unknown sub-culture with some sensitivity. It also broaches important ideas about how our culture perceives sexuality and Romantic Love that are worth considering and debating. I’d say that makes it a must-read, even though it failed to fully engage me on an emotional level and occasionally got a bit sanctimonious.

At least, that’s how I perceived the book through my own very liberal rose-coloured glasses. I am certain others are going to find the content shocking, distasteful and even blasphemous. And some will no doubt categorize Chester as the Devil himself, come to destroy marriage, Valentine’s Day and long, hand-holding, eye-gazing walks on the beach.

In our ever more polarized culture, that sort of knee-jerk activism seems to have replaced intelligent exploration, thoughtful consideration and civilized debate. 

Ghostly Sketches From The Past

Something haunting happened to me last fall at the Fan Expo event here in Toronto. I’m still thinking about it, and wondering what happened, exactly.

            The Fan Expo is an enormous event, a multi-geek-fandom affair featuring horror, anime, gaming, sci-fi and, of course, their poor country cousin, comics. Thanks to my old buddy James Armstrong, I always have a table in artist’s alley.

The Toronto Fan Expo

Home away from home for
the Geek hordes.

Over the years it isn’t uncommon to have a friend or acquaintance from the dim dark past recognize my name and stop by my table to say howdy. It happened a few years ago with a gent named Joe Arena, who was actually the first man to publish my comics, way back when I was a cocky, seventeen year old wanna-be with a very long way to go. I also had the eldest son of my old shop teacher, Ross Andrews, come up with greetings from the old fellow himself. Mr. Andrews (as I still think of him) was the first person to encourage my drawing when I was just a goofy, long-haired thirteen year old, trying to construct a box from tin sheets in his grade seven shop class.

            Usually meeting an old friend is a rather pleasant experience, catching up with people, (or the sons of people) who played some role in my past life is nice now and then. However, last year a chance meeting with a former buddy of mine went rather a different way.

            I only knew Fletch for a few years.

In my hometown of Tillsonburg there weren’t too many comics freaks. This was the seventies, and the exploding collectors market was still more than a decade into the future. The grand master of comic collecting in our town was a guy named Mason Armstrong. He was older, in his mid twenties, and he possessed an impressive collection. (His Fantastic Four collection started with issue #9!) Mason was a tall, sandy haired, soft-spoken guy, with thick glasses, who worked in his parent’s drug store. He’d stake out the comic spinner in the store and make contact with the town’s other budding comics addicts, like myself. There were only four or five of us. A few desperate, continuity starved, square pegs who made the rounds of all the drug stores and convenience stores in town, vainly seeking to satisfy our personal four color addictions from the titles available from the spotty local distribution.

It was Mason who first introduced me to Fletch. Fletch was about my age, but taller and more athletic, and much more conscious of his appearance and looking ‘cool’. He was pure 70’s, while I was clinging to the fading hippie aesthetic. (A look I still haven’t abandoned!) We were both into comics and rock music and drawing. At that time, Fletch was probably a better artist than I was. He seemed to have a keener grasp of anatomy and proportion, whereas I was a little better at storytelling and continuity. (I wish I still had some of his drawings to post.)

We did what most fifteen year-old boys in Tillsonburg did. We fought valiantly against the crushing boredom! We hung out, listened to The Stones, Alice Cooper, and Aerosmith, swilled down crap like potato chips, Oh Henry bars and Coke, and schemed to meet, and theoretically date, girls.

Teenager food.

            And we drew piles of superhero pictures.

Batman, Superman, Conan, the Incredible Hulk, and the amazing Len Wein Dave Cockrum re-launch of the X-Men were our bibles. We copied poses, and fearlessly attempted our own pin-ups and pages. We debated the relative merits of our favorite characters and companies. He was a DC man, and I was a Marvel fan, he liked Batman, and I liked Conan. I remember that the great Jim Aparo was Fletch’s favorite artist, while I preferred the comics stylings of John Buscema. (In retrospect we had both chosen great role models, though I admit the fact that Aparo penciled, inked and lettered his own work was unique at the time.) 
It was a productive rivalry. We had great fun, pushed each other to do better, and dreamed of drawing comics for a living.

Similar poses from two comics giants.
(Click for larger image)

We were thick as Zamorian thieves for a few brief months.

I never got a clear picture of what was happening, but Fletch began to have a lot of trouble getting along with his parents. We started to meet exclusively at my house as tensions rose between he and his folks. They were one of the wealthier families in town, and perhaps Fletch’s career aspirations, or lack of them, were a sticking point. I honestly don’t know. We got together less and less frequently, and then I heard nothing from Fletch at all. It was Mason who told me, some weeks later, that he was no longer living at home. I don’t know if he left, or his parents threw him out. I later heard a vague rumor that Fletch had some sort of unpleasant brush with the law, but I can’t confirm the truth of this.

I tiptoed gingerly around my parents for a few months after that.

About two years later I saw Fletch for the last time. I was about to head off to college and this was my last summer of freedom. Mason and I were about to make a final trip into nearby London Ontario, to visit some great comic shops and used bookstores there. Mason mentioned that we were also going to pay a visit to Fletch.

Naively, I brought along a stack of my drawings. I still hadn’t fully grasped the fact that Fletch was out on his own, and had more pressing concerns than doodling Batman poses. I foolishly assumed he had been drawing the whole time.

Aparo was the king of
drawing spooky mists.

We met Fletch at his apartment, which he shared with a few other guys, and was a bit of a mess. He seemed really excited to see us and we yakked about nonsense for a while. He mentioned he was working at some sort of manual labor job, construction, or public works, I can’t recall what, exactly. Finally, Fletch pointed to my portfolio and asked to see my drawings.

Due to the exceptional art classes I’d been taking at College Avenue Secondary School in Woodstock, I’d made a lot of progress. I proudly yanked out my artwork. Not just comics pages, but life drawing, portraits and caricatures, as well.

Fletch looked it all over in silence, and then looked back at me and said: “Wow, you’re like, really good now.”

He handed back the stack of drawings and I put them in the portfolio. I asked if he had any new drawings.

“No, man, I been too busy working.”

I was aware enough to realize that the mood in the room had changed, but not quite sensitive enough to understand why. Fletch put up a good front, but after a few minutes he cut things short, claiming he had to get to work.

Then, last year, over thirty years later, he showed up at my table at the Expo.

I was working on one of the many commission sketches I drew that afternoon, when I noticed a rather imposing looking dude stopped a few yards away from my table. He gave me an intense look. The guy was tall, very muscular and beefy, wearing a body hugging T-shirt, and jeans. He looked at me, and then up at the big name tag behind me a few times, and finally approached me.

“Dude, you’re from Tillsonburg!”

I laughed and admitted I was.

“It’s me, Fletch!”

Suddenly, I could see the face of my teenaged friend through the wrinkles and graying hair. I was thrilled to see him. He was very excited at first, and we did the catching up thing.

“Dude, I knew that was you,” he said, “I can’t believe you still got all that hair!”

“I would never give up my hair, man! You got some real muscles there, Bro, you must do a lot of weight training.”

“Nope, just from working,” he answered.

It was nice for a couple minutes.

Then he started looking at my drawings. He seemed to become more pensive.

“This stuff is great, man. You’re working in comics now?”

“A little. I worked in animation for a long time. Now I mostly do storyboards for movies and TV, but I do a bit of writing and drawing for the comics when I can.”

He got this very distressed look on his face.

“I’m getting a bit freaked out here,” he said. “I feel like I’m gonna cry… I gotta go.”

“Come back later,” I called after him, as he moved off into the crowd.

“Yeah, man,” he called back.

But, he didn’t.

I don’t know for sure why Fletch got so emotional.

It could be because I had industriously traveled a road he’d once considered for himself. Or, perhaps he wondered what his life might have been like if his parents were a bit more supportive of his interests. Hell, maybe he just missed drawing.

As the afternoon wore on, and it became clear he wasn’t going to come back, I began to feel very sad about it.

If he had come back, I’d have told him some important things.

First, I never realized any of my most prized goals. I wanted to draw for Marvel and DC and I never did. I wanted to animate for Disney, and I never did. I wanted to write and perform television comedy, and, so far, that hasn’t happened either. I’m glad I attempted all these things, and I try never to regret my life choices, but man, I can tell you, failing hurts like a sumbitch.

Second, I made choices in my life too. A few were good choices, but many were extraordinarily bad. Yes, I stuck to my path, and I worked hard and I had a few successes here and there. I’ve had some flush financial booms, and a few creatively rewarding experiences. But, I’ve also many periods of hardship, including right now.

Fletch, you lived your life. You made your choices, for better or worse, and you’re still here. You survived. For a human being, that’s plenty.

            I really hope you come back to the Expo again this year.

I miss you buddy.

One of my Batman sketches, in honor of
Fletch, Danny, Albert and all the other lost
comics buddies from my past.
(Click for larger image)