Category: Comics

Snakebite is the colorist/compositer/digital painter on Image Comics’ The Red Star, a title we’ve talked about once or twice on this site already. It’s his job to bring the computer models and Chris Gossett’s pencils together to create seamless images. (Check out some before-and-after shots from Snakebite’s portfolio.) Snakebite also teaches at The Animation Academy in California, working with artists looking to break into animation. He has strong views on art and its intersection with commerce, and isn’t afraid to share them in his own inimitable style with anyone who asks.

DT: What motivated you to get into coloring? What motivates you to keep doing it?

S: Linda Medley and Lynn Varley were my first two inspirations to color back in the late eighties. I feel the most comfortable when I’m coloring and when you’re a colorist you get to work on many different artists . . . it works well with my A.D.D.

DT: What are the skills you needed to learn to do the job well? How did you go about learning them?

S: Contrast and composition, in my opinion, are the two most important things when coloring. Knowing color theory is important as well, but everyone sees color differently. Like everything mileage is key.

DT: When you first start on a page, what are the first things that go through your mind? What are the initial creative choices you make to set the direction for the finished product?

S: Where’s the focal point and emotional message? These are the two most important questions I ask myself.

DT: What do you think comics readers should look for when they look at a page, in terms of coloring, in order to fully appreciate the work?

S: If they get the emotion and story telling, then I’ve done my job.

DT: What do you think differentiates ‘good’ from ‘bad’ coloring?

S: If it makes you physically sick . . . it’s bad, he he. Subjectivity fucks up any real chance to answer that question.

DT: What of your own works are you particularly happy with? What is it about those pieces that you like?

S: I like my latest work and since that hasn’t happened yet, I couldn’t tell you why, he he he. I’m constantly experimenting and my A.D.D. never lets me like my work for too long. I’m just happy and blessed that I have been able to live off my art for the last 9 years and that I’ve put myself in a position where I can grow as a human and artist.

DT: Can you take us through the process a little bit? What’s it take to get a page or an issue of The Red Star done?

S: I’m the last guy to touch everything minus dialogue, Mr. Starkings and crew [from Comicraft] handles such deeds. Although Goss has always included me in the rest of the process from layout to design, I receive the pencils and the 3D assets to composite in a shot, under the guidelines of Goss’ thumbnail layouts. Pages do not come to me like a typical comic page. Almost every element is its own asset (illustration scan or 3D model).

Once I acquire the 3D models and the pencil illustrations are scanned into my hard drive, Goss comes over to my home studio (MEAT PRODUCT, providing essential creative juices that are lacking in today’s boring corporate diets) for a “COMP” session, or “The Dance” as I like to call it.

It goes like this, each page has many different layers (in Photoshop). Each layer is an asset, a lot of the time (although we’re getting better) not to scale to one another. We move everything around, transform it to fit the layout of the original thumbnail. Although when actually collaborating with another you find other paths and the finished product sometimes finds a new conclusion . . . which is one of the many rewarding aspects of this particular project. It’s not about a dictatorship . . . it’s about creating and growing as artists and individuals.

When the “Dance” is completed the preparation work is far from done. I still have to clean up the pencils. When working with a medium like graphite you’ll always have clean up. A lot of the time smudges assist in the integration between the D’s. I then have to flat the illustration — ‘flatting’ is a process used by us point and click bitches to paint using Photoshop. It is ideal for editorial changes. The last few issues I have had the pleasure of a Flatter, Aaron “Strawberry” Horvath who is a student and instructor at The Animation Academy. This job is bone head work and his skills far surpass the task but it’s nice not to have to do it anymore, he he . . . and it’s nice to give out work to a brutha or sista.

From there the fun begins, I FINALLY GET TO PAINT!!! At this point there’s no one way, I approach it from many positions and try new angels all the time . . . I like to think of it as The Kama Sutra of Digital Painting . . .hmmmm, maybe I’ll write a book one day . . . Anyhoo, so I approach the page with fundamental questions always in mind. My teachers say “If you can find the right question, the right answer always follows.” . . . Or was that a dream? . . . Yoda? . . . In any case, it works. Of course education, experience and mileage really help one find the questions . . .

I approach the 2D and 3D the same way, as far as painting . . . just slap the color right on top, no fear. I’m not held back at all by Goss, he encourages me to go further, push it more . . . until the deadline gets closer, he he. People who have ego problems just couldn’t work with us. No sensitive artist types around this book, except for the crying and hugging — but that’s a different story, he he. It’s gotten to the point where I do all the texture mapping on the 3D as well. We have great 3D crews, John Moberly and more recently KGB (these bruthas are under cover), and they lay down some kick ass rendering and sometimes they push the textures but ultimately this book is printed turning it 2D, so there’s no point in bruthas doing extra work for nada. It takes less time, for our schedule, for me to do it in Photoshop then for us to wait for the rendering process . . . although it puts more on my plate . . . I have a healthy mental appetite so it works out. I like how Goss puts it, “You can’t argue with the end results.” He’s right, I haven’t been this satisfied with a project since I can remember and the extra work we put in, although my eyes could argue with me, is soon forgotten by our bodies and what’s left over lasts forever.

And that’s what art is about, The Red Star and The Animation Academy constantly challenge the roles of the artist in our world to be more than just T&A commercial whores (although a lot of those bruthas work real hard to draw spaceships and girls with great bodies and broken backs). We want to be apart of the movement of artists taking back the industry that affects so many people. The visual medium is a strong one when it comes to education and communication and we should feel responsible for what we put in the collective minds of our world. Don’t get me wrong, I like the occasional porno, it’s the balance, but come on there’s only so much porno a person needs (subjective I know). But let’s define success differently so that it means uplifting people and making them more aware so that they can ask the right questions and find the answers that work for them. This is what makes my artistic journey complete at the moment. I say “at the moment” not because I want to move on just because life has this way about it, so I enjoy what it gives me . . . at the moment . . .

DT: What do you need from your collaborators in order to do your job to the best of your ability? How well do you feel comics companies and creators have given colorists the support and respect they deserve?

S: The Red Star has been the only true collaboration that has been printed in the comic industry that I’ve had the pleasure of working on. I work with a lot of great artists at The Animation Academy and just in general, but this book has been my only gig to see print that is a true collaboration. I don’t get a script but Goss walks me through every page . . . with sound effects, he he. I pick up a lot of my color inspiration from the passion he shows in walking me through the story .

As far as the industry is concerned . . . as a whole (’cause I’ve met individuals who aren’t this way) it can eat a dick as far as its respect for colorists. For the most part it has been dependent on colorists. A lot of artists use colorists as a crutch. We can make or break a book. We are the last ones to touch it and for anyone that says “you can’t polish a turd” I would like to invite them to the “Shiney Shit” exhibits in our industry’s archive. Colorist are always saving the collective asses of the people that come before, i.e. editors, artists, inkers.

Ever hear of the “we’ll fix it in post” attitude? Well, in comics colorists are considered “post”.

I’m not saying colorists are key, but we’re damn close to it.

Colorists are artists and should be treated like one. Anywhere you see a penciller credit or inker, you should see a colorist. We should get paid the same amount as everyone else . . . in some cases more. If you go anywhere to get any service on a “rush” basis you pay more. Well . . . colorists are always getting rushed and our paychecks always seem to come late and light. With technology the way its going, colorists are pulling off color stunts at a caliber that pencilers just aren’t capable of doing. What makes comics these days cutting edge is us point and click bitches, without a doubt. Without colorists Image would not have been as big of a hit as it was in the early nineties. Without colorists everything would be black and white . . . I’m not bitter, I’m just aggressive and tell it like it is. I see a shift of the attitude. More artists are making themselves more savvy and therefore more compassionate to our position in the creating process . . . now if we could only get the editors to see the light of day.

DT: When you say that colorists often have to fix the errors of those that have gone before them, can you be more specific about what kind of errors colorists might have to correct?

S: Deadline is always screwed by the time it reaches us. Now I’m not a cry baby, deadlines are screwed all the time when dealing with artists on any level. The mere fact you associate yourself with a artist screws up your deadline right off the bat, he he he.

I won’t get into past artists’ attitudes I’ve experienced, but usually problems arise from lack of exposure to other aspects of production. Since colorists are digital we live in the myth that we can click away any problem with our Finish-dis-Shit button.

I like to point fingers on a individual basis, he he, so I’ll just say that color is just as if not more essential when conveying an emotion and/or story and should be looked at with that kind of respect.

DT: Following up on ‘colorists are artists too’ — do you think the creators’ rights movement in comics has overlooked colorists? What can be done about that?

S: Hells yeah. I tried to rally the troops on many an occassion but most of the time the troops don’t want to rally so I’m goin with Gandhi when i say I’m just gonna be the change I want in this industry. If theres something I don’t like goin on I’m just gonna step up to the plate and do my best not to be apart of what i don’t like and focus on the otherside of the spectrum….Keep creating!!!

DT: What type of stuff are you doing at the Animation Academy?

S: As of November 26, 2001, The Animation Academy in Burbank has been certified and its program approved by the Bureau For Private Postsecondary Education of the State of California. This is very exciting for us, we are now capable of offering transferable units for students who want to continue their training at other schools to gain degrees (although we have students from other prestigious schools coming to us, as well as from other countries). The state certification allows us to give out Certificates when the student completes our program. Next, on the list for the school, is to be able to offer associate degrees. Considering that the owner, Charles Zembillas, started in the back of a restaurant a few years ago this is quite a accomplishment..

The Animation Academy has two student-art-directed-by-instructors productions under our belt. The first was an original animated concept by Charles Zembillas, he did everything up to key frames and had his students do the in-betweening over the course of a few years. Recently he just had a handful of students finish the coloring on it and it competes across the board. Six minutes of solid animation.

The second production was a Flash short and we negotiated the deal ourselves with the investors. This is one of the points we try to convey in our classes, artists can make deals. Now with this production we were just manual labor. The designs, storyboards and script were completed previously and by a different artist. The school and the students did the production but we did pay the students close to industry standard (which most studios don’t even pay these days). How many schools can offer education, experience and good pay? Not many, it’s old school Frank Lloyd type of thinking but it’s a classic brain frame that I’m glad to be a part of reviving . . . We are all working on that being a regular thing.

The Animation Academy practices the fundamentals of art but we also practice the fundamentals of artists’ legal rights with classes like “Business Law for Artists” with Randall J. Kelley, Esq., an attorney with 20 years’ experience with copyrights and contract negotiations for major art publishers and studios. Randall is a personal friend of mine and I truly believe he offers precious insight for anyone that pursues art as a career. Although our main focus is on solid drawing, with instructors from just about every major animation studio in Burbank – Jose Lopez, Thomas Perkins, Gregg Davidson, Kristen Sych, John Nevarez, Richard Chavez, Alan Simmons and Stephen Silver – we still stress the importance of good business sense and sensibilities . . . after all this is a business . . . I can’t think of another school that offers Business Law class as part of their full time certified programs

We also have an offspring site called animationnation.com. It’s a message board with some of the most talented, knowledgeable people in the art industries, who are all willing to share their knowledge. I love them all, even the ones I can’t stand, he he. It’s a fun online place to learn and find out what the real deal is in the art industry….and not just animation, we have members from all walks of life and all over the world…our thousandth member just registered tonight and we have thousands more who just read

On a personal tip, I feel at home when I’m at The Animation Academy. There’s a brotherhood there, the knowledge passed through there lifts people up to the level they want to be at. Sure I’ve seen people filtered through the school to never return…but that’s the way of things. I can’t find the right words of appreciation to communicate where I’m coming from . . . I guess it’s all about walking a mile in a brutha’s shoes.

DT: What other projects are you working on?

The Red Star and The Animation Academy take a lot of my focus, but my A.D.D. keeps me desiring collaboration with others constantly. One thing I would say to the peeps just starting out is to keep yourself versatile but not stretched too thin. Finish what you start, the obvious cliche for a reason. Learn every aspect. Comics used to be the cheapest way to test a multi media property on a market, now it’s the internet. Sure the internet doesn’t make you any money, well neither does comics. They’re both two different ways to do the same thing, market yourself for potential future investors.

If you’re a creator, you ultimately have the power and if you’re willing to make the journey across the desert to reach your destination, your destination will be worth the long trip . . . or short, depending on life, he he.

But I can’t stress the power of the internet enough. With Dot-Com-Failures it could seem bleak, but those fuck heads approached the whole thing wrong and with too much money . . . kinda like what we saw happen in the mid-nineties in comics . . . BOOM!!! “Why my lip all busted up, and where’s my money?”. It’s all about solid content.

Paul Mounts is the colorist for Marvel’s The Ultimates, Black Bull’s Just a Pilgrim, Image Comics’ Tellos, and Vertigo’s SCI-Spy. (Check out two covers for Just a Pilgrim: Garden of Eden. He has been an artist in comics for over fifteen years, and currently heads up his own studio, Bongotone. ) His cover for The Ultimates 2 is the basis of this update’s cover image.

DT: What motivated you to get into coloring? What motivates you to keep doing it?

PM: After spending three years drawing and coloring storyboards and animatics for television commercials, I needed a change. I saw what the advertising world does to people — art directors at age 40 looking 65 and drinking at 9:30 in the morning-and was really bored spending entire days drawing dog food, cereal flakes, and deliriously happy people eating Big Macs. I’d always loved comics, and at that time there were a few publishers in here in Chicago (First, Now and Comico) that I could pencil, ink letter and color for. Then one day an old high school friend who was drawing for Marvel (Tom Morgan) was working on a series that they need higher-end coloring on, and showed the editor (Howard Mackie) some of my storyboard work. I helped Marvel get setup with a local service bureau to make the blue-lines form the original art (since at that point the only higher -end coloring that they had done was either on the original art or on greyline stats). After that series got published, I was suddenly known as a colorist, so that’s the work that kept coming my way. It’s paid my bills for quite a few years now, and when you’ve got a wife, kids and mortgage, that’s motivation.

Beyond that, however, I think that I can bring something to the books I work on that is unique, and that feels good. And I still pencil and ink sometimes — I’ll have a pinup in Just A Pilgrim: Garden of Eden #4.

DT: What are the skills you needed to learn to do the job well? How did you go about learning them?

PM: The time I did storyboards was boot camp. You can learn more in 6 weeks at a good studio than you can in 6 years of art school. You learn to concentrate on the basics, the storytelling. You learn how to lead the eye through a scene, and how to trick the viewer into seeing exactly what you want him to see. How lighting affects mood, and the importance of the basic contrasts: Light against dark (the most important!), warm against cool, saturated against unsaturated. When I was freelancing for Continuity Associates, Neal Adams once gave me an afternoon crash course in the importance of these three contrasts that’s stayed with me in all the years since. The important skills are in threes — the three contrasts, the three levels of importance when approaching a scene, and the three things you need to have/be to succeed. The skills are: 1) Tell the story (the most important); 2) set the mood (important, but subordinate if it obscures the storytelling); 3) render it up pretty (relatively unimportant, often unnecessary). You need at least two of the three things to succeed: 1) be on time; 2) be really good at what you do; 3) be a really nice/easy person to work with.

DT: Could you take us through the evolution of coloring a little bit from your perspective? How have the tools and the processes changed?

PM: When I started, fully-painted blueline color was just getting going (middle 1980’s). We went all digital in the fall of 1994, and it was perfect timing, as right when we got computers the blueline work started drying up overnight. Which was fine; after airbrushing Dr. Martin dyes and gouache for so many years, I was sneezing rainbow colors from inhaling all the fumes. (And, yes, I had a large industrial air cleaner/filter attached across the top of my drawing board, but that can only catch so much . . .)

We never used the vector-based coloring software that Steve Oliff developed; I’ve been Mac and Photoshop since day one. Viva le Mac! The operating system for those with superior taste and intellect. Death to the PC traitors!! (I’m kidding! No flames, please!).

DT: When you first start on a page, what are the first things that go through your mind? What are the initial creative choices you make to set the direction for the finished page?

PM: I guess I answered part of this in the last question. The first and most important thing-what’s the point of the cover/page? What’s the story it’s trying to tell? What was the penciller/inker trying to accomplish? And how can I amplify that? On the Ultimates 2 cover, it was, at its heart and for all its detail, a relatively simple scene showing the power and mood of Iron Man; basically, to create a sense of wonder in a superhero that’s been seen hundreds of times before in various incarnations. The background had to fall back, both to pop Iron Man forward and to create a sense of darkened-lab drama. The drama on the figure comes from the various lights playing off of the armor. (See a side by side comparison of the line-art and colored versions.)

DT: What do you think comics readers should look for when they look at a page, in terms of coloring, in order to fully appreciate the work?

PM: I like well-chosen simple color rather than overly rendered art that makes no sense and confuses the eye. I also appreciate a colorist that’s not scared of color. There’s a growing trend to use really grey, monochromatic schemes in an attempt to be “mature,” but if comes off as dismal if not handled correctly. The grey scenes have much more punch if contrasted with colorful scenes. Uninterrupted unsaturated colors are as harsh and diluting to the eye as uninterrupted bright color.

DT: What’s the work process like? What stages does the piece move through?

PM: We either get scans on disc or from an ftp site, or the original art is sent to us for scanning. My assistants resize and format the scans and lay in flat color. Then I take the pages and rework the palette and render them up.

DT: What’s your work environment like? How many books are you working on at a given time?

PM: Like any good artist, my studio is generally an ungodly mass of clutter, from toys, plots and comic reference to old coffee cups and food wrappers. (Because all the best food is wrapped for you sanitized consumptive pleasure!)

In the studio this week: SCI Spy 3, Just a Pilgrim: Garden of Eden 2, Ultimates 3, the cover for Ultimates 6, the cover for Just a Pilgrim 4, the covers for SCI Spy 5 and 6, X-Factor 1, a Dragon Tales children’s book, a Superman Playstation magazine cover, thirteen Superman Gameboy screens, a 10 page Rogue/Wolverine story for Unlimited X-Men, promo artwork for Garth Ennis, Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmitotti’s Pro, the next Tellos book, and lettering on a pitch for a new comic by Todd Dezago and Craig Rousseau. Whew . . . lucky I only sleep about 4 hours a night! But I have two assistants, Ken Wolak and Jeff Engert, that keep things moving through the pipeline.

DT: That workload sounds insane. How do you keep it up? In an ideal world, would you do that many books at once?

PM: That sounds a bit ridiculous, I know. But they’re not all getting done start-to-finish in one week, obviously. Some jobs are coming in, some are going out, but it’s all in various stages of completion during this week. One of the tricks of the freelance life for any artist is juggling projects and budgeting time — just as valuable a skill as the artistic ability.

Admittedly, you caught us at a busy time. I really have been going round the clock lately and just not sleeping. If you go to the ComicColor web site, you’ll see that I’m not the only one. Scheduling can be tough, and everything can get backed up if even one penciller/inker is late with pages, or if something hits you unexpectedly (covers that need to be done immediately for solicitation, etc.).

In an ideal world, I’d be a reclusive billionaire.

DT: What do you need from your collaborators in order for you to do your job to the best of your ability?

PM: We all need to learn that sleep is for chumps.

I like to stay in contact with the pencillers on the books I color. I talk with Bryan Hitch regularly on Ultimates (even though he gives me an unbelievably free hand to do what I want). I also need the plot of the book I’m coloring. Which sounds really basic, but I’ve seen some colorists do entire runs on books without once looking at a plot.

I also need time. If I get the line art the day before a book goes to press, there’s no way I can do my best work. The letterers and the colorists are the end of the line, and any time lost by the writer, the penciller or the inker has to be made up by us.

DT: How well do you think the comics industry recognizes and fulfills those needs?

PM: It’s not always (never?) perfect, but I’ve had very good luck generally, working with artists and editors who really are trying their best. It’s very rare that I’ve run into someone who unabashedly abuses the system.

DT: How much time do you need to do your best work, from start to finish?

PM: Even after all these years, I have no idea how to answer this. Every project is different. It’s an artists’ maxim that if we have three weeks to do a job, it’ll take three weeks. If we’re told we have four days, we’ll do it in four days. The project will expand to fill the time allotted to it. That, combined with my rather anal-retentive and control-freak personality is probably why I’ll never be enough of an efficiency expert to run a big factory-type studio.

DT: What work by other colorists do you particularly enjoy?

PM: Well, obviously the others that you’ve interviewed here, plus Lee Loughridge, Guy Major, Richard Isanove, Matt Hollingsworth, Liquid. That’s off the top of my head; as soon as this is out of my hands I’m sure I’ll be kicking myself for forgetting about 10 others I should have mentioned. Also artists who color their own work, like Michael Golden and Dave Johnson, and Japanese and European artists like Yoshitaka Amano, Moebius, Bilal, and Daniel Torres. Also, movies (City of Lost Children, Citizen Kane and Double Indemnity (black and white, but the tonal storytelling –wow!) and any of the cinematography of Jack Cardiff) and comic strips (the Sundays of George Herriman and Bill Watterson), and most importantly, real life.

Brandon McKinney is the artist on two upcoming graphic novels from AiT/Planet Lar: the superhero Planet of the Capes (written by Larry Young) and the SF Switchblade Honey (written by Warren Ellis). He has adapted Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones into a big-little book for Chronicle, and a coloring book (Heroes and Villains) for Random House. The Star Wars works will be out in May; the graphic novels are scheduled to come out this year. Both of the GNs are black and white, which might raise the question of what he’s doing in a feature on colorists. McKinney essentially ‘colors’ his own pencil work in Photoshop, using graytones instead of a full color palette. The result is much more textured than black and white art typically is. (Check out page 3 of Planet of the Capes.)

DT: What’s your training and background?

BM: I’m mostly self-taught, but I received a B.A. in Fine Art at UCLA. I was also fortunate enough to apprentice under Gil Kane and Steve Rude while I was down there. I learned a lot from both of them.

DT: How did you get involved with comics?

BM: Ever since reading them as a kid, I knew I wanted to draw them. My first job was in high school with SilverWolf Comics in Sacramento. Didn’t get paid much but got a taste of the business. In college, my buddy Darick Robertson hooked me up with Innovation Comics to do some Child’s Play comics. That led to my meeting Andy Mangels, a writer who got me involved with Elfquest and Lucasfilm. Darick also introduced me to Larry Young who I’m working with now on Planet of the Capes.

DT: How would you describe your art?

BM: I’ve heard my art descibed as “traditional”, in the sense that I didn’t jump on the Jim Lee bandwagon or do Manga-style faces. No disrespect to either of those influences, but they weren’t me. I grew up on Ross Andru and Gil Kane’s Spider-Man, John Byrne’s Fantastic Four and George Perez’s Teen Titans. Those are what stuck with me. I just try to draw in a dynamic straight forward sense that suits the story.

DT: How and why did you develop the techniques that you use?

BM: The black & white tones I’m using for Planet of the Capes came as a result of knowing the book would be in black & white and I wanted to get as much out of the art as possible. I’d started doing it for an Elfquest project, since I knew that would be in black & white as well, and I liked how it was going. I figured I’d use the same process I’d started on EQ with Larry’s book. It’s easier that doing full color since I just have to make value judgements (which areas should be shaded darker or lighter) and my color sense is still in its early development.

DT: What advantages and disadvantages do you think B&W art has over color art? How do you attempt to maximize the advantages and/or minimize the disadvantages?

BM: I think the B&W art has advantages in that it can be easier to read. Bad color can distract from the artwork and thus the story. I don’t think I could do a color book as well as I could a B&W book right now, until I gain more experience. But a well colored book can be mind blowing. I think the stuff that Laura DePuy, Moose Bauman and Paul Mounts produce is gorgeous — they really know how to set a mood with their color choices and themes. In attempting to maximize the advantages and/or minimize the disadvantages, I just try to apply the same principle of using more or less shading to create a mood or an atmosphere. I may not be able to show the reader the difference in the characters’ costumes, but hopefully the book will look better than if it were just B&W line art.

DT: When you say you ‘wanted to get the most out of the art’ in black and white, what exactly do you mean? Does using the graytones offer up any new storytelling tools that might be harder to use with line art? Or does it come down to the mood and atmosphere you mention?

BM: Most black & white comics are printed just that way: Black & white. Doing the gray tones allows a broader palette to work with. I admire the great artists who can use black & white effectively: Alex Toth, Steve Rude, Dave Lapham and Dave Sim to name a few off the top of my head. They know you to make the art interesting without any color or greys at all (well, Steve Rude used zip-a-tone, so he should get credit for cutting all that stuff out!) I find the tones just make my art look better than if it were just black & white. I can make things darker for scenes that take place at night, less if it’s a day scene. It does help the atmosphere.

DT: Does knowing that you’re going to tone the art yourself affect the way you do the line art itself? If so, how?

BM: It definitely does. For example, I won’t ink in a night sky because I know I’ll fill it in with a dark grey. I’ll do less shading on faces and skin, less texture on rocks, streets, metal, etc. because I know I can make it look better when I work on the pages in Photoshop.

DT: When you do line art and then give it to someone else to do full color on it, what kind of communication goes on between the penciller and the colorist? In an ideal world, how would the penciller, inker and colorist interact?

BM: When I did just pencil art, I would (and I know other pencillers do this) make notes in the margins to the colorist about if I’d want something a certain color, or if I wanted a certain line or set of lines to be changed to another color. In an ideal world, either the three artists (penciller, inker & colorist) are in phone contact, work in the same office, or they are the same person. I know there are times when I’ve picked up a finished issue of a book I worked on and been pretty disappointed by how the colorist finished the work. I’ve been pleasantly surprised in some cases, but that isn’t as common as the opposite reaction. I really like that I get to finish my own work. It stands or falls on its own merits.

DT: Could you perhaps describe in some detail how you go about creating the tones? What tools do you use, and when you’re looking at the page, what kinds of things are you thinking about?

BM: I’ll answer this assuming that the reader has a basic knowledge of Photoshop (which is all I really have anyway!). I basically use the Paintbrush, Pencil, Airbrush and Fill/Paint Bucket tools to do the basics. When I discovered how to use the Lasso and the Magic Wand tools, that opened up a world of possibilities in the art. You can get a variety of great effects by selecting an area and using the Gradient tool to create a blend of dark to light (or light to dark) tones that can help show a light source very well.

If I find I’ve toned a figure or panel and it isn’t dark enough, I can create a new layer, set it to Multiply and go over the art with a light Paintbrush to push the tones darker. I also like using the Motion Blur effect to create the illusion of movement. It gives panels a very cinematic appeal (see the bottom panel on page 5).

When I do the tones, I’m mostly thinking about light sources. I know painters do this more than line artists. I want to pick where the light source(s) are coming from and emphasize those. I also want to think about emphasizing or de-emphasizing foreground objects from background ones. I can do this by coloring one darker than another, or blurring one and keeping the other sharp. With line art, an artist usually puts a thicker outline around a foreground object and/or adds more spot blacks to it. It’s basically all about choosing where you want the readers’ eyes to go in the panel or the page.

DT: Any final thoughts?

BM: I hope people respond well to Planet of the Capes despite its lack of color. Larry Young and I hope that it has the same appeal as film noir — that the readers can use their imaginations to fill in the color if they so choose. I really enjoy the look of it and I hope it provides an alternative to the mainstream super-hero comics that are out there.

Laura DePuy is the colorist for CrossGen’s Ruse as well as the art director for Sequential Tart, an outstanding webzine that focuses on comics, including but not limited to the role of women as creators and characters. She has been a staff member at Wildstorm FX and a freelance colorist, working on books like Planetary, Authority, and JLA. Warren Ellis made a point of requesting her in his initial Planetary proposal, and I’m glad he did — her work makes that excellent book shine. Now, along with writer Mark Waid, penciller Butch Guice and inker Mike Perkins, she’s bringing the Victorian-esque world of Arcadia to life in Ruse, a highly entertaining mystery series. (Check out the cover to issue 2.)

DT: What motivated you to get into coloring? What motivates you to keep doing it?

LD: I was in my junior year at college, and as a graphic design major, I was looking at a possible career in advertising, print layout pre-press and/or presswork. Not a bad gig, if you can get it. But deep down inside, I really wanted to pursue something more artsy. Getting into comic books hadn’t even occurred to me, until a friend said, “Hey, you know . . . you could do comic books!” And suddenly, a light bulb went off . . . the world of illustration and digital painting opened up to me.

In some ways, the fine art aspect is what drives me. Digital painting gives me more of a creative outlet than graphic design. Painting is a chore in humility: the more you do it, the less you realize you know, and the more you strive to understand. The same goes for digital painting. I learn something new every day, and it’s never enough.

DT: What are the skills you needed to learn to do the job well? How did you go about learning them?

LD: Someone wishing to become a colorist really should start off with an inherent talent toward art. With that raw talent in place, anything else can be taught and honed with art classes, self-study, and plenty of practice. The first and foremost skill is the ability to visually interpret objects in space: a colorist must be able to create form and depth from a two-dimensional image. A good understanding of color theory is also necessary. And finally, a colorist should have some understanding of the pencilling and inking process, as he or she is not the sole artist on a project and therefore must be able to communicate with his or her penciller and inker to achieve the correct impact. Again, however, these skills can all be taught.

DT: When you first start on a page, what are the first things that go through your mind? What are the initial creative choices you make to set the direction for the finished product?

LD: The first thing I do is consult the script and/or the penciller. I’ll get the basics down: Who are these characters? What happened on the page before? What time of day is it, and where are the light sources? And perhaps the most important question: What mood and impact do I need to convey in this page? I might also seek out reference material if there’s something I’m unfamiliar with. Once I’ve got those pieces of information, I’ll approach the page very simplistically, blocking in the basic colors and establishing a color scheme for the scene. From there, it’s all in the details.

DT: What do you think comics readers should look for when they look at a page, in terms of coloring, in order to fully appreciate the work?

LD: What a great question! There’s so much to be appreciated. First and foremost, I’d like readers to appreciate the time and effort involved. I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard the phrase, “I don’t really pay attention to the coloring.” Ack! That’s like saying, “I don’t pay attention to the spices in the chili. I’m just there for the beans.” How can you NOT pay attention to the color!

Beyond that obvious request, though, I’d like to think that readers can appreciate when the coloring marries the art to the story, and describes the scene properly. Not everything is seen in “local” (natural) color. For instance, a sunset will tinge the whole world in oranges and pinks. A heavily overcast day will pull color out of the environment, leaving it gray and dull, whereas a bright sunny day will saturate the world with color. Colors aren’t “local” when viewed at night or in shadow. That’s the kind of sensitivity to scene lighting that I look for as a reader, and while I certainly don’t expect everyone to have as critical an eye as I have, I’d like to think that the everyday non-art-trained reader can appreciate the differences from one scene to another.

DT: What do you think differentiates ‘good’ from ‘bad’ coloring?

LD: See above. 🙂 All kidding aside, there are two things that separate a good colorist from the pack: one, the ability to create a mood, and two, the ability to define light sources and volume, to create depth and shadow where there was none. The first is based on color theory; the second, on visual interpretation of the black and white artwork. Beyond that is simply a difference in skill levels.

DT: What of your own works are you particularly happy with? What is it about those pieces that you like?

LD: The toughest ones are always the montage images, because there is no background, so there’s no point of reference with which to establish a space/volume relationship between the characters. I have a harder time getting those to “read” right, so when I have a successful piece, I’m quite thrilled. The covers to Stormwatch: Final Orbit and The Authority: Relentless were two of my favorites, as was the cover for JLA: Heaven’s Ladder.

Sometimes it’s a single element that makes the whole piece work. Miranda’s upper back on the cover of Ruse #2 sells that entire piece.

The fun ones are when there’s a very distinct, very harsh light source that obliterates all natural colors. The Authority #7 was a great example of that: one scene is lit entirely in yellows and greens, while the next is harsh reds and blues. It’s jarring, but it was a real lesson in dynamic lighting. That’s probably my favorite example.

DT: What do you need from your collaborators in order to do your job to the best of your ability? How well do you feel comics companies and creators have given colorists the support and respect they deserve?

LD: The best thing that I can ask for is feedback. I want the comic book to be a collaborative effort, where the penciller and inker both have an idea of what I can do in order to help them set up the page initially. Once the page is done, I like hearing back on it; I always learn something new about the penciller’s approach and thought patterns, so that I can incorporate that into the next page. If my interpretation of a scene is completely different from what they had in mind, I want to know.

Support and respect have been uphill battles — no doubt about that. But we’re gaining ground, thanks to some of the newer publishers accepting computer colorists as part of the creative staff. Prior to the advent of Photoshop, coloring was part of the production process. In some companies, that’s still how they’re interpreted. But as colorists improve their approach to both the comic and Photoshop, and creators recognize the difference between styles and colorists, and publishers realize the worth of a good colorist, our position in the comics industry improves.

DT: What impact has the CrossGen working environment had on your work? (Most CrossGen artists and writers work at the company’s Tampa studio, and extra time for artists is built into the production schedule.)

LD: I’d say the impact has been pretty noticeable. I’ve had the luxury of working very closely with other teams (Authority’s Warren Ellis/Bryan Hitch/Paul Neary and Planetary’s Ellis/John Cassaday), whom I got along with famously; but we never physically worked in the same area. Also, we fought the age-old deadline problem: for whatever reason, I would receive the script or the art late, which meant that I would have to work like crazy to meet the deadline. I was proud of the work I did, but I can only sit back and wonder how much better it would have been had I taken more time on each page.

At CrossGen, the proper amount of time was built into our schedules from day one. While I wouldn’t call our pace “leisurely,” as we (Butch, Mike, and I) work hard on every page, I’d say the schedule is much less hectic, leaving us to concentrate on doing the best work of our careers. I know it’s working for me. On top of that, the creative environment at CrossGen allows us all to experiment, to push our skills to the next level. It’s become a friendly, healthy competition among the creative staff; we’re all constantly trying to outdo each other. It’s a beautiful thing.

DT: What work by other colorists do you particularly enjoy? What appeals to you about those artists and those works?

LD: Oh wow, that’s a huge question. I feel bad naming names, because every colorist is an influence on me in some way, and I don’t want to leave anyone out.

Naturally, the CrossGen guys are great. They’re among the best in the field. And I’m not saying that because I work with them — I’ve had my eyes on these guys since they started publishing. They’re constantly experimenting with new media and styles; that’s what is really exciting about their work. I have to fight just to keep up with them!

Richard Isanove (Origins) continues to flabbergast me with his ever-changing approaches. He’s always five steps ahead of everyone. I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the work from the Hi-Fi guys (New X-Men) — they’ve really stepped up to the plate and are making the Marvel books look good. I don’t know how the coloring process goes, whether it’s digital or hand-done, but Ladronn’s work (Inhumans) just blows me away. Jeromy Cox (Promethea) has the most pure palette of anyone I know. And he does pretty clouds. And then there’s Snakebite (The Red Star), who is the only colorist so far who (in my opinion) can convincingly blend 2-D coloring with 3-D rendering.

There’s a whole slew of colorists whose work affects me: Chris Ware, Brian Haberlin, Lynn Varley’s work on 300, the European painters for Metabarons and Raptors, and on and on. I really can’t name them all, and I know I’m forgetting someone major, so I’ll just stop here and say that there are far more than I can possibly name in one sitting.

If you look at any comics sales chart, one thing you’ll notice is that color titles far outnumber those in black and white. This is far from an earth-shattering observation, as the same holds true of movies and television. In most cases, though, movies and TV shows are filmed in color in the first place, and when someone tries to transform a black and white film into a color one . . . well, purists get kind of nervous. Most comics start out as black-and-white pencil-and-ink, so someone has to put the color in. That someone is a colorist, an artist whose contribution to the comic is often overlooked, even as the artform of coloring itself has grown tremendously over the last decade.

Up until the late 80s and early 90s, most of the most popular color titles were printed on inexpensive newsprint, so they had the quality and durability you would expect from your local paper — namely, not too much. Inks got smeared, pages were flimsy, and sometimes the things were darn near illegible. This inevitably affected the quality of comic book color. Comics (and most other publications) are printed in a four-color process, in which four dyes are mixed together to produce all the color that you see. This is often referred to as CMYK printing, for the four dyes in question: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black; a printed page actually goes through four presses, one for each color. (If you’ve ever seen a newspaper with a color photo that looks like one of those old 3-D movies, with a ‘halo’ of one color or another, it’s because the page wasn’t lined up perfectly as it went through one of the presses.) Each pass puts a series of dots on the page, which hopefully blend together to create the variety of colors we perceive. The smaller the dots, the better the blending. In the case of those old newsprint comics, the dots were often quite noticeable, and because the paper couldn’t hold much ink, the color was often faded.

Furthermore, the colorist could never be sure that his or her work would be exactly reproduced. The colorist might use paints or markers to color a black and white copy of the line art, but that colored page would then be broken down into a set of instructions for each of the four presses by a separator. These instructions could not be very complex — the printer could fill all of a given area with a particular color, fill half of it with the color, or fill a quarter of it. Colorists and separators only had a total of 64 combinations available, so subtle gradations in tone were impossible. (In contrast, my computer monitor can display millions of different colors, and even the stripped down ‘web-safe’ palette in my web design software includes 256.) Even when comics publishers used a higher quality paper to achieve brighter, more vibrant color, they were still limited to those 64 colors. Comics color, therefore, was very flat.

Today, better paper quality and advances in scanning and reproduction mean that the colorist’s work can be transferred directly to the printing presses. Separators are not confined to the 64 combinations anymore, and those colorists who work digitally can actually prepare their own separations, ensuring greater fidelity to the colorist’s vision. Pages can hold more ink, so colors can be deeper, more saturated, and more vibrant. The flat colors that used to be the end product are now only the beginning, as colorists can enhance the artwork with highlights, shadows, subtle gradations in tones, and special effects such as lens flares. In fact, some colorists employ assistants or subcontractors called flatters to handle the initial stages of the process. (Check out this side-by-side comparison of comic colors from different periods to see the difference.)

To fully realize the potential of this technology requires a highly talented artist, whether the colorist uses ‘traditional’ paints or does the work digitally through Photoshop as many of today’s colorists do. Either way, the colorist must be keenly aware of how light interacts with the world to create our color perceptions, and translate that awareness onto the page in a way that preserves (or enhances) the visual information needed to develop the narrative while also connecting to the reader on an emotional level.

“Bad color can distract from the artwork and thus the story,” says Brandon McKinney, a penciller who uses Photoshop to add gray tones to his line art, in essence ‘coloring’ the book in black and white. (The effect can be seen in the upcoming AiT/Planet Lar graphic novels Planet of the Capes and Switchblade Honey.) “But a well colored book can be mind blowing. I think the stuff that Laura DePuy, Moose Bauman and Paul Mounts produce is gorgeous — they really know how to set a mood with their color choices and themes.”

There’s more to the color theory that colorists must grasp than I could ever hope to describe, but there are three key factors, or colormaking attributes, that must be considered. (Check out handprint, an excellent resource, for more info on color theory.) Hue is what we would call the actual basic color itself. Value is the amount of light reflected or sent to the eye by a colored object — the lightness or darkness of the color. Finally, saturation is the intensity of the color — how deep or pure we believe it to be. The artist must know how to balance these variables to create the proper effects.

“There are two things that separate a good colorist from the pack,” says Laura DePuy, colorist of CrossGen’s Ruse. “One, the ability to create a mood, and two, the ability to define light sources and volume, to create depth and shadow where there was none. The first is based on color theory; the second, on visual interpretation of the black and white artwork.”

While colorists’ achievements are impressive, the comics industry itself has not been so quick to recognize the talents and contribution of these artists. If you look at the cover of most comics today, the writer, penciller and inker are usually credited, but not the colorist (or the letterer, for that matter, but that’s a topic for another time). There are exceptions — Warren Ellis makes a point where possible to credit the colorist on his books, and CrossGen Comics credits the colorist on all its titles. But they are few and far between.

This might seem like a trivial issue, but it’s one that fundamentally shapes the way people look at comics. I admit, until I kept seeing Laura DePuy’s name on the cover of Planetary, or Caesar Rodriguez’s on Sojourn, I tended to think of colorists as an afterthought — a necessary part of the production, and capable of doing some fine work, but not really a ‘creator’ in the same way as the penciller. Looking back, I realize that’s ridiculous. Just look at this month’s cover image. As great as Bryan Hitch’s pencils are, Paul Mounts’ colors are essential to the impact of that picture. (See a side by side comparison of the two pieces.)

Unfortunately, I’m not the only person to come to such ridiculous conclusions.

“I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard the phrase, ‘I don’t really pay attention to the coloring,'” says DePuy. “Ack! That’s like saying, ‘I don’t pay attention to the spices in the chili. I’m just there for the beans.’ How can you NOT pay attention to the color!”

It’s not merely a question of credit or recognition, important as those things are. The nature of comics today is such that many artists are freelancers, working far apart and sending pages around through FedEx or swapping digital files. The vision of pencillers, inkers and colorists don’t often get the chance to fully mesh, which can lead to communication breakdowns and other problems. As the last people to touch the art, colorists are often expected to make up lost time or clean up any lingering mistakes. (The message board at Comic Colors — another nice website with tutorials and other coloring info — is full of the late-night posts of colorists trying to stay coherent long enough to meet a deadline.)

“Ever hear of the ‘we’ll fix it in post’ attitude?” asks Red Star colorist Snakebite. “Well, in comics colorists are considered ‘post.’ I’m not saying colorists are key, but we’re damn close to it. Colorists are artists and should be treated like one. Anywhere you see a penciller credit or inker, you should see a colorist.”

“Without colorists everything would be black and white . . . I’m not bitter, I’m just aggressive and tell it like it is. I see a shift of the attitude. More artists are making themselves more savvy and therefore more compassionate to our position in the creating process . . . now if we could only get the editors to see the light of day.”

For more in-depth conversations with the colorists quoted in this article, and samples of their work, check out the full Q-and-As.

Laura DePuy
Brandon McKinney
Paul Mounts
Snakebite

One of the critical elements of pragmatism and of Not News’ overall philosophy is that nothing exists in a vacuum; the connections between events, ideas, statements and people add shadings of meaning beyond what we can find in ‘the thing itself.’ Without trying to, I discovered a vivid example of this recently while reading through some graphic novels I recently purchased, a group that included Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning Maus and Joe Sacco’s American-Book-Award-winning Palestine. Those accolades should make clear that each is a tremendous work on its own; each is a nonfiction narrative with great emotional power. Reading them so close together, however, hit me especially hard, due to their thematic connections and shared contexts.

Maus is a fascinatingly multi-leveled story. It is a recounting of Spiegelman’s father Vladek’s recollections of his life as a Jew in German-occupied Poland and in Auschwitz. It is also the story of Spiegelman’s relationship with his father during the conversations in which he tells his son the stories over a period of several years. Yet further, it also becomes at times the story of Spiegelman’s efforts to finish the story years later, after his father has died and after the initial chapters of the story (which was originally published in serial form) were published to great acclaim.

All of this is done with deceptively simple art that features anthropomorphized animals rather than humans as characters — Jews are depicted as mice, Germans as cats, Americans as dogs, Poles as pigs, and so on. While some have complained that the device smacks of racial and ethnic stereotyping (especially in the case of the Poles), I found it to be effective, at least for an American audience long familiar with such anthropomorphic characters as Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse. In much the same way that the violent antics of Looney Tunes don’t quite seem real, Spiegelman’s cats and mice give us a little bit of emotional distance from the horrors of the events depicted. Given the intensity of those events, that can be necessary, and lets the reader absorb more of what the characters are saying as the emotions that Spiegelman infuses into these characters. (As for the stereotyping, I didn’t find it to be much of a problem. As someone of partial Polish descent, the pigs did throw me off for a moment. At the same time, whether it’s the alliteration or my association of my Polish roots with pork roasts, kielbasa and the like, or something else entirely, it also somehow seemed to fit. More importantly, the animal avatars are purely a visual device — Spiegelman no more portrays the Poles as being like pigs than he does the Americans as being like dogs.)

The accounts of Spiegelman’s meetings with Vladek are more than a mere framing device; they are as essential as the Holocaust recollections. Here, Spiegelman is either brutally honest or lacking in storytelling skill, or perhaps both. There is clearly tension between the two Spiegelmans; it seems apparent that if Spiegelman were not working on his comics project, he would not want to have much, if anything at all, to do with his father. In depicting this tension, Spiegelman often comes off as immature and self-centered; he is unwilling to go to his father’s house to help him replace storm windows, and he calls his father a murderer when he finds out that Vladek destroyed the journals that his mother (who had long ago committed suicide) had kept during her time in the camps. Spiegelman tries to portray Vladek as a difficult man, demanding and even cruel to others and frugal to the point of miserliness. In most cases, though, I found a lot more to like in the father than in the son, and he didn’t strike me as any more set-in-his-ways or difficult than many of the other people I know of that generation, and it is clear that he loved his first wife and that he loves his son. Whatever causes Spiegelman to view his father the way he does, it does not come across clearly on the page, even as so many other parts of the story do.

A few weeks after I read Maus I picked up Palestine, a relatively recent collection of Sacco’s series from the early 1990s about his two months in the Israeli-occupied territories in the early stages of the intifadeh (or uprising). Trained as a journalist, Sacco bounced from town to town, refugee camp to refugee camp, trying to collect as many stories as possible from the Palestinians. While Sacco provides some details to set the historical context, Palestine does not attempt to be a thorough treatment of the history of the region or the root causes of the conflict, nor is he concerned with achieving the dispassionate ‘here’s one side of the story, now here’s the other side with equal time’ attitude that is usually considered to be ‘objective’ news reporting. He is concerned with truth and with facts, but he also makes clear that he believes that the American audience has thus far received a one-sided view of the Palestinian issue and that he hopes to do at least a little to rectify that.

In doing so, Sacco doesn’t spend too much time with any one group of people, and so it’s somewhat difficult to really identify with many. It is not impossible, however, and that’s a testament to Sacco’s writing and drawing skill. He distills each person’s story to its essential details without leaving out emotional resonance, conveying rage, despair, grief and hatred in an atmosphere of violence, poverty and injustice. The description of conditions in the Ansar III prison camp, or of the efforts of Israeli soldiers to coerce confessions from prisoners, are vivid for being relatively brief.

Morever, his detailed and realistic landscapes and surroundings contrast with a more distorted, almost cartoon-like depiction of human beings, with facial features (especially mouths) getting increased emphasis. In part because we don’t get immersed in any one person’s story, Sacco’s hyper-realism is as well-suited to his story as Spiegelman’s abstract simplicity is to the highly personal Maus. Sacco also makes liberal use of captions to provide narration for the story, and unlike the tidy rectangles that many comics raders might be used to, these caption boxes often seem to fall haphazardly over the page, graphically demonstrating his disjointed and hurried stream of thought while going through security checkpoints, smuggling illegal videos from house to house, or trying to figure out what exactly he is trying to accomplish so that he can explain it to the skeptical Palestinians who have come to distrust the West and its media.

As I’ve said, Palestine on its own is a tremendous work, one that I can’t recommend highly enough. But reading it so soon after I read Maus at times filled me with a sense of despair. To see Jews with the Star of David sewn onto their coats harassed, interrogated and tortured by German soldiers, and then to see Israeli soldiers take Palestinians from their homes, beat them, and hold them in squalid prisons without trials while trying to force them to sign confessions was truly disheartening. I kept thinking of George Santayana’s warning that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it, and I found myself wanting to scream ‘Have we learned anything?’ In the weeks since, as I look at today’s environment of us vs. them ideologies and wars on terror, I still wonder if we have . . . or worse, if we have learned the wrong lesson.

KO: Was Columbus a good town to work in?

JH: I don’t think anything would have happened the way it did if I hadn’t been in Columbus. I really attribute it not only the owners of The Laughing Ogre, but the environment, and the fact that there was this place with friendly people who were interested in the work and what I was doing, and who were plugged into all this independent alternative stuff, and all of this mainstream stuff, to the point that they offered a legitimate perspective. Those guys were all so very helpful. They’re not comics pros, but these are the guys that I would actually show the stuff to, other than my wife and my best friend Jeff. Their encouragement helped quite a bit too. I sold 600 issues maximally. I peaked at about 640 on the third, fourth and fifth issues of Clan Apis, and I think 100 of those were sold at The Laughing Ogre. It’s astonishing the effects a store can have just by saying, “You should look at this.” The Ogre is a kind of place that will recommend a DC book that they like, and they’ll recommend a no-name alternative book that’s on its first issue. If it’s good, they will point it out. I think that’s the strength of the store. I think that’s why they make a lot of money for a comic store. At some level, I have to believe that Clan Apis is good. Once it gets into people’s hands, and they give it a chance, I think the majority of people say, “You know what? I like this.”

KO: In some way the industry supports that as well, in that since it’s still kind of struggling, people just starting out might be given more of a chance than they would in TV or film or publishing.

JH: One of the things I used to do was I used to point out when a book was coming out. I would hype it on the usenet groups. What you have there, and I think in comic shops across the nation, and in magazines like Comics Journal, you have not only an acceptance, but a yearning to find something new and different that’s good. I mean, there’s a difference between new and different that sucks, and new and different which is good. I think that people are looking, and people want to be entertained, and readers are much more open to giving people a chance. It’s still not that big a chance, but I think that Clan Apis really took off and started to do well. My numbers went up from my first issue. I’ve always been told that that’s unusual. I’ve always been told: Big first issue, and then drop-off. And I had dreaded that through word-of-mouth in the industry. And then people like Neil Gaiman were saying in interviews that they really liked Clan Apis. Alex Robinson mentioned Clan Apis. People who don’t know me being kind enough to say things like that — that has, at some level, a really significant impact in this industry, because it is so small, and it is so tight-knit.

KO: What do you read now?

JH: I’ve really cut back on my pull. I read Bone, I read — I’m trying to think of what I just got. Castle Waiting. Dork. I love Evan Dorkin, dystopic and depressed as he can be sometimes.

KO: Milk and Cheese is definitely something that’s not for all ages.

JH: No. It is not. There’s a book called The Wiggly Reader, by John Kerschbaum, that I really like. Usually anything by Jim Ottaviani, which is great. Rachel Hartman’s Amy Unbounded. I just read Box Office Poison, which I loved. And From Hell. And I’m a huge Stan Sakai fan. I love Usagi Yojimbo. That’s one of my favorite books, and I’ve said this to him. There’s a story in there that was really one of the major inspirations for Clan Apis. The story opens with a sequence demonstrating how the samurai swords are made. The constant folding of the metal. And I thought, “Wow. Here’s sequential art, it’s a fundamental element of the plot — it’s also taught me something.” I enjoy Akiko. The Wiggly Reader is adult fare, it’s pretty sick humor. I’m trying to think what else. I like Murder Me Dead. Stray Bullets. I’ve been reading some Spider-Man lately, mostly because of J. Michael Straczynski. I’m a huge Babylon 5 fan. I love Hellboy. It’s just fun.

Not a lot of ongoing books, but graphic novels, like Stuck Rubber Baby. I just handed a big pile to another faculty member here. She grew up reading ElfQuest, so I wanted to hand over a few things that she might be into. I love Rich Geary’s Treasury of Victorian Murders. Hate. I loved Hate, which is not kiddie fare by any stretch of the imagination. There was The Replacement God by Zander Cannon, who’s doing a lot of work with Alan Moore these days. One of the things I find interesting is that there’s a fair bit of fantasy in there, and I’m not much of a fantasy buff. So it’s not so much genre.

KO: There seems to be kind of an overarching philosophy in what you write that says “You’re special, but you’re still a cog in the machine.”

JH: The philosophy I always keep in mind is this: Reality is so much more interesting, and at times more painful, as recent events have taught us, than most of the made-up stuff. I’ve already admitted to liking Babylon 5, so the whole concept of aliens is fun. But we live in a world obsessed with concepts like that, like pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo. We drape ourselves in it, we wrap ourselves in it, we call it philosophy. And these are the same kinds of people sometimes that really don’t have any fundamental idea of how the world works. And as a biologist, you can’t help but be just blown away by how the world works. The way in which individual organisms have adapted to environment. The enormous history that this planet has. And when you accept as I have the concept of evolution — and when I say “accept,” it makes it sound like a religious thing, and it’s not; obviously firm scientific evidence is the best explanation for what we see — you have to recognize that you are this point in this continuum that has existed for four and a half billion years on this planet. Each of us is very special in that we are unique. We have this big brain that confers upon us this consciousness, and that consciousness is shaped by our invariably different experiences. So we are unique.

But we have a habit sometimes of equating uniqueness with deification. Each chimpanzee is unique, but it’s not a god, it’s not divine. We spend our time being awed by the quote-unquote miraculous — which oftentimes is just coincidental — and we ignore the marvelous, which is all the awe-inspiring things in nature. I’ve got this story I want to do in which we trace a photon of light which leaves a star four billion light-years away, at the same time the Earth is forming. And it’s flying in a trajectory toward the Earth. And it’s heading in, it’s heading in. And you sort of draw the story in parallel, above and below. And below is this sequence of Earth changing and yada yada yada, and evolution, blah blah blah. And you get to the point where the photon of light reaches its destination, which is the fortuitous turning of someone looking toward the sky, and it popping onto their retina, and turning on a photoreceptor, and having that register. The payoff here is that the person actually appreciates it. The person says, “Whoa. That star, that light that I’m looking at, is older than I. It could be older than the Earth.” It’s amazing little marvelous elements like that in nature that we don’t spend any time, or we spend very little time, marveling at. It’s not cool, it’s geeky. Whereas it’s really cool if we imagine dinosaurs coming back to life today, and eating people. That is cool, K-E-W-L cool. A lot of my work is the recognition that we are unique, but that we are part of this ongoing drama that really is writing itself as it goes. And there’s all this amazing stuff around us, and we’ve got all these other players in this drama who have eked out very unusual existences. There are all these different strategies that life has taken to survive. The point is that we’re all unique but we’re also connected.

KO: And we’ll see that coming back in The Sandwalk Adventures?

JH: I hope so. For me, the concepts of coming to terms with different ideas and facing your position in the scheme of things, and being content with that — maybe content’s the wrong word — having appreciation for the role you play, that’s going to be playing out with the follicle mite. And Darwin is going to be in a position where he’s the grand master, the storyteller.

KO: When you look at Cow-Boy these days, how do you think of it?

JH: I still like it. It still makes me laugh.

KO: You don’t look at Cow-Boy now the same way you look at your older strips?

JH. No. Uh-uh. There are things I look at and say, “I’d change that. I could have stood to re-draw this, or paste that better,” but you invariably look at things and find things that you would fix or do differently. But so far, it’s one of those things that I’m really proud of.

KO: What kind of choice was self-publishing for you? Have you ever considered trying to go to a bigger publishing company? Would you do it full-time?

JH: There’s a part of me that would love to write books, and with comic books, I’m releasing a book in installments. So a collection isn’t an endpoint, it’s the goal. But I’d love to write books for the rest of my life, but I also love being in the classroom. So as far as full-time — No, I haven’t really entertained that seriously. And in self-publishing — and this is not a disparaging comment on those that do — I never wanted to write somebody else’s characters. I’ve been always very proprietary about the things I write and draw. And the other thing is, if I were at a big publisher, I’d have to make a decision, probably. I wouldn’t be famous enough to write and draw. The bottom line is, too, that I’m not a good enough artist to be at a place like that. I have to do my own thing and do my own style and not worry about the specifics of house style or whatever. So that never was a goal of mine. Self-publishing feels like the only avenue. And I feel compelled to place the caveat here that the money hasn’t been mine, the money has been Daryn’s. I’ve sort of just done the creative thing. And it’s been tremendously valuable for me because I’m not a businessman, nor do I have any interest in that. So we share the revenues from the work.

But I have a real problem being told what to do. It’s a good thing that I’m an academic, because the course is mine to make exactly the way I want to do it. I don’t take direction very well, except from Lisa and Max. And mom and dad, I can handle that as well. But I don’t, and I tend to feel like, when it comes to writing a story, I know what’s best for my story. And I’ve taken one piece of advice on structuring a story. It was from Lisa. And I only admit this because it was really good advice. It was the fourth issue of Clan Apis. And you know how that opening sequence ends with Nyuki saying “Isn’t this great?” and that sort of segues into her working on the comb? I was going to have that be the first page, and have the whole (foreign bees invading the hive) conflict thing happen later on. The way it works is that I would write out the stories and I would read them to Lisa. This is when we were living in Columbus. She would come in, and I’d say “I need you to listen to this, it doesn’t feel like it’s got the right oomph.” And she said I should put the whole fight thing at the beginning. And I sort of looked down, angry that I hadn’t thought of it myself. I was unwilling to admit that that was exactly what I was going to do, since I’ve developed a pretty firm reputation with her for not listening to what she tells me. And that made it a really good story, but for the most part I chafe a little bit at being told what to do. So self-publishing is the only option for someone who’s as fussy as me.

KO: As you went through this, did you feel you were sort of going it alone in terms of breaking into the industry?

JH: I know a lot of people in the industry now, and email and talk to a lot of people who I really like and look forward to seeing at shows. But before Clan Apis finished, it wasn’t until it finished did I consider myself a participant in the industry. When people read it, and thought it was good, that was sort of my ticket into the dance. Before that, people were really nice. But in all fairness, I was some unproven person. And it’s tough for me to ask for help. What that left us with was me trying to figure it out on my own. Daryn and I didn’t really become partners until we did the Clan Apis trade. I got the Xeric Award for the first issue, and I published all the other issues myself, although he did step in once when I didn’t get the invoice and covered my costs on the second issue. But it wasn’t until we were done with it that I started talking to people. I didn’t make too many horrible blunders. But not really, I didn’t really have guidance on the way. And that’s not me saying “oh, boo-hoo me,” because I really didn’t ask for it, and I really didn’t know anybody.

KO: Would you do it the same way if you could do it over again?

JH: Yeah. I applied for the Xeric Award, and it’s nice to have that award. A lot of great books have gotten a start, or have gotten attention, with the Xeric Award. Jim Ottavianit’s Two-Fisted Science, which I love — great book — is a Xeric work. There’s a whole long list of them, and of course I can’t remember anybody’s names right now. So that was nice. It was nice to have that recognition, because ultimately, that was a group of people who didn’t know me, a funding organization that was reviewing my first issue. I hadn’t really shown it to anybody, and I was pretty unsure. And to have someone like Peter Laird and his group say, “Hey, this is good. We’re gonna give this money.” I’d have to say that was the one sort of industry pat on the back that gave me the boost to have the confidence to do it. I’m at heart not a very confident person, and some would say borderline neurotic. I don’t know that that makes me much different from many other cartoonists. But I approach things with trepidation, and the assumption that it’s not all that great. So that was nice. That was the one big pat on the back. I met Jeff Smith for the first time at the Chicago Comicon, and shamelessly dropped my name as doing the Cow-Boy strip, which he apparently liked. And he was impressed, or acted impressed. So that was a nice boost too. It’s just little things like that, little nudges like that, that keep you going.

KO: Your first book, Cow-Boy, was published by The Laughing Ogre, a comic shop in Columbus, Ohio. Did you get your start in Columbus?

JH: I was a cartoonist as a little kid. I drew as a little kid. I think I remember my first gig being the Crestview seventh grade yearbook, where I did some spot illustrations. I did them in pencil, and I though it was insulting — I don’t know what my problem was — I thought it was insulting for someone to say I had to trace them in ink. Pencil wasn’t good enough. I still had the same stupid mentality my freshman year in college, when I submitted some cartoons to the newspaper there and they said “Well, they’re okay, and we’ll accept them if you go over them in ink,” and I was like, “I don’t think so,” which just demonstrated that I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. But my sophomore year is really when I got my start, and that was when I wrote a cartoon in the first newspaper of the year, and it was just the most awful thing in the world. And it was really poorly drawn, and there was no indication at that point to me that I could be funny, but I knew that I could draw better than that, and so I submitted my cartoons, and they were accepted, and that ran twice a week.

KO: A regular strip?

JH: It was an editorial cartoon called Under the Bubble. Most colleges talk about being in a bubble or cut off from the world, and there was this thing called the DePaul Bubble, so that was what it was called. I took it as an opportunity to make puns when I wanted to, to make political comments when I wanted to, and it was very open, very free form, and in the end, not that good.

KO: Why do you say that?

JH: My wife and I were actually talking about this last night. When I went to graduate school I had a weekly strip for five years called Spelunker. Looking back on those strips, you kind of go ooooh, aw. God. We were talking about the fact that when you are developing as a cartoonist or an illustrator or a storyteller or whatever, you have to have just the right balance between two things: Self-criticism, so you actually get better, and self-delusion, so that you think that what you’re doing at the time is actually pretty good. I look at strips that I did when I was in graduate school, and I remember finishing the strip, saying “Man, that is good. I can get better, but that is good. I’m really happy with that.” There would be strips I would leave sitting out on the drawing board for a few days so that I could admire them. “Mmm, that is good.” And you look at them now, and you’re like “Ho-lee smokes, that is bad.” And so it’s that balance between the two that keeps you going, and keeps you muddling through, and hopefully, you haven’t been discouraged. I had the great fortune of being surrounded by people who liked me enough to lie to me. Well, not all the time, but were very supportive. I wasn’t getting dinged and dissed, and on top of that I had a publishing outlet — in this case, two college newspapers. You have that learning that goes back and forth balancing between those two things. I was a graduate student until ’95 at Notre Dame and then I stayed for a year and a half, just to get some teaching experience.

It was at that time, and just a little bit before, that I started doing Cow-Boy, which was a strip that ran in Comics Buyers’ Guide weekly. I was getting to the point there at the end when I was teaching after I had gotten my degree that the whole three-panels-punchline shtick was just, number one, I didn’t feel I was very good at it, and number two, it was just tedious. And I wanted to do something longer and I wrote and drew a story called “Escape from Womb World,” which was the first Cow-Boy story. I did it because it was a biology thing. I did it because it was a superhero spoof. You don’t get any more origin than that — that’s the very first thing that can happen. And then I did “The Pernicious Peril of the Plummeting Plane.” Those whole sell-your-soul kind of stories have always been kind of — well, since I don’t believe in the devil, it’s always been kind of silly.

KO: And for something as lighthearted as Cow-Boy, it’s a pretty intense philosophical situation.

JH: Yeah, the thing is that — I don’t know if this distinction exists, but it exists in my mind — Cow-Boy was never a parody, it was a satire. Which, to me, I don’t know if Webster’s defines them as different things, but to me they’ve always been different things. X-Farce, that’s a parody. Swift’s “Modest Proposal,” that’s a satire. And so I always thought you could make a serious comment about something and still laugh. That was what a lot of those things were. “The Mighty Morphin Mutton Monster” — that was a comment on mob mentality, and how easy and seductive it can be. And of course there were things in there that were utter fluff. And you could argue that it’s all fluff. But once I started doing those long-form things, I could start playing with ideas that you really can’t address in a strip. I could start being serious every once in a while. The humor in my work, where it exists, seems to me on my own analysis to be not punchlines and zingers, but stems from a character saying something in character that’s funny. So I’m not spending a whole lot of time setting up the joke. I’m just having someone be themselves, and that itself is funny.

Which is the type of funny we encounter every day. We don’t go through life setting up jokes strategically to get our friends, we crack wise, and we make fun of the people we know best, because we know them best. That’s the type of humor that I like to write, and you can’t really do that in a four-panel strip. Unless you’ve been around like Charles Schultz was, for decades, and you have firmly-established characters. But anyway, I went to Columbus with a couple of those stories, and I got to know the guys at the Ogre, and they were very encouraging, and said, “Why don’t you do a book?” and it was one of the owners who footed the bill, and has actually become my business partner as far as Clan Apis and The Sandwalk Adventures and Active Synapse in general. But it was when they said, “Hey, we should do this book,” that I thought about putting more stories together. And then once I had the comic book out there, there’s just no way I’m gonna go back to that short form stuff.

KO: Are you hoping to achieve that with The Sandwalk Adventures as well?

JH: Well, Sandwalk has potential to be much higher profile, because it deals with Darwin and it deals with evolution. And because those two things are so contentious. Part of the desire to produce The Sandwalk Adventures is because I’m a Darwinophile, and the other part is that this argument, to me, doesn’t need to be as contentious as it is. In fact, in the United States, we’re notorious for it being so, well, awful. I deal with Preemie Print and Litho in Canada, and Kevin Johnson works there and handles my covers. We were talking about my covers one day, and he had seen the interiors and read it. And he asked me, “Is this going to be a problem down in the States?” And it occurred to me, that here is someone from another country, who speaks English, that’s European, essentially. They don’t have this problem. They don’t view Darwin as a threat to anything. And yet we have entire school systems in our country — states, you know, Kansas as well — where it’s not required. My wife’s a teacher, and we know that when you say something’s not required, then you have tests that are testing children’s knowledge, the required things don’t really get addressed. Ninety percent of all biologists will tell you that evolution is the key framing element of biology. And so I guess in some ways, aside from my Darwinophilia, the other goal in The Sandwalk Adventures is to contribute an explanation of evolution that’s relatively straightforward, that’s simple without being simplistic, and that can at least educate those that may not believe that evolution occurs. Because so much of the argument on either side springs from either an inadvertent or willful misrepresentation and misunderstanding of the other side. And so I just want to contribute: “Here is what I know. I’m a biologist.” Of course there’s another part of me that wants to find a place to have it banned someplace, because when something gets banned, the sales go through the roof.

KO: Well, here’s hoping. Let’s talk about you having two jobs. How do you compare and contrast your roles as writer and artist with your roles as teacher and scientist?

JH: I find them to be very similar. During the day, I spend the day researching. When you talk about being a lecturer at a small college, your primary responsibilities, at least during the year, are teaching. In the summer we get to do research, and I’ll get to do a little more research during the year once I get more established. But during the year, it’s primarily teaching, and in order to teach, you have to prepare a lecture, and in order to prepare a lecture, you have to read reference material, you have to distill certain elements, and you have to write the lecture. Usually it’s an outline. For me, at least. Oftentimes, you have to illustrate it in some way. You have to pull up images to illustrate your point, to use in your PowerPoint slides, to show to your students. And so in reality, writing a lecture is writing a story that’s illustrated and has a plot that fits within the allotted 50 minutes.

Doing The Sandwalk Adventures is very similar. I have a story that has to fit within 22 pages. I have to illustrate it. It has to have a plot. Just like in a classroom lecture, you have objective points that you have to cover in that 50 minutes, I have objective points that I want to cover in those 22 pages. And so one informs the other in helping me construct lectures and to write stories. I think the big difference is that I get paid to teach, and that’s what most of my time is spent doing. And with my son, and we actually have another one on the way, the amount of time to do cartooning dwindles. And so I’ve actually changed the way in which I did it. With Clan Apis, each issue I’d probably write about eight pages, then I’d draw those pages, then I’d write the next eight pages and I’d draw those pages. Now what I do is I write the entire story, and then once I’ve got the story I draw piecemeal through the day and then sometimes in the evening when I get a half hour or 45 minutes here or there to finish things off.

But being an academic has really helped me with this Darwin story. And the Darwin story has actually helped me to be a better academic, because what I’m doing is history, and history’s hard. I mean, biology’s hard, but history’s hard. You have all these resources, and you’ll never have enough. I’ll never do it in the depth that a true historian does, so I have twelve references where they have twelve hundred. And so you’re confronted with situations of determining which references are reliable, which is something you do when you prepare a lecture or write a paper. You’re faced with the question of “Do I have enough information on this to go ahead?” So they really complement each other.

KO: Do you use Clan Apis in the classroom?

JH: I have.