Knightfall Interview

I was interviewed on SYFYWIRE about my time on the Batman comic from the whole Knightfall  event, check it out!

Baltimore and More

Last weekend I attended the annual Baltimore Comic Con and had a blast! First I got to see my best buddy Bret Blevins for the first time in the flesh since 2010! Last year he was going to come but broke his collar bone-but luckily no bones were broken to stop this meeting.

                                               Bret, Jamar and myself at a power breakfast

I also just like this show because Marc Nathan and crew do it right, there are plenty of pros and just a few TV/Movie types so the focus is on comics and so we get lots of people who are readers and not like the Wizard shows which is mostly a bunch of people looking for prints, autographs, etc., and who are not readers. I also love this show because I get to see many pros I like and admire like Tom Palmer, Garcia Lopez, The Simnsons and more. Up early for breakfast and you can talk to guys like Neal Adams or Howard Chaykin and dinners are great too. Its so great to talk to Tom and hear about the good old days at Marvel and his experiences there and in advertising as well.

                                                   The amazing and gracious Tom Plamer

I checked into the hotel on Thursday but worked till about 3PM on Friday as I had to deliver my week's worth of strips, which I had inked but had to letter and color. I knew Friday would be the slower day and deadlines are deadlines. I saw plenty of regulars at the show, fans and pros I see every year and did some nice sketches. I was so glad to get to meet and spend time with fellow Strip artist June Brigman and got to meet the great Joe Giella who retired from comics after 70 years! June and her hubby Roy have taken over Mary Worth from Giella and now belong to the trifecta of Marty Worth, Rex Morgan and Judge Parker.

 

Bret, June Brigman and me

The great Joe Giella and me

Unlike some cons, NYCC or Sandy Egoes this con you can stop and chat with people. I met a nice family from Belgium I did sketches for and another artist from France as well as Phantom and Judge Parker fans. I even brought along strips to show to a few who sat behind the table as we talked for a while. I rubbed Skull Rings with Alex Saviuk and long time pals Thom Zhaler and Steve Conely and hung with my other best bud Jamar Nicholas. My friends Will and Alina came down to share my room two nights so the could do the show.

I didn't attend any bar-nights or the Harvey Awards, but instead either had a nice dinner with friends or caught up on some sleep. I am not into awards at all but I heard Dean Haspiel gave a nice speech. I did reflect back on seeing the late Darwyn Cooke at the show last year and he came up and gave me a big hug--then a few months later he was gone--it does make you think about how precious time is as it flies along.

                              Man, what do I spy with my little eye looking up from a sketch...


I have to say I saw more female butt cheeks those 3 days than at any other show due to all the Harley's walking about---though seeing the little girls dressed up like that with their hiney exposed as well was actually disturbing. I'm no prude, but seeing girls under the tween age like that is kinda' wrong, if I had a daughter she'd have to dress as the regular Harley till she's of age---sorry!

I didn't shop for anything as I still have way too much crap here but I did score a fantastic pencil page by Garcia-Lopez---my hero!

Then it was all over except for a nice breakfast--then it was back up the road to Philly and back in the drawing chair to get the next week's Phantom in and onto more Judge P which I am finishing now,

I did try and do a digital plien air painting from my hotel window after the con as the sun set before we had dinner.

                   A Swamp Thing sketch that the buyer requested be in my "wind down style"

Francesco's first month on the strip and the ongoing "death of Sophie" story line continues to spin out with great response from readers--even some snarkers. It seems killing characters off gets peoples attention on a often sleepy strip like the Judge. But sleepy time is no more!! But all outstanding story lines are going to be wrapped up and by November we will be in a new age on the strip.

                                                                 A Ninjack Sketch

                                                                            Venom

                                     One fan even had a 23 year old Azbats sketch I did--Yikes!

One thing that always seems to remain consistent is many readers impatience for things to happen in the strip and they don't get the difference between comic strips and other media like movies, TV etc. Comics moves at a different pace, the one of your own CPU and its not a "push media" like TV. Its true the strip was slow, often too slow for my own tastes but a week can be only ten minutes in strip time, or a month depending on how it's written.

A Phantom week and Judge Parker week in production

Abbey and Sam drive to the accident scene which I imagine was maybe 60-90 minutes away, say from Philly to north Jersey. Thus it could be raining at my house and not across the Ben Franklin Bridge or even downtown Philly. I have seen it rain across the street out west, while my side was dry. I think when fans take things too literally they kind of ruin their own enjoyment and the fantasy.

We've never ever seen anyone go to the bathroom, nor hardly ever shower--but we assume they do. Wilson had a pace he inherited from LeDoux and Ces and I will work our own pace out as we go along, but I definitely want some characters to die off, some literally and fade out for a long while to give the strip more fire and drama. By my count there were 26 separate plots or sub plots that Wilson had laid out, most were dropped and moved  from or never resolved, so we are wrapping all of them up in a nice body bag. Its been great to get such nice private feedback from fans about the current story that I think I'll pitch another to Ces next year. Alien abduction perhaps...

I was even thinking of having some kind of contest for real JP fans where I'd give away a few originals as prizes. I'll have to put my thinking cap on in the next few weeks to work that out.

The Phantom The Bat and Supes

Here are a few more pages from the Tomb job for DD Digital. Here are my layouts and my pencils. I drew my layouts at print size, scanned them in, blew them up and worked over them on my lightbox for speed.

                                      And here is the last week's worth of the Phantom.

First Day In The Skull Cave

 Today marks my start on The Phantom as the regular artist on the daily strip as the torch is passed officially on the comics page from the late Paul Ryan to me. Its hard to still process that it all happened so fast, Paul passed away only two months ago and within a few days of his passing I was hired by King as his replacement and had to hit the ground running fast. Luckily Tony DePaul the long time Phantom scribe as well as the folks at King and fellow Phantom artist Terry Beatty who does the Sunday strip gave me as much help to get up to speed quickly as I came in on the very end of the current story line. I also did all of this while still keeping up on drawing Judge Parker.

This was exactly the same situation that lead me to get the Judge Parker strip when Eduardo Barreto passed away back in 2011. No artist likes to inherit work this way but the comic strips must go on and this situation is very similar to what happened to John Prentice jumping into the drawing chair on Rip Kirby when artist Alex Raymond was tragically killed driving Stan Drake's new sports car. King was is a panic to replace one the the greatest cartoonists ever on short notice.

I met Paul only once that I remember clearly at a con many years back though we rubbed shoulders at Marvel on books like Quasar with me following him on that book when he left to do other books like The Avengers and The Fantastic Four. Paul left us all a great legacy to enjoy and be inspired by for the ages with his art for Marvel and his long run on the Phantom.

I posted the pencils for today's first strip and the final versions and you can see there were some changes swapping the King and the Colonel. its hard to jump in on something like this and grab the characters and the feel of where the story is at and the actors as it were so I spent as much time as I could reading over the last several weeks of the story and Paul's art.

I also belong to s small club of artists who have also drawn both Batman and The Phantom. They include Jim Aparo, Terry Beatty, Don Newton, Carmine Infantino (As a Ghost for Sy Barry), Joe Giella ( Ghosting for Bob Kane), Graham Nolan, Paul Ryan and myself. That's pretty good company!

 

 Here is a recent commission just off the drawing board I completed for a fan of Bats and Killer Croc based on my cover for Batman 512. For now back to the drawing board!

Azbats Commission

Here is a recent commission re-creation of the splash page to Batman 500 alongside the original page itself.  I was super pumped to work on Batman back then, if not about having to draw Azbats. I really hated drawing that costume, mostly because I wanted to draw The Batman, not his replacement. Plus, how could he even walk across the floor without getting tangled on all those fins? But there was a lot of bad costume design going on in those days, but the good was that issue sold well over a million copies.

 

Here is a nice scan of the recreation. Its sort of strange to redo a comic piece for me and revisit my self artistically from over 20 years ago. I see things maybe I'd change now and the inking which I am still very happy with, but I suppose that's normal. I have more re-creations lined up to do, the next one is a redo of Darkhawk No. 1

Commission: Batman Zero Hour

Here is one of my latest commissions, a new version of the cover to Batman Zero Hour. Using the toothbrush for the splatter is fun, but it make your fingers dirty like Frankenstein's Monster!

Background Designs: Batman Beyond

 Here are some more rough designs for Batman Beyond for theChimera institute where people went for fashionable gene splicing--which of course went wrong and Batman had to kick some monster ass.

I'd start out with these quick sketches searching for cool shapes o start with, the biggest shapes first then smaller cool shape details. The idea is to create a great stage with interesting angles to stage the action. You can see my notes to George about what I was thinking.

I even played around with some quick logo ideas

 Sometimes the shapes would go from round to square in design as you can see from this first rough of the institute and the lab with tanks below.

Batman Zero Hour

 More from the Manley Archives! Here is the original cover sketch for batman 511, which I drew on the back of some fax paper--remember that stuff? How many trees died so I could fax stuff back and forth in the mid 90's? I haven't located the other sketches yet for this cover, but I'm slowly working to put my extensive----and I mean extensive amount of drawings, art and sketches in order. Of all of the Batman cover I did this was my favorite. The original is below.

I hated the fact that when I started the book Kelly Jones was doing the cover--I felt that since I was the artist on the book, I should do the covers as well---nothing against Kelly. But DC was always kinda' weird that way, one artist on the book, another on the cover. I was almost always disappointed as a kid when I'd buy a comic with a cool Adams or Cardy cover and the insides were not by the same artist. I think this is pretty much the way it is today, one artist on the cover and another on the guts. i don't really go to the comic shops or buy comics anymore, but when I stop in once or twice a year this seems to be the fashion. Comics are now way, way to expensive for their short entertainment value---but that's for another post.

This was brush and the good old Hunt 108. There is no logo dressing on this which for me is good as the covers at the time were kind of a mess with all kinds of logos and blurbs that really covered up the art.

Blast From The Past: Batman 511 Pencils

I figured I start 2014 by looking backward to around 1994, twenty years into the couldy past on some pencils from my run on Batman.  More pencils from my archives, this time from Batman 511 which was during the Zero Hour storyline. The last two issue of Batman were the only ones I truly enjoyed drawing besides Batman 500 because they were like old Batman comics. Robin, Batgirl, Joker, etc.  Most of the other issues I didn't enjoy so much for a variety of reasons.  The first was since all the books were tied together it was a reference pain in the keister! You had to get ref from what the other artists were doing, wait to get it and there was little freedom for you as an artist. This was in the day of the fax, long before the internet took over the world. It was more like being a hired gun then, no input as an artist, just draw monkeyboy. I wanted to really do single one or two issue stories like the ones I was a fan of, especially during Aparo's run. But that clearly wasn't going to happen. It lead me to eventually leave the book.

 But for a few issues it was fun. I wish I had  more time on these and could have inked them myself, but it was a real race at 3 pages a day at times to keep up with the schedule in those days. 12-13 weeks ahead of shipping! Now things can be late----super late---but back then the "Hot List" was a book 12 weeks from shipping. How things have changed!

 I lobed drawing the Joker the most, and I was definitely tipping the hat to Neal Adams version of the character which was my touch-tone for the character and the whole Batman Mythos as a kid.

There of course are a lot of things that bother me about the drawing now, but I think that's always the way it is looking back at 20-year-old work.

Superman-Batman layouts

Here are several pages of layouts I did last year for Jerry Ordway on Superman/Batman Worship to help with the old deadline doom.

Batman Brave and the Bold Character Design

here are a bunch of batman designs i did for an episode that had a spoof on comic con and the cosplay crowd.

Blasts from the Past

I came across two more old pieces on my G4 today while cleaning up stuff. one is a page of sketches of that Gen 13 character Roxy, and another old commission, this time of Batman, Ithink the buyer wanted this for his wife's office.