Interviewed By A Student

I agreed to do an interview by an illustration student for a school project, and thought it might be of interest to some folks here. I bashed this out because the student needed it back quickly, and I'm spinning a lot of plates right now. So, it's not exactly beautiful prose, but hopefully the ideas come through and make some sort of sense. I hope the student foesn't get an "F" because of me. 

1. Did you always wanted to pursue a career in the illustration industry?

I wanted to draw comics professionally as far back as I can remember. For a time I wanted to become an animator, which is what I studied at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, but film school made me realize that I preferred to work alone and have more control over my own projects. That led me back to a focus on comics, which I stumbled into sideways during a hiring frenzy in the mid -late 1980s. I managed to hang on and improve my craft and develop a career in comics. Eventually I ended up writing and providing artwork for a number of television shows, mostly animated series. I've never really thought of myself as an illustrator, I've done some book and magazine illustration work in the past, and some artwork for CD and album releases, but on the whole I've always considered myself a cartoonist, first and foremost. 

2. What is your process of work?

For a comic book or drawing assignment I usually start with a series of rough layouts or sketches, usually done in color pencil, usually using a Prismacolor Col-Erase red or blue. This is something held over from when I was studying animation, the different color pencil lines allow me to separate various line choices to pick what I think works best in a pose or detail. I also like to draw sketches in red, do revisions over it in blue, then firm up figures and details with a fairly dark pencil, maybe a 2B. The rough is what I usually send to clients for their approval or for revision notes. Once that's done I will use the roughs to set up the pencil art, using a Litepad to trace the image onto Bristol board in pencil. This is where a lot of cleaning up and final revisions come in. Sometimes I'll do a revision on tracing paper and scan that to print out and work with.

Once I have a full pencil drawing done I ink with a variety of tools, usually Tombow calligraphy brush pens, Microns and Rapidographs. I do corrections by hand with white ink and brush, or use a Presto Jumbo Correction pen for large patches. I usually scan and pass the raw inks over to my wife, Sarah Dyer, who cleans it up digitally and adds color if it's a color job. She also readies it for print. I'm terrible at working with computers, as you can tell from the description of my process I'm a dinosaur, I do everything except some minor digital corrections by hand. Left on my own I will do corrections as physical patches to be glued down on the original art with a gluestick, most often this is done on lettering mistakes. I work traditionally because that's all I know. Very little of this applies to younger creators working on computers, obviously. 

3. How did you decide upon and refine your style?

Like most young artists I started out by copying the artists and cartoonists I admired, largely artists working at MAD magazine, in newspaper comic strips and at Marvel Comics. I was born in 1965 so I was a product of the 70s as far as early influences went. Other influences that had an effect on my style included animation, and later on a lot of indy and alternative cartoonists working on their creator-owned comics and strips for free weekly newspapers like The Village Voice and New York Press. I worked in a comic shop that supported a wide range of comics and soaked up a lot of that in my own drawings. I'm mostly self-taught, and my work wasn't very good when I first broke into comics. But I was able to meet other artists and peers and got tips from some of them, and feedback on where my art needed work.

I never really decided on a style, I originally wanted to become a Marvel superhero artist, but I ended up doing more of my own work, influenced by my outside interests in music and the New York punk and new wave scene. My style was influenced at first by artists such as Jack Kirby, who was a pillar of the Marvel Universe, George Perez,  a superhero mainstay, and Will Elder, an early MAD artist. All three were very detail-oriented, and Elder had a habit of putting a lot of extra visual gags into his backgrounds, known as "chicken fat". This approach had a large influence on my own work, I developed a very detailed, busy approach, a kind of maximalist style that tried to throw everything I could think of on the page and cover up every inch of white space on the page. This isn't something I'd recommend, by and large. Sometimes detail can overwhelm or muddy a drawing or comic book page. I've managed to learn how to balance details with varying line weights when inking, and to take a cleaner an d clearer approach to textures and crfoss-hatching as well as where I'm placing them. I can work in a simpler, less busy style, and have done so when designing for segments of the Yo Gabba Gabba TV series, which required the art be simple so it could be adapted for flash animation.  But left on my own, I have a tendency to just add more characters, situations, dialog and jokes. I feel like the style chose me, I didn't choose the style. I sometimes wonder how much my style owes to being self conscious about my art, always seeing the flaws, and my wanting to compensate for them by throwing more onto the page. I'm too old to stop my drawing habits, but with age comes weaker eyes and carpal tunnel in my drawing wrist, so I always tell younger artists to keep that in mind if they are detail-oriented. 

4. have you any advice for illustrators at the start of their career?

The industries I grew up in have changed so much, most of my work and career experiences are not replicable anymore. When I was starting out you could go up to DC Comics to show an editor your portfolio, or arrange to pitch ideas. For pragmatic and legal reasons that doesn't happen anymore. You can't go into NYC and visit magazine and comic publishers. I have no idea how anyone gets started and gets noticed these days. Comics was a smaller field back in the late 80s when I broke in. It was much easier to get to know editors and publishers through local conventions. Something I see people doing is simply posting their own work and interacting with like-minded creators and people who enjoy webcomics and online art. Someone once asked me online how they could break into comics, and I said "Post your comics online. You're in comics. How to make a living in comics, that's the big question". And nobody really has an answer for that which works across the board. Everything's changed. But if you have talent, an interesting style, and can put something of your own personality, your own "voice" into your work, it will give you a boost above the fray. Depending on a hot style or aping a popular artist's work, no matter how well it's done, just makes you one of the crowd. It doesn't make for a sustained career, tastes change and fads disappear, and a lot of working artists stuck with the "old" style find themselves left behind. Originality and personality have served me more than technical drawing skills, I'm not a great artist, but I make what some people consider to be very good comics. Things balance out, I'm able to wear different hats as a writer and artist, which means more work opportunities across several fields. I wish I had something more to say about pure illustration, but I only got that sort of work through my comics. People liked my style and hired me. I've never actually had a real portfolio to show around. Work creates work and so far I've managed to keep jumping from one ice floe to another without drowning.

There's three things I can tell artists to consider: develop a personal style, try to have a range of things you're capable of doing, and work to get your art in front of people. Beyond that, have fun. Creating art should be fun, especially in a field like comics. It's not an easy job, sometimes it's really hard (I clocked a month's worth of 24 hr+ work shifts one year in the 90s) but if you're miserable while drawing and creating, something's not right. So try to have fun. The art should be something worth doing, even when the audience isn't there yet. Make art for yourself, even in your commerial work, find something to have fun with. Enjoy your work as much as possible.