draw #14

THE PROFESSIONAL“HOW-TO” MAGAZINEON COMICS ANDCARTOONING

PLUSTHE THIRD INSTALLMENTOF MIKE MANLEY ANDBRET BLEVINS’

PIGTALE’S

OOVVII NNEEDDEELLCCUU

SAM & MAX CREATOR

SSTTEEVVEE PPUURRCCEELLLL

PIGTALE’S

OOVVII NNEEDDEELLCCUU

SAM & MAX CREATOR

SSTTEEVVEE PPUURRCCEELLLL

PLUS�THE THIRD INSTALLMENT OF MIKE MANLEY ANDBRET BLEVINS’

TTHHEE MMOONNSSTTRROOUUSS AARRTT OOFF

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TTHHEE MMOONNSSTTRROOUUSS AARRTT OOFF

DDOOUUGGMMAAHHNNKKEE

$6.95IN THE U.S.A.

NUMBER 14SUMMER 2007

Spawn of Frankenstein TM & ©2007 DC Comics.

18265827764

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SUMMER 2007 • VOL. 1, NO. 14

THE PROFESSIONAL“HOW-TO” MAGAZINE ON COMICS & CARTOONING

Editor-in-Chief • Michael ManleyDesigner • Eric Nolen-WeathingtonPublisher • John MorrowLogo Design • John CostanzaProofreaders • Eric Nolen-Weathington and Chris IrvingTranscription • Steven Tice

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DRAW! Summer 2007, Vol. 1, No. 14 was produced by Action Planet Inc. andpublished by TwoMorrows Publishing. Michael Manley, Editor, John Morrow,Publisher. Editorial Address is PO Box 2129, Upper Darby, PA 19082. SubscriptionAddress: TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Dr., Raleigh, NC 27614.DRAW! and its logo are trademarks of Action Planet Inc. All contributions hereinare copyright 2007 by their respective contributors. Action Planet Inc. andTwoMorrows Publishing accept no responsibility for unsolicited submissions. Allartwork herein is copyright the year of production, its creator (if work-for-hire, theentity which contracted said artwork); the characters featured in said artwork aretrademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners; and said artworkor other trademarked material is printed in these pages with the consent of thecopyright holder and/or for journalistic, educational and historical purposes with noinfringement intended or implied. Batman, Birds of Prey • Black Adam, JLA, MajorBummer, Plastic Man, Spawn of Frankenstein, Superman ™ and © 2007 DCComics • Stormwatch ™ and © 2007 WildStorm Productions • Hulk ™ and © 2007Marvel Characters, Inc. • King Tiger, The Mask, Motorhead ™ and © 2007 DarkHorse Comics, Inc. • Pirates of the Caribbean ™ and © 2007 Disney Enterprises,Inc. • Sam & Max, Toybox ™ and © 2007 Steve Purcell • Big Wheels, GumballSeeds, Inima, Pigtale ™ and © 2007 Ovi Nedelcu • Death Jr. ™ and © 2007 DigitalEclipse Software, Inc. • Pink ™ and © 2007 Will Vinton/Laika • Maniac Mansion ™and © 2007 Lucasfilm Games • Juniper Lee ™ and © 2007 Cartoon Network •Felix the Cat ™ and © 2007 Don Oriolo • Tarzan ™ and © ERB • Scorchy Smith™ and © 2007 Associated Press • Rip Kirby ™ and © King Features • Akira ™ and© Manga Entertainment • This entire issue is © 2007 Action Planet Inc. andTwoMorrows Publishing and may not be reprinted or retransmitted without writtenpermission of the copyright holders. Printed in Canada. FIRST PRINTING.

COVER STORY INTERVIEW WITH

DOUG MAHNKE

3

Front Cover Illustration byDoug Mahnke

BEHIND PIGTALEAN INTERVIEW WITH THE SERIES CREATOR

OVI NEDELCU

COMIC ART BOOTCAMPSPOTTING BLACKSBY BRET BLEVINS & MIKE MANLEY

WELCOME TO THE FUNHOUSE SAM & MAX CREATOR STEVE PURCELL

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WWW.DRAWMAGAZINE.COM

70 ON THE ROAD TO CHINATHE STATE OF THE COMIC BOOK INDUSTRY IN CHINABY MIKE MANLEY

And don’t miss the FREE PREVIEW of our sister magazine ALTER EGO #70, on page 80!

DRAW! • SUMMER 2007 5

Conducted by Mike ManleyTranscribed by Steven Tice

Doug Mahnke is an artist’sartist. He does all of the

hard things well, and makes itlook easy. He’s one of the rareartists in the medium ofcomics who can flex betweenfunny, fantastic action and hor-ror. From Seven Soldiers ofVictory: Frankenstein to TheMask, Major Bummer,Superman: Man of Steel andthe JLA, Mahnke’s powerfulfigure work has always stoodhead and shoulders abovemany other artists working inthe field. It’s not surprising tofind out that the man whodraws such powerful anddynamic heroes is also a com-petitive power lifter. DRAW!Editor Mike Manley catchesup with this busy artist andfather of six from his homestudio in Minnesota.

BATMAN ™ AND©2007 DC COMICS

DRAW!:What is your typical workday like?

DOUG MAHNKE: It has varied quite a bit over the years,but I’ve settled into some fairly regular habits, as it has becomeobvious to me what gets the job done. I could divide this upinto two different days, which is the productive day vs. theunproductive day. They do their best to coexist, although I feel

the unproductive day always gets the better deal as the produc-tive one has to pick up the slack.

Productive day: I get up by 5 a.m. and go right down to thestudio. The first thing I tend to do is turn on the computer tocheck e-mail and let my brain warm-up by visiting some of myfavorite sites, all of which tend to be weightlifting-oriented. By6:00 or 6:30 I get to work penciling or inking, whichever is the

priority at the moment. I might just sit in silence or turn on theradio. I get into ruts where my “atmosphere” is concerned, andwill go for very long stretches doing one thing then suddenly shiftand do another. It might be talk or sports radio for a month orthree, then some local music station for a while, then I might lis-ten to a Greek or Italian station on the net for days. I will also putin a movie to keep me company. Most recently on a long produc-tive day—which actually stretched into two days—I watched thefirst season of The Beverly Hillbillies over and over again. I’m notactually watching it very often, just listening to it. Oddly, I didthis recently with the Jet Li movie, Hero, which is in Chinese.

As I sit and work I hear the house wake up, as one after anoth-er my six kids and my wife rise until the house is full of noise.Usually after seven I go upstairs for a quick breakfast with the fam-ily, then back downstairs. It might be a bowl of oatmeal and someeggs or a protein drink. Coffee is a major player in myregular day, although I try to drink green teanow and then at the recommenda-tion of DC editor PeterTomasi. I also drink YerbaMate. The bottom line is

caffeine, which I am pretty sure is the secret to the success of thehuman race as we know it. Back to work after breakfast, and I try toget at least one page finished by 10 a.m. I eat a snack then... proba-bly a piece of fruit and more protein. Back to work and try and geta little more done before lunch, which can happen at any timebetween 11:00 and noon, or whenever my kids have lost theirminds with hunger. After lunch I will goof around on the computerfor a little bit, but I keep it down on productive days. I find keepingoff of the computer the best way to get work done. The computercan kill your day. I don’t play any games or do much with it, buttime flies even when you’re looking for reference.

After my goof-off time, it’s back to work, which will be moreof the same, penciling or inking. If everything has gone well, aproductive day can have me finished with my work by 3:30. I’llknock off then and lift weights until supper. I don’t have a set pat-tern for the amount of penciling I will do before inking, although

I do know it’s best for me to mix the two, so I can makerealistic projections of when I can finish a page.

Unproductive days for me are almost identical toproductive days, except everything is slower. I get towork later, I eat longer, I linger on the computer, Iget distracted by some pointless Internet thread. Icould be looking up some military reference, thendiscover myself an hour later looking up informa-tion on the old Will the Real Jerry Lewis Please Sit

Down cartoon. I might find myself paying too muchattention to some facet of a page that will probably end up coveredin a word balloon, or using some ink that is so thick I can barely getit to pour from the dropper, let alone flow from my nib. Out of afive-day work week, if I have two slow days it takes a couple ofultra productive days to make up the difference. The problem latelyhas been to turn the heat up on the productive days, as they feelthey contribute enough. Occasionally I will work late, but I justfunction better in the morning work-wise than in the evening.

Recently I’ve gone through a very long “anti-productive”slump, possibly the worst I’ve had in my 18 years of comicdrawing. I chalk it up to a couple of things... one is comingoff of an enormous productive stretch that lasted a coupleof years and left me mentally exhausted. When I say “anti-

productive” I mean in terms of quantity, asthe quality is pretty high. I also was in a carwreck one year ago on October 14th, whichis the date of my anniversary. My wife and Iwere going to go out for a quick bite at oneof our favorite restaurants. To do so we were

driving our kids to my sister-in-law’s place.About one mile away from our home we were

rear-ended, while waiting to turn left off of thehighway. I saw the car coming at the last moment in my

rear view mirror and hit the gas, getting us moving justenough to diffuse a little of the impact. The driver, a young guy,nailed us at 45 to 50 miles an hour. My seat broke and threw mebackwards, the back of my head smashed into my oldest daugh-ter’s head, just above her right eye, severely fracturing her sock-et and the bones on the right side of her face. (I’m happy toreport a full recovery by the way)... it could have been prettygrim. I received a concussion, but being the true professionaltotally behind the eightball with a big deadline, I went home that

DOUG MAHNKE COMICS

6 DRAW! • SUMMER 2007

THIS PAGE: Batmanpencil sketch.NEXT PAGE: Coverto Dark Horse’s KingTiger & Motorhead #1. BATMAN ™ AND

©2007 DC COMICS

night while my daughter was in theintensive care unit and finished five orseven pages if I remember correctly.The injury also effected my sight for awhile, but I managed to work. Honestly,there are a few months that are merelya blur for me, but when you have a jobto do you have to do it.

DRAW!:What’s your drawing pacelike?

DM: In all actuality, when only pen-ciling and if the pressure is on, I canpencil a page every two to three hoursof straight work. If it’s referenceheavy, that can slow me down, but if Iknow what I’m doing, I can knockthem out fast. I’m very fast with draw-ing and pretty accurate with laying outperspective without ruling lines. Theonly problem is it can fatigue me pret-ty bad these days, and leave me a men-tal pile of mush. I’ve penciled a com-plete book in a three-day tear with thehelp of my old assistant Shawn Moll.This is all fine and great but a sensibleperson would never put themselvesinto a position to find that kind of out-put necessary. Having to work thathard and fast is usually the result oftaking on too much work—which I’vedone—or too many unproductive days.

DRAW!:What is your studio set uplike?

DM:Very unimpressive. My studio isfairly small; it’s in a 12’ x 12’ room inmy basement. Thankfully I have a nicewindow. My most recent addition to itis a large desk where I can organize mypaperwork and store books and sup-plies. The last time I bought somethingfor my studio was 18 years ago. I’vealways been terribly frugal where mystudio is concerned, and it wouldn’t hurt me to invest in some newstuff now and then, but I’ve been comfortable enough to workwith what I originally bought those many years ago. My desk andchair have seen better days, and I rule lines with an angle that isbroken in two pieces. The angle has so many chips and dings in itthat I have to watch out for the irregularities when inking with it.It does add character to a straight line though.

There is an old tabby tray on the left side of my desk that isnothing more than a glorified pencil holder and graveyard forold erasers. I also have a picture of my wife and my mom there,and a cool little piece of artwork one of my kids made for methat I always liked. Sitting next to me on my left is an old child’sschool desk that I use for a table. Reference material, opened ink

bottles and scratch paper is usually sitting here, while inside is anice hand mirror that I swiped from one of my kids as well asmy old broken one. Whichever ends up in my hand first is theone that gets used. Right behind me is a little piece of furniturewith three open shelves, which I clear off a few times a year andslowly pile stuff on for the rest. I also tend to set coffee or foodback there. I have a shelf that I line with knick-knacks and pho-tos of my family, a Swedish horse, a little Greek vase, a Hmongtiger carved out of ivory, and my prized Lou Martin/MajorBummer Inaction Figure that my friend Joel made.

I have a second desk that I bought a few years ago when myfriend Shawn Moll started to work with me as my assistant. Sincethen Shawn has gone on to do his own work, but the desk stays. It


DOUG MAHNKE COMICS

KING TIGER, MOTO

RHEAD ™

AND ©2007 DARK HORSE COMICS, INC.

STORYTELLING: PLOT VS. FULL SCRIPT

DRAW!: Getting back to the guts of laying out and storytellingthe thing you mentioned about figures weaving in and out or sud-denly changing place without regard to continuity, that’s some-thing that I see a lot of professionals don’t really pay attention to.You see characters seeming to randomly jump around on a page,the breaking of the 180º rule. I guess that’s even more evidentwhen people learn to work from the Marvel method, where it’s a

loose plot, and you kind of put things where you want, and thewriter goes in and places the balloons to help try and clarify thestorytelling, as opposed to the more traditional full script, wherethe writer’s really dictating specifically, “This person is talking,then this person is talking.” And that means that you have to put theperson who is speaking first usually on the left side of the image.

DM:Yeah, I mean, you certainly do your best. I suppose there arepeople who would sit down and read a comic and they never evennotice that you moved people around. Maybe it’s just that when Iwas introduced into comics that I worked with a very fastidious

and specific writer, JohnArcudi. John’s scripts taughtme a lot about how to drawcomics, because he alwaystold me what was importantin a script. And so I’vealways enjoyed full scriptsand things that have somequality and detail to them.His scripts were always per-fect for the comic medium.And it’s—this is kind of get-ting off the track of what wewere talking about, assis-tants, moving into ShawnMoll, who’s different. Butwith the writers that I’veworked with over the years,you can see where thewriter has got a comic bookmind. And Arcudi’s one ofthem. He thinks in comicbook when he writes incomic book, as opposed tocinematically.

DRAW!: Or TV, with lotsof dialogue.

DM: I worked with JoeKelly for quite a bit, andJoe was quite capable ofjust about giving me ananeurism per script. And,you know, I love Joe Kelly,we’re friends. And I wouldtell him every once in awhile, “What are you, try-ing to kill me with thisscript?” Because Joe thinksvery fluid, and so when hewould write a scene Iwould call, I would tellhim, “You’re writing aFellini moment. How am Isupposed to put all thisstuff in?” And he might


DOUG MAHNKE COMICS©2007 DOUG M

AHNKE.

amount of information that you put down. But I’ve discoveredthe one area that I can’t fool around with is women’s faces. I’vegot to make sure that they’re right, otherwise they end up lookingfunny. I hate to go back and go over a page and go, “Boy, I reallybotched that.” You know, it’s like you have one chance to get itright, and then you have to drag out the whiteout. At least that’sthe one area I probably spend more time making sure that every-thing is correct. But the rest, male characters, I put an awful lotin with the ink. I really finish it, I definitely finish it with ink.

DRAW!:Well, you know there’s a much more narrow toler-ance for what we accept as a pretty girl than what we accept asa handsome guy. One nostril is a little off and she goes frombeing a hottie to homely, y’know?

DM: It’s so easy to mess it up.

DRAW!:And the guys who do it so well, like Blevins, do it so eas-ily it’s infuriating sometimes. [laughs] You know, there are certainguys like him or Bob Oksner, that just have that deft touch with apen. One little dot with a nostril, or just breaking a line on a face orsomething could just add so much to an expression, or add a littleair to the.... Or make it free. So your basic tools are, you have a C6

lettering pen. Any particular ink you like or don’t like?

DM: No, I just use Black Magic. I’ve got a dozen bottles sit-ting around in there. When I’m washing in some blacks, I’llgrab a bottle that’s all coagulated and heavy so that it has somedensity to it. So at least when the page gets done, it looks like anice, finished page. The rest is extremely little. My wife hasbeen helping me fill blacks, and she’s better at it than I am.

DRAW!: So you don’t do things like I did on that lastSuperman job, scanning and FTPing the pages to DC, are youstill sending them the original pages?

DM: No, I’m sending the originals.

DRAW!: So you don’t have a scanner?

DM:No, I’ve got a scanner, but I just send in the boards. If there’sanother way to do it, I should talk to them. If that’s what people aredoing, isn’t it sad that I’m sitting here just sending stuff out Fed Ex?

DRAW!:Well, the reason I mention that is, you were talkingabout things like whiteout, and I find myself now, especially ifI’m pressed on a deadline, cleaning up any glitches, smudges


DOUG MAHNKE COMICS

BELOW AND NEXT PAGE: A Stormwatch page from rough layout to finished pencils.

STO

RMWAT

CH ™

AND ©2007 W

ILDSTO

RM PRODUCTIONS.


Conducted by Jamar NicholasTranscribed by Steven TiceEdited by Mike Manley

From comics and animation to Lucasfilm, Pixarto video games, Steve Purcell has worn manyhats and used many different palettes, digitaland traditional, in his career. DRAW!’s JamarNicolas conducted this interview with the busy,multi-medium artist just on the cusp of the newhit game release based on his Sam & Maxcharacters.

JAMAR NICHOLAS:A lot of my interviews are about trying toreally get into the artists’ head, and since I’m an artist, too, a lot ofit’s just process junkie type stuff, the things only we would careabout asking, like how do you hold a pen versus...?

STEVE PURCELL: Those are kind of hard questions sometimes,because you don’t normally have to think about the way you dothat stuff.

JN: Right, right. Are you that type of person? Do you devour upother people’s working styles, or do you just kind of do your ownthing?

SP: Not at all, I tend to always try to reinvent the wheel. I’m kindof stubborn that way. I don’t like to ask for help. It’s good for mewhen I do, but I like to try to sort things out on my own.

WELCOME TO THE

SAM & M

AX ™

AND ©2007 STEVE PURCELL.

JN: Do you keep a network of people around you, orare you the solitary artist?

SP: I like to make my mistakes in private, so workingin a collaborative environment at an animation studiomeans you end up having to show stuff before youwant to sometimes. But it’s good for me to have peoplelooking over my shoulder from time to time. At homeI’ll show projects to my wife, Collette, but only if Iwant to get feedback because she’ll give it.

JN: I’m sure you have a studio at home, too, right?

SP:Yeah, I do.

JN: How much does that differ from your work envi-ronment?

SP: Physically not too much. My studio is full of abunch of crap that’s all around me. I have lots of art-work hanging up, I’m surrounded by toys, books andmusical instruments. I keep a really messy desk. I havethings right in front of me where I work, and I kind ofhave to shove things out of the way. And my office desk is prettymuch the same. Somehow things just pile around me, and I’malways digging through the strata, the layers of junk to find whatI need.

JN: I just started a new day job, and I’m finding that my work-space at home looks like a disaster area, but I keep my work-space at work really clean. I don’t know what that’s about.

SP: Is anybody looking over your shoulder ?

JN: It just, it kind of makes more sense at work to have a non-chaotic space. But in the house, it all makes sense.

SP: Once in a while I’ll take the time to go, “Okay, time toclean all this junk out.” I go through it all and I’ll actually man-age to put it where it should go, but over time it always buildsup again. It’s like, right now my paint jars are all over my desk,I’ve got your magazine, I’ve got a lot of sketches and other stuff.Somehow that all ended up on my desk, and it hasn’t beenthrown away in about a year.

JN: That’s awesome. I have very random things laying aroundmy space, too. Now, let me ask you a question, since we’re talk-ing about work areas and things like that, do you find that youspend more time creatively at work versus home, or vice versa?

SP:Well, we built this studio at home. It took a lot of last yearto do it, and it moved me out of the house, freeing up one of thebedrooms upstairs. Somehow having this little separate spacethat I have to walk twenty feet from the house to has been moreproductive as far as creating anything. This last year I’ve beenable to do more paintings and things on the side than I have pre-viously, and I don’t know what the difference is, really. It’ssomething about having a separate space. It feels more fertile forcreating stuff than the old studio inside the house.

JN:Yeah, that’s true on a couple of levels. I always forget whosaid this quote, and it’s probably somebody who’s still alive, butthey said, “When you work at home, you’re always at work.”

SP: That’s true. That’s true. Whenever I was doing freelance,which is most of my career, I spent about 20 years doing free-lance stuff, I always felt like I couldn’t get going until late in theday. I would end up working late into the night, and it would be,like, a twelve-hour work cycle, into about three in the morningor something like that. And I felt like I had to do a lot morehours at home because of distractions. I kind of like having astructure of knowing that my day is this many hours and whatev-er I can get done in that block of time is the work day, and then Ican come home and kind of create another workday for my ownstuff.

JN: Even if you have to walk a couple yards to home, stillthere’s that difference, right?

SP:Yeah, I’ve known people where it’s worth it for them to renta space in town just so they can leave the house, and they go tothis place and they feel like there’s structure, having to go some-place to work.

JN: Do you find time to do a lot of commissions? Do you do alot of commission work?

SP: Not so much private commissions, but I do a few illustra-tions from time to time. I did a Death Jr. cover for a trade paper-back. It’s something that I normally don’t do, but they neededone in a hurry, and I like the character, and I like the creator,Mike Mika, and agreed to do it. And it was fun, because I don’tdo a lot of that. And then I agreed to do the digital color, whichI also haven’t done a lot of either, because I figured I’d take astab at it to get better at doing it. I had an idea in my head to seethe whole thing through. I always find a way to make the jobmore complicated for myself. There’s another guy, Jai Nitz, he


STEVE PURCELLCOMICS

PREVIOUS: Concept art for the Sam & Max TV show.ABOVE: Steve at age 5 in Magnolia, Massachusetts.


STEVE PURCELL COMICS

was doing a book for Image, and he asked me if I would do acover for him. Okay, I’ll just do a quick painting, I thought, andI started to do this thing thinking I could do it in my characterdesign style, which is really rough pencil with washes of colorover it, but I didn’t like it. I started the whole thing over so that Icould be satisfied with it. So the idea of a quick, shaggy coverdisappeared.

JN: Do you ever find yourself being in positions where youcan’t give something away? Just like you said, you don’t think it’sgood enough, so you keep messing with it and messing with it?

SP: I have done that. I normally don’t do it so much anymore. Iremember I had a teacher that I didn’t learn a lot from, but onething I do remember learning is, whenever he would see some-body fussing over a painting too much, he’d say, “If you’re going

to go to that much trouble, why don’t you just do another paint-ing?” At that time it was really great advice, and it’s somethingthat I’ve thought about a lot, that if you’re going to keep rework-ing everything, you could have done three or four paintings forthat amount of effort.

MEDIUMS

JN:What are you working in these days? Now, I know you do alot of gouache and things like that, don’t you?

SP: I used to. Actually, I started doing gouache for game coversearly on when I was freelancing. I found out I could do thosepretty fast, that I could do the painting in a couple of days, andthe style that I was using was kind of painfully detailed. I wasdoing these little hatch lines instead of just blocking in tones. Atsome point I started experimenting with acrylics, and it took mea while, but it is more of a loose, washy acrylic style that I’musing now, where I kind of work detail into the more opaquepart and let the washy stuff show through the darker areas. Istarted doing that at ILM when I was painting a lot of characterdesigns for the feature development group and I would start withthese really loose pencil sketches. I’d Xerox them onto Bristolboard and build them up in washes and I really liked workingthat way. It seemed like I wasn’t having to be as painfullydetailed as I was when I first started out painting. So that’s howI’ve been working lately and if there are structure lines that are

ABOVE: Panorama view of Steve’s studio space.LEFT: Steve at work at the drawing board. BELOW: Ever wondered what was inside an artist’s desk drawer? Well,here’s a look into to Steve’s—you might even be able to find art supplies.

TELLING

TALL

TALESwith ovi nedelcu

Ovi Nedelcu’s Pigtale, a story about a talking pig published by Image, was one of thestandout comics of this last year. What’s so big about a talking pig you might ask? Ohit’s just a comic filled with intrigue, charm and style—making his book quickly the talkof many of his new comic peers. This was also another case of an animation artist doinga comic, which seems to be a growing trend. A veteran of animation story developmentand character design, Nedelcu seemed to “pop” into comics out of nowhere. DRAW!magazine editor Mike Manley wanted to find out where Nedelcu came from and how hegot so good...

DRAW!:Why don’t you tell us a bit about your background,education, etc. Did you go to art school at all?

OVI NEDELCU: Sure, I left high school in 1997 and wentstraight into art school at the Academy of Art University in SanFrancisco. I was an Illustration major, but only managed to fin-ish two years out of the four I was supposed to be there. Mostlybecause I got a job offer from WB Animation down in LA, butalso because I just couldn’t afford to keep taking classes. Myfunds were just about empty and I had no job or other means tokeep paying tuition with. So it kind of all worked out just intime, which was fine with me because I never went to artschool for a diploma. I got what I needed and got out. AlthoughI have to say there are one or two classes I wish I could havetaken, but for the most part I’m happy with what I got. I have abig problem with paying $2000 for a “required” academic“career search” class. If you’re paying that much for school andyou don’t know what you want to do for a living, you’re in trou-ble. The school recommended you take three art classes andthree academic classes so that your workload wasn’t too over-whelming. But I think this is just another way to get you to takeworthless expensive classes you can take at a community college

for a fraction of the price. But some art schools won’t let youtransfer the credits. It’s an evil monopoly. I only took art classeswhile in school. I took six art classes every semester, for twoyears. I got what I needed, and left the expensive “required”classes behind. Wow, this interview is starting out on a goodnote. [laughs] Just making friends.

DRAW!: Can you tell me a bit about how you broke into theanimation business? What was it you were aiming forjob/career wise?

ON:Well, back when I was in art school and even before that Iwanted to be a professional comic book artist/illustrator. Iwould always attend comic book conventions and show myportfolio to pros and editors trying to get advice and a job likeevery other 18-year-old aspiring artist. I continued to attend theshows through college and still do to this day. Although I lovedanimation and the art form, it was never something I sawmyself doing or getting into. I just didn’t like drawing the samething over and over to make it animate. After I got into the ani-mation business I realized there where plenty of other things todo besides in-betweening.

RIGHT: Pink development art, pencil on paper.

OVI NEDELCU ANIMATION


PINK ™ AND ©2007 WILL VINTON/LAIKA.

At this time were you still taking any life drawing classes orworking heavily in sketchbooks, you know working out or prac-ticing theories?

ON:Yup. I’m always drawing in my sketchbook. I haven’t beenlife drawing as much lately but I still try and do it when I get thechance. But yeah, I’m always drawing in my sketchbooks, ornow that I have a digital PC tablet, I draw on that also.

DRAW!: So what do you do at Laika?

ON: Right now I’m a story artist on HenrySelick’s next film, Coraline. I did some early pro-duction art/design work at the very beginning, butnow I’m on full time as a story artist. Before thatI did some character design and storyboards onHenry’s short film, Moongirl. The work beingdone on Coraline is absolutely amazing and I’mnot just saying that because I’m working on it.Films like this only come around once in a while,and I’m glad to be a part of it. Working with Henryhas been a great experience. People are going to beblown away when they see this film.

DRAW!:What would you say you learned from animation that you

apply directly to your comics work?Do you feel that working in film lan-guage, the cutting and editing has real-ly influenced your comic work?

ON:Yeah definitely, a lot of peoplehave commented on how the bookfelt cinematic when they read it, andI think it comes from working inanimation and studying film. I don’ttry to deliberately make it feel andpace like a film, it’s just the way Ivisualize and pace things in myhead when writing and doing lay-outs. I think it started long before Iever got into animation, though.Back when I was in high schoolwhile I was studying comics, afriend of mine gave me a bookcalled The Five C’s ofCinematography. I was blown awayby all the great information in thatbook and I still reference it to thisday. That and Will Eisner’s Comicsand Sequential Art really shaped meinto what I am today as far as anytype of storytelling “language”goes. But yes, later when I got intocollege and in animation I got inter-ested in all the different forms of

film language and just visual language in general.

DRAW!:What is your studio athome or work set up like? Whattype of computer do you use? Areyou working more digitally?

LEFT: Pigtale digital pin-up art.BELOW: Juniper Lee character develop-ment art, pencil on paper & digital color.


PIGTA

LE ™

AND ©2007 OVI NEDELC

UOVI NEDELCU ANIMATION

©2007 CARTOON NETWORK.


ON: My studio at my house is actually pretty sweet. It’s basi-cally a living room turned into a studio space. When I boughtmy house here in Portland, that was one of the things I knew Iwanted to have: a good studio space. I moved up to Portlandfrom Pasadena, California, and I had the smallest studio spacein that apartment I moved from. So, yeah, I was hell-bent onmaking sure I had enough room to work and store all my booksand materials. Right now I’m using an HP workstation. It’snothing fancy but it gets the work done. I use a flat LCD 20”Viewsonic screen and have a tablet I draw with. Eventually I

want to get a Wacom Cintiq so I can draw directly on my screenlike I do at Laika. It’s pretty sweet.

At Laika I draw my storyboards digitally on the Cintiq, butat home I still draw my comics on paper. I’m not sure if I’llever switch over and do my comics digitally from start to finishbut you never know. I still like paper.

DRAW!: Okay, now it’s time to talk shop. What are your toolsof choice, paper, pens, etc.?

BELOW: More Juniper Lee development art.

OVI NEDELCUANIMATION

©2007 CARTOON NETWORK.

SP:Yeah, you don’t want to be doing too much of the samething. Like, I’m trying to do some comic work right now, butif I were to try to make my living doing comic work, I think itwould take some of the wind out of it, because when I wasdoing straight comics for a living it was really a struggle. Itseems like the people I know having the most fun doingcomics right now are people who are doing it as a hobby,because they do what they want and it doesn’t matter if itsells or not.

ANIMATION AND STYLE

JN: Now, you have a pretty vast background as far as yourartistic stuff. You have a lot of animation in your background,too.

SP: I wouldn’t say a lot. Most of the animation that I did wasdoing game animation for LucasArts. I worked for ColossalPictures in San Francisco at one point, and I actually got thatjob because they were teaching animation to illustrators in thearea so that they could call them to do freelance animationjobs. So I took a class there and learned how to do screen ani-mation, but ended up just doing character design and story-board stuff for them. I jumped straight from there to LucasArtsand was animating game characters, which were really primi-tive. It wasn’t anything like 3-D animation.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 32

LEFT: Steve at Lucasfilm Games with his Maniac Mansion painting.BELOW: “Pigeon”—an acrylic painting from Steve’s personal work.


STEVE PURCELLCOMICSMANIAC M

ANSION ™

AND ©2007 LUCASFILM GAMES.

©2007 STEVE PURCELL.

kind of experimenting now to see if I can do a comic with mysketching style, and I’m liking the look of it. I’m painting ontop of my sketches, and it’s looking really spontaneous, andI’m going to try that and see what people think of that,because it’s very different looking. It has this kind of energythat maybe my inking doesn’t necessarily have.

JN:Wow, that sounds interesting. I’ve been experimenting,myself, with maybe doing a comic book on nothing but paperbags.

SP: I was working on brown paper when I used to do figuredrawings in school. I loved workingon that with, like, a little bit of whitechalk on the figures.

JN: Ah, yeah, that’s great. Thosemid-tones, they just pop at you.

SP: People are always, like, fussingabout acid-free paper and stuff,“You’re drawing on butcher paper?You need to make sure this doesn’trot,” but tons of drawings that I didon newsprint in high school are stillaround, even though they don’tdeserve to be. I like working withjunk materials from time time totime and if those works don’t sur-vive beyond me I’ll never know.

JN: So getting back to that wholetechnology thing, are you archivingany of your work on the computer?Are you hands-off with computers?

SP: I have computers around. I usethem to write, and my wife uses herMac to do graphic design and mystuff gets scanned and manipulatedon her computer. I’ve got some of iton disc, but until recently there’sbeen no really good, concerted effortto archive all that stuff. I’ve got flatfiles in my office, and all the work Icare about is in those. And there arecopies of most everything I’ve donesomewhere, so it’s not really a veryorganized way of archiving it. Butlately everything I paint I scan at600 DPI just for the record.

PREVIOUS PAGE: “Black Tree400”—another of Steve’s acrylic paintings.ABOVE : Concept art from Sam & Max.The ship’s design is based off a DeSoto.LEFT: This acrylic painting of Sam & Maxwas done for a limited edition print.


STEVE PURCELLCOMICSSAM & M

AX ™


JN: I was going to ask you when we were talking about officethings before, what’s your theory on file cabinets? Do theywork, or are they just a graveyard for paper?

SP:Well...yeah, they can be. I try to go through and sift stuffout sometimes, and usually what I throw out is what I can’tstand looking at anymore. I’ll keep things as long as I can,because I feel like anything that’s an original drawing should besaved, but then I go through the stuff, I go, “Oh, look at that, Iwould never show that to anybody.” So there’s a practical usefor file cabinets, but you have to purge from time to time.

JN:Yeah, that’s one of my problems, I put it in there, give it acouple last rites, and I’m done with it. I never see it again.

SP: I have a lot of concept stuff that I did for games, and it’snot like I would ever show it to somebody, but I look at it and Igo, “I spent a lot of time on that drawing. I’m not going tothrow it away yet.” Even though it’s not something I would everwant in a book or put in a portfolio or anything. It’s just takingup room, and at some point I’ll have to purge it.

JN:Do you ever go back to old designs and reuse them for things?

SP:Well, yeah. Especially in the comics file, there are ideaswhere I’ll just randomly write what I think is a funny line for aSam & Max moment. It’s amazing how much of that stuff hasn’tgotten used and still has a place somewhere. Like just a jotteddown catch phrase or something will remind me of an idea fora gag I had a long time ago.

JN: Do you keep a sketchbook?

SP: I don’t ever keep an official bound book, because I get intim-idated by having a binding. I just don’t draw in it because I don’twant to mess it up, because I feel like, oh, it’s got a binding, sothis has to be an important drawing. I keep ringed, spiral sketch-books just so I have paper to draw, like if I go on a trip or some-thing, but it’s not like I keep them together. If I like the drawing,I’ll tear it out and put it in the drawer. Most of my sketches aredone on random pieces of paper and just collected in a pile. So Iwouldn’t call it a sketchbook, but I guess I do sketch quite a bit.

JN: That’s interesting, too, that there’s kind of an emotion thatcomes to just an object. You know, like you said, just having thebound sketchbook, it almost gives you this feeling of dread. “Idon’t want to draw in that. I gotta draw in something else.”

SP: Something with a spiral in it releases me from the pressure ofworrying about what’s in it, because I can tear out the drawings Idon’t like and it doesn’t make a mess out of the book. I still havespiral sketchpads from my old comics stuff that I’ve kept because

I like the thumbnail and the idea, and the rough sketched for thefirst time on the side of a panel layout, so I guess I keep that kindof an informal sketchbook from time to time.

JN:When I was in high school—I went to a creative arts highschool—they beat it into us to keep a hardback sketchbook, sonow that’s all I can use.

SP: Oh, I was visiting the Art Academy in San Francisco while Iwas working at LucasArts, and there was one professor, BarronStory, and he was the one that promoted the sketchbook. He wouldhave students pasting things in the books, sketches and photos andpoetry and they were really cool art pieces. And we would receivea lot of those sketchbooks at LucasArts as portfolio submissions. Iremember one time this staff artist was lamenting, “We keep get-ting all these sketchbooks with guys’ paintings of their nakedmother. Doesn’t anybody want to draw monsters anymore?”

JN: [laughs] I think they beat it out of you. They beat all typesof imagination out of you. You can draw a lot of apples andcantaloupes.

SP:Yeah, they’re amazing sketchbooks, but very serious. Verymuch still lifes and café sketches and things.

JN: I just like to doodle. I’m a doodler, and I’ll just attacksomething.

SP: I want to do a sketchbook of just heads because I like to dothese random drawings of, like, devil heads, Frankenstein heads,and gorilla heads.

JN:We all have one thing we draw all the time, for some reason.


PREVIOUS PAGE (CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT):“Bud Luckey”—personal acrylic painting. “Uncle Blue”—personalacrylic painting. “I Hunger”—personal acrylic painting. “Humpty”—personal acrylic painting.RIGHT: For New Year’s of 2006, Steve drew up this festive Sam &Max illustration as a greeting for his website.

STEVE PURCELLCOMICS

SAM & M

AX ™


JN: There’s definitely a rhythm to it.

SP: Sometimes I’ll favor a rhythm rather than comprehension.Like, I’ll put in a silly word that doesn’t make sense just to makea sentence sound funnier, rather than be more informative.

JN: Do you find the writing process to be... does it hold yourinterest more than the art?

SP: Oh, yeah. That’s why there’s been such a dry spell for meto do any comics stuff is because seeing it through is the obsta-cle. It’s not the writing of it. I’ve got a million stories in myhead, and when I’m writing them is the fun part because it’s all potential, not having to see it through. But then actuallydrawing things and making it make sense in the visual is thepart that slows me down. So at least I have a little headstartdoing the web strips where I don’t have to ink them, so that getsme on the page a lot faster. Nobody has complained about thestyle, so it’s more likely I’ll do the work if I can present it in away that doesn’t take me forever.

JN: Do you do any other writing, like, personally?

SP:Yeah, there’s always something I’ve got kindof brewing in the background. And writing is partof what I do at Pixar, too, so I end up writing a lot.

JN: Do you see yourself as a pretty on-task type ofguy? Do you stop and start a lot? Do you have somestimulus to keep you going until something’sdone? Do you “ADD out,” as I like to call it?

SP: I like to be working on new stuff, and in the past year or so, I’ve been trying tocontribute to these little painting shows,so it’s fun to have an excuse to producethose. It does help me to know thatthere’s a goal. If the goal is too open-ended, it’s too easy to push out of theway. Like, when I was working withthat sketchbook idea, it had this intan-gible deadline, and it was easier to pushit out in favor of other stuff. So it doeshelp me to have a drop-dead kind ofgoal for something to get it finished.But I think I’m pretty good at using mytime to create work beyond my day job.

JN: Do you have an assistant?

SP:An assistant? Oh, that would drive me crazy tohave an assistant. You mean, like, a person?

JN:Yes. [laughs] Or a robot or something.

SP: I was wondering, do you mean acomputer program? No, that would becrazy to have somebody breathing downmy neck looking for stuff to do. Thatwould make my regular life like a job to

have to feel obliged to be providing them busy work or some-thing rather than making good use of them. I’d want to keepthem busy just so they wouldn’t be breathing down my neck.“Take all these old drawings, and line them up.” It’s probably agood idea, but when I think of it, it makes me anxious to thinkof somebody hanging around looking for something to do. Butif I think it through, I could see there’s a lot of good things that Icould have somebody like that do, like go through my file draw-ers and get everything from every drawer kind of organized, atleast by subject, so I could decide which things matter.

JN: I feel like I’ve struck a nerve, man.

SP: The joy of doing my own stuff is not having anybodybreathe down my neck, so it’s just work on my own terms, andif I want to stay up late and paint or something like that, thehobby side of it, that’s my choice. But if it gets to the pointwhere I needed an assistant to do it all, I think it would be toostressful to be worthwhile. I would maybe just shut it all downand concentrate on my day job only.

DIGITAL DRAWING

JN: Did I ask you what your computer setup was? Hasanything changed?

SP:Actually, what has changed is at the office, I don’tknow how much I can say about the set-up at my day

job, but I’ve been using a big Cintiq tablet atthe office, and I find that really appealing. Ican see maybe installing that at home. I’mworking on a sketch for a game magazineright now, and it is such a time saver to havethe actual format of the magazines just onthe desk. To actually have it there and to be able to draw right into the layout of the magazine cover and just do simpleblocking in of color and stuff, there’s a real appeal to that ease in the kind of graphics/layout step of coming up with

concepts. I don’t know that I want to do a lot of finished art on it, but I sure like it for blockingout ideas.

JN: Do you like the tactileness of it? Do youlike the way that feels? Because I know there’s alot of people who don’t.

SP: Drawing on the Cintiq?

JN:Yes.

SP:What I do like about it is it kind ofreminds me, when I was a teenager Iused to draw with markers on, like,

cheap kind of poster board orsomething, and the pen wouldglide over the surface of that in away that I liked, so I don’t mind it

PREVIOUS PAGE: Concept art for the Sam & MaxTV show.ABOVE: Sam & Max character concept for Flint Paper.

STEVE PURCELLCOMICS

SAM & MAX ™ AND ©2007 STEVE PURCELL.


By Bret Blevins and Mike Manley

HULK ™& ©2007 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

What is “spotting blacks” you ask?

Simply put, “spotting blacks” is the placement of black as adesign element in a composition (panel, splash page, cover orpage) which directs the viewer’s eye to the focal point(s) of thecomposition and helps achieve depth, separating figure frombackground, background from foreground objects. The use ofblack as a design element also helps lead the reader’s eyepathacross the comic page as a whole, for the arrangement of panelson a page must be considered not as single panels but as a unit,the master composition we use to tell a story in a sequence. Thesmart, planned use of black, the placement of word balloonsalong with the direction of the elements in the panels themselveshelp create a road for the eye to follow across the page. Mostreaders are unaware of this “magnetic path,” but the artist mustbe; he or she must purposefully plan this out carefully. Poorlyplaned or poorly used placement of black or lack of black canreduce a dynamic drawing or page to an unreadable, boring hashor flat, lackluster drawing.

In pen-&-ink drawing, which comic art clearly is, the amountof middletone rendering is usually at a minimum, even the mostrendered comic style usually has a minimum of halftone, thereforemost of the range of tonal value is either black or white whichreads as light or shadow—two values. The middletone, or thirdvalue, is reserved for a slight “feathering” between the light andthe shadow areas on a form. The feathering can be done in a vari-ety of styles but they all achieve the same result: a halftonebetween the shadow and the light. But the greatest achievement ofdepth or shadow is created not by the rendering, or half-tone ren-dering, but by the careful placement of the shadow, or black.Unlike a charcoal drawing or other medium where we can achievea highly sensitive passage of values, light to shadow, in comic artwe are reducing the values down to a very narrow range, often tojust black-&-white with no middletone value. The exception heremight be the few black-&-white comics where the artist canachieve a more rendered style since they don’t have to worryabout the color muddying up things or covering up the linework.But for color comics clarity is essential, as one has to take intoaccount the color will probably have as much if not more to do insome cases with the clarity and how well a page reads.

This “high contrast” style or approach in comic books came from comic strips first, and the more photorealistic approach isclearly evident in the masterful drawings of the comic strip masters Noel Sickles (Scorchy Smith) and Milton Caniff (Terry and thePirates, Steve Canyon) who were the first to employ this approach along with Hal Foster on Tarzan before he created PrinceValiant. Later artists like Alex Raymond (Flash Gordon) as well as many others came along to follow in the realistic tradition ofcomic strip art and there became a few distinct styles or “schools” as it were. The Caniff School and the Foster-Raymond school.


The Use and Placement ofBlack to Empower a Page

Welcome to the third installment of our continuing ComicArt Bootcamp series, where Bret and myself instruct on

the basics of cartooning and comic art. If you’ve been workingtoward breaking into the business for any time, be it by readingan interview in DRAW! or standing in line to get a personal cri-tique from a pro or an editor at a con, you have almost certainlyheard the term “spotting blacks.” I remember the first time I

heard it myself; it was at a local comic-con in the Detroit area,and the artist, a pro, who I was showing my work said to me Ispotted my blacks pretty good on one page but could use thembetter on the others in my samples. At first I wasn’t exactly sureof what he meant, but he took his pencil and showed me. Takinghis pencil he added a few shadows or pointed to where on hisoriginal art he used big areas of black to lead the eye to some-thing important, to frame something, to push something forwardor make it stand out. This is, in essence, 2-D design—using thecontrast of certain elements of a design (in this case blacks) tofocus the attention where you, the artist, want the viewer to paymore attention, to make something stand out or “pop.”

This page of Felix the Cat by Otto Messmer is a classic example of clarityand charm. This clear-lined comic style is employed with minimal use of ren-dering and fluxuation of line weight, the center of attention in each panel isclearly Felix whose solid black color is a prime example of “local color.”

FELIX THE CAT

™ AND ©2007 DON ORIOLO

. SCAN COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS.COMIC ART BOOTCAMPSPOTTING BLACKS

The huge success of these four artists wenton to influence other artists of the day andthe roots of their stylistic approaches topen-&-ink art have trickled down artist toartist and are still with us today. Foster andRaymond employed very realistic drawing,as did many of the artists who followed inthat tradition, often using photographs andmodels to achieve a highly realistic look.Noel Sickles left comic strips for the fieldof illustration, but Milton Caniff continuedto refine that approach along with the disci-ples of the style such as Frank Robbins whocontinued to produce a very chiaroscurostyle which was bolder, employing a boldbrush line and more cartoonish and stylizeddrawing than the Foster-Raymond school.

In the context of comic art, animationand illustration we are discussing here, theconcept of spotting blacks serves as a narra-tive tool in conjunction with its simultaneousroles as a design element and a form-description technique. I know that soundslike a lot to hold in your mind at the sametime, and it can be confusing, but it gets eas-ier with a little careful study of each role.

First let’s define a few conditions of ourworking properties:

Black as Shadow

In the basic optical sense, black exists inthe absence of light, so when making car-toon line drawings with our extreme limita-tions of either pure black or pure white,using black to indicate cast shadows from alight source creates a black shape on thecomposition. This is a logical way to placeblack within your images, and is a solid foundation for buildinga series of black patterns (that must also, because they effectthe composition, function as design). Our eyes understand howshadows behave in the actual three-dimensional world, and willaccept these patterns in artwork that effectively mimics them.Even here though, aesthetic distortion, exaggeration or elimina-

tion is often necessary. If you look at the Sickles examplesbelow you’ll see that he eliminates or simplifies shadow thatwould logically appear on the faces of the characters in some ofthe scenes—this is intentional and helps the characters “read”better—too many shadows obscuring their faces would be dis-tracting and serve no purpose.

COMIC ART BOOTCAMP SPOTTING BLACKS


TARZAN ™

AND ©2007 ERB.


those areas are “asking” to be removed or modified. All thesechoices should be made in the planning or pencil stage—chang-ing black areas of original inked art on paper is an unpleasantchore. If you are working digitally this isn’t a big problem, butit’s still better to learn to think clearly in the planning stagesrather than “find” your best results by later trial and error. Yourwork will be stronger and more consistent.

A second difficulty is the fact that any number of choiceswithin the same set of images may work equally well! This iswhere your personality, preferences and intentions must guideyou. In many cases the possibilities are decided by the moodthe material and your treatment of it requires. A gothic horrorstory or image is a natural vehicle for deep, black, shadow-rich

scenes, a lighthearted, whimsical humor story suggests a brightcheerful approach. Notice the complete shift in effect betweenthese two treatments of the respective subjects. Depending onthe desired narrative intent, any treatment can work, but in typi-cal cases a specific mood will “feel” appropriate.

As I’ve already mentioned, mood, (or narrative effect) creat-ed by “spotting” black is almost impossible to apply isolatedfrom the other specified functions of black—they are almostinvariably woven together, because any placement of black thatdoesn’t strictly describe form moves into the role of local color,cast shadow or arbitrary elements of shape and contrast, any ofwhich also automatically becomes a design element.

If this seems confusing, just stay with it, study and experi-ment and you will understand the concepts. If youare reading this you are already interested in narra-tive artwork, so you have seen the effects in thematerial you find inspiring—look at them with afresh eye, make altered versions (like those below)of images or sequences that strike you. Doing thiswill reveal how an effect was achieved (or missed)by the artist’s original choices, and you will begin todevelop a sense of manipulating the black patternsin your own work to achieve the results you intend.

The cute elephant looks bright and silly in the first image.The stylization of form, the caricatured features and theimpossible pose are contributing to the playful fantasyfeel of the drawing, but absence of black is a key factor,too. Look at the creepy incongruous effect of the second,heavily shadowed version. It’s slightly disturbing (thoughin the right context it could be made to work) because itdoesn’t seem appropriate.

The crawling corpse seems muchmore menacing in the first version—the heavy shadow of the armacross the skull gives an impressionof mass and weight and locks theeffect of a light source (moonlightwe might presume) casting theshadow pattern throughout the restof the image. The weightless out-lined image seems almost dainty bycomparison and certainly doesn’tproject much spooky atmosphere.


LEFT (MIKE): This is an unused page that I drew and inked forBirds Of Prey #66 which took place in a library at night. As aresult I was looking for ways to use the background and fore-ground elements as well as blacks and cast shadows to make cool,interesting patterns and help create not only mood, but depth. The simpler and stronger the black patterns are the stronger the designwill be. The the “X” of the window’s shadow as a design element

combined withthe framing ofthe girl’s headhelps focus oureye on her faceeven though it’sin shadow. Therepeated squareshadow patternof the cast shadows and thedecreasing thick-ness of the shadow patternsrunning acrossthe floor helpachieve great

depth and focus our eye on the figure leaving. No amount of detailwould be able to achieve depth as well without these strong blackpatterns. Shadows or light create depth, not detail.

BELOW: The drawing of Frankenstein below is a quick illustra-tion in how adding black to a drawing gives it so much power.The first version of the drawing is fine, if it was colored well itwould be a solid panel, but you can’t always rely on the coloristto save you, in fact, you usually can’t. By simply adding the blackcast shadow against the wall we quickly put Frank in front of thewall, by following suit with adding black to the arch and a castshadow shape in the archway we create the illusion of greater

depth verysimply. It’sthe black thatgives thepower andpop here, thedepth, notthe detail orlinework. Ifin doubt agood solutionis to make acopy of yourart andexperimentwith placingblacks with amarker first.

BIRDS OF PREY ™ AND ©2007 DC COMICS




This unused page from Birds of Prey #66 is anothergood illustration of how the careful placement ofblack, especially as drop shadows (shadows created orcast by an object or form) or black cutting into whiteas a framing device gives the figures weight. This useof black should be planned out from the beginningstages to help hold the page together and lead the eye where you as the artist want the focus to be. All of this is conscious design, blatant, nothing is byaccident.

BIRDS OF PREY ™ AND ©2007 DC COMICS

COMIC ART BOOTCAMPSPOTTING BLACKS

Back in June I spent two great weeks in China with myfiancée, Echo, who is from Beijing. It was a great tripand a wonderful experience, especially visually as an

artist. I snapped a ton of pictures from our trip through Beijing,Kunming and Dali.

One of the things I was interested in seeing when visitingChina was what the comics situationwas like there. Echo had done somecomics for a publisher in Beijingbefore she moved to the US—we evenpassed that publisher one day riding tothe Forbidden City in a cab. The onlyChinese comics (manhua) I had beenexposed to previously were some I hadpicked up downtown in Chinatownhere in Philly. They were basicallycomics where dudes were fightingeach other, like some kind ofDragonball crossed with Fist of theNorth Star. Echo said these are comicsfrom Singapore, Korea or Taiwan.

The father of Echo’s friend,Summer, ran the dorms for interna-tional students, and he was able tohook us up with a dorm for a week fora ridiculous price of about $170 US.The dorm wasn’t bad and had air con-ditioning, something none of the otherfar more expensive hotels we stayed athad. Being near several universities,like the Schools of Language, Geophysics, etc., had a lot ofbenefits, as there were many Internet cafés, bookstores, etc.One day after having breakfast at the local McDonald’s, Echoand I noticed a sign for a comic shop called Cool Comics.

Echo said that there really wasn’t much done domesticallycomic-wise in China, as the publishers didn’t last long and mostChinese readers wanted Japanese comics. Also the governmentwould crack down on anything that was deemed too far-fetched,

lewd, etc., and there really wasn’t the local fan support.The shop was located in the small mall in the bottom of the

same shopping complex at the McDonald’s at a busy intersectionabout a half mile from our dorm. There was also a jewelry store,music store and a calligraphy shop where some artist did signsand gave lessons. When we showed up the comic store wasn’t

open yet. We peered into the dimly litshop, which reminded me of the tripsmy parents took us on to Ann Arborfrom Detroit as kids. Before we movedto Ann Arbor we visited often, andalways on a Sunday as that was mydad’s day off. We’d often pass a comicshop which was always closed. I’d long-ingly stare into the door wanting so badto be able to go inside. Years later I didvisit that shop, sometimes a few times aweek after we moved to Ann Arbor.

We both looked around the mall abit then to wait till the shop opened at9:30. Our hours were pretty screwedaround still as Beijing is a 12-hourdifference from Philly, so we’d wakeup at 4:00 a.m. and were a bit out-of-sorts as nothing was open yet exceptfor places like McDonald’s, as it wasopen 24 hours a day.

Soon the shop owner came by andwe were able to go into the shop. I wasa bit let down to see the store was

stocked with pretty much just all Japanese comics, in fact the samestuff you’d see here in the States, though translated into Chinese, ofcourse. I didn’t see one single American comic, no Hellboy or SinCity even, though I did see a TMNT figure. As we perused theshop a few more teenagers came in and shopped. I had Echo intro-duce me to the shop owner whose name was Lai Yongxiang, whichtranslates to something like Eternal Peace. They did have somemanga drawing supplies, so I bought that up, Zip-a-Tone, paper,


DRAW! Editor-in-Chief Mike Manley

recently returned from traveling for two

weeks in China and gives you DRAW!

readers a glimpse into the comic book

business—or manhua as comics are

called in China—as it exists today.

CHINA INTERNATIONAL COMICS

ON THEROAD TO

CHINA

pens, inks—just to try and for presents for friends back home.Echo’s comments about there not being many, if any, local

Chinese comics seemed to be proven true when we lookedaround the shop. I didn’t see one local Chinese comic as Iscanned the shelves, but instead walls filled with figurines, but-tons, cosplay costumes, book bags, backpacks—many featuringNightmare before Christmas characters. Maybe there were, butI didn’t see any; we asked the shop manager and he said he did-n’t really sell any. The only other comics I had seen on the tripwere a few bagged Disney comics in the local newsstands. TheChinese LOOOVVEE Disney.

One of the things that happened comic-wise was that wenoticed on the CCTV English channel we had on the cable inour dorm, a news story about popular Japanese manga, DeathNote. As I reported on my blog from China, it seems the popu-larity of both the manga and the movie have caused a little con-troversy in Beijing, at least. It seems the local authorities had

become upset over thecomic, especially I thinkthe licensing, specificallythe Death Note notebookwhich had been made. Iguess the idea of disgrun-tled teens writing down thenames of people they want-ed to “punish” didn’t sitwell with the authorities.The funny thing was in thenews story they showedbooks being taken offshelves, DVDs confiscatedand they were interviewinglittle kids, kids under 10,who the book certainlyisn’t written for nor I imag-ine would appeal to. I hadto laugh, it was the sort ofthe Chinese version of thelame old story we see here:“Bang! Zap! Comics arenot just for kids anymore.”

I asked the manager about this, or had Echo translate forme. I asked him why he still had copies as I had seen on TVthat the local authorities had been removing copies from storesall over. He said that they really only wanted the notebooks, notthe comic. He had a full set in his comic shop. I’ve read manyof the volumes so far and have enjoyed the story, and I wascurious why it was so popular with the Chinese fans. So I askedone who was shopping who appeared to be in his early 20s. Hesaid that he liked the story because it required thinking andstrategy over super-powers or some other type of magic ability.That thought was also echoed by the manager and the otherteen shopping. It seems that the more cerebral approach reallyappealed to the readers. This wasn’t the Naruto crowd, thoughclearly he seems as popular there as here in the US—they evenhad a ready-made cosplay Naruto costume hanging from theceiling of the shop. This store was part of a chain, and whenEcho mentioned we were traveling to Kunming, the managergave us a card and said they had a sister store there.

Like I said in the first post I didn’t see any Americancomics my whole time in China. I guess you could call theDisney comics I saw in the kiosks and newsstands American,but since I never opened the bagged issues I saw I am not surewhere the material originated. Disney does have studios aroundthe world that produce comics, so perhaps that work was merelyreprints. That’s what I imagine anyway. I saw no Civil War, 52,Hellboy, Sin City, Batman or even Spidey comics in either shopI visited nor on the newsstands I saw. I did see ads for DVDs ofthe Batman/Superman cartoons and Tom and Jerry that WarnersBros. is releasing in the big bookstore I shopped at in Kunming.


CHINAINTERNATIONAL COMICS

LEFT: A merchant I bought a fewbrushes from in the market inKunming. TOP: The Cool Comic store inKunming. ABOVE: The manager of theBeijing Cool Comic shop and me. RIGHT: A calligraphy shop thatwas located next to the comic shop.


samurai anime-type DVD. In the back were lots of photos ofkids dressed up in cosplay—some looked pretty good. The shopalso sold pre-made costumes, as well. In this shop I did findthese two weird American super-hero figures.

As I scanned the store again I noticed basically the same typeof manga and anime material I see in shops and cons here.Naruto, One Piece and the boy-on-boy comics too. The store also

had plenty of Nightmarebefore Christmas- as well asMiyazaki-inspired product,too. Echo was happy as shewas able to buy the completeset of 3 Eye by Tezuka she’dbeen looking for. Several girlscrowded around as Echo chat-ted briefly with the managerand then we left. But as wewalked out I noticed thatalmost right next door to CoolComics was another comicreading room called ComicsWorld. Here you could sit,order food and read, like a

comics café. I know these are common in Japan, but it seems theyhave become popular to at least some degree in China as well. Wedidn’t stay as the huge package of art books I bought was startingto get really heavy, so we hailed a cab and went back to our hotel.I think the Chinese market is ripe for some good homegrownChinese comics. If they could develop some cool concepts andcharacters and stay free of the Chinese government censorship,

who knows,10-20 yearsdown theroad the nexthugecomic/anima-tion propertycould beChinese, notJapanese.One thing

was clear from my trip, China is going through a huge revolution,bigger than the old cultural one, as it is trying to leave the thirdworld and the borders are open to a lot of culture from around theworld in a way they never were before. Just like the comics andanimation hugely influenced the Japanese artists like Tezuka afterWWII, I think the same is going to happen or is already happen-ing in China now. Somewhere in China there is a teenagerscratching away with a fevered imagination, ink and some blankpaper dreaming of being the next big world-wide comic star.

If you’d like to read more about my travels in China, visitmy China-Manley blog at:

http://china-manley.blogspot.com

CHINAINTERNATIONAL COMICS

PREVIOUS PAGE: Cool Comics, Beijing. Two comic pens set madeby Memory. ABOVE LEFT: The packs of comic paper I bought. ABOVE RIGHT: Fans in Cool Comic’s reading room watching a DVDand some of the fan art they do displayed on the wall behind them.LEFT: Ink—one white, one black—I bought.BELOW: The art section in the Kunming bookstore showing theamazing amount of good art instruction books available.


and one of my favorite books was one thatDark Horse had been publishing. I wonder ifthey still are doing it, I haven’t checked thatout for a little while. It was Blade of theImmortal. If that guy used assistants, he wascertainly using the right ones.

DRAW!: I have the feeling that maybe hewasn’t, but I think guys like Otomo were. Ithink the guy that was doing, what is it.... ButI think most of them do, simply because ifyou’re doing something in Shonen Jump andyou’re doing 40 pages a week or whatever, it’sa huge amount of work; you have to have zip-a-tone boy, you know, and zip-a-tone girl, andbackground guy. You simply have to, or youwould be dead. You would have to draw apage an hour or something and eventuallyyou would give out.

So what are you reading these days? Ialways find it sort of interesting to see whatfellow professionals are reading, what’s get-ting them excited about..... You know, whenyou have that Maytag repairman day, do yougo to the comic shop? Do you flip open anold Eerie or Creepy and look at a José Ortizstory or something?

DM:You know, surprisingly, I have very littletime to read. At least I stopped reading cook-books. On the other hand, I like to cook andthat was always a bit of a passion, but I don’thave time for it anymore. I was an avid readerat one time. I read all the time, and I alwayshad a book I was working on. But these daysit’s pretty rare. In fact, the last book I read is abook I’ve read many times over, and it’s...I’ve probably read it ten, eleven times, and Ijust reread it. It’s a book called Eleni, and it’sa true story. It’s a story written by the fatherof the writer that I’m working with on Stormwatch. Eleni is thetrue story of a woman living in post-World War II Greece, whenthe Communists occupied northern Greece. And she was in asmall village near the Albanian border named Lia. Her childrenare in danger of being taken north beyond the Iron Curtain. Shemanages to get them to escape but has to stay behind, and iskilled for this. Her son grows up and becomes an investigativereporter for The New York Times and researches her life as well asher death. His name is Nick Gage. Well, Nick Gage happens tohave a son named Christos Gage who’s writing comics right now,and we’re working together at the moment.

DRAW!:Wow! That must be an interesting story.

DM:Yeah! There’s so much more to it. It’d be hard to go intoall the detail. But I ran into Christos on the DC message boards,and I noticed his name, Christos M. Gage. And I’m thinking,what are the chances? I’ve read all these books, the story ofNicholas Gage’s life and his mother’s saga in northern Greece,

and also he followed up with a book called A Place for Us,which takes place in, I think, Worcester, Massachusetts, wherethe boy Nick grows up, after he leaves Greece. He and his sis-ters go to live with his father, who’s an American originallyfrom Greece. But it wasn’t unusual for Greek men to go abroad,especially back then. So at the end of these books, I know ofthe birth of this man’s son, whose name is Christos. And I’mthinking, oh, could it possibly be? So I e-mailed him and said,“Are you the son of Nick Gage?” And he goes, “Yes, I am.” SoChristos had been working in television and film, and he startedworking in comics, and the rest is kind of history at themoment. A brief one. We ended up working together atWildstorm. So pretty neat. For me it was fantastic. It’s likeencountering, even though just a little tiny character, a characterout of a book that I have read. So that was the last book I read.

As far as comics goes, what did I just read? Solo withSergio Aragonés. It’s just been lying around the studio and Ipick it up and I read it again.

DOUG MAHNKE COMICS

©2007 DOUG M

AHNKE.


they make for good strongmen. I’ve been lifting weights since Iwas 17 years old, and I did a lot of physical stuff before then, soI’m as much of a jock as I am an artist. I’m always busy. Infact, that’s probably one of the most contradictory things in mylife is how much I actually have to sit, when I’m very much nota sitting kind of person.

DRAW!: Well, you can’t do this job if you’re not sitting. Well, Iguess you could stand, but you really have to, it’s about having yourass in the seat. A minimum, I mean, if you work eight hours in aday, you’re probably like me, “Wow, that wasn’t really working.”

DM: Boy, eight hours, that’s nothing.

DRAW!: That’s one of the things I always try to impress uponpeople who are interested in this as an occupation; it’s like, ifyou don’t derive a great sense of pleasure from sitting there anddrawing—it has to be something you really love to do as much,if not more, than you like doing anything else—you’re going tohave a really hard time with this job.

DM: You’re going to be in trouble.

DRAW!: Especially if you’re trying to draw, I would say, monthlycomic books. I mean, if you’re doing independent comics, or you’redoing your own thing, or you’re doing a graphic novel and you’vegot a year deadline, fine. But if you’ve got to draw an issue ofSuperman in two weeks, you’ve got to be able to put your ass in theseat and go. And if you can’t, you really can’t make your living at it.

I sometimes wonder how some of my fellow professionals make aliving, because I see so little work from them, so I always assumethat they must be rich, or their wife’s a doctor or something.

DM: Yeah, my wife was saying everyone’s wife is a nurse orsomething like that.

DRAW!: So where do you compete? On what level, interstateor national?

DM: Well, I was almost World Masters Champion at one point.I lost to a Canadian on body weight. That’s what I get for eatingan extra slice of bread.

DRAW!: Wow!

DM: Yeah, I’m pretty good at it. I’m one of the better locallifters.... It’s divided into categories, so it’s not as much “wow” asyou think. On a national level I’m very competitive in my weightclass for the Masters category. That means “old guys lifting.”

DRAW!: So where are you, are you middleweight, heavy-weight, bantamweight?

DM: I am what would be a light heavyweight right now. I weighabout 220 pounds, and we just had our state championships andI took third. But it was kind of a lackluster performance. I’mnursing some injuries, so I couldn’t perform very well.

DRAW!: I know that is as much about as strength it’s abouttechnique, and if you mess your knee up or something, thosebig ligaments there where you have to finesse to get the weightup, it’s tough.

DM: Yeah, if they’re complaining, you’re not going to be doingtoo well at that.

DRAW!: So you don’t go to a regular gym to train?

DM: No, I’ve got everything at home. But I kind of save timeby training at home. And training in an unheated garage allwinter in Minnesota can be pretty daunting, but I still do it. So,yeah, I’m kind of hardcore that way. But I can’t stop it. Iabsolutely compulsively like to lift weights, and since I’m stillcompetitive, that probably gets me more interested in it.

DRAW!: It’s always interesting to me as an artist to also find outthe other artist’s passions. Because usually artists are very pas-sionate people, and they usually have other... maybe art is a majorpassion, but they also might like music, or in your case you like tocook and you’re a power lifter. So I would think that physical typeof hobby or sport, it definitely feeds into what you do as a comicbook artist, because you’re drawing these massively muscular,strong people, so I would think it definitely does give you....

DM:Yeah, in a lot of ways. To me, they always were connected,oddly enough. The first thing I did when I started reading comics asa kid was, well, I want to be a super-hero, you know? That wasnumber one. And I remember when I was five years old or six yearsold, something like that, I strapped a couple of squeeze bottles to

DOUG MAHNKE COMICSS

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DRAW! #14Features in-depth interviews and demos with DC Comics artistDOUG MAHNKE, OVI NEDELCU (Pigtale, WB Animation),STEVE PURCELL (Sam and Max), plus Part 3 of editor MIKEMANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ COMIC ART BOOTCAMP on“Using Black to Power up Your Pages”, product reviews, a newMAHNKE cover, and a FREE ALTER EGO #70 PREVIEW!

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