It’s Kyle Baker’s birthday today so wish him a happy birthday over on Facebook, visit his blog, leave a comment, and buy tons of his books while you’re at it.

For the occasion, I wanted to spark a discussion about the differences between digital vs hand drawn comic art. What better artist to focus on than one who has mastered both: Kyle Baker.

Kyle Baker used to draw with pencils and ink and white out and paper back in the 80s. According to his high school classmates, he used to ink Marvel Comics assignments on the NYC Subway trains. Baker would later describe this inking technique to The Comics Journal as “expressionistic”. By the mid-90s, he started toying with computers and he hasn’t looked back since. Much to a few purists’ chagrin, he’s almost completely abandoned the old ways in order to make room for the new.

I’m paraphrasing here but Baker has stated that cartoonists are the only people left in the world that still use nibs and brushes dipped ink the way our forefathers used to. OK, so he’s not into ink anymore, but that’s only a criticism in contrast with other media such as animation and illustration. After all, canvases and paint are still used. Baker’s point is broader, though, in that he knows exactly what he’s competing with in the realm of entertainment.

Baker’s new digital approach wasn’t my favorite (I still like using an actual dry brush over a dry brush tool in Photoshop) until I realized that he was using computers the same way Gary Panter uses paint or Ralph Steadman uses ink: he was maximizing the specific properties of those tools in an aggressive way. As he recently discussed in his Modern Masters book, Baker is unabashed about having his comics look like computers made them.

Baker’s argument is why shouldn’t it look like computers? With that, he’s at odds with most of the cartoonists that use this technology to mimic other styles, which is almost everybody. Baker abandons all such pretenses about trying to make something look like something it isn’t.

Brian Bolland makes a strong, intelligent case for digital comic booking in the introduction for the DC Guide to Digital Inking, boiling it down to the primal concept of tools and their function. It wasn’t enough to convince me, though, that it isn’t just a mechanism used to expedite production as opposed to using it to enhance the art form.

I’m not entirely dismissing digital art. I know Chris Ware draws and letters by hand but aren’t his color done digitally? You cannot argue with his results; they’re perfect. Most cartoonists use computers in some way or another. Who doesn’t use their computer for their comics, anyway? Why do I sound like an old man when discussing this? My suspicion is that the hand drawn line will eventually be obliterated. It will become a niche hobby like poetry or stamp collecting. One can say it already has. Another scenario is that the old school ink line will increase in value and reclaim its chokehold on the world, as it should.

Frank Quitely recently went directly “onscreen” with his drawing of the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, but despite how cool and exciting that process may be, I find that the results generally lack… something. Watch this video and see for yourself. Quitely’s process is interesting, but this may be one of the very few pieces of his that didn’t do it for me. Granted, Quitely’s comfort level will eventually adjust itself to this new approach. As for Bolland, take note and compare his older covers to his newer ones. The skill is still there, but the line is a little cold, a little dead.

Thing is, Baker’s narrative chops are as strong as ever, his writing’s still funny and you can still see his style beneath all of the pixels (recently, though, some of his figures look like digital models). So is this a question of the tool or our perception of the tool’s results? I’m still a little skeptical about those results, but Baker’s attitude is what makes me appreciate his recent efforts more than ever.

Anyway, with all this talk about futuristic art making propaganda, I posted a bunch of old school Kyle Baker art over here, including a few rarely seen bits, and a Fishbone interview conducted by Kyle himself from way back. What better way to celebrate the future than by saying goodbye to the past?

Happy Birthday, Kyle.

Clutching onto my nib and inkwell with my life,
Michel Fiffe

I wouldn’t mind it if Juan Bobillo’s art was in every high profile mainstream comic book, as well as their countless spin-offs and one-shots and graphic novels and… and… well, you get the idea. I like his comics. Bobillo’s work displays a remarkable level of craft while never becoming a slave to it. His style is carefully rendered, but it’s never so precious that it loses its power and effectiveness. His work on the She-Hulk really exemplified what a Marvel Comic could be: original looking, energetic and fun. While I believe that his rendition of the Marvel Universe was a breath of fresh air, Bobillo’s style is fairly unorthodox in contrast to the general mainstream aesthetic. His works have been largely underrated which may be due in part to his absence from the stateside comics scene. However, he’s been concentrating on creating a new body of material, free from any editorial edict. In effect, we may be witnessing an artist develop a voice beyond mainstream expectations, even if those expectations were mostly self-created. Bobillo, currently living in Argentina, was kind enough to take part in this interview and talk a bit about cartooning.

Michel Fiffe:Tell me about how you broke into comics. It was sometime in the mid-90s, I believe?

Juan Bobillo: I was assisting Ariel Olivetti on several publications, several jobs. Then I started to work on my own stuff. I did a comic called “Anita”, which may be re-published soon in the States. I did that when I was 20 or so. But after helping Ariel out, I got the chance to do some comics for Marvel. Captain America was the first.

Before that period, though, you worked on some European comics. Was there something that turned you off about the American comics industry or was it just where the opportunity presented itself?

Well, it sounds strange but you’re right. I began to turn off quickly. At first I wanted to do superheroes so bad and when I got the chance, well, my heart was in another place. It’s not easy for me to keep a line of work, a certain style, if my heart is not there. I am always changing and I get bored really quickly and that shows in my work. Even after working for just a few years, I asked the Marvel editors to give me more unknown characters, more comedy than action. I really enjoy doing my own characters, and when you work doing mainstream characters, you have to kind of be in love with them and know everything about them. When you do such intense characters, you have to mean it. That world of characters, I think, is built on a kind of a collective spirit, and that is no joke. You have to be a fan, in certain way. And I started to lose that feeling faster than others.

Was this loss of feeling and interest a recent thing?

When I did the fourth chapter of Howard the Duck, I said this isn’t fair for the readers [laughs]. I don’t think that was all that bad… the script was great and the inking and the colors were great… but I felt I wasn’t at my best at all and I haven’t done any stateside comic since then.

I hope that doesn’t last.

I hope I come back! I really want that to happen. Not now but soon. Please wait for me!

You have an amazing industry over there, full of amazing artists and editors. And I’ve been treated so nice. I’ll be forever grateful. [Chris] Claremont, [Evan] Dorkin, [Dan] Slott, [Ty] Templeton… such great writers I’ve worked with. I’m so lucky.

I want to get to the collaborations you’ve had, but I want to go over your first main collaboration, which was with writer Carlos Trillo. How’d you guys meet?

I met Carlos working in Argentina. We were doing stuff for the same editor. Carlos is a legend, and we enjoy working together. He is also a great, great guy. We will do another book next year. I don’t know what is going to be but I’m looking forward to working with him again. We’re in touch all the time. He is always telling me I’m a failure, a true disappointment for him! He tortures me by saying he expected so much from me. Well, we do what we can.

A marriage of sorts, it seems. You guys worked on a lot of books together, all within varying genres. It’s not that common for a writer/artist team to cover such diverse ground these days, which I find impressive.

Well, both of us are very curious and we always want to check out new things. Carlos is such a rare writer, he is absolutely amazing. He used to work with so many different artists and he always comes up with something appropriate for each one of us. He is a writing machine.

Bird seems to be the one book you guys kept returning to, expanding her story and such. What’s the allure of such a character for you?

It’s already finished. I did it like ten years ago… shit! Time goes by so fast! It’s a three book story. It’s a wonderful story and the characters are great. Carlos is crazy.

Ok, so years passed and you found yourself back in the US, working on Captain America. Were the editors already familiar with your European material?

You know, I used to go to comic conventions and did thousands of samples and never got a chance in Marvel. I eventually forgot about doing samples and started doing my own comic. That was what the Marvel editor saw and then gave me a chance. They asked me to try doing a Fantastic Four sample and then I was in. I always tell this story to wannabe artists, so they don’t waste their time doing samples forever.

That method seems to work for some people, though.

That didn’t work for me. Do your own comic!

After that Captain America issue, you went straight to a six issue series, Mekanix, with Chris Claremont. Did you work in the old school Marvel Method where he hands you a plot, you draw it, and then he scripts it?

No, his way was his usual way of working, I guess. The script was very specific. Of course he [reworked] the words after seeing the art. Claremont, my god, what a great writer.

There were hints of things to come in that series, but it was during your Agent X issues, written by Evan Dorkin, where your art took a turn. It became cartoonier, more detailed, really expressive… was there anything in that specific project which inspired that change?

Every time I have the chance of do a new character I have to redesign my style a little bit. I say just a little bit because when working with [Marcelo] Sosa, the best inker in this world, I have to draw in a certain way. So I try not to do something too different from what we’re used to as a team. I think that was my best work at Marvel yet. Really funny. Dorkin’s a genius.

Your next comic was the monthly series She-Hulk, written by Dan Slott. How did that come about?

I asked them if there was any forgotten character around… you know, to have more freedom with the art. I must say that I had all the freedom I wanted at Marvel, but I felt I could go too far with my art if I didn’t have the responsibility of making a big hit. I felt that way, I don’t know.

Go too far in what way?

May be it’s just me, but I believed that when you were working on Spider-Man, you had to be a little bit more responsible. I mean, Spider-Man can’t be scratching his ass on every page, and I thought a lesser known character would be allowed to do that if I chose to. I was looking for ass scratching art at the time. I was sick of the classic heroes “acting”. Believe me, every time I sent a page to Marvel I got the feeling they were going to make me change everything or that they were going to be mad at me… “Hey, She-Hulk would never act like that! Who the hell do you think you are?”

You were trying to be more comical and more natural.

I was always careful, too careful, perhaps, to avoid being disrespectful with the characters and their tradition. They are like Greek gods. You have to be under them… that’s my belief about superhero mythology. In the end you find that every Marvel character has his loyal fans and you shouldn’t treat them differently. They’re all myths. Besides, I didn’t know anything about She-Hulk, so it was easier for me to come up with something new, which was great. I felt that if I was offered to do Spider-Man, my favorite character when I was a kid, lots of other artists’ images would come to mind and that could lead to some stupid self- comparison or competition. I didn’t want to deal with that at the time. I’m so glad She-Hulk came into my life! I hope she’s doing fine. I don’t even dare to see her in someone else’s hands, so I lost contact with her.

I wish you would’ve gone as crazy as you wanted! But what do you mean by “a responsibility to make a big hit”? What’s a big hit to you?

I thought Marvel fans and editors would expect more from bigger characters, and they would ask me to be spectacular in every page. And I was tired of that. I couldn’t do it. But again, they never told me anything. Marvel always gave me all the freedom I asked for. And freedom is something you are not ready to deal with sometimes, so you need to say to yourself, “Noooo, I can’t do this or that. I would, but they won’t let me”. Bullshit. They did let me, all the time. I love them, those damn Marvel editors. Damn you, Aubrey! You left me with no arguments. It was my mistake to assume what the editor was expecting from me. I tend to do that sometimes. I know I shouldn’t, but it happens. Even so, I truly hope I came up with some wild shit.

So that’s how you ended up drawing fresh new versions of characters that have always looked more or less the same.

That’s my way of having fun. I remember doing Spider-Man for the first time. The script said that he entered the room doing all kinds of acrobatics actions and I couldn’t do it originally. I know I can manage to do some good action stuff but I’ve seen Spider-Man doing acrobatics so many times, with so many postures, there was no way I could do it in an original way. So I did only the web line, and pop! — He was already sitting in the room. I kept doing that with every character. My goal was to be original and fun, y’know, surprise the reader with a new point of view. That’s what we all aim for, I guess. I had fun doing that. I got bored trying to come up with the biggest shot, the most powerful image, the most intense look all the time. If you do that every time you start to draw all the same expressions, same heroic postures. That was not for me.

How did the fans react to that approach?

No idea. I try not to be aware of that reaction. I’m not the kind of guy that cares about public opinion. I know for sure that a thirteen year old boy could ruin my week just writing about my work, so I try to stay away from the internet and so. I don’t have a web page. Just a week ago I posted my work on the web for the first time. I created a blog but I left no room for opinions, know what I mean? It’s a waste of my time and energy. I must say that I had my share of recognition along these years. I’ve always been treated great, but I’m sure there are lots of Marvel fans that would punch me in the face if they see me. [laughter]

Really? Why do think they’d be so hostile?

Take that Spider-Man I did, for example. I knew most readers wouldn’t appreciate me for that… I wouldn’t if I was a Spider-Man fan, but I wasn’t thinking about that. I knew someone over there would get the joke, too.

That’s the issue that sold me on you, actually.

Ha! You can’t try to please everybody and be original at the same time. Besides, remember that I was born far away and it was hard enough to develop the American way of storytelling and designing. Believe me, that takes a lot of work, too.

Knowing fandom and how close they hold these characters to their hearts, I can see how your style was like an anathema to them.

Shit, do they hate me that bad? Anathema? Oh, Michel…you broke my heart. You see why I try to be away of the fans’ reaction?

That was a compliment, though! What about editorial? How did Marvel react to the way you were bringing those scripts to life?

Editors loved that in Marvel. They encouraged me to keep doing it. Of course, every now and then they had to remind me about some matters… like “hey, Captain America doesn’t fly”, “She-Hulk is not the Hulk’s wife”, etc. They encouraged me, but it was all my fault! Sorry, guys. I promise Spider-Man will enter the room kicking ass next time!

You’ve pretty much only worked with inker Marcelo Sosa. How did you guys end up becoming an art team?

The masterful Ariel Olivetti was our teacher, so we knew each other from class. Then we worked for him, helping him with some comics, me drawing and Sosa inking. Sosa and I, we started working mostly at the same time, we have our own art school now, Sotano Blanco, and he is a terrific illustrator and great friend of mine.

Do you pencil tightly or do you leave room for Marcelo to ink away? Do you prefer this method to the one where you’re in charge of the entire process?

When working with Sosa I have to do some tight pencils. Really tight, though he understands my drawing perfectly. So many details everywhere, and I always adjust the inking a little bit, too. Sorry, Sosa, but that’s the truth! He never reads the script! So sometimes he doesn’t know what the hell is happening [laughs], but we understand each other really well on paper. I guess it will be hard for me to work with him again. I’m not so sure I want to do those tight pencils anymore. I told him that already. I hope he understands. He didn’t complain, so I guess we’re ok.

How did you like working with Ty Templeton on the Howard the Duck story?

It was the usual writer/artist relationship. He is a really funny guy, so talented. So talented! I’m not that proud of what I did to him and Howard, that’s why I stopped doing it. He never told me anything, but I would understand if he also thinks I’m the worst anathema of all time!

But there’s always an element of confidence to your work. What specifically are you not proud of?

Well, I enjoy telling stories more than anything, so I never concentrate only in a good image. I get bored doing just that, so I always try to make the reader hear something, or see some movement, and be surprised. I work hard on layouts.

Tell me about your new comic strip Coca, Ramon & Fernet.

It’s my first time as a writer and I’m having the time of my life. My main goal is to start writing my stuff or write for other artists. I thought this strip would be a good way of learning. It’s something simple and kind of easy to draw. Actually, I’m finding out that this is not that easy. I have like 70 strips done already. I’m really having fun. I know some of the jokes suck but hey, I’m learning. I have great hopes for this strip.

Would you consider writing a longer narrative?

Sure, that’s the main purpose. Though I’m beginning to think maybe I shouldn’t do anything else but this strip. I have so much fun.

What current projects are you working on?

I’m working on “Animas”, a long story written by Gabriel Bobillo, my brother. I’m doing it with no deadlines, so it’s taking me forever. I hope to get it finished next year. It’s a three book project. I’ll drop some pictures when I have any. I’m working the layouts like crazy. I feel like I’ve done nothing yet even though I’ve been working on it for more than a year now. Is it me or does time goes by faster every time?

This interview doesn’t speed things up. Thanks for taking the time to do it, though.

It was an absolute pleasure. But, shit, I’m concerned about fans hating me now… thanks for that, Michel.

That’s what I’m here for.

Don’t forget to check out more of Bobillo’s comics over at my site, and tons of sketches and upcoming projects in his very own blog!

By MICHEL FIFFE for The Beat

Previously in part 1 and part 2, Badger spoke of his breaking into comics, his approach to character icons, and his collaborations. In this final installment, he catches us up on the Instant Piano anthology series, being an activist, digital drawing, unionizing artists, and prioritizing the cartooning lifestyle.

Michel Fiffe: I’d like to talk a little about Instant Piano and how it came to be. Was it just a bunch of friends getting together to make comics?

Mark Badger: It was Robbie Busch who really started it. He started out at Pratt and I don’t even know how Robbie and I met. Probably through the inker, Art Nichols, but Robbie was my assistant when I was living in New York and he was friends with Evan Dorkin, who I was incredibly cruel and arrogant to. I think at some point in San Diego, I was drunk and Evan had 2 comics out. I looked at one and just bashed it.

F: No–

F: It’s the kind of thing where you go, “OK, I feel really bad.” It’s one of those things you don’t remember doing and feel really guilty for. “That was me? I was that much of an asshole? I can’t believe it, I’m so sorry that I was such an asshole!” The drunken arrogance of me, 25 years old, and poor Evan, he was 21 or 22 or however old he was. Anyway, so Robbie brought Evan in and was hanging around in the offices and Kyle Baker and I were hanging out so we all started going out talking about doing something. We pitched it to Dark Horse and then their lawyer took a hundred years to negotiate a contract because heaven forbid you can just do a book. So many policies at Dark Horse. But it was really just 5 guys hanging out, doing a book. It had no grand pretension. You got Kyle doing the Shadow, I was doing Batman, and we thought we’d make some money, not lose money. We sold some copies, though. What happens is that you get older and you analyze why it all fell apart. But there was a fun period of hanging out in the West Village before there were any McDonald’s there.

F: You were all in New York at the time, or were some of you West Coast by then?

B: I was in Hoboken, Evan was in Staten Island I think, Robbie was in Brooklyn maybe, and Kyle was in the Village. Stephen DeStefano was in Brooklyn or Queens. It was like if you work at an office and then you kinda hang out afterwards. It was just hanging out.

F: Instant Piano came out around 1994. Were you one of the first to use computers for your art?

B: Yeah, it’s got Painter or Sketcher or something. I started learning the computer on that stuff. That was the beginning of the digital age.

F: Sounds like you were one of the early guys to use that stuff, you and Kyle. I’m not counting the “digital” comics Marvel and DC put out years before, which were more novelty than anything else.

B: I think we were the first guys to pick up the Wacom tablet and really draw on a computer. We were just sick of dealing with the production people, which was sort of the first impetus of the computer. I can’t stand dealing with the production people. That was the beginning of it all.

F: The other thing that’s interesting about your stuff in Instant Piano is that you used the comics platform to talk about things, about immediate problems like politics, personal health issues –

B: Multiple sclerosis is a chronic illness. I was diagnosed with it when I was 30. It’s a pretty mind blowing experience. At that point, I pretty much figured I would live forever, but then I was diagnosed and I was like, “Ok, how do I deal with this?” There was no model for that at all. One of the things I’m very clear about is that the activism is a model for dealing with it. It’s depressing when you say ’94 because at that point there was a single-payer health care system in California that I was working on, and Hillary Clinton was thinking about doing her thing in ‘94. Now, 20 years later, Barack Obama and Congress are screwing everything up all over again. So the personal stuff in comics, I tried to figure how to get it to come out. I mean, guys your age grew up with a model of people doing comics like that. There weren’t many models for that kinda stuff back then. But I’m lucky, I married well. She’s an artist, a Tin Tin fan, and she was able to transition from running her own business to working on the web at a big company so we would have health insurance. And eventually drugs came out for MS and they work on me. It’s pretty sad that the artist health plan comes down to “get married to an office worker”.

F: You were actually giving out phone numbers in your comics for people to call up and be active.

B: I think if I wasn’t an activist I probably would’ve been a much more successful comic book artist. I would’ve been more focused on making money and being a good cartoonist and not putting together demonstrations. People don’t appreciate how much work it takes to get a demonstration together. Elliot S! Maggin said it best when he was like, “That’s the whole point if you read superhero comics. You become a Democrat if you read Superman comics.” You’re supposed to go out and fight for truth and justice. As far as fanboys go, I’m the 6 or 7 year old that always feels, “That’s what you’re supposed to do!” It was very life affirming for me during the Obama election and Gerry stuck up on his blog the famous Ditko Spider-man scene where he’s buried beneath the machinery and it goes on for several pages. I was like, “Ah! They finally get this! Yeah, that’s good! There’s a reason I like working with this guy!”

F: What happened after Batman: Jazz? Did you say you were blacklisted from comics?

B: I don’t know if it was blacklist. I’m sure DC doesn’t have a list of people you can’t hire. They’d probably get into antitrust laws if they did, but I certainly couldn’t get any work at all. The style I had was just too out there. I’d done a bunch of stuff for non profit people, I’ve been teaching Flash and ActionScript. Eight years of that, and then I burned out on a lot of teaching. At this point I qualify as an Internet guy who can do Flash applications and stuff. It’s frightening. It’s totally frightening. Part me thinks, “You draw comic books, you’re not capable of putting together an application!”

F: Were you also trying to build a union for cartoonists?

B: The Graphic Artists Guild has been around forever. When I got diagnosed I had to have insurance, so I joined the Guild which was mostly illustrators and graphic designers. There weren’t a lot of cartoonists. I helped the California chapter expand, and not fall into bickering by applying the techniques of community organizing. All the things I had learned in doing CISPES [Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador] I started teaching to the California Guild members. Basically, our chapter went from 3 or 4 activists and 100 members to 300 or 400 members with 20 to 30 activists because of all of these organizing techniques I had. This kind of stuff works really well and can benefit almost any organization. The Guild ended up affiliating with United Auto Workers. The affiliation gave the Guild some more economic power to higher organizers.

F: That would’ve been a big push to have that kind of support.

B: Yeah, we had an honest to god lobbyist in Washington who could work on artists’ rights. And so I went to work for the Guild for about a year. I went from teaching it locally to teaching it across the country and started getting some success with some of the chapters. The executive director being a white male — as a white male I can bad mouth white males, right?

F: Feel free.

B: He didn’t want a grass roots community. He wanted to put on conferences to get his people to treat him like something special. Because I was able to talk to the artists and get them organized and working together, he and the presidents didn’t want that. And that’s the way they went. At that point the Guild started falling apart. The Guild still exists but the local chapter’s gone. Every year or two they put out a Pricing and Ethical Guidelines Handbook, and they make a lot of money off of that. As an organization, it’s really sad. They wanted what they got. They didn’t want to be a union. They didn’t want to work with blue collar commies, big labor. And they didn’t want to be a community where you’d have members working together to improve conditions, but a bunch of people make a living off of publishing the Guidelines.

F: That’s too bad.

B: It’s probably the saddest part of my work life. All artists need an organization working for them, but unions and campaigns don’t just happen. Organizers are the glue and structure that hold things together and make stuff happen. I think it’s fair to say at that point there weren’t any other artists who had any organizing skills so I was in a perfect place to fight for “truth justice and the American Way.” So I did that and taught for 8 years and lots of web development. Now I’m doing a bunch of comics. Suddenly I’m back doing comics.

F: That’s a shame about organization, too, because it’s true that artists don’t usually organize. They have no training in doing so, maybe not even the interest.

B: That’s the thing. Every artist wants to get together and drink beer. You know any artist that would not want to get together to drink beer, or coffee for those who’ve been alcoholics in reform? The interesting thing is everybody I’ve ever worked with, the union people I worked with are self employed artists. They all know how they’re being screwed, they all wanna get out of their studios and they’re all really capable of doing stuff. They can all take on a project, do it on their own and not have it fall apart. People who have regular jobs, you have to hold their hands all the time. They don’t realize how good our skills are. I mean, if you can draw comic, you can do almost anything. Comics are a shitload of work. That’s the interesting thing about being out of comics. Suddenly I have more respect for all the people doing comics than I ever did when I was doing comics. Artists need a little bit of support and skills, superstar artists need to get hit over the head because of their egos, but then artists just run with it.

F: Evan Dorkin recently blogged about the health care issue, about cartoonists living in New York. His wife, Sarah Dyer, did the bulk of the research but he put up all this information which was great. We need all the help we can get, y’know. It’s a little weird and pathetic how we make no money.

B: There was this one person who was into design and she was on the Guild and she would say how she had all these degrees yet all the union guys were making 3 times the money, and paid vacations, and health care, and that’s not fair! Well, yeah, they’ve got a union; they’ve worked their ass off for it. We haven’t. We’re creative and we do it all ourselves. Partially, artists are legislated against. If you and I wanted to form a union legally, we can’t, because if you and I form a union for comics, that’s an antitrust move.

F: No kidding.

B: Yeah, that would be antitrust. You would be doing something with the Competition law. That would make it antitrust to bargain with Time Warner, who are what, owners of 70% of the universe or something?

F: Sounds about right.

B: Part of the legislation is to prevent individual workers from unionizing because unions are bad. So that’s good that Evan’s pushing stuff out there. The question is can Obama get the country back to the point where there’s a middle class or not? He’s got to get it back to the point where there’s less of a feeling of intense pressure. Once you have a middle class, you can have artists existing as part of the lower class. There are a few artists that make it up to the upper class, but we need a middle class. Everyone should go read Elizabeth Warren, don’t listen to me. She heads up the TARP Oversight Committee and is pushing for more regulations. Jon Stewart clearly has a huge crush on her. What’s sad is when I was working with the Guild, a rival organization started up. It was all the big name illustrators who started in the 60s and 70s and they felt the Guild worked with too many peons and was the problem. They hated “Leftist Big Labor.” The UAW was evil to them because they felt they were the equal of Time-Warner. Single artists were the equal to large corporations, and only the really successful were worth supporting and working with. To them, Time-Warner is good and the UAW is bad. So supporting the civil rights movement, single payer health care, equal rights for gays, bad. Making as much money as possible for a few people at the top, good… if those at the top give you a cupcake or two.

F: I think a lot of cartoonists may be technically poverty line now.

B: I mean, there’s a lot of money to go around, it’s just not going around to everybody.

F: It’s not circulating down to us.

B:  Yeah, there are huge loads of money out there. Somebody posted how much money the board members of the recent Marvel/Disney buyout made. It is a big deal. I didn’t recognize any of the names. They didn’t make any comics I ever bought! I never saw any of the movies Marvel made but they’re all making 30, 40, 50 million dollars. There’s plenty of money going around now. You’d think Marvel can take one million from 10 board members and set up a creative independent arm and spread all that money out to a bunch of the artists that make their comics. But y’know, what’s more important, making comics or a board member making another million?

F: Clearly, the board members need all the money they can get.

B: I’m happier now that I can teach and do flunky work for Pixelpushers as a programmer so I can do comics and just put them out there. It’s great to work with non-profits where the idea and the story are important, not sticking to the company’s house style. Ultimately… comics are like poetry now, where you make your comics and have a day job to support them. It makes the lines clearer about what’s important, so if I want I can go off and draw an 8 page abstract comic without a publisher and the success is linked to the drawing not making the editor happy. I’m so out of comics it’s ridiculous. It’s sweet that you wanted to do this and Heidi is running it, but I’m just a guy who flitted through comics for a little while, fit into some of the cracks in the business and went on with his life. I may be dumb but I think what I’ve done working with CISPES, working on health care, working with the Guild, working in my kid’s school are all more important than Batman. We lose perspective and think “comics” are the only thing, but the world and how you walk through it that’s what really matters.

It’s been a great pleasure interviewing Mark Badger, who was kind enough to let me ask him anything to begin with. Make sure to bookmark Mark Badger’s Art Blog and check in frequently. Visit right here for tons more Badger artwork and comics. –Michel Fiffe

[Continuing Michel Fiffe's interview with artist Mark Badger. Part 1 can be found here.]

By MICHEL FIFFE for the Beat

In this second round (out of three), Mark Badger sheds some light on collaborating with J.M. DeMatteis, co-creating the Mask, being influenced by Howard Chaykin, cultural significance in “realistic” art, the virtues of Jim Shooter, and working with the late, great Archie Goodwin.

Michel Fiffe: Getting back to inking, you’ve inked other artists. Is that just as weird as having your work inked by others?

Mark Badger: Those jobs were other artists wanting me to ink their work. I did do some sort of commercial inking gigs, but I was never like a regular inker. They basically said to come in and “Badgerize” them. The Doctor Strange thing [Triumph and Torment], Mike Mignola was gonna ink it himself but then he was like, “If I ink it myself, I’m gonna have to draw the whole thing and I don’t wanna draw the whole thing so if I get someone who can ink it who could draw…” He wanted somebody who could finish his breakdowns and take it to the next level. At that point we were talking a couple hours a day, like, “You want little Moebius lines here, I’ll put little Moebius lines here” or, “I’m gonna get Berni Wrightson’s Frankenstein book out for this part here” and all that. “Do you want this color or do you want this color?”

F: It seemed to have worked.

B: It was really more of collaboration than just one guy penciling and then handing it off to another guy. I’d be a lot more embarrassed if I had to ink somebody now.

F: If you think about the history of comics, nobody really inked anybody else’s work. I’m talking about the old newspaper strips from the 20s and 30s up to the early Marvel years. Well, I guess there were the assembly lines in all of the shops in the 40s, so —

B: Yeah, I mean, didn’t Joe Simon ink a bunch of Kirby stuff? It’s a production thing, y’know. It’s a weird process, though, like when you’re finishing a drawing. I don’t really understand the really tight pencilers and then the inkers go in and ink the pencils. What’s the point? I could never draw that way anyway. I could never draw like Art Adams in a million, trillion years. I could never produce something that tight. I’d have my arm in a straitjacket.

F: You mean you can’t draw every window sill in every single building in a cityscape?

B: Yeah! I suppose I could, but…

F: …but why would you want to? It kinda serves no purpose.

B: Well… how old are you?

F: 30.

B: You’re at that point where you’re still… you’re young, you’re young. [Laughs]. At your age I thought everyone’s taste should be just like mine. I was a snot. I got over it.

F: Thanks? [Laughs.]

B: I can feel like when you’re in high school and you look at those drawings and… I remember looking at Barry Smith and going, “Look, he drew all this cool stuff in Conan.” It’s utterly amazing what he did in Conan. I didn’t like the loose, sloppy guys, I didn’t like Frank Robbins. If your audience is basically a high school audience, then part of you should be doing every window. That’s part of what the audience wants. I have a 13 year old son now and the comics he likes are not the comics I like. When you’re a kid, you think what you like is perfect and everything else sucks. In your twenties and thirties you want everyone to like what you like and you get pedantic about explaining what’s cool. I think I’ve hit this point where I’m pretty okay with what I like and if others like something different that’s fine. I can really respect all the craft and skill that goes into creating a super hero comic these days. So I like seeing my kid do all this giant robot stuff and build these Gundam models. Not my interest, but it’s really cool.

F: He likes comics, though?

B: Well, he likes Manga. There’s a specific cultural difference between Manga and us. At least from their kids’ perspective, Manga is a very different thing than Marvel and DC.

F: Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate hyper-detail, even when it’s superfluous – I love when Barry Smith draws every blade of grass – but sometimes I don’t need to see every muscle and sinew… y’know, just move the story along. I find that readers, whether they know it or not, go back to those comics mostly because of the stories, not because of Batman’s well defined six pack.

B: Yeah, but for us to talk about the value of storytelling as an artist looking at the work as opposed to what the audience wants, I would argue that that six pack is really, really important to people somehow. Alex Ross is sort of the perfect comic book artist for the audience in terms of what fans want. I mean, they want the story, but they want the reality somehow.

F: There’s something about Alex Ross’ work that takes it to this… odd level and I know the audience totally loves it, yet I can’t relate to it. They hold that “realism” as the golden standard. Neal Adams started this “realism” trend… and although I like aspects of his work and his contributions to comics, there’s something stiff and humorless about his work, about that entire approach.

B: Yeah, y’know, we were going over my fanboy faze and there was definitely a big Neal Adams faze. I don’t know… at some point you just have to say, “Well, a bunch of people are into this stuff and more power to them and… I gotta get on with my life! [Laughter.] It is weird. I mean, there are Republicans in the world and you have to accept the Republicans in the world. [Fiffe laughs.] I can’t explain it. If you’re a millionaire I can’t explain why you’re a Republican. Neal did have a story with Green Arrow that Elliot S! Maggin wrote walking through a riot and he was carrying the dead kid and there was some pompous quote from high literature and it was like the greatest piece of comics ever [“What Can One Man Do?” , Green Lantern/Green Arrow #87, Dec/Jan ’71]. When I was 14 and that came out, I was like, “Hooooly fucking shit!” It just blew my brains. So Neal hit that point, totally. I mean, he hit something there that resonated with 14 year old Mark Badger and that was really cool. I mean, that’s kinda neat. I kinda like that 14 year old now and don’t have to disapprove of him any more.

F: Let’s talk about Greenberg the Vampire. How did that come about? Was that one of the first fully painted comics?

B: It was relatively early in the Marvel series of graphic novels. There was definitely other stuff going on, I don’t think it’s… certainly the first non-superhero graphic novel they did. Marc DeMatteis had done a Greenberg story with Steve Leialoha, one of the nicest guys in comics. Marc’s one of the nicest guys is comics, too. But they had done it in Bizarre Adventures [#29, Dec. 81], one of Marvel’s black and white magazines. When Marc wanted to do more Greenberg, there really was no place to put it. We did Gargoyle and he said, “That cop you drew in Gargoyle kinda looks like a Leialoha cop! Wanna do a Greenberg graphic novel?” At that point, Marvel was giving out graphic novel contracts to everybody and anybody. “I wanna do a comic with the drunk on the bridge when Spider-Man swung by” and somebody was like “…ok, we can do a graphic novel.”

F: Sounds kinda fun.

B: Graphic novels were selling really hot, so they’d do anything. They just said to go do it. Jim Shooter stuck his finger in almost everything, but when it was something like Greenberg and he didn’t know anything about it. He kinda admitted, “I don’t know what you guys are doing, you’re writing literature and drawing not like anything I understand as drawing. Go do your thing.”

F: And he let it go, just like that, huh?

B: Yeah… we couldn’t have ever done that in Captain America, y’know, with that approach. That wouldn’t have been right. But at that point it was just “Make Marvel run, work on time, the work’s coming in, it’s fine”.

F: People always have Shooter stories.

B: I wasn’t at Marvel long enough at that period to have Shooter stories.

F: I figured even people that have met him only once are usually polarized by Shooter. But it seems that as much as people hate him, a lot of creators hit their creative peaks during the Shooter era. I was hoping for a positive Shooter story.

B: I gotta say that Shooter’s $1.25 lecture on storytelling is some of the best fundamentals about comic book storytelling. Every new artist he’d make ‘em come in… I’m relatively short, I’m like 5’9 and Chris Warner is shorter than me. We kinda went in and Shooter was standing over us, showing us this Jack Kirby comic book and going panel by panel by panel and explaining the logic behind why Kirby picked his shots. That is the best foundation for doing really clear, straightforward, this-is-what-comics-should-be… and y’know, Shooter takes the most boring period of Jack’s work — and I think Jack is the greatest artists in the 20^th century — and pushed the value of having those fundamental skills. Shooter really laid those out for people. I’m sure you could talk to editors these days and you’d just get some watered down version, some 22 year old kid who’s gonna give you the Jim Shooter lecture from a very perverted point of view. That’s kinda what happened, they’d take Shooter’s lecture and water it down, “We can’t be too much of a hard ass like Shooter because he was an asshole about some things, and so we’re not gonna edit”. They’d make up all these other rules to go with stuff. And that’s sorta what Shooter ended up doing, he would make up other rules. Have I mentioned the white zip-a-tone yet?

F: You mentioned it in our previous back-and-forth that Marvel was buying all of the white Zip-A-Tone.

B: Later in Shooter’s reign, every black shape in the background had to be covered in white Zip-A-Tone to get depth…

F: For every Marvel comic? That makes no sense. Was that all handled by production people?

B: Shooter didn’t want blacks in the backgrounds for compositional reasons. Someone had explained atmospheric perspective to him, like in traditional painting. As things went further in depth they get lighter. So he turned it into a law. The staff would just have to go in every time a black was spotted and it would get white Zip-A-Tone over it, making it a light gray. In painting it makes sense, that’s an actual technique but paintings are big and they’re oils and they’re lush and rich and this was a period in comics where you’d still see the dots in the printing and the solid blacks were a fuzzy gray to begin with. So that design level of whiting blacks to make the figure pop in the foreground … that’s when Shooter was making too many of the rules and not paying attention to what was going on in the actual comic.

F: That’s around the time that you left, right? You then worked with Howard Chaykin on American Flagg?

B: Yeah, I think that was right after Greenberg, I was working with Dark horse and went on to Flagg. American Flagg was going on and then Chaykin left and I think I finished up Greenberg and Mike Baron had wanted me to draw an issue of Badger, which has never happened, but I was going up to First Comics saying, “OK, I need work. I’d like to do the Badger issue now.” But there were changes going on in editorial, and I just said “I don’t know what you guys are doing with Flagg but I’d totally be interested in working on it.” And they were like, “Oh, yeah, you wanna do the book?” That’s basically how I ended up drawing the book.

F: DeMatteis wrote those.

B: Yeah. Steven Grant wrote a couple of them but we weren’t working in any way shape or form… so I sort of said to First, “We’re not clicking, can we get DeMatteis to write it?” They said, “Yeah, we can do that. We wanna keep you doing the book.” Marc came in and wrote the anti-Chaykin version of Flagg. Marc and I are probably 180 degrees from Howard’s world view. Marc’s the nice, nerdy, sensitive Jewish guy and Howard is the smart ass, bad ass comics guy, so I don’t know if what we did on Flagg worked very well, but it was a great experience.

F: What did Howard think about your work?

B: I think at that point Howard wanted to walk away from Flagg and let it run on its own. The only thing I got from him was that “You draw like you’re on another fucking planet”. I was busting my hump on the job trying to bring all this technique to it but I was just doing me and not a Howard riff. There really shouldn’t have been anybody else but Howard doing Flagg. I mean, there’s no way for anybody to just come in and do it. Howard’s pretty much one of a kind. You could make an argument that the first 12 issues are a graphic novel and leave it at that. He did what, 16 more issues after that, 4 more storylines? Those were sort of him running on his craft, where the first 12 issues were tightly plotted out.

F: Yeah, the first 12 were definitely the most incredible issues.

B: I can sit here and rave about Monark Starstalker and Howard would probably get embarrassed. Howard was one of those guys who, like Wrightson, would have regular gigs. His stuff would pop up and I, all throughout high school, would go, “Aw, this is really cool! I wish they’d do more of these!” Then it would disappear and he would do something else. He did the first Star Wars before it was anything big and you’d go, “Howard’s gonna do this!” Then you were like, “No, he’s not. That’s kinda lame.” Now you look at it and know that Chaykin was just doing a job and nobody knew that it would be a big thing and more power to him, but as an adolescent kid you’re expecting every job to be this great masterpiece. He did some issues of Solomon Kane and it had no context of a Puritan adventurer, I’m sure, but they were really cool. So I’m totally a Howard fanboy, I went though a period where I’d study his work and see all the artistic influence he would pull into that stuff, his stuff. It’s really impressive.

F: Funny how you say that you’re a Howard fanboy because I noticed some influence in your writing. You rarely ever write your own stuff, but you wrote The Masque [later, the Mask], which I think is great.

B: Well, thank you.

F: Yeah, it’s very much like Chaykin because it dropped you in the middle of a conversation, or a situation and we had to figure what was going on. How’d you end up doing that comic?

B: Mike [Richardson] wanted to do a character but really didn’t have the time or probably the patience to actually sit down and actually write something at that point. I don’t know what his situation was. When we were doing this, comics were like off the seat of your pants, none of this, “Did you have to think this up and write a proposal for this?” No, it was all just, “Let’s make some comics.” There was no money involved and we were just sorta screwing around and doing stuff. I mean, he really just had this idea for a Shadow knock off, y’know, that’s really what the main idea was. Instead of a hat and cloak and a big gun, there was a mask and a big gun. That’s what Mike wanted to do and… that’s not me. I don’t have this burning desire to rework all this old character stuff.

F: Right.

B: Part of my failing in the comic book industry is… well, I’ll have to draw Batman but I’ll go, “I’ll draw Charlie Parker and Batman!” I don’t really care about Batman. I admit it that I’ll get into drawing Batman’s cape. I mean, the cape is a whole other issue. So Mike Richardson asked me to do this thing, The Masque, and we were supposed to plot it together. At that point, when I worked with DeMatteis, we’d talk out a plot and Marc would type up something and then dialogue it and it would make sense. So I thought Mike and I will talk and then I’ll write it up, but Mike wasn’t able to plot. He didn’t really know anything about plotting at that point. This wasn’t the guy who’s a Hollywood exec. This is a guy coming from running a comic book store. So I was trying to integrate his ideas with my ideas. I was getting all fascinated with the stuff in Central America and what was going on there, like what wouldn’t it be really surreal  if what happened in Central America  happened in America? Then trying to integrate that with Mike’s idea of doing a Shadow knock-off and wanting no plot to go in there. I’m not a writer and I tend to not have stories to tell. Structural stuff and putting together a story really is what interests me. It’s why I like working with writers so much, because I can think of all the structure and interesting bits. I should’ve written more of my own stuff, but I’m not sure what kind of stuff I would do.

F: So it’s more about the building of a story from the ground up rather than giving it a point or a purpose?

B: It would be interesting to go over this with Marc and Gerry and ask what I did to contribute when we plotted together. One of my favorite comics is a back up in Fantastic Four Special # 5 [“This is a Plot?”] with Stan Lee and Jack plotting a story and they would throw stuff and shoot and jump around the room and map out the whole story. That’s the model of what you’re supposed to be when you’re plotting comics, right? Working with Gerry and Marc has totally been that experience. I’m pretty sure they like working with me, since we’ve done so much of it.

F: You just didn’t want to do it all yourself.

B: I didn’t wanna be the brand. I don’t have that burning desire. Mignola was always talking about his stories. My brain doesn’t get activated until we’re actually working on something and juggling the problems.

F: Some of the chapter introductions, where the Masque breaks the fourth wall, were the best parts. There was this one where he was just going off on the reader about styles and the industry and art and then the story sort of comes in later… it all seemed natural, not forced humor at all.

B: Well, the one thing I’ve never been good at doing is… OK, if you’re doing a comic about Batman, it shouldn’t really be about you as the artist in the context of the corporate machine of DC Comics. I mean, if you can figure out how to turn “This is who I am and what I’m saying” into a story, is sort of easy when you’re doing… if you look at most of the autobiographical stuff now it’s kinda nice and I like it but then I think “What really matters beyond your ability to deal with things and what are those bigger issues?” That’s always been the tension and the dynamic I’ve had trouble with.

F: You mentioned to me before that the ideas you wrote in the Masque were scary to people. Or rather, that comics people are usually afraid of new ideas. That’s still going on, I would say. That’s still an issue, and it’s very relevant with what’s going on.

B: Are you serious? In context to – who are you talking about?

F: I’m talking about the bigger companies and their imitators for the most part. It seems as if there’s always been this kind of sameness or a refusal toward anything new. That’s why I find it remarkable whenever something obviously different gets in through the door at all. It’s all very conservative still.

B: Yeah, I don’t know if they’re more conservative now. The funny thing about you wanting to interview me is that I don’t know if they’re any more conservative now than they were when I was in comics. I mean back then, I couldn’t understand what I was doing wrong. I have a bit of comics Asperger’s, y’know, they’d say, “You could be a great artist if you’d just draw what I want.” I’m sure they’re just doing their job in producing for a big entertainment industry, but should it fit into the mold? Look at the movies; how often do they give you the model? And so part of me thinks “I should’ve scared the shit out of Mike Carlin.” [Fiffe laughs.] I remember one time Carlin had a Mignola pencil drawing of Superman and then he had Jeff Jones ink it and it actually looked like a cross between Jones and a loose Mignola and it didn’t look anything like Superman. It was just a pin-up and Carlin was like “I can’t run this.” Why couldn’t he run it? Isn’t that weird? What’s one pin-up in one comic gonna do to the universe? It’s a weird business. If you look at Japan, where they have Naruto, the anime and the manga fit together more or less. There’s a slight deviation but there’s also a consistent business model going on there. But if you look at Superman, there’s Superman by artists A, B, and C and none of them look alike. So they’re not doing the business model, yet they’re trying to do one. Part of me thinks they’re right to want that iconography for their business, but the part of me that’s an artist says, “Well you should want your art form to grow and change and not just be this little entertainment thing.”

F: They should have room for that.

B: Yeah, they should have room for that art form stuff but they clearly don’t. There are some people that if you don’t fit in their mold somehow, you can’t make yourself fit. It’s nice being out of it because I can see how I didn’t fit into their mold. So I don’t have to beat myself up for not fitting into what their idea of comics are. I don’t have to burn up my energy on being mad at them that I can’t fit into their model of comics.

F: I think the America comics mainstream has always tried to do interesting and different things here and there, but isn’t it difficult for creators with a distinctive style to thrive under the usual conditions? It’s the really unique voices that make the lasting comics. Why wouldn’t you want to nurture that?

B: I think unique voices are really hard to recognize and support because they challenge your assumptions about what’s good. If you’re trying to make trains run on time, it doesn’t help to have something different. So if you have this one voice that’s unique, what does it do to all the people that fit into the model of what you’re doing? What’s weird is the line I always got, “I like your work but it’s not commercial.” After I did the Excalibur [#s 37-39, 1991] I did Batman: Run, Riddler, Run, and that was the payoff for doing Excalibur, and it sold just fine. It sold just as well as anything that sold at the time. It bought me my first computer. I had proved that my work was commercial to Dick Giordano or whoever, and then suddenly it became, “Well, I don’t like your work so therefore I’m not gonna use it”. So they went from liking my work but not using it because it wasn’t commercial to, “You can sell but I don’t like it so I won’t use you.” Their attitude is that I had deviated from the norm and they didn’t quite know how to define that. It was interesting working with Archie Goodwin on Batman: Jazz because he can actually say, “You did something wrong in Run, Riddler, Run that wasn’t right for Batman. I don’t know what it was, but you’re doing something right with Batman: Jazz. I don’t know what you’re doing different but you’re doing something right here.”  I said that I thought it was me basically given up trying to make editors happy. I knew at that stage that Archie’s the only guy who could say, “Yeah, you’re never drawing Batman again, you’re too weird.” He was that cool. It wasn’t like everybody else saying, “Ah, well, you never know!” Archie was secure and honest enough to be up front about things. The man was great. It was nice to hear that up front and honest. I felt like the world was not totally insane after all!

F: Every time I read or hear something about Archie Goodwin, it further confirms that he was the best person, very caring of his creators and his work.

B: Unfortunately, I didn’t work with him that much. My connection with him was really more when I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and we had a couple conversations about living with chronic illness because he had cancer at that point. Yeah, he was solid in away that – I’m not sure what it was – at that point he had gone through  the anger, denial, and fear and had accepted that his cancer was eventually going to kill him. So he could calmly tell me that when I was in the middle of the anger, fear, and denial about my illness. He said he would rather have what he had than what I had, “but I’ve accepted that some point cancer is going to kill me, so I’ve got to live my life.” That kind of pure acceptance of life and getting on with it was this huge treasure to me at that stage. I mean, it was like the distilled essence of Buddhism being passed to me at a critical moment. “We’re all going to suffer and die so go on and live your life.” He was just a really good man who took the time to talk about something so precious with a kid who was doing three comics with him.

(to be concluded)

By MICHEL FIFFE for The Beat

[Editor's note: We're proud to continue running Michel Fiffe's series of interviews with some of the more fascinating comics artists of the last few decades. This time out: Mark Badger -- one of the most progressive comics artists who ever worked in mainstream comics.]

I’ll admit that it took me a while to appreciate Mark Badger’s work. Something about his style didn’t seem quite right, and yet it stayed with me. I found myself going back to it as if though I wanted to make sure that I didn’t like it. It’s a typical reaction to things that leave some sort of lasting impression on us, positive or negative, whether we want them to or not. My staggered appreciation of Mark Badger’s work grew to a full blown interest and personal influence.

I was interested in how his bold approach to cartooning functioned and what it represented throughout the comic book world. Whether Badger’s unmistakable stamp is calculated design or blithe reveling, it is above all drawn like he’s “from another fucking planet”, as Howard Chaykin aptly put it. Kirby, abstract narrative, breaking into Marvel, gallery art, comics iconography, corporate manipulation, Jerry Rice’s calf muscle, and a slew of other things you can’t go on not knowing about are discussed in this first portion of my interview with Mark Badger.

Michel Fiffe: I want to talk about some of your recent work. How did your contribution to the “Abstract Comics” book come about?

Mark Badger: It came out of nowhere. It was absolutely stunning. I had posted a couple of pages I had done of a Mike Zeck’s Master of Kung Fu in art school, probably ‘77-‘78, on my blog and I get this e-mail from this guy, Andrei Molotiu, who wanted to do a book about abstract comics for Fantagraphics and asked if I would be a part of it. He said, “You were ahead of the movement. You were doing it for a while before anybody else was!” It’s really funny because the way comics work for him is the way they work for me. Usually when people talk about Jack Kirby, the writers will talk about all of his great ideas, but artists are say, “Yeah, yeah, but he drew those really neat things. What’s with this idea stuff?” With Andrei, we started talking about the flow of how a comic panel moves and he was really interested in that as sort of the gestural drawing in the composition, all of these little images that were stuck in a grid to make a bigger image that make up this sequence. Most comics have punch line or a narrative, but in abstraction you find the interesting compositional stuff and structural elements that make the stuff happen. That’s what I like about comics! I never met anybody who liked that about comics. Everybody thought it was weird that I liked that about comics. To me, there’s this opening sequence in the Eternals where a plane gets fished out of the water by this energy block or something, and it’s like 10 panels and it’s a totally an effective emotional thing. It’s just a sequence and 99% of it is Kirby crackle, Kirby water, no figures, the plane is like a sausage with wings stuck on it. [Fiffe laughs.] It’s just a powerful sequence of shapes and colors put together. Does it need to be in the Eternals to be expressive and make you feel something? It’s so close to abstraction that what it feels like to me was Jack trying to express some kind of movement and power, beyond just the costume, the ideas or the wacky machinery. There’s something that is the essence of Jack when he does stories that transcends his plots, dialogue, and what he is drawing. You can really feel it when other people draw his characters, they can “draw” more representational than Jack but they can’t get that essence. Except Walter Simonson. He does something similar.

F: Wait, so you never talked about this kind of stuff with your peers back in the day?

B: Are you kidding?

F: Well, maybe not with Kyle Baker, but nobody at all?

B: Kyle would talk more about cartoon craft. He sucked up everything that way. Robbie Busch and I have talked about it a little bit. Robbie and I have sort of a bet about abstract comics versus narrative comics. Nah, you don’t talk about this stuff. This is like talking about Henri Matisse or something. That’s insane. Nobody knows who those guys are. I don’t know if it’s different now, the way you guys talk, but… did you go to art school?

F: No, I didn’t.

B: What percentages of the people you hang out with have gone to art school?

F: A good number of them have gone to art school.

B: There are levels of discussion of craft in what you’re doing, and I suspect that this is something that has changed. Partially, it’s the Comics Journal’s fault for expanding the vocabulary of the discussion of comic art and I think it’s the fact that so many people can go to school for comics and talk about comics in that way. When I lived in New York and was in comics, it was sorta, “Yeah, that’s really cool, what kind of pen point do you use? Oh, that’s neat how you spotted that black. Oh, you swiped Sergio Toppi, too?” It was always in the context of comics. Looking at the bigger stuff that might’ve come in. At one point Mike Mignola and I were talking about Charles Robinson and he was like, “You like that stuff? It’s weird because you never talk about that stuff.” I was looking at stuff, going into The Museum of Modern Art and looking at Matisse’s “Bathers by a river” before stopping at DC. You weren’t supposed to talk about, like Fine Art. To me, I wanted to make comics like Matisse. I just think the field built it up so much in the last 20 years, the vocabulary and the discussion of Art that you get out of art school, and I think it’s kind of phenomenal. In art school you would pull things apart a lot more. It’s a more critical approach to your own work and others’ work, where you’re always looking at it and pulling it apart. I think that always trying to analyze the work and what makes it click and “What can I do better” is not respected. It may just be that I could not communicate clearly, most likely, and so in talking about “work”, you were seen as a critical asshole. Mind you I was 25 and probably pretty much an arrogant asshole anyways. As my work would get rejected, I would get more and more confused about what to say and what was going on.

F: I’m discovering that even the most marginally critical point is met with resistance, or worse, it’s taken personally. Imagine applying that to the comics industry on a whole, or with editors.

B: The contemporary example I can think of is Chris Ware, he’s an exceptional cartoonist with great ideas who has made a clear decision that people with bad eyesight should work hard to read his comics. He’s made a craft choice that eliminates me from his readers. It’s visually just too much work to just read the words. It’s distracting to the whole experience of the comic. At times, lettering got smaller and smaller in some comics and when I pointed out that it made it hard to read, I was seen as dismissing the whole comic by the editor.

F: Discussing art in comics… I’m not saying it’s that common, but it does happen. I just assumed there were always little sects talking about that sort of stuff back in the day.

B: We talked craft and comics artists. I weirdly never met David Mazzucchelli until I was out of comics and I think we are on some of the same wave lengths around art and comics issues. But comics was an isolated field for a long time. The last 20 years have really opened up in a different way. Culturally, there was Marvel and DC when I started Gargoyle. I don’t think Dark Horse existed. Fantagraphics had just started publishing. There was no Drawn & Quarterly, Eclipse had just started, and First Comics… basically there were little Marvels and DCs.

F: Yeah, cut from the same fabric.

B: Oh, yeah, I mean, D&Q and Fantagraphics started transforming comics. The variety of comics you can buy in a standard store is just amazing. Mind you, I live in the Bay Area so my standard stores are covering the whole field that most people don’t get. Have you actually seen the Abstract Comics book?

F: Yeah.

B: It’s amazing. The design of it, the presentation… it’s just… these aren’t my comics but y’know–

F: I really liked the pencil version of your story. There was something about seeing it in pencil that was really impressive, really nice…

B: The fascinating thing about drawing in pencil is that you get to see the mistakes. That’s something that I’m really interested in drawing, to see the process in it. You can’t really see that in a done drawing, where pencil’s always gonna leave some of that process. That’s something that’s really good for the drawing. You can see the artist thinking. You don’t really see the writer thinking. Drawing is a process of work and thought cohering into this image. There’s a tension that I can’t quite resolve in my head about how much do you leave in of what you’re doing. All these artists going, “I wanna leave all my working drawing there so I can show all the people how the drawing is made. Gary Panter’s work builds all this stuff up into an overwhelming force. I don’t think I’ve ever read a whole story by him but I’m just stunned by the drawing. Jack Survives is one of the other comics where the process is drawn into the stories. Jerry Moriarty is a painter working in comics so he has more of, “I’m making a drawing, not I’m duplicating an icon.”

F: Right, it’s a different type of commitment on the page.

B: I’m always trying to figure out what I do that freaks comic people out so much. To them, Batman, this icon, this reality. That’s real, that’s their little diagram of the guy who beats people up, that’s real. Drawing him as an emotional thing, “You mean Batman is just a bunch of lines that generate emotions and not ‘reality’, are you nuts?” The balance of all the decision making is based on what my hand is doing, how I feel, the emotions of the drawing, what it looks like. I’m not duplicating the icon.  Stephen DeStefano freaks out when he watches me draw because I don’t do all the traditional construction work he does. I sort of “take the line out for a walk.” He just doesn’t understand how I can see the drawing. Perhaps that’s what people mean when they think my work is weird.

F: You’re creating your own iconography.

B: I don’t think comics are supposed to be “drawn” that way, and on some cultural level they really shouldn’t. If you have a repeating character, shouldn’t it be repeatable and reference some form of reality? I mean, even if it’s an animation style characters that are all made up of balls, that makes it a reality that the reader can enter into. I’m actually on Carabella using a lot more construction then I ever did before.

F: You really don’t think they should be drawn that way, that expressive way?

B: I don’t know. I really don’t know if process should be involved in the making of comics. I mean if I look at Baru, would it make it better to see his process of drawing? I don’t think it would. If I look at David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp, the things where he uses the process of drawing are the things I like the least. I thought it worked really well, him drawing the characters in different styles and colors and the process of line that he went through. But it’s still the characters and the drawing styles are inked, finished and resolved. None of the marks on the page are not right. The thought process of the drawing, they’re still the usual perfect lines David does. Should he have left the process of line completely there? Or should he use the drawing style to make character icons? I don’t know. Would it make it work better? I’m ambivalent.

F: As long as it works for the story, I think seeing the process can work. It may or may not need it, but the story ultimately dictates that.

B: Well, that’s the thing. How much do you really need to tell a story? I mean, I can point to somebody who did a comic with stick figures and it’s sorta cool but I don’t really wanna look at it. It’s interesting, but the drawing wasn’t exciting enough. I mean, I don’t know if a fixed icon is enough, or if you actually need a cool drawing. As artists, we want really cool drawings. It’s one of those things that as an artist I need cool drawings to satisfy me, but as a reader, do I need that to survive? Am I just working for myself then? That’s probably what happens. That’s the whole challenge of doing abstract comics and what does it mean for representational comics.

F: Tell me a little about Carabella, your webcomic with Gerard Jones.

B: I’ve done a bunch of projects paid for by grants. I guess it’s the payoff for doing political work. Privacy Activism is a group that grew out of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. One of the lawyers wanted to focus on just privacy and use artists to educate people about privacy. I worked on a game with them, sculpting the story and setting up the situations and all the branching structure. This time, the Rose Foundation, which gets its money from corporations who screw people’s privacy rights, forked over some money to make nice nice. Rose distributes that money to non-profits. So they got the grant, I brought in Gerry and we laid out a plot about building a back story for Carabella. It was fun to work with Gerry again because we’re both idea nerds. Our plots have always been driven more by things like Batman and Jazz, or Batman and real estate developers, or how do you do a Super Bowl story with [Joe] Montana and Bernie Kosar? So we had to pull apart social networks and what they actually could do if the government and large corporations used social networks as a tool to manipulate us. We of course know that large corporations and government would of course never try and control and manipulate us. I mean, when I go to Daily Kos, there’s no reason that I see ads for Marvel’s Online Comics right? With Facebook, they’re not tracking what I buy and what my friends do right? My government is not tracking all those demonstrations I organized and recording all my phone calls right? So Carabella is from a world that uses some advanced social networking tools embedded into everyone’s hair extensions. Everyone has to wear Princess Lea buns to be part of the network by law. She comes to our world and gets involved with a guy who embeds this technology into shoes as the perfect Twitter/Facebook tool. So can poor Carabella stop our world from becoming totally dominated by Facebook/Twitter linked into the essence of our souls?

F: How’re you drawing all of this?

B: It’s all drawn on Flash and we’re posting a couple of pages a week, and rather than just posting comics pages, I’m rethinking them to deal with the issues in screen proportions and the click instead of the page turn. What does it mean that panels can be animated? Playing with that while trying to not turn it into a cheap animated movie. I’m seeing what I can figure out about comics online that isn’t McCloud dogma or motion comics after-effects process. It’s interesting because it’s so separated from the business that I can do things that Marvel wouldn’t let me do in the AOL/Spiderman online stuff. So now it’s just Gerry and I doing the work, trying to get back into the mode of comics again.

F: What made you do comics in the first place? I’m assuming you were into comics as a kid.

B: Everybody of my generation grew up on Kirby and Steve Ditko as a little kid. New Gods stopped when I was in 8^th or 9^th grade. Neal Adams started doing stuff by the time I was in high school, y’know. I was a complete fanboy in high school. Barry Smith, Walter Simonson, the Studio guys and the Upstart guys were the pinnacle of cultural achievement in my mind. From there I guess there were a couple of books on English fantasy illustration put out by Ballantine and there were a couple of books by Frank Frazetta and a couple of books that covered Arthur Rackham and all those guys. There was a little bit of Art Nouveau. I mean, just thinking now about the richness of that fantasy stuff back in high school, there’s nothing like it. I was excited when I found a paperback with a Frank Frazetta illustration for a cover… that was a really big deal. “Oh, Mike Kaluta did a front piece on one of these things!” I mean that was it. It was all kinda like a serious, other world. Now you can find books on any of this stuff at a comic book store. So that’s the stuff that got me into it.

F: So was it through those guys that you discovered fine art?

B: What happened is I went to Parsons in New York and I went right into the illustration program because people that make gallery art don’t make a living with it, they all teach. They had a lot of interesting teachers just saying, “Go look at this gallery and yes you can draw really well but I want you to make this abstract composition. Oh, look, here’s all this really cool art that you haven’t heard about and here’s the Soho art scene.” They were very seductive to the young minds. My girlfriend from art school was really into fine arts, too, so that was kinda what turned my brain a little bit. I got very seduced by fine art and then gallery art and modernism and minimalism and the art scene in New York at the time. So I transferred from illustration to Fine Arts. I spent four years trying to make abstract comics in the fine arts program but got out and thought, “I don’t have to do all this intellectual stuff, I can actually draw comics and make a living.” I vividly remember slogging through some Jacques Derrida book and finishing it, the conclusion being essentially that all books were meaningless, and throwing it across the room. You couldn’t tell me that in the first chapter so I don’t have to read the whole thing? So from there I started going back and looking at superhero comics to break into Marvel and DC.

F: You found that you couldn’t do abstract comics for a living.

B: Yeah, there’s no market for abstract comics. Gallery art is gallery art and I think gallery art is really wonderful, but there’s something about it that didn’t work for me. I’m not sure what it is but I like the idea of a print book, a narrative with a story that you’re going to tell. The balance of my life of going back and forth between what abstraction is and the idea of telling a story is really… that’s fascinating to watch. I don’t feel like a pure cartoonist who has stories to tell in comics, but I’m an artist who really likes telling stories.

F: Right. Galleries and comics, two very different worlds not only in money but in what and how you can actually distribute the information. Totally different experiences.

B: Yeah, I mean the actual thing you’re making is two different… one’s very intimate and, y’know, you get to a point where gallery art people are just as pretentious as anybody in comics. I mean, it’s sorta easier to perceive as pretentious but comic book people can hide their pretention. Gallery people have all the same issues.

F: So what was it exactly that got you from studying fine art to then start working for Marvel?

B: You know what it was? It was a French guy named Hermann Huppen. He does Jeremiah, and the Survivor… Fantagraphics published some of his stuff. Jeremiah was even made into a sci-fi series with one of the Cosby show kids and somebody else, I can’t quite remember. He’s a European storyteller. So in my 3^rd year of college, Forbidden Planet opened up and they started importing European comics and I realized that you can do adventure comics that don’t have to look like DC Comics! In there, I probably discovered Tin Tin, Asterix, but the Hermann stuff was the start of it, and it was colored beautifully. I was just a point where Charles Vess and I would go to Forbidden Planet to buy one of these albums just for the coloring. Everybody was talking about that European color tone. That’s really what made me wanna go, “Oh, I can draw comic books now.” And I think the work I actually showed Carl Potts, the editor at Marvel, were pretty blatant swipes of the Hermann stuff and he was thought, “This is very interesting!”

F: So Potts wasn’t familiar with Hermann?

B: I think at that point he didn’t know that stuff. Carl’s definitely one of the more diverse editors. He definitely had a wider range of comics than the average guy. When you started with Carl, he would give you these little Xeroxes of old Chinese comics and they were drawn gorgeously with beautiful composition.

F: It’s interesting that he also broke in a bunch of artists with unconventional styles such as yourself, Tony Salmons, Mike Mignola, he worked with Kevin Nowlan a bunch… He took care of all you guys when another editor may have just dismissed you so I think there’s a lot to be said for that.

B: Well, Al Milgrom and Larry Hama were artists, too, so they had an ability to see a wider range of potential. The writers who become editors have the visual knowledge and taste of whatever’s the current fashion. I mean, whatever the politics of working in an office is determines what you can do. Guys who are just writers don’t go, “Hey, look, this is an interesting artist!” Carl was great, he was bringing in lots of talent, taking old guys and inspiring them. Sal Buscema and Don Perlin did some great work for him. I think he, or Al Milgrom, broke in Mignola… and Jim Lee, so Carl’s had a major effect on comics. If he started off just Mignola and Lee, Carl would still deserve some of the credit for major chunks of the industry in the last couple of decades. He’s one of those people no one really every mentions in terms of developing artists.

F: Tell me a little bit about working with J. M. DeMatteis on Gargoyle. How was it handling an entire mini series off the bat? Even just inking yourself was weird because they never let guys ink themselves around that time.

B: Carl was gonna get Al Williamson to do it and I was like, “That’s kinda cool, but what does he have to do with my work?” I didn’t know anything about inking or drawing at that point. I think Carl just let me take a shot at it. I don’t quite remember how it happened, like we couldn’t get the average Joe to handle the stuff, it was too weird.

F: Are your pencils loose and crazy sketchy?

B: Compared to whatever they can pencil art today I’m sure that they’re just beyond the boundaries of, y’know… it would drive inkers insane these days. But the Gargoyle job was pretty tight because it was my first job. There were all these tiny little lines etched on the paper and my drawing wasn’t based on copying other artists. So that’s why I inked it. There was some sort of discussion but it wasn’t that big a deal to ink myself. I think most people weren’t very interested in it.

F: The fans or editorial?

B: No, artists. I mean, I don’t remember it ever being a big issue to me. Sometimes I’d be scared of doing it, but… Kyle Baker and I would both do it because we were like, “They’re gonna pay us twice for doing the drawing once?” That was the logic. At least that was sort of our logic. The couple of times I’ve worked with inkers it’s always been very… odd.

F: Yeah, it kinda doesn’t work. I could see what you were going for, and I’m sure they had their own agenda, but it was… off.

B: The thing that really hit me, the one time I really remember specifically was with Romeo Tanghal, who is a fine inker for George Perez, but I did an issue of Green Lantern and Gerry. Being football fans, we did a football story and I drew all these football players. I had all this reference and I noticed that a football player’s calf muscle is different than a superhero’s calf muscle. There’s a sort of lean angle the way their lower leg is structured. So you’re drawing Jerry Rice and there’s a very specific body type, but Romeo inked it, and I’m sure it was partially his instinct to make the big bulging calf and that’s just the way he inks. That’s the iconography of superhero comics. In context, it’s right, but it’s not Jerry Rice, and I think it’s fair to say that my hand just can’t make the iconography of superheroes. So when I was inking people, it got “Badgerized” or just looked weird. Although, I did one Curt Swan job [Secret Origins #47, Feb. 1990] and when Scott Dunbier bought pages from Swan, Curt made a pile of the more “artistic” stuff. I was excited to hear that my pages got put in the artistic pile.

F: Even the iconography of superhero comics should be challenged.

B: I think there’s some dialogue always going on with artists where you’re drawing from relationships from the past and the history and the icons of what you’re drawing. The language of what you’re drawing. With what you’re looking at and what you’re bringing to your world, your work. That’s something I’ve never really figured out, the relationships in comics and how to bring in all the iconography. If you look at the comics, the iconography and the history of comics is sort of unified in a certain way.

(to be continued)