I love writing comics too much.
If I were to take five comic books, from four different publishers and Marvel, and lay them out, even if you didn't know the characters, you would be able to take a look at that Marvel comic and go, 'That's Marvel.' There's something unique about the way the story is presented.
First of all there was a guy named Charles Nicholas, who used to do all of the inking that Jack and Simon didn't do. Simon used to do splashes and covers, but Charles Nicholas, after a while, did the inside of all of the stuff.
We start out talking about the story, trying to figure out who is who and what should happen, taking notes the whole time. Then I do a rough layout of the issue, showing what happens on each page. Then we discuss that some more.
I understand the visual media very well, as I used to write comic books for Walt Disney, and I've written a graphic novel.
Nick Cardy's work helped define some of the things we see in comics today and take for granted. He broke out of the mold in terms of covers and layout and created a truly interactive experience for the reader that directly points back to his time with the Eisner studio.
Comics are a particularly esoteric field where you really learn how to do it, by doing it or by learning from other practitioners.
Comics as art. I do comics as comics, and my opportunity to tell stories. Simple. Basic. Let the characters have the excitement, not the package. That's where I come from.
The graphic style itself is influenced by a lot of very layered and detailed comics that I read as a kid, like 'Vagabond' by Takehiko Inoue.
I've read comics all my life and have wanted to write a comic for as long as I can remember. Alex Barnaby and Sam Hooker seemed like the perfect team to make the move into the graphic medium.
My overall artistic goal is to marry graphic design with comic books and traditional storytelling.
I hate it when I'm reading a comic, and the dialogue looks like stickers stuck on top to explain what's going on. For me the best is when your eye goes in a certain point and moves through the composition and then springs out on the dialogue, or gets confused in the image and then goes to the dialogue for an explanation.
Writing comics and drawing comics is a really very specific art form. It's a lot easier to get it wrong than it is to get it right.
To my mind, the most successful and the best comic book illustrators are those who translate the real world into a consistent code. If you look at Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko, their drawings look nothing like the real world, but they are internally consistent. In terms of a comic book it can work just fine.
I changed the layout of comic books in general. When I came in, layout design wasn't really part of what you did. It was all just panels, panels, panels. So when I came in, I thought, 'Nah, let's change that,' and I designed the page.
