Studio Space - Excerpts
Newsarama has been posting a small preview of this book, featuring these creators:
There was a year when I was fanatical about Archie, I’m sure that had to do with the fact that the girls were pretty. There’s an awful lot of Betty and Veronica in Gwen and Mary Jane, on purpose in many ways, and not just from me but also from Stan Lee. So I was seriously into collecting and reading. I was copying these books, which is a pretty good way to start. One of the cool things about comics is that they are automatically short handed, that is to say there’s this short hand of anatomy, its expressionistic, and it can be thrilling for the adolescent reader, boobs and muscles. I re-learned that not only when I was drawing Gwen and Mary Jane, but also The Hulk, sort of falling in love with muscles in that way all over again.
Here’s an example, say someone wants to draw Batman’s cape, they think of it as a piece of cloth hanging down a man’s back. To me it is an abstract shape, so if I’m drawing Batman moving then the cape has to make some kind of interesting shape. I don’t what that shape is, but either I’m going to get it down really quick as a gesture, perfect, or I’ll spend the next six hours drawing and erasing the shape until I get it right.
If Hellboy is smoking a cigarette, and there’s a puff of smoke coming off, that take me either a second or the rest of the day. I’ll keep drawing, erasing, until I get the shape I like. I’m nuts (laughs). It is a fine arts mentality. I have this drive to discover wonderful shapes, and the simplification of shape. Right now with the piece I’m working on, I’m constantly going back and forwards to the reference to interpret position and scale of these shapes. It’s not as case of, ‘Oh, these are folds, so I’ll copy them the way they are.’
Japanese culture and art is something that’s always had an influence on me too. I love the way the Japanese so unabashedly combine sex and violence in a way that Westerners shy away from and they create an exaggerated mystical approach that in many ways seems truer than the real world. I first discovered Lone Wolf and Cub when I was first starting out and felt that it ripped away all this glummery that had covered up comic books
I really, really want to read this…
