Today, over at WIRED/Geek Dad they announced The First Annual GeekDad Awards. Among the multitude of categories is Best Comic Book. Making the list of multiple choice is, The New York Times bestseller, THE UNWRITTEN. There's also a category for Best Geek Celebrity and Neil Gaiman makes the cut!
So go vote now!
The Vertigo Blog was nice enough to ask me to talk about my art process on The Unwritten, using some art from our soon to be classic issue #1, and when the Vertigo Blog asks for something, I jump to it...
We’re going to look at pages 5, 6, and 7 of The Unwritten #1. In the pages before this we saw a scene from the last Tommy Taylor book (the layouts for that scene are reproduced in the first tpb--out in stores last week and on the NY Times Bestseller list this week!) Then we had a quick cut to a close-up of the last page of the book, being autographed by Tommy Taylor himself. Only, Tommy is Tom now, grown up and weary of his life as the namesake for a famous series of books...
This page was our first shot of Tom Taylor, the adult version of the fictional Tommy Taylor. But of equal importance to what he looks like is his situation in life-so I cut part of the line in panel 1 and moved the remaining dialogue to the previous page so this page starts with a big establishing shot that makes a great transition from fantasy world in the first scene. We enter the real life of Tom Taylor--reluctant guest of honor at a huge TommyCon event.
Then I took Tom’s last line in script panel 2 and broke it off into the first close-up of Tom. I wanted that first reveal of him to focus on that really important defining line of dialogue about him and his father, Wilson Taylor.
Mike and I worked really hard in the first Tom scene to really establish the status quo of Tom Taylor’s life and I think we did a great job of having almost every line give you some great background on the character. (Can you tell I care as much about the story and character bits as I do about the actual art--which is what I’m supposed to be talking about here). But actually, I feel like the story is king and the art should serve that--which is probably the reason that Vertigo has kept me busy all these years and you haven’t seen me on a superhero book in a long time...
I’m not sure if I should mention that one of those two authors casting aspersions on Tom has appeared again later in the series and I don’t think anyone has noted the connection. But it shows you how Mike’s been planning things from the start.
Back to the art, I just want to say a bit about composition. (This is something that was pointed out to me by Jim Shooter of all people, at a Con in Chicago long ago when I was trying to break into the business. Frank Miller even joined in for a bit! Shooter had someone find a copy of an old Jack Kirby story featurig the Human Torch and Captain America, and he went through it a panel at a time explaining to me what Kirby was doing in the composition. The bit where Frank Miller joined in was because he had gotten the same lecture from Shooter at an early point in his career!
What I learned, and still practice on every page today is that the flow on the page from panel to panel is very important and you almost need to guide the reader through a page visually even when it’s pretty self evident where to go.
On this page, in panel 1 the line of the tables leads your eye to panel 2--and in case you don’t get that, the line of the crowd guides you back into the second tier of panels. In panel 2, Tom hands the book off into panel 3. In panel 3 the perspective of the author’s heads leads you to panel 4. In panel 4, Tom leans in to complete that angle and he still faces to the right where we’ve already been coached to go to next. In panel 5 the line of the tables leads you back into the lower tier but in case you want to go too far to the lower left, Tom stands straight up with an arc to his back that leads you straight below to the point between the two writers for the ending beat on the page.
All that sounds incredibly nit-picky but it does all apply. It’s hard to do fluidly at first but one good way to check if your layouts flow correctly is to flip any given panel over, either on the computer, or with tracing paper--and you’ll instantly see how clunky the page gets when the flow is counterproductive. Thanks, Jim Shooter, for the secret of my success!
The most memorable thing on this page for me is that I really wanted to do a visual gag where we see somehere at TommyCon that someone was selling copies of a cel phone video of Tom losing his virginity years before. Sadly, we never had the space to get it across ut it does make it’s appearance in the background a the polaroid photo snapped for a fan. Mike changed the XXX to “Tommy’s Magic Horn” in the final. There was a story point to it all--the idea being that everything in Tom’s adolescence had been subject to his fame, even his presumably embarrassing first time--living on for posterity! I’m going to get that bit back in a story sometime (and fully explained)--I promise!
For me the layout is the hard part of the job, even if it’s not the most time consuming. I don’t usually put the lettering in by hand because it takes almost as much time as doing the layout. But with this book I find it’s really important that I see that the dialogue is working with the art. It’s also really hard for me to ink Mike Carey scripted pages without the lettering roughed in because he writes a lot of nuanced dialogue. And if I don’t have the words right there I might get the expression a bit off. We used to ink pages after the lettering was in but after digital lettering came about we had to ink without letters. On Lucifer I was always grabbing the script and finding the line as I was inking and that gets really annoying and time consuming. So on Unwritten I put it in rough so I can read it.
Technically, I do my layouts on print size paper with pencil and marker. I do some sketching on the script as I’m reading it multiple times to get an overall feel for the issue. and I usually come up with a rough idea of the panel layout and what’s going on in them.
These had a bit more pencil than I generally use because I wasn’t set on what characters looked like yet. As I get farther into the series I’ll use more marker. I work at printed size so I can get a feel of how things will look in the actual comic. I have a tendency to put in too much detail if I work big and that really doesn’t make the pages work better.
When the layouts are done I scan them and send them to Mike and our editor, Pornsak Pichetshote for their ok.
After they’re approved we digitally clean the art then print the pages out in non-photo blue ink on the approximately 11”X17” art boards that DC provides.
The big dirty secret of comic artists is that we use assistants to help with the background inks, filling in blacks, and doing the digital clean-up. My assistant on Unwritten is Barb Guttman and it’s nice to have a chance to give her credit for the great job she does!
I ink the pages with brushes, fountain pens, and markers. You wouldn’t believe the trials I’ve gone through looking for the right ink over the years. I get totally obsessed about finding the right inking tools, and invariably, once you find something perfect, they quit making it. So when I do find something great I tend to buy a big batch of it. I recently found a great ink from Japan that I couldn’t get here in the States so I bought $300 worth from a supplier in Singapore. It’s the only waterproof fountain pen ink that doesn’t feather on the DC bristol board. (Email me if you know another one!)
I hope it ages well because I have enough for years...
The inking stage takes longer because my “pencils” are pretty minimal and like other artists who ink there own stuff, I tend to do a lot of the drawing straight with ink (penciling on my here and there as I go to tighten things up. You can see how everything is there in the layouts but I don’t think I’ll ever be an artist that they can turn the pencils into digital inks!
Barb did a great job on the TommyCon posters and all the little crowd running around and the booths. Like I said, I’d never get a page done on time without help.
You can also see in the final product how much Todd Klein adds with the letters and Chris Chuckry with the colors. Early on I was considering having my wife Jeanne McGee color the book in watercolor in a technique we developed for a book called Chosen that I did with Mark Millar (now reprinted as American Jesus). and this is one of the pages we did test samples for. We decided Chris had the right look for the real world pages and we decided to use Jeanne’s watercolors for the Tommy world and other fictional pages (in case you ever wondered why there’s two names credited for colors).
The TommyCon panel talk! I used all my Con experience to draw this page. And the first Con talk I did after completing it was sort of an eerie experience. I felt like I was Tom up there on the stage looking out at the crowd.
Story-wise, I changed a few beats from the script. In panel 1 you can see I was undecided whether to go with a long shot of the hall, or straight to a closer shot of Tom. We picked the long shot. In panel 4 we cut Tom’s line.
In panel 5 I had a rare disagreement with Mike.
I have this manipulative technique where I leave off Mike’s lines from my hand lettered layout if I’m not sure about them. Or I rearrange it however I want, or even write a new line. My thinking is that Mike and Pornsak will read my version and get it in their head before they remember the original version. It works pretty well on Pornsak, but it never works with Mike. He remembers every damn one of his lines. But it does serve to open the discussion and we get incredibly nit picky about the purpose of every line.
You can see the details if you compare script to layout to final page but the gist of it was that I wanted Tom to repeat the question from panel 4 in panel 5 and let it hang there with a pregnant pause. (I left of the question in panel 4 because I was hoping Mike would edit it, which he did do).
But I really wanted that question to hang in panel--like the beginning of an angry response, or like Tom couldn’t believe someone would ask the question. Mike didn’t agree but he gave in enough that he kept my line but he added what was the second part of the fan’s original question as a rejoinder/clarification. I think it was good solution but I still miss that hanging moment...
The only other change on the page was to split script panel 5 into art panels 6 and 7 to create a more fidgety beat for Tom as he realizes he’s been a bit too honest.
And that’s Lizzie Hexam in panel 2, getting ready to confront Tom and send his life to pieces on the following pages.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how we draw The Unwritten!
I forgot to add a bit about Tom’s look. Tom has a penchant for bowling shirts, he grows his sideburns out in an attempt to look older than Tommy Taylor. And despite his best attempts, his hair tends to fall into 3 clumps in his bangs, just like little Tommy Taylor in the books--especially when the weirdness starts to happen and the adrenaline flows!
THE UNWRITTEN is about the power of story and it incorporates all kinds of literary references. In Volume 1 Carey and Gross include mentions of George Orwell’s 1984, Charles Dicken’s No Thoroughfare, Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and many many more.
What books would you like to see woven into the narrative of THE UNWRITTEN?
We’d love to know so please do answer in the comment section.
And in case you’ve missed the terrific media coverage of THE UNWRITTEN Volume 1, check out some of the pieces below:
Mike Carey is interviewed at THE WALL STREET JOURNAL/Speakeasy and AIN’T IT COOL NEWS (where an interview with Peter Gross will be posted next week).
Mike Carey’s playlist for Volume 1 at LARGEHEARTED BOY
Reviews at NPR/MONKEY SEE, THE ONION/AV Club, CBR/Robot 6
In the Vertigo Voices piece in THE UNWRITTEN #9 (see below in ital), on sale today, co-creators Mike Carey and Peter Gross ask:
Is there a story you read as a child that still has huge power and resonance for you now - and if so, what?
Answer it and who knows, maybe your fact will influence Mike and Peter's fiction?
At some points in this arc, the spotlight has swung away from Tom Taylor as we explored the power that books have, at certain times, to hit the shunt mechanism that sends our entire life off onto a different track, for better or worse. The idea was so interesting it got the two of us into an intense, if inconclusive, discussion about the books that had done that to us...
M: Can you even remember the first book you really loved? It comes pretty early on, doesn't it?
P: I'm almost embarrassed to admit it, but I think comics were the first books I ever loved.
I was a voracious reader and I would have thought there were a lot that I loved but it wasn't until I got exposed to comics that I ever would have ridden my bike for miles from little store to little store on the off chance that new comics might be in. And God forbid that I found out a friend from school had a pile of old comics that I hadn't read before.
I'm trying to think when an actual book commanded that sort of
dedication from me. I guess I'd have to say The Hobbit and The Lord of
the Rings. There was something about moving from the relative
childishness of The Hobbit to the more adult LOTR that was awe-inspiring.
Reading them paralleled my own passage through puberty!
M: Yeah, I know what you mean. From the ages of four to eight, I was completely in love with any comics that Leo Baxendale did. I didn't know his name, because there were no creator credits on UK comics back then, and I can't say I was aware of his style - it was just that his stories - in The Beano, then Wham, then Pow - were the ones I gravitated to.
But increasingly, there were also fantasy books. I had a real Michael
Moorcock addiction in my early teens, and wrote a couple of appallingly
derivative "novels": really novella length, but they were novels to
me. For a long time, I thought mystic-artifact-quests were the only natural form for fantasy.
If I read a book without a rune sword or a mirror helm, I was baffled.
Do you think anything you've read has had a profound influence on your
own work?
P: I went through the same addiction to fantasy and I think it all
profoundly influenced my work. But I think I was most drawn to series.
I loved if the books continued on. I think that goes back to reading
the Oz books. One of the series that had the biggest effect on me was
Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover books. It was a series that wasn't
written in order, didn't follow the same characters and were set
hundred's of years apart. I didn't know how to read them! I eventually
decided to read them in the order the author had written them so I
could at least experience them in the way she did.
I think lately I've come back more and more to The Space Trilogy by CS
Lewis. There's something about the way he used those books as such an
obvious metaphor for his views on theology that I find really moving.
That he was working out the deep spiritual issues in life through the
genres of stories that he loved as a child is very compelling to me. I
think I always liked stories that escaped the confines of this
world but still felt like the author was trying to say something about
our everyday lives.
But I think it's interesting when I hear you say how you tried writing
novels back then because I never tried that--but I always tried to
illustrate the stories I read.
M: Whereas I pastiched them! There's this theory that you probably
know - "the anxiety of influence". The idea is that you start out
being in thrall to a previous creator, and then you rebel against them
in an Oedipal way to establish your own voice. But your own voice
will actually turn out to be a corruption or inversion of their voice.
I always thought it was bollocks, to be honest, but it's true that you
learn certain tropes from the creators who came before you, and then
at a certain point you struggle to break free of them.
There are some writers I envy. And then there are some who are so
good they're beyond envy. I'm just happy to live in the same world
with them.
P: Then there's the other theory that I've heard from writers, artist
and even Bruce Springsteen; that everything we explore in art is set
by the time we're twelve years old. I think there's some truth to that
but I'd extend the age until we're at least past puberty! But I think
what's really clear is that the stories we read as children have
immense power and influence on the rest of our lives. Like Cosi and
Leon in this issue, maybe we all have a trigger that can send us
running off into a burning prison to rescue our childhood heroes.
M: We'd be interested to hear if that's true for anyone reading THE UNWRITTEN.
Is there a story you read as a child that still has huge power and resonance for you now - and if so, what? Let us know at the VERTIGO blog GRAPHIC CONTENT at http://vertigo.blog.dccomics.com/, under THE UNWRITTEN: RESONATING READING entry. Who knows, maybe your fact will influence our fiction.
The cover of THE UNWRITTEN Volume 1 is very striking and sets the tone for the entire book. Tell us about the themes you wanted to capture in cover?
YS: Thank you, that is so nice of you.
Well, my editors, Karen and Pornsak, and I had a lot of back and forth on the first cover.
Actually, this was not the first cover I created for this series. There was one before this, which never got published, and I was happy we ended up redoing the cover. I am very happy with this one, and I think so were everyone else involved.
We wanted the first issue to have a cover that set the mood of the big picture of the story, and not just the first issue. After a lot of back and forth and ideas that were not bad but not perfect for the first cover, Pornsak finally called up and said “It is just Tom and book(s) and the rest you just go crazy with the idea.” I think this really freed me up to come up with a simple idea.
You have mentioned that it was difficult to nail down the first cover since you only had the first chapter to read at that point. Can you walk us through your process?
YS: The toughest part was that with the first issue, I didn’t really know who Tom was, what kind of character he was, and what was awaiting for him in the future issues. Once I know the main character, it gets easier, but it was at first like walking in the dark. Pornsak was like the guide holding my hand and walking me through this darkness till I start seeing some light.
I honestly don’t remember how many sketches I made. Maybe like 15? First set of sketches were done, and I made the cover, but I was not happy. It had too many ideas in one, and too busy. It got killed, and I was rather relieved by it.
The second sets didn’t work either, but we were starting to see the directions.
And in the third set, which was done really quickly and loosely, there was a rough idea of the final cover.
What fascinated me was that Karen and Pornsak saw the final image in their head (which I wasn’t even seeing) from my rough sketch, and encouraged me to go to the final. Mike and Peter helped me out by sending me the keywords and sentences that should be drawn in. I don’t think anyone tried to read what was written in those crazy swirls of words, but they are actual keywords related to the story.
Because I am not used to drawing type, that took me quite a long time (A friend drove a bike over and sat with me and chat while I was drawing one letter at a time. That was really nice), but it was actually a lot of fun.
What were your inspirations for designing it?
YS: I love graphic design, and I often fantasize about being a graphic designer. I know, it’s kind of funny, but I have real appreciation for design. So, it is my attempt to fake being one! (lol)
When you're focused on a project such as a cover, do you work through the night until it's done or do you stop and constantly revise?
YS: I always needed a lot of sleep. I try and sleep at least 7 to 8 hours a night to get a productive work day. So, I never work through the night. Productivity drops when I am tired or half asleep. I’d rather stop, go home and get some sleep, come back to my studio refreshed.
How long did it take you to complete the cover once the sketch was approved?
YS: I don’t remember exactly, as it is close to a year ago. It was probably the whole weekend. Drawing the figure in swirl was probably half a day with a full day of drawing out the type. The last step is to put them together and add color in Photoshop, and tweak some type, fix typos, etc. that was probably another half a day.
What type of materials did you use?
YS: The drawing of Tom is done with black India ink (Dr. Ph. Martin’s Black Star Matte) on watercolor paper. Type was all drawn with special ink for film on Mylar. The finish part is done on Adobe Photoshop CS3 on my MacBook Pro connected to a 23” screen using a Wacom tablet.
Was this the first comic book cover you've ever done?
YS: Actually, the first time I worked on DC Vertigo cover was when I helped my friend Paul Pope by coloring the cover of his 100% graphic novel wrap around. Maybe around 2004 or 2005? I think it was something like Jose Villarrubia, who is his regular colorist and also a good friend of mine, was not available and it was a rush job... Something like that. It was fun but a lot of responsibility to color someone else’s work. Good learning experience.
The first for DC Vertigo I did the full cover for was for SANDMAN: Dream Hunters series that came out about a year ago. That was really fun.
And actually, the very first comic book cover was for a book called “Prophecy Anthology” which got published around 2003 or 2004. It is out of print now, but it was a nice large format full color book. I only did the cover.
The cover to Volume 1 has and will be seen in a lot of media outlets, how does that feel? What kind of reaction have you been getting from fans of the comic book and folks who are just fans your artwork in general?
YS: It is VERY exciting. What is the most exciting is that I am creating covers for the series that I really enjoy the story of. Story gets better every issue. My editors are great, and I love Mike and Peter.
As an illustrator, something that is challenging and new is always a great thing. Creating comic book covers is a lot different from drawing for a business magazine. Not that which is better, but it is about making my art brain flexible to have them both. Both are fun in a lot of different ways. Besides, it is wonderful to have a whole new group of people looking at my work. I think I gain a lot more respect now from my students at School of Visual Arts! (lol!)
Recently I received an e-mail from someone in his 20s who said he stopped reading comics when he was 13, but his friend took him to a comic book store recently and he saw The Unwritten first issue cover, loved it, bought it, and since then he is buying every issue and enjoying the story more and more. Now he is back to reading comics again. That was really really nice.
Some people know this already, but James Jean (yes, that famous creator of FABLES covers) was my roommate right when James graduated from college and I started graduate school.
I remember picking up a phone call from DC that they were interested in working with him on this new series called Fables. Then I kept seeing him working on cover after cover every month till he moved out of our loft to move to California. It definitely gave me a strong impression that comic book covers must be fun to make. So I had been thinking that I would love to create some DC Vertigo covers eventually.
Now I am doing it, each month is different from the previous, and it is, in fact, a lot more fun that I imagined!
Today IGN announced The Best of 2009 List.
I’m excited to share with you that they have selected THE UNWRITTEN (Vol. 1: Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity goes on sale in January) by Mike Carey and Peter Gross as Best New Series saying, "When you manage to make the creator of Y: The Last Man and Runaways jealous, you know you've stumbled onto a winning formula. The Unwritten has been another fantastic debut series for Vertigo." I couldn’t agree more.
And Best Series of The Year is UNKNOWN SOLDIER by Josh Dysart and artist Alberto Ponticelli! They rave, "Dysart has somehow managed to find a perfect mix of pseudo super-heroism, horror and startling raw power, crafting what has already become one of Vertigo's best series." If you want to read more of Josh Dysart's work, look for NEIL YOUNG'S GREENDALE, a graphic novel with art by Cliff Chiang coming in summer 2010--we'll be posting more about it on the blog soon!
For the full list of IGN winners click here.
It’s that time of year when the “Best Of” lists start circing.
TIME/Techland's 10 Best Comics of the Decade, includes: # 10 Y: The Last Man and # 2 100 Bullets
The PASTE Magazine Top 20 of the Decade, includes: at #11 FABLES Deluxe Vol. 1 and #4 Y: The Last Man Deluxe Vol. 1
The ONION AV Club Top 25 Best Books of 2000’s, includes: Y: The Last Man Deluxe Vol. 1
The VILLAGE VOICE Best Comics and Graphic Novels 2009, includes:THE UNWRITTEN
Question: What Comics and Graphic Novels would make your top 10 “Best Of” list this year?
Tommy Taylor has affected the lives of millions, winding his way into their dreams and fantasies. But sometimes dreams and fantasies are a poisoned cup. Follow Cosi and Leon on an adventure of a lifetime as they move into a new home, while at the prison of Donostia, innocence meets experience with tragic results...
Here’s a glimpse of what’s to come in THE UNWRITTEN #8:
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Tommy Taylor, the boy wizard, is one of the most beloved fictional characters of all time and a pop culture phenomenon. Everyone has either read Wilson Taylor’s bestselling TOMMY TAYLOR books, seen the movies or played the videogames. Nearly everyone also knows the story behind the story: Wilson Taylor disappears after the publication of the thirteenth and final book in the TOMMY TAYLOR series, leaving his son, Tom, an orphan. And much as Christopher Robin Milne saw Christopher Robin and Winnie the Pooh as an exploitation of his childhood, Tom Taylor resents being the real-life embodiment of his father’s fictional creation. In fact, Tom Taylor hates Tommy Taylor.
Welcome to the world of THE UNWRITTEN one of the most magical, entertaining, complex and thought-provoking books you’re likely to read this year. THE UNWRITTEN Volume 1: TOMMY TAYLOR AND THE BOGUS IDENTITY is the first in an ongoing series of graphic novels about the joy of storytelling; it is a book for discerning readers who love to lose themselves in fiction, by two creators who know that every story has a story—and that some stories are considered quite dangerous. Graphic novel writer (and occasional prose novelist) Mike Carey and artist Peter Gross deliver a compelling story that more than delivers on its meta-premise; the narrative blurs the lines between fiction and reality and introduces a conspiracy that spans all of literature from the first clay tablets to the internet.
THE UNWRITTEN is chock full of mystery, magic, cameos from famous writers (Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde) and allusions to fictional characters (Frankenstein and Lizzie Hexam, from Charles Dickens’ last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend). It is a literary scavenger hunt, one that stretches across the globe from the India of the British Raj to the Villa Diodati, the Swiss Villa where John Milton penned Paradise Lost and Mary Shelley conceived Frankenstein.
We invite you to sit back, follow Tom Taylor on his quest to discover the truth about his life and his missing father, and remember once again just how powerful a story can be. Read it here. Then, tell your friends and become a fan on FACEBOOK.
IGN reviews THE UNWRITTEN #7 calling it “as engrossing and mysterious as it's ever been.” Check out the full review here.
For those of you looking forward to what’s to come, a new storyline begins with issue #10! Tom finds himself in 1940 Stuttgart—a ghost city inhabited by the master liar of the Third Reich, Josef Goebbels.
Check out this imagery:
