THIS Is Why I Do This.

The Society of Illustrators held an evening panel entitled "Drawing the Line: An Evening with Comic Luminaries" three nights ago on Wednesday the 11th of May. The Society brought together mainstream American industry legends Jim Steranko, former Marvel Comics E-i-C Joe Quesada, and Walter Simonson to be questioned by Dennis Calero, a man with a young but varied career in comics himself, to speak about the craft of making sequential art.

Here's my Twitter blast from the evening with some new, fuller commentary from me:

@LongandShortbox
Listening to Jim Steranko, Joe Quesada, & Walt Simonson at the Society of Illustrators in NYC moderated by Dennis Calero! Amazing.~@JonGorga
11 May

Jim Steranko: "You want to be in comics? Four words: Draw. Like. John. Buscema. Draw every day until you have maximum facility."

The statement sounds like he's saying 'Just get good enough so you can coast' but the three artists were talking about 'good-art' days and 'bad-art' days. Times when the pencil just doesn't flow over the page like it should. The goal, as a professional, is to be able, even on those really bad days, to produce work that is still competent.

Jim Steranko: "I can't recognize my own work as apart from other artists. I'm in the middle of the forest, I am the forest."

As an over-active creative myself, I am far too familiar with being unable to see the forest for the trees, but what Steranko is referring to here is seeing instead of his own style or his own hand, only his mistakes. More on this concept to follow.

Walt Simonson: "I had to quarry it from the blank page. I know two people who seemed to just trace it out: Jack Kirby & Bernie Wrightson."

Simonson revealed at several points over the evening genuine frustration at making the lines on the page do what they needed to do. And the subsequent unique solutions and creative diversions that resulted from that frustration.

"Your style is defined by the things you can't draw well because you have to make it work in your own way." ~ @JoeQuesada

Quesada followed this by saying: 'You'll always hear people say "Oh, I love how you draw feet" and you smile and thank them while you think to yourself: "I can't draw feet to save my life" because you came up with a creative solution to a personal stumbling block.' (This writer thinks it's entirely possible that the specific mention of feet was a side-jab at a certain well-known artistic punching bag in the American comics industry whose ability to draw basic things such as feet has often been called into question.)

"Great advice I received: You won't be good until you have complete disregard for your own work. You have to forgive yourself." ~@JoeQuesada

This was really good for me and I suspect any and every young artist to hear. He also said 'Somedays it's all coming out of the pencil just the way you want, and somedays it just doesn't flow. On those days you have to forgive yourself for sucking, take a breath, and go write or go walk in the park. Just take the time to be away from the drawing-board and when you come back tomorrow you'll be refreshed instead of losing multiple days to the frustration and anguish of being angry at yourself for sucking.'

Walt Simonson: "I came in the 70s. I thought I'd be in comics 5 years and get a real job. I never got a real job and I'm happy to be here!"

Simonson was asked about how it felt to see some of the things he'd created for the world of Marvel's Thor become three-dimensionally realized for film and he proceeded to share some delightful stories from his three days on the set of "Thor" a year ago.

Q&A time. I REALLY don't want this evening to end.

I really didn't.

Walt Simonson: "I took mythology classes in college, I was fascinated by the stuff as a kid and it had a huge influence on my work on Thor."

This was, I'm sure, especially interesting to hear for long-time Thor fans. The statement was part of Simonson's answer to an audience question for all three panelists: 'Do you find your work draws on mythology?'

Jim Steranko: "I think many comics creators are children of urban mythology."

This was part of Steranko's answer to the question about mythology. He went on to say: 'Comic-book artists often grow up in cities and draw cities. Into these urban settings they place gunshots and brawls and crime, but these guys have never been in a fight in their lives!'

Jim Steranko: "Don't try to beat us at our game. Find what's unique about you and you'll make a name for yourself." #makingcomics #advice

This is where things went from educational to inspirational.

"Pacing is important. Find the crescendo. There might be smaller ones, but find the largest. The explosion could be a kiss." ~ @JoeQuesada

Quesada illustrated this by telling a story. A younger and more popular artist in the mid-Ninties saw him at a convention and asked: 'How do you get that awesome pacing down, Joe?' And Joe asked the intense prototypical 90s artist back: 'How would you open a story with all the major Batman villains sitting in a hideout drinking tea?' And this young gun answered: 'I'd draw them really angry and excited with The Joker screaming so there was spittle flying out of his mouth and the tea splashing everywhere!' Joe then said: Okay, then on page two Batman crashes the party.'' This got the guy even more excited according to Joe: 'I'd have him crash through the skylight with glass everywhere and his boot coming right at the reader's face!' Then Joe said: 'Okay. Page three. An atomic bomb goes off. How do you sell it?' And the guy had nothing to say. Hopefully he learned something.

"I always do my main layout at print-size, otherwise you'll have to walk ten feet away to see your work as the reader does!" ~ @JoeQuesada

This is really interesting because it is industry standard to my understanding to work at roughly 1.5 times print-size. Marvel and DC's pencilers and inkers produce their artwork on huge pieces of bristol board that look almost like the boards we all used to buy to display our science projects with in elementary school.

"I took two #comics classes at #SVA. One with Will Eisner. One with Harvey Kurtzman. I failed both of them." ~ @JoeQuesada

Quesada didn't intend to enter the comics industry when he was a student. He took the classes for the fun of it and when push came to shove between doing those classes' finals or his non-sequential illustration classes? He just didn't pass anything in. He learned his sequential storytelling from a storyboard class he took at SVA. (I stand outside SVA's main building as I write these words.) He went on to say he saw Eisner years later at a convention and thought they could have a laugh about it now as two adults in the industry, but Eisner wouldn't have it. He was still mad.

Jim #Steranko: "Start with the story. The story will tell you what to draw, what to do."

I can think of fewer words that make for better advice for comics artists and/or comicsmiths. Find a good story, then find what that story needs on the page to be most effective.

That was one of the best #comics events of the season. #Makingcomics #advice & #comicshistory, all #wonderful! ~ @JonGorga

That it was.

~@JonGorga

Weekly Process Roundup 5/13/11

The weekly process roundup is a collection of sketches, pencils, inks, thumbnails, everything other than finished product, from The Long and Shortbox of It's favorite artists and illustrators, hitting every Friday.

• Monica Gallagher shares with us some of her very cool and sexy sketches from a Free Comic Book Day appearance. [See above.]
• Chris Samnee blows my mind with an inked sketch of Superwoman.
• George O'Connor gifts us one in a series of sketches of the goddess Hera.
• Jason Little posts the layout for a page of a new project.

Joe Quesada, Walt Simonson, Jim Steranko, and Dennis Calero gathered at the Society of Illustrators for a panel discussion about their history and working process on May 11th. The Long and Shortbox Of It was there and you can see some of the evening quoted on the @LongandShortbox twitter account. A more detailed account is forthcoming.

~ @JonGorga

A Long Awaited Return...

Thor has, since its JMS driven relaunch a couple of years ago, consistently been one of Marvel's best books. Handled, as it should be, by premier talents like JMS, Olivier Copiel and now Matt Fraction and Pasqual Ferry (with fantastic up and comer Kieron Gillen acting as a bridge between the two), there hasn't been a bad issue of the book in a long, long time.

And Thor #615 may very well be the best of them.

Months and months ago, with the announcement of the creative team of Fraction and Ferry, Thor fans rejoiced- maybe the book will finally ship on time, we said. And ship on time it did, but with a pretty decent six month run written by Gillen that tied into the larger Siege storyline and acted as both prologue and epilogue to the larger shared universe story while tying up JMS's last loose threads. Now that Fraction and Ferry are here, though, aided by John Hollingsworth and John Workman doing colors and letters respectively, Thor fans should again rejoice, and doubly so: this is great comics, some of the best straight up superhero work Fraction has ever done.

Although we've seen great Thor writing from him in the past, this blows all of that other stuff straight off the world tree. The scope here is huge, epic and cosmic and takes its influences from the Thor greats of years past, greats like Kirby and Simonson (and if you don't believe that that's what Fraction and Marvel have in mind, then why do you think they brought Workman, who lettered on Thor for Simonson, back on board?). Fraction not only has a handle on all of these characters and their relationships- this is clear from the Thor/Donald Blake dialogue (which is a home run) and the way in which the titular character mourns for his half brother- but also the way a book like this should feel. The sense of impending doom, expressed explicitly near the end, that lurks underneath the whole story, that imbues it with a sense of urgency is an indication of just how brilliant, in both subtle and straight up ways, the writer can be.

Pasqual Ferry's art is soft in all the right ways, and his slight redesigns of the Asgardian garb to give it a more sci-fi feel and help signal the shift away from a fantasy based book. His art, although stiffer than I like generally, has a certain diffuse energy to it and his line, thin and soft, moves the comic away from Copiel's hyperrealism into a more mythic territory- this is not something you could walk out of your house and see going on down the street, and Ferry does a great job expressing it. Hollingsworth's soft colors and, in particular, Workman's fluid lettering help this impression as well.

If the next issues of Thor can be as good as this one- or, imagine, if they could be better- we have a new classic on our hands. Fraction and Ferry were a long time coming, but now that we have them we should feast and rejoice- they just don't make comics like this anymore, even if sometimes they try.

Whatever Happened to the God of Thunder?

It used to be that I thought Thor wasn't very interesting. I used to believe that the most compelling superheroes were those with whom we could identify, those that we see ourselves as. This is a variation on the oft-stated opinion that Batman is the most compelling super-hero because he doesn't actually have any super-powers (which, incidentally, is untrue: Batman's superpower is being as rich as God. I suppose the argument might work with Nightwing, or maybe a character like Hawkeye or Green Arrow but in the context of what I'm about to say and recent events its mostly a moot point).

Both of those suppositions are wrong*.

The latter is wrong mostly because no-one says it about Iron Man (who is a much better Marvel analogue to Batman than Moon Knight, mostly because the basic character type is the same). The reason that no-one makes this argument on Tony Stark's behalf is that, mostly, Tony isn't as interesting as Bruce Wayne, because his hook isn't nearly as fantastic. Iron Man really is just a dude with a lot of money and training; Batman is a dude with lots of money and training whose parents were killed by criminals, scarring him into becoming a psychopath, albeit an awesome one.

I discovered that the former isn't true because of J. Michael Straczynski's run on Thor. I love JMS's Thor. I love it so much that I'm willing to throw out one of my core beliefs about what makes a good superhero concept simply on the basis of a series that I've been reading backwards, from #602 back to #8 (which is far, far less impressive than it sounds, considering the renumbering). I love it so much, in fact, that I have since bought (and fallen in love with) Matt Fraction's Thor One-Shots**, and some Walter Simonson Thor issues out of a fifty-ceny bin.

So, basically, Thor is by far one of the best superhero comics being released at the moment. The problem is, of course, that I have to use a term like "released" loosely, because the timeline between issues seems to roughly consist of forever, and this is extremely frustrating.

Unfortunately, JMS is leaving Thor, apparently beacuse of the big upcoming "Siege of Asgard" event referenced here. Rich Johnston has a couple theories about what this might be, here and here, and although the former has been discredited, the latter seems to be within the realm of possibillity.

That is, until one considers that the most recently announced Marvel Event is called Assault on New Olympus, which sounds sort of similair to "Siege of Asgard" insofar as it involves attacking a new representation of an old home for ancient gods. Now, Marvel is sort of notorius for appropriating ideas from elsewhere (take that Identity Disc miniseries from a few years back or the upcoming Necrosha event, which is basically Blackest Night featuring mutants) but stealing from yourself is a little absurd, even for the House of Ideas.

So, True Believers, the question is this: Is it Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente who are going to bring the God of Thunder back into the Marvel U. proper? Will it be Bendis and Copiel, as Rich proposes? Or is it something else entirely?

For what it's worth, my allowance is on the first option: given both Herc's status as a former Thor supporting character and Amadeus's previous history with helping out heroes in need, as well as the title similarities pointed out above, and the dots seem to connect in all the right places. Still, the second option isn't inconcievable and (despite my modest bashing of Bendis earlier this week) would probably be quite wonderful.

Whatever happens, I'm excited to see where Thor goes- although JMS's issues were so few and far-between, he concocted a great setup for the next guy, and I can only hope that that guy is someone equally as talented.

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*This is a sweeping generalization- the kind I should have learned my lesson about with the sweeping generalization made in the introduction- and, as is usually true of such statements, it is incomplete. There are two sets of comics characters who are compelling because they are identifiable, and a third who sort of fits the bill. The first two, are, of course, the X-Men and (if my limited knowledge is correct) The Doom Patrol, both of which are made of heroes both hated by humanity and sworn to protect them. Spider-Man sort of fits the bill, except I suspect we like Peter Parker mostly because we like him, not because we feel like we are him.

**Now, Fraction's work makes me suspect that my first sweeping generalization wasn't so wrong after all- what he makes clear is that Thor exists as we know him in the Marvel comics because he was flawed. Thor was, essentially, cursed to be bound with a mortal because he was a holier-than-thou ass, which rubbed Odin the wrong way. Perhaps if the sweeping generalization is modified into "The only heroes that aren't compelling are those heroes that aren't flawed" which would, of course, mean that Superman may be the least interesting cape of all time- as near as I can tell (despite attempts by people like Brian Azzarello, who's Superman run is fantastic) Supe's only flaw is that he's got this moral code that no one can live up to but him, which maybe the least realistic flaw of all-time. I have no problem with suspension of disbelief (I am blogging about comics, after all), but that's just absurd.