A discussion related to Adventures Into Digital Comics.

1) Can you tell us about your background?

I grew up in a military family. My father was a career Air Force officer, and so we moved around a lot. I was introduced to comics at an early age because my folks used them as teaching aids, while teaching me to read. When I first figured out that someone was actually drawing the comics, I realized that I wanted to do it too. I had other possible career choices -- aeronautical engineer, or paleontologist -- but I was terrible at math, and once I realized I'd never encounter a live Tyrannosaurus Rex in the field, I gave up on paleontology (besides, I was terrible at physics and chemistry, too). My art teachers in college were horrified that I wanted to draw comics. They practically waved crosses and evil eye signs in my direction. But I was determined to make it in comics, and after a six year hitch in the U.S. Navy, I came to New York, looking to be the next comic art sensation. I barely hung on by the skin of my teeth for the first couple of years, but I did finally get that big break with The Legion of Superheroes at DC Comics. After that, I moved on to Marvel and The X-Men.

2) You’ve been an illustrator for years. What do you find in comics that you wouldn’t find in another type of visual exercise?

Where else can you blow up entire galaxies, or hurtle through space on a tiny surfboard, or travel to other dimensions, or meet the most outlandish alien beings, on the miniscule budget we get to work with? The only thing George Lucas has that we haven't, is sound and motion.

3) You began your career in the early 70’s. What was the overall mood in the comic book industry back then? How has it evolved? Do you remember what kind of readerships the publishers were trying to reach at that time?

The mood was pretty optimistic then. Comics were doing well, new titles were coming out and for the most part catching the eye of the readers. Our readership then was still young grade school kids, mostly male, but we also had a hard core of college readers. Stan Lee's line of bombastic self promotion -- the "Excelsiors" and the "Make Mine Marvel" and such, caught the imagination of the college readers, and some of them went on to become George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, and the like.

4) Once you were established, was it hard to find new jobs in the industry? What was the size of the talent pool? How would you compare it to today’s market?

Once I'd done the Legion and the X-Men, finding work was not the problem. I was offered a lot more than I could ever produce. I'm not very fast, and so I had to turn down a lot. As for the talent pool -- when I first came into the business, I'd estimate that there were no more than about 400 people in the entire industry. These days it's so flooded with talent that older people like me are being forced right out of the market.

5) The comic book audience nowadays is older than the one we could find in the 60’s or even until the mid-80’s. Has the industry completely forgotten its younger target audience?

I can't speak with any authority there, because it's been about three years since I followed the market at all. But the last I knew, they were still aiming some books at the younger market -- or at least producing books that both the younger readers could read and identify with as well as the older ones -- like the books based on the Batman cartoon show, and other books like it.

6) 1993 was the last profitable year for the industry. The market has been shrinking ever since. What do you think are the causes of the industry's collapse in the 90’s?

Video games. The internet. Electronic entertainment in general. Plus some pretty damn poor stuff coming out of the publishers, especially Marvel. Plus, the industry's massive pandering to the collectible market, producing four, five, six different editions of a book in the hopes that collectors would absolutely HAVE to have all versions. Holographic covers. Forty-six different X-Men titles (not actually that many, but it seemed like it). Marvel overextending itself by buying Toy Biz and Skybox and God knows what else. When the collectible market crashed, so did Marvel, and then so did the industry.

7) During your career you worked for the big publishers, but you also made some creator-owned work, such as Futurians. How would you compare both experiences?

Futurians was very satisfying. Basically, it was a Cockrum project in toto, because I wrote, penciled and inked it, and my wife, Paty, colored it. Lettering and editorial were all that was done outside my own studio. Working for the big publishers was more restrictive, in that I had to adhere to the companies' set rules and standards regarding their characters, plus the industry as a whole tended to be somewhat chaotic.

8) You have not worked in the industry for years, and not because you didn’t try. We had an interview with Marv Wolfman who told us that the industry had become a “flavor of the month” type. Can you tell us about your experience in the 90’s and your thoughts about the industry nowadays?

Jobs became fewer and fewer. Marv Wolfman is correct about that "flavor of the month" business. There was always some of the editorial tendency to want artists to draw like the current favorite; when I came into the business, Marvel wanted everyone to draw like Jack Kirby. How I managed to get in with a style of my own, I'll never know. It started in earnest, though, with Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld and Todd McFarlane and the others who went off to establish Image. They became so hugely popular that the new, younger editors wouldn't hire anyone unless they drew like the current "hot" artists. Ultimately the industry became flooded with imitators, and anyone who didn't imitate the current "hotties" couldn't get work. For me, the only jobs available were occasional fill-ins or annuals, until I finally landed Soulsearchers and Company, published by Claypool, a small independent which had three black & white titles. I worked there for several years, at a page rate of less than half what I had been getting at Marvel and DC.

1 2 3