Comics creator and Eisner Winning illustrator Michael Avon Oeming (Blue Book, The Mice Templar, Powers) joins me on the show today to discuss his new Dark Horse Comics project, William of Newbury. I've been a fan of his work for years now and following his process videos on TikTok inspired me to take this interview in that direction. We talk about how he pulled from English history, specifically the Anarchy, and why he adapted the English historian William into a raccoon cause who would see that coming? The anthropomorphic sandbox is always an interesting one and its motivation here might surprise you. William of Newbury drops in late May. Don't miss it.
Make sure to check out our monthly crowdfunding comics feature book: Super Kaiju Rock n Roller Derby Fun Time Go!
Preview pages:
[00:00:00] Your ears do not deceive you. You've just entered the Cryptid Creator Corner brought to you by your friends at Comic Book Yeti.
[00:00:07] So without further ado, let's get on to the interview.
[00:00:11] Skirt of Good Muts sound like something spoken by a Cthulhu cultist for the name of a weird craft beer brand,
[00:00:16] but it's actually the shorthand for this new wild crowd-finding comics project
[00:00:21] Super Kaiju Rock and Roll Derby Fun Time Go from creator David Hedgecock.
[00:00:25] This is a mash-up of Jim and the Holograms meets Roller Derby with Kaiju with a twist of 70s pop culture thrown in.
[00:00:32] Harmony, Lyra, Melody, Cadence, and Biola are a struggling 20-something band
[00:00:38] and a Roller Derby team fleshed with talent but broke as a joke.
[00:00:42] The burnouts are thrilling concertgoers with their killer looks and vibe until a music mishap
[00:00:48] drops a curious ancient artifact into their hands.
[00:00:51] Cheeky, lighthearted and fun, it will be launching soon
[00:00:54] and there's an early bird special if you catch it in time.
[00:00:57] This course you would discount and a VIP wristband.
[00:01:00] I'll drop the link at the show notes.
[00:01:02] I read the advance for this and honestly, it reminds me of my own
[00:01:04] carefree days giggling on the road in the music industry, but with way better shower scenes.
[00:01:09] The only thing missing is more cowbell.
[00:01:15] Hello, everybody, and welcome to today's episode of the Crypto Creator Corner.
[00:01:19] I'm Byron O'Neill, your host for today's chat.
[00:01:21] And we got a good one for you because I'm joined by illustrator Michael Avon Oming,
[00:01:25] who I've been a fan of for quite some time.
[00:01:28] I love the mice Templar and, of course, that whole Eisner winning powers thing.
[00:01:33] And I really enjoy talking to creators who are, I think, crazy and talented enough
[00:01:38] to try and do everything on a project themselves, which is the case
[00:01:42] for the latest endeavor coming out with Dark Horse Comics, William of Newbury.
[00:01:46] Michael, thanks for coming on. How are you doing?
[00:01:49] Thank you so much.
[00:01:49] Thank you for having me on me and I really appreciate it. I'm doing well.
[00:01:52] Good, good.
[00:01:53] Well, I gotta admit, I feel a little bit bad right now because I was doing my
[00:01:57] research and knowing you were on TikTok.
[00:01:59] I follow you on TikTok.
[00:02:00] Went over there to see if I could pull something interesting, you know, like a
[00:02:03] tidbit to talk about. And I came upon a post of yours where you said it's
[00:02:06] easier for me to work for seven days nonstop on something than to talk
[00:02:11] about it for 30 seconds.
[00:02:12] So I will do my best to at least try to make this entertaining for you
[00:02:16] and stuff.
[00:02:17] So this is much easier than on your own going on social media,
[00:02:22] unpromptedly bragging about yourself or however you want to.
[00:02:25] OK, good. Good.
[00:02:26] That's tough.
[00:02:27] This is good having conversation with especially with smart people like you
[00:02:30] was amazing.
[00:02:32] Oh, OK, you don't know me well enough to say that yet, but I hope that's true.
[00:02:36] OK, OK, good.
[00:02:38] But anyway, I got a chance to read the advanced copy of William and
[00:02:42] I found it really delightful.
[00:02:44] There's so much to dive into, but I kind of want to start with the
[00:02:46] history angle or at least a loose interpretation of it anyway.
[00:02:50] Right. So this is in 12th century England during the time of the
[00:02:53] Anarchy, which encompasses this period of civil war in England and in Normandy,
[00:02:58] largely revolving around a succession crisis and this kind of result
[00:03:02] and breakdown of what passed for law and order at that time.
[00:03:06] So what drew you in to kind of wanted to plant your story,
[00:03:09] at least on a cursory level there?
[00:03:12] It started with one of the other books that I'm doing is
[00:03:17] Blue Book with James Tinian.
[00:03:18] Yeah. And in the back of and that is obscenitly about UFOs,
[00:03:22] but in the back of it he has these sections called True Weird,
[00:03:25] those true strange stories.
[00:03:27] Right. And one of my favorite oddest stories ever was from this time period
[00:03:32] and it's called The Green Children.
[00:03:33] And it is about these two children who just had green
[00:03:37] fleshed and clothes who just appeared in 12th century England.
[00:03:41] They didn't speak English.
[00:03:42] They didn't seem to be familiar with our food and all this kind of stuff.
[00:03:45] They were like sort of allergic to the sunlight.
[00:03:47] And like the rumor was or the explanation was they were from this fairyland.
[00:03:51] In fact, when they learned to speak English, one of them died.
[00:03:55] The one who survived had these memories of being from this far off land
[00:03:59] and very descriptive about it.
[00:04:00] And she called it St. Martin's Land.
[00:04:02] And this was supposedly this sort of, you know, supernatural fairy land.
[00:04:07] And so that this was a story that I that I wrote and drew for this
[00:04:12] this short story called The Green Children.
[00:04:14] And in doing the research, I came across the work of William of Newburg.
[00:04:19] Now, William of Newburg and William Newberry, the same person that the
[00:04:24] his name is slightly different depending on where in the country you were.
[00:04:26] So he has both monarchers with him.
[00:04:28] And the more I read about him, the more fascinating he became.
[00:04:31] He was this monk who he spent his life in the monastery
[00:04:36] and he was England's first historian.
[00:04:38] And he wrote about this time period called The Bionic,
[00:04:41] where it was King Stephen and Queen Matilda and at this whole fact that
[00:04:45] this is like House of Dragons based on.
[00:04:48] It's literally based on this this part of history,
[00:04:51] this is the succession issue.
[00:04:55] But in the middle of this true history stuff,
[00:04:58] he's also recording stories of revenants, of dead things,
[00:05:02] dead people coming back to life, ghost stories, demon stories,
[00:05:06] but not as stories he's recorded in his factual things
[00:05:09] because he was a medieval Christian monk.
[00:05:11] This was their reality.
[00:05:13] So I became fascinated with it and I always love I'm a big history nerd.
[00:05:17] Anyway, and I started to want to tell more of his story
[00:05:23] in these other stories.
[00:05:24] And I had missed the mice, Templar, anthropomorphic stuff.
[00:05:30] And there's always there's always lots of finding ways
[00:05:33] of bringing my simpler back.
[00:05:34] And I love this sort of world.
[00:05:36] And I thought, well, what would separate this from, say,
[00:05:40] you know, very straightforward telling of it, you know,
[00:05:43] which I originally was going to do.
[00:05:44] And that's kind of I went the anthropomorphic route.
[00:05:47] And then I started thinking about,
[00:05:49] well, how what can I say with an anthropomorphic world
[00:05:52] that's different than straightforward people?
[00:05:55] So I have these sets of rules for William of Newbury
[00:06:00] of you will see representations of humans.
[00:06:04] There are no human beings as characters,
[00:06:06] but they're a part of the world if that makes any sense.
[00:06:08] Yeah, yeah.
[00:06:09] And I find and I chose specific animals to represent
[00:06:14] not to represent.
[00:06:15] So I came up.
[00:06:16] That was a really fun part was wasn't just
[00:06:18] let's do an anthropomorphic thing,
[00:06:19] but it was really kind of digging out
[00:06:21] like all the sort of metaphors for that for for it.
[00:06:23] And I started with that.
[00:06:26] And then I just literally took actual
[00:06:28] his William of Newbury's or Newberg's
[00:06:31] actual accounts, like his story.
[00:06:33] So each of these stories for them, there's
[00:06:37] I'm forgetting the titles because they're weird.
[00:06:41] They're like, you know, serious nonsense and bear wick,
[00:06:45] the green children and there's a couple and there's two other
[00:06:47] and these are actual retellings of his stories,
[00:06:50] some of which I toned down because they were so sort of horrific
[00:06:54] and and, you know, outlandish, you know,
[00:06:56] I had to and make my own narrative.
[00:06:59] So when I say that this is a true story,
[00:07:01] it's based on these true accounts, but like Newbury
[00:07:04] Newberg never left the monastery once he was there.
[00:07:08] You know, so he wasn't part of these stories.
[00:07:09] So of course I'm I'm turning it into a to a larger
[00:07:13] a tale to tell, you know, and then writing in
[00:07:17] stuff from that time period, the Anarchy is going to play a part of it.
[00:07:21] If we get to do a follow up series,
[00:07:22] I really, really hope we get to do will get deeper into that.
[00:07:25] And that was the beginnings of the idea.
[00:07:28] So that's where it all started from.
[00:07:31] OK, yeah, I was doing a little research on that
[00:07:33] and that the William of Newburg, Newbury
[00:07:37] that some of those stories laid the groundwork,
[00:07:39] at least some people kind of consider it to be for our
[00:07:43] sort of European vampire mythology, like roots.
[00:07:46] I see a lot of articles calling him like the first vampire hunter.
[00:07:50] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:07:51] You know, he was like Coltrack the Nightstalker of his time.
[00:07:56] Yeah, so it's a really interesting take on it.
[00:07:58] But I just love the fact that to them these were like when he heard these
[00:08:01] stories, they made sense to them in that world's context, right?
[00:08:06] So I'm not like a Christian monk, but I'm writing this from the point of view
[00:08:09] of somebody who believes that that's that's how this world operates,
[00:08:13] which is also really fun to I'm writing it in like a non-secular way,
[00:08:19] but trying to be respectful of the times.
[00:08:23] I'm also trying not to get too much into religion stuff,
[00:08:26] because like if any religion, like I don't want to, you know,
[00:08:29] when you have like girls running around and stuff like, right, right.
[00:08:33] I don't want nobody wants to see like the Fox version of of of,
[00:08:37] you know, Mother Mary or something like that.
[00:08:39] You know, sure. Yeah.
[00:08:40] So some careful of how I'm handling stuff because I it's
[00:08:45] I'm not making a statement one way or the other about religion or anything
[00:08:48] that my hope is whatever your background is,
[00:08:52] you'll be able to find your own your own narrative in a story,
[00:08:55] you know, and you can treat it that way.
[00:08:57] You can treat it as a secular or non-secular and hopefully I'm still enjoying it.
[00:09:01] OK, yeah.
[00:09:02] And the read through that was that was definitely one of the things
[00:09:05] I was because I was not raised Catholic.
[00:09:06] I was I was raised Southern Baptist of all things.
[00:09:10] So it's like, OK, these prayers sound legit,
[00:09:13] but I like I have no background at all.
[00:09:15] So like the prayers I took from from actual prayers.
[00:09:20] I did my research on it, but I can't tell you exactly where I got them from.
[00:09:25] I tried to leave out like very specific names,
[00:09:30] you know, so like Jesus is in there because that starts to step on somebody's
[00:09:34] beliefs, I think, like if I'm playing around with Jesus in a highly fictional
[00:09:39] kind of way, you know.
[00:09:42] And then again, I'm just trying to keep it kind of doors open for everybody.
[00:09:46] So like if you do believe in that stuff, it's not going to
[00:09:49] it shouldn't trip you up.
[00:09:50] If you don't believe in it, it shouldn't trip you up
[00:09:52] and hopefully it's because mainly people will be into the characters,
[00:09:56] like the characters, I think are the strongest points.
[00:09:59] You know, wow, like like it's a lot of fun, you know, with revenants coming up
[00:10:03] and fighting demons and doing extra systems and all this sort of stuff.
[00:10:07] And just the setting of it, I think the characters are a lot of fun.
[00:10:10] It's sort of neurotic monk who is afraid of everything except the ultimate evil.
[00:10:15] You know, I think that is a lot of fun.
[00:10:16] And you know, the sidekick character Winnie being, you know,
[00:10:19] this smart ass and the fact that it's that thief and a monk
[00:10:23] that are teaming up to take things things on, I think is really fun.
[00:10:27] Yeah, I mean, the story's primary protagonist is the monk raccoon.
[00:10:31] You know, that's William.
[00:10:32] So aside from in my head, what is the obvious reason which is OK,
[00:10:37] raccoons are fun to draw because they just look really neat with that automatic mask.
[00:10:41] Right? Sure. Yeah.
[00:10:44] But yeah, you alluded to that.
[00:10:45] He's constantly trying to overcome his anxiety.
[00:10:47] He's a bit neurotic, which typically isn't what you do associate with raccoons.
[00:10:51] You know, I think of these like curious little chaos merchants.
[00:10:54] Right. Yeah.
[00:10:56] So we're ascribing kind of these human emotions into these characters.
[00:11:00] So like what how did you want to present William?
[00:11:03] Is that is that something that was associated historically
[00:11:06] with the historian William, for instance, just no.
[00:11:11] I mean, we know very little but very little about the actual historian,
[00:11:15] you know, kind of know where he lived, you know, kind of know when he lived.
[00:11:19] But we don't know pretty much anything about his own
[00:11:22] personal personality or anything like that.
[00:11:26] And one thing I was sitting on to do was like that the I try not to write things
[00:11:31] with a sort of social or political statement at all.
[00:11:36] I like for the reader to take from it what they will, you know,
[00:11:40] like I don't want to tell you how to feel about it.
[00:11:42] I want you to tell me how you feel about it.
[00:11:45] The one thing I was trying to make kind of a statement on
[00:11:47] is just about like human equality.
[00:11:49] So these animals in here, they never
[00:11:53] like like there's not I'm not describing
[00:11:57] a personality because of the animal to the person.
[00:12:00] So nobody ever even refers to each other as having tails or anything like to me,
[00:12:04] they're just people. They're they're actual human beings.
[00:12:06] And kind of how I would like the world to see people is that we are all
[00:12:09] just very equal work, you know, there's just, you know, who we are
[00:12:13] is on the inside, not on the outside.
[00:12:15] So it's not our claws or paws or tails and such.
[00:12:19] So there wasn't like a sense of like, well, you know,
[00:12:22] then it would make sense to actually make the thief the raccoon, right?
[00:12:25] Because that's kind of how we would associate it with this stuff.
[00:12:28] And originally he was going to be a fox.
[00:12:30] But to be honest, like I am everybody knows from my work,
[00:12:34] like I'm very, very much influenced by Mike Manele's work.
[00:12:38] And there's this fox that he drew a few times, this humanoid fox.
[00:12:41] And like, I just knew there was no way that I could draw this guy
[00:12:44] and not just look like I was just drawing like fox.
[00:12:48] So like that was a weird like it was just it was just a detour for me.
[00:12:52] I was like, you know, I just there's no way I could I could I could not
[00:12:56] draw that character. So so weirdly that he started out as a fox.
[00:12:59] And I was like, I can't I had to kind of find my own voice with it and stuff,
[00:13:03] you know, his work is already stamped out all over everything.
[00:13:06] I didn't have to do that as well.
[00:13:10] Well, I'm kind of always amazed when people play in the anthropomorphic
[00:13:13] animal sandbox and they managed to come up with something new and different.
[00:13:17] And I feel like you've certainly been successful here, but inevitably mentally,
[00:13:21] you know, you're going to come back around or at least I do to, you know,
[00:13:24] Brian Jacques Redwall series. Sure.
[00:13:27] Sure. And, you know, so what are some of your other influences on the project
[00:13:31] aside from 12th century English historians?
[00:13:37] Yeah, I mean, I grew up with like Secret of Nymn as a kid was my biggest influence.
[00:13:41] OK, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:13:43] There's Redworn, there's a few others,
[00:13:44] but I didn't really become more aware of them to later.
[00:13:47] But the two really big ones was the Secret of Nymn animated film
[00:13:51] and then the Watership Down animated film,
[00:13:55] just know for being like, you know, really dark, right?
[00:13:59] And you can kind of see both my simpler and William of Newberry
[00:14:03] has these things in common.
[00:14:04] These there's acuteness, there's a safe-ness,
[00:14:07] and there's also this danger and threat to it.
[00:14:10] Although my simpler is definitely more
[00:14:12] action oriented, more
[00:14:18] it wasn't as safe as put it that way.
[00:14:20] You know, like my tagline for this is Newberry is a safe place to be scared.
[00:14:24] You know, so I'm not trying to write a comforting book.
[00:14:28] You know, even though it's funny, I joked at the beginning
[00:14:31] that this was medieval heart during a plague, you know, for children.
[00:14:38] But it's not really a children's book.
[00:14:40] Like I call it all ages, but like it's just meant to be that any age
[00:14:42] can enjoy it, but it's not actually meant specifically for kids.
[00:14:46] And back to be honest in the direct market,
[00:14:48] I don't think that that will be the main audience anyway.
[00:14:53] Yeah, well, as an artist, you know, you're interpreting these these forms
[00:14:58] and your transitioning kind of you have this background in the mice template.
[00:15:02] So you have different projects using non-human animals.
[00:15:05] Are there are there tricky bits, you know,
[00:15:07] kind of either anatomically or just just drawing them, right?
[00:15:12] Details get away and there was interesting questions like
[00:15:18] and I was trying to find answers about this,
[00:15:19] like there has to be papers written about anthropomorphic stuff, right?
[00:15:24] Because it goes where they're talking about like Beatrix Potter
[00:15:27] and you know, Winnie the Wihlows kind of stuff,
[00:15:29] like it's been around a long time and there seems to be these different sets of rules.
[00:15:36] And one thing I was thinking about is like size differences, right?
[00:15:38] Like one of the things that keeps this book,
[00:15:42] particularly like comforting to me is the animals that I chose.
[00:15:45] I chose mammals that are
[00:15:51] cute, that feel accessible.
[00:15:55] You know, it's kind of hard to put the finger on because I was like,
[00:15:56] well, I don't want these animals.
[00:15:58] I don't want those animals.
[00:15:59] And then there's weird stuff like there's dogs in the book,
[00:16:02] but then there's actual dog.
[00:16:04] So there's characters who present as dogs,
[00:16:06] but then there's actual dogs in the book.
[00:16:10] And then every now and then I'll have to ask myself, are there sheep here?
[00:16:12] Like does it make sense?
[00:16:13] And I was like, there's no sheep people, but but I have sheep in it.
[00:16:17] Like I wouldn't want a sheep person.
[00:16:19] I might end up having to do a sheep person at some point just because
[00:16:22] I found a trap that I set for myself in some of these limitations.
[00:16:26] But I had a crowd scene.
[00:16:27] I was like, oh my God, like I can't draw another
[00:16:29] rural person or there's, you know,
[00:16:31] and it's also why I gave William specific markings on his face.
[00:16:34] It's not just a simple black line going across.
[00:16:37] It's sort of broken up and stuff.
[00:16:40] So there were these really interesting challenges
[00:16:42] because of these these rules that I set for myself, these sort of parameters.
[00:16:46] But what's an animal?
[00:16:47] What's not an animal?
[00:16:48] What presents as a person?
[00:16:50] Right.
[00:16:51] And there's a spiritual thing going on where like once you're dead,
[00:16:54] then you're seen as a full human.
[00:16:57] So and they don't they don't talk about this,
[00:16:59] but I don't address it in the book at all.
[00:17:01] It's just there.
[00:17:02] So like we'll see angels and we'll see saints when we're in a church
[00:17:05] and we see images of saints.
[00:17:06] They're they're they're human.
[00:17:08] There are skeletons, human skeleton floating in the sky and stuff.
[00:17:11] So there's this sort of sense of like we're not truly our full,
[00:17:15] you know, the realized potential until after we pass.
[00:17:21] And until then, you know, we're all sort of
[00:17:23] I don't want to say we're animals
[00:17:24] because it can be a negative kind of connotation to that.
[00:17:26] But we are all we're all these like struggling creatures
[00:17:30] who are very much equal, which is why I just didn't want to
[00:17:35] differentiate like you're this animal or that animal
[00:17:38] because it already that already has that sort of weird.
[00:17:41] This feels like a stretch like a real stretch,
[00:17:44] but there's like there's even a sense of like class and racism.
[00:17:47] You know, once you start breaking people down into animal classes and stuff,
[00:17:52] you know, and like that's not part of the sea either.
[00:17:55] You know, but like you just start seeing the stuff so closely
[00:17:58] that you can't help but think of these things as you're working at,
[00:18:02] which I found incredibly rewarding and interesting.
[00:18:06] Like the closer you look at the anthropomorphic world
[00:18:09] and trying to figure out like why certain things are done a certain way.
[00:18:13] When did you choose to have like animals that are of different sizes?
[00:18:17] You know, even in my simpler, we chose like we had these weasel characters.
[00:18:21] They were twice as large as the mice character.
[00:18:25] Cats were still cats.
[00:18:27] We had a much simpler world in my simple as far as that part goes,
[00:18:30] as far as, you know, addressing what the animals are and stuff.
[00:18:34] Did you ever have that moment where you just look back and wish, man,
[00:18:37] I like if Brian had written this or something, it would be so much easier to do
[00:18:43] in terms of like because I could see obsessing myself, I know myself,
[00:18:48] you know, over OK, how is somebody going to interpret this?
[00:18:50] Because there's so many different ways you can approach
[00:18:53] these animal characteristics and how human they are.
[00:18:56] You know, both emotionally and physically, you know, like bipedalism,
[00:19:00] you know, comes to mind like that.
[00:19:01] Yeah, you know, and I didn't personally have any
[00:19:05] any trouble with like the buy-in of the story, you know,
[00:19:09] and that's something as somebody who's relatively new
[00:19:13] and trying to start writing, you know, comic scripts myself.
[00:19:16] And so I go through that process before an interview when I read something
[00:19:20] and like, OK, if I was writing this, how would I do that?
[00:19:23] So, you know, what did you find that trick was
[00:19:26] to kind of sell it from the jump?
[00:19:27] Or did you just obsess about it enough and finally were like, OK, I'm done.
[00:19:31] It just came to me all very quickly, you know, when I was doing my step
[00:19:35] where there was a sense of like, well, there's this much larger universe
[00:19:38] that I want to build out.
[00:19:39] And like Brian and I got together through gaming,
[00:19:42] through like D&D and Star Wars role playing games.
[00:19:45] OK. And just through knowing him over the years, like
[00:19:48] his sense of like the cosmos and world building is
[00:19:52] I don't know anybody else who does it better, you know,
[00:19:55] and that was a big part of what I needed for my simpler.
[00:19:58] This was a much smaller story.
[00:20:00] I kind of knew almost immediately sort of what it was about, you know,
[00:20:04] and at this point, I just had enough of my own writing experience.
[00:20:07] I felt a passion to do it myself.
[00:20:09] In fact, at the end of the day, I did everything myself,
[00:20:11] lettering, the coloring and everything.
[00:20:15] You know, and also Brian is he's public about this.
[00:20:18] So I think it's fine to say he's a religious person, you know,
[00:20:22] and he'd think that would make more sense to have them writing
[00:20:26] or something that has a religious thing to it.
[00:20:28] But I don't want to step on his toes either and say to him, no,
[00:20:32] about anything, you know, that, you know, and he's very reasonable
[00:20:36] about that stuff and stuff, but it was just a position I also did
[00:20:38] want to put myself in, you know, or him, you know.
[00:20:42] Right. And again, I'm also hoping that this
[00:20:45] and open up a pathway for for more of my simpler stuff in the future,
[00:20:51] you know, yeah.
[00:20:53] Yeah, that makes it they couldn't be cross of us because the worlds are too
[00:20:56] wildly different.
[00:20:58] Yeah. But yeah, I mean, I still love that series.
[00:21:02] And it means a lot to me work with Victor Santos, one of my closest friends
[00:21:06] through comics over the years.
[00:21:08] It would be great getting getting to work with him again and stuff.
[00:21:12] Well, I want to touch on how you structure your stories kind of as an artist.
[00:21:15] You know, do you you're coming at you've got this concept,
[00:21:18] you know, kind of where you want to go.
[00:21:20] So did you draw the concept art first and then kind of work on paneling?
[00:21:25] I'm just trying to get a flow.
[00:21:27] If you first it was just a lot of sketches, you know, what does this world look like?
[00:21:30] You know, and it's interesting because the character sketches that did earlier on,
[00:21:34] they evolved once I started drawing it, you know, so like their heads were much
[00:21:38] larger earlier on.
[00:21:41] And that sort of just changed through like like no matter how much preparation I do,
[00:21:45] I don't really find the characters until I'm actually drawing the page.
[00:21:50] So sometimes I don't do any
[00:21:54] sort of character studies, like maybe I'll do one drawing and that's it.
[00:21:57] And then I just go right into it.
[00:21:58] OK. But but having already just like I just saw my head so clearly
[00:22:03] from really early on.
[00:22:08] Yeah. So when it came to the writing part,
[00:22:12] I think I had a handful of drawings, they were just sketches.
[00:22:14] You know, we'll see them in the trade at some point.
[00:22:16] But once I actually started working like the page was the page,
[00:22:19] like I didn't have to I didn't have to like sort of figure out
[00:22:21] how is this page going to work and stuff like it's it's it's the one place
[00:22:26] in my life where I operate well, which is I can see all this stuff very clearly
[00:22:29] in my mind before I'm doing it.
[00:22:32] So.
[00:22:34] What was the struggle was all story stuff was just making sure that I had,
[00:22:39] you know, character arcs that I had subtext that I wasn't saying things
[00:22:43] with too much exposition.
[00:22:47] Like, you know, how do you say something without saying it is always the trick?
[00:22:50] You know, never say the thing that the thing is about is is, you know,
[00:22:54] the show, don't tell stuff is such a puzzle that
[00:22:58] it's so rewarding and challenging.
[00:22:59] And that was a big part of the writing.
[00:23:01] And Taki was a big help in that.
[00:23:03] But she's she's always my sort of proofreader editor of like,
[00:23:07] you know, yeah, of looking out for those those pitfalls and stuff.
[00:23:12] So it was the writing was the main thing, you know, is there's sort of
[00:23:16] there's a lot of research in figuring out.
[00:23:22] The monastic life, a lot of the research that I never used,
[00:23:25] but I just needed to have it in the back of my head to know what I'm
[00:23:30] writing because like William, not only is he in the church,
[00:23:33] but then his brother is the Abbott, the neck was a challenge to.
[00:23:37] So his brother.
[00:23:39] Is a brother. So like the Abbott's colleagues,
[00:23:42] like so the vernacular became really like his trap at one point,
[00:23:45] like how do I phrase this that he's his brother, but also a brother?
[00:23:50] You know,
[00:23:53] so all of that became really, really tricky.
[00:23:56] There's a lot of like church politics stuff that I'll get into a little bit,
[00:23:59] but it has mostly to do with the economics of the time,
[00:24:02] like the the the monasteries at the time were
[00:24:06] of course they were about religion and belief and stuff,
[00:24:08] but they also had to operate in a way to make money, you know,
[00:24:13] to to operate, right?
[00:24:15] Like you can't feed people for free and stuff.
[00:24:16] So there was like a lot of the wool trade was a thing
[00:24:20] growing food and crops and your own food and crops.
[00:24:23] It was a really interesting thing of like their own economic system
[00:24:27] and there's this great.
[00:24:29] I'll send you a link afterwards.
[00:24:31] My recall is terrible, but there's a medieval podcast
[00:24:34] that I listened to that was was really useful.
[00:24:38] And she wrote some amazing books about the monastic life
[00:24:41] that was very helpful.
[00:24:43] OK, yeah.
[00:24:44] Well, before we escape that, I had a note here and it's totally tangential.
[00:24:48] So apologize to listeners, but I got to know this, right?
[00:24:50] You're talking about being on other podcasts
[00:24:52] and there's been a lot of in your recent work anyway,
[00:24:58] such a loaded word, but like a cult kind of stuff.
[00:25:01] You know, you've got, you know, with Will
[00:25:03] you've got, you know, with William and then you have Blue Book
[00:25:06] and you have Project Monarch.
[00:25:09] So, you know, kind of doing my research for this chat,
[00:25:11] I came across another podcast you were on,
[00:25:13] which I haven't had a chance to listen to.
[00:25:15] But they talked about a paranormal experience in Snoqualmie.
[00:25:20] And I lived outside of Tacoma for seven years
[00:25:24] and I spent most of my time back then as an outdoor landscape photographer.
[00:25:26] So I'm like pretty familiar with the region
[00:25:29] and just my other background in anthropology
[00:25:33] and studying Native American mythology.
[00:25:34] That was my folk college.
[00:25:36] So I got to know what's here.
[00:25:39] So so just just a little precursor.
[00:25:43] I've always been interested in this stuff.
[00:25:44] I've always wanted to have some sort of experience,
[00:25:46] whether they're with the UFOs seeing something paranormal.
[00:25:50] Like I've never had a real experience of any kind, really.
[00:25:56] Nothing that I can't like write off or rationalize in some way.
[00:26:00] But there was this time, yeah, we I was interviewing to go to Valve
[00:26:04] to work at Valve, the video game company were made like Left 4 Dead
[00:26:07] and Team Fortress, but she's other games.
[00:26:10] And they put us up at that hotel where Twin Peaks was filmed.
[00:26:14] And we're in one of the rooms
[00:26:16] and I wake up about three in the morning
[00:26:18] and at the foot of my bed, I see very clearly a very large
[00:26:22] almost like it was superimposed.
[00:26:23] This is head of a young man.
[00:26:26] And I jokingly call him the douchebag ghost because
[00:26:29] like he had his like baseball cap on kind of backwards
[00:26:31] and he just looked like a teenager.
[00:26:33] It was just like, hey, you know, OK.
[00:26:35] Jersey Shore got it. Yeah.
[00:26:37] And I saw it long enough that I could process what I was seeing.
[00:26:41] Right.
[00:26:41] Like when we go stargazing, we've seen some something in the sky
[00:26:45] or like a star will like light up and disappear.
[00:26:47] And then just happened so quick, you just not even sure.
[00:26:49] Like it's like half a second kind of thing.
[00:26:51] But I was asking myself questions as I saw this.
[00:26:55] Right. So it was long enough, like three to four full seconds.
[00:26:59] Right. And if you count that out in your head, OK, yeah, that's
[00:27:02] that's that's enough time to realize you've seen or not seen something.
[00:27:06] Yeah. Then it goes away.
[00:27:08] I didn't have any feeling around it or anything like that.
[00:27:11] In fact, like, Takis felt me moving around
[00:27:14] or tell us up or something.
[00:27:15] And then I just told what I saw and there's all right lights on.
[00:27:18] Um, I don't know what to think of it.
[00:27:20] Maybe the ghost image that I saw kind of looks like
[00:27:24] the scout from Team Fortress with one of the video games of the play.
[00:27:29] So maybe in some way I was I was projecting that into my head.
[00:27:32] But why would I literally project it at the bottom of the bed and stuff?
[00:27:36] I don't know.
[00:27:38] Something you ate. Well, yeah.
[00:27:40] It could be, you know, this is as close as we could get, you know.
[00:27:43] And then I was thinking, well, at that time, when you go to
[00:27:45] Snowfall, you go down to from the hotel area to those waterfalls.
[00:27:50] Yeah, they had these wooden stairs that went down at a certain point.
[00:27:53] The wooden stairs ended and there was like rocks.
[00:27:56] And you kind of had to hang off of the wooden structure and stuff.
[00:27:59] Like it was really dangerous.
[00:28:00] Like clearly people could get killed going down there.
[00:28:04] It was amazing if they let us go.
[00:28:07] And then my thought was if it was a ghost like me and why that look.
[00:28:11] So maybe it was some young dude who fell and died or something.
[00:28:14] But I don't know that I necessarily believe in that kind of stuff.
[00:28:18] Sure. You know, and I think, you know, I have a.
[00:28:22] I think the closest we get my my closest explanation to any of this weirdness
[00:28:27] is that we live in some sort of consciousness, not consciousness driven.
[00:28:31] Like our consciousness has a lot to do with the way we perceive things.
[00:28:34] And like I think that can spill over on some level
[00:28:38] and not I don't know if physically is the right word, but like
[00:28:40] it's just the the universe is a weirder place than we think it is.
[00:28:43] So for sure.
[00:28:45] That was basically my experience.
[00:28:46] That was it. I know other people, my mother had some serious
[00:28:50] like phenomena happened around her.
[00:28:52] She's had real culture guys experiences.
[00:28:54] I've had other friends who had real what they believe are real experiences.
[00:28:59] And there's no reason for them to lie to me or make up the stories.
[00:29:04] I've known people who have had
[00:29:08] who have seen, you know, UFOs in a classic sense.
[00:29:12] I've never experienced it.
[00:29:13] So like, you know, it's not that I don't know what to think like you don't have an opinion.
[00:29:18] But I just I just I think people are seeing things like there's
[00:29:22] people are having experiences as an anthropologist.
[00:29:26] I you'd be interested in one of the things that I've noticed in the UFO lore
[00:29:30] through Blue Book is that the UFOs seem to present themselves
[00:29:35] in accordance with the time that they're seen.
[00:29:38] So that has something to do with how we're perceiving them.
[00:29:40] Like back in the fifties, there was a lot of nut and bolt stuff.
[00:29:43] There's a lot of landing gears and landing gears, you know, photos of where
[00:29:47] that this ship landed, landing gears and stuff.
[00:29:49] You know, nobody talks about landing gears anymore in UFO sightings.
[00:29:53] You know, nobody talks about nuts and bolts.
[00:29:54] Everything is like a light ship now or something that's made out of one solid piece
[00:29:58] or something like that.
[00:29:59] And previous to that, you had like the sightings of
[00:30:03] the airships in the 1850s or 1870s or something where somebody would show up
[00:30:07] and it sounds like a mnolo con, but somebody would show up, you know,
[00:30:10] like an alien with a fake beard on in a in an airship to take somebody
[00:30:15] on a ride to show them around.
[00:30:17] And all that stuff is very reminiscent of fairy folklore.
[00:30:22] And again, that, you know, that could be very like, oh, this is all
[00:30:25] like a psychological phenomenon, but I think there's something a little
[00:30:28] bit more than just straightforward, like,
[00:30:31] you know, hysteria or something, you know, but what it is, I couldn't say.
[00:30:37] Fair enough.
[00:30:37] I started to put you on the spot.
[00:30:39] Thank you for talking about this stuff.
[00:30:41] Yeah, well, let me let me share a story of mine then.
[00:30:44] Since you were willing to share here.
[00:30:47] So back in the day, I was assistant technical director of the Beeshoe
[00:30:50] Theater in Knoxville, Tennessee.
[00:30:52] And that has quite the sorted past.
[00:30:56] It's been everything from, essentially, Civil War Hospital all the way up
[00:31:01] through a vaudeville place for a while.
[00:31:04] They still had back in the day they're still there,
[00:31:07] but on the fly rail, they would have old plastered vaudeville posters.
[00:31:11] Like just remnants of it.
[00:31:13] It was a beautiful old theater by 900 seat theater.
[00:31:16] It was after a show.
[00:31:18] Don't remember the show.
[00:31:19] And there were three of us that were on the stage.
[00:31:23] And so second level is where the sound and lights were operated.
[00:31:28] And it's behind glass.
[00:31:30] And so it's on the soundboard and the lighting board on a table
[00:31:35] that are below where the glass edges.
[00:31:39] And we're all on the stage and that glass pops out.
[00:31:45] It's completely shatters.
[00:31:47] And for whatever reason, the lighting console is up on the edge.
[00:31:50] So we walk up there.
[00:31:52] Nobody else in the theater is it's locked, right?
[00:31:55] And we go up there and investigate stuff.
[00:31:58] And there is no plausible explanation at all for how that
[00:32:02] lighting console jumped up four inches.
[00:32:05] Smash that window.
[00:32:07] Wow. Yeah.
[00:32:08] Yeah, I mean, I love that kind of stuff.
[00:32:12] Yeah, yeah.
[00:32:12] It was it was weird.
[00:32:14] And there was so much that that was one of the few places
[00:32:17] I've been in my life where I just constantly felt just like that,
[00:32:21] that itchy feeling you know, you get like somebody's over
[00:32:24] watching you over your shoulder.
[00:32:26] There were there were areas of that theater I did not like going at all.
[00:32:30] You know, anytime of day, you just get the willies.
[00:32:32] But yeah, I'm really interested in all that kind of stuff.
[00:32:35] You know, like as an artist, you know, I know that composition is
[00:32:40] like a big part of like how it draws your eye.
[00:32:43] It can kind of manipulate how you feel, you know, something with a lot
[00:32:45] of angles to it is a very different feeling than something
[00:32:48] that is softer and rounder and stuff.
[00:32:50] And that obviously happens when we get into spaces,
[00:32:53] like spaces will freak you out.
[00:32:55] Right now, one of the big things that's that's very popular
[00:32:58] is this idea of liminal space.
[00:33:00] And there's all these like YouTube channels.
[00:33:02] There's there's something called the back room was the short film
[00:33:05] that somebody made.
[00:33:06] And basically, it's just like a series of empty rooms and these empty
[00:33:10] rooms that we normally associate with having presence in them when they're empty.
[00:33:14] Like they they trigger something in our minds
[00:33:17] that makes us uncomfortable and weird feeling.
[00:33:20] I think that's just as interesting as any sort of like ghost phenomenon.
[00:33:24] Right? It's like what why are we being triggered in these ways?
[00:33:27] Why do we feel these certain things?
[00:33:28] You know, when you look at like, say, the ancient Egyptians
[00:33:31] or the ancient Greeks, they had all these, you know, these cults
[00:33:35] and religious beliefs that had to do with spaces like the areas that you were in
[00:33:39] that would heighten your your your awareness or a feeling of something inside of you.
[00:33:45] You know, and, you know, I don't think that you need even
[00:33:49] like anything supernatural for that.
[00:33:51] Like it's there's something about spaces and geometry
[00:33:54] and the way that we see and perceive things and ourselves in them
[00:33:58] that can sort of trigger these feelings.
[00:33:59] And maybe those feelings are everything that that creates this next step.
[00:34:04] Right? You know, maybe it's those feelings
[00:34:06] that that gets us to see a weird ghost thing or but but in your particular case,
[00:34:11] that's physical, so I don't know what what that would be about.
[00:34:14] No idea. No idea.
[00:34:15] To this day, I have no idea at all what happened, how it happened, anything like that.
[00:34:21] But yeah, endlessly fascinating.
[00:34:23] It is all that stuff.
[00:34:25] All right, let's take a quick break.
[00:34:28] Hey, comics fam.
[00:34:29] Itty comic book publisher Banda Bars just got a level up and announced it is now a cooperative.
[00:34:35] This heralds a new era for them, including a partnership with Dallas Stories
[00:34:40] and they added several new members to the ownership group.
[00:34:43] Marcus Jimenez is now chief operating officer.
[00:34:46] Brent Fisher takes on the role of chief diversity officer.
[00:34:49] And Joey Galvez is introduced as head of Kickstarter Ops and social media manager,
[00:34:54] which is sure to increase their capabilities overall as a publisher.
[00:34:58] And it further promotes their mission statement of advancing representation,
[00:35:02] inclusion and diversity in the media.
[00:35:05] They also established a new board of directors to help chart the new path of their journey
[00:35:09] with new projects in the works like Alaska by dropping in June,
[00:35:13] unbroken soon launching on Kickstarter and pond coming up with Dallas.
[00:35:17] Stay tuned to this space for more exciting news from the growing Bards family.
[00:35:25] Let's get back to the show.
[00:35:26] Well, let me get back to to William here.
[00:35:29] Sure.
[00:35:30] One of the hallmarks of kind of your style is the diversity of page layouts.
[00:35:35] And let me tell you as somebody I can't draw to save my life,
[00:35:39] but I do come from a visual arts perspective from photography and stuff.
[00:35:43] And I've taught it and everything.
[00:35:45] And the layouts are absolutely a joy to look at. Right?
[00:35:49] On one page, you can have bubbles, breaking panel planes,
[00:35:53] different panel border colors, some with double matting here.
[00:35:57] You know, panels have this infinity extend where they're unbordered.
[00:36:01] You know, all these little tweaks that lead a viewer around the page
[00:36:03] and make us ultimately spend more time reading. Right?
[00:36:07] So how did you put these together?
[00:36:09] You know, it has like a almost a cut and paste feel almost to me with it.
[00:36:15] So how do you do that?
[00:36:17] What's interesting is this particular book, I chose a style that's very straightforward.
[00:36:23] You know, so like you look there's a lot of like six panel layouts.
[00:36:28] There's a lot of five panels where it's like usually one long panel and then four panels.
[00:36:32] Yeah, I didn't do a ton of like what I do in powers or murder ink
[00:36:36] or especially on cave Carson, which was one of my most experimental stuff
[00:36:40] where I was really trying to make the page like a three dimensional layout.
[00:36:44] My favorite thing in sequential art is to help guide the eye.
[00:36:48] You know, whether it's a very straightforward left to right
[00:36:51] or sometimes I'll find a neat trick to make the eye move from right to left
[00:36:57] all through the layout and using the composition.
[00:36:59] So it is my favorite part is that kind of language.
[00:37:03] I also have learned to see panel borders, gutters
[00:37:08] as a much part of the storytelling as
[00:37:11] the layout of what's inside of them.
[00:37:15] So, you know, like an angular panel can obviously
[00:37:19] show frustration and anger.
[00:37:24] Having a panel right up next to another panel indicates
[00:37:29] either a moment that goes by really super quick or an intimacy
[00:37:33] that's different than when panels are separated.
[00:37:36] OK, so yeah, I try I try to use all of that.
[00:37:40] Try to find ways to just the page layout
[00:37:45] and the panels themselves that aside from the layout has its own language.
[00:37:51] And those are some of the most fun things to to explore.
[00:37:57] Yeah, trying to absorb all this because I'm trying to picture your progression
[00:38:02] because when I read this, what it says
[00:38:05] and confidence sometimes is perceived as a bad word, but like this is experience.
[00:38:10] You know, I got sure, right?
[00:38:13] So you started inking if I'm remembering correctly.
[00:38:17] That was kind of the beginning of your career.
[00:38:18] So we haven't got a chance to chat before.
[00:38:20] So kind of talk to me about your journey there.
[00:38:22] So how does a lead to be, if you will?
[00:38:27] I stood out really young.
[00:38:28] I was very, very driven.
[00:38:32] He by by about what maybe by age 13.
[00:38:35] I just made up my mind.
[00:38:37] I knew exactly what I wanted to do, which was to be a comp of artists.
[00:38:40] OK.
[00:38:41] So, you know, there's a longer story of like how I kind of got into it.
[00:38:44] But once I became focused on it and I met a couple of other
[00:38:49] comp of creators nearby, one of which was was Adam Hughes,
[00:38:52] who lived one town over for me and Adam hadn't broken in yet.
[00:38:55] But through him, I met other creators like Neil Vokes and Brit Trankin.
[00:39:00] And I started to learn stuff.
[00:39:01] One of the things that I was learning is that you could send your work
[00:39:04] to an editor, you know, in care of the company to get usually get feedback.
[00:39:09] You know, some and they will hire you as you get better and stuff.
[00:39:12] But early on for me, it was just to hear what I was doing right or wrong.
[00:39:16] Then eventually somebody hired me at a very early age.
[00:39:19] I was like 14 during my first real work.
[00:39:22] Wow.
[00:39:23] But obviously my ability to ink was stronger than my ability to draw.
[00:39:27] I was 14.
[00:39:29] Yeah, of course.
[00:39:30] But I had a really good inking eye.
[00:39:31] So I was able to start out very young
[00:39:35] inking always having in mind that was going to be a pencil or
[00:39:38] that was going to be a full pencil and inking artist.
[00:39:42] And even back in the nineties, early nineties, my first real job
[00:39:47] at DC, which was working on Judd Shred, I was penciling and inking the book.
[00:39:51] And that that wasn't very common back then.
[00:39:55] But that's because I come up as an anchor.
[00:39:57] So I never even really really learned how to do full pencils
[00:40:00] for somebody else to ink.
[00:40:03] So it went from the inking to drawing and drawing and inking
[00:40:09] and that eventually went into writing, which I didn't set out to do specifically.
[00:40:15] But coming up with ideas is always I think every comp
[00:40:19] of artist has ideas.
[00:40:20] Yeah.
[00:40:21] But I think through the storytelling, the physical storytelling,
[00:40:24] what how you tell a page, a story on a page,
[00:40:27] I started them begin really to be interested in the writing process itself.
[00:40:32] And then especially by time, I met Brian Bendis and like
[00:40:36] his ability to talk about writing and the writing process
[00:40:39] really encouraged me to go forward.
[00:40:41] Did your time with the video game company devalve?
[00:40:44] Did that did you find that that influenced your artistic style?
[00:40:47] It's been a little while now, right?
[00:40:48] Hugely.
[00:40:50] So before I went to Valve, I never worked digitally before.
[00:40:53] So going to Valve, I went from being an analog artist using strictly pen and paper.
[00:40:58] And that's where I was introduced to stuff like.
[00:41:01] Well, a Cintiq, you know, those these these large screen wake homes, you know,
[00:41:06] up till then, you know, you had the little these things that you could
[00:41:11] draw separately from the page.
[00:41:13] But other than doing tiny, tiny.
[00:41:16] Hush ups, I can never really connect to that to produce anything.
[00:41:19] Well, because other people did.
[00:41:22] So when I got there, I learned to draw digitally.
[00:41:24] And I also just met a whole bunch of other artists,
[00:41:26] a whole bunch of other creative people who showed me all kinds of stuff.
[00:41:31] You know, so one of the things that was most excited about working there was
[00:41:35] was to learn from other artists and learn another technique
[00:41:37] because I never been to art school or anything.
[00:41:39] So there I was surrounded by these geniuses that many wish you were
[00:41:43] ex Pixar people and Disney people.
[00:41:45] Wow. Animators and engineers working together.
[00:41:50] And I just I learned a lot both creatively and professionally
[00:41:54] because I hadn't had an office job up to that point.
[00:41:57] You know, that was my first time interacting with the people in an office.
[00:42:00] So there's a learning curve there, you know.
[00:42:02] Yeah. And yeah, that changed everything that that changed the way I drew.
[00:42:08] It gave me more tools, which I'm really grateful now, especially as I've gotten older.
[00:42:13] My eyesight's a little little wonkier, right?
[00:42:15] So like being able to go back and forth, which I do now work both
[00:42:19] analog and digital to this just sort of depends on the project.
[00:42:24] OK, yeah. I was listening the other night to an off panel episode
[00:42:28] and David was chatting with with Kieran.
[00:42:31] And it was such a great episode, by the way, I'll add
[00:42:34] people should go back and listen to that if you're at all interested
[00:42:37] in the writing process, the X-Men, it was fantastic.
[00:42:42] But what I took away from it was a curiosity about the phases
[00:42:46] of an artist writer, any creative career.
[00:42:50] And Kieran made the comparison about bands having different albums
[00:42:53] with different fields, you know, even out this for a while.
[00:42:57] So can you see these distinct periods in your own work?
[00:43:01] For sure, for sure.
[00:43:03] I mean, when I say pre-powers, you know, I didn't have any sense of real direction.
[00:43:09] So like I just had this energy, I had this really interest in doing art
[00:43:12] and like in comics and specifically like I thought I was going to be
[00:43:17] a superhero artist, you know, and like even even though when I look back
[00:43:21] and I realized like that was never a huge interest in mine.
[00:43:24] Like everything that I create on my own, I seem to it was it was
[00:43:28] only any ideas I had there were they were definitely actually venture
[00:43:32] like you know genre stuff, but there were there's very few actual superhero stuff
[00:43:36] in there, but I just assume that was the path that I was going to go on.
[00:43:40] And then once I started making a lot of comics, they were
[00:43:45] of a different ilk than than now, you know, now I'm I'm much more
[00:43:49] interested, I'm less interested in fight scenes now than I am in character stuff.
[00:43:54] I think I still want to draw fight scenes, but instead of being six or seven
[00:43:57] pages, you know, one or two is plenty.
[00:44:00] You know, to me, the action is really in the dialogue and characters choices.
[00:44:05] Like a character's choice to me is much more powerful than
[00:44:08] you know, being thrown through a window or anything.
[00:44:11] You know, and I think like if you think about like music,
[00:44:13] like there's a lot of bands that will start out like really loud
[00:44:16] like a lot of energy and it's like this really unique period where
[00:44:21] their energy is never matched again, right?
[00:44:25] But then they evolve in other ways.
[00:44:27] You know, like staying with the police might be a good example of that.
[00:44:30] There's tons of other examples where you start with like this raw energy
[00:44:34] that you wish you could have now, but you don't.
[00:44:37] Now you have a different set of tools with you, you know.
[00:44:42] And yes, so I've definitely gone through through a lot of that.
[00:44:45] Like a lot of the stuff I'm doing now is semi-historic based
[00:44:48] and a lot of the stuff I'm doing in the future.
[00:44:50] And I've recognized recently is a lot of things that are pulled from
[00:44:55] history and one way or the other, as opposed to a science fiction
[00:44:59] world that I completely make out of my own head and stuff.
[00:45:03] Is there a difference in approach when you're when you're working
[00:45:06] or you're finding with a writer, you know, versus writing your own stuff
[00:45:11] in how you're compositionally coming up with stuff beyond the obvious, of course.
[00:45:17] I love working with other creators.
[00:45:19] I love working with a co-writer, you know.
[00:45:22] I love working and marrying your ideas together.
[00:45:27] The core of that is all about what's best for the project,
[00:45:32] you know, and really putting your ego completely aside,
[00:45:36] which might be challenging.
[00:45:38] But I think if people give it a try, like you're going to find
[00:45:40] like the stuff that you've come up with is it will surprise you
[00:45:44] and it will keep you fresh every time.
[00:45:47] A lack of control over every aspect of something is really refreshing.
[00:45:53] Sometimes when Brian and I work together,
[00:45:56] like he'll strip dialogue out of the page after he gives it to me.
[00:45:59] And I'm like, at first, I used to be like, well, why did you take that out?
[00:46:02] Like that was why I drew it the way I drew it.
[00:46:05] Yeah, but then you drew it so well, it didn't need the words anymore.
[00:46:07] Now the words were just being redundant, you know,
[00:46:10] which is like the ultimate compliment.
[00:46:11] But like at first I couldn't even I couldn't understand why.
[00:46:14] But like that's a great example of putting your ego aside for what's best for this
[00:46:18] or for the book and what's best for the scene.
[00:46:20] So my favorite stuff is working collaboratively with other people.
[00:46:26] It can be hard working on your own.
[00:46:28] Like Newberry was a little lonely, you know.
[00:46:31] Yeah, I bet.
[00:46:31] Didn't have a lot of people to show it to.
[00:46:33] And it was too far off at the time because I was doing it.
[00:46:38] I was going to complete it before it was even solicited.
[00:46:40] So like it was just way too early.
[00:46:42] Like so I'd let out little tiny pieces here and there,
[00:46:44] but I couldn't really share much of it with anybody other than my wife
[00:46:47] and editor and like my closest friends.
[00:46:51] So yeah, it's it's they're two different bees.
[00:46:54] They're very different. Yeah.
[00:46:56] Yeah, yeah, I imagine so.
[00:46:57] And going back and studying William from a colorist perspective,
[00:47:03] you know, you've got a lot of you use a bigger brush, which.
[00:47:07] Yeah, I have found is definitely my wheelhouse.
[00:47:10] I don't I'm not to the point, at least yet, of being able to do more
[00:47:13] of the nuanced finer line work.
[00:47:16] And it's really, really suited to that with the skies,
[00:47:19] with the backgrounds and everything like that.
[00:47:21] So so how did you approach wanting to color William?
[00:47:25] That just came in these baby steps.
[00:47:28] One was just learning to color digitally period, you know,
[00:47:31] and I've just done my own covers and stuff over time.
[00:47:33] And I always struggled with them
[00:47:34] because I didn't have a good sense of color theory.
[00:47:38] And it took a long time to get some of that into my head,
[00:47:40] what works and what doesn't.
[00:47:44] And I'm also always surrounded by great colors.
[00:47:45] So often I enjoy working with them.
[00:47:49] But I think it was working on Blue Book that pushed me over the edge.
[00:47:52] So Blue Book was it's all line work.
[00:47:55] And then I'm doing two tones of blue that illustrate everything.
[00:48:00] Yeah. And in doing that, like I realized,
[00:48:03] like this is so close to already coloring,
[00:48:05] even though it was only two tones of blue is already really close.
[00:48:08] It was the basics of, you know, layers and opacities.
[00:48:12] And and from there, it just became really easy to just go ahead and do full colors.
[00:48:18] And a lot of that just comes with experience.
[00:48:22] You know, sometimes somebody watching you in can like I'll do
[00:48:25] like a really long line that's very steady and stuff.
[00:48:28] And how do you do that?
[00:48:29] And it's well, you know, 10 start with 10 years, you know,
[00:48:34] and then build off of that.
[00:48:36] Yeah. And like the coloring that I'm able to do now
[00:48:41] because of experience and honestly,
[00:48:44] the tools just make it easier and easier and easier.
[00:48:48] I'm amazed because I'm thinking about Blue Book
[00:48:51] and such a stylized presentation, you know,
[00:48:56] and that the color work there and it opened up.
[00:48:59] That gave you the opportunity, you know, to be able to expand
[00:49:03] and and do that. That's that's wild.
[00:49:06] I would not have thought that a pathway.
[00:49:08] And part of that was also like
[00:49:11] when way back when when Taki, Brian and I were doing
[00:49:15] Murder Inc. And we were first started it.
[00:49:18] We were looking at a lot of like
[00:49:19] Storenko stuff and a lot of Alex Toth work and we're going,
[00:49:24] you know, this was just for for old fashioned four color processing
[00:49:27] on like really limited printing abilities.
[00:49:31] It was called like potato printing, right?
[00:49:32] It was like, you know, sometimes it'd be outside of line and stuff.
[00:49:36] And, you know, it looks great.
[00:49:39] You know, why do we need to gloss everything up
[00:49:41] and do these larger effects?
[00:49:43] So like at first I was going to color it with a limited color palette
[00:49:48] with not a lot of fades or special effects or anything
[00:49:52] like just looking at those those those old comics
[00:49:55] and eventually Taki jumped into there
[00:49:57] and she found her own language of coloring, which is
[00:49:59] it's it's it's not a literal sense of color.
[00:50:03] She she's coloring with mood and storytelling
[00:50:05] intentions as opposed to literal color, which is brilliant.
[00:50:11] But I think of just looking
[00:50:13] of just pulling everything back to its basics.
[00:50:15] Just what is what is the color?
[00:50:17] What are you saying with color?
[00:50:19] Right? Like it's not about
[00:50:21] lures or fades or lense flares or any anything.
[00:50:24] It's literally what are the color values
[00:50:27] you're putting on a page that drives the eye.
[00:50:30] If you just pull everything way back to that,
[00:50:32] then everything else becomes easier.
[00:50:34] But editing like that is hard.
[00:50:36] You know, it's hard to edit out all those choices
[00:50:38] that you have, especially in Photoshop
[00:50:40] and all these different tools that we have that can just
[00:50:43] you know, there's endless possibilities
[00:50:44] that you can do digitally.
[00:50:46] But if you put your own sort of parameters around yourself,
[00:50:49] you're going to find your path a lot clearer, a lot easier.
[00:50:53] OK, yeah, because one of the things
[00:50:54] that really stood out to me in in William
[00:50:57] were how you used yellow and it very much felt like a mood expression.
[00:51:03] You know, yeah.
[00:51:05] And so what I'm hearing is that you can thank your wife for that.
[00:51:09] Is that absolutely?
[00:51:12] Absolutely, 100 percent.
[00:51:13] Yeah, I mean, that's one of the great advantages
[00:51:15] that I'll brag about this being married to another artist.
[00:51:17] It's like.
[00:51:19] You balance your ideas off of each other all day, you know,
[00:51:21] and it's not even about your work.
[00:51:22] It's just about the show that you're watching.
[00:51:24] You know, we were watching some cooking show earlier
[00:51:26] and somebody was mentioning the name of their restaurant
[00:51:29] and we just went on about how bad the logo was, you know,
[00:51:32] and like why it didn't work,
[00:51:33] why it didn't express what this restaurant was about.
[00:51:36] Like when they told us what the restaurant was about,
[00:51:38] and then I saw the logo and I was like,
[00:51:40] everything is wrong here.
[00:51:41] You know, this isn't saying what this is about.
[00:51:44] It was and that's just a small example
[00:51:46] of like how we go about our days.
[00:51:47] Just constantly talking about story, our story,
[00:51:51] other people's story.
[00:51:54] One of the things that we really enjoyed recently
[00:51:56] is we figured out that there was such a giant difference
[00:51:58] between writing a script and pitching,
[00:52:01] like a pitch document that you send to an editor or a publisher
[00:52:06] wildly different than anything you're going to write as a script.
[00:52:10] Even like it's such
[00:52:12] it's such an art form in itself
[00:52:15] that only through 20 years of pitching and pitching badly.
[00:52:19] And then a lot of this I will I always credit to
[00:52:25] Taki's book, Sleeping While Standing.
[00:52:28] So this is a biography that she did about her life.
[00:52:30] And the way that she chose to tell the story was instead
[00:52:33] of doing like sort of a single narrative
[00:52:36] or even these chapters that went different lengths,
[00:52:39] she chose a parameter for herself again,
[00:52:41] choose a parameter for yourself and she chose four pages,
[00:52:45] four pages to tell any event in her life,
[00:52:48] no matter how complicated or simple
[00:52:50] as four pages or less.
[00:52:52] And through this exercise,
[00:52:54] she learned to really just focus on what a story is about.
[00:52:57] What is the point?
[00:52:59] Right. And there's so many other things that happen in these
[00:53:01] true stories, but if they weren't the point of the story,
[00:53:04] then it doesn't matter.
[00:53:05] That's not what it's about. Don't leave it in, right?
[00:53:07] And like just learning to be like that kind of editor.
[00:53:10] We extended that to our writing.
[00:53:13] I extended it to my own writing.
[00:53:14] And then we figured it out with pitches
[00:53:17] that there's so much that a story is about when you're pitching it.
[00:53:20] But the only thing it's really about is to get the editor
[00:53:23] or publisher interested in buying your book.
[00:53:25] That's it.
[00:53:26] It's not about the world building stuff
[00:53:28] or the fancy names that you have for things.
[00:53:31] It is just about the characters and their choices.
[00:53:34] And to write a pitch like that is so,
[00:53:36] it's so challenging and fun.
[00:53:38] It's like a puzzle that if you solve it,
[00:53:41] like we just literally high-fiving each other.
[00:53:43] No.
[00:53:45] And yeah, so that's kind of where we're at with.
[00:53:50] And that just extends to everything that I'm talking about.
[00:53:52] Like that that extends to the coloring.
[00:53:54] Like, well, what is the purpose of the coloring that you're doing?
[00:53:56] It is to express something, you know, in William of Newberry.
[00:53:59] It is a plague-driven civil war world
[00:54:03] where it's really reary and drab.
[00:54:05] So that brings a mood to it.
[00:54:08] And that mood can get even darker when something as evil is happening.
[00:54:11] And then if a color pops, it's popping because something big is happening,
[00:54:14] usually supernatural.
[00:54:16] And that's what like this, there's like a yellowish green
[00:54:18] that shows for all of the supernatural stuff.
[00:54:21] Yep.
[00:54:22] And outside of that yellow screen,
[00:54:24] you only see some yellow with like a candlelight or something and that's it.
[00:54:27] And then just the less choices you give yourself, the better,
[00:54:31] you know, put those parameters up.
[00:54:33] As a photographer, you would know this, right?
[00:54:35] You mentioned your photographer.
[00:54:37] So like if you're working in black and white,
[00:54:39] you're just thinking in values, right?
[00:54:41] You're almost completely thinking in composition and value as opposed to
[00:54:44] that you can get lost in color.
[00:54:46] Color can kind of always cheat for you, right?
[00:54:48] And also when you're doing black and white,
[00:54:51] by not filling in every detail for the viewer,
[00:54:56] you're inviting them to participate, right?
[00:54:59] Audience participation, especially in something that's black and white.
[00:55:02] You're asking them to fill in the blanks.
[00:55:05] Yes.
[00:55:06] And then you're doing the same thing.
[00:55:08] If you tell somebody everything that your story is about,
[00:55:10] you will ruin it for them.
[00:55:12] You're taking from the reader their ability to go,
[00:55:16] that's what that means.
[00:55:18] That's why that character did that.
[00:55:20] Because if you just tell them, even in the best words that you could find,
[00:55:25] you're stealing an experience from them.
[00:55:30] That's how we feel.
[00:55:32] Ah, bless you.
[00:55:34] This is a gift right now because it makes my little artist heart sing
[00:55:38] to talk about it this way because it very much is my own operation
[00:55:46] of storytelling with images and stuff.
[00:55:48] Because black and white is my preferred way to present my work.
[00:55:53] And I've always thought about that way,
[00:55:54] but you articulated it so much better than I ever could.
[00:55:57] It's only because we just obsessed completely over these things.
[00:56:01] Even when we're talking about old movies and stuff,
[00:56:04] and how special effects now,
[00:56:06] your average person is getting sick of them.
[00:56:10] Your average person is getting sick of everything.
[00:56:14] There's something about a film that,
[00:56:17] whether they don't show you everything
[00:56:19] or even though the special effects aren't quite good enough,
[00:56:21] and even though they look bad and cheesy,
[00:56:24] you're being asked to fill something in.
[00:56:27] When you watch a Ray Harryhausen film,
[00:56:30] with this kind of jittery movement and stuff,
[00:56:32] people are completely fascinated by that
[00:56:34] because you're being sucked in to do those in-between parts.
[00:56:39] And that's not happening when everything is CG
[00:56:42] and beautiful and stuff.
[00:56:43] And there is a place for that for sure.
[00:56:45] Unquestionably, there's a place for that.
[00:56:49] I think it's best to ask the audience
[00:56:51] to figure it out for themselves,
[00:56:53] which can be frustrating.
[00:56:54] Not every audience is like that.
[00:56:56] And there's a place and a time for everything,
[00:56:59] and nobody's opinions are wrong
[00:57:01] especially about art and stuff.
[00:57:03] So that's where we land.
[00:57:05] Yeah, well those are my favorite projects too.
[00:57:08] I just did a little snap review on TikTok
[00:57:11] of Tyler Crooks the Lonesome Hunters.
[00:57:13] One of my lead points is
[00:57:16] I don't need to be told everything.
[00:57:19] Yes.
[00:57:20] Just take me along for the ride,
[00:57:23] the beautiful ride.
[00:57:24] This one might go too far,
[00:57:26] but one of my favorite films is Green Night.
[00:57:29] And I say it might go too far
[00:57:30] because a lot of people hate the film
[00:57:31] because it leaves a little too much thinking to yourself.
[00:57:35] And I love the fact that I feel like
[00:57:37] talking and I would talk about this all the time,
[00:57:39] there's about three different points in the film
[00:57:41] where he might have died
[00:57:42] or the main character might have died.
[00:57:44] And then there's this ending that's really enigmatic.
[00:57:47] And I can get that some people are frustrated by that,
[00:57:51] but I love the fact that we have had so much mileage
[00:57:53] out of this movie,
[00:57:54] talking about it over and over again
[00:57:56] and rewatching it
[00:57:57] and then rewatching it from a different point of view
[00:57:59] because you're asked to participate as the audience.
[00:58:02] Even in like a movie like Pulp Fiction,
[00:58:05] which sounds like, oh, it answers everything.
[00:58:07] You know why this character doesn't listen to this?
[00:58:09] But there's still that suitcase with the MacGuffin in it
[00:58:12] and stuff and there's some sort of mystery
[00:58:14] of how some of these characters know each other
[00:58:16] and you're just asked to participate.
[00:58:19] And so you're asked to think and to be part of it.
[00:58:22] And that's sort of where our minds at these days.
[00:58:27] And once you have a philosophy like that,
[00:58:30] it helps you form what you want to do.
[00:58:33] Speaking of what you're doing,
[00:58:35] you are an extremely busy individual right now.
[00:58:38] I just saw the Mad Cave drop today with the new pages,
[00:58:41] which looked fantastic.
[00:58:42] Thank you.
[00:58:43] That's a sci-fi though.
[00:58:44] Yes, yes.
[00:58:45] Yes, Galaxy of Madness.
[00:58:47] It's called Galaxy of Madness.
[00:58:48] It was Mags of Thaddeo contacted us.
[00:58:53] We become friends when we were working on...
[00:58:56] I was working on Kate Carson
[00:58:58] and she was working on Shade,
[00:59:03] getting the full title, my recall is so bad.
[00:59:07] But it was all that young animal stuff, right?
[00:59:09] So we become friends and we started figuring out
[00:59:12] like what to do in the pandemic hit
[00:59:14] and we came up with this idea.
[00:59:16] And it's taken a while for it to come out, you know,
[00:59:19] but it finally has.
[00:59:21] So like, yeah, we're excited.
[00:59:22] This is the thing that she wrote.
[00:59:24] I drew, Takis coloring.
[00:59:27] It's science fiction.
[00:59:28] It's a lot of fun.
[00:59:29] It's again very character and family based,
[00:59:31] family and like family friendly,
[00:59:33] but family that's the dynamics of it.
[00:59:35] Yeah.
[00:59:37] So really excited about that.
[00:59:39] And yeah, this is the year all this stuff
[00:59:41] that I've been working on
[00:59:42] is all coming out at the same time.
[00:59:46] It seems to go like that.
[00:59:47] I was, you know, talking to David proposed
[00:59:49] about that like this week
[00:59:50] and it seems like you have so much
[00:59:52] and he's like, it doesn't seem like that to me.
[00:59:55] But, you know, I guess it's the nature of the beast.
[00:59:57] Yeah.
[00:59:58] I also do tend to...
[00:59:59] I do enjoy juggling several projects at once.
[01:00:03] Yeah.
[01:00:04] So that's definitely part of what I like to do too.
[01:00:07] But sometimes they'll get like just caught up.
[01:00:10] And so they'll either take forever to come out
[01:00:13] or they'll come out at the same time
[01:00:15] or you can't always control it and stuff.
[01:00:17] But yeah, it's gonna be a big year
[01:00:18] I'm gonna be asking a lot from people out there
[01:00:21] by this book, by that book, by this book, by that book.
[01:00:24] Well, where can people find you online?
[01:00:27] Social media is usually just at Oming.
[01:00:31] Except for TikTok, it's filming.
[01:00:33] That's me and my A4.
[01:00:35] If you just search my name, it'll pop up.
[01:00:40] And then there's my website, MichaelAvonOming.com.
[01:00:43] Okay.
[01:00:44] And you're doing YouTube stuff
[01:00:45] or I saw some stuff up there.
[01:00:46] Yeah, definitely YouTube channel.
[01:00:47] Again, if you search my name out there,
[01:00:49] it's YouTube slash Oming, something like that.
[01:00:51] And there's a lot of process videos.
[01:00:55] I've also collected almost sort of my favorite
[01:00:57] sort of documentaries of interviews
[01:00:59] with comic book people and that sort of stuff.
[01:01:01] But a lot of real time inking pages
[01:01:05] and just talking about the process as I'm working.
[01:01:07] So you can definitely find a lot of stuff there too.
[01:01:09] Cool.
[01:01:10] Yeah, I'll put that in the show notes
[01:01:11] so people can check it out.
[01:01:12] I need to dive a little bit more into it
[01:01:14] because I was like, oh, I didn't even know you were on YouTube.
[01:01:16] Yeah, I mean, yeah, I got to keep up with that stuff.
[01:01:19] It's so hard.
[01:01:20] I mean, I can't even imagine with all of them.
[01:01:23] Yeah, takes a lot of time.
[01:01:25] Well, make sure to get your orders in for William of Newberry
[01:01:29] and we're expecting that in stores when?
[01:01:32] May 29th.
[01:01:34] Okay.
[01:01:35] Well, Michael, thanks so much for coming on the show
[01:01:37] and chatting with me today.
[01:01:38] It really had been a pleasure.
[01:01:39] Thank you so much.
[01:01:40] Thank you, Byron.
[01:01:41] Thanks so much, man.
[01:01:42] Yeah.
[01:01:43] Well, this is Byron O'Neill
[01:01:44] on behalf of all of us at Comic Book Yeti.
[01:01:46] Thanks for tuning in and we will see you next time.
[01:01:48] Take care, everybody.
[01:02:05] And more importantly, how we can improve.
[01:02:07] Thanks for listening.