#30 SPRING 2015 $8.95 IN THE US The Professional “How-To” Magazine on Comics, Cartooning and Animation

CHRIS SAMNEE THE DAREDEVIL ARTIST ON EVERYONE’S RADAR

BUTCH GUICE CREATING W I N T E R WO R L D

PLUS! REGULAR COLUMNIST JERRY ORDWAY AND MIKE MANLEY AND BRET BLEVINS’

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1 82658 27764 2 THE PROFESSIONAL “HOW-TO” MAGAZINE ON COMICS & CARTOONING WWW.DRAW-MAGAZINE.BLOGSPOT.COM

SPRING 2015, VOL. 1, #30 Editor-in-Chief • Michael Manley TABLE OF CONTENTS Managing Editor and Designer • Eric Nolen-Weathington Publisher • John Morrow CHRIS SAMNEE Eric Nolen-Weathington interviews the artist about Logo Design • John Costanza 3 cartooning in a photorealism-driven field Front Cover • Chris Samnee Front Cover Color • Tom Ziuko DRAW! Spring 2015, Vol. 1, No. 30 was pro- duced by Action Planet, Inc. and published by TwoMorrows Publishing.

Editorial address: DRAW! Magazine, c/o Michael Manley, 430 Spruce Ave., Upper Darby, PA 19082. RIGHT WAY, WRONG Subscription Address: TwoMorrows Publishing, WAY—ORDWAY! 10407 Bedfordtown Dr., Raleigh, NC 27614. 36 From your mind’s eye to the page DRAW! and its logo are trademarks of Action Planet, Inc. All contributions herein are copyright 2015 by their respective contributors. Views expressed here by contributors and interviewees are not necessarily those of Action Planet, Inc., TwoMorrows Publishing, or its editors. Action Planet, Inc. and TwoMorrows Publishing accept no responsibility for unsolicited submissions. All artwork herein is copyright the year of produc- Butch Guice tion, its creator (if work-for-hire, the entity which Winter has come. Mike Manley interviews the contracted said artwork); the characters featured artist about winter soldiers and winter worlds. in said artwork are trademarks or registered trade- 42 marks of their respective owners; and said artwork or other trademarked material is printed in these pages with the consent of the copyright holder and/or for journalistic, educational, or historical purposes with no infringement intended or implied. This entire issue is ©2015 Action Planet, Inc. and TwoMorrows Publishing and may not be reprinted or retransmitted without written per- comic art bootcamp mission of the copyright holders. ISSN 1932-6882. Printed in China. FIRST PRINTING. This month’s installment: 72 Ear, ye! Ear, ye! Let’s hear it for the ear! If you’re viewing a Digital Edition of this publication, PLEASE READ THIS:

This is copyrighted material, NOT intended for downloading anywhere except our website or Apps. If you downloaded it from The crusty Critic another website or torrent, go ahead and read it, and if you decide to keep it, DO Jamar Nicholas reviews the tools of the trade. THE RIGHT THING and buy a legal down- 78 This month: A pen nib and a pocket sketchbook load, or a printed copy. Otherwise, DELETE IT FROM YOUR DEVICE and DO NOT SHARE IT WITH FRIENDS OR POST IT ANYWHERE. If you enjoy our publications enough to download them, please pay for them so we can keep producing ones like this. Our digital editions should ONLY be downloaded within our Apps and at www.twomorrows.com

DRAW! SPRING 2015 1 Chris Samnee

A LEAP OF interview conducted by Fa Eric Nolen-Weathington and transcribed by i Jon Knutson T hris Samnee knew he was going to be a comic book artist at an age when most kids still dream of being firemen Cor astronauts. But he hasn’t always held that same strength of belief and determination in his natural cartooning style. Editorial resistance to his work led him astray for a time, but with the help of the right projects and the right editors, Chris has taken his cartooning to Daredevil © Marvel Characters, Inc. bold new heights. What do editors know anyway?

DRAW! SPRING 2015 3 Thumbnail cover designs and finished inks for a DCBS exclusive variant cover for the newly relaunched Amazing Spider-Man #1. Spider-Man © Marvel Characters, Inc.

DRAW!: I don’t know if you remember this or not, but I first was going through pretty much the same thing on the writing met you, I think it was 2003, at the Comic-Con International: side, and we said, “Why don’t we do a few things together?” San Diego. You came up to the TwoMorrows booth with, I So, there were a couple of other things we did. I can’t remem- don’t know if she was your fiancée at that point or just your ber what they were. girlfriend, and you were surprised I knew your name, because you really hadn’t had much published at that point. DRAW!: There was a G.I. Joe blog he had. CHRIS Samnee: Yeah, I was surprised. CS: Oh, yeah, I did some G.I. Joe head sketches that looked like the backs of the old cards. [laughs] You’re really digging DRAW!: You’d worked with Chris Irving, who’d done some deep. Most of that stuff I’ve forgotten. work for TwoMorrows, on this little book that I don’t think had even been distributed, Blackbird. DRAW!: Well, that was the early days of the Internet being CS: I know he printed some himself. I don’t know if they a way to get your work out there. Were you trying to meet ever went out to anybody besides friends and family, and people on message boards at that point? people that he hand-sold them to. I had a few copies. CS: I didn’t even have a computer back then. Chris told me about : Dead End [a short fan film] and I was like, DRAW!: I think the idea was to use that comic as kind of “Oh, that sounds awesome. I’d love to see that!” He said, “It’s a portfolio. Were you doing a lot of that kind of spec work? on the Internet,” and I was like, “Oh, I don’t have a com- Whatever you could to get your work out there? puter.” He had to mail me a CD he burned of the video. Oh, CS: I was doing samples all over the place, and I’d kind of man, that makes me feel so old! [laughter] gotten to the point where people would look at it and say, “This is good, but we don’t know where we would put you,” DRAW!: If you didn’t have Internet access, what were you and I just kept doing more and more samples. I’d just create doing to find these opportunities? my own story that was three or four, five pages. CS: I was just beating the bushes. St. Louis had a lot of I met Chris Irving, and we got along really well, and he conventions back in the day, and every time a convention

4 DRAW! SPRING 2015 it.” It was basically Harvey’s slush pile, and they’d say, “Here, page rate, and my wife and I were crunching the numbers, make this into a comic strip.” [laughs] and we were like, “We could totally survive if I got this every Some of them were just one sheet of paper, but with 24 month!” No, we couldn’t. [laughter] That was all I did then, panels, and Jon would say, “Okay, can you make this into six so we could pay our bills in our little apartment. Oh, gosh, I’m pages?” “What?!? No!” I didn’t know how! That was jumping thinking back to our tiny little apartment and working for Oni into the deep end on trying to do storytelling from bare bones. when Oni was a three-man operation. It was cool. Otherwise I never would’ve gotten to work with I don’t know, I’ve always been into mainstream comics, Pekar. I mean, I know that we didn’t work hand-in-hand, but I so my style might have been more indie at the time, but that did do his story. I don’t know if he ever saw it. was because I was experimenting and trying to teach myself how to ink. Even after a whole graphic novel or two, I was still DRAW!: Your inking with that, you really went into chiar- trying to find who I was. Area 10 looks totally different to me oscuro mode. What were you looking at to feel your way through that process? CS: I was looking at the later Steranko stuff—the black-and-white stuff he did, Red Tide—and I found a bunch of scans of black-and-white “V for Vendetta” pages. I was really into David Lloyd at the time. All the blown-out line and stuff, that’s mostly from Steranko and David Lloyd.

DRAW!: Yeah, you weren’t doing a solid holding line all the time. CS: I knew it was going to be in black- and-white, so I felt I was free to experi- ment. I was already trying some of that in Capote in Kansas, and I just carried it through into the next few things. All the was in black-and- white, I knew Area 10 would be in black- and-white, and I was just trying to get comfortable with inking and trying new things. I was never great at contour lines, I didn’t have a steady enough hand, and when I was trying to teach myself inking on Capote in Kansas, I went simpler and simpler, because I thought the less lines I had to draw, the less chance I would have to screw up. [laughter] I was just trying to make it as simple as possible so there was less of me botching things up.

DRAW!: After that you started getting more work from the big publishers. You did Checkmate, and in 2008, you got work from Marvel for the first time. Were you feeling more comfortable working in the more traditional approach? Did you ever really get to a place where you felt like that was something you could do forever? CS: I did four issues of Queen and Country somewhere in there for Oni, and I remember it was a really, really Pencils for the cover of Magneto #2. low rate. It was a per-issue rate, not a Magneto, Professor Xavier © Marvel Characters, Inc.

DRAW! SPRING 2015 13 Finished inks for the cover of Magneto #2. Magneto, Professor Xavier © Marvel Characters, Inc.

14 DRAW! SPRING 2015 DRAW!: Are you looking at maybe doing something creator-owned in the near future? That’s the big thing right now with Image going gangbusters, and all these guys doing their own thing. Do you have any aspirations to strike out on your own? CS: Yeah, I’ve got a couple of irons in the fire. There’re a few things I’d like to do. There’re guys I want to work with, and there’re ideas, too. At some point, I’d like to do some creator-owned work. I mean, I can’t do mainstream superhero comics forever. I feel like at some point I need to own something. I mean, technically, Area 10 is creator-owned, Capote in Kansas is creator- owned; I own half of each of those. So when I’m asked, “When are you going to do creator- owned?” those are creator-owned, they’re just for bigger companies. You know, I’ll get there. It’s a goal, but right now, I’ve got bills to pay, and only so many hours in the day, so the creator-owned stuff is going to take a little while longer to come out, but I am slowly working on some things.

DRAW!: Speaking of hours in the day, how do you divide up your day? I think you said you work in two different shifts.

CS: I do, yes. My girls wake up between 5:30 and 6:00 every morning, so I get up with them, make breakfast, get everybody changed, and try and be out of the house between 9:00 and 10:00. I have a studio in the house I work in at night, and a studio outside of the house that I work at during the day. It’s just office space that I rent.

DRAW!: Is that just to keep your mind free of distrac- tion? CS: A lot of time in my house is downstairs, and with two kids bombing around up there, it’s hard to concen- trate. I mean, somebody’s always screaming about toys, or they’re playing really loud. I can hear every single thing, and it’s just hard to concentrate. I hate to have to leave the house to get work done, but sometimes that’s just how it is. I wish I could be like Allred and be around my family all the time, but I don’t get any work done that way. So yeah, I work from 10:00 to about 5:00, then go home, have dinner with the family, put the girls to bed, have them both in bed by 8:30 or so, and hang out with my wife for a little bit, watch a movie or some- Samples of Chris’ coloring efforts done in his spare time. thing, then I go back to work. I’m back down at the table Batgirl © DC Comics. Captain America © Marvel Characters, Inc. usually from about 10:00 to 2:00, and that’s usually

30 DRAW! SPRING 2015 The Right W ay, The Wrong W ay, and The OrdWay!

CAPTURING THE PICTURE IN THE MIND’S EYE by Jerry Ordway

ll start out this time with an example ’that shows how things don’t always go smoothly from layout to finished art. I had a straightforward assignment, to draw a Batman piece including Commissioner Gordon, as well as the Bat-Signal. I had an idea, and with my eyes closed, could visualize exactly what I wanted to draw. I rarely capture that mind’s eye picture on paper as perfectly as I see it in my head, but I keep trying, year after year, regardless.

I began to sketch out my image at a reduced size, 5½" x 8", on copy paper. I had my Fairburn System book (Set 1, Book 1) open as reference for a trench coat (see right), which Commis- sioner Gordon would be wearing. I could have made it up but wanted the added detail only a photo or the real thing could provide. The Bat- Signal spotlight is in the middle ground, easily cobbled together from various Google images, while the Batman figure is in the background. The story to tell here, since every picture tells a story, is that Batman always has a way of sneak- ing up on Commissioner Gordon!

36 DRAW!DRAW! SPRINGSPRING 20152015 In the finished layout (right), now tightened up, I re-worked the Batman pose. I was still not happy with it, but I committed to it because the other ele- ments worked fine. I was ready to start light-box- ing, or tracing the image onto my Strathmore 3-ply Bristol paper.

DRAW!DRAW! SPRINGSPRING 20152015 37 The final piece with the addition of a little Pro white paint and razor blade scratching across the projected light of the signal, is finished. I’m a big fan of the effect you get with a razor blade, or an X-Acto knife, but it works best with a fresh blade, and an angle almost parallel to the surface of the paper. You have to do it quickly, and know when to stop, or you’ll have a torn up surface. Practice it on decent paper scraps, over inked in black areas before you try it on a drawing you care about!

DRAW!DRAW! SPRINGSPRING 20152015 41 butch guice Walking in a WinterWorld Wonderland interview by Mike Manley transcribed by Jon Knutson

rom the Microverse to the DC Universe, Acclaim, and now the frozen arctic of FWinterWorld, prolific and versatile artist Jackson “Butch” Guice pulls back the curtain on his process and career.

42 DRAW! SPRING 2015 Butch’s rough sketch (above) and full pencils (right) for a cover for the recently reformed Valiant. All characters © Valiant Entertainment, Inc.

DRAW!: You just finished the WinterWorld stuff, right? step into the tail end of a storyline, or you just are there for the Butch guice: Just finished WinterWorld, and currently, issue, and you don’t know who half the characters are, so you the main project is a book called Paradigms, which Nick Spen- sort of fall back to—I’m sure you’re well aware—just focusing cer and I are doing together for Image now. So, that’s coming on the craft of filling in the story, but you just don’t have any up, and I’m also doing some work for Valiant, a backup feature inherent emotion involved with it from that standpoint. in Ninjack of all things. DRAW!: Right, I’m kind of doing that right now. I’m doing a DRAW!: I’m trying to remember, you worked with them miniseries for DC, and I’m drawing the Justice League Inter- before, right? national, the Kevin Maguire days version…. BG: Yeah, in the Acclaim days. I worked for them for three BG: Yeah, it’s not like you have this history with the charac- years or so. ters. You know how it is: the more you work with the char- acters, if you’re having a pleasant experience, the more you DRAW!: I worked for them for about a year when they did get involved with it, you start getting little personal touches the big relaunch. Were you…? in, and you develop personal characters you actually like BG: I was with them too, yeah. I was on Eternal Warrior, and drawing and try to make your own, as opposed to doing the then they yanked me off of that and I was all over the place. As standard costume designs of this character or that character. people were going to other companies and stuff, I was filling That’s a real gravy for the job, is being able to do something in on Bloodshot, and Turok, and X-O—an issue here, an issue special with it. there kind of thing—for about a year toward the end. DRAW!: Yeah, exactly. Comparing that to when you were DRAW!: Was that hard to jump from character to character working on WinterWorld, and following the miniseries that if you didn’t necessarily have any feeling for the character? Jorge Zaffino did, how did that compare to, say, doing an BG: It definitely made it more of a job. It’s hard enough, you issue of Bloodshot?

DRAW! SPRING 2015 43 DRAW!: The thing I do remember was that was a bad batch normally would and then shrink it down and paste it back in of pages. in Photoshop so it will hold up properly. You’re going for a BG: Yeah, as soon as you put ink on the paper, it bled all over bunch of thin lines, and stuff, and you just can’t do it on the the place. [laughs] paper that you’ve got anymore.

DRAW!: The quality of the paper has really declined, espe- DRAW!: What paper are you using now, Strathmore? cially in the last four or five years. Are you going to be doing BG: I’m actually having halfway decent luck with some everything in Studio soon? Tinson Bristol that I bought, the Foundation series. It’s the BG: I still do everything, for the most part, on the boards. smooth, and that’s only because I was busy trying to find Sometimes it turns into more of a patch-and-paste job, something. I kept buying pads of paper, and two or three pages because if the paper’s bad, or the brush is just not working, in, setting the whole pad aside, because I was so frustrated sometimes I’ll have to draw it two or three times larger than I with trying to do any kind of pen work. You almost are forced into using Microns and things like that. I’ve bought a lot of that stuff too, and I just don’t have the ability to comfortably make that stuff work with a life to it—the Microns and stuff. I really prefer the dip pens. As a matter of fact, most of the pen points I use, I go on eBay and buy vintage pen points from the ’50s and ’60s, pay extra money for them, but at least I know I’m still getting some good quality material on occasion.

DRAW!: I do the same thing, and I know other guys that do the same thing. Jerry Ordway switched over to using this old fountain pen, because he was having a prob- lem with the 102 and 108 actually tearing up the paper. He’d get a little gob of paper at the end of the nib, so he was using the fountain pen, because that would give him the line, but it wouldn’t tear up the paper, and then he’d go in and use the brush. But Terry Beatty does Rex and The Phantom in Manga Studio. BG: There are a lot of guys using Manga Studio right now, and there’s a whole debate about the future of inking going on as well. I know a lot of people, particularly a lot of people trying to break in, are switching to it, and they’re doing the digital inking thing. Honestly, it would take me the rest of my career to figure it out, to get a comfort level with it. After 30-plus years of doing it on the board, I just would not have the connect to be doing it digitally. The eye-hand coordina- tion just wouldn’t be there. Depending on the paper, depending on the pen point, depend- ing on the brush, your instincts will lead you, because that’s what you’ve done for three decades, going, “Okay, I’ve got to go a little heavier with this. I’ve got to watch that stroke, because the brush keeps wanting to The background for this Captain America pinup was imported digitally, split on me.” [laughs] but that’s about as far as Butch will go in his process. All characters © Marvel Characters, Inc. DRAW!: What kind of dip pens do you like?

50 DRAW! SPRING 2015 he ear is one of the great defining features of a character or personality. My mom used to say “little children have big ears” in Tregard to my ability to sometimes hear things I shouldn’t have been privy to. She also used to say I “heard what I wanted to” in regards to me suddenly being hard of hearing when it came to doing chores and cleaning up my room or piles of loose comic books. We can see how important the ear was to great illustrators like Norman Rockwell and Albert Dorne in helping to define a character type, as well and other features that were often exag- gerated, like the nose, head shape, hands, and feet to get a great character type. To the caricaturist, the ear is one of the main features that gets exaggerated to push a likeness.

“ Artist” (above) and “The Gossips” (right), both by Norman Rockwell. Artwork © respective owner.

The hallmark of a handsome head of a male or female are well-defined and well-placed features, including the placement of the ear in its proper place on the head and in its proper proportion. Too far forward or back, too large or too small, and the head will start veering towards caricature. While this might be true, there are well known actors and actresses who are thought of as beautiful or handsome that do have some features one might term “off model.” Cary Grant is a perfect example of this. Certainly one of the most handsome and iconic leading men of all time, his features were striking and distinct, including his rather smallish ears in comparison to another rugged leading man, Charlton Heston, or Clark Gable, who was known for having rather large ears.

72 DRAW! SPRING 2015 If we take Clark Gable’s ears (center) and put them on Cary Grant (left), well, it just doesn’t work, does it? Photographs © respective owner(s).

Anatomy of an Ear The ear’s anatomy is actually quite com- plicated with many tapering and shell-like segments and cartilage. This is of course all designed to capture sound, and unlike many animals, the human ear is much smaller in proportion to the head, and for most people has little movement, though some are able to “wiggle their ears” via the Auriculares muscles. The ear perches on the back of the zygo- matic arch. The amount the ear is tilted back (angulation) varies from individual to individual, but the average tilt is about 20º (see the cyan lines on the male and female heads at right).

Helix canal Helix The ear breaks down into four main segments: • Helix antiHelix • Antihelix • Lobe • Concha or cymba cavity, the deepest depression, which concha leads directly to the external auditory canal. anterior Notch Sometimes the earlobes are attached and sometimes not. This little detail can also be played up to express a type of character and define their personality and look. Women’s ears tend to be smaller than men’s, and the zygo- matic arch on a female skull is much less pronounced than on a male. Their ears are also more delicate in general. I am stressing this here for the sake of drawing the ideal types of features and relationships. Almost no one has all the ideal features, and no one lobe except identical twins has the same features as anyone else.

DRAW! SPRING 2015 73 UNDER REVIEW TWO-FER: OF PEN NIBS & WALLET/SK ETCH BO OKS

elcome back, all and sundry, to the corner between ArkVW\OHDUFKLYDOYDXOWEXWWKHUHLVVRPHVWRFNWKDWH[LVWVRXW the pages of DRAW! where the Commandant of in the wild. Col-Erase, El Capitan of Eberhard-Faber,IF YOU ENJOYED TtheHIS PREV2QHRIP\&UXVW\$JHQWVLQWKHÀHOGKLSSHGPHWR%UDQIEW, - W CLICK THE LINK TO ORDER THIS person who puts the prestidigitation backISSU Ein I NPresto! PRINT OCorrec-R DIGITALdon’s FOR MEtsyAT! store, where he sells classic stock of Esterbrook tion Pens, returns! It is I, Jamar Nicholas, your Crusty Critic, nibs, and even though this Crusty Critic doesn’t use nibs in my back again to give you the what-for and why-izzit on art sup- daily practice, I jumped at the chance to buy these, which were plies, tools tricks, and (unfortunately, as the job entails some- affordable, and worth delving into the great history lesson. WLPHV WUDSV I’ve missed you all. During my absence I have traveled the world and back—literally, as I got to visit Tokyo last year and will be returning again, about which I will do a Crusty 'HEULHÀQJLQDIXWXUHDUWLFOH%XWWKLVLVVXHDPLOHVWRQHLVVXH IRUVXUHWKHELJKDVPHUHWXUQLQJKRPHWRÀQGDSDLURI WUHDWVIRUWKLVZULWHXSLQP\VWXGLRPDLOER[7KLVFROXPQ features reviews of two separate products: one is a blast from the past, the other a signal from the future. Let’s get started, DRAW! #30 shall we? We focus the radar on Daredevil artist CHRIS SAMNEE (Agents of Atlas, Batman, Avengers, Captain America) with a how-to inter - view, comics veteran (Captain America, Super - man, Ruse, ) talks about his creative process and his new series THE “CRUSTY CRITIQUE”Winter World , SYSTEMcolumnist JERRY ORDWAY shows his working These product reviews will be judged punderrocess, plus mmyore C otrustymic Art Bo oberettcamp by BRET BLEVINS and ed - itor MIKE MANLEY ! Mature readers only. 5IFTUFFMQFOJOUIFøFTI‰UIFJOGBNPVTOJC VFDOH³IURPRQHEHUHW QRWZRUWKWKHWLPHPRQH\HIIRUW WR(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 UIBUNBEFPeanutsQPQ ÀYHEHUHWV D&UXVW\VXFFHVV%X\LWLPPHGLDWHO\DVPXFKDV(Digital Edition) $3.95 http://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=1182 \RXFDQFDUU\  DOES IT WORK? (YHQWKRXJKWKLVFULWLFGRHVQ·WH[SHFWWRLQKHULWWKHFDUWRRQLQJ ESTERBROOK RADIO PEN #914 traits of Schulz, it is a nicely balanced nib, which works a little First off, a tip of the beret to my new friend Brandon McKinney, KHDY\EXWLVÁH[LEOHDQGFDQWDNHSXQLVKPHQWRQWKHSDJH a collector and history buff of the Esterbrook line of pen nibs ZKRUXQVDWRSÁLJKW(WV\VWRUHZKHUH,SXUFKDVHGWKHSURGXFW HOW MUCH DID IT COST? Most cartoonists worth their salt know the legacy of the $VWHDODWDQLEDQGWKHQ%UDQGRQZDVJUHDWHQRXJKWR 5DGLR&KDUOHV6FKXO]DIWHUKLVORYHDIIDLUZLWKXVLQJ toss in some freebie nibs, the transaction highlighted by his WKHERXJKWRXWWKHHQWLUHVWRFNIURP(VWHUEURRNEHIRUH personalized labeling in an elegant hand-written script, show- the company was sold to a pencil company. Some say that casing the descriptions of the new nibs in my Crusty Clutches whatever Sparky didn’t use is sitting in a Raiders of the Lost which added a great touch of class.

78 DRAW! SPRING 2015