It's nice doing anything to know
that as I put down these darks, that this is the last time I'm going in
on this particular image that in a way, it's locked very quickly with painting,
you can sort of always keep adding to it. You can always be dissatisfied
with it in many ways, and with doing a pure black and white
representation, I can be very satisfied with the sense of like,
Okay, that's pretty much it. So, you know, the downside is I'm used to being able
to use tone to define things
light and dark and full shade. And when you're trying to reduce an image down to just pure light and dark you don't have that middle tone to rely upon for for rendering, for drama, for all different ways that you're trying
to illuminate the subject. And what I cheat with,
which is what I'm doing right at this exact moment, is dry brushing,
where you basically got a little bit of paint or ink on the end of your brush, and you're lightly
going across the surface to kind of get it to catch a little bit
so that you're creating a kind of half tone effect. There's a lot easier on a form of drawing,
like with the thing where he's got all kinds of cracks and crevices
and his sort of his rocky exterior. So I could be very rough with it. Whereas when I'm rendering human faces, I try and get a lot softer with this,
but I still use the same approach. So in effect, me as an anchor is a cheat because I'm not actually using ink because this is still, gosh, this is Jet Black Wash that I'm using and it looks like ink, but it if I need to repair an area that I feel
I screwed up, I can take water over this and lift up the tone and reapply and not feel like I lost a whole image. I've definitely thought
about using ink for for real, you know, some
of that is just like a confidence thing. But I also am wary
a little bit of just the chance of screwing something up by reaching over and you got an ink well there
and that could always get knocked over and then make this mess on my desk
that suddenly I'm having to clean up this whole spill. Whereas water
and the gouache watercolor paint I don't have nearly the same chance
of disaster to happen. You know, plus I've been doing it for
30 years, so I'm trying to do a page a day If I'm more ambitious,
I'd like to do at least a page and a half. And I know that some anchors
could do much more than that in pages. It all comes down to how much rendering
are you trying to add to the subject? I'm applying
more than the average amount of rendering. Plus,
like I've got these tiny little details that I'm rendering
with tiny little ink strokes, and I don't want to sacrifice
that little amount of detail. So I don't have a bold line. I don't have a big fat ink line that defines everything. I've got a really fine line. So there was a big deal basically
getting the F back in publication and that only happened
within the last few years because Marvel had chosen to not publish it
until they required the full rights
or worked out a deal with Fox. And that's where we are now. So I was one of the people lining up
saying to Marvel like, Hey, I want it Problem is, there was one of their
top writers worked it into his renegotiation
of his contract to have first dibs, first writer refusal work on it
if it ever should come back. And so I had made a pitch
and my pitch was worthless because you can't compete with a contract
they already made Well,
I'm terrified of what they're going to do, rebooting it again,
because what's happened with all the cinematic versions
that have occurred thus far is they're all based upon
updating it to a kind of modern esthetic and trying to make it cool
for a modern audience as opposed to adapting the work
from what it was inherently. And really taking a close eye
for the way that Jack Kirby had defined these things physically is
what I. I don't trust that they would do without sort of putting too much
of their own modern spin on things. If they could set the story in the
sixties, that would be a positive thing. Sort of, you know, establishing
that this is where their origins come from and then they can time travel around
or get set, you know, pulled into the modern day
because everything has got to be in the modern
day to keep people interested I would love to have them kind of assess the best way to truly translate this material for what it is in its original definition. But I don't know that's
what's really going to happen in Hollywood because they have to deal
with whatever actors they can hire that have a certain
kind of following that's
going to bring people to the property. They don't do a lot of hiring of unknowns
to play these characters. For the most part, So I would love it
if it would be these perfectly cast people that look exactly like the way
that these characters were drawn Thing is, is that, you know, the fan base out there,
they're a lot more forgiving than I am in terms of what they think seems
to be the right casting for stuff. The format of my book will be like,
it's a graphic novel and it will be a hardcover
like magazine size format, which is not something that was possible
to do within Marvel. So it is going to be published
by a licensor of Marvel which is Abrams. I've tried to base the faces off of models as close to what I saw
in the comics as possible. And since I've been drawing these
characters for much of the last 30 years, I've made choices before based upon within certain
kind of things to come across like using a certain actor's face for one
version I used to do with Reed Richards, and I've become more invested in the idea that the way that Jack Kirby Drew has its own subtle nuance
that I need to pay more attention to and pick up on the way that he would draw
certain things, certain ways. And in some ways,
I just need to see that with a real face and see how it would correspond
to the Jack style in draftsmanship. So I've kind of evolved a little bit in the way
I draw. There's a lot of work
that's been done in the last 20 years on the series that some of the finest work
ever done with the comics. There's a particularly good run by Mark
Millar or Mark
Millar, as is supposed to be produced his his work with Brian Hitch on the series was really inspiring. And after that Jonathan Hickman
worked with Dale Evil Sham on the book. And I really love what they did There's been a phenomenal array of talent
that's worked on life in the last 20 years and
I've been following it very, very closely. And some of which I feel like it's made me want to jump in there and sort of show
what I would do. Either that learns from what they did
or what I would do differently
