Oh My Endorphins!!
Plus! anatomy of a bat-page! Daredevil 650! More!
Look, issue one of DAREDEVIL (again) was very exciting. A new release like that isn’t just a comic book release, it’s an endorphin release for me, akin to a nice round of sex. Do I want you to picture me making love when you pick up your comics from your “pull box” every Wednesday and sometimes Tuesdays? Yes, I do.
But the other “issue numbers” that spark the same kind of endorphin release for me are “anniversary numbers.” Now, once upon a time those were quite rare, only to be celebrated with centennials. You hit issue 100 of a book? 200? That’s a celebration, akin to a nice round of sex. But these days we’ve (the movers and shakers and sellers of the comic industry, The Shilluminati) cracked the code wide open and now “anniversary numbers” pop up like beautiful sex groundhogs!!
Case in point, issue two of my new Daredevil run is also issue 650 if you add up the previous six volumes of issues! We did it! An oversized celebratory issue directly after the oversized introductory issue! They said it couldn’t be done, but we persevered and accomplished it by using the calculator app on our phones!
Now, I know what you’re saying to yourself: “wow aren’t you just hilarious poking fun at the thing that you’re participating in,” and you’d be right. I’m hilarious. But even though I poke gentle fun, my endorphins are still primed because we’ve actually put a lot into Daredevil 2/650 and have hopefully made it a great read for Daredevil fans new and old! Check out the press release here!
We’ve managed to secure some WILD guest artists for parts of our story! Alongside Marco and Rafael, our regular and outstanding DD artists, we’ve got…
ALEX MALEEV! PAUL AZACETA! CHRIS SAMNEE! KLAUS JANSON! MIKE HAWTHORNE! PHIL NOTO! It’s a murderer’s row of talent! But these artists—except for one— haven’t murdered anyone!
It’s very cool, and all of them have been coloured by Matt Wilson. Seeing Matt’s colours with these legends has been AMAZING!
Speaking of Daredevil, the AMA on Reddit went well! I answered questions as fast as I could and was a very frustrating answerer as most questions were, “is so and so going to show up” and I just kept saying “who knows???” because I’m not a spoiler guy. Even if you want it!!!
There were a few questions that revolved around the similarities between Daredevil and Batman, but man oh man for the life of me I just don’t see it! There are superficial ones for sure (brooding martial artists, uh, protuberances from their heads), but these characters feel so different to me! If they didn’t, I probably wouldn’t have taken the Batman job, to be honest!
But I DID take the Batman job, and my first issue on the title, the CELEBRATORY OVERSIZED ISSUE 125 (Nnnnnn my ENDORPHINSSssss) has sold out! Which is actually shocking since they printed way too many of them IMO. But it turns out people like Batman! So DC is going back to press and they’re using a variation of my variant cover for it!
OOooo spoooooky!
There’s also going to be a 1:25 foil variant featuring Jorge’s Failsafe design! It’s wild that there’s an incentive foil variant on a second printing! What a world. what a BAT-world.
This feeling felt VERY nice, until last night when I read this spectacular NYT profile of Janeane Garofalo and got to this bit:
It’s an interesting balancing act for me most days. I genuinely love these characters and have stories I want to tell with them, but I’m also highly aware of the need to sell some books, which means being “popular and well liked” on some level. There may be a part of me that wants to do a Batman story where he has to make a nice meal for his beautiful boys, but also I need to make sure DC doesn’t fire me because, hey, I still need to buy ingredients for MY meals.
I know I just activated dozens of you who now want an issue of Bruce Wayne making a beautiful meal for his beautiful boys, so maybe my example doesn’t work???
Anyway! I’m having a lot of thoughts lately!!!
OH GREAT
Sorry! It’s a weird time in the world, my life, and my “career”!
In some nicer news, I’m a HUGE fan of the artist Lee Gatlin. You’ve undoubtedly seen their work before. For the month of July they’ve been doing Marvel-themed sketches and they’re AMAZING. And his comics are so charming! They’re always the best:
Like, come ON!!
Anyway, I love theirwork so much. Go to their website and just enjoy all the charms.
But what I REALLY wanted to show you was this recent time-lapse video of them working on a drawing of the classic Marvel character Jack-O-Lantern.
There’s sometimes the assumption that a simpler—or more “cartoony”—style is faster than a detailed and realistic one. If you’re a bad cartoonist then the answer is surely yes, it’s faster. But when you’re the best, like Lee? There’s a pursuit of creating the best possible version, of thinking it through and working out the issues, that means you put it in as much time, if not more, than your detailed contemporaries. Click that video and watch someone really working a simple drawing. I’m a very average, lazy artist and I would have been satisfied at almost any of those stages, but not Lee.
Also, holy shit the candy corn base is just genius.
HAVE YOU EVER CONSIDERED GETTING BETTER AT ART
Not really!!!!
Oh shit speaking of art they JUST announced that I’m illustrating a short story in DD 650 written by Ann Nocenti ahhhhh I’ll talk about it more next time!!!!
Okay! It’s been a while since I did a proper Q&A, so go ahead and drop questions in the comments! I’ll kick things off with this recent question from Sean Walsh:
Hey Chip. Quick question regarding the art in your first Batman issue. Jorge's artwork this issue was some of the best I've seen from him, absolutely breathtaking. I was wondering if, being an artist yourself, are your scripts a lot more detailed, with panel descriptions explaining exactly how you envision the art looking, or did you trust Jorge with a much looser script, allowing him to draw it how he sees it? It was a great first issue, and I can't wait to see where it goes next!
Great question! I have little to do with Jorge’s continuous ascent with his art! He JUST KEEPS GETTING BETTER, regardless of who he works with! Below I’ve posted his final art from a page of BATMAN 125 and my script so you can see how we work together.
So, unless I really have a specific idea in mind, I don’t dictate angles or anything as specific as that. You can see from the above where Jorge’s rightly deviated from the script to make it much better.
The first panel is a much more interesting angle than what I envisioned with my “TIM sneaking down STAIRS to the BASEMENT, sneaking up behind a PENGUIN GOON” description. Jorge’s angle is really fun and interesting, a perspective shot that most comic artists wouldn’t even attempt.
And the second panel too is much more interesting! Bruce retrieving his belt is a better panel than him just simply putting it on.
When I was drawing Sex Criminals, sometimes I’d hit a panel description from Matt that I just couldn’t parse. I’d think about it wayyy too much, trying to figure out how to draw what was specifically written, when really I should have just taken it as suggestion and drawn a panel that worked with the spirit of what he wrote. Because now that I’m a writer for artists I realize that I’m spending maybe a minute or two on a panel description and am missing some obvious things, while the artist is going to sit with it and understand what needs to happen better than I ever could.
Okay! That’s it for this week! No KAPTARA today, but I have a special one-pager from the VAULT!
In the early-2000s I did a bunch of all-ages strips called MONSTER COPS. The idea was simple and stupid: what if Dracula, Frankenstein and a werewolf were all cops? These stories were always fun to make, and I had some ideas to do a full series with the characetrs, but somehow an all-ages comic about cops doesn’t quite feel as good now as it did when I started doodling these. Go figure!
Anyway! This page was done for an FCBD anthology book called Comics Festival that TCAF put out. I hate how it looks now!!! Oh well. Click to make it bigger because my old font was also trash!!!!