[dramatic music] ♪ ♪ - Hello, and welcome to Comic Culture.

I'm Terence Dollard, a professor in the Department of Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

My guest today is artist, Chuck Patton.

Chuck, welcome to Comic Culture.

- Thank you, Terence.

I'm really glad to be here.

- Chuck, you are one of my favorite artists.

When I really got into comics in the 1980's, you were working on The Justice League, and it was around the time of the Justice League: Detroit, and to me, that will always hold a very special place in my heart.

And you had, sort of, that tough time of going from the classic lineup of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, into a whole new team that was, I guess, really trying to shake up the market a little bit, and get The Justice League a little bit more readers.

You also had the opportunity to design and redesign some characters.

So, when you're working on a book like that and, you know, you've got your regular deadline, how do you, sort of, find the time to, you know, come up with a new costume design for Vixen, or maybe come up with a new character, like Vibe, and still get your pages done?

[Chuck laughing] - I just came up with a very flippant answer, which I don't know, it would be not PG enough.

But, and it would've really been flippant.

The truth is, honestly, to quote Don Heck, I was full of a lot of beans.

Which meant I had a lot of energy.

I was happy to be there.

I had reached, it was a goal that I've had since I was five years old.

Probably younger than that, but five is the best number I can give you, but I was drawing all my life.

And so, here I am now at that age, I think I turned 27, and thought I was over the hill.

But the thing is, is that I was just so happy to be there, to be this artist.

And so, in a way it was great to be thrown on the bus and say, "Now you're driving the bus kid.

You gotta find the new route.

And oh yeah, that route that you've been studying all your life, we're gonna bypass that, you gotta go into new ground."

So, I went in knowing I can draw Superman, I can draw Batman.

But when the curve came that those guys are gonna be taken out, it was a new muscle.

It's like you had this muscle that you were ready for, and then they say, "No, you're not going cross country, you're going mountain climbing."

So, it's like, "Oh gee."

So, I had to adjust that muscle.

If that makes any sense.

My enthusiasm helped.

The flippant answer I was gonna say was copious amounts of drugs, but I've never done that.

[both laughing] So, it was really just gut and gonzo love of comics.

And so, when I got thrown in and there were times when I would literally go to Dick Giordano "You sure you got the right guy?

You sure I should do this?"

And he would just constantly go, "Hey kid, you got the job."

You know he'd always put the tie he was the rabbi that none of us ever had before.

And now he's our rabbi and he was our teacher.

And so, Dick would always give me the faith that I could do it and I had the responsibility of doing it.

So, I didn't have time to sit there and go "I don't know how to do this."

I just delved into my comics and looked at the things I liked.

And I knew when I got Vixen.

It was easy because, as much as I really admired the original artist for it, Bob Osner, the costume was just honestly appalling.

It was just, and even Gerry admitted it.

So, it was easy to look at Vixen and go "Oh, we can do better this."

Especially, as we talked and we talked earlier about how the power of a good interview is to listen.

And I've always been a pretty good listener.

And as Gerry was telling me, I saw that the essence of what he wanted wasn't being addressed.

She was a superhero, but it was like, no, this is an African woman who went through a trial of combat and all these other things and horrible things that happened to her.

And now she has this Tantu Totem and this thing gave her power, powers.

So I knew right there, we gotta do something that's gonna strike out, that's gonna really stand out.

And also her name's Vixen and she looked nothing like a vixen.

I think she was in blue and yellow colors.

Which was, oh my God, I don't know if they, and this isn't the sixties anymore, we're in the deep part of the seventies.

So it's like, that's not working.

And so I looked at Wolverine.

Wolverine was the man, if you wanted savage hero, it was either Wolverine or Timber Wolf, kinda the same guy.

So I looked at those things.

In other words, I used comics to teach me.

And since I was a big aficionado or in other words, fan of comics, it was easy to go in and go "All right, I want this and I want that."

With Vibe there was a part of me that wanted to make, and I've never told anybody this, but I wanted Vibe to be like an urban Captain Marvel.

And not the Captain Marvel, Marvel's, but Captain Marvel, Shazam.

The idea of this young guy getting all this power, he's still a young guy, but he has this power.

That was the essence of Captain Marvel for me.

And so I wanted something that would be striking, also street-worthy.

Street-worthy, being young, cause he was a dancer and all that.

And that was hard.

That was probably the hardest character.

Cause I really didn't relate that well to, great dancing and here, and this is my assignment, make a break dancer, a superhero.

And I certainly didn't wanna make him look like Dazzler.

I feel like I may have, didn't quite get it right.

But I know in my heart, that's where I was going.

Redesigning Steel was easier.

Just take Steel, I mean he's basically a Captain America rip off so, or whoever else.

Well, Captain America's always the pinnacle.

So, you got the shield and then the original Steel, so let's just do a variation of it.

I was never really that crazy about him because of that.

I wanted, I would love, I mean I wanted to make him our version of Colossus.

So I was really influenced, I mean again, by comics, the hit comics.

My favorite comics at the time would been, you know, between Titans and X-Men, X-Men being stronger.

And so I went to, you know, a lot of them writers have been Marvel people anyway.

So, a lot of the dynamics at the time of DC was, "How can we compete with Marvel?"

So that was really the edict, when we did the younger Justice League, was how to make this much more open to an X-Men audience.

Same way as the Titans did, the original Titans was a lot more sugary, you know, sugar coated and more like the Archies than it was the Titans that it became.

And that edge we wanted to bring to Justice League.

That stood out to me.

So, it was basically going, it was like doing my homework.

I went back into comics to learn comics.

- You talk about how your, and I believe you did a handful of maybe some backup stories and comics before you got the Justice League.

And sort of, being new to the industry to get handed, what is one of the flagship titles in all of comics.

The big seven are always considered to be in the Justice League.

And there you are, your first real big assignment and where some of those stories are a lot of fun, your handling the Mars-Earth War, which kind of changes the status quo.

And the fact that you're able to take a character like Vixen and this to me speaks of the impact of your run on Justice League, is that after you've made your changes to Vixen, after you and Gerry Conway have adapted the character for, I guess, the new decade of the eighties, she ends up being a lead character in the very successful Suicide Squad series.

And then, I mean, gosh, she's back, she's on TV as a character on Legends of Tomorrow.

So again, I don't think that would've happened if it wasn't for your love of comics and that idea that you're, kind of, combining Wolverine and Timber Wolf into this badass character, who doesn't really look good in blue or gold.

[both laughing] - Well, again, when you say Vixen, I don't know, I mean, that's a red fox.

So, I wanted something that was gonna be, which again, made sense and also I wanted something that would be paying homage to our African heritage.

So, that was important to bring the earth tones in.

All those things I was just sort of, I made the analogy of being thrown on the bus that now I'm the driver, as well as the passenger.

And it really was that.

So I was kind of excited, but also going, "Where am I going?

Where am I going?"

And, and thank God I had older guys, the classic artists around me to be helpful.

Don Heck was a lot more helpful than most people realize in pointing out to me, "Don't let this, it's a job."

That was the other thing.

He helped me really see this and become a professional.

And not just let the fanboy freak out.

The professional has to turn in a certain amount of pages.

Professional has to interpret the story this way.

You shouldn't come in with this attitude of grandiosity.

I came in with an attitude of gratitude.

And that's what he recognized and really helped hone that, as he was passing the baton.

And that was really cool, too.

That really helped me get into it.

I was always a fan of Justice League.

That was the other thing.

It wasn't, I mean, as much as I was always a DC guy.

I grew up on DC Comics.

There wasn't a DC Comic I did not have, or didn't know.

So even when we were talking about who to bring into the League, Lynn, Wayne and I would sit in the office and throw out names, and it was almost like we were doing a precursor to Who's Who.

Cause I would say, "Hey, what about this guy?"

"No, we can't use that guy."

I wanted to bring Metamorpho in.

Unfortunately, they already grabbed him for Outsiders.

I always loved Metamorpho.

I love that guy.

I can't explain why.

I like him more than Plastic Man.

That's how much [laughs] He was, I guess, my generation's Plastic Man.

So, it was a lot of characters like that, that I related to, and unfortunately was not allowed to work with.

That I wanted to bring, I really wanted to do the classic Justice League.

I had it in my mind what to do.

And then again, like I said, getting it, and then being told, "Guess what?

They're not gonna be around long.

You gotta take it, bring in new guys."

And me really going through a crisis of, oh my, I don't know enough to bring new stuff in this.

So, I'm really led by what Gerry wanted to do.

And putting in what I saw, were filling in holes that I thought weren't there.

I love the exclusive or the, I love when we brought in different people.

I love bringing in people who were like me, brown-skinned people, different people.

Even Gypsy.

I was the one that told Gerry, "We gotta really make her roaming.

She really has to be a real gypsy, not just somebody calling herself Gypsy."

Even though she was clearly catering to the Kitty Pryde category, but I really wanted to bring the mysticism.

And that was the thing we had a hard time to say, "Is it mysticism or some sort of, is she a mutant or what?"

And I think that was probably the failure of us to really nail that.

But in my mind, I wanted her to be somewhat quasi-mystical.

And I love whatever I read about the gypsy culture, to bring that into it.

So, there was a lot that, I give him a lot of credit for listening to me when I said, "Hey, let's try this instead of that."

And then the part that I felt, "Oh my God, he's listening to me.

Why me?"

This guy's got 30 years experience.

I've only come in five minutes.

I just got here.

I'm really grateful for that.

I guess, I can go on.

- Well, it's fantastic.

And you mentioned some of the characters that you brought in.

I was thinking of Dale Gunn and [Chuck laughs] Dale Gunn was one of those great supporting characters.

And some people may have implied that maybe he was based on you a little bit.

[Chuck laughing] But when you're creating some of those supporting characters and building this new universe, it's gotta be kind of rewarding to be able to have that free reign.

And it seems like Gerry was leaning on you.

It was that collaboration, that team, rather than here's the script and just execute it for me.

So was he letting you do sort of the Marvel style or was he giving you that full script and, kind of, putting out all the beats for you?

- When we did the annual, it was more like a, kind of, it was a Marvel style.

The breakdown was a Marvel style.

And then he would go back in and rescript it.

I enjoyed that.

It really was a flex of muscles of everything Dick was teaching us in class, all of a sudden, now I gotta bring into this book.

And again, it was a swerve.

I was ready to, kind of, go into Metropolis and now we're, oh God, we're doing Detroit.

And that's my fault cause I said Detroit.

So again, it was, at the beginning it was very exciting.

And I had visions of what I wanted to do.

The initial thing was to make Detroit bigger than life.

And that you would see this urban sprawl of this urban decay, but underneath was this spooky, super, science stuff that nobody knew about it.

And I wanted to tap that and make that why Detroit was gonna be, as I learned later, there's a great name for it, it's like it was a nexus of trouble.

I wanted to make Detroit the nexus of trouble like New York has become.

Or like in the DC universe, would be Metropolis or Gotham.

I wanted Detroit to have that feeling.

And from there on, I think that's where we kind of went [sucks teeth] and didn't really come out that way.

And it became script and less collaboration.

Less talking back and forth.

Or me getting a plot from him going, "Why are we in Russia?

why are we doing this?

Where is the super villains?"

It just got, I got a lot more questions than I got answers.

Or at least, yeah, I got a lot of questions and not a lot of answers.

And it quickly became less interesting for me because I was hoping to grow and learn.

And I felt like, well, you're learning how to turn in and meet deadlines, but you're not growing as an artist where you felt that collaborative effort.

That got kind of stymied later and I don't know why.

Even years later as we, he and I met at one of the conventions, I think it's just, you know, we had different paths.

That's the best way to say it.

And it just didn't come together.

- You mentioned the trip to Russia.

As I recall, that was the villain with the keytar.

- [laughs] Yeah.

He was based off, I think, The Fiddler or some guy like that.

I made it that because I think I was still, no I think by that time, I just moved to California.

And looking at a lot of night-flight television.

I remember seeing Edgar Winter playing that.

I thought "That's kind of cool."

And that was the other thing, I wanted to really jack, kickstart.

let's say jack cause I lost the word, but I really wanted to kickstart JLA: Detroit into this is like X-Men and like Titans.

This is the new era.

We're coming into the eighties, it's gotta be hipper.

So I wanted this villain, even though he was so a 1940's guy, I wanted this to reflect what's happening.

This is like a Mad Mod guy for the era.

And because we weren't talking back and forth, that didn't come across to me.

So, it was kind of difficult to grasp and became just an assignment instead of something where I thought, "Ooh, we're building a real villain here."

And when I created The Cadre, when we did The Cadre in the initial four, that was probably the last time we really had back and forth.

The Cadre was somebody I wanted to become, because having them go against the Royal Flush Gang or any of the old villains with the new crew was too soon.

And I really wanted them to feel, again, bring some gravitas to it.

So, they needed their own villains.

So, what's not better than go, "Let's go cosmic.

Let's get some these creepy cosmic kind of guys."

Unfortunately, it tied in too much with Crisis.

[laughs] Which was sneaking up behind us and realized, "Oh no, we got other cosmic guys."

This guy is nothing compared to the Anti-Monitor.

And it was just bad timing.

But at that time in DC, that really was the catalyst, why DC gave us free reigns to change JLA.

The regular characters, most of 'em were being killed off.

Or not killed off, but reimagined.

So it was gonna change, as it did, the status quo of their myths and backgrounds.

So guys we were used to, villains like The Key or Hector Hammond, they're gonna change.

And I saw that, but I also did not see how our JLA was gonna fit in.

Because the plans for Crisis was enormous.

And it was already, like you said, changed the status quo.

We lost The Flash, we lost Superman, we lost Batman, we lost Wonder Woman.

Without those core people, who's the Justice League?

So, it was an interesting time.

Interesting conundrum.

- It's gotta be difficult, as a creator, when you've got this mandate from editorial.

Folks running the bean factory, they're telling you, you know, how to put the cans on the shelf.

It's gotta be tough because you want to tell stories, but it has to fit into this bigger universal story.

And I guess, it would make it tough for you to kind of build that world.

And we were talking before we started recording, about that four issue with The Cadre.

That beautiful overlapping cover, four covers that turn into one poster.

That was when I started to read.

And that really grabbed my attention as a young teenager reading comics.

It was just so exciting and so much fun.

Now, you talk about how daunting it is, you ended up following in the footsteps of George Perez twice.

Once on the Justice League.

And then again, on the last four original issues of New Teen Titans before they started reprinting the direct sales book on the newsstand edition.

So, when you're working on those four issues of the New Teen Titans, how much flexibility do you have?

I mean, obviously, Marv Wolfman knows the characters inside and out, but is he giving you the chance to, kind of, express yourself through storytelling?

Or is he giving you again, it's that DC style where every page is broken down into panels and you're sort of executing it as best you can?

- Big difference between JLA and Titans was when Gerry and I came up with JLA Detroit, we had dinner, we sat down, literally mapped out.

I think we spent two or three hours, couple times.

One time was at his house.

So, it was a real like war meeting.

When I got Titans, Marv wrote down on a napkin, my basic start set up with Raven in another dimension.

And cause he was juggling so many books, the conversation with that napkin was so energizing and so empowering.

In other words, he trusted me.

And as soon as I started battling, he goes, "George trusts you."

And I only got to see George, in person, once when I first got the job on JLA.

And that was the first thing out of his mouth is, "You're gonna do good."

You know?

And so Marv saying, "George trusts you, I trust you."

was almost like a shot of adrenaline that I missed in JLA.

And so, even the plotting from that napkin, Marv and I just talked.

And Marv would say, "I'd like to see this happen.

Let's do that."

And I go, "Well, could he do this?"

"Yeah.

I wanna see, you play with it."

And me hearing that was like, oh my God, this is what I missed, this is what I wanted.

So to answer your question, I got a lot of, I was allowed a lot of input.

And I just went, I just channeled George.

I just thought, "What would George do here?"

Let's try this.

Even if I didn't know how to do it, I tried it because I knew George would go that way.

Whether it looked like him or not, it was just, I wanted that spirit.

And I felt akin.

I felt the characters.

I knew Starfire, I enjoyed, and even though I was primarily drawing, it's around Cyborg.

I really enjoyed the Raven stuff.

That's why I thought it was great when he gave me the description.

I wish I had kept that napkin.

Cause when I tell people, they go, "Are you nuts?"

No, no.

I've had couple of times when someone gave me something like that.

One was, this was a gift.

And the second time I got something like that was kind of a nightmare.

[laughs] And unless you ask what it is, I won't go into it, what it is.

But the Titans stuff, I was given a lot of, a lot of trust.

Allowed a lot of input, which again was a lot of fun.

It kind of broke my heart that I didn't get to do more.

I really wanted to do more.

I really loved the characters.

And what I felt again too, that was the other thing was that with JLA: Detroit, I didn't feel like I could really impose the characterizations.

I know I wasn't getting the characterizations I wanted to do.

And in Titans I knew who they were.

You knew who Cyborg was.

You knew what he was gonna do.

You knew what Raven was gonna do.

You knew what Nightwing's gonna do.

You knew what Wonder Girl was gonna do.

You know, even Gar was easier to deal with.

And cause I don't like doing crazy, goofy characters for goofy characters' sake.

So Gar was, but the fact he was Beast Boy that I can relate to from the Doom Patrol helped.

So it really was night and day.

- It's funny because that story does focus on Vic Stone and he's getting, I guess, skin-colored pieces for his cybernetics, so he doesn't have to have the armored pieces.

And it's heartbreaking when everything fails for him.

And you're really able to capture that.

And that's why for me, as a comic reader, it was disappointing that you moved into animation.

I'm sure it was rewarding for you because I see behind you that you have an Emmy award.

And I understand that that was for your work on Spawn, which was an animated series based on Todd McFarlane's Image comic character.

So can you talk about the similarities between animation, maybe storyboarding and storytelling in comics?

I hate to do this to you but you only have about five minutes left.

[Chuck laughing] - Okay.

I knew this was gonna come, so I'm gonna try to simplify it.

One, and this has came up recently with some other young artists on Twitter, comics and storyboarding are two different things.

The one thing they have in common is storytelling.

For me with storyboarding, it is telling film.

You're telling it with film language.

You're using the film medium.

Television's a lot harder than just doing feature.

So, there is a very strict structure that you have to work with.

While with comics, you can go all over the place.

You can be this tight, you can be this verbose.

You can be like Musicelli and make it look simple, but very, very, I mean, he was very cinematic in his choices.

But it still isn't the same as storyboarding.

Storyboarding is working, you're doing a lot of drawings to illustrate one single moment, time.

While with comics, we have control of time.

Like we are like, we're like, I can't think of his name now the Lord of Time in Marvel.

But you have that control.

And so that's the big difference.

If you're able to walk and use both those rules, then you're gonna be rewarded.

I've been very grateful that my work and comments allowed me to learn storyboarding, so that I can do that.

And gunning onto Spawn was unique because we were asked right off the bat, don't board this the way you would do a normal show, a Batman show or a Marvel show.

We want this to be unique.

So we went more cinematic and meaning that we, again went to the language of film.

We were looking at, I went from everywhere from anime to German Noir to express Spawn.

And had a ball doing it, enjoyed it and it's, kind of, been my template ever since.

I wasn't allowed to do that a lot in comics because of time, because of the nature of the job.

I only got to do bits of that.

But while, when storyboarding, I got to just immerse myself.

So, that's the big difference.

And they're both different disciplines.

A lot of people are gonna mix their wording "You can do one, you can do the other."

No.

Although the guys who brought me an animation, some of the guys who brought me an animation, were guys who came out of comics and learned that.

But the rest I learned by working on the job.

And also becoming a filmmaker, editing, directing, supervising the sounds and supervising the music, as well as, working on the pallettes and working with the artists.

There's so much going into it.

It's definitely a team effort.

But with comics, it's just you and a pencil and paper.

Or a stylus now and a Cintiq or tablet, it's much more solitary.

- Now you mentioned the Cintiq, and imagining in animation, maybe it's gonna be easier for you to work on a digital platform rather than a pencil and board.

In the minute or so that we have left, are you able to do, cause I've seen some commission work that you've done on social media and I know that you've done some work for Power Comics recently, are you working digitally?

Or are you doing the old traditional ink and board on the page?

- Honestly, I got ink and board on the page.

Primarily, because it feels more comfortable.

It feels more natural.

I've seen guys do things on digitally, which kind of does that, but it doesn't give you that same thrill.

It also makes you make decisions right now.

I think would digitally, you're allowed so many variations and you can go for it in perfection.

And I think that can be a crutch.

If you can do this cover 15 different times, how do you know that maybe you got it right the first time?

I just recently did a cover, well last year, for the Aquaman 80th Anniversary.

And I did like 10 templates, 10 roughs, on paper for DC to decide.

The joke is they picked the first one I roughed out.

[both laughing] But I gave them 10 variations cause I just kept going and going.

Cause, I realized if I was doing this digitally, I probably would've got this perfected perfect shot, but it wouldn't let allow me to go to my gut.

And really these are just tools, they're not the real thing.

Real creativity comes from up here and this hand.

Doesn't matter what tool you use.

- Chuck, that's probably a good spot for us to end.

We have run outta time.

I wanna thank you so much for taking time out, to talk with me today.

- No problem.

I really enjoyed it.

Glad to have done it.

- I'd like to thank everyone at home for watching Comic Culture.

We will see you again soon.

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