[triumphant orchestral music] [triumphant orchestral music continues] [triumphant orchestral music continues] [triumphant orchestral music continues] - 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 Robb Epps.

Robb, welcome to Comic Culture.

- Hey, thanks for having me.

- You are also a member of the faculty at UNC Pembroke, just like I am, but you're in the art department.

So, what is it that you teach that is, you know, comic-adjacent?

- So, I'm officially the digital arts professor in there.

So, anything that has to do with digital media, we start off roster graphics, go into vector graphics, communication design, and then I do time-based media as well.

So, we'll do a good bit of compositing, animation, and motion design.

- And I mentioned that you are a color artist working on a number of different projects.

I know you recently had some work done with Power Comics, and you've worked a lot with the artist Pat Broderick.

Your latest comment comic out is "Bronze Star."

I know that you just did a Kickstarter for that.

So, how did you get associated with Pat Broderick?

Because he's, you know, got a big name in this career.

- That is a big name and I lucked out, really, with that.

He's a great guy.

Of all things, we ended up working at a place called the International Academy of Design and Technology down in Tampa, Florida.

And so, he was brought in to do the storyboarding classes there, and I was doing 2D animation classes there.

And we met, developed a strong relationship.

He saw the digital painting stuff that I was doing.

And when he was starting his first creator project that was called "Nibiru: Legend of the Anunnaki," he asked me to do the colors for that.

We got on that and then went through a number of different side projects here and there, some that have worked out really well, some that have disappeared into the middle of nowhere, hopefully some that will still come out.

Currently, we've put in six issues for first comics, and hopefully Shatter 2.0 will come out in the near future.

But yes, the most latest thing was a weird Western written by Mike Baron called "Bronze Star."

- It's funny you mentioned First Comics.

Recently attended the Baltimore Comic-Con, and they did an entire panel on, I guess, the 40th anniversary of First Comics and how some of those characters are coming back.

So, it's gotta be interesting, because it doesn't seem like comics were your first love or your career goal.

So, you know, is it a shift for you to be sort of a digital artist to becoming somebody who is working, you know, with black and white art to give it that three dimensional quality?

- Yeah, it's been interesting going through.

I had always drawn, growing up, but then I got into doing music.

And so, I did all the official channels, growing up, like all-county band, all-district band, Governor School of North Carolina, all with music.

So, of all things, I got my music education degree first, but got roped back into comics, always was interested in that, and just storytelling in general.

So, that always been in there.

But I never thought of how I could do that officially.

So, then I found out about Savannah College of Art and Design actually having a master's degree program as opposed to the only other thing that, at that time, that was around was the Joe Kubrick School, which was certificate only.

So, since it wasn't set up for anything officially, I snuck in and tried the SCAD route.

Got to meet some great people there; James Stern, Bob Pendarvis, Durwin Talon.

Excellent comic artists there.

And working with Durwin, he was the comics coloring professor there and also taught a bunch of illustration classes and painting for comics classes there.

And where I hadn't had a whole lot of color experience, he really encouraged me and saw something in what I was doing that he put me in front of a couple of editors.

I tried to take that feedback as best I could and move along with it, 'cause of course, you know, the first time you get in front of editors, they tend to not be so kind.

[laughs] I will never forget Chris Brunner, an excellent comic artist, having his work, and he had some Superman pages up in front of a comic arts forum event down in Savannah, and Mike Carlin saying, "That's not Superman's Chin."

The entire audience goes, "Ooh," 'cause there was these beautiful artwork, and he, of course, Chris Brunner has gone on to being a very successful comic artist in his own right.

But, you know, just that one thing could, you know, cut it off for everybody.

So, you gotta be tough skinned at the beginning.

- It's interesting, because I know that, you know, teaching media classes, students tend to be very precious about their projects, and I'm imagining in the art department it's the same sort of thing.

And it's a fine line between, you know, saying what needs to be said and making sure that you aren't destroying them and their confidence, but helping build it up instead.

So, you know, that experience working with somebody like Mike Carlin who can look at one little detail and say, "Oh, that's not the right chin," how do you sort of employ that with your students to make sure that you encourage them but also make sure they learn the lesson?

- It comes down a lot to really setting up the objectives for your assignments ahead and make sure they're pretty clear.

And normally, the way I always couch my critiques is generally starting off with, "Okay, what's working?

What is actually working in there?

Then saying, "Okay, what needs to be improved?"

So, it's kind of the criticism sandwich a little bit in there, 'cause yeah, it's really hard to divorce yourself from what you create, even at my current age and level as well.

Sometimes it's easy to get precious with something, or feeling that you're too close to it.

Gotta at least give some extra headway to folks that haven't had to survive that as much.

- And it's interesting because, you know, you mentioned Pat Broderick, who I've met a couple of times at HeroesCon, and he's a funny guy, a big personality, but I'm pretty sure he is a straight shooter.

So, when you're working with Pat and you're working on that first assignment with him and you show him those first couple of pages, is he going to be, you know, really hyperfocused on what he doesn't like, or is he going to just say, "Oh, I think we should lean into this direction?"

- Well, I'll definitely tell you yeah.

If there's something that he sees that isn't working, and a lot of times I'm going like, "Ah, I'm not so certain about this.

You let me know."

And yeah, he'll definitely have some colorful language to that we wouldn't wanna put on the air to describe things that aren't really working in there.

But again, we've developed that relationship, so we're able to be that way with each other with realizing that we're not, you know, stepping on each other's toes or anything like that, that we're all just going for trying to make it as strong and working as best the project can.

- And speaking of projects, when you are working on maybe a science fiction story versus working on a Western, I'm imagining that color palettes are going to be, well, wildly different.

So, how do you sort of design and decide what that universe is going to look like?

Is it a collaboration with the artist?

Is it a collaboration with the script?

Or is it something where you kind of look at the art and come up with your own interpretation?

- It depends on who you're working with.

You know, some people will be extremely hands-on.

Tom Morgan; I got to color some of his stuff for that Power Comics master's issue 2.

And they had a very specific look that they were going for.

And so, he even did color comps on top of the stuff that I did.

So, I'd send something over and said, "Oh, here, try this, and send that back."

And so, then I'd update the files off of that, whereas other artists would be like, "Hey, you're the colorist; whatever you say."

It just kind of depends on who you're working with.

And then, of course, subject matter will then come into play; a lot of reference, try to look at what's there.

Get a sense of, from the writer or from the editor, what they're looking for, what their hopes are for the book.

And so, then that will lead me to push towards one reference or another.

Sometimes, again, you know, you think about genres and you have things that get associated with certain aspects.

And if something is even science-fictiony and made up, generally, even that has some sort of basis in some existing technology.

So, you try to find what's out there as a existing equivalent and see if you can reference to that.

So, like, the floating cars that I had to deal with in "Shatter."

Originally in a poster, I'd done orange kind of glows for them just to help them stand out and be warmer compared to the rest of the backgrounds.

But the radiation was really made more sense to be kind of a blue-green once they told me that, "Oh, it's supposed to be this type of engine to, to do that."

So, it actually had something that came from a little bit of some scientific background in there.

So, once I knew that we had that reference, went back in and made those changes.

- It's interesting because, you know, you talk about a particular thing, a detail that might make the difference between understanding how a technology works.

Now, if you're dealing with, let's say, something that takes place in the Old West, you know, when there's certainly not as much air pollution, the skies are not cloudy all day, as they say.

How do you sort of go from something that might be, you know, noon on a sunny day to being the mood is changing, and now, you know, maybe there's going to be, if it's the Old West, maybe a gunfight or a stampede or something like that.

How do you sort of approach that from a color point of view to guide the mood as it fits the action?

- So, you can think there's types of shadows that you can play with and how hard those might be to give a sense of a little bit of a change of time of day, if you're getting to a particular aspect.

Of course, you can go crazy with a twilight or a sunset and really get very emotional and evocative with colors at those points in time.

- It's, I guess, the fact that, you know, action happens and mood changes.

How do you sort of use mood to, I guess, bend the reality of the scene, you know, work in the emotional side with color?

- In some cases, you might even have to pull out the background altogether; or like you said, yeah, if there's an emotion that we're trying to get to, that may become a wash over kind of the entirety of it affecting every single color; that would be the attached color of a character, of a building, of the horse; you know, so on and so forth, whatever props are around.

But I'm a big fan of having kind of a unified background first before worrying about any sort of foreground elements.

Even when I'm just doing kind of natural and believable lighting, reflected light, refracted light is gonna affect how color looks.

But if you have that emotional standpoint, we start with that as a background influencing everything that would go on top of it that will keep that unity there.

And I think that influence then helps keep it grounded and feeling believable, even if it is very emotionally evocative rather than photoreal in styling.

- You're dealing with "Bronze Star," which is taking advantage of the modern printing abilities and the fact that you can read something on your tablet or your phone.

But then, you also worked with Power Comics on "The Masters," which is designed to look like those eighties comics from Marvel and DC which has a different color palette.

So, how do you kind of go from having all the crayons in the box to having those, you know, four-color heroes again?

- Discipline.

[both laughing] Even with animation, there was... who was it had... Dr. Ken Musgrave; this is gonna seem like a really weird aside, but he had produced this thing called Mojoworld in which it would generate planets for terrain.

But he talked about, "Okay, you're gonna fly this camera through this area."

Okay, digital camera has no requirements on it, but it makes it much more believable if you treat it as if it was a physical camera.

If motions had slow-in slow-out to them to mimic the idea of coming to a stop and having inertia affecting how it works.

So, I think you gotta be smart about it, know what was going around, and think about how you're using your colors, so that you're just not picking without intention.

'Cause that's one of the things that, yeah, digital gives you all the colors in the rainbow, so on and so forth.

But already, if you're picking things without true intention, then yeah, it's just gonna end up being a mess.

So, hopefully, whether you're going for a full modern look, or something that's meant to evoke a certain age or a printing process, you're picking with intention, and that way, you're gonna, you know, end up with the result that you need.

- And again, printing has changed quite a bit in the last 30 years.

And I know this might seem a little in the weeds, but, you know, when you are picking those colors, are you kind of thinking about what it would look like on the paper when it's printed, or are you just trusting that the process at this point is so seamless that you don't have to worry about the saturation of the ink on the page, and it's just going to look as it is on that screen?

- Yeah, unfortunately, I would love more control on that.

I would love more information.

But sometimes you don't even get a chance to know who they're going to go to for print.

They may not have that even decided at that point where you're working on things.

So, you do your best, calibrating your own machine and trying to keep things realistic within a certain range of colors, a spectrum of colors, so that you're not working way out in the weeds, though, so if they do go to a different paper stock, that it's not gonna blow everything way out of proportion for you.

So, yeah, unfortunately you don't always get that knowledge, so you just kinda, you have to trust a little bit.

- The great artist Lee Weeks said that we are now in the golden age of coloring, comic book coloring, referring to the fact that we have the digital tools and better printing.

But he also lamented the fact that, sometimes, color artists will go in and kinda tweak the line work, and maybe they aren't thinking about the light the same way that the pencil artist is.

So, when you are working on something with, like, say, Pat Broderick, are you staying true to the line work?

Are you maybe going to add a color to where he's got a shadow to give it more of an ombre or something?

Or are you just gonna kinda work with what he has and, you know, keep it as true to what his vision was as possible?

- Well, yeah, with someone like Pat, you know, he's got so much knowledge in his materials that, yeah, you don't really wanna try to stray from that.

There are times where we'll do color holds over-top the ink work, you know, to colorize something that would, you know, on paper if you had it, was just black at this point in time.

But, yeah, I've never found myself, you know, changing anything as far as where a highlight is or anything like that.

And I've always tried to make sure that the pencils or the ink work is what comes through the fore.

A lot of people complain that, you know, here we'll say it's the golden edge of coloring; but the coloring, if it's overtaking the artwork, then it's not being a team player.

And it needs to all work together.

And a lot of times, people, they're not going to a book for the colorist, unless it's maybe Dave Stewart or someone like that, who is amazing.

But yeah, not too many colorists are really the biggest draw for the book.

So, if you're overtaking the artwork, then I don't think you're really doing your job right.

- I think that is a problem, too, because sometimes, you know, you can look at a page where the storytelling gets lost because the coloring might add something or take something away from the clarity, at the expense of, "Oh, I'm gonna add a lens flare here, or something like that."

- Let's flare.

- Right?

- Sorry.

- I mean, obviously we're not dealing with film, and if we were dealing with film, we really wouldn't wanna see a lens flare anyway because it, you know, shows us that we're watching a movie.

So, again, when you're dealing with all these really cool tools, how do you sort of avoid the temptation to go too much and just keep it simple and keep to that line work and to the story?

- That also comes to just looking at the art and really understanding what's coming from it.

You know, Pat's material's very illustrative, lots of small scritchy marks, especially then here with the Western, you know, selections.

I wouldn't go in and work on making ultra-smooth selections on top of that 'cause that would give colors and shadow shapes that would be completely different from what was in that artwork.

So, I tried to match the style of the coloring to match the style of the illustration, whereas somebody who's a little bit more modern, a little bit more clean line, then yeah, maybe I'll make selections in such a way that is a little bit more smooth, a little bit more clean, a little bit more graphic design-oriented rather than painterly.

- And, well, you mentioned Pat.

Pat has a really detailed style, and I'm imagining that, when you get those pages in, you've gotta sort of flatten everything out.

It's tough to make sure that those thin lines retain that thinness.

But also, you talk about matching the texture, and it's probably easier when you're using digital tools to come up with a brush that will give you something that looks or feels like fabric or, you know, can cheat what an old page might look like and get that paper effect in there.

So, is that something that you're looking at when you get those pages in?

- I don't normally do a whole lot of brush creation in there.

I've got a few kind of texture brushes that I'll go to from time to time, but yes, you do look at what texture and what feel you're gonna get out of an artist and try to make things match up for that.

So, yeah, if things are, again, like, ultra clean-line, anime, manga kinda style, then I'm going to go a little bit more hard edge, a little bit more cell shading scenario versus something that's a lot more illustrative, and then I'll try to get either texture maybe in the brush or maybe in another layer; maybe I'll drop in a paper sample that I've scanned in, or something like that to help break up the noise but not let it be a canned effect, 'cause again, if anybody can tell you're using a filter, you're in trouble.

[laughs] - Right.

I guess, again, a fine line between showing everybody everything that you can do and picking the right moment, playing that right note in a symphony rather than playing every note all at once.

- Yeah, you are a member of the ensemble and not the feature performer.

- Another thing that's gotta be tough is you are, like I am, you're a professor here at UNC Pembroke, and you've got a number of classes you have to teach every semester, you've got advisees, you've got grading to do, you've got a home life, and you've got a lot of other things that go on.

So, how do you sort of balance your schedule so you can, you know, do your creative work and still have time to enjoy life and, you know, take care of the day job that, you know, pays the bills and keeps the... - There's life to enjoy?

What is that?

No.

[both laughing] Yeah, balances, I think, is always, and it seems to be a big thing in society even right now, this whole idea of work-life balance.

Luckily it's kind of part of our gig here as being a professor that we've gotta have that scholarship, and so it's nice that at least what I'm doing isn't completely separated.

I can have those things work together between the materials that I create outside of college and inside college.

And I don't think a lot of people realize that's part of a requirement for faculty to be practitioners.

I don't know, that's, like, the stereotype is like, "Oh, you can't do, so they teach" or whatever.

When really, you know, professors, it's part of the requirements that you do.

So, it's, I think it's be good to know that, for people going in, that, yeah, professors really actually are having to do stuff as opposed to just, you know, sitting in a kind of academic ivory tower or something like that.

You know, there are plenty times where, like, oh, why did I take on this gig, as far as a deadline for the coloring if it's eaten up all the hours when, yeah, sleep would be nice or nice to read a book or something like that.

But luckily, I haven't been going for, like, the big three as far as publications, 'cause that would be our harsher turnaround.

So, luckily there's been this expansion of create-our-own materials and crowdfunded materials that give a little bit more flexibility than it would be to try to work for a Dark Horse or Image or so on and so forth.

- You know, you mentioned crowdfunding, and I know that, for those of us who have supported crowdfunding campaigns, there's always a gamble: will they get the job done?

And I think of a few that I won't name, but you put your money in, and you support because you support the artist, you support the concept, and for whatever reason they can't come through.

For me, it's a shame because I'm going to not get the book, and I spent probably more than I would if I bought it at the store.

But if you're part of that creative process and you've been promised, you know, income from that, is it tougher for you when it is a Kickstarter or, you know, crowdfunding and you've gotta sort of chase things down, or is it, you know, if you get those pages, you know you're going to get paid as promised?

- Luckily, so far, everyone that I've primarily worked with that has gone and gotten to the official of actually putting stuff to a Kickstarter has been solid for that.

I've had things where they said, "Yeah, we're gonna crowdfund, and we produced a bunch of materials," but they didn't actually post; it, yeah, evaporated underneath our hands or our feet there.

And so, that was a sucky scenario.

I've been lucky, you know, knock on wood, hopefully that keeps going.

But, you know, you try to pick your bedfellows that you work with as best you can.

You find folks that feel like they can handle it, they can handle throwing in the business side and being professional on it, even if they weren't business people to begin with.

Which, you know, how many artists really are used to being business people?

Not that many, but you end up having to be, especially if you're freelancing or self-publishing and so on and so forth.

So, you gotta build those relationships and give trust to those that are deserving of it as best.

And hopefully, that's gonna fit out and work out for you.

- And I know that comic work is labor intensive.

It's not the same as, you know, building a house or digging a ditch, but you are at the computer or at the drawing board hours at a time, working on something.

So, when you get a page, you know, you probably have to put down a base layer, and then you've gotta put in all the highlights and everything else.

How long does it take you to do a typical page?

- I'm a slow guy unfortunately.

There are people that are doing it for a profession, a lot of times, talked about trying to be able to knock out four pages a day.

That seems incredibly far beyond my reach as far as I could tell.

Yeah, the whole thing we used to get told back in school was that, yeah, pencillers should knock out a pencil page a day; an inker should knock out two pages a day; and colorists should be able to do three or four letter, or three or four or more a day, or so on and so forth.

But whether people are really hitting that, I don't know.

But, like, web comics evidently are even more demanding at trying to keep content going out there on a very, very regular basis.

So, it's interesting to see what people will put themselves through.

You hear about people going through burnout from overdoing it 'cause, yeah, it is work-intensive.

So, normally it takes me a-day a-page in there.

That's kinda my average in there.

So, I am spending a good bit of time.

I admit that I think I'm a slow one, and therefore, so.

That's why it's not my full, my only income stream.

- And I see we have probably about a minute or so left.

You know, when you are working and sitting at the computer for hours at a time, do you, you know, schedule your day so that you can get up, walk around, and not feel like you're just, you know, a couch potato in a sense?

- You try to, yeah.

You can't really spend that time; it can be really bad for your health if you're sitting there the whole time.

But it's also easy to kind of get tunnel vision for a while and then go, "Oh, what?

That was a day."

"Oh, it's night."

So, it does happen either way, but luckily I've been able to get up and stretch most of the times, instead of being in that tunnel vision too much.

And the last question is, if the folks at home wanted to find out more about you and your art, is there a place they can find you on the web?

- Yeah, I've got a website at eppsart.weebly.com, although I need to update that thing, and it has a little bit of links to materials that I've got, but bronzestarcomic.com is out there.

Pat's already working on issue two, but publication has happened, and they are shipping out books now.

I think they still are taking orders, though, so maybe they'll do another print run.

- Well, Robb, thank you so much for being here on Comic culture.

Thanks everyone at home for watching.

We'll see you again soon.

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