[driving triumphant theme] ♪ - 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 writer, artist, publisher, Jim Valentino.

Jim, welcome to Comic Culture.

- Thanks for having me.

- Jim, let's start with the basics you have been in comics for quite some time.

I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you got your start.

- I started with a small press comics, mini comics, back in the stone age we had to do the month, you know stone tablets and stuff.

It was great.

And then from there, I just sort of progressed on through.

Did underground comics for a while, small press underground's, independence, worked at Marvel.

Somewhere in between there I did animation.

And then from Marvel, we formed Image.

- You talked about animation, I've spoken to a number of creators who have done some storyboard work and character design and whatnot.

So, I mean, obviously telling a story on a static page is one thing but when you're telling a story for motion how do you sort of translate those skills?

- It's not that much different to do story from comics to storyboards.

They're kind of almost the same except you have to do the camera and stuff.

Know how the camera moves and how things move within the camera.

And you also don't leave space between the drawings for word balloons, you know, so it's pretty similar, very similar.

I switched to storyboards a couple of weeks after I started at, I worked at Marvel Productions back in the day.

- Okay.

Marvel Productions, they gave us shows like G.I.

Joe and Transformers as I recall.

- Yeah.

I didn't work on either one of those.

I worked on The Real Ghostbusters and I worked on the Defenders of the Earth which was Flash, Gordon and Mandrake and the Phantom.

And then I worked on a bunch of other shows for different, different studios.

- You mentioned that you worked at Marvel and one of the the books that you worked on, I guess, through part of what you've done and part of what other creators have done since, it has become sort of a part of our cultural vernacular it's Guardians of the Galaxy.

So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that book, because as I recall in an era of grim and gritty heroes, you sort of brought the fun back.

- Yeah.

That was what I tried to do, my Guardians of the Galaxy is not the same as the one in the movies.

You know, it's quite different.

Mine took place a thousand years in the future.

So it's quite a bit different.

My whole focus on that was to do kind of an old fashion fun action-oriented comment without a lot of angst in it, there was enough angst going on at that time.

- So when you're working on something like Guardians of the Galaxy, I'm assuming that this is going to be a book that you are doing because they were books that you read when you were first becoming interested in comics that captured that spirit of fun and that sort of energy.

So I'm wondering, is there, you know that sort of a lineage that you look back at and say, "You know what, when I started reading comics, this really struck me and that's how come I make the comics that I make.

[Jim laughing] - I had done some work at Marvel and I was looking for a steady gig.

Like most freelance artists are looking for a steady gig.

So Marvel had published this series of books called the Marvel Universe Handbook.

And I was looking through it and trying to find, trying to find properties, trying to find characters that weren't in general use.

I figured they weren't going to put me on the X-Men right away.

So what do I do?

Well, I worked up several, we knew that Tom DeFalco and Mark Gruenwald were going to be at a convention in Oakland.

We were in Southern California at the time.

And so Rob Liefeld and I went up together to that show to talk to them.

I had several proposals, including one with Rob that we call the Young Avengers which was basically Marvel's Teen Titans.

And when I talked to Tom about it, he had said that he had just written the Thor issue with where he introduced the new warriors which was basically Marvel's Teen Titans.

We didn't know about it so it was sort of one of those, you know, synchronicity things.

So just before we left for the convention I saw the Guardians of the Galaxy in this pen book.

And so I called up Rob and said, you know "What do you think of the Guardians of the Galaxy?"

And he said, 'They'd look really cool but they don't have a story," which was true.

They didn't have a story.

It was just the Badoon invading the earth or the earth system and that was it.

So I thought about it.

I think I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and it hit me, there were a thousand years in the future, why not explore the Marvel Universe as it will be a thousand years from now?

And the hook was a quest for Captain America shield because it had already been established advance Astro, his hero was Captain America.

So it all just sort of tied in.

And when I presented it to Tom, he said he had an idea for the Guardians, but he liked mine better.

So there you go, that was it.

Yeah.

But as far as lineage, you know a dream book, that kind of thing, it really wasn't.

But I did love it while I was working on it.

- It's funny because you you had an idea that Tom DeFalco, you know, two similar ideas to what he was working on.

That's, again, it's sort of that synchronicity you know, how that, that kind of happens.

But you were able to turn your time on Guardians of the Galaxy into becoming one of the founders of Image Comics.

I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about those crazy heady days of the nineties, when you left the relative security of Marvel Comics and tried to, you know, 20 some odd years later turn it into one of the largest comic publishers in the country.

- It's almost 30 years now.

It'll be 29 years in February, 2020.

Yeah.

Well, what happened was Rob wanted to do he wanted to create a company, okay?

So Rob came up with the name and he came up with the image I, and all of that and he talked to the three people that he felt the closest to in the industry.

And that was Todd McFarlane, Erik Larsen and myself.

And so we basically formed the core of what became Image Comics.

So Rob, I think, talked to us for an entire summer as I recall, and I may be off about that, but I think it was an entire summer, trying to talk us all into doing this crazy thing.

[mumbles] Eric signed on right away.

Todd was reluctant.

I was iffy about it.

My book wasn't a million seller.

I was not a millionaire, you know, and I had five kids.

So it was very, very difficult decision for me.

But once Todd signed on, Todd gave me a call said he was signing on.

And I said, Okay, that's it.

Rob started it but I don't think it would have happened without Todd - At the time Todd is working on- - No, he was retired.

- Really?

- Yeah, he had quit Spider-Man when his daughter Cyan was born, his first child.

So he was retired at the time.

What he wanted to do is he wanted to make hockey cards trading cards.

He actually did.

I saw, I think Rob added, a sheet of uncut cards but he couldn't get the, he couldn't get the license or something for some reason.

So no, he was out of the comic business at that point.

- Well, that's amazing.

I did not know that.

You know, so this is, you know kind of a gutsy move because at the time Marvel and DC are really dominating the sales charts and, you know, trying to break into distribution and whatnot, that's gotta be quite a steep learning curve.

- Well, what we did was we hired Malibu for one year.

The deal was they would get 10% of, I think it was gross profits for 10 years, for one year which was a lot of money that first year.

Okay?

And what they did was they immediately started like three competing comic book out with all that money.

So we hired them for a year because they had the infrastructure.

And after a year we didn't we incorporated, the Image became an, a corporation and that kind of thing.

As far as the risk goes, I think I was the only one that was really at risk because like I said, I wasn't on a super popular book or anything like that.

I remember calling up Larry Martyr and because I had two confidants at the time Larry martyr and Eric Stevenson.

And I told Larry, I, you know, when Todd and Rob went to New York to tell Marvel we were leaving, they, they got Marksville Vestry first and then Jim Lee.

And I remember calling up Larry and saying, "Remember that avalanche we've been talking about all summer?"

And he goes, "Yeah."

I said, I think it just became an atomic bomb.

And he said, "Why?'

And I said, "Well, they signed up Jim Lee" and Larry uncharacteristically just went dead silent.

And he said, "You guys are gonna do so much damage."

And, you know, the rest is history.

- So what is it about the crew behind Image?

What is it about them that makes this company successful that you're looking at 30 years in the business?

What is it about your cohort that was able to make it work and others just weren't?

- I think it was a combination of things.

I think it was a combination of timing.

We had Rob, Todd and Jim who were at the time the best selling artists ever, including now.

So not just at the time but now they were the best-selling artists ever.

That's why the atomic bomb comment.

It was just one of those things where the hype was really real.

It wasn't manufactured.

And I think what the kids and you'd have to ask like Robert Kirkman, he's certainly a child of Image but I think what they saw is what my generation saw with Marvel.

When Marvel came out, I was about, or when Marvel started I was eight, nine, 10 years old around that vicinity and their comics were completely different from DC's Comics.

They looked different, they smelled different they were totally different.

And you could get on the ground floor.

Okay?

There weren't 150 issues or anything like that.

And because Stan Lee was writing and editing the entire line they did something that no one else had done before.

There were, you know, you'd see in an issue of Spider-Man you'd see Thor go flying by.

That never happened before.

In DC, because it was a five-ten everybody lived in their own universe.

So the bad guy had to defeat the Adam in order to take over the world, nevermind Superman or Batman or anything like that, in the Marvel Universe it was kind of the same, except it was more cohesive.

One of the problems I think everybody including Image did at first, was tried to do with integrated universe from day one.

That's not the way Marvel did it.

Marvel and the movies are good example of it.

Marvel built it over a period of years.

And for a couple of years where they would guest a character introduce a new character and an ongoing series, et cetera, et cetera, all that formula began with Stan Lee and later with Roy Thomas.

So what made us more successful?

I think it was real.

I think the fans wanted it.

They wanted a superhero company and that's another thing but they wanted a company where they could get in on the ground floor by issue number one all that kind of stuff.

And don't forget it was huge speculator marketing at the time.

So it was this confluence perfect storm, if you will that made us more successful.

- So, you know, you're talking about the speculator boom and bust of the nineties, Image is able to weather that.

And at that time, you sort of step in and serve in an administrative role as the publisher of Image.

And you start to bring in other creators like you said, Robert Kirkman who's known for the Walking Dead and whatnot.

So as this company starts to change from the core group into a group that's, a company that's looking for more creators, how do you sort of shepherd that transition?

- Well, we had always had more creators, at 1992 San Diego Comic-Con, we introduced the second line to come in.

So, you know, we had Jerry Ordway and we had, oh gosh, Mike Krell and Sam Keith, and Dale Keown and all these people coming in to Image which was another thing that helped boost us as we had the second wave.

Immediately the second wave, I brought in Alan Moore which was a pretty big thing at the time, you know.

I think it was always there, Image was never a superhero company, per se.

It was, it was about creator ownership and the ability to own your own creation and to decide what to do with it.

I always looked at it as self emancipation.

Okay?

So that was just a natural thing.

By the time I became publisher, Image had been on some pretty hard days for awhile.

The books were mostly titillating books and I just didn't think they were they were up to the partner's standards, you know?

So my idea was to basically expand the parameters of what we were doing.

So I brought in a lot of quote unquote, independent books, books that weren't mainstream.

I got rid of all the titillation books.

And, you know, I told the partners it's going to take five years for me to rebuild.

But the first thing I have to do is scorch the earth just get rid of all this all this garbage so that we could bring in people of quality, creators of quality.

So Brian Michael Bendis, Warren Ellis, a lot of these guys came in through me because I opened up that door.

- That's quite a door to open up because obviously you've got an eye for finding that new talent.

I'm wondering, you know, when you are sitting down at the drawing board, you probably have a sense of how you're going to put a page together.

How you're going to put a story together.

How do you sort of work with somebody who is close but not quite to your level and how do you sort of guide them and give them the step up till they get to that next level?

- I think a lot of it is, sorry about that, you give them notations and you try to explain to them you know, this is why certain things are done certain ways, okay, you need to introduce your characters.

You need to continually reintroduce your characters so people know who they are.

You need to establish, do an establishing shot so people know where we are.

These are things that are just super important.

And they come through with every single, every single type of writing.

So what I did, by the time I would publish someone they would already be there, you know, and just let them go, stay out of their way, let them grow.

Because the more pages you do, the more you'll grow up.

So they're already there.

They're at professional level.

They'll just get better, okay?

That's the way that happens.

At conventions and stuff for people who aren't there yet who may be a few years off, I just recommend several books to them to read.

You know, you need to read these books, you need to study these books, they need to become your Bible and you'll get there if you have the ability.

- Now, back in the day, those might be something like Stan Lee and John Buscema, How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, is there- - That's only for kids.

- That's only for kids?

- Only for kids.

Because it gives you a basic, basic step.

The books I would recommend are Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, because it gives you the philosophy, Comics and Sequential Art by Will Eisner because he shows you how it's done and Figure Drawing for All it's Worth by George Bridgman.

He was the guy who taught Will Eisner.

He taught Joe KUbert.

He taught all of these comic greats.

What it does, what he does is he breaks the body down into geometric form.

And that's much easier to move and to put into perspective than anything.

So it's a basic, this is how you draw a kind of guide.

So those are the three books that I recommend.

To a kid, I would recommend, How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way because that's your very, very basic understanding of perspective, anatomy, composition, et cetera.

- You know you've had a career that's gone through a number of different trends.

And I'm wondering as you look at visual storytelling now, has your approach changed?

Has the industry's approach changed from what we might be seeing in the eighties the nineties, or, you know, obviously further back it's going to be markedly different, but what are you seeing as sort of the the biggest change in visual storytelling?

- Computer coloring.

I think which we kind of started.

I think it just depends on the kind of book that someone is doing or the type of artwork that they're doing.

And that's it, good storytelling is good storytelling and the good storytellers stand out.

A friend quietly for example, just stands out head and shoulders above almost all of his peers because of how, what a good storyteller he is not just what a good artist he is but what a good storyteller he is.

But if you're doing a book like like I've been rereading Sandman Mystery Theater by Matt Wagner and Seagle and Guy Davis and that's a different type of approach than you would take to say the X-Men, you know it's almost impossible to say that other than the fact that a lot of stuff now is done on a computer and all the coloring was done on computers.

When I first started, you had to use Dr. Martin's dyes for the colors and then you had to mark what colors were which and it was a pain.

- It, you know, it's one of the many innovations that Image brought into the industry.

It was the slicker looking paper, the brighter colors that just popped out at you and the art was different than you would see.

I mean, obviously, you know, if you were Jim Lee and you had just left, X-Men, you're still gonna look like Jim Lee, but that stylist is dynamic and- [both laughing] But that style is so dynamic.

You know the image creator style is so dynamic that it spawns so many imitators.

And yet when you look at image books now you're not seeing what might be referred to as a house style.

You're able to see someone who is just got a completely different way of putting together a story a different way of putting together a figure.

Is this something that you're, again, you're talking about it just being good storytelling, but you know is this ever something that you're looking at and saying, well, it's just a different look and therefore we should try it.

- No, it's something that's up to the creator to do.

And most people, when they talk about Image style which most of us really despise what they're talking about basically is Rob Liefeld style.

They're not really talking, Erik Larsen never drew like that.

Todd McFarlane never drew like that.

I never drew like that.

Jim Lee had his own style.

So it was sort of, and so did Marc Silvestri, you know, envelopes potassium, there may have been similarities in the guys who were in the X-office, you know the hatching and the crosshatching and all that stuff but there was no quote unquote Image style ever.

It was just something it's kind of like I read this thing not too long ago about Jiffy peanut butter.

Do you remember Jiffy peanut butter?

No, there never was a Jiffy peanut butter.

There was Jif peanut butter and Skippy peanut butter but there was never a Jiffy peanut butter.

And it's sort of like somehow or another our memories pull disparate things together.

And that's what we see, you know, in our heads.

We, we see that.

So, you know, it's sort of like, if you're writing a paragraph or you're writing a tresis or you're writing a story or whatever, most people will forget to put in articles.

So they'll write a sentence and it needs the word of and they see it there when they write it.

Okay?

Which is why you need someone to look at what you've written, because they'll see, wait a minute you forgot, you know of here, you know, doesn't that make the sentence, you know, make more sense.

And you go, but you didn't see it.

You saw the word of there because you knew in your head it was supposed to be there.

So as far as the different styles and the different approaches, I think that's wonderful.

You know, it's like, let the artists express themselves and they do have a good artist and you have a good concept, get out of their way, let them do it.

At least, that's what I think.

- It's rare in a creative venture to have sort of that generosity of, I'm going to help you and you go do what you're going to do without, you know wanting to put your thumb print on everything.

- Yeah, I think that's the worst.

Think that's the worst.

I think that was one of the problems with both Marvel and DC.

Many years ago, I had an editor who she was new.

I was training her to edit and she got in this script and she called me up and said, I don't know what to do.

And I said, "What do you mean?"

She goes, There's nothing wrong.

There's no misspelled words.

All the grammar is correct.

All the punctuation is correct.

She goes, "What do I do?"

Well, I said, Well you send them a note and you say, thank you very much, job well done, yay.

And she goes, But how do I justify my fee?

And I go, you read through it.

That's it stay out of their way.

If they don't need the help stay out of their way.

- But it's always great when you get someone who knows what they're doing and you can just watch them work.

It's a joy to see what comes out of it.

Especially when they have a connection to the material.

They're telling me that we're out of time, Jim.

And I just want to thank you so much for taking time out to talk with me today.

- Thank you very much.

- I just want to say hopefully we can talk again in the future.

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

We will see you again soon.

[instrumental music] ♪ - [Lightle] But to me, it's always been about telling your story because this is what I do.