[powerful theatrical music] [powerful theatrical 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 Lance Tooks.

Lance, welcome to "Comic Culture."

- Well, I thank you; happy to be here.

- Lance, we talked a little bit before we started our interview today that your current project is an autobiographical comic that is covering a lot of ground in your life.

And one of the things is talking about how you got a job at Marvel Comics at 16 years old.

So how does somebody who's in high school essentially get a job at what I'm assuming at the time was the biggest comic book company in the world?

- Well, I mean, it was a great, great, great privilege to grow up in New York.

Because you had all these crazy opportunities that popped up on every corner.

And one of the things was I went to the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan.

And they had an internship program at various places: at Marvel Comics, at Neal Adams Continuity Studios, Ovacion Animation.

And I submitted portfolios, like a grownup professional portfolio to each of these places.

And those three chose me.

But the one that I chose was Marvel Comics.

Because I realized that, you know, that that was what I wanted to do was to learn how to make comics from a variety of different people.

And I wasn't so interested in animation.

And so I figured I'd never wind up going into that business.

But I loved comics, and I loved making my own comics.

I loved taking, you know, three sheets of loose leaf paper, folding 'em over and just doing a comic every week with, I guess, The Fly was one of my superheroes who was an imitation of Spider-Man.

You know, I didn't make any money making it.

But a lot of people have made a lot of money making imitations of Spider-Man.

So I was on a good start.

But yeah, it was terrific working there.

I worked in Jim Shooter's office.

So basically, I was the intern.

He's the one who hired me.

And my job was being a gopher, you know, go for coffee, go for this, go for that, make photocopies or whatever.

But I got to be in the middle of, yeah, my favorite comic book company.

And I could look over the shoulders of these giants, the people that created Spider-Man and The Avengers, and all those books that I loved so much.

And I could even, in some cases, I could take my feeble 16-year old's artwork and hand it to these professionals.

And they, with much respect, would put a piece of onion skin tracing paper over it and give me lots of pointers on how I could improve my style.

And, you know, "You have to work on your anatomy.

"That's the most important thing."

And, "Don't cut the feet off at the bottom of the panel "or everybody's gonna know "you have no idea how to draw feet."

And all kinds of things that, you know, to be a 16-year-old who wants to be a cartoonist.

And you could look over John Romita Sr.'s shoulder.

And he had patience and great advice.

So it was definitely an amazing situation that I blundered in.

So that's basically what my autobiography is gonna be, is me just recounting these situations that I've blundered into over the years.

You know, my mom, she came up with the title, inadvertently.

'Cause once, she called me the World's Fattest Starving Artist.

So I said, "That's gonna be the title of this book, Mom."

And she said she doesn't even remember saying it.

But it's a book that's gonna be kind of inspired by, I go for the most pretentious inspirations, "Ulysses" by James Joyce, which each chapter is in a different style.

So basically, I'm talking about different chapters of life and events that happened.

So I'm gonna endeavor to, you know, to execute this, you know, this giant book.

And we'll see what comes of it.

- This idea of each chapter a different style.

You know, as an artist, you know, we evolve.

As people, we evolve.

We get past what we were when we were 16 years old.

And hopefully, with a little reflection, we get better every day with what we're trying to do.

And I know that your art style is probably different from what it was when you were 16.

So maybe as you're looking back and thinking, "I can draw it in that style I had when I was 16," or, "I'm gonna give it that Marvel style "when I'm talking about Marvel," is it difficult for you to tap back into that 16-year-old mindset?

Or is it easier because you have, you know, I'm assuming four or five years experience from that point where you're able to look at it and say, you know, "I can do it because I understand what it requires now "because I'm a professional artist."

- I mean, one reason why it's gonna be very easy for me to tap into it is I kept all that stuff.

So I mean, I've got artwork from when I was that age.

And I remember making a comic that was based on a movie that I saw that I really liked called "Black Belt Jones" with Jim Kelly from "Enter the Dragon," a big Afro, martial arts guy.

And basically, that's what it was.

It was this guy.

He gets this James Bond-ish kind of assignment and winds up on a cruise ship fighting against a guy dressed in a Cobra outfit and falling in love with a, you know, beautiful Asian super spy.

And I did half the book, and I decided that one of the other things that's gonna be a part of this project is me finishing that story, you know, 40 years later basically picking up where I left off as if no time had gone by.

But, of course, visually, a lot of things.

I learned a lot in all this time.

My animation years, which came later, were a really great school to learn how to change your style on every single assignment.

Because very few things are really original.

So at one point, whatever was popular, that would be the style they wanted us to draw in.

They wanted something that was Simpsons-esque or Pee-wee-esque.

Just add esque to everything, and that basically tells you what it is, whatever was popular in that moment.

It was also just a great challenge to be able to change styles for whatever particular project I had to do.

And in the meantime, I was also coming up with my own personal style for various comics that I was interested in creating.

And I created them.

- I know with my students here at UNC Pembroke, you know, if I'm giving them criticism of a project that they're working on, they might take it personally.

They might say, "Well, you just don't get it."

Or they might think that a criticism of what they've presented to me is a criticism of them as a person.

Somehow, by pointing out that you needed to do this rather than that diminishes them in their minds.

So when you're 16, when you're in animation later on, how do you sort of balance what somebody's saying with that ego that we all have?

I mean, the younger we are, the stronger our ego is.

We always seem to know better.

- Oh yeah.

- So how do you sort of balance that and take what they're saying with that grain of salt and also with that, "You know what, "they're trying to help me."

- That grain of salt was completely unnecessary when I would see the pages that John Romita would be turning in, and this is the person who's telling me what I can fix about my artwork and make it better.

So there wasn't even a minute that I even thought not to listen to the advice given.

Because you could tell it wasn't coming from a mean-spirited place or anything like that.

You know, a lot of the most popular artists at the time at Marvel were a lot of young artists.

And they could be rude in their critiques or whatever because they don't wanna be bothered.

Whereas it was always the veterans, these kind of warmhearted Marvel cartoonists who, you know, everyone has seen their work, they were the ones that I just completely appreciated a moment of their time.

So yeah, if you're gonna show your artwork to someone who's a great professional, you have to, you know, grow up a little bit.

You can't take it personally, you know.

Because, you know, I knew this was for my own good, you know, some of these things.

Yeah, it's all in the attitude of the person as well.

'Cause there's some, you know, comics greats who are also famous for being, you know, vicious in their critiques of these young kids.

But at the same time, I mean, in a comic book convention situation where they're presenting their work and sometimes the kids don't have any idea how to speak respectfully to an elder and all that kind of thing as well, it kind of goes both ways.

So I was extremely fortunate.

Like Neal Adams was famous for eviscerating folks.

But he was just super encouraging to me when I was a kid.

And I, you know, never forgot that.

Steve Ditko, for example, was very warm.

He's famously cold, but he was very, very warm to me and even put up with some of my, you know, teenage knucklehead antics.

When I first met him and I asked him if he would sign a comic book that he had just done, he said, "Well, sure kid."

And I reached into my drawer and I had five more copies.

And I said, "Can you sign these too?"

And I look back at that like, you know, boy, he had all the patience in the world.

But he actually burst out laughing when he saw me do that.

Like I said, I'd blunder into situations.

And so, it was very, very fortunate that I blundered into the right situations and not the wrong ones.

- Working in animation, working for a client, you know, it's less about you and it's more about the product.

You know, how do you sort of temper the fact that you know you could do a better job, but the client says, "Oh no, that's exactly what we want."

- They're paying.

[Terence and Lance laugh] So, I mean basically, that was all I thought about.

I mean, I always loved animation, but I never wanted to pursue it from my own ends.

But it became a means to an end because there was lots of work at the time.

It was a period...

I started in animation in '87.

And the very first job I worked on was Madonna's film, "Who's That Girl."

I started there as a messenger.

My job was delivering, you know.

I saw another opportunity that looked just like Marvel.

They were in production on "Pee-wee's Playhouse."

So they had all of the props and things from the television show in showcases, just like they had all the props and images at Marvel when I was there.

So I saw an opportunity.

And within about a week or two, I wound up becoming an inker on Madonna's film, "Who's That Girl."

That led to 100 television commercials, music videos for other folks, like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, film titles, storyboards, album covers, a whole bunch of things.

But, you know, it was kind of an adventure.

And at that time in New York, there was a lot of work.

It was a very fertile environment.

And you would be able to jump from one project to another one over the course of weeks and wind up seeing the same folks toiling away on these jobs.

And now, everything has moved to California.

So all of my friends are, you know, most of the friends that I met there are not even in New York anymore.

They've all moved off to the other side of the planet.

But it was a great time, very creative.

And MTV had started their offices.

So they had their own animation studio there where I worked for a few years on various cartoons like "Daria" and "Spy Groove" and an adaptation of Peter Bagge's "Hate," a bunch of different things.

And also, I worked at Nickelodeon on Bill Cosby's kid show, "Little Bill," doing character design on a lot of the characters and learning how to use Photoshop on the job.

Which was great, they paid me to learn how to use this.

And I took it and applied it to my comics after leaving there.

- Coming to Marvel in the '80s when everything is still pen, paper, brush, board, all this traditional tools, I'm wondering how you made that transition.

So it seems pretty early on, you were adopting this new technology, Photoshop and maybe some of the other programs.

So as you are working now, are you just strictly digital or are you also going back to the traditional, you know, hands-on an actual piece of whether it's canvas or board?

- I never stopped drawing on paper.

I mean, and that was the thing that was exciting to me about a drawing is being able to with just a few lines create an image.

And I admire artists who have the patience to do extremely realistic work and all of that for hours.

I mean, I like to just jump on it and get there and move on and tell the story.

At the time I learned at Art and Design High School, they taught us with pen and ink and with brush.

And so that's how I learned how to function.

But I always loved markers.

And I grew up also around a lot of graffiti artists.

This was late '70s, early '80s.

So it was the moment where hip hop was being born, which was rap music, graffiti art and break dancing.

So you had these three strings of storytelling that are basically doing the same thing but in different ways.

And so, those were the kids that I grew up around and that was the environment.

And in Art and Design, it was very common to see these hard-covered sketchbooks that graffiti artists would do their magnificent designs using design markers and Prismacolor and these really bright and glowing colors as well.

And so, I was immediately drawn to markers.

So, you know, even when I was there, I mean, I knew how to draw with a brush and a pen, but I always preferred markers.

And so Photoshop, when it came along, I mean, if it didn't exist, I would've found a way to invent it or to find someone who could invent it, because it was everything that I wanted.

'Cause I love collage.

And my favorite thing to draw are people.

I love drawing people.

And I can draw other things with reference or whatever, but they don't just pour outta me the way that character designs do, the way that simple images do.

And I always wanted to mix my drawings with photographs or with geometric shapes.

And that's what Photoshop was perfect for.

And then there was the "X-Factor," which was to me the most wonderful thing ever created in the world of comics, which was Zipatone and, you know, dots and dashes and lines and cutting those out.

Before I moved on to Photoshop, I basically always used those tones because I just loved the way they popped off the page.

And, you know, one of the few actual printed comic things that I worked on was when I was an assistant editor on the adaptation of "Blade Runner" that was by Al Williamson and Archie Goodwin, of course, one of the greatest writers ever.

My job was, a few of the pages were done by Ralph Reese, who's also another one of my artistic heroes.

But my job was to put the Zipatone in that he had indicated on that page.

I hope I didn't mess up his pages too bad, 'cause I was, you know, a teenager.

Couldn't be trusted to drive, let alone to put Zipatone on these professionals' work.

But it was a pleasant experience.

And like I said, I just loved cutting and pasting all that stuff.

And eventually scanned all my Zipatone into Photoshop and just used it with the tool.

The great fun of making comics is making comics.

All the rest of the stuff is downhill probably, you know, when you see it in print after a few years and you say, "Oh, I could've done this differently or..." But you have this one feeling when you've just completed a book where it's like, you feel like you're on top of the world for approximately an hour and a half.

[laughs] But it's worth it.

It's worth it for that.

- You have to love making comics to make comics.

Because it is such a labor intensive, such a time intensive way to tell a story.

It is so satisfying when you get that page and you complete it and you know where you're going to start on the next page.

And then when you get to do the details, like putting in the Zipatone and just place it, I mean, it's so much fun.

But also, it is so time consuming that by the time you finish a book, maybe that first couple of pages you look at compared to the last few pages, you can't feel satisfied with it.

So there's always that desire to keep going.

As you are, you know, moving on in your career and you're doing different styles and different types of comics, are you still experiencing that same sort of like, "Ah nuts, I could have done that better?"

- Definitely.

I mean, yeah, we see our mistakes before anyone else does I think.

I mean, I guess that depends.

But, you know, definitely I see mine, you know, definitely.

But also recently, because I've been printing a lot of images that I've done over the years on Instagram, I'm noticing that some of the ones that I hadn't seen in decades were better than I thought they were.

You know, maybe part of it was also me being overly critical on my skills at the teenage.

But some of the things were a little bit, you know, precocious, you know, and weren't as bad as I was maybe telling myself at the time.

I mean, the biggest thing that helped me develop as an artist was listening to the advice of John Romita and of Marie Severin especially, who is my favorite cartoonist.

'Cause she could do everything.

She could do, you know, these, you know, Cole Comics with her brother, these "King Cole" Robert E. Howard books.

And she was the greatest humor cartoonist ever to walk the face of the earth, the greatest colorist, you know, in the world.

And she's one of the people who I just spent the most time.

She was the most, you know, just willing to encourage me to stick around, just don't get in the way of anything, and had a great dynamite sense of humor.

But the things that they told me were, well one: It's not what you put into a drawing, it's what you leave out that makes it a good drawing.

You know, that whole idea about, you know, minimalism.

And Miles Davis had the same principle in music and jazz about his music, and so did Picasso about his painting.

And so, you know, basically it's not what you put in, it's what you leave out.

And the other one was: If you wanna get better at anything, you have to do it every day.

So draw every day.

If you wanna be a better race car driver, you gotta drive every day.

You wanna be a better chef, you have to cook every day.

And so what that led me to was filling up two volumes of hard-covered sketchbooks, you know, those same graffiti sketchbooks that my friends were passing around in the lunchroom in high school.

I started to fill them up to the point now where I've got over 80 volumes of sketchbooks because I filled up two of them every year.

And it's like an Encyclopedia Tooks, Lance Tooks, of, you know, I can look at 'em almost like a diary.

And I can know what I was thinking when I did this particular drawing or what was popular at the time as far as like being inspired to draw creatures that were inspired by popular movies or comics at the time.

And yeah, and I still do this.

I still fill these books up.

You know, living here in Madrid, my apartment is too small, so I can't really call it an art studio.

But one day, I decided all of Madrid was going to be my studio.

So I started to take my artwork on my back and go to bars.

And I, you know, would be sketching in the window and inspired by the energy of the place and young people coming in and going and having their conversations or their disagreements.

But I would be that person in the corner doing my sketches or whatever.

Sometimes, I would show the drawings to the people I was sketching.

Nobody ever interrupted me or anything in any way because I was there for the collaboration as well.

As a result of me being this weird, strange guy that's in the bar drawing, I met a lot of people.

I got a lot of jobs that I wasn't imagining.

Like I became an actor in short films.

And I was in four short films and four TV commercials.

Became a model, I modeled in stuff, you know.

I've done voiceovers for museums.

So that if you were to go to the Prada Museum and you put on the headphones in English, you'll hear, "Georgia O'Keeffe is one of the most respected artists "of the 20th century."

And did that at the Thyssen-Bornemisza as well, and also at the Museo Athletic de Bilbao, which is a Football Club Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

But did it in a little basement studio here in Madrid.

But there've been so many things that I've blundered into that basically wound up when you string them all together, they, you know, they make a book.

And so that's the idea behind it.

- It's funny what you can step into when you just keep an open mind and don't fear something different or something unexpected.

And it seems like you've been able to keep that excitement and creativity and that desire just by being willing to do something like move to Madrid.

If the folks watching at home wanted to find out more about you and your work, is there a place on the web that they can go?

- Well, they can just Google search, and there's tons and tons of images.

There's also Instagram that I keep pretty regularly.

I used to have a website, which was lancetooks.com.

That doesn't exist anymore, because I don't know if anyone goes to websites anymore, of that kind anyway.

I also had a blog spot, but, you know, just a simple Google search of Lance Tooks will find tons and tons of images, some compromising and embarrassing and others entertaining, I hope.

- Well, Lance, it's been a very fast and entertaining half hour.

I wanna thank you so much for staying up late to talk with me today.

- Ah, I'm up all night anyway.

So this is, I'm just getting started.

But very happy to meet you and thanks for the invite.

This was the first time I've ever talked about comics on a website or a place that was devoted to comics.

- Thanks to everyone at home for watching "Comic Culture."

We will see you again soon.

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