[exciting music] [exciting music continues] [exciting music continues] [exciting music continues] - Hello, and welcome to "Comic Culture".

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

My guest today is artist, Rick Leonardi.

Rick, welcome to "Comic Culture".

- Thank you for having me.

It's wonderful.

- Rick, you are known I guess as one of the best storytellers in comics, with a career that spanned, I don't want to say how many decades, but at least going back to the 1980s.

You know, as you are looking at your body of work, working on a title maybe like "Cloak and Dagger" or "Amazing Spiderman" to the work that you're doing recently at DC Comics with "Batman", what sort of progression do you see in your ability to tell a story, and how you've applied the tricks along the way?

- As I get further into the career, I start to toy with the idea of teaching storytelling, and I've done seminars, and I've gone to various institutions of higher learning to try to convey some stuff, and I find that so much of what I've learned is now sort of instinctive, and I can't exactly articulate why I make the decisions I make anymore.

So but yeah, that basis, the founding principle is really to always remember that as a penciller, your job is to kind of stand between the writer and his white hot moment of inspiration and the reader, who wasn't there when that happened, who has no clue what's going on, hasn't got the script in front of them, and may very well be new to the title.

So you have to put yourself in the position of that reader, and walk that reader into the book, and through the book, from one panel to the next, leading them by the hand, and try not to confuse them.

That's basically the job.

- And you know, a lot of people will think of the art side of a penciller, where they're thinking about how well something is rendered, and I see a lot of modern comics where the artist has really put together a beautiful image, but not necessarily a clear story, or a compelling story, and maybe one where the characters don't have that life, that acting doesn't seem to ring true.

And that's something that you've been able to convey through your figures, and when you are laying out a page, how much of it is perhaps the design, and how much of it is how can these characters best tell the story?

- That's exactly kind of an endemic problem, and it is worsening over time, 'cause I think a lot of the lore is getting lost, especially at the editorial level.

But yeah, allied to what I was saying just a minute ago, pose is part of your characterization, facial expression, obviously, but also fighting style, the way the characters interact.

All these things feed into each character's individuality.

The smart penciller uses all that, and keeps it in top of mind.

Nightwing doesn't fight the way Batgirl does.

And so on and so on.

Spiderman has totally different body shape, totally different possibilities in terms of folding him up and triple jointing him than, say, Superman does.

I'm about to start a Superman card set.

I'm actually fairly dreading it, because there's just not that much you can do with him.

He's like, he's Superman.

You can't bend him over, can't fold him over like you can Spiderman, for example.

These are all the kinds of things that come into play as a penciller that sort of escape that first blush impression that people have of the job.

Unfortunately, it isn't drawing just the first thing that pops into your head.

Alas, there are rules, and there are restrictions.

- When you are getting, when you are starting a new assignment, how much time, if any, do you spend sort of getting to know the characters, or the way that you wish to draw them, whether it's researching what someone else has done, or just kinda maybe doing some sketching to get the feel for what Wolverine should be like when you're drawing his face out of costume, so that way you can be true to yourself, and also true to what the audience is expecting?

- I've always envied those pencillers who appear to have a wealth of planning sketches and studies, and stuff like that.

Unfortunately, I kinda dive right in, and figure it out as I go along, and usually that's a function, frankly, of the shortness of time that's available.

I'd love to sort of dub around, and work out the finer details, but usually don't have the time for it.

What you find up in the end, in my case, is you wind up with long boxes of comics that you've produced, and these little shorter boxes, of three by five layouts for each book.

Each book, each page, has a three by five little piece of sketch paper with a plan for it.

And those short boxes are far more precious to me than the long boxes are now.

So that's where all the thinking is.

- You know, I spoke once to Lee Weeks, we talked about sometimes you work on a drawing so much, you kinda snuff the magic out of it.

There's that loss of spontaneity as you kind of push to get something the way that you think it should go versus that initial three by five thumbnail sketch that you might have been doing.

- Right.

- So how do you balance between that spontaneity on that small sheet of paper to something that's going to be drawn, what, 10 by 15, and then eventually inked and published?

- Oh, that's a tough question.

Um, yeah.

A lot of times, I think that actually explains a big portion of why those shorter, short boxes of planning sketches are more valuable to me than the finished product, but I do have a rule, as far as the thumbnails go.

I mean, if I'm working on a panel, and I can't figure out how to do it, if I've been attacking a panel the same way with the same sort of camera angle, and the same view, the same distance from the subject matter, and I can't quite get it to work, after three to five attempts, if I've been scrubbing it out furiously, after the fifth attempt, it's time to start over, just move the camera someplace else, and do something else.

I think overwork is always a danger.

It's hard, really, if you've got the time to overwork a panel, to overwork an entire book, for example, in comic books, you're probably doing it wrong, because this is all about volume, over produced in a very short period of time.

I tell the kids, kids I do lessons for, I always tell them, your best drawing is gonna be your next drawing.

So, move on.

You know, if it comes to that, you can actually just take the drawing you've been working on and crumple it up, force yourself to crumple it up, throw it over your shoulder, and start over.

That's the way to break out of preciousness.

- You know, you're talking about preciousness, and this is, again, I've noticed over the past 20 years or so, maybe going back to the 90s, where the new hot artist would come in, and they would have a book that would sell a million copies, let's say, and they couldn't get a book done on time because they were putting in so much detail, and overworking, and so much patching, and whatnot.

So as someone who has a career going back to the 80s, again, at Marvel, where you are hitting those deadlines or you're not getting a paycheck, how do you look at what somebody is doing versus making sure that you're able to get 22 pages done in a month, and still be satisfied with what's on that page?

- When I first interviewed at Marvel back in January of 1980, I was shown, one of the stops I made as I was making a tour of the bullpen, was John Romita Sr's studio.

He had a little office off to the side.

He was the art director at the time, so he had his own little lair.

And I was shown in there, and he said, "Kid, these are okay."

He was looking at my stuff.

"The secret to success, though, in this business is in any kind of three by, any kind of five, seven panel page, any kind of grid of that sort that you're working on, and that's gonna be your rule, basically.

Five, six, seven page panel.

Only one of those panels should be a stretch for you.

Only one of those panels should be some sort of artistic reach.

The rest of the panels on the page should be repetoire panels," is what he called them.

They should be panels that you can do in your sleep and knock off, they're almost reflexive, you know, two shots, foreground, background, conversational shots, maybe a silhouette just for fun.

Only one panel on the page should be a test for you of any artistic merit or ability, otherwise you're just gonna get bogged down.

It's gonna eat you alive.

If every panel on the page is some sort of fight, you're gonna be there all day.

So that was his rule, and I tried to stick with it.

Shooter almost in the, later interview with Shooter, but Shooter used the word "facility", and I never quite figured out 'til much later what he meant by that, but I think what he meant was simply being able to flash through two or three or four panels before finding one that might be a little bit of a reach or a stretch.

And I just haven't been able to internalize those sorts of rules, and live by them, and I'm still alive 45 years later, but.

It's tough.

- You know, it's funny, because I think about my own work in television, and in those early days, I will tell you, I was a bit of a doofus to those around me, especially if they had criticism, critiques, something that they thought they were helping me with, I might be resistant to that.

And it wasn't until years later that you start to see there was merit in what those people were saying, and perhaps you should slow down and give pause, and think about those kind of words.

So as the young artist going into Marvel, and hearing something from John Romita, how much of it is, "Yeah, old man, I'm not gonna listen to you," and how much of it is- [Rick laughing] "Wow, this is Buddha up on the top of the hill, and I'm gonna listen to what this guru is telling me"?

- Well, it was John Romita Sr. And I kinda worshiped the man, so.

Yeah, there are examples of that.

Now I don't know, this is probably apocryphal, but Shooter, again, loves to tell the story about Frank Miller, when Frank Miller first broke into the comics, and everyone, of course, knows him for his panel layouts, and his groundbreaking storytelling, and all that kinda stuff from "Daredevil" onward, but there's an appreciable body of work that Miller produced that was quite a bit more conventional.

You know, with Shooter looking over his shoulder, and making sure that he was internalizing the basics, getting the rules right, before he went out and broke them, which is the way Shooter characterizes it.

You gotta know the rules before you break them.

And you know, could be a pile of rubbish, but it's a good story.

And there's a lesson in there, too.

Yeah, you do have to know the rules.

You do have to know the fundamentals of storytelling, you have to internalize that idea that you're the advocate for the reader.

If you don't feel the reader's bafflement, looking at what you've done, if you're not conscious that you've just lost your audience going from panel A to panel B to panel C, because you've done something wild and artistic, you're just not doing the job right.

- What happens to the young artist when suddenly the editors want you on their book, and not just any book.

Maybe it's "The Amazing Spiderman" when they're bringing in this new costume that's going to be obviously boosting sales, or when the writer of "The X-Men" says "I want you on the team."

How do you sort of keep your head from swelling, and make sure that you're not panicking that I've gotta deliver the goods, or else, you know what, next week I'm gonna be doing the back of the cereal boxes?

- The rule that Shooter always promulgated, I'm amazed at how often his name's coming up in this interview.

But he always used to say that we don't need you to be better than our worst guy, we need you to be as good as our best guy.

So yeah, when you get invited onto a book like "The X-Men", and the reason I was invited onto "The X-Men" at all was because Marvel had gone to the double time schedule in the summertime.

They were putting out "X-Men"'s every two weeks instead of every month.

So it was a 15 issue year, basically.

And Mark Sylvester, he goes, "There's no way you could do that."

So that opened the door to a lot of noobs like me to come in, and knock off the occasional "X-Men".

That said, that was a pretty fast track, and you had to have your best shoes on, and no fooling around.

You're going.

I got lucky, too, in that this opened the door to a lot of inkers who otherwise wouldn't have had "X-Men" exposure, so like P. Craig Russell, Kent Williams did that wonderful "X-Men" job.

And I got, who else?

Bill Sienkiewicz inked the new "Mutants" of mine.

Bill Sienkiewicz, come on.

So with that kind of crowd, you really had to bring your A-game, and you knew it, so not that hard, really.

Traveling that company, you don't slouch.

You just stand up straight and do your work.

- It's funny because your career, like we've said, and I hate to keep going back to the 80s, but it goes back to the 80s.

- Goes back to the 80s.

- And you've been working pretty much nonstop that length of time.

So as flavors change, and audiences may get tired of an artist.

You hear about the rising star who burns out after three or four years.

How do you sort of maintain the discipline to keep working on a book month after month, year after year, still getting the pages done, but also making sure that newer readers when they come in aren't going to think that you are either not the right fit for what they're looking for, or not too much of an old fogey?

- Two answers to that.

One is, and there's an interesting cross check of this.

It goes back to this issue of storytelling.

You know, readers, at the end of the day, yeah, they want flashy page design, and some dazzling rendering.

But they also wanna understand the story.

And to the extent that you're able to tell the story in such a fashion that they're satisfied with it, and not confused by it, I think there's always gonna be a market for you.

The way to check that, or the way that I've seen it demonstrated over time, is the occasional editor will call up and ask for your help in thumbnailing out someone else's pencils, because that someone else can draw, they can dream, amazing, but can't tell a story, and he needs a little help.

He needs a little touch-up.

So I've had that happen more than once, and it kinda demonstrates to me, I think, that there's two skillsets, and the one that's really more important is that storytelling skillset.

In answer to the question of am I getting stale, or too old for the job, it's possible.

This "Death in the Family: Robin Lives" thing, the editor, concerned, was explicit in saying that they were really looking for a retro look, they were looking for somebody who could hark back to the Aparo days.

So yeah, I may be approaching kind of an emeritus status here, whether I want to or not.

It happens.

Bound to happen sooner or later.

- Well, I certainly wasn't implying that you had entered that stage, but it is interesting when an editor is looking for someone with that retro look, and it is an iconic book, is there, I mean, "Death in the Family" is one of those books that is sort of, for a comic fan, the death of Robin, Jason Todd at the hands of the Joker, the victim of a 1-800 number, and apparently only by a few hundred votes.

- Yeah.

- Stepping into that storyline now, 30 some odd years later, is there any intimidation?

I know you are a professional who's been doing this for a bit, but is there intimidation in looking at this, and saying, "Man, I've got some big shoes to fill."

- Not so much that.

I was dead curious to see what they were gonna do with it, though.

It's a what if story, but it's a what if story with a big difference, because it does answer kind of a fairly pointed question, like, what if you, the readership, had voted the other way?

What would the result have been, and would you be satisfied with it?

So there was a, I think there was a real opportunity to tell a story that it wasn't just kinda like a what if, could be, could not be, whatever.

Whatever story we told here would, in fact, be in a weird kind of way, canon.

This is what would have happened if it'd gone the other way.

This is not just some random tree branch, this is an actual large tree branch here.

So I was kinda curious just how ambitious they were gonna be with it.

In the end, I think DC played it safe, and wound up with kind of a palatable ending from the corporate point of view, in the sense that the wheel turned, balance is restored, there's always gonna be a Batman, there's always gonna be a Joker.

Okay, you know.

I guess I could sort of see that.

Spoilers, if you haven't read it.

Unfortunately, you know, I think they kind of missed an opportunity to do something really different, with quite a bit more of interest.

So my feeling.

There's a much longer, I have a much longer story to tell about this, a much longer impression to share, if we had time, but you know, I'll leave it at that for right now.

- Well you know, one thing that has changed over the course of time with comics is that modern artists are not necessarily working on boards with ink.

They might be working on screens with pixels.

And I'm wondering if you are still the traditionalist working on the Bristol board, or if you've made that move over, and maybe you're using Procreate or Clip Studio, or something like that.

- Without getting too tedious, I have kind of a hybrid approach.

I'll still do thumbnails, like these, on pieces of paper with a pencil, and then I'll take those and blow them out to 11 by 17, light box them onto an actual piece of Bristol board, pencil the page in the traditional way.

Then back to the machines.

What I'll do is I'll feed the pencil original through a Kinko's copier, or an industrial copier, and copy that pencil black line onto another piece of Bristol board, and that will serve as sort of the ground of my ink, so-called.

I'll go back into that with brush or pad, and trick out the larger black areas, and clean up a lot of the artifact that is the result of the copying process.

But that results in what I will call an inked original.

That, in turn, will get scanned and made into a file in Procreate, and then I'll clean that up even further, and do even more modifications in Procreate.

Then Procreate will allow you to do screen effects, it will allow you to, something I do fairly frequently is chop heads off, shrink 'em down, blow 'em up, because my proportions are usually wrong.

So yeah, there's all kinds of digital stuff, digital trickery that's available in that last final step.

And what winds up getting sent to DC is a file, and not a piece of Bristol board.

From the collector's market, it makes things interesting, because now there's gonna be a pencil original of the page, and an inked original of the page.

And this digital file, it may look nothing like it, so, not my lane.

Not my problem.

- You know, it brings up a couple of, to me, interesting points.

One is that this seems like it's a lot more work than it was 20 years ago when maybe you just had to sit there and erase a little bit, and maybe paste a new head on.

- Yeah, and sort of pass it off to the inker, and let the inker save your bacon, which happened more times than I'd care to admit.

Yeah, I went into it for sure with the attitude that this was gonna be some sort of big time saver, but it's not.

The process, I've essentially cut out an inker, for example, in that the candid machine down at my local Kinko's is taking my pencil original and making a black and white version of it on a fresh piece of Bristol.

So there goes the inker's paycheck right there.

That's sad to me, in a way, because one of the great things about the traditional way of working where you had an inker to resort to was you got that inker's second point of view on everything.

And in the best of worlds, that inker is an artist himself, or herself, with as much stature as your own, and you wound up with a hybridized result that was stronger than the original.

Doesn't happen so much anymore.

Inkers are hard to come by, and as you say, everybody's working digital.

- Conventions are a huge part of, I guess, the income for an artist, especially because you can go and sell an original page, so is this something that you're able to kind of flip, like hey, here's the pencil, and then hey, here's the ink, and then let's not look at the issue that we can see the differences between the two?

- I'm finding that the tide is running the other direction, now that we have, now that you look at it and say to yourself, wow, you have two streams of originals now to pick from, if you're a collector.

That's true.

On the other hand, there are so many people now who are working entirely digitally that, in fact, there's less and less original art, physical original art, on the market.

It's driving up prices to ridiculous heights, and it's caused me, actually, to exit the market entirely.

I don't know how to price these things.

I'm not making original art that I care to part with, at this point.

Either because I think that I don't really like it, or it's older stuff that was inked in the traditional way, and I'm having less and less of it, and I'm certainly not getting any more of it.

So I'm just gonna hang onto what I've got.

So, sorry about that, but original art, if you want a sketch, that's one thing, but original art, it's hard to come by.

- Well Rick, they are telling us that we are out of time.

I wanna thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk with me today.

- Well it was a pleasure.

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

We will see you again soon.

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