[heroic music] [heroic music continues] [heroic music continues] [heroic 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 writer artist Rick Parker.

Rick, welcome to "Comic Culture."

- Oh, well, thank you very much, Terence.

It's a pleasure to be here.

- Rick, you have a long and storied career in comics, but you are still creating new and interesting books today.

And I understand you've got a new book that's just about to be released or if it hasn't been released already called "Drafted."

So can you tell us a little bit about that particular book?

- This is the first book that I have both illustrated and written, and I've been working in comics for 50 years.

So I would advise anybody if there's something you want to do, don't wait till you're 70 to start working on it.

But yeah, it's a story, it's a true story of a young kid from Georgia who gets drafted into the army during the height of the Vietnam War, and that was me, that kid was me.

- Now, I saw on one of your social media posts that there's some stuff in this that is really uncomfortable.

I think there's a scene where your character has to crawl through a tunnel, but is going through backwards.

- Oh, yeah.

You know, I refused to go down there head first because there was a lot of dead animals, and I think somebody had taken a, urinated into the thing or pooped into it, I don't know?

But I went down there feet first, and then when I entered the tunnel, I had to crawl feet first through the tunnel.

Not the smartest move I've ever made, but, you know, I got out, somebody helped me out at the end.

There were a lot of uncomfortable things in that book, Terence, but I would, that's probably number 17 on the list actually.

- So what makes you go back and look at that particular time in your life?

I mean, it was, I guess about 50 years ago or so, maybe a little bit more.

- It was 55 years ago.

I worked in comics from starting about 1977, and after a few years I kind of fell in love with comics.

I was really in, when I went to New York, I was going to be a painter or a sculptor, and I was getting my work in shows and I was doing good work but I could never make any money at it.

So I had met a girl who worked at Marvel Comics, and when I went up there with her one time, I thought, wow, what a great place to work, but I didn't want to try to compete with somebody who I was dating.

But anyway, she got married and moved to Arizona and then I realized, wow, I could, maybe I could go up there and they'd give me a job.

But I was still thinking of Marvel as just a place to make money, I wasn't really.

I'd read comics and comic newspaper strips and things like that when I was a kid, but I wasn't, my ambition was not to be a comic book artist, but I love, I love the stuff, but I hadn't really read comics since I was a, you know, a teenager.

But after a number of years and working at Marvel, I just got more and more interested in comics and I kind of fell in love with it.

And I was lettering the "Spider-Man" strip for Stan Lee, and I was getting excited about it, you know, I mean, I'd lettered comic books, you know, other comic books, and I won't name any names here, but I didn't get all that excited.

But for whatever reason, working on Stan Lee stuff, probably had a lot to do with the fact that it was drawn by John Romita who I thought was a great, everybody acknowledges was one of the great "Spider-Man" artists.

And Stan, of course, was a great writer, and I wanted to do something, so I wanted to do a comic strip.

I thought you can do a lot with a comic strip.

So I created a comic strip that I didn't show to anybody.

I mean, I wasn't the type of person that wanted to just do something and show it to somebody right away.

I was kind of trying to be, you know, more reserved.

But anyway, I kind of always wanted to do something in comics, and I did a number of, illustrated a number of.

I did the "Beavis and Butt-Head" comic book, which was a great thrill.

I'd worked there for 15 years at the time I got that project, and it was a great experience for me.

But somehow it, you know, it's just not the same as when you write the material and illustrate it yourself, you know?

So I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, but I did, I worked with Harvey Pekar in 2009 and 2010 I was one of the artists that was illustrating stories for Harvey, and I realized, wow, I'd like to do something autobiographical.

And I thought, I looked at my own life.

I was about 70 at the time, and I thought, well, the army was a very interesting period.

I was a young man then and there was a lot of change that took place in my own way of looking at the world.

And even when I was in the army, there were many times in which I was experiencing things that I was thinking, this is unbelievable.

I'm gonna have to tell somebody about this one day.

I'm gonna have to write a book about this or something.

You know, little did I know it was gonna take me 50 years and it would be, you know, a comic book.

But I spent a couple of years practicing my figure drawing because I wasn't really all that comfortable with my figure drawing.

So before I started on the project I had written, I have a blog with 150 autobiographical stories, and many of them had to do with the army.

So I just took some of those stories that I had already written several years earlier and adapted them into comic book, into, you know, words and pictures.

It took me about five years, I guess, to finish the project and I work seven days a week, you know, 12 hours a day, so very labor intensive.

Of course, I have to do other things, you know, you gotta walk the dogs and, you know, buy groceries and things like that.

But it was a lot of work and it felt really good to finally get something of my own created, you know, because I always wanted to do something of my own.

And now that I've had a taste of what it's like to create my own book, I'd like to try to do another one and another one, you know, as long as I can keep going because it's taken me a long time to find what was right for me.

I'm very grateful to have found that before it's too late, you know?

- One thing that I find so interesting about comics is that you can tell just about any story that you want.

Now you mentioned that you had written up a number of these experiences as blog posts.

So as you are adapting something that is I'm gonna read it and there's the description in it, versus I'm going to condense that down to the six or seven images that will make the most sense on this page with just the right words that, you know, are going to fill in that gap that is required.

So how do you kind of shift gears from, you know, what we would consider the prose style writing to the cartoonist style writing where it's pictures and words in combination?

- Well, that is an excellent question, and I wish I had an easy answer for it.

The only thing I can say is that I think that I am blessed.

I have a great intuition in terms of creative stuff.

And, you know, I didn't go to school to study, you know, comic art or anything like that.

I guess I would, you know what, read the material and I was very familiar with it, and you'd get an image in your head of something that you thought you wanted to draw.

And then I would see which of these words can I leave out?

If the information is conveyed in the picture, you don't really need to have the words to reinforce that.

There are a million different ways you could do it too.

I mean, I might not do the same exact thing, you know, in the morning of one day that I would've done a day later.

You know, it just depends on a lot of things that are going on at that time.

But it's, you know, it's doable, you know?

It's a doable.

You try not to repeat the same.

There's no really need to.

I try to use as few words as possible to communicate as much information as possible.

What I discovered about myself was that I'm not good at taking something complicated and making it simple.

What I'm good at is I'm good at taking something simple and making it very complicated.

The whole thing's a learning process, you know, the more you do of anything the, you know, the more you learn and hopefully, I won't say easy is not the word, easier it becomes is not the word.

But the more the confident you become and the decisions that you make.

And it really is, it's about making, you have to make a million little decisions and some of them you don't even realize that you're making them as you're making them.

My approach is very intuitive as opposed to trying to plan everything out very carefully and then go ahead and then do that.

I have this kind of, just throw myself in there and see what happens approach.

I don't recommend that this is the best way for other people to work.

I think everybody has to find his or her own way of working.

What works best for you, that's what you should do.

But the stuff that I described is kind of the way I work, but my process is constantly evolving.

A lot of changes took place once I started using, when computers came in, I stopped drawing everything on one piece of paper.

You know, prior to that, all the pages were on one piece of paper, but I started drawing separate figures and scanning them, and then adding them and moving them around in the frame and overlapping and stuff like that.

- The digital art sphere has given creators so many new tools that we can tap into.

I mean, in the old days, if you screwed up one panel, you either had to start from scratch for the whole page, or you had to cut and paste something physically, literally a piece of paper on top of that image that you messed up to fix that.

- Right.

- Are you ever tempted as you're working digitally to just, you know, it's never good enough, you know, as you're working.

And do you have to sort of push yourself away from, you know, this panel's good enough for now and I can move on to the rest of the story?

- I've learned that perfection can sometimes be the enemy of the good.

And I think that one of the nice things about comics is it's a storytelling medium.

So you have to, I think you have to have a good story, and I think you have to tell the story well.

But as far as the art goes, I think that the readers, fortunately the readers cut you a lot of slack that, I mean, you know, I can't draw as well as a lot of the artists who are working today.

But I think that if I can tell the story and people don't get confused as they're reading the story, and they don't look at the figure on page 25 and say, "Wait a minute, is that the same guy that I was looking at three pages earlier?"

You know, you gotta keep things moving along and if I don't, if I'm not happy with something, I'll redraw it.

Or if something's not working, a panel is not working for me, I'll redraw it.

But what I mean by working for me is if I'm drawing a scene and it gives me the same feeling that I had or that I was hoping for, or reminds me of the situation that I was actually in.

If it feels right to me, that's good enough.

And also if there's something about the art that's bothering me, I'll redraw a figure or something like that, you know?

I mean, I try to, within reason, to make it, you know, I've gotta please myself.

If I expect anybody else is gonna like this, I've gotta like it myself first.

Hopefully do something that you love and hopefully maybe somebody else will at least like it.

- Now you talk about characters and trying to be consistent throughout.

One of the toughest things for even the best artist is trying to create a character that has, you know, a certain body language and, I guess, a way of acting.

So as you were, I guess, starting this project, did you see that evolution in your own characters that maybe you connected with them a little bit more, and maybe the buddy is going to be drawn a certain way because that reflects his personality.

Was it sort of that organic thing, or was it something where perhaps you're consciously saying, okay, I want to differentiate between the characters by giving them their own nuances and their own behaviors?

- I just drew the figures in a way that, you know, that sort of, it seemed to work for me.

I didn't put that, you know, I didn't really consciously put a lot of thought into it.

One of the nice things about doing a book about being in the army is that, like I was, you know, I got to draw myself over and over again and I was pretty familiar with, you know, drawing myself.

I had that part down pat.

Everybody's wearing pretty much the same clothes all the time, so I didn't have to worry about a million different kind of costumes and things like that.

So there were some things I think that made it that I didn't have to worry about too much and that was the costumes and things like that.

That would've, I remember when I was working at Marvel and I was lettering a "Transformers" job, and I remember thinking, "Oh my God, this poor artist has gotta draw all these complicated, you know, characters from all these different angles."

But, you know, my story has a lot of people in it, and it's got, you know, some machinery in it and, you know, people that are looking at stories of, you know, army, they're gonna expect a, you know, a rifle to look like a rifle.

So, I mean, I wasn't too cartoony there but, you know, my work is kind of a mixture, I think, in between cartoony and realistic, some hybrid of that.

But yeah, if it felt right to me, I would just go on to the next page.

- And, you know, you mentioned having to letter a page of "Transformers" where you have all these different characters.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Tom Orzechowski a few years back, and he was talking about when you letter a page that the superheroes out of their costume, that they're in their civilian garb, you never cover their hair because the hairstyle is how the reader will know that that's, you know, Wolverine versus, you know, Cyclops.

So when you were lettering a page, did you have sort of the same philosophy of how to make sure that the readers understood which character is which?

Or was this sort of something that was passed down generation to generation at Marvel?

- Well, fortunately, you know, for the most part, I would say that Marvel, the quality of the artists that worked at Marvel Comics, they were all really good at their jobs, and they knew that they had to leave a certain amount of space at the top of, generally the lettering is above the figures at the top of the page there was generally enough space.

And, you know, I lettered as small as I could without it being ridiculously small.

You know, all of my superhero lettering was done, you know, with using an Ames guide to draw guidelines so that the lettering wasn't all over the place the way it was, say, when I was doing "Beavis and Butt-Head."

I dispensed with the Ames guide completely and had more of a freeform organic lettering style that, you know, didn't use any guidelines at all.

You know, the artwork is there and, you know, you have to look at it.

You don't want to cover anyone's head for sure, and the hair on a person's head, if you draw two ovals on a piece of paper and you put two different hairstyles on them, it automatically starts leading people into thinking that, well, oh, this is Elvis Presley and this other person is, you know, Jesus, or, you know, whatever, you know?

Hair is one of the things that people notice right away.

It helps distinguish who that character is.

And, you know, it's one of the most important features, actually.

If I started drawing a picture of somebody, I would immediately look at the shape of the person's face.

You know, some people have more elongated heads, some people it seems like they're eyes are maybe not halfway down, but a little bit lower.

You don't want to exaggerate, I don't think.

I don't like to exaggerate too much to make it really caricature, you know, looking.

But the hair is really important.

And at first, I didn't know how to draw hair.

I remember a lot of the first characters that I started drawing comics for, like the "Watcher" for example.

He was the first character I remember drawing, and I picked him 'cause he didn't have any hair 'cause I wasn't really sure how to draw hair.

When I went to school to study art, I learned how to draw things by looking at them and drawing what I was looking at.

And that's really not how comic artists work.

You know, they have, you know, lots of different styles.

Some people are doing characters, you can tell they're trying to make them look like real people.

And then there's Jack Kirby who did comic characters that, yes, you could tell that they were based on real people, but they were comic book characters.

They were pure comic book characters.

There weren't people in the real world that looked like that but that was okay because it was a comic.

- No, it's great to hear stuff like that because, you know, there's a lot that goes into a comic page, and I think we tend to think of lettering as not as important as, let's say, you know, Jack Kirby's layout on that page, or what John Romita is doing with that Spider-Man figure, but we do read the lettering and it has to be done just right.

So as you are going from being one of the top letterers at Marvel working on, you know, "Spider-Man" whether it's the newspaper strip or the comic, how do you sort of make that pivot into convincing them that you are the right person to take over a new licensed property like "Beavis and Butt-Head?"

- When I was lettering from Marvel, if I'd finished a job and I'd call up the company and tell 'em that it's okay, send a messenger down, I finished this.

And while I was waiting for the messenger to come, I had the pages all inside of an 11 by 17 manila envelope.

And in the beginning, I just would write the editor's name on there that the project, that the envelope was supposed to be delivered to.

But then there was plenty of extra space on the envelope so I started doodling, you know, funny pictures on there because I've always liked to draw from the time that I was a little kid.

But my style was more humor style not superhero or art, you know, I didn't understand the whole thing with superheroes because, you know, when I was 18, I think that was the, or 16 was when "Spider-Man" came out and I'd already stopped reading comic books at that time.

So I was more, I grew up in kind of the "MAD Magazine" tradition, but I used to always do a lot of drawings and show them to, you know, on the envelopes.

And one day I went up to Marvel and they had these envelopes they'd ripped off the drawing I did, and they were plastering them on all the bulletin board or on the filing cabinets, and I thought, wow.

Anyway, there was a young assistant editor there who said, "Hey, I really like your work and if I ever get to be an editor here I'd like to work with you."

And he was a funny guy.

So when Marvel got the license to do "Beavis and Butt-Head" comic book, they hired him to, you know, be the editor of it and because he was the person that liked my work, I got to be that artist.

But there were a few people at Marvel who could have done a great job on it I think.

Marie Severin was working there at the time, she's a great cartoonist.

Alan Kupperberg was there and I think that, you know, they could have chosen him.

Hilary Barta was a freelancer for Marvel in those days.

He could have done a great job on it.

But I was there, you know, at the office and there's no substitute for being right there where people can see you and, you know, that probably gave me an advantage.

But he expressed an interest in wanting to work with me.

And that was great, finally, something came along that I was well-suited for.

But what I tell young artists, and if they'll listen and, you know, when you get to be an old guy, you start wanting to give advice to everybody, you know, especially the young people.

So here's what I would, here's the advice that I would tell people.

Do not wait for somebody to discover you.

Do not wait for somebody to recognize that you've got something to offer.

Do not wait to be invited or picked or chosen to do work on a project.

Figure out who you are, what kind of an artist you are, what you've got to, or writer, or writer and artist, and what you've got to offer and how you would do something.

And then just go ahead and give yourself permission to just do that and make it as good as it can possibly be.

So rather than wait to be invited to the party, you know, you become the party yourself.

And if you do anything good, somebody will recognize that and they will want you to do more of that type of thing.

But, you know, most people, I was, I don't know about most people, I was always waiting for somebody to discover me.

I was always waiting for somebody to say, "Oh, look what he can do."

But you know, just go ahead and do it and make it the best that you can and hopefully, you know, somebody will like it.

- I wanted to ask you about, I mean, "Beavis and Butt-Head" at the time are huge media figures making not only great ratings on TV, but the cover of "Rolling Stone" magazine and now their own comic series.

And I know that the first year or so the series is selling huge numbers.

So when you are working on a book that has that high of a profile, is there a lot of input from, let's say, Viacom, the parent company of the characters?

Or are you just, you know, free to, as long as they look good enough, we're not gonna get in the way?

- Yeah, I was surprised at how little, you know, that they wanted to become involved with it.

The thing that seemed to me that the only thing that was important to them was that the characters were on model.

As long as it looked like the characters, they didn't seem to care what you did with it.

And so I've always been the type of person that liked to go out on the limb to see how far I could go before it would break.

And so I kept, you know, wanting to see what I can get away with here.

And especially once, I think it was like issue 26 when I found out that the series was gonna be canceled and the last issue would be 28.

So issues 26, 27, and 28, I just, I did, I took chances and did things that I thought, well, this is really, you know, this might, some of these things might border on being inappropriate.

But the thing that I realized with the general public is that you, especially something like "Beavis and Butt-Head" there's nothing you can do that, they just want you to put your foot down on the accelerator and hold it to the floor.

You know, I was, when I first started doing this, I thought, people are going to think, "Oh, you're a bad person.

Or I, you know, I don't let my son read your comic."

Nothing could have been further from the truth.

You can't do enough for the, and of course, after "Beavis and Butt-Head", you know, they came out with "Family Guy" and, you know, and "Family Guy's" just, I was shocked by some of the stuff that I saw on "Family Guy."

You know, I was raised, I grew up in the 1950s, they didn't have things like that on television, you know?

- So we have just a couple of minutes left before we have to wrap up our conversation.

- Okay.

- So I know that your project "Drafted" is available for sale on websites like Amazon.

If the folks watching at home wanted to find out more about you, where can they find you on the Web?

- I've got a great Facebook page that I've been working on, like, it's a regular job for about 15 or 16 years.

You just Google Rick Parker Cartoonist and, you know, it'll come up.

And the book is, my book is available wherever books are sold.

I mean, you can buy it at any bookstore will have it, just ask for it.

If they don't have it, they can get it for you.

- And do you have any projects that you're considering for the near future?

Anything that you wanna hype?

- Yes, well, the book, my book "Drafted" was supposed to come out in 2023 and when, or 2022.

And when it didn't come out, rather than get, you know, spend a lot of time outing, I just decided I'm just gonna start on another project.

So I started on a story which I'm calling "The Artiste" and it's a story of a young artist that goes to New York to seek his fame and fortune.

He knew that he wanted to be an artist, but he wasn't sure what kind of artist he was gonna be, but he felt that, you know, he would be able to, you know, to succeed as an artist and New York was the place to go.

And that I'm pretty much finished writing the book and doing all the layouts on the book.

And I previewed some of the pages on my Facebook page, if people wanted to see what that looks like or on Threads.

And it's called "The Artiste" and it's the story of a young artist that goes to New York and I've been working on that since December of '22 and it's looking really good, Hoping to finish that sometime next year.

- That seems like it's the spiritual sequel to "Drafted."

- Yes, except my wife was really about being an artist not so much about being a soldier.

But I like the soldier story because it has a beginning, middle, and an end.

You know, it started pretty much when I was a kid and when I got out, that was it.

And you know, this other book covers a 25 year period when I was in New York.

And so the "Drafted" book was three years and it 250 pages.

So a book of 25 years, I figure it's gonna be about 700 or 856 pages.

So I'm gonna have to make sure that the editor helps me, like, decide what parts to leave out.

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

I wanted to thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to talk with us today.

- Thank you very much.

I really enjoyed speaking with you, and I look forward to seeing you sometime in person.

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

We will see you again soon.

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