Mark Badger: How To Draw Comic Books
Mark Badger sits down and talks about his journey as a comic book artist, teacher, coder, and activist.
Mark Badger is an American illustrator who has worked as a penciler, inker, cover artist, painter, and colorist in the comic book industry (including Marvel and DC). Additionally he's one of the friendliest, funniest, and most down-to-earth guys you'll ever meet. I had the pleasure of being his student in San Francisco almost two decades ago, and we keep in touch each time we run into each other at Comic Con. As Blurb expands our education series to include advice on creating and publishing comic books, it made sense to interview Mark and learn a few things he's picked up along the way.
AP. What's your experience drawing comic books and comic book characters?
MB. So I started drawing comics in 1985, I had been out of art school for a few years and showed a Marvel editor, Carl Potts at a comic book convention some work and he said "You're OK, I'll give you some work." So I worked at Marvel and DC Comics along with Dark Horse over the next 15 years. In that time I got to do everything from Greenberg the Vampire, Spiderman CyberComics at Marvel and AOL, to Martian Manhunter and Batman for DC.
I found I loved telling stories with pictures, working with writers was totally fun. The 80's comics was very loose and people were trying all sorts of different things as the 90’s developed the field closed up and became much more limited in what you can do so I ended up moving on from it to web development and eventually teaching in San Francisco.
Now after leaving teaching I have the time and space to devote myself to my own comics. I've done an adaptation of Julius Caesar, a series of Abstract Kirby comics, and I've started a practice of coloring my life drawings and structuring them into comics pages as fodder for social media.
AP. How did you develop the "comic book style" technique?
MB. Well it starts with basic drawing skills being able to draw a large range of subject matter from cars to flowers and everything in between, from Jewish grandmothers to monsters. Carl Potts was great editor who introduced me to some European artists, talked storytelling and drawing so I learned a lot from him. Marvel's editor-in-chief at the time Jim Shooter had a $1.98 lecture on storytelling he gave to all the artists. He went panel by panel through a Jack Kirby comic. Jack's the guy who created Black Panther, FF, most of the Avengers, the original X-Men, the creative driving force behind Marvel. The American equivalent of Tezuka or Herge, but a forgotten part of comics for far too long. This was just a 12 page story he had blasted out to fill some pages for a deadline. It was a profound foundation to build comics drawing knowledge on it. Here's a link to a web version of that lecture.
AP. What was the most difficult thing to learn?
MB. For me the balance between being an artist and working in a commercial field is something I still haven't learned. The "artist" mythology is do your own work. But then in a commercial field you have to do what sells. Balancing the two as you move through life is really difficult. If you're lucky you turn into Mike Mingola, who as a DC/Marvel artist was well liked, but didn't become MIKE MINGOLA until he went off and created Hellboy, which he didn't expect to last 25 years and generate three movies and publishers across the world. How much of that was plan and work and how much was luck? I don't think we ever understand the balance of these things.
Right now I'm trying to teach myself how to "write" comics, so I'm not just an artist who co-plots but control the whole thing.
“ I got to redesign the character as a real Martian and while that form has mutated over the comic book years, I got to put a little weird into the DC Universe. ”
AP. Tell us about the usual types of talents you partner with to create a comic book?
MB. Commercial comics are really a group activity no matter how much you think you're doing by yourself. Editors and publishers control the money. Inkers, colorists, and writers can all screw the work up in different ways. When you start working on your own work it becomes about how much of a community can you build to support you, emotionally and creatively. Social media helps, but just having a group of artists to chat with, even if it's about your cats or politics is really important.
AP. Thoughts regarding the steps to create comic books: a) outline b) character design c) script d) illustration e) layout in sequence f) coloring g) publishing
MB. In comics 1 to 4 people can do all of them. That's what makes comics more interesting than most other commercial mediums. A movie can have a few thousand people involved with all the effects. An Avengers comic is a writer, an artist, and a colorist. With print-on-demand one person can even do the publishing, get the books, and hand sell them to stores. I think it's really important to understand all the steps and not try and just be one of the cogs in the wheel.
AP. Tell us about your biggest projects?
MB. Probably the two Batman projects I did in the 90's Batman: Run Riddler Run and Batman: Jazz. Batman:Jazz was with the writer Gerard Jones and the legendary editor Archie Goodwin. It was about a Jazz musician loosely based on Charlie Parker. Our guy had gone off to Paris gotten himself clean, studied modern music and come back to Gotham to play. Initially we had Bruce Wayne running around to clubs and investigating everything in the outline, at some point one of us said "let's have Bats go to the jazz clubs." So I got to do Batman listening to jazz with a hundred foot cape.
Then Archie said: "Can you make the 48 page story into a 75 3 issue story with splash pages and big panels?" So I was totally free to explore visually. I had just purchased a computer and colored the job myself so it has lots of collage, experiments in color, and probably the only comic that references, not just Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, but Picasso's Three Musicians too.
“ ...At some point one of us said “let’s have Bats go to the jazz clubs.” So I got to do Batman listening to jazz with a hundred foot cape. ”
AP. What are your favorite projects?
MB. Other than Batman Jazz, there's a Martian Manhunter mini-series I did for DC. I got to redesign the character as a real Martian and while that form has mutated over the comic book years, I got to put a little weird into the DC Universe.
I've done a series of comics called Abstract Kirby, which started out as abstract explorations of Jack Kirby's work and have moved into just an exploration of abstraction and it's relationship to the philosophical ideas of Buddhism. It's probably my best work.
AP. How do you go on about publishing your comic books?
MB. I use a direct to print service that takes PDF's and sends me back books. It's a great way to do books like Julius Caesar or Abstract Kirby where there isn't a publisher interested in it or a huge demand. I don't have to go broke printing a ton of books and then I have print copies to sell at shows and give to friends.
AP. Tell us about Networked: Carabella On The Run
MB. Carabella came out of working with non-profit Privacy Activism at the start of social media taking over the internet and when Flash was still a viable tool. We got a large grant for doing it, so I made it into a web comic (before web comics were cool), and used Flash to play with the layout as a comic. Then it got printed as a book to distribute in schools. It featured a bunch of college students fighting against the big bad corporations that want to run our lives. It even had a few guest appearances from some students from my classes.
AP. Are there any other projects you wish to plug?
MB. I'm starting on a "graphic novel" right now but who knows when, what, and where that is going to show up. But following me on instagram as @mark.badger or Twitter @badgetoon you can see how my drawing projects evolve. Or just check out my website at markbadger.org
AP. Do you have any favorite formats (sizes, paper type, etc) for your comic books?
MB. I'm so old, I like comics on newsprint that you can roll up and stick in your back pocket. But I'm a real sucker for the artist editions that print comic pages at the size they are done.
AP. Where do you see the future of comic books (both indie and mainstream)?
MB. The young adult and teens market is booming. There's a lot of wonderful light cartooning being done for kids outside of the superhero market that is selling really well.
AP. Any advice for aspiring comic book artists?
MB. There's the cliche of carry a sketchbook all the time and draw everything, cars, clouds, coffee shops Bart riders, bicyclists the whole wide world. It's important because you're not going to be doing that one thing that you love to draw all the time. Stories always go places that you don't know how to draw. The more skill you develop drawing kitchen plumbing (or anything) will help you invent wild and crazy spaceships.
There is no magic book tool or paper to make you a good artist, but time. If you put in an hour a day, you will be a better artist in a month, in a year you might be okay, in four years you will improve a lot. Look at your day and figure out how much time you have to devote to drawing, not chatting on the internet and drawing, not watching tv and drawing, just drawing. And do that every day, religiously. Convince yourself that you will burn in hell if you miss a day (even if you're an atheist), or that your home will fall down, or that your best friend will hate you if you miss your daily practice.
Working every day for a fixed amount of time is really the only way to achieve anything, schedule 17 minutes (or whatever you can do) of drawing time and make that your number 1 priority.
AP. Anything else I forgot to ask?
MB. You didn't ask about my teaching career. It was pretty weird because a couple of times I almost failed algebra and then I ended up teaching coding to art students. What was funny was I think the most important skills I passed on were project management and storytelling. Project management I learned from political activism and storytelling from comics. Everyone needs to understand how to break a project into chunks and schedule it out over the time you have, so I taught students who are now working at Facebook, Blurb, and Google, the skills of revolutionary Communists from Latin America.
I thought initially comics and code had no relation. Then I realized for code to make sense you needed to understand what you were trying to do. When you work out a clear story it's much easier to create the code. Figuring out the plot to a project is the hard part either in code or comics.
It was really delightful to help students learn how to make complex projects and now watch them go off get married, have lives, become real adults, and work at places like Blurb interviewing me. :)