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Flight Volume 3 is coming out soon -- what’s your involvement with that? Care to reveal anything in advance?

Nothing for Flight 3. But I am preparing a story for Flight 4.

What sort of characters do you prefer to create in comics?

I'd say I'm still taking baby steps in my comics-drawing ability and approach. There’s still so much to learn, but where I stand now I’ve got a system that seems to work for me. When it comes to creating lead characters, I'm really drawn to characters that have an innocence to them. Even though they may have shortcomings, like a temper or laziness or inexperience, I want them to also be pure and honest. That said, I also like my villains to be genuinely bad. I'm a classic good versus evil kind of guy, and I think there’s always a place for it.

What’s the comic-making process like?

When coming up with a story, I tend to draw and write at the same time. Writing happens almost in conjunction with thumbnailing out the pages. Once the pages are in a good place in rough thumbnail form, I'll draw them out bigger and work out a little more of the compositional aspects of everything. When working on a finished page I like to keep things rough and simple in blue pencil. I don't want to have everything figured out. It leaves room for spontaneity and happy accidents that happen in the final pass.

Is there a comic that you're particular proud of?

I really like The Robot and the Sparrow. It was one of those projects where all the planets aligned for you and everything made sense. I love the two characters and hope to work more with them. I have a much larger story in mind for the life of Robot that I hope to put down on paper some day. There's a warmth to them and to the story that I hope to achieve again in future stories as well. If I could change one thing though, it would be to refine the robot’s design. I think I borrowed too much from Kanchi on the anime and manga series Furi Kuri. I've been accused of that on a number of occasions. I'd like a design that still evokes a sense of childlike innocence, but that’s more unique.

I especially liked The Robot and the Sparrow as well. How about the previous comic, Hugo Earhart, from Flight 1?

That was fun and I learned a lot about storytelling while working on it. And that's mainly how I view it: as practice.

I'm also interested in your High Steaks t-shirt design. How did you get into this project?

It was just something different to do. I get bored with a certain style every so often so I do other things that stretch me in a different way. This was just a submission to an ongoing t-shirt design competition over at threadless.com. Sadly, it didn't cut the mustard for them and they passed it up.

Like you said, your artwork contains a certain childlike innocence. Where do you find the inspiration for these elements in your work? Are your own children an impact?

I find inspiration in a lot of things. High on my list are history books and natural history museums. I love the American Museum of Natural History here in New York, and try to go often. There's so much raw material there. While I lived in Dallas I would go to the Dallas Museum of Art at lunchtime and hang out in the historical artefacts area. Pretty much every world culture was represented there. I would look at a mask that was carved by some guy a couple of hundred years ago on a little speck in the Pacific Ocean and it would just blow my mind. I couldn't help but think of stories and draw drawings after seeing things like that. I also get stoked when I read a National Geographic, or Smithsonian magazine for the same reasons. It's like bringing the museum into my living room. All of this stuff sloshes around in my head waiting to be used and applied to the things I create.

And having children has impacted my artwork immensely. These days I tend to draw things and choose subject matter that I think my kids would enjoy. Even if the story or piece isn't geared for an audience that young, I'll still have something in there that they could identify with. My kids directly inspired a few characters as well. Having children has been the single most life-changing event for me. I am an entirely different man than I was five years ago. It's helped me to prioritize and organize my life in a way that wasn't possible for me to have done before.

Did museum visits help you think up those cool little monsters like the ones in Sneak02 and the wormy creatures in Climb?

It's all about mixing things that you wouldn't think go together, but once they're bound they make something really special. I'll be thinking of something or have some idea on my mind and then I'll see an object at a museum or in a book and the two will bounce around each other up there. And pretty soon I'll have a new idea or a new way of approaching my original idea.

So how old were you when got into art?

My parents were always very supportive of my artistic endeavours. My dad was my first paying client when I was about six or seven. He commissioned me to illustrate seven desert scenes and he paid me a dollar for each drawing. So they were always doing things like that to get me to draw more. I had a grandmother who painted and my mom is very creative, so I think it was in my blood to draw and enjoy it enough to get good at it. I also have two sisters who were the brains of the family and a lot of fun to grow up with.

 

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