Sale Well, somewhere in between. I'm 52 and have been a fan and reader
of comics since I was six or seven. I grew up reading primarily Marvel
comics - since then my reading has expanded a great - and any time I get
asked to draw a classic character I certainly go back to my memories or do
research to see what other people have done. Here are two characters and two
different things that happened to me. One is Batman. Batman is a DC
character and I didn't read DC comics as a kid but I did know Neal Adams's
work on the character and I loved it. I thought I would be influenced by him
when I began to sketch out what my approach to the character would be but it
turned out that I couldn't in any way draw like Adams. I had to find my own
way and I ended up with my most satisfying incarnation of the character. The
other character was Spider-man. I really enjoyed Steve Ditko's incarnation
but my personal favourite was John Romita's. When I did Spider-man Blue I
knew that people were expecting me to draw more like Ditko, but I wanted to
draw more like Romita to see what I could do. It turned out that I was an
abject failure, as far as I'm concerned. No one can draw like Romita. I
certainly could not draw anyone as handsome as his Peter Parker is or as
beautiful as his Gwen Stacy. As opposed to how I feel about Batman now, I
think my Spider-man was a failure. It was probably easier for me to get into
Batman because I had no personal stake in him, whereas with Spider-man, he
is my favourite character, he was my favourite character growing up and
Romita was my favourite artist growing up, so there was a lot of
intimidation. I will say that studying Romita taught me an awful lot about
how to draw women, attractive women. I'd been in the business for years by
that time and had had to draw many women who were supposed to be attractive
and I look back and can see that they are not.
The Times The first time I noticed your work was Batman: The Long
Halloween, which came out in 1996 and pretty much established you as the new
drawing force on the block. But you had been drawing comics for some time
before then. How did you get started in the industry?
Sale Well, starting slowly. I had wanted to get into comics for years.
I grew up in Seattle but the comic industry was in New York, so that meant
mailing my work. Most of the time, as I understand it, envelopes ended up in
the trash can, nobody would look at them, so I grew frustrated and didn't
know what to do. At some point my local comic store, Golden Age Comics, was
hosting an event with Richard and Wendy Pini, who were the successful
writers, artists and publishers of a book called Elfquest. Because they were
successful they were looking to expand and publish other books, and on their
way across the country while appearing in different comic stores they were
going to look at artists' portfolios. I showed my work to them and they
hired me to be an inker on something called Myth Adventures, and through
that I met other people in the industry. I then did something called
Thieves' World, which I lettered, inked, pencilled and broke down. When I
went to San Diego Comic Con in the late Eighties I met four people who would
change my career - [writer] Matt Wagner, [and editors] Diana Schutz, Bob
Schreck and Barbara Randall. Now Barbara Randall was an editor at DC and she
looked at my portfolio. She didn't really say much but took it away and
later she hired me to work on Challengers of the Unknown, which put me
together for the first time with Jeph Loeb. This was the end of the Eighties
and if Long Halloween is mid-Nineties, it took Jeph and I that long to
really make it work. In the meantime I did a lot of exciting projects and a
lot of growing with Matt Wagner and Diana Schutz and Bob Schreck.
The Times You've had fruitful collaborations with some of the best
writers out there - Darwyn Cooke, Matt Wagner - but the name you are most
associated with is Jeph Loeb. What is it like working with him?
Sale Our relationship has evolved a great deal over the years. We are
very different as people and in how we grew up - he's from Connecticut and
grew up with money - but we had a shared love of comics. We both came
together when we were in our thirties and found that as different as we were
we connected strongly through pop culture. He could say, "Remember when
Neal Adams did this?" or "Remember when Bogart did this?" and
I would know exactly what he meant. We had a great time breaking things
down. Nowadays he writes full scripts for me - so I get, here's the page,
here's the panels, here's what goes on, here's the dialogue, and he allows
me to break it down in different ways if I feel strongly about it. But he's
also writing for me. I don't know how he writes for other people but it's
very clear when I read his scripts that he's writing for me and he can only
do that because we've doing it for so long. But in the beginning he would
call me and we would talk for up to five hours. He would take a credit card
and stencil around it on a yellow legal pad and the outline would be one
[comic] page. He would do 22 of these rectangles and scribble inside each
one what was going on in the page and then he would call me and describe
what the page was. And I would do the same thing at my end. Obviously
working like this took a long time but it also established a rapport between
us, so that now we have a shorthand way of doing things. It's one of the
interesting things about collaborating with people. I don't have that type
of relationship with anyone else I've worked with.
It's my belief that we are in a time in comics that is dominated by writers.
Actually by British writers. The trend was begun by Alan Moore and Neil
Gaiman and has continued with Grant [Morrison] and Mark Millar. What they
have in common is that they want to write what they want to write and what
that ends up meaning is that they are the dominant force in the book and the
artist is secondary. Which is not to say that they dismiss the art but there
is a sensibility that they feel the art is there to service the script. And
not just the script but the breakdown of the page, how you get to page one
to page 22. That can work well but I would never want to work that way. I
want to be more of a part of the book and the storytelling.
The Times I think those writers' stories work best when the artist
drawing them is a strong creative force.
Sale I would say it's not just that. For example, Bryan Hitch and Dave
Gibbons are really well suited for Mark Millar and Alan Moore because they
are OK with the idea that they are just going to service the script. And
they can find enough creative juice and enjoyment and excitement in that to
keep them going. I don't know how Hitch does it because Hitch is brilliant
and if I was that brilliant, I wouldn't know how to do it, but God bless
him. But Gibbons seems to me - and he is a tremendously sweet man - as an
artist perfectly suited to Watchmen. And that's because he is a precise,
careful, detailed-orientated artist, like George Perez. He's somebody who
would not bristle at getting 9,000 pages from Alan Moore.
I was at a Barcelona convention with Mark Millar and he was sounding me out
about working together. I was certainly interested and I enjoyed his work
but the more he talked about it the clearer it became that he wanted to call
more shots than I was cool with. But, as I said before, we live in the age
of the writer. If they can work with people who are not brilliant artists
and still sell comics, then ... hey.
That didn't used to be true. I remember when Jeph and I first started working
together he said, "I think comics are an artist's medium, not a
writer's." That's not true right now, at least commercially.
The Times One of things I've noticed about the Colour books you did
with Jeph at Marvel - Daredevil Yellow, Hulk Grey, Spider-man Blue - is that
they could almost work without dialogue, without words.
Sale That's the Marvel way of doing comics - that you ought to be able
to rudimentarily follow the story without the words. The words would add a
great deal, nuance and humor and so on, but you should figure your way
through the story without them. Jeph always felt that his job was to present
the plot for the artist to draw, and that fed into the story that he would
create. After that, the words he put on the page were to enhance the
pictures that were there. And that's a fundamentally different way of
telling a story to how Alan Moore or Mark Millar work.
