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Do you have a guru? Someone that teaches you how to work these tools? OR are you more of a self-taught kind of guy?

I guess I'm more self-taught, although I've had a lot of volunteer gurus over the years - people who have offered to be gurus, but I try to call on them sparingly. Certainly at the very beginning I did have a list of people who I would call, periodically, for advice. I was very struck at how open they were, and how willing they were to share various trade secrets. That's an ethic I hope to continue throughout my life, that I'll be equally open with such idea, so that I can help others just getting started. But most of it is self-taught, reading manuals, magazines and books. Now that the web is part of my daily life, I often go to the web directly to find out about what's going on or how to code a page, or whatever

What kind of tools do you use for the drawing?

Apart from the usual, the computer itself, one device that almost any graphic artist uses on a daily basis, that other users may not be aware of, is the graphics tablet, where instead of a mouse you draw with an actual pen that has a pressure-sensitive tip and some special software. So that you have the dexterity of an actual pen. Mice were never meant to draw with, though many tried at the beginning. Then there are certain pieces of software, which are - if not standards, then close to it: Photoshop, Painter, Illustrator... I use a 3-D modeller from a company called Strata, although the 3-D field is wide open, there are many competing programs. Apart from the tablet and the scanner, the hardware is mostly uninteresting, mainly for storage, zip drives, jaz drives, an external hard drive, things like that. I'm not interested in the machines as such, it's the technology and what it enables, and the principles that the technology represents, that interests me. The machines change regularly.

How often do you find yourself upgrading?

A little less, now, than in earlier years. I've spent a lot of money over the years, over the last seven years I've spent about thirty thousand dollars. But to get the same results today would cost no more than about five. And getting started for around that, and you'd have a better setup than I have (laughs). But there's always that penalty for early adopters.

Yeah. Are you someone that likes to sit a little bit behind the first wave and see what goes on before involving yourself?

Absolutely. I very strongly suggest - as far as hardware goes - that anyone who's getting involved with computing for the first time, that they never ever buy the top of the line machines, because you'll pay fifty percent more for something that's ten percent faster. And you'll feel like an idiot three months later when something comes out that's even faster than that.

I'm much further behind that you - I've just got my first Macintosh, and it's an LC. I think most people who own macintoshes would be laughing at me - "What are you doing? It's as much use as a Classic!" But it's got Photoshop 2.0 and Quark 3.3 and Illustrator 5, and it does the job for my modest needs. I've now got a design studio in my room. Granted, it's a design studio that most "real" designers would turn their nose up at, but it works...

One of the interesting things about the emergence of the web as a publishing venue, is that we've graduated to a form that takes much less horsepower to manage. You can put together a web page with a far more anaemic machine than you could put together a print magazine. Print requires much higher resolutions, it requires four-colour, which is far more complex. You can need up to four times the amount of memory to put together a print comic than one designed for the web. In a funny way, we've taken kind of a U-turn as far as the kind of computer you need to get your work seen.

That's a comforting idea...

Still need that tablet, though. Drawing with a mouse is... not good. You don't need a big one, you can get a small one for as little as two hundred dollars.

Okay, let's tangent here a bit. We've tackled all the big questions that I wanted to get through, now we've got the throw in ones to see where they'll take us.

Go for it.

Okay, the first one is - what's it like doing comics for a living? Did you ever visualise doing that as a child?

I was fifteen years old, it was Summer, Kurt Busiek and I were in my room reading comics and I turned to him and said, "I'm going to make comics for a living." And he just said, "Okay, whatever."

So you knew it was going to happen?

Pretty much. I'm a creature of obsessions. I go from obsession to obsession. That one stuck.

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