Frank Quitely What Do Artists Do All Day?

I started drawing, younger than I can remember,

and I drew all the time.

What I get from a comic, the way it works, the way it's put together, it's unique.

I've become fascinated with the way the visual narrative actually works,

the way it flows,

the way one picture leads into another one.

This is Hope Street, Hope Street Studios.

No puke today.

This is my room.

This last year I've been working between six and seven days a week.

I'm very often here until the last bus and when it's near deadline

or if the work's just going really well, I'll sometimes just stay in.

One of the projects that I'm working on just now is called Jupiter's Legacy.

You've got older heroes from the '30s.

They're altruistic, everything that they do, they do for the greater good.

Then they've got these children and grandchildren who've simply

grown up this way, the equivalent of your kind of Paris Hiltons.

They've got superpowers and they're famous

and they've got advertising contracts and they get invited to

all the A-lister parties and all the rest of it but they're

a different generation and they've got a different mind-set from their parents.

When I get the first script in, it's always the same process for me.

I read it and re-read it until it becomes quite clear in my mind.

Even at that stage you actually start making decisions

about atmosphere and layout and the way you're going to put it together.

I have to be thinking about...

..the easiest, simplest way of making

it clear what's happening but it also has to be interesting

because sometimes the easiest, simplest way isn't very satisfying.

Page 13, we've got a bunch of fire engines flying past

and our two heroes, Hutch and Jason, are father and son,

are walking up the street. And then the kid

goes into a public lavatory, out the skylight window and flies away.

His name's Jason,

so far in the script he hasn't got a superhero name.

This is the first thing that he's done, he's got changed

and flown up into the sky.

His father, who is the son of some famous super villain,

but he doesn't actually have powers himself.

His mother's fully super powered

but they don't actually know that he's out doing this.

I've read the script often enough that

I see the whole thing as a selection of still images

which I think are going to work best, but often

I have more than one image for each panel and it's not always a question

of taking the still image that looks the best in isolation,

you have to actually chose the still image that looks the best within the sequence.

Sometimes I come up with it quite quickly

and sometimes it takes ages, but, irrespective, it always takes

a good long while to actually draw it up -

considerably longer than it takes to read it or look at it when you're flicking through a comic.

I was born in 1968 in Glasgow here.

I always loved drawing and I always

thought I was quite good,

even when I didn't have

anything to compare it to.

I would say my biggest

single influence from

when I was younger was the

Scottish artist Dudley D Watkins.

He did the Broons and Oor Wullie

for decades and decades,

and Desperate Dan

and lots of things.

I used to read them in

my grandparents' house on a Sunday.

I was the best drawer in class

in primary school.

And I was the best drawer

in my class in secondary school

and then I went to art school

and then I started freelancing

and then I drifted into comics.

From the thumbnails on the script, I make page layouts,

which I generally do digitally now.

I'm going to have three skylights here and this one is going to be

opened, so I'll have the boy in here and a head a shoulders coming

out here and then flying away in the distance...

..and then I'll have a cop

standing here with his back to us and the guy in the hat standing here.

And then we'll go to this shot of young Jason flying up towards us.

I often draw it like that just to get the proportions right

and then put his trousers in, you know,

when I'm doing the final line work in pencil on paper.

I've drawn out a character design for Jason wearing the white under-armour that he

wears for his soccer and he's got his rucksack that he just

carries about with him anyway so that's where his jeans and shirts go.

He keeps his Cons and socks on so the only really...the only

bit of kit that he has to put on really is his wee home-made

diamond mask and a bandana.

The colours are chosen because they tie in with his grandfather,

who was the main character from the first three issues, The Utopian.

The whole look is just kind of reminiscent of that.

Grant sat and just ran through a casual synopsis for the whole

thing and it just sounded amazing.

It was pretty exciting, you know,

and it was kind of... it was one of those moments.

Classic '50s Superman was part of the aesthetic of it but I also

had to come up with a way of drawing Superman that was natural to me,

so it's just a kind of - this is what Superman looks like

in my mind, but because it's me that's drawing it,

it does have...it's got a hint of Desperate Dan about it.

It's quite a big story and it's a big human drama,

and it's about accepting your own mortality.

Thanks to a cunning plan by Lex Luthor,

Superman ends up flying too close to the sun.

His cells start deteriorating. So it's kind of like the equivalent of

cancer for him so he realises he's got about a year to live

and there's a number of things that he has to put in order before he dies.

Since the dawn of modern humans,

storytelling has been one of the main ways we communicate ideas.

In the same way that I'm sure

soldiers going into war would tell stories about great heroes to gee

people up and inspire them, you know.

Most fiction, most fictional characters are either there for

cautionary purposes or to inspire us, to be like role models for us.

I mean, you do get drawn into what you're drawing, of course.

There's two issues of the 12 issue run that have Bizzaro in them.

Bizzaro is the mad, upside down, topsy-turvy type Superman

and everything is just broken and back to front.

I was actually at my most stressed when I was drawing those issues.

Deadlines were completely shot right from the start.

There was the stress from that

but also the exchange rate between dollars and pounds was really

poor at that point as well and I thought I was going to lose

the house and stuff like that so it was a really frantic time.

I actually think the drawings are slightly looser, slightly more

frantic but I was certainly more looser and more frantic drawing it.

Grant was delighted, of course, he was hoping I'd have a full

breakdown to make the issue really good.

ENGINES ROAR

Two mods have just gone by on Lambrettas.

I haven't seen a mod for ages.

Because I'm drawing from my imagination all the time,

there is a general look to most of the characters.

I always think it's a bit like if you go to a family wedding

and pretty much everyone in the room looks vaguely like another

few people in the room, you know, there's slightly too many

connections for it to be anything other than a family wedding.

I often like do wee sketches of people in the street or

in the train station, on the bus or whatever.

Sometimes it's for really simple things like just here's

a convincing way that tired people sit when they're sitting on a bus.

I know a lot of comic artists and they'll say, even if they're not trying to get a likeness,

they'll be thinking in terms of Clint Eastwood for this character or whatever,

but, for me, it tends more to be people I know or combinations of different people that I know.

These are the roughs for the Walking Dead cover.

She was based loosely on a teacher from my primary school.

She seemed to me at the time, when I was six or seven to

like about a hundred years old and she had horned-rimmed glasses.

She was incredibly skinny and wrinkly.

So you turned her into a zombie?

Well, you know, I thought it's that way, like,

you know, you must get granny zombies, you know, so...

I'm wanting the city to be drawn with enough detail that

it looks convincing like a city from the air,

but when it comes to colouring I'll ask Peter to keep the line work of the foreground figure in solid black

and drop the line work of the background

back a bit so that there's a little bit more of a distinction.

When I'm working digitally it's very easy to change things

and I don't feel precious about it but

when it comes to actually doing fine detail, even though this is a really

sophisticated piece of technology, the feeling of being like...

it's like trying to touch your finger against the glass,

it never quite meets.

There's something like the feeling

when your working with this, it's just not quite perfect.

And the level of sensitivity you've got with a tip of the pencil

on the paper, it's like there isn't a gap there at all.

There we go.

Ready to print this out in blue

and then start doing the finished line work.

We've got eggs, are you wanting any?

-Vin, can you boil the kettle?

-Yeah, sure.

Hope Street Studios is a pretty nice place to work, you know.

We have a slow kind of turnover of people.

Some people stay about for years, other people are just in for

a few months and move on but the way it goes, it's always word of mouth.

All the people who have ended up here

have been friends or colleagues of the people who already work here.

You can be a tribute act or you can be inspired by various

different sources and that helps shape you.

As a teenager I had Katsuhiro Otomo, the Japanese guy that did Akira.

He was depicting a world that had enough detail,

but it was entirely believable, you know. Cities crumbling and

there was a sense of scale and a sense of place.

The fact that he didn't resort to sketching in areas

of the city in the background that weren't actually depicted

with some degree of accuracy,

I think that's one of the things that kind of helped sell that

whole world that he was presenting.

Over the years, I've never managed to get any faster even though

I've become generally more efficient with all the different skills that I need.

When I started out it was all about just keeping things clear

and easy to understand

and, over the years, the more I've learned about storytelling

the more I've learned about the way you can lead the eye around the page

or the way you can encourage

somebody to move very slowly from left to right across a panel.

All this stuff I've become so kind of fascinated by

and engrossed in the way it actually works.

I find that I spend more and more time planning the pages

than I do actually drawing up the finished art work.

This is the page from We3 that took a couple of weeks to work out.

To some extent it's about our relationship with technology,

and war, and our relationship with animals and each other.

The human characters were hardly in it.

You know, we actually decided that we would

try and have as few faces in it as possible.

A bit like the Tom and Jerry cartoons where you would always

just see the legs and feet.

We had a number of other ideas about storytelling

and kind of page construction and panel layout that we hoped

would be kind of new and that would suggest the action

playing out in a way that we wouldn't normally perceive it.

The idea of trying to come up with something

that was aesthetically different

but also, like, more importantly, that actually worked differently

in the way the visual narrative was presented.

We hoped that that would also give this feeling

that maybe this was kind of the way it would work

for, for instance, a cat or a dog.

The CCTV sequence was half a dozen pages of

little frames like TV screens in a high-security building

where the animals are escaping from

and the whole sequence is told mostly wordlessly,

just from multiple cameras. It was so difficult

to fine-tune it when I was trying to draw all those panels,

or redraw them all in different orders, you know,

on separate bits of paper, that I ended up cutting them up.

I worked out this sequence

of a hundred and however many individual drawings.

Yeah, I mean, I have the geography of the building,

or the relevant parts of the building, in my mind.

And...

So I drew each of the sequences

from the imaginary viewpoint of the cameras that I'd installed

in those parts of the building.

I sound absolutely mad.

You go to extraordinary lengths sometimes

to try and make complicated things

kind of simple and understandable.

Whether that's some kind of...

if you're trying to sell some sort

of emotional part of the story

or it's just in terms

of building up an atmosphere

or a level of detail that helps

make an environment believable.

You just... You do a lot of thinking

in order that the reader

doesn't have to do any.

In this page from Jupiter's Legacy,

there's this bad guy here who has got immense power

and he's just blasted everybody away from him

and this character Walter comes down. He can control people's minds

to the point where he can put them into an environment of his choosing.

What he's actually doing is creating a cell or creating a little world

constructed from his thoughts. It's a fabrication.

And, er...

my process is sketching out roughly in blue

and then adding more detail and then going in with a black line.

So what I ended up doing was

a kind of cutaway type thing where you have a cube,

like a prison cell, and as we go in from the front to the back

we actually go through the creative process of producing this image

so that it echoes the creative process

of him fabricating this little cell to trap the bad guy.

So this is me doing the finished line work on my blue underdrawing.

This is where I'm making my decision about which, you know,

where to make the line work slightly simpler

and where to add a little bit more detail.

Because they can be exaggerated characters or archetypal characters

I think they lend themselves quite well to...

..to being used as just vehicles for getting an idea across,

you know.

I heard that Superman sells better

in times of economic depression

and Batman sells better

in boom times.

One of the theories, I think,

is that when things are bad, people are looking for a...

a God figure or a father figure, you know, or...

..a "help from above" kind of thing.

Somebody to come in and fix things.

Whereas like in the '80s, for instance,

when everyone was making money,

and people felt powerful and self-assured,

Batman seems to fit the zeitgeist better.

Batman's a self-made man.

What I can do is add porridge.

-Mm-hm?

-Do it with water and then I add my milk in later.

If you don't mind.

No, not a problem.

Cheers.

I don't know whether or not it's a good industry to grow old in.

On the one hand, I suppose

you can slowly keep getting better at what you do

in a way that you can't if you're a footballer,

but then you've got the problem of falling out of fashion.

Just not really being in step any more.

And there's an element of that in comics.

Brilliant - somebody's out there in silver hot pants.

THEY LAUGH

So when I'm doing this, erm,

although it looks like I'm only tracing over it,

I'm actually making little modifications.

I'm just kind of fine-tuning it

because the blue lines are going to get stripped out

so all that's going to be left are marks I'm making just now.

Mostly I quite like working late.

I usually get slightly more done at night-time.

You know sometimes, like, if I'm working late at night...

I can be thumbnailing or doing page layouts or whatever.

And I can be

pottering around with the same problem

and not being able to solve it for ages,

but when I'm doing the finished line work like this,

like, because all the decision-making's been made,

it is just adding detail and texture

and extra layers of information

and making things clearer,

and, you know, it's really fairly kind of...

Not quite automatic, but it doesn't require a great deal of thought.

Just needs a wee bit of concentration.

Almost every day I get to a point

where the drawing goes really quickly and just really flows,

and it happens more often at night-time than during the day.

Sometimes I go out for a walk,

and even when you're trying not to think about the problem

you're wrestling with or the piece of work that you've left behind

that you're about to go back to,

the experiences you're getting while you're walking around

end up influencing, like, you're drawing a futuristic city

and rather than just Googling futuristic-looking things,

sometimes it's good to just go out and walk around

and see what's actually out there, and what's actually out there

is, like, funny-looking street cleaning vehicles

that look like bugs, and, you know, like, bin lorries and stuff.

The world I live in, in some ways,

it's a far cry from drawing a city in some future world,

but at the same time, quite apart from the fact

that Glasgow is a pretty colourful place to live,

there's certain things that are kind of universal.

The way people interact with each other.

The way people act in the morning commute

when everybody's trying to get to work

and the way they're acting at the end of the night.

These things are kind of universal.

Everything about the world around me and my life

is something that I can draw on.

If I get a few hours' sleep, then often what I do

is I'll get up and do some more work

and go get a shower in Central Station

and then work for another few hours during the day

and then go home kind of, like, late afternoon or dinner time.

It's funny because I used to look at the showers at the stations

and think, "What kind of people use the showers in Central Station?!"

and...now I know.

This is the semi-supine position.

You stand against a wall upright

and you measure the space between the back of your head and the wall.

That's the number of books you need under your head.

Normally it's three Akiras.

There's six Akira books and they're all slightly different thicknesses.

For me, I've got to pick the right three.

For years I worked in the house. I had a studio in the house.

And it was nice, and it was really convenient

to be able to get out your bed and make a pot of coffee.

And then about eight years ago or so

I rented a desk just for a couple of months.

And as soon as I got to the studio

my wife just started packing up my stuff.

She couldn't believe how good it was to get rid of me.

I'm incredibly messy.

I mean, like, this is the tidiest I've ever kept my workspace

and it's only because I'm sharing a room with two other people.

Nearly there, yeah.

This is me just finishing off the detail on the cityscape

in the background.

Ideally, you want to be a couple of months ahead, but...

..I rarely am.

Only ever at the start of a project.

Well, that's me.

-Finished?

-Yeah.

It's half four, er...

..and I'm gonnae go to bed.

I've got a sleeping bag here.

Good night.

See you in the morning.

Yeah, aye, I slept well. It was quite a short sleep...

Comics aren't the best paid of the creative industries.

I could make more money going into the games industry

or magazine illustration or do storyboarding or whatever.

It doesn't matter how high up you are in the storyboarding game

or the computer games character design department or whatever -

the fact is you're a tiny cog in a huge machine

rather than being one of only a couple of cogs,

and that appeals to me more.

And what you're doing in a comic

is you're putting something down that can't...

doesn't really work in a film, doesn't really work in prose.

The more I understand about how they work,

the more I realise how unique they are.