1. What drew you to comics?
I really enjoyed 70's X-Men comics (though I was reading reprints with Art Adams' covers) and the original Eastman & Laird TMNT comics when I was 11 or 12. There was something about seeing Kevin & Peter's names in possessive form above the title 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' that put me in the right mind space to understand the idea of making comics––reading those stories, even 11 year old me could tell, those guys were just making that stuff up and then drawing it. I wanted that job.
I also found my people. A few friends of mine in middle school and high school not only liked making up stories (most of us played RPGs together) and liked comics, but a few of them also liked drawing. So, we tried making comics together. No page counts ever got finished for a story to be read, but we created about 30 original IP's between each other at that time. What I liked about comics as a teenager with nothing but time and ambition is that comics is one of the few visual storytelling mediums that you can do all by yourself, and other than for fancy coloring or printing, you can do relatively cheaply. Animation, filmmaking, video games, etc., all take teams and a lot more budget––but you can sit in a room my yourself with pencils, pens, and paper and make a comic.
2. Please tell us about your creative process. Some of it has changed as I've worked on Mouse Guard (and as I'm working on the next book, I'm finding it's changed again—) but most of the change is in the writing part of the process. Sometimes it's an outline alone before I start putting pencil to paper and drawing panels, sometimes I wrote out scenes, sometimes full dialogue scripts. For the artwork I like the feel of pencil on paper and I sketch/draw out ideas for panels. Once I have a lot of bits I like, I'll scan them into Photoshop and arrange them in a page template. I can rotate, resize, correct drawings, combine images together, even add in reference from models or architectural photos. I then print out that digital amalgam and on a light pad ink the page on a sheet of bristol with the printout underneath. When the inks are done, I scan them and do the coloring and lettering digitally. Beyond that, it's hard to describe creativity––sometimes I get ideas from seeing paths other stories didn't go (like when you watch a movie and think 'that's not how I would have taken the 2nd act...') or just raw inspiration from nature, other art, music, etc. And sometimes the well feels very dry and you do what you can to eke out something without forcing it to the point of becoming overly discouraged and burnt out.
3. What do comics allow you to do as a storyteller?
The easiest answer is that they allow me to tell my stories. The storytelling method I'm best at is in creating images, so with comics being a visual medium, I can do just that. And while there are words in narration and dialogue, it's not the same as writing prose with a few illustrations every chapter; in that scenario the text is doing the heavy lifting, and I'm not as strong of a wordsmith or writer as I am with a drawing.
Sequential art storytelling allows for the manipulation of time more easily. The spaces between panels is when time happens––how much or how little is under the control of the artist and the interpretation of the reader. Time can be long between panels 2 and 3, but nanoseconds between 3, 4, and 5, and then reverse in panel 6. It's something that's harder to do in fluid motion mediums like film and animation. The cuts for time are built in to the structure of panels in a comic, and they need to be edited in to the other mediums, and are easily jarring and disruptive to the flow of 32fps.
I also really like the freedom. Some of that comes from the concept that there's no budget for the settings, props, special effects, costumes, etc when you're drawing the story, so you can do whatever you like and are only limited by your current skill, time, and imagination. I also am given a lot of freedom from my publisher, that has a hands-off approach to the content of Mouse Guard, they step in when it comes to promoting and marketing the book. Some of that trust I've earned, but some of it is the nature of a 'creator-owned' comic title, something many other mediums don't have as wide spread an equivalent of.
4. Please tell us about Mouse Guard and any other titles/work you'd like to share about.
Mouse Guard is an all-ages comic about medieval mice struggling to survive in a world that is very big. Mice are small and low on the food-chain. They build their cities and towns hidden away and spread out, that way if attacked, the entire population isn't wiped out. But, that could have made them prisoners of their own civilizations––instead an altruistic group of mice called the Mouse Guard patrol the open space between settlements to escort mice, shipments of food and goods, and to ward off predators from making dens and nests too close to mouse villages. The first book, Fall, starts with three Guardmice going on a routine patrol for a missing grain merchant and they uncover a plot to overthrow the Guard from within. The second book, Winter, follows up with a more intimate story between characters where they have gone out into the most dangerous of seasons for needed medicines, and the real struggle is just getting home. And the third book in the main series, The Black Axe, is a prequel to Fall and serves as a quest story for the legendary mouse titled The Black Axe. There is also a table top RPG, spin-off anthology volumes where I asked other creators to tell the tall tales and Legends set within the Mouse Guard world, and sets of short stories I've done that act as short bedtime stories and morality tales. I'm currently struggling with the next book in the series: The Weasel War of 1149.
My best friend and I unearthed a bunch of the old high-school era drawings and projects and documented them in a YouTube series called The Plotmasters Project (www.theplotmasters.com) In addition to sharing the old embarrassing artwork and walking the viewers though the concpets, characters, and our influences at the time, we each created a new piece of artwork to show what we'd do if we were working on that IP today.
And I occasionally get hired to draw covers for other comics. I've been fortunate enough to draw multiple covers for TMNT, Dark Crystal, Usagi Yojimbo, The Muppets, & more. 5. Where can we go to find more information about your work, including sites and social media spaces? mouseguard.net is the homepage for Mouse Guard. I have a weekly blog where I show my art process davidpetersen.blogspot.com. The Plotmasters Project is on a long-term hiatus after one season, but I hope we'll get to do more at some point, and you can look at all of that material at theplotmasters.com.
I stream on Twitch twice a week: twitch.tv/davidpetersen. And I'm on Twitter, IG, & Hive with the username mouseguard
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