What initially drew you to comics?
I remember my parents reading the Sunday newspaper “funnies” to me when I was a child and enjoying that. My grandmother gave me a subscription to the magazine Children’s Digest, which serialized Herge’s Adventures of Tintin. Tintin sucked me in. I don’t know exactly what drew me to comics. I think it must have been the synthesis of the art with story. When I was in elementary school, comic books published by Harvey Comics, such as Richie Rich and Casper, obsessed me. By the time I was in ninth grade, I knew that I wanted to be a cartoonist. At that point, my ambition was to draw the Justice League of America.
Please tell us about your creative process.
My creative process starts with ideas. And then it’s all a gradual refinement of those ideas—writing, revising, drawing, re-drawing—until I reach a point where the work seems to convey what I intend the reader to experience.
Clarity and communication are important to me in cartooning, just as I think they’re important in any other artform. Finding an appropriate style to draw each comics project in is important to me. I also strive to present a project in a way that will connect with the reader most deeply, although I continually struggle to reach that ideal. I think I make incremental progress in achieving that.
Please tell us about your work on Oz, Age of Bronze, and any other titles you'd like to share about.
I’ve loved L. Frank Baum’s Oz book series since I was six years old. As as child, I saw that other writers had continued the Oz series after Baum. I decided I would do that, too. At first, I didn’t realize that I’d be doing it in comics. One of my first major works as a professional cartoonist was a series of Oz graphic novels, initially published by First Comics. I did five of those graphic novels before I decided to turn my efforts elsewhere. But I’ve never been able to get out of Oz altogether. I always have one Oz project or another going, some big—such as the graphic novel adaptations of Baum’s Oz books Skottie Young and I did for Marvel Comics—some small—such as the many presentations I’ve done at Oz conventions. Currently, I writing a book titled All Wound Up: The Making of The Tik-Tok Man of Oz, which tells the story in text and photos of L. Frank Baum’s 1913 stage musical based on one of his Oz books.
Age of Bronze is my complete comics retelling of the Trojan War legend. I’m combining as many versions of the story that I can find into one long graphic novel series, while basing aspects of the artwork on archaeological research. The story is the traditional one, but the artwork avoids the traditional Classical Greek trappings in favor of the costumes, architectures, et cetera, of the 13th century BCE Aegean Bronze Age. I’ve been working on Age of Bronze for a long time and gathered a lot of critical acclaim. Currently, the colorist for Age of Bronze, John Dallaire, and I are working on the color for the fourth book in the series.
Are there any storylines/characters you'd like to tackle next or revisit?
Yes, I need to finish the next issue of Age of Bronze, which deals with the final showdown between Troilus and Achilles. This episode is fascinating because the sources are mainly artistic rather than literary. I’ve had to work in a lot of details from paintings on pots rather than the usual work I do of conflating contradictory written sources.
Where can we find more information about your work?
Here’s my website: www.age-of-bronze.com
And here’s my blog: age-of-bronze.blogspot.com/
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