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¦ Features ¦ John
McCrea interview part 3
PJ: What
about your class then, how are they going? There's one guy in John's class who's
a fantastic artist. But on the two occasions I saw him he had exactly the same
samples, he was no further on.
JMcC: Remember
when I told you off for telling someone that they'd never make it in comics? Well
he won't.
PJ: Do you
have many women wanting to learn comic art?
JMcC: We've
got six in the class at the moment.
PJ: There
was a girl in the class too who was doing a Manga style?
JMcC: She's
doing very well. She's just one a $5,000 prize in a Manga competition for the
best new Manga artist. Presided over by none other than Pete Waterman, of all
the bizarre people. But apparently he's very into Manga. She's come on in leaps
and bounds.
PJ: Do you
think it's helpful for them to have you there, to give them a focus and tell them
'That's what you should be doing?' I know you're going to say yes... but if I
hadn't met you or anyone else who was into comics, I would quite easily not have
bothered.
JMcC: I
think, not wanting to blow my own trumpet but I will, most of them said that they
were very unfocused, and didn't know which way to go. I dunno... it doesn't seem
like rocket science to me.
PJ: But
you were really driven.
JMcC: I
was. But I think it helps just to have someone to say 'You should do this and
send it there.'
PJ: It's
not even that, it's knowing that someone has already blazed the trail.
JMcC: And
the other aspect is that you get to meet a group of people who are like minded,
and you get to make friends with them.
RC: You
find out you're not crazy after all.
JMcC: Yes,
which was how it felt back in Northern Ireland.
PJ: So didn't
the class produce their own comic?
JMcC: The
second one's going to be out for Bristol, and it's so much better than the first
one. No disrespect to the first bunch of guys, but this new lot, especially some
of the girls stuff, it's just unbelievable. There's this Japanese girl, and she's
going to go to the convention, go up to the Tokyo Pop stand, and they'll hire
her straight away, I guarantee it.
PJ: When
I got my first drawing job, I went to the tax office and said I was going to be
self-employed for doing this stuff, and they handed me a pile of forms. I thought,
'I just want to draw!'
JMcC: That's
one of the first things I have to tell my students. Your job is drawing comics,
but your job is also keeping on top of your tax, keeping your receipts. I employ
a bookkeeper and an accountant...
PJ: And
a masseuse?
JMcC: I
have claimed against tax for a masseuse, yes.
PJ: I know
a writer who was writing a dinosaur related story, and bought Turok Dinosaur Hunter,
and claimed it against tax.
JMcC: Oh
yeah, absolutely right too! One of my class asked how much a comic artist earns.
Well, a big factor in that is where you live. The UK is one of the worst places
to work for America in the entire world. If you live in South America, you get
your $60 royalty cheque and you buy a car, I get mine and it doesn't even cover
my weekly groceries.
So move to South
America and live in Santiago. It wouldn't be a hard thing to do, I've been to
Santiago and it's a great place.
PJ: When
you were first doing comics you were jetting around all over the place.
JMcC: I
was jetting around right up until we had kids. I was at Santiago about a month
before my first child was born. I was in Santiago, San Diego, New York, Germany
and Spain that year. Then I had children and I haven't been anywhere!
Well, I was at
San Diego once, but that was work, I was there, do it and come straight home.
Santiago was fucking great. I was there with Paul Gulacy, who's a great guy. We
had these big queues lined up for us, and we each had a translator girl translating
for us, and these big guys letting people through one at a time. And I hear this
giggling from further back in my queue, and these two Philippino girls show up,
and they've got my comics, and they ask for a sketch through the translator. I
say, 'Do you want me to sign it?' and they say, 'No', and pull down their tops
and say, 'Can you sign these?'
And I thought,
'This is never going to happen again, I think I'll just enjoy this!' For that
one moment it was Rock and Roll!
RC: So we've
discussed DC, what about when you did Spider-man?
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Hulk
Smash
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PJ: How many
of these superhero things did you go, 'Garth? Why don't we do a Spider-man?'
JMcC: All of
them! Garth has no interest in superheroes whatsoever. In fact he's already said
about Hulk Smash that he was just writing it for me. I thought he wrote a great
comic, there's plenty of tanks and soldiers to draw. I had a great old time drawing
Hulk. PJ:
And you had Klaus Janson inking, which maybe isn't the best marriage of inker
and penciller I've ever seen.
JMcC: You
know there's a story in this, don't you?
I'd done one image
before that had been inked by Klaus, and it was great, I thought he did a fantastic
job on it. I had a chat with him on the phone after he inked it and we got on
great. Then I did the Hulk and originally they wanted Kevin Nolan to ink it, and
my jaw dropped to the floor. Garth though, was not that keen on it, he said, and
to an extent he's right, that Kevin Nolan takes anybody he inks and makes it look
like Kevin Nolan. I reluctantly, with Garth's poking and prodding, said no to
it, and they suggested Klaus, and I said, 'Great'.
It turned out that
Klaus went into the office to pick up the first batch of pages, he had said to
them (I'm guessing he'd forgotten who I was, or it was just another job for him),
'Am I inking these or am I working my magic on them?' And they said, 'Whatever',
and let him go away and do whatever the fuck he wanted with them.
It was a tricky
time, because within five days of me sending the first pages in, the staff changed
and Stuart Moore was brought in as editor. Stuart sent me copies of the inked
pages, and I went ballistic.
It wasn't even
that he'd changed the way I'd drawn the Hulk, it was the fact that he'd taken
the tanks I'd draw, and I'd researched it properly, they were A1M1's, and Klaus
had just rubbed them out and drawn some generic, 1940's looking tank in place
of them. They weren't small panels, or backgrounds, they were big fuck-off tanks,
I went nuts, phoned Stuart and told him to send me all the pages back, tell Klaus
to stop inking until he just inks what's there. Klaus wouldn't change what he'd
done; he'd already been paid for it.
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The
Punisher |
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They sent them
all back to me, and I got James Hodgkins, who's my inker on a lot of things, to
do an imitation of Klaus' inks, and in some places we scrapped the entire page
and re-inked it. I had to pay James to do this. About eleven pages I had to pay
to get re-inked.
And then beautifully,
Marvel took the eleven pages James re-inked (they still had Klaus' pages on disc),
fed them into the computer, shuffled them, and randomly published them! So I think
they published six of Klaus' inks and five of James'. And I wasn't happy about
that either, but I was very happy with Klaus' inks once he started to doing what
was there. He and I worked very well together. Stylistically, he's one of the
best inkers out there; he does a great job on my stuff. And I don't think it was
really his fault, there was just one editor coming in and one leaving.
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