A still from the upcoming Scary Godmother animated special.

Style

LYNN EMMERT: Looking through your earlier work, I was impressed with your ability to adapt to different drawing styles for the different types of projects that you worked on. I thought, how do you go from something like your Classics Illustrated watercolor style to something like Black Orchid? Those are very different. Is that just your adaptability?

JILL THOMPSON: I have no idea. Because I don't plan it. Maybe it has to do with the school that I went to, or the fact that in illustration class you had to copy other people's styles, because they were preparing you for the fact that you were going to be drawing -- pretty much the computer has taken over for all of that -- but they were teaching you to draw everything from the black-and-white illustrations that would go in the newspaper to show that the liquor was on sale at the Walgreen's to color illustrations or fashion illustrations. You had to be able to do whatever an art director needed you to do. And you needed to have different styles. But when I sit down with comics, I always suspect I'm going to draw exactly the same thing, every single time. And I never do. Some things are... I guess I'd call it like Steve Rude and Jaime Hernandez influenced, where the lines are real rounded and smooth. But when I started drawing Scary Godmother, I never knew it was going to come out the way it did. And if people want me to draw like that for other projects I can't do it, the characters don't look like that. Sometimes I try, and there's a little bit of that influence in there, but it's just whatever the story calls for. And I don't even think about it when I start it. It's just what comes out when I'm through reading or beginning to lay out a page or draw. Sometimes I wish I could draw everything one way. But I can't.

EMMERT: I don't follow traditional comics that much, but you seem to be one of the few artists who can draw anything in any way.

THOMPSON: I can't draw the underside of a car. [Emmert laughs.] If I do, the car's going to look stupid and silly, like some kind of souped-up Big Daddy Roth hot rod. But that was always one of my biggest fears of drawing comics: cars, and then cities. An overhead shot of Manhattan is daunting. Eventually it becomes fun, but on a deadline basis it can get way too time consuming. It's not fair that a writer gets to say, "We see Superman flying over Metropolis from above. He's... " And you know, "Oh, my god. I have to draw all of those windows. If I want to be really accurate, there're a billion people and cars down on the street." And the writer got paid for writing one page and it's one sentence. It took me three days to draw this thing! It's not fair! But those are challenges. It's fun to tackle, but also a pain sometimes. There are things that I like to draw better than other things, but I guess I can draw anything if I had to.

When I was growing up I thought that you never could use photo reference. I thought that that was cheating. I thought you had to memorize how to draw everything. That was why cars were so difficult to me, because I didn't understand how you could just draw out of your head. Then when I went to art school I met this guy named Dave who could draw any car out of his head. That was his idiot-savant talent, I guess. You could say, "Draw me a 1968 Cadillac." And he could! And it would be accurate. And he would draw it right in front of you, too. So it wasn't like he was going home and tracing it. But he couldn't draw people without reference, and I can, so...

EMMERT: I always wondered about mainstream comics' policy of using a different artist for the cover art than the one that did the insides. Did that ever bother you? Did you feel that you made it when you got to do your own cover art?

THOMPSON: Well, yeah. For one, I've always thought doing covers was a great gig. Since art school, you always wanted to draw the pin-up type of illustration. I don't understand why Edu-ardo Risso doesn't do the covers on 100 Bullets. Maybe it's a time-constraint thing. Not that I don't ever want to see Dave Johnson's covers again, because that stuff rocks. I want to see a hundred of those. But yeah, there are people who might have a more unusual style or a less "mainstream" style, where you need a Brian Bolland cover on the front to make people pick it up. Because readers are goofy like that. And then they'll see the inside stuff and they'll go, "Hey, this is pretty cool." But yeah, I wanted to do the covers because I had spent tons of time in illustration at school and pretty much that was your big thing, like you wanted to do a movie poster, which they don't illustrate any more. Or you wanted to make these big, cool kind of portrait-y things that would just stand alone.

Now, doing Scary Godmother myself, and doing the covers, it's a pain to do all of the things. Because it really is all about the deadline. In March you have to think about what your August cover is going to be. And it's like, "Well, I don't really know if the story is going to go the way I think it's going to go." Or, "I wasn't thinking that far down the line." You always have to think ahead and there has to be promotional materials, and there has to be solicitations. And if you're busy jamming on the inside of something and then you have to stop and worry about something four issues on, I can see where they're just going to have different people do different stuff. Mostly because it's all assembly line kind of stuff anyway.

EMMERT: You work in both color and black-and-white comics. Which do you prefer?

THOMPSON: That's a hard question. I like all comics. You mean like regular, Wonder Woman-type comics? I like flat color if I'm going to have color in comics. I'm not a big fan of computer color unless it's done by somebody who is trained, with a color or painting background. Too many techniques or effects are detrimental to the end product. People think you have to make everything shiny or give everything a texture. But then that flattens out the composition. Everything in the background becomes just as important as everything in the foreground and you're really messing with what the artist's plan was. That's why I think the coloring on Hellboy is some of the best coloring, and Patricia Mulvihill's coloring on 100 Bullets. I think she uses the computer. I'm so computer illiterate. But they're using that as a painterly tool instead of just something to shove a lot of glitter on top of something. Used properly, special effects can totally enhance a comic. But used constantly, it becomes an eyesore.

EMMERT: Sometimes even distracting.

THOMPSON: Yes. Exactly. And bothersome.

EMMERT: I think if the art's good, it speaks for itself.

THOMPSON: And you don't cover it up, either. Especially if you're working in a collaborative situation like that. If you're not doing it yourself it's something where you have to realize that the story is the end product. And if you're coloring is making it hard to figure out what's going on, you're doing a disservice to the entire book. I read both black-and-white and color comics, but I'm just a dork. I read comics!

EMMERT: I don't think that's dorky. I read comics, too.

THOMPSON: Oh, I don't either. I mean that in a loving way.

EMMERT: Speaking of collaborations, how do you feel about inkers? As someone who's more in tune with alternative comics, that's one thing I don't get -- I mean, I understand the need to break up the workload for a monthly mainstream comic, but did it bother you? Or did you learn anything from seeing other people, like Vince Locke on Sandman, inking you?

THOMPSON: It bothered me quite a bit at times. When I was just starting out as a penciler every inker I worked with seemed to smother all of the things that were important to me. Subtle things I did with expression or body language. It enraged me. And it seemed that no matter how hard I tried to accentuate the areas I wanted inked with more care, the more they were lost in the translation. At times I would ink faces -- or then panels or entire pages so some of the art would remain the way I wanted it seen. It's a difficult situation because generally you have no control over who will be inking you and the person chosen may have an art style totally incompatible with your own. But those kinds of situations are usually dictated by artists' availability and deadline.

I think either you find an inker you can work with as an ongoing collaboration or you make the leap and ink your own work. Whether that's out of frustration or control issues or both depends on the person. But one thing it does teach you in the long run is how to pencil effectively in shorthand. You have to learn how to draw clearly and graphically -- because what you do will be interpreted by another person.

It's a fine line. I think if you leave too much open to interpretation you run the risk of your style of art being lost in the shuffle. And if you delineate everything and shade all the black areas so preciously you might as well be inking yourself because you're using the pencil as an inking tool already. The inker who works on that is fairly redundant.

An inker has to be an artist in the first place. A good inker can save a bad penciler or can make a mediocre penciler look terrific. But an inker who simply traces what the penciler puts on paper will be an exact representation of what's already there. Which if you're an accomplished artist means it will look great and if you aren't as accomplished it will only accentuate your flaws. So I guess you can learn what you need to work on if that's the case.

I've been lucky -- I've had some good inking experiences and I've learned from the bad ones. I did make the jump to inking myself, though, and that was all control and art issues. Plus you get both paychecks and all the art back.

[To read the rest of this interview, please see The Comics Journal #244.]

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