Post by grahamthomson on Feb 11, 2009 11:14:51 GMT
A few teaser questions from a Q&A session with Transformers artist Stephen Baskerville.
What made you decide to become an artist?
Seeing Gene Colan and Jack Abel's artwork on Iron Man, in black and white reprint form in a late 60's comic called Fantastic was what did it for me. My older brother had been buying comics for a while, and none of it interested me much (some guy called Kirby seemed to do most of it!) but seeing this art, in what looked to my young eyes as hyper-realistic detail was an absolute revelation. I'd never been one of those kids at school that were perceived as 'good at art', but from that moment on I knew what I wanted to do, and started by copying those Iron Man pages. In those days, there were no British artists working on American comics (though I believe Barry Smith did some of his first work doing back page pin-ups on those Fantastic reprint books),so I never imagined I’d ever be able to do it for a living. But I made my own comic, naively calling it’s hero The Phantom, and sent it to Marvel Comics in New York, and 6 months later I got a letter from Stan Lee, which even at the age of 11 I knew was some kind of duplicated form letter. Nevertheless, it was signed by Stan himself, or so I thought~ it transpires it was more likely to have been office manger ‘Fabulous’ Flo Steinberg~ but that signature, along with the encouraging message was enough to hook me in for life!
How did you come to work on the Transformers comic?
I was inking Steve Yeowell on Thundercats, for Marvel UK, under some crazy assistant editor called Simon Furman (what ever happened to him?) which I really enjoyed. But after Steve left to work for 2000AD, Simon gave me some Jeff Anderson Transformers pages to ink. Jeff’s pencils were very polished, but I did find Transformers quite difficult at first, and even today they’re more time-consuming to ink than super-heroes. Then, having previously drawn some Thundercats covers (Marvel UK had a great policy which seemed to be that covers weren’t very important~ at least, that’s what I assumed was the case, given that they were employing me to do them!) I was given some Transformers covers to do. Then, eventually, after Andrew (Wildman) had started doing the Marvel US Transformers comics, and wasn’t too keen on who they’d found to ink him, I got the call.
You were often associated with Andrew Wildman's work; inking his
pencils, particularly during the last years of the Marvel US
Transformers comic. Was there anything specific to his style that
attracted you to his work?
Andrew’s pencils are very kinetic, really full of life, and generally, just exciting. I find that if pencils are exciting to look at then they’ll be exciting to ink, and hopefully the finished comic will look exciting too. Plus, he leaves room for the inker to contribute, rather than ‘trace’!
Who were your favourite Transformers characters to draw?
The easy answer is to say that, like your children, you’re not allowed to have favourites, and love them all for what they are. But it’s probably truer to say that the names of each Transformer have blurred in my memory over the years, so I’d be hard pressed to put a name to a face in many cases! I would say that I prefer the ones who actually have faces though, so definitely not Shockwave
The full Q&A will appear in Hubris #9 - Coming Soon!
What made you decide to become an artist?
Seeing Gene Colan and Jack Abel's artwork on Iron Man, in black and white reprint form in a late 60's comic called Fantastic was what did it for me. My older brother had been buying comics for a while, and none of it interested me much (some guy called Kirby seemed to do most of it!) but seeing this art, in what looked to my young eyes as hyper-realistic detail was an absolute revelation. I'd never been one of those kids at school that were perceived as 'good at art', but from that moment on I knew what I wanted to do, and started by copying those Iron Man pages. In those days, there were no British artists working on American comics (though I believe Barry Smith did some of his first work doing back page pin-ups on those Fantastic reprint books),so I never imagined I’d ever be able to do it for a living. But I made my own comic, naively calling it’s hero The Phantom, and sent it to Marvel Comics in New York, and 6 months later I got a letter from Stan Lee, which even at the age of 11 I knew was some kind of duplicated form letter. Nevertheless, it was signed by Stan himself, or so I thought~ it transpires it was more likely to have been office manger ‘Fabulous’ Flo Steinberg~ but that signature, along with the encouraging message was enough to hook me in for life!
How did you come to work on the Transformers comic?
I was inking Steve Yeowell on Thundercats, for Marvel UK, under some crazy assistant editor called Simon Furman (what ever happened to him?) which I really enjoyed. But after Steve left to work for 2000AD, Simon gave me some Jeff Anderson Transformers pages to ink. Jeff’s pencils were very polished, but I did find Transformers quite difficult at first, and even today they’re more time-consuming to ink than super-heroes. Then, having previously drawn some Thundercats covers (Marvel UK had a great policy which seemed to be that covers weren’t very important~ at least, that’s what I assumed was the case, given that they were employing me to do them!) I was given some Transformers covers to do. Then, eventually, after Andrew (Wildman) had started doing the Marvel US Transformers comics, and wasn’t too keen on who they’d found to ink him, I got the call.
You were often associated with Andrew Wildman's work; inking his
pencils, particularly during the last years of the Marvel US
Transformers comic. Was there anything specific to his style that
attracted you to his work?
Andrew’s pencils are very kinetic, really full of life, and generally, just exciting. I find that if pencils are exciting to look at then they’ll be exciting to ink, and hopefully the finished comic will look exciting too. Plus, he leaves room for the inker to contribute, rather than ‘trace’!
Who were your favourite Transformers characters to draw?
The easy answer is to say that, like your children, you’re not allowed to have favourites, and love them all for what they are. But it’s probably truer to say that the names of each Transformer have blurred in my memory over the years, so I’d be hard pressed to put a name to a face in many cases! I would say that I prefer the ones who actually have faces though, so definitely not Shockwave
The full Q&A will appear in Hubris #9 - Coming Soon!
