Adventurecon: The Artists Speak

AdventureCon is Knoxville’s annual comics, fantasy and sci-fi collectors convention, held the first weekend in June at the Convention Center.  In addition to sci-fi oriented television and film celebrities, as well as stars of professional wrestling, the organizers had more than 20 internationally published comic book artists there, plus one Web artist and a “local.”  The artists were sitting at two long rows of tables, back to back, all set up to produce original drawings for fans who requested them.  Stacked in front of the artists were their finished publications, many piles of original inked comic page boards, along with the tools of their trade.  I interviewed four of them, asking each the following four questions:

1. Does drawing for the public make you feel like PBS performer Bob Ross?
2. What are your favorite tools and pens?
3. Do you only illustrate other people’s stories, or, do you have your own projects, too?
4. Do you produce artwork outside the comic industry?

James Rodriguez / Quantum:  Rock of Ages, Chronicles of Sara
1. No.  He likes to draw at Starbucks to get out of the house and meet fans.
2. He hates drawing in with blue lines — it is distracting.  He likes Pentel mechanical pencils with HB leads because you can go light or dark the easiest.  He likes Microns and likes to laser copy storyboards to lay the color ink on the laser paper, which hardly crinkles and takes the ink well.
3. He illustrates the works of other writers, but Dreamchilde Press gives him lots of creative control over a number of panels and creative decisions.
4. He does oils on the side, preferring large landscapes.

Phil Noto / Hellboy, Batgirl, Captain Marvel, X-Men
1. He is used to it. He started as an animator with Disney and sat at the door where the tours went through.
2. He likes Microns and Pantones on Bristol Board.  He does extensive direct drawing on a Wacom Cintiq 21UX interactive monitor.
3. He is working on a comic with a friend but is happy drawing other people’s stories and has a good amount of artistic input.
4. He does oil and acrylic paintings heavily influenced by vintage advertising.

Talent Caldwell / Superman, GI Joe, Battlestar Gallactica, Spiderman
1. Who is that?
2. Talent prefers to sketch in with blue, then graphite.  He buys every product he can find to experiment with.  He prefers pencils to ink, but feels the old refillable, clog prone, rapidograph pens have better ink than the disposables, like the Microns.
3. He is in the process of developing his own stories, in addition to illustrating other people’s writing.
4. He has drawn storyboards for a movie that was never made and has also illustrated covers for video game packaging.

Keith Champagne / JSA, Green Lantern Corps, 52, World War lll
1. Sometimes, but Bob only had happy little accidents.
2. He uses nib pens, Raphael sable brushes and the blackest of liquid drawing inks, Koh-I-Noor.  His drawings are 90 percent brush, 10 percent nib pen.
3. He writes all the stories he illustrates now, and it was a tough job with lots of hurdles to get there.
4. He has been doing screenwriting in his down time.