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When it comes to ComiCons, what are they for you?  Business, face time, fun?  When you think, “oh I need to go to this con”, how do you react?

Large-scale comic cons?

Yes, something like New York ComiCon.

ComiCons are generally the best of my world, … it’s about time with friends, it’s about promoting, face time, being on panels, friends in the industry you haven’t seen forever and then it’s the worst because an overwhelming number of people in a sort of always packed, kind of oppressive environment and trying to navigate just to one end of the hall to another can be very difficult.  So conventions for me are mixed bag, the large scale ones, in that the fans are always amazing, the people I meet are amazing, and it’s always great to reconnect with fellow freelancers/creators I haven’t seen in a while and then my best friends are in this business so that’s always really fun and them it tends to be overwhelming to me because the crowds are so large.

Understandable!  So how was this one [NYCC 08] for you?  Was there anything that drove you crazy? That you wish had happened different? Or that you enjoyed more particularly than others?

What struck me about the con is that it was packed; the convention floor was full from beginning to end.  And for me that’s actually really exciting, to have a New York City, east coast based con, there hasn’t really been a successful one in years, and to see this one really building up its actually quite thrilling considering both Marvel and Dc both publish here.  As for anything else… 2 things really stood out, actually three.  One was reuniting with Bryan Hitch, an artist whom I have not seen in 10 or 12 years, we realized, and I have known for almost 20.  So that was really exciting to reconnect with Bryan physically considering we have been in the same cities without ever crossing paths and it was lovely to see him.  I also ran into other people like Gail Simone and I got to meet Milo Ventimiglia, who is actually very sweet, the actor form Heroes and that was really fun. Seeing students, past and present, come to me with their works so I can check their progress is probably the best part of the convention. I am always exciting to see talent I helped nurture who find work and they are still so wide eyed and they still find this thing so amazing and it’s really exciting to see it through their eyes.

Out of all the cons that you go to, which is generally your favorite to go too? Small or big?

I only go to a couple of large cons a year, San Diego and New York, I tend to prefer small shows, but I cannot think of a favorite show?  The shows that treat me the best, I have to say, and the country that treats all freelancers the best is Spain. Most comic conventions [there] are state sponsored or get government money so they are funded very well, they treat us very well, we are allowed to take spouses, and they never work us particularly hard.  Most of them have a high level of city pride, so if its Barcelona or Madrid, or smaller shows like Grenada or Avilles, the con folks are more interested in showing us their town.  We work a couple of hours and spend the rest of the day eating tapas and drinking wine with fans and hosts, so the Spanish hosts are pretty amazing.

So are they brining you out there for American comics or you actually working on things in foreign countries right now?

We are American talent that they bring over.  Particularly in Europe, Marvel comics still has a pretty strong following, DC less so since they weren’t translated in the 70s and 80s, as I understand all of Marvel had their books translated in multiple languages.  And so, they are still quite popular with Spain and France and other countries, but Spain likes their superhero comics.  Invariably there will be a large number of us there from the states and usually England as well.  People who draw mainstream superhero comics. But, I am not working on anything for them [foreign publishers].

Back to the cons for a moment, when it comes to the cons, is there anything you wish they would do different? That you see happen at every con and you think ‘gosh if they would just do this different it would make it better for all of us?’

That is actually a complicated question.  The thing I feel like American conventions could learn from foreign conventions is how to tone it DOWN a notch.  And what I mean by that is not tone down the booths, not tone down the activity, or the excitement, but control the workflow for the freelancers. The sheer numbers of people sometimes makes these conventions incredibly overwhelming for the people working them, but it is something that I have never felt in a foreign convention-- they are much better at controlling the crowds and giving us time off here and there just to breathe. Maybe that is just the way everyone likes it.

As I talk this aloud, I second-guess myself.  Maybe that is just the way American conventions are.  I certainly know that San Diego last year had been much better than it had been in previous years because I did not work as much and I spent time outside of the convention center with friends and fans. I found just being out of the building itself was just sort of a literally a breath of fresh air, because by Saturday those places can be kind of wretched. It all sounds more negative than I mean it to.  The thing I find I love about the smaller and foreign shows is that because of their scale it is easier to meet people. It is easier to connect with fans and readers. It is easier to talk with publishers and retailers to find out what they are looking for and find out what they like and do not like.  It is easier to draw sketches for people without burning out. It’s just easier to connect with people when the conventions are smaller. The large-scale ones are just this flurry, you will see one person for 30 seconds, and then you will never see them again.

Yeah you had, at several points, you had quite a little line waiting to see you and I noticed you were saying ‘I can’t sign things, commissions are one thing, but there are just too many people I need to finish these commissions for.’

I always say that my lines are essentially the same people. It is just that they have stood in line for an hour because I do like to talk to people and I do not crank them through. Often if you really take a look at the line, it’s just the same people waiting for a long, long time, so the line actually looks longer than it is.  That’s actually my secret.  Whereas I suspect people like Alex Ross and Bryan Hitch have real lines where they move hundreds of people through, I move 20 people through. But they get a good drawing and I get to know a little bit about them, which I like.

Do you ever feel like you are asked to attend too many cons?

That is actually a common complaint with the creators. I hate the term creators, and I guess that’s what we are… it just sounds loftier.

Or ‘talent’.

Talent, yeah, freelancers. I get the notion. It’s just such a strange thing.  In terms of shorthand, like the talent, freelance, whatever we are, we are offered too many of them.

Yeah, how are you expected to go to every one of these things and still do your work? Bendis basically said, “I’m only doing one show this year.”

I started doing that last year unless they were foreign shows or a super small show I really, really like, or in my hometown.

And then, there is the catch of ‘how far can you pull back before you stop becoming visible.’

Well that’s the great debate.  My feeling, and its one thing since I live in New York City, in terms of visibility and work as long as I am visible to the people who give me work, I am okay.  As long as I am constantly engaged with editors at DC and Marvel and showing work that makes them happy, I am less worried about it from a promotional standpoint.  I don’t think wizard has ever done a spread on me in 10 years, even though I have done a lot of work for Wizard; I’ve never actually been a featured artist ever. 

Which is funny, because you would think when you did Infinite Crisis, which you drew, and it was a big deal [The comic], that would have been a moment there.

That was a big deal but it was not going to happen.  The Wizard guys have been incredibly, incredibly good to me. I call them up sometimes just to say hi, ask business advice, and see how their families and girlfriends are doing. They have been great to me. And I am dead serious. I know that sounds it’s for the interview. I am not bullshitting, I am just underscoring. They have been wonderful. I’ve done so much work for the magazine and it’s funny that I have never been a feature for them. But I have some degree of visibility, I keep getting gigs that I get, and I feel like I am doing okay.

Wizard, to me, it seems like their featured artists tend to be the ‘it of the moment.’

Yes.

And you’re not the ‘it of the moment,’ but everybody knows who you are. They know your work.

I don’t think I will ever be the ‘it of the moment’ because a few years ago they had me as an ‘up and comer’ and I here I’ve been working for 12 years and I am on a list of ‘up and comers’ – I forget what the book was for – oh it was New X-men when I was doing Grant’s New X-Men and I just realized, the way I work, what my work looks like, I am never going to be ‘it boy’. And I am actually kind of fine with that.

Do you think that is partially because you have a very George Perez sensibility to your art?

Yeah and George can do it better than I can.

Whereas people don’t see it as being this drastically different [type of art] either.

Right. It’s not… What I haven’t done, and I kind of regret on some level, maybe I am just not artistically capable of it, is doing what Bryan Hitch did. We were both rooted so heavily in our influences, obviously that’s one of the reasons we bonded, Bryan had his Alan Davis thing and I had my George Perez thing, he went somewhere else with it.  Part of that, though, was that he was driven by, my sense is, by a desire to sort of meld two mediums – i.e. film and comics. So, what he has essential done, as he has with Ultimates and Authority, by creating that widescreen thing, he was trying to bring a film sensibility and visual vocabulary to the comic… it’s all about cinema. I find while I am interested in that, he’s already conquered that territory and conquered it very well.

My interests are still [where they are], I think, and I say this with some trepidation, because they are still very few people who can do what George and I can do in terms of large multi-panel story pages. There was talk about doing Infinite Crisis as big budget ‘widescreen spectacle’, but there was no way.  We would have never had room.  You know Geoff [was] scripting for us 14 and 15 panel pages. So, you can’t do that. You cannot do what Bryan did. You cannot make an action blockbuster when you are trying to do intimate character moments with a cast of thousands as well. So part of the reason I don’t think I have moved on particularly is because I like that story telling format. I am not so much interested in pushing boundaries as I am in really cementing them.

Also, I find, teaching students as I do, while storytelling is still very conceptually difficult, it’s the one thing I know I can do well. So, my drawing hasn’t evolved in a way that I like, but my storytelling actually has and I am happy for that. I am happy that when editors tell me they never question the story when they are looking at pages. They always know what’s happening, they know where you are, they know where the characters are. That stuff is more important to me than being the ‘it boy.’ I guess my other spin off on this, ‘It boys’ tend to be often, and not always, and there are some fantastic smurfin brilliant IT Boys and maybe girls out there too, but so much of what I dislike in comics and I’ve tried to move away from, is topical, I should say, surface flash.  Which there is a lot.  There are a lot of fantastic technique artists out there who know how to crosshatch, who know how to do a very cool face, who know how to use heavy blacks and spot them in a very dramatic way particularly for single image pages, but they don’t know how to tell stories as well.  They can have their status; I still think that what I am most interested in is telling a good story in the best way that I can.

What are the current projects are you are working on currently?

The current comic book project I am working on is The Amazing Spider-Man with Mark Guggenheim as part of the ongoing weekly book. Which means I tend to be working several months ahead of every arc that I am doing and the stories, I understand, are broken down into three issues arcs, sometimes 4, each with a different artist writer team. My first one was Bob Gale, my second is Mark Guggenheim, and I do not think they have announced the third writer and we are working towards a much larger story for next summer.

So you are actually working as a writer on these as well?

I pitched a story.  What I am working on is as more of a plotter. An interesting thing I have discovered working on this weekly book and working with a number of writers is that I have a very strong, and this is all artistic ego, I have a very strong hand in the way I tell a story, in the way I break a story down panel by panel per page.  Writers do not often work with artists who can put 15 panels on a page, so something I am finding is that they tending to write fairly open. So I am adding little bits of character by adding a panel or filling a space but what am I trying to get them to do, all of them to do, is think in terms of action, because they have been condensing action in to a very small number of pages and trying to increase the character time which is fine, except we end up with 9 panel action pages and 4 panel character pages, which on the page look really bad. Dealing with TV and film writers, what I think I am discovering is that they are trained to put just enough on the page, to let the actors run with it.  Technically, I am the director making these characters act but what I am trying to get them to do is to think they are not working with actors but with drawn characters on a comic page. And they have to remember what that looks like. 

The story I am working on right now… What happened was at the last Marvel summit, I am not a big spider-man fan, I never was – I took this job because I was excited about the opportunity to work on Spider-Man and to work with Steve Wacker, the editor. So I started reading all these back issues. Because anytime I start a long-term commitment to a character or characters I tend to have to know as much about them as possible. I am very inside out when it comes to characters.  I like to know what they eat, how tall they are, where they sleep and how they grew up and what their religions are and all that stuff. To me it is part of who they are, part of their character, so it helps me understand them.  And so, with Peter Parker and some of these continuity revisions, I decided to go back and start reading about him and I realized there was a plot hole.  Not so much a plot hole, but a character that should have been around and never was. No one ever decided to deal with that character and so I created a whole story based on this and pitched and apparently, Joe Quesada really liked it.  Hopefully, if all goes well, we’ll see the character introduced in the Mark Guggenheim story I am doing and then we will see that pay off in the next year. 

The point being that I am not actually writing, I sort of have a big story idea and what I am hoping to do is work with a lot of writers on the story so that there is a pay off. I was the outsider who came in with this ‘hey I got an idea’ and they seem to like [the idea] but in deference to them, and to be respectful to them, I wanted them to engage with it so I want them to contribute as well. I don’t want to write over them. Actually, I want them to write it with some help. 

So is that the only comic you are working on right now?  You are not doing anything for DC Zero? Or any of the final crisis?

I am under contract with Marvel Comics for another few months. My DC work is actually for licensing. I am actually working on the Wonder Woman Encyclopedia, which is, of course, loads of fun and outrageous amounts of research so I get to read about Wonder Woman issue after issue all day. I have to say has been interesting in [seeing] story trends in comics.  It’s interesting to see. Different characters, like spider-man, just lend themselves to certain types of stories.  The milieu itself suggests a certain kind of tale.  The same with wonder woman.  This sort of Greek mythology background. The island of immortal women. The military. The over protective mother.  It’s been fascinating to see how historically the same sorts of stories have been told over and over again. I am not even sure creators between generations actually know this.  They just think, “Oh my god I’ve got the perfect wonder woman story!” Like, “someone else is going to be wonder woman.” Only to find out and realize that in comic book history there have been 10 Wonder Women.  Three of whom, mind you, are the golden age, earth 1 and post crisis versions. So there are three Dianas.  But Wonder Woman has been replaced numerous times.  Some cranky Amazon has said ‘I can do your job better than you can’ and has tried to orchestrate another contest. They get the outfit, they find out they are not suited for it, Diana gets the outfit back, - Artemis, Orana, another one from the 60s, Donna Troy, Circe.  It’s interesting to me how the costume goes around.  The point being that one of the things that has been fascinating me is sort of marking these story trends. And once the encyclopedia is done, I can honestly say that we never need to see another Amazon challenge Wonder Woman to the title, because it’s been done.  Not because it’s not such a good story but because it’s been done over and over again.

What it excites in me about this, in rethinking that character, trying to figure out what’s some new angle on the story now that I have a large historical perspective. What stories would I tell with Wonder Woman to take the best aspects of the versions of them but do not necessarily rehash the stories that have been told multiple times over the decades.

Who are your favorite characters to draw?

My favorite characters to draw are all women. Wonder woman, of course. Donna Troy. The Titan girls – Starfire and Raven.  The X-women. My favorite characters to draw are probably mostly my favorite characters. Partly because they are my favorites because I get them, I know how to body them, I know how to make them act, they all have fantastic hair, and usually their costumes are really good.

Who are some of your least favorite?  When you have to draw them, you just think ‘ugh.’

I’m not a fan of street level characters.  So Batman, Daredevil,.. Who else… who do I dislike drawing. I am not a big fan of drawing Cyclops. I tend to like characters, chalk it up to being gay or not, with a touch of flamboyance particularly in costume or personality.

I was going to say, it sounds like the ones who were somewhat plain in their costume.

Yes, because I think that the bigness of them is fun to draw.  You know like, that is actually one of the reasons I like superhero comics, because they are big and flamboyant and they are over the top and I am not a fan of street level books.  Daredevil is one of my least favorite characters in comics and its not to say I would ever have him eradicated. I know people love him, but I would not touch him.  Have at him, great awesome fantastic.

Therefore, if someone came to you and said ‘would you draw this [daredevil comic]’, you would be like ‘pass.’

I am actually drawing daredevil now [in Spider-Man] and with all characters, the challenge is figuring him out inside and out. I would never try to sabotage him. Unlike some creators who dislike some characters, I never try to sabotage ones I dislike because I know other people do.  You know, just because I dislike them, does not make anything wrong with them. That character can be fantastic, I just do not respond to them, so I am constantly on a mission to draw the best daredevil I can.  I am calling up people I know ‘like how do you draw daredevil?’ What’s the thing to remember?” I just had a conversation with Klaus Janson about that.  What are the things – like what is his physicality?  How does he fight? How do I draw him? That was actually fun but most street level characters and plain costume characters I am not a fan of. 

Whom do you want to draw that you have not gotten a chance to draw yet?

Oh god, there is no one.  The beautiful thing about doing these large crossovers is I get to draw everyone.  Who I would love to do… My two dream projects at Marvel would be the John Byrne Alpha Flight team and the Chris Claremont/Bill Sienkiewicz New Mutants team. If I could draw any two teams professionally, maybe even meld them, [it would be them]. That would be a dream.

Maybe an Alpha Flight vs. New Mutants would be the best?

Yes, that would be so much fun. Some sliver of time or alternaverse story.

Are there any writers or artists that you have not gotten a chance to work with that you really want to work with? You see something of theirs and go, ‘You know, they would be really fun to work with!’

I have worked with almost every writer I have wanted to. Which is kind of glorious. Again I have very little to complain about at the end of the day. Again, this goes back to that conversation we were having about being an ‘IT boy.’ As long as I get to work with these people, I don’t care. That thrills me.  But, I would actually be curious to work from a Brian Bendis script. I think that would be interesting. And when he’s on it, he’s really on it. I think he’s a lot of fun. 

That would be interesting to see because he can be very panel-y.

Yes! But he gets it.  He is one of those writers who knows how to do it.  I think I could really get into that.  Off hand, well the obvious and easy answer is Alan Moore. A pitch that never went through is that I pitched a series of one shots with various Justice League members in black and white and I tend to think that my stuff looks best in black and white, not to disparage my colorist, but I think printing, invariably takes away from the beauty of the color. My colorist, Jeremy Cox, is a Genius! But the printing never measures up to what he comes up with. My stuff with Andy Lanning inking is so beautiful in black and white and people came up to me at the convention and were like ‘Wow your stuff looks so different!’; IE better in its original form. 

Anyway, I pitched this series, seven one shots, black and white, Justice League each with a different writer, but with people you wouldn’t imagine, so it was like Peter Milligan and Garth Ennis, Warren Ellis.  Just a bunch of sort of ‘high endy’ writers, swapping back and forth with characters. Geoff [Johns] was on the list too. So there are a couple of people I haven’t worked with that I would like to, but for the most part, I’m pretty lucky.  Oh, I’m dying to work with Grant Morrison again.

I noticed unlike a lot of writers and artists, you seem to have the ability to, more so than a lot of people in the industry, to work for pretty much both Marvel or DC pretty easily. Is just that your own willingness or is there something that you have done that has made people like ‘oh yeah come work for us.’? Sometimes there seems to be animosity when that happens, but with you I just don’t seem to see that. With you it’s just ‘oh I am going to go work for Marvel now’, and after so long at DC it was just ‘Oh, ok!’ and it is okay.

Part of it is that I don’t think I talk trash in the way a lot of other creators do. I am not interested in it. Most people will understand that I was at DC for many, many years and I wanted to play at Marvel. I have not been, in the past, as kind as I could have been to certain people at both companies, but generally, I have good relationships with people and I want to foster that and I think we should foster that. I am not interested in any sort of ‘gotcha politics’ that happens between these two companies. I do not know about them [the politics], I do not want to know about them. Mostly I find it’s just having the luxury of working on different characters. I definitely think I am stronger with some than others. 

Spider-man was definitely on the learning curve that I was not expecting. I thought it was going to be a much easier gig than it would be and I felt so much better talking to some people at NYCC, a lot of people have trouble with spider-man, who you would think would e easiest character on the planet to draw, but there’s a lot of thought that goes into him. Everything from size and shape to how far his leg should flip over his back to how big the black eye mask goggles are.  Everyone really thinks about it. My initial difficulties trying to figure that character out, I felt was being mirrored by other artists [and that] took a load off my heart.

Concerning spider-man right now, does it make it more difficult to know that right now, more than any time there is such a huge division in the fan base? Where there are just a lot of people who really don’t like it and it’s not just the normal ‘they don’t like the elements,’ this is more so than anything that has happened in YEARS in comic books that they [Marvel] have really been lambasted for?

I am not hyper invested in that. That’s the funny thing about not being a spider-man fan is that I don’t care about what they care about in the same way. I get it. I have seen things happen to my characters. [Things] that I love, that make me crazy, that make me stop reading the book.  It doesn’t occur to me to hate this in the way they do, so I am sort of along for the ride. Also, on some level, we have the privilege of knowing what’s happening 6 months from now, a year from now, so what seems so bleak at the moment, I know how it pays off .

It is easier to be more comfortable with it.

Yes.  It’s like, you know, whatever. Its comics. Things change. Things go back and forth. You might hate things for a year.  As I get older, I’m a little more playful than I think I used to be with characters and their continuity, tracking their history. As long as books sort of make sense internally, I am okay with this. What frustrates me is the wholesale changes that don’t track internally or that you can’t justify internally that’s more difficult.  What I want to do is make sure these comics read as Spider-man comics, so everything for me is a struggle, because I want to make sure that marvel people, the editors, the fans, non-fans, they look at this and go this is spider-man.  This is more important to me than this is ‘Spider-Man Brand New Day’.  That’s beyond me. I cannot control that.  But, if somebody reads it and is like ‘yeah that read like a spider-man book and I believe that’s peter parker and that looks aunt may and feels like I am reading spider-man,’ than I am okay.

Well said. Last thing, so you teach as well?

I do

Where do you teach and what?

I teach at the New York school of Visual Arts. I teach a life drawing for sophomores. This is, certainly by most accounts, the best part of my week.  Its one class and I teach about 20 students with a live model and it’s amazing.

Do you ever have people in the class that you feel like took the class because they can be in a class with Phil Jimenez?

I’m more pleased with the people who don’t know me. They are just there to fill their requirement and I‘ve had a couple of fans and I have had students ask for autographs and sketches.  What I love though is that I have a reputation for being notoriously hard, which I am.  I’m very difficult to please. But, when I am pleased I am really, really pleased. I take their education very seriously.  They are spending a lot of money and a lot of their time in this really formative period where they are deciding to be artists and because I take it so seriously, I never let them go to that sort of fan place. I’ll tell them stories, I’ll engage them, we’ll joke and certainly as the semester goes on we become friendlier.  But I am not there to be idolized or worshiped as it were. I am not there to be the guy who goes ‘ooo! Twenty immediate fans!’ I want to prove to them that I know what I am talking about and I can help them work. It is important for me to work with them so they know that I can help them not just because I am Phil Jimenez but because I am good teacher.  That is very important to me. I always end up with a handful students that I think will make it. I have an incredibly talented crop this year.  What’s even better is that sort of middle range group where I am like, ‘Oh, my gosh!’ you’ve gotten better all year and they might not be immediate successes but in 2 years they could have a career doing this. So it’s very exciting to me.

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