We're at the halfway point in our yearlong "Experience Creativity" campaign, and with June rapidly winding down, I wanted to continue my monthly rundown of the ads.
June was the 20th anniversary of Todd McFarlane's Spawn, so it only made sense to start the month off with Big Toddy. I've mentioned before that I like how some of these ads show how different artists approach their work, and the different levels of technology involved, but I think this image of Todd using his Cintiq is probably something of a revelation for many. Todd isn't 100% digital – he goes back and forth – but the quickness with which he incorporated new tools into work really impressed me. I think everybody has a set impression of what Todd's like, but something I've always respected about him is his incredible versatility, not just as an artist but overall.
Skullkickers creator and writer Jim Zubkavich – or Jim Zub as he often prefers to be known – sent in a ton of amazing photos, but this one was my favorite. Jim's reading over a Skullkickers script he's just finished here, and like thinking, it's an important step in the creative process for any writer. Every writer reads and re-reads what he or she has written, making sure it's just right, or that some important element of the plot hasn't been left out, or that the dialogue reads correctly. Even the most successful and assured writers spend time considering what they've written.
Rob Guillory is the artist behind the insanely awesome Chew, and given how twisted that book can be, it's probably a little shocking that Rob (like writer John Layman) looks so damn normal. Rob's a great guy, though, and he has an amazing work ethic. Something worth noting, too, is that the pages in the background are from the issue of Chew he's working on. A lot of artists pin pages up on the wall as they complete them, so they can take in the overall flow of the issue and see if anything's missing. As more artists move to digital, it's a practice that is becoming slightly less common, but there's something really wonderful about seeing a whole issue's worth of pages tacked up on the wall in an artist's studio.
Finally this month, we have Eric Jones, artist on the relatively new Danger Club. Eric and writer/co-creator Landry Walker are long-time collaborators – they did Supergirl together over at DC – but Danger Club is their first Image book. Because I think of Landry and Eric as a pair, I'd initially thought it would be neat to do a shot of the two of them together, but later thought better of it. Even though comics has a long history of creative duos – Siegel and Schuster, Simon and Kirby, Lee and Kirby, Byrne and Claremont, and so on – one of the strengths (I think) of this whole campaign has been the focus on individuality. The overall structure and design of the ads unify them, not the actual images, and each creator has an opportunity to stand out on his or her own terms. Crowding a writer and artist together into an ad would undermine that, I think.
