For fairly obvious reasons, most new cartoonists whose work you encounter without hearing much about beforehand are young: People in their late teens or early twenties, beginning to take their craft seriously and potentially begin a career. Their concerns reflect where they are in life in a way where an older reader might see potential in the art, while still sensing an immaturity in the overall perspective the work is concerned with.
So, imagine my surprise to read a 120-page comic by an artist previously unknown to me, explicitly about realizing you've lost track of the ages of your friends' kids, wondering how responsibilities to a growing child can be balanced against a desire to still party and be social, all while the job market in which you might make a living is increasingly dominated by automation and machinery. Such was Gigs, published in 2021 by Michael Shea-Wright, born in September of 1983. So many men Shea-Wright’s age, whose facility with figure drawing was forged in the mines of a childhood copying superhero comics for hours on end, cannot get past their nostalgia for that era to attempt something as resonant and engaged with the world as they experience it now, but Gigs’ characterization of its female protagonist spoke to a life lived in the company of a variety of independent adults.
This was the first comic I was consciously aware of reading by Shea-Wright, having either missed or forgotten about the week’s worth of Cartoonist’s Diary strips he had done for this site, since collected alongside other material in a zine called Nibble Notice. I learned in our conversation that in his sixth grade yearbook, when asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, Michael said “either comic book artist or professional baseball player,” but one of the things I must salute him for as an adult is having made the mentally healthy decision to not attempt a full-time career out of drawing comics exclusively. His Cartoonist’s Diary strips cover Shea-Wright’s working as an art teacher during COVID.
Learning he works as an art teacher makes sense, not just due to his work’s evident love of drawing, but because his oeuvre has an educator’s sense of presence in the moment, encountering the page as if invigorated by all the ways the evident possibilities it presents threaten to overwhelm. In comics like his series Verge Escapement, we see him thinking on paper, exploring drawing and all the thought processes that emerge while putting pen to paper. Stylistic explorations abut each other, like the artist and the figures he draws each need to work out new ways to move across and through the environment of the page.
These comics present plenty of excitement, but at the end of 2023, Shea-Wright released the first issue of ATP, a full-on action comic, presenting a sincere and original take on the genre with a story about a personal trainer enlisted as a gig worker to defend a millionaire from assassins, who were in turn also hired as gig workers via an app. Here, Shea-Wright gives readers extended fight sequences and ends with two pages of sketchbook material trying to work out what approaches to action in comics work. While his comics and sketchbook work display plenty of documentary evidence of his thought processes, and his Youtube channel Comics People, cohosted with Nick Forker, has the two men sharing comics work they find inspiring, I still had questions about his work, background, and influences.
I thank him for taking the time to talk to me. This interview has been edited for clarity and structural reasons, and to remove instances where I recommended movies or comics the artist had not seen that didn’t go anywhere. – Brian Nicholson
BRIAN NICHOLSON: Do you want to start off talking about teaching art? Your methodology for doing that?
MICHAEL SHEA-WRIGHT: Sure. I just finished up my sixth year teaching, I teach elementary school, Pre-K through fifth grade. This was the first year that I had pre-K. I hadn’t had students that young before, which is an interesting challenge. You want to be able to give them all individualized attention but in a class of twenty, twenty-five kids you really do have to break them down into meeting them where they are skill-wise, especially with the younger kids, because in a pre-K group the skill spectrum is enormous. You have kids that are basically babies functionally, and you have kids that are speaking in complete sentences, in full thoughts. Some of them can cut a shape out of a piece of paper, some of them can’t even hold a pair of scissors. With the little kids it’s more about building motor skills, but once you get to between second and fifth grade you can start to engage with them on more exploratory levels.
It isn’t until maybe late fourth grade or fifth grade where they start to get self-conscious about what they’re doing and be aware that other people are gonna have opinions about what they’re working on, so one of my biggest goals for those kinds of kids is make sure they know that art is an exploration and it’s not a copying process. It’s about finding an in to what you’re doing. I had never thought of it that way before until I started working with kids. To me, I always had a way I wanted to draw and I knew how to get there in my mind. I just had to work, work, work until it looked the way I wanted it to, and then it wasn’t until I started working with a huge range of hundreds of kids that I was like no, it’s possible to find your own angle into whatever you want to do. It’s all about having someone guide you towards that personal goal, meeting you where your skill set is, and then not telling you where to go but gently nudging you.
What are some lessons that you do that maybe balance skill-building for the kids that are more interested in the act of drawing with not making the kids self-conscious about doing something incorrectly?
When they get to around third grade, I teach them the process of sketching and then finalizing, because it’s not totally intuitive that you can plan the drawing. I think a lot of younger kids might look at a drawing of Batman or Spider-Man and assume the artist can just hold a pen and then they draw the drawing. The idea of planning out a drawing is similar to what they do with writing in school. I try to teach that same concept where you can plan the pose and then build the drawing around that. I teach them this thing called the "super stick figure," which has an oval head and a square body. You just kind of connect limbs to it so it’s an articulated stick figure. Then I show them you can turn this into a person, or draw a huge shape and give it twenty legs, now it’s a monster or something like that. It’s a planning concept, but whatever they do with that plan is up to them. Some people want to draw faces, some people want to draw creatures, but it’s the same infrastructure. Whatever they do with that is up to them. The real goal is just to finish it. I try to give them enough time to finish it, and if someone’s struggling, I help them out, but the goal is not to do something good or bad, it’s to complete something and feel the satisfaction of doing something unexpected.
I feel it’s hard to work with kids without reflecting on your own childhood and your own experience getting better at art. Is there anything you wish you’d known when you were younger? What was your own “art practice,” for lack of a better word, like when you were a kid?
The experience of teaching has been really wild. This is a second career for me. The experience of being in a classroom is so different at 36 than it was when I was ten. I was able to put myself back in that feeling of “Wow this is really a overwhelming environment to try to learn something in.” I definitely can zero in on the kids that are similar to how I was at the time and I make sure I don’t give them any extra attention.
What do you mean? What kind of thing?
Personality types I guess. The kids who are introverted but have a really wild imagination and their imagination definitely outpaces their technical ability. Sometimes they’ll say, “Mr. Mike, I really want to draw a dragon flying over a city from above.” That’s hard for me to draw, and I’ve been drawing for years. Let’s break that down a bit and maybe pick a different angle to draw. You can feel them pushing up against their technical ability because they have boundless imagination.
Then other students are like “I don’t really want to do this project, what’s the least amount of work I can put into it,” and I was not that kid, but those are who need the most help, because they might feel like they’re bad at art, and they’re the ones who need the push into, "OK, why don’t we approach this from a side angle." When I was younger a lot of art was copying. You make the macaroni necklace. There wasn’t a lot of exploration in the art classes I was in as a little person. Fortunately, my parents noticed I liked art, and I was an only child and my parents were separated so I had a lot of solo time to myself, so when they realized that I liked drawing, they just gave me all the drawing stuff I could need, so that was a way for me to occupy my imagination. But I always felt there was a right way to do it. I read a lot of comics and was like “I want to draw like Jim Lee.” That was my north star. I would pick an artist I liked and copy their work repeatedly. I had no idea about self-publishing or that you can do something in your own way. There was this feeling that there was a right way to do something and if you do it the right way you get attention for it from a publisher. Just having art be open-ended: Here are some tools to start with, go have fun, make mistakes, see what happens. That’s a really valuable thing for kids to know.
Did you read comics consistently from childhood through adulthood or was there a time when you stopped?
I took a break once I reached the end of my X-Men phase. I liked the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon, so I read the comics that were based on the cartoon. I had some random Richie Rich stuff I had inherited and I really liked Mad Magazine. Once the Claremont/Lee X-Men ended, I started to lose interest. I was in middle school by then and was like, “Girls are not gonna like me if I like comic books.” I also played a lot of baseball, so it was all about trying to be social. “Are people gonna like me if I’m a sports person more or if I’m a comic book person more?” I now know neither of those things mean anything, but at the time I was like, "I’m gonna lean more into the athletic side because people will think I’m cooler." Until early high school, then I met some new friends through my art class who were really into Vertigo comics. That was the first time I read – Preacher was the big one – comics where I was like, “Oh wait, there’s comic books for adults that might not be embarrassing to talk about in public” because they were really violent. I wouldn’t say those comics are for adults but they’re for adolescents who want to feel adult. But I really loved them and that was a new way back into comics from there.
I was reading mostly Vertigo stuff, 100 Bullets. I really liked Scud The Disposable Assassin, mostly for the artwork, and I’ve always liked action and violence and stuff like that. So that was most of high school. Then when I got to college was when I discovered stuff like Chris Ware and independent comics. I didn’t know you could self-publish comics until one of my professors, Brian Ralph, was like, “You should go to SPX.” I went to MICA in Baltimore. I remember walking into SPX for the first time, having an epiphany of “Wow, there’s hundreds of people just making things and putting them out there.” No one ever told me you can just make a thing and give it to people. I had no permission to do that, I just thought drawing was something you either did in private or [were] a professional being paid. I didn’t realize this middle ground of self-publishing and distributing on your own. I didn’t know anything about Love And Rockets or Cerebus or any of that stuff.
It seems like you got into self-publishing your own stuff relatively recently. Or is it just that the older work you’re more embarrassed by and aren’t showing people?
In college I made some stuff, but I only made ten or twenty copies because I didn’t how to distribute. It wasn’t until the last five or six years where I felt like I want to make comics and get them out there to as many people as possible. That’s been a relatively recent discovery. Before it was like a fun hobby. It wasn’t until I started meeting more people in comics that I felt inspired to get it out there to people. I’m doing more shows now. It feeds the beast that I want to do more ambitious projects and create a body of work moreso than tossing off these little one-off things.
It seems like, if I’m getting the chronology right in my head, becoming a teacher at the age of 36 coincides with taking the distribution more seriously.
For sure. Part of that is just free time. As a teacher, it’s basically a nine-month-a-year job. Right after the Trump election, I was like I’ve gotta do something other than a computer web-design job all day, and so I went back to school. I wanted to engage with more people instead of just read about all the terrible things that were going on. But that comes with time, you get these three-day weekends, you get holiday breaks, and you get two months of summertime. I don’t spend all that time working, I have my wife who I love and my friends, but you do have dedicated chunks of time I know I can do a certain number of pages within.
I know you were saying that when you finish a comic you move on to working on a sketchbook zine, but a lot of your comics also have a sketchbook element to them. They seem to grow out of certain practices. For instance, in Nibble Notice you have this comic about flow states, encouraging adults to get into drawing. One of the suggestions you make is “just fill up a space” and then there’s a certain visual style you use in Verge Escapement which seems like that’s what you were doing. Do you want to talk about the way that sketchbook practice and comics feed into each other?
My ultimate goal is always to create comics that are some combination of planned and spontaneous. I’ve never been able to make a script and follow it in any kind of way. Obsessive drawing is something I always did naturally and then was able to identify it a bit more in graduate school, because I did my thesis on obsessive drawing and obsessive artists. A lot of that is this horror vacui filling of space. It was abstract, really non-narrative, but I felt this pull because it was so similar to how I felt filling up pages and panels and that impulse to be like “it’s not done until it’s full.” I admire artists like Aidan Koch who work in more minimal styles. it just doesn’t feel satisfying to me until it gets to that point. Filling up sketchbooks was always something that scratched that itch, and in college a lot of what we would do is stay up until two or three in the morning watching TV and drawing in our sketchbooks. I always think of that as a secondary education. We would have our more conceptual class during the day then late at night spend two, three hours a day drawing in sketchbooks. That’s gonna level you up really quickly.
At some point, I decided I really wanted to draw in pen. Maybe I saw a video of Crumb doing it or something, but I really stopped drawing in pencil. I really enjoyed this idea of drawing in pen without any idea in mind and making a wobbly shape that can be made into a face or something. We had a recent Comics People episode with Austin English and he was talking about this idea of “the consequence of the line,” which is a phrase that really speaks to me. You’re not responding to the line, but you’re creating the condition for there to be a consequence to it already, and you have to react to that. The idea of that I find really exciting. But I work in a couple modes, because I also like the precision of sketching something out, getting it just right, doing a really crisp, sorta Jeff Smith-y brushline. It scratches a different creative itch.
That’s why I like to balance between these projects, because something like ATP, the action thing I’m working on now, is really precise, because I want the action to be really clear, and I want the choreography to be really readable. I’m plotting that out tightly and keeping the linework tight because I want it to be one to the next, whereas something like Verge Escapement is more exploratory, and started because I was drawing too many faces and bodies, so the first page is just wilderness. I was like “I’m just gonna fill up these panels and backgrounds, each one’s gonna be really really dense and then I’m just gonna think about what I’m gonna do next while I’m drawing that page.” Because it was so labor-intensive, it took a few hours, it generates ideas just by responding to that consequence of the line. And the first Verge Escapement is interesting to me because halfway through I started to have ideas that I wanted to be more precise, and so I did start sketching it out, but the first half of that book is all pen to paper, responding and thinking on the page.
With sketchbook stuff, are you drawing from life or are you in your studio?
Most of the comics are just from my mind, from memory. From time to time I’ll put my phone on my desk and angle it if I need foreshortening or something really close to the reader’s eye I’ll do that. I try not to do any poses because I think you can see in comics when people are using photo reference because it has this stiffness to it. I have done a ton of figure drawing, I love going to figure drawing classes with live models. It’s more for expanding the mental visual vocabulary. If I feel like I understand how the body works, then I can draw it myself on my own. I don’t use those poses specifically for anything, it’s more about studying musculature and proportions and how things articulate and how they twist. I’m applying what I’ve seen and what I’ve learned from the observations into being able to conjure these things from my mind. I like drawings that feel like they come from a person. There’s a stiffness to photo reference that takes you out of whatever you’re reading because it doesn’t feel like it’s coming from the individual, it feels like it’s part individual and part something else. I like the comic artist as the lens through which the idea comes without any interference. Those are kind of my favorite things.
There’s an element of caricature to your work. That’s not coming from observation, that’s all straight off the dome?
Yeah, I don’t do any people posing for anything, I just sketch it out until the emotion looks right, then go for it. Or if it’s a pen drawing, if I put down a face and it’s making a certain emotion, that then tells me who that character is. If they look frustrated or confused or excited, then in the next panel I can say ok what are they excited about? It’s about setting yourself on a path and then responding to it until you’re in dialogue with the drawing without a specific goal in mind.
How do you balance the improvisatory aspect with the writing process? There’s a lot of stuff in the sketchbook that feels like it could be overheard conversation, or that’s stuff in a comic that seems like working out a thought process in dialogue.
In the looser stuff, like the Verge Escapements or the sketchbook things, it does become a collage of whatever I’ve been thinking about at the time. I want to read something and get a sense of where this person’s at in a particular moment. I write a lot of stuff down, just thoughts that I have, or conversations I’ve had, or things I’ve overheard. The most recent book has a lot of collage in it too, things I’ve snipped from various magazines. It seems random as I’m putting it down, I think it’s a cop-out if I put these things in the book in the moment of making them. But then I find when I read that work back later it does have a surprising amount of coherency to it and I don’t know if it’s because I’m picking things at a certain time that respond to how I’m thinking. I’m pulling bits and pieces from magazines that are sometimes thirty, forty years old, combined with things I’m thinking about now, and how I’m isolating these things end up corresponding to each other in certain ways and I like that as part of the spontaneity.
Let’s talk about Gigs. It's a good example of the sketchbook style. That’s a project that you didn’t continue and I was wondering if when you’re doing something in a improvisatory way you eventually get to a point where you either lose momentum or it feels like you need to start plan out the next moves.
I have ideas for things all the time, like all artists do. David Lynch has that idea about “catching the big fish,” like if you just let all thoughts kinda linger out there, at a certain point your brain is gonna latch onto one, and then you’re gonna follow that to its logical conclusion. So when I latch onto that idea, it’s often all I can think about for a long time. But sometimes it takes maybe 6 or 8 months or a year for me to formulate the trajectory of where it’s going. and sometimes that trajectory is six pages, and sometimes it’s a massive sprawling idea. For Gigs specifically, I have lots of ideas about where that story could go. The Gigs thing goes back to what we were talking about in terms of distribution earlier. I did that book and printed it through Mixam. I think they did a really nice job with with book, but they were expensive. It was oversized, with a matte finish. I love how they look, I think it’s a great object. I also got some feedback from shops where they were like this book is awesome but it’s way too big. Comic shops are small, and real estate is at a premium. I bought an inkjet printer right after I finished that Gigs project but that book is 120 pages and I can’t print those with any regularity on an inkjet printer, so I’ll just start doing some smaller projects until I figure that out.
I just got so into doing smaller zines and smaller books, and when I was tabling at shows, the smaller books were selling way better. I was interested in the idea of being able to do things really fast and really quickly. I draw really quickly too, so to do these spontaneous raw-looking things is appealing to me, so it’s not so much that I didn’t know where to go but more like do I want to spend the next 6 months doing another 120 page chunk. or do I want to shift my mind to something else. That book specifically was ultimately going to be about parenting and making choices as a young person trying to be social and going out to parties. The more time went on the less interested I was in talking about parenting. Your brain drifts in different ways and I didn’t feel as passionate about that story but I know exactly where it would go. I’ll probably get back to it at some point.
There’s all these notes in your sketchbook stuff about different drawing approaches. There’s one where you’re like, “Is hatching for me?” There’s another where you say you want to do a bad drawing that you over-render, then you do it and make a note saying this is cool but maybe it would be better just as an outline. When you’re working on style in a sketchbook, how do you figure out when to apply it to a comic, or what makes a certain style appealing, or are there certain styles that correspond to certain types of stories for you?
I really like when an artist can adapt their style to suit whatever story they’re telling. I think some people have a wheelhouse. They perfect their thing and they do that thing forever, maybe with some minor variations. Chris Ware or someone like that, they pick a spot they go. I was really interested in Chris Ware’s sketchbooks. He’s not one of my big guys but I really like Chris Ware a lot, but I love the sketchbooks, way more than the comics, and I saw him give a talk at BAM a few years ago. I asked why hasn’t he drawn a comic in the styles that he draws with in the sketchbook. He said, "Well, the story ideas I have in mind just suit the way I draw comics better than the way I draw a phonograph or a person sitting in an airport." He said, "If I had an idea for a story I think would look better drawn that way, I would do it, but the ideas I have in my mind feel like they work better in the traditional Chris Ware style."
I thought that was really interesting. I’m always kind of trying out new styles because I’ll usually see something and think “ooh, I want to do that.” That’s always how I’ve drawn. When I was really into 100 Bullets all I wanted to do was draw like Eduardo Risso, in this perfect ligne claire style with these heavy heavy shadows. The hatching thing was I watched Crumb for the first time, and I had the reaction I think everybody has, which is I gotta get the rapidograph pens out and do some hatching. I had dabbled in it a little bit but it’s always been in my mind of why can’t I do that, and this particular time I had that feeling of just a little bit of that unlocking and then suddenly you know how to go further that’s really satisfying. I did one comic in that Botzinger Archives book that is crosshatched really heavily. I ultimately decided it would be way too time-consuming to do for anything more than a couple pages, but it’s nice to have in my back pocket if I have an idea I think would look cool in that style, I now have that confidence that I could do it in that way. I’m trying to build the visual vocabulary I have so that whatever idea I have I’m ready to go for it.
In some of your older stuff, there’s a kind of “cute” style that you would do – cartoon kids with large heads, large eyes – did that come from a certain place?
I think that might’ve started originally from responding to some Michael DeForge comics or something. And then I was trying to draw kids for something, I forget what it was, but I was trying to draw them as small people, and it just didn’t look right, it didn’t seem funny. There’s something about the exaggerated big head and the small body that I found really funny. Tucker Stone asked me to do a Cartoonist’s Diary, and I was talking about teaching during the pandemic, and I was drawing a lot of kids and I just thought it looked funnier. They’re so small and I’m so gigantic to them that it looked funnier for them to be these toddling things that look like they’re about to topple over. Trying to draw kids realistically didn’t suit the voice of how I was writing them.
So let’s talk about Comics People, and about the cartooning community of New York City. When did you find that and how has that been for you?
It’s the best. I’ve gotten the most I’ve ever been into comics in the past ten years or so, but the last single year has been the most I’ve ever been immersed in it in my adult life. I met Nick Forker on an airplane to TCAF. I was drawing in my sketchbook on the plane. He reached around the seat and handed me a comic book. He was sitting behind me with his girlfriend, he was like “just seeing your drawings, are you going to TCAF? I’m going to TCAF too.” We’re both tabling there, independently of each other. We’d never met before and we hung out all weekend, he and his girlfriend were super-cool, we just became fast friends, and it turns out he teaches at the 92nd Street Y, which is right by where I live in Manhattan. So he was like “I’ll come by sometime after class and we can hang out and talk comics.” We did that maybe twice before he said, “I really want to do a podcast or a YouTube show or something where we just talk about comics.” I had never thought of myself as being an on-camera person, but I find that talking about things with other people really helps solidify your own thoughts, it helps you look at things in creative ways that you wouldn’t have considered.
It’s been amazing. He knows people in the comics community that I don’t know. In New York and Philadelphia right now there’s such amazing things happening that are not just cool comics coming out, it’s actually a social thing. There are live drawing nights, there are art supply swaps, there are readings going on all the time. These are things I did not know existed before about a year ago, it wasn’t on my radar. I didn’t think of comics as a social thing at all. I just read this book Meet Me In The Bathroom, it’s a discussion of early 2000s rock and roll like The Strokes and The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and you read about it, a lot of people were just hanging out in the same bars all the time. That’s how scenes develop. This feels similar, with less potential for international superstardom. There are no record label executives going to a Desert Island reading or something. but you can go to an Aidan Koch reading at Desert Island and talk to the people who run the New York Review Of Books. I just went to the Charles Burns signing on Friday, and he’s just a dude, he’s just hanging out. There’s no hierarchy of fame that prevents you from having a cool chat. It is so easy to approach people to talk about this stuff. If you’re in New York and you’re a cartoonist, you can call Josh Bayer or Austin and say hey do you want to come on the show and have a conversation. Anyone we’ve brought it up to who’s seen the show was like “I’d love to do that.”
We want to stray away from interviewing people, because there’s so much great stuff doing interview stuff anyway, what we really want to do is champion the things that when you’re in a rut, you look at where you go, this is why I’m still doing this thing. Because there’s no money and there’s no fame in it, but every fan of this medium has those things that they look at, the magical thing that keeps the thing happening. We just want to celebrate as much stuff as we can. The bigger the audience grows the more opportunities we have to shed light on people who might not otherwise have that platform. Our biggest fear is that people think we’re doing this to promote ourselves. I’m so hyper-paranoid about someone thinking we’re just using other people’s work to get attention for our work, which is the opposite of what we’re trying to do. We just want to further build the community that’s already there and highlight this energy. That’s the goal, and it’s been hugely energizing for me.
Nick and I have become really fast close friends. We went to see Time Masters yesterday, it’s like a Moebius movie that got refurbished. (Directed by Rene Laloux as a follow-up to Fantastic Planet, it features Moebius character designs - Brian) It was OK. It’s nice to have this new friend as an adult. It’s been a nice entry point into more social aspects of the medium. It took me 41 years to get to where I’m at and I’m just excited for the point where I am creatively and also socially. It’s really exciting to be doing what we’re doing right now. I feel really proud of the work I’ve done and the connections I’m making.
ATP is your new series. It could also be titled Gigs, if that weren’t a title you were already using, because it’s also about gig workers. When you announced you were working on an action thing, I thought, well, your comics already have a lot of action in them already, and you were like, “Well, more like an action movie.” Do you want to talk about what your principles are behind ATP and what you’re going for and what you were looking at?
It starts with just wanting to draw the body. I love action movies, and I watch a lot of action movies. I started to think about why do I love these things so much? I’m not an advocate for violence in general, I don’t like guns in real life. I just think a lot about why these things are so appealing. I started to think about what action movies I find the coolest, and it’s all choreography. I love fight choreography and I love hand-to-hand or knife stuff that doesn’t involve guns at all. I started trying to look at comics and there’s so few self-published comics out there at comics shows that are exciting and full of action. I was reading Michel Fiffe’s Copra which is really cool and that’s one of the few that I’ve seen that’s really doing something interesting specific to comics. I wondered if I could do fight choreography just as a personal challenge. I wanted it to be grounded in reality so I can still talk about the concepts that I’m interested in. It is about gig workers trying to scrape by and butting up against wealth. Trying to visualize how that’s exploitative, in an exciting kind of way. I just find myself so angry at wealth distribution in this country in general, I ultimately just want to draw someone punching rich people. So that was an underlying motivator too. I landed on this idea of a personal trainer, someone who’s strong, and physically capable, but is not created to be violent, and wanted to see what would happen if that person was presented with violent circumstances, how they would interact in that way.
My favorite movies are action comedies. I heard someone say once that violence makes comedy funnier, and comedy makes violence scarier. They’re so different from each other that if you can disarm someone with one, you can affect them with the other. I like movies like The Nice Guys, with Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe because when violent things happen in that movie, they’re really shocking because there’s all this hi-jinx, and it’s like a goofy buddy thing, and then something gross and bloody happens and it’s more jarring.
For a split second I thought you were talking about Jackie Chan’s Mr. Nice Guy.
Jackie Chan’s a great example that’s balancing these exciting dangerous situations, especially knowing that he’s doing this stuff, with tremendous choreography, really carefully calculated moments, using the environment around him and doing these things. When a punch lands or somebody gets hit with a microwave or something, you have that reaction of both laughing and going “Oh my god” at the same time.
I wanted to do something with a more traditional genre, to see if I truly understand how that stuff works. I wanted to have an example of “This is how I feel like something can be good,” and to see if I can actually pull it off.
Who do you think in comics does action well?
Well fight choreography, Masamune Shirow does incredible choreography. I think it’s mostly manga. I love Miura, I think Berserk is really incredible. I think the fighting in Scud is really interesting. One of the problems I have with superhero stuff is a lot of times panels seem composed independently of the sequence. Like someone’s punching someone with their right hand and then they might be punching them with their right hand again in the next panel and that’s just not how that stuff works. I really like artists who get if you’re punching someone through to one side, their momentum’s going to be going this way, so the other person is going to be responding to that moment, maybe they have to spin and hit them with the back of their hand. Allow the figure to respond to the figures in the frame that way. There’s a lot of cool stuff in 100 Bullets but that’s more gun-based.
Is part of the way ATP works because you’re not interested in the technical aspect of drawing guns where you’d rather do something more cartoony? There’s a lot of stuff with kettle-bells.
I think I just don’t want a book to come across as gun porn. I like John Woo, and I like Hard Boiled, all those movies I think are really cool, but guns are such an enormous problem in the United States. I don’t want to throw any shade to directors who have guns in their films I just find myself more interested in physical choreography than gun choreography. I want to champion the human body in these things and someone running and shooting is not as fun to draw for me as someone grappling with another body. I like the musculature and all that stuff.
Page count is interesting too, because I’m doing all my printing on my own. I bought my own used copy machine. It’s a Toshiba e-Studio 2555c. It has been, I would say 85% delightful and has a few frustrating quirks. It’s more than covered the cost of the investment in terms of what I’ve saved from what I would’ve spent going through Mixam or Kablam. It’s nice that I have these constraints: I know that my paper cutter can only cut ten sheets of paper, so the books I’m making now are maximum forty pages. It’s a nice creative constraint. I’m not going to make a series that’s ten issues long because I’m not going to keep ten issues of forty page comics in print forever. I like these creative constraints, and I like knowing, “OK, I only have so much toner left, I don’t have colors, so this next page is just gonna be black and white,” those little things help guide these decisions that sometimes seem too big to manage.
How many copies of these are you printing and how many stores are you dealing with?
I’m not great at numbers so at the moment when I make a new book I reach out to Domino, Partners And Son, Atomic Books, Secret Headquarters. I was sending stuff to Pure Folly in Hudson - I think they just came back online but they closed up shop for a while. I have a list of people I reach out to and say, “Hey I made this new book,” and I send them however many they’re interested in, between ten or twenty at a time. I’ll just try to keep ten or twenty in stock at my house so that if someone makes an order I can fulfill it right away, but I’m basically printing them on demand. For shows I try to bring ten or fifteen copies of everything to a one-day show or just double it for a two-day show. I’m not very good at keeping track of how many I’ve made.
I wanted to ask when you got into manga.
I bought a Appleseed collection when I was probably 12 or 13, mostly because it had nudity in it. I was at a baseball tournament or something and stopped at a comic shop, my parents were like, "Just go in, we don’t want to go in there anymore," because I would always go into comic shops and stay there for an hour. "OK, here’s my chance to find some stuff I wouldn’t ordinarily be allowed to read." I found this rack of manga stuff and I think it was book three of Appleseed and I was just astonished that it existed. I felt like I had found some window into some other universe I didn’t know about. Just the way the bodies were rendered was really appealing to me, just the way he draws. I was a teenage heterosexual boy, the way Shirow draws female bodies was really appealing to me. Those characters were also murdering people in awesome ways and driving robots around, I was like “This is the best thing I’ve ever seen, what is this,” and the guy at the counter was like “Oh, you like manga?”
That was the starting point, but I wouldn’t consider myself a real head like Holmberg or Brian Baynes. A lot of people are way deeper into manga. I haven’t read a lot of Tezuka at all. I didn’t know Garo existed until a year ago so I don’t really know anything about alternative manga really. I like the big names. I like Urasawa, Twentieth Century Boys was a big deal to me several years ago. I l don’t like the endless ones, like One Piece, but I like big stories that have an epic scope to them. I love Berserk, Berserk was a big deal for me for awhile. I’m a huge Taiyo Matsumoto fan, which is not action at all. Well, except No. 5 has a lot of action in it. Actually the action in No. 5 is great.
And Tekkon Kinkreet. And Ping Pong. Sports are action.
Yeah that’s true. The flow of the Ping Pong stuff is amazing. Every one of those panels is a perfect response to the previous one. Unless it’s meant to be deliberately chaotic. I love Matsumoto, he’s one of my favorites.
After having this conversation, Michael sent me a list of artists he had forgotten to mention, all of which I wanted to follow up with him, so we scheduled a second call where we went through the names he’d sent.
Let’s talk about these artists you sent to me: I would say Geof Darrow, for all his technical skill, is the most impressive in terms of fight choreography.
Yeah I was thinking specifically of that one stretch of Shaolin Cowboy issues, I think it’s two or three full issues of no dialogue, and he just has this double-chainsaw pole, and he’s just slicing through zombies. (These are collected under the title Shemp Buffet. – Brian) For three issues. I remember those would come out every couple months and it was like, wow, it’s another one. He really put out another one of these. I was equal parts annoyed and completely beguiled by that. It forces you to follow the choreography, because there’s no plot, there’s no dialogue. He’s really inviting you to look at how he’s moving bodies through this space. I look through those all the time, I think they’re amazing.
In ATP, when the action gets going, I drop the backgrounds out entirely, mostly because I think it looks cool but I want to be focused on the continuity of character to character. Darrow somehow manages to get detail but also beautiful clarity into his work, I don’t really know how he does that.
Darrow’s also really good at being funny in the context of an action comic, which is impressive.
Totally, and it’s so much more engaging to me. This word doesn’t really mean anything but he’s a Boomer Democrat, I would guess, in my assumptions of who he is. There are plenty of those people who will just draw Trump pooping his pants or something like that. It’s so much more interesting to funnel those frustrations into something that’s actually really exciting and thrilling to read. To be able to draw like him and be able to push what would otherwise be really banal sentiments into the world through this action comic is the coolest. I love that stuff.
Yeah I would say it ends up transcending the banality of politics because it’s like… oh yeah the world has Nazis in it. They’re fucking awful.
Yeah. Let’s punch them in the face and have them dismembered by a shark or something.
What Frank Quitely stuff were you looking at?
I was looking mainly at All-Star Superman and We3. I read some of the Jupiter’s Legacy stuff. I don’t really like it as a story but he does some really incredible things with speed in that book. There are a lot of ways to show speed, you can show speed lines, you can show a puff of dust or something like that, but it never really conveys how superhuman speed is something you can’t see. What Quitely does is rather than show the speed he shows the result of the speed. So there might be someone in a space and then the next panel they’re just gone. There might be something small like a curtain has moved a little bit, or there’s a scuff on the ground. It’s very slight, and I think it’s interesting to show something unbelievably superhumanly fast in as subtle a way possible, because I think the first instinct would be “I’ve got to fill this space full of lines.” It’s almost showing this thing without showing it, which I think is really tremendous. And then he just really lands those big impact moments too. When something gets hit, you’re not necessarily seeing the thing collide, you’re seeing the result of the collision, which is more intense.
He’s also a big body language guy.
Yeah. I’m in this comic reading club on Mondays with some friends, and we’ve been rereading All-Star Superman, and I just keep saying I love the action stuff in that, but I would also read 100 issues of Quitely’s Clark Kent. Just how interior he is, and how he’s holding himself, and how his clothes are too big. There’s that famous panel of him, it’s a wide shot, there’s seven of him, showing one thing to the next. The continuity of him entering the room as this bumbling oaf,and then it ends with him stepping on this paper on the ground, and the next panel he’s on the ground and the paper is under his foot a little bit. … Just every panel of All-Star Superman is saying so much. Every character from one frame to the next is looking somewhere or feeling a certain way or reacting to something. That’s really inspiring to me. It’s not just the people talking in a frame that are interesting, all the ancillary information you put in there can also tell the story or enhance whatever’s going on. You’re not just focused on the balloons pointing to this guy and he’s talking. You can use the whole frame to add to or accelerate whatever you want to show or say in these really interesting ways. He’s so good at that.
The opposite end of the spectrum would be Paul Pope. I know you were talking about how you think drawing fast is another way of making things feel exciting.
Yeah, I know Quitely’s really slow and precise with getting everything the way it needs to be. In other hands, being precise can seem really labored and stiff. He manages to have that soft, pliable humanity in those characters by being really precise. But Pope is more gestural. When I was trying to learn to ink with a brush over the course of the last fifteen years, you can draw with your wrist, which gives you a really short kind of line, but if you draw with your shoulder and your whole arm, pulling the ink in a certain direction gives you a way different line quality. It’s not nearly as precise, but it gives you a crisper, sharper line and it becomes a record of the energy you’re putting into it. You’re not just trying to capture, “Oh, this is this bicep and this is this finger,” what you’re doing is putting your own energy into the mark. There are parts of THB where it’s kind of hard to tell what’s going on, if something’s going really fast. It’s another example of speed and impact and there are some panels where if you isolated that panel without the surrounding page, you wouldn’t know what it was. It’s just this series of abstract marks but in the context of the scene it makes a lot of sense. If you pause a movie when things are going really fast, it’s not going to be an intelligible image, it’s gonna be blurry, there’s gonna be all this noise in it. I think it’s ok to include those panels of noise where not everything is perfectly clear because a fight especially is not going to be perfectly clear. There’s going to be a lot of chaos. A real fight between two people who have never met is not glamorous. I like adding these panels of chaos where you’re not totally sure what’s going on. I haven’t been very successful in that so far because I am obsessed with clarity to a certain degree but it’s something I would like to include more of in future action based things.
I was just assuming that you are printing your comics at the same size you are printing them, but talking about Pope makes me realize you could be drawing at a larger size and then reducing them.
I know Pope draws on 18 by 24 poster-sized pages, ATP 1 is on 9 by 12 paper, so it’s only a couple inches bigger than the printed size. For the second issue I scaled up to 11 by 14, just to see if it would have an impact. So far it just means I fill the space with more stuff. I don’t know if it’s really changed anything so far, but I’m curious if when I get to the ink stages the pages actually take longer.
I think that Pope draws on the big paper so he can stand. He’s left-handed, I think it’s part of the gesture of drawing these things is he can really draw with his whole body. Part of that is size. He’s got a big studio with enough size where he can draw and ink on poster-sized paper, and most of us live in apartments. We’re limited to the size of our desk. 11 by 14’s about as big as I can do comfortably.
Gabriel Ba’s another name you’ve listed. I’ve read a decent amount of his comics but the first thing that came to mind is Casanova.
Yeah, exactly right. I think I’ve only read Casanova actually.
He also did some Hellboy stuff that’s in one of those short story collections. But it’s not very good. (laughter) Hellboy’s a weird one because Mignola can get incredible people to draw it but because of the visual style not everybody can pull it off.
He’s definitely a Mignola acolyte or descendant of that style for sure. I like Casanova a lot, it’s been a while since I’ve read the whole thing but I pull those issues out from time to time. A lot of times while I’m working on something, if I feel like I’m stuck, I’m not looking to copy something but I want to feed my brain something different. I really like how Ba approaches speed also. He’ll do a lot of panels where during a fight it’ll be a big page and there’ll be four or five of the same person but only one of all the other people to show that person’s moving much more quickly than everybody else. I also like how he approaches the shape of the panels – it’s something Mignola’s really good at too. I guess it’s ultimately a Kirby thing. When you think of the characters as shapes in the space before you get down into the details. A lot of times when I draw I’m trying to think of the body as a bunch of different pieces, but if I think of them as an outline first, it helps to block out the paneling, which I think Ba is really good at because he has this angular style. That also helps you spot things like big shadows. Starting from the shape side rather than the meat and sinew of a thing is really helpful for me to lay out a page quickly and put things down quickly without having to erase too much or start over.
You also said Ben Marra, who’s a guy who changes his style a lot. What’s the stuff of his you’re looking at?
That was less stylistic and more – I was mostly looking at Night Business and One Man War On Terror. We touched on relatively simple drawing, heavily rendered, and I really like that his stuff doesn’t seem overly labored even though I know he’s an incredible technical draftsman. Looking at those things that I guess would be characterized as “power comics” now, because of the imprint, I love that stuff. It feels really pure and really raw and it’s not trying to get everything exactly right but it’s right enough to serve the panel. It’s just inspiring to be like, don’t overthink it, get it out there, let it read and let it happen on its own and don’t overly prepare it too much. Maybe that’s making light of how he actually works, I have no idea, but it’s inspiring to think of it as being like “got to get this on the page.”
The sort of outlier for figure drawing you listed is Jesse Moynihan, I think. But maybe I’m wrong.
Something I think is really cool about Jesse Moynihan’s character design is that the characters are all identifiable, they’re all distinct, but they’re also all unique to his brain. And I like his action too, I think the action in Forming is a good balance of well-staged and interacting with the backgrounds a lot. They’re all gods and monsters and creatures. They’re not just in a big field, they’re using trees to fight with. It has that Jackie Chan energy of the environment is part of the scene. They’ll punch a hole in the Earth and fall down into that. Really ambitious environmental space. And it’s really funny! It hits a good balance of the serious stuff feels really huge and important but they’re calling each other dickheads, which is charming.
Henry McCausland you named. I actually bought River Rangers on your recommendation and was looking at that again today. He does a lot of full figure drawing throughout the page.
I just love the way he draws. It’s cartoony but the proportions are accurate to real life so it has this verisimilitude of reality while still being very cartoonist-y. Just the fluidity of the poses and the way the bodies are interacting is really strong. There is only a few pages of fighting in River Rangers, but the choreography between the bodies spinning this way and therefore the punches have to come from their interaction with each other is not done to be splashy. It’s focused on the arc of the movement and the trajectory moreso than impact or speed. It’s just these lovely little choreographies. He does that with fighting, he does that with dancing, he does that with just one person learning something in a space. His approach to the page is really inspiring and unusual. I haven’t seen anything else like River Rangers that I can compare it to.
The last person you said is Lale Westvind.
Grip is just this celebration of what a body can do, something I really want to do in ATP. Everybody’s making stuff about AI and computers, and that’s always been this sci-fi trope, but it’s especially a hot topic right now. I want to take the opposite approach. Rather than do something scary about robots, let’s celebrate the potential to be fleshy human beings inside of this thing, because people still exist within the confines of this exploitative machine or whatever comes next. I think Grip especially is a celebration of what a body can do. Showing it in this magical way is beautiful, I love that book so much. I can’t pretend to have a thesis on what it all means but reading it makes me feel really excited to be alive and using my hands to make stuff. I don’t draw digitally, I draw everything on paper with ink, and I love all the marks that she makes. Whatever the movement is has a specific kind of approach. If something is spinning or if something is expanding, if something is collapsing, whatever marks they choose are perfectly suited to whatever the movement is, and I think Lale has a distinct language that’s all her own. I don’t know anyone whose work looks like theirs either.
How did you like those issues of Grendel? (At the 2023 Philly Comix Expo I had given Shea-Wright some doubles I had of the Comico issues, including the wordless issue drawn by the Pander Brothers and the two-parters Matt Wagner drew. – Brian)
Oh they’re cool! I plowed through them right when you gave them to me and I gotta revisit them again. I like reading stuff out of sequence. when someone’s like, “Here’s issue seven and here’s issue twelve,” and you just have to figure them out on your own. I really liked the page layouts. He’s pretty inventive with the way he draws the eye around the page, which is not something I’m trying to do with ATP at all. I’ve done books in the past where the page is set up to suit the action but this one I’m really just keeping panel to panel. It opens up for the fight sequences. I like how the panel layout is going to suit whatever’s happening on that page, which is a huge amount of planning and effort, and I like that. And the action’s good, like the choreography and stuff that does have that kind of flow from one panel to the next, it’s not flashy splashy stuff.
When’s the next issue of ATP due?
I just started drawing it last week [in mid-August]. I think I have eleven pages penciled, so hopefully by the end of the year.
The post An interview with Michael Shea-Wright: ‘It’s about setting yourself on a path’ appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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