Technology

JOHN KELLY: I was showing someone I work with your portfolio yesterday. She's in her early 20s. I was walking her through the Lulu Scarlet Letter strip. I was pointing at things like where you were using white space, what style you were imitating, the rhythm that's created by varying the number of panels, things like that. I was trying to show that there's a thought-out process to the design, that it's more than someone just drawing whatever they wanted to. She said, "What do you mean? You mean they draw this stuff every time? Why would they redraw the character? It's the same thing over and over again. I always thought they just redid the dialogue and just moved it around on a computer."

R. SIKORYAK: [Laughter.] It's unrealistic to think you could actually do it on a computer. At least, you couldn't do it convincingly. Although Nancy seems perfect because it's meant to be static and you've already got 50 years of drawings to sample! [Laughter.] I imagine that once you'd spent a year or two cataloging every one of those images, you could begin to do it, but you'd still have to draw stuff. You'd never be able to just do it all on the computer.

KELLY: I think her comment was a telling outsider view of comics. It's a sort of commentary on our culture [laughter] "Why would anyone draw this stuff?"

SIKORYAK: Oh certainly. I remember once showing my "Blond Eve" slide show, and afterwards someone asked me, "Did you do that on a computer?" I guess if you have a computer, you can do anything. [Laughter.] I didn't even own a computer, so I scoffed, "No, I didn't; I drew it." But there's often the assumption, if a computer is involved, there's no effort. There's just buttons to be pushed. Still, it's kind of insane to think that people actually do draw this stuff because... "Why?" But that's maybe more of a philosophical question than the person who asked you had in mind. [Laughter.]

KELLY: I can remember when I first started doing these interviews, I had a computer before a lot of you guys did. Whenever the conversation would drift toward the direction of computers with different cartoonists, some would be very insulted that anything they were doing -- I was mostly thinking coloring at the time -- could be recreated or made easier on a computer. It was kind of a slur. Today, a lot of cartoonists and illustrators use them, but I remember years ago thinking that someone like J.D. King, who was just starting to do his angular, jazzy style, could do a lot of it on a computer. Who knows, maybe he does now.

SIKORYAK: Yeah, although he might lay it out on paper and then render it on the computer more perfectly.

KELLY: Richard McGuire was another one.

SIKORYAK: Richard's doing great stuff. Perhaps it's all done in Illustrator, where I think you can get that look very easily. Although Richard's so proficient at so many different things, he may draw stuff by hand that you'd think he did on the computer. And maybe vice versa.

Well, I still bristle at the suggestion that the computer makes it all painless. But having a computer has just completely changed and, in some ways, simplified the way I work. I lay out my strips in Quark, where you can determine the panel size and the word-balloon placement. I'm working on this EC parody right now. As there's usually seven panels on a page, I can draw the panels and put in the type. Then I scan in my sketches and put them in. Next I'll change my sketches on the computer, enlarging or reducing figures, then print those out and refine them by hand. It's a lot of back and forth, but many steps have been speeded up.

KELLY: It's easier to storyboard it?

SIKORYAK: Oh, it's so much easier. One of the things that I don't miss at all is having to write out the text 15 times to make it fit in a word balloon when I can reconfigure it in Quark so easily. Sometimes I'll design a specific font to use, but even if I don't have one I can use Helvetica to lay it out, then print out the file and trace the Helvetica. I'll use the kerning and the spacing of the Helvetica, but redraw the letter shapes by hand to resemble the style that I'm parodying. It's such a time saver. It makes comics less insane to do, because there are many ways to cut the work time down a bit. The incredible amount of time that goes into making my comics is a real source of anxiety for me.

KELLY: Coloring on computer is a no-brainer.

SIKORYAK: Well, that's why I finally bought my computer, in '99. I had just finished the black-and-white art for "Dostoyevsky Comics." I had only used a computer for the lettering, which I pasted up on my boards before I drew the strip. I had a font made, which I based on 1950s DC lettering, and the text was set on Kriota's PC. I didn't have Photoshop, Quark or any graphics programs, so when Chris Oliveros saw the finished strip and asked me to color it, I thought, "OK, now I have to get a computer." There's no other way of coloring an 11-page story in an old-fashioned style, besides doing it on the computer. I never considered cutting Zipatone again. [Laughter.] Once I finally bought it, it changed my life. I scan the art on my cheap little $100 scanner. I just have an iMac, but it's great. Every step of the way, it really saves time.

KELLY: Do you e-mail your work to clients?

SIKORYAK: I do. Not always, because sometimes my files are too big and my dial-up connection's pretty slow. But when I can, it makes a big difference. It certainly gives you more time on magazine deadlines when you're delivering computer art, because they don't have to do much to it. They don't have to scan it, and they don't have to color correct it, if they would even bother. [Laughter.] Some magazines are good about that, but others I wouldn't trust to get the colors right.

KELLY: Yeah. Cartoonists are so famously down-to-the-wire with deadlines, I guess computers give them more time to procrastinate [laughter] or make it right.

SIKORYAK: That's the other beauty of the computer: it's so easy to change your mind. I change my mind twice as often. That can be trouble, but it often makes the work better.

Illustration Work

KELLY: You do quite a bit of illustration for Nickelodeon. Where else? You're all over the place, right?

SIKORYAK: Yeah. I'm amazed, since I'm not very good at promoting myself. I'm amazed at how people find me. I finally have a Web site, which I have been planning for a long time, mainly as a promotional tool for art directors. My brother Joe helped me put it up, but it's still not done. I don't know when I'm going to finish it, because I'm too busy to look for work right now.

Wired called me out of the blue to ask me for a Tintin parody. Outside magazine called me because they wanted a Norman Rockwell-ish illustration for an article about boy scouts. I think you may have seen it -- it doesn't look anything like Norman Rockwell, but they were happy with it. [Laughter.] When I finish a job, the editors often say, "That's great. This is exactly what we need. We'll call you again," but very often they don't call. I don't know if that's a matter of the art director leaving the magazine or them thinking, "Well, gee, he was right for this job, but what else could we possibly use him for?" On the other hand, a magazine like Nickelodeon is great for me, because they always do parodies of different things. Besides the comics I do for them, they've been letting me write and illustrate some articles, which has been fun. They also do a lot of fake magazine inserts. I just did something for them, which was an in-flight magazine for the Wright brothers in 1903. In this case, they wrote it, but I did all the drawings in a turn-of-the-century pen-and-ink style.

KELLY: Did they come up with the idea?

SIKORYAK: Yeah, this was strictly an illustration job. Sometimes those jobs are really easy and a treat. They're often in different styles, so I still get to play around and try things out. I'd be happy to do research and draw in different styles all the time. One of my frustrations in college was some illustration teachers -- well, one in particular really felt that my stuff was too inconsistent, not in quality but stylistically. He felt that art directors wouldn't know what to do with me. At that point, I wasn't doing parody per se, I was trying a lot of different media out because I get bored and fidgety if I do the same thing for too long. I think using the parody angle lets me play around with that and still have a consistent aesthetic and approach that people can more easily understand.

Process

KELLY: How much do you have to do to immerse yourself in to a particular artist to be able to capture their style? It's got to be a lot of work.

SIKORYAK: It is. And it usually depends on how much time I have for the job. Like the Rockwell boy-scout piece I mentioned -- you may have to print it if I talk about it too much [laughter] so maybe I should stop. But in illustration work, like that job in particular, you have a really short deadline, so you just do what you can to evoke a period even if you can't evoke a specific style. I compile as much reference as I can. You see I have those binders down there? [Points to shelves.] Those contain all the reference for the longer stories I've done. Actually, why don't I show you?

This is what I'm working on for the next Drawn and Quarterly. I'm doing an EC parody, an adaptation of Wuthering Heights. It's going to look like Jack Davis, God willing, so I went through all of his EC stories, photocopied them and cut out reference for every one of my panels. I was able to do this because Chris delayed the book for a year, so I had more time to get obsessive. Once I have the general layout, I'll go back to Davis' drawings and try and find corollaries to it. So there's a lot of time spent looking for how he would stage a picture and looking for character types and all sorts of details.

This is probably more extensive than some of my previous stories, like the Batman and the Little Lulu parodies I did for Drawn and Quarterly. Both of those were house styles, so I didn't have to get the particular nuances of one artist, even though Irving Tripp drew most of the Lulu stories and Dick Sprang was really my main influence for the Batman story. But in Davis' case, there are more idiosyncrasies to his style. I felt I couldn't get away with as much cheating or fudging, so I've been really diligent; I have 60 pages of reference for the whole eight-page story.

KELLY: And this is all in a binder, with everything broken down, page by page.

SIKORYAK: Even down to the panel. There's no way of keeping track of this stuff. This is much more extensive research than I've done before, but as I get down to the wire, I'm starting to feel, "I can't do Davis! This is just insane!" His style is so particular -- there's something about the way he draws, down to the details on fingers -- that if I don't get it right, it's going to really bug me [laughter] because once it's in print, it's in print for good and everyone sees it. I have to say that I haven't been concentrating on this story much until the last month or so. I've put it aside for a long time and done a lot of commercial jobs, but now this is a slow period and I've earned enough money that I feel I can hide away for a little while. The story is all I'm going to work on for the next two months, unless I get a great offer I can't refuse, but I don't think that's going to happen.

I have three other binders of reference, of costumes from the period, among other things. Here are more panels of Davis organized by different topics; pages of women, pages of men, pages of older men, pages of children, there's interesting compositions, there's violence. I have pages of people getting punched, because that's a recurring theme in my story. There are close-ups, eyeballs. At some point I decided this wasn't enough, and that's when I moved on to breaking it down panel by panel. Kinko's gets a lot of money out of me. After I make these binders I'll use them as reference to do my pictures. There's a panel in my story of Heath throwing an applesauce at his rival, so I have Davis reference of people getting hit in the face or choked or punched, with similar compositions. I even have Davis pictures of viscous fluids. His dripping wax is a little bit like the flying applesauce. So then I'll swipe parts of his drawing, then redraw it, then move the arms around and find reference for the fingers, because I'll need an extra hand. Then, after I do my sketches, I'll scan them into the computer and resize elements and actually position them in Quark or Photoshop. Then I'll print those out, enlarge them, trace them onto boards and ink them. There are about five steps from this sketch to the finished drawing. Since there's such a long deadline, I have the ability to do this. I think I'm getting a little more obsessive with the story because it's been a while since I've done a long story. I'm just hedging my bets. With Batman and Lulu, I had the advantage of aping a house style, so the drawing could look a little more generic, although I still tried to find reference for as many positions as I could. It has to have that verisimilitude, you have to forget it's a parody if it's going to work. You don't want any of the drawing to be jarring and pop out.

KELLY: The Lulu stuff was done in the comic-book house style.

SIKORYAK: Yeah. There was one artist, Irving Tripp, who drew it for maybe 30 years. John Stanley would give him the layouts and then Tripp would redraw and ink everything. A little bit like Kurtzman, although I don't think Stanley was nearly as obsessive about the details as Kurtzman. Anyway, for my Lulu parody, it was important for me to use the style that people remembered. The early drawings by Stanley are really fun and idiosyncratic, but they aren't as iconic as Tripp's were. And that's also why I picked Dick Sprang's Batman, because his was the pinnacle of that era. In some ways, that made it easier to imitate. The house style was the corporate distillation of the character. That's why Davis is so different, but I'm anxious to do his cross-hatching, fat brush lines and wonky details. I'm hoping, once my story's colored, you won't see all the flaws in the drawing. [Laughter.]

[To read the rest of this interview, please see The Comics Journal #255.]

All site contents are © 2002