In the Year 2000 – Part IV

In the last part of my series on how we used to do production at DC Comics back in the early 2000’s, I will talk about art corrections.  I had previously talked about how we did lettering corrections, but the real fun part of my job and the other artist’s in the bullpen, was doing art corrections.  This was really where we were proud to say we worked on comic books on a daily basis.  This was where we, as artists got to contribute to the book itself by actually drawing and changing interior pages.

All of the bullpen artists at that time wanted to be comic book artists.  We wanted to and strived to be full time freelance pencillers, inkers, and creators ourselves.  Since we were either not ready to do that, or we just needed a stepping-stone to that end, we did the next best thing, and worked as production artists.  I fell into the former category.  I wanted to be, and still want to be a comic book penciller.  Since that is a dream I’m still working on, my favorite part of working in the bullpen has been doing art corrections.  Like I’ve said before, our job was to make any and all changes that we were called upon to make, and when it came to art corrections, all of our skills came into play.  We all went to art school, some of us from The Kubert School, some from SVA, and me from Syracuse University School of Visual and Performing Arts.  We all had to show a portfolio to get the job, and definitely had to show a level of knowledge and passion for the comic book industry, and how to draw comic books in general.  This was very important for our job, mainly because of the extensive art corrections we would be called upon to do.

The main thing to remember about doing art corrections on these books was that we were not the main artists on any books, obviously.  We were there to make any changes that the artist, writer or editor needed.  Since we worked so far in advance (about three months), the artist of any particular book was well into working on the next issue or two of the series.  Since it was just too much work to fed-ex any artwork back to the artist and too time consuming for the artists themselves to have to back track to an already “completed” issue.  Once tan artist turned in his work for that issue number, we handled any changes that had to be made.  Sometimes the artist did send us patches or new art to be stripped in, if they really wanted to, and had the time, but for the most part, we did anything from penciling, inking, backgrounds, and page reconstruction.

For example, if an artist had drawn Superman’s chest emblem wrong (it always was), we had to redraw it.  If the artist drew Superman with his right arm up while he was flying to the sky, and the editor wanted his left arm up instead, we had to redraw it.  If an editor wanted an American flag behind Superman in a panel, we drew it in, and inked it.  Our job was to make those kinds of changes, and most importantly, make it look like it had always been that way, originally drawn by the artist.  What that meant was that we had to mimic the style of the artist we were making corrections over.  This was a lot of fun, yet the most challenging. Sometimes we would work on an artist that was as far away from our own style as possible.  I remember working on Gilbert Hernandez artwork, and having to make art corrections on a book of his.  My style is so far from his, that it was very difficult for me to match his style.  But after a few tries, you do the best you can, and hope it fits in without anyone knowing something was drawn by someone other then the artist.  I liked to call ourselves, the Wizards of Oz, because we are supposed to make it look like we never existed.  If we did our job correctly, you should never know that we had changed any artwork, because we were supposed to make it look like that is what the freelance artist had always drawn.

There are so many things I would love to go into about the pros and cons of my job, but that is another column entirely.  I will just leave you with the example I have provided for this article.  For this art correction, I was told that the art was too risqué.  This issue featured two females scantily clad on a bed, almost fully naked.  The correction for me to do was to cover them up as best I could.  I decided the best way to do that would be to cover them in the bed sheets that they were laying on.  I handled this by putting a piece of paper over a photocopy of the page to use as an overlay.  I put the art on a light-box, and drew all the wrappings that the characters needed for me to cover them up.  I tried to match the style of the artist as best I could.  In this case it was superstar artist, Eddy Barrows.  I tried to draw thinking about how it would look like if Eddy drew it himself.  When I was happy with how it looked, I inked the bed sheets and the new fully covered women.  When I was done with that, I sent it off to our stat room guy, who I talked about last column, who made a stat of the corrected overlay.  We used the stat guy as much for art corrections as we did for lettering overlays.  Then, using the wax machine, ran it through, and then finally pasted it up onto the original board.  And there you had it.  Hopefully, you would never have known that a change was made to that artwork unless I told you.

The Original Artwork by Eddy Barrows

Art corrections done by me over Eddy Barrows

The final inked artowrk used in the issue by Eddy Barrows, with corrections by me

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As you could tell, contributing to a book like that was a real pleasure and was a lot of fun!  Especially when I got to work over artists such as my personal favorite, Chris Bachalo on books such as Stan Lee Presents Catwoman.  In that book, I even got to draw an entire panel, where Selina is holding a teddy bear in her apartment.  So there you have it, just a small example of how we used to do art corrections back in the day.

Finally, next week I will go into our transition to the digital age.  There is a lot to tell you, so I hope you continue to stick around.  Now that I got the early years out of the way, I will also be covering a lot of different topics.  I have many a story to tell, such as artists’ reaction to finding out that we, as bullpen artists, made changes to their work that they didn’t know about.  Let’s just say, some people don’t like that.

I’ll talk about all that and a hundred more topics as the weeks go by.

So stay tuned…

Corey Breen

* The example I am using in this column is actually from an issue of 52 the series back in 2006, when we had already gone digital.  I used this an an example because I did this art correction all manually (the “old school way”).  It is a great example of how we used to do the art corrections back then, even though it is not an example from that time period.  When a correction is this extensive, we still do it this way since it is actually harder to draw with a tablet sometimes.  Now that I have a Cintiq, though, even that may change.  I do have examples from back in the day that I will have to dig up back home next time I visit my parents, where all that is stored.  I have a cover of Birds of Prey that I did a very cool art correction to, that I would love to show once I find it.