Master Digital Color Talent Search 2010 – Part 4: FIGHT!

The Master Digital Color Talent Search 2010 is nearing an end.  We’re heading into the final stretch and so far they are looking amazing!!  I can’t wait to see the promo cards when this Talent Search comes to a close!  Today we have the grand finale of interviews.  We’re talking with writer Kevin Church and artist Tracie Mauk who are the team behind the upcoming webcomic, Fight!.

A quick note:
As you probably already know our forums have been down for over a week now.  This is troublesome seeing as how that’s where contestants need to  go to enter the competition.  Stay tuned after the interview for the inside scoop on what we’ve done to work around this problem.

Tribal Council: My interviews always start out the same: What’s your favorite color?

Tracie Mauk: Green. But I’m very particular about which shade. Tends to be more in the olive family. No bright lime garbage. I prefer my green to have more yellow in it than blue. (you color nerds will appreciate this yammering, yes?)

Kevin Church: Hot pink or forest green. I think because they are so opposite: one’s vibrant, bright, eye catching, the other is part of the background but is soothing at the same time.

TC: For the uninitiated who are not familiar with your work, tell us a little about you and what you do?

TM: I’m a penciler, inker, colorist and sometimes writer of comics, though by day I am a mild-mannered data entry monkey. It is mostly button pushing and leaving a mess of crumbs on the floor. I have had my comics work published in WILDGUARD INSIDER from Image, COMIC GEEK SPEAK ANTHOLOGY, KEENSPOT SPOTLIGHT and some guest bits in Agreeable Comics’ THE RACK and LYDIA. (or NEBRASKA QUARTERHORSE MAGAZINE if you somehow bought that in the late 90′s)

KC: Started off as a jerk that blogged about comics, wrote a promotional comic strip called Nitroglycerin and some comics for BOOM! Studios (Cthulhu Tales, Cover Girl) and came to the realization that I’d rather create than react. Now I write comics for the web atwww.agreeablecomics.com with a group of great artists that somehow manage to tolerate me.

TC: How did you get into comics?

TM:I started reading them thanks to the gateway drug that was the 90′s Fox X-Men animated series. I was already drawing stuff from Sesame Street and the California Raisins to Ghostbusters, Ninja Turtles and Mario Bros. so moving on to X-Men was a natural transition. I originally wanted to do comic strips and be the next Jim Davis (or,
later, Berke Breathed) but I started aping the work of Jim Lee and Andy Kubert and realized comic books offered me more room to tell the kind of stories and do the kind of drawings I was interested in doing which the 3-5 panel gag strip didn’t seem to offer. Eventually guys like Joe Madureira and Humberto Ramos hit the scene and I learned that you could do superhero comics and still bring in your cartoon influences.

KC: Reading? DC’s Star Trek comic hit me at just the right time, and from there I started reading ‘Mazing Man and some other non superhero titles. It wasn’t until I was in middle and high school that I started reading superhero comics very much at all, starting with the Giffen and DeMatteis Justice League.

Writing, I was just very lucky and got along with the right people at the right time and just kept that ball rolling for myself.

TC: Kevin, how did Agreeable Comics come about?

KC: It started with a minicomic that Benjamin Birdie (with whom I was writing Nitroglycerin) entitled Agreeable Comics and then he came up with the idea of doing The Rack and it just sort of spun out of that with the Lydia spinoff, She Died In Terrebonne, The Loneliest Astronauts, and now FIGHT! with Tracie. Somewhere along the way there’s an abandoned comic entitled Waimea that I can’t talk about without great heaving sobs, but I’ve been very fortunate in regards of having really driven collaborators that want to do fun, pop-oriented comics.

TC: And Tracie, how did you get involved with Kevin Church and Agreeable Comics?

TM: I’m convinced it was the result of a curse placed on me by some ragged stranger in peril who I mistakenly ignored– but essentially, I was a fan of Agreeable Comics (READ THE LONELIEST ASTRONAUTS!) and Kevin was looking for artists to submit pin-ups for a guest week they were running on THE RACK and shortly after submitting my piece, Kevin shot me an e-mail pitching what would become FIGHT! and it sounded like the exact sort of project I wanted to be involved in.

TC: What can you tell us about Fight!?

KC: FIGHT! is a superhero comic for people that like superheroes but don’t necessarily need a big cohesive universe shoved down their throat all the time. If I were to slice open its DNA, chunks of Justice League Unlimited, the old-school The Defenders and Giffen and Dematteis’s work would be apparent, combined with my pop sensibilities. Also, there will be punching and guns.

TM: FIGHT! is our love-letter to everything we think is great about superhero comics. Trimming the fat and just getting right to the good stuff and, most importantly, making the stories and characters FUN. We’re pretty sure superhero comics can be fun. I kind of really adore the whole cast we’ve cooked up so far so I’m exited to see what people think when we start getting these guys and gals to start punching each other and save/destroy the world/neighborhood/stuff.

TC: How does color effect your work?

TM: I tend to have a really open style when I draw so I leave a LOT up to color to add depth to my work and establish light sources. If I’m working on something that I know I’ll color later, sometimes I take that into account when I’m drawing and try to imagine the finished project as I’m working and factor in techniques I want to try out once
it gets to the coloring stage.

KC: It depends on the project. For practicality’s sake, I’ve stayed with black and white for The Rack because it’s updated three times a week and anything I can do to make Birdie’s life easier is a good thing because he’s already stuck with art and lettering chores. The Loneliest Astronauts has a muted palette that Ming Doyle and I came up with after a bit of discussion: it’s primarily black and white with accents and atmospheres that use this gray-green that accentuates both the alienness of the environment and Ming’s heavy inks. She Died In Terrebonne is black and white by choice: just as I’m trying to create the feel of an old-school newspaper strip with short, clipped scenes, TJ’s emulating that feel with his art.

I’ve asked Tracie if she can do color with FIGHT! and if she can, boy, that’ll be a nice thing. She’s got a strong eye for colors and reads enough superhero comics that she’s not going to need much in the way of coaching on my part.

As an aside, my first (and so far only) major print project was Cover Girl for BOOM! and I’ve always felt that the colors chosen were a bit dark and, for lack of a better word, grubby for a comic that takes place in the glitzy world of Los Angeles. That’s always bugged me, but it wasn’t my choice to make and it is the only negative thing I’ve got to say about working with them, which says a lot about how good they are.

TC: Tracie, do you work manually or digitally? And what are your thoughts on both?

TM: I draw manually, though I’m envious of the digital work guys like Mike Norton and Max Riffner have been doing. I have a tablet but it’s just not a process I’m comfortable with, though I have used my tablet to do page layouts before going to pencils. I still prefer the feel of pencil and paper for the finished piece, though it’s nice to have Photoshop to fall back on when I want to fix or tweak my inks. My coloring is totally digital, though, and that’s something I’ve gotten pretty comfortable with over the years, though I’m still changing the way I work all the time.

TC: What’s your biggest challenge when drawing a page?

TM: It is all WAY EASY and I am SUPER GREAT at it. Except that no it isn’t and no I’m not. Much to learn, much to improve. I think the biggest challenge with each page is just getting it started. Cracking that rough page before just settling into it and hashing out all the fun little nuances you couldn’t wait to get to. Each page seems like that.
Struggling to find out where you’re going before you can enjoy the ride. I dunno. What am I even saying? You’re making me feel all
nervous and vulnerable just thinking about this.

TC: And on the flip side…what comes to you the easiest?

TM: Self-deprecation. None of it’s easy, exactly, but the part I really enjoy working out is the “acting.” The character’s facial expression, what they’re doing with their hands, just trying to infuse as much personality as I can in the figures. Maybe that’s just what cartooning is, but as a sometimes actor myself, it definitely feels like “acting”
to me when I draw these characters, except they get to do anything as cartoons and aren’t bound to the same rules I am.

TC: Kevin…similar questions for you. What’s your biggest challenge when writing a page?

KC: Cutting away the fat. I’m trying to do something different with each of my webcomics but I want every strip to feel necessary and want to avoid spinning my wheels too much. With Fight!, every strip is going to have a beginning, a middle, and an end so they’re individual units and part of a bigger story.

TC: And what comes to you the easiest?

KC: Dialogue. Sometimes it’s too easy and I have to shut them up.

TC: Anything else coming up that we should be on the look out for?

TM: We should be launching FIGHT! at AgreeableComics.com this summer and look for the LYDIA collection from Kevin Church and Max Riffner at San Diego Comic-Con this summer for a guest strip by myself and a handful of other talented ladies. Also MEET ME! I’ll be lingering at the Agreeable Comics table at SDCC intermittently until Kevin yells at me to leave. You can follow me on Twitter (@Maukingbird) for further announcements of what I’m doing. (and I mean EVERYTHING that I’m doing… Everything.)

KC: No real announcement yet, but Veronica Gomez: Shaolin Line Cook is going to be underway soonish, I think. It’s science-fiction martial arts romance set fifty years in the future, when the Chinese have taken over our west coast.

HUGE thank you to Tracie and Kevin for providing us with that awesome piece of art and for taking some time to sit in the Council for a few minutes.  Be sure to check out Fight! when it debuts!

I’m sure you all have noticed that our forums at www.HueDoo.com have been having a LOT of trouble lately.  In case you DIDN’T hear…the parent site was hacked about a week ago and our admins have been trying to rebuild the infrastructure since.  There were a few days where it was partially up…but that didn’t last long.  As of this morning the Admins say they are in the process of moving the forums over to a new server.  Not sure when that’s going to be finalized though.  So…what does that mean for the Talent Search since to make an official entry you have to post to the forums??  It means we have to make a slight adjustment to how things are going to work.  I have to ask that all new entrants as well as all entrants that have already posted to HueDoo.com please email the images to me at TribalCouncil.MDC@gmail.com Because I don’t have any access to the forums either…I don’t have any of the images that have been submitted.  I don’t know for certain if the forums will be back up before our deadline so please email it to me.  I was going to spent a part of my day today PMing all the entrants on HueDoo for some information that we’ll be using for the winners.  I’m going to also ask that along with the image please include this following in your emails:

• Your username is on HueDoo.com
• Your real name (how you would want it to appear on the promo card & on the big screen at SDCC
• Any other contact info that you would like people to have (including websites, portfolio sites, etc)
• An address of where we would send the promo card set if you were to win
• Let me know if you are going to make the trip to SDCC and if you are going to be at any particular booth or table

Because the forums have been  down more than a week, we’ve also decided to extend the due date.  You must have your submission(s) emailed to me (or, assuming they get fixed, posted in the pixel shrine section of HueDoo.com) by 11:59 pm Central time on July 5th.  That’s an extra 5 days to get your colored pieces turned in!!  However…that is the absolute deadline so we can make no exceptions for pieces submitted after that time.

And finally many people have been emailing me to obtain a link to the downloads for the line art I thought I’d link to them all here.

Science Fiction Style: Tommy Patterson

Pin Up Style: Bruce McCorkindale

Superhero Style: EPIC!

Animation Style: Fight!

I can’t apologize enough for all the trouble that we’ve been having with our technology.  It’s terrible timing that it happened RIGHT in the middle of our one BIG challenge this year. Feel free to ask any questions you’d like either here in the comments section or through the new Tribal Council email: TribalCouncil.MDC@gmail.com