Bryan Hitch

I know Mark hasn’t seen the finished movie yet. I’ve had a more hands on more hands on approach with it because I worked on some of the designs. But they sent me preview copy several months ago, which I sat down and watched with the kids. I wanted to see if I would like it as well as my children. Even though it’s been very true to the comics I think they wanted to appeal to the younger audience without alienating a more adult, PG-13 type of audience. I think they’ve really managed to do that.

Yeah. The youngest one wouldn’t have watched it though because he’s two and a half. But the older ones are seven and 11. They loved it.

They’re not comic book fans. They’re computer game fans really. They come around when I’m sitting there at the kitchen table inking a cover or something. They go, “Oh, look it’s Spider-Man or the Hulk. That’s cool.” But it’s not something they go out of their way to look at. It’s what daddy does at the office. But the cartoon is something they understand because they watch television and they play computer games. When I did the Hulk game for Universal, they were really interested in that because it was a computer game, regardless of the fact that it was the Hulk. In this case, they were able to sit down and actually watch something on television that had my name on it.

No. They followed the comic book very closely so they asked us to act as consultants. I think it was also a way of keeping us on site too because it was such a close adaptation in places. I think almost every panel I drew in the book is in there in some form because they’ve tried to keep to the actual Ultimates comic itself. Obviously there’s inbetweening because one standard comic book panel will not make three minutes of a TV movie, but essentially it’s all been based on the comic book panels.

I understand where they’re coming from because we were going for a much more hard nut kicking kind of guy.

Yeah, the Hulk specifically. Also one of the reasons they called it Ultimate Avengers rather than just the Ultimates was because they were trying to bring in some of the elements of the classic Avengers. Their Iron Man is much closer to the Marvel Universe version than the Ultimate one. I think Captain America is very much a blend of the two as well. Even though the story is very based on ours, he’s a little more the Boy Scout from the Marvel Universe than the nut-kicking soldier that he is in the Ultimates.

That also depends on what they have the rights for too. I know that the second one has Black Panther in it and features a storyline set in Wakanda. I think they have plans to adapt the second two stories Mark and I have done in Ultimates II. But I don’t know how fixed those plans are.

Right but Marvel still owns the initial character creations like Captain America and Iron Man, so technically they aren’t created by us.

Warren Ellis and I are credited with the creation of the Authority in every issue. That’s not going to happen on the Ultimates simply because these characters preexisted. Captain America was created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby so no matter how we’ve interpreted it, it’s actually their character. We don’t have any legal claim on any of these things. Anytime you create a new character for Marvel, you do get a participation in any profits they make. Avi doesn’t run Marvel as a charity by any stretch of the imagination. He’s certainly not going to give away anything that he can keep for himself.

I would’ve liked to have seen Hawkeye because, especially in the Ultimates II, he is turning into one of the coolest characters. There are sequences in issues ten and 11 where I defy people not to stand up and cheer Hawkeye. That comes as a result of us massacring his family.

Yeah, I guess so. We went with Pym as the asshole so go figure.

Well, how do I answer that one without sounding like a jerk? I can understand fully why they didn’t do it because there’s a very limited amount of time in the 70 odd minutes that they had. If they had included that scene, they would’ve had to have some character resolution within the confines of the film. Either Hank would’ve got his comeuppance or would’ve had his turnaround and made good on it. That’s an awful lot of time so it’s one of those things you probably have to cut out simply because there isn’t enough time to show those things happening.

That’s good. At least that’s one character dynamic that we get. I like alcohol abuse in a cartoon. If there’s anything I regret not doing in the comic, was having Nick Fury smoke big cigars.

Yeah, no smoking allowed in Marvel comics.

I know and he’s the one with the healing factor. It’s not like he’s going to get cancer or anything.

If somebody wanted to give me $200 million to make a live action Authority movie, I’d jump at it. But I wouldn’t be interested in an animation of it at all. I’d want it to be as visceral as possible because I think that’s the nature of the material. If somebody wants me to direct a movie, that’s a different thing but not an animated one.

No, I haven’t because I’ve been doing comics all the time so I don’t have the technical expertise. I know a lot of producers and directors who have encouraged me to pursue a more cinematic career. So that’s something I’m moving towards but it’s happening through design more than anything else at the moment.

Nothing I can talk about right now. But I got my first taste of it last year when I did the designs for the new Doctor Who TV series for the BBC. The executive producer, Russell Davies, offered it to me on the strength of my comic book work. I was invited to design some of the key sets and aliens which was great fun. It also got me some very good contacts and some very good technical groundings because even though I know instinctively from reading a script exactly how something ought to look, having the technical knowledge to pass that information on to a crew and the cast, who have their own ideas, is something else altogether. That’s the experience I don’t have but I’m getting it.

It wasn’t going to be a full time job simply because they didn’t have the budget to have me there all the time. We decided that I’d be a consultant and I would just come in whenever they had an initial meeting about several episodes. I would read the scripts then throw out ideas either verbally or visually. Sometimes I’d leave scribbles for their design department to follow up on and then I’d come back and have another look at them and give suggestions. The only set I really had huge input into was the TARDIS set, which I pretty much designed from scratch. That was great fun because it’s the first time I’d ever got to walk around one of my own drawings.

Yeah, both of them do. But I’ve been blessed in both relationships in that once they realize the way I work, I practically ignore anything but the dialogue. At one point, Warren was only writing dialogue in anything but the basic action scenes and in the action scenes, he was pretty much writing “You came up with this, you get on with it.” With Mark, it’s not a clear cut writer/artist relationship. He doesn’t just write the script and I don’t just illustrate it the way he’s written it. It’s a much greyer area than that.

Usually upon reading the script it takes very little effort for the images to appear in my head. After that, it’s just a question of how warm I am. If it’s early in the day, I have to do a little more in the way of thumbnails until I get what I’m actually aiming at in my head. If it’s later in the day, I’m usually right on the art boards without even the use of an eraser because it’s so clear. There’s no clear cut formula for how this stuff works. Sometimes it comes out very naturally. Sometimes I just have to labor at it because I know exactly what I want to achieve. Other times I’m not quite getting it and pages get torn up and sequences get redrawn. I suppose it is much closer to directing and editing a film because it’s not so clear cut as just drawing the panels as laid out and described by Mark.

I haven’t. I’m not really a game player. The kids are into games but I never bothered with them for some reason. My eldest son likes the Hulk game very much. He’s a huge game fan and he followed the whole process from when I was designing the characters.

No, I don’t know where they come up with that stuff. They wanted to base it very much on our take in the Ultimates. That was why they got in touch with me in the first place. They initially wanted me to do the first Hulk game but I wasn’t available. For the second game they wanted to make it less like the Hulk movie and more like the Hulk in the Ultimates. All I really did for them was a whole pile of Hulk action shots. Six large poster-size action shots, which have shown up as various publicity shots and the box cover art as well.

I’ve got plenty of stories in me but I don’t have a timeline for them or a suggestion that it will be like a biography. If a story grips me, I don’t care what it is, I’ll pursue it. But I’m much more into the action adventure stuff. I don’t really like getting too introspective. I don’t mind having things that I understand personally informing the character relationships in the more action based comics, but I’m more interested in action based comics than I am in introspective works.

I’m really busy at the moment. I’ve got dozens of covers I’ve been doing for Marvel. I’ve got a couple of portfolio things going on in the side. I’ve got a film coming up that I can’t talk about and of course there’s my follow up project with Mark too. At the moment I’m just doing the cover art and promotional material for the second Ultimates DVD.

I think those are tags other people put on work to try and pigeonhole or quantify it to some degree. But I do tend to think more cinematically than back to classic comic books. I’m much more interested in film than I am in comics. This goes way back to when I was a kid. My biggest influence was Superman the movie because I loved Superman as a comic. But seeing it as a movie, where it became real and how it had all those beautifully shot camera angles, suddenly everything clicked for me. I always loved film and I devoured television and comics. The difference was that I was living in the northern part of England where Hollywood and television was something done in a mystical land far away. At seven years old I knew it was 20 odd years away before I could make a film. All I had to do to draw a comic was pick up a pencil. So all that got channeled into doing comics but I’ve never lost my love of cinema. Now my drawings allow me to be capable of realizing anything I can see in my head. It’s the cinematic vision that I have more than a comic book vision.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck