Ex Machina is the best superhero related book coming out on the market today. But it has a unique spin on the concept. Written and by Y: The Last Man co-creator, Brian K. Vaughan and penciled by Tony Harris, Ex Machina is about Mitchell Hundred, a civil engineer that was caught in a mysterious explosion which gave him the power to control machines with his voice. Calling himself The Great Machine, Hundred became a superhero that managed to save one of the towers of the World Trade Center from collapsing during 9/11. In the wake of The Great Machines popularity Hundred was able to spin it around and be elected as an independent to the position of Mayor of New York City. Each inimitable issue of Ex Machina has a blend of politics, violence and things blowing up.
As artist and co-creator of the series, Tony Harris is able to put his pencils to work making even the driest of situations, such as municipal meetings, become as dynamic as The Great Machine fighting off an attack from the German government. The latest trade paperback of Ex Machina further explores the mystery that surrounds the origin of Hundreds powers while the mayor must decide whether he wants to unite a couple in a same sex marriage.
Buy Ex Machina Vol. 2: Tag
Daniel Robert Epstein: I read the second Ex Machina trade paperback and whats really funny is the book is truly about politics. How do you like drawing scenes that are often people sitting around talking in an office?
Tony Harris: Thats something that Ive cultivated a love for over the past 16 years because its really no secret to anybody thats followed my career that Ive never been crazy about superhero stuff. I dont hate it by any means. I know thats the root of the medium but Ive always gravitated towards more reality-based stuff, just because I feel like thats where my strength is. I am really interested in trying to make that kind of stuff interesting looking. I took it as a challenge because in Starman, which James Robinson wrote, there was a lot of what we call talking head scenes.
DRE: I loved Starman.
Harris: Thank you. You can only do those talking head scenes in so many ways until they become absolutely boring to look at. At the very base of what I do, its a visual medium. Ive always looked at it as, if folks want to read a book, theyll read a book and the reason they read comic books is because they want to look at pictures while theyre reading. So I always took that as a challenge, What can I do to make two guys having coffee interesting? Or to make four suits in a room debating politics visually grab you and keep you interested? I look at it as nothing but fun. Ive never hated doing that kind of stuff because I like to bide my time and try to make it fun. That way when I do get to the action and the faster paced stuff, its like twice the pay off.
DRE: Since you and Brian [K. Vaughan] are credited as co-creators. Who put the two of you together?
Harris: Actually Brian pitched the original concept about a year or more before I got involved. They couldnt find the right guy to draw it. I had approached WildStorm about another creator owned series of my own. Ultimately they said no because they didnt think it was commercial enough. [Executive Editor of WildStorm] Scott [Dunbier] said, Hey. Would you be interested in doing something for us? I said, As long as its not company-owned stuff because I want to do some more creator-owned stuff. They sent me I think two different pitches that Warren Ellis had submitted, one of which I believe was Desolation Jones and another one I cant remember what it was and then of course Ex Machina. I read Ex Machina and I called them back in about ten minutes and said, Im in.
DRE: Had you read Brians work before this?
Harris: No, not a word. Im so busy in the studio that I just dont get down to the comic shop that often. Im in a real small town so theres really only one shop and they dont have a huge selection of stuff. They just kind of cater to peoples pull boxes and that kind of thing.
DRE: Im assuming that you designed the green language that is on the shrapnel.
Harris: Yeah.
DRE: How does one come up with something like that?
Harris: I havent actually sat down and done the entire alphabet or anything yet. But ultimately Im going to because as the series progresses, a lot of that stuff is going to get more fleshed out. Plus I like to have all that kind of stuff as extras to be able to put into trade paperbacks. Ultimately I will sit down and create an alphabet so that if youre a fanboy like me, you can sit around and write notes to your friends in it.
DRE: Mitchell Hundred is the mayor of New York City. Do you take a lot of photo reference?
Harris: Oh yeah. My brother has been living in New York City for about 10 years so I get up there as often as I can. Every time I go to New York I make a point of shooting thousands of pictures. I dont really shoot a lot of what most people would shoot when they go, I just walk around and shoot cracked sidewalks, street signs and phone booths. All the little stuff that that you see when two people are walking down the street. It makes it believable without distracting you and taking you out of the moment.
DRE: I thought that Ex Machina looked so much different from Starman because you were using a different inker. But when we met at the Big Apple Con you told me that wasnt true.
Harris: To a degree it is because my inker on Starman, Wade Von Grawbadger, is a brush inker. The inker Im using on Ex Machina, Tom Feister, is more of a pen guy. Hes graduating into brush stuff now, but he started out as a totally with pen and ink. I think that does make a difference in what stuff looks like but I actually changed the way I was drawing things specifically for Ex Machina. Its a lot more open. Theres a lot less like heavy blacks all over the place because I knew I was going to be working with [colorist] JD Mettler. Hes local down where I am so I can actually leave the art open and totally trust him with doing the right thing. Back in the earlier days, with Starman, it was a different story. At that time you couldnt work as closely with colorists, especially if you were in different towns. That was before computers took everything over. Greg Wright was in New York and I was down South. Greg was doing hand done colors on paper and then those were being sent to a separator. So the separator really had the final say on what the color looked like, regardless of what Greg would do. Ive always been such a control freak about every little aspect of the books I work on so I really wanted to make sure that Ex Machina had a very specific look to it. Ive been lucky to get the team that I wanted from day one.
DRE: Will your next very secret project look totally different from Ex Machina?
TH: Yeah. The style is a little bit different, but its pretty consistent with what youve seen me do in Ex Machina, but again its a different project. I want to let the project that Im doing at the time dictate what it has to look like. So if something is a little bit more tongue and cheek or whatever the case may be, I kind of gravitate my work towards that look. I have about four different looks I use for stuff so I just let the project speak to me.
DRE: I believe Ex Machina is the first project you did after Obergeist.
Harris: I think thats right.
DRE: So after you had gotten to write your own very personal book like Obergeist, how did that change things for you?
Harris: Im not going to say its taking it backwards, because its not. I had some options. I couldve done some different things but like I said, I was so bowled over by Brians pitch that I knew immediately that I had to be a part of it. Brian has been so cool about wanting to being a collaboration. Some writers, who are great writers, write very specific and very detailed scripts and they want the scripts adhered to. Then you have a different kind of writer, like a Brian Vaughan, who writes a detailed script but theyre interested in collaboration from the artist. When Brian turns in a script he always says, Hey. If you see a better way of laying this page out or a better approach for it visually than what Ive written, go for it. Hes always been very open to my ideas as far as the characters go because even though he created it a year or so before I got involved, he knows Ive got as much invested in it as he does. If Ive got an idea I can call him at 1 oclock in the morning and go, What about this? Hes been cool about actually incorporating a lot of stuff that Ive pitched to him into the series, some of which you havent even seen yet.
DRE: In the first issue of the second trade paperback when in costume The Great Machine meets his NSA handler, Jackson Georges, he says that he looks kind of dorky. You actually did manage to draw him kind of dorky.
Harris: That was completely on purpose.
DRE: I was going to ask something like, How come you didnt make him look as cool as something like Dave Stevens Rocketeer?
Harris: There have only been a couple of memorable characters with rocket packs. So you run the risk of people saying, Yeah. Youre eighth in that. But at the same time I said, If were going to do a reality-based book here, I want to ground everything in that same reality. Ive always hated the idea of some cat with powers sitting around in front of a sewing machine trying to put together some cool looking costume. I just got these horrible visions in my head of those montage scenes in films where the guys trying on different outfits. I just totally wanted to avoid any of that kind of stuff. Im a huge collector of military memorabilia, specifically World War II stuff. Therefore I just drew from what I know, which is what they always tell you to do. I figured that this guy just went shopping at Army surplus stores and put together an outfit thats practical. Then if its looked at in the right light or if its photographed right it could be construed as looking cool but as Jackson Georges said When youre just like standing there, talking to the guy, he just looks like an idiot. Everything is practical from the helmet to the reinforced leather gloves to the flight suit itself, which is based on those full body leather suits that bikers wear.
DRE: The book is suggested for mature readers. Besides the cursing and the color of the blood, it doesnt seem much different than a lot of other books. Is it just more freeing or do you just not want to up the ante in terms of the sex and the blood at this point?
Harris: There have been some things in there that I couldnt have done in other books. For instance, the scene where the guy is like banging that hooker in the alley and those brutal murders in the second trade paperback. Weve done some stuff that we really did not think was going to fly at all. Just like in most print mediums, theyre more willing to let sex go than they are violence. We got so much junk from them over the scene where the guy is splayed open and dead in the sewer than we did on showing some guy with his pants around his ankles banging some hooker in an alley. To me, its just personal preference with what you find more offensive. They made us go back two different times on that scene in the color stage, which was weird. They actually approved my pencil drawing and then they approved the ink drawing. Then when it got to the color, they went, Oh, Jesus and actually made JD go back and tweak it two or three different times before they got it dark enough.
DRE: They want to make blood purple, right?
Harris: Yeah. JD and I were doing a lot of bitching about having to go back and tweak that, but in the end when you saw that in print, you were like Wow. Its actually kind of creepier that you cant really see it well.
DRE: I love those green wires that come out of Mayor Hundreds head.
Harris: Yeah. If you were looking at a three dimensional sculpture of Mayor Hundred you could run your hand across that scaring on his body and it would actually be raised. Its almost like its a section of a circuit board thats subcutaneous but its only just below the first layer of skin. So when he activates his power, you get like a green glow from under the skin.
DRE: How much influence did Brian have on the design of The Great Machine?
Harris: None really. Brian left a lot up to me, especially with the costume, because his original notion was that it was just supposed to be some guy in a cape. He had never had any kind of rocket pack or anything. But when I read the pitch my first inclination was towards a machine-based outfit of some kind and thats where the rocket pack came from. I figured with a cat that was able to control machines, it would make sense to have part of his costume be machinery.
DRE: Did you read Preacher when it came out?
Harris: On and off. Ive got all the trades and I still havent finished reading it.
DRE: When Jesse Custer used his word it was described in the book as sounding like broken glass or something like that. I was wondering what Hundreds voice sounds like when he uses his powers.
Harris: I have never thought about that. I think about that kind of stuff a lot, but never specifically about that. It reminds of reminds me of Bill Watterson who created Calvin and Hobbes. He said that was one of the reasons hes never done any merchandising or an animated film or anything like that is because hes always felt like Calvins voice or Hobbes voice should sound like the individual reader thinks it should. I feel the same way. One time Brian said I write the story. He draws it. Once we put it out there and people read it, they make it theirs. People take from the book what they need and want.
DRE: How important is it to you to make each characters face very distinctive?
Harris: Thats extremely important to me, so much so that I actually went out and cast the book like a film. I actually cast the whole thing in my neighborhood. We had a Christmas party one year. I was having a drink, walking around the party and I had just gotten the job. I wanted to shoot photo reference for the whole project because I thought the drama would be better if the characters had faces you could recognize every single time that you saw them. So everybody in the book I got at that that Christmas party.
DRE: Thats amazing. How long do you see yourself doing the book for?
Harris: The entire run. There will be no fill ins either. The book is only going to have a four-year run because it is like youre following Mitchell through his first term. Then were going to end the series right there. I think were going to be doing roughly about 50 issues.
Also Brian came up with this great idea for a two parter thats going to be basically the adventures of The Great Machine that one year he was an actual superhero. Were doing it in flashbacks but Brian is real careful about making the flashbacks that we do in costume very specific to the current storyline. Brian wrote a cool ass, total action superhero thing with him in costume that Chris Sprouse is going to draw. Its going to come out right after issue 20 hits the stands and its a two parter and then my next issue will be issue 21 that comes out two months later. So the numbering on my run will be uninterrupted.
DRE: But theres no chance in Mayor Hundred getting reelected?
Harris: No comment.
DRE: What else are you working on?
Harris: Dark Horse just asked me to become the permanent cover artist on Conan so thats my other side thing. The only other thing Im working on is called Roundeye for Desperado Press.
DRE: Will we see Obergeist coming back anytime soon?
Harris: No. Probably not in the form that you know it now because the writer and I own the property jointly and were on the outs. I own half of it and he owns half so unless we're willing to sell it to the other one or work together again, youre probably not going to see that character again. Its a shame because I really have a huge affinity for that character. We had ideas for several other stories.
DRE: Whered you go to school for art?
Harris: I didnt. I have a high school education. I didnt have the grades or the money to go to college. I really wanted to but I just wasnt in a position to go to art school so I just really made it my business to educate myself and just really read as much as I could. I read art history and everything I could get my hands on. Though I did take figure drawing classes privately for about two years.
DRE: What was the first comic book that you did?
Harris: It was a self-published thing I did back in like 1988 called Blade. You can actually find it in quarter bins. We actually did okay. We did two issues and called it quits after that because we couldnt compete with a lot of the other books out there.
DRE: When I spoke with James Robinson a few years ago he mentioned that he wants to a hardcover Starman book with you.
Harris: Yeah, we were going to do it as a fully painted graphic novel but James went off to do the Hollywood thing. I just had to pursue some other things. Im not saying I dont want to do it eventually, but at this point I really dont know if Starman has an indefinite shelf life. We probably should have struck a little sooner to be fresh in peoples minds. As far as I know there still is and there always has been interest from DC and the fanbase for the project to happen, but I dont know. If youre reading this, James, call me.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
As artist and co-creator of the series, Tony Harris is able to put his pencils to work making even the driest of situations, such as municipal meetings, become as dynamic as The Great Machine fighting off an attack from the German government. The latest trade paperback of Ex Machina further explores the mystery that surrounds the origin of Hundreds powers while the mayor must decide whether he wants to unite a couple in a same sex marriage.
Buy Ex Machina Vol. 2: Tag
Daniel Robert Epstein: I read the second Ex Machina trade paperback and whats really funny is the book is truly about politics. How do you like drawing scenes that are often people sitting around talking in an office?
Tony Harris: Thats something that Ive cultivated a love for over the past 16 years because its really no secret to anybody thats followed my career that Ive never been crazy about superhero stuff. I dont hate it by any means. I know thats the root of the medium but Ive always gravitated towards more reality-based stuff, just because I feel like thats where my strength is. I am really interested in trying to make that kind of stuff interesting looking. I took it as a challenge because in Starman, which James Robinson wrote, there was a lot of what we call talking head scenes.
DRE: I loved Starman.
Harris: Thank you. You can only do those talking head scenes in so many ways until they become absolutely boring to look at. At the very base of what I do, its a visual medium. Ive always looked at it as, if folks want to read a book, theyll read a book and the reason they read comic books is because they want to look at pictures while theyre reading. So I always took that as a challenge, What can I do to make two guys having coffee interesting? Or to make four suits in a room debating politics visually grab you and keep you interested? I look at it as nothing but fun. Ive never hated doing that kind of stuff because I like to bide my time and try to make it fun. That way when I do get to the action and the faster paced stuff, its like twice the pay off.
DRE: Since you and Brian [K. Vaughan] are credited as co-creators. Who put the two of you together?
Harris: Actually Brian pitched the original concept about a year or more before I got involved. They couldnt find the right guy to draw it. I had approached WildStorm about another creator owned series of my own. Ultimately they said no because they didnt think it was commercial enough. [Executive Editor of WildStorm] Scott [Dunbier] said, Hey. Would you be interested in doing something for us? I said, As long as its not company-owned stuff because I want to do some more creator-owned stuff. They sent me I think two different pitches that Warren Ellis had submitted, one of which I believe was Desolation Jones and another one I cant remember what it was and then of course Ex Machina. I read Ex Machina and I called them back in about ten minutes and said, Im in.
DRE: Had you read Brians work before this?
Harris: No, not a word. Im so busy in the studio that I just dont get down to the comic shop that often. Im in a real small town so theres really only one shop and they dont have a huge selection of stuff. They just kind of cater to peoples pull boxes and that kind of thing.
DRE: Im assuming that you designed the green language that is on the shrapnel.
Harris: Yeah.
DRE: How does one come up with something like that?
Harris: I havent actually sat down and done the entire alphabet or anything yet. But ultimately Im going to because as the series progresses, a lot of that stuff is going to get more fleshed out. Plus I like to have all that kind of stuff as extras to be able to put into trade paperbacks. Ultimately I will sit down and create an alphabet so that if youre a fanboy like me, you can sit around and write notes to your friends in it.
DRE: Mitchell Hundred is the mayor of New York City. Do you take a lot of photo reference?
Harris: Oh yeah. My brother has been living in New York City for about 10 years so I get up there as often as I can. Every time I go to New York I make a point of shooting thousands of pictures. I dont really shoot a lot of what most people would shoot when they go, I just walk around and shoot cracked sidewalks, street signs and phone booths. All the little stuff that that you see when two people are walking down the street. It makes it believable without distracting you and taking you out of the moment.
DRE: I thought that Ex Machina looked so much different from Starman because you were using a different inker. But when we met at the Big Apple Con you told me that wasnt true.
Harris: To a degree it is because my inker on Starman, Wade Von Grawbadger, is a brush inker. The inker Im using on Ex Machina, Tom Feister, is more of a pen guy. Hes graduating into brush stuff now, but he started out as a totally with pen and ink. I think that does make a difference in what stuff looks like but I actually changed the way I was drawing things specifically for Ex Machina. Its a lot more open. Theres a lot less like heavy blacks all over the place because I knew I was going to be working with [colorist] JD Mettler. Hes local down where I am so I can actually leave the art open and totally trust him with doing the right thing. Back in the earlier days, with Starman, it was a different story. At that time you couldnt work as closely with colorists, especially if you were in different towns. That was before computers took everything over. Greg Wright was in New York and I was down South. Greg was doing hand done colors on paper and then those were being sent to a separator. So the separator really had the final say on what the color looked like, regardless of what Greg would do. Ive always been such a control freak about every little aspect of the books I work on so I really wanted to make sure that Ex Machina had a very specific look to it. Ive been lucky to get the team that I wanted from day one.
DRE: Will your next very secret project look totally different from Ex Machina?
TH: Yeah. The style is a little bit different, but its pretty consistent with what youve seen me do in Ex Machina, but again its a different project. I want to let the project that Im doing at the time dictate what it has to look like. So if something is a little bit more tongue and cheek or whatever the case may be, I kind of gravitate my work towards that look. I have about four different looks I use for stuff so I just let the project speak to me.
DRE: I believe Ex Machina is the first project you did after Obergeist.
Harris: I think thats right.
DRE: So after you had gotten to write your own very personal book like Obergeist, how did that change things for you?
Harris: Im not going to say its taking it backwards, because its not. I had some options. I couldve done some different things but like I said, I was so bowled over by Brians pitch that I knew immediately that I had to be a part of it. Brian has been so cool about wanting to being a collaboration. Some writers, who are great writers, write very specific and very detailed scripts and they want the scripts adhered to. Then you have a different kind of writer, like a Brian Vaughan, who writes a detailed script but theyre interested in collaboration from the artist. When Brian turns in a script he always says, Hey. If you see a better way of laying this page out or a better approach for it visually than what Ive written, go for it. Hes always been very open to my ideas as far as the characters go because even though he created it a year or so before I got involved, he knows Ive got as much invested in it as he does. If Ive got an idea I can call him at 1 oclock in the morning and go, What about this? Hes been cool about actually incorporating a lot of stuff that Ive pitched to him into the series, some of which you havent even seen yet.
DRE: In the first issue of the second trade paperback when in costume The Great Machine meets his NSA handler, Jackson Georges, he says that he looks kind of dorky. You actually did manage to draw him kind of dorky.
Harris: That was completely on purpose.
DRE: I was going to ask something like, How come you didnt make him look as cool as something like Dave Stevens Rocketeer?
Harris: There have only been a couple of memorable characters with rocket packs. So you run the risk of people saying, Yeah. Youre eighth in that. But at the same time I said, If were going to do a reality-based book here, I want to ground everything in that same reality. Ive always hated the idea of some cat with powers sitting around in front of a sewing machine trying to put together some cool looking costume. I just got these horrible visions in my head of those montage scenes in films where the guys trying on different outfits. I just totally wanted to avoid any of that kind of stuff. Im a huge collector of military memorabilia, specifically World War II stuff. Therefore I just drew from what I know, which is what they always tell you to do. I figured that this guy just went shopping at Army surplus stores and put together an outfit thats practical. Then if its looked at in the right light or if its photographed right it could be construed as looking cool but as Jackson Georges said When youre just like standing there, talking to the guy, he just looks like an idiot. Everything is practical from the helmet to the reinforced leather gloves to the flight suit itself, which is based on those full body leather suits that bikers wear.
DRE: The book is suggested for mature readers. Besides the cursing and the color of the blood, it doesnt seem much different than a lot of other books. Is it just more freeing or do you just not want to up the ante in terms of the sex and the blood at this point?
Harris: There have been some things in there that I couldnt have done in other books. For instance, the scene where the guy is like banging that hooker in the alley and those brutal murders in the second trade paperback. Weve done some stuff that we really did not think was going to fly at all. Just like in most print mediums, theyre more willing to let sex go than they are violence. We got so much junk from them over the scene where the guy is splayed open and dead in the sewer than we did on showing some guy with his pants around his ankles banging some hooker in an alley. To me, its just personal preference with what you find more offensive. They made us go back two different times on that scene in the color stage, which was weird. They actually approved my pencil drawing and then they approved the ink drawing. Then when it got to the color, they went, Oh, Jesus and actually made JD go back and tweak it two or three different times before they got it dark enough.
DRE: They want to make blood purple, right?
Harris: Yeah. JD and I were doing a lot of bitching about having to go back and tweak that, but in the end when you saw that in print, you were like Wow. Its actually kind of creepier that you cant really see it well.
DRE: I love those green wires that come out of Mayor Hundreds head.
Harris: Yeah. If you were looking at a three dimensional sculpture of Mayor Hundred you could run your hand across that scaring on his body and it would actually be raised. Its almost like its a section of a circuit board thats subcutaneous but its only just below the first layer of skin. So when he activates his power, you get like a green glow from under the skin.
DRE: How much influence did Brian have on the design of The Great Machine?
Harris: None really. Brian left a lot up to me, especially with the costume, because his original notion was that it was just supposed to be some guy in a cape. He had never had any kind of rocket pack or anything. But when I read the pitch my first inclination was towards a machine-based outfit of some kind and thats where the rocket pack came from. I figured with a cat that was able to control machines, it would make sense to have part of his costume be machinery.
DRE: Did you read Preacher when it came out?
Harris: On and off. Ive got all the trades and I still havent finished reading it.
DRE: When Jesse Custer used his word it was described in the book as sounding like broken glass or something like that. I was wondering what Hundreds voice sounds like when he uses his powers.
Harris: I have never thought about that. I think about that kind of stuff a lot, but never specifically about that. It reminds of reminds me of Bill Watterson who created Calvin and Hobbes. He said that was one of the reasons hes never done any merchandising or an animated film or anything like that is because hes always felt like Calvins voice or Hobbes voice should sound like the individual reader thinks it should. I feel the same way. One time Brian said I write the story. He draws it. Once we put it out there and people read it, they make it theirs. People take from the book what they need and want.
DRE: How important is it to you to make each characters face very distinctive?
Harris: Thats extremely important to me, so much so that I actually went out and cast the book like a film. I actually cast the whole thing in my neighborhood. We had a Christmas party one year. I was having a drink, walking around the party and I had just gotten the job. I wanted to shoot photo reference for the whole project because I thought the drama would be better if the characters had faces you could recognize every single time that you saw them. So everybody in the book I got at that that Christmas party.
DRE: Thats amazing. How long do you see yourself doing the book for?
Harris: The entire run. There will be no fill ins either. The book is only going to have a four-year run because it is like youre following Mitchell through his first term. Then were going to end the series right there. I think were going to be doing roughly about 50 issues.
Also Brian came up with this great idea for a two parter thats going to be basically the adventures of The Great Machine that one year he was an actual superhero. Were doing it in flashbacks but Brian is real careful about making the flashbacks that we do in costume very specific to the current storyline. Brian wrote a cool ass, total action superhero thing with him in costume that Chris Sprouse is going to draw. Its going to come out right after issue 20 hits the stands and its a two parter and then my next issue will be issue 21 that comes out two months later. So the numbering on my run will be uninterrupted.
DRE: But theres no chance in Mayor Hundred getting reelected?
Harris: No comment.
DRE: What else are you working on?
Harris: Dark Horse just asked me to become the permanent cover artist on Conan so thats my other side thing. The only other thing Im working on is called Roundeye for Desperado Press.
DRE: Will we see Obergeist coming back anytime soon?
Harris: No. Probably not in the form that you know it now because the writer and I own the property jointly and were on the outs. I own half of it and he owns half so unless we're willing to sell it to the other one or work together again, youre probably not going to see that character again. Its a shame because I really have a huge affinity for that character. We had ideas for several other stories.
DRE: Whered you go to school for art?
Harris: I didnt. I have a high school education. I didnt have the grades or the money to go to college. I really wanted to but I just wasnt in a position to go to art school so I just really made it my business to educate myself and just really read as much as I could. I read art history and everything I could get my hands on. Though I did take figure drawing classes privately for about two years.
DRE: What was the first comic book that you did?
Harris: It was a self-published thing I did back in like 1988 called Blade. You can actually find it in quarter bins. We actually did okay. We did two issues and called it quits after that because we couldnt compete with a lot of the other books out there.
DRE: When I spoke with James Robinson a few years ago he mentioned that he wants to a hardcover Starman book with you.
Harris: Yeah, we were going to do it as a fully painted graphic novel but James went off to do the Hollywood thing. I just had to pursue some other things. Im not saying I dont want to do it eventually, but at this point I really dont know if Starman has an indefinite shelf life. We probably should have struck a little sooner to be fresh in peoples minds. As far as I know there still is and there always has been interest from DC and the fanbase for the project to happen, but I dont know. If youre reading this, James, call me.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
courtneyriot:
Ex Machina is the best superhero related book coming out on the market today. But it has a unique spin on the concept. Written and by Y: The Last Man co-creator, Brian K. Vaughan and penciled by Tony...