KEVIN by Lon Levin atkinson

When did you first think about art as something you wanted to do? Were you encouraged or discouraged by family, friends, teachers, mentors?

I wanted to be a cartoonist since I was 4, in 1965. I used to copy the funny papers. Charlie Brown, Dennis the Menace. Popeye, etc. My dad noticed me doing this and encouraged it. He told me it was a job people had and comics became the one I wanted, never was interested in another career path. I was a little bit of a child art prodigy, took art lessons from age 6 and began winning prizes in local art shows. My teacher in first grade hung up a big piece of butcher paper and had me draw cartoons all over it while everybody else had to read or something, so that was a nice piece of early recognition.

What kind of kid were you? Where did you grow up? What were your influences?

As a kid I did not have too many typical interests, especially sports, which I thought was very boring. I grew up in Texas, initially in a very suburban kind of place. My friends were mostly of the outsider stripe, like myself. When I was 13, my family moved to a very small, rural type of town. Really deep in the middle of nowhere. So I spent even more time than before, immersing myself in comics and art and drawing. I also got very into music, specifically stuff like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

My early childhood influences were television like 60's Batman and Dark Shadows. Also comics, Marvel, DC, Gold Key Horror and tv adaptions. Disney animated films, Harryhausen. Lots of stuff. By age 12 I had discovered Golden Age comics, EC comics, R. Crumb and the Undergrounds. Also the golden age of newspaper comics with Alex Raymond, Windsor McCay, Caniff and all those legendary cartoonists. Painters like Van Gogh and Rembrant. By my mid teens I discovered Heavy Metal and the Europeans.

The way I work now is what I've seen referred to as automatic drawing/writing. I'm not really consciously influenced by anything as I'm working, although I think I the results come from my influences and life experience. I'm kind of a late bloomer. My style didn't really emerge until I was 28, and out of art school. When I have time and want to look at comic art, I usually go to the masters. Eisner, Kubert, Wrightson, Crumb, Moebius and many others. When I started getting my work published 30 years ago, I was also very interested in a few contemporary artists that were around, Mike Allred, Chester Brown, Charles Burns, and Dan Clowes. I'm also influenced by art forms outside of comics, like music and film. I sometimes play a lot of music while I'm drawing, Lou Reed, R.E.M...Blues and Beat!es. In film.I'm particularly attracted to David Lynch.

"Cartooning was an arduous climb up the ladder. Several rungs were missing."

How did you evolve as a comic artist? What steps did you take to become a comic book artist?

I always wanted to be a comic artist of some sort from age 4 up. But I just sort of generally drew cartoons until I was 12, when the Marvel/DC superhero bug really hit me.Then I started actually drawing strips. I wasn't really interested in drawing other people's characters at that point, though. My friend David Price and I created our own superhero universe and that kept me going for a few years. By the time I graduated High School I still had the thought in my head of being a comic artist but I didn't really know how to get there, being in TX. Comics genius Joe Kubert had started his school in New Jersey, and I knew about it, but I didn't have the nerve to go there. So I went to a regular commercial art school to get a conventional education. Comics, being a somewhat unlikely occupation, I wanted something to fall back on. I was a terribly mediocre student, though, and wasn't very interested in most of the classes, graphic design for the advertising industry being the main focus. I just wanted to draw and didn't fit in terribly well at the school. I did well enough to get jobs once I got out, but just felt like I wasn't going anywhere near what I wanted, which was a job in the comic book industry. When I was 24 I finally signed up for Joe Kubert's school and that was a really great move. Like paradise, compared to what I was used to. Drawing comics all day, into the night.

I pencil, ink, and letter my comics traditionally. I color them digitally. I've recently acquired most of the hardware and software to do it all digitally and will soon be experimenting with that.

I checked out Complex World and it looks great. Love the dialogue…What’s the story behind it and is this a personal project that’s coming out soon?

Complex World evolved out of the comics I did after graduating from the Kubert School in 1988. I had spent three years at the school hoping to attain work in the comic book industry and so I figured it would be best to concentrate on samples for the two major publishers who also happened to be local, Marvel and DC. I spent the summer after school let out drawing comic book pages with their characters. I showed them to Joe Kubert, and he wasn't very encouraging. He felt like I was knocking my brains out trying to be like everybody else and I suggested I try and do something more original. He thought I had more potential than to be just another superhero artist. He was right, my samples of that summer were pretty generic.Truth be told, my interest had waned in Marvel/DC product at that point. The comic book field had greatly expanded in the late 80's and their were lots of publishers putting out all kinds of diverse books. I had enough general commercial art experience I didn't really need to try and make a living off comics so I decided to strike out on my own and pitch my work to other publishers. I got immediate acceptance from places like Ripp Off Press and Kitchen Sink Press, who were legendary in those days. It was almost beyond belief to get published and checks from those companies.

The work that emerged after my discussion with Joe was unlike anything I had done before. An entirely different style, raw, immediate, darkly comedic. Many of the pages were done very quickly. I wanted my comics to be more like the music I listened to. Expressive, emotional, directly related more to my own inner life than adhering to any company's house style. I was very influenced by artists like Crumb in that regard. My first book length work followed the exploits of a damaged character named Caleb Steel and was called Eaters, with a series title of Snarl. It was a very turbulent, time for me and the title reflected that. Snarl was a reasonable success for it's publisher, Caliber Press and I proceeded with my next graphic novel length work, Planet 29. I went into my own psych even deeper for that piece, and ultimately followed a lighter, less personal direction for the comics that followed, a collaboration called Rogue Satellite Comics with a writer, the late Chris Reilly. The book went on for a number of issues and combined Chris's universe of characters with my own. At Rogue Satellite Comic's conclusion I decided to diversify my portfolio, and illustrated for Eureka Publication's Graphic Classics series of books. There I had the rewarding experience of interpreting, Poe, Mark Twain, H.G. Wells, Lovecraft and others. During that time I also had my singular experience with corporate owned superhero comics, working for several years on New England Comics Tick line of books. Which brings me to Complex World...

I think it was 9 summers ago, 2010, for the first time in more than 20 years nobody was asking me to do anything, no gigs lined up. I began to think about what another comic, entirely written and drawn by me would be like. What came forth was Eaten by Planet 29, it's title a consolidation of two earlier story titles, Eaters and Planet 29. At first, it was just my own characters, but soon collaborative characters with Chris Reilly found their way in. After four books in the series, I changed the title to Complex World, from a spin off series I had done with Chris Reilly who had recently passed away. Complex World is currently where all my creative energy goes. I've mostly dropped out of gigs Many of the people I've worked with in the comics field have died, gone out of business or both. I don't know where Complex World and Eaten by Planet 29 will end up, with a publisher or doing it myself. I'm hitting 59 in age and have had a few health bumps, 5 eye surgeries in 3 years. Right now I'm trying to keep my hand in, and tackle publishing later. One of the last things Chris Reilly did for me before he died was turn me on to the work of Fletcher Hanks. Hanks was a comic book artist/writer who produced very amazing work for about 3 years in the late 30s. No one noticed at the time but decades later people discovered him and his work is now widely read. I find Hank's career path inspirational and making all my original work available online for free. If I never muster the energy to publish, hopefully the work will be around long after I've stopped doing it.

I have a very simple philosophy in Complex World. I want every page to be as amazing as I can make it. Life is short and I don't want to spend time drawing anything boring. I often start with a visual idea and leave space for word balloons which aren't written, or maybe half written in my head. I think this would be called the Stan Lee style of comic book writing. There is no script, no preliminary sketches. Doing comics has become much more interesting for me if there's little or no pre-planning. Just sitting down and letting it flow. It often seems as though it's coming from somewhere else, and I'm just a receptor for it. It's always very exciting for me to start new pages as I often don't know exactly what's going to happen and I literally can't wait to find out. I set the series up like a soap opera and I hope it continues far into the future. Many of the plot threads and characters have been running for over 30 years now. The characters appear out of nowhere, but it's rare for them to arrive. Many of the characters I'm now using came about 14 years ago, in a period of about two weeks. My mother was dying and I was very distressed but I wanted to keep drawing, so every day I would do one drawing of a character that didn't exist before. Among others, my characters Devil Damsel and Mr. Mirth sprang from that, and it's that random element that keeps me entertained and interested in producing comics. I feel like the comics are working when it comes forth naturally when I was in "The Zone" and their was little sweat or effort in creating it, just having the energy to get it down. These days I find the Zone much harder to achieve with commissioned work.

What made you focus on this style of comic book art?

When I was in the Kubert School I was just desperate to get into comics and be the next inker of Iron Man, or whatever. The classes were diverse and you had to please a lot of people. I had a great teacher named Dennis Corrigan for the humor class and he emphasized cartoonists like Kliban and a wide range of stuff. I was really able to hone in on a humor sensibility there. Then at the end of the courses it was helpful to have Joe tell me I was trying too hard to be a dime a dozen superhero artist. He told me I had the potential of a Walt Kelly, (Pogo creator) and not really having the chops for that sort of rigorously muscular art, I thought it was smarter to go with that. I needed stories to draw and I was going to have to write them myself. I'd always watched things like Saturday Night Live and read Heavy Metal and Underground comics so humor seemed to be a through line to whatever I was doing. The art style evolved out

Who if anyone influences your work?

I once met Will Eisner and he asked me who influenced my work and I told him he did, and R. Crumb. He was surprised by that as he thought the two artists were diametrically opposed. I don't really think so. They both have a certain comic fluidity and mastery of black and white ink work that I'm attracted to. I also greatly admire the film work of David Lynch, and his ability to create arresting visual images combined with thematically challenging and mysterious concepts. I also get a lot from the music I play as I work, such as the narrative story telling and poetry of artists like Lou Reed, Dylan and the Blues.

I’m curious about how you choose what to work on. Is there a certain type of project or client you gravitate to- wards?

Currently I'm semi-retired from commercial work. If I need to make money I will try and draw anything the client asks, period.

What do you do to promote yourself and get work?

I have several Tumblr Blogs full of my comics and good old Face book.

What’s the future hold for you? Any ultimate goal?

I hope to stay healthy and keep drawing.

If you could meet anyone in the field you’re in who would it be and why?

I've met some of the greatest in my field already. Kubert, Eisner, Crumb, Wrightson, Kurtzman, Gil Kane. David Lynch is film maker but he also paints and draws so I'll say him. I also would've liked to have met Aubrey Beardsly and Edward Gory.

Kevin Atkinson was born and raised in Texas in 1961. Between 1985 and 1988 he was in New Jersey to study at the Joe Kubert School. Since then he has done short stories and full-length comics for various publishers. He wrote and drew two series, 'Snarl' and 'Planet 29' and collaborated on another, 'Rogue Satellite Comics', which climaxed with a guest appearance by 'The Flaming Carrot'.