 Hey, how's it going? Dante, it's Jim here from Boston Comic Con, and today we're running... What is it? The fifth to sixth Boston Comic Con. Boston Comic Con is a 40,000 square feet of nothing but comics, t-shirts, posters, anything comic related, it's in there. Superman number one, Batman number one, Spider-Man number one, they're all in there. All those big books that go for millions and millions of dollars, they're right behind us. But this is like a real hardcore comic show where a lot of comic shows, they bring in all these celebrities and stuff like that. We've got nothing but comic gods, hardcore comic gods. This weekend we have Neil Adams, Joe Cooper, Frank Coitley, Art Adams, J. Scott Campbell, and actually we have over 200 artists in this room back here. Ghostbusters is a Red Sox fan. Look at that. Rocky Road. What's up, bro? What's up? How you doing? Oh, snap. It's Deadpool. Deadpool. What's going on, man? Not much, man. Logically, he's Kidpool. Kidpool. He's a teenager now. Oh, right. Kidpool. Easy. Oh, snap. It's the new great comic, Scott. What up, man? Don't tell you how's it going. I hope you're enjoying Comic Con. Oh, Mario. What's up, man? What's up, Mario? Where's Luigi at? Not here today. Princess. Cooper. What's up? Where they at? It's myself today. Take it easy, man. For those of you guys who don't remember, my boyfriend was at the 2009 Boston Comic Con. He gave me one of the coolest interviews to this day. I still quote this man. He told me to keep practicing my craft and to, you know, to continue working at whatever job until I got better at what I did. And, you know what's dope, Coy? You know what's ill? I've been a teacher for two years, and I just put my two weeks on the teacher because I got some serious money like filming. So my transition from my teaching job to, like, my film life was pain-free. And I stuck to my teaching job because you told me to. You didn't tell me specifically, state it, but your interview helped remind me to keep, you know, that for sure money coming in. And I kept practicing. I filmed every day after school. I've been teaching. I mean, so how do you feel about that? How do you feel about that, like, that philosophy, that strategy? Yeah, I think just what I live by basically means, you know, something you like, you got to work at. You can't take shortcuts. You can't substitute one responsibility for another. You know, you're going to do both until one can really sustain itself. You can't, it's just the way that I live. It requires a lot of work, not a lot of sleep, but I think it's the, it's really great payoff when the time comes and it feels good that you really earned it. You're going to take control of it. You're really working hard. So I'm glad to work for you. Appreciate it. Look at you. You're feeling pretty good for yourself now. Keep it busy. Like I said, no sleep. Appreciate it, Coy. You got it, buddy. Easy, mate. I like this image of Superman. It's from about ten years ago. It's a nice iconic image for the character, I think. I like what he did with it. Thank you quite a bit. I draw comic books for mostly for DC Comics recently. Drawing's always been my thing since I was a kid. So after high school I went to art school and then when I left there I was just doing any kind of art that I could. You know, posters for nightclubs, murals and restaurants. But I didn't always have worked on. I had worked to do for a couple of weeks and then I got a couple of weeks with nothing. So during that time, it was my early twenties, in fact it was my late teens, I got involved with a bunch of guys that were doing their own comic, like a self-published thing, like an underground human comic. I had read comics when I was a kid and I had just read Mad Magazine and some other stuff as a teenager. I hadn't been a big comic fan. And then just from actually drawing comics, from working on my own strips, I really started enjoying just the whole process of telling a story in the comic form. And then I set off a bunch of samples to all the different publishers I could think of. And back then there was quite a lot of publishers, like 20 or more. And I got, I think I only got... I got a lot of replies, like about half of them replied and just said it wasn't the style they were looking for. But one of the publishers in the UK got back to me and that was for Judge Dredd, this UK comic. I did that for a couple of years and then I ended up working for DC Comics after that. Average day for me is I get into the studio and I start drawing and I draw all day and I often draw kind of halfway into the evening. But when I started out I just drew first from my parents house before I got married and then from my own house. And I used to kind of work like six and a half days a week. And now after doing it for 20 years I pretty much try and keep it down to five days a week. I try and keep the weekends off now, but it's still pretty long hours. You know, you're your own boss and I suppose I'm not sure what I would do now after having done this for so long. I'm not sure what I would do now if I wasn't doing this. Hopefully some other kind of art, but it suits me. If you want to get started in comics I recommend the two things you've got to do. One is you've got to keep practicing drawing, looking at how others have to do it, look at books and how to do it. You need to practice your drawing, practice your drawing, practice your drawing. But the other thing you actually have to do is do pages of story. Don't just do headshots of your favourite characters or just copy your favourite covers. You actually need to do story, like strip pages. Any editor you meet at a comic book convention if you're trying to impress an editor, they've seen the whole copy in somebody else's work before. They want to see whether or not you can tell a story, you know, like in sequence. That's the main thing. Practice your drawing and do stories. And of course, where I started in Small Best of Self Publish I guess probably web comics would be the way to do it now. My name's Adam Hughes. I'm a comic book artist. I work for DC Comics, Lucasfilm, Warner Brothers. I'm a successful commercial artist and I've been doing it for 22 years. I didn't have the good luck to go to college, so I had to teach myself. I'm self-instructed to this day. I'm still teaching myself how to draw, but I was lucky enough I got into professional comics when I was 19 years old. And it's... Fortunately, the American comic book industry doesn't require you to have a diploma. The only qualifications you need are you need to know how to draw. You need to know how to tell a story to be a successful and competent storyteller to improve visual arts. And I made sure that every time I put pencil to paper I walked away from every illustration, every assignment, every job that I've ever done with at least one lesson learned. Either a positive one or a negative one. I walk away from a... Like I do covers for DC Comics. I've done Wonder Woman covers. I've done Catwoman covers. I've done everybody. And if I can finish each assignment and come away with either a new way to draw something or my favorites are the bad lessons. When you finish drawing something and you go, oh, that thing didn't work out well there. I need to change that. I need to do better the next time. I think that an artist learns more when they paint themselves in the corner and then they have to paint themselves out. I'm all for positive life lessons but I think artists make greater leaps when they can recognize their mistakes. And I think that's the heart of self-instruction when it comes to at least the visual arts is it's okay to sit there and wallow and revel in your successes but you're not going to try to improve if you're so in love with your own work that you think you're beyond reproach. The artists who are able to look at their work and go, okay, that was good but I could have done a better job here or I could have drawn that foot better or I could have done the lighting on that here slightly more gloriously. The ability to look at the negative and go, okay, I recognize that that's not everything that it could be. I'm going to fix it the next time. That's the key to self-instruction. That's the key to growth as an artist. And even if you go to college and you go to art school, being able to do that in your professional career and throughout the rest of your life as an artist that's what's going to make you improve and that's what's going to make you a growth artist and not like a stagnant pool of water that's like, okay, I learned everything I need to learn in those four years of art school my brain will not accept any new information right now. Being able to recognize what needs improvement is what will make you better as an artist I think in a lot of areas of life. The nice thing about the American comic book industry is the work ethic is very simple. You have to have the work done when the company needs to publish it. If you want to be a comic book artist and draw a 22-page comic a month, well, it's very simple. You have to have 22 pages done a month. You go, okay, well, there's 30 days in a month on average. You do the math. That's almost the page a day. It is a page a day if you want to take the weekends off and have a family or if you want to go out and have fun. The work ethic is literally draw as much as you have to to get the job done when the client needs it. And that goes not just for a comic book art but any form of professional illustration. The client says they need it on Friday. Well, they don't care about your excuses. They don't care about your sick mom or your puppy got run over. They need the art on Friday. So the thing is that each artist has to decide for themselves what their own personal work ethic needs to be. I'm not the fastest artist in the world so I have to maybe put in more hours than somebody who can draw very quickly. There are some people who are extremely disciplined. They can get up at 8 o'clock in the morning, they can be at their drawing table at 9, and they've worked like a demon until 12.30, take off lunch and then start drawing again at 1. I can't do that. Whatever wise person once said, man, know thyself, they're talking about artists because the day I became my more successful professional illustrator was the day when I realized what my limitations are. I'm not the most disciplined person in the world. I'm not the fastest person in the world and I don't control my art. My art controls me. So on that day I stopped trying to make my art fit into this sort of disciplined, boxed, controlled thing. I was like, okay, I'm going to draw when I need to draw. As much as I need to draw to get it right, I will stop drawing when the job's done. I will sleep when I'm tired and I'll wake up when I'm done sleeping. For me personally, it makes for a Bohemian lifestyle but here we are 22 years later and I've made a fairly decent success out of it. So I can describe my work ethic and it might not apply to everyone. The best thing you can do is figure out what work ethic works best for you based on your disposition, your talent, your time, and your life situation. My name is Arthur Adams and no one really knows what I do but some of I go from city to city and sit around doing strange drawings and superheroes and some of I've made a living at this for almost 28 years. When I started doing this quite a while ago I just got the names of all the editors I could find out the big comic book companies Marvel Comics and DC Comics and just sent them, kept sending them zeroxes of my work until someone responded said they thought that I had some potential and basically gave me a job. I mean, it's a very solitary job. I spend a lot of time just sitting in my studio trying to get stuff done and trying to do it to the best of my ability in a relatively timely manner which I almost always fail at at least in the timely part. Basically, I just try to work every day and just try to do the best I can do. It was always my plan that I would become a professional artist and just somehow continue to keep working out. I do occasionally wonder if people are going to finally say we can get someone else to do the same stuff cheaper and a lot faster but it seems to be working out okay so far. But I don't really know how people get into comics anymore. A lot of the people who are working who are getting into comics these days seem to be doing a lot of their own creations first doing their own self-published work and then proving their talents that way in print before they're noticed by some of the bigger companies. But honestly, it's a job that I really like doing. Basically, you pretty much know whether you like doing it or not. It's a lot of work. You probably end up getting fat and old like, are you doing it? It's good stuff. Who are you and what exactly do you do? Very simply, just a cartoonist. And that's what I do. I do the comic books. Do you remember when you first started taking comic books seriously? When you really started first drawing because you believed in yourself when people started believing in you and you started taking comic books seriously? I never thought of it as a way to make a lively book and do something that I enjoy doing. What was your career like? You ask questions as if you ask questions as if as if I'm supposed to know some definite answers and I don't. I know them now. I know what happened now or the insolence of them all. But when the things happen nobody knows where they're going to land or what they're going to be doing or why they're going to be doing it. What's a college? Yeah, finish college. Finish college. Yeah, finish college and I got a degree and something that I don't use. What did you discover then that you weren't thinking about it then? And what you went to school for more you didn't require anything in school that you could use in your life. Is that true? I mean, philosophy helped me appreciate perspective but it didn't help me get any jobs. I mean, I didn't, nobody was in a hurry to hire a philosopher. I went straight to work at a pizza shop right after earning a four-year degree. I was 20 years old with a four-year degree and I went straight to a pizza shop. Was there anything that interested you? I applied everywhere. I tried everything. But what, you went to school? I wanted to go to law school or business school and I saw that philosophy majors scored real high on the L side or the GMAT and then studying philosophy I realized, like, Dante, what do you really want to do when it wasn't business or law? I wanted film. Like, I really wanted to produce films. I mean, I was already $45,000 deep. I was $45,000 deep halfway through college and I was like, I could run around with $45,000 deep without it with an incomplete degree or I can finish it, spend 90 and at least have something in my pocket even if I'm not using it. So, I mean, I got, I mean, I'm paying off bills with my camera sometimes I didn't take any classes to film and I get hired to film every week and it's my life now. So, what they're doing is you're educating yourself. Is that so? Yeah, absolutely. You are educating yourself. It's not costing you anything but you're getting a kind of experience that you wouldn't have had otherwise. You found out what interests you, right? Absolutely. And now you're following it, right? Absolutely. Well, then that's good. That's what we all do. And a lot of us do make this. There's a lot of things, I guess there's a lot of things that I've learned in life that I don't use all the time but I think that one way or another, you've learned something from the fact that you made a mistake the first time around. So, that's a possibility. You did learn something from it. You learned what you're not interested in. So, what do you have to say for maybe older artists that want to... They're still too late. It's never too late. It's never too late. Why is it never too late? Well, because it's never too late. It's only too late that you decide that it's too late. I shall forever be the freshest, no end in me.