Comic Books are my Passion; Graphic Design is my Bread and Butter.

Like many cartoonists and creators in the industry, I have a background in graphic design and spend my nine to five art directing in and around the NYC area. I’m fascinated with logos, cover design, trade dress and typography… and lately, I’m discovering that I’m not alone. Designers like Chip Kidd, Seth, Brian Wood, Laurenn McCubbin, and Rian Hughes are garnering fame not for not only their storytelling abilities but for the way they wield their Adobe Creative Suite packages. With awards being offered for “Best Publication Design”, books like Wood’s PUBLIC DOMAIN flying off the comic book shelves and the logo redesign of the DC Comics “Bullet” making headlines, it’s clear that graphic designers aren’t just men and women hunched over in cubicles across America hiding from copywriters and art directors: often they’re the critically acclaimed geniuses designing your favorite comic or graphic novel.

Antony Johnston, writer of over eleven graphic novels and the ongoing Oni Press series WASTELAND, is one of those geniuses. He’s designed for Oni, Cyberosia Publishing and various magazines and freelances in North-West England where he lives with his his partner Marcia, his dog and his iMac. Recently Antony and I discussed graphic design and it’s impact on comics and graphic novels. Enjoy:

KLEID: We’ve both broken into the comics industry in the last few years where comics and graphic novels have slid from being items that are bagged, boxed and stored to display pieces, art objects that are placed on shelves next to art books and works of literature. How much of this comic-as-literature versus comic-as-comic shift do you feel affected the way comics and graphic novel packaging is designed?

JOHNSTON: I actually think it might be the other way around, or at least a bit of both… Fact is, comics design has improved a lot over the past few years, especially on the ‘true mainstream’ (i.e. non-spandex) titles. And not just on book format stuff, either, though that’s clearly where the latest movement started. One big factor, I think, has been the small but vocal movement aimed at courting the mainstream audience with ‘art’ and genre comics.

The attitude seems to be that if we actually take the time to design a cover that’s both eye-catching and composed in a way people are used to seeing in other media, that we can convince people to at least consider that a comic is worth their time. Whether or not it works is hard to say - was it the great, simple cover design of PERSEPOLIS that attracted people to the book? Or was it simply the enormous publicity campaign, which in turn dictated that the cover look as little like a traditional comic as possible?

The downside is that as comics become bigger and bigger business, we’re going to see cover design taken out of the hands of artists and placed instead with marketing people (cf. novels and DVDs), which is always dicey if they’re not willing to listen to a (good) designer. Mind you, the percentage of good to bad covers isn’t exactly sterling right now, so maybe it won’t make a difference.

KLEID: I guess I tend to be an optimist about these things - seeing folks like spiegleman, Ware, Seth and Chip Kidd take the graphic novel-AS- novel hubbub by the horns and help direct it into this wild and wooly bookstore mainstream makes me feel perhaps silly hope that the artist will remain the Art Director. I think you’ll always have editorial input - whether you’re designing a book or comic for Vertigo or NBM or designing for Scholastic or Simon and Schuster, so that’s always going to be a tough row to hoe….but still, I find that for the most part editors tend to rely more on the cartoonist’s decision when it comes to designing their covers.

You say comics design has improved over the last couple of years - who would have ever thought, like which editor works on which book, that readers would care so much about graphic design decisions when it comes to comics. Little things like Vertigo altering their trade dress or DC Comics redesigning the classic Milton Glaser “bullet”? I mean, other than those of us obsessed with keyline, leading and font sizes, who would have thought people cared?

It’s like the influx of good designers opened the gateway for design books and sketchbooks to sit on the shelves along with stories and narratives and turned innovators like Chip Kidd and Seth into sought-after signees for books they didn’t write or draw - but simply designed. I find that interested as both a designer and a “comics guy”. Graphic Designer as Cartoonist or Cartoonist as Graphic Designer?

JOHNSTON: Let me interject here and counter your optimism with my usual brand of pessimism. I don’t think it’s a question of the Art Director being an artist - they almost always are - but of how much control they actually have over the final product. In most large non-comics publishers, the Art Director may theoretically be equal to the Marketing people, but ultimately he or she works at their behest. We’re quite lucky in comics that we generally don’t have the myriad levels of management and interdepartmental rivalry that larger publishers in other entertainment industries have had for so long. For the most part, comics is done by comics people, and creatively that’s a great thing. My concern is that as comics become more and more mainstream, the decision makers will be increasingly drawn for their business acumen rather than their creative talents. That’s not a bad thing per se, but it does often result in designers having very little final say in the product.

KLEID: PESSIMIST!

No, I hear where youre coming from - everyone in comics is just Happy To Be Doing Comics and therefore there’s not cuthroat Art Director VS Copywriter VS Creative Director back and forth. Thing is, In my experience with the larger book publishers (and from what I’ve been hearing from friends and associates doing work for them) they’ve been treating the artist as Artist. Book design, jacket design - you name it, they want to make sure we’re happy with it. Scholastic is going to make sure Raina Telgemeier likes the BSC final jacket and I bet she has final approval (after Ann L. Martin, i’m sure) because the artist is the Artist and not the guy or girl in the 4th Floor Graphics cubicles.

JOHNSTON: That’s interesting, I didn’t know that. We can only hope that continues, but the cynic in me says the honeymoon will soon wear off. And, of course, it makes me wonder who has the final say when the work’s a collaboration… I could see that causing a few arguments!

KLEID: But take a DC Comics - or hell, NBM Publishing who put out my graphic novel, BROWNSVILLE. There were changes made to the jacket that I designed that I didn’t see before press time - blocks of copy moved around due to time and technical reasons. That doesn’t make NBM a bad publisher by any means - but it dilutes me as the Artist in a sense. Obviously DC Comics doesn’t check in with the guys writing and drawing JUSTICE LEAGUE before changing the logo or trade dress, but you gotta think that their design department shows the cover proofs of SLOTH to Gilbert Hernandez or THE QUITTER to Pekar and Haspiel before sending them to print.

Which makes me wonder if graphic design gets more important, company-wise, as you get more levels and departments involved or less important? Does DC Comics care less about the SUPERMAN trade dress than Oni Press does about QUEEN AND COUNTRY because they don’t involved the creators and artists working on the book in deciding about logos, colors and layout?

JOHNSTON: I wouldn’t say they care less, just in a different way. DC has other people responsible for that area, people like Mark Chiarello who’s an excellent Art Director. But they’re still, as we said earlier, people who are All About The Comics. So they still care, just in the context of a large bureaucracy rather than the independent boutique manner of someone like Oni.

And I *can* understand comics readers caring, because this is a visual industry. But often, that interest in the visuals has only been concerned with the actual content - the illustrator’s work. What’s interesting is that people are now starting to take a more holistic interest, not just in the penciller/inker’s images but in the look of the comic as a whole.I think a lot of this modern interest can be traced back to Dave McKean’s work on SANDMAN. When that book first came out, it looked like nothing else on the shelves. And this followed through into the collections, where McKean handled stuff like the indicia and biography design - again, ending up with an object that looked utterly unique in comics, and that fitted the feel of the comic perfectly. That was something quite unusual at the time, the idea that not just the logo but the whole comic should be designed to match the mood and atmosphere of the contents.

As for signings and the like, hell, it’s about time. Where were these fans when you and I were slaving away in professional repro, eh? Eh?

KLEID: Probably playing video games.

You mention logos matching the mood and atmosphere of a comic… I find that interesting - especially in the mainstream world where logos=characters.Like old Silver Age DC Comics (and recently, the new JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA) placing logos directly within the action near an appearance of a character like Green Lantern or Wonder Woman so that there’s an immediate icon-character shorthand: Lightning bolt = Flash and so forth.

It’s like that section in Scott McCloud’s UNDERSTANDING COMICS (or is it REINVENTING?) where he distills comics to it’s basic shapes and colors… Red+Yellow+Blue=Superman. Blue+Grey+Yellow=Batman. Fascinating, isn’t it, how graphic design in comics goes beyond how a page is laid out and a book is assembled?

JOHNSTON: It is, and I think you’ve hit on something there that’s very telling about mainstream comics, which is that the title character/s define the mood and atmosphere. Which is a strange reversal of most ‘true mainstream’ fiction, where the mood and atmosphere are set by external story forces and the character’s own nature is almost irrelevant. (There are, of course, a few exceptions in mainstream comics - mainly the big icons like Batman and Superman, whose brands are so iconic that they can encompass a broad swathe of styles and moods.)But that’s not really anything to do with design, of course. So let me close by saying: yes, I think the success of comics-as-literature and the increasing care and thought put into the graphic design of comics are intrinsically related; and yes, as a sign of the medium’s maturation this is a very good thing indeed.

Long live the designer.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 16th, 2006 at 10:49 am and is filed under Art and Design, Comic Books, Creators, Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.