Adam Hughes celebrated 20 years of working in the industry at this year’s San Diego Comic Con with his very own spotlight panel. Since 1987, Hughes has been working non-stop, from his years at Comico to his immense involvement with the Star Wars Celebration this year and the upcoming All Star Wonder Woman. Having started in the industry when “anyone who could draw a straight line could get a book”, Hughes has only been unemployed for 15 minutes (between Comico and DC Comics) and admittedly gained a sort of ‘tenure’ respect that he’s still getting used to.

Fans asked the obvious question regarding the new All Star Wonder Woman book, but Hughes was tight-lipped on his answers. Fond of the “Salad Bar Batman” approach to the Batman animated series, he plans on similarly taking as much from the different interpretations of Wonder Woman, from her Golden age origins to the work done when George Perez was on the book, plus his own personal touches. Hughes expressed a belief that both villains and supporting characters should be interesting enough to “float their own book”, so expect compelling interpretations of Steve Trevor (who will be appearing as a love interest) and Wonder Woman’s admittedly small Rogues Gallery. No redesigns of the costume, he wants Wonder Woman herself as iconic as possible, but Hughes mentioned how well costume changes worked on his Lara Croft covers, so look out for something similar for the Amazon Princess. Also look for the invisible jet to make at least an appearance despite not being a fan of the idea; he doesn’t want to be judgmental, but to use the opportunity to do something “cool”. Among the things he can’t say related to the appearance of the greek gods (”They will be invoked.”) and whether the book will have any elements from the World War II era Wonder Woman (” “lots of war in it, perhaps nazis”).

“Everyone’s a big fan of the previous all star release dates,” Hughes said, regarding ASWW’s release schedule, getting a good chuckle from the moderately sized audience. He wants his all star book to ship on time, so nothing will ship until he is comfortable that the book will go out monthly. Since his contract says he’s signed for 6 issues, it was suggested by his manager that he might hand them in out of order to make sure DC waited to print them in order.

When asked about his artwork, Hughes wants to have a large “coffee table book” of his artwork, especially considering the anniversary, but due to the work-for-hire nature of a lot of his pieces, there is a difficulty with getting the rights to a lot of his work so the book remains ellusive; a ‘tutorial’ DVD, perhaps on his coloring technique, is much more likely as he has done similar work before in a power point presentation at college art lectures. Of any Marvel character he’d like to draw, a World War II era Captain America tops his list; he told Joe Quesada this when he first became Editor-in-Chief, but Quesada felt the book would be a hard to sell. Hughes joked that there aren’t many “bikini car washes in the Battle of the Bulge” so he could see Quesada’s point, and now that Captain America was dead, it would be an even harder sell.

He set a very jokey and friendly tone for the panel, chatting about using Wonder Woman’s lasso as a kind of ‘cape’ in his cover illustrations to the fact his ‘joke’ Lone Wolf and Cub homage Catwoman saw print. But it didn’t look like he was going to make it out of the panel before someone asked about the Mary Jane statue controversy; he restated his opinion that he draws a lot of very powerful images of women and did not intend the sketch or the statue as a mysogynist depiction. Also, he believes that people don’t do laundry in a basket on the floor, so the idea of her discovering the costume rather than washing it still stands. He notes that if he was going to draw her doing the laundry, he would have made it very obvious with a washboard and a very annoyed look on MJ’s face, far more cute and funny.

Before the panel ended, Gary Sassum from the San Diego Comic-Con gave Adam Hughes an award for his 20 years in the business. The next in the series of Marvel Comic-ette statues (The Black Cat) was released as of July 27 as well as the first color convention sketchbook for the 20th anniversary.

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