At MangaBlog, Brigid Alverson posts the full interview she conducted with Akiko creator Mark Crilley for this shorter PW Comics Week article. It’s an interesting Q&A that focuses on Crilley’s latest work, the four-volume Miki Falls:
As soon as I decided to do this as my manga project, I went on a crash course, a self-taught crusade to teach myself how to draw in this style. I went to my local bookstore and started pulling out volume after volume and found the volumes that appealed to me and started doing very direct copies and studies. When I started doing the pitch, and I started to head down the road of very obviously manga type style, my agent actually said “Mark, are you sure, do you want to lose your own approach so fully and disguise yourself so fully as a manga artist?” And I said, “Yeah, she’s right, why not make this a sort of hybrid that joins my sensibilities about art with my personal favorite aspects of manga art?” I think it’s fairly straightforward. This is not traditional manga, I’m not trying to do that, so please don’t judge it on that. It’s something new. I’ve always been, and this goes back to the cinematic aspect, very much in love with lighting and shadow and atmosphere and very much feeling like you’re really there. It’s a pencil-Photoshop combination process I have come up with that hopefully gives a sense of lighting, a sense of depth, a sense of subtlety and shadow that I would not have got with just pen and ink.
I have to say that I have always been a little bit puzzled as to why in American comics and probably Japanese comics as well we have created this idea of penciling and inking, and penciling is this prep thing that must be totally obliterated to make way for inking. When I studied art, I was told “Don’t erase all those pencil lines, that’s part of the beauty of drawing, you’re going to kill the life of your illustration if you do.” When you study art, when you study Rembrandt, Degas, they keep all the preparatory pencil [drawings], then when you come to comics, you’re supposed to lose it.
There’s much more at the link.
