Artist August: Marcos Martin [Interview]

On today’s second day of Artist August, we have a special treat for you. Shortly after the arrival of the third issue of “The Private Eye,” I had the chance to spend an hour on Skype with that series’ co-creator and artist Marcos Martin. Martin is one of the best storytellers in comics today, and when working with writer Brian K. Vaughan and colorist Muntsa Vicente, nothing has held him back en route to creating some of the best work of his life.

I talk to Martin about his desire to write, his inspiration as an artist, his destiny as a letterer, sustainable architecture, colors, and turning the industry and everything we know about how comics should be released on its head. Thanks to Marcos for talking with me, and I hope you enjoy this lengthy interview with one of the absolute best.

The Private Eye is just so amazing. I want to say how much I love it, and love how I can never expect when it will come out. It just drops on us.

Martin: Well thank you. I kind of like that too. The fact it’s pretty much unexpected. It also has some problems because it takes a while for everyone to know that it has really come out. So that’s a draw back from a practical standpoint.

I think it’s exciting. I like that nobody really knows when it’s going to come out. Including us sometimes.

I have to ask. Do you guys really have a schedule of when you think each issue is going to come out?

Martin: We try to go as fast as possible. That would probably be the best way to say it. We try to aim for a specific date, just so we don’t stray too far away. But we always miss. By a couple of weeks usually. But if we didn’t have that set, we would probably miss by more.

It’s good to have a general goal to go off of, but the guerrilla nature of it and the fact you are handling everything adds a lot of time to it a standard comic wouldn’t have, I’d imagine.

Martin: Well, yes (laughter). There is a lot of work in my case other than actual drawing. There’s stuff…right now I have to letter and translate it into Spanish. Those are a couple more things I need to do. We just opened our Twitter and Facebook accounts, so that also adds a little more to the work burden. It’s really a lot of work. But it’s fun. It’s such a fun project that I never…I’m tired, but I don’t despise it. (laughs)

You opened up the Facebook and Twitter pages for the Panel Syndicate. Was that essentially because some people weren’t hearing the book was coming out?

Martin: Mainly, it was a way to better communicate with our fans, I’d say. To actually be able to have a proper platform to announce our launches and updates. New translations and other things going on.

Also, it will allow us to post interesting stuff. Interview we’ve been doing, and probably some previews at some point. I do like the mystery of people not knowing much about the next issue, so I don’t know if there will be too many previews in the form of drawings or sketches or something like that.

I have to say, not only is it innovative in the digital distribution model, but by the time comics and movies come out these days, it feels like you know everything about them by the time it comes out. I love that we don’t know anything about The Private Eye until it comes out. It’s an experience unlike anything else. No previews, please!

Martin: I agree with you completely. That’s one reason we like doing this this way. The same thing basically. Nowadays, you have so much information about everything, especially all types of entertainment, and by the time you actually get to read or watch the movie or whatever, you feel like you’ve already seen too much of this. That’s why we try to keep all of the information about the issues at a minimum.

Even when choosing preview pages, I try to choose ones that don’t give away too much. Sometimes, that’s a problem because they might not be the most spectacular pages, but I’d rather sacrifice that so I don’t give away parts of the story.

Absolutely. Well, before we get more into the Private Eye, I have some more general questions about comic art. What made you first appreciate comics, and how did you first decide that you wanted to pursue it as a career?

Martin: Well, I started reading comics when I was a little kid. I was always growing up with comic books around. I’m from Barcelona, so I read a lot of the European editions of the Walt Disney Comics that we have here. Most of them are done in Italy, or were done that I used to read. I didn’t know that. I thought Walt Disney drew them all. He was dead at the time, but I didn’t know that.

Also, we obviously had Asterix and Tintin, and I grew up with the Spanish editions of mostly Marvel heroes. I was lucky enough to grow up reading the Kirby and Ditko stuff, even though it happened much earlier. I’m not that old (laughs). But I read the Spanish editions of those comics. Pretty miscellaneous stuff I grew up with.

I always loved comics, and at one point, I thought I wanted to write comics. I wanted to become a writer. I thought that probably the easiest way to become a writer was to draw the comic books myself. That’s when I thought, “I’ll draw them so I can become a writer.” At one point, I realized that I wasn’t a very good writer, but I enjoyed drawing.

So instead of becoming a writer I became an artist. That’s pretty much the story behind it.

I think it’s interesting, because that story happens a lot amongst writers, but writers who wanted to be an artist, but couldn’t do it, so they became just writers. I think you’re the first that did both, and focused on being an artist.

Martin: I was lucky enough to realize I sucked early on (laughter). I would have been sad if I didn’t.

I think it’s interesting that you grew up with Walt Disney and Asterisk, but the person I most often hear associated with your work is Steve Ditko. Do you think his work stands out as a particularly great influence, or do you think there’s a little bit of everything in the mix there?

Martin: I don’t think anyone was more than Kirby. I grew up with much of his stuff, and it must have made an impact in a subconscious way. But I also loved the Romita Spider-Man stuff. I don’t know though, but I get the comparison a lot. I wish I was as good as he was. That’s one of the best people to be compared to.

But I wouldn’t say he was a much stronger influence than anyone else. Probably the strongest influence was Mazzucchelli.

There are digital tools for every aspect of art in comics these days. How traditional do you stay, or have you incorporated digital tools into the process of your artwork?

Martin: I’ve incorporated a little bit, but probably not enough to make my life easier (laughs). My process…first I start with the breakdowns, and that I have to do by hand. Once I have the breakdowns, I do scan them and I blow them up and print them out, then work from those. But then everything is handmade until I have the final art, then I scan the pages again and get them colored.

It’s a combination, but really, it helps me speed up the process between the breakdowns and the final art I would say. But not much else, other than panel boarders and, now that I’m lettering…I hand lettered the first issue. It was so much, I was sick for a week after doing that because I had to letter it three times in three different languages…so yeah, that wouldn’t work.

I finally got myself a font of my handwriting, and that’s what I’m using for the new issues. That obviously speeds up the process more. It’s been a great help, and I try to use it as best as I can, but I’m not the most technologically savvy guy on Earth. So there’s a limit.

You’re talking about the lettering. You’re not just handling the art, but also the lettering. Why did you decide to take that job, and how important is it for you to control all aspects of the visuals?

Martin: Well, I’ve always been trying to control as much as possible. That’s just the way it is. I’m a control freak…a pain in the ass, also comes to mind…and with the Private Eye, this is basically a three…a two man and a woman operation, besides my friend who is the tech person who takes care of everything regarding the site.

So, there was also the financial aspect to it. Basically, we didn’t have the money to spend on a letterer, and I took that as a chance to try and letter myself and see what happened. I think if I had been given the chance, and had the money to hire a letterer, a professional letterer, I probably would have done that because it would have made my life easier and the work better. But that’s the way it was.

And now, I’m just used to it. I’ve ended up doing it myself, even if it would have made my life much easier not to.

Oh yeah, especially with all the languages. What are you up to, four languages?

Martin: Yeah, but we have a fifth one coming up.

It’s a level of lettering most don’t have to deal with, so that adds some time and…

Martin: David, I’m basically a letterer (laughs). Sometimes when I have time, I draw.

Going back to the Private Eye, and I’m sure you’ve told this story many a time at this point, how did this project with Brian come together, and why did you decide to move towards creator-owned work?

Martin: Well, why did I decide to start some creator-owned work…it was because I just felt that was the way to go. After working for so long in the work for-hire comics, which is fun, but there’s really…your work doesn’t belong to you. And that’s hard. That’s tough. It’s something I don’t think you can do forever. You need to try and building something for yourself at some point, so creator-owned seems like a logical step.

So I already had made the decision to try and come up with something creator-owned with a writer, again, because that’s not what my skill is (laughs). Even though I thought so at one point. And that’s when Brian appeared, and he pitched me his idea for The Private Eye, and it was perfect timing, because I was going to finish my contract at Marvel, and I had already told them I wasn’t going to renew.

Basically, that’s when I started working on the project. And I had been thinking of the idea of doing something exclusively digital in the distribution for years, actually. The market was getting smaller. Comics were becoming the opposite of what it started up as. At the beginning, I think the comics medium started as a cheap entertainment for the masses, which isn’t bad. That isn’t a bad thing. It’s just the nature of the product.

Lately, as the years have gone by, it has really become a more expensive product for a much smaller audience. So we are at risk of ending up as a kind of ghetto. If you were to compare it to music, when we started we were pop music, and no we’ve almost ended up as jazz. Which is cool, but it’s a small world, for something that really should be a popular medium.

So basically, on the Internet for me was a way to broaden that audience outside the usual channels of distribution. That was the idea behind it. It also gives you the chance to lower the price of the product, because of no printing or distribution costs, almost. So once more, you have the opportunity to create a product that can reach a wide audience for a very low price. At the heart of the project…that was the heart of the project. To once more regain that aspect for the comic medium.

With that in mind, that is what I pitched to Brian. I always pictured it, if I was going to do something like that, I always imagined Brian being involved. Both because he’s a friend, and because he’s someone who can bring enough clout to the project to make it viable.

So everything was serendipitous, I guess. It all came together. The most surprising thing was that Brian agreed with my crazy idea (laughs). He likes to call me crazy, but he was as crazy as I was, because he didn’t doubt it. He said, “let’s do it.” That’s how the project started.

I love it in the first issue’s afterword, and your relationship and how you proposed doing it digitally. I thought that was fantastic.

I agree with you about the perspective about the comic audience getting smaller and smaller. It’s a combination of cost and continuity that has made it such a niche medium. It’s hard to find and hard to understand where to start, so with something like the Private Eye, it’s so global friendly. You have the flexibility of formats and of languages, but for both of those, how important for the team was it to make sure readers had options?

Martin: The most important aspect of the whole project was to make everything as easy as possible for the reader. Paramount to that was making it DRM-free, and in the PDF format, so that you would be able to download your comic book to your computer and own it. I think that’s the most important thing. That makes it likable to anyone around the world. The fact you don’t have to deal with any kind of apps or anything. Everyone has a computer or a PDF reader.

Afterwards, we added the CBR and the CBZ just in case. For the more comic book specific readers. Really, the PDF is the key, I guess, to making it as accessible as possible to anyone. Even more than the languages.

I think it was especially interesting that you guys launched right around the time a similar program to ComiXology just shut down one day, and everyone who spent money on this cloud platform lost their comics. I think the idea of having that file on your computer became extremely important in that moment, or at least people became aware.

Martin: I wasn’t aware of how ComiXology worked until very late…until about the time we were about to release the first issue of The Private Eye. I always thought you were downloading something. But apparently you just have access to a link, or something.

Something like that. It exists on the cloud, and you can’t read it without an Internet connection. As someone who travels a lot, it’d be frustrating not being able to read it just because the Internet goes down, but I’m mostly a print reader. It’s a fascinating conundrum that I don’t think people really thought about before things like that popped up.

Martin: I guess I understand the fact it’s done that way to prevent pirating. But once again, my beliefs about piracy is it’s something that has to be fought with education. The Internet is about culture being free. It should be for everyone. But I think what people have to realize is it has a cost. You can have access to everything, that’s why we’re giving it away – we’re giving people the choice of what they want to pay for the comic depending on your perceptions and economic possibilities – and I think that’s the way to go, because that’s just the way the Internet works.

Also, I like the fact we’re establishing a new relationship between the reader and the author. Both have a mutual responsibility, in the sense that we’re responsible of creating a product. A quality product, to the best of our abilities. And the reader has to be responsible, if they like our product, they have to realize that does come at a cost. The only thing is, you have to decide what is that cost? What is the value they give to that product?

I think that aspect is extremely interesting. I ask people I know who read it what they pay for it, and people have paid anywhere from $0.99 to $4.99 for it. People in the letters of issue three, it sounds like…it just fits everyone’s situation seemingly. I find that fantastic.

Martin: One of the things I never, ever thought of, and I thought of a lot of things while working on this, but I never thought people would discuss how much money they were paying. That took me completely by surprise. Now it sounds obvious, but when I started, people were giving it so much importance. I never thought people would talk about it. How much they were paying. It’s fun to see people talk about it.

It opens up a lot of conversations I don’t think people talked about before it existed strictly because nothing like it ever existed.

Martin: Yeah, I guess (laughs).

Going into the actual art, one of my favorite parts of the book is the world you’re all building. I think it’s one of my favorite types of future stories, as it looks like our world developed, just with a different bent on it. For you as an artist, how exciting is it to create this new world visually?

Martin: It’s amazing, I would say. It’s a challenge. It took me a few months to design and conceptualize how this world works, and looking for reference. It’s really fun. Sometimes I’m sad that I don’t get to put as many things as I thought about in the comic books, yet, because I try to focus on telling the stories and not showing things that are not relevant to what’s going on.

That sometimes prevents me from showing stuff that would be cool. Most of the buildings, there’s a little bit of a green pattern to them, because most of them are sustainable. They’re sustainable architecture. That’s what I thought of the future. It should be more of a utopia more than a dystopia.

Without the Internet, it’s been allowed to evolve into something better as people were working on it instead of just talking about it on the Internet (laughs). That’s something Brian insisted on. So one of the things I thought about was the buildings are going to be cool and they are sustainable, and everything will work on its own. They kind of have…in my mind, I haven’t shown this yet…but there are gardens on top of the buildings and you can probably grow your own stuff, like carrots and potatoes on top of that.

I keep thinking of stuff, and some of it will come up eventually, hopefully.

It’s also very exciting because I get to do a lot of research, which is always fun. Everything I’ve seen on the Internet is something that could be an object for our new world. But at the same time, it has to have some sort of 80’s vibe to it, because in the end, it’s a world that existed before the Internet, which is the 80’s. That’s why there are cassette tapes and video tapes and Blockbusters still around. Tower Records is still around, Kodak, all of that stuff. It’s a lot of stuff that already existed and just existed that is fading away now, and new stuff that is coming up that works in this context of Internet-less society.

I thought the Blockbuster inclusion in the third issue was really funny because a Blockbuster in Anchorage literally just closed. It closed on Thursday, and the Private Eye came out on Friday.

Martin: (laughs) Sorry about that.

You jinxed them!

I love the glamours, if you’d call them that, which people wear. Do these speak volumes of the characters, or are they just cool things people wear?

Martin: Are they a reflection and a mask, basically?

Yeah.

Martin: I’ll leave that to the readers to find out (laughs). Just so I don’t have to give an answer. I can tell you, some of them have a reason probably. An ulterior reason. Some of them are just cool looking.

I do have to admit, I like to look through the busy sidewalks and see what everyone is wearing. The level of detail is great. I like looking around the rooms and…the P.I. is wearing a shirt in the third issue, an upside down tree shirt, that I swear I have seen before. I love the depth of the visuals. How important is making the details on the page as real as you can make them?

Martin: It is important, but it’s also important to not fall too into the details that the reader is lost in them and still follows the story. It’s a balance. It’s tough. Sometimes they are there for texture or atmosphere, but not enough to grab the reader’s attention from what is actually going on. From the information you want the reader to get.

The details and background stuff does really have an importance to the story too, but sometimes it can detract from the action. That’s a tough balance to work with sometimes.

I do like to put as much detail as I can, but detail that makes sense. So if we’re on the street, there has to be stores, and I like to think of what kind of stores they’d be. Like Blockbuster. Something that not only gives atmosphere that ties the reader to this world.

Otherwise, little other details like the shirts have to have attitude to them. I think you’re right, that shirt P.I. wore actually exists. It’s not exactly that. It’s something close that stuck with me. I thought it would look cool on him. I never looked up the actual reference. I know I’ve seen something similar to that.

My fiancé is an architect, and I’m going to have to show her the book to see what she thinks about the sustainable architecture.

Martin: I have a lot of architect friends, and they love the comic but sometimes they’re like, “come on dude, the future is not going to look like that.”

Did you tell them it’s sort of like the 80’s too?

Martin: I tell them all sorts of shit, but they don’t fall for it.

As far as the book being digital only, does that change your approach at all vs. print, besides the horizontal format?

Martin: The horizontal format does change the approach. I had done double page spreads on the Stan Lee stuff; the Sunday stuff I did on Spider-Man. That’s the closest I’ve come to this format. It’s not really a double page spread. It’s more widescreen than that. It’s done to actually fit the computer screen. But yeah, it’s different in how you approach the storytelling. There are things you are used to doing with the more vertical format that don’t work with this format.

On the other side, there are advantages and disadvantages, but one of the things it does is it lends a little bit to the L.A. atmosphere. I think a landscape format brings more of an L.A. vibe to it, while vertical is more of a New York kind of a setting. Horizontal is California to me, with vertical being New York or Chicago because of the skyscrapers. It’s very subtle.

But again, I think the most important part is the actual design of the page. How to tell the story in this format because…I’ve kind of reached the conclusion the best format is the more vertical format because of the way the eye reads across the page. We tend to go up and down and left to right, and here you have to go left to right, and then down, and again to the right. No real up and down. That is kind of hard sometimes. That is tough to figure out how to lay out the information on one page.

I think that’s the basic challenge.

I have to imagine that given you’ve worked in the industry for so long, you might have to retrain yourself on how to tell the story.

Martin: Basically. I might not say retraining, but you have to change things you are used to doing. Brian obviously is writing a normal script, so he’s used to just the usual comic book format. Sometimes we’ve come to realize that things that are in the script won’t work in the horizontal format. Some of the shots, I have to condense pages or spread them into different pages. That’s one of the good things about the project though. There is no set number of pages to each issue.

I can always move stuff around or add pages, take away pages. Nobody cares.

How closely do you work with Muntsa (Vicente) on the coloring? One of my favorite things in the book is how many of the panels have the solid color backgrounds, like the yellows and oranges in #3. It really makes them pop and stand out. How closely do you work in creating that look, and how did the solid colors come to be?

Martin: Well, we work very closely, because she’s actually my partner (laughs). She actually sits in the chair I am sitting in while she’s working, and I stand right behind her, either drawing or standing up staring at the computer screen while she’s coloring.

How does it go? She’ll be coloring, and I’ll be standing right behind her and go, “change that color a little bit” and stuff like that. Then she’ll yell at me, and tell me to piss off. Then I’ll go, and when I come back, and she’s made all of these wild choices, I say, “okay, that looks great.” That’s how it works.

We work very closely, and she makes these kinds of decisions usually because she’s an illustrator who has an uncanny sense of color that I love. She’s not really…she doesn’t think in terms of colors in the way a comic book colorist does these days. She has more of an illustrator mindset. She uses bold choices that I love. Usually expressionistic, that matches more the atmosphere of the action rather than the actual…then from a more realistic point of view. That’s why you end up with those solid colors on the same page.

You have a purple sky a couple pages later that really stands out, and I think it’s phenomenal. I love the way it accentuates your art, and how it looks different than anything else around. I’m not surprised you work that closely (laughs).

Martin: It’s going to be a miracle if this project doesn’t end in my divorce (laughs).

Going back to the digital distribution model, I’m curious as to how successful you all think it has been so far?

Martin: I think it’s been very successful. We had no idea how this would work. We had no idea how this would end up working. When I saw the reaction to our first issue coming out…that was amazing. We got 10’s of thousands of people coming. When we were doing it, usually our conversations were “we don’t know if anyone is going to come. We’re going to get like 100 people coming.” We just didn’t know.

We could have had millions of people. That would have been a real success, and Google would have bought us by now (laughs), but we’re happy with the success we’ve had so far.

Is it viable? We’ll see. It’s still…it’s only been three months. Three issues. We’ll see what happens. We’d like it to be something that more people would read, because I believe that this is a good model. A good business model, a very fair model, for everyone involved. Both for the authors and for the readers. I would like to see it go further than our project.

But that is not for me to decide. That is more for other authors, and to see if they agree with us and our model or not. That’s the beauty of the model. It’s really in our hands to decide which way we will go.

I’m curious. In print, a book will come out and have huge sales on the first issue, but drop precipitously before finding the level it’s really at. Do you feel because of the nature of the project, you find things respond differently? Like, your audience is growing due to the nature of it?

Martin: We’re still trying to figure that out. It’s still too early. What we’ve realized by now is the most important thing is exposure. It’s not so much a matter of when the issue comes out, so much as how many websites talk about it and how much impact that has on the actual Internet. That’s how people find out about us and on the website, and about the comic book. If we don’t get the exposure, we won’t.

A large fanbase will come out as soon as they find out a new issue is out, but if websites don’t talk about it or reviews don’t come out, we realize the reaction dies down. But then again, the cool thing about this is the moment any big website talks about it, it explodes. It’s not so much a matter of the launch date being important, but any other day during the time its there, something might happen that might make the visits and the downloads go up, just because we’ve been mentioned wherever.

It works differently than the print method or system.