In a climate where the unpredictable is preferred, and “house style” is encouraged instead of discouraged, it can be easy to ask: how have Art Baltazar and Franco built a career doing cartoony, all ages comics?
The answer is really simple: by doing it better than anyone else has, potentially ever. These guys have become the shorthand for quality comics that are not only kid friendly but truly work for all ages. They do it by being funnier, smarter and harder working than anyone else. Currently, they are running their own comic book store, Aw Yeah Comics, in downtown Skokie, IL, have completed an incredibly successful Kickstarter for an “Aw Yeah Comics,” well, comic, which raised more than three times the intended goal, and have already planned out to issue #20 of the series with no plans of slowing down (they are also being released via Thrillbent, if you want to go the digital route). That doesn’t account for their current gig writing “The Green Team: Teen Trillionaires” for DC, nor does it count the reason we are here to talk about today, “Itty Bitty Hellboy” (which we reviewed yesterday).
Art and Franco chatted with me last weekend and talked about all this and more. Check it out!
How did you guys start working together, and how did your style develop?
Franco: Do you want the real answer or the made up ones we give people?
[Laughs]Both?
Art Baltazar: We met at a convention, just like all other artists meet. I was setting up my table, and there was no one at the show, so we started hanging out. It was real easy. And it turns out I lived just a few minutes away from the guy, so I’d go to his house and watch wrestling and eat pizza and look at girls…I mean…and we’d just start drawing and creating stuff and it just happened.
And I liked him.
That’s important.
AB: Yeah, we became friends.
F: I was yelling at someone who was telling me they didn’t like my book, and was telling me so for about a half hour, and then Art comes in and says “Do you sell a lot of books that way?” And I was like, “Uh, another one of those guys.” And then, like two minutes later, he says “Hey, wanna swap books and read each other’s stuff?” And I was like “I don’t wanna read this guy’s stuff, he was kind of a jerk to me.” But it was really good, it was fun, and it was kind of like what I was doing, and he thought the same thing, so we got together and started making comics.
I never get those guys at conventions who yell at creators. You wouldn’t walk up to an actor and just boo him to his face.
AB: People think the comic book character is real, and the creator is not. They forget that the creator is a real person who has to go home and take out the garbage and make dinner for the kids.
Let’s talk about your DC work quickly – how did you guys get to do your style of book at DC? Because DC, historically, is not a company that lets too many people do such an idiosyncratic take on their characters.
AB: We make books the way we make books. Like with “Patrick the Wolf Boy,” we were just trying to make comics the way we make comics. Even when I was in college, professors wanted me to change my major, and when I was out of college at job interviews, people would tell me to go back to school and learn how to draw. Especially at portfolio reviews at big comic companies, they were telling me I was too cartoony, too stylized, and that there was no room for me in the industry.
But we have a friend, Jan Jones, she was a fan of ours and bought our books because she likes the cartoony stuff, she became an editor at DC, and an editor that could hire people. She said I was the first one she called when she got approval for a new line of kids books. And they didn’t want us to draw any other way or make stories any other way than we know how. Our books have always been the way they are, but DC gave us a big platform. If you look at our books before we were at DC, they haven’t changed at all, and DC didn’t want us to change our format. They said “Make ‘Patrick the Wolf Boy’ books, but with our characters.”
Continued belowThere isn’t really any fighting in our books, and if there is any fighting, no one really gets hurt. Even in the Superman book [“Superman Family Adventures” – Ed], Superman will just throw something real far. I don’t know if Superman even punched anyone in our book – I know he was punched a few times, but I don’t know if he punched anyone. We don’t really avoid punching and fighting and violence, but we just do stuff that we know is funny and awesome.
The thing that I always really enjoyed about “Tiny Titans” was the absolute disregard for continuity, and I mean that in the nicest possible way. [Laughs] As a kid, what got me into comics was the idea that literally anything could happen. There were no parameters; there was a multiverse, and anything was possible. It was cool to be able to turn the page and anyone could be waiting for you, and anything could happen. It brought me back to a real child-like place of loving comics, and I really appreciated that.
AB: We were on a few DC panels, right around the time Martian Manhunter got killed, and a bunch of other characters were dying, before they all came back in ‘Blackest Night.’ And at the panel, fans kept asking “Are you going to bring so and so back?” and everyone would be all hush hush, but we’d always say “Yeah, we’ll bring them back in ‘Tiny Titans,’” because no one ever dies there, and if they did, they’d come right back.
How do you guys split up your writing duties? Is one of you more the plotter and the other the scripter, or is your work more intertwined than that?
AB: We talk everyday on Skype – we used to do phonecalls, but Skype is free – so we talk everyday. A lot of time Franco will write down everything we talk about in an outline form, and he’ll send it to me, and I’ll write some jokes, and then I’ll send it back to him. So yeah, it is a true collaboration from the beginning. I’ll make little thumbnail drawings based on what we talk about, and if its funny, it goes in the book.
One of those is included in the backmatter of “Itty Bitty Hellboy,” and I really enjoyed looking at your process in that way. But before we get into that, let’s talk about “The Green Team: Teen Trillionaires,” which is your first in-continuity, New 52 book. This is a book that is a little outside of your wheelhouse and is building, issue after issue, into something quite different than the ‘1%’ designation given to the book when it was announced along with Gail Simone’s “The Movement,” which was similarly cast as an Occupy Wall Street analogue. What makes the book unique in today’s climate, however, is how much has changed and developed since the first issue. Was it risky, to you guys, to do a first issue that did not lay out the plot and the style of the book as overtly as many books do, especially with unknown characters?
AB: Well, we knew that it would be a hard sell, since it isn’t a Superman or a Batman book, but that if people bought the first issue, we got ‘em.
F: There were some things that we discussed prior to starting it that we were asked to put in the book. It slowed the momentum a little bit, but we knew what we wanted to do story-wise, but it is really hitting its stride in issues 3 and 4 (and beyond). We know what we’re doing storywise – we’ve been doing it our entire lives, and we’ve been doing it professionally for a long time now – but it may come as a surprise to people that we can do this sort of story.
AB: Yeah, we’ve been reading comics all our lives, so we grew up on “Teen Titans,” “New Mutants,” “X-Men,” Superman stories, Batman stories, all that. They always say that people write what they know, so that is why we write awesome stories.
Continued below[Laughs]
So, let’s talk “Itty Bitty Hellboy.” Did you guys have much history with the character as fans, or was it something that came up sort of out of the blue?
F: We’ve been reading his stuff for years. Art and I have been saying this for a long time, but if you want a role model for how to do creator-owned stuff, Mike Mignola definitely fits the bill. We’ve been fans of his for years. You can ask Art – and I kind of feel like we’re patting ourselves on the back here, and I don’t like that – but when we won our Eisner, they took a group shot of all the winners, and I got to stand next to Mike Mignola. You can ask Art, I was flipping out, “Mike Mignola is standing right next to me!” and Art turned to me and said, “Yeah, he won an Eisner just like you did.”
That’s awesome.
F: It put things in perspective, and I told him “Dude, I’m a huge fan.” So, that’s a testament to the fact that we are fans of his and have been fans of his, and to see a guy doing the creator owned thing, and doing it right…
And doing it 20 years before anybody was doing it on the scale he was doing it.
F: Absolutely.
So how did this project actually get started?
AB: Elisabeth Allie…and that’s Elisabeth with an S, because the S means hope.
AB: She’s been a fan of ours since “Tiny Titans,” and she interviewed us a bunch of times for her website. They were watching our Kickstarter [for “Aw Yeah Comics”], so she and Mignola’s wife and daughter, once they saw we were available to do comics, they asked us to do it. It was the power of the ladies that contacted us. And it’s funny, once we said yes, then they told all the guys [Allie and Mignola]. We saw Mignola in San Diego, and he told us that he didn’t even approve it or, rather, that he approved it based on what his wife and daughter…
F: Or, according to his wife and daughter he “wouldn’t be allowed to live in his house anymore.”
[Laughs]AB: He approved it without even looking at it, because his wife and daughter were so into it. After he approved it, he went back and looked at it, and said he was happy he did.
When you’re working on a character that comes from a darker place, like Hellboy does, do you approach the book differently, or is it the same as working with Superman or the Teen Titans?
AB: It adds more characters to our universe. The challenge is how to design him, and then what do they do? They’re all different. We look at the characters in the comics, and in our book, Roger is a lovable guy who takes his pants off all the time, and Abe is just kinda hanging out in the water, but he’s talking to everyone and is a fan of Lobster Johnson. Hellboy is real curious, but likes to wreck stuff, so he’s a troublemaker a little bit. I don’t know, we just do it. It’s not very hard.
F: With this, unlike “Tiny Titans” or Superman, Hellboy comes from a much darker place, literally – or much brighter, I don’t know, I haven’t really been there. We get to play with that, too. Later on down the series, we send Hellboy to Hell – he literally winds up in Hell. And for a kid’s book, I think that’s funny.
[Laughs]Franco: We actually send Hellboy to hell. It was originally supposed to be a three-issue series, so when we got the green light to expand it to five, Art’s like, “What are we going to do?” Well, we sent him to Hell, let’s send him to Heaven! We sent ideas back and forth, and we’re laughing – it’s been our motto, if it makes us laugh, it goes in the book.
Continued belowI can’t wait to read the Heaven issue now.
AB: Yeah, it’s a good one. I should be done with it in the next two days. When we work on these stories, I always go through a period when I wonder if it’s any good or not. I ask Franco, “is it funny?” and he says “yeah, it’s all good.” So, when I was drawing #4, I went back and read the first three, and I thought, “Oh wow, these are funny.” And then Dark Horse put some pages up as a sneak peak, and my wife read them, and she’s never read Hellboy at all. She only knows who he is because I talk about him, and so she liked them too. She goes, “That’s really cool.” She liked it a lot, and she didn’t know what it was until she read it.
And I know kids like monsters, and there are a lot of monsters in our books.
I was going to say something about that. Although the name “Hellboy” might be objectionable to some parents, Hellboy is a really fun, funny and warm (pardon the pun) character, and he totally works in this context. I never really thought of the B.P.R.D. as a kids club, but you guys make it work in, like, 4 panels! You guys really captured the essence of the characters in the design and what you have them doing. Having Abe in a baby pool alone is genius.
F: Well, that’s what he does.
AB: He gets wet.
[Laughs]How expansive do you get when plotting out these series? Like, did you get approved and then say “great, let’s send him to Hell!” or does that come after being in the character’s skin for a little while?
AB: Well, we usually pick a theme for each issue, because if we pick a theme it helps us tell some stories with that idea. So, going to Hell was kind of funny, but we didn’t know how we get him to Hell. But, I think the Baba Yaga gets angry and sends him there.
F: The idea came up pretty early, because they are out looking for something, so where are you going to send them to look for something? Also, the question came up, “Can we send him to Hell?” And I said, “Yeah, his name is Hellboy, of course we can send him to Hell.”
Do you guys feel a great sense of freedom writing a book like this because the sky is the limit, in terms of what you can do?
AB: Yes.
F: I think so, yes, because nobody else knows how to do it. Again, sounding egotistical, they know how to do it, but they don’t take the chances that we do. They look at it more with rose-colored glasses, because Art’s drawings are so cute. They see the book and say, “Oh wow, he’s so cute, look he’s in Hell surrounded by fire!” The message is there, and the scenario is there, but Art’s artwork kind of masks that, and we’re able to get away with that more than someone else might be able to.
AB: I think part of it has to do with the publisher’s confidence in us, too. Because, wherever we work, we’re able to do whatever we want to do, when it comes to all-ages books. We kind of create our own universe. There’s a new guy in issue 3 or 4, that I just threw in there, and when they go underwater, I’m going to throw another guy in there, and I don’t think they’re going to tell me that I can’t use those guys.
I learned early on that when you ask if you can use a character, they always say no, so I put a lot of stuff in the DC stuff and no one ever complained.
Ambush Bug!
AB: Yeah, he was in there. And it’s funny because I was working on Super Pets, and they’d ask “did this character ever appear in this costume before, because we can’t find any reference?” And I’d email them a page of “Tiny Titans” and they’d say “Oh, ok, it is part of your universe.” I think it is the confidence of the publisher knowing that we’re going to do good stuff, and so they let us do our own thing. As I always say, the hockey gloves are still on the ice – we took them off awhile ago. We just go for it, and that’s how we work best. Let us do our thing, and we’ll hand you something cool at the end.
