SPEAKER_01 0:02

Hello, everybody. This is John Katz. I'm a criminal defense and DUI defense lawyer here in Fairfax, Northern Virginia. This is Beat the Prosecution, and I am having a lot of trouble controlling my excitement today over our guest. And he accepted my invitation, which is cool too. His name is Bob McLeod. He's one of our many guests who is outside of the legal field. Bob McLeod is famous in the comics industry. He created, he was the co-creator of the New Mutants uh series. He has inked and penned and done creation on apparently all or mostly all of the uh super major superheroes, at least with Marvel. He had an office just a few doors down from Stan Lee. And what brought my attention to him? Well, my wife went ahead and bought this great book by him from around 2006 called Superhero ABC. And when my son and I went to the Baltimore Comic-Con several years ago, who was there but Bob McLeod? And my response was, whoa, you've given us so much fun here. I mean, any of you with uh children, or you want to get a child a gift, you want to show them how to uh uh go ahead and learn their uh alphabet? I mean, is this outrageously great or not? I mean, that's uh the volcano vomits on villains. He's valiant, he's vile. You like all that alliteration? It's very gross. Now, why, by the way, is a criminal defense lore uh into superheroes when actually uh, you know, I'm I'm representing the alleged villains, the alleged. Uh well, of course, what's interesting is cops testify in court. I never hear of superheroes testifying in court. Here's another one, Captain Cloud. This is the uh image that uh Bob uses on his emails, for instance. He has a cape, he's cool, he's so cool. He's a cowardly criminal. Captain Cloud calmly catches crooks. In the trial or his college, we learn uh to tell to persuade through storytelling. And around the second to last day, at least when I was there, we went and painted. Now, we didn't really have uh many excellent uh artists there. Bob's uh Bob's excellent. We're gonna get to Bob in a in a few moments. But this idea of uh persuading through storytelling and imagery is so important. I'm gonna ask Bob. I think he's more involved with the visual part of the comics, or when he was doing comics, he was more involved with the visual part versus the writing, but he'll tell us. But I want to encourage all of you to find your artistry and to do it. So I'm not very good with uh drawing, but what I did find I can do is I do origami peace cranes with one and a half by one and a half inch paper. I was I'm self-taught on that. Another one is before I went ahead and plopped down nearly $800 for a Kaz Tanahashi uh uh Enso uh calligraphy, he's amazing. I researched myself to find vegan material. Bob, you know uh perhaps that I guess the India ink doesn't tend to be vegan, includes animal products, I think. So I found out about walnut ink and I found out about the papers that aren't vegan, and this is what I did. See, that's my origami. Beast, not organize calligraphy says, be still. I'm talking too much. I want to focus on our guest, Bob McLeod. Please tell me if I pronounced your name correctly, and please introduce yourself, Bob.

SPEAKER_00 3:42

Yeah, that's you did a very good job with my name. Um I'm a longtime comic book artist, uh working for Marvel and DC Comics mainly. I've worked for other publishers as well as a little bit, uh, but that's been my whole adult life basically uh for almost 50 years and just retired from actively working in the comics uh about two years ago, a couple years ago.

SPEAKER_01 4:08

Okay, and everybody, where can you find Bob's work? He's got a Patreon page, which I think actually if you go to bobmacLeud.com, you'll find it. He'll he spells his name M C L E O D. Uh, but you can also find him at www.patreon, p-a-t-r-e-o-n dot com slash C slash Bob McCloud. And he's got a longer URL for selling uh plenty of his other material. Uh, and I'm gonna put this on the liner notes here, which is mbarist.com slash collections slash Bob hyphen mcloud, hyphen Marvel, hyphen and hyphen DC, hyphen comics, hyphen artists, hyphen M like Mary B Artist. Uh Bob, are you still doing commission work?

SPEAKER_00 4:54

Yes, I do occasional commissions. I I cut back a lot on commissions because I wanted to do some painting for myself. So I've just been doing some landscape paintings uh just for the fun of painting, because I never got to do painting while I was you know working on my career. I was busy doing little black and white drawings of superheroes and things. Um, but I still do occasional commissions.

SPEAKER_01 5:17

So if anyone wants you to uh to check if you'll do a commission for them, do they contact you by email?

SPEAKER_00 5:24

Yes, just uh you can give them my email. Uh it's just my last name, but first, it's mcloud.bob at gmail.com.

SPEAKER_01 5:34

Bob, what motivates you to go to the cons and what motivates you to said publicly, I think as recently as a year or two ago in an interview, that you will answer people's fans' emails and you will answer their messages to on Facebook. I don't know if I'd be that open to everybody.

SPEAKER_00 5:53

No, I think it's great having fans that want uh advice from me or want to just uh get my autograph or say hello to me. It's wonderful meeting the fans at Comic Cons. Um, so many of them had told me how much my work meant to them as young people growing up. And that was just astounding to hear because you know, when I was doing all that work, I was just alone in my studio with very little feedback even from the editors. Uh, so mostly just trying to please myself and uh do what I thought was a good job. Um, so it's it's great uh talking to the fans.

SPEAKER_01 6:32

Uh I'm I'm gonna tell you, Bob, I've had some great experiences going to the Comic Cons and all the other culture cons uh with my son. Uh we met Pro Z D, who's a um I guess a video game voice at the Autocon, O-T-A-K-O-N, in uh in DC. And we met uh the original Batman, Adam West, uh, at the awesome con in DC many years ago. And he was right next to Burt Ward, who played Robin. And I asked someone, why is the line longer to meet Bert Ward than Adam West? And someone said uh probably because uh Bert Ward's uh uh signature is maybe more rare. Maybe he shows up uh less often. Uh we met Jules Pfeiffer many years ago at the Baltimore Comic-Con, who did the uh artwork for um uh for the Phantom Toll booth, and uh Stan Lee, uh amazing. He was I think he was talking at Comic Cons right into his 80s, probably possibly even 90s. We saw him at the awesome con uh uh several years ago.

SPEAKER_00 7:39

Stan was going to cons right up practically until the day he died. Uh he loved talking to the fans.

SPEAKER_01 7:46

Now, I told you that we have at least two things in common, one of which is a love of mad magazine. The other one is we both used to uh play the trumpet. And um I didn't get a chance to read many of the crazy magazines, but is that true that that was the first publication you worked for, Crazy Magazine? And if so, uh whether or not it it it was the first one, was it a Marvel? Um uh was it a Marvel publication at the time?

SPEAKER_00 8:17

Yes, that was Marvel's version of Mad magazine. Uh they were doing a humor magazine. Uh there were a lot of humor magazines at the time in the early 70s when I started my career. Um, so that was their version of Mad. And you know, I started out wanting to be basically more Drucker and do movie satires for Mad magazine. Um, and a friend of mine was a big uh fan of Marvel Comics, so he said, Oh, you got to work for Marvel. So I thought I'd get my feet wet, you know, starting with Marvel Comics, and uh got rejected, of course, when I went up there at first. But uh eventually I got my foot in the door, and uh that was the first job they gave me was a satire of the movie Westworld with Jul Brenner. So so that was my very first published work.

SPEAKER_01 9:09

How long were you at uh Crazy Magazine?

SPEAKER_00 9:13

Well, I did occasional work for them uh for the up into the mid-80s, so a little over a decade. Um, but I wasn't steadily working for them. That after that first job, um I actually uh tried doing some inking. One of the artists that I met up at Marvel, Mike Esposito, uh, told me that I could learn to do inking faster than I could learn to do penciling. Um, and I had never thought about just being an inker, but I thought I'd give that a try. And my inking career kind of took off. So I did a lot of inking, and then about five years later, finally got a penciling job, and then my penciling kind of also took off.

SPEAKER_01 9:57

So I want to talk about both of those and the people who know comics. Okay, fine. I'm a neophyte, I'll I'll just ask the question. Uh, to a point I know what penciling and inking is, uh, but let let me uh wrap it into what is penciling and what is inking, and why uh are not more people doing both the pencil? This why why is it not common often for the same person doing the penciling and inking? And to what extent uh uh has has computer uh design changed all of that?

SPEAKER_00 10:32

All right, so the the editor hires a writer, and then they hire an artist who they call a pencler because he works in pencil, or at least for the before computers took over, everybody was working in pencil. Um and uh you would draw when I started penclers were doing like rough, sketchy uh pencils that they wanted an inch to kind of add some style to and have a nice finish uh over their rough pencils. Uh, they were come the pencil is primarily concerned with the storytelling, with you know, camera angles, uh, how many panels to use, uh, what shape are the panels going to be, everything to do with composition and design and visual storytelling. Whereas the inker and in the early days with of my career, uh kind of a we were also called finishers, where we would take the rough drawings and decide what kind of rendering to use. Uh, we would go right over the pencil lines in ink with a pen or a brush, and um then they would erase or we would erase the pencils. So it was actually the ink line that got printed, and the pencils were erased by us. Um, but we would decide maybe where to put a black, a shadow, what kind of lighting to use, where to you know, direct the lighting, um clean up the drawing. Maybe if the penciler didn't quite spend enough time drawing that hand, you know, we had to make it look exactly like a hand. So uh the incher was mainly to clean up and polish it and um make it look as good as it could look. Eventually that kind of it's a long story. Eventually that kind of changed to where the pencils got tighter and tighter into the uh 1990s, they started getting really tight. What the editors would call bulletproof, where anybody could ink them, they could just almost trace them. And so inking became more like tracing, where there was a lot, still a lot of skill involved, but you were not deciding on the lighting that had already been decided in the pencils. You weren't deciding on what kind of rendering that was in the pencils already. So you're still cleaning up and making it really uh as as good as it could look, but the whole job kind of changed creatively in that sense. And then uh when computers came in, everybody started drawing with a stylus. Uh, not everybody, but a lot of artists just went right to the computer and and were working with a stylus. And with a full range of colors, it changed the way the finish looks. So in black and white with flat colors, we were trying to do inking styles that would add uh make the work look more three-dimensional with some gray uh cross-hatching or feathering or whatever to make to soften the transition from black to white. So once you had a full range of colors on the computer, that wasn't needed anymore. And a lot of the inking devolved kind of into just an outline, and all of the rendering was left up to the color in the current comics. So there are still some inkers inking in the old style with a lot of rendering, but the more I see more and more where it's it's letting the colorist uh take care of all of that.

SPEAKER_01 14:07

Uh, was there a time when lettering was done by hand? And is it being done by hand anymore? And uh when did that change to not being done by hand if it was uh if there was that transition?

SPEAKER_00 14:19

Yeah, actually, when I started, my first uh job at Marvel was working in the production department doing lettering corrections. Um, and I worked my way up to art corrections and then to doing artwork. Uh, but uh I was taught how to hand letter by the letterers at Marvel who actually designed all of the titles for the comics that would have been on the cover of the comic. Spider-Man has to be in a certain logo style, and they would design those things. And they taught me how to hand letter, and I hand lettered a few comics. It was a it's a great skill in itself that I admire. Uh hand letterers. There are still uh some, but even those few, I think today, once computers came in, everything switched over to using computer fonts uh rather than hand lettering because it was faster, um uh a little cleaner, and uh you don't really see hand lettering maybe in some of the smaller publications, uh more than Marvel and DC say. The big publishers now it's all fonts, computer coloring, computer lettering. Most of the well, there's even computer inks now. A lot of inkers are are using a stylus and inking digitally. Um but most of the art I think is still pencil and ink on paper, and then it's scanned and and colored.

SPEAKER_01 15:49

I'm so fascinated by what you do. I'm gonna I'm gonna get to New Mutants soon, but can you tell me what's what do we see in your studio? What's what's up on the walls behind you, and and what are all those books that you got there?

SPEAKER_00 16:03

Well, over here is a uh uh Rip Kirby strip by John Prentice. He's one of my influences, one of my favorite artists. I met him near the end of his career. Below that is a little cartoon by Stan Drake, who did the strip, The Heart of Julia Jones. And then right behind me is a Julia Jones strip that he gave me and signed to me, autographed to me when I met him. Uh what else can you see on there? Over over here is Dateline Danger by Al McWilliams, uh, another newspaper strip. I liked the newspaper strip artist. And when I was learning to draw comics, um, I looked at a lot of comic artists, but then I wanted to know well, where did they learn to do what they were doing? And so I uh found out that a lot of them learned from the newspaper artists. So I went back and studied the newspaper artists, and then well, where do they learn? And they learned from the book illustrators. So I went back and studied the book illustrators because I wanted to see the progression and learn as much as I could. Um, I had never had an art teacher, I never uh really learned my craft in in school. So I'm basically self-taught, and uh there's so much to learn, you know. So I was I was an eager student.

SPEAKER_01 17:24

And perhaps you're not having more formal training that actually helped you develop your style more and helped make you all the more in demand.

SPEAKER_00 17:33

You know, when I when you uh said you might ask me something along those lines, uh got me to thinking, um I think it made me more determined, since I couldn't find anybody to teach me, it made me really determined to learn this on my own and and get good at it. Um and I especially um when I was initially rejected. First time I showed my work to DC Comics, the art director told me that I needed to go back to school and learn how to draw. And I had already been to college for a year and to an art school for a year and quit both because they were discouraging me from doing cartooning and weren't I wasn't learning anything about uh cartooning. So I I just was determined to prove that I could be a successful professional cartoonist. Um uh it it might have might have made me more original, it might have uh determined my the direction of my career uh the way it happened. If I'd had a tutor, an art teacher teaching me exactly how to do things, I'm I'm sure I'd have a different style and it maybe a different attitude. I I don't know. It's you know I can't know because it didn't happen.

SPEAKER_01 18:54

What are your preferred materials for doing artwork off uh computer and what are your favorite uh programs for that? Can you include uh the types of pencils, markers, brushes, paper, and um and any kind of um uh computer programs?

SPEAKER_00 19:13

Sure. I like um let's see, these old Ticonderoga number two pencils, or actually it's a two and a half that I prefer.

SPEAKER_01 19:25

As simple as that.

SPEAKER_00 19:26

Plain old I like an eraser on the top. You know, these kind of pencils that we're supposed to use as artists, they don't have an eraser up here. And I do use a big white eraser.

SPEAKER_01 19:40

Um is that a special eraser? Is that the kind you can just get at a CVS?

SPEAKER_00 19:45

You cannot get these at CBS. This is let me see if I can find a new one for you. Well, I did yeah, here they are. That's my favorite. It's a white eraser. I don't like those pink pearl erasers because they leave a pink trace on your white paper. Um, so I like magic rubs, and I've also got this guy a big old uh electric eraser. Great, and it's metal. They've got plastic ones now that aren't any good, they're crap, but the metal one is good, and it's got a nib in it that's uh for erasing pencil. But if I just keep at it long enough, I can correct a mistake in ink, it'll erase the ink. Um, so it's a lot cleaner than using white paint to correct your mistakes, or the old guys when I started would actually scratch with an X-acto blade or a razor blade, they would scratch the ink away to correct a mistake. Uh, but I like the electric eraser a lot. And then I use brushes Windsor Newton or Raphael. This is a Raphael 8303, is a good uh inking brush and India Ink, like you were saying. Uh Windsor Newton makes good brushes. Um I use a pinpoint. Uh when I started out, the pinpoint I used is no longer available. So everybody in the business kind of switched over to the Hunt pinpoints. Uh Hunt 102 was a became the standard. Um and now these days I use what's called a brush pen. It's a marker that has a flexible point on it, like a brush. So I can get very thin lines or thicker lines. Um, and it's uh pigmented ink, so it's waterproof and light fast.

SPEAKER_01 21:51

And who's the who's the maker or manufacturer of that?

SPEAKER_00 21:54

Oh, you got me. It's Japanese does not matter. Oh, it's Mitsubishi. You can get them on jetpins.com is where everybody buys their brush pins. And these are any number of different ones you can get. They also have uh just uh different ones at Dick Blick, um Faber Castell Pip Pins. There's you know you know, just scads of them to choose from, but I like the uni pin. Um I I quit using real brushes because uh believe it or not, um they're not as good as they used to be. All of the art supplies have kind of gotten worse. They use uh, even though it's still a red sable brush, I've heard that they use less satisfactory parts of the sable to get the hairs from. So it's not as good as it used to be. The ink, uh, I used to use pelican ink my whole career. Pelican ink isn't what it used to be, uh, sad to say. Um, I'm in a search right now for some India ink that I really like. I haven't found one. Um so paper. When I started, Marvel had this amazing paper that we would work on. Um their paper is no good anymore. Everybody's working digitally. Um, Strathmore is kind of the standard, uh, but there's other companies uh that sell Bristol paper. Tuply is what we work on. Um we draw them one-third bigger than comics are printed. They used to draw them twice up, but now we switch down to one-third up for standard size, but you can digitally you can draw them any size you like.

SPEAKER_01 23:41

And what do you use for um computer software for doing design?

SPEAKER_00 23:46

So I personally only work with Photoshop um just out of laziness. I'm too lazy to try other programs if I can get Photoshop to do what I want it to do. Um, so I don't do much digital inking. What I usually do is scan my work into a computer and kind of clean up whatever I don't like uh digitally and color digitally. Um I still do watercolor uh originals, uh, but most of what I do definitely for publication is is colored uh in Photoshop.

SPEAKER_01 24:21

I do want to talk to you about copyright. I found on Internet Archives something that I assume would make you uncomfortable. I found what seemed to be several of the um uh uh graphic novels of um New Mutants online and some of your other comics there. I mean, for my preparation, I went ahead and bought the first edition of New Mutants from uh from Kindles, so I did it uh correctly. And then when I go to the cons, I see so much superhero art. I have to assume that this some of this would be maybe classified as fan art that is in that gray area, that maybe does not um necessarily fit uh the copyright laws in fair use, but but that maybe there's a wink and a nod to it by the um uh uh by the owners of the copyright. And then I take it that uh since you said I could talk about this great Yoda being assigned for me at uh the Baltimore Comic-Con about three to four years ago, that you had authority to do that, I guess, including that you've worked on uh one or more Star Wars comics. So that's a lot of questions there. So we can just give you some of your thoughts about both those sides of copyright, about you know, people uh putting your work up there without you getting any any payment for it. And and uh and then that gray area with the fan art, perhaps is called called that, and and how you get the authorization uh to go ahead and just just do your variations on Yoda, for instance.

SPEAKER_00 25:51

Yeah, so I guess starting back in the 1960s when conventions, comic conventions kind of originated, uh the artist uh started doing sketches of the the comic characters, and the publishers I don't think said anything because it was so small potatoes, it wasn't worth them uh complaining about it or putting a halt to it because the artists were often doing them for free, and if they charged, they were charging a very small amount of money, like ten dollars or whatever, for a sketch. I think the companies, from what I've heard, I didn't start till the 70s, but from what I've heard, the companies just didn't think it was worth bothering about. Then it really took off, and um today uh we do sketches of their characters all the time, and I think uh it we kind of got grandfathered in. They kind of uh, like you said, with a wink and an odd, they to me, I think it's publicity for their characters, it's good for their characters, for it's good for the publisher to have the fans excited about their characters. Um, and the publishers aren't publishing sketches of their characters, they're publishing stories, and we're not allowed to I I can't just draw up an X-Men comic book and and try to sell that. That that they have the copyright and the the rights to that. Um, but I can do a sketch of one of the X-Men or several of the X-Men because that's not directly uh taking money out of their pocket, it's not actually competing with what they're selling. Uh so it's kind of uh sympathy that they're letting us do these sketches that are technically uh breaking their copyright. Uh, but the only publishers I've heard that have an issue with it are Disney. And of course, now Disney owns Marvel Comics. Um, but I have not heard of them giving any grief to people doing any any kind of superhero sketches. I would be I would be careful drawing Disney characters, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. Um, I'm not gonna be doing sketches of those because I have heard that they, you know, do not like that. With Star Wars, um kind of the same thing. Marvel got the rights to publish Star Wars originally, then Dark Horse Comics started publishing them later, but um, I never heard of any feedback from Lucas saying we couldn't do sketches of Star Wars characters, however, uh there are I've I've heard that if you are doing large-scale, nice, maybe full color or paintings or whatever of Star Wars characters, uh George Lucas wants to have first dibs on buying the original. That's great. He collects comic art and he just opened his new museum in California. Um, so he wanted to be able to buy the art if he if he could. Um, I don't know how he could ever enforce that request, but um, you know, there you go.

SPEAKER_01 29:19

How much have you been involved with uh doing work on uh Star Wars material and especially with my favorite Yoda?

SPEAKER_00 29:28

I did about a half a dozen issues of Spider-Man in the 80s, I mean of uh Star Wars in the 80s. After I left the New Mutants, um I was looking for other projects, and the same editor who had hired me to do the New Mutants uh was the editor of Star Wars, and they needed someone on Star Wars around that time, so uh I started excuse me, I started penciling. You asked before why we don't pencil ink uh at all ourselves. It's deadlines. There was a monthly deadline for most of my career, and there's 22 pages in the average comic book, and there's really 20 work days in the average month. So somewhere in there you had to work an evening or a weekend to get those 22 pages done because we typically do a page a day, and that's a page of penciling a day and a page of inking a day on average. There are days that I've inked four pages and that I've inked a couple pages, and then that I've penciled a couple pages, but uh on average, typically you would want to just draw a page a day and then ink a page a day. So I wasn't fast enough, and most artists weren't fast enough to pencil and ink um a page a day, is why we split it up into teams. And um the artists that I've seen that did do a page a day would typically do fewer backgrounds, they'd do a lot of headshots, uh they'd take a lot of shortcuts in their storytelling, which I didn't really want to do and I didn't really like. Um so most of the time you'd have a team working on a comic instead of one artist.

SPEAKER_01 31:17

Now back to Star Wars. So was there anything uniquely different about doing Star Wars and my favorite Yoda if you're doing that versus working on the uh superheroes? And was Star Wars part of Marvel when you did that work?

SPEAKER_00 31:31

Yes, uh Marvel had the rights to it when I worked on it. And Lucas actually uh went over every script that we worked on to make sure that we didn't step on his toes and do something in the comics ahead of when he wanted to do it in the movies, say. So uh there was a lot of back and forth between the writers and Lucas uh about what was uh what they could do, what they couldn't do. Um and as far as my work on it, when I was drawing it, um I could I they wanted me to try to make the characters look like they did in the movies. Uh so I did my best with the likenesses, which I enjoy doing likenesses, so that was not an issue with me. The robots were really difficult to draw, um, but uh you know, you you get a lot of reference. And um, when I started drawing it, I needed all this costume reference, and this was pre-digital, so I couldn't just Google everything. So I would have to go get books out of the library or whatever. And the local comic shop, the owner there collected all these little figures of this of the Star Wars characters. He had this big collection of about 50 of them. Um, and I asked if I could borrow it for reference for when I was drawing their costumes, and so he let me borrow it. And then my two-year-old nephew came in and saw all these guys in my studio, and I said, Oh, you can't play with those, they don't belong to me. And I, you, you know, you might break them. And I you I'm sorry, but you I'm just using those. And so then he went and asked my wife, Does Uncle Bob just sit in there and play with those Star Wars guys all day?

SPEAKER_01 33:22

Actually, so my understanding from you is you actually started doing uh um images of Star Wars characters when you were crazy?

SPEAKER_00 33:30

Yeah, when I I did a uh satire of the Empire Strikes Back, and that was published before the Empire Strikes Uh uh Strikes Back movie came out. Um, and we didn't really know how Yoda was going to look. But uh someone at one of the artists uh had done some production designs of what they might have Yoda looking like, and that's all I had to go by. So my Yoda in that satire looks nothing like the Yoda in the movies. I had no idea that they were going to use a puppet uh in that way.

SPEAKER_01 34:06

So when you were doing the Star Wars uh work with Marvel, was that on comics that were called Star Wars? Because I I know that there are by now uh uh comics that are actually called Yoda. And did you work on any of the Yoda-specific um comics?

SPEAKER_00 34:21

No, at the time there was only Star Wars, uh, all that other stuff came later, um, with with more of the movies and longer years publishing Star Wars. That was kind of the early days. I think Marvel was the first publisher that got the rights to the do the comics. And I started uh with issue number 83. So they had already done 80 82 issues by the time I got on board. Um, my first issue was a story about Lando Calrician that I penciled and inked. I was able to do both that one issue. Uh, and then when I did later after that, I started just doing penciling uh for the inker, the regular inker on the series, Tom Palmer, who was my favorite inker.

SPEAKER_01 35:07

So, did you do any images of Yoda for Marvel?

SPEAKER_00 35:12

Um I don't think he was in any of the issues that I penciled in the comic book, just that satire that I did. Uh I did the Luke and Leia and Han Solo and Lando and the Brobots um and some of the bad guys. Uh, but I I I don't think in the issues that I drew, I don't remember drawing Yoda.

SPEAKER_01 35:36

Now, as I said early on, you know, of course, the name of the show is Beat the Prosecution. I was talking about, we, you know, we deal with uh persuasion not just through words, but through imagery. But to what extent have you been involved during your career in uh I don't creating the the words, the scripts, whatever you call, including for new mutants, rather than focusing on the imagery, which of course, you know, uh imagery is symbols, words are symbols, so you can get across the ideas that way as well.

SPEAKER_00 36:08

So I've never been that interested in making up stories. Uh I just like to draw. But in the early days, uh, most of my career, I was given a plot to work from rather than a finished script. So in the plot, they they give you the basic story, but they don't have the exact dialogue the characters are going to be speaking. Um there might be some slight uh revisions in uh minor things. Uh so for example, when I got a plot, I would have to decide how many panels were going to be on a particular page to tell that part of the story and what shape those panels would be. And the more panels you use to show an action, it slows down time, the fewer panels it speeds up time. So you got to decide with your storytelling how many panels you think are appropriate and where you should end a page and start the next page, um, where you should use a close-up, because the closer up you get, the more involved you are with uh the character. Like you and I are so close to each other visually right now, where I you would be concerned if I fell out of my chair, right? Or if something hit me on the head. But if you do a long shot where I would be across the street from you, you would be less concerned with me falling over than if I was right in front of you falling over. So you have to think about distance visually and how that's going to affect the reader's involvement with the story. Everything we do, uh camera angles and positioning of the of the poses, is it's all to get a reaction from the viewer uh emotionally to make them more curious or uh uh sad or happy or excited or you know, we're uh with the visual storytelling, I'm I'm trying to manipulate the reader as much as I can um with how I'm showing what I'm choosing to show, what I'm not showing. You know, you're cropping a lot of the world out when you're drawing a picture. You're only showing one little piece of it. Like right now, I'm just looking at you and and your small background behind you. I have no idea what's in the rest of your house. I don't know if there's anybody else in the room with you. Um, so all of those things uh change how I'm looking at you and what I'm thinking about your your world right there.

SPEAKER_01 38:48

When you started New Mutants with Chris Claremont, uh who was uh taking on which roles and and the teamwork on that? And were you involved in developing what do we call it? Dialogue? Is that what you call it? Yeah, versus the image.

SPEAKER_00 39:09

And I uh talked a lot on the phone and in person. I was living in Florida at the time, so I would go up to New York and talk to him, or we'd just talk over the phone. He was in New York or Connecticut, I forget where he lived, and I was in Florida, and we had we didn't even have a title for the series. Uh they just said we've got a younger team of superheroes, we want to make them adolescents and we want to make them more multicultural. Um, so Chris and I talked about uh how many characters we were gonna have in the series, and uh I knew that he was strong writing female characters, and I said, Well, you you're good at writing females, I like to draw females, let's have more females in the group than males, which at the time was uh kind of revolutionary because up until that time the the superhero teams would just have a token female, um, and they were mainly males on the team. So we had three females and two males, and uh we didn't know how tall or short or or muscular or thin or whatever they were gonna be, their body types were gonna be. That was all on my shoulders, trying to create what they were gonna look like. We talked about whether they would have individual costumes or a school uniform since they were in a school uh learning how to use their powers. Um, so we ended up with uh school uniforms, um, just a lot of decisions like that that had to be made for a new series, um, including coming up with a title, The New Mutants. Um we talked about, you know, back and forth, going back and forth, uh just fleshing out ideas. Chris is a great idea man. Um, so he had just scads of ideas. Uh, one of the characters was originally going to be Iranian and changed her to being Scottish, uh Rain Sinclair, the the um Wolfspain uh werewolf character. Um so all those a lot of changes. Um just uh you have to do at the beginning of a series. Uh but he Chris would write the dialogue after I had drawn the pictures. So he would tell me, have the Danny and and Rain talking in this panel, discussing the school or whatever. Um, but he wouldn't tell me exactly what they were going to be saying. And then draw it. Then he would look at my drawings and write the dialogue, hopefully to fit my drawings. Sometimes he had certain things he really wanted to say that didn't quite fit what I had drawn, and there'd be a balloon coming from off-panel.

SPEAKER_01 41:56

The dialogue usually was coming after your art?

SPEAKER_00 42:00

Yeah, the right because I was working from a plot, so the writer would have to uh make up the exact dialogue after he was looking at my drawings. But I would I would try to uh leave enough room for the dialogue balloons in my drawings, and um in I would try to intuit what the writer might want to say in that scene, uh, so that I would give him enough room. And that's kind of a trial and error thing you learn when you're starting out, uh how much room to leave. I I was teaching comic art for about 10 years here in Pennsylvania, and um a lot of my students had trouble uh leaving any room for dialogue. They'd do a really nice drawing, but couldn't have anybody say anything. There's no room to put a balloon there.

SPEAKER_01 42:52

What drove uh the uh racial uh diversity, gender diversity, and the ages and new mutants itself, and what drove Marvel to be moving more into the 20th and 21st centuries by having that diversity away from just a bunch of white males among superheroes and in comics in general?

SPEAKER_00 43:16

I think it just got to that time. Um you know, when the X-Men originally started on the cover of the X-Men comic, it said teenage superheroes. And they actually they gradually aged up into their 30s. And so the editor, uh Louise Simonson and Chris Claremont, the writer, and maybe I think the editor in chief, Jim Shooter, was involved, uh, wanted to do a younger team of X Men. Um, they just thought it was uh commercially a good time to have a younger team go back to the the idea of a younger team for younger readers uh to identify with better. Um And they wanted and it's just socially was getting to be the time where uh it was obvious if you didn't have more women involved and more people of color involved, uh it didn't it didn't look good. Uh they they wanted to be more inclusive. Um right around that time they may have even started having gay characters. Some of the superheroes turned out to be to be uh gay. And then um, you know, so we just wanted to do a younger team with more uh uh like a Native American, uh Scottish girl, uh a guy from Kentucky, uh a little uh uh boy that was uh half Brazilian, half black. Um he had a black father and a white mother, I think. Um just trying to be more inclusive because our readers were all kinds of people. So we wanted to have start having more superheroes that reflected our readership.

SPEAKER_01 45:05

I haven't had a chance to watch the New Mutants movie versus just the trailers. So, to what extent is there less diversity in the New Mutants movie? And to what extent have you been involved with the making of any Marvel uh movies or any other uh movies?

SPEAKER_00 45:23

Unfortunately, the the director that uh made the New Mutants movie did not contact me for any input. Um, I was upset to see that uh the casting of the uh the black character uh Sunspot uh he ended up hiring a uh light-skinned actor for. And part of the character, as Chris and I designed him, was his uh dark skin, was integral to his character. So I don't know. Hollywood seems to have a problem uh in that regard. They always um are lightening the skin of the dark characters for whatever reason. Um, so that was a little distressing. And then um I felt that none of my characters, the way I designed them, looked like themselves in the movie. And the one character that I didn't uh design that was brought into the series after I left the book, Magic, looked exactly like she does in the comic books. So uh I, you know, it just kind of felt like um the director put nothing, none of my input into the series in the movie. And it's not a bad movie, but I think it could have been a lot better if they had uh put a little more of what Chris and I had done in the comic into the movie.

SPEAKER_01 46:53

Have you been involved in the creative process of any movies?

SPEAKER_00 46:57

No, that's a different business, and um not in my area of expertise and or interest, really. I I I like to draw, and I don't think I would want to be in the movie business. That's we we have a team in comics of the writer and the editor and the pencil and the inker and the colorist, but in the in the movies, you've got dozens of people involved in each movie, uh all kinds of egos, butting heads, and and make and wanting to do things different ways. Um it would be to me a nightmare to work in the movie business.

SPEAKER_01 47:35

Your use of the word words egos and butting heads lends itself well to the teamwork I was going to talk to you about. We criminal defense lords, when we're dealing with major felony cases with multiple criminal defendants, unless everyone else snitches. I've had uh trials with as many as six defendants in federal court, and we still have to split the number of uh strikes of jurors uh by the total divided by that number of defendants, uh, that plus coordinating who does oh who who uh who starts uh cross-examining uh uh prosecution witnesses, it does not always fit in uh gently at all. So can you talk about the teamwork process that you have experienced and maybe it's changed along the way? Because I think I heard you say in one interview, for instance, that uh Marvel Comics, at least at one point, uh, was a lot much more uh supportive of the creative process, whereas maybe the uh DC Comics process was a uh a little more stiff and corporate.

SPEAKER_00 48:42

Yeah, so you can imagine uh comic books creating visual stories um is a creative endeavor. Uh so any any creator, uh writer or an artist is gonna have a certain amount of ego where they want things done their way. It just makes makes sense. So Chris Claremont, when he's writing uh The New Mutants, has definite ideas about what he wants, how he wants his characters portrayed and have them what they're gonna be doing, whatever. And then I, as the artist, have certain ideas about how I think they should be portrayed. Um, so it's very possible that the writer and the artist can really disagree, and uh that's happened a lot in in my career, not just with me, but with all kinds of writers and artists. Um they just don't get along and so they end up not working together, and then there's other teams, and Chris and I are a good example where we did get along and he liked what I was doing, I liked what he was doing. Um we didn't have any big disagreements. Um early on talking about hand lettering. I wanted to put balloons in certain places, and Chris disagreed where I was putting the balloons, so we had a slight disagreement with that. Um, and then I ended up saying, fine, fine, we'll do it your way, because I didn't feel as strongly about it as he did. He's got a very certain way of putting uh little little balloons in certain places um for his idea of storytelling. Uh and I wasn't as set in my ways, I was new to penciling at that time. Um, so I was happy to just, you know, do it his way. It didn't, it wasn't that big a deal to me. We had a little disagreement there. Um, but it's obvious you're you're a team. Um I I usually did not like the way my pencils were inked by other inkers. And maybe other pencils didn't like the way I inked their pencils. You there wasn't a lot of uh uh communication. You sometimes I never even met the penciler that I was inking over or the inker that I was doing pencils for. Um so uh thankfully, maybe we didn't get a lot of uh butting heads. Uh everybody was doing their own little piece, kind of in their own little studio for the most part.

SPEAKER_01 51:28

Do I have that right that at some point you had an office only a few doors down from Stan Lee? And how much person to person, in-person interaction did you have with him?

SPEAKER_00 51:40

So when I started at Marvel, uh I was working in the production department doing lettering and art corrections, and it was a small, almost like a family business at that time. Uh, just a few different offices. Um so I was in kind of the main area, uh, and then the art director, John Ramita, had an office right to my right, like 10 feet away. Stan, I would get up and and go down the hall, uh, you know, just a few doors down the hall, there was Stan's office. Um I never had much direct uh direct business with Stan. Um because I was just at that time when I was working in the office, I was just doing art corrections and Stan was doing, you know, big stuff, creating the characters and and uh dealing with uh the artist doing the pages um that I didn't start until later when uh I had basically moved down to Florida from New York uh because it was cheaper to live in Florida. Um so I didn't I didn't have much uh direct to do with Stan, but I did meet him and talk to him. Um he seemed uh very much like you've seen him in the movies. He's an outgoing, energetic guy uh that was uh had a lot of personality.

SPEAKER_01 53:04

When you are doing the artwork, are you playing music in the background? Are you having music or mantras in your head? Are you just totally uh are you just totally part of the art you're doing? How does this process work or does it just move around back and forth, back and forth, in and out?

SPEAKER_00 53:24

I'm usually sitting right here at this drawing table. Um I have worked in a studio with other artists before uh when I was living in New York, but once I moved to Florida, um just set up my drawing table, and I don't have a TV in my studio. I think it's too distracting, um, particularly when I'm penciling and needing to think about how I'm gonna pose my characters and all the decisions I'm making as a penciller. Um I don't need distraction. So I I typically wouldn't even have music on. Um occasionally I do listen to music or an audiobook even while I'm working, uh, but I'm totally fine just working in silence. I've got a lot going on in my head that I don't need outside distraction. Uh it's nice when it's quiet. Uh in fact, when I started out, I used to work in the middle of the night and sleep during the day because it was less distraction and and I could just really concentrate. Then I when I got married, I needed to start you know having a normal nine to five existence.

SPEAKER_01 54:33

Let's talk about superhero ABC. I cannot emphasize enough uh the hours and oh my gosh, scores of times that my son and I had a great time together with that book, and my wife and son and I had a great time with that book. So, what was that creative process like? And how much did you enjoy it or feel that it was any of it was dreadlike to me, the deadline? And uh how how popular has that book been? What's the circulation been?

SPEAKER_00 55:04

Believe it or not, that came out in 2006. So 20 years later, it's still in print, which is very unusual for a children's book because you know, obviously, new books come out every month, and the bookstores have to have room on their shelves for those books. Um, so it's an alphabet book, and uh a lot of teachers and librarians tend to collect alphabet books. So that really helped it uh stay in print. Um so when I got the my my comic book career started getting a little slower, where it was they weren't just automatically sending another job to me every month. I would have to go to an editor and say, Do you have anything? And so I started looking around for other things to do. Um and I had always wanted to do a children's book. My wife really wanted me to do children's book. Um, so I decided I'd I'd try one. And I didn't think about uh just doing the illustrations. For some reason, um I thought, well, I should write it and draw it, even though I'd never written anything else. Um and I couldn't decide what kind to do, what kind of children's book to do. And my wife suggested doing a superhero alphabet book. She said, You know so much about superheroes? Do a superhero alphabet book. And I said, Wow, that's a great idea. I don't know why I didn't think of that. So I started trying to write, you know, one page for each letter, make up a hero, and soon discovered why there weren't any other superhero alphabet books out there. Um, all the characters I came up with were already copyrighted. So it was really a job coming up with uh unique characters that hadn't already been used in the decades before that, uh, by Marvel and DC and all these other publishers. But I managed, I decided, well, for little kids, I'll just come up with silly heroes. So I have Bubble Man for B character, you know, and uh Captain Cloud calmly catches cooks. Um, I just thought alliteration made a lot of sense in an alphabet book, so I used a lot of alliteration, trying to make funny characters uh to entertain the kids, and also I knew parents were gonna have to read this every night to their kids, so I tried to make it on two levels where the parents wouldn't be bored out of their minds reading it to them. Uh, so I tried to make it fun for the parents and the kids, and also for my comics fans. I wanted to make little slight things that would make them relate to it uh so that they would maybe want to buy it. Um and my editor wanted me to get it done in time for Christmas, so I did have a deadline. Um sometimes these comic these children's book authors uh artists take over a year or more to do the book, and I had eight months, and um there was a lot of pressure since I had never done one before, and it's a different thing than doing a comic book. Uh there's different requirements. Um I was used to doing a vertical page. So after I did my initial sketches, all of them were vertical pages, and and the designer for the book said, Well, why don't you do a double page spread? You know, why don't you make some horizontal? And I just hadn't thought about it. So, you know, then I started making some horizontal, taking up two pages, um just doing different uh ideas, different layouts, uh more more uh layouts that I hadn't thought about originally because I was so nervous just trying to think what would a children's book be. And it was kind of a little bit out of my realm. So it took a lot of thinking. Um, and I was working fast, and uh, you know, I did the the case the page you mentioned, the the uh volcano vomits on villains. I did that as a joke because I didn't I thought it was too gross, I didn't think the editor would use it. And the editor said, Oh no, that's gonna be the boy's favorite page. So um, you know, things like that, uh back and forth with the editor showing her ideas, and she would say, Well, it looks too much like Captain America, you can't do that, or or whatever. Um, and then I did a character called um multiplying mic, right? So my original sketch was multiple man, and then I found out uh through my editor that Marvel had this long-running character, multiple man, I had never heard of. So I couldn't use multiple man, I made a multiplying mic becomes many more men and moments, and his mom makes them all mind their manners, you know, just a lot of alliteration. So I just tried to have fun with it, and um it's it's been great. I'm so glad I did it because it brought a whole new audience to my work. Uh, I've been to book fairs and uh met all these uh kids that have uh they'll see me at a Comic Con and said, Oh gosh, I had that book when I was a kid, you know, the alphabet book. So it's great experience.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:23

I've gone over time. Have you created any other children's books that just aren't in publication, or are they at least in your mind?

SPEAKER_00 1:00:33

Yes, I had two or three other ones. I was gonna do a numbers book, uh, superhero one, two, three. Um, I had a little storybook I was gonna do with one of my characters, uh uh the little super guy in it, Sky Boy. Um, and I I was too busy drawing comic books. Uh with with children's books, you get paid on the back end, whereas comics I would get paid in the front end, um, or doing commissions for the fans, I would get money up front. So it just was easier for me to do comics than it was to do children's books. And um I could I could do for work for months trying to develop a children's book and then maybe not even be able to sell it. So it was just uh something that I was always on my back burner and I never really uh got any more published, but I had a couple ideas and started work on on two or three others.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:35

Okay, so if those never become finished products, is there a price that you would set for a person to purchase what you've already done for any of those books?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:45

I don't think I would sell them. I I have already given the art to my kids. I've got three kids. Um rather than put them out in the market. Um I guess if somebody really wanted one, they might twist my arm and I would ask the my one of my kids if they wanted to sell it. But um, as of now, I'm not trying to sell those.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:07

I won't go over time any further. I will say this as with so many of my fascinating guests, if I had your permission, I'd go for hours and hours. But I know I'm gonna see you again at a future Baltimore Comic-Con, and that'll be great. Uh, I want to give you the opportunity, Bob, to say anything that you haven't said already or to emphasize anything else and to include uh, well, I'll have it on my liner notes anyway. You can remind anyone of your URL for a Patreon or whatever else.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:37

Uh, I don't know about your lawyer friends and students or or whatever that you're uh that might see this. Um, I'm always getting asked uh about uh, you know, is it a good profession or how do I get into the profession of drawing comics? It's been great for me. I had a wonderful career. It's very, very competitive. When I started, I was only competing with artists that were in New York City. You had to be in New York to get the work. Now everybody's competing with artists all around the world. So it's a very different business than it was when I did the majority of my career. Um, and I would just say whether you're a lawyer or or an artist or or writer, uh just have uh confidence in yourself and uh persistence, per perseverance, you know, stick with it uh in the face of uh rejection and and uh competition and uh just go for your dream.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:36

I agree. Perseverance. Everyone, you heard from Bob McLeod. That's M-Capital L-E-O-D. Talk to us from Pennsylvania. One of his websites we can check him out is www.patreon.com slash C slash Bob McCloud. Any child who doesn't know the alphabet yet, any of who does know it will love you for getting his superhero ABC. That's one of my favorite books to buy for the children. Thank you so much, Bob. This is John Katz. I'm a criminal defense and DUI defense lawyer here in Fairfax, Northern Virginia. This is Beat the Prosecution because there is no other way. Stand by, Bob.