NYCC 08: THE BRYAN HITCH SPOTLIGHT PANEL

[MattBrady]

by Russell Burlingame

The New York Comic Con wrapped up its first day of events with several panels, including a spotlight on Fantastic 4 artist Bryan Hitch moderated by Marvel's John Barber, former editor of Ultimates, who described Hitch as a man who needs no introduction

"Introduce me anyway!" Hitch ordered, and Barber obliged, telling the audience that Hitch's work on The Authority and The Ultimates have helped shape the last ten years of superhero comics.

Hitch explained that 1987 at 16 years old, the first job he got was on a GI Joe title--"Why I got hired I have no idea. I assume they were drunk. That went into some Transformers stuff and then Death's Head. Then I took over She-Hulk after John Byrne quit."

"That was the highlight, right?" Barber joked. "I think it's available in trade paperback."

Hitch joked, "I encourage everyone to buy one and burn it."

He then related a story about deciding to draw comics as a teenager. "I was at seminary intending to be a priest before I realized that Superman was much cooler than God," Hitch said. He was 14 and in seminary and it was meant to be a long-term thing, where he would be ordained around age 22. He says that he quit due to what he called a "fundamental lack of belief in God," and the instructor at seminary said, "What's that got to do with working in the Church?" "Funny that the Pope is in town while I'm here, then, isn't it?" He joked.

"It took about 12 years before I got to the point of drawing The Authority. There was a lot of time when I didn't know what I was doing--aping other artists, everyone probably knows about the Alan Davis connection but he wasn't the only one by any means. There was hardly ever a job I got that I liked but I had to do them because I had to make a living. It got to the point where I was going to quit and try to work in TV or movies or something and then I got asked to finish up an aborted run on StormWatch that another artist had left and it was already behind--months and months behind--and I took it anyway because I felt like it was a chance to make some money and do some looking for another career. And I got to work with Warren [Ellis], which was like a lightning strike."

"Within a few days of my finishing StormWatch, I'd been offered a number of offers from WildStorm. I was going to work with Scott Lobdell on a project and Warren called back and said, 'I can't do it, I can't let you work with Scott Lobdell,'" at which point Ellis pitched a series for which he had nothing except a title--"The Authority"--and the fact that he wanted Jenny Sparks in it. Together they hammered out the run for The Authority over the phone and Hitch decided to stay in comics.

When Barber brought up Hitch's DC work, Hitch said that both he and writer Mark Waid were disappointed in the way their JLA work came out, and blamed it on former editor Dan Raspler, who he described as having problems with many creators, and even other editorial staff at DC.

Hitch said of collaborator Waid, "On paper, we got on really well, but there was just not that lightning bolt that you get when two creators are completely in synch."

Asked about whether that book is what had set his mind on wanting to one day draw Superman, Hitch said, "I had drawn Superman before--I had drawn an Action Comics annual that Louise Simonson wrote. That was a great relationship, I liked Weezie a lot, but I didn't really work well with Mike Carlin. I like him as a person, but it was strained because he likes his books to be on time and as you know I have a tendency sometimes to be somewhat late with some of my books. Like two years or so."

He says that he doesn't think the rumored Millar/Hitch Superman is imminent, saying that "what we want to do with Superman is not what DC Comics wants to do with Superman right now."

He says that after The Authority, he was "aggressively wooed by Crossgen, which didn't happen, which was when Joe Quesada called and said, 'the lunatics are running the asylum, do you want to come and party?'"

Prompted by Barber, Hitch said that Millar was hand-picked by Ellis and Hitch as a follow-up on The Authority. After accepting Quesada's invitation to come to Marvel, Millar was the first creator to get hold of him. "Mark then called within 20 minutes of me agreeing to join Joe's part of insanity and we hit it off immediately."

In a reversal of the kind of art-versus-marketing debates that creators often cite coming up against editorial on, Hitch said of his first major Marvel work, "We were determined that it had to be called “The Ultimate Avengers” because we thought nobody would buy a book about the “Ultimate Avengers” if it wasn't called “Avengers.” Quesada said that they weren't avenging anything, and after all sales were around 40,000 on Avengers, and those were 40,000 that would buy it anyway, it was the other people we had to worry about. So I drafted a very complex e-mail justifying why we had to call it “Ultimate Avengers” and by the end of it I had talked myself out of it."

Hitch says that he was impressed that, although initial sales favored Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Strikes Back, which debuted the same month as The Ultimates, in the long run Marvel's series outsold DC's. He also says during that run, he got the Internet for the first time and got "stage fright" looking at reviews and message boards.

Barber says that he came onto Ultimates 2 with the last on-time issue.

"So it's your fault then?" Hitch asked him.

Barber answered, "Yes, I just said, 'Bryan, you have to slow down!'" He then related a story about how the page numbers on Hitch's artwork kept changing as Hitch re-laid-out the art as he drew it. "I would get a page ten that obviously came before a page eight, and then another page ten that came much later in the issue," Barber said. In the end, it was Hitch who was often responsible for huge growths in the comics' page counts.

On how he's beating his current deadlines, Hitch said, "On Fantastic 4, I'm working on three issues simultaneously at any given time. The pages keep changing; they're not like The Ultimates at any given time but they always grow by 2 or 3 pages an issue."

Asked how he likes working with Millar again, Hitch joked, "I despise him, actually, can't stand him."

Hitch says he's drawing the book substantially larger than a normal Marvel page, but that's allowing him to draw much faster than he had. "I think it feels like there's more space on the page--more spacious. But also I'm having fun. The Ultimates was a real slog--I used to quit every Friday and sign back up every Monday. Although we'd already agreed to do 26 issues, I really remember not wanting to do Ultimates 2 a lot. It was quite a struggle to do it but Mark talked me into that and my editors had to persuade me every week not to quit."

Barber noted that Hitch had seemed very excited about starting on Fantastic 4.

"It just felt right; it felt like a breath of fresh air. I had been confined for so long by Ultimates that it felt like a real freedom to go flying again."

Asked how the relationship with his inkers is working now that Paul Neary is no longer working with him, Hitch explained, "I have been inking more of it in house. When Paul moved on there was a period where I didn't know who was going to be inking and I didn't want to hand it off to some faceless guy that I didn't know who he was." He said that occasionally he will redraw pages and ink them himself. "These days I have a process where I'll sit down and do very tight breakdowns on about four pages in a couple of days, and then go back to them every week."

Then they opened up for questions.

The first inquiry was from a young man who asked when Hitch was going to work with Garth Ennis.

"There was a chance to do an Authority project that Fabry ended up doing, but it was a very Garth project and it wasn't The Authority I was used to drawing. Given the right project if he wanted to work with me and there was time to do it, happily because he's a great writer. I loved his early Punisher stuff before he got serious again, it was great humor, just almost like a Looney Tunes."

A second audience member asked if he could see himself going back to DC one day.

"I'm under contact to Marvel for a few more years anymore but you never say never. It's always the right project the right writer, the right circumstances. I'd love a crack at Superman in the right circumstances, I'd love Green Lantern although Ivan Reis is amazing. I'd love to do Justice League the way I always wanted to do it."

At this, Barber asked if there was a "dream project" for Hitch.

"I've got four more issues of Fantastic 4 to pencil and I'm starting to think what's next because we have an X-Men project but that's at least a year away. I'd love to Spider-Man and Hulk but they've both had a big push. I've always wanted to do Spider-Man with Joss Whedon but he's too busy right now. Likewise Damon Lindelhoff wants to do the Hulk. I'd love to do Spider-Man, I'd love to do Hulk, I'd love to do Thor. Olivier is great; I couldn't do any better than Olivier. Fantastic 4 is a nice project because it was lying fallow a little bit in terms of its profile and with Mark and I agreeing to do it, Marvel brought a lot of PR to the game which gave it kind of a boost. Any suggestions?" (Silence from the audience) "No? Then I'l take a year off."

Barber also asked why it was that Hitch favored black gutters instead of the traditional white ones in comics.

The black borders were all to do with holding the color in. When computer coloring came in it's so saturated and so heavy that it felt like a single little line around the borders wasn't doing it for me. Filling them in black felt like a good way of holding in the borders. The white borders in Fantastic 4 was a response to feeling so tense during Ultimates I wanted to feel open and airy and less tense to get kind of the exact opposite of what I was doing with The Ultimates." Hitch says he always loved what Sienkewicz did with Elektra and I wanted to get that kind of feel a little bit. He said he was also influenced by Chris Bachalo.

He sent the colorist on Fantastic 4 a pile of scans from Thunderbirds books from the '60s to get the "feel" and openness of the look he wanted for FF.

Barber asked, "There's a sense of movement to your art--it's always impressed me how fast I read it despite the fact that there's so much in there that should be slowing me down."

"Do you think I shouldn't put so much in, then, if you're not noticing it?" Hitch joked, and Barber joked back, "I don't care, I'm not editing that book."

Barber followed up, "What are your concerns when you're going through the page?"

"The easiest thing is the storytelling, that just happens. The thing I struggle with is the drawing. I've worked very hard to improve my drawing to be able to tell a story better because the better I draw the more i can improve. The more you can convey physically in the artwork, the better comic you're going to get. The best synthesis is when you're not trying to do the other person's job." He used to examples of (usually older) comics and movies where someone would declare the action that they were performing on camera or on panel, as in, "I am kicking you!"

Asked about the logic behind drawing larger, Hitch said, "The reduction thing has been kind of an interesting experiment." He said that the first thing that he drew big was a cover for Avengers where he worked with standard equipment and "when it was reduced it looked like I'd done it with a stub of a pencil."

Asked by an art student in the crowd if he would suggest his method to aspiring artists, Hitch said, "I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, because it's a lot more work. It does work or me because it allows me to be more gestural. I stand up a lot more now. I sharpen my pencil with a knife and then use the side of it a lot. I've also started inking more with a brush than a pen. With a pen it's a very mechanical process, whereas with a brush you can do it all in one sweep if you can do it well enough. it's revolutionized the way I've drawn comics and I'm going to do it forever this way now."

An audience member asked if he had different styles for different writers.

"The only I can claim to have any experience with are Warren and Mark, and they're remarkably similar really. There's individual differences but essentially the storytelling is a very defined, I think, accidentally defined approach. And Warren and Mark when they write do it very similarly, although they ask for very different things. When Warren wanted something very complex, he would follow up with something simple to let you catch up. Mark just asks for everything all the time. My favortie one, which appears on every page he ever writes, is 'It's the best effing panel you've ever drawn.'"

He gave an example of an Ellis script, saying, "One of the things that Warren said was 'let's have an alternate Earth invade ours. And then I said 'And we'll do it on horseback,' but then I thought better of that because I'd never drawn horses before. And then we decided to have planes do a dogfight over Los Angeles." He said that in the end, Ellis wrote as "And the ships engaged. Off you go." He said, "It probably took him thirty seconds with one finger and a cigarette and a can of Red Bull, and it took me a week to draw it."

An audience member asked who helped him learn the ropes in the comics industry and the language of visual storytelling, since he got started so young, and asked if it was Alan Davis.

"The storytelling actually was pretty well set by the time I met Alan and Paul. I adored comics. From the age of seven or eight I did nothing except sit on my belly in front of the television copying Jim Aparo Batman comics and All-Star Squadron by Jerry Ordway. I lived and breathed comics, I wanted to draw comics, I knew I would draw comics and that was it. It just never occurred to me that I wouldn't draw for comics."

"In my head I was alright, when I couldn't draw for crap really."

Alan Davis recommended him to go to American comics, saying that he felt his style would fit it better than it would the British scene at the time.

"When I was doing Authority a friend of mine brought me an old issue of Transformers and I said, 'Why are you showing me this, this is dreadful,' and they said, 'but look at the storytelling.' And it was almost identical to what I was doing on Authority."

"I love working with Mark, we're great friends. He's just one of the best writers I've ever seen."

A ten-year-old in the audience said, "I loved The Ultimates."

"Oh thanks. It was great fun to work on once I was done with it," Hitch laughed.

A fan asked if he had been subjected to any e-mail pranks from Millar, which Hitch responded to by saying, "He's tried a few; he tried to be Samuel Jackson's mother once, and he almost had me, but it just had to be Mark."

Asked how he knew it was a joke, he said, "She swore a lot--Samuel L. Jackson's mum--but I know Mark's gotten Bendis at least once."

Asked if he would ever go back to Ultimates, he said that Millar and he still have a very big story--it would probably translate to eight issues--planned for Ultimates one day, but it's hard to say whether they'll ever do it because it's questionable whether, by the time the book is free, it would work. "Warren and I have this one last great Authority story too, and we know we'll never do that either."

A young fan asked him what his favorite book was that he had drawn, and Hitch answered, "The next issue, probably. By the time I'm done with anything, I'm bored with it. The Authority was the best book I could do at that time, but now it looks crude to me."

Another fan asked if he had any favorite characters to draw.

"They were all kind of favorites, and it's the same with FF. You can often tell the ones I don't like drawing because they just don't come out right. The one I had the hardest time with was the Wasp actually. She was sometimes Asian and sometimes not. She was only a little Asian, anyway. Her father was Dutch, hence the name."

Do you ever have something you send back to the writer and just say that you can't do it?

"Artist's block is for amateurs. Now I'm supposed to be a professional, so I can always move along if I feel like it's not working."

Further explaining, Hitch said that, during their run, he had found himself working across three issues of Authority at any time, and it had worked well so he asked Millar to do that with Fantastic 4 so that he can take a break from things that are giving him problems and move ahead to another issue to work on something he's not stuck on.

Return to the New York Comic Con 2008 mini-site...

[Daring D]

Originally Posted by MattBrady

...Likewise Damon Lindelhoff wants to do the Hulk...

Oh god.....

[ME5]

Hello.

Did they just say Hitch is doing an X-men project?!?!?!

WHHAAAAHHHHOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!! yeah, BABY!

So looking forward to this.

Be Well...

[Wormdrink]

used to love hitch. back when his art looked a lot like alan davis, but since Ultimates 2 it seems his art has degraded. almost to a point that it looks like quick, sketchy thumbnail sketches.

no offense bryan. both volumes of The Ultimates pretty much rocked my world, but it would be really cool if you could just clean it up a bit.

[Burnt Frog]

"Warren and I have this one last great Authority story too, and we know we'll never do that either."

When you say never though, you don't really mean that, right?