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He [Matt Fraction]sends me a plot with what happens, sometimes some dialogue and sometimes not -- usually not. Then, I start sketching and I send him the sketches. We start talking about it.
(...)
I start sketching more and he writes dialogue. When I have the dialogue, I do the final pencils and then I do the final inks. The thing is, I sketch on the computer, so I always have all the text and dialogue. I sketch with them so I can see the whole composition, the text captions and where the balloons are going to be.
I write the balloons and do the first lettering on the page so I know exactly how much room I have for drawing, or where the text panel goes. When I'm done, I send the page for lettering to Chris Eliopoulos. There's a great relationship with everything, with Matt, with Chris, and with Matt Hollingsworth, of course. We talk a lot of about the color. It's a very collaborative book.
(...)Is there ever a point where you're working and you say to Matt, can you cut some of the words in this scene?
Not really. Like I said, I'm sketching and I know how much room I have, so I try to adapt. Maybe if I see there's too much dialogue for this one panel, I'll have [the dialogue] in three balloons. But as he sees my sketches, he writes the dialogue thinking about those sketches. It's very collaborative. It's unnecessary to fix.
(...) For example, right now, we're interacting. I cut up every single sentence into very small balloons. It's a comic. Everything you can do to tell it visually, you have to do it visually. Not by words. Pictures are there for a reason. They have to be there for a reason. They have to give you information. The text is saying something, so let's try to say something different with the pictures.
(...)
If you can read the pictures without reading the text, then you have done something right. That's always what I try to do. When I finish a comic, I check the pages and see if everything is understandable. Can you follow the story without balloons? If you can, it's okay. Obviously, the words have a lot of information, very important information, but it has to be complementary in some way, I think.
How long does it take you to draw an issue?
It depends. Mostly a month and a half for both pencils and inks. It's exhausting. The ideal would be to have a couple months or even more. That would be perfect. [Laughs] I lose a lot of time sketching and thinking about the issue, about how to tell the story visually. I like to have the plot and to see the issue as a whole. If you're going to use a grid, then use it through the whole issue and see it in a specific way. For example, in Issue #3, for the car chase scenes, after thinking a lot and doing tons of sketches, I thought of the idea of the grid with little inserts for the arrows and little details that could make the narrative flow.
(...)You mentioned illustrating the car chase as being an involved process. In general, how much research do you do? A lot. I'm psycho. I have to know how every car works, how the streets are, how archery is done, the gun, architecture. I did a lot of research on archery. I've lost a lot of time doing that. I need to do that. I think every little detail is important because it will give you a sense of credibility. We're in a fantasy world, but you have to make the reader believe. He's going to accept that a man can fly, but he's not going to accept that a gun doesn't have to be reloaded. I think those little details are very important -- at least for me. Maybe you fail, but at least you tried. This issue, the famous dog issue, the entire team has been doing great things. For example, Matt Hollingsworth has colored the whole issue in the dog spectrum, in blues and yellows. It's amazing.
The dog issue. When we started, Matt and I wanted to do something like Steranko's "Red Tide," a book with a couple of illustrations and a lot of text. Our first idea was to do something like that. I think when he wrote the plot, we thought it was going to be something like that with just a couple of illustrations. The idea was to give me a little more room for hitting deadlines. It was going to look great and we loved that idea and everything was fantastic, but then I started sketching it. Suddenly, I started going what if --? I managed to explain everything with pictograms, everything the dog was smelling or hearing. It's a difficult comic, I think. There are lots of little details. It's the first time I have done lettering myself. I love Chris Eliopoulos, but in this issue, I put all the text in the balloons first and then erased all the words a dog would not understand. You'll see. It's something crazy. I can't believe they've let us do this stuff. [Laughs] I decided it was going to be harder to explain to Chris what I wanted than to just do it myself. I have to thank Chris because he let me do the lettering here.
So the issue was envisioned to make it easier for you, but you transformed it into something harder and more involved?
Yes, I think it's been the hardest comic I've ever done. [Laughs] But that's me. That's the story of my life. I complicate everything.
(...)Before you started in comics, you were working as an illustrator, is that right?
I was working as an illustrator. I loved comics, and some of my illustrations had balloons or panels, but I was an illustrator. I'm a Spaniard, and when I started there was not a big comics industry [here]. More than anything, I had to pay rent. [Laughs] I found more jobs and better paying jobs in illustration. I did a lot of things. Book covers, magazines, newspapers -- everything. I had different styles. I'm also a designer. When I did a CD cover, I always asked to do the design, the typography, all that stuff.
You mentioned earlier that you do all your artwork on the computer. When did you stop working on paper?
With "Hawkeye," in fact. I have been sketching on the computer for a while. I found it easier, but I always did the pencils and inks on paper. Lately, I had some covers done on the Wacom [tablet] and I realized that I had some work done on the Wacom and some on paper -- and I myself could not recognize [which was which]. So I said, let's try to do it on the Wacom, and I realized I saved a lot of time. Now that I've done the "Hakweye" series on the Wacom, I think it would be hard to go back to the table with the ink. I think I would lose too much time. When I worked with ink, I was more slow because I was afraid of being wrong. With the Wacom, if you do something wrong, it's OK.
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