TO Jeff and all:)
FRI, 7/27/01, 2:28 p.m. - In Response To: Re: Sure (Jeff)

Thanks, but where does the Image Kabuki comics fit into this (or are they in one of the trades?)
Jeff

The Metamorphosis title in that list, is the Image series. It is the lates completed series and comes right after Skin Deep.

Thanks for taking the time to find out. And thanks for reading my books! I really appreciate that you are reading Kabuki.

And I want to thank everyone else on the board for being so helpful to new readers by giving them the order of reading and answering questions.

DM

This book is for a good cause.
The CBLDF. It has con stories from different creators like myself and Bendis.

Hey Trick,

I got my copies at the con. I wanted to thank you and everyone for doing such a great job on my story.

DM

Just as a heads up to everybody, the comic books shipping this week include Occupational Hazards #2. This book benefits the CBLDF and contains the story that David Mack wrote and my best friend Lee Ferguson and myself did the art for. Lee will be pencilling the upcoming Marvel Mutant X comic series. This was a special project for me to work on, so please support this book. It is for a great cause and David's story was really neat to read.

Thanks,
Patrick Wedge

PS: Please read it and post whatever reactions you have about the book on the board.

Hi David Thornon,

It was good to see you at the San Diego Con. Thanks for posting this kind of information update. It is very helpful.

As for the Tigerlily Mask included in the October solicitation, I do urge everyone to order it AHEAD OF TIME. Just tell your store that you want it and that should helpf them order enough.

The Kabuki Mask went fast and the Scarab Mask is moving very quickley too. But if your retailer knows that you want all of the masks ahead of time, you should have no problem.

Thanks

David Mack

about the first Kabuki Mask from Moore creations.I totally missed out on it.I don't suppose you have any on the checklist,or by chance,know where I can find one.I've seen the TigerLily one and it looks great.

Corran

At the moment I only have a precious few that I ordered from Moore Creations ahead of time. I planned to use them for Christmas gifts.

I've asked Moore Creations if I could get some more to sell throught the checklist, but they are all out of the KABUKI mask. I think you can still get the SCARAB mask.

As for the Kabuki mask, you might want to ask your store to see if Diamond (the distributor) still has any.

Hi Rae,

It's only the conclusion to THIS Scarab story. There will still be more Kabuki stories, more stories of the Noh Agents, and probably different Scarab stories in the future.

it's the conclusion?! no.... i'm gonna die! i think i'm starting to look like a fool at my comic retailer because i'm calling in and stopping by once a week to ask about it.... i've been asking for months..... i just go in there and infiltrate. I go through all the image stuff in the boxes on the shelves and in the bins just to make shure there is something i havent overlooked... i figured out today nothing has been overlooked...man that makes me sad...:(
Rae

Hi Greg,

Thanks for reading Kabuki. I appreciate that you gave it a try and enjoyed it.

In a lot of my work I like to contrast the page and storytelling with both abstract design and some realism. When I'm going for a very realistice piece in painted art, I often start with photo reference. In Kabuki, it is fairly easy for my to take photo reference of my girlfriend and other friends, and use photos that I have personally taken in Japan. And the script is taylor made for me to make up the rest. And sometimes I like to bury more Japanes Pop culture in there as well.

In Daredevil, I worked from someone elses script for the first time, so I wanted to make sure I was able to fulfill all the requirements that the script called for. I wanted to make sure that I had enough on site photo reference to pull off everything that Brian asked for.

I shot about two hundred polaroids of my next door neighbor who plays the little boy. The other kids in the story are also my neighbors, and the kids on the playground are from photos I took of kids playing in Spain.

I had a friend pose for a lot of the Ben shots, and I modeled for a bunch more of them myself. I even bought the trenchcoat from a second hand store. I also modeled for a lot of the Daredevil shots. You may see a lot of these when the story is collected as a trade paperback.

However there are a lot of shots that I took from my "reference file". When I was younger, this is the first thing that professional comic artists would tell me to develope. They will tell you to make files from magazine photos for objects, places and figures that will aid you in drawing those things realistically. All artists in comics that I know use this as a tool.

You always pull out photos of guns, cars, buildings, horses, trenchcoats etc. Because you may not always have those things at your immediate disposal to draw from.

So after first reading Bendis' script, I started keeping a collection of NYC buildings, men in trenchcoats, and people that might fit the bill of the cast in his script.

He asked me to draw the teacher as Laryn Hill. So I filed away several shots of her. When we started this project, Decaprio was up to play Parker in the Spiderman film, so we elected to put a little of him in the Parker likeness.

So that's how I approached this DD story. I'm sorry if it detracted from any of your enjoyment of the story. If it did, maybe I haven't learned to handle the "reference file" as a proper tool yet. I'm still learning. I probably used more reference on the DD story than usual, because I wanted to make sure I served the script properly.

I picked up Kabuki last year and thought that David Mack was about the best guy around. Now, I am rethinking that quiet a bit... Has David Mack always been simply copying his images? While reading Daredevil I noticed how just about every picture in there was copied out of magazines or stills from movies. I also noticed that he wasn't giving any credit where it was due for the pictures that he was taking. Kabuki seemed to be entirely his own creation, but now I am wondering about that as well. I know many artists use photo ref for their work, but usually not already copyrighted ones... What the Hell is going on? This has started to bug me so much that me and my friend no longer collect his work, but rather skip through it in the comic store and play "spot the advertisement"

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for the kind words. I'm glady you enjoyed my Daredevil work. If you are looking to purhcase any of the original pages, just e-mail my girlfriend Anh at Anh2tran@yahoo.com.

Just mention the pages that you are interested in and we will send you the prices of those pages. Then if you decide to purchase one or more of them you can send a check or money order and we will fed ex you the artwork.

We'll look forward to your e-mail.

Thanks

David

dear david,
thank you for the art you have produced for daredevil. you convinced me to go back to buying new comics after an 8 year hiatus in the golden age. please take this in the right way, but your art reminds me a lot of bill sienkiewicz (which is the nicest thing i could say about anyone because ......bill is god). i have a few pieces by bill and would love to add one or two of your painted pieces to my collection. you can email me privately (monkeyb0y@home.com ) or on the board about how i might go about doing this. i don't live anywhere near san diego so i missed a chance to see you in person and thank you for the work you have done.
jeff

I thought some of the characters looked kinda fimiliar. But after reading your DD story with Brian 2 times. I was reading and and putting the images with the words which created a awesome story. And now that you've said you used people's likenesses in the comic is a bonus. Kinda like how Alex Ross throws in all kinda famous people in his work. Always fun to look for. Oh yeah David any chance of a print of the page of DD #19 of DD hugging the little boy? That was my favorite piece that you did in the whole series. If your not gonna make a print of it would it be ok if I went to a kinko's type place and have that page blown up to size. Or draw it myself although I couldn't do it justice. I just want it on my wall man.

Keep up the great work,

Bryan Goff

As far as I'm concerned, you are welcome to blow it up or draw from it. Have a blast.

I've recieved a lot of amazing feedback about that page. I had no idea so many people would like it this much. Mostly I have to give credit to my neighbor kid who posed for Timmy. His name is Tyler Smith. He did a great job at acting out all of the emotions in the story. I told his mom that he is a natural actor. All the stuff between him and DD on the bridge are from photos of him (as Timmy) and me (as DD) on my front porch. Anh took the photos.

In my own books, I always list the models and any artist that I have conscously referenced. In a Marvel book, I don't have my own letter collumn to mention everything that I want to. So you will have to wait for the trade collection for all my personal acknowledgements. And we've planned on showing a lot of the photo reference in there as well.

DM

How do you get/ask people to model/pose for you David? Do you give some of them money, art, or just tell if you pose for me you'll be in a comic book.

I've modeled for, and appeared in books drawn by Brian Bendis, Mike Oeming, Dan Brereton, Rick Mays, Joe Quesada, Greg Horn, Andy Lee, and many others.

Of course, I also take a ton of photos every where I go. And sometimes I pull from these and the people in the photos that I have shot in public places probably never know that they made it into a shot here or there. Like the people playing soccor in Spain that I put in the background of a DD panel.

I have a basket ball court in my driveway and I often play ball with the neighborhood kids. So for the longest time I knew that the kid next door would make the perfect actor for the kid in the DD story. So when I got the script I mapped out the scenes that the kid was in. Then of caurse I explained to his mother and asked for her permission, before I took photo reference of him. Tyler thinks it is very cool and it gave him a lot of bragging rights. He really looked forward to each issue. Everytime the new issue came out I would give it to his mother first, and ask her to look at it to make sure it she was comfortable with him reading it.

Some of Tylers friends also made it into the playground scene with Ben.

I also took photos of my neighbor on the other side of my house to pose as the young KINGPIN, Wilson Fisk, for my Parts of a Hole Daredevil story. And I sent them to Joe to work from.

But usually I use myself and my girlfriend. We've both modeled for other artists together too. Andy Lee models for others too. He was in Oeming's Bullet Proof Monk. You can't miss his handlebar mustache. And Brian Bendis often models for P. Craig Russel.

In some of the Kabuki issues, my sister-in-law Hiromi modeled as Akemi. I did a lot of shots of Hiromi and Anh (my girlfriend) interacting as Akemi and Kabuki.

Photo reference is just a tool. There are a zillion ways to do things and you pick and choose the best way to approach each scene based on the atmosphere that bests supports the story.

Usually, I go for the cruder, abstract, raw, or more design oriented renderings. But in order to make those have the full effect, I like to contrast them with some more realistic renderings here and there.

I just recieved the prototypes for the Siamese masks today from Moore Creations.

These look great! Probably my favorite of the masks so far. I didn't quite realize how striking these would be in real life.

They will come right after the Tigerlily mask. Both Siamese masks will come as a set. And the price will be cheaper than the cost of two masks individually. Hopefully only $35 for both!

I still have a lot of great stuff that I wanted to mention about this past San Diego con. Here is some of it:

It was great to see Mike Oeming at his first trip to the San Diego show. I am real proud of him. He's such a great person as well as a fantastic artist and it is good to see him getting such recognition. I'm very happy that he and Bendis won an Eisner this year for POWERS. We had a great time at the Eisner Awards togerther.

Another great part was when they were mentioning Dave Johnson as a nominee for his cover art on 100 Bullets and they showed one of his covers on the big screen. It was the 100 bullets cover of the black gang member pointing the gun at the reader. Rick Mays modeled for Dave on this cover and it was funny to see Dave's painting of Rick so big on the screen. I was like, "Hey, that's Rick Mays!"

It was great to have Rick Mays signing at the Kabuki tables. We finally got to meet his fiance Tomomi, and we all had a great time. Anh and I spent the next week with Rick and Tomomi at Rick's home in LA and we all had a great time there.

In LA, Anh and I had a meeting at the FOX studios about the Kabuki film and it went GREAT. I feel like we are really on track with this film. There is a lot more I'd like to say about it, but I should wait to make sure it is ok to speak of it. So hopefully there will be announcements about this in the not to distant future.

Thursday Bendis, Mike, and I and our significant others, all had a great dinner with all of our friends at Image Central. We bonded in a lot of hilarious ways and had a great time.

Saturday we also had a great Marvel Knights dinner with all of our Marvel Knights friends. Lots of great possibilities were discussed.

But the best thing about the entire con, was the great positivity and excitement that you could feel from all of the readers. We were real happy about that. Bendis and I were discussing, how on the net there often seems to be a rudeness, and cynicism among a lot of the online comic communities. It was great to be reminded that that is not the true attitude of the real comics community.

It was great to feel such friendliness and positive expectations from all of the readers and artists alike that we interacted with.

So I want to thank every one who showed up!

There are a ton of other great things that happened at this show. Jon Muth drew a great portrait of Anh that I will print in a future book. It looks like Kent Williams, Thom Ang, Greg Spalenka, and Dave McKean will also each be doing a Kabuki piece. It was great to hang out again with Allen Spiegal and all of these artists at his table. We also met and had some good talks at the Graphiti design party.

Jamie Tolagson and Scott Morse each gave me a Kabuki painting at the convention and they both look GREAT! I'm going to have to print these in a future book as well.

Bill Sienkewiez stopped by our booth to pick up his copy of Metamorphosis. Was great to see him. We had a nice talk. We mentioned that is was two years ago that he, I, and Bendis had met to discuss working together on a Marvel project that fell through.

I saw a lot of fans and store owners that I have met in other contries. Was good to see them again. Ashley Wood brought by his new art book- UNO FANTA which looks great.

Clay Moore and I had a great time signing the Kabuki action figures that were being GIVEN AWAY to convention goers.

Andy Lee had a great con. There is a ton of other stuff that I'll mentione next time.

But the energy at the con was great. I'm really happy to see my readers so energized and to see my long time artist friends doing so well for themselves and finding thier place in this medium!

After Clay and I were done signing at the Diamond booth, I had a great discussion about the next wave of Kabuki action figures which will be distributed my Diamond Select.

Scarab will definitely be next. Then Siamese. We talked at length about the details and things are going great.

Diamond Select is currently producing the full scale Kabuki Sickle replica. I'm looking forward to showing you the designs on this.

I also had a lot of fun speaking at both Image and Marvel Knight panels. The crowds that showed up were a delight.

This was pretty funny. Dave sent Mark and Mike (the indy film makers in the documentary called AMERICAN MOVIE) to to the Comicon. It was hilarious to see on Dave's show the same scenes that I saw first hand last week.

And if you haven't seen AMERICAN MOVIE, rent it. I was thoroughly entertained. These two guys work their but off to realize thier dreams. Regardless of the subject matter, they are really doing the best they can. It is a heartwarming film. I really appreciated them. I'm glad they are making it for themselves.

Can't wait to get my hands on those figures. The Samiese figures will be a two pack right? Guess I'll have to change my plans on making the Spawn Samuria Lotus figure into Tiger Lily instead of Scarab(which I had planned on customing)
Later,

Bryan Goff

The Siamese figures will be a 2 pak!