Dick Tracy was also one of the last big pictures where we were still doing matte paintings on glass. The whole movie had the Chester Gould look—flat colors, almost like the comic strip had come to life. The matte paintings were a big part of making that work.

Harrison Ellenshaw had been brought in as visual effects producer after the budget for the matte paintings got badly out of whack, and the production needed someone with the experience to bring things back under control. Harrison was the right person for that. He wanted another seasoned matte artist on the team, and he thought of me. I was super happy to get his call. I’d worked with Harrison at Disney before, and it had been one of the most instructive periods of my career. Harrison had a terrific eye, and he could be tough when it was needed. I learned a lot from him the first time around. The chance to go back to Disney and work alongside him again was one of the main reasons I said “yes” as quickly as I did.

When I flew out to Los Angeles, the production was already in full swing. I was set up in an apartment and given a rental car, which I thought was generous, though as it turned out, the car was less a perk than a necessity. The apartment was only a few blocks from the studio, and on my first morning, I decided to simply walk. I nearly got hit by a car before I’d gone half a block. The apartment complex, it became immediately clear, had been designed with absolutely no provision for pedestrians. There were no sidewalks. Apparently, the architects had assumed nobody in Los Angeles would ever walk anywhere. After that, I drove the few blocks to the studio like everyone else.

David working on Dick Tracy.

By the time I arrived, the production was already under pressure, with double shifts in our department. The release date was getting closer, and the visual effects were behind schedule.

I managed to embarrass myself pretty badly one day when I was introduced to director Rupert Hitzig, who was touring the Disney matte department. We got to talking, and I mentioned I lived in Hoboken, New Jersey. I told him a lot of movies had been filmed there, and that just down the block from my home, they’d shot a terrible movie starring Brooke Shields called Backstreet Dreams. Hitzig gave me a polite little smile and said he knew that movie quite well as he’d directed it.

Not my finest moment.

I have told this before, but I wanted to include it in the context of working on Dick Tracy. One of my favorite stories from the picture is only funny because we survived it. Warren Beatty decided to change all of the signs visible in the matte paintings, making every branded sign generic. The “Wonderful Bread” sign became “White Bread.” “Ohio Franks” became “Delicious Franks.” Warren had made up his mind and wanted it to be done. What he didn’t understand was what changing a sign on a glass matte painting actually entailed. The problem was that these were paintings on glass. They weren't digital files where somebody could change the lettering and hit render. If you changed a sign, we had to repaint the glass and photograph the whole thing again. There were a lot of signs.

The producers explained that doing what he was asking would set the visual effects back by months on a film that was already over budget and running late. Warren listened and said he wanted the signs changed anyway. That led to a lot of back-and-forth between Beatty’s people and the Disney producers. Eventually, they worked out a compromise. We would repaint and re-photograph only the largest, most prominent signs and leave the smaller background signage as was. It was still a huge amount of extra work, and we had to do it in a hurry. By the time we were finished, the streets of Dick Tracy were full of hotels and hot-dog stands with wonderfully generic names.

For the first book, I chose to paint the interior illustrations in gouache. I use gouache all the time, but these took me longer than I expected. The problem was that I was treating every little illustration like a tiny masterpiece, and there simply wasn’t time for that.

After seeing how long the first batch took, Don Munson, the art director, suggested that I switch to marker for the next book. Marker was much faster, and I liked the graphic quality I was getting from it. I loved working in gouache, but there was no way I could keep working that slowly and get the rest of the books done. I’m still proud of those first illustrations. You can see the extra time in them. You can see the difference in the originals. The images have more depth to them, and there was a lot that disappeared when they were printed. A lot of the subtle values and little shifts in tone just disappeared in the printing.

That’s why I wanted to show the originals here. They look quite a bit better than they did in the books. The one of Indy fighting the alligator is still a favorite of mine. Anyway, here they all are.

A large part of that was due to the people I worked with, especially Harrison Ellenshaw, who ran the matte department. He was a terrific mentor, and I learned a lot about painting just by being around him and watching how he approached his work.

One thing I learned on that picture had nothing to do with painting. It was something I didn’t really understand until later. I learned quickly that having a great time making a movie doesn’t mean you’re going to end up with a great movie. I was reminded of this recently when I heard actor Alfred Molina say essentially the same thing. Some of the projects he enjoyed the most didn’t turn out particularly well, while others that were difficult or even miserable to work on ended up being excellent. When you’re in the middle of it, you really have no idea how it’s going to turn out.

In addition to my work on the film, I created several pieces of artwork to promote it. The most notable was the cover for Cinefantastique.Fred Clarke, the publisher, gave me an unusual assignment. He wanted the painting to work as a wraparound cover, but also as a poster that could be pulled out and given to readers. Since part of the painting disappeared around the back of the magazine, most of the punch had to be on the front. That was what people were going to see on the newsstand.

I also had the opportunity to do a cover for my hero Jim Steranko’s magazine, Prevue. In that case, Steranko himself designed the layout for my painting, which thrilled me.

Beyond those, I painted a cover for Questar magazine.

I also did a piece commissioned by the Walt Disney promotional department, though where that one ultimately appeared, I’m not sure.

When I first came to work at Disney on The Black Hole, I was very green. The experience turned out to be an education in film production from the ground up. Harrison brought me onto the matte department before the production had fully ramped up, which gave me a valuable window to learn the craft. During that time, I was able to work on another Disney feature, The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again.

That was where I really started learning how the stuff worked. I learned to paint on glass and started getting into the technical side of it, including the Cinex strip test used to determine the proper exposure so that a glass painting would match seamlessly with the live-action plate.

While things were still relatively quiet, Harrison encouraged me to roam the Disney lot. Harrison told me I could wander around the lot, so I did. I poked my nose into different departments and watched what they were doing. I learned a hell of a lot just by meandering around. By the time The Black Hole was fully underway, I felt much more at home at the studio.

I had the chance to meet many of the actors, including Anthony Perkins, Robert Forster, Maximilian Schell, Ernest Borgnine, and Joseph Bottoms. I had just seen Perkins in Remember My Name, and when I complimented him on his performance, he seemed genuinely pleased that someone recognized his work outside of Psycho. Joseph Bottoms would sometimes hide out in the matte department to escape the brutal heat of the Los Angeles summer, so I ended up getting to know him a bit better than the others.

Then there was the time I backed into Ernest Borgnine and knocked him flat. I was walking backward without looking and suddenly there he was. Fortunately, he was incredibly gracious about it and didn't have me thrown off the set. I’ve had a soft spot for him ever since.

The black hole effect was actually pretty simple. Oil-based paint was poured into a large water tank with light sources all around the circular, transparent tank, with an outboard boat motor at the bottom used to create the swirling motion. The effect was filmed using a high-speed camera rented from NASA. Today, digital cameras can capture high-speed footage with relative ease. This was all shot on film, of course, so getting enough light was a huge problem. The amount of light they needed was crazy.

The shoot was supervised by Peter Ellenshaw (Harrison’s father) and Art Cruickshank, who were positioned high above the tank on a camera crane. Powerful lights surrounded the setup, so the heat on that crane was intense. At one point, Art actually passed out from the heat and fell. Fortunately, he didn’t fall into the tank and wasn’t seriously hurt. But watching a guy fall off a crane above a tank of swirling black paint was pretty damn scary.

I got to go to the premiere where I got to meet, shake hands and talk to Ronald Reagan. This was before he was president, but I was struck by how handsome he was. He was like someone from another universe. I still didn’t vote for him either time.

I was convinced the movie was going to be a masterpiece. After all, I was working on it. Then I saw the finished picture at the premiere and, well, there went that theory. It was not a very good film. It has since become something of a cult classic, and even has a Facebook page devoted to it: www.facebook.com/groups/61035896393. So in spite of my opinion, it has its admirers.

I ended up painting more than a hundred matte shots on the show, and I’m still proud of that work. The people at Disney must have been pleased as well, because when Harrison left to set up the matte department at ILM, they asked me to take over. What I hadn’t anticipated was how different the job would be. Being a department head meant meetings and a shift away from actually making images. I’ve never been more appreciative of what Harrison did! I’ve always been the kind of person who would rather do the work than discussing how it ought to be done, and I found that adjustment difficult. I lasted a year or two before I waved the white flag and went back to freelance illustration full time, where the meetings were shorter and usually held with myself.

Every now and then I wish I’d had more of a knack for supervising. A good supervisor like Harrison is essential, giving direction and keeping everyone moving. Without that, even the most talented artist can end up like a bee without a queen, busy and slightly confused about what they’re supposed to be doing. I was always happy being one of the worker bees. Turns out running the hive is a different job entirely.

For a long time, putting a nude on the wall where everybody could see it wasn’t respectable. If you were rich, there was an easy solution. Have an artist paint you a nude, then stash it away in a room where the uninvited won’t stumble in and have their delicate sensibilities disturbed. In Spain they even had a name for these private rooms: salas reservadas. Basically, a room where the respectable people could keep the paintings they didn’t want the rest of the household—or their wives—seeing.

Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World is probably the most famous example of a painting that was made for that kind of private viewing. It was commissioned by a wealthy diplomat to become part of his collection of nudes. The painting is extremely graphic, so I’m not going to include it here. If you’re curious, Google it. Just don’t have the kids around when you do.

I’ve never been a huge Courbet fan, but I think The Origin of the World is a terrific painting. It’s direct and doesn’t make any excuses for what it is.

Going way back, Titian painted Venus of Urbino, which I saw in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. I’d seen reproductions of it, but seeing the actual painting made me see why artists drool over Titian’s flesh tones. I was blown away by the subtle color changes he used to turn the form. I don’t love everything Titian did, but this one is a triumph.

Manet’s Olympia was a direct reaction to Titian’s depiction of a woman. This isn’t some idealized goddess lounging around waiting to be admired. Olympia looks right back at you. She knows you’re there. When Olympia was first exhibited, it caused a tremendous uproar. People were apparently so worked up about it that guards had to be stationed around the painting to keep visitors from attacking it. We forget how seriously people once took paintings.

There are plenty of great painters whose nudes leave me cold. Rubens is the first one that comes to mind. I admire his work a lot, but I never liked his women. They’re a little too fleshy for my taste. When it comes to Rubens, I’d take his action paintings over his nudes any day. I like his scenes with people fighting, horses going crazy and bodies twisting around each other.

Rembrandt is another one where I love the artist but don’t particularly care for the nudes. Bathsheba at Her Bath just doesn’t do much for me. Rembrandt could paint almost anything. His faces, his hands, his old people, his self-portraits, I love all of that. But painting nudes wasn’t his strong suit. I’m sure Rembrandt isn’t losing any sleep over my opinion.

Getting to nudes that I really like, first comes Ingres, who painted a number of those exotic harem scenes that were super popular at that time. My favorite is La Grande Odalisque. It has been criticized for years because Ingres took some serious liberties with the anatomy. The proportions are stretched and the back is too long. I don’t care. I love the painting. Ingres wasn’t trying to win an anatomy contest. He was after elegance. Sensuality. An impossible kind of beauty.

Diego Velazquez’s The Rokeby Venus is a stunning painting in the National Gallery in London. Velazquez probably did a lot more female nudes, but this is the only one to survive. He could paint a king, a dwarf, a dog, a dress, or a room of people. Velazquez is hard to beat painting anything, but this makes me wish history had saved more of his paintings. Of all the painters I’d like to see more nudes from, Velázquez is number one.

My favorite contemporary painter, Steven Assael, did his own take on The Rokeby Venus. He did it as a demo in Chicago, and brought it back for display in his studio. Whenever I saw the painting, it reminded me of something. It finally clicked: Velázquez. The shape of the back, that razor-sharp line across the top of the figure, and especially the mirror. Once I realized what Steven was referencing, the painting became even more interesting to me. I love that kind of thing. You can look at the painting and enjoy it without knowing where it came from. Then you recognize the reference and suddenly the Velázquez is sitting there underneath the Assael. If you don’t know Assael’s work, you should. He has a web site: www.stevenassael.com The pictures on the site don’t do the paintings justice. In person they seem to glow.

A few more come to mind. I can’t leave John Waterhouse out. The Lady of Shalott is one of my favorite paintings in the world, and Hylas and the Nymphs gives you a pretty good idea of what he could do with the figure. Waterhouse is usually lumped in with the Pre-Raphaelites, although he wasn’t actually a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. When you are in London, you can visit Waterhouse’s studio. I love seeing the places where these guys actually lived and worked. You can stand in a room where a painter you’ve admired actually worked, and somehow that makes the whole thing more real. Information about Waterhouse can be found at: johnwilliamwaterhouse.com.

No discussion of nudes can go by without mentioning William-Adolphe Bouguereau. It seems like every other painting by him had nudity. But when you do it that well, I guess you just keep on doing it. You can argue about whether his paintings are too polished or too academic, but technically, the guy was a monster.

Alexandre Cabanel was roughly Bouguereau’s contemporary, and his The Birth of Venus, which is in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, is another knockout. Cabanel was a little more theatrical than Bouguereau. The Birth of Venus is almost ridiculously beautiful, and I mean that as a compliment.

There were also quite a few painters in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s who did nudes on the side, usually for private clients. Gil Elvgren is a good example. He made his name painting the kind of “girly” pinups that showed up on calendars and advertisements, but if somebody wanted a nude, he was happy to paint one. There were plenty of illustrators who did this sort of thing. Elvgren is just one example. He could paint the wholesome calendar girl for a client and then turn around and paint something somewhat less wholesome for a private collector.

Andrew Loomis is another favorite of mine.

Most people know him now because of his books on drawing and illustration, Creative Illustration, Fun With a Pencil, Drawing the Head and Hands, and Figure Drawing for all It’s Worth. His books have influenced generations of artists. All his books are worth reading, but I re-read Creative Illustration in particular every few years. I wore my original copy out, and bought a new one when it was re-published.I think it is the best book ever written about illustration, and relevant no matter what medium you work in, oil, acrylics or digital.

And finally here is Earl Moran, who specialized in glamor pictures, but spent his retirement years painting some amazing nudes.I loved how he mixed loose, almost abstract passages with very controlled, realistic painting. He gives you a very realistic figure, but sets it against a background that is just dabs of bright color. Even the fabric she is sitting on is very loosely rendered.

Now I’m looking at the list and realizing how many names I left out. Botticelli, Boucher, Leighton, Alma-Tadema, Collier, Gérôme, Giorgione, Renoir, Gauguin… I could keep going all day. I’m sure somebody is going to remind me of a painter I should have included. Good. That’s half the fun of making lists like this. I’m always on the lookout for a painter to fall in love with.

At both schools I watched colleagues who meant well pull students aside to tell them they had no business being in our program. They urged them to reconsider their path. I understood why they did it. They thought they were doing the kid a solid by telling them the truth before they wasted years. But I never believed that, because a teacher can’t tell the future.

I never felt qualified to make that call. A student could look completely lost one semester and then something would click. I’ve seen a student who seemed to be getting absolutely nothing from my class, who produces work that is terrible, and then something shifts. Something gets through. Then the student who looked hopeless goes on to do something fantastic.

I didn’t want to be the guy who told a student to quit a week before that breakthrough. A kid doesn’t always show much talent at the beginning. Sometimes they just need more time. Mostly, they need somebody not telling them to give up.

I’ve had students I wasn’t sure were absorbing the material from my class come up to me years later and thank me for everything they learned. Those conversations meant a lot to me because, at the time, I wasn’t sure they were getting anything from me. Apparently they were.

That was one of the things I believed most strongly about teaching—I just didn’t know. I couldn’t know what a student was going to become. Sometimes they were a lot closer to becoming a terrific artist than I suspected. And if I didn’t know, then my job was to teach them what I had learned in my career, and give them enough room to figure out the rest.

Jim once told me he thought the essence of his style was his ability to “make the ugly beautiful.” I told him I thought that was wrong, that what makes him unique is that he’s one of the smartest artists ever to work in comics. Steranko is one smart cookie with an amazing grasp of comic, art, and film history. Jim didn’t like that. Being smart is for pussies. He’d rather think of himself as tough.

That’s the dichotomy of Steranko’s work. He always wants to put himself forward as a tough guy with guns, broads, and brawls, but he just can’t help being brilliant. Steranko’s politics are diametrically opposed to mine. I’d describe myself as a liberal with a full-blown case of Trump derangement syndrome, while Jim’s a Trump supporter who thinks guys like me are lily-livered weaklings. But like a lot of fans, I love Jim’s work so much that I disconnect it from the views I disagree with.

When I was young, Steranko’s work came into my life as a revelation. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate how much other artists influenced Jim. His work never looked like anyone else’s. He was a magpie of sorts, taking from a lot of different sources and then, through the alchemy of his talent, making it uniquely his own.

Jim had several influences, but one of the primary ones was Jack Kirby. He took Kirby’s figure dynamics and made them his own. In the early issues of Agent of SHIELD, Steranko worked over Kirby’s layouts, since Marvel didn’t trust him to do the book on his own yet.

It was a strange combination of talents as the Kirby layouts actually seemed to restrain Steranko’s instincts. The work got noticeably better once they let him do it all himself.

The next influence on Jim was Wally Wood, particularly in his approach to technology. Wood used a circular motif over and over (Dynamo’s belt is a good example), and Jim borrowed it. Wood also liked to fill his panels with walls of machinery, which Steranko adapted in his own way.

Another major influence worth mentioning is Will Eisner. Steranko’s inking always reminded me of Eisner’s work, and his fascination with unconventional layouts echoes Eisner’s as well.

A less obvious influence is Alex Toth. Where Kirby and Wood gave Steranko his dynamism and his machinery, Toth gave Jim the confidence to let a black shape simply be a shadow rather than rendering every form. You see it in how Steranko knows when to stop.

Jim constantly references film noir with his lighting, recalling those films, and he seems to have a remarkable grasp of film history. Part of what sets Steranko apart from his contemporaries is his hard, directional lighting.

His pages carry a lot of black, and not just as spotting the way Kirby used it. Kirby never lit a scene as directionally as Steranko did. Kirby’s blacks were spotted across the page to balance it out and were often applied to figures that would read without them. Steranko’s blacks describe a light source. There’s a single key light implied, and everything else is falloff. You can feel Jim thinking in terms of cinematic lighting, not just ink.

That single-source logic is also why his women look the way they do. It’s the specific kind of glamour you get from 1940s portrait photography and studio lighting, where a face is built out of one strong light and a fill, with everything else falling into shadow to flatter the bone structure. Steranko draws women the way George Hurrell photographed them.

After Steranko’s all-too-brief time in comics, he turned his attention to cover art, where he again produced groundbreaking work. Very few comic artists are also wonderful painters, but I would put Steranko alongside John Buscema and Frazetta. Once again, you can see influences on Steranko’s painting, most notably the pulp artists of the 40’s and 50’s like Norman Saunders and Rafael DeSoto, but there is no missing the fact that the cover is a Steranko. Steranko wasn’t just a good painter; he was also a great designer.

Put it all together, and you get the dichotomy I started with. The guns-and-broads stuff is real. As far as I know, Jim means it, and he’d probably rather I stopped there. But underneath the tough-guy surface is a guy who absorbed Kirby’s anatomy, Wood’s machinery, Eisner’s page design, Toth’s restraint, and a hundred years of film lighting, and fused all of it into something that doesn’t look like anyone else’s work. He can call it “making the ugly beautiful” if he wants. I think it’s just him being a genius who’d rather not admit it.

The next year, I stepped things up a bit. I painted us in front of a fireplace, with the cats stuffed into Christmas stockings. This was right around the advent of Photoshop, so no actual cats were crammed into stockings in the making of that image. I also included Orson, along with Cathe’s favorite cats Agatha and Emily, framed above the mantel like honored ancestors.

The following year, we went to Macy’s and had our photo taken with Santa. Of course, I added the cats to the scene through the magic of Photoshop. That was one of the early moments where I realized just how much freedom the digital tools were going to give me.

The next card marked our first full-color effort. I painted us caroling together with the cats. One of my favorite details is Annie, our black cat with the white bib and muzzle, belting it out like she’s singing for the ages.

In 2001, I did a portrait of Cathe and me standing in front of our home. Around that time, our cat Mouse had recently passed over the rainbow bridge, so I gave her a small halo. It was a way of keeping her with us.

I always tried to tie the card into whatever was happening in our lives at the time. In 2002, after I became interested in yoga, I made a yoga-themed Christmas card. Gagan and Reetu, who owned and ran our yoga studio, appear on the left, and I put Henry up on Cathe’s shoulders, showing off.

In 2003, I went down the rabbit hole of 3-D work and created an anaglyph holiday card. I even mailed red-and-blue glasses along with each card so people could see the effect properly.

In 2004, I didn’t mail everyone a card, but I created an animation of me, Cathe and the cats dancing for people to use as a holiday screen saver. That was the first year we had Jackson, and he was a tiny, scrawny little kitten. He turned into a wonderful cat.

Around the time I started working on the Animorphs series, I did a card inspired by that concept, depicting myself morphing into our cat Henry, and Cathe morphing into Annie. That one felt especially personal, since it blended my professional work directly into our holiday tradition.

One of my favorites came during the Bush administration. I gathered 210 photographs of friends and family and placed them on the cover with the line “Here’s 210 reasons why we pray for peace…” When you opened the card, there was an image of the Earth with a magnifying glass and the continuation “…and 6,525,486,603 more.” At the time, I thought George Bush was about as bad as it could get. Little did I know what was coming years later.

We were watching the excellent George C. Scott version of Dickens A Christmas Carol when I got this idea. It showcased New York City, with a subway stop behind us. That is Carnegie Hall on the left.

I did the Mars Christmas card when I was commissioned to do a Mars exploration piece for National Geographic. I just swapped the faces out for me, Cathe and the cats. And of course added the tree.

Here are 4 more cards I don’t have stories about. I am not sure what possessed me to do a card with me skiing—I haven’t ever skied in my life!

Each year they cards got more and more elaborate and in the end I was spending as much time as creating a book cover. The last holiday card I got printed up and send through the mail was in 2009. On the front, Cathe and I stand in front of a grand mansion, proudly displaying our “wealth.” When you open the card, the wider view reveals everything falling apart around us. I particularly like Santa’s sleigh on fire.

That final printed card was inspired by Al Jaffee’s fold-ins from Mad Magazine. As a kid, I was amazed by his ingenuity. Those fold-ins were the first thing I turned to whenever a new issue of Mad arrived.

I called all of these cards a “Spot Orson on the Cover” production. Even though she wasn’t alive to be featured on the cards, I made sure she was hidden somewhere on all the cards except the first one. Sometimes she is extremely hard to find, but she is always there.

Card back

Here is a time lapse animation of us trimming the holiday tree.

In 2011 we did one more card that we e-mailed only, giving up on printing and mailing them out. It was after we got back from a vacation in China where we took this picture in front of a statue.

Looking back at these cards now, there’s a bittersweet quality to them. Year by year, you can see us getting older, our cats getting older, and us adopting new cats. But you can also see the life we built together, one holiday at a time, surrounded by cats.

I usually prefer comic artists who ink their own work. There are fewer and fewer of them, mostly for economic reasons. A top-tier penciler could make far more money by handing off pages to an inker and moving on to the next job. Inking your own work slows you down. Still, some artists insisted on doing it themselves.

One of the best examples is Joe Kubert. My suspicion is that Kubert inked a lot of his own work because it allowed him to work looser. His pencils were often preliminary, more of a roadmap than a finished drawing, and he would essentially finish the work during the inking process.

Another one of my favorites is my art school roommate, Paul Chadwick.

Paul has inked about 90% of his own work, and it shows. His style is so idiosyncratic, so dependent on the particular weight and character of his line, that when anyone else inks him, something essential gets lost. His drawings are still there, but part of Paul isn’t.

That same commitment to a personal line shows up in artists like Alex Toth, Mark Schultz, and Jim Aparo. These are artists who understood that inking isn’t just a finishing step, it’s half the drawing.

I think John Buscema was one of the greatest artists ever to work in comics. Marvel, however, often felt his pages were too “simple,” and brought in inkers to add “detail.” As a consequence, he inked only a small percentage of his work. The ironic thing is that those pages are highly sought after by collectors, while the many pages that were inked by other artists are no where near as valuable. Buscema’s work was like haiku, every line perfect. Adding more “stuff” to it made it worse, not better.

All that said, there are exceptions, artists whose work I actually prefer when inked by someone else. The first one that comes to mind is Neal Adams. He had the same inker, Dick Giordono, for many years, and I preferred what he did with Neal’s work over when Neal inked himself. Neal had other good inkers, like Tom Palmer, but Dick was the perfect match to his style.

Jack Kirby inked none of his work (If anyone has example of Jack’s inking, I would love to be proven wrong). Jack had an inker, Vince Colletta, who has come in for a lot of abuse. This is heresy to say in the artistic community, but I liked Colletta’s work.

Colletta inks over Kirby

He was the go-to inker when you had a tight deadline, and sometimes he would simplify Jack’s panels, but I think he did a great job on Jack’s work on Thor, the early issues of Kamandi, New Gods and The Demon .

Vince Colletta

After Jack moved to DC, he got Mike Royer to ink his work exactly as he drew it, and it made me missed the decisions Colletta made. I know Royer didn’t work with Kirby in his prime, but some of those pages in the late Kamandi, New Gods and The Demon were dreadful.

Royer inks

Most of Kirby’s work on the Fantastic Four was inked by Joe Sinnott. Sinnott’s work was top shelf, no matter what artist he worked over. If there was one inker who made any artist better, it was Sinnott.

Another artist who inked almost none of this work was Jim Steranko. Steranko never considered himself to be a good inker, and preferred his work inked by Frank Giacoia.

Steranko inks

I like Giacoia’s work, but the few pieces Steranko inked himself were fantastic. I wished he did a lot more.

In the end, it all comes down to authorship. Comics are a collaborative medium by necessity, but when an artist pencils and inks their own work, there’s a unity of vision that’s hard to replicate. Every line comes from the same hand.

You can feel the difference. It’s there on the page, even if you can’t quite articulate it.

When I told my students that the original version had only one undo and one layer, they looked at me in horror. Layers didn’t arrive until version 3 in 1994.

Before that, everything happened on a single layer, so any mistake could cost hours of work. Today artists, including me, routinely use hundreds of layers and rely on seemingly unlimited undos.

Early on, I was part of the Photoshop beta team. Every year, I submitted the same four suggestions. Each time, the team responded, “Those are great ideas.” Then the new version would ship, and none of them would be included.

Here are those four ideas:

1. I work with a Wacom tablet, and I’ve always wished for a “reverse” checkbox on all brush controls. For example, I’d like to tie scatter to pen tilt so that when the pen is upright there’s no scatter, and when it’s tilted, the scatter increases. Currently, it works the opposite way. The same would apply to opacity: with “reverse” checked, a light touch could produce full opacity, and heavier pressure would reduce it. That may sound counterintuitive, but it would open up a lot of expressive control.

2. Painting with a sampled image is awkward. I wish you could simply Option-drag to select an area of an image and load it into the brush as a complete sample. Then, when you resize the brush, the entire sample would scale proportionally. As it works now, changing brush size crops into the sample or adds empty space around it, which doesn’t make intuitive sense. Artists think in terms of scaling an image, not slicing it apart.

3. I’ve often wanted something like an “image hose” brush. You could load multiple image samples, say ten, and the brush would randomly cycle through them as you paint. I ran into this while doing a matte painting that required thousands of tiny houses. Being able to paint a variety of houses randomly would have saved days of work.

4. In the Brush Tip Shape settings, I wish you could squash the brush from all four sides, not just top and bottom. Right now, you can make a brush fatter, but not thinner in the perpendicular direction without rotating it. The workaround, rotating the brush 90 degrees, adjusting it, then rotating it back, is clumsy. Direct control on both axes would be much more intuitive.

I always thought these were solid, practical ideas, so I was baffled that they were never implemented. My friend Brian Maffitt offered an explanation, when Photoshop releases a new version, they want to promote new features. They don’t want to say, “We finally fixed an old problem.” All of my suggestions involved improving or correcting existing tools, not adding flashy new ones.

That may explain why Photoshop continues to accumulate features no one asked for, while issues that artists deal with every day remain unresolved.

I assume this stems from my behavior at past sci-fi conventions, combined with a Substack post I wrote. Apparently I managed to cross some invisible line between being an annoying guy with opinions to being an actual threat to Scientology.

L. Ron Hubbard’s writings list classic examples of Suppressive Persons—Adolf Hitler, Napoleon Bonaparte and anyone who criticizes Scientology. It’s a weird list. Putting Hitler and Napoleon in the same category as someone who criticizes Scientology is like making a list of “lawbreakers” and putting murderers, child molesters, and jaywalkers on it. Technically, I suppose the definition works. But one of the three really doesn’t belong on that list.

Now I’m on that list. I find it hilarious that my supposedly dangerous influence is now great enough that Scientologists have been instructed to stay away from me. Most of the time, I’m pretty aware that my opinions don't have much impact on anything. I write about anything that concerns me—old age, art, illustration, movies, plays, and my career. Sometimes someone agrees, occasionally someone gets annoyed, but mostly people read it and move on with their day.

Yet somehow Scientology has decided that my commentary is dangerous. Well, hell, talk about an ego boost. I'd like to thank the Church for finally recognizing the terrifying influence I apparently have. So, thanks to David Miscavige, Tom Cruise, and whoever decided I needed to be declared an SP.

I feel super important. Of the honors I've received, this one is certainly the strangest.

I’ve love Alan’s writing. I read all of his books first and only later went back to watch the episodes they were based on. It didn’t take long to realize that his novelizations were often better than the source material. That was often the case with Alan’s work. He had a talent for expanding on what was there by adding background and story elements that didn’t exist in the original versions. A good example is his novelization of The Black Hole, a film I worked on. The publisher, Judy-Lynn del Rey, once told me she thought Alan’s book was better than the movie. After reading it myself, I had to agree. It even made me wonder why we hadn’t simply based the film on his novelization. It would have made for a much better movie.

When I was assigned the Star Trek covers, I was told I had to use the original design of the Enterprise. If you’ve watched the original series recently, you’ll notice that the ship has almost no surface detail. Later versions were covered in “nurnies” and paneling to give them a greater sense of scale, but the original is relatively smooth and simple.

Rather than fight that limitation, I decided to work with it. I made the Enterprise smaller in my compositions and focused instead on creating large, dramatic environments around it. That approach helped offset the simplicity of the ship and gave the covers a stronger sense of spectacle. The format of the paintings also presented a challenge. I typically work at a 2:3 ratio—14 inches wide by 21 inches tall. These covers, however, were designed as narrow vertical strips, measuring 21 inches tall by just 9 inches wide, roughly a 1:2.2 ratio. It was an unusual proportion, but one that ultimately made me think differently about composition.

One of the headaches of painting book covers is dealing with the top third of the image as the area that will inevitably be covered by type. Something still has to exist there, but it can’t be essential, since it will ultimately disappear beneath the title and author’s name. Different artists have handled this problem differently. Jeffrey Catherine Jones would sometimes cut off the top of his paintings after they were returned. Ken Kelly took a more practical approach. He would fully paint the top, then cover it with wax paper so he wouldn’t accidentally disturb it while working on the rest. If you ignored the issue altogether, the composition could feel unbalanced, with all of the important elements pushed into the lower two-thirds of the image.

The “strip” format for the Trek paintings avoided that. There would still be type over the top of the painting, but most of the important information would be on the other, non-painting part of the cover.

Alan wrote short books since they were novelizations of television episodes, and Ballentine/delRey decided to gang three of the books together to make a bigger book in the end.

I wasn’t thrilled about that since my paintings appeared about the size of postage stamps, but at least the original, slim volumes were still available.

While working on these covers, I looked closely at the work of one of my artistic heroes, Robert McCall. Whenever I start to feel pessimistic about the future, I immerse myself in his paintings. McCall was an eternal optimist. His vision of the future, filled with flying cars and vast, floating megastructures, is one I’d much rather live in.

He has 3 books of his work available, although some are out of print and will require an eBay purchase. All of them are all well worth checking out.

What makes John particularly unusual within the science fiction community is that he reportedly doesn’t enjoy reading science fiction very much. While many illustrators, like myself, will carefully read through an entire manuscript, scouring the pages for a scene worth bringing to life visually, John almost never reads the books he illustrates. Instead, he simply paints, and his agent, Alison Eldred, finds books that will fit around the paintings John has already created. Luckily, his paintings are generic enough that they can work on a lot of books.

John’s work immediately calls to mind the paintings of J.M.W. Turner, albeit transported into the vastness of space. All of his spacecraft feel genuinely, overwhelmingly large. Crucially, he achieves this without resorting to the tricks many other artists rely on, such as thousands of tiny windows, intricate paneling, or densely packed mechanical detail. John relies almost entirely on atmosphere to convey a sense of scale. His paintings often appear loose and unlaboured, as though they came together quickly and effortlessly, yet they come as close to fine art as anything you will find in the science fiction genre. He has published a couple of collections of his work, one of which is simply titled Mass, which is a word that perfectly encapsulates the overwhelming sense of weight and scale that defines his paintings.

If Turner was the proto-impressionist of the sea, then John Harris is the proto-impressionist of space. Harris is the spiritual successor to Turner. Both were painters who used light and atmosphere to evoke feelings of awe before the infinite. Turner looked at the English Channel and felt it. Harris looks at the cosmos and does the same. Turner made a radical decision to simplify later in his career. He abandoned the painstaking task of rendering every intricate rigging line on a ship’s mast and instead focused on conveying the raw power of a scene, the heaving waves, the howling wind, the luminous, turbulent sky. When you stand before a Turner, you don’t find yourself admiring the technical accuracy of the vessel he painted. You feel the power and majesty of the sea itself. The ship almost becomes incidental.

Much the same is true of John Harris. He has shed the traditional visual vocabulary of science fiction spacecraft and gives you only the impression of the scene. In doing so, he communicates something far more powerful than detail ever could, the sheer, humbling enormity of space itself.

Frank Frazetta, one of my artistic gods, worked fast. I don’t think his paintings would have been better if he had taken longer. I just wish Frank had done more paintings. The world would be a better place with more Frazetta’s!!

Other artist talk about their technique with weirdly misplaced pride. I’ve heard artists proclaim, “I painted the entire piece with a single-hair brush,” as if that makes the painting better. My reaction is—why? What did a tiny brush do for you that a big brush couldn’t? Did it serve the making of the painting? There’s a tendency among artists to confuse difficulty with achievement . If something is harder to do, it must be better. A limitation can be useful in the creation of art, but only if it makes a work better rather than worse. Too often constraints become a performance, a way of signaling achievement rather than realizing it.

Peter Ellenshaw, one of my artist mentors, told me should work with the largest brush possible. At first, that idea seems silly. Larger brushes seem to take away control, and most artists spend years struggling to control, but that loss of control is the point. A large brush keeps you from hiding behind fussiness. Detail has a seductive quality. It gives you something to point to and say, “Look how much work I’ve done.” But detail can be a trap, as painting overloaded with detail often feels smaller.

That lesson extends beyond brush size to the tools themselves. There’s a reverence many artists have for pristine materials like new brushes with perfectly shaped tips. Some of the most interesting marks come from brushes that are worn down, splayed, and unpredictable. The kind of brushes most artist would throw away. These tools don’t behave perfectly, and that’s why they’re valuable. They introduce variation you didn’t plan, edges that feel alive rather than manufactured.

Artists like to talk about “happy accidents,” but accidents don’t just happen. They emerge when you allow a degree of unpredictability into your process and when you stop trying to control every outcome. A brand-new brush will do exactly what is expected. A worn-out one might do something better, or at least different.

A viewer doesn’t see how long a painting took, or what size brush was used, or whether the tools were new or worn. They don’t experience your struggle, they experience the result. A painting doesn’t care how it was made, and neither does anyone else.

The first few months of our relationship, I felt something I’d never experienced before. I was out of my mind in love with Cathe. It was the kind of love where if she’d asked me to step in front of a bus I would have. People talk about that mad rush in novels and movies, but it was new to me. I fell hard. I remember sitting in her apartment on the Upper West Side, her cats Agatha and Emily curled up beside me while I read through a manuscript. I felt a warm glow just from being there, waiting for her to come home from work.

Before Cathe, I was a complete workaholic, and a timid eater to boot. For an entire year I ate Salisbury steak TV dinners every night because they were fast and required no thought. Cathe pulled me out of that small life. I followed her lead into a much bigger world of new foods and new places. I started enjoying life instead of just getting through it.

I stopped working all the time. My first wife, Barbara, wondered why I hadn’t made those changes for her. She was right, I hadn’t. But there’s an exceptional magic in a new relationship, a force that reshaped me in ways I never saw coming. Cathe didn’t just enter my life. She changed it. She made me a better man. We’ve now been married 34 years, together for 40. It has been a lifetime of love and companionship.

We traveled the world together. We travelled to Scotland, Ireland, Peru, New Zealand, Spain, Italy, China, France, England, and Africa. Those journeys were part of the fabric of our lives, as we both loved to travel. But some of the memories I treasure most were far simpler. I remember sitting in our backyard on a hot summer early evening. There is a chessboard between us, two sour apple martinis sweating in the sun.

We didn’t share the same taste in everything. Cathe loves Cézanne and she never quite warmed to the neoclassical painters I admire like David and Ingres. We both love live theatre, but she leans toward straight drama. I’ve always had a soft spot for musicals. Like any married couple, we compromised, and now we see mostly straight dramas.

As she got older, Cathe developed Parkinson’s disease. After her diagnosis, she began to lose her memory. The first signs appeared during those backyard chess games. She had become a strong player, good enough that I had to pay attention. She would beat me now and then. Then, slowly, her game began to slip. At first it was subtle like a careless move. But over time she began making moves the pieces simply weren’t allowed to make. I told myself it was just aging. I wanted to believe that.

Finally, she stopped wanting to play chess at all.

Later, while traveling in Africa in 2024, I noticed something more troubling. Her speech would drift and sentences would tangle or trail off. She would lose her train of thought mid conversation and then not be able to continue. She already had the Parkinson’s diagnosis, so I assumed the memory issues were part of that. But a PET scan told a troubling tale. It was Alzheimer’s.

The following months and years have been the hardest of my life. Anyone who tells you this process is easy is lying. There’s nothing easy about watching the person you love slip away piece by piece. It demands patience I didn’t know I lacked, and strength I’m still not sure I possess. It has forced me to grow up in ways I hadn’t yet, to confront without illusion the nature of loving someone.

What I have learned from this is that love isn’t just wonderful adventures and easy companionship. It is about being there, especially when times are tough. I had the great times with her, now I am having the hard times as she changes before my eyes. I am learning to let go of her, as difficult as that is. When you have loved someone as much as I love Cathe, this ending is impossible to endure. What I want to do now is see her through this final phase with as much dignity and happiness as I can

I ended up doing three covers while living in L.A. One each for Rick James, The Commodores, and Edwin Starr. I never got to meet The Commodores, which was a disappointment, but I did meet both Edwin Starr and Rick James. Rick, in particular, made an impression. For his cover, I arranged a photo shoot so I could capture his likeness accurately. This was before the days of digital photography, so everything was shot on film. After the session, Rick handed over the transparencies for me to use as reference. They ended up sitting in my files for decades, essentially untouched. As far as I know, this may be the first time they’ve ever been seen since that shoot.

At the time, Rick was at the height of his fame—a larger-than-life figure surrounded by an entourage of hangers-on and groupies. He had that unmistakable mix of charisma and volatility that made him fascinating to be around. During the shoot, he offered to smoke marijuana with me and “rap” about the cover. Back then, I was pretty straight-laced, so I declined. I’ve regretted that decision ever since. Smoking dope with Rick James is one of those missed experiences that would have made for a much better story. Rick also became a cautionary tale. When I met him, he was a cauldron of creativity and energy, completely in his element. But years later, I saw what the lifestyle had done to him. The excess, the drugs, the hard living, it all adds up. It’s one thing to see someone at their peak, and another to see the long-term cost.

After Rick passed away, his estate emailed me asking if I would give them the transparencies for free. Since I owned the photos, I wrote back and asked what they were offering. I never heard from them again.

I still have the original painting for Bustin’ Out of L7, which I believe is the only painted album cover Rick ever had. Most of his covers were photographic, which makes this one something of an outlier. Because of that, I’ve always thought of it as a small piece of rock history, and I’ve held onto it, waiting for the right buyer to come along. https://www.ebay.com/itm/235113852233

My experience with Edwin Starr was memorable for a different reason. I met him at a recording session, and within moments managed to put my foot in my mouth. I asked him if he was a member of the group War. He wasn’t, of course—but he had recorded the hit song War (What Is It Good For?), which is what led to my confusion. When I asked the question, he looked genuinely stunned that I didn’t know who he was. In my defense, I wasn’t particularly familiar with his music. Still, it wasn’t my finest moment. It does raise an interesting question about how these assignments were made. The record company paired artists with illustrators based on style and portfolio, not musical taste. I’m not sure there’s a better system. Do you start by asking illustrators what kind of music they like? In this case, I knew The Commodores well, but not Edwin Starr. I did listen to some of his tracks while working on the painting that were provided by the label, but I never really connected with the music. The artwork itself came out pretty good!

On a side note, I just re-watched Rush Hour, and I had forgotten that Edwin Starr’s War plays a significant part in it. I have been a long time admirer of Jackie Chan, and Rush Hour is the best of his American movies. It was directed by Brett Ratner, who has proven himself to be a grade A, certifiable douche bag. One can only hope that directing Melania and being a slavish lickspittle to Donald Trump has put an end to his directing career. Having said that, the first Rush Hour (stay away from 2 and 3) is terrific, but a lot of that can be laid at the feet of the talents of Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker. Am I alone in thinking Tucker is funnier than Eddie Murphy, who he is often compared to?

I got the Edwin Starr gig on the basis of some of my work on Flesh Gordon. In fact, the album art was a direct lift from something I had done for the movie.

Edwin Starr

Flesh Gordon painting

When I got the call to do The Commodores Greatest Hits, I was genuinely excited. I loved their music and was hoping it might lead to meeting the group. Unfortunately, that never happened. Even more frustrating, I never got the original painting back.

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One of the last offers I got while living in Los Angeles was to do a cover for Molly Hatchet in the style of Boris Vallejo. I asked why they didn’t just get Boris to do it? They said they didn’t know that was possible, so I gave them Boris’s number. He did a cover for them that was much better than I ever would have done.

You can see a very disco video of Edwin Starr on YouTube here:

And Rick James here:

Years later, in 2002, Rick James performed at B.B. King’s on 42nd Street in New York, and I went to see him. By that point, after a stroke, time in prison for kidnapping and torture, and multiple attempts at recovery, he was only a shadow of the man I had met years earlier. The spark was still there, you could see flashes of it, but it was greatly diminished. He died two years later, in 2004, at just 56. Seeing him at both ends of that arc, from peak creativity to steep decline, left a lasting impression on me. It’s one thing to witness talent and success up close. It’s another to see what happens when the excesses finally catch up.

Ken Kesey wouldn’t even watch One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest because it was different from his novel. I always thought— why not just see it? The movie’s fantastic. His book didn’t vanish. Nobody went to his home and burned his copy. Stephen King hated Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining. Admittedly, Kubrick went off-book right and left. Years later Stephen King backed a version that stuck way closer to the novel… and when’s the last time anyone brought that one up? Being faithful doesn’t magically make something good.

Then there’s the whole Elon Musk thing, which honestly made me laugh. He had a problem with Lupita Nyong’o playing Helen of Troy, saying it wasn’t “historically accurate.” That’s a weird comment, considering The Odyssey is, you know, fiction. It’s hard not to feel like the “accuracy” argument is covering for a deeper prejudice. Let’s face it, for him, the only good movie is an all white movie. He’s probably the only person waiting for an all white version of Porgy and Bess.

Personally, I couldn’t care less what the cast looks like as long as they’re good, and Lupita is fantastic. There are exceptions, and I think of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. From a purely technical standpoint, it’s impressive. But you can’t separate it from what it is: straight-up Nazi propaganda. It’s probably Elon Musk‘s favorite film. But in general? If the movie works, it works.

The same debate shows up in painting. When Théodore Géricault exhibited The Raft of the Medusa, there was controversy over his decision to place a Black man at the apex of the composition. Today, it’s hard to feel the shock that decision provoked at the time, we’re simply too far removed from that moment. But the question still remains: does the painting lose anything if the man signaling on the raft was probably white? For me, the answer is no. Géricault wasn’t documenting an event like a journalist. He was shaping it to express something larger, about hope, about humanity, about who gets to embody both. Artists need to be freed from the shackles of historical accuracy, sometime to make a point, sometimes to make the composition better, and sometimes both.

A perfect example is Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware. It’s full of historical inaccuracies. The crossing actually happened at night. The boat isn’t right. Washington didn’t stand like that or he would have fallen into the water. Even the flag is wrong for the moment being depicted. And yet none of that matters. It’s a powerful image, bold, dramatic, and instantly recognizable. It’s become the defining visual of Washington.

Years later, Mort Künstler painted a version that aimed for greater historical accuracy. It’s carefully researched, and correct in ways Leutze’s painting isn’t. But it’s also far less memorable. It doesn’t have the same iconic power.

One of my favorite stories involves Stanley Kubrick while making 2001: A Space Odyssey. He strove to be as accurate as possible, but for one scene he ignored what the advisors were saying. One of the crew members challenged Kubrick, saying that what he was doing wasn’t technically accurate. Kubrick responded “Yes, but it must also be interesting.”

Artists should strive to be accurate as long as it serves the project, but if they need to violate accuracy to create something more in line with their creative vision, they must be free to do so. Accuracy has its place, but it isn’t the same thing as truth. Sometimes getting the facts “wrong” is exactly what allows a work to feel right.

John is seven years older, so when I was growing up he really seemed like a wise old sage. Of course, seven years seems like nothing now, but at the time I looked up to him as having an infinite well of life experience. One of the things I loved most about John as a kid is that he always took me seriously. Older people generally don’t listen to young people, but he seemed to genuinely value my opinion. That may or may not have been entirely real, but it didn’t matter. It was important to me.

Throughout my life, whenever I needed wise counsel or advice, I turned to John. He influenced me in more ways than I can recount. The deep discussions we had about spirituality probably had a lot to do with making me the atheist I am today.

John spent his senior year of high school as an exchange student living with family friends in Australia. On his way home, he took his time and saw the world, stopping in many countries and soaking in the local cultures. There was a stretch of many months where we weren’t entirely sure where John was. By the time he made it back to our hometown, he had seen more of the world than 99% of the people in Fort Collins. John no longer felt like just an American, he felt like a citizen of the world. In my hometown, the jingoistic “America is number one,” attitude was basically the only acceptable opinion, even if you’d never set foot in another country. John took a lot of abuse for holding an unpopular view, and that experience probably shaped him into the disruptive, contrarian person he remained for the rest of his life. He was never afraid to hold a position that went against the grain, and watching him do that liberated me to think for myself.

John did another thing for me that I’ll be forever grateful. Right after I married Cathleen, I wanted to buy a computer and make the switch to being a digital artist. At the time, computers were prohibitively expensive, but John loaned me the money to buy one anyway. That single act of generosity changed the course of my life.

John was also the first “hippie” I ever knew. I once brought him to my grade school after he got back from Australia so he could explain “youth culture” to my classmates. His hair wasn’t even that long. Having hair over your ears made you a radical back then in the age of buzz cuts.

John became a farmer, much to the disappointment of my mom. She had always seen John as a lawyer. He certainly had the smarts to do it, but he had an affinity with the land that took him out of pursuits my mother would have liked. He has farmed and ranched all these years, and still lives in Colorado. He no longer lives in my home town, but in southern Colorado.

John has always been very supportive of my desire to be an artist. He has had a number of my paintings hanging on the walls of his homes over the years. He still has a very early painting I did in art school for him of a farmer in his fields.

Whenever I visit his home in Southern Colorado, I am always stunned by the skies. Living just outside of New York, I rarely get to see uninterrupted skies. Where he lives the skies are so glorious they almost make me believe in a heavenly power. Almost.

Late in life he had some serious health issues, but I have taken advantage of FaceTime to stay in touch with him every week. It has been wonderful to reconnect with him, complete with video.

They needed an artist to design an urn that was central to the story. The film starred Nicolas Cage and Alfred Molina, and was directed by Jon Turteltaub. I read the screenplay, and could tell right from the jump the film was going to be a stinker—they’d kept very little of what made the original segment so special. Still, they made me a good offer, so I signed on.

Having worked in film before, I was prepared that there would be a lot of waiting around, but The Sorcerer’s Apprentice took it to a whole new level. I would make an appointment to see the production designer to show her my ideas, arrive on time, then sit on my ass for a couple of hours, waiting to be seen. I was getting paid, so in theory I should’ve just relaxed. But as the hours dragged on with no feedback and no clear direction, I got increasingly frustrated. The bigger problem was that I couldn’t get anything approved. They eventually started pushing me to begin painting the urn, but I told them I wouldn’t start until I had a design that they had said worked for the film. No one would say “yes” to anything. I was stuck in limbo, expected to move forward without any real guidance. Eventually, I’d had enough. I quit, and they brought in another artist to finish the job.

When you work in movies, as in any art form, you don’t know how something will come out until it’s finished. Projects that seem doomed can surprise you, and things that look great on paper can fall apart in execution. In movies especially, there are so many variables, actors, director, crew, places where things can go wrong. Would Godfather III have worked with Winona Ryder as Pacino’s daughter? Would Casablanca be a classic with Ronald Reagan as Rick? Lots of things have to go right to make a good movie. You never know what is going to be good or bad until it is finished.

One of the reasons I left Disney Studios to do paperback cover is that movies take a LONG time. With a book cover, I worked on it for a couple of weeks, and it was gone. Some turned out good, some turned out bad, but I hadn’t worked a huge part of my life on it. There’s another key difference in film, especially at the level I was working. The vision isn’t yours, it belongs to the director. I used to tell my students that it doesn’t matter how good your idea for a shot is, if it doesn’t serve the film, it doesn’t matter. Your individual contribution, no matter how strong, has to fit into the whole.

It wasn’t that way with a book cover. You had to deal with the art director and the publisher, but at least you were in charge of the final cover. Good, bad or indifferent, it was yours.

I never saw the The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, so I have no idea how the urn turned out.

In these stories the dead find themselves in hell having encounters with other historical figures while forming coalitions and becoming rivals. The central push of the series was that authors could send their least favorite public figures to hell and have them mingle with other shady personalities. One of my favorite stories featured Mary Baker Eddy who was the founder of Christian Science, which gives you an idea of the tone the series.

From an illustrator’s standpoint, the series was wonderful. It allowed me to dive into visuals of hell, which has a long history in Western art. I found myself thinking about the work of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, whose depictions of hell fascinate me.

Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights is one of the most astonishing paintings I have ever seen, especially its hell panel. The amount of detail is beyond description. Every inch of the surface is alive with figures engaged in weird, sometimes outlandish activity, suggesting stories.

Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death has a different vibe, but a similar craziness. It presents a vision of destruction populated by a myriad of figures, creating a scene of human behavior under horrible circumstances.

My wife and I had the opportunity to visit the Prado in Madrid, where I was able to see these two works in person. Reproductions didn’t prepare me for the experience, the scale, the way my eye kept finding new details each time I looked. It fundamentally changed my understanding of what those artists accomplished. Those paintings became a touchstone for me as I worked on the Heroes in Hell covers. I made a conscious effort to infuse a sense of that density by populating my compositions with multiple figures and small narrative moments. I wanted the covers to feel lived in, as though hell were a crowded environment filled with ongoing stories. I was aware of the limitations and demands of book cover illustration at the same time. These images had to read clearly and quickly, often at a small size. There needed to be a strong focus and a readable composition that would work on a bookstore shelf. I knew I would never capture the kind of devastating density seen in Bosch or Bruegel without sacrificing clarity.

I didn’t come close to achieving what those artists did. What I took from them was less about matching their level of detail and more about getting the feeling of their works. The Heroes in Hell covers was my attempt to balance the zeitgeist of their paintings with the realities of illustration.

As I look back, this series remains one of the most enjoyable I’ve worked on because it allowed me to draw on historical influences while applying them to a modern, impious, and highly imaginative context.

You can buy signed prints of any of my paintings, including the Heroes in Hell covers, here:

www.davidmattingly.com

On the other hand, Chris Foss got it exactly right. I really love his four covers for the series. He is one of the true groundbreakers in science fiction art. After Chris came on the scene, spaceships never looked the same again. He brought this incredible sense of mass and texture to his ships, and the whole genre shifted around him. I’ll confess that I may have borrowed a ship or two from Chris. I consider it a tribute.

Jim Baen approached me and asked whether I’d be interested in taking on the books. His idea was to consolidate the series into two volumes, the first two books together and the second two in another book. He wanted a single wraparound painting that would serve both books, with the front of the painting would be used as the cover for Volume One, and the back would become the cover for Volume Two. It was the sort of challenge I couldn’t turn down.

What made the timing particularly great was that this was the very first cover I worked on after returning from California, where I’d spent time working on Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy. That film had an extraordinary heightened visual language, bold colors, stylized cityscapes, that felt simultaneously real and completely theatrical.

I came home with all of that still rattling around in my head, and I was eager to find a place for it. If you look closely at the buildings in Volume One, you’ll notice they bear a more than passing resemblance to the matte paintings from Dick Tracy. That influence was completely intentional, and I think it gave the cityscape an energy that felt right for a story about cities that had literally taken flight.

You can buy signed prints of any of my paintings, including the Cities in Flight cover, here:

www.davidmattingly.com