Creator Spotlight: Mike Cavallaro on Comics, Coloring, and Making Them Tell You No

Mike Cavallaro

First, thanks for this chance to talk shop here, comics are my favorite subject, and thanks also to anyone taking the time to check out this discussion.

I've been a working cartoonist for over 30 years, I do—and have done—a lot of different things. I started as a colorist at Valiant Comics, Milestone, and DC in the 90s. I segued into storyboarding at MTV Animation working on Celebrity Deathmatch, then became a background painter on Codename: Kids Next Door for Cartoon Network. I worked on the pilot episode of The Venture Bros., painted backgrounds again on Batman: The Brave & The Bold for Warner Bros., and I was a background layout artist and prop designer on The Mike Tyson Mysteries for Adult Swim. Somewhere in there I segued back into comics because that's always been where my heart is. I did Parade (with Fireworks) on the webcomics site ACT-I-VATE, it was later published by Shadowline / Image Comics, and I received an Eisner Award nomination for that, which helped solidify my move back into comics. After that, I did a couple projects with the great J.M. DeMatteis, one of my all-time favorite writers, and around the same time I began what's become a long working relationship with Mark Siegel, the Editorial Director at First Second Books, where I've done most of my work over the last few years, including Free Speech Handbook with Ian Rosenberg, my Nico Bravo series, and its spinoff, the Eowulf series.

With those last two, combined for five books so far, I've settled into middle-grade graphic novels, which is basically readers from 8-12 years old, but I think Nico and Eowulf are true all-ages books, meaning there's something in there for everyone. If you like reading comics and watching cartoons, you'll like these, no matter how old you are.

Nico Bravo is a kid who works for the god, Vulcan, in a supply shop for gods, heroes, and mythical creatures. His coworkers are an angry unicorn named Buck, and a very responsible sphinx named Lula. As they attend to the needs of creatures both good and evil from all the world's mythologies, hilarity ensues. Eowulf is the descendant of Beowulf, and was originally an important supporting character in the Nico books, but then we spun her off into her own series. Nico stories take place in far-off Realms and dimensions, while Eowulf stories deal with the ripple effects those events have in our world.

These books bring together everything I've learned in a few decades of making comics and animation. I write, draw, letter, and assist on the coloring, which is the one place where I usually bring on help, because by that point I'm tired!

Mike Cavallaro

In the case of Nico Bravo, I was living in Brooklyn where I had a shared studio workspace with a bunch of other local cartoonists. But a couple days a week, I was also working part-time at a local comic book shop. A lot of professional cartoonists would visit there, and on some occasions I got to meet some of my cartooning heroes, like Lewis Trondheim and Jaime Hernandez. That's how I got the idea for a story about a kid who worked in a store where heroes shopped. As I developed it, I found I could tack on all the things I loved most and the idea still worked; monsters, mythology, giant robots, science fiction, wacky folklore, sword & sorcery elements, etc. The idea expanded to "a kid who works in a store where gods, heroes, and mythical creatures shop." I named that kid Nico after my landlord's cat, and that eventually became the Nico Bravo series.

So the idea came from a very simple thing, a part-time job I happened to be working at the time. I always say, start with a basic idea that's easy to relate to. You can get as weird as you want, but underneath it all, it should be something very easy to wrap your head around.

Mike Cavallaro

Good ideas get passed over, and bad ideas get made all the time, it's hard to really know which is which. All we can do is try to make work we're psyched about, and then pursue those until they either get made or there's nowhere left to turn. If you're psyched about an idea, you have to go for it. I always say, "Make them tell you no," never talk yourself out of it.

Mike Cavallaro

I think things like writer's block are actually our storytelling instincts trying to warn us that we've made a wrong turn. When a story stops speaking to me, I just back-up to the last spot when things were still rolling along, and try to take another road. That usually does the trick.

Mike Cavallaro

Lately, I most enjoy the writing, and in that I include the page layouts or thumbnails. I don't write full scripts, I write in comic book form; boxes, stick figures, blobs, scribbled lettering, etc. That's been the most fun. Cleaning it up, doing the lettering, coloring, that's all grunt work to some degree.

Mike Cavallaro

I don't know if I have an answer for this because when I look back, very little appears disposable. I'm the accumulation of everything I've done, all the advice I've received, all my failures, a few scattered successes, etc. I'm not sure there's one person or thing I can credit, so many people have helped me along the way, so many experiences inform what I do or don't do. Everything seems to have contributed something.

Mike Cavallaro

The cartoonist Lewis Trondheim did an interview several years ago for, I think, The Comics Journal? His interview changed my entire approach to making comics. I had attended the Joe Kubert School, and I had been working in probably the tradition you'd expect; roughs, pencils, lettering, inks, coloring. Hours and hours for each page. Trondheim exploded that. In his interview he talked about going straight ink on his pages, no script, no roughs, making it as he went. The interviewer asked, "What if you get to the bottom of the page and decide you should have done something else in Panel 3, or you could have drawn something better?" and Trondheim said, "I throw it out and do it over. Who cares? It only took me an hour or two. Those guys who spend 8 hours on a page can't do that, there's too much time invested, if they don't like something they're stuck with it, they've got to move on to the next page." He was right, and I never drew comics the same way again. My approach on the Nico books is basically what Trondheim described. I do a very rough pass to work out the story and then I just ink. A page takes me maybe 2 hours, tops. The stories are free and wild, and sometimes what happens next surprises even me. I love it.

Mike Cavallaro

Well, at the time of this interview the release date is in the rear view mirror and The Creature Connection is already out. This is my favorite story in the series so far. As a character, Eowulf is all about contending with having been raised as a ruthless monster hunter only to discover that not all mythical creatures are bad, and that hunting them down only makes HER the monster. She is constantly coming to terms with the fallout from this. In The Creature Connection, she's the only hope left for a bunch of mythical creatures who are being forced to work for the enrichment of some evil druids. It allowed me to talk about how easy it is to exploit people who are just trying to follow a dream, or do something that's meaningful to them, which is something that happens a lot in creative fields like mine. The story also allowed me to bring in the entire Supply Shop staff, Nico, Buck, Lula, and Vulcan, who were very much sidelined in the previous Eowulf book. As a result, it's the kind of chaotic, multilayered story I love telling, with lots of action, surprises, twists and turns.

Mike Cavallaro

The rule with an Eowulf story is that it must have a foothold in our world. My girlfriend and I had spent some time in Queens, NY, near the old Kaufman Studios, which in the 1920s was the original Paramount Studios location, and quite literally a legendary place. I had always wanted to use it in a story somehow, and from that I started working out how it could be the jumping-off point for an Eowulf tale. The idea of doing a classic Hollywood mystery, the kind that takes place behind the cameras and between shoots, started to come together. I thought the idea that movie monsters are real, while CGI is a myth, was hilarious. Things like that just really seemed to lock in tightly with the whole Nico/Eowulf mythos I'd already made. It just went from there.

Mike Cavallaro

Life does not wait while we make comics. I was in the middle of this when my girlfriend and I had a pretty serious health scare that knocked us sideways for a bit. We were lucky that she was covered under the ACA, got some good care, and is thankfully doing well now. Meanwhile, I had already volunteered as a faculty organizer at the school where I teach because we had decided to unionize for better working conditions. It was a gigantic task, but we eventually won our union election with a 77% majority, and now we're in the middle of our first contract negotiation. Healthcare issues, the union effort, and making a graphic novel were all demanding attention NOW. Like I said, Life doesn't wait. It was really a difficult period. My editor, Mark, and everyone at First Second, were incredibly compassionate and understanding. I received zero pressure from them.

Of all of these, the comics-making part was the easiest by comparison. In a way, having this one thing to do that I know and understand well kept me grounded as we dealt with the other two.

In regards to surprises, my own stories always surprise me because I rarely know how they're going to end. They literally tell me what happens next, and next, and next, and when things are going well, I'm hanging on for dear life, trying to write it all down as fast as possible. If you've read one of my books and found yourself surprised by something that happened, chances are I was too.

Mike Cavallaro

I should clarify that I've designed my Digital Coloring class at The School of Visual Arts based on my experiences in comics and animation, but so have the other instructors teaching the same subject, like Andy Pearlman. The school likes each instructor to put their own spin on a subject, so that's what we all do.

One thing in particular that a student today needs to know—that we didn't—is Photoshop, for starters. I was painting by hand for the first few years of my career. A lot has changed in comics, including the birth of the book market, or graphic novel market, which didn't exist when I was getting started. While I had to contend with other artists who could physically make their way to New York City, thanks to the internet my students are contending with worldwide competition for work, with many artists living in places where the local economy allows them to work for lower page rates than someone here can survive on. We spend a lot of time talking about strategies that make a career feasible.

Mike Cavallaro

Don't give up.

Mike Cavallaro

I make a book in a series of passes, so it depends on where I'm at in the process. First I go through making the roughs I mentioned before. This is me scribbling down sloppy versions of each page. At this stage, I try to get through 5 - 10 pages a day. I do the whole book this way, then I go back to the beginning and start ruling panel borders, turning the scribbled lettering into real lettering, turning the stick figures and blobs into inked artwork. I try to do 2 of these a day. Then it's back to the beginning again to start coloring. I'm usually working together with someone on this part. On the first Eowulf book, that was Irene Yeom, who's now drawing a book in collaboration with a writer for First Second. On The Creature Connection, the colorist was Sarah Jay Buck, an incredibly gifted artist with a number of great projects under her belt. I work closely with the colorist, it's really an exchange of ideas, though they absolutely take the lead, and I'm mostly there as support, and to make minor revisions. If we can lock down 4 pages a day, we're probably doing well.

Mike Cavallaro

I've tried everything. I used to obsess about 500 Series Strathmore Bristol and Windsor & Newton Series 7 brushes, etc., etc. But for the past many years, I've done everything on an iPad Pro, mostly using Clip Studio Paint. After decades of being chained to the drawing table on the best of days, I love being able to go to the park, enjoy the good weather, and still get a day's worth of work done. The iPad has been pretty ideal for that. Since Photoshop is still the universal language, we usually switch to that for the interior colors, but I color my covers in Clip because those are just me working on my own.

Mike Cavallaro

Right now, I'm working on a little 6-page story written by my pal J.M. DeMatteis for an upcoming anthology called Negative Burn. Apart from that, I'm working on what I hope will be the next Eowulf book, which I'm calling The Chaos Machine, although that title might change. But there's also more Nico Bravo on the way, which is something I'm very excited about, though can't say much more than that at this time.