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Waiting For Tommy XXVIII
By Richard Johnston |
Right. It's been two weeks since
Joe
Quesada turned spinning top on me. I'm fully recovered.
Time for a nice, normal interview now, promise, with Erik Ko,
head honcho of UDON
(don't call them UDON Studio, as I found to my cost), artists
to the stars.
You may not know their name, but they're often known for
their 'anime' work, seemingly, specialising in an 'anime'
style for a variety of publishers. With anime and manga become
ever more popular, is the future theirs? I talked to Erik
as he confirmed his new license signing. But he wanted to
make something clear. He even put down his cup of noodles
as we began. ERIK
KO: First and foremost - unlike some other groups or company,
we are not an 'Anime Style' only group. I guess we stand out
more as an anime style group because we are asked to do a
lot of those projects. But we actually do offer a lot more
than that.
ROBOTECH
#1 - REMARKED VERSION |
If
you look at what we have done, our artists can do a
lot of different art style from digital painting (various
cover work with Marvel,
DC,
etc.), computer rendering (Marvel Recharge Cards and
HeroClix Packaging), traditional American Comic colours
(Citizen V, Spider-Girl),
to Anime Cel cuts (Robotech,
Battle
of the Planets). No doubt that most of us we are
heavily influenced by a lot of Japanese artists, but
we are also very inspired by local American guys like
Jim
Lee, Joe Madureira, J.Scott
Campbell, Alex
Ross, etc. for their art, and Liquid and Haberline
for their coloring!
I
am hoping one day, some day, people can just look at
our stuff as art. I am always kinda upset when people
go 'this is manga style' or 'this is anime style'. |
As manga
and anime are such generic terms (manga is the Japanese word
for Comic Book, and anime is the Japanese short form for Animation),
the term 'manga style comic art' really translates to 'comic
book style comic art' which means nothing! And just like the
American Comics, Japanese comics do have a lot of variety
of styles and genre. Here, we have the old Golden age style
from Bob Kane, Stan
Lee and Jack
Kirby, to the silver age /modern style like Jim Lee, and
the Image gang. Right now, we are experimenting on a lot of
different approach. And great new talents like Kaare Andrews
is doing some very innovative stuff; Keron Grant, the Led
Heavy guys, LeSean, etc, are all taking a whole new approach
to doing comics. Consider this as another evolution that we
have a whole new bunch of artists doing different things.
I believe the art style in comics does evolve with the audience.
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