Long John

With “Save the Bones” wrapped up in all of its oblique glory, I decided to celebrate.

Recently, I sat down with Josh (across the internet, that is) and recorded a long chat with him that I will be breaking up into more consumable segments. The first of which was released as a portion of my weekly nerdy/geeky discussion podcast that I make with another good friend (my nerd co-dependent), Seattle’s Gamer Viceroy & Quizomancer, Andrew Asplund, titled A Podcast [ , ] For All Intents and Purposes. This was a part of the mildly Thanksgiving-themed episode and the interview starts around the 7:30 minute-mark.

The dominant theme of the segment is process and how it relates to creativity and personal history and goals. We learn a little about Josh’s own artistic principles which present a frame of reference for his unique take on Hellrider Jackie’s story (which is specifically discussed in a future segment).

What I can’t emphasize enough is Josh’s persistence to literally make art. He not only makes images, but he makes the canvases and has probably made his own paint and brushes (if not brushes, at least other painting tools). He does photography––a lot of pinhole photography––and his literally made cameras from scratch and develops the film himself. He disassembles his vehicles and puts them back together again. Sure, part of it is expense, but he says in the podcast it’s about “knowing how to make a painting” where “painting” can be a variable for any creative endeavor. Before he sits down to do nearly anything, he has to know everything about, to internalize it, and make it his own. That’s part of what excited me about getting him to draw these pages because I wanted to see how he deconstructed her character.

While I linked to full episode above, at the bottom of this post is the segment by itself. The future segments will also be isolated and uploaded to the site here for posterity.

Also, since I’ve talked so much about them, I’ve also included the layouts I sent to Josh to draw from, utilizing a writing process I stole from the Prophet crew ( which I wrote about here). It was a fun way to work as well as being especially efficient for two illustrators to talk to each other. My basic goal of the layouts was to make sure they answered any basic question Josh could come up with. Since this was my first time writing for another artist, it wasn’t perfect, but as soon as I started getting certain questions from Josh, or started getting art back, I knew exactly what I had to do if there were a next time. What was quite fun was seeing how Josh interpreted my scribbles and layouts into something that remained what I wrote but also became uniquely his.

D. Bethel’s notes & layouts to Josh Tobey (click to enlarge)

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