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David Mack: Pushing the boundaries of comics
David Mack - JP/Wendra AjistyatamaIt takes a bank of ideas and hundreds of horrible sketches before you find your own voice
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David Mack - JP/Wendra Ajistyatama
It takes a bank of ideas and hundreds of horrible sketches before you find your own voice. The advice came from Daredevil comic artist and KABUKI creator David Mack.
American comic book creator David Mack is a man of many talents. Best known for his work on Marvel's Daredevil comic and his innovative KABUKI comic series, Mack has also moved beyond the comic universe.
He has produced an illustrated children's book, title sequences of films and television series and album artwork.
At the recent Indonesia Comic Con in Jakarta, Mack greeted admirers and local comic artists and shared his artistic journey and a handful of tricks to stay creative.
Every time new ideas come into his mind, Mack writes them down in little notes and stores them in a folder. He always comes back to the folder whenever he needs inspiration for new stories and sketches.
'When it comes time to do it, I pull it out and I look at these 200 little scraps of paper that I don't even remember making. But I go, 'Ohh... yes, whoever wrote this, this is a good idea,'' he said in an interview session with a handful of journalists on the sidelines of the comic convention.
'That's kinda like previous me has given a gift to current me.'
Mack suggested aspiring comic artists have such a folder to stave away writer's block.
'Always have like a whole bunch of ideas that you've always outlined. And so that the real problem is how to get as much of the stuff done before you die.'
The bank of ideas has assisted him to produce notable works that eventually brought him to Marvel Comics.
Impressed by Mack's KABUKI comic series, notable comic book editor and artist Joseph 'Joe' Quesada invited Mack to work on his Marvel book project, which was later known as Marvel Knights.
'It was a blast,' Mack said, recalling his initial collaboration with Marvel in the late 1990s.
'He [Joe] said 'Write any story you want, but I only ask one thing and that's you creating a brand new character for Daredevil.''
To the famed superhero comic series, Mack introduced Echo, a Native American superheroine with a white handprint covering her face. Echo, also known as Ronin, has become one of the very few deaf characters who exists in the comic book world.
One of the Daredevil miniseries that he wrote, DAREDEVIL: End of Days, debuted in hardcover at No. 1 on the New York Times Best Sellers List. Additionally, he was involved in a number of Marvel comic series, such as Alias, New Avengers and White Tiger.
Before Echo, Mack had explored strong female characters in KABUKI, the comic series that helped launched his career.
The comic series follows the life and dreams of an assassin codenamed Kabuki who lives under a repressive regime in a near-future Japan.
Mack initially wrote the first KABUKI story for his senior thesis in college and did not intend to draw it.
'I was trying to look for an artist that I felt was much more talented and skilled than myself to draw it.'
Mack was drawn into sketching KABUKI comics after being invited to participate in various comic anthology projects. Later on, he collected eight-page KABUKI stories featured in the anthologies and republished them as the first volume of KABUKI in 1994.
'Each one was a little different but I felt like I put them in order and it still feels like a comic book. I did that and it was successful enough for me to keep doing it,' he said.
Mack offers a fresh approach to the comic medium by integrating different art styles in KABUKI, from watercolor, pencil and ink to magazine clippings and manga scans.
'Even in the context of one story or one issue, I might change page-to-page or scene-to-scene the feel of the story visually because of the change of the character arc or the flow of the story.'
'If you draw a comic, you have so many options. There is no reason for you to draw the same way every time; you use the same media each time.'
In 2007, Mack launched children's book The Shy Creatures, based on a fictional children's book read by the main character in KABUKI.
'It was kind of nice because it was an artifact of the KABUKI world that now exists as a real story.'
Mack continues to push the boundaries of comics through his multimedia works, including the credit sequence of blockbuster film Captain America: The Winter Soldier and the last two seasons of Dexter Early Cuts, an animated web series based on American crime drama series Dexter.
He has illustrated jazz and rock albums for both American and Japanese labels, including for Paul McCartney.
Mack admired the early Daredevil comic artists, Frank Miller and Klaus Janson, whose works Mack has enjoyed since he was nine. He named his mother as his first and foremost artistic influence.
'She was a first grade teacher. As a child I would see her create things to teach her students. She would make visual things for them to learn the numbers, colors or seasons. So I think I was introduced very early on to the idea of art as a communication.'
To aspiring comic artists wanting to follow his path, Mack suggests they start sketching comics and distributing them.
'Either you publish it on the web or you go to a copy center and make your own copies and you go to conventions and you sell it at your table and you give it to other companies.'
'Because in the US, like Marvel or DC, they are only gonna hire you based on your previous comic book.'
And don't be discouraged if a first comic is not so great. Mack believes it takes a thousand horrible pages before aspiring authors can find their true style.
'So you have to get really busy making all the bad pages first and all the horrible comics to get those out of the way so you can then come to your own voice and have the book that you feel comfortable showing.'
