Interview by JSS of The Banner
A year or so ago, I started a website with the intent of shining a little light on artists I was into. As usual, shit got hectic, and I never got the thing up and running, but I did get to do a couple good interviews, such as this one with Ross Mooncalfe, who is responsible for such indie titles as Wet Moon and more recently Shadow eyes.
JSS – How old are you and what’s your earliest memory of drawing?
Ross – I’m 29, and I think maybe I’m too old to remember anything that long ago! I remember tracing dinosaurs out of dinosaur books when I was little and also being obsessed with Calvin & Hobbes and trying (and failing) to draw like Bill Watterson.
What schooling or art education have you had, if any, as far as art goes?
I went to the Savannah College of Art & Design and majored in Sequential Art. I don’t think I was ready for college at the time and so I never paid attention or did what I should have done, so most of my technical and anatomical learning was done after I graduated, when I was old enough to finally realize that I sucked and needed to kick my own ass into gear. It was still a great experience, though, I don’t regret it (except maybe the loans, ugh).
Tell me a little about your current projects, Wet Moon and whatever else you got going on.
My next release is Wet Moon Volume 5, from Oni Press, which comes out this year in August, but hopefully with a pre-release debut at the San Diego Comic Con in July.
I think that’s it for what I can talk about, everything else is stuff that hasn’t solidified yet or stuff that’s still secret. Right now I’m between gigs, so I’m working on a mini-comic, a lead-in/teaser thing to
kick off my angsty emo superhero story Shadoweyes. I think I have a publisher for that series but I shouldn’t say yet, everything’s still in progress with that. I’m not sure what my career is going to look like by the end of the year and whether my comic output will be affected, but we’ll see.
What is your favorite medium to work in and what medium do you use most frequently as far as fine art or merch is related?
I’m kind of all over the map right now with materials. I used to do a lot of coloring in Photoshop in college, but after a while I ditched that and for years did exclusively traditional stuff with watercolors, ink wash, acrylics, and markers (although the first two Wet Moon volumes had digital greytones done with a mouse). Only until a year or two ago, when I finally got a Wacom tablet, did I start messing around with digital coloring again, and then started doing linework with it, too. It’s totally different from traditional stuff and a real challenge for me, so I really enjoy it, I think that’s my favorite medium to work in right now.
I still do a lot of traditional stuff, both for fun and to sell or make prints of, and for that I ink with a brush and then use mostly markers. For my interior comic pages, though, I only use pencil; I can’t ink as much as I
used to because it kills my drawing hand.
What are your “go to” or favorite products to work in?
I really like Prismacolor markers, I never get tired of those even though they run out of ink pretty quick. I like how soft their tips are.
Who would you say were your biggest influences as far as who got you into art/illustration and who is your biggest influence currently?
I mentioned Bill Watterson earlier, he was a huge influence on me when I was a kid, along with Kevin Eastman & Peter Laird (their old, original Ninja Turtles comics were the first things that really got me set on the comics road), and HR Giger. Nowadays I don’t find myself influenced by other artists, I think I’ve gotten to the point where my work feels very insular and when I look at other artists who are awesome I feel awe or discouragement, that’s about it. I’m sure I must be subconsciously influenced by others, though, I guess that’s unavoidable, but consciously not really anyone right now. I think if I had to pick somebody it would be either Frank Quitely or Jillian Tamaki; not so much their figures or specific visual style, but their compositions and layouts. I only wish I could lay out a picture frame like they do.
What other current artists are you into?
The aforementioned Jillian Tamaki and Frank Quitely, of course. Michelle Silva, Brandon Graham, Becky Cloonan, Cameron Stewart, Vasilis Lolos, Afua Richardson, Ashleigh Hetrick, Raphaelle Marx…hmm…Yuko Ota!!!
Do you have any musical preferences when drawing?
Nothing specific, I guess. I’m mostly listening to metal these days, a lot of power metal type stuff. I also like a lot of cheesy new age music, but right now I’m starting to get into female rappers. My favorite band is Bella Morte, so they’re always on heavy rotation, too.
In your comics work, there seems to be a lot of focus on body types rarely focused on as often in comics of any genre – specifically, thicker to “chubby” African American or more ethnic girls. As a white artist, what about these character types stands out to you that apparently doesn’t strike the majority of other comic book artists now?
It’s mostly because, well, they exist, they’re real, and my work reflects that. Simple as that. It’s insane how lily white and homogenous comics is, characters of color of any descent are horribly underrepresented, with some exceptions of course. On the professional end, comics is mostly white people, and lots of people seem to subscribe, whether they realize it or not, to the concept that white is the “default” (particularly straight white male), and that extends to fictional characters, too, and I think it just doesn’t occur to a lot of creators, not out of any kind of malice, to have characters that aren’t straight and white and cisgendered and abled. I think a lot about that stuff.
Do you ever do Gallery shows? Do you enjoy them?
I’ve only done one gallery show, it was fun, I’d love to do more. I don’t know if I’m a gallery exhibit type of artist, maybe only because my pieces tend to be pretty small. Or that my comic pages usually look sloppy and raw, sometimes I have a tough time selling them because they don’t look “finished” like they do when they’re tidied up for printing. Still, I’d take any opportunity I got to do a show.
For the next bunch of questions, I picked a few pieces of Ross’s that stood out to me and had him pick a couple of his own to discuss.
This first one is one of the ones you picked, is this a new character?
She’s sort of new, yeah, her name is Shadoweyes. She’s been around for a while in my head and first showed up in my deviantart gallery about a year or so ago, but I’m itching to tell her story and I’m hoping she’ll be a flagship character for me in the near future.
This second is definitely Kitty Pryde of the X-Men, but you definitely put a personal spin on her. Was this for anything specific or just horsing around?
I did this for a charity gallery exhibit and auction called “Full of Pryde,” put together by Douglas Sherwood of Oni Press and exhibited at Floating World Comics in Portland, Oregon. All proceeds went to the Oregon Hemophilia Treatment Center. Doug is a friend, he does a lot of the post-production stuff on my Oni books, and I like Kitty Pryde and the X-Men, so I jumped at the chance. I think it came out pretty good, although I’d originally meant for the surface she’s phasing through to be flat, but I messed it up and it came out looking more curved, like the inside of a half-pipe or something.
This is one of my favorites of the pieces on your online portfolio, Zombie Baby thing.
Not a zombie baby, this is one of the mutant babies from filmmaker Larry Cohen’s Alive trilogy of movies, It’s Alive, It Lives Again, and Island of the Alive. The It’s Alive baby has been one of my favorite monsters ever since I saw the first movie when I was a kid, and I love Larry Cohen’s work. For the past few years I’ve been drawing a movie monster for Halloween, just for fun, and that’s what this piece was done for. I think it was the second one I did, after a Brundlefly piece the previous year. Not a lot of people seem to know about the It’s Alive movies, or if they do they know the first one but not the more obscure sequels, they’re pretty low budget and not for everybody but I highly recommend checking them out.
This one stands out a bit to me from your other stuff, it reminds me almost of a D&D/Eberron style character drawing.
I used to do a lot of these “mystic monk warrior” type drawings years ago, back when I had a lot more free time. I wanted to do a mystic monk comic called “A Promise Of Shade And Meadows” but it never materialized, partly because I was busy with other stuff like Wet Moon, and that the monk comic was going to be kind of abstract and surreal, I guess, and I couldn’t think of a publisher who’d want to put something like that out. And I also wanted it to be in color, another obstacle. I also never had much of a story for it other than tropical monk characters meditating and exploring various locales or something, the comic was just as much about the weather and environment as the characters, and yeah, the whole thing was way too sprawling and abstract and never got off the ground. Maybe someday I’ll see
what I can do with it. Anyway, this piece is of a character from that comic, her name is Kundrav Of The 2000 Masks.
Ok I think this one might be one of your more well-known pieces, it’s definitely one of the ones I’ve seen the most, this was the cover for one of the Wet Moon trades correct?
Yeah, this is the cover to Wet Moon volume 4. The character’s name is Zia, she’s been kind of a minor cast member so far, but I thought she’d make for a good cover, and because she finally got a real introduction and pagetime in that volume.
This last also seems to be a new chracter of sorts, I know there’s a few more of her on your page, is this another upcoming/new character?
She’s not new, no, she’s the main character in a self-published comic I’ve been doing for the past few years called Mountain Girl. I think the first issue I did was in 2005. Her name is Naga, she’s a self-exiled princess of a mystic cannibal warrior tribe called the Humunga, and everything takes place in a magical post-apocalyptic ice age in the far future. Everything is bombastic and over-the-top, the characters all have a shakespearian power metal way of speaking and have crazy combat moves with names like “A Tale Inscribed By The Red Ink Of The Fray” and “The Body’s Unending Remembrance Of Boreal Vengeance.” I only have 3 issues of the comic under my belt, and I’m likely going to reboot and retool the series as a singular book for a publisher who I won’t name yet, but we’ll see how things go.
Let’s go back over all your available and upcoming projects real quick before we wrap this up.
WET MOON:
My longest-running series, the first Wet Moon book came out in either late 2004 or early 2005, I actually can’t remember! I’ve been juggling installments with other projects over the years, and the long-delayed volume 6 is finally set to come out October 2012. I think the comic is usually considered slice-of-life, but I think of it as more a drama comedy romance with horror undertones, or something like that. It takes place in the fictional city of Wet Moon and centers on a group of mostly punky, mostly female art college students and their relationships. It’s sort of like a Teen Twin Peaks in some ways, except with much less plot and more meandering character-driven stuff.
SHADOWEYES:
This one is a futuristic dystopian teen vigilante drama story, it centers around Scout Montana who becomes the titular superpowered antihero Shadoweyes. It’s more sociopolitical than Wet Moon, it’s got more stuff about morality or the lack thereof, and is more of a character study of Shadoweyes herself and the changes she goes through as she figures herself out and figures out what sort of hero she wants to be. Even though it has superhero aspects it’s very character-driven, lots of Shadoweyes, who looks like a blue Ninja Turtle lizard creature, sitting around talking about her feelings and lots of angst. It’s also more YA than Wet Moon or my other comics, the themes are still adult and the cast is made up of my usual teenage characters, but there’s no profanity or nudity, and there’s violence but it’s not super gory or anything. There are two books so far, Shadoweyes and Shadoweyes In Love, and I’m working on the third, Shadoweyes Unmasked, right now. The comic also runs for free on shadoweyes.net with a page every Monday.
MOUNTAIN GIRL:
Mountain Girl started off as me goofing off between big books and self-publishing single issues once a year, which lasted for 3, almost 4, issues. It’s a bombastic fantasy thing, not European medieval Lord of the Rings type fantasy, but more Asian, Polynesian, and Native American-influenced fantasy, taking place in an ice age filled with loud-mouthed mystic cannibal warriors and animal gods. I stopped doing the comics mostly because I got more serious about the characters and story, and I decided I wanted to do a more cohesive, thematically-coherent revamp where I wasn’t boxed in by the issue format. I have the new book outlined and character designs sketched out, but the main obstacle is getting the time to do it. I like to think like I’m letting the story marinate.
GLORY:
I was approached by Image in early 2011 about drawing the new Glory series as part of the Extreme Studios relaunch, which includes a few other revamps of old Extreme books. It’s written by Joe Keatinge who is great to collaborate with, we’re really on the same page in taking Glory, who was previously a more supermodel-like bombshell character, in a more real-deal warrior direction. Glory is born of the union between the queen of a race of superhuman women, Demeter, and a demon-like overlord, Silverfall, training her from birth to forge her into a weapon to police the boundaries between their two peoples, and the story details what happens after Glory’s duty is over and what that means for her.
OTHER STUFF:
In addition to all that, I’m doing an issue of IDW’s new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, the Leonardo micro-series/one-shot issue, which is a dream come true. That drops in April, or maybe it’ll be out already by time this interview is published.
Thanks Ross. Where can people contact you if interested?
mooncalfe at greenoblivion.com
http://mooncalfe.deviantart.com/
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