The Origin of Marvel Zombies Part 3
2007-03-22 14:39:25
Writer in place, we started searching for a penciler for Marvel Zombies.
When Greg Land drew the Zombies in Ultimate Fantastic Four, he’d (of course) drawn them in his signature photo-realistic style. Our initial thought was to move away from that style in the Zombies book, mostly to avoid trying to compete with Greg’s art. If the series was in a totally different style, you wouldn’t really be able to compare it with Greg.
Joe Quesada agreed, and we sat down with Chris Allo, Marvel’s Talent Coordinator, to come up with some ideas.
I may have mentioned before in this blog that I’m a fan of the British comic 2000AD; one of the things that really got me into that comic was the realization that a lot of my favorite writers and artists in the American comics industry were 1) British and 2) had come into comics via 2000AD.
2000AD is almost a mini-industry on its own, with its own trends—styles rise and fall fairly independently of what’s happening at Marvel or DC. There are a wide variety of artists there, but one thing I’d noticed over the past several years was that a few of the artists seemed, to my eye, like they were influenced by Sean Philips.
And I really like Sean Philips’ style. It’s dark and cool, more evocative than presentational. So the idea of getting someone operating in that milieu appealed to me.
So I suggested it to Chris Allo, and Chris—without pointing out that I am a complete idiot—counter-proposed that maybe we could actually get the real Sean Philips.
Which, like finding the writer, was a real smack-myself-in-the-head moment. For some reason that just didn’t occur to me.
Sean had recently wrapped up one of my all-time favorite comics, Sleeper, with Ed Brubaker over at Wildstorm. Just to throw in a Marvel plug, here—don’t miss those two’s next series, Criminal, from Marvel’s Icon imprint.
So I was excited about the prospect of having Sean on the book. I gave him a call, he was interested in doing the series, and bam—everything seemed like it was falling into place.
June Chung, who I’d had (in my mind and in the paperwork) on standby for doing the colors, actually was looking for work when Jae Lee (her husband and collaborator) started working with Richard Isanove on Dark Tower. So she happily agreed to color Sean—she’d actually just been coloring Sean at DC…
Ultimate Fantastic Four letterer Randy Gentile seemed like the natural choice for lettering, and he was happy to come on board.
So we were all set…except Chris Allo had this one idea about who should do the covers…
Next: Suydam!
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About this blog: Associate Editor John Barber gives the inside story on the Ultimate line of comics--plus whatever other comics John edits!
About the author: John Barber has been a web cartoonist, self-publisher, author, and now comic book editor. He lives in New York with his fiancee Alison.
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