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Richard Starkings: SBC Q&A, Part 1

Posted: Wednesday, September 10
By: Tim O'Shea

To say Richard Starkings is a person of many talents is to state the obvious. He’s done a little bit of everything in the comic book industry, but what many may know him from is the company Comicraft—Purveyors of Unique Design and Fine Lettering, which he cofounded with John ‘JG’ Roshell in 1992. In the first portion of this two-part interview (conducted in mid-August), Starkings discusses his various creative endeavors and projects. Tomorrow in the second part, SBC addresses Hip Flask: Elephantman and Waste LA by Bill O'Neil & John ‘JG’ Roshell (in fact we’ll get the straight scoop on that from Roshell himself), as well as Starkings’ web design work and the road ahead for him and his numerous projects.

Tim O’Shea: You're a diverse creator, what with the Comicraft entity, as well as your role as writer of Hip Flask and the myriad other offshoots of the Active Images Network. If you just had to pick one aspect, which would you say is your favorite creative outlet?

Richard Starkings: I love drawing, and would like to have time to create more of my Hedge Backwards strips, but I enjoy all the various aspects that my role of President & First Tiger entails. I do like variety. Being able to work closely with Ladronn on my own project -- Hip Flask -- easily makes me the luckiest man in comics. This evening I start work on the penultimate Lee/Loeb Batman and earlier today I was putting the finishing touches to the lettering on Hulk Gray #2, Tim Sale's best work to date.

Over the weekend I had to handle an avalanche of orders for our fonts (which allow us to finance the publishing side of the business) and the Hip Flask hardcover, as well as an enquiry regarding the movie rights to Strange Embrace -- David Hine's Gothic Nightmare which we just published in time for San Diego last week. Later this year we're publishing another trade paperback, this one is Skidmarks by Ilya, another Tundra UK book that never got collected.

TO: What's the response been like to Al Davison’s The Spiral Cage? How did the reissue project come about?

RS: Al and I are both Buddhists and we'd been talking back and forth about one thing or another for a couple of years. I'd bought the Titan edition of The Spiral Cage way back in 1990, in England, and was impressed by Al's painful honesty and the inventive way in which he told his story. Al showed me some of the color pages of the sequel at the San Diego show a couple of years ago and some time later told me that he couldn't find a publisher interested in reissuing the original book, which had never found distribution in the States anyway. I leapt at the opportunity and here we are eight months later with the book in stores doing very well, and once more garnering praise from those hard-to-please critics.

TO: Not every creator is willing to share their wealth of knowledge. But you have, be it through the Balloon Tales website, or your recent book, Comic Book Lettering: The Comicraft Way. Why is sharing your experience such a seeming priority to you, is it a way to pass on the education that others passed on to you, or is the scenario in fact the quite opposite (and you had to learn everything on your own?)

RS: There's really nothing to be gained by holding back knowledge. I remember reading the inscription "Enter to Learn, Exit to Serve" above the doorway of El Segundo library here in Los Angeles. Information is simply a tool, and like any other tool, what's important is not whether you have it but how you use it. Ladronn showed me a blank piece of paper the other day and asked me what it was. "A piece of paper," I said... "Yes, Richard," Ladronn replied... "But in the right hands it is a Masterpiece!"

I was helped along in my work by dozens of different individuals — the late Bill Nuttall, whose letter to me I published on the endpapers of The Comicraft Way, got me my first professional work, following which I got tips and advice from letterers like Tom Frame, Annie Halfacree and Steve Craddock and artists like Alan Davis, Paul Neary, Jerry Paris and 2000AD's art editor, Robin Smith.

I dedicated the first two issues of Hip Flask to the writers, artists and editors of 2000AD, simply because they showed British creators a way through the woods no one had opened up before. My conversations over the years with Dredd creator John Wagner and Batman scribe Alan Grant convinced me that the only way to go was creator-owned. At Marvel UK I fostered the first (and last) wholly creator-owned Marvel UK title, The Sleeze Brothers, and Hip Flask is my own creator-owned title, which, of course, I'm self-publishing.

Teaching others is one of the best ways of learning more about what it is you do. It's also the key to the next door of a room full of new challenges. Publishing fonts allowed us to publish Hip Flask, I'm sure publishing The Comicraft Way will open doors for us we didn't even know existed.

TO: Comicraft has helped foster the modernization of comic book lettering in general. From your perspective, what do you view to be Comicraft's greatest accomplishment to date?

RS: Unfortunately, I think that although the modernization of comic book lettering was inevitable and essential, lettering is STILL regarded as little more than a necessary evil -- a mechanical production task assigned these days to the lowest bidder. Marvel's current one-font-fits-all approach is the clearest example of this mindset.

Having worked closely with top artists and writers like Brian Bolland, Tim Sale, J Scott Campbell, Joe Madureira, Kurt Busiek, Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee we learned the importance of creating lettering styles that suited each of the books presented to us. Artists always appreciate the extra level of attention and seek us out when they're working on new projects.

However, I think that Comicraft's Greatest Accomplishment is our library of commercially available typefaces at www.comicbookfonts.com

If I had a penny for every self-publishing artist or writer who has come up to the Comicraft booth at conventions and thanked us for making our fonts available... Well, I'd have a lot of pennies.

TO: Where do you see the lettering craft and Comicraft in particular in five to 10 years?

RS: This is one of those questions that presupposes that the Art of Comic Book Lettering Comic Books has died a painful death/might die a painful death or will simply be abandoned altogether. Creativity is an essential part of Human Nature. Even if you hire letterers off the streets to work inhouse at $7 an hour, you'll eventually -- and probably inadvertently -- pick up someone who understands his role better than his colleagues... Someone who is sympathetic to the requirements of both the script and the art, and who is prepared to push against the limitations thrown in front of him so that he can work harmoniously with the writer and the artist and thereby tell a better story.

Comics will always need letters and talented creators will always seek out the best letterers. End of story.

TO: What's the story behind Hedge Backwards?

RS: Dave Gibbons once told me that he felt that British comics needed a character akin to Tintin, Herge's boy scout/newspaper reporter/global traveller/adventurer. When I moved to the States, I kept a sketchbook in which I would doodle from time to time. Out of that sketchbook came the character Hedge Backwards, which I intended as an Englishman's answer to Tintin.

I worked up half a dozen newspaper strips featuring Hedge and his friends, Fish, Woodshed and Honey and submitted them to the local free paper – The El Segundo Herald. The young editor there, Corey Albert, turned out to be a huge fan of Batman: The Killing Joke (which I lettered) and he snapped up Hedge immediately. I produced about thirty or forty strips for the Herald until Corey left and was replaced by a somewhat frostier editor who wasn't so keen on comics. Thinking back on it, I probably shouldn't have caricatured her as 'Every Thursday' in the strip.

Fortunately, Hedge was made welcome in the pages of The World Tribune, the weekly Buddhist newspaper published by the lay organization to which I belong, the Soka Gakkai (literally: Value Creating Society). Unfortunately, after another year or so, the editors at the Tribune wanted Hedge to overtly propagate Buddhism rather than inadvertently do so by way of his own philosophical musings, and my interest and energies got diverted as Comicraft became more and more successful. Recently I returned to Hedge and I've been endeavoring to draw his somewhat meandering adventures into sharper focus. He never did turn out to be much of an adventurer, but he allowed me to realize that what I really wanted to create was a strip with a semi-autobiographical tone, so the strip on the website -- www.hedgebackwards.com natch' -- has been created with that in mind.

Please click here for part two.