You know his work and you love it! All those covers for Rush City, Batman and Scalped. His interior pages for The Losers, Faker and Green Arrow: Year One. His early stuff on Judge Dredd and Lenny Zero. You love it all and if you say you don't—it's 'cause you haven't seen 'em yet (ha)!
Jock, like a lot of European artists working in mainstream American comics, is kicking much ass and taking names. His style is so gritty and edgey, his compositions so well staged—he can't help but stand out from the crowd. You won't find too many artists today making better use of negative space than he does.
My first exposure to his art was in the Green Arrow series mentioned above, a book he did with his frequent collaborator, Andy Diggle. I must admit, after one look, I was hooked and immediately went out and grabbed, ohh...EVERYTHING ELSE HE'S DONE! And I haven't looked back!
Dwight and I caught up with the Scottish-born artist at his studio in Totnes, England and tried to get him to spill the beans about everything. Turns out, there were no beans to spill! He's just a regular guy, who's the coolest of the cool, and he's got crazy skills behind the drawing board (works for us).
In our chat, we find out how he got the nickname Jock, how he ended up as the cover artist on Jason Aaron's Scalped and some inside scoop on the progress of The Losers movie, which is in production. He also tells us about his new Hellblazer graphic novel, his taste in movies (bad '70s horror flix) and we toss in a few famous names for good measure: actor and director, Peter Berg and talented pop singer, Christina Aguilera.
OK, so maybe there were a few beans.
**For this episode, we played a snippet of Beck's "Loser" in honor of Jock and Andy's project going to the big screen.
Click here to download the show.
For those who want to see more of Jock's covers in progress, he usually runs his stuff through the Panel and Pixel Cover Action thread that he started (http://www.panelandpixel.com/forum/?webtag=PANELANDPIXEL&msg=370.383). And to add to the list of long running comic artists, how could you leave out Marko, and Nic Klein... I know they're at Marvel, but you had also brought up Dark Horse folks in the cast so I figure they are fair game.
Posted by: John Bivens | January 07, 2009 at 03:03