Read Alex Grand’s Understanding Superhero Comic Books published by McFarland Books in 2023 with Foreword by Jim Steranko with editorial reviews by comic book professionals, Jim Shooter, Tom Palmer, Tom DeFalco, Danny Fingeroth, Alex Segura, Carl Potts, Guy Dorian Sr. and more.
in the meantime enjoy show:
A sit down chat between Alex Grand and Jose Villarrubia, Eisner nominated Comics colorist and Professor of Art at various colleges, universities & museums on various key aspects of his life and career including renovating Richard Corben’s Den for Darkhorse. His personal and working relationships with Corben and Alan Moore are discussed, as well as his childhood reading comic books in Spain, moving to the USA in 1980, working as a photographer in the 1980s, entering comics with Jae Lee in the 1990s at Image Comics, working on Neil Gaiman’s Wheel of World’s, coloring for Marvel, DC Comics, Vertigo on titles such as X-Men, Batman, Spider-Man, Sentry, Sweet Tooth, Promethea, Tom Strong, Cuba, My Revolution, Django Unchained and more.
Edited & Produced by Alex Grand.
#JoséVillarrubia #ComicArt #DCComics #MarvelComics #AlanMoore #GraphicNovels #ComicBookColoring #ComicIndustry
📜 Chapters
00:00 Welcoming José Villarrubia
00:39 Richard Corben | Remastering Den
04:10 Growing up on comics
06:30 Meeting comic pros in Spain
08:19 Family background
09:40 Favorite films in teenage
11:10 Childhood Color appreciation
13:19 Favorite Marvel comics
15:44 Journey to the USA in 1980
18:33 Work in the 1980s
19:55 Collapse of photography in the late 80s
21:35 Getting into coloring the comics | Jae Lee
23:20 Digital coloring of comics
25:00 Crediting approach of colorists in the 90s
26:46 Supervision of Art-No space for innovation
29:52 Wheel of Worlds by Neil Gaiman
31:32 Uncanny X-Men – 360, 1998
32:38 Work for Veils and Flinch 1999
35:22 Veils dedicated to Richard Corben
37:39 Karen Berger | Vertigo
39:52 Alan Moore Pro Work
44:53 Alan Moore the Person
48:15 Interact with Editors
50:52 Color tone for Marvel and DC
51:52 Color palette for characters
55:21 Inking and coloring | Eisner recognition
55:53 Genre in coloring
59:01 The Sword and Sorcery | Color & Genre
01:01:04 Marvel’s America | Axel Alonso
01:03:02 Richard Corbin’s Den
01:07:47 Princess of Mars
01:09:01 DEN project director at DarkHorse
01:15:28 Viewpoint on nudity
01:20:46 Richard Corben: Flights Into Fantasy
01:22:18 Murky World
01:23:00 Richard Corben’s legacy
01:24:16 Wrapping up
Alex Grand: [00:00:06] Well, welcome back to the Comic Book Historians Podcast. I’m Alex Grant. Today with Jose Villarrubia, an Eisner nominated professor of art at various colleges, universities and museums whose work we’ve seen adorned comics illustrations of Bill Sienkiewicz, Paul Pope, J. Lee, writings of Alan Moore and others. Now, with a recent project that he’s doing with the art of Richard Corben for Dark Horse. Jose was kind enough to also color Andrea Bulgarelli pencils and inks on our Frank Thorne that we did a couple of years ago, which was very nice. Jose, thanks for coming on the podcast.
José Villarrubia: [00:00:37] My pleasure.
Alex Grand: [00:00:38] You’re remastering Richard Corben’s den for Dark Horse. From what I’ve seen, it looks outstanding and beautiful, and I love Corben’s art and the illustrations. And it sounds like you guys had a friendship. Before we get started on your biography, tell us what brought on that. It sounds like a passion project.
José Villarrubia: [00:00:56] It is. I’ve always loved Corben since I was like 13 years old, and it was one of the highlights of my career. When I finally got to work with him and do a little bit of coloring for him, when he started to do commercial work and had other people color his work, I wanted to make sure to preserve the early material that he did in the 60s 70s up to the early 80s, which is how I fell in love with his work. And because he used very complex printing techniques and it was not reproduced very well in many cases the first time around, I was very concerned of the quality of the reprints that would happen. So I about ten years ago I was working for Dark Horse and my editor was the editor of the Warren titles, and I asked him as a favor if I could restore the volume they did of his Warren stories, creepy and eerie presents Corbin, which I did, and Corbin helped me out. He sent me scans of original art and was very helpful. I did a handful of stories that he did for Vampirella as well, and then time went by, and eventually after he passed away, it was clear that his classic titles had to be brought back to print. So I’m working with his widow and his daughter. We figure out a way to do it, and starting with then, I knew for a fact that he had kept all the originals, having the original sources, meaning the original grey tone painted art makes it much more feasible than to restore the work than it would be to working from printed sources, which is something I had to do in some of the creepy and eerie stories.
Alex Grand: [00:02:59] And it sounds like it’s a way to also kind of resolve the fact that he did pass away and to have some sort of dedication to him and his family. It sounds like an opportunity for that as well. Is that correct?
José Villarrubia: [00:03:11] Absolutely. It’s a tribute to his work, and I think it’s a way to try. It’s my attempt to be able to help facilitate keeping his work in print for posterity under the best possible conditions. A lot of subtle corrections, but also keeping the vibrancy and strength that it had to begin with. And I had the full cooperation and support of Donna, his widow, and Beth, his daughter, who’s also a colorist and worked with her dad a lot. It’s been thrilling because they’ve been giving me feedback of how Richard would have liked to see the work, not necessarily exactly how it was printed sometimes, but a little bit differently. So that was that’s been really great.
Alex Grand: [00:04:04] Yeah. Maintaining true to the intention, I think that’s wonderful. Um, so now this is the Comic Book Historians Podcast, of course. And we we have a biographical approach to a lot of our interviews. So you were born in 1961, in Madrid, Spain. Um, you came to the USA in 1980. From what I understand. So you were you had already kind of developed, you know, into a young adult by the time you came to the United States. So did you. Did you grow up on comics as a kid or.
José Villarrubia: [00:04:33] Yes. I, um, as I said many times, my generation in Spain, everybody grew up on comics. Like, there were children’s comics that everybody read, all the children. It was kind of considered an extension of children’s books, but much more affordable. So everybody knew the same Children’s characters and they were funny stories. In addition to that, they were French and Belgian comics that were very popular, like Tintin and Asterix and Lucky Luke, which all the kids, we all read them and they were hardcovers and they were like graphic novels. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [00:05:11] Albums. Right? Yeah. Albums.
José Villarrubia: [00:05:13] Yes. So Alex and all that stuff. Marvel and DC was also published in Spain. Dc not so much. It was Mexican imports, but they were easily sold. Marvel that were reprinted in black and white. And I remember around 11 or 12 I started reading those as well. Soon after, I discovered my talent and the work of Moebius, and the work of Corben, and the work of Spanish artists, Italian artists like Dino Battaglia or Sergio Toppi, Hugo Pratt, um Guido Crepax. Um, that was all in my early teens.
Alex Grand: [00:05:48] And that’s in the 70s. The like the Spanish illustrators that were kind of coming out with a lot of that Warren stuff. Is that some of that stuff you’re looking at?
José Villarrubia: [00:05:56] I was looking at that, but that wasn’t my favorite. I read them, but my favorite of the Warren books definitely was American artists like Corbin and Bernie Wrightson. I liked Maroto. Of the Spanish artists, I like him a lot, and I knew him already from Spain, from this magazine called Trinca for the magazine called Dracula, which was a tabloid magazine. I also like Henrico, I like. I mean, there were some really amazing Spanish artists, but it wasn’t. I didn’t like them so much for their work for Warren. I liked them for more European projects.
Alex Grand: [00:06:29] So then did you kind of seek them out since they were since they were local then or since some of them were local, did you kind of try to find them or were they just around?
José Villarrubia: [00:06:38] It didn’t even occur to me that they could be approached. There was no conventions or fandom to speak of. So there was no there were no signings. There was no nothing. The only thing that was found was a club that was mostly professionals that were all much older than me. They would have sporadic gatherings and this was a very bad time in Spain. It was the ending of the Franco dictatorship. So there was a lot of turmoil, a lot of violence, and it was bad. I went to some meetings of this association and through them I met some professional artists like speedy and others and older fans, and I got introduced to the work of the Spanish fanzines at the time, and I did some work for the fanzines in my late teens before I started college, and then I moved to America. So I left that scene. But the only signing I ever went to in the 70s in Spain was when Moebius came to the book fair in Madrid, and I was already an absolute fanatic. So I did go to have my book signed. I came, I remember with a huge pile of Moebius books, mostly in French, and he signed and sketched every one of them. And oh, wow. He gave me a copy of The Eyes of the Cat, which he had just done with Jodorowsky, which was not for sale with a really nice sketch. And he was there for three days, and I was there for three days. I would just go and hang out. He had no lines. Hardly anyone talked to him. And I was just, uh. I brought my brothers. We just were kind of hanging out, and he didn’t kick me out. He was very polite.
Alex Grand: [00:08:18] Now, what did your parents do? Were they artists at all?
José Villarrubia: [00:08:21] Yes. Uh, to an extent. My father had an advertising agency. Oh, and his best friend was his partner in the agency. And he was a really talented painter named Ezekiel, spelled Ezekiel. And, uh, the kid was very. He was an illustrator, but he was also a fine artist. And he was very interested in comics. He started a he started a beautiful large format, uh, painted comic adaptation of the Divine Comedy.
Alex Grand: [00:08:51] Mm. Oh, well.
José Villarrubia: [00:08:52] And which would have been amazing. But then come shrink folded. And so the project was never published. He thought it was funny that I read American comics and he thought they were silly. But he liked Dino Battaglia, and he liked Victor de la Fuente and other people. And then my mother was, uh, she studied she worked in a ceramics studio when she was young, and she was an amateur painter. And then she became a professional photographer and did professional photography, first for my father’s agency and then for her own fine art, uh, commission works on fashion photography and so forth. So, yeah, she’s completely into art.
Alex Grand: [00:09:36] Yeah, the visual and the visual expression, the communication. What were your favorite films growing up as far as what which ones had like the most visual impact on you as a teenager trying to find your way artistically.
José Villarrubia: [00:09:49] Kubrick’s for sure. 2001 Barry Lyndon.
Alex Grand: [00:09:52] I love that movie.
José Villarrubia: [00:09:53] I do to this day, in terms of movies, I was trying to catch up with a lot of the classics I was trying. It wasn’t easy. There were no videos. Even so, you had to go to little theaters that showed cycles. And so, um, I tried to catch up all the classics growing up, but of the newer ones that were coming on at the time, it definitely Kubrick was my favorite specialty visually, but in general. And and then I had like cult classic favorites like Phantom of the Paradise, which my brothers and I watch. I remember counting them. We went to the theater 17 times. We really loved that movie. Brian De Palma with the poster by Neal Adams and Richard Corben. I have that framed. Later on. I liked a lot of filmmakers, I still do. I was not a big Star Wars fan. I was not a big Star Trek fan. I just everything seems so silly because I had really loved 2001, and it just felt like from speculative science fiction going down to like soap opera with princes and princesses and kimonos and stuff. Just this wasn’t for me. I was too old. I was 23, but I felt too old.
Alex Grand: [00:11:05] Yeah, well, maybe your tastes were. We’re so sophisticated by that point. Um, did you gain an appreciation for color at a young age?
José Villarrubia: [00:11:14] I don’t think that I ever thought about color other than as an integral part of art. So when I started to like certain artists, then I started to really pay attention to how they use color. And that was also in my early teens. I got the French reprint of it, but it was an American book about Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac, The Art of Frank Frazetta. Those really played a big role for me artistically and in terms of the aesthetics, including the art. My brothers and I, we were fanatics of Alphonse Mucha, some of his posters hanging in our wall, and his palette was exquisite. I loved the photography work of David Hamilton at the time and the way that he used color. I also bought his books and I was very, very impressed with his aesthetics. He led two other photographers, like Sarah Moon, whose work I always loved for the color as well. My visual awakening in terms of like finding inspiration in all different kinds of art. Color was one of the elements that was fundamental for some of them, but I never thought about it as a separate concept. I had no idea. I was learning to paint and draw and paint as well. You know, that’s another thing. When I was 12 years old, my art teacher in school told my parents I should start preparing for the art academy. So I started taking traditional art Our courses after school. First thing I did was a copy of an Impressionist painting by Joaquin Sorolla. Sorolla was all about color and I could only use primaries. And I did watercolors, charcoal drawings, so on and so forth. So I knew that knowledge of color and color theory, I already knew a lot because my mother had encyclopedias at home about how to learn different artistic disciplines. And as a young teen, I already read them and done a lot of the exercises. So I knew color theory and a new composition and a new perspective. We had to do linear perspective in school anyway. So.
Alex Grand: [00:13:19] Now, you mentioned the Marvel. The stuff was black and white. Then what were you looking at like the Kirby Ditko kind of stuff? What was your like favorite Marvel at the time?
José Villarrubia: [00:13:29] I like the Kirby stories. I didn’t like Ditko. I didn’t like Kirby’s art. I liked the stories. I liked that the characters cross over from one series to the other. That was very exciting when I was 11 or 12, but I didn’t start really appreciating the art until I discovered Neal Adams. Neal Adams had a huge impact on me because his work was completely different and so much better drawn than anything I had ever seen in American comics. Because the Spanish reprints had no credits. My brothers and I would make up nicknames for the artists. Neal Adams is a nickname for us was The Futurist.
Alex Grand: [00:14:10] Oh that’s great.
José Villarrubia: [00:14:10] El Futurista because whenever it’s like, look at this, this thing by the futurist. Because what everything he drew looked like from the future compared with Kirby or any of those or Ditko. I also really loved John Buscema when he took over the Kirby series like Fantastic Four and Avengers, and I was like, this art is beautiful. I like it Gene Colan a lot. And then I discovered the Studio Wrightson, Barry Windsor-smith, Jeff Jones, Mike Kaluta.
Alex Grand: [00:14:40] You were drawn toward that stylized realism sensibility versus the cartoon it sounds like.
José Villarrubia: [00:14:45] As a teenager, I like cartoons that were cartoony, like, I love Quino, who did comic strips like Mafalda. He was like, everybody loved him. But I really loved him, and I loved his single illustration gags and he was totally cartoony. We all like a bunch of Spanish people that did cartoon stuff like Borges and, uh, and other humorists. I like the energy in a lot of the more stylized American artists, but I was not attracted to the art. Now I appreciate them in a different way. The team I thought Ditko’s characters were so ugly that I just couldn’t stomach them. Now I think he’s genius. But as a teen, when Romita started to draw those characters, all of a sudden everybody was beautiful and glamorous. Yeah, and the soap opera part really worked because I could never understand Peter having a crush on. Like the way those girls were drawn and stuff. It just didn’t work for me.
Alex Grand: [00:15:41] I got you now. You came to the USA in 1980. I read in one interview you said to just kind of get away from your background. That’s what I had seen as an answer for why you did that. Um, what what did you feel you were getting away from? Uh, if I may ask, or what was the overall theme of your journey to the US?
José Villarrubia: [00:16:03] Many things that contributed to that. Spain was in a state of turmoil after the death of Franco, and I got accepted, which was very difficult to the most prestigious place to study art, which was the Academy of San Fernando, in part of the University of Madrid. It had just been incorporated into the university system. It was an art school that had become part of the university system and they added certain classes. It was a mess. Half of the semester students were on strike. Half of the semester the teachers were on strike. I remember my painting class had 80 students in it. I never met my teacher. I painted and I got a grade. That’s it. So it was a waste of my time. So I thought coming to the States would be an opportunity to. Actually, I already had a lot of training, so I was ready for more training, not just. And I had been to the States and I had friends in the States, but more importantly, I wanted to have my own identity as separate from where I came from and my family and so forth. I mean, I was working with a little bit with my father as a teenager. If I had stayed in Spain, I would have continued working for him and I would have been his son. We have the same name. I didn’t want that also because I’m gay. I didn’t really want to stay in Spain because Spain had terribly homophobic laws at the time, and there was not a path forward in terms of that in Spain. Um, that came much later. So even though things were very difficult Here. They were not as difficult as they were back there.
Alex Grand: [00:17:40] I see what you’re saying. So even the the Reagans, America was actually a lesser, um, a lesser evil in a way. You’re saying?
José Villarrubia: [00:17:49] Well, Reagan’s America became a nightmare. But when I came, that was the year Reagan was elected. So it was still Carter’s America. I see Carter’s America was a much better place. Reagan America became very, very difficult, especially because of Aids and because of like what came afterwards. So things went downhill real fast once I was here.
Alex Grand: [00:18:09] I see. Okay. So it was a disappointment. Yeah.
José Villarrubia: [00:18:12] There were a lot of great things happening here. And, you know, certainly my education was great. My career really took off. And, you know, um, everything was going great. But, uh, being gay in the 80s was absolutely awful. It was just absolutely be terrible.
Alex Grand: [00:18:33] What kind of work did you do in the 1980s? Because I officially got into comics in the 90s. So what was what were you doing in the 80s for.
José Villarrubia: [00:18:40] The first part? I was still in school, and I got my bachelor’s in, um, in fine arts, and then I studied a master’s degree in, um, painting in fine art painting. So I started off as a painter, and I would do gallery work, and I would do, uh, portrait commissions, and I did that for a couple of years, but I got bored with it, and instead I decided I wanted to be a fine art photographer. So I was very good friends with the local photographer who’s brilliant named Stephen John Phillips. And, uh, I asked him for a lot of advice and, uh, and I started doing fine art photography, exhibiting it here, and then later in New York, in Soho.
Alex Grand: [00:19:31] Where were you living at this time?
José Villarrubia: [00:19:34] Baltimore. I was living in the same place. I’m talking to you from.
Alex Grand: [00:19:37] Oh. That’s great. Uh huh.
José Villarrubia: [00:19:39] And, uh, so I started to show photography in New York, and that’s what I did towards the end of the 90s. It lasted about ten years. And there was a until there was a big collapse in the photography world. And, and I had to reinvent myself in the 90s.
Alex Grand: [00:19:55] Is the internet in any way, in part responsible or digital cameras in part responsible for the collapse of photography?
José Villarrubia: [00:20:03] I mean, now you could argue that, but back then there wasn’t that wasn’t the case. What happened was, um, the 80s had been spend, spend, spend, live beyond your means. Speculate, speculate, speculate have been in comics, you know, like that stupid speculation about Death of Superman and all that stuff, right? Yeah. So people were spending more money that they had in all kinds of, Uh, goods, including art. So there was a boom in collecting. Um, but people were basically living beyond their means. And when the when things came down, things like fine art galleries really, really suffered. And, um, that’s what’s happened with everything that was shown in galleries, including photography. Photography at that point wasn’t really done digitally. Um, I mean, I did a little bit of Photoshop back then, but for the most part it was still done with film and printed on paper and so forth. And it was those additions that were valuable. So digital photography and everything that came from that and the facility to share images in the internet that came much later.
Alex Grand: [00:21:28] So yeah, it’s just like a lot of things in the 80s where people just spent money until they didn’t have any more to spend, and then it just kind of falls down. How did you get into then coloring comics? Um, how did that start? And I see that it seems to be tied in with a lot of, uh, Jae Lee’s artwork or pencils. How did all that happen? How did you get into comics?
José Villarrubia: [00:21:49] You know, I had already published a little bit some penciling work that I did for Legion of Super-Heroes. I was offered a story, and I said no at that time, later on, because I was in the fine art world, I was part of the advisory board of directors of Really Nice Art center here in Baltimore. They asked me to curate a show of local comics artists. So I invited Bernie Wrightson and, oh, Marc Hempel and Mark Wheatley and, uh, Ron Wilson and, um, and several other people. And then somebody in the comic book store told me, you should ask this guy Jay Lee, to do it. And I didn’t know who he was. He was very young. He was like the hot new thing in Namur at the time. And then we became really good friends. So then when he left Marvel and joined image, it was when coloring was going through a change and digital coloring was becoming a thing. Basically, he was not happy with the kind of digital coloring that he was seeing. And since he knew that I could paint because I was a painter and he knew that I loved pills and cabbage. Kent Williams painted art. He asked me if I would do painted colors on his comics, and I said yes. So I learned Photoshop. And then we did Health Shock together. And then when he went to Marvel, he took me along with him. When he went to DC. He took me along with him. He tried to take me along to Dark Horse, but didn’t happen at first, but then eventually it did.
Alex Grand: [00:23:19] They had their own colorist at that in-house colorist?
José Villarrubia: [00:23:22] Yeah.
Alex Grand: [00:23:23] How coloring was changing to digital was that basically Photoshop that was doing a lot of the coloring at that time.
José Villarrubia: [00:23:28] In the comics world? It was. They were in transition. The first comics that were colored digitally. They were colored with some PC paint program, which I don’t know which gave, like, I would say, more crude graphics. It was a thing for five minutes. I learned Photoshop and Photoshop then wasn’t what Photoshop is now, you know, 30 years later. But it had a lot of same intuitive features. So the way I colored for the first few years, I was doing painted colors on paper, and then I was tweaking them in Photoshop, so it wasn’t all Photoshop. So it was a very laborious process. That’s how I color, you know, fantastic 412, three, four or Captain America.
Alex Grand: [00:24:07] Yeah, that sounds like it was a very creative kind of finding the right balance. And because you had a thing for illustration and the textures of the paint and fine arts world, that was your niche as a colorist, you brought that sensibility to it, that then a lot of pencillers appreciated on their work is how I’m understanding this.
José Villarrubia: [00:24:26] That’s correct. And the years are diversified. I started doing more different kinds of coloring also because I like to try new things. For example, when Paul Pope asked me to work with him, I knew that his colors were going to be very flat because of the way he draws. Yeah. When Ryan asked me to color him, he asked me for flat and I gave him flat. He couldn’t believe it because he told me nobody had done that. When he asked for it, it’s like depending on the art and depending on the taste of the artist and the taste of the editor. You work in different ways.
Alex Grand: [00:24:59] And I noticed, like on the credits, especially in like the mid 90s, that of the stuff you were in, sometimes it wouldn’t just say colorist, it would say like computer coloring. And it sounds like that’s what they meant was that you were basically doing a hand coloring, but then doing a Photoshop kind of thing on those credits. Like, I look at credits and it’s interesting that they were writing it as computer coloring for a lot of your stuff. Um, what was that? The main approach to coloring in comics, basically from the mid 90s and on. I mean, is that basically how most colorists approach comic books around that time? It just kind of went digital.
José Villarrubia: [00:25:39] It took a long time. Yeah, for many, many years. Um, for example, in DC you had to do color guides and give it to a studio and they would like I just found like Mark Wheatley and Mark Hempel did the story for flinch. Beautiful story. And they wanted me to color it with painted colors and all I could do, because they would not do it other ways. I had to paint the pages, give them to all the optics, and all the optics would mimic what I did in Photoshop instead of just scanning it.
Alex Grand: [00:26:15] Oh, wow.
José Villarrubia: [00:26:16] And it was like I had already done painted colors for Jay for years when that happened. But at DC they were like, oh, this has to be copied by, you know, a technician. It’s like, okay, so it took a long time. Um, and I would say like ten years to make the transition so colorists could do just whatever they thought was best without having color guides done first.
Alex Grand: [00:26:44] Amazing. It sounds like each company had their own different way of doing this.
José Villarrubia: [00:26:49] Oh, absolutely. This is the thing that technically with image, it was kind of like a free for all because they were creating own books and like, the creators would do whatever they thought was best in every single sense. So there was no supervision of the writing or the art of the coloring or nothing, just whatever the artist wanted. But Marvel and DC and Dark Horse, they had their systems in place and innovation had no space. They see they saw themselves as companies producing a professional product that was marketable. Why mess with something that works. So they had no interest in growing or because growing and experimenting means risking failure.
Alex Grand: [00:27:31] Right. And cost, I guess.
José Villarrubia: [00:27:33] Not so much cost. Because, for example, having an intermediary between my color guides and the finished pages, that’s adds cost to the work. Oh, yeah. As opposed to just me doing it. It wasn’t so much cost as it was. This is the way we do it. This is the way we’ve always done it. Even if you hadn’t been, it had been just a few years. For example, I would insist on getting the pages scanned in grayscale as opposed to bitmap, because so much line art was dropped in bitmap, and that was like struggle, like theaters had to argue with production for that to happen. So but I understand them. They don’t get paid to try new things because if it printed bad and it could. Then there would be in trouble.
Alex Grand: [00:28:21] Mhm.
José Villarrubia: [00:28:22] And printing was I mean I had to do my own trapping for years and. It was a mess. It was complicated. It was very difficult. Um but whatever you know, I mean I learned to color in a way that I always tell my students, I kind of average the pages. So I color in a way that if it prints too dark, it still looks good. If it prints too light, it still looks good. So you just kind of like with the years and doing thousands and thousands and thousands of pages, your eye just can see that. Yeah, that dark blue is going to print. Terrible.
Alex Grand: [00:28:58] Yeah, yeah. That’s great. Yeah, sure. Yeah. The experience and uh, and then you see the results anyway. Do you buy your own stuff like, let’s say you’ve colored stuff. Do you buy it just to see what it ended up looking like?
José Villarrubia: [00:29:10] No, I get comps.
Alex Grand: [00:29:11] You get the comps. Yeah. And then do you kind of study the results and then that informs you on how you approach it next time.
José Villarrubia: [00:29:17] No, I haven’t done that in years. I the printed. I don’t remember being surprised by the printing in 15 years or 20 years. I mean, no, there’s no need for that. You know, normally it looks just like what it did.
Alex Grand: [00:29:30] On the screen. Yeah. Yeah.
José Villarrubia: [00:29:32] 5 to 10% changes. But those are par for the course.
Alex Grand: [00:29:38] That’s one of the things I remember when I first came upon that concept. I was like reading up on Barry Windsor-smith, and he’d be frustrated that he put all this detail in his, in his Conan. And then when he’d see the, the print production, he would be like so frustrated. And now it’s not just coloring, right? You’ve also done this kind of computer photography fumetti kind of stuff. Yeah. But you did a cover art for Neil Gaiman’s Wheel of Worlds.
José Villarrubia: [00:30:01] Oh my goodness.
Alex Grand: [00:30:02] Yes. First, how’d you get onto that project? And it sounds like you were taking photos and then doing manipulation in Photoshop to create a cover. How did that work?
José Villarrubia: [00:30:10] That was like one of my first jobs. I think the first time I actually colored something fully was for Xander of the Lost Universe with Jay, and the files were so big that I had to go to Printing Center to overlap the line art into the painted art. I just couldn’t find a computer that could handle that, not even in my school, because the size of the files. So I did a few Zander covers.
Alex Grand: [00:30:36] That’s a Gene Roddenberry thing.
José Villarrubia: [00:30:38] Yeah. I did. The first one was color guides and the Ridiculous method I told you. And the second one, I said, just let me do it. And then he did. And then, because I had been doing fine art photography and I was I had I had learned to do Photoshop and I was doing a little bit of fine art, Photoshop, manipulated photography of figures and so forth. Um, the editor asked me if I would do the cover for For the Wheels, Will of Worlds and The Wheel of Worlds. I did a sketch and it was approved. I did the photoshoot. Issued. It was approved, um, together and sent it to them. And that was that.
Alex Grand: [00:31:19] Yeah. Yeah. Well, it’s just very striking and kind of unique looking cover, especially for comic books. So I enjoyed looking at, uh, well, in researching this, it was a lot of fun stumbling onto things like that. You colored jail on uncanny X-Men. It was like a variant cover. I think it was the Dynamic Forces cover. Uh, issue number 360, 1998. So when you’re doing this, are you doing this all from Baltimore, like from internet, or are you in New York at all in Baltimore? And that was under editor Bob Harris at Marvel. Did you have any interactions with the editors, or was this all like through J communicating with you? Like how how did that all work?
José Villarrubia: [00:31:57] Anything with J has always been because J demanded that I work with him.
Alex Grand: [00:32:01] Mhm.
José Villarrubia: [00:32:02] So I would really have no editorial communications. I was just kind of.
Alex Grand: [00:32:07] Like.
José Villarrubia: [00:32:07] In a way like an assistant of J’s.
Alex Grand: [00:32:10] Yeah. So it was always through J basically he was the intermediary in all these things?
José Villarrubia: [00:32:14] Yes.
Alex Grand: [00:32:15] Yeah. Because you did a lot of cool things there. You colored Jay on the Spider-Man chapter one Dynamic Forces cover under editor Ralph Macchio. So just kind of a cool time when you look at your covers, you know, versus the other variants, yours stands out. It just feels like the art and the coloring, they just have something unique that you’re looking at. And the other ones look a little more standard, I think, for the time. Thank you. The photo art that you mentioned, you also worked in 1999 on Veils and Flinch. Yeah. Yeah. Those are the two things that you did. So did you do those in a similar process as the Neil Gaiman cover that you did? Yes.
José Villarrubia: [00:32:52] That was my friend Stephen John Phillips that I mentioned before, that had been my mentor in fine art photography to an extent. He is the one who encouraged me to take a Photoshop class, and we took it together, a summer class. But I learned Photoshop quicker, more efficiently. And so then he talked to Karen Berger about doing a graphic novel about a harem. He had done some covers because photo covers were a thing then, and like people like Dave McKean had done some photo covers and other people, and so he did all of the covers for a series called chiaroscuro about the lives of the life of Leonardo da Vinci. With, uh, with another digital artist doing the Photoshop part. So for veils, that was an idea he had. He had done a series of odalisques, uh, for fine art, and he and this writer, Pat McGreal, came up with the concept of doing sort of like a feminist fantasy story about a harem. Stephen and I made a sample page and we presented it in the project was approved, and then it was a challenge to do it, but it was very fun. Basically, we got the script, I did the layouts, which were kind of like pencils.
José Villarrubia: [00:34:05] We’ll get notes on those. And then from that, uh, Stephen will shoot most of the models, and I would incorporate them into backgrounds and combine them sometimes with figures from paintings. We also had my friend Alexei Zolotarev did some 3D. He was working in a video game company, so he did the screens and he did the bathhouse and several other elements. He also worked on on Promethea later for me, and then all of the cast and all of the costumes and all. We had zero budget, so everything was Favre’s friends borrowing, you know. Those things had to be real. Karen showed it to Harlan Ellison, who really liked it. We got a great write up in Entertainment Weekly, and Stephen went on to do other photographic novels, but not with me. He worked with other digital artists. He did one called AI paparazzi, and then he did one about Edgar Allan Poe. Edgar Allan Poe is very attached to Baltimore, so it was a good subject. I went on to work with Alan Moore on a special chapter of Promethea that he wrote for me, and that I had to do the work by myself. Getting models, making costumes, wigs was hard.
Alex Grand: [00:35:16] Which that really stands out by that because I read all of Promethean. I remember looking at that going, whoa, this is different. This is great. In veils, you dedicated your work to Richard Corben in that I noticed. Yes. So Corben is like a real presence, you know, for a long time. I mean, long time forever. So. Yes.
José Villarrubia: [00:35:32] Yes. This is not just a fad for me. Um, Corben, in addition to everything else, which is too numerous to mention, one of the things that I’ve been obsessed is the two fumetti that he did. He did two stories photographically, and especially the first one, which is called ochre, which Jan Strnad wrote. It’s a mini masterpiece. He actually shot real people. Bruce Jones was the male model, Karen Gilbertson was the female model. His clay figures and sets collaged them, but he would distort the figures photographically, like by tilting the projector that prints the photograph tilted and get distorted photographs and then cut them. And I mean amazing, just absolutely, insanely brilliant. And then at the end, he would color it with his manipulating the color layers of the.
Alex Grand: [00:36:24] Printing.
José Villarrubia: [00:36:25] Separations. Insanely artistic. Creative. Shocking. Beautiful. In addition to everything else, veils was a new thing at the time, but I felt like without having seen what Corbin did, I would have never pictured doing something that was beautiful and fantastical. Because photo comics in Europe are like photograph soap operas, telenovelas we call them in Spain, and they’re just very tacky pictures of like, you know, photographs of people making faces. And Corbin took it to another dimension, and then he did another one called, and then he was going to do the continuation of ogre, but he put a thing about how there was a catastrophe and he couldn’t do it photographically, and he just drew it. So that was that.
Alex Grand: [00:37:13] Interesting. You’re able to access that otherworldly dimension with digital photo art because of the exposure to Corbyn, or at least that’s that was a strong part of it. Which, which, which is almost a story of den with that guy that goes into that other dimension, um, and encountering that fantastic world. So in a way, you’re that guy in that in an artistic way for for veil. Yeah. You also colored the century with J. Lee under Joe Quesada. So it’s interesting you’ve worked under a lot of these interesting editors. Did you have any interesting interactions with Karen Berger, by the way?
José Villarrubia: [00:37:50] Very much so. She’s a friend. Karen was my first boss. Really? Because veils was Alisa Kwitney, but she was under Karen supervision. So I knew Karen from the beginning, doing things like the cover for flinch and stuff like that. That was with Joan Hilty, who then became a friend as well. Karen and I really bonded in Naples. I was 14 years ago. I was in my first sabbatical and I went to my first convention in Italy, and it was in Naples, and Karen was a guest as well. And Naples is amazing, but it’s a very overwhelming place when you first go. I was overwhelmed, chaotic and fun. Karen saw me there. She was like, oh, you’re here. And we really bonded. And she liked that. I could communicate in my terrible Italian, and I would explain to her what was going on half of the time. So we had a great time. We had a blast. And then she told me she wanted me to do some stuff for Vertigo, and I said, absolutely. So because of that, I did several things. Pornsak was Karen’s assistant at the time, so that’s how I became friends with Pornsak, with whom I work much later in infidel. I know Karen and Karen has been very kind and when she left Vertigo, I went with her to her burger books. She gave me coloring for Anthony Bourdain’s series Hungry Ghosts. I had already color under Karen. I had color Anthony Bourdain’s Guajiro graphic novel, and I also colored the second one, so he liked what I did. And Paul Pope was doing the covers, and Paul likes what I do, and I got two colors from people that I hadn’t colored before that were wonderful. So I have enormous respect and admiration for Karen. I can’t say enough good things about her professionally, creatively and personally. She’s one of my absolute heroes.
Alex Grand: [00:39:47] She’s her own legend, you know, with a lot of the work she did. Absolutely. In comics. Let’s talk a bit about Alan Moore, you know, and how you got kind of, um, you know, working with him. You did color plate illustrations for his for a couple of his novels. Right. Voice of fire. How did you get involved in that?
José Villarrubia: [00:40:05] I discovered him in Swamp Thing, like most American readers, and then I was very, very impressed by his writing, and I started reading everything by him and devouring it. Eventually, I read his novel voice of the fire, which had come out in England in small format with little black and white illustrations. Beautiful, a pocket book. I had this idea that I could do photo illustrations for voice of the fire if I could find the right publisher, so I approached a couple of publishers that had done books like that, and we just didn’t click. So one day I was in San Diego and I was walking by the top shelf booth, and there was Chris Staros, who I had not met, but I knew had a sterling reputation as one of the nicest people in comics. So I went right up to him, introduced myself. He knew who I was. We were talking about Alan. He was already doing something with Alan. Maybe he had already talked. Started talking about finishing those girls. So I told him I wanted to. An illustrated hardcover of voice of the fire. And he said, funny, you mentioned. And he pulled out a yellow notepad from under the desk in his booth. And like, right there in this to do list was published an American edition of voice of the fire. So that’s how it happened. I went to Northampton and Alan made a map of Northampton, and he marked where everything took place in the story.
Alex Grand: [00:41:38] Oh, cool.
José Villarrubia: [00:41:39] Melinda and I, Melinda, his wife. Fiance. Then we took a taxi and we spent a day going around Northampton, taking lots and lots of film pictures back then. And that was the basis for illustrating voice of the.
Alex Grand: [00:41:52] Fire, because like you said, you did kind of digital photo art for Promethea. You did some, you did Coloring. You also colored what Chris Prowse on Tom strong as well. Another Alan Moore work and then the Mayor of Love 2004. That was part of an anti-homophobia kind of message. So did he have you in mind for that or is that something you really wanted to be a part of as well? Um, how did that one come about?
José Villarrubia: [00:42:17] This is how I met him. I remember what happened when I first met him and he opened the door. He gave me a huge hug, and he told me, I’m going to make you a cup of tea.
Alex Grand: [00:42:26] Oh, yeah. That’s great.
José Villarrubia: [00:42:29] Very English. And, uh. Um, I had talked to him before, and I think the first time I talked to him was because I had this idea to adapt, uh, The Mirror of Love as a play.
Alex Grand: [00:42:53] Mm. Okay.
José Villarrubia: [00:42:54] And my friend David Drake did an adaptation, and I performed it in a theatre festival here in Baltimore. And then it was filmed, and I took a tape and gave it to him and Melinda, and they really liked it.
Alex Grand: [00:43:07] Oh, okay.
José Villarrubia: [00:43:08] That’s interesting. I had no intention of turning it into a book at that point. I just wanted to play. Then I propose illustrating voice of the fire. Chris Harris agreed. Then I don’t know what happened then, but this French friend of mine proposed that I do a mirror of love as a book. As a comic, I said I won’t do it as a comic because it was a comic already, which I never saw until after I’d done the play adaptation. But I think it would be a great book. And so I proposed that to Chris. Chris said, yes, we propose it to Allen. Allen said yes. I actually got Allen to rewrite some of the parts, which was good. And Allen really likes that book, and he’s taken it and done readings in like, schools and stuff with it.
Alex Grand: [00:43:50] You guys got along quite well. And maybe sharing, um, certain artistic tastes may be a kind of also a mutual European sensibility about some things. And, um, sounds like you enjoyed his company and he enjoyed yours. And it’s really wonderful. Um, Alan is.
José Villarrubia: [00:44:08] The friendliest, nicest, warmest guy you can imagine. And, you know, over the years, I, um, you know, I got close to him, but also to Melinda, his wife, who came to visit me in Paris. Um, several times. Um, and we went together to Portugal, to Amsterdam, to Denmark, um, and to other places, uh, with Melinda. Not so much with Alan, because Alan doesn’t like to travel. But we I also know Leah well, his daughter. And she’s been wonderful always. So I’m friends with the family. Um, and, uh. Yeah, they’re they’re wonderful people.
Alex Grand: [00:44:51] Yeah. Um, quick question about your interactions with them as far as what you’ve observed as a friend. And but when I read his stuff and I feel like I’ve read everything he’s done, at least in Comic World, um, there almost seems to be like a very metaphysical, you know, view of the world and the people and the emotions. And then he describes that in this really unique and and amazing way. And something I always wonder is, is he like, is it do you feel like there’s he has some sort of psychic or at least some sort of empathic ability with his, with fellow humans and creatures? Uh, did you observe anything like that, or is he just a very good writer? And, you know, I mean, what’s your impression of that?
José Villarrubia: [00:45:34] It’s brilliant. I mean, he’s the most intelligent person I ever met. So he makes connections that are dazzling. They’re not just surprising. They’re beautiful connections and also sometimes very complex. He does talk very lightly about mystical experiences. Never predicating never preaching, never and always with humor, always like he coaches everything he says with mild self-deprecation and so forth. So he’s absolutely, uh, mesmerizing. Speaker. If you buy, uh, there is a DVD that is around called The Mindscape of Alan Moore. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [00:46:21] Yeah. And.
José Villarrubia: [00:46:23] Um, if you watch that, that’s very close to talking to him. Except he’s a great listener. Right. And he tells you things, but he also wants you to tell him things, and he really listens. Um, and he remembers things, and he loves stories. So when you tell him stories, it’s like you’re doing, like, giving him a little present.
Alex Grand: [00:46:49] Oh. That’s great.
José Villarrubia: [00:46:52] I was very surprised at first because when he would ask you what was going on with you, what’s going on with this and that, and then you start to tell him the story, and then he gets very close to you and he opens his eyes very wide. It’s like he doesn’t want to miss anything of what you’re saying, right? And then you realize is that that’s the highest currency in his world. Stories.
Alex Grand: [00:47:12] Amazing.
José Villarrubia: [00:47:14] And so he doesn’t care about anything material. He doesn’t care about fame, fortune, riches, celebrity. Uh, but he loves stories. And he loves people. And when he walks around Northampton, everybody knows him. He talks to everybody. I mean, literally everybody. And he knows their name. He knows their story. He helps out people as much as possible. Um, he’s enormously beloved by his community. And, um, it says so much about him. You know, there’s a lot that people just don’t know about him that is remarkable. He’s he’s a really incredible person. Mm.
Alex Grand: [00:48:00] Well, it says a lot about you, about these specific things that you notice about him. That’s really great. It sounds like those are things that you value as well. Then with you, the way, the way you describe it. Um, now, um, kind of back to back to coloring. And so I just want to review a couple of things you did. You did some pretty interesting things. You did like a colored Wolverine cover under editor Mike Martz. Um, Gambit Bishop coloring those covers. Color the cover for Hulk with, uh, penciler um J.H. Williams under Tom Brevoort. So in a lot of these, when it wasn’t Jay Lee, it was maybe other people. Would you have more in contact with the editor, or was it more again through the penciler? How was that working?
José Villarrubia: [00:48:43] Hands on the editor. Mike was the first editor that I worked after working for Nancy Quezada doing sentry. Yeah. Mark edited and his, um, assistant Mike, right at the time. Uh, they were editing the sentry crossover, and they were very involved, and I got a lot of work from them, from the editors, them in particular after I worked with them. Once I did Bill Sienkiewicz, Hulk Sentry crossover, and Mark Teixeira angel X-Men sentry crossover. Tom. Uh, I worked with him a number of times. Usually I deal with his assistant, so it depends on the situation. Some editors have their assistants deal with the colorist. Some editors deal directly with the with the colorist. But it’s it varies on the situation. Uh, Mike Martz was wonderful and very hands off, and I worked with him until he left aftershock last year. Uh, I’ve done a ton of work for him, and he’s always been, um, Great to work with and always listen to. Like I would tell them. I’d like to work with this artist that you’re working with, and he would always make arrangements for that to happen. I have very good relationships with editors by the 2000.
Alex Grand: [00:49:59] Around this time that we’re talking about, you’re coloring a lot of covers. You’re working a lot. If you were to color like a cover in interiors for an issue, how much time would that take you around this period?
José Villarrubia: [00:50:11] Depending on the complexity of the covers and the art inside, I would say that in the 2000 it would take me. Typically it would take me a couple hours, interior page would take me also an hour and a half roughly. The average page. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [00:50:28] Yeah.
José Villarrubia: [00:50:28] That’s good. I didn’t have assistance back then.
Alex Grand: [00:50:31] But oh I see. So you have some assistants now then that kind of help out.
José Villarrubia: [00:50:34] Yeah. Flatters yeah.
Alex Grand: [00:50:35] Oh flatters yeah. That’s right. Yeah yeah I’ve seen that because I’ve done some I’ve done some graphic novels on my own. And I noticed that um for an artist, sometimes they’ll have like a flat colourist kind of do it first and then they’ll do other things after that.
José Villarrubia: [00:50:49] So the colours when.
Alex Grand: [00:50:52] You work for Marvel and DC, you know, what determines your color tone is that basically like you’re looking at the the art and then that determines it. Are you looking at it? Does does editorial in some way guide you as far as color tone of a cover?
José Villarrubia: [00:51:06] Some editors are very hands on, some are very hands off for both covers and interiors. I get guidance or not from a combination of the editor first and foremost, since they are the boss, the artist, sometimes the writer, like Garth Ennis, for example, is very hands on with the colors he wants. Sometimes I have certain ideas when it comes to coloring, particularly covers, so I try to do something that goes with the art and that is striking. And more times than not I get very few or no notes. Sometimes the artist has very specific ideas of what they want, and that’s my least favorite way of working.
Alex Grand: [00:51:44] Yeah. So when the artist says, okay, I want this to be this way, or they say, okay, you know, it’s it’s not as creative. It sounds like.
José Villarrubia: [00:51:50] Anybody can do.
Alex Grand: [00:51:51] It. You did a lot of covers, you know, Doctor Octopus, Spider-Man, Batman, Superman, X-Men, Silver Surfer. You know, when you see that it’s a particular character, then does that then also help or rather guide you or inform your decision on how to color that, like Silver Surfer is in space. So you, you know, you have a maybe a certain color palette in mind. Spider-man in the city. Batman at night. You know, are these all things that kind of inform that?
José Villarrubia: [00:52:14] It depends on the illustration. The illustration tells you what color it should be. I mean, I see an illustration and I picture in color in my mind, and then I just go and put those colors in, you know. So sure, outer space has those psychedelic colors and. Oh I see.
Alex Grand: [00:52:25] But it’s not necessarily the character. It’s it’s the picture.
José Villarrubia: [00:52:28] It’s the picture. About ten years ago I looked at this database online somewhere, which counted how many pages and covers I had done. And this is about ten years ago. Yeah. And it said I had done 14,000. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [00:52:40] Right.
José Villarrubia: [00:52:41] And then I looked and there were a lot of projects that were missing, so I can’t even imagine how many I’ve done. But it’s been a lot. So, you know, like everything else, you do it so much that eventually you sort of have a muscle for it, so much you do unconsciously. And that’s why I like teaching, because I have to explain what I’m doing. Otherwise I just do it. The line art dictates the palette and the style of the coloring. What you do is a good colorist is to finish the art without overpowering it. I have a preference for flatter colors more than render colors. I have a preference for complementary colors, particularly to do overly colorful pieces unless it’s a psychedelic project. For example, I just finished this project that hasn’t been announced yet, and the artist was wonderful. And the writer, who’s also an artist, asked me to do a look based on the giallo films of the 60s, like Bava, and I did a few pages and they were like, oh, like this one. Like this one was super bright colored and I was like, sure. So basically I did all 85 pages. I think it was um, with like, uh, really shocking colors. And, uh, they loved it. And I and we work more in other projects after that. Uh, I would not have had the nerve to color it so brightly if I hadn’t been encouraged. But once I like, go with it, then. Sure. On the other hand, I did another project for a very high profile character. I got the probably the worst advice that I can get when doing a project, especially with someone I never worked with before and an artist that never worked with before. How would you like this color? Right? And they say, oh, do whatever you want. When I hear that, I know I’m going to have to redo it.
Alex Grand: [00:54:32] Oh, interesting. Because you do what you want and then they want something different.
José Villarrubia: [00:54:36] Exactly what I do when I do that is, I do a decent version that doesn’t take any chances of the material. They could go to print and it would sell just as well. And then I wait for them to tell me what and which is completely different always. It’s like 100% different. Like in this case, they wanted all monochromatic schemes in most pages. And I was like, okay, that’s not something I’m going to do naturally.
Alex Grand: [00:55:02] Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s so specific now.
José Villarrubia: [00:55:04] Yeah, I work fast, I work efficiently, I like the work and and I’m totally open to changes. So it’s like I take notes and notes and notes. Right. And it’s a lot of fun. And it allows me to work with many different people, many different styles, many different subjects.
Alex Grand: [00:55:20] You colored Paul Pope’s Batman Year 100 and that won an Eisner. And that brings up a question for me as far as inking and coloring. Does sometimes inking happen during a coloring process where you’re kind of doing both? No. Okay. So they’re clearly distinct. And so you’ll have things prepared before you color it. Yes. The feeling of recognition when that Eisner came through, was it?
José Villarrubia: [00:55:45] I can’t tell you much I wasn’t there. I don’t think I was mentioned in the ceremony, but.
Alex Grand: [00:55:50] The colors are clearly a part of.
José Villarrubia: [00:55:51] It. Yeah. That’s so. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [00:55:53] So now I’m just going to kind of name a few things around the same time, which I find interesting because each one is so different from the other. But I think as a colorist, that’s the cool thing, is the variety that you’re a part of. Jeff Lemire, Sweet Tooth 2009 2013 2010 Inverna Lockpez Cuba my Revolution. When I look through it, it was like black and white and red, right? 2013 you did some of Django Unchained, which had a comic which was part of the Quentin Tarantino kind of thing. So, you know, it’s just a lot of variety and a lot of interesting choices that you probably were making through all this. Does genre play a role in coloring?
José Villarrubia: [00:56:28] Yes, yes. Paul always works in black and white. So when he came up with Batman Year 100, it was going to be his first mainstream project. I remember he picked me because he liked my colors and the photography that he had seen, like The Mirror of Love. And he definitely didn’t want standard coloring. And I remember we met in Washington Union Station, and he had a few issues of Metallic Blonde, and we went over some of the things that were happening in Metallic Blonde. Paul is very good to work with because he always tells me what he wants, but he doesn’t tell me the colors to use. Like he would say to me, make this cover look like Murnau’s Nosferatu. If he had filmed it in color.
Alex Grand: [00:57:11] Oh, I see.
José Villarrubia: [00:57:12] And I know exactly what he means. So he was the feeling. And he lets me choose the colors. And so he likes that. That he can tell. We did an Elvis that he wanted color with El Greco palette. And it’s like, I can totally do that. And he likes that. He can say things to me that I know what he’s talking about. Jeff likewise always works in black and white. I knew him from the top shelf family, and uh, his first mainstream book was Sweet Tooth, and, uh, so he wanted to work with me because he knew me personally, and he liked me personally. And we were friends. Uh, both of those projects were with Bob Schreck, who was extremely open minded about art approaches. Cuban revolution was Karen approved that project? Joan Hilty, my friend, was the editor. Dean, who’s also a friend, wrote. I mean, he adapted and illustrated the story. They decided to make it in two colors. Dean had in mind to make it brown and yellow. I didn’t want to color it in brown and yellow. I wanted it to color in black and red because Communist Cuba. So we did some tests and so forth. And finally Dean agreed. And when my when Harvey from that which is funny, that I got my Harvey for coloring for using one color. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [00:58:34] That’s funny.
José Villarrubia: [00:58:35] And then the one you mentioned after that, which one was Django Unchained?
Alex Grand: [00:58:38] Colored Denis Koun’s art in.
José Villarrubia: [00:58:40] That Denis Cowan that’s right. And for that, I actually had a copy of the movie in my computer, and I actually freeze frame the scenes to like, get a very accurate palette for each one of the scenes. But then I had to heighten them because movie colors are not comic book colors. So that was great. And it was nominated for an Eisner as well.
Alex Grand: [00:59:01] The reference toward genre and coloring is he also did the 2016 Conan role playing game Sword and Sorcery. Right? If someone were to mention, hey, look, you know, I want the color palette to be like a sword and sorcery type. Does that automatically have its own colors that yet that you have in mind?
José Villarrubia: [00:59:17] Oh yes. And the first job I got for Conan on the Dark Horse was I was supposed to take over. When Dave Stewart left, Richard Isanove did some issues and then I was supposed to take over, but then Kerry North left, Timothy Truman and Tomas Giorello began, and somebody else was coloring him. And then they did discover that Tomas wasn’t happy and he wanted a color like Frazetta. I colored it exactly like a Frazetta, and he was happy. And so I started working with him. And then I was supposed to work with Corbin on that, and eventually I did. And then I stayed with the series. We did many. The series was a collection of mini series, really, but it was about six years that Tomas and I and Timothy worked together, and it was very fun. And definitely there was a type palette that is appropriate for swords and sorcery that is, um, a lot grittier than a superhero comic or like a contemporary story.
Alex Grand: [01:00:15] Mhm. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. I mean that’s part of the genre is the and then in movies then you add sound to color and composition and, and now you have a genre right there. So that’s pretty cool. And that’s cool that, you know, if someone you know hires you to color something, they say okay, here’s the genre. You already have like a kind of a whole backlog of experience of what kind of kind of colors you might end up using. But then, of course, it sounds like the picture that you’re receiving then defines the ultimate color choices. Also, based on some discussions you have with the people that are that are that are part of that.
José Villarrubia: [01:00:48] So that’s right.
Alex Grand: [01:00:50] So that’s cool. And it’s like a and it gets more specific, you know, the closer you get toward the actual picture. And then the final execution. That’s great. And that that’s wonderful that you’re talking that through with me because it helps me also understand the arts in general better. So in 2017, you colored the first five issues of America, Marvel’s first Latinx, you know, LGBT hero. You know, tell us about that experience. And were you selected for that? Did you want to do that? How did that work?
José Villarrubia: [01:01:17] Joe Quinones asked for me, and I met him socially. I really loved his work. This was under Axel Alonso, and Axel always liked working with me and I always like working with Axel. Axel was a wonderful editor. He’s the one who really got me to work with Corbin, so I will forever be in his debt. Axel was one of those editors who’s really sensitive to art. When America came about, it was very exciting to do it because working with Joe and I realized that the entire team was Hispanic. Gaby Rivera was writing the story, so it was like everybody a story inker or penciller, everything and colorist and, you know, Latinx lesbian hero, which was exciting. It was very edgy at the time to have this queer immigrant from another planet, but Latina nevertheless character be called America, which was very in your face. And it was a lot of fun. Joe wanted me to color it exactly how I had worked with Adam Hughes and Betty and Veronica and Adam had a very, very, very specific idea for Betty and Veronica that had to do with flat colors, soft Gradients, colored cheeks, and colorized outlines in everything. It was very laborious. It was very beautiful because it’s Adam Joe’s style is different. So, you know, I sort of adapted to that. And then he had filling artists that I tried to do the best I could to make it all match. So we did the first trade. I’m very proud of that work. It got a lot of nominations for different awards, especially for visibility and for representation, and it went great. Gabby Rivera was a wonderful writer, and I hope she’s doing a lot more comics because she was really, really terrific. That was a real joy.
Alex Grand: [01:03:01] So now let’s talk about Richard Corben’s den and your function as the project art director on this for Dark Horse. We talked about it a bit earlier, but he died three years ago at 80 years old, roughly first. Do you remember, like what year you first met him? Started talking about art with him. Do you remember what year roughly that was?
José Villarrubia: [01:03:20] When? When did cage come out?
Alex Grand: [01:03:22] Oh, and that was through Axel Alonso.
José Villarrubia: [01:03:24] Yeah, 2002. Two, 20 years ago.
Alex Grand: [01:03:27] Tell us about that. And what was your initial impression of him about how you guys communicated artistically about things?
José Villarrubia: [01:03:32] I really was very pushy to Axl since he was in Vertigo, and he hired Corbin to do Hellblazer. I was very pushy when he moved to Marvel. He was going to do Hulk. He didn’t give it to me. He gave it to this team of Mexican colorists. After he finished that, he did cage and then cage, he offered to me and he gave the colorists, uh, the regular series of the Hulk. John Romita Jr. Was doing with Bruce Jones. I remember getting the original pages at home. They were beautiful. I scanned them, I talked to him on the phone. I had an idea of how to do it, and I did it. And he was rendering them kind of in a pointillist way, which I’d never seen him do before with teeny teeny dots. I sort of tried to mimic that in the coloring, put a lot of work in those pages after the first issue came out. Axl loved it, but Corbin said that he wanted me to simplify the coloring. I said I’d do anything you want. Just tell me what to do. He actually did a sample for me, and I followed that after that, and it was colors in him. I had never seen him use himself until then. He had always rendered everything like super three dimensionally. Starting then, he just wanted flat colors and gradients, which was a look I never would have thought for him.
José Villarrubia: [01:04:50] So basically I did a hybrid of what I was doing and what he asked me to do because of continuity and because Axel really liked what I was doing. So he sent me a postcard with an Andrew Wyeth painting. Very, very kind. And more importantly, one day I received this very large cardboard box. I opened it and inside the box were five beautiful drawings of nudes from life, from observation that he was he sent me. And so I was flabbergasted. I remember I was like, I almost fell on my butt. I called him, I said, Richard, I just received this package with five drones. And he said, well, they’re for you. And I said, well, that’s incredibly generous. And he said, well, you told me you liked my work, so I thought you would like to have them. They’re framed in my living room, by the way. And they’ve been hanging there for 20 years. And I said, well, yes, I love them. What are they? He says, I like to work from life. I go to life drawing sessions every week. I said, well, that’s very interesting, Richard, because among the many other things that you do so well, one of the things that you’re those of us who love your work are very impressed by your deep knowledge of anatomy and how you can place the muscles in the figures and distort them, and do realism and do exaggeration when you want to.
José Villarrubia: [01:06:17] It’s like that’s one of your absolute strengths that sets you apart. Part. And he said to me, well, that’s very nice of you to say, but, you know, when it comes to drawing the figure, you can never be too good. And I was like, Holy cow. I do like a little shitty drawing. I was like, look how awesome I am. And it’s like Corbyn saying that it was such a lesson for me because he was so humble. He was not humble bragging either. He’s just that’s who he was. And he did that all the way to the end. He would just go and sit there with students and draw people from life. Amazing. Such a master. Yeah, that’s how we first got our start. And then over the years, I colored several things by him. He liked when I color him and he liked when Dave Stewart colored him in Hellboy. He liked both of us because I remember he wrote to one of my editors and my editor told me so. I colored him in other series. And eventually, like ten years after I worked in cage, I did the creepy presents that I was talking about before.
Alex Grand: [01:07:18] Even in martial arts, like the highest level. There’s always that feeling. Well, it tends to be accompanied with a feeling of humility, and you can never be too good and constant practice, constant work to constantly try to get to that point. But you never get there, but you get closer. It sounds like he had that approach. He was almost like a 10th degree black belt that was still, you know, constantly seeking self-improvement, which which is amazing, right? Because you feel like they don’t need that. But amazing.
José Villarrubia: [01:07:45] Amazing.
Alex Grand: [01:07:45] But it is amazing. Yeah. So then, you know, just to give the audience a little backstory, it’s not exactly sword and sorcery. It’s like a sword and otherworldly fantasy series. I watched the animated 1968 film he did. People can watch that on YouTube, but it’s about a normal guy who enters another world as a virile, strong man. And there’s a big breasted woman, inhuman monsters. And it’s she has, like, this kind of convoluted publishing history because it was an underground comics, Métal Hurlant, heavy metal Penthouse comics. It had some reprints here and there. He did some stuff with his own Fantagor press on that. So were you following that stuff in real time as it was happening?
José Villarrubia: [01:08:27] Yes. I bought the first appearance in the underground. I bought that when I was in my 20s, when I was in my teens when that came out, and the movie was impossible to see. He reprinted what was in the underground comic in Métal Hurlant. I bought some of those already. And then, of course, in heavy metal he reprinted the whole thing, and then the whole thing was collected. So yes, I was following it from the beginning, except I didn’t get the grim wit in 1972 because I was a ten year old boy living in Madrid.
Alex Grand: [01:08:59] Right. So tell us about this whole process and your role as the project art director on this Dark Horse Den reprint? How has this process been? The remastering and coloring process?
José Villarrubia: [01:09:12] It’s been very interesting. His two favorite comics that he ever did were Where? Blood Star and then Blood Star. I also got to restore what is in black and white. It was done work for hire. So he didn’t own the rights to that. But it was reprinted in France and it will be reprinted here as well. Then, as opposed to Blood Star was a multi-volume series. He did it for several decades in a way more personal work. That then character, he projected a lot of his personality in the character, and so it’s a very unusual hero. It’s not stereotypical. He’s not macho or randomly violent. He doesn’t have the qualities of a lot of other barbarian type characters. It’s loosely inspired by John Carter of Mars, but he doesn’t have any of that militaristic origin that John Carter has. It’s a lot more chaotic in narrative structure, psychedelic in many ways, because the plot moves with feelings. In a way, it’s very sporadic, and the first volume in particular, it was done over a span of years. The art style changed and he wrapped it up at the end. The second volume is very structured as a single narrative, as are the rest of the stories.
José Villarrubia: [01:10:38] I was very excited to do it. Obviously for many reasons, personal and artistic, but also because it’s his masterpiece and I want it to be like a beautiful edition, much better than any that appear all those years ago. And so I knew that he had kept the art. As I said before, Donna and Beth scan all the pages. So I had all the original, not just line art, but grayscale work to work from. I have many different editions of it, so I scanned Different editions of it to find the optimum color and dynamic color corrections. And then they gave me some color corrections as well. I work with the letterer to replicate his very unusually shaped word balloons, but with better lettering. I worked with the designer. I put together all the additional materials. I wrote longish Essay to contextualize how the character fits within American culture in terms of like, bodybuilding and so forth. You know, I’m the one who canceled the pages and sent to Dachau so they can litter it. I don’t know the production work for it or the background production work in addition to the coloring, in addition to the supervising the whole thing. Right?
Alex Grand: [01:11:51] Yeah. Because it doesn’t just say colorist. It says project art director, and you’re basically producing this thing.
José Villarrubia: [01:11:57] I am Dark Horse. That’s very talented production people. But there’s also like taste like what was going to be the frontispiece, you know, what size was the font was going to be, blah, blah, blah. I was going to the introduction that I wrote is going to be laid out. I did a little bit of editing and patent pattern. Oswald’s introduction as well. The editor has been very gracious, very respectful. So Donna and I have been extremely hands on with this project to get it right. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [01:12:25] Dark horse sent it to me to look at in preparation for our interview, and I was really amazed by it really visually pops. It wastes no time in. You’re looking at great things right off the bat. I love the way you put it together and the essays are just well done. Beautiful. And the whole thing is a real high class production. I’m really impressed with it. Thank you.
José Villarrubia: [01:12:47] So much. I think that it’s given me a chance to really analyze it, even though I’ve been reading it all my life, I never read it with so much attention because every little space had to be considered. The first 16 pages, which are taken from the underground, have a much simpler drawing style, but in those 16 pages there is so much experimental narrative in terms of like the panel Structuring and the page layouts like this in 180 degree panoramas. Amazingly creative stuff done so simply. Yeah. After that chapter, the art just explodes. It’s just like the next chapter, which was the first one in metal. When he’s using Photocollages, I’ve never seen such vivid, realistic art in such dynamic contexts. I never saw it then, and I’ve never seen it again. Nobody has done it like the second chapter of then and Then he painted a whole chapter and it’s all like this beautiful, jewel like paintings that were not colored in printing. They were colored on the page. And then he then again changed again and started doing gray tone with manipulated color plates. I feel like it’s a source of inspiration. It’s delightful to read superficially, but it’s extremely instructive to analyze in a way that hasn’t been because it’s been out of print for so long, and because it has so much nudity, it’s been dismissed.
José Villarrubia: [01:14:10] Bloodstar was the first hardcover in America that used the word graphic novel in its own description, because it was genre work. It’s been kind of dismissed. Likewise, then has been dismissed because it’s not only genre work, but it’s genre work that has very voluptuous and exaggerated nudity. Yeah, like the whole idea of doing longer narratives to put it in yourself became dominated with autobiographical comics or another genre, which is the kind of like Yiddish theater kind of versions that Eisner did in A contract with God, that kind of moral stories and so on and so forth. Urban plight and the underground art is already some of them were very resentful of Richard Corben because he was so successful when he worked in the underground and because his work was so visually enjoyable. And I think that alternative comics have inherited some of that, dismissing it as less because it’s fantastical in nature. So I hope that changes, and I hope that he’s actually studied more seriously. The many virtues in the work are discovered for the first time by many people. Yeah, I.
Alex Grand: [01:15:24] Think that’s very possible based on the beauty of the production. You know, you mentioned the the body types and the bodies in it. How much of that is an American sense of sex somehow being some sort of taboo versus a European sense where it isn’t? And how much of that is also like a sex negative versus sex positive viewpoint on things? Do those things collide into that dismissal? Yeah.
José Villarrubia: [01:15:52] In the 80s, when he did his continuation, he had underwear on everybody.
Alex Grand: [01:15:57] Yeah, right.
José Villarrubia: [01:15:58] Because the distributors wouldn’t carry it. Whereas in Europe, nobody bats an eye about the nudity. Everybody enjoyed it. So, you know, I think that I was talking about this the other day in an interview, but I to me then comes not just from bodybuilding, like I wrote in the essay, uh, and Jayne Mansfield and this obsession with, like, voluptuous stars and muscular men and all that stuff. But, um, that was joined with like the fact that when you read John Carter in your mind, everybody’s naked because that’s why it’s described, even though the illustrations have, like little outfits. And then nudity was really big in the 60s, like in the late 60s and early 70s. I remember when I first came to America, um, in 74, and it was like skinny dipping and like which I never heard of that concept in Spain. And but we had streakers that would just take all the clothes and run around in the street. And it was like. And nudism was a big thing. Um, and that sort of there was this burst of like, um, enjoy your body and enjoy other people’s bodies and like this freeing sensation, the feminism, burn your bra, all that stuff was, like, in the air in those years, right? And then the backlash, the anti-feminist backlash, the homophobia, the, um, you know, the Reagan years, the conservativism like.
Alex Grand: [01:17:42] And also, I think I think just the just Aids also just culturally made a lot of these backlashes, uh, more feasible, probably because then people got afraid, like, well, what did. And it puts it ended up casting a blame, which I think is unfair, but probably culturally Aids had a big.
José Villarrubia: [01:18:00] Oh, it’s definitely had an.
Alex Grand: [01:18:02] It mixed into that.
José Villarrubia: [01:18:03] A lot of people were happy that Aids was happening, because it was getting rid of all the perverts in their eyes. And it wasn’t just that they were gays, that they were gay, that actually dares to do something about it and not be victims all their lives. Right. And so there was definitely an anti-sexual moralistic thing going on. Don’t forget the anti-feminism with Nancy Reagan. Like women. Step back. You know, the Equal Rights Amendment never got passed, which was like a done deal in the 70s. It’s like all the sun is like the higher echelons were like telling women, know your place and, you know, stand by your man, Tammy Wynette. And like, um, so in that way, women were only seen as, uh, good meaning chaste and supportive of their husband, or bad meaning naked and promiscuous. Right. No grey zone in between and no way to integrate that. And that whole Madonna whore syndrome, which has been, you know, studied at nauseum. Yeah. So that dichotomy, um, doesn’t exist in Corbin’s work. It’s completely like, far from that. You know, the women are, um, very voluptuously drawn, but they are, uh, oftentimes not passive. They’re very aggressive. Yeah. He’s surrounded by these women that really have a huge impact on the stories. And, um, yes, some of them get rescued sometimes. But, you know, just remember in the first chapter, the woman that looks like it’s going to be the victim is the one that actually gets the monster eaten, and she eats him. She eats the monster. Yeah. So that really defines Corbin in so many ways. The hero is simple. He thinks he. The women needs rescuing. And then at the end, it turns out to be very different than what meets the eye. Mutant world begins the same way, right?
Alex Grand: [01:20:13] Yeah, it’s interesting because I think Corbin was like a midwest guy, Midwest American guy, but he had such, um, a different way of looking at things compared to just the standard Midwest American man. And he had such a almost like a almost like a European sense about him. Um, but it was he loved the, you know, the Edgar Rice Burroughs stuff, of course. But, um, just interesting that he, he carried that with him artistically, even as, as, like from a young age. I just find that such a unique and interesting thing.
José Villarrubia: [01:20:44] Yes. If you see the first season, Borussia did a wonderful book on him, um, called Flights Into fantasy. And that book has enormous amounts of information. And one of the things is a comic that he did as a teenager, or I think he may have been a tween, like a young teenager, and it’s all done like it was never published. And it’s all these little drawings and it’s like these two naked muscle guys, you know, horse in the desert, and one is the friend, and he faints and his friend takes him there, and then he gets to a castle and there is a monster. And it’s like that world is already formed there long before the animation of then long before his comics, he already had. And he did. He did a, uh, a comic about his dog. And that’s where Ralph comes from. Yeah. So all the ingredients were there from early on, and then he just masterfully developed them over the years. And, um, it’s such a unique, uh, vision and it’s so delightful in so many ways. Um, that I think I’m very curious to see how it’s going to be received.
José Villarrubia: [01:22:02] I know that these books are going to be treasured in Europe, and I think there’s a certain kind of reader in America that really would like them to. I just don’t know, uh, yet, you know, we’re going to see what happens. But. Yeah, sure. Um, it’s interesting they put out Murky World first because Mercury World is like his penultimate work. It’s done in a much more distorted style, but it has a lot of the same obsessions that you see in then. And then it’s like a flashback in time. And he left Cole graphic novel finished. That just needs a little bit of tweaking in the coloring of the last few pages that I’m going to be working with. With Beth, it’s called Linwood, and that’s one of his kind of like H.P. Lovecraft inspired. Yeah, but with a very, very like rat. God is like that. And that’s going to be published. Well, I’m very excited to see a posthumous work by him in print because he never cheated. He drew the heck out of each page.
Alex Grand: [01:23:04] Yeah, right. Absolutely.
José Villarrubia: [01:23:05] And he was disciplined in a way that I never known anyone, because up until his untimely passing, he would just sit down and draw a page a day like. Amazing. So, um, you know, I’m very grateful to Donna and to Beth, um, for, um, allowing me to get involved, um, and, uh, and to Dark Horse for giving me the possibility to do this because, um, you know, that shows a flexibility on their part that is uncommon in larger companies. Um, and also an eagerness to, to justice, uh, not just to the readers, but to the legacy of of Corbin. And, um, I think that’s that’s something that, uh, the editor and the assistant editor and the whole team, the letterer. Nate, um, we’re all super conscious about it. Um, and, uh, and I’ve been pushing everyone real hard. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [01:24:12] When does this then come out?
José Villarrubia: [01:24:14] August.
Alex Grand: [01:24:15] Yeah. So. Well, this is this has been a wonderful episode, uh, today of the Comic Book Historians Podcast. Joey, thanks so much for being here with us, uh, sharing with us about your life and your experiences with, um, in the, in the comics and the arts in general. And, uh, you know, it sounds like, uh, Richard Corbin in some way was, uh, a mentor to you. So it’s great that you can, uh, take part in almost this revival or this revitalization of an appreciation for him culturally. And, uh, yeah, I’m looking forward to seeing that take off. So thank you so much for being here.
José Villarrubia: [01:24:48] My pleasure. Anytime.
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