Don’t interrupt Moll…
Have you heard of M-Day? It was started for the anniversary of the passing of Marvel editor Mark Gruenwald and arist Mike Wieringo, to encourage donations to the Hero Initiative.
I proudly list Mike as one of my biggest influences as an artist. His unabashedly fun and “cartoony” (I hate that term, but that’s what most people take away from it) work was some of the most distinctive stuff throughout the late 90′s/00′s. Personally, Seeing his art for the first time knocked it into my head that maybe I didn’t need to spend so much time trying to figure out how to crosshatch everything. Discovering that he was just one of the nicest people in the world (a big animal lover too!) just cemented the idea that this was a guy that I should try to be more like.
One of the most intimidating, yet thrilling moments of my career was filling in for Mike on a story at Oni with my writer pal, J. Torres. Mike was supposed to do a four page story for J’s Sidekicks series, but was only able to do two due to some Marvel commitments. I was picked because I knew J and everybody knew I was pretty much trying to copy Mike Wieringo’s style at the time… so I made for a good fill-in. I look back at those pages and think about how cool it was (after the wincing at how terrible my pages are in comparison- I just a hacky Mike W. wannabe), and how much Mike has had an effect on me.