Draw what you love and keep improving at it if you want a career in comic books, artists at Toronto’s ComiCon said on Saturday.
“The secret is hours spent. Real art study is out in the world looking at real things,” said Scott Hepburn, 39, who lives in the city’s west end and has Marvel and DC Comics as clients.
Hepburn grew up drawing with pencils and paper, but in a world with tablets, Instagram, Deviant Art and other platforms, “the barrier to showing your work to the world is so thin now,” he said.
“If you’re good, it’s not that hard to get attention.”
Continuing Sunday at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, ComiCon is a place to dress up like Harly Quinn or Superman, or join a line to get an autograph from Star Trek’s Robert Picardo.
But like Toronto Fan Expo, ComiCon is also a trade show where aspiring artists get discovered.
It happened to Jamal Campbell, a Toronto-born artist who’s 25 and lives in Mississauga. Comic book editors at the 2015 Fan Expo looked through his portfolio, and two weeks later he was offered the chance to do a cover.
Since then, Campbell has drawn for DC’s rebooted Justice League of America and just finished Prowler #1 for Marvel.
“Deadlines are all that matter,” said Campbell, who also started his own online comic called the Immortal Nadia Greene. “I wanted something that was just my own.”
Campbell can’t imagine himself now doing anything but drawing comics. But with the internet changing publishing so much, will comics be in book form 20 years from now?
Digital comics will have a huge market share, Campbell predicted, because people are becoming comfortable reading comics that way.
But he doesn’t think the story structure of comics will change. Nor will such “time-tested” characters as Superman, who in comics is essentially the same as he was 70 years ago.
“They’re sort of like the best or worst parts of us,” Campbell said.
Hepburn, who has drawn Teen Titans and Red Lantern for DC, grew up in Port Elgin, Ont. with comic books, video games, pro wrestling, and Saturday morning cartoons.
Captivated by these simple adventure stories, he studied animation at Sheridan College. By 19, his friends were artists aspiring to build worlds, tell stories.
He’s a traditionalist, drawing mainstream superhero stuff. He wants his version of Drax from Guardians of the Galaxy to be the one people remember.
But Hepburn also wants to write and draw his own stories.
He’s part of RAID Studios on College Street and said his studio mates are now his biggest influences. “The learning curve is exponential when you have a group mind like that”
Hepburn, Campbell and other artists are guests of the show because that draw fans.
A man wearing a Captain Canuck fan T-shirt handed Hepburn a comic, and got him to sign a Captain Canuck cover Hepburn drew.
The artist grinned. “It seems like it should be much more difficult to have this influence on culture,” he said.
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