RADIOMARU
Bryan Lee O'Malley is a cartoonist. He lives in Los Angeles.
BIO |
PREHISTORY
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LOST AT SEA
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SCOTT PILGRIM
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SECONDS
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The worst Q&A
Ask questions here: http://radiomaru.tumblr.com/ask
Please read previous answers: http://radiomaru.tumblr.com/tagged/asksorry everyone i’m sick today but here’s my best attempt at a Q&A for my fans…
Q. You probably get asked this a lot but what’s your advice for people who want to create their own graphic novel ?
A. bleggghhhhhhhh
Q. I really want to know how you pitched your idea to Oni Press? What would you recommend to other comic book creators who want to get published?
A. bleggghghghghhghgh i don’t knowwwww
Q. Could you tell us a bit more about Lisa Miller? She’s my favorite character in the entire series and I know she’s got a bit of a cult following. Will you ever explore her character in the future? What about those “alternate Lisa Miller” almost cyborg-looking designs you posted? What was she up to before she met up with Scott at the mall? What did she end up doing after she left?
A. BLEGHG
Q. Have you ever drawn yourself as a background character in Scott Pilgrim? Because i think i saw someone that looks like you in Volume 5.
A. blegh i’m all over the place
Q. I apologize if you’ve answered this before, but Raleigh works in the Mexican restaurant in SP Volume 2, right? I just need confirmation.
A. looks just like her
Q. When you just started out making comics, did you have any experience in do-it-yourself printing? I’ve just completed a short comic and I’d like to showcase it at a local comic fest. I’d like to try to be as professional as I can, but seriously, I can’t think of a way to actually print out tons of copies besides going out to Staples. Any tips you could give to a budding comic writer/artist so I can appear more professional and get my name out there?A. go to staples everyone does it it’s called minicomics
Q. Are you using assistants on your current projects? I don’t recall reading the exact reasoning for using them on the last book(s), but I assume it was deadlines (and the books turned out looking fantastic!). So, do you enjoy that method of working, or are you going solo?
A. i prolly will find help later because i waste all my time writing and have no time left for inking
Q. The alternate film ending (Scott leaves with Knives) got me thinking as to whether or not there were other pairings in the end that you thought were “suitable” - obviously Volume 6 is about Scott coming to terms with the mistakes in his past and coming to “own” them, and coming to terms that he and Ramona might not be perfect together, and trying to get it to work. Do you think it could’ve ended as well with Scott and Knives, or Scott and Lisa, or any other pairing I’m forgetting?
A. OTP ooonnnlllyyy
Q. First off id like to say im in lesbians with Scott Pilgrim the Series (and the movie)! I immediately fell in lesbians with Kim Pine ♡ Would you mind telling us Kim Pine fans about her birthday and if she will ever date anyone because of her personality! Thanks and you ROCK!!!!!
A. previously…
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It’s official! From the man himself! Scott Pilgrim is finally getting an animated series!!
Brian Lee O’mally just announced last Friday on twitter that our favorite canadian gamer/slacker is making his TV debut since 2010’s “Scott Pilgrim Vs. the animation” on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. No word on the premiere stay tuned for more updates on this glorious event.Hahaha… this is not true. Totally 100% fake and bogus! Cool!!
i’ve never said “yup” in my entire life
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Q&A for may 27, 2012
IN THIS EDITION… swearing, webcomics, the invisibles, the secret origin of scott pilgrim’s giant eyes, my top five NES games, and… did ramona cheat on the twins?
Ask questions here: http://radiomaru.tumblr.com/ask
Please read previous answers: http://radiomaru.tumblr.com/tagged/askQ. in lost at sea and some of your shorter comics there’s strong language pretty much throughout. in scott pilgrim and some of your other other comics it’s fairly moderate. is this like a conscious decision you make after you come up with the story but before you start writing dialogue? also are you not cool with depicting nudity?
A. hi… um, so, in Lost at Sea and my earlier stuff there is definitely more swearing. After Lost at Sea came out, i read it and heard back from people and saw it through new eyes i guess and realized it was a LOT of swearing. i mean, me and my friends certainly swore a lot in our late teens and early twenties, it’s not like i was just storing all my swears to put in writing. It’s just how i talked and how i thought.
But anyway, as a personal challenge to myself, i decided to drop the swearing to like a “PG-13” level in Scott Pilgrim book 1. It was really hard at first, but i came to feel that it can be a crutch to use ‘fucking’ all the time instead of the whole rest of the dictionary. Swearing can be creative and fun but other words are important too.
am i not cool with depicting nudity? wha? I don’t see how there would have been a place for nudity in SP or Lost at Sea. But yeah, since you ask, i guess i’m not that cool with it. I like nudity just fine but i don’t like drawing it that much and I will probably refrain from using much of it in my work for the foreseeable future. maybe it’s because i was raised catholic or maybe i’m just bad at anatomy.
Q. Do you read any webcomics? What are your favorites? Also I love you
A. yeah, i like lots of webcomics, and I read these ones regularly:
octopus pie (Meredith Gran)
bad machinery (John Allison)
hark a vagrant (Kate Beaton)
pictures for sad children (John Campbell)
homestuck (i’m kinda 800 pages behind on it right now though which isn’t even that much if you know homestuck)i also have been reading Achewood since like the very beginning and i still enjoy it whenever he updates. A true modern classic. Also i love you
Q. is some part of you bummed that you wrote sp with an ending? like are there times you’d still like to be working with those characters, maybe telling different, less epic stories? or were you happy to wrap that up and move on
A. hi, i feel like this is a loaded question or something or like you’re trying to trap me somehow.
here’s the thing: no. I am not bummed that the comic had an ending. It always had an ending. the ending was written in the dna of the story. He fights the guy, they figure shit out, the end. it’s just how it works.
that said, yes, i still like the characters and sometimes i have ideas for what i could do with them in a future story. but comics take a lot of time and energy and right now I want to put that energy toward something new. So, like i’ve said here before, i’m doing this book Seconds and then i’m moving on to a completely new different series that won’t be scott pilgrim or seconds or lost at sea or anything else old. It’ll be new. But i’ll try to make it really good and hopefully people will like it almost as much as scott pilgrim.
Q. What is the process of making a comic? LIke how do you get it from your computer to the shelves?
A. ok, I think this is a very complicated question but here’s the one sentence version: I make up a story and draw it on paper and scan it into a computer and send it to a publisher who puts it together in virtual book format and then sends it to a printer where they print real physical books and then they send it to a distributor who then sends it to book stores, which have shelves.
Q. What is the story behind Scott and alcohol? As it’s often mentioned how he doesn’t drink during the events in the books/film, with the exception of a G&T and a couple of beers Ramona makes him drink, yet there was a mention of a drunken experience by Comeau.
A. hm. was that not clear? In the book anyway i intended it to be clear that scott only started saying “I don’t drink” after his drunk fight with Envy on New Years Eve. Like maybe he drank regularly in his dark mysterious past, and everyone kind of rolls their eyes when he says he doesn’t drink, because they all think of him as a drinker. I guess that wasn’t actually clear.
Q. Hello! I’ve been curious for a while as to if there is any real connection between your Gideon, and Gideon Stargraves from The Invisibles. I’d heard you were a fan of the series, and I’d wondered if it meant anything. Also, did you pick up Flex Mentallo? I think it’s Grant’s best meta-work on comics & creativity! Can you dig it?
A. hello. There is no real connection between Gideon from SP and Gideon from Invisibles. I read all of Invisibles a year or two before i started SP, but Gideon was named specifically after a different gideon, and Graves was an homage to Agent Graves from 100 BULLETS, my other favorite Vertigo comic.
i did read Flex, and i love it, it’s really good. I love the Invisibles a lot too and I also love the Filth and i also love Seaguy.
Q. In ‘Lost at Sea’, the art style is obviously a little different to Scott Pilgrim, given that you did it a year beforehand. In particular, the eyes were kind of simplified lines, and it occured to me that they show less emotion than the big SP ones. Was this a decision made to show Raleigh’s detachment from her emotions and the emotions of others? Or are the eyes different by the time SP was drawn simply because of art style evolution? Thanks!
A. well, in high school, I used to always draw round ‘vacant’ eyes like that, like Little Orphan Annie eyes. i dunno why, and people always commented on it. Later on i got into anime and started drawing big anime eyes, and the earliest Lost at Sea sketches had kinda shiny anime eyes, but the more i drew the characters the eyes simplified and became little vacant round eyes. There was no conscious decision as far as i recall.
with SP, i started out drawing them all with little round lost at sea eyes, but they wanted something bolder, and eventually i was inspired by a friend’s obsessive drawings of Clarice, the girl reindeer from the old stop-motion Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer cartoon. Her eyes are big and crazy with all-black irises, and they directly influenced the eyes in SP.
Q. Top five NES games?today’s list…
megaman 2 (the purest most bestest game)
river city ransom (the most funnest game of all time)
startropics (i still get the music stuck in my head when i think about it)
super mario 3 (all-time ultimate game of my generation)
final fantasy OR dragon warrior 4 (i can’t decide, they both rule)honorable mentions 6-10:
double dragon 2 (incredibly weird in the best 80s way)
super mario 2 (i was deeply obsessed with it)
battletoads (i really did beat it)
solstice (mostly cause i just heard that andrew hussie hates it; it’s actually amazing)no zelda. I never owned a zelda game. Link to the Past and the GBA ones were the only ones i ever really played much. i only had startropics :(
Q. Did Ramona really date each of the Katayanagi twins behind each other’s back? This is almost certainly the cruelist and more duplicious thing she ever does or is said to have done, yet it’s completely glossed over? What’s Ramona’s side of that story?A. there’s a really complicated story there which I really wanted to put in the book but somehow it got dropped. I guess I was scared to say too much about Ramona, but I think i erred on the side of caution. It is my sincere hope to write & draw a new bonus chapter of book 5 dealing with this flashback and include it in the color version (spring 2014).
Q. Do you have predetermined measurements for panels and page layouts? Do you have a set of rules regarding this? I have only created a few pages ever, but when I did I set up a somewhat rigid system where gutters on top and bottom were a certain distance, gutters on either side were a certain distance, and the distance from the edge of the page was a certain length (unless I was letting a panel bleed over. It looked good but it was really time-consuming. Do you think there’s a better approach?
A. the Scott Pilgrim approach was motivated by extreme laziness, but also shrewd cunning. I cut an 11x14 page in half, making two 7x11 pages. I ruled the page at about 1/8 inch on the “spine” side of the page (right side for left-hand pages, left side for right-hand pages) and then i just drew the page and didn’t worry about margins. Scott Pilgrim pages were mostly full-bleed, which meant a lot less measuring, which meant things moved a bit more quickly overall.
I scanned the whole page in my 8.5x11 sized scanner, pasted it in to my existing page size (3150 x 4613 pixels, 600 dpi) and cropped it so the edges of my drawing wouldn’t be visible in print.
Starting with volume 4, i got a big 11x17 scanner and started drawing bigger and let things get slower and more complicated. I do miss the ease of those 7x11 pages but it was hard to get much detail into the panels given how i suck at drawing.
Q. As an artist, would you say it’s better to play to your strengths and work on your weaknesses, or fumble around and try to be at least mediocre in every aspect of art?
A. in case you haven’t noticed, i’m effing mediocre at a lot of stuff. but I think you need a mix of both approaches. I mean, my first weakness was ‘finishing stuff’. that one’s easy to overcome: just finish something!!! and with each volume of scott pilgrim i gave myself new challenges. vol 1, i started tackling photo reference and trying to make things feel grounded. vol 2, i did two fight scenes in real locations (Casa Loma and the Library). vol 3, i challenged myself to draw honest ed’s, that thing is crazy!
anyway, I guess that means I want you to play to your strengths and work on your weaknesses. but work on your strengths too. Work on everything. There’s always room for improvement.
Q. Hey, how come LaunchPad McQuack from the first book didn’t become one of Sex Bom-Omb’s songs in the movie?
A. because it suuuuuuucked and was a terribly dumb song that i made up (for the comic) in five minutes while lying on the floor of my girlfriend’s apartment
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SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT
i’ve seen this pic go all around up and down the internet with all different attributions! it’s a joke. it’s fanart. it’s a diss piece. it’s by me.
HERE’S THE TRUTH: this was drawn specifically for me by Aaron Ancheta, junior assistant on vol 6. Date: AUGUST 2009. This was a few months before he actually became my assistant. I drew some of his characters (voila) and asked for a pic of “scott pilgrim punching someone’s head off in a geyser of blood” in exchange.
I posted it on flickr and the scott pilgrim forum and then it escaped into the wild where it continues to confuse people to this day.
Aaron drew amazing Scott Pilgrim characters so i hired him as my assistant.
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My homework assignment for Intro to Seq, making a comic based on a scene from a movie in the style of a famous cartoonist.
The movie is Inception, the artist is Bryan Lee O’malley (Scott Pilgrim).I had a ton of fun with this assignment. I’ve been looking forward to it all quarter, really, lol. Kinda got distracted in drawing all the characters in his style. I still need to draw Robert Fischer and Mal in the style. I’ll get to that
after school stops eating meeventually. :Di have to reblog this because it’s sooooo cool and really well done and i am obsessed with Inception. my only crit would be that you haven’t really gone below head & shoulders in two whole pages …. oh, and the word balloons would bleed off page (at the top), which is a no-no :0
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Q&A VII
Ask questions: http://radiomaru.tumblr.com/ask
Previous answers: http://radiomaru.tumblr.com/tagged/askQ. According to Barney Stinson in the show How I Met Your Mother, in every relationship there is a reacher and a settler. The reacher is the person in the relationship who is dating someone outside of their range. The settler is the person who is dating below their range; in other words, they could do better. In all of Scott’s relationships (Knives, Envy, Ramona) who do you think is the settler and who is the reacher?
A. first of all, this is a horrifying question. Taking relationship cues from a ‘womanizer’ stereotype character on a tv sitcom is a bad idea for your life. This ‘theory’ is reductionist and shallow. It’s a false dichotomy based on arbitrary rankings of real live people. Yes, you can boil anything down to two types of whatever, but that doesn’t mean it’s the ONLY WAY the world works. The world and the people in it are infinitely complex.
Knives, Envy and Ramona are all presented as complicated women, each traveling along their own character arcs. It seems like Scott ‘settles’ for Knives, but when she starts growing up and becoming ‘sexy’, Scott panics and runs away. You could say Scott is ‘reaching’ for the famous & hot Envy, but then you realize he started dating her when she was a boring college student wearing baggy clothes. And with Scott/Ramona, both of them are reaching in their own way — Scott reaching for someone beautiful and fascinating (he’s shallow), and Ramona reaching for someone she thinks is decent and good.
Q. i was pretty shocked when stills came out. have u met anyone who, like stills, gave up on his manhood out of a failed relationship? is stills the kind who would stay gay or is it a phase, like ramona’s case with roxie?
A. this is another horrifying question! Thanks!
Scott’s line “Julie turned you gay?!” is a JOKE. Girls do not turn boys gay. That’s not how it works. Also, being gay is not ‘giving up your manhood’. Gay men are still men.
Stills was partly inspired by a good friend of mine, who did actually come out as gay during the years I was working on these books. I asked his advice on if he thought I should have Stills come out too, and he thought it was a good idea. So, in volumes 4-5 I planted information and patiently waited to reveal it at the very end.
I don’t know if Stills is ‘really’ gay or if he’s bi or experimenting or what. All I know is he realized he wasn’t into Julie and decided he’d rather be with a man. If I revisit the characters in the future, I’m sure I’ll explore this aspect further.
Q. Hey Mr. O’Malley! I love your work and I’m a really big fan of Scott Pilgrim and I was just wondering how did Scott become the best fighter in the province?
A. Scott won the All-Ontario Fighting Tournament when he was 19 (or did he?). I was originally going to put this information in a flashback during volume 6 but changed my mind. I prefer that it isn’t explained in canon. I think explaining things too much goes against the spirit of the series.
Q. Do you read any comics or manga these days? Anything that stands out to you? Rumor has it you’re a fan of One Piece.(AND)
Q. What do you think about the manga series One Piece? I ask this because of a part in volume 6, when Scott sees Envy in that birthday party… There’s a painting in the wall with the protagonist’s ship.A. Sorry to say but the One Piece pirate ship in vol 6 was drawn by my assistant, Mr John Kantz, without my knowledge. I have read only the first 5-6 volumes of One Piece, and that was back in 2004, around the time I was starting Scott Pilgrim. I love the art and the spirit of it. I’ve always meant to catch up on it. Now that I have an ipad maybe I can read it on there! (the idea of owning 60+ books of it scares me, and I’d rather read a legal version than scanlations)
As for other manga, i don’t read a ton right now but I really like Dorohedoro, Drops of God, and Cross Game. I am also still collecting Gantz and 20th Century Boys, even though I did read most of those in scanlations years ago before they were picked up in english.
Q. You moved to Asheville, and then you moved to LA. Does your location affect your art?
A. Well, it’s a bit hard to say because I was working on the same series that whole time. The only real change I can think of is that when I moved to Nova Scotia, where it rains a lot, I made it rain during Volume 3 of Scott Pilgrim. It seemed appropriate, but I probably wouldn’t have thought to do it if I still lived in Toronto where it only rains a normal amount.
I really like Los Angeles and am fascinated by it. Now that I live in LA, I plan to set my next series here. As a cartoonist, it’s certainly easier to set a story in your immediate environment, so you have lots of inspiration and reference material.
Q. Hello, I read SP and Lost At Sea, really enjoyed and identified myself with the books and some questions came to my mind: what’s about all the cigarettes? They aren’t the main subject, of course, but they appear and you make small discussions about them. Do you or someone close to you smoke? What do you think about smoking?
A. I’ve never been a smoker, but I’ve always had friends who smoked. I think in my late teens something in me decided that smoking was cool — cool people smoked. Yes, I realize that is what Society Wants Us To Think. Fortunately, i never thought of myself as cool, so i never got into smoking, but i guess I got into portraying smoking as cool in my work. In Lost at Sea the cool kids smoke. In SP, Scott has his own weird attitudes about smoking, but I still show the cool kids smoking. As the series goes on, I think it becomes less about being ‘cool’ and more about being ‘troubled’.
I don’t have any strong feelings on smoking at this point. Some part of my brain probably still thinks it’s cool and sexy. the rest of my brain does not seem to care.
Q. What was it like working with Edgar Wright during the production of the movie?
A. During those years, hardly a day went by that we didn’t exchange emails, and I would frequently get calls from him at weird hours about weird subjects. He’s always full of energy (he really does drink that much espresso) and very positive about everything. He would almost never say a bad thing about any movie, even something universally reviled. He loves movies and the people who make them. It’s impossible to say how lucky I was to work with Edgar Wright, and I’ll never stop being amazed that he opened up Scott Pilgrim vol 1 and read it and genuinely liked it and thought it was funny and had potential.
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Ramona Flowers and Envy Adams cosplay.
Ramona vs. Alien. WARGH!
Myself as Ramona.
My friend Anja as Envy.
LFCC 2010
Sooooo awesome
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Questions & answers: art process edition
ASK QUESTIONS HERE
Q. How long did it take you to create the art form that you wanted to use for the characters in comic? Did you fuss around a lot having many trial and error sessions before you got something you were pleased with or have you always drawn this way?
(AND)
Q. How did you find an art style you felt comfortable using? I’ve been having difficulty developing a style. I’m essentially just trying to find a style that feels natural to me. I just want to get to a point in my work where I don’t have to think too much about how I’m going to draw a leg, nose, etc. Do you have any advice? Thank youA. hmm, i was just talking about this on twitter today. When i was a teen i copied other artists stuff, I spent some years drawing Anime Style, i got really obsessed with Paul Pope and tried to draw just like him (that’s when I started using a brush). Eventually all those influences and attempts to copy other artists piled on top of each other, and at a critical moment I ended up drawing a whole comic. 96 pages of Hopeless Savages comic for Oni Press. It was really really hard. But from the beginning of it to the end of it, I basically learned to draw for myself. I broke myself down as an artist and started over.
No matter how cool and stylish you think your art is, it’s going to be sucky and horrible and mutate a lot when you have to tell a whole story, drawing lots of stuff you don’t care about (houses, cars, trees) and new problems you never worried about before (drawing someone from behind, from above, drawing someone hugging someone else, kissing, touching, fighting, etc).
In general i think a lot of young artists use the “character design and style definition” period as a tool for procrastination. This period is undoubtedly important. But it has to end as soon as possible, because you have a story to tell.
In answer to the other person, you’re going to be thinking really hard about how to draw every leg, nose etc possibly forever, but at least for the first few years / 300-500 pages of comics. Drawing is a nightmare. Get comfortable with it by doing it. You can’t get perfect before you start.
Q. Do you use skeletons or outlines when you draw? Or do you just freehand it all?
A. I never did skeletons or like ‘wooden dummy’ figures or that kind of thing, but then, I drew crappy static poses for years (and bad anatomy). The more you draw, you start to get comfortable with things. It is easy for me to freehand a face or a simple pose nowadays. If it’s something elaborate, there can be a lot of planning and sketching. If you are drawing several characters in a scene where they interact with each other or objects (dinner scenes come to mind — awkward hands holding cups, knives and forks, etc, and chairs are the devil) you’ll be doing some underdrawing no matter how cool you think you are.
Q. Hi, while reading the Scott Pilgrim series, I noticed your style gradually changes+refines. What sorts of things were influencing/inspiring/necessitating you to make those changes?
A. Hmm, well, it was another year passing with each new book. I got into different comics & artists and they probably influenced me. Also, there’s a magical thing when your book is done and you look back at it and you’re like “THIS IS SOOOO UGLY” and you want to change your style immediately. So I would say self doubt is a huge factor in artistic development.
Q. Is there any particular reason Julie spontaneously started wearing glasses in volume 3 (and at the very end of volume 2, I suppose)?
A. Yeah. there is. I confused her with Monique. hahaha. I accidentally put the glasses on her in the end of book 2 (thinking Julie was Monique for a minute) and then decided to keep them. ANNOUNCEMENT: i actually added glasses on Julie in volume 1 in the reprinted color edition coming this summer. That’s one of the few things i changed. sorry yall
Q. Stylistically, where are you going with ‘Seconds’? Something more toned down, like your pre-Pilgrim stuff, or something more like Scott, or a mix? From your preview roughs things are looking fairly Pilgrimmy.
A. to me right now, it looks better than anything i’ve ever done before!!!! I’ll probably hate it when it’s done though… sigh. Anyway, it’s very cute, the characters have slightly bigger heads, and much bigger hair. There is also more variation in character’s appearances (facial features, etc). It has a bit of european influence (Christoph Blaine, Kerascoet & Hubert) and strong Tezuka influence. I am also really into some of Natsume Ono’s stuff, mostly her earlier stuff I think. Her layouts are so cool and her characters are adorbz.
Q. I’m an Illustrator/Graphic Designer and I feel sometimes that my stuff ain’t good or not as good as it should be. The question is have you ever felt like that in your career? If so, how did you deal with it?
A. yes, I’ve spent a lot of time feeling like I suck, i’m the worst, i’ll never be good at anything, other people are better than me, etc.
deal with it by listening to radio or audio books (seriously) — having that background chatter always drowns out the part of my brain that’s yelling at me.
other than that, just force yourself to keep going. It gets a bit easier as you do more work and become more confident in your work.
Q. Do you prefer scripting, brainstorming for ideas, drawing, or seeing the finished product?
(AND)
Q. What was your favorite part about creating the Scott Pilgrim series? Like, during the process?A. hmm. I like every part to some degree. Having ideas is probably the most fun. Drawing can be fun but is also challenging and slow. Scripting is intermittently amazing, but mostly HORRIBLE and soul-destroying. Seeing the finished product is a tiny bit of “hooray” and a lot of “uggghhhhhh” (you tend to only see mistakes and problems and things you meant to fix).
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A fanart I did after reading vol 4. Bryan Lee O Malley put this up on fanart section of his website and it was the greatest day of my life ever.
This fanart is from a number of years ago, way before the movie. I think everyone who reblogs this should pressure ‘dammitjosh’ to draw some comics. His work is too good to die in obscurity.
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