Kids Comics Q&A Blog Tour: David Rubin

In honor of Children’s Book Week (which was earlier this month), Macmillan organized a month-long blog tour featuring Q&As (all written by Dragons Beware! authors Jorge Aguirre and Rafael Rosado) with 32 different authors and illustrators of children’s and teen’s comics and graphic novels. For our stop on the tour, we’re featuring Jorge and Rafael’s Five Questions with accomplished Spanish graphic novelist David Rubín who was hand-selected by legendary graphic novelist Paul Pope to take over the art for the Battling Boy prequel.

Check out the list of the graphic novelists and cartoonists interviewed on Macmillan’s blog.

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RAFAEL/JORGE:  Hola, David, es un placer conocerte.  Gracias por contestar nuestras preguntas.  (Hi, David, it’s a pleasure to meet you. Thanks for answering our questions).  [Note: David is originally from Galicia, Spain; Rafael is originally from Ponce, Puerto Rico; and Jorge is of Colombian descent]

QUESTION 1:  What’s it like to work with Paul Pope?  Did you try to imitate his style, or stay true to the spirit? What was the collaboration like?

DAVID RUBIN: Paul and I had worked together in few illustrations some years ago but at this moment I couldn’t imagine that someday Paul would call me to collaborate with him in a big project as Aurora West is.

It’s a great present for an artist to draw an amazing story like this in a new and unexplored universe like Battling Boy’s world.

I wasn’t scared by this dare, quite the opposite, I was very excited as a raging bull with this! I couldn’t wait to draw this universe and those characters!

Paul gave me some art direction guidelines and a lot of retro sci-fi examples (Flash Gordon’s TV Series, some old horror and adventure films, and a lot of photographs in this classic style).  There was a short but intense preproduction phase with Paul, JT, and First Second, but I felt totally free while I worked on the pages.  It was a comfortable process for me and made the work so easy.

QUESTION 2: So many Spanish artists are doing awesome work in the US — Javier Pulido, Marcos Martin for example.  Is there something in the Spanish character that you all share? What Spanish artists have influenced your work?

DR: Some Spanish cartoonists like Javier Olivares, Santiago Sequeiros, Max or Miguel A. Robledo have really influenced my work.  But influences in my work not only came from comics; the music, the cinema, the painting and other disciplines of pop culture influence my work, too!

QUESTION 3: Growing up in Spain, did you read comic books as a kid?  Were they American imports or Spanish?

DR: At the beginning – and to this day – my influences are authors like Jack Kirby, Frank Miller, Osamu Tezuka, Toriyama, Guy Peellaert, JC Forest, Blutch, José Muñoz or Teddy Kristiansen.

I have always been interested in mixing the different ways of thinking about comic art. I mean, I like to blend superheroes with manga as well as with European BD styles, all in the same package.

QUESTION 4: What are you working on next?

The English version of my graphic novel adaptation of Beowulf arrives at stores in 2015 from Image Comics.

And as for future projects . . . at the moment I’m making a new graphic novel with high content of sci-fi and scathing critique of the current political and economic system, with the Spanish writer Marcos Prior. I think that will be finished for the end of 2015.  And before that, I’ll draw a four issues mini-series for Boom! Studios, an all-new completely original series.

QUESTION 5:  What’s on your nightstand?

I’m reading some graphic novels — Jesse Möynihan (Forming, vol. 2), Michel Deforge (Ant Colony), a great and courageous graphic novel about the painter Velazquez called Las Meninas, by Santiago García and Javier Olivares, Culto Charles by José Ja Ja Ja, Magnus Robot Fighter by Russ Manning, and the amazing online comic series The Private Eye by BKV and Marcos Martín.

Really I’m not sure how I find time to read all of these books!

 

Sponsored by the Children’s Book Council with Every Child a Reader and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund in celebration of Children’s Book Week.

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