[00:00:00] Intro: Welcome to the Corner Box with David Hedgecock and John Barber. With decades of experience in all aspects of comic book production, David, John and their guests will give you an in-depth and insightful look at the past, present and future of the most exciting medium on the planet, comics and everything related to it.

[00:00:23] David: Hey everybody, welcome back to the Cornerbox. I’m one of your hosts, David Hedgecock, and with me is two legendary figures of the comic book industry. One is my regular co-host, John Barber, and the other is legendary comic book artist, Bart Sears. This is part two of our interview with Bart, where we dig in with him on some of the early aspects of his career. I feel like I could do. Another 20 hours worth of interviews with Bart Sears. I’m a huge fan of his work and we were just so lucky to have him on the show. So sit back, relax and listen to part two of this amazing interview with legendary comic book artist Bart Sears. All right, take it away. Where do you pivot from there? The Clipso. Oh, Clipso. Okay, yeah.

[00:01:13] Bart Sears: Yeah. Then I went to Michael Urie who was an awesome guy. Never meant to be updated. Anyway, I don’t know if you know Michael, but I think he’s a great dude.

[00:01:23] David: No, I never met him.

[00:01:24] Bart Sears: So I got on the Eclipso. So yeah, I did design that Eclipso, which they told me was the design they that inspired them for the Eclipso and the Teen Titans series. His name sent me a private message. Thank you because he loved that. And that’s what he used when he was making that series. I can’t think of his name right now. I’m so bad with names. I was the showrunner for DC stuff over there back in the day. I can’t remember his name. But yeah, so then I jumped to Eclipsa. That was two 80 pagers. And that was brutal.

[00:01:57] John: Yeah, you did a ridiculous amount of 80 pagers. The number of people that if you look kind of the first 30 comics, three of them are 80 pagers. It’s probably zero.

[00:02:07] Bart Sears: Wow. Did finish out the second one. Keith had to do a few pages. I just couldn’t get it done. I don’t know if you remember, but in the Eclipse of stuff, I had a bunch of straight lines across forms, different style for me. I did that because I thought it’d be quicker. I thought I can get some grayscale to my work without all the normal lighting and double lighting and all that stuff. I said, “I’ll just do these gray-toned lines over it.” I mean, the black lines, but the gray-toned. And, uh, boy, is I wrong because that took forever to hug that ditch for myself. I thought the stuff looked cool as hell, but it didn’t take while.

[00:02:48] David: Yeah, that’s probably my, some of my favorite work of yours for sure. That eclipse low means here. And I’m going to just put this out here for all the comic book collectors out there. Bart was not responsible for the gym and the head of eclipse. So on that first issue, poking a hole into the back of whatever comic is in front of that that eclipse. So Bart didn’t have anything to do with that. So you don’t blame him for that.

[00:03:09] Bart Sears: Actually, if you’ve seen the comic where he’s actually got this little purple gem there, I didn’t know they were doing it. I do think it was the best gimmick cover ever. And as much as I’ve heard people bitch about it, they just needed to buy two and put them face to face. And then it wouldn’t screw anything.

[00:03:24] David: Do like me just put it in the front of the box. There’s fun. But some people, you know, they’ve got their collections in specific orders. They can’t, you know, the OCD won’t allow them to put it somewhere else. I get it. I get it. And then what’s next for you? At this point, your, your story is rising, man. You are like top of the heap. The industry is all paying attention to everything you’re doing. So where do you go?

[00:03:45] Bart Sears: So monthly, which I did not want to do because I knew super villain book. Yeah. Initially, I thought it might be cool, but then when I saw it was going to start out with a war Lord in Ecuador or whatever the heck it was, a drug lord or something. I literally had no interest in it, but I couldn’t get DC to put me on something else. And at the same time, I think DC took me to San Diego that year. Steve Masarski started wooing me, taking me to dinner and setting me front row, eat me king and different things because he wanted me to valent. And that’s, I went back, basically told DC, you know, I wanted one of the main characters where I was gone. They weren’t willing to do it, so I quit. I think I still had like eight years left on my exclusive contract.

[00:04:33] David: You had an eight year long exclusives, an exclusives that still had eight years left on it?

[00:04:38] John: Wow. I don’t think Warner has an eight year contract at eight year exclusive on DC right now.

[00:04:46] David: Like that’s a long time, man.

[00:04:48] Bart Sears: Well, I know everything they asked me on time or early.

[00:04:51] David: Clearly, well deserved. Like not only were you hitting deadlines, but you were east and you were crushing it at that time, like you were top three in the industry in that moment, like easily, that nobody was touching you.

[00:05:02] John: Back when I was at Marvel, but Joe Cassata would talk about like being a big impetus for him leaving as well was they seemed real stingy with giving young people their big characters that it seemed to be or the way he was describing it was like, you earned that by being alive a long time or working with them. Yeah. Was that how it looked on your side too? Or was it? I honestly don’t don’t know what it was.

[00:05:21] Bart Sears: I just couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t put me on one of their bigger books. It just didn’t make any sense to me. It came from Justice League, which Justice League Europe always sold better than Justice League America. And Adam was always trying to swap titles. And I was like, no, no, no, no. You know, because I was making more royalties. Like no, I don’t want to do a regular. I’m happy with Europe. It just didn’t make any sense to me. I didn’t understand it. I would be surprised if the her flothole with Alpha was part of that nonsense. I don’t think they had a lot of faith in Eclipso monthly. And I thought maybe if I was on it, it might have some legs. I don’t know. I never talked to anybody about that.

[00:06:01] David: That’s a weird line of thinking, right?

[00:06:04] Bart Sears: They did it with him in the superhero universe, fighting some storylines with different heroes and stuff. That would have made sense to me, but dumping him, fighting drug lords, it was just like with Bruce Gordon chasing him around the globe. It was just like, nobody wants to buy that.

[00:06:21] David: Yeah.

[00:06:22] John: It seems like a real weird way to look at what you did on Eclipso, the limited series. That’s the big crossover thing. You put them on the damn thing with the big characters because Eclipso wasn’t selling Eclipso. You know, you and the heroes are selling Eclipso.

[00:06:35] Bart Sears: Yeah. Yeah. It was just weird. I never understood it, but. Yeah. So I really felt like DC was a family. I mean, they, as a company, they took pretty good care of me back then. They had me so many years exclusive in that meant health insurance and stability and all that stuff that you know, anyone with a family worries about. I gave them every option to keep me but they just wouldn’t do it. Did they let you out of the contract? They didn’t have to. You could quit at any time, I think. Okay. Honestly, I don’t really know. I just quit. Okay.

[00:07:04] John: Classic comic book contract of also either side can void this at any time.

[00:07:11] David: You went to San Diego Comic Con and you’ve been wooed by Valiance. Yep. And you’re like, “Hey man, look, I want to stay at DC but you just got to make me feel wanted. And they’re like, there’s the door, buddy.

[00:07:22] Bart Sears: Yeah. Felt that way.

[00:07:23] David: So then you’re off to Valiant. And Valiant at that point is a pretty fledgling company, right? Like they’re still, oh, no, I guess, no, they’d been, they’ve already got some E on them.

[00:07:32] Bart Sears: Yeah. They had a lot of heat. They manufactured that. They’re very smart in how they marketed and their business plan, because they, they undershipped all of their books the first at least year. You know, they didn’t print an order ever. So they’ve created a feeling like you can’t get their books. Look, they sold out, you can’t get their books. So their orders just kept rising like gangbusters every month until the culmination of Turak Narwhal. In the end of the comic industry as we knew it.

[00:08:01] David: Wait, are you claiming that you ended the comic book Zind Street in the 90s boom?

[00:08:06] Bart Sears: Oh, of all value along with that was the same month that the rebirth of Superman came out. They had the six titles and they all sold like 3 million and Turak sold a million seven. And there’s boxes of all those books still on open to this day.

[00:08:21] David: I’m going to lay the blame squarely at DC’s feet on that one. I think Turrock probably was a slight due to pre-infected, but I was just long for the

[00:08:30] Bart Sears: ride on that one.

[00:08:31] David: I mean, DC really laid an egg on that one. In fairness, common bookshops laid an egg on that one. Like they shouldn’t have been drinking the Kool-Aid the way they were, but they were all like, Oh, we just sold 6 million copies of the death of Superman. Of course everyone’s going to come back for the life of Superman. like, no, it’s not how this works.

[00:08:48] Bart Sears: And what they were doing is they order an extra box or whatever, whatever hot comics there were. And then after they sold out, they put a premium off. So they would say, Oh, well you can get it now for $5 instead of $2.50 or whatever. So they were making money hand over fist, but that back then, but that was doomed to fail. Plus all the card dealers that destroyed the card industry came into comics and And they were buying them and drove for that resale price market. And that drove sales to that huge extreme. But then it just wasn’t sustainable. So just like they did to the card industry, they did honest.

[00:09:27] John: So yeah, Tawaghi decided to go into business making comic books. Is that right?

[00:09:32] Bart Sears: I screwed myself with Valiant though. They gave me a great royalty rate and they’re telling me how much money I’m going to make. And I’m like, well then I want this much upfront for each book and they wouldn’t go there. But I’m like, “But I need that to survive. Give me that. I’ll do that. The book will be fine.” And they wouldn’t do it, even though they knew what sales pretty much were going to be, and I’d be making crazy money off each book. They just wouldn’t up front it. So I agreed to do XO and Turok at the same time. I’d worked fast before. I didn’t think it’d be a good problem. I figured I could do it for a little while and then dump one of them off and settle in once the money’s rolling in. That was dumb. at this point, I’m still burned from Dark Knight. I still want to go really illustrative with my art and less comic booky. So I decided to do that on XO and I just could not do it fast enough. So I screwed up that on XO and got into rock and got even more in my head, started issue two and got canned. So that sucked. Oh, wow.

[00:10:33] David: You had canned because you weren’t hitting the deadlines?

[00:10:36] Bart Sears: Yeah, I was too slow. I could barely get one done if that the big thing was I was not but I kept telling myself

[00:10:41] David: You do it right right? This was the thing that you were capable of doing but it just was too much

[00:10:47] Bart Sears: 10 you were basically setting yourself for weeks of 10 pages of a week. I’ll be fine, you know, right But I just could never get there I was way too in my head and at that point when I started falling behind and with the quality of work that I was capable of producing I couldn’t produce it at that rate working fast So I just fumbled I kind of went in a hole and they can if I’d stayed communicating I probably would have been fine So I could be a worse wheel. I was too embarrassed and admitting that failure was I wasn’t able to do that

[00:11:17] David: Openly then a another tale as old as time. I think John and I have dealt with So many times so many times for any new artists listening That’s Bart says like communication is so important as an editor if I know what the situation is and I know where to set expectations. You can work with anything as long as you are in contact, but it’s as soon as things go quiet and you don’t know what’s going on. It’s like, “Oh man, this is…” Everybody’s in their head at that point.

[00:11:45] Not Sure: Yep.

[00:11:49] David: Now you’re unemployed, your exclusive contract is up at DC. Valiant gave you a one-hit giant paycheck maybe with the number one.

[00:11:58] Bart Sears: Meanwhile, I was designing all the ToyBiz X-Men figures.

[00:12:02] David: Yeah, you were doing too much.

[00:12:04] Bart Sears: The first year I was working on it, I think I only did like 12 figures or something. Like the second year I started ominous because I got the Turok and XO money. So I started ominous press and I was doing pretty much all of the ToyBiz X-Men figures and I brought in like three guys I was training to, I would do the initial design and they they do like everything but the faces and I was teaching them how to do the cross hatching stuff and then I do all the faces and all the heads. I think two years of them that way. I was doing all the figures myself and one other guy and ToyBiz wanted to hire me to do all the package art and all the sculpture sheets. I don’t know it’s like 50 figures a year or 90. I don’t know they were doing a lot of figures whatever it was.

[00:12:52] David: For all their figures not a specific line for just everything?

[00:12:55] Bart Sears: All their marble, all the marble stuff.

[00:12:57] David: All the marble stuff. Okay, got it.

[00:12:59] Bart Sears: So I’m like, okay, you know, when’s it gonna start? And they’re like, it’s gonna start in January. So that’s when I hired people and started teaching more people how to do this stuff. So I knew the amount of work I’d have, just jeez. The package art I wasn’t worried about. It was the toy figures, the designs they were doing at a very specific looking feel, a specific render. And they’re really, really good to sculpt from. So I drink the guys on that. Meanwhile, I’m going to launch this press. I’m starting to work on that stuff. But that was slow build. I was trying to figure out what exactly I wanted to do, how to do it. And I had a bunch of characters I created and they’d been thinking about on the side for years, so I was trying to figure out how to work it all in, get their stories down and on the toy biz part, I remember in January, I called, I was asking, you know, where’s, where’s the work? Where’s the work? They’re like, oh, it’s coming. It’s coming. February. Where’s the work? Where’s the work? Oh, it’s coming. it’s coming. March, they finally told me that they weren’t giving me any of it. So I had about three color artists and three figure artists in my studio at the time. And no work. I was just paying them guys. We were doing odd jobs and different stuff, but I hired them all for these two contracts. I was supposed to have a toy biz, which they pulled.

[00:14:08] David: Do you have any insight as to why that happened?

[00:14:11] Bart Sears: I don’t know.

[00:14:12] David: Interesting.

[00:14:12] Bart Sears: You have no idea. Maybe they heard I had people and they wanted just me or whatever. Because some students of mine at the Hubert School and asked them to replicate them and do toy design. So they got a lot of that work. It was like, is it the fee? I mean, we can talk about the fee and there’s so much work. I wasn’t worried really about the fee at all. They decided and that was that. That was right when I was gearing up on the ominous press books. Sean Husfar, who I brought in to be my marketing guy and Garib Sheamus and I had a meeting and they talked me into going with So I wanted to start with giant. They said, go through and babe, go through. Babe. You know, they’re famous from wizard and everybody knows those characters and comics.

[00:14:54] David: Let’s digress for just a second here. So Bruton babe, just so people know. So I think most people do, but just in case. So Bruton babe, you were doing a how to draw comics in wizard magazine and you get this for a while. And so you use brute and babe, these two characters that you created to help illustrate the drawings on how to draw basically. So those were the two characters using for that. Why weren’t you credited on all the wizard magazine covers that you were doing? It was always just McNabb on the cover.

[00:15:24] Bart Sears: When I first started with wizard, I’d done a few covers and wizard nine was coming up. And I was a little worried because I was still at DC at the time. I was a little worried that they get pissy and all this work I’m doing for wizard. And I had an exclusive and it wasn’t really competition, you know, it was a news back essentially, but I was like, I didn’t just didn’t want them to get a burr up there. But so I scared if I could use a pseudonym. And he’s like, Yeah, let’s do it. I’m curious. We can sell a cover by an unknown no name artist. I’m like, sure. And that first one was wizard number nine, which was the venom card. It’s so like hotcakes. I don’t know how many times but Garib told me at one point that that’s what saved the magazine was that number nine covered.

[00:16:07] David: I just FYI, nobody was fooled. I think I was like 12 and I was like, Oh, Bart Sears is different cover from Western magazine.

[00:16:18] Bart Sears: But yeah, so that’s why Whitman is on several of those.

[00:16:24] David: Whitman and McNabb. Okay. Yeah. So it was because of the DC exclusive.

[00:16:27] Bart Sears: You were worried about, I was, I was a little worried and want, you know, a fly in the ointment just didn’t want to have a conversation about it.

[00:16:34] David: Did you have to have that conversation or did that do the trick?

[00:16:37] Bart Sears: They never mentioned it.

[00:16:38] David: I mean, I think was smart to do that, but it doesn’t feel like that would be a conflict. The magazine is different. It’s not a comic book.

[00:16:44] Bart Sears: You see the stupid things the companies do sometimes.

[00:16:47] David: You’re just like, yeah, yeah, you never know.

[00:16:49] Bart Sears: I can avoid that. Why don’t I avoid that?

[00:16:51] David: So Broom Babe were part of your how to draw comics that was featured in the Zyr magazine for a couple of years and you were doing covers for Wizard magazine. We was definitely elevating your profile on top of the work you were doing at DC and that was all reason for people really know your name and understand who you were and really enjoy your art.

[00:17:06] Bart Sears: About mostly Marvel characters on those covers. That’s right. Which was great. Both, a lot of X-Men, a lot of Wolverine, Sabretooth, all the crossover, cover first, those big fold outs.

[00:17:16] David: Yeah, man. For a kid like me, like seeing Bart Sears do the Marvel characters, that was bomb, man. I loved that. I loved that. I loved to work at DC, but everybody at that point was a Marvel kid. Yeah. It was great to see you doing that stuff. - So you’re getting ready to launch Ominous Press and Garib Shamis and your marketing guy, Husfar, are like, go with what everybody already knows. And even though you wanted to go with Giant Killer first.

[00:17:47] Bart Sears: - Yeah, I had stories for all my other characters and never had a story for Brute and Babe. They were just tools for the drawing call. I never planned anything beyond that for them. So then I went back and started to try to create a universe fit into ominous where they could inhabit. And that’s what eventually came out. But I started working on this stuff right when I learned that we had no toy biz work and I had the studio with the silver head and all these people for jobs and health insurance and everything else. So I was scrambling, trying to find other work to keep them busy. So I wouldn’t go broke. Andy Smith and Ron Myers talking into taking silver surfer. And he’s like, you’re fast. just blow Surfer out, you know, on the weekends or whatever. And I was like, yeah, all right. So I agreed to do Silver Surfer and I ended up doing a cover in 12 pages or something, and then I just quit because I was so stressed about everything else going on and it wasn’t making enough money to make a difference. I just quit back out of that project. But I don’t even know what we did to keep things going. I had the ominous books and I was trying to get those penciled so that they could get inked and colored. Yeah. I don’t know what other work you did. Eventually it turned into a color studio and color, but all a, a lot of value books, not most of them and bunch of early for Zeta books for Danzig. Oh, interesting stuff like that. They did a bunch of stuff there on for a couple of years.

[00:19:08] David: So ominous press was never, it doesn’t sound like it was ever meant to be the main thing. It was meant to be the side project thing.

[00:19:15] Bart Sears: It ended up, it was meant to be the main way for me. And with this, and I built a studio to do the hand build in inks and colors. So they do that spaster work. So that was meant to be my main focus and I would dip in and make sure all the toy sheets were done correctly. And I was still doing all the designs for all. I could do like a toy figure layout cause I made a billion bucks of different portions and I would mix and match them if I had to, but then I throw that on a light box and do a rough 10 or 15 minutes and hand that off and take, you know, a guy a couple days to finish.

[00:19:46] David: So, so John, full disclosure, Bard has done work for me. And recently we’ve been working on sugar bomb together and he’s done all the main character designs for Sugar Bomb, my stupid superhero comic book, at which I don’t know why. I still don’t know how I keep convincing Bart to help with that, but I’m not even kidding. Like, I don’t know, a couple weeks ago, I’m like, “Hey Bart, I’ve got the three new super villains or super characters that I want to do. I don’t even actually know if they’re villains yet.” And I’m like, “Here’s some descriptions, you know, do you have time?” He’s like, “Yeah.” And I’m not even kidding. Two days later, Bart shows up with like these amazing designs. They’re amazing. And not only does he give me the designs, but then he gives me like a full paragraph of like all the cool extra things that he was thinking about for these characters and fully fleshes them out in like ways that I never could have any distance like 24 hours. And it’s incredible to watch him be part of that process. So I fully believe you when you say you could have worked on the designs and basically then fit some on the onomist press side of things.

[00:20:47] Bart Sears: And if I’m just doing breakdowns, I can do just in an easy day, six pages. I mean, that’s why I did breakdowns on Spider-Man because I paid that much less than full pencils. And once I found that out, I’m like, I’m never penciling anything again.

[00:21:04] David: For the audience, we prepped Bart for this. They’re not dropping this on him. We’ve talked about this, but I had a time a little bit. So we ominous press launches with a zero issue, kind of like preview issue in Wizard magazine.

[00:21:16] Not Sure: Yeah.

[00:21:17] David: And then I believe the first book that you put out is It Begins the Monument. So as a publisher, Bart, first of all, how did this idea of this monument edition get in your head? For those who don’t know, Bart Sears, Ominous Press first comic book is this thing called a monument edition and it features Bruton Babe, as we’ve already been talking about. But the book itself is in a clear, hard plastic, thin box, the size of the comic book, slightly larger than the size of the comic book, and it’s got like a closing plastic lid on it. And then when you pull the comic book out, it’s not a comic book, it is a cardstock cover that is loose, and then inside are all the pages, but the pages are also loose, and they’re basically oversized trading cards, like they are thick cardstock trading card style pages. They’re not stapled together or anything. There’s eight trading cards, and on one side of the trading card is the first half of the story, and then you flip the cards over and you get a bunch of cool sort of like inside story about what is going to happen next in the ominous press universe. You get introduced to a bunch of different characters. Each card essentially kind of acts as a trading card of an individual character. So this is the first comic book, and it’s not a comic book. What are you doing?

[00:22:36] Bart Sears: I’ve never heard that before. What are you doing? I always liked trading cards. My idea of the ominous universe has always been kind of grandiose, hence the monuments at in each of those cards as a tablet, you know, I was really leaning into kind of a mythological feel. Honestly, I don’t know why the hell I did it, but I thought it was really cool. The plastic case was a nightmare. I think it took 10 people in my mother’s garage, like three weeks to fill all 50,000 of those darn things. It was a nightmare.

[00:23:08] John: I was curious about that. I was curious about how that got manufactured.

[00:23:12] David: And I didn’t have that answer, but that was, I was curious. I did either. So we’ll hold on, hold on, hold on. I got to get this. So the, the plastic sleeves or came separately. Yes. All the interior. Yep. And you had to physically hand insert that sort and handed through. look into the, and then close it in that little, that sounds like so much work.

[00:23:42] Bart Sears: Was a huge amount of work. Needless to say, no money was made on that project.

[00:23:46] David: Seriously? You sold so many of those. Those things were everywhere.

[00:23:49] Bart Sears: I was like 50,000 up though, but you made really no money on it, but it was cool and it’s memorable. I don’t know why I just didn’t put them in a comic bag, honestly.

[00:23:59] David: For the hard plastic container. Was that a off the shelf?

[00:24:02] Bart Sears: It was a special order. No, it was a special order with some company that made. plastic cases. That’s how stupid I was. There’s my business sense right there.

[00:24:12] David: I love it. Were you thinking like, oh, this is gonna really get people’s attention? Or like,

[00:24:18] Bart Sears: was it really like honestly just thought it was cool. I just thought it was a really cool idea. And it gave me the the backs of the cards to, you know, feature characters that I was passionate about that would appear, you know, in books down the line. So, you know, I had, like I said, very grandiose plans. And I would have done one of those every year. There would have been a monument set every year. That was the plan. Like each year would launch with a new monument set.

[00:24:45] David: In the marketing and the advertising of the books, the following issue is a regular comic book issue. By the way, everyone needs to go out and get this off of eBay or wherever you can find it. the entire ominous press run is gold and you should absolutely get it. It’s some very intense and aggressive world building that Bart puts together. And just it begins, there’s literally years of story that you’re setting up. Like there’s so much. It’s so much. Anyway, so the next book is “Male’s Rage” and that’s a standard comic book. I believe it’s “Male’s Rage.” That’s a standard comic book. And in that, you actually advertise the third book is going to be another monument edition.

[00:25:26] Bart Sears: It’s the death of pharaohs, I think yeah was gonna be supposed to be like a 18 page set

[00:25:32] David: You’re gonna you’re like this monument thing man. I’m gonna dull down on this

[00:25:37] Bart Sears: Yep

[00:25:39] David: fantastic I love it. I don’t think that ever came out

[00:25:43] Bart Sears: It was never finished never came out You mentioned the wizard half-size comic that they used to give away in their books. So we printed that full size

[00:25:51] David: That’s after mails rage. I think you finally comes out

[00:25:54] Bart Sears: I think they came out the same month. Oh, interesting.

[00:25:56] David: Oh, males rage, males rage in the infinity.

[00:26:00] Bart Sears: Literally split sales. I have.

[00:26:02] David: Oh, it was not.

[00:26:04] Bart Sears: Now they’re a smart business move.

[00:26:06] David: In today’s day and age, maybe that wouldn’t be the case. That was it for the moment. Yeah. But at that point, you’re like, man, I’m breaking even. I got to get out of this.

[00:26:14] Bart Sears: Yeah. I was just mentally crushed at that point. Couldn’t function. Just trying to keep everyone paid and the studio together. the work at that point, I had to generate. And then the studio I could bring in behind me, but meant I still had to do it. And it was trying to do ominous press.

[00:26:33] David: And do you think it was the pressure of feeding those extra mouths? That was the thing that

[00:26:38] Bart Sears: put you over the top? And partly is it’s, you know, I’ve got a history of burnout, which I now know comes from depression, you know, I burned out a few times before I attribute burnout to what happened with Banyu the first time. I was so stressed out I just burned out and couldn’t function and couldn’t draw. And I’ve never really enjoyed drawing. When I have free time I don’t draw. I don’t never had a sketchbook. I don’t particularly like to draw, which I know

[00:27:06] David: freaks people out. It’s not something. It’s just incredibly unfair. I know how that sounds. And I

[00:27:12] Bart Sears: sound probably entitled as fuck. I mean, I’m lucky I had a lot of talent and I had it early and I was, you know, able to capitalize on it from the time I was basically 20 on. But it’s just never something I enjoyed doing. That partly leads to burnout with financial issues and other family stresses might get in there too. It just makes it next to impossible to sit and focus and put stuff out. And it’s funny because when it’s going good, I don’t even focus. I mean, it just rolls all on its own. And when it’s not, it’s really difficult. Yeah. That’s what happened with violator. Right Todd when I took the job that I was burnout out and I couldn’t agree to a deadline. If he was fine with that, I was okay with doing it. And he said, yeah, yeah, that’s fine. Which what he really meant was I don’t believe you, you’ll get it done like normal. I think I spent like, I don’t know, four issues on or four months on the first issue. At the same time I was building Yomness Press Studio. I wasn’t really doing any work there. I mean, I was still doing the toy stuff, but that one is nothing. I think he found that out. And then the second issue I did in, I don’t know, six or seven weeks and they were 24 page stories with a cover. And I called him for the third issue and he said, “Oh, I already gave that to somebody else.” I was like, “Okay.” But I was so burnt out after Valiant that penciling a comic was just the hardest thing in the world for me to do. It took forever to get back into it. And that was probably the longest case of burnout it had, unfortunately, on Violator. But then the toy stuff heated up and that’s when I really started adding people and teaching people had a color getting all the computers and all that crap back then. You know, my first Mac, I bought the most powerful Mac you could get and it was 256 megabytes.

[00:28:52] David: Yeah, baby.

[00:28:54] Bart Sears: I think we watch it.

[00:28:55] John: I think Ralph Macchio sent me a script off of that recently. One of the things that struck me a lot on your stuff over the years, I was at Marvel when you were doing Cap Falcon with… Right. It was amazing and it was like there was not traditional layouts. You know, you basically had a full figure on every page. If I remember it right, like almost all of it was constructed in two-page spreads. Am I misremembering that? Am I confusing? I remember that. And there was at least one in each issue, but okay. The path though, that was all like two-page spreads, right? Yes. Okay, that’s why I was complaining those. Yeah, but the path is the other one where it was just like, man, this is like somebody that is not coming. Like, I bet the scripts aren’t coming in like this, first of all. of all, it’s interesting that somebody’s approaching this in that way. And I didn’t realize the design stuff, like in terms of professional order, came before the comic stuff. And the sculpture stuff came before the drawing stuff was at least equal to that’s

[00:29:52] Bart Sears: all fascinating to me. How do you approach a page with Cap Falcon? I was very happy to get Cap Falcon. But then it was him fighting drug lords. And I’d been through that on a clips on I just had no interest. Right. So I might as well I want to draw caps. I’m going draw a big big cap or a big falcon on every single damn page. So I did. Part of it too is I get if I’m bored with the story, I will almost always veer towards I’m going to draw something big on every page. Just to make it interesting for me. That’s pretty much what happened on cap is I really wasn’t into the story. No offense to priests, but you know, I wanted a cap plate and I don’t know where his caps villains are. I can’t think of them on top of my head. Give me some of that stuff in New York City. That’s what I thought I’d signed up for. Yeah. No, not that anybody ever told me that. They said, “You want to do Cab Falcon?” I said, “Sure.” And that was that. Right. And that one, I knew who the anchor was, which was Rob Hunter. And I always wanted him to dig my stuff because something about his ink line was just incredibly gorgeous. And so I penciled the crap out of that stuff, really rendered the hell out of it because I knew what he would do with those lines. And he did. It looked gorgeous until he got fired, you know, and then I inked it myself. And of course, it doesn’t look anything like that. Few of the pages did, but I just couldn’t do that and maintain the schedule. So I had to simplify some of it. But I mean, if you notice on Cap Falcon, I never drew a vehicle that wasn’t in silhouette.

[00:31:16] David: Oh, really?

[00:31:18] Bart Sears: Maybe one or two. But if you go look through it, you’ll see every vehicle is in silhouette. I didn’t have time and I thought it looked cool. And that’s came to think of that story. And nobody’s ever mentioned that. So I don’t think anybody even noticed because if you look at the action scenes with the vehicles. They’re pretty action packed actually, even though all you see is the vehicles and silhouette. It’s kind of crazy, but that’s something that was fun for me to figure out. So that’s where I went with that one. The path was, I just decided I would do that. And I was our director at CrossGen so nobody could tell me no. And we didn’t have ads.

[00:31:52] David: It was a Ron Mars script, so you have to do a lot of heavy lifting on this guy. My God, yes.

[00:31:57] Bart Sears: Let’s be for- Ron’s like, “I wrote six panels on that page and there’s 32 now.” I’m like, “I gotta draw something.” But yeah, part of it is I get bored. That’s why my style is always somewhat changing too, is I get bored drawing the same way all the time. That just wears on me. And since I don’t love to draw, I’m looking for ways to keep my brain involved. So I’ll switch up styles, I’ll switch up paper, I’ll switch tools, do no rendering, I’ll do rendering a special way. Like with the path, most of the pencils I did were on 8.5x11 typing paper or copy paper. Okay. And I did them in markers. I would give them to Mike the colorist and he would scan them in and print it out on the big two-page spread paper and blue line and Pennington could just go to town on that. Oh wow, that’s fascinating. That’s amazing. When I started the path, I did them that way, blew them up myself and then pencil. I was art director and I couldn’t spend that much time. So basically in the morning, usually I’d stay home. I’d get up early and I’d go in the office about 11, but I did at least half a page, penciled in marker, and go in and do all the art directing stuff and then the next page to the other half. So I still do my five pages every week.

[00:33:12] David: Well Bart, it’s been a delight. We could go on and on forever, but I think we’ve probably hugged up enough of your time today. But I definitely want to talk to you more about like the second half of your career and what you’ve done post cap Falcon. And I’d love to get into the cross gen stuff with you as well. So hopefully you’re willing to come back and talk about this stuff.

[00:33:30] Bart Sears: - Yeah, it’s a blast. Cracking open the memory.

[00:33:32] David: - Thank you, appreciate it so much. And thank you listener for coming in today and hanging out with us. We will be back next week.

[00:33:41] Outro: - This has been the corner box with David and John. Please take a moment and give us a five star rating. It really helps. And join us again next week for another dive into the wonderful world of comics.