An Interview with Artist Toren Atkinson
Friday, April 23rd, 2010
Toren Atkinson. Photo by Adam PW Smith. Copyright 2008 Adam PW Smith.
Toren Atkinson is the artist of Reggie-Town, but also front-man of the rock band The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets, and a veteren illustrator for various RPGs. In the following interview, Toren talks about all these things.
Rumor has it you, Kevin and Todd knew one another before you worked on Reggie-Town. Is that correct?
I had just taken Steve Rolston’s “Introduction to Comic Book Production” course and I was at one of the local comic cons. Kevin was staffing the Critical Hit Comics booth and recognized me as the lead singer of the H.P. Lovecraft inspired rock band, The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets (as seen on Rock Band 2 the video game). I told him that I was branching out from illustration (having done spot illos for many games such as Dungeons & Dragons for about a decade) and getting into comics. He mentioned that the series they were producing at the time, Outnumbered, needed some cover artwork, so I submitted. They liked it enough that they asked me to do it again for the next issue.
Despite the relationship, you still had to “tryout” for the gig. Tell us what that involved.
With that background, they pitched the Reggie-Town gig to me. As this was a more gritty kind of a story than what I’d done for them previously I guess they wanted to make sure I could capture the dark, grungy mood. Basically, they picked a single page out of the story and I drew and inked it. That page was #4 for those interested. As it turns out by the time we started working on the whole thing I knew I would have to go back and make some adjustments to that page, so what you see in the book isn’t quite the audition page, but it’s close.
When you did receive the script for Reggie-Town what was your initial reaction?
Excitement! Knowing that Kevin & Todd don’t pull any punches, I was looking forward to matching my drawing style with their intense writing.
How did you go about planning and establishing the visual style for Reggie-Town?
I knew that it was going to be dark and sketchy, so there was a learning process in loosening up and not getting caught up in being overly precise & detailed. The roughs were actually my proving ground to myself. I had to find a way to make the finals look ‘unpolished’ without seeming incomplete. I did a lot of research and went back and forth with the writers on the characters and locations in the script: what does Reggie’s bedroom look like; what kind of a barn does he take the baby to, that sort of thing.
To what extent were Todd and Kevin involved in that process?
They watched me like hawks! Actually, we would have progress meetings every few weeks. They were very open to my interpretation of the script but when something wasn’t working for them on the art board they were on top of it. They have very specific visions for some segments and so did I. There were only a couple of panels they nitpicked, and it was probably in retaliation for the nitpicking I did with their script.
Tell us about your creative process– what you use to draw, where you do it, when, etc, specific to Reggie-Town.
I ended up using a friend as a model for Reggie, even though I promised myself I wouldn’t do photo-reference when I took the job, but I’m glad I did because it worked out great. Doing so allowed me to focus on page balance and other complicated factors when working in sequential art that I am still very much learning, and less about making sure Reggie’s eyes were the proper distance apart in every panel, and every artist’s time-suck: perspective. But I approached the photo session in the same way I approached the drawing style – quick and dirty. When I took the photos I didn’t worry about lighting or even, as it turns out, focus! So that forced me to work out light, shadow, and distance on the page rather than use the photo reference excessively as a crutch. I’ve seen lots of comics that look like photographs with a high contrast filter with Photoshop on them, and I wanted to steer clear of that. I did everything on paper, with a pencil, brush pen and a marker. For the most part I eschewed rulers even for cars and buildings to maintain that rough, broken look that pervades Reggie’s world.
What other creative endeavours have you been involved in?
My aforementioned study under Steve Rolsten had me create four pages of Spaceship Zero which is based on my band’s album and tabletop roleplaying game of the same name. The comic story is a prequel to the storyline established in these other mediums, and I polished it off for publication in Cloudscape Comics‘ anthology Exploded View which came out just before Acts of Violence.
And what’s up next?
Presently, I’m working on the polar opposite of Reggie-Town, my own creation called The World Wildlife Federation of Justice. This tells the various tales of superheroes and villains in a world populated strictly by anthropomorphic ‘funny animals’ in the same milieu as Captain Carrot & His Amazing Zoo Crew, Mighty Mouse, and Supergoof. I’ve already told “The Ominous Origin of Rhinosferatu” in the anthology Historyonics, and had Go-Rilla face off with Elk Diablo in Funday Sunnies (both published by Cloudscape Comics), and as of May 2010 you can read up on Hypnopotamus, Enormouse, Shockatiel and a host of other ridiculous characters in a supplement for the award-winning superhero roleplaying game Mutants & Masterminds, published by Atomic Overmind Press.