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To Greg and all...

Posted By: MACK!
Date: SAT, 7/28/01, 10:38 p.m.

In Response To: Has Mack always been like this? (Greg)

Hi Greg,

Thanks for reading Kabuki. I appreciate that you gave it a try and enjoyed it.

In a lot of my work I like to contrast the page and storytelling with both abstract design and some realism. When I'm going for a very realistice piece in painted art, I often start with photo reference. In Kabuki, it is fairly easy for my to take photo reference of my girlfriend and other friends, and use photos that I have personally taken in Japan. And the script is taylor made for me to make up the rest. And sometimes I like to bury more Japanes Pop culture in there as well.

In Daredevil, I worked from someone elses script for the first time, so I wanted to make sure I was able to fulfill all the requirements that the script called for. I wanted to make sure that I had enough on site photo reference to pull off everything that Brian asked for.

I shot about two hundred polaroids of my next door neighbor who plays the little boy. The other kids in the story are also my neighbors, and the kids on the playground are from photos I took of kids playing in Spain.

I had a friend pose for a lot of the Ben shots, and I modeled for a bunch more of them myself. I even bought the trenchcoat from a second hand store. I also modeled for a lot of the Daredevil shots. You may see a lot of these when the story is collected as a trade paperback.

However there are a lot of shots that I took from my "reference file". When I was younger, this is the first thing that professional comic artists would tell me to develope. They will tell you to make files from magazine photos for objects, places and figures that will aid you in drawing those things realistically. All artists in comics that I know use this as a tool.

You always pull out photos of guns, cars, buildings, horses, trenchcoats etc. Because you may not always have those things at your immediate disposal to draw from.

So after first reading Bendis' script, I started keeping a collection of NYC buildings, men in trenchcoats, and people that might fit the bill of the cast in his script.

He asked me to draw the teacher as Laryn Hill. So I filed away several shots of her. When we started this project, Decaprio was up to play Parker in the Spiderman film, so we elected to put a little of him in the Parker likeness.

So that's how I approached this DD story. I'm sorry if it detracted from any of your enjoyment of the story. If it did, maybe I haven't learned to handle the "reference file" as a proper tool yet. I'm still learning. I probably used more reference on the DD story than usual, because I wanted to make sure I served the script properly.

: I picked up Kabuki last year and thought that David Mack
: was about the best guy around. Now, I am rethinking
: that quiet a bit... Has David Mack always been simply
: copying his images? While reading Daredevil I noticed
: how just about every picture in there was copied out
: of magazines or stills from movies. I also noticed
: that he wasn't giving any credit where it was due for
: the pictures that he was taking. Kabuki seemed to be
: entirely his own creation, but now I am wondering
: about that as well. I know many artists use photo ref
: for their work, but usually not already copyrighted
: ones... What the Hell is going on? This has started to
: bug me so much that me and my friend no longer collect
: his work, but rather skip through it in the comic
: store and play "spot the advertisement"

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