Off the Record...

Cully Hamner, a friend of Comic Books, ETC! since May of 1992, was a guest of the very first CBEtc store location (then called Champion Comics). At the time, he was the fresh, new regular penciler for DC Comics’ Green Lantern: Mosaic, and CBEtc was one of the first public signings he ever did. A few months later, he became a member of Gaijin Studios, with the likes of Brian Stelfreeze, Karl Story, Tony Harris, Adam Hughes, Joe Phillips, and Jason Pearson. We sat down with Cully recently to talk about some of his upcoming projects and the pros and cons of working in a studio like Gaijin.

Cully, a lot has happened since Mosaic #1 came out. If you hadn’t broken into comics, what would you have been doing the past decade?

I always wanted to do comics. I could probably have done commercial art or something in that vein, but I really don’t think about it much because comics are what I’ve always wanted to do. I’ve had plenty of opportunities to do something else and make more money elsewhere, like doing animation design and a lot of freelance stuff outside of comics, but I like telling stories in this medium. I get a lot out of it.

How exactly did you break into the industry?

I spent a lot of my teen years doing samples, and I’d send stuff to comic book companies, but I didn’t get serious about it until a year or two after high school. I spent a couple of years trying intermittently to break into comics and not having any luck, but there came this one year where I just knew it was going to happen. I can’t explain it or tell you why. I went to the Spring Comics Fair in Atlanta; this was probably around 1990 or ‘91. I was showing samples to Steve Rude and got a pretty good review from him, and met a guy named Chuck Moore.

After my review from the Dude, while I was walking down this breezeway, Chuck comes running up behind me and says, "Hey, I’m a writer for DC, and think you’re really good. I’d like to do some stuff with you." At the time Chuck was writing Dragonlance, one of DC’s TSR books, I think. So I corresponded with Chuck here and there, and we put together a few pitches for DC and Dark Horse and it really got my name around. Michael Eury, who was the editor of the Legion books at the time, made note of me. Nothing ever really panned out, but Mike kept me in mind for other stuff.

In the meantime, I had gotten to be friends with the group of guys that would become Gaijin Studios: Brian Stelfreeze, Karl Story, Adam Hughes, Dave Johnson, Tony Harris, Joe Phillips, and Jason Pearson. This was before there was a studio, and Chuck had introduced us, actually. I had just started doing conventions as an artist rather than just as a fan, so I’d hang out with those guys. Karl took a packet of my samples and gave it to one of his editors, Michael Eury, who in turn was sharing an office with Kevin Dooley at the time, the Green Lantern editor. Kevin showed them to Gerard Jones who was going to be doing this new Green Lantern book, and he liked them.

So they called me and asked me to do some samples for them. They liked them and I got the job. I was so excited, I think I did the entire book in three weeks. It was the fastest I’ve done anything! That didn’t last long. [Laughs] I’m not known for being a speed demon, you know.

You’ve been with Gaijin Studios almost from its inception 10 years ago.

They had been around as a studio about one year before I came in, but it was understood from the beginning that I was going to be one of the guys in there. I wanted to get some issues under my belt first, and get some money in the bank before I made the move from Alabama, where I had been living.

Cully (right) with CBEtc! owner, Rick Verbanas, way back in 1992 (when both had more hair).

Obviously, you enjoy working in a studio environment and play well with others.

Well, I hate it. I really can’t stand any of them, not a one. And they stink. Whatever they shower in, it’s not water. Make sure you put that in. [Laughs] Nah, you kidding? I love those guys.

What’s the drawback to being with a group of fellow artists?

The drawback? I’m not sure there is a drawback. It’s a positive way to do your work. The only drawback is that we get along so well that we can end up distracting each other or taking up each other’s time with hijinks. There’s really no true drawback, that I can think of.

You mention hijinks…Years ago, when Image was just starting out, you guys at Gaijin Studios used to have some friendly competition with the guys over at the Image bullpen. What was the worst practical joke you remember?

… I’m not sure what you’re talking about. I don’t remember there ever being any kind of "rivalry," at least not that I remember. I, personally, didn’t have much contact with any of the Image guys. I sporadically spoke with a few of them, here and there. Brian [Stelfreeze] was fairly friendly with Jim Lee. Dave [Johnson] knew Erik Larsen quite a bit, as did Karl [Story] and Jay [Pearson].

I remember occasionally that there were practical jokes…not the kind where someone gets a bucket of something on their head. It wasn’t so much the Image guys; it was more like the Homage Studios when it was Jim Lee, Mark Silvestri, and Whilce Portacio. I do remember one thing. It wasn’t exclusive to Homage, but we would fax around to everybody. There was this artist, who shall remain forever nameless, who was pretty well known for being… well, a naturist. He had sent Joe Phillips this sort of weird Halloween card with a picture of himself on the front of it, partially nude, holding a jack o’ lantern. The pumpkin was… well, I guess you could say it looked like it was eating something.

"Eating something?"

[Laughs] He just had this look on his face like "Hey, Happy Halloween!" And so Dave Johnson, Tony Harris and I, thinking that this was patently hilarious, took that photo and we used to take other people’s faces and put it on the photo and manipulate it so that the jack o’ lantern was in different places, doing different things with his mouth, that sort of thing. We started out doing that with each other’s faces. Then, we started putting other people’s faces on it. We sent it everywhere…to Homage studios… to Joe Quesada… ArtAmUs Studios… everywhere. Obviously, everybody knew where it was coming from since it had "Gaijin Studios" at the top of the fax. I don’t think anybody knew who it actually was in the photo, because it always had a different head on it. So to speak.

Dave (Johnson) loved practical jokes. That guy was always stealing my pages on Fed-Ex day. I come back from the rest room or something, and the page I’m working on is just gone. I’m looking everywhere and I can’t find it. Dave’s acting all innocent, and I’m fuming, because I’ve only got a couple more hours to finish the damn thing before I’ve got to send it out. So Dave would let me sweat for a bit, and then tell me where to find it. It would end up being somewhere fairly obvious, Dave would yuk it up, and I wouldn’t be able to do anything because I would then have to rush just to finish and get to Fed-Ex.

So, anyway, one Fed-Ex day rolls around, and Dave is really under the gun. He walks in to the bullpen… and his page is gone. He turns around to me: "All right, where is it?" I just look at him. There’s actually a halo hanging over my head. So he starts looking everywhere for his page. This goes on for a while, and finally, I just can’t stand it anymore. Dave standing in front of his desk, hands on hips, looking around. When he looks at me, I point up. He looks up and sees that I’ve tacked his page up on the ceiling, directly over his desk. [Laughs] You can bet that he got me back.

Cully showing off his "Chop Stick" penciling technique, which he used exclusively while doing the art for the Wildstorm Summer Special! (Patent Pending)

Gaijin Studios, while definitely known for being a production house of top-notch artists, also has the dubious reputation for being, shall we say, a tad bit lenient with the deadlines. Do you think that’s fair or do you think it’s been exaggerated over the years?

Probably fair to a degree. Probably exaggerated to a degree. You have a situation where no one in our studio is willing to hack anything out, if they can help it. Most of us in the studio don’t do monthly books, with Georges Jeanty being the one exception [DeadPool]. Karl [Story] did Batman up until recently, but he’s doing several projects at once right now, none of which are monthly. The interesting thing is that most of us have done monthlies in our careers. As you mentioned earlier, I did Mosaic, Adam [Hughes] did Justice League, and on and on. Even Brian did an unbroken run of over fifty painted covers on Shadow of the Bat.

Now, having said that, I can be a bit trying for an editor when it comes to deadlines. I am a bit better than I used to be, even though I still screw up occasionally. There are just as many times, though, that an editor will sit on a script too long, or forget to send me paper to work on. Things like that will also make a deadline get blown. Mostly, however, it’s just that I’m not fast. I tend to start slow, and speed up as I get to the end of a job. So, knowing that, if an editor and I can sit down and we both know that I’m not fast, we’ll come up with a realistic deadline. Pretty much every editor I work with nowadays knows that even if it’s not on time, it will be a good job.

And something I learned a long time ago is to not duck phone calls. That to me solves a lot of problems. Even if it’s not going to be on time, it’s better that the editor not be left in the dark, so that the schedule can be adjusted.

The fact is that I’m not a speed demon, I’m not a fast guy, but I’m a quality guy. It’s indicative in the work I do, considering I have this reputation and I still have more work than I ever had. I think that, at the very least, editors realize that they will get good work out of me and that I’m a pleasant enough person to deal with.

There’s an axiom that goes around that to be successful in the comic book artist, you need to be two out of three things. Those three things are: a very nice guy; a really good artist; and a really fast artist. You could be a really nice guy and a really fast artist, but you don’t really have to be that good. You could be a really good artist, and a very fast one, but you don’t have to be that nice. Or you could be a really good guy and a good artist, but not be that fast.

And which one are you again?

[In an announcer voice] I’m a nice guy, who’s a good artist, for pete’s sake! [Laughs] My god, is your sarcasm going to come through when this thing is posted?

Ummm…yeah, SURE! Ahem. The Wildstorm Summer Special looks like it was one heck of a collaboration. Whose idea was to take on such a huge project, and did you have as much fun on it as it looks?

I can’t remember exactly whose idea it was, but I seem to remember that it was one of those things where two or three of us had the similar ideas at the same time. I remember having several conversations with Brian [Stelfreeze], going back a couple of years, about the fact that Gaijin’s 10th Anniversary was coming up and that we should do something special to celebrate. We talked about seeing if we could get a publisher to allow us to do an annual or something and get everyone who has ever been associated with Gaijin to contribute something, whether it be a chapter, or a story, or a pin-up, but at least something.

We talked about it here or there but it finally came up earlier this year when Brian and I were having one of our daily morning walks, which we do to try to clear our heads and get ready for the day. Brian looks at me, and out of the blue, he says, "Hey, Cul, are we gonna shit or get off the pot?" And we started talking about who we could do the anniversary book for. Both of us had recently been doing stuff with Wildstorm, and felt we were treated really well and that they liked us and we liked them. So we cleared the idea with the rest of the studio, made some calls to Wildstorm, and several months later, we had us a book.

We thought the only way to do it, to really make it worth something, was to get the biggest and best writers we could possibly get our hands on. So, I became kind of the "de facto studio editor" on this. You see, the way we do things like this at Gaijin, is to elect one person to handle group projects, to be the contact for the "real" editor, who, in this case, was John Layman. That way, there is less confusion. So, among other things, I was in charge in getting writers on board.

The first one I contacted was Warren Ellis, since I was going to be working with him on an upcoming project anyway, and I really enjoy his work. He agreed to do it, as a favor to me, even though he had left The Authority behind and had no intention of ever writing them again. Then we got Brian Azzarello, whom we all admire and are big fans of for his work on 100 Bullets and Hellblazer. And then we called Paul Jenkins, who had recently moved into the area. We really enjoyed his work on The Sentry, and The Inhumans. Even though he is one of the busiest men on the planet, Paul agreed to do it.

From the beginning, we wanted it to be a complete Gaijin project, packaged in-house. Not only did we hire the writers, but we wanted to take care of our own lettering, and color and separate it here at the studio, just do the entire job at the studio, if only to prove to ourselves that we could do it. Of course, we were all working on other assignments and projects while this was going on, so it was a mad rush to get everything done near the end.

I was penciling my story and spending a lot of time on the phone for this, while working on my Batman project at the same time. Brian volunteered to color the entire thing, minus a couple of the pin-ups, while he was drawing his own story. He was also working on his upcoming Domino mini-series. Karl [Story] was inking the whole 48 page book, while still doing Batman and starting on Tom Strong. Adam [Hughes] did the cover while working on his other cover assignments and writing his Tomb Raider project. Georges did his story while doing DeadPool. It was a lot of late nights while doing it in our spare time.

Would you ever consider editing again?

Oh, I don’t know. Maybe. I ‘m not sure I would ever want to do it as a full-time job. Anybody who thinks that editing comic books is easy work is seriously wrong. I think I maybe have some skill potential for that kind of work but, on the other hand, my aforementioned reputation with deadlines might make it hard trying to get others to adhere to deadlines. On the other hand, [laughing] I know all the tricks, all the excuses! I think I could do it, but I’m too happy being a freelancer. To me, an editor is more like a coach than a player, and I like being a player.

And let me state me for the record that John Layman actually edited the project. I don’t want anyone to think otherwise. At best, you could consider me kind of his "assistant editor" on the WSS. John’s the one who got the book out the door.

You’ve worked with a wide variety of writers over the years: Gerard Jones, James Robinson, Scott Lobdell, Steve Seagle, Warren Ellis, as we mentioned. What writer would you most like to work with on an upcoming project?

Hmmm… I’d like to work with Brian Azzarello sometime. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything of his that I didn’t like. Brian, if you’re reading this [Laughs]… Ummm, Alan Moore. Everyone says Alan Moore, but there is a reason everyone says that. I’d really like to work with Harlan Ellison, that would be interesting. Frank Miller. You know, the big guys.

Mark Millar’d be cool. Peter Milligan has been very interesting to me the last couple of years. Frankly, after the little taste that I had with my X-Men Unlimited story last year, I’d like to write more of my own stuff. Is that a cliché?

What can you tell us about "Tenses," the Batman project you are working on with writer Joe Casey?

It takes place around the Batman Year One, Year Two period. Bruce Wayne has returned to Gotham the year previous after traveling the world and training. He’s just taken hold of Wayne Enterprises and he is doing some things that are raising a lot of eyebrows among the rich: laying people off, closing parts of his business, selling assets. Nobody can figure out why Wayne is doing this. We come to realize that he is freeing up capital to finance his war on crime – pay for the best computers, the best vehicles, and so on. Wayne is so obsessed and focused on the coming war that he doesn’t realize his own importance to the local economy. His actions are creating the kinds of conditions in Gotham that cause crime to fester.

So, in the story, we meet a guy named Ted. Ted, figuratively, has "loser" branded on his forehead. Nothing has ever gone right for this guy, and nothing ever will. His one talent is an apparent clairvoyance, but he’s such a loser that he can’t even make that work for him. It starts to push him over the edge. When he loses his job due to Wayne’s cutbacks, he finds himself out on the street. It’s not long until he falls in with bad people who take advantage of him. And they run afoul of Batman.

It’s going to be two 64 page books, so it is a monster of a story. It is not an Elseworld’s tale, but the only character from the Bat-books is Bruce Wayne himself; there’s no Alfred, no Gordon, no Robin. So, if you’re a Bruce Wayne fan, I think you are going to like it. If Batman Year One was, as Miller has said, "Batman before he got any good at it," then this would be Batman before he really figured out how to be Bruce Wayne.

Well, I’ve been following your work from the beginning, and I have to admit, this is some of your best work yet.

Well, thanks. Have another drink…

What can you tell us about your upcoming project with Warren Ellis?

It’s a spy story. The central figure in this tale is a character named Paul Moses. He’s a retired CIA killer, living out his twilight in comfort… at least in the first half of the first issue. Then everything goes haywire. Extreme violence ensues. [Laughs] Need I say more? It’s Warren, dammit! It’ll be good.

Okay, now is the time for "2099" portion of our interview. This is where I ask you 20 questions in 99 seconds. It’s basically an "either/or" type of response, but you can answer whatever first pops into your head.

Interior pencils or covers: Interior pencils.

First Print or TPB: TPB

John Stewart (Mosaic) or Kyle Rayner: Hmmm… I’m going to have to go with John Stewart. He’s my guy.

Late night or early day: Early day.

1st Batman movie or X-Men: X-Men

Cold cereal or grits: Well, I’m from Alabama, so I’ll say grits. With sugar and butter.

Star Wars or Star Trek: Uhh… I have a problem with both of them nowadays. But I’m going to have to go with Star Trek. I was exposed more to Star Trek growing up, especially in my teen years. Episode One was a let down, so maybe I’ll change my mind after the next Star Wars.

Play with toy or keep in box: Play with it.

Sega DreamCast or Sony Playstation 2: I don’t have either, so I’ll skip this one.

Fly or drive: Fly

Telepathy or Flight: Hmmm… Flight.

South Park or Simpsons: The Simpsons

Cell phone or E-mail: E-mail

Big G.I. Joe or little: Oh, the big ones. I’m thirty-two, man…

Tomb Raider or Raiders of the Lost Ark: Raiders

Squeeze in the middle or at the end: Squeeze in the middle

Super Heroes or Guys with Guns: Hmm… I used to say super-heroes, but I think I’m going to have to say guys with guns nowadays.

World Series or Super Bowl: World Series, I guess

Lou Ferrigno or Adam West: [Laughs] Adam West is much funnier. And dammit, he’s sexier, too, isn’t he? Lou Ferrigno had these perfect abs, but Adam West had just one big ab. It’s just a single large ab! That’s right, it’s a wash-tub stomach. God, what a man, you know? You’re still writing this stuff down, aren’t you?

Buffy or Vampirella: Don’t particularly care about either, to be honest…

CREDITS

GREEN LANTERN: MOSAIC #1-15
GREEN LANTERN #58
SILVER SURFER #83
FIREARM #1-4, 6, 9
STORMWATCH SPECIAL #2
UNCANNY X-MEN #352
PENTHOUSE COMIX
ROBIN #46
DAREDEVIL #376-379
Various DC SECRET ORIGINS
Various DC 80-PAGE GIANTS
THE TITANS #14
X-MEN UNLIMITED (WRITER, PENCILER, INKER) # 29
AUTHORITY ANNUAL 2000
WEIRD WESTERN TALES #4
GEN-ACTIVE #5
WILDSTORM SUMMER SPECIAL
BATMAN: TENSES (2002)
RED (2002)