Tim McEwen

Voice Over (00:01):
This show is sponsored by the Comics Shop. We hope you enjoy the show.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (00:24):
Hello and welcome to Tuesday Chinwag. Good to see Tim is actually frozen. We’ve been sitting in the green room and everything’s been all good. And now he’s frozen up. So you got me at least. So what am I doing here? I’m sorry to disappoint. So there was a cyclone in Townsville. Now Townsville is where Lee Chaka lives. So Helen Hunt was on the scene. There was a cow seen flying through the air. I don’t really know the difference between cyclones, tornadoes, twisters, nor’easter, but the internet fell prey to said wind. And Lee did me the honour, oh golly, of letting me post his show. So what is Chinwag? You might ask because this is the first show for the year. So Chinwag is a show obviously where we talk comics. You sit down with an illustrator, a writer, a creator in some form or fashion, and we talk about their career, talk about their comic books, talk about all manner of whatnots, and it’s based around six prompting questions.

(01:49)
Who, what, when, why, how, and where. For instance, where is my guest? So firstly, thank you Gary. Welcome back to Chinwag. I do apologise that Lee’s not here. As you can see, the one comic on my brand spanking new shelves is I’m getting a text message from Tim. Are we down already? No, just click the link. It’s all good. Look, I’ve got it mate. I’ve got it. Like, nah, just click the link and join back in. Join Bacon. Hopefully he’ll knows what that means. So few things to get underway. So we are brought to you obviously by Comex Comex shop, where you can buy all sorts of Australian indie comic books available right now with a flat shipping rate. They also come quite flat in the package, which is a bonus when ordering comic books. Curly comic books are not a desired thing that I know about, right?

(03:12)
Also, we are streaming live on Aussie verse, so you must be super confused as to what’s going on right now. If you are tuning in on an Aussie verse, where’s Bo? Where’s Lee Chaka? Where’s Tim? Holy moley, we do encourage questions, so please hit us up with questions. Tim says, now my net is actually down, must be trying to catch crabs. Little does he know I’ve already caught something, if you know what I mean. But dear hell mate, so he said to give him a sec. So I’m going to do that. So shout out here to quick, Nick, hope you’re doing well. I miss you. We will see you my friend this Friday. As drink and draw returns, we will be sitting down with Peter Wilson and a bunch of other cool cats and we’ll be drawing devils and demons to suit to fit with Peter Wilson’s foes Kickstarter campaign. That is Kraken at the moment.

(04:21)
So tune in for that. That’s on Friday and I promise there will be more people on the screen than just me. Whoa. See, I was worried that people would tune in to Chinwag and think, wow, SP’s just taking over the show. I at least thought I’d have Tim with me to carry some of that weight so it wouldn’t look like I’m totally just taking the show for myself. But he is on his way. Am I back? He said I’m not, it dropped out again. Hang on. Alright, well they don’t call me Dracula for nothing mate, because I’ve been known to Vamp. Yeah. Alright, Gary, thank you. Yes, I need all the help we can get. I can get at the moment. Love to Lee. Have a good one. Spie and Tim, I don’t know who this Tim is that you refer to Nick, but we will find out Ben Sullivan.

(05:25)
Ben, this is a page from a comic book that you and I co-created with Ryan Vela and the man Lee Chalker. And this is a page here done by Dave Di. So my new shelving unit, it’s got two of, it’s a fair whacker shelf for two things, but we will get there a bookshelf of good taste. You. I like that little personalization at the end there. Goodness me, the camera loves you. Sp tell me about the white backdrop. Yes, because at this point I’ve got to tell you about something. So I am in my garage, it was a garage. Now it is called the watermelon room. We do not harvest watermelons here. But when asked my 7-year-old son, I said, what should we call this room? I don’t want to call it the garage room. He said, call it the watermelon room. So this is my new space for this sort of what Whatnots Siz said. Do you want me to hop in? Well, siz, thankfully I’ve got a few more comments to get through, but if you see me start crying then alright, just do some juggling or something. In the meantime says 10. So I was nervous going into tonight’s show and really now that my greatest fears have come true, it’s not as scary as I thought.

(07:14)
I mean it’s pretty scary. But we’re going to get there. Dan May with a $20 super chat. Just drop Now I wish I watch a streamer who gets $20 Super chats if we could click the button that gets that back. Kraken. I’ll sit here all night long. Dan, good to see you. I do promise you a show of some sort. This might be it. The weirdest chinwag in history and Andrew Law, amazing artist. Yay. Drinking and drawing. Yes sir. We are back in action this Friday. Can’t wait to dust off the cobwebs. If there was any cobwebs, I’ve definitely, well look, ain’t no spiders on me. Tim has gone to greener pastures. Yes, unfortunately. I’ve just got the text. Tim has died. No, Tim has just messaged me. I’m so sorry. Not as sorry as you will be, Tim, because you’ve got a lot of talking to do when you get here. All right, next up Facebook user. Just dropping a quick fu, get it. Facebook user. This looks like the Invisible Man’s book collection. Yes, I do have a lot of comic books right now. They’re all stacked in piles. Speaking of piles, I’m sitting on two cushions because, well, I’ve been known to grab some piles. Anyway, come for the McEwen. Stay for the sp. Please actually stay for the McEwen because I believe he is switching routers on and off. Someone has clicked the thing. Holy moly. Holy. Alright, I’m going to click it.

(09:17)
Do you know big shoes to fill tonight? Right? That I had to fill Lee’s shoes. I didn’t realise I’d have to fill Lee’s shoes and the guest’s shoes.

Tim McEwen (09:28):
Oh man, I’m so sorry. You know what? I forgot. I forgot that. Telstra just turns off my internet every night at 6 31.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (09:36):
Oh,

Tim McEwen (09:37):
Every night at 6 31 if we’re watching some, sorry. 8 31. 8 31. I was

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (09:42):
Going to say, because it’s eight 40 right now,

Tim McEwen (09:46):
If we’re watching something streamed, it just cuts out for sometimes two minutes, sometimes five. Looks like tonight it was nearly 10. I’m so sorry. And as soon as it cut out going, oh, what’s happened? Something’s gone wrong. And then, anyway,

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (10:00):
Well look, my worst nightmare came true. And it wasn’t that bad. We made it through. We only lost four viewers in the meantime. But we’re still in double digits. We’re alright.

Tim McEwen (10:11):
I’m so sorry.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (10:13):
No, it’s alright. It’s fine. I’ll change my pants later. This cushion. It is an heirloom, but I’ll air it out later. Alright, Tim, if you didn’t know, this show is beautifully helmed normally by Lee Hawker who asks six prompting questions. Well, he says five, but I No, no, he says six and then listed five. Anyway, it’s a whole thing. Who, what, where, when, why? What did I get ’em all? I’m not sure, but Tim, I said your name, pretend I didn’t. Who

Tim McEwen (10:55):
Am I?

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (10:56):
Yeah, that’s how he starts it. He says

Tim McEwen (10:58):
Who? Cool. I’m Tim. I’m Tim McEwen. And if I’m to elaborate, I’m the co-creator of Greener Pastures, an Australian comic book, which is actually celebrating its 30th birthday in about a week’s time. Happy

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (11:18):
Birthday.

Tim McEwen (11:18):
Yeah. I’m also a storyboard artist and an educator, sometimes a graphic designer, all sorts of things like that. So is that enough of a who?

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (11:30):
Yeah. But I’m going to delve a little bit deeper. Give us, what did your dad do? Obvious was your dad’s line of work.

Tim McEwen (11:39):
He was an accountant. He didn’t want you to be an artist, which is why I’m sometimes a graphic designer because he wanted me to have a real job and art was not a real job and the closest art job that we could think of. Or he and my mom could think of. The closest real job to art was being a graphic designer. So I guess that’s why I studied to be a graphic designer. The job I never really liked and was not really that suited for or wasn’t really that good at. That’s why I don’t do too much of it now. And why I was always looking for a job that was adjacent to graphic design, not actually graphic design.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (12:22):
Yeah. What about, did your parents support your comic habit? Did drawing come first or comics come first, as in collecting and reading comics?

Tim McEwen (12:36):
Yeah, good question. I think drawing came first because we’re always scribbling from as soon as you can hold some kind of implement that will make a mark as a baby and a toddler, you’re pretty much drawing immediately. So drawing must have come first. But comics came very early and I can’t even remember, I can’t remember far enough back to when I didn’t have comics. I think some of my earliest memories include me and my comics. So they came pretty early and I probably can’t put my hands on ’em right now, but my mom just recently, because decluttering her house, found some of my old drawings from kindergarten, maybe earlier. And even then that was storytelling. They were kind of cool. I can still remember all of my obsessions. I used to go through phases of obsessions with my drawing and one of them was spies and they lasted a long time. That lasted kind of ebbed and flowed throughout probably well over a decade, but I think it was probably watching get smart on television, but drawing a spy car with all of these gadgets, James Bond’s car has tax that fall out the side and a flame thrower and blah, blah, blah. So a car like that drawn in profile how when you are young, everything’s kind of in profile

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (14:12):
Or when you’re 46,

Tim McEwen (14:18):
Every gadget was operating all at once. I had to show what all the gadgets were. So already it’s kind of like, this is what this vehicle is all about. And then if you turn the page over, it’s like that’s the before. And then this is the after and the car has crashed into a wall and the guy is kind of maybe dead, I suppose, dead on the ground behind it. And all the gadgets are all over the place and fire. But there were a couple of other bits and pieces, other pages that also had drawings that were never a standalone drawing. There was always a series and either that series were like, I went through a phase where I was drawing my hand or a body or whatever, and I would draw my hand and I would draw all the skin and the nails and the wrinkles and then I would redraw it and I’d draw all the bones instead.

(15:09)
And then I’d redraw it and I draw what I thought would be the veins. So again, a series of drawings wasn’t just a single kind of drawing. So that kind of sequential drawings probably predated even having comics. So I, I’m only putting these jigsaw pieces together in the last couple of years really that because if you’re into comics, it’s like that saying about being in the, I guess it’s the mafia, is it? You can’t ever get out. Once you think you’re out, they drag you back in. And we often say that when we’re talking about comics and Australian comics, anyone who’s been in it for any kind of length of time, it’s kind like you just never seem to be able to get out. You always, you can’t escape it. You always want to make them or read them or draw them or something. And it’s interesting to see that that really even predates probably my knowledge of what comics were that I was already drawing in that kind of sequence.

(16:11)
I was just talking to, again, talking to my mom the other day about the fact that I was probably one year too old for the class I was in at school. So I was always bored at school. I should have been one year below. So I was a bit more challenged or one year, one year ahead. So I was a bit more challenged. And I said, I can remember sitting in class in year one with a little notebook, probably a little diary or something from my dad that was a year out of date. So he didn’t need it anymore. And using that to draw on and drawing the Jupiter two from lost in space and page after page, drawing it, flying through space and then crash landing on the planet, what happens every second episode of Lost in Space and people coming out. So again, sequential drawings, which could almost be animated again, everything’s kind of in profile and it just kind of moves along. You don’t really think too much about composition like we do now about camera or viewing angles and stuff. So yeah, again, in year one drawing, I dunno if I knew that they were comics, but drawing sequential illustrations, one after the other. Yeah.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (17:23):
Wow. Alright, so my next thing was pets and kids. I was like in the who? What makes you up? So that was your dad answer. So we got pets, we’ve got kids. What’s the situation there? Yeah,

Tim McEwen (17:39):
The cat was actually here before, she’s not here now, so that’s Boots. Boots lives here. She used to live next door until the people next door had to move and they couldn’t take their cats and they knew the cats were visiting us a lot anyway and they were very young cats. So we adopted Boots and Pig. Oh, there’s boots now just in front of Boots.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (18:04):
Where were you 20 minutes ago? Boots. I could have talked to anybody. It would’ve been

Tim McEwen (18:10):
And Boots Sister Pig is just buried over there. She didn’t last as long as Boots has unfortunately. Pig was the dumb one and Pig

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (18:22):
Was a cat.

Tim McEwen (18:23):
Both of them are cats. Yeah, the Sisters Pig the Cat. Yeah. What’s wrong with you?

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (18:28):
Yeah, no. Hey that makes sense. My dog’s called Horse. So we’ve all got your

Tim McEwen (18:35):
Dog’s called Horse like the

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (18:38):
It’s not him. It’s not.

Tim McEwen (18:39):
It’s not. Okay. I

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (18:42):
Trust he has a very regular name. His name’s Leo. But anyway, we’ll edit that out in post. It’ll be fine.

Tim McEwen (18:50):
Leo’s a lion’s name anyway. Okay. But next door’s first Cat, Maggie, she was the first resident on this street and I think probably the first resident in the suburb because it’s a reasonably new suburb and she used to visit me a lot and she was 21 when she died. Beautiful old cat that would be cranky, but in winter would sit on my lap right here where I’m sitting now. And Sally next door never let the cat into her house. But the cat was in our house all the time, Maggie. We kind of had all of the cats from next door. But Boots officially lives here. Maggie never did. So that’s the animal situation. The two kids, Samuel, and they don’t live here anymore. They’re too old to live with mom and dad now. So yeah, Samuel works for the A, B, C has been working for good game for all of last year, worked for Triple J before that, Annabelle just finished her master’s at the National Art School master’s in printmaking. And I’m sure we’re going to talk about greener pastures number eight later. But they both contributed to a page to that. Samuel makes comics on a pretty regular basis. Annabel does printmaking and freaks out anytime I ask her to make comics because it’s not really her wheelhouse

(20:25)
Other,

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (20:26):
My son Carter is killing it at Minecraft, so I just didn’t want

Tim McEwen (20:31):
My son Samuel’s killing it at Minecraft too because works for the abc, doesn’t

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (20:36):
We have that one at least.

Tim McEwen (20:39):
But yeah, Annabel helped me print these the other day. Tote bags. Oh, wicked Tote bags because she

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (20:45):
Works old school screen printing.

Tim McEwen (20:48):
Yeah, yeah. Check out the Facebook page. There’s a video of a time lapse of us doing it. She helped. And Annemarie, my wife helped and I did a little bit of it too. Yeah,

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (21:02):
Well that should I guess lead us into what, so I feel like we’ve successfully done who, so let’s try what, because we, yeah, when you went on before and I was like, what was I thinking when I said to Lee I would do this? No. So greener pastures, is that correct, Michael? I want to say a last name that I can’t pronounce.

Tim McEwen (21:29):
Nico Lando.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (21:30):
There you go. Yeah. So for those that don’t know, let’s talk about the Trevor Bovis of it all. Where did he come from? Also, just because I want to get it said so that we make sure we tackle it because I, I think it’d be really interesting releasing comics in the eighties versus releasing comics in the 2020s, I imagine completely different. So I’d like to sort of talk about Trevor then and Trevor now, but also Tim making Trevor comics then and Tim making Trevor comics now, what’s changed, all that sort of stuff. So tell us about him.

Tim McEwen (22:16):
Yeah, that’s a pretty wide kind of ranging thing. We’ll start with where greener pastures came from. So like I said, we’re celebrating 30 years of publishing the Greener Pastures comic, but the greener pastures IP characters, et cetera is actually even a few years older than that because Michael and I did the comic as a comic strip for his university newspaper for a year about three or four years before we rejigged it and redrew it for a comic book. So it’s even older than 30 years. But yeah, Michael and I met at the first Australian comic convention that I’ve ever been to. Hi Steven. Yeah, I will get to that. That’s one of my favourite stories actually. So yeah, Michael and I met at a comic convention at the Sydney Opera House. Stanley was supposed to come and didn’t turn up, but Jim Starco and Will Eisner were both there and they are two of the biggest names in comics ever.

(23:22)
And it was just astounding that Richard Ray put together this comic convention with those two guys and France Cantor an Australian guy, and I met Michael there. We were just finishing our high school and we didn’t know anybody who made comics and we just happened to sit next to each other. So we became friends during the convention, but I was probably too socially awkward to be able to figure out how to have a friendship that would go any further than sitting next to this guy for the weekend. But he had a camera and I didn’t bring a camera, so he was taking photos, but I was working in a camera shop where you develop photos. So I told him, bring me your film and I’ll develop it for free if I can get a copy of the photos. So he came back in to get the photos and we saw phone numbers and we actually did a couple of short stories together for a couple of underground kind of mini comicy sort of things in Sydney at the time. Bodine America printed one of them, Bodin and Jason Paul, I think maybe they were both publishers of it, I think it was called. We did a couple of things for that. One thing for that.

(24:31)
And then Michael was studying at the University of New South Wales and the newspaper there, thca said that they had space for a comic strip if he wanted to contribute. Now Michael doesn’t draw, but he does. And the only person he knew I think that could draw was me. So he rang me or he contacted me however it was, and said, do you want to do a comic strip together for Theca? And I said, yeah, that’d be great. So we were trying to think of a strip that would appeal to students, tertiary students and be a bit irreverent and funny, but also was talking about stuff that we wanted to talk about and draw stuff that I wanted to draw. And we were coming up with pretty cliched ideas about things like an alien comes and lands at the university and goes, oh, what is life on earth all about? Somebody talk me through it. And it’s like, oh man, that’s a little bit, not only cliche, but very hand fisted. And so we couldn’t think of something and I’m pretty sure we were about ready to just kind of go, oh, forget it, we can’t think of something. But at about that time I went on a farm holiday, a farm stay holiday with my then girlfriend, now wife in the other room, shout out for boots.

(25:52)
It’s bongo, not boots. And you think of joking, you’ve met Mongo, right? I have. That’s right. So yeah, we went and stayed on this farm for about a week and one of the days the farmer loaded us into his four wheel drive and said, I’ll take you around the farm and show you what’s here. Because the rest of the time we’re just in a farm, like a house that he built to just relax. And we were there with a whole bunch of friends, but we all went around in this four-wheel drive and it struck me, there was not much on the farm other than some cattle. And I was looking at the cattle and I was going, they look like they don’t do much. They look like they’re pretty bored. And I said to the farmer, I said, what do they do all day? Are they just resting?

(26:40)
He said, you see how they’re lying on the grass under that tree at the moment? I said, yeah. He said, well, they were doing that under that tree earlier, and that’s about the size of it. They come from one tree to the other, they eat some grass in between and they’re done. And I went, wow, it’s kind of boring. And the first, whatever it is, four pages or so of the first issue of greener pastures came to me right there in the four wheel drive. The whole idea that you would have a spark of inspiration and stand on your hind legs and go and knock on the farmer’s door and say, Hey, I’m bored, can I come in? So that whole kind of thing came to me. We got home from the holiday and I said to Michael, is this something we could work with?

(27:25)
And I gave that idea to Michael, which he must have liked because the next time we met up he had, I’m sure I’ve got the printout in my files somewhere, but he came to me with a printout of what he’d written, which was like maybe three or four paragraphs of Trevor’s entire life story from beginning to end. And there is an ending, which we’ve always wanted to get to. And he said, how about this? And I went, man, that sounds fantastic. So that was when we started and it was meant to be a really long journey to get there. Tell lots of funny stories in the meantime. And that’s where the first seven issues of greener pastures, or at the time it was the comic strip, the first 12 little episodes of the comic strip where they first came from, if you ever see the comic strip, and it was reprinted in a couple of places over the years in an American comic called Hep Katz, and in an Australian mini comic called Nervous Breakdowns, you’ll see huge influence of Will Eisner in that already at that kind stage. But the story was interesting, but we expanded upon it quite a lot for the comic book itself.

(28:44)
But Michael always had his eye on the really long story, which we never got to because we did seven issues, we did two half issues, we did a special and a couple of mini comics and some shorts. But it really was only the beginning of Trevor’s story. And then Michael and I both got married, not to each other but to different people. We both had kids and we both had careers, and it just got harder and harder to get the comic done on a regular enough basis that I felt like I was doing a good service for the people who wanted to read it and eventually just kind of petered it out. So yeah, that’s where number seven. And then seven and half were the last issues that were done back in 1997. Shall I keep going? Shall I tell you about the new stuff?

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (29:38):
Well, firstly I just want to touch on, so to me it seemed like a big deal for your comics to be in news agencies was a big, was that easy, hard, was that like a badge of honour to have your book in New Zealand?

Tim McEwen (30:01):
From memory? It was actually ridiculously easy, partly because we weren’t the first to do it. There were others in front of us, I think really it was probably like hair, but the hippo was, I think they were a little bit ahead of everybody else in regards to news agent distribution. And a little bit ahead of him was cyclones. So with Southern Squadron and Cyclone Comics and the individual comics that they started to publish, of course Tad before that with Dark Nebula. But news agents in Australia at that time, that’s where you bought comics. If you didn’t know of a specialty shop and most people didn’t know of or didn’t, didn’t live near a specialty shop or comic specialty shops, that’s where you got your comics. So it was definitely a thing. So for a while there was quite a few Australian comics. At any one time there was greener pasture, platinum Grit bug and stump hair. But the Hippo issue ones Zero Assassin and Cyber Swine, Southern Aurora, I dunno, at any time you could see all of those in any news agent and Gordon and got needed comics to distribute to news agents. So if you rang up and you said, I’ve got a comic, they just go, cool. They didn’t care what it was, what looked like, how good it was, or they were just taking it.

(31:39)
So that was the easy part. The hard part was trying to get them to take notice of their own sales figures. And if a news agent sold five copies of number one, they would only get two copies of number two, and then four copies of number three, and then 20 copies of number four. They just didn’t worry about how to distribute this stuff properly. And we finally found out, I forget one of us, not me, but one of us kind of had the conversation with Gordon and got that they got the truth out of them where the comic books and the soft porn were just space fillers for news agents. So a news agency would want to have X amount of dollars worth of material every month, and that would be Woman’s Weekly and New idea and the TV week and all those legitimate magazines.

(32:35)
And then to make up the rest of the dollars, they would just throw porn and comic books at the newsagent. So they didn’t care what the mix was and how many it was and all of that stuff. So on one hand it was pretty easy, but on the other hand it was also not easy to wrangle or to guide. But the fact that we had news agent distribution meant that we were printing up to 10,000 copies, which is unheard of now to print that many. So that’s why it’s on newsprint in black and white, because that’s the only way to print that many copies of a comic. And we would keep a couple of thousand for ourselves to sell it at comic shops and comic conventions. The rest would go to news agents, they would sell a percentage, 20, 30% of them and the rest would go to be pulped.

(33:29)
But we always made sure that we got a few of those back, like a thousand or so back you could pay to get some of them brought back so that I had, again, more copies and that’s why I’ve still got comics in the garage that I can sell now. So at conventions the last couple of years I’ve been selling them again, the old copies we’re starting to finally get to the end of the nice copies like the ones and starting to get to ones that are a little bit more ragged, but I think I’m nearly out of them. Yeah,

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (34:02):
I like you sent me, I was lucky enough to get them sent to me and having the news agents stickers on there, it made me feel like I went and got ’em a bit of history. So did we do where we did wear in terms of where did you grow up?

Tim McEwen (34:22):
Where did I grow up here in Sydney? So I’m Sydney in Asheville is where we grew up. Asheville in Croydon. I went to school in Asheville and Croydon primary school in Croydon High School in Asheville. I went to Uni way out west of Penrith. So yeah, mostly Sydney based, haven’t really lived anywhere else. We lived in London for about five months, but that was just because we were backpacking.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (34:53):
Yeah, and excuse me if I jump all over the shop in terms of timeline, but I was curious too, if you had a teacher, a specific teacher growing up that was, I feel like many of us creatives, we tend to have that one teacher amongst a sea of stop drawing and concentrate on the whatever, and then there’ll be one who gets your weirdness, gets where your heart is and all that sort of stuff. Is there a person like that, perhaps a mentoring? No teachers? No. No. Is that maybe why you strive to be that for other creators?

Tim McEwen (35:31):
Oh, for others? Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. So I’m an educator. I lecture at tertiary level mostly to animation students, mostly drawing and storytelling kind of subjects. And if I’m lucky enough to have a first trimester class, I often, not always, but I often do a little bit of a lecture about permission to be, Hey Nick, I often do a little bit of a little talk, not a lecture, a little talk about my struggle to be permitted to be an artist and what it means to be given permission and how I felt like I was never given permission and I still struggle with it today. It’s still a huge struggle that I’m wasting my time drawing. And a lot of that I think is because I was never given permission from anybody in a position of seniority in my life, like parents, teachers, et cetera. And I know that a lot of the kids that we get at the tertiary level are there despite what their parents want. A lot of their parents want them to be doctors and lawyers and a dental technician, one my dad wanted me to be, and they have to really struggle to get to be in the class that they want to be in.

(37:03)
And I talk about how that might affect their artistic endeavours from that point and that lack of permission can be an ongoing thing. And this is something I worked out for myself. And again, if I studied what it means to be an educator, maybe there’s something in textbooks about this kind of thing, I don’t know. But it took me, again, decades to figure that out for myself. So I tried to fast that.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (37:30):
I’ve only just working it now, you’ve blown my mind. I think I have that same thing where I feel like I have to earn drawing time by doing so many things around the house or whatever to contribute properly before then

Tim McEwen (37:49):
You feel like it’s a guilty thing that you’re doing, which makes it an uncomfortable thing to do. It’s like having a stone in your shoe while you’re trying to run. You could be running so much faster if you didn’t have to limp because of this big stone in your shoe. So I try to fast track that for a lot of my students and get them to understand what it means to have permission. And I try to give them the permission, even though it might be the first day they’ve ever met me, I’m already in a position of seniority, of not seniority, but I’m the mentor there, I’m the teacher, I’m the one that they’re already looking at going, you are going to teach me. And I try to make that, one of the first things I do for them is say, I give you permission to be an artist. You need to embrace that. Even if no one else has given you permission to be an artist, I give it to you. And if you embrace that, then we’re well on our way. And I’ll tell you what, I’m trying to very much step around how I talk about that in class because when I do do it in class, I actually get pretty emotional and have to really reign myself in. Otherwise it can get a bit out of hand. Yeah,

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (39:03):
Yeah. Well remember our safe word is pickles. So because you’re blowing my mind right now because kind of going to want you to give me permission before we finish up

Tim McEwen (39:17):
Do, I’m hoping my mom’s not watching because parents like to follow us on Facebook and whatnot. So I dunno. I dunno if you’re watching mom, but there you go. That’s probably blown her mind as well.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (39:30):
Yeah, so my dad was an actor and a musician, but when he met my mom, there was a transitional period where she said, why are you lying down on stage when you sing? He thought that was rock and roll, and I think it’s rock and roll, but when it came time to buy a house and settle down, he legit put the, he played in the church choir and stuff, but for all intents and purposes he put the guitar down and stopped acting and all that sort of stuff because it took time away from whatever. And so I feel like I’ve got his creative gene or whatever, and I have an element of his, you should settle down and focus on real things and they’re at odds. They’ve been at odds since I was 21 or something. I forget what my larger point was, but just that

Tim McEwen (40:38):
That’s the point. It’s great. Yeah, it’s a hard thing. I think it’s a really hard thing. I know of even just comic creators and cartoonists in this country who have got creative parents and have always been a creative household and how great that was for their upbringing. I tried to do this for my kids and at times we kind of worry that, have we equipped them to get a good enough job? I’ve equipped them for life. I hope we’ve equipped them for life. I’m pretty sure we have. I’ve got two really amazing adults as kids, but I always worry, are they going to struggle to make a living? And it’s what do you do when you’re artistic? Are you going to struggle to make a living or are you going to struggle with your mental health because you’re not being creative? Which one do you want to struggle with? Take your choice. But I think, like I said, Samuel’s at the A B, C and is doing a creative job and still does his comics and is in a couple of bands on weekends and at nights and whatnot. So I think he’s being creative and Annabel is a practising artist and does her printmaking and is also an educator and is also a researcher. And so I think they’re doing okay. I tried to show that balance I guess in my life so that hopefully they can have the balance in theirs as well.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (42:14):
I’m very fortunate to, my day job is to be an illustrator, but I noticed quickly I played in bands as well when I was younger and I would play in cover bands. I played in an original band and that was my pride and joy. I was a singer songwriter, but then I played in cover bands to pay for the other band and if you know what I mean. And so now I illustrate during the day, but I’m essentially a cover band artist during the day. I’m not drawing what I want to draw. Do you struggle with that, with being a storyboard artist? You may be on a project that’s not your project and you wish you were drawing Trevor, that sort of thing?

Tim McEwen (43:05):
Oh my god, yeah. I do like the short answer is yeah, I do. Should we move on? No, yeah, we can

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (43:13):
End it right there. Thanks so much.

Tim McEwen (43:15):
Because the project in question is a big factor in that. So I worked on Happy Feet two in the storyboard department and then in the art department, and it was probably the best job I’ve ever had in that I could actually stay at that job and I could actually go in every day, five days a week and really be happy to wake up and go in the next day. I haven’t had many jobs that do that. And part of that is because it was storytelling and I was working with people who were definitely people to aspire to be as good as, I mean at the top there was George Miller, who’s an Academy Award-winning writer director. He made Maybachs Fury Road and et cetera. Every time we were in a meeting, it was astounding to just hear what he had to say about storytelling. But just working with Mark Sexton and Nico Sullivan and Chewy Chan in that art department and a bunch of other people as well, but they’re like my closer comic book friends and I’ve still got a really close friend, Nick Chesky, who’s a writer director who we met at that point as well all that time ago.

(44:46)
So that I guess was being in a cover band, but just loving the riffs every time you went on stage. But there are other times where I’ve had freelance work where somebody said, I will pay you money to draw a comic, and I’ve just gone, I can’t do it. It’s just like, it’s horrible. What are you trying to get me to draw what you are doing and I’m drawing this marketing thing so that hopefully you’ll make money and I don’t do it. I can’t do it. So very, very seldom. So often when somebody says, do you want to contribute to a comic? Most of the time, most of the time I don’t have time, but most of the time it’s also just, I don’t think I’m going to be able to bring myself to do it. But when Gary proudly comes knocking and says, you want to draw towel guards, you go, yeah. And when Sizzle comes knocking and says, do you want to do a page for Sizzle in the multiverse? I go, yeah, because that kind of stuff’s fun. I’ve still got on my to-do list. I’m doing a battery hand page for

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (45:50):
Yeah, me too.

Tim McEwen (45:52):
Yeah, I’ve still got to do that. So things like that I can do. And most of the time it’s the stuff that no one will pay me for. That’s easy to draw soon as money I’m going, I don’t think I can do so it’s a weird thing. But yeah, I haven’t done storyboards for a little while, but the Blinky Bill movie and Wolf Creek two, I did boards for both of those as well, and they were all really good. It becomes a problem solving exercise as well, someone else’s script, and they all have their own style that they want to work in. But Happy Feet Two definitely had this Bible that was given to us that was a reiteration of the Bible that they had for Happy Feet one about the visual style, and it was really cool to understand why shots were done in a certain way and why you’re not allowed to do these kind of shots and why you’re not allowed to and all that stuff. So it was a great time. So that was fine. But yeah, any other kind of, anyway, that’ll cover that. I think

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (47:03):
I just wanted to shout out the people in the comments. We keep ’em coming, we will, I’ve put up little ones here and there, but they’re just non conversation driving ones. We will hit the comments towards the end of the show, so feel free. There are a bunch of cool questions for Tim in the little chat thingy. So I want to double back now to, we did the then and now of putting out comics and how it’s different. I found just even reading comics that I went away for a while from reading comics and then came back and I found it quite daunting to try and find out where Spider-Man was up to and whatever. And same with music. I went away and then I tried to come back and the music scene was totally different and I recognised nobody, and it was a different way of doing things. And is it daunting to return to actively putting out issues of greener pastures?

Tim McEwen (48:10):
Yeah, yeah. So it was kind of simple. You would draw an issue because of my graphic design background, I knew how to speak to printers. You’d take it to the printer and you’d get it printed and send it off to Gordon and Goch, keep some copies, send ’em the King’s Comics and Phantom Zone and wherever. And so it was kind of straightforward because it was all physical and there was pretty distinct methods to get it into the hands of the reader. And you’re right now it’s kind of different. I struggled for a while, should I just put it online? Shall I just have it online for free and with the internet? And that’s a really hard thing for me to come to terms with giving it away for free. Now, I don’t make money out of it. You don’t make money out of it one way or the other.

(49:01)
So maybe it’s cheaper not to print it and not make money out of it. But anyway, I’m trying to make money out of it. But then again, back in probably not Napster days, but file sharing, when a comic was being Torrented, there was, I forget who it is, but a reasonably well-known indie comic creator in America said, I love it when people torrent my comics. I don’t lose any sales and I watch the Torrenting data and anytime there’s a spike Torrenting my comic, there’s a subsequent spike however many months later, exactly the same in my sales. People get their free first hit and then they come, I want to buy everything else. So there’s all of that rational data, and I still can’t bring myself to figure out if I can do that. So what I have been doing is trying to figure out and simplify what the methods of distribution are now.

(50:05)
And I’ve come down like everybody else, not everybody else, but a lot of people have to the Kickstarter idea that Kickstarter is a good accepted, understood method of getting comics as a reader. I’m going to try to do something that not many people do, and instead of, I’m going to try to use it as a pre-order kind of system. So issue eight is about to be kickstarted, and I’m sure we’ll talk about that a bit more in a minute. But number nine, 10 and 11 are written. Number 12 onwards are all written as well. But number 12 was already drawn because that was the stuff that was in Gary Cha’s Adventure Illustrated comic. And I want to get them out on a really regular basis. I want to get probably four out a year, and I want to do that as a bit of a Kickstarter pre-order system.

(51:08)
So I’m being mentored in all of that by Darren Close, who’s running the number eight Kickstarter for me and is always dropping truth bombs and wisdom on me all the time. And so I think between the two of us, we’re trying to figure out how to make that work for me in the best way possible. I’m trying to keep it simple. I don’t like, as a consumer, I don’t like Kickstarters, which I’m scrolling through and going, I don’t even understand what I’m buying. All I want is a comic book. I’m trying to keep it simple. And number eight is probably a little bit more complex or complicated than I probably normally would do going forward, but I’m going to for number nine, 10, et cetera, going to be reasonably straightforward and he’s a comic buyer and see how we go. And that being said, I’m still looking at international distribution via comic shops.

(52:12)
And that now is slightly different to what it was when I did it the first time because all of my issues have already been through Diamond once international distribution. And again, that’s kind of easy if you just want to press the button and let it go on autopilot. But there’s a lot of stuff you can do to try to boost sales. And I’m looking for advice on that from a lot of people. I have a few people that I message regularly and say, what do you think of this? And blah, blah, blah. But there’s also people like Mel Briggs who runs Impact Comics that we had a good chat the other day over Messenger about indie comics and comic shops via distribution and how does that work? So there is a lot of reeducation. But that being said, I’m an old man and I’m pretty entrenched in the methodology that we had the first time around. And I’m actually trying to replicate that as closely as possible because pretty straightforward and simple in that you make the comic, you distribute the comic, you make the next one and the next one and the next one. And I don’t want to complicate matters too much. So some things have changed, but some things are just like the same, make the pages, print the pages, get the pages into people’s hands. That’s what I’m trying to do.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (53:39):
And how do you go with the creator versus the marketer? Are you a natural marketer or hate that bit or

Tim McEwen (53:48):
I don’t want to do it, you want to do it for me?

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (53:51):
No. Well, I’m doing a version of it now, I guess. Great.

Tim McEwen (53:58):
This kind of stuff I love, but it’s anything that takes me away from the drawing board, especially going forward. That’s the big thing. Any day away from the drawing board is another page or half a page that hasn’t been done. So I want to keep that to a minimum, and that’s why I want to keep things as simple as possible. And again, God bless Darren Close with the way he’s working with me for the Kickstarter. He often will pepper his suggestions to me with, I know you don’t want to be away from the drawing board, but blah, blah, blah. So he’s got that in mind as well. And it’s the most important thing. If I don’t have pages, then I’ve got nothing to sell. If I don’t have new pages, I’ve got nothing new to sell. And then why are we bothering at all? So I’ve got to get the pages done. So all of the marketing stuff, it’d be great if somebody else was doing it for me, but a bit of a one man band in regards to all of that.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (55:04):
Yeah, absolutely. Well, the thing is, yeah, we spend 50 to a hundred hours making this thing. It really deserves. I mean, it deserves its time in the sun and sometimes we’re the only ones giving it that time in the sun. And so really you need to honour that time you spent by giving it another 50 to a hundred hours of here’s my book and yeah, I just want to draw and tell stories and then,

Tim McEwen (55:35):
But that’s like

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (55:36):
Hand it to someone and then yeah,

Tim McEwen (55:40):
Jack is the one that we all should look to. He would never even look at the printed comic. He would just draw a page and hand it on and go, I’m done with that one. Right? What’s next? It was all about making the pages because he was part of a machine, which to some extent, at certain points of his career just ground him down to a nub. But he was part of a machine that meant make the pages, make the pages, we’ll take care of getting them into the reader’s hands. And because of that, that’s how come he’s got a billion pages in print.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (56:20):
I wonder though, if he wasn’t

Tim McEwen (56:22):
Of time getting the pages out as it takes me to make the pages in the first place, but that’s where I’m at the moment.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (56:30):
I mean, would you be happy to be in the Marvel DC machine where you just make pages of someone else’s character and then they go off and

Tim McEwen (56:40):
Definitely not. Definitely not. But I would be happy to have enough success with greener pastures that I could have an assistant, like a marketing assistant or an admin assistant that would take care of all of that stuff so that four of my five days could be just drawing and one would be just making sure everything else was running, and then maybe that would only be a half a day and maybe then it would just be a half an hour every day. Just make sure that that’s all happening. I don’t often articulate that. I don’t think I’ve probably even articulated that to myself. But I mean that would be the best solution, right? I’ve got the script from Michael and I just get to draw, draw, scan, clean it up, put together, maybe not even have to put together the InDesign document and the PDF maybe that as well, and have them ring up the distributors and the printers and

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (57:49):
Yeah, I mean, we need to all team up and work in a big studio and we all chip in and pay the interns and they all put the books together, but it would never happen. But it’s nice to dream about.

(58:05)
Okay, so we’ve done who we’ve done what we’ve done, when I want to save, why till the end, I think why is the more challenging one we’ve done where now before we talk about the Kickstarter, I wanted to just spend a little bit of time on how, because there’s a few things I find interesting, and that’s, I’ve only drawn from other people’s scripts a handful of times. I normally just write and draw for myself. I’m curious how have you ever written your own stuff? How do you break down a script from Michael? How loose are your scripts? How tight? Let’s, there was a question in there somewhere, I’m sure.

Tim McEwen (58:58):
So working with Michael, let’s talk about that first. I dunno if Michael will watch this back later. I’m sure I’ve said this to him, but usually Michael Scripps, whether it’s a short story or a 20 pager or a chapter in our big graphic novel ending to greener pastures always starts with page one, panel one, blah, blah, blah, blah, panel two, blah, blah, blah, blah, page two, blah, blah, blah. And by the time he gets to page four and five, the panel descriptions or the panel breakdowns are disappearing. And then by the time he gets to page eight, the page numbers have gone. And he stops telling me what page, because he, he’s in the flow of writing, right? This is my assumption is so he’s not worrying about pages, but he also, he just goes, why am I telling Tim how to break this down?

(59:49)
He knows how to break it down. So unless Michael has a very specific part of storytelling or imagery that he needs page breaks or a certain way of panelling, he leaves it all up to me. So I’m the storyteller telling his story, telling the script that he’s written. I’m the storyteller. So we will, as comic creators, we know I’m the director, the act of the lighter lidar, the cinematographer, all of that stuff is pretty much up to me most of the time. Michael never tells me to change anything really. Most of the time it is on a spectrum between that’s exactly what I imagined. I can’t believe that you got it without me even telling you to. That’s so much better than what I thought it was going to look like, right? So just because of the way that we work, it’s always been that way. So we’re pretty lucky with each other in that regard. So I get a script from Michael and I do thumbnails. I dunno if I can get any here.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (01:01:00):
Just do me a favour and don’t knock your internet cord.

Tim McEwen (01:01:03):
Yeah,

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (01:01:05):
I’ve used up all my material. That’s the start of the show.

Tim McEwen (01:01:07):
Yeah. My God. One day you’ll tell me, actually, I’ll have a listen and listen back to what it was that you were yammering on about while I was off in limbo. I’ve got my thumbnails

Tim McEwen (01:01:21):
Here somewhere here.

Tim McEwen (01:01:27):
So for greener pastures, number eight, which is a jam issue, I’ve actually got an awful lot more material than I normally would have because I was making sure that other artists understood everything that they needed to understand. But I get a script from Michael, and then I do thumbnails. I

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (01:01:52):
Think I can click a button.

Tim McEwen (01:01:54):
Oh, cool. Click that button. So greener pastures number eight. You’ll see at the top corner. Top corner there, version two. So that would be my second run through of thumbnails. So this page is 1, 2, 3, and maybe four. No, one, two, and three. Number one is pencilled by Dave Sim. Number two is pencilled by Katie Howton, ward, Katie, Hollywood. And page three is pencilled by Chris Wall. So they’re my thumbnail. So whether I’m working for myself or for other people, that’s how I do everything. I just do thumbnail breakdowns. You’ll see that’s the page here is the page breakdown. But then I’ve got a new idea, a better idea. And I do it really small, right? Because even draw this big again when it’s just trying to fix an idea. Same here, that panel’s no good. So I redid it as this one here.

(01:02:57)
And that’s my method, right? It’s got little balloons all over it, ready for the dialogue. I put little A, B, C, make sure I’ve got enough room for all the dialogue. And that’s pretty much the method of working with almost any rider. I really did the same thing with Gary proudly for tail guard. That’s how I work. So if I’m writing for myself, which I’ve done a little bit of, not a lot, but a little bit of. So for a while I thought I might do a kids comic, and I wrote a bunch of stories from a bunch of prompts that I wrote. I wrote a bunch of prompts and then wrote short stories out of that. And each one of those, or a lot of those had very different methods of doing the writing. So most of the time I was writing with thumbnails.

(01:03:46)
I would write visually. So being a visual storyteller, that was mostly how I tackled that. I would start with a page shape and start with a splash panel and start doodling what I think would be a cool thing to happen in this story. So most of the time, that’s pretty much how that worked. Writing dialogue outside that thumbnail and crossing it out and rewriting it and trying to figure out what good dialogue would be. I had one story. I had one story that was a time travel conundrum sort of story, which was really hard to figure out how to make sure everything fitted. So that one I wrote as dot points, just where everybody was at every point to make sure that it all worked. And then I took those dot points and started doing the thumbnails.

(01:04:40)
So yeah, that’s probably the two main ways I don’t start with typing out a script. Thanks, Steven. I don’t like the idea of typing out a script, but that being said, I’m already playing with a couple of ideas for what I’ll do after greener pastures in 60 years time. And again, they’re reasonably big stories. So then I’m going to have to figure out what the arcs in a really large sense and start to a thumbnail, like a big thumbnail, and then kind of refine those down into smaller, smaller arcs, et cetera. So that I can already see is be different. But the way that I work now, that’s pretty much that should probably cover it. And then I take that and I draw it up onto a three so that this is actually what I inked for issue eight. This is not my pencils, this is Dave Sims pencils, but I inked over the top, so I blue line that.

(01:05:57)
So this is the final art for those three pages of thumbnails I just showed you. So that’s Katie Hollywood’s page there and Chris Wall’s page there. Normally I would draw a pencil on board and that’s the cover. You can still see a lot of the pencils behind because I haven’t rubbed out those pencils. I’m still trying to figure out if I’m going to put a background on it or not. Oh, you’d think I’d have that. So yeah, pencil on board and it’s graphite pencil, it’s not blue pencil. You’d think I’d wake up to that after 50 years and draw in blue lines so I wouldn’t have to erase things. But I’ve still erase things and then I ink with a brush and a pen, a

Tim McEwen (01:06:48):
Pan and a brush.

Tim McEwen (01:06:52):
Good thing you just happen to be my studio. Hey, that’s my, where can I put it so I can actually see it there? It’s a Chinese calligraphy brush. That’s my brush of choice. I really like it once it’s charged with ink, it actually holds ink for a long time. You don’t have to keep on dipping it. So I can ink sometimes for 20 minutes without having to reddi that brush. It’s got super fine point and it’ll give you a really fat point, really fat line as well without having swap brushes. So I really like that. Every so often I think maybe my hand gets tired and I go to a dip pen, usually a G pen, which is especially made for manga artists. They’re blunt pretty quickly. They get blunt after using them pretty for a short time. But they’re pretty good. They’re very flexible and you can press on them pretty hard and they won’t break. That’s that.

Tim McEwen (01:08:08):
Oh yeah,

Tim McEwen (01:08:09):
Just a dip pen. So that’s a pretty modern dip pen. I know all my heroes have probably been using a Gillette or is that how you pronounce it or, yeah,

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (01:08:20):
We have been, yeah.

Tim McEwen (01:08:21):
Yeah, cool. You’ll have to send me some or a hunt 1 0 5, which have got a march finer point. But after using this one, which is built for manga artists, just kind of attack the page and you can press pretty hard. I bought a pretty expensive nearby Hump 1 0 5 and forgot that they’re really fragile and pressed just as hard as I would with one of these and it just went broke and I went, oh, right, that’s that one.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (01:08:49):
Do you have a different approach to inking your stuff versus inking other people’s pencils?

Tim McEwen (01:08:56):
No, not really. I don’t think, no. So comics is a really time consuming activity. Once you’re on the page, it just takes time. And I know the writing takes time as well, but it just takes so long to lay out a page and then to pencil it and make sure your pencils are right before you go to the inking stage. And then the inking is meticulous. For me it is anyway, not overly meticulous, but you know what I mean. It’s a precision activity for me. So all of this stuff is time consuming and if you’re not going to enjoy it, then why are you spending all of this time hunched over a drawing board? So I need to make sure that each phase of the activity is exciting. So that thumbnail session is storytelling and problem solving and trying to be creative in that regard.

(01:09:53)
And then on the final art, I work very loosely to begin with a really blunt pencil. I don’t have one here, I’m not really set up at the moment anyway, a really fat, blunt pencil so that I can’t do detail and I usually stand up while I do it. So I’ve got a really kind of loose layout of my page based on the thumbnail. And then I’ll go in with a sharp pencil, like a 0.5 or a 0.7 clutch pencil and put in all the detail. And that’s like the drawing part. You know what it’s like when you’re drawing, it’s such a great thing to do to get the for shortening and the anatomy. And so anytime you kind of feel like you’ve gotten something right, you’re going, I’m successful today. And that’s the drawing part of it. But I try not to be, I don’t be too descriptive about line.

(01:10:55)
I know where the line is and I’m very precise in my pencilling about where the line might be, but I don’t describe it any more than that because I want to have fun at the inking stage and at the inking stage, that’s all about how thick and thin the line will be. Getting that variation in line, thinking about am I going to do a hatch or a cross hatch or how much feathering will I put? So every stage I make sure that there’s creative problem solving to have and fun to have. Thanks Steven. You’re very kind. So yeah, every stage has got to be that for me. Otherwise it would, you’d shoot yourself after the drawing all day and not enjoying it.

(01:11:44)
So I try to do that. So you ask me if I have a different approach for other people. I inba in Toba came out of this desire to remember what it’s like to draw an ink because most animators draw digitally now. So this animator said, I’m going to draw an ink for a month and I’m not even going to the pencil first. I’m going to go straight in with ink. So that was the genesis of it. And we all have our own take on what we want to do with in Toba. And one year, the only year I’ve ever done in Toba, yeah, that’s the one. I picked a different artist every day and printed out hello, printed out some blue lines of some of my favourite artists Will Eisner, like I said before, will Eisner, Jim Steranko, Paul Glacey, Gary Shaer.

(01:12:42)
And I just inked each person for a half an hour to an hour every day just to see what that would be like and see what I could learn from that. And yeah, I didn’t try to change my inking style, but it was a really different experience to be inking Jack Kirby compared to inking Tim McEwen because his understanding of three dimensionality is a level levels above mine. And it’s like it was really interesting to do two days of Jack Kirby and I was really looking forward to inking Frank Miller and it was just awful. I just couldn’t understand how to do it On the period that I picked, I picked an early eighties one and I probably should have picked some other time. It didn’t suit my inking style at all. I like to go along the limb and everything that he had was around the limb. So I needed to change my inking style and I didn’t and it ruined it. So that was what I learned from that. So yeah, that was a really fun month to do that. There’s still all on my Instagram from about, I dunno, five years ago now if you want to scroll back that far, got little lapses and the final product.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (01:14:10):
Well let’s spend some time talking about the Kickstarter, that’s Kraken, and then we’ll smash through people’s comments and then we’ll end on the why of it all. But Kickstarter, greener pastures comic.com is the link. So give the people the spiel.

Tim McEwen (01:14:35):
So number seven, green departures. Number seven was the last issue back in 1997. Number eight was written and thumbnailed, but we never got any further with it. And I, I’ve wanted for a long time to get back to greener pastures and every time I was ready to get back to it, Michael was not. Every time Michael was ready, I was not. We just couldn’t get into sync. But we’re in sync now and he’s written three brand new issues set in the 1990s, which is when we have to have the story. It’s not like Superman where you just set it today, it’s got to be set in the 1990s. That’s when that was set. So number eight takes place immediately after number seven. And in fact, 5, 6, 7 and eight are probably within 48 hours of each other. It’s incredible. It’s like a hundred pages there that are a 48 hour period, but it’s still a really good jumping on point because you really get to see what Trevor’s like because this is the issue where he gets a new love interest for the first time.

(01:15:44)
You definitely get to see what Colin is like. So Trevor and Colin are really the Abbott and Costello of this comic. And they’re flatmates Caesar, he’s hilarious as well. So we’ve got a really good jumping on point and I thought if we’re going to start with number eight, if we’re going to relaunch with number eight, it would be a really interesting bridge to use the old script with my new art. I thought that would be cool. And then I thought, you know what? We’re going to be coming out of nowhere and I want a lot of people to get excited about this besides myself. And the idea occurred to me that we’ll do a jam issue. So every page of the comic is pencilled by a different artist except for six pages that are done by me. Those six pages are all the new love interest page. So I kind of just grabbed all of those for myself. But every other page is drawn by a different artist and then I inked and lettered the whole thing to give it some kind of uniformity.

(01:16:52)
Everybody who’s read it says it takes maybe two or three pages to get used to that and then you just go with it. I’ve got really big eye bigfoot cartooning on one page opposite, quite hyperrealistic on the opposite page, but it just carries through. That’s partly because of my inking. I didn’t overly, at no point did I try to change anyone’s art I just used, we were just discussing. I just used my inking style I normally would, and I just use hatching where I normally would and all that kind of stuff, and it kind of smooths it out. But again, it’s a really fun kind of issue to get back into it. But I’m hoping that that will be like an added extra interesting aspect to bring new readers to greener pastures. So one of my all time heroes in comics is Dave Sim and he said yes when I invited him and he took the opening page, which meant that he also did the title lettering and he’s really, he’s well known for his lettering as well. So that was astounding. Gary Chaan, there is another one of my heroes, so he’s done a page, but there’s also Nicholas Scott, John Summer River, Jeffrey Cruz, Dean Rankin, I think he was the first page I inked and he did his almost Simpsons kind of style. And to try to bring that a little bit closer towards a style that you have with a flowing brush that was so much fun.

(01:18:32)
Ashley Wood, who is an amazing Australian comic book artist and toy maker, his page was incredible to inc. Absolutely astounding one probably if people ask me what my favourite page is, it’s probably that one I probably learned the most from that one as well. So that’s what the book is. And it’s funny, it’s called Sweet Sweet Release, the story, the episode, but the working title back in 1997 was Sex and Violence. This is what the title is, sex and Violence. So you kind of understand what the story might be about. This is not a comic that you give to your 10-year-old son or niece or nephew, but it’s all in fun as well. There’s nothing over the top, I don’t think, close to it, but not quite over the top. So yeah, I think it’s a great jumping on point. The Kickstarter starts in just over a week on the 8th of February.

(01:19:39)
One of the really cool things, I don’t really have any here to show you, I don’t think, but one of the really cool things is we’re offering the comic, but we’re also offering a pencils only version as well to show what the pencils look like before they all got ified by my inking. So there’s a pencils only version that you can get as well. And it’s not being sold at the premium, it’s being sold for 10 bucks or whatever. It’s 12 bucks, like the regular edition. But you can get of those and I think that’s cool and that’s probably as complex as the thing is really getting, there’s regular edition, the pencils only edition, and then a sketch cover edition, which you can either buy blank or with a drawing from me on it.

(01:20:22)
And then also you can get all of the back issues. So every back issue will be available one to seven, four and a half, seven and a half the extravaganza. They’re all the back issues and they’re all available. There’s a very limited quantity that are in really good nick, so they’re going to go fast. And then there’s another quantity that are pretty average in quality, as in they’re pretty roughed about. So yeah, that’s the Kickstarter. It’s my first ever Kickstarter, so I’m shit shitting bricks, so it’ll go off. We’re still trying to nail down the final few details on it. Even right up until just before we got on tonight, I was conversing with Darren about a couple of bits and pieces. So yeah, I’m very excited. This is the beginning of the rest of it. Like I said, number 9, 10, 11 are all written for 1990s era stuff. And then what’s that? 9, 10, 11. And the number 12 onwards is set in the 2020s and Trevor’s a middle aged bull instead of a young bull.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (01:21:39):
Yeah, well yeah. So you can click the link. Well, you can’t click it, you have to type it in, but this guy here, Kickstarter, greener pastures comic.com, click the notify me now thingy to be notified when it launches. Now don’t be shy if you can’t afford to back. It’s crazy times. Money is scarce, a share alike, all those sorts of things. Maybe grab the PDF is a cheaper option sometimes. Some people sometimes, sorry, I could only get the pdf. I’m like, no, we love that. Please get all the PDFs. So yeah, go forth, check it out. So let’s smash some of these questions and comments if you don’t mind, Tim. Yeah, so we’ll stick to about a thousand words or less per one. See how you go, Tim. So we covered the initial idea of Trevor. Will Eisner say no more? Well, a legend. Here’s a good question though from Ryan Vela. Hey. Hey, I’m sure I saw Tim’s art in a strip ad for a brothel in penthouse. I’ve always wondered about that. That’s so punk. Was it you?

Tim McEwen (01:22:54):
No, it wasn’t me. Yeah,

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (01:22:58):
It was me Pickle. Awesome. Yeah, earlier you were talking about porn and comics and I was like, that’s my life’s subtitle that, and I’ve never had Dave Sims work on one of my comics, but I’ve eaten plenty of dim sims while reading comics.

Tim McEwen (01:23:20):
Fantastic.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (01:23:22):
Hey Dave, you can see your art right behind me on my scarce shelves.

Tim McEwen (01:23:27):
Yeah, yeah.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (01:23:29):
Steve says greener pastures made it all the way to the mid North coast News agents the only way to get local comics outside of the city.

Tim McEwen (01:23:38):
Yeah, cool. It was such a great way to get fans all over the country. We were so lucky to be out and about at that time.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (01:23:47):
And then art influences, I see a bit of Will Eisner’s art style in

Tim McEwen (01:23:52):
Yeah, definitely, definitely Will Eisner it is kind of interesting, I must’ve always known, but from the first time I saw Gary ER’s work, it impacted so strongly and I think I knew by the time he was into the second or third issue of cyclone, that’s how I wanted to ink. That was the style of inking I wanted. And all of his storytelling, the way he drew, the way he kind of combined pretty realistic drawing with cartooning as well. All of that stuff was really ringing my bells. So I think he’s a bigger influence on me than I ever realised until just recently. Both in my inking but also in just the way I draw character.

(01:24:57)
And of course I think also because he’s a graphic designer, he had this amazing design sense on a page and within a panel and within the shot, just all of that. He’s possibly one of the three big influences for me. And I think I’ve only just realised that recently. The fact, I think I’ve said this to Gary, I’m not sure, but the fact that I was in his publication in Adventure Illustrated where I was sandwiched greener pastures was sandwiched between two Celler stories, the Jackaroo Squadron stuff at the front, sorry, cyclone Force stuff at the front and the red Kelso stuff at the back and greener pastures in the middle. I can remember the day where I was looking at my computer at the PDF proof to make sure that everything was okay just before it went to print. And I stopped flicking through the pages and I went, this is insane that I’m in his comic.

(01:25:54)
That’s just not on and everything’s right with the university at this minute. This is really amazing. So that was a big deal. But definitely Eisner. I don’t think I ever really was drawing enough when I was fully into Starco to really get that through my art terribly much. But the other really big influences, Dave Sim definitely, I was so enamoured with service once I discovered it back in the late eighties and the period from the late eighties up that was like issue 80 something to about issue, I don’t know, 1 50, 200 that was like that kind of storytelling was so, and the fact that it was black and white and the amount of detail that was also like I just, can I draw like that? I can’t. But there’s an awful lot of influence. And his lettering definitely, if only I try and I fall short so much. But his lettering is a huge influence on what I want to do as well.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (01:27:02):
That was 1,712 words. So you’ve failed that one. What comic did Tim collect growing up?

Tim McEwen (01:27:12):
I collected everything. Steven, you were talking about how news agents was the only way to get comics. It was the same for me for a long time. So every Saturday morning, every Saturday or Sunday morning after my paper run delivering papers, I would then do another hour or hour and a half on my bicycle to all of the news agents within riding distance and by whatever I could find because nothing was ever one issue after the other. But if you want to go back before I discovered Cyclone Comics and Will Eisner and Cebu, if you want to go back, it was definitely, it was the uncanny X-Men, it was the Avengers, it was Daredevil and Iron Man, all of that stuff. I loved Remit JR. And Bob Layton on Iron Man and Perez is one of my guards to me as well. Whatever he was on, I was buying whatever burn was drawing, I was buying. So all of that stuff. And then I would just buy whatever else I could as well because there I was hard to find comics on a regular basis. Anyway,

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (01:28:17):
My collection from that time is very sort of like two silver surfer issues and then a big five issue gap. And then there’s another three. It was just you’re at the mercy of what your local news agents has and I would ride my bike to several news agencies. But yeah, my collection’s got so many holes from those days. I just wanted comics so I would buy whatever was there. Punisher done Batman. Sweet. Alright, so this is Andrew. This is when we were talking about the permission of it all.

Tim McEwen (01:28:47):
Andrew

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (01:28:47):
Understands the battle we are brought to you tonight by Ozzy verse Omni Bow is the head honcho over at Aussie verse. Good day, gents from Steve. Hello. Yo, from Claudia.

Tim McEwen (01:29:01):
Yeah,

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (01:29:02):
Who stole all of Rob’s comics and painted the shelves white. So by drink and draw on Friday. My comics will be, but it’s the whole thing. I’ve moved rooms and whatnot. Thanks Alex. How much of a pain in the ass is your Kickstarter manager?

Tim McEwen (01:29:22):
A big pain in the ass.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (01:29:24):
It must be handy having someone sort of take that sort of stress off your shoulders a little bit. Digging the thumbnails from Steve. I think I might’ve popped that one up. This is Sean Craig. He does a comic book called Blade Whip saying his ink styles fantastic. I think we touched on that. Did you ever inks emer or John Buser?

Tim McEwen (01:29:57):
You know what, it’s funny. Those two brothers, right? Actually there was a period where one of the comics that was actually I would get regularly from the news agent was the black and white yaffa reprints of Marvel team up by Salima and whoever was inking it at that time. And I got so into Sal and the Defenders by Salima, the black and white reprint of the Defenders Avengers crossover, one of the first ever kind of crossovers like that. It just so loves Sal, but it’s really hard to find pencils by cell on the internet. It’s very hard to find them. I’ve downloaded a few, but very hard to find now it’s hard to find time to just sit and ink someone for fun. So now I’ve never done Sal or John. I know John is an amazing artist, but he doesn’t interest me as much as Sal does. I dunno, probably

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (01:30:59):
Controversial

Tim McEwen (01:31:00):
Splitting everybody who’s watching into Sal and John territory now.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (01:31:05):
Yeah, we’re about to go viral on Twitter with these controversial opinions. Joe Sun, my favourite Inca from Steve.

Tim McEwen (01:31:12):
I think there’s a huge influence of Joe, thanks for bringing that up Steven. There’s a huge syn influence in me. My favourite comic you’re bringing back all the memories was that period of the Fantastic four from the late, probably 180 to 200 until burn took over, right? And then Burn is also obviously a favourite, but that whole run, that later run of syn over Perez, who else was doing it at that point? Pollard, Keith Pollard and Joe Sin. And I’ve got a lot of syn in my inking, obviously nowhere near as good as Joe in it, but yeah, amazing stuff.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (01:31:54):
This question I’m going to take. Hi

Tim McEwen (01:31:56):
Steven, very astute, angry. I was going to say, you should say on this side of the screen when the internet wasn’t working.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (01:32:07):
Yeah, but I want to take this question seriously because I wanted to touch on it earlier, but it just missed my moment. Have you and Michael ever had a creative disagreement? And if so, how have you solved it? If the answer’s no, that’s fine too.

Tim McEwen (01:32:34):
We have not huge, in fact, number eight, there was a few pages he rewrote some of it because it’s now however many years later and he wanted to reword it and in fact, that’s why Louis Purdy is actually the writer on it. Michael’s not the writer on number eight. Louis Purdy is, and we just talk it through again, you’re going to get more than a thousand words out of me, but we’re working on a short film script for a live action short film for greener pastures that we’re actually in production of. If I could show you the sculpt for the prosthetics mask, which is Yeah, I

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (01:33:14):
Was going to say cgi I or person in a suit. It’s a person in a suit.

Tim McEwen (01:33:19):
We just looked at that like Wednesday week ago. The prosthetics like the sculpt, but it’s been hard work to try to get to a script for a short film, which has got to be different to what we do in the comic. So he gives and takes as much as I do. It’s pretty amazing. So yeah,

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (01:33:43):
We are in the winding down period, but I just want to touch on that quickly. It’s been a few years since I read Green of Pastures one, but I believe Trevor is amongst regular looking cows, like they’re drawn regular and then Trevor has a cartoonish the large sort of. So prosthetics wise, does he look like a legit real cow standing up or have you gone stylized? Look,

Tim McEwen (01:34:14):
We’ve got, I mentioned Nick Chesky earlier, a friend of mine, writer director, and he’s spearheading this and we’re using a place called Makeup Effects Group or Make for Short and they’re award-winning world class prosthetics people. And we really left it up to them to figure out, we gave them all the material and left it to the people who know how to make live action to try to make sure that this works the best. Making a cartoon character was not going to work. I kept on talking about that first teenage Muja Turtles movie with the animatronic. I was going, it wouldn’t be amazing if we could do that because

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (01:34:59):
Yes, it’s legit. What I was thinking when you first said

Tim McEwen (01:35:02):
Hundred percent believable as far as I’m concerned, but this is not goofy like that. So I don’t think that would work on top of that. We can’t do all that animatronics. It really is prosthetics and the movement of the actor underneath the latex is what’s going to make everything move. We talked about the 1960s Planet of the Apes movies and TV show and they call it like a hamburger kind of mouth where the mouth is way in here because the SNA snail out there. Do we do that? How do we get around that? So we’re, we have to keep the snout short, which is basically what we’re coming to that so we can still move lips both upper and lower. So these are the kind of things that you need to battle with. You can’t have huge kind of cow eyes or cartoon eyes can’t, it’s still a person’s eye behind there. And we’re talking about ways that we can accentuate that. And Nick, the writer director, is talking about things that I don’t think about because Trevor in the comics or drawer has got these huge brows, right? The eyes are pretty set deep in there. He said, but if we like that, we’re not going to see the eyes at all. And that’s where the acting is. So we’re going to have to not have the brow out quite as far as you normally would have. This is why we’re there to discuss things, but they’re the guys who know what they’re doing.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (01:36:30):
Wow. I mean you picked the crazy character to then try on live action. Yeah, full on Omni Bows signed up to be notified upon launch. I do. I think he’s telling other people to do it. Hopefully he, yeah. Love hearing Tim’s enthusiasm. Can’t wait for the Kickstarter. Thank you Andrew. Thank you Andrew. We’ll look to back you for a physical copy when it goes live will be my introduction to the series. Thank you. Josh, what made you quit? Well that’s a pickles, sorry I should have read ahead. Looking forward to seeing forward the pencilled and inked versions. Fantastic idea.

Tim McEwen (01:37:11):
Thanks man.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (01:37:13):
Syn inked, a bit of Salma Sal is my favourite. Salma did a run of amazing Spidey and seeing him adapt his style to the popular styles of McFarlane and Larson’s. Fascinating. Darren is a monstrous fan of Eric Lawson, I do believe. Can I pick my ins or what?

Tim McEwen (01:37:35):
Very good.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (01:37:37):
And then Dave di Tim, thanks for showing us your process. Thumbnails and draughts. Also interested in finding out where I can get one of your inking brushes.

Tim McEwen (01:37:50):
It’s been a little while since I bought one, but I’m sure that they’re still in business. I buy them online from Wills quills, I think it’s wills quills.com or.com au. I can’t remember. And you look up Chinese calligraphy brush probably by a medium to start with. I use a medium and a large, but the medium is slightly easier to control or hit me up Dave and I’ll send you some links. Happy to do that.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (01:38:24):
And then last one from Steve short film Greener Passage. You heard it here first. You’re damn straight Chinwag breaking news, breaking the internet, all that sort of what nots. Alright Tim, so this question in my mind is one of the more serious of the who, what’s and the whens, but you take it as like or as seriously as you would like. Why?

Tim McEwen (01:38:50):
I don’t know. I think we were touching on that earlier when I said I was drawing comics before I knew what comics were. And if people had given me permission to be an artist, maybe it’d be out of my system by now and I’d be a very wealthy businessman who sells widgets or something instead of somebody who’s sitting here at the drawing board still trying to draw comics. But I dunno why, I actually had a job last year, which was a managerial job. It was the first time I’ve ever had a job that was absolutely no creativity whatsoever. And I actually, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t stand it and I had to quit. So there’s definitely something that won’t let go. So instead of fighting it, Anne Marie and I are letting it be the thing that it is and we’re going to see how long we can let that be. And we’ve got a plan to go for, well as long as we can, but for years. So if you get on board now you get all of the old issues and you’ll get the brand new number eight. But I keep on saying I’ve got new ones in the works already and they’re the best writing that Michael’s ever done.

(01:40:10)
And our artwork is, I’m excited to be drawing young Trevor 1990s Trevor as well as the 2020s Trevor, the work I was doing in Gary’s Adventure Illustrated, I was. So it’s almost an out body experience. I’m putting pages up on my wall as I draw them. Did I really draw that? That’s pretty good. Have I really? I know I’m, I’m still not as good as any of those people that I’m talking about, but I’m better than I was a year ago. So I’m hoping that this is all happening as I hit a really good stride and I’m hoping that I get fast enough as well. I’d really love to be releasing six issues a year, but four issues a year will probably be what I’m doing.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (01:41:01):
Yeah, I mean four issues a year is a monster effort, so I wish you godspeed and whatnot. You can do it. Yeah. So for one final time there be the link, go forth, do some clicking, it would be much appreciated. So that’s pretty much our show for tonight. I do believe Lee Chalker will be back in this seat, his version of this seat in a fortnight. I believe this show is fortnightly drink and draw is this Friday back. We’re drawing devils and demons. So come along, send in your art, send in your questions, all that sort of good stuff. I do need to, oh, thank you to Steve. Cheers. Spie and Tim taking the time out to chat. No, no thank you. Now we are,

Tim McEwen (01:41:52):
Can I just say thanks a lot please. Thanks for having me. Thanks for stepping in for Lee and Lee. I hope everything’s cool where you are, miss you greatly. We’ll catch up again some other time. We’ll have a chat some other time. And thanks to Comex continuing to sizzle and Comex for continuing to support all of this kind of stuff and helping us get our comics out there and for us to have a platform to talk about them as well.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (01:42:19):
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And thanks to Lee for trusting me with his baby while he was out. It wasn’t able to be postponed. Tonight was the night. So Lee asked me to step in and he hosted drink and draw once filling in for me and more than happy to return that favour. So yes he did tell me to say a few things. Comex, of course the comex.shop. We are streaming on the Comex network. It does cost money to stream all this good stuff. So if you could at once some point, maybe go to comex.shop, check out some of the comics for sale there from creators all over Australia. And remember, community is unity. And also we are streaming on Aussie verse. So big thanks to Beau and the team at Aussie verse for giving us those extra eyeballs. And always remember that Aussie verse is for life. And I believe that’s all the hand gestures I had to do. Will see. I’ll check the comments from Siz and Lee and Bo, but I think I nailed it. Hopefully we’ll see.

Tim McEwen (01:43:29):
Nailed it.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (01:43:30):
If not, I’ve got another hand gesture ready for them. Alright, now I have to click a thing. Just let me find it and then we’ll head home. Tim, thank you so much. This was a daunting task, but we have chatted before, we’ve sat, we’ve broken bread before. As they say in mediaeval times we may be heirs to a kingdom or something. I don’t know, possibly. It’s a thing. You made it very easy. So even when you weren’t here, I felt at ease knowing you would soon return. Alright,

Tim McEwen (01:44:04):
Thanks for having me. You did great.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (01:44:06):
No, no, thank you. All right man. Alright everybody, thank you so much. Bye for now. This

Voice Over (01:44:11):
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