 Tony Wicks is currently working with fellow comics creator Martin Buxton, an immensely talented script writer who is now a partner in the self publishing venture C2D4. Tony busies himself drawing and co-writing their growing array of titles, and draws commissions, while also submitting samples to various publishers. At the ripe old age of 39 Tony has a lot of history and influences to draw on, but still remains very clear on how it all began, where it wobbled for a bit, and how he came back to it at last.
Tony Wicks first started drawing in 1975, when he was six years old, copying Dinosaurs, faithfully, in pencil, from his favourite book 'The Evolution and Ecology of the Dinosaurs.' The hyper-real paintings and pencil sketches of Govanni Caselli utterly fascinated Tony, with the sinewy scaly plated monsters based solidly in evocative prehistoric backgrounds. So many hours were spent copying each creature (and learning the spelling of each exotic name) with studious patience.
His fixation with drawing dinosaurs continued until, many months later, his Mother bought him his first Marvel comic at Witham train station to read on the journey to London. The comic in question was 'Captain Britain' issue 1, and the bold blocky exaggerated action of Herb Trimpe's artwork cast a spell on him instantly. Reading this first edition was responsible for starting a love affair with Marvel that was to continue for many years. Soon a collection of black and white UK reprints was being amassed, featuring characters such as Thor, Luke Cage, Iron Man, Spiderman, The Hulk, and The Fantastic Four. Add to that the many annuals at Christmas, and soon Tony had an endless supply of Marvel titles to read, and also to copy slavishly from. Herb Trimpe, Jack Kirby, and John Buscema provided hours of entertainment, as well as an impetus to clumsily copy their every heroic pose, line for line.
Occasional copies of Battle Picture weekly, complete with Carlos Ezquerra's 'Rat Pack' topped up Tony's weekly exposure to comics. British titles such as Tiger, Krazy, Roy of the Rovers and Hook Jaw's blood spattered home, Action, had equal appeal to Tony as a reader, but it was always Marvel that triggered his urge to draw, primarily as an imitator. That is until, one morning, his subscription of 2000ad came through the door as usual...but this particular week's Judge Dredd was a doorway into the chiaroscuro world of Judge Death, as drawn by one Brian Bolland. For the next year or so 2000ad became Tony's primary comic, both as entertainment and also artistic inspiration.
Next up was 1980's DC Comics. Exhibiting an eleven year old's fanboyish loyalty to his new favourite brand, Tony ditched Marvel and 2000ad for the stories of Superman, The New Gods, The Justice League of America, The Legion of Superheroes, and Hawkman. Having missed out on the work of Neal Adams' Batman during his Marvel years, Tony was immediately impressed by Adams-alikes Garcia Lopez and Richard Buckler, who seemed to draw in a Neal Adams style whenever they tackled Superman stories. The Superman/ Shazam crossovers found in DC Comics Presents triggered an almost obsessive need to copy these artists' work, almost page-for-page. But the recurring theme of copying was about to become a thing of the past.
Tony's family migrated to Gibraltar, and it was at school here that he hooked up with a like minded artist called Adam Plater, also a big fan of 2000ad...the only decent comic to be imported into Gibraltarian kiosks at the time. They decided to co-write and co-draw their own strip, a Marvel rip-off called Power Pack (many years before Marvel's own Powerpack ever materialised). After cobbling together an Avengers-meets-Hammer-Films style plot, a dozen or so pages of shared art masquearding as a finished issue were waved under a surprised editor's nose at the Gibraltar Chronicle. Either the strip was impressive enough or the adolescents bolshy enough, but whatever the reason, £30 pounds was paid and the strip serialised weekly, a page an issue. As far as Tony was concerned that was it. He was going to be a professional comics artist.
Issues of 2000ad containing Judge Death Lives (Bolland again) only served to further his obsession, as did his London based Grandpa shipping out parcels stuffed with The Forbidden Planet's finest comics. Tony could only dream what an entire shop devoted to comics must look like, and so had to content himself with sending out his pocket money as postal orders, in return for comics such as Camelot 3000, Ronin, Epic Illustrated and his most prized title, Warrior.
In late 1985, when Tony's Father contracted a form of lymphatic cancer, the entire family had to return to England for his treatment. Unfortunately the treatment began too late, and his Father died. The family settled back in England, and Tony eventually found his way to David Lloyd's legendary Cartoon Workshop in Royal Oak, London. A young (almost embryonic) Dougie Braithwaite was there, already sickeningly impressive as an upcoming artist. Occasionally Garry Leach would drop in. Despite the traumatic loss of his Father, Tony was suddenly immersed more deeply in the world of comics than ever before, with the superstars of Warrior actually before him, sharing their knowledge, and occasionally having nice things to say about his own artwork. He began working towards submitting samples to 2000ad, and also began scripting and drawing a number of his own stories.
A disrupted education and external interference from well-meaning relatives were, however, making the pursuit of an artistic career seem like a frivolous waste of time, and so, with little encouragement from anyone to continue studying art, let alone comics art techniques, Tony decided to simply stop a life time's pursuit of drawing, and finally in early 1990 he did just that.
Feeling the urge to step away from the solitude of the drawing board rather keenly, he still felt the need to do something creative. One of his close friends was a guitarist, just starting to dabble in bands. Tony decided to learn the drums, and began lessons straight away with Kim Wilde's drummer at the time. Throwing himself into it with an enthusiam usually reserved for drawing mutants killing other mutants, Tony soon became good enough to help his second drum teacher teach drums above a local music shop, when the teacher went on holiday. In 1995 Tony was deeply into the local band scene, teaching drums, practicing obsessively, but also drawing flyers and (to everyone's amusement) incredibly rude one page strips, straight down in inks, for the band's mail-outs.
Tony had still kept his hand in, albeit after a few years of literally not even looking at a pencil. His day-job career of colour room reprographics technician/ camera operator at the local paper was about to take a slight detour. In 1998 they decided that he was to be a webdesigner for a new project, due to him owning a PC at home for playing Quake and also being quite good with Photoshop. Being the highest paid technician in a department full of low paid trainees may have had a hand in it too. Tony's artistic output had dropped off again, as the need for flyers and one-off strips abated in his current band, but thinking creatively, even artistically, on a daily basis, was about to become a way of life once again.
Within a few years of working at his new town-based office, Tony had begun sidestepping the use of clip art, drawing straight into Macromedia Flash, enjoying the smoothness of the vector graphics, and of course the ability to animate simple drawings. The company had even bought him one of the early Wacom digital tablets on the say-so of a fellow designer who recognised Tony's fluency with a biro when sketching images to be scanned into Flash. Quite an investment at the time. Although the days of becoming completely at home with the Intuos system were extremely far away, the seed had most certainly been planted, even if Tony didn't know it yet.
As the nineties became the noughties Tony, now married to Jenny, had became a parent himself. At work he became friends with an editor called Martin Buxton, who just happened to be a bit of a comics nut on the sly. Pretty soon they were bringing in their collections in small manageable chunks,and swapping comics. Tony's collection was hopelessly outdated, not having been added to other than with the occasional Aliens film tie-in comic...a purchase inspired more by the love of the movies than a love of comics. Although a copy or two of Pitt had also been bought when Dale Keown's art suddenly jumped off the shelf and into Tony's retina one day in the late 90s.
Tony began visiting Martin's favourite store, Ace Comics, and spending close to the amounts he'd once squandered back in the Forbidden Planet days. He began catching up on all the Manga videos he'd previously ignored when Manga had been the big thing. Akira was watched with almost monotonous regularity at this time. In 2003 Tony's children were old enough to start watching cartoons on TV, some of which fell into the 'far too good for kids' category. Tony was constantly bombarded with Dragon Ball, Sonic, Bey Blades, Robot Boy, Dexter's Lab, and, best of all, the excellent Justice League Unlimited. What's more, his sons were always asking for their Daddy to draw them sketches of their favourite characters, to be stuck on cardboard, then painstakingly cut out as action figures. In doing so, Tony found to his dismay that he actually couldn't draw anymore. Not to save his life. His kids were mightily impressed...Tony, however, wasn't.
It actually started to bother him, because more and more comics were being bought, read, studied, and a growing sense of having thrown away something extremely important slowly began to dawn on him. One book in particular, Frank Miller's Dark Knight Strikes Again (DK2) bothered him as much as it pleased him. Here was an artist who Tony had once avidly followed, who had remained at the height of his powers throughout, and who, in DK2, had created an effortless narrative full of the most audaciously reimagined characters, with a verve and freedom most artists could only dream about. Looking at how the art seemed to just pour from his pen, especially in the sketchbook at the edition's rear, and how he was able to write so well to boot...this impressed Tony like the Captain Britain of old. Something began to awaken. Witnessing Frank Miller's prolific talent made Tony hungry for the whole process again.
In 2004 Tony bought a small table top drawing board, translucent so it doubled as a light box, plus a handful of pencils, rubbers, sharpeners, pens...all the paraphanaelia he had so carelessly disgarded all those years ago. He began to draw pin ups of favourite DC, Marvel, 2000ad, Manga....even Playstation game characters. It was painfully hard work, but at least there was still something there. Alot of the time he found himself scanning in the finished piece, and colouring a pixel-smoothed version in Flash. The distinction between hand drawn and digital art was begining to blur. He hadn't even begun to consider using the Wacom pad at work yet.
After a while the need to draw a sequential strip resurfaced. So Tony began scripting a story called Dimo...a quadrilogy in fact, amounting to over 80 pages. It was heavily based on Manga greats such as Devilman, and certain non-sexual aspects of Overfiend. After drawing over twenty pages of it, Tony suddenly realised that while many encouraging things could be taken from it, his idea to draw it in a rigid Watchmen style grid was proving far too restrictive. It had been a good exercise in getting rid of the rust as a story teller, and he was starting to think in terms of camera angles, dramatic lighting and pacing once again. But he stopped Dimo immediately in August 2006, with the view to putting together something far more suitable for a portfolio.
At about the same time he made this decision, his long-time employers had made a decision of their own. Tony was to be made redundant from his job, and given a pretty good pay off, plus the option to take any and all clients who liked his design work enough to stick with him. Thankfully this meant nearly all of them, and Tony was able to set himself as a webdesigner working from home, building a new client base both for webdesign and illustration. In the months leading up to his final day at the premises, as the company wound down operations, Tony was able to use a large part of the day practicing using the Wacom pad, for more than just the odd Flash vector drawing. Tony spent hours practicing drawing 'perfect' circles, cross hatching, tracing. Not really drawing as such, more getting his hand-to-eye coordination up to par.
By the time Tony left his company he was getting quite comfortable with looking at a screen while drawing on a board balanced on his lap. In fact, after one particularly successful session of 'pencilling' (drawing a rough image, then fading it out to grey as a guide layer) Tony erased the image on the screen with the end of the
intuos pen on the pad, then tried to rub out non-existent pencil shavings with the back of one hand. The transition from drawing freehand on paper to drawing straight into a computer was probably made at that very moment. This was tempered by Tony having started a life drawing class, and so traditional pencil sketching techniques, as well as an improved grasp of anatomy bolstered his art.
In early 2007, while sketching out a futuristic building on screen using a new brush tool in Photoshop, Tony decided that the figure emerging from its sliding doors was to be a man with a chicken's head...carrying a samurai sword. He then followed that up with a full sized sketch of the character, nicknamed 'Frank'. He sent it to Martin, asking if it was 'stupid' or not. Martin really liked it. The next day, while in the shower, Tony had the entire storyline for Last of the Chickenheads Book 1 flood into his head. And this lead to a 46 page comic being drawn in 6 months, February to August, finally being published in the October of 2007 as a response to all the people at BICS 2007 telling him to get it out there as soon as possible.
This became the first C2D4 project. The next was a reprised story which Tony had originally conceived back in his Cartoon Workshop days, and which David Llloyd still clearly remembered when Tony approached him, rather nervously at the Bristol Comics Con in May 2007. That story was Jack in the Box. Feeling that the project would benefit from Martin's excellent grasp of characterisation, and uncanny nack of writing natural dialogue, Tony asked his friend if he'd like to co-write a comic, turning the story into a fully fledged script. Martin agreed, and the finished result was printed, and then sold at Bristol Comics Con, May 2008, which C2D4, now a fully trademaked partnership, took by storm their first time of visiting.
And so, over thirty years later, with his comics being stocked in Gosh Comics, London, Tony has continued from where he left off, making up for lost time and becoming more enthusiastic and prolific than ever before. Many more new characters are on the way, as well as the serialised stories of established C2D4 titles. Watch this space. |
