[ACC 2019] Over two decades of flowing comic ink – Scott Koblish Interview

Sometimes, you just want to go back to the source material, with Marvel this, DC that. Chances are, you would have come across Scott Koblish, a cartoonist for Marvel and DC Comics for about 26 years. He’s done mostly comic books, with involvement in animations and story boards too.

He tells us he’s liked comics since an early age, but only really catching on watching animation. In his little quest to find more Spider-man after seeing the webbed superhero on television, he goes from the newspaper to the comic books. His route to comic artist seemed pretty set from the tender age of 7/8. He attended the Kubert School of Cartooning and Graphic Art for Saturday Classes, onwards to The School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, and finally, landing a job in Marvel at a young age. One could say the rest is history.

The initial professional work saw Koblish be involved in the art corrections department. As the name goes, it involved correcting mistakes or making changes. His first real pages were from Sleepwalker, some Marvel Comics Presents, and Moon Knight. With such a long tenure in comics, there must be thousands from then till now, considering his start in Marvel Comics’ apprentice program since 1993. Koblish talks about how nice it is just to see the volume of art he’s managed to do, seeing his growth, and to shoot for something similar in say, the next 26 years.

Maybe you might’ve heard of Deadpool 3, and his imminent entry into the MCU. Scott’s been working on Deadpool himself for 6 years now, and he certainly doesn’t think the character will be going anywhere. He hopes they’ll keep at it, expressing his enjoyment of the movies, saying they’ve captured the character’s spirit. He confesses torturing Deadpool is his favourite thing to do. Thanks to the strength of the character, there’s a lot of room for the funny, the sad, and anything in between for Deadpool to go through and still keep his character intact.

“The crazier the things we did with Deadpool, the better off he was,” Koblish says. “He’s just a character who feeds on strange things, conflicts, weird ideas, and he just gets better and stronger with each of them.”

Now, you might have noticed comics crediting pencillers and inkers. As Koblish explains, they’re slightly different skills. Pencils involves getting the story idea across, a script of sorts, and to get the reader to understand. The world building, character placements, page compositions, and emotions are done here. Inks is where you smooth out all those elements and put them together. The inkers are there to make the printing process smoother.

Should you want to try get into comics, Koblish tells us there’s lots of room for many voices. Be comfortable with who you are, and tell as many stories as you can. It is, after all, a story telling medium much like film, TV, books, you name it. Tell the story you want to tell, with your own voice, is his advice.

Koblish mentions creating Deadpool 2099, and thinking it fantastic that people actually enjoyed the character. He talks about the wonderful feeling of seeing people’s enthusiasm interact with his work: he puts his work out there, and it comes back in the love and respect other people have put into their rendition of his work. He’s been drawing for so long now, he thinks it closer to a compulsion. “It’s just something I do,” he answers, regarding his inspiration to continue his work.

Whatever it is, Koblish’s excited to be in Malaysia for Asia Comic Con, and wants to meet as many people as possible. He’s been travelling a lot around the world, and will hopefully be continuing to travel, and seeing everyone’s excitement reflected back to him just means a lot to him. Do say hello if you’re able, and definitely keep enjoying comics!

Check out Scott Koblish’s twitter here and his own wiki page here! Remember to check out our Asia Comic Con 2019 coverage right here.

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