THE MARK, "WHAT GOES AROUND", PAGE 9

I spent most of 1993 penciling and inking the artwork for “The Mark In America”, for Dark Horse Comics. At the time, my artistic heroes were Alex Toth, Jack Kirby, Neal Adams, Alfred Hitchcock and Hayao Miyazaki. One thing all these men had in common was they either wrote or controlled the writing or collaborated heavily on the writing of their material. I aspired to a similar relationship to the writing of my material. That affected this page in that the dialogue balloons in panel 2 were my addition. The writer of the series, Mike Barr, wasn’t particularly pleased; he remarked that he considered it to be a bit “arch” (a bad thing in this case). I have no objectivity on the matter, and there’s really none to be had; he had a right to his opinion and in a different situation could have pulled rank and had things his way. This power dynamic plays out differently on every project; part of the job is learning who has clout in any given environment. In this case, the editor, Bob Schreck, was apparently only concerned with the final product, not with who was or wasn’t encroaching on someone else’s turf.

This is page #9 from Dark Horse Comics #15, “The Mark: What Goes Around”, written by Mike Barr, drawn by Brad Rader, published in December, 1993.