Photo by Bill Knight. Peoria illustrator Skottie Young signs copies of his latest New York Times best-seller at a book store in Peoria. He credits some of his success to hours spent as a boy copying “Calvin & Hobbes,” “Bloom County” and Mad magazine.
New York Times best-selling graphic novelist and Peoria illustrator Skottie Young might be offbeat, but he’s not off-balance.
Whether work and fun, his job and his family, or words and pictures, Young is about balance, despite a visual style that’s somewhere between Tim Burton and Tim McGraw: wild and homey both.
Skottie Young’s Rocket Racoon is his version of the popular Guardians of the Galaxy character.
Talking after his 5-year-old son went to bed after they’d gone to the “SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water,” Young says his son enjoys movie studio logos and “playing” with them as “toys,” not unlike Skottie, who turns 37 on April 3, spent his childhood discovering different inspirations – inspirations that continue to drive his enthusiasm for creating comic books, graphic novels and a variety of art projects.
“I’m hard-core disciplined,” he says. “But I’m not a workaholic or recluse. I’m really more of an extrovert, outgoing and social, in the real world. People who email me through my web site or whatever might not get a reply and think I’m some kind of a-hole, but I’m just working. Thank goodness for social media like Twitter, because I’m active there.
But “creativity is like a fuel tank,” he adds, “and you use up what you have and pretty soon you’re near empty, so you have to replenish it. So it’s a matter of prioritizing time – and having a good time.
“In some ways it’s like a Cat worker who works 40 hours a week on heavy equipment and each weekend works on cars or whatever,” he continues. “I draw and write from 9 to 5, and then, when I’m done and at home when things settle down and my son’s asleep, I grab my sketchbook and write and draw. It’s fun.”
Young started writing and drawing as a kid who savored the Sunday funnies, especially “Calvin & Hobbes” and “Bloom County,” and Mad magazine.
“That’s how I learned to draw, really,” he says, “– copying everything from Mad.”
He continued through school, but didn’t go to college. Instead, he drew and drew and built a portfolio, and at a table at a comic convention he made contact with Marvel writer/editor C.B. Cebulski, and within months had an offer to fill in for Marvel’s “Iceman” title.
From there, he’s worked on “New X-Men,” “The Human Torch,” and “Spider-Man,” plus a wonderfully goofy series of “baby variant” covers for dozens of Marvel titles, showing heroes and villains as children.
All that led to collaborations with Eric Shanower for a modern version of L. Frank Baum’s Oz tales and with Newbery Medalist Neil Gaiman for a children’s book, “Fortunately, the Milk.”
Young continues to attend comic conventions – he’s scheduled to appear at Planet Comicon in Kansas City March 13-15 and at C2E2 (Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo) in Chicago April 24-26 – and maintains a web site, skottieyoung.com.
The award-winning Oz series started with Marvel’s graphic novel “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” and its follow-up “The Marvelous Land of Oz” (both 2009) – both NYT bestsellers.
Taking on a series based on Baum’s classic was less of a challenge than a fun-filled opportunity, Young says.
“It was easier,” he says. “I was playing with an old ‘toy,’ a cool foundation. It’s super-fun stuff, interpreting, taking a world and reinventing it instead of working from scratch. It feels like a collaboration, taking all the stuff [from before] and sort of sprinkling some magic on it.
“Maybe I’m naïve or arrogant, but I had no concern with the fan base’s expectations,” continues Young, who’s worked with Shanower on four other Oz titles. “If you let that creep in, it can start to inform what you do and that’s a creativity killer.”
His HarperCollins collaboration with Gaiman – a middle-grade novel described as a book about “time travel and breakfast cereal … an ode to the pleasure and wonders of storytelling” – also was a NYT bestseller.
“That was very cool,” he says. “It was a weird thing, too, because you’re working six months ahead most of the time. I remember getting an email, a heads-up from an editor, that ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ was about to debut at Number 2 or 3, and it was there for 20-some weeks.
“Comics and graphic novels on the New York Times best-seller list was new then [so] it was never on my bucket list or anything,” he adds. “But it was really neat.”
Now, in a modest, messy studio in an otherwise unassuming strip mall (Young says it’s “insurance agents, lawyers and a comic-book artist”), Young looks over piles of books, Starbucks coffee cups and, of course, copies of Mad magazine, inking with a Kuratake Brush Pen or a Pentel Pocket Brush Pen and drawing in Sketchbook Pro and coloring everything in Photoshop CS5 or Corel Painter 11 to work on “Rocket Raccoon,” the character featured in last summer’s blockbuster film “Guardians of The Galaxy.”
“I couldn’t wait to work on this guy,” Young said. “It’s going to have a connection to that nostalgic feeling for ‘Looney Tunes,’ that old animated flavor where everything wasn’t squeaky clean. Daffy Duck would get his bill blasted off with double-barrel shotguns… That’s what I grew up watching, and being able to play around with that in this hyper-superhero intergalactic universe will be a lot of fun.”
For personal fun, Young goes to movies, concerts and reads, but prefers fiction to nonfiction.
“Even as a boy, I always liked He-Man more than G.I. Joe,” he says, laughing. “G.I. Joe was too real for me.”
Realty can be fun, too, of course. Young has to go check on his son’s preparations for a Valentine’s Day party at school.