2015 Comic Book News Archives

August 19, 2015: Interesting Superman Moments in "Justice League #43"

Justice League #43 Page In an interview with IGN.com, writer Geoff Johns and artist Jason Fabok discuss some key moments for Superman in this week's #43 issue of "Justice League". Be warned, the following excerpts do contain SPOILERS about the story...

    IGN: Jason, there's this incredible moment after Lex and Superman are done fighting. You drew this really shocked look on Lex's face, then we see Superman all bloodied up, and just this look of dread in Superman's eyes when he realizes his powers are fading. How did you capture those specific emotions, which we're not used to seeing on either of those characters?

    Jason Fabok: Well, I come from an animation background. I took animation in college, and one lesson I still use today is that, whenever you're trying to capture emotions, be an actor. Get up, look in front a mirror or take pictures, photo reference, things like that. You'll see little nuances in your face and you can try transfer those into the character. So I think that's one thing a lot of times comic book artists, you don't really think that - at the same time, you're also an actor. You're trying to act through the artwork. You're trying to capture the emotion that's just written on the page and trying to get inside these characters' heads and think, "Well, how would they really react?" Like, how would Lex Luthor react? Usually, he's calm, very cool, doesn't show his emotions. But something like that, seeing Superman bleeding, would be a shock to Lex Luthor. This is a guy who's been trying to do this to Superman for years and failed. Now he's seeing that face to face on this terrible planet, Apokolips, that he's on right now.

    You're really just trying to get in these characters' head, trying to act, trying to approach it like a director would approach filming a movie or something like that. Those are the scenes that are - I think that shot where Superman's bleeding, I think I redrew that face three or four times before it actually got to the point where I was happy with it, or at least had to move on because I had to get to the next page. But yeah, that's one of my favorite pages and was one of the harder pages of the book to capture.

Justice League #43 Page
    IGN: Then at the end, we have that final page with Superman, and we of course knew this was coming thanks to your big reveal at Comic-Con, but it's still scary to see him like that, like this negative Superman. What was the thought behind that design?

    Fabok: Artistically, Geoff had brought up this whole idea that Superman gets corrupted by the Apokolips solar pits. I've always had this idea that it would be really cool, with the technology we have now for making comics, to take a piece of art, draw it, color it normally and then render it as a negative. Inverting the colors, you get a real funky look to a character. I'm sure it's been done sometime someplace, but I wasn't able to really remember that being done. I just thought, "Man, that would be a really striking visual," to be able to do that in this book and then see that play out in these issues coming up.

    So artistically, I draw the same way I would normally draw it, send it to the colorist Brad Anderson, who killed it on every single page. He takes it, colors it normally, and then in Photoshop or whatever, he'd just invert it, flip the colors, add some saturation to it so it's black and white, and you got a really unique image. It's a little bit more work to do that and a little bit more planning on my part trying to separate different layers for him to tackle, but I think it makes for a pretty cool effect. You'll see more of that coming up.

Read the entire interview at the IGN website.



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