It's the best thing Hanzo's ever recommended to me. I think American Barbarian and Afrodesiac are the best comics I've read in the last ten years. They're both homages/pastiches but they're so well done.

American Barbarian - and Godland - are the reasons I was so disappointed in FF Grand Design. Those two things are so great, it was hard to believe the same guy had done FFGD.

I saw a few minutes of the one where Scioli attempted to explain his take on the FF. I didn't get too far into it because I genuinely thought Scioli seemed...odd. I haven't spent any time watching any of the other videos, although Doot put a link to that one in the Grand Design thread.

I should probably have a look at those, Marcus. I do genuinely love Afrodesiac and I'd like to read Street Angel as well. I'm behind the times most of the time.

It's the best thing Hanzo's ever recommended to me. I think American Barbarian and Afrodesiac are the best comics I've read in the last ten years. They're both homages/pastiches but they're so well done.

American Barbarian - and Godland - are the reasons I was so disappointed in FF Grand Design. Those two things are so great, it was hard to believe the same guy had done FFGD.

Simon, Simon ... you like to pretend you're not interested in any new comics or shows, N

Thank you, Hanzo my Hanzo!

I assume that Hanzo wanted me to write an opinion of it here, on IMWAN. So here we go.

Tom Scioli Part 1 - He-Men and New Gods

Tom Scioli is slated to have a big 2012. With the last two issues of his and Joe Casey's "GODLAND" slated to hit the stands later this year, and with a collected edition of the Scioi-written-and-drawn "American Barbarian" coming out from AdHouse sometime in the next few months, Tom is poised to blast comic shops with his explosive imagery and Kirby-esque designs.

I wanted to find out, from Tom, what was going into his 2012 work, and we'll get to those kinds of questions and answers next week. First, we talked about the comics that inspired him, and took a close look at one particularly influential Jack Kirby issue that still resonates today.

Tim Callahan: Okay Tom, we're going to talk about Jack Kirby soon enough, but let's not start there. Let's start with something formative outside of Kirby. Tell me about a comic or two that had an impact from you at a young age. What were some of your keystone comics?

Tom Scioli: "The Vengeance of Skeletor" and "King of Castle Greyskull," both minicomics packaged with He-Man figures, with beautiful art by Alfredo Alcala. Â "Vengeance of Skeletor" was the more evocative of the two, with a really scary/psychedelic jungle and a sea monster in a bottomless lake. The imagery of "King of Castle Greyskull" didn't stick with me as much, but it was probably the more influential of the two, just in that I'd re-enact variations on its story when I'd play with my toys.

I remember those comics! I don't have mine any more, but that was one of my early exposures to comics, now that you mention it. Certainly my first exposure to Alfredo Alcala. I remember buying the follow-up miniseries from DC, along with the "DC Comics Presents" team-up between He-Man and Superman, but those weren't as good as the minicomics packaged with the toys, from what I recall. And since, in my childhood head, the Masters of the Universe saga was kind of like a high-fantasy/supernatural Conan epic (though I wouldn't have known Conan yet), I was hugely disappointed when the Filmation cartoon came out, with Orko hamming it up. Orko was not in the Alcala comics, for sure.

Did those Masters of the Universe comics lead into other comics for you? Or were they kind of isolated examples from that time in your life? Let me know the journey from those minicomics to your commitment to comics as an art form.

I wonder if there are a lot of people our age who had that identical experience. I loved the fantasy of those early minicomics. I didn't like when they moved into a more comic-book direction, with ones like "The Ordeal of Man-E-Faces." When the Filmation cartoon came out, I hated it. I watched every episode, but I hated it. He-Man got domesticated. He was an enigmatic wanderer of the plains before. Now he had a mom and dad and a secret identity and comic relief. Beast Man and Skeletor were scary, in the cartoon they were buffoonish. I've later found out that those early minicomics were great because there wasn't a mythology set up yet. The writers could just do whatever they wanted. Once they set about deliberately crafting a bible that's when all those trite pre-fabricated elements started coming in.

Those were my earliest exposure to comics, and they were ones that stuck with me. I'd buy A "Star Wars" comic here and there, or Superman. But it was out of a fandom to "Star Wars" or Superman, not to comics. I didn't have an older sibling or a parent who was into comics and gave me their old collection. Comics were something other kids were into, but not me. It wasn't until the late 80s, the post-Dark Knight period when comic stores started showing up, that I started checking out this thing called comics. That's where I got my first Kirby comics. I wanted to check out "old" comics and the two Kirby comics I grabbed looked suitably old.

If there's a thread from those He-Man minicomics to my comics career, it's a path of following the things that hit those same notes. It started out as more of a genre thing than a comics thing. It went like this: "Star Wars" -- Thundarr -- He-Man -- Thor -- Dune -- Nexus -- Seven Samurai -- Ronin -- New Gods -- making my own comics. That's my personal chronology. For me, Kirby's "Thor" is linked to the 80s, "New Gods" is the 90s, because that's how I encountered them.

When you took those early-for-you trips into your first direct market stores, what made you want to even seek out older comics instead of the shiny new ones on the shelf? Was it a function of the type of stories you visited -- I know in my case, the store I used to frequent was a used book store loaded with piles of old magazines and comics, so the older stuff was emphasized -- or was it just some historical interest on your part, or what?

I really don't know. There were pricey Marvel Masterworks volumes with their devotional book design. There was the idea that old comics were valuable. There was a mystique surrounding old comics. Another comic that was formative for me was "Superman from the Thirties to the Seventies." It was the only comic you could get out of the library, so I checked it out over and over. Talking about it now, it seems like the pull of old comics would be really strong. That would be the most obvious thing that comics stores had to offer that 7-11 didn't.

Of course I bought my share of new comics, too. The "new" comics I was drawn to, as it turned out, were also old comics. "Classic X-Men," which reprinted the Claremont-Cockrum-Byrne years was one of my favorite comics. I had no idea that these were old stories. Also "Marvel Tales," which was the Spider-Man reprint book, was another favorite, which was reprinting Claremont/Byrne Spider-Man stories at the time I was buying it.

From what I've seen of your online presence, you are somewhat of a comics historian, or at least you have a strong interest in the aesthetic history of the medium, specifically around superhero comics. Is that a fair observation to make? And now that you're looking back on some of those stories that were formative influences on you, what do you think of them, from an aesthetic history perspective? Is there stuff that you wish you had seen earlier? Stuff you didn't like then, but really appreciate now, or vice-versa?

Definitely. Everybody I know who makes comics seems to be very well-educated in the history of the comics traditions they are working in.

Sometimes I wish I would've read more Kirby as a kid, but I think I was better off that I didn't get to read most of it until I was older. I think I needed Kirby more in adulthood than I did in childhood.

The stuff I liked as a kid for the most part holds up, but that's probably because it helped form the baseline of my likes and dislikes. I recently read a bunch of those He-Man minicomics, and the Alcala ones are still the gold standard. The Bruce Timm ones are pretty neat, too. I liked Ditko's Spider-Man a lot, and I still do. I think I only had a couple of Ditko reprints, but I wish I'd had more. I think they felt contemporary because the 60s Spider-Man cartoon was still in regular rotation at the time. That's what Spider-man looked like. It didn't feel like something from another era. A kid in the early eighties consumed a lot of sixties and seventies culture. The Beverly Hillbillies, H.R. Pufnstuff, The Brady Bunch -- these were part of the eternal present.

I didn't like the Spider-man comics that were new at the time I was reading them. It was the post-Watchmen era, and Spider-Man was too dark for me. It was the era of "Kraven's Last Hunt." People talk about how great that comic is, but I don't know that I'll ever be able to see it that way because it wasn't what my 10-year-old self was looking for from a Spider-Man comic.

The Claremont/Cockrum/Byrne X-Men are still an enjoyable read and are nice-looking comics. I read a lot of Batman comics leading up to the Michael Keaton movie. Â I bought "Death in the Family" as it came out. For all their grimness, those comics were too sedate, too tame. I would've liked a little more silver age bombast, but I wouldn't have known to call it that. I still really like Jim Aparo's Batman art from that era.

I guess something I really liked back then was the switch from newsprint, to the heavier white paper, with the higher resolution, more saturated color printing. I hated the feel of newsprint and welcomed the change. Now I feel the opposite way. Newsprint comics seem to have a more pleasing, more unified aesthetic.

I didn't even realize Bruce Timm worked on any Masters of the Universe comics. Which ones did he do? What were they about?

He drew "King of the Snake Men." It reads really well and has a few signature Timm-isms. "Grizzlor, the Legend Comes Alive" is not quite as good, but still pretty lively. Then there were a couple that he just inked, which were pretty good: "Escape from the Slime Pit" and "The Powers of Grayskull."

I guess we should probably just move beyond listing which comics we liked and didn't like, growing up -- for the record, I thought the cover to "Elektra: Assassin" #1 was so silly I refused to buy it when it came out, and I thought Kirby was pretty terrible because all I knew him from back then were the covers to the "Super Powers" comics -- and really get into what's important: namely, Jack Kirby's best work. I'm certainly partial to 1970s Kirby, and though I appreciate his work in the early Silver Age, it's "New Gods" and "O.M.A.C." and "Kamandi" and even "The Eternals" and "Devil Dinosaur" that really get me excited about his comics. Those comics, in fading newsprint or in glossy hardcover collections, are still the things that I look to when I need to recharge and remind myself why comics are such an amazingly powerful visual form.

Because you're an artist, and an aesthetic historian, and a Kirby man to the core, it might be beneficial for us to focus our Kirby discussion a bit by talking about a single story or a single issue and really go through it and talk about Kirby's work through that lens. What do you say? What's a Kirby comic that you'd like to really hone in on? What's the good stuff in that comic?

It would be issue #7 of "New Gods," entitled "The Pact." That's the comic that really hit me hard and made Kirby jump to number one for me. It was "Star Wars" and He-Man and Thundarr and Dark Knight Returns and Hellboy all rolled into one, but 100 times better.

Just reading that opening caption on page 1, it feels like the bible, it feels like the opening crawl of "Star Wars." I'll never know what it's like reading the New Gods without knowing "Star Wars." When I read it, it feels like "Star Wars," but that's because I've seen "Star Wars," so I know how to assemble these words and images in my head. What did readers in the 70s think when these books came out? Did it make any sense to them? Is that why the books weren't a massive hit, because you had to watch a movie that didn't exist yet in order to fully appreciate them?

I love how Kirby uses two exclamation marks for every sentence, until he needs to up the ante and go with three exclamation marks for emphasis!!!

I understand the "Star Wars" connection, because the mythology has a similarity and, of course, I also don't know what it's like to read this stuff without having "Star Wars" in mind and yet...this doesn't feel much like the aesthetics of "Star Wars." This feels muscular, even on the opening, tranquil page in a way "Star Wars" doesn't. "Star Wars" feels like Alex Raymond to me, with its thin heroes and their swashbuckling ways. This opening page of "The Pact," and the scene that follows, feels like a rhino in a china shop. Kirby is bursting at the seams. The panels can barely contain his bulky forms and energetic lines.

There is a precursor to this early-New Genesis stuff -- at least in terms of its setting -- in the "Tales of Asgard" work Kirby did in the back of "Thor." But this is a level up from that, right? It's got an intensity that even those mythic stories didn't have.

I've read so many Kirby comics, the exclamation points are invisible to me. I grew up with the Odyssey 2, not the Atari. I don't know if you've read any of the instruction booklets from it, but it's all exclamation points.

It gets more Star Warsy as it goes on. Funny you should mention Raymond, because to me this is Kirby doing full-on Raymond. Look at that first year of "Flash Gordon." Before the art got too pretty. "New Gods" is Kirby going back to his Raymond roots. Steppenwolf's design is Prince Barin. Heggra is Darkseid's mother. I wouldn't be surprised if Ming were his father. The Royer inking throws you off the Raymond trail, but look at the pencils. Kirby's pencil lines look like Raymond's brushstrokes.

Also, "Star Wars" was pre-steroid era moviemaking. You couldn't find an actor who was built like a Kirby character. If it came out in the mid-80s the characters would've probably been played by more Kirby-esque actors.

I'd read enough Thor comics that I got that Balduur and the unnamed Sorceress could be Balder and Karnilla. Although I pictured them as the stone-like megagods that Metron ran into in the opening pages of "New Gods" #5. I wasn't certain of the Thor connection, although it seems like the consensus is that's what Kirby intended. The references to the "Old Gods" in this issue sound mysterious, Lovecraftian.

There's swashbuckling here, but it's Vietnam-era anti-war swashbuckling.

This portrayal of Darkseid is an interesting one, because he looks just like full-fledged, ominously evil, nearly omnipotent Darkseid, but he doesn't seem to have a lot of power here, in these early days. He appears first with a robotic hand -- a "Killing Glove" built by his pal DeSaad, and his uncle Steppenwolf gives him grief about his "bizarre companions. Darkseid still has the arrogance we know and love, but this is the eager, ambitious young Darkseid, who later talks about how he's into new technology and he has the foresight to see where the culture is heading.

"We must seek NEW roads to tread!!" he declares to his uncle.

Meanwhile, in that earlier scene, Kirby throws in that tiny character bit where a steward, ON THE FIELD OF BATTLE, is refilling Steppenwolf's horn flask while the uncle gives Darkseid grief.

It's not all wall-to-wall bombast, which is what many readers seem to forget.

Tom Scioli Part 2 - Kirby Tech, Big Endings & Barbarians

Tom Scioli: I love all the entourages that the various characters in "New Gods" have. Yeah, that's the other level this comic works on. It's a prequel, but it's full of surprises. It thwarts expectations and reveals the depths of the characters you've met in the prior 6 issues. Darkseid isn't the god of evil yet, he's a quiet introvert. He's quiet because he's in the earliest stages of his conquest. The kindly grandfather figure Highfather is a warrior god in a surprise reveal in the last few pages of the story. The aloof Metron, who probably seemed like the most elevated of the New Gods, is actually a mercenary who will kiss whatever ass he has to to get that cosmic throne of his. Peaceful, idyllic New Genesis was once ravaged by war. Orion is revealed as Darkseid's son -- this was mentioned in issue 1, but in such a passing manner, that it probably would've been missed by most readers.

It's not all bombast. There are great quiet scenes, but when the bombast comes, it is huge. For a comic with so many scenes and different moments, it doesn't feel rushed. The panel-to-panel transitions almost have an animation or movie-editing feel to them. They feel perfectly natural.

Tim Callahan: Let's talk a little bit more about the transitions in this story, because if I have a problem with it, I guess it would be that I have a hard time pinning down where things are taking place. That adds to the feel that the whole thing is bigger than the panels can possibly contain, but there are the smooth panel-to-panel transitions within scenes, but then there are the sequences which are high-octane comic book montage-plus-caption pages. And Kirby will alternate those with the quieter scenes, but then he'll jump right into an action scene taking place elsewhere.

When the troops of New Genesis say, "Apokalips' armor! Coming out of nowhere!!" on page 12, you can't help but agree because the page before was Darkseid and Heggra (in an admittedly very Alex Raymondy scene). The Apokalips attack, even with the caption, is like a thunderstrike out of nowhere.

And you're saying this is a jarring transition? It feels natural to me. It's on a page turn, so you can have that kind of big jump in time. It follows the logic of the scene, without being tedious. The caption at the bottom of the last panel on page 5 saying that the war has begun and Izaya is still alive. Then you turn the page and the war is in full force. If it were a movie, you'd see his hand start to move or something, some sign of life in a character who was pronounced dead, then you'd cut to a scene of all-out war of revenge. I feel like Kirby's use of symbolism in his design makes it a smooth transition, but if you're having trouble with it, maybe it's not as smooth as I think it is. It's obvious to me that this is Apokolips, because it's covered with gray Kirby technology. The denizens are demonic and bestial, and they're being attacked by techno angels carrying a weaponized ark of the covenant, so they're obviously from New Genesis. It makes sense to me, but maybe my early exposure to the Apokolips episodes of "Super Friends" hard-wired me to have an appreciation for this stuff.

Another thing that makes the transition smooth is that page 5 ends with a ship taking off from New Genesis bound for Apokolips, so Kirby is already sub-consciously prepping us for a trip to Apokolips, we just get there a couple of years later.

To me, it's totally jarring. Not that I mind it at all, because it does pack a wallop, but when I'm reading I often get to these kinds of Kirby-jumps and then get a couple panels into it before I think, "Wait, what is happening and where is this taking place?" and then I have to go back and start the scene again. It doesn't ease the reader into anything, which is pretty great, as far as I'm concerned, but it does feel unnatural, probably because I didn't come to this Kirby New Gods stuff until the 1990s either, after I'd been trained to read comics by the likes of John Ostrander, Chris Claremont, Marv Wolfman and everyone who copied Alan Moore after he showed up on the scene. None of those guys would dare a transition between scenes like the ones Kirby routinely pulls off.

A question: how do you read page 20, with the Source Wall? Because my reading of it doesn't actually match the images completely, if that makes sense. Particularly on the fourth and fifth panel where it looks like Highfather is smashing the wall with his staff and then writing "The Source" in flames, but the words in the captions indicate that the wall is bursting with energy and a flaming hand is writing on it. There's no way I would interpret the images that way, without the captions directly contradicting what seems to be shown. (I mean, that hand at the bottom of the page would normall read as Highfather's hand, right? But it's not.)

It would probably be even less jarring to someone who grew up with Grant Morrison comics or [Robert] Kirkman's comics, where there's the occasional page turn where you feel like two pages were stuck together, but then realize you've been sent forward in time. Then your imagination fills in the scene in between.

But isn't that kind of transition something you'd routinely see in other media, prose, movies, TV.

Page 20. You're right! An encounter with the Source would be enigmatic, wouldn't it? The reference to the Uni-Friend and the Source didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. I hadn't read issues 1-4 where this stuff was set up, so I had no idea who the Uni-Friend is or what the Source Wall is, but by this point in the story I was thoroughly hooked and ate it all up. I knew it had to mean something awesome.

I don't have my copy of the original issue handy, I'm reading the Baxter reprint. What color is the hand? It's red in the Baxter reprint and surrounded by flame, so I do read it as a flaming disembodied hand. But you're right, that's because of the caption. Without the caption it would read as Izaya's hand catching fire and inscribing the words himself. I never would've picked that up.

I don't read the fourth panel as him smashing the wall. I read it as the wall angrily exploding at him, in answer to his question from the previous panel, like the flaming head of the great and powerful Oz. But again, without the caption it would read as him smashing the wall with his staff. Comics reading is such a solitary experience that it's easy to forget how much of the storytelling is going on in your head rather than on the page for all to see. Everybody's reading the same comic, but having vastly different experiences, moreso than other visual media. Probably not as much as prose.

This issue is so bursting with story, that every element has to carry its own weight. I don't know that Kirby has ever made the captions bear this much of the storytelling burden. Look at that first panel of the next page.

We should talk about the techno-cosmic war from page 17 and the first panel of page 18. This is where we go into Star Wars territory, into full Kirby mode, the stuff that I wanted desperately to tap into. The dragon tanks from page 12 were pretty rad, too. Like the toys we grew up with. Like something out of He-Man, or Zod, the giant GoBot. Something ancient and hi-tech at the same time.

At the time I'd first read this story, I hadn't read enough Kirby comics to realize that this is how he drew technology. I thought these zig-zaggy M.C. Escher structures were specific to New Genesis and Apokolips culture.

They are specific to Fourth World technology as far as I'm concerned. It's like this is what the inside of Jack Kirby's mind looks like, and sometimes that Fourth World tech just spills over into other projects. Of course, that doesn't really make any sense chronologically, but there's something to the notion that this New Genesis/Apokalips tech is pure Kirby in a way that some of his pre-New Gods work is Kirby trying to do something that resembles our reality.

How do you tap into this "full Kirby mode"? Are you talking about doing that as a reader, or as a creator? Where does this stuff filter into what you produce?

Prior to this, it would be Inhumans tech/architecture or the stuff that Orikal gave the trolls in Thor. I imagine the Inhumans, Orikal, Galactus, Silver Surfer, the cosmic characters that were a step above the Marvel super heroes were Kirby's proto-New Gods.

When I talk about tapping into it, I'm talking as a creator. But as a reader, it made me want to do comics and do comics in this mode. I imagine Kirby's work has that effect on a lot of people.

8-Opus was, in a lot of ways, a direct reaction to this stuff. I wanted to create a world of sci-fi gods utterly divorced from our reality. American Barbarian, too, with all its alien landscapes, strange creatures, revenge and family dramas. The "Godland" cosmology is a little closer to the Marvel model, where these gods intrude into a more standard superhero milieu.

I'd like to hear a bit more about the plan for 8-Opus, and then how you shifted things up for your collaboration with "Godland." What's the overarching story in 8-Opus, from your point of view? Was the project an attempt to take Kirby and do your own take on it? Or did you have a giant story in mind, and the Kirby style was the best way to get the visuals into the world?

8-Opus is something I still plan on completing. When I started, I wanted to do the Kirby thing. Create a universe, populate it with worlds and characters and have them all duke it out with each other on as large a scale as I could accomplish. I wanted it to look like Kirby, feel like Kirby, read like Kirby. But have it be something totally new. Like somebody found a lost Kirby epic that no one had ever seen before. It's the sort of thing you hope for from a favorite artist, that there's some lost masterpiece waiting to be discovered. There are those rumors that Ditko has been working on the continued adventures of Dr. Strange for his own entertainment for the past 5 decades.

When I was first picking up the issues of "New Gods" from various back issue bins, there was a misprint in the price guides in "Wizard" magazine saying that issues #1-19 of "New Gods" were written and drawn by Jack Kirby. It was a disappointment when I found out there were only 11 issues.

When we started "Godland," I wanted those god-like elements to come into the story a lot earlier, but Joe was wise enough to realize that it made more sense to build toward those elements rather than have them there at the beginning.

Tell me some more about "Godland," then and now. I know Joe Casey has talked about how he wanted to use his improvisational style while writing that comic, and you guys work Marvel-style on that book, right? Has the collaboration changed from the beginning to the almost-end? What are you struggling with, if anything, as you reach the conclusion of the story this year?

It's been all over the map. It's a very free, very organic collaboration. The struggle is that you want to have an effective ending. Which expectations do you thwart, which do you satify? I had gotten a little bit burnt out on "Godland." I wasn't even sure if I wanted to give it an ending. Do you end it and have a nice complete work, or do you leave it unfinished and keep it as your ace in the hole. Finishing it won out. A lot of Jack Kirby's works have a mystique around them because of their unfinished nature, but I know Kirby would've loved to have given each of them a proper ending.

To get back in the "Godland" frame of mind, I went back and reread the series from the beginning to see it from the reader's point of view. What did they expect to see. What might they want to see. What's the shape of this thing? The next morning I woke up with a million ideas I jotted them all down. I sent them to Joe and he flipped for them. I got the impression he was having a hard time getting back into "Godland," too. I might be wrong. This definitely seemed to energize him. We threw some stuff back and forth. Now we have the plot for #36 hashed out.

There were a couple of ideas I was very excited about that Joe didn't want to do. They were pretty crazy. I can understand why he wouldn't want to do them. I figure if I'm that worked up over them, I can draw those pages and put them in the back of the trade as bonus material.

Yeah, an "alternative ending" for the Celestial Edition Volume Three. That would be a great bonus feature.

And how about "American Barbarian"? That's getting a nice collected edition from AdHouse, so let's hear more about that project. I haven't read all of it yet, but I was keeping up with it for months, and then just decided to wait it out until the collected edition eventually turned up, and now it's almost here. I just need to look at the story in a physical form. There's definitely a Kamandi riff going on in "American Barbarian," but that's not all -- how would you describe the comic, and what does the collected edition look like?

The collection is quite handsome, which is to be expected from an AdHouse book. Nice weight to it, nice texture. I think you'd have a difficult time knowing it started as a webcomic, because the book is so perfectly-realized.

As far as describing the book, it's a cheerful post-post-apocalyptic revenge story. It's the culmination of everything I've done up to this point. It's the work I'm proudest of, and I don't think it's something I would've been capable of without all the years of figuring things out.

How would you say your storytelling (from a writer/artist perspective) has changed since you first began 8-Opus? Did you find your style (in art or narrative) changing to reflect the serialization of "American Barbarian" online?

There's a general loosening up, which is inevitable once you get comfortable in the medium you're working in. In the beginning everything was a struggle drawing, pacing, dialogue, composition. When you're fighting every element of the form, it's difficult to do anything deliberate. You just kind of follow where your abilities take you. You make the kind of comics you're capable of making. Once you've gotten more experience, you can get your abilities to do what you want them to do. It's exactly what people say happens to an artist as they enter their thirties, that's where their work starts to really get good. In my 20's I was impatient. Comics history is full of 20-something-year-old prodigies. I wanted to be one of them.

A big turning point for me was the "Space Smith" story I did for "Next Issue Project: Fantastic Comics." Since it was a one-off and the nature of the project encouraged me to loosen up, I was able to try things I hadn't tried previously. I really liked the results. And I saw that the less precious you are about everything, the better your chances of creating something worthwhile.

Another lesson I learned was just from working on sprawling narratives like 8-Opus and "Godland." I wanted to make sprawling narratives like Kirby did. But at the point I decided that, I hadn't read the entirety of Kirby's sprawling works. I'd read bits and pieces and assumed it was all going to add up to something incredible. And they didn't. They meandered. They had periods of excellence and meaning, but they also had long periods of digression and mediocrity. They didn't pay off narratively. Â I think the Fourth World could've been different had it continued, but there it is. Life gets in the way of these things. Comics get cancelled. You as an artist change. How can you expect to be committed to a project ten years after you begin it?

To make it worth the commitment of years of your life, the stories would have to pay off in a way that I don't think art is capable of. Maybe Kirby could've done it had he been allowed to finish the works he did at the height of his powers.

I've been doing comics for at least 10 years and only now that I've finished "American Barbarian" do I have a complete work. I realized that a work of art is complete, it's not a run-on sentence. I've decided I'll only embark on projects where the end is in sight. And "American Barbarian" is an epic. Having it be 2000 pages as opposed to 300 wouldn't have made it any better.

When you're walking in the footsteps of a talent as titanic as Kirby's, you wonder if there's anything you could do that Kirby couldn't. One thing I can do that Kirby couldn't is that I can end my works the way I want to end them. Kirby wasn't able to end "Fantastic Four," "Thor," "Fourth World," "Eternals." I think "Silver Star" might be the only one. Despite all of Silver Star's warts, the fact that Kirby was able to say everything he had to say about that story elevates it in his pantheon of works.

I think "American Barbarian" benefits from its finite nature. It certainly helped my in the creation of it. Because the end was always in sight and because I had the treadmill of regular online updates keeping me going, I was able to commit my full creative energies to it. The relief of not having to serialize it in single issue form for the direct comics market was a big help. There's a lot of pressure to fill up every page with bits of business to make up for the fact that single issue comics aren't worth the price of admission.

If I had done "American Barbarian" as a monthly comic, it would've been very different, and not as good. There were experiments that worked out really well that I wouldn't have attempted if I felt the pressure of, 'people are paying a lot of money for this, don't get too crazy.' I was able to let loose, and I think that's when we get the best out of ourselves. With a webcomic, readers can figure out if they like a work or not, without having to pay upfront. With monthly comics it's, "Did I like this chapter enough to pay for the next one?" Where else do you see that?

Webcomics is more like TV. It's in your house already, you can check it out with no pressure, and you're more likely to give something new a chance. And it may end up becoming your new favorite.

American Barbarian was originally a webcomic, when you started out did you have most of the story already plotted out, or was it something that evolved naturally as you took on more and more in the story?

For all it’s free-wheeling, it’s the most traditionally-structured thing I’ve ever done. It was carefully plotted from start to finish well in advance. I spent like 3 years developing it before I drew it, but I wanted the reading experience to “feel” improvisational. I wanted to give the impression that I was making it up on the fly, one page at a time. When the various threads come together and the plot points pay off, it seems almost like a magic trick.

Fans of your ongoing Transformers vs. G.I. Joe series can find a lot to love in the blood and freedom-soaked pages of American Barbarian, but for any who are unfamiliar with your work what can they expect to find here, and only here?

It’s a new mode of comics. You’ll be taken on a colorful roller coaster ride that takes full advantage of the unlimited budget of comics.

There are clearly a lot of different influences here, from Robert E. Howard, to M.A.S.K., was there a particular iteration of these influences that you looked at while developing the story and characters here?

I watched Thundarr cartoons. I read as many of the He-Man mini-comics as I could get my hands on, particularly the ones drawn by Alfredo Alcala, where the mythology was loose and hadn’t been rigidly codified yet by the TV cartoon.

I watched the movies that would’ve inspired Kirby, going directly to the source. Old adventure movies with Douglas Fairbanks or Errol Flynn. The Black Pirate in particular was a key influence.

I read a bunch of Howard’s original Conan stories, and lots of Conan comics and barbarian comics in general. Dagar. Mighty Samson. Turok. John Carter.

I was revisiting the weird moment in time when barbarian stories were a staple of children’s television. Thundarr, He-Man, Blackstar, Galtar, Herculoids.

I think it’s common for an artist to revisit the shows and books they enjoyed as a child and find inspiration in how bad they actually are when viewed through grown-up eyes. “What if I made a comic as good as I REMEMBER these things being?”

You can’t help but read this book with a big goofy grin on your face, was it the same for you while writing and drawing?

Yes! I had more fun working on this than anything I’d done before. Doing it as a webcomic, posting pages as I finished them, definitely fed into that. The immediate feedback was a lot of fun. I had a constant creative euphoria while I worked on it that lasted about a year. It was a great feeling, something I’m still chasing.

For regular comic readers, what can you compare this to… if anything?

Comics to compare it to? The first year of Alex Raymond‘s Flash Gordon. All-Star Superman, for it’s whimsical rigor. That Legend of Zelda comic that was just recently collected. The work of Fletcher Hanks. It’s hard to compare it to what’s going on in comics. It’s closer to what’s going on in games and animation. It’s got similar influences and intent as Adventure Time and Steven Universe.

It’s got more in common with food than it does with other comics. It’s closer to Dippin’ Dots, or a bag of Skittles, or a Ninja Turtles ice cream bar.

What does the future hold for you and American Barbarian?

I want to get as many copies of this book in as many hands as possible. It’s my masterpiece. I don’t plan on making any sequels. I like the story just the way it is. I’ll move on to other comics while American Barbarian fights Two-Tank Omen again and again in a never-ending cycle of myth within the pages of this book.

You didn't have to do all that. All you gotta do is fine some content out there and post HUGE cut-and-pastes of it.

The storytelling is on-point, and by far the comic’s greatest strength. There is a ton of creative layout and design-work here, but of the type that always guides the eye and keeps the reader on track. This isn’t Sienkiewicz-style creative design, where things are so dense and insane that it takes you an hour just to get through 20 pages. I don’t know how long this collection is (the pages aren’t numbered), but I polished it off in something like 45 minutes? And it’s a collection of at least eight issues, I think, so.

But it’s an awesome comic to look at. Whether you just want to page through it to admire certain sequences of pages, or if you’re reading from page 1 to page last, it’s a real feast for the eyes. It’s also a great book for any Kirby fan, as so much of its visual style emulates the King.

If there’s one aspect of Scioli’s attempt to do a Kirby-style comic that’s lacking, it’s in the costume design. As much as I love Scioli’s layouts and panel-design, his design ideas for individual characters is something else again. It doesn’t end up mattering too much, because the reader is just swept along by the overall energy … but when I first saw American Barbarian in his costume, I was definitely underwhelmed. It doesn’t look cool the way the characters on those old 80s cartoons did. But it also doesn’t necessarily work as a parody of those old cartoon designs. It just feels like an uglier variation on a theme. So I would ding the comic a bit on that score.

I’m also not really part of this camp of comic book fans that goes all nuts at “funny juxtapositions” like … an Egypitan pharaoh … but with TANKS FOR FEET. OMG, can you imagine? It was really en vogue for a while for comics bloggers to try to sell you on a comic because of some “crazy” element like this. “The villain in this issue is a bear with a jetpack. A BEAR WITH A JETPACK YOU GUYS.” It always makes me shrug my shoulders.

Thanks again, Hanzo. I hope this long rant was worth spending your hard-earned dollars to gift me this slice of comics excellence.

Hey, Hanzo! Thanks for posting the interviews!!

You bet, I think they help you appreciate the work and since he's a guy whose audience seems to be a niche within a niche within a niche, there aren't a whole lot of in-depth interviews with him like the bigger stars of the industry. I definitely relate to him.