Q&A 21: The many questions of Luke Drotos

In a very special edition of Q&A, I am going to answer all the questions reader Luke Drotos asked me, with the proviso that I will not answer another of his questions on any platform until 2025.

Looking back, are there any specific characters that you think could’ve been handled better

No. I think more that there were characters or stories that didn't need to be written. When you've committed to churning it out, week in, week out, whether it's A or B or D-grade material, mistakes get made but they were the best I could do at the time. If a character starts to get a bit two dimensional, having previously existed in three, I now understand that they're getting close to their use-by date.

What’s your favorite storyline from each series (Bobbins Classic, Bobbins.Horse and New Bobbins count as separate in this scenario) 

This presupposes that I can remember all the stories, or for some series, any of them! My favourite Bad Machinery story is #8, The Case Of The Modern Men. My favourite Giant Days issue is #50, the cricket issue. My favourite Steeple story is Clotted Crime, the TV story, but I also liked the generic shape-changing robot story. My favourite Scary Go Round story is the 2008 one about antiques, but I also like the Easter Bell story. I don't know about the others. The early 2010s minis are my real favourites - Giant Days, Murder She Writes, THAT, and Expecting To Fly. Giant Days x Batman and Conan I think are some of my best latterday stories. Nothing sticks out from the Bobbins strips other than perhaps the Amy Chilton pregnancy/birth arc.

Would you ever want to do another story that has no connection to Bobbins whatsoever like By Night (even if that is still in the same continuity) 

Steeple was separate too, really. I joined it on to the regular continuity for fun but only during the pandemic when nothing seemed to matter any more.

By Night is a bit different. I created it solely because I didn't know how to say no to my publisher. It was designed to be separate and different so I wouldn't cannibalise the other things I was writing at the time. I burned out spectacularly in the process and have never really got 100% back on track.

It's a huge mental effort for me to step outside what I'm working on and come up with something completely new. It takes a long time to come up with a new set of believable or sympathetic characters. Genre pieces like the Kitty Pryde/Wolverine thing or Conan are easy because the rules are all set, the characters and setting are there already.

Plus, there is no reader buy-in for something totally new. For a lot of people, in a crowded field with lots of calls for their attention, it's a jumping-off point. The way I work, switching out to a new thing is really risky. You're messing with someone's morning reading routine.

A big part of your art style’s appeal for me is the very specific and dynamic way characters are posed, at least I believe they’re specific. Are there any precise inspirations, or is it more something that naturally formed as your style evolved? 

This is hard to explain. I don't think there's an influence on poses other than I try, when I'm drawing, to "feel" my way through the poses to be true to the emotion expressed. I don't have much of an ability to visualise a pose so it comes from sense memory and something close to acting. I try to watch and understand people whenever I can. There's a certain empathy to understanding why they stand as they do and how they relate to one another. It fascinates me.

Do you ever see your characters appearing in non-comic media, whether it be adaptations or even original stories? I’ve heard there was a couple attempts at TV adaptations that didn’t go too far, and I know of the Giant Days novel. 

This just doesn't interest me at all. If I make money that lets me keep making my own comics, that's great. But the creative side of spin-offs means nothing to me.

Individual pages in longer stories and even print comics always tend to have their own mini-stories like a comic strip. How do you balance that with having the pages flow together?

With difficulty! it's a constant battle. I have to think about pages as individual pages for the web, pages as double page spreads for print, and pages as constituent parts of a 22/24/32 page issue, and as part of a combined storyline, and as part of a complete volume. I also try to give value to each panel as an individual drawing, a value which is diminished by it competing on the page with other panels. There are compromises at every stage in search of balance.

Have you ever considered also putting your work on a social media platform like Instagram? That app is very welcoming to comics.

The answer to the previous question is relevant here. To make a comic work on Instagram, every panel has to be regular. It compromises storytelling and the larger product. I can't go that micro and serve all the other aspects of my storytelling. Also, you have to slice all the comics up into pieces and pay for a service that will let you post them in advance. Also, the Instagram algorithm makes serving a narrative up in sequence borderline impossible. Also, no one reads long form narrative on Instagram. Also, I tried this my Bobbins.horse comics when they were four regular panels in a strip and no one was bothered outside the people reading me elsewhere. It is possible that the app is only truly welcoming to the most aggressively formatted and meme-able comics, and anything else is a compromise.

How is Ralph doing these days?

Ralph Malph is on a "New York High".