Interview with Matt Ryan,
as conducted by Chris Buchner

How did you decide on cartooning as your career?
I feel like it’s the only thing I was born to do. Like, I’m a kid at heart, and unfortunately with Bigger being a mature readers book and Psychosis! being a mature readers book…I still like the appeal to the older kids. Just being a kid at heart and with the cartoony style I just feel like this was the path for me, that I never really had another option.

Were you always proficient in art or did that take practice?
I sucked when I was in elementary school [laughs]. There was a kid who could draw like a tyrannosaurus rex a hell of a lot better than I could back when I was in third or fourth grade, and that flipped the switch for me. I had practiced and before you knew it my dinosaurs were better than his and it just kept going from there.

Where did you study art?
I went to Tunxis Community [College] in Farmington right here in Connecticut. I got my visual fine arts associates degree and I started pursuing my graphic design degree and I ended up getting a job with Mark Lewis Creative Arts. I did a good amount of learning at Tunxis under Bill Thompson, but then when I stopped going to school when I got that job at Creative Arts that’s when things really picked up. I was starting to get involved with package design on things like candy and video games, and then at that point I was almost at a journeyman level and then things started to pick up a bit.

Mark said to me, “I want to get into the Shareware video game industry,” and before you knew it we were doing that stuff for Ambrosia Software and Maxsoft and he was using my artwork. Like I was animating some of the little bastards that tried to kill you in these games and it was like this is pretty cool! It was cool to have a job that embraced my cartoony style. He closed the studio and opened one up in San Juan, [California] and I opened up a sister studio to his called The Mine Studio, which I still run now, but it was in Simsbury, [Connecticut].

He would shoot jobs over the Internet to me, and that’s when I started doing the sequential stuff because, still pretty much right out of college, I was starting to get commissions on my own as well as under the Mark Lewis banner. The gigs I was going for were cartoony based; working off the successes I had with Ambrosia and with all those other companies. So I did a lot of learning at Tunxis, but then a lot of learning under Mark Lewis because he was giving me hands-on experience, showing me the value of deadlines.

I remember we were working on chocolate coated snacks and we had to do 24 comp bags and have them delivered by 10 O’Clock the next morning. We just were non-stop, flat out to get that job done and still maintain the quality, still take pride, not to just push it out of house but to still take the time and love it. So when you’re delivering you still got that pride, that sense of value. There was aot of learning in that joint.

What is your media of choice?
Pencil, pen and ink I’d have to say is my favorite. My dirty little secret would have to be watercolors. When I was in college, man, Bill Thompson...he was a wizard with that stuff. You know, he was working on gigs for Subway and the Muppets and he could get photorealistic qualities from watercolors.

I’m going off on a tangent, but this is very important to me. When I met him, I was taking two art classes and they were in the same room. There was always a couple minutes between, and I busted out some comic submission pages that I was gonna carry around to New York or Philly or something. He came in, he comes over and he’s like, “What are you working on?” And you know at first you try to cover it up, and I’m like it’s a comic submissions and I’m gonna try to get in the comic industry. His eyes lit up and he goes “Oh I’m working on stuff too!” I’m like are you serious, and he pulls out these comic pages from his bag. His are water-colored and they’re gorgeous and after that he showed me so much. Every once in a while I’ll be at a convention and I’ll get to see him and it’s great to see him and he taught me a lot. Great guy.

What was your favorite experience to date?
I would have to say Bigger, just because it’s gotten me the most notoriety from just being a featured purchase in Diamond. It’s the book I’ve worked on the longest. I’ve grown a lot working on that book; from the mini comics we did at first, you know for the portfolio distributions, to collecting them and putting them in the first book, then going off and doing a four-issue limited series. And then I took five years to just work on pages.

The story of Bigger starts off with this kid, Will Risin, and he’s a pervert and he sees women as just this one thing, and my thought behind the concept of the story was to teach this kid a lesson. It’s a comedy and a tragedy in itself. It puts its perversion right on the front stoop. My mother, a very religious person, only read the first couple of pages and she closed it and she just like stopped talking to me for months. Every time I’d see her it’s like, “Could you just read it and see what I’m trying to say?” Then she did, finally.

Yeah, the subject matter was a little racy, but certainly not anything that I was not wholly embarrassed about. I just felt really bad that my mom…I would never wanna do something that would offend my mom. We’re over that now, which is good [laughs]. But I guess that would be something that…yeah, I kept it a secret from her for probably a year and a half before it was released through Diamond when I was able to give her the physical book. Because we were working on it in eight-page chapters, so it was a while before she saw that. And that’s big because that’s like the biggest thing that I’ve worked on.

It’s pretty rewarding to look back and see your hard work, and the feedback is what does it. You work on something for so long and it’s like in a little capsule and you forget about the jokes that you write, forget about the silly pictures…and now we’ve just published it over the summer, and I haven’t posted it to Diamond yet, but I’ve been selling it here and there, and to get the feedback and the responses to the jokes it’s like…you’re kind of nervous, it’s like sending your kid off to school I’d imagine. You dunno what the hell is gonna happen, and its nerve-wracking, but I love feedback. Good, bad or indifferent, it’s all learning, it’s all about learning.

So I’d have to say Bigger is the most rewarding project right now, even though there’s no real big monetary hit yet, but it kind of pays for yourself, don’t you think?

What are some of your inspirations that guide you in your work?
John Kricfalusi who created Ren & Stimpy, Joe [Madureira] from the X-Men fame, Jeff Smith from Bone, Bruce Timm who created the Batman animated series, my family… My family makes me work harder. You know, I’m a new father and she’s a living, breathing non-English speaking boss that I just want to bust ass for and make happy. She’s my biggest inspiration I guess; her and my beautiful wife. That’s everybody.

How has it been juggling a family and what can be very demanding work?
My wife is super supportive. The whole time she’s known me this has been my double life. For a while I had a secret life where I was working this other job and I didn’t tell anybody about it and I was very embarrassed about it. It was a regular 9-5 job, but I was so embarrassed to be working at it. So I was actually juggling the relationship with my steady girlfriend who would then become my wife, and then working on the comic and having the Mine Studio and then working this other job. It was hard, but my wife only knows me for that one thing. And she also knows that I’m pretty determined. Like, I would beg her to go out on dates with me when we first got to know each other.

If I have my sights set on something I work pretty damn hard to get it done, and I think that applies to my private life with my wife as well as working in the studio. And if there’s a deadline, my wife knows I’m gonna stick to it. Come hell or high water, I’ve had some pretty hellacious jobs come through where I’ve had to say, “Sorry, honey, we’re not doing anything this weekend because I’ve got a job to turn in Monday morning”. And she’d say, “Well, where did this come from?” “Well, I just got it on Friday”. And she knows it’s kind of balls to the wall to get it done, but she knows I’ll make it worth her while.

It’ll definitely become interesting when the baby gets older because she’s gonna definitely usurp a lot of attention from me. But I think that I would like to instill some creative energy in her so that maybe I can put some crayons down in front of her while daddy works on the next deadline. [laughs]

Talk about the Mine Studio; what was it like getting that started and what goes on over there?
Well, when I opened up in Simsbury it was tough, because I was the only one making money and the money would go right back to the rent and I’d be able to put some away, not much. I had a graphic designer in there who, God bless him, but he wasn’t able to go out and farm jobs for himself. So that was tough.

While we were there, I’m trying to build up revenue and that’s when I started giving private lessons to learn cartooning or drawing or painting. That was the steady money maker. I knew on a Saturday I’d be anchored in there and I would be able to build some revenue. It was good, because I was able to put some money away and it would help pay for the mini-series that I would do after the one-shot from Bigger. But it was cool because we did some pieces for Hyper Studio and some pizza place out in California. So it was good, [Mark] kept us busy. Every once in a while I’d get a graphic piece in to give to the guy and before you knew it…what happened was I was penciling these pages for Bigger and he had nothing going on, so he taught himself how to ink and he became my inker. So it actually worked out pretty good, until I had to close it. It’s a tanning salon now *sniff*. I hate that. I drive by and it’s like a shot in the heart.

I run the studio out of my house now, and it’s cool. Like on Sundays I kinda give up privacy rights and my gaming guy comes in, and my graphic designer comes in, and we’ll sit down and work or we’ll game test. There’s always something going on. We created Dungeon Downloads; printable terrain for table-top gamers. So that was a little bit off the mark for me, and for a while I had to learn how different table-top games worked and it’s cool because it always seems like there was something else going on. With the Mine Studio, I’m involved in all the projects that go on but I’m not the dad in all of them which is cool.
There’s this guy Norman Katz, and he just does good girl art and, you know what, it works. I paid to have a sketchbook published and the guys like it, it’s a very tattoo-esque, very counter culture maybe. But it’s fun stuff! Steve and I are working on some stuff for Radbu Productions, a comic company out of Massachusetts; they’ve got a book called Unhappy Gran’ma that’s coming out in the summer. Steve’s doing some graphic design work for them and I’m doing the pages. And we’re working on a role play game of our own to kind of go with the terrain, so there’s always something different going on which is nice.

I still do lessons for the Farmington Valley Art Center and the Greater Hartford Chapter of the YMCA, and I do silly things like caricature gigs at parties. I even did dogitures where I would draw people’s pets at pet fairs. Always something different, which is nice. I guess the bottom line truthfully, having my own studio there’s always something different to do, which is cool.

Where did that name come from?
[laughs] When I was in college, I was kind of segueing out of college and going to Mark Lewis Creative Arts, and he had his studio. There was a studio where I was doing a comic for and the book never saw the light of day, but I was putting in hours there and I had just started renting out the studio in Simsbury. I would be like I gotta go, I gotta go hit the studio, put some time in. People would go, “Which studio?” and I would go, “Mine”, and that’s kinda where it worked from. And my studio in Simsbury, you would like park in the front of the plaza and was split by a set of stairs that would descend down to the back of the plaza. Almost felt like you kinda were going underground to get into it, and that’s kinda where it came from.

Where and what do you teach and what kind of lessons do you give?
Right now I’m not doing anything private, but people always say I wanna hire you for this or that. I’ve been teaching at the Farmington Valley Art Center continuously for the last five years teaching cartooning, which is the curriculum I created back when the Mine Studio was in Simsbury. I’ve been doing that and drawing and painting for teens, which is almost like a portfolio [preparation] for college where I expose older students that are looking to continue further education in the arts to different media formats: water colors, acrylics, etc. And then I teach cartooning for the [YMCA] as well. It’s fun, and it’s rewarding, and every once in a while if there’s like a dead class where there’s no real subject matter I get to do something without a deadline, and that’s fun to be able to work on something and not feel stressed about it. Like the other day I drew a fish and it felt great. [laughs]

What got you into comics?
[laughs] My grandma lived in Florida and she’d send these little care packages up to us here in Connecticut, and she’d fill them with candy and all crap we shouldn’t have. And down there, I dunno where she got it ‘cause I was still a young kid, but she’d get like these 8-packs of Marvel Comics. And it would be like eight different books that came out the same month from Marvel: Star Wars, Dr. Strange, The Avengers, Captain America…and I remember getting those boxes, and I didn’t care about the candy as much as I loved it (and there was four of us kids) I just went for those comics. Give me that crap right now.

Because with that first bag of comics we got, it was Star Wars (I think #16) and Walt Simonson was the guest penciler and it was about this cyborg guy looking for droid lovers and he was killing them. I went this was the coolest book ever and bam! I was hooked. There was an Avengers/Dr. Strange crossover that was tied in with Dracula or something… I can tell you about all the books that came out that one month. [laughs] But that was, I loved that. It was kind of all on my grandma.

What would happen is I’d start walking to the center of town and I’d pick up comics like The Micronauts, I’d pick that up, and so it was my grandma’s fault. And then I started picking up Savage Sword. I was way too young to be reading that stuff, but they didn’t know it was a mature readers book (they didn’t mark it as such back then) and I would go to the local pharmacy and pick up this gorgeous painted covered comic and it was black and white and I didn’t care. And sometimes there would be partial nudity or whatever and I was like hey! And I got that and I was like this is the best! Yeah, grandma, God bless her and God rest her soul, she’s the one who instilled that love for comics for me, that monthly fix.

Do you have any favorite comic books or characters currently being put out?
Oh, I’m loving those Conan books. I’m loving the Star Wars books that Dark Horse is putting out right now. I still enjoy Savage Dragon, I get Stray Bullets (I don’t let anyone read them, though [laughs]). Oh! And Captain America. That book taught me I was a colorist fan. Frank D’Armata, he is just off the chain good.

How did you get involved with the Comicbook Artists Guild (CAG) and Guild Works Productions (GWP)?
You know what, this is a pretty cool question. When I met Keith for the first time, he was at the East Hartford Convention and I was there trying to re-start my comic life. And I met him, and the guys from Radbu, and my whole point in going and doing my portfolio review there was, you know, I’ll go to this little rinky-dink show and meet nobody important. And if I say or trip up on any stupid words or anything it will be a minor crime because the following Friday I was gonna go to Wizard World: Boston and that would be a much more important show to me. And little did I know that meeting Keith, and Aaron, and Steve Warren, that was gonna be one of the most influential and most important conventions I would go to affecting me now. I did not join CAG at that time, but I thought it was a cool concept. And [Keith] gave me a lot of great input, a lot of good info.

When I reconnected with him at the New York Comicon (which was pure chaos the day I went) it was a Saturday when they stopped letting people in…I was gonna go out and get some lunch, and I saw all this craziness going on outside. I was like well, I’m standing here and I’m not leaving till it’s time to go. It was great because I handed out all my samples and I joined up with the CAG. Keith said he had a perfect idea for me. He wanted me to take part in the Comics Jam War up in Northampton, [Massachusetts], and I was super excited about it.

So I joined then and I went to the Jam War and had a blast meeting those guys. It’s just been a great experience. And the Psychosis! thing…They said that they had an opening for a story. I’m not a…I don’t wanna be known as a writer. I’ve done my own stuff, but I definitely like penciling more than anything. I was so jazzed that they said “Oh, if you can think of something, let us know.” So I cook up this concept, and they’re like “Oh the concept is pretty good” and Mark Mazz, he was great, he said, “Here’s how you should submit a script in the future” and he sent back this gorgeous script that he had done and I’m like I’m totally keeping this and using it for reference if I ever submit anything again,
but in the e-Mail, they’re like “Congratulations and welcome to Psychosis!, we don’t want your story.” I’m like, what the heck? They said, “We’re gonna hook you up with this guy, Bob Sodaro. We hope you don’t mind, but can you pencil and ink this story?” I’m like oh my god, this is great! I was on Cloud Nine that day. I got the story and it creeped the hell out of me. It was great just to have somebody say we just want your art, and in truth that’s what I wanted.

What was the Comic Jam Wars?
It was this national competition that included Canada, I think, and there were these teams of people and you had 12 hours. They would give you an image, and you would have to draw an eight-page story based on the image they gave you. It was a Paul Smith illustration that said “There’s an Alien in the comic shop”, and you had to build your story around that. That was a real good experience. It was very long and very tiring, but it was great to be able to sit down with those guys. Like I didn’t have too big of a chore, I just did the breakdowns and stuff, but it was still fun. A lotta, lotta fun.

What was your approach to doing the story for GWP’s Psychosis! publication?
Well, at first I was confused because I was a cartoony guy and it was such a serious story, but I still stayed with my strength. I figured I’d have a bright part and a dark part. Bob had a lot of visuals…like he verbalized a lot of visual direction; the settings, the landscapes, where everything was taking place. So I went out and I shot a good 24 to 30 photographs for reference in a town nearby that has a very nice, kinda upscale but small-town feel to it, and that was good for me, to give it that location to anchor the story around it.

It was hard, because I was working on that while in the beginning and after my wife gave birth. So, it was tough. I even brought it to the hospital before the contractions got real hard. I just kind of went with not as silly a feel as the Bigger concept, just a little more serious; a little more emotion in people’s faces and stuff. I definitely wanted to push it a little bit more, but I definitely wanted to give it a small town feel. I wanted someone to feel like “Wow, I feel like I kinda know where this is!” I wanted to anchor the reader; I wanted them to know this is a place that could exist. I finished the story two days after we were home from the hospital. That was a good feeling, and that’s been great too because everyone’s said a lot of nice stuff about me still being able to deliver on the deadline that we had.

What advice would you give to people looking to break into the field?
I would say don’t expect it to be easy. Somebody told me that breaking into the comic industry is like getting into the NFL. I kinda believe that, because I feel like that I’m definitely not in the big leagues yet; I’m in a smaller division. Bring your work to conventions, get the critiques done. Find somebody who’s willing to give you a real critique and invest a little bit of your time and efforts. If you have the opportunity for them to be nitpicky, do it, because it’s just gonna help you in the long run.
Don’t be discouraged if you meet a jerk who’s just insulting. If you’re gonna do it, partition a chunk of every day, dedicate a chunk of every day. And this’ll probably be the hardest part: start with an hour and make that one hour that you work on your comics of every day. And then if time allows make it two hours a day, if time allows make it three hours a day. And then what’s gonna happen is you’re gonna be in a nice little rhythm where you can dedicate yourself, and that’s your time to work on that other job that may not be paying you that much yet, and all of a sudden you’re going to be able to commit to that. It’s probably the hardest part, but it’s the most rewarding part because once you get into that cycle it’s gonna be hard to break and you’re gonna love the progress that you make every single day.

I know that, for me right now, it is my full-time job to draw and try to make money, and it’s not easy from day-to-day, but I’m able to get it to the point where it’s like every single day I have to sit down at that table and do something. I think the biggest thing is to give yourself that time because pages aren’t just born overnight, you’ve gotta commit to them. And I know for me it takes 5 hours to pencil a full-size page. And if you partition that little commitment for yourself you will get things done.

What would be your dream project if you had the opportunity to work on it?
Yeah, anything…I’m not picky. If someone was willing to try me and my cartoony style out, I’d be happy to work on anything in the industry right now. Like I was thrilled to work on Bob Sodaro’s story, I’d be thrilled to work on anything. Y’know, for Marvel or on the commercial side just doing some ad stuff. I was a huge Conan fan when I was a kid, but with the cartoony stuff I don’t know if it would fit. That’s a tough Question…what would I like to do?

I’ll tell you what; do you remember the Sable & Fortune mini-series? Remember the last issue? How much did that suck? I could’ve kicked ass on that. I would not have painted it, but I’ll tell you what, I woulda kicked ass on that. So that woulda been a dream job to draw a pretty lady with guns and have fun with that. I totally would’ve rocked it out on that. That’s a good motivator for me. I keep that crappy issue in my studio to let me keep going, because that is just wrong. The other issues in that series were just gorgeous, and then all of a sudden here you’re excited to see this last issue and all of a sudden you wouldn’t even wipe with it. And you’re just like what happened? What happened here? That was terrible. I would’ve loved to finish that. That would’ve been my dream job there.

I don’t think I have the Captain America feel. I guess maybe a light-hearted comic in the mainstream audience… that would be fun. I’m not picky. A job’s a job.

If you were a superhero, your catch phrase would be?
Treat others as you’d want yourself treated, as corny as that would be.

Free ad space: GO!
Freelunchcomics.com, go there, check out what’s there. Go to Mattsminestudio.com, gonna have a store there soon selling Bigger. Buy Bigger, it’s funny. I’d have to say it’s the best example of my big hands, big feet work to date. It’s 128 pages. I very much love the fact I got that book done. I got another 100 and something pages that I’m gonna publish within the next half year. Check out Norman Katz’s book Pretty Hot Women. Some nudity, but nothing too intense. Shadow of the Sorcerer, the game that’s gonna be coming out from Free Lunch Comics very soon. I’ve played it, it’s very different, I love it. Next summer: Radbu Productions, Unhappy Gran’ma. I’m gonna hafta say that’s gonna be the next big step for me. Two full issues of the very Savage Dragon-eque book about a grandma who fights crime, robots, all crazy kind of stuff like that. Just keep looking for me, I’m gonna try to keep making noise somewhere. I’m not gonna stop because I’m still a kid at heart, I still like getting that good feedback, making people laugh, making people enjoy my work. And as long as people enjoy my work I’m gonna keep doing it.

Top© 2006 Atomic Media Group