All in Black & White Interview with Joe Jusko - 2007

Welcome to our second interview at All In Black & White For 75 Cents, this time with artist Joe Jusko!

As anyone who takes interest in this blog already knows, Joe Jusko provided many, many covers for Marvel's b/w magazine line, most famously for Savage Sword of Conan. His muscled, bluntly realistic Conan is permanently etched in this particular fanboy's mind, to say nothing of his grotesque monsters and impossibly sexy women. For me, Joe Jusko rangs alongside John Buscema whose rendition of the character comes to mind when I think of "Conan the Barbarian."

Joe left me a comment on the blog a few days ago, when I talked about an issue of SSOC that he did the cover for. I quickly pestered him for an interview, which he just as quickly agreed to:

All In Black and White: What did you read growing up? Comics, I assume, but did you read lots of sci-fi, fantasy?

Joe Jusko: I read just about everything! I was a voracious reader, actually. I was doing book reports in 6th grade on stuff like "A Portrait of T.E. Lawrence" and "Gulliver's Travels". I loved to read. Unfortunately, there just doesn't seem to be any time anymore to read as I used to. Life takes up a lot of time! LOL

B/W: Were there painters or other artists you admired, that made you want to be an artist?

JJ: John Buscema was God to me as a child! I discovered his work when I bought a couple of secondhand copies of Avengers #'s 57 and 58 from a kid in a playground when I was about 8 years old. I had only sporadically bought comics up until then, but bought everything after! LOL I was consumed by the desire to draw comics. I did nothing else from that day on. My father would sit with his friends at the bar and send me across the street with $5 to buy whatever comics were out. Comics were 12 cents at the time, so five bucks went a long way! I would sit in a booth and draw while my father talked to his buddies.

Buscema is still the most influential comic artist on my work. I miss seeing new Big John work terribly.

I didn't paint until the summer I graduated from The High School of Art & Design in NYC. I realized that as much as I loved comics, I just wasn't fast enough to produce a monthly book. That, and a really short attention span led to the transition to painted work. I had more time, and I wasn't drawing the same thing over and over, page after page. Although I was painting Conan, for example, on a regular basis, each cover was a totally different idea and challenge.

My influences at the time were the guys who were doing what I was doing; Boris, Larkin, Frazetta. The usual influences one has when starting in this field. In the 30 years since, my influences have changed on an almost weekly basis. Wildlife artists, 60's paperback art, movie poster artists. The list is endless, really. It's how you grow, and how you stay versatile, which in turn leads to career longevity.

B/W: You ended up doing, like, a thousand Savage Sword of Conan covers. How did you get that gig?

JJ: It really does seem like that many, doesn't it? LOL Oddly enough, I got that gig through the back door. I was 18 years old when I got my first cover job at Marvel (Starlord, Marvel Preview #15). It's a ghastly painting! Marie Severin did a really nice color sketch for me, and I foolishly redrew the Starlord figure in a much weaker pose and really ruined the composition. I did not know how to paint at all. I was teaching myself as I went along. I got the job, I guess, because I had sold the very first painting I had ever done to Heavy Metal magazine, which at the time (1977) was the hot magazine.

Apparently, Marvel liked it enough to give me more covers to screw up, and I started doing Rampaging Hulk covers as well as other miscellaneous one shots. I did a cover for a proposed "fumetti"(telling a comic story with photos) version of a Japanese Spider-Man TV show(!)
and another Starlord cover that Stan(Lee) hated so much he had Earl Norem repaint it!

That being said, I was learning and I was getting better, through trial and error. Thank God there weren't that many people available to do painted covers or I probably would never have had the opportunity to progress as a painter at Marvel.

Savage Sword was the flagship of Marvel's magazine line, and I was dying to paint some covers for it, but I got the impression that Roy (Thomas) wasn't very fond of my work, because I never got a cover. :-)

Eventually, Roy stepped down and Louise Jones took over as editor. John Bolton had done a full length King Kull story for either Bizarre Adventures or Marvel Preview, can't remember which, that I did the cover for. John decided that he wanted to paint the cover for his own book (rightly so) and the cover I did was then redirected for Savage Sword! I painted out the crown and the scar, added an armband and Weezie (as her friends call her) commissioned a story to go along with the re-slated painting. Both eventually saw print in SSOC #65. >whew!< What that cover did in the meantime, though, was get me in the SSOC door, and Louise started giving me covers. So, while SSOC #63 was my first published cover, #65 was actually my Conan first painting (kinda)!


B/W: How were the covers done? Were you given basic instructions like "It needs to have Conan, a girl, and a monster" or was it more specific?

JJ: That depended on the editor and whether there were actually pages in from the book that I could look at for character reference. The cover to SSOC #64, for example, was painted from the plot, so the monster doesn't look like Buscema's version in the story as his pages weren't in yet. Sometimes I was left to design the cover myself, other times the editor had very specific ideas as to cover content.

Larry Hama was a lot of fun to work with as he's an artist himself and often would draw up thumbnails or sketches to explain what he wanted. I got the point eventually where I would come up to the office with a painting that wasn't ever commissioned and just voucher it. Larry had told me at one point that the issues that had my covers on them sold better than ones that didn't, so I got as many covers as I could handle.

B/W: Was it hard getting other comics work, since the Conan magazines seemed to be its own little corner of the comics world?

JJ: I was pigeon holed for a while, yeah. It's really odd, but you tend to get categorized by what you're most currently working on, and people assume that's all you can do. When I did the SSOC covers, I was the "Conan guy". When I started doing superhero covers (and especially after the 1992 Marvel Masterpieces cards) I was the "superhero guy" who couldn't do anything else. LOL I prided myself on being versatile, so I always tried to move between different genres as much as possible.

B/W: Any particular favorite covers, ones you think were your best?

JJ: Looking back at them some 15-25 years later, I see things in all of them that I would do differently today, but also things I still like.

If I had to pick several that I thought were successful for the time they were done, I'd probably pick issues 69 (though it printed terribly), 74 (a cool vignette, tho' his head's a little small), 96 (I like the color scheme), 99 (a cool composition that I wish had printed better),


104 (tho' I chuckle every time I see the Falconman's zipper! What was I thinking? LOL), 112 (that was a big "look what I can do" painting, but the urns are terrible), 131 (another good composition that I wish could have been painted knowing what I know today), 143 (seems to be my iconic Conan cover) 144 (I love this cover! The veil on the dancing girl's butt was added under duress after I handed the cover in!) and 191 (because I got to paint over a Buscema pencil!)





B/W: Did you ever go to comic cons or get to meet the fans? If so, were they a different audience than the typical comics reader?

JJ: I do a lot of cons, as I love meeting the fans (although now I get "My father's a big fan of your Conan covers!" LOL) They aren't the typical comic fan. Lots of bikers, tattoo artists, bodybuilders, etc. I'm always shocked to see one of my covers tattooed on someone's back!

B/W: Any character you've wanted to work on but haven't had the chance yet?

JJ: That's tough. I'm a big Howard and Burroughs fan, and while I've done a lot of work with both properties, I don't think I've done either of them justice, yet.

B/W: What are you doing now?

JJ: Right now among other things, I'm doing covers for Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, Vampirella, and several other series, I'm producing a series of "Jungle Lord" lithographs for The Forest Primeval.com, a lot of private commissions and a retrospective hardcover Art of Joe Jusko book to be published by Desperado Press. I'm also determined to get my website finished. It's languished half-operational for way too long now.


Joe was extremely friendly and generous with his time, and I was thrilled to get to talk to someone whose work made such an impression on me growing up. Thanks Joe!