Exclusive: Buz Hasson on The Living Corpse, Horror Illustration & Career Insights | Pencil to Pencil Livecast

There’s something truly special about watching NouVeau Studios Alumni connect and geek out over the craft. In this episode of Pencil to Pencil, Mike Manley—co-creator and artist of Marvel’s iconic ’90s hero Darkhawk—sits down with Buz Hasson, the veteran illustrator and horror comics powerhouse best known for co-creating the cult-favorite undead anti-hero The Living Corpse (and his early work on the NVS title Percival’s Quest).

These two industry workhorses dive deep into the nitty-gritty of illustration techniques, career longevity in comics and tattoo art, creative processes, and the enduring passion that keeps them drawing after decades in the game. It’s a rare, candid conversation packed with insider insights that any aspiring artist, horror comics fan, or ’90s Marvel enthusiast will love.

Watch the full interview below and join the live chat vibes!

Pencil to Pencil Livecast: Exclusive Interview with Horror Comics Legend Buz Hasson – Creator of The Living Corpse

Welcome back to Pencil to Pencil, the must-watch weekly livecast where comic fans and aspiring artists interact live with top comic book creators, illustrators, and industry pros!

Hosted by acclaimed cartoonists Jamar Nicholas, Steve Conley, and Mike Manley, this episode features a deep-dive conversation with multi-talented creator Buz Hasson—a veteran comic book artist, co-creator of the cult-favorite horror series The Living Corpse, freelance illustrator, and premier tattoo artist.

Who Is Buz Hasson? A Horror Comics and Tattoo Powerhouse

For decades, Buz Hasson has built an impressive career at the intersection of horror comics, thriller storytelling, and body art. Alongside co-creator Ken Haeser, he brought to life The Living Corpse—a gritty, undead anti-hero battling supernatural evils in graveyards and haunted worlds. Published by Dynamite Entertainment (including collections like The Living Corpse Volume 1: Post Mortem), the series has earned a dedicated following among fans of dark, atmospheric comics.

Buz’s portfolio extends far beyond comics. His artwork has appeared in Fangoria magazine, official Stargate Atlantis comics, and various horror/thriller projects. He’s also contributed covers and illustrations to titles like Hack/Slash, Return of the Living Dead, and more. All while maintaining a thriving career as a tattoo artist (currently at Skull and Rose Tattoo Studio and Séance Tattoo), where his bold, detailed style translates perfectly from page to skin.

In this episode, the hosts chat with Buz about:

• His creative process behind The Living Corpse and other horror properties
• Balancing freelance comic work with a busy tattoo client list
• What’s currently on his plate—and what’s coming next in comics and beyond

Whether you’re into indie horror comics, classic monster tales, or the business side of being a full-time creator, Buz shares decades of hard-earned insights.

Watch the Latest Pencil to Pencil Episode Now

This week’s guest makes it another can’t-miss installment of Pencil to Pencil—the weekly livestream dedicated to the craft, business, and passion of cartooning, illustration, animation, and narrative storytelling.

Catch the full live interview on YouTube: Pencil to Pencil YouTube Channel

Follow Buz Hasson for more horror art, tattoo designs, and updates:
Instagram: @buzcorpse

Support the Hosts of Pencil to Pencil

Love what these creators do? Show some appreciation and follow them for daily art, tips, and behind-the-scenes:

• Jamar Nicholas (cartoonist, author of Leon the Extraordinary): @jamar_nicholas_cartoonist
• Mike Manley (comic artist and educator): @drawmanley
• Steve Conley (webcomic creator, The Middle Age): @steveconley

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Don’t miss an episode—subscribe to Pencil to Pencil on YouTube, turn on notifications, and join the live chat next time. Comic creators, horror fans, and tattoo enthusiasts: this is the weekly internet event you can’t skip!

Here is the transcript of this Pancil to Pencil episode

00:00:01
[Music] [Music] [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] [Music] You know the phrase that pays kick. Yo, it’s the golden hour. It’s y Oh, it’s a little It’s a a call back over there in this in the in the center square. I love it. Shout out to the protector, guys. I feel like it’s deja vu all over again. If you see these three smiling angelic countenances, that must mean a couple things. One, it must be Wednesday, 8:00 PM EST. And also, that must mean it must be pitch me, I must be dreaming

00:03:21
time. That’s right. The boys of summer have returned. Pencil to pencil is back on your video scope. Let’s do some introductions. Uh, my name is Jamar Nicholas. Uh, I am a cartoonist in good standing and guys, I wear a lot of hats besides this one. I am on the board of the National Cartoon Society. I’m the Philadelphia chapter chair and I am also a graphic novelist with a series that’s Scholastic underneath the graphics imprint. Leon Worst Friends Forever is the newest volume of my Leyon series in

00:03:51
stores now. Tell them, Steve Connley, cop it. Why don’t you? Yes, I love it. Yes, I love it when a player comes together. Handle it. Guys, I would be remiss. I would be in remission if I did not introduce my cohort, co-conspirator, and co-co compatriate. He is in title contention. He beat Hastax Calhoun last week in Asbury Park, New Jersey, and he’s coming for the web comic World Heavyweight Championship belt. That’s right. Make the discount double check motion. By God, it’s Stone

00:04:23
Cold Steve Connley. What’s up, Steve Connley? Gentlemen, it’s so good to see you. Yes, I am I am back from Heroes Con and boy is my right hand tired. Uh, my name is Steve Connley. I write and draw the web comic, your 78th favorite web comic, The Middle Age, which you can read over at middle-agcomic.com. It’s over on the webtunes, the tapest, the go comics, etc. I also make the TTRPG stuff. If you play the dungeons and or the dragons, you can uh check out my stuff over at stevecon.com.

00:04:56
But I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the miracle mark maker, the majestic uh the magnanimous, the uh something else with an M. Mikely I like that. The the magnificent one. Oh, magnificent one. That’s right. Hey, Mike. Drawer of childhoods as I have become known around these parts. I love it, Mike. Um, we were just talking to Steve off stage about uh we’re we’re what is it? We’re filthy. We’re lousy with cons these days. And uh uh Mr. Con just came back from Heroes Con and we before I asked Steve H for a

00:05:48
road report. Um we know that there are certain shows that have certain vibes to them, right? And you know all the pros know and even a lot of the fans know where they’re going because of the kind of stuff they’re into. And Heroes Con has always been known as a like a strong mom and pop show with a lot of community built up. Um, Steve, is that the case and was that uh on display last weekend? Absolutely it is. Uh, Shelton Drum is the founder and daddy of the show. Uh, he has uh, Heroes Aren’t hard to find as

00:06:26
a comic shop in Charlotte, North Carolina. He’s the owner of that shop and and you can tell conventions that are run by comic shop owners. They kind of have their heart is in the right place. They didn’t come to this from the outside like, “Hey, let’s comics are big and my my vape shop’s not doing too well. My VCR store folded.” And so they get into the the Comic-Con business and these these folks really know their stuff and because they read the comics and the focus is that way.

00:06:52
And Heroes aren’t hard to find. And Heroes Con is even more so that because there’s no media guests, no voice actors. It’s all it is thick with cartoonists and it’s an art convention. Books sell well. There’s still print walls, but it’s not like every third booth is like a soap vendor or something like soap. Oh, I love I’ve been to some of those shows where it’s like, oh, wow, that person just they it’s a it’s a it’s a maker convention, but it’s not a comic

00:07:26
convention. This one, Heroes Con is a is a comic convention. And I saw some pencil ears. I saw uh Marshall Lakes. I saw uh El Jimal. I saw JRD. And I saw the the entire Deans uh uh institute. I like the Deans Institute. I got my uh I got my Hback search from the Deans Institute. I could do heating and cooling repair now. That was great. It was It was a wonderful show. I I I I need uh I have more I have too many books now. My table is covered with books. I need to figure out I have to go vertical now. So that’s my whole thing.

00:08:02
That’s my personal takeaway. But it’s a great show. Like a cage. One of those cages at least one of those four tier things. It’s like a not quite a spinner rack, but something got I need height. I I keep hearing and this somebody finally gave it a name. The um the uh uh like the Mr. Softy truck setup. like you have stuff all around you and your face is in a window in the middle. Yeah, because I saw that with um it was I check out these YouTube channels where it’s someone who’s at an uh artist alley

00:08:32
somewhere and their prints are behind the table. They’re in their their sorted totes where they know every where everything is and the outside of the wall is really number five, number six, number seven. Just give them a number. They know which one to get. The prices are on the outside. It really does look like an ice cream truck. No, I got a bomb pop at a at at a at a cone with jimmies. Thanks. Um, so here’s the here’s the the $100,000 question. How were sales? Sales were good. I My table

00:09:05
didn’t say if you want to make money at at I think at Heroes Con, the focus for us as cartoonists is art. You should be you should you should be accepting commissions, you should line up commissions beforehand. That’s a big thing that changed the dynamic of a lot of these shows because initially the people would have the VIP tickets and they would just burst through the door making a beline for George Perez’s table or something like that. Uh but now people really line up those commissions

00:09:29
and you they kind of go to the convention to pick them up. Um right. Right. But they still take people still take commissions and so there is still that people hurrying to get there early in the morning. But uh my books did well. my table didn’t wasn’t really focusing on the artwork, which you kind of, you know, I hadn’t learned my lesson with just how many books I had. Um, but the books did well. Not only did the uh the graphic novels, the middle-age collections, but also the game books.

00:09:55
So, it was a wonderful show. I did well. I’m excited to go back next year. Wonderful. And also, I must say, you you don’t look too crispy around the edges. You look good to go. No con crud. Followed you home. No, like I that thing I said about having a little saline spray keeps things from uh keeps me from being too vulnerable. But I did avoid some people. Some people had that kind of like I was like leaning way far away from you. You have a convention. You’ve lured the NCS to your neighborhood, haven’t

00:10:31
you? Oh, yeah. The uh American Library Association conference is in Philly this year and uh downtown and it’s a giant deal and um uh the the National Cartoon Society is going to have a giant space on the show floor. I’m very excited about it. Uh I also have some scholastic business uh on the floor uh that weekend too. But I want to basically be in this element to meet all the educators and the librarians because the vibe is a lot different from a comic book convention. They’ll run up right up to you like, “Oh

00:11:03
my god, can we take a selfie? This is amazing.” Uh but I’m very excited about it and uh I hope to give you guys a good report next week. Um, so also, hey Mike, speaking of Heroes, you’ve done Heroes before, haven’t you? Like 200 five something. A long time ago. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it seems like kind of close to Philly, but it isn’t. No, that was a long drive. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. That’s like nine hours or something like that, right? That’s a Yeah, that’s a that’s a pedal pusher right there. I got

00:11:45
a ticket because somebody some cop saw me with an out of state plate. He’s like, you got a ticket? Oh, man. That’s that’s work. Somebody’s getting jacked on a commission that weekend. You got to pay for that. Uh so, but you know, speaking of conventions and the other side of the exhibition table, I’m very excited to uh talk about our guest tonight. Um let me find my graphic. Where is he? Buzz Haskins’s with us tonight and look at I got all this crap on the screen. I’m sorry. Uh who is a

00:12:17
longtime buddy and I’m I’m a little remiss that we’re just getting a buzz and uh we’re going to have a really fantastic talk. It seems like uh a lot of the guests that we’ve been having on the past couple of months have been um what’s the word I’m looking for? Kind of like uh triple threats, quadruple threats. um you know people who are like self-publishing or they’re they’re publishers in self-publishers. They make movies. They’re animators and doing this

00:12:46
that and the other. They’re at every show every weekend. And I almost feel like that’s the new kind of like Rubik’s cube of being a cartoonist these days. Like you have to have your fingers in a lot of pies. Uh so uh what a what a natural reason to have Buzz on to talk about his properties, his IPs, his very interesting road through comics and illustration in uh film and other media and you know and also the the magic art of tattooing. So there’s a lot on his plate. There’s a lot going on. So I’ve

00:13:22
said too much. All right, Buzz, prepare for rendering, please. Welcome to Pencil to Pencil, Buzz Hassing. Hey, thanks for having me, guys. Yeah, it’s the magic. Thank you. It’s the magic of rendering. Look at that. You’ve been rendered. So, uh, Buzz, thanks so much for coming on. I’m I’m really excited that we could have you on. Um especially like I said um I’ve been really excited about I think we’ve been knocking it out the park all year like real rap like every week of pencil to pencil has been

00:13:57
amazing and you know not I can’t just blame us I mean come on but it’s just also the the you know the chat is really lively the in the conversations are really really interesting and we’re having a really eclectic mix of guests so welcome to that pantheon awesome thanks for having me guys. I I I respect all you guys so much that being here is like a real honor. Thank you. Oh man, you you’re going to make me blush and that’s hard with my complexion. So, let’s just kind of let’s kind of

00:14:30
start not at the beginning, but let’s start with the the right now. I asked this once in a while. Uh Buzz, what’s on your plate right now? Um right now I’ I’ve been doing a lot of horror license covers the last like few years or so. maybe five. A lot of different cool stuff I grew up, you know, u renting in the video store. It was It’s weird. Like I never thought they’d make a comic book for Return of the Living Dead or for Fright Night. I mean, they they have, but um you know, I always wanted to do

00:15:00
that kind of stuff. I I just never knew how or how it would happen, but that’s kind of what I’ve been working on. Um I’m always doing a lot of commissions and I’m tattooing five days a week, so staying pretty busy with that stuff. Yeah. Wow. Um and I don’t know. This I want to show my ignorance. I don’t know a lot about the tattoo world. I have a lot of buddies who are tattoo artists. Yeah. And I just know like the demand the modern demand for tattoo artists is crazy, right? It

00:15:30
kind of it kind of went from a thing like, oh, you had to go down to South Street in Philly, right? Like, right, and pound a couple of tall boys and then, you know, Oh, yeah. It’s a wild bunch down there on Art Street. You know what I mean? to now like there’s like whole conventions just for tattoo art. Sorry. No. So, I was just gonna uh maybe ask how all of these worlds kind of overlap in interesting ways. I’m sure probably even with your clients, they probably intersect. Yeah. I I got into tattooing

00:16:02
through skateboarding. I was a skateboarder and I started to see in Thrasher magazine, they were all tattooed. I just thought it was the coolest thing. And then I would run into a few guys that would have like a nice tattoo and this is the mid 90s so there’s no cell phones or in social media to like discover anything. Um the grocery store had a couple tattoo magazines and I would pick that stuff up and then a couple of guys would be like a this guy’s really good over here you know and then I’d go in the shop and

00:16:27
they were like what do you want you know and they would it’s like whoa you know like it was a rough crowd you know I was not ready for that. I was very sheltered, you know, I pretended to be a Ninja Turtle. I was 15, you know what I mean? Like, but it was that I was enamored by skateboard art and like punk rock and metal and MTV and all that stuff. And so that’s what led me to it. Um, ironically, when I got into tattooing, I realized there was a major crossover element I had not put together, which was growing up playing D

00:16:55
and D, there was an illustrator in the early books named Greg Irons. And Greg Irons went on to become a tattoo artist. Now, he died young, so he didn’t get more a big career out of it, but he he literally Greg Irons changed the entire tattoo game by drawing things three dimensionally. Everything was flat before that and like three colors. Yeah. Greg came in and was I mean, he wasn’t even using rubber gloves back then. Like, I swear to God, there’s pictures up. Yeah. But he changed the game. He

00:17:23
was doing the uh hookasai waves, but they had like funnel depth in them. He was doing stippling like from inking and it was when I discovered that I was like ah that’s where like this brainchild in myself is kind of coming from. I was influenced by the D and D art for so many years, then getting into tattooing and then I had a great mentor named Bob Montana who who who knew Greg Irons. He had showed me his art and stuff like that. And I was like, “Ah, you know, I I went out and got the Skull Comics and

00:17:50
the what is it the slow death and all these like indie books he had done in the San Francisco, you know, indie comic boom.” And uh it it just really like I still have prints of his stuff on my wall now in my bedroom. I mean, between Greg Irons and growing up reading comics and and getting the tattoo and I was like, “All right, this is where it all houses. It houses under this.” And uh so as I was like learning the tattoo tattoo and getting really good because it matters who you learn from. If you if

00:18:16
you learn from someone who’s kind of like okay, you’re only going to be okay. So, you know, if you’re the best tattoo artist in the shop, you need to find another shop. And and and that was kind of I had a very a stringent apprenticeship. It was a three-year process, 3,000 hours. was I lived with my mentor. I cleaned the shop. I learned everything. I made needles, you know, tattoo machines. We fixed things. Like there was no supply companies. There were like two and you would buy everything from there. And it was a real

00:18:42
like counterculture, but within it was a lot of really talented guys like lowbrow painters. Everybody was inspired by Guyer and Robert Williams. Like they loved all that stuff, you know what I mean? And so it was just this culture that I was like, I can prosper here because I like all this stuff too. Wow, that’s fantastic, man. And so kind of like did what happened first? Was it did the comics come before the tattooing? Were you kind of like doing a lot of sketch work and doing freelance? And then like what kind of what was the

00:19:16
stacking order of how all this stuff came together? Yeah, it’s a stacking order for sure. And there’s a lot of bouncing around because I I really wanted to be a comic strip artist. Like I grew up on Bloom County and Calvin and Hobbs and my father was a huge Charlie Brown fan and we we we were I was obsessed with it and I really felt like these comic strip worlds were like real. I I I you know I would wait I was cutting Calvin and Hobbs out and saving it in a roll like a rubber band ball. Oh

00:19:46
wow. A roll of the strips that was like a knot of wood and then all of a sudden Walden Books is putting out to collect it and I was like I can throw these away now. You know what I mean? You had like a money roll was happening in mobs, dude. And I the paper didn’t age well, which was disappointing. But when by that point, you know, they started putting out the collected, so I was getting those, but comic strips. And then as I matured and grew older and playing D and D, things got more sophisticated. I was really interested

00:20:14
in like Larry Hama’s G.I. Joe World and mythology. And I just wanted to mature through through cartooning into comics. And then I thought comics were real, too. I would read anything. I would read any book I can get. I couldn’t get them consecutively. Yeah. You know, I’d have a missing issue here or there because it was newsstand stuff, but it was comics, comics, comics always. And then, you know, you go to school when you draw that stuff like in the last show you were on, they don’t really support the

00:20:40
cartoonists, you know what I mean? They’re always trying to get you to do something else. Yeah. I just, you know, I never gave it up. I was like, nah, this is the thing I’m into, you know? And I think I went to like a Philly Comic Con when I was 16 in like the early 90s just to and it was just like soaking it all in. You know, everybody was there and you know the biggest celebrity guest is Lou Frigno. You know what I mean? Like I’m there to meet like you know artist and stuff. But in high

00:21:04
school I had this classmate whose brother went to Joe Cubert and that kind of that spun it a little bit for me on okay you might actually be able to tactfully go go about this. My dad was a Marine, so he was a very like, you know, if you’re going to do it, just be the best you can be at it kind of thing. And uh so that’s when like I got real serious about the comics. And um but I did I was still very amateur, you know, I needed a lot of uh I needed a lot of schooling and stuff like that and and

00:21:31
and I take portfolio reviews and you know, they would trash my stuff. And I I took it really well because I had a father in the military who could give constructive criticism. So I was able I was already prepped for it. Like I wasn’t like destroyed by it, you know. Right. Right. I would go home and they were like, “Draw better hands.” I would go home and get George Brisman’s How to Draw Hands and like just studied all summer. Like that’s what I did all summer, you know, until I figured it

00:21:54
out. So, it’s interesting to hear your um uh kind of like beginning in strips where you know a lot of times when we talk about our origin stories and things like that, people are always trying to look for this line between what you liked or what you really adored at a certain point and they’re looking for it in your work. So like I don’t really see Calvin and Hobs in right corpse and things like that. But so did something kind of take over your your creative interest as you went on or did you you know always like

00:22:29
a call back? It was a huge turning point for me. I I I I tried to go to art school. Uh I was you know got in by the skin of my teeth at Maryland Institute or Maryland College of Art and Design or community stuff and I just was unsettled. wasn’t what I wanted. And I I was really enamored with like the worlds of like, you know, George Lucas and and all that type of stuff. And I was like, I want to make something. I want to make these things, you know. And uh I would I would finish a semester and then I’d

00:22:56
drop out and I’d be like, it’s got to be something else. And then I was in school for fine art doing a lot of abstract stuff, like live model stuff, and I was having fun with it, but I was I was um still felt like a black sheep, you know what I mean? But I was a huge fan of horror movies in Fangoria. And I had seen in the back of a Fangoria that they had a school for makeup effects. And I begged my parents to drive me to Florida to like talk to these people. And I went and I and I got in to a makeup effect

00:23:25
school. And that’s what really started linking everything together for me when it came to creation, design, uh storytelling, uh and and and monster movies, you know. And so I went to a school in Orlando called the Joe Blasco School for Professional Makeup, theater makeup. And it was associated with Universal Studios. Wow. And so I had taken a year, it was a year-long thing. And my parents were like, “If you can’t do it in a year, you can’t do anything, you know?” Like I did it, it was like nine months,

00:23:54
and then I took like an advanced course, which was another two months or three for full bodysuit like characters. And uh a lot of the students that went to the school had went to work on Sequest, the TV show, and various other stuff. And so Florida was sort of like this breeding ground for people that were eventually going to go to either Canada or LA and to and go make these movies and stuff or do whatever. And so Iworked I I went to school. I graduated and then Iworked and got a job at Universal

00:24:21
working on the u the Monster Show and the Beetlejuice show like doing makeup and stuff. And it was interesting was um I picked up drawing threedimensionally better from sculpting makeups doing that stuff. And I studied under um this guy named Jord Uelle who was a sculptor for a lot of the stuff on Men in Black and Hellboy and stuff like that. He’s a phenomenal sculptor. And um then I got to the the degree and I went to Universal, worked over there for a little bit, but it was like a seasonal

00:24:49
gig. And so when that was done, I had seen an ad for a big makeup convention out in California and I went and I took my portfolio and I kind of did the thing that I, you know, probably shouldn’t have done, but it worked was, you know, I I knew the makeup artist on the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I loved all the vampires and the character design. Yeah. So I had sort of stalked this group of people that were in what what is called Optic Nerf Studios, which were all guys that learned under Tom

00:25:17
Cevini. So, I was waiting for Cevi to come up. Yeah, I know. It’s funny, right? When I came back from makeup school, AOL Instant Messenger had been developed and I had like found Tom Ceini on there and he had uh been like a pen pal with me on there for for a while kind of coaching me on how to go about it, you know what I mean? Being honest with me, being like, “It’s very difficult to do it here. You’re going to have to go to Canada or LA.” And I went to both. And uh and I found success at

00:25:42
both. Um, I got in with the optic nerve guys and and and they were uh kind of grooming me to come in and, you know, be their plaster monkey, clean all their stuff up. But, you know, that’s where you start and you get in with these these guys. And, um, they they saw all my work and they were kind of like, you know, you you you um it’s it’s good, but it’s not that good. And out and out in c Hollywood, like they only want the best, and even the best is not good enough often. So, um, they were like, “Where

00:26:12
you went to school is kind of looked at as a joke out here.” And they were like, “You’re going to need to talk to Dick Smith, who is the makeup effects artist for Exorcist, The Hunger, and and many other things. He he’s revolutionized it. He he coached Rick Baker and Sini.” Yeah. Dick was in Connecticut and um I wrote him a letter and he got back to me and uh he took me on a consignment course and like basically was making my stuff more professional and and dialing up like the skill sets and he looked at my

00:26:42
concept design and he was like, “Man, you don’t even really have to do makeup.” He’s like, “You draw well enough that you could just design this stuff. They they look for guys like you.” And I was already a fan of Carrie Gaml and and he was Carrie was working with Steve Johnson doing designs for Steve Johnson effects and I knew there was this rollover between like illustrators and monsters and I was just trying to find a place in all that and I was able to. Yeah. Well, the chat is

00:27:11
stone quiet. They’re just like the thing is is like I was kind of an ADD kid where I always just wanted to learn something else. You know what I mean? And yeah, I figured it would I went to a convention and saw some dude dressed up as Death’s head, the character. Yeah. Like, man, like what if you could, you know, make your character and make the mask like do the whole thing, you know? I didn’t want to rely on waiting for someone else to do it for me. I wanted to try to figure out a way

00:27:37
to do it on my own. Mike, what are you gonna say? I was saying, how long were you in California then? Not long. um because I had gotten the opportunity to learn how to tattoo. And so I had felt that after my experience in in Hollywood, you could be great and get the gig and get right in no problem and you will probably work for no credit to little to nothing. And I was balancing that with the with tattoo and the culture of tattooing. And I was looking at both like I want to do both, but I kind of

00:28:07
need to pick one and get serious. like I think I was 20 years old, 21 and uh tattooing felt like whatever I did for a person I was gonna get more value out of. They were going to be more appreciative of the work and in the movie biz it was kind of like you were more it was like it was easily replaceable, right? And um I figured I still love this stuff. It’s not out of my life but maybe I’ll revisit it another time. And I was able to later obviously but Did you do any tattooing in LA? I didn’t. Uh I tattooed in Jersey

00:28:37
is where I learned and um you know mostly east coast like I tattooed in Philly for a while, Delaware. Um I did a lot of conventions with my mentor. I was traveling with him as an apprentice. So I was like I had a red carpet experience right in the tattooing like the best of the best of the best. And the first thing I learned was humility. Like immediately like don’t talk about your work. Don’t tell anybody who you are. Just listen. And and so I spent a lot of time those first two three years watching my mentor was

00:29:04
very well known and had a reputation for helping younger artists get started. So a lot of the younger artists who became to be these famous tattooers who were tattooing like guys in bands like Slayer and White Zombie and Pantara like that was the celebrity ring of tattooing. Uh Paul Booth is an artist from New York, guy HSN from Chicago. My my mentor was close with these guys and so my first portfolio reviews in tattooing were with like the guys who were at the top of the game right away. Wow, that’s fantastic.

00:29:34
Go ahead. No, go ahead. Go ahead, Buzz. Go ahead. What’s ironic was after the portfolio review, they didn’t really say anything and I was kind of like, well, that’s a bad thing. And then they looked at me and they were like, what do you do besides tattooing? And I said, well, you know, a creature effects kind of guy and like comics. I want to do comics. And they were like, never stop doing that. And I was like, “Are you telling me to never stop because I’m not going to make

00:29:54
it at tattooing?” And they were like, “No, all that stuff is going to influence how you tattoo your tattoo designs and it’ll be an inspirational thing where you’ll you’ll be different than the next guy because you’re bringing those elements in.” And I stuck with it. And I did a lot of like comic designs and monster designs and many many tattooers were like, “No one’s ever going to get that stuff, man.” And I was like, “Okay.” And I just draw it and

00:30:17
hang it on the wall, you And eventually it caught on and now there’s an entire culture built around it. Wow. Yeah, that’s fant. I’m I’m blown away by your your lore already. This is really cool. I was going to ask you kind of like a like a surface to tool question. What were some of the differences between like doing makeup art? I mean, you know, like makeup, uh, doing makeup or all or sculpting or tattooing because all of those different kind of like threshold to surface differences like did one of

00:30:49
keep did you connect with one more than the other or they’re all kind of the same to you? They they’re all similar but different. Um, in tattooing it’s like engraving, carving, and drawing all at the same time. And you have to think like that. So, you’re gripping like a surface that’s like rounded and concave or like oblong shape and it’s never flat unless it’s a back and they’re not even that flat, you know. Um, but working on people’s faces in the makeup trailer, I

00:31:16
I did go to Canada and I worked up there for three months on a bunch of stuff in Montreal. Um, some some of the fears I worked on. We were like making like dead bodies and stuff from the nuke blast and and um so being in the trailer at 3:00 in the morning on a movie set, you got no sleep. you’re up all night casting everything in urethane and airbrush and stuff and you’re in there and you’re like, you know, in someone’s eye, you know, right on their eyelash like trying to do the makeup and the seams. And so

00:31:42
being gentle and having good bedside manner, that translated immediately to tattooing. And I think that’s why a lot of people come back to me as a tattooer. It’s because I I have that element in my room. You know, they see a lot of the monsters in the comics and they they’re like, “Can you even do a butterfly tattoo?” You know, I can, but it’s like, you know, just the the friendliness, the the comfortability, like that that was in makeup. Has to be in makeup or you’re

00:32:04
they kick you out. Yeah, I can do a butterfly, but I got to press really hard, right? They call a biker grip when you grab someone’s arm underneath and just squeeze it. Oh. Was any of the was the Was the permanence of tattooing ever intimidating? 100%. I used to throw up before every tattoo. It was It was insane. Like for the first year I was so nervous and didn’t want anyone to know I was nervous. But you find out later that like most clients don’t know. Well, now they do, but back in like early 2000s

00:32:35
they didn’t have a clue what was going on. So you could have messed the whole thing up and they would have not figured it out till someone told them it was bad later. Right. Right. But yeah, I used to get sick and then eventually you just kind of get over it by the seventh or 12th tattoo and you’re just you ink it just like you ink a comic page. you you land the the needle into the skin, you ride it and come out just like that. And so again, to Greg irons and all that brush work, you know, and studying that stuff

00:32:59
and and doing it myself, practicing over and over, you know, you’re tattooing, it’s like just, you know, and the thing is a lot of people, a lot of new kids these days that are learning to tattoo aren’t getting the good tutelage. So, they’re kind of teaching themselves. And the thing they forget is to dip the the needle into the ink more often because they’ll run the whole thing like it’s uh Bill Cosby’s pen drawing running, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, you have to go back

00:33:23
every two inches, you know, and to make the lines like black that this is this is thrilling. Um you said you were going to if I if I can you said you were going to keep you or you were encouraged to keep cartooning while you’re doing all this. Did you ever put a comic together or indie comic? That’s what The Living Corpse was was I had eventually met my co-creator Ken Hazer who was a graduate of the Cubert School who already was doing his own comic and we had a mutual friend and we all hung out one night and

00:33:52
then me and Ken just hit it off like brothers and I was just talking to him today getting his blessing for coming on here tonight and um I tattooed him and uh I started hanging out with him. He had a book called Eyes of Asia from digital webbing.com. I don’t know if you guys remember that site. Me and Ken, me and Ken met and then were both he was on digital webbing then I jumped on digital webbing and we were all hanging out with Ed Dukeshshire and so many talents today had came from digital webbing and we

00:34:20
were like this first wave of guys that were like attacking the internet for comics and I would tattoo all day and make money and then run home get online to digital webbing and and talk to Jamal and Mike and Bowden and all these guys and make friends with them and post drawings and sketches and like study their stuff and follow their progresses and and Ken had a uh a four issue miniseries that he needed help finishing inking and I obviously is a tattooer and so I was like ah I’d love to help out

00:34:46
you know and I finished some stuff he printed it and when we were done I was like what’s next you know and he was like I don’t really have anything I’m going to take a break from a four issue miniseries that I wrote drew inked and you know lettered and printed myself or through digital webbing rather um and so we jumped into um the living corpse we came up with this idea Uh, The Walking Dead was hot at the time. No TV show, just the comic. And we always love zombies. We loved Eric Pal’s work on The

00:35:13
Goon. We were like huge nerds for Resident Evil, The Game, uh, Dead World. Uh, I think it’s from Stuart Carr and, um, Vince Lock. We love these indie gritty grimy like back of the back issue Ben Stanky book zombie thing, you know, and that’s what we wanted to do. We wanted to do something like that. And we wanted to kind of push the envelope where we weren’t just doing like this Romero thing, right, that was coming through The Walking Dead, you know, and um so we put this idea together called

00:35:42
the corpse. It was going to be like told from the perspective of the zombie, his experience in this in the narrative, not survival, not fighting amongst your friends for food, just the zombie and what it was like. And especially just a one shot. we’re gonna do it for fun because I think Ken was pretty exhausted from the the miniseries, but I hadn’t made a comic yet and I was ready to go. I was bursting at the themes to put something together. I had had this idea in my head. I’d always love Tales from

00:36:09
the Crypt and the comic in the show and I’d had this idea of something called Graveyard Chronicles where like each grave is like a story and it would be more like a Tales from the Dark Side kind of thing. Um, and then Ken, hanging out with Ken was like osmosis, just learning how to build character, plot, do layouts. I think he was working at AT&T at the time. And every day he’d get off of work and scan me a work like four pages of thumbnails from the back of a work form. And then I’d blow them

00:36:37
up and pencil over the whole thing till two in the morning at the tattoo shop. And at the end of the week, he’d come and collect five pages. And then he’d take them home and ink them. And uh we would start we would do that over and over and over for as long as you’ve known us. That that’s how we did it. It was a very uh how to draw comics the Marvel way kind of thing. So you were making your living as a tattoo artist at that time, right? Absolutely. Yeah. And that funded it all as well. Um which tattooing was very

00:37:07
lucrative at that time. And um I just I was printing t-shirts and hoodies and paying for convention tables and we were printing at Kinko’s printing ash cans. I tattooed a girl at the kinkos and was printing ash cans with her and then uh we found Kablam online and I think we learned that through that was who Ed was using at digital webbing and we pitched uh Ed the corpse first and he was interested but he was like ah you know I don’t know and that’s the thing is like we we pitched that book to everybody and

00:37:36
they were like hey we hear you got a zombie book and they were ready to cash in on that walking dead thing but I had always been taught you know I would get portfolio abuse you know I’ve seen Mike back in today and Simonson and all these guys and they’re like be original, don’t steal, draw your own stuff, practice, have fun, you know. So, we were like, cool, let’s do something different then, you know, that’s our signature to us. We were big fans of the tick, you know, and Hellboy. And so, we wanted to kind of

00:38:01
put these silly worlds together with monsters and stuff. And we didn’t want any human characters, you know, I mean, like we we just wanted like monster characters. And, uh, we would pitch this stuff and people would just look at us like, you know, very sad. Like, they were it was not Walking Dead. It was not a ripoff of Walking Dead. I want to come in and copy the hottest book. What are you talking about? But then I realized later that’s what they’re looking for, you know? So, we just took it ourselves, you know. We we

00:38:27
pitched it to Ed. He wasn’t sure and we printed ourselves. We put 500 copies in my trunk. We hit every comic shop from New York to DC and we hung out with people and we did free sketches and we met with people. And I’ll be honest, I think like being like these black t-shirt tattooed guys, people were like a little more they were like kind of intimidated but a little more interested in who we might be and not so stuffy like as a creator. So So you have a trunk full of comics. You go to a comic

00:38:56
shop that you may or may not have ever been in before. Oh, I would contact him ahead of time. We were using MySpace as the character. We jumped on there and made the living corpse a person. And so we were talking to people like we were him. And even before that we were in chat rooms like like unsolicitedly dropping pages into like zombie chat rooms be like check out our book. We had no idea that it was like kind of like bad a phauxa to do that. We were just trying to get readers and it wasn’t even

00:39:25
about money. It was about like check out our thing. Check out very gorilla. Yeah. That’s how we Yeah. We treated it like an like an indie rock band and we pushed it like that. And we even had like indie rock bands we or any metal bands we knew making songs for the character and we would we would we would get together with these comic shops and they would be like, “Oh yeah, sure. Come by.” You know, and we would just hang out and we were really cool. We built relationships with them. Um bunch of shops, Staten

00:39:51
Island, Baltimore, Philly, like all over a lot in Jersey. Yeah. It was a lot of fun, man. And then I think we went from that we went to Pittsburgh ComicCon. It was like the first one we did and I was like, “All right, like this is where we belong.” That’s a good place for living for sure. And we started there and nobody knew who we were that could give a [ __ ] about who we were and we put a sign on the table that said free sketch and we and somebody gave me like one guy gave me a really hard time about it and

00:40:19
I was like nobody knows who I am, man. But they’re all walking by me, right? Got to do something to get them to come over and at least look at, you know. Was he was he upset? He thought he were going to take business away. He was like, “Why are you doing them for free when we’re trying to charge every year?” And he had a great point. I totally get it, but like I’m invested at this point. I’m dumping tons of money into it. Yeah. Right. That’s a deal. But I mean, yeah, kind of like that. And you know, I

00:40:43
tried to talk to the guy and I was like, “Look, man, I’m really sorry, blah, blah, blah.” But I I had to do something and it and it drew people over. And ironically, there was a line in front of us for uh Salma and people saw the free sketch and were like, “While I’m waiting, hold my spot. I’m going to go check this out. And it was really just meeting meeting people. Some people were into it, some people weren’t. And we kind of had this thing. Um I don’t want to take any credit for it, but Ken had

00:41:07
this idea to make the cover blank. And I was like, “What for?” And he was like, “We’re going to do a sketch on it for people when they buy it.” And I was like, “That’s a really good idea.” I was like, “What if we did like the the border like blue line?” And we did that. And then we had seen it Billy Tucci do it with for a she ash can in like the mid 90s but it was like a smaller version and I hadn’t really seen that around at the time and so we did it and

00:41:32
that’s what sold the books. We sold 500 of them because people were like what is the drawing thing? I’m like oh when you buy the book we draw the character on it and it was just this little stance the Kai quick zombie head thing. You’ve seen me do it or post it 100 times. Yeah. And that that’s what moved it. And then, ironically, four years later, a bunch of things happened to accelerate us. Ken ended up working for Dynamic Forces in Dynamite Entertainment, and that’s what he does for a living is basically the

00:41:58
sketch covers. And they were the guys to get in. They saw our stuff and were like, “Oh, we’re going to we’re going to do this, too.” And they started printing blanks for everything they get their hands on. Sure. Blank blanks are everywhere now. Oh, it’s Yeah, it’s a whole industry. That’s That’s crazy. Um, funny I was gonna say it’s funny. Um, funny story was we were ripped one year moving them and uh I always kind of paid attention to who everybody was and I had

00:42:25
seen uh that guy um Brian Pledo I think is how you say his last name guy. He came over to the table and I knew who he was and I was drawing one. He was like what are you doing there? I’m like oh it’s like do the sketch on the cover when you buy the book. He’s like oh it’s really cool. I’m like here let me just give you one. You know I’m a fan of evil Ernie and all that stuff. Yeah. like, “No, no, no. I’m good. I’m good. Keep it. Sell it.” I was like, “All right.” A

00:42:46
year later, someone gave me a um a a a collection of uh Spider-Man sketch covers. And in the inside credits, it was like, “Joe Casada wants to thank Brian Paleo for the idea to do the Spider-Man sketch cover project.” And I was like, “Are you kidding me?” I was like, “Get out of here, dude.” And I go to Ken and I tell him about it. He’s like, “Ah, you know, what are you gonna do?” You know, go back to work. We’re like, “Whatever.” But that really

00:43:13
happens. It’s It’s in print, you know what I mean? But it’s just ironic. But we had a lot of fun. That’s so comics. That’s It’s so comics, dude. That’s so comics. It’s 100% comics. Yeah, that’s We have an old Somebody that was like, “Oh, yeah, that guy’s done some cool stuff.” You know what I mean? That’s There’s a phrase that we say around here. Yay! Comics. Yay! Comics. Do you still do conventions? Yeah, I do uh a horror con called Monster Mania.

00:43:42
And the reason why I do it Yeah. Yeah. Uh the reason why I do it is because it’s a great mix, man. And horror fans support anything and everything. Comic fans have walked past my table for 18 years and not looked at it. You know, I’m in the same spot at Baltimore. I’ve we’ve seen each other there 100 times and they just won’t look at the book. They’re familiar with the graphics, the banner, everything. They won’t touch it. I’ll give you the book if you if you don’t have the money, you know? So, I

00:44:08
was just like the horror con thing. Anybody would check the book out. Anybody, you know, from 13 and up. Some people were like, “Oh, I’ve got I’ve got every one of these. What’s new?” I’m like, “I don’t have anything new yet.” They’re like, “Well, let me get another round of them.” You know what I mean? Like horror fans, they don’t they’ll just dive in, man. And so, I I’ve been doing Monster Mania. It’s It’s in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. It’s in Baltimore.

00:44:28
It’s in Oaks, PA, like four times a year. And that that’s enough for me. That and Free Comp Day. I’ve got three three teenagers and a farm. So, yeah, keep my toe in the horror thing a little bit. There’s there’s something to be said even just through your lore line is that you kind of have to go to where people want you. You know what I mean? I know there’s a kind of like you might spin your wheels for five years just thinking that because there’s a show in town, you’re supposed to be there

00:44:58
because it says comics outside, right? You know, but you know, you’re prove positive. It’s like, well, these people over here are, you know, feeling this, so let’s just give them what they want over there. Yeah, we we did 10 cons a year for 10 straight years promoting The Living Corpse and uh we dumped I saw you I saw you at all. Yeah, we were always there, but we dumped so much money into it and we made money up until about 2012. Yeah. And um and then it became like break even kind of and it’s like,

00:45:25
all right, well, how long do you want to break even? you know, and so when I found we were already doing Mermania at that point and so it was we had such a great relationship with those guys. They’re the guys that throw that show, their kids hang out with my kids. It just became so cool and it’s like the celebrities are cool. It’s a personal environment. It’s not like the fan expose where it’s like two seconds you’re up and out. They actually you can get time with a celebrity is disgusting.

00:45:48
I met Henry Winkler. I’ve met so many people and you get you get your good three three four minutes and three four minutes will feel like 15, you know, and and I really enjoyed that. I didn’t enjoy the hustle and bustle of the big con like give us all your money and here’s your here’s your hard to stand on surface for three days and chicken tenders and hot dogs only. So, you know, we were we we boiled it down to this Monster Mania thing is just too cool. Like there’s too many cool people here.

00:46:17
They’ll they’ll all support it. And so it just became that. And then, you know, I I did I did a con in Jersey recently with the podcast, which was super fun, but like, you know, I’ll probably stop by Baltimore for the day, but I probably won’t work it, you know. Do you do you crosspollinate your comic work at the tattoo shop? All the time. I have tattooed the living corpse on probably 25 people. Wow. Yeah. And they’re still asking for it. It’s weird, man. But I love it and it’s

00:46:45
really cool. I tattooed it on Ken. Uh they made a this kid named Jim Canatelli who was a uh filmmaker at the Wington University near us. He had seen the movie in uh Redbox and that’s a whole another conversation the movie thing. Yeah. Shirt and he’s working at Walgreens and I had this Living Corpse shirt on and he’s like looking at the shirt. He’s like the movie’s up and he was like this little filmmaker. So he would follow us around to all the conventions and film stuff. Wow. And us

00:47:12
drawing and everything. And I was like we need to do this on film because it’s probably not going to last forever. It’s gonna break up at some point, man. I’m glad we did it. So, there was like a documentary that like that that came out. I think we even put it on VHS to be nerdy. I still got like 25 copies of it. Do you think that people uh I mean I’ve always felt that one of the things that’s odd about fandom is people will be very very rabid you know fanatics literally about stuff

00:47:46
but it’s in a very specific lane and you can’t take somebody who might like let’s say Star Trek and make them like something else or you can’t make somebody who likes the X-Men like Swamp Thing, right? It used to seem like people had a broader sense of taste. Maybe because, you know, we’re we’re we’re older now, so you never knew what you were going to get. Like you said, when you went to the 7-Eleven, you might get a Sergeant Rock, you might get a cartoons magazine, you might get a MAD.

00:48:23
Whatever was there, that’s what you picked up. So you generally got a much wider range. But you know when you go to a comic con Yeah. It’s like people who want George Perez are gonna go beline right for George Perez. They’re not going to go to other stuff and you could give it to them. They’re like, “Yeah, that’s nice.” But yeah, you’re right. It’s like there’s so much stuff they kind of have to tunnel down on what they really like. And uh I saw that live in person when we did

00:48:53
Baltimore in 2019. Um we had put out a oneshot of The Living Corpse and we had we had we were I had become friends with David Michelini and I wanted to bring him into what we were doing. I was like it’s obvious I’m never going to work for Marvel. I was like let me just go get the guy who I read all his stuff and bring him to us. And I’m a big comic collector. I have a pretty vast collection. A lot of graded stuff, raw stuff. I I’m a fan. And so I met these guys that knew him and they kind of

00:49:21
pulled him out of the woodwork when the Venom movie came around and um he did a signing at Blue Hen and um Joe had asked me if I would come hang out and draw the line wrapped around the building for him and I was like absolutely I’m a huge fan. I have a Venom tattoo. I was like I’ll be there. I went right in beline to him shook his hand like making eye contact. I’m like dude I love everything you do. I met him like years before but it was quick and he was just he remembered me and like you know it

00:49:46
warmed my heart and he’s a really great guy and he’s become a family friend now after working with him but I was like is there any way we could hire you to write like an issue for us because after 15 years of doing the book we were like we need something new that’s going to keep excited and he was like sure you know and he charged us like half his rate because it was indie and he went to town and he wrote this book for us called the living corpse hex files where he brought in this sort of like gray ghost

00:50:10
character from the Batman animate series. Yeah. Where it was like a ghost detective. He was a theoric and like he’s crossing over with Living Corpse and stuff. Really cool issue. And um I I was going to we were going to Baltimore to like push it. And I asked David, I was like, “Do what are the chances you’ll come to convention with us?” And he was like, “Yeah, sure.” And I just couldn’t believe it. So we we promoted it. And then the Baltimore guys were like, “Hey, we we saw you bringing Mick

00:50:34
Aligni to the show.” And I was like, “Yeah.” Yeah. And so when we had him, I never seen a line like that, man. I ne I never seen anything in my life. Like I was like, I’m not drawing anything. I’m just going to hang out, watch David. And I’m listening to like, you know, the fans talk about referencing what Mike said about liking one thing. The line of people coming out for him, it was out of control. The amount of stuff, the 40 years of writing comics, just the amount of stuff. And

00:51:02
then he would look at every cover and like talk about, you know, his experience with it. But seeing that seeing that line dedicated to him like within the first 10 minutes of the show, I was like, “Wow.” You know, like it was crazy to see that level of fandom just like militant about getting his signature and meeting him. And that’s beautiful. I love it. Uh there’s a couple questions, boys, I want to start to trim off before we get too deep into the show. There’s a lot of tattoo

00:51:28
questions. All right. And then there’s some questions about how to um get some of your product. So let’s do this first one from our buddy Paul Pate. What up Paul Pate? Paul Pate says, “Is there a progression from small tats to larger ones? Like how big after one year, five year? Is there a scaling in tattoo apprenticing?” Sure. Uh my apprentice is in the chat actually, but I always tell them all the time, don’t draw anything bigger than the palm of your hand because if it looks like crap, you can

00:51:55
cover it up with a bigger piece later. So when you’re starting, you know, on year one and two, you keep them in business card size to palm size and you get good at that because you can control that. If you have a big piece like this, you get overwhelmed. You’re halfway in, you’re sweating, it’s taking three times as long as it normally would and you never get to the top of it. So just right here in the s space. Uh arms and legs are easier. You know what I mean? They’re flatter surfaces. Wouldn’t

00:52:21
recommend starting on a rib or a stomach or a chest. It’s like a weird angle. So yeah, you start small line work first. You got to have the crispy clean line work or it’s it’s garbage. And then you learn the shading and the value system of that and how that works with the inks. And then uh you move into color saturation, you know. And color saturating is like weaving color together like the way you make a barall Prismacolor solid on tracing paper by scrubbing. Yeah. So you kind of do the

00:52:50
interlocking circle in the tattooing back and forth. But remember the dip. You always have to go back and get more pigment because you can’t do it as it runs out into the skin. Goes into the skin, then you’re out of it. So, you’re always dipping and coming in this way and that way to make things solid. But yeah, but by the third year you’ve got it. By the fifth year, you think you’re the [ __ ] And by the 10th year, you’ve have burnout. And then by the 15th year, you get reinvigorated. And then the 20th

00:53:14
year, you’re teaching somebody. Wow. Thanks, Paul. It’s great that I think Steve’s going to be an apprentice. He’s he’s he’s in wrapped attention, right? Is there a So you had to do uh three you said three years of apprentichip. Is that still the case? Is that still is that industry standard? Yeah, it should be. Unfortunately, they sell the equipment on Amazon now. So everybody’s buying it and it’s they went from these like um fire department doorbells like you take

00:53:43
the bell off a fire department, the cap off of it. There’s two coils in it and that was what the tattoo machine was made out of. The coils were mounted. A magnet was applied. 1895 they they figured it out and then now you can buy them in these pens that just come from China and you can like click the needle in and just go and it has no cord. The batteries in it like a vape battery type thing and you can just tattoo all over. But there is a technique that you want to watch somebody do. So to pick it up

00:54:09
it’s kind of tough you know on your own. Wow. Um did that answer your question? I’m sorry. I might No, that was fantastic. What was your first tattoo? Ironically, it was a Greg Iron’s dragon and sword, and I was very proud of that. Uh, and I shaded it wrong. And my mentor came over and was like, “The dark color goes underneath, the light color goes on top.” Right. Right. I was like, “All right, cool.” You know, it was like green, like three green values. So, it’s

00:54:36
something I probably could have went in later and fixed, but they were gone. How the I made money off of, too. How often do you run into old clients or do they kind of find you after a while like, “Look, bro, it’s still holding up.” Yeah, they hit me up. I see them at Walmart, the mall, like the at a concert. Like, I can’t go anywhere without running into someone that I tattooed. And that’s a cool thing, you know, like you become part of the lore. I always wanted to make art that just

00:55:03
outlived me. It didn’t matter to me if it was a sailboat or a back piece. Um, I’d like to be as original as I can. It’s hard to do these days with so much out there. But um yeah, I run into old clients all all the time. Now I’m redo I’m doing like second and third layers on stuff that’s 15 years old. The thing about tattooing is no matter how good you are at it or well known you are, they all do break up and fade over time. And it’s just the nature of the skin. It’s porous, it’s flexing, muscle gain,

00:55:30
weight loss, and so things change and the work changes with it. The sun is a natural enemy to the tattoo. So, you want things to be bold, clean, not too complicated, easily read, you know what I mean? And they usually hold up good. My my work was always bold and large. And if you were like, I want a tattoo on my arm, I’d be like, okay. And I would do your whole arm with the tattoo because I was like, that’s gonna that’s going to live longer than like this little guy. Like right now, right now,

00:55:56
it’s crazy popular to be covered in little ones. And what happens is over time the ink spreads. And anything where the two lines are closer together than the width of a match, they’re going to bleed together eventually, like a marker on a napkin. Like I said, I don’t care how good you are at or how popular you are at it. That’s what happens to all of them. So, you have to think about that design-wise when you’re doing anything. A lot of comic guys will come to me when they find out a tattoo and they want

00:56:20
their like stuff tattooed on them and I have to go over that with them, right? You know, they’ll bring me a Jim Lee page and wants Psylock from Jim Lee and I’m like, there’s too many lines in it. We gota we got to do more of like a Alex Ross version of this, you know, or something like a Bruce Tim where it’s simpler, you know what I mean? Right. They age well, you know, whereas like the the constant cross-hatching just doesn’t. Scott Williams is gonna fall apart, right? Yeah. And my love work.

00:56:45
Uh, all right. There’s a there’s another t question. Uh, our new friend Art by Anna asks, “When you first started tattooing, was there anything you think was harder to draw, harder to tattoo than to draw?” Uh, probably realism, you know. Um, because on a paper, realism, you can kind of like, you know what you’re going to get when you put the mark on the paper if it’s a light wash or if it’s like a hard shadow. And the skin, it has to heal. And so when it heals, it changes. And so when you see

00:57:15
it healed, you’re like, “Oh, that’s like I always air to the light side and I can always darken it later. If it’s dark, I can’t lighten it.” So, um, yeah, seeing realism, uh, shift as it heals. If you do like a portrait of Elvis and you’ve got all the cool greasy forms of his face, you’re doing them in like graywash, they may lighten up and heal and then you lose that whole shadow. And so, you have to do high contrast a lot to like get that look. So I think portraiture is a lot of people do

00:57:44
portraiture because there’s all kinds of tutorials for it now. But I think the transition from doing it on like a watercolor to going to the flesh like you’ve always got to be aware that when it heals it might not look exactly like the day you did it. You might have to go in and like tighten some stuff up. And don’t people use like stencils now? Like you have a really complicated thing you’ll transfer it onto the stencils. Yeah. They’ve always been a part of the process. There used to be acetate that

00:58:10
they would take a razor blade and cut the design in and then shake charcoal powder on it. This is in the 40s and 50s. And they would put the soap on you and then lay the acetate over and the charcoal would leave the stencil and that’s how they would trace those hoola girls and stuff. And then they eventually got a hold of a uh those um zero those thermofaxes from high schools for dittos. Oh, like Yeah. And we’re still using those to this day. um they’re a little more upgraded, but like

00:58:37
yeah, it’s that purple paper that comes out. You shave the skin, you hit it with alcohol to sterilize it, you put this the gel on, and then the paper is like real form. You can form it now and cut it and form it to the shape of the area. But everything’s traced, copied, and then burned through a thermopax to make the transfer. And then the transfer is how you get like if it’s a portrait, I’ll like stipple where the shadows are and stuff and like a pattern. And then I have the reference next to me and I put

00:59:02
the stencil on and then I just like shade it as I look at the reference and kind of recreate it. I was going to ask you a question but it can wait. I want to I got to I want to get Do you do you deal with like different skin? Like people have thin skin, thick skin, you know. Yeah. Yeah. It’s a lot of different stuff. It’s like uh you’ve got like old guys that work outside so their skin’s like turtly like turtle texture and then you’ve got people who are like so fair that you

00:59:31
know white the ink color white shows up on them bright as day. Wow. You have Yeah. You’ll dictate that as you have experience over and over again with a client or you know uh different pigmentations and stuff like that. And I learned a lot about pigmentation in makeup school too. So going into tattooing and understanding the value of like someone who’s Latino or from you know another country or something like that and you know on darker complexions you want to go bigger on lighter complexions you know there’s more

01:00:00
options it’s all different you just try to make the best piece you can for the area some people have blemishes there’s like scarring or something like that you have to work around and uh do are are there a lot of tattoo artists who kind of I kind of come from a couple of worlds like you was like I kind of come from graffiti world too where there are those kind of like rules of engagement like you don’t go over other people’s pieces you know that kind of stuff are there any kind of tattoo rules like that

01:00:30
like unless somebody hire you for a cover up like yeah yeah there are there’s a lot um people will come to me be like a I want to get rid of this and I’m like who did it and they’re like ah I’d rather not say I’m like I need to know because if it’s my friend I’m not going over [Laughter] See, I love it. This is Yeah. So, we do that, you know, like if I I have to work next to my buddy’s stuff all the time. There’s collectors that go around and and they’ll give me like this space to

01:00:56
like wedge in like, you know, a half face of something and you’re like going up to the next piece and you’re like, do I touch it? Do I connect it? Sometimes I’ll talk to these guys like, hey man, I’m working next to this. What do you think? Most guys are like, do whatever you want. You know, I mean, I love you, man. do whatever you want and other guys panic you like don’t get too close to my thing you know right but yeah that there’s a lot of rules in tattooing that you know have been thrown out the window

01:01:23
these days by a lot of new people but the rules are in place for a reason and because it it helps the longevity of your career there the rules are sort of created by the guys that were in the 70s I learned from older guys in the 70s 80s um and there’s there are these rules and I still hold them up I’m teaching them to my apprentice now and I think they matter And I think they help you last long in the business rather than just going for like what you want to get out of it, you know? I guess rules for

01:01:49
outsider art because that’s sort of like juxtapose magazine. I mean, tattooing was, you know, it became mainstream. Yeah. You know, I mean, like all the everybody goes, I want to be uh I want to be uh unique. And then they all go get the same tattoo, wear it, some some Asian symbol that they don’t even know what the hell it means, but they think it’s going to be Yeah. You know, I remember picking up just ju just justosition and noticing when lowbrow tattoo art started making its way into the magazine. And

01:02:25
what had happened was was tattoo convention started in the 70s with Ed Hardy. Ed Hardy was the first guy in tattooing to be considered a tattoo artist. Before that, it was a dermographic practitioner or tattooer or electric modern tattooing. But Hardy went to art school. He went to the Art Institute in San Francisco and got into tattooing kind of like after the fact and was doing the dragons and and things like that. Most people know him now from the clothes, but um he he was the first guy to come in and paint, you know, like

01:02:55
in the tattoo booth. And it was a biker thing. It was a gang thing. It was an old sailor thing. It was a beatnick punk rock thing. And all these weird lifestyles were into it. It’s what I loved the multiculturalism of it all. It’s why I got into it. The last thing I wanted to do was wear a tie and be in an office. I just wanted to hang out with crazy people. And and when when Hardy brought the art in and it became a tattoo art, that’s when it expanded. The conventions expanded. My mentor was at

01:03:18
every convention. He was friends with Hardy. And um like I said, when I got in the 90s, she started seeing like the bands come in and get tattooed. And all of a sudden they started bringing camera crews in. Like Discovery Channel wanted to see what we were up to. And uh everyone was like, “Ah, you know, they’re going to they’re going to chew us up and spit us out now. They’re going to like invade our culture.” And some guys were all about it. Like I’ll talk to you. I’ll show you everything. You

01:03:40
know, and so that’s how the shows came. The shows came out of like 10 years of tattoo conventions all over the country and uh seeing slowly but surely like you know models coming in and celebrities coming in and the camera crews coming in and next thing you know everyone was like how do I get my stuff more known more seen and that’s when that sort of we always wanted it to be from counterculture not necessarily mainstream we wanted to be taken seriously as artists we didn’t want to be like considered criminal and it is a

01:04:12
criminal element. It completely started black and gray tattoos started in jail. They did not start in a tattoo shop. They didn’t think that the black and gray wash would last. So, everyone was doing everything in color. And then the the gang guys got out, opened up shops in SoCal and were doing all black and gray cho stuff and it took over, you know, and so um but we wanted it to be taken seriously as an art form. And then that’s what invited in all this like gallery presentation and crossover into

01:04:38
magazines and oh, I’m an artist also and I paint. I don’t just tattoo and the camera crews and then social media, you know, once that butted in, it was it was the cat was completely out of the cats were completely out of the bag. Yeah. This is so this is so wild. I wanted um while the the questions keep stacking up, but our buddy Pulp to Pixels, welcome to Pencil to Pencil says, “Are you and Ken still doing planning to doing more living quarters? What’s up with the property?” Uh well, we we did

01:05:08
15 straight years of it and um we do have another story we want to do. Um I think you know 2020 kind of killed progression like after working with Molini was like I don’t know how to top that. Like I don’t know how to top that. I just don’t what do you do? You know do you’re not going to resurrect Stan Lee. You know what I mean? And um so yeah we kind of you know 2020 kind of slowed things down and when they fired back up me and Ken had been offered license work. We had done enough living corpse

01:05:36
that like and I’ll tell you like I I I took a a portfolio review with Bob Shrek from DC one time and like maybe 2000 and he said to me, you know, the best business card you can ever give me is your own comic book and it just shattered me and I was like, I’ve been doing the wrong thing, you know? I’ve been showing samples. What am I doing? I ran home, met Ken, and we made the living corpse. But um once we started that, it was like, well, this is all we want to do. We’re just going to make

01:06:05
No one’s telling us what to do. Ken Ken was the professional. I was learning everything osmosis like live verbatim and um we did as much as we could and and after working with Michelini, things slowed down. We got the license work. We had another story written. Uh we had Michelini write another backup story for us. It all kind of sat with getting paid work. You know, we were breaking even. We were breaking even on Corpse. We were running successful Kickstarters, you know. Um but uh we would love to. It’s

01:06:32
just uh you know, you gotta get paid for what you do and I’d rather not take a bunch of money up front and then make it. I’d rather like have it come organically and uh you know, Ken still wants to do it. We talk every day. He’s my best friend. We we we you know, we have all kinds of plans for it. It just depends on if the time’s right. Um obviously with the diamond debacle, it’s like slowed things down on indie level. We I I I work with American Mythology Productions who put out all the horror

01:06:59
licensed stuff I’m working on. and um they they’ve been doing some reprints of Corpse and they would probably put it out for us no problem, but we got to figure out where the industry lands after all this, you know what I mean? There’s a lot of people that are that are upside down on the whole thing. So, um Corpse isn’t going anywhere. I actually have a couple guys that are interested in some live action independent film stuff that has a decent budget to do something. So, there may be

01:07:23
like a YouTube thing that pops up that I’m not going to tell you about now, but it’s there’s always something cooking on it. I wish I wish we could keep doing it, but Ken’s really busy at Dynamite on like every cool license there is, you know what I mean? Like from from uh Darkwing Duck to Gargles and Thundercats and Garbage Pale Kids and we did Grumpy Cat with them over there. Um but yeah, more Corpse in the future hopefully. You know, we’d love to h Has the licensed stuff helped uh bring a crowd at the

01:07:52
horror conventions? Oh yeah, it it took off, you know, because corpse is finite, you know, there’s only so much of it. And um so the license stuff I was doing, Night of Living Dead, Fright Night, Return of Living Dead, Willy’s Wonderland, Patchet, um I forget what else, My Bloody Valentine. And um you know, I was getting on the ground floor with uh James Kahuric over that. He runs American Mythology and we had done some covers for him for Dynamite. He came up in Dynamite. He still works for DF, I

01:08:19
think, or Dynamite. But we talk to him every day, too, you know, and we’re trying to help him keep that company going. Um, a lot of the licenses, you know, were ideas I had. I was like, dude, it’d be great if you could get this, you know, and then we get the license and it’s kind of like a headache to deal with, but we do it anyway, you know. Um, so yeah, the horror license stuff flies off the table, you know. It’s it’s only covers, you know, the the scale wasn’t enough for me to jump in on

01:08:42
interiors. I would love to and I was it was all offered to me but I just couldn’t keep up with it with like the tattooing also. So I’m happy to do the covers and be a part of the the the horror production stuff. Well, before we go any further, you got to talk about other media. Oh yeah. So um it’s real here this is really a weird thing that happened when we were on MySpace promoting the as the character and acting like the living corpse and talking to people and doing like sketch giveaways and all this stuff. Uh, I was

01:09:11
invading forums and chat rooms and I and I end up running across a visual effects director named Justin Ritter who was a good friend of mine and um I didn’t know him before I met him but he become a good friend of mine and he um he used to work for Roger Corman and I was a big fan of all that old sci-fi horror stuff from the 60s that Corman had done and we were like you know he hit me up and he was like man I love this little zombie thing you got. He’s like is there any chance you’re making it into like a

01:09:36
comic or a movie? And I was like well it’s a comic in production. the first issue is not even done yet, but like what is this movie thing you’re talking about? And he was a director and he he ended up helping us sell the rights to Morris Ruskin, who was a producer at Shoreline Entertainment, and he was a um Oscar award-winning producer on Glengary Glenn Ross. And so I knew right away I was dealing with real people, right? Not messing around with some talk, right? And uh we fought with them for a while

01:10:05
over the contract because I knew about this stuff from being a makeup guy. And uh Justin was really cool. He negotiated it all really well. Morris was really cool to work with, but it was like we were dealing with a third or fourth generation Hollywood producer. So they were like, you know, they knew exactly what they wanted out of us. They wanted you to sign the boiler plate and lose the licensing, right? Yeah. They they their contract said the word forever, right? I swear. I swear it did. Not even in

01:10:35
perpetuity is forever. Forever, dude. Forever. Ever. Yeah. Or they or they’ll put something in like in all the known universe. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Um amazing. But uh so I I went back and forth. I was savvy. I had already worked on movie stats. I had already like I I could hang, you know, and um but I did not know contracts that well, the legal ease. The second movie we did on another property I was way more savvy on. We basically were in a race because they were try I didn’t know this at the time

01:11:06
but they were going back and forth between the living corpse and us and Ben Temple Smith and Wormwood Gentleman Corpse and I didn’t know that at the time. They just said they had another guy they were talking to. I didn’t know if he was nobody or somebody and they were not going to tell me who and um I had a lot of respect for Ben and his work on 30 days and what he was doing with Wormwood and but they chose us because Image was just too hard to work with and Image I think was put in the book out at the

01:11:31
time. Image wanted 6% of royalties and we we took one and I took one because I knew that Marvel only got two from the Sam Ramy Spider-Man. So I was like there’s no way they’re ever going to give you six. You know what I mean? There’s no way. So, we can lose the deal or we can take the one. And that’s what Justin said. He’s like, “Take the one. The next deal will be better. If you don’t take the one, you don’t get another deal for 10 more years.” And so, we took we took the one. And it took me

01:11:59
a while to convince Ken. And they they tried to get me to cut Ken out. And I was like, “You ain’t got nothing from me.” That’s how they That’s how they get you. That’s how they get We really like you, man. We like working with you. And I’m like, “That’s cool. I can’t do the book without him. It’s that simple. The answer is no. There’s no deal. And I walked. And then two days later, they walked and they were like, “All right, fine. We’ll do it.” And I knew they

01:12:22
would do that, too. That’s a friendship killer right there. Dude, I had read so much comic history about that stuff. It was impossible that I would ever let it occur to me and my buddy who did this. There’s impossible. And I think that comes from the tattoo thing, the respect and tattooing. I just had it. I have it for you guys. I just had it. I’m not losing it. No fame, no nothing is going to take away the the pride and the the due diligence of that those relationships. They’re the

01:12:52
foundation, you know. But eventually they balked and worked with us anyway. And the movie movie was horrible. It was, you know, poor animation. They I told them forever. I’m like, “Please do live action with a guy in a rubber suit because that stuff ages for all time, right? People are still watching the old Godzillaas. You’re still watching Ultra Man. you’re still watching, you know, Andre the Giant as Bigfoot and B and you know, the Bionic Man or whatever. It’s like it’ll last. And they just were

01:13:18
like, “We’re gonna animate it.” And I’m like, “Gh, it’s dead.” And so we just Ken was like, “Let’s just focus on the book.” So we focused on the book and we were we help with the movie a little bit, but it did come out. It did see fruition. It ended up on Blu-ray. It was at Redbox. It it you know, they made the dist at distribution. Yeah, distribution is hard. Making the movie is not as hard. Not Not nearly as hard. So Lionsgate picked it up. Justin had some

01:13:41
connections in Germany to the Lionsgate division. They went they went for it immediately. But we we we had done this thing where like Justin went I think to Korea to to bring animators back to to make it better and then DreamWorks stole him from us. Offered him a dollar more and it was like we lost the whole crew and the animation tanked and it sucked, man. It broke it broke my homie Justin and uh he he did everything he could. We did get to go to San Diego for like a premiere, which was our first time there

01:14:09
and the last time there. Um, but and they went all out, you know, and I was standing in the in a condo, million-dollar condo with the producers and and I look like this, you know what I mean? Like, I should I’m not hanging out with these guys, man. You know, they’re like, “What’s your attitude about?” I’m like, “I don’t have an attitude.” And it was like the East Coast thing. Like, they just couldn’t get it. You know what I mean? Yeah. I’m standing there with him and I’m doing

01:14:30
all the press. I did all the press. kill everything for him because I’ve always been the Jay and Ken’s always been the Silent Bob and um the producers like like Lex Luthther looking out the window over all of San Diego and he’s like man if I would have known you guys were going to drag out all these people to the premiere I would have put more money into the movie and I was like well you know hindsight’s 2020 and you know I tried to tell you what you had you right but it’s funny because we had uh Scott

01:14:57
Savo on here last week and we’re talking about the the uh what is it Mirage of Hollywood. Yeah. And it’s great when we have, you know, people come from comics and you get into that world and you kind of see quickly like, well, maybe it the juice isn’t worth the squeeze all the time. Yeah. You know, some people lose their whole seen a lot of guys. I mean, I watched, you know, Eric Pal fight for years to get his movie made, and he deserved a movie more than we did. We didn’t have a

01:15:25
comic book done yet. We were still putting it together. Yeah. It’s it’s it’s a they don’t really know what’s a hit until it hits. They want to know. They just don’t know. And I’ll be honest with you, too, everyone investing in the movies has a side hustle. They’re not just movie producers. They run real estate. They do this. They do that. So, everyone’s in there using smoke and mirrors to make it look like something that it isn’t. I like that. I’m a I went

01:15:50
to theater school, you know what I mean? Like, I’m cool with pretending that it’s something, you know what I mean? Um, but uh, yeah, they they just don’t know what’s a hit. They never read the book, you know what I mean? Like they don’t know, right? You hear you hear it all the time. Yeah. But I was like, I’m not missing this shot because you just never know. And even though it was kind of like we did a premiere down at Third Eye Comics, everyone’s laughing at the movie. We were embarrassed, but we but

01:16:13
the book was strong. Like the book was still good, you know? It was a very very cool uh comic and people like that. You know, they liked us and we drew a lot of sketches and stuff. You know, I wish it would have done a little better, but you know, you get what you get and you you just keep going. You know, we we all we never lost sight of the fact it was just supposed to be a comic book. It was supposed to be a movie, too. That was like right something extra that I was like entertaining and pushing and and it

01:16:37
worked and it went through. So, it was a good experience. We did do a second movie called Little Dead Rotting Hood, which was like a play off of Little Red Riding Hood. And I had pitched this comic idea to Zenoscope because they were the first ones to publish The Living Living Corpse. We had gotten that publishing deal through the movie. Those guys are from Hollywood. So, they wanted to they wanted to do um the movie stuff, so they thought they were going to like piggyback us. So, they put out six

01:17:02
issues. And then eventually we broke our contract with them because we just were a bad fit. You know, they’re cheesecake art and goofy cartoony zombie stuff. It just didn’t work. And then, uh we got in with Dynamite. They put it out. But, uh yeah, we just stayed true to the comic. You know, when the movie flunked, we were just like, let’s go do another book. And we did. We went from a flop movie to a 160 page graphic novel in three years. Wow. And we rocked it. And there’s someone out there who was given

01:17:26
this was was offered the chance uh to make their movie if they cut out their friend and then they cut out their friend and they made that awful awful, you know, I knew I had a good idea it was going to be bad anyway. And I don’t care. I like bad movies, you know. Is it Is it fun? Is it Would you would you recommend we we check it out? Oh, no. No. Don’t watch it. Okay. Hey, it’s not it’s not a mystery. What’ you say, Mike? It’s not MS MS3. Oh, yeah. No, I would love for those

01:17:58
guys to do our movie. I would I would like my movie better if Joel got back up in that seat and did that joint. And again, that’s what you’re talking about is something that fans have no idea about why things work and don’t and don’t work, you know, because you may have a guy that’s got the checkbook, has no idea. I mean, they’re not horror fans. They’re not Del Toro, right? Who knows comics? Who knows? Horror, right? You know, if you if you’re with Sam Ramy, if you’re

01:18:38
somebody like that, then it may not have the budget that you want, but at least you know the person understands the source material, right? Yeah. It’s it’s ironic. Ted Ramy actually contacted us uh in 2015. He was interested in doing a live action show for it and then um so we were so excited we just gave him everything we had in the graphic the next graphic novel that was about to come out. And in issue four, Corpse wakes up in an asylum and it was all a dream. He was never a zombie. He was just insane. And um Ted

01:19:10
eventually sort of disappeared from our chat and I was like, I guess he’s moved on to something else. And then when Ash versus Evil Dead came out, season two, and he was in the show, episode four, Ash wakes up in an asylum and it was all a dream. I swear, dude. I’m on the the producer calls me right away and is like, Ted stole the thing or whatever and I’m like, I can’t I don’t know what to You brought Ted in. That’s Hollywood. That’s right. And he brought he brought Ted

01:19:37
Ramy into the conversation. We were just like, “Okay, I’m throwing a Hail Mary because I love Evil Dead.” And Sam Ramy is like one of my biggest influences. I’m not missing this. Here’s everything we have. And then they were like, “Well, they could only steal what you show them.” And I’m like, well yeah, you know, but like we were stealing from evil dead already. So it’s like, okay, like the underbite on living corpse comes from evil ash from Army of Darkness. So that we were is you know,

01:20:02
one hand washes the other on it, but it really happened. You know, like you’re like, “Here’s our chance. We finally made it into Remy.” And then it still flunks. Well, there’s that stuff in ET. Yeah. That came from Dave Stevens. You told me that at Lehigh Valley Comic- Con one year. I never forgot it. Yeah. and and uh supposedly the story I heard is Spiel he was pitching it’s Spielberg saw it and he basically stole it but I think he gave Dave storyboard work or whatever and

01:20:34
basically was like they’ll pay you out for it right yeah don’t that’s what Hollywood does they just buy it they just steal from each other right that’s why now you can’t even go and see some people if you don’t have an agent because of that, right? I Rick I I didn’t have an agent for any of this, man. I didn’t even know you needed an agent until 2022. I didn’t I just was rocking it, you know what I mean? And then I was like bored because the show was dead for me. And I

01:21:05
went over to Scott Dumbire or is it Dumbierre or went over to him and I was like, “You’re doing portfolio reviews?” He’s like, “Yeah, I bring over four portfolios.” Like I’m like, “Go through my stuff, man. I want to hear like what you got to say.” and and uh he was like going through everything and he was like right away he was like, “Ah, you [ __ ] up already. You’re showing me old stuff.” And I was like, “Well, that’s all I got.” You know, so he reviewed it

01:21:24
anyway and he looked through it. I’m like waiting for him to trash me, man. I’m the youngest guy in line. There’s all these guys from like South America getting reviews and I’m like, I’m waiting to hear all the negative and he didn’t have one negative thing to say. And he was like comparing me to Plus Head and some other guys and stuff like that. And I was like, I love all that stuff. And he was like, “Yeah.” He’s like, “You know what you need to do? you

01:21:45
need to go over to uh he’s like you need to meet this dude Felix at Felix Comic Art. He’s like you tell him I sent you. And I was like really and I was like all right cool. So two months I like was stewing on it like should I send him my stuff? You know then I sent him the stuff and he was like hey man stuff looks great. He’s like but my client list is so long I got a waiting list. So I did all that work with no agent just to get to a point where I found that I needed an agent then got sent to the big

01:22:08
agent and then it was too late. But it was still cool to get the good review because I mean I’ve been I’ve been listening to the guys that I love trash my [ __ ] for 20 years. So well Buzz, how does that shape you going into the future like now that you’re kind of uh pointing in another direction? Are you kind of like building up your reserves like you know let me let me line up a good agent and you know some entertainment lawyers for the next round? I don’t know the first thing

01:22:35
about it and I’m happy to get some advice, you know, later from all three of you. Just send me a message or something if it’s in your head, crawl. I’m kind of looking at it all, you know, my in 2023, we had a family scare. My wife survived a massive brain tumor and uh she’s great, you know, now, but like it kind of slowed me down to just kind of like, okay, I just did all this stuff. And even Ken is like, dude, I think I’m done with conventions. I think I’m going to sit back a bit and just do

01:23:04
this license stuff. And then I got the license stuff. And so we just been chilling. Um I got a I got a pitch out with a buddy now for adapting a novel for paid work. But you know, I I’m not jumping into anything, you know, that I’m not like either getting paid for or I’m like all about because I kind of just did the last 15 years of like extreme running, right? All this stuff, you know what I mean? Right. I also love that we’re at a stage where you have options. Yeah. Yeah. Say, “No, no

01:23:33
thanks.” Yeah. I do a lot of covers, you know, I do a lot of like exclusive prints for people because they’re quick and I’m tattooing still. Um I would love to work on another Living Corpse book with Ken, but I won’t do it without him. I refuse to. Um you know, we we we we develop stuff on the side for fun. You know, we do page layouts, three or four page layouts for something or concept something out, just kind of sit on it. But yeah, I think we’re just sort of waiting to see what happens with the

01:23:58
Diamond thing and the in and the book distribution. Then I’m going to know what I’m going to do next. You know what I mean? Like how that’s going to go. There was something that just dropped an hour or two before the show where Diamond now is supposedly from what I heard I saw posted that they’re going to start selling people’s stock, which they’re not supposed to be able to pay. Yeah. They’re not paying the publishers and they’re selling the books anyway, right? And now they’re all

01:24:25
finding out I have not been getting paid on three or four invoices and they’re just selling them anyway and they’re going to comic shops and being like, “Hey, are you selling books through them because they’re my books.” So there’s like a Yeah, there’s like a last minute kind of stabbing happening, you know, at the end of the end of all this. I don’t know where it’s going to land. You know, we we only sell maybe 2500 copies of something. So we’re super low. I don’t

01:24:46
know if somebody’s going to pick us up or not, but Khurk is a diehard. He he’ll figure it out. He always finds a way to stay alive in it. and I’m just in his corner, you know? I’m his cut man. Like, let’s do this, let’s do that. You know what I mean? We have fun working together and it’s enough work for me to stay in comics with him. And because Ken’s over at Dynamite. Yeah. Well, it seems like the print is just going to remain choppy. So, it seems like if you’re going to do

01:25:15
stuff now, you might have to look at, you know, doing web comics or or doing stuff on YouTube or, you know, I think that’s just sort of the way everything is moving now. I mean, yeah, because if you can’t get your idea, you’ve got to put your idea where the most eyeballs are. And if the most eyeballs are no longer in comic book stores, right, it’s, you know, and then you’re either doing what? you’re doing a Kickstarter or a you know there’s a lot there’s a lot of old media that’s really

01:25:47
struggling now Hollywood is struggling animation is struggling people I know haven’t had work in a couple of years top level people haven’t work you know they’re putting on their Instagram and their blue skies hey I’m looking for work right people that never had to look for work I know right so I think We’re really at a at a at a point and then you’ve got the whole AI thing on top of that. Yeah. Right. You know, people are going to start making AI comics. They’re going to try to Yeah.

01:26:22
Right. And you know, they’re they’re they’re doing AI animation already. I see tons of stuff on my Instagram the last month. There’s all this superhero stuff where they’re doing, you know, fanfiction stuff with AI. It’s a big lawsuit coming after Mid Journey right now from uh Universal and Disney. It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out. You know, I don’t know how you put the toothpaste back in the tube, but Well, I think what they’ll do is what they will do is they will settle it

01:26:53
where they get a customdesigned software by those companies that works for Disney or works for Right. Yeah. They do the military thing where they just the government, they just absorb it. Yeah. Right. They’ll say, “Okay, we won’t sue you, but you gotta work for us. You gotta you gotta make this stuff for us, right?” Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I think I I personally I’m not really into AI. To me, it’s dull. Um I I’m a original art collector myself. I’m surrounded by

01:27:25
Kevin Eastman, Jay Lee, Sakai. I have it all over my house. I love original art. So, when I look at AI, I’m like, “Yeah, it’s going to have its run. You know, it’s going to do this or do that and it’s going to take over this and blah blah blah.” But I I I think people are eventually going to get bored of it and some people won’t. Some people are looking for pre I just I’ve been friends with a guy at Pixar and he the first thing he asked me when he found out I drew comics was are you doing AI? I’m

01:27:47
like no. He’s like out there there’s this moral compass that they’re trying to wrestle into position to be able to get permission to use AI be cool with it. And I personally feel like it’ll do its thing, but I I just it all looks the same to me. Like I kind of get tired of seeing and it’s like that metal song that you can’t understand the lyrics to or read the logo and the whole album sounds like that. Like for one or two songs to rage out to then I’m like, “Dude, turn that off.” Yeah. Wet. It all

01:28:17
looks wet. Yeah. It looks wet and drippy and like it’s covered in oil and I like that. It all looks wet. All right. That’s a great segue into lightning round question. Pooa time. So Buzz, you know how this works for all of your uh people that came in on the slipstream uh because you’re on tonight. Let’s explain how this work. Stone Cold Steve Connley is going to ask Buzz a barrage of questions from the chat and Buzz is going to give us tight snacksiz answers and then and then we’re going to

01:28:49
w start wrapping up. Steve, you have the floor. All right, here we go. I’m just going to take it from the top. There’s going to be no order here. Don’t expect a theme or any rhyme or reason, but we’re going to start with Paul Pate from YouTube. Hello, Paul. Are face tattoos only done by very senior artists? And are butt tattoos done by beginners? He asked a good question before, but he so he earned this one. Face tattoos I don’t do until you’re completely tattooed. So, you have to earn your

01:29:17
bodysuit before I’ll put it on your face. If you come in and have a face tattoo and a hand tattoo, I call it the warp to sleeve because when you take your hoodie off, you don’t have any other tattoos. You’re just trying to look like hard right away. So, you have to earn your hardness by getting like hard areas done first. When it comes to butts, I try not to do them. I have done them. They’re very tender like on the skin and uh it’s just not like the most pleasing thing to do. So, I’d rather

01:29:41
wait for like the next skull to come in or something. Fa fantastic. Uh I’m still on the butt part. Uh Pete Fe features on YouTube. Do you still do monster makeup? Every Halloween I usually go pretty hard like on on makeup and I’m teaching my youngest stepdaughter now how to do it at 16. And uh I still keep stock of like the morticians wax and the latex. And I’m constantly thinking of like costumes to make. I have like a bat creature now sculpted that’s just been sitting fully sculpted, rendered. Um yeah, I’m always

01:30:13
doing something. My house looks like Halloween year round. It’s It’s stupid. But did that did that school also include like things like armatures and mechanical uh bits? Yeah, I got more into actual makeup application like lawn cheny, not so much the servo stuff and RC stuff because as I went to Hollywood in Canada, they only look for guys who are like masters at one thing to do that job. There’s a set of dentures that need made. They get a guy who’s like awesome at making dentures. And so like I I was

01:30:42
more of like a a little bit of everything. And so I learned kit makeup, which is like the lawn cheney thing where you come in with like a box of stuff and just start making somebody into something is what I mostly still do. Wow. So I feel like with that stuff, the old stuff, if you cast it in light and shadow, it still looks just as cool as the most expensive high-tech sculpted silicone thing ever in full light, you know. Wow, that’s great. Uh, thank you for that question. Uh, P fe Fatures, uh,

01:31:08
John Meny on YouTube, does your style change when shifting between skin and paper? Like in what ways does a tattoo gun change your approach to a piece? Well, yeah. Um, usually we’ll go simpler in the tattoo. Not like again in comics you can line and texture and splatter and put little textures and stuff and go over with white. In tattooing you want to keep things high contrast and simplified. Um, I we we call it a tattoo machine, not a gun. So that’s like not related to anything criminal or anything

01:31:38
like that. But uh yeah, I think I try to I I flesh out shapes like you do, you know, in comics. I do the same thing with a tattoo design if it’s like a dagger next to a skull with a leaf coming in or something like that. So I still draw in blue line like as a tattoo artist which just kind of like stuck with me and everyone always asked me that but and then I explained the whole non-photo thing. So yeah, I do a lot of rough sketches in blue paper. I don’t really draw on an iPad. It just doesn’t

01:32:04
it feels alien to me. I I can and you know I think people do cool stuff on it but the style shift is in simplicity more using shading for value versus like uh contour lines or cross-hatching to develop the value. That’s great. That’s great. Thanks for the question, John. Uh oh, sorry my my machine hiccup there. Uh is a question from Michael. Hello Michael on YouTube. Uh, is there an issue with licenses and and IP usage for tattoos? A lot of people have tried to create an issue with that because tattooing so

01:32:41
popular. They’ve tried to make an issue about it. It doesn’t really go anywhere because the sovereignty of the individual wearing the tattoo is who you have to go after. And the choice to do that is kind of free will. And so it’s it’s such a a thin line area. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen it happen with photography. like a photographer who has like a really famous picture and then like a really famous tattooer will do the tattoo and then the photographer is like I want some money for using the

01:33:08
picture but like it doesn’t really hold up in court. I don’t I don’t think it many things have resulted from it. That’s interesting. Uh thanks. If anything if anything there’s more plagiarism on design than there is on anything else. You can have an artist who has a style that is very signature to them and many many people will just bootleg that thing and tattoo the same exact thing. That is more of a fiery subject than tattooing Mickey Mouse. Mickey Disney at one point tried to stop

01:33:35
uh official tattoo brand Flash, the Flash on the walls. They tried to stop people from putting Mickey on it, but it’s like, you know, the toothpaste is out of the tube. So, so it’s it’s the other tattoo artists who have created something unique, someone ripping that off, that’s kind of the bigger faux paw. That’s like that’s a very big faux paw. And there’s the only way to really handle it is in person with fisticuffs. And uh some people do, you know, I kind of look at it like, well, I’ve already

01:34:01
done it and put it out there, so I’m on to the next thing. But other people get pretty salty, especially if they’re limited in skill set on style. If they have like one thing they do well, they get a little they get a little territorial around it. I do all styles, so I don’t I just move. That’s great. Uh Eternity Forever, hello on YouTube. Do you recommend practicing on pig skin first? Pig skin. Uh so pig skin goes bad in a couple days. It’ll start to smell real bad in your shop. So, you got to

01:34:28
get it tattooed and get it done and get it outside so it can cure. I have done them. You have to nail them to wood or it’ll just curl up like dried flesh. Whoa. Are there artificial surfaces to practice on? There are now. There wasn’t when I was learning. When I was learning, I just got two hillbillies that didn’t care what it looked like and I just tattooed two guys until they started looking good. And I’m still tattooing one of them to this day. Um, but there’s fake skin now. There’s fake

01:34:53
limbs. Um, silicone is very difficult to tattoo, but it it is emulative of it. You can get a start there. Obviously, you don’t have like a laundry list of people outside that are willing to be like plunk down and and get a piece. So, you got to do something. Pig skin’s a little harder to come by. You got to go to the butcher. Um, it’s slippery, too. So, like as you’re working on pig skin, it’s like sliding all over the place. Whereas, like the silicone um is non-reactive, so it’s like right there.

01:35:17
The pig skin does take the ink like real skin, though. But I don’t like to deal with a lot of like rotten meat in the shop, you know, after after a while. Do you kind of like dry that out? Make some cracklins for the shop. Yeah. I have a wolf head I did for my wife that I like nailed to like a like a plaque and it’s still in the house somewhere, but it just turns kind of clear and hard. It doesn’t really doesn’t hold up. You you can put it in a jar with embalming fluid and it’ll like float forever in there

01:35:43
and you can look at it whenever you want. You’re blowing Steve’s mind. Fantastic. Halloween year round is what I’m hearing. That’s fantastic. You can do a very realistic portrait of somebody’s face and then put it in a jar. That’d be cool. Like optical illusion. Yeah. All right. Going to going over to comics leaving tattoos behind for me. Uh pulp the pixels on the YouTube. When you and Ken work together, how do you keep the style so consistent when I know you guys swap inking and penciling duties? That’s

01:36:12
a great question because in the early days for the Zero issue which was black and white from Kablam to the first issue which was full color from Zenoscope we had this idea that we were going to switch duties. We plotted everything together. He would do thumbnails. I would blow them up and pencil them. And then the next issue we were going to flip. And what we realized about two issues in that we were like all right what works best is this. You know we plot together. Ken does thumbnails. I do the pencils. His inking was cleaner than

01:36:42
mine and I just liked the way it looked and printed. I was still in that McFarland era putting too much in there and so he had that slick simplified look and I liked it and I learned clean inking from watching him ink the pencils and so we just felt that that was that was the way to go. So from layout to pencil um we have the same artistic influences. My my comics were always organized by artist, not by title. And so we drew together all the time. And you know, he had ways of doing things and I would

01:37:12
like swipe it and and do it too. And so it just we just osmosis symbiotically kind of had the same style. And I love that about our relationship and the work. And the only thing the only bad side to it was people were getting us confused all the time like who was who. There aren’t a lot of Yeah, there aren’t a lot of teams like that. That’s that’s that’s fantastic. Um, thanks for the question, Paulixels. Uh, we got uh Jason uh Katraniano on YouTube. Buzz, describe your dream project and what

01:37:42
kind of team you’d pull together for it. That is an awesome question and a big dream to put together. Uh, I’d probably work with like Jamaras, the crew here, the crew on this show. Um, I don’t know, man. I’ve never really thought about it. I think I’m already working on some dream stuff with the horror licenses. I always wanted to do comics and horror somehow. So, I think I’m kind of achieving it with that. Um, and I’d love to do more corpse and bring uh guys in that I look up to as artists,

01:38:16
too. I’d love to have guys at some point draw the character. You know, I have a sketchbook, actually, that is almost completely full of sketches of Living Corpse from every comic book artist I get my hands on. Mike’s done one. I gotta get one from you, Steve, if like if you’re around. Jamar’s in there a couple times. So, I love to see that all these guys like doing the character. Perez did one. Eric Pal Eric Pal did one and was like, I’m not sketching. And somebody somehow got a sketch from him

01:38:41
for me for the book. Um, I’ve got a William Stout one, which is awesome because he’s like the Torman zombie guy from Return of the Living Dead, the designer, and everybody knows him, you know, from comics. But, so that was a dream to have that. So yeah, I think doing another living corpse thing and then bringing in all the friends, you know, everybody wants to do one page or something. That’s great. That’s great. Thanks for the question, Jason. Uh oh boy, what is that one? Uh how about

01:39:08
this one? Uh Pulpixels has a followup. Where can people pick up your books like the Hex Files book? So uh you can get them from me. Hit me up on Instagram at Buzz Corpse. I’ll be happy to fill the bag with swag for you. Um, after years of having other people put it out and not seeing the money, I was like, we’re going to Kickstarter. And then after doing like a lot of great stuff on Kickstarter and having a lot of fun over there, um, we just been kind of doing them oursel and, uh, keeping it limited

01:39:34
runs. That’s one thing I learned from, uh, a lot of guys in the biz was, you know, the indie guys, like just doing short runs, keeping it simple, and um, making it limited, you know what I mean? Not like doing 5,000 copies like sitting in my attic getting wet, you know? thousand copies, you know, stuff like that. So, yeah, you can hit me up is the prices aren’t crazy. I think I sell the hex files for five bucks, you know what I mean? Like, if you want Ken to sign it, you got to find him. He’s in Jersey

01:39:59
somewhere. If you want make a line to sign it, good luck. You know what I mean? Like, I have a stack of them. You guys can hit me up. I don’t have everything. We We have been around a while enough that I’ve just sold out of stuff. You know, you can get stuff on eBay, some of the first trades, some of the first six issue minis. Um, but I have plenty of hex files. That’s great. Uh, and we got some uh more tattoo questions kind of snuck in here. Uh, do you recommend tattooing yourself to

01:40:24
practice? Well, you have, Dio, quite a bit for 10 years. So, uh, yeah, I mean, you can if you have the dedication to drop down on yourself and do that. I got a lot of respect for that. That that’s quite a thing, you know what I mean? Um, but yeah, it’s a it’s a great place to start if you can tolerate the pain. But, you know, it the angles are weird, so you’re limited to what you can do on yourself, so it’s easier to do it on other people. It’s kind of like pulling your own teeth. You know, you’d want

01:40:49
somebody else to pull your tooth. You don’t want to pull your own tooth out. Yeah. Dio has moved on to uh not He does still tattoo himself and he’s actually killing it. He’s doing really good. That’s amazing. Thanks for the question. Dio did. Uh I think you touched on this. Oh, you mentioned this. Uh P features asked, “Hey Buzz, are you open to having an apprentice?” I think I got I got one right now and he’ll be my apprentice until I’m probably done tattooing. I

01:41:14
don’t know if I can do two because I’m starting kind of late. But um my mentor told me my art was good, but he took me on to teach me how to tattoo for one reason because after talking to me, he felt like I was someone who could teach. And I was really young when I heard that and I was like, I’m not really want to be a teacher. I want to be an artist. And but it all these years later it like came back into my crawl space like oh yeah you know he was like talking about that and he said and there’s no no point

01:41:43
me teaching a tattoo if you can’t teach somebody else and pass it on. And so yeah so one one great apprentice is worth more to me than six bad ones you know that go and open up a business down the street. That’s great. Uh El Jamal who I just saw in Heroes Con and uh again just didn’t recogn He had gray. I didn’t expect it. I didn’t expect it. threw me off. Very gray. Very gray. Somehow we’ve all gotten a little bit older. Uh how many jars uh do you have? I presume a business of formaldahhide and uh and

01:42:13
faces. I don’t have any, but I have left a few at shops in the past. Um I should probably do one. Uh and and this question I I think Jimar just put this in here to taunt me. Uh Jared Warmarmac, hello Jared on YouTube. Will uh you tattoo me live on the stream next time. That’s maybe not next time, but we can always do it if you want. You come to the shop. It’s a cool spot. Uh and that’s lightning round. You did it. You survived. I love it. Good job. Uh Buzz, we’re gonna start wrapping you up. We had a

01:42:48
time tonight. I I have a I have a couple really quick questions for you and then we’ll we’ll let you get out of here. Uh we’ve had an exciting time. Uh people were really engaged and really enthused by your career. Uh even talking about tattoo art which um there’s some really interesting overlap that I don’t think a lot of people think about and that’s why we bring these pros on. Um I wanted to ask you about how kind of like tattooing is I don’t want to say trending because

01:43:17
that sounds like very like go but like it’s popular now. Like a lot of stuff that was very underground is very popular now. And now uh with horror, I’m starting to see horror is trending too. Yeah. Like like like uh uh JunjiIo uh horror manga and things like that. How do you how do you feel about the genre like bubbling up? I think it I I think it lets in a lot of the like you get a little too much of it and it starts to all kind of mix together and be the same. Mhm. Um, I don’t want to downplay

01:43:52
anybody’s efforts to do it, but uh, I come from like a cult classic background. I worked in VHS stores. I’m still collecting VHS. There’s VHS festivals at drive-ins. I’m still a part of the nerdy niche underground of it. And now that it’s like trending, you know, I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing, but it you just have to it’s there’s so much coming out. So, like what might look cool when you get into it is like, oh, this isn’t as good as I thought it was going to be. And there’s

01:44:19
a lot of that, you know what I mean? So, um, horror is where Hollywood started. Their first big blockbuster movies were Frankenstein and Dracula. It’s the first crossover universe. We talk about it a lot on the podcast, uh, on the that comic podcast about it being the first crossover universe. And they make it it, you know, entertainment made its boom in in horror. And so, I think it’s always going to have a place. I think there’s always going to be new people coming in. There’s a lot of cool stuff happening.

01:44:44
People are making movies with iPhones now and stuff like that. Um, my I think my take on it is is just put some substance in there, you know, make it come from a place that like, you know, is a story worth telling instead of just retelling other stuff verbatim, you know, because that will catch on to, but there’s a lot of it, you know, it can kind of when things get saturated, things get a little dull. So, uh, I I’d say look, when we were doing corpse, we always tried to come from a perspective of what

01:45:12
are we not seeing? So, let’s make something we’re not seeing. You know, we didn’t see a comic book where the zombie was the main character other than like Simon Gar or things like that, you know. So, we made that character for that reason. So, I think when it comes to horror, you want to add to it, not just detract and copy. So, so bring in like folklore, you know, all science fiction is coming from folklore, you know, so bring in something that you haven’t seen that you’re not seeing a lot of and try

01:45:39
to do that as an idea is what I would suggest to people that want to do horror or the horror scene. When it comes to the collectivity or the fandom, I love it. The more fans the better, you know, makes this makes it look like a Kiss concert of horror, you know. I love it. All right, last thing for me. Shout out your podcast. So, I know you just spoke on it quickly, but you want to go into a little more detail podcastpodcast.com and we’re on Instagram. We’re on all media platforms. Really cool show over

01:46:05
there. We cover news, what’s trending. Uh, everybody’s reading new books on Wednesday and reviewing them. Um, and and those titles change. Some of us read the same book, some of us read different books. We post every day. We love comments, negative and positive. So, hang out with us. Say your peace. join in and and and and join the party, if you will, cuz we’re just fans that, you know, are so passionate about this stuff that we get together once a week just to catch up on like what we’re into, what’s

01:46:32
new, what’s hot, what’s dumb, you know what I mean? And just kind of goof on stuff like that. But yeah, that comic podcast. Thanks, man. All right. Thank you. And one last uh twirl around the sun. Please follow Buzz on Instagram. You killing it on the gram. I love it, Buzz. We had a fantastic time hanging out with you tonight. We’d love to have you back. Tell Ken come come with you next time. I’ll try to twist him into it. He’s being camera shy this time, but we’ll forgive him. Um, yeah, I know.

01:47:02
That’s my man. I know. I love you guys. You know, thank you for all of you. Yeah, we’re down the road for a long time, buddy. And I’m just I’m glad to see you flourishing and I look forward to whatever happens next. All right. All right. Sorry. All right. We’re gonna let you get out of here. We got let’s do our outros and we’ll go. Guys, thank you so much. We’ll see you next week. We don’t know what we’re doing yet. You’ll be the first to know. Thank you for hanging out

01:47:25
with us. And we’re at the end of the road, you guys. So, make sure you wash those Kirby hands. Put those Kirby hands up, Buzz. There you go. All right, guys. That was great. Thank you. See you next See you next week. See you next week.

PETER A DELUCA AKAPD

AKAPAD is a versatile thinker known across Philadelphia, Europe, and even in the vast Multiverse as The Electic One. By day, he excels as an IT Mastermind, assisting individuals, both big and small, with a wide range of simple and complex solutions. In contrast, he is also a talented illustrator, a passionate comic book enthusiast, a creative content creator, and an active live streamer. Additionally, his podcast, “AKAPAD The Film Buff Podcast,” boasts an impressive catalog of over 500 episodes available on nearly every major platform.