Fan Expo 2014: Geekpr0n chats with Leonard Kirk
Leonard Kirk is as much of a fan as he is a talent. His enthusiasm for comics and science fiction shows in everything he does. He is the man behind the pencil of the Marvel NOW! Fantastic Four, but his work has also graced the pages of such heroes as Batman and Supergirl, not to mention his long run on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Here is a little bit about him in his own words:
Geekpr0n: If you weren’t an artist, what would you do?
Leonard Kirk: I enjoyed acting a lot in high school, so I looked at something like that but didn’t really follow through. I enjoyed math, I enjoyed physics, I looked at doing something like that, I also looked at teaching. When I started working in comics, I had actually graduated with my bachelors and thought, well I’ll take a year off and see if comics takes off and if it doesn’t I’ll go back for my masters and teaching certificate and make something of that…I hadn’t really hadn’t put a lot of thought into another career, a little but not a lot, just because I think I pretty much decided that this is what I want to do around age 12. Either [comics] or be an astronaut, but as it turns out I’m terrified of heights.
GP: You knew you wanted to work in comics when you were 12, what defined that for you?
LK: I don’t really know, I’ve just always been into comics since a very young age. I remember some of the earliest comics…I remember, I think they were friends of my family outside Chicago and we were visiting and they had a bunch of old comics including a bunch of old Marvel [titles] like Son of Satan. I was really surprised that I was allowed to have those books considering how religious my family was…The earliest comics I remember when my family moved to Canada was an old issue of Adventure Comics drawn by Jim Aparo featuring Specter. It was one of those bizarre, fitting punishments for somebody. I read stuff like that, I remember constantly running out and grabbing comics.
GP: Where do you look for inspiration? Do you have a ritual when you work, or listen to music?
LK: A little bit of everything. Sometimes what I’ll do is flip through some of my favourite books, especially if I’m having a little trouble trying to come up with something to draw then I’ll find one or two of my favourite artists and flip through their comic. Stuart Immonen is still a big influence on me, he’s one of my favourites…I love a lot of Mignola’s stuff. It’s very interesting how his style has evolved over the years. I do like listening to music. I do like listening to talk radio. I like having movies going in the background. I absolutely love Kurosawa movies, though I’m typically listening to the audio commentary because I don’t speak Japanese. Although there are a couple of films that I do let play with the normal dialogue because I’ve watched them so many times that I know what they’re saying…I know what’s happening in the movie.
Leonard Kirk’s cover for Fantastic Four #1
GP: What is your dream project? If you could work on any comic, what would it be?
LK: Oh my goodness, something that I haven’t worked on already?
GP: Or something you have. I know you’re a big fan of Star Trek and you worked on that series for a while.
LK: Oh, absolutely! That is a big one, I would love to do more Star Trek books. I did get to work on Deep Space Nine, that was cool. That actually parlayed into visiting the set…I paid the bill but I was going down there anyways…it was my first year going to San Diego and I blew off the first day to drive to Los Angeles to go to Paramount because I wound up befriending Mike Westmore, the makeup artist for Next Gen and DS9. He liked the way that I drew the comics and got my info through the publisher and wound up commissioning me to design a t-shirt that he was handing out to the makeup crew on Next Gen when the series ended. That was a lot of fun. He said when you’re down here come on in and I’ll show you around, and I finally made the trip…I was sitting in Quark’s bar doing sketches and whatever and he gave me a Klingon nose at the end of it that was actually used on the show.
GP: That is very cool! You and I have discussed your enthusiasm for Star Trek before, but you’ve never told me about that.
LK: I was really into DS9, and it’s really kind of funny because it was one of those situations that was absolutely thrilling because I got to work on it, but it was also very frustrating because I realized early on that I knew more about Star Trek and DS9 then anyone else working on the book…It got to a point where, even if I wasn’t drawing the issue, I was the regular cover artist and I said “you know, I like the covers to tie into the [story] so send me all the scripts”. That was part of the reason, the other part was that I wanted to read them and correct any mistakes then send them back…I eventually took one script and I rewrote an entire page, I said “this doesn’t make sense” and at that point the editor just said “do you want to write this?” …so I ended up writing one of the issues near the end of the run and that was a lot of fun. I had about a half-dozen other stories getting ready to go but at that time Malibu lost the licence…so those stories just went by the wayside.
GK: Would you like to resurrect those?
LK: I would love to! Because they would still fit in the continuity of the story….Now that you have me thinking, a couple of dream projects that would be kind of fun, and unfortunately they’ve both already been done but I wouldn’t mind putting my own spin on them. One is the Six Million Dollar Man, Kevin Smith recently came out with his own version. I remember reading the original novel…and I would love to basically redo that series starting over incorporating a lot more science into it. Explaining how his body would work….they would have to reinforce his entire skeletal structure….Another two dream projects of mine would be Logan’s Run, I’d love to do something like that but based more on the novel. Another one…is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I just reread that again recently and as much as I love the film, there is stuff in the book that would really be a lot of fun to play with.
A huge thank you to Leonard Kirk for taking the time to speak with us.
