Interview with Dean Trippe

I'm sick as a dog so I am going to make this intro short and sweet. Here it is.

Dean Trippe draws real good. He draws better than you, he draws better than me. He draws the best ever.

Here's the Q &A.

I know you went to a really bad ass art school in Georgia . What was the most important thing you learned there?

Yeah, I graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2003. SCAD was a great place for me, and I owe my professors a lot. Profs. Bob Pendarvis, Mark Kneece, and Paul Hudson in particular. The school also held events, where I got to meet big industry folks like Bob Shreck, Cliff Chiang, Walt Simonson, Joey Cavalieri, Axel Alonso, and some of them even remembered my name later! Haha, but the best thing about SCAD, in my opinion, was just being around other kids learning to make comics--the community of it. You pick up so much just sitting around drawing, talking about comics, swapping trades and GNs. The most important thing I learned from all that is that a) there is more than one way to make good comics, and b) it's not just arbitrary. It's debatable what's wrong or not, but it's not arbitrary.

As far as I know you don't have a 9 - 5 day job. What do you do for money?

I draw comics! I generally have about ten things on The List of things for me to draw. I'm always trying to get ahead, but there are always new things getting added. I used to work at a comic shop, and a sign store, and I taught middle school art for a while, but right now I'm just doing freelance work for various folks.

You have some really beautiful webcomics. What is the biggest art mistake that you commonly see in other people comics?
Thanks. Uh, I always get in trouble for this, but honestly, it's bad lettering. Basic mistakes like breaking panel borders with your balloons for no reason other than you didn't leave room. Or using perfectly elliptical balloons, which look pretty unnatural. Or leaving too little space between the actual text and the word balloon borders. Yeah, you can choose to do these things, but it just looks lazy in my opinion. I remember the first time I got called out for doing both of those things was by my Prof. John Lowe, who's a pretty dang good professional inker. I argued with him, but he just said, "Go home. Check your comics." I did, and he was right. These seem to be pretty common in web comics these days, though.

Where did the idea for the Butterfly comics come from?

I honestly don't really know. I was sitting in church one week, drawing on the back of the bulletin, as usual. I knew The Daily Grind was starting soon and I needed a comic to draw for it, so I was just thinking of possible storylines. I happened to have this random thought that the name 'Robin' is less threatening than 'Batman' and so I wondered what would be after Robin. I settled on "Butterfly" and drew the first sketch of the character. And that was that. I wasn't planning on it being a real series when I drew it. I thought I could just draw random comics every day, but the idea of a sidekick having their own sidekick seemed to click with a lot of folks reading the Grind comics, so I just kept doing them, pretty much with no planned direction.

So Dean , What's new?

Well, it's been a big last few weeks, really! Andi Watson, Jamie Galey, and I accidentally kicked off that insane Batgirl Meme thing that you may have noticed going around (actually still going), so we've both gotten a lot more notice via big blogs and new sites and just folks linking back to us. I've been finishing the Butterfly origin story with John Campbell for AdHouse Books' Superior Showcase #1 coming out in April. I'm drawing a teen superhero 'pilot' issue for a new publisher called General Jinjur. And I'm in talks with a big company for a new monthly series that I cannot WAIT to be able to actually talk about. Besides that, I've just been enjoying living with my wonderful wife in Tennessee.

 

Check out more of Dean's pretty drawings at
www.deantrippe.com
www.tencentticker.com
bffalliance.com

 

And as always check out Dave's mindless pap at http://www.culturalvoid.net